Illinois Gov. Pritzker ahead of Trump National Guard deployment: "To Chicagoans... Look out for your communities and your neighbours. Know your rights. Film things that you see happening... Authoritarians thrive on your silence. Be loud for America."

Just received this statement from Lisa Cook: "President Trump purported to fire me 'for cause' when no cause exists under the law, and he has no authority to do so. I will not resign. I will continue to carry out my duties to help the American economy as I have been doing since 2022."

The full 12 minutes of @govpritzker.illinois.gov speech today, which was superb. (Via Nicole Wallace / @msnbc.com segment.) www.msnbc.com/deadline-whi...

There are a lot of USAID post-mortems out there. I read 18 of them and wrote about what they get wrong. In short, the problem is that the development sector’s reckoning with the destruction of USAID has been largely unmoored from what actually happened timhirschelburns.substack.com/p/everyone-i...

What Danielle said. According to the Yale Budget Lab, the average effective tariff rate in this economy right now is 18.2% Let me put that another way. President Trump has raised taxes on American businesses and consumers by -- on average -- 18.2%

On the left: Nate Cavanagh, a 28-year-old DOGE staffer and college dropout. On the right: Mohammad Halimi, a 53-year-old exiled Afghan scholar. This is the story of how DOGE targeted Halimi on social media. Then the Taliban took his family. 🧵

NEW—Earlier this evening agents from ICE/other fed agencies were outside Rhode Island Ave metro in DC asking people exiting the station for their IDs, per someone who experienced it. When the person presented their Real ID license, an agent said that wasn't sufficient. Luckily they had secondary ID.

USAID funded roughly half the world’s supply of ready-to-use therapeutic food. The dismantling of the agency has disrupted the global supply chain that provides the packets, leaving thousands of malnourished children at risk of dying.

New working paper from me & some colleagues on East Africa's maize markets from c. 1900 to today, based on a major data collection effort to fill in the long-run history of food prices in one of the world's poorest regions: www.aehnetwork.org/working-pape...

Kim’s mother: “I immigrated here to the States - I thought I understood it was a country of equal rights where the Constitution applies equally.”

My practical tips for designing, implementing, and analyzing powerful experiments. In today's blog I summarize a new paper I've written for a special issue on power calculations. A key message is that it does not make sense to talk of “the” power of an experiment. blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...

@rglenner.bsky.social advocates for radically simplifying how we do aid (and how we communicate it). www.youtube.com/live/uvyFva0... (starts at 10m30s) #ABCDE2025

The Supreme Court's disdain for Congress, the statutory design of agencies, and the public services they provide to millions truly astounds. Destroying a 50-year-old Cabinet-level department may be the biggest violation of the Take Care Clause in U.S. history—and six justices simply ... don't care.

Can a small pilot project still be effective when scaled up to reach millions? New evidence shows digital advisory can help farmers who experience weather shocks to obtain higher yields. Read today's article to learn more:

Developing a rapid diagnostic could save thousands of newborn lives and slow AMR. Read the full series to learn more: www.cgdev.org/blog/case-pr... @siddhharia.bsky.social @cgdev.org @rrolapp.bsky.social

This is not about the merits of Iran’s nuclear program. No president has the authority to bomb another country that does not pose an imminent threat to the US without the approval of Congress. This is an unambiguous impeachable offense.

Every year South Asia’s brick kilns spew as much CO₂ as the entire U.S. car fleet. Kilns poison the air that 2 billion people breathe—and kill over 50,000 annually A new study in Science shows how simple fixes can clean air, cut emissions & improve public health🧵⬇️

WELKER: Your secretary of state says everyone who's here, citizens and non-citizens, deserve due process. Do you agree? TRUMP: I don't know. I'm not a lawyer. I don't know. WELKER: Don't you need to uphold the Constitution? TRUMP: I don't know

FYI: The Spencer Foundation, Kapor Foundation, The William T. Grant Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation have collaborated to offer $25K rapid response grants. "This rapid response bridge funding opportunity is for scholars and teams whose grants have recently been cancelled by NSF."

Happy to share this new @voxdev.bsky.social post summarizing findings from our recent JDE paper on the effects of relaxing multiple agricultural productivity constraints in a program operating at scale Blog post: voxdev.org/topic/agricu... Paper (open access): www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Over 86% of 10,000 simulations show that a bundled agricultural programme in Kenya had a positive societal net benefit. Read the full article w/ @joshdeutschmann.bsky.social, Maya Duru, Kim Siegal & @econemilia.bsky.social to learn more:

The @oneacrefund.bsky.social bundled farm program that provides credit + training + insurance to smallholders, boosted maize yields & profits in Kenya. Our new @voxdev.bsky.social piece discusses why tackling multiple constraints together can unlock big gains If bundling works, how can we scale it?

🆕 Why bundled agricultural programmes may succeed where others fail Today on VoxDev, @joshdeutschmann.bsky.social (University of Chicago), Maya Duru (OES), Kim Siegal (Mathematica) & @econemilia.bsky.social (Macquarie University) outline research on Kenya: voxdev.org/topic/agricu...

How do business owners feel about hiring family members, and how does this affect hiring decisions? Read the full article w/ Nicholas Swanson @stanfordkingctr.bsky.social to learn more:

Could you ever have imagined you would see a headline like this in your lifetime

Three U.S. citizens, ages 2, 4 and 7, swiftly deported from Louisiana www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/...

Walz: If you say you love freedom but you don't believe freedom is for everybody, then the thing you love is not freedom, it is privilege.

Almost every line of this story would have been simply unbelievable a few months ago: —Pioneering cancer researcher; —*Arrested* at airport in Boston; —Now indefinite ICE detention in Louisiana; —"Crime": not declaring some frog-embryo samples for research. Read it. www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

Van Hollen on Fox News Sunday: "I'm not vouching for the man. I'm vouching for the man's rights. His constitutional rights to due process."

Van Hollen: This case is not just about one man. It's about protecting the Constitutional rights of everybody who resides in the United States of America.

I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance. I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love. I look forward to providing a full update upon my return.

One of hundreds of people abducted by ICE and sold to slavery in El Salvador was a 19 year old with no criminal record in the US or Venezuela and no tattoos of any kind. An ICE kidnapper who grabbed him outside his house said, "He's not the one." The other said, "Take him anyway." So they did.

The Trump administration is asserting the power to disappear people into foreign gulags without due process and openly discussing putting citizens there next. This is tyranny. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/u... www.nytimes.com/live/2025/04...

We have had nearly two decades of panic about Free Speech on Campus and not a single case, not even the ones they made up, were as bad as what's happening now

NYT - The Trump administration intends to terminate financial support for Gavi, the organization that has helped purchase critical vaccines for children in developing countries. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/26/h...

Each dot represents 10 people whose lives depend on US foreign aid, just for HIV prevention & treatment. Without it, 1.6m people could die *per year*.

I know this is going to sound naive or earnest, but I genuinely find myself shocked by how little people seem to be upset by the levels of corruption we're seeing. Is that the median voter assumes everyone is corrupt already? Or isn't actually getting stories about the corruption?

This isn't going to get the attention of Columbia, but it's at least as bad: the University of Maine is having its funding cut off because the governor of Maine dared to challenge Trump.

NEW: White House says the arrest and deportation of student activist & legal US resident, Mahmoud Khalil, is a blueprint for more. The final line here is chilling. The White House specifically says Khalil was not breaking the law. No evidence, no due process, no crime. He was just disappeared.

New Paper: Vulnerability of US dairy farms to extreme heat. My co-authors and I estimate the impacts of extreme heat (high temperature and humidity) on dairy cattle production throughout the Midwest. Some of the main findings:🧵

BREAKING: Supreme Court DENIES President Trump‘s emergency bid to cancel nearly $2 billion in USAID spending. The vote is 5-4.

NEWS: The USAID official put on leave for disseminating two memos about Rubio's failure to push through life-saving foreign aid was in the process of writing a THIRD memo when fired. We obtained it. It's far more alarming than the first two. www.thebulwark.com/p/what-a-wee...

The choice not to reform USAID—but illegally obliterate it without any thought or analysis of the consequences—will sicken and kill people all over the world.

NEW: USAID's acting asst administrator, Nick Enrich, has been placed on leave after sharing a memo detailing how political appointees have "wholly prevented" staff from continuing life saving aid.

NEW: When the Trump Admin abruptly cancelled almost all USAID programs, it also refused to pay $2bln the U.S. govt owes **for work that’s been done.** One of the cut-off programs in Syria couldn’t afford security and was robbed by masked men. www.propublica.org/article/trum...

An estimated 300,000 children globally are expected to lose access to a nutrient-dense peanut butter that’s specially formulated to treat severe acute malnutrition.