by Lauren McGaughy, The Texas Newsroom

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This article is co-published with The Texas Newsroom and The Texas Tribune as part of an initiative to report on how power is wielded in Texas.

Elon Musk’s team of Texas lobbyists during the 2025 legislative session did not rival those of huge energy and telecommunications companies, which typically employ dozens of people to represent them. But Musk and his companies still hired more lobbyists this year than any other since 2021, according to data from the Texas Ethics Commission.

Musk, the billionaire businessman behind carmaker Tesla and aerospace company SpaceX, influenced several new Texas laws this year. How his lobbyists came about these wins, however, is more of a mystery.

His lobbyists, who represented Tesla, SpaceX and the social media giant X Corp., spent tens of thousands of dollars on things like gifts and meals for Texas elected officials and others during the session, according to an analysis of state ethics data. In most cases, Texas transparency laws do not require lobbyists to disclose which politicians they wined and dined or on behalf of which clients.

The Texas Newsroom reached out to all 12 of Musk’s lobbyists registered with the state this session. Only one, Carrie Simmons, a lobbyist who counts Tesla among her clients, responded, but she declined to be interviewed. She said only Musk’s companies could comment on their work this session.

Emails sent to Musk’s companies and to Musk himself were not returned.

The Texas Newsroom was able to find hints of some of their actions in records obtained from Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and state Sen. Adam Hinojosa. Other documents detailing their deeper connections are hidden from disclosure by state laws.

Ethics experts said the responsibility to improve transparency lies with Texas lawmakers. State law provides a “base level of transparency” for the public on who lobbyists are and who they represent, said Andrew Cates, a former lobbyist who wrote a guide on state ethics rules.

“Beyond that, the Legislature simply has not prioritized enough transparency in how the dollars are actually being spent on legislators on a regular basis. But that’s not the lobby’s fault, it’s the Legislature’s,” Cates said.

Tom Forbes, president of the Professional Advocacy Association of Texas, a statewide lobbyist organization, said while lobbyists sometimes get a bad rap, they play a critical role for lawmakers trying to make decisions on complex policies. He told The Texas Newsroom that his group is “agnostic” about making reporting requirements more stringent but will follow any changes the state implements.

“Our association is going to comply with whatever law the Legislature passes,” Forbes said.

Who did Musk hire and who did they lobby?

Eight of Musk’s lobbyists worked for SpaceX, according to filings with the Ethics Commission. Tesla had four, one of whom also worked for X.

Musk’s lobbyists include former advisers and staffers for Gov. Greg Abbott, among them Mike Toomey and Reed Clay. Another lobbyist, Will McAdams, once sat on the Public Utility Commission of Texas, which regulates the state’s electric, telecommunications, and water and sewer utilities.

All but one lobbyist had other clients for whom they were also working, making it more difficult to track exactly how much spending went to further Musk’s agenda. Benjamin Lancaster, a former legislative staffer, was only on SpaceX’s payroll.

Lobbyists are not required to report their exact salaries, only a pay range. According to Ethics Commission data, Musk pledged to pay somewhere between about $400,000 to nearly $1 million in total to his lobbyists for their work this year. Half of them could rake in more than $110,000 each working for Musk’s companies.

Each month, lobbyists report their total spending. But state rules don’t require them to disclose who was on the receiving end unless the lobbyist shelled out more than $132.60 on one person in a single day. This includes food and beverages, transportation, lodging or entertainment. Taxes and tips are not counted. The disclosure threshold for gifts is $110.

Lobbyists also don’t need to disclose exactly who attended events to which all legislators were invited, like catered lunches for the entire Texas House of Representatives or happy hours hosted off-site.

In practice, these rules mean a lobbyist could buy the same elected official a steak dinner every night. As long as the daily cost stays under that amount, they don’t need to say who got the free meal.

Musk’s lobbyists spent more than $46,000 on food and drink alone for elected officials and their staff, family and guests this year, according to state ethics records. None of them detailed which elected officials may have been on the receiving end, implying all of their spending remained beneath the daily threshold.

Jim Clancy, the former chair of the Ethics Commission, said it’s common for multiple lobbyists to divide a single bill in order to stay below the reporting threshold.

“They have 15 different credit cards in the deal to make sure that it’s all below the limit,” Clancy told The Texas Newsroom. “The Legislature has to change it. And if they did, they wouldn’t get to eat for free.”

A slate of ethics bills, including several to require transparency into who funds mass text messages for political campaigns, failed to become law this year, according to The Texas Tribune. Meanwhile, legislators approved a new law that will reduce the fine for former lawmakers who engage in illegal lobbying activity.

What do other records show?

While lobbyists are not required to disclose which bills they discuss in private meetings with officials and their staff, they must note their position if they choose to testify on a piece of legislation. This is how The Texas Newsroom identified the 13 bills on which Musk’s lobbyists took a public stance.

The Texas Newsroom was able to glean some additional insight on lobbyist influence from records received through public information requests.

Calendars for Hinojosa, a newly elected South Texas Republican who authored multiple bills that would benefit SpaceX and other aerospace companies, showed he or his staff had meetings scheduled with lobbyists or representatives from Musk’s rocket company at least three times in two months. Emails showed Patrick penned a letter to the Federal Aviation Administration supporting SpaceX’s ability to increase the number of launches at its South Texas rocket site.

Patrick was also invited to take a tour of the Tesla Gigafactory outside Austin, these records showed, but it’s unclear if he went.

Neither Hinojosa nor Patrick responded to requests for an interview.

The Texas Senate declined to release other documents that could have shed light on how Musk’s companies interacted with elected officials. In denying their release, Senate Secretary Patsy Spaw said communications between state lawmakers and Texas residents are “confidential by law.”

The reason, she said, is “to ensure the right of citizens of the state to petition their state government without fear of harassment, retaliation or public ridicule.”

This could include emails with lobbyists.

Lauren McGaughy is a journalist with The Texas Newsroom, a collaboration among NPR and the public radio stations in Texas. She is based at KUT in Austin. Reach her at lmcgaughy@kut.org. Sign up for KUT newsletters.

This post was originally published on ProPublica.

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson was wrangling votes for a massive budget bill Wednesday when House Democratic leaders gathered their caucus on the U.S. Capitol steps.

Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and other lawmakers denounced provisions in the bill that would leave 12 million people uninsured while handing tax breaks to the wealthy. They have attempted to adopt a tough posture against the sweeping legislation and rebrand it as “One Big, Ugly Bill.”

One big thrust of the bill wasn’t mentioned, however: the $170 billion that Republicans want to use on mass deportation and border walls.

After taking a drubbing in the November election, Democratic leaders in Congress have been notably quiet about the bill’s efforts to turbocharge Trump’s immigration crackdown. That has frustrated some rank-and-file Democrats and advocates for immigrants, who say that whatever polling advantage Republicans had on the issue is dwindling as fast as ICE raids multiply.

“The election made them nervous on immigration, and they haven’t quite recovered yet,” said an Democratic immigration activist and former congressional staffer, who requested anonymity to speak frankly about party leadership. “We need more polling and research to show them, frankly, because it’s becoming extremely unpopular.”

The photo op on the House steps had something in common with Jeffries’s statement last month about the passage of the House version of the budget, as well as a press conference that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer gave Tuesday about the Senate version.

None of them mentioned immigration.

The leaders’ offices did not respond to requests for comment, but some political observers think the reason for the silence is clear enough. Many consultants believe that Democrats lost in November because President Donald Trump successfully controlled the narrative by demonizing immigrants.

In other contexts, especially when members of their caucuses have been personally threatened, congressional Democratic leaders have taken opportunities to speak out about immigration, like when Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., was handcuffed at a press conference held by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, or when first-term Rep. LaMonica McIver, D-New Jersey, was arrested outside an ICE jail.

During the budget bill fight, however, party leadership has focused their messaging on massive cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Affordable Care Act plans, and tax breaks for the uberwealthy.

From one perspective, the Democrats’ messaging appears to have worked. Polls show that the budget bill is generally unpopular with Americans.

Yet there are some Democrats who believe that party leaders have missed an opportunity.

“Have we talked about it enough? No. That’s the honest truth,” said Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill. “Part of the problem we have had about immigration is we don’t know how to talk about it. This is not about what you think about the border. Do you stand up for humanity or not?”

The White House still seems to believe that it has an advantage on the issue, as evidenced by Vice President JD Vance’s claims on social media this week that Medicaid cuts are “immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.”

 

Yet while polls have shown that immigration is a relatively good issue for Trump, that edge began to evaporate as his administration ramped up its immigration crackdown this spring. The shift has come as masked immigration officers throw people to the ground in videotaped encounters and the administration locks up more day laborers, farm workers, and line cooks who don’t have criminal records.

One Democratic pollster told The Intercept that he believes leadership is simply focusing on the most unpopular components of the bill, rather than actively avoiding immigration.

“If I was advising the Democrats, I would say first and foremost talk about the Medicaid cuts, because they are so deep,” said Matt Barreto, who worked for Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign last year and Joe Biden’s campaign in 2020.

Yet the issue is not as clear-cut of a win for Republicans as Vance seems to think it is, Barreto said.

“Yes, maybe he is attempting to pull the focus back to immigration, and if he does that, I think that’s problematic for the administration,” Barreto said. “Why do you think the hotel workers and owners are coming out and saying, ‘Please stop deporting our staff, our workers’?”

One immigration advocate said he understood why Democratic leaders have settled on their current message. Still, he said that even in the minority, Democratic members of Congress wield power to push back against the Trump administration by inspecting ICE facilities, speaking out for detained immigrants, and conducting oversight.

“It is understandable, the focus on other pieces in terms of Medicaid and these other issues that impact people across the board. But I will say, more generally, it is incredibly needed for members of Congress to be focused on what’s going on on immigration,” said Jesse Franzblau, the associate director of policy at the National Immigrant Justice Center.

Hours after the caucuswide press conference Wednesday, a smaller group of progressive Democrats held a media event of their own, along with advocates, attempting to spotlight the bill’s immigration provisions.

Rep. Veronica Escobar, a Democrat who represents a border district in El Paso, Texas, said there were far too many Americans who did not realize that the bill would dedicate $45 billion toward “supercharging” an immigration detention system dominated by for-profit companies.

“It is such an abomination that I think not enough people know about,” she said.

The post Trump’s Budget Bill Would Explode Funding for ICE. Top Democrats Aren’t Talking About It. appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has repeatedly claimed that the U.S. government deported a cannibal that “ate other people” and then, while on a flight from the U.S., became so “deranged” that he began to “eat himself.”

Noem first shared the dubious tale late last week during an interview with Fox News’s Jesse Watters. The Cabinet secretary said that a U.S. marshal “off-handedly” told her about a cannibal on a “planeload of illegals.” When Noem asked, “What do you mean he was a cannibal?” the marshal replied: “He started to eat his own arms.” 

Watters probed further. “Was this bad hombre handcuffed to something and he was trying to chew his arm off so he could escape, or was he just hungry?” he asked. “You know, what bothered me the most is that this U.S. Marshal just said it like it was normal,” Noem replied, adding, “He said he was literally eating his own arms. That is what he did. He called himself a cannibal and ate other people and ate himself that day.”

Noem repeated the story on Tuesday as she and President Donald Trump toured a migrant detention facility in the Florida Everglades, officially named “Alligator Alcatraz,” that will house up to 5,000 people and cost around $450 million a year to run.

“The other day, I was talking to some marshals that have been partnering with ICE,” she said, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “They said that they had detained a cannibal and put him on a plane to take him home, and while they had him in his seat, he started to eat himself and they had to get him off and get him medical attention.” 

As Trump nodded along, Noem continued: “These are the kind of deranged individuals that are on our streets in America, that we’re trying to target and get out of our country because they are so deranged they don’t belong here.”

Noem did not reply to repeated requests by The Intercept for further information about the alleged incident and the supposed cannibal immigrant.

Cannibals — real and imagined — have been the source of fear and lurid fascination for Westerners stretching back to at least the 15th century, when Christopher Columbus kicked off the colonization of the Americas. Panic over supposed subhuman, barbarous savages helped to justify all manner of racism, violence, exclusion, assimilation, territorial expansion, and conquest. These weaponized racial myths are baked into colonial rhetoric and foundational to Western bigotry.

Despite issuing an endless stream of sensational press releases about deportations and crimes by immigrants, ICE has not referenced the cannibal immigrant deportee mentioned by Noem in any of its reports. 

Requests for additional information sent to ICE and the Department of Homeland Security went unanswered.

Unhinged claims of cannibalism have become a theme in the Trump orbit.

In March 2024, tech billionaire and future Trump White House adviser Elon Musk and other right-wing pundits advanced claims of Haitians and Haitian immigrants as cannibals. Right-wing gadfly Ian Miles Cheong, posted on X about “cannibal gangs in Haiti who abduct and eat people,” adding: “Reminder that these people are now illegally entering the US en masse.” Musk also referred to “cannibal gangs” and amplified warnings about a possible invasion of the U.S. by them. When he was called out for smearing Haitians, Musk responded: “If wanting to screen immigrants for potential homicidal tendencies and cannibalism makes me ‘right wing,’ then I would gladly accept such a label!”

Marlene Daut, a Yale University professor of French and African diaspora studies, told NBC at the time that Western powers began spreading baseless tales of cannibalism in Haiti after the country’s slaves overthrew French colonizers in 1804. “It is very disturbing that Elon Musk would repeat these absurdities that do, indeed, have a long history,” she explained.

Later that same year, Trump repeated fictitious stories about Haitian immigrants eating pets in a small city in Ohio. “In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They are eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump said during a presidential debate. Musk and Trump’s vice presidential pick, JD Vance, also advanced the misinformation.

The QAnon conspiracy movement of Trump’s first term, which cast the president as a savior, also rested on outlandish theories of people-eating. In the QAnon view, Democratic politicians and celebrities — from Hillary Clinton to Oprah Winfrey — were Satan-worshipping, pedophile cannibals. “Well, I don’t know much about the movement other than I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate,” Trump said of QAnon back in 2020.

The fictional serial killer and cannibal Hannibal Lecter also seems to permanently live in Trump’s mind. During his most recent presidential campaign, Trump frequently mentioned the fictional character during rants about immigration at rallies. In his rambling, free-associative style, Trump connected Lecter with the imaginary threat of unspecified Latin American countries emptying their prisons and mental institutions and sending the inmates to the United States.

“People are pouring across the border now, disease-ridden people,” he told a crowd in Erie, Pennsylvania, in July 2023. “And I said it, I said it over and over: people from mental institutions, from insane asylums. That’s like ‘Silence of the Lambs’ stuff. But they’re coming into our country.”

Trump often added more, often confused and confusing, details, appearing to misremember the movie. “Silence of the Lamb! Has anyone ever seen ‘The Silence of the Lambs’? The late, great Hannibal Lecter is a wonderful man. He oftentimes would have a friend for dinner. Remember the last scene? Excuse me, I’m about to have a friend for dinner as this poor doctor walked by. I’m about to have a friend for dinner,” Trump rambled last May in Wildwood, New Jersey. “But Hannibal Lecter. Congratulations. The late, great Hannibal Lecter. We have people that are being released into our country that we don’t want in our country.”

In March, now in the White House, Trump continued to invoke Lecter’s name, claiming that Lecter was real, or rather that real-life Lecters had crossed the border, or that he had stopped them from crossing the border, or something. “They used to go crazy when I talked about — when I talk about Hannibal Lecter. The late great Hannibal Lecter, right? The fake news would say, ‘Why does he talk about that? He’s a fictional character.’ He’s not. We have many of them that came across the border. He’s actually not,” he said, before possibly referring to himself in the third person. “But when the people went to the voting booth, then we understood why he talked about that because they voted for us. They say, ‘We don’t want Hannibal Lecter in our country.’”

The Intercept could find no independent evidence of the self-cannibalizing immigrant cannibal referenced by Noem.

She has, however, been caught lying in the past. In her 2024 memoir, “No Going Back,” Noem described instances involving international leaders that were called into question, including meeting North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and canceling a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron. After the alleged incidents came under scrutiny, a Noem spokesperson referred to the claims as “two small errors” that would be “corrected.” (The book previously came to prominence for her account of her brazen killing of her own puppy, Cricket.)

Earlier this month, Noem was called out for lying about the Secret Service manhandling Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., while she was giving a press conference. “This man burst into the room, started lunging towards the podium, interrupting me and elevating his voice and was stopped. Did not identify himself,” Noem told Fox News, noting that “nobody knew who he was.” However, video footage clearly shows Padilla identifying himself before Secret Service agents force him out of the room, wrestle him to the ground, and handcuff him. In one of the videos, Padilla could be heard shouting: “I’m Sen. Alex Padilla. I have questions for the secretary.”

Noem also has a questionable record of financial truth-telling. While serving as governor of South Dakota, Noem received $80,000 from an anonymous donor but later failed to declare it, according to a new report by ProPublica. After becoming head of Homeland Security, she released a detailed accounting of her assets and sources of income from 2023 on but still failed to mention the money. Experts have called this a likely violation of federal ethics requirements.

Trump’s lies, for his part, are legion. The Washington Post counted more than 30,000 during his first term in office. The relentless dishonesty has continued during his second term.

In addition to his dehumanizing cannibalism rhetoric, the president also espouses discredited notions of genetic criminality. During last year’s presidential campaign, he said 13,000 “murderers” had crossed into the United States through an “open border.” He said that, for murderers, “it’s in their genes. And we’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

The “born criminal” theory, pioneered by Italian physician and criminologist Cesare Lombroso in the 1870s, was rooted in racism and cast Africans, Indigenous Americans, Roma, southern Italians, and others as “primitive” humans “not of our species but the species of bloodthirsty beasts.” The ideas, which eventually fell out of favor around the world, were embraced in eugenics-obsessed Nazi Germany.

Trump has long espoused the same line of thinking. “You have good genes, you know that, right?” Trump said during a 2020 campaign rally. “You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory,” he said.

The twin fantasies of criminal genetics and lurid cannibal stories, if one makes the mistake of believing them, can lead down some strange paths.

In 2017, the Daily Mirror reported that Trump could be related to Peter Stumpf, a 16th-century cannibal serial killer nicknamed the “Werewolf of Bedburg.”

Stumpf, a farmer in the city of Bedburg, near Cologne in what is now Germany, was convicted of murdering at least 13 children — including his own son — and two pregnant women before devouring parts of their corpses. He was executed in 1589, reportedly alongside his lover Katharina Trump, who was found guilty of aiding the killer cannibal.

The Stumpf story became infamous in 16th-century England thanks to a popular pamphlet — a precursor of the sensationalist British tabloids, like the Daily Mirror, that mix stories of celebrity affairs with headlines of decapitation threats, stabbings, and horrific accidents.

Kevin Pittle, an anthropologist at Biola University in Southern California, told the Daily Mirror that records were incomplete and inconclusive. “What I did stumble across, was people working on Donald Trump’s genealogy — and there were several Katharinas early on,” he said. “We’re investigating — is it possible that the Katharina Trump named in the werewolf narrative — is it the same Katharina Trump that Donald is descended from? There’s no way to support it at the moment,” Pittle admitted. “But is it entertaining to consider? Yes.”

The post Why Won’t ICE Comment on Kristi Noem’s Cannibal Stories? appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

by Lauren McGaughy, The Texas Newsroom

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This article is co-published with The Texas Newsroom and The Texas Tribune as part of an initiative to report on how power is wielded in Texas.

Elon Musk was pleading.

It was April 2013, and Musk stood at a podium in a small committee room in the basement of the Texas Capitol. The Tesla CEO asked the legislators gathered before him to change state law, allowing him to bypass the state’s powerful car dealership lobby and sell his electric vehicles directly to the public.

He painted a bleak picture of what could happen if they didn’t give him his way.

“We would, I’m afraid, we would fail,” Musk told the assembled representatives. “So for us, it’s a matter of life or death.”

Clad in a dark suit instead of his now ubiquitous black T-shirt and baseball hat, the younger Musk was unable to persuade lawmakers in Austin. That year, the bill he wanted to pass died.

More than a decade later, however, Musk’s fortunes inside the Texas Capitol have changed — dramatically.

Musk is now not only one of the richest people in the world, who, until recently, was a key member of President Donald Trump’s second administration, but he’s also become one of the most powerful business and political figures in the state.

During this year’s legislative session, Musk’s lobbyists and representatives publicly advocated for almost a dozen bills that would benefit his companies. The Texas Newsroom identified these priorities by searching legislative records for committee testimony and other evidence of his public stances.

Musk wanted legislators to pass new laws that would make it faster and easier for homeowners to install backup power generators, like the kind Tesla makes, on their properties. He wanted them to create new crimes so people who fly drones or interfere with operations at his rocket company SpaceX can be arrested. And he wanted to change who controlled the highway and public beach near SpaceX’s South Texas site so he can launch his rockets according to his timeline.

Musk got them all.

In a Capitol where the vast majority of bills fail to pass, all but three of Musk’s public priorities will become law. The two bills his lobbyists openly opposed are dead, including a measure that would have regulated autonomous vehicles.

Musk made gains even on bills he didn’t publicly endorse. Texas lawmakers followed the tech giant’s lead by rewriting the state’s corporate laws and creating a new office modeled after the Department of Government Efficiency, the controversial effort he led in the Trump administration to cut federal spending.

By all accounts, Musk’s influence was great enough that he did not have to formally address lawmakers in person this session to make the case for any of his priorities.

Critics said these new laws will hand Musk’s companies more cash, more power and more protection from scrutiny as his business footprint continues to expand across Texas.

“The real harm is the influence of a private company on the decisions made by government,” Cyrus Reed, the conservation director for the Sierra Club’s Lone Star Chapter, told The Texas Newsroom. The Sierra Club is part of a group suing the state over SpaceX’s activities in South Texas.

Musk and his representatives did not respond to requests for an interview. He recently ended his run with DOGE, and his relationship with Trump has increasingly frayed.

Contrary to his slash-and-burn tactics in Washington, D.C., where he bulldozed his way onto the scene after Trump’s reelection, Musk has played the long game to amass power in Texas. He still hasn’t succeeded in changing Texas law to allow for Tesla direct sales, but that hasn’t stopped him from steadily investing his personal and professional capital in the state over more than a decade. Most of his businesses, including the tunneling firm The Boring Company, social media giant X and Tesla, are now headquartered here. While it’s still based in California, SpaceX operates production, testing and launch sites across Texas.

Musk has also moved his personal home to the state, reportedly securing properties in the Austin area and South Texas.

In the Texas Capitol, Musk’s power is subtle but undeniable.

Calendars and emails obtained by The Texas Newsroom through public information requests show his company’s representatives met regularly with lawmakers backing his priority bills and invited Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick to tour SpaceX. Patrick, who leads the state Senate, also penned a letter to the Federal Aviation Administration supporting the rocket company’s request to increase its launches in South Texas.

Texas politics, with its long history of outsize characters, has never seen the likes of Musk, said Rice University political scientist Mark Jones.

“Even in the heyday of the [George W.] Bush era, you couldn’t find somebody who had such dramatic wealth as Musk, who also had the same level of access and business interests here in Texas,” Jones told The Texas Newsroom. “Today, Elon Musk is arguably the most powerful and influential private citizen in the country.”

A mural of Elon Musk in downtown Brownsville, Texas (Michael Gonzalez for KUT News) “It’s All to Help Elon”

When lawmakers convened their 2025 legislative session in January, one of Musk’s top priorities was quickly clear. He wanted more control over the area around SpaceX’s launch site in South Texas.

Known as Starbase, the massive rocket testing and launch facility has come to dominate the small rural area between Brownsville, on the border, and the Gulf of Mexico. It is the launch site for Starship, the rocket meant to eventually take humans to Mars and the heart of Musk’s mission to make humans a multiplanetary species. The FAA recently gave SpaceX permission to increase Starship launches fivefold.

Although SpaceX owns most of the land around Starbase, county officials retained the authority over access to the adjacent public beach, called Boca Chica. The county worked closely with SpaceX to ensure the area was cleared ahead of launches, but the company’s leaders did not have ultimate control over the process.

That changed this year. First, Musk decided to incorporate the launch site as its own city. That happened on May 3, when the few residents who live in the area — most of whom The Texas Newsroom determined work for SpaceX — voted to create the new city of Starbase.

Musk then wanted state lawmakers to hand the new city the power to close Boca Chica Beach and the adjoining public highway during the week, a change the county officials opposed.

State Sen. Adam Hinojosa, a newly elected Republican who represents the area, authored the legislation to shift control to Starbase. Dozens of SpaceX employees got involved in the effort, submitting pages of identical comments to lawmakers in support.

Democrats succeeded in killing Hinojosa’s bill, prompting local activists to celebrate. Their victory was short-lived. Late in the session, lawmakers decided instead to shift some of this power to the Texas Space Commission, which facilitates the state’s space exploration agenda.

The new law states that the commission’s board can close highways and gulf beaches with the approval of a local municipality, which, in this case, is Starbase. SpaceX retains a connection to the commission itself: Kathy Lueders, who confirmed that she left her job as Starbase general manager last month, still sits on the Space Commission board. She directed additional questions to the commission.

The Space Commission declined to answer questions on SpaceX’s potential future involvement with these discussions.

“The way I view it is SpaceX wanted a certain amount of power,” said Reed, with the Sierra Club. “And at the end of the day, they didn’t quite get it, but they got something pretty close.”

The bill passed along largely partisan lines. Republican state Rep. Greg Bonnen, who authored the bill, did not respond to a request for comment about the role Starbase may play now that it will become law.

Lawmakers passed several more bills to benefit spaceports, the sites where spacecraft launch, like SpaceX.

While Texas is home to multiple spaceports, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, SpaceX dwarfs the rest in size and scope of influence across the state and country, boasting large federal government contracts and a growing satellite industry.

Hinojosa was an author or sponsor on most of these bills; he did not respond to multiple requests for an interview or comment for this story.

Other than the beach closure legislation, many passed with the support of Democrats.

At SpaceX’s urging, Texas lawmakers passed a measure to ban drones over spaceports. They also added spaceports to the state’s “critical infrastructure” facilities, which already include airports and military bases. The law will make it a felony to intentionally damage or interrupt the operation of any site where a spacecraft is tested or launched. Similar critical infrastructure laws have been used in other states to arrest people protesting oil and gas pipeline projects.

Bekah Hinojosa with the South Texas Environmental Justice Network, a local activist group, told The Texas Newsroom the new critical infrastructure law will let Musk “militarize our Boca Chica Beach for his dangerous rocket testing endeavors.”

The Sierra Club and other groups from South Texas, including a local Indigenous tribe, are suing the state, arguing that closing Boca Chica violates an amendment to the Texas Constitution that protects access to public beaches.

The General Land Office, the main defendant in that suit, declined to comment. In court filings, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton argues the state can still regulate beach access for public safety reasons and that it cannot be sued in this case because it has immunity. The case is pending at the Texas Supreme Court.

A rally at Boca Chica Beach against the incorporation of Starbase on May 3 (Michael Gonzalez for KUT News)

Legislators also passed two more new laws that will shield companies like SpaceX from public scrutiny and legal challenges.

One will exempt certain military and aerospace issues from public meetings laws, allowing elected officials in some cases to discuss these topics behind closed doors. The proposal was so concerning to residents who live close to SpaceX’s facility near Waco, where locals say the company’s rocket testing has spooked livestock and damaged homes, that they submitted a dozen comments against it.

This law went into effect on May 15.

Another new law will make it harder for crew members and certain other employees to sue space flight companies. This, like most new legislation approved this session, will become law on Sept. 1.

SpaceX’s only significant public defeat during this year’s legislative session was the failure of a bill it supported to give spaceports a tax cut. The measure would have cost nearly $14.5 million over five years, according to an official estimate from the Legislative Budget Board.

Moriba Jah, a professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin, believes Texas is pandering to Musk.

“It’s all to help Elon,” said Jah, who added that his viewpoint is rooted in resisting policies that enable what he called “environmental plunder masked as ‘innovation.’” He has concerns that the state is investing in spaceports, most notably Musk’s, while carving out exceptions that prohibit public insight and input into what’s happening at those facilities.

“There’s this whole cloak of secrecy with whatever Elon is doing,” Jah said. “We will not and should not cease to launch satellites or explore space. But the way in which we do it matters a lot.”

“They Never Come Out of the Shadows”

This year, Tesla’s lobbyists publicly advocated against only two bills. Both died.

One was a GOP-authored proposal intended to create a buffer zone between homes and large-scale energy storage facilities like the kind Tesla sells.

The other bill would have imposed more regulations on the type of cars that Musk is rolling out as robotaxis in Texas, and would have required a public hearing if a collision involving an autonomous vehicle resulted in a fatality.

Bill author Rep. Terry Canales, an Edinburg Democrat, believes his legislation failed because it was not pro-industry enough.

“Tesla is the worst actor that I’ve ever dealt with in the Capitol. They’re subversive. They never come out of the shadows,” Canales told The Texas Newsroom. “Not only did I not hear from them, I didn’t expect to hear from them because that’s the way they operate.”

Lawmakers instead advanced a different bill, one with a lighter regulatory touch that was crafted with input from the autonomous vehicle industry.

It will require commercial operators, such as robotaxi and driverless big rig companies, to obtain authorization from the state. This approval can be revoked if the company’s vehicles endanger the public, including causing “serious bodily injury,” though it requires no public hearings in the case of a fatality, as Canales’ bill would have done. Autonomous vehicle companies will also have to develop plans for interacting with emergency responders.

Tesla took a neutral stance on the legislation. But the bill’s author, state Sen. Robert Nichols, R-Jacksonville, told The Texas Newsroom that Tesla’s team participated in work groups and stakeholder conversations with industry groups, trial lawyers and others.

Texas has been at the forefront of testing this technology for years, rolling out its first regulations in 2017. But with more autonomous vehicles hitting the streets, Nichols said it was time to clarify the rules and called his bill “a real opportunity here to actually improve safety.”

Nichols’ legislation initially died in the Texas House. But with less than a week before lawmakers packed up to go home, a House member added the entirety of Nichols’ bill as an amendment to another transportation bill, which will become law Sept. 1.

Tray Gober, a personal injury lawyer who handles vehicle crash cases in Austin, said it’s smart to get new regulations for autonomous vehicles on the books. But he worries that Texas is rushing to give its blessing to a technology that has not been fully tested.

“We’re not talking about rockets crashing into the ocean. We’re talking about cars crashing into other people,” he said, comparing Tesla to SpaceX. “There’s going to be people that are hurt during this process of improving these systems, and that’s unfortunate. I think it’s viewed as collateral damage by these companies.”

When asked about concerns that there could be fatalities as the number of driverless cars grows in Texas, Nichols said, “There probably will be. Eventually there will be. I would not doubt that.” But he pointed to studies showing autonomous vehicles are safer than human drivers.

“If you start looking at the breakdown of the fatalities on the roads and the crashes and the wrecks, what causes them? It’s not equipment failure. It’s driver distraction,” he told The Texas Newsroom.

Critics of these studies argue their scope is too narrow to make conclusions about the safety of self-driving technology. Citing safety concerns, some local lawmakers asked Tesla’s robotaxi rollout in Austin to be delayed. The company continued with the launch but with human monitors in the passenger seats.

Many Democrats opposed Nichols’ proposal. But at least three other bills affecting Tesla got bipartisan support.

At times, the Sierra Club was fighting against Musk’s SpaceX bills while working with his Tesla lobbyists on clean energy legislation, said Reed, the club’s conservation director. For example, Tesla and the Sierra Club both supported legislation to create new fire standards for battery energy storage facilities and address the environmental and financial challenges associated with decommissioning them.

Tesla also backed a bill that had bipartisan support to make it easier for homeowners to install backup power generators, such as the company’s Powerwall.

Reed said Musk’s shift to the right has created interesting bedfellows, sometimes making it easier for Republicans to back some of the energy policies more traditionally associated with progressives.

He remarked, “It’s an interesting time in our country, right?”

Musk’s Indirect Influence

A Tesla showroom in Austin on March 24 (Michael Minasi/KUT News)

For all the bills Musk pushed to see pass, he also indirectly influenced the creation of new laws on which he did not take a public stance.

Texas lawmakers created the state’s own DOGE office housed under the governor, the name an homage to Musk’s controversial federal cost-slashing effort in Washington, D.C.

Musk himself took no public role in creating the new office. But at a signing ceremony for the bill, Gov. Greg Abbott explained he was the inspiration.

Texas legislators also rewrote the state’s corporate laws after Musk raised concerns about business codes in other states. Authored by Republican state Sen. Bryan Hughes, the rewrite shields business leaders from lawsuits and establishes thresholds for the types of legal challenges shareholders can file.

Musk and his lobbyists never came out in support of the bill, but he has long complained that states needed to shore up protections for CEOs and other business leaders.

Musk began crusading on the issue after his $55 billion compensation package at Tesla was challenged in Delaware’s business courts. Musk moved many of his businesses elsewhere, including Texas, and publicly urged other companies to “get the hell out of Delaware.”

The legislation written in response was dubbed the “DExit” bill.

“Texas is much better than Delaware,” Musk posted on X in early April, just days after the bill passed the state Senate. “If Delaware doesn’t reform, it will lose all its corporate business.”

Last year, a Delaware judge ruled Musk’s pay package violated his fiduciary duties to the company’s stockholders. He won most of it back in a shareholder vote, but the judge again rejected his pay package in December.

In an interview, Hughes told The Texas Newsroom he heard input from different groups in crafting the Texas legislation and could not remember whether Musk’s companies were involved.

Abbott signed the DExit bill and a handful of other business bills into law on May 14. Standing behind him at a public ceremony marking the occasion were Hughes and a large group of business representatives.

Standing behind Hughes was a representative from Tesla.

Lauren McGaughy is a journalist with The Texas Newsroom, a collaboration among NPR and the public radio stations in Texas. She is based at KUT News in Austin. Reach her at lmcgaughy@kut.org. Sign up for KUT newsletters.

This post was originally published on ProPublica.

After three days of nonstop negotiations on Capitol Hill, the Senate voted 51-50 on Tuesday to pass a domestic policy bill that accomplishes much of President Donald Trump’s first-year agenda. Vice President J.D. Vance cast the tie-breaking vote. Three Republicans — Rand Paul from Kentucky, Thom Tillis from North Carolina, and Susan Collins from Maine — voted against the package, while Democrats were united in opposition.

If approved by the House of Representatives and signed by Trump, the legislation will make the deepest cuts to America’s social safety net in decades and unravel the country’s only existing federal plan to diminish the greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change. 

“This sweeping legislation is the most anti-environmental bill of all time and will do extreme harm to our communities, our families, our climate, and our public lands,” the League of Conservation Voters, an environmental advocacy group, said in a statement. 

The estimated cost of the GOP’s top policy priority — extending tax cuts from 2017 — is more than $4 trillion over 10 years. In order to offset those tax cuts, Senate Republicans sought to slash spending on green energy approved by Democrats during former president Joe Biden’s term, among other programs such as food stamps and Medicaid. The clean energy subsidies formed the heart of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, the largest climate spending bill in American history.

The legislation now goes back to the House of Representatives, which passed a less expensive version of the megabill in May, before it goes to Trump’s desk for his signature. The House legislation would have sunsetted the IRA’s investment and production tax credits for wind and solar power within 60 days of the bill’s enactment, an aggressive timeline that renewable energy groups said would weaken their their industry and disincentivize new renewable projects. Fears over regulatory changes have already led to the cancellation of $15.5 billion in clean energy investments this year. 

The Senate legislation is only marginally less punitive to the clean energy industry. Wind and solar projects that either start construction before July 2026 or are placed in service by 2027 would be able to take full advantage of existing tax credits. Under the IRA, those credits were set to continue in some form until the country achieved substantial emissions reductions.

An earlier version of the Senate bill also included an extra “excise” tax on wind and solar, which an analysis by the American Clean Power Association showed would increase consumer energy prices up to 10 percent and cost clean energy businesses as much as $7 billion by 2036. That tax was removed from the legislation before the final vote on Tuesday. Conservative lawmakers disclaimed responsibility for the tax’s initial inclusion in the text. “I don’t know where it came from,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican from South Carolina, told NBC. 

The earlier House bill placed strict limits on using Chinese components in renewable energy projects. The Senate version eased that proposal to include fewer penalties for moderate use of China-linked hardware. But Senate Republicans sped up the House’s proposed phaseout for consumer tax credits for new and previously owned electric vehicles by two months, from the end of this year to September 30. Consumers previously had until 2032 to take advantage of them. 

The bill does not include the massive and controversial sell-off of public lands championed by Senator Mike Lee, from Utah, who withdrew that amendment after facing backlash in his state and across the country. 

The Senate-approved phaseout of tax credits for wind and solar comes at a time when demand for industrial power is skyrocketing in the U.S. as energy-hungry data centers and clean technology factories crop up across the country. “The intentional effort to undermine the fastest-growing sources of electric power will lead to increased energy bills, decreased grid reliability, and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs,” the American Clean Power Association, a clean energy lobbying group, said in a statement. “We can’t afford to pick winners and losers when it comes to reliable, American-made energy.” 

The changes made by the Senate during a 24-hour period of intense debate could set up many more hours of debate in the lower congressional chamber. The House squeaked through its version of the bill by striking a balance between moderate Republicans from blue states like California and New York who wanted higher caps on state and local income tax deductions and fiscal hawks from deep-red states who wanted deeper spending cuts. The Senate’s version is about $800 billion more expensive, an increase that could tee up a fight over clean energy tax credit timelines and more. Chip Roy, Republican lawmaker from Texas who wants deeper cuts to green spending, already called it “a deal-killer of an already bad deal.”

Some Republican senators think that’s a good thing. 

Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska who sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune this April asking him to preserve the clean energy tax credits, was the last holdout in the Senate after Paul, Tillis, and Collins made it clear they were going to vote against the Senate bill. Despite the bill’s consequences for clean energy, Murkowski agreed to support the bill after obtaining a set of carveouts for her state on food stamp work requirements and healthcare cuts. 

After voting for the bill, Murkowski expressed misgivings about its contents. “My hope is that the House is going to look at this and recognize that we’re not there yet,” she told reporters.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Senate Republicans just voted to dismantle America’s only climate plan on Jul 1, 2025.

This post was originally published on Grist.

President Donald Trump took to social media Monday night to promote a limited edition, self-branded fragrance in a bottle topped with a gold statuette of a generic man in a suit, called “Victory 45-47.” 

“For Patriots who never back down, like President Trump. This scent is your rallying cry in a bottle,” reads the advertising copy for both a men’s cologne and a women’s perfume sold under the same name.

Trump launched the scents with an announcement on Truth Social, wedged between posts boasting about U.S. tariff revenue and touting the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Hours later, Trump posted: “We brought respect and dignity back.”

“Trump Fragrances are here. They’re called ‘Victory 45-47’ because they’re all about Winning, Strength, and Success,” wrote the president. “Get yourself a bottle, and don’t forget to get one for your loved ones too. Enjoy, have fun, and keep winning!”

Victory 45-47 costs a whopping $249 for 3.3 fluid ounces. Roughly the same quantity of Chanel No. 5 retails for $176.

Last month, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said it was “absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency.”

Trump’s net worth was estimated at $5.1 billion in March, a full $1.2 billion more than the year before, according to Forbes. It is the highest Trump’s net worth has ever been in the magazine’s rankings. “It’s quite a comeback for the former president, who more than doubled his net worth in a year,” wrote Forbes senior editor Dan Alexander in March. “It pays to be king.” (Just recently, Trump attacked Forbes and Alexander in a Truth Social post.)

 

The first convicted felon to serve as president, Trump has sidelined past notions of propriety, busted all previous ethical boundaries, and annihilated remaining norms surrounding graft. After being twice impeached during his first term, the president has dismantled any viable machinery of accountability during his second stint in the White House. Trump has fired government inspectors general, installed loyalists at the Justice Department and FBI, and is protected from legislative oversight and additional impeachments by a Republican-controlled Congress.

The Intercept has documented Trump and his family’s efforts to monetize the presidency via meme coins and cryptocurrency. They and their business partners have collected at least $320 million in fees from $TRUMP crypto.

To mark the 100th day of Trump’s second term, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., read 100 reports of graft into the congressional record on April 29. “Trump and his administration have paved the way for the president, his top officials, and his billionaire buddies to personally feed at the trough of government corruption,” she said.

Trump reported income of more than $630 million last year, including $57 million from cryptocurrency sales.

Trump has assets in excess of $1.6 billion across a business empire that includes real estate holdings, hotels, golf courses, as well as investment accounts and numerous Trump-branded efforts, according to a 234-page financial disclosure released by the White House earlier this month.

But every little bit counts: Trump also made $2.5 million from Trump sneakers and perfumes in 2024.

Trump previously hawked a “Fight, Fight, Fight” line of fragrances that harken back to the 2024 attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania. Those scents sell for $199 a bottle.

The new Trump perfume and cologne are also available through GetTrumpSneakers.com. A webpage touting Victory 45-47 perfume refers to it as “rare, exclusive, collectible footwear.”

“45Footwear uses Donald J. Trump’s name, likeness and image under paid license from CIC Ventures LLC,” according to the website’s fine print, which also notes “these are only official Golf Shoes, Sneakers & Fragrances by President Trump!” 45Footwear, LLC is “not owned, managed or controlled” by the president, the Trump Organization, or CIC but says that it pays CIC for a branding deal. Trump himself is the manager, president, secretary, and treasurer of CIC Ventures, according to his recent financial disclosure, which valued the firm at somewhere between $1 million and $5 million. Wyoming, where 45Footwear is incorporated, does not require businesses to publicly disclose their owners’ names.

“Trump Fragrances are not designed, manufactured, distributed or sold by Donald J. Trump, The Trump Organization or any of their respective affiliates or principals,” the Trump Fragrance website says, despite this close connection.

The scents and sneakers are part of numerous merchandise, retail sales, and licensing deals worth more than $8 million, which also include products from guitars to watches.

Not all Trump-branded products can deliver a rallying cry in a bottle, or even Trump’s full name. Tim Petit, a Rhode Island man, bought a $640 “Inauguration First Lady” pink-dialed timepiece for his wife, who cried when her husband gave her a watch that instead said “RUMP.” “I’m very disappointed,” he told his local NBC affiliate. “I want it to be a special thing for her. And we had expected that it would have the integrity of the president of the United States and good follow-through.” 

Trump has recently addressed the problem of corruption head-on by encouraging other nations to turn a blind eye to possible wrongdoing by their elected leaders.

Last weekend, Trump demanded Israeli prosecutors drop the graft charges against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is on trial for allegedly accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars of luxury goods in exchange for political favors and attempting to negotiate for more favorable coverage from Israeli media outlets. “Bibi Netanyahu’s trial should be CANCELLED, IMMEDIATELY, or a Pardon given to a Great Hero, who has done so much for the State,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “It was the United States of America that saved Israel, and now it is going to be the United States of America that saves Bibi Netanyahu. THIS TRAVESTY OF ‘JUSTICE’ CAN NOT BE ALLOWED!”

The post The Whiff of Corruption: Trump’s New Perfume Has Strong Notes of Graft appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.