GOP-controlled local boards restrict voting on Sundays and find other ways to make voting harder by Bob Ortega

 

When voters in Tarrant County, part of a key swing district in Texas, prepare to cast ballots for the midterms, they’ll encounter a whole new set of rules.

Those allowed to send mail-in ballots will now need to provide a Social Security or state ID number. And in-person voters will find that nearly 100 polling places have been shuttered – including all sites in one zip code that’s mostly Black and Latino.

Those kind of changes aren’t unique to Texas.

Republican lawmakers and officials around the country have taken steps at the state and local level to make it harder to vote this November, from enacting stricter registration requirements to adding ID restrictions to dramatically reducing early voting sites, polling places and ballot drop-boxes. 

 

These changes, pushed through state Capitols and county boards of election, have not received the same attention as President Donald Trump’s dramatic attempts to curb mail voting and assert control over voting rolls, but they could have just as significant an impact on turnout in key races to control Congress.

The new restrictions, all passed since the last midterm election in 2022, could affect highly competitive Senate races in states including Iowa, Ohio, North Carolina and Texas, as well as toss-up House races, as Democrats seek three seats to retake the House and four to win the Senate.

“Many states are emulating the president’s agenda at the state level,” in ways that affect “whether eligible voters have a clear accessible path to cast a ballot,” said Celina Stewart, CEO of the League of Women Voters. “In 17 years of working on voting rights, I have never seen such a widespread and coordinated effort to restrict access to the ballot.”

Voters in at least 22 states face new hurdles in casting their ballots compared with the 2024 election, according to a recent Brennan Center report. These new restrictions come on top of at least 78 restrictive laws passed by 30 states between 2020 and 2024. 

 

Many GOP state and local officials have argued that the changes are needed to help make elections more secure, often echoing Trump’s repeatedly debunked claims that voting fraud runs rampant.

Speaking in August at the Republican midterm convention, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said his state had adopted “the toughest voter ID law in the United States of America,” and that “we made clear that in elections in Texas, you have to be a United States citizen to vote.” 

 However, there’s no evidence non-citizens have voted in Texas or any other states in significant numbers. Election experts say the new restrictions could depress turnout by making it harder for first-time voters to register and for those without driver’s licenses – such as some seniors and disabled voters – to cast ballots.

The changes in some locales are being made over significant protests from residents – including in Tarrant County, where many of those in a long line of speakers at a recent meeting pleaded with commissioners not to cut polling sites. 

 

As protesters massed outside on September 1, the GOP-controlled county commissioners court voted 3-2 along party lines to reduce polling sites by nearly 30 percent – a change that County Judge Tim O’Hare said was needed to save money.

Opponents, though, said the cuts will make it harder to vote for groups seen as likely to back Democrats in the highly competitive county.

“Jane and Jim Crow are very much alive in Texas today,” said Brianna Brown, Executive Director of the Texas Organizing Project, which works to protect minority voting rights. “In Texas,” she said, “the demographics of young people and black and brown people are increasing, so the GOP is looking at ways to shrink participation.” She noted that Black and Hispanic voters make up a majority of the Texas population.

Similar dynamics are playing out across the country.

Ohio: Voter ID crackdown

In Ohio, which features a tight Senate race between GOP Sen. Jon Husted and former Sen. Sherrod Brown, the Democrat, as well as numerous key House races, Buckeye voters will confront one of the nation’s strictest voter ID laws for the first time in a midterm. 

 

That law, passed by the GOP-controlled legislature in 2023, requires a photo ID to vote, meaning Ohioans can no longer use digital IDs, paychecks or other documents as identification, or to prove residency.

For new voters, it similarly limits the kind of documents they can use to register. The law also shortened the deadlines for voters to request absentee ballots, and to fix any errors on their ballots; and it eliminated early voting the Monday before Election Day. 

 

Ohio voters will also have fewer places to drop off ballots. The law limits each county to one drop box, open only during business hours, and says only voters with a documented disability who can’t physically enter a polling place can use curbside voting. It also made it a crime for anyone other than an immediate family member to drop off a ballot for a disabled voter, with some exceptions.

GOP officials said the law would protect the security of elections in the state. 

 “Elections integrity is a significant concern to Americans on both sides of the aisle across the country,” said Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, at the time it passed.

The ID restrictions in large part target non-citizen voters, but there’s little evidence such voters exist in large numbers. In a 2024 review of the state’s 8.2 million registered voters, the Ohio Secretary of State’s office found 137 non-citizens wrongly registered to vote through the Bureau of Motor Vehicles. There was no indication any of them had voted.

Last year, the legislature also adopted a law that requires absentee ballots to arrive before polls close on Election Day. Previously, ballots could arrive later, as long as they were postmarked by Election Day.

On Sept. 29, a federal appeals court reinstated a provision that requires proof of US citizenship from anyone trying to register to vote through the Bureau of Motor Vehicles. 

 

The law could also affect many college students who have out-of-state driver’s licenses, which are no longer acceptable ID in Ohio to register or vote.

“Students are often first-time voters. The law says if they are residents on a college campus, they can use that address to register to vote. In Ohio, you have to show a utility bill,” as one option to prove where you live, said Rebekah Caruthers, president of Fair Elections Center, a nonpartisan voting-rights groups based in Washington, DC. “But if you live on campus, you don’t get utility bills.”

Jen Miller, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, said that voters who don’t have driver’s licenses must use provisional ballots. As a result, she said, Ohio has some of the highest provisional ballot counts in the country this year.

Critics say the drop box limitations particularly hurt voters in large urban areas – a demographic fact that will impact Black voters in particular in major Ohio cities. 

 

“Think about Cuyahoga County, where Cleveland is, to say more than a million people should have only one place to drop off their ballot. That is what you do when you want to make it harder for people to vote,” said Caruthers.

North Carolina: ‘This is ultimately about representation’

In North Carolina, Democrats hope to flip a Senate seat with two-term former Gov. Roy Cooper polling strongly against Michael Whatley, a former Republican National Committee chair.

Numerous House seats also could change parties, including in a race between Republican state Rep. Jennifer Balkcom and Democrat Jamie Ager. Both are seeking to replace Rep. Chuck Edwards, who dropped out of Congress after an ethics panel found evidence he repeatedly made unwanted advances toward two female staffers. 

 As CNN recently reported, state and local GOP leaders have worked to significantly restrict voting in the state – including by sharply cutting back on Sunday voting and imposing new restrictions on how mail-in ballots are processed. 

 

The GOP-controlled legislature also transferred authority in 2024 over the state board of elections from the governor, a Democrat, to the state auditor, a Republican, who could then appoint Republicans to controlling positions on the state board and every county board of elections.

This year, those county elections boards voted not to have early-voting polling places near or on a variety of college campuses, including at North Carolina A&T State University, the nation’s largest historically Black college or university, and UNC-Greensboro, among others. 

 

Francis De Luca, chairman of the State Board of Elections, said in January that he opposed voting sites on university campuses because they had limited parking.

Students have pushed back hard against the changes, including in Guilford County, home to North Carolina A&T and UNC-Greensboro, to no avail.

“Students have been attending meetings at the Guildford County Board of Elections for months. Both have significant on-campus populations and are close to areas with a significant number of residents who don’t have access to a vehicle,” said Tyler Daye, program manager for Common Cause North Carolina.

At North Carolina State University, in Raleigh, the Wake County Board of Elections voted along party lines to move the early voting site this year from the Talley Student Union, at the center of campus, to a building a mile away and across a busy boulevard. 

 

Boards also eliminated Sunday early voting in 23 counties. Sunday voting historically is important to Black churches that organize members to vote after services. De Luca, the state election board chairman, said that he opposed voting on Sunday because, “it’s the Lord’s Day.”

Iowa: Elderly citizens and IDs

In Iowa, two recent polls of likely voters show Democratic Senate nominee Josh Turek, a state house representative and two-time Paralympic gold medalist, running neck-and-neck with three-term GOP Rep. Ashley Hinson. There are also three competitive House races in the state.

In 2025, Iowa became among the earliest states to agree to use the federal SAVE citizenship-verification database, which has misidentified eligible voters as non-citizens. 

 

In May, Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds signed into law a bill that changed Iowa’s “attestation” law, which allowed a fellow voter from the district to vouch for the eligibility of someone who shows up to vote without a permitted ID. Now, those voters must use a provisional ballot and return by the Monday after Election Day with a valid ID to have their vote counted.

State Rep. Adam Zabner, a Democrat from Iowa City, told CNN, “I have concerns about the Republican agenda on voting and on this bill in particular.”

He said that “most people who take advantage of this system are older Iowans who no longer drive, don’t have driver’s licenses, and come in with family members who attest for them.” He noted that, under the old law, anyone falsely attesting to someone’s identity would have been criminally liable.

Kansas: A 94-year streak

Kansas, which Trump won with 57% of the vote in 2024, hasn’t elected a Democrat to the US Senate since 1932. But now the race between incumbent Republican Sen. Roger Marshall and Democrat Adam Hamilton, a United Methodist pastor, is neck and neck. 

 

This year, term-limited Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, vetoed several bills passed by the GOP-controlled legislature that would have enacted voting restrictions.

But lawmakers overrode her veto to enact the SAVE Kansas Act, which expands methods for purging voter rolls, restricts third-party efforts to register voters, and orders state agencies to share, with the Kansas Secretary of State, data on non-citizens receiving state benefits.

Lawmakers also overrode Kelly’s veto of a new state law that eliminated the three-day grace period for mail-in ballots to arrive at election offices. The new law would require mail-in ballots to arrive at election offices by 7 p.m. on Election Day to be counted.

But in July, the Kansas Supreme Court let stand a lower-court ruling that blocks that law from taking effect while a lawsuit against it is being litigated.

Texas: ‘There is no polling place in our zip code at all’

In Texas, recent polls show no clear leader in the Senate race between Democrat James Talarico, a state representative, and state Attorney General Ken Paxton, who defeated Sen. John Cornyn in the GOP primary, marking a comeback after being impeached by the Texas House but acquitted by the Senate in 2023. 

 

A key battleground in that race is Tarrant County, the state’s third most populous county, which President Joe Biden narrowly won in 2020 but Trump flipped back in 2024.

In September, Republican Tarrant County commissioners voted to cut early voting locations to 47 from 50 in the last midterm, and election day voting locations to 224 from 316. They also denied requested polling locations on five campuses. There also will be no polling places at all within the 76103 zip code, according to a lawsuit seeking to restore polling places. In that zip code, 76% of the population is Black or Hispanic, according to census data.

O’Hare, a Republican and the county’s chief political officer, said in a press release before the meeting, responding to criticism that the changes would make it harder for students and minority voters to get to the polls, that “no Tarrant County voter should ever feel they don’t have enough time to vote,” and that “this is a sensible plan designed to ensure that.”

On Oct. 2, a Fort Worth City Council member filed suit in state district court seeking to reinstate the 92 voting sites cut in September. 

 

“What they have done is systematically gone through and made it harder for people of color, people in lower economic areas and people in Democratic areas to vote,” said Deborah Peoples, who said she filed the suit as a private citizen, not a city council member. “This was something we could not sit idly by and not speak up about.”

O’Hare’s campaign adviser Nick Maddux dismissed the suit as intended to benefit Tarrant County Commissioner Alisa Simmons, who is running against O’Hare. “Tarrant County voters will not be fooled by these shenanigans,” Maddux said in a statement.

A judge this week denied the request to reinstate the sites.

Some other changes across Texas this year also remain in flux due to court challenges. In August, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that mail-in and assisted voting restrictions will apply statewide this November. 

 

Texas doesn’t allow universal vote-by-mail, but voters over 65 and those with certain disabilities, among others, can do so. They’ll now have to provide a Social Security or identification number matching state records for their mail-in ballot to be accepted; and anyone helping a disabled voter will have to disclose their relationship to the voter, sign an oath they didn’t coerce the voter, and disclose whether they received compensation.

Meanwhile, as first reported by Votebeat, Texas Department of Public Safety recently flooded numerous county registrars across the state with backlogged voter registration applications after discovering it had failed to process at least 500,000 applications submitted through its online driver’s license portal, some up to a year earlier.

Chris McGinn, executive director of the Texas Association of County Election Officials, said that counties across the state have been working overtime since mid-September to clear up the backlog. He said that “from what we’re hearing, all the backlog has been updated and all the voters should show on the list of registered voters” by the time early voting begins on Oct. 19.

Across the country, many of the new laws affecting voters this fall “are aimed at solving a problem that doesn’t exist,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, senior director of voting rights and elections programs at the Brennan Center.

“Disenfranchisement – the denial of a person’s constitutional right to vote – is a problem whether or not it swings the outcome of an election,” he said. “It can also have consequences beyond the election itself, shaping whose interests elected officials feel compelled to represent and respond to.”

Using light to control brain cells – neuroscientist Karl Deisseroth explains how he made his Nobel‑winning discovery by Karl Deisseroth

 

The 2026 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine honored Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel for their work developing optogenetics – a technique that allows researchers to control the activity of neurons with light.

The Conversation Weekly podcast talked to Karl Deisseroth, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, about his journey developing optogenetics and its potential to treat a wide range of neuropsychiatric conditions. What follows is an edited transcript of the podcast.

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Take us back to the early 1990s. You’re training to be a doctor and you start a rotation working with psychiatric patients. What questions about the brain did that raise for you?

Both basic neuroscience (people asking how the brain works) and clinical neuroscience (doctors trying to help people with brain disorders) have faced a very similar problem, which is the brain is quite mysterious and quite hard to study.

It’s billions of fragile, transparent, very fast-acting cells, buried within the skull and doing very complex things. We don’t have a good model for how the brain works, unlike the heart, which is very obviously a pump. We don’t actually know what the brain’s trying to do.

A lot of neuropsychiatric treatments are not as effective as they could be, and developing new ideas has been hard. The treatments we had were not grounded in a solid understanding of the cells involved. What are the cells actually doing? What are they trying to do? This was a problem that held back treatment.

 

When I was in psychiatry training in the early 2000s, and also as a medical student in the late 1990s, I was very much impressed with the magnitude of the challenge.

You went on to get a Ph.D. in neuroscience, and then you set up a lab at Stanford trying to understand how to control particular cells in the brain. What were the first experiments you did?

I have a background in molecular biology, and I knew how to work with genes. So I was motivated to see if we could use genetics to make a treatment or an intervention that targets one kind of cell.

Every cell has genes that tell it what to do. Different cells in the brain, just as other parts of the body, can be genetically targeted because different cells have different jobs. A cell that is a dopamine neuron has all the machinery needed to make the hormone dopamine. It uses different genes than a cell that makes the hormone serotonin, so they can be distinguished from each other.

And so the thought was maybe I could have a way of controlling just the dopamine cells or just the serotonin cells by inserting a specific gene into them. But I didn’t know what would work well, so I tried inserting different types of genes into neurons.

 Some of the genes I tried were quite conventional; they were genes from mammals that I thought might affect the activity of neurons. But one was a gene from a single-celled algae – a microbe that converts light to energy. This gene coded for a light-activated protein called channelrhodopsin-2 that Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel identified a few years earlier.

And I thought it was worth a try. It was the least likely to work, but why not try it?

And amazingly, that was the one that worked. The genes that were lower risk didn’t work, and this gene from a single-cell microbe actually did.

Walk us through what you did. You inserted the gene into rat cells, right?

I had a preparation of cultured rodent neurons in a dish – basically a 24-well plate that let me look at many different conditions at the same time in different wells of this plate. This let me test side by side the conventional mammalian genes and this gene from the algae.

So the first step was to get the genes into the cells. Then I exposed some plates of cells to light, while others I did not. I used a test to see which cells had activated.

When I looked across the cells in the screen, I found that the ones that had the algae gene and had gotten light were showing this marker of activation, whereas the others had a much lower signal. That was a really thrilling moment because it showed that this gene from a photosynthetic single-celled organism – almost as far as you can possibly be from mammals evolutionarily – was working beautifully in fragile mammalian neurons.

 It was a moment of a lot of pressure and complexity, but also delight. 

 

You went on to name your method optogenetics – the ability to control specific nerves using light in the brain – and you soon went on to using it to control living mice in various ways. What was it like in those first few years of working with live animals?

The first experiment was in 2004, but we didn’t show that it could control the behavior of freely moving mammals until 2007. So it took almost three years. But that first moment in 2007 was quite uplifting because that showed we had gone a big, big chunk of the way toward making it work.

This was an experiment that was very visible and easy to understand. The right side of the brain controls the left side of the body and attention to the left side of the world. We put in a fiber optic into the right part of a mouse motor cortex – the part that controls movement – and when we flipped the switch, the mouse immediately began going left in circles.

And then as soon as we turned off the laser light, it stopped and just looked up at us, as if nothing had happened.

That, coupled with the first experiment – those were transcendent moments.

What changed in your understanding of the brain in the moment you were able to switch particular neurons on and off?

We understood that the technique would probably work to help us understand the brain better at that moment. And then we immediately started applying it to all sorts of different cells where things were mysterious – where nobody knew or couldn’t prove exactly what one cell type or another was doing in perception and cognition and action.

We were able to find cells that were involved in hunger and thirst – basic survival drives. We were able to identify cells and pathways controlling aggression and defensiveness, parenting, how all the different parts of anxiety come on together and go away together, memory, motivation.

The general applicability became clear over the subsequent years.

Researchers are now using optogenetics in attempts to restore sight in people with visual impairment. How does that work?

In 2010, two of my colleagues in Europe were interested in delivering one of these light-activated proteins to human eye samples – specifically the retina of the eye – which worked very well.

So they did careful studies in monkeys and in people. And in 2021, just five years ago, they published a paper showing they could confer light sensitivity back to the retinas of a person who was completely blind from a neurodegenerative disease called retinitis pigmentosa.

That’s what we call direct optogenetics. It’s somewhat complicated because you have to deliver the gene and light to the person. 

 

And going back to your psychiatric patients, who you still see in the clinic today, how do you hope optogenetics will be able to help them?

There’s a much easier and more broadly impactful avenue that we call indirect optogenetics, which uses the knowledge that comes from studying which cells matter in a symptom and then designing medications that target those cells. This is something we’ve really lacked in neuropsychiatry for a long time.

Indirect optogenetics is making strong headway for autism and schizophrenia. There are trials that are moving to their final stages for those disorders.

My particular clinical specialty is autism, and I see the difficulties that come with irritability and anxiety in these patients. And I can see optogenetics leading to new medications that will help.

. 

 

 

Cystic fibrosis patients got their ‘miracle drug’ thanks to federal research funding – new Trump administration rules may cut future miracles short by Fred D. Ledley

 

The hardest disease to care for when I was training as a pediatrician in the late 1970s was cystic fibrosis, a disease in which abnormally thick mucus secretions block the lungs’ airways and make it progressively harder to breathe.

Back then, there was no treatment for the disease itself. All we had was physical therapy to clear mucus from the lungs, and drugs to dilate the airways and aid breathing. We used high doses of antibiotics to treat chronic pneumonia – drugs that also generated dangerous antibiotic-resistant infections that not only made the disease progressively harder to treat but also posed a threat to other people. At the same time, we also had to manage co-occurring conditions, including diabetes, malnutrition and heart failure.

Worse, these efforts did not work. In 1979 the median age of death from cystic fibrosis was 15. While all young deaths are tragic, caring for children with a progressive, inevitably fatal disease that denied emerging adolescents the promise of adulthood was especially heartbreaking.

Cystic fibrosis treatment changed dramatically after 2012, when the biotech company Vertex Pharmaceuticals launched the drug Kalydeco (ivacaftor), followed by additional cystic fibrosis drugs Orkambi (lumacaftor/ivacaftor) in 2015, Symdeko (tezacaftor/ivacaftor) in 2018, Trikafta (elexacaftor/tezacaftor/ivacaftor) in 2019 and Alyftrek (vanzacaftor/tezacaftor/deutivacaftor) in 2024

 Now, the median survival age for a child with cystic fibrosis born today in the United States is 66 years. Mary Vought, the former wife of the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, stated that their daughter, who was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, “can live likely a full life because of this miracle drug,” and that “it is very, very, very hopeful.”

Cystic fibrosis treatments are not miracles; they required decades of research funded by a combination of public and private investments. The largest contributor to this work was the National Institutes of Health, which funded much of the pivotal research required to understand the genetics and biology of the disease. Only with this knowledge was it possible to begin searching for drugs to treat cystic fibrosis.

 

Ironically, the federal funding that was so critical to developing these drugs is now threatened by policies that were initially proposed by the Office of Management and Budget. Those policies, which would increase political control over federal research grants, limit peer review and curtail research on certain topics, were temporarily blocked by Congress. But several federal agencies are still pursing portions of this agenda, including the NIH.

NIH laid the foundation for treatment

My colleagues and I examined the role that federal funding from the National Institutes of Health has played in developing cystic fibrosis treatments. We found that NIH funding supported more than 6,200 published research papers on the biology of cystic fibrosis in the 27 years before Kalydeco was approved in 2012.

Some of these publications describe celebrated milestones in understanding the biology of CFTR – the gene that causes cystic fibrosis – or the disease process. Others describe the studies necessary to replicate, refute or refine these advances and ensure the necessary scientific rigor to successfully discover and develop new drugs.

 Overall, we identified US$3.2 billion in NIH funding for basic research on cystic fibrosis from 1985 to 2012 and approximately $940 million in funding for applied research on potential drugs. This funding complemented at least $200 million in investments from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation for the discovery or development of these drugs as well as undisclosed spending by Vertex to develop and commercialize these products.

The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation acknowledged the essential role of the NIH in a 2025 letter to Russell Vought and other Trump administration leaders, writing that “ensuring that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is fully functional is critical for furthering our knowledge of the biology of CF and advancing CF therapeutic development.”

What will it take to produce future miracles?

Developing groundbreaking drugs requires a long-term, sustained commitment from the public, from the government and from industry.

FDA-approved drugs are typically based on 20 to 30 years of basic research in the lab and eight to nine years of human testing in the clinic. This work is supported, at least in part, by an average of $1.4 billion in NIH funding and as much as a reported $1.4 billion in industry funding per drug.

Russell Vought and his family have benefited from the commitment that scientists, advocates, legislators and industry leaders have placed into developing treatments that now offer patients with cystic fibrosis a normal life. A similar commitment can help find cures for patients who don’t respond to available drugs and to provide cures for cardiovascular disease, cancer, dementia and other conditions.

This commitment to research is currently under threat from Trump administration proposals that would reduce NIH funding, research, training and global research collaboration. Protecting or expanding federal funding for basic research instead can help lead to innovative therapies for countless patients.

Scammers Are Stealing Millions From Food Stamp Recipients. Congress Could Fix It — but Won’t. By Eli Hager

 

It wasn’t the kind of call a grocery store gets every day. A customer with a thick Eastern European accent was on the phone saying he wanted to buy several thousand cans of Red Bull. Could the store have them in stock in a few days? Also, did they have equipment to move all those stacks of energy drinks into the parking lot, where two minivans would be waiting?

When the day came, Oct. 19, 2022, employees at the Smart & Final store in San Diego sold 3,960 cans of Red Bull and 720 of Monster Energy to two men and two women, all with the same accent, and helped them wheel the pallets out back. To pay for it all — the bill came to $10,747.05 — the group pulled out piles of plastic. These weren’t credit or debit cards; they looked more like hotel-room keys. There were 25 cards in all, each with a different amount loaded onto it, and the four people took turns swiping one after another. Then, the payment complete, they drove off.

In the days that followed, people as far away as New York and Florida made panicked calls to the store. They wanted to know why their food-stamp accounts (containing their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits) had been drained at this seemingly random location in San Diego.

It would turn out that what became known as the Red Bull Crew had gotten ahold of their SNAP data and used the funds to buy the energy drinks, which they then sold online or to smaller stores. It was hardly an isolated event. From September through November of that year, the same crew, part of a criminal syndicate based in Romania, bought at least $305,274.52 in energy drinks, using SNAP account information and PINs stolen from at least 174 victims nationwide, according to court documents and federal investigators.

To hear the Trump administration tell it, the SNAP program is under siege by well-heeled recipients of food stamps. Vice President JD Vance, upon being named “Fraud Czar” this spring, said: “There are people who have Lamborghinis who currently receive SNAP benefits.” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, whose agency oversees the program, regularly goes on TV and social media to allege that masses of SNAP recipients are scamming the system, driving Bentleys, Ferraris, Maseratis and, yes, Lamborghinis.

The federal government’s own statistics tell a different story. Confirmed cases of intentional program violations — fraud — committed by SNAP recipients account for $64 million a year, or about 0.08% of all benefits issued annually, according to the most recent 50-state reports compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

 

Meanwhile a far bigger fraud wave has exploded over the past five years: organized theft from SNAP recipients. In 2025, $470 million was stolen electronically from beneficiaries — and thus from the U.S. taxpayer — according to data supplied to ProPublica by Propel, a company that provides a mobile app for SNAP recipients to check their account balances and transaction histories. More than 990,000 households that received food assistance last year had benefits stolen. (The reason it’s necessary to use data from a private company: The federal government has stopped tracking rates of this crime.)

ProPublica interviewed nearly 100 victims of SNAP theft, federal prosecutors, Secret Service agents, USDA officials, caseworkers and other experts to understand what’s behind this phenomenon and why more isn’t being done to stop it. The victims are almost all working people with families, or retirees, who have struggled to afford groceries in the current economy. Most didn’t learn about the crime until they were in a checkout line, only to have their benefit card declined.

 

Upon reporting the disappearance of their food assistance, victims are informed that nothing can be done under current federal law. “The only thing they said was that [my benefits] cannot be refunded unless they were lost due to a natural disaster,” said one SNAP theft victim in Ohio. “They told me they’d add my name to the list,” said another in rural Oregon. “They advised if I feel the place is sketchy, don’t run my card there,” a victim in Philadelphia said. Still another, in Virginia, added, “They even charged me $2 for a replacement card.”

Perhaps the most vexing aspect of all: The federal government knows how to prevent the vast majority of this crime in a single step. Congress just hasn’t been willing to take it.

 

SNAP theft is an old scheme applied to a new target. For years, scammers would surreptitiously install skimming devices on card readers at ATMs, gas pumps and corner stores. These devices could read the data on people’s cards as they swiped — while a pinhole camera or overlay keypad captured their PINs — all of which could be picked up later or sent via Bluetooth to someone sitting in a nearby cafe or parking lot. This pilfered data, in turn, was used to make online purchases, or it was loaded onto cloned cards to withdraw cash.

Skimming became exponentially more difficult when credit and debit card companies installed digital microchips in the 2010s and then introduced tap-to-pay. But one kind of card did not get the new chips: Electronic Benefits Transfer, or EBT, cards, which people use to access SNAP and other public assistance. These still rely on the 1960s-era magnetic-stripe technology that skimmers can easily read.

EBT cards are not a particularly high-value target compared with bank cards. (The average monthly SNAP benefit is about $350 per household.) But funding boosts to SNAP during the pandemic temporarily increased benefit amounts, and profits could be considerable if you skimmed hundreds of people’s card information every month. Skimming teams, often run by Romanian gangs, pivoted. With cloned magnetic-stripe cards, they started buying up huge quantities of SNAP-eligible products like energy drinks and baby formula that are easy to store and resell.

“We’ve started many, many briefings saying that one of the biggest ways we’re going to fight this is to just get chips in the cards,” said Michael Peck, assistant special agent in charge of the Secret Service’s Criminal Investigative Division. Among the Secret Service’s lesser-known functions is investigating many financial crimes, and Peck leads its efforts against benefit theft. He said he and his team have delivered this message on Capitol Hill both at committee meetings and to individual members of Congress.

Yet congressional leadership has continually blocked legislation that would fund chip EBT cards nationally, despite universal support for the measure among Democrats and significant support among the Republican rank and file. For instance, House Committee on Agriculture Chairman Glenn Thompson, a Republican from Pennsylvania, said at a hearing in March that chip technology is “very effective.” But he shut down a bipartisan proposal to upgrade EBT cards with chips, citing unspecified budgetary constraints. (“Chairman Thompson is supportive of finding a fiscally responsible path forward for implementing policy that supports chip cards,” a committee aide said in a statement on his behalf. She added that “there was an appetite” for this reform among Republicans, but that Democrats weren’t willing to “find the budgetary offsets” for it.)

 The Congressional Budget Office has yet to formally score the proposal, but multiple Hill staffers said they were told the total cost would be in the range of $215 million, as compared to the $600 million-plus annual loss on theft of SNAP and other benefits.

 

The main thing Congress has done about SNAP theft is to abandon a previous effort to help victims. The federal government had, since late 2022, been replacing people’s stolen funds, just as banks are required to do if your debit card is hacked. As a result, 753,929 households were compensated.

In December 2024, a bipartisan spending agreement that included a provision to extend these reimbursements through 2028 was on the brink of becoming law. But Elon Musk, who had been named a leader of the new Department of Government Efficiency, attacked the legislation more than 100 times on X, pushing to “defund everything.” (Musk did not reply to a request for comment.) Trump then sank the deal. Victims of SNAP theft can no longer get any of their benefits replaced. And with the government off the hook for losses, there is now less incentive to put money into the solution.

 

In the 22 months since, the Trump administration has gone on to strip funds for addressing EBT theft from the USDA’s annual budget requests to Congress, while cutting at least 650 of the staff of the federal Food and Nutrition Administration, the subagency that oversees SNAP. More than half of the technical experts whom the agency had hired to help it develop EBT card security guidance have been pushed out, according to the Government Accountability Office.

“Many of us who were working on fraud, we’ve left the federal government entirely,” said Kym Ayodeji, who had been a data scientist in the SNAP program until she departed this spring. (FNA, the agency she worked for, is also responsible for tracking fraud committed by retailers, which is far more prevalent than that committed by beneficiaries.) Ayodeji said she and her colleagues had been working on ways to identify retailers where unusually large quantities of certain items had been purchased and addresses where purchases made with many different EBT cards were being delivered. Some of this work was indefinitely delayed by firings, early retirements, agency reorganizations and government shutdowns, she said.

 

SNAP is federally funded and supervised. Congress and the USDA traditionally mandate, and pay much of the costs for, major changes to the system, especially involving technical coordination between states. States evaluate applicants and administer the accounts of those who are approved.

That said, states are allowed to adopt chip cards on their own. California has nearly completed the transition, and Alabama and Oklahoma began rolling out new cards this year. A handful of others initiated the process in recent months — before the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, starting Oct. 1, cut 50% of states’ administrative funding for SNAP, which Alabama and the others had tapped to transition to chip technology.

The rest — about 40 states — have likely missed their window, unless Congress acts. They’re also waiting for regulatory guidance on EBT card security and chip card implementation that the USDA has been claiming for nearly four years it is planning to publish. (The USDA Office of Inspector General has found that the agency’s failure to issue this has allowed the theft of at least $555 million in SNAP benefits.)

State-level SNAP administrators have also been overwhelmed with the hundreds of new requirements that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act has saddled them with. For one, the law mandates that states adopt intensive new work requirements for older adults and others, resulting in voluminous additional monthly paperwork. And federal funds will be slashed even further next year if states don’t scramble to reduce their “payment error rate,” a figure that measures unintentional over- and underpayments in SNAP benefits. With all of this to juggle, many state officials told ProPublica that they’ve put chip card implementation on hold in order to implement the Trump law — one of whose ostensible goals was to reduce fraud.

 All the while, that law has cut food aid for more than 1.2 million children. The USDA’s Rollins has said that nearly 6 million people in total have been “moved off SNAP” during the current administration.

 The White House declined to respond to a detailed list of questions. A USDA spokesperson, in an emailed statement, did not refute that Rollins has focused on individual SNAP recipient fraud rather than on EBT theft, but said that finding “cracks in public statements screams politics, not fact-finding.” The spokesperson also did not address ProPublica’s reporting showing that the agency has failed to deliver solutions on EBT theft specifically. Instead, the statement pointed to the agency’s work, in collaboration with the Department of Justice, combating retailer fraud. The USDA says it has cracked down on thousands of stores that were abusing their SNAP privileges.

 Absent action from Congress or USDA leadership, it has largely been left to the Secret Service to apply an enforcement approach to what is arguably a policy problem. Agents first went after gangs like the Red Bull Crew, often by watching hours upon hours of grocery store surveillance footage. More recently, they’ve tried to get ahead of the scammers by heading to cities that have been hit by EBT theft attacks and then going store to store to check card readers for skimming devices. The agency has run more than 70 of these operations since April 2024, independent of any White House initiative.

 

Most of them are led by Peck, the assistant special agent in charge. With his form-fitting black polo tucked into cargo pants and a contoured beard, he has a flat affect even as he lists off colorful details like how the criminals sometimes ship dishwashers full of cash overseas. But he also emphasizes the vulnerability of the victims and wishes there was even more his team could do for them. “The U.S. has been fighting the War on Drugs and the War on Terror for how many years?” he said. “We are pushing hard and we’re doing all we can with the resources and abilities that we have.”

One bright morning in late June, dozens of law enforcement officers gathered in a Secret Service meeting room on the top floor of a downtown Brooklyn skyscraper, with a commanding view of the New York City skyline. In addition to unarmed Secret Service analysts in short-sleeved shirts inscribed with the field office they were joining from (Nashville, Miami, San Diego), there were agents from the USDA Office of Inspector General as well as a smattering of NYPD officers — who had guns, handcuffs and the jurisdiction to make arrests should anything go awry that day.

From a podium, Peck recapped how the multiday New York operation was going so far, including that the previous day, officers had happened upon two foreign nationals installing a skimming device, chased them down and made arrests. “Be safe, watch backs, stay fed,” he concluded.

 

Then everyone dispersed into teams of three or four. Each was given a list of dozens of stores in Brooklyn or Queens — disproportionately ethnic and dollar stores, but also some larger chains like 7-11 — that they were assigned to visit, based on data analytics showing where skimming activity was most probable.

The squad that ProPublica joined was headed to Midwood, in South Brooklyn, which is home to Orthodox Jews and immigrants from the Middle East, Central Asia and elsewhere. As we walked around the neighborhood with these federal agents, we got plenty of confused looks and some scared ones, too.

“Hello, we’re here with the Secret Service,” one of the analysts would say upon entering each store. Then they’d ask the store manager for permission to inspect each card reader. They also handed out flyers in four languages telling the cashiers what to look out for.

When they did find a skimming device, they donned gloves and masks to handle it. After prying it off the card reader, they bagged it and tagged it, to be sent in for DNA and fingerprint testing as well as digital forensic analysis. Maybe a lead could be extracted, a connection to a larger EBT theft ring.

These missions are clearly well-intentioned, and every skimmer removed saves families from being deprived of food. Yet, plainly, conducting store-to-store checks of card readers is inefficient. Over the course of two years, the agency has spent tens of thousands of staff hours checking 69,805 point-of-sale terminals at stores, 42,972 gas pumps and 10,661 ATMs. They’ve found 637 skimming devices. And as one agent told ProPublica, “There could be a new skimmer on there tomorrow.”

 

Ultimately, it just won’t be possible to arrest one’s way out of this crisis, both federal and state law enforcement officials acknowledged. Low-level runners keep arriving from Romania and elsewhere; even if they do get caught, they’re often able to bond out of jail because they’re only facing state charges for nonviolent offenses. Then they disappear.

Funding for chip EBT cards still faces dim prospects on Capitol Hill, according to Democratic and Republican lawmakers and staffers, even with newfound support from major retailer associations and big players like Walmart. There’s a chip card provision in the Senate’s draft version of this year’s Farm Bill, but the whole package is mired in a dispute between the parties — over the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s cuts to SNAP funding — that looks like it will last until well after the midterm elections. This almost doesn’t matter, given that on the House side, the Farm Bill has already passed, and it contains no funding for chip cards.

And there’s been no movement on repeated bipartisan proposals from Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and others to renew the reimbursement program for families that have had their food assistance taken.

 

Certainly, the mass distribution of any new payment technology isn’t easy. California, Alabama and Oklahoma have had to phase in their new cards gradually, allowing customers to still use the card’s magnetic stripe if the chip isn’t working everywhere yet. And they’ve tried to notify rural convenience stores and gas stations, and help corner bodegas update their card readers, so that no one is left with only a chip card in a desert of stores that still just accept magnetic stripe.

But by doing all of this and employing additional data tools, California has reduced the theft of food and cash benefits by as much as 83% in just two years, the governor’s office said. And Alabama officials claim their state hasn’t had any confirmed EBT theft cases since they began to distribute chip cards this year.

Still, chip cards aren’t the entire solution and doubtlessly, scammers will find clever ways to get around this technology. Moreover, SNAP recipients have largely been denied the basic services that banks and credit card companies use to block likely fraudulent transactions in real time. (Think of the email or text alerts you get from your bank when suspicious purchases are attempted with your card information.)

 

If states were to try this without federal help, they would have to individually pay for the additional security features. Most have gone for cheaper options like advising or requiring SNAP recipients to change their PIN regularly and to lock their card when not using it. Both are useful stopgaps but require constant diligence.

State and county SNAP caseworkers said they’ve been deeply frustrated that ever since Trump and Musk killed the reimbursement program, all they can do for victims is suggest they change their PIN more often and maybe try reporting the crime to local law enforcement. “It is a short conversation,” said Norman Vogele, a caseworker in Oregon. The date of the crime and the missing amount is recorded. “It isn’t clear why we even do that much,” he said, “as there is zero recourse.”

 

The Red Bull Crew stayed on the run for over a year, using looted food benefits to buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of bulk energy drinks in Oklahoma, Kansas, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. After hundreds of hours of surveillance by the Secret Service, federal prosecutors and local authorities, all but one of the members were arrested and served sentences ranging from one to three years. They’ve all since been released, and some may have been deported.

Meanwhile, every day, SNAP theft sprees keep popping up in new corners of the country. A Secret Service official sounded gloomy about the pursuit of street-level operatives on its own, without policy change. “You can arrest them,” he said. “But essentially once you take them off the street, there’s 10 more that are doing the same thing.”

Americans' Savings Help Fuel Private Credit by Heather Gillers,

 

When Sabrina Elliott inherited some money, her son-in-law helped her invest $40,000 in a product that dangled the prospect of stock-market gains with no risk of loss.

In exchange for locking up her money for 12 years, it promised returns tied to the market's performance. One catch: The company behind the product, Aviva, could periodically lower the portion of market gains Elliott received.

That happened twice after Aviva was purchased by Athene, an insurer backed by private-asset giant Apollo Global Management. By the time the policy ended in late 2023, her annualized return had come to 3.7%.

"That's one of the downfalls of the indexed annuities," said Carlos Dias Jr., Elliott's son-in-law and a financial adviser outside Orlando, Fla. "Insurance companies can change the amount that's received from the particular index every year, every two years."

Wall Street behemoths like Apollo and Brookfield are just now starting to find ways to tap in to the vast sums of money in 401(k) accounts, pitching their alternative investments as another way for people to grow their nest eggs. But private-asset managers have already been vacuuming up the savings of American households through indexed annuities, which have surged in popularity over the past decade and helped power the rise of their private lending to risky companies.

The annuity industry recently got a black mark after Delaware Life, an insurer controlled by Dodgers owner Mark Walter, disclosed it was under federal investigation for failing to report loans to other entities he owned.

Indexed annuities are meant to appeal to older people who may be on fixed incomes and have little appetite for risk, but still want some exposure to stock-market gains. People turn over $50,000 or $100,000 worth of savings for a decade or so. Insurers guarantee that their investment return will never fall below zero, with the potential for better returns than a CD or savings account.

Exactly how much a person's money grows is based on terms the insurer can change during the life of policy, such as the share of the deposit that can earn market returns, any cap on returns and any spread subtracted from those returns.

In the first year of Elliott's policy, 60% of her money earned returns tied to the S&P 500, minus a 2.9-percentage-point spread. In the policy's seventh year, Athene lowered that share to 55%, then to 45% in the 11th year. The rest of the money grew at a fixed rate of 1%.

Elliott, a 69-year-old professor of nutrition in the Florida university system, had paid for add-ons that let her choose to parcel out payments over her lifetime or to her heirs. That reduced her annual return by about 2 percentage points.

The 3.7% annualized rate she earned over the 12-year life of her annuity beat the 1.9% she would have gotten from Treasurys. But it paled next to the annualized return of 13% on the S&P 500.

Athene, which Apollo fully took over in 2022, said in a statement that the annuity "performed exceptionally well, earning returns well in excess of similar safe yield alternatives, guaranteeing 100% principal protection, and providing optional enhanced death benefits and guaranteed lifetime income."

The company said "it is highly misleading to measure the performance of fixed indexed annuities using a scenario that pairs historically low rates with a strong bull equity market."

Products tied to the stock market are typically overseen by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and selling them often requires a securities license. But indexed annuities can also be sold by state insurance agents, who aren't subject to the same rules on disclosing conflicts of interest or acting in a client's best interest. Indexed annuities are often among the most lucrative products these agents can sell.

American Equity, for instance, pays agents a commission of 5% to 7% of a policyholder's deposit on some 10-year indexed annuities. That is compared with around 3% for simpler annuities with fixed rates sold by the Brookfield-owned insurer.

Insurers say the higher commissions reflect the complexity of the products, which require greater explanation.

Still, consumer advocates say indexed annuities can be a magnet for misleading sales pitches. Educational materials for an indexed annuity sold by Delaware Life, for instance, show a premium of $100,000 growing to $2.7 million over the next 21 years.

But the "Momentum Growth" annuity is tied to a stock-and-crypto index established just last year. The returns advertised draw on hypothetical data based on the past 15 years -- a period that included 11 years with double-digit stock-market gains.

After the financial crisis, private-asset managers began buying up insurers to access their huge pools of policyholder premiums.

Indexed annuities were particularly attractive. Payouts follow a relatively predictable timetable, and the policies typically last about a decade, compared with about three to five years for fixed-rate annuities. That gives asset managers flexibility to put the money into riskier, less-liquid private-credit investments like collateralized loan obligations or asset-backed securities.

If their investments do poorly, the insurer can cushion against loss by lowering the caps on policyholder gains, and if their investments do well they can fatten their profits the same way, said Larry Rybka, chief executive of Valmark Financial Group, which sells life insurance, annuities and investment products. "That's why private equity likes this, because they can change the deal on the consumer," Rybka said.

Christa Pike survived 2 doses of an execution drug. How is that possible? by HANNAH SCHOENBAUM and HALLIE GOLDEN

 

Christa Pike regaining consciousness and speaking a week after receiving two doses of execution drugs in Tennessee has astonished even some medical professionals and left many people wondering: How did she survive?

Attorneys for Pike, 50, called her recovery “medically unprecedented” after she was placed on a ventilator following the bungled Sept. 30 attempt to make her the first woman put to death in Tennessee in 200 years. On Wednesday, they said Pike was confused, “speaking limitedly” and could not move her arms, one of which had a blood clot.

Pike, who was convicted in the 1995 torture and killing of classmate Colleen Slemmer, is the only person to survive after receiving lethal injection drugs during an execution, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Many details of the execution process remain secretive, and Tennessee officials say they are investigating what went wrong.

Still, medical experts raised a few possibilities that could explain how Pike was able to survive, including the potential drug quality and the placement of IV lines. Tennessee’s executioners had difficulties earlier this year with IV lines for another execution, leading to it being called off.

 

Only a small amount of the drug may have entered her bloodstream

The 5-gram dose of pentobarbital used in executions is many more times the amount that should put someone in a medical coma, said Dr. Jonathan I. Groner, a retired pediatric general surgeon at Ohio State University College of Medicine who has studied lethal injections.

“The fact that she woke, on one hand, says she got really little of it into her system. So that’s kind of shocking,” Groner said. “It says how badly they botched the execution.”

At high doses, the potent barbiturate should make a person lose consciousness and stop breathing.

Groner said the IV might have been placed improperly, or Pike’s veins could have been fragile and ruptured, causing the drug to seep into the surrounding tissue instead of flowing through the bloodstream. Pike’s attorneys have said she was poked with needles at least seven times in the state’s death chamber and that she has a blood disorder that makes it tough to get needles into her veins.

 

Sourcing of drugs for executions is shrouded in secrecy

Another possible problem could be the drug quality, said Michaela Almgren, a South Carolina pharmacist and educator who has consulted on several lethal injection cases.

Many major pharmaceutical companies refuse to supply drugs for lethal injections, which has raised questions about how states get them. Court orders have revealed that some states have turned to compounding pharmacies, which create custom drugs from raw ingredients and operate with less regulatory oversight.

Tennessee does not disclose its drug supplier and has not said where Pike’s supply came from. Almgren said that makes it difficult to track if a drug was prepared, tested, handled and administered properly.

That also means the public may never know exactly what happened in Pike’s case.

Pike’s attorneys asked a court to require the Tennessee Department of Correction to preserve evidence, including drug lot numbers, communications and other material from the attempted execution. A judge told prison officials on Wednesday that they must preserve “anything that was in the actual room.”

Outgoing Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has paused executions and ordered a “comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred.” It’s unclear whether the state will try executing Pike again.

 

Hospital treatment likely involved flushing the drug from her system

Before the execution attempt, Pike’s attorneys told courts and prison officials that she had medical conditions that could complicate a lethal injection and make it agonizing.

Dr. Joel Zivot, a professor of anesthesiology and surgery in Atlanta who consulted as an expert for Pike’s legal team, said Pike has a blood-clotting disorder that causes her body to produce an excess of platelets. Her lawyers had argued that the condition could cause clotting at injection sites or bleeding that could affect her lungs.

State protocol calls for a second dose of pentobarbital if the first doesn’t result in death, but it doesn’t spell out what to do if an inmate survives the second injection.

The attempted execution got underway around 7:30 p.m. At some point Pike appeared to lose consciousness, but she could be heard breathing until media were escorted from the witness room at 8:53 p.m. An ambulance arrived at 9:14 p.m. and took Pike to a hospital.

 

Once there, doctors likely tried to stabilize her breathing, checked how much pentobarbital was in her system and worked to quickly flush it out, said Dr. Michael Baden, the former chief medical examiner of New York City.

Pike’s lawyers said the failed attempt left her arms burned and blistered. She was unconscious and on a ventilator for several days.

“She was very fortunate that there was enough (pentobarbital) to put her into a deep sleep, but they were able to keep her breathing going and they were able to start flushing it out,” Baden said. 

 

Truth, evidence and controversy: Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion at 20 by Jamie Q. Roberts

 

In my youth, somewhere in the late 1990s, when I was a goth or a punk or something, I had a t-shirt proclaiming, “Ignorance should not reproduce”. Along with the text there was a provocative image, which included the Christian cross.

Back then, if you were an educated liberal type, who valued reasoning and evidence, the scientific method, free expression and broadly progressive social values – the kinds of values championed by civil rights movements – there was a decent chance that you felt yourself to be battling against a stuffy, illiberal Christian orthodoxy that, to a considerable extent, held the reins of power, especially in the United States.

In 1999, at a Republican primary debate, the presidential candidates were asked “what political philosopher or thinker do you most identify with?” Without missing a beat, George W. Bush said “Christ”. This was arguably the moment he became the frontrunner to become president.

Religion and power commingled. This was not only a concern in politics, but in education, where we often heard about intelligent design being taught alongside natural selection.

Rereading Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion, which turned 20 this year, I’m reminded of this time. The God Delusion offers a sustained critique of religion, and Christianity, in particular. Its arguments are presented across ten chapters, the most significant being the fourth, titled “Why There Almost Certainly is No God”.

The book was a huge bestseller – it sold more than three million copies and was translated into more than 30 languages. It struck at the heart of the religious leviathan, at least for its educated, secular readership.

 

It was also immensely controversial, with many significant rebuttals being published. There were three main objections.

First, Dawkins was accused of engaging with a caricature of religious faith. Literary scholar Terry Eagleton famously accused Dawkins and others of producing “vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince.”

Second, he was criticised for his tone. Theologian Alister McGrath spoke of Dawkins’ “shrill, aggressive rhetoric”.

Third, Dawkins was accused of replacing one religion with another – science. The title of novelist Marilynne Robinson’s 2006 article about Dawkins’ book, Hysterical Scientism, very much conveys this. (I’ll return to this last objection at the end.)

Notably, opposition to The God Delusion took the form of intellectual debate. He wasn’t “de-platformed” – cancelled – in any significant way.

Still, Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, who made his name with The Selfish Gene (1976), became one of the “Four Horsemen of New Atheism”, along with the brilliant and polemical journalist Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great, 2007), cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell, 2006), and philosopher Sam Harris (The End of Faith, 2004, and Letter to a Christian Nation, 2006).

Today, Dawkins remains a controversial figure, more for this statements around questions of trans identity than his criticisms of religion. But the enduring value of The God Delusion lies in its championing of liberal values: reasoning and evidence, free speech, thinking for oneself and putting regard for truth before one’s concerns about group membership.

Bristling at censorship

In his opening chapter, “A Deeply Religious Non-Believer”, Dawkins presents different incarnations of religiosity. He contrasts those who encounter the immensity of the universe and posit the existence of a God, with atheists, like himself, who feel awe but remain secular.

“A quasi-mystical response to nature and the universe,” he writes, “is common among scientists and rationalists.” He then quotes physicist Albert Einstein:

 

To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.

For Dawkins, this kind of religiosity deserves respect. What follows is a lengthy objection to the fact that, at the time, there was a broad taboo against criticising religion. “A widespread assumption,” Dawkins writes, “which nearly everybody in our society accepts – the non-religious included – is that religious faith is especially vulnerable to offence and should be protected by an abnormally thick wall of respect.”

Naturally, Dawkins affirms that he will not follow this assumption. When I think about The God Delusion now, it is Dawkins’ bristling at censorship that most stands out in my mind, not his criticism of religion.

The origins of complexity

In the following chapters, Dawkins defines what he means by God and presents several arguments for God’s existence, including those by noteworthy philosophers and theologians such as Thomas Aquinas.

The most significant argument, for Dawkins, for the existence of God, which he tackles in Chapter Four, is “intelligent design”, which claims that the complexity we observe in natural things, such as the human eye, could only have arisen through the will of some intelligent designer.

But an easy rational objection to intelligent design is that saying God is the intelligent designer of the universe doesn’t really help, because, by the same argument, something even more intelligent than God must have designed God.

The greatest strength of The God Delusion is Dawkins’ account of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. “Darwin and his successors,” he writes, “have shown how living creatures, with their spectacular statistical improbability and appearance of design, have evolved by slow, gradual degrees from simple beginnings.”

According to the theory of natural selection, complexity in life arises not from chance alone. Rather, random genetic variations (the chance part) are filtered by natural selection, so the genetic variants that provide survival and reproductive advantages in particular environments persist.

Also important, although less definitive, is the chapter in which Dawkins speculates about the roots of religion. While he hesitates to say how, exactly, religion arose in Darwinian terms, he argues that religion is a by-product – a “misfiring” – of other evolved capacities, such as the inclination to intuitively assign purposes to everything, or the necessity that children believe what stern adults tell them, lest they eat something poisonous or fall off a cliff.

In the remainder of the book, Dawkins discusses whether religion is necessary as a source of morality (the answer is “no”), the questionable morals of the Bible (the so-called “Good Book”), and the negative effects that religion can have on people.

The book’s final chapter is the most poignant. It brings us to the enduring relevance of The God Delusion. “It is often said that there is a God-shaped gap in the brain which needs to be filled,” writes Dawkins. “We have a psychological need for God – imaginary friend, father, big brother, confessor, confidant – and the need has to be satisfied whether God really exists or not.”

He then writes that religion “has at one time or another been thought to fill four main roles in human life: explanation, exhortation, consolation and inspiration”.

In other words, religion tells us how the world works and how to be good, it makes us feel a little better about our fleeting existence, and it inspires us to do great things.

Dawkins acknowledges that religion may well console us, but makes the cutting point: “Religion’s power to console doesn’t make it true.”

 

Dawkins’ recent troubles

As I have noted, in The God Delusion Dawkins was not only battling against what he saw as the irrationality of religion, but the taboo, in many circles, against criticising religion; indeed, the success of the book indicates that many surely felt the same way.

However, times have changed since 2006. And this is demonstrated by Dawkins’ own recent troubles.

Dawkins ran afoul of the social justice world when he tweeted the following in 2021:

In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP [The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People], was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss.

Dawkins was applying reason to the vexed issues of racial and trans identity and he was punished. Among other things, in 2021, the American Humanist Association withdrew his 1996 Humanist of the Year award.

In an open letter responding to this decision, philosopher Rebecca Goldstein and psychologist Steven Pinker, both of whom had received the award, argued that seeking to “punish, dishonor, or humiliate a writer rather than engage with his words is a betrayal of humanism”.

“It has not been lost on commentators,” they observed, “that an association of ‘freethinkers’ has deemed certain thoughts unthinkable, nor that it is enforcing dogmas and catechisms by excommunicating a heretic.”

As the language of Goldstein and Pinker indicates, parts of the “woke” left, even though secular, now exhibit some of the characteristics of religious zealots. There is much more that could be said here about the alleged “God-shaped gap” in the human psyche.

Dawkins has written several books since this decision, including The Genetic Book of the Dead: a Darwinian Reverie (2024). He continues to attract controversy.

Science works

I mention all this because the great value of The God Delusion lies not in its criticism of religion, but its embrace of liberal values: reasoning and evidence, free speech, thinking for oneself.

Honestly, coming up with arguments against religion isn’t that challenging if one is so inclined. And when one tussles with a religious person, often the conversation ends up on the point that religion is more about faith than it is about reason. Religious people themselves refer to their religions as “faiths”.

The liberal values in mention have been hard-won across the centuries and they are always under siege. Sometimes this is from religion, as was the case 20 years ago. But sometimes the threat comes from the secular world: communism, fascism and even what we might call “identity politics” or “wokism” today.

Why do we care about reasoning and evidence and truth? One simple point is that when we have a regard for such things, our world gets better. This is what distinguishes science from religion.

In my favourite Dawkins moment, he was challenged at a talk by some smarty-pants in the audience to justify the scientific method – the intimation being that science is indeed just one faith among many, and is thus indistinguishable from religion.

Dawkins replied:

It works. Planes fly, cars drive, computers compute. If you base medicine on science, you cure people. If you base the design of planes on science, they fly. If you base the design of rockets on science, they reach the moon. It works, bitches.