SUMMARY: A gunman in his 20s opened fire outside the Annunciation Roman Catholic Church in Minneapolis during morning mass, targeting children attending the first week of school. Armed with a handgun, shotgun, and rifle, he fired multiple shots through the church windows, killing two children aged eight and ten and injuring 17 others, including 14 children, two critically. The shooter then took his own life. Minneapolis officials condemned the deliberate act of violence, expressing deep sorrow and urging community support for the grieving families. Police continue investigating the motive, noting the shooter had no criminal history or known connection to the church or school.

A gunman armed with three weapons opened fire on Catholic school students on Wednesday morning as they celebrated mass at Annunciation Church in Minneapolis, MN. Two children were killed and 17 others were injured. The gunman also died.

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Since it was signed into law on July 4, West Texas Republican Congressman Jodey Arrington has been broadly praised by allies for his stewardship of the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson called Arrington, who chairs the powerful House Budget Committee, “one of the most effective and consequential members of Congress.” And Arrington has wasted no time touting his victory in West Texas, proclaiming it to be a “game changer for Rural America” and “a big beautiful win for West Texas.” He’s argued the so-called entitlement cuts to Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program will “root out waste and fraud.” 

But many of his constituents in Congressional District 19—a vast, deeply red rural district that includes over 30 counties—stand to lose access to both their healthcare and their local hospitals under the massive tax-and-spending bill, which will slash Medicaid and ACA spending by more than $1 trillion and knock 10 million more people off of insurance nationwide over the next 10 years, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates. Arrington’s district is home to more rural hospitals than any other in Texas, and roughly a quarter of those are at risk of closing under the new law, according to a recent study. Six of the 25 hospitals in the 19th are at risk of closing, according to a June study by the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina. Using data from 2020 to 2022, the study defined at-risk rural hospitals as those with three consecutive years operating with a negative profit margin or those which receive a disproportionately large share of revenue from Medicaid. 

Losses to rural hospitals from changes to Medicaid funding under the new law may be blunted by a $50 billion rural health fund that was added as a last-minute concession to rural members. The National Rural Health Association projected that the major hit Texas rural hospitals would take under the new law would shrink from an estimated loss of $1.2 billion to $407 million after the rural fund is applied over the next five years. But both the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and state governments will have wide latitude on how to use the funding.

That’s left rural hospital administrators in Arrington’s district uncertain about the future of their facilities—and how the new law will affect them. Dennis Fleenor, the leader of the hospital in Muleshoe in Arrington’s district, has concerns. “By the time CMS and the state and everybody else get their fingers in that small slice of pie,” Fleenor said, rural hospitals like the one he runs may not get much money from the rural health fund.

Arrington did not respond to the Observer’s questions about the healthcare impact residents and hospitals in his district may face under the OBBBA. Arrington has served as the district’s representative since 2017 after a career that included working for a private healthcare company, for Texas Tech University, and as an aide for George W. Bush in the Texas Governor’s Office and the White House. Arrington has served as chairman of the House Budget Committee, one of the most influential positions in Congress, since 2023. He’s also served on the House’s Rural and Underserved Communities Health Task Force since 2019.

The 19th Congressional District hugs the New Mexico border on the west and crosses central West Texas past Abilene to the east. Anchored by Lubbock and Abilene, the district is largely rural, featuring 17 million acres of farmland that produce a fifth of the state’s total agricultural sales and more cotton than any other district in the country. It’s also mostly white and deeply conservative. Around 15 percent of the district’s residents are uninsured, according to 2023 census figures, which is nearly on par with the statewide rate—the highest in the nation. Many residents in Arrington’s district rely on public healthcare: 131,000 or 18 percent of the district population are enrolled in Medicaid. Statewide, 16 percent of residents are enrolled. 

Ten percent of the district’s population is enrolled through the ACA marketplace, lower than the state’s 15-percent rate, according to a study by the health research and policy organization KFF. The tax-and-spending bill doesn’t extend ACA tax credits that expire at the end of the year and thus will cause insurance premiums to surge for the vast majority of current enrollees. KFF estimates the removal of the tax credits and added hurdles to enroll in the ACA could cause 1.7 million Texans to lose ACA coverage. 

Because Texas never expanded Medicaid under the ACA, the state will not have to impose work requirements on Texas’ Medicaid patients or reduce its provider tax rate, which will be a requirement under the new law starting in 2027. However, the OBBBA did freeze the provider tax rates states use to finance Medicaid on July 4, making it more difficult for states to increase their own funding for the program. 

Dr. Adrian Billings, a longtime West Texas community physician and associate dean of the Rural and Community Engagement Division at Lubbock’s Texas Tech Health Sciences Center, said that hospitals are required by law to provide emergency care to patients regardless of whether they can pay. But unlike urban hospitals that serve a higher volume of patients and can better afford to offset the costs of treating uninsured patients, increases in uninsured rates can quickly dig rural hospitals into bigger financial holes. 

“It is harder for a rural hospital to absorb when somebody without insurance shows up in the emergency room or needs to be hospitalized,” Billings said. “There’s just not much fluff at all left in a rural hospital’s margins to suffer any significant hit to their collection.” 

The Mitchell County Hospital District serves the county of nearly 9,000 in the southern area of Arrington’s district, situated between Big Spring and Sweetwater. CEO Michelle Gafford told the Observer that the county hospital projected to lose about $700,000 in Medicaid funding, or roughly 3 percent of its 2026 fiscal year budget. “The cuts are going to hurt everybody, but they are not as crucial as they once would have been,” Gafford said, since the hospital’s share of Medicaid patients has steadily transferred to privately run managed care organizations. In the 13 years Gafford has worked at the hospital, it’s made a profit in only one year. The hospital is designated as a critical-access hospital, which allows it to receive Medicare reimbursements at roughly the same amount of the cost of services. However, other insurers, particularly Medicare Advantage and other private insurers, routinely underpay or deny coverage for services, leaving rural hospitals like the Mitchell County Hospital District persistently in a financial hole.

More recent data gathered and analyzed by the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform shows that 11 rural hospitals in Arrington’s district now have had a negative total margin in the most recent three consecutive years with available data—representing over half of the 19 total such hospitals in the state. According to that data, three hospitals in the district have 20 percent or more of the hospital’s patient costs associated with Medicaid services. That includes the Muleshoe Area Medical Center. 

Since the 1980s, the Muleshoe-area hospital, located in the sparse western Panhandle near the New Mexico border, has gone through its ups and downs as its owners changed from one group to another. According to the hospital’s website, after one national company bankrupted the hospital in 1987, a Muleshoe physician named Bruce Purdy kept it running by seeing patients, cleaning its bathrooms, repairing the facilities, and even sleeping in his clinic to attend to late-night emergencies. Dennis Fleenor, a Lubbock transplant, now runs the critical-access hospital on a shoestring budget. “It’s a struggle everyday. But we’re here to take care of our community, and we will take care of our community whatever challenges we face,” he told the Observer. But he said that Congress can go a long way to help rural hospitals by making insurers fully reimburse hospitals for patient service costs. Even though the hospital reported an average of 20 percent of the hospital’s patient service costs over the last two years were related to services for Medicaid patients, Medicaid paid the hospital for only 18 percent of those costs. 

Between 2005 and 2025, 25 rural hospitals in Texas have closed, the most of any state, according to the center’s analysis. In CD-19, two rural hospitals closed during that time and at least six of the district’s 30 counties in the district already lack hospitals. In Jones County, north of Abilene, there once were three hospitals. In 2018, Stamford Memorial Hospital closed because it didn’t have enough in-patients. The following year, nearby Hamlin Memorial Hospital closed, leaving only its medical clinic and emergency medical services open. By 2023, Anson General Hospital was hanging by a thread with $1.9 million in outstanding debt. At that point, its board decided to convert the facility to a “rural emergency hospital.” That federal designation was established under a 2021 law that Arrington helped spearhead as a last resort for rural hospitals; in order to qualify for federal grants, those facilities must eliminate in-patient services. Texas now has five Rural Emergency Hospitals statewide; two, Anson General Hospital and Crosbyton Clinic Hospital, are in Arrington’s district. 

Vance Boyd, an Anson-based cattleman, pro bull rider, and general contractor, told the Observer he remembers when Anson General Hospital was “thriving, productive, and employed a lot of people.” But he said it’s now “a triage center to get you to a bigger market.” As a cancer survivor, he travels roughly 24 miles to Abilene to see his doctor. “If you’re having a health emergency in a more remote area, you’re pretty much on a dice roll whether you’re going to make it,” Boyd said. 

Gaines County, which borders New Mexico, was the epicenter of Texas’ recent measles outbreak. Since January, the outbreak led to 762 cases, 99 hospitalizations, and two deaths statewide, according to the Texas Health and Human Services. Eighty-one percent of the cases occurred in counties within Arrington’s district. Cash-strapped county hospitals with crumbling infrastructure in the surrounding area lacked the space to test for measles or beds to treat patients, the Texas Tribune reported. 

Frustrated with the healthcare system, the “death spiral” of rural hospitals, and “AWOL” politicians, Boyd, a conservative Republican, ran against Arrington unsuccessfully in the 2020 and 2024 GOP primaries. His campaign centered, in part, around the need to expand Medicaid in Texas. 

“When you live in an area where the average income is low and many are on some sort of government assistance, to expect everybody to have a premium healthcare plan is not realistic,” Boyd said. “I feel like our representative didn’t fight for us.” 

Arrington, meanwhile, has his sights set on even further cuts to Medicaid. In mid-July, less than two weeks after he helped pass the OBBBA, Arrington told Bloomberg News that he would be seeking to pass deeper cuts to Medicaid, along with Medicare cuts that he had tried and failed to get locked into the Big Beautiful Bill. Among Arrington’s goals for a budget bill sequel this fall are to cut the federal reimbursement rate to penalize states that expanded Medicaid coverage under the ACA and reduce Medicare reimbursements to hospitals by paying the same rate regardless of the provider. 

“I think we will do one before the end of the year,” Arrington told Bloomberg News. “It’s going to be a more targeted set of reforms.”

The post West Texas Congressman’s ‘Big Beautiful’ Cuts Could Harm Rural Hospitals in His District appeared first on www.texasobserver.org

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Center-Left

This content presents a critical perspective on a Republican congressman’s budget bill, emphasizing the negative impacts of Medicaid and ACA cuts on rural hospitals and vulnerable populations. While it acknowledges the congressman’s achievements and conservative district context, the overall tone highlights concerns about healthcare access and funding reductions, reflecting a viewpoint more aligned with center-left critiques of conservative fiscal policies.

“Texas power plants and chemical companies benefit as Trump eases pollution rules, experts say” was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

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The nonprofit publication Capital & Main produced this article. It is co-published with permission.

For Donna Thomas, smokestacks are a typical sight from her home in Fort Bend County. Since she was a child, she has seen the coal and natural gas-powered W.A. Parish Generating Station puff clouds of haze during the day and light up brightly at night. The facility — which has been around since 1958 — is both part of the background and all she thinks about.

Thomas is not alone. For decades, residents have expressed concerns over the pollution emitted from the Parish coal plant — a separate facility from the natural gas plant — and called for its closure. The plant, located about 30 miles southwest of downtown Houston, is ranked by Texas environmental regulators as one of the worst polluters in the state for certain hazardous emissions. These include mercury, a toxic heavy metal particularly harmful for children and pregnant people.

This year, mercury has been top of mind for environmental activists and residents like Thomas. In April, President Donald Trump announced an exemption for companies from implementing stricter Biden-era mercury regulations for two years. Of the 163 eligible coal plants, 11 are in Texas and six have been approved, including Parish’s operator, NRG Energy. In Missouri and Illinois, five coal plants have been exempted, and in Pennsylvania, all 12 of the coal plants seeking approval have been approved.

Then in July, Trump exempted chemical companies for two years from Biden’s 2024 HON Rule, a set of regulations that control hazardous air emissions from chemical plants called the Hazardous Organic National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants.

The Trump administration determined the exemptions are in the country’s best interest and represent a burden on industry, and that the technology is not available to meet stricter regulations. Companies like NRG agree.

However, critics say the Biden administration’s 2024 Mercury and Air Toxics Standards — called MATS for short — and the HON Rule were long overdue and the two-year delay in implementing them is merely a tactic to protect industry profit margins at the expense of public health.

Moreover, critics point out that the MATS delay may be giving companies the freedom to ignore toxic air emission rules until the Trump administration repeals the Biden-era regulations altogether. In June, the Environmental Protection Agency under Trump proposed a rule to eliminate the 2024 MATS rule completely.

The two rules together have set off alarm bells for experts and environmentalists in Texas, home to one of the world’s largest petrochemical sectors and 11 coal-powered plants. The exemptions will run from 2027 — when the Biden rules were supposed to take effect — to 2029.

“We know these rollbacks are not good for anyone, especially for those that are community fenceline,” said Thomas, also the founder and president of the Fort Bend Environmental — a grassroots organization focused on environmental justice. “We have around 1,000 homes within three miles of Parish, so that’s going to affect all of them.”

A two-year delay

The EPA has been working on stricter environmental regulations for chemical plants since the early 1990s. Only in 2020 did Biden’s EPA begin drafting new rules in earnest.

But owners of the chemical plants should not act so surprised, said Neil Carman, a former regulator for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

“The chemical industry has known for decades that this was all coming, but they don’t like rules, because it means they have to put on more pollution control and they have to do more leak inspections,” said Carman, now the clean air director for the Texas chapter of the Sierra Club. “These plants will always tell you safety first, safety first, but then you run into this thing called money.”

Of the 79 chemical facilities in Texas requesting exemptions, 15 have been approved, including 13 along the Gulf Coast and the so-called petrochemical corridor.

Carman pointed out that the heads of chemical companies have been in talks with Trump’s EPA since the election. In March, the administration announced that companies could apply for exemption from MATS, HON and seven other sets of emissions standards.

That same month, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin met with Dow Inc. Chair-CEO Jim Fitterling to discuss regulations imposed by the Biden administration, according to public records and emails obtained by the Sierra Club.

In one email sent on March 17, Dow reps asked to discuss “clarity” on the EPA’s recent announcement that it will reconsider the HON rule and “Dow has met with the Office of Air and Radiation regarding an extension of the current compliance deadline, which is impossible to meet.”

In May, Zeldin met with Fitterling and other chemical company CEOs to discuss the industry at large. Then in July, Trump announced the exemptions for HON, including for two chemical plants in Louisiana and one in Seadrift, Texas, operated by Dow and its subsidiary Union Carbide.

In a statement to Capital & Main, a Dow spokesperson said that “safety and integrity are at the core of both companies’ operations” and the “extensions are appropriate and necessary to address the technical challenges and to ensure the continued safe and efficient operation of these facilities.”

Carman doesn’t buy it. He worked as an environmental regulator in Texas for 12 years. Even then, he said, companies never seemed to be able to find the budget to limit their emissions and chemical leaks. For him, it’s still the cost.

“A lot of these are old plants and so when they go in and do all this work,” Carman said, “they have to find a place where they’re going to put in new controls and they have to engineer it. They have to design it all. It’s months of planning, but these rules were out there. They knew they were coming. They just want two more years of delay.”

Limiting mercury

When the EPA implemented the 2012 MATS rule, mercury emissions dropped 86% — or four tons — in five years.

In 2024, Biden’s EPA approved a rule to strengthen MATS by tightening the emissions standards for mercury by another 70% and reducing pollutants discharged through wastewater from coal-fired plants by more than 660 million pounds per year.

The rule could prevent as many as 11,000 premature deaths, 2,800 cases of chronic bronchitis and 130,000 asthma attacks, according to the EPA under Biden.

However, in April, Trump approved the exemptions for 47 coal-powered plants across the nation. As of mid-August, 70 are now exempted, including Parish.

“These rules were just so critically important to people’s health,” said Surbhi Sarang, senior attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund. The Trump administration “was doing this process that was just not transparent. I mean, there was no process. Whereas in rulemaking, there’s public comment. This is just like a presidential action that was kind of taken in a vacuum and then announced.”

In response to the exemption, Erik Linden, senior director of communications at NRG, said the time is needed and will be used to evaluate the technology for air quality systems and monitoring equipment for compliance.

“All existing MATS emission controls will be properly maintained and remain in service,” Linden said of the current MATS rules that began in 2012. The exemption would give NRG until 2029 to implement the changes.

However, in July, Trump’s EPA proposed eliminating Biden’s rule entirely by the end of the year. Interested parties had three weeks to submit comments, and the Environmental Defense Fund’s request for an extension was denied.

“Rule-making usually takes 12-18 months if not longer,” Sarang said. “They’re moving very quickly.”

All of this is alarming for residents living near industry. With the extent of the changes to environmental regulations coming down from the Trump administration, there’s a lot for Thomas, the Parish generating station neighbor, to process. But she hasn’t given up. Increasingly, Thomas is talking to her neighbors and fellow residents about fighting back.

This means sending letters to representatives in Texas and in Washington, D.C. Thomas said it pays to be loud.

Parish is “going to do the same thing it’s been doing,” Thomas said. “If the EPA does not put a stop to these [emissions] getting out, then everyone is going to pay for this with their lives and in their water and in their air.”

Disclosure: Environmental Defense Fund and NRG Energy have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

Copyright 2025 Capital & Main

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This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2025/08/27/texas-trump-mercury-rule-mats-coal-power-plants-pollution/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

The post Trump delays mercury pollution rule, helps Texas power plants appeared first on feeds.texastribune.org

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Center-Left

The content focuses on environmental regulations and critiques the Trump administration’s rollbacks of Biden-era pollution controls, emphasizing the potential public health risks and environmental justice concerns. It highlights the perspectives of environmental activists and regulatory experts who advocate for stricter pollution standards, while portraying industry and the Trump administration’s actions as prioritizing economic interests over health and safety. This framing aligns with a center-left viewpoint that supports stronger environmental protections and regulatory oversight.