GOP Megadonor Got Payday Before Rent-Fixing Charges

🔥 Today’s Lever story: You’ve already paid $6 billion to develop weight-loss drugs you can’t afford.

👇 Spend four minutes reading this 974-word newsletter to learn about: 

• The team-up in professional sports that nobody asked for.
• A Federal Reserve scam to jack up your mortgage rates.
• The $1 billion check corporate landlords don’t want you to know about.
• How the woman who made Stone Cold Steve Austin famous is planning to dismantle public education.

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📚 Trump’s DOE is DOA. President Donald Trump could direct WWE founder Linda McMahon to dismantle the Department of Education as soon as today, according to a draft order obtained by the Wall Street Journal. The move is torn from Project 2025’s playbook. McMahon announced “profound changes” to staffing, budgets, and agency operations in a Tuesday memo titled “Our Department’s Final Mission.” 

🪦 RIP Social Security (1935-2025). DOGE layoffs are soon expected to hit the Social Security Administration, which oversees benefits for 73 million Americans. New research highlighted by The American Prospect finds that similar layoffs under Reagan led to a major gap in coverage for some 80,000 elderly and disabled Americans. The number of Social Security beneficiaries has nearly doubled since the ’80s. If you can, start saving now.

🥎 A match made in hell. The self-described Amazon of sports and the conglomerate Ticketmaster/ Live Nation are teaming up to further monetize the fan experience — if that’s even possible — by launching the Fanatics Ticket Marketplace, an all-in-one app for ticket resales, merchandise, and memorabilia trading. The goal: further cannibalize the industry and funnel sports fans to a single all-inclusive e-commerce platform. Sound familiar?

🏡 Cashing out on destroying the American dream. Weeks after prosecutors charged private equity giant Blackstone with participating in a rent-fixing scheme, the company reported another $1 billion payout to its CEO, Republican megadonor and Trump whisperer Steve Schwarzman. Blackstone has used investment cash from public universities and public workers’ retirement funds — as well as billions from a Depression-era affordable housing program — to become America’s largest landlord while ramping up evictions and rents across the country.

🔍 Check our work — we link to all our sources in the web version of this newsletter.

Estimated real GDP growth in the first fiscal quarter of 2025 is predicted to be -2.8%. (Source: The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta)

A win for renters. A Chicago landlord has been ordered to pay $80,000 to former tenants after threatening to call immigration enforcement on them during a rental dispute. This is the first application of Illinois’ 2019 Immigrant Tenant Protection Act, which protects tenants from being evicted or intimidated due to their immigration status.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell testifies on Capitol Hill (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

The Great Bank Robbery Of 2025. You know the subplots from Superman III and Office Space — where scammers skim bits of cash from lots of people, which adds up to tons of money? That’s the kind of heist the Federal Reserve is helping banks pull off, according to new data about net interest income — which is the difference between what banks charge you for loans, and what they pay you on your deposits.

The net interest income scam. Last year, seven large banks reaped more than a quarter trillion dollars by using higher Federal Reserve rates to jack up interest rates on mortgages, auto loans, and credit cards – all while those same banks paid low interest to depositors, according to new letters from Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.). One of many examples the lawmakers document: The Fed pays JPMorgan Chase 4.4 percent interest on its deposits, but “customers continue to earn a negligible .01 [percent] on their savings” at JPMorgan Chase.

• In all, banks have used this scheme to reap more than $1 trillion in new revenue over a two and a half year period, according to the Financial Times — and new federal data show net interest income is rising. Read The Lever’s ongoing coverage of the Great Bank Robbery, and listen to our podcast episode on the topic.

Banks can do what you can’t. Banks can deposit your savings at the Fed and get paid 4.4 percent interest, while paying you almost nothing — but unlike banks, you can’t deposit your money at the Fed to get that same rate. The difference between Fed rates offered to banks and bank rates offered to you recently hit “a modern high.” While some countries have taken action against this scam, and proposals for a new U.S. public banking system could combat this problem, Wall Street lobbyists have blocked those initiatives. 

Banks don’t want you to shop. The process of switching banks to get better rates is often an annoying rigmarole (by design). When the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau last year finalized a rule to simplify switching banks, JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon vowed a “knife fight” against regulators and deployed his lobbying group to file a lawsuit against the rule.

Trump defunds the bank police. Trump’s administration stalled that rule, tried to dismantle the CFPB, and dropped the agency’s lawsuit alleging that Capital One cheated depositors out of $2 billion of interest payments. Trump’s regulators also repealed guidelines aiming to slow bank mergers (like Capital One’s), which tend to reduce competition to offer better interest rates. One recent study found “a 35 percent reduction in deposit interest rates” in counties that experienced such mergers.

Remember when the Federalist Society-sponsored Supreme Court handed Trump his own unilateral get-out-of-jail-free card last summer? The real-life nightmare we’re living in today is the consequence of the conservative right’s decades-long pursuit of the unitary executive.

🐔 The chickens are social distancing. Premium farmers’ market eggs seem pretty reasonably priced these days. Here’s why.

🥸 The CIA has infiltrated SXSW. Literally.

🦣 They’re trying to bring back the woolly mammoth. Presenting, the wooly mouse.

It's extremely on brand that Democrats decided that their Trump response would come from a former CIA operative and Bush administration national security Karen opting to use the opportunity to venerate Ronald Reagan.

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