In the Press

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Trump administration leaves Congress in dark on spending decisions (opens a new window)

  • July 14, 2025
  • Reuters

Trump’s focus on slashing the federal government also has made his administration less concerned about congressional queries, said Cerin Lindgrensavage, counsel at Protect Democracy, a group which is suing the administration over removal of online spending details.

“Usually, administration officials would be wary of angering the appropriations committee for the same reason it’s a bad idea to bite the hand that feeds you, but now, Congress is negotiating against an executive branch that seems happy to cut more spending,” Lindgrensavage said.

The growing surveillance state in the U.S. is far worse than you imagined (opens a new window)

  • July 10, 2025
  • PRISM

The Privacy Act—passed in 1974 partly as a response to the infamous Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) COINTELPRO surveillance program—restricts the sharing of personal information between government agencies. However, “the options for challenging the changes the bill makes to Medicaid’s data sharing setup would be limited, especially in terms of litigation,” said Nicole Schneidman, technology policy strategist at the advocacy group Protect Democracy. It makes “any effort to push back on this quite aggressive collecting of information much, much more challenging.”

Ian Bassin: The Democracy Champion (opens a new window)

  • July 8, 2025
  • The Chronicle of Philanthropy

As Ian Bassin studied the rise of left- and right-wing authoritarian regimes that came to power over the past decade, he saw they had one thing in common: The governments used everything at their disposal — litigation, voting restrictions, policy development, and public messaging — to restrict democratic rights.

If the US president threatens to take away freedoms, are we no longer free? (opens a new window)

  • July 5, 2025
  • The Guardian

“Trump is making clear that if he can do that to the world’s richest man, he could certainly do it to you,” said Ian Bassin, co-founder and executive director of Protect Democracy. “It’s important, if we believe in the rule of law, that we believe in it whether it is being weaponized against someone that we have sympathy for or someone that we have lost sympathy for.”

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The Trump administration is making an unprecedented reach for data held by states (opens a new window)

  • June 24, 2025
  • NPR

“Every week we’re seeing new examples of this administration demanding or sharing sensitive government data for unprecedented uses,” said Nicole Schneidman, who heads the technology and data governance team at Protect Democracy, a nonprofit legal center that describes its mission as “defeating the authoritarian threat.” Schneidman said Americans should understand “the data that they have entrusted to state governments right now is truly a target.”

“Once this kind of data is in the wrong hands and in particular is aggregated, it can be used for an incredibly broad ranging set of purposes,” Schneidman of Protect Democracy said. “It is critical for every American to understand there is no ‘undo’ button here.”

Militarized LA: troops here to stay as Trump doubles down on deployments (opens a new window)

  • June 23, 2025
  • The Guardian

“The military shouldn’t be in the business of domestic law enforcement. That’s not what they’re trained to do,” said Beau Tremitiere, a lawyer with Protect Democracy, an advocacy group supporting the suit.

“If Americans weren’t aware of the risks posed by politicized domestic deployments by the military before the events in Los Angeles, they certainly are now. Healthy and respectful civil-military relations are yet another bulwark of US democracy that the president is trying to erode. We’re all on notice.”

Bloomberg law logo.

Judge Rejects Trump’s ‘Appalling’ NIH LGBTQ, Race Grant Cuts (opens a new window)

  • June 16, 2025
  • Bloomberg Law

Kenneth Parreno, a Protect Democracy attorney arguing for the plaintiffs in that case Monday, maintained the Administrative Procedure Act requires the NIH to make decisions on grants in a reasoned away, while the “record shows a slap-dash decision making process,” including a series of emails in which NIH leadership took “just minutes” to make a decision on grants affecting “hundreds of researchers and millions of lives.”

“The directives themselves are explicitly spelling out a process where HHS is directing and identifying these terminations, that NIH officials are, in turn, just rubber stamping them, not providing any review,” Parreno said. “What this is is a slap-dash, harried effort to rubber stamp an ideological purge.”

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Judge orders NIH to restore cuts to research grants related to diversity (opens a new window)

  • June 16, 2025
  • The Washington Post

“We are really gratified that we have a judge who has taken a fair look at the record and come to the very clear conclusion that NIH and the defendants have acted unlawfully in terminating these grants based on ideological grounds and not based on science,” said Shalini Goel Agarwal, special counsel at Protect Democracy, an advocacy group representing the plaintiffs in one of the cases.

By terminating the grants, the Trump administration was effectively declaring that certain groups of Americans are not worthy of having their health studied, Agarwal said. It is part of “a pretty ugly history that the judge is rightly calling out as wrong and fundamentally unlawful.”