The milestone comes after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth intervened in a series of military promotion decisions that disproportionately affected women and minority officers.

Military promotion boards selected 31 officers for advancement after determining they were the most qualified candidates within their respective competitive categories.

Hegseth ultimately canceled or withdrew nine promotions.

All seven women selected by the boards were removed.

The only other officers denied promotion were two Black men.

No white men selected by the boards were removed.

The military’s promotion boards are designed to identify the most qualified officers for advancement based on performance, command experience, evaluations, and service records.

Their recommendations are traditionally given significant weight because they are intended to reduce political influence over promotions.

Hegseth’s targeted attacks on women in the U.S. military has left the armed forces with zero four star female generals for the first time since 2008. With zero left on the list to be promoted, that likely won’t be a problem fixed in the near future.

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A Brief History of Female Four-Star Officers

Only ten women have ever achieved four-star rank in U.S. military history.

Army

Ann Dunwoody (2008–2012)
Laura Richardson (2021–2025)

Coast Guard

Linda Fagan (2021–2025)

Air Force

Janet Wolfenbarger (2012–2015)
Lori Robinson (2014–2018)
Ellen Pawlikowski (2015–2018)
Maryanne Miller (2018–2020)
Jacqueline Van Ovost (2020–2024)

Navy

Michelle Howard (2014–2017)
Lisa Franchetti (2022–2025)

Dunwoody became the first woman in U.S. history to receive a fourth star in 2008. Over the following 17 years, women steadily advanced into the military’s highest leadership positions, including combatant commands, major logistics operations, fleet commands, and service chief roles.

That progression has now ended.

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Hegseth’s History of Opposition to Women in Leadership

Hegseth’s nomination as Secretary of Defense was controversial in part because of public allegations regarding his treatment of women.

Hegseth’s own mother described him as an “abuser of women.”

Hegseth was flagged as a potential “insider threat” before President Biden’s 2021 inauguration. Internal correspondence showed concerns raised by a superior officer that ultimately resulted in him being removed from National Guard duties connected to the inauguration.

Since becoming Secretary of Defense, Hegseth has been on a war path to reduce the role of women and minorities within the military hierarchy.

In his 18 months since being confirmed as US Secretary of Defense in a 51-50 vote (a tie broken by Vice President JD Vance), Hegseth has:

Stated that women should not serve in combat roles and erroneously claimed their inclusion made the military less effective.
Fired Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead the Navy and first woman to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Fired Admiral Linda Fagan, the first woman to lead a U.S. military branch.

Female Navy officers told the Associated Press they viewed the removal of all women from a promotion list as a signal that their careers now have a ceiling.

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Part of a Broader Shift

The promotion decisions align with broader personnel changes across the federal government under the Trump administration.

Project 2025, the “blueprint” for dismantling democracy developed by the ultra-far-right Heritage Foundation and allied organizations, calls for eliminating many diversity and inclusion initiatives throughout the federal government.

These discriminatory practices disproportionately harm women and minorities.

Through executive orders, agency directives, and personnel actions, departments have been instructed to eliminate DEI offices, terminate related programs, remove diversity requirements from hiring and training, and review employees associated with those initiatives.

Diversity initiatives do not change educational requirements, military standards, professional credentials, or performance benchmarks.

Rather, they are intended to expand recruitment pipelines, identify barriers to advancement, and ensure qualified candidates are not excluded because of discrimination or unequal access to opportunity.

Researchers have warned that eliminating programs designed to reduce barriers to advancement may allow existing disparities in hiring, promotion, retention, and leadership representation to persist or widen, particularly in institutions with documented histories of discrimination or unequal access to opportunity.

DOGE eliminated at least $3 billion in grants supporting research, education, workforce development, and public programs benefiting women and girls.

Subsequent investigations and court proceedings uncovered evidence that DOGE-led funding decisions explicitly considered protected characteristics.

In May 2026, U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon ruled that DOGE’s cancellation of more than $100 million in National Endowment for the Humanities grants was unlawful and discriminatory, finding that DOGE had “blatantly used protected characteristics as criteria for grant termination.”

Court records showed DOGE used ChatGPT in a way that was both “illegal and dumb” to target grants with keywords about race, gender, ethnicity, religion, and other protected categories.

The judge further found that DOGE’s process resulted in the termination of grants involving subjects including Black Americans, women, Jews, Indigenous communities, and other historically underrepresented groups, concluding that the government had engaged in unconstitutional discrimination and viewpoint-based decision-making.

And in the military, the administration has removed several of the most senior women serving in military leadership, and is denying all female candidates for promotion.

Whether that is a temporary anomaly or the beginning of a broader trend remains to be seen.

What is not in dispute is the historical significance of the moment.

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More than 100 FBI agents targeted one of Ohio’s largest voter registration organizations Thursday in what civil rights leaders are calling an unprecedented act of voter intimidation.

According to leaders with the Ohio Organizing Collaborative (OOC), approximately 25 FBI agents arrived at the group’s headquarters while more than 100 additional agents targeted individuals affiliated with the organization at their homes, offices, and even their children’s schools.

Among those targeted were volunteers and organizers connected to the group’s voter registration efforts.

According to former OOC Executive Director and current board member Prentiss Haney, agents demanded to speak with individuals who were not employees of the organization despite lacking warrants or subpoenas.

“We have not seen this sort of intimidation since Selma,” Haney said, visibly shaken after the operation.

The Ohio Organizing Collaborative is not a fringe organization. Established more than two decades ago, it has become one of the most influential civic engagement groups in Ohio, registering voters and organizing communities that have historically been underrepresented in the political process. It is particularly well known for its efforts to register new Black voters.

The history of voting rights in America is, in many ways, the history of attempts to stop people from voting.

In the Jim Crow South, Black Americans who attempted to register voters faced surveillance, arrests, threats, economic retaliation, and violence.

Civil rights organizations were infiltrated by law enforcement. Activists were monitored, harassed, and prosecuted under dubious legal theories. Local officials routinely used the machinery of government to discourage participation in elections.

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The events that unfolded in Ohio this week evoke uncomfortable memories of that era.

The comparison to Selma made by Haney is not merely rhetorical.

Before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, law enforcement agencies often worked hand-in-hand with political leaders seeking to preserve existing power structures. State troopers beat peaceful marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge on what became known as Bloody Sunday.

During Freedom Summer, voting rights organizers were surveilled, jailed, assaulted, and murdered. Churches hosting voter registration drives were burned. Entire communities were terrorized for attempting to participate in democracy.

The lesson of that history is simple: democracy does not die only when ballots are thrown away. It can also be weakened when citizens become afraid to participate.

That concern was front and center Friday as attorneys, clergy members, voting rights advocates, and elected officials gathered to discuss a response.

“Ohio is the pilot,” said Congresswoman Joyce Beatty. “We’re going to call this what it is – voter intimidation. We will not be intimidated. We will not be silenced. We will not let any President bully our voters into staying home.”

Federal agents were not raiding a cartel operation. They were not dismantling a terrorist network. They were targeting individuals connected to voter registration efforts in a state that has become increasingly central to the national fight over voting rights.

The operation also comes at a moment when election conspiracies continue to shape American politics.

For years, Donald Trump has falsely claimed the 2020 presidential election was stolen despite dozens of court rulings, audits, recounts, and investigations reaching the opposite conclusion. In recent days, Trump has similarly made false claims regarding the 2026 Los Angeles mayoral election.

The danger of those narratives is not merely that they are false. It is that they create a political environment in which voting itself becomes suspect and organizations dedicated to increasing participation become targets.

History shows where that road can lead.

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From Reconstruction to Jim Crow. From literacy tests to poll taxes. From COINTELPRO’s surveillance of civil rights leaders to modern efforts to criminalize voter registration mistakes, the methods change but the underlying objective remains familiar: reduce participation among communities viewed as politically threatening.

That is why so many voting rights advocates view what happened in Ohio as bigger than Ohio.

If the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency can deploy more than a hundred agents against one of the state’s leading voter registration organizations, every volunteer, every organizer, and every citizen who believes in democratic participation is going to take notice.

The question is whether they become intimidated by it.

Rev. Michael Harrison of Union Baptist Church in Youngstown says he will not.

“I have no intention of stopping,” Harrison said. “And I’m going to get the biggest coalition of people I can get my hands on so that we can make sure that fairness and opportunity takes place for us all.”

When voting rights organizers see Selma in the actions of federal officials, the country should pay attention and act.

As Beatty told the crowd Friday, “We will fight like our life depends on it, because it does.”

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When Florida attempted to hide COVID data from the public, I refused. That decision changed my life.

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The future of science policy is increasingly being shaped by people who neither practice science nor appear particularly interested in it.

At Mesoscale News, I travel directly to conferences, hearings, communities, and disaster zones to document what is actually happening — not what officials say is happening. That means sitting through the speeches, asking uncomfortable questions, interviewing the experts being pushed aside, and reporting what larger outlets often miss.

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The theme of this year’s Capitol Hill Ocean Week is “Voyages and Breakthroughs.”

Yet as the annual gathering opened Tuesday morning in Washington, it felt less like a celebration of scientific discovery than a reflection of the slow dismantling of the institutions that once made such discoveries possible.

While the heavy-handed tech focus of last year’s event was comparatively watered down, much of the focus in “breakthroughs” discussed were technologies that have already been used for years.

Roughly half of the scheduled events during the conference’s opening day were film screenings.

Among the first day’s panelists, not a single one was a PhD scientist (though one moderator was).

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The disconnect became even more apparent when NOAA Administrator Neil Jacobs delivered the event’s keynote address Tuesday morning.

Jacobs, whose confirmation last year came as part of a mass vote on more than 100 nominees, spent much of his speech opining about robotics, artificial intelligence, privatization, and his ambition to make NOAA operate “more like a startup.” Science, meanwhile, was conspicuously scarce.

Jacobs remains one of the most controversial figures ever to lead the agency — and not just because he refuses to acknowledge that humans, not natural processes, are causing climate change.

In 2019, he played a central role in the episode now known as “Sharpiegate,” when NOAA issued statements backing then-President Donald Trump’s false claim that Alabama was in Hurricane Dorian’s projected path.

An independent investigation later concluded that Jacobs violated multiple scientific integrity policies, finding he acted “knowingly, intentionally and with reckless disregard” for agency standards.

For many in attendance, those memories have not faded.

“He’s putting the most positive spin he can,” said Diana Haemer, a doctoral student at Oxford University who attended the event.

Haemer said Jacobs appeared eager to project approachability before an audience of scientists and ocean advocates, but noted that his standing within much of the scientific community remains deeply damaged.

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The presentation itself drifted between personal anecdotes and broad management philosophies. At times it felt less like a keynote address at one of the nation’s premier ocean conferences and more like a venture capital pitch for remaking a federal agency.

What was missing was perhaps more revealing than what was said.

On the second day of the Atlantic hurricane season, Jacobs offered little reassurance about NOAA’s readiness for the months ahead. There was no substantive discussion of climate change, despite oceans absorbing more than 90 percent of excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases. No mention of the global coral bleaching crisis now unfolding across much of the world’s reefs. No discussion of accelerating sea-level rise, collapsing marine ecosystems, or growing threats to protected ocean habitats.

The issues dominating scientific journals, policy debates, and coastal communities around the world were largely absent from the remarks.

Instead, the speech often seemed detached from both the audience and the moment.

That contrast was particularly noticeable because one of the conference’s strongest themes this year has been the inclusion of Indigenous voices. Tribal leaders and representatives from multiple Indigenous communities are participating throughout the week, bringing perspectives rooted in stewardship, cultural connection, and generations of lived experience with the ocean.

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Yet Jacobs appeared oblivious to that context when he closed his remarks by describing the tarpon as his “ocean spirit animal.”

His reason, he explained, was that he enjoys catching and killing them.

The comment landed awkwardly in a room filled with ocean advocates, conservationists, researchers, and Indigenous representatives whose relationship with marine ecosystems is often framed around preservation rather than extraction.

Whether the remark was intended as humor or not, it underscored the broader disconnect that hovered over the morning.

Capitol Hill Ocean Week was founded to bring together scientists, policymakers, and advocates around the future of the world’s oceans.

On its opening day, however, science felt like an afterthought.

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What happened at Capitol Hill Ocean Week was about more than one speech.

It was a snapshot of a broader transformation occurring across federal science agencies — a shift away from expertise, transparency, and public service toward privatization, branding, and political loyalty.

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For the past several weeks, I’ve been deep in research and writing a series of academic and scientific papers examining the impacts of large-scale data center expansion on local communities — particularly the environmental, in…

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Reports described repeated brutal beatings and even an incident in which Miller threw a pot of boiling water on his wife — all in front of their young daughter.

Miller rose the political ranks as a controversial Trump aide.

Stephanie…

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Disaster Briefs are semi-regular summaries of natural and man-made disasters, climate change, public health, and global conflict. Data is retrieved, analyzed, and synthesized on the day of publication unless otherwise noted.

If you rely on clear, data-driven reporting that cuts through misinformation and noise, support independent journalism that priorit…

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The Washington, D.C. City Council is poised to make permanent a policy that does not solve youth violence, does not make communities safer, and does not respect the rights of children.

Instead, it risks doing something far more dangerous: normalizing the idea that young people themselves are the probl…

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If the Trump regime’s proposed 2027 budget is passed, it will undermine science as we know it in the U.S.

With cuts of nearly 70% in some areas, the current administration seems determined to destroy our nation’s overall leadership in the sciences, with disproportionate reductions for geography, climate, …

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After nearly a year of additional votes, the analysis is holding strong. The worst of the worst have gotten worse, and the fighter for good are still fighting.

With primary elections well underway and running through September, there’s still time to look at the candidates running against incumbents who have failed to stand up for our democracy.

You can see when your state’s primary and general (or runoff) elections are here.

Rep. Cueller (TX) took the top spot, but other than shifting places, not much has changed.

We can’t keep voting in Fetterman’s and Moskowitz’ and expect to save our Democracy.

The updated analysis includes bills from the second half of 2025, in addition to select bills from 2026, including: HR 8029, HR 5103, HR 1958, HR 556, HR 7744, H Con Res 38, H Res 1099, HR 4758, HR 4626, HR 2189.

Based on the index, here are the representatives Democrats need to start working toward primarying, starting with the worst for our democracy:

1. Cueller (TX)

2. Golden (ME)

3. Davis (NC)

4. Perez (WA)

5. Gonzalez (TX)

6. Moskowitz (FL)

7. Gray (CA)

8. Landsman (OH)

9. Suozzi (NY)

10. Vasquez (NM)

11. Gillen (NY)

12. Costa (CA)

13. Gottheimer (NJ)

14. Lee (NV)

15. Pappas (NH)

    ---

You can read the original post with the original methodology below.

I’ve developed an index which Democrats should use as a guide for challenging those in our ranks who do not support us or democracy in 2026, based on the voting records and bill proposals of every member of the Democratic Party in the U.S. House of Representatives in 25 key legislative votes1,

I looked at legislation during the 118th and 119th congressional sessions in which only a small percent of Democrats broke with the party in voting for GOP-sponsored legislation.

Most of the legislation considered fell under one of five umbrellas: immigration, the environment/climate change, economic welfare, free speech, and MAGA “show laws” (like the absurd “Gas Stove Freedom Act”).

This is not simply a liberal-or-conservative scale and it does not consider tweets, dramatic speeches on the house floor, or one-liners and talking points on the news, only their legislative record.

Which, at the end of the day, is all that really matters when electing someone to congress to legislate.

There are 213 Democrats currently serving in the House of Representatives.

Sixty-one Democrats scored highly enough to be considered outside the normal clustering pattern for the party, though there were 32 amongst them who broke away even from that group.

The top nine voted more with the GOP on divisive legislation than they did with Democrats.

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I will warn you: you might see representatives on this list that you like. I was surprised and even hurt to see someone I campaigned for in the last cycle on this list.

But this is the reality.

Remember that a large part of running for and staying in Congress now is marketing.

What someone says and what they actually do on their job can be two entirely different things.

Based on the index, here are the representatives Democrats need to start working toward primarying, starting with the worst for our democracy:

1. Moskowitz (FL)

2. Perez (WA)

3. Davis (NC)

4. Golden (ME)

5. Gillen (NY)

6. Gottheimer (NJ)

7. Costa (CA)

8. Cuellar (TX)

9. Landsman (OH)

10. Craig (MN)

11. Gonzalez (TX)

12. Gray (CA)

13. Lee (NV)

14. Pappas (NH)

15. Suozzi (NY)

16. Ryan (NY)

17. Shrier (WA)

18. Kaptur (OH)

19. Torres (NY)

20. Morelle (NY)

21. Horsford (NV)

22. Soto (FL)

23. Vindman (VA)

24. Budzinski (IL)

25. Case (HI)

26. Davids (KS)

27. Goldman (NY)

28. Harder (CA)

29. Houlahan (PA)

30. Scholton (MI)

31. Stanton (AZ)

32. Wasserman-Schults (FL)

What about the good ones?

If you want to know who is out there voting to save democracy, the way I created this index allows me to pull out lists from within subject areas.

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Here are the top 10, starting with the highest scoring at #1, for those working hardest to ensure our civil rights and freedoms are not trampled out, that our universities are not dismantled, and that agencies continue to protect the people as they’re supposed to.

1. TLAIB (MI)

2. OMAR (MN)

3. OCASIO-CORTEZ (NY)

4. PRESSLEY (MA)

5. LEE (PA)

6. GARCIA (IL)

7. CASAR (TX)

8. RAMIREZ (IL)

9. FROST (FL)

10. GARCIA (CA)

On these issues, for example, Moskowitz (FL) ranks #357 out of 438 for all representatives — in the bottom 20% of ALL of the House of Representatives (even Republicans).

If you want to know who is working the hardest on fighting for economic justice, working class people and families, and unions, here are your top ten, from the highest scoring at #1.

1. GARCIA (TX)

2. TURNER (TX)

3. ANSARI (AZ)

4. BELL (MO)

5. WATERS (CA)

6. CASTEN (IL)

7. JAYAPAL (WA)

8. CLARKE (NY)

9. SIMON (CA)

10. SCHAKOWSKY (IL)2

Nothing has changed in Texas, though, and a story today in New York Magazine shows that the people most responsible for these girls’ deaths pl…

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What happened:

A pregnant woman went to a Georgia hospital to give birth.

The infant was in breach, in distress, and heart rate was dropping.

The doctor said they needed to perform an emergency C-section.

…

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