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California, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado and Washington are part of a 20-state coalition suing the Trump administration over restricting access to health, education and social service programs.
The lawsuit contends the federal government is going too far in requiring immigration and citizenship records.
Democratic attorney generals from the states warn the new rules are threatening the Head Start program for children 5 and younger, Title IX family planning, adult education, mental health and substance abuse programs, community health centers and shelters for at-risk youth and domestic violence survivors.
The lawsuit noted that hungry individuals were previously never required to show a government-issued ID to enter a soup kitchen or food bank and that parents never had to show their children’s citizenship or immigration records before enrolling them in Head Start.
“People facing homelessness or domestic violence have never needed proof of immigration status to walk into a shelter,” the suit said.
The U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services, Education, Labor and Justice on July 10 reinterpreted the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act to restrict federal funds for people who can’t verify their immigration status. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes’ office said the decision is a major change from previous Republican and Democratic administrations.
“This is yet another outrageous attempt by this administration to workaround the law and disrupt critical services Arizonans depend on every day,” Mayes said in a news release.
Rhode Island, Washington and New York are leading the lawsuit, which was filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for Rhode Island. Besides California, Colorado, Nevada and Arizona, the rest of the coalition consists of Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia.
“Congress designed these services to be widely accessible to people in this country. But now the Trump administration wants to do an immigration check as preschoolers file into the classroom, ready to learn their ABCs,” Washington Attorney General Nick Brown said in a news release. “These notices impose unworkable requirements on state agencies and providers that are plainly intended to damage these vital support systems and intimidate vulnerable people.”
California Attorney General Rob Bonta warned the Trump administration’s “latest salvo in the President’s anti-humane anti-immigration campaign” would target working mothers and their young children. Bonta said the federal government is not going after waste, fraud and abuse, but programs delivering essential child care, health care, nutrition and education assistance.
“The Trump Administration’s abrupt reversal of nearly three decades of precedent — and decision to put at risk not just support for undocumented families, but ultimately families who rely on these programs nationwide — is cruel, but unfortunately unsurprising,” Bonta said in a news release. “So is its lack of regard for the law. Six months into the second Trump Administration, I’ll repeat a familiar refrain: We’ll see President Trump in court.”

North Carolina congressional support of Israel in its Middle East war with Hamas was affirmed Monday evening by U.S. Sen. Ted Budd.
The Republican’s position was made clear on a social media post by Rev. Mike Huckabee, the ambassador to Israel for the Trump administration and former governor of Arkansas. They were responding to 25 Western countries – led by Britain, Canada, France, Italy and Australia – and the European Union commissioner issuing a joint statement calling for a ceasefire and assessing blame to both sides.
Budd said on social media, “653 days after October 7th, 50 hostages remain held captive by Hamas in Gaza. What was true on day one is still true today: Hamas is the impediment to peace and must release the hostages immediately.”
Huckabee called the statement “disgusting.” He said putting pressure on Israel “instead of savages of Hamas” and blaming America’s ally was “irrational.”
Israel rejected the statement.
The North Carolina Democratic Party, gathering this coming weekend for its annual convention in Raleigh, has through its executive committee on June 28 adopted a resolution declaring Israel of apartheid against Palestinians. It also said Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza; and using American weapons in “self defense” against hospitals, schools, homes, refugee camps, mosques, churches, journalists and humanitarian aid workers.
The Center Square was unsuccessful getting comment, and has otherwise seen silence, on the statement from the governor, former Gov. Roy Cooper, four other Democratic members of the Council of State, and all four North Carolinians in the U.S. House of Representatives.
U.S. Rep. Valerie Foushee, D-N.C., said on Monday, “Trump’s aid plan for Gaza doesn’t work. Starving civilians are being met with gunfire at aid sites – it’s inhumane and unacceptable. I continue to call for a ceasefire to ensure the flow of aid to the region and safe return of the remaining hostages.”
The statement said 800 Palestinians have been killed seeking aid. “The Israeli Government’s denial,” it said, “of essential humanitarian assistance to the civilian population is unacceptable. Israel must comply with its obligations under international humanitarian law.”
The statement also said, “The hostages cruelly held captive by Hamas since 7 October 2023 continue to suffer terribly. We condemn their continued detention and call for their immediate and unconditional release. A negotiated ceasefire offers the best hope of bringing them home and ending the agony of their families.
“We call on the Israeli government to immediately lift restrictions on the flow of aid and to urgently enable the UN and humanitarian NGOs to do their life-saving work safely and effectively.”
The acronyms are for the United Nations and nongovernmental organizations, meaning typically nonprofits.
The statement also said, “The Israeli government’s aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazans of human dignity.”
The countries making the statement, according to Global Affairs Canada, are the foreign ministers of “Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the European Union Commissioner for Equality, Preparedness and Crisis Management.”

The Trump administration released $1.3 billion in education funding back to the states after bipartisan pushback.
After the U.S. Department of Education announced it would withhold $6.8 billion in federal education funding, lawmakers and education officials across the country took steps in demanding the funds be released.
Now $1.3 billion has been released with a caveat. The federal government said the funds must be allocated toward “allowable activities,” or the money will be revoked.
Each year on July 1, states receive their federal education funds for the upcoming school year. But on June 30, the U.S. Department of Education sent an email to state education departments across the country, stating it would not be “issuing obligating funds” to education programs.
The Office of Management and Budget at the White House told The Center Square that in its review, it found that states had “grossly misused” the grant programs to “subsidize radical leftwing agenda.”
As part of a coalition to release the funds, 24 states and the District of Columbia sued the Trump administration for withholding these education funds.
Two days following the lawsuit, a letter, led by U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-West Virginia, and nine other Republican senators, urged the administration to unfreeze the education money and send it to the states.
“We share your concern about taxpayer money going to fund radical left-wing programs,” the senators wrote to Russell Vought, director of the OMB. “However, we do not believe that is happening with these funds.”
The senators said the withheld money supported programs that had bipartisan support.
“These funds go to support programs that enjoy longstanding, bipartisan support like after-school and summer programs that provide learning and enrichment opportunities for school aged children which also enables their parents to work and contribute to local economies,” the letter stated.
Now, $1.3 billion has been restored to the states, yet education officials are calling on the administration to release the remaining $5.5 billion.
“While we’re pleased to see crucial dollars going to afterschool programs which are vital for students across the nation, the bottom line is this: Districts should not be in this impossible position where the Administration is denying funds that had already been appropriated to our public schools by Congress,” David Schuler, executive director of the Schools Superintendents Association, said in a statement. “The remaining funds must be released immediately — America’s children are counting on it.”
The California Department of Education told The Center Square that it is still waiting to receive the Grant Award Notification for this funding. The department did not say the amount.

Republicans’ recently-passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act will add trillions to the federal deficit and debt over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s final cost analysis.
The long-awaited CBO score, released Monday, estimates that the budget reconciliation bill will increase the federal deficit by a net $3.4 trillion over the 2025-2034 period. Most of the cost stems from the legislation permanently extending the 2017 tax cuts, which CBO calculates as lost federal revenue.
Using the CBO score, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget projects that the policies in the bill will also add $4.1 trillion to the national debt over the same time period, when accounting for interest.
“It’s still hard to believe that policymakers just added $4 trillion to the debt,” CRFB President Maya MacGuineas said Monday. “We’ll hear a lot of excuses, of course. Claims that economic growth will cover the costs or that spending cuts will wildly exceed expectations, or that they shouldn’t have to pay for extending temporary provisions in the law. None of these excuses pass muster.”
Republican leaders had promised deficit-wary constituents that they would pair any provisions in the bill resulting in lost revenue with dollar-for-dollar spending cuts or provisions boosting economic growth.
While House committees largely followed those promises by authorizing a ten-year tax cut extension with offsetting spending cuts, Senate committees leaped far out of the fiscal bounds established by the budget reconciliation’s original blueprint.
Because extending the tax cuts permanently would cost more than lawmakers could realistically cut, the Senate changed its accounting methods to paper over the entire cost. Under the current policy baseline, the OBBBA costs only $441 billion by 2034, as The Center Square reported.
This new fiscal framework allowed Republicans to permanently extend the tax cuts, as President Donald Trump wanted, while still theoretically complying with budget instructions. But the CBO, CRFB, and nearly all budget organizations denounced the tactic as a “gimmick.”
“[M]odelers from across the ideological spectrum universally agree that any sustained economic benefits are likely to be modest, or negative, and not one serious estimate claims this bill will improve our fiscal situation. Rather, positive growth effects are likely to be swamped by the effects of higher debt and interest rates,” MacGuineas said.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has said that he wants to do a second budget reconciliation bill to codify even more of the president’s agenda. MacGuineas said that if Republicans do so, the bill “should focus entirely on deficit reduction.”

California and Nevada are tied for the nation’s second-highest unemployment rate.
Each state saw a rate of 5.4% in June, according to the U.S. Bureau Of Labor Statistics. The number rose 0.1% from May in California and dropped by the same amount during that period in Nevada.
The highest jobless rate for June remained in Washington, D.C., with 5.9%. The bureau said nonfarm payroll employment was “essentially unchanged” since May in the nation’s capital and 35 states.
In California, the number of nonfarm payroll jobs dropped by 6,100, according to the state Employment Development Department. The decrease followed a job gain of 11,700 positions for May.
Four of the Golden State’s 11 industry sectors gained jobs in June. The highest increase was in “Private Education and Health Services,” which saw an increase of 9,900 positions, a gain for the 41st consecutive month. “Leisure and Hospitality” saw an additional 4,300 jobs.
The department said the largest decrease in jobs were 9,900 that were lost since May for “Professional and Business Services.”
Nevada’s rate trickled down to 5.4% in June – its lowest in over a year – but at only a small improvement from May’s 5.5%, according to the state Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation. Within Nevada, more government jobs were lost than any other sector, while questions remained about long-term trends.
“We’ve been through this growth phase, and I think we’re calming down,” David Schmidt, the department’s chief economist, told The Center Square. “When Nevada was growing by 6% [annually] in people, it made sense to be growing 6% economically.”
In the post-COVID-19 pandemic boom, population and economic growth soared in the Silver State, but in recent months, these trends have cooled.
“You can only sustain employment growth if you’re bringing in more people, or employing more of your people,” said Schmidt. “I think looking ahead, job growth at or around 1% is a lot more reasonable.”
Across the last year, nonfarm employment in Nevada has only increased by 0.3%. While some states have experienced job market declines, Nevada’s 5.5% in May still sat second-highest for national unemployment rankings, only behind Washington, D.C.
Jobs lost in the government sector were higher than any other in June at 4,100 seasonally adjusted. Despite headlines over federal cuts, Schmidt was not yet convinced those were to blame for the decline.
“It’s not federal. It’s state and local government,” said Schmidt, who added that most of the sector’s change was education-related. He noted many bus drivers and cooks in school districts see their jobs interrupted by the students’ summer break.
While those non-teacher education jobs often drop across the summer, the large dip may still be part of a larger trend.
“It could also just be something as simple as more teachers than usual retiring, and more will come in when the school year restarts,” said Schmidt. “It’s a larger than average swing, and when we get to data in November, we can see if this is a shift, but for now we can’t say … If we rebound to a lower level, then some of this is probably a response to federal cuts.”
Strains on the housing market were also reflected in the June unemployment report, with 1,500 construction jobs lost after seasonal adjustments.
“I do think that we’re seeing some tightness there, because of the housing market,” said Schmidt. “I don’t think it’s a bad housing market like you would have seen in 2009-2010, but it’s coming down a little bit.”
Across 2025 and likely for the foreseeable future, the state’s economic rebound has begun the transition to a slower pace of growth, with more stability. For Nevadans looking to find work or fill open positions, the DETR recommends employNV.gov.
The nation’s lowest jobless rate in June was in South Dakota with 1.8%, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. Eighteen states had rates lower than the national unemployment rate of 4.1%.

Polls show Americans are concerned about President Donald Trump’s tariff plans, worried that prices will increase, but administration officials hope to win over the public.
Polling shows Americans don’t think the administration is doing enough to lower prices. Americans are also concerned about higher prices as a result of tariffs.
Trump has set out to reorder global trade through tariffs to give American businesses a fair playing field in the worldwide economy. His on-again, off-again tariffs have rattled financial markets, small businesses and big-box retailers.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CBS that Americans will come around on tariffs.
“Oh, they’re going to love the deals that President Trump and I are doing. I mean, they’re just going to love them. You know, the president figured out the right answer, and sent letters to these countries, said this is going to fix the trade deficit,” Lutnick told CBS News’ “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan.
“This will go a long way to fixing the trade deficit, and that’s gotten these countries to the table, and they’re going to open their markets or they’re going to pay the tariff,” he added.
President Donald Trump sent letters to dozens of countries warning of 20% to 50% tariffs, which will be imposed beginning Aug. 1, unless those foreign nations can reach better deals.
Last week, the Federal Reserve’s latest “beige book” found that businesses across the country reported passing the cost of tariffs on to U.S. consumers, something Trump warned them not to do. All 12 Fed districts reported price increases. Seven characterized price growth as “moderate,” and five called it “modest.”
“Many firms passed on at least a portion of cost increases to consumers through price hikes or surcharges, although some held off raising prices because of customers’ growing price sensitivity, resulting in compressed profit margins,” according to the Fed report.
In June, an appeals court ruled that Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs could remain in place while a legal challenge over his authority to impose import taxes continued.
That came after the administration appealed when a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of International Trade unanimously ruled in May that Congress did not give the president tariff authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977. The appeals court ruling means Trump can continue collecting the taxes while the legal challenge moves ahead.
Economists, businesses and some publicly traded companies have warned that tariffs could raise prices on a wide range of consumer products.
Trump has said he wants to use tariffs to restore manufacturing jobs lost to lower-wage countries in decades past, shift the tax burden away from U.S. families and pay down the national debt.
A tariff is a tax on imported goods paid by the person or company that imports the goods. The importer can absorb the cost of the tariffs or try to pass the cost on to consumers through higher prices.

Hoping to create “the world’s best weather forecasting system,” U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., sent a letter to the Oval Office on Monday with her five-point plan attached.
She called it a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” A shot to catch up to Europe’s weather modeling system as extreme events occur more frequently. While the United States used to track around nine extreme weather events annually, Cantwell says it’s now an average of 23, with 27 having occurred in 2024.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, each event cost Americans at least $1 billion, and last year, the total hit $182.7 billion. Cantwell cited a recent study that put the number at $1.5 trillion over the next decade, and called the cost of her plan “minuscule” in comparison.
“We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create the world’s best weather forecasting system that would provide Americans with much more detailed and customized alerts days – instead of minutes – ahead of a looming extreme weather event,” Cantwell wrote to President Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, Trump recently proposed cutting NOAA spending by $2.2 billion, a 27% reduction.
Democrats argue that doing so would result in dramatic consequences for the National Weather Service, as the Department of Government Efficiency has already significantly reduced staffing.
NWS would receive a slight funding boost under the president’s budget proposal, but some say it will do little to offset mounting vacancies amid Trump’s current hiring freeze through October.
A few media outlets and Congressional Democrats suggested the Trump administration should bear some of the blame after more than 100 people recently died in massive flooding in Texas.
The Guadeloupe River rose over 26 feet in under an hour as most people were asleep in bed.
NWS issued warnings days in advance, but dozens of adults and children still didn’t evacuate.
“There is strong support for making the generational investments necessary to become a weather-ready nation that will empower Americans to get out of harm’s way,” Cantwell wrote.
Her five-point plan includes modernizing data collection, investing in supercomputing, bolstering NOAA’s research funding, expanding broadcast alert systems and passing bipartisan legislation.
Cantwell said NOAA needs more data and recommended upgrading the nation’s Doppler radar network, which dates back to the 1980s. Replacing Hurricane Hunter aircraft with C-130s, and expanding weather satellite and ocean-observing systems could also help collect more data.
Supercomputing could help the NOAA compete with the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which often outperforms domestic forecasts. Pairing that with additional research, which only accounts for about 10% of NOAA’s budget, could increase that impact.
Upgrading broadcast alert systems and expanding that network to rural areas could save lives.
The last step in Cantwell’s plan includes passing the Weather Act Reauthorization Act of 2024.
She and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, introduced the bill last year to do much of what her letter proposes.
“Now is the time to take the tough lessons learned in the wake of the recent natural disasters and human tragedies in places like Texas,” Cantwell wrote, “and create the world’s best weather prediction system. We must meet the moment or the situation is only going to get worse.”

The use of autopen for executive actions, including pardons during former President Joe Biden’s presidency, has been questioned throughout the congressional investigation into his mental fitness, with some Republican lawmakers questioning the validity of those actions due to the use of the device.
President Donald Trump has described the Biden administration’s use of the autopen, a mechanical device used to place an individual’s signature on documents or other surfaces, to carry out executive actions, as “one of the biggest scandals” the country has seen in 50 to a hundred years.”
Some Republicans have suggested that some of the executive actions could be voided, pointing to the use of the autopen. However, there is already precedent for presidents using the device to carry out executive action.
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, led by chairman Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., is currently leading the investigation and may have difficulty proving Biden didn’t approve the executive actions himself.
Attorney and legal scholar John Shu explained to The Center Square that “the president may authorize” his staff to “use the autopen to sign presidential documents, including pardons and clemency grants,” with the caveat that “the president is mentally competent.”
“If the pardon covers a group of people, there doesn’t have to be a separate, signed pardon for each individual. Instead, a specific description of the pardon’s applicable criteria is sufficient,” he added.
Shu cited historical precedents when presidents carried out mass pardons and did not sign individual documents.
“For example, Presidents Lincoln and Johnson pardoned secessionists who fought against the Union in the Civil War in order to heal the nation and bring it together. Similarly, President Carter pardoned a group of more than 250,000 Vietnam-era draft dodgers,” according to Shu.
The legal scholar explained that the crux of the autopen debate is Biden’s direct orders and the ability to prove he was not in sound mind when ordering the pardons.
“If a staffer or someone else decides on his own that someone should be pardoned without the president’s actual authorization, that would very likely be a criminal act, and the pardon’s validity would be in serious doubt. This isn’t merely because of autopen use, it’s because someone who is not the president committed a presidential act without the president’s knowledge or authorization and used the auto pen to essentially forge the president’s signature,” said Shu. “This would be even more true if the president was not of sound mind for any reason, because he would not be capable of authorizing or doing anything in that situation. In the case of President Biden, the Committee would have a challenge proving his mental status because it is unlikely that he was of unsound mind every moment of every day.”
The committee’s current challenge, however, is getting the witnesses to talk. So far, three key Biden witnesses in the investigation have invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in less than two weeks, with more likely to come.
As previously reported by The Center Square, the committee could potentially grant certain congressional witnesses immunity, a common tactic that would require them to testify because they no longer could self-incriminate and be subject to prosecution.
Questions regarding Biden’s mental fitness were raised well before the 2020 presidential election. Republicans and many in the conservative media continued to raise questions regarding the former president’s health throughout his presidency.
However, the White House claimed Biden received regular medical exams, showing a healthy, competent president.
The House committee announced in early June that it was expanding its investigation into the “cover-up” of Biden’s “mental decline.”
Comer sent letters to five former senior Biden White House aides, “demanding they appear for transcribed interviews.” Comer’s committee is investigating “potentially unauthorized issuance of sweeping pardons and other executive action.”
The investigations have been fueled in part by a book written by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, “Original Sin,” which the congressman quoted as claiming, “Five people were running the country, and Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board.”
Karine Jean-Pierre, who served as Biden’s press secretary; Ian Sams, former assistant to the president and senior advisor in the White House Counsel’s Office; Andrew Bates, former deputy assistant to the president and senior deputy press secretary; and Jeff Zients, Biden’s former chief of staff, have also been called to testify in front of the committee.