Broad + Liberty’s Todd Shepherd was awarded first place in the investigative reporting category in the 2025 Keystone Media Awards, one of Pennsylvania’s most competitive and respected contests recognizing excellence in journalism.

The Keystone Media Awards received over 2,500 entries from news outlets across Pennsylvania. Broad + Liberty competed in Division I—the category for the state’s largest publications, including the Inquirer and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Read all about it here ([link removed]) .
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What happens when government documents accidentally fall into a reporter’s hands? And why do some explosive stories never make the front page?

On the Voices of Reason podcast ([link removed]) , Broad + Liberty's Todd Shepherd takes us inside the world of investigative reporting in Pennsylvania — where exposing the truth means battling bureaucracy, political pressure, and media silence.

Good morning and welcome to Broad + Liberty's Weekly Reads.

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** 1. Guy Ciarrocchi: They did not cut Medicaid (for better or worse) ([link removed])
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By Guy Ciarrocchi

Medicaid spending is set to increase in 2026 by 6.8 percent. It will grow by the same amount in 2027, too.

Those are facts. The “big, beautiful bill” doesn’t reduce spending in 2026 or 2027. Many of the reforms don’t even take effect until January 2027. And, the cost restructuring — placing more burdens on states to design their own plans — doesn’t begin until 2031.

All of the yelling, theatrics, and warnings of death are built on misinformation, lies, or cynical politicians trying to gain political power. They do not care that innocent people — seniors, families with children, or the disabled — might become frightened. It’s just a cost of doing business for the Left and their quest for an insatiable, ever-growing, ever more powerful federal government.

Why It Matters. The sad political reality is that the Left talks about death and despair as a rhetorical tool. To grab attention. To instill fear. To try to pull voters away from Trump and the GOP.

Plus, many on the Left are screaming about “cuts” to avoid what they’re really defending, but won’t say out loud.

What they are really angry about are the reforms in the “big, beautiful bill.” The Left hates any limits being placed on the scope of the budgets of their pet projects. There are reforms in the bill that slow the growth, ensure that the money spent goes only to those truly deserving and in need, and that money is not wasted. (By the way, when the economy grows, and more poor people get jobs and don’t need Medicaid — and, therefore, less money is needed for Medicaid — that’s a good thing for everyone.)

Continue Reading ([link removed])


** 2. Do one job and do it right ([link removed])
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By Kyle Sammin

No one in the Philadelphia area is likely to be a big fan of Bill Belichick, but plenty of people in our region will nod in agreement with the former Pats’ coach’s quotidian mantra of “Do your jo ([link removed]) b ([link removed]) .”

It’s a pretty simple concept: when you have a task in life, whether it be at home or at work, just do the thing you’re supposed to do. Do it. Then, when it’s done and everything is as it should be, you have time to take on other tasks that you may find more enjoyable.

“Do your job” is what many government employees need to hear when, even as their primary missions are failing, they insist on taking on more responsibilities in the social justice arena.

Why It Matters. Why are we doing this to ourselves? Why let public institutions degrade?

It is partly a problem of governmental cowardice – everyone in Harrisburg and the county seats is afraid to cut funding for anything. So they just pour more money into sections of government that are not only not getting the job done, but are increasingly uninterested in even trying — not if trying comes at the cost of not doing all the new trendy stuff.

The employees themselves are the issue here in many cases: instead of the people funding it making decisions, the staff are. And the staff wants to do what is rewarding to the staff, whether the customers (us and our children) agree or not. Librarians and schoolteachers used to be staid professionals, not political activists. They weren’t looking to start a revolution, they were trying to educate and elevate the next generation of Americans.

Continue Reading ([link removed])


** 3. Lightning Round
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* Audio: Voice messages reveal orchestrated effort to oust St. Joe’s math professor over racial reparations tweet ([link removed])
* Richard F. Kosich: The sanctuary county ([link removed])
* Trump, McCormick unveil $90B AI and energy investment pledge for Pennsylvania ([link removed])
* David Sanko: Local roads and bridges left out of Shapiro’s massive mass transit funding bill ([link removed])
* Paul Davis: An organized retail theft story ([link removed])
* Joshua Phillips: The hidden harm of legalizing marijuana use — why libertarians should oppose SB 120 ([link removed])
* Thom Nickels: Travels in the Steel City ([link removed])


** 4. What we're reading
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A year ago, a would-be assassin changed the course of the 2024 campaign and, with it, the course of American history. Christopher Caldwell looked back this week on Donald Trump’s brush with death in Butler, Pennsylvania, in an essay at UnHerd ([link removed]) and posits that the shooting added an emotional valence to a theme that was already at work. “An argument persisted on the campaign trail that summer over whether Trump was being righteously held to account for his own corruption, or persecuted by adversaries who were corrupt themselves. The bullet fired at Trump settled that controversy. Not in any logical way, of course. But in an emotional way it validated the notion that ‘they’ — meaning something in society and the spirit of the times — were out to destroy Trump.”

It is worth remembering all that is at stake in our politics, and how close we came to the national chaos that would have surely descended had that one deranged individual succeeded in his plans to murder the once and future president.
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— The Editors at Broad + Liberty
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