Six minutes of news from around the nation.

The head of the Food and Drug Administration steps down; Feds propose reversing protections for transgender people in shelters; Arizona educators push for school voucher accountability; Report: Connecticut utility company wrongly rejects solar procurement.

TRANSCRIPT

The Public News Service daily newscast May the 13th, 2026.

I'm Mike Clifford.

President Donald Trump says that Dr. Marty McAree, the commissioner of the FDA, resigned on Tuesday after weeks of pressure and rumors that Trump was planning to fire him.

The BBC notes he was in the role for just over a year and had faced criticism both from inside and outside the Trump administration, including for his resistance to authorizing flavored vapes and to tightening restrictions on abortion bills.

Meantime, the public comment period is now open on a Trump administration proposal to allow federally funded homeless shelters to deny transgender women access to women's bathrooms and sleeping quarters.

People have until June 29th to put in their two cents on the Federal Register's website.

Tony Newman with the nonprofit TransCanWork says the administration would replace the terms gender and gender identity with the word sex in the non-discrimination clause of the equal access rule as it applies to shelters.

You know, this rule was really established to ensure that federally funded housing and shelter programs operate with fairness.

No one really should be denied shelter or made to feel unwelcome, unsafe because of simply who they are.

The administration's proposed rule says the change is necessary to protect the safety of other people in the facility, and it allows shelter employees to ask questions or even require evidence to prove a person's sex at birth.

I'm Suzanne Potter.

Next, the Arizona Education Association is collecting signatures for a November ballot initiative designed to rein in home and private school vouchers.

ESAs have been law in Arizona for 15 years, and they cost the state about $1.3 billion annually.

The program has also been marred by allegations of fraud.

Association President Marisol Garcia says the initiative isn't meant to end the ESA program.

It just regulates it.

We can't turn back the clock.

We have to exist in 2026.

And so one of the things we can do, because the legislature has not done so, is set up guardrails and ensure that taxpayer money is used appropriately.

Home and private school educators often leave public schools so they can educate their own kids with fewer state mandates or because those schools can't offer services some kids need, especially those who have emotional or physical challenges.

They say they want the choice to educate their own kids and that most don't abuse the money.

I'm Mark Moran.

In addition to creating spending guardrails, the initiative seeks to prohibit the payment of family members with voucher money, except for students with disabilities.

And federal prosecutors criminally charged the operator of the Dolly Containership violating maritime and environmental laws.

The Washington Post notes it was conduct, they say, caused the vessel's 2024 crash into Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge that destroyed the span and killed six people.

This is Public News Service.

The Trump administration has finalized its rescission of the Bureau of Land Management's public lands rule.

Critics say the change weakens protections while prioritizing resource extraction from the country's public lands.

More than 130,000 comments were submitted during the comment period for rescinding the rule, of which nearly 98% were opposed to the change.

Alice Weston with the Oregon chapter of the Sierra Club says the BLM is ignoring the broad opposition.

People are saying they want their children to be able to recreate in these places, to hunt, to fish, to go out on their bike, hike, camp, and enjoy clean water and clean air.

So these rules and these protections are something that help preserve our wild places for future generations.

The BLM manages more than 250 million acres of public land across the country, including nearly 25 percent of the total land in Oregon, largely east of the Cascades.

The Bureau states revoking the rule will restore a balance to land management practices.

I'm Isobel Charle.

And a new analysis shows nearly half of young kids in the U.S. live in child care deserts.

In North Dakota, at least 14 counties meet less than 60 percent of the demand for child care.

The Center for American Progress says the gap is even higher in remote communities, creating a stark urban-rural divide.

Casey Peaks with the center says policymakers are rightfully focused on affordability issues given child care costs are out of reach for most American families, but adds that's only part of the problem.

You can make child care free for every family living in a rural community tomorrow, but that's not going to solve the access piece.

We need to bring down the cost for families, but we also need to think about supply solutions.

Peek says inadequate staffing leads to program closures and results in less options and higher costs for families.

I'm Judith Ruiz Branch reporting.

Finally, Connecticut rate payers could lose out on major savings due to what some affordability advocates call a miscalculation by power provider Eversource.

An Acadia Center report finds the company is abandoning a multi-state 54-megawatt solar procurement plan, citing high development costs.

It also finds those contracts would potentially save ratepayers $80 million over the next 20 years.

Kate McAuliffe with the Acadia Center says Eversource has a double standard for solar projects, but not for its asset condition projects.

Those can amount to as much as $300 million in spending annually.

When you compare that to the annual cost of the solar project, it's pretty small.

And yet we're not hearing the same level of objections from the companies when they look to recover a cost of those asset condition projects.

These projects are mostly rebuilds of existing assets, making them a factor in Connecticut's high utility bills.

I'm Edwin J. Viera.

This is Mike Clifford for Public News Service.

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