This blog on Texas education contains posts on higher education, as well as preK-12 policy accountability, testing, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues at both the state and national level. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in Texas.
Texas at a Crossroads: Gina Hinojosa, the Public Good, and the Future of Democracy
by
Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
October 9, 2026
Texas faces a consequential choice about its future. At stake is more than who occupies the governor’s office. The larger question is what kind of state we want to become—and whether our public institutions will protect the rights of Texans, serve the public good, and expand opportunities for generations to come.
State Representative Gina Hinojosa has placed public education at the center of her campaign for governor. Her proposals include increasing support for teachers and public schools, restoring local control, reforming the state's accountability system, and redirecting resources from administrative expenditures into classrooms. Her record and proposals invite serious consideration of what meaningful public education reform should entail.
For those of us who have devoted our lives to educational equity, civil rights, and democratic participation, this election raises fundamental questions about our collective future. Will Texas invest in its children and educators? Will it honor the knowledge, histories, and voices of its diverse communities? And will its leaders recognize that strong public schools and universities are not simply public expenditures, but essential institutions of democratic life?
These are questions every Texan deserves to consider as we approach the November election. I encourage readers to learn more about Hinojosa's education priorities through her Teach the Vote Candidate Questionnaire.
In the video below, I share my own perspective on Gina Hinojosa's candidacy for governor and why voting her in holds great promise for the future of our democracy.
'Let My People Work': A Cry for Justice Amid ICE Violence
by
Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
October 9, 2026
We should all be outraged.
The speaker in the Instagram video shared here, which has gone viral, is Gabriel Rosales, Texas State Director of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). Founded in 1929, LULAC is the nation’s oldest and largest Latino civil rights organization and has played a historic role, alongside organizations such as the NAACP, in the long struggle for civil and constitutional rights.
Gabriel gives voice to much of what I have been feeling after a disturbing series of shootings involving ICE officers—including the recent shooting of Wilber Rafael Garces Perez in Austin and the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston.
Garces Perez’s attorneys say he was working as a DoorDash driver when he was shot.
In the Houston case, Salgado Araujo’s family and witnesses have disputed the federal government’s account of the encounter and described him as a longtime worker seeking laborers that morning. These cases remain contested in important respects, which is precisely why transparency, independent investigation, and public accountability are so necessary.
Gabriel’s outrage and moral clarity brought tears to my eyes—tears of rage, but also a profound sense that we need more of our leaders willing to speak with this kind of urgency. After hearing his remarks, I called him and told him that he sounded like Moses when he exclaimed first in Spanish and then in English:
“¡Deja mi gente trabajar!”
“Let my people work!”
There is something elemental in that plea. Let people work. Let families live without terror. Let children go to school without fearing that a parent might not be there when they come home. And when the government uses potentially lethal force, let there be transparency and accountability.
Relatedly, I recently came across the national ICE tracker called The Trace. As of today, it documents 100 incidents, including 9 deaths and 16 injuries.
Whatever our individual views on immigration policy, figures like these demand our attention.
And then, this very morning, I learned about 28-year-old Oscar Belgal in New York City.
According to The Washington Post, federal immigration officers approached Belgal during a targeted enforcement operation in Manhattan’s Marble Hill neighborhood—on the border of Manhattan and the Bronx—at approximately 4 p.m., just as schools were letting out and the street was crowded with children and families. An ICE officer fired at least seven rounds at Belgal’s vehicle, striking him in the neck. His five-year-old son was in the back seat and, thankfully, was not physically injured.
I can only imagine the trauma this child experienced. He has become, in a deeply painful way, a symbol of the human cost borne by children and families when immigration enforcement is carried out with such force and fear. It is cruel, brutal, and truly appalling.
Federal officials say Belgal drove his vehicle toward officers and government vehicles and that the officers believed lives were in danger. New York officials have raised serious questions about the tactics used in the operation and have called for the release of body-camera footage. Those competing accounts make independent scrutiny all the more important.
Again, whatever one’s position on immigration policy, I think most of us would agree that the firing of at least seven shots into a vehicle containing a child, on a crowded city street as school was letting out, demands the highest level of public scrutiny and accountability.
The Washington Post further reports that this was the third officer-involved shooting since July. That should concern all of us.
We should be asking not only what happened in this particular encounter, but larger questions as well: What kind of immigration-enforcement system are we building? What rules govern the use of deadly force? Who investigates when that force is used? Who is accountable when policies or procedures are violated? And are fear, masked enforcement operations, armed confrontations, and the use of potentially lethal force becoming normalized in our communities?
These are not abstract questions. They concern the power of the state and the human beings—including children—who may find themselves in its path.
Per yesterday evening’s blog (Valenzuela, 2026), The controversy surrounding Ben Shapiro’s October 7th appearance yesterday at the University of Texas at Austin raises questions that go well beyond the speaker himself. Moreover, from Faith Bugenhagen's piece in today's American Statesman posted below, matters have gotten worse.
Turning Point USA denied press credentials to the Austin American-Statesman, reportedly removed a Texas Monthly reporter who had entered with a general admission ticket, and nevertheless characterized the gathering as a “private event” open to the public.
That contradiction becomes still more troubling given reports that the UT president’s office helped secure the LBJ Auditorium and was listed in connection with the reservation. At a public university, an event cannot simply become “private” when scrutiny arrives at the door. What makes this episode especially disgraceful is the appearance of unequal institutional treatment.
Only days earlier, the University Democrats struggled to secure a larger venuefor Hasan Piker despite enormous student demand with approximately 3,000 RSVPs (Chowdhary, 2006).
By contrast, the Shapiro event proceeded in a nearly full 967-seat auditorium with apparent assistance from university leadership.
As I noted in yesterday’s blog (Valenzuela, 2026), the issue is not whether Shapiro should have been allowed to speak. Of course he should have been. So should Piker. The more fundamental question is whether UT is exercising procedural fairness by applying the same rules, providing comparable access to institutional resources, and extending the same level of administrative support across political viewpoints.
The exclusion of journalists makes this matter considerably more serious because it implicates one of the foundational protections of our constitutional democracy. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects not only freedom of speech, but also freedom of the press. Those freedoms are closely related for good reason: public debate cannot remain genuinely free when the institutions exercising public power can operate beyond independent scrutiny.
This should make us all deeply alarmed. A public university—an institution of the state that regularly invokes free speech, viewpoint diversity, and institutional neutrality—should be especially vigilant about circumstances in which professional journalists are barred or removed from a politically charged event taking place in a public university facility.
Whatever the precise legal status of this particular event and situation, the constitutional principle could hardly be more important: a free press exists in part so that institutions of power can be observed, questioned, and held to account. Universities, of all places, should be defending that democratic function rather than creating conditions that appear to impede it.
UT therefore owes the public a clear explanation of who sponsored this event, what university resources were used, what authority Turning Point USA exercised over access to a university facility, what role university personnel or security played in excluding journalists, and whether those same arrangements would be extended to organizations and speakers elsewhere on the political spectrum.
Institutional neutrality means little if it exists only in rhetoric while institutional power is exercised unevenly in practice. The First Amendment is not merely an abstraction to be celebrated when convenient; its protections of speech and a free press are part of the democratic infrastructure that allows us to scrutinize public institutions themselves. Neutrality must therefore be demonstrated through consistent rules, transparent procedures, equal treatment, and openness to scrutiny. Without these things, what is being called neutrality begins to look much more like viewpoint management. Read on.
The University of Texas chapter of Turning Point USA hosted conservative commentator Ben Shapiro before a nearly full auditorium Wednesday night, but the event unfolded under restrictive media policies that drew criticism from journalists.
The event, part of TPUSA’s “America: Love It or Leave It Tour,” — which the group describes as a nationwide effort to promote patriotism, was held at UT’s Lady Bird Johnson Auditorium. The 967-seat auditorium was nearly at capacity, with only a handful of seats remaining open.
Although the event was open to the public, with general admission tickets available to nonstudents and nonfaculty members, Turning Point USA denied the Austin American-Statesman press credentials, instructed a reporter that they could not operate in a reporting capacity and blocked a Texas Monthly reporter from entering with a general admission ticket after, the reporter said, event staff circulated his photo.
After aStatesman reporter entered the auditorium, Sha Cathey, TPUSA — the national organization, not university chapter — Media’s public relations manager, said the organization would not allow the newsroom to operate as media while attending with a general admission ticket. Cathey described the event as a private event that wasopen to the public and said TPUSA had the right to decide which outlets received press credentials.
Cathey declined to identify the organizations that received credentials. Roughly five members of the media sat in a designated press section, and another event worker told the Statesman they were independent media. Cathey referred questions about whether The Daily Wire was the only approved media outlet to TPUSA’s press office. Shapiro is the co-founder of The Daily Wire.
On Thursday, TPUSA spokesperson reaffirmed that the Statesman’s press credential for what they described as “last night’s private TPUSA event” was not approved.
“You were admitted as a general attendee and were advised that you were attending in that capacity only,” the spokesperson said in a written statement.
The spokesperson said that The Daily Wire — Shapiro’s media organization — did not apply for a press credential or attend as press. The spokesperson declined to provide a list of credentialed media organizations in attendance.
Texas Monthly reporterRob Downen posted on X that he was removed from the eventafter entering with a general admission ticket.
“I was also removed from the event as soon as I got through security,” Downen wrote. “I had a general admission ticket but was told by security that TPUSA had passed around a photo of me in order to kick me out.”
Earlier Wednesday, the Statesman reported that UT president’s office helped reserve LBJ Auditorium.
The reservation renewed criticism from some students and faculty members who haveargued university leadership has exercised increasing influence over political events — while favoring conservative speakers — despite the university’s commitment to institutional neutrality.
Those concerns intensified last monthafter the University Democrats said the group faced difficulties securing a venue for a late September event withleft-wing Twitch streamer Hasan Piker. The group said more than 2,400 students RSVP’d or joined the waitlist for the event before being told its original location raised space, safety and capacity concerns. After searching unsuccessfully for another venue to accomodate those concerns, the group hosted Piker at the originally planned venue, the William C. Powers Auditorium.
The department sponsor for the Shapiroevent was listed as the UT president’s office and LBJ Library, according to an online reservations document obtained by the Statesman.
Shapiro focuses on Oct. 7, Piker and Texas politics
Gavin Webster, UT TPUSA president, introduced Shapiro on Wednesday night, saying Piker should “take notes,” referring to the larger crowd size at Shapiro’s talk.
Shapiro opened his addressby marking the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel before discussing the Israel-Hamas war, Texas politics and Piker. He called the streamer “one of the worst human beings in America.”
Shapiro then said that despite his criticism, Piker has First Amendment rights and a public university should not discriminate against speakers based on their views.
“They shouldn’t do that. That’s all,” Shapiro said. “I didn’t say he should be suppressed. I said he’s an a--hole. It turns out lots of people think I’m an a--hole too, and you know what? I don’t care. Does he have a right to speak anywhere that I have a right to speak in America in a public venue? Of course he does.”
Shapiro also criticized Democratic U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico.
“[Talarico], like most Democrats at this point, despises meritocracy and believes it does not exist,” Shapiro said. “His entire worldview is predicated on the idea that government is designed to achieve equal outcomes, and that the rules are rigged against the common American.”
During a question-and-answer session of the programming, tensions rose when one audience member argued that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and challenged Shapiro to agree. Audience members heckled the woman, while Shapiro rejected the characterization.
Gill emphasizes immigration
The program also featured RepublicanU.S. Rep. Brandon Gill and Jeff Metcalf, father of Austin Metcalf, the 17-year-old killed during a confrontation at a Frisco track meet last year.
Gill focused his remarks on immigration, calling it the country’s most important issue, arguing that immigration policy should primarily benefit Americans.
He said immigrants should assimilate culturally and not become dependent on public assistance. Gill also argued that some cultural traditions are incompatible with American values, specifically referencing political Islam.
“We are conservative because we want to conserve the America that our parents and our grandparents got to grow up in,” Gill said.
Faith Bugenhagen is a breaking and trending reporter for the Austin American-Statesman. Before coming to Austin, Faith spent over 3 years covering the Houston area for Houston Press and Chron, writing about all things news, particularly, government and politics. She is a native Texan with a 3-year stint in Boston, Massachusetts, where she attended Emerson College.
Neutrality on Shaky Ground: Who Gets to Speak at UT?
by
Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
October 7, 2026
I don't know about you, but I'm definitely scratching my head.
Lily Kepner’s reporting earlier today lays bare a troubling pattern at UT Austin: shifting explanations, changing sponsorship labels, unusual intervention by university officials, and a venue policy that seems to be interpreted differently depending on who is speaking. The issue is not whether Ben Shapiro should be allowed to speak. Of course he should. The issue is whether access, institutional assistance, security arrangements, and venue rules are being applied consistently across viewpoints.
When one student group struggles to secure space, pays extraordinary security costs, and is told that political events require layers of approval, while another appears to receive unusual institutional help and a pathway into a venue whose own policy restricts political activity, the university invites questions about selective enforcement and institutional favoritism.
What makes this especially concerning is the lack of transparency. A reservation initially identifying the president’s office and LBJ Library as sponsors is changed after press inquiries; the library says it was listed by mistake; university explanations about who consulted whom are subsequently revised. None of this inspires confidence in a supposedly neutral process.
"Sneakiness" is perhaps too informal a word for institutional practice, but it captures the appearance created when decisions are made opaquely, records change after scrutiny, and responsibility becomes difficult to locate.
There is also a deeper irony here. Those who frequently invoke “viewpoint diversity” and “free speech” too often seem interested not in a genuinely pluralistic university, but in elevating particular perspectives while constraining others. A university committed to intellectual freedom cannot operate this way. Viewpoint diversity cannot mean creating privileged pathways for favored speakers while putting procedural, financial, or administrative obstacles in the way of others. Nor can institutional neutrality mean neutrality in rhetoric but selectivity in practice.
Kepner’s piece therefore raises questions that go well beyond a single event:
Who gets institutional help?
Who bears the costs of security?
Who decides what counts as “controversial”?
When are venue rules enforced, and when are they relaxed?
And who gets to decide which voices belong at the center of university life and which must struggle simply to be heard?
If UT is serious about institutional neutrality, then its policies should be transparent, consistent, and viewpoint-neutral in practice—not merely on paper. Otherwise, “neutrality” risks becoming less a principle than a mechanism through which power quietly decides whose speech receives institutional support.
The stakes for students are substantial. Students are learning not only from what universities teach in classrooms, but from how institutions exercise power in practice. When access to space, security, sponsorship, and administrative support appears to vary by political viewpoint, students receive a troubling lesson about whose ideas are institutionally welcomed and whose are treated as burdensome, risky, or suspect. It begs the question of who is an institutional insider and who are the outsiders?
Perhaps this has always been true to some degree, but the grotesqueness of the present circumstances only heightens our expectations for procedural fairness, transparency, and institutional consistency. Precisely because the stakes are so high, universities should be held to a higher standard—not a lower one.
Taxpayers, are you listening? You're/we're paying for this.
When access to space, security, sponsorship, and administrative support appears to depend on political alignment—if not entitlement altogether—the distinction between institutional insiders and outsiders becomes impossible to ignore.
To wit, Mexican American Studies and African and African Diaspora Studies did not arise simply to add “diversity” to an otherwise "complete" curriculum. They emerged because students, faculty, and communities challenged universities whose curricula, knowledge structures, and institutional priorities had systematically marginalized or excluded the histories, experiences, and intellectual traditions of Black and Mexican American communities.
I underscore "systematically," because it happens over and over and over again. And then over, and over, and over again.
The Center for Mexican American Studies at UT grew directly out of Chicana and Chicano student activism demanding equitable representation and resources. The students simply got tired of being stigmatized. Our artists, writers, civil rights organizations, and communities, too.
All of this affects more than campus programming; it shapes students’ trust in the university, their willingness to organize, speak, dissent, and participate in public life. If higher education is to prepare students for democratic citizenship, then procedural fairness, transparency, and equal access cannot be secondary concerns. They are themselves part of the education.
Thanks to Lily Kepner for shining a light on all of this.
US conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro speaks during Turning Point's annual AmericaFest conference in remembrance of late right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk, in Phoenix, Arizona on December 18, 2025. (Photo by Olivier Touron / AFP via Getty Images)OLIVIER TOURON/AFP via Getty Images
On Wednesday evening, Shapiro — who co-founded The Daily Wire and has been criticized for his comments on race and gender — will address the 967-seat auditorium in the university’s public affairs school. The event is part of Turning Point USA’s “America: Love it or Leave it” tour — a fall series at universities across the country focused on promoting patriotism.
As of Tuesday afternoon, the department sponsor for the event was listed as the UT president’s office and LBJ Library, according to an online reservations document obtained by the Austin American-Statesman. After the Statesman asked UT about the reservation, the document was changed on Wednesday to identify the event as “Turning Point USA — Ben Shapiro” and the sponsor as the Thompson Conference Center, which manages the auditorium.
Casey Murphy, a spokesperson for the LBJ Library, said the library must have been listed accidentally, as “neither the LBJ Library nor the LBJ Foundation are hosting or sponsoring the event.”
The Texas Student Experience office, which oversees student groups, consulted events staff who work with the president’s office about where the Shapiro talk should be located because of security concerns and a large anticipated crowd size, UT spokesperson Mike Rosen said. The staff has experience hosting high-security events, such as an April talk by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Rosen initially said the Texas Student Experience office consulted with events staff in the president's office but later clarified that it consulted with staff who used to be in the president's office, but no longer report to the president.
Last September, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was assassinated at a campus event in Utah, sparking fear and security concerns over chapter events nationwide.
“Safety is always our highest priority," Rosen said. "Turning Point obviously has heightened safety concerns. Staff who normally work with the student organizations hosting guest speakers rightfully sought the advice and assistance of events staff who have expertise with venue selection."
The University of Texas System Board of Regents, which has ultimate authority over the venue, has a policy stating programs in the LBJ auditorium “must be educational in content, non-profit, and free of political, religious, or sales activity.” All student events held at the venue require sponsorship by an academic dean or executive officer, but being sponsored by the president’s office gives events “scheduling priority,” according to a publicly available scheduling form.
Less than three weeks after the president’s office reserved the space, UT’s chapter of Turning Point USA announced in on Instagram that the “University of Texas is hosting the America Love It or Leave It Tour October 7th!!!” The initial post did not mention a location for the event.
UT’s chapter of Turning Point USA declined to comment.
The president’s office’s reservation of this space comes as some students and faculty have raised concerns over UT leadership increasing its influence over events on campus, seemingly favoring conservative speech and sidelining liberal groups, despite the university’s pledge to uphold institutional neutrality.
Last month, University Democrats struggled to find an appropriate venue to host leftist streamer Hasan Piker after the group’s initial location presented space and security concerns. A UT official in charge of the LBJ auditorium told the Democratic student group that the only way to get approval for a political event was through a UT department, college or school sponsorship. The official said that the group needed ultimate approval by university leadership, according to emails sent to organization president Adit Raha.
Murphy said the LBJ auditorium is owned and managed by the Thompson Conference Center and is available for student groups to rent. The LBJ Auditorium has hosted everything from graduations to talks with American presidents and comedian Kate McKinnon, according to its website.
Ella Barwick, a second-year master’s student and student leader at the LBJ School who has dealt with reservations, said it is uncommon for the president’s office to reserve a space in the auditorium or hold a space for a student group.
The 12 other times the auditorium has been reserved this semester, reservations were made by the Thompson Conference Center or the LBJ Library Foundation, according to a review of the reservation document.
“We have never seen the president’s office reserve a space,” Barwick said. “We’ve had very high caliber government or author-type people come in. That’s all done through LBJ and through the various centers that work with us.”
Barwick emailed her concerns to interim LBJ School Dean Paul Pope and was told that the event was not sponsored or initiated by UT or the LBJ School.
As of this fall, students must get dean-level approval for any speaker “that may be considered controversial in nature,” according to the student events form for LBJ venues.
Cameron Samuels, an LBJ School master’s student who hosted an event called “Censored University” with journalist Nikole Hannah Jones in the Bass Lecture Hall this March, said that rule had been updated since their event took place. Their event was required to secure a UT security officer after the dean’s office became aware of the event partners and tone of the event, which was initially pitched as a talk on the future of education policy and civic leadership.
Political concerns
Since the spring, UT leadership has taken a greater role in campus events. In multiple statements, officials have emphasized security concerns as the reason for their involvement, no matter the political nature of the events.
Just before Austin’s public radio station hosted its inaugural community festival this spring, top UT leadership cancelled large swaths of the event over security concerns. U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, D-New Jersey spoke at the LBJ auditorium as part of the event as other portions of the festival were forced off campus. At the time, KUT General Manager Debbie Hiott said UT’s concerns were unfounded.
After searching for alternatives and eventually paying $20,000 in security fees to Austin Police Department and UT’s police department, the organization hosted Piker in the original planned location, the William C. Powers Auditorium. Raha condemned the university for not helping his group find another suitable on-campus venue for the Piker talk. He questioned whether the university would have responded differently for an event hosting a conservative speaker.
It is not clear if President Jim Davis played a role in his office assisting UT’s Turning Point USA chapter in booking a space for Shapiro.
Editor's Note: This report was updated with remarks from UT spokesperson Mike Rosen, who clarified how the Texas Student Experience division consulted with the president's office.
I strongly encourage readers to spend time with this visionary and extraordinarily important work from the Stand Up for Science Foundation, which is doing much more than documenting attacks on science: it is mapping the larger political architecture behind them and insisting that science, democracy, accountability, and the public good must be defended together.
In brief, the Project 2025 playbook lays out an authoritarian governing agenda organized around several mutually reinforcing strategies: redirecting public funding and institutions to align with presidential priorities; advancing Christian nationalist and culture-war governance; politicizing knowledge and expertise by weakening peer review and discrediting scientists and scientific institutions; deconstructing the administrative state while outsourcing key public functions to the private sector; reducing regulatory constraints and steering public resources toward favored industries; intensifying border and immigration control; and weakening checks and independent oversight by limiting the authority of advisory boards, career experts, and independent agencies.
Taken together, these strategies concentrate executive power, install ideologically aligned operatives in key government positions, and expand the influence and power of tech-right interests—the BIG winners here. The net effect is a reconfigured system in which political loyalty increasingly shapes agency leadership, scientific inquiry, public funding, and institutional independence.
This first chapter that I'm sharing today traces how Project 2025, expanded executive power, Christian nationalist politics, tech-right influence, attacks on independent expertise, weakened oversight, and the redirection of public funding fit together as parts of a broader governing strategy; crucially, it is only the opening chapter of a larger manifesto organized around four stages—Assessment, Accountability, Deconstruction, and Reconstruction—aimed not simply at restoring what has been damaged, but at building a stronger and more resilient scientific and democratic order.
Stand Up for Science deserves enormous credit for naming these connections so clearly and for coupling diagnosis with a forward-looking vision of science as a public good. While we're at it, let's all add "techno fascism" to our vocabulary as it captures well a great part of what is afoot.
I urge readers to follow their continuing analyses, policy work, and updates directly at the Stand Up for Science Foundation.
“The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power—including power currently held by the executive branch—to the American people. Success in meeting that challenge will require a rare combination of boldness and self-denial: boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will and self-denial to use the bureaucratic machine to send power away from Washington and back to America’s families, faith communities, local governments, and states.”
-Russell Vought, Chapter 2, Mandate for Leadership:
The Conservative Promise (Project 2025), 44.
The assault on the federal research system did not begin with a vision for the science and research enterprise. It began with a theory of the presidency. So to understand the reshaping of the science and research ecosystem under Trump 2.0, we must first examine the motivations of a small connected group of political actors driving the President’s agenda, what unites them, and what drives them. At its center is a theory of power laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership—the volume better known as Project 2025. While the codifying of vision was driven by the Heritage Foundation and its authors, the network and cast of characters that have been involved in executing this vision and funding it are much broader than just one organization. This chapter dwells on motive because the usual assumption no longer holds: that we are dealing with ordinary politics, and that the people driving it are acting in good faith. What follows is a sobering account of the perverse incentives that allowed these actors to emerge and to treat science as something to be captured to advance political goals.
Saying that Project 2025 contained a coherent plan for the science and research enterprise would be imprecise. Coordinated by the Heritage Foundation as a presidential transition project, Project 2025 laid out hundreds of conservative policies intended to transform the mission and operations of White House offices and federal agencies, including independent regulatory bodies. The authors were explicit in their vision for a conservative government that would deliver on four promises: the family as the centerpiece of domestic policy, a dismantled administrative state, closed borders, and the right to enjoy the “blessings of liberty”1. Science was not a subject so much as a tool, valuable when it served the authors’ revision of an agency and expendable when it did not. Individual chapters are dedicated to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, and Environmental Protection Agency, with special attention to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Agencies are largely described as incompetent, overregulated, and “woke,” with many of their functions proposed for outsourcing or transfer to the private sector. The most consequential chapter was written by Russell Vought, then president of the Center for Renewing America, as part of the volume’s opening section, “Taking the Reins of Government.” That chapter supplied the theory of executive control—using the White House, and Office of Management and Budget in particular, to direct the agencies. Without it, much of what has since transpired across the federal research system would have been far harder to carry out.
With the blueprint in place, what followed were the actors required to enable the plan and the staff required to execute it. Agenda-setting for science and technology wasn’t a simple hand-off but a product of political bargaining that ultimately carved off a decisive part of the federal science and research enterprise to the tech-right: a tight-knit group of Silicon Valley billionaires and their operatives that spent years at odds with Trump. The current state of campaign finance and Trump’s readiness to sell a seat at the table for the right prices made the reconciliation between the tech-right and the President possible. Elon Musk, the largest donor of the 2024 cycle, was granted special access to the government and with him brought in the Department of Government Efficiency, which gutted the U.S. Agency for International Development and became a blunt instrument for canceling billions in federal grants. Some of the other actors, like Peter Thiel, stayed behind the scenes, but were nevertheless successful in installing their operatives as political appointees in the Executive Office of the President. Still, OMB via Russell Vought holds unprecedented sway on the staffing and the direction of federal funding in scientific agencies.
The conservative project supplied the theory of executive power. The tech-right supplied capital, staff, and a taste for blind deregulation. What the public and the scientific community are now seeing is a new arrangement in how federal science and research funding is organized and controlled, in which the tech-right dictates where to aim capital and the conservative operatives are the moral gatekeepers. Understanding the political and financial bargaining that has led us to this moment will help the scientific community understand the limits of traditional advocacy and bipartisanship that have been tried and true for decades but are no longer effective in advancing positive change, let alone in defending the scientific enterprise.
Christian Nationalism, Techno Fascism, and Unfettered Executive Power
The MAGA political base, conservative think tanks, and the tech-right converge around a shared interest in expanding executive power, stripping the administrative state, and dismantling regulations to ultimately transform government to fit their own designs. That overlap has produced an unlikely partnership of interest groups that share the same enemy in the concept of democracy but diverge greatly in their motivations and their desired end state.
A very visible bloc of partners in the conception of Project 2025 were Christian-right organizations that heavily shaped the document by promoting Western Christian ideas of family, sex, education, and religious liberty. Though not explicitly naming their worldview, the whole document is oriented around a Christian moral order that its authors treat as under attack by leftists who, by their account, have captured the government bureaucracy. Project 2025 turns this moral imperative into an executive agenda: restore biblically-based gender norms, treat diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives as a warrant for firings and grant terminations, and protect Christian schools and churches from the administrative state.
Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget and a principal architect of Project 2025, sits at the center of the effort to dismantle what conservatives call the deep state. He has embraced the label Christian nationalist as a description of his worldview and calls himself a “radical constitutionalist.”2 In his account, too much power has migrated to Congress, the courts, and the career bureaucracy. The presidency, he argues, was meant to hold the whole executive power, not to manage a semi-independent administrative state. That is the operational core of his Project 2025 chapter on “Taking the Reins of Government”. Vought views independent agencies, insulated civil servants, and appropriated spending that a president opposes as constitutional errors to be reversed, including by refusing to spend money Congress has enacted. He frames this as a return to the Constitution’s original design after two centuries of drift. Since early 2025, we have seen how this theory of power has been executed with little to no regard to law and statutes.
Christian nationalist views are reflected throughout Project 2025, and the authors do not hide their intention to restructure government around a religious moral order. In some chapters they are explicit. The Department of Health and Human Services chapter was written by Roger Severino, who directed HHS’s Office for Civil Rights in the first Trump administration. Severino, a lawyer by training, drove civil rights rollbacks on sex, gender and abortion, and created the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division within HHS in 20183. In this chapter, Severino writes:
“Protect faith-based grant recipients from religious liberty violations and maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family. Social science reports that assess the objective outcomes for children raised in homes aside from a heterosexual, intact marriage are clear: All other family forms involve higher levels of instability (the average length of same-sex marriages is half that of heterosexual marriages); financial stress or poverty; and poor behavioral, psychological, or educational outcomes.”
Severino argues that federal health and welfare policy should be rooted in biblical teaching and in a selective reading of social science that supports a particular view of gender and sexuality. Read in its entirety, Project 2025 is a rejection of secularism and of the separation of church and state that has been the foundation of religious freedom in the United States. It is not surprising that Project 2025 contains no serious discussion of the science enterprise. A research system organized around open inquiry and scientific evidence would be antithetical to the vision the project seeks to impose.
For the tech-right, the motivation is a different idolatry altogether: unencumbered technology and profit. Where the Heritage Foundation authored a vision of governance rooted in a desire for a Christian state, tech oligarchs became the willing suppliers of funding and personnel. Over the past several years, Silicon Valley billionaires who once disdained Trump have rallied behind him. Trump has taken money in politics to a new level of corruption by creating a pay-to-play system, where a Super PAC donation or a contribution to his ballroom can buy a cabinet position or a government contract. Watchdog reporting in 2026 found that more than half of known corporate donors to the White House ballroom project received new or expanded federal contracts totaling more than $50 billion in six months, including firms such as Palantir, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.4,5
This alignment of ultra-wealthy entrepreneurs with Trump’s authoritarian government is what Gil Durán calls “tech fascism.”6 Silicon Valley discovered in Trump a way to seize power rather than evade it. Tech fascism, as Durán explains, offers AI, crypto, defense tech, and surveillance systems as tools the government can use toward authoritarian goals. In exchange for money and those tools, the tech oligarchs gain unfettered access to data, the power to surveil, more opportunity to profit, and a seat at the table to influence policymaking. Under Trump 2.0 the worldview of the technofascists finds an unexpected bedfellow in Christian nationalists and together they have effectively tapped the fear and insecurities of Trump’s MAGA base to ensure that the culture war continues to be their focus.
What we now see, nearly two years into a second Trump term, is a more coherent and aggressively law-defying strategy to turn the highest public offices into instruments of corruption and profiteering for a small circle of elites. The number of ultra-wealthy people holding power in this administration is unprecedented, and it is the most extreme expression yet of money in politics. Public Citizen found that the administration has appointed at least 57 people with assets of “as much as” $100 million to run federal agencies or serve as U.S. ambassadors – eight of them are billionaires now in public office.7
It is no secret that influence can be bought in Washington and that political appointments are often a result of political bargaining. What is distinctive in Trump 2.0 is scale and concentration: a cluster of extremely wealthy appointees now sit atop agencies that set research priorities, grant rules, and technical standards. Access to senior science positions can be purchased with generous donations, proof of loyalty, or proximity to tech oligarchs. Public Citizen reported that Jared Isaacman, now administrator of NASA, directed roughly $2 million to Trump-aligned political vehicles around the period of his nomination. Some appointments, like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr's, follow a more traditional route of political bargaining. He exited the 2024 presidential race, endorsed Trump, and delivered a vaccine-skeptical donor network and the Make America Healthy Again constituency and was subsequently appointed secretary of HHS. Other science-relevant appointments drew on the same donor milieu associated with the so-called tech-right. The table below summarizes publicly reported assets and Trump-aligned contributions for a cross-section of those officials. It illustrates how contemporary campaign-finance arrangements have enabled the ultra wealthy to hold formal authority over the public scientific enterprise.
Table 1. List of Agency Heads and their Reported Assets and Contributions to Trump Campaigns
Nowhere is the tech-right more visible than on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, the outside body that is mandated to advise the president on science and technology. Past councils mixed university researchers, national lab leaders, and industry experts. Previous administrations, such as the Obama-era PCAST, met about six times a year and ranged across biomedicine, climate, education, and computing. The Trump administration rechartered PCAST in January 2025 and named 13 members in March 2026. The task force is co-chaired by Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios and AI/crypto adviser David Sacks. The sole academic is John Martinis, a UC Santa Barbara quantum physicist and Nobel laureate who also works with Google. The rest are big tech’s biggest names: Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Safra Catz, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, AMD’s Lisa Su, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Dell’s Michael Dell, Andreessen Horowitz’s Marc Andreessen, Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam, two nuclear CEOs (Oklo and Commonwealth Fusion), and investor and podcaster David Friedberg. So far the council has met only once, and as an advisory body it looks largely symbolic. But the access these pay-to-play seats on the Council provide is significant. As the Revolving Door Project reports, a place on PCAST gives these executives a sanctioned channel into the White House and, at times, direct access to cabinet members—the kind of access other companies pay lobbyists to chase.
The administrative state is being bent toward a conservative moral order and a tech-right vision of unregulated innovation. Ideas that threaten “traditional values” on sex, gender, reproduction, and climate are treated as illegitimate. At the same time, the tech right is pulling what remains of civilian federal science money toward AI and adjacent technology. In the imperfect status quo, the scientific community still had meaningful leverage to inform the science and research agenda. This is no longer the case.
I encourage you to take the time to read this deeply tragic account of the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Houston father and construction worker who was fatally shot by an ICE agent while on his way to a job site. The circumstances of his death remain contested, and his family and community have demanded transparency, an independent investigation, and accountability.
What is also striking, however, is the political awakening taking shape around this tragedy: grief and outrage are being transformed into public protest, civic engagement, and demands for change. At a moment when immigration enforcement has become central to the Trump administration’s governing agenda, this kind of community mobilization will, no doubt, carry enormous implications for the Midterm election and for the broader electoral and democratic response to the violence and utter lack of accountability of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Trump administration.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was fatally shot on his way to work by an ICE officer, after authorities say Salgado Araujo used his vehicle as a weapon. An outraged community is demanding justice — and change.
HOUSTON — As the sun set on a late September evening, a voice rose over the din of traffic at the roadside memorial for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, the 52-year-old husband and father fatally shot here by immigration authorities three months ago.
Sitting on barbershop steps, Berta Lopez, a nearby resident, alternately sang, recited prayers and cried for a man she never met.
“It was unjust — he was killed unjustly! The family is deeply hurt, his wife, his children. They are like family to us. And why don’t they show the people who did the killing? Why don’t they show them? Why don’t they release the names of the people who killed Lorenzo? Why don’t they expose them?” she said in Spanish.
In tears, Lopez said that after more than a year of intensive operations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Salgado Araujo’s killing was a clarifying moment. The government, she said, saw those who weren’t U.S. citizens as less than nothing. She was tired of it.
“Just because we’re Hispanic, shouldn’t we hold our heads high? No, God doesn’t want us hanging our heads in shame. He wants all of us, his children, to hold our heads up high,” Lopez said. “God doesn’t care about papers.”
Lopez’s hurt and anger were reflected in NBC News interviews with more than three dozen Houston-area Latinos, elected officials, activists and political strategists. They reveal a distraught community whose members feel degraded by the messages they hear out of Washington, D.C., during President Donald Trump’s second term. They said they have been terrorized by the constant stories of those detained, many wrongly, and left to languish. They were aghast that the government was sending immigrants to countries they had never heard of.
Many said Salgado Araujo’s shooting death crystallized their feelings of powerlessness. Most Latinos were better versed in the details of the incident than in the names and backgrounds of those running for some of the highest-profile offices in their state.
Their refrains were in the same vein: That could have been my dad, my brother, my uncle, my son — or me.
A rally in Houston's Hidalgo Park in July. Many said Salgado Araujo’s shooting death crystallized their feelings of powerlessness. (Mark Felix / AFP via Getty Images file)
“They’re being unfair. They’ve lied about a lot of things. They’re killing innocent people, breaking families apart. It’s just not right. They have no sympathy for other people,” said Julio Roa, a Houston resident who lamented what he was seeing happen in his state. “I come from Mexican parents. I’m born a U.S. citizen, but I live it day by day when they’re scared to go to the corner store.”
It all illustrates a political environment in which Republicans and Trump are bleeding support from Latinos. A new NBC News/Telemundo survey of 800 registered Latino voters nationally showed that fully 69% disapproved of the job Trump was doing as president, and 54% said they intended their midterm vote to be a signal of opposition to the president. The survey, carried out Sept. 21-28, had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
Notably, immigration and border security did not score high among priorities in the survey, with 6% of Latino voters calling it a top issue. But it has hit a nerve: 67% of potential Latino voters said Trump’s immigration enforcement had gone too far.
In an earlier NBC5 Dallas/Telemundo Station Group poll of Texas Latinos, respondents ranked immigration and border questions as the second-highest priority behind economic factors. That survey showed a sizable swing. In 2024, 55% of Texas Latinos supported Trump, according to exit polls, but recent surveys show statewide Democrats garnering at least 55% of the Latino vote.
That’s part of the reason Texas’ Senate race between Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton has become a battleground contest and why Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, is facing perhaps his toughest-ever general election challenge, from Democrat Gina Hinojosa.
One man who once held a deep allegiance to Trump said he could not explain the regret he felt.
“I’m guilty as charged. I voted for Trump. But I never thought it was gonna happen the way that this happened,” said Albert Riseño, a plumber who works in the Houston area. Riseño is a three-time Trump voter. He described a fear that has settled over the Latino community since Trump’s second term in office.
“There’s no words to describe what’s going on,” he said. “Everybody’s scared.”
Posters, signs, flowers and other items memorialize Lorenzo Salgado
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo woke before dawn on a hot Houston morning on July 7, as he did most days. He had lived in the U.S. for decades without legal status but was in the process of getting a work permit. He had no criminal record.
He picked up workers in his white van and was driving to a jobsite when he was pursued by immigration agents in unmarked vehicles. An officer shot him, according to authorities, after they say he used his vehicle to ram them. It’s a story contradicted by witnesses in the van, but it’s one immigration authorities have told before in explaining how a traffic pursuit turned deadly.
This time, though, the family wasn’t having it. Salgado Araujo’s eldest son stood before cameras and delivered an emotional testimonial to his father that went viral.
“He was a hardworking family man who never wanted his name to be known by anyone outside of his family,” Ronaldo Salgado said at a news conference days after his father’s shooting, as his brother held up a photo of their father.
Ronaldo Salgado stressed that the story of his dad ramming government vehicles could not be true. Their father had always taught his kids that if law enforcement attempted to pull them over, they were to pull off the road, hand over their license and registration and act respectfully.
In the end, authorities admitted Salgado Araujo was not the intended target of the operation.
In an interview with NBC News, Ronaldo Salgado said as immigration arrests became more prevalent in 2025, they talked to their father about the procedure if he had an encounter, including calling his family, and that they’d contact their attorneys.
“Just remember, don’t sign anything. Call us,” Ronaldo Salgado said he told his father.
Sitting at Las Perras Cafe in Houston, where a makeshift altar to his father sits in the corner, Ronaldo Salgado recited the names of those who had been killed by immigration officers, including Renee Good, Alex Pretti and Ruben Ray Martinez, saying the country is not now safe because of their deaths.
“These are lives that are lost, and they need to be investigated, just like any other life lost. It needs to be investigated with the full cooperation of the agents involved and the agencies involved,” the son said.
Ronaldo Salgado at a makeshift altar to his father, Lorenzo Salgado
Araujo, at Las Perras Cafe in Houston. (Natasha Korecki / NBC News)
“All of this isn’t making us any safer. How is going after my dad going to work making the city safer?” Ronaldo Salgado said. “Criminals don’t wake up at 5 in the morning to pick up their crew and go to do a day of backbreaking labor. You don’t.”
In an unusual move, federal officials made public an FBI search warrant to get inside Salgado Araujo’s van after his death. Then, federal officials released a stinging detail: The bureau sought entry to look at baggies with crystals that they said resembled meth.
When he heard that, Ronaldo Salgado said he couldn’t help but break into a little smile: “Ohhh, they messed up.”
He knew what it was. And it would only make things worse for federal authorities. It was a homemade electrolyte mixture, mainly of salt, that his father later mixed into Gatorade for himself and workers to combat the triple-digit Houston summer heat outside.
The U.S. attorney’s office later confirmed that the mix was in fact not methamphetamine, surprising few who knew Salgado Araujo.
Ronaldo Salgado felt it was an effort to sully his father’s reputation and dampen public outrage.
The implication just added to community anger, viewed as a thinly veiled attempt at smearing the man immigration authorities killed.
“It really shook the community,” said Jasmine Khadem González, an immigrant rights organizer with the Houston Democratic Socialists of America. “A lot of us who are Latino, we have somebody in our family: If it’s not our father then it’s our uncle who has a very similar job. … To see somebody like that be targeted for just being on his way to work or for the color of his skin or for the kind of truck that he’s driving — because it’s associated with Latino men — to see somebody like that be targeted for doing a very everyday thing. For just existing.”
In the NBC News/Telemundo poll, 31% of Latino voters say they or someone close to them started carrying identification over concerns about ICE enforcement, while 27% say they know someone who has been deported or detained by ICE in the last two years.
Amy Zachmeyer, the executive director of New Economy for Working Houston, a group that helped organize community vigils and demanded accountability and transparency in the probe, said the Salgado family’s high-profile pushback kept authorities in check.
“They’ve shown incredible strength to be able to really defend their father,” she said.
Zachmeyer grew emotional as she spoke about the sons. “They never let a narrative set in that he was anything but a loving father, a Houstonian, a Texan, a hard worker.” Anger reshapes local politics
Adrian Garcia, a Harris County commissioner, said Latinos are “feeling a lot of attack and disrespect.” Over the last year, he’s worked to reach out to those who don’t vote often. From his view, people now are willing to walk across broken glass to send a message to the Trump administration.
“The low-propensity voters that I’ve been speaking to absolutely have a great intensity to vote in this election, and they specifically speak to ICE enforcement. A lot of young kids: ‘I’m voting for my mom. I’m voting for my dad.’ I hear that a lot,” Garcia said.
More Latino registered voters than ever — 72% — rated their interest in the upcoming election as 10 out of 10 in the NBC News/Telemundo poll.
Garcia described the greater impact that fear of immigration enforcement has had across the Texas economy.
“This is not what our community deserves, and it is also what is impacting the things that we care about the most, the business, the economy. They’re hurting the industry,” he said. “They’re hurting those who work hard and play by the rules.”
Jareli Barrera, who works as a server at the popular Cielito Cafe in Houston, said she has never been so tuned into an election. Today, she said she’s helping others, including co-workers, to register to vote.
She cannot stand seeing the level of fear in her community, including among those who are citizens but fear being separated from family or an aggressive encounter.
“Republicans are probably going to lose. It’s not going to be the greatest thing for them at the end of the day,” Barrera said. “Most of these immigrants are the ones that are making the U.S. successful. They’re doing the hard work. … If everyone’s deported, who’s gonna do the hard labor? Who’s gonna construct? Who’s going to do all this cleaning that they don’t want to do?”
Since 2025, local activist groups have tried to work with the city of Houston to better protect Latinos as they watched intense enforcement operations in cities like Minneapolis, Los Angeles and Chicago upend life for residents and lead to encounters with immigration authorities that turned violent or deadly.
Jennefer Canales-Pelaez, a Houston-based senior policy attorney and strategist with the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, said Salgado Araujo’s death was a “culmination of years of Texas entrenching itself, entangling itself with ICE” and “illustrated to them the fear, the levels of persecution of justice that immigrant communities have been living with in Texas for a very long time.”
Before Salgado Araujo’s death, Canales-Pelaez was among those who worked to deter cooperation between Houston police and federal police agencies and pushed for greater transparency into immigration operations. Abbott, the three-term governor and a staunch Trump ally who is up for re-election in November, threatened to block $200 million in grants to Houston and other major cities if they didn’t change local rules that directed police forces not to hold individuals they encounter for longer time periods to assist ICE. The cities, including Houston, reworded their ordinances.
Houston Mayor John Whitmire, a centrist Democrat, told The New York Times last October that he kept his head down as other city and state leaders in the country grew combative with the White House over immigration operations. Whitmire said his city had avoided “turmoil” that others faced.
Whitmire initially declared his hands were tied after the shooting; the Houston Police Department had no jurisdiction to conduct an independent investigation. After community uproar, the city changed course. Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare has now launched a probe, with the county government approving the $2.5 million request to fund it.
“It ignited this flame and really showed other people that aren’t necessarily living this experience or working in this line of work, ‘Oh, this got to us,’” Canales-Pelaez said. “When the mayor told us that we weren’t going to be another Minneapolis, we weren’t going to be a Los Angeles, well, now we are. Someone’s dead. That really has sparked this rage, this collective, righteous anger.”
A makeshift memorial for Salgado Araujo in Houston in July. Most Latinos
were better versed in the details surrounding his death than in the names
and backgrounds of those running for some of the highest-profile offices
Abbott, who has long taken a hard-line stance on immigration, was silent on the Salgado Araujo shooting for a week but then ended up backing an independent investigation.
“Immigration laws can be enforced, and stopping illegal immigration from coming across our border can be achieved, without shooting people,” Abbott said in mid-July.
Paxton, the Republican state attorney general locked in a tight race with Talarico for the Senate seat, met with the U.S. Hispanic Business Council last week and made supportive statements about an immigration program designed to help industries in need of workers.
Paxton has aggressively supported Trump’s immigration policies and in June boasted that his office had blocked public money to help pay for legal representation for immigrants facing deportation. Paxton had described the practice as “evil and wicked.”
Last week, Paxton had a softer tone on another aspect of immigration.
“Our birth population isn’t keeping up with demand, and so as long as we are doing this by the rule of law,” Paxton said, “I’m open to having help.”
Ronaldo Salgado doesn’t rail against Republicans or Trump. He has stressed that the quest to investigate exactly what went wrong in a deadly encounter with law enforcement “should not be a partisan issue.”
He also said those incensed by what they see should vote in November.
“Immigrants’ rights shouldn’t be a partisan issue, and I just urge faithfully to look for and to vote for candidates who honor and respect the lives and rights of immigrants,” he said. “Every single elected official right now has immigrants living in their districts, in their states, their neighborhoods, and it’s their job to protect them. And if they’re not willing to protect them, then people should elect someone else that will.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
