The American Prospect #340

DAVID DAYEN: THE SUPREME COURT HOBBLES CONGRESS

PAUL STARR: CAN DEMOCRATS WIN BACK YOUNG MEN?

vs.

Election 2024 Where Kamala Harris and Donald Trump stand on the issues

GARY DORRIEN OVER FROM UNION ROAD

MY CHRISTIAN-LEFT-INTELLECTUAL LIFE

$49.99 hardcover | 326 pages | 6 x 9

ISBN 978-1-4813-2241-6

THE LONG- AWAITED ACCOUNT OF THE MAKING OF GARY DORRIEN

“Gary Dorrien is the greatest Christian ethicist since the legendary Reinhold Niebuhr. Yet his working class origins, deep philosophical probing, and especially his genuine roots in the Black prophetic tradition take him beyond Niebuhr in serious and substantive ways. What a great intellectual and spiritual gift his life and book are to us in these grim times!”

—CORNEL WEST, DietrichBonhoefferProfessorofPhilosophyandChristianPractice, UnionTheologicalSeminary

“Dorrien artfully weaves his life story together with an intellectual history of twentieth-century progressive political movements (secular and religious) and their interface with socially engaged theologies. He takes us on a dazzling tour!”

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“This riveting and beautiful book is the remarkable story of how Gary Dorrien became Gary Dorrien, how a shy athlete from rural Michigan became the foremost religious historian and theological ethicist of our time.”

—DEMIAN WHEELER, SophiaAssociateProfessorofReligiousandTheologicalStudies, UnitedTheologicalSeminaryoftheTwinCities

24 How Congress Gets Its Groove Back

The Supreme Court’s recent rulings will change how Congress writes laws. It may even force the legislative branch to take a hard look at its own dysfunctions. By David

Dayen

34 An Epic Dystopia

How a near-monopoly gained control of most of the nation’s electronic medical records, to the detriment of medical practice and doctor morale.

By Robert Kuttner

42 A Ponzi Scheme of Promises

Five years after the Business Roundtable ‘redefined’ the purpose of the corporation, has anything changed?

By Adam M. Lowenstein

I’m writing this with weeks to go in one of the stranger election seasons of my lifetime, which started with the two oldest candidates in American history and the first presidential rematch since 1892, saw one tag out after a debate collapse, then saw the other have a rather similar debate collapse at the hands of his new opponent. But the oddity is just as much about what we’re spending our time discussing, despite all the nation’s challenges at home and abroad.

With every topic Republicans hoped to exploit—Mexican border crossings, inflation, crime rates—suddenly no longer statistical liabilities, a multiday news cycle was instead invented about the presence of Haitian immigrants in a relatively small city in a non-swing state. Accusing migrants of eating pets has a tragically long and racist history, intended to demonize outsiders and drive tribal divisions. It’s disgraceful, and even though Donald Trump is exactly who you would expect to say it, it’s also a sign that his political movement is truly incapable of pursuing anything else.

Brazen nativism demands a forceful response; anyway, that’s how it feels in the moment. But of course, that’s just what nativists want. They want to play on fears and insecurities and blot out the concerns of the American people with a face they can call a savage. Instead of lunging at where the nihilists want to lead us, we can pull back and look at what they don’t want you to see.

So in this pre-election issue, we have a series of comparative studies between the candidates, on issues that don’t always get elevated to the front lines of national politics: RYAN COOPER on climate and energy, JANIE EKERE on rural America, LUKE GOLDSTEIN on corporate power and market structure, SUZANNE GORDON and STEVE EARLY on veterans’ health care, ERIK LOOMIS on the stewardship of public lands, and SARAH LEAH WHITSON on geopolitics in the Middle East.

There are of course many other areas that matter in this election: abortion rights, the future of Medicare and Social Security, the war in Ukraine, and a tax fight that will dominate headlines throughout 2025 regardless of who wins. But at the Prospect, we try to fill the gaps in coverage on the progressive left, and bring you information that you might not get elsewhere.

We’re doing the same thing throughout the election, with our reporters visiting the battlegrounds, walking along on the voter canvasses, taking in the rallies, talking to the voters, and getting to the truth. If you visit prospect.org throughout the election, we will have Election 2024 coverage from across the country that you can use to be more informed about what really matters.

And if you’re a subscriber, I have some other surprise news for you: This is not the only magazine you’ll be getting from us this October! Keep checking your mailbox for a special issue that I think you’re really going to enjoy.

Politicians, operatives, and hangers-on want to distract you. We don’t have to let them. We find stories about ideas, politics, and power, and shine a bright light for all to see. Thank you for joining us in that collective journey of understanding. –David Dayen

ROBYN

EXECUTIVE EDITOR DAVID DAYEN

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PROSPEC TS

HAROLD MEYERSON

The Stakes in This Election

In the winter of 1945,

Franklin D. Roosevelt traveled to Yalta to meet with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin to make decisions on the war’s endgame and the shape of the postwar world. FDR had met repeatedly with Churchill and his entourage during the war, and once, in Tehran in 1943, with Stalin and his aides. Looking across the table at Stalin’s advisers, however, he saw one he hadn’t met before.

“Who’s that?” Roosevelt asked Stalin.

“That’s Beria,” Stalin replied, then adding helpfully, “my Himmler.”

I cite this exchange as a way of describing, as this issue of the Prospect endeavors to do, the stakes in the upcoming presidential election. And I can think of no better way to begin that discussion by noting that Donald Trump has his own Himmler: Stephen Miller.

I hasten to explain that I don’t mean Miller plans or desires to kill anyone; by all available evidence, his is not an agenda of extermination. But anyone who remembers Trump’s war on undocumented immigrants during his previous go-round as president can have little doubt that it will be Miller who will be charged with carrying out one of the few specific pledges that Trump has made repeatedly in the course of this year’s campaigning: forcibly rounding up all 12 million undocumented immigrants (in the ABC debate, Trump put the “real” number at 21 million), placing them in concentration camps along the border, and expelling them to their nations of origin, even if they’ve

lived and worked in the United States for many decades, even if they’re the parents of children who are U.S. citizens.

It was Miller, after all, who ran Trump’s war on immigrants when Trump was in the White House previously. It was Miller who devised and championed the shortlived policy of banning all immigration from seven Muslim countries. It was Miller who devised and championed the practice of separating children, even infants, from their parents at the border, with utter indifference to how and whether these families could ever be reunited. It was Miller who capitalized on the pandemic to lock out all immigrants at the border on the basis of public health. And it was Miller who ran roughshod over administration officials who lacked sufficient zeal to expedite the arrests and expulsions of the undocumented.

Unlike many Trump administration functionaries, Miller was a hard-working and diligent channeler of Trump’s most brutal instincts. He made clear those were his instincts, too, and dealt harshly with colleagues whose cruelty he found lacking. (One such insufficiently zealous figure was Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, whose resignation Miller effectively forced.)

I dwell on Miller because it’s clear he will be the anti-immigrant czar of a second Trump administration, almost certain to prompt Trump to call out the National Guard when big-city police fall short in arresting immigrants, and to use the threat of force, and

force itself, when both immigrants and citizens resist the mass arrests, the concentration camps, and the deportations. Nor will his portfolio be limited to immigration: During Trump’s term as president, his title was senior adviser, in which capacity he was—and surely would be in a second Trump term—the most avid proponent of a top-down civil war on the media and other elements of our civil society opposed to autocracy and the right-wing politicization of the administration of justice.

I also dwell on Miller because if Trump prevails at the polls, Miller will not be the odd man in this time around. In 2017, Miller was more of a freelancer. There was not yet a full cadre of dedicated Trumpians with whom Trump could fill his administration.

From James “Mad Dog” Mattis to William Barr (a zealous right-winger but not an election denier), there were powerful appointees who hadn’t drunk all of Trump’s Kool-Aid. Miller, by contrast, wasn’t merely the dedicated delivery boy of Trump’s furies; he brought furies of his own to the fray.

This time around, the entire Trump administration will be staffed by the fury-filled. This will be the Stephen Miller presidency.

Much of the discussion of a second Trump term has focused on economics and foreign policy: what across-the-board high tariffs would do to Americans’ cost of living, what the renewal of Trump’s expiring tax cuts would do to our already stratospheric levels of inequality, and what Trump’s affinity for foreign autocrats would mean for defenders, both foreign and domestic, of democracy. Despite the lip service that both Trump and J.D. Vance have given to the cause of American workers, their policy toward organized labor will surely be that of Trump’s designated “efficiency czar” Elon Musk, whose call for the immediate firing of striking workers who seek a voice on the job was echoed by Trump in their two-hour meandering discourse on X.

Despite Trump’s drumbeating for economic nationalism, the tariffs he slapped on Chinese and other imported products during his presidency did nothing to jump-start a return of American manufacturing. To the contrary, it was President Biden’s turn to industrial policy that prompted the first measurable increase in factory construction that the nation has seen in decades. The tax credits going to companies that mean to build electric vehicles or computer chips or other elements of a green economy

increased domestic factory construction by more than 70 percent over previous years. Likewise with infrastructure. Despite Trump’s annual proclamations of “infrastructure weeks,” the dollar amounts he asked Congress to provide for rebuilding roads, bridges, airports, and the digital infrastructure were so meager that Congress could never construct a plausible program with them. Biden, by contrast, won sizable bipartisan support for the massive repair job that the nation needs, and without which a renewed industrial sector (or any economic sector, for that matter) cannot flourish.

Trump’s personal stake in the quiet movement of money across borders may also stand at odds with his vows of economic nationalism. It’s unimaginable that Trump would do anything to impede the characteristically concealed and laundered shifting of vast sums of money from country to country, autocrat to autocrat, that has become a regular feature of global capitalism. Indeed, it’s a good deal more imaginable that Trump might personal-

the funds needed to rebuild industry and infrastructure were instead showered on corporations, whose taxes were cut from 35 percent to 21 percent. Now Trump is proposing to lower those tax rates even more. By contrast, industrial-policy investments have become a hallmark of today’s Democratic Party, and would surely be prominent in a Kamala Harris administration.

Harris has made clear that if elected, she’ll augment Biden’s signature investments in the industrial and transportation sectors with major investments in what she terms “the care economy”: helping working- and middle-class families find affordable child care and elder care, permanently expanding the Child Tax Credit, and enacting paid family and medical leave. She’s also broadened her economic agenda to include tax breaks for small businesses. Like her care economy package, this is a cross-class pitch that Latinos and Asian Americans in particular (both groups that have high levels of smallbusiness formation) might welcome.

ly benefit from such movements of money. The insufficiently explored allegation that Trump was offered $10 million in cash from the government of Egypt five days before he became president suggests that, well, he might.

Trump’s version of economic nationalism focuses, like his immigration policy, on walling off the country to outsiders. But he is too existentially bound to his personalized version of laissez-faire capitalism—namely, tax cuts and deregulation—to do what’s required for a more vibrant and egalitarian domestic economy. During his presidency,

This economic stool, however, still needs a third leg: a commitment to a “build economy” that surpasses Harris’s vow to have the government aid in the construction of three million new homes over the next decade. To address the anxieties of working-class men—a demographic where Democrats desperately need to do better—she should pledge to create an outreach agency funneling willing workers into the construction unions’ apprenticeship programs, with appropriations to enlarge those programs, and tax credits and other funding to raise the homebuilding target well above three million. That would be both good long-term policy and good long-term and short-term politics.

Though the funding for all these longoverdue investments in working- and middle-class America will come from higher taxes on the rich and corporations, my colleague David Dayen has pointed out that some leading Democrats have already com-

mitted themselves to tax cuts of their own. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, for instance, has called for ending the limit on the federal income tax deduction for state and local taxes based on property assessments. Such cuts would constrict Harris’s ability to fund her expansions of assistance to working- and middle-class Americans. As president, Harris would have to rein in some of her colleagues to deliver on her promises. And should she win, it’s those promises that will have been a clear factor in her victory.

But other factors will be in play as well.

Perhaps the strongest card in Harris’s hand is the 21st-century version of Warren Harding’s 1920 Republican presidential campaign: Her election would mark a return to “normalcy.” To be sure, for Trump and the MAGA faithful, the presidency of a BlackAsian woman who is also a mainstream Democrat has nothing “normal” about it. To them, it signals the further fall of America into something new, unsettling, and subversive of the white and patriarchal America of whose restoration they dream.

But both non- MAGA Americans and swing voters alike know that a second Trump stint inescapably brings with it a loud and unending war on enemies both real and imagined, a constant disruption of the civic order through his lashings out at those against whom he harbors a raging fury for political and personal affronts. That’s why Joe Biden used this normalcy frame successfully in 2020: He called it a battle for the soul of America.

Harris similarly offers the prospect of a White House not wrapped up in the private hatreds of a wounded narcissist or the public hatreds of a casual bigot. Her claim to normalcy is that she’ll do the public’s business minus the obsessive personal insecurities that structure everything Trump does.

Trump’s enemies list is both dangerous and ridiculous; his inability to keep his daily rants from sounding ridiculous can lead a wearied public to discount the dangers they present. But in a second Trump term, the danger will be far greater than it was in the first. A second Trump administration will be almost uniformly staffed with aides who share his bigotries and hatreds, and have no hesitation wielding the power of the state, as untrammeled as the Trumpian courts will allow, against these “enemies.” One of those aides will be Stephen Miller. Trump’s Himmler. That’s what’s at stake in this election. n

Trump adviser

Stephen Miller

NOTEBOOK

America’s Climate and Economy Are on the Ballot

The Biden-Harris administration sowed the seeds of a green American economy. A second Trump term would poison them.

By Ryan Cooper

The Biden administration undoubtedly has the best climate policy record of any president in history. Even granting that almost no other presidents even tried, President Biden and the Democratic Congress in 2021-2022

got a shocking amount done, especially given their razor-thin margin in the Senate.

ELECTIONS2024

The three principal laws Biden signed are the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), by far the largest climate policy package in history, at roughly between $800 billion and $1.2 trillion in size (depending on who you ask); the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), a more traditional bill with about $500 billion for transit, passenger and freight rail, EV chargers, and

upgrades to the electric grid (as well as more for highways and such); and the CHIPS and Science Act, which authorizes about $280 billion to stand up a domestic advanced manufacturing industry for semiconductors and other high-tech industries, as well as funding more scientific research and much else. In addition, the administration has put through a blizzard of new regulations and standards to reduce carbon pollution, some independently and some as part of these new laws.

The basic goal here is to decarbonize electricity generation and electrify everything. Simultaneously, policymakers would replace all the fossil fuel–powered power plants—already in progress with the explosion in wind and solar power— while replacing all the fossil fuel–powered transportation, cement and steel production, manufacturing, agriculture, and so forth with electric versions. Technologies to do this are either already in wide use (EVs), being rolled out (green steel), in the prototype stage (industrial heat), or on the drawing board (carbon capture).

Overall, the 2024 edition of Princeton’s REPEAT Project report estimates that these laws got us about halfway to America’s stated climate goal of a 50 percent reduction in emissions (from the peak in 2005) by 2030 and thence to net zero by 2050.

Yet all those accomplishments are under threat. Should Donald Trump win another term, he would likely do serious damage to this climate policy framework, and potentially engender so much economic chaos that the entire planet’s climate efforts would be greatly set back. On the other hand, if Kamala Harris wins, she at least will have another four years to cement her predecessor’s legacy—and should the Democrats win control of Congress at some point during her presidency, she would get a chance to build on Biden’s foundation.

Let me start with the bad.

Trump has at various points promised to repeal the IRA ; re-withdraw from the Paris climate accords that Biden rejoined; revoke Biden’s regulations on power plant pollution, vehicle emissions, and fuel efficiency; revoke his limitations on oil and gas drilling; and much else. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump term, overwhelmingly written by former Trump staffers and associates, is much more specific and extreme, essentially arguing for a wholesale gutting of the government’s capacity to protect the environment in any way.

As usual with Trump, it’s anybody’s guess what he would actually do in office. In April, he openly attempted to shake down a group of oil executives for a $1 billion campaign contribution, promising just about everything on the Big Oil wish list in return. Trump has long nurtured a bizarre prejudice against renewable energy, especially windmills, which he has claimed produce

Should Donald Trump win another term, he would likely do serious damage to Joe Biden’s climate policy framework.

“tremendous fumes” and kill whales, without evidence. (Apparently, this goes back to a wind farm built near Trump’s golf course in Aberdeen, Scotland; he thought it ruined the view.)

On the other hand, Trump recently made an abrupt about-face on electric cars “because Elon endorsed me,” and many Republican districts have benefited disproportionately from IRA spending. Several House Republican lawmakers have warned against eliminating IRA tax credits because of the impact on jobs in their districts. We all remember the last time Republicans had a trifecta in 2017-2018; they failed to repeal their previous bugbear—Obamacare— though only by one vote in the Senate.

On balance, I judge that it is highly likely that under a GOP trifecta, Trump would sign at least a partial repeal of the IRA . The pressure to inflict pain on liberals by ripping out Biden’s biggest legislative achievement would be overwhelming. And unlike repealing Obamacare, which would have thrown something like 24 million people off their health insurance, the damage from tearing up the IRA would be somewhat contained initially. It would only be later, when the American economy fell into backwardness and stagnation, that the true damage would be felt. America’s climate progress as well as its toehold on the industries of the future would be set back, possibly permanently. Whatever happens in Congress, the threat to Biden’s regulatory agenda on climate is clear. Despite Trump’s duplicitous disavowals of Project 2025, if his first term is any indication his laziness and incuriosity will give the lunatic rank and file in the conservative movement great latitude to do whatever they want.

But perhaps the greatest danger is Trump’s personality itself. In his first term, he started innumerable deranged trade fights with China, Europe, and anyone else who drew his random ire. In his second term, not only would he be even more erratic

as his obvious mental decline gathers pace, he would also have few or no institutional restraints. Virtually all Republicans who challenged or tried to contain Trump’s spiteful outbursts in his first term (with modest success) have been driven out of the party. The court system is full of his own appointees ready to rule in his favor—most importantly the Supreme Court, which has already assured him that he would be for all practical purposes immune from prosecution for any crime committed in office.

It’s impossible to say with any certainty what would happen if Trump carries out his plan to get rid of the income tax and replace it with tariffs—which if you do the math would have to be something like 133 percent—or his promise to put a 60 percent tariff on every Chinese import and a 10 percent one on everything else. At a minimum, it would start the biggest trade war in world history, with America against every country in the world.

The United States, as the global hegemon, is the keystone of the world economic system. It controls the pipelines of international finance (in part through its alliances), its dollar is the global reserve currency, its central bank serves as the lender of last resort for half the planet, and most importantly for our purposes, it has long been the global consumer of last resort through its enormous trade deficit.

There are many critics of the American economic order, including lots of Americans. But simply dropping a cluster bomb in the middle of the global economic system, without so much as a napkin sketch for what might replace it, would be unimaginable. Potentially most of the vast network of global supply chains—which as the pandemic revealed, are quite delicate—would be damaged or shattered. A tidal wave of bankruptcies, unemployment, and a deep global recession would be likely. And that would come at the worst possible time, amid the ongoing process of restructuring the global economy around green energy. This would be thrown into utter chaos, sending global temperatures soaring.

Trump might blink at this prospect, but the man was a loose cannon even before his brain started falling apart. Eliminating that risk would be worth paying almost any price.

If we look on the bright side, we can do much better than continuing the status quo. A

Harris administration could improve on her predecessor’s record, especially if her party manages to regain total control of Congress.

Even without Congress, Harris would be able to preserve the structure of Biden’s climate policy. One central goal of the IRA was to provide a full decade of policy certainty around subsidies for clean-energy installation and production, which had been previously yanked up and down willy-nilly, causing repeated chaos in the industry. Just having a Democrat in the White House (absent some debt ceiling showdown at least) would keep the current exponential growth of green energy and industry going.

Second, Harris could continue moving implementation forward. Despite heroic efforts from the federal bureaucracy,

door as of this April. More has been done since then, but much more remains.

Third and most promisingly, if the Democrats maintain control of Congress, a Harris administration would have an opportunity to pass new legislation. The nonprofit Evergreen Action, founded by a group of Washington Gov. Jay Inslee’s former presidential campaign staffers and an influential player in the design of the IRA , has identified several policy arenas that need legislative attention, including the electric grid, industry, transportation, building efficiency, and international diplomacy. “With the Harris administration, we have a fighting chance to achieve our climate goals and usher in the future she is running on: growing the middle class through clean-energy jobs, decreasing pollution and creating health-

a tremendous pile of paperwork remains before these laws can be developed to their full potential. Requirements, standards, rules, and much else must be written and put through the grinding administrative process before subsidies can flow. Under Biden, only about 17 percent of the $1.6 trillion authorized in his climate bills and the American Rescue Plan had gotten out the

ier communities, and a growing economy based on clean-energy technology,” Lena Moffitt, executive director of Evergreen, told the Prospect in an interview.

Again, much progress has been made. But for all the components of Biden’s incipient strategy to reach the required scale in time, the transition to renewable energy must be greatly accelerated. More subsidies are

needed for green industrial technology and agriculture, as well as more research into zero-carbon aviation and carbon capture. Probably the biggest general goal should be to speed up the pace of government. From the local up to the federal level, climate projects of all kinds have been caught up in America’s Kafkaesque and glacially slow bureaucratic process—especially by how long things can be tied up in the courts. At the national level, a high-voltage transmission line between what will be the largest wind farm in the Western Hemisphere and Phoenix, Arizona, has been stuck in legal limbo for more than 18 years, with no end in sight. About 1,400 gigawatts of renewableenergy proposals—or more than five times as much as exists at present—are stuck in the “interconnection queue” waiting for approval to connect to the grid. At the household level, a major reason why American rooftop solar installations cost roughly three times as much as they do in Australia is the elaborate permitting process here, which often varies dramatically between locations.

A recent analysis from the Energy Innovation think tank put some numbers on the possibilities here. They examined a bestcase scenario for Harris versus the Project 2025 plan for Trump. For Harris, they estimated that by 2030, she would actually beat the 50 percent emissions reduction target slightly (and hit net zero by 2050), add 2.2 million jobs, save $7.7 billion in yearly household energy costs, increase GDP by $450 billion per year, and prevent 3,900 early deaths from air pollution.

For Trump, they estimated that by 2030, he would stall out emission cuts (meaning an increase relative to Harris by 1.75 billion metric tons per year), destroy 1.7 million jobs, increase household energy spending by $32 billion, decrease GDP by $320 billion per year, and increase early deaths caused by air pollution by 2,100.

In sum, a second Trump administration would mean major job losses, reduced growth, a loss of the 21st century’s cuttingedge industries, great harm to the climate, and possibly a global economic crisis. A Harris administration would mean more jobs, more growth, and advances in America’s technological edge. And should the Democrats win control of Congress during her term, America may just possibly do our entire part to fight climate change for the first time. Let’s call it lose-lose-lose-lose versus win-win-win-win. n

The Inflation Reduction Act offers a decade of policy certainty for clean-energy installation and production.

Rural America’s Project 2025 Problem

Trump is promising major disruptions for small-town communities. Yet residents still favor him over Kamala Harris’s development and investment approach.

By Janie Ekere

With the possibility of another Trump presidency, Democrats have directed much media attention toward Project 2025, the 922-page document laying out a far-right conservative governing agenda. The policies proposed under Project 2025 range from slashing social programs to banning abortion nationwide to eliminating corporate regulations.

People in rural areas are generally more likely to live in poverty and lack access to important social services than their urban and suburban counterparts. So as disastrous as these policies would be for most Americans, they would hit rural communi-

trade policy, corporate concentration, and climate change.

Consolidation affects various parts of the rural economy, but it’s especially prominent in agriculture. Large companies like Tyson and Smithfield receive the bulk of government agricultural subsidies and can use their economic and political power to control various aspects of agricultural production. Small farmers—especially young, female, and minority farmers—struggle to compete, often going into debt or being forced to sell their land. Even the inputs for farming, like seeds and equipment, are dominated by big players like Bayer and John Deere.

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ties hardest. In fact, many similar policies have already been enacted in rural parts of the country, resulting in higher poverty rates, weaker infrastructure, and poorer health outcomes.

The Biden administration has received praise for its work in breaking up corporate monopolies, revitalizing infrastructure, and funding social programs for low-income households. These policies have played an outsize role in strengthening America’s rural communities, from improving health outcomes to increasing economic participation. But questions remain about whether these rural revitalization efforts will continue under either a Harris or Trump presidency.

Agriculture sits at the intersection of many, though not all, aspects of rural policymaking. Not only does it concern America’s food system, but it’s also relevant to issues like

There are laws in place to ensure fair prices and markets for smaller farmers, like the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921, which governs livestock and poultry production. But the Trump administration weakened those laws on behalf of big agricultural companies. They even eliminated the division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) meant to enforce the Packers and Stockyards Act, and folded its duties into the Agricultural Marketing Service.

The Biden-Harris administration’s pursuit of antitrust legislation has started to level the playing field for small farmers. For example, the USDA has enacted clearer standards under the Packers and Stockyards Act to prevent discrimination, retaliation, and deceptive practices against livestock producers. The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice have halted multiple mergers, stemming corporate monopolization in industries like food and shipping. And the DOJ filed suit against Agri Stats, a middleman that gathered comprehensive data about poultry and other meat markets and enabled large farming interests to effectively collude to raise prices.

“When you start taking on big corporations, you help workers and small businesses everywhere, but especially in rural communities. Because in rural places, the economies are much less diverse, so one or two big corporations can run the show,” said Anthony Flaccavento, co-founder and executive director of the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative.

A Trump presidency could end these regulatory efforts. Project 2025 specifically states that departments like the USDA “should play a limited role” in agricultural markets, focusing on removing “governmental barriers that hinder food production.” One of those so-called “barriers” is sustainable agriculture.

Through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) offers food producers technical and financial assistance to engage in climate-friendly agricultural practices. But much of the money going toward EQIP has been funneled to corporations whose practices are damaging the environment, said Sean Carroll with Land Stewardship Action.

“When this program was created, part of the program said, we’re not going to use any of this for confined animal feeding operations,” Carroll said. “And then the industry lobbied and removed that protection.”

Project 2025 also includes the elimination of any policy that protects certain communities from discrimination. This could mean, for example, that the USDA’s standards on discrimination against farmers could be nullified. BIPOC farmers and growers would face more difficulties entering or staying in agriculture.

Protectionist trade policies are often touted as a way to maintain fairness between domestic farmers and foreign markets, but farmers and consumers often shoulder the costs of these policies. After the Trump administration imposed tariffs on Chinese imports in 2018, China retaliated by imposing its own tariffs on agricultural products. The resulting trade war raised the price of food and burdened people living in agricultural areas.

Despite this, the use of tariffs against China is still politically popular across party lines. Biden has left most targeted tariffs in place, and Harris is likely to do the same as president, said Matt Barron, a political consultant with MLB Research Associates. Trump is reportedly planning to increase

People in rural areas are generally more likely to live in poverty, and are hurt more by policies that roll back social services.

these tariffs and impose them across the board, despite the negative effects increased tariffs could have on the economy.

Agriculture is just one aspect of rural policymaking. One that is at times overlooked is health care. People living in rural communities are less likely to have private or employer-sponsored health insurance, so Medicaid coverage is often the only way they can afford medical treatment. People in rural areas, especially children, disproportionately rely on it for low-cost insurance, said Edwin Park, a research professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families.

Hospitals serving large numbers of Medicaid recipients and low-income uninsured patients also receive increased Medicaid funding through disproportionate share hospital (DSH) payments, intended to off-

set uncompensated care. Rural hospitals and health clinics rely on DSH payments as a source of revenue. And this makes an especially huge difference in reproductive care.

According to a 2024 report from the University of Minnesota’s Rural Health Research Center, over 58 percent of rural counties did not provide hospital-based obstetrics care. People in these areas who need reproductive care usually have to drive long distances to more metropolitan areas to access services, meaning they are less likely to receive needed prenatal or postnatal care. For states that have not yet expanded Medicaid, more rural hospitals have closed or stopped providing ob/gyn care due to lack of funding.

The Biden administration’s investments helped close crucial gaps in health care in rural communities. The American Rescue Plan of 2021 allowed states

to extend pregnancy-related Medicaid coverage from the federally mandated 60 days to 12 months. As of August, 47 states have implemented the extension. In 2023, the Department of Health and Human Services announced over $100 million in awards to train nurses, midwives, and other nurse faculty. While not directly related to Medicaid, this will help address the disproportionate shortage of ob/gyn care in rural areas.

There are multiple proposals within Project 2025 to cut Medicaid funding, from capping federal funding for state programs, to moving toward individual high-deductible plans, to “voucherizing” Medicaid.

“Medicaid would be cashed out instead of providing a comprehensive array of benefits,” Park said. “You would receive as an individual some amount of funding to purchase coverage on your own in the individ-

The Democrats have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to building rural support.

ual market, and presumably an individual market that looks more like an individual market before the Affordable Care Act than the individual market we have today with the marketplaces.”

These proposals would make health care more expensive, which would deter people from seeking medical treatment. It could also lead to interruptions in care due to the addition of red tape, Park said. This is particularly dangerous, as it means rural people would be more likely to delay prenatal or postnatal care.

Another social program with major implications for rural health is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. SNAP allows primarily low-income families to purchase fresh and healthy food. In 48 states, the SNAP benefits are fixed, meaning those living in lower-cost areas have more purchasing power. A 2019 study from the Journal of Health Economics found that children in SNAP-recipient households in areas with lower food costs not only improve their health through their diet, but they are also slightly more likely to receive medical care.

One complication with this is that many rural areas aren’t located close to a grocery store. This means that even if a household receives SNAP benefits, their only nearby food source is a local dollar store. Some dollar stores may have a limited stock of fresh fruits and vegetables, but they primarily sell unhealthy, overly processed foods. These stores have been replacing independent grocery stores primarily in rural, low-income, or predominantly Black communities since the 1990s, leading independent grocers to exit these communities. And when compared to urban areas, the resulting loss of stores and employment decline lasts longer.

Through the bipartisan infrastructure law, the Department of Transportation provides billions of dollars in grants to support the development of public transit in rural areas. This could help people in rural communities travel more easily to

grocery stores. But SNAP and DOT grants may both be on the chopping block under a Trump presidency, making fresh groceries less affordable and less accessible for rural communities.

One of the few policies that would likely remain in place under either administration is the Child Tax Credit (CTC). The CTC currently allows households making under $200,000 (or $400,000 for those filing jointly) to claim a tax benefit of up to $2,000 for each qualifying child. As a fixed benefit that does not vary by state, the CTC has more impact in areas with a lower cost of living, which is often true for rural areas.

Both the Trump and Biden administrations have supported expanding the CTC. Trump first increased it in the 2017 tax bill from $1,000 per child to $2,000 and raised the phaseout threshold. Those measures expire in 2025. In 2021, Biden increased the credit from $2,000 to up to $3,600 for younger children, but the policy expired at the end of that year and was not renewed.

This time around, both parties are talking about a permanent expansion, and the upcoming tax fight in 2025 provides an opportunity. Trump and J.D. Vance have mused about a $5,000 CTC , though they have provided few details; Harris has endorsed bringing the CTC back to where it was in 2021, with an additional bump for newborns to a total of $6,000 in the first year.

“What we would like to see is it made fully refundable in whatever tax bill that we see in 2025 so that the families with the lowest incomes can continue to receive it,” said Elizabeth Lower-Basch, deputy executive director of policy at the Center for Law and Social Policy. Refundability means that poorer families without any tax liability can still claim the credit. “That was the change that caused child poverty to be cut almost in half in 2021,” Lower-Basch said.

In addition to funding social programs for all working-class Americans, the Biden administration has enacted several initiatives specifically targeted toward rural development. The aforementioned bipartisan infrastructure law has invested billions of dollars toward clean water, broadband connectivity, wildfire protection, and other services.

The Democrats have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to building rural support. In many rural districts, Republicans

have run unopposed for decades, leaving few electoral options for progressive voters. At the same time, Democrats running in these areas have historically struggled to gain party support or funding at the federal or state level, instead being left to run campaigns largely on their own.

Additionally, past Democratic administrations under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama made concessions to corporations at the expense of the rural working class. This has contributed to mistrust among voters.

“People felt let down by Obama,” Barron said, referring to an initiative to crack down on consolidation and anti-competitive treatment in the agricultural industry. “Obama had taken some baby steps. He’d held some hearings, and then his people at the Justice Department left for corporate jobs, big law firms, and Wall Street, and nothing happened, and people felt burned.”

With corporate donors still courting Democrats this election, there are questions about Harris’s commitment to uplifting the rural working class. In that regard, her VP pick, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, helps add some credibility.

“I’ve been a little bit nervous about Harris, because she’s surrounded herself with some people that are trying to push her back towards a Clintonian kind of Democratic politics,” Flaccavento said. “Easing up on the corporations, giving them a break, cutting them some slack. And I think that selection of Walz will help solidify her stance on anti-corporate and pro-rural, pro-farmer, pro-worker.”

There have also been growing efforts to support rural progressive candidates and reach out to voters in these areas, much of which came after Trump won the 2016 presidential election. An August call hosted by Rural Americans for Harris-Walz brought together politicians, celebrities, and activists from across the country. Attendees spoke about the importance of approaching rural issues with nuance and empathy. Harris also recently hired Matt Hildreth from RuralOrganizing.org, a powerhouse in organizing in small-town America, as her rural engagement director in the swing states.

Trump had four years to uplift rural America. He did little, but maintained rural support. Biden did more but received little goodwill to show for it. Harris will likely carry on Biden’s efforts; whether she’ll get more out of it remains to be seen. n

A Crossroads on Corporate Power

Where would Harris and Trump take antitrust enforcement?

By Luke Goldstein

For 40 years, untrammeled monopoly power has been the defining characteristic of the American economy. In the 1980s, after a laissez-faire approach to antitrust laws originating with the Chicago school took hold in the Reagan administration, wealth inequality soared and new innovators struggled to break through an incumbency advantage favored by Wall Street.

Only during the Biden administration have those trend lines begun to change, thanks to a new crop of antitrust regulators: Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, Jonathan Kanter at the Department of Justice Antitrust Division, and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director Rohit Chopra have sent a clear message that the full body of anti-monopoly laws will be enforced to ensure open, competitive markets for consumers, businesses, and workers.

The presidential election will decide whether this brief window of opportunity to radically reshape economic liberty in this country can fully take root as a more permanent policy structure. But the stakes for corporate power are uniquely multifaceted.

Trump has shed the economic populist instincts he tapped into during the 2016 campaign, and cozied up to segments of the business world that previously viewed him with suspicion. Kamala Harris, on the other hand, resisted articulating a full policy vision until early September, when her campaign finally launched an issues page on her website. The economic platform gestures at giving new powers to antitrust enforcers under the overall framing of going after “bad actors,” a vague designation that leaves a lot of questions up to interpretation.

Despite Harris’s coy attitude toward policy, the political incentives are more aligned in the Democratic coalition for her to inherit the strongest administration on corporate power in decades, and give them four more years.

Based on recent polling, a majority of voters blame corporate price-gouging for inflation and support breaking up monopolies as a tool against it. The C-suite executive class also views antitrust and competition policy as one of the top issues on the ballot this November, but for entirely different reasons.

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It’s one of the rare policy areas where a baseline consensus has emerged, in large part because of a massive political shift since the 2008 financial crisis.

On both the left and right, populist factions are battling it out with a more corporatist political establishment for the soul of their respective parties. But when it comes to the actual governing record, Democrats have been far more willing to challenge monopoly dominance than Republicans.

Notoriously erratic and fickle, Donald

For months now, companies have been selectively timing the announcement of new acquisition targets, in the hopes of a more businessfriendly administration with a more relaxed merger policy to wave deals through. Behind the scenes—and sometimes in public— Wall Street has also been waging an allout pressure campaign to urge the next Democratic administration to remove Lina Khan from the FTC

Those efforts didn’t really stand a chance with Biden as the nominee. But corporate leaders saw an opening when Harris, a Californian close to Silicon Valley, stepped in as the party’s new nominee. Her close advisers include the general counsel of Uber (who is also her brother-in-law) and a lawyer rep -

resenting Google against an active Department of Justice antitrust lawsuit.

When Harris took over, a procession of CEOs and business leaders, led by Democratic mega-donor and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, went on cable shows to demand Harris oust Khan. Maryland’s governor, former investment banker and Harris ally Wes Moore, echoed this on CNBC. When asked directly about Hoffman’s proposition to move on from Khan, he said, “I think we will and I think we have to … There are going to be different dynamics that are going to require different philosophies.”

The remarks from donors came off as a thinly veiled quid pro quo and sparked widespread backlash. Even more centrist lawmakers in tough re-election races, like Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV), scrambled to post pictures in a room with Khan to show support. Hoffman was forced to recant during a later CNN interview, claiming he was merely speaking about Khan as an “expert,” not a donor.

Harris has never commented on the incident, nor has she committed to keeping Khan if she wins, despite championing several of the policies of Khan’s agency on the campaign trail. However, she put some progressives’ concerns to rest with her economic-policy rollout in August. It included a federal ban on price-gouging for groceries, a crackdown on algorithmic price-fixing in housing, and reforms for pharmacy benefit managers driving up drug costs. Within weeks, DOJ sued RealPage over rental pricefixing, buttressing Harris’s message.

Undeterred, monopolists continue to pressure Harris’s campaign. They aren’t wrong to view the election in such consequential terms.

It took Reagan two terms, and really a third under George H.W. Bush, for the Chicago school consumer welfare standard to become fully ingrained. If the neo-Brandeisians get another four years with a Harris administration, they will be able to more fully institutionalize one of the most far-reaching policy revolutions since the New Deal.

In the first year of his administration, President Biden issued an extensive executive order laying out a whole-of-government approach to competition. The document all but dethroned the old enforcement model of the Chicago school and gave his new-guard antitrust regulators a green light to move forward with their agenda.

That agenda has resulted in a sweeping policy overhaul. Several of America’s largest Fortune 500 companies are facing antitrust lawsuits. Agencies have gone after scam robocall farms and initiated rules to make it easier for people to cancel digital subscriptions, limit credit card late fees, or ensure medical debt doesn’t appear on credit reports. The most significant new rule, the FTC ’s ban on restrictive noncompete agreements in employment contracts, will ultimately be determined by the Supreme Court, and along with it whether the FTC has authority to create new rules through its unfair methods of competition powers.

The new merger guidelines, finalized by the FTC and DOJ last year, amount to a new corporate charter for how business can grow, and establishes that companies must innovate rather than acquire com-

petitors for market share. While there have been some setbacks operationalizing this approach to corporate power, by the FTC’s count they’ve won in court or otherwise stopped roughly 90 percent of their merger challenges. DOJ has tallied notable victories, such as blocking the Spirit-JetBlue airline merger, and publisher Simon & Schuster’s proposed combination with Penguin Random House. In August, Google was found guilty of monopolizing search markets, the first major monopolization verdict in a quarter-century. These victories have shown that neo-Brandeisian legal theories can hold up in court.

The Google search ruling in particular could prove a major precedent for other monopolization cases the FTC and DOJ have filed, including Big Tech cases against Apple, Amazon, Meta, and a separate case against Google for monopolizing

adtech markets being heard now. DOJ also has the RealPage lawsuit, and a monopolization case against Live Nation for rolling up the concert venue, promotion, and ticketing businesses.

“Once a few more of these cases win in the courts, you’re going to witness a sea change in how businesspeople operate,” said Matt Stoller, policy director of the American Economic Liberties Project.

The fate of this project to fight economic concentration depends on the next administration’s appointments and continued support.

Anti-monopoly policy still relies heavily on the inexorably slow litigation process. It usually takes more than one presidential term to initiate an investigation into a company, file a monopolization case, argue it in court, and then hash out a remedy if the government wins. That’s a near-Herculean

Some of Kamala Harris’s donors want her to oust Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan.

task for chronically understaffed enforcers whose funding is continuously put at risk in congressional appropriations.

By its very nature, this process requires more than four years to accomplish. Some antitrust experts believe this predicament necessitates some degree of bipartisan consensus, given how frequently the White House swings between party control in our current political era.

On this front, Trump has not exactly instilled confidence this election cycle. It’s hard to imagine that on the trail in 2016 he pledged to break up a giant telecom merger, calling it “too much concentration of power in the hands of too few.” Granted, the merger was between AT&T and Time Warner, the owner of CNN, a media organ hated by Trump. But it was a legitimate competition issue; his DOJ followed through on filing the merger challenge, but lost (only for AT&T to voluntarily sell off Time Warner in 2022).

During the current campaign, Trump has been more eager to court the Business Roundtable and Silicon Valley oligarchs. The latter have been core to his support and are influencing his agenda. His current platform says nothing about monopolies, but does promise light-touch regulation for crypto and essentially no government interference with the development of artificial intelligence. That’s a stark contrast with the current FTC and DOJ, which are probing the OpenAI-Microsoft partnership and AI chipmaker Nvidia.

Despite his more business-friendly posture, Trump did pick as his running mate J.D. Vance, a bête noire of the GOP’s old guard, who comes from the populist wing of the party. On several occasions, Vance has openly praised Lina Khan, one of the few Biden regulators he thinks is doing a “pretty good job.” Some antitrust proponents on the right believe that Vance will steer the policy direction of their administration.

“We’re certainly a minority in our party but the energy is on our side … we expect that to carry through to appointments,” said Jon Schweppe, policy director at the American Principles Project, who worked on the antitrust sections in Project 2025 as part of the broad coalition assembled by the Heritage Foundation.

The Project 2025 antitrust section is internally conflicting, but there’s consistency in one respect: calling for dismantling the CFPB, whose constitutionality has

The real risk is that Trump will use antitrust law as a blunt political tool to go after his enemies.

been under legal threat since its origination. Many of the Bureau’s current rules, yet to be finalized, would likely be gutted under Trump, based on his first administration’s CFPB.

But there is reasonable optimism for a modicum of continuity on antitrust, even if Trump wins. Khan and Kanter have been far more coherent and bold about their policy direction, but in key respects they inherited some of the previous administration’s work on corporate power, which began the initial break from neoliberal orthodoxy.

The Biden DOJ gets credit for winning the Google search case, but it was first filed by Trump’s DOJ Antitrust Division head Makan Delrahim. The Republican-chaired FTC under Trump also filed an antitrust case against Facebook, targeting its acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp. That case is being pursued by the current FTC.

Delrahim’s DOJ even brought some unexpected cases in labor markets, targeting no-poach agreements where competitive employers conspire not to hire each other’s employees. That was a rough precursor to the noncompete ban.

The next Trump administration would likely continue the cases against Big Tech, which conservatives view as harboring liberal bias. There could be overlap on some health care policies too. Republicans have started to rally behind cracking down on pharmacy benefit manager middlemen that drive up drug costs. Republican FTC commissioner Andrew Ferguson voted with the Democrats this July to issue a damning interim study of the industry. Pharma patent abuse is another area of convergence. “Institutional heft at the agency to take on bogus patent listings is pretty well solidified at this point,” said Spencer Waller, a law professor at Loyola University Chicago, who mostly recently served as senior adviser to the FTC

The real risk is that Trump will install loyalists at the antitrust agencies to use the

law as a blunt political tool to go after his enemies, and not pick particularly impactful legal cases. This was the legacy of Delrahim. Trump certainly won’t touch industries dominated by GOP donors, such as oil companies, or anything tech-related that harms his new Silicon Valley cronies.

Selective enforcement is also a concern for a future Harris administration. Her framing of taking on “bad actors” does not establish clear principles for what is and isn’t fair competition. Is Google, for example, a bad-actor monopolist? Harris doesn’t specify, despite a court ruling that the company violated the Sherman Act. It’s a far cry from the Biden executive order on competition, which diagnosed America’s monopoly problem as a widespread, systemic issue.

Politically, though, Harris is well positioned to continue the Biden administration’s legacy, albeit perhaps under some modified directives.

Her campaign’s rollout is especially focused on the consumer protection side. It makes sense to highlight those actions in an election year when inflation is still a major concern for voters. But it also hints at a quiet return to the consumer welfare standard, which could bleed into the policies that enforcers are pressured to target under her administration. “I see a lot more room for crackdowns on junk fees across numerous sectors. Both Biden and Harris have made that a priority,” said Waller. If Harris keeps Khan and Kanter—and there will be significant grassroots pressure to do so—their agencies will be able to finish the work they’ve already initiated and focus on clear-cut remedies to the monopolization cases. Existing litigation will take up much of their allocated budgets, but a handful of other cases could be pursued. There are active investigations into OpenAI, Nvidia, and the health care giant UnitedHealth.

There’s also hope within the anti-monopoly movement that agencies will fully resuscitate a dormant prong of antitrust law, the Robinson-Patman Act, which targets pricing discrimination.

These ambitious policy efforts require a lot of time and resources, as well as the luck of the draw in the courts. But the transformational power of this work is already playing a major role in this year’s election. It could reshape our country’s politics for decades to come, if the revolution under way can coalesce. n

How Walz Can Help Harris Woo Vet Voters

And just maybe save the VA

By Suzanne Gordon and Steve Early

Amid the rhetorical fog of their gamechanging presidential debate on June 27, Donald Trump and his then-opponent dealt with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) only in passing.

Trump claimed that, after he vacated the White House, “crazy Joe Biden” simply abandoned his policies of giving eligible

The results were “incredible,” and earned his administration “the highest approval rating in the history of the VA.”

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veterans the “choice” to remain inside the VA health care system or seek treatment outside it. According to Trump, VA patients were able to “get themselves fixed up” in private hospitals and medical practices, rather than waiting “three months to see a doctor.”

Amid his general befuddlement, Biden didn’t point out two things. One, outsourcing has been a disastrous experiment that has led to out-of-control spending on private care and left the VHA with a projected $12 billion budget shortfall for fiscal year 2025. And two, Biden didn’t abandon these policies at all: There has been more privatization of veterans’ care under his administration than Trump’s.

Biden instead pivoted to talk about the PACT Act of 2022, which enabled many more post-9/11 vets to file successful disability claims based on their past exposure to burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over the next decade, the PACT Act authorizes hundreds of billions of dollars in additional spending for

these claims; military veterans are “a hell of a lot better off” as a result, Biden said.

This brief, typically unilluminating exchange left unaddressed the rather dire position of the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), which operates the nation’s largest public health care system and provides highquality and specialized care for nine million former service members. As a “Red Team” review committee of experts warned VA Secretary Denis McDonough in a report leaked to the Prospect last spring, “the increasing number of Veterans referred to [outside] providers … threaten to materially erode the VA’s direct care system,” leading to mass closures of VA clinics or certain services and “eliminating choice for the millions of Veterans who prefer to use the VHA direct care system for all or part of their healthcare needs.”

The dramatic and energizing midsummer switch at the top of the Democratic tick-

Tim Walz (right) was the ranking Democrat on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee when he served in Congress.

et has made it possible to imagine a more substantive debate about the past, present, and future of VA care. Particularly since both parties are now fielding, as their vicepresidential candidates, military veterans who have personally used VA-dispensed benefits to attend college.

If Kamala Harris and Tim Walz win in November, there will be a major opening for “not going back” to what Harris has called the “failed policies” of Trump’s first term, which have been reworked by the Heritage Foundation in its infamous Project 2025. The tough part for Harris, if not Walz, will be acknowledging that this also means curbing, not continuing, the disastrous bipartisan experiment with VHA outsourcing embraced by the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations.

Walz to the Rescue

Any optimism about addressing what the Red Team called an “existential threat” is based on the personal bio—and, hopefully, postJanuary portfolio—of Harris’s running mate.

Before becoming governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz was an Army National Guard member for 24 years who used GI Bill benefits to attend a state college, and then become a public-school teacher and union member.

Walz ran for Congress in 2006 after Vietnam veteran John Kerry’s failed bid for the presidency two years earlier. After winning the first of six House races, he joined the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee (HVAC)—a low-status committee assignment spurned by many aspiring politicians.

Walz was well positioned to advocate for fellow veterans with service-related conditions because of the hearing damage he suffered due to repeated exposure to artillery blasts during National Guard training exercises. He also won applause for co-sponsoring a bill named after a Marine veteran who killed himself in 2011 after long struggles with PTSD and depression. The Clay Hunt Suicide Prevention for American Veterans Act, signed into law in 2015, kept the VA focused on the challenge of reducing suicide rates among former service members.

Walz eventually rose to become ranking Democrat on the Veterans’ Affairs Committee. In 2018, he joined just 69 other House Democrats in opposing the VA MISSION Act, one of Donald Trump’s proudest legislative achievements and the basis for his 2024 campaign pledge to make VA “patient choice” more widely available.

Denis McDonough plans to step down as VA secretary in 2025. He continued much of Trump’s privatization of veterans’ health care.

Walz warned, accurately, that MISSION Act outsourcing would force the VA to “cannibalize itself” by diverting billions of dollars from direct care delivery to reimbursement of private-sector providers. This incremental defunding of VHA hospitals and clinics now threatens to leave them in what Walz called a “can’t function situation.”

This is exactly what has transpired, with serious manpower shortages and red ink throughout the VHA . Walz was absolutely right, and he should take that good judgment into office if he wins.

In contrast, a campaign spokesman for Sen. J.D. Vance recently hailed the MISSION Act as bipartisan legislation that “expanded veterans’ access to quality care and cut needless red tape.” Walz’s opposition to it was “not the kind of leadership veterans need in Washington,” the spokesman said.

A VA Union Ally

Walz’s role as ranking Democrat on a then Republican-led HVAC is fondly recalled by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents VA employees in his home state. During his first run for Congress, Walz reached out to then-AFGE vice president Jane Nygaard, who discovered that “he’s not someone who just says something to make you happy, he actually takes action.”

According to Nygaard, “when we had issues with the St. Paul VA, which had bad management and low staffing, Congressman Walz listened to the union. He got the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service

involved and we ended up having a threeday retreat with upper management. Eventually, upper leadership retired and labor relations improved.”

The one bad mark on Walz’s union report card is his vote in favor of the VA Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act of 2017. This Trump-era effort to strip VA workers of their due process rights in disciplinary cases was challenged in court by AFGE. To his credit, VA Secretary Denis McDonough ended a five-year legal battle over implementation of the act by reaching a deal with the union last year. Thousands of unfairly fired workers became eligible for reinstatement or back pay, at a total cost estimated to be hundreds of millions of dollars, according to the Federal News Network.

Other workers or managers terminated for “grievous misconduct” were not covered by the settlement. On the campaign trail, Trump has promised to “fire every corrupt VA bureaucrat who Joe Biden outrageously refused to remove from the job.” He has also threatened to arrest any Harris-Walz supporters in the VA, which would include many of the nation’s veterans.

Fixing the VA in 2025

If the VA does become part of Walz’s vicepresidential portfolio—and his biography is prominently mentioned on the veteran policy section of Harris’s issues page—he could help engineer much-needed personnel and policy changes. That first requires finding suitable replacements for McDonough, now scheduled to leave in January, and his undersecretary for health, Dr. Shereef Elnahal.

If the VA becomes part of Walz’s vice-presidential portfolio, he could help engineer much-needed personnel and policy changes.

As chronicled in the Prospect since 2021, McDonough has spent his term in office placating privatization fans in Congress, downplaying the disastrous impact of outsourcing, and refusing to reverse Trumpera patient referral rules, despite having administrative authority to do so. Meanwhile, his deputy, Elnahal, did not provide strong or innovative leadership at the VHA , while making mistakes that gave Republicans an easy political target.

If they win, Harris-Walz transition planners need to recruit a better team at the top. During the Clinton administration, Marine veteran Jesse Brown, the first African American VA secretary, was tasked with undoing 12 years of Reagan-Bush damage to the agency. Brown hired and empowered fellow veteran and public-health expert Dr. Kenneth W. Kizer as undersecretary for health, to lead what the Harvard Business School called the largest and most successful “turnaround” in U.S. health care history. (Kizer came to the aid of the VHA again recently as chair of the Red Team, whose urgent recommendations to McDonough have been largely ignored since last spring.)

On the website’s policy section, Harris and Walz promise “end[ing] veteran homelessness, investing in mental health and suicide prevention efforts,” and “expanding economic opportunity for military and veteran families.”

Any new administration must also tackle mounting problems at the Veterans Benefits Administration. VBA critics say this part of the agency still suffers from serious understaffing and lack of training for those who assess veterans’ service-related conditions to determine their benefit eligibility. “Because claims raters aren’t given sufficient time to understand veterans’ complex disability claims,” one Gulf War veteran explains, “this results in mistakes, which in turn creates long delays and a tsunami of appeals.”

Platform Differences

To do anything different at the VA than Biden did, or Trump before him, Harris and Walz first have to win in November. They can help boost veteran voter turnout, particularly in battleground states, by zeroing in on the skimpiness of the GOP’s plan to “Take Care of Our Veterans”—all 48 words of it!

This lone paragraph, buried in the Republican platform adopted in Milwaukee, leads off with immigrant bashing. The party pledges to “end luxury housing and Taxpayer benefits” for border-crossers and “use those savings to shelter and treat homeless Veterans.” In addition, a second Trump administration will “expand Veterans’ Healthcare Choices, protect Whistleblowers, and hold accountable poorly performing employees not giving our Veterans the care they deserve.”

The equivalent Democratic Party platform statement is far more substantive. It covers veteran homelessness and suicide, PACT Act implementation, improving mental health programs, new services for female veterans, support for family members caring for VA patients, and cracking down on scams targeting veterans who file disability claims over their toxic exposures.

“Going forward,” the Democrats declare, “we will strengthen VA care by fully funding inpatient and outpatient care and long-term care, and by upgrading medical facility infrastructure.” The adverse impact of Biden administration outsourcing on funding for all of the above is not mentioned. The platform also reminds voters that, as president, Trump “pushed to cut funding for veterans’ benefits.”

Tying Trump to Project 2025

The best way to drive this last point home is by tying Trump to the VA-related recommendations of Project 2025. As Iraq War veteran and Pennsylvania Rep. Chris Deluzio points out, that Republican playbook “takes dead aim at veterans’ health and disability benefits.”

In August, Deluzio warned readers of Military.com that his Republican colleagues on the HVAC have often “sided with corporate interests to outsource care” for VA patients. And now their presidential transition planners at the business-backed Heritage Foundation want to refer even more vets to “costly private facilities, a fiscally reckless move that … has ballooned costs for the VA.”

According to Deluzio, the “ultimate

endgame of these plans—to dismantle the VA’s clinical care mission—should send shivers down the spines of America’s veterans and those who want them to have the best care.”

On the campaign trail, Republicans are, per usual, diverting attention from that “endgame” by positioning themselves as defenders of “patient choice.” At a mid-August event at a VFW hall in Western Pennsylvania, J.D. Vance referenced the very real health care access problems of “our veterans living in rural areas.” He assured his invitation-only crowd that if “those who put on a uniform and serve our country … need to see a doctor, we got to give them veteran’s choice to give them that ability to see a doctor.”

On Capitol Hill, conservative Republicans in the House and Senate have been laying down their own cover fire for Trump and Vance by pressuring McDonough to stay the course on “community care”—the preferred congressional euphemism for privatization—until their team takes over again in January.

In less coherent fashion, Trump made similar points during an August 26 speech to a Detroit convention of the National Guard Association. The former president accused the Biden-Harris administration of gutting his many “VA reforms” related to “choice” and “accountability,” and hailed VA outsourcing as a great system of “rapid service,” in which patients “go to an outside doctor … get themselves fixed up and we pay the bill.”

According to these MISSION Act defenders, “community care is more cost-effective than VA’s direct care system”—despite all evidence to the contrary. It also doesn’t provide care that is suited to the particular needs of veterans.

Between now and Election Day, it will take a lot more truth-telling and plainspokenness by people like Walz and Deluzio to counter the steady drumbeat of disinformation directed at veterans. And it will take the commitment to a new way forward to roll back the bipartisan damage of privatization. n

Suzanne Gordon is a senior policy analyst at the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute. Steve Early is a longtime journalist and health care reform advocate. They are co-authors, along with Jasper Craven, of Our Veterans: Winners, Losers, Friends, and Enemies on the New Terrain of Veterans Affairs (Duke University Press).

Preserving Public Lands

Deb Haaland has been a remarkable secretary of the interior. But the future is about funding in Congress.

By Erik Loomis

One of the most remarkable political actors of our generation, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, has reoriented the Department of the Interior into an agency geared to the needs and demands of Native Americans. Haaland, a Laguna Pueblo herself and the first Native American to serve in a Cabinet position, has become the most prominent Native person in arguably the most proNative administration in American history. She recently had a prime speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention.

But while Haaland might have a secure legacy as a pioneer, the ultimate success of her repairing of a troubled agency extends beyond what she could accomplish in four years. First, decades of underfunding by Congress has created massive employee dissatisfaction, with leadership lacking the resources to administer our public lands properly. Second, another Trump administration would likely overturn nearly everything Haaland has accomplished, thus

corruption resulted. Most notably, Albert Fall, secretary of the interior under Warren Harding, leased Wyoming’s Teapot Dome petroleum deposits to oil companies in a sweetheart deal, leading to one of the biggest bribery scandals in American history.

The DOI also took over management of the national parks after the creation of the National Park Service in 1916, giving it both an environmental and tourism mandate. Today, the DOI hosts a collection of important agencies, including the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

As the agency involved with both managing public lands wrested from the Tribes and then running the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the DOI has often operated as a colonial institution. Notoriously corrupt BIA agents often stole money and goods guaranteed through treaties, and led the charge to force Native children away from their parents and into boarding schools, such as the Carlisle Indian School, which in the words of its founder Richard Henry Pratt, would “kill the Indian and save the man.”

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requiring continued Democratic Party governance to solidify reorienting the agency to repudiate its genocidal past and create an equitable future.

Founded in 1849 during the James K. Polk administration to administer the nation’s vast public lands during and after the violent eviction of Native Americans who were living there, the Department of the Interior primarily existed initially to find ways to transfer those lands to private holders, whether through the Homestead Act of 1862 or giveaways to railroad companies. During the 20th century, Interior became the steward of valuable natural resources, and mass

These schools enforced this directive through cutting Native children’s hair, banning their religion, and beating them if they spoke their own languages, with sexual abuse and starvation endemic. Indian schools have large cemeteries of the graves of Native children, a symbol of the abuse and genocide of the American experiment. Through the 20th century, the DOI was at best indifferent to the needs of the Tribes, and as Native rights activism developed in the 1960s, the BIA was the target of many large protests from the American Indian Movement and other groups.

Given this history, even having someone like Deb Haaland as secretary of the interior is a remarkable moment. But Haaland reorienting Interior as an ally of the Tribes

is nothing less than a revolutionary turnaround in our history. On her first day, she told a group of Native journalists that she intended to consult with the Tribes on every issue that affected them, and she has lived up to the promise. She and President Biden worked with Tribes in the American West to create large new national monuments. She advised him on his pledge to restore the boundaries of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments, both of which Trump had reduced to a sliver of their original boundaries.

Biden pledged to preserve record amounts of land, and while he might not quite get there in one term, he and Haaland worked closely together to achieve this goal through co-stewardship agreements, perhaps the most important transformation of the agency’s relationship with the Tribes. The BLM alone manages 10 percent of the nation’s land, much of it in the arid American West, where dozens of Tribes consider these lands sacred. The Tribes have convinced the Biden administration to fulfill its conservation goals by co-managing these arid lands, now redefined as national monuments.

For example, Biden created a 506,000acre preserve at the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument in Nevada, ensuring traditional indigenous use of land that at least 14 Tribes consider critical to their history and culture. The Navajo and Havasupai in Arizona lobbied Biden to create a nearly one-millionacre preserve at the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni National Monument, a decision that has infuriated mining interests and the state’s Republicans.

There will likely be additional national monuments created in this manner before the end of Biden’s term, including Sáttítla in Northern California, where the Pit River and Modoc Tribes have urged action; and Kw’tsán, near the Mexican border, where the Fort Yuma Quechan Tribe has supported protections. For the first time, Tribes have an active advocate in a leading government role.

But Haaland has done much more than just protect land. During her time in office, the Biden administration restarted the Tribal Nations Summit, an annual gathering to bring Tribal concerns to the highest pinnacles of power, which Donald Trump predictably had ended. She created the Missing and Murdered Unit in the BIA to help with the enormous wave of crimes against Native Americans, many of which go unsolved. She has also demanded a reori-

enting of our public history in the National Park Service, telling stories of Native history and starting a theme study of Native history in the 1930s and 1950s, often the first step toward new National Historic Sites. She also has tasked the agency with taking responsibility for the tragic history of Indian schools, and making remembering that part of its mission.

As Adam Sowards, a leading historian of the nation’s public lands and professor emeritus of history at the University of Idaho, told me, “Interior has often been a place where Tribal issues have been neglected and where land exploitation has been facilitated. Haaland has ensured that’s not the case during her tenure. There is more work to do to solidify and extend gains … but the ways Secretary Haaland has reoriented the department have been unmistakable and impressive.”

But it is in the “more work to do” where the future of Haaland’s successes gets tricky. On non-Native issues, Interior remains rife with problems, stemming mainly from a lack of investment by Congress.

In 2020, environmental historians James Skillen and Leisl Carr Childers wrote that both political parties have abandoned Interior’s core mission. Republicans see Interior as little more than a repository of natural resources to mine, log, and fish, blaming “liberals” and “environmentalists” for the boom-and-bust cycle of natural resource economies. Since the Reagan administration’s support of the Sagebrush Rebellion, far-right extremists have made hay on these beliefs, including the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge by Cliven Bundy and his fellow anti-government activists in 2016. Meanwhile, Democrats see the public lands largely as a place for their urban supporters to play, supporting trail building, mountain biking, and wildlife protection, but doing a very poor job of making connections with the economically marginal people of the rural West.

Both positions have added to the general gridlock over the role of the federal government in leading a widely underfunded agency. In the more bipartisan postwar decades, the most powerful members of Congress

Deb Haaland has reoriented the Department of the Interior to the needs and demands of Native Americans.

from the American West made sure they controlled key committees on public lands. Whether Colorado’s Wayne Aspinall or Idaho’s Frank Church, powerful Western politicians created their legacy over public land management. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) presently chairs the U.S. Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies. He’s a good senator, but hardly a dominant force in the body. The House Natural Resources Committee, Aspinall’s power base, isn’t even led by a Westerner, but rather Arkansas’s Bruce Westerman, although Arizona’s excellent Raúl Grijalva would retake the chair if Democrats can win the House.

Regardless of who leads the committees, in today’s hyper-politicized environment, few of the nation’s most powerful members of Congress use their clout to push federal resources to DOI programs. As with the rest of the regulatory agencies, Republicans want to privatize or eliminate them, while Democrats often seek to overcome gridlock by turning services over to public-private “partnerships,” subcontracting, and outsourcing.

Morale in most of the DOI remains extremely low. In a recent governmentadministered survey, only 45 percent of employees at the National Park Service, long suffering with frustrating leadership and charges of mismanagement, believe that “senior leaders maintain high standards of honesty and integrity,” while a full 32 percent of employees answered no to a question about whether they “can disclose a suspected violation of any law, rule or regulation without fear of reprisal.” National parks face billions in maintenance deficits, and not even environmentally minded pres-

nent, and doing so protects these largely desert lands for traditional uses, while limiting or eliminating uranium mining, gas drilling, and other devastating extractive industry. What it also does is reduce administrative costs for the agency, and reinforce the idea that the federal government does not need to take the lead in regulating public goods.

Haaland’s administration of Interior has broken new ground and reset the agency’s relationship with the Tribes. But she cannot accomplish everything needed to make Interior the robust agency the American public deserves. We cannot overlook the

Navajo and Havasupai Tribes co-manage a nearly one-million-acre preserve in Arizona.

idents like Obama or Biden have prioritized the agency in federal budgets.

Attitudes at the Bureau of Land Management are generally better than at NPS, partly because of the work BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning has done to reform the agency under Haaland. But it will take decades to rebuild the funding, staffing, and work culture to make the DOI a functional agency again. For as superb as Haaland has been, she has not convinced Congress to fund Interior’s missions properly or create better leadership cultures at many DOIadministered agencies.

In fact, the Biden administration’s work with the Tribes in creating the new national monuments has some roots in the devolution impacting so much of government in the last half-century. Co-managing these resources with the Tribes has a strong moral compo -

Trump’s secretaries of the interior were disasters on Tribal issues and environmental protection.

desperate need for real investment from Congress and seriousness from political parties about public lands policy, while also continuing to build on Haaland’s legacy.

Democrats need to understand that smart politics can accomplish both of these policy goals at once. Interior must be a priority in funding; the generally popular national parks can be used as a tool to put pressure

on Republicans to fund the agency. Putting powerful Western Democrats in charge of key committees can move things forward in Congress. Committing to appointees who build on Haaland’s legacy on Native rights can do more than almost any tool we have to fight for Native justice at the federal level.

Almost everything Haaland has accomplished depends on Democrats winning in November. Trump’s secretaries of the interior, Ryan Zinke and then David Bernhardt, were disasters on Tribal issues and environmental protection. Project 2025 would roll back even more protections for public lands and the Tribes, including prioritizing petroleum production on the reservations. Trump’s disinterest in policy-based agencies such as Interior would mean his farthest-right advisers would get to select the new secretary.

A Harris administration needs to build on Haaland’s work. First, Haaland should be asked to remain on as interior secretary. The Biden administration has already seen record-low turnover in Cabinet positions, and the possibility of a hostile Senate means there’s a good chance that many Biden appointees will stay on for a Harris term. If Haaland does not, Harris should consult with the Tribes about her replacement. Perhaps National Park Service director Chuck Sams, a member of the Cayuse and Walla Walla Tribes, would be a good option.

Second, Harris needs to rebuild employee morale by listening to NPS and BLM workers about their concerns and acting internally to implement them. Third, Harris must prioritize proper funding of Interior’s missions. This requires working with a potentially hostile Congress, but that is true of every agency, and unfortunately Democratic presidents of the recent past have avoided potentially fruitful politicization of Republicans’ reticence to fund the national parks. The public lands are America’s playground. Create a successful politics around it.

As with much of modern governance, progress under Democratic governance may be limited, but Republican governance explicitly promises to repeal everything decent. For the Tribes, this is the difference between continued acknowledgment of them as partners in managing their lands and a return to the genocidal policies of the past. n

Erik Loomis is professor of history at the University of Rhode Island, specializing in the American West, labor, and environmental history.

Shared Zones of Interest

Harris and Trump’s foreign-policy aims in the Middle East proceed from the same incentive structures and presuppositions about U.S. supremacy.

By Sarah Leah Whitson

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, if elected, are sure to produce vastly different outcomes on nearly every domestic issue in contention: women’s reproductive rights, taxation, public education, corporate regulation, the environment, and immigration. There’s far less divergence, however, on foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East. Like the Biden administration before it, a Harris administration may be softer around the edges, a “Trump lite” if you will, with rhetoric and sentiments favoring human rights and international law but no policies to back them.

There are two principal reasons for this. First, Harris and Trump’s worldviews are grounded in an article of faith that has undergirded America’s post–World War II foreign policy: maintaining U.S. hegemony and supremacy. There is full agreement, as Kamala Harris recently declared at the Democratic convention and reiterated in her debate with former President Trump, that the U.S. must have the “most lethal” military in the world, and that we must maintain our military bases and personnel globally. While Trump may have a more openly mercenary approach, demanding that the beneficiaries of U.S. protection in Europe and Asia pay more for it, he is a unilateralist, not an isolationist. At bottom, neither candidate is revisiting the presuppositions of U.S. primacy.

administration’s “unconditional,” “ironclad” support for Israel in the face of its yearlong onslaught in Gaza. It has forced self-proclaimed Zionist Joe Biden to throw a few bones to progressive and Muslim American voters, with heightened rhetorical criticism of Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment, a brief delay in restocking Israel’s diminished supply of bombs, and even sanctions against “bad apple” Israeli settlers who have terrorized Palestinians in the West Bank. A strong majority of Democratic voters now oppose military aid to Israel and support Palestinian rights and freedom.

ing more on the military and selling more weapons abroad than any other country in the world. The sell-side defense industry has fully infiltrated the U.S. government, with campaign donations and a revolving escalator to keep Republicans and Democrats fully committed to promoting their interests. The buy-side foreign regimes have gotten in on the pay-to-play, ensuring handsome rewards to U.S. officials who ensure weapons sales continue. And all sides play the reverse leverage card: If the U.S. doesn’t sell weapons, China and Russia (or even the U.K. and France) will. There is no countervailing economic pressure, and little political pressure, to force either Harris or Trump to consider the domestic and global harms of this spending and selling.

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In the Middle East, the incentive structure is at its most powerful, combining the influence of the defense industry and the seemingly bottomless disposable wealth of the Gulf States. And there are two additional factors—the unparalleled influence and control of the pro-Israel lobby, which rewards government officials who comply with its demands and eliminates those who don’t; and Arab control over the oil and gas spigots that determines the prices Americans pay for fuel. As a result, continued flows of money, weapons, and petroleum will ensue, regardless of who wins in November. Within these confines, there are some marginal differences in how Trump and Harris will approach specific issues in the region, but it is doubtful they will be significant enough to be dramatically consequential.

Harris no doubt feels pressure to promise some recalibration of Biden’s policies, but she has largely confined this to expressions of sympathy for Palestinian “suffering.” She has reiterated the Biden team’s pleas for a cease-fire, but refused to support conditioning aid to Israel to achieve this. Her representatives at the Democratic convention went out of their way to make clear that there will be “no daylight” between her and Biden’s policies on Israel, and that like Biden, she will stick to “frank conversations” with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And like every administration before hers, she will feel the sway of her pro-Israel donors much more than her voters once elected, making it unlikely that her policies will shift away from Israel to any consequential degree. There’s no reason to believe she will walk back Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, or Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, as the Biden administration has failed to do.

Second, both Harris and Trump are subject to the overwhelming incentive structure that rewards administrations for spend-

Let’s start with Israel. Democrats have become increasingly divided over the Biden

The Biden administration prioritized securing more Abraham Accords, a series of normalization measures between Israel and surrounding Arab states, in lockstep with Trump administration efforts. Whether Harris will continue this remains to be seen. But neither she nor her chief national security adviser, Phil Gordon, has said anything to suggest moving away from this goal. The war in Gaza has crushed Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s dream of delivering Saudi normalization for Israel; but for Netanyahu’s savagery, his persistent rejection of a ceasefire, and his declarations that he will never agree to a two-state solution, this would already have been achieved. Both Netanyahu and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman may be saving such a deal as a bargaining chip with the next administration, but under these circumstances, the Saudi price will now be much higher.

The Biden team has already agreed to two outstanding demands: a bilateral U.S.-Saudi security agreement, and construction of a civilian nuclear plant, with enrichment to take place inside Saudi Arabia. But without tying them to Israeli normalization, it’s doubtful that the Senate will approve these terms. It’s conceivable that Trump will actually take a tougher line with Netanyahu than Harris, forcing him at least to accept a ceasefire, though not a “pathway” to Palestinian statehood, to secure Saudi normalization. But it’s just as conceivable that Trump pushes for a separate stand-alone deal with Saudi Arabia, as the Saudis have proposed.

The most important issue in Israel-Palestine where Harris and Trump will likely differ is on the move by Israel to formally annex most or even all of the West Bank. David Friedman, who served as ambassador to Israel in the prior Trump administration, has

openly endorsed Israeli apartheid and proposed annexation of the West Bank, minus political rights for Palestinians living there. Friedman has stated that he plans to closely consult with Trump on this “One Jewish State” solution. Trump delivered everything else on Friedman’s wish list—including Jerusalem, Golan, the Abraham Accords, and moving Israel under the U.S. Central Command—the last time he sat in the Oval Office. He has also made clear that he sees IsraelPalestine not as a struggle to end apartheid and occupation, or to establish Palestinian self-determination, but as a real estate dispute between Jews and Arabs. “Israel is a tiny little spot compared to these giant land masses … I actually said, ‘Is there any way of getting more? It’s so tiny,’” Trump has said. It stands to reason that he would ultimately support Israeli annexation of the West Bank, as well as Israeli demands that “other Arabs” take in the Palestinian population.

A Harris administration, in classic Democratic fashion, would wring its hands, wag its finger, and ramp up rhetorical condemnation of Israel were it to move on annexation. But it’s doubtful that it would stop arms transfers or support U.N. Security Council sanctions for such an unlawful and dangerous act. If the horrors in Gaza have not been enough to persuade candidate Harris to demand even a mere suspension of U.S. weapons transfers to Israel, it’s doubtful that annexation would persuade a President Harris to do so.

Sadly, international law prohibitions on acquiring territory by force are now greatly eroded, thanks in no small part to the United States. The Trump administration not only recognized smaller Israeli annexations of Palestinian territory but Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara. The U.S. has completely ignored the International Court of Justice ruling that Israel’s occupation is

The aftermath of a bombing in the West Bank in August. Former Trump advisers have proposed a “One Jewish State” solution.

It may not be up to either Trump or Harris to choose a course of action on Iran, if Israel’s efforts to escalate to war succeed.

illegal and that it must remove its forces and citizens from the occupied Palestinian territories, so it’s hard to see how even more “illegal acts” would tip the Harris administration into abiding by international law. Harris should have sufficient support to try to dissuade Israel from moving forward with annexation plans. Netanyahu may calculate that he can afford to be in the Harris doghouse for a few years until annexation becomes old news, and the forced displacement of Palestinians, alongside the accompanying humanitarian catastrophe, becomes the new news. It’s much easier politically to remedy humanitarian harms with aid than it is to fight and punish violations of a severely eroded law.

Harris and Trump will also have different strategies to deal with the International Criminal Court’s ongoing prosecution of war crimes in Gaza. The ICC has indicted both Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, but has delayed issuing arrest warrants against them. Like he did before, Trump will move again to sanction the court’s prosecutor, staff, and their families, and may escalate further by demanding that other countries sanction the court, and even push them to withdraw from the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the ICC. Harris, like Biden, is unlikely to take action against the court, but also like Biden, is likely to exert maximal pressure behind the scenes to stymie the prosecution. Trump would definitely, and Harris most likely, refuse to arrest Netanyahu should he arrive in the U.S. after an arrest warrant is issued, further diminishing the court’s standing as a global court for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Neither the Biden nor the Trump administration achieved any of their oft-stated goals to “withdraw” from the Middle East and “pivot” to Asia. But Trump may be the stronger candidate in his ability to avoid broader entanglement in a regional war,

given his willingness to act as the boss of the Middle East. He refused, for example, to come to Saudi Arabia’s defense after the massive 2019 attack on its oil facilities in Abqaiq and Khurais. A small group of Muslim American voters have said they will vote for Trump specifically because they believe that he alone can bring Netanyahu to heel and avoid a war with Iran.

While Biden notably ended the war in Afghanistan and has finally secured an agreement to remove U.S. forces from Iraq, he has entered into a new war footing in Yemen, attacking Houthi forces for blockading and raiding ships headed to or from Israel. Biden also massively expanded the deployment of American military forces to the region, and suffered numerous attacks on U.S. troops in Jordan, Syria, and Iraq, primarily on behalf of Israel. And of course the Biden team has put the finishing touches on the defense agreement for the Saudi regime, prepared to deliver for free what Trump would likely extract more concessions for.

Where both administrations will converge is on continued arms sales to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Egypt, and Israel. While the Biden administration initially promised to halt weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, it caved to the built-in incentive system. While Trump has made clear his enthusiasm for maximal weapons sales for maximal profit, the Harris team, like the Biden team before it, will speak more softly but deliver similar results. Such weapons sales and support for abusive regimes in the region are perceived as a cost worth paying in the shared worldview that prioritizes U.S. military domination of the Middle East.

What remains a toss-up is policy on Iran. Harris’s lead national security adviser, Phil Gordon, played a leading role in supporting the nuclear deal with Iran during the Obama administration, and has written extensively on the failures of regime change efforts in the Middle East. Harris supported the Iran deal, condemned Trump for canceling it, and would likely want to pursue it again. But extreme anti-Iran sentiment among both Republicans and pro-Israel Democrats would pressure her against moving forward, particularly if the conflict between Iran and Israel continues to flare up. For now, at least, candidate Harris is treating any less pugilistic policy on Iran as an opening for political attack; on September 5, she criticized Trump on X for

suggesting he would consider lifting sanctions on Iran. (His reasoning was that sanctions hurt the U.S. economy, encouraging de-dollarization.)

Assuming Trump remains guided by anti-Iran extremists, he will continue to oppose the nuclear deal, reinvigorate his “maximum pressure” policies, and likely support further surprise attacks on Iranian facilities and targets—like the extrajudicial execution of IRGC commander Qassem Soleimani and nine others—and even a lowlevel state of war. If Trump continues to free himself from extremists like John Bolton, however, he may well pursue an agreement with Iran, if only to prove he’s the president who can deliver the best deals.

But it may not be up to either Trump or Harris to choose a course of action on Iran, if Israel’s efforts to escalate to war succeed. If tensions in the region spiral, there will be no room for a new nuclear deal, and the only question will be whether or not the U.S. steps in to fully back Israel. For both candidates, that remains unclear.

In September 2020, on the eve of the presidential election, I wrote a similar piece evaluating what a Trump or Biden presidency would look like, writing that “Biden is expected to return to a more moderate, but fundamentally unchanged approach of prior administrations, which centres on close ties to Israel and arms sales that fuel the region’s arms race.” Four years later, with the very same values and incentives at play, a Harris term appears poised to follow the same course.

Foreign policy largely remains the province of an elite clique of decision-makers. None but the tiniest segment of the electorate prioritizes foreign-policy issues in their voting choices. But changing course from normalizing America’s very abnormal policies in the Middle East isn’t impossible. Legislative reforms can and should tackle the malign influence and infiltration of the defense industry and foreign states, just as open debate can reform outdated ideological commitments. Public opinion clearly desires a new approach; the only challenge that remains is forcing our own government to comply with the will of the people. n

Sarah Leah Whitson is the executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now. Previously, she served as executive director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa Division from 2004 to 2020.

GROOVE

HOW CONGRESS GETS ITS GROOVE BACK

The Supreme Court’s recent rulings will change how Congress writes laws. It may even force the legislative branch to take a hard look at its own dysfunctions.

By David Dayen

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS GASH

This is not just another fish story.

It begins with the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, a law dedicated to preventing overfishing within 200 miles of the U.S. coastline. Congress gave the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) control over approving plans for this purpose, including the requirement that all fishing boats host inspectors to collect data “necessary for conservation and management of the fishery.”

But Congress forgot something. While it specified in the law that foreign fishing ships and ships off the Pacific coast would cover the wages of the inspectors, it never designated who would pay for inspectors on Atlantic herring boats. The NMFS had to make a judgment call. And it decided the herring boats would pay.

Loper Bright Enterprises, Inc., ran some of these boats. And it didn’t want to pay. So the company sued, arguing that Congress didn’t specifically authorize the NMFS to charge the herring industry. After winding its way through the legal system, the case reached the Supreme

Court. And in June, the Court’s conservative majority used the complaint to obliterate the administrative state.

For 40 years, questions like this followed the precedent of Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. The doctrine of “Chevron deference” said that courts must give executive branch agencies wide latitude to interpret ambiguous statutes, as long as the decision was reasonable. But on behalf of herring companies like Loper Bright, Chief Justice John Roberts overturned Chevron deference, ruling that federal agencies no longer get the benefit of the doubt, and that judges are empowered to “exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority.”

This was a long-standing goal of conservatives and corporations. It interrupts the normal process of agency rulemaking and lets courts throw out regulations they don’t like. With the Supreme Court under right-wing control, that presages a deregulatory bonanza.

Hearing this story, you might consider it a struggle for

power between the judiciary and executive branches. Yet it’s really an attack on Congress.

The Constitution vests all legislative authority in the first branch of government, which explicitly authorized executive branch agencies to carry out their statutory wishes. If judges now get to decide what those statutes actually mean, Congress is cut off from the execution of the laws it passes.

Congress’s new mandate sounds deceptively simple: Just tighten up your legislative language. But Hill veterans know that won’t be easy. As Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, told me: “We’re going to have to try to be as specific as possible, but it’s impossible.”

Nadler has witnessed the full history of Congress’s descent into idiocracy. The institution lacks manpower and resources to make granular decisions in complicated policy areas, instead diverting those questions to the agencies. It lacks the common ground of a unified governmental branch to coherently fight the judiciary’s self-aggrandizement. And it lacks a time machine to know how new developments will affect laws in the future. If agency interpretations can no longer adapt to changes in technology and society without further congressional action, vast areas of policy could go unaddressed.

But most of these wounds are self-inflicted, and can be reversed. In speaking to over

20 lawmakers, current and former staffers, and experts in congressional procedure, I learned that Congress can legislate with clarity, purpose, and sufficient resolve to counteract judicial policymaking. It will require boosts in staff capacity, new processes to affirm legislative intent, stronger roles for lawmakers outside of leadership, and maybe even new agencies to assist Congress. And with almost no notice over the past few years, both parties have actually begun to work on this. Loper Bright could serve as a precipitating event to accelerate this modernization of Congress.

“When you look at the history of Congress, every 40, 50 years they change things fundamentally,” said Daniel Schuman, a

In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich cut legislative branch professional and support staff, uprooting the institutional knowledge of Congress.

Congress can legislate with clarity, purpose, and sufficient resolve to counteract judicial policymaking.

Staffers like Simon knew that textual ambiguity would comprise a de facto deferral of authority to administrative agencies, and they would add specificity if they didn’t want agencies to have that power.

Ambiguity in drafting legislation has always been a useful tool. Some statutes are imprecise by design. The Communications Act of 1934 could not have possibly anticipated the internet, in the same way that the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 did not anticipate crypto. Broad authority to manage communications networks or financial asset classes can accommodate what we learn as we go.

stock gains or company growth. Six agencies were tasked with managing the details; the rule has still not been promulgated 14 years later. “That’s where Congress can say, ‘We think a way to do that is, senior executives put their money into a pool and if there’s a problem, [agencies] take the bonus,’” Ramamurti said. “There’s a known problem with a solution you can impose.”

congressional reform expert with the American Governance Institute. “Loper Bright comes at a moment when the members on the House side are educated about how they’ve enfeebled themselves.”

In the end, the outcome will depend on whether Congress respects itself. Thousands of bills are written every session, and hundreds pass into law. Countless hours are spent in deliberation and debate. Will elected representatives and their staffers summon the courage to defend their work, and make sure what they do for a living actually matters? Or will all that effort go to waste, tossed into the judicial meat grinder and transformed beyond recognition?

Chevron , decided in 1984, kept in place a Reagan administration action that weakened the Clean Air Act’s mandates for reducing factory emissions. Chevron deference didn’t necessarily facilitate regulation or deregulation; it protected a process whereby Congress legislated and the agencies filled in details within certain parameters. When Republicans controlled the presidency and wanted to dismantle the New Deal regulatory state from within, conservatives cheered the Chevron ruling. As Democratic presidents sought to repair the damage from the Reagan Revolution, conservatives suddenly reviled agency interpretation, and appealed to right-wing jurists to nullify it.

With Chevron deference in place, Congress recognized that it didn’t have to solve for every policy nuance. A 2018 empirical study found that Chevron was the most familiar judicial opinion to those who drafted legislative text. “At some point you stop asking why you write things a certain way. It becomes part of the muscle memory,” said Sam Simon, a former lead Democratic staffer on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“[With] CFPB [the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau], we said, ‘There are a million known scams, and we want you to monitor the marketplace and figure out what’s deceptive,’” said Bharat Ramamurti, former senior counsel to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and former deputy director of the National Economic Council. “Congress in 2024 won’t know that in 2090 there’s some new AI scam that needs a rule.”

Other times, vagueness is strategic: a way to maintain a fragile political coalition by focusing on goals over details. If you can’t get the votes by being specific, you might be able to get them by identifying a principle and letting the agency handle the rest. “We wrote the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act knowing that there were terms and provisions that were going to be interpreted by ATF and DOJ,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), referring to the first major gun safety legislation in 30 years. “And so we didn’t have to cross those bridges in a difficult negotiation. It will make negotiations much harder because you will have to decide every single little granular question.”

There’s a third category, resulting from both the frenzied nature of the modern Congress, and the foreknowledge that agencies, before Loper Bright , could clean up mistakes. “Punting to the agency” was a phrase several people used. It could happen because technical knowledge of obscure issues isn’t available in Congress, because lawmakers dealing with giant omnibus bills run out of time to adjudicate everything, or simply because it’s easier.

The Dodd-Frank Act, a catchall law with hundreds of provisions, punted to the agency on numerous occasions. For example, DoddFrank placed a limitation on incentive-based compensation agreements, so senior executives wouldn’t take on undue risk by chasing

That sounds simple, but questions abound: Which senior executives would have their bonuses held in escrow? For how long? Sometimes lawmakers can’t reach consensus on an answer. “I’m thinking about when it’s 3 a.m., and we don’t agree on how we want this provision to work but we trust the agency,” said Simon. “On many issues, people read a vague statute and say, ‘Did Congress not think about this problem?’ No, we thought about it for weeks!”

Loper Bright says that agencies can no longer resolve those statutory ambiguities themselves, and that courts have “special competence” to do so. But Congress has the greatest ability to determine its own meaning. It’s just that the institution has inflicted so much self-harm that such a possibility seems remote.

Forcing lawmakers to wrest back control of the legislative process sounds empowering. But if Congress is to meet the judiciary’s demands, it will first have to reverse its epic slide in capacity, ushered in largely by Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolution in 1994.

When Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives that year, crippling government was an end goal, so thinning out the personnel in Congress who see government as worth preserving became an imperative. Gingrich immediately cut professional staff, who work for committees rather than individual members, as well as legislative support staff at agencies like the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the Congressional Research Service (CRS), which audit and analyze policy questions. The Office of Technology Assessment, established to provide technical advice to Congress, was completely dismantled.

Today, the legislative branch retains about 0.4 percent of total discretionary spending, and nearly one-quarter of that goes to the Capitol Police and the Architect of the Capitol (which handles building renovations). Those two divisions increased their budgets 279 and 131 percent, respectively,

between 1995 and 2019, eating up most of the increase in funding over that period. The rest of the legislative branch, especially the segments that write the laws and provide the institutional knowledge base, has been ravaged.

Only 6.3 percent of legislative branch spending is devoted to House and Senate committees, where subject matter expertise is supposed to accumulate. Since 1984, the year Chevron deference was instituted, House committee staff is down 41 percent (adjusted for inflation), according to the American Governance Institute. Overall, congressional staff head counts peaked in the late 1970s. Gridlock, low pay, understaffing, and the lure of selling out to lobby for corporate America has led to record-high turnover, extinguishing even the brightest minds in government.

Members and staff have few options inside the institution to supplant their knowledge. Over 2,000 researchers and analysts left legislative support agencies like GAO and CRS between 1993 and 2011; staff levels are more than 25 percent below where they were 40 years ago. So when Congress needs to understand something, it inevitably turns to lobbyists, PR firms, trade organizations, or partisan think tanks. Oftentimes, that’s who writes the legislation.

Simultaneously, Gingrich centralized power in the Speaker’s office, something Democrats never really rolled back. Staffing for House leadership has nearly tripled since 1977, and more resources are devoted to politics and communications than legislation. In addition, many bills are dictated by leadership, rather than through the painstaking work of building a legislative record. Before Gingrich, committees had real power. A bill would only be produced for the floor after committee hearings, markups, and votes, memorialized in a committee report. Something drawn up by leadership doesn’t carry the same weight, and is typically more reliant on agency implementation.

Gingrich’s power grab contributed mightily to this, but so have the narrow margins in Congress in recent years, and the deepening partisan strife. Without a working majority to govern, last-minute dealmaking has become the norm, with bills written on the fly to meet tight deadlines. “If the Court is looking for language, the committee record becomes massively important. Getting everyone together in the Speaker’s room doesn’t build a record,” said Marci

Harris, a former legislative staffer and the co-founder of POPVOX , one of a handful of organizations focused on improving congressional effectiveness.

In short, Congress’s brain has been removed and shrunken, at a time when policy complexity and federal regulatory activity has soared. It’s no wonder that executive branch agencies have become a crutch. “The executive branch has 120 times more funding than the legislative branch,” said Maya Kornberg, a congressional scholar at the Brennan Center.

Chevron allowed a bewildered Congress to outsource their understanding of difficult issues to regulatory agencies. What Chevron deference really deferred was Congress’s investment in itself. The Supreme Court has slammed the door shut on that dynamic.

Responding to the Court will require a new way of thinking on Capitol Hill. One point of view is that Congress will simply have to legislate more. “No one’s going to strike down a transportation regulation when they pass a transportation bill every five years, because they have to reauthorize all the trust funds,” said Soren Dayton, another former Hill staffer and director of governance at the centrist Niskanen Center. “The call to Congress is, ‘Get off your ass and start passing laws.’”

It’s true that, if Congress actually reauthorized statutes, took care of annual appropriations, and moved legislation on a consistent basis, it could adapt better to emerging developments. Instead of the Environmental Protection Agency straining to reinterpret the Clean Air Act for the threat of climate change, Congress could actually affirm its intent to reduce fossil fuel emissions. (Democrats quietly did this in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, amending the Clean Air Act to define carbon dioxide as an “air pollutant.”)

But a determination to regularly update statutes presumes that you could get a deeply divided Congress to pass those laws, or that members would want to take the tough votes necessary to do so.

Harris rejects the premise that Congress has to be more specific in writing legislation; it may just have to be clear while following the rules of statutory construction. “Instead of making a list of all the things that [legislation] should apply to, what if Congress describes what it’s trying to address,” she told me. “That’s a drafting

Legislative drafters could explicitly add a mini-Chevron into all bills, directly delegating certain decisions.

skill that is not currently emphasized but exists in the world.”

At a briefing for staffers in July, Harris explained the concept. Let’s say Congress enacts a new financial regulation. Being specific would mean listing the types of institutions subject to the new rules: banks, credit unions, credit card companies. Being clear would mean issuing instructions that all institutions that “accept deposits, provide loans, issue credit or facilitate electronic payments” are eligible. That incorporates future innovations.

Loper Bright still enables Congress to “confer discretionary authority on agencies,” as long as it’s explicit. Legislative drafters could explicitly add a mini- Chevron as a template into all bills, directly delegating certain decisions. One expert I talked to offered the example of the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act. Instead of designating stamp prices in the legislation, Congress handed that power to the Postal Regulatory Commission, identifying specific objectives for setting postal rates and what criteria to consider. That intentional delegation has held up.

In the main, legislative drafters need to write bills with more in mind than getting a majority of lawmakers to agree. The new constituency is the courts. Congress must expect scrutiny of every word of text, and account for the hierarchical processes courts use to divine statutory intent.

That means using regular order to establish a committee record of legislative intent. It also means engaging with the regulatory process after a bill is signed, to reinforce that further. Giving substantive guidance to agencies in private, managing appropriations to ensure the rule is staffed and funded, and filing official public comments during the notice and comment period

must be a greater part of the job, Harris explained. Though some might expect this to be routine, it varies wildly within Congress; many see their job as finished when a bill gets a vote. “There’s no feedback loop for how policy is implemented,” said Harris. “Those relationships, except for happy hours and text chains for people who used to work together, don’t exist in our system.”

All of this would require members of Congress and their staffs to have more training about administrative law, more expertise at their fingertips, and more time to engage in oversight. “It’s first and foremost a money problem and it’s not very much money,” said Schuman, of the American Governance Institute. By his estimates, congressional committee staff could be doubled and legislative support agencies enhanced through an additional 0.03 percent of the annual discretionary budget, barely even a ripple in federal spending.

One question is where this expertise would actually sit in Congress’s organiza-

Despite increasing policy complexity, the executive branch has 120 times more funding than the legislative branch.

tional chart. You could bolster the Office of Legislative Counsel, the group of attorneys who do the work of drafting legislation. You could hire more legal staff who understand how statutory construction is viewed by the courts; GAO has studied the potential for a new Office of Legal Counsel, which could serve some of this function. You could bulk up committees, so more subject matter knowledge is available inside the Capitol. Michael Thorning of the Bipartisan Policy Center points out that the intelligence committees in Congress designate staffers to members, bulking up both committee expertise and personal staff, while providing an outlet for expertise in committees that isn’t tied to whims of the chair.

Alternatively, Kevin Kosar, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has co-authored a proposal for a Congressional Regulation Office, similar to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which reports on the fiscal implications of legislation. Kosar told me that Congress has the

ability to follow the money, through requesting GAO audits. It can identify corruption at agencies through inspector general reports.

“But Congress never built something for regulation,” he said. “People whose job it is to follow this important aspect of implementing the law.”

A Congressional Regulation Office could bring together statisticians to analyze the impact of regulations before the fact, and legal minds to review agency interpretations after. Much like CBO, it could offer advisory assessments on proposed rules to advise Congress, which would ultimately decide on whether to act. The Regulation Office could also produce lookback reports on how regulatory regimes are working.

An archconservative proposal called the REINS Act would force affirmative approval of major agency rules; nonpartisan analysis could help ground those votes in reality rather than an anti-regulatory mindset.

Despite its conservative roots, liberal reformers have endorsed the Regulation

Office concept, albeit with some reservations. “You have to be careful on how to set it up,” said Schuman, mindful of the Congressional Budget Office’s inherent biases. “CBO is like, it’s always too expensive. This can’t be always saying regulations are a burden. There have to be other measures, like saving lives.” Schuman prefers a both/and approach: He would establish an office to advise on regulation that details some of its expert staff to committees, which can carry out oversight functions. Such an agency would be relatively cheap to establish: CBO was budgeted $70 million in the most recent fiscal year, a flyspeck in the annual budget.

Regardless of where the capacity increases go, staffers say the status quo is unacceptable. Said Lorelei Kelly, a former staffer who has worked on improving Congress for two decades: “We have to look at how stark our situation is. I think Congress is at its eleventh hour.”

Many rulings during Chief

All of these options to solve the Loper Bright riddle only work if the courts serve as a good-faith actor in the process. Too often it seems like, when it comes to the judiciary, the other two branches are chasing a moving target.

Before overturning Chevron in practice, the courts had overturned it in theory by inventing new methods to strike down agency interpretations. The so-called “major questions doctrine” applied new standards of specificity to rules of “vast economic and political significance,” as determined arbitrarily by judges. Essentially plucked out of thin air by conservatives, the Roberts Court has used the major questions doctrine in recent years to strike down COVID vaccine mandates, greenhouse gas emissions standards, and student debt forgiveness.

There’s nothing stopping courts from conjuring up new doctrines to counter whatever Congress does to satisfy their alleged concerns in Loper Bright . “This Court is extremely hostile toward administrative governance,” said Josh Chafetz, a law professor at Georgetown University. “If

Congress writes specifically, they could say that’s a major question so you didn’t do it specifically enough. If Congress wrote deference into the statute, they could say that rests on constitutional principles.”

Any successful legislation has hundreds of supportive lawmakers, with different reasons for voting yes. A motivated judge can always find stray committee reports or floor speeches to reinforce their version of legislative intent, and toss out rules based on that. Or they can randomly decide that federal agencies got the intent wrong, based on thin justifications. “Having been a clerk as a 25-year-old in the D.C. circuit court reading a FERC administrative record,” said Ramamurti, “when we talk about unelected bureaucrats setting federal policy we should be worried about those people. Me.”

Sabeel Rahman, who worked in the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under President Biden, believes that while agencies might take congressional engagement like public comments seriously, the judiciary probably won’t. “Courts won’t treat a letter from a member as anything special compared to the legislation authorized by Congress,” he said. “There’s no substitute for

when Congress speaks with its full voice by putting something into statute.”

Even when the Court appears to restrain itself, it can find ways to wriggle out. For example, Chief Justice John Roberts said explicitly in the Loper Bright ruling that previous cases which relied on Chevron would not be overturned, and regulations allowed under the old framework remained good law. But a separate ruling from the Court this year, Corner Post v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System , allows any entity newly injured by an agency rule to challenge it, even if the six-year statute of limitations has run out. This makes every agency rule in American history subject to judicial review, meaning they all could be reassessed under Loper Bright, even if they were once affirmed under Chevron .

In the face of an aggressive judiciary, Congress can get similarly aggressive. Given our separation of powers, any action from courts to overturn the intent of Congress can be met with a reaction. “Congress can tell the courts how to act and what to do,” said Devon Ombres, a former congressional staffer now at the Center for American Progress.

The easiest way to restore Chevron deference is to simply codify it. Sen. Elizabeth

Justice John Roberts’s tenure on the Court show a hostility toward administrative governance.

If judges persist in finding ways to nullify rules, Congress can pull out the nuclear weapon: jurisdiction stripping.

overturn court decisions that invalidate agency rules. The process would be similar to the Congressional Review Act of 1996 (CRA), which allows Congress to disapprove of finalized agency rules within 60 legislative days. CRA resolutions get privileged access to the floor without amendment or the need for a filibuster. Wyden’s bill would create the same fast-track timeline to overturn a court on a regulatory matter, giving Congress the final word on interpreting statutes.

“judge shopping” in right-wing courts in Texas when they want a rule overturned.) A more extreme version would terminate court challenges at the appellate level, cutting out the Supreme Court.

Warren (D-MA) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) have introduced versions of that bill, known as the Stop Corporate Capture Act. The bill defends the principle of Congress drafting legislation broadly to account for unforeseen changes, and directs that “if a statute that an agency administers is silent or ambiguous … a reviewing court shall defer to the agency’s reasonable or permissible interpretation of that statute.” This would eliminate the need to place a miniChevron into every bill. Rep. Nadler has separate legislation that would reverse the Corner Post ruling.

In a 2020 Prospect story, Rachel Cohen and Marcia Brown identified dozens of statutory rulings where Congress could simply reaffirm its stated intent and restore a regulation that courts have thrown out. For example, a district court in Texas decided in August that the Federal Trade Commission cannot make substantive rules blocking unfair methods of competition, and therefore cannot ban noncompete agreements. The language in that instance was rather clear (it literally says the FTC can “make rules and regulations”), but Congress could simply restate that clarity, and prevent judicial intervention.

There are two barriers to this. First, legislation is a multiyear process with fragile coalitions, and regulations take years to promulgate. By the time a court rules, the votes may not be in place to counteract them. But the more immediate barrier is that the abuse of the filibuster, and congressional leadership’s control over the legislative calendar, makes it difficult to get statutory overrides onto the floor for a vote.

One lawmaker has proposed a workaround for the second problem. In August, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) introduced the Restoring Congressional Authority Act, which would set up a fast-track process to

“This is ultimately a question of political will,” Wyden explained. “Congress has got to dig in and stand up on a key constitutional principle.” He added that without flexibility for agency interpretation, Congress would always fail in its policy responsibilities. “I don’t think Ben Franklin was sitting around thinking about the internet,” Wyden said. “Legislation was always meant to be something breathable. You do your best to spell out where you want it to go.”

If judges persist in finding ways to nullify rules, Congress can pull out the nuclear weapon. Lawmakers can use “jurisdiction stripping” to confine judicial review to particular courts, or restrict what elements of a law courts can review. Although this would seem to be the most extreme alternative, there are actually recent examples of Congress defending its prerogatives this way.

In the bipartisan infrastructure law of 2021, Congress gave the D.C. district courts “exclusive jurisdiction” for challenges to broadband deployment decisions made by the Commerce Department, and even added that “the court shall affirm the decision” of the agency unless it finds corruption, fraud, or other misconduct. The Inflation Reduction Act barred judicial review of the process by which Medicare can select prescription drugs for price negotiation and the determination of that fair price, or the calculation of rebates for high-cost drugs that raise prices above the rate of inflation.

Liberals have talked about broader court reforms, like packing the Supreme Court with more judges, introducing term limits, establishing an enforceable code of ethics, or requiring supermajority or unanimous votes for some rulings. But jurisdiction stripping has the benefit of being operational, often bipartisan, and constitutionally sound. Lawmakers and experts I spoke with expect it to be used, perhaps by limiting all rulemaking challenges to the D.C. Circuit, where most rules originate. (This would remedy the problem of corporate interests

“Trying to strip all judicial review is the kind of thing that will get the judges’ hackles up,” said Chafetz. “But the Constitution is incredibly clear that Congress can do it. If Democrats have a trifecta in 2025 and are doing something with regulatory ambition, that’s exactly what I would do.”

Developing a consistent response to Loper Bright demands sufficient brainpower in the Capitol and a reinvigoration of the regular order that once produced a legislative record. You will be surprised to know that Congress has actually been working on these problems for half a decade.

In 2019, when Democrats regained the House, they created the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress, a rare example of government introspection. Over four years, the committee produced over 200 bipartisan recommendations for improving Congress as a workplace, as a writer of laws, and as a representative body for all Americans. Many of them were adopted, and Republicans kept the project alive when they took over in 2023, folding it into the House Committee on Administration. Several of the new processes are things you probably thought Congress already did, like allowing members to file and cosponsor legislation electronically, or making sure district offices have Wi-Fi. But the House also developed a Digital Service to support its technology needs, and created an eDiscovery platform to better process information. “One of the biggest wins, when generative AI came on the scene, within four months, a detailee from GAO was working on AI policy for the House,” said Harris, one of a small group of process obsessives pushing modernization. “That kind of responsiveness is unheard of.”

In perhaps the biggest change, the House delinked staff pay from member pay, which hasn’t risen since 2009. Now staff can be paid more than members, which could help with capacity-building, since Congress will be competing with industry for administrative law expertise. “If you want to keep them from going to K Street, you have to pay them more,” said Kosar. In addition, formulas were changed to increase funding for member offices, and House staffers obtained

expanded tuition assistance and reimbursement for certification programs. Bipartisan common office spaces and staff retreats have been instituted to rebuild working relationships. Congressional staff retention actually improved slightly last year.

Dedicated workweeks for committees were instituted, edging away from the hollowing out of committee work. And Congress sort of reanimated the Office of Technology Assessment, through a new division of GAO called Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics (STAA), which provides factual data and forecasting. It’s a bit slow and needs more funding, but it’s a beachhead for technical knowledge.

There was no multibillion-dollar lobbying swarm to get Congress to think about improving its functioning. It’s been led by a few think tanks and focused organizations like POPVOX , the Foundation for American Innovation, and the American Governance Institute. Most of the leaders of the movement are former staffers. That it’s been modestly successful speaks to renewed urgency surrounding the degradation of the legislative branch.

“I think the hopeful story is we’re at the end of the pendulum swing of centralization of Congress and dysfunction of Congress,” said Dayton, who worked for the late Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). “There is a world where Congress says OK, we need to clean this up.” But the Loper Bright threat means this bespoke, artisanal modernization project must scale up to far larger ambitions. And that’s where things get dicey.

In July, the House Committee on Administration met to consider the post- Chevron world, and advocates expecting so little from Congress considered even that to be a victory. But while lawmakers in both parties offered homilies to Congress as the most powerful branch of government and highlighted the need to strengthen it, the old partisanship couldn’t help but reveal itself. Republicans saw Chevron as restoring Congress’s power to rein in the administrative state; Democrats derided a power grab from unelected judges.

While lawmakers and the witnesses generally agreed that Congress required more expertise and adequate appropriations, Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY) pointed out that House Republicans had failed to pass a $7 billion legislative appropriations bill just a week earlier. “I feel like I’m watching Love It or List It,” Morelle said, referring to the reality

home makeover show. “The one that wants to move, they list all these things that would cost $1 million with a budget of $100,000.”

Committee chair Rep. Bryan Steil (R-WI) asked the witnesses, which included Kosar and Chafetz, if Congress could review all rules coming out of agencies today. Every witness said no, and that Congress needed to build capacity. Later in the hearing, Steil wondered whether current staff could be pulled into regulatory oversight. Kosar replied, “I wish I could point to some legislative branch support agency personnel and say they’re not doing enough and should be brought into this other thing … But I just can’t.” Steil responded that there are 2.2 million nonmilitary federal employees, and surely some of them could be reallocated. (Only about 31,000 of those employees work for the legislative branch.)

Schuman put his best face on the hearing. “While the premises were different for Democrats and Republicans,” he said, “there was general agreement on the result: a massive increase of Congress.” He noted that the last appropriations law did increase funding for the legislative branch, during a time of relative cutting. But the unavoidable reality is that one party in Congress wants government to do less, and sees Loper Bright as helpful to that desire.

Despite this, some Republicans at the hearing acknowledged the need to write clearer laws and even participate in formal comment periods. If you squinted, you could see the stirrings of a unified resolve to fix Congress. Satya Thallam, a nonresident senior fellow with the Foundation for American Innovation, summed things up well. “If one branch does not energetically exploit its prerogative to make policy decisions, those policy decisions will be made elsewhere by the other branches,” he said. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition, but apathy does not beget apathy.”

After Watergate and Nixon’s threats to impound congressional spending for partisan purposes, Congress overhauled its budgeting rules. After 9/11 and the anthrax scandal, it finally let constituents email comments rather than sending letters. Reforms have almost always come in response to crisis.

Whether Loper Bright is seen as a crisis remains to be seen. Fears of what the ruling could mean for policy areas like banking, student debt relief, artificial intelligence,

Congress needs to think of itself as an institution deserving of its place in the governmental pecking order.

workplace safety, disability policy, or climate change loom mostly in the future. So far, several administrative actions have been reversed due to the Supreme Court’s ruling, and others have been upheld despite it. There’s another Court precedent called Skidmore that gives a different kind of deference to administrative agencies, as long as their work is thorough and consistent. If chaos is necessary for Congress to pay attention, we’re not quite there yet.

But any reasonable observer knows Congress is in crisis. The House couldn’t keep its Speaker for more than ten months this session. The Senate confirms presidential nominees and little else. In 2023, only 27 bills were signed into law, the lowest output since the Depression. The Loper Bright threat combines with a ruinous process where nothing gets done.

Increases in capacity, new strategies for drafting, and forceful responses to the judiciary are the building blocks of a postChevron world. But Congress doesn’t only need to overhaul how it makes laws, but also the structures of contemporary lawmaking that have hollowed out the legislative branch. Lawmakers need to be able to govern again, within committees where expertise can be gained. Power needs to be shared rather than zealously guarded by leadership. Muscles that have atrophied must be rebuilt. Only then will the actions of courts and executive agencies be seen as attacks on Congress’s role as the nation’s primary policymaker.

In other words, Congress needs to shift its mindset, and think of itself as an institution deserving of its place in the governmental pecking order. “This is an attack on us to govern ourselves in a democracy,” said Sabeel Rahman. “New creativity and energy can be unlocked by this moment … it’s opening people’s eyes that they need to act.” n

AN Epic DYSTOPIA

II periodically see three wonderful doctors, my internist and two specialists. They all know that I’m a journalist who once wrote for The New England Journal of Medicine . Every time I see them, even before they examine me, each one spends several minutes railing about something called Epic. That sort of thing tends to pique a journalist’s curiosity.

Epic, known formally as Epic Systems, turns out to be a privately held company that provides the electronic database for patient records and billing used today in 39 percent of all U.S. hospitals. But that understates Epic’s market dominance. The company has become the medical record database vendor for the vast majority of academic medical centers and other large hospital systems. Epic’s software keeps track of about 260 million individual patient records, just under 80 percent of the entire U.S. population. Its revenue was $4.9 billion in 2023, according to a company spokesperson.

Epic has only one large competitor, Cerner, which has had several stumbles in recent years. In 2022, Cerner was purchased by Oracle Corporation, but it keeps losing hospital clients to Epic. In the past year, Cerner lost at least nine hospital systems to Epic. In principle, electronic health records,

How a near-monopoly gained control of most of the nation’s electronic medical records, to the detriment of medical practice and doctor morale

BY ROBERT KUTTNER

ILLUSTRATION BY RICHARD BORGE

or EHR s, should be a blessing for patients and clinicians alike. EHR s track every patient’s medical history, warn against drug interactions, offer prompts when one condition might signal the risk of another, handle scheduling, facilitate communication among different doctors engaged with a patient, flag epidemiological patterns, and a great deal more. Epic boasts that in 2023 its system prevented 66 million potential adverse drug interactions and 250,000 potential surgical errors.

But in practice, clinical needs are often sacrificed to profit maximization. The demands by Epic’s system on physician time have increasingly taken over the practice of medicine. Astonishingly, studies show that entering required data into the

Epic system consumes about two hours of doctor time for every one hour spent providing hands-on patient care. The result has been an epidemic of doctor burnout and early retirements.

To its critics, Epic epitomizes everything perverse about the commercialized mess that American medicine has become. “Epic’s clients are not doctors. They are the CEOs and CFO s who write the checks to Epic,” says Dr. Bill Stead, who created pioneering electronic health record systems at Duke and then at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, both eventually supplanted by Epic. Epic became the dominant vendor of databases because it was better than anyone else at combining regulatory compliance with maximizing hospital income.

The Epic campus in Verona, Wisconsin, evokes elements of a fantasy theme park.

Epic enables the hospital to maximize the use of codes that determine the payment.

“Before Epic, nobody was able to systematize upcoding,” says an executive of one hospital system.

There are about 10,000 possible billing codes that indicate conditions and complications. These Hierarchical Condition Category (HCC) codes allow increased payments based on risk. For instance, diabetes with no complications, HCC code 19, pays a capitation rate of $894.40, while diabetes combined with kidney failure can use 2 HCC codes, 18 and 136, which increases the capitation rate to $1,273.60. Doctors have the ability to also use codes for past patient conditions that have nothing to do with current presenting symptoms.

Assigning codes to each patient health malady is more of an art or artifice than a science, where doctors’ judgment calls can bleed into Medicare fraud. Payments are based partly on time spent with a patient, on a scale from 1 to 5. One doctor told me that her supervisor, who gets reports from Epic

on her billing practices, regularly contacts her and says things like “That appointment was a 2. Don’t you think it might be a 3?” Epic’s software can thus enable doctors and hospitals to overcharge patients, insurers, and government agencies such as Medicare and Medicaid. Before a doctor can complete the record of a patient visit, they must respond to every question and check every required box. Hospitals have financial incentives to make patients look sicker so that they can maximize revenue, and Epic’s software facilitates this.

Dr. David Bor, a senior pulmonologist who practices at the Cambridge (MA) Health Alliance and is a professor at Harvard Medical School, told me, “For billing and insurance purposes, the system requires a huge amount of material that we have to add into the note that is clinically irrelevant. It’s a giant time sink.” The irony is that the quality of care, one of the biggest original selling points of commercial database systems like Epic, is debased rather than enhanced. This detracts from patient

care, while it serves as a money machine for hospitals that today are mostly for-profit, in fact if not in law.

An Epic spokesperson challenges this picture. “We take the integrity of health care billing and coding really seriously,” he told me. “We have the tools to help hospitals code accurately, so that they can be fairly reimbursed, based on what the doctor or the nurse has documented in the chart. As a company, we are committed to supporting our healthcare providers in delivering care effectively and ethically without any incentive or support for practices like upcoding.” In other words, if a hospital decides to use Epic’s software to engage in upcoding, Epic’s hands are clean.

EEpic was founded by Judith Faulkner, who began the company in 1979 under the name Human Services Computing. She and her family own about 47 percent of all Epic stock, and at 81 she is still the company’s CEO. In 2021, Forbes estimated her net worth at $6 billion, and it is probably double

Epic’s

software can enable doctors and hospitals to overcharge patients, insurers, and Medicare and Medicaid.

that today. Faulkner has a master’s degree in computer science and no clinical degree, though early in her career she apprenticed to one of the most widely admired designers of a hospital-based electronic records system, Dr. Warner Slack, who created the system for Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital based on regular input from doctors and nurses. But even Brigham and Women’s well-loved system was eventually supplanted by Epic.

The company is based in the town of Verona, Wisconsin, where Epic has almost as many employees as the town has residents and a vibe that many critics describe as cultish. For instance, buildings on the Epic campus have fantasy themes drawn from Tolkien, Harry Potter, Roald Dahl, and other such writers. According to plans submitted to the Verona city Plan Commission, Epic’s sixth campus on its 1,700-acre site will be called “Other Worlds,” and has been described in the local press as having a “‘floating forest’ and plenty of references to elves.” The fantasy theme is Faulkner’s own, reflecting her long-standing interest in science fiction. It evokes a series of theme parks, as in the movie and TV series Westworld . Of Epic’s 14,000 worldwide employees, about 12,500 work in Verona. Despite the fact that information technology is well suited to remote work, Epic executives encourage Epic employees to work at its home campus, so that they can bond as a team and absorb Epic values.

The development of electronic recordkeeping began with the best of intentions. Late in the George W. Bush administration, both parties collaborated on legislation called the HITECH Act, which stands for Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health. The legislation was designed to provide financial incentives for hospitals and other health systems to adopt electronic recordkeeping systems,

and to promote direct patient use of them. At the time, only about 10 percent of hospitals had any kind of electronic systems. The rest relied entirely on paper records.

After the financial collapse of 2009, Congress passed and Barack Obama signed the near-trillion-dollar American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. One goal was to get money out the door as fast as possible. The HITECH Act was folded into the Recovery Act, with added incentives to get electronic systems up and running. Some $27 billion in grants and bonus payments were available to hospitals via Medicare and Medicaid. This was ready-made for commercial vendors, since only a handful of large hospitals such as Boston’s Beth Israel had the capacity to design their own systems. At the time, there were more than a hundred fledgling for-profit vendors of electronic health record systems.

There was a vogue in the Obama administration for combining electronic recordkeeping with pay-for-performance incentives, to improve both quality and efficiency. So a whole other set of metrics was layered on top of the basic electronic recordkeeping. This was also ready-made for one monopoly vendor to emerge, though few appreciated that at the time.

At the center of this grand strategy was Dr. David Blumenthal, a physician and former senior vice president at Boston’s Partners HealthCare (now Mass General Brigham) in charge of information technology. Obama appointed Blumenthal to the newly created position of national coordinator for health information technology. It was a dream job and Blumenthal became a missionary for the idea of combining electronic records with quality incentives—with tens of billions of dollars available for rapid implementation.

wouldn’t be where it is today if it weren’t for the federal government.”

As Blumenthal came to appreciate, the real problem was that electronic health records became part of a health system whose drivers were increasingly commercial. And the administration was content to let the market decide how hospitals would use the recordkeeping software. “Our system is a creature of the market economy,” Blumenthal says today. “One thing few people understood at the time was how incentives would shape the product. The customers were the chief information officers and the chief executives of hospitals, not doctors. Their principal goal was to protect revenues. Systems like Epic were not designed to improve quality because there was no financial incentive to do so at the time.”

“We digitized the health records over the past 20 years,” another veteran of those efforts recalls, “but lost the hearts and minds of clinicians along the way.”

An Epic spokesman also challenges this picture, telling me that from its earliest beginnings, Epic grew by digitizing clinical records with the goal of improving information accuracy and quality, and that its utility in billing came only later.

PBlumenthal and his colleagues added a system of metrics to optimize quality and efficiency, known as “meaningful use.” It had about 140 data elements. Dr. Brent James served as chief quality officer at Intermountain Health, the largest nonprofit health system in the Mountain West, with 34 hospitals and 385 clinics. Dr. James told me, “I had a profound disagreement with the Obama health IT administration. They were bringing complex regulatory standards too soon, effectively locking in relatively immature IT technology … The regulations raised compliance barriers that locked out smaller competitors. Epic

Privatized Medicare Advantage policies, which are run by insurance companies, are notorious abusers of upcoding, even as they sometimes deny necessary treatments. The government’s Medicare Payment Advisory Commission’s annual report to Congress projects about $83 billion in excess billing by Medicare Advantage insurers compared to conventional public Medicare in 2024 alone. Many MA insurers, like UnitedHealth, employ large numbers of physicians, and some have been found encouraging their doctors to upcode.

But this doesn’t stop with privatized Medicare; one extensive research paper titled “Upcoding Medicare: Is Healthcare Fraud and Abuse Increasing?“ documented a steady increase in the use of diagnostic codes that required higher payments by traditional Medicare.

For example, Diagnosis Related Groups (DRGs) were a widely touted reform in which Medicare pays hospitals a flat rate per patient stay, to discourage hospitals from profiting by keeping inpatients for prolonged periods beyond what is medically necessary. But even DRG s can be gamed,

since they pay more based on the supposed intensity of the condition.

An extensive 2021 report by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General found that from 2014 through 2019, the number of hospital stays billed at the highest severity level increased almost 20 percent, and accounted for “nearly half of all Medicare spending on inpatient hospital stays.” The OIG added that the billing patterns were indicative of upcoding, since almost 30 percent of the inpatient stays at the hospitals lasted a particularly short time, and “the number of stays billed at each of the other severity levels decreased.”

The inspector general can and does prosecute Medicare fraud in extreme and flagrant cases. But neither HHS nor other insurers have anything close to the resources to go after the nation’s more than 6,000 hospitals for what has become routine upcoding. One senior doctor recalls asking his hospital CEO why they spent over a billion dollars a year to convert to Epic. He was told that the hospital would make that back many times over.

All rich countries have electronic medical databases. But no other has engendered the doctor backlash we see in America. That’s mainly because most foreign systems, even multi-payer systems, use fixed prices, and offer far fewer opportunities for gaming the system.

When I got a full workup at a French hospital in 2022 for a possible cardiac event that turned out to be nothing serious, I got a bill for 875.57 euros based on a schedule of fixed prices. Had I been French, the French social security system would have paid the entire cost. Profit maximization was not part of the equation. Electronic health records exist in France and most other Western countries, but their purpose is not profit maximization.

By contrast, several doctors across the U.S. have told me that Epic not only includes clinically trivial data entries, but long hours of time-consuming training sessions. The system is extremely arduous for clinicians. Just entering a prescription via Epic, according to one study, takes a doctor 18 separate keystrokes.

Dr. Bor of Cambridge Health Alliance told me, “Because you can use a standardized template, doctors tend to save time by using cut-and-paste from yesterday’s notes, and then updating. That introduces mistakes. It promotes lying. I ran TB clinics. TB is not typically associated with pain.

But the system would not let me get out of the chart without adding a pain score. So I would add zero.”

Doctors don’t begin to have the time to keep up with Epic demands during the usual clinical day, and find themselves catching up during their off-hours. When I contact my doctor electronically to ask a medical question, she typically responds around 2 a.m. Other doctors say they find themselves working long into the evening at home to keep up with Epic documentation demands.

Dr. Gordon Schiff of Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who has been a leader in that hospital’s quality program, quotes a colleague: “I am embarrassed to have others read my notes. They are so bad, but I have to keep cutting more and more corners to get them done.”

Most of the dozens of people I interviewed were scathing in their description of the demands Epic puts on doctors’ time, but would speak to me only on background. Hospitals have invested massively in Epic, and doctors have been ordered to get with the program. Clinicians have plenty of suggestions on how to make Epic more physician-friendly. But doctors who have made these suggestions tell me that, for the most part, these ideas fall on deaf ears.

An Epic spokesperson disputes this account, offering examples of how Epic systematically solicits physician feedback and pointing to Epic’s flexibility in allowing individual hospitals to customize how the Epic database is used: “We design the software so that the customer can configure it. It’s not an off-the-shelf system.” If hospital management is not taking doctor complaints seriously, that’s the fault of the hospital, not Epic.

Even the parts of the Epic system that seem like time-savers can come at the expense of patient care, depending on how they are used. The latest innovation is the use of speech recognition software as enhanced by AI, to spare physicians the need to write notes during a patient visit. Epic uses two leading companies that pioneered this technology: Dragon, now rebranded as Nuance, which was bought by Microsoft, and Abridge, a startup created in 2020 at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. The technology is known as “ambient listening.”

During a patient exam, the doctor places a cellphone or other monitoring device nearby. The AI application then turns the conversation with the patient into something

All rich countries have electronic medical databases. But no other has engendered the doctor backlash we see in America.

that looks just like a process note, including the patient’s clinical history, medications, current condition, and the doctor’s plan. But according to Dr. Schiff and others, the AI decides what to include from the conversation and what to leave out.

Some doctors love this and some hate it. It’s a big time-saver, yet it also takes something away. As Dr. Schiff explains, “Writing the note yourself is a way of reflecting about the patient, thinking out loud about the assessment. It’s the most important part of the note. But the opportunity to reflect is killed by automating the note. It’s powerful and dangerous and makes errors. We are unfortunately falling for this because of the time squeeze.”

Ironically, the same time squeeze that is substituting AI for the time-honored practice of writing notes is caused by all of Epic’s other demands on the doctor’s time. “Ambient listening is a solution to a self-created problem of requiring too much data entry by clinicians,” one hospital executive told me. As Epic took over, according to another doctor I interviewed, something vital tended to get lost: cultures of local learning. Reliance on time-consuming automated communication crowds out hands-on communication between doctors and patients and among doctors.

Epic’s rejoinder is that doctors just need to get more proficient and more comfortable using the many tools that Epic offers. For instance, the ambient listening app allows the doctor to review and revise the process note created by AI. But to Epic’s many critics, all this looks like Epic increasingly taking over the practice of medicine.

CCompared to its prompts regarding billing, the Epic software’s clinical prompts are sometimes rudimentary and irrelevant. Quality metrics have been a huge priority for the Department of Health and Human Services, and hospitals are financially

rewarded for improved outcomes. But Epic turns this goal into an automated system of alerts that may have little to do with a patient’s actual condition and risks. That in turn causes busy doctors to routinely override the alerts. The problem is known as alert fatigue.

For example, HHS concluded that hospitals were insufficiently mindful of the risks in hospitalized patients of sepsis, an infection that invades the entire body. Various studies estimate that sepsis is present in 30 to 50 percent of hospitalizations that culminate in death. So HHS created a system of financial rewards and punishments based on the hospital’s performance. In turn, Epic created a set of automated computer alerts of supposed sepsis risks, based on correlations in its massive database. But expert analysis shows it paints with far too broad a brush.

One extensive study of Epic’s sepsis alert protocol, after reviewing 27,697 patients, found a vast number of false positives and

false negatives. The study, published in JAMA Internal Medicine , concluded that “the Epic Sepsis Model poorly predicts sepsis; its widespread adoption despite poor performance raises fundamental concerns about sepsis management on a national level,” and that the model creates “a large burden of alert fatigue,” in which overwhelmed doctors just ignore alerts entirely. (An Epic spokesperson takes issue with this criticism, sending me a PowerPoint quoting testimonials from six hospital systems which reported that use of the Epic sepsis model resulted in reduced incidence of sepsis.)

Another general study of alert fatigue found that close to 100 percent of alerts were routinely overridden by harassed doctors. In this respect, Epic has become like the boy who cried wolf. By excessively broadcasting poorly designed alerts, Epic cultivates doctor skepticism of the system’s clinical veracity and reliability.

Dr. Lara Goitein, a practicing pulmo -

Some doctors complain that the time they have to spend on trivial data entry comes at the expense of personal connection with their patients.

nologist, directs a quality improvement program at Dartmouth Health designed to empower frontline physicians and nurses to make improvements in systems. She and a colleague were interested in tracking and reducing the overuse of sedatives in the ICU that resulted in more patients staying for prolonged periods on mechanical ventilators, which added risks of longer ICU stays and increased infections.

“The EHR [electronic health record system] allowed us to do some simple things, like identify all the patients on mechanical ventilators and find the amount of time they were in the ICU,” Goitein said. “But we needed another level of detail for a quality improvement project—for example, the types of sedatives, the amounts given, and patient sedation levels, especially during efforts to remove the ventilator.” For that, the electronic system proved useless, even though the hospital had invested heavily in specialized consultants to extract the data.

“After many months of trying and hun-

Hospitals like Boston’s Beth Israel used to invest in their own electronic record systems, but they have all switched to Epic.

dreds of expensive person-hours, we finally decided to cut our losses,” she said. “I hired a nurse to do a chart audit—that is, to read through a bunch of charts and enter data into an Excel spreadsheet. It took less than a week. We made some changes and ended up decreasing the average length of mechanical ventilation by a full day. With this and other changes, our rate of ventilator-associated pneumonia fell by two-thirds.”

The EHR in that study was Cerner, but Dr. Goitein finds similar frustrations trying to use Epic for systematic quality improvements. Epic’s rejoinder is that if doctors just took advantage of everything Epic offers, they could extract all the data they needed.

Dr. Goitein is preparing a paper for publication titled “The EHR Ate My Quality System.”

TThese systemic frustrations would be less of an issue in a database designed primarily for clinical purposes. The best locally designed electronic medical record systems that predated Epic, built by teams of information technology specialists and

medical leaders at some of the nation’s best hospitals, such as Beth Israel and Brigham and Women’s in Boston and Vanderbilt in Tennessee, did exactly that early in this century. But by about 2015, they all found themselves overwhelmed by the increasingly complex pay-for-performance metrics designed by HHS, combined with the financial imperatives of an increasingly commercial system that corrupted even nonprofits. “The process of internally keeping up with the regulatory changes and technical changes became impractical,” says Vanderbilt’s Dr. Stead.

Epic is simply better than anyone else at meeting the ever-changing demands of HHS aimed at grafting quality and efficiency incentives onto a for-profit system. Epic has also been a bonanza for consultants. Every time Epic adds a new complication or optional feature, tech consultants spring up to advise hospitals how to use it, further adding to outsourcing and middleman costs.

With great reluctance, the largest homegrown systems gave up and shifted to Epic,

shouldering transition costs of at least a billion dollars, plus costly annual licensing fees. “They had not only economies of scale,” says a former senior official at HHS, “but economies of learning.”

Just this past June, Boston’s Beth Israel finally completed converting its excellent homegrown and doctor-friendly electronic records system to Epic. The hospital’s convenient patient access portal, called PatientSite, was replaced by Epic’s clunkier universal system called MyChart. Beth Israel, now merged with the Lahey Hospital and Medical Center, was one of the last holdouts. The transition threw the hospital into chaos. I happened to have a routine medical visit during the first week of the changeover, and an appointment that should have taken 20 minutes took close to two hours because of new Epic demands on clinicians.

I sent a message to the hospital’s manager of media relations, Kristina Murray, explaining my research for this article and requesting an interview with a senior executive. In response to her questions about what I’d be asking, I explained that I was

Epic has many of the hallmarks of a monopoly. It wields immense market power.

interested in why the hospital had switched to Epic, what it had cost, and how management proposed to address the massive doctor backlash and reduce the toll on clinicians. After a few days of silence, she replied, “I am unable to help you with this inquiry. Best of luck with the story.”

OOne major issue that led to the pushing of electronic health records has been what data wonks call interoperability: the ability of a doctor at one hospital to access a patient’s records at another hospital, and the ability of the system as a whole to produce epidemiological and public-health data. With a single near-monopoly vendor of databases, interoperability should be close to automatic. But some hospitals have been proprietary about their patient records. This is known as data hoarding or information blocking, and HHS has issued regulations making it illegal. Lately, interoperability has become another Epic selling point, as long as you play by Epic’s rules. Epic, with far more patient records than any other system, now helps doctors in hospitals that use its system to exchange patient data with non-Epic hospitals, and also works on data sharing with federal agencies. This is a public service that helps entrench Epic’s market dominance.

make refinements to keep hospitals tethered to its system, further adding to the complexity, and effectively increasing the demands that doctors modify their practice patterns by getting with the program.

Epic’s massive patient database is also a treasure trove for research. Because access to the data is far from intuitive or automatic, researchers have the choice of partnering with Epic or paying Epic charges for gaining access to the desired data in usable form.

One of Epic’s latest innovations is called Cosmos, a database for research purposes of more than 100 million patient records purged of individual identifiers. According to Epic’s pitch on its website, “Cosmos integrates both inpatient and outpatient charts into a single, comprehensive record— including as patients move between health systems. In addition to diagnoses and medications, it includes patient-generated data and specialty-specific data.” This will give Epic another huge profit center to sell such data to researchers.

EEpic has many of the hallmarks of a monopoly. It wields immense market power. Under the Sherman Antitrust Act, being a monopoly is not a “per se” antitrust violation if you got to be a monopoly by building a better mousetrap. That surely describes Epic. It got better than anyone else at using data to allow hospitals to maximize their income. As payment systems and reporting requirements became ever more complex, most large hospital systems had nowhere else to turn.

access to its hospitals as potential customers, does that suppress innovation and competition among other vendors in the sector? Does it raise prices? Is it analogous to Google giving preference to some sellers?

The Federal Trade Commission handles antitrust cases in the area of health care. I queried FTC media relations on whether, hypothetically, abuses by a near-monopoly provider of health data systems might warrant an antitrust investigation. I was told, “We have no comment.”

In many respects, a national health database truly is a natural monopoly. But to be efficient, natural monopolies must be either regulated as a public utility or placed in the public domain. A private, unregulated for-profit monopoly is the worst of all possible worlds. It can be opaque, arrogant, nonresponsive to complaints, and still make a fortune.

As Dr. Stead puts it, “The frustrations with Epic can’t be fixed by Epic alone, because each fix requires a coordinated change in health system policy, clinical workflow, and software logic. They need to be fixed locally, but most hospitals got rid of their own clinical informatics experts when they put in Epic.”

Ideally, our national health database would be in the public domain and treated like a universal social asset. Local users would be free to customize it. The fact that Epic’s logic is hyper-commercial is a reflection of the fact that our entire health system is hyper-commercial.

There’s another twist that reflects Epic’s market power. To qualify as a preferred vendor within the Epic system, your company can join what Epic initially branded as its Partners and Pals program. This is now called Showroom. For a fee to Epic, vendors of specialized subsystems gain privileged access to Epic’s hospital customers.

A set of for-profit vendors have developed systems that tap into the Epic database but create a separate clinician interface that is more user-friendly for doctors. One such vendor, called SaVia, allows a hospital to create and modify clinical support apps. The problem is that such vendors add yet another layer of expense. Epic continues to

But the other test under the Sherman Act is whether a monopoly abuses its market power. How might Epic be abusing its power? Because hospitals have few other options, it could be overcharging. It’s very expensive to shift to Epic, and it would be expensive to dump Epic in favor of a competitor or a local system. That lock-in also increases Epic’s pricing power.

Epic’s profit margins are not a matter of public record because it is a privately held company, so it would take an investigation to reveal whether they reflect monopoly pricing power. By enabling hospitals to overbill, Epic’s systems might also be contributing to the increasing costs of the entire health system.

Epic’s program for vendor partners also raises antitrust questions about regarding Epic’s role as a monopsony. To the extent that vendors pay Epic to gain privileged

“There’s a need for broader reform,” says Dr. Adam Gaffney, a critical care physician at the Cambridge Health Alliance who was previous president of Physicians for a National Health Program. “Handing the keys over to a private monopoly doesn’t make sense. You need to think of a national medical record system as a public service.”

But that fundamental reform is likely to happen only as part of a shift to a national health insurance system or perhaps in the aftermath of a major antitrust action against Epic. In the meantime, the epidemic of doctor burnout and early retirements caused by digital demands might compel some reforms. The American Medical Association projects a shortage of between 37,000 and 100,000 doctors over the next decade. For now, hospital CEO s are big fans of Epic’s revenue enhancement. That will change only when lots more exhausted doctors quit. n

A Ponzi Scheme of Promises

Five years after the Business Roundtable ‘redefined’ the purpose of the corporation, has anything changed?

BY ADAM M. LOWENSTEIN ILLUSTRATION BY JON KRAUSE

Steve Pearlstein was eating Honey Bunches of Oats when Jamie Dimon called. “That was the stupidest fucking column I’ve ever read!” Dimon announced when Pearlstein picked up the phone early one morning in June 2018.

“Wow, good morning, Jamie. Nice to hear from you,” Pearlstein, a longtime Washington Post columnist, replied.

The Pearlstein column in question had started with praise for an op-ed that Dimon, CEO of the mega-bank JPMorgan Chase, had written the day before with the iconic investor Warren Buffett, urging publicly traded companies to stop publishing forecasts every three months showing how much profit they expected to pay out to their shareholders. The business leaders argued that quarterly earnings estimates drive companies “to an unhealthy focus on short-term profits at the expense of long-term strategy, growth and sustainability.”

Buffett and Dimon were right, Pearlstein wrote, to acknowledge that the estimates often did little more than reward executives for short-term cost-cutting and other accounting gimmicks that served as sugar highs for their companies’ stock prices. But Pearlstein contended that the Business Roundtable, the ultra-exclusive coalition Dimon chaired at the time that represented CEOs of more than 200 large U.S. corporations like Google, Walmart, and Goldman Sachs, hadn’t gone far enough in its reforms. If the group really wanted to show it was serious about encouraging executives to run their companies with a focus on the long term, “it should reconsider its 30-year-old decision to declare maximizing value for shareholders as the sole purpose of a corporation,” Pearlstein wrote.

The columnist was referring to a statement that the Business Roundtable had issued in 1997, stating that the “principal objective” of a company is to deliver returns to its shareholders, rather than serve its workers, customers, or communities.

This philosophy derived from the radical economist Milton Friedman, whose doctrine that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits” emerged from the fringes of right-wing thought in the 1950s and ’60s, before rapidly entrenching itself in corporate boardrooms and the broader ecosystem of American capitalism. Stock markets were the economy, in this conception, and stock prices reflected a company’s success, along with the success of its CEO.

Pearlstein argued that you could draw a direct line from this obsessive focus on short-term profit-seeking to national economic trends like income inequality, wage stagnation, and exploding CEO pay. Shareholder primacy, Pearlstein wrote, had become “the source of most of what has gone wrong with American capitalism.”

That’s what set Dimon off that morning. “He started explaining why I was full of shit,” Pearlstein recalled when we spoke last year. While he and Dimon weren’t close, they were familiar enough that Pearlstein understood that the CEO’s comments were tongue-in-cheek, not hostile. But he also knew that Dimon meant what he said.

Nevertheless, about a year after that conversation, corporate America had a new message. On August 19, 2019, the Business Roundtable issued a press release containing a roughly 300-word statement, signed by 181 of its members. “Business Roundtable Redefines the Purpose of a Corporation to Promote ‘An Economy That Serves All Americans,’” its headline read, citing a quote from its chair, Jamie Dimon. The CEOs pledged to “lead their companies for the benefit of all stakeholders—customers, employees, suppliers, communities and shareholders,” and “move away from shareholder primacy.” The CEO s added, “Each of our stakeholders is essential. We commit to deliver value to all of them, for

the future success of our companies, our communities and our country.”

No details were offered about what, exactly, their companies would do differently. Nor did the executives—a cohort notoriously obsessed with numbers and metrics— include any specific or binding commitments to which they could be held accountable for their promises to all of their “stakeholders.”

In public relations terms, though, the statement was deemed as historic as the Declaration of Independence. “There were times when I felt like Thomas Jefferson,” Alex Gorsky, then the head of Johnson & Johnson and the Business Roundtable member who led the drafting of the statement, told The New York Times , which placed the news on the front page.

Fortune magazine had been informed far enough in advance to publish a lengthy cover story, featuring staged photos of Dimon, Gorsky, and former IBM CEO Ginni Rometty staring stoically at the camera. A Wall Street Journal headline announced, “Move Over, Shareholders: Top CEO s Say Companies Have Obligations to Society.” A prominent business columnist called the new statement “a significant shift and a welcome one.” “CEO s From the Largest U.S. Corporations Just Changed the Purpose of Business,” exclaimed Inc. “A major change in thinking,” suggested the Financial Times editorial board. A Reuters columnist called it a “bombshell.” NBC News informed its readers, “Shareholder value is no longer the main focus of some of America’s top business leaders.”

A new narrative quickly began to solidify: Milton Friedman’s profits-at-all-costs way of thinking was dead. In fact, Fortune wrote in its cover story that “Friedman must be turning in his grave.”

There was just one catch: CEOs weren’t actually promising a new way of doing business, but simply a new way of talking about doing business.

A driving force behind the Business Roundtable’s emergence in 1972 was a pervasive feeling among CEOs that they were misunderstood. As historian Benjamin C. Waterhouse demonstrates in Lobbying America , his definitive history of corporate America’s political mobilization, many executives had become convinced that they weren’t getting the credit they deserved for their contributions to the economy and society—creating jobs, building infrastructure, giving

This Business Roundtable statement was released in August 2019.

consumers products they wanted, generating economic growth. Then, as now, CEOs couldn’t figure out why people didn’t seem to like them or trust them.

Yet for much of its lifespan, the Business Roundtable had been content to keep a low public profile. The organization exists to defend corporate executives’ interests in the halls of power, not at the ballot box. That effort has manifested in more than $400 million worth of lobbying over the last quarter-century, in quiet rooms in the nation’s capital. “We don’t seek visibility,” said Thomas Murphy, the head of General Motors and an early leader of the group, in 1979. In 2002, The New York Times was still describing the Business Roundtable as “a small, effective, somewhat mysterious fraternity,” even as the paper of record remarked on the group’s loud promises of ethics reform following a series of corporate scandals that left its members claiming to be “appalled, angered and, finally, alarmed.”

By 2019, however, circumstances had changed. Anonymity was no longer an option. The 2008 financial crisis had seen millions of Americans lose their homes and retirement savings while Wall Street leaders and corporate executives not only escaped accountability but also made off with billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts. Decades of globalizing, offshoring, lobby-

ing, deregulating, and tax-cutting had created an incarnation of American capitalism that defined business success by the ups and downs of the stock market.

For 50 years, workers’ productivity had soared, but they had shared in few of the gains generated by their labor, even as many navigated stagnating wages, declining social mobility, and ever more precarious economic and environmental conditions. Meanwhile, CEOs, many of whom had built flattering profiles as acclaimed “thought leaders” and cultural icons, were taking home compensation that was, on average, 320 times greater than that of their workers.

Corporations and their bosses had created an unfair, unjust, and wholly rigged system—a self-serving collection of laws, regulations, principles, and worldviews that they had built at home and exported around the world. The system’s architects had helped themselves to its spoils, extracting from it more wealth, more cultural influence, and more political power than ever before. They could no longer hide the fact that it was working better for them than for anyone else. While calls for change began coming from seemingly every corner—politicians of both parties, scholars and researchers, protesters in the streets and in Zuccotti Park, at the foot of Wall Street—CEOs were particularly worried about the calls coming

CEOs weren’t actually promising a new way of doing business, but simply a new way of talking about doing business.

from inside the house. Survey after survey showed that Americans wanted to work for companies that did more than just make money. Executives didn’t want to lose the workers who enabled their prosperity, but they also didn’t want to have to pay higher wages or provide better benefits—or, even worse, give workers the power to negotiate and bargain collectively.

What big business needed was “a clear expression of purpose,” concluded Larry Fink, the head of the behemoth asset manager BlackRock (and who, at the time, was an enthusiastic proponent of what become known as “stakeholder capitalism,” before deciding it was bad for business). “Society gives each of us a license to operate,” agreed IBM CEO Rometty in 2019. “It’s a question of whether society trusts you or not. We need society to accept what it is that we do.”

In an age of public theater—when, from social media influencers to clickbait headlines to the occupant of the Oval Office, actually doing things had been increasingly supplanted by public pantomimes— CEO s scrambled to put on a different costume and sing a different song. If they had to become benevolent bosses, they wanted that benevolence to happen on their terms.

A few months after being chewed out by Jamie Dimon, Pearlstein got another call, this time from the CEO of the Business Roundtable itself, Joshua Bolten, the longtime Washington insider, bass guitar player, and former White House chief of staff to President George W. Bush. Bolten said he and Dimon wanted to meet with Pearlstein to talk about the column.

Such an invitation wasn’t unheard of. The Business Roundtable exemplifies the D.C. folk wisdom that influencing public policy requires

more than just paying for face time with lawmakers and regulators. It also requires subtler, more intangible maneuvers—including attempts to persuade the insular networks of the so-called “opinion elites” who shape public policy, such as congressional and White House staffers, reporters, pundits, lobbyists, and consultants. The group routinely hosts off-the-record “salon dinners” before its CEO meetings, designed for influential journalists to get “a sense of how the CEOs [are] thinking about the big public-policy issues facing the country,” Judy Miller, Jamie Dimon’s longtime chief of staff, told me.

The invitation Bolten had issued to Pearlstein, Miller said, was a “smaller subset” of those off-the-record gatherings. In fact, when Pearlstein made his way to one of Dimon’s private rooms at JPMorgan’s Park Avenue headquarters on October 16, 2018, he was accompanied by just two other journalists: Joe Nocera of The New York Times, and Rick Wartzman, who was contributing regularly to Fast Company and had written critically of the Business Roundtable’s 1997 pledge to put shareholders first.

Pearlstein also invited Judy Samuelson, who ran a program at the nonprofit Aspen Institute that focused on advocating for corporations to operate with a long-term mindset. Bill McNabb, the former head of the institutional investment firm Vanguard and then a member of the Business Roundtable’s board, was there, as was Miller, Dimon’s chief of staff, though neither said much during the dinner. As Dimon and the journalists spoke, Bolten mainly took notes, chiming in on occasion.

Sitting across from each other at a long conference table, Dimon held the floor for a long time. “He kind of fills the room,” Wartzman said. The essence of Dimon’s comments was: Why did the media harp on criticizing big companies? Why couldn’t people appreciate the reform efforts that CEOs and the Business Roundtable were already making? Why did critics of corporate power insist, as Dimon would caricature their arguments in a followup email the next day, “that large successful companies have created the ills of society”?

There was no shortage of concerning trends for the group to discuss over dinner, from rising inequality to exploding CEO compensation to climate change–fueled destruction to a sharp increase in companies’ spending financial gains on buying their own stock to drive their share prices—and their executives’ pay packages—even higher. This

obsession with stock buybacks reflected the broader “financialization” of the U.S. economy, where more and more business activity was generated by hedge funds, private equity firms, and other Wall Street traders who made money by moving money around, and who shared only a fraction of those gains.

At one point, Samuelson, who was sitting directly next to Dimon, tried to jump in to ask where the Business Roundtable stood on climate change. “He said, ‘Don’t interrupt me,’” Samuelson recalled. “With all due respect, I thought you brought us here because you wanted to hear from us,” she replied. (The following year, the organization released a statement calling for “market-based solutions” to the climate crisis.)

As they had in public, Pearlstein and his colleagues pushed Dimon and the Business Roundtable to reform its 1997 statement proclaiming that corporations existed primarily to deliver returns to their shareholders. But the CEO didn’t appear to buy their arguments. He said that to be successful, companies already had to address the needs of employees, customers, and the communities they operate in. Whenever the dinner guests “tried to ask him a question about broadening the Business Roundtable’s vision beyond shareholders,” Nocera told me, “he would just say, I already do that and I already knew that. We take care of employees. We take care of our customers. I don’t understand what the problem is.”

In an email, Miller told the Prospect that it “was not the case” that Dimon opposed changing the statement. “The dinner helped clarify his own thinking and led Jamie to encourage the Business Roundtable to restate the purpose to clarify what is already true— that, like Jamie said, successful companies do take care of employees, customers, and communities,” Miller said. “The statement was not a re-prioritization—it merely clarified that for companies to be successful over the long term, they have to do these things.”

The journalists’ point, however, was that when push came to shove, when the inevitable trade-offs had to be made, investors always came first over other stakeholders. Wartzman kept pushing, noting that the Business Roundtable hadn’t always been explicitly committed to shareholder primacy. In fact, he pointed out, the group had endorsed some version of stakeholder capitalism in the early 1980s.

Eventually, after much back-and-forth, Dimon said that he and Bolten would look

into it. That’s the biggest kiss-off in history, Wartzman thought. But then came the Roundtable’s new statement the following August, seeming to give Dimon’s dining companions what they’d asked for. “I was stunned,” Wartzman said. “I felt like, yeah, we had really done something at that dinner.”

Elite response to the Business Roundtable’s statement wasn’t unanimously positive. Some conservatives, still in thrall to Milton Friedman’s argument that a company’s only “social responsibility” to society is to make money, called the statement “virtuesignaling fanfare”—an early preview of Republican political posturing about “woke capitalism” that would become a significant issue in the party’s 2024 presidential primary. Steven Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs partner who was then serving as Donald Trump’s Treasury secretary, said he “wouldn’t have signed it.” The Wall Street Journal editorial board, ardent defender of free-market fundamentalism and biggeris-better corporate concentration, groused that “the mucky-mucks of the Business Roundtable are tweeting in unison how ‘proud’ they are to have abandoned the corporate purpose of serving shareholders for the more politically au courant ‘stakeholder’ model.” Yet these dissents only served to underscore the statement’s significance.

The years that followed saw COVID -19 unleash not just immense human suffering but also trillions of dollars of new wealth for some of the world’s richest people. Enormous sums of taxpayer money were used to prop up desperate companies, which then promptly deployed much of the largesse to buying up their own stock and rewarding shareholders.

Corporate governance experts routinely described the pandemic as a test case for the promises of stakeholder capitalism exemplified by the Business Roundtable statement: If company bosses were serious about taking care of everyone, the thinking went, they would uphold that commitment even when circumstances made it challenging.

Yet a number of studies from this period found that, compared to other firms whose CEOs did not sign, those whose CEOs affixed their name to the statement were more likely to lay off employees during COVID-19, were less inclined to contribute to pandemic relief efforts, had “higher rates of environmental and labor-related compliance violations,” emitted more carbon into the atmosphere, and spent more money on dividends and

buybacks (which overwhelmingly benefit executives and shareholders). When it came to whether Business Roundtable CEOs changed their behavior after putting their names on the 2019 statement, one researcher concluded that “signing this statement had zero positive effect.”

An important tell about the intentions behind the statement was that its signatories were not companies but their chief executives, in their capacity as individuals. In fact, a study conducted by two Harvard Law School professors found that almost none of the CEOs who elected to sign the statement (at least among the public companies that responded to the scholars’ inquiry) had that decision reviewed or approved by their board of directors. “The most plausible explanation for CEOs choosing to join the BRT statement without board approval,” the scholars argued, “[had] to do with their view that the statement would not produce a significant change in their companies’ treatment of stakeholders.”

In other words, despite the hype around the statement, CEOs failed to get the kind of buy-in that would have signaled something meaningful. On this point, at least, one Business Roundtable CEO might have been expected to agree with the Harvard study’s conclusion. In 2018, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, a signatory of the 2019 statement, wrote that he expected a chief executive to “publicly articulate your company’s strategic framework for long-term value creation and explicitly affirm that it has been reviewed by your board of directors. This demonstrates to investors that your board is engaged with the strategic direction of the company.”

Shareholders quickly reached the same conclusion as the Harvard researchers. As Columbia Business School’s Shiva Rajgopal, co-author of one study that investigated whether Business Roundtable CEOs followed through on their pledges, observed, “When these guys signed the BRT statement, the stock prices of these firms [did not] move … There was no heartbeat at all.” This suggests, as Rajgopal and his co-author wrote, “market participants agree with the assessment that the BRT statement represents cheap talk.”

Yet the clearest signals about what the Business Roundtable really intended with its high-profile statement came not from academics, not from workers, not even from shareholders, but rather from the Business Roundtable and its CEO members themselves.

Sometimes they weren’t particularly sub-

Despite the hype around the statement, CEOs failed to get the kind of buy-in that would have signaled something meaningful.

tle. In December 2020, after a media blitz celebrating the first anniversary of the statement’s release, Joshua Bolten spoke at a forum hosted by the industry publication Directors & Boards. In the audience were many board members—the people who hire and fire CEOs and set their pay—and corporate governance experts. These are people who would want to know, and who in some cases are legally required to know, whether companies were suddenly changing their strategies and business models to focus less on shareholders. Bolten told the audience that the statement “gives the public a more accurate reflection of what we think CEOs are doing every day—the important work that our companies are doing to support all of the company’s stakeholders.” The Business Roundtable head was “proud of our work to correct [the] misimpression” that “corporations are run solely for profit, for the already rich people who own shares in the corporation.” Asked to leave board members with a recommendation, Bolten encouraged companies to use the statement as a marketing asset. “Tell the story of your corporation to the public,” he replied. “Do not underestimate the value of promoting all the good that your company is doing for our society in the course of doing its regular business” (emphasis added).

A few months later, in May 2021, the House Financial Services Committee held a hearing with the six biggest bank CEOs: Dimon, as well as Jane Fraser of Citigroup, Brian Moynihan of Bank of America, James Gorman of Morgan Stanley, David Solomon of Goldman Sachs, and Charles Scharf of Wells Fargo. Five of these CEOs had signed the 2019 statement. Fraser wasn’t running Citi at the time, but her predecessor had signed, and during her tenure Citi continued to highlight its signing of the statement. (Fraser also joined the Business Roundtable’s board of directors.)

One participant in the committee hearing was Andy Barr, a Republican congressman from Kentucky, who derided stakeholder capitalism as a “radical” scheme by “the extreme left” to infiltrate boardrooms and undermine the free market. When it was Barr’s turn to question the bank bosses, he asked each CEO to respond to the same question: “In an event where there is a direct conflict between the interests of shareholders and non-owner stakeholders, will you prioritize shareholder interests?”

“Yes,” replied Dimon, who, in addition to chairing the Business Roundtable when it issued the 2019 statement, had earlier published a 66-page letter touting his company’s commitments to its stakeholders, noting that “it’s important to understand and reaffirm the magnitude of our contributions.”

In the past, these CEOs had either implied or stated explicitly that stakeholder capitalism was a “win-win” that didn’t require trade-offs at all. The statement itself proclaimed that the “long-term interests” of different stakeholders were “inseparable.” But Dimon, when asked point-blank to take

a side, reflexively aligned with investors.

Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan, who had been a loud proponent for stakeholder capitalism, tried at first to deflect, stating that “we deliver both for shareholders and for society.”

“When there is a conflict, which one will you prioritize?” Barr asked again.

“We will prioritize the returns for the company,” Moynihan acknowledged.

The other CEOs agreed. Goldman Sachs’s David Solomon: “Yes, we would prioritize shareholders.”

Citi’s Jane Fraser: “Yes, we will prioritize our investors.”

Wells Fargo’s Charles Scharf: “Yes, our shareholders.”

The years since have seen corporate profits reach record highs while driving inflation and consumer prices upward. Meanwhile, on issue after issue—fighting climate change, protecting workers, strengthening the economy—the Business Roundtable has continued to lobby and litigate and otherwise back a ferocious barrage of corporate resistance

against the very policies and viewpoints that the group earned a crescendo of elite praise for claiming to support.

While the 2019 statement included a commitment to “protect the environment,” for instance, the Business Roundtable spent millions of dollars lobbying and campaigning to defeat President Joe Biden’s landmark climate law and stymie his administration’s environmental agenda. In March 2021, after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed a rule to require public companies to study and disclose how climate change could affect their businesses, the group pushed aggressively for the SEC to weaken the proposal. Three years later, after the SEC finalized a watered-down version of the rule—even adopting some of the changes that the Business Roundtable and other corporate trade groups had suggested—the organization still filed an amicus brief to get the rule tossed out entirely. “Business Roundtable has concluded that the final rule is counterproductive and beyond the SEC’s statutory authority,” Bolten said.

The claim that the climate disclosure

Jamie Dimon served as chair of the Business Roundtable when the new statement on the purpose of a corporation was issued.

rule is beyond the SEC’s authority echoed an argument that the Business Roundtable and other corporate interest groups have used to stop other Biden-era regulatory efforts— and that, following the Supreme Court’s June decision to throw out a 40-year-old precedent known as the Chevron doctrine, will make it far more difficult for federal agencies to impose any new rules on businesses, no matter how popular the rule or how predatory the business.

The Business Roundtable deployed this overstepping-its-authority reasoning in a nearly instantaneous lawsuit earlier this year against the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) ban on corporate noncompete agreements. Noncompetes give companies the power to stop their employees from leaving to work for a competitor, or from starting a business that might compete with their former employer. The day after the FTC finalized the ban—one of many popular Biden administration efforts to challenge corporate power—the Business Roundtable joined a handful of other companies and corporate trade groups in its lawsuit against the measure. “The FTC’s categorical prohibition on noncompete agreements is misguided and far beyond the agency’s statutory authority,” Bolten said.

The FTC estimates that freeing workers from noncompete agreements could raise wages by $300 billion a year. In 2022, three years after the Business Roundtable’s new policy statement, executive compensation remained some 344 times higher than typical workers’ wages. By that point, CEO pay had risen more than 1,200 percent since 1978, according to the Economic Policy Institute, compared to only 15 percent for workers. Closing that gap might appear to align neatly with the Business Roundtable statement, in which CEOs pledged to “invest in our employees,” in part by “compensating them fairly and providing important benefits.”

Banning noncompetes, moreover, could liberate some 30 million workers to move to (or start) companies that offer better pay, benefits, and opportunities than their current employers—a pro–free market policy if there ever were one. That, too, is a principle that the Business Roundtable routinely celebrates. “We believe the free-market system is the best means of generating good jobs, a strong and sustainable economy, innovation, a healthy environment and economic opportunity for all,” the statement’s signatories affirmed.

One of the most consistent rationales that Business Roundtable members offered for

signing the 2019 statement was the need to provide meaning to their employees’ work. “Attracting and retaining the best talent increasingly requires a clear expression of purpose,” BlackRock’s Larry Fink wrote in 2019. That same year, the scandal-plagued consulting giant McKinsey & Company, whose CEO is a member of the Business Roundtable and which counts numerous Roundtable companies as clients and confidants, advised that talking about social and environmental issues could “help companies attract and retain quality employees, enhance employee motivation by instilling a sense of purpose, and increase productivity overall.” Defending noncompete agreements, however, suggests that while executives might like the idea of motivating workers by offering them a “sense of purpose,” they’re just as happy to retain those workers using legal threats and coercive employment contracts.

(In response to an email requesting comment for this story, the Business Roundtable referred the Prospect to an essay published by the organization about the statement’s five-year anniversary.)

The Business Roundtable will likely have little need in the future to sue the federal government on this and other matters if cirCorporate

RICHARD

The aim of the celebrated 2019 statement turned out to be simply to preserve and perpetuate “CEO tyranny.”

lobbying might will reveal its true priorities. Beyond new tax cuts and fewer regulations, however, Trump’s re-election would deliver another benefit, if a less tangible one, for CEOs: Even as they work tirelessly for parts of his economic agenda, they can once again take the opportunity to be seen as society’s saviors, as the compassionate and benevolent and empathetic bosses who stand against polarization and division, as the earnest policymakers who lead the nation’s response on climate change, racial justice, worker discontent, and inequality—even preserving democracy—while the Trump administration does the opposite.

inequality and climate change, businesses preserved an all-important seat at the negotiating table in the policymaking process, a position CEOs have used to dictate the terms of public debates and to steer policy outcomes in their favor.

cumstances deliver them an outcome with which CEOs appear increasingly comfortable: Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

Much of the disgraced former president’s economic agenda aligns closely with corporate America’s insatiable hunger for lower taxes, which the Business Roundtable has pursued throughout the Biden presidency and in previous decades. Over the past year in particular, the group has joined other corporate trade groups in spending liberally to secure another round of corporate tax cuts. While they have thus far been unsuccessful, the campaign appears set to continue, especially as many of the 2017 Trump tax cuts expire next year, and a lobbying battle royale commences in Washington.

“For the remainder of this year and next, Business Roundtable will be putting its full weight behind protecting and strengthening tax reform,” Bolten said recently. “We’re fully energized for this effort, and we’re prepared to spend eight figures over the course of this campaign, among the largest efforts in the 52-year history of the Business Roundtable.”

If the group succeeds, one almost certain consequence will be a further widening of America’s racial wealth gap. The Business Roundtable’s goal of securing additional corporate tax breaks while preserving some of the individual tax provisions for the wealthy—both efforts that, like the Trump tax cuts, benefit white Americans far more than Black Americans—is fundamentally incompatible with its stated commitments of tackling racial injustice. The organization has regularly held up its campaigns about racial justice and equal opportunity as evidence that its members are following through on the commitments they made in 2019. Where the group puts its money and

A second Trump term hands CEO s a chance to claim the appreciation that so many of them feel they deserve—a present-day incarnation of the same craving for praise and power that drove the group’s creation more than half a century ago.

In May 2020, Fortune magazine asked CEOs of the Fortune 500 the question that many observers had wondered since the Business Roundtable’s communications team hit “send” on that headline-generating press release some nine months prior: Did they really mean what they said about redefining the purpose of the corporation? The response was revealing. Sixty-three percent of Fortune 500 CEOs said, “I agree with the statement and believe most good companies have always operated that way. Nothing changed .” (emphasis added).

“Nothing changed” was, of course, precisely the outcome that the CEOs were seeking by acting as if everything had changed. Signing a bold-sounding statement, conveniently devoid of specific benchmarks or binding commitments, deflected public scrutiny by giving executives something to point to when pressured or challenged by activists, employees, or other “stakeholders.” If asked to prove that they were following through on a commitment or pledge, they could simply issue another one. It was a Ponzi scheme of promises.

But CEOs weren’t the only beneficiaries. A world in which corporations fixed problems on their own came with benefits for politicians and regulators, too. As long as corporations appeared to be solving environmental and social problems, policymakers were spared the difficult and politically fraught prospect of imposing new taxes, regulations, or laws. Similarly, by appearing to solving global challenges like income

Executing as aggressive (and expensive) a PR effort as the 2019 “purpose of the corporation” statement might have been a relatively novel undertaking for a trade association known mainly for its behind-the-scenes lobbying. But the Business Roundtable’s promise to save the world and make money doing it was only the most visible manifestation of the group’s decadeslong campaign to protect the interests of executives. As reflected in its ongoing efforts to shape Biden-era policy, the aim of the celebrated 2019 statement turned out to be simply to preserve and perpetuate what I describe as “CEO tyranny”: the power of business titans to run their companies without being questioned or scrutinized—unencumbered and unchecked by regulations, taxes, labor unions, or oversight of any kind—and to capture for themselves as large a share of their companies’ profits and their workers’ labor as they can get away with.

If the 2019 statement had come from a political party or candidate for elected office rather than a group of chief executives, it would have been easier to recognize it for the campaign ad it was. In fact, what the Business Roundtable statement revealed was not the beginning of a fairer and more equitable capitalism, but rather the culmination of a decades-long transformation of the role of the CEO from a business manager into a politician.

Despite the relentless fire hose of hype from CEOs and their boosters in the consulting class and the business media suggesting that corporate America was leading the charge to change capitalism once and for all, the only campaign that was really under way was the one that the Business Roundtable had been waging since its creation more than half a century ago: the preservation, at all costs, of political and economic power. Milton Friedman’s embrace of shareholder primacy may have been pronounced dead, but CEO tyranny was alive and well. n

Adam M. Lowenstein is a journalist who writes about corporate power and political influence. He also publishes “Reframe Your Inbox,” a newsletter of interviews and essays.

What Should Democrats Say to Young Men?

Young men appear to be drifting right. Ignoring them means trouble.

By Paul Starr

Signs have been mounting that, for the first time in recent decades, Democrats may lose majority support from young men in 2024. The risk to Democrats is that this is not just a one-time fluke but an indication of growing trouble with men in coming elections. Democrats can celebrate the support they are getting from young women, but they also need to take the disaffection of young men seriously, engage them directly, and respond to the visions of manhood and masculinity that Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are offering.

Although men overall have moved toward the Republicans over the past half-century, the youth vote has given Democrats grounds for hope that the losses among men have been

transitional, a reflection of an older generation’s difficulties in adjusting to more equal gender relations and a changed economy. Young men’s support for Democrats reached a high point in Barack Obama’s victories. According to exit polls in 2008, Obama won 62 percent of 18-to-29-year-old men as well as 69 percent of women that age. By 2020, the gender gap among young voters had widened, but Joe Biden still received the votes of 52 percent of young men along with 67 percent of young women. As recently as the 2022 midterms, Democrats won 54 percent of young men as well as 72 percent of young women. But 2024 may be different. According to New York Times/Siena polls, the Democrats’ deficit with young men had already emerged when Biden was the presumptive Demo -

cratic nominee. In four national polls from December to June, Trump held an edge among 18-to-29-year-old men averaging 11 points, while Biden’s margin among women that age averaged 28 points. In August, with Kamala Harris as the nominee, the gender gap among young voters was higher in a poll of six swing states, but nearly all the difference came from a surge of support for Harris among young women to a 38-point advantage. Trump’s margin among young men, at 13 percent, was just two points higher than in the earlier national polls.

In other words, the Democrats’ problem with young men did not originate with Harris, and ultimately it is not about her. Although the picture is mixed, a variety of sources indicate a long-term trend favor -

Vice-presidential candidates J.D. Vance and Tim Walz are two exemplars of contrasting messages about masculinity.

ing Republicans. According to Gallup data compiled by Daniel A. Cox of the American Enterprise Institute, 48 percent of young men in 2023 identified as or leaned Republican, up from 38 percent ten years earlier. It is too early to say how significant and durable the shift among young men is, but it is not too early to think about how to respond to young men’s attraction to right-wing politics.

The contemporary political gender gap, with men to the right of women, is a widespread pattern in high-income countries that has been roughly a half-century in the making. In the United States, the differences in voting by men and women were minimal until 1980, when more men than women began voting Republican. In Europe, men traditionally voted more for the parties of the left and women for parties of the right until the emergence in different countries at different rates of the “new” or “modern” gender gap. Women have moved left, while the vote for far-right parties in Europe, like the vote for Trump, has come disproportionately from men.

The breadth of this political realignment suggests that the underlying causes are changes in the structure of the advanced economies that have reduced the advantages that men once enjoyed. These include the

decline of manufacturing jobs and diminished ability of men with less than a college education to support a family, while women have made gains in education and the postindustrial labor market. This shift has coincided with the rise of feminism and support from left-of-center parties, including the Democrats, for gender equality and LGBTQ+ inclusion. To some extent, parties of the left have taken the blame from men for an economic and social transformation that did not have partisan origins. But as Thomas Edsall has pointed out in The New York Times, the gender gap in voting has recently become a “gender gulf” in the United States and some other countries.

The shift among young men is part of that heightened polarization, and its causes may be both economic and political.

The economic causes may lie in growing disparities in life chances between young men and women as the men fall behind women their age in education and college completion. (A college degree is now generally associated with more liberal views.)

A variety of other measures—employment, earnings, mental health, “deaths of despair”—tell a story of rising distress among young men. The acceleration of these

problems has occurred in an era when the word “masculinity” has been continually paired with “toxic” among liberals and progressives, and young men could easily get the impression that Democrats see them as nothing but trouble. Politically, the result could be the reverse of the optimistic theory that only older men, stuck in their ways, were moving to the right in response to greater gender equality. If younger men follow that path too, the political implications would be enormous.

Democrats cannot and must not go back on their feminist and LGBTQ+ commitments. Yet neither can they ignore the rightward political drift among young men, dismiss it as an inevitable by-product of social change, or say to them, “Just get with the program.” Democrats need to find ways both to uphold their commitments to gender equality and to bring young men around from Trump and Vance.

The Democratic Party has not given this challenge much attention. “Democrats don’t speak to men,” my son, who is in his thirties, said to me as we talked about these issues at the time of the Democratic National Convention in August. If the convention made any attempt to address young men, I missed it. Democrats haven’t thought it necessary

Professional wrestler Hulk Hogan introduced Donald Trump at the 2024 Republican National Convention.

According to Gallup data, 48 percent of young men in 2023 identified as or leaned Republican, up from 38 percent ten years earlier.

to speak specifically to men in the way they have singled out other groups.

Should Democrats “speak to men”? And if they do, what should they say? The answer, I think, is that they need to engage Trump and Vance directly on how men can lead a good and worthy life today. And today’s Republicans have given them a magnificent opportunity to do that.

Trump and Vance have made the recruitment of young men a key part of their campaign and deliberately put masculinity at the center of the election in the hope of reaping a harvest of new voters. While representing somewhat different strains of reactionary gender politics, both Trump and Vance defend traditional masculinity in over-the-top, extreme forms. That exaggerated masculinity is a source of both their appeal and their weakness.

Trump offers young men a fantasy of manhood as an unapologetic assertion of dominance. It’s a vision that celebrates fame and power, aggression, and sex without obligations—the fantasy behind Trump’s taped Access Hollywood line, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” Trump’s efforts to identify himself with fighting sports, like Dana White’s mixed martial arts Ultimate Fighting Championship, are part of his carefully cultivated image of dominance and toughness. His first public appearance after his criminal conviction in New York was at a UFC event. White introduced Trump for his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, and the former wrestler Hulk Hogan stirred up the crowd for him, calling Trump a “gladiator.” Trump entered with “It’s a Man’s, Man’s,

Man’s World” playing in the background. He may be shrewd, but he is not subtle.

Vance’s hypermasculinity is more closely tied to social conservatism, an exaltation of the old male-breadwinner family and sharp, biologically given distinctions between men and women. He is now famous for his mockery of “childless cat ladies,” his view that women should de-emphasize careers and have more babies, and his suggestion that people with children should have more votes than those without. In a 2021 podcast interview, he said that when women prioritize careers over children, it “causes them to chase things that will make them miserable and unhappy.” Presumably, men should chase those things because that is what they are meant to do according to their inherent, God-given nature. But, in Vance’s view, the elites today are trying to “suppress” masculinity, an insidious plot to undercut male vitality and turn boys into girls.

Neither of these visions of masculinity is new. Trump’s has its origins in Hugh Hefner’s 1950s Playboy, which the adolescent Donald no doubt read or at least ogled. His understanding fits with much of today’s manoverse, grown into a formidable influence on young men through Joe Rogan’s podcasts and Dave Portnoy’s Barstool Sports. The vision of manhood in that world is primarily about men’s freedom to say and do what they like, not about family obligations.

In contrast, Vance’s celebration of the family and distinct gender roles is a rehash of the campaign for “traditional family values” of the 1970s and 1980s, with its roots in the Christian right. It fits with the evangelical celebration of a “militant masculinity” and “sweet submissive femininity” that Kristin Kobes Du Mez describes in her 2020 book Jesus and John Wayne. Zack Beauchamp at Vox refers to Vance as one of the “neopatriarchs,” along with Elon Musk and Sen. Josh Hawley, author of a recent book, Manhood , pointing to the Bible as the guide for the revival of male virtues. Substantively, there isn’t much “neo” about them, but Vance personifies a coming together of tech bros and the Christian right in support of gender traditionalism. That alliance lends a veneer of novelty to old ideas that now have a political champion on the Republican ticket. No doubt substantial numbers of young men respond to these appeals to gender traditionalism. In different ways, they raise the possibility for young men of being the boss at home in the way their grandfathers could

have been. But neither Trump’s model of unrestrained male dominance nor Vance’s call to revive the old male breadwinner ideal bears any relation to contemporary realities. Neither represents a successful way to be a man today, much less a practical way to help young men. In contemporary America, where women are doing better at school and are overrepresented in the most rapidly growing occupations, Vance’s prescription for women to return to the home is as much a fantasy as Trump’s unapologetic male domination. Young men are facing genuine problems, but the Republicans have nothing to contribute to the solution.

That’s not to say Trump and Vance’s appeal to the manoverse will fail politically. In 2016, the gender gap increased not because more women voted for Hillary Clinton than had voted for Barack Obama in 2012, but because more men voted for Trump than had voted for Mitt Romney. As research subsequently showed, Trump had an appeal for men with the most sexist attitudes that mainstream Republicans did not have. He brought men to the polls who might not have voted at all. In his efforts to mobilize the manoverse, particularly through his appearances on shows with audiences of young men, Trump is trying to do that again. As The Wall Street Journal reports, Trump’s allies are financing a $20 million voter registration drive focused on young men, first announced on a podcast by two stars of the manoverse, the Nelk Boys, at the beginning of an interview with Vance. Democrats need to figure out a response.

Although Democrats did not address young men or issues of masculinity directly at their convention, they do have a potential messenger in vicepresidential nominee Tim Walz. As a football coach, teacher, and officer in the National Guard, he has had long experience in working with young men. He could take up the challenge of engaging Republicans directly on what a worthy life is for men today. By going on the podcasts and YouTube shows with male audiences, he could reach out to the young men who have heard from Trump and Vance but not from the Democrats.

In late July, two weeks before Harris asked him to run on the ticket, Walz changed the national conversation about Trump and Vance with five words, “These guys are just weird.” What Walz said imme -

diately afterward connected that weirdness to Trump and Vance’s hypermasculinity: “They’re running for He-Man Women Haters Club or something, that’s what they go at. That’s not what people are interested in.” Together, those attention-catching lines have the kernel of what Democrats ought to be saying to young men—one part a counterattack against Trump and Vance; one part positive statement about the Democratic alternative and the genuine interests of young men.

There is something weird about Trump’s way of relating to women and Vance’s bloviations about “childless cat ladies.” They aren’t offering models of a normal masculinity that makes sense today. Relations between men and women are more equal because, in the economy, men and women have become more equal. As Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in her 1983 book The Hearts of Men , women used to need men more than men needed women. A man could get by on his own, whereas a woman “would be hard pressed to make a living on her own at all.” Traditionally, what was at stake in marriage for women was “a claim on some man’s wage.” In the words of the feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who was born in 1860: “The female of the genus homo is economically dependent on the male. He is her food supply.” That world is the source of Trump and Vance’s ideas. It still exists in some traditional quarters of our society, but it’s remote from the life most men and women lead. The “tradwife” is a luxury most young men will not be able to afford.

In making their case, Democrats do not have to be highly original, any more than Trump and Vance have been. They can rightly claim to be the ones who are talking sense about how men and women normally relate today, not as boss and underling but as members of a team, as “Coach Walz” might say. Gender equality does not preclude a vital masculinity, any more than teamwork on a playing field does. The masculine virtues are still virtues on a team, and no, masculinity is not a pathology. Men and women complement each other. They need each other.

A major part of the message that Walz could carry to the online audiences of young men concerns the Democrats’ economic program, including their commitments to expand housing construction and aid for first-time homebuyers, forgiveness of student debt, child tax credits, and policies

More young men grow up today without any regular contact with their fathers and in schools with few male teachers.

aimed at bringing back manufacturing jobs that pay well and don’t require a college degree. Democrats shouldn’t expect to win the competition for young men with policy proposals, but the odds are that young men haven’t heard about their proposals, which convey a message that Democrats want to make a practical difference in their lives. Democrats don’t have to pull back on abortion rights to win their support; there’s no evidence that young men have turned right on abortion—they just don’t vote on it.

In talking about the issues affecting young men, Democrats ought to listen to Richard Reeves, author of Of Boys and Men , who has been arguing for “a positive view of masculinity that is compatible with gender equality.” Obama listed his book as one of his recommended readings for summer 2024 even though Of Boys and Men came out two years earlier, a sign of growing interest in what Reeves has been saying. Some Democratic lawmakers such as Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, who has been especially concerned about loneliness and mental health issues, have called attention to Reeves’s research. Reeves rejects the idea that feminism has “gone too far” in empowering women and insists that “paying more attention to boys and men does not mean backing off the cause of women … A world of floundering men will not be one of flourishing women, or vice versa.”

Class and racial differences are a key part of the story that Reeves tells. He emphasizes that the problems afflicting young men in school, at work, and in their mental health have been especially severe in low-income communities of color. More young men grow up today without any regular contact with their fathers and in schools with few male teachers. The share of male K-12 teachers, he notes, has fallen from 33 percent in 1980

to 24 percent today. Just as the women’s movement has rightly insisted that girls need positive models to look up to, so many young men need models today of successful manhood. He’s right that we need more men in K-12 teaching as well as more investment in vocational education and technical high schools to give young men who may not go to college the chance to make a decent living. “The future cannot be female,” Reeves says. “Nor, of course, can the future be male. The future has to be for every single one of us.”

When I talked recently with Reeves, who runs a nonpartisan think tank, he said that Democrats have a “political opportunity to honor and recognize young men without dishonoring women.” But they have to get out of the “zero-sum trap,” the assumption that any recognition of men’s problems diminishes concerns for women. It would help Democrats if Harris and Walz gave young men “a simple message of welcome … Guys, we see you. We’re on your side as well.” And because Republicans “performatively” side with young men but don’t follow that up with policies, Democrats can gain an advantage by backing up rhetoric with substantive ideas that work for young men. It wouldn’t kill them to point out to young men that the infrastructure bill Biden passed is creating lots of good-paying jobs for them.

Young men aren’t wrong to be concerned about manhood and to respond to political leaders who address it. It’s a legitimate concern for young men who are finding their place in the world, and it’s legitimate for Democrats to respond to them. If Republicans are the only party talking to them about manhood in a positive way, Democrats are going to be in trouble. One theme of the civil rights movement, represented in the slogan “I am a man,” was the defense of Black manhood. Democrats ought to be addressing these issues today because it is a right and necessary thing to do; the floundering of young men is an obstacle to the flourishing of us all.

David Hogg, a founder of the gun control group March for Our Lives, tweeted in early September, “I hope I’m wrong but if we lose in November I think the main reason why will be the number of young men of all races that are no longer Democrats.” I don’t know whether that is true, but the drift of young men to the right isn’t just dangerous for Democrats in this election. Large populations of angry young men are a recipe for long-term political instability and violence. We ignore them at our peril. n

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Cascading Shame

Arlie Russell Hochschild returns to study the motivations of the left-behind right.

By Rhoda Feng

Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right

By Arlie Russell Hochschild New Press

In her 2016 book Strangers in Their Own Land , Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hoch schild explored a seeming paradox. Why is it, she asked, that many people living near polluting petrochemical plants in southern Louisiana support a political movement that opposes environmental regulations and government intervention? She undertook an ethnographic experiment to find out, spending time with and interviewing dozens of people in the bayou country. Her book unfolds a “deep story,” that is, a symbolic, “feels-as-if” story that people tell themselves about themselves. The deep story of this large segment of the political right goes something like this: Hard-working conservatives find themselves patiently “waiting in line” to pursue the American dream, only to see others—“women, immigrants, refugees, public sector workers,” as well as people “on special visas or green cards”—cutting ahead of them. Anger and resentment ensue. If this sounds more like a Fox News talking point than a theoretical framework, it’s one that Hochschild’s downwardly mobile, largely white subjects readily cosigned.

Hoch schild’s new book, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right , builds upon insights from her earlier exploration of life in working-class conservative America as well as her copious work on the management of emotions and feelings to tell an even deeper story about the emotional scaffolding of politics. This time, she trains her sociological lens on eastern Kentucky and the feelings of pride and “unwarranted shame” that float like free radicals in its atmosphere. For her purposes, “pride” and “shame” are “master term[s]” that encompass a range of other

feelings, like “honor, respect, and status” and “humiliation, mortification, or embarrassment,” respectively. A host of factors, including the shrinking of the coal industry, declining unionization, job loss due to automation and offshoring, COVID sickness and death, extreme weather events, and widespread drug addiction, have turned the small Appalachian region of Pike County, Kentucky, into a kind of shame factory— “an epicenter of a larger crisis,” observes Hochschild.

Not that long ago, Kentucky had been a politically moderate state. It’s only relatively recently that the state has seen a significant shift to the right, particularly in Kentucky’s Fifth Congressional District—the setting for Hoch schild’s book and “the whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the country.” For all their regional and historical differences, Kentucky and Louisiana share a number of similarities that make them useful for exploring what Hochschild has called “keyhole” issues, which offer insight into both the perspectives of individual people and broader patterns. Economically, both states have been hard-hit by the decline of key industries—coal in Kentucky and petrochemicals in Louisiana—leaving many communities struggling with high poverty rates and limited job opportunities.

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Whereas Strangers in Their Own Land took up the issue of an environmental paradox—the more polluted a state, the more likely it is to vote Republican— Stolen Pride explores what Hoch schild calls the “pride paradox.” In a nutshell: Appalachians pride themselves on their hard work, yet the “beleaguered economy [has] greatly lowered their chance of success and vulnerability to shame.” When the residents in KY-05 whom Hochschild got to know were unable to secure jobs, pay off debts, or move up the economic ladder, they felt ashamed and “turn[ed] shame inward, project[ed]

shame outward,” or tried to devise a creative way out of the dilemma.

There is, as Hochschild points out, a longstanding tradition of attributing success or failure to personal effort. It’s no accident that many Appalachians are descended from ancestors who hail from Scotland and Ireland—the very populations that sociologist Max Weber identified as embodying the Protestant ethic and “worldly asceticism.” Surveys also show that Republicans tend to adhere more strongly to this traditional work ethic than Democrats; they “impose harsher conditions for deserving pride even as they struggle with making a living in the hardest-hit regions—those more prone to factory closures and lowered wages,” notes Hoch schild.

The theory of the “pride paradox” is buttressed by dozens of interviews, conducted over the course of seven years, with Kentuckians from both the “hill” and “holler,” or upper and lower classes. Her sources include: Andrew Scott, the mayor of Coal Run, ex-governor Paul Patton, a city manager, various right-wing extremists, a disabled TikTok artist, a Muslim doctor, prisoners, and recovering drug addicts. As in her previous book, Hochschild shadowed her subjects at work or visited them in their homes, quoting them at generous length. Through these stories, a clearer picture of their “pride biographies” emerges. Some of her subjects take “bootstrap pride” in their ability to support their family, others cling to “survivor’s pride” after escaping a drug-addled past, and still others style themselves as moral outlaws, which comes with the cachet of “bad-boy pride.”

Almost all the people Hoch schild met with vividly recall instances in which they were “put down for being hillbillies.” One young woman remembered that when she told a bookstore employee in Boston that she was from eastern Kentucky, “he leaned over the counter to see if I was barefoot.” The Appalachians of Stolen Pride staunchly reject the stereotypes of being “fat, drugged out, talking funny, being poor and prejudiced.”

It’s a testament to Hochschild’s humane outlook and grace as an interviewer that

A co-leader of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, seen here, also organized a dress rehearsal in Pikeville, Kentucky, where the book takes place.

none of her subjects comes across as a stereotype—especially impressive in light of the fact that she conducted a portion of the interviews over Zoom after the COVID pandemic made travel from Berkeley to Kentucky impossible. One person we meet who shatters all stereotypes of Appalachians is Ruth Mullins, a 73-year-old retired African American civil servant who has deep family roots in Pikeville. Although she attended an integrated high school, she still faced exclusion in everyday life. One particularly painful memory involved a school trip in 1963, during which she and other Black

students were told to eat in a restaurant’s kitchen while their white classmates dined in the main area. Their teacher did nothing to intervene. To this day, Pikeville is overwhelmingly white—less than 3 percent of its population is nonwhite. And of course, as Hochschild reminds us, the Black-white wealth gap has not budged since 1968.

Another member of Pikeville’s chromatic minority is Dr. Syed Badrudduja (affectionately known as “Dr. Budgy”), a general surgeon who emigrated from Hyderabad, India, to eastern Kentucky in 1976. Initially, he felt isolated in the remote hills of

Appalachia, where he was the only Indian in the area. Over time, more Muslim families joined him, and today there are dozens of medical specialists “from India, Pakistan, Lebanon, Bangladesh, [and] Syria.” Yet Dr. Budgy has felt targeted at times because of his Muslim faith. After 9/11, he received “harassing drunk phone calls” and found that the windows of a mosque that he oversees were shattered by BB gun shots.

While Mullins and Dr. Budgy learned to be “on guard for thrown-off shame-turnedblame,” other subjects embody what Hochschild calls “bootstrap pride.” This form of

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pride emphasizes self-reliance and personal responsibility, and will be recognizable to anyone who has so much as glanced at the cover of J.D. Vance’s memoir, which recounts his Horatio Alger–like ascent from a poverty-stricken childhood in an Ohio steel town to Yale Law School. One of Hoch schild’s interviewees, a small-business owner named Alex Hughes, has long embraced an ethos of “bootstrap” individualism. When first his tattoo parlor and later his computer networking business collapsed, he felt both shame and anger—as if he had been “forced to pawn his honor.” Unable to secure unemployment insurance or food stamps, he scrambled to cobble together a series of odd jobs, only to watch those opportunities dry up as well. Yet rather than blaming structural or external forces, like the collapse of the coal industry or the rise of Amazon and big-box stores, which had decimated small businesses across America, he held himself accountable.

Stolen Pride is careful not to hierarchize different kinds of shame, but the book’s most enlightening section concerns the feelings of people who experience a disjuncture “between public narratives and personal struggles for pride.” David Maynard, a 34-year-old white disabled artist, relates to Hochschild that neither the left nor the right offers him a narrative in which he can see himself reflected or respected. Raised in a trailer park, he “couldn’t be seen as a bootstrapper” but also couldn’t “disregard the pride most Americans [feel] based on being one.” He lives, as he says, “between two racisms”—between the Scylla of Donald Trump and his venomous racism toward nonwhites and the Charybdis of a “new form of racism from the far left” that proscribes talking about “your own experience of being put down” as a white person since whites are assumed to benefit from white privilege. Even as Maynard holds onto a kind of “survivor’s pride” from moving out of the trailer park, he perceives the pride paradox as “a shame trap” for people like him: white, poor, and deprived of full access to “white privilege.”

One of the more infamous figures Hochschild profiles is Matthew Heimbach, the neo-Nazi founder of the Traditionalist Worker Party. Heimbach’s involvement with white supremacist groups is well documented and has been covered in other recent books like Vegas Tenold’s Everything You Love Will Burn and It Can Happen Here:

Almost all the people Hoch schild met with vividly recall instances in which they were “put down for being hillbillies.”

White Power and the Rising Threat of Genocide in the US by Alexander Laban Hinton, the first of which Hochschild references. The connection of right-wing extremism to the pride paradox is relatively straightforward: For many in Appalachia, the rhetoric of groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers appeals because it taps into their feelings of grievance and loss.

Heimbach’s efforts to restore lost pride— he is a descendant of both German and Confederate ancestors—through racial separatism and white nationalism are a direct response to the perceived emasculation and marginalization of white workingclass men. In 2017, he was sued for having co-led the Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia, which left one person dead and 35 others injured. Prior to that march, he had organized another white pride march, in Pikeville, Kentucky, and it is with this earlier march that Hochschild begins her book. The dress rehearsal march, held in 2017, had its detractors: The Kentucky legislature passed a resolution weeks before the march disavowing the Traditionalist Worker Party even as it upheld their “First Amendment right to espouse their hatred.”

In subsequent interviews with Heimbach, Hochschild learns that he was driven by three aims: to “mainstream an extremist message in the peaceful town of Pikeville” by softening the edges of white nationalism; to “lure regular people to his cause”; and to unite the hodgepodge of groups that had signed on to the march, which included the Knights of the KKK , National Socialist Movement, the Dirty White Boys, the Masons, White Lives Matter, and the Council of Conservative Citizens. Hochschild kept in touch with Heimbach for four years, during which time she professed to see “astonishing changes” in him. Years after the march, however, Heim-

bach admits that he still admires Russia’s Vladimir Putin and that he has not passed “the DHS definition [of] ‘de-radicalized.’” His story is a ringing reminder of how easily the pride paradox can be exploited by those with dangerous agendas.

Hoch schild suggests that a major part of Donald Trump’s appeal lies in his ability to tap into the deep wells of shame that exist in communities like those of eastern Kentucky. As the coal industry has withered, so too has the region’s pride, leaving behind a void that has been filled by feelings of shame and resentment. Hoch schild speculates that several “stayers” in the region found in Trump a salvific figure through whom they could “grieve their own stolen pride.” His rhetoric of economic nationalism and his promises to “bring back coal” resonated with those who felt that globalization lowered their rank in the national pride economy. To Roger Ford, the CEO of an energy corporation and an organizer of a 2020 pro-Trump parade, Trump symbolized nothing so much as “a master antishame warrior,” who could dispel both personal and collective shame.

Left unchecked, the deep sense of grievance that exists in regions like eastern Kentucky has the potential to fuel further political polarization and even violence, while contributing to the further erosion of democratic institutions and the rise of authoritarianism.

Noting these dangers, Hochschild urges “relief from the uneven burdens of the pride paradox.” What this looks like in practice is left unsaid. Even as Hochschild refrains from providing specific, actionable policy items to resolve the pride paradox, however, she suggests that we revise the notion of the American dream and equalize access to it. Some people, like David Maynard, the TikTok artist who felt excluded by dominant narratives, may elect to put themselves on a path to an “emotional American Dream” rather than a material one. No matter where we sit on the political spectrum, Hochschild urges us to “recognize the faces of the overburden,” which is the term for “the mountaintop soil the machines dump over the side,” and “expand access to a re-envisioned American Dream.” n

Rhoda Feng writes about theater and books for The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, The Nation, Vogue, and more.

It’s Good to Be the King

The ins and outs of how the mega-rich wall themselves off from government’s prying eyes

By Helaine Olen

Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism

By Brooke Harrington Norton

The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World

By Atossa Araxia Abrahamian Riverhead

The greatest observers of how money influences people and corrupts institutions are not, as a general rule, those who possess it. They are instead those who, as F. Scott Fitzgerald recognized a century ago, live and work in close proximity to them. This is the insight that both inspires and informs sociologist Brooke Harrington’s trenchant new book Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism . Harrington grew up in the extremely monied Chicago suburb of Lake Forest, a place so familiar to Fitzgerald he drew on it when writing The Great Gatsby. But even though she attended the same public school as the heirs to great American fortunes, Harrington comes from the wannabe class, with a working mom, a dad whose attempts to make a fortune eventually only earned him a term in jail, and a sister so severely disabled that the family was forced to rely on state funds to get by financially. The cognitive dissonance must have been overwhelming.

In the manner of bright and somewhat neglected children, Harrington intellectualized this conflict. She studies the stealth-like ways of the richest among us, first to survive attending school with these young scions, and then in adulthood as a sociologist researching the impact of inequality.

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This, in turn, leads her to the extremely opaque area of offshore finance, a world that encompasses everything from anonymous Delaware corporations to “peripheral fiscal paradises” like the Cook Islands, Panama, and the Bahamas, where a not unsubstantial part of the economy consists of “helping wealthy foreigners break their own countries’ laws.” Economist Gabriel Zucman estimates total offshore wealth accounts for 10 percent of global GDP and that this institutionalized tax evasion is costing $200 billion in global revenue annually.

Needless to say, it’s an area where scholarly study is desperately needed. Everyone

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from Russian oligarchs to Third World dictators takes advantage of the ever-growing, secretive financial world of anonymous shell companies and arcane interpretations of murky laws. A rogues’ gallery of governments and lawyers and accountants assist the globe’s wealthiest men and women as they hide their money—from not just the taxman, but also political and business rivals, not to mention the occasional ex-spouse. Harrington quickly and unsurprisingly runs into brick walls attempting to learn more about this secretive system of wealth, until she recalls something she first noted about the rich families she encountered as a child: They rarely do anything for themselves. They need help, even with something as mundane as changing a light bulb. (This is literally true. Harrington tells us she went to summer camp with a chewing gum heiress whose parents were unable to perform this basic life task.) The same is the case when it comes to something as significant as managing and investing money. So Harrington gets credentialed in wealth man-

agement, specializing in her target, offshore finance. She’ll study the rich by studying their financial consiglieres and enablers.

As an academic, Harrington is granted no access. As a peer, even though she isn’t working in wealth management and informs everyone she is doing academic fieldwork, she’s viewed as not just an equal, but someone with whom secrets can be shared. In sociological terms, she performs immersive fieldwork, gaining the trust of wealth managers so she can reveal this world to the rest of us.

While conducting fieldwork research in this system, the rationalizations she hears are endless. Offshore finance was pitched to newly independent nations after World War II as a way of financially prospering while sticking it to their former masters. Call it a form of “postcolonial resistance.” Many— though not all!—of the wealth managers enabling offshore finance deny the gravity of what they are doing. “Most of what we do is paperwork,” one such financial factotum tells Harrington, but that’s yet another bit of excuse-making. It’s not just paperwork,

any more than Hannibal Lecter is simply an expert in adventurous dining.

Instead, these occasionally conflicted but often boastful men (they are not infrequently men) are inadvertently facilitating the destruction of fair and just economies, not to mention political systems, around the globe. A number identify more with their über-wealthy clients. “Social democracy,” one sniffs, “is creating too big demands on the wealth creators.” The resulting missing money (at least from public coffers) is no small part of the ongoing collapse of both our public services and political culture. Democracy, as a rule, decreases as wealth inequality rises. It distorts the economics of day-to-day life as well. Anonymous money has sent the value of everything from fine art to real estate skyrocketing, as the wealthy shelter money in alternative assets and in pied-à-terre condos in cities like New York and London.

While the rich obviously benefit immensely, it doesn’t really help the residents of the assorted global tax havens. The inflow of cash rarely trickles down to them. Instead,

The Cook Islands is one of the new independent territories after World War II that turned to offshore finance to prosper.

Abrahamian’s concern is the growth of what she describes as the extraterritorial state—a place where the rules don’t apply.

many continue to live in poverty and nearpoverty, even as the open contempt for the tax laws of other nations leads to an increase in contempt for the laws of their own, and everything from petty corruption to violent crime soars. A fisherman in the Cook Islands tells Harrington, “Everyone calls us the Crook Islands now,” while Panama City, another favored destination, at one point had one of the highest murder rates in the world. If this sounds vaguely familiar, it should. The term “offshore” itself is something of a misnomer. The United States is the premier destination for those who would hide money, courtesy of some of our national virtues: regulatory laxness and, bluntly, legalized corruption. Why bother with the Bahamas if a black-box Delaware corporation will do?

Here in the U.S., these rich evading Uncle Sam probably increase the taxes the rest of us pay by at least 15 percent, even as we are still routinely told “we can’t afford” for the government to do everything from spending on mass transit to offering paid maternity leave. White-collar crime is common, while prosecutions for it are less so. A recent investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists revealed that even though the IRS has had explicit authority since 2010 to go after offshore maneuvers undertaken to avoid taxes, it rarely took action until recently, seemingly as a result of a combination of BigLaw lobbying and agency employees being aware that their greatest chance at riches was to take advantage of the revolving door and go work for the firms doing their darndest to cheat the American public.

This secrecy is corrosive in another way too. The same laws and financial investment techniques that enable tax dodging are also in no small part responsible for the flood of dark money into our politics. It is yet another reason why we’ve got the best government money can buy—for the monied elite, that is. A study conducted a decade ago by Martin Gilens, then at Princeton University, and Benjamin Page of North-

western University found that American government actions and policies are much more responsive to the sentiments of the wealthy than the majority. The anti-democratic thrust of offshore finance offers up a reason why.

Offshore is not Harrington’s first book on the topic—that would be 2016’s Capital Without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent—but her latest benefits from almost a decade’s worth of knowledge and events. Donald Trump’s election to the White House led many to ponder how much of his wealth came not from smart investing strategies but by turning his eponymously named real estate residential towers into a parking lot for Russian oligarchs’ prodigious wealth. Leaks like the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers also revealed to the public in excruciating detail how everyone from Queen Elizabeth to high-ranking elected officials hid their funds in complicated offshore financial arrangements. We know a lot more than we used to about the consequences of offshore finance, and Harrington has more secrets to tell. But it’s still not enough.

The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World , by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, is another attempt to unravel this secretive space, albeit from a different vantage point. Abrahamian’s concern is the growth of what she describes as the extraterritorial state—a place where, in significant ways, it can be said the rules don’t apply, at least not the way one would think they should. This world encompasses the world of offshore money that is Harrington’s concern, but it is bigger than that. Whether a person or nation wants to get around money-laundering laws, the taxman, environmental or labor regulations, or rules governing asylum requests, there is a geographical place where it can happen.

As Abrahamian explores Swiss banking laws, fine art storage, factories on the African island nation of Mauritius where workers earn a fraction of what they would in developed countries, or Australia’s penchant for stashing migrants offshore so it doesn’t need to consider possibly legitimate claims for asylum, it’s hard not to suspect all this is an extralegal version of “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” but with much more consequence.

These books are, in many ways, mirror images of one another. Harrington’s book is short—a mere 120 pages—and can be read in one sitting. Abrahamian’s is more dis-

cursive and reads like a series of connected magazine articles. I wished Harrington’s book was longer, while Abrahamian’s, overflowing with descriptions and histories, could have benefited from an editor with a more merciless red pen. Neither, unfortunately, spends much time parsing the world of cryptocurrency, though the “currency”— note the quote marks—opens up new frontiers in cash laundering, tax avoidance, and incentivizing criminal behavior.

Abrahamian echoes many of Harrington’s critiques, pointing to the inequality endemic to these places. (The lack of labor rights enforcement in Mauritius? A feature, not a bug.) But she also believes they’ve existed for hundreds of years for a reason: They serve to reconcile the competing imperatives of nationalism and globalism. These two competing views lead to something of a cop-out at the end of her book: a declaration that they cannot be viewed as “all good, or all evil” and instead offer us an alternative way of viewing our world and how it came to be. All true, but given some of the financial human horrors described in the book, a sterner conclusion is called for.

Harrington is tougher. She concludes her book by making the commonsense suggestion that we need not just a return to shame culture—make cash laundering and tax dodging embarrassing again!—but also more enforcement. Returning to her childhood, and the insight that started her curiosity about wealth managers, she calls for governments to make it partially or fully illegal for licensed professionals to assist the rich in shielding their money in offshore vehicles.

This stuff is enormously complicated. It requires knowledge of not just finance, but laws in multiple jurisdictions. Few billionaires have the wherewithal to comprehend it without the aid of trusted and discreet experts. But a salaryman, no matter how well paid or well credentialed, is still just the staff. We will never, to riff off F. Scott Fitzgerald, be able to fully stop the wealthy from smashing things up and wanting to retreat back into a world cushioned by their money. But we sure can make it harder for them to find enablers to smooth their path to doing just that. n

Helaine Olen is a contributing columnist at MSNBC.com, a 2024 Reporter in Residence at the Omidyar Network, and managing editor at the American Economic Liberties Project.

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The Capacity to Change

Sally Rooney on love and redemption

By Tisya Mavuram

Intermezzo

By Sally Rooney Farrar, Straus & Giroux

In chess, an intermezzo is when a player opts not to play the move expected of them, instead posing an immediate threat their opponent must address before playing the expected move. This typically happens in between exchanges or tactical combinations, shifting the situation to the player’s advantage. There are more possible chess positions than atoms in the known universe. Even grand masters with hundreds of thousands of positions committed to memory know that at any given moment, the tide can turn and players can find themselves in unknown or even dangerous territory. Sally Rooney’s new novel, Intermezzo, is

accurately named, especially for a writer whose style and impact has been so well documented. When people talk about Rooney’s contributions to literature, it’s often in the context of her age. She is the voice of a generation, or at least a voice of a generation. The New York Times called her the first great millennial novelist, which says as much about what critics think about millennials as it does her own considerable talent. She writes insular stories, putting a few well-dissected characters under a microscope while the rest of the world is set dressing.

Her particular style has inspired plenty of imitators, but it’s hard to strike a balance between the ultraspecific and the universal. When you write about people in such a granular fashion, you run the risk of irrelevance. Intimacy between two people is everything to them. Does it mean anything to the rest of us? Crit-

ics seem to believe that this is the extent of the literary legacy millennials have thus far created for themselves; they focus intensely on personal relationships and their feelings, but it’s questionable whether zooming in so closely will stand the test of time. What else can you expect from youth?

The thing about millennials is that they’re not so young anymore. In an interview with The Telegraph back in 2018, Rooney confessed to the interviewer her internal discomfort with writing novels for a living. “I feel like I could devote myself to far more important things,” she said. “And I have just failed to do that.”

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When that interview was published, Rooney had just released her second novel, Normal People, to widespread critical and commercial acclaim. Normal People follows two on-again, off-again lovers, Connell and Marianne, through their last year of secondary school and then at university. Connell wants to be a writer. There’s a moment during his freshman year where he discovers his classmates appear confident but they don’t do the reading, and then through sheer preparation he finds himself at the top of his class. Connell often expresses disgust with the superficiality of literary culture, and is aggrieved at the presumption that wealthy students can bullshit

their way through the world without ever truly having to earn their place in it.

Despite his cynicism, the intimacy he shares with Marianne is generative for him, even as their relationship runs into questions. “All these years they’ve been like two little plants sharing the same plot of soil, growing around one another, contorting to make room, taking certain unlikely positions,” Marianne thinks of their history. “But in the end she has done something for him, she’s made a new life possible, and she can always feel good about that.” The story concludes with Connell becoming as successful as a university graduate in English can hope to be, getting accepted to a prestigious MFA program in New York.

In Rooney’s last novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021), Alice is a successful writer who has recently suffered a mental breakdown and is trying to recuperate in a small town in the Irish countryside. She and her best friend, Eileen, write long emails to each other about the superficiality of the pursuit of love, considering that there is so much suffering in the world. Ultimately, neither of them is inclined to change their lifestyle or become more politically active as a result of the injustices they are so quick to name. They’re more interested in proving to themselves and others that they’re smart rather than actually doing something. It’s easier to complain about the world than to change it.

It was good timing for Beautiful World, Where Are You to come out just as the COVID vaccines became widely available and we re-entered the world after lockdown. Three years later, as the housing affordability crisis has only gotten worse, we teeter on the edge of climate catastrophe, and a genocide is under way in Gaza, mild nihilism isn’t right for the moment anymore. It feels tone-deaf to complain about wasting one’s life away as people suffer abroad, while we have seen graphic evidence of their suffering every day for nearly a year. The West cannot afford to wallow in its own neuroses while facilitating horrors on the rest of the world. Three years later, it seems that Sally Rooney has finally made peace with being a novelist. Intermezzo zooms out beyond the granularity of intimate relationships to explore grief and familial bonds, what ties family members together and what drives them apart. The story concerns two brothers who are reeling in the wake of their father’s death. Peter, 32, is a human rights lawyer in Dublin, and Ivan, 22, a semi-professional chess player.

Putting fraternal bonds under the microscope with which she typically analyzes romantic relationships is a natural next step for Rooney.

Ivan and Peter are not close, and their father’s death has exacerbated the dynamics that keep them separate. Peter had a lessthan-ideal relationship with his father, while Ivan lost one of the only allies he felt he had. Peter is torn between two women in his life: his former longtime girlfriend Sylvia, who ended their relationship six years ago after suffering a disabling accident, and Naomi, a younger woman with whom he has a transactional and, despite himself, emotionally intimate relationship. Underlying this central tension is Peter’s intense desire to live conventionally, to be perceived as normal. Once successful and well liked, he has taken to self-medicating with pills and alcohol, numbing the anxiety generated by his intense need to be unexceptional.

His narrative mimics this self-medicating habit: half-formed sentences, erratic thoughts. Jumping to conclusions, making snap judgments about people. He is selfaware about his challenges but less sure of who he is, filtering everything he does through the lens of what it says about him and what other people may think. “All you do is tell lies and talk in clichés all the time,” Ivan says of Peter. “You never say anything true.”

Peter may be an unreliable narrator, but Ivan is also implicated. In meticulously observing the world laid out in front of him, it’s obvious to the reader that he is processing emotions that are totally new to him. He takes in his surroundings and picks apart each detail, using logic to discern his feelings and process them in the context of the moment. His narrative is nothing new for Rooney, bringing to mind a teenage Connell in Normal People , who was frequently trying to dissect feelings too large for him to comprehend.

In the rural village of Leitrim, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman who works at the arts center where a chess exhibition is taking place. Despite her misgivings, they soon

begin a relationship, becoming intertwined with one another in rapid time. Everything about their relationship is logistically unsound. Margaret is 14 years older, they don’t live in the same city, and she is recently separated from her husband.

This isn’t a novel about age gap discourse, but Rooney is careful to address the dynamics between Ivan and Margaret that inevitably present themselves, without passing judgment. Like Peter, who is also cursed with the anxiety of advancing in age, Margaret worries about the implications of their intimacy: “She would soon grow older, too old, no longer beautiful, unable to give him children, while he was still a very young man. He didn’t understand or want to know that now: and why should he have to, when they were lying there in bed together, languid, happy, in love, why think about the cruelty of time?”

Ivan has no such hesitation. Once an incel, radicalized by the internet like so many young men his age, he is less misanthropic in love, more inclined to feel a camaraderie with those around him. Being in love with Margaret gives him a sense of purpose in life.

Reflecting on his less-than-stable occupation as a freelance data analyst, Ivan thinks to himself: “Of course, whether or not there is a beautiful woman in his life who enjoys being kissed by him, he still has to pay rent: he accepts this. Nonetheless, it is better to feel hopeful and optimistic about one’s life on earth while engaged in the never-ending struggle to pay rent, than to feel despondent and depressed while engaged in the same non-optional struggle anyway.”

In the grief accompanying their father’s death, both brothers turn further away from each other as they increasingly rely on the women they love, struggling with the weight of their choices. Putting fraternal bonds, or the lack thereof, under the microscope she typically reserves for romantic relationships, Rooney proves that she can cover more ground than what the literary world expects from her. In doing so, she reinforces a central thesis of her work: that intimacy can make people change, deepening their commitment to the collective, and that change is always possible. Intermezzo is a powerful rejoinder to Rooney’s skeptics, proving that the millennial novel can be just as expansive as older literary traditions. n

PARTINGSHOT How?

“Donald Trump is an unserious man. But the consequences of putting him back in the White House are extremely serious,” said Vice President Kamala Harris at her DNC speech in Chicago. It was a good line, and one that begs a much bigger question: How the f*** are we here again? How are we a handful of swing-state voters away from giving head-wound Hitler another shot at the Oval Office? How are we here, when everything about this man is both unserious and dangerous?

Trump and J.D. Vance prove week after week just how unserious they are about this election. Their answers to policy questions are at best mere slogans and at worst nonsensical. Trump told a bearded biker concerned about housing affordability that they were going to “drill baby drill,” and said that his proposal for lowering the cost of child care is to impose tariffs on foreign nations. I’m sorry, what?

Meanwhile, Vance is just an upcycled Mike Pence with more venture capitalist money. He is pathologically obsessed with the idea of somehow making women have more babies, but when actually asked about child care, says that states should lower regulations for day care providers. Doesn’t he represent the party that alleges groomers in education are harming children? Yes, let’s take down the guardrails for day care providers. CPR certification is woke! Look, we know the Trump campaign has been in hysterics ever since President Biden did something they could never fath-

om doing—relinquishing power—and now they have to actually try. But this level of negligence on basic policies is both dumbfounding and terrifying. It’s clear that if elected, their administration will just be a cipher for libertarian billionaires and religious theocrats. Maybe they think they don’t need to do more given the new MAGA state election board in Georgia and new voter ID laws in Nevada? None of it resonates with the American electorate and yet somehow, somehow this election is still close.

And therein lies my real issue with this election. Once again I am asking, once again I will continue to ask, from now until November 5: How?

How in the gReAteST DEmoCraCy on EaRth, how is Trump still running for office? How have the courts, the media, and our electoral system allowed a convicted white-collar felon and sexual abuser, a man with dozens of criminal charges hanging over him, who time and again abused the office of the presidency to do things like blackmail the government of Ukraine, weaponize the DOJ, and oh yeah, advocate for a DIY coup of ex-military boat dads to attack the Capitol, to take a shot at becoming the most powerful man in the world, again? And on top of that, how is every judge and prosecutor too chickensh*t to sentence the guy for the crimes he has been convicted of before November, out of fear of politicizing the election? Heaven forbid the election becomes TOO POLITICAL!

“But whatever could we do about it?” the

centrists coo in their calmest NPR voice. Let’s pause and take a look at another democracy in the Americas: Brazil. Former President Jair Bolsonaro, the “Trump of the Tropics,” also denied the election results of his 2022 loss. He also summoned a mob to attack the nation’s legislature. But because Brazilian democracy stipulates elections are overseen by a federal electoral court rather than a state patchwork, Jair Bolsonaro was ruled ineligible to run for president for eight years. Brazilian law says that any elected official who abuses their power is temporarily barred from seeking re-election. Meanwhile, about a dozen states in the U.S. have tried, and failed, to disqualify Trump from the ballot for inciting an insurrection against the government because * NPR voice* “Would that merely embolden the president?” Yes, wouldn’t the criminal be emboldened to commit more crime if they were held accountable for their criming? Are we hearing ourselves?

To function in American democracy is to perpetually paper over the feeling that you’re going crazy. And to treat this election as normal is to agree to be gaslighted over and over again in the service of “balance,” “respectability,” or any of the other meaningless traits we use to characterize ourselves like a bad cover letter for our country. America is proficient in racial unity and ballot access. Also Microsoft Excel!

But anyway, back to the horse race. Oh look! Another poll!—Francesca Fiorentini I mean it, how?

Project 2025: ‘Institutionalizing Trumpism’

By Randi Weingarten, President, AFT

Donald Trump wants to run as far away as he can from the extremist—and extremely unpopular— manifesto known as Project 2025, but his attempts to disassociate himself from it don’t pass the sniff test. The explicit goal of the plan, according to its chief architect, is “institutionalizing Trumpism.” Its authors, who include former Cabinet secretaries and top White House officials in the Trump administration, detail how to do that in the first 180 days of what they hope will be a second Trump term.

Trump recognizes that Project 2025 has become a very bad brand, but the overlap between the radical plan and Trump’s official campaign platform, Agenda47, and his own statements tie the former president to the most dystopian elements of this authoritarian and anti-American agenda. It’s why so many Republicans, including George W. Bush’s former vice president and his former attorney general, see Trump as such a grave threat to our republic that they have crossed party lines to endorse Kamala Harris.

I’ll slip into teacher mode to describe some of what’s in the 900-plus page tome. Project 2025 would affect every facet of our lives, starting with healthcare. It eliminates the protections for people with pre-existing conditions—reverting to the bad old days before Obamacare when insurance companies could deny coverage to people with asthma, diabetes, cancer or countless other conditions. It allows the government to monitor pregnancies so they can prosecute people if they miscarry and imprison doctors and nurses who treat patients experiencing pregnancy-related health crises. It would take money out of your pocket—banning Medicare from negotiating lower drug prices and ending prescription drug price caps, increasing costs for as many as 18.5 million seniors. This authoritarian plan would undermine the rule of law and democracy. The Justice Department and the FBI would be wholly owned subsidiaries of the White House to carry out Trump’s orders, such as his threat last week to jail political opponents and election officials for what he baselessly claims is election fraud. And it would allow nonpartisan, career government experts on everything from nuclear energy to national security to be fired and replaced by Trump loyalists.

Project 2025 would kick the ladder of opportunity out from under all but the most advantaged children and families—and Trump doesn’t distance himself from these plans. He pretends that abolishing the Department of Education would be a simple bureaucratic maneuver, but it would rob millions of students in public schools in every community in the country of vital resources, programs and protections. And if states and localities wanted to replace the loss of vital federal funds, they would have to increase taxes.

Project 2025 would eliminate Title I funding for schools serving low-income children—sending class sizes soaring and stripping individualized attention from students with the greatest needs. It would slash funding to support students with disabilities, rescind protections for LGBTQIA+ students and cut free school lunches. It would harm the youngest and oldest students—scrapping Head Start and reinstate crushing student debt.

Ending Head Start would hurt both young children and their families. Children would be denied the learning and enrichment that come from highquality preschool. And many parents would be forced out of work by the high cost and lack of availability of child care, pushing their families into

poverty. This would exacerbate the already critical lack of child care, particularly in rural areas.

Project 2025 paves the way for the extremists’ holy grail—limitless funding for private and religious schools, leading to the end of the separation of church and state and of public education as we know it.

This agenda is not pro-child or pro-family; it is about cementing power, opportunity and advantages for some and denying them to others.

Why do these extremists want to erase decades of progress? Why do they want to destroy public education? They fear what public schools do—the teaching of critical thinking, honest history and tolerance—because their backward-looking brand of greed, power and privilege cannot survive in a democracy of diverse, educated citizens.

This extremist manifesto is the stuff of demagogues and dictators, not democracies.

So they’re going after educational opportunity. They’re going after economic opportunity. They’re going after equal opportunity. They’re going after the legitimacy of elections. This is the stuff of demagogues and dictators, not democracies. This is not the promise of America. We can and must do better than this—for the sake of our families and the future of our republic.

Photo: AFT Staff

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