Good Morning, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Why is Trump Building a Secret Copy of Vote.gov?
Independent researchers say a quiet White House office called the National Design Studio has been rebuilding the government’s most sensitive websites and moving them under Trump’s direct control. The studio is run by Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia and staffed with veterans of Elon Musk’s DOGE. Researchers found working copies of vote.gov and passports.gov, traced back to the Executive Office of the President, running through a single private server with no privacy notices on file. Across twelve programs, the legally required disclosures don’t exist. The order behind it sets a delivery date of July fourth. Now, the broader claims about a stolen election remain unproven allegations. But the documented part is bad enough. Trump once told supporters, “you’re not gonna have to vote.” Someone in Congress should be asking why.
Millions Will Lose Their Health Care Over Paperwork
On Monday the Trump administration finalized a rule forcing most adults on Medicaid to prove they work, study, or volunteer eighty hours a month or lose their coverage. It starts January first. The Congressional Budget Office says five point three million more people will be uninsured within a decade, and almost none of them because they stopped working. They’ll lose it because they couldn’t fight through the paperwork. We’ve seen this movie. Arkansas tried it and eighteen thousand people lost coverage in months. Mehmet Oz, who runs the program now, says, “We’re forgiving, but we’re not foolish.” Foolish would be pretending this is about jobs. It’s about a wall of red tape built to push sick and poor people out. That’s the whole design.
Who’s Paying for Congress to Fly to Israel?
New filings show that since the October seventh attacks, dozens of members of Congress have taken lavish, all-expenses trips to Israel. Most were paid for by the American Israel Education Foundation, the charity arm of the lobbying giant AIPAC. Here’s the trick. A lobbying group can’t legally hand lawmakers free travel, so AIPAC runs the trips through its charity and slips right through a loophole it lobbied to create. About three out of four congressional trips to Israel come through this one outfit. They get the briefings, the borders, the meetings with top officials, and they come home voting the way their hosts want. When the people writing the checks also write your itinerary, that’s not education. That’s influence with a passport stamp.
Can the Government Make You Take Down a 86-47 Flag?
A federal judge just said no. Park Service officers tried to force anti-Trump demonstrators in Washington to remove a flag reading “86 47,” the same phrase the Justice Department used to indict former FBI director James Comey. Judge Randolph Moss ruled the flag was protected political speech, not a threat, and he blocked the government from yanking the protesters’ permit. He wrote that officials were trying to “squelch core political speech” with no evidence behind it. That’s the point. They wanted to silence people demanding a president’s impeachment, and a court reminded them the First Amendment still works.
Geeky Science Alert. What Could Go Wrong When Google Messes With Mother Nature?
It sounds like a joke, but it’s real. Google is asking federal regulators for permission to release up to thirty-two million mosquitoes across Florida and California. Sixteen million in Florida first, sixteen million in California next year. They’re males carrying a bacteria that keeps their offspring from hatching, built to wipe out the kind spreading dengue and Zika. Google says it wants to “stop bad bugs with good bugs.” Maybe it works. But history’s full of bright ideas that fixed one problem and made things worse.
Cute Alert. Did Mamdani Just Repeal Bedtime for Five-Year-Olds?
He sure did. With the Knicks in the NBA Finals for the first time in twenty-seven years, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani gathered a crowd of kids and signed a one-of-a-kind executive order. “Bedtime is repealed. All of you can watch the finals,” he told them. Somewhere a parent is groaning. Somewhere a five-year-old is cheering. Democracy in action.
And that’s the way it is, Today Tuesday, June second, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
