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President Trump Defends Tucker Carlson After Interview with White Nationalist Holocaust-Denier Nick Fuentes - Bucks County Beacon

2025-11-17T03:06:16.000Z

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — President Donald Trump on Sunday brushed aside concerns about conservative commentator Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with a far-right activist known for his antisemitic views, which has caused a schism within the GOP.

Trump defended Carlson, citing “good interviews” he’d had over the years with the former Fox News host. He said if Carlson wants to interview Nick Fuentes, whose followers see themselves as working to preserve America’s white, Christian identity, then “People have to decide.”

Carlson had an amiable sit-down on his podcast last month with Fuentes that touched off a controversy among conservatives. It roiled the Heritage Foundation, where the president of the right-wing think tank defended Carlson for his interview, drawing outrage from staffers. Heritage President Kevin Roberts later denounced Fuentes’ views.

Trump told reporters as he prepared to fly back to Washington from a weekend in Florida that when it comes to Carlson, “You can’t tell him who to interview.”

“If he wants to interview Nick Fuentes, I don’t know much about him, but if he wants to do it, get the word out,” Trump said. “People have to decide.”

Tucker Carlson’s interview with antisemite Nick Fuentes exposes rift among Republicans

Trump a few minutes later added, “Meeting people, talking to people for somebody like Tucker — that’s what they do. You know, people are controversial.”

The president then said: “I’m not controversial, so I like it that way.”

It’s not the first time Trump has been asked about Fuentes. Three years ago, he hosted Fuentes at a dinner at his Mar-a-Lago resort, along with the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West.

Trump at the time said he had not previously met Fuentes and “knew nothing about” him.

Fuentes’ visit to Trump’s estate was condemned by numerous Republicans, including former Vice President Mike Pence, who said it was wrong for Trump “to give a white nationalist, an antisemite and Holocaust denier, a seat at the table.”

INTERVIEW: The ‘Groyperfication’ of the GOP, With Ezra Klein and John Ganz

Trump said Sunday that he didn’t know Fuentes at the time and that he didn’t know he was coming with Ye.

Trump’s defense of Carlson’s interview comes as he has used his second-term administration to crack down on colleges and universities over what his administration claims is a tolerance of antisemitic views during protests over the Israel-Hamas war.

Carlson has been critical of U.S. support for Israel in that war and has come under fire for his own far-right views, including the white-supremacist theory that says whites are being “replaced” by people of color.

OPINION: PA-01 Congressional Candidate Bob Harvie Is Not Afraid of Town Halls Like Incumbent Brian Fitzpatrick - Bucks County Beacon

2025-11-16T18:00:55.000Z

First let’s update the score. In almost 10 years of being the Congressman for Pennsylvania First Congressional District, Brian Fitzpatrick has had only one town hall. Just one.

Meanwhile, Democratic Congressional candidate Bob Harvie, who announced his candidacy to defeat the Fitzpatrick machine just a few months ago, already has had four town halls and plans to have more all over the county. That’s four wins and counting for Harvie and his future constituents – and he is just getting started.

I attended his fourth on Nov. 12. This one was in Doylestown. I was glad I attended because I learned what a great Congressman Harvie would make.

Some may say perhaps Fitzpatrick forgot what a town hall is. Well, way back in 2018 and 2019, I wrote him 52 letters. He only answered one. But unfortunately he never answered the two letters I wrote about the value of town halls, if he even bothered to read them.

I guess some people just can’t be taught about what is essential to the performance of their job.

On the other hand, I learned at Harvie’s town hall that he has been a model public servant. He has been a high school teacher for 26 years in Bucks County. He has had direct leadership experience for years as Falls Township’s Chairperson of the Board of Supervisors and as Bucks County’s County Commissioner.

Harvie’s focus has always been on solving problems of the people he represents, not playing political games to stay in power or to please the rich and powerful. To solve the problems of the people, he knows you have to listen to them. Hence the town halls.

Unlike Fitzpatrick, Harvie is not afraid of meeting and talking to his constituents in a public forum. Harvie was eager to hear what everyone had to say and confident in his ability to respond with intelligence, compassion and courtesy. Fourteen people felt comfortable coming to the podium to ask questions. Harvie was not afraid, but amused at the fact that the opposition was present videotaping his every word, hoping to find something to use against him. He confidently responded when he was asked two absurd conspiracy questions by two of the attendees which were clearly outlandish lies. Harvie refuted them calmly and succinctly. He had no time for nonsense and instead listened to and responded well to real unscripted, unreviewed questions from his future constituents about important topics like health care, affordability, education, infrastructure, and our precious democracy.

Harvie feels that Fitzpatrick’s focus is not on the constituents he should be listening to, but on maintaining the power of his party and satisfying the outrageous and oftentimes outlandish demands of President Trump. Harvie, on the other hand, has no problem challenging his party hierarchy if the fundamental principles of our country are being attacked. His focus will be on the needs of his constituents. Harvie will lead with compassion and expressed outrage against GOP insistence to take health care away from the sick and food from the hungry. However, he does feel that many voters have lost trust in both parties and our political institutions. He vowed, if elected, to try to restore that trust by not dividing us against each other, but to show progress by solving real problems that all Americans face.

INTERVIEW: What Did Sheriff-Elect Danny Ceisler’s Victory and Bucks County Democrats’ Blue Wave on Election Day Teach Us?

He vowed to champion investments in both physical and human infrastructure to create the America that will benefit all citizens. Harvie supports more funding for SEPTA in Bucks County. He admitted that our health care system needs reform, but that we must not destroy our health system without replacing it with something better so that people in need do not get hurt in the change process. We must not let the perfect be the enemy of the good when the ill need healthcare now!

Many in the working class have lost faith in the Democratic Party so Harvie plans to restore that trust by taking action and reminding workers of the Democratic Party’s traditional support for unions, higher wages, and workplace safety through a well-funded OSHA. Harvie supports student loan forgiveness, not just for four year colleges, but for trade schools as well. Electricians, plumbers, and construction workers deserve the respect of all since they are the ones that actually build American infrastructure that we all need to live the good life.

Harvie is also against big money in politics and feels Citizens United should be repealed. Elected officials waste too much time fundraising instead of helping their constituents and then become beholden to the big money of lobbyists. He also would consider some kind of term limit for elected officials, a number of years that would allow the experience in the job to be utilized, but would also allow fresh blood to enter at the appropriate time. Harvie is proud of our voting systems here in Bucks County and confident that the hardworking election officials do a great job ensuring a free and fair election. He supports strengthening our democracy by requiring civics education and financial literacy courses in high school and by making investments in our educational systems so citizens can be informed and be able to distinguish truth from falsehood. Harvie also reminded people that he always focuses on job competency and character when making hiring decisions so that the best people could work to satisfy the needs of the people.

READ: Democrat Bob Harvie Calls out Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick for Failing to Protect Health Care for His Constituents

I told Harvie that he was a perfect candidate for this time. We need a champion for truth, a history teacher, to separate the fiction from the facts. We need a leader who has actually solved real problems in Falls Township and Bucks County, not someone who just pretends to be a problem-solver.

Harvie reminded us of the “present” the outgoing Republican administration gave him when he first became County Commissioner: an $8 million deficit. Harvie worked with his team to creatively deal with that problem by making tough but necessary decisions. Finally, we need a fighter who will work tirelessly to defend our democracy, win elections, and work to make the lives of all citizens here in Bucks County better.

I feel Bob Harvie, who has worked hard to win five elections already, is that person who, with your help, would win his sixth election and become our next Congressman who not only knows what a town hall is, but also is not afraid to have them for the good of his constituents.

Ruth Kapp Hartz Speaks to BCCC Students About Surviving the Holocaust - Bucks County Beacon

2025-11-16T13:00:49.000Z

Ruth Kapp Hartz shared the importance of continuing to educate future generations about the Holocaust at Bucks County Community College on Thursday afternoon. She shared her story about being a “hidden child” of the Holocaust at the free event event presented by BCCC’s School of Social and Behavioral Science and the Holocaust and Genocide Studies certificate program, in collaboration with the Holocaust Awareness Museum and Education Center.

Hartz chronicled her life before the war, during her time in hiding, and life after. She shared old photos of her family members, as a young girl in the convent, the trap door she hid in, and the return trips to reconnect with her rescuers and their descendants. Hartz’s message centers around the experiences of the “hidden” children and the people who aided them.

When she was a four-year-old, Hartz and her family refused to wear the gold stars and went into hiding aided by two families, the Fédous and Valats. The family separated and Hartz was sent to a small Catholic convent in southern France for six months where she was an orphan. Hartz was given the name Renee, meaning “reborn” in French, by her cousin Jeannette to hide her Jewish identity. The Mother Superior Rosalie was the sole nun who knew Hartz and the other hidden Jewish children’s identities. She hid the children in a trap door when the Vichy French Police and Gestapo were informed of the nuns hiding Jewish children.

READ: Faith Leaders Condemn a Pennsylvania Halloween Parade Float With an Auschwitz Sign

“She said ‘Me, hide Jewish children? Why would I do such a dangerous thing?,” said Hartz recalling the conversation then hearing the authorities walk away. The children stayed hidden in the trap overnight.

Hartz and her parents were reunited. Her grandparents and cousin survived, but many of her relatives did not. During the holocaust, Nazis murdered six million Jewish people including a large majority of the Jewish children in Europe. Hartz is among the 6% of European Jewish children to survive.

Ruth Kapp Hartz at BCCC. Photo courtesy of Holocaust Awareness Museum and Education Center Facebook page.

“So in order to survive, you had to have luck and people who helped you along the way,” Hartz said.

For many years, Hartz did not speak about her experience because she did not consider herself a survivor as a “hidden child”. Now, Hartz has been speaking for 30 years and has passed on stories to her children who speak publicly, as well.

Hartz documented her story in “Your Name is Renée: Ruth Kapp Hartz’s Story as a Hidden Child in Nazi-Occupied France” written by Stacy Cretzmeyer, a former student of Hartz at Springside Chestnut Hill Academy in Philadelphia. Cretzmeyer approached Hartz for help with writing about “hidden children”, not knowing her former teacher was one. The book was published in 1994 and later translated into French.

In 2017, Hartz was approached by composers David and Jenny Heitler-Klevens about creating “Hidden: The Musical” based on her story. The married duo performed songs, “Never Again” and “I’m Not a Hero”, from the musical after Hartz’s presentation.

“I wish I could say it’s ‘never again’,” said Hartz. “Unfortunately, it’s ‘ever again.’”

Hartz concluded her presentation noting this year marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, yet there is continued “alarming cries of Holocaust denial, anti-semitism, genocides around the world, and unchecked hatred.” She recalled U.S. Representative Brendan Boyle (PA-13) saying “Never Again” needs to be reinforced with action.

“We can start by ensuring that future generations will never forget about the dangers of extremism and discrimination that defined the Holocaust,” said Hartz.

“I wish I could say it’s ‘never again.’ Unfortunately, it’s ‘ever again.’”

Hartz, at 88 years old, continues to speak to students across the country about her story, telling students “you are the last generation to hear our stories.”

Pennsylvania is one of the many states that don’t require teaching the Holocaust. Hartz said many students graduate unexposed to the Holocaust, often not knowing what the word means.

READ: Newly Discovered Photos of Nazi Mass Deportations of Jews Give Previously Faceless Victims a Voice

“The Holocaust teaches universal lessons, including World History extremism, the fragility of democracy, human capacity for immorality, the role of perpetrators and bartenders, and the importance of empathy,” said Hartz.

Hartz says she tells students show compassion, strength, and hope while remembering the Holocaust.

“I would like to leave you with a quote from the most famous hidden child of the Holocaust, Anne Frank, who sadly did not survive,” said Hartz. “She said, ‘When there is hope, there is life, it fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again.’”

The City of Philadelphia Continues Annual Burial Ceremony for Deceased and Unclaimed Homeless Persons - Bucks County Beacon

2025-11-15T13:08:14.000Z

A group of homeless advocates – in a ceremony Wednesday open and welcoming to the public – will bury 50 persons whose unclaimed remains spent the last year in storage at the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s office.

This is the fifth year that people with prior homeless experience will be honored with a funeral and not buried en masse with hundreds of the city’s other unclaimed dead who eventually share a communal grave in Northwest Philly’s Laurel Hill Cemetery.

“The cremains of 50 unclaimed and formerly homeless individuals will receive a dignified burial through a community-led effort to ensure respectful final arrangements for all,” the City of Philadelphia announced this week.

Beginning at 10 a.m. on Nov. 19 at Mount Peace Cemetery at 3111 West Lehigh Avenue, they will hold a ceremony named in honor of Lester Ross, the first recipient of this dignified practice.

Quibila Divine, founder and CEO of The Educational Advocates Reaching Today’s Hardworking Students (The EARTHS), and Joyce Sacco, former director of housing at the Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual Disability Services (DBHIDS), for Philadelphia were among the original organizers of the effort funded by donations from local nonprofits and community residents to provide burials for people who had experienced homelessness.

“Lester was a hoot. In Philly, a lot of people knew Lester. He had a community at SELF,” Sacco recalled. “I still miss him.”

For years, Lester lived in supportive housing at SELF Inc., an organization dedicated to Strengthening and Empowering Lives and Futures. Divine explained that once placed in housing on his own, Lester returned regularly. “I worked at SELF for about 5 years. He had gotten a home but would return back to SELF because of the community.”

Divine described the experiences at SELF that Lester had with his friends.

“He knew the case managers there, he knew that when he got there, people would make them take a shower, give them some clean clothes, give them something to eat,” she said. “And when you experience homelessness and you’re thrust into a situation where, okay, here, here’s your home. Go live there. It’s like, okay, now what? So, what he used to do was come back often and visit.”

Until he didn’t.

“During COVID, we realized that he was not coming around,” Divine said. “Our former president and CEO, Mike Hinson, who has since deceased, tried to track Lester down. He was calling people and searching all around and finally realized that Lester had passed away.”

Sacco remembers their search.

“They were trying to find him. He passed during COVID, when lots of times we called the medical examiner’s office. Do you have so-and-so?” said Lester, noting that when they called about Lester, the answer was yes. “Yeah, he’s here and we also have 40 other people who we can’t bury, who have not been claimed.”

READ: Corporate Investors Are Gobbling Up Philadelphia’s Single-Family Homes at an Unprecedented Rate, New Report Shows

And when people experiencing homelessness die – especially those who have interfaced with the alphabet soup of Philadelphia agencies dedicated to helping them – the advocates who got to know them feel a profound loss.

“So, finding Lester was the beginning of it. Because the medical examiner was a really great guy too, and was like, this doesn’t feel right,” added Sacco.

When Hinson realized that the medical examiner had Lester’s body, Sacco said he went into action. “Mike Hinson communicated with others who were in the homeless realm – serving homeless people or those experiencing homelessness. He wanted to do something for Lester, in order to honor him, in death as we did in life.”

That was in 2021.

What started as a funeral for one man who had won the hearts of service providers, turned into a mindfulness about others living in homelessness with no one to claim them.

Divine explained that Lester’s memorial was an inspiration to provide a dignified goodbye to others like him. “It was really, really nice. It was a great homegoing service and memorial for Lester. And after that, that’s when Mike told everybody, look, we’re going to start a memorial fund so that no other person who’s experiencing homelessness would be left unclaimed.”

By 2022, Hinson had an organization and a plan. “He worked with others and raised enough money. The first time we did it, we buried, I think it was 32 formally homeless individuals.”

READ: Pennsylvania Homeless Advocates Condemn Trump’s Plans to Punish the Unhoused, Involuntarily Commit Them

Not long after Hinson and others organized the Lester Ross Memorial Fund, he too passed away. “Mike Hinson died in 2022. Yeah, so we’ve continued this as a legacy to Mike Hinson as well.”

According to the national non-profit Healthcare for the Homeless, “People experiencing homelessness are generally sicker than their housed counterparts and more prone to death.”

Chronic homelessness so negatively impacts individuals’ health, that living on the street takes more than three decades off their lives – resulting in a life expectancy of 48 years – versus the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s overall U.S. life expectancy of 78.4 years.

While people experiencing homelessness are often seen as unworthy of assistance or care – with efforts made regularly by local, state and federal officials who support destroying camps and other makeshift dwellings – the people who work with the unhoused daily have a very different opinion.

Retired, but still involved, Sacco will be at Wednesday’s burial for the 50 unclaimed – but not forgotten individuals – who struggled with homelessness. “I’m volunteering for this effort because I care about it. And it just feels like the right thing to do.”

Summing up her commitment to folks experiencing homelessness, Sacco added, “Sometimes it’s simply about kindness. Even if people don’t look the way you think they’re supposed to look or if they do what you think they’re not supposed to do – they’re just people and we need to be a little kinder from the beginning to the end of people’s lives.”

What can ordinary people do?

“The world needs people to be involved – to make better solutions. Whether it’s homelessness or people not having enough food – get involved in something where someone has less than you,” said Sacco.

How Does Bucks County Handle the Remains of Unclaimed Individuals at the County Morgue?

Bucks County’s First Deputy Coroner, Kristina Johnson, has quite a reputation for trying to find family and friends of the hundreds of unclaimed individuals at the county morgue. At press time, Johnson told the Bucks County Beacon, “We currently have approximately 275 unclaimed decedents.”

What happens when they can’t find anyone?

Johnson makes every effort, but, “Since every case is unique, we do not adhere to a set amount of time before we move forward with cremation. For those with no known family, we typically spend a few months actively looking for family, however distant or estranged they may be, before making the decision to cremate.”

And if the deceased was homeless at the time of death? “That is a difficult thing to gauge and I can’t give you an exact number. We have certainly brought decendants in that were actively homeless.

“Sometimes when they are brought in from hospitals or nursing homes though, there’s not a clear picture of how they ended up there and if they came from a residence or elsewhere. We have contact with some of the homeless outreach programs in the county and they have been invaluable in helping us locate family.”

But often those family members are as unable to care for the person experiencing homelessness in death as they were in life. In those cases, the unclaimed individual remains in the permanent care of Bucks County.“Coroner Campi is actively working with the county to have a building constructed, or adopted, where the cremains could be stored, families could visit, and memorials could be held,” said Johnson.

US Sen. John Fetterman’s heart condition could have posed deadly threat, experts say - Pennsylvania Capital-Star

2025-11-14T23:15:00.000Z

Pennsylvania Democratic U.S. Senator John Fetterman (Photo courtesy of Sen. John Fetterman)

The heart health condition officials say caused Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman’s fall Thursday could have been deadly if it wasn’t immediately treated, according to cardiologists. And the first-term Democrat’s life was likely saved by an implant given to him after a stroke more than three years ago.

According to an announcement posted on Fetterman’s Senate account on X, formerly known as Twitter, Fetterman experienced a “ventricular fibrillation flare-up” on Thursday while taking a walk, the spokesperson said. The event resulted in Fetterman “feeling light-headed, falling to the ground and hitting his face, with minor injuries.”

Fetterman’s office has provided no additional details about his condition or prognosis. But Dr. Justin Lee, a cardiac electrophysiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, said that ventricular fibrillation, or v-fib, is a “dangerous heart rhythm” that causes a surge of electricity in the bottom chamber of the heart. If the person isn’t given a shock to fix their heart rhythm very soon after the incident, they will die, he said.

The heart “begins to quiver instead of pump. And when that happens, blood flow just stops, and a person can just collapse within seconds,” he said. “It is a main cause for sudden cardiac arrest, and the only way to fix it in the moment is an electrical shock to the heart.”

Fetterman likely received such a shock thanks to treatment he received after he suffered a stroke and was hospitalized during his campaign for Senate in May 2022. At that time, he said the stroke was caused by a clot from his heart during an episode of atrial fibrillation — a different and less immediately dangerous form of heart arrhythmia — two days earlier. He later had surgery to implant a pacemaker with a defibrillator to manage the condition.

Implanted defibrillator devices can be lifesaving for protecting people who are at high risk for v-fib, Lee noted, especially because v-fib can strike suddenly. The device monitors a person’s heart rhythm, and administers a shock to it if they go into v-fib.

“Think of it like a sprinkler system attached to a fire alarm. It would detect a fire, and the sprinkler system would activate to put out the fire,” Lee said. Without such immediate intervention, he warned, “the death rate from v-vib — we can think of it as 100 percent. It’s the rhythm of death. That’s why urgent defibrillation of ventricular fibrillation is very important.”

Lee said a fall like the one Fetterman’s office described would not be a surprising outcome in such a case: “Because there’s no blood flow, that would cause one to fall. And then the defibrillator would kick in so that the v-fib doesn’t progress any further.”

On Thursday Fetterman’s office said he was “receiving routine observation at the hospital,” so doctors could “fine-tune his medication.”

Dr. Nikos Pappan, a cardiologist at St. Clair Hospital in Allegheny County, said it was important to keep an eye on the effects of medication — and that some medicines used to treat atrial fibrillation can increase the risk of v-fib.

“ What they do is they can sometimes prolong the repolarization of the heart muscle” — when the heart recovers from its resting state — “and that causes people to have a higher propensity to go into v-fib,” he said. “That’s why we continue to monitor these patients on these certain medications, and have very close follow-up and monitoring.”

A v-fib incident most often occurs when arteries become blocked, Lee said. Other triggers, like heart failure or genetic conditions, can also kick off a v-fib incident. According to the Cleveland Clinic, an estimated 180,000 to 450,000 sudden cardiac deaths happen annually in the US. Of those, a significant portion may be because of v-fib or other kinds of ventricular arrhythmia.

And Lee said that even if heart patients are saved by a defibrillator, they should head to a hospital immediately after they experience v-fib — in much the same way that fire trucks will head to the scene of a blaze even after the sprinkler system activates. They might need to be examined for blockages, or require a check of the implanted device itself. Patients may also be at risk from an “electrical storm” in which their body goes into v-fib repeatedly.

The need to respond to a v-fib event immediately is why automated external defibrillators, or AED devices, are placed in areas where large numbers of people gather, like schools and airports.

Pappan emphasized the importance of learning where the AED is located in any particular building or place of work, and learning how to use it.

“People are not prepared for something like that, for someone to collapse,” he said. “ Go and open it up and familiarize yourself with the specific AED that you have at the workplace. Because if that time ever came, that’s not the time to figure out how to use it.”

There are very few advance warning signs of v-fib, Papan said, which is one reason patients with a high risk of heart problems should see a cardiologist, to find out whether they need further treatment or lifestyle changes before such an event can occur.

“For patients that have coronary artery disease, high blood pressure, family histories of sudden cardiac death,” he said, “these are the types of patients that it’s really important to maybe see a cardiologist for preventative care.”

Downwind: The Shared Cost of Philadelphia’s Trash - Bucks County Beacon

2025-11-14T21:22:00.000Z

Across the Delaware Valley, we share one atmosphere. From Chester to Camden, Philadelphia to Bucks County, the air we breathe is the same—and so are the consequences of how we treat it.

Every day, Philadelphia exports its waste to Chester City, where the Reworld (formerly Covanta) incinerator burns through thousands of tons of garbage. It’s the largest trash incinerator in the United States. The smoke doesn’t stay in Chester; it rides the wind across the river and north through our region. What we call “waste disposal” is, in truth, air pollution shared by millions.

For more than three decades, Zulene Mayfield and Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living (CRCQL) have fought to end this injustice. Chester’s residents, mostly Black and working-class, live beside a facility that burns other people’s garbage so other cities can claim to be “clean.” Their fight has never been against waste alone—it’s been against the system that assumes someone else’s community can absorb it.

Now, Philadelphia City Council has a chance to do something about it.

Councilmember Jamie Gauthier, Chair of the Committee on the Environment, has introduced Bill No. 250768 – the “Stop Trashing Our Air Act,” which would bar the city from contracting with any company that incinerates waste. It’s an opportunity to end the city’s decades-long reliance on Chester’s smokestack and to confront the reality that 37 percent of Philadelphia’s municipal trash is burned there. The city’s waste contracts expire in 2026. What happens next will determine what—and how—we all breathe.

A life-cycle analysis commissioned by Delaware County found that burning trash and then landfilling the ash is 2.3 times more harmful to human health and the environment than directly landfilling unburned waste. Incineration doesn’t eliminate garbage; it transforms it into airborne toxins and heavy-metal residue.

The American Lung Association’s 2025 State of the Air report gave the Philadelphia–Reading–Camden region—which includes Bucks County—a failing grade for ozone pollution. The Delaware Valley functions as one air basin. When Chester burns, Bucks County breathes it.

The Myth of “Waste-to-Energy”

The industry calls incineration “waste-to-energy.” It’s a marketing term, not a science. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, incinerators produce less than half of one percent of the nation’s electricity—while releasing dioxins, nitrogen oxides, mercury, and particulate matter into nearby communities. What they generate in power, they more than offset in pollution. It’s not energy recovery; it’s combustion dressed up as sustainability.

A Regional Crisis, Not Someone Else’s Problem

Philadelphia’s waste doesn’t vanish when it leaves the curb. It’s trucked to Chester, burned, and released into the same air that hangs over Camden, Montgomery, and Bucks Counties. Pretending this is a local issue is exactly how it’s been allowed to continue. The Delaware Valley’s air-quality problems aren’t isolated—they’re cumulative.

And the root cause runs deeper than one incinerator: it’s the sheer, unchecked volume of waste we create. Every disposable cup, takeout container, and plastic fork contributes to a system designed to hide its consequences. Food scraps tossed in the trash decompose into methane, a greenhouse gas more than 80 times stronger than carbon dioxide. Our convenience has a price, and Chester pays it first.

What We Can Do as a Region

On Monday, November 17 at 1 p.m., the Philadelphia City Council will hold a public hearing on the “Stop Trashing Our Air Act” in Room 400 at City Hall. Chester residents will be there, demanding relief. Philadelphia residents should be there, taking responsibility. Bucks, Montgomery, and Delaware County residents should be there too—because what burns in Chester doesn’t stay in Chester.

If you can’t attend, write to City Council and urge them to support Bill 250768. Share the hearing details with neighbors, friends, and colleagues. Then look closer to home:

Compost food waste instead of sending it to the landfill.
Reduce single-use packaging by supporting refill and reuse programs in local stores and cafes.
Demand that your own county commissioners and municipal waste authorities reject incineration contracts and ensure waste isn’t being trucked to vulnerable communities.
Push for regional composting infrastructure and stronger extended producer-responsibility policies so manufacturers, not residents, bear the cost of disposal.
Back local organizations—from CRCQL in Chester to neighborhood environmental groups in Bucks and Montgomery Counties—working to keep waste prevention and air quality on the agenda.

Incineration is not disposal—it’s pollution. And “waste-to-energy” is a scam. The way out isn’t cleaner burning; it’s creating less to burn.

There is no “away.” We all live downwind.

SEARCH: See how much money your Pa. school district will receive to close adequacy, tax burden gaps - Spotlight PA

2025-11-14T18:57:42.000Z

HARRISBURG — Pennsylvania’s 500 school districts will each receive a slice of $565 million that lawmakers put in this year’s budget to aid schools with large “adequacy” gaps and high tax burdens.

The legislature first created these supplements in the 2024 budget in response to a Commonwealth Court ruling that found Pennsylvania’s public school funding system to be unconstitutionally inequitable.

However, unlike the 2024 payments, all school districts will be guaranteed at least $50,000 from this pot of money.

(Search the full list below or here.)

Intense conversations over school funding began in 2023, when a state court ruled that Pennsylvania’s spending on public education was inequitable — so much so that it violated the state constitution. Specifically, the judge found that students in poorer districts, which don’t have the resources to raise as much money through property taxes, weren’t serving students well enough.

That suit was brought against the state by a group of parents, administrators, and advocacy groups, including the Education Law Center.

For much of 2023 and 2024, lawmakers held hearings and negotiated on how exactly to quantify the funding shortfall.

A commission convened to study the issue eventually came up with the concept of an “adequacy target” — the bar at which a district can serve students at an acceptable level.

This measure sets a baseline amount of per-student spending, then adds in additional spending based on a district’s student body and factors like poverty and level of English proficiency. If a district spends less than the resulting number, it is missing its adequacy target and has an “adequacy gap,” the report said.

The budget lawmakers passed for the 2024-25 fiscal year acknowledged a $4.5 billion adequacy gap.

Earlier this year, state Senate Republican leadership said that they wanted to revisit the funding system, questioning the fairness of the new formula.

“Fairness is in the eye of the beholder,” Pittman said during a February budget hearing with the state Department of Education. “And frankly, I think the more we review this adequacy funding formula and the way it treats all the school districts, that there is inherent unfairness within this formula.”

In the end, lawmakers agreed to spend an additional $526.4 million on adequacy funding, $32.2 million on tax equity, and $6.4 million for schools that didn’t qualify for either supplement.

“For two straight years, a bipartisan commitment to adequacy signals that lawmakers have made this a non-negotiable priority until full constitutional compliance is achieved,” PA Schools Work, a coalition including the plaintiffs in that suit, said in a statement. “That represents progress and integrity.”

Solar rooftop program for Pa. schools survives budget deal that cut major climate policy - Spotlight PA

2025-11-14T15:49:45.000Z

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here.

In Carlisle, a sleepy town in the heart of Pennsylvania Trump country, solar energy appears to have escaped the black hole of partisan politics. Or at least, that’s been the experience of Carlisle Area School District Superintendent Colleen Friend, who has met little resistance spearheading a project to install a solar array about the size of a football field at a local elementary school.

The project is itself the beneficiary of a political anomaly, the $25 million “Solar for Schools” initiative. The bill that created it last year made it through Pennsylvania’s divided state government, even though basically nothing else on energy policy has reached the governor’s desk in recent years.

It also remains one of the few policy bright spots for clean energy advocates in the state budget deal struck on Wednesday, which saw the program re-upped for another year, even as Democratic leadership agreed to exit a potentially paradigm-shifting regional carbon cap-and-trade program.

Friend isn’t surprised that Solar for Schools proved a survivor in a budget battle that dragged on for months. The bill signing ceremony in Harrisburg last year was “very bipartisan,” she said. Her school district received $252,000 in funding for the ongoing project, and Friend now plans to apply for more.

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“We already know the next building we’re going to put a solar array at,” she said.

But does distributed solar — the diffuse installation of small-scale arrays on the roofs and lawns of homes, businesses, and municipal buildings — present a wider bipartisan opportunity to move climate policy forward in the acrimonious world of Pennsylvania politics?

Long a fossil fuel juggernaut with bountiful reserves of coal and gas, Pennsylvania at one point was also considered an innovator on renewable energy. But it has since fallen into position as a national laggard. Fights over fracking and former Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s move to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the interstate cap-and-trade program known as RGGI, had ground down any progress in the space to next to nothing.

On paper, distributed solar appears to have breakthrough potential. Solar for Schools’ wide bipartisan support last year followed what advocates describe as a herculean effort by its sponsor, state Rep. Elizabeth Fiedler. The Philadelphia Democrat and chair of the House Energy Committee toured the state to discuss its opportunities, focusing on economic benefits and reaching across the aisle.

Flora Cardoni, deputy director of the nonprofit PennEnvironment, helped champion the program and said it proved to be a rousing success in its first year, with 88 applications requesting $88 million in funding, more than three times what the budget allowed. Ultimately, 73 schools were awarded a total of $22.6 million in May.

“There’s clear demand, that more schools applied for the Solar for Schools grants than were able to receive an award,” Cardoni said. “We would just love to see even more schools follow their lead.”

Distributed solar also stands to benefit from deregulatory policy, a potential attraction for conservatives. Among five energy-related statehouse bills packaged under Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro’s “Lightning Plan,” the one that promises to adjust regulations to facilitate “community energy” projects — picture neighbors subscribing to a local communal solar array — has garnered the most bipartisan support.

Distributed solar can also avoid perhaps the biggest hurdle to solar development in Pennsylvania at present: the backed-up queue of grid operator PJM Interconnection, which oversees large, utility-scale energy development. Utility-scale renewable projects are waiting years for approval to hook in, but distributed solar skips that step entirely.

Ron Celentano, president of the Pennsylvania Solar & Storage Industries Association, thinks it has high potential. He points to a 2018 analysis by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection that found rooftop solar could account for 10 to 35% of all solar power in the state by 2030, if lawmakers enact solar-friendly policies.

“I tend to push hard on [distributed solar], because it’s often a missed opportunity in a lot of areas,” Celentano said.

And yet, advocates wonder how much ground can be covered, especially in light of the new budget agreement. Cardoni believes that RGGI could have generated about $1 billion annually for Pennsylvania to invest in clean energy technologies while forcing a market shift toward renewables, an impact that dwarfs an additional $25 million slated for the second year of Solar for Schools.

In the lead-up to the budget breakthrough, advocates had also heard that Lightning Plan bills could be part of the negotiations. But in the end, there was nothing to suggest that any of them, including the community energy bill, would be brought up for a vote in the Republican-controlled Senate.

“We would need to get a lot of policies like that passed to make up for RGGI in terms of carbon reduction,” Cardoni said.

And even the calculus behind Solar for Schools is shifting. Advocates say that many school districts had planned to combine state grant money with federal financial incentives covering another 30 to 50% of costs, depending on demographic factors. But those credits are now scheduled to expire next year after the One Big Beautiful Bill Act rolled them back.

With a deadline to start construction looming next summer, Celentano said that timelines are getting tight for school districts to go through bidding and design, never mind finding a contractor in the midst of a rush.

Adding to the problem is what Celentano said are delays at Pennsylvania electric utilities such as PECO and PPL, which have their own waiting lines for applicants seeking to connect rooftop solar and other similarly sized ground arrays to the grid. PECO did not respond to requests for comment, but a spokesperson for PPL confirmed that approval for larger examples of such projects may take “one to three years, depending on complexity.”

“We remain committed to processing interconnection applications as quickly and efficiently as possible,” PPL spokesperson Dana Burns wrote in an email, adding that the utility is “actively working to minimize delays and prioritize transparency and communication with applicants.”

No school districts have yet announced abandoning their plans, but Celentano said some clients have asked him to run new analyses on what costs will be without federal tax credits. He predicts many projects wouldn’t survive a scenario in which they lose up to half of their funding via federal incentives, and the impact on interest for a second year of funding remains unknown.

“There’s a little bit of concern to some of these schools: Are we going to make it?” Celentano said.

Bipartisan opportunities

On paper, distributed solar has political potential across red and blue counties in Pennsylvania. In a September report analyzing the first year of Solar for Schools, PennEnvironment calculated that approximately 5,000 schools across the commonwealth have the physical capacity to install solar. Collectively, they would save a potential $342 million over the lifetime of the systems, while powering the equivalent of 187,000 homes and reducing carbon emissions by the equivalent of 300,000 cars.

“The rooftops of Pennsylvania’s roughly 5,000 schools are often flat and unshaded, making them excellent sites for solar panels,” the report noted.

What’s more, rural counties, with their often-abundant space, stand to benefit considerably. PennEnvironment calculated that Lancaster County, quintessential home of the Pennsylvania Dutch, had the second-highest cost-savings potential, after Pittsburgh’s Allegheny County. And while the nonprofit found that the 20 counties that stand to save the most in total are the most populated, it is mostly rural counties that would save the most per school.

“That just speaks to the vast savings potential,” Cardoni said.

The 2018 Department of Environmental Protection solar potential report calculated that distributed solar would also employ more people than large “grid-scale” arrays, at about 3 to 5 jobs per megawatt hour installed, compared to less than 2.5 jobs.

In a high-end scenario where 35% of the state’s solar mix came from rooftop arrays, the analysis predicted the creation of more than 32,000 total jobs. That’s about triple the current number employed in Pennsylvania’s waning coal industry.

Fiedler, the Solar for Schools sponsor, said she leaned into the economic benefits of solar and sought the support of labor unions as she traveled across the commonwealth stumping for the program. It worked: In final votes on the legislation last year, 10 of 101 House Republicans and 21 of 28 Republican senators joined all Democrats in voting yes.

“We think as individual households the bills that we get are high,” Fiedler said. “And they are, they’re going up. But for school districts, it’s even more — add a couple of zeros on the end.”

Jim Gregory, a former three-term Republican state representative who is now executive director of the Pennsylvania Conservative Energy Network, said he also makes economic and reliability arguments when lobbying his former colleagues on supporting renewable energy. He believes the political gridlock on energy will have to give way soon, given dramatically escalating electricity rates for consumers in the state. He’s pitching solar as an important and quickly scalable option within an “all of the above” energy strategy, with the ability to take “pressure” off fossil fuel supplies.

“We can’t continue to do nothing. … The pain is going to overcome the fear that people have of a pipeline in their backyard on the Left, or a solar field on the farmer’s property next to theirs in rural Pennsylvania,” Gregory said.

But it’s not clear how much wider bipartisan support for solar truly exists in the legislature. Some efforts this year seem to have stalled out.

Democratic state Rep. Peter Schweyer’s community energy bill passed the House in May by a 114-89 margin, with more Republican support than Solar for Schools received. But the bill has remained in a Senate committee ever since, with no signs of movement even in the wake of a budget deal.

Democratic state Rep. Robert Merski, meanwhile, introduced a measure to put solar on municipal buildings like firehouses. But that legislation has remained stuck in a House committee since January.

And the cross-party coalition on these issues appears somewhat fragile.

State Rep. Craig Williams, a Republican from Delaware County in the Philadelphia suburbs, voted for both Solar for Schools and the community energy bill and said he believes there is a dire need to adjust state energy policy in the midst of rapidly rising costs.

“I’m trying to work across the aisle to get any form of generation online that’s clean and sustainable,” Williams said, adding he finds geothermal and nuclear particularly promising.

But Williams, a former PECO assistant general counsel, has also at times proved a thorn in the side of solar advocates, introducing amendments to legislation that they fear could negatively impact net metering, the way that owners of distributed solar panels receive financial compensation from utilities.

Williams said he thinks the current compensation system unfairly increases costs for non-solar owners, an issue utilities have also raised to state regulators. Solar advocates dispute that. Celentano said he’s pressed for evidence of such a cost shift, “and they can never show us the data.”

For Williams, discussions about advancing solar and community-generation policies are also part of an all-of-the-above strategy. He wants to see Democrats move off long-held positions against bringing new fossil fuel power plants online, citing concerns about power demand outstripping supply.

“There is a tremendous opportunity if we can get out of our own way,” Williams said.

What next?

Numerous advocates said they believe Fiedler’s Solar for Schools program has benefited from a unique combination of her persistent efforts, fortunate timing, and the non-controversial nature of saving school districts money. One former clean energy lobbyist, speaking on the condition of anonymity after taking a job with a public entity, said a one-off program with $25 million in the bank is more politically palatable than something with wider ramifications, like a community energy bill that could shift how electricity is generated and distributed in Pennsylvania.

“It’s a little bit of an easier selling point than saying, ‘Hey, let’s create a whole new system of microgrids that the utilities see as an existential threat,’” the former lobbyist said, adding that he thinks supporters would be wise to focus on rising consumer costs. “I think that argument has not been made. And into that vacuum have come the utilities that quietly whispered in the ears of the Pennsylvania Senate to say, ‘Hey, this could hurt us.’”

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The recent budget deal did little to boost hopes. Advocates note that a House vote on H.B. 501, the so-called PRESS bill that would elevate renewables in the state’s energy mix, has now been set for Monday, an apparent consolation prize to climate advocates upset about RGGI. But there’s no indication Senate Republican leadership will also bring it up in their chamber.

Similarly, the budget includes language that would clear the way for the state to use $156 million in federal “Solar for All” funding, which would install rooftop solar in low-income areas in Pennsylvania. But the fate of that Biden-era federal appropriation remains tied up in the court system after the Trump administration attempted to cancel it.

Sharon Pillar, executive director of the nonprofit Pennsylvania Solar Center, suggests that solar supporters may have better luck focusing not on the legislature but on the state Public Utility Commission, which has the power to draft new rules for utilities. In early November, the advocacy group Vote Solar launched a petition asking the commission to require more transparency on utilities’ solar connection queues and also create “clear, enforceable timelines” for applications.

“If the state can fix those things—if they’re willing to—then we can be moving this forward without a lot of other action,” Pillar said.

In an email, PUC spokesperson Nils Hagen-Frederiksen said the commission has “not been made aware” of any backlogs for small-scale projects like residential rooftop solar, which he said are often given same-day, automatic approval for standard designs. But larger, more complex commercial arrays, he said, take more time to process, given cost and safety consideration, along with an application rush ahead of federal incentive sunsets.

“The Commission continues to review interconnection-related issues statewide to ensure that the process remains timely, transparent, and fair for all customers,” Hagen-Frederiksen wrote.

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Shutdown ends, but more federal chaos looms for states - Pennsylvania Capital-Star

2025-11-14T15:13:33.000Z

Maryland Democratic Gov. Wes Moore spent a few minutes sorting donated food before signing an executive order in late October declaring a state of emergency to allow for distribution of food aid. As the federal government reopens, questions remain about how states will be reimbursed for the costs they incurred. (Photo by Bryan P. Sears/Maryland Matters)

Though Congress ended the record-setting federal government shutdown, many questions remain for states that were already wading through seismic federal changes.

One major uncertainty: whether and how states will be reimbursed for the costs they incurred, as they have been in previous shutdowns. And for the longer term, the shutdown offered a glimpse into the funding challenges facing states. They’ll have to rely more on their own money and staff to keep federal programs going even at a time when many face their own budget problems.

That’s a top concern for the federal food stamp program, known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Amid conflicting federal guidance during the shutdown, states reacted in different ways: Some issued partial benefit payments, others sent aid to food banks to keep people from going hungry.

But even after the government reopening restores SNAP aid, other challenges loom. The major tax and spending law enacted this summer tied SNAP funding to state error rates, which measure the accuracy of benefit payments. Advocates fear the shutdown will increase error rates because of conflicting federal guidance.

Air travel, SNAP benefits, back pay at issue as federal government slowly reopens

“States are really worried,” said Crystal FitzSimons, president of the Food Research & Action Center, a nonprofit working to address poverty-related hunger.

And states have been rushing to inform rural residents, veterans and older adults that they will soon be forced to meet work requirements or lose SNAP benefits. It’s just the first in a wave of cutbacks to the nation’s largest food assistance program required under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that President Donald Trump signed in July.

FitzSimons said the shutdown highlighted the importance of SNAP and how “untenable” many of the upcoming changes will prove for states. For now, states are working to get benefits to people immediately, and then will focus more on questions of reimbursement and ongoing changes to SNAP.

“The hope is that states will be able to move quickly and then turn their attention to all the changes,” she said.

While public attention has centered on the shutdown chaos in recent weeks, more fundamental changes are occurring outside the spotlight, said Eric Schnurer, founder and president of Public Works, a consulting firm specializing in government performance and efficiency.

“The ground is shifting under their [states’] feet even as this goes on,” he said. “Even if the Trump administration and his policies were to pass on in another three years, there are serious structural changes in the relationship between state and federal government.”

Since taking office, the Trump administration has stripped states and cities of billions of dollars that Congress approved for education, infrastructure and energy projects. And the president’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act mandates deep cuts to social service programs, including Medicaid and food stamps.

Under the law, states will be required to pay a greater share of administering SNAP in the coming years. That requirement, along with eligibility changes, could result in millions of Americans losing benefits.

“I think the public in general got a taste of what that might look like over the past month,” Schnurer said, referencing the shutdown’s first-ever disruption to SNAP benefits.

State-federal strain

The legislation to reopen the government approved by Congress and signed by the president this week says that states shall be reimbursed for expenses “that would have been paid” by the federal government during the shutdown.

“So that sounds promising for states,” said Marcia Howard, executive director of Federal Funds Information for States, which analyzes how federal policymaking impacts states.

But it’s unclear how that language will be interpreted. For example, states that sent money to food banks for emergency food assistance are less likely to be made whole compared with states that sent funds through existing federal programs like SNAP, she said.

California dedicated $80 million in state funds and deployed the National Guard to food banks across the state. But Virginia launched a temporary state-level version of the federal food stamp program.

Previous administrations have been more flexible with federal funds, making it easier for states to receive funding or reimbursement, Howard said.

“This administration is really more holding states’ feet to the fire perhaps than other administrations have. So I think they’ll be less permissive in who and how they reimburse,” she said.

It could take weeks or months before states know the full fallout from the shutdown, especially with food assistance.

“[States] did such different things, and I think there’s going to be a fair bit of back-and-forth: should this be covered? Should this not be covered?” Howard said.

The shutdown and its aftermath underscore the ongoing strain between state and federal governments, said Lisa Parshall, a professor of political science at Daemen University in New York.

Federal uncertainty can cause state leaders to be more cautious about their own budgets — similar to how an economic downturn can decrease consumer spending, she said.

In some ways, even though the shutdown is over, things are not going to go back to ‘normal.’

– Lisa Parshall, a professor of political science at Daemen University

“There’s a delay of services, there’s a diminishment of capacity and partnership, and those things might be harder to quantify when you’re talking about what is the cost of the shutdown,” she said. “But I think those are real costs.”

And the end of the shutdown does not extinguish those tensions.

“In some ways, even though the shutdown is over, things are not going to go back to ‘normal,’” she said.

More changes coming

Aside from spending cuts and new administrative costs, Trump’s July law made major tax code changes poised to cost many states, said William Glasgall, public finance adviser at the Volcker Alliance, a nonprofit that supports public sector workers.

Most states use the federal tax code as a basis for their own income tax structures, so changes at the federal level can trickle down to state tax systems or states can choose a different structure to avoid those changes.

Last month, a Massachusetts budget official said federal tax changes would cost the state $650 million in revenue this budget year.

So even with the government back open, states have to plan for some level of unpredictability, Glasgall said. And the future of entire agencies like the Department of Education remain up in the air, he noted.

“So there’s still a lot of uncertainty, even with this bill,” he said.

On Wednesday, state budget analysts briefed Maryland lawmakers on the $1.4 billion budget gap they could face as they head into the 2026 legislative session.

That figure does not include the fallout from the federal government shutdown, which may not be known for months, according to Maryland Matters.

In late October, Democratic Gov. Wes Moore declared an emergency and directed $10 million in state funds toward food banks and pantries. Earlier this month, he announced $62 million in state funds would be deployed directly to SNAP recipients.

Rhyan Lake, a Moore spokesperson, told Stateline that Maryland expects the federal government to reimburse the state for its SNAP expenditures during the shutdown.

But lawmakers are still gearing up for a hit from major federal changes.

In addition to cuts from Trump’s domestic tax and spending law, Maryland has lost about 15,000 federal jobs, budget officials said. But many federal workers who took buyouts were paid through September. And the shutdown caused a pause in federal employment data, potentially concealing the true impact.

State Sen. James Rosapepe, Democratic chair of the joint Spending Affordability Committee, said he’s worried the state has only seen the beginning of its federally induced fiscal challenges. He also noted that this week’s shutdown-ending legislation only assures the government remains open through January, meaning another shutdown could be just a couple months away.

“We’re less than a year into the administration, and the effects of things they’ve already done don’t seem to have flowed through yet to the data that we have, which leads me to believe that the worst is yet to come,” he said.

Stateline reporter Kevin Hardy can be reached at khardy@stateline.org.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Pennsylvania Capital-Star, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

New UVA research recommends gun violence prevention strategies for state, local governments - Pennsylvania Capital-Star

2025-11-14T15:07:15.000Z

In response to a June 6 mass shooting outside a Richmond high school graduation that left two dead and several injured, a group of demonstrators held an anti-gun violence rally at the steps of the state capitol, Wednesday, June 7, 2023. (Photo by Samantha Willis/The Virginia Mercury)

New qualitative research from University of Virginia professors and law students explores contributing factors to youth gun violence in Virginia as well as solutions at the state and local levels.

“We shouldn’t be scared to walk around our own city without a gun,” said a 25-year-old Charlottesville resident interviewed as part of the research, which was released Thursday.

That person was one of nearly 60 minors and adults from around the state researchers interviewed to glean insights about what inspires people to carry guns and what might make their communities feel safer instead.

The study builds on other research, like a 2024 study that revealed how teens exposed to neighborhood gun violence were more likely to begin carrying their own guns. For the UVA research, authors explored different hotspots around the state where homicide rates were higher.

Lynchburg-area resident James Watkins, a longtime violence reduction and youth outreach strategist, conducted interviews with youth for part of the qualitative research and is one of the authors.

At times in his own childhood, Watkins lived in high-violence areas before he found a sense of community and earned a scholarship to Virginia Military Institute where he eventually earned a psychology degree. His mentorship background and own lived experience, he believes, helped make the interviewees, whose identities the report kept anonymous, more comfortable.

After the young people opened up and shared their experiences with him, Watkins said his takeaway is that adults should listen to minor’s perspectives when it comes to gun violence – from causes to engagement to reasons someone might have a gun in the first place.

“If you don’t feel comfortable going to law enforcement or an adult (to resolve an issue), a kid is going to pick up a gun, because they’re accessible,” Watkins said. “They’re going to pick up a gun to protect themselves.”

Study shows what works, suggests further steps

The research points to several recommendations for actions that state and local governments can take to help drive down violence.

As interviewees shared their insights living in areas where violence has been prevalent, they also shared how they think police could more meaningfully listen and engage with communities. A Hampton-area resident suggested officers seek local residents’ feedback for solutions in hotspot areas to help inform certain actions.

Aside from law enforcement, the report also noted instances where civilians are stepping in to prevent conflicts from escalating to a need to call cops in the first place.

The study’s authors also suggest local governments set memorandums of understanding with “organizations that employ people with lived experience.”

One such organization is the Central Virginia Violence Interrupters, a nonprofit based in Charlottesville. The group, established by people with past criminal histories, seeks to help reduce violence and prevent crime through conflict mitigation and deescalation tactics.

The idea is that people with the lived experience of doing time for crimes are well-suited to intervene to assist people on the verge of it. The once-volunteer cohort has been supported in recent years to treat their work as a part time job as they devote hours of time putting themselves in risky situations to benefit the overall community.

City Council has appropriated funding to the organization in recent years and it had obtained federal grants, but the numbers have dropped this year as President Donald Trump’s administration cancelled grants or awarded them in other areas of the country. Additionally, Charlottesville has budgeted less for the group. The researchers suggest localities should continue to support groups like the Violence Interrupters.

“When we traditionally talk about safety, we’re thinking about potential victims. But we want potential offenders to feel safe too. That will make it less likely that they act in ways we all regret and they will regret,” said Andrew Block, one of the report’s authors and director of UVa’s State and Local Government Law Clinic.

The research also points to successful state and local actions that can be continued. For instance, Hampton, Newport News and Norfolk have established interagency steering committees that share data on which areas of their towns are gun violence hot spots where intervention and public safety resources can be prioritized.

As assistance to the research, an organization called Virginia First Cities Coalition hosted a virtual and in-person conference this past September with law enforcement leaders and violence interruption groups to share insights.

“Everybody has to play a role,” said Kelly Harris-Braxton, director of Virginia First Cities. “We’re all in this together.”

Law enforcement leaders discussed how they’d started devoting “the same level of investigatory resources to non-fatal shootings as they did homicides.” The approach led to quicker arrests and prevented retaliatory violence, the report stated, and was another recommendation for law enforcement around Virginia to implement.

Harris-Braxton called it “refreshing” to see how energized the police chiefs in attendance at the conference were about reducing violence.

Likewise, outgoing Attorney General Jason Miyares’ Ceasefire Virginia program was noted as a success. The program, which invests in gang prevention and targets repeat offenders, has also distributed grant funding to violence intervention and youth mentoring groups around the state.

When celebrating the program’s work last year with Virginia Speaker Don Scott, D-Portsmouth, Miyares said “you can’t just prosecute your way out” of violent crime.

Continued funding for violence intervention programs and groups is a paramount recommendation from the UVA study for state government. The authors also suggest expanding the funding where possible and ensuring the funding is flexible as localities tap into grants.

Authors also noted that Newport News-based Democratic Del. Cia Price’s effort to create the Virginia Center for Firearm Intervention and Prevention has previously passed the legislature but was blocked by Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s veto pen. With Democratic Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger set to take the helm of the state next year, she could potentially sign it into law.

The state’s gun storage safety laws could be bolstered, researchers said, some of which have been successful over the years, and others which have been vetoed.

At local levels, the authors noted some holistic approaches that may help reduce gun violence in hotspot areas, such as investing in community centers and enabling school districts to address absenteeism.

Both Harris-Braxton and Watkins emphasized that school or afterschool programs are places minors can find mentorship and friendship.

“Some kids don’t have a stable family,” Watkins said. “There’s a void so they go searching for gangs for belonging but then they get sucked into the lifestyle.”

When speaking about the idea of community centers in an interview for the study, a Richmond-based young adult said that youth “are looking at their environment” and if violence and crime is what they see, they’re more likely to engage in it. A third space to connect with others and supportive environments can be nurturing, they said.

“You don’t have to keep getting into this cycle of getting into these crimes, ending up in the jail cells, then not being able to find a job and then again, back to crime and falling into jail,” they said.

By exploring ways to prevent gun violence in the first place and how to address it when it arises, Block explained that state and local actions can achieve synergy and progress.

“If we think about this mass problem of youth gun violence on a more local level and almost micro level, it becomes a much more solvable problem,” Block said.

This story was originally produced by Virginia Mercury, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Pennsylvania Capital-Star, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

11/14 Playbook: Fetterman Hospitalized After Fall - PoliticsPA

2025-11-14T13:30:38.000Z

The Weekend Is Here.

In Today’s PoliticsPA Playbook. Fetterman Hospitalized After Fall. PA Budget Winners and Losers. Top 1% Pay Over A Third Of PA’s Personal Income Taxes. Pitt Hosts “Gameday”

Your Morning Pick-Me-Up. About the Weekend. The Jellybricks

PA Weather
Pittsburgh | Increasing Clouds, 54
Harrisburg | Increasing Clouds, 54
Scranton | Partly Sunny, 49

The PoliticsPA Playbook is compiled by Steve Ulrich. To read in your browser, click here. Was this email forwarded to you? Subscribe for free.

Top Story

1. Fetterman Hospitalized After Fall

“Pennsylvania U.S. Sen. John Fetterman was hospitalized after a fall on Thursday.

His office said he suffered a “ventricular fibrillation flare-up,” or type of irregular heartbeat, that caused him to feel light-headed and fall during a morning walk near his home.

Fetterman, who suffered a stroke in May 2022, has disclosed that he was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy and a heart condition called atrial fibrillation. He suffered minor injuries to his face and was under “routine observation” at a Pittsburgh hospital.” | PoliticsPA

Elsewhere

Fetterman Hospitalized In Pittsburgh After Heart Episode, Fall Outside His Braddock Home. “The first-term senator and former Pennsylvania lieutenant governor fell while taking a walk and experiencing an episode of ventricular fibrillation, the spokesperson said in a statement.” | WESA

Pennsylvania Inadvertently Making Drivers’ License Data Available to ICE. “In a letter to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Democratic lawmakers are letting the Commonwealth and other states know that a little-understood digital loophole could be making drivers’ data available to U.S. immigration authorities.” | PoliticsPA

After Shutdown Delay, Hearing Set On Congressional Stock Trading. “Proponents of an effort to stop members of Congress from trading stocks are cautiously optimistic that it could pick up steam now that the government shutdown has ended.” | Roll Call

State

2. With PA State Budget Signed, Who Are The Winners and Losers In The Final Bargain?

“After 19 weeks on a knife edge, Pennsylvania finally has a budget. The short-term political problems have been solved through a series of give-and-take compromises; the long-term political problems remain.

The quick version of this year’s budget impasse is that Democrats offered to come down from Gov. Josh Shapiro’s original budget request – which featured $51.5 billion in general fund spending – but were leery of going too far below the $50 billion mark and cutting into the bone of programs they’ve championed.

Republicans were adamant that Shapiro’s budget framework ran an excessive deficit and would result in runaway spending, passing a flat-funded budget bill of $47 to $48 billion multiple times to make the point.” | PennLive

Elsewhere

What Does Pennsylvania’s New Budget Mean For K-12 Schools? “The new state budget includes new funding and policies for public schools.” | Penn Capital-Star

State Budget Sees No New Money For Public Transit. “Pennsylvanians woke up Thursday to a $50.1 billion state budget that makes additional investments in public schools and creates a new tax credit for lower-income people but provides no increase in funding for public transportation.” | TribLIVE

Why Elon Musk Should ‘Buy’ Harrisburg: Analyst Argues For Tech Bro-Driven Renewal. “The article — titled “Elon Musk Should Buy Some Small Town Centers” — explores the conundrum of why “dried-up midsize towns” that boast good housing stock that’s affordable, can’t be ground zero for the next big tech start-up, in contrast with big urban centers like San Francisco, which have “abysmal house prices, high crime, and terrible social policies.”” | PennLive

Around The Commonwealth

3. Top 1% Pay Over A Third Of Pennsylvania’s Personal Income Taxes

“The wealthiest households in Pennsylvania are carrying over a third of the state’s personal income tax burden, according to a new study.

The top 1% now pay 35.09% of all personal income taxes collected in the Keystone State, the study by finance company SmartAsset found, which examined the latest IRS data from tax year 2022.” | TribLIVE

Elsewhere

Chester County Seeks Explanation For Pollbook Error As It Checks Provisional Ballots. “Chester County has reviewed more than two-thirds of the provisional ballots cast on Election Day, and confirmed that it has begun counting eligible ballots, though officials still cannot explain what caused a pollbook error that forced independent and third-party voters to use provisional ballots.” | Votebeat

‘More Needs and Less Money’: Philly’s Collar Counties Are Preparing For Tight Budgets, Tax Increases. “Across the Philadelphia suburbs, county leaders are tightening their budgets, and looking toward potential tax increases. Counties are required by law to complete their budget for next year by Dec. 31. But they entered this year’s budget season facing uncertainty with federal funding and a lack of clarity over state dollars.” | Philadelphia Inquirer

Second Carlisle Democrat Enters Primary For 199th State House District. “TaWanda Stallworth, 47, joins fellow Carlisle Democrat Rick Christie in the primary race to try and unseat Republican state Rep. Barb Gleim of Middlesex Township.” | PennLive

Shubilla Steps Down As Chairman Of Luzerne County Democrats After No-Confidence Vote. “Luzerne County Democratic Party chairman Thom Shubilla resigned Thursday, a day after the party executive committee almost unanimously voted no confidence in him.” | WVIA

Editorial

4. What Do You Think?

Trump Has Snatched the Power of the Purse. Congress Should Take It Back | New York Times
What Was The Point Of All This? | Broad + Liberty
Politics, Elections And Not Listening | Lori Falce
I Didn’t Vote For Trump For His Character. But We Deserve The Truth About His Past. | Nicole Russell
MAHA Is Making America Vulnerable Again | Lisa Jarvis

1 Thing

5. What Hosting ‘College Gameday’ Means For Pitt — Economically, Culturally and Institutionally

“Saturday’s top-25 matchup between No. 23 Pitt and No. 9 Notre Dame is already a marquee moment. Add ESPN’s flagship college football show, and Acrisure Stadium — home to both Pitt and the Steelers — transforms into a national showcase for the city, the university and a fan base still fighting for sustained relevance in college football’s modern landscape.

“This game is the epicenter of college football right now,” Pitt athletic director Allen Greene said. “All eyes will be on this game.” | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

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OPINION: Voters Didn’t Let Anonymous Election Text Sway Langhorne Borough’s Mayoral Race - Bucks County Beacon

2025-11-14T12:49:00.000Z

The evening of November 3, just hours before the polls were set to open for local elections, a text message popped up on my phone. It featured a hazy image of a Langhorne Blue yard sign followed by a 100-word slur against Barry Truchil, the Democratic candidate for Langhorne Borough Mayor. Although no one has yet developed an olfactory ‘smell-o-rama’ app for the iPhone, the text coming across my screen began to reek of the worst of American politics. Halfway through I skipped to the bottom to see who it was from. It was unsigned. Anonymous. The sender didn’t have the courage to put their name to it.

Given that Langhorne Borough’s mayoral contest was a two-person race I figured this was a desperate, last-minute push in support of Robert Farrow, the Republican candidate. A smear tactic used to sway undecided voters. But Mr. Farrow’s name was never mentioned. Actually the text gave no reason at all to vote for the Republican candidate. If you can’t say anything to support the Republican all you’re left with is taking a swipe at Democrats.

Politics has always had a slimy underbelly. And America has endured negative campaigns since John Adams and Thomas Jefferson attacked each other in 1800. But after 225 years of mudslinging you would think we’d have worked this cesspool of slander out of our system. At the very least, you’d think today’s political hacks would be better at it.

Nope.

This deceptive, divisive, and partisan attack accused Mr. Truchil of being deceptive, divisive and partisan. What was that about the pot calling the kettle black? My favorite line is the one that paints Mr. Truchil as a “left wing extremist partisan college professor” and urges voters to ‘keep politics out of local government.’ In today’s Republican party, it seems like anyone more moderate than white nationalist, neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes is a left-wing extremist.

It’s a pretty big group.

The real political takedown was exposing Mr. Truchil’s not so secret life as a college professor — you know, someone who spends their career inspiring young minds? Wow. Is that the best you got? What is it with Republicans and their disdain for education? Why wouldn’t you want an inquisitive, better-informed citizenry able to make well-reasoned choices? Wait, I think I just answered my own question. As for trying to keep politics out of government … does the author of this text have a dictionary? The first definition in Merriam-Webster defines politics as “the art or science of government.” Keeping politics out of government is like keeping yarn out of sweaters. Unless, of course, you aspire to live under an authoritarian, one-party regime. Is that what this is about?

Modern communication tools let people hide behind third-party text numbers, anonymous email, and unaccountable social media. But the FEC requires that public communications disclose who paid for them. In this case the image that accompanied the text states it was paid for by Community First PAC. So I Googled it.

READ: Read the Election Results and Exhale a Little

I found a website with a single page featuring a picture of Republican Pennsylvania State Senator Frank Farry talking to veterans and a statement claiming Community First PAC is ‘working to elect people who will put our community first here in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.’ There are no other pages. No address. No phone number. No way for this political action committee to hear from the community they claim to be putting first. But the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania does make available the PAC’s finance reports detailing who their contributors are. The state also provides a web page with the names of the PAC’s officers.

That’s a start.

By the end of election day, the results were in. The residents of Langhorne Borough, who are a pretty savvy bunch not easily taken in by anonymous texts, had elected Barry Truchil as mayor — by 30 percentage points. Voters know Barry from his years on Langhorne Borough Council, the borough’s zoning board, and as co-lead for the non-partisan “No Cloverleaf” campaign.

Barry Truchil is the only man I know of who still believes public service is an honorable endeavor. He cares about his town. And he’s got a record of service to prove it.

Overtime and unexpected bills force Reading to pull from its reserves - Spotlight PA

2025-11-14T12:00:00.000Z

READING — The City of Reading may be forced to pull millions of dollars from its reserves over the next few years to balance its budget as unexpected costs and overtime outstrip revenue.

Experts say that trend is worrying for a city that exited the state’s financial distress program in 2022 and requires officials to maintain a healthy savings account (known as a fund balance or reserves).

Reading officials have projected a growing need in recent years when finalizing the following year’s budget to pull money out of reserves. Those withdrawals remained hypothetical because revenues were higher than the city planned — the everyday equivalent of an employee receiving an unexpected bonus and no longer needing to use their savings to pay rent.

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That ended in 2024, when the city was forced to pull $1.9 million from its reserves. The shortfall was the city’s first since 2018 and primarily stemmed from hourly overtime costs in fire and emergency services, said Christopher Turtell, a partner with the auditing firm Cherry Bekaert. Turtell has worked on Reading’s annual, third-party audit since 2016 and presented the newest draft report to City Council in late October.

The money the city actually had to pull out of reserves to cover 2024's cost was much lower than initially projected: $6.8 million.

For 2025, the city projected it would need $9.8 million. While officials have not yet determined a final number, the current estimate is closer to $2 million.

City Council is currently debating the 2026 budget, which is made whole with a hike in property taxes and a $12.3 million pull from reserves. Officials do not expect the deficit to be that high at the end of the year, but the growing need presents a concern.

“We can't quite stay the course as we have,” said Jamar Kelly, the city’s finance director. He added that though the potential for a higher deficit has grown, the city’s team is doing everything to “prevent that from becoming a reality.”

“That means that there's a crunch coming, and that's why I've been kind of beating the drum on the revenue bit,” Kelly said of potentially higher deficits.

Turtell said he has seen significant improvements in the city’s bookkeeping capabilities over his time auditing as Reading moved out of the distress program and maintained more consistent staff. However, he cautioned that dipping too far into reserve funds would ultimately reduce the budgetary “cushion” the city worked to build.

The amount of unrestricted reserve funds has to stay at 20% of the city’s overall general fund budget or $22 million, whichever amount is higher, according to the Reading charter. The account acts in part as a rainy day fund that contributes to the city’s overall credit ratings, but also can be used for capital projects like recreational or infrastructure work.

The goal is for reserve funds to be higher than charter requirements. In 2024, the ending fund balance was about $51 million, with around $36 million unrestricted. That gap still is healthy, Turtell said, but the city needs to widen the interval between total and unassigned funds as operational spending grows.

Why is the budget deficit projected to grow if revenues are up?

Revenue was higher than expected in 2024 — high enough to avoid the full projected $6.8 million deficit, but not enough to completely keep from being in the red.

Earned income tax, the city’s highest source of income, was $3.9 million higher than expected. That extra revenue stems in part from workers earning higher wages or gaining new employment in the city.

“Everybody feels the [financial] pinching, but what's generally happening is that wages are increasing too,” Turtell said. “They're just not increasing as much as the expenses are.”

Other taxes, including from real estate, brought in over $2 million more than expected. However, the city did not receive around $1.7 million in expected revenue from license fees, permits, and fines.

Earned income and real estate taxes are expected to be higher than budgeted again in 2025, but Kelly still anticipates an overall deficit due to an unexpected $600,000 contract renewal charge for police body camera equipment and another year of high overtime among fire and emergency services personnel.

“It's gonna be the same story [as 2024],” Kelly said, despite nearly doubling the fire and EMS overtime budgets in 2025.

Fire and EMS overtime are difficult to control and regularly exceed anticipated costs because of their inherent volatility. Firefighters cannot just leave mid-fire because they are close to hitting their allotted weekly hours, and some emergencies, such as the costly 5th Street fire that affected three rowhomes in September, come with a “mammoth overtime bill,” Kelly said.

However, administration and other costs can be better managed, he said.

Turtell said he has seen a trend of rising costs for cities and suburbs across the commonwealth, not just in Reading.

Maintaining essential services will have to be balanced with those growing costs, said Kelly.

“The cost of business is going to keep rising over time, and the city will continue to have to make challenging decisions on both revenue growth but also managing employee growth,” Kelly said.

Approximately 70% of the city’s budget is reserved for personnel, which includes the amount held for vacant positions. When those roles are not filled during the year, the money remains unspent or is used in other ways, reducing the need to use reserve funds.

The strategy can be risky. In 2026, the police department budgeted for 175 officers, though it currently employs around 152. The department hopes to fill the positions, but the city coffers ultimately would pay the price.

On the flip side, additional staff could also lead to fewer overtime hours.

“That's always a dangerous precedent at some point in time, just because if you eventually do go to full-time staffing there, then you will spend all that money, so you won't have a cushion,” Turtell said.

The new community development director, David Barr, similarly has made a promise to fill open positions in his department. Kelly said the administration expects Barr’s work to increase citywide development and quality of housing stock, which will ultimately increase property values and subsequent real estate taxes to help the entire city budget.

Additionally, Kelly’s department is looking to add a full-time budget analyst to do more frequent reviews of spending and ensure departments are not going over budget.

“When you don't have regular monitoring, it's one thing to produce numbers in a report,” Kelly said. “It's another thing to be able to make the time to comb through it and to respond to the anomalies and things that stick out in that report.”

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Possible budget increases coming

The mayor’s administration pitched the $126 million budget in early October, and City Council has until the start of the new fiscal year to propose any changes and pass it. So far, the councilors have not proposed any changes.

The administration wants to increase part-time wages from $15 per hour to $18 before the budget passes, which Kelly said would have a “nominal” impact. The city employs a small percentage of part-time workers, but not all of them will be affected by the increase if they already make above the minimum wage. The Public Works budget proposal already reflects the increase, but other departmental changes would have to be made if passed.

The larger question is if (and how much) Reading will give to the City Revitalization and Improvement Zone, known as the CRIZ. CRIZ Board Chair Peter Rye said at the authority’s October board meeting that he was in talks with the city to receive short-term funding in the new year to continue CRIZ operations before it is able to financially support itself.

Kelly said additions may be made to the budget during one of the last meetings before passage. Mayor Eddie Morán allocated city money to the CRIZ in 2025, and additional funding is not out of the question, Kelly said.

“I think [Morán is] committed to doing everything he can to make sure the CRIZ is successful, and if that requires some administrative funding support in its first decent few years, he's certainly not opposed to that,” Kelly said.

Tracy Hunt: Democracy Is for All of Us, Not Just the Party Insiders - Bucks County Beacon

2025-11-14T10:30:00.000Z

When I decided to run for Congress in PA-01 for the seat currently held by Republican incumbent Brian Fitzpatrick, I did so because, like many Americans, my anger and frustration with the Trump Administration and its march toward Authoritarianism demanded I do something. Watching the erosion of our Democracy and the dismantling of our system of checks and balances also made me question what our elected officials were doing to stop it. It turns out the Republicans were doing nothing, and the career establishment Democrats didn’t have real solutions either.

A true democracy — our democracy — was founded of, by, and for the people. (Those aren’t just my words; that’s Indivisible.org’s own vision statement.) That’s why I was stunned when Kierstyn Zolfo, in her role as an organizer for Indivisible Bucks County, authored a November 11 piece in this publication that was so biased, inaccurate, and undemocratic in its portrayal of me that I felt compelled to respond — not just about me, but about what democracy truly means.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

Let’s start with some facts.

In Bucks County, there are currently over 202,000 registered Republicans, 192,000 registered Democrats, and 85,000 third-party or unaffiliated voters. All of those groups turned out to vote in 2024. Since then, as PhillyBurbs points out in an Oct. 1 article, Republicans and unaffiliated voters have gained voters (955 and 174 respectively), while Democrats have lost 1,129.

What does this mean?

Despite the fantastic Democratic successes recently, both locally and nationally, we cannot win in 2026 without third-party and unaffiliated voters. Republicans will line up behind their candidate. Democrats will line up behind theirs — but with 10,000 fewer registered voters than the Republicans.

If Ms. Zolfo truly believed in democracy, she would accept my campaign’s proposal for three candidate forums, hosted by Indivisible Bucks, where voters could hear directly from all Democratic contenders.

So whoever connects best with those 85,000+ independent voters will win. That’s how Brian Fitzpatrick has held this seat four times — even during the 2018 Blue Wave and in 2020, when Joe Biden carried PA-01 by six points — often winning by large margins.

They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Well, trotting out a career politician that is backed by the establishment seems to be exactly what Ms. Zolfo would like to see happen. While she attempts to support a theory for why this time it will turn out differently, her bias outweighs her logic.

She argues that her preferred candidate, Bob Harvie, has “won” twice in Bucks County. However, the 3-person Bucks County Board of Commissioners (Mr. Harvie’s current political office) are decided by the top 3 vote getters for that election — two from the majority party and one from the minority party. What she leaves out is that those “wins” came from finishing third in the 2019 County Commissioners race (only 655 votes from fourth place) and second in the 2023 race. As we all know, finishing second in a general election for Congress means you lost.

Bias, Smears, and Omitted Truths

Ms. Zolfo’s piece spends most of its space trying to tear me down — personally, professionally, and politically — in a style that leans closer to libel than journalism. She takes a swipe at what she calls a “stain” on my legal career, referencing a six-month suspension from five years ago. What she omits is that it was the result of not completing the annual continuing legal education requirements on time and writing 2 letters on law firm letterhead before completing the requirements and that I self-reported the issue before any action was taken.

Ms. Zolfo conveniently omits how in the Philadelphia Inquirer article, as well as in the Delaware Valley Journal and any other publication that sought comment, I took responsibility for my mistake. I’ve always been accountable — unlike most career politicians. As Ms. Zolfo sits in judgment of my 27-year legal career, I can only imagine how she might describe a candidate whose name and political office has been associated with a years-long investigation by the FBI for corruption.

For context, I’ve represented working people and stood up to corporate giants. I’ve gone toe-to-toe with Bank of America, won a precedent-setting case against the NFL for the late John Facenda, and taken on Toll Brothers — exposing that then-Congressman Mike Fitzpatrick accepted flights on the Toll Brothers jet while they pursued a shady land swap in Newtown Township involving the federal government. I have drafted, interpreted, litigated and advised countless elected officials throughout Bucks County on statutes and ordinances.

That’s what accountability looks like. Results. Service. Integrity.

So when Ms. Zolfo tries to cast me as some kind of wolf in sheep’s clothing, it’s not just false — it’s insulting to the people who know my record of fighting for them.

Conspiracies and Convenient Fictions

Ms. Zolfo’s “research” — if we can call it that — drifts into conspiracy theory territory. She strings together names of people who’ve crossed paths professionally over the past two decades and suggests it’s part of a plot to undermine Democrats. However, Ms. Zolfo’s haphazard use of Google, ChatGPT and whatever other “research” she may have used does nothing but reflect her journalistic incompetence.

Here are the actual facts:

– My relationship with Begley, Carlin & Mandio was as Of Counsel—a contractual position, not an employee.

– I joined in 2021 and left in 2025 when I launched my campaign.

– I worked in New Hope, not the firm’s main office in Langhorne, and my job was to grow business in my community.

If Ms. Zolfo cared about facts as much as she does about gaslighting her audience, she would have known I was not at BCM when any of the ridiculous scenarios she advances took place. One of the few accurate observations Ms. Zolfo makes is that Begley, Carlin & Mandio has generally been associated with the Republican Party here in Bucks County. So, once I decided to run for Congress as a Democrat, the decision was made that it would be best for all involved if we ended the relationship.

In less than four years, I brought in roughly 100 new clients. So, the idea that I would walk away from all that to “pretend” to run for Congress is absurd — and Ms. Zolfo knows it.

The Real Undemocratic Act

Here’s where Ms. Zolfo’s behavior crosses the line from biased to undemocratic. She fixates on how often I’ve voted — or didn’t — as if that disqualifies me from public service. She conveniently ignores that I’ve voted in every general election since 2018, except one. Like millions of others, my civic engagement grew stronger during the Trump era, when it became clear how much was at stake.

As one of the organizers of Indivisible Bucks her tactic of vote shaming borders on sacrilege.

Ms. Zolfo’s real goal isn’t to “inform” voters. It’s to gatekeep the process — to clear the field for her preferred establishment candidate, and to discourage anyone outside the party machine from participating. She pretends to be writing as a service to voters. What she is really trying to do is stifle democracy.

READ: Political ‘Outsider’ Rob Strickler Announces Congressional Run in PA-01

She thinks it is appropriate to throw numerous baseless claims onto the internet — that she even admits on her various reposts of her piece are merely “circumstantial” and may not be true — in an effort to disparage me for having the audacity to engage in the most basic tenets of democracy; allowing the people to hear for themselves from those wanting to represent them.

Her real objective is to try to clear the path for her preferred candidate, Bob Harvie; the establishment career politician who cannot beat Brian Fitzpatrick.

If Ms. Zolfo truly believed in democracy, she would accept my campaign’s proposal for three candidate forums, hosted by Indivisible Bucks, where voters could hear directly from all Democratic contenders. Let the people decide — not party insiders.

But she won’t. Because she’s afraid of what real democracy looks like.

Door C: The People’s Choice

Perhaps if Ms. Zolfo engaged in unbiased research and was trying to actually provide helpful, accurate information to the readers instead of gaslighting them about a person she never reached out to about her concerns — despite having Facebook messaged with him — she would have added a third option — Door C.

This is the one where a regular citizen decides to try to make a difference in this broken political system by running for Congress.

A person shaped by a military upbringing, a strong work ethic, a long legal career, years of college teaching and community service, fatherhood and family life, and a deep sense of accountability to the people he serves.

All characteristics that make him more than qualified.

Before running, I was unsure if I should get involved in politics, because I was sick and tired of ineffective career politicians — so I had a conversation with former Congressman Jim Greenwood who encouraged me to take the leap.

READ: Bucks County Democrats Prove ‘All Politics Is Local’ With Sweeping Election Wins

I connected with the Mikie Sherrill campaign in New Jersey during the Spring of 2025 and was introduced to her staff — including her 2018 campaign manager and 2025 multimedia team — whose partner was the former Executive Director of the DCCC. They decided to get involved with my campaign because they believe there needs to be a change to the status quo of politics.

Then veterans of campaigns for Senator Chris Murphy (CT), Governor Wes Moore (MD), and Senator Tim Kaine (VA) got involved. These are lifelong Democrats who believe in shaking up a broken system. They see what I see: that the only way to change Washington is to change the type of people we send there.

Unlike Ms. Zolfo’s “circumstantial” piece, everything behind this door is true.

So, which door do you prefer — the one guarded by political insiders, or the one opened by the people?

This column expresses the views of its author, separate from those of this publication.

These teachers survived school shootings. Now they’re offering support to others. - Pennsylvania Capital-Star

2025-11-14T10:19:22.000Z

Teachers who have survived school shootings meet on Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025 at the Homewood Suites hotel in Philadelphia. (Photo by Sammy Caiola / Chalkbeat)

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters

Gathered in a circle in a Philadelphia hotel conference room, 11 teachers brought out a “grounding” item — something that calms them when they feel frightened or sad.

Robin Walker brought a hand-sewn tissue pouch that another Sandy Hook Elementary School teacher made for her and their colleagues after they all survived a mass shooting there in 2012.

Amy Taylor, also a former Sandy Hook teacher, brought a rock a student had painted for her.

Ivy Schamis, who taught in a Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School classroom that was ambushed by a gunman in 2018, brought a picture of the desk in the school office where she works now. It’s protected by bulletproof glass and by her service dog, Waffles.

These are three of the nine teachers who’ve survived school shootings and are now using those experiences to support other educators. A national crisis intervention team they launched this week plans to visit campuses after mass shootings and provide one-on-one phone and email support to teachers in need.

“They don’t have to be alone with those thoughts or those fears in the aftermath of gun violence,” said Kiki Leyba, who ushered his students to safety during the 1999 Columbine High School shooting, at the team’s training on Saturday. “There are others out there who they can connect with.”

The crisis team is a project of a larger gun violence advocacy organization called Teachers Unify to End Gun Violence.

Kiki Leyba, left, and Amy Taylor pose for a portrait during a meeting for teachers who have survived school shootings on Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025 at the Homewood Suites hotel in Philadelphia. (Photo by Sammy Caiola/Chalkbeat)

School shootings often physically injure dozens, and leave many more grappling with the events of that day. Yet the needs of educators can go overlooked by school administrations, members of the group said, and teachers often don’t know where to seek help.

Close to 400,000 students have been exposed to gun violence during school hours, according to a data analysis from The Washington Post. There is no similar count for teachers who have witnessed or been injured by a school shooting.

Leyba said he went right back to the classroom after the tragedy.

“I was not equipped to deal with the trauma,” he said. “I was just really blindsided.”

But after years of working on his own healing and speaking with fellow survivors, he feels he is ready to support others.

The inaugural cohort of teachers has been meeting with a trauma-focused psychologist and another clinician since June to learn how to offer peer support, and handle their own feelings and responses that may arise while helping others. They also received training on a five-step approach to group facilitation around difficult topics.

Educators who call the crisis line can sign up for conversations with members of the new intervention team as well as sessions with mental health professionals.

Teachers’ needs often fall by the wayside after these incidents, said Abbey Clements, cofounder of Teachers Unify to End Gun Violence and a Sandy Hook survivor.

“Often teachers don’t feel like they have what they need,” she said. “Not enough days given for grieving, not enough support to come in and help you in the classroom … You can’t concentrate. You’re not sleeping, you’re not eating. So all these things are very common.”

Following a shooting, administrators are primarily focused on student well-being, the logistics of how to get kids back to class, and incoming lawsuits from victims’ families, said Jaclyn Schildkraut, who studies mass shootings at the Rockefeller Institute of Government’s Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium at the State University of New York.

“With all of the balls that are being juggled in the aftermath, supporting teachers might be one of the lowest things on that priority list,” she said.

Peer support can help fill that gap.

“It’s the people that you don’t have to explain ‘this is why I feel the way I do’ … they just get it,” she said. “And so sometimes you can just sit there with these folks and not have to say a word, and still feel more supported than going to therapy.”

Teachers who have survived school shootings meet on Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025 at the Homewood Suites hotel in Philadelphia. (Photo by Sammy Caiola/Chalkbeat)

Schildkraut isn’t aware of any other existing support networks specifically for teachers after school shootings, though there is one in place for principals.

Members of the crisis team hope to work with school administrators to help them better support teachers after these kinds of tragedies. They also hope to train more teachers in the future, pending funding. The group says they’re open to helping teachers at schools where neighborhood gun violence is common, as well as those who experience shootings inside the building.

Clements said teachers especially need help with how to answer questions from students who’ve lost their classmates.

“What do you say when they say the things that they say?” she said. “Why did this happen? … Why is there a desk removed? Why aren’t we stopping at somebody’s bus stop on a bus route?”

Amy Taylor, who protected her second grade class during the Sandy Hook shooting, said going back to teach was a difficult decision.

“It was messy. I did not want to teach anymore,” she said. “I had a really hard time for a few years. It took me a while to love my job again.”

She relied on exercise and meditation to get through the anxiety and fear she felt. Now she wants to counsel others on self-care strategies.

“If it doesn’t work for you, that’s OK, but we’ll find something,” she said.

She is looking forward to the opportunity “just to listen and be there.”

Any teacher or school, public or private, can reach a member of the crisis intervention team by calling 203-296-3689 or emailing response@teachersunify.org.

The National Center for School Mental Health has also created a resource list for teachers, students, and parents impacted by violence.

Sammy Caiola covers solutions to gun violence in and around Philadelphia schools. Have ideas for her? Get in touch at scaiola@chalkbeat.org.

Quiz: Can you match famous Pennsylvanians to their words? - Spotlight PA

2025-11-14T10:00:00.000Z

Pennsylvania has been home to plenty of famous residents throughout its history, from artists to politicians to business magnates. Can you recognize their words?

In this quiz, we’ll show you 10 quotes from notable people — some living, some dead — who’ve called the Keystone State home at some point in their lives. Your job, for each quotation, will be to match the words to their speaker, choosing from a list of three prominent Pennsylvanians.

The game takes about two or three minutes to complete. Are you up for the challenge?

Let us know if you encounter any technical issues. Just email Newsletter Editor Colin Deppen (newsletters@spotlightpa.org) with a heads up. And good luck!

Fetterman Hospitalized After Fall - PoliticsPA

2025-11-14T02:54:15.000Z

Pennsylvania U.S. Sen. John Fetterman was hospitalized after a fall on Thursday.

His office said he suffered a “ventricular fibrillation flare-up,” or type of irregular heartbeat, that caused him to feel light-headed and fall during a morning walk near his home.

The 55-year-old former lieutenant governor of the Commonwealth has said that it was a-fib that caused his stroke. He underwent surgery in a Lancaster hospital afterward to implant a pacemaker with a defibrillator to manage the condition.

Cardiomyopathy can impede blood flow and potentially cause heartbeats so irregular they can be fatal. Atrial fibrillation can cause blood to pool inside a pocket of the heart, allowing clots to form. Clots then can break off, get stuck and cut off blood, causing a stroke.

Statement from Sen. Fetterman’s Spokesperson:

“During an early morning walk, Senator Fetterman sustained a fall near his home in Braddock.

Out of an abundance of caution, he was transported to a hospital in Pittsburgh.

Upon evaluation, it was established he had a ventricular…
— U.S. Senator John Fetterman (@SenFettermanPA) November 13, 2025

Fetterman joked that “If you thought my face looked bad before, wait until you see it now!’

Gov. Josh Shapiro sent well wishes to the senator.

“Lori and I are praying for Senator Fetterman’s full and speedy recovery and thinking of Gisele and their children. It’s the most important thing in the world to have good health and be with your family, and I know all Pennsylvanians join me in sending well wishes to the Fettermans during this time.”

Fellow Pennsylvania Sen. Dave McCormicj said that he has been in touch with Fetterman.

“I reached out to Senator Fetterman and Dina has spoken to Gisele. John is a tough Pittsburgher and is already on the mend. We are thinking of him, Gisele, and their entire family — looking forward to seeing my good friend in the coming days.”

What does Pennsylvania’s new budget mean for K-12 schools? - Pennsylvania Capital-Star

2025-11-13T23:53:24.000Z

The state Capitol building in downtown Harrisburg on October 14, 2025. (Photo by Jessica Kourkounis for the Pennsylvania Capital-Star)

A number of changes to K-12 school policy and funding are included in Pennsylvania’s 2025-2026 budget.

Primarily, they’re based around increasing oversight of cyber charter schools, increasing the amount of money doled out through the state’s adequacy formula and recruiting and retaining teachers as the commonwealth faces a shortage.

While most policy shifts are relatively small, public education advocates have called the budget a positive step in the right direction.

“While the delayed budget makes planning and operations difficult for public schools, this agreement demonstrates what’s possible when our leaders prioritize students and work together to meet Pennsylvania’s constitutional duty to provide a ‘thorough and efficient’ public education system,” said a statement from PA Schools Work, a coalition of organizations that have advocated for Pennsylvania public schools.

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Cyber Charter funding and oversight

Some of the biggest education policy changes in the budget revolve around cyber charters, which are privately operated and paid for with tax dollars that students can attend remotely via webcam.

Cyber charters have come under intense scrutiny in Pennsylvania by officials from both parties. A February report by GOP state Auditor General Tim DeFoor looking at five cyber charters found they were raising large amounts of money and spending it in ways that didn’t seem tied to educational outcomes or opportunities.

Generally, tuition for cyber charter schools comes from the public school districts where the students resides. This remains the case, but public schools will now be able to deduct a greater amount from the total they would have had to pay per student.

The legislature estimates savings for public school districts will be around $178 million statewide.

The move was a compromise with mostly Democratic lawmakers and Gov. Josh Shapiro, who had called to cap cyber charter tuition at $8,000 per student.

”It’s a step in the right direction, and it is a very welcome step,” said Susan Spicka, the executive director of Education Voters PA, who has been a longtime advocate for cyber charter reform.

A number of policies will also be instituted with the intent of adding accountability for cyber charters.

One is an attempt to reign in truancy at the largely remote schools. A new policy will bar public school students with high truancy rates from transferring to cyber charters, unless a judge decides it’s in their best interest.

Students will also be required to be visible on webcam during synchronous instruction — real-time lessons — in order to be marked in attendance.

A hallway in the Pennsylvania Capitol building in Pittsburgh on October 14, 2025. (Photo by Jessica Kourkounis for the Pennsylvania Capital-Star)

Cyber charters will also be required to conduct mandatory weekly wellness checks on students. Teachers will also be required to undergo training in recognizing signs of child abuse.

The moves follow the death of one cyber charter student following severe abuse at home, signs of which were not reported by teachers. That led the students’ family to file a wrongful death lawsuit against her school.

The budget also institutes a policy that’s intended to make it easier for public school districts to dispute paying cyber charter tuition for students who are no longer residents.

House Education Chair Peter Schweyer (D-Lehigh) says the move came in response to reports that public school districts faced an onerous process for disputing tuition payments for students that moved during the school year.

“The goal isn’t to beat up on the cyber schools,” Schweyer said of the reforms. “It’s to make sure the students are learning and the tax payers are getting what they’re paying for in all this.”

Tweaking the adequacy formula

Last year, lawmakers created a new adequacy formula for doling money to the state’s least funded school districts. That was in response to a Commonwealth Court ruling that found the state’s public school funding scheme had been unconstitutionally inequitable.

By and large, the adequacy formula, which takes into account factors like district poverty levels and the number of students learning English as a second language, remains the same this year. However, more than $500 million in additional dollars will be distributed through it.

Most of the funding was part of a planned step up from last year. When lawmakers created the formula, they had planned to increase spending through it annually until the total reaches around $4.5 billion after nine years.

Yet despite early pushback from some Republicans, who said they felt too much money was being distributed to a school system with dwindling enrollment numbers, the budget that passed will dole out even more money through the adequacy formula than what Gov. Josh Shapiro had asked for in his February budget address.

That’s because lawmakers instituted a $50,000 minimum distribution for all school districts, meaning even districts that would have otherwise received no money through the adequacy formula will now receive the $50,000 each.

Gov. Josh Shapiro at the 2025-2026 budget signing ceremony on Nov. 12, 2025 (Ian Karbal/Capital-Star)

More than 130 of the 500 public school districts will receive the minimum amount this year.

“We recognize that all school districts have some sort of additional needs, so we put a minimum funding balance of $50,000 for all school districts,” Schweyer said. “None of that hurts any school districts, in fact it makes sure that all school districts are in a good space.”

The move to increase funding through the adequacy formula, which faced an uncertain future during the months-long negotiation over the budget, was hailed by public school advocates.

“With this budget, lawmakers affirmed that the Commonwealth remains on the path toward a fully and fairly funded public education system,” read a joint statement from the Education Law Center and Public Interest Law Center, two nonprofits that were involved in the lawsuit that led to the creation of the adequacy formula. “This is another step forward – one that must be followed by continued commitment and sustained investment until every student, in every community, has the resources they need to learn and thrive.”

Teacher recruitment and retention

The budget also institutes policies aimed at helping Pennsylvania schools recruit and retain teachers.

Currently, the state faces a teacher shortage, with a high number leaving the industry and a dwindling number of people entering it.

Policies implemented by the new budget are intended to make it easier for new teachers to enter the profession, including those coming from nontraditional backgrounds.

One of those, long sought by the Pennsylvania State Education Association, increases funding for student teacher stipends, which allows the state to pay student teachers for the time they spend in classrooms working towards their certifications.

Another new policy allows districts to hire teachers with lapsed certifications while working with them to help them re-certify.

According to Schweyer, this policy is aimed at making it easier for former teachers who left the field to care for families or pursue other careers get back into the classroom.

The budget also creates what’s called an experience-based teaching certificate, which is intended to fast track the certification process for professionals who want to transition into teaching in fields related to their work.

Buses are lined up at the Kansas City Public Schools bus barn in Kansas City, Mo., between morning and afternoon routes. (Photo by Kevin Hardy/Stateline)

For example, a school district could hire a professional chemist as a high school science teacher. They would then get an experience-based teaching certificate and have five years to complete their practicum while working as a teacher.

Other changes include a mandatory shift towards what’s called evidence-based literacy education for teachers working with young children on reading skills.

Students in kindergarten through third grade will also be screened for reading ability three times a year. If a student’s reading skills are found to be deficient, their parents will be notified. All schools will also be required to report to the Department of Education annually on their students’ progress.

The budget also includes a policy that expands the number of grades that a teacher can be certified to teach at any given time.

$125 million will also be set aside for school facility repairs, including at least $25 million for the Solar for Schools program, as well as $100 million for school safety and mental health grants.

It will also become a requirement for graduating students to enroll in FAFSA, which is intended to encourage more students to apply for colleges, unless they choose to opt out.

“Ultimately it’s a really good product,” Schweyer said. “There’s more to do, there always is, but overall we’re pleased with where we landed.”

November SNAP benefits in Pa. should be paid by weekend - Pennsylvania Capital-Star

2025-11-13T22:55:27.000Z

Pennsylvania Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program aid recipients as a percentage of population, by county, as of October 28, 2025. (Emily Previti/Pennsylvania Capital-Star)

Pennsylvanians should get Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits for November by the weekend, if not sooner.

SNAP payments stopped Nov. 1 due to the federal government shutdown.

About two million – or 15 percent – of people living in the commonwealth received more than $350 million, combined, in assistance for groceries in September, according to the state Department of Human Services. The agency released a statement Thursday afternoon announcing the full resumption of SNAP following the end of the shutdown.

Mobile soup kitchen God’s Chuckwagon served 150 meals – quadruple the typical count – in Shamokin and Sunbury during the first two days following the official stop of federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. (Photo by Emily Previti/Pennsylvania Capital-Star)

Payments for early November were missed as the Trump administration fought a court order to make them despite the federal government shutdown.

The situation was exacerbated by the shutdown’s effect on other components of the nation’s social safety net – such as the Low-income Heating Assistance Program (LIHEAP) and Women, Infants and Children (WIC)

Pennsylvania’s scenario was more complicated due to a 135-day state budget impasse that has since concluded with Gov. Josh Shapiro signing the 2025-26 budget into law Wednesday.

During October, food banks along with private donors and state and county governments mobilized to try to help compensate for the looming SNAP loss.

Last week, a succession of confusing actions by various branches of the government worsened the chaos: the U.S. Department of Agriculture sent money to states to partially pay SNAP, prompting some – including Pennsylvania – to announce and issue benefits to those who’d missed payments already (typically, people get SNAP benefits on a specified business day within the first half of every month). USDA then told states to undo the payments as the Supreme Court temporarily blocked them.

Meanwhile, more stringent qualifications for the program are setting in. They include ending work exemptions for veterans, older adults and others.

Air travel, SNAP benefits, back pay at issue as federal government slowly reopens - Pennsylvania Capital-Star

2025-11-13T22:51:05.000Z

Planes line up on the tarmac at LaGuardia Airport on Nov. 10, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — The record 43-day government shutdown that ended Wednesday night scrambled air travel, interrupted food assistance and forced federal workers to go without a paycheck for weeks.

It also cost the U.S. economy about $15 billion per week, White House Council of Economic Advisers Director Kevin Hassett told reporters Thursday.

As the government began to reopen Thursday, officials were working to untangle those issues and others.

But in some areas, the processes for getting things back to normal after such a lengthy shutdown will also take time.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday night signed a package passed by Congress reopening the government, which closed on Oct. 1 after lawmakers failed to pass a stopgap spending bill.

Flights back on schedule by Thanksgiving?

The Federal Aviation Administration’s shutdown plan, announced last week by Administrator Bryan Bedford and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, was to reduce flights to 40 major airports by 10%.

As of Thursday afternoon, the FAA had not lifted the order restricting flights. But the agency did stop ramping up the percentage of those affected.

The FAA started by asking airlines to cancel 4% of flights Nov. 7. A Wednesday order halted the rate at 6%.

That was enough to cause major disruptions to travel, and it remained unclear Thursday how long it would take to resume normal operations.

In a statement, Airlines for America, the trade group representing the nation’s commercial air carriers, welcomed the end of the shutdown but was vague about how much longer air travelers would see disruptions. The statement noted the upcoming holiday as a possible milestone.

“When the FAA gives airlines clearance to return to full capacity, our crews will work quickly to ramp up operations especially with Thanksgiving holiday travel beginning next week,” the group’s statement said.

The FAA and Transportation Department did not return messages seeking updates Thursday.

The reduction in flights was meant to ease pressure on air traffic controllers, who worked through the shutdown without pay.

Many missed work as they pursued short-term jobs in other industries. Duffy said that left the controllers on the job overstressed and possibly prone to costly mistakes.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem sought to reward other federal workers at airports, those employed by her department’s Transportation Security Administration, with $10,000 bonuses if they maintained high attendance records during the shutdown.

Noem handed out checks to TSA workers in Houston on Thursday and said more could come.

Federal workers return, with back pay on the way

Hundreds of thousands of federal workers who had been furloughed returned to the office Thursday and those who had been working without pay will continue their duties knowing their next paycheck should be on time.

All workers will receive back pay for the shutdown, in accordance with a 2019 law that states employees “shall be paid for such work, at the employee’s standard rate of pay, at the earliest date possible after the lapse in appropriations, regardless of scheduled pay dates.”

A spokesperson for the Office of Management and Budget said the White House has urged agencies to get back pay to employees “expeditiously and accurately.”

Agencies will need to submit time and attendance files, and payroll processors can then issue checks. According to the spokesperson, agencies have different pay schedules and payroll processors, and “discrepancies in timing and pay periods are a result of that.”

The office estimates that workers will receive a “supercheck” for the pay period from Oct. 1 to Nov. 1 on the following dates:

Nov. 15

General Services Administration
Office of Personnel Management

Nov. 16

Departments of Energy, Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs and Defense

Nov. 17

Departments of Education, State, Interior and Transportation
Environmental Protection Agency
NASA
National Science Foundation
Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Social Security Administration

Nov. 19

Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Justice, Labor and Treasury
Small Business Administration

Doreen Greenwald, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said in a statement Wednesday that federal workers across all agencies “should not have to wait another minute longer for the paychecks they lost during the longest government shutdown in history.”

“The anxiety has been devastating as they cut back on spending, ran up credit card debt, took out emergency loans, filed for unemployment, found temporary side jobs, stood in line for food assistance, skipped filling prescriptions and worried about the future. Federal employees should receive the six weeks of back pay they are owed immediately upon the reopening of the federal government,” said Greenwald.

The union represents workers at 38 federal agencies and offices.

States Newsroom spoke to several furloughed federal workers who attended a special food distribution event during the shutdown.

The American Federation of Government Employees, one of multiple unions that sued the Trump administration over layoffs during the shutdown, said its members were used “as leverage to advance political priorities,” according to a statement issued Tuesday by the union’s national president, Everett Kelley.

The AFGE, which according to the union represents roughly 820,000 federal workers, did not immediately respond for comment Thursday.

The shutdown-ending deal reinstated jobs for fired federal employees and prohibits any reductions in force by the administration until Jan. 30.

Federal workers speak out

A statement released Thursday by a group of federal workers across agencies struck a different tone on the shutdown and praised the 40 senators and 209 representatives who voted against the temporary spending bill deal.

“The fight mattered. It changed the conversation. More members of the American public now understand that Trump is shredding the Constitution,” according to the statement issued by the Civil Servants Coalition.

The coalition also noted, “Even though the government is reopening, none of us will be able to fully deliver our agency’s missions. Our work has been exploited and dismantled since January through harmful policies and illegal purges of critical staff.”

The group emailed the statement as a PDF document to an unknown number of government workers and urged them to “channel that frustration toward action” by contacting their representatives.

SNAP saga concludes

The government reopening ended a drawn-out saga over the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which helps 42 million people afford groceries.

The U.S.Department of Agriculture told states in a Thursday memo they “must take immediate steps to ensure households receive their full November allotments promptly.”

The guidance also noted that states should prepare for another shutdown as soon as next October by upgrading systems so that they could allow for partial payments.

A key point of dispute between the administration and those seeking SNAP benefits was the lengthy time the administration said it would take to fund partial benefits.

A Wednesday evening statement from a department spokesperson said full benefits would be disbursed in most states by Thursday night.

Lauren Kallins, a senior legislative director for the National Conference of State Legislatures, said Thursday “states are all working hard to resume full benefits.”

“But there will likely be logistical challenges, depending on a state’s system’s capabilities and whether the state had already issued partial benefits, that may impact how quickly a state is able to push out” benefits, she wrote.

The program, which is funded by the federal government and administered by states, sends monthly payments on a rolling basis.

That means that the day of the month each household receives its allotment varies. Households that usually receive benefits mid-month or later should see no interruption.

But many of the program’s beneficiaries receive their payments earlier in the month, meaning that, depending on their state, they may have missed their November payments.

Some states, including Democrat-run Wisconsin, Oregon and Michigan, began paying full benefits last week after a Rhode Island federal judge ordered the administration to release full November payments and the department issued guidance to states to do so.

The administration then asked the U.S. Supreme Court to pause enforcement of the Rhode Island judge’s order and reversed its guidance to states, telling them to “immediately undo” efforts to pay out full November benefits.

The Department of Justice dropped its Supreme Court case Thursday.

“Because the underlying dispute here is now moot, the government withdraws its November 7 stay application in this Court,” U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote to the high court.

In the trial court, the administration cited the USDA guidance and said it would discuss the future of the litigation with the coalition of cities and nonprofit groups that brought the suit.

Capital area tourist attractions reopen

Tourists in the nation’s capital have been shut out of the Smithsonian Institution’s 17 free museums and zoo for most of the federal shutdown.

The institution on Friday will open the National Museum of American History, the National Air and Space Museum and the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, an annex of the Air and Space Museum located at Dulles International Airport in Virginia, according to a message posted on the Smithsonian’s website.

All other museums and the National Zoo will open on a “rolling basis” by Nov. 17.

Multiple public-facing agencies, including the National Park Service and Internal Revenue Service, did not respond to States Newsroom’s requests for reopening information.

National parks were closed or partially closed during the shutdown.

Several IRS services were reduced or altogether cut as the funding lapse dragged on. Those disruptions included limited IRS telephone customer service operations and the closure of in-person Taxpayer Assistance Centers.