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Christopher Schuler, christopher.schuler@sierraclub.org
Today, the Trump Administration continued its assault on public health and safety, shuttering key environment offices across the federal government, including closing the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights and “remaking” the Department of Justice’s Environment and Natural Resources Division.
EPA’s Environmental Justice office worked to ensure that everyone, regardless of race, color, national origin, or income is entitled to equal protection from environmental harms and risks.
ENRD’s lawyers represent the government in cases involving everything from pollution, public lands, and wildlife. In FY 2023 alone, ENRD attorneys worked on 4,500 matters and obtained over $440 million in civil and criminal fines, penalties and costs recovered. The division also secured federal injunctive relief valued at $2.3 billion, saving the United States more than $2.5 billion through litigation.
In response, Sierra Club Executive Director Ben Jealous released the following statement:
“Donald Trump is hellbent on dismantling and disregarding so much of what helps keep our families and our communities safe. Protecting our air and water and holding deadly polluters accountable helps American families. By shuttering these offices, Donald Trump has decided that we do not deserve clean air or water, and our right to a livable and safe planet comes second to further enriching his fossil fuel friends and donors. Trump has been on the job for less than a month, but every single day he is making our communities less safe. The American people deserve better than this.”
The Sierra Club is the most enduring and influential grassroots environmental organization in the United States. We amplify the power of our 3.8 million members and supporters to defend everyone's right to a healthy world.
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"Extending negotiation delay periods is nothing but a total capitulation to the demands of drug corporation lobbyists," said one advocate.
U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order that aims to delay Medicare negotiations for a broad category of prescription drugs, handing the deep-pocketed pharmaceutical industry a major win as it lobbies aggressively against efforts to rein in its pricing power.
Trump's order, titled "Lowering Drug Prices by Once Again Putting Americans First," instructs Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to work with Congress to "modify" the Medicare drug price negotiation program that was established under the Biden administration and has already yielded significant results despite pharma companies' best efforts to block it in court.
Specifically, Trump calls for a four-year extension of the period during which small-molecule prescription drugs are exempt from price negotiations with Medicare. Under the Inflation Reduction Act, small-molecule drugs—which are typically taken in pill form and represent 90% of medications currently in circulation—are not subject to the price negotiation process until at least nine years after their Food and Drug Administration approval date.
Steve Knievel, a drug policy advocate at Public Citizen, warned in a statement that by pushing back the negotiation date for many drugs, Trump's order could do the opposite of its stated goal, potentially reversing recent progress on an issue that has long plagued the United States.
"Further delaying Medicare drug price negotiation would lead to higher prices for patients and taxpayers, not lower ones," said Knievel. "Empowering Medicare to negotiate drug prices is the only significant legislative measure taken to address Big Pharma price gouging in the last 40 years. Now Trump proposes to undermine that singular achievement."
"Extending negotiation delay periods," Knievel added, "is nothing but a total capitulation to the demands of drug corporation lobbyists that want to continue to overcharge Medicare beneficiaries and taxpayers."
The advocacy group Protect Our Care said following the order that "Trump just caved to Big Pharma—again."
"His new executive order pushes to delay Medicare drug price negotiations, giving drug companies four extra years to price gouge seniors," said Protect Our Care. "The only winners here are the drug companies."
The president's new order echoes language that pharma lobbyists have used in their messaging against the Medicare price negotiation program, which the industry has opposed from the start.
The first section of the order states that the four-year difference between when small-molecule drugs and biologics are subject to Medicare price negotiations under current law is known as the "pill penalty"—a label that the pharmaceutical industry's largest lobbying organization has invoked repeatedly in its attacks on the Biden-era program.
The "pill penalty" language was also used in ads run by a group called Seniors 4 Better Care, which—as Sludge's Donald Shaw and David Moore revealed—"is not really a seniors group, but rather a front for a lobbyist-led shell group called the American Prosperity Alliance."
"Seniors 4 Better Care has ramped up its spending on ads that appear to be targeting Trump and his inner circle," Shaw and Moore reported in February.
Earlier this year, Republican lawmakers in the House and Senate—including leading recipients of pharmaceutical industry campaign cash—introduced legislation that would delay the price negotiation process for small-molecule drugs, signaling GOP support for the objectives laid out in Trump's executive order.
"Make no mistake," Patients for Affordable Drugs executive director Merith Basey said of the legislation, "this is yet another attempt by Big Pharma to rig the system in its favor—at the expense of patients."
"The people of this country do not want oligarchy, they do not want authoritarianism, and they want a government that works for all of us, not just the 1%," Sanders asserted.
As U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders' Fighting Oligarchy Tour continues to draw massive crowds—even in states where people overwhelmingly voted for Republican President Donald Trump—the democratic socialist on Tuesday published a video highlighting the grassroots movement against rule by billionaires like the president and Department of Government Efficiency chief Elon Musk.
"When Donald Trump looks out at this crowd—and they pay attention to this stuff, and Elon Musk does—you are scaring the hell out of them," Sanders (I-Vt.) said in the video posted on social media, which shows highlights from last Saturday's rally in Los Angeles that drew an estimated 36,000 attendees.
Since then, the Fighting Oligarchy Tour, on which Sanders has been joined by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), has rocked attendees of the Coachella music festival and drawn crowds of more than 20,000 people in deep-red Utah—a state in which Trump won the 2024 election by over 20 points—and upward of 12,000 in Nampa, Idaho, where Trump thrashed Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris by a whopping 36%.
Pro-Palestine attendees of the Idaho rally were quickly removed by security after unfurling a Palestinian flag. This prompted Sanders—who has been criticized by Palestine defenders for his early refusal to endorse a cease-fire in Gaza as Israel launched its genocidal assault there and, later, by Israel backers for introducing legislation to ban U.S arms sales to the key ally—to declare that Israel "has the right to defend itself" but "does not have the right to wage all-out war against the Palestinian people."
Dismissing claims by Trump—who is known for his crowd size fixation—that Fighting Oligarchy rallies are drawing "two, three thousand people," Sanders told the Los Angeles rally: "He lied. There are people half a mile away!"
The video's narrator, pointing to reporting that Sanders' rallies are "pissing off" Musk, said that "Elon is so desperate to try and discredit this grassroots movement" that "instead of facing the reality that working-class people are fed up with billionaires like him, Musk decides to claim the crowd was full of paid protesters."
cDismissing the unfounded claim, Sanders said: "I invite the president to come to LA. Tell the people here why you think it's a great idea to cut Medicaid and nutrition and healthcare, so you can give tax breaks to billionaires."
"Musk and his friends see you as nothing more than workers to be disposed of," the senator continued. "They got rid of tens of thousands of federal workers. They don't give a damn about you. And what we have got to do is say, 'Sorry, We are human beings.'"
"Because they know what you know and what I know, is that they are the 1%, we are the 99%," Sanders said, reprising one of the slogans from his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. "They own Congress, they own the White House, but they don't own us!"
"Now, I'm not going to tell you that it's going to be easy, it's not," he admitted. "We're gonna have to fight them door to door, workplace to workplace, school to school. We're gonna have to educate, we're gonna have to mobilize, we're gonna have to stand up in a dozen different ways."
"But from the bottom of my heart—and I've been to every state in this country; I don't care whether you're Republican, Democrat, or Independent—the people of this country do not want oligarchy, they do not want authoritarianism, and they want a government that works for all of us, not just the 1%," Sanders added.
Sanders' video came as the Fighting Oligarchy Tour continued, with one rally taking place Tuesday in Bakersfield, California and another scheduled for later in the afternoon in Folsom, California. Thousands packed Dignity Health Arena in Bakersfield to see Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, while enthusiastic supporters were seen forming a long queue ahead of the afternoon event in Folsom. Following that rally, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are scheduled to continue the tour with a stop in Missoula, Montana.
Common Dreamsreported Tuesday that new polling from
Harvard's Center for American Political Studies and Harris found that 72% of Democratic voters support politicians "who are calling on Democrats to adopt a more aggressive stance towards Trump and his administration and 'fight harder'" over ones who "compromise" with the president and his authoritarian agenda.
"Amid the rising tide of hate speech and ethnically driven violence and reprisals, we fear the darkest chapters of this conflict have yet to unfold," said the head of one U.N. mission.
Human rights groups on Tuesday marked two years of civil war in Sudan by decrying "international neglect" and urging the international community do more to end the conflict, while one United Nations official warned that the worst of the conflict may be still to come.
"The world has witnessed two years of ruthless conflict which has trapped millions of civilians in harrowing situations, subjecting them to violations and suffering with no end in sight," said Mohamed Chande Othman, chair of the U.N.'s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan, on Monday. "Amid the rising tide of hate speech and ethnically driven violence and reprisals, we fear the darkest chapters of this conflict have yet to unfold."
Sudan has been racked by violence since fighting erupted between the between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF)—the nation's official military—and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in April 2023. The civil war has also led to famine in certain areas of the country and mass displacement.
The head of the U.N. Children's Fund warned that Sudan is experiencing the world's largest and most devastating humanitarian crisis, according to a statement from last month.
"Sudan is now worse off than ever before," Elise Nalbandian, a regional advocacy and communications manager for Oxfam International, toldThe Guardian. "The largest humanitarian crisis, largest displacement crisis, largest hunger crisis... It's breaking all sorts of wrong records."
The two year mark of the start of the civil war comes on the heels of a wave of attacks in displacement camps and around the city of El Fasher carried out by paramilitary forces, according to The Guardian. Nine workers with Relief International were killed as part of the attacks.
"Today is a day of shame. Shame on the perpetrators on both sides of this terrible conflict who have inflicted unimaginable suffering on civilians. Shame on the world for turning away while Sudan burns. Shame on the countries that continue to add fuel to the fire," said Amnesty International's senior director for research, advocacy, policy, and campaigns Erika Guevara Rosas in a statement on Tuesday.
According to Rosas, both the Sudan Armed Forces, Rapid Support Forces, and their allies have committed atrocities, such as sexual violence against women and girls and tortute, that amount to war crimes. "Despite these atrocities, the world has largely chosen to remain passive. Alarmingly, the U.N. Security Council has failed to implement a comprehensive arms embargo on Sudan to halt the constant flow of weapons fueling these heinous crimes," she said.
In an opinion piece published Tuesday, two directors at Human Rights Watch highlighted both the anniversary of the crisis and a conference focused on Sudan that was held Tuesday and hosted by the United Kingdom with the African Union, the European Union, France, and Germany, per Reuters.
"As the U.K. convenes an international gathering on Sudan today, the stakes couldn't be higher for civilians there," the two wrote. "It is essential for the conference to deliver concrete actions designed to stop unfolding atrocities in Darfur and rally high-level support for protecting civilians."
The U.K. must use the conference to "rally global action to prevent more atrocities, starting with the creation of a coalition of states willing to work urgently to protect civilians. It also needs to move ahead with sanctions against commanders," they added.
According to Reuters, the European Union and the U.K. pledged at the conference to increase aid to Sudan.
