Category: Washington Post

An attorney for Lindsay Clancy, the 36-year-old Massachusetts mother who admitted to killing her three children, said he hopes President Donald Trump would consider a pardon for his client after the high-profile murder case ended in a mistrial last week.

“Mr. President, I would hope that you would consider this young lady, the type of person she is, what she’s been through, and consider a pardon,” Kevin Reddington said Tuesday on Good Morning America.

The president cannot pardon state-level crimes, and Clancy’s case is being tried in state, not federal, court.

Governors can grant clemency for state crimes; under pressure from Trump, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) in May reduced the state prison sentence of former county clerk and election conspiracy theorist Tina Peters, who was convicted for a scheme to copy her county’s election computer system.

Asked about the trial and pardon request, the White House referred the Washington Post to Trump’s comments on Friday in which he described the case as a “horrible tragedy.”

“It’s a terrible situation. Look, she did a horrible, horrible, thing. Can’t be worse,” he said. “But you’ll find out what the price to pay is. There’ll be a price. It’s going to be mental institution or jail or something.”

Reddington also said he hoped he would “be able to work something out that would be acceptable to both sides,” after a mistrial was declared on Friday. Prosecutors have not said whether they will seek another trial.

Clancy’s case captured the public’s attention and became a cultural touch point, putting postpartum mental health issues in the spotlight. She had said she killed her three children by strangling them at home in 2023, and the jury was asked to decide whether she should be held legally responsible for her actions. Reddington had argued that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time, which prosecutors disputed.

The jury was dismissed after failing to reach a unanimous decision after deliberations hit nearly 40 hours following a trial that stretched more than six weeks.

Veterans and Democrats are escalating efforts to prevent construction on President Donald Trump’s planned arch as the anticipated start of site work approaches, arguing the project is illegal and would diminish the experience of visiting nearby Arlington National Cemetery.

VoteVets, a political organization aligned with Democratic veterans, on Tuesday launched a new messaging campaign to mobilize more veterans against the planned 250-foot-tall arch.

In a 2½-minute video, which was first shared with the Washington Post, speakers call attention to the Trump administration’s stated plan to spend 20 hours per day building the arch over several years, which they note could conflict with military burials. The arch also would feature an observation deck for tourists to gaze at the city — and look out at the cemetery.

“We don’t need tourists overlooking funerals. I’m just appalled,” Karen Meredith, a Gold Star mother whose son is buried at Arlington, said in the video.

Home of the Brave, a political advocacy group whose leaders and advisers include prominent Trump critics such as commentator Bill Kristol and former Biden administration official Susan Rice, is also supporting the campaign. In an interview, people involved in the effort said they would start with social media posts this week and could expand to paid promotion.

Meanwhile, Rep. Chellie Pingree (D., Maine) on Tuesday urged House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) to sue and halt construction before it begins. Johnson and other Republican leaders have shown no interest to date in blocking Trump’s construction projects.

“Congress has neither appropriated funding nor granted authority for this project under the Commemorative Works Act. The Administration is building it anyway, betting this body will do nothing to stop it,” wrote Pingree, the top Democrat on a House subcommittee that oversees funding for the Interior department. “I am asking you to take all necessary steps to file suit immediately, while there is still ground left to save.”

Trump officials, emboldened by a Supreme Court ruling last week that allowed construction of the president’s ballroom to proceed, signaled Thursday that site work on the arch would begin this month.

The court’s decision, which found preservationists seeking to stop Trump’s planned ballroom likely lacked standing, has become part of the administration’s construction strategy. Justice Department lawyers cited the ballroom ruling in asking a federal judge to dismiss a legal challenge brought by three military veterans and a historic preservationist, who are seeking to halt the triumphal arch.

The high court’s ruling also sent advocacy groups scrambling to reconsider how to oppose the president’s construction projects. Some say they are reassessing whether they need to have other individuals or organizations join their challenges.

Several legal experts pushed back on the Trump administration’s efforts to invoke the Supreme Court’s ballroom ruling to dismiss the arch and other projects.

“The Justice Department would like to turn the ballroom decision into a universal immunity card for presidential construction projects,” said Greg Werkheiser, a co-founder of Cultural Heritage Partners, a law firm that has advised preservation organizations. “But the Supreme Court decided one standing question involving one plaintiff, one project, one factual record.”

Trump has spoken for nearly a year about his plans to build a triumphal arch that will honor the nation’s 250th anniversary, vowing that it will be the largest triumphal arch in the world — about 86 feet taller than France’s famed Arc de Triomphe. The administration plans to erect it on federal parkland in Memorial Circle, a traffic roundabout near Arlington National Cemetery and just inside the city’s boundaries.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said last week that construction would soon begin.

“We are pleased to announce that after a very long wait (over 125 years!), we are preparing to start, over the next two-week period, the excavation work necessary for the Great Triumphal Arch and Military Observation Deck,” Burgum wrote on X.

While Burgum’s announcement catalyzed a wave of new legal filings, Trump officials have argued that it is too soon for a federal judge to decide whether the project can be halted because Trump and other officials’ statements are not binding and the project has not been formally approved. The National Capital Planning Commission, a federal review panel that reviews the administration’s construction projects, has issued preliminary approval for the arch but has yet to award final approval.

Trump officials also said last week that the work they plan to do soon at the arch site is for informational purposes.

“This activity is not construction, or demolition in preparation for construction, of an arch,” Justice Department lawyers wrote in a court filing Friday.

U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan ordered that the administration provide her with 48 hours’ notice “before engaging in any activity on Memorial Circle” other than on-site information gathering.

Preservationists have stressed that an arch does not belong in the solemn corridor between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery.

Charles Birnbaum, the founder of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, a Washington-based advocacy organization, invoked 1916 comments by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., a landscape architect who helped design Washington.

Olmsted said that “to build a monumental feature such as an arch would be a ‘slap in the face’ to the Lincoln Memorial,” Birnbaum said in the VoteVets video.

Paul Eaton, a retired major general and VoteVets adviser, told the Post that he has heard from Republican veterans who are also opposed to a new structure towering over the cemetery. He called for veterans to submit comments to their lawmakers and to the National Capital Planning Commission.

“There’s nothing partisan about what we’re doing right now. It has everything to do with how the United States honors its dead,” said Eaton, whose father’s remains are interred at the cemetery. “That’s why we are so focused on this particular vanity project on the part of Mr. Trump.”

For decades, Washington has replayed the same fight over taming the soaring national debt: Democrats cite a need for more taxes. Republicans refuse. And anyone who suggests cutting the biggest source of spending — federal retirement benefits — gets attacked.

But a coming crisis in Social Security appears to be pushing at least a few Republicans off the GOP’s long-standing pledge never to raise taxes.

This summer, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R., Ohio) joined Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) in proposing to raise the payroll tax cap so people with higher incomes pay more into the program. Now the idea is emerging as an acceptable fix among other GOP lawmakers, including Rep. Tom Cole (Oklahoma), the influential chairperson of the House Appropriations Committee.

“We’ve got too many people who say, ‘Well, we have to stay within the current income level or stay at the current tax rate,’” Cole said in an interview. “I’m willing to look at the tax rate. I am willing to raise the amount of income through tax.”

The rare GOP concessions on taxes come as lawmakers begin to confront a Social Security shortfall so large and so imminent that the party’s traditional demand for curtailing benefits is unlikely to suffice. In just six years, millions of Social Security recipients will absorb a 22% cut in benefits unless lawmakers provide an immediate infusion of nearly $500 billion.

“Twenty or thirty years ago,” when the shortfall was far in the future, “you could come up with a straight-faced solution” that solved the problem entirely by cutting future benefits, said Charles Blahous, a senior research strategist at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center who served from 2010 to 2015 as the Republican public trustee for Social Security.

Now the problem is so big and urgent, Blahous said, “I don’t think you can look at it with a straight face and not do all of the above.”

Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform and the longtime enforcer of Republican anti-tax orthodoxy, dismissed the crack in party discipline, arguing that Republicans should stick to demanding spending cuts. Otherwise, he said, they risk infuriating voters already angry about the high cost of living.

“When Republicans say no to tax increases, they win. When they say yes to tax increases, they lose,” Norquist said. “They don’t get spending cuts — at all. And, they get smeared in the next election.”

But Cole, at least, said he thinks the political blowback from Social Security benefit cuts would be far worse than a comprehensive solution that includes raising taxes.

“I love Grover. But … you’ve got to deal with Social Security,” Cole said. “And believe me, you’ll have a lot bigger problem if it goes bankrupt than you’ll have keeping it whole, because people will feel cheated.”

Created during the Great Depression, Social Security provides monthly cash benefits to more than 70 million Americans. It is the single largest program in the $7.4 trillion federal budget, paying out $1.7 trillion this year, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. (Medicare is a close second at $1.3 trillion.)

The program is funded by a payroll tax on wages up to a “cap” of $184,500 a year, with workers and employers each paying 6.2%. Workers who pay into the system can receive monthly checks as early as age 62, though the full retirement age is 67.

For years, annual tax collections exceeded the cost of benefits, allowing the program to amass a surplus known as the Social Security trust fund. As the baby boom generation retired, however, the math flipped: Social Security now pays out far more than it collects and is draining the trust fund to make up the difference.

The trust fund is projected to run dry in 2032. At that point, Social Security would have to rely solely on incoming tax collections — meaning monthly checks would shrink by $440 on average unless Congress acts, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank.

Closing the shortfall would require $459 billion in cuts or fresh revenue in 2033 alone, according to the BPC — and the sum would grow larger every year.

That relentless math persuaded Moreno, a former car dealership owner who rode into office with President Donald Trump’s endorsement in 2024, to break ranks with his party on tax hikes. In his proposal with Warren, Moreno calls for eliminating the payroll tax cap so highly compensated workers pay the tax on their entire income.

“Why should a middle-class nurse pay a larger share of her paycheck than a wealthy corporate lawyer?” Moreno and Warren wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times, noting that one recent poll found that 62% of Republicans support lifting the cap. “This is doubly unfair in an economy in which top earners’ wages, over time, have pulled far ahead of those of the average worker.”

Moreno declined an interview request. His spokesperson Reagan McCarthy said in an email: “Sen. Moreno promised Ohioans he would fight for them in DC and make sure they get the benefits they were promised and that’s exactly why he’s leading this effort.”

Removing the cap without increasing benefits for high-earning workers would close more than half the program’s shortfall, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan group focused on deficit reduction. Blahous and others have cautioned against that approach, saying it would sever the connection between contributions and benefits that makes Social Security different from — and more popular than — other social welfare programs.

Uncapping the payroll tax alone would push the top marginal federal tax rate over 50%, according to the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.

Some Democrats would go further. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.) argues not only for lifting the payroll cap but also for taxing the investment income of wealthy households and closing a loophole that lets business owners shrink their personal tax bills.

That proposal, which would fall entirely on the backs of the wealthy, would raise enough cash to fully fund Social Security for at least 75 years, according to a 2023 estimate by the program’s chief actuary.

The historic link between contributions and benefits makes changing Social Security politically perilous. That’s why many in Congress want negotiations to be outsourced to a bipartisan commission or advisory board.

Cole has introduced one of several proposals to form such a panel. He argues that more tax revenue, including from raising the payroll tax cap, “ought to certainly be on the table” alongside adjustments that would reduce future spending, such as raising the retirement age.

A third GOP lawmaker, Rep. Lloyd K. Smucker of Pennsylvania, has also said he sees more tax revenue as part of a Social Security fix. “You’ll probably have to do something on the payroll half of the money being paid into the system,” Smucker told Roll Call last week.

Smucker said lawmakers should also consider means testing, so benefits are reduced for the wealthy while low-income retirees are protected. Smucker’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Though raising taxes is unpopular among Republicans, it has long been part of bipartisan plans to solve the Social Security puzzle. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan, a Republican, and House Speaker Tip O’Neill, a Democrat, saved the program from its last bout with insolvency, agreeing to a mix of solutions that included increasing payroll taxes and gradually raising the retirement age.

In 2005, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) argued for raising the payroll cap and trimming benefits. Weeks later, President George W. Bush said he was open to a “variety of options,” though his plan to curtail future benefits for all but low-income retirees and divert some tax dollars to new private retirement accounts was dismissed by Congress.

And in 2010, several Republicans on a commission formed by President Barack Obama voted in favor of a debt-reduction plan that included raising the payroll cap, raising the retirement age to 69 and trimming benefits for wealthy retirees. The plan offered by the so-called Bowles-Simpson commission never received a vote in Congress.

Sen. Mike Crapo (R., Idaho) was among the commission’s yes votes. Crapo now serves as chairperson of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over both taxes and Social Security.

At a committee hearing last month, Crapo said the Bowles-Simpson plan “has informed subsequent Social Security solvency discussions.” His office did not respond to questions about his current position on tax hikes.

Another hallmark of Social Security reform has been deep involvement by the White House. Cole said he has urged Trump to take on the hard work of fixing the program, calling it a potential “crowning achievement.” Since Trump is not running for office again, he could “do it with no political risk,” Cole said, adding, “I think he’ll get enormous political credit for it.”

But while Trump has warned Republicans not to cut “a single penny from Medicare or Social Security,” he has not said how he would raise the vast sums needed to bolster the programs’ deteriorating finances.

White House spokesperson Liz Huston did not respond to questions about fixing the program, saying via email only that “there will be zero reductions to Social Security payments” under Trump’s leadership.

The Trump administration has removed language criticizing a memorial to the Confederacy formerly located in Arlington National Cemetery, part of its ongoing effort to reshape portrayals of the Civil War.

The Confederate Memorial, a 32-foot bronze statue commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and unveiled in 1914, was removed from the military cemetery in 2023. Its removal followed a congressional mandate to rid U.S. military property of names and symbols honoring the Confederacy and its leaders.

The decision by the bipartisan Naming Commission to remove the statue was based on criticism and backlash over the memorial’s depictions, which included an enslaved woman carrying an infant child of a white officer and an enslaved man following his owner to war.

A Defense Department website and a marker at the memorial’s former site included contextual language describing the sculpture as portraying a “nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery.” The website also described the two Black figures as enslaved people, including an enslaved woman depicted as a “Mammy,” and it remarked on how the portrayal of the “faithful slave” helped to shape American pop culture.

Now, that language has been removed from the website, and the marker in the cemetery has been replaced by a new sign that omits wording critical of slavery and the Confederacy.

The website also formerly featured additional context about the sculpture’s symbolism, including a Latin phrase inscribed on it.

“An inscription … construes the South’s secession as a noble ‘Lost Cause,’” the website previously read. “This narrative of the Lost Cause, which romanticized the pre-Civil War South and denied the horrors of slavery, fueled white backlash against Reconstruction and the rights that the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments (1865-1870) had granted to African Americans.”

That language and other text was removed in recent weeks, according to photographs of the sign and archived versions of the webpage.

Asked about the changes to the sign and the website, the Defense Department referred questions to Arlington National Cemetery, which did not respond Monday.

The statue was relocated to the Virginia Military Institute in 2023 amid some congressional GOP opposition. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said last year that the statue would be reinstalled at Arlington National Cemetery. Last year, then-Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) had said that the statue would return next year.

“The Army expects to display the sculpture at this site in 2027 after it has undergone comprehensive conservation and refurbishment,” according to a new marker in Arlington National Cemetery at the statue’s former site.

Stephen West, a Catholic University historian, said he first noticed that the sign had been changed when he visited Arlington National Cemetery on Sunday.

“The language that used to be on the sign and website described the Memorial correctly. Ezekiel’s sculpture did sanitize slavery, and it did mythologize the Confederacy,” West wrote in a text message to the Washington Post. “And so as a historian, I’m deeply disturbed by the removal of that language and by plans to restore the statue — especially because they’re of a piece with the censoring and slanting of history at other federal sites.”

Trump has previously said he supports efforts to recognize the Confederacy and sees it as a freedom of speech issue.

“When people proudly have their Confederate flags, they’re not talking about racism,” Trump said in a 2020 interview with Fox News. “They love their flag, it represents the South; they like the South.”

The president has decried efforts to remove Confederate statues and worked to reinstall them in his second term.

A statue of Confederate Gen. Albert Pike that was torn down and torched by protesters in 2020 was restored to its original location in downtown Washington in October. And last year the Pentagon ordered that a portrait of Gen. Robert E. Lee in his Confederate uniform be restored to the West Point library. The painting, which had been ordered removed by the Naming Commission, featured an enslaved man in the background tending to Lee’s horse.

Ty Seidule, a retired U.S. Army brigadier general who served as vice chair on the commission, said he was particularly disturbed by the Confederate Memorial’s pending return.

The Confederate Memorial “is the cruelest monument that I have ever seen,” Seidule said in an interview Monday. He said that he and a number of his colleagues called the statue “the most egregious example of racism that they had seen on any public land in America. It is a pro-slavery, anti-United States monument.”

Seidule said the rewording of the marker and the website is the first step the administration is taking before bringing the memorial back to the cemetery. Restoring the monument, he said, would be “against the will of the American people through their elected representatives in the law that they created.”

SANTA FE — A year after New Mexico launched free childcare for all families, Dakota Rivera still can’t find a place to send her kids.

The mom of two was ecstatic when the state’s Democratic governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, announced last September that New Mexico would expand its daycare assistance program to any family who wanted it.

But Rivera lives in a city with an acute shortage of childcare centers. She still spends her days piecing together care with help from family members, canvassing social media, and searching for babysitters.

She’s on 10 different waiting lists.

“I think the systems that they put in are great, sure, but it’s just not there yet,” Rivera said, as she tried to answer work emails while holding her 8-month-old daughter, who was cooing and waving a plastic giraffe. “In five years, maybe. For parents trying to do it now, it’s impossible.”

When Lujan Grisham first announced the program in a state with a majority-female legislature, it was widely praised as a historic step to address an issue that consumes the lives of parents everywhere — and their incomes. Costs for caring for an infant can often exceed a year’s rent, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

But the groundbreaking program, in part funded by the state’s sizable oil and gas revenue, has had a rocky debut.

The number of children who have enrolled has skyrocketed, far outpacing the capacity of daycare centers in the state. Lujan Grisham has had to grapple with legal challenges, including a whistleblower case from the program’s chief financial officer, who says she was fired after flagging an $83 million budget deficit.

Critics have raised concerns that annual costs could balloon to more than $800 million — nearly $400 million more than when the program debuted. State legislative analysts have also found that newly eligible, higher-income families may be squeezing out some of the lowest-income recipients. The state’s GOP leaders dubbed the program “Nannies for Millionaires.”

The stakes could not be higher as more Americans say raising children is too expensive and as political leaders look to New Mexico as they try to address overwhelming childcare needs. Vermont and Connecticut already have smaller-scale programs, and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) is rolling out free daycare for thousands of the city’s 2-year-olds – a move that has also had a bumpy start.

Sara Mickelson, an early-childhood policy expert and former deputy Cabinet secretary for New Mexico’s Early Childhood Education and Care Department (ECECD), said the state got two big things right when rolling out its plan: the money and the vision. But a subsidy doesn’t help parents if there is no program to take it, she said.

“Families there are still calling around and finding no openings,” she said.

Lujan Grisham has acknowledged the challenges, telling MSNBC, “We’re building a rocket ship as we fly it.” The governor said in an interview with the Washington Post that she sees the plan as a “game changer” for her state and a blueprint for the rest of America.

She said the program would need more than $1 billion from the state’s early-childhood fund over the next five years, $300 million more than the legislature initially allocated.

“No one said it was an inexpensive enterprise, and likely it shouldn’t be,” she said. “It should be something that invests in child well-being and development, and that’s what we’re doing.”

A report Tuesday from ECECD touted its successes, citing “dramatic gains” in childcare enrollment, growth in higher-quality care and wages for workers topping $19 an hour, $3 more than the national median.

“We’ve stabilized and really strengthened the childcare sector in New Mexico in ways that are critical. It’s critical that families have choices, and these choices reflect the kind of care they need,” said Elizabeth Groginsky, the ECECD cabinet secretary. But, she said, “there’s more work to be done.”

‘This felt too good to be true’

The move to universal childcare was the culmination of a decadelong journey for advocates in New Mexico, a poor, majority-minority state of 2 million whose fourth-graders rank last in both reading and math, according to the biennial National Assessment of Educational Progress, the “nation’s report card.”

In 2020, the state legislature created a trust fund with about $300 million in oil and gas revenue to support early-childhood education and care, a pot that has since ballooned to about $11 billion.

New Mexico expanded income limits for the childcare assistance program three times. In 2022, more middle-class families became eligible in a change that allowed 80% of families in the state to participate.

Last September, Lujan Grisham took the final step, announcing that New Mexico would be the first to open its subsidized daycare to any family, a move estimated to save families $13,000 a year per child.

“That was always the vision,” she said at the time. “It took us this long to realize it, but by golly, we did.”

The announcement was met with applause and cheers, but behind the scenes, state legislators — who said they had not been informed that the program would become universal — were confounded, along with some members of the department’s own staff.

“We were all shocked,” said state Sen. George Muñoz, a Democrat and chairperson of the Senate Finance Committee. “Nobody knew about it until the day it was in the paper. All of a sudden we were all calling each other, saying, ‘Where did this come from?’ ‘Did anybody from the governor’s office talk to you about it?’ Nope, we were all in the dark.”

Word of the expansion moved quickly through the young moms groups of Santa Fe, a picturesque city that is not always easy on parents with its high cost of living and long waiting lists for daycare that can stretch for years.

Meghan Montelibano Gorman, 33, a mother of two and a marketing consultant who runs an Instagram account called “Santa Fam,” moved with her husband back to Santa Fe in 2022 from Denver to be closer to family.

She initially tried to work full time doing marketing for the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper. But managing a full-time job and the health of her older son Charlie, who has breathing and speech issues, quickly took a toll. She recalled acing a presentation one day, but the elation she felt was sliced with guilt because she had to move Charlie’s speech therapy to do it. Even if they had been able to get a spot for daycare, it would have gobbled up most of her $35,000 annual salary.

“It was untenable,” she said. “Something had to give and it was me. I broke through that process.”

With the support of her husband, an engineer, she left her job to start her own marketing company. Creating her own flexible hours, she cared for her son and second child, Max, now 2, with help from family members.

She said her life changed for the better when they were able to enroll both kids in universal daycare this summer before Charlie moved into prekindergarten. She was able to pay off Charlie’s medical bills and triple her income.

“I was in shock this was happening,” she said of the new state program. “Happy, of course, ecstatic. I had been so in the trenches — with the scheduling, the negotiations, wiggling into shapes I didn’t fit into to make our life fit — this felt too good to be true.”

Now, she said, “I’ve reclaimed some of my joy because I’m not stressing out all the time.” She later invited program organizers to her Santa Fam parent meetup to help spread the word.

Capacity challenges

Enrollment has soared to 47,000 from 32,000 since the launch, but so have the costs.

In February, the legislature passed a bill formalizing the program. Only afterward did lawmakers learn from the Lujan Grisham administration that it already faced a $60 million budget shortfall, Muñoz said.

The legislature’s finance committee said in a report last year that the program could soon cost the state almost $849 million annually, a roughly $400 million increase from the fiscal year 2026 payouts. The governor disputed that finding, saying that the legislature’s analysts did not factor in those who would remain in private care.

Ismael Torres, the committee’s chief economist, warned in a committee hearing last month that such a spike could put the trust fund that helps pay for the program in jeopardy.

Jacob Candelaria, a former Democratic state senator, is representing two former New Mexico Early Childhood Education and Care Department staffers who said they were penalized after raising red flags about the finances. He also represented a trio of Republicans who challenged the program in court and lost.

He said Lujan Grisham, who is term-limited and will leave office this year, has embraced universal childcare as her legacy issue and a “stepping stone” to the national stage in 2028. She was eyed as a potential running mate for both former president Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and this year successfully pushed to have New Mexico become the fourth state to vote in the 2028 presidential primary — a prime slot.

“Whatever the governor has planned for the next steps of her career, this universal childcare narrative is a central piece of it,” Candelaria said. “My clients have had the unfortunate luck of getting in the way.”

The governor said she expects the whistleblower lawsuits to fail like the GOP suit did. She also expects the issue of childcare to be a topic during the presidential debates in 2028, she said.

“You’re going to have this as a signature issue about where the country goes,” the governor said. “We need a universal approach supporting families who need care.”

Asked whether she expected to be on the presidential stage herself, she said, “I hope I’m in the ears of people on the stages, because I know we need this.”

The state has worked to address the capacity issues by offering low-interest loans to providers and attempting to speed up approvals. New Mexico was short an estimated 15,000 daycare slots when the program was launched and added 6,700 since then, an ECECD spokesperson said.

Anne Liley, the director of the First Presbyterian Child Development Center in Santa Fe, said the majority of families at the center now use the universal system instead of paying privately. Most are families with two working parents whose incomes are just above the previous limit of $106,600.

“It’s been huge for them,” she said. “When both people are working, trying to get by, and you have two children, half your income is going to childcare.”

More than 400 children are on her center’s waiting list, so she’s looking for a new space that would allow her to add about 85 infants and toddlers, a critical need. She’s still trying to find the right building, which is difficult in Santa Fe with its many historical structures, she said.

Critics have said allowing families who made more than $106,600 (for a family of three) last year to use the universal system has squeezed out low-income families who desperately need care. Sometimes, they are seasonal workers who leave and then return, only to find a wealthier family has taken their slot, analysts said.

The program serves 3,700 families who make above that amount, according to the ECECD report this month.

“If you’re making that kind of money, you really don’t need this,” said state Rep. Mark Duncan, a Republican. “Are we keeping kids who really need it out because they didn’t get there first? That’s my concern.”

Lujan Grisham said they did away with income requirements because the state is “building for an equitable system.”

“You don’t make it for poor people, you don’t make it for middle class and you don’t make it for billionaires, you make it for everybody,” she said. “We’re really leaning into the developmental well-being aspect and family stability.”

When James Krantz, a tech executive, and his wife Caitlin, who owns a marketing company, had their son a little over a year ago, they too found lengthy daycare waiting lists in Santa Fe. He said the state is now paying for their babysitter after the couple made the argument that “universal childcare” should include private in-home care.

“Doesn’t universal apply to everybody?” he asked. Having the full-time sitter has been “magical” for the couple, who can work with somebody “to closely align with how we want to raise our child.”

Muñoz said that going forward the department needs to focus its efforts on “at-risk kids, low-income kids, and special-needs children … to really deliver on the transformational investment the state is making.”

When Rivera, 29, a legal assistant, gave birth to her son three years ago, she looked at the cost of daycare and was “stunned” by the price tag — more than $20,000 a year. She and her husband, a technician, cobbled together a complicated schedule: She does her work from home, and other family members are enlisted to help. She makes an online calendar to keep everyone on task.

“I’m constantly overwhelmed by the process,” she said. “My kids are seventh-generation New Mexicans. To feel like we’re not welcome anywhere when the family has been here so long is so frustrating.”

She and her husband have completely “lost hope” on finding help for this school year and are looking to 2027 for relief. Maybe she can find a preschool for her son and a daycare for her daughter then.

The Pentagon is investigating the high likelihood that an explosion in southern Iran that destroyed a home hosting a wedding celebration was caused by a U.S. bomb that missed a nearby target, a person familiar with the operation said.

The strike on the home, which Iranian officials said killed at least four civilians and injured dozens more, was part of a larger wave of attacks on Tuesday in southern Iran, described by U.S. officials as retaliation for increased threats to U.S. troops and commercial shipping.

U.S. forces launched an airstrike in the coastal town of Kuhestak that targeted a communications complex, a U.S. official said. The complex, which included a small building at its base, sat in a civilian area but was believed to be utilized in part by Iranian forces to conduct operations, the person familiar said.

Six bombs dropped by U.S. Navy jets traveled on a tight pathway toward the tower and all struck the site except for one, which appeared to go astray, said the person, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive operations.

An explosion tore into the roof of the home approximately 440 feet from the tower, according to visuals verified by the Washington Post.

The explosion killed at least two women and two children aged 4 and 16 years old, according to Ali Jafarian, Iran’s deputy health minister, and injured more than 90 others. The Post could not independently verify those figures.

The mishap followed an exhaustive targeting process, which include U.S. personnel working to minimize harm to civilians, the person familiar said, like multiple layers of verifying target locations.

“We’re investigating it because obviously we care. We want to know,” Vice President JD Vance said when asked about the strike in a news conference Thursday.

Central Command, which oversees military operations in the area, said it was aware of reports of civilian casualties and is “looking into them” but declined to provide additional details.

“The U.S. military never targets civilians, unlike the IRGC,” said Navy Capt. Tim Hawkins, a spokesperson for Central Command, using the acronym for Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard.

Officials are assessing one other possibility for the explosion at the home, including an air defense missile falling out of the sky — a circumstance the person familiar and weapons experts independently said was highly unlikely.

The tower was the only target slated for attack in Kuhestak, the person familiar said, ruling out a scenario that the home was intentionally struck or was mixed up with some other target.

The Post verified photographs and video from the night of the attack and aftermath published on social media to determine locations and precise distances.

Details of the strike were earlier reported by the New York Times and Reuters.

The bombing is among a growing list of U.S. strikes that have killed civilians during the six-month conflict, which has entered a tenuous ceasefire marked by occasional attacks.

The Trump administration has dismissed concerns raised by lawmakers and human rights groups that have alleged airstrikes without due regard for civilians nearby are violations of international law. The Pentagon has mostly dismantled an office focused on mitigating civilian harm and reassigned personnel who investigate such incidents.

An airstrike on an Iranian military compound in the early hours of the war in February struck a nearby school, killing at least 175 people, many of them children, according to Iranian state media. That strike was the result of an error that involved outdated targeting information, the Post previously reported.

Video posted by the Iranian Red Crescent Society from the night of the wedding attack showed people with flashlights rushing into the damaged buildings, and emergency workers appearing to use a hose to douse fires.

“In the new list of war crimes and attacks by the U.S. army on civilian targets in Iran, after schools, stadiums, and residential homes, now add wedding ceremonies to this list too,” the Iranian Red Crescent Society wrote on X.

It is unclear why the bomb in Tuesday’s strike did not hit its intended target. Guided munitions rely on several precise capabilities, including GPS coordinates, and almost always strike their intended targets, munition experts have said. Errant strikes are rare and typically the result of flawed intelligence, human error, or malfunctions on the weapon itself.

The munitions used to target the tower complex were U.S. glide bombs known as Joint Standoff Weapons, or JSOW, the person familiar with the incident said. One of the several variants carries a 500-pound warhead, according to the Navy.

Images from an Iranian state news channel showed strike remnants that were consistent with the JSOW’s tail fin and casing, said Trevor Ball, a weapons technical analyst for Armament Research Services who served as an Army explosive ordnance disposal technician. The Post was not able to independently verify the pieces were recovered from the site.

The damage seen is consistent with a variant of JSOW that uses two warheads with about 193 pounds of explosives inside, Ball said. The uniform shape of the crater, plus a spread of fragmentation on the structure and nearby buildings, showed a munition that detonated directly on the roof or exploded right above it, he said.

He ruled out other possibilities for the damage, like an Iranian air defense missile falling onto the home or a weapons depot exploding nearby, because the damage and shrapnel marks would have appeared significantly different.

The JSOW can be manually updated on its way to a target and it is possible they missed by aiming for a narrow segment of the tower, said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.

It is unlikely that electronic jamming or some other interference would alone be sufficient to disrupt the trajectory of a JSOW, which have complementary guidance systems, Cancian said. He said it was “highly likely” the strikes at the tower and home were conducted by U.S. forces after reviewing imagery and other details.

Wes Bryant, who previously served as a targeter in Air Force Special Operations, said military planners are obliged to consider the immediate area when attacking in a populated area.

“Civilian pattern of life should be established prior to attack, and every structure adjacent to the targeted structure should be characterized,” said Bryant, who later served in the Pentagon office focused on mitigating harm to noncombatants.

Workers on Saturday removed drapes shrouding the White House’s iconic North Portico, as President Donald Trump prepares to show off his renovation work when Chinese President Xi Jinping visits the White House later this month.

Teams of workers had been working under the shrouds for two months to repair the North Portico’s tall white columns, as well as fortifying the portico’s entrance to the White House.

The removal meant that scaffolding on the portico’s columns was newly visible for the first time since July. Workers are expected to soon remove the scaffolding, too, said two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the project.

The White House did not immediately respond to questions about the state of construction on the North Portico. Administration officials have previously said Trump has personally driven the project.

“President Trump comes out to greet a world leader. He sees door dings in the pillars and says, ‘Look at all this stuff. It needs to be repaired,’” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in July on The Katie Miller Podcast.

The North Portico project is among a slew of White House construction and renovation projects launched by Trump, with the president seeking to complete several before Xi visits for a planned state dinner on Sept. 24.

Trump earlier this year sped up a project to build a new helipad on the White House’s South Lawn and overhaul a nearby portion of the driveway, hoping to have the work done before Xi arrived. That project was completed this week, Trump has said.

Trump also has mused about more renovations, such as redoing the North Portico’s graceful Ionic columns, which have served to frame the White House’s main entrance for two centuries. Trump prefers more decorative columns, a style known as Corinthian, the Washington Post first reported in March.

“To be honest with you, the White House should have used Corinthian,” Trump said in a New York Magazine interview that published Friday, adding that the White House was a “luxury house” that deserved a higher level of column. “Maybe I’ll fix that, too.”

Asked by reporters on Friday what he hoped to accomplish during Xi’s visit, the president quickly pivoted to the helipad.

“We have a beautiful heliport, should he want to use a helicopter, just opened,” Trump said. “If you want to go outside and check it out, it’s beautiful. Just was completed, under budget, ahead of schedule, and beautiful.”

Trump has also invoked Xi’s visit as a reason he is working to complete his new White House ballroom. The president has said that the White House is not currently equipped to hold large events to honor VIPs, forcing officials to either set up tents outside on the lawn or limit attendance.

“Everybody’s fighting for tickets,” Trump said in a Rose Garden event on Wednesday. “We’re arguing over seats, but we won’t have that in a year from now. We won’t have that problem anymore.”