Can new coastal protection leader reverse Louisiana's disappearing coastline crisis?
Michael Hare takes over as executive director of the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, which oversees an ambitious 50-year, $50 billion master plan to preserve and perhaps restore portions of the Louisiana coastline.
Hare replaces Glenn Ledet, who Landry recently appointed as his secretary of the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development.
Hare has worked in both the government and private sectors related to coastal protection and environmental issues.
'Michael has years of experience in coastal restoration, and I am confident that his leadership and commitment to our state make him well-suited to lead CPRA," Landry said in a statement.
Hare said Louisiana's land loss crisis must be urgently addressed "to protect and sustain our culture and way of life for future generations."
Louisiana has lost about 2,000 square miles of coast during the past century.
That rate could accelerate with rising seas levels and more frequent and severe storms pounding the state from the Gulf of America unless Louisiana can stem the tide with effective restoration projects as it also increases levee protection.
"We must remain united as a coastal community and maintain our sense of urgency to confront the challenges along our coast," Hare said in a statement.
Securing sufficient money for such projects will become more difficult when the multi-billion dollar settlement from the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill expires in 2031.
But last year voters approved an amendment to the Louisiana Constitution expanding the dedication to the CPR Fund to add federal money the state receives from offshore wind, solar and other alternative or renewable energy sources generated in federal Gulf waters off of the state's coast.
Such money could come from federal lease sales, operating fees and other agreements.
And earlier this month future funding for Louisiana coastal protection and restoration was boosted in President Trump's "Big, Beautiful" tax and spending bill by up to $50 million annually from offshore revenue.
More: Louisiana voters approve amendment to Constitution aimed at restoring disappearing coast
Greg Hilburn covers state politics for the USA TODAY Network of Louisiana. Follow him on Twitter @GregHilburn1.
This article originally appeared on Shreveport Times: Gov. Jeff Landry appoints leader to save Louisiana's disappearing coast
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Boston Globe
2 hours ago
- Boston Globe
A clash over a promotion puts Hegseth at odds with his generals
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Hegseth met with Sims one final time but refused to budge. Sims is expected to retire in the coming months after 34 years in the military, officials said. Through a spokesperson, Sims and Caine declined to comment. A Pentagon spokesperson declined to comment on Hegseth's role. Advertisement The standoff over his promotion reflects an ongoing clash between Hegseth's highly partisan worldview, in which he has written that the Democratic Party 'really does hate America,' and the longstanding tradition of an apolitical military that pledges an oath to the Constitution. Hegseth's actions could shape the military's top ranks for years to come. His insistence on absolute loyalty, backed with repeated threats of polygraphs, also creates uncertainty and mistrust that threaten to undermine the readiness and effectiveness of the force, officials said. Advertisement The tension between top military officers and their civilian leaders has been persistent since the earliest days of Trump's second term, when senior administration officials ordered the removal of Milley's portrait from a Pentagon hallway. Caine, who pressed Hegseth on Sims's behalf, got the job of Joint Chiefs chair after Hegseth and Trump fired General Charles Q. Brown Jr., his predecessor. Hegseth accused Brown, who is Black, of prioritizing diversity over the combat effectiveness of the force. Also removed during the first months of the new administration were the first woman to command the Navy, Admiral Lisa Franchetti; the first woman to command the Coast Guard, Admiral Linda Fagan; Hegseth's senior military assistant, Lieutenant General Jennifer Short; and the US military representative to the NATO military committee, Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield. All were dismissed as part of a campaign to root out diversity, equity, and inclusion from the military and restore what Hegseth has described as a 'warrior ethos.' Hegseth also recently withdrew the nomination of Rear Admiral Michael 'Buzz' Donnelly to lead the Navy's Seventh Fleet in Japan -- its largest overseas force -- amid reports in conservative media that seven years earlier the admiral had allowed a drag performance to take place on the aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan. The decision not to promote Sims, who is white, seems unrelated to any issues of race or gender. Rather, the general's career seems to have become tangled up in broader suspicions about leaks and a mistrust of senior military officers that have defined much of Hegseth's first six months on the job. Advertisement Hegseth, a former Fox News host and an Iraq War veteran, came to the Pentagon with little managerial experience. Since his arrival, a series of firings and resignations in his inner circle have left him with only a skeleton staff of civilian aides to run his office. He has been without a permanent chief of staff since late April. Ricky Buria, a recently retired Marine colonel who has forged a close relationship with Hegseth, has been serving in the critical role. But White House officials, who have concerns about Buria's competence and qualifications, have blocked Hegseth from formally appointing him to the job, officials said. Buria, meanwhile, has clashed repeatedly with many of Hegseth's closest aides and some officers in the Pentagon. This spring, Eric Geressy, a retired sergeant major who served with Hegseth in Iraq and now advises him in the Pentagon, threatened to quit after an argument with Buria, according to people with knowledge of the situation. The rift was reported earlier by The Washington Post. Geressy briefly went to his home in Florida before Hegseth persuaded him to return, officials said. Hegseth is also still contending with a review by the Pentagon's inspector general related to his disclosure on the Signal messaging app of the precise timing of US fighter jets' airstrikes against the Iranian-backed Houthi militia in Yemen in March. The office has received evidence that the information that Hegseth put in the commercial chat app came from a classified Central Command document, according to two US officials with knowledge of the review. The classified origins of the information were reported earlier by the Post. The infighting, investigations, and personnel churn have strained Hegseth's ability to manage critical operations in the Pentagon. Hegseth found himself in the crosshairs this month after Democrats and Republicans in Congress blamed him for pausing critical shipments of interceptors and other arms to Ukraine without sufficiently consulting with the White House or the State Department. Advertisement The suspension was particularly jarring because just days earlier Trump had said he was open to selling more weapons to Ukraine after meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky on the sidelines of a NATO meeting in The Hague. It also left the impression that Hegseth and his top aides had failed to keep the president and senior White House officials in the loop. As aides to Hegseth traded blame, and then tried to play down the impact of the pause, Trump dramatically overruled the Pentagon, saying he was unhappy with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. The frustration with Hegseth is seeping out. Senator Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican who cast the deciding vote to confirm Hegseth, this month called him ill-suited to lead the Pentagon. 'With the passing of time, I think it's clear he's out of his depth as a manager of a large, complex organization,' Tillis told CNN. For now, Hegseth's missteps do not seem to have hurt his standing with the person who matters most: Trump. Like Trump, Hegseth had a career in television before joining the administration and relishes the performative aspects of his job. As defense secretary, he regularly posts videos that show him exercising with troops. The photo ops -- known inside the Pentagon as 'troop touches' -- are a central part of almost all his public appearances, current and former aides said. Several officials have complained that the photos and videos -- including one that he posted from Omaha Beach in Normandy in which he joins Army Rangers carrying a soldier on a stretcher as part of D-Day remembrances -- are distractions that serve primarily to bolster his image. Advertisement Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, said that Hegseth retained Trump's 'full confidence' and cited the 'critical role' he played 'in ensuring the flawless execution' of the strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in June. Current and former military officials said that Trump largely bypassed Hegseth in the days leading up to the strikes and instead relied on Caine and General Michael Erik Kurilla, the head of Central Command, for counsel. But officials with knowledge of the president's thinking said Trump especially admired his defense secretary's combative response at a news conference to reports questioning the effectiveness of the attack. In the wake of staff dismissals and a series of negative stories about Hegseth's performance in the job, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, offered a window into how Hegseth views the department he now runs. 'This is what happens when the entire Pentagon is working against you and working against the monumental change you are trying to implement,' she said. This article originally appeared in
Los Angeles Times
11 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
With Manifest Destiny art, DHS goes hard on ‘white makes right'
Since the start of President Trump's second term, the Department of Homeland Security's social media team has published a stream of content worthy of a meme-slinging basement dweller on 4chan. Grainy, distorted mug shots of immigrants. Links to butt-kissing Fox News stories about MAGA anything. Whiny slams against politicians who call out la migra for treating the Constitution like a pee pad. Paeans to 'heritage' and 'homeland' worthy of Goebbels. A Thomas Kinkade painting of 1950s-era white picket fence suburbia straight out of 'Leave It to Beaver,' with the caption 'Protect the Homeland.' All of this is gag-inducing, but it has a purpose — it's revealing the racist id of this administration in real time, in case anyone was still doubtful. In June, DHS shared a poster, originally created by the white-power scene, of a grim-faced Uncle Sam urging Americans to 'report all foreign invaders' by calling Immigration and Customs Enforcement. On July 14, the DHS X account featured a painting of a young white couple cradling a baby in a covered wagon on the Great Plains with the caption, 'Remember your Homeland's Heritage.' When my colleague Hailey Branson-Potts asked about the pioneer painting and the Trump administration's trollish social media strategy, a White House spokesperson asked her to 'explain how deporting illegal aliens is racist,' adding that haters should 'stay mad.' Now, behold the latest DHS salvo: a July 23 X post of a 19th century painting by John Gast titled 'American Progress.' A blond white woman robed in — yep — white, with a gold star just above her forehead, floats in the center. She holds a book in her right hand and a loop of telegraph wire that her left hand trails across poles. Below her on the right side are miners, hunters, farmers, loggers, a stagecoach and trains. They rush westward, illuminated by puffy clouds and the soft glow of dawn. The angelic woman is Columbia, the historic female personification of the United States. She seems to be guiding everyone forward, toward Native Americans — bare breasted women, headdress-bedecked warriors — who are fleeing in terror along with a herd of bison and a bear with its mouth agape. It's too late, though: Covered wagon trains and a teamster wielding a whip have already encroached on their land. The white settlers are literally in the light-bathed side of the painting, while the Native Americans are shrouded in the dusky, murky side. It ain't subtle, folks! 'A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending,' DHS wrote as a caption for 'American Progress' — a mantra you may soon find printed on the $20 bill, the way this administration is going. Gast finished his painting in 1872, when the U.S. was in the last stages of conquest. The Civil War was done. White Americans were moving into the Southwest in large numbers, dispossessing the Mexican Americans who had been there for generations through the courts, squatting or outright murder. The Army was ramping up to defeat Native Americans once and for all. In the eyes of politicians, a new menace was emerging from the Pacific: mass Asian migration, especially Chinese. Scholars have long interpreted Gast's infamous work as an allegory about Manifest Destiny — that the U.S. had a God-given right to seize as much of the American continent as it could. John L. O'Sullivan, the newspaperman who coined the term in 1845, openly tied this country's expansion to white supremacy, expressing the hope that pushing Black people into Latin America, a region 'already of mixed and confused blood,' would lead to 'the ultimate disappearance of the negro race from our borders.' O'Sullivan also salivated at the idea of California leaving 'imbecile and distracted' Mexico and joining the U.S., adding, 'The Anglo-Saxon foot is already on its borders. Already the advance guard of the irresistible army of Anglo-Saxon emigration has begun to pour down upon it, armed with the plough and the rifle.' This is the heritage the Trump administration thinks is worth promoting. Administration officials act shocked and offended when critics accuse them of racism, but the Trump base knows exactly what's going on. 'This is our country, and we can't let the radical left make us ashamed of our heritage,' one X user commented on the 'American Progress' post. 'Manifest Destiny was an amazing thing!' 'It's time to re-conquer the land,' another wrote. DHS seems to be vibing with the Heritage American movement, now bleeding into the conservative mainstream from its far-right beginnings. Its adherents maintain that Americans whose ancestors have been here for generations are more deserving of this nation's riches than those whose families came over within living memory. Our values, proponents say, shouldn't be based on antiquated concepts like liberty and equality but rather, the customs and traditions established by Anglo Protestants before mass immigration forever changed this country's demographics. In other words, if you're white, you're all right. If you're brown or anything else, you're probably not down. Our own vice president, JD Vance, is espousing this pendejada. In a speech to the Claremont Institute earlier this month, Vance outlined his vision of what an American is. 'America is not just an idea,' Vance told the crowd. 'We're a particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.' Weird — I learned in high school that people come here not because of how Americans live, but because they have the freedom to live however they want. 'If you stop importing millions of foreigners,' the vice president continued, 'you allow social cohesion to form naturally.' All those Southern and Eastern Europeans who came at the turn of the 20th century seem to have assimilated just fine, even as Appalachia's Scots-Irish — Vance's claimed ethnic affiliation — are, by his own admission, still a tribe apart after centuries of living here. Trump, Vance added, is 'ensur[ing] that the people we serve have a better life in the country their grandparents built.' I guess that excludes me, since my Mexican grandparents settled here in the autumn of their lives. The irony of elevating so-called Heritage Americans is that many in Trumpworld would seem to be excluded. First Lady Melania Trump was born in what's now Slovenia. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is the child of Cuban immigrants. Vance's wife's parents came here from India. The Jewish immigrant ancestor of Trump's deportation mastermind, Stephen Miller, wouldn't be allowed in these days, after arriving at Ellis Island from czarist Russia with $8 to his name. Even Gast and O'Sullivan wouldn't count as Heritage Americans by the strictest definition, since the former was Prussian and the latter was the son of Irish and English immigrants. But that's the evil genius of MAGA. Trump has proclaimed that he welcomes anyone, regardless of race, creed or sexual orientation (except for trans people), into his movement, as long as they're committed to owning the libs. Americans are so myopic about their own history, if not downright ignorant, that some minorities think they're being welcomed into the Heritage Americans fold by Vance and his ilk. No wonder a record number of voters of color, especially Latinos, jumped on the Trump train in 2024. 'American Progress' might as well replace red hats as the ultimate MAGA symbol. To them, it's not a shameful artifact; it's a road map for Americans hell-bent on turning back the clock to the era of eradication. Like I said, not a subtle message at all — if your eyes aren't shut.
NBC News
21 hours ago
- NBC News
Federal judge dismisses Trump administration's lawsuit against Chicago over its sanctuary city policies
A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit by the Trump administration that sought to block the enforcement of several "sanctuary policies" in Illinois that restricted the ability of local officials to aid federal immigration authorities in detainment operations. In a 64-page decision, District Court Judge Lindsay C. Jenkins, a Biden appointee, granted a motion by the state of Illinois to dismiss the case after determining the United States lacks standing to sue over the sanctuary policies. The judge noted in the ruling that Illinois' decision to enact the sanctuary laws are protected by the 10th amendment, which declares that any powers not specifically given to the federal government, or denied to the states, by the Constitution, are retained by the states. 'The Sanctuary Policies reflect Defendants' decision to not participate in enforcing civil immigration law—a decision protected by the Tenth Amendment and not preempted by the [Immigration and Nationality Act],' the judge wrote. 'Because the Tenth Amendment protects Defendants' Sanctuary Policies, those Policies cannot be found to discriminate against or regulate the federal government.' The federal judge wrote that granting the administration's request would create an "end-run around the Tenth Amendment." 'It would allow the federal government to commandeer States under the guise of intergovernmental immunity—the exact type of direct regulation of states barred by the Tenth Amendment.' Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker praised the dismissal, which he said will ensure state law enforcement is "not carrying out the Trump administration's unlawful policies or troubling tactics." "As state law allows, Illinois will assist the federal government when they follow the law and present warrants to hold violent criminals accountable. But what Illinois will not do is participate in the Trump administration's violations of the law and abuses of power," Pritzker said in a statement. The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Trump Justice Department sued the state of Illinois and Cook County, the home of Chicago, in February for policies it argued infringed on the ability of federal authorities to enforce immigration laws, the first lawsuit by the administration aimed specifically at targeting "sanctuary jurisdictions," a label applied to states, cities, counties or municipalities that establish laws to prevent or limit local officials from cooperating with federal immigration authorities. In the 22-page lawsuit, filed days after Attorney General Pam Bondi was confirmed by the Senate, the Justice Department sought to block state, city and county ordinances that prohibit local law enforcement from assisting the federal government with civil immigration enforcement absent a criminal warrant. Bondi said the policies "obstruct" the federal government. 'The challenged provisions of Illinois, Chicago, and Cook County law reflect their intentional effort to obstruct the Federal Government's enforcement of federal immigration law and to impede consultation and communication between federal, state, and local law enforcement officials that is necessary for federal officials to carry out federal immigration law and keep Americans safe,' the lawsuit indicates. The administration has taken similar action to target sanctuary jurisdictions across the country, including a lawsuit this week against New York City, which was described by the Justice Department as 'the vanguard of interfering with enforcing this country's immigration laws' in a complaint filed on Thursday. The administration filed a separate lawsuit targeting New York state in February over it's 'Green Light Law,' which enables undocumented immigrants to apply for noncommercial driver's licenses and bars state officials from turning over that data to federal immigration authorities. The Justice Department in June filed a complaint against Los Angeles for immigration policies it argued interfere and discriminate against federal immigration agents by treating them differently from other law enforcement agents in the state. The suit came as Trump administration officials increasingly sparred with California Democratic leaders after immigration detainment efforts in the state led to clashes between protesters and federal authorities, and resulted in the deployment of thousands of National Guard troops. In January, Trump signed an executive order directing Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to ensure sanctuary jurisdictions 'do not receive access to federal funds' and to consider pursuing criminal or civil penalties if localities 'interfere with the enforcement of Federal law.' A federal judge in April blocked the effort to withhold federal funds from sanctuary jurisdictions, finding that Trump's order violated the Constitution's separation of powers principles. That judge blocked an earlier effort by Trump in 2017.
