U.S. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) is followed by reporters as he walks to the Senate Chambers in the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026, in Washington, D.C.
At the start of Donald Trump’s second term, the Senate had a very important job: provide advice and consent on the newly elected president’s cabinet picks, as enumerated in Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution.
These hearings don’t always come with fireworks, controversy, and drama — in 2017, for example, all but one of Trump’s nominations were confirmed. In 2021, all but one of Joe Biden’s picks were confirmed.
But in all fairness, neither 2017 nor 2021 was the wild and wacky clown show of 2025.
Trump’s second-term Cabinet reads like a list of Who’s Who of questionable and unsavory characters from the quackiest corners of the MAGA mediasphere.
There was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose “Fox & Friends” weekend co-host gig may have gotten him the job, but whose personal life — accusations of infidelity, sexual assault and alcohol abuse — became a humiliating and alarming sidestory that nearly derailed his confirmation. Emphasis on “nearly.”
There was Justice Department head Pam Bondi, who had actively worked to undermine the 2020 election results, had faced accusations of corruption while Florida attorney general, and was presumed to be a willing accomplice in Trump’s efforts to weaponize the DOJ against his political enemies.
There was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a known science-denier and conspiracy theorist whose weird interactions with a dead bear, a dead dog, a dead brain worm— and a living New York magazine reporter— very much should have ended his confirmation bid.
And let’s not forget Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, Kristi Noem and Howard Lutnick — a “Star Wars” bar of unqualified, attention-seeking sycophants who definitely weren’t “the best people.”
But every one was confirmed, in many cases with every Republican voting yes — only five of the 53 Republicans voted against at least one of the president’s nominees, despite their clear and concerning controversies. It was an embarrassing look for the upper chamber.
But what a difference a year — and a midterm election — makes.
The Senate seems to have finally found its voice in standing up to Trump as he — and maybe because he — actively imperils their majority with every primary challenge, impolitic distraction, and election denial he offers.
Majority Leader John Thune has resisted pressure from Trump to eliminate the 60-vote legislative filibuster, and is now openly stating his frustration at Trump’s demands that Republicans pass his election-denialism SAVE America Act, telling Trump to “get on the phone and get the votes.”
Despite Trump’s insistence, Thune is pushing for senators to go home so they can campaign for their reelections, something Trump seems wholly disinterested in.
Meanwhile, retiring Sens. Thom Tillis and John Cornyn — both victims of Trump’s capricious and needless primarying — have held up his nomination of Todd Blanche to be attorney general, insisting Blanche provide a written guarantee the administration will not pursue a $1.8 billion weaponization slush fund.
Trump, who can only afford to lose one Republican vote, said Thursday that he may withdraw Blanche’s name until Tillis and Cornyn are out of office next year.
Three other Republicans — Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski — banded together to oppose Bill Pulte’s appointment to be director of national intelligence, effectively forcing Trump to give up.
And a group of Republicans, including Cassidy and Rand Paul, joined Democrats to limit Trump’s unilateral war powers, hoping to force an ending to his unpopular, ill-advised and spiraling Iran war adventure.
It’s perhaps a taste of the continued pressure Trump may face from his own party in his lame-duck years, or maybe it’s a foreshadowing of his life under a Democratic majority if Republicans get voted out in November.
But either way, it’s a welcome sight — senators, finally doing the job they were elected to do.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.
Texas families increasingly rely on after-school programs, but funding cuts and workforce shortages are limiting access.
Every afternoon in Texas, the end of the school day creates a daily scramble for families. Five out of six parents say they want after-school care, but cannot access it.
The demand for after-school programs is not theoretical.
In about 70% of Texas families with children ages 6 to 17, all available parents are working. This forces painful trade-offs between employment, supervision, and student safety at the very hours when children are most vulnerable to learning loss and disengagement.
At the same time, parents who secure a spot overwhelmingly say the programs work. Three in four parents rate their child’s after-school program as “excellent” or “very good," reflecting the support these programs provide in improving attendance, supporting academic growth, and offering stability during after-school hours. Lack of this support system is reflected in juvenile crime risk, which rises to 18% between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. on school days.
If families need and value after-school programs and evidence supports their impact, the question facing Texas is why access remains so limited.
The answer is capacity, driven primarily by unstable funding and workforce shortages.
For years, after-school programs in Texas have relied heavily on federal 21st Century Community Learning Centers funding, administered through the Texas Afterschool Centers on Education (ACE). In parallel, Texas also used $125 million in COVID recovery funds over roughly three years, averaging over $40 million annually, to expand after-school access.
That funding structure has tightened significantly.
COVID recovery funds expired in September 2024. At the same time, Texas ACE dollars have fallen from $97 million in 2020-21 to $57 million in 2023-24, resulting in a 40% reduction in the size of the funding pot.
What now remains is $5 million for the biennium by the state for community-based or nonprofit-run after-school programs and $57 million for districts through ACE.
As district-run programs scale back or shut down, nonprofit providers and districts are expected to absorb growing demand with just $59 million annually, a pale substitute for the roughly $140 million annually, once provided through ACE and COVID recovery funds. The result: programs close and families are turned away.
But money does not cut itself. Programs are run by people, and when funding tightens, staffing is the first thing to break.
Across the after-school sector, 87% of program leaders report serious concern about staffing shortages, driven by staff burnout, competition with higher wages in other industries, and the inability to offer more hours. When programs cannot retain staff, they cap enrollment, shorten schedules, or suspend services entirely.
Texas has reached a point where after-school can no longer be treated as an optional add-on. The state has shown it can invest at scale when priorities are clear, including recent multibillion-dollar investments in public education.
Extending that commitment beyond the final bell is not a conceptual leap. It is the next logical step if Texas wants learning, attendance, and family stability to hold through the full day.
The first requirement is funding stability beyond a single grant window, through multi-year grant cycles with predictable renewals that allow districts and community partners to plan, hire, and retain staff.
But funding alone will not solve the capacity gap. So the second requirement is an intentional staffing strategy that reflects how after-school programs actually operate.
One part of that strategy is organizing the pre-existing civic capacity of Texas. College students, retirees, and community members are willing to contribute, and a statewide volunteer corps designed specifically for K–12 and after-school settings could channel this capacity into tutoring, mentoring, and enrichment roles under professional supervision.
Nonprofits already operate this way at a smaller scale, and programs such as ASPIRE show that when volunteers are intentionally placed and supported by educators, programs can expand without sacrificing quality.
A second part of the staffing strategy is better aligning after-school programs with the pipeline of future educators.
Each year, thousands of teacher candidates complete clinical placements or paid internships in K-12 as part of certification requirements. Allowing these candidates to contribute to supervised after-school education would strengthen staffing during the hours of greatest need, while giving future teachers structured practice in after-school settings.
The choice before Texas is straightforward. After-school programs can remain secondary supports, or they can be treated as essential educational infrastructure, backed by the funding and workforce required to sustain them. For hundreds of thousands of students, that choice will shape what happens after the final bell.
Kusuma Buddhiraju is an economic policy and analytics leader with over a decade of experience in public education finance and institutional reform. She has advised policymakers and authored widely read research on civic literacy and education finance.
Advocates for closed primaries believe that political parties should be allowed to limit participation to registered party members. Their logic is…logical. Why should Elks Club Members have a say in Rotary Club Business?
But Americans are looking for ways to make our country better, logical or otherwise. They don’t care about the self-serving rules and arguments that the two-party cartel has set up to keep us siloed. They want to vote. They want to impact. They want to be heard.
So let’s dive deeper into what is really going on in states that legally bar independents from voting. It’s wild!
Open Primaries and the Independent Voter Project conducted a poll in early July of 1400 registered Democrats in New York City. We asked them a simple question: “Why did you decide to register to vote as a Democrat?”
The answers will astound you.
48% said that they registered to vote as a Democrat because they are a proud member of the Democratic Party, or because they usually vote Democratic, and so it made sense to join the party. 39% said I’m not a Democrat, I’m an independent; I registered to vote Democrat to be able to vote in primaries. The remaining 13% were either Republicans or unsure.
Almost half of Democrats in New York City…are not Democrats.
If the goal is to ensure that only party members are involved in selecting party nominees, then the closed system is a complete failure. Hundreds of thousands of independents have registered as Democrats simply because they want a say in who will represent them.
And New York is not an anomaly.
I was talking with my friend Joe Kirby about these numbers, and he brought me up to speed on what’s happening in real time in South Dakota. Joe is a lifelong Republican, a conservative businessman, and a staunch advocate for nonpartisan primaries. We’ve worked together for a decade to advance the open primary conversation in the Mt. Rushmore State - and we both have the scars to show for it.
The South Dakota GOP primary for Governor was on June 2. No candidate cleared 35%, so a runoff was held on July 28 to decide the winner. Between June 3 and July 13 - the deadline to change your registration - thousands of South Dakota independents and Democrats changed their voter registration to Republican in order to vote in the runoff, which is the de facto General Election.
“They didn’t suddenly become Republicans,” Joe told me. “They simply wanted a meaningful voice in choosing the person who will likely become South Dakota’s next governor. And the biggest lesson isn’t simply who won. It is that thousands of South Dakotans wanted a voice in the election that really mattered. For one election, South Dakota experienced something resembling an open primary. Participation broadened. The winning candidate earned support from a larger and more representative electorate. The process worked much as advocates of open primaries have long argued it would.”
Both New York and South Dakota exposed that our crazy system of partisan voter registration and closed primaries forces millions of Americans to join private organizations that don’t believe in just to participate and have a voice.
And party activists claim that closed primaries keep their parties pure! It’s actually the exact opposite. If political parties want to limit membership to true believers, they should a) embrace open and nonpartisan primaries and nonpartisan voter registration. Then the only reason to join a party is that you believe in it, not because you’ve been coerced into joining just to vote.
John Opdycke is the president of Open Primaries, a national election reform organization.
As nonprofits increasingly use AI to determine access to food, housing, and healthcare assistance, concerns over transparency, accountability, and algorithmic bias are growing. Explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping America's social safety net and why policymakers are being urged to act.
America's safety net has new administrators. They are not government agencies. They are nonprofits and are making decisions using algorithms.
Nationally, civil society organizations are using AI to determine who receives food assistance, emergency shelter, and medical referrals. In an era of federal and state budget cuts and struggles with the latest administrative databases that support necessary operations, nonprofits have gradually stepped into these roles. An unofficial AI welfare state is emerging, operating beyond the boundaries of official ones.
Government retrenchment over the past decade has pushed welfare functions toward civil society. Nonprofits are no longer just supplementing public services. In many communities, they are replacing them. AI accelerates this shift. Predictive tools that flag food insecurity, triage shelter demand or identify at-risk youth allow smaller organizations to scale their reach. This can be genuinely valuable. But scale introduced through automation carries its own systemic distortions. When machines allocate scarce social resources, the political judgments encoded in those models become invisible. Accountability disappears with them.
The accountability problem is structural. When a government agency determines welfare eligibility, legal safeguards apply due process rights, administrative review and legislative oversight. When a nonprofit uses a proprietary AI system to make equivalent decisions, none of those protections necessarily follow.
Algorithmic bias in social service allocation is not hypothetical. Research demonstrates that seemingly neutral models reproduce structural inequalities, systematically denying help to the communities most likely to need it. The vendors building these tools are not elected. Neither are the nonprofits deploying them. The individuals affected hold no formal right of appeal. Closing the accountability gap in algorithmic systems requires deliberate institutional design — it does not self-correct.
When nonprofits use AI, they usually transfer decision-making authority to their software vendors and proprietary models. These systems now indirectly shape who receives food assistance, job training, or mental health services. That is a welfare function. It carries welfare stakes. Algorithmic systems embedded in social institutions tend to entrench existing power asymmetries rather than correct them. The most affected citizens in communities rarely participate in designing or governing the tools deployed on their behalf.
Not all nonprofits have the same capacity. In metropolitan areas, large institutes have the budgets to acquire sophisticated AI platforms. Many of the smaller nonprofits serving rural & low-income populations in America simply cannot. The distribution of AI-assisted service delivery mirrors and monitors the geographic features of poverty itself. Economic mobility is already highly correlated with social capital and access to institutional resources. If an uneven AI infrastructure is laid on top of such a stratified social system, the result can be to exacerbate, rather than reduce, entrenched inequalities.
Federal AI policy has concentrated nearly exclusively on commercial and national security applications. There is hardly a thing that regulates the use of AI when it comes to nonprofit welfare delivery. But as long as policy interventions (e.g. anthropogenic policies) that call for human intervention in algorithms do not provide binding transparency, fairness and appeal standards, they remain structurally deficient. Nonprofits are behaving like quasi-governmental functions without the accountability of a quasi-governmental status. It is not a technicality, but a structural failure of democratic governance.
Congress and state legislatures need to do three things.
First, expand algorithmic accountability standards to all nonprofits implementing government-supported social services.
Second, require algorithmic impact assessments prior to deploying AI tools in welfare-adjacent programs.
Third, fund independent ongoing audits of all systems used by states to administer food, housing, and healthcare assistance.
America did not consciously choose to privatize its welfare state through software. It is happening by inaction, one algorithm at a time. The decision to govern this shift remains available. But the window is closing fast.
Feroz Ahmed is a Research Assistant at Lamar University, USA, where he conducts research on Management Information Systems (MIS), digital governance, artificial intelligence, and data-driven technologies. Alongside his academic work, he also serves as a 'System Security Analyst' with Amazon & Securitas Security Services USA Inc. in Seattle, Washington, where he is involved in security operations and technology risk monitoring.
The Great American Grumpfest