The average first 90-degree day in D.C. is May 18.

A fossil-fueled heat wave is bring the carbon summer to the District of Columbia region as Congress returns from a two-week break after House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La., no relation) blocked the Senate deal (S.Amdt. 4790) to resolve the funding impasse for most of the Department of Homeland Security, excluding Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the border security operations of the U.S. Customs and Border ProtectionBorder Security Operations.

Thus, the entire Department of Homeland Security remains without federal appropriations for the remainder of fiscal year 2026. DHS employees and operations are being paid for illegally and unconstitutionally by the Trump regime, without a peep of protest from members of Congress. Republican Congressional leadership are hoping to use the budgetary loophole of the reconciliation process, by which they jammed through the One Big Brutal Bill Act last year, to provide appropriations on a party-line basis to DHS for the remainder of Trump’s term.

Rock the Vought

House Budget ranking member Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) criticizes OMB Director Russell Vought for failing to appear before Congress at all, March 26, 2026.

Now that Congress has retreated from another of the White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought’s forays to seize the federal purse, the institution is moving to consider the fiscal year 2027 budget process.

Vought’s proposed budget consolidates the regime’s victories in implementing Project 2025 through the DOGE chainsaw in the pursuit of a Big Brutal Box landscape of warehouses for incarcerating people and housing fracking-fueled hyperclusters, while burning through one-and-a-half trillion dollars a year on feckless yet genocidal fossil-fuel imperialism.

As celebrated in a White House document attacking “the globalist climate agenda,” the budget proposes massive cuts for climate and environmental programs, including cutting the Environmental Protection Agency budget in half, slashing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration budget for the thoughtcrime of “efforts to radicalize students against markets,” killing the National Aeronautic and Space Administration’s climate research, and eliminating $15 billion in renewable energy infrastructure funding from the Biden-era infrastructure law. Vought is seeking similar cuts across the entire American scientific enterprise, led by slashing the National Science Foundation budget in half. The Department of Energy is redirected to rebuilding the U.S. nuclear arsenal and supporting the fossil-fuel, mining, and artificial-intelligence industries.

Vought’s budget is “just an out-of-touch plea for more money for guns and bombs,” Senate Budget ranking member Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) commented, “and less for the things people need, like housing, healthcare, education, roads, scientific research, and environmental protection.”

Vought is scheduled to testify before the House budget committee, led by OBBBA shepherd Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) and ranking member Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), on Wednesday, and before the Senate budget committee, led by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Merkley, on Thursday.

If Vought does testify, this will be the first time he appears before Congress this term.

So Wright It’s Wrong

Secretary of Energy Chris Wright promoting the Iran war at CERAWeek, March 23, 2026.

Fracking executive, climate denier, and Secretary of Energy Chris Wright testifies on the nuclear-winter-or-global-burning DOE budget before House appropriators on Wednesday afternoon and the House Energy and Commerce energy subcommittee on Thursday morning.

While Wright testifies on Wednesday, other committees are negotiating the data center industry’s insatiable pressure on planetary limits. A House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hears testimony from industry and academics on global competition in the semiconductor industry, from mining and chip design to manufacturing; and the Senate Energy and Natural Resources energy subcommittee hears testimony from Federal Energy Regulatory Commission staff on bills to feed the data center boom, including an industry-designed proposal for liquid cooling of data centers co-sponsored by a bipartisan team of AI enthusiasts, Sens. Dave McCormick (R-Pa.), Chris Coons (D-Del.), Ted Budd (R-N.C.), and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), which could lead to a catastrophic rise in superpolluting greenhouse gases.

The Liquid Cooling for AI Act of 2025 has support from the AI Supply Chain Alliance, Chemours, UNICOM Engineering, the American Chemistry Council, SEMI Americas, Vertiv, the Grenzebach Group, Accelsius, 2CRSi, Alcatex, Cool Filtration, Schneider Electric, EneosUSA, Modine, and the University of Delaware.

In a related hearing about addressing the ravenous demand for electricity and chips on Thursday morning, the House Science energy subcommittee discusses subsurface science and technology for domestic mining and geothermal energy with industry, federal, and academic witnesses.

More Climate Hearings This Week

Tuesday, April 14 - Historical Record High of 91°F (1960)

At 4 pm, the House Rules Committee prepares for floor consideration three bills to weaken the Clean Air and a FISA Amendments Act extension. Two of the anti-Clean Air Act bills arbitrarily exclude air pollution from air quality standards; from wildfires (FIRE Act, H.R. 6387) and foreign sources (FENCES Act, H.R. 6409). The third eliminates EPA review of federal projects separately covered by the National Environmental Policy Act (RED Tape Act, H.R. 6398).

Wednesday, April 15 - Historical Record High of 89°F (1941)

At 10 am, the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee oversight subcommittee looks at the state of scientific publishing, in line with the Trump regime’s efforts to cut off federal scientists from access to scientific journals.

Meanwhile, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hears testimony on restoration efforts in the Great Lakes region, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee discusses the United Nations with Trump officials Mike Waltz, the disgraced Signalgate national security advisor and current U.S. representative to the U.N., and Jeff Bartos, a failed Republican politician and the U.S. representative for U.N. reform.

Thursday, April 16 - Historical Record High of 92°F (2002)

House Appropriations chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) decided to celebrate Emancipation Day by stacking Thursday with eight different budget hearings. In addition to the aforementioned DOE budget hearing, they include:

• 10 am: Department of Homeland Security: CBP, ICE, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services with the agency heads

• 10 am: Army Corps of Engineers and Bureau of Reclamation

• 10:30 am: Department of Agriculture with white-nationalist Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins

• 11 am: The Office of the United States Trade Representative

• 2 pm: Department of Homeland Security: CISA, TSA, U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Secret Service, and FEMA

• 4 pm: United States Forest Service with Chief Tom Schultz

Friday, April 17 - Historical Record High of 95°F (2002)

The heat wave will break in D.C. as this blob of hot air pushes back out over the Atlantic. As is true every day now, most of the rest of the world is gripped by brutal heat and faced with fossil-fueled disaster.

At 8 am, House Appropriations is holding a joint subcommittee meeting to mark up both the Fiscal Year 2027 Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies Bill and the Fiscal Year 2027 Financial Services and General Government Bill. The latter covers the Department of Treasury, the Executive Office of the President, the Judiciary, and dozens of agencies and institutions gutted, crippled, or eliminated by DOGE, including the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Merit Systems Protection Board, the Office of Government Ethics, and the Office of Inspector General, as well as 700,000 residents of the District of Columbia.

A replica of the January 6, 2021 plaque displayed in protest against Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La., no relation) refusal to install it, January 5, 2026. Credit: Drew Murray.

Last week, the war-criminal Trump regime took another major step to render Congress irrelevant by asserting the “emergency” power to pay Department of Homeland Security employees with moneys not appropriated by Congress for that purpose. This illegal directive is in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution and multiple statutes, including the Purpose Statute, the Antideficiency Act, and the Impoundment Control Act.

If this action stands, Trump will have yet again seized for his own use the House of Representatives’ power over the purse, described by the founding fathers as the “most compleat and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people.”

The March 27th executive memorandum, which called for TSA employees to be paid with “funds that have a reasonable and logical nexus to TSA operations,” and an April 3rd memo which similarly directed the Secretary of Homeland Security to “use funds that have a reasonable and logical nexus to the functions of DHS” to pay “each and every employee of DHS” despite the lapse in appropriations for the department that began February 14th, were signed by President Donald Trump and almost certainly authored by his vizier Russ Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.

This “nexus” argument is bunk.¹ As Georgetown administrative law scholar David A. Super wrote on April 5th:

The only funds that have such a “reasonable and logical nexus” to pay for DHS employees are funds appropriated by Congress to pay for DHS employees.

Because of Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La., no relation) refusal² to pass the Senate’s bipartisan appropriations deal to fund all of DHS except for ICE and part of the Border Patrol, those funds still don’t exist.³

“As best I can tell,” legal scholar Zachary Price noted on March 31 in the Yale Journal on Regulation, “paying TSA would be unlawful.”⁴

And yet, the stolen money has started flowing.

If Acting Under Secretary of Homeland Security for Management Benjamine Huffman and Senior Officer Performing the Duties of the Chief Financial Officer Holly C. Mehringer were smart, they would have filed for an advance decision from the U.S. Comptroller General on the legality of complying with these memoranda.

“I assume anyone taking these actions either is unaware of the state of the law,” Professor Super tells Hill Heat, “or is trusting that they will be covered by an omnibus pardon when President Trump leaves office.”

If their bet is wrong, they'll be going to jail.

We’ll leave Professor Super with the final word:

Thanks for subscribing and spreading the word. If you’ve got job listings, event listings, or other hot news, I want to hear it. Connect with me—@climatebrad.hillheat.com on BlueSky, @climatebrad@mastodon.social, and @climatebrad on Threads.

P.S. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin is the breakfast keynote speaker at the first day of the Heartland Institute’s 16th Annual Climate Denial Conference at Hotel Washington this morning.

PRESENTED BY THE BLOOD-RED SKIES OF SHARK BAY

The official peak bloom of the cherry blossoms in the nation’s capital was Thursday, March 26, two weeks before the pre-Anthropocene norm. The price of Brent crude peaked at $108.

In the early hours of Friday, March 27th, Senate Republicans finally accepted the Democratic offer to fully fund almost all of the Department of Homeland Security, with a carve-out for ICE and CBP enforcement operations, which have about $100 billion in ongoing funding from last year’s One Big Brutal Bill Act. This was a political win for the Democratic caucus, in that they offered this deal at the beginning of the month and then stuck to it, but not a win for the American people, as ICE’s kidnap-and-murder squads remain unchecked.¹  

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La., no relation) claimed there was no way he would ever accept the deal. Temperatures hit 113° in Mexico. The skies of Shark Bay turned blood red. Oil surged to $115.

Saturday, March 28, was the third No Kings Day. In Washington, D.C., thousands marched across bridges towards the National Mall from both the southwest (Arlington National Cemetery) and the southeast (Anacostia). I joined the crowd marching past American Petroleum Institute propaganda and the military-compound residence of Stephen Miller, “the architect of Renee Good and Alex Pretti’s deaths.” Cyclone Narelle struck Australia for the fourth time.

No Kings march past petrostate propaganda, Washington, D.C. Credit: Hill Heat

On Palm Sunday, March 29, Pope Leo XIV castigated the U.S.-Israel’s Christianist-Zionist “preëmptive” war on Iran and Lebanon, preaching:

Monday, March 30: American Petroleum Institute and Trump DOJ lawyers argued that Vermont’s Climate Superfund law should be struck down. “Imagine an Iran that, instead of spending their wealth, billions of dollars, supporting terrorists or weapons, had spent that money helping the people of Iran,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said without irony. “You’d have a much different country.”

On Tuesday, March 31, the Trump regime gave Gulf of Mexico oil drillers the green light to drive the last 50 Rice’s whales to extinction. Oil hit $119.

Now it’s April first. Johnson (no relation) folded and ended his five-day pout about the Senate DHS deal. As expected, Republicans will go it alone with One Big Brutal Bill Two: Electric Bugaloo to protect Trump’s ICE-CBP murder squads from limits or oversight. Oh, and this happened:

April Fuels!

Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-N.Y.) has proposed a delay to the state’s landmark 2019 climate law. Stop her attack.

The fossil fuel-driven climate emergency is blowing up home insurance.

At least 23 American climate scientists have decamped to Norway.

“Trump’s stumped, hoist by his own petard, stuck between a rock and a hard place, and up the creek without a paddle. The creek in question is, of course, the strait of Hormuz.”

Somebody is coming out ahead on Op. Epic Fury: U.S. LNG exports have reached record highs.

The NCAR demolition continues: PIOMAS Arctic Sea Ice Volume Reanalysis has been terminated.

Michael E. Mann is in Cambridge tomorrow, April 2, to talk about Science Under Siege.

Thea Riofrancos is in Philly tomorrow, April 2 to talk Extraction, and she’s joining a murderer’s row of climate authors—Alyssa Battistoni, Billy Fleming, Tao Leigh Goffe, and Julian Hattem—in Baltimore on April 4th:

More than 20,000 troops have spent the past year occupying the United States as an active war zone. Funny how no elected officials or major news outlets seem to have noticed. So now I’m a paid subscriber to The Border Chronicle, since they and The War Horse have published the only investigation of the Joint Task Force-Southern Border obscenity (other than yours truly).

Save my beer.

PRESENTED BY HYPER-ROTKEHLCHEN

Before the cherry blossoms, only good things!

Tonight at 7 pm, join Jane Fonda, yes actually, to phonebank for the climate candidates running for Phoenix’s utility board; early voting has already begun for the April 7th Salt River Project Board election.

Congratulations, America! The Data Center Working Group has released the Data Center Site Fight Guide, an epic resource for any community interested in stemming the scourge of hyperscalers.¹

Congratulations, America! Dominion Energy’s $11.5 billion wind farm off Virginia Beach‘s coast delivered its first power to the grid on Monday.

The cherries are in peak bloom in Washington, D.C., weeks before their pre-Anthropocene peak. Credit: Brad Johnson

Condolences, America! A mega-report from Grist, led by Jake Bittle, lays out how climate pollution is fueling surging insurance premiums across the nation. Even before Trump’s tariffs and oil-war shocks, climate pollution has been sending the price of food soaring. Tomorrow at 10 am, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) is leading a spotlight forum on how climate polluters are driving up household costs through rising climate destruction.

Condolences, America! Trump gave the French a billion dollars to kill two offshore wind farms, in return for nothing. TotalEnergies “promised” to “invest” in oil and gas projects it was already committed to, such as the Rio Grande LNG terminal it partially owns. Despite the complete lack of confirmed changes in ownership stakes or equity commitments, the energy press has reported Trump’s bribe as “reallocated funds” to fossil-fuel projects “in exchange.” There was no exchange! The money is gone to chez Patrick Pouyanné, and we’re not even getting any new gaz naturel liquéfié bomb trains for it. C’est dommage.

Condolences, America! FEMA’s teleporting race-war voter-fraud QAnon conspiracy theorist Gregg Phillips was dropped from the witnesses at today’s DHS hearing, replaced by Trump’s FEMA PR flack Victoria Barton.

They're removing the R from Sprite to modernize the brand

— weeder (@weeder.bsky.social)
5:18 PM • Mar 24, 2026

EHRMAGERD, JERBS!

The Clean Energy Transition Institute is seeking a new executive director ($155K-$175K, Seattle) to continue the strong work of its founding ED, Eileen Quigley.

Public Citizen’s Climate Program is working to open a new front in the fight to hold Big Oil accountable for its role in the climate crisis: criminal prosecution. The program is looking for a legal director ($170K-$180K, D.C.) and senior legal strategist ($109K-$160K) to build the foundation for climate criminal prosecutions.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is hiring an energy and environment legislative assistant ($75K, D.C.).

The Association to Preserve Cape Cod is hiring a campaign manager to oversee the its new The Cape We Shape campaign ($62K-$70K, Dennis, Mass.).

Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ) is hiring a worker organizer ($100K, Seattle), to be filled by June 2026.

Hearings on the Hill:

• 9:30 AM: Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee
  The State of the Bulk Power System

• 10 AM: House Homeland Security Committee
  Impacts of the DHS Funding Lapse

• 10 AM: House Appropriations Committee
     Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Subcommittee
  Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies – Member Day

• 10 AM: House Appropriations Committee
     Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee
  Oversight Hearing - U.S. Office of Personnel Management

• 10 AM: House Appropriations Committee
     Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Subcommittee
  Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies – Member Day

• 10 AM: Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee
  Markup of Regional Ocean Partnerships Reauthorization and other bills

• 10:15 AM: House Natural Resources Committee
     Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee
  Fast-Tracking Mining and Renewable Projects, Coal Mining Subsidies, and Fracking Carlsbad

• 11 AM: House Appropriations Committee
     Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Subcommittee
  Oversight Hearing – National Weather Service

• 2 PM: House Natural Resources Committee
     Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee
  Mining and Supply Chains

Climate Action Today:

• 7 PM: Jane Fonda Climate PAC
  Lead Locally
  Make Calls for Salt River Project Climate Champs

Thanks for subscribing and spreading the word. If you’ve got job listings, event listings, or other hot news, I want to hear it. Connect with me—@climatebrad@mastodon.social, @climatebrad on Threads, and @climatebrad.hillheat.com on BlueSky.

At 7 pm on Wednesday, Jane Fonda is rallying climate hawks to make calls for the clean-energy slate for Phoenix, Ariz.’s publicly owned utility, the Salt River Project Board. Early voting has begun for this April 7th race, with the climate candidates—Sandra Kennedy and current board members Randy Miller, Casey Clowes, Krista O’Brien and Kathy Mohr-Almeida—running against a fossil-fuel team backed by Turning Point USA and the data-center industry. In a deeply anti-democratic throwback, only property owners are allowed to vote.

Wednesday’s phonebank for Salt River Project Climate Champs is supported by the Jane Fonda Climate PAC, Lead Locally, Third Act’s Gray PAC, and the DNC Council on the Environment and Climate Crisis.

Then-Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), in Phoenix for the Turning Point AmericaFest, November 2024. Electricity provided by the Salt River Project. Credit: Greg Skidmore

Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), an oil-backed climate denier who profited from inside knowledge of Trump’s plans to attack Venezuela, is now the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, thanks to the support of Senate Republicans, Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), and Energy and Natural Resources ranking member Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.).

Heinrich has also backed climate denier Marco Rubio for State, climate denier Chris Wright for Energy, climate denier Doug Burgum for Interior, climate denier Jared Isaacman for NASA, and other fossil-fuel functionaries such as Kyle Haustveit and Leslie Beyer.

“I consider Markwayne Mullin a friend,” Heinrich explained. Heinrich’s state is home to three ICE concentration camps—the Otero County Processing Center, and CoreCivic’s Torrance County Detention Facility and Cibola County Detention Center.

The Senate is looking to end the DHS funding showdown this week, with a bipartisan deal in the offing to fund all of DHS except for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ICE-ERO). The all-but-agreed-upon bipartisan plan includes funding for U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations (ICE-HSI). The deal does not include an end to masked secret police or the concentration camps or any clawback of the One Big Brutal Bill Act’s ICE-CBP slush funds. Senate Republicans are trying to explain to the White House and House Republicans why they’re not eliminating mail-in-voting, while Senate Democrats are deciding which ten or so will have to vote for the deal so the rest can participate in a No Kings rally on March 28th.

Oklahoma fossil-fuel executive Alan Armstrong, chairman and former CEO of the fracked-gas pipeline giant Williams Companies, has been appointed U.S. Senator to replace Markwayne Mullin and is being sworn in today, maintaining the seat’s alliteration. Williams stock has tripled in the last five years on the boom in LNG exports and the fracking-powered AI data-center bubble, which Hill Heat has previously discussed.

Climate Hearings

Tuesday, March 24

At 4 pm, the House Rules Committee sets up the floor debate rules for several bills, including , a vehicle for funding the Department of Homeland Security (H.R. 8029) and a bill to establish a federal “parks” commission to further strip Washington D.C. of home rule (H.R. 5103).

Wednesday, March 25

At 9:30 am, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee looks at the state of the bulk power system, the backbone of the electric grid, with electric power supply lobbyist Todd Snitchler, climate denier Travis Fisher, and Liza Reed, an electric policy expert at the “abundance”-aligned center-right Niskanen Center. Fisher was the temporary Department of Energy appointee brought on to manage the failed climate-denial report that was abandoned as a justification for the Trump administration’s revocation of the greenhouse pollution endangerment finding.

At 10 am, the House Homeland Security Committee looks at the impacts of the DHS funding lapse on the department’s agencies other than ICE and CBP. The witnesses are U.S. Coast Guard vice commandant Thomas Allan, the acting Transportation Security Administration head Ha Nguyen McNeill, the acting Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency head Nicholas Andersen, and Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Office of Response and Recovery Associate Administrator Gregg Phillips, the QAnon conspiracy theorist, race war advocate, and self-proclaimed teleporter.

At the same time, the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee marks up several bills, including reauthorization of NOAA’s Regional Ocean Partnerships.

House Natural Resources Committee subcommittees are holding a pair of hearings on speeding up domestic mining. At 10:15 am, the Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee hears witnesses on bills for fast-tracking mining and renewable projects, coal-mining subsidies, and fracking Carlsbad, N.M. Bureau of Land Management mining official Mitchell Leverette will testify, as will climate advocates Adam Met and Dr. Barbara Vasquez and some fossil-fuel lobbyists.

Then at 2 pm, the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee holds a hearing on domestic mining for non-fuel “critical” minerals with mining advocates and the Project of Government Oversight’s Faith Williams.

The United States now considers 60 minerals to be “critical” and thus deserving of fast-track approval; in November, boron, copper, lead, metallurgical coal, phosphate, potash, rhenium, silicon, silver, and uranium were added to the official U.S.G.S. list. In February, the Trump White House announced “Project Vault” to spend billions to build a government stockpile of these minerals.

Thursday, March 26

At 10 am, the House Natural Resources Water, Wildlife and Fisheries Subcommittee hears testimony on four bills, including one to support Alaska native ivory handicrafts and traditional hunting, from NOAA Deputy Administrator Tim Petty and state and tribal officials. Virginia Tech’s Kevin McGuire will testify on a poorly written bill (H.R. 7889) that would insert “the growing artificial industry” specifically as a matter of interest in researching how to reclaim waste water.

Then at 2 pm, the committee’s Federal Lands Subcommittee will hear testimony on a different quartet of bills. One (H.R. 6778) would authorize speed cameras in the National Park System to raise fees for parkway maintenance, which could inadvertently help automate ICE deportations on the parkways. A much worse bill (H.R. 7951) would double the maximum length of “Good Neighbor Authority” deals for private logging on federal lands to twenty years. And H.R. 7979 would establish that roads and trails on federal land are presumed to be open to motorized use unless explicitly restricted.

Also at 2 pm, the House Homeland Security Committee will hold a hearing on security in the rapidly melting Arctic with melting-Arctic wargamers Bryan Clark, Heather Conley, and Marisol Maddox.

Friday, March 27

At 11 am, a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee holds a hearing on Latin America After the fall of Maduro with State official Michael Kozak, a diplomat whose career began in the 1970s.

Appropriations Hearings

Even though the FY26 appropriations are still being negotiated, appropriations season has begun for fiscal year 2027. The work begins with oversight hearings with agency and department heads and member days for members of Congress to submit earmark requests.

Wednesday’s oversight hearings include, at 10 am, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s Scott Kupor, a primary agent of the Russ Vought-DOGE devastation of the civil service; and at 11 am, the National Weather Service’s Taylor Jordan. Jordan is a Republican Congressional staffer and corporate lobbyist whose clients have included artificial intelligence, weather and satellite companies. He composes ambient music under the name "The Greatest Hoax."

On Thursday, Appropriations will hold an oversight hearing on the Government Accountability Office’s Assessment of the Federal Buildings Fund with GAO official David Morroni. The Trump regime has pushed hard to sell off huge swathes of federal real estate. Though the most extreme DOGE assault was stalled, plans have been moving forward quietly.

Wednesday’s member days include Transportation, Housing and Urban Development and Energy and Water Development. The deadline for members to submit energy and water development earmark requests has passed, but Transportation-HUD community project funding requests—such as those for public transit infrastructure—can be submitted by members of Congress through Friday.

Thursday’s member days are for Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies earmarks in the morning and Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies earmarks in the afternoon.

PRESENTED BY SUBSCRIBERS LIKE YOU

“Teleporting is no fun.” — Gregg Phillips, FEMA Associate Administrator of the Office of Response and Recovery

Hill Heat will investigate this claim, but first, here are some D.C. cherry blossoms:

Cherry blossoms in Malcolm X Park, March 23, 2026. Credit: Brad Johnson

In 2004, Florida Emergency Management Administrator Craig Fugate noted that the true indicator of the severity of a climate disaster in the southeastern United States was the condition of the reliably 24-7 Waffle House regional chain:

Fugate, an emergency administrator since 1987, later served as the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency for both terms of Barack Obama’s presidency, overseeing the reorganization of the post-Katrina FEMA to establish the Office of Response and Recovery in 2009, and managing the federal response to climate disasters such as Superstorm Sandy, Hurricane Matthew, and the 2016 Louisiana floods.

Long Beach, Miss. in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, September 4, 2005. Credit: WyldKiss

It’s now 2026, and our spring is hitting the fracked gas, with scorching heat baking the west, melting all the snow, and towering fossil-fueled floods scouring everywhere from Hawaii to Washington state. Deadly floods have hit Colombia and Malawi while Brazil sizzles. And the Federal Emergency Management Agency is on life support.

As Trump turns everything to fossil farce, his regime has been seeking to eliminate FEMA while installing cartoonish characters to run the critical agency. One year in, we’re on our fourth acting administrator.²  

And the official in charge of FEMA’s disaster response since December is the aforementioned teleporter Gregg Phillips, whose claim to fame before Trump installed him at FEMA was being a Trumpist election-denier conspiracy theorist who was stupid and violent even by the standards of Trumpist election-denier conspiracy theorists.

Andrew Kaczynski unearthed a January 2025 podcast in which Phillips described his violent hatred of President Joe Biden and his claimed teleportation to a Waffle House in a manner that seems more than a bit like a blackout episode:

Phillips also reported “teleporting” into a ditch while he was driving.

More importantly, Phillips is a foaming racist and bigot, who has tried to spark a race war against immigrants for years.

To conclude, Phillips is wrong that teleporting is no fun. Teleporting is a lot of fun! 

Being Gregg Phillips is no fun.

Phillips will testify before the House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday morning.

Speaking of foaming bigots in charge of FEMA, former MMA fighter Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) is about to be confirmed by the Senate to be the next Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, after a bit of kayfabe with Homeland Security chair Rand Paul (R-Ky.) at his confirmation hearing last week. Hoo boy: “Paul airs beef with Mullin!” “Paul eviscerates Markwayne!” “Mullin hearing went off the rails!”

It sure seemed like Mullin was on the ropes! But then at the committee vote two days later, Mullin was able to tap back in with a vote from John Fetterman (D-Pa.). What a surprise victory for Markwayne!

Really, it wasn’t.

If Paul sincerely opposed Mullin, he had all the power as committee chair to slow-walk the nomination. Instead, he put Mullin on the fast track to confirmation.

In more Senate kayfabe, the inevitable conclusion of the DHS “shutdown” farce is near. After Democrats struck the deal to cleave DHS funding from the guns-and-butter minibus in January, the incentive for the Trump regime and its Congressional lackeys to rein in ICE disappeared. There will be more feints and political stunts, but unless Trump’s goon squad guns down more Americans in broad daylight (always possible), there will be a bipartisan deal to fund the non-ICE/CBP elements of DHS and a GOP-only extension of the One Big Brutal Bill tab for the ICE gang.

It should be slightly more browned and each hole filled w syrup and butter

— Sally Jenkins (@sallyjenx.bsky.social)
4:39 PM • Mar 22, 2026

Thanks for subscribing and spreading the word. If you’ve got job listings, event listings, or other hot news, I want to hear it. Connect with me—@climatebrad@mastodon.social, @climatebrad on Threads, and @climatebrad.hillheat.com on BlueSky.

PRESENTED BY CHIFFCHAFFING

NCAR at sunrise, 2005. Credit: Jon Hurd

The universities that oversee NCAR are finally fighting back against Trump’s retaliatory disintegration of the Boulder, Colo.-based climate research institute.

In a lawsuit filed Monday, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) accused the Trump White House of using the National Science Foundation (NSF) as part of a broader campaign to inflict “unlawful retaliation” against the Colorado state government.

The suit cites the ongoing case Colorado v. Trump, over the Trump administration’s blockage of SNAP food benefits for the state. The judge in that case agreed the Trump regime’s administrative actions against Colorado are tied to Trump’s petulant efforts to overturn Colorado’s conviction of county clerk Tina Peters, who conspired to overturn the 2020 election.

The lawsuit, filed by the boutique California litigation firm Hueston Hennigan on behalf of UCAR, notes a “cascading series of retaliatory measures” against UCAR and NCAR, including “gag orders”:

The defendants named for their “series of ongoing unconstitutional, arbitrary, and capricious actions” are the National Science Foundation, acting NSF director Brian Stone, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA director Neil Jacobs, the White House Office of Management and Budget, and OMB director Russ Vought.

The House Natural Resources’ Federal Lands subcommittee heard testimony on a suite of bills this morning, including a proposal to expand Mammoth Cave National Park (H.R. 3286). The subcommittee chair, Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wisc.), doesn’t want to pay the Nature Conservancy for the Mammoth Cave land. Although it was not the subject of any testimony, another bill attached to the hearing would enlarge the Customs and Border Patrol training complex in Harpers Ferry (H.R. 6062).

CBP’s tin-soldier martinet Greg Bovino has been deposed in the wake of his deadly Minnesota siege. His core crew of lawless, violent, masked CBP-Gestapo agents remains. A joint investigation by Evident Media, Bellingcat, and CalMatters looks at Bovino’s agents of chaos: Timothy Donahue, Georgy Simeon, Kristopher Hewson (C-29), Michael Sveum (EZ-2), and Edgar Vazquez (EZ-17). All have been subjects of earlier reporting, but it’s stunning to see it put together:

Speaking of which, it turns out that Homeland Security chair Rand Paul (R-Ky.) doesn’t agree with Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.)—Trump’s nominee to replace the deposed Kristi Noem as DHS Secretary—that the violent caning of abolitionist Sen. Charles Sumner was a good idea. Maybe this nomination isn’t getting fast-tracked after all.

MARKWAYNE MULLIN: Dueling with two consenting adults is still there

RAND PAUL: It's been illegal for 170 years! There's no precedent for legal dueling

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com)
2:10 PM • Mar 18, 2026

The State Department no longer has any oil and gas experts, having fired them last July as part of the DOGE reduction-in-force chainsaw.

The New York Times is on a real climate-denier kick lately, airing climate activist Rebecca Solnit’s podcast interview with propaganda ads from the American Petroleum Institute, bending over backwards to avoid explaining that climate pollution is responsible for our increasingly extreme weather, and printing the gobsmacking “It’s not clear how climate change will affect Colorado yet.” I’m guessing A.G. has installed a new climate-denier editor from an outlet like Politico or the Daily Caller to screw up the work of their climate team. If you happen to know, my DMs are open.

The Illinois primaries are over, after an absolute onslaught of AIPAC-AI PAC money. In a race marked by corporate overspending and bad blood between Gov. J.B. Pritzker and the Congressional Black Caucus, Lt. Gov. Julianna Stratton won the Senate primary to succeed Senate whip Dick Durbin. In the House primaries, candidates supported by the Sunrise Movement lost all of their bids, though they did succeed in forcing billionaires to burn tremendous piles of cash. AIPAC-backed Donna Miller overcame AI PAC-backed Jesse Jackson Jr. and Sunrise-endorsed Robert Peters in the 2nd; AIPAC/AI PAC-backed Melissa Bean beat Sunrise-backed Junaid Ahmed in the 8th; and Evanston mayor Daniel Biss defeated Sunrise-endorsed Kat Abugazaleh and AIPAC candidate Laura Fine in the 9th.

Hearings on the Hill:

• 9 AM: House Appropriations Committee
     Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Subcommittee
  American Indian and Alaska Native Public Witness Hearing Day 2, Morning Session

• 9:30 AM: Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee
  Nomination of Markwayne Mullin to be Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security

• 10 AM: House Natural Resources Committee
     Federal Lands Subcommittee
  Testimony on Bills to Enlarge Mammoth Cave National Park, to Enlarge the Harpers Ferry CBP Training Facility, and other bills

• 10 AM: Senate Environment and Public Works Committee
     Fisheries, Water, and Wildlife Subcommittee
  Challenges and Opportunities with Implementing the Endangered Species Act

• 1 PM: House Appropriations Committee
     Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Subcommittee
  American Indian and Alaska Native Public Witness Hearing Day 2, Afternoon Session

Thanks for subscribing and spreading the word. If you’ve got job listings, event listings, or other hot news, I want to hear it. Connect with me—@climatebrad@mastodon.social, @climatebrad on Threads, and @climatebrad.hillheat.com on BlueSky.

It’s election day in Illinois. Don’t forget to vote.

This Week’s Top Climate Hearings

Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) at the Charlie Kirk memorial, Sep. 28, 2025. Credit: Gage Skidmore

This week, Senate Homeland Security chair Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is fast-tracking confirmation of plumbing executive and oil-soaked climate denier Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, with a confirmation hearing on Wednesday and a committee vote on Thursday.

The department remains without budget authority; while the Trump regime has established an illegal carveout to keep paying ICE and CBP agents from the One Big Brutal Bill Act slush fund, employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other DHS divisions are furloughed or working without pay. The shuttering of normal FEMA operations is suboptimal, as fossil-fueled weather is running amok, with “a blizzard burying the upper Midwest, wildfires spreading across the Plains, dangerous flooding in Hawaii and triple-digit temperatures in the Southwest.”

Extreme weather in Tennessee, Monday, March 16, 2026.

The climate deniers Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.), Chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and Rep. Bob Latta (R-Ohio), Chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy, have organized a hearing for Tuesday morning at 10 am on increasing climate disasters and fossil-fuel and renewable electricity generation. Their argument is that rising extreme weather necessitates an energy grid powered by fossil fuels, which might make sense if fossil-fuel pollution wasn’t responsible for the rising extreme weather.

Democratic climate hawks are responding with a roundtable Tuesday afternoon at 3:15 pm on the skyrocketing energy costs due to Trump regime policies aligned with Big Oil interests. Organized by Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), the roundtable will include Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), and Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.), as well as Robert Reich, the Sierra Club’s Greg Wannier, GRID Alternatives tribal programs director Talia Martin, Arcadia Center’s Anna Poplavska, and former Arkansas Public Service Commission chair Ted Thomas:

House appropriators are hearing two full days of testimony of representatives of American Indian and Alaska Native tribes and tribal organizations starting at 9 am on Tuesday. There are 24 witnesses scheduled on Tuesday morning, 14 more in the afternoon (including seven Indian Health board witnesses), 21 witnesses on Wednesday morning, and 21 more in the afternoon. The wide range of testimony includes the Enbridge Line 3 tar-sands pipeline in northern Minnesota, Columbia River fisheries, opposition to the uranium mine being fast-tracked in Mt. Taylor, N.M., the Central Arizona Project water management, relocating coastal villages inundated by sea level rise, the General Motors Superfund site in Massena, N.Y., buffalo herds, and the tribal timber industry.

More Climate Hearings of Interest, In Brief

Tuesday, March 17

• 10 AM: House Judiciary Committee
     the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust Subcommittee
  Regulation and Competition in Maritime Shipping

• 10 AM: House Ways and Means Committee
     Trade Subcommittee
  The World Trade Organization’s 14th Ministerial Conference

• 10 AM: Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee
     Water and Power Subcommittee
  U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and FERC Testimony on Water and Power Legislation
  David Palumbo, Deputy Commissioner of Operations, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and Terry Turpin, Director, Office of Energy Projects, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, testify.

• 2 PM: House Foreign Affairs Committee
     Oversight and Intelligence Subcommittee
  Foreign Assistance Inspectors General
  The USAID Inspector General will argue to keep his office open.

Wednesday, March 18

• 10 AM: House Natural Resources Committee
     Federal Lands Subcommittee
  Testimony on Bills to Enlarge Mammoth Cave National Park, to Enlarge the Harpers Ferry CBP Training Facility, and other bills

• 10 AM: Senate Environment and Public Works Committee
     Fisheries, Water, and Wildlife Subcommittee
  Challenges and Opportunities with Implementing the Endangered Species Act
  Defenders of Wildlife vice president Jake Li testifies against corporate lobbyist Thomas E. Riley and the industry-backed climate-denial think tank Property and Environment Research Center’s Brian Yablonski.

Thursday, March 19

• 9:30 AM: Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee
  The Department of Energy’s Implementation of President Trump's May 2025 Nuclear Energy Executive Orders
  Theodore J. Garrish, Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy, U.S. Department of Energy, Dr. John C. Wagner, Director, Idaho National Laboratory, and Dr. Mike Laufer, Co-founder and CEO, Kairos Power, testify.

Write back and let us know if you prefer this shorter format for our weekly preview of climate hearings, or prefer our usual deeper dive.

Friday the 13th is the deadline to reply to National Science Foundation’s announced breakup of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, founded 66 years ago to lead American atmospheric science. In December, Trump vizier Russ Vought declared NCAR would be executed for “climate alarmism.” A month later, NSF published a “Dear Colleague Letter” requesting advice on how to sell off NCAR for parts.

A whistleblower to Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.) has recently exposed that Vought’s OMB made a secret deal in January, before the NSF letter even went out, with a private company to take over NCAR’s space weather program. That company is presumably Lynker, who launched its space-weather division in August 2024 under former NCAR deputy director Scott McIntosh, although its CEO is publicly denying that.¹

It is a safe bet that state universities in Republican, fossil-fueled climate-denial strongholds are also part of the secret deals. The University of Wyoming is presumptively taking control of NCAR’s supercomputer, and the University of Oklahoma is taking over NCAR’s weather-forecasting and education capacities.

Nevertheless, I present my letter to NSF, submitted using the American Geophysical Union’s letter-submission tool. You should too!²

NCAR in silhouette, 2015. Credit: im me

To: NSF_NCAR@nsf.gov

Subject: Response to DCL – NCAR Restructuring and National Research Continuity

This submission responds to the February 2026 Dear Colleague Letter regarding the proposed restructuring of the gold-standard National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

1. NCAR’s Integrated Mission

NCAR’s numerical modeling systems (e.g., UFS, CESM, WRF), the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC), observational testbeds, and research aircraft form a tightly integrated, world-class research and operational capability. These components are interdependent: supercomputing enables large‑ensemble forecasting and model development; community models provide the physics and assimilation frameworks used by NOAA and NASA; airborne platforms provide the targeted data that improve model performance. Disaggregation of these functions would sever critical links between research, forecasting, and operational use and threaten the United States’ status as the gold standard for scientific knowledge in service of the betterment of life on Earth.

2. Existing Statutory and Interagency Dependencies

Under the National Science Foundation Act (42 U.S.C. 16), NSF funds and oversees fundamental science and national research infrastructure, including federally funded research and development centers such as NCAR. NCAR’s structure meets this mandate by enabling sustained, coherent research across atmospheric, climate, and space sciences.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s statutory responsibilities for weather research, forecasting improvements, and hazard prediction—which Congress seeks to expand in the Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Reauthorization Act of 2026—rely on community modeling, high‑performance computation, and research testbeds that NCAR currently provides.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) mandates presuppose resources and coordination that are uniquely provided by NCAR. The 2018 Earth Science Decadal Survey consensus report, Thriving on Our Changing Planet, stresses the need for integrated observation, modeling, and data assimilation across agencies to address weather, climate, and environmental challenges. The 2024 Heliophysics Decadal Survey similarly identifies space weather modeling as a national research priority supported by coordinated infrastructure investments. 

The Department of Energy (DOE) collaborates with NCAR on high-performance computing (HPC) development for coupled climate and atmospheric systems, including research on decarbonization impacts and advanced climate simulation frameworks.

The Department of Defense (DoD) depends on NCAR’s modeling and forecasting capabilities for atmospheric simulations and forecasts relevant to operational planning, flight environments, and space weather effects that impact defense systems.

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and other DOI science offices rely on NCAR’s integration of hydrology, atmospheric chemistry, and hazard prediction models for land‑water‑climate system assessments.

These and many other cross‑agency dependencies mean that dismantling or reassigning NCAR functions poses national security risks, jeopardizes public welfare, and threatens economic resilience by degrading federally mandated research, forecasting, and hazard prediction systems.

3. Bipartisan Political Opposition and Legal Concerns

A broad bipartisan coalition of 76 members of Congress, including Representatives Neguse and Hurd and Senators Bennet and Hickenlooper, has publicly mobilized to protect NCAR’s ongoing funding and core capabilities, describing NSF’s proposals to dismantle it as illegal and indefensible and inconsistent with statutory intent. This political opposition reflects both the legal exposure of actions contravening Congressional intent and the national-security and public-safety implications of undermining a world‑class research institution.

Last week, the Senate Commerce, Science, and Technology Committee, whose members include Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming and John Hickenlooper of Colorado, reported favorably the aforementioned Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Reauthorization Act (S. 3923) with a provision forbidding any action to “restructure, divest, or transfer” NCAR activities and infrastructure for at least 60 days, another clear indication of Congressional intent.

4. Climate Change Cannot Be Wished Away 

Implicit in the restructuring rationale is an attempt to narrow NCAR’s role to “seasonal weather prediction, severe storms, and space weather” while excluding climate observation and research. The underlying premise is fundamentally flawed and dangerous. Man-made climate change is a fact. It is a legally recognized threat in long‑term hazard planning, infrastructure investment, and national security assessments; it is codified in federal strategies including the Quadrennial Climate Review, Decadal Strategies, and national climate assessments. Removing or diminishing NCAR’s integrated climate observation and modeling capacity risks catastrophic policy decisions on sea level rise, drought, wildfires, extreme heat, and other phenomena of our climate system.

5. Other Concerns

NCAR operates under a cooperative agreement with NSF, managed by UCAR, most recently renewed for a five-year term in 2023. Abrupt divestiture or fragmentation of facilities (NWSC, aircraft, modeling programs) would violate contractual commitments, including obligations to maintain research integrity, access, and continuity for federally funded programs.

Geoscience research priorities including AI-driven workflow integration, data assimilation, and automated modeling (Gil et al., CACM 2019) depend on access to NCAR’s unique observational, modeling, and computing infrastructure. Dissolution or fragmentation of NCAR would directly impede NSF’s ability to execute this forward-looking scientific agenda.

6. Recommendations

To fulfill statutory obligations and national research priorities, NSF should affirm the continuity of NCAR’s integrated mission under UCAR stewardship, preserving NWSC, modeling systems, and observational platforms as a cohesive infrastructure.

Any restructuring within NCAR must explicitly safeguard continued interagency access, particularly for NOAA and NASA operational and research functions, and align with legislative intent as expressed by Congress in appropriations and reauthorization statutes.

Before taking any further action, NSF must provide a clear and comprehensive justification that proposed changes do not contravene existing statutory directives, cooperative agreements, contractual obligations, interagency dependencies, or obligations to states and localities.

7. Conclusion

The scientific and operational harms to the national interest caused by disintegrating NCAR outweighs any administrative edict for fragmenting its assets. Continuation of NCAR as a coherent entity under UCAR is essential for NSF to fulfill its statutory mission of supporting national research infrastructure, and is the best path forward to maintain a gold standard for American science.

With all due respect,

Brad Johnson

Editor, Hill Heat

Thanks for subscribing and spreading the word. If you’ve got job listings, event listings, or other hot news, I want to hear it. Connect with me—@climatebrad@mastodon.social, @climatebrad on Threads, and @climatebrad.hillheat.com on BlueSky.

PRESENTED BY RESERVOIR DUCKS

Seventy years ago this Sunday, on March 8, 1956, scientist Roger Revelle testified before the U.S. House Committee on Appropriations that humanity was conducting “the greatest geophysical experiment in history” by “burning, as you know, quite a bit of coal and oil and natural gas” and “producing tremendous quantities of carbon dioxide in the air” which may “cause a remarkable change in climate.”

In 1958, U.S. scientists organized the University Committee on Atmospheric Research and called for the formation of a national atmospheric research institute. The National Science Foundation immediately began developing plans, and in 1960 Dr. Walter Orr Roberts was announced as the founding Director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). Sixty years ago, in September 1966, NCAR moved into its permanent headquarters in Boulder, Colo., the I.M. Pei-designed Mesa Laboratory.

The final days are now here for NCAR. The Trump National Science Foundation, following Russ Vought’s directives to kill NCAR’s “climate alarmism,” is illegally dismantling this jewel of civilization right now. They have set a deadline of Friday the 13th to submit comments on their deadly scheme. Many of the world’s top climate scientists, including Max Boykoff and Kevin Trenberth, have warned against the demolition, but they need our help. The American Geophysical Union has established a website to make commenting to NSF a simple matter.

Do it.

In 1958, the U.S. established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration after the Soviet Union was the first nation to launch a weather satellite. In 1984, Congress formally added “knowledge of the Earth” to NASA’s core mission.

Now, climate-denier Musk-fanboy space billionaire Jared Isaacman is overseeing the rapid demolition and privatization of NASA's earth science mission as NASA Administrator, which position he gained with the backing of 16 Democratic senators. On Monday, he affirmed to Science journalist Paul Voosen that his secret plans to eliminate NASA’s earth scientists and privatize its satellites are now his public plans, because how is it “useful to anyone” for “NASA to assemble scientists and put out papers on politically charged issues”?

Did I mention this Moncheechee Yahoo was supported by 16 Democratic senators? I did? Oh, well, nevertheless.

As already featured in Today in Tabs.

A consistent feature of scientific evaluations of the effects of anthropogenic climate change with significant socio-economic implications is the intensification of, and geographic shifts in, the hydrological cycle.

More bluntly, God’s judgment for poisoning the climate oft arrives as biblical flood and drought.

To wit: Kenya floods have killed at least 45 people. The death toll from January’s Mozambique floods has reached 270. Juneau is moving forward on a $25 million buyout of the 18 households on a street regularly overwhelmed by glacial outburst floods. Vermont is on flood watch as summer-like heat threatens rapid melting and ice jams. The Chicago region was hit by flooding rains last night from thunderstorms that spawned tornadoes that killed two people in Indiana, less than a week after different rounds of storms that flooded the Chicago region and spawned tornadoes that killed four people in Michigan and floodwaters that swept two Indiana motorists to their deaths.

Meanwhile: Corpus Christi, Texas is careening towards the other water catastrophe—running completely dry. Corpus Christi is at the center of Cancer Alley, the hyperconcentration of insanely toxic petrochemical and hydrocarbon facilities at the receiving end of the Permian Basin fracking boom. These refineries, plants, and LNG facilities require ungodly amounts of water to run. Even though Texas is running dry from fossil-fueled droughts, Corpus Christi officials welcomed their construction. Now the bill is coming due. This Inside Climate News-Texas Tribune piece by Dylan Baddour is one bone-chilling sentence of corporate catastrophe after another:

I can only say:

More than a decade after Inside Climate News (them again!) broke the story that ExxonMobil (them again!) knew for decades that they were profiting from climate destruction, there has still not been a single criminal case against Big Oil bosses.

Part of the reason is that they’re protected by corrupt politicians like New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who is now trying yet again to dismantle New York’s climate laws.

However, the Empire State is not a pure plutocracy yet.

Last month, New York State Senator Michelle Hinchey (D-Poughkeepsie) and Assembly Member Emily Gallagher (D-Greenpoint) introduced companion bills establishing “the crime of corporate catastrophe” (S9519 and A10210). The purpose of the law is to “to make it a crime to cause a catastrophe when acting as a member, manager, director, or officer of a corporation in furtherance of one's corporate duties or interests.” 

Public Citizen notes there are similar laws on the books in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Maine, Utah, and Missouri. Time to enforce them!

Read Food & Water Watch’s new report, The Urgent Case Against Data Centers. 

Or, if you prefer, hire the Heatmap journalists to help you build more data centers.

LNG giant Cheniere just scored a highly suspicious $370 million pay-day from the IRS. 

The Trump EPA climate rollback may, ironically, give new life to state-level climate laws.

Hearings on the Hill:

• 10 AM: Senate Environment and Public Works Committee
  S.3135, to require the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency to authorize manufacturers of certain vehicles to suspend engine derate or shutdown functions in prolonged cold weather conditions

• 10:30 AM: Senate Foreign Relations Committee
  Vote on Nominations of Wesley Brooks to be Asst. Secy. of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, Billy Long to be Ambassador to Iceland, Robert Sweeney to be U.S. Director of the Asian Development Bank, and others

• 2:30 PM: Senate Indian Affairs Committee
  Examining Federal Policies Governing Indian Water Rights Settlements

Thanks for subscribing and spreading the word. If you’ve got job listings, event listings, or other hot news, I want to hear it. Connect with me—@climatebrad@mastodon.social, @climatebrad on Threads, and @climatebrad.hillheat.com on BlueSky.

Rev. Rodney Sadler, Rep. Rodney Pierce, Patricia Smith, and Veleria Levy, who defeated right-wing Democrats in key North Carolina state house races last week

As Trump sets the Middle East on fire, Congress is quiet. The House is not in session, and the Senate committees have a light schedule. Before we preview this week’s climate hearings, let’s review last week’s climate primary results in the redrawn North Carolina and Texas Congressional districts. First, we have the good, the bad, and the undecided:

• The Good (TX-30): Green New Dealer Frederick Haynes III won the primary to succeed Rep. Jasmine Crockett (who lost the Senate primary to James Talarico).

• The Bad (NC-04): Green New Dealer Nida Allam conceded to the AIPAC-AI PAC incumbent Valerie Foushee after losing by about 1200 votes; Allam was backed by $2 million in outside spending, while Foushee benefited from $2.3 million.

• The Undecided (TX-18): Newly elected Green New Dealer Christian Menefee is headed to a runoff with veteran Rep. Al Green in this new Houston district.

Hill Heat is also monitoring the races which may determine whether Democrats take control of the House, although they don’t involve climate hawks. So it’s undecided whether the result will be good or bad. These include:

• NC-11: DCCC pick Jamie Ager will challenge the vulnerable GOP incumbent Chuck Edwards.

• TX-15: Unofficial DCCC favorite Bobby Pulido will take on vulnerable GOP incumbent Monica De La Cruz.

• TX-33: Former Rep. Colin Allred and Rep. Julie Johnson are going to a runoff in this solidly Democratic district.

And now for a pure shot of good. At the local level, Lead Locally and Climate Cabinet backed several climate hawks for the North Carolina state house who defeated Democrats who vote with Republicans.

Congratulations to Patricia Smith, who defeated the right-wing incumbent in HD-23, Rep. Rodney Pierce, who beat back a right-wing opponent in HD-27, Veleria Levy, who beat the right-wing incumbent in HD-99, and Rev. Rodney Sadler who defeated the corrupt incumbent in HD-106. Levy and Sadler’s opponents cast the key votes to overturn the governor’s veto of a bill that killed Duke Energy’s climate targets.

Climate Cabinet is also supporting several Democratic incumbents who ran unopposed in the primary: Rep. Lindsay Prather (HD-115), who represents a Helene-ravaged district, and state senators Lisa Grafstein (SD-13), Terence Everitt (SD-18), and Woodson Bradley (SD-42).

Mississippi’s primaries are tomorrow, and Illinois’s many competitive races are on March 17th.

There’s not much good in the GOP-controlled Senate this week.

Tuesday, March 10

After a record-hot and dangerously dry winter, much of the nation is in moderate to severe drought, and Trump’s tariff war has hit agricultural producers hard, as export markets have collapsed. At 3 pm, the Senate agriculture committee hosts farm-industry lobbyists to discuss increasing domestic consumption of United States-grown agricultural products. In addition to American Farm Bureau president Zippy Duvall, the soybean, corn, cotton, wheat, and produce lobbies are represented.

Wednesday, March 11

At 10 am, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee holds a hearing on S. 3135, the Cold Weather Diesel Reliability Act, which would require the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency to authorize manufacturers of diesel-powered vehicles to suspend engine derate or shutdown functions in prolonged cold weather conditions. NRDC’s John Walke will be testifying against two Alaska Department of Transportation officials.

Dr. Wesley Brooks testifies at his nomination hearing, February 12, 2026.

The fossil-fueled winter was blazing hot.

December 2025 through February 2026 was the 2nd warmest winter on record for the Contiguous U.S. according to Prism climate data. The widespread record to near record warmth in the west easily outweighed the cool temps in the east. 🔥🔥🔥

— Climatologist49 (@climatologist49.bsky.social)
4:39 PM • Mar 1, 2026

Iran’s catastrophically hot winter continues, even as Trump’s bombs fall.

A corrupt North Dakota judge has affirmed his award of $345 million to the tar-sands giant Energy Transfer against Greenpeace for the Dakota Access protests. Greenpeace will appeal, and has filed a countersuit in Europe against Energy Transfer.

With Tuesday’s primaries in Arkansas, North Carolina, and Texas, Congress has given itself a light work week.

Tuesday, March 3

At 10:15 am, the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee’s Science, Manufacturing, and Competitiveness Subcommittee run by Sen. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) holds a hearing on AI safety, productivity, and health care with AI industry executives and Brookings fellow Mark Muro.

At 5 pm, the House Agriculture Committee marks up H.R. 7567, the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026—the parts of the farm bill that were not included in the One Big Brutal Bill Act (OBBBA). OBBBA slashed nutrition assistance programs (SNAP aka food stamps), mandated a doubling of timber sales in federal forests, slashed conservation programs, and increased agribusiness subsidies and tax cuts. This “mini” farm bill mostly continues the new status quo.

Wednesday, March 4

At 9:30 am, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee holds votes on a passel of federal lands bills and three extremist Trump nominees: former Rep. Steve Pearce (R-N.M.) to be Director of the Bureau of Land Management, Project 2025 author David LaCerte for a full FERC term, and fracking engineer Kyle Haustveit to be Under Secretary of Energy. Ranking member Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), who goes out of his way to accommodate Trump’s picks, is opposing Pearce. In the spring, Heinrich supported Haustveit’s nomination to be Assistant Secretary of Energy for Fossil Energy. In September, Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) voted with Republicans in support of LaCerte joining FERC.

At 10 am, the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee
marks up their chamber’s versions of the NASA reauthorization and NOAA weather forecasting bills. The NASA Authorization Act of 2026 (S. 933), is bipartisan legislation from Chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and ranking member Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.). The House markup of H.R. 7273, NASA Reauthorization Act of 2026, took place in February. The bill embraces the Trump-Musk vision of commercial space exploration, and does not mention of earth science or climate science at all. Notable sections include Section 605, which extends the commercialization of space satellite data; and Section 603, which permits the NASA administrator—namely, Musk fanboy and billionaire Jared Isaacman—to ignore NASA’s 2017 ten-year scientific research plan for earth and climate science set by the National Academies of Science if the NASA budget changes.

The Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Reauthorization Act of 2026 recognizes the importance of NOAA’s leadership on weather forecasting and warnings through the collaboration of the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, the National Weather Service, the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS), National Integrated Drought Information System and Fire Weather Services Program, but also codifies and expand NOAA’s mandate to acquire commercial weather data, thereby privatizing much of NESDIS work.

The legislation raises a conflict with the rapid, illegal demolition of the National Center for Atmospheric Research by the National Science Foundation at the behest of Trump vizier Russ Vought, for the crime of “climate alarmism.” The period for public comment on the ongoing privatization and breakup of NCAR is closing March 13th.

The House version, H.R. 5089, includes AI forecasting and fog weather forecasting provisions not in the Senate text.

At 10 am, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee votes on Douglas Weaver’s nomination to a full term on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Backed with bipartisan support, Weaver replaced Annie Caputo in December, after Caputo was forced out as part of the aggressive Trump campaign to dismantle NRC independence. As A.J. Camacho reports:

After the vote, the committee holds a hearing on the industry-written Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) Fee Reauthorization and Improvement Act of 2026. The bill introduces a “more likely than not” threshold for regulating toxic risks, narrows the scope of risk reviews to manufacturer-defined uses, limits worker protections by restricting the EPA from assuming noncompliance with outdated OSHA standards, and introduces fast-track exemptions that prioritize industry data.

Thursday, March 5

At 10 am, the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee
interviews Trump’s nominees to be NASA Deputy Administrator and Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Matt Anderson and Arvind Raman. Anderson is a corporate Space Force lobbyist. As the dean of Purdue Engineering, Raman has been actively involved in CHIPS Act investments in Indiana and new collaborations with the Silicon Valley industry. NIST is currently roiled by new Trump rules barring hundreds of foreign scientists from working at the federal institute. Raman immigrated from India to attend Purdue for his graduate studies. Such are the little ironies that constitute one’s ultimate legacy.

AIPAC and the crypto PACs of 2024 are now supplemented by AI PACs, as outside billionaire and corporate political spending to influence Democratic Party elections continues its relentless rise. Similarly, pink-slime news continues to grow as real local journalistic outlets decline.

Among Democratic climate and environmental political groups endorsing Congressional candidates, the Jane Fonda Climate PAC (JanePAC) and Sunrise Movement back progressive candidates who oppose corporate polluters, while the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) and 314 Action are part of the corporate-consultant New Dem bloc, willing to endorse active allies of the oil and gas industry such as Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) and state Rep. Jasmeet Bains (D-Calif.).

Many groups are way behind this cycle: MoveOn has endorsed only Nida Allam for North Carolina’s 4th, and Food & Water Watch and Friends of the Earth have not made any 2026 endorsements. [Correction: Food & Water Watch has made some endorsements but has not listed them.]

Although Indivisible announced a major campaign to contest Democratic primaries last November, the organization has not made many endorsements yet, in part because they require local chapters to act first. Other groups fighting the AIPAC-AI PAC onslaught, usually aligned with the Congressional Progressive Caucus, include the Working Families Party, Our Revolution, Progressive Democrats of America, Justice Democrats, and Beyond the Ballot.

The official campaign arm of the House Democrats, the DCCC (financed by dues collected from its members) is beginning to weigh in on competitive swing-district primaries, picking candidates aligned with favorites of the official New Dem PAC and allied groups like EMILY’s List and Defend the Vote.

March Primaries

Early voting is well underway for the March 3rd primaries in Arkansas, North Carolina, and Texas. North Carolina and Texas Republicans have redistricted to improve Republican chances; Rep. Don Davis (D-NC-01) is now facing a more GOP-friendly electorate; Reps. Al Green (D-TX-09), New Dem Julie Johnson (D-TX-32), and Green New Dealer Greg Casar (D-TX-35) are vying for election in new districts while Marc Veasey (D-TX-33) and Lloyd Doggett (D-TX-37) have chosen retirement.

Mississippi’s primaries are on March 10th, and Illinois’s on March 17th; Illinois began early voting at the beginning of February.

The hottest March Democratic primaries for climate hawks are North Carolina’s 4th and Illinois’s 2nd, 8th, and 9th. The Illinois primaries are so active because five Chicagoland incumbents are leaving safe Democratic seats, either to retire or for a shot at the Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Dick Durbin.¹  AIPAC groups have spent a recorded $13.7 million on their four preferred Chicagoland candidates.

North Carolina’s 4th

Incumbent: Valerie Foushee (D)
Rating: Safe D
Primary: March 3

As Hill Heat previously discussed, this race is an expensive rematch between incumbent Valerie Foushee—elected in 2022 with AIPAC and crypto cash and now backed by AI PAC slop and the cartoonishly corrupt LCV—and climate-hawk challenger Nida Allam. Nida is backed by Sunrise, Our Revolution, Justice Dems, and the new anti-AIPAC super PAC American Priorities, managed by progressive operative Hannah Fertig.

North Carolina’s 11th

Incumbent: Chuck Edwards (R)
Rating: Likely R
Primary: March 3

Republican Chuck Edwards is the incumbent, and will be vulnerable if there is a Democratic wave in November. In the Democratic primary, the DCCC is backing Jamie Ager, a farmer running a strong campaign on a sadly milquetoast platform in a district ravaged by the fossil-fueled Hurricane Helene.

Texas Senate

The race for corporatist climate denier Sen. John Cornyn’s (R) seat is wild on both sides of the aisle—the radical climate denier Ken Paxton has a good chance of unseating Cornyn as the GOP candidate, and Democrats Rep. Jasmine Crockett and state Rep. James Talarico are in a knockdown, drag-out race. Neither Crockett nor Talarico are climate hawks, though Crockett is more aligned with the movement.

Texas’s 15th

Incumbent: Monica De La Cruz (R)
Rating: Likely R
Primary: March 3

Rep. Monica De La Cruz (R-TX-15) is the most vulnerable Republican incumbent. On the Democratic side, the Tejano star Bobby Pulido, a national recruit, is backed by the Blue Dogs and Progress Texas, while Dr. Ada Cuellar has the support of Jasmine Crockett but is running on an anti-climate platform.

Texas’s 18th

Incumbent: Christian Menefee (D)
Rating: Safe D
Primary: March 3

Young climate justice champion Christian Menefee, backed by JanePAC, just won special election and is going directly into a primary again against Rep. Al Green, redistricted out of Texas’s 9th. Menefee is expected to win easily.

Texas’s 28th

Incumbent: Henry Cuellar (D)
Rating: Leans D
Primary: March 3

Unfortunately, the oil-and-concentration-camp Rep. Henry Cuellar, by far the most corrupt, fascism-friendly Democrat in Congress, is not facing a serious primary challenge.

Texas’s 30th

Open (Crockett)
Rating: Safe D
Primary: March 3

In Jasmine Crockett’s current Dallas seat, Sunrise is backing Rev. Frederick Haynes III, Crockett’s pastor, against former Dallas City Council member Barbara Mallory Calloway and pastor Rodney LaBruce.

Texas’s 33rd

Open
Rating: Safe D
Primary: March 3

In the redistricted Dallas-area TX-33, two near-incumbents are battling it out: current freshman TX-32 Rep. Julie Johnson, a New Democrat, and former TX-32 office holder Colin Allred, who left the seat in a failed bid against Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). Johnson has picked up almost all of the institutional support. Tech executive Zeeshan Hafeez is backed by Progressive Democrats for America in an long-shot anti-AIPAC bid.

Texas’s 34th

Incumbent: Vicente Gonzalez (D)
Rating: Tossup
Primary: March 3

Rep. Vicente Gonzalez is, like Cuellar, a corrupt Oil Dem. Frankly, if we lost this seat to a Republican the party would be better off.

Illinois Senate

Open (Dick Durbin)

The Democratic primary is expected to be decisive in the race to succeed Senate whip Dick Durbin, first elected to the Senate in 1997. The top contenders are Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi and Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton, both of whom are running on platforms of anti-Trump economic populism, boxing out economic progressive Rep. Robin Kelly.

Illinois’s 2nd

Open (Robin Kelly)
Rating: Safe D
Primary: March 17

State Sen. Robert Peters is the progressive favorite, a Green New Dealer backed by numerous groups including Sunrise; Jesse Jackson, Jr. is the crypto PAC and AI PAC candidate; Donna Miller the AIPAC favorite.

Illinois’s 8th

Open (Krishnamoorthi)
Rating: Safe D
Primary: March 17

Junaid Ahmed is the Sunrise-backed progressive, while former Rep. Melissa Bean is the AIPAC-AI PAC contender.

Illinois’s 9th

Open (Schakowsky)
Rating: Safe D
Primary: March 17

The most entertaining of the races, in the seat being vacated by the octogenarian Jan Schakowsky, features AIPAC-aligned Laura Fine running against popular Evanston mayor Daniel Biss, the pick of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, LCV, and 314 Action, and the dynamic Palestinian-American online activist and media critic Kat Abugazaleh, who is backed by the Sunrise Movement. The dreadful possibility is that Kat and Daniel manage to split the progressive vote, putting in the billionaire-backed Fine. All three have raised millions of dollars, though Fine’s money is mostly from out-of-state big money.

PRESENTED BY THE CEUROW GEUROW SCHKRUNENOW

Overall, public awareness of the exploding data-center construction boom is low, but people hate it, pollsters with Climate Power find. One out of four K Street lobbyists are now working desperately for Team Fracking-AI to get Congress to let them flood the nation with data centers before Team Humans can mobilize to stop them. That’s the main business in Congress today, in the shadows of the Trump State of the Union address.¹

The House Science investigations and oversight subcommittee held a powering hearing titled “Powering America’s AI Future” this morning “assessing policy options to increase data center infrastructure” with a top Google lobbyist, and House Natural Resources subcommittees held hearings with utility executives on cutting down federal forests for electric transmission lines and with mining executives on legislation to fast-track mining projects.

As Rob Mealey points out, one of the most insulting things about the AI boom is that we. already. paid. for. all. this. “It is publicly funded infrastructure being enclosed by private companies who are now paying lobbyists to write the rules governing property they didn’t build.” Public investments trained the scientists. Public investments developed the AI algorithms. Public investments built the Internet infrastructure. Public investments built the “data” training the AI. Public investments built the electricity and water infrastructure the bots require, and the public is paying for the electricity production and the pollution.

I remember when i was pretty new to smoking weed i took a hefty bong rip and we went to watch the Behind the Scenes Production for Bambi with friends. And 5 minutes in I was so mad i had to leave the room because everything sounded like this video

— Morg (@toolow.bsky.social)
9:31 PM • Feb 19, 2026

An early test of the lasting power of AI cat’s-paws in Congress is the North Carolina 4th District rematch between incumbent Valerie Foushee, elected in 2022 with AIPAC and crypto cash, and climate-hawk challenger Nida Allam. The primary is March 3; early voting is already underway. As the Downballot’s David Nir summarizes a report from The American Prospect’s David Dayen:

On Saturday, the Anthropic AI front group “Jobs and Democracy” reported a $280,000 ad spend for Foushee. Dayen reports they’ve already expanded the buy to an eye-popping $700,000.

“The same folks building data centers are also funding and lifting up MAGA Republicans and spending hundreds of millions of dollars,” Allam said in the Prospect interview. “If Democrats in the safest blue seats aren’t willing to take a stand, then who will?”

If you personally don’t have million in AI slop money to burn but you can spare a few minutes, join the Sunrise Movement in phonebanking for Nida.

Just because I did the work, here’s a look at the bills related to that mining hearing:

• H.R. 1501, the Protecting Domestic Mining Act of 2025, amends the FAST Act to formally include mining projects within the federal expedited permitting process. It further prohibits the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council from implementing 2023 regulations that would have restricted which mining projects qualify for these accelerated, “fast-track” reviews.

• H.R. 2969, the bipartisan Finding ORE Act, is legislation that allows the U.S. government to send geologists and technology to other countries to help them find buried mineral deposits, provided those countries give U.S. companies first dibs on mining them. The Democratic cosponsors are Reps. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-lll.), Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.), Haley Stevens (D-Mich.), Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), Kristen McDonald Rivet (D-Mich.), and Eugene Vindman (D-Va.).

• H.R. 4781, the bipartisan RESCUE Act of 2025, grants “fast-track” status to projects that extract or process minerals from toxic waste sources, specifically acid mine drainage, mine tailings, and coal byproducts. The Democratic cosponsors are Reps. Scott Peters and Josh Harder of California.

• H.R. 5929, the bipartisan Critical Minerals Supply Chain Resiliency Act, empowers the President (who, I remind you, is Donald Trump) to fast-track mining projects by legally linking a Presidential Determination under the Defense Production Act to the federal permitting process. After such a designation, the bill compels federal agencies to adopt a synchronized, accelerated schedule for environmental and land-use reviews under the FAST-41 system. Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) is the Democratic co-sponsor.

• H.R. 7126, the bipartisan SECURE Minerals Act of 2025, would establish a $2.5 billion government-owned corporation run by a board appointed by the President (still Trump), the Strategic Resilience Reserve Corporation, to increase the domestic supply of raw materials for technology through investments in private mining and processing projects, including ownership stakes, loans, and purchase guarantees. Rep. Chris Pappas (D-N.H.) is the Democratic co-sponsor.

• H.R. 7458, the Domestic ORE Act, accelerates the U.S. mining permit process by imposing strict, short deadlines for environmental reviews and making approval the default if agencies fail to meet them. The bill limits long-term scientific analysis, narrows the scope of environmental impact studies, and drastically reduces the timeframe for public legal challenges to mining projects.

Hearings on the Hill:

• 10 AM: House Science, Space, and Technology Committee
     Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee
  Assessing Policy Options to Increase Data Center Infrastructure

• 10:15 AM: House Natural Resources Committee
     Water, Wildlife and Fisheries Subcommittee
  Expanding Electric Transmission Rights of Way in Federal Forests

• 10:15 AM: House Energy and Commerce Committee
     Environment Subcommittee
  Challenges and Opportunities for Safe, Reliable, and Affordable Drinking Water

• 10:30 AM: House Natural Resources Committee
     Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee
  Testimony on Legislation to Fast-Track Mining Projects

• 9 PM: Joint Session
  State of the Union Address

Climate Action Today:

• 8 PM: MoveOn
  People's State of the Union

Thanks for subscribing and spreading the word. If you’ve got job listings, event listings, or other hot news, I want to hear it. Connect with me—@climatebrad@mastodon.social, @climatebrad on Threads, and @climatebrad.hillheat.com on BlueSky.

Powered by fossil-fuel pollution, a bomb blizzard has paralyzed the Northeast. More than 30 inches of snow has fallen so far, with two feet reported in at least five states. About a half a million households have lost power. Meanwhile, the Iranian winter is a relentless, sweltering heat wave; as is the winter in China; Japan is drenched in summer-like heat; there’s record heat in Germany; and Mexico’s year without winter continues.

John Glover Statue in Snow, Boston, February 23, 2026. Credit: Josh Levinger

Congress has a light official workload this week, with Trump’s first State of the Union address of his second term Tuesday night, which will be boycotted by many Congressional Democrats. MoveOn and MeidasTouch are leading a People’s State of the Union show, streamed live from the Mall in Washington D.C. Expected speakers include Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Tina Smith (D-Minn.), and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), and Reps. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.), Becca Balint (D-Vt.), Greg Casar (D-Texas), Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), and Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.).

The Department of Homeland Security funding standoff continues, as Republicans remain committed to defending Trump’s “Big Beautiful” squadristi, maritime assassinations, and big-box concentration camps. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has already restricted FEMA disaster deployments and disaster aid.

Last week, the Trump regime backed the increased production of the toxic pesticide glyphosate and announced it was weakening limits on mercury and other air toxics.

The Supreme Court is issuing rulings on Tuesday and Wednesday, with a decision weakening the Voting Rights Act expected, and another to obliterate campaign-finance limits possible.

At 8 pm on Thursday, Stop The Money Pipeline is hosting a webinar entitled Better Options: How Large Companies and Nonprofits Can Select Climate-Aligned Credit Card Partners. It’s a bit wonky, but it’s good.

PRESENTED BY EISVOGEL

Thanks to the rapid insertion of nearly two trillion tons of industrial greenhouse pollution into the atmosphere, the planet is heating faster than at any time in at least three million years. The risks of self-reinforcing feedbacks pushing “the climate system past a point of no return, committing the planet to substantially higher long-term temperatures, even if emissions are later reduced” are rising daily. In “the risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory,” Oregon State climate scientists William J. Ripple, Christopher Wolf, and Jillian W. Gregg, with European climate scientists Johan Rockström, Katherine Richardson, Nico Wunderling, Thomas Westerhold, and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber caution that “we may be approaching a perilous threshold, with rapidly dwindling opportunities to prevent dangerous and unmanageable climate outcomes.”

On Thursday, Our Dark Lord Donald Trump took decisive and blatantly illegal action to send humanity into the hothouse, reversing the U.S. government’s recognition that industrial greenhouse gases are pollutants. That endangerment finding was only made in 2009, after decades of delay at the behest of corporate polluters. A faint silver lining of this miasmic cloud is that the regime was forced to drop Fracking Secretary Chris Wright’s hackjob climate denier report down to an appendix to its ruling, which now hinges on the the Trumpist shift in the Supreme Court since its 2007 decision that compelled the endangerment finding.

“Praise be!” worshipped the anonymous Jeff Bezos puppets on the Washington Post editorial page.

Thursday’s climate demolition was a regime-wide affair. The National Science Foundation is rapidly stripping the National Center for Atmospheric Research for parts, announcing on Thursday that it is taking away NCAR’s supercomputer. And the Department of Energy announced its new AI-driven research Genesis mandate, including “Unleashing Subsurface Strategic Energy Assets,” a wild euphemism for fossil-fuel drilling (more on the fracking-AI acceleration below the eisvogel).

Also on Thursday, a mini-Trump judge quashed Carrboro, N.C.’s climate-harms suit against Duke Energy, claiming “many significant issues regarding climate change are not only the subject of complex scientific debate but also implicate political, economic, and moral choices made by governments and members of the public literally across the globe.”

Sure, the planet may get too hot and unstable for people, plants, and animals. But will it be too hot for data centers? That’s the question that would keep the billionaire Universal Paperclip cultists awake at night, if they weren’t too busy feeding ever more of human society into their fields of gas-powered silicon wood chippers and spewing garbage into our political system to ensure voters choose between AI-and-crypto-beholden Democrats or AI-and-crypto-beholden Republicans.

The Palantir-OpenAI-Marc Andreessen super PAC Leading the Future “announced recently that it and associated organizations had raised over $125 million in commitments and had over $70 million cash on hand at the start of this year.” It’s already dumped $500K on Laurie Buckhout in N.C.’s 1st and promised $5 million for the extremist Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) in his campaign to be Florida governor. On the Democratic side, it’s planning to back Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (Ill. 2nd) and former Rep. Melissa Bean (Ill. 8th) in their competitive primaries.

While the dark-money group Public First (and its GOP front group Defending Our Values) backed by the Anthropic effective-altruist cultists has better branding, claiming it’s backing “AI safety,” it’s looking to spend at least $75 million to prop up candidates including Trumpist Republicans like Tennessee gubernatorial candidate Sen. Marsha Blackburn and Nebraska Sen. Pete Ricketts.

In a recent interview, Anthropic CEO Dario “Wario” Amodei pledged to destroy civilization through annual 3x growth:

When’s that tripling gonna stop, Wario? Half of the world’s data centers are in the United States. If that ratio remains constant, then Wario is saying by 2029 Team Fracking Paperclip will be be using one-quarter of the country’s current electricity generation capacity. And in three or four more years his industry—which employs fewer people than a large retail chain—will be using more electricity than total current global generation.

In the long run? IN THE LONG RUN?¹

Wario’s Schismatrix-Accelerando vision isn’t just a threat to American democracy or human civilization; it is a threat to all life on earth. If we’re lucky, he and his fellow AGI worshippers will merely be leading the global economy into a Great Depression-scale crash.

These people make Bond villains look like sober bureaucrats.

Something I do love are the good folks who are fighting back, unafraid to fight for this planet and its people and against the brutal boxes of Big Oil and Bigger Silicon. Just this week, CA-32 candidate Chris Ahuja signed the Green New Deal pledge, and CO-AG candidate Jena Griswold signed the No Fossil Fuel Money pledge.

It’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day.

Thanks for subscribing and spreading the word. If you’ve got job listings, event listings, or other hot news, I want to hear it. Connect with me—@climatebrad@mastodon.social, @climatebrad on Threads, and @climatebrad.hillheat.com on BlueSky.

PRESENTED BY A WAREHOUSE NEAR YOU

As techno-neoliberalism collapses into techno-fascism, the Big Box era is giving way to the Big Brutal Box era. For decades, Amazon, IKEA, Wal-Mart, Target, and others hollowed out local economies with warehouse-fed sales plugged into a global fossil-fueled shipping network. The Trump-Musk economy doesn’t bother with the sales: the warehouses are being converted to data centers to warehouse economically “productive” computers and concentration camps to warehouse economically inconvenient people. Both sides of the Big Brutal Box equation are fed by the One Big Brutal Bill Act, a multi-trillion-dollar behemoth of codified anti-human cruelty.

This desecratory death machine is fueled by ever-faster extraction and pollution. The Trump regime’s daily moves—ordering the Pentagon to prop up coal plants, revoking the greenhouse endangerment finding, killing stop-start incentives—all serve the techno-Moloch.

Via Keith Cowing, we’ve got the latest move by Trump vizier Russ Vought and Musk ally Jared Isaacman to eliminate climate science at NASA—a directive to “pause all activities that would create new financial commitments” on various earth science projects.

In another galling move, the Federal Judicial Center deleted a new chapter on climate science from a scientific reference manual for judges, after the state AGs who put the AG in MAGA cried climate denial. The chapter, published in December 2025, was written for the National Academies of Science by climate legal scholar Jessica Wentz and climate scientist Radley Horton, and is still available at the NAS website. The center, a Congressionally created institution, is led by judge Robin Rosenberg. Whose husband Mark McAuliffe was general counsel for Bill Koch’s Oxbow Carbon from 2012 to 2024. Which I’m sure is just a coincidence.

Dare I say, some good news!

Dr. John Kotcher has been named director of the Center for Climate Change Communication, the research center chartered by the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at George Mason University founded by the great Ed Maibach. John had been serving as interim director following Ed’s retirement last June.

Thirty-six Congressional climate hawks have filed an amicus brief in defense of Biden climate funds illegally impounded by the Trump regime. The brief “urges the Court to block the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) illegal efforts to eliminate the National Clean Investment Fund and the Clean Communities Investment Accelerator programs, both of which are part of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF).”

Like a message in a bottle washing ashore, a piece of powerful climate journalism completed before the Washington Post purge was published today. Written by Shannon Osaka (now on leave to write her book on microplastics) and climate data journalist John Muyskens, the piece explains how there are troubling indicators that the rate of global warming is accelerating, with the heat of 2023, 2024, and 2025 zooming off the charts. Okay, so maybe it’s not the best of news, but it’s good that it’s news, and not, say, an anonymous editorial publishing climate-denial bilge praising Trump’s murder of the finding that greenhouse pollution is pollution. Fun fact: now-fired Bezos hatchetman Will Lewis had a $3 million salary!

I'm pretty good at operating tiny buttons in response to predetermined environmental stimuli, in case any scientists out there are looking to hand out small cheese rewards for that

— mindflakes (@mindflakes.bsky.social)
12:28 PM • Feb 11, 2026

If you’re interested in making the news better: Climate Defiance is hiring a distributed organizing director ($50K-$80K, remote)!

Oakland’s Local Clean Energy Alliance is looking for a campaign manager ($72K, Oakland).

Hearings on the Hill:

• 10 AM: House Appropriations Committee

  Homeland Security Subcommittee
  Potential DHS Shutdown Impacts

• 1:45 PM: House Natural Resources Committee
  Markup of Mining Deregulation, Seafood Country of Origin Standards, Wildfire Study, National Parks, and Other Bills

• 2 PM: House Foreign Affairs Committee

  South and Central Asia Subcommittee
  South Asia: U.S. Foreign Policy in the Region

• 2 PM: House Science, Space, and Technology Committee

  Research and Technology Subcommittee
  U.S. Surface Transportation Research

• 2 PM: House Homeland Security Committee

  Emergency Management and Technology Subcommittee
  Surveying the Threat of Agroterrorism, Part II: Assessing Federal Government Efforts

Thanks for subscribing and spreading the word. If you’ve got job listings, event listings, or other hot news, I want to hear it. Connect with me—@climatebrad@mastodon.social, @climatebrad on Threads, and @climatebrad.hillheat.com on BlueSky.

Boxes photo: Rob Young.

Bad Bunny’s epic Super Bowl halftime show, a distillation of his 30-show Puerto Rico residency last summer, was a primer on Puerto Rico’s history as United States’ colony, including the lasting devastation of the 2017 fossil-fueled Hurricane Maria and the Wall Street cabal that controls the island’s collapsed power grid, which suffers from rolling blackouts to this day.

Bad Bunny sang an excerpt from El Apagón (Blackout), standing atop exploding telephones. The song’s video includes an entire 18-minute documentary, Aquí Vive Gente, on this crisis of climate injustice:

The Trump regime is formally reversing the 2009 climate pollutant endangerment finding this week, a blatantly illegal decision that is likely to be affirmed by the Trumpist Supreme court. “This amounts to the largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin told the Wall Street Journal’s Meridith McGraw and Benoît Morenne. Lisa Friedman and Maxine Joselow explain how this has been an ideological mission of OMB Director Russ Vought, Vought lieutenant Jeffrey Clark, former Inhofe staffer and Project 2025 author Mandy Gunasekara, and Department of Energy general counsel Jonathan Brightbill for years.

From the vigil for Alex Pretti in front of the US Department Of Veterans Affairs in Washington, DC.

— Jason of the Resistance (@jasongooljar.org)
12:16 PM • Jan 29, 2026

In the wake of the gangland executions of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, Congress is debating the future of the Department of Homeland Security and its $200 billion slush fund for masked thugs and private-contractor concentration camps this week, on the floor, in press conferences, and in at least six hearings. On Tuesday, the House Homeland Security Committee grills the heads of ICE, CBP, and USCIS, Senate Judiciary’s John Cornyn (R-Texas) hosts white nationalists for a hearing on “Somali Fraud in Minnesota,” and Senate Homeland Security’s Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) holds another kangaroo court on Minnesota fraud; on Wednesday, the lawless Attorney General Pam Bondi goes before House Judiciary, and House Appropriations investigates the potential impact of a DHS shutdown on the department’s other agencies, including FEMA; and on Thursday, Senate Homeland Security holds another hearing on the Minnesota siege with Minn. AG Keith Ellison, GOP whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), and the ICE, CBP, and USCIS heads.

The Senate GOP are also expected to push forward on a resolution to blow up the Washington D.C. tax code, a move opposed by home-rule advocates, the D.C. Chief Financial Officer, and the D.C. business community.

Among the most exceptional temperatures yesterday in The Central States (85F in Oklahoma,84F in Kansas),
Nebraska was more at records level:
78F Aurora missed by 1F its monthly record ,despite we are well into the first half of the month

— Extreme Temperatures Around the World (@extremetemps.bsky.social)
11:54 AM • Feb 10, 2026

Monday, February 9

On Monday, the House Rules Committee set up floor votes for two radically anti-environmental bills: the Undersea Cable Protection Act (H.R. 261), which would would prohibit the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from requiring any authorization for the installation, continued presence, operation, maintenance, repair, or recovery of undersea fiber optic cables in a National Marine Sanctuary; and Securing America’s Critical Minerals Supply Act (H.R. 3617), which would permit the Trump regime to define fossil fuels as “critical minerals” and exempt them from environmental regulations.

Tuesday, February 10

At 10:15 am, the House Natural Resources Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee holds a hearing on a key form of graft for the Trump regime this year, public-private partnerships supporting America’s semiquincentennial on our public lands.

In the afternoon, the House Natural Resources Federal Lands Subcommittee receives
testimony on federal lands bills, including one commissioning a study on brush fires.

At the same time, House Foreign Affairs holds a hearing stoking fears of “weaponized” mass migration. The hearing, ostensibly about Russia driving people into European countries as a form of political warfare, is a transparent exercise in white nationalism.

Relatedly, a Senate Appropriations subcommittee holds a hearing on Haiti security and foreign assistance priorities at 2:30 pm.

Wednesday, February 11

On Wednesday afternoon, there are several hearings on climate policy.

At 1:45 pm, the House Natural Resources Committee marks up legislation on mining deregulation, seafood country of origin standards, wildfire study, National Parks, and other bills.

Then, at 2 pm, the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee marks up National Lab Cloud Computing and other bills.

At the same time, the House Foreign Affairs South and Central Asia Subcommittee holds a hearing on U.S. foreign policy in South Asia.

Also, the House Science Research and Technology Subcommittee takes testimony from witnesses on U.S. surface transportation research, including Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a notorious climate denier who was the lead author of the Project 2025 Department of Transportation chapter.

Finally, the House Homeland Security Emergency Management and Technology Subcommittee surveys the “threat of agroterrorism”, with DHS and USDA officials.

PRESENTED BY THE TRUMPET OF THE SWAN

The Epstein Files is the reverse Climategate.¹  

We’ve mentioned previously how climate-denier-for-hire Bjørn Lomborg, the climate-denial advisor to Microsoft billionaire and pal-of-Jeffrey Bill Gates, is in the files, meeting with Jeffrey Epstein on a September 2012 afternoon before Jeffrey’s dinner with Wøødy Allen.

Also among the files: Nathan Myhrvøld, the Microsoft and patent troll billionaire involved with the Freakonomics climate denialism chapter, re-forwarding to his friend Jeffrey the Dr. Strangelove-esque Løwell Wøød’s forwarding of a Steve Køønin climate denial column. Koonin has recently appeared in the Hill Heat files, as he was one of the deniers picked by Energy Secretary Chris Wright to be on his illegal climate-denial group:

Here’s Bari Weiss’s new CBS contributor Peter Attia telling his pal Jeffrey in 2015 that an extraordinarily nasty climate denial screed by the prominent British climate denier Matt Ridley is “pretty good piece.”

The work of a legislator is never done!

Watch members of House Science Committee put the corpse of NASA earth science into the ground, with their markup of the NASA Reauthorization Act of 2026, which began at 10 am.

At 2 pm, members of the Energy and Commerce energy subcommittee mark up several bipartisan bills intended to militarize (sorry, “secure”) the electric grid and fracked-gas pipeline network and bring the Department of Energy into deeper collaboration with the Department of Homeland Security. The great thing about applying the war-on-terror security framework to the power grid is that it extends the police state everywhere, right into everyone’s homes!

And at 2:30 p.m, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s European subcommittee host international oil, LNG and mining lobbyists to explain how European “energy security” means giving the oil, LNG, and mining industries carte blanche.

Sure is funny how all this security isn’t making the world more secure.

It was a bit difficult to explain to my son why centibillionaire Jeff Bezos is destroying the Washington Post, but he did get that AI slop is cheaper to make and less likely to criticize centibillionaires.

“The owners of a Colorado power unit say the Department of Energy violated their Constitutional rights when it ordered them to continue running a coal-fired generator they had been planning for years to retire at the end of 2025.”

They’re just following task orders:

Highlighting the speaker who stood in front of the Surprise mayor and told him to consider what the Mayor of  Ohrdruf must’ve thought before he died by suicide: “He might have thought ‘how is this my fault I had no jurisdiction over this’ maybe he said ‘this site was not subject to local zoning.’”

— Arizona Right Watch (@azrww.bsky.social)
6:43 AM • Feb 4, 2026

It’s turning out that the vast majority of Americans, regardless of party or politics, don’t want the regime to keep building concentration camps.

The ice is melting.

Hearings on the Hill:

• 10 AM: House Science, Space, and Technology Committee
  Markup of the NASA Reauthorization Act of 2026

• 10 AM: House Natural Resources Committee
     Water, Wildlife and Fisheries Subcommittee
  Testimony on Bird Conservation, Fish Conservation, and Private Big Cat Ownership Bills

• 2 PM: House Energy and Commerce Committee
     Energy Subcommittee
  Markup of Grid and Pipeline Security Legislation

• 2:30 PM: Senate Foreign Relations Committee
     Europe and Regional Security Cooperation Subcommittee
  European Energy Security

Thanks for subscribing and spreading the word. If you’ve got job listings, event listings, or other hot news, I want to hear it. Connect with me—@climatebrad@mastodon.social, @climatebrad on Threads, and @climatebrad.hillheat.com on BlueSky.

PRESENTED BY WEXMAC 2.2 TITUS and LOGCAP V JTF-SB

Given that Trump has just signed the $839 billion Department of Defense appropriations title today, and Congress will spend at least the next two weeks debating the Department of Homeland Security [sic] funding package, let’s talk about how the regime is bending the U.S. military to its fascist war on the American people.

(TLDR: Easily.)

Oregon Army National Guard who were called up on Sept. 27, 2025 to support U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during protests in Portland traveled to Fort Bliss, Texas, before returning home on January 16, 2026. Credit: Oregon National Guard

As many have noted, Trump’s paramilitary police state is the inevitable outcome of the U.S. government’s “War on Terror” response to the September 11 attacks twenty-five years ago. There’s Spencer Ackerman, author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump in 2022. And Richard Beck, author of Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life in 2024. Here’s David Wallace-Wells, in a review of Beck’s Homeland:

One of the strongest voices in the darkness is Karen Greenberg, the author of Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump in 2021. As she wrote in January, 2024:

After Trump’s election, Greenberg knew exactly what Trump was going to do, because it’s what he and his lieutenants promised on the campaign trail:

Fifty days in, she wrote “The War on Terror Comes Home.”

More recently, Obama’s national-security speechwriter-turned-podcaster Ben Rhodes shares regrets about the “war on terror” and “homeland defense”:

Georgia National Guard work alongside U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Uvalde, Texas on Feb. 12, 2025. Credit: Georgia National Guard

I bring all this up because yesterday the tireless Pablo Manríquez caught my attention with a piece entitled “How the Pentagon is Quietly Building Trump’s Concentration Camps.” He takes a (slightly incorrect) look at NAVSUP WEXMAC 2.2 TITUS (Region 27), one of the acronymic vehicles the Trump regime is using to put the U.S. military’s awesome logistical capacity at work building the concentration camps financed by the One Big Brutal Bill Act and the measureless Pentagon budget.

The alphabet soup stands for:

• NAVSUP: Naval Supply Systems Command, the logistics branch of the U.S. Navy;

• WEXMAC: Worldwide Expeditionary Multiple Award Contract, an umbrella vehicle collaboratively managed by NAVSUP and ACC, Army Contracting Command for picking contractors used during the Biden administration exclusively for overseas missions, including the Afghanistan evacuation, Ukraine support, Sudan evacuation, and the ill-fated Gaza pier;

• WEXMAC 2.2 TITUS: Territorial Integrity of the United States, the second iteration (after 2.1) of the domestic concentration-camp project launched last year by the Trump regime, now with a ten-year spending cap of $65 billion;

• Region 27: The United States and Outlying Territories, allowing major contractors to receive up to $2.5 billion per specific contract; it supplants WEXMAC 2.0’s Region 23 designation, which was limited to small businesses and small contracts.

WEXMAC 2.x TITUS is the U.S. military’s concentration-camp campaign. As the WEXMAC 2.1 solicitation, drafted in June, details:

The $10 billion WEXMAC 2.1 TITUS solicitation went live on July 8, less than a week after Trump signed the One Big Brutal Bill Act into law. OBBBA gave ICE $45 billion to build concentration camps (Sec. 90003) and the U.S. military $1 billion to support the concentration-camp effort (Sec. 20011). By September, the list of contractors on the concentration-camp rolodex was established. On December 31, WEXMAC 2.2 TITUS raised the cap to $65 billion, and dozens of new contractors were brought on in January.

It’s important to understand that the new $65 billion cap under WEXMAC 2.2 TITUS does not reflect actual expenditures, and that Naval Supply Systems Command is essentially acting as the general contractor for ICE, which is in most cases responsible for picking up the tab.

What normal people would consider a contract—with money actually being spent on a real outcome—are the WEXMAC 2.2 TITUS Task Orders; so far, $1.1 billion has been spent on about 60 contractors (another 30 contractors have received token payments of $500 to stay on reserve for future projects). Most of the money spent has gone to Acquisition Logistics, a shadowy company that is widely understood to be a pass-through to exploit “small-business” loopholes in the contract award process and hide the identify of the actual death-camp profiteers.

From the Acquisition Logistics website

When the OBBBA spigot turned on, Acquisition Logistics won a $1.5 billion contract with ICE through the Department of Defense to build the nation’s largest concentration camp, Camp East Montana, on the grounds of Fort Bliss in Texas, work that has been quietly subcontracted to Trump-adjacent contractors like Nathan Albers’s Disaster Management Group and logistics giants like the engineering firm Amentum. Three inmates have died in the concentration camp, most recently one murdered by the guards.

Army Staff Sgt. Matthew Beckmann, left, and Army Spc. Brady Dresden, assigned to Joint Task Force Southern Border, inspect brush near Laredo, Texas, Aug. 15, 2025. Credit: Army Sgt. Logan Ubaldo Lechuga

The regime, of course, did not wait until the One Big Brutal Bill to start its reign of terror. The Army’s Joint Task Force, Southern Border (JTF-SB) was created in March in response to Trump’s inauguration-day executive order, “Protecting the American People Against Invasion,” in order “to form an experienced, agile, and technologically advanced command, designed to leverage unique military capabilities in support of DHS”:

Through JTF-SB, increasing numbers of troops are deployed within the United States in all of the states bordering Mexico.

In April, the mega-defense-contractor KBR (formerly Kellogg Brown & Root), was given $12 million (now $21 million) in an emergency no-bid contract to build up the facilities for the Fort Bliss deportation-and-detention blob, justified by Trump’s inauguration-day declaration of a national emergency at the southern border. That contract, in support of ARNORTH (Army North Command) and JTF-SB and paid out of the Army’s massive Operations and Maintenance budget, came through KBR’s long-running LOGCAP V (Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, Fifth Iteration) umbrella contract.

Today, 21 House Democrats, strongly aligned with the military-industrial complex, voted to help Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La., no relation) pass the appropriations deal and let 21 House Republicans vote against it. The FY2026 Army Operations and Maintenance budget they appropriated is set at $58,249,178,000.

As Congress debates its appropriations bill, the Department of Homeland Security retains access to its five-year $190.6 billion Brutal Bill slush fund and $2.5 billion in continuing funds for the next two weeks. ICE has already spent $2.27 billion on private contractors this fiscal year. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has throttled the Federal Emergency Management Agency in favor of the ICE and CBP domestic war of terror. Last week, she released long-delayed funds for recovery from dozens of fossil-fueled climate disasters—$2.2 billion for 1,721 recovery projects, about what has been spent so far on the concentration camp at Fort Bliss.

Hearings on the Hill:

• 10:15 AM: House Natural Resources Committee
     Federal Lands Subcommittee
  Using the L.A. Wildfires to Promote Logging

• 10:15 AM: House Energy and Commerce Committee
     Energy Subcommittee
  Oversight of FERC

• 10:30 AM: House Appropriations Committee
     Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies Subcommittee
  U.S. Department of Agriculture, Office of Inspector General

Thanks for subscribing and spreading the word. If you’ve got job listings, event listings, or other hot news, I want to hear it. Connect with me—@climatebrad@mastodon.social, @climatebrad on Threads, and @climatebrad.hillheat.com on BlueSky.