Trump 47

White House emails revealed in lawsuit in court show desperate rush to punish universities by Trump Admin​


President Donald Trump told staffers that he wanted even more punitive measures against top universities, according to newly revealed communications.

NOTUS reviewed a March 18 email chain titled "Funding yanked from San Jose State + UPenn" that included high-ranking White House officials. It surfaced in court documents as part of a case challenging Elon Musk's funding freezes, and the messages show how senior officials coordinated with DOGE teams and Fox News to carry out the president's wishes.


“POTUS wants to see more action against universities,” wrote senior policy strategist May Mailman, and officials then scurried to make that happen.


The emails show a previously unreported effort by the administration to target San Joe State before a Title XI investigation into transgender athletes had concluded, but officials were concerned about how the punitive funding cuts would look if they touched on national security or public health.

“If you all deem we should turn this back on, we can do that immediately given criticality- it’s just a simple email given we didn’t terminate,” wrote federal acquisition service commissioner Josh Gruenbaum.

However, those concerns were outweighed by the White House's desire to punish the schools – and quickly.

“Today, we have paused ALL grant awards to San Jose State which continued to play a male athlete on the female volleyball team, including access to intimate, overnight spaces,” read the first draft that Mailman sent to the White House communications team.


Trump had taken an interest in San Jose State during the 2024 campaign after an online publication outed volleyball player Blaire Fleming as trans, and Mailman – who works closely with White House deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller – pushed other officials to quickly identify sweeping cuts to that university and Penn, which the administration targeted for in the past allowing a trans athlete to compete on the women’s swimming team.

“Josh,” Mailman wrote back, “per Stephen, we need to get this on social media TODAY. Please no more piecemeal emails. Just one with clear bullet points on what’s being frozen/paused and from which agency. THANK YOU!!!”

The following morning Fox Business flashed a breaking news alert and reported on the threatened cuts to the university using language that mirrored the communications team's draft statement.

“President Trump has promised to protect female athletes, he has threatened to rip federal funding away from any university that defies his executive order banning biological males from infiltrating women’s sports, and he is doing it,” said Fox Business host Hillary Vaughn, reading from her phone live on air. “We are the first to report President Trump has paused $175 million in federal funding from the University of Pennsylvania over its controversial policies.”
 
PF5 said:
View attachment 12583
Click to expand...
100 year catastrophe my ass

The 1987 Guadalupe River flood caught campers by surprise on the evening of July 16 after an unexpected thunderstorm strengthened by a cold front dumped nearly 12 inches of rainfall over Hunt, Texas.

The camps located along the river quickly started to evacuate early the next morning as water levels swelled to 29-feet high — after rising a frightening 25 feet in just 45 minutes, according to the National Weather Service.

10 of the teenage campers were wept away and died in the flood, including a girl named Melanie Finley who fell to her death during a rescue attempt, KSAT reported.

The remaining 33 children and adults clung to treetops until they were rescued via helicopter by the Texas Department of Safety, members of the US Army and a local television station.

Catastrophic Texas Christian summer camp flooding eerily similar to 1987 disaster along same river

nypost.com

Catastrophic Texas Christian summer camp flooding eerily similar to 1987 disaster along same river

10 of the teenagers swept away died in the flood, including a girl named Melanie Finley who fell to her death during a rescue attempt.
nypost.com nypost.com
 
Last edited:

Guadalupe River flood deaths were entirely preventable - but Local Leaders rejected Flood Warning System saying it was too costly in 2016 and in 2025 Texas Elected officials rejected a bill to create an Emergency response system based on 2019 USGS data and report done for Texas stating that climate change would lead to 20% increase in water discharge in the Guadalupe River.​


Former Kerr County Commissioner Jonathan Letz, who retired in December, knew in 2016 that the flood risk was high and the warning system inadequate. Neighboring Comal County had spent about $300,000 to install a flood warning system with sirens.

"We are very flood-prone. We know that," Letz told the San Antonio Express-News in 2016. "We have an obligation to look at what we have, especially since we have a warning system out there that may or may not work. If it doesn't work, we need to get rid of it."


The Republican leaders in Kerr County, which is relatively wealthy and very conservative, in 2018 chose not to spend less than $1 million to install a system like Comal's.

The U.S. Geological Survey warned in 2019 that rain would fall faster and harder on the Guadalupe River due to climate change. Scientists compared past rainfall with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite data and global warming statistics and predicted a 20% increase in peak discharges.

The Texas Senate, which Patrick oversees, this year killed House Bill 13, which would have formed a statewide council to develop emergency response systems for the state's growing number of natural disasters.

State and county officials also ignored more immediate warnings. The privately owned forecaster AccuWeather called out local officials for ignoring them and the National Weather Service.
 
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Polds4OSU said:

Trump Administration Will Blind Hurricane Forecasters Starting July 31st , says Data Sharing will be Permanently Disabled​


The Trump administration is about to make life a lot harder for meteorologists predicting when and where hurricanes are going to hit the United States. Last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association announced that it would no longer provide information from military satellites that have been relied on heavily to determine a hurricane’s path. The satellites, which orbit the Earth’s poles, use microwaves to look inside the storm, offering experts important data on rapid intensification — the dangerous process of a hurricane growing in speed or size before making landfall, made more frequent by climate change. The change will take effect on July 31, just as the peak of hurricane season begins.

Since the announcement was made, meteorologist and former FEMA official Michael Lowry has been speaking out about the change, which could make this season more dangerous for tens of millions of Americans in the hurricane belt.

Can you explain what these microwave-radiation satellites do that other satellites cannot?

For hurricane researchers and forecasters, the biggest capability that it gives us is the ability to peer through the clouds that we can’t typically see through using conventional satellites. We can see the structure of the hurricane itself — in particular the structure of the eyewall, which is the strongest part. We can tell how strong a hurricane currently is, but it also gives us indication of how strong it could become.


In the last ten years, we’ve been able to use that as a really impressive tool in our arsenal to detect when these cases of rapid intensification may happen. And you’ve seen that in the improvement in the intensity forecast. That’s an area that’s been a real challenge for the science, but the inclusion of this microwave data has been a boon for forecasting. That’s a capability that looks like it’s going to be turned off here at least on half of the satellites from which there are available data sometime within the next month.

Let’s say the administration sticks to that August 1 deadline. What do hurricane forecasts look like when the season starts to ramp up in the late summer?

When you turn off half the satellites available to us, we have half the data available today. For most people, you go, Well, you have other satellites; just use the other satellites. The problem is that these are low-orbiting satellites that are up about 500 or so miles above Earth versus satellites that are 22,000 miles up that can see a wider area. Those lower-orbit satellites are giving us little swaths and they hit the same place on Earth twice a day, and you hope that it just happens to hit where the hurricane is. And oftentimes they miss; oftentimes they sideswipe. So what you’re left with is cobbling together the available swaths that you get from these microwave satellites.

You’ve got to basically hit a bullseye with these other satellites to get the information that you get from those Defense satellites with microwave radiation. Even if those Defense satellites just get the edge, they’re super-useful. You don’t have to be perfectly spot-on over the storm. You could be half on it and still see, Oh, okay, we have two eye walls that are going on right now, and that tells us a tremendous amount of information. The other satellites are just kind of blurry, and in many cases they’re useless.

What justification did NOAA give for shutting down this microwave satellite data?

That these satellites don’t last forever, and we kind of expected that they would probably become not operational within the next year and a half. But they still work.

We still haven’t been given really good reason for the sudden termination of the data itself. If the satellites are still working and we can still receive the data, then why can’t we see it? We’ve been told it’s something related to cybersecurity. But what’s curious about all of this is that what they’re saying is it’s a permanent discontinuation of the data. It’s not — we’re going to turn it off and see how we can fix the security issue.

And then another curious thing was that we were given a moratorium on this for July 1. But if it were a true immediate security issue, then why are we allowing, why is the Defense Department allowing us to see the data for another month?

With those questions of motivation, it does seem to fit within the larger cuts toward NOAA or FEMA that the administration has proposed thus far.

I reached out to NOAA, I reached out to the Department of Defense, I reached out to Space Force. I’ve reached out to the Navy, and I’ve not received comments as to the rationale behind this aside from it being a cybersecurity issue.

There are other groups that use these microwave-radiation satellites, but one of the big uses is to track sea ice in the Arctic and the Antarctic regions. That’s given us this continuous record of sea-ice data that goes back to the late 1970s. So this data from these satellites is obviously important for issues related to climate and climate change.



Is there an example of a past hurricane in which the data from these satellites has been able to save lives? Or is it so integrated into the process that it’s every time?

Every time might be an overstatement, but not by much.


I would have no other way of confidently being able to tell you how a hurricane is developing aside from a hurricane-hunter airplane flying into the storm. They don’t do that regularly out in the eastern Pacific. Even in the Atlantic, one or two in every three forecasts that are issued are issued without the benefit of hurricane-hunter data from the airplanes. The airplanes just can’t fly 24/7 all year round. So these microwave-radiation satellites are the only other way that we have to know what’s going on structurally inside of the hurricane.

This satellite decision comes as Trump proposes a cut to the entire research arm of NOAA. How would that impact hurricane forecasting?

The budget would eliminate NOAA’s office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research.

It is everything for us when it comes to forecasting hurricanes. It would be a generational loss for hurricane forecasting. The tools that we rely on regularly to forecast hurricane intensity, to forecast the track of hurricanes, all come from this office that is being completely eliminated. Within this office are over a dozen research laboratories and nonprofit cooperative institutes that are affiliated with 80 different universities.

It’s nonsensical why it would be eliminated. But what you do have to realize, again, and this is just stating a fact here, is that many of these offices and their programs are affiliated with climate research.

This is huge. This is not a situation where you say, “Okay, well, the budget is passed as it’s proposed and we wait four years and a new administration comes in. And we put it back to where it was.” Once you’ve shuttered these world-class research laboratories and all these experienced scientists go off into the world, you can’t just cobble that back together. It took us 50, 75 years in some cases to put these institutions together.

If you went to the NOAA website, it would be like, “Hey, we don’t have the data that you’re looking for.”
Click to expand...

They are going to blind them? That seems a bit harsh.
 

Oklahoma State has an endowment just over $1 Billion as of 2024 and enrollment of 22,000. This will mean a 1.4% tax will be charged to OSU every year based on their investment Income for the previous year. In 2024 OSU Endowment Investment returned $83 MILLION in revenue. ​

This would mean Oklahoma State would owe an additional $1.2 MILLION in Taxes on that Endowment investment which up until now had Not been charged any tax.

Trump's Big Beautiful Bill creates a tax on College endowments​

President Donald Trump's "big, beautiful bill" has passed and is causing panic for the heads of America's top universities.

The bill — which was unanimously opposed by Democrats in the House and the Senate — was sold by Trump as a method for providing tax relief and expanding American wealth.


Among its various provisions, the bill levies a tiered tax on university endowments, which previously were not taxable. The new tax is justified by the Trump administration as a way to prevent universities from "[abusing] generous benefits provided through the tax code".

The taxes range from 1.4 percent to 8 percent at the wealthiest institutions.

Universities rely on their endowments to fund essential operations and to provide services to their students.

In 2017, during Trump's first term, Congress started taxing universities with endowments of $500,000 or more per student at 1.4 percent. The new bill expands on that and is based on endowment-per-student calculations.

Harvard and Princeton both have endowments of $2 million or more per student. They will be subject to an 8 percent tax on their investment income. It could be worse; the original House bill set the tax at 21 percent, and Vice President J.D. Vance — himself a product of a wealthy school and its endowment funding — wanted to set the tax at 35 percent, according to the New York Times.


Harvard has the largest endowment of any U.S. university, with an estimated $53.2 billion. The 8 percent tax rate applies to the school’s annual investment income, not total endowment, according to the Harvard Crimson. That figure stood at $2.5 billion in fiscal year 2024, which would mean about a $200 million tax bill.

Several U.S. universities qualify for the highest tax rate; Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, CIT, Juilliard and Amherst.

Schools with endowments of between $750,000 and $2 million per student will be taxed at 4 percent.

That tier includes universities such as Notre Dame, Dartmouth, the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Baylor, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, Duke, Vanderbilt, the University of Chicago, Columbia and Brown.

All other schools that qualify will be taxed at 1.4 percent.

The tiered endowment taxes aren't the only changes to higher education that the "big, beautiful bill" has introduced.

Student loans are also being re-tooled. A lifetime borrowing cap of $100,000 for graduate students and a $200,000 cap for law and med school students is now in place.


The bill also set a $65,000 cap on Parent PLUS loans, which are unsubsidized loans that parents can use to support their dependent undergraduate students. Those loans will no longer be eligible for repayment programs.

Repaying student loans has also changed. The new bill puts limits on deferments and forbearances and replaces existing income-based payment plans — aimed at helping lower-income borrowers — with two ways to repay.

One plan is a standard repayment plan that lets borrowers pay over 10 to 25 years based on their loan amounts, regardless of their income. The other is labeled at a "Repayment Assistance Plan" that is based on a percentage of a borrower's discretionary income.

The approximately eight million borrowers enrolled in former President Joe Biden's SAVE repayment plan will have to wait a little longer for a judge to rule on the program's legality.
 
random thought...in a world where US citizens generally do not trust their government to tell them the truth (´you can´t handle the truth´) and be transparent; why, for the love of God, do GOPers now trust the most dishonest person to have ever lived in the White House?!
 
Leavitt: “As for the takeover of Gaza, I don't believe the President ever said that.”
Trump in February: “The U.S. will takeover the Gaza Strip.”

www.threads.com

Chidinma Anyanwu (@amay.a100) on Threads

Leavitt: “As for the takeover of Gaza, I don't believe the President ever said that.” Trump in February: “The U.S. will takeover the Gaza Strip.”
www.threads.com www.threads.com
 
Karoline Leavitt: You've seen people in the Gaza strip yelling out "thank you Trump" for the aid and meals that they have received because the previous administration never did that for some reason.

www.threads.com

Craig R. Brittain (@brittainforsenate) on Threads

Karoline Leavitt: You've seen people in the Gaza strip yelling out "thank you Trump" for the aid and meals that they have received because the previous administration never did that for some reason.
www.threads.com www.threads.com

President Biden, Oct. 21, 2023:

"The United States remains committed to ensuring that civilians in Gaza will continue to have access to food, water, medical care, and other assistance, without diversion by Hamas."

Statement from President Joe Biden on the Delivery of Humanitarian Aid to Gaza | The White House

Today, the first convoy of humanitarian assistance since Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack on Israel crossed the border into Gaza and reached
bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov
 
Fl_Poke said:
Americans are dumb.
Click to expand...
“ A redacted copy of Epstein & Ghislaine Maxwell’s phone directory—nicknamed the “little black book”lists roughly 2,000 contacts ranging from Prince Andrew to Rupert Murdoch—was submitted during Maxwell’s 2021–22 trial. Prosecutors moved to enter an unredacted version, but the judge ruled the book would remain under seal to avoid “public namedropping.”

— Source: Time magazine 11/29/2021

www.threads.com

Robin Reed (@robinreed53) on Threads

“ A redacted copy of Epstein & Ghislaine Maxwell’s phone directory—nicknamed the “little black book”lists roughly 2,000 contacts ranging from Prince Andrew to Rupert Murdoch—was submitted during Maxwell’s 2021–22 trial. Prosecutors moved to enter an unredacted version, but the judge ruled the...
www.threads.com www.threads.com
 
Polds4OSU said:

Guadalupe River flood deaths were entirely preventable - but Local Leaders rejected Flood Warning System saying it was too costly in 2016 and in 2025 Texas Elected officials rejected a bill to create an Emergency response system based on 2019 USGS data and report done for Texas stating that climate change would lead to 20% increase in water discharge in the Guadalupe River.​


Former Kerr County Commissioner Jonathan Letz, who retired in December, knew in 2016 that the flood risk was high and the warning system inadequate. Neighboring Comal County had spent about $300,000 to install a flood warning system with sirens.

"We are very flood-prone. We know that," Letz told the San Antonio Express-News in 2016. "We have an obligation to look at what we have, especially since we have a warning system out there that may or may not work. If it doesn't work, we need to get rid of it."


The Republican leaders in Kerr County, which is relatively wealthy and very conservative, in 2018 chose not to spend less than $1 million to install a system like Comal's.

The U.S. Geological Survey warned in 2019 that rain would fall faster and harder on the Guadalupe River due to climate change. Scientists compared past rainfall with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite data and global warming statistics and predicted a 20% increase in peak discharges.

The Texas Senate, which Patrick oversees, this year killed House Bill 13, which would have formed a statewide council to develop emergency response systems for the state's growing number of natural disasters.

State and county officials also ignored more immediate warnings. The privately owned forecaster AccuWeather called out local officials for ignoring them and the National Weather Service.
Click to expand...
Ah, I gather Texas Republicans didn't want to buy a new siren warning system because doing so would admit that Global Warming isn't a hoax after all.
 
Polds4OSU said:
“ A redacted copy of Epstein & Ghislaine Maxwell’s phone directory—nicknamed the “little black book”lists roughly 2,000 contacts ranging from Prince Andrew to Rupert Murdoch—was submitted during Maxwell’s 2021–22 trial. Prosecutors moved to enter an unredacted version, but the judge ruled the book would remain under seal to avoid “public namedropping.”

— Source: Time magazine 11/29/2021

www.threads.com

Robin Reed (@robinreed53) on Threads

“ A redacted copy of Epstein & Ghislaine Maxwell’s phone directory—nicknamed the “little black book”lists roughly 2,000 contacts ranging from Prince Andrew to Rupert Murdoch—was submitted during Maxwell’s 2021–22 trial. Prosecutors moved to enter an unredacted version, but the judge ruled the...
www.threads.com www.threads.com
Click to expand...

Polds4OSU said:
Vance just got roasted with one of his own tweets

View attachment 12592
Click to expand...
Our local MAGA folk always seem to make themselves real scarce around these times.
 
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