More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Rep. Pramila Jayapal doesn’t believe in growing a thick skin. “I want to feel people’s pain,” she tells me. As chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and founder of the Resistance Lab, she’s building a politics rooted in empathy, resistance, and readiness: “We have to get strike ready.”
From walking out of the State of the Union to confronting power with “moral clarity,” Jayapal is done playing by the old rules: “When you don’t give respect, you don’t get respect.”
When I lost my job while on maternity leave, I never expected I’d soon be in a hospital while my infant underwent emergency surgery. As my life became a highwire act, Medicaid became a safety net for my family.
Our Medicaid plan provided 100 percent coverage for what would’ve been thousands of dollars in hospital and surgical bills. It covered my baby’s follow-up appointments with specialists and his prescription formula. It covered all of our basic health needs. It covered my therapy.
Diana Greene Foster is responsible for landmark research on the effects of abortion access—a massive 10-year study that tracked thousands of people who had an abortion or were denied one. But funding for a follow-up to her seminal Turnaway Study has just been cut as part of a wave of canceled health policy research.
Foster received a MacArthur “genius grant” for the Turnaway Study. That piece of research, which examined the impact of restrictions even before the fall of Roe v. Wade, helped shape public understanding of how abortion access can affect people’s health and economic well-being by finding that people who were denied abortions were more likely to experience years of poverty compared to those who could terminate their unplanned pregnancies.
On the first day of his second stint in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order freezing all U.S. foreign assistance. Four days later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio halted foreign aid work already underway. Soon after that, Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) began to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and Rubio canceled 83 percent of its programs.
“Since Inauguration Day, I’d say the Trump administration has immediately gone to work in reckless, heartless and shameless ways that have attacked sexual and reproductive health and rights [and] LGBT rights,” said Caitlin Horrigan, senior director of global advocacy for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
President Donald Trump restored gun rights to his friend Mel Gibson, who admitted to abusing his girlfriend. In a reality where domestic abusers are armed, women will suffer most.
—A gun in a domestic violence situation makes a woman five times more likely to be killed.
—Homicide is the leading cause of death for pregnant and postpartum women, with 68 percent of those homicides involving firearms.
—Black women face higher rates of intimate partner violence and are more likely than white women to be fatally shot.
—Forty-one percent of perpetrators in mass shootings between 2016 and 2020 had a history of domestic violence.
So why would any administration push policies that arm abusers? As always, follow the money.
U.S. Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer has given most U.S. Department of Labor employees until April 18 to opt into early retirement or deferred resignation programs, signaling the imminence of mass layoffs. As ironworker tradeswomen, we are particularly concerned about what this could mean for the Women’s Bureau, a critical agency within the department, as well as the Women in Apprenticeship and Nontraditional Occupations (WANTO) program it administers.
It is imperative that Chavez-DeRemer, a former representative of Oregon, preserve and expand support for the Women’s Bureau and WANTO. It is only fair: Oregon has received and benefited greatly from WANTO funding, along with additional federal funding for infrastructure. These investments have driven the state’s thriving economy at a time when employers nationwide face a shortage of skilled workers in key industries like construction, plumbing and electrical work.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has long been a sprawling agency with often-conflicting goals. It’s in charge of both promoting healthy diets through the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, school food and nutrition assistance programs and boosting commodity crops, which are dumped into our food system in the form of unhealthy, ultra-processed foods and excessive amounts of meat and dairy.
But since its founding, the USDA’s role has been to recognize the vital importance of agriculture in our country and to protect America’s food supply.
So if you’re wondering how attacking transgender youth helps our food system, you’re not alone.
Once dismissed as fringe, pronatalism has moved into the mainstream—finding powerful champions in Trump, Vance and Musk, and gaining policy traction within the administration. Rooted in eugenics, antifeminism, and anti-immigrant sentiment, this ideology casts high birthrates as a patriotic duty and low fertility as a national threat.
Now, federal policies are beginning to reflect this dangerous worldview—one that sees women’s bodies as tools of the state and reproductive freedom as collateral damage.
International students across the U.S. are losing their visas without warning. For many, the only explanation is a dream turned nightmare—and a government no longer pretending to welcome us.
As Trump moves to dismantle the Department of Education, echoes of Jim Crow remind us what happens when states are left to decide who deserves an education—and who doesn’t.
Programs like Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare and the GI Bill exist because certain rights are too fundamental to be left to the whims of individual states or marketplaces. Education is one of them.