November, 30 2021, 10:04am EDT

As Overdose Crisis Claims Record Lives, Coalition of 240 Organizations Urge Congress to Pass Lifesaving Public Health Bills
Drug Policy Alliance, Harm Reduction Coalition, People’s Action & VOCAL-NY Lead Coalition of Groups Calling on Congress to Pass Harm Reduction Funding, MAT Act, STOP Fentanyl Act & Medicaid Reentry
WASHINGTON
Today, following the CDC's latest provisional overdose counts--showing the that over 100,000 people in the U.S. died of overdose in the 12 months ending April 2020--the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA), National Harm Reduction Coalition, People's Action and VOCAL-NY led a coalition of 240 civil rights, drug policy, criminal justice reform, public health and faith-based organizations in urging members of Congress to pass legislation that will prioritize the evidence-based public health approaches we need to tackle the overdose crisis. These include critical harm reduction funding, the MAT Act, the STOP Fentanyl Act and Medicaid Reentry.
"With over 100,000 people dying of overdose in the U.S. during the first year of the pandemic, passing these critical pieces of legislation is not only more urgent than ever before--it's literally a matter of life and death for so many people," said Maritza Perez, Director of the Office of National Affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance. "We are far past the point of waiting for a politically convenient time to take the necessary steps to curb this crisis and save lives. The U.S. Government has targeted and criminalized our communities for drugs over the last 50 years as a political ploy which has only fueled the overdose crisis. With countless more lives at stake, it's time to stop playing politics and continuing down this ill-fated path. It is absolutely imperative that policymakers change course immediately and prioritize evidence-based public health alternatives that are proven to actually save lives."
The letter urges Congress to enact the following legislation before the end of the 2022 calendar year:
- $69.5 million in FY22 funding (the House-passed level) to increase access to overdose prevention, harm reduction, and syringe service programs through the CDC's Infectious Diseases and the Opioid Epidemic program. Congress must finally appropriate this funding before December 31, 2021 and not delay these urgently needed and life-saving resources.
- The Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment (MAT) Act (H.R. 1384/ S. 445), which eliminates the redundant and outdated requirement that practitioners apply for a separate waiver through the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to prescribe buprenorphine for treatment of substance use disorder.
- The Support, Treatment, and Overdose Prevention (STOP) of Fentanyl Act (H.R. 2366/ S.1457), or the STOP Fentanyl Act, which improves surveillance and detection of fentanyl and enhances evidence-based public health approaches to opioid overdose and substance use disorders.
- The Medicaid Reentry Act (H.R. 955/ S. 285), currently included in the Build Back Better reconciliation package, which would allow Medicaid to cover health services during the last 30 days of incarceration and create better linkages to community-based care during reentry. Such linkages, including overdose prevention and substance use disorder treatment, would reduce the high risk of deadly overdose upon reentry.
"100,000 of our friends, family, and colleagues are no longer with us. Sitting with the gravity of this monumental figure and remaining steadfast as we push for critical funding, science-based legislation, and harm reduction education," said Michelle Wright, National Policy and Advocacy Director at the National Harm Reduction Coalition. "We can no longer afford to wait - we must create opportunities to save lives by any means necessary."
"We know how to fix the overdose crisis-through evidence-based, public health solutions," said People's Action Campaigns Director Sondra Youdelman. "Our communities just suffered a record-breaking 100,000 preventable overdose deaths in a single year. Instead of continuing to criminalize drug use, Congress needs to take evidenced-based action now, and listen to the people who lost 100,000 loved ones."
"Our nation is at a heartbreaking, infuriating watershed moment. With over 100,000 of our loved ones dying from a preventable overdose, it is a grave failure that evidence-based solutions proven to turn the tide on the overdose crisis remain out of reach," said Jasmine Budnella, Director of Drug Policy at VOCAL-NY. "Congress must heed the calls for urgent action, and pass legislation rooted in science, harm reduction, and care before the new year. If our leaders fail to act, another year of devastating and historic overdose deaths is inevitable."
The Drug Policy Alliance is the nation's leading organization promoting drug policies grounded in science, compassion, health and human rights.
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Pushing to Eviscerate Head Start and SNAP, Trump Wants to Give Parents Medals for Having More Kids
Republicans, said one feminist writer, "don't care about making the world better, safer, or healthier for American families and children. They just want women to have more babies."
Apr 23, 2025
Political observers have warned that U.S. President Donald Trump has spent his first months in office "flooding the zone"—unleashing a torrent of executive actions and Republican proposals meant to overwhelm his opponents while furthering his right-wing agenda, including pushes to slash healthcare for more than 36 million children, eliminate funding for early childhood education, and weaken environmental justice initiatives.
But new reporting this week revealed that while taking significant actions that are expected to directly harm millions of children—and make the cost of living higher for parents across the country—White House officials have been considering a range of proposals aimed at encouraging people to have more children.
As The New York Times reported Monday, White House aides have met in recent weeks with policy experts and advocates for boosting U.S. birth rates, which have been declining since 2007.
Simone and Malcolm Collins, activists who founded Pronatalist.org, which they describe as "the first pronatalist organization in the world," told the Times that they have sent multiple draft executive orders to the White House, including one that would bestow a "National Medal of Motherhood" on women who have six children or more—a scheme with history in numerous fascist regimes, including those of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.
Other proposals aides have discussed would reserve 30% of Fulbright scholarships for people who are married or have children; grant a $5,000 "baby bonus" to families after they have a baby; and fund programs that educate women on their menstrual cycles so they can use "natural family planning" and determine when they are able to conceive.
"Just so we're clear: Instead of teaching kids about birth control and sexual health, the government would fund programs that teach little girls how to get pregnant," wrote Jessica Valenti at the Substack newsletter Abortion, Every Day.
The latter proposal would likely be offered without offering women any information about contraception or other comprehensive sex education, which President Donald Trump vehemently opposed in his first term.
The administration's "pronatalist" push has been steadily building since before Trump won the presidency. During the campaign last year, Vice President JD Vance provoked an uproar when he doubled down on his comments from 2021 when he had said the Democratic Party was run by "childless cat ladies." He said last summer that people without biological children "don't really have a direct stake in" the future and defended his previous remarks that the government should "punish the things that we think are bad"—meaning not having children.
"For years, proposals and debates have separated having children from raising children. But parents aren't dumb. They'll look around and ask whether this is a world where it's good to have children."
Vance's claim that the Democratic Party is "anti-family and anti-child" was based largely on his belief that politicians on the left are too negative about the future—frequently expressing concern about the scientific consensus that continuing to extract fossil fuels, which Trump has promised to ramp up, will cause more frequent and devastating extreme climate events.
Since Trump took office, he has pledged to be a "fertilization president"—touting his support for in vitro fertilization even as federal researchers in reproductive technology were dismissed from their jobs—and his transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, told staffers to prioritize infrastructure projects in areas with high birth and marriage rates.
But the Republican Party, including Trump, has long scoffed at concrete policy proposals meant to make raising children—not just birthing them—more accessible for American families.
The Michigan Republican Party penned a memo in 2023 saying a paid family leave proposal was a "ridiculous idea" akin to "summer break for adults," and a budget proposal by Trump in 2018 claimed to require states to provide paid parental leave, but it was derided as "phony and truly dangerous" by one policy expert.
Senate Republicans last year blocked legislation that would have helped lift 500,000 children out of poverty by expanding eligibility for the child tax credit.
According to a leaked draft for the Health and Human Services Department's budget, Trump is now proposing eliminating federal funding for Head Start, which provides early childhood education and other support services for low-income children and their families, helping nearly 40 million children since it began six decades ago.
Bruce Lesley, president of First Focus on Children, said of the proposed cuts to Head Start last week that it was "shocking to see an administration consider a proposal that will impose such widespread harm on children."
"Rarely has there been such a clear, targeted attack on children," said Lesley. "Parents already have trouble finding available childcare and early learning programs, and even when they do, they struggle to afford them. The average annual cost of center-based childcare for an infant is over $15,000, more than in-state college tuition in many states. And who has the least access and greatest financial challenges to care? The children served by Head Start.
Meanwhile, the federal budget proposal passed by House Republicans earlier this month would help pay for "huge tax giveaways for wealthy households and businesses," said the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, by cutting health coverage for 72 million people who rely on Medicaid and food assistance for an estimated 13.8 million children who receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.
Responding to the reports of Trump's potential "pronatalist" proposals, Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute, told the Institute for Public Accuracy that the White House "can't just encourage people to have children. You have to think about what happens to those children after they're born."
"The countries that have been more successful in [raising children] have given family allowances, parental leave, and focused on who will teach and take care of children," said Galinsky. "The more children you have, the more likely it is you'll need to work and bring in a salary. Do parents have flexibility at their workplace?"
"For years, proposals and debates have separated having children from raising children," she added. "But parents aren't dumb. They'll look around and ask whether this is a world where it's good to have children."
Republicans' proposed cuts to essential services for families demonstrate that they "don't care about making the world better, safer, or healthier for American families and children," wrote Valenti. "They just want women to have more babies."
"What happens after that?" she added. "They couldn't care less."
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Survey Shows Progressive Voters Want 'Fighters,' Not 'Status Quo' Democrats, to Battle Trump
Our Revolution connected the sentiments expressed in the survey to a bid by Democratic National Committee Vice Chair David Hogg to support primaries against safe-seat incumbents.
Apr 23, 2025
Active progressive and Democratic-leaning voters are interested in seeing primary challengers to Democrats who represent the "status quo" and are "failing to meet the moment," according to a survey from the group Our Revolution, which polled more than 4,100 voters meeting that description between April 18-20.
According to survey results published Wednesday, 92% want primary challenges to status quo Democrats who aren't generating enough grassroots energy—and 96% support "transforming the party from within," which Our Revolution defines as electing Democratic challengers who reject corporate political action committee (PAC) money and are "ready to take the fight directly to Trump and his enablers."
Our Revolution, a progressive political organizing group launched as a continuation of Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) 2016 presidential campaign, said in a statement Wednesday that the results reveal a deep frustration with Democratic Party leadership.
Our Revolution also connected the survey results to an effort by David Hogg, Democratic National Committee vice chair and survivor of the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, to primary "ineffective, asleep-at-the-wheel" Democrats in safely blue seats.
The PAC Hogg co-founded, Leaders We Deserve, has pledged to spend $20 million to support primary challengers in such races.
"Our Revolution polling shows Hogg's sentiment is shared by a large majority of engaged progressive voters," Our Revolution said.
"The voters we organize with are sounding the alarm: they want fighters, not placeholders," added Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of Our Revolution. "If the party establishment continues to sleepwalk through this crisis, they'll be replaced by a new generation of leaders who aren’t afraid to take on the fight of our lives."
In the release, Geevargheese called the survey respondents voters that Our Revolution organizes, though the statement about the survey results doesn't offer more information about the survey sample.
In addition to support for primarying establishment Democrats, 87% of respondents said the Democratic Party has "lost its way."
What's more, 82% want the Democratic Party to stop accepting "Big Money" from billionaires and corporations, 70% said they are not confident Democratic leaders will do what's needed to stop Trump, and 72% support moving away from a "cautious, centrist approach" in confronting Trump and the far right.
In March, Our Revolution conducted a survey of its own members which found that nearly 90% of respondents believe Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) should step aside from his leadership role, and 86% said they would support a primary challenger against Schumer for his Senate seat, should he refuse to step aside.
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Under Trump 2.0, Business Is Booming for Corporate Lobbying Firms
"Lobbying firms like Ballard Partners know they can trust the Trump administration to fight on behalf of their corporate clients."
Apr 23, 2025
Disclosures filed this week show that lobbying firms with close ties to U.S. President Donald Trump's White House have seen business surge at the start of 2025, with one group that used to employ Trump's chief of staff and attorney general more than doubling its first-quarter revenue compared to last year.
Ballard Partners, a firm led by a Trump donor, reported $14 million in lobbying revenue in the first three months of this year, up from $6.2 million during the same time in 2024.
Politicoreported earlier this week that Ballard "has disclosed more than 130 new lobbying clients just since Election Day, including JPMorgan Chase, Chevron, Palantir, Netflix, Ripple Labs, and the Business Roundtable."
Attorney General Pam Bondi and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles both previously lobbied for Ballard, as did Trump's deputy director of personnel, Trent Morse.
"Lobbying firms like Ballard Partners know they can trust the Trump administration to fight on behalf of their corporate clients," the anti-corruption group End Citizens United said in response to the new disclosures.
Mother Jonesnoted that Ballard "wasn't the only lobbying firm to see a Trump bump."
"Mercury Public Affairs, where Wiles briefly worked repping a tobacco company, reported earning $5.1 million from lobbying in the first quarter of 2025—nearly half the $11.4 million it earned in all of 2024," the outlet observed. "Miller Strategies, run by super-lobbyist Jeff Miller (the firm's website includes a link to a Wall Street Journalarticle proclaiming Miller 'Trump's K Street rainmaker' for his prominent role in campaign fundraising), reported earning $8.6 million in the first three months of this year. In all of 2024, it only reported $12.6 million."
Despite claiming on the campaign trail that he was "not a big person for lobbyists" and that politicians "have to stop listening" to them, Trump has shown a willingness to do their bidding at the start of his second term in the White House.
Earlier this month, as Common Dreamsreported, Trump signed an executive order aimed at delaying Medicare negotiations for a major category of prescription drugs after pharmaceutical industry lobbyists pushed aggressively for the change.
On Monday, The Leverreported that Trump's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) "hid data that mapped out the locations of thousands of dangerous chemical facilities, after chemical industry lobbyists demanded that the Trump administration take down the public records."
"After President Donald Trump's victory in November, chemical companies donated generously to his inauguration fund," the outlet observed. "Oil giant ExxonMobil, which is a member of the American Chemistry Council, the industry's main lobbying arm, donated $1 million. The multinational chemical company DuPont donated $250,000."
Trump has placed Lynn Dekleva, a former lobbyist for the American Chemistry Council and DuPont, at the head of an EPA office with "the authority to approve new chemicals for use," The New York Timesreported in February.
During her time with the American Chemistry Council, Dekleva led the group's lobbying campaign to limit EPA regulations on formaldehyde, which the U.S. National Toxicology Program labels as a known carcinogen.
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