Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Why Are You Paying For Trump’s Nine Hundred Million Dollar Ballroom?
The Washington Post got hold of confidential contracts and planning documents, and they show the Trump administration is set to spend at least $970 million dollars on construction at the White House. That’s the gilded ballroom sitting where the East Wing used to be, plus a helipad, a visitor screening center, an underground security complex, and a redo of Lafayette Square. Trump swore private donors would foot the bill. The Post reports half the $600 million East Wing tab lands on you. Instead of asking Congress, the administration pulled money from other agencies into a maintenance account that normally holds a few million bucks. Congressman Ro Khanna didn’t mince words. “This is money they’re taking out of your healthcare.” Congress is supposed to hold the purse, not Trump.
Justice Department Indicts The Woman Who Spent Her Career Hunting Hate Groups
Heidi Beirich ran the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project (SPLC), the arm that tracked white supremacists for decades. On Wednesday, federal prosecutors charged her with wire fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering. They claim the SPLC told donors and banks it was dismantling extremist groups while quietly paying confidential informants inside them. The indictment says Beirich oversaw those payments and had a romantic relationship with one informant, sharing a home and two bank accounts that took in $140,000 from an SPLC account. Her lawyer calls the charges political and says his client is innocent. “This case is without merit.” Attorney General Todd Blanche then misidentified Beirich as the group’s former chief financial officer. The SPLC has pleaded not guilty. When government prosecutes those who expose hate groups, the haters are winning.
Is Wearing A Union Shirt Now A Fireable Offense In Trump’s Government?
Stephen Wheeler is a data scientist who’s worked at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau since 2022, and he chairs the union’s organizing committee. Last Thursday the agency put him on administrative leave and opened an investigation. Nobody will tell him what he’s accused of. What we know is this. Wheeler wore his union T-shirt to watch Russ Vought testify before Congress. He helped coworkers hang union signs in their cubicles. He talked to NPR about the chaotic forced relocation of bureau staff. Wheeler calls the investigation “bullying and intimidation for union activity and protected speech.” He’s the second union voice targeted. Alexis Goldstein was fired in February. The bureau is down to about a thousand employees from seventeen hundred and fifty. Here’s the plan. Get rid of the watchdog and silence anyone who complains.
How Long Since Anyone Inspected The Farm That Grew Your Salad?
Seven years. That’s how long it had been since the FDA inspected Taylor Farms de Mexico, the grower believed to be behind the cyclosporiasis outbreak sickening Americans right now. The agency managed just under 1,000 foreign food inspections last year. Federal law requires 19,200. In the ten years that law’s been on the books, the agency has never hit even ten percent of it. Foreign inspections dropped 29% in a year, the worst count since 2011 outside the pandemic, after layoffs stripped support staff. Without routine inspections, one federal watchdog author says, the FDA is “just completely blind.” Forty-seven thousand foreign plants ship 90% of our food. The FDA’s checked 4.5% of them. Maybe RFK needs to stop his cooking show and get to work.
Who’s Watching The Cops Who Are Watching You?
The Institute for Justice launched a database Wednesday documenting more than 100 cases of police abusing automated license plate readers, mostly Flock cameras, for what it calls “romantic stalking, wrongful stops and detentions.” In Florida, a sheriff’s deputy saw a woman at a TV shoot, tracked her down, and pulled her over. In Texas, a deputy searched more than 83,000 cameras nationwide hunting a woman who’d allegedly taken abortion pills, at the request of her abusive partner. In Georgia, a police chief tracked his ex-girlfriend and her teenage daughter hundreds of times. The authors say that’s probably a fraction of the real total, because officers type vague reasons into the search box and nobody checks. These cameras were sold to towns as crime-fighting tools. Now this machine follows you to your doctor, your church, your protest.
Geeky Science. Scientists Name The Monster That Eats Snow
Matthew LaPlante is a climate scientist at Utah State who taps aspens for syrup. Some mornings he wakes up and inches of snowpack are gone. He says it feels like a monster came and “took a bite out of a snowpack.” So scientists gave it a name. A new study in Science Advances defines a snow eater as a stretch of three to five days when temperatures stay above freezing day and night. That roughly doubles how fast snow melts. Since the 1850s the area hit by snow eaters has grown about 40,000 square miles per century, and the first one now arrives a month earlier every hundred years. Out West, snowpack is the reservoir. When it comes down early, water shows up as a flood instead of a supply, and the forests left behind burn.
And that’s the way it is, Today Thursday, August 13, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
