* Attorney General Kwame Raoul…

Attorney General Kwame Raoul today issued the following statement after joining a coalition of 20 attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to stop the Trump administration’s dismantling of the Department of Education.

“Illinois students have long relied on the Department of Education to oversee the timely processing of financial aid applications and the release of aid, so they can make informed decisions about pursuing postsecondary education,” said Raoul. “The Trump administration’s unlawful, unconstitutional action will severely hamstring the processing of essential financial aid. The elimination of large numbers of employees in the department’s Office of Civil Rights Harms Illinois students seeking redress from the federal government when violations of their rights affect their ability to obtain an education. Using mass layoffs to effectively dismantle a department that has its responsibilities set in federal law is yet another example of this administration’s unconstitutional and unlawful overreach.”

“What’s happening now in D.C. is devastating, disheartening and destructive to our nation’s education system,” said Arne Duncan, Former Secretary of Education and current Managing Partner at Chicago CRED. “Trump trying to dismantle the Department of Education does not help a single child learn how to read, which we should be focused on as a nation. Education should be the ultimate bipartisan issue. Trump’s attacks on education are unprecedented in the history of our nation. I appreciate Attorney General Raoul’s leadership and commitment in trying to right this wrong, not just for Illinois, but for children across the country. I will do whatever I can to help in this effort.”

The Department of Education’s programs serve nearly 18,200 school districts and over 50 million K-12 students who attend roughly 98,000 public schools and 32,000 private schools throughout the country. The department’s higher education programs also provide services and support to more than 12 million postsecondary students annually. As Attorney General Raoul and the coalition assert in the lawsuit, dismantling the Department of Education will have devastating effects for states like Illinois, which was expected to receive around $3.56 billion in federal funding in fiscal year 2025. According to data from the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE), the state is home to 866 K-12 school districts comprised of 3,835 schools that serve over 1.85 million students.

Students with disabilities and students from low-income families are some of the primary recipients of the department’s services and funding. Federal funds for special education include support for assistive technology for students with disabilities, teacher salaries and benefits, transportation to help children receive the services and programming they need, physical therapy and speech therapy services, and social workers to help manage students’ educational experiences. The department also supports students in rural communities by offering programs designed to help rural school districts that often lack the personnel and resources needed to vie for competitive grants. In Illinois, more than 375,000 students benefit from the funding provided through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the federal law that ensures students with disabilities have access to education.

With this lawsuit, Attorney General Raoul and the coalition are seeking a court order to stop the administration’s policies to dismantle the Department of Education by drastically cutting its workforce and programs.

* Subscribers were told about the Illinois connection to this story today. The New Republic…

The FBI is moving to criminalize groups like Habitat for Humanity for receiving grants from the Environmental Protection Agency under the Biden administration.

Citibank revealed in a court filing Wednesday that it was told to freeze the groups’ bank accounts at the FBI’s request. The reason? The FBI alleges that the groups are involved in “possible criminal violations,” including “conspiracy to defraud the United States.”

“The FBI has told Citibank that recipients of EPA climate grants are being considered as potentially liable for fraud. That is, the Trump administration wants to criminalize work on climate science and impacts,” the @capitolhunters account wrote Wednesday on X. “An incoming administration not only cancels federal grants but declares recipients as criminals. All these grantees applied under government calls FOR ENVIRONMENTAL WORK, were reviewed and accepted. Trump wants to jail them.“

The Appalachian Community Capital Corporation, the Coalition for Green Capital, and the DC Green Bank are just some of the nonprofits being targeted.

* January poll of Illinois AFL-CIO union members finds strong support for pension and retirement benefits, ranking the issues ahead of all other priorities. Click here for the polling memo and a letter to legislators.

*** Statewide ***

* The Detroit News | U.S. reps want Illinois to quit delaying project to block invasive carp from Great Lakes: Bipartisan members of Congress from Great Lakes states are urging the state of Illinois to “promptly” end its delay of construction of a $1.15 billion project to prevent invasive carp from the state’s waterways from infiltrating Lake Michigan. “This project is essential to prevent the spread of invasive carp throughout the Great Lakes. Both Illinois and Michigan signed the project partnership agreement with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 2024, now Illinois must take action to allow construction to proceed,” the lawmakers said in a joint statement.

*** Statehouse News ***

* Chicago Eater | Illinois Considers a Ban on Black Market Restaurant Reservations: Illinois, California, Nevada, and Florida are among the states where lawmakers are considering legislation, following New York’s lead with measures that would make selling restaurant reservations illegal. Their reasoning? Scalpers make reservations scarce, using bots that swarm reservation sites. As a result, normal customers miss out on scoring a table and potential walk-ins won’t stop by because the restaurants appear fully booked. And when reservations don’t sell, restaurants are left to deal with no-shows that hurt business.

* ABC Chicago | Gov. Pritzker, educators rally against Dept. of Ed cuts at Illinois Education Association assembly: “Students in rural communities who have relied upon federal funding to keep their schools open are likely to see closures and will have to travel further,” Pritzker said. There is deep concern among state educators at the representative assembly about the future of federal funding for their schools, especially Title 1 schools who receive federal dollars for students who are low-income.

* Jonathon Bush | Lawmakers can help former inmates trying to clean slates, get lives back on track: I had an opportunity not long ago to do something a bit different: I joined a mentorship program to give entrepreneurial advice to incarcerated individuals who are getting ready for a fresh start. During the session, one gentleman who had been baking lots of cookies while in prison came up to me and told me that he wanted to become a baker when he got out. He asked me for my advice on how to start his own business. Now, as the owner of a wholesale bakery, I have a soft spot for warm cookies and a lot of respect for anyone with that kind of passion. But I also know how tough starting a small business is, so I gave it to him straight: I told him that even though people love cookies, there’s also a lot of competition in the baking space. If he’s going to be successful, he will have to offer a product that’s truly unique or special.

* Politico | Top Illinois Democrat readies a Senate bid — and tells people she has major backing: In a brief interview Wednesday, Durbin acknowledged the lieutenant governor was among the Democrats who are preparing for his possible retirement: “She said if I run she’s not going to.”

*** National ***

* Daily Herald | Judge orders Trump to reinstate probationary workers let go in mass firings across multiple agencies: U.S. District Judge William Alsup on Thursday found the firings didn’t follow federal law and required immediate offers of reinstatement be sent. The agencies include the departments of Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Defense, Energy, the Interior and the Treasury.

* Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy | Tesla Reported Zero Federal Income Tax on $2 Billion of U.S. Income in 2024: Tesla’s annual financial report, released this morning, shows the company enjoyed $2.3 billion of U.S. income in 2024 on which it reports precisely zero current federal income tax. Over the past three years, the Elon Musk-led company reports $10.8 billion of U.S. income on which its current federal tax was just $48 million. That comes to a three-year federal tax rate of just 0.4 percent – more than 50 times less than the statutory corporate tax rate of 21 percent.

* WaPo | How microplastics could be affecting our food supply: Microplastics are floating in the air around us, surging through rivers and streams, and burrowing deep into soils. And now, a new study suggests that all those tiny pieces of plastic are also disrupting the growth of plants. A paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday found that the tiny plastic particles could be slashing photosynthesis rates globally. Microplastics, the scientists estimated, are responsible for a reduction in photosynthesis of 7 to 12 percent worldwide in plants and algae. That cut in photosynthesis, the researchers warned, could also impact large-scale crops that humans depend on, such as wheat, corn and rice.

* NPR | Trump’s hiring freeze has halted local head counts and could threaten the U.S. census: “This was unexpected. We didn’t think that it would affect something like this. But it did,” John Corbitt, White House’s mayor, tells NPR. The Tennessee town — about an hour north of Nashville and named after what was once a white-painted inn — paid the U.S. Census Bureau more than $581,000 upfront last August for a local head count ahead of the next once-a-decade, national census in 2030. A more up-to-date tally could boost the town’s share of population-based funding from the state by as much as $875,000 a year, local officials estimate.

*** Downstate ***

* Capitol News Illinois | ‘You are flying.’ Inside the harrowing 100-mile police chase in Sangamon County: When Sangamon County Sheriff’s Deputy Jonathan Pearce saw a white pickup spotted outside a motorcycle shop that had been burglarized earlier that night, he punched the gas and chased the fleeing truck, reaching race car speeds and screeching his tires through hairpin turns. Sgt. James Hayes, his supervisor, asked whether he had enough gas. “I got a full tank, baby,” Pearce said on a dispatcher’s recorded line.

* Illinois Times | DOGE cuts come to Springfield: Springfield business owner John Chiang received a letter March 10 that landlords dread: a tenant is breaking its lease. The tenant is the U.S. government’s Department of Labor, which rents office space on the second floor of the building at 3161 W. White Oaks Drive. The building is owned by Chiang, 82, who also owns the information technology company Novanis that operates out of the same building. “In Springfield, the commercial real estate market is not so great. It could take a while to fill this vacancy,” he said.

* Illinois Times | The future of electric vehicles: According to Kelly Blue Book, electric vehicle (EV) car and pickup truck sales reached 1.3 million in 2024, which is a 7.3% increase from 2023. EVs made up 8.7% of all vehicle sales last year, and during 2025 one in four vehicles sold are expected to be EVs or hybrids, which use a combination of electricity and gasoline for power. In Illinois, approximately 3,500 fully electric vehicles are being purchased by residents every month.

*** Chicago ***

* Chalkbeat Chicago | Chicago’s fight over school staff pensions: 4 big things you need to know: The budget amendment on the school board’s agenda for its March 20 meeting accepts an additional $139 million in unexpected revenue, but does not spell out what the board will spend the money on. It lays out three possibilities: paying the yet-to-be determined costs of a new contract with the Chicago Teachers Union, funding an inaugural collective bargaining agreement with the union representing principals, and giving the money to the city as a contribution to the retirement fund that supports non-teaching school staff.

* Crain’s | Johnson and other big-city mayors asked to meet with DOJ task force on antisemitism: The federal task force, led by Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Leo Terrell, claims there have been instances where schools in Chicago, New York, Boston and Los Angeles “may have failed to protect Jewish students from unlawful discrimination,” according to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice. The aim of the meeting, to take place in Chicago, is to gather information and determine if further action is required.

* Tribune | CPS data breach: Here’s what to know to protect yourself: To follow standard good security practices, parents should ensure they’re using strong passwords and enable two-factor authentication, according to Chetty. Good cyber-security hygiene will prevent someone from compromising your account, even if they’re able to get ahold of your password. “Because you can’t predict when that information will be exploited or exactly what it will be used for… then it’s hard to know what else you can do to safeguard yourself.”

* Block Club | Chicagoans Ditch Their Teslas To Protest Elon Musk: ‘Nobody Wants To Buy Them’: Skylar Damiano went from owning a Tesla to spitting on them. The Humboldt Park resident would take his 2022 Tesla Model Y on roadtrips from Detroit to Dollywood — but he finally had enough of Elon Musk by President Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day, when the Tesla CEO made what appeared to be a Nazi salute. Damiano promptly traded in his Tesla, the first car he owned, for another electric vehicle at a “huge loss,” he said. That suburban dealership told Damiano nine people came in trying to offload Teslas in just two weeks, he said.

* WBEZ | Inside the fossil hunt: Digging for the monsters of Illinois’ Mazon Creek: Under McFetridge Drive in Chicago, two stories down in the catacombs of the Field Museum of Natural History, Jack Wittry slides open a handmade wooden drawer. There are thousands of such drawers that visitors never see, in row after row of towering, metal cabinets. These drawers hold more than 63,000 specimens that were dug out of the ground 50 miles south of Chicago over a 200-year period. Hammered open by people like Wittry to find a prize inside, they represent one of the most spectacular fossil beds on the planet: the Mazon Creek lagerstatte, or mother lode.

* Tribune | Colson Montgomery ‘looks like a big-leaguer’ — but Chicago White Sox prospect will start the season in minors: “He’s got a really good head on his shoulder,” Venable said Tuesday at Camelback Ranch in Glendale, Ariz. “He looks like a big-leaguer, he walks like a big-leaguer, he talks the talk. You get the sense that he’s a really good player, and we expect him to be that.” Montgomery’s development will continue in the minors after the Sox optioned their 2021 first-round pick to Triple-A Charlotte.

* Bloomberg | Chicago’s Koval joins distillers racing to flood Europe with whiskey: To cope, some are ferrying as much product as possible to the EU — one of the industry’s biggest export markets — before the April 1 deadline. Koval, a Chicago distillery founded in 2008, is ramping up shipments to reassure distributors, keep prices stable and secure shelf space against competitors, said co-founder Sonat Birnecker Hart.

*** Cook County and Suburbs ***

* Daily Herald | Real estate company withdraws plan for apartment building in downtown Des Plaines: The city council needed to approve a development agreement for the project. It publicly discussed the proposal in December and suggested revisions. The council was again scheduled to discuss the plan in February but postponed the review to give Advent time to adjust the plans, city senior planner Samantha Redman said in a memo to City Manager Dorothy Wisniewski. But on March 4, following several delays requested by the company, a lawyer for Advent emailed city officials and announced it is withdrawing its application.

* Tribune | Ravinia Festival 2025: Beck, Lenny Kravitz and a mouth-watering weekend with celebrity chefs: The festival, which usually ends in mid-September, will run from June 5 to Aug. 31 to clear the way for a multimillion-dollar renovation of the Ravinia Pavilion. The renovation is scheduled to be completed by next summer, at which point the festival will begin updating other structures on its Highland Park campus.