The Gophers football program has reportedly added Vanderbilt transfer running back Johann Cardenas through the NCAA transfer portal. The Katy, Texas, native did not play as a true freshman in 2024 and entered the portal on Tuesday.

Cardenas was considered a three-star recruit and a Top 50 running back in the nation in the 2024 recruiting class, according to four recruiting services. The 6-foot, 223-pounder totaled 2,268 rushing yards, 340 receiving yards and 34 total touchdowns in 11 high school games in 2023. He also was on the track and field team at St. Thomas High School.

New Gophers running backs coach Jayden Everett was Vanderbilt’s running backs coach in 2023 before moving to Michigan in 2024 and briefly South Alabama to start in ’25.

One of the Gophers’ running backs in the 2024 class, Jaydon Wright, entered the transfer portal earlier this week.

Cardenas is the third addition via the transfer portal, following Purdue defensive tackle Mo Anomode and Iowa cornerback John Nestor on Tuesday and Sunday, respectively.

Recruiting services 247Sports and On3 first reported the news on Cardenas.

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By Shalina Chatlani, Stateline.org

As Republicans in Congress consider cutting the federal share of Medicaid funding, states are weighing numerous options to scale back their programs. But voters in three states have significantly limited those options by enshrining Medicaid expansion in their constitutions — creating a potential budget disaster and a political challenge for the GOP.

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Over the past several years, voters in conservative Missouri, Oklahoma and South Dakota have amended their state constitutions to require their Medicaid programs to cover all adults below the age of 65 who earn equal to or less than 138% of the federal poverty level ($21,597 for an individual in 2025 ). Those states are among the 40 plus the District of Columbia that expanded Medicaid eligibility under the 2010 Affordable Care Act, with the federal government picking up 90% of the cost.

But much of that federal funding could soon vanish. Republicans in Congress are debating several options to achieve $880 billion in Medicaid cuts. One proposal would slash the 90% rate to the lower match rates states get for the traditional Medicaid population, mainly children and their caregivers, people with disabilities and pregnant women. Those percentages range from 50% for the wealthiest states to 77% for the poorest ones.

If Congress goes that route, states would have to come up with $626 billion over the next decade to keep the roughly 20 million people in the expansion population on the rolls.

Nine states (Arizona, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Utah and Virginia) already have laws on the books that would automatically roll back Medicaid expansion if the federal funds dip. Some states are considering requiring people to work, go to school or volunteer in order to receive Medicaid benefits, a condition that would trim the rolls and save money.

But because Missouri, Oklahoma and South Dakota have put Medicaid expansion in their constitutions, they can’t easily take those steps.

“Legislators cannot change that law without going back to voters for a whole other campaign to change the constitution,” said Kelly Hall, the executive director of the Fairness Project, a nonprofit that helped put the constitutional amendments on the ballot in all three states.

“Even if the federal government cuts their contribution towards funding Medicaid expansion, those three states do not have the option to reduce eligibility or benefits for the Medicaid expansion population,” she told Stateline. “They will have to find those resources.”

Medicaid is a huge component of state budgets. Including the federal matching money, states spend an average of nearly a third of their budgets on Medicaid. And the program is also the single largest source of federal funds for states.

Missourians voted in favor of a constitutional amendment to expand Medicaid in August 2020. When state lawmakers refused to fund the expansion, residents sued the state’s Department of Social Services. In 2021, the state Supreme Court ruled that the legislature had to find the resources for Medicaid expansion — a huge win for progressives.

For 2025, Missouri allotted $18.2 billion for Medicaid, with the federal government covering $12.7 billion of that, or about 70%. If Congress cuts the federal share of Medicaid funding by $880 billion over the next decade, it would leave Missouri with a budget hole of around $1.7 billion next year, according to research from nonprofit group the Commonwealth Fund. That would force the state to come up with some options to avoid fiscal disaster.

Timothy McBride, a health policy analyst and co-director of a program at the Institute for Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis, told Stateline that these include raising taxes, cutting enrollment for other Medicaid populations, diminishing reimbursements to providers, getting rid of optional medical services such as dental care or ceasing payments for equipment like wheelchairs.

Raising taxes is not a likely or popular choice in Republican-leaning Missouri, McBride noted, while adding that cuts to providers would further endanger struggling hospitals.

“We lost 10 hospitals in Missouri in the last few years. And if you start cutting their payment rates, that’s going to just put them at risk,” McBride said. “The real money is in the disabled and the elderly populations. And so if you really wanted to quote-unquote save money, that’s probably where you’d have to look. But that’s really controversial.”

The state budgetary implications of a potentially sharp decline in federal Medicaid funding have influenced some prominent opponents of Medicaid expansion to have a change of heart. U.S. Republican Sen. Josh Hawley supported efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2018 when he was Missouri’s attorney general. Now, Hawley has said he would refuse to vote for any Medicaid cuts.

“I’m not going to vote for Medicaid cuts, benefit cuts. Work requirements are fine. But 21% of the residents in my state receive Medicaid or [the Children’s Health Insurance Program]. That’s a lot of people,” he told reporters on Capitol Hill in February.

Republicans in the closely divided U.S. Congress might have trouble pushing through Medicaid cuts if other conservative lawmakers from Missouri, Oklahoma and South Dakota follow Hawley’s lead.

Oklahoma voters expanded Medicaid via a constitutional amendment in 2020. South Dakota followed suit in 2022. Republicans in all three states want to impose work requirements on able-bodied Medicaid recipients, but doing so would not save enough money to make up for the loss of federal dollars.

South Dakota Republican state Rep. Will Mortenson said he respects that voters chose to expand Medicaid, and added that the state has “faithfully” implemented it. But the decision to amend the state constitution “can only be described as a foolish decision,” he said in an interview.

“A constitution is not meant to be a flexible document that you change annually or even every other year,” Mortenson said. “And so now, as we’re staring down the barrel of the federal government contemplating changes to Medicaid, including for the expansion population, our state is hamstrung in that we cannot effectively respond to those changes.”

Mortenson is one of the lead sponsors of a bill that would ask voters to consider a ballot measure in the next general election to amend the constitution again, this time conditioning Medicaid expansion on the level of federal assistance. The measure has passed both chambers of the legislature.

But some of the supporters of the original constitutional amendment say they would fight any attempt to change it. Any restrictions, including work requirements, would severely harm working-class people, said Doug Sombke, head of the South Dakota Farmers Union. Sombke told Stateline that most farmers in the state struggle to make ends meet and certainly cannot offer high wages or health care benefits to their workers.

“There’s just no extra income,” Sombke said. “And, in South Dakota, we’re a right-to-work state, so you can get fired for any reason. As a worker, you really don’t have a lot of choice.”

Hall, of the Fairness Project, said amending the constitution is the most effective way to expand Medicaid in states where conservative-leaning lawmakers have been reluctant to do so. She said she suspects that voters in other states might pursue the constitutional amendment strategy if their state lawmakers try to roll back expansion.

“I do think that it’s possible that if we see these cuts move forward in D.C., and states are making highly unpopular choices to cut benefits for people, that we will see this issue back at the ballot box,” Hall said. “But for right now, I would say we’re seeing the power of constitutional amendments to protect benefits in action in real time.”

Stateline reporter Shalina Chatlani can be reached at schatlani@stateline.org.

©2025 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

On May 20, the city will resume selling the debt of property owners who owe taxes or water, sewer and emergency repair charges—the first lien sale since the pandemic struck. But recent reforms mean homeowners have more options, and more avenues to seek help.

Home in Brooklyn. (Adi Talwar/City Limits)

On May 20, New York City will resume selling the debt of property owners who owe taxes or water, sewer and emergency repair charges—but recent reforms mean homeowners have more options, and more avenues to seek help.

This year marks the first time the city has carried out the tax lien sale since it was paused during the COVID-19 pandemic. In reauthorizing it to resume, the City Council and Mayor Eric Adams passed a series of policies in 2024 intended to “alleviate financial hardship and promote housing stability for at-risk owners.”

This included the introduction of the Easy Exit Program, which allows landlords of one- to three-family homes or condos to delay their inclusion in the sale for up to a year, as long as they live at the residence and meet certain income requirements.

The city also allocated $2 million for outreach and education to homeowners at risk. This includes a partnership with the Center for NYC Neighborhoods, which is offering free, one-on-one sessions with certified housing counselors and attorneys.

“It’s not too late right now,” said Kevin Wolfe, the group’s senior government affairs manager. “There are so many different options for the homeowners that are built into the system, and there may even be other options for you to get financial relief that you’re not aware of.”

This includes potential exemptions for senior citizens, veterans, disabled homeowners and nonprofits, as well as three different payment plan options.

“We encourage them to to reach out to us, talk to us, go over their situation, and then we can help them with a variety of options to work out the best way to get off the lien sale,” Wolfe said.

City Limits sat down with Wolfe to talk more about the history of the lien sale, how it works and what at risk owners should know about the process.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What is the tax lien sale, and how did it get started in New York City?

The tax lien sale is the mechanism that New York City uses in order to basically collect delinquent taxes, water debt or municipal debt from from [the Department of Housing Preservation and Development] called the emergency repair liens.

They have certain thresholds that change from year to year. If your taxes have been late for a certain amount of time, or you owe a certain amount of taxes, water debt, or your emergency repair lien is too high…it will turn into a lien. The lien is not recorded on your property, but it is a lien, and at a certain point, your lien will be eligible to be sold on the tax lien sale.

Basically what happens is, the city will sell the lien to a trust; a private investor cannot buy a lien. They sell the lien to the trust, and then the trust basically handles the servicing of the debt, and they will have a third party servicer a lot of times. What will typically happen if the lien is still not paid off after it’s sold, the trust will foreclose the property and they will go through a tax foreclosure process—that’s the process where you lose your home. But different from mortgage foreclosure, tax foreclosure is very hard to defeat. There are far fewer defenses.

New York has not had a lien sale forever. The lien sale originated in the 1990s under the Giuliani era, where there were a lot of properties that were vacant, that were abandoned, that tax delinquency was a big issue [with], and the city really financially had gone through a lot of struggles in order to pay its debts.

The Department of Finance says…that in order for the city to borrow funds from the bond market, they need to have stable sources of revenue. And the bond market needs to see that if New York City says, ‘Well, we have property taxes, and that’s one of our revenue sources’—they need to see that they have enforcement mechanisms to actually collect on the property taxes due. And so the lien sale is that mechanism, and that’s one of the things that gives the bond market confidence and can lower the city’s borrowing costs and increase the amount that the city can borrow from year to year.

How might a homeowner find themselves on the tax lien sale list?

Homeowners are disproportionately on the tax lien sale. About 42 percent of the properties on the lien sale are tax class 1 properties [one-, two- or three-family homes].

We are seeing a plurality of the homes that are on the lien sale are actually water debt, it’s not taxes. If you have a large apartment building and the landlord’s not paying the water and you shut [it] off, then you’ve got to be on the nightly news about how the tenants don’t have water. The city doesn’t want to be in that situation, and so what they’ve done instead is sell the lien. And so it gets homeowners caught up who just cannot afford the water bill.

This is not instances where somebody is $200 behind. You have to be thousands of dollars behind in debt. Very rarely do you have somebody who’s just using $10,000 worth of water every year—typically what will happen is that there’s a major leak. New York’s homes are old; a disproportionate amount of our homes are were built before World War II compared to the rest of the country. These are big pipes, and so if they burst, you have a huge amount of water that’s coming out, and your bills can easily escalate.

Most of these homeowners don’t have a mortgage. You hear a lot in many of the neighborhoods, “I’m house rich, but cash poor.” This is that type of situation where the house is valuable, but the the homeowner does not have the money to pay the taxes, and in many cases, has a tough time accessing capital and unlocking the equity in their home for a variety of reasons.

The tax lien program has been heavily criticized for disproportionately impacting certain communities. What has that impact looked like previously?

The lien sale is very concentrated in who it actually impacts. In majority Black neighborhoods, you’re six times more likely to have a lien sold on your property than a majority white neighborhood; majority Hispanic, Latino [neighborhoods] are twice as likely than a white neighborhood.

If you look at the map—we actually have a tax lien tracker on our website—you could overlay those historic maps where it says “redlining”—it’s the same neighborhoods we’re talking about. Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, Flatbush, East New York is a huge neighborhood, the central Brooklyn neighborhoods, Southeast Queens, Jamaica, Hollis, St. Albans. It’s the same areas that historically were redlined, it’s the same areas that were targeted, that had racial predatory lending. It’s the same areas that have suffered from discrimination for decades, almost a century.

As we already mentioned, the city passed policies last year aimed at protecting small homeowners at risk. Are there further reforms you think lawmakers should pursue?

Long term, we would want to see the lien sale abolished for homeowners, for our one- to three- family tax Class 1 homeowners, even with water debt.

This has unfortunately been an instrument of displacement…we’re trying to change that inequity. We totally understand, “I’ve got a big building in midtown or downtown, I’m a slumlord”—that type of thing should not be excused, and the city should make every effort to collect the debt on those properties. But when you’re talking about someone’s home, it’s an entirely different situation.

The reason why people are not paying the loans, the typical reason, is they have a hardship. They have a fixed income. These are senior citizens. They’re in medical debt. Perhaps there was a death in the family and they lost the income. We’ve never come across somebody who’s just like, “I don’t want to pay my taxes.” Everyone wants to figure out how to rectify the situation—nobody’s hiding money. You’re talking about low- to moderate-income people who don’t have the economic means to pay their debt. We want to change that situation and come up with a more equitable way so the city is collecting their debts without displacing homeowners.

Is there anything else people should know?

There are a lot of scams. One of the unfortunate things is that the list of homeowners on the lien sale is made public. Even though New York City does not sell its liens to private investors like Texas, they do make the list public.

What will happen is that you’ll have people who go door knocking and…they’ll scam the homeowner. Again, these are very, very valuable pieces of property, and the scammers know it.

So we definitely encourage homeowners, before you make any decisions on it, to reach out, and get advice from a lawyer.

To reach the editor, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org

Want to republish this story? Find City Limits’ reprint policy here.

The post NYC’s Tax Lien Sale is Back. Here’s What You Need to Know. appeared first on City Limits.

By FATIMA HUSSEIN and CHRIS MEGERIAN

WASHINGTON (AP) — Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent leveled harsh criticism at the operations of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund on Wednesday even as he tried to reassure nervous investors that the United States would maintain its global leadership role.

“America first does not mean America alone,” he said in a speech to the Institute of International Finance. “To the contrary, it is a call for deeper collaboration and mutual respect among trade partners.”

Although Bessent said the IMF and the World Bank are “falling short,” he stopped short of calling for the U.S. to withdraw from the institutions as some conservatives have advocated.

It was the latest example of how Bessent, a former hedge fund manager who keeps a close eye on the financial markets, has tried to calm the economic turmoil as President Donald Trump tries to rewire international trade through aggressive tariffs.

After Bessent’s remarks, reporters asked him about a Wall Street Journal article that said the huge U.S. tariffs that the Republican president has levied on China could be cut in half, citing unidentified people familiar with the matter.

Bessent said: “I’d be surprised if that discussion is happening.” However, he said he expects “there’d have to be a de-escalation” from Washington and Beijing’s trade confrontation.

Trump had said on Tuesday that the 145% tariffs on China could “come down substantially.” And then on Wednesday, he told reporters that “everybody wants to be a part of what we’re doing” and “everyone’s going to be happy.”

Bessent’s speech in Washington represented a broadside against the IMF and the World Bank, which provide loans and other financial support around the world.

He said the Trump administration “will leverage U.S. leadership and influence at these institutions and push them to accomplish their important mandates.”

Some of Bessent’s criticisms echoed the Trump administration’s efforts to root out progressive ideology from federal institutions. Bessent said the IMF “has suffered from mission creep” and “devotes disproportionate time and resources to work on climate change, gender and social issues.”

He said there were similar problems at the World Bank, which he said “should no longer expect blank checks for vapid, buzzword-centric marketing accompanied by half-hearted commitments to reform.”

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One of the problems, Bessent said, is that China is still treated like a developing country, which gives it more favorable treatment from global institutions. With China as the second-largest economy in the world, he said, “it’s an adult economy.”

Despite growing friction between Beijing and Washington, Bessent said “there is an opportunity for a big deal here.”

Bessent wants the U.S. to boost manufacturing while China increases consumption, making its economy less reliant on flooding the globe with cheap exports.

“If they want to rebalance, let’s do it together,” he said. “This is an incredible opportunity.”

Beijing said Wednesday that “exerting pressure is not the right way to deal with China and simply will not work.”

Associated Press reporters Didi Tang and Michelle Price contributed to this report.