Trump world to donors: A dollar to DeSantis may as well be a donation to Biden

A pro-Trump super PAC is trying a new tactic to woo donors, warning that any cent spent on any GOP candidate other than Donald Trump is a de facto in-kind donation to President Joe Biden.

In a memo sent to top Republicans on Tuesday, MAGA Inc.’s CEO Taylor Budowich painted the 2024 GOP primary as a fait accompli (even without all the candidates even in it). He cited Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ tumble in the polls and Nikki Haley’s inflated fundraising numbers as reasons for donors to unite around Trump.

“One month after Alvin Bragg’s indictment, President Trump has a 41-percent lead in the Morning Consult tracking poll. Republicans have coalesced around President Trump,” the memo reads. “This reality presents a unique opportunity to unite our Party and take the fight directly to Joe Biden and the divided Democrats.”

The memo was sent hours before a New York court delivered a verdict finding that Trump was guilty of sexual abuse of advice columnist E. Jean Carroll and awarding her $5 million in damages for that and defamation.

Budowich’s memo is, to a degree, a classic boast of a campaign that finds itself in a leading position. He describes Trump as “thoroughly vetted on a national stage” and portrays the legal troubles surrounding the ex-president as fundamentally good for him. “GOP voters aren’t just supporting President Trump overwhelmingly despite the investigations, they are supporting him because of the investigations,” he writes. He also writes that the argument Trump is “not electable” doesn’t hold water with recent polling.

But the memo is also notable in another respect: underscoring that Team Trump isn’t content to rest on its current lead but eager to keep attacking its main competitors. The memo bashes DeSantis’ Florida legislative session as a “bucket of cold water” for the governor.

“On top of losing major financial backers and cratering poll numbers, the most memorable part of his legislative session is that he picked a fight with Disney and lost,” Budowich writes. “DeSantis invested tremendous political capital to pass a 6-week abortion ban — in contrast, President Trump maintains a strong pro-life record with exceptions for rape and incest.”

The memo comes as DeSantis inches closer to making a presidential announcement and as Trump’s team is going after high dollar donors for support — some of whom have publicly wobbled on support for DeSantis or have put their donations on ice until they have a more clear picture of the field. The latest sign that the Florida governor plans to announce soon: DeSantis recently severed ties with his state-level PAC, which has a whopping $86 million, opening the door for that money to be transferred to a pro-DeSantis super PAC supporting his presidential ambitions.

Last month, Never Back Down, the pro-DeSantis PAC, said it had raised $30 million. The PAC also plans to have staff in the first 18 states on the Republican nominating calendar, according to the AP.

“While Governor DeSantis tallied up an impressive number of wins for the people of Florida this legislative session, Donald Trump offers the same old, pathetic attacks right out of Nancy Pelosi’s playbook to attempt to diminish the Governor’s conservative success story,” said Erin Perrine, the communications director for Never Back Down in a statement. “Donald Trump blamed the pro-life movement for his endorsed candidates’ losses in the 2022 midterm elections, and states like Trump’s real home, New York, have legalized infanticide up until birth. In Florida, Governor DeSantis has enacted historic measures to defend the dignity of human life and transform Florida into a pro-family state,” she added.

At the end of 2022, MAGA Inc. reported $54.1 million on hand, and the PAC has spent millions on national cable ads taking direct aim at DeSantis’ record on Medicare and Social Security. The PAC also paid for an eyebrow raising ad that accused DeSantis of “sticking his fingers where they don’t belong” into entitlements. The ad was also a reference to a story about DeSantis using his fingers to eat chocolate pudding on an airplane.

The MAGA Inc. memo, according to a PAC official, was being circulated on an individual basis Tuesday “to current, past, and targeted donors to MAGA Inc. and like-minded committees” as it “makes a strong push for unity as it looks towards the end for the quarter.”

After a disappointing midterm election for Republicans, where some important primary races were split over Trump’s endorsement and involvement, the memo calls on donors to rally around one singular Republican candidate to best help 2024 down ballot candidates.

“The 2024 cycle presents a promising opportunity for Republicans to realize massive gains in the U.S. Senate, House of Representatives, and down ballot races across the nation. Unifying early and focusing our collective resources towards maximizing our gains can be the difference maker,” Budowich writes.

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Florida approves K-12 social studies textbooks after pressing publishers to tweak content

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Florida’s Department of Education as of Tuesday approved dozens of social studies textbooks for use in local schools after initially rejecting many over content the DeSantis administration found objectionable.

Publishers in many cases tweaked the content in their books after an initial review from the state, according to the state’s education agency.

State education officials flagged several potential textbooks for “political indoctrination,” including one lesson urging parents to speak with their children about kneeling during the National Anthem as a symbol representing America. Publishers also amended some of the books at Florida’s urging, such as removing a reference to the police killing of George Floyd in a middle school book, as Gov. Ron DeSantis continues to fight against “wokeness” in education.

“To uphold our exceptional standards, we must ensure our students and teachers have the highest quality materials available — materials that focus on historical facts and are free from inaccuracies or ideological rhetoric,” Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. said in a statement Tuesday.

The textbook adoption process for social studies was expected to face intense scrutiny in Florida following the state education agency denying dozens of proposed math textbooks last year for containing “impermissible” content, including lessons on critical race theory.

Conservatives in Florida, led by DeSantis, have ramped up criticism about what students are reading and learning in school, particularly surrounding race, gender, and sexual orientation through legislation and rulemaking alike. The Republican-dominated Legislature during its 2023 session passed a bill tightening rules for local book objections by requiring schools to yank challenged works within five days of someone flagging it, a shift opponents equate to “book banning.”

The state is also engaged in a high-profile dispute with the nonprofit College Board after state education department officials rejected its African American studies AP program for initially including coursework on queer theory and intersectionality. The objections angered many Black leaders across the country, with some accusing DeSantis of stoking a cultural fight to boost his presidential aspirations, as the course remains in limbo today.

Florida as of Tuesday accepted 66 of 101 social studies books submitted by publishers for use in the state, according to the Department of Education. Even with 35 books still pending approval, this marks a major jump from last month when the state initially rejected 81 books for various reasons.

The agency on Tuesday cited several examples of publishers modifying books after the state flagged them, such as an “inaccurate description of socialism” in one middle school book that claimed the political philosophy "keeps things nice and even and without necessary waste" and "may promote greater equality among people while still providing a fully functioning government-supervised economy." The publisher stripped that language in a change to the textbook posted by the state.

The DeSantis administration also spurred one publisher to remove a section in a middle school textbook about “New Calls for Social Justice,” which mentioned the Black Lives Matter movement and Floyd police killing in 2020. This piece of text detailed that “while many American sympathized” with Black Lives Matters, “others charged that the movement was anti-police.”

Florida determined this content broached “unsolicited topics,” yet critics pan the state's decision to reject it.

“Look at the revisions they are celebrating & ask yourself if you trust [Florida] to write our history,” the Florida Freedom to Read Project, an organization that monitors local book challenges, wrote in a tweet.

DeSantis officials, meanwhile, credited the Florida Department of Education for pushing publishers to rethink their proposals to the state.

“The political indoctrination of children through the K-12 public education system is a very real and prolific problem in this country,” DeSantis press secretary Bryan Griffin wrote in a tweet Tuesday.

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House GOP leaders strike private deal to move forward on border bill

Republican leaders are racing to lock down support ahead of a Thursday vote.

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Feds turn antitrust focus to digital pharma ads

The Federal Trade Commission is currently investigating a merger in an obscure but lucrative part of the pharmaceutical industry: The $8 billion digital advertising market.

IQVIA is buying Propel Media, which owns DeepIntent, one of the main advertising technology companies used by drugmakers to market their products to doctors and patients. FTC staff have been investigating the deal for months, according to four people with direct knowledge of the matter and confirmed by IQVIA.

The deal, which has not been previously disclosed, was first inked last year, three of the people said. IQVIA is believed to have paid in the range of $700 million to $800 million for the purchase, according to two of the people. The FTC investigation has also not been previously reported.

At issue in the FTC probe is whether the deal would help IQVIA, a $35 billion pharmaceutical data and analytics company, lock up the bulk of the market for digital advertising of pharmaceuticals aimed at doctors and patients, thereby harming rivals and potentially increasing costs for drugmakers, said three of the people, who were granted anonymity to discuss a confidential investigation. IQVIA is already the largest player in health data and analytics.

The FTC is nearing the end of its investigation, and staff lawyers reviewing the deal are leaning toward filing a lawsuit to block it, according to two of the people. No final decision has been made, and the agency could ultimately choose to not bring a case.

“There are many companies — from very large, well-known companies (e.g., Google, Microsoft/Xandr, WebMD) to smaller recent entrants — providing technology, data, and services to support digital advertising from life science companies to doctors and patients,” IQVIA spokesperson Trent Brown said. “IQVIA began providing some of these services only in the past few years, and the DeepIntent business will fill a gap in IQVIA’s offerings by adding a demand-side platform.”

Brown said the company will continue working with the FTC to clear the deal.

A DeepIntent spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. A FTC spokesperson declined to comment.

IQVIA is the leading provider of pharmaceutical sales and reference data, and also sells software for analyzing that information. Drug companies use IQVIA’s trove of information — which includes over 800 million de-identified patient records and petabytes of sales, promotional and prescription data — to gauge the likely demand for the drugs they’re developing and accurately compensate their sales forces. Generic drug companies, for example, can use the data to determine if it is financially feasible to introduce a competitor to a branded drug.

DeepIntent is a privately held advertising technology company that works with pharmaceutical companies to market drugs to doctors and patients. It also helps client companies measure and improve the success of those ad campaigns.

IQVIA made multiple moves in 2022 to build out an advertising business, including the separate purchase of Lasso Marketing, another health care ad tech company.

The FTC is investigating both the combination of the two direct competitors — Lasso and DeepIntent — as well as so-called “vertical” concerns of whether IQVIA would be able to leverage its mountain of pharmaceutical sales data to monopolize the pharmaceutical advertising market, three of the people said.

In its most recent annual report, IQVIA said the scope of its data covers more than 85 percent of the world’s pharmaceuticals. That includes “more than 1.2 billion comprehensive, longitudinal, non-identified patient records spanning sales, prescription and promotional data, medical claims, electronic medical records, genomics, and social media” from around 150,000 data suppliers.

Pharmaceutical advertising is big business. The total U.S. market for pharma ads is at least $11.5 billion, based on data collected by advertising analytics company Standard Media Index. Darrick Li, SMI’s vice president of sales in North America said anecdotal evidence could put that number as high as $15 billion. Of that, he said, around 53 percent (roughly $8 billion at the high estimate) is digital, which is growing at a rapid 17 percent clip, in the first quarter of 2023 compared to the year-earlier period, Li said.

And while the pharmaceutical industry has been slow to evolve from traditional television ads, the digital shift is happening, and that’s where companies like DeepIntent come in. According to industry participants, it is one of a handful of companies helping drugmakers target ads at both doctors and patients. Last year the company said it could offer guarantees on the number of verified patients reached.

In targeting ads at doctors, IQVIA is already a key supplier of data to DeepIntent.

Part of the FTC investigation is focused on how the deal could pose a threat to competing ad platforms serving the pharmaceutical industry including The Trade Desk, which uses IQVIA data, as well as Pulse Point, according to three of the people with knowledge of the investigation. Those companies help advertisers, including drugmakers, place ads around the internet. The latter is owned by Internet Brands, which also owns WebMD and Medscape, an informational service for health care providers.

The FTC is concerned that with both DeepIntent and Lasso, the bulk of these ads will run through IQVIA, those people said. Those ads show up on health care-focused websites used by doctors, and general websites across the internet.

Spokespeople for The Trade Desk and Pulse Point did not respond for comment.

The FTC is also focused on IQVIA’s ability to control the market for services that measure the success of digital advertising campaigns. IQVIA offers this service, as do companies including Veeva Systems and PurpleLab. Those companies can currently measure the success of advertising campaigns run by DeepIntent, but if the merger goes through, the FTC is concerned IQVIA would make it more difficult for them to do so, according to three of the people.

Spokespeople for Veeva and PurpleLab did not respond for comment.

“Does this give IQVIA the incentive and ability to withhold the data or raise prices to people who access it today? If the answer to that is ‘yes,’ then maybe there's an antitrust issue here,” a health care lawyer said on the condition of anonymity, due to client conflicts.

The FTC is concerned with exactly that scenario, the people said.

However, at least one ad tech expert disagrees.

“IQVIA in this case is just buying a revenue stream,” said Augustine Fou, a digital advertising consultant who advises companies including drugmakers. “They are unlikely to turn away revenue from selling data if other companies are willing to pay for it. While it’s possible that IQVIA could favor its own platform, for example by only selling outdated data to competitors, that would be difficult to prove before it happened.”

When a company controls a key input used by its competitors — in this case pharmaceutical sales data — it only works to withhold that data from rivals if it facilitates a price increase that would justify the lost revenue.

In this case, Fou said IQVIA would be unlikely to recoup its losses by raising prices for its advertising services. And even though DeepIntent’s lower data costs post-merger would allow it to theoretically undercut its rivals on price, it would take years to get advertisers and agencies to switch to DeepIntent, even with prolonged, deeply discounted pricing, because of long-term contracts, Fou said.

IQVIA is no stranger to antitrust scrutiny or the FTC. The company was previously investigated by the agency’s lawyers for how it bundles various products, and its unwillingness to allow competing software companies to access its data. The related FTC investigation, first reported by The Capitol Forum, did not result in an enforcement action.

Antitrust enforcers in recent years have been wading deeply into the complex world of digital advertising, primarily targeting Google, which was sued by the Justice Department in January over allegations it has illegally monopolized the market.

Within the greater world of programmatic advertising, DeepIntent is a relatively small player. However, specializing in health care gives it an edge in its specific niche over larger players. For example, Google allows pharmaceutical companies to run search ads and place ads in health care-focused websites. However, the platform does not allow advertisers to target consumers based on health information and also cannot target doctors directly.

A Google spokesperson declined to comment.

Google’s leading position in the overall digital ad market is not a factor in the FTC’s investigation, according to three of the people with knowledge of the probe.

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Israeli aircraft strike Islamic Jihad targets in Gaza Strip

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Israeli aircraft conducted strikes early Tuesday on Islamic Jihad targets in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military said, and residents reported blasts in the Palestinian enclave.

Witnesses said an explosion hit the top floor of an apartment building in Gaza City and a house in the southern city of Rafah. Palestinian media said several people were injured. There was no immediate confirmation from health authorities.

The airstrikes come as tension boils between Israel and militants in the Gaza Strip, which is ruled by the militant Hamas group.

In anticipation of Palestinian rocket attacks in response to the airstrikes, the Israeli military issued instructions advising residents of communities within 25 miles (40 kilometers) of Gaza to stay close to designated bomb shelters.

Last week, Gaza militants fired several salvos of rockets toward southern Israel, and Israeli military responded with airstrikes following the death of a hunger-striking senior member of the Islamic Jihad in Israeli custody.

The airstrikes are similar to ones in 2022 in which Israel bombed places housing commanders of Islamic Jihad group, setting off a three-day blitz that saw the Iranian-backed group loosing its two top commanders and other dozens of militants.

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Opinion | We Need a Manhattan Project for AI Safety

Worries about artificial intelligence have suddenly seized Washington: The White House just hauled in a roster of tech CEO’s to press them on the safety of their new AI platforms, and Congress is scrambling for ways to regulate a possibly disruptive and risky new technology.

There are a lot of immediate concerns about the latest generation of AI tools — they could accelerate misinformation, job disruption and hidden unfairness. But one concern hovers over the rest, both for its scale and the difficulty of fixing it: the idea that a super-intelligent machine might quickly start working against its human creators.

It sounds fanciful, but many experts on global risk believe that a powerful, uncontrolled AI is the single most likely way humanity could wipe itself out.

At the heart of the threat is what’s called the “alignment problem” — the idea that a powerful computer brain might no longer be aligned with the best interests of human beings. Unlike fairness, or job loss, there aren’t obvious policy solutions to alignment. It’s a highly technical problem that some experts fear may never be solvable. But the government does have a role to play in confronting massive, uncertain problems like this. In fact, it may be the most important role it can play on AI: to fund a research project on the scale it deserves.

There’s a successful precedent for this: The Manhattan Project was one of the most ambitious technological undertakings of the 20th century. At its peak, 129,000 people worked on the project at sites across the United States and Canada. They were trying to solve a problem that was critical to national security, and which nobody was sure could be solved: how to harness nuclear power to build a weapon.

Some eight decades later, the need has arisen for a government research project that matches the original Manhattan Project’s scale and urgency. In some ways the goal is exactly the opposite of the first Manhattan Project, which opened the door to previously unimaginable destruction. This time, the goal must be to prevent unimaginable destruction, as well as merely difficult-to-anticipate destruction.

The threat is real

Don’t just take it from me. Expert opinion only differs over whether the risks from AI are unprecedentedly large or literally existential.

Even the scientists who set the groundwork for today’s AI models are sounding the alarm. Most recently, the “Godfather of AI” himself, Geoffrey Hinton, quit his post at Google to call attention to the risks AI poses to humanity.

That may sound like science fiction, but it’s a reality that is rushing toward us faster than almost anyone anticipated. Today, progress in AI is measured in days and weeks, not months and years.

As little as two years ago, the forecasting platform Metaculus put the likely arrival of “weak” artificial general intelligence — a unified system that can compete with the typical college-educated human on most tasks — sometime around the year 2040.

Now forecasters anticipate AGI will arrive in 2026. “Strong” AGIs with robotic capabilities that match or surpass most humans are forecasted to emerge just five years later. With the ability to automate AI research itself, the next milestone would be a superintelligence with unfathomable power.

Don’t count on the normal channels of government to save us from that.

Policymakers cannot afford a drawn-out interagency process or notice and comment period to prepare for what’s coming. On the contrary, making the most of AI’s tremendous upside while heading off catastrophe will require our government to stop taking a backseat role and act with a nimbleness not seen in generations. Hence the need for a new Manhattan Project.

The research agenda is clear

“A Manhattan Project for X” is one of those clichés of American politics that seldom merits the hype. AI is the rare exception. Ensuring AGI develops safely and for the betterment of humanity will require public investment into focused research, high levels of public and private coordination and a leader with the tenacity of General Leslie Groves — the project’s infamous overseer, whose aggressive, top-down leadership style mirrored that of a modern tech CEO.

I’m not the only person to suggest it: AI thinker Gary Marcus and the legendary computer scientist Judea Pearl recently endorsed the idea as well, at least informally. But what exactly would that look like in practice?

Fortunately, we already know quite a bit about the problem and can sketch out the tools we need to tackle it.

One issue is that large neural networks like GPT-4 — the “generative AIs” that are causing the most concern right now — are mostly a black box, with reasoning processes we can’t yet fully understand or control. But with the right setup, researchers can in principle run experiments that uncover particular circuits hidden within the billions of connections. This is known as “mechanistic interpretability” research, and it's the closest thing we have to neuroscience for artificial brains.

Unfortunately, the field is still young, and far behind in its understanding of how current models do what they do. The ability to run experiments on large, unrestricted models is mostly reserved for researchers within the major AI companies. The dearth of opportunities in mechanistic interpretability and alignment research is a classic public goods problem. Training large AI models costs millions of dollars in cloud computing services, especially if one iterates through different configurations. The private AI labs are thus hesitant to burn capital on training models with no commercial purpose. Government-funded data centers, in contrast, would be under no obligation to return value to shareholders, and could provide free computing resources to thousands of potential researchers with ideas to contribute.

The government could also ensure research proceeds in relative safety — and provide a central connection for experts to share their knowledge.

With all that in mind, a Manhattan Project for AI safety should have at least 5 core functions:

1. It would serve a coordination role, pulling together the leadership of the top AI companies — OpenAI and its chief competitors, Anthropic and Google DeepMind — to disclose their plans in confidence, develop shared safety protocols and forestall the present arms-race dynamic.

2. It would draw on their talent and expertise to accelerate the construction of government-owned data centers managed under the highest security, including an "air gap," a deliberate disconnection from outside networks, ensuring that future, more powerful AIs are unable to escape onto the open internet. Such facilities would likely be overseen by the Department of Energy’s Artificial Intelligence and Technology Office, given its existing mission to accelerate the demonstration of trustworthy AI.

3. It would compel the participating companies to collaborate on safety and alignment research, and require models that pose safety risks to be trained and extensively tested in secure facilities.

4. It would provide public testbeds for academic researchers and other external scientists to study the innards of large models like GPT-4, greatly building on existing initiatives like the National AI Research Resource and helping to grow the nascent field of AI interpretability.

5. And it would provide a cloud platform for training advanced AI models for within-government needs, ensuring the privacy of sensitive government data and serving as a hedge against runaway corporate power.

The only way out is through

The alternative to a massive public effort like this — attempting to kick the can on the AI problem — won’t cut it.

The only other serious proposal right now is a “pause” on new AI development, and even many tech skeptics see that as unrealistic. It may even be counterproductive. Our understanding of how powerful AI systems could go rogue is immature at best, but stands to improve greatly through continued testing, especially of larger models. Air-gapped data centers will thus be essential for experimenting with AI failure modes in a secured setting. This includes pushing models to their limits to explore potentially dangerous emergent behaviors, such as deceptiveness or power-seeking.

The Manhattan Project analogy is not perfect, but it helps to draw a contrast with those who argue that AI safety requires pausing research into more powerful models altogether. The project didn’t seek to decelerate the construction of atomic weaponry, but to master it.

Even if AGIs end up being farther off than most experts expect, a Manhattan Project for AI safety is unlikely to go to waste. Indeed, many less-than-existential AI risks are already upon us, crying out for aggressive research into mitigation and adaptation strategies. So what are we waiting for?

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Mexican president calls Florida’s new anti-immigration bill 'immoral'

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador slammed Florida’s new anti-immigration bill on Monday, calling it “immoral” and “politicking” after lawmakers passed a bill last week that gives Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis $12 million for migrant transports.

“Why does [DeSantis] have to take advantage of people’s pain, of migrants’ pain, of people’s need for political gain,” López Obrador said at a press conference. "This is immoral. This is politicking."

The measure will guarantee $12 million for a controversial program DeSantis has used to fly migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard.

“Now I found out that the Florida governor — imagine, Florida, which is full of migrants — is taking repressive, inhumane measures against migrants in Florida because he wants to be a candidate,” López Obrador said. “Can’t he not make another proposal to convince people?”

DeSantis is expected to announce a run for president in the coming weeks.

The legislation lawmakers passed last week would require medium-sized and large employers to use the federal E-Verify system to check the status of new employees and mandates hospitals to ask patients about their legal status.

The bill, SB 1718, will also allow authorities to charge someone with human trafficking if they knowingly transport an undocumented migrant across state lines. It would also prohibit an undocumented immigrant from driving a car even if they have a driver’s license from another state.

López Obrador said that he has a call planned tomorrow with President Joe Biden to discuss migration and the fentanyl crisis.

“We will talk about our cooperation, which is very good, very, very good, and we will keep it that way," López Obrador said.

López Obrador’s comments come as GOP governors continue to send migrants to Democratic-led states. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Monday that Texas would bus “thousands more” migrants in the coming days. On April 30, Mayor Lori Lightfoot urged Abbott to stop shipping busloads of migrants to Chicago, saying the city does not have the resources to absorb more. New York City Mayor Eric Adams has also been critical of Biden for “failing” the city on immigration.

On Christmas Eve, three buses of migrant families arrived from Texas near the home of Vice President Kamala Harris in record-setting cold.

“Then, in an inhumane, vulgar and vile way, they started to take migrants while it was cold to New York, to Washington, to the vice president’s house," López Obrador said. “The Republicans did this … something that degrades them from a moral, human point of view.”

Carmen Paun contributed to this report. 

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