🤑 President Musk’s big Senate vote today

🔥 Today’s Lever story: Private equity is looting billions from a Depression-era housing assistance program.

⏪ ICYMI in The Lever: This is how David Sirota would run DOGE. 

👇 Spend four minutes reading this 982-word newsletter to learn about:

• Roundup’s big lobbying blitz for the Cancer Gag Act.
• The loophole in The White House’s “no tax on tips” proposal.
• The latest banks let off the hook by Trump’s gutted CFPB.

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🏭 Actions speak louder than Trumpisms. In last night’s address to Congress, President Trump spotlighted a child whose “cancer likely came from a chemical he was exposed to when he was younger” and he declared that his administration’s “goal is to get toxins out of our environment (and) poisons out of our food supply.” Also yesterday: News leaked that Trump’s administration will drop a lawsuit against a chemical maker accused of increasing cancer risks in nearby communities. Trump is also advancing a GOP proposal to block states from warning consumers about toxins in food.

💳 The Senate will vote today on deregulating Musk’s latest business venture. The GOP bill would repeal a rule subjecting digital payment apps to the same oversight as credit cards and bank accounts. Three days after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finalized the rule, Musk tweeted that the agency should be “deleted.” Soon after, Musk’s company X announced a deal to become a payment app, and then Musk’s DOGE began dismantling the CFPB — part of the Trump administration’s larger campaign to defang agencies regulating Musk’s empire. 

🚔 Big Banks get jailbreaked. The CFPB just dropped a lawsuit against Zelle, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo after alleging the banks failed to properly investigate $870 million worth of fraud. Moreover, the CFPB dismissed the case with prejudice — meaning the government can’t bring charges again in the future. 

😂 There’s a metaphor in here. The Democratic Party’s voter information database was sold off to a private equity firm in 2021 and now, after corporate pillaging and layoffs, The New York Times reports that the database is on the verge of a collapse that could render it unusable.

🚒 Musk cuts off federal firefighters. Bureau of Land Management firefighting staffers across multiple states told The Lever last week the Department of Government Efficiency put a $1 limit on their state-issued credit cards, preventing them from buying time-sensitive supplies to prepare for the fire season or even traveling to fight fires. Other agencies faced similar draconian measures.

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Post-pandemic inflation cratered everyone’s savings — except for the top 10 percent, of course. (Source: The Wall Street Journal)

🧑‍⚕️ No more getting ghosted by your doctor. Hospitals and care networks often force physicians to sign restrictive noncompete clauses limiting where and how they can practice once they leave their jobs — leaving patients in the lurch. Last month Pennsylvania lawmakers banned noncompete agreements for physicians, and similar bills have advanced in Wyoming and Indiana — a welcome sign of resistance against corporations’ tightening grip on health care.

RoundUp weed killer is shown as RFK Jr. watches his client win $298 million in damages from Monsanto/Bayer.

Bayer’s buying its own get-out-of-jail-free card. The maker of Roundup weed killer is lobbying state and federal lawmakers to block cancer victims from suing the company for not properly disclosing the herbicide’s alleged health risks. Last year Bayer (which acquired Monsanto in 2018) helped write versions of a “Cancer Gag Act” introduced in Idaho, Iowa, and Missouri — and briefly featured in a federal farm bill draft — that shield chemical makers from “failure-to-warn” lawsuits if they comply with the EPA’s labeling standards. 

Big Pesticide can’t shake the science. Bayer has paid at least $10.9 billion settling over 167,000 legal claims asserting a link between Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate, and lymphoma — a link that the company disputes. The World Health Organization declared the key pesticide ingredient is “probably carcinogenic to humans” in 2015. Studies since then have linked glyphosate exposure to cancer — pretty alarming since it’s in seemingly everything. 

Make America Healthy Again? In 2020, the Trump EPA ruled that glyphosate is “not likely” to cause cancer — but after court challenges, the finding was revoked and sent back to EPA for reconsideration. Now, Trump’s new EPA is ready to sweep the glyphosate issue under the rug again. Meanwhile, Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. is outspoken against glyphosate — he helped sue Monsanto/Bayer in a successful $290 million failure-to-warn suit in 2018.

It may all end up in SCOTUS’ hands. Last fall Bayer won a case in the Third Circuit advancing its argument that federal law preempts state action against state failure-to-warn cases. It had lost similar cases in other circuit courts, setting up a “circuit split” — and a potential showdown in front of the Supreme Court. In fact, the Third Circuit court’s pro-Bayer ruling — written by a Bush-appointed judge — explicitly invited the high court to hear the case.

As Elon Musk and his cabal of tech billionaires argue their massive interest in influencing the White House comes from “love” for the country, this is a reminder that federal law offers Musk and others a massive tax break for serving in government — a special one not available to anyone else in the country.

🪫 Re-dumb your smartphone. And try this neat hack for happiness.

👆 Let me be Kier. The disembodied voice of villainous megacorp Lumon in Severance was almost played by Barack Obama — which might’ve been a little too on the nose. 

❤️‍🩹 Sending off a true hero. Australia’s most prolific blood donor passed away at age 88 after donating every two weeks between 1954 and 2018, saving the lives of 2.4 million babies.

We’ve waited almost a decade for Democrats to leave 2016. Still waiting.

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