Mike Levin

Let me tell you what just got reported, because you will not believe it until you see it laid out. The Trump administration cut a billion-dollar tungsten deal with Kazakhstan. Tungsten is the metal we need for missile warheads, fighter jets, and computer chips. Trump himself got on the phone to close it. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick worked it from the inside, sending letters, leaning on the Kazakh president, lining up as much as $1.6 billion in federal financing. Within weeks of those negotiations, investors tied to a firm partly owned by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump took a 20% stake in an entity connected to the very same Kazakhstan project their father was negotiating. Around that same time, Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm run by Lutnick’s own sons, raised $210 million for a partner in the deal and pocketed the fees. The fathers set the policy. The sons cashed in. Six days after the Trump sons and their partners moved their money, Lutnick signed the final deal. The reporting found one or both families have financial ties to at least 14 companies working with the government on critical mining deals. The total federal funding flowing toward those companies tops $8.9 billion. This is your tax money. It is supposed to secure our supply chains and protect our troops, not pad the portfolios of the President’s children and the Commerce Secretary’s children. This is the most corrupt administration in American history. It is not close. We must keep digging, and keep asking the questions they do not want asked. Republicans in Congress are unwilling to lift a finger. Mike Johnson is running a protection racket. Either we will end the corruption, or the corruption will be the end of us. google.com/url?q=https://…

As the grandson of a World War II veteran and the representative for Camp Pendleton, this was a special moment. This week, on the 250th birthday of our country, Carlsbad broke ground on Veterans Memorial Park. At nearly 94 acres it will be the largest park in the city, and it will be the first place in Carlsbad dedicated to honoring the men and women who served. I was proud to help secure a $3 million federal grant to make it happen, alongside the funding the city and state put in. Our veterans and their families deserve to know their service is remembered close to home. This park is one lasting way we say thank you. sandiegouniontribune.com/2026/07/09/car…

Startups are now paying tens of millions of dollars a day to white collar workers to train AI built to replace them. One company alone pays 30,000 contractors more than $4 million a day. They are building simulated workplaces so the models can watch how bankers and analysts think, then reproduce it. The goal is to make these workers unnecessary. We should be honest about where this leads. Fewer stable careers or reasons for young people to pursue higher education. A population with less expertise and less ability to see when it is being misled. This administration has no plan to protect or retrain workers, to make sure these gains are shared rather than hoarded. On the defining economic question of the decade, the White House offers nothing of substance. We must keep fighting for real guardrails. Workers deserve protection when their labor builds the tools that replace them. We need transparency about how these systems are trained and who profits. And we need to stop pretending this is a problem for some distant future. It is happening right now. The future is not written yet. We must help shape it by telling the truth and fighting for the people about to bear the cost. nytimes.com/2026/07/10/bus…

This is your daily reminder that Trump and Republicans are spending billions of your tax dollars on an unauthorized war in Iran and Stephen Miller’s ICE agenda while gutting Medicaid, slashing SNAP, and driving up your health care costs.

Trump is trying to gut the Endangered Species Act. This is a big deal, and he must be stopped. For half a century, harming a protected animal meant you couldn’t destroy the place it lives. The Supreme Court backed that up in 1995. Six justices said the obvious thing, that if you wipe out an animal’s home, you wipe out the animal. Trump wants to throw this out so his friends can pave over the last nesting ground of a vanishing species and call it legal, as long as they don’t personally kill the animal. Starve it, drill it, mine it. Go right ahead. It’s a permission slip for oil and mining companies to speed up extinction, and habitat loss is already the number one reason species disappear. This rule ignores the plain text of the law Congress wrote. The 1995 ruling is still on the books, and a rule this lawless is exactly what judges are there to strike down. Congress must act too. I’ll push for a vote to overturn this, and I’ll fight any spending bill that tries to lock these rollbacks in. And you have a role. Public comments already are hundreds of thousands strong against this. Keep the pressure on. nytimes.com/2026/07/10/cli…

It is long past time to ban members of Congress from trading stocks. The bill to do it is bipartisan and has broad support in the House. Speaker Johnson said he backs a ban, but has let his own promised timeline come and go with no vote on the floor. The American people are watching, and they deserve action.

This is outrageous. Taxpayers are spending hundreds of millions of dollars, with some outside estimates as high as $1 billion, to retrofit Qatar Force One. Yet when it came time to leave the NATO summit in Turkey, Trump didn’t even fly home on it. He switched back to the existing Air Force One for the first leg of the trip. Reports indicate the Qatari jet still lacks some of the specialized defensive systems and command capabilities built into the current presidential aircraft. So we’re spending an enormous amount of taxpayer money to modify a foreign gift, and it still isn’t a full replacement for the aircraft we already have. The Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause was designed to guard against foreign influence over American officials. A foreign government giving a luxury aircraft to a sitting president is exactly the kind of arrangement the clause was intended to prevent. We’re also only about two years away from receiving the new Air Force One aircraft that we already ordered from Boeing. And under the administration’s plan, this aircraft would ultimately be transferred to Trump’s presidential library in Florida. Totally unacceptable. It should remain the property of the United States. Personally, I’d sell it once he’s out of office and recover what taxpayers can. This has become an extraordinarily expensive vanity project. cbsnews.com/news/air-force…

This is bad. Yesterday Trump fired every member of the Election Assistance Commission. What’s left is a federal election agency with nobody running it, four months before a vote that decides who controls Congress. Congress built this agency after the 2000 election mess and balanced it on purpose. Two members from each party, so no one could hijack it. That balance is gone now. With no commissioners, the agency cannot certify voting machines or protect the national voter registration form. Trump had been pushing it to add hurdles for voters, and courts kept blocking him. So he cleared out the people who kept saying no. It’s all part of an obvious and disturbing pattern. He still falsely claims 2020 was stolen. He has spent years attacking mail ballots and voting machines. He tried to rewrite the rules, lost repeatedly in court, and now fires the referees instead. When the game doesn’t go his way, he swaps out who holds the whistle. We will fight this in the courts and every other way we can. Americans decide our elections, not one man out of touch with reality firing everyone who might tell him no. wapo.st/4ydQ3TP

Congress spent months negotiating the most significant bipartisan housing bill in a generation, one that finally cracks down on Wall Street speculators buying up single-family homes, cuts red tape, and helps families struggling with the cost of a roof over their head. It passed both chambers by overwhelming margins. And the President of the United States refuses to sign because the Senate will not pass a completely unrelated voter suppression bill he wants. He is throwing a tantrum and calling members of his own party names on social media. This is a grown man acting like a petulant child, stamping his feet because he can’t get his way. Families cannot afford homes right now. While people lie awake worrying about rent and mortgages, the President is picking fights on the internet and treating their struggle like a bargaining chip. He is completely out of touch with the reality millions of Americans are living every single day. Here’s the good news. This law takes effect at midnight whether he signs it or not, because Congress did its job. Democrats and Republicans came together, delivered for the American people, and made clear they would override any veto. Leadership means showing up for people when it counts. The families waiting on this help deserve better than a President this detached from their lives. politico.com/live-updates/2…

For decades, federal grants ran on independent peer review. Scientists judged other scientists’ proposals on scientific quality, and those recommendations drove the funding. It was simple, nonpartisan, and it worked. The Trump administration now is seizing political control over which research the government funds. It’s beyond dangerous. It has already canceled hundreds of grants for no longer fitting its priorities, including projects that were approved and already underway. Many studies take years. When the money can vanish halfway through, labs lose staff, long-term data collection breaks, and taxpayer-funded work gets abandoned before it delivers anything. Leading scientific organizations are sounding the alarm. Their warning is blunt. Politicizing funding decisions undermines the independence of research and pushes scientists away from any work that might put them crosswise with those in power. Medical breakthroughs, safer food, better weather forecasting, and stronger national security all depend on research judged by merit, not politics. The more political loyalty replaces scientific review, the more all of us have reason to worry. I’m not going to sit quietly while this happens. On the Appropriations Committee, I’ll fight to protect independent peer review and block funding schemes that let political appointees override the scientists. I’ll keep pressing for answers and demanding accountability for the researchers and jobs already lost. And I’ll keep standing with the scientists and institutions in our community who refuse to let politics decide what counts as truth.  Our health, our safety, and our standing in the world depend on getting this right.

Trump made one promise on energy. He said he would cut electricity bills in half in his first year. A year and a half later, the opposite is happening. Residential electricity prices are up nationwide since last fall. More than a dozen states have seen double-digit increases. Trump’s policies are projected to cost households more than half a trillion dollars through 2040. How did this happen? The country is in an electricity crunch driven by AI and data centers. Demand is surging. The obvious response is to add new supply as quickly and affordably as possible. When demand rises faster than supply, prices follow. Instead, Trump has made it harder to build much of the new generation coming online, while Republicans in Congress rolled back major clean energy tax incentives.  Trump’s Energy Secretary called renewable energy “low value.” Yet in the first quarter of this year, solar and battery storage accounted for roughly 91% of new generating capacity added to the grid. Those technologies are doing much of the work to meet growing demand. Building less of them while demand keeps rising puts additional upward pressure on prices. Meanwhile, the administration committed roughly $700 million to extend the lives of aging coal plants that many utilities had already planned to retire because they were no longer economical to operate. I think if the goal were truly to help families in coal country, the priorities would look very different. Legislation signed by the same president is projected to reduce health care and nutrition assistance for many of the same communities. How about investing that money in health care, basic services, and job training instead? Developers are now racing to finish renewable energy projects before key tax incentives expire. Many analysts expect new construction to slow after that, even as electricity demand from AI and data centers continues climbing. In sum, Trump promised to cut your bill in half, and instead he is raising your costs, propping up the most expensive power on the grid, and cutting the safety net out from under the very families he claims to fight for. cnn.com/2026/07/07/cli…

Disasters don’t check your party registration before they strike. But FEMA’s own data shows the Trump administration is moving slower than any administration before it to help blue states hit by disaster. California is the worst example yet. The Palisades and Eaton Fires devastated our state in 2025. More than 100,000 Californians were displaced. Over 13,000 homes burned to the ground. A year later, the Trump administration still hasn’t moved to get those families the disaster funding they need. Trump is dragging his feet to settle a petty political score against states that didn’t vote for him. We cannot let this become normal. Retaliation and politics have no place in a crisis while American families are suffering. When disaster strikes, every American should be able to count on the federal government for help based on need, and nothing else.

Trump is trying to resurrect a rejected century old plan to erect something towering in his own image, a 250 foot arch, right at the gateway to Arlington National Cemetery. He claims Congress authorized it a century ago. That claim falls apart the moment you check the record. What Congress actually approved in 1925 was a bridge and two 166 foot columns. Not an arch. The columns were never built. President Hoover scratched them from the plans in 1931 after the Commerce Department warned they could endanger aircraft. That is the “vision” Trump is citing. A design that was rejected almost 95 years ago. Arlington is sacred ground, and no president should be allowed to wall it off with a monument to himself that Congress never approved. wapo.st/4aGwgm0

This is your daily reminder that Trump and Republicans are spending billions of your tax dollars on an unauthorized war in Iran and Stephen Miller’s ICE agenda while gutting Medicaid, slashing SNAP, and driving up your health care costs.

America is and always will be a capitalist country. Capitalism is how we became the biggest economic engine the world has ever seen. What we have today is a White House whose corruption and economic mismanagement have undermined confidence in that system. Tariffs that raise costs, policies that favor the well connected, and a war that taxpayers are helping finance are not signs of a healthy economy. Here’s what Donald Trump and some in his orbit seem to miss. Real capitalism was never built on greed alone. Adam Smith, the father of modern capitalism, wrote his first book in 1759 about moral sentiment, about empathy. He understood that a healthy economy depends on two things working together: self-interest and concern for the people around you. What we have now is only half of that. Self-interest for the connected few, while working families are asked to pay more. That isn’t capitalism at its best. It’s an economy where political access matters too much and ordinary Americans are too often left to absorb the costs. The answer is not to abandon capitalism. The answer is to restore it. Reward work, not insider access. Lower costs, not raise them. Build an economy where the family trying to buy a home and the builder putting up that home can both succeed. That’s capitalism worthy of America.

It’s easy for the president to say everyone is doing great. It’s easy to wave off the strain families are feeling at the grocery store, the gas pump, the pharmacy counter. It’s easy to not care how Americans are actually making ends meet when you just raked in $2 billion in personal profits.

DHS just spent $1.5 billion in taxpayer dollars to buy two California ICE detention centers from CoreCivic, a company Trump holds stock in. Follow the money and it runs straight back toward the president’s own portfolio. Do you get it yet? cbs8.com/article/news/l…

This is just dumb. We run a trade surplus with Spain. They buy more from us than we buy from them. Cutting off trade with Spain means selling less to one of our customers. That hurts American exporters, American workers, and the communities that depend on those exports.