In a new op-ed, Democratic Reps. Rick Larsen of Washington and Greg Stanton of Arizona draw parallels to the Trump administration’s cuts to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, better known as FEMA, and the lead-up to the devastation caused by 2005’s Hurricane Katrina.

The Hill published the representatives’ op-ed on Thursday. They warn that hurricane season is coming and FEMA is in “disarray,” pointing out that President Donald Trump has called on Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to dismantle FEMA by the end of the year.

“It’s eerily reminiscent of the summer of 2005, when hasty organizational changes, brain drain and unqualified leadership plagued FEMA in the lead up to its catastrophic response to Hurricane Katrina. The images we saw along the Gulf Coast then shocked the nation, and communities are still recovering to this day,” Larsen and Stanton wrote. “As we approach the 20-year anniversary of that catastrophe, this administration seems dead set on repeating history’s mistakes.”

READ MORE: No Trump, No FEMA? Tornado Ravaged City’s Mayor Pleads for Federal Assistance

The representatives pointed out that the Department of Government Efficiency got rid of 2,000 FEMA workers. The White House had also been approving and denying requests for disaster relief funds without informing FEMA, according to CNN, causing delays.

“As Trump hobbles FEMA’s disaster preparation, he’s also playing politics with federal funding for recovery. So far, almost every approved disaster declaration has been for Republican-led states, while requests from Democratic governors — including Washington — remain pending or have been denied outright. Even conservatives have had to grovel to Trump for federal assistance,” the representatives wrote.

Larsen and Stanton are referring to actions like Trump’s desire to tie California’s disaster relief to the passage of a voter ID law. Another example is when Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s former press secretary, had to publically beg Trump to reverse his decision to deny aid after tornadoes hit the state.

During Trump’s second term, the United States’ disaster response record has not been great. During his January tour of parts of North Carolina damaged by Hurricane Helena, he called FEMA “not good.”

“FEMA turned out to be a a disaster. And you could go back a long way, you could go back to Louisiana, you could go back to some of the things that took place in Texas. And it turns out to be the state that ends up doing the work. It just complicates it. I think we’re gonna recommend that FEMA go away. And we pay directly and we pay a percentage to the state, but the state should fix it,” Trump said at the time.

And in May, when tornadoes hit states including Kentucky, Missouri and Illinois, St. Louis, Missouri Mayor Cara Spencer said that FEMA was completely absent, despite the devastation.

“FEMA has not been on the ground—we do not have confirmed assistance from FEMA at this point,” Spencer said. “I do want to say, however, every other level of government has been on the ground with us, helping in every capacity possible. But when you have a disaster of this scale, eight miles of just pure destruction, this tornado didn’t just touch down and leave, this tornado ripped through our community for a full eight miles in the city of St. Louis, and this is an area that has needed help, that we need investment, you know, our North St. Louis has been neglected for a long time, and we need the help of our partners here.”

At the time, Noem said that she’d spoken to the governors of those states and offered resources. But she also said the feds would defer to local governments.

“We discussed how while emergency management is best led by local authorities, we reinforced that DHS stands ready to take immediate action to offer resources and support,” Noem wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Local emergency managers should swiftly notify people in the affected areas to take action to protect themselves and their belongings. DHS stands ready to help when a state needs, requests, and declares an emergency.”

Image via Reuters

The Department of Justice announced an investigation into the University of California system, saying its policy of valuing diversity in hiring could run against the Civil Rights Act.

On Thursday, the DOJ sent a letter to Dr. Michael Drake, the president of the university. The DOJ said it was investigating whether or not the hiring plan laid out in the UC 2030 Capacity Plan violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VII is meant to protect potential hires from being denied a job based on protected classes like race, sex or religion.

“Public employers are bound by federal laws that prohibit racial and other employment discrimination,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement. “Institutional directives that use race- and sex-based hiring practices expose employers to legal risk under federal law.”

READ MORE: DEI Policies Go Against 1964 Civil Rights Act, DOJ Warns

The 2030 Capacity Plan addresses both enrollment goals and faculty hiring. One of its goals is “reflecting California’s racial/ethnic diversity.”

“Faculty are the backbone to the University of California – they create highly ranked academic programs, develop the curriculum, and produce research that yields important discoveries and scholarly works,” the plan reads. “For UC to remain excellent, it must grow and diversify its faculty. The University is committed to increasing the diversity of its faculty, both underrepresented minorities and female faculty.”

To fulfill this goal, UC says it started the Advancing Faculty Diversity (AFD) program with both state funding and funding that came directly from the UC president’s office.

“AFD identifies best practices in equity opportunity hiring by providing competitive awards to campus pilots testing new interventions aimed at increasing faculty diversity and improving academic climate and faculty retention,” the plan reads.

Though the plan cites diverse hiring as a goal, it does not lay out how exactly this is being accomplished. The only other reference to the program is in the section about UC San Diego specifically, where it says the campus is “actively involved” in AFD, “and has already invested in 28 new [full-time equivalent programs], half in a cohort on STEM impacts on the Black diaspora and half on Latinx/Chicanx experience in Humanities and Social Sciences.”

Though the DOJ alleges the 2030 Capacity Plan “directs its campuses to hire ‘diverse’ faculty members to meet race- and sex-based employment quotas,” the UC website makes no mention of such quotas. UC describes its AFD program as awarding “competitive grants to faculty project leads on all ten campuses in two priority areas: recruitment and improving climate & retention.”

This is just the latest in the Trump DOJ’s fight against “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” or DEI policies, often using the Civil Rights Act as a cudgel. Though the landmark Act was meant to help qualified women and people of color find work they’d been shut out of before, many right-wing pundits claim it’s resulted in white men being blocked out of jobs.

A number of studies—including three from the National Bureau of Economic Research—show this claim is unfounded, according to The Oregonian. These studies, each published in the last six years, say white people are still more likely to be hired than people of color.

“We thought if we’re going to see [a preference for female or minority candidates] anywhere, we’re going to see it in these prestigious employers who tell us up and down they’re trying to hire for diversity,” Wharton economist Corinne Low told the paper. “We see either no preference, or we actually see a penalty toward female and minority candidates.”

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The Supreme Court ruled Thursday morning that South Carolina had the right to block Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funding, a decision that Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson compared to the Jim Crow era.

Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic was over a South Carolina executive order that prohibited the public use of funds to go towards abortion. In July 2018, the state decided that providing Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood ran afoul of the EO and cut it.

A patient, Julie Edwards, and Planned Parenthood sued the state, claiming the state was in violation of the 1965 law that created Medicaid. The Medicaid law called for states use funding so “any individual eligible for medical assistance . . . may obtain [it] from any [provider] qualified to perform the service . . . who undertakes to provide [it]”.

READ MORE: Progressive Group to Launch $10 Million Campaign Focused on SCOTUS Reforms

In a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the Supreme Court rejected this argument. The case ultimately hinged on Section 1983 of Title 42 of the US Code of Law. That law says that anyone has the right to sue if their civil rights are violated. Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that Edwards had no standing to bring the case.

“[T]he decision whether to let private plaintiffs enforce a new statutory right poses delicate questions of public policy. New rights for some mean new duties for others. And private enforcement actions, meritorious or not, can force governments to direct money away from public services and spend it instead on litigation,” Gorsuch wrote. “The job of resolving how best to weigh those competing costs and benefits belongs to the people’s elected representatives, not unelected judges charged with applying the law as they find it.”

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a concurring opinion, arguing that the case stretched section 1983 to its breaking point.

“The “scant resemblance” between §1983 today and §1983 as it was traditionally understood creates good reason to doubt our modern understanding,” Thomas wrote.

Justice Brown’s dissent, however, compared the case to cases brought during the Jim Crow era—or rather, the lack thereof.

“Like other §1983 skeptics, JUSTICE THOMAS seems to view the paucity of early §1983 lawsuits as evidence that the statute was originally understood to do very little. But other explanations come to mind, too—such as the fact that filing civil rights lawsuits during the Jim Crow era could be quite perilous, especially for the people whom the statute was originally meant to benefit. Many would-be plaintiffs had reason to fear that filing a lawsuit would lead to physical or economic reprisals,” Brown wrote. “Add to that the difficulty of finding a lawyer, prevailing before often-hostile juries, and (if successful) enforcing a judgment, and it is not hard to imagine that the dearth of §1983 lawsuits in the wake of Reconstruction might have myriad alternative explanations.”

Thursday’s ruling could have wide-ranging effects, allowing other states the ability to block Medicaid funds from not just Planned Parenthood but other providers.

“Even though the state is trying to claim that it has sole authority to decide who’s a qualified provider, this isn’t really about whether Planned Parenthood is a qualified provider. It’s about a political calculation on abortion,” Nicole Huberfeld, a health law professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health, told The Guardian. “Really, what’s happening here is states making politically driven decisions about access to medical care.”