Dispatches January 2026

MIKE JOHNSON TOUTS $901 BILLION MILITARY BUDGET PLAN AFTER GUTTING MEDICAID, SNAP. Republican congressional leaders unveiled a sprawling military policy bill Dec. 7 that would authorize $901 billion in US military spending for the coming fiscal year, just months after GOP lawmakers and President Donald Trump pushed through the largest-ever cuts to Medicaid and federal nutrition assistance, Jake Johnson noted at CommonDreams.org (12/8).

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who aggressively pushed cuts to Medicaid by peddling false claims of large-scale fraud, touted the 3,086-page National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) as legislation that would “ensure our military forces remain the most lethal in the world.”

The bill, a compromise between House and Senate versions of the annual legislation, would authorize $8 billion more in US military spending than Trump asked for in his 2026 budget request.

If passed, the 2026 NDAA would pump billions of dollars more into the Pentagon, a cesspool of the kinds of waste, fraud, and abuse that Johnson and other Republicans claim to be targeting when they cut safety net programs, stripping health insurance and food aid from millions. The Pentagon has never passed an independent audit and continues to have “significant fraud exposure,” the Government Accountability Office said earlier this year.

Final passage of the NDAA would push total military spending authorized by Congress this year above $1 trillion, including the $150 billion in Pentagon funds included in the Trump-GOP budget law enacted over the summer.

In November, as Common Dreams reported, a coalition of watchdog and anti-war groups implored Congress not to approve any funding above the originally requested $892.6 billion, warning that additional money for the Pentagon would enable the Trump administration’s lawless use of the military in US streets and overseas.

The groups also noted that “the surge in Pentagon spending stands in sharp contrast to the drastic cuts in healthcare and food assistance programs imposed by the reconciliation package.”

“At such a time,” they wrote in a letter to lawmakers, “bipartisan agreement to provide additional funds to the Pentagon would deliver a cruel message to the American public, one out of step with Democratic messaging over healthcare, reconciliation, and the shutdown.”

DEMOCRATIC GOVS 2026 MESSAGE HITS TRUMP’S SORE SPOT. Meeting in Arizona Dec. 6-7, Democratic governors said they would continue to push policies meant to address the issue of affordability. The Democrats renewed focus on the key issue comes while President Donald Trump has falsely described affordability as a phony issue made up by his political opponents, Oliver Willis noted at DailyKos.org (12/8).

The Democratic Governors Association held their meeting after a successful campaign cycle in 2025, where their candidates in states like Virginia and New Jersey won while making affordability central to their campaigns.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, chair of the DGA, told those in attendance, “We have to be laser focused on people’s everyday concerns and how hard life is right now for the American people. He added that the gubernatorial races in Georgia, Iowa, and Nevada would be the top three races the organization would focus on flipping during the 2026 election cycle. 

The Democratic focus on the issue stands in stark contrast from Trump, who has been dismissive of the issue.

“There’s this fake narrative that the Democrats talk about—affordability. They just say the word, it doesn’t mean anything to anybody,” Trump said. He also claimed affordability is a “con job” and a “Democrat[ic] scam.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson has a similar point of view to Trump. Asked by a reporter the previous week if Republicans are doing enough to address the issue, Johnson said the public should simply “relax” and that “it’s gonna be fine.”

The public disagrees with Trump and Johnson.

A recent poll from Politico/Public First found that Americans generally say the current problems with affordability are Trump’s responsibility. Even 37% of voters who backed Trump blame him for the economy’s current crisis. 

After campaigning last year on lowering prices, Republicans have failed to do anything to address the issue. Conservative ideology runs directly opposed to the notion of using the government to fix or ease these problems, presenting a huge obstacle to Republican action.

In fact, the key piece of Republican legislation passed since Trump took office—the “Big Beautiful Bill”—has caused more problems. Cutting funding for vital programs like Medicaid and curtailing Affordable Care Act subsidies increases costs instead of cutting them.

Trump’s tariff policies also hurt the U.S. economy by raising prices for middle- and working-class families, leading to reduced spending and job cuts.

In Tennessee, Republicans saw more evidence that ignoring the affordability problem is a political loser. While the party held on to their seat in the special election for the state’s 7th District last Tuesday, the Republican candidate trailed Trump’s performance in 2024 by 13 percentage points, which encourages Democrats heading toward the midterm elections.

Trump can continue to argue that affordability is a myth, but voter anger is very real and aimed directly at the GOP.

REPORT TRACKS TRUMP ‘WAR ON FREE SPEECH,’ URGES SYSTEMIC RESISTANCE. The US advocacy group Free Press on Dec. 8 released a report examining how President Trump and “his political enablers have worked to undermine and chill the most basic freedoms protected under the First Amendment” since the Republican returned to the Oval Office in January, and Free Press called on all Americans to fight back, Jessica Corbett noted at CommonDreams.org (12/8).

For “Chokehold: Donald Trump’s War on Free Speech & the Need for Systemic Resistance,” Free Press analyzed “more than 500 reports of verbal threats, executive orders, presidential memoranda, statements from the White House, actions by regulators and agencies, military and law enforcement deployment and activities, litigation, removal of website language on .gov websites, removal of official history and information at national parks and museums, and discontinued data collection by the federal government.”

“While the US government has made efforts throughout this nation’s history to censor people’s expression and association—be it the exercise of freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly, or the right to petition the government for redress—the Trump administration’s incessant attacks on even the most tentatively oppositional speech are uniquely aggressive, pervasive, and escalating,” the report states.

The five recurring attack methods that Free Press identified are: making threats of retribution against would-be opponents; emboldening regulators to exact penalties; supercharging the militarized police state; leveraging heavyweight corporate capitulation; and ignoring facts, removing information, rewriting history, and lying on the record.

“Trump’s censorship playbook is responsible for the administration’s central retaliatory ethos and inspires a set of strategies that loyal actors in government use to silence dissent and chill free expression,” said the report’s author, Free Press senior counsel Nora Benavidez, in a statement. “This playbook is to lie, distort reality for the public, and deploy a cadre of henchmen to carry out Trump’s threats of reprisal.”

Free Press compiled a timeline of “nearly 200 of the most potent examples,” including Trump’s blanket pardon for the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrectionists shortly after beginning his second term, the White House taking control of the presidential press pool in February, the president’s alarming speech to the US Department of Justice in March, and the administration blocking the Associated Press from the Oval Office in April over its refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

In May, Trump, among other things, signed an executive order to defund National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Service. In June, he deployed the National Guard in Los Angeles. In July, he sued Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal for $10 billion over reporting on the president’s ties to deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In August, he deployed the National Guard in Washington, DC.

In September, under pressure from Brendan Carr, Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chair, ABC temporarily suspended late-night host Jimmy Kimmel. In October, the Pentagon’s new press policy—which journalists across the political spectrum refused to sign—took effect (The New York Times, which faces a defamation lawsuit from Trump, sued over it in early December). In November, Trump threatened to sue the BBC over its documentary about Jan. 6, 2021.

The administration has also targeted foreign scholars and journalists for criticizing US policy, from federal support for Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to the president’s pursuit of mass deportations. The report stresses that “no one is safe from attack in Trump’s quest to control the message, though the administration targets the press most of all.”

The publication also pushes back against “Trump’s claims that he’s protecting people and defending free speech,” and acknowledges that “the administration’s censorial tactics are amassing tremendous resistance across political and geographic lines, with a majority of people worried about the government’s attacks on free speech.”

Benavidez emphasized that “if only one person speaks out against injustice, their speech is notable, but it is also more vulnerable to attack and subversion under this administration.”

“If more people speak out against injustice, the collective drumbeat can more easily withstand government reprisals,” she continued. “Democracies erode little by little; would-be dictators need to scare only some of us, and the rest will follow. The very reason we must speak out together is so we can leverage our collective power.

LEAKED MEMO SHOWS PAM BONDI WANTS LIST OF ‘DOMESTIC TERRORISM’ GROUPS WHO EXPRESS ‘ANTI-AMERICAN SENTIMENT.’ A leaked memo written by US Attorney General Pam Bondi directs the Department of Justice to compile a list of potential “domestic terrorism” organizations that espouse “extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment,” Brad Reed noted at CommonDreams.org  (12/7)

The memo, which was obtained by journalist Ken Klippenstein, expands upon National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), a directive signed by President Trump in late September that demanded a “national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”

The new Bondi memo instructs law enforcement agencies to refer “suspected” domestic terrorism cases to the Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs), which will then undertake an “exhaustive investigation contemplated by NSPM-7” that will incorporate “a focused strategy to root out all culpable participants—including organizers and funders—in all domestic terrorism activities.”

The memo identifies the “domestic terrorism threat” as organizations that use “violence or the threat of violence” to advance political goals such as “opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, or anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality.”

Commenting on the significance of the memo, Klippenstein criticized mainstream media organizations for largely ignoring the implications of NSPM-7, which was drafted and signed in the wake of the Sept. 10 murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.

“For months, major media outlets have largely blown off the story of NSPM-7, thinking it was all just Trump bluster and too crazy to be serious,” he wrote. “But a memo like this one shows you that the administration is absolutely taking this seriously—even if the media are not—and is actively working to operationalize NSPM-7.”

Klippenstein also warned that NSPM-7 appeared to be the start of a new “war on terrorism,” but “only this time, millions of Americans like you and I could be the target.”

GROUPS URGE CONGRESS TO IMPOSE MORATORIUM ON NEW AI DATA CENTERS. Environmental and economic justice advocates alike have been sounding the alarm for months regarding the Trump administration’s push to built massive data centers to support artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency in communities across the United States—regardless of local opposition—and on Dec. 8 Congress heard from a coalition of more than 200 groups demanding action to stop what they called “one of the biggest environmental and social threats of our generation,” Julia Conley noted at CommonDreams.org (12/8)

Led by Food and Water Watch (FWW), which originally demanded a moratorium on new AI data centers in October, more than 230 organizations have signed a letter warning that thus far, Congress has failed to take action to stop the rapid expansion despite the fact that “the harms of data center growth are increasingly well-established, and they are massive.”

The national and state groups, including Greenpeace USA, Oil Change International, and the Nebraska-based Save Rural America, pointed to a number of harms associated with the expansion of data centers in places including rural Michigan, Wisconsin, and northern Virginia.

They warned that pushing the build-out onto communities—many of which have protested the approval of the centers to no avail—will lead to:

• Enormous electricity consumption, with a tripling of data centers in the next five years projected to result in the facilities consuming as much electricity as about 30 million households;

• Unsustainable water consumption, with those data centers requiring the amount of water normally used by 18.5 million households, just for cooling the computer servers;

• The worsening of the climate emergency, with 56% of the energy used to power data centers sourced from planet-heating fossil fuels;

• Surging electricity costs for people living in the vicinity of energy-sucking data centers; and

• Skyrocketing job losses as half of all entry-level white-collar jobs are projected to become obsolete due to the growth of AI and companies’ investments in the technology, even as corporations report they’re not seeing a significant positive impact on their bottom lines.

“The rapid, largely unregulated rise of data centers to fuel the AI and crypto frenzy is disrupting communities across the country and threatening Americans’ economic, environmental, climate, and water security,” the groups told Congress. “We urge you to join our call for a national moratorium on new data centers until adequate regulations can be enacted to fully protect our communities, our families, our environment, and our health from the runaway damage this industry is already inflicting.”

The groups noted that electricity costs have risen 21.3% since 2021, a rate that “drastically” outpaces inflation, driven by the “rapid build-out of data centers.”

As CNBC reported in November, residential utility bills rose 6% in August compared with last summer, and though price increases can be due to a host of reasons, electricity prices rose “much faster than the national average” this year in states with high concentrations of data centers. Consumers in Virginia paid 13% more, while those in Illinois paid 16% more and people in Ohio saw their costs go up 12%.

SENATE GOP SENDS TRUMP BILL HANDING ARCTIC REFUGE TO BIG OIL. Climate campaigners, conservationists, and Indigenous people vowed to keep defending the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge after US Senate Republicans on Dec. 4 sent legislation that would restart fossil fuel leasing in ANWR’s Coastal Plain to President Donald Trump’s desk, Jessica Corbett noted at CommonDreams (12/4).

All Republicans present except Sen. Susan Collins of Maine supported House Joint Resolution 131. The 49-45 vote came after three Democrats—Reps. Jim Costa (Calif.), Henry Cuellar (Texas), and Vicente Gonzalez (Texas)—joined all GOP House members but Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.) in advancing the bill in November.

If Big Oil-backed Trump signs the joint resolution of disapproval, as expected, it will nullify the Biden administration’s December 2024 efforts to protect over 1 million acres of land in Alaska from planet-wrecking oil and gas exploration.

“Simply put, the Arctic refuge is the crown jewel of the American National Wildlife Refuge System,” Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) said in a Dec. 3 floor speech against the measure, noting that the area is “home to hundreds of iconic wildlife species.”

“The Arctic refuge is also deeply connected to the traditions and daily life of the people who have lived there for thousands of years,” the senator continued, ripping “the Trump administration’s relentless attacks on public lands.”

Heinrich’s speech was welcomed by groups including the Alaska Wilderness League, League of Conservation Voters, and Defenders of Wildlife, whose vice president of government relations, Robert Dewey, also blasted lawmakers’ use of the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to repeal the refuge’s protections.

“Once again, oil and gas development is taking precedence over science-based solutions for conserving wildlife and mitigating climate change. In these instances, the use of the CRA accomplishes nothing meaningful and instead harms iconic species such as polar bears, caribou, wolves, and migratory birds,” Dewey said after the vote. “In addition to threatening wildlife, severe regulatory disruption in Alaska is the inevitable result of targeted rollbacks in one of America’s most ecologically critical regions.”

‘SOMEBODY’S GETTING RICH’: SENATOR SUGGESTS TRUMP PARDON SPREE IS YET ANOTHER GRIFT A Democratic US senator suggested during a television appearance Dec. 3 that President Trump’s flurry of pardons for fraudsters and other white-collar criminals—from disgraced politicians to former corporate executives—is yet another cash grab concocted by the president’s inner circle and lobbyists with ties to the White House, Jake Johnson noted at CommonDreams (12/4).

“My sense is that somebody is getting rich, ultimately,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes shortly after Trump pardoned a former entertainment venue executive who was indicted by the president’s own Justice Department over the summer.

“There is a cabal of administration officials and MAGA-friendly lobbyists that are in league together,” Murphy continued. “They all huddle together at these elite restaurants and clubs in Washington, DC, and they likely hatch deals in which, if somebody pays a MAGA-affiliated lobbyist a couple hundred thousand dollars, then maybe you’ll be able to get a pardon.”

“There’s clearly a whole group of people around him that are making millions of dollars, and they’re handing out favors to folks in the form of pardons in order to make sure that they get their pockets lined,” the senator added. “That’s just, like, bread and butter corruption.”

Since the start of his second term, Trump has used his pardon power to rescue well-connected executives and political allies from accountability, invariably claiming—without evidence—that the Biden administration manufactured the charges.

Many of those pardoned have been accused or convicted of white-collar crimes; “fraud” appears 57 times on the Justice Department page listing the names and offenses of those who have received clemency from the president this year.

Trump’s willingness to unthinkingly pardon fraudsters has spawned a lucrative business for lobbyists and consultants linked to the administration. NBC News reported earlier this year that “two people directly familiar with proposals to lobbying firms said they knew of a client’s offer of $5 million to help get a case to Trump.”

Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, reportedly had a lobbyist working to secure his pardon, which came in late October.

“I don’t know who he is,” Trump said when asked about the decision, adding that “a lot of people asked me” to pardon Zhao, who pleaded guilty in 2023 to “failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program.”

Trump also made history with what’s believed to be the nation’s first-ever presidential pardon of a corporation: HDR Global Trading, the owner and operator of crypto exchange BitMEX. The company was sentenced earlier this year to a $100 million fine for violating anti-money laundering laws.

The watchdog group Public Citizen estimates that the Trump administration has halted or dropped more than 160 corporate enforcement cases since the start of the president’s second term.

“Corporate pardons are just one of the ways that Trump is replacing democracy and rule of law with authoritarian power and rule by personal favor,” Murphy wrote in his report. “If we are going to save our democracy, we need to act now.”

IN TRUMP ECONOMY HOLIDAY SPENDING PLUMMETS AND LAYOFFS HIT HIGHEST LEVEL SINCE COVID PANDEMIC. A new batch of data is offering more evidence that the US economy was in rough shape heading into the holidays, Brad Reed noted at Common Dreams (12/4).

The latest Economic Confidence Index released by Gallup on Dec. 4 found that Americans’ confidence in the economy has fallen by seven points over the previous month, and stood at its lowest level in more than a year.

Overall, Gallup found that just 21% of Americans currently describe the economy as excellent or good, while 40% describe it as poor. The outlook for the near future also looks grim, as more than two-thirds of Americans surveyed said the economy is currently getting worse.

This deteriorating economic confidence is weighing on Americans’ holiday shopping plans, as Gallup found that planned holiday spending expenditures have “plummeted” from just over $1,000 in October to $778 in November. The decline in spending expectations also occurred across all income groups, although it was particularly steep among low-income households, which slashed their estimated holiday spending by an average of $267.

Gallup noted that while it’s common for shoppers to trim their spending plans the closer it gets to the holidays, the drop between October and November this year was the biggest it has ever recorded, even “surpassing the $185 drop seen during the 2008 global financial crisis.”

The Gallup survey was not the only troubling economic data to drop on Thursday, as outplacement firm Challenger, Gray, and Christmas released its latest report showing that hiring in the US has slowed to its lowest level in the last 15 years, while layoffs now total their highest level since 2020, when the country was at the peak of the Covid-19 global pandemic.

The data on layoffs came just one day after global payroll processing firm ADP estimated that the US economy lost 32,000 jobs in November, with small businesses shouldering by far the most job losses.

President Donald Trump, who had dismissed concerns Americans might have about affordability as a “Democrat scam,” has reportedly decided to hit the road in an effort to convince voters that they’ve never had it so good.

According to Axios, Trump will start touring the country to tout his administration’s economic policies, and he is expected to “aggressively push back against criticism over the cost of everyday essentials—an issue that helped propel him to victory over Kamala Harris last year.”

However, a new poll published by Politico Dec. 4 shows that Trump may have an uphill climb selling his economy even to his own voters.

Overall, the poll found that 37% of voters who backed Trump last year now say that the cost of living crisis is the worst they have experienced in their lifetimes, while only 24% of 2024 Trump voters say that the cost of living crisis at the moment is “not bad.”

The poll also found that Trump’s efforts to blame former President Joe Biden for the current state of the economy aren’t flying, as 46% of voters say that Trump is most to blame for the current state of the economy, compared to 29% of voters who put the primary blame on Biden.

IN FOX’S BIZARRO WORLD, HUGE LAYOFFS MEAN ‘GOOD NEWS’ FOR TRUMP. Following a report that showed a spike in layoff announcements, a Fox Business reporter said it could be “good news” for President Trump, Oliver Willis noted at Daily Kos (12/4).

The consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas released a report on Thursday, revealing that companies have announced 1.17 million layoffs in 2025, the most in a single year since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. For about 8,000 of those layoffs, Trump’s tariffs have been cited as the reason for job cuts.

Despite the dire economic sign—one of many in recent days—Fox Business reporter Grady Trimble saw an upside for Trump while discussing the new report with pro-Trump anchor Stuart Varney.

“This signifies the cooling job market that we’ve seen for some time now, Stu, but it could be good news for the president in the end because he wants the Fed to cut rates and this jobs data increases the chances of that happening next week,” Trimble said.

The Fox News spin (Fox Business is owned by Fox News) comes as a series of economic indicators show weakness under Trump after years of improvement under former President Joe Biden.

On Dec. 3, payroll processor ADP’s November report showed a total 32,000 drop in private-sector jobs for the month, with 120,000 jobs lost for small businesses. Two days before that, the Institute for Supply Management said the manufacturing industry has lost jobs for nine consecutive months this year.

In response to the bad economic news and ongoing concerns about affordability, Trump falsely said on Dec. 2 that the entire issue was a “fake narrative,” “scam,” and “con job by the Democrats.”

Fox’s overly optimistic reporting is in line with the network’s attempt to prop up the sagging Trump presidency.

For instance, after Trump failed to do much of what he said he would do in the first 100 days of his presidency, Fox ran a list of supposed accomplishments. Among them were nonsensical issues like ending federal support for paper straws, eliminating production of the penny, and establishing a “White House Faith Office.” Those topics were a far cry from lowering grocery prices and ending the Russia-Ukraine war, which Trump had said he would do.

Fox has spent the first year of Trump’s return to office inventing a cringe-inducing parade of excuses and justifications for his failures and shortcomings. In that context, a surge in layoffs can easily count as “good news.”