Trump declared war on working people last night

Plus: special election results, immigrant raids, housing, and more

Welcome to a Tuesday night edition of Progress Report.

I’m hesitant to write this opening paragraph with anything but broad strokes about the news, because otherwise, by the time I finish and hit send, there’s a decent chance that Donald Trump will have authorized some new unprecedented catastrophe.

The pace and fury of his second administration’s assaults on American society and global civilization has been astounding, surpassing even my most dismal predictions. Immigration raids on schools and churches, innocent civilians captured and tossed into the backs of vans, detonation of civil rights, manufactured public health emergencies, economic self-destruction… it’s all happening with such head-spinning velocity that I’ve had to reimagine the newsletter in a way that can better keep up.

Starting tonight, I’m piloting a faster news delivery system that will arrive in your inbox at least twice a week, with at least one exclusive to paid subscribers. These issues will count down key political and policy stories from around the country, with both longer narrative reporting/analysis and quicker hits.

Note: This is a fully independent newsletter — no ads, no sponsors, no politicians able to apply pressure or influence what we cover and write. Progress Report relies entirely on readers and supporters willing to fund independent journalism and political thought.

This election showed that progressives desperately need to build up their own alternative political media infrastructure, and for just $5 a month, you can help keep us afloat and build the movement.

---

---

1️⃣ A midnight massacre in DC

It seems as if Donald Trump finally got around to reading Project 2025 and liked what he saw.

(Yes, he was very well aware of the contents of that right-wing terrorist handbook, despite what he swore and the media credulously reported during the campaign.)

Trump began his second week in office by continuing to steamroll his way over the federal government, public health, civil rights, and much of the economy. His order to suspend all federal grants and aid money has demonstrated just how willing he is to send blast of millions of Americans into the sun.

The order, before it was temporarily blocked by a federal judge moments before going into effect, was due to cut off vital funding for Head Start, Medicaid, housing construction and housing vouchers, medical research, student loans, community services like Meals on Wheels, disaster recovery programs, and so many more.

There are stark warnings that public housing authorities would probably collapse and that programs to keep low-income people with mental illness housed would be curtailed. An employee of a community development organization told me that without block grants, their job would be gone. A friend who works with immigrant children felt doomed. Frankly, cuts of this magnitude would probably wind up shutting down my own kid’s daycare.

The judge’s restraining order is only good for a week, and barring other legal action, some version of this freeze would go into effect by Feb. 3rd. We got a preview of the chaos that would ensue today when administrators for many of these programs were locked out of the funding websites, which the White House blamed on some kind of technical outage. More likely it was a matter of one federal contractor or another receiving the OMB orders and jumping the gun on shutting down the infrastructure on which these things operate.

I can’t tell yet whether this madness is being done to satisfy every right-wing think tank wet dream or as a twisted negotiating tactic to ultimately defund 90% of the social safety net. Either way, it’s deeply illegal, but the law is only as good as its enforcement.

The bet by Republicans is the federal judiciary, now filled with far-right ideologues, will either grind challenges into dust or just let him get away with this stuff altogether.

The Diet Coke president also had enough caffeine in him late last night to fire the NLRB’s aggressively pro-union general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo. That one was to be expected — Abruzzo, a former SEIU lawyer and the most pro-union government official since Frances Perkins, stayed in her job as long as possible and forced Trump to fire her. He also fired Gwynne Wilcox, the one remaining Democrat on the board, which was both illegal — she was confirmed by the Senate through 2028 — and devastating to workers’ rights.

The NLRB is supposed to have five members, and the Supreme Court has ruled that it needs to have at least three to issue any rulings. A vast majority of cases that the NLRB adjudicates are allegations of unfair labor practices made by workers about their employers, often involving blatant union-busting that would otherwise go unpunished (and often functionally still does). Right now, there are two members of the NLRB, and without a quorum, it’s likely that the anti-worker cases being pushed by the likes of Amazon and SpaceX will make their way to the Supreme Court.

Wilcox is challenging her firing and has promised to take it all the way to the Supreme Court herself if necessary. Abruzzo left on a defiant note of her own, with a provocative and bruising statement released late last night about the agency’s accomplishments for workers and what might happen should the courts or Trump’s NLRB seek to repeal them:

There’s no putting that genie back in the bottle. So, if the Agency does not fully effectuate its Congressional mandate in the future as we did during my tenure, I expect that workers with assistance from their advocates will take matters into their own hands in order to get well-deserved dignity and respect in the workplace, as well as a fair share of the significant value they add to their employer’s operations.

American labor laws and the NLRB were developed both to give people the ability to legally organize as well as to prevent the growing radicalism of fed up Depression-era workers from boiling over. Abruzzo is very flatly suggesting that business interests may want to think twice before trying to abolish the federal agency or legitimate paths to recognition and protection.

Finally, Trump also fired two members of another worker protection office, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Both were Democrats, ending the party’s majority on the commission and depriving it of a quorum as well.

What are Democrats doing about it all? There was some action from state attorneys general, who sued over the cuts, and in DC, there were... a few sharply worded press releases. Otherwise it’s been literally business as usual — the Senate was in session and Democrats were there dutifully casting votes instead of raising hell for the cameras, publicizing every horrible consequence of Trump’s orders, and using every procedural tool they have to stymie his agenda.

I am increasingly confident that the only thing keeping this country from balkanization is the cowardice of Democratic leaders, who simply are not able to respond to even the most extreme and illegal assaults.

---

2️⃣ Special Elections

Iowa: Democrats continued their habit of wildly over-performing in special elections, flipping Iowa’s 35th state Senate district on Tuesday night.

Largely based in Clinton County, the district went for Trump by 21 points in November and figured to be a safe hold for Republicans after its incumbent senator was tapped by Gov. Kim Reynolds to be her deputy. Instead, Democrat Mike Zimmer, the president of a local school board, defeated GOP organizer Katie Whittington by 3.5 points.

Minnesota: Briefly tied after the death of Sen. Kari Dziedzic, the state Senate has swung back to Democrats after Doron Clark trounced her GOP rival with 90% of the vote. The state House is still pending after the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that Gov. Tim Walz had to push back the special election in District 40B.

3️⃣ As ICE raids escalate, Democratic states debate protections

Now that ICE agents are running around the country, raiding any place they think they can find some immigrants to detain and fill their quotas, blue state and local government leaders have to decide whether they’ll step up to meet the moment or surrender their constituents to Donald Trump’s shock troops.

Lawmakers are considering a variety of ways to help immigrants, both in directly dealing with the legal issues around the raids as well as providing more aid for families in crises. For example:

Democrats in states such as Connecticut, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington are backing measures to expand health care and higher education for immigrants, restrict landlords from inquiring about immigration status or block government agreements to open new immigrant detention centers.

In New York, advocates are pushing Gov. Kathy Hochul for additional legal aid funding — raids began here on Tuesday morning — and lawmakers in California are pushing to pass a bill that would restrict where ICE agents could enter without permission.

4️⃣ Affordable housing fights rumble on

Any hope of building below market rate housing — or really any housing — rests with funding the federal government, so depending on what happens over the next few weeks, this could all be something of a moot point. But let’s be optimistic for once and assume that there will at some point be a return to the necessary normal for projects to go forward.

In New Jersey, the coalition of towns who sued to stop the state’s affordable housing mandate were handed yet another loss in court on Monday, meaning that barring a miraculously successful third appeal, they’ll have to allow modestly less wealthy people to live within their borders. The towns now have until Friday to either accept the number of affordable units assigned to them by the state or present an alternative number that complies with the new legal formula.

What’s pitiful is just how few housing units they would each have to produce under the formula; the lawsuits are probably going to cost them as much as the subsidies to get them built.

California has much more significant affordable housing mandates, which many cities have accepted… with an asterisk. Turns out that Los Angeles, San Diego, and other major cities are bending the rules and building many of the affordable developments not in transportation-accessible areas but near the biggest, most dangerous and polluted highways in town. At the moment, they’re still not willing to locate multi-family units in neighborhoods traditionally zoned for single-family houses.

Despite the state’s desperate housing crisis, voters in California voted down a proposed expansion of rent control in November, a huge blow to the state’s hope of clawing out of the hole. There are 32 other states that preempt most local rent control laws, including New Mexico, where legislators will try to repeal it for the second year in a row.

State Sen. Antoinette Sedillo’s bill would end the prohibition on local rent control and allow municipalities to set regulations on how much landlords can raise the rent every year. New Mexico is suffering from one of the worst housing and homelessness crises in the nation, and recent laws that require landlords to offer 30 days notice when they’re going to raise the rent by 10% aren’t exactly cutting it.

5️⃣ Abortion rights are under attack — even in places where they should be legally untouchable

Emboldened by their huge majorities and mistaken belief that the country has moved to the right on social issues, Republicans in a number of states are taking their anti-abortion crusade to the next and most unhinged level yet: fetal personhood.

You know, the idea that the moment an embryo forms, it has full human rights that are equal to or supersede that of its mother.

If fully enacted, fetal personhood would not only ban abortion but would rewrite entire arenas of US law, from traffic regulations to taxes. So far in 2025, lawmakers in at least six states have introduced bills to strengthen fetal personhood, while Trump has tucked fetal personhood language into one of his executive orders.

The “homicide” bills have been introduced in Indiana, North Dakota, Oklahoma and South Carolina. The Oklahoma bill not only explicitly strips away protections that keep abortion patients from being prosecuted, but also separately prohibits anything that may “direct, advise, encourage or solicit” an abortion.

Republican lawmakers in Missouri are also looking at a fetal personhood bill as an end-around the new voter-approved constitutional amendment that guarantees abortion rights in the state.

6️⃣ Blue state labor advances inch forward

As we wait to see what happens with the pending phase out of Michigan’s tipped minimum wage (piece on that coming tomorrow), we can now add New York back to the list of states where that perpetual battle is back on.

Right now, tipped workers make $11.00 an hour in NYC and surrounding counties, where the normal minimum is $16.50, and $10.35 everywhere else, where the minimum is otherwise $15. Assemblywoman Jessica González-Rojas and Sen. Robert Jackson are sponsoring a bill that would phase out the tipped minimum wage by 2028 in NYC and the surrounding area and 2029 outside of the metro area.

This battle has been raging for a while. Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a bill that ended the tipped minimum in professions outside of food service. In 2022, I covered a serious effort by the One Fair Wage coalition to push Gov. Kathy Hochul to end the tipped minimum by executive order. Not shockingly, she declined.

In Maryland, lawmakers want to simultaneously raise the minimum wage to $20 and phase out the tipped minimum, which sits at just $3.63 right now. If the bill passes the legislature, it would go to voters for approval as a constitutional amendment. This wlll be the third year in a row that they try to eliminate the tipped wage.

If Maryland does pass a $20 minimum, it will bring an immense amount of pressure on Hochul to push up the wage in New York after she slashed the increase last year.

---

Wait, Before You Leave!

Progress Report has raised over $7 million dollars for progressive candidates and causes, breaks national stories about corrupt politicians, and delivers incisive analysis, and goes deep into the grassroots.

None of the money we’ve raised for candidates and causes goes to producing this newsletter or all of the related projects we put out. In fact, it costs me money to do this. So, I need your help.

For just $5 a month, you can buy a premium subscription that includes:

• Premium member-only newsletters with original reporting

• Financing new projects and paying new reporters

• Access to upcoming chats and live notes

You can also make a one-time donation to Progress Report’s GoFundMe campaign — doing so will earn you a shout-out in the next weekend edition of the newsletter!