This is Lever Weekly, a recap of our work from the past week. If you only read one email from us all week, this should be it.

What The Lever published this week:

💄 The Cover Up Coverup. Warren Buffett’s conglomerate profited off a makeup ingredient linked to cancer. Now its subsidiary is trying to create a legal precedent — and deny victims remuneration.

🔒 BONUS: How To Avoid Asbestos In Your Makeup. Many beauty products include talc, which has been shown to be contaminated with a dangerous toxin. Here’s how to avoid the risk.

Trump Issues Ethics Waiver For His AI/Crypto Czar. The White House granted the waiver to David Sacks a month after Trump fired the director of the independent agency charged with enforcing federal ethics statutes.

Trump’s Gift To Loan Sharks. Trump promised caps on credit card rates — but his regulators are helping banks kill state initiatives to impose those caps.

Bank Failures For All. After the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, a new rule targeted the riskiest deposits. Now Trump has rescinded it.

How Dems Are Destroying Their Party. They’re giving Trump congressional votes, helping MAGA in blue states, and resurrecting their unpopular has-beens. Polls show America hates it.

Who Actually Owns Crypto? Almost Nobody. As Trump prepares for a digital currency bailout, new data show just a tiny fraction of Americans own any of it.

How Elon Musk Helped Close Your Local Pharmacy. The billionaire’s rage tweets protected the corporate middlemen inflating your medicine prices and killing your community’s economy.

🎧 Trump’s Tuesday Night Massacre. The president just fired antitrust regulators investigating his corporate boosters. The Lever speaks with one of them about why he’s now taking Trump to court.

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💥 Everyone’s getting rich off Trump’s war. Leaked Pentagon planning documents obtained by journalist Ken Klippenstein reveal the Trump administration is refining the next generation of plans for a “major regional conflict” with Iran. Meanwhile, lawmakers looking to cash in on more war are dumping money into Palantir, a cybersecurity firm founded by Trump and Vance ally Peter Thiel that sells its software to the Defense Department. Taxpayer-funded government contracts account for half of Palantir’s revenue.

😳 Big Crypto wages revenge. Cryptocurrency firms are joining the Trump administration’s war on federal regulators and calling for a boycott of law firms that hire former government lawyers who tried to regulate the industry. That includes the Winklevoss twins — who are pressing Trump officials to fire and publicly name the government employees who probed their crypto platform Gemini — and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, who said regulators committed ethics violations when they investigated crypto firms.

🚨 Student activist locked in Trump donor’s facility. A Palestinian student activist arrested for his alleged “pro-terrorist” protests against Israel’s war on Gaza is currently locked in a detention facility privately run by a major Trump donor, the GEO Group. Mahmoud Khalil — who officials admit did not break the law — was arrested in New York and moved to a GEO Group facility in Louisiana, a friendlier forum for the government.

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Every week, our paid subscribers receive a newsletter full of policy wins, environmental victories, social initiatives improving your life, and more. 

A taste of this week’s good news:

• Thousands of federal employees head back to work.
• Two red states are ahead of the clean energy curve.
• A judge shields climate grants from clawbacks.
• All 50 states push for the right to repair.

Lever Leaders provide us with our highest level of support and score additional perks in return, including a yearly gift subscription for friends and family, access to an exclusive Lever staff meeting for a sneak peek at our future plans, and an annual gift of limited-edition Lever merchandise. 

Current Lever Leaders just received a special vinyl printing of original music from The Lever’s hit podcast Master Plan, including artwork from the animated trailer and liner notes from the composer. And we have big ideas for our next Lever Leader gift!

• Current Affairs — The magazine cited our newsroom as a necessary alternative to the corporate media ecosystem.
• TechCrunch — The technology-focused outlet named The Lever as a top outlet on the newsletter platform Ghost developing a new media ecosystem.
• Longreads — The compendium of exceptional longform journalism selected our reporting about the battle over a prison-tech empire as an editor’s pick.
• The Syllabus — The curation platform featured our reporting on the family feud tearing a prison company apart in its list of the week’s best journalism.
• The New Republic — The magazine referenced our reporting on Bitcoin reserves.
• Project On Government Oversight —The advocacy group featured our reporting on Trump’s ethics czar’s conflicts of interest and the federal flood insurance program’s subsidies for the rich.
• Workers World — The Workers' World Party newspaper referenced our reporting on Elon Musk’s attempts to shield corporate executives from legal action.