Abrams has filed many lawsuits under GNGH2 Inc., targeting borrowers who had links to China, among other things. He has also filed some suits under his organization, the Zionist Advocacy Center, which he said seeks to do “pro-Israel work in the court system.”

In September, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia announced that Americans for Peace Now, a progressive Jewish nonprofit, had agreed to pay $261,890 to settle allegations that it improperly obtained a $130,945 PPP loan. In June, the office said the Middle East Institute had also agreed to pay $718,558 to settle allegations that it improperly obtained a PPP loan. Abrams, who sued both groups, accused them of fraudulently certifying that they were not “primarily engaged in political or lobbying activities,” according to the complaints.

Hadar Susskind, president and CEO of Americans for Peace Now, said officials thought they had qualified for the loan because they did not consider the nonprofit to be a political organization. He said they had settled because it could have been costlier to go to court.

Susskind said he had never met Abrams, but he believed the complaint was “very much ideologically motivated” because of the nonprofit’s work to promote Israeli-Palestinian peace.

In an email, Abrams said: “In America these anti-Israel organizations have the right to spin, distort or even outright lie about Israel. However, they do not have the right to subsidize their activities with government monies for which they were not eligible.”

Abrams said he had long done other activist work, including recently representing a Jewish high school student who was the victim of antisemitic bullying. He said he did not charge fees in those matters, and that the “whistleblower cases do generate significant revenue, so things more or less balance out.”

”Clearly, it’s irresponsible to run back the same tax cuts after the deficit has tripled,” said Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a former Republican congressional aide. ”Even congressional Republicans behind the scenes are looking for ways to scale down the president’s ambitions.”

Democrats and many economists say Trump’s income tax cuts disproportionately benefit the wealthy, which deprives the government of revenues needed for programs for the middle class and poor.

“The president-elect’s tax policy ideas will increase the deficit because they will decrease taxes for those with the highest ability to pay, such as the corporations whose tax rate he’s proposed reducing even further to 15%,” said Jessica Fulton, vice president of policy at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington-based think tank that deals with issues facing communities of color.

Trump’s team insists he can make the math work.

”The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail, including lowering prices. He will deliver,” said Karoline Leavitt, the Trump transition spokeswoman.

When Trump was last in the White House in 2020, the federal government was spending $345 billion annually to service the national debt. It was possible to run up the national debt with tax cuts and pandemic aid because the average interest rate was low, such that repayment costs were manageable even as debt levels climbed.

As harried commuters arrived on the Northstar Commuter Rail platform in Minneapolis last week, Metropolitan Council Chair Charlie Zelle and other Metro Transit employees met them, bearing cookies and words of thanks.

The celebratory sweets marked Northstar’s 15th birthday this month, a quiet milestone for rail service between Target Field and Big Lake that has struggled for relevance from the very beginning, especially after a precipitous decline in ridership during the pandemic.

The big question forever dogging Northstar is whether the line will ever connect to St. Cloud, as originally planned more than 15 years ago.

The current answer? No one knows. And, unlike previous years, there doesn’t appear to be any groundswell of support bubbling up at the moment to make the final 28-mile connection between Big Lake and St. Cloud a reality.

“Northstar has never lived up to its aspirations,” said Zelle, who, as the head of the Met Council, oversees transportation planning in the metro.

While Northstar has been successfully ferrying suburban Minnesota Twins and Vikings fans downtown on game days, Zelle said daily commuter service “falls into the challenges of express routes in general.”

With the rise of hybrid work during the pandemic and pronounced shifts in the way people commute to work, Northstar provides three southbound trips and one northbound trip each weekday morning, and three northbound trips and one southbound trip on weekday afternoons. No weekend service is available, except for special events.

For now, Metro Transit’s proposed operating budget preserves current service on Northstar. Whether that will change is unclear.