MoInd 📰

Growing up in Missouri in the 1980s, the Show Me State meant something. We built America’s cars. We brewed America’s beer. We even had America’s best baseball teams. Missouri was a bellwether state. If you wanted to know what was happening in the country, Missouri could show you. But my home state, once proudly independent, […]

GREENBELT, Md. — U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis will retain an order keeping the wrongly deported El Salvador national Kilmar Abrego Garcia out of federal custody for the rest of the year, the judge said at a Monday hearing. In the first hearing that Abrego Garcia was present for after his release last week, Xinis […]

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s administration said Monday it’s halting leases for five large-scale offshore wind projects under construction along the East Coast due to national security risks. The Interior Department paused the projects — off the coasts of Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Virginia and New York — due to analysis from reports that have […]

Nearly a decade after Missouri lost its NFL franchise in St. Louis to Los Angeles, the state learned Monday that the Kansas City Chiefs are moving across the state line to Kansas. The news, rumored for days, was greeted with shock and despair in Missouri, where hopes were high that a $1.5 billion incentives package […]

TOPEKA, Kansas — The Kansas City Chiefs are moving to Kansas with a deal to use more than a billion dollars in taxpayer funding to help build a domed stadium, entertainment district, new team headquarters and a training facility, Kansas officials announced Monday. The announcement followed a closed-door meeting by legislative leaders who then voted […]

After Missouri lawmakers passed a gerrymandered congressional map this fall, opponents submitted more than 300,000 signatures seeking to force a statewide vote on whether to overturn the map. But Republican state officials say they will use the map in the meantime. Missouri courts now appear likely to weigh in. “If we need to continue to […]

For the 2.5 million Missourians in rural areas, health care is scarce and hospitals are struggling to survive.  Rural communities have fewer than one-fifth as many OB-GYNs per capita, and hospital care is more than twice as far away as in urban and suburban Missouri. Over the last decade, 12 rural hospitals have closed and […]

It’s been a bruising year to be a Missouri Democrat. Even setting aside the broader tumult of Trump 2.0, life inside the Missouri Capitol has been especially unforgiving for Democrats. After years of infighting, Senate Republicans finally learned how to work together this year. Early in the 2025 legislative session, that newfound discipline broke through […]

Earlier this year, Gov. Mike Kehoe’s administration sent an internal memo to Missouri state employees requiring their return to office by late March. Across the state and throughout the country, other employers, including AT&T, JPMorgan and Ford, have taken similar steps this year. With 2025 marking half a decade since the beginning of COVID-19, the […]

WASHINGTON — The Department of Justice began releasing thousands of records Friday related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, but questions remained over whether officials will meet the requirements of a law overwhelmingly backed by both Republicans and Democrats and signed by President Donald Trump. The department posted four data sets of images and documents […]

President Donald Trump’s executive order to reschedule marijuana won’t change much in terms of how Missouri’s marijuana industry operates, business owners and legal experts agree.  It doesn’t change the fact that marijuana can’t be transported or sold across state lines. It doesn’t do away with the cap on the number of business licenses to cultivate […]

A new group of bipartisan state legislative leaders issued a declaration at their first meeting calling for a renewed focus on states’ rights and an end to federal intrusion into state laws.  The Assembly of State Legislative Leaders, which includes more than 40 lawmakers from 30 states, unanimously approved a 449-word declaration on the importance […]

As pennies vanish from the American landscape, many businesses are clamoring for federal guidance on how to handle cash transactions in a penniless world. Should retailers round up or down? Should they round in favor of the customer? Or in favor of the business? So far, calls for federal direction have gone unanswered. Some businesses […]

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s administration took major steps Thursday in a campaign to block minors’ access to gender-affirming care nationwide.  Under two proposed new rules from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, hospitals would be barred from providing gender transition treatment for children as a condition of participating in Medicare and Medicaid programs, […]

The process of drafting a new formula to calculate state aid for Missouri’s public schools became more challenging this week as state officials discovered some federal data sources are likely to disappear. Kari Monsees, the state education department’s semi-retired chief of finance, told working groups tasked with revamping the formula that he hopes to find […]

In 2023, the U.S. secretaries of Education and Agriculture did something Missouri can’t shrug off: they wrote Gov. Mike Parson that from 1987 to 2020 the state underfunded Lincoln University by about $361 million in per-student support compared with the University of Missouri. It was a figure highlighted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and […]

Kansas legislative leaders will meet Monday to take one of the final steps toward luring the Kansas City Chiefs across the state line, floating bonds worth hundreds of millions so the team can build a domed stadium and an entertainment district. With a year-end deadline looming, the Legislative Coordinating Council will consider approving Sales Tax […]

The U.S. Department of Justice has sent a confidential draft agreement to more than a dozen states that would require election officials to remove any alleged ineligible voters identified during a federal review of their voter rolls. The agreement — called a memorandum of understanding, or MOU — would hand the federal government a major […]

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday to loosen federal restrictions on marijuana, which Trump said reflected the drug’s potential medical benefits while discouraging recreational use. The order moves cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III on the Federal Drug Administration’s list of controlled substances. Schedule I, the most restrictive category under federal law, indicates […]

WASHINGTON — The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a prestigious cultural hub in the nation’s capital, will be renamed the Trump-Kennedy Center, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced Thursday. The renaming comes after President Donald Trump named himself chair of the board in February in a major shake-up. He later fired […]