The SNAP-Ed program — which focuses on nutrition education and overall wellness for people on food stamps — will end Sept. 30, cutting off hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual grants that supported programming across all Vermont counties, including recipe demonstrations, meal kits and active-living guides.

The program’s elimination was part of President Donald Trump’s sweeping budget adjustments that passed on July 4 in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. As the state’s food assistance network finds its way through a new landscape of shortfalls, officials worry more residents will fall through the cracks.

SNAP-Ed is an extension of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which has experienced a number of cuts across the board. Instead of providing funds for individuals to purchase food, SNAP-Ed’s much smaller grants focus on community education and initiatives to improve eligible households’ engagement with 3SquaresVT — Vermont’s name for the larger body of resources under SNAP. 

“Just providing food for people is not the whole answer to food security,” said Suzanne Kelly, who was the SNAP-Ed coordinator at the Vermont Department of Health for a decade until last month. Her former position, and another related role, will soon be discontinued.

“SNAP-Ed is sort of that extra bit of information to really make sure that people can access the food, can use the food, and can enjoy it over time,” Kelly said.

The program is deeply focused on health outcomes, she said, including prevention of chronic conditions and disease, and promoting wellness through nutrition and exercise.

Kelly is concerned about the immediate impact on Vermonters. 

“These are decisions that trickle down to the most vulnerable people in our communities,” she said.

Kelly referenced a SNAP-Ed needs assessment earlier this year that identified certain populations in the state with a disproportionately high need for food assistance, including rural Vermonters and people with disabilities. Outreach programs that meet people where they are geographically will be an especially big loss, Kelly said.

The end of SNAP-Ed has already had tangible effects in recent weeks, causing the imminent shutdown of a food pantry in Holland and contributing to the Vermont Foodbank’s recent staff cuts. Of the seven employees the food bank let go, three were specifically operating SNAP-Ed programs, according to Chris Meehan, the company’s chief impact officer.

Vermont residents received over $147 million in SNAP aid last year. The projected allocation for Vermont’s SNAP-Ed budget in 2026, which the Department of Health received May 30, was less than half a million. Five weeks later, Kelly learned that the program was canceled.

‘We’ll have to be really creative’

Meehan said the SNAP-Ed cuts will effectively end the Vermont Foodbank’s VTFresh program, which has reached every county in the state with initiatives to increase access and understanding around nutrition. The program provided a space for people to exchange knowledge about cooking, recipes and budgeting, and was often particularly useful for families, she said.

While the food bank employees who ran the initiative are no longer with the organization, the program’s existing resources will remain on the Vermont Foodbank website. VTFresh’s continuing presence, Meehan said, will be “more passive than active.”

Meehan is grateful for the infrastructure that VTFresh has left behind — it has been “transformational” for the food assistance network in the state, she said. 

Denise Walton, a Concord resident who is a lead volunteer at Sid’s Pantry in town, said VTFresh recipe materials had been invaluable in allowing her community to make better use of fresh foods. It’s common, she said, for people to ask questions about how to prepare food as they’re taking it.

“I think people want to cook,” said Walton, who herself is on food stamps. “They may not have learned, or been taught, or had the time.”

Walton said she would keep trying to provide resources to help people fully use the food they’re receiving — but that it will be more challenging going forward. 

“We’ll have to be really creative,” Walton said.

Vermont Foodbank’s situation is par for the course statewide at smaller food assistance providers.

The Vermont Garden Network will lose its dedicated nutrition educator, according to executive director T Hanson, one of only five staff at the organization. Come Alive Outside, a nonprofit which used SNAP-Ed funds to reach thousands of school-age kids in Rutland County with tips on how to stay active, has told its staff it may not have sufficient funds to pay everyone in six months, according to Executive Director Arwen Turner. 

Meanwhile, in Burlington, the People’s Farmstand will continue as a purely volunteer effort, according to founding Director Nour El-Naboulsi. There hadn’t been salaried roles, he clarified, but they had previously been able to offer staff — primarily farmers — a stipend for their time. The organization offers free fresh produce (both self-grown and donated) at weekly open events but has also been conducting educational outreach through its Veggie of the Month program. 

El-Naboulsi said the initiative features a combination of staple Vermont crops and “culturally relevant produce — things from Nepal, Somalia, Iraq (and) other places in the Middle East and East Africa.” The organization serves a relatively large proportion of immigrant and refugee populations, he said, and the program is designed to combine familiar food with information about how to prepare local produce.

With the loss of SNAP-Ed funding to the People’s Farmstand and sister organization Village Hydroponics, El-Naboulsi said he has had to reprioritize.

“We kind of lose the capacity to do supplementary education, recipe preparation, outreach,” he said.

‘A great return on investment’

Keith Robinson, a pediatric pulmonologist at UVM Children’s Hospital, emphasized a connection between SNAP-Ed and health outcomes for families. He’s the hospital’s vice chair for Quality Improvement and Population Health and built the provider’s screening platform for food insecurity.

“We are trying to go deeper and further upstream to make sure that we’re solving the root causes of food insecurity in Vermont,” Robinson said.

For him, nutrition education has been a big part of that work — that’s why the end of SNAP-Ed is such a blow, despite the small scale of previous funding.

“It’s gonna make communities potentially less healthy, and it’s also gonna create gaps in the systems that we need to have around families,” he said. “While the dollar value may not be great, the impact of those dollars is extraordinary.”

Robinson referenced a state report on SNAP-Ed last year, calling survey data that indicated diet and exercise changes for participants “a big deal.” Roughly a third of people who received direct nutrition education reported they ate more fruits and vegetables each day, and 20% said they exercised more, according to the report.

“That’s a great return on investment,” Robinson said.

Modifications and cuts to the SNAP program at large have been made in the name of eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse” — a narrative that Kelly disputed. 

“The strategies that are used (in SNAP-Ed) have shown outcomes — real outcomes,” she said.

A page addressing cost concerns on the USDA website references studies showing that for every dollar spent on SNAP-Ed and similar programs, 10 times that can be saved in future health care costs. The total nationwide cost of the program would have been $550 million in the 2026 fiscal year.

“It’s probably not the best idea to be cutting programs that are going to eventually help reduce costs way further down the line,” Kelly said.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture did not respond to requests for comment.

A document briefly detailing SNAP overhaul from the U.S. House Committee on Agriculture called SNAP-Ed a program that has wrought “no meaningful change” for its target population. The committee cited a 2019 report from the Government Accountability Office that appears to primarily conclude that the effectiveness of the program is difficult to properly evaluate due to uneven standards of reporting from state agencies and a lack of coordination at the federal level. 

“When federal benefits get cut like this, we need to think about how to bolster connections in our community, and think differently about how to fill those gaps,” Robinson said. 

Jeanne Montross, executive director of Helping Overcome Poverty’s Effects, or HOPE, in Middlebury, said her organization has been seeing the effects of staff and program cuts elsewhere in the state’s assistance networks. Montross’ nonprofit is primarily funded by private contributions.

“It always ends up flowing down to HOPE,” she said of increased need in her local community.

Anore Horton, executive director at Hunger Free Vermont, said the state’s food assistance network “cannot in any way mitigate the loss of all of these different sources of funding.”

Any solution to a problem of this scale must be “collective,” Horton said, but must also involve significant new assistance from the state government. But in a situation this urgent, Horton said it wouldn’t necessarily make sense for the state to replace nutrition education funding.

Walton said Sid’s Pantry has also been increasingly relying on community support and donations.

“We’re very fortunate to have a little buffering like that,” she said, “especially for an aging community that needs healthy food and needs access to things out in the rural areas.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Loss of SNAP-Ed program leaves gaps in Vermont’s food assistance network.

Courtney Cutting has listened to the local radio stations around her hometown of St. Johnsbury for as long as she can remember. Her listening hit a stride two summers ago, she said, when flood damage shuttered the diner she worked at, putting her out of a job.

But last month, Cutting noticed a change on the airwaves. The newscasts that her favorite station — WMTK “The Notch” — played at the top of the hour, and which she relied on for national and international news, sounded different.

“When it would come on, I would turn up the radio to be like, ‘What am I hearing?’ Cutting said in an interview. “And then that’s when I got the end tagline, which is, ‘America’s listening to Fox News.’”

“The Notch” is one of seven stations based in the area where Cutting grew up that are now owned and operated by Essex County Republican Sen. Russ Ingalls. The Newport real estate broker purchased the media group earlier this year in a $1 million deal with longtime local broadcaster Bruce James. The stations, which air different types of music and some sports and talk programs, broadcast throughout the district Ingalls serves in the Senate.

Cutting emailed Ingalls to ask about the change, and when the senator replied, it confirmed what she had suspected for weeks: While the seven stations previously aired news from a mix of sources, he had switched all of the broadcasts, solely, to Fox News. Ingalls told VTDigger that, before the change in early August, the stations played news from either the Associated Press or the major broadcasters ABC, CBS and NBC.

Cutting wrote back, in an exchange she shared with VTDigger, that the switch had left her frustrated. To her ears, she wrote to Ingalls, the Fox newscasts offered scant context about the many controversial actions taken by President Donald Trump’s administration in recent months, and often lacked the perspectives of people who opposed them.

Ingalls contended in response that the reaction he’d received from listeners after changing the newscasts had been overwhelmingly positive. He told VTDigger he had received more than 1,400 supportive messages from local residents since he made the change, while he’d so far had only “two confirmed emails of dissatisfaction.” 

“I’m sorry that you don’t like the president,” Ingalls wrote to Cutting. “I didn’t like the last one much but he was still the president. I don’t know what I can tell you that will help you other than it was a good business decision based on what we are hearing.”

The stations Ingalls operates include WMOO “Moo 92,” JJ Country and WIKE “The Notch” in Newport; Magic 97.7, Kix 105.5 and WSTJ out of the St. Johnsbury area; as well as WMTK “The Notch” in Littleton, New Hampshire.

Earlier this year, as he was starting to operate the local radio group, the senator told VTDigger he did not want to make the stations’ content more political — even as he, himself, is one of the area’s most recognizable politicians. In an interview this week, he contended he was motivated to change the newscasts not by his conservative politics, but by the repeated requests he heard from listeners to “do something about the news.”

None of those listeners specifically asked for a change to Fox News, Ingalls said. He settled on that network because people were asking for more “positive” stories about the country, he continued, something he believes Fox News provides. He said he’s frustrated by “negative” news coverage of Trump in mainstream news sources.

“Just because CBS, ABC, NBC and AP hate Trump doesn’t mean that the rest of America does. I mean, he’s our president,” Ingalls said. “I was tired of the negativity that was coming from all those other news sources. That’s not what my stations are about. That’s not what Russ Ingalls is about. It’s not … how I run my businesses. I like cohesiveness. I like people getting along and being together.”

He contended, too, that the decision had nothing to do with supporting Trump.

“I don’t give two shits about Trump. I really don’t. But it’s the country in itself — this country is doing very, very well. It really, really is. It’s a great nation,” he said. “I want a news source that’s going to report and reflect (that) accurately.”

Fox News’ radio programming is syndicated to about 1,500 stations across the country, according to a company press release. The network frequently features pro-Trump opinion hosts; the president’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, has her own program on the network.

In 2021, Fox News was sued by the voting equipment manufacturer Dominion Voting Systems over claims the network’s hosts had knowingly peddled falsehoods that Dominion rigged the 2020 presidential election so Trump would lose. The news giant later agreed to pay about $790 million in damages to resolve the case. 

Ingalls is well-known as one of the Vermont Senate’s most conservative voices. He faced criticism from the state’s Democratic Party in April when he was one of a handful of members of the chamber to vote against a resolution condemning the arrest of Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian student activist, by masked federal immigration agents in Colchester. The Columbia University student, who was a prominent leader of pro-Palestinian protests on campus, was later ordered released by a federal judge.

To be sure, Ingalls also represents some of the state’s most politically conservative areas. In Essex County, which makes up most of his district, 55% of voters supported Trump in the 2024 presidential election, compared to 33% on average statewide. 

Cutting, the longtime radio listener, said there are other changes Ingalls has made to the stations’ content that she likes. She said she’s noticed more spotlights on local businesses — “that is a wicked cool idea” — and regular on-air listings of community events. There’s even a show Ingalls hosts himself that “I just love to listen to,” she said.

“I really stand behind the way he wants to use it in building community, and making it a forum to foster these kinds of conversations,” Cutting said of the radio network.

“We need to be informed and have hard conversations as a community,” she said — but added that if “all of these radio stations go to one news source that isn’t reporting the full breadth of the news, then, what’s there going to be to talk about?”

Read the story on VTDigger here: A Republican state senator bought a group of radio stations. Now, they play Fox News..

Representatives from Vermont’s Department of Health and seven other Northeastern states met last week to form a regional public health coalition that can respond to challenges passed down from the federal government amid dramatic changes brought on by the administration of President Donald Trump, such as disparities in vaccine recommendations or losses in lab funding. 

Vermont’s interim health commissioner, Julie Arel, confirmed that she and her principal adviser went to the meeting in Providence, Rhode Island, as did the state epidemiologist, lab director and other senior staff members in the Department of Health. The meeting was first reported by the Boston Globe.

Arel described a collaboration in its preliminary stages: “The intent of that meeting in Rhode Island was to start to say, ‘What is this thing?’ We haven’t really defined it. We haven’t really decided what it is we’re doing with this.” 

Still, she sees an increasing need for interstate collaboration as the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention restricts funding for lab testing and departs from scientific consensus on its immunization messaging. 

“The biggest issue for public health right now is the uncertainty coming from the federal government,” Arel said. “That level of uncertainty is really hard for entities that are as heavily funded by federal grants as we are.” 

No more than a week after the regional meeting, the federal center’s director, Susan Monarez, was forced out of the position, reportedly due to her objections to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s efforts to change vaccine recommendations. On Wednesday, Monarez’s lawyers posted a letter on X that claimed her ouster was due to her refusal to “rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts.” 

The CDC’s chief medical officer, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, the director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases and the director of Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance and Technology all resigned that same day.

On Thursday, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders called for a bipartisan congressional investigation into Monarez’s firing, citing in his statement the dangers to public health posed by what he called a “reckless” and “dangerous” decision. 

The regional meeting last week centered on questions of infectious disease epidemiology, vaccines, laboratory sciences and emergency preparedness, Arel said. The coalition included all of the New England states except New Hampshire, as well as New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania.

“There may be times where we are looking to provide more information than maybe the CDC is. But every state is going to need to do its own thing,” she added, explaining that the idea is that the regional coalition could be a source of guidelines and resources for states to act on independently. 

Attendees were particularly interested in discussing how states might navigate a situation where the CDC’s vaccine recommendations split from state health officials’ scientific consensus, Arel described. 

On Wednesday, the FDA issued approvals for updated Covid vaccines and removed emergency authorizations for their use, which had broadened access to the shots. Kennedy posted on X that the current authorization makes the Moderna, Pfizer and Novavax vaccines available to patients over 12 years old after consulting with their doctors. Still, the end of the emergency designation is expected to make it more challenging for individuals to get the shots without that approval. 

In a Thursday email to VTDigger, Vermont Department of Health spokesperson Kyle Casteel added that what qualifies as an underlying condition to make someone eligible for the vaccine, and how it is proven to someone administering the vaccine, remains unclear. 

The CDC is still expected to issue a recommendation for who should receive those vaccines. In June, Kennedy replaced the vaccine panel at the CDC with vaccine skeptics, and many worry that the panel’s recommendation may further limit access to Covid immunization when it meets in mid-September. 

“The approval of this fall’s COVID vaccine has not followed the typical approval process, and we are still assessing recommendations and potential impacts so we can provide guidance to Vermonters about who can get the vaccine and where,” Casteel wrote. “We are working to reduce any access barriers as much as we can and will keep sharing information as it becomes available.”

He added that the state will continue to communicate with counterparts in other states to inform how to move forward with the confusion surrounding the federal directives. 

Officials at the coalition meeting discussed areas of collaboration in which states can find efficiencies by acting as a larger group — such as buying bulk lab supplies as a region, which would bring cost savings to Vermont as a small state. When the loss of federal funding reduces resources for the state Department of Health, those savings can make a big difference, Arel said. 

Other ideas for collaboration would leverage regional cooperation in less tangible ways — like brainstorming and coordinating messaging, public information campaigns or collectively  strategizing on how to overcome public health challenges as they arise. 

The collaboration Arel described is still at the stage of laying the groundwork and relationships for when the need to collectively act arises: “We don’t want to get out ahead of anything,” she said. “A lot of it has been making those relationships stronger.” 

Read the story on VTDigger here: With CDC in chaos, Vermont joins regional coalition to navigate public health challenges.

Stacy Harshman describes her dairy-barn-turned-gift-shop in Wallingford as a “surprising dose of wow.”

The Sparkle Barn is a pop of bright color along a quiet, mostly rural stretch of Route 7 in Rutland County. The first floor is filled with “eclectic gifts,” Harshman said, while the second serves as an Alice in Wonderland-inspired art installation called “the bloom room.”

“I’m an artist, and my right hand lady (and) retail manager, she’s an artist,” Harshman said. “So I consider the Sparkle Barn an oasis. A lot of people describe it as magical.”

The store sources many of its products from Vermont and other New England artists, but other products come from artists around the world. It’s that portion of her sales that has Harshman worried for the future of her store. 

President Donald Trump announced various tariffs on different products and countries beginning in March, but until now, many small businesses have fallen under an exemption called the “de minimis” rule. Essentially, orders under $800 were not subject to the duties and fees of the tariff schedule, according to the National Foreign Trade Council. 

That exemption is coming to an end. Due to an executive order from Trump, beginning Friday, all imports into the United States will be subject to the same duties, regardless of the size of the order. 

Trump argued the de minimis exemption allowed for the illegal import of fentanyl into the country, when he signed the executive order at the end of July. Amy Spear, president of the Vermont Chamber of Commerce, said the decision also appeared to target foreign e-commerce websites like Shein and Temu. 

But regardless of the intent, Spear said, the end of the exemption could erode the thin margins of Vermont’s small businesses, especially artisans and small-batch producers. 

“Our small businesses have gotten swept up in the foreign e-commerce firms that I think the federal government is trying to target,” she wrote in an email. “The end of it means that small businesses, artisans, et cetera, are going to have higher costs and new red tape that they’re going to have to go to when they’re looking at their supply chain.”

Harshman said some of her most popular products are imported, and she is only beginning to understand how the end of the exemption will affect their prices. 

The Sparkle Barn has imported hand-illustrated cards from an English artist named Fay and, so far in 2025, has sold more than 600 of her cards at $5 each. The next order would have an additional $80 tariff charge, adding about 27% to the price of the order, according to Harshman. 

But it’s hard for her to predict exactly what the final charges might be. Last week, she said she was hit by a surprise fee on an order above the exemption from the United Kingdom. She expected the 10% general tariff rate, but administrative fees raised the total to 17%. 

“Customs actually charged a $50 fee for billing us!” she wrote. 

Harshman said it makes her sad to think she might have to end relationships she’s built with international artists, some of whom she has worked with for seven or eight years. 

“I look around the shop and I’m like, ‘How much is this going to change our vibe?’” she said in an interview.  “Because, you know, I have to make the decision: Do I keep carrying the item and raise the price, or is it something that is just not gonna work anymore?”

Harshman said she also is frustrated by the politicization of her business. When she posted on Facebook about her struggles, she received many supportive comments — but also accusations that she was “blasting democratic political screed” and overly simplistic suggestions that she simply buy more U.S.-based products, she wrote. 

In fact, she has heard from the local artists that she works with that they, themselves, are facing higher costs for the materials they use to create their products. 

“Even artists that are making it down the road in Wallingford … their materials are coming from overseas,” she said. 

Spear said she’s heard of similar issues with maple syrup producers. Though maple syrup is well-known as a Vermont product, supplies like the tubes between trees or collection buckets may be sourced from overseas.  

Erik Waring, owner of Erik’s Sugarbush in Kirby, said a recent order of a stainless steel tank from Canada came with a new stipulation: He had to sign a warning that the product may or may not have a tariff on it when it got to the United States. 

He said he simply cannot afford to sink thousands of dollars into stockpiling equipment. As a small producer, he is already contending with stiff competition from larger companies that have the advantage of economies of scale. 

“The deck’s stacked against the smaller producers, other than the fact that we should be selling our better, our best stuff, and put our best foot forward,” he said.

In Montpelier, the stationery and gift shop Magpie & Tiger offers a wide variety of international goods, from German notebooks to Korean paper stickers. Owner Elena Gustavson said many of the products she offers are not manufactured in the United States or are not manufactured to the same quality level. 

“This country does not have the infrastructure, knowledge, or systems — and hasn’t for many, many years,” she wrote in an email. 

She said she is now navigating “ridiculous” product codes and the federal tariff site to understand what her liabilities might be. She also is stockpiling what she can in preparation for the busier months of fall and winter. 

But with little ability to absorb the additional costs, she believes she will have to stop importing many of the store’s international goods for now. 

“To put small businesses, the heartbeat of their communities, through this political circus is beyond my understanding,” she wrote. 

Clarification: Captions in a previous version of this story partially misrepresented Stacy Harshman’s job title.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont shops and businesses brace for higher costs on imports after Trump executive order.

This commentary is by Beth Zigmund, MD, of South Burlington.

Severe heat, abnormally dry weather, and wildfire smoke have assailed Vermont and much of the U.S. throughout this summer, a testament to the growing menace of climate change. Despite this  — and adding to a long list of assaults on public health — President Trump is now using the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to aim its sledgehammer at the endangerment finding, the rule which gives the EPA the authority to regulate air-polluting, climate-warming gases.

If President Trump succeeds, Vermonters will be sicker and poorer for generations to come. Now is the time to use our voices to protect this critically important rule.

The endangerment finding

The endangerment finding was issued by the EPA in 2009 to protect the public by regulating six planet-warming gases. The rule rests on a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision finding that greenhouse gases are pollutants, leading the EPA to make a science-based determination that they endanger public health under the Clean Air Act. The endangerment finding underpins long standing safeguards, including critical vehicle and power plant emissions standards.

Seemingly unaware of the EPA’s mission to protect public health and the environment, President Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office directing the EPA to review the endangerment finding, arguing that regulating planet-warming fossil fuel emissions is too expensive for the industries causing the pollution. On July 29, the EPA fulfilled the President’s order, and the rule is now under review.

Vermonters should be alarmed by this reckless proposal to place industry profits above the interests of our communities, loved ones and future generations.

The costs of ignoring climate science

The consequences of fossil fuel-driven air pollution and climate change are not theoretical. Air pollution from burning fossil fuels causes between 5–10 million deaths per year globally. Recent floods in Vermont and other states have devastated whole communities. Smoke from climate change-driven wildfires has become a regular feature of Vermont summers, carrying toxic particulate matter linked to premature births, exacerbations of lung and heart diseases, increased risk of dementia and some cancers and premature mortality. Heat-related deaths are expected to increase as extremely hot days become more common. Warmer, more humid weather in our state is creating a vast utopia for dangerous, vector-borne illnesses while also lengthening and intensifying the allergy season. 

Poorer mental health is at the nexus of all these climate impacts.

According to the EPA itself, the consequences of climate change and air pollution are disproportionately borne by children, pregnant women, older adults, people with disabilities, low-income communities, people of color and indigenous populations.

Health threats aside, economic facts pour cold water on the Trump Administration’s claim that regulating planet-warming gases is too expensive. The inflation-adjusted economic costs of climate-related events are staggering, totaling $462 billion in the U.S. from 2022-2024.      

The American Lung Association estimates that by switching away from fossil fuels to cleaner energy, the U.S. would generate $1.2 trillion in health benefits, while averting 13 million lost workdays, 110,000 premature deaths, and 3 million asthma attacks by 2050. According to the US Department of Energy, moving away from fossil fuels to renewable energy would spur job growth and could position the U.S. as a global leader in designing, manufacturing and deploying renewable energy technologies.

The public wants stronger protections

President Trump’s proposal to gut the EPA’s pollution-regulating authority is wildly out of step with public opinion. People know they sit in the crosshairs of weak public policy on climate change. Polling consistently shows that about two-thirds of Americans believe the government is not doing enough to protect us from climate change. Three-quarters want stricter limits on air pollution. Meanwhile, “climate denialists” are dwindling in number, representing only about 15% of Americans. Vermonters are among the most concerned about climate change in the country.

Despite accelerating climate impacts, broad-based public support for regulating health-damaging climate-warming gases and air pollution, and the rapidly mounting costs of climate-related disasters, the Trump Administration is boldly proceeding with its attack on the endangerment finding and attempting to undo decades of scientific consensus.

Fortunately, there is time to act. The EPA public comment period is open through September 15, 2025. Anyone can comment, no matter what your background. Authentic personal stories about how climate change is affecting you are the most powerful.      

For those who want to provide oral testimony, a virtual public hearing will occur from August 19 to August 22, 2025, recently lengthened due to a very high number of registrants. Anyone can sign up to provide oral testimony; oral comments are limited to three minutes or approximately 450 words.

Every written and oral testimonial must be considered in the EPA’s decision. And, if the EPA rescinds the endangerment finding, testimony will serve as evidence in legal challenges to the EPA’s decision.

Please use your voice to protect this vitally important rule, which stands as a bulwark between public health and dangerous, unregulated fossil fuel pollution.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Beth Zigmund: President Donald Trump wants to undo the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to protect our climate and air — and we must speak up.

State officials maintain Vermont is not a sanctuary state but received a letter Monday from the U.S. attorney general’s office alleging it has immigration enforcement policies in place the federal government sees as unlawful.

“For too long, so-called sanctuary jurisdiction policies have undermined this necessary cooperation and obstructed federal immigration enforcement, giving aliens cover to perpetrate crimes in our communities and evade the immigration consequences that federal law requires,” reads the letter dated Aug. 13, shared with VTDigger.

Studies show immigrants in the United States commit crimes at lower rates than the U.S.-born population. Meanwhile, immigration authorities this year have been detaining and deporting record numbers of immigrants who have little or no criminal record, according to the Marshall Project.

Gov. Phil Scott is reviewing the letter from Attorney General Pamela Bondi and is preparing a response to push back on that assertion, according to Dustin Degree, a spokesperson for the governor.

“You are hereby notified that your jurisdiction has been identified as one that engages in sanctuary policies and practices that thwart federal immigration and enforcement to the detriment of the interests of the United States. This ends now,” Bondi’s letter states.

Degree rejected Bondi’s assertion Monday.

“Importantly, Vermont is not a sanctuary state. Vermont does not have any law or policy that impedes the enforcement of federal immigration law,” Degree wrote to VTDigger in an email.

“In fact, the opposite is true: Vermont State law is very clear that the State does not prohibit or impede any public agency from complying with the lawful requirements of 8 U.S.C. §§ 1373 and 1644,” he stated.

Those laws state local law or governmental entities may not prohibit or restrict the sending or receiving of information from federal authorities regarding a person’s immigration status.

Any policy or practice that existed in Vermont that conflicts with federal immigration requirements has been abolished, according to Degree.

“Governor Scott will convey these important details in a response to the AG, which we expect will be sent tomorrow,” Degree wrote.

The letter, which was sent to multiple communities, threatens criminal charges, civil action and potentially withholding federal funds if entities don’t comply.

The letter comes on the heels of the Justice Department announcing its latest list of 35 sanctuary jurisdictions, which includes Vermont, as part of the federal government’s continued effort to target communities that it believes are interfering with immigration enforcement.

An earlier list in May named more than 500 jurisdictions across red and blue states in response to President Donald Trump’s April 28 executive order directing federal authorities to identify so-called sanctuary jurisdictions nationwide that are “deliberately obstructing the enforcement of federal immigration laws and endangering American citizens.”

The whittled down list naming about three dozen sanctuary jurisdictions, largely Democratic, makes no reference to the older list which has been quietly removed from the Department of Homeland Security’s website.

Read the story on VTDigger here: US attorney general tells Vermont it’s violating Trump’s immigration policies.

Mere months ago, the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project was furloughing staff, reeling from federal funding cuts that slashed about half of the group’s budget. 

Now, the key immigration law organization helping noncitizens fight detention and removal in Vermont is expanding rapidly, according to Executive Director Jill Martin Diaz. That’s thanks to both private donations — some in the six figures — as well as a $100,000 grant from the Vermont Immigration Legal Defense Fund. 

“For better or worse, this year has taught me how to run a business,” Martin Diaz said. 

The asylum assistance project is the first recipient of money from the legal defense fund. A group of well-connected leaders and elected officials announced the fund in May, quickly raising more than $30,000 in donations online after that rollout, according to Natalie Silver, a consultant for the fundraising operation.

More than three months in, the fund, created to expand legal resources for Vermonters facing immigration proceedings, has raised $250,000, a quarter of the way to its $1 million goal. 

As President Donald Trump’s administration ramps up immigration enforcement nationwide, the effects have hit Vermont, with noncitizens detained, incarcerated in the state’s prisons and moved by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement around the country. Few attorneys in Vermont have immigration law expertise, a niche that the legal defense fund and asylum assistance project have looked to fill. 

“This is something Vermonters really care about,” Silver said. “What we have learned is that people are fired up about the fact that there are people in our communities who are being pushed through this system without ever speaking to an attorney.”

Silver said the fund has received money from more than 700 individual donors, and has benefited from partnerships, like one with Vermont Green Football Club, which raised $25,000.

“There is an urgent need. The need is only increasing,” she said. 

Martin Diaz agreed. The asylum assistance project is looking to increase its partnerships by having staff work alongside other community organizations, growing the clinic’s regional reach. The organization is also increasing its work in Vermont’s prisons, where legal staff can meet people in need of representation. 

“This is a system that’s overdue for Vermont, and we want to sustain it going forward,” they said. 

In the next few months, the project will bring on two new legal fellows, as well as an intake specialist and a director of operations, among other positions, according to Martin Diaz. On the back of strong fundraising, the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project plans to more than double its spending, from $383,000 last fiscal year to more than $1.05 million this year. 

Martin Diaz described this whirlwind period as bittersweet. On the one hand, the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project has taken off. But that’s due to the surge in immigration enforcement since Trump took office, and meanwhile, other organizations engaged in similar work have suffered from federal funding cuts. 

“To think that in just a few months we pivoted so dramatically, it’s stunning,” they said. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Immigration Legal Defense Fund raises $250K, fueling expansion of key organization.

This commentary is by Mike Pieciak and Sue Minter. Pieciak is the Vermont state treasurer and Minter previously served as executive director of Capstone Community Action, secretary of the Vermont Department of Transportation, state representative and state director of recovery after Tropical Storm Irene. The Task Force on the Federal Transition was convened by Pieciak and co-chaired by Minter.

Vermonters have learned a hard lesson from past disasters: Being prepared makes a difference.

The Covid-19 pandemic, Tropical Storm Irene and devastating floods of recent summers have shown that when we plan ahead and protect our state, we keep Vermonters safe, businesses open and costs down. Today, we must use this same approach as the Trump administration threatens the security of workers, families and our communities.

Vermonters are already feeling the impact of the MAGA agenda. Inflation is worsening, tariffs are driving up costs for businesses, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids are tearing families apart, and important programs like Medicaid and food assistance are being slashed. The stock market may be riding high, but this bears little resemblance to the reality of most Vermonters. 

Across our state, there is deep anxiety about how President Donald Trump’s policies are affecting our neighbors, the cost of living and the most vulnerable among us. To better understand the impact of these changes as they unfold — and develop recommendations to protect Vermonters from incoming and future changes — the State Treasurer’s Office convened the Task Force on the Federal Transition.

Meeting regularly since January, the task force included a range of local leaders and heard from local and national experts about how federal changes are impacting Vermonters, our economy and the state’s fiscal health. 

As a small, rural state, Vermont is especially vulnerable to any shifts in federal support. On a per capita basis, Vermont receives about 36% more federal funding than the average U.S. state. Federal funds, meanwhile, account for roughly 35% of our state budget. 

Over the past decade, Vermont has also been the fourth-highest recipient per capita among all U.S. states of disaster-related federal funding. With the role of the Federal Emergency Management Agency now in question, any loss in disaster-related support would shift more costs to states, businesses and taxpayers.

In our communities, ICE raids and changes to immigration policy have stirred needless terror and dislocated neighbors and family members. This has also added pressure to Vermont’s already strained workforce, driving up costs in critical industries like health care, agriculture and housing.

At our northern border, Trump’s rhetoric and tariffs are dramatically impacting Canadian travel to Vermont. In March, April and May, year-over-year private-vehicle crossings from Canada into Vermont were down about 35%. This sudden drop in Canadian visitors is hurting our state’s $4 billion tourism industry, which many of our rural communities rely on. 

When Washington, D.C., changes course or tone, Vermonters feel it here at home.

Recently, the task force published a final report with 11 recommended actions to make Vermont’s economy more resilient to federal policy changes. The recommendations include creating a state natural disaster recovery reserve, convening nonprofit leaders to strengthen services, and establishing a state office of new Americans to coordinate resources for foreign newcomers and help grow our workforce and economy. 

Across all recommendations, the report delivers a clear message: Vermont must prepare now for a future with fewer federal dollars, greater economic uncertainty, and higher costs for workers and families. 

We cannot control what is going to happen in Washington, D.C., and we cannot fully replace the federal support that is being cut away. But we can organize, plan ahead and take proactive steps to provide the best outcomes possible to Vermonters.

This work takes on even greater importance under Trump’s domestic policy bill, which was passed after the work of the task force was completed. In the coming years, cuts and new requirements to programs like Medicaid and SNAP will kick tens of thousands of Vermonters off their health insurance and cause children across the state to go hungry. 

This will trap more families in poverty, strain social services and drive up costs for everyone. It’s a historic betrayal of the working and middle class.

Recognizing these challenges, we must lean into our strengths as Vermonters: strong communities, a deep care for our neighbors and a shared commitment to protecting the place we call home. We must work together and prove once again that when we stand shoulder to shoulder, we can build a better future for everyone. 

That won’t change — no matter what happens in Washington, D.C.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Mike Pieciak and Sue Minter: How Vermonters can prepare for a future with less federal support.

Gov. Phil Scott has turned down a second request from President Donald Trump’s administration in as many months to use members of the Vermont National Guard to carry out elements of the White House’s controversial domestic policy agenda. 

The Department of Defense last week asked Scott for “a few dozen” troops it could deploy to Washington, D.C., as part of the president’s sweeping push to crack down on crime in the city, Vermont Public reported Friday. But the governor said no, telling the Pentagon he didn’t think the request was an appropriate use of the guard’s resources, according to the news outlet.

Dustin Degree, a spokesperson for Scott’s office, referred VTDigger to the Vermont Public story in response to a request for comment Friday afternoon. He declined to be interviewed or answer questions about the governor’s decision.

Trump has ordered hundreds of troops onto the streets of the nation’s capital in recent days and moved to assert federal control over the city’s police department. At a press conference Monday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said states could be called on to reinforce the city’s national guard, if needed. On Friday, Washington, D.C., Attorney General Brian Schwalb sued the Trump administration over its efforts to take control of the local police force.

In late July, Scott rejected a separate request from the Trump administration to allow a dozen Vermont guard troops to do clerical work for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the federal agency’s field office in St. Albans.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Phil Scott rejects Trump administration request to use Vermont national guard in president’s DC crackdown.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

As President Donald Trump orders federal troops into the streets of Washington, D.C., to “do whatever the hell they want” to stop crime, Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., is traveling across Vermont to share what he insists is the real news that Trump is trying to divert attention from.

Welch has tallied the impact of Trump’s economic policies and determined that they will cost families in Vermont an average of $2,120 each year. He says that 99.5% of all Vermont families will lose money as a result of Trump’s tariffs and his budget reconciliation bill, which the Senate narrowly passed in early July after Vice President J.D. Vance cast a tie-breaking vote.

The Vermont Conversation caught up with Welch at Snow Farm Vineyard in South Hero, where Welch held a listening session attended by about 150 people.

Welch conceded that even he is “shocked” by the devastating impact of what he calls the “big ugly bill.” His office released a list of those impacts, including:

• As many as 45,000 Vermonters will lose health care
• As much as $1.7 billion in lost revenue for Vermont hospitals
• Over 26,000 Vermonters will lose access to discounted premiums on the Affordable Care Act marketplace
• 6,000 Vermonters are at risk of losing SNAP assistance
• Annual energy bills for Vermonters will rise by $290
• The state will lose 1,400 jobs by ending green energy projects
• Mortgage payments will rise by $1,060 annually
• 78,000 Vermonters with student loans will pay $3,694 more over the course of their loans

These cuts will shred the country’s social safety net, and undo social programs that date back to President Roosevelt’s New Deal and President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

“There (were) a lot of lies that were peddled by the administration and frankly by many of my Republican colleagues about how great the bill was,” Welch said, while “ignoring the concrete reality” of how it will hurt the people they represent. Welch said Trump’s budget will add about $4.5 trillion to the federal deficit.

In a rare criticism of Gov. Phil Scott, Welch slammed the governor’s recent decision to provide the Trump administration sensitive data on thousands of Vermonters who receive nutrition assistance. “We should not be providing the private information of our citizens to the federal government,” said Vermont’s junior senator. “We should be protecting the privacy of Vermont citizens.”

All together, Welch said Trump’s actions are part and parcel of an authoritarian push. He accused the president of employing a “dual standard” around crime in the nation’s capital. “You had a riot that was inspired and incited by Trump and those folks who were intent on doing real violence and hurt many of these law enforcement officers have been pardoned by the president.” Welch was in Congress hiding from mobs of Trump supporters who rampaged through the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Abroad, Welch was also sharply critical of Israel’s war in Gaza. Since the Oct. 7, 2023 attack in which Hamas killed some 1,200 Israelis and took hostage some 250 soldiers and civilians, Israel has killed more than 61,000 Palestinians, detained about 3,000 people — none of whom have been charged with a crime — and waged a campaign of starvation against a desperate population. In response, Welch has called for a ceasefire, the return of hostages, and a cutoff of sales of offensive weapons to Israel.

“Being against starvation is not at all being against the endurance of the democratic Jewish state of Israel. It’s about being against starvation and that starvation being inflicted by the authority of the state.”

American democracy is “fragile,” Welch said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: Sen. Peter Welch slams Trump on his ‘ugly bill’, DC takeover and war in Gaza.

This commentary is by Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, of Burlington.

For years, the city of Burlington has worked hard to adapt our responses to public health challenges, including homelessness, substance use disorders and mental health crises. 

Camping and rough sleeping have been prevalent in city spaces for decades. However, since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, Vermont has seen an alarming increase in the number of people experiencing homelessness. 

Over the past three years, uncertainty around the State Emergency Housing Program, also known as the motel program, has left the city and partner organizations in a near constant state of crisis-response. 

Vermont’s municipalities do not have the staff or resources to adequately respond to these overlapping challenges. The most recent round of motel exits on July 1 saw hundreds of people pushed out of the motel program statewide, including families with children, older adults and medically vulnerable individuals. 

Many who exited had nowhere to go.

Based on local data, while Chittenden County accounts for 26% of Vermont’s population, we hold 34% of the state’s residents sleeping unsheltered. This is a policy failure that has left vulnerable people and those trying to serve them in crisis. We need more residential treatment beds, more shelter capacity, stronger renter protections and more affordable housing — real solutions that we have collectively failed to achieve.

On July 24, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order: Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets. This executive order promotes forced institutionalization, prioritizes the criminalization of homelessness and deprioritizes funding for evidence-based public health responses. This executive order is not a mandate, and we will not treat it as such in Burlington. 

As Burlington’s mayor, let me be clear: We will continue to move forward with compassion, using evidence-based practices like housing first and harm reduction while also prioritizing public health and safety, and maintaining our public spaces for all to enjoy.

In Burlington, we have made progress in evolving our responses to public health challenges, including increased funding for embedded social support providers and clinicians within our police department, creation of the fire department’s community response team, continued support for the urban park ranger program, and an increased investment in Howard Center’s Street Outreach Team. 

Key staff across multiple departments meet weekly to identify encampments, remove them from city parks, and assess campsites on other city land for health and safety. 

We also recently launched the Situation Table, an international model for intensive case coordination with the goal of reducing relevant risk factors for individuals at a heightened risk of harm to themselves or others. Anonymized risk factor data is then recorded so that we can track interventions, measure the effectiveness of the Situation Table, and assess if services are successfully mitigating risks. 

This data helps inform the development of local policies and initiatives to address safety and can be used to advocate for additional resources. We are also preparing to launch the City Circle initiative, which will offer an immediate accountability process for individuals who violate local ordinances and employs a restorative justice approach. 

I am proud of these innovative initiatives, however, they are at best triage and harm reduction responses necessitated by our maxed-out and chronically underfunded system of care. 

As mayor, I and other municipal officials have pleaded with state leaders, hoping to impress upon them the impossible burden municipalities face when the state fails to take action. My office has coordinated with city councilors and department heads to send several letters to Gov. Phil Scott on this issue. 

I have personally met with Scott and Agency of Human Services leaders to request a truly collaborative statewide response. Homelessness, substance use disorders and mental health crises touch every Vermont community in some fashion. If we are serious about supporting Vermonters, then we cannot ignore the public suffering that is affecting so many communities across our state. 

Municipal officials have advocated repeatedly for a coordinated response by the Agency of Human Services, including expanded shelter capacity and treatment beds. These pleas have largely been met with inaction. Burlington remains a willing partner to Scott, other state leaders and service providers to identify and implement real solutions to homelessness and our housing crisis. 

The conversation around H.91 was a good start, but Scott vetoed that bill to the surprise of many legislators and without offering alternatives. H.91 would have allowed for a more regional approach to shelter and service provision, offering a bridge to more community based shelter capacity and away from motels. 

Our city team will continue to adapt within our capacity to respond to the unprecedented scale of unsheltered homelessness in our community. However, we cannot do this work alone. When we expend resources to fill gaps left by the state, we have less for other local services and have to make difficult decisions, as we did in the previous two municipal budget cycles. 

Finally, I ask people to combat the narrative that just because people do not have permanent housing, they pose an inherent risk to others. Now more than ever, it is imperative to maintain our collective empathy. 

I encourage Vermonters to reach out to Scott. We need help from his administration. The level of human suffering in our communities is unacceptable, and the financial costs are untenable.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak: Vermont’s municipalities are at a breaking point. We need state partnership now more than ever..

Updated at 6:12 p.m.

Vermont Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas said Wednesday her office will not share personally identifiable information about voters in Vermont with President Donald Trump’s administration, if the federal government asks for those details.  

The announcement, in a press release, comes as Trump’s Department of Justice has sought voter registration data from at least nine other states in recent months, according to Stateline. That data could include voters’ dates of birth, driver’s license numbers and social security numbers, among other identifying details, the news outlet reported. 

As of Wednesday afternoon, Vermont has not received a formal request to share voter information with the federal government, Copeland Hanzas said in an interview. 

The secretary’s office did receive an email from the Department of Justice asking for a meeting to discuss potential information-sharing, according to Bryan Mills, chief of staff to Copeland Hanzas. It then had “a brief phone call” with a justice department official in late July, Mills said, but the call did not result in any agreements or consensus.

The office expects to get a formal request for information from the justice department soon, Mills said in an interview Wednesday.

Asked Wednesday if her announcement was, also, partly a response to the recent decision by Gov. Phil Scott’s administration to share the personal data and shopping habits of thousands of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, recipients in Vermont with the Trump administration, Copeland Hanzas said: “yes.” 

She said that “Vermonters were outraged” by news of that decision by the Republican governor, and she contrasted the decision with her office’s approach. 

“I learned in second grade how to identify a bully on the playground. And by fifth grade, it had become very clear to me that when there’s a bully on the playground, you are not going to win by trying to duck. You might save your own skin, but you’re going to watch your friends get their lunch money taken or their nose bloodied,” she said. 

“And so I will not be willing to duck in hopes that this kind of madness doesn’t come to us,” the secretary continued. “Because if somebody doesn’t stand up and say, ‘no, this is wrong,’ then it’s only a matter of time before they have whacked everyone else — and then, they come and whack you.”

Copeland Hanzas said she believes her office has firm legal backing for its decision. Existing Vermont law “specifically prohibits” the state and municipal governments from sharing voters’ personal details with the feds for certain uses, she said. That includes, per the law, handing over voters’ information so federal agencies can compare it to “personally identifying information contained in other federal or state databases.”

Any member of the public can access a basic list of all registered voters’ names and addresses in Vermont, she explained. But the secretary of state has more personal data than that on file, such as details on which elections someone has voted in. It’s the latter bucket of data her office is particularly concerned about protecting, she said.

Other secretaries of state have not received clear explanations as to why the Trump administration wants access to detailed voter information, Copeland Hanzas said. But part of the reason, she said, appears to be to follow through on Trump’s March executive order aimed — among other goals — at preventing non-U.S. citizens from voting in state and federal elections, a practice that’s nevertheless already illegal. 

(A handful of municipalities around the country, including three in Vermont, allow non-citizens to vote only in their own municipal elections.) 

There is no evidence, she said, that non-citizens illegally vote in state or federal elections in significant numbers — so plans to scour government data for cases where the practice happens are akin to looking for “a needle in a haystack.” The secretary said the administration’s efforts were exaggerating a problem for political purposes. 

“You know, it’s boogey-monster scare tactics that the administration is using to continue what it’s been doing for eight years, which is to try to undermine people’s confidence in voting and in the democratic process,” Copeland Hanzas said Wednesday. 

Some states have already declined requests to share voter information with the Trump administration, including Maine, where Democratic Secretary of State Shenna Bellows told Trump to “go jump in the Gulf of Maine” in response late last month. 

Others, meanwhile, have willingly shared such data, Stateline reported — including Indiana, where Republican Secretary of State Diego Morales inked an agreement with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services giving his state access to a federal database that would allow it to verify whether its registered voters were also U.S. citizens. 

Within Vermont, state leaders have also adopted different tactics in response to the slew of controversial actions the Trump administration has taken since the start of the year.

Gov. Scott’s office said earlier this month that, in the case of SNAP recipients’ data, the federal government was well within its legal rights to ask for the information — and his administration was merely following the law by providing it. His office also said it was concerned that fighting against the request could put Vermonters’ benefits at risk. 

But his decision faced sharp criticism from the state’s Democratic treasurer, Mike Pieciak, as well as the head of the Vermont Democratic Party. Meanwhile, Democratic Attorney General Charity Clark said the Scott administration’s actions stymied her office’s plans to join a federal lawsuit in which 20 other states are arguing that the request for SNAP data is, in fact, unlawful.

Scott’s office did not return a request for comment Wednesday on the secretary of state’s announcement. 

Copeland Hanzas said her office was coordinating with Clark’s office on a potential need to defend in court the secretary’s position on voter data sharing. Clark, who’s a Democrat, has joined a separate multistate lawsuit challenging the legality of Trump’s March order aimed at non-citizen voting. A federal judge has temporarily blocked parts of the order from taking effect, though the case is ongoing.

“The Attorney General and I will also continue to coordinate with other states that are committed to protecting citizens’ private data and preserving the constitutional balance of power,” Copeland Hanzas said in Wednesday’s release. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont secretary of state says she won’t share voter data with Trump administration.

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced last week that his department would slash about $500 million in mRNA vaccine contracts, a hit to an industry already reeling from other public funding cuts. 

Those impacts are being felt in Vermont, experts say. 

Kennedy and other vaccine skeptics in President Donald Trump’s administration have espoused distrust of mRNA technology. But experts say the criticism is by and large inaccurate and the vaccines are safe and effective, having saved millions of lives during the Covid-19 pandemic.  

“We are now at a point where the most efficacious of technologies, because it’s new, is causing fear, and that fear has found a political outlet,” said Dev Majumdar, an immunologist at the University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine who focuses on RNA biology. “There’s no question that mRNA vaccines work.”

When used in vaccines, messenger RNA, known as mRNA, teach cells to create a protein or parts of protein that lead to an immune response, helping protect a person against a disease. Scientists can use the mRNA platform to develop vaccines more quickly, and the method is an alternative to other forms of vaccines, like those that include a weakened form of a pathogen.

The Covid-19 vaccines manufactured by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech used mRNA. Moderna has also developed an mRNA vaccine targeting Respiratory Syncytial Virus, known as RSV. 

Majumdar, who leads a UVM RNA lab, said scientists should continually prioritize how they talk to the public about vaccines and pandemic preparedness. It’s OK for scientists to acknowledge when past work has failed, he argued, and there should be no shame in celebrating successes. 

“The public is a part of the process, and we have to constantly try to do better to bring the public in,” Majumdar said. 

In Vermont, the national debate and federal cuts to vaccine research is having an impact on a significant player in the mRNA manufacturing field.

Vernal Biosciences in Colchester manufactures mRNA — for research and clinical trials — as well as lipid nanoparticles, which help mRNA achieve scientists’ intended uses. With additional investment in recent years, the company has been able to follow stricter federal guidelines with the goal of expanding its client base.

Billions of dollars in cuts to public financing of research from the likes of the National Institutes of Health have hit the mRNA field hard, said Christian Cobaugh, Vernal’s founder and chief scientific officer. Plus, the industry, which boomed during the Covid-19 pandemic, was flooded with new players, and demand has since dropped. 

“We’re all feeling it,” Cobaugh said. “It just takes more money out of the total pool.”

When it comes to the impact of reduced public investment, Cobaugh said it ranges from the “specific” to “wait and see.” Cuts to National Institutes of Health grants led Vernal to stop some work mid-contract, he said, in the short-term costing the company in the six figures with a long-term impact in the seven figures. 

In addition to infectious disease vaccines, mRNA use has shown promise in treating cancer and in gene editing therapies. So far, the latter two applications have not been as targeted by federal funding cuts. 

The most recent Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority mRNA vaccine contract clawbacks mainly impact research and development into infectious diseases, according to Cobaugh. That’s a field central to pandemic preparedness, one that’s long relied on public funding.

“We will be less prepared” for the next pandemic, he said. “I don’t want people to be scared that we’re not going to be ready for this. We’re just not going to be as ready as we could be.”

As for the future of mRNA vaccines in a landscape marred by skeptics, Cobaugh said he believes opposition to the technology is fringe. 

“What we’re dealing with here is a fundamental loss in critical thinking skills,” he said. “If people continue to outsource their decisions to politicians of all stripes, we’re going to continue to struggle with technology and where it should fit into our lives.”

Majumdar fears cuts to vaccine research may harm the industry in ways that won’t become fully clear for a decade or more. 

“It’s hurt morale a lot among the people who spend 60 to 80 hours per week working on these things,” he said. “I really, really worry that we’re looking at the precipice of a lost generation of young people that really wanted to go into this, that wanted to cure cancer and fight disease.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: How federal cuts to mRNA vaccine development will affect Vermont .

The federal government killed a program that was designed to reduce the cost of electricity for low-income Vermonters by installing millions of dollars worth of solar energy across the state. 

The state is set to lose $62.5 million in grant funding, according to a letter received by the state on Thursday evening from the Environmental Protection Agency. 

That grant was part of a $7 billion national initiative called Solar for All, introduced by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, as part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The program intended to pass on solar benefits to more than 900,000 households in low-income and disadvantaged communities across the country. Approximately 60 grant recipients, including 49 states and six Native American tribes, are affected. 

“The Department of Public Service, with the full support of Gov. Scott’s team, is working with our affected colleagues nationally, as well as the Vermont Attorney General’s Office, to pursue every opportunity including litigation to restore funding to this critical program,” Kerrick Johnson, commissioner of Vermont’s Public Service Department that received the grant, wrote in an email. “That work has just begun and so much more to come.” 

On X, formerly known as Twitter, Sanders wrote on August 6 that the program “significantly reduces electric bills for nearly a million working class Americans, creates many thousands of jobs and cuts carbon emissions. That’s why the Trump administration wants to illegally cut it. We won’t let them.” 

The state has spent roughly $150,000 on staffing, and they bill EPA on a reimbursement basis for expenses the month after they incur them, according to Melissa Bailey, director of the state energy office within the Vermont Department of Public Service. 

The state has a grant agreement with Vermont Housing Finance Agency to support planning and implementation of one piece of the state’s Solar for All program, and that agency is  incurring expenses that they would expect to be reimbursed, according to Bailey. More than a third of the $62.5 million grant was awarded in May to the agency, a quasi-public entity that acts like a bank for affordable housing. 

From there, the funds would have been awarded to new affordable housing projects like multi-family apartment buildings, largely benefiting renters, in early 2026.

The EPA said it plans to reimburse states for money they’ve spent implementing the program so far, according to the agency’s August 7 letter.

Partners on the project, however, may not be made whole by a refund from the feds. While the state may attempt to subsidize those costs, the partners have built an annual program and staffing budget based on doing Solar for All work, Johnson said in an email. Those losses also don’t include “the potential loss of reduced energy bills for Vermonters due to this EPA action,” Johnson wrote. 

The cancellation came on the heels of the July 4 passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill. The law repealed grants from a $27 billion Inflation Reduction Act program called the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which aimed to lower carbon emissions. One of the three programs within that fund was Solar for All. 

In a video posted on Friday, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin said his agency “no longer has the authority to administer the program or the appropriated funds to keep this boondoggle alive.” 

He called Solar for All a “grift” with 15% of programmatic costs going towards “middle men taking their own cut.”

But for states like Vermont, the purpose of the program was to help low-income energy users.

“Towns with the highest energy burden in Vermont have the least amount of installed solar,” Johnson told VTDigger in May. The primary objective of the program, Johnson said, was to deliver the grant’s benefits to disadvantaged Vermonters, regardless of where they live.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Trump cuts $62.5 million in promised federal funding to Vermont solar projects.

This commentary is by Rebecca Holcombe of Norwich. She is a Vermont state representative for Windsor-Orange 2.

On March 20, the Trump administration issued an executive order directing all federal agencies to break down “information silos” and gain “unfettered access” to data from every state program funded by the federal government. 

This includes a terrifying array of data: your psychiatric and health records, detailed financial data, photos, and more, all to be consolidated into a single massive federal surveillance database.

Then, last month, the Trump administration ordered states to turn over sensitive personal and financial data from Americans who have used SNAP, a food assistance program, in the past five years, including during the Covid-19 pandemic. In response, 21 states and Washington, D.C., sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture, seeking to block the order.

Vermont was not one of those states.

Instead of joining those leaders who are standing up for their residents, Gov. Phil Scott handed over the data — without the consent of affected Vermonters. No press release. No consultation. Just quiet compliance.

Let’s be clear: This is not abstract. 

According to Vermont Public, these records include “names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, and home addresses of all members of any household in Vermont that received SNAP benefits in the past five years.” The Scott administration even plans to share your specific food purchases. 

At least 1 in 5 Vermont households is affected. Many of them are working families, children, U.S.-born children of immigrants and people who lost jobs during the pandemic. 

This wasn’t just a technical decision. This was a political decision — and a moral one.

Other leaders said no. 

Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky called the order what it is: unlawful. California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta called it “a bait-and-switch of the worst kind.” As he put it, “SNAP recipients provided this information to get help feeding their families — not to be entered into a government surveillance database or be used as targets in the president’s inhumane immigration agenda.”

Why didn’t Scott do the same? Why didn’t he stand with other states to fight back? Why didn’t he give Vermont’s own attorney general, Charity Clark, a chance to resist in court? As Clark told Vermont Public, “(The Scott administration is) approaching this in a way that prevents me from being able to join a lawsuit.”

This is not how Vermonters expect our government to behave. Data collected to ensure that Vermont children do not go hungry is now being used to fuel a federal surveillance regime. It is a betrayal of consent, a violation of trust, and a direct contradiction of Vermont’s proud tradition of protecting privacy and resisting federal overreach.

This isn’t about “waste, fraud and abuse.” In 2024, Vermont had the fifth-lowest SNAP payment error of any state — a level even the Trump administration deems acceptable. The federal government explicitly stated that Vermont does not need corrective action on SNAP. So if they are demanding our personal information, it’s not to solve a problem with SNAP. It’s to serve a different agenda.

And yes, there’s an obvious and immediate threat: immigration enforcement. USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins, who requested the data from Vermont, has publicly called for “mass deportations” and “no amnesty under any circumstances.” The fear is not hypothetical. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is already using data-mined insurance claims as a “deportation tool.”

Now, thanks to Scott, ICE and other federal agencies may have access to the updated addresses and immigration statuses of tens of thousands of Vermont residents. Vermont did not send the National Guard to round people up, but we did tell the federal government where to find them.

Even federal technologists have warned against what’s happening. In a public resignation letter, 21 staffers from the Department of Government Efficiency wrote:

“We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services.”

But that’s exactly what Scott enabled. Once this data has been handed over, it cannot be taken back.

The people of Vermont deserve answers. We deserve to know what was shared, with whom and why. We deserve to know why our state’s leadership broke ranks with other governors who chose to defend their residents. We deserve to know how the Scott administration will protect the people who are now at risk: neighbors, children and families whose only “crime” was asking for help to eat.

Vermonters do not believe in big government surveillance. We do not believe in handing ICE a search engine to find our friends. We certainly do not believe helping feed your kids should cost you your privacy.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Rep. Rebecca Holcombe: Why does Gov. Phil Scott want to give DOGE your grocery list?.

President Donald Trump’s sweeping new tariffs on countries across the globe took effect this week — a move experts have said will further disrupt trading patterns and increase prices for U.S. consumers on goods from clothes to food to appliances.

The impacts are somewhat complicated for goods imported to the U.S. from Canada, which data shows is by far Vermont’s largest trading partner. Here’s the latest:

Canadian imports to the U.S. now face, broadly, a 35% duty. That’s an increase from the 25% tariffs that had been in effect since March. (The new rate for Canadian goods took effect Aug. 1, while revised duties on other countries took effect Thursday.)

Trump increased levies on Canadian imports after failing to reach an updated trade agreement with the country’s leaders by the start of August. The president has tied the tariffs, in part, to what he maintains is Canada’s failure to reduce the cross-border flow of illicit drugs into the U.S. — though Canadian leaders have disputed that claim. 

It’s not clear when a deal between the two countries might be reached.

The latest tariffs have a critical exception, though: the 35% duties don’t apply to goods covered by an existing deal called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which Trump signed in 2018, during his first term. That agreement allows many products to be traded duty-free if they largely originate from within North America.

Vermont State Treasurer Mike Pieciak said between 85% and 90% of Canadian exports likely fall under that agreement. Meanwhile, he said, all of the energy that Vermont imports from Canada appears to also be covered by the agreement.

The latter is particularly important since Vermont gets about a quarter of its electricity from Hydro-Quebec, based in the province of the same name, while about a third of the fuel used to heat homes and businesses in the state comes from Canadian dealers.

The tariff situation is further complicated by the fact some products have been facing separate levies for months, Pieciak said. Imports of Canadian steel and aluminum have faced 50% tariffs since June, he said, and aren’t exempted under the 2018 deal.

Meanwhile, 25% tariffs on foreign imports of automobiles and auto parts have been in effect since earlier this year, though there are certain exemptions to those levies. 

Pieciak said the tariffs on metals have already affected some businesses in Vermont this summer. He recalled conversations with housing and business developers who are concerned that future projects could be plagued by higher material costs. 

“A lot of the projects that are up and running had to source their steel well before they started construction. And they largely have missed the recent imposition of the tariffs,” he said. “But I do worry about what it means for projects that are on the drawing board — projects that will come to fruition in the months and years ahead.”

Trump’s tariffs on foreign-made cars have not yet been reflected in the prices consumers see at dealerships around Vermont, said Matt Cota, who represents auto dealers in the state. That’s because there is often a long gap between when a new car leaves a factory and when someone buys it at a dealership, he said.

But “unless things change,” Cota said, higher vehicle prices are on the horizon.

Pieciak also noted Vermonters can still expect new expenses in the coming months, across the board, due to Trump’s tariffs. The Yale Budget Lab estimated this week that some of the sharpest immediate impacts will be to apparel costs — with near-term price increases expected at 39% for shoes and 37% for clothing. 

Gov. Phil Scott, a Republican, said at a press conference Thursday that the new slate of tariffs would only further strain the U.S.-Canada relationship. He predicted further detrimental effects on tourism in Vermont as a result.

“I think it’s going to be a while before they start trusting us again,” Scott said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: What do Trump’s latest tariffs mean for trade with Canada?.

Thousands of Vermonters could lose access to nutritional benefits funded by the federal government in the coming years as a result of cuts laid out in the sweeping Republican-led spending package that President Donald Trump signed into law last month. 

The reductions, along with many other measures in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, are designed to fund parts of Trump’s domestic policy agenda, including an extension of tax breaks that estimates show will benefit wealthy people the most, as well as major increases in funding for border security and immigration enforcement, among other changes. 

State officials and advocates emphasized in recent weeks that they haven’t yet tallied the full impacts the tax and spending package could have on Vermont. But a number of provisions, they said, will undoubtedly make it harder for people to access food using the federal government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

About 65,000 people currently receive SNAP benefits — commonly known as food stamps — in Vermont, according to Ivy Enoch, policy director for Hunger Free Vermont, a nonprofit that advocates for ending systemic hunger in the state. Her organization estimates as many as 14,000 of them could see nutritional benefits they rely on reduced or eliminated entirely as a result of the legislation. 

“This will make it harder for people to meet their most basic needs,” Enoch told VTDigger. “Fundamentally, it will cause harm to every one of our communities — and it is also forcing our state to contend with really difficult decisions.”

Vermont’s SNAP program is called 3SquaresVT. People are generally eligible for the program if their household income is equal to or below certain thresholds established by the federal government, or if they receive the state’s earned income tax credit. The vast majority of SNAP benefit recipients in Vermont are children, older adults and people with disabilities, Enoch said.

Currently, many SNAP recipients between the ages of 18 and 59 are required to report to the federal government that they are working, or participating in a work training program, in order to receive their benefits. But the new law expands that work reporting requirement to certain people up to 65 years of age.

There are certain exceptions to those reporting requirements, including for parents with teenage kids. Currently, parents of children under age 18 can be exempt from requirements to work, but under the new law, many parents will only be able to claim an exemption if they have kids under 14. People experiencing homelessness, veterans and young people who have aged out of foster care could also be subject to new work reporting requirements, Enoch said.

Proponents of the changes have argued they would ensure more people are working and that SNAP benefits are reserved for people with the greatest needs. But research has shown that existing requirements do not increase employment and have only pushed more people off of the safety net program. 

Enoch said many SNAP recipients who can work, do work.

“This rule will be expanded to more people, who will need to take more time — that they don’t have — to fill out complex paperwork and submit it to the state,” she said. “And the state will then need to review more paperwork, creating more burden on both.” 

Hunger Free Vermont estimates many people in the state will start to face the prospect of losing their SNAP benefits in February 2026, though the timeline is not entirely clear, Enoch said.

A more immediate impact, she said, will be felt by immigrant communities in the state. Starting Oct. 1, under the new law, refugees and asylum seekers — who have lawful status to live in the U.S. — will no longer be able to access SNAP benefits. Hunger Free Vermont believes about 1,600 people in Vermont will no longer be eligible for federal nutritional benefits because of that change. 

The legislation also restricts future increases to the value of the nutrition plan the federal government uses to determine how much money many SNAP recipients should receive. Under the new law, the value of this “Thrifty Food Plan” will continue to reflect established cost-of-living increases. But barring future updates to the underlying value of the plan could mean SNAP payments lag over time, Enoch said.  

Beyond the cost of food for individuals, the legislation is also expected to put new pressure on states, including Vermont, to pay for administering SNAP programs.

While the federal government pays the cost of SNAP benefits, it shares the cost of administering SNAP programs with individual state governments. Right now, that burden is shared 50-50. But it’s slated to change starting in October 2026, Enoch said, to a cost share that’s 75% on states and 25% on the feds.

The Vermont Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Office reported last week that this change will cost Vermont $8 million a year starting in 2026. It’s one of many fiscal changes, prompted by Trump’s return to the White House, which state legislators will need to contend with when they return to Montpelier for the 2026 legislative session next January.

Other advocates have said a reduction in the number of people receiving SNAP benefits in Vermont could have broader impacts on the state’s food system.

The Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont runs a program called Crop Cash, which leverages federal funding to multiply the dollar value of SNAP benefits when recipients use them at local farmer’s markets. SNAP recipients spent more than $385,000 at markets across the state in 2024, according to the organization’s data. 

The organization is not immediately concerned about funding for the program itself. But if fewer people are shopping at farmer’s markets because they cannot afford to without SNAP benefits, local farmers could lose out on income, which could be a potentially painful hit on already tight margins, said Jessica Hays Lucas, a policy organizer for the association. 

“We’re just going to have so many fewer dollars in circulation,” she said, referring to SNAP benefits.

Read the story on VTDigger here: 14,000 Vermonters could lose nutritional benefits under Trump’s spending package.

Medicaid cuts and other elements of the “Big Beautiful Bill Act” will restrict access to health insurance for noncitizens in Vermont in 2025 and 2026. 

Even though some noncitizens will avoid the worst impacts, the confusion alone could inhibit them from accessing care, people working to provide health care for immigrants say. 

“There’s a lot of Vermonters with a whole range of different immigration statuses, and they are the people who are putting on our roofs and helping milk our cows,” Mike Fisher, Vermont’s health care advocate, who helps people navigate the health care system, told VTDigger. “It’s so disheartening to see an attack on their access to health care.”

State health officials shared their predictions of how many immigrants will lose health coverage in the next year and a half, even as they emphasized that the exact implications of the latest federal cuts are still unknown. Medical providers and advocates helping immigrants access health services told VTDigger they’re already seeing patients eschew care due to the bureaucratic complexity and fear of the Trump administration’s federal immigration enforcement. Advocates predict the health system’s administrative burden will only become worse in the months ahead.  

In a hearing with legislative leaders last week, Jenney Samuelson, secretary of the Vermont Agency of Human Services, shared the state’s latest predictions on the scope of the federal cuts impacting immigrant health care. 

She said an estimated 100 legal noncitizens who have been in the country fewer than five years are slated to lose health insurance premium assistance on Jan. 1. The state also expects 400-500 refugees, asylum seekers and nonlegal residents to lose the same assistance at the turn of the year, she said.

Between 500 and 600 Medicaid enrollees who are asylum seekers or refugees are expected to lose eligibility in October 2026, Samuelson told lawmakers.

The increased administrative burden associated with the “Big Beautiful Bill Act” will make it more difficult for noncitizens to access health care, said Naomi Wolcott-MacCausland, program coordinator of the Bridges to Health program, which helps migrant workers access health services.

“Health insurance can be really complicated for anybody, regardless of whether you speak English or don’t have access to the internet,” she said in an interview, and the federal changes will only add to those challenges.

A patchwork of federal and state programs allow some noncitizens with a range of immigration statuses to receive health care. 

In Vermont, the Immigrant Health Insurance Plan allows pregnant individuals and young people not otherwise eligible for Medicaid to enroll in health insurance. 

But many immigrants go without coverage. 

One barrier to insurance, according to Wolcott-MacCausland, is that it is challenging for many immigrant workers to estimate their incomes because industries like agriculture or construction can boom or bust due to uncontrollable factors like weather. 

As the “Big Beautiful Bill Act” causes health insurance subsidies to shrink or disappear altogether, Wolcott-MacCausland said, the changes will disproportionately affect immigrants and those with variable incomes. She said she already sees many workers on temporary visas who are eligible for insurance choose not to enroll due to concerns that their fluctuating income will lead them to owe more money than they expect. 

Federal cuts to services for noncitizens are not the only changes in Washington, D.C., affecting access to health care. Wolcott-MacCausland said increased federal immigration enforcement is causing people to fear going to the doctor. 

“People are delaying care that can in turn result in them being at a really costly emergency department visit,” she said. 

Open Doors Clinic, a free clinic in Middlebury serving uninsured and under-insured local residents, including migrant and immigrant workers, is seeing fewer new patients, according to Julia Doucet, the clinical and program director. She said she is also seeing patients who are choosing to return to the countries where they were born. 

While health workers are already seeing people change their behavior, the full scope of new federal policies is still coming into focus.

“We’re trying like everybody else to understand impacts as the changes are coming down,” Wolcott-MacCausland said. “There’s a lot of unknowns.”

Correction: Due to inaccurate legislative testimony, the immigration status of people losing health insurance premium assistance was misrepresented.

Read the story on VTDigger here: How Medicaid cuts and federal policy changes will impact health care access for Vermont’s noncitizens.

Vermont and other states sued the Trump administration Tuesday over its effort to eliminate federal funding for Planned Parenthood, a day after a judge granted the health care organization’s request to block the cuts.

Advocates of health equity and access in Vermont welcome the win but said the fight is not over.

Vermont is among 22 states and Washington DC that sued the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers to Medicare and Medicaid Services for continuing to target Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood in the sweeping tax and spending bill signed into law by President Donald Trump earlier this month, also known as the One Big Beautiful Bill.

Filed in the U.S. District court in Massachusetts Tuesday, the complaint argues that the provision in the bill to defund — which prevents the use of federal funds for any health care obtained at Planned Parenthood health centers — is unconstitutional. The suit states the administration continues “to target and punish” the nonprofit “for advocating for abortion access.”

Earlier this month, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America sued the Trump administration and a court issued a temporary restraining order mandating the federal government must continue reimbursing Planned Parenthood clinics for Medicaid-funded services. That order expired last week but a federal judge in Boston issued a new court order Monday to protect Medicaid funding for all Planned Parenthood clinics nationwide while the case continues. 

U.S District Court Judge Indira Talwani in Boston ruled the defund provision in Trump’s so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” violates the First Amendment, the Equal Protection clause, and the prohibition on Bills of Attainder in the U.S. Constitution. 

Well known for providing abortion care, Planned Parenthood plays a critical role in Vermont’s health care access especially for low income people, those in rural areas and those who have historically faced barriers to care.

Beyond providing abortion care and sex education, about 200 Planned Parenthood clinics across the nation — including six across Vermont — provide cancer screenings, sexually transmitted infection testing and wellness exams to those who do not have other options.

In fiscal year 2024, Planned Parenthood clinics served 16,000 patents in Vermont, of whom 24% were covered by the Medicaid program. It provided 32,192 STI tests, 1,781 cervical cancer screenings and 1,049 breast exams to Vermonters, according to data shared by the organization.

If the nonprofit was forced to scale back or close clinics, it would create dangerous gaps in access, according to Daniel Barlow, executive director of the People’s Health and Wellness Clinic in Barre that provides free health care to uninsured and underinsured adults in Central Vermont.

“For many patients on Medicaid, Planned Parenthood is not just a provider of choice, it’s often the only provider available that offers the full range of reproductive healthcare services in a welcoming and inclusive environment,” Barlow wrote in an email. “Efforts to defund or discredit Planned Parenthood don’t just target an organization — they threaten the health, dignity, and autonomy of our communities.”

More than 70 million people rely on Medicaid, the federal government’s insurance program for low-income people, according to federal enrollment data.

Medicaid insures about 200,000 people in Vermont and costs approximately $2.4 billion, of which about 62% is federally funded, according to a press release from Attorney General Charity Clark’s office announcing the lawsuit. Vermont Medicaid covers reproductive health and preventative services and Planned Parenthood “plays a critical role in delivering that care,” the release states.

“In a rural state like ours — where medical providers are few and far between — the loss of Medicaid reimbursements for Planned Parenthood will leave Vermonters without access to basic care,” Clark stated in the release.

The lawsuit argues the provision is “impermissibly ambiguous,” unlawful and would lead to “widespread disruptions in preventative care and increase health care costs.”

The continued effort to defund Planned Parenthood is “a direct attack on the health care access of millions of low-income Americans, disproportionally harming women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and communities of color,” the release stated.

Planned Parenthood remains “one of the only affirming places” where young people in Vermont can access affordable and gender-affirming health care, Dana Kaplan, executive director of Outright Vermont, wrote in an email Tuesday. 

“Bodily autonomy is at the heart of both reproductive rights and gender-affirming care, and in this political climate where both are under attack, losing Planned Parenthood would create devastating gaps for youth—especially those on Medicaid,” he wrote.

While the lawsuits and this week’s court decision are good news for the organization, the fight is far from over, said Jessica Barquist, spokesperson for Planned Parenthood of Northern New England and Planned Parenthood Vermont Action Fund, in the release.

The attack is politically motivated, she said, and the nonprofit remains committed to providing care to anyone who seeks it. 

“During these turbulent times, we know our Medicaid insured patients won’t be able to access care elsewhere, which is why our commitment to see them is so critical,” she said in the release.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont sues Trump administration for efforts to eliminate federal funding for health care provided by Planned Parenthood.

The Trump administration on Friday announced the release of the remaining $18 million in federal education funding for the Vermont’s Agency of Education and the state’s local school districts.

Vermont Education Secretary Zoie Saunders, in a press release issued on Friday, said the agency will begin their regular process for distributing the funds to school districts on Monday.

The U.S. Department of Education announcement comes less than a month after the agency first announced it was withholding more than $6 billion in funding for six federal grant programs nationwide. The federal government withheld roughly $26 million from Vermont school districts that help fund after-school and summer programs, and English language instruction.

A portion of those dollars also helps fund Vermont’s adult learning centers, institutions which offer residents a path to earn a high school diploma or GED certificate, as well as English language classes and workforce development programs.

In the statement, Saunders called the release of the dollars “a positive development for our most vulnerable students.”

“Vermont school districts will now be equipped to begin the school year knowing they have the resources to staff critical positions and provide the meaningful and tangible opportunities that these dollars represent,” Saunders said. “Vermont schools deserve to have confidence that they will be supported with resources that have been promised.”

The release of the funds ends weeks of uncertainty for the state’s school districts. School board officials set their fiscal year 2026 budgets assuming the federal funding would be in place. Then on June 30 — just hours before the start of the new fiscal year on July 1, when the funds have historically been made available to states — the Trump administration announced they were withholding the money pending a review.

The transfer of the money to the state also brings to an end a brief hiring freeze implemented in the state’s Agency of Education earlier this month. With the federal funding restored, the agency “now has the flexibility to begin hiring for vacant roles,” said agency spokesperson Toren Ballard. 

“Let’s be clear: Today the administration solved a problem of its own making by finally releasing funding for our public schools that it illegally and unconstitutionally withheld,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, said in a release on Friday after the Department of Education’s announcement.

Two weeks after the funding freeze was announced, Attorney General Charity Clark joined 24 other states in a lawsuit against the Trump administration for “unlawfully freezing” those federal funds.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Education announced it was releasing some of the funding allocated for Vermont — roughly $6.5 million — specifically for afterschool programs.

But districts and adult learning centers were kept in limbo, with more than $18 million in funding still withheld. The Winooski School District, for example, relies on those federal funds as a high-poverty district.

Sarah Haven, the director of finance and operations for the Winooski School District, said the district was thankful the funding was being restored and was “once again supporting local budgets.”

“We’re relieved to move forward without disruption and hope that future decisions will protect the stability our educators, students, and families rely on,” Haven said. “We look forward to a wonderful school year.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Trump administration releases remainder of withheld federal funds for Vermont school districts.

The Trump administration last week announced it was releasing a portion of federal funding for local school districts’ afterschool programs that had been withheld earlier this month.

Roughly $6.5 million was made available to local school districts Monday, according to Toren Ballard, a spokesperson for the Vermont’s Agency of Education.

These funds, Ballard said, will provide “integral summer and afterschool programming, and enables students across Vermont to receive engaging, structured support to ensure that they return to school in the fall ready to learn.”

The resumed flow of money offers some relief for both state education officials and local school districts who rely on the funding for staffing and programming.

School districts were left in limbo this month after more than $26 million from six federal grant programs were withheld, including Title IIA and Title IIIA grants, which fund, respectfully, professional development for teachers and staff, and support services for English language learners.

The U.S. Department of Education informed state education officials June 30 it would be conducting a review of several federal grant programs but provided no timeline for when that review would be completed.

School districts around the state had budgets for the 2026 fiscal year, which began July 1, with those federal dollars already built in.

The state’s Agency of Education last week entered into a temporary hiring freeze to protect federally-funded positions at the agency. The agency uses a portion of the blocked federal funds to administer federal programs.

While the release of funds offers some relief for afterschool programs, concerns still remain for other federally funded programs. More than $18 million of congressionally-approved federal education funding for Vermont remains locked up, pending review by the Trump administration.

“Federal education dollars support our most vulnerable students and withholding these funds, even temporarily, disrupts districts’ ability to staff critical positions and provide a wide range of programming,” Ballard said in a statement Monday.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaking at a press conference Monday, said he has had “lengthy” discussions with Education Secretary Linda McMahon since the freeze began. He called the release of funding for afterschool programs a “partial success that will help a lot of struggling school districts.”

“But the truth is that most of the money in those appropriation bills are still being held illegally by the administration,” Sanders said.

Vermont was one of 24 states that last week sued the Trump administration to restore the funding, arguing the freeze was unconstitutional.

The funding pause generated bipartisan backlash in Congress, with senators on both sides of the aisle expressing concern over the impact.

Sanders said the federal government released the $1.3 billion in federal funding for afterschool programs nationwide in part because of that pressure. More than $6 billion was initially frozen by the Trump administration.

In Vermont, those dollars help fund nearly 100 afterschool and summer programs in Vermont that serve 11,000 students, Sanders said.

“Congress clearly and unambiguously passed this education funding and the president signed it into law. The Trump administration has no right to withhold or impound it,” Sanders said in a release issued on Friday.

Alice Finno contributed reporting.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Trump administration partially lifts funding freeze, sends $6.5 million to Vermont schools for afterschool programs.

The Vermont Agency of Education announced Thursday it was implementing a temporary hiring freeze, citing difficulties created by the Trump administration’s recent federal funding pause.

The agency is implementing the freeze “to protect federally funded roles at the agency,” spokesperson Toren Ballard said in a statement. 

“While the agency is aware of other state education agencies that may be preparing to lay off federally funded staff, the agency is thankfully not in this position,” Ballard wrote.

The U.S. Department of Education on June 30 informed state education officials they would be conducting a review of several federal grant programs but provided no timeline for when that review would be completed. Roughly $26 million has since been withheld from Vermont.

Ballard said the agency uses a portion of those federal funds to administer federal programs, and the Trump administration’s freeze “impacts the agency’s budget in addition to denying opportunities to Vermont students.”

The freeze is not expected to affect new roles created by Act 73, the state’s new sweeping education reform bill signed into law earlier this month, Ballard said.

Ballard wrote that Education Secretary Zoie Saunders “is proud of the professionals at the agency who have been ahead of other states in responding to these challenges and supporting the field.”

“The Secretary remains confident in the agency’s continued leadership in delivering quality services and navigating the uncertainty with professionalism,” he wrote.

The pause in federal funding has left school districts and adult learning centers in limbo. Six federal grant programs were affected by the freeze, including Title IIA and Title IIIA grants, which respectively fund professional development for teachers and staff, and support services for English language learners.

In Vermont, the grants for years have helped fund nearly 100 after-school and summer programs, serving more than 10,000 students as well as an array of English language programs.

The Trump administration announced the funding cuts on the evening of June 30, Agency of Education officials said previously, less than 24 hours before the new state fiscal year was set to begin July 1.

On Monday, Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark joined a 24-state lawsuit against the Trump administration accusing them of illegally halting funds for six federal education funding programs previously approved by Congress.

Clark in a press release said the Trump administration “does not have the power to freeze these funds — funds that Vermont schools are counting on.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Agency of Education announces hiring freeze amid federal funding pause.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

Vermonters overwhelmingly voted to enshrine reproductive rights in the state constitution in 2022. But what if those rights — to abortion, birth control and other reproductive health services — are nearly impossible to access?

Putting care out of reach appears to be the strategy behind the Trump administration’s relentless assault on Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest provider of reproductive health care. President Trump’s “big beautiful bill” that he signed into law on July 4 includes a provision to defund Planned Parenthood and other organizations that provide abortions. A federal judge has temporarily blocked this provision, but if the Trump administration prevails, Planned Parenthood says that numerous health care centers may close, mostly in states where abortion remains legal.

This compounds a problem in Vermont, since half of Planned Parenthood’s clinics in the state have closed in the last three years due to an ongoing financial crisis with Planned Parenthood of Northern New England (PPNNE).

Medicaid already bans funding for abortions. Most of Planned Parenthood’s Medicaid patients who obtain family planning services receive birth control and STI testing. One in four Planned Parenthood patients in Vermont and Maine are insured by Medicaid, and one in five in New Hampshire.

“The absurdity of all of this is just so transparent,” Nicole Clegg, CEO of Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, told The Vermont Conversation. “We have long-lasting relationships with our patients. We could be their main provider for years … and to suddenly be told, ‘Sorry, you can’t go to that provider anymore because they also provide abortion care’ — that’s what’s happening here. That’s the goal.”

Clegg emphasized that “the overwhelming majority of what we’re providing to patients are disease testing and treatment, cancer screenings, wellness exams, birth control. Those are the primary needs that people have during their reproductive years.”

Abortion opponents are “no longer interested in the states where they’ve been successful in banning abortion. They’re now really focused on the states where abortion is still legal, so that includes Vermont, and what they’re trying to do is go after providers. So that’s the new tactic,” Clegg said.

She noted that people seeking an abortion in states where it is banned are increasingly coming to New England for care. She told the story of a couple seeking an abortion who drove from Oklahoma to Vermont “because they felt like that was going to be the safest option for them.”

“We live in an area of the country where we are a little bit insulated from this fear, but this fear is very real.”

What is motivating the attacks?

“It’s about abortion. It’s about controlling people and their ability to make decisions and decide when to have a family,” Clegg replied.

A 2024 Pew survey found that two out of three Americans – and 79% of Vermonters – believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

“We needed to sort of wake people up by having them lose these basic rights. That’s where we are right now.”

One in three women have received care from Planned Parenthood in their lifetime, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. 

“There’s just no other healthcare provider in our country that has that kind of reach and impact,” Clegg said.

I asked Clegg what a world without Planned Parenthood would look like. She cited research on what has happened in areas where a Planned Parenthood health center has closed.

“Worse pregnancy outcomes. Increased rates of cancer. Increased rates of unintended pregnancy. Untreated sexually transmitted diseases. Increased rates of HIV and AIDS.”

Will Planned Parenthood survive?

Clegg noted that this year marks Planned Parenthood’s 60^th anniversary. “We have touched the lives of more than a million people” in northern New England, she said. 

“I fundamentally believe we will get through this because people support us. People want to come to us for care. We are embedded in our states and a part of our community in deep ways. We matter too much for our states and our communities to just accept that we would close our doors.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: Planned Parenthood’s Nicole Clegg on reproductive rights without clinics.

Attorney General Charity Clark joined a 24-state lawsuit against the Trump administration for allegedly “unlawfully freezing” $26 million in federal education funding for Vermont schools, and over $6 billion nationwide, according to a press release Monday.

The lawsuit, which includes Vermont as a plaintiff alongside 23 other states and Washington D.C., accuses the Trump administration of illegally halting funds for six federal education funding programs previously approved by Congress.

The six grants in question vary in scope and mission. They include supporting after school and summer programs, educating children of legal migrants, training teachers to work with working class students and students of color, school conditions and drug-prevention for low-income and inner-city schools, adult literacy and education and instruction for English language learners.

The lawsuit states that funding for the six programs must be made available to schools on July 1 so they are able “to staff, to supply materials for, and to prepare facilities for the imminent school year.” The lawsuit alleges the Trump administration sent a “boilerplate three-sentence e-mail,” on June 30 that halted funding, citing a review of this year’s awards to ensure the money spent on these programs is “In accordance with the President’s priorities and the Department’s statutory responsibilities.”

This marks the 22nd lawsuit Clark has filed against the Trump administration. Clark has been one of several attorney generals to file visible, cross-state lawsuits in order to preserve federal funding for their respective states.

“Once again, the President wishes to unconstitutionally undo appropriations made by Congress,” Clark said in the release. “The President does not have the power to freeze these funds – funds that Vermont schools are counting on.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont joins multi-state lawsuit after Trump freezes $26 million in education funding.

School districts and adult learning centers across Vermont are beginning to feel the impact of the $26 million in federal funding President Donald Trump’s administration is withholding from the state.

The U.S. Department of Education told state education officials on the evening of June 30 — less than 24 hours before the funds were set to be dispersed — that they would be conducting a review of the grant programs. No timeline was given for when that would be completed.

The funding pause was part of a broader freeze by the Trump administration of more than $6 billion nationwide for after-school and summer programs and English language instruction.

Six federal grant programs were affected, including Title IIA and Title IIIA grants, which respectively fund professional development for teachers and staff, and support services for English language learners.

In Vermont, the grants for years have helped fund nearly 100 afterschool and summer programs, serving more than 10,000 students, as well as an array of English language programs, according to the office of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

The abrupt pause in funding has left many school districts in limbo. The announcement, which came just days before the Fourth of July holiday, has sent school officials scrambling to realign their budgets without federal funds.

That is likely to be a tough task for some districts. In the Winooski School District, the funding pause has left a roughly $700,000 budget hole for the high-poverty district, according to the district’s director of finance and operations, Sarah Haven.

The district has primarily used those dollars to fund staff salaries and has signed contracts with its staff through the 2025-26 school year, Haven said.

Because the district is a designated high-poverty district, officials have been able to pool those federal grant dollars together and have primarily tied them to salaries, Haven said.

“The hardest thing about what’s happened here is that this decision came after we had done a lot of financial planning, and we’re caught really off guard,” said Michael Eppolito, the director of curriculum and learning with the Winooski School District.

“We don’t really know what the impact is going to be, other than somebody is going to have to pay for it, particularly because most of this money is tied up in positions that we’ve already agreed that we will pay,” he said.

Eppolito said he expects to cut programming that is not vital.

“We need to start looking anywhere we can to trim things that are not essential,” he said. He pointed to a digital program teachers use to support math and English language arts instruction in the classroom.

Haven said she expects leadership to begin developing an action plan in the coming weeks. Any changes to the district’s budget allocations will need board approval.

She anticipates the district will be able to manage the hit this upcoming school year but said harder decisions may need to be made during next year’s budgeting cycle.

“In the long run it is going to impact the students that have the fewest resources or the most vulnerable students — there’s no doubt that they’re going to be the ones that are hit,” Eppolito said. “And it will be really apparent in Winooski because anything that we cut out is going to affect those kids right away.”

Budget shocks

Other districts took similar hits to their budget. The Essex Westford School District had allocated in its fiscal year 2026 budget more than $400,000 from federal grant funding, according to Mark Holodick, the district’s new superintendent.

“It’s a significant source of funding for us,” he said. “We’ve already had a number of internal meetings. We’re beginning to plan accordingly if these dollars are not released.”

In the Harwood Unified Union District, Superintendent Michael Leichliter said the funding pause is forcing the district to pause professional development programming.

Leichliter said the federal funding pause threatens to exacerbate an already difficult budget climate for school districts in the state.

“We’ve already been in that trim back mode,” he said. “We’re getting to the point where in order to provide basic services, it will be challenging to reduce any further.”

Holodick, likewise, said his district over the past two years has cut $10 million from its budget.

“What I don’t want to see is the mindset shift from the expectation being, ‘We are providing an outstanding education to our students,’ to ‘This is an adequate educational system where we’re getting by,'” he said. “That worries me greatly with the way we’re chipping away at our budget and resources for our students and families.”

‘Wait and see’

Local school districts are not the only organizations that are affected. The grant money also helped fund adult learning centers, institutions which offer residents a path to earn a high school diploma or GED, as well as offer English language classes and workforce development programs.

Tara Brooks, the head of VT Adult Learning, which runs adult learning services in seven counties throughout the state, said the funding pause will “drastically impact our ability to serve students.”

Her organization last year served nearly 1,500 residents, helping some earn their GED or bolster their English language skills.

Brooks estimated the pause will amount to a nearly $500,000 hit to her organization. If the funds are not released, she said she will have to cut staffing.

“There’s no way around it,” she said. “We already have wait lists for a lot of our bigger locations, so in Chittenden and in and some of our southern locations … it’s only going to increase the wait lists that we have if we have to reduce staff.”

Sean-Marie Oller, who operates The Tutorial Center in Bennington County, said the roughly $36,000 cut to her organization means she will have to cut back on night classes.

“We will continue to do the work with what we have, but I’m cutting people’s hours back, I’m cutting two classes that would be in the evening,” Oller said. “Things like that impact people directly.”

The Vermont Agency of Education has yet to hear from federal officials since their decision last week, according to Toren Ballard, a spokesperson for the agency.

Ballard said the agency is “closely coordinating with the governor, the attorney general and our congressional delegation on next steps, as well as continuing to provide intensive support to school districts.”

It’s unclear what the Trump administration will ultimately decide about the funds. Similar federal funding cuts in other sectors have resulted in litigation against the federal government.

Sanders wrote to Secretary of Education Linda McMahon and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought last week, demanding they immediately reverse what he called “their illegal and unconstitutional decision” to withhold those funds.

“Your unexpected and cruel decision has sent shockwaves, distress and heartbreak in local communities all over America who now may be forced to cancel or substantially delay summer school activities that had been planned for months,” Sanders wrote.

“Further, your illegal actions have denied teachers the funding they rely on for professional development,” he added. “Important services for English learners have been halted. Thousands of school principals, superintendents, and school board members may be forced to lay off dedicated staff. And school district budgets in every State and community have been negatively impacted. That is beyond unacceptable.”

Patrick Barham, a spokesperson for Sanders, said they have not gotten a response to their letter.

Some are holding out hope that the funds will be released. Brooks said her organization is “in a wait and see mentality.”

“We’re trying not to knee-jerk react to the news yet,” she said.

Catherine Kalkstein, the head of Central VT Adult Education, which serves Washington, Orange and Lamoille counties, said her organization is relying on reserve funds in the meantime.

“We don’t want to impact our students in any negative way and disrupt the services that we’re currently providing,” she said. “We don’t know whether these cuts are going to stick.”

“But,” Kalkstein added, “it’s not something we can continue to do long term.”

Holodick hoped that officials at the federal level would “come to their senses and release this funding — not just for kids in Essex Westford, or Vermont, but for the students across this country right now.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Sean-Marie Oller’s name.

Read the story on VTDigger here: School districts and adult learning centers are feeling the impacts of the Trump administration’s funding pause.

BARRE — President Donald Trump’s broad budget changes, which were signed into law last week, will be “devastating to rural America,” U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., said at a press conference Wednesday. She predicted large-scale loss of access to health care and food assistance for Vermonters, among other public services.

The White House has called parts of the bill “the largest tax cuts in history,” with substantial breaks on tips and overtime, and for adults over 60. Balint, however, urged Vermonters to consider the long-term effects of the bill. 

In a release Tuesday, she referenced a congressional Joint Economic Committee Minority report that predicted 35,242 Vermonters could lose access to Medicaid coverage as a result of the bill. The Vermont Agency of Human Services has projected roughly 45,000 people total could lose insurance statewide.

Balint criticized the added administrative demands of the new Medicaid reforms, in particular the proof-of-work requirement. She called conservative claims that many covered patients are willfully unemployed “erroneous.” 

“They’re the working poor, and they rely on Medicaid for their insurance,” she said.

A June 29 statement from the White House said the intent of the bill was “strengthening the integrity of Medicaid by eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse.” 

However, Ashley Berliner, the state director of health care policy, said her team’s focus was to maintain as high a rate of insurance coverage as possible.

“We don’t have any evidence to suggest that there are a bunch of people in the [Medicaid] expansion population who aren’t working and aren’t meeting other exemptions,” she said Wednesday.

Berliner added that the administrative burden itself will be costly for Vermonters. The new requirements will “impede people’s ability to get on and stay on Medicaid,” she said.

“They’re trying to make it difficult,’” Balint said Wednesday. “It is transparent.”

Balint also highlighted the potential cost of losing the flow of federal money into Vermont’s health care industry, citing a Congressional Budget Office report from December. 

“When you suck that much money out of the health care system, it is going to drive up everyone’s premiums,” she said.

The state’s largest health insurance company, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Vermont, is already in financial peril in large part due to its administration of Medicare Advantage plans. Officials say the provider’s failure could cause the state’s health industry to collapse. This year already saw the company seek significant hikes in premium costs, some parts of which have been modified and approved by the Green Mountain Care Board.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Vermont spokesperson Sara Teachout said the effects for premium rates are impossible to predict. 

“These are important questions that we do not have the answers to yet,” she wrote in an email.

The federal budget bill also contains provisions to reduce spending on the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the bill would result in a roughly $285 billion decrease for the program over the next decade. The report additionally detailed tighter restrictions on SNAP eligibility, such as extending the proof-of-work age requirement by a decade, to those 64 and under. The bill also appears to withdraw SNAP eligibility for some refugees and residents who have been granted asylum.

“Vermonters are already hungry,” Balint said. “It is a cruel, cruel bill.”

Anore Horton, the executive director of Hunger Free Vermont, said the state’s charitable food system is already “stretched beyond the limits.” Roughly 65,000 Vermonters currently participate in SNAP, according to Horton.

The new cuts could mean that 13,000 of them lose SNAP access, Horton told NBC5.

In the coming years, Balint said, the Vermont Legislature and Gov. Phil Scott’s administration will face “really tough decisions” in order to meet the basic needs of their constituents. 

“There are no easy answers here,” Balint said.

Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the projected SNAP spending reductions over the next decade.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Rep. Becca Balint on the new federal budget: ‘Devastating to rural America’.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

What explains the fierce loyalty of Donald Trump’s base, even when he enacts laws that hurt them?

Arlie Russell Hochschild has searched for answers in the heart of Trump country. She is one of America’s most thoughtful writers about right wing movements, whose insights are informed by her deep relationships with people on the right. 

Hochschild is a renowned professor emerita of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her latest book, “Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right,” is based on her work in eastern Kentucky, where she spent seven years exploring one of the poorest and whitest areas in the country. Her 2016 book, “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right,” was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is a regular contributor to the New York Times, which recently published her essay, “My Journey Deep in the Heart of Trump Country.”

Hochschild says that communities that have been ravaged by poverty, disinvestment and the opioid epidemic have suffered a deep loss of pride. Trump provides an appealing narrative by telling people that their pride has been stolen from them by undeserving immigrants, women, LGBTQ people, and African Americans, to name a few. Trump promises revenge for this stolen pride.

Arlie Hochschild spoke to me this week from her home in Maine. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The unabridged audio version of this interview can be heard by clicking the audio bar above. 

David Goodman  

On July 4, Donald Trump signed into law his “Big Beautiful Bill.” It includes draconian cuts to government services that will shred the safety net that many of his working class supporters rely on. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that over the next decade, some 17 million people will lose their health insurance and millions will see the loss or reduction of food assistance. Some one third of Americans will see their incomes decline and many rural hospitals are likely to close. Yet you report that in your conversations with people in eastern Kentucky that Trump’s followers are mostly happy with what he’s doing. Explain.

Arlie Hochschild  

They’re happy and confused and a little worried. We’re talking about an area of the country, Kentucky 5 (congressional district), which is the whitest and second poorest in the country. It’s coal country. They’ve become used to a kind of up and down economy, and now it’s been down. Like the 42% of all Americans (who are) without a B.A. degree and white, they have in the last three decades been downwardly mobile: less income, decline in owned property, more people living alone, and signs of what are called diseases of despair — alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicide, especially among men. So it’s kind of a depressed area. It has known better times, and now it’s bad times. 

Donald Trump speaks to a social vacuum and they didn’t see anything for them that the Democrats had to offer. Among registered voters (in this district), 80% voted for Donald Trump, 20% voted for Harris, and 45% didn’t vote at all. So most people in this reddest of places actually didn’t vote for Trump but (Trump supporters) were the mobilized people. So you’ve got a loss story, and then a mobilization of people who are experiencing loss, and now what’s happened? Wham, they’re losing. Most of them are on Medicaid. All the children in this area qualify for Medicaid and their rural hospitals — there’s a major one in Pikeville, but without Medicaid money, it’s going to have to do layoffs — Head Start summer programs in public schools, all that will be gone. 

When I went back to the people that I wrote about In “Stolen Pride” about a month ago, they were not sure how this was going to land. They were keeping a close eye on tariffs and the effects that would have on the price of gas, the price of eggs, the price of bread, and worried, but they weren’t giving up (on Trump) yet. They had been promised some relief. Finally, someone’s come to save us, so they were hanging on. 

There was a metaphor that Donald Trump put out that sustained this that said, “America has been sick, and I’m the tariff doctor. I’m the budget cuts doctor. I will cure you, but it might hurt. There may be some chemo pain along the way, but hang on, and you’ll be cured at the end.” So that metaphor has been holding on. 

There is a counter metaphor that the Black man who is head of the Democratic Party in Kentucky told me: “Sometimes if (people who) look like me are called the enemy, then maybe you don’t mind when the president is peeing on your leg and calling it rain.”

So you have these two metaphors. One is a sense that, “Donald Trump is betraying me personally,” versus “Hey, catch on. It’s happening.”

David Goodman  

I feel like I got a glimpse of the world that you’re describing. A few weeks ago, my wife and I were riding bikes across western Pennsylvania on a famous rail trail called the Great Allegheny Passage. It follows a defunct rail line that once carried coal and steel, but those industries have died. So now it’s a beautiful bike trail and there are historical markers along the way explaining what once thrived here — this used to be a steel plant, or a coal mine. What struck us besides the wonderful biking was cycling through these small, rural downtowns that were just hollowed out. I kept thinking that this is like the land that time forgot. There has been no improvement here. They are like frozen in time from the 50s and 60s when the steel mills and the industries here closed and nothing has come in to replace it. There are just empty storefronts. 

What happened here in these Rust Belt communities that you write about in Kentucky and that I saw in western Pennsylvania? This is very much Trump country. 

Arlie Hochschild  

Yes, it is. What I saw was a group of people who would be called “stayers” — the people who haven’t left. I went in thinking there’s race, there’s social class, there’s rich, there’s poor. But I wasn’t thinking in terms of stayers and leavers. What I realized is that when an economy goes down and the center of economic gravity is somewhere else, a lot of people, often the more educated people and the younger people, leave. So there’s that new divide. The people who stay feel abandoned and feel a sense of anger and betrayal.

We have to think about emotional narratives. I think they’re the main thing going on and it’s unspoken. I believe that the conditions you biked through and that I saw over quite a few years are a story of a loss. Donald Trump came in and spoke to people predisposed to listen to a narrative that explained it and offered a way out. Trump came in with a promise to make America great again. Many politicians make promises, but there was also an unspoken narrative, which is, “You used to have a lot, and now you stayers have a little. It’s not just lost — it’s been stolen from you. Someone took it.”

David Goodman  

In your book “Strangers in their Own Land,” you talked about the “deep story” that people experienced in these places where they felt forgotten. Could you describe that deep story, and also how your sense of the deep story has evolved as you’ve continued to research and write?

Arlie Hochschild  

A deep story is what the world feels like to you. Your politics flow from that. The original deep story that I discovered in “Strangers” was this: you’re waiting in line, and you don’t feel like you’re angry at anyone, you don’t feel prejudiced. You just feel like you’re waiting in line for the American Dream. The line hasn’t moved in decades. You’re just waiting there, and the dream is far away. Many more are behind you, but you only look ahead. You’re sort of in the middle. The dream is just ahead, and you’re stuck. 

Moment two of that deep story is you see line cutters cutting in line ahead of you and pushing you back. Who are they? They’re women, African Americans, immigrants, refugees. You think, Oh this isn’t fair. And you look and you see that there’s President Obama who seems to be waving at the line cutters, legitimating them and pushing you back.

The final moment of the deep story is that someone ahead of you looks back and says, “You’re uneducated. You’re backward. You’re prejudiced. You’re a redneck.” Then you’re just insulted. You’ve lost all pride. You’ve been publicly humiliated. And you say, “I’m out of here. Whatever anybody has to offer me that’s an inch better than that, I’ll take.” 

That was the deep story that I heard and checked out in Louisiana for my first book. I brought it with me (and shared it with people in Kentucky) in “Stolen Pride.” One guy told me that what’s different now is that there’s a bully in line, and that bully is helping the line cutters. He’s not letting (me) go forward. He’s the bad bully. But also in line is a good bully. (Trump) is our bully who is fighting the bad bully. That’s how it feels. 

Feeling is underlying all politics. We need to not just focus on policies and logic, because often you don’t find that in a Trump speech. But there is an emotional logic that is allowing him to build up the kind of MAGA loyalty that he has. The bully is part of his appeal, that he’s going to be strong.

David Goodman  

It also explains something that I’ve found politically confounding, which is Trump promising as part of how to make America great again that “I am your retribution.” I’ve never heard a politician say that. He’s saying, I am going to inflict pain on those people. That’s the part that I find so disturbing, these displays of inflicting harm and terrorizing immigrants in Los Angeles and elsewhere. The pain is the point. It’s the theater of revenge.

Arlie Hochschild  

That’s right. There is a sequel to the narrative that I described in “Stolen Pride” of loss turning to shame, and then loss turn to stolen. Donald Trump says, “They took it from you.” Who is the “they?” It keeps getting expanded. 

What he also does in his narrative is to say, “I’m standing up for you. I’ve just said something transgressive and people are shaming me. Look at the press, they’re making me feel terrible. (You) know what that feels like to be shamed. Doesn’t it feel awful? They’re doing to me what they want to do to you, and I’m taking it on. I’m heroic, almost a religious figure. I’ll take your shame on. But unlike religious figures, I’m getting revenge. I’m getting retribution. I’m going to get even for the bad things and the shame that have occurred. And now I’m in power. It’s legitimate to feel angry.”

Elon Musk has said empathy is how civilizations get lost. If you count up the number of times Donald Trump says “hate” or “loser,” that’s part of this retribution. He’s establishing a category of insider and outsider – “And you my follower are the insiders. You’re American, American-born, really American. And these outsiders, the cause of your pain, they’ve been taking things from you.” He’s giving back their pride.

Here’s the paradox for me: I don’t see a whole lot of difference between this sinking blue collar white sector of America and migrants coming and trying to get a better life. They’re both at a border control. For migrants, it’s geographic control that they can’t get over. For white blue collar, it’s the B.A. they don’t have that could give them access to the jobs they seek. There’s a border control there too. Getting a B.A. is the knife that cuts between blue collar jobs that are going down and white collar jobs that are going up. You have two groups that actually have all this in common. (Trump) does a lot of rhetorical work to degrade and demean and demonize the non-American, and then he’s going to extend that category of non-American from undocumented workers to residents who are here legally and to people who don’t talk in an American way. There’s already a clampdown on dissent.

He is establishing what I would call new “feeling rules:” It is good to be angry. That’s the main thing he’s doing now, to put us in a different emotional atmosphere by saying, “It used to be rude or bad to be angry and impolite to insult people. Now that’s good.” 

Look what he’s done: he’s attacking universities, on the one hand, which should be the center of rational thought and civility, and he’s getting Ultimate Fighting on the White House lawn — anger, get it out. 

We’re in the middle of a new retribution narrative that’s playing out. It’s unspoken: “I’m recruiting you all to feel and act like soldiers in an army and I’m picking my enemy list, and you’re to join me.” That’s what the new deep story is.

David Goodman  

You’ve talked about the need to build “empathy bridges.” Explain what those are. And how do you build empathy bridges across a divide of retribution and anger? 

Arlie Hochschild  

Empathy bridges aren’t bridges of agreement. The Norwegians have a name for it that translates into “communities of difference.” You differ and you’re probably never going to agree. But that doesn’t mean you fall into silence. It doesn’t mean you’re hostile. It means you’re talking because you come to like each other and you think there’s common ground. 

The people I feature in “Stolen Pride,” we’re actually planning to all get together next October. We’re going to get a “holler log” going, including people who fear and hate Donald Trump and others who think he’s sent by God. 

David Goodman  

What are you going to do?

Arlie Hochschild  

We all need to learn to listen. Learning to listen and turning your own moral frame off temporarily so you can listen without defending your beliefs. Just listen. It’s an art, and I don’t think either side knows how to do it. Actually, polls have shown that people on the left are a little less good at doing this than people on the right, who are more likely rural or semi-rural. They live in more diverse communities than do people on the left. Studies also show that more Americans are more moderate than either party is. 

I think common ground can be found actually on issues such as clean energy. The people even in coal country would say, “You see that sawed off mountain up there? I think we ought to have a solar array up there or a windmill up there.” And Biden, paradoxically, has through the Inflation Reduction Act given billions of dollars, 80% of it to red states. This man who thinks God sent Donald Trump is against Trump on this issue. He says (renewable energy) can be a basis of economic growth. There could be crossovers. We’re never going to agree totally. 

David Goodman  

You have been clear that Democrats bear a lot of responsibility for the fact that their popularity is now hovering around 25 to 30%. What have Democrats done wrong? What should they do to right the ship? 

Arlie Hochschild  

The Democratic Party is more than a little the author of its own defeat here. I think it has closed the door to the white working class. And that’s a huge mistake and big problem. We used to have labor unions 30-40 years ago that were the middleman between the workers of both races and the Democratic Party. Now fewer than 9% of American workers are unionized. So that building block of the Democratic Party is gone. We’ve kind of disappeared into a variety of interest groups — women’s groups, African American groups, gay pride. We’re in pieces and we agree on a lot, but we haven’t got the leadership that we need to articulate that. There is a lot of great ferment and activism out there, groups like Indivisible, for example, but they’re not connected to the Democratic Party. 

The Democratic Party needs to eat some humble pie. Get some great leadership. There are great emerging leaders. I think I would even look at Andy Beshear, the Democratic governor of Kentucky, a Republican state, who’s very popular. So surprises all out there.

David Goodman  

We began this with you saying that politics is really about narrative, and Trump had one that just resonated with more people. What would a new Democratic narrative sound like?

Arlie Hochschild  

It should begin with, Yes, a lot of us have suffered. The whole class system has gotten out of whack. The middle class has shrunk and a bunch of super rich have risen to the top and Trump is having us look the other way while that has happened. A lot of people are anxious that they’re falling down. So we need to say, Yes, there’s loss that you used to have something and now you don’t, because that’s the psychology that creates terrible anxiety. But nobody stole it from you, apart from the outsourcing large corporations that sought cheaper labor pools in Mexico and China. So if you want to blame someone, don’t blame your nearby migrant, but look at larger economic forces. And then say, don’t look around for the robber. Look around for the good people out there that see a problem and are rolling up their sleeves and in the American style fixing it, like the rescuers in Texas that are trying to get people out of harm’s way. Let’s not wait til there are more dead bodies. 

Let’s start with renewable energy, and let’s restore America through universities, our source of ultimate jobs and knowledge. They are a passport. Open the passport control to education. It’ll get you a job, and it’s gotten more expensive and out of reach. You need to extend curriculum so that you open the gates to the middle class. Base pride not on just being rich and having an enemy, but on being a giver. The translation of the word “pride” is to be able to help, to be of service, to make a difference for other people. I think we go back to that original concept of pride. Our narrative should be based on that, building instead of tearing down.

David Goodman  

You shared with me just how unsettling and scary this moment is. You spent your life in a university, and Trump is now taking a sledgehammer to higher education. Where do you find hope in this moment? What sustains you?

Arlie Hochschild  

Foremost, I have family and friends. But I also see a lot of great people who could make that alternate narrative come true. 

There are two stories out there. I know one person who says, Well this is getting so bad, I’m going to go to New Zealand. But there’s another person that I know who said, Look, I’ve been living in New Zealand, but the fight is on and I’m coming back. 

That’s the job ahead of us: to be fighters and creators of this new narrative.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: Sociologist Arlie Hochschild on the rise of the right in rural America.

The sweeping Republican tax and spending bill that cleared the U.S. House Thursday could cause about 45,000 people in Vermont to lose health insurance in the coming years, state officials say. The bill is now heading to President Donald Trump for a sign-off.

In order to pay for key parts of Trump’s domestic agenda included in the legislation, called the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” GOP budget-writers are counting on proposed cuts to Medicaid, the shared federal and state program that funds insurance for people with low incomes.

Meanwhile, the bill has sparked concern among hospital leaders in Vermont over a provision that would limit how much state governments can tax health care providers such as hospitals to, ultimately, access more federal Medicaid funding. Vermont, like most other states, relies on these taxes to fund expanded benefits for Medicaid recipients, which is a practice that helps support providers, too.

“The ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ is deeply concerning. I don’t think it’s beautiful, and I think it’s super harmful to Vermont,” said Mike Del Trecco, the president and CEO of the Vermont Association of Hospitals and Health Systems, in an interview earlier this week. 

President Donald Trump and his GOP allies in Congress have said the legislation would target waste, fraud and abuse in Medicaid funding and have pointed to how the cuts would pay for policies such as breaks on taxes for tips and overtime pay. However, critics point to a Congressional Budget Office analysis showing the bill would boost the incomes of the country’s wealthiest households while costing the country’s poorest households more. 

The legislation would result in about 12 million people across the country losing their health care coverage over the next decade across Medicaid and the commercial insurance marketplace, according to the Congressional Budget Office, which is a nonpartisan agency that scores the fiscal impacts of federal legislation.  

One key provision in the bill would impose new requirements that certain people on Medicaid demonstrate that they are working in order to receive coverage. States will also be required to determine a participant’s eligibility for Medicaid every six months rather than every year, as they do now.

The fact that more people will have to fill out additional paperwork will lead some to fall off of coverage, according to Ashley Berliner, director of Medicaid policy for the state Agency of Human Services.

Berliner, in an interview, estimated that about 30,000 Vermonters will lose coverage because of that greater administrative burden. That makes up roughly half of the adults in Vermont who currently receive health insurance coverage under the expansion of Medicaid provided by the Affordable Care Act. That act, commonly called Obamacare, has significantly increased the number of people able to access health insurance.  

Federal spending for those 30,000 people would equate to $205 million annually that would, as a result of the bill, no longer be coming into the state, Berliner said. 

Meanwhile, she said, Vermont health officials believe an additional 15,000 people who purchase coverage on the commercial marketplace created by the Affordable Care Act will also lose coverage, at least in part because signing up for it will become more difficult. The budget bill doesn’t allow people to automatically reenroll in their current health care plan and shrinks the sign-up period for coverage by a month. 

Historically, only about half of people respond to the agency when it requests additional information to verify people’s eligibility to be enrolled in Medicaid, Berliner said. 

“When you ask people for additional information, they don’t fill it out and they fall off — the burden becomes too high and coverage is lost,” she said, adding that the picture is similar across the country, and GOP leaders are relying on the dropoff to help facilitate their proposed cuts.

Officials are also concerned about the impacts of a measure in the bill that would whittle down a long-standing mechanism states use to raise additional funds for Medicaid services by taxing health care providers. The rate of Vermont’s so-called provider tax, which is the name for that mechanism, would be reduced by 2.5% between 2028 and 2032. Vermont’s rate is currently set at the highest level allowed under existing law.

Cumulatively, over the period ending in 2032, Vermont is set to lose around $211 million from this change, counting both a loss of state dollars and additional federal Medicaid funding those dollars would allow the state to bring in, according to Berliner.

Hospitals will also feel pain from lost funding under these reductions, Del Trecco said.

Berliner added that she’s concerned by a measure in the bill that would ban state Medicaid payments for at least one year to health care nonprofits that offer abortions. This would include, notably, Planned Parenthood, which has clinics throughout Vermont.

One additional fallout, she said, could be shifting the costs of the reproductive healthcare those nonprofits provide in Vermont onto other providers. 

All three members of Vermont’s congressional delegation have criticized the impacts of the budget bill and voted against it. 

Last week, before the Senate approved a version of the bill, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., released a report that his office said showed the bill would increase the number of uninsured people in every state in the country. In some states, the rate of uninsured people would nearly double.

The legislation would “devastate rural hospitals, community health centers and nursing homes throughout our country and cause a massive spike in uninsured rates in red states and blue states alike,” Sanders said in a press release last week. 

Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., speaking on the Senate floor earlier this week, derided the potential impacts the bill would have on states with all political leanings.

“I want to repeat here: this is the bipartisan infliction of pain. This is real. This is real. And is the tax cut — largely directed to the very wealthy people — is it worth inflicting that kind of pain on so many, when the tax cut benefits so few?” he said. 

Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., voted against the bill Thursday when it was up for final approval. 

“This Republican budget is far and away the cruelest piece of legislation I’ve seen in my career,” she said in a statement Thursday afternoon. “It’s an utter moral failure.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont officials estimate 45,000 people to lose health insurance under Trump’s tax bill.

A New York federal judge issued a nationwide preliminary injunction last week that allows Job Corps centers, like the Northlands Job Corps Center in Vergennes, to remain open while the legal battle to determine their fate continues.

In issuing the order, Judge Andrew Lamar Carter, a federal judge for the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, stated that the arguments by lawyers for National Job Corps Association and a litany of fellow defendants — ranging from Education and Training Resources, the contractor who operates the Job Corps in Vergennes, to current Job Corps students — were largely likely to succeed. The plaintiffs all sued the U.S. Department of Labor to stop its attempt to shut down the program.

In late May, the Department of Labor told Job Corps centers across the country to “pause” all of their operations. This order would have forced Job Corps center to shut down a program that provides room, food and a vocational education to low income 16 to 24 year olds by Monday, June 30. 

Instead, the department’s order would have instated what the administration characterized as a “cost-effective” $2.9 billion “Make America Skilled Again” grant program that shifts from federal programs like Job Corps to state-led registered apprenticeships, intended to train workers and provide an alternative to college.

The Job Corps centers had already been funded from July 1, 2025 to June 30, 2026 by Congress, which previously approved $1.7 billion for the program. 

The plaintiffs in the case argued that the Department of Labor “effectively prevented new enrollment” by ending background checks starting in March, court documents show. Students attending Job Corps need to be background-checked to attend the program, but it is unclear now whether or not the government intends to resume background checks, or if they can be legally compelled to do so.

The Department of Labor claimed that they had only temporarily halted Job Corps operations. However, Carter wrote in his order that the “way that the DOL is shuttering operations and the context in which the shuttering is taking place make it clear that the DOL is actually attempting to close the centers.”

Carter also found that the Department of Labor did not have the power to end the program, writing that the department must “concede that, as part of the executive branch, they do not have the authority to unilaterally eliminate a congressionally mandated program like Job Corps.”

Carter also stated that there were clear harms in ending the programs, citing the circumstances of a plaintiff who is a student with the Job Corps program who was previously homeless.

The plaintiff “will immediately be plunged into homelessness, and she will lose all of the progress she has made in her culinary program. She would be forced to leave a stable residence and placed in a homeless shelter,” he wrote. It is “undisputed,” he wrote, that she was being harmed by the department’s actions.

“The Department of Labor is working closely with the Department of Justice to evaluate the injunction. We remain confident that our actions are consistent with the law,” Ryan L. Honick, a spokesperson for the Department of Labor wrote in an email.

A student enrolled at Northlands said the injunction is “a relief.” 

“We were all kind of scrambling to figure out a plan in less than two weeks of finding a job and trying not to be homeless,” she said in an interview. VTDigger is not naming the student because of potential retaliation by the federal government. 

She said that Northlands is the first place “I’ve ever had three meals a day, and a lot of emotional support, and it’s the first place that I think a lot of kids have a safe environment to explore themselves as a person and [have] the ability to grow.”

The student, who is enrolled in an associate’s degree information technology dual-program between Northlands and the Community College of Vermont, said the opportunities provided by the program were unprecedented for her. 

“I would be the first woman in my family to get a degree,” she said. “I would probably stay in Vermont. I love it… I’d get a job in programming or software development after this. And I’d probably pursue my bachelor’s degree.”

The injunction was also cause for political celebration among Vermont’s Democratic state and federal officials. 

Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark also joined 18 other attorneys general to file an amicus brief in support of the program.

Noting that she was “pleased, and not surprised,” by the court’s order, Clark added that “this order will allow Northlands Jobs Corps Center in Vergennes to continue serving young Vermonters in their journey to achieve their career goals and access stable housing.”

In an emailed statement, U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt. called the Job Corps “a critical training ground and opportunity pipeline for so many Vermonters.”

“I was pleased to see it remain open and operating for the time being,” she wrote. “But the Trump administration remains adamant in ripping away these programs that give Americans a fair shot at success – while training the exact trades workers that Vermont so desperately needs. I’ll keep fighting every step of the way to keep these funds going to the programs just as Congress mandated.”

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. and U.S. Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt. signed a letter with thirty eight other Senators urging the Department of Labor “to immediately reverse this decision to prevent a lapse in education and services for Job Corps students.”

The injunction comes at a time where the Trump administration is butting heads with the judicial branch, as many of President Donald Trump’s sweeping executive actions have been repelled by various federal judges through nationwide injunctions.

On June 27, Carter ordered parties involved in the Job Corps battle to file motions arguing whether or not the recent Supreme Court decision — which limited federal judges’ power to issue nationwide injunctions — would impact the injunction he filed by June 30. The Department of Labor requested an extension that may push the filing date to July 11.

Carter also denied any order to stay the case, meaning the battle for the future of the Job Corps seems poised to continue. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Federal judge’s order means Vermont Job Corps center stays open, for now.

This commentary is by Larry Satcowitz of Randolph. He is a Democrat representing the Orange-Washington-Addison District in the Vermont House of Representatives, and the ranking member of the House Environment Committee.

I was scheduled to be the final speaker at the “No Kings” rally in Burlington last week. Unfortunately, the event ran longer than anticipated, and I was not able to address the crowd. Here’s what I had planned to say: 

Good afternoon. My name is Larry Satcowitz. I’m a state representative from Randolph.

In these terrible and deeply disturbing times, it is a great joy to see you all today. Your presence gives me hope that we are a part of a large and growing resistance movement. Your presence gives me hope that we will thwart the billionaires and fascists that are currently in control of our federal government. 

We heard many wonderful speakers today. One person, however, was notably absent: Our governor, Republican, Phil Scott.

The Democratic Party is united in its opposition to Donald Trump. Every time a Democrat, like me, stands up, exactly no one is surprised. But opposition to Trump should not be a partisan issue. The president is destroying our democracy. He is destroying our economy. He is actively undermining our national security and the rule of law. These should not be partisan issues. 

A Republican governor who spoke out loudly, boldly and vigorously against the travesty taking place in Washington would do so with a special kind of authority. I remind you that Donald Trump and Phil Scott are on the same team.

I and others have recently published commentaries that ran in outlets all over the state, calling on our governor to speak out forcefully against the horrors that we are protesting here today. Days later Phil Scott issued a statement saying, “We must not allow ourselves to be distracted or live in a constant state of fear, anger or outrage.”

I can tell you that I have been terribly distracted since Jan. 20, I’ve been afraid for my country ever since that date. I am angry every single time I read the news. This is our reality, and we must face it.

Phil Scott called what’s going on “national rhetoric.”

He further wrote: “To move the Nation past the chaos Washington is causing, we need to rise above it and lead by example.” 

We do need to lead by example. The leaders who have preceded me on stage here today have done just that. If we followed our governor’s lead, we would not be here today at all.

There are Republicans who are opposed to what the president is doing. I believe Phil Scott is one of them. Imagine if he, as governor, took a clear, moral stand against the wrongdoings of the Trump administration. Imagine his leadership inspiring other Republican governors to stand up and do the same. Imagine the difference that would make for our country.

We need Phil Scott to oppose the cruelty of the administration in Washington in the strongest possible terms. We need him to oppose its recklessness in the strongest possible terms. We need him to oppose its outrageous corruption in the strongest possible terms.

Phil Scott frequently reminds us about how he is the governor of all Vermonters. All of us. Well, Phil, at this moment, we need you. We’ve never needed you more. Where are you? Why aren’t you here, with us, right now?

Read the story on VTDigger here: Rep. Larry Satcowitz: Gov. Phil Scott, we’ve never needed you more. Where are you?.