Investigating Corporate Welfare For Wealthy Corps, Meeting With AI Leaders In CA, Broken Promises To Patients Needing Lifesaving Care, Wasting $ While Weakening Civil Rights, Rollback ICE Funding, Some Healthcare Funding Improvements, ICE Is Out Of Control: Senator Sanders 

Editor’s note: Our most recent updates from Senator Sanders included a new bill he introduced to stop sitting presidents from naming buildings after themselves.  This would include the now-Trump Kennedy Center, and the two landmarks in New York that he is demanding be named after him in order to guarantee funding that was appropriated by Congress.  These are the famous Penn Station in Manhattan, as well as Washington Dulles International Airport. New Yorkers, most of whom did not vote for this president, likely do not want these important and longstanding landmarks named after a current president for years to come. 

Sanders Launches Investigation into Trump’s Corporate Welfare for Walmart & Wealthy Corporations

WASHINGTON – Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), today announced an investigation into how Walmart, Kroger, Dollar General and Dollar Tree stand to benefit from large tax breaks in President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” while they force tens of thousands of their employees to rely on Medicaid and SNAP. This situation will be made even worse as a result of the largest cut to Medicaid and nutrition assistance in American history that Republicans enacted last year.

“It has never been acceptable that incredibly profitable companies like Walmart — owned by one of the richest families on Earth — pay their workers starvation wages, forcing many of them to rely on programs like Medicaid and SNAP,” Sanders wrote to Walmart. “But it is even more unacceptable when those benefits are being slashed so that corporate executives and billionaires like the Walton family can become even richer.”

As part of the investigation, Sanders requested that Walmart and the other major retailers disclose how much they expect to make from the Republicans’ tax breaks and whether any of these savings will be passed along to workers. At a time when their corporate leaders and wealthy shareholders stand to benefit significantly from President Trump’s so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” which gave a $1 trillion tax break to the top one percent and over $900 billion in tax benefits to large corporations, Sanders called on the highly profitable companies to increase their employees’ pay and benefits so that taxpayers are no longer forced to subsidize the starvation wages they currently offer.

“Kroger pays wages so low that many of its workers rely on public assistance to survive,” Sanders wrote to Kroger. “At Kroger, tens of thousands of low-wage workers are forced to turn to SNAP to feed their families and Medicaid to get the health care they need — all paid for by U.S taxpayers.”

In 2025, taxpayers paid more than $26 million just to provide Medicaid to Walmart workers and their families in Nevada alone. Even though Walmart and other major retailers could afford to provide their employees with a living wage and comprehensive health care benefits, they choose to enrich their executives and shareholders instead. For example:

1. Walmart made $19.4 billion in profits in 2024 and spent at least $7 billion on stock buybacks in 2025. Meanwhile, one in five Walmart employees in Nevada are on Medicaid.
2. In 2024, Dollar General made $40.6 billion in revenue and paid its shareholders $519 million in dividends. In 2022, Dollar General spent $2.75 billion on stock buybacks.
3. Dollar Tree’s CEO, Michael C. Creedon, made 592 times the average pay of a Dollar Tree employee in 2024, while Dollar Tree spent hundreds of millions of dollars in stock buybacks each year from 2022-2024.

“At a time of massive wealth and income inequality, I am respectfully asking that the multi-billionaire owners of Walmart and other large corporations do the right thing: get off of corporate welfare and pay all of your workers a living wage with good benefits,” Sanders concluded in the letter to Walmart. “No one who works for a company that generates billions of dollars in profits should be living in poverty, going hungry or unable to get the medical care they need without taxpayer assistance.”

Read the letters here.

Senator Sanders at rally. Image Credit – Sen. Sanders

Sanders to Meet with AI Leaders in California

WASHINGTON – Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today announced he would travel to California this month to speak directly with Artificial Intelligence (AI) leaders, and released the following statement:

Artificial intelligence and robotics will transform the world. Today, a handful of billionaires in Silicon Valley are making decisions behind closed doors that will shape the future of humanity. Meanwhile, working people have no voice in these discussions, and far too little visibility into the rapid changes already underway.

That is why I look forward to visiting California this month to meet with AI leaders and to ask the fundamental questions we need to be asking as a country. Here is just some of what I plan to raise:

1. Who will be in charge of the transformation into an AI world? Is the goal of the AI revolution simply to make the very rich even richer and more powerful, or will this technology be used to benefit all of us?
2. What impact will AI and robotics have on working people? If AI and robotics eliminate millions of jobs, how will people survive if they have no income?
3. What will AI mean for our democracy? At a time when authoritarianism is rising, will AI and robotics help make us a freer, more democratic society or will it give even more power to the oligarchs who control the technology?
4. Does AI raise an existential threat to the human species? The “Godfather of AI”, Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, recently told me that it was only a matter of time before AI becomes smarter than humans. How do we work together with the international community to prevent this extraordinary threat?

Bottom line: AI and robotics are the most transformative technologies in the history of humanity. The American people must determine how AI impacts their lives. We can’t let those enormously important decisions rest in the hands of a handful of billionaires.

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Senator Sanders at rally. Image Credit – Sen. Sanders

Sanders Report Details How Trump Broke Promises to Patients, Cut $561 Million from Lifesaving Research While Failing to Lower Prescription Drug Prices

WASHINGTON – Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), today released a new report documenting how the Trump administration has broken its promises to American patients by gutting medical research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) while failing to lower prescription drug prices and engaging in political censorship. The report documents the defunding of more than 300 clinical trials, including research on pediatric brain tumors, dementia, Alzheimer’s, diabetes and heart disease.

“Trump promised to defeat childhood cancer. Trump promised to end chronic disease. Trump promised to lower prescription drug prices. He has done none of these things,” Sanders said. “Instead, Trump has terminated hundreds of millions of dollars in cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and heart disease research. He has abandoned patients in clinical trials. And he has done nothing to lower the outrageous prices Americans pay for the drugs their own tax dollars helped create.”

The report analyzes NIH data and draws from interviews with federal scientists, researchers and workers. It finds that NIH has terminated or frozen at least $561 million in research on four of the leading causes of death in America, including:

• $273 million for cancer research (116 grants)
• $111 million for heart disease research (71 grants)
• $94 million for Alzheimer’s research (65 grants)
• $83 million for diabetes research (68 grants)

While Trump claims to support “gold standard science,” his administration is using a list of banned words to decide which research gets funded, including apartheid, adolescent, COVID, climate change, inequity and natural disasters.

The report further documents how Trump has failed to lower prescription drug prices for medicines developed with taxpayer-funded NIH research. The report finds that every single drug invented with help from NIH scientists is sold at a lower price in other countries than in the United States. For example:

• Gilead charges Americans $504,000 for the cancer drug Yescarta, while that same drug costs $377,000 in the United Kingdom, $266,000 in Germany and $182,000 in Japan.
• Johnson & Johnson charges Americans $57,000 per year for the HIV drug Symtuza, while that same drug costs $11,000 in the United Kingdom, $9,000 in Germany and just $8,900 in Japan.
• Bristol Myers Squibb charges Americans $544,000 for the cancer drug Abecma while that same drug costs just $394,000 in Canada.

“The American people are sick and tired of paying, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs,” Sanders concluded. “We need real action to take on the greed of the pharmaceutical industry and substantially reduce the cost of prescription drugs for all Americans, not more lies and phony press releases from President Trump and his administration.”

Read the report here.

New GAO Report Finds Trump Admin Wasted up to $38 Million While Weakening Civil Rights for Students

WASHINGTON  – According to a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, the Trump administration’s efforts to illegally dismantle the Education Department wasted up to $38 million by paying investigators at its Office for Civil Rights (OCR) not to work while it dismissed roughly 90% of discrimination complaints from students nationwide without review.

Commissioned by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), and released today by the GAO, the report examines the costs to American students and taxpayers of Trump’s attempts to illegally fire nearly 500 dedicated workers at OCR, the agency responsible for protecting students from discrimination based on race, sex, disability, color, national origin and age. The president’s layoffs came a year after OCR received a record number of civil rights complaints in 2024.

“Every child in America should be able to get a good education no matter where they live, what their religious beliefs are or whether or not they have a disability,” Sanders said. “Instead, the Trump administration fired half of the Education Department employees working to protect the civil rights of students and wasted as much as $38 million in taxpayer dollars by preventing investigators from doing their jobs. That is unacceptable.”

The report documents the unprecedented efforts by the Trump administration to gut the agency responsible for enforcing federal nondiscrimination laws in schools and colleges:

• In March 2025, after the administration attempted to lay off nearly half of OCR’s workforce, those employees were kept on paid administrative leave for nine months — costing taxpayers up to $38 million while investigators were barred from doing their jobs.
• During Trump’s 2025 government shutdown, the administration proposed a second round of layoffs, slashing OCR to just 10% of its prior capacity.
• In December, the administration reversed course and reinstated staff, ending the lawsuits, but some of the damage could not be reversed. Today, far fewer investigators are serving our students than in 2024.
• During this period, Americans filed more than 9,000 discrimination complaints with OCR — and roughly 90% were dismissed without review.

The report builds on Sanders’ oversight efforts to hold the Trump administration accountable for weaponizing and undermining civil rights laws. Last month, Sanders released a report revealing that the president has violated or likely violated the First Amendment in 17 cases related to college campuses, according to federal courts. In March 2025, Sanders released a report finding that the administration’s reckless layoffs at OCR would leave more than 46 million students in 27 states and territories without dedicated investigators to protect their educational civil rights.

Read the report here.

Senator Sanders at Healthcare for All rally. Image Credit – Sen. Sanders

Sanders Secures Vote on His Amendment to Cut $75 Billion in ICE Funding and Redirect Those Funds to Medicaid

Watch Sanders’ remarks introducing his amendment:

WASHINGTON – Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today secured a Senate vote on his amendment to the government funding package to repeal the $75 billion funding increase for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — originally included in Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBB). The amendment would use those savings to reverse Medicaid cuts in the OBBB, preventing 700,000 Americans from losing their health care.

“As we speak, ICE agents are shooting American citizens in cold blood, breaking down doors to arrest people, and sending 5-year-olds to detention centers, all in clear violation of our Constitution,” Sanders said. “Instead of funding Trump’s domestic army, we should instead use that money to prevent hundreds of thousands of Americans from losing the health care they desperately need by investing in Medicaid. I urge my colleagues to support this commonsense amendment and stand up for the rights and dignity of all Americans.”

Ranking Member Bernie Sanders Statement on Bipartisan Health Care Deal in New Minibus Funding Agreement

WASHINGTON – Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), released the following statement on the minibus agreement announced Monday by congressional leadership:

Over the past several years, one of my top legislative priorities as Chairman, and now Ranking Member, of the Senate HELP Committee has been to address the primary care crisis in America, the massive shortage of doctors, nurses, dentists and mental health professionals in our nation, and to lower the outrageous cost of prescription drugs.

Given the extremely dysfunctional political environment in Congress, I am proud that we were able to reach a bipartisan health care deal to begin to provide meaningful relief to the American people on all of these major crises.

Under this agreement, community health centers will receive the largest increase in mandatory funding in a decade, equivalent to a rate of $4.6 billion through the end of the year — nearly $1.2 billion more than Republicans put on the table. Community health centers are the backbone of our primary care system, providing high-quality care to over 32 million Americans, including 9 million children.

Under this agreement, the National Health Service Corps will receive a 13 percent increase in funding compared to a few years ago, equivalent to a rate of $350 million through the end of the year — $88 million more than Republicans asked for. This important program provides loan forgiveness and scholarships to doctors, dentists, nurse practitioners and other medical professionals who practice in rural and underserved areas.

Under this agreement, the Teaching Health Center program will receive a 137 percent increase in funding by the year 2029, when funding will rise to $300 million. Teaching Health Centers are extraordinarily important because they allow medical school graduates to complete their residencies in community health centers, and if we want more doctors to practice in rural and underserved areas, this is an important way to do it.

Under this agreement, pediatric cancer research will be expanded, improved and strengthened through the Give Kids a Chance Act in its entirety. As a nation, we must do everything we can to find new cures and treatments for children who have been diagnosed with cancer.

Under this agreement, more Americans will be able to receive low-cost generic drugs instead of outrageously expensive brand-name drugs, and we will finally take on the greed of pharmacy benefit managers — the middlemen who have made tens of billions in profits by artificially inflating prescription drug prices year after year.

Let’s be clear: While this bipartisan health care deal is a very modest step forward, it goes nowhere near far enough.

It does not rescind the largest cut to Medicaid in American history that Republicans in Congress and President Trump made in the summer in order to pay for the $1 trillion in tax breaks they gave to the top 1 percent.

It does not prevent the doubling, tripling or quadrupling of health care premiums that millions of Americans are seeing as a result of the expiration of the Affordable Care Act tax credits.

It does nothing to substantially reform our broken, dysfunctional and cruel health care system that is designed to make the executives and shareholders of big drug and insurance companies incredibly rich at the expense of the well-being of the American people.

As the Ranking Member of the HELP Committee, I will not rest until everyone in America is guaranteed health care as a fundamental human right, not a privilege, through a Medicare for All, single-payer system.

Someone walks their dogs in South Minneapolis. Walking past a painted fence that reads “We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.” Image Credit – Chad Davis

NEWS: Sanders Statement: “ICE is Out of Control”

BURLINGTON, Vt. – Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today released the following statement:

ICE is out of control, ignoring the law and our Constitution. Congress must vote NO on any additional funding for DHS.

Further, here is SOME of what else we must do:

1. Get ICE, CBP and the rest of Trump’s domestic army out of Minnesota and Maine NOW
2. No more warrantless arrests, no more stopping people based on race or because of the languages they speak
3. End qualified immunity for ICE and CBP agents to ensure Americans’ constitutional rights are protected
4. Unmask ICE and CBP agents and require clear identification
5. End detentions and deportations of U.S. Citizens
6. Investigate and prosecute every single DHS officer who broke the law and require DOJ and DHS to cooperate with states and cities investigating immigration agents who broke the law
7. Repeal the $75 billion for ICE and the nearly $65 billion for CBP in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and restore funding to health care
8. Impose strict standards on all detention centers and hold them accountable for their human rights abuses

Banner Image: Senator Sanders at rally. Image Credit – Sen. Sanders