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This story was originally published by ProPublica.

Even a glance at Shy’tyra Burton’s life reveals her need for the sort of federal government assistance that helps disabled Americans stay in their homes. Born two months prematurely into a poor family in Philadelphia, unable to breathe or swallow without tubes and largely confined to medical facilities until age 4, Burton was diagnosed with a litany of developmental and intellectual disabilities that left her with an IQ below 70.

She persevered and graduated from a high school special education program, then attempted community college. But she struggled to grasp basic tasks and information. She couldn’t get hired, including at McDonald’s. After multiple medical and psychological evaluations and a hearing before a judge, the federal government approved her for the Supplemental Security Income program, which provides a basic income to those with severe disabilities and to indigent older people.

For Burton, now 22, the $994 monthly benefit is lifesaving but not enough to completely support herself on her own. So, like many SSI recipients, she has continued to live with her father, who makes around $2,000 a month as a Philadelphia sanitation worker.

Now, President Donald Trump’s administration is poised to penalize people like Burton simply for living in the same home as their families, according to four federal officials, internal emails and a federal regulatory listing. The administration is working on a rule change that would deduct the value of a disabled adult’s bedroom from their SSI allotment, even if the family members they live with are poor enough to qualify for food stamps. This would mean slashing the benefits of some of the most low-income SSI recipients by up to a third — about $330 a month in Burton’s case — or ending their support altogether.

This would mean slashing the benefits of some of the most low-income SSI recipients by up to a third.

The effort to cut SSI for families who also rely on food stamps under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, was initiated by top White House and Department of Government Efficiency officials last year, multiple Social Security officials said. It marks a second attempt by the Trump administration to quietly but dramatically downsize disability benefit programs overseen by the Social Security Administration, despite those programs’ strict eligibility standards and minimal instances of fraud. White House Budget Director Russell Vought and Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano abandoned a different proposed regulation involving disability payments last year after ProPublica and other news outlets reported on the harm that the plan would cause to hundreds of thousands of largely blue-collar workers in red states. (The disability programs are administered by the Social Security Administration but separate from the retirement program for which the agency is named. The Trump administration has promised not to cut Social Security retirement payments.)

The likely SSI cut will affect not just younger adults with disabilities such as Down syndrome and severe autism who are still living at home with their low-income parents, but also retirees and other older people with health or financial problems who have had to move in with their adult children on tight budgets. All told, as many as 400,000 poor and disabled people and indigent older people across the United States could have their support cut or eliminated, according to a ProPublica analysis of actuarial figures from the Social Security Administration.

Protecting the SSI program from such a fate is “about how the faithful will be judged, and our care for the most vulnerable,” said Galen Carey, vice president of government relations for the National Association of Evangelicals and himself the father of a 35-year-old son with Down syndrome who lives at home and receives SSI. Carey said it’s wrong to reduce a disabled person’s SSI benefits for choosing or needing to live with loved ones. “Knowing that they are contributing and not a burden to the family can be a source of great pride,” he said. (Some 40 Down syndrome organizations recently sent a letter to Bisignano expressing their opposition to the planned change.)

The reason this will especially affect SNAP families is complicated. Essentially, under a long-standing federal policy that was updated during the Biden administration, if a household has already demonstrated its poverty via SNAP or other public assistance programs’ own extensive income-reporting requirements, then the family is officially deemed unable to financially support a disabled loved one living at home. (The typical SNAP household that is also supporting a person who receives SSI has an annual total income of just $17,000, according to the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.)

The Trump rule will undo this approach. It won’t matter if the SNAP program has already determined that a family is poor enough to receive aid; anyone living at home beyond age 18 without paying full rent will be treated as if they have a benefactor. The value of their bedroom as well as any income and assets their family may have will be calculated and recalculated as often as every month and deducted from their SSI check.

The SSI rule change is being reviewed by the White House Office of Management and Budget, a process that involves editing the draft regulation and considering where it falls on the list of the president’s priorities. Once it’s returned to the Social Security Administration for initial publication, there will be an opportunity for public comment; it could take until next year to be finalized, depending on the amount of opposition it faces.

All of these people could have their SSI benefits cut because they live with family.

Presented with a detailed list of this article’s findings, Rachel Cauley, the OMB’s communications director, asserted that “this story is false because it speculates about policies that have not yet been decided.” Asked to specify what was false, Cauley did not identify anything, instead reiterating that the story is “trash.” A Social Security Administration spokesperson said “Commissioner Bisignano remains committed to protecting and strengthening Social Security and serving America’s most vulnerable populations.”

ProPublica interviewed families who rely on the SSI program in Philadelphia and across the country. We talked to a young couple struggling to support not just their kids but also a parent with Alzheimer’s. We heard from a mother, Opal Foster, whose 18-year-old son has Down syndrome and lives at home as he strives to become a chef. And we spoke with a middle-aged woman with schizophrenia and panic disorder who lives with her brother’s family because she can’t hold down a job and fears being left alone in a nursing home.

All of these people could have their SSI benefits cut because they live with family, even though disability advocates, evangelicals and budget experts agree that it’s more humane and less expensive for adults with disabilities to live at home rather than in institutional facilities. The potential cut to Burton’s SSI benefit, for example, would save taxpayers about $11 a day. But if her dad as a result of the reduced support can’t afford to provide for her anymore, then it could cost taxpayers many hundreds of dollars a day or more to house her at a residential facility, according to the state of Pennsylvania’s fee schedules.

*   *   *

Supplemental Security Income, which serves 7.5 million Americans who are unable to make a living because of severe disabilities or destitution in old age, has never been easy to qualify for. Fewer than a third of applicants are approved, and the process often takes years. Recipients of these benefits in turn regularly have their finances reevaluated, and are also intermittently examined by medical and vocational experts, to determine whether their payments will continue.

This paperwork-and-review-heavy process generates hefty overhead. The SSI program distributes just 5% of all Social Security Administration benefits yet accounts for nearly 35% of the agency’s administrative budget. Month after month, staffers have to pore over microscopic changes to SSI beneficiaries’ living arrangements and family members’ incomes and assets.

Current and former Social Security officials have told ProPublica over the past year that the SSI program’s complexities and absurdities remain perhaps the agency’s biggest bureaucratic headache. As ProPublica reported last summer, DOGE did nothing to address this, mostly ignoring SSI despite its obvious inefficiencies. In fact, DOGE and the White House pushed out roughly 7,000 Social Security employees, many of whom had been working on SSI reforms and backlogs.

The Biden administration had tried to do something about SSI’s excessive red tape. Under existing law, disabled people whose families have already established themselves to be poor by qualifying for certain other public assistance programs, such as veterans’ benefits or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, don’t have to do all of the same check-ins, over and over again, to receive SSI. In 2024, Biden added SNAP — which is more widely used now than when these SSI rules were created — to the list of such programs.

This was ultimately an act of government efficiency, said Marianna LaCanfora, who was for years the deputy commissioner for retirement and disability policy at the Social Security Administration, including during Trump’s first term. Safety net programs like SSI don’t have to be so complicated and thus expensive, LaCanfora and others at the agency said. But they often are that way because of all the effort spent triple-checking that the poor are actually poor.

Fewer than a third of applicants are approved, and the process often takes years.

Nevertheless, conservative think tanks opposed the Biden SNAP policy, with some claiming that paying these low-income SSI beneficiaries less could save the federal government $20 billion over the next decade. And the White House included the rule change as one of its agenda items for the SSA heading into 2025. It was part of a broader push by the administration and DOGE to undo anything that the Biden administration had touched.

If enacted, the change will require intellectually disabled young people like Burton as well as very elderly people to file extensive monthly reports if they want to continue their benefits even at the reduced level. They’ll have to provide details about the property where they live, whether it’s leased or owned, as well as the names of anyone living in the home and whether any of those people has any new income or assets. They’ll also have to include documentation of all household bills and expenses, showing how much they do or don’t contribute personally, as well as financial documents such as bank statements and any pay stubs.

Burton will likely have to make an appointment and report in person at a Social Security field office any time her father’s hours or wages change even slightly, any time she and he switch up how they split utility bills, and any time an adult sibling spends even a few nights at the house and helps her with living expenses. If she doesn’t, she could later receive bills accusing her of having been overpaid by Social Security.

For his part, Bisignano, the Social Security commissioner, wants to be seen as a leader who’s making the agency more businesslike and efficient, according to interviews with agency staff and recordings of him speaking in private executive meetings. But the SSI rule change, by all accounts, will increase the administrative burden not just on families like Burton’s but also on the staff who’ll have to constantly assess the living arrangements and family incomes of her and millions of other people.

Given the tension between what the rule will do and the sense of efficiency that Bisignano says he wants to instill at Social Security, some agency insiders told ProPublica that he could still push the White House to drop the plan.

*   *   *

Shy’tyra Burton’s monthly SSI support check is what allows her to contribute to her household, by paying her own phone and internet bills and buying many of her own meals, according to her father, Rondell. “I’m still barely managing, though,” he said. He has largely been a single parent to Shy’tyra and her siblings, who need some support too, although they’re more self-sufficient. Groceries and gas have only gotten more expensive.

“I’m still barely managing, though.”

Burton is calmer and better at managing her disabilities when she can sense that her family’s economic circumstances are relatively stable, her father said. When he blew out his shoulder last year trying to hurl a heavy recycling bin onto a garbage truck and had to have surgery and take time off work, the loss of income soon manifested in her behavior, he said. “It’s a trickle-down effect,” he explained. “My daughter absorbs money stress in her body.”

One recent 75-degree afternoon, sitting on the front stoop of the rowhouse where she lives with her dad, Burton was rubbing her hands together vigorously, as if it were cold out. When asked why, she claimed it reminded her of being a baby in the neonatal intensive care unit and touching her parents’ hands through the small opening in her incubator.

Burton still has some childlike ways. She grips her stuffed animals when she’s nervous, which is often. She talks to imaginary friends out loud, the same ones she talked to when she was a girl. What she likes about living at home is in part that she can be herself, and her family will still be there to care for her. She doesn’t like the lack of freedom and that she can’t truly be “out there” like her adult siblings.

Burton wanted to go into the child development field, to help kids growing up with disabilities like hers, but some of the concepts were a bit too difficult. Now, she’s excited by cosmetology and intends to support herself one day as a hair stylist. She spends much of her time practicing on mannequin heads in her childhood room.

The post The Trump Administration Aims to Penalize Disabled Adults Who Live With Their Families appeared first on Truthdig.

Two years ago today, an intense heat wave engulfed much of Brazil. For five days at the end of April 2024, temperatures in the central and southern regions climbed to sweltering heights. Many affected were still reeling from another extreme heat wave that had walloped southern Brazil. Just the month before, the heat index in Rio de Janeiro reached a staggering 144.1 degrees Fahrenheit, the highest in a decade. 

The two events were part of a cycle of prolonged and severe periods of heat that has hit one of the world’s largest agricultural powerhouses over several years. Yields of soy and corn, two of Brazil’s biggest commodities, fell in southeastern states like São Paulo. Peanuts, potatoes, sugarcane and arabica coffee also suffered widespread losses. Droves of livestock pigs in the central-western region were afflicted with severe heat stress for the better part of a year. And when an atmospheric cold front was blocked by the prevailing heat dome and triggered devastating rainfall and flooding throughout the southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul, the supply chain and markets for pink shrimp were disrupted throughout Brazil.

Much of this data is documented in a new joint report released last Wednesday by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Merging weather datasets with agricultural ones, the report traces the compounding effects of extreme heat on the global agricultural system and outlines how to produce food in a world where extreme heat is becoming a baseline. 

In the report, Brazil is the sole country-level case study explored in detail; the country’s exports face outsize pressure from warming temperatures and the oscillating extremes of the natural weather cycles El Niño and La Niña. But a few dozen other nations are mentioned in the 94-page document, too. 

“We’re not moving at a speed that is good enough.”

The authors cite how, in Chile, warming seas in 2016 prompted massive algae blooms that killed off an estimated 100,000 metric tons of farmed salmon and trout, creating the largest aquaculture mortality event in history. In the U.S. Pacific Northwest, when one of the strongest heat waves ever recorded struck in 2021, entire raspberry and blackberry harvests were lost, Christmas tree farms saw 70% timber volume declines, and the intersection of extreme heat, vegetative drying and wildfires led to an increase of 21% to 24% of forest area burned in North America that year. After a record heat wave hit India in 2022, wheat yields in over one-third of Indian states fell between 9% and 34%, dairy animals afflicted with heat stress produced up to 15% less milk, and some cabbage and cauliflower yields were halved. And last spring in Kyrgyzstan’s Fergana mountain range, a region known for its year-round snow, spring temperatures rose 50 degrees higher than the seasonal average — an occurrence so unusual that it contributed to a locust outbreak and dramatic declines in cereal harvests.

Human-caused warming has already been increasing at an unprecedented rate. The past 11 years are also the 11 warmest years on record. “We’re not moving at a speed that is good enough,” said Martial Bernoux, senior natural resources officer for the FAO’s Office of Climate Change, Biodiversity and Environment. “And we have, really, a residual risk that is increasing.”

On a high-emissions trajectory, much of South Asia, tropical sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Central and South America could experience as many as 250 days a year that are simply too hot to work outside by the close of the century, according to the report. 

Dangerous exposure to heat is already an occupational crisis for much of the world’s agricultural workforce. A 2024 report by the International Labour Organization found that extreme temperatures had put more than 70% of the global workforce, or some 2.4 billion people, at high risk. Those findings spurred a call to action on extreme heat by António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, in summer 2024. He urged governments and the international community to prioritize four areas: caring for the most vulnerable; stepping up protections for workers exposed to excessive heat; boosting resilience using data and science; and quickly and equitably phasing out fossil fuels. 

“Heat is estimated to kill almost half a million people a year,” Guterres said at the time. “That’s about 30 times more than tropical cyclones. We know what is driving it: fossil fuel-charged, human-induced climate change. And we know it’s going to get worse.”

According to Bernoux, the joint FAO-WMO analysis is a direct response to the secretary-general’s call to action. “The U.N. said, ‘We have a problem,’” said Bernoux. “So FAO and WMO, we decided to work together to be able to reply to that.”

Naia Ormaza Zulueta, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia studying extreme heat and the agricultural workforce, questions whether their report focuses enough on the people who raise and harvest the world’s food. 

“The diagnosis in this report is sharper than anything we’ve had before, and that matters,” said Zulueta, who calls it a breakthrough in perspective — one that underscores how climate change and food systems can no longer be studied in isolation. “The prescription is where the system hasn’t caught up.” 

“The workers are present in the diagnosis, but they’re largely absent in the prescription.”

First, the worker exposure calculations omit both hourly and nighttime wet-bulb exposure; Zulueta argues that these finer-grained metrics capture the severity of heat exposure for outdoor workers better than daily averages — meaning that she thinks the number of days of dangerous heat identified in the report is likely an undercount. 

The report’s recommendations on how the sector can best adapt also center entirely on crops, livestock, and ecosystems — such as planting earlier or later in the season, developing heat-tolerant breeds and investing in large-scale irrigation systems. Direct recommendations for agricultural laborers, though, only appear in passing references to existing international agreements on worker safety and health adopted more than a decade ago. For instance, the FAO and WMO call for dramatically increasing global climate-related development finance for food systems and increasing early-warning systems to lessen extreme heat’s compounding risks, but no concrete roadmap is provided for how best to adapt food production in order to protect the billions of outdoor workers exposed to intensifying heat. 

Perhaps the oversight, says Zulueta, is because U.N. agencies tasked with worker rights — like the International Labour Organization — weren’t involved in the report. Even so, she finds it hard to justify, given the secretary-general’s own emphasis on protecting the workforce from escalating temperatures.

“The workers are present in the diagnosis, but they’re largely absent in the prescription,” Zulueta said. “It’s a little sad, to be honest with you. It almost feels like the human dimension is missing, and everything that comes with it.”

The post The World Is Getting Too Hot to Feed Itself appeared first on Truthdig.

At the right-wing Heartland Institute’s International Conference on Climate Change held in Washington, D.C., earlier this month, speakers mocked their usual cast of environmental targets: Greta Thunberg, John Kerry, and of course, Al Gore.

But the fringe climate denial movement that Heartland represents and promotes might be facing a new threat, this time from within the Trump base itself: Make America Healthy Again.

On a panel called “The Most Important Upcoming Battles” at the group’s annual conference, Heartland board member and Energy & Environmental Legal Institute Fellow Steve Milloy called the MAHA movement and its champion, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a “left-wing op” that the Trump administration needs to “get rid of.”

Milloy, who denies anthropogenic climate change and founded the website JunkScience.com, said the MAHA movement was a risk to everything from the global food supply to the fossil fuel industry.

His comments at this year’s event April 8-9 highlight a growing rift between what was once seen as a largely aligned Trump coalition. In the past, fringe climate-denial groups like Heartland primarily faced opposition from progressives and environmental advocates.

Panels at the conference focused on debunking proven climate science.

“People that are worried about everything in the environment used to be the Democratic Party and the radical environmental groups,” Milloy said. “Now, it’s a feature of the Trump administration.”

Panels at the conference focused on debunking proven climate science, and what speakers characterized as Trump-era deregulation “wins,” particularly Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin’s decision to repeal the 2009 endangerment finding, which concludes that greenhouse gas emissions are a threat to human health and welfare and therefore fall under the EPA’s regulatory jurisdiction.

Milloy and fellow panelists Jason Isaac, CEO of the fossil fuel advocacy group American Energy Institute; Willis Eschenbach, whom Heartland refers to as an “amateur scientist”; and Angela Wheeler with the CO2 Coalition, which argues that carbon dioxide is beneficial to the environment, spoke about the major battles facing the climate denial movement, with a particular focus on the rise and influence of MAHA.

MAHA is “wrong about everything,” according to Milloy, including its push to pressure the EPA to regulate food additives, pesticides, microplastics and PFAS, or so-called forever chemicals — all of which have been linked to serious health risks.

“It’s only a matter of time before they become interested in climate,” Milloy said. “The microplastics scare is actually a climate-op, right? It’s another way to get to the fossil fuel industry and to get to the oil and gas industry because that’s where plastic comes from — the petrochemical industry.”

When asked to respond to Milloy’s remarks, HHS pushed back. “These claims are inaccurate,” an HHS official told DeSmog in an emailed statement. “The Trump administration, including HHS, will no longer weaponize federal food policy to destroy the livelihoods of hard-working American ranchers and protein producers under the radical dogma of the Green New Scam.” 

“HHS is focused on supporting policies that improve access to fresh, healthy food, and strengthen the systems that sustain public health,” the statement went on to say. “Secretary Kennedy is committed to ensuring not just the survival, but the prosperity, of American Farmers.”

DeSmog reached out to several MAHA activists for comment, including Kelly Ryerson, Alex Clark and Courtney Swan, but none responded by press time.

Both MAHA and climate denial advocates have been criticized for dismissing peer-reviewed research and cherry-picking scientific data. But a clear fissure is emerging: One faction is pushing for stricter environmental and public health regulations (particularly around chemicals and food), while the other is actively working to dismantle them.

In recent months, the Trump administration, and Zeldin specifically, have struggled to keep members of the MAHA movement happy. In December, MAHA activists even circulated a petition urging Trump to fire Zeldin over his decisions to loosen chemical regulations after the EPA approved the use of two separate pesticides.

Both MAHA and climate denial advocates have been criticized for dismissing peer-reviewed research.

“What kind of Republicans go after a Republican administrator?” Milloy asked during the panel.

These internal fractures may also be fostering unlikely bedfellows between MAHA and progressives. Last week, MAHA activist Kelly Ryerson and Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, teamed up to co-write an op-ed for The Hill against the chemical industry and federal pesticide preemptions.

Ryerson and Pingree stated that they are “united by three simple beliefs: that everyone should be able to eat food that is free of toxic chemicals; that people should have proper warning about possible health risks associated with chemical use; and that giant corporations should not get special immunity when their products pose real health risks.”

The day after the op-ed appeared, Trump hosted MAHA activists and influencers at the White House for a private strategy session aimed at easing tensions ahead of the midterms, according to The New York Times. Around the same time, the EPA also decided to halt the approval of dozens of forever chemicals. Taken together, the MAHA Oval Office meeting and the EPA’s current PFAS posture “reflects the fragility” of the Trump administration’s alliance with the MAHA movement, as The Times said, and shows that MAHA, at least for now, holds significant sway over the administration’s environmental narrative.

As of now, it’s unclear if Milloy’s alarm will materialize into MAHA shifting its sights to targeting the fossil fuel industry for producing emissions, especially now that the EPA has repealed the endangerment finding. 

Still, at the panel Milloy remained adamant. “[MAHA] is not science-based and the science is what I care about. It is very disheartening to me,” he said in closing. “If they succeed with microplastics, they’re going to cause real problems. … They’re going to get to climate.”

The post Trump Alliance Cracks as Climate Denialists Turn on RFK Jr.’s Movement appeared first on Truthdig.

Conflict and displacement are intensifying South Sudan’s hunger crisis, with 7.8 million people facing high levels of acute food insecurity while 2.2 million children are suffering from acute malnutrition, according to a joint statement on Tuesday from UN agencies.

Twenty years after the conflict in Darfur first sparked global outrage, children in the region are once again trapped in a catastrophic cycle of violence, hunger, and displacement – but this time, the world is failing to take notice.

Three mass graves were recently uncovered in northeastern Syria, including one reportedly at the site of a former detention centre run by the Kurdish-backed Syrian Armed Forces (SDF).