Catching Our Eye News Roundup, July 28, 2026

Every morning in the Ohio Capital Journal’s free newsletter, The Eye-Opener, we round up the news and commentary from across Ohio and around the country and world that is catching our attention. We call this feature Catching Our Eye, republished here.

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Catching Our Eye

• Records. Mother Jones reports, “Assault, Misogyny, Verbal Threats: Records Detail New Allegations Against Rep. Max Miller.”

Police reports and filings in a bitter custody dispute raise new questions about the conduct of an Ohio Republican as he campaigns for a third term.

• Segregated Ohio schools. The Ohio Newsroom’s Kendall Crawford reports, “Ohio schools are among the most segregated in the nation, per report.”

A recent report from the Segregation Tracking Project and education advocacy group Brown’s Promise finds Ohio’s public schools are the fifth most racially segregated in the U.S. — behind New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Those racial divides lead to worse outcomes for Black students, said Ann Owens, UCLA professor of sociology and one of the founders of the tracking project.

• County budget commissions. Ideastream’s Matthew Richmond reports, “County budget commissions now have the power to reduce property taxes. What will they do with it?”

Budget commissions have existed in Ohio since 2010 and have always had the authority to approve the tax budgets of any entity that receives property taxes; school districts, parks, libraries, social services agencies, townships, port authorities and community colleges, to name several.

But how far the commissions could go is an open question.

• Acting AG violated law on Epstein. Politico reports, “Todd Blanche ‘conceded’ violating law on Epstein files, judge finds.”

The Justice Department has effectively conceded it is violating the law Congress passed last November requiring the public release of the vast majority of records relating to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a federal judge declared Thursday.

• Weaponization of government. The New York Times reports, “Trump Administration Admits Canceling Grants to States That Did Not Vote for Him.”

Federal officials said in court documents that they halted billions of dollars in funding for energy projects to states “based solely” on whether they backed President Trump in the 2024 election.

• Musk tries to deny deaths caused by DOGE cuts. The New Republic writes, “The Real Reason Elon Musk Keeps Insisting DOGE Cuts Killed “Zero” Kids.”

“Zero died because of DOGE. Zero. Point. Zero.”

That remarkable claim is from Elon Musk’s interview last week with The Economist, in which he reiterated one of his favorite new claims: His Department of Government Efficiency’s huge cuts to international humanitarian aid did not result in the death of any children abroad. This isn’t meant as a vague or hyperbolic exaggeration. Musk’s assertion is quite emphatically that not a single child—or even a fraction of a child, as his strange “zero point zero” formulation suggests—died due to these DOGE cuts…

But it’s all nonsense. Researchers have documented hundreds of thousands of deaths. A USAID whistleblower revealed that the agency itself projected that the cuts would unleash immense human suffering. Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times recently documented specific, concrete cases of people who died in Africa of malaria, HIV, and other maladies due to DOGE-driven reductions in medical supplies and aid workers.