The American Prospect, #343

ERWIN CHEMERINSKY ON TRUMP AND THE SUPREME COURT

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN ON HIS ECONOMIC AGENDA

Who Really Gets Fat From the Federal Budget?

It’s not who Elon Musk says is responsible

By David Dayen

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16 We Found the $2 Trillion

Elon Musk wants to cut government spending. But the waste in the system goes to elites like him. Here’s a better way to bring down deficits. By David Dayen

26 Will the Courts Enforce the Constitution Against President Trump?

If they don’t, the checks and balances that have defined our government since its inception will give way to one-man authoritarian rule. By

Erwin Chemerinsky

Chips on the Table

The Biden administration wanted to restore the domestic semiconductor industry. The results have disappointed. By

Susannah Glickman and Madhumita Dutta

44 From the Middle Out and Bottom Up

The 46th president of the United States outlines his economic principles, and his record. By Joe Biden

The Onion of Kensington

The American dream collides with tragedy in a historic, largely immigrant community in Philadelphia that’s one of the epicenters of the nation’s fentanyl crisis.

Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera and Sergio Chapa

I write this a week before the inauguration of Donald Trump to be the 47th president of the United States. Democrats have spent the transition period falling all over themselves to figure out the best way to work with him and the Republicans. It wasn’t all that long ago that Democrats were an opposition party, doing the kinds of things an opposition party does, like “offering a contrast” and “trying to make the ruling party pay a political price for their unpopular beliefs.” But it feels like all of that has been forgotten in the run-up to Trump’s re-coronation.

This was actually true of Trump’s first term, too. I remember Chuck Schumer trying to work together with Trump on an infrastructure plan, and a lot of Democrats on Capitol Hill believing that Trump could be nudged in their direction; wasn’t he a Democrat most of his life, after all? Core to this tendency for Democrats to kneejerk collaborate when they lose power is that they have internalized a critique Republicans have beaten into the media, that “real Americans” hate liberals and their ideas. This leads to Democrats positioning themselves as kinder, gentler Republicans for a spell. Republicans, on the other hand, lose power and mull over whether to change their approach for about six nanoseconds before doubling down, combined these days with claiming they didn’t actually lose.

Democrats are neurotic; Republicans are pathological. The party responses to defeat proceed from there.

Typically, it takes some precipitating event for Democrats to realize that they stand for something. In the first term, it was the Muslim ban; I was actually getting off a plane in Los Angeles at precisely the moment that the

protests started in the adjacent terminal, and was the only person in the protest trailing baggage behind me. We don’t know what the precipitating event will be this time; maybe mass deportations (Emma Janssen has a good piece in this issue about advocates and individuals preparing for that), maybe an unconstitutional power grab (UC Berkeley law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky highlights the major possibilities there), maybe the bid to revoke worker voices on the job (Harold Meyerson writes about the attack on the nation’s labor laws), or maybe the imperial conquest of Greenland (see our back page). But there is likely to be something that the public sours on, that makes Democrats realize they can actually fight the descent into conservative authoritarianism. Let’s hope it arrives soon.

My story for this issue begins to envision what an opposition party might say on the plan to slash social spending to pay for tax cuts, a rather unpopular initiative where Democrats have a good story to tell as an alternative: Budget giveaways to the rich and powerful make up practically all the “waste,” so let’s attack those areas instead. When the shock of the election loss wears off, this is a potential starting point for the days ahead.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the terrible loss our Prospect family suffered at the end of last year. Our John Lewis Writing Fellow Janie Ekere passed away; she was only 25. There’s a tribute in this issue that highlights her work uplifting marginalized voices and fighting for a better world. We remember her and vow to do the same. —David Dayen

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PROSPEC TS

ROBERT KUTTNER

Corrupted Capitalism and Dithering Democrats

In the past few dec­

ades, American capitalism has become more concentrated, more corrupt, and more opaque. This is true of banking, insurance, telephone and cable companies, electric utilities, airlines, railroads, tech platforms, the drug industry, and of course hospitals and health systems. The trend is also infecting smaller industries that were traditionally locally owned, such as veterinary practices, tree services, pest control companies, nursing homes, and many more, all of which are being bought up by private equity companies.

Wall Street has a cynical term for this strategy: rollups. They frustrate the competition that makes capitalism tolerably efficient, raise profits, further enrich the rich, and take advantage of consumers and workers. Orchestrating mergers and acquisitions also enriches investment bankers, so the system feeds on itself.

This has occurred despite the heroic efforts of two of President Biden’s best appointees, FTC Chair Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, who made a dent in extreme concentration by reviving longmoribund antitrust enforcement.

But without a clear ideology and narra­

tive, voters don’t connect the dots between corporate concentration and their own daily frustrations. Instead, voters vaguely blame a corrupted system. Voters perceive, all too accurately, that neither party is addressing their frustrations and that both are part of an establishment that someone called the swamp. And they’re right.

Donald Trump got elected a second time because Democrats failed to use the Biden interlude to articulate a general critique of corrupted capitalism and its impact on ordinary people. Instead, a talented demagogue deflected inchoate grievances against predatory capitalism onto immigrants, trans people, and condescending metro liberals.

Trump and his corrupt crony, the world’s richest man Elon Musk, epitomize the marriage of faux­populist rhetoric and personal grifting. Too many people admire the sheer nerve of Trump and Musk, and imagine that it will somehow spill over and benefit them.

Democrats can try to point out Trump’s hypocrisy, and they have. But that’s not sufficient. And the reason why Democrats have failed to tell their own compelling story is all too obvious: Democrats are part of the corruption. Not all Democrats,

but enough Democrats to blur a coherent opposition narrative.

What concentration and corruption have in common is that they are blindingly complicated and largely opaque to ordinary people. To grasp why health care is such a nightmare, you need to know something about the consolidation of insurers, providers, and pharmacy benefit managers by conglomerates like UnitedHealthcare; the systematic upcoding of bills; other pricing games that hospitals play; the deliberate crowding out of primary care doctors by more profitable specialists; the proliferation of other middlemen in the health system; and a lot more.

Only occasionally does the abuse break through to popular consciousness and popular anger, as after the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, or in the popular revolt against the airline cartel during delays in 2022, which finally roused Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to issue some pro ­ consumer rules.

But a political analysis on the part of the electorate is not self­ executing. The spotlight on UnitedHealth was a rare teachable moment. The Democrats did not use it to teach.

Private equity’s takeover of more and more industries is another instance of abuses that are largely invisible to the general public. Only occasionally, as in the case of the takeover of a group of Catholic hospitals by Cerberus Capital, which rebranded the chain Steward Health and extracted over a billion dollars needed for patient care, is the abuse so flagrant that it becomes palpable.

But for the most part, the executioner’s face is well hidden. Ordinary people notice that nursing homes are deteriorating in quality, or that it has become far more expensive to take your dog to the vet, or that retailers keep going out of business. They don’t track changes in corporate ownership. The press simply reports that another iconic retailer went broke.

Much of what we do at the Prospect is investigative and explanatory pieces on the deepening corruption of American capitalism and how it affects regular Americans in their roles of workers, consumers, parents, patients. The story of how corrupted capitalism undermines the living standards and life chances of ordinary people adds up to a narrative and an ideology. But it doesn’t create a politics. That’s the job of an opposition party.

Some Democrats grasp this. The work of

Elizabeth Warren, for example, provides a rough draft of what the opposition would be espousing if they were a Democratic Party worthy of the name.

For instance, Warren’s Accountable Capitalism Act, first introduced in 2018, would require any company with gross receipts over $1 billion to obtain a federal charter. For these companies, employees would elect at least 40 percent of the board of directors. A 75 percent vote of shareholders and directors would be required to approve any political spending over $10,000. The act would give directors a duty of “creating a general public benefit” with regard to a corporation’s stakeholders, including shareholders, employees, and the environment, and the interests of the enterprise in the long term.

The idea of requiring federal chartering of large corporations has been around since the Progressive Era, as an antidote to the weak system of state chartering that has created a classic race to the bottom. Warren is willing to name the problem right in the bill’s title: accountable capitalism . National Review called Warren’s proposal “the most radical proposal advanced by a mainstream Democratic lawmaker to date.” That’s precisely the point. A proposal that ought to be at the heart of the Democratic Party program is at the fringe.

A second Warren bill, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, seeks to end the enterprise as we know it. Private equity operators make their fortunes by looting the assets of the portfolio companies they acquire. Warren would curb the use of acquiring companies via debt, end “special compensation payments” to private equity owners, put those owners on the hook for operating losses, and restrict abuse of the bankruptcy laws. The 2024 version of the bill was expanded to prohibit private equity companies from selling hospital properties to real estate investment trusts.

Private equity exists only because of a huge loophole in the securities laws that should never have been created. It is at the heart of corrupted capitalism. It is also central to the screwing of workers, since private equity owners invariably cut wages and loot pension plans.

But Warren’s bill has just six Senate cosponsors. Why? Because private equity operators include Democrats as well as Republicans, and they spread their political money around. The perception on the part of so many Trump voters that the supposed

mainstream of both parties is corrupt turns out to be all too accurate.

The Democratic Party should be explaining and narrating all of this. Instead, in the aftermath of the defeat of Kamala Harris, Democrats are all over the place in their diagnosis of what went wrong and how to fix it.

A related obstacle is that fixing a system as convoluted as health care is genuinely hard. Even if Democrats had the votes to replace the entire mess with national health insurance, the transitional challenges would be immense.

But partial policies can open the door to more transformative policies. When I was young, practical lefties were reading a French theorist named André Gorz, who came up with the concept of “non­reformist reform.” By that, Gorz meant policy changes or political demands that seemed merely incremental but that had the potential to lead to more transformative strategies. By contrast, many seemingly reformist policies have the perverse effect of reinforcing existing structures. My colleague Paul Starr, in a classic article co­written several decades ago with Gøsta Esping­Andersen, called this policy trap “passive intervention.” When progressives lack either the votes or the imagination to achieve transformative policies, they settle for inefficient half measures that reinforce existing structures of private power and make the government look bad.

The two classic areas where this occurs, Paul and Gøsta wrote (in 1979!), are health care and housing. Their critique anticipated the flaws in the Affordable Care Act, which further entrenches the private health insurance system instead of supplanting it with true social insurance.

During the ACA debate, progressives pressed President Obama to allow people to opt for a Medicare ­type “public option” for insurance. But Obama didn’t expend political capital on assembling the votes, even though the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. Too many Democrats were in bed with the insurance industry.

In the case of housing, the government spends tens of billions subsidizing private developers to provide affordable housing, which is reversed as soon as the developer finds it expedient to convert to market­rate housing. Permanent social housing would be more efficient and more just, but government even under Democrats lacks the ideological nerve and the votes.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, another Warren invention, is a splendid example of non­reformist reform. In protecting consumers from a variety of corporate abuses, the CFPB shines an educational light on just how predatory capitalism works.

I was personally involved in one epic case of non ­reformist reform, the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, which requires banks to affirmatively extend credit to underserved communities if they want regulatory approval for various activities. For four decades, the CRA energized community organizing around reinvestment goals and compelled banks to reverse redlining. This progress came to an abrupt halt after bipartisan collusion on extreme banking deregulation led to the 2008 financial collapse, wiping out several decades of progress.

A related problem for Democrats is a vacuum of leadership. I cannot recall a time when there were so few Democrats who are plausible as national leaders or possible candidates for president.

Last December, Jon Stewart interviewed the very talented and eloquent Ben Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party and a leading candidate for chair of the Democratic National Committee. So compelling was Wikler that Stewart was utterly smitten. He ended the segment by saying that Wikler should not be running to head the DNC, he should be running for president. Wikler is great, but what does it say about the state of the Democratic Party that someone who has never held public office seems more attractive as a presidential contender than any elected official?

Then again, it worked for Trump.

As my Prospect colleagues and I keep writing in different ways, this era of American politics will be a populist era. Either it will be the fake populism of billionaires scapegoating various categories of “other” while they use the power of the state to further enrich themselves and further debase democracy with the power of money. Or it will be authentic economic populism.

It’s too much to expect the Democratic Party to be reborn as an anti­ capitalist party. But Democrats should at least be narrating the impact of concentrated capitalism on ordinary voters. If 2024 demonstrated anything, it was that a medley of left positions on social issues and modest economic measures are no match for Trumpism. n

NOTEBOOK

Preparing for the Worst

From the church to the schoolyard to the legislature, Americans are making plans to protect themselves and their loved ones from deportation.

By Emma Janssen

Across the country, some Americans are steeling themselves for the moment when agents of the federal government, whether from the military or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), storm into their communities and deport anyone suspected of lacking legal documentation. These preparations are happening across a wide scale, with nonprofits and legal organizations dusting off strategies from the first Trump administration, teachers discussing plans in break rooms, and mixed­ status couples marrying to get their documents in order.

During the 2024 campaign, President Trump promised to enact the largest mass deportation effort in U.S. history. Such an act would take an immense coordination of federal, state, and local law enforcement entities, including the National Guard and local police departments. Democratic ­governed states would almost certainly throw sand in the gears, as some are already planning to do.

Trump’s soon­to ­be “border czar,” Tom Homan, has said that any immigrants who pose “public safety and national security threats” will be targeted for deportation first. Rhetoric that paints America’s 45 million immigrants as “threats” to public safety is a key Republican strategy to drum up support for mass deportations. One of the first bills passed by the Republican House in the new Congress was the Laken Riley Act, after the 22­year­ old nursing student who was killed in February 2024 by a Venezuelan man who had entered the country illegally.

The bill would require any undocumented person or DACA recipient arrested for burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting­related offenses to be detained, even if they are ultimately never charged with a crime.

The criminal justice system has long been a mechanism for deportations. Since 2015, 82 percent of ICE arrests have occurred within a local, state, or federal jail, according to Immigration Impact. During the second Trump administration, this connection between ICE and the prison system may be strengthened, with local sheriffs empowered to detain those suspected of being undocumented during even routine stops. Though much of their rhetoric has focused on immigrants already involved with the criminal justice system, Trump, Homan, and other advisers have given no indication that they’d stop there.

Some experts suggest that mass deportations of the sort Trump and his advisers have promised are improbable if not impossible. Despite that, the administration might enact a number of deportation efforts that, though far short of a full­ scale mass deportation, would jeopardize the perceived security of immigrant communities, forcing undocumented people into the shadows and out of public life. Rumors have been floated of a high­profile workplace raid in the D.C. area, to instill just this level of fear.

Now, Americans everywhere are preparing for the worst, whether within their families, in the halls of state legislatures, or at nonprofit and legal organizations that work in immigrant communities.

Priscilla Monico Marín, the executive director of the New Jersey Consortium for Immigrant Children (NJCIC), told the Prospect that the group is deep in contingency planning, taking the lessons learned from the first Trump term to hit the ground running on day one of the second. NJCIC represents unaccompanied children and other youth in need of immigration legal help across New Jersey. Founded in 2015 to respond to the 80 percent increase in unaccompanied children in New Jersey over just one year, NJCIC weathered the family separation crisis and operated under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

“Immigration law can and does greatly change and shift from one administration to the next and immigration practitioners must be trained, nimble, and unified,” Monico Marín said. In the lead­up to Trump’s inauguration, NJCIC has been broadening the scope of its legal services, now including rapid response efforts. “This means increased on­the ­ground lawyering for young immigrants facing immediate and dangerous consequences stemming from the ripple effect of federal administration policies designed to disenfranchise, detain, and deport,” she explained.

In the coming months, Monico Marín says that the group will set up Know Your Rights trainings and mobile legal services to support families facing immediate danger of detention or separation. When asked what community groups can do to protect their undocumented members, she emphasized the importance of “sensitive location” designations. “Churches, schools, funeral homes, hospitals, and the like are designated as sensitive locations where, as per current policy, ICE enforcement will not take place. The incoming administration has plans to scrap these designations, which could be catastrophic for immigrant communities as they seek critical and necessary community services,” she said. If these designations are rescinded, Monico Marín recommends that community groups designate certain areas of buildings as “private” and receive training on how to respond to warrants.

For his part, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who called a special legislative session after Trump was elected to plan the state’s resistance strategies, has crafted a rough draft of how the state could respond to

Donald Trump is expected to carry out mass deportations in part to instill fear among immigrant communities.

mass deportations. The Los Angeles Times reported on a fact sheet titled “Immigrant Support Network Concept,” which describes Newsom’s plan to mobilize California state resources. If the plan goes into action, the California Department of Social Services will create regional hubs to connect “at­risk individuals, their families and communities” with legal services, local government assistance, and other resources. The fact sheet also says that the Social Services Department would direct funding toward nonprofits that can

aid in community outreach and legal services.

“While there is a robust network of immigrant­serving organizations and other community supports, there is no centralized coordination mechanism, which limits the ability of providers to effectively leverage available resources; share critical information and expertise; and identify (and adopt) best practices,” the fact sheet states.

Some Americans don’t feel comfortable relying on their state or local governments

to protect them in case of mass deportation. John and Maria (names changed to protect their identities) are high school sweethearts, now 23 and living together in New Jersey. Maria was born in Brazil but came to the United States with her family when she was 14. The family—Maria, her parents, and her younger sister—overstayed a tourist visa, making them officially undocumented residents in the country.

Growing up, Maria’s family and close friends knew her immigration status, but

she rarely told anyone outside of that tight circle, fearing that her family would be vulnerable if word got out. When she and John began dating in their senior year of high school, she waited four months to tell him that she was undocumented.

“I actually didn’t want to tell him,” she said. “My grandmother was here at the time, and she just wanted me to be completely honest, but I was very nervous and scared.”

John laughed as he told his side of the story: “You know, we were in the car, and she’s just crying, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh no, is she moving?’ And then she was like, ‘I’m undocumented.’ And I was like, ‘Oh thank God. That is the least of my worries!’”

Trump’s rise to power has coincided with Maria and John’s biggest milestones. Maria had just moved to the U.S. when he came into office for the first time. John voted for the first time in 2020 after years of being opposed to Trump’s policies and rhetoric. “Before he even won his first election, when

he was campaigning, he’s calling Mexicans rapists and criminals and doing the Muslim ban and all this stuff. So I was completely disgusted by everything [he] and his supporters stood for at that point,” he said.

Less than two weeks after Trump won the 2024 election, John and Maria got married. “We got engaged in August, and up until the day of the election, at 9 p.m., we were confident Kamala supporters,” John said. “And frankly, we knew it could happen, but we didn’t think it would. And then reality set in, and we had our marriage date set already by that point.”

Trump’s rhetoric and conservative immigration policy throughout the country had the couple on edge. “We knew there had been talks of that judge in Texas in the Federal Circuit that was shutting down parole in place for green cards and things like that,” said John, referring to a ruling that vacated the Biden administration’s “Keeping Families Together” policy two days after

For everyone who manages to find safety and status over the next four years, there will be someone else without the same security.

the 2024 election. The policy was created to let the spouses and stepchildren of U.S. citizens remain in the country while applying for permanent status. “We just knew that it would be good to [get married] as soon as possible, just in case. But we were going to do it no matter what.”

Steered by an immigration lawyer, John and Maria are on their way to securing a green card, and eventually citizenship, for Maria. Once Maria gets her green card, she said, she can apply for her parents and younger sister, allowing them to live in the country legally as well. A successful outcome would grant Maria and her family a sense of security that they haven’t had since their move to the U.S. But the process is difficult and often lonely. “People at Maria’s church have … gone through [the process], but nobody really close in age, or anyone that we talk to. So in a way, it does kind of feel like we’re doing it ourselves. There’s nobody to really help us walk through this other than the immigration lawyer,” said John.

Maria mentioned that some of the other immigrants who attend her church voted for Trump in 2024. “They didn’t experience what me and my family experienced,” she said. “It’s upsetting to see that they don’t really care about the people like their friends that are in different situations.”

For now, the couple will continue their careers and the legal process. Maria works as a nursing assistant while going to grad school for nursing, and John teaches third grade. His school has over 250 bilingual students, nearly all of whom are immigrants who have arrived within the last year. “There’s talk amongst other teachers like, what if all our students get deported, or what if they start leaving because they’re scared of getting deported?” John said. For everyone who manages to find safety and status over the next four years, there will be someone else without the same security. n

Advocates for immigrants are taking the lessons of the first Trump term to inform their work in the second.

Conservatives Have Big Plans for D.C. Public Schools

Making vouchers universal in D.C. would be universally unpopular, but there’s nothing to stop the GOP.

By Hassan Ali Kanu

The push to replace existing public school systems with government­ subsidized private and religious schools suffered a major blow on Election Day 2024, as voters rejected ballot measures to implement universal voucher schemes in Kentucky, Nebraska, and Colorado.

Those votes offered more data that universal voucher proposals lack popular support, even among the same populations and demographics that voted for a Republican president and for a right­wing Republican majority in both chambers of Congress.

Still, the “school choice,” or voucher, movement, which has been steered for several decades by a handful of ultraconservative billionaires, is in the midst of a watershed moment, buoyed by the aftereffects of a global pandemic and the so ­ called culture wars attendant to the rise of Trumpism.

“School choice” programs generally reroute public money to private and religious schools via vouchers, education savings accounts, tuition tax credits, and other mechanisms. Proponents say they compel schools to improve through free market–style competition, and offer better opportunities to underprivileged families.

Opponents have generally opposed them as destabilizing to public schools.

But the issue is also clearly ideological: Leaders of the movement, like billionaire philanthropist and former Trump education secretary Betsy DeVos, have said candidly that one of their primary goals is to transform the existing public education system into a religious Christian public education system. And proponents are plainly opposed to education about nontraditional gender and sexuality, as well as historical and systemic racism.

In 2023, 18 states enacted or expanded “universal” voucher programs that allowed public money to flow to private schools, according to EdChoice. At least eight of those programs are available to nearly all students, regardless of income. The number of students who actually use a category of vouchers called “education savings accounts” nearly tripled from 2022 to 2023, rising from 33,000 students to 93,000, according to EdChoice, the leading advocacy group promoting vouchers.

Now, as Donald Trump re ­ enters the White House, private school vouchers are poised to have another banner year. That includes the distinct possibility that advocates could effectively and fully voucherize the whole public school system in the only

jurisdiction with an existing, federally funded voucher program, which is also the only one subject to direct control by Congress: deep ­blue Washington, D.C.

Lindsey Burke, director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, told me that the “time is right” to expand D.C.’s program into a universal one that gives students federal money regardless of family income or background, and allows families to spend that money on private schools, charter schools, tutoring, and even other kinds of educational expenses. Burke is the primary author of the education section in the conservative manifesto Project 2025, which calls for Congress to enact “universal school choice” in the District, among other changes.

“The D.C. program has always been a marker of where Congress stands on the issue of school choice,” Burke said. “This is the best opportunity we’ve had probably since the beginning of the program to expand it.”

Along with eliminating the Department of Education, “universal school choice” is a big piece of the conservative movement’s current education policy agenda. Besides Project 2025, it was laid out in the Republican Party’s official 2024 platform, as well as in “Agenda 47,” the Trump campaign’s own set of presidential policy plans.

When Trump announced his nomination of former professional wrestling executive Linda McMahon for the secretary of education post, he touted her previous work to help “achieve Universal School Choice in 12 States,” saying she “will fight tirelessly to expand ‘Choice’ to every State in America.” McMahon herself is a longtime supporter.

“One of the issues most important to me is the question of school choice,” she wrote in 2015, adding that she believes further privatization and deregulation does not “take anything away from traditional public schools … as some have feared.”

Project 2025 specifically wants Congress “to provide an example to state lawmakers” via the “K­12 districts under federal jurisdiction, including Washington, D.C., public schools. (The federal government also oversees certain military schools and has authority over public schools on reservations and tribal lands.) In other words, Project 2025 aims to make D.C.’s existing public school system a sort of “laboratory of democracy,” where conservative politi­

cians—from other states—can experiment with education policy ideas.

Specifically, Project 2025 includes a subsection on the city’s Opportunity Scholarship Program that calls for some fairly straightforward, yet radical, reforms: expanding voucher access universally, and deregulating the program entirely.

“Congress should expand [voucher] eligibility to all students, regardless of income or background, and raise the scholarship amount closer to the funding students receive in D.C. Public Schools,” Burke and her colleagues wrote.

Josh Cowen, education policy professor at Michigan State University, wrote the 2024 book The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers , and has studied voucher programs for about two decades, including research funded by conservative organizations. He notes that the Opportunity Scholarship Program was a federal creation of a prior right­wing government. “The federal government has always tinkered with the D.C. public school system to try and create what they want,” Cowen said. “It wasn’t an accident that when they couldn’t get vouchers nationally, in No Child Left Behind [in 2002], that they then did it in D.C.”

The D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) use a combination of federal and local funding, with more than 80 percent of the budget coming from local revenue sources like property

Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick for education secretary, is a loud supporter of school choice.

taxes, according to the DC Fiscal Policy Institute. The Opportunity Scholarship is uniquely designed to provide equal federal funding to the city’s traditional school system, charter schools, and the voucher program. Each program received roughly $17.5 million in each of the last five fiscal years, according to a 2023 report by K­12 Dive and data from the Department of Education. It funds scholarships for low­income students whose families earn less than 185 percent of the federal poverty level, which comes out to about $57,000 for a family of four. Scholarships for 2024­2025 were between $10,000 and $15,000.

“Congress should additionally deregulate the program by removing the requirement of private schools to administer the D.C. Public Schools assessment and allowing private schools” even more control and freedom in their admissions processes, according to Project 2025. The document also urges the Trump administration to implement policies in DCPS that would bar acknowledgment of or education about transgenderism, as well as teaching about contemporary or historical racial discrimination, among other policy changes.

Research by Cowen and other education experts over the years has shown that vouchers don’t necessarily accomplish advocates’ stated goals. Studies have shown that students participating in school choice

programs in Indiana, Ohio, and Louisiana actually saw their academic achievement and performance decline relative to their peers, partly due to the dearth of participating, high­ quality private schools.

In 2019, the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences published a comprehensive comparative analysis of outcomes for D.C. students and parents between 2012 and 2014. The study found no statistically significant differences in reading or math, three years after students had applied to the program. Students who used the scholarships tested 2.1 percentile points lower in reading, and 0.2 percentile points higher in math, compared to the control group.

Studies have also shown that the programs tend to actually benefit higherincome students who are already enrolled in private schools.

The “school choice” movement’s other arguments—including the push for religious education, and to exclude LGBTQ or other nonconforming children—are obviously divisive. Indeed, since the late 1970s, voucher programs have been rejected virtually every single time that they have actually been put to a vote by state residents.

Yet proponents, who have seen some major successes through other political channels, say the programs work, and are continuing to push for national expansion. Trump himself praised and defended the D.C. voucher program during his first term, just days after another study by the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance found that the program had a negative impact on reading and math scores.

And the latest GOP platform promises to “reassert greater Federal Control over Washington, DC”; while Trump has threatened to “take over” the city and its government during his second administration.

In short, Republican politicians have made clear that they would like to exert

more control over D.C.’s government; and conservatives, more broadly, are advocating for transforming the city’s existing public schools into a universal voucher system, applicable to students and parents at all income levels, and without much effective oversight—simply because they can.

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment.

To put it simply, there just isn’t much that the D.C. government can do about this.

The Constitution gives Congress exclusive jurisdiction over Washington, D.C. An act of Congress, the D.C. Home Rule Act, allowed the District its own locally elected mayor and city council for the first time in the 1970s. By the same token, Congress could revoke local governance, or change local laws and policy, including via its control of federal purse strings.

Indeed, Congress originally imposed the existing voucher program on D.C. residents in 2003 by forcing it into an appropriations bill that had to be enacted in order to avoid a government shutdown, according to reports that November by The Washington Post , Education Week, and Baptist News Global.

The city’s voucher program could also be revamped via similar maneuvers, even if partisan Republican support cannot overcome a Senate filibuster.

Nonetheless, Republicans are nearly certain to face a number of challenges, including, most obviously, a lack of consensus on the issue. In some conservative ­led states, for example, Republican representatives from low­income or rural areas that lack quality private school options have become holdouts against their colleagues’ bills to expand or implement private school vouchers. Voucher expansion legislation failed in Georgia, Texas, Idaho, Virginia, Kentucky, and South Dakota in 2023, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute in April that year.

And, of course, average parents and other voters in red states like Kentucky and Nebraska rejected voucher expansion when it was put to a ballot this past November.

about other than focusing on D.C.,” Henderson, a former staffer for Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), said.

Burke told me she can’t disagree on that end. “That’s not incorrect,” she said. “It’s definitely going to be a challenge to reinvigorate interest in this, and we need a concerted effort among coalition groups and other interested parties, but this is the best opportunity” we’ve had so far.

Henderson ticked off a number of other factors that might complicate an attempt to implement universal vouchers in DCPS, including that both program and private school administrators have been advocating primarily for more voucher money, rather than to expand eligibility to a broader pool of students. That’s partly a result of the relatively high cost of living in D.C., which drives up teachers’ salaries, as well as the availability of high­ quality and exclusive private schools and specialized charters.

Still, those challenges that Republicans might face in trying to prioritize items within a broad legislative agenda, or garnering votes for an unpopular policy, are totally outside of the control of D.C.’s government. Republicans might indeed be very busy with other issues, or may be wary of imposing an unpopular policy on people who didn’t vote for it, or fearful that an expanded voucher program might not actually improve academic performance. But these are undoubtedly not preventative measures for the large majority of D.C. residents and elected officials who oppose the GOP’s proposals.

Henderson, for her part, told me the council is prepared “as much as we can be,” and “to the extent that we have control,” to counter impositions on D.C.’s public schools.

She added that officials were prepared “to explain to the many members of Congress who may not have worked in state or local government, and don’t understand balancing a budget, implementing programs,” or “the impact of some of the things” they have proposed.

Republican politicians have made it clear that they would like to exert more control over D.C.’s government.

Christina Henderson, an at­large member of the D.C. City Council, told me she is “just not convinced” that Republicans will successfully achieve Project 2025’s goals for DCPS, or even make a serious attempt.

“In terms of their education agenda, at the top of which is getting rid of the Department of Education, they have a lot to worry

D.C. residents can hold on to hope that the policy and facts­ on­the ­ground arguments will prove convincing to Republicans. At any rate, whether or not the GOP actually pulls off the broadest and most politically significant expansion of a school voucher program remains, for now, largely a matter of chance. What is certain is that many conservatives want to do so, and, in terms of politics and the law, there’s nothing truly in their way. n

The Musk-Bezos War on Collective Bargaining

When Biden’s NLRB began to restore workers’ rights, the world’s richest men moved to shut down the NLRB altogether.

By Harold Meyerson

On Wednesday, January 8th, even as firestorms wreaked havoc around Los Angeles, attorneys representing Amazon came to the federal courthouse in downtown L.A. to make clear that their client was still insisting on dismantling the only agency of government that enables private ­ sector workers to join unions and bargain collectively with their employers.

During Joe Biden’s presidency, his appointees to the National Labor Relations Board—a majority of the Board’s members and the agency’s general counsel—had strengthened workers’ rights to form unions and sought to penalize employers who illegally thwarted those rights, in a manner not seen since the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Vexed by the Board’s determination to resurrect the letter and

spirit of the original pro ­worker National Labor Relations Act, Amazon, as well as SpaceX and Starbucks, had all brought lawsuits during the past year arguing that the NLRB’s power to charge unions and employers for labor law violations and have administrative courts hold hearings and rule on those charges had suddenly become unconstitutional. This is a power upheld by the Supreme Court in 1937 that had gone unchallenged ever since.

The world’s two richest men: Elon Musk (right) and Jeff Bezos

Not coincidentally, beginning in 2022, both Amazon and Starbucks had seen workers at a number of their facilities vote to go union, the first time either company had experienced such an affront to their hitherto unchallenged power. (Though no major organizing campaign was under way at SpaceX, the Board did charge the company with two labor law violations over illegal firings, which was all it took to prompt CEO Elon Musk to file suit against the NLRB as well.) As is the norm for American employers, both Amazon and Starbucks have yet to sign contracts with any of their workers who voted to go union.

Amazon argues that its now threeyear refusal to bargain with Staten Island warehouse workers who voted to unionize in early 2022 doesn’t violate the nation’s labor law. It also argues that its California, New York, Illinois, and Georgia delivery drivers who’ve voted to join the Teamsters—who deliver packages from Amazon warehouses, driving Amazon trucks, wearing Amazon uniforms, obeying Amazon’s productivity standards, and who are surveilled by Amazon cameras in their Amazon cabs—aren’t really Amazon employees, since Amazon franchises out its driving operations to third­party contracting companies.

The January 8th Los Angeles hearing was notable in that it was the first proceeding challenging the NLRB’s existence since the Senate had failed in December to confirm the renomination of Biden appointee Lauren McFerran to her post as NLRB chair. McFerran’s defeat meant that incoming president Donald Trump could immediately nominate McFerran’s successor, who would surely win confirmation in the newly Republican­ controlled Senate and thereby give Republican and pro ­ employer members an NLRB majority.

This means that the new Board will surely reverse several Biden Board rulings in short order. Like the one that had held the mega ­ companies that franchise out their work to contractors jointly responsible for labor law violations at those contractors, and for refusing to enter into bargaining with those franchised workers. Like the Cemex ruling, which compelled employers to begin bargaining with their workers when those employers had been found to have violated labor law and when a majority of those workers had affiliated with a union. Like the one that instructed Amazon

to bargain with drivers at its Palmdale facility in northern L.A. County, who’d voted to join the Teamsters, to which Amazon had responded by dropping its contract with the contractor (who was the drivers’ nominal employer) and claiming it had no obligation to bargain with those workers.

But despite the impending 180 ­ degree shift in the composition and posture of the NLRB, Amazon’s attorneys weren’t content to let the new Trump Board reverse its ruling on joint employers, or undo the increase in penalties employers face for their all­butroutine violations of labor law. In federal district court in Los Angeles (where the Palmdale case is being litigated), and in federal district court in Texas (where the Staten Island case is dubiously being litigated), the lawyers for the companies founded by the world’s two richest men—Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk—have persisted in their efforts to effectively abolish the only federal agency with the power to enable workers to have some say in their compensation and their conditions of work.

A word on the Texas lawsuit: Despite the fact that none of the Amazon warehouses whose workers and drivers have voted to go union are in or even near Texas, Amazon’s lawyers filed their suit in federal court there on the microscopically thin premise that of the roughly 8,000 workers at the Staten Island warehouse at the time they voted to go union, precisely four of them now reside in Texas. Of course, they really filed in Texas because federal district courts there, and in particular the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals there, are famously Neanderthalstyle right­wing. The NLRB has filed to move the case to Washington, D.C.

Even though the combined wealth of Bezos and Musk now exceeds an almost incomprehensible half a trillion dollars, they have glimpsed spotty clouds on their earnings horizon. In 2024, Gallup put unions’ approval rating at 71 percent, while the share of Americans who had a “great deal” of confidence in big business stood at a bare 6 percent. Worse yet, the Biden NLRB was imposing actual penalties—like being compelled to enter bargaining—on employers who illegally threatened or fired workers seeking unionization. For years, the only penalty imposed on employers had been to reinstate the workers they’d illegally fired, fork over their back pay, and post a notice in the workplace saying they’d violated the NLRA , which is small potatoes

when compared to having workers with whom they are actually compelled to bargain. And when Republicans controlled the NLRB, employers could often avoid even those mini­ sanctions.

In federal court in San Antonio, Amazon’s attorneys have not contented themselves with simply contesting the constitutionality of the NLRB. They’ve also sought an injunction immediately forbidding the NLRB from issuing a final ruling on the cases brought against it, arguing that to do so suddenly constitutes “irreparable harm” against the company, despite the fact that NLRB rulings are not self­ enforcing and that Amazon can appeal that ruling or any such ruling in federal courts, a process that can take months or even years.

Julie Gutman Dickinson, the attorney who represents the Teamsters in these proceedings, notes that Amazon had “brought 43 charges against the Teamsters and Amazon Labor Union [the union of the Staten Island warehouse workers, who later voted to affiliate with the Teamsters] before the Board. They consistently availed themselves of process”—until, apparently, they decided the one way they could ensure they’d prevail was to shut down the NLRB altogether. After almost 90 years during which the Board has ruled for and against employers and for and against workers, it suddenly became a matter of immediate urgency to shut the Board down through a court injunction.

Attorneys for both Bezos and Musk have likely calculated that the ferociously antiunion Sam Alito may be able to assemble enough of his Supreme Court colleagues to curtail at least some of the NLRB’s fundamental powers. They are doubtless also encouraged by the Court’s 6­3 decision last year to curtail the regulatory powers of federal agencies and leave it to the courts to determine which rules and regulations pass muster.

Whether or not Amazon gets its injunction, it can still press its case against the NLRB, just as SpaceX and Starbucks can press theirs. It’s not clear that Trump’s NLRB will continue to oppose those companies in court; if it chooses not to, the Teamsters (for the Amazon workers) and Workers United (for the Starbucks baristas) will continue to try to keep the NLRB up and running. As there’s no union involvement at SpaceX, however, Musk’s lawyers could continue unopposed if President Trump (or de facto President Musk) tells the NLRB to drop the case, and effectively, to drop out of sight. n

JANIE EKERE: IN HER OWN WORDS

Janie Ekere, our John Lewis Writing Fellow since May 2024, died on December 10, just a couple of weeks shy of her 26th birthday. She was exactly the type of person those of us in journalism need to welcome into our industry. She was born into an immigrant Nigerian family in Greensboro, North Carolina, graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill two years ago this month, and interned with The Daily Yonder, lifting up the struggles of the working poor in rural America, before coming to the Prospect . She had a passion for telling stories about underrepresented and marginalized communities, in part because she lived that experience.

A Continuing Struggle to Reform Payday Lending

Jessica Vega, senior policy analyst at Rhode Island Kids Count, has personal experience being caught in the payday loan debt cycle. As a college graduate living on her own for the first time, she needed cash to pay for her mounting living expenses. So, after seeing ads for payday loans and consulting a friend, she visited a payday loan center.

“I borrowed, I think it was whatever the max was at the time, which is $400, or $450,” Vega said. “They give you two weeks roughly to pay it back. So when those two weeks came, I realized I didn’t have that money. So I asked for an extension … I was constantly paying back the money because I was getting paid biweekly. So I’d pay the money, and then borrow the money again.”

Vega’s story is common among payday loan borrowers both in Rhode Island and across the country. According to a fact sheet published by

the Rhode Island Coalition for Payday Reform, three out of four payday loans are a result of “churning,” or taking out a loan to repay an existing loan that’s due. The payday loan business

model depends on long­term use, with over 60 percent of their business generated by borrowers with 12 or more loans a year.

We are a small organization, and something like this has a much greater impact on our family at the Prospect . We wanted to devote some space in this issue for Janie’s writing, to give you a sense of what she focused on and what she cared about. In the first essay in his short volume The Message , Ta-Nehisi Coates imparts to young journalists the task of “nothing less than doing their part to save the world.” Janie was doing her part: learning the rhythms and meters of journalism, learning how to elevate people in pain and grant them power. We will miss her terribly.

The Hardships of a Working-Class Candidate

The high costs associated with campaigning often lead to wealthier candidates running for office, according to reporting from Carolina Public Press. These individuals have more resources to self­fund their campaigns, and often attend prestigious schools and work in high­paying jobs like law, giving them additional opportunities to network with wealthy potential donors. Candidates who aren’t wealthy often lack access to large donor networks and support from their parties, and are more likely to have to rely on small individual donations.

It’s also personally expensive for candidates to run for office. Poorer candidates may still need to work their regular jobs simultaneously. They can take a salary from the campaign, a provision that was expanded last year after a working­ class candi­

date named Nabilah Islam took her case to the Federal Election Commission. Now, non­incumbent federal candidates can pay themselves up to 50 percent of a congressional salary (which is currently $174,000), or pay equivalent to their own average annual income over the previous five years, whichever is smaller.

But that still may not be enough to manage the increased personal costs of running a campaign. As the Prospect has reported, Dan Osborn, a union steamfitter apprentice and independent candidate running for U.S. Senate in Nebraska, didn’t own a suit before a trip to Washington to meet with advocates and donors. His campaign didn’t want to pay for one out of its coffers because the law prohibits using campaign expenditures on expensive clothing.

Rural America’s Project 2025 Problem

With the possibility of another Trump presidency, Democrats have directed much media attention toward Project 2025, the 922­page document laying out a far­right 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

Student Debtors Could See Hopes Vanish Under Trump

Project 2025 also calls for the elimination of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which offers complete debt forgiveness for borrowers who have worked for the government or a nonprofit organization for at least ten years. The authors of the document argue that PSLF unfairly favors public ­ sector over private ­ sector employment.

PSLF , signed into law in 2007, was dysfunctional prior to the Biden administration, with Trump’s first­term education secretary Betsy DeVos approving just a tiny sliver of those who applied for debt forgiveness. The Biden administration fixed the program, and by

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 communities 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.

Mark Robinson: A Product of the Republican Controversy Pipeline

The beliefs expressed by Robinson are part of a particular brand of Black conservatism, one that holds Black people responsible for rising above racial oppression rather than opposing it through protests or direct action. It ultimately shifts the blame for anti­Black racism from a wider system to Black individuals. And, crucially, it offers validation to white conservatives who hold similar beliefs.

this October, over one million borrowers had PSLF loans canceled.

But Trump’s return could mean that promises made on PSLF could simply be broken, with government or nonprofit workers who played by the rules on the expectation of debt relief denied cancellation and thrown into chaos. Meanwhile, Congress and the White House could attempt to end PSLF for new entrants.

“Teachers, firefighters, nurses, social workers and other public servants who are just a few months away from earning cancellation through PSLF already face enough barriers to earning the relief they’re entitled to, and a Trump presidency will work to walk back every gain debtors have made in the past four years,” said Braxton Brewington, spokesperson for the Debt Collective, a union of debtors.

Robinson’s ability to rise inside the party is interesting. It’s become increasingly common for Republican politicians to gain party prominence for controversy … Before the ascendance of the Tea Party, North Carolina Republicans tried to walk a tightrope between pushing conservative policies while still appearing more moderate, which helped them succeed against Democrats. But that strategy is difficult to maintain with candidates like Robinson, who, perhaps to capture the magic of Trump, double down on incendiary rhetoric.

Maybe the pipeline from viral comments at city council meetings to running for the highest office in a swing state will be closed for people like Robinson in the future. But given the dynamics in the Republican Party, maybe not.

WE FOUND THE

Sometime between the 2024 election and the 2025 inauguration, Americans discovered that they had actually voted for Elon Musk for president. Since the election, Donald Trump has faded into the background, while center stage has been taken by the South African–born billionaire with the Twitter addiction of an adolescent, whose frenetic posts are often being treated like official government statements.

Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have been named co ­ chairs of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which sounds like a federal agency but is actually an outside agitator, tasked with devising recommendations to reduce the size and scope of government. During the campaign, Musk

Elon Musk wants to cut government spending. But the waste in the system goes to elites like him. Here’s a better way to bring down deficits.

By David Dayen ILLUSTRATIONS

BY HUGH D’ANDRADE

said he was confident he could remove $2 trillion in unnecessary waste from the budget. If he meant annually, that’s nearly onethird of total federal expenditures.

Skepticism is heavily warranted. Presidents going back to Ronald Reagan have impaneled blue ­ ribbon commissions to hack away at deficits, with minimal success. Nongovernmental advisers carry no formal power, and Congress holds the purse strings tightly. “One person’s waste is another person’s vital congressional jobs program,” said Michael Linden, a former official with the White House Office of Management and Budget.

There are signals that DOGE will be even more useless than its predecessors, with

early proposals consisting primarily of things that sound funny but serve valuable functions, or things that are far too minuscule to make a meaningful dent in the budget. Hilariously, Musk gave up on his $2 trillion goal before the Trump presidency even started, calling the number a “best­ case outcome” in an interview on his social media site and declining to identify specific cuts.

Many Republicans, however, are dead serious about slashing social spending and obliterating the administrative state. House leaders have been passing around a menu of $5.7 trillion in cuts over ten years, including a large chunk from health care and food assistance for the poor. Musk’s following

among the rank and file could provide ballast for these long­held conservative wishes, while catering to his own pocketbook in the process.

federal contractors, isn’t likely to touch any of this.

How Democrats should deal with DOGE has become a top ­level conversation. One school of thought argues for calling out Musk and Ramaswamy’s game of using spending cuts to make room for their own tax cuts. Others draw red lines on cherished, popular programs like Social Security and Medicare, or highlight serial conflicts of interest. Still others counsel constructive engagement.

But the focus on federal spending could also teach Americans how their government really works. I’ve tallied up the savings from redesigning a handful of policies to improve effectiveness, and you really could find $2 trillion in net annual federal outlays, with no direct impact on the most vulnerable. The key lies in knowing where to look: profit­hungry contractors, privatized boondoggles, systemic overpayments, and a mountain of tax avoidance.

The world’s richest man, himself a serial tax evader and one of the nation’s biggest

This article should come with a warning label: We should not cancel the equivalent of 7 percent in annual GDP all at once, which would trigger a deep recession. But identifying the real sources of inefficiency in our government—the trillions funneled to elites—can preserve resources for programs to help those in need. And it can display the values of an opposition party that has strayed from its core purpose of fighting for the little guy.

Too often, Democrats have leapt to defend institutions that most Americans look upon with scorn. Now it’s the Republicans who control all branches of government; they are the establishment in every sense of the word. The Musk/DOGE plan is one of self­ enrichment and outward punishment. Someone should outline a different path.

DOGE’S GAME

It’s hard to critique DOGE because it’s hard to divine its actual intentions. Making government more responsive can sit in tension

with cutting spending. Smaller government may be ideologically satisfying but also fantastically wasteful. And when billionaires are making the decisions, self­aggrandizement is sure to follow.

Take the preoccupation with labor costs. Ramaswamy has called for a 75 percent personnel reduction across federal agencies. This would hardly save anything. According to the Congressional Budget Office, there are about 2.3 million federal employees with total compensation in 2023 of $271 billion; that’s 4 percent of the U.S. budget. Federal employees were roughly 4.3 percent of all workers in 1960 and 1.4 percent today. As a result, we’ve seen an explosion in contractors undertaking tasks that government workers used to perform. Nearly three times as much money is spent on contractors than federal workers.

Slashing the federal workforce, almost two ­thirds of which is at the Departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security, would likely lead to more expensive contractors, and also increase the $247 billion in improper payments the government makes every year. “When you talk about

cutting people in the Pentagon, these are people overseeing military contracts,” said economist Dean Baker. “There’s already fraud and there would be a lot more.”

Another chunk of the bureaucracy is devoted to processing federal benefits. Social Security’s administrative costs are legendarily low, down to 0.5 percent. Cutting 75 percent of its staff would delay benefit claims, make checks more difficult to process, and invite fraudulent scams. That’s the opposite of the alleged efficiency goal. Or take what Public Citizen co ­president Rob Weissman calls “policymaking by anecdote.” Musk’s brain­poisoned antipathy to anything that sounds woke led him recently to attack the “fake job” of Ashley Thomas, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation’s director of climate diversification. But Thomas has nothing to do with diversity, equity, and inclusion; she works with farmers to diversify crops, to deal with changing weather patterns. So is efficiency the goal, or merely reverse political correctness and slipshod word­policing?

At times, DOGE ’s goals collide with ignorance over governmental procedures. Ramaswamy claims that $516 billion could be excised by ending programs that are “unauthorized” by Congress. But in every case, lawmakers have allocated funding and therefore inherently authorized those programs, which include things like health care for nine million veterans. Congress can and should reauthorize and improve programs, but any savings would be far lower than throwing out the entire Veterans Health Administration, the Justice Department, or NASA (where Musk has had $11.8 billion in contracts over the past decade).

The closest thing to an official vision for DOGE was laid out in a Wall Street Journal

op ­ ed with Musk and Ramaswamy’s byline. The only named programs slated for cuts are the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Planned Parenthood, which total about .012 percent of federal expenditures. And there’s a legally suspect claim that the president can nullify congressionally appropriated spending, which would be an enormous grab at Congress’s power of the purse that would trigger a constitutional crisis.

But the main target of the op ­ ed is regulations written by “unelected bureaucrats.” (I’m straining to understand who elected Musk or Ramaswamy.) Supreme Court rulings, the DOGE duo claim, prohibit agency discretion on rulemaking, and therefore allow the president to simply pause any regulation that he imagines exceeds congressional authority, and subsequently fire the workers overseeing them.

This isn’t what the Supreme Court said; Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo specifically protected past regulations devised under the older framework of deference to agency interpretation. And a president cannot pause regulations without going through administrative procedure, nor fire employees with civil service protections. But these half­truths do serve the goal of rolling back or curtailing enforcement of regulations, which happens to benefit companies that are habitually under regulatory scrutiny, like, oh, I don’t know, Tesla and SpaceX.

Guided by this vision, Musk will pick the lists of regulations the president can insta­vanish. You can see how the incentives would run. “Every regulation has net positive savings for the country,” said Weissman. “They may cost corporations, they may cost billionaires, but they do not cost the country.”

have to go because they impede the free flow of capital, or because the Securities and Exchange Commission has been fighting with Musk for seven years?

Maybe it seems too parochial to suggest that the “government efficiency” effort is simply cover for defunding Elon Musk’s regulatory police, steering more contracts his way, depriving rivals of the same treatment he gets, and building oligarchy in America. Maybe Musk is a real efficiency expert who wants to bring his style of business cuts to government as a public service. Maybe he’s truly concerned about burdens being left to his children and grandchildren. Maybe he will nobly share in the sacrifice.

Color me unconvinced. And let me submit as evidence a litany of items that DOGE is likely to leave mostly untouched in its drive for austerity.

HEALTH CARE

The federal government is often described as a health insurance company with an army. About 75 percent of all spending is concentrated in four buckets: Social Security payments, health care programs (e.g., Medicare and Medicaid), veterans’ benefits, and the Department of Defense. If you’re not touching them, to cut $2 trillion you’d have to eliminate everything else government does, in total.

But health care in particular is lousy with private ­ sector profiteering, providing several options for savings.

Nearly 33 million seniors are enrolled in Medicare Advantage, a private insurance substitute for traditional Medicare. It’s heavily advertised to seniors as offering better benefits (including gym memberships and wellness programs) at a lower cost. And it’s true that MA plans typically include dental, hearing, and vision coverage, which is not part of traditional Medicare, as well as reduced premiums.

In this sense, DOGE intends to rewire government for personal use. Ramaswamy has taken unusual interest in a $6.6 billion Department of Energy loan to electric truck manufacturer Rivian. Which electricvehicle maker do you suppose would like to cancel government support for a rival? Musk has also targeted the bipartisan infrastructure law’s program to build out rural broadband; might he be mad about how his own broadband service, Starlink, was excluded from the grant process, and want to reverse that? Is high­ speed rail development truly a “wasteful” program, or an old vendetta from a car manufacturer who opposes mass transit? Do bank regulators

But Medicare Advantage has been criticized heavily for overbilling the government, not just by liberal activists but also by gold­standard independent auditors. The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (Med PAC), a congressionally established expert panel, calculated that Medicare Advantage overpayments came to $83 billion in 2024 alone.

There are two reasons for these overpayments. First, Medicare reimbursement is weighted depending on the health of the patient. Insurers are compensated at higher THE MUSK/DOGE PLAN IS ONE OF SELFENRICHMENT AND

levels for enrolling sicker patients with more diagnostic codes that correspond to ailments. Insurers have exploited this in Medicare Advantage by “upcoding” patients to make them appear sicker, regardless of the actual care they receive. The Wall Street Journal recently found that UnitedHealth, the leading MA plan sponsor and also the largest employer of doctors in the U.S., routinely encouraged its doctors to add codes to their patients.

Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), which advocates for a singlepayer system, noticed even greater savings potential in the MedPAC report. Traditional Medicare sets a “benchmark” for spending on the average beneficiary. Several studies have shown that MA plans spend between 11 and 14 percent less, because they cherrypick healthier patients, even after accounting for upcoding to make them look sicker. Increasing denials of care allows MA plans to rake in even more profit.

In all, PNHP found that MA plans charge the government at rates $140 billion per year higher than traditional Medicare. Dr. Ed Weisbart, national board secretary with PNHP, estimated that Congress could use savings from MA overpayments to add an out­ of­pocket spending cap, a public drug benefit, and dental, hearing, and vision benefits to traditional Medicare, and have tens of billions left over.

“If you’re serious about DOGE , here’s something you can do,” said Weisbart. “At least let’s agree that Medicare Advantage is being outrageously subsidized.” But with the incoming administrator of Medicare and Medicaid, Dr. Oz, a longtime booster of Medicare Advantage, that’s an unlikely avenue for DOGE

Reforming physician pay schedules for Medicare could yield more savings. As my colleague Robert Kuttner has written, pay rates are determined mostly by a secretive advisory committee mostly made up of specialists, who give themselves higher reimbursements at the expense of primary care. The government rubber­stamps the recommendations, and private insurers typically use them as a benchmark. Lowering these rates, which incoming Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has expressed interest in, would not only slash specialist pay but properly value primary care, reducing health expenditures over time by finding medical problems before they fester.

Dean Baker estimates that bringing U.S.

doctor pay (now at $350,000 per year on average) to the level of physicians in Germany or Canada would reduce national health expenditures by around $200 billion per year. Some of that could be done through reductions in the federal pay schedule, but allowing qualified doctors in other countries to practice in the U.S. could also constrain costs through competition. “We have free trade in manufactured goods but we don’t do anything in services,” Baker said. “It would still be a well­paid profession, just not as much as it is now.”

Federal health programs like Medicare (which serves 68 million enrollees) and Medicaid (72 million) account for roughly half of all national health expenditures. So a good estimate for federal savings would be $100 billion per year.

The government also spends massive amounts of money on prescription drugs. In 2022, U.S. drug prices were 178 percent higher than in 33 other industrialized nations, according to a report funded by the Department of Health and Human Services. Some of these drugs are sold at 20 to 30 times the cost of production and distribution; pharmaceutical profit margins are significantly higher than private ­ sector counterparts.

Democrats did take some action in 2022 by allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices with manufacturers for the first time; new prices on ten drugs will begin to come online in 2026. But more can be done. “It’s not all drugs right away negotiated to the best price possible. Anyone would look at that deal and say you should get the best deal right away,” said pharma activist Alex Lawson of Social Security Works.

Using federal statutes to seize certain drug patents and distribute them to generic manufacturers that charge less would also save billions. But more structurally, we could overhaul the monopoly patent system that gives drug companies exclusive rights to charge whatever they want for a set period.

Baker has proposed having the government pay for clinical trial research up front, rather than distributing patents to private companies so they can recoup research and development costs. Paying for clinical trials wouldn’t be cheap—maybe $100 billion annually—but the savings realized by freemarket prices for drugs without monopoly protection would be considerable: $500 billion per year by Baker’s estimates. Again,

LIMITING PRIVATESECTOR PROFIT-TAKING AND BOOSTING PUBLIC PROVISION IN HEALTH CARE COULD SAVE THE GOVERNMENT ROUGHLY $490 BILLION PER YEAR.

some of that would accrue to patients and private health plans; let’s call it $200 billion per year in government savings. The fact that Trump and RFK Jr. literally dined with pharma executives during the transition, however, makes this unlikely to get onto the DOGE list.

There are smaller opportunities. Group purchasing organizations, which help hospitals buy bulk supplies, have been shown to inflate health care prices and cost Medicare and Medicaid $17.3 billion a year, according to a 2010 report; with conservative inflation assumptions, let’s raise that to $20 billion. Medicare and Medicaid made $101 billion in improper payments in 2023, according to the Government Accountability Office, and have been criticized for weak enforcement even when they find health care scofflaws. Moderately better enforcement could yield $10 billion a year. Boosting funding for community health centers, which efficiently fund direct primary care, saves Medicaid $2,371 per enrollee according to one study. Spending $3 billion to get ten million more people care through these clinics would therefore save about $20 billion a year on net.

Of course, moving to a single ­payer system wholesale could yield over half a trillion dollars in savings from administrative expenses alone, per the People’s Policy Project. But even if the nation isn’t ready for single ­payer, limiting private ­ sector profittaking and boosting public provision comes to roughly $490 billion per year.

MILITARY SPENDING

In 2023, Congress appropriated $841 billion in military spending, nearly equivalent to all nondefense discretionary spending combined. And the Department of Defense

(DOD) is not a model of efficiency. In 2024, it failed its seventh consecutive audit, which means it could not account for all its spending in the last fiscal year, or the six preceding ones either. The best the Pentagon could muster in response was a press release claiming it “has turned a corner in its understanding of the depth and breadth of its challenges.” Even Musk had to admit that “DoD gets terrible value for money.”

He ought to know! His companies have $3.6 billion in contracts with the Defense Department, and SpaceX is in talks with a consortium of tech firms seeking to win a greater share of military spending. But this merely doubles down on a prime source of waste in how we finance our military.

“Our budget wouldn’t be justified if the DOD did pass this year’s audit,” said Julia Gledhill, research associate for the National Security Reform Program at the Stimson Center. “Contractors continue

to be rewarded for not doing their jobs terribly well.”

One of the best examples of this underperformance is Lockheed Martin’s F ­ 35 Joint Strike Fighter, now slated to cost $2 trillion over its lifespan. As with most new weaponry, the Pentagon invested heavily in producing F­35s before the design was complete, and before thorough testing had been conducted. The F­35 is not optimal for traveling long distances or close ­range combat; in 2021, over 800 continuing defects were found on the plane. Yet after 20 years of spending, it was greenlit for full­rate production in 2024, because to do otherwise would be too colossal a waste of prior funds. Weapons systems that are excessively over budget breach the Nunn­McCurdy Act, triggering reviews of whether to continue the program. But when Northrop Grumman’s Sentinel, the land­based missile part of the nuclear triad, exceeded the Nunn­

McCurdy threshold last year, DOD determined that it could go forward, arguing that it was critical to national security. “There haven’t been any significant consequences for that critical breach, and we’re just chugging along,” Gledhill said. “We do have guardrails in place, but corporate interests are so entrenched.”

Much of the reason that DOD fails audits is that it cannot account for the property it owns that’s in the possession of contractors. “The government doesn’t know if contractors are accepting bids to create spare parts that they already have, because that’s against their interest” to tell the government, Gledhill explained. Amid this confusion and despite all this funding, the military still has trouble producing enough ammunition or missiles.

The lack of accountability for contracting failures combines with rampant pricegouging dating back decades. TransDigm,

a private equity rollup in spare parts for military aircraft, was caught marking up prices as high as 4,451 percent in 2019, and had to give $16 million back to the government. But they’re hardly the most lucrative contractor. Five “prime integrators” (Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX , General Dynamics, and Boeing) now take the lion’s share of contract dollars; in the 1990s, it took 50 contractors to command an equivalent share. Some of the five have been routinely cited for overcharging the government. Sole ­ source suppliers have proliferated, becoming expert in gaming rules to hide cost data from procurement officers, or sidestepping prohibitions on selling commercial items to the government at a higher price than you could get off the shelf.

Solutions are available. In 2021, the Congressional Budget Office offered a range of options to take the Pentagon budget down by $1 trillion over a decade. Gledhill estimated significant savings from service contracts, which make up close to half of all Pentagon obligations. Many are redundant or could be done more cheaply in­house. Other possibilities include unwinding ineffective contract orders and bringing in other firms to drive down costs through a competitive bidding process.

Making such cuts requires backbreaking political work. Military contractors have skillfully spread components of their systems across the country; Lockheed brags on its website that the F­35 has “suppliers in nearly every U.S. state.” Lawmakers are constantly pressured into agreeing that weapons systems are really jobs programs. And DOD is the only federal agency required to send in “unfunded priority lists” (UPL s), essentially wish lists of extra spending they would like but which wasn’t included in their formal budget. “Imagine if you get a raise and you submit a wish list so you can take a ski trip or get a laptop,” Gledhill said. “[But] once the budget gets to the committee stage, when they add $10 to $25 billion as they regularly do to the Pentagon budget request, they include UPL s.”

Putting a number on Pentagon savings is difficult, but using CBO’s conservative figures would net $100 billion per year. Some people I talked to think that could double. Let’s split the difference and say $150 billion a year.

The kind of procurement reform in service contracts and equipment orders needed at DOD could be replicated across the gov­

ernment, insourcing operations and ensuring that taxpayers aren’t routinely ripped off. The Project on Government Oversight has found that federal employees are almost uniformly less expensive than contractors. The Organization for Economic Co ­ Operation and Development estimates that onefifth of government procurement globally is siphoned away through bid­rigging. In the U.S., that translates to $150 billion a year. As much as $521 billion a year is lost due to fraud, according to the Government Accountability Office. As Matt Stoller has written, management consultants with a tendency to do nothing but add bloat cost the government $70 billion in 2023.

Some of these projected savings overlap with Pentagon savings. But by reining in the runaway contractor state just modestly— more stringently enforcing fraud and abuse, insourcing operations, and no longer paying for bad advice—you could get another $150 billion.

TAXES

Deficit commissions often play the game of looking only at the spending side of the ledger for budget savings. The revenue side is simply ignored. The typical retort to this is that tax­and­ spend liberals just want to raise taxes on hardworking people. But the much bigger available pot of money lies in merely collecting what is owed.

The Internal Revenue Service regularly estimates the tax gap, the distance between tax liability in a given year and actual taxes paid. In 2022, the last year studied, the IRS put this number at an astonishing $606 billion per year. This gap is concentrated among the top 1 percent, who evade $163 billion per year, according to a 2021 Treasury Department report.

Of course, a well­funded industry has been constructed to help certain persons avoid taxes by any means necessary, but you can only access it if you can afford it. A secret trove of tax files published by ProPublica in 2021 showed that Elon Musk paid no income taxes in 2018 and had an effective tax rate of 3.27 percent during a five ­year stretch. I don’t think he’s ideally suited to lead the charge to make himself pay more.

To reduce the tax gap, you need more personnel to enforce audits. Economist Kathryn Anne Edwards walked me through some numbers showing the extreme efficiency of tax personnel. “The IRS collecting all the taxes owed will beat anything that

the government efficiency bros can do any day,” she said. For every dollar spent on an in­person audit, Edwards estimated, $2.17 in revenue comes back. For an in­person audit for the top 0.1 percent, it’s $6.29. A separate study from last year estimated the value of every dollar spent on auditing the top 10 percent at $12 in revenue.

A large majority of such savings actually comes in during the ten years after the audit. “There are tax cheats but also tax idiots,” Edwards said. “The audit could be a threat but also an educational intervention, [showing] you are not doing taxes correctly. You get ten years of higher tax collections for that person.”

For this reason, Democrats added $80 billion in funding for the IRS in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), as a major method to pay for its policies. The Congressional Budget Office estimated a gain of $207 billion in revenues from that $80 billion investment, for a net deficit reduction of $127 billion. (The White House put the return on investment much higher, at around $700 billion in revenue.) But nearly the entire allotment earmarked for enforcement has been eliminated in successive budget deals with Republicans.

Given Republican antipathy toward the IRS, reducing the tax gap will not be on the DOGE agenda. But a real effort to cut the tax gap in half, even with the conservative estimates calculated by CBO, could bring in around $200 billion per year, and more under different estimates. But that would require investing in enforcement, the complete opposite of Musk and Ramaswamy’s plan to cut head count in government.

One way to actually reduce head count

DEFICIT COMMISSIONS OFTEN PLAY THE GAME OF LOOKING ONLY AT THE SPENDING SIDE OF THE LEDGER FOR BUDGET SAVINGS. THE REVENUE SIDE IS SIMPLY IGNORED.

THE ROAD TO $2 TRILLION

Health Care

Unwind Medicare Advantage

Redo physician pay schedules

Overhaul drug patent system

Other health savings

TOTAL

Defense/Contracting

Reform the Pentagon budget

Police government procurement

TOTAL

Tax Code

Close the tax gap

Pay corporate taxes in stock

Reform tax expenditures

Scrap the Social Security cap

TOTAL

Other

Cancel fossil fuel subsidies

Curtail abuse of farm subsidies

End the Home Loan banks

Close pass-through loophole

End manned spaceflight

TOTAL

Lower interest rates and reduced interest

GRAND TOTAL

$140 billion

$100 billion

$200 billion

$50 billion

$490 billion

$150 billion

$150 billion

$300 billion

$200 billion

$100 billion

$200 billion

$100 billion

$600 billion

$10 billion

$5 billion

$7 billion

$5 billion

$4.5 billion

$31.5 billion

$578.5 billion

$2 trillion

tax rate equals about $13.5 billion per year in revenue. Setting a 25 percent tax rate through stock returns would lead to almost no difference between the nominal and the effective tax rate. For the past couple of years, the effective corporate tax rate has been around 20 percent. Add five points and you’re up to $65 billion per year.

Ramping up this automatic tax collection would also allow the IRS to devote more resources to auditing the wealthy to close the tax gap. This could get you to $100 billion per year. If you think about it as $1 trillion over a decade, it’s equivalent to an amount put forth in an interesting recent research paper from George Washington Law professor Jeremy BearerFriend, who suggested a $1 trillion capital fund to pay for reparations through a 2 percent, one ­ time tax on all $50 trillion of wealth held in shares.

Bearer­Friend didn’t see tax paid in stock as a substitute for corporate taxation, but he did see the benefits of simplicity. “Companies buy other companies with stock,” he said. “It’s unnecessary to turn to the public sector and not use tools that have been so effective and efficient.”

Another reason to scrutinize the tax code is the seemingly endless instances of spending embedded in it. This “submerged state,” as Cornell political scientist Suzanne Mettler famously termed it, cuts the public off from how the government really distributes wealth. Two of the biggest tax expenditures are the tax exclusion for employer­provided health benefits ($300 billion per year) and tax exclusions on retirement benefits ($250 billion). Both are upwardly redistributive. The health insurance tax exclusion is bigger for higher­income policyholders, and more high­income people get insurance at work than those with lower pay and incomes. Tax exclusions for retirement benefits are also weighted toward wealthier people with actual retirement savings.

and increase tax collection simultaneously is through Dean Baker’s idea of taxing stock returns. Corporate taxes are notoriously difficult to collect, thanks to loopholes and creative accounting. But stock returns are dead simple to determine: combine dividend payouts with stock appreciation in a calendar year, all of which is publicly reported. This obviously only holds for publicly

traded companies, but that would comprise the vast majority of corporate profits. This would dramatically cut down on tax avoidance. But the big losers would be companies with impossibly high stock price/ earnings ratios, like … Tesla. So scratch this off the DOGE list.

But what could be gained from it? A onepercentage ­point increase in the corporate

There are several other major tax expenditures; the Tax Policy Center lists the top 13 as costing between $1.12 trillion and $1.38 trillion per year, depending on the estimate. It’s a dizzying amount of money, funneled mostly from working people to elites. “When we have public policy debates, they hinge on who’s deserving,” said Mettler. “But where we’re different is that much more of our social welfare spending is going to high­income people.”

Just bringing this submerged spending

Even without much push from the opposition party, Musk’s DOGE was unpopular with a majority of Americans in December polling.

to the surface, and having a real debate about the extreme amounts involved, could radically change the level of distribution. Rebalancing the support given tacitly to high­income people through the tax code, and asking for less than 20 percent of it back, would get you another $200 billion.

One glaring example of this disparity is the cap on Social Security taxes. Every dollar of earnings above $176,100 in 2025 is not subject to payroll taxes; as Michael Hiltzik has written, many billionaires met their Social Security tax burden on the first day of the new year. Scrapping that cap, the Congressional Budget Office estimates, would take in $100 billion per year.

There are countless other ways to raise revenue, but I’ve confined myself here to limiting exclusions and collecting what’s owed. That adds up.

INTEREST COSTS

There are several smaller giveaways that could also be eliminated. Fossil fuel subsidies for a mature industry with stable

profits cost the government about $10 billion per year. The crop insurance program has been consistently cited as a haven for waste and fraud, and cutting down on that would save another $5 billion. The Federal Home Loan Bank system receives an implicit federal subsidy of $7 billion per year despite massive growth and a shift far away from its original mission to improve housing finance. A loophole that allows passthrough businesses to shift assets between different entities and avoid taxes is worth $5 billion per year. Baker notes that we still spend $4.5 billion a year on manned spaceflight, even as unmanned probes gather just as much knowledge.

If you sum up everything (see chart on p. 23), you’ll see that the current budget savings already laid out in this article stands at $1.4215 trillion, entirely from corporate welfare, tax avoidance, procurement abuses, and other funneling of funds to the ruling class. And now we get to the other big cost in the federal budget: interest on the national debt. Last year, the government

paid nearly $900 billion in net interest costs, more than was spent on defense or Medicare; the ten­year estimate for interest costs exceeds $12 trillion.

First of all, if you’re saving something like $1.4 trillion per year, the hypothetical interest costs on that money will disappear, reducing the overall deficit. But the bigger way to eliminate large amounts of interest payments is to reduce interest rates. Stephanie Kelton, economics professor at Stony Brook University, recently wrote that instructing the Fed to sharply curtail interest rates and use other tools for purposes of inflation management would create on net trillions of dollars in savings over time.

“The trick is to look for ways to cut spending that will have minimal impact on those who can least afford to bear them,” Kelton said. “I just want to try to explain to the public that there is a painless way to cut $2 trillion, and Elon and company are determined to choose the painful alternative.”

Cutting interest rates would cause maybe the biggest freak­ out in the history of rich

WE REALLY DO KNOW WHERE THE FAT IS IN THE BUDGET; WE SIMPLY DON’T HAVE THE WILL TO TRIM THAT FAT.

ignore that. Hard­liners have demanded $2.5 trillion in cuts just to lift the nation’s borrowing limit, but reversing health care privatization or reforming runaway Pentagon contracting or ensuring proper tax collection aren’t part of that agenda.

to the Pentagon budget, for example. “I’ve been pushing for a Truman­like commission for defense cuts,” he told me. “If DOGE wants to make concrete recommendations on defense cuts and holding the five primes accountable, I’ll work with them.”

people if it were even suggested. But theoretically, yes, lower interest rates would sharply reduce the government’s interest costs over time, by trillions of dollars. I’m going to use my version of a magic asterisk and say that the combination of interest rate reduction and reduced interest generation from all the other savings will be enough to get you to $2 trillion in cuts per year.

A QUESTION OF VALUES

Such a dramatic and immediate budget cut is not something that anyone in the government should even think about doing. A dollar of federal spending is no different than a dollar of private ­ sector productivity for the purposes of economic growth; in fact, removing that dollar from circulating through the economy would cause more than a dollar hit to GDP, a reverse multiplier effect as that dollar is not spent on consumption.

“If they found $2 trillion in cuts, and actually tried to do that? Instant recession,” said Michael Linden. Even Baker, who originated several of these cost­ cutting plans, acknowledged that “we do have an issue of maintaining demand in the economy,” and that a rapid $2 trillion deficit reduction would spike unemployment for a long time.

But many of these measures will take time to ramp up. Tax collection improves after audits in the out years, and moving to public clinical trials will gradually bring a free market to pharmaceuticals. Moreover, cuts need not all go to deficit reduction: Congress could instead invest in programs with a more equitable reach. Abolishing Medicare Advantage and using the savings to bolster traditional Medicare is a good example.

The basic point is that government outlays are far too heavily weighted toward wealthy individuals and mega ­ corporations. The right­wing governing majority demanding budgetary austerity will almost certainly

There have been conflicting reports on whether Social Security and Medicare are at risk; for every pronouncement that they will not be touched, there is another floating hundreds of billions in cuts. More likely, the targets will be Medicaid, the health care program for over 72 million poor people, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps, providing food for another 42 million poor people.

Work requirements for Medicaid beneficiaries (millions of whom are destitute “dual­ eligible” seniors, so get into the job market, grandpa) and block­grant spending caps for both programs are among the options being discussed. Separately, allowing bigger subsidies for Affordable Care Act exchanges to expire would save a relatively small sum—about $30 billion a year—but hit millions of middle ­ class families with significantly higher premiums.

There are other possibilities, like tariff collections, repealing clean­ energy investments from the Inflation Reduction Act, and reversing student debt forgiveness. But the overall picture provides a very stark choice. The Republican message is to throw deficit reduction on the backs of the most vulnerable people in society; the reality is that it’s the rich and well­ connected who disproportionately benefit from federal budget expenditures.

That’s the kind of contrast Democrats could easily and effectively draw. Even without much of a push yet from the opposition party, DOGE was down to 49 percent support in December polling, with a majority of independents disapproving. A more plainspoken approach on the differences between making government more efficient and denying vulnerable people assistance could spiral DOGE further downward. “We shouldn’t give the richest man in the world the benefit of the doubt that he has the interests of working people at heart,” said Linden.

Some liberal base voters have seethed at Democratic representatives who have joined the DOGE caucus, or made overtures on certain facets of deficit reduction. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) has focused on trims

But when I asked him whether he’s optimistic that a serious effort was in the offing, he acknowledged that the variance between DOGE’s lip service on Pentagon spending and their hints on Medicaid or Social Security cuts was a “total cognitive disconnect … We’ll see what they come up with. It’s better to say, ‘We’re willing to work with you,’ and then see what they do and hold them to it.”

Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-PA), a former naval officer, also saw a path for taking a stand on corporate corruption in the budget debate. “If you pay attention to some of the Armed Services Committee hearings, you’ll get some head nods on the Republican side,” he said on the podcast that I co ­host, Organized Money. “These are folks who are pretty muscular about defense spending and don’t like getting ripped off, don’t like seeing weapons systems not on time, don’t like seeing us paying for things that aren’t worth what we’re paying for.”

DOGE did not need to be invented. The nation’s auditor, the Government Accountability Office, already does an admirable job identifying waste. “These [are] quiet heroes at GAO,” said Kathryn Anne Edwards. “People love bringing up waste, fraud, and abuse in DOD, I think that’s been on GAO’s high­risk list since 1993.”

Unfortunately, agencies like DOD and others won’t change their practices to conform to GAO recommendations, Congress won’t write laws in line with GAO recommendations, and if either of them tried, every lobbyist on K Street would rush to the Capitol to browbeat the members until they gave up. In very real ways, we really do know where the fat is in the budget; we simply don’t have the will to trim that fat.

But DOGE has forced these conversations to the fore. In a political battle, having an actual plan is typically helpful. And Democrats have a pretty killer one available. Right­wing Republicans and outside oligarchs are making room for billionaire tax cuts by taking aim at meager benefits for the poor. But the real sources of waste, fraud, and abuse in the budget come not from welfare queens or greedy seniors, but from bloated contractors, health care middlemen, and wealthy tax cheats. n

Will the Courts Enforce the Constitution Against President Trump?

If they don’t, the checks and balances that have defined our government since its inception will give way to one-man authoritarian rule.

By Erwin Chemerinsky ILLUSTRATIONS BY MIKE HADDAD

As a first-term president and more recently as a presidential candidate, Donald Trump showed little understanding of the Constitution and even less interest in complying with it. Many of the proposals he has been advocating are clearly unconstitutional under well­ established law. Some are chilling for how they would change fundamental aspects of separation of powers, for how they would infringe individual liberties, and for how they would harm people’s lives.

As was not the case during his first term as president, when some of his worst impulses were checked by those around him, he now seems surrounded by people whose primary qualification is loyalty to Trump. Does anyone expect Kash Patel to stop Trump from using the FBI against his political foes? Does anyone think that Pam Bondi will say no to Trump, as at times even Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr did as attorneys general during the first Trump presidency? Does anyone imagine Pete Hegseth or Tulsi Gabbard limiting Trump’s use of the military and the intelligence agencies in irresponsible and unconstitutional ways? Congress is limited in its ability to check specific excesses of power by a president

and, with a Republican majority in the House and the Senate, seems unlikely to pass new laws to restrict Trump’s actions. It will take four Republican senators to join the 47 Democrats to stand up to Trump. It is hard to identify who they might be, and even harder to identify the Republican House members who might vote to impose restrictions on him.

In consequence, when Trump acts unconstitutionally, the only plausible check will have to come from the courts. But will the judiciary, and especially the Supreme Court, enforce the Constitution against Donald Trump?

The Supreme Court has had at best a mixed record of being willing to uphold the Constitution in Trump ­related litigation. During Trump’s first term as president, in Trump v. Hawaii , in a terrible decision, the Court upheld Trump’s Muslim travel ban. In a 5­4 ruling, split along ideological lines, the Court allowed a Trump executive proclamation that banned individuals from designated countries that were predominantly Muslim from entering the United States. The Court deferred to Trump’s assertion of national security and ignored the over­

whelming evidence that the executive action was taken to implement Trump’s repeated campaign promise of a Muslim ban.

More recently, in 2024, in Trump v. Anderson , the Supreme Court refused to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which disqualifies a person from holding civil office if he took an oath of office and then participates in a rebellion or insurrection. The Colorado Supreme Court held that Trump was disqualified under this provision from running for president by virtue of his actions on January 6th. The Supreme Court, however, ruled in favor of Trump, effectively nullifying Section 3 of the 14th Amendment by holding that the courts cannot enforce it.

And on July 1, in a decision that belongs in the Hall of Shame of all­time bad Supreme Court rulings, the Court held in Trump v. United States that a president has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for any official acts taken pursuant to the Constitution or a statute. Coming from a Court where a majority of the justices are professed originalists who pledge fidelity to the Constitution’s original meaning, it was astounding to see them adopt a view of unchecked presidential power so completely

at odds with the framers’ desire to reject royal prerogatives. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor explained in her dissent, the Court’s decision means that a president would have absolute immunity if he ordered the Navy SEAL s to assassinate a political rival, or took bribes in exchange for pardons, or used the Justice Department to get retribution by prosecuting his political rivals.

Trump thus takes office knowing he cannot be criminally prosecuted even for blatantly illegal acts.

To be fair, sometimes the Supreme Court stood up to Trump in his first term. The Court ruled that Trump could not rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program without following the procedural requirements of the federal Administrative Procedure Act. Additionally, the Court held that the Trump Department of Commerce acted improperly in adding a question about citizenship to the 2020 census forms. But it also should be remembered that both of these were 5­4 decisions against Trump when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was still on the Court and part of the majority. It is an even more conservative Court today.

This history certainly provides a basis for skepticism that the justices will be willing to stand up to Trump and enforce the Constitution. So it is worth considering what Trump might do and how these actions might fare in the courts. The list of presidential actions to be worried about seems endless, but here are some to expect.

Impoundment of funds. Trump has talked about eliminating federal agencies, such as the Department of Education. But agencies are created by federal statute and can be abolished only by a new federal law. It seems unlikely that Congress will go along with this plan because many important federal statutes are enforced by this and other federal departments.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the

co ­ directors of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, have spoken of radical reductions in federal spending. Musk has talked about cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget, and Ramaswamy has said that the federal workforce should be cut by 75 percent. It is inconceivable that Congress would approve such spending reductions. It would require drastic cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and defense spending.

So Trump, Musk, and Ramaswamy have embraced a way to defund federal agencies and cut spending without Congress: presidential impoundment of funds. Impoundment occurs when the president refuses to spend federal money that has been appropriated in a federal statute. The practice is an unconstitutional usurpation of Congress’s power of the purse, and it violates the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.

President Trump engaged in illegal impoundment in his first term when he withheld military aid that had been appropriated to Ukraine until its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, agreed to investigate Joe Biden—which Zelensky did not do. This was the basis for the first impeachment of President Trump by the House of Representatives.

As a candidate in 2024, Trump explicitly embraced controlling federal spending by impounding funds. Musk and Ramaswamy also did so in an op ­ ed that they published in The Wall Street Journal

Under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, the spending power is assigned to Congress. To be sure, the president has a role in this process; he can opt to veto spending bills passed by Congress. But once a spending bill has been adopted, whether with the president’s signature or over his veto, the president has no authority to refuse to spend the money.

The Supreme Court long has made clear that separation of powers is violated when one branch of government usurps the powers of another. That is exactly what impoundment does: It gives the president control over federal spending and undermines Congress’s constitutional power over the purse.

Impoundment is not new. Thomas Jefferson was the first president to impound federal funds. But Richard Nixon used it more extensively than his predecessors, and his impoundments were challenged in courts. Almost without exception, the courts found that his impoundments vio ­

Trump takes office knowing he cannot be criminally prosecuted even for blatantly illegal acts.

lated the law, including the United States Supreme Court in Train v. City of New York (1975). In that case, the Court ruled that Nixon lacked the authority to impound federal monetary assistance under the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972, a program that he had vetoed, only to see Congress override his veto. The Court unanimously held that the law gave President Nixon no power to impound funds appropriated by a federal statute.

The issue of impoundment has rarely resurfaced in the last half ­ century because Congress, in 1974, passed a statute, the Impoundment Control Act, that outlaws such presidential actions. The act was adopted in reaction to the repeated impoundments by the Nixon administration and actually was signed into law by Nixon.

The law forbids presidential impoundment of funds, but allows the president to propose rescissions of money appropriated by federal law. If the president wishes to rescind spending, he must send a special message to Congress identifying the amount of the proposed rescission, the reasons for it, and the budgetary, economic, and programmatic effects of the rescission. After the president sends such a message to Congress, he may withhold funding for up to 45 days. But if Congress does not approve the rescission within this time period, any withheld funds must be disbursed. The act also allows the president to defer federal spending in very narrow circumstances, but again with required notifications to Congress.

Musk and Ramaswamy in their Wall Street Journal op ­ ed argued that the Impoundment Control Act is an unconstitutional usurpation of presidential power and would likely be struck down by the Supreme Court.

Trump’s threat to withhold funds to Ukraine during his first term was an illegal impoundment, and the basis for his first impeachment.

Their constitutional argument is both wrong and dangerous. It is wrong because impoundment itself is unconstitutional, even without the Impoundment Control Act, as the president has no such authority under the Constitution, which exclusively delegates the spending power to Congress. Moreover, as Justice Robert Jackson observed in his landmark opinion about

separation of powers in Youngstown Sheet and Tube v. Sawyer (1952), the president’s power is at its lowest ebb when he is violating a federal law. The Impoundment Control Act is a clearly constitutional law to protect Congress’s control over federal spending. It would be terribly dangerous for the courts to declare the Impoundment Control Act unconstitutional and give the president

such great control over federal expenditures. The Constitution assigns the spending power to Congress because its authors wanted a broad ­ based elected branch of government to control how federal money is disbursed. If the president can impound funds at will, there will be an enormous shift of unchecked power to one person.

Trump, Musk, and Ramaswamy have been clear about their plans to use impoundment, and the question is whether the courts will stop this blatant power grab, which would fundamentally alter separation of powers.

Recess appointments. Several times, Trump has suggested that he might choose to make recess appointments of cabinet officials and others requiring confirmation, rather than have these nominees confirmed by the United States Senate as the Constitution requires. This would negate a basic check created by the Constitution: the need for Senate confirmation of presidential appointees. Given some of Trump’s nominees, and their dubious qualifications, it is easy to see why he sees recess appointments as a way to easily get them into office.

The Constitution actually provides a way that he could do this. Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution says that if the House and the Senate disagree about whether to adjourn, the president “may adjourn them to such time as he shall think proper.” Trump’s plan would be to ask Republican leaders of the House and the Senate to disagree about whether to recess. He then could adjourn Congress until he called it back into session and take advantage of another provision of the Constitution which allows him to make recess appointments that last until the end of the two ­year session of Congress.

It is frightening to imagine the president putting Congress into indefinite recess and using this to circumvent a vital constitutional check on the president’s appointment power: the need for Senate approvals. It is

imperative that members of Congress not agree to this power ploy and that they take their constitutional duties seriously. Especially given the controversial nature of many of Trump’s appointees, Senate consideration and confirmation is vital. No president in American history has ever tried to evade the need for Senate confirmation of the cabinet in this way and Congress must not allow Trump to do so now.

Actions against noncitizens . Central to Trump’s campaign, and to virtually every speech he has given, have been his promises and threats with regard to immigration. He has talked about ending birthright citizenship, about mass deportations of undocumented individuals and creating deportation camps, of forcing state and local governments to cooperate with federal immigration authorities, of using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport even those lawfully in the country, and even of deploying the military to carry out his immigration policies. Cumulatively, these would terrorize noncitizens and citizens alike, and would change the country in frightening ways.

While all these actions are unwise, many of them would also be unquestionably unconstitutional. Although Trump has pledged to end birthright citizenship— which provides that every person born in the United States is an American citizen— he has no authority to do so. There has been speculation that Trump will issue an executive order directing federal agencies that issue citizenship documents, like the Department of State or the Department of Homeland Security, to deny that documentation to the children of unauthorized immigrants in an effort to deny them American citizenship altogether.

But this is blatantly unconstitutional. Section 1 of the 14th Amendment provides that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the juris­

diction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” This was adopted in 1868 to overrule the Supreme Court’s tragic decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford , which held that enslaved individuals were not citizens even if born in the United States. Section 1 of the 14th Amendment is an unequivocal grant of citizenship to all born in this country. The phrase “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” is to ensure that children born to Americans in foreign countries while serving in the military or working in an embassy also are deemed citizens.

The Supreme Court long ago held that Section 1 of the 14th Amendment bestows citizenship on all born in the United States. In 1898, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Court held that children born in the United States are citizens regardless of their parents’ immigration status.

This decision is binding precedent on lower federal courts, so they should be expected to strike down any Trump actions to the contrary. And the hope must be that even the Supreme Court, which has been willing to overrule important precedents, will adhere to the text of Section 1 of the 14th Amendment and say no to Trump on this.

It will be harder to challenge Trump’s efforts to engage in mass deportations, but the way he opts to do it certainly can violate the Constitution. The federal government has the authority to deport those who are unlawfully in this country. But the Supreme Court has been clear that individuals, including noncitizens, have a right to due process before being deported, including the right to be informed of the charges against them, the right to an attorney, and the right to present evidence in their defense.

Practically, the limit on mass deportations may be the lack of sufficient immigration officials, detention facilities, and immigration judges to carry them out. One way that the Trump administration is likely to try to augment its resources is to force state and local governments to assist in enforcing federal immigration laws. During the first Trump administration, it adopted a policy to deny federal law enforcement funds to police departments that did not assist United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement by turning over undocumented individuals.

On December 23, 2024, Stephen Miller, who has been named Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, through his Amer­

The Supreme Court repeatedly has held that the federal government cannot force cities and states to enforce federal mandates.

ica First Legal, sent letters to 249 elected state and local officials in jurisdictions with sanctuary policies. These are governments that have laws prohibiting their cooperation with ICE and forbidding their schools, public hospitals, and police from turning over undocumented individuals to the federal government or providing information about them. These policies make great sense because otherwise undocumented individuals who are ill, including with communicable diseases, won’t go to public hospitals for treatment. Parents will be reluctant to send their children to school. Crime victims who are undocumented will hesitate before reporting crimes for fear that they could then face being deported.

Miller’s letter said that people living illegally in the United States are subject to removal and that it is a federal crime to conceal, harbor, or shield them. It is an obvious attempt to try to intimidate state and local governments into cooperating with Trump’s deportation efforts. This is sure to lead to a conflict between the Trump administration and progressive cities and states, as it did during the first Trump term. The Supreme Court repeatedly has held that the federal government cannot force cities and states to adopt laws or to enforce federal mandates. For example, the Court declared unconstitutional a provision of the federal Brady Handgun Control Act which required that state and local law enforcement personnel do background checks before issuing gun permits. In Printz v. United States (1997), the Court declared this unconstitutional as impermissibly commandeering state and local governments.

Even when Congress has tried to induce action by putting strings on federal grants,

the Supreme Court has said that such provisions are unconstitutional if they are unduly coercive. Most famously, the Court struck down a provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) which required that states receiving federal funds expand their Medicaid eligibility. The Court said that illegally amounted to “dragooning” the states in violation of their sovereignty.

During the first Trump administration, efforts to require state and local law enforcement to cooperate with ICE were challenged on this basis. Most lower courts, including the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, declared this unconstitutional. But it never was ruled on by the Supreme Court and the issue is sure to arise again. This time around, Trump has talked about even more extreme measures to enforce his immigration policies. He has spoken of invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The law gives the president the power to detain or deport the citizens of an enemy nation. The authority includes power over both the undocumented and those who are lawfully in the United States.

The statute, however, applies only if there

is a declared war or when a foreign government threatens or undertakes an invasion of the United States. It has been invoked just three times in American history: during the War of 1812, World War I, and World War II. It was used to justify the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

The Alien Enemies Act has no relevance now. There is no declared war and no foreign government has threatened to invade the United States. Any invocation by President Trump should be immediately invalidated by the courts.

Using the military within the United States Among the most chilling ideas advanced by Trump is his using the military domestically

to enforce immigration laws and more generally to carry out his policies. In the spring of 2020, during the protests following the murder of George Floyd, Trump apparently wanted to use the military to quell demonstrations—although (or, in Trump’s mind, perhaps because) using the military against dissenters is common practice in the most authoritarian countries.

Can he do it? The Posse Comitatus Act forbids the United States military—including federal armed forces and National Guard troops who have been called into federal service—from taking part in civilian law enforcement. This law reflects a deeply embedded tradition in the United States that liberty and democracy are threatened by the military’s involvement in domestic matters. But the Posse Comitatus Act has an exception permitting the domestic use of the armed forces if authorized by a federal statute.

Trump has talked about using authority under the Insurrection Act, a federal law initially adopted early in American history, to get around the Posse Comitatus Act and to use the military to carry out his policies.

Trump’s allies have suggested ending birthright citizenship, which Section 1 of the 14th Amendment bestows.

The law says the military cannot engage in civilian law enforcement, but the Insurrection Act provides an exception.

The Insurrection Act provides the president the authority to use the military domestically in three situations. Section 251 permits the president to use the military if a state legislature, or a governor if the legislature cannot meet, requests federal help to quell an insurrection.

Section 252 of the Insurrection Act authorizes the president to use the military to “enforce the laws” of the United States or to “suppress the rebellion” whenever “unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion” make it “impracticable” to enforce federal law in that state by the “ordinary course of judicial proceedings.”

Section 253 permits the use of the military in a state to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” that “so hinders the execution of the laws” that any portion of the state’s inhabitants are deprived of a constitutional right and state authorities are unable or unwilling to protect that right. This was the authority President Dwight Eisenhower invoked to use troops to ensure the desegregation of the Little Rock, Arkansas, public schools in 1957.

Most broadly, Section 253 also permits the president to deploy troops to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” that “opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.” This is so expansively written that it conceivably could allow the president to call out troops against any conspiracy to violate a federal law.

These provisions give the president frighteningly broad powers to use the military domestically. In fact, in 1827, in Martin v. Mott, the Supreme Court ruled that “the authority to decide whether [an exigency requiring the militia to be called out] has arisen belongs exclusively to the President, and … his decision is conclusive upon all other persons.”

Thankfully, in the last half­ century, presidents rarely have invoked the Insurrection Act. It was last used in 1992, when California Gov. Pete Wilson requested military aid from President George H.W. Bush when there were riots in Los Angeles following the acquittal of four police officers who had been charged in the beating of Rodney King.

Although there have been many calls to modify or repeal the Insurrection Act, that has not happened. And it could be invoked by President Trump to use the military within the United States to carry out his policies. Then it would be the responsibility of the courts to limit the president’s domestic use of the military by narrowly construing the Insurrection Act.

Controlling federal agencies. Donald Trump repeatedly has expressed a desire to control the federal bureaucracy to ensure that it hews to his wishes. For cabinet agencies, the president has the authority to fire cabinet secretaries and top officials and then to

Trump has made clear that he believes he has the power to fire even federal workers protected by the Civil Service Act.

is different depending on the number of people running the agency. It is thus easy to imagine Trump looking for the test case where he will try to fire members of a federal regulatory commission even though their tenure is protected by federal law.

replace them, subject to Senate approval, with those of his choosing.

But outside of these political appointees, the president’s legal authority is much more limited, though Trump has made clear that he will claim greater power and test the law in this area. This might initially be directed against the officials who head federal regulatory agencies for terms fixed by federal statutes, and who can be removed only for “just cause.” This applies to leaders of such important federal agencies as the National Labor Relations Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and many more.

In Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, in 1935, the Supreme Court held that it is constitutional for Congress to limit presidential removal of these agency officials. In that case, the Court ruled that President Franklin Roosevelt lacked the power to fire a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission.

Some have speculated that the Supreme Court, which in recent years has acted aggressively to limit federal agency powers, might be ready to reconsider Humphrey’s Executor, and to hold that Congress cannot limit the president’s power to remove agency heads. In fact, in 2020, in Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau , the Court declared that it was unconstitutional for Congress to prevent the president from firing the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. However, the Court also ruled that Humphrey’s Executor allowed Congress to limit the removal of members of a multimember body, like the Federal Trade Commission, but that it did not apply to an agency where there was one person in charge, like the CFPB

From the perspective of the Constitution, it is hard to see why the president’s power

Many thought that the National Labor Relations Board would be a likely target for such Trump actions. But in December, Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema refused to go along with Democratic senators in confirming Lauren McFerran, then the outgoing chair of the NLRB, for another term. Had McFerran been confirmed, there would have been a 3­2 Democratic majority on the Board for the first two years of the Trump presidency. It was speculated that this might cause Trump to try to remove one or more of the Democratic appointees, notwithstanding the federal law that fixes the length of their terms and thus limits their firing. Now, Trump will fill this seat on the NLRB and it will have a Republican majority. But there is every reason to expect that some other federal agency will draw his ire and he will create a test case to establish his power to fire all executive officials.

Since the 1930s, the Supreme Court has recognized the importance of Congress creating federal agencies whose top officials have some independence from the president. Now, however, a majority of the justices appear to believe that there is a “unitary executive,” with the president in control of every aspect of the executive branch of government. This, together with the conservative justices’ hostility to the administrative state, may make it willing to overrule precedent and allow the president to fire any agency official.

At the same time, Trump has made clear that he believes he has the power to fire even federal workers protected by the Civil Service Act. The central idea of civil service— that federal employees should be chosen based on merit and protected from political reprisals—is not new. The Pendleton Act was adopted in 1883 to ensure that most employees within the federal government are chosen on the basis of merit and not political patronage.

In October 2020, President Trump adopted an unprecedented attack on the civil service system. Executive Order 13957 created a new “Schedule F” classification, and deemed these to be positions that were outside the civil service. Trump invoked a provision of federal law that exempts from

civil service protections positions “of a confidential, policy­ determining, policy­making, or policy­advocating character.” This always has been understood, by both Democratic and Republican administrations, to apply to a small number of positions traditionally filled by political appointees. In recent years, the number of such positions has been roughly 1,200.

By contrast, Trump’s executive order reclassified and deprived civil service protections for a huge swath of federal employees. Estimates of its scope range from 50,000 to hundreds of thousands of government workers who could be replaced by the president, including for political reasons.

President Biden, on taking office, rescinded the Trump executive order, but Trump has said that he would reinstitute Schedule F on “day one” of his new administration. This would decimate the civil service and allow Trump to exercise unprecedented control over the federal workforce, firing those he deems disloyal and filling positions with his loyalists. It certainly would violate the very purpose of the Pendleton Act and the civil service system.

These, of course, are only some of the actions of dubious legality that Trump has promised, and there are sure to be many that have not yet been mentioned. Two conclusions emerge from just these. First, taken together, these constitute a clear path to authoritarianism. It is not hyperbole to say that, in aggregate, these actions—giving the president virtually unlimited control over federal spending and over federal agencies, using the Alien Enemy Act and the Insurrection Act, employing the military to carry out his domestic policies—would radically change the United States. They would shred checks and balances. They would create a presidency unlike any ever imagined by the Constitution’s authors, and unlike any ever seen in this country.

Second, virtually all of the actions described in this article would violate clearly established law, including many that are blatantly unconstitutional. But the crucial question is whether the Supreme Court will enforce these laws and stop Donald Trump. The future of American democracy likely will turn on this. n

Erwin Chemerinsky is dean and Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.

Chips on the

During the 2020s, semiconductor production returned to the forefront of U.S. industrial­policy objectives, with President Biden’s administration determined to get the country that invented the technology back to manufacturing it. The CHIPS and Science Act was conceived with two main goals: revitalize the domestic semiconductor industry, and bring supply chains back to the U.S. Passed in 2022, the act committed to a one ­time payment of $52 billion: $39 billion for “manufacturing incentives” and $13 billion for research and development.

The act has, for the most part, been greeted with enthusiasm, and there is some cause for optimism. U.S. government

investment in semiconductor manufacturing in 2024 will surpass total expenditures over the previous 27 years. CHIPS money has been decently distributed beyond the top players like Intel, Samsung, and TSMC. And although semiconductors have long been central to the U.S. military’s vision for

dominance, the CHIPS Act is run through a civilian agency—the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) at the Department of Commerce—rather than the Department of Defense.

The CHIPS Act and other Biden initiatives also sought to leverage public investment to make advances in child care, community benefits, profit­ sharing, employment for minority populations in economically distressed areas, and the inclusion of labor priorities. For these reasons, its architects have branded the full suite of Bidenomics policies as heralding a restoration of public investment and the end of neoliberalism.

Many Biden administration policies, like its investments in clean energy, had success in increasing homegrown production capacity and creating union jobs. But the

By Susannah Glickman and Madhumita Dutta

Table

The Biden administration wanted to restore the domestic semiconductor industry. The results have disappointed.

CHIPS effort in particular harks back to the industrial policy we’ve seen in the U.S. since World War II, closely tied in to national security. As computer pioneer Grady Booch has frequently stated, all computing is “woven on the loom of sorrow.”

Forged by and for war, computer technologies like semiconductors have never escaped the logic of military Keynesianism, binding the U.S. state and capital more tightly together, producing endless variations of public­private cooperation. And the bipartisan coalition for tech policy interventions like CHIPS always hinges on the imagined capacities of an enemy nation. During the Cold War, it was the USSR; during the 1980s and 1990s, Japan; presently, it is China.

Biden’s anti ­ neoliberals oversold the progressive nature of the CHIPS Act, whose solutions in practice make little break with the technocratic and anti­ democratic methods of neoliberalism. The goals of solving climate change, restoring the middle class, strengthening supply chains, regaining control of leading­ edge and legacy chips, and repairing our weakened democracy were not backed up by incentives or enforcement. Moreover, the act has begun the process of shifting defense money from traditional D.C.based defense contractors to a newer, venture capital–startup alternative based in the West. As Silicon Valley edges further into military contracting and assumes positions of power in the second Trump administration, the future of CHIPS could wander even further from how it was initially sold.

Making and Remaking a Global Order Against China

In 1984, U.S. companies like Intel, which had long enjoyed a huge market share in semiconductor production, suddenly lost ground to Japanese competitors. Many feared that the U.S. would lose control of semiconductors, the same way they had “lost” the automobile industry to Japan. The Reagan administration responded with political might, even briefly imposing sanctions on Japan for dumping chips on

the U.S. market, and demanding that the country purchase U.S.­made chips.

A public ­ private semiconductor partnership called SEMATECH was founded in the 1980s to collaborate on research and development and revive U.S. manufacturing. But SEMATECH was an old boys club comprising the most historically powerful companies. Because those companies did not want to benefit competitors, SEMATECH refused to test new prototypes. This refusal led directly to the success of the Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre (IMEC) in Belgium, which became the indispensable testing bed for new semiconductor technology.

The United States’ other semiconductor strategy was to inaugurate a new global order built around distributed chip production. As Chris Miller describes in Chip

War, the industry boosted firms that filled a vacuum in East Asia after the wars in Vietnam and Korea. Enterprising businessmen, who often got their start in American semiconductor firms in the 1970s and ’80s, brought their expertise home to Korea and Taiwan. The U.S. encouraged these upstarts to undermine Japan.

As the Japanese threat faded in the late 1990s, Clinton officials inaugurated trade regimes that allowed then­ dominant U.S. high­tech firms maximal access to foreign markets. Through luck, savvy, and U.S. hubris, Korean and Taiwanese firms gained on their American competitors. Packaging and assembly moved to nearby locations like Malaysia, Vietnam, China, and Indonesia, where labor was cheap and manufacturing well subsidized. U.S. politicos saw only upside; globalization was a way to spread

development, wealth, and stability while ensuring a supply of cheap goods to U.S. consumers.

The CHIPS Act and other semiconductorrelated policies thus build on a long­standing feature of U.S. policymaking. They aim not only to reshore leading­ edge capacity, but to knit together a new world order through trade, labor, and industrial policies. The older order was aimed at countering Japan; this new vision aims to counter China. The chip industry as a whole is not going to be reshored absent a radical shift. While the U.S. is paying to bring some semiconductor production stateside, the real goal of these policies is familiar: to distribute production among allies to ensure nominal U.S. control, even if it remains abroad. This is sometimes given the anodyne ­ sounding moniker “friendshoring.”

The U.S. lost its hold on semiconductor research and development to foreign efforts like the Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre (IMEC).

But it’s not just about investment. The strategy includes extensive export controls on advanced chips and the means to produce them, limiting technology transfer to China, and much more. These measures have not reached the level of belligerence displayed by the Reagan administration, and are less effective than Reagan’s measures, perhaps due to the U.S. being in a less hegemonic position than it was in the 1980s. This ineffectiveness has not deterred their use: U.S. trade representative Katherine Tai claimed that “we really haven’t seen the PRC make any changes to its fundamental systemic structural policies that would make sense for us to provide any relaxation.” Yet there is little cause to believe this might moderate under a Trump presidency, because the effort is bipartisan.

A Defense-Industrial Anti-Neoliberalism?

Policymakers following distorted notions of industrial policy as economic warfare by other means carry echoes of a much older defense­industrial­complex critique of 1980s neoliberalism. Influential ex–Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine blamed the collapse and consolidation of defense firms on 1980s financialization, not 1990s defense cuts. Going back to the early 2000s, Augustine and his allies criticized offshore production and the elevation of China; Augustine likewise was crucial in founding In­ Q ­Tel, the CIA venture capital firm responsible for Palantir, Anduril, Skydio, and others.

This defense industry critique of neoliberalism attracted influential staffers to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a group of State Department figures associated with Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan, and the new tech defense right. CHIPS itself was molded from two bipartisan bills, the Endless Frontier Act

Figures on the Tech Right, who are deeply embedded in Trumpworld, are hoping for escalation with China.

and the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, with Schumer and several leading Senate Republicans functioning as one of many mouthpieces for the defense ­industrial consensus that formed in the late 2000s.

Sullivan allies were crucial in building a broader coalition around the legislation, bringing together climate activists, anti–Wall Street campaigners, organized labor, and the New Right. They have sprinkled money around from philanthropic groups to cement their narrative, and even convinced skeptical left­wing critics like Quinn Slobodian to praise the shift to a more confrontational stance against China.

This faction gained influence in the Democratic Party in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s surprise defeat. They believe in the “China shock” theory of Clinton’s loss: that a disgruntled Rust Belt working class, angry at the Democrats for trade policies that exposed them to foreign competition, rebelled and switched sides. In practice, the theory has merged with an increasing hawkishness toward China, which Sullivan ally Jennifer Harris has said is a threat that “lack[s] historical precedent … [because] the Soviets were never an economic match for the US.” Given the fact that U.S. Cold War mistakes and unnecessary escalations cost millions of lives, this is a weighty claim.

Certainly, removing trade barriers with China led to job loss across many industries in the U.S. The “China shock” narrative, however, offers little in the way of explanation for why leading­ edge semiconductor manufacturing went abroad. Nor does it justify new export controls. Labor costs are minimal in leading­ edge factories because they are largely automated. Their offshoring, instead, was a product of historical contingencies, the short­term priorities of new MBA­ CEOs at Intel and other firms, and U.S. government hubris.

A new Tech Right also claims ownership over the bill. Some conservative groups are much friendlier to industrial policy and state intervention than the paleoconservative right was at the time of Reagan’s intervention into semiconductor production in the 1980s. But the emergence of a Tech Right carries aims that are increasingly anti­ democratic and militaristic.

Tech industry oligarchs like Eric Schmidt and Peter Thiel, as well as figures at think tanks like the Manhattan Institute, have a different vision for America’s new industrial policy. Like the Sullivan wing, they want

to “end neoliberalism,” but by binding tech companies more closely to the state, eschewing “soft” products like advertising technology in favor of “hard” defense products. Tech companies have more or less always been defense contractors, and certainly function that way today. The heightened focus on semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, and AI functions as an excuse to shift money and power from traditional defense outlets to their own.

Barack Obama, who had very warm relations with tech moguls, brought Schmidt into government advisory and policymaking roles. Government venture capital firms like In­ Q ­Tel helped steer Silicon Valley funders in the direction of defense by providing long­term lucrative government contracts to their chosen startups. Palantir, Anduril, and other new tech­ defense hybrids now see prodigious opportunities for profit in a revived defense focus under Trump. The Financial Times recently reported that the two firms plan to join forces with a dozen competitors to bid on $850 billion in military contracts, to “disrupt” the incumbents. Private equity and venture capital have reasonably concluded government­funded defense firms are a good bet.

Figures on the Tech Right, who are deeply embedded in Trumpworld, are hoping for escalation with China. At a presentation for the now­ defunct Silicon Valley Bank by America’s Frontier Fund (AFF), a Thiel and Schmidt venture capital firm, their spokesperson described how they aimed to “profit from several ‘choke points’ in semiconductor and rare earth mineral supply chains.” They also boasted that AFF ’s investments would increase “10x overnight, like no question about it” if “the China/Taiwan situation happens” or, more generally, “if there is a kinetic event in the Pacific.”

Schmidt himself has claimed that his underlings helped write significant sections of the CHIPS and Science Act, and his spokesman has also described how government subsidies for priorities like semiconductors are a “fourth pillar” of AFF ’s business. These claims should be taken with a serious grain of salt as they are bragging to potential investors, but it’s clear that the tech sector has been prominent in the defense ­heavy tilt to semiconductor policy.

The Infrastructure of CHIPS Implementation

A vast array of new industrial­policy sub ­

agencies were created to do the practical work of distributing money and crafting regulations and agreements with industry. These include the new CHIPS Program Office at NIST (housed in the Commerce Department), the Undersecretary of Energy for Infrastructure, the Energy Department’s Office of Critical and Emerging Technologies, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Industrial Base Policy, and the Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (TIP) directorate at the National Science Foundation.

We interviewed several agency participants who were largely optimistic about the CHIPS Act and the “sea change in government philosophy” at work in Biden’s industrial­policy efforts. In our interviews, agency actors were, like Schumer, the Sullivan wing, and the new Tech Right, focused on competition with China.

To the chagrin of some progressives, many of the CHIPS ­related offices are, as Dan Kim of the CHIPS Program Office stated, “unique in government … because most people come from the private sector,” specifically Wall Street firms like McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, and Blackstone. Many of these new bureaucrats are motivated in their approach by high­profile failures of the past, where technology was originated but not sustained in the U.S. Likewise, the belief that previous administrations were just “throwing money out” without accountability colors the design of the programs.

CHIPS applications mention community benefits, local involvement in planning, union participation, worker training, environmental stewardship, reinvestment for “excess” profit­ sharing, and supply chain resiliency. But the agreements remain noncommittal: They require a plan for profit reinvestment and child care, but not their ultimate provision.

The agencies wanted to create long­term partnerships with carrots and not sticks; to shape but not control U.S. industry. As they see it, these new initiatives are not government capture by industry, but the opposite. But their model builds venture capital further into U.S. industrial policy, offering them even more subsidies and derisking, while asking for little in return.

Environment: Toxic Chemicals and Carbon Emissions

Public discussions around CHIPS have almost entirely ignored environmental problems, which have been at the cen ­

ter of labor and community organizing around electronics since the 1980s, both in the U.S. and abroad. Samsung in Korea and Vietnam has faced considerable criticism and activism around the hazards it knowingly exposed workers to, the most important of these being toxic chemicals like PFAS used in the production of semiconductors and the energy that powers it. Many workers have either contracted cancer or incurred serious reproductive harms. In Santa Clara County, California, alone, there are 23 Superfund sites from the historic production of semiconductor chips. The state has passed special toxic gas ordinances as a result.

Until recently, the CHIPS Office viewed environmental regulations in terms of potential delays to implementation, and has assembled a team to avoid “roadblocks” that would slow down potential projects. Last October, Congress passed the Building Chips in America Act, which adds exemptions from federal environmental review for every project receiving CHIPS money.

CHIPS agencies have indicated they are committed to making semiconductor fabrication plants (known as fabs) more efficient in energy and water use, making the projects cheaper. Likewise, application guidelines express a preference for projects that are net­zero; applicants must “submit a climate and environmental responsibility plan.”

But despite claims and pledges of netzero energy use, this does not seem to be the case for several planned fabs. New York, for example, encourages Micron to source clean energy, but local grid operators are concerned about where this will come from. Commitments to renewable energy frequently rely on unbundled renewable ­ energy credits that don’t put any new renewable energy on the grid. Micron doesn’t plan to invest in new clean­ energy sources and will only use renewable ­ energy credits. This is true for Intel in Ohio as well. While grids can handle load growth, in many cases this will increase demand for dirty energy. In Arizona, for example, local utilities are using new demand to justify increases in fracked gas and to slow the retirement of old coal plants.

In addition, environmental protection goes beyond climate issues. Industry wants environmental exemptions on even regulated chemicals, though many chemicals they use are presently unregulated and untest­

Rather than focusing on high-quality jobs, agencies in charge of CHIPS have advanced industry priorities like workforce development.

ed. Local agreements tend to lack transparency about chemical use, making the understanding of the full impact to human health unclear.

More recently, the issue of PFAS and related toxics has garnered more attention, including from several Democratic senators, prompting meetings among CHIPS agencies. The new prototyping and research entity, Natcast, recently released a program called PFAS Reduction and Innovation in Semiconductor Manufacturing (PRISM). Notably, PRISM is not explicitly about removing PFAS from semiconductor manufacturing entirely. Alongside this effort is a longerterm set of funding opportunities for PFAS alternatives, which may not survive the Trump administration.

Developing cleaner chips is a long­held goal of the environmental­labor coalition. However, unions and the Sierra Club worry that even if PFAS and related chemicals are phased out, they will be replaced by other chemicals like PFBS, which still has some level of toxicity but will be allowed for use without public testing and regulation.

Labor: Worker Training vs. Union Involvement and Representation

When the CHIPS Act was announced in 2022, the Biden administration committed to place labor at the center of its new industrial policy. The CHIPS Office funding documents ask that companies follow the “good jobs” principles outlined by the Departments

of Labor and Commerce. To what extent did the administration deliver on its promises?

The unionized building trades, especially the pipefitters unions, have won contracts to build and maintain new electronics plants. But only one company has committed to labor neutrality (an agreement not to fight unionization) for other longterm workers: Akash Systems, which only received $18.2 million of the $39 billion in manufacturing incentives for its West Oakland facility. Although Micron announced in 2023 that it would talk labor peace with the Communications Workers of America (CWA), a year later the union said the discussions were “disappointing.”

Rather than focusing on high ­ quality

jobs, the agencies in charge of CHIPS have advanced industry priorities like workforce development and training. For example, design is one of the few areas of the semiconductor industry where the United States still dominates. The average worker in this field is in their mid­ to late fifties. Over the past five years, Apple, which has been very concerned about this predicament, has developed and funded its own curriculum and training program. Intel has taken similar steps to address workforce problems.

In an interview, Dan Kim of the CHIPS Office said that creating a broader semiconductor ecosystem in the U.S. will encourage workers to circulate among companies, develop best practices, and improve tech­

niques. In theory, these exchanges can create the engineering expertise that, according to many, produced TSMC’s dominance.

The Chips Communities United (CCU) coalition is the most active left pressure group, comprising various unions, environmental groups, and other independent activists. CCU aims to unite its coalition to steer industrial policy around chips toward a Green New Deal–style framework, where workers and communities get a fair shake. This kind of push would make these investments more palatable to communities and solve some of the labor shortages often cited by companies, by creating more attractive, better­paying jobs that don’t expose workers to toxic chemicals.

The land used for Intel’s chip facility in Ohio was acquired through high-pressure sales to a company owned by billionaire Les Wexner.

But the coalition formed only recently, was not active in drafting the legislation, and doesn’t yet wield the kind of influence that more established left groups used to shape Inflation Reduction Act allocations in clean energy. Legislative staffers involved in CHIPS whom we interviewed note that they have felt little left pressure and think it’s a mistake that more powerful and established left organizations have not mobilized around CHIPS money.

According to Judith Barish of CCU, the coalition has been “trying to get the Department of Labor at the table,” as well as building local coalitions to get signed community benefits agreements (CBA s). But no preliminary CHIPS agreements have a minimum living wage, or detailed minimum standards like community benefits, worker voice in production, worker ­led elected health and safety committees, whistleblower protections, or “green and clean” R&D. Several companies that have received preliminary agreements have either union ­ busted or resisted worker demands. In a recent interview, workers at Analog Devices, Inc., in Oregon, said it is a “real struggle to survive” on their salaries.

In addition, right­wing (and some centrist) attacks on the child care provisions in CHIPS have been effective, despite not being credible (labor costs are minuscule compared to other capital requirements). Labor organizers we interviewed were upset that Democrats did not fight back.

Some state grants, like Ohio’s agreement with Intel, require a minimum average pay floor and a certain number of jobs created. But companies exploit averages to hide that the bulk of jobs pay poorly. As the Dayton Daily News reported, 70 percent of the 3,000 new employees at an Ohio Intel plant are slated to be technicians, who can make as little as $50,000 a year, which is well below the average wage.

According to labor sources, the largest share of workers on the production side are operators and assemblers, who are paid a median wage of $18.13 an hour. Most of the production jobs pay around $40,000 a year. Many of the most advanced plants are automated, meaning there are fewer production workers and more engineers, who make around $70,000, not the six figures the Biden administration intimated. Fabs often run 24/7, and engineers are frequently called in to work weekends

Financial Subsidies to Intel in Ohio

Ohio Onshoring Incentive

Infrastructure improvements

Water reclamation facility

Personal property exemption

Construction materials exemption

Semiconductor equipment over $100M exemption

$600 million Grant

$391 million Project-specific spending

$300 million*** Project-specific spending

$196 million* Sales tax exemption

$161.8 million* Sales tax exemption

$16.4 million* Commercial activity tax exemption

R&D equipment exemption Unknown Sales tax exemption

Environmental equipment exemption

Exemptions for Intel suppliers

JobsOhio Land acquisition

Workforce development

Community Reinvestment Area

Exemptions for Intel suppliers

Unknown Sales tax exemption

$0.8 million** Commercial activity tax exemption

$125 million Grant

$25 million Grant

exemption

Unknown Property tax exemption

Table created by: Chips Communities United; State data calculated by Zach Schiller, Policy Matters Ohio

* Figure is for fiscal years 2024 and 2025.

** Figure is for fiscal year 2025.

*** Ohio allocated funds to Intel’s Water Reclamation facility from the federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA).

and nights. But they don’t make overtime, despite working these extreme hours. This creates lots of turnover.

For its part, industry has complained that it can’t find enough domestic workers, in order to justify more H­1B visas, which can trap people in bad jobs at risk of deportation. Unions claim there are plenty of workers, including many in the marginalized communities that the Biden administration wanted to target. But it’s hard to attract workers for poorly paid jobs with

terrible hours and potential exposure to carcinogens.

It is unclear if Biden administration claims about how many jobs CHIPS will create will pan out. It is possible there will be even fewer jobs created than the (meager) 125,000 cited, unless industry is held accountable with strong contract metrics. Meanwhile, the more labor­intensive pieces of semiconductor production, like packaging and assembly, are not coming to the U.S. without more political pressure or subsidies;

attempts to reshore these tasks have been much less significant than the attempts to regain advanced chip manufacturing. East Asian governments that house most highend fabs provide prodigious subsidies, tax breaks, free land, and cheap labor; it will be difficult to dislodge all facets of production.

The longevity and political benefits of this kind of industrial policy rely on whether the jobs are good union jobs, whether workers can have a say in production to make sure companies are not just looting government subsidies, whether profits get reinvested in production, and whether communities get benefits. All of these factors are apparent in the vision of CHIPS, but were not prioritized in the rollout.

CHIPS at the State Level: Ohio as a Case Study Ohio government, like many state governments, is notoriously corrupt. Yet the CHIPS legislation relies heavily on the state and local level for implementation. Land deals around CHIPS allocations in Ohio offer a window into a political economy where oversight is scant and crony capitalism and corruption are often ignored.

In his 2022 State of the Union address, President Biden highlighted “a thousand empty acres of land” east of Columbus, Ohio, as “the ground on which America’s future will be built. That’s where Intel, the American company that helped build Silicon Valley, is going to build a $20 billion semiconductor ‘mega site.’”

These “thousand empty acres of land” were not originally empty. Much of it was leased out for farming. But for over a year prior to Intel’s announcement of an advanced chip manufacturing plant in western Licking County, this emptiness was quietly created through pressuring local residents to sell. With increases in land prices stemming from speculation around new semiconductor plants and data centers, landowners who inherited this farmland have been selling rather than leasing land to working farmers. Many felt coerced.

In the summer of 2021, several farmers and homeowners in unincorporated areas in western Licking County, such as Jersey and Monroe Townships, received unexpected letters and knocks on their doors from representatives of the New Albany Company, a private real estate business owned by

billionaire Les Wexner. These representatives made offers to option their properties at possibly 50 percent above market rate, with payment up front on the condition that owners sign a nondisclosure agreement. MCVGCM Holdings and MBJ Holdings—two business entities of the New Albany Company—would then buy the properties.

Within six months, these entities acquired over 3,190 acres of farmland in Jersey Township and eventually moved to annex the land into the City of New Albany, a city that Wexner built in the ’80s. The Jersey Township trustees approved the annexation, albeit reluctantly. Trustees claim they were kept in the dark about the purpose of these changes.

In May 2022, the New Albany City Council voted for emergency legislation to annex and rezone 1,689 acres as a “technological manufacturing district.”

The whole process was shrouded in secrecy; residents were unhappy with these arrangements but felt helpless to stop them. “You either work with them or they run over you,” said Jeff Fry, a trustee in Jersey Township. Many people privy to the plans had signed nondisclosure agreements.

Wexner and his company benefited from the plan to bundle together thousands of acres for Intel and other companies. JobsOhio, a private entity, supplied the funds for Intel’s land. Responding to Intel’s new facilities, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and

Google all pledged investments to expand data centers; for this purpose, Amazon and Microsoft bought 1,700 acres of land from Wexner’s company for $400 million. These land transactions yielded massive profits for Les Wexner’s company; he still owns over 1,000 acres in the area.

Intel’s $28 billion fab is now scheduled to be operational by 2030, five years after the original estimate. Its announcement came with the promise of 7,000 construction jobs and 3,000 manufacturing jobs, and has found enthusiastic responses among politicians across party lines, state agencies, unions, community colleges, universities, and local media. It will benefit from $1.5 billion in federal grants, including nearly $2.5 billion at the state and local level (see chart).

Former Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown saw Intel’s factory as an opportunity to “bury” the “Rust Belt” tag. “We know how to speed up our supply chains, lower prices, and better compete with China: make more things in America,” Brown wrote in a statement in 2022, “and there’s no better place to do it than Ohio.” A Brookings Institution report from 2023 promoted central Ohio as a place “to facilitate large ­ scale economic inclusion by ensuring sizable numbers of workers can access training pathways toward semiconductor manufacturing occupations.”

At the forefront of this effort are community and technical colleges in Ohio.

They see their task as to “fulfill the expectations of the semiconductor industry,” in the words of Richard Woodfield, chief academic officer for the state’s community colleges. Woodfield wants as many of his member institutions to participate with a common semiconductor curriculum, but he claims that hostility to higher education in the state makes it hard to produce enough trained workers.

In 2022, Intel announced a $100 million investment, part of which established the National Semiconductor Education and Research Program. Half of this was promised to Ohio higher education. Intel’s new investments, administrators hope, will provide the state with equitable prosperity. The state is expediting the rollout of this new educational infrastructure at a historic pace, Woodfield said, because they believe “if we don’t produce the workforce … then all those additional fabs … won’t be built.” He added that less rigorous programs would facilitate the inclusion of women and minorities: “The longer the curriculum, the more likely that they won’t finish … life gets in the way.”

Just as at the national level, in Ohio critical questions of job quality, union rights, and workplace safety and health are missing from discussions of “workforce development.” Melissa Cropper, president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers, lamented that administrators are “not interested in labor rights or health issues or quality jobs; [they want to] prepare the workforce but not quality jobs.”

Intel sought and received a “trade secret” exemption from Ohio’s Environmental Protection Agency, allowing them to avoid disclosing information contained in their air pollution control permit application. Communities residing around the proposed plant will not receive adequate information about pollution, nor will they be briefed on what to do in an emergency if there is an accidental emission or discharge. Communities and advocacy groups have not received responses to their inquiries and concerns.

Targeting marginalized communities for haphazard worker training for jobs that might not be particularly good or safe may prove a flawed workforce strategy. Intel has only offered vague information about who is getting these jobs, despite grant stipulations about inclusion.

Anti–Wall Street Priorities

As Vivek Chibber argues, successful indus­

trial policy requires the state to be able to discipline its capitalist class, preventing them from simply looting subsidies. Likewise, for industrial policy to succeed, constituencies beyond industry have to benefit. But none of the anti–Wall Street priorities have manifested in the CHIPS rollout, which is not completely surprising considering the predominance of Wall Street financiers at the core CHIPS agencies.

Many of the fights about allocating CHIPS money have been about whether it should go to U.S. or foreign companies. Both options have major drawbacks, which could be tempered by nationalizing more crucial pieces of the infrastructure. Existing players like Intel and Micron have less ­ than ­inspiring recent records. As Adam Tooze noted, Intel has already had to indulge in creative financial engineering to supplement government subsidies. Meanwhile, Samsung has been having serious internal issues, and both TSMC and Samsung are in talks to build fabs in places like the UAE , which may undermine the anti­ China export controls the Sullivan wing has been so intent on rolling out.

Progressives wanted a national infrastructure not controlled by current chip monopolists, hoping that this would encourage the emergence of more functional alter­

natives to Intel, which has staggered over the past couple of years. A nationalized infrastructure could also prioritize Green New Deal–style values: not just making chips smaller, faster, and cheaper, but also making them and their production more environmentally sustainable, in terms of both toxic by­products and energy usage. Likewise, while industry tends to prioritize incremental improvements over genuine novel research (it’s less risky), more government oversight over national infrastructure could help course ­ correct.

But the fight over whether the new testing and prototyping entity, the National Semiconductor Technology Center, will be open and democratic has been lost. Industry has succeeded in instituting a pay­to ­play model for incumbents that has failed in the past, for example with SEMATECH.

Meanwhile, stock buybacks have historically hampered investment in the industry. The American Economic Liberties Project estimates that through stock buybacks, growing executive pay, and other similar issues, “$698 billion” has been squandered— “an amount 14 times the total CHIPS Act funding, or enough to build 70 leading-edge fabs.” The Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund express similar concerns; they

The electronics industry as a whole remains skeptical that this industrial-policy push will be sustained enough to do much.

current government interventions. Neglecting progressive priorities aimed at increasing the longevity of industrial programs could produce the same failures.

recently reported that the first 11 CHIPS Act awardees have “spent more than $41 billion combined on stock buybacks.” Intel spent $30.2 billion on stock buybacks from 2019 to 2023. Texas Instruments stockholders recently balked at the idea it would invest in production over stock buybacks.

Unfortunately, much like the care economy investments, the CHIPS Office guidance merely suggests it prefers that awardees refrain from buybacks.

Conclusion: Is There a Path Forward?

After the election loss, the main priority for the Biden administration was getting all $52 billion in CHIPS money out the door. But that level of cash is not proportional to the capital­intensive nature of the industry (a single new fab costs between $4 billion and $20 billion). AI companies are now seeking CHIPS funding, which would further reduce available funds.

There have been successes. The TSMC plant in Arizona has produced yields on par with, or even better than, those in Taiwan. The U.S. government has successfully used political pressure and has leveraged Apple’s monopolistic position, including a promise to buy TSMC’s Arizona­produced chips, to bring production of some cutting­ edge chips to the U.S.—at least temporarily.

But without continued subsidies and political pressure, production may shift back, as happened with Intel’s Ireland facilities. Donald Trump has criticized funding for TSMC’s U.S. plants. And TSMC’s recent failure to keep its chips from Chinese users demonstrates that anti ­ China crusaders may not get what they want from CHIPS.

Reagan’s pro–big business industrial policy in semiconductors and other high­tech goods was unable to sustain itself past the late 1990s, and led to much of the consolidation and dysfunction that motivated the

Why do policymakers seeking to revitalize U.S. tech­industrial policy keep trying the same methods long after they’ve failed? Perhaps it is related to the dulling effects of access and overclassification. In his book The Theatre of Operations, Joseph Masco recounts what Daniel Ellsberg told Henry Kissinger upon Kissinger’s entrance into the classified world of government, that “it will become hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have these [security] clearances … The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.” In short, policymakers have become increasingly unable to take in new information, ideas, and expertise. A renewed willingness to do industrial policy and spend fiscally is encouraging and, contra Jonathan Chait, not a shortterm fad. But in itself, industrial policy is not anti ­ neoliberal; Reagan’s industrial policy for semiconductors was in many ways the model for CHIPS . Many of the climate initiatives in the Inflation Reduction Act more successfully included labor, maybe because these fields are more suited to the theories and practices of the new industrial policy and garner more attention and lobbying from the left. In CHIPS, China ­hawkishness among policymakers has overcome any serious efforts at moving on from the failed industry­ centered industrial policy of the past.

The electronics industry as a whole remains skeptical that this industrial­policy push will be sustained enough to do much, and will merely continue a cycle of sporadic government funding. Industry has quietly claimed since its inception that CHIPS lacked enough money. A second CHIPS bill has quietly been proposed, but the Republican takeover of government and a focus on cutting spending makes that prospect remote. The semiconductor business is cyclical and often volatile; scale and the cost of capital can determine success. It is not an industry that can survive without government coordination, funding, and trade and foreign policy assistance.

Tax breaks may be the future of CHIPS funding at the federal, regional, and state

levels. The CHIPS Act included a 25 percent tax break on manufacturing equipment for semiconductor production. As The Wall Street Journal reported, former Intel chief executive Pat Gelsinger has cited the tax incentives as “the most important mechanism to keep the momentum of the program going in the long run.” Official and unofficial state and regional subsidies could also help sustain these investments.

The biggest problem for the industry in the short term, which may spell doom for the entire CHIPS policy venture, is what will soak up all the chips they are producing in these new plants at home and abroad. The question of what to do with the excess capacity is vitally important. Otherwise, semiconductor prices will collapse, and the U.S. will be in the uncomfortable position of having excess chips to dump. The U.S. government could contemplate something along the lines of a strategic chip reserve for use in grants, government uses, and even foreign aid to make sure prices don’t melt down once capacity goes up.

Newt Gingrich’s dream that high tech might obviate the need for the state is dead; the opposite is true. Semiconductors are one of the fundamental motors of tech, built now into every facet of society. Their production, it is now understood, requires a robust state infrastructure and massive state investment and planning. The fact that the genuine technological marvel that crucially undergirded claims about the efficacy of the post­Reagan political­ economic model—the Moore’s Law–compliant chip— explicitly violates the tenets of the ideology it is enlisted to defend is a wondrous contradiction. Nonetheless, due to a fundamental lack of imagination and unwillingness to reexamine escalating anti­ China sentiment pervasive in both parties, old models prevail in semiconductor policy, over attempts to escape the neoliberal. n

Susannah Glickman is an assistant professor at Stony Brook University, writing about the political economy of various forms of computing and the U.S. state, focusing on material, ideological, and political infrastructures.

Madhumita Dutta is an associate professor in the Department of Geography at The Ohio State University. She researches and writes on political economy of labor and labor geographies.

FROM THE MIDDLE OUT

The 46th president of the United States outlines his economic principles, and his record.

By Joe Biden ILLUSTRATION BY DEENA SO'OTEH

As America prepares to transition to a new presidential administration, I want to take stock of the progress we have made together in laying the foundations for an economy that creates opportunity for all Americans. Over the last four years, we’ve faced some of the most challenging economic conditions in our history. Not only have we recovered, we’ve come out stronger, and have laid foundations for a promising new chapter in our American comeback story. It will take years to see the full effects in terms of new jobs and new investments all around the country, but we have planted the seeds that are making this happen. If these investments and actions are built upon, U.S. economic leadership will be stronger and the middle class more secure in the years and decades ahead.

When I took office, the economy wasn’t working for most Americans. It was clear that a fundamentally new playbook was essential. My focus was to transform the economy to improve the lives of regular Americans, the kinds of people I grew up with. That’s why I fought to invest in the jobs of the future, lower costs, raise wages, and strengthen workers and small businesses—because I know this will help American families and build the economy from the middle out and bottom up.

At that time, economic policy was in the grip of a failed approach called trickle­down economics. Trickle­down tried to grow the economy from the top down. It slashed taxes for

OUT AND BOTTOM UP

the wealthy and large corporations and tried to get government “out of the way,” instead of delivering for working people, investing in infrastructure, and ensuring America stays at the leading edge of innovation.

But this approach failed. Too many Americans saw an economy that was stacked against them with failing infrastructure, communities that had been hollowed out, manufacturing jobs that were offshored to China, prescription drugs that cost more than in any other developed country, and workers who had been left behind.

I believe that, from America’s earliest days, we have been at our best when we have taken on important challenges and fought to deliver big things on behalf of the American people—from the Erie Canal to the transcontinental railroad, from the Hoover Dam to rural electrification, from the Social Security system to the National Highway System.

As president, I fought to write a new economic playbook that builds the economy from the middle out and bottom up, not the top down. I fought to make smart investments in America’s future that put us in the lead globally. I fought to create good jobs that give working families and the middle class a fair shot and the chance to get ahead. I fought to lower costs for consumers and give smaller businesses a fair chance to compete.

In what follows, I describe why this new approach is so important.

INVESTING IN A AMERICA’S FUTURE

I have always seen the economy from the perspective of the small city where I grew up—a city with a proud history of making things in America, a city that fell on hard times when politicians turned their backs on communities like mine. Too many corporations moved their supply chains overseas and focused on quarterly profits and share buybacks instead of investing in their workers and communities here at home. Our infrastructure fell further and further behind, and a flood of cheap, subsidized imports from China and other countries hollowed out our factory towns. Economic opportunity and innovation became more and more concentrated in a few major cities, while heartland communities were left behind. Scientific discoveries and inven­

tions developed in America were commercialized in countries abroad, bolstering their manufacturing instead of ours. I came to office with a different vision. When I said I was president of all America, I meant it. I was determined we would invest in the places that have suffered from neglect and disinvestment: rural areas, manufacturing towns, coal and power plant communities, in red states and blue states. I was determined to create good jobs with family­ sustaining wages that don’t require a four ­ year college degree. I vowed to restore U.S. leadership in the industries of the future—like semiconductors and clean energy—while fortifying our infrastructure and supply chains. I committed to putting the United States back in a position of clean­ energy leadership and building a 100 percent clean power grid.

Investing in Infrastructure and Industries of the Future

We succeeded in securing historic investment laws to turn those goals into reality. My Investing in America Agenda—the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)—together mark the most significant investment in the United States since the New Deal.

For many years, this country’s infrastructure was underresourced and neglected. Since the passage of the BIL , we have been hard at work expanding high­ speed internet, replacing pipes to provide clean drinking water in every community, and rebuilding roads and bridges and ports and airports in every state. These projects are creating millions of good jobs—many of them unionized—so American families across America will share in the benefits of the infrastructure investments. In the years since I took office, we’ve funded over 74,000 infrastructure and clean­ energy projects in every state and territory in the country.

The construction of new factories has hit record highs. Already, tens of thousands of skilled construction workers are hard at work building the factories of the future. Soon, these factories will be hiring advanced manufacturing workers, and products from semiconductors to batteries to electric vehicles will be rolling off of these new, American production lines.

The Inflation Reduction Act is the largest single investment in clean energy in the history of the world. It is creating good­

I was determined we would invest in places that have suffered from neglect and disinvestment: rural areas, manufacturing towns, coal and power plant communities, in red states and blue states.

paying jobs and investing in American manufacturing, while also taking action to reduce emissions. It is spurring investments to build solar panels in Dalton, Georgia; to build wind towers in Pueblo, Colorado; and to manufacture and recycle batteries in Reno, Nevada.

Investing in Communities

Our place ­ based investment approach is creating economic opportunity in communities across the country that had been left behind. Our investments in high­ speed internet and transportation networks are reconnecting these communities to jobs and revitalizing small businesses. We are investing in technology and innovation engines in every region of the country that will sustain economic development for years to come. We are supporting farmers that use climatesmart agriculture practices and ensuring rural small businesses can access historic development resources that will cut energy costs and increase energy efficiency. Communities across the country are poised for economic comebacks. With the benefit of our special investment incentives, the places hit hardest by closures of coal plants and by unfair trade with China are receiving a disproportionate share of new investment, bringing hope to communities that have been left behind for too long. For instance, the first new American aluminum smelter in 40 years will be built in Kentucky, powered entirely by clean energy.

Targeted Trade Actions

We have taken tough but targeted actions on behalf of American workers, businesses, and factory towns to counter violations of

Biden joined striking United Auto Workers on the picket line in Michigan in 2023.

our trade laws. China is using unfair practices to threaten American businesses and workers in sectors like vehicles and solar cells and wafers. That’s why we imposed tariffs on imports from China in key sectors. A 100 percent tariff on Chinese electric vehicles, for instance, is enabling American auto communities to continue powering the global car industry.

But tariffs by themselves are no panacea. To regain and sustain America’s lead in areas from clean energy to semiconductors, it is vital to couple targeted tariffs with strong investments in manufacturing, R&D, and workforce.

Advanced Manufacturing

While semiconductors were invented in America, for too many years politicians in

Washington gave up on the semiconductor industry, and leading­ edge semiconductor manufacturing moved to Asia. But thanks to the CHIPS and Science Act, some of the most advanced semiconductors in the world will be built in Phoenix, Arizona; Syracuse, New York; New Albany, Ohio; and Taylor, Texas.

Before the CHIPS and Science Act, 90 percent of the world’s leading­ edge chips were manufactured in Taiwan. Some skeptics said America could never compete. They were wrong. With the benefit of a CHIPS award, not only has global leader TSMC committed to build three leading­ edge semiconductor manufacturing plants in Arizona, but in October it was reported that early production yields at one of those plants met those at manufacturing plants in Tai­

wan. And America will be the only economy in the world to have all five of the most advanced semiconductor manufacturers in the world operating on its shores—no other economy has more than two.

My investment agenda is already attracting $1 trillion in commitments of private capital so far, not crowding it out. These investments are helping to strengthen our supply chains, so that we won’t be dependent on a single foreign country for the semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, or critical minerals that we need. And they are starting to create opportunities for workers, businesses, and communities to contribute to the strongest, most productive economy in the world.

This is my vision—a future that is made by American workers across America. It will take years to see the full effects in terms of new jobs and new investments all around the country, but we have laid strong foundations, and now it is important to build on and not reverse the progress we have made.

I was determined we would invest in the places that have suffered from neglect and disinvestment: rural areas, manufacturing towns, coal and power plant communities, in red states and blue states.

SUPPORTING WORKERS, NOT THE WEALTHY, TO GROW THE MIDDLE CLASS

I’ve long seen the economy through the eyes of my dad, who used to say, “A job is a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity. It’s about your place in the community.”

But trickle ­ down economics ignored this basic truth. Tax cuts for the wealthy didn’t create opportunities for workers and their families. Instead, factory towns were hollowed out, and fewer Americans ended up better off than their parents. My middle ­ out/bottom­up economic playbook instead puts working families and the middle class at the center of all of my economic policies.

Strong Employment and Income Recovery

When I took office, the economy was in chaos. Thousands of businesses were shut down, and millions of Americans were out of a job. As soon as I came to office, I signed the American Rescue Plan that vaccinated

the nation and got our economy going again. As a result, America returned to full employment faster than other advanced economies, and has seen the lowest average unemployment of any administration in 50 years.

The share of working­age Americans who are employed is at a multi­ decade high, at over 80 percent. We’ve also seen record lows in unemployment for workers who have often been left behind in previous recoveries. In our full­ employment expansion, the real pay of low­wage workers outpaced that of higher­paid workers, the reverse of what we saw under trickle ­ down.

The pandemic and the inflation it created caused enormous pain and hardship for families across America. That’s true not just for us but for every major economy in the world. But now, inflation has come down in the United States—faster than almost any of the world’s other advanced economies.

Investing in Our Workforce

I know how important it is to provide pathways to middle ­ class careers for the 60 percent of Americans who choose not to pursue a four­year college degree. The many investments I described above have provided an unprecedented opportunity to create good jobs in construction and manufacturing. We created workforce hubs in areas with new investments to align high schools, community colleges, unions, businesses, and local governments around stackable credentials that enable students to move seamlessly from the classroom to careers, and allow workers to upskill and secure better jobs.

To build the pipeline of skilled and trained workers for the industries of the future, we’ve also invested more in registered apprenticeships and career technical education programs than any previous administration, with one million apprentices hired during my time in office. Many of these apprenticeship programs are sponsored by unions, which means that graduates will earn a good union wage with benefits and retirement.

Supporting Unions

The middle ­ out/bottom­up playbook supports unions because unions have been vital to building the middle class by providing pathways to family ­ sustaining careers. When I came to office, union workers and retirees faced cuts of up to 70 percent or more to their earned benefits through no fault of their own. But we fought for and

Saving Consumers Money and Tackling Junk Fees

Here are a few of the savings resulting from our pro-competition actions:

• Millions of Americans are now able to purchase hearing aids over the counter, saving as much as $3,000.

• Some Americans pay only $35 on inhalers from the largest producers—saving those consumers over $1,000 a year.

• On banking, Americans are saving an estimated $5.5 billion a year in overdraft and bounced-check fees.

• On travel, I secured bipartisan legislation to ban family seating fees, saving a family with two children $200 for a round-trip itinerary. And passengers now have the right to automatic cash refunds for canceled flights.

• On housing, I proposed a bold plan to build more houses and lower costs. We also capped rent increases for millions of homes and cut mortgage insurance premiums by about $900 per year

secured the Butch Lewis Act to restore and protect the pension benefits they earned. Because of this law, we have protected the pensions of over 1.2 million union workers and retirees so far.

Expanding unionization is essential to creating a fairer economy. The evidence is clear: Unions are the best way for American workers to get their fair share. I was proud to be the first president to walk a picket line with workers. I appointed strong members to the National Labor Relations Board who have enforced our labor laws rather than undermine them, as happened under the previous administration. It is no accident that union election petitions have doubled since I took office. Support for unions is the highest it’s been in more than half a century, and the labor movement is expanding to new companies and industries.

A Fair Tax System

The middle ­ out/bottom ­ up playbook is not just about giving working families a fair shot, it is also about asking the very wealthy and most profitable corporations to pay their fair share. We need to balance our tax system to work in favor of the mid­

dle class and working families, not the rich and well­ connected. Tax fairness is central to building an economy that works for all Americans—where growth is broadly shared and we keep our commitments to seniors and have the resources to meet key national needs over the long run.

I promised not to raise taxes on middle ­ class families, and I kept my promise. Instead, I delivered tax cuts to help families raise children and afford health care. I fought hard to expand the Child Tax Credit because it is one of the highest ­yielding investments we can make, cutting child poverty nearly in half in 2021. I also secured an expansion of the premium tax credits to make health insurance more affordable for millions of Americans, which helped lift health insurance coverage to record levels and doubled Black and Hispanic enrollment, with over 21 million people enrolled. I also secured investments to make sure wealthy taxpayers pay what they owe and play by the same rules. After a decade of severe underfunding, I fought hard to secure an investment in modernizing the IRS that is already paying off. The IRS is already collecting over a billion dollars from

wealthy tax cheats. It has successfully rolled out Direct File, offering millions of Americans a free and easy way to file their taxes for the first time.

I’ve long seen the economy through the eyes of my dad, who used to say, “A job is a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity. It’s about your place in the community.”

LOWERING COSTS AND HELPING SMALL BUSINESSES THRIVE

I’ve also long seen the economy from the perspective of my family’s kitchen table growing up, so I know that the high prices from the pandemic have been hard on American consumers. That’s why I have been laser ­focused on lowering costs for hardworking Americans. Our work to help unsnarl supply chains helped bring inflation back down to the levels right before the pandemic. But even with pandemic inflation back down, many consumer prices are too high.

In some sectors of the economy, high prices reflect inadequate competition. And too often, politicians in Washington haven’t had the courage to take on big corporate interests when they use their market power to mark up their prices.

Promoting Competition to Lower Costs

Promoting competition is central to my vision for an American economy that grows from the bottom up and the middle out. I came to office determined to make promoting competition a priority for every agency. Fair competition means better choices, a

I’ve long seen the economy through the eyes of my dad, who used to say, “A job is a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity. It’s about your place in the community.”

fair shot for small businesses, a more resilient economy, and lower prices.

This is particularly important in health care. It’s not right that Americans pay two to three times more to buy a prescription drug in Chicago than it costs elsewhere in the world. I am proud that I took on the pricing power of Big Pharma and secured major cost savings in the Inflation Reduction Act.

Due to the IRA , people with Medicare pay no more than $35 a month for insulin, down from as much as $400. Out­ of­pocket drug costs for people with Medicare will be capped at $2,000 starting next year. But seniors are already saving on lower prescription drug costs thanks to the IRA . In just the first six months of 2024, seniors got $1 billion back in their pockets with additional savings in the years ahead thanks to this historic legislation. Starting in 2026, prices will be reduced by 38 to 79 percent on key drugs for people with Medicare, and taxpayers will save roughly $160 billion over a decade.

We also worked to lower gas prices. After Russia’s war against Ukraine caused gas prices to spike globally, I undertook the biggest release of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in history. I also encouraged oil and gas companies to take their record profits and invest in more production. Today, American energy production is at record levels—including record oil and gas production—and the price of a gallon of gas is below the level before the time of the invasion. In addition, we have successfully purchased back all of the reserves released while making taxpayers a profit of nearly $3.5 billion. By selling high and buying low, we lowered costs for families while securing a good deal for U.S. taxpayers.

Record Small-Business Creation

Fair competition is especially important for small businesses, which need a level playing field to have a fair shot to compete and win. Our competition and investment policies are unleashing a wave of new business startups on Main Streets in towns and cities across the country. In fact, we have seen 20 million new business applications during this administration—the three strongest years on record.

Black and Hispanic entrepreneurs have been leaders of this small ­ business boom, with Black business ownership doubling and Hispanic business owner ­

ship up by 40 percent since before the pandemic. The share of women business owners is also on the rise.

THE PATH AHEAD

The bottom line is, the past four years have been marked by some of the toughest economic challenges in American history. We took decisive action and it paid off, with the strongest economic comeback in the world. Even while managing that recovery, we made generational investments in our economy and balanced the scales more toward workers and the middle class.

Outside commentators have noted that due to our policies, “President­ elect Trump is receiving the strongest economy in modern history which is the envy of the world.”

It is worth reviewing the facts on the U.S. economy that I am handing off to my successor: Unemployment has been at the lowest average rate of any administration in 50 years. We have created over 16 million new jobs, and more than 1.5 million of those are in manufacturing and construction. Inflation has been brought down close to 2 percent, the same level as right before the pandemic. Incomes are up by nearly $4,000 adjusted for inflation, and unions have won wage increases from 25 percent to 60 percent in industries like autos, ports, aerospace, and trucking. We’ve seen 20 million applications to start small businesses. Our economy has grown 3 percent per year on average the last four years—faster than any other advanced economy. Domestic energy production is at a record high, and gas prices are around $3 per gallon.

When I came to office, I believed the only way for a president to lead America was to lead all of America. In fact, the historic investments I made went more to red states than blue states.

I believe that the economy as I leave is stronger for all Americans.

And I believe there is no country on Earth better positioned to lead the world in the years to come than America today.

Now we are at an inflection point. The next four years will determine whether the incoming administration builds on this strength. If it does, then 10 or even 50 years from now, U.S. economic leadership will be even stronger than it is today—proving that when the middle class does well, we all do well. n

Joseph R. Biden Jr. was the 46th president of the United States.

Stepping off at the Allegheny subway station in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood, visitors are immediately met with a grim reality. Sidewalks are littered with trash and used needles. Every few hundred feet, somebody is slumped over in a trance ­ like state. Those who are awake are so fixated on preparing and shooting up drugs that they don’t even acknowledge or notice passersby. It’s also eerily silent. Nobody is talking and nobody asks for spare change. The air feels heavy with despair and hopelessness.

Just eight subway stops away from where the Declaration of Independence was signed, distressing and shocking scenes unfold in plain sight. A man on Allegheny Avenue bleeds openly from a fresh injection

est open­air drug market on the East Coast. Located in the heart of the neighborhood, McPherson Square Park, grimly nicknamed “Needle Park,” serves as both a gathering point and a tragic symbol of the decline of the U.S. empire. While efforts have been made to clean the area, remnants of addiction remain stark against the backdrop of a stately public library.

Patrol cars are a constant presence, but it’s not uncommon to see police officers checking their cellphones instead of intervening in the chaos and suffering unfolding around them. Decades after declaring a “war on drugs,” the United States now faces a deep ­ rooted fentanyl crisis, with politicians preferring to blame Mexican cartels instead of

The Onion of Kensington

The

American dream collides with tragedy in a historic, largely

immigrant community in Philadelphia that’s one of the epicenters of the nation’s fentanyl crisis.

By Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera and Sergio Chapa

wound. A woman sleeps in a wheelchair parked in front of a Catholic charity, her left foot amputated. Two women camp in a tent on a sidewalk with a young girl. Numerous working­age men are completely oblivious to the world around them. On the steps to enter the nearby Somerset subway station, a woman injects a companion in the breast, presumably due to a lack of viable veins elsewhere on her body.

Kensington is the epicenter of Philadelphia’s opioid crisis and a haunting symbol of failed drug policies. The iconic city gave birth to American independence and was defined by the progress and prosperity of the Industrial Revolution. But now the City of Brotherly Love is shadowed by the larg­

funding drug treatment and prevention programs or identifying the underlying causes of addiction.

Yet, amid the chaos, life persists. Kensington is home to resilient communities, particularly from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, who now make up 59 percent of the neighborhood’s population. Carving out lives amid the hopelessness, they navigate the unwritten laws of the street with quiet strength. Flags flutter from porches, and children splash in a kiddie pool placed on a sidewalk. People walk around human feces and needles on the sidewalks. Conversations with residents reveal stories of survival and determination, like one Puerto Rican man who relocated

after Hurricane Maria, in search of a better future for his family.

Cantina La Martina and “the Chef”

In this challenging landscape, Cantina La Martina stands out as an unexpected oasis. Located at the corner of East Somerset Street and Kensington Avenue, this acclaimed Mexican restaurant is a world apart, with colorful murals, traditional Catrina figures, and handcrafted Mexican decor creating an oasis from the surrounding maelstrom.

Opened by Chef Dionicio Jimenez and Mariangeli Alicea Saez, Cantina La Martina tells a story of resilience and ambition. Twice nominated for the prestigious James Beard Award, Jimenez was a semifinalist for “Outstanding Chef” in 2024. Investing everything he had, he opened the restaurant in Kensington in February 2022, even living above it for two years. With over a decade of experience at El Rey, a renowned Mexican restaurant in downtown Philadelphia, Jimenez envisioned a space that would honor Mexico’s rich culinary heritage beyond tacos and burritos.

Limited financial resources steered Jimenez to Kensington, where his vision

finally became a reality. To support the restaurant’s early days, he planned to work as an Uber driver, and relied heavily on delivery services to stay afloat post­pandemic. Despite the odds, Cantina La Martina gradually gained a loyal following. Word spread, and patrons began to see the restaurant not just as a place for exceptional food, but as a symbol of hope and perseverance amid Kensington’s harsh realities.

Today, Cantina La Martina is more than just a restaurant—it’s a testament to the power of community, culture, and culinary excellence in one of Philadelphia’s most challenging neighborhoods.

Usually sporting cowboy boots and walking with a confident swagger, Jimenez carries immense pride in his Mexican heritage and the arduous journey that brought him to the United States. As a tribute to this experience, he commissioned a striking mural painted by Mexican artist Ignacio “Nacho” Bernal from Morelia, Michoacán. Facing Somerset Street, the mural, titled El Sueño Americano, or “The American Dream,” captures the immigrant experience in Philadelphia with raw honesty.

The mural tells a powerful story: backpacks symbolizing the journey of undocu­

mented migrants, and crosses marking the graves of those who never made it. Flags from across Latin America highlight the diversity of the immigrant experience, while two eagles—one Mexican, one American— symbolize the deep connection between the two nations. At its heart, the Virgin of Guadalupe represents faith and resilience, while the Statue of Liberty stands as a beacon of hope. Shaking hands at the mural’s top represents the solidarity often found at the border among migrants. Death is an ever­present danger along each step of the journey to the United States. And yet when they make it to their destination, many migrants shrug off encounters that would scar most people with post­traumatic stress syndrome. It’s a type of self­victimization that Jimenez believes is characteristic among people from colonized societies.

“Sometimes migrants fear reality,” Jimenez said. “We do not want to tell the truth. Many times, we act as victims; but we aren’t victims. Why victimize ourselves for something nobody forced us to do? It was our decision to migrate.”

The mural’s hopeful message contrasts sharply with the Dantesque surroundings as an emblem of hope and perseverance, telling

Chef Dionicio Jimenez and the mural at his Kensington restaurant, Cantina La Martina

Most people struggling with addiction are not from the neighborhood. They come from the suburbs and other cities in search of drugs.

sumably died from overdoses, one almost in front of the restaurant, another at the corner, and the third across the street. She and restaurant staff have had to administer the lifesaving drug Narcan to revive unconscious people. Even after nearly dying, some refuse help, fearing police involvement.

a story of sacrifice, survival, and the pursuit of a dream that transcends borders. Despite its vulnerable location, Jimenez remains confident the mural will be respected.

“It is a mural that we did in Kensington and the people of Kensington try to protect it,” he said.

Mariangeli’s “Onion”

Jimenez’s wife Saez brings both strength and determination to the restaurant she helped to open. A proud Puerto Rican, she sees their venture as more than just a business—it’s a platform to represent the Latino community in Kensington with dignity. Opening a restaurant in this neighborhood remains a formidable challenge, but for Saez, it’s a mission worth pursuing.

Saez highlights the struggles they face daily, navigating interactions with individuals battling substance use disorders. These encounters are routine—requests for food, water, or restroom access—but Saez approaches them with respect and humanity. Her approach is simple yet profound: offering assistance in exchange for small tasks, reinforcing dignity and purpose.

“They all deserve respect,” she said. “They all need to feel they are seen and that they matter as human beings.”

But she also notes the systemic factors contributing to Kensington’s crisis. Most people struggling with addiction are not from the neighborhood. They come from the suburbs and other cities in search of drugs. Police from suburban areas are said to shuttle them to the neighborhood, creating a cycle of concentrated neglect.

Over her past two years in Kensington, Saez has seen several heartbreaking scenes— overdose victims collapsing on sidewalks, people foaming at the mouth and suffering seizures. One day, arriving at work, Saez was greeted by the flashing red and blue lights of emergency vehicles. Three people had pre­

“Sometimes you wonder if it is OK to call 911,” Saez said. “It is very difficult to see this. Since we live and work in Kensington, we observe the deterioration of some people we get to know; we see them getting their first ‘high’ and then see how they slowly deteriorate. Weeks pass by and you see how some start to bend, how they start to die slower or faster … it depends.”

And yet Kensington is not defined solely by despair. Saez describes the neighborhood as an “onion,” layered with both hardship and hope. Beneath the visible crisis lies a resilient community with youth program leaders quietly driving change. Saez challenges the dominant narrative about Kensington, emphasizing the importance of seeing beyond its struggles.

“There are very profound and complex problems to solve here of course,” she said. “But above the negative, above that stigma, there are good things, and there is a community that fights for change … the mission of our restaurant is to change the perspective people have about Kensington. Yes, there is trauma and pain involved, but we need to analyze that sentiment and transform it.”

Working-Class Neighborhood

Tracing its roots back to the early 18th century, Philadelphia’s working­ class Kensington reflects the broader social and economic shifts throughout urban America. More than 300 years ago, the neighborhood was founded as a center for shipbuilding, ironworks, and textile manufacturing. Irish and German immigrants flocked to the neighborhood drawn by jobs and tight­knit communities.

By the early 20th century, Kensington was a bustling industrial hub, with row houses lining residential streets. Generations of families worked in the nearby factories and mills, embodying work ethic and thrift. However, the mid ­ 20th century brought significant decline. During the 1950s and 1960s, numerous factories in Kensington and the rest of Philadelphia closed. And as unemployment rose, many white working­ class families moved away in search of better opportunities.

In the decades that followed, Kensington experienced a demographic shift as Latino immigrants, primarily from the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, began to settle in the storied neighborhood. By the 1980s, Kensington had become a hub of Puerto Rican culture in Philadelphia. Spanish­language storefronts, bodegas, and vibrant murals became common sights. Although the Latino community brought a renewed sense of identity and cultural pride, economic opportunities remain scarce while poverty and a lack of investment persist.

Beginning in the 1990s, the neighborhood became a focal point in Philadelphia’s opioid crisis as cheap heroin flooded its streets. Kensington’s location, with easy access to major highways and public transportation, made it a convenient hub for drug dealers. Abandoned buildings and vacant lots became hot spots for illegal activity, while open ­ air drug markets began to appear. As the opioid crisis deepened in the 2010s, Kensington gained national attention as a symbol of urban decay and public ­policy failure. Overdose rates soared, while scenes of human suffering became all too common.

Incomplete Harm Reduction

Heroin has been replaced as the top drug on the streets of Kensington by fentanyl and other opioids. One of the most dangerous newcomers, known as “tranq,” is the street name for xylazine, a horse tranquilizer not approved for human use. This central nervous system depressant is often mixed with fentanyl, heroin, or even stimulants to enhance or prolong the effects. Once in the body, the mix causes a slow heart rate and deep sedation, leaving users in a zombielike state. The drug has also been linked to necrotic skin ulcers that can lead to severe infections and even amputations.

Policing remains a visible presence in Kensington, yet decades of contrasting strategies—ranging from zero tolerance to community policing and displacement campaigns—have all fallen short. Clearing encampments under bridges or along railroad tracks, often supported by city initiatives with corporate involvement like the Resilience Project, has done little to address the neighborhood’s core issues.

It’s clear that policing alone cannot resolve Kensington’s social and economic struggles. Civil society efforts, while well intentioned, are often fragmented and struggle to include the voices of those most

affected. The challenges here go far beyond addiction and homelessness, touching on mental health, inequality, gentrification, and entrenched economic disinvestment.

Harm reduction has emerged as a strategy in U.S. cities, prioritizing the mitigation of drug­related harm over eradication. While praised by some policymakers, harm reduction creates more problems than it solves in Kensington, according to those who live and work there. For example, programs like Prevention Point Philadelphia’s syringe exchange have unintentionally contributed to streets being littered with used needles, according to local residents and business owners.

It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss the benefits of these programs in saving lives and reducing the spread of infectious diseases. Overdose deaths in the United States decreased in 2023 for the first time in five years, and the widespread availability of naloxone, or Narcan, is said to have played a significant role in that decline. At a national level, there were 74,702 deaths attributed to synthetic opioids in 2023, a nearly 2 percent drop from 76,226 the year prior, according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

In Philadelphia, drug overdoses are the third­leading cause of death in the city, just behind heart disease and cancer. The City of Brotherly Love saw a record 1,207 overdose deaths in 2022. Although that number fell to 1,122 in 2023, that’s still more than 2.75 times the number of homicides, the sixthleading cause of death in the city.

Some residents express skepticism toward NGO s operating in Kensington, viewing them as overly reliant on external funding and lacking long­term solutions. However, it would be unfair to suggest these organizations operate with self­serving intentions. The problem isn’t harm reduction itself, but the absence of complementary strategies, such as increased funding for comprehensive treatment programs and sustained economic investment in the neighborhood.

Addressing Kensington’s challenges demands a multifaceted approach. Harm reduction should remain a key component, but it must be paired with broader investments in treatment, mental health services, and economic revitalization. The goal should not just be reducing harm but creating pathways to recovery, stability, and dignity for Kensington’s residents. Without a commitment to meaningful collabora ­

Overdose Deaths vs Homicides in Philadelphia

tion, sustainable economic initiatives, and inclusive community engagement, the cycle of addiction, poverty, and systemic neglect will continue.

Living and Working in Kensington Roz Pichardo is the founder of Operation Save Our City and the Sunshine House, a community center for individuals living with addiction and the unhoused. Known by her nickname “Mama Sunshine,” Pichardo highlighted that drug dealers in Kensington distribute free samples multiple times a day to hook new customers. Calls of “Free samples!” echo through the streets, drawing in vulnerable individuals and creating a fast track to addiction.

Many NGO s operate with government grants. Although most are well­meaning, residents of Kensington argue that these initiatives often create unintended consequences that generate hazardous waste and concentrate human suffering.

“The provision of these grants … is used by local governments to allege they are doing something to solve the problem,” Saez said. “Actually, they are delegating their responsibility to a private partner.”

Community members share similar frustrations, emphasizing that while protecting the lives and safety of drug users is worthwhile, it often overlooks their rights and well­being in the process. In addition to used and discarded needles, temporary aid, such as food or tents, frequently leaves behind litter and disruption.

“Maybe if they want to help, they could also bring trash bins,” one resident suggested.

Jimenez echoed this frustration, noting that police clearing one street simply pushes the problem to another, often equally impoverished, area—demonstrating a lack of coordinated social responsibility. Harm­reduction supporters, he said, rarely advocate for such programs in their own neighborhoods.

“Where are the rights of the children, the business owners, and the families that live in Kensington?” another neighborhood resident asked. “Where are the human rights of the members who live in our poor community?”

Despite these criticisms, many in Kensington acknowledge the value of harm reduction when applied responsibly. However, meaningful change requires a level of state investment and commitment that seems unlikely in Pennsylvania’s current political landscape, where the legislature remains split, with Republicans safely controlling the Senate and Democrats holding a narrow 102­101 majority in the House. In that political setting, funding initiatives explicitly aimed at community well­being face significant political hurdles and are unlikely to gain broad bipartisan support.

Residents like Saez see the nuance of the situation. “It’s not black­ and ­white,” she said. “Leaving people on the streets isn’t humane for them or the community. These individuals need treatment and support in spaces equipped to help them recover.”

At the same time, she wants the government to also display compassion for everyone who is impacted by the crisis. “There is a reason and a place for harm reduction,”

Saez explained. “However, there is a sort of war or plight between harm reductionists and residents. We hardly hear the voices of the residents.”

The Biggest Drug Cartel

The story of Kensington underscores a broader reality: The opioid epidemic is fueled not just by illegal trafficking but also by Big Pharma’s role in spreading addiction. Pharmaceutical giants continue to profit from harm­reduction strategies, including government­funded programs to purchase lifesaving medications like naloxone, while largely avoiding accountability for the devastation they’ve caused.

“Pharmaceutical companies receive the extraordinary benefits of harm­reduction strategies since they benefit from social programs in which the government buys narcotics to deal with overdose,” Jimenez said. “At the same time, they receive significant tax breaks. We need to make the businesses and pharmaceutical companies accountable for all the damage they have caused and for the role they have played in the making of this human tragedy. Unfortunately, politicians, the media, and public opinion in general prefer to place the blame on the Mexican cartels.”

Nobody wants to stop buying Narcan when it can save so many lives. However, a small but growing number of voices believe that pharmaceutical companies should be required to provide naloxone for free as part of their settlements in opioid­related lawsuits. So far, public officials seem more content to merely manage the crisis, rather than resolve it. Meanwhile, the people of Kensington must bear the social and economic burden.

The true beneficiaries of this ongoing public ­health emergency are pharmaceutical companies, NGO s, and, eventually, real estate developers who see opportunity amid despair. This is, according to one Kensington resident, “the perfect time for developers to buy properties. And after the police relocate the drug consumers and the unsheltered, massive development projects can break ground in those areas that were once impassable and unlivable.”

Real estate interests are frequently an overlooked but significant factor in the narrative of urban decline and renewal. Once an area is cleared of visible poverty and crime, developers move in, reshaping neighborhoods while driving up prices and displacing longtime residents.

Still largely unwritten, the story of Kensington is a microcosm of America’s broader struggles with systemic inequities, drug policy failures, and misplaced blame in addressing the fentanyl crisis. Politicians have long favored performative measures and law enforcement crackdowns over systemic change that would address the root causes of drug use and addiction. Experts argue that rehabilitation, education, and prevention programs need funding levels comparable to those allocated to law enforcement if there’s any hope of reducing demand.

Solely blaming Mexican drug cartels for the fentanyl crisis is not only misleading— it’s dangerous. Calls for border walls and declarations of “war on cartels” may play well in political sound bites, but they sidestep critical questions about funding rehab programs and anti­ drug education.

The widely perpetuated myth that fentanyl enters the U.S. primarily through unauthorized migrants crossing the southern border is contradicted by evidence: Most fentanyl seizures involve U.S. citizens returning from Mexico in private vehicles. In 2021, U.S. citizens made up 86.2 percent of fentanyl trafficking convictions. Meanwhile, only 0.02 percent of the people arrested by Border Patrol for crossing illegally possessed any fentanyl, an analysis from the libertarian, pro ­immigration Cato Institute shows.

This narrative not only fuels xenophobia but also distracts from the far more insidious role of pharmaceutical companies, which profited from opioid prescriptions and now profit again through taxpayerfunded harm­reduction programs.

But addressing the opioid crisis requires more than blame ­ shifting—it demands courage, collaboration, and systemic change. The unfolding story in Kensington serves as a stark reminder that el sueño americano —the American dream—remains alive in the hearts of immigrants and long­ standing residents who refuse to surrender to despair. But resilience alone isn’t enough. True change requires a holistic approach to the opioid crisis—one that prioritizes accountability, equity, and human dignity over political expediency.

Taking a holistic approach to tackle the problem won’t be easy or cheap. Solving the opioid crisis in Kensington and elsewhere in the U.S. requires intergovernmen­

tal cooperation to simultaneously address addiction, poverty, mental health, and economic investment.

The first step would be to prioritize comprehensive drug treatment and recovery services that go beyond short­term measures. That means funding long­term residential treatment facilities, in addition to outpatient counseling and wraparound services such as housing assistance and job training. The programs would also be culturally competent to meet the needs of Kensington’s diverse community. Integrating mental health care into addiction services is critical, as deep psychological traumas are often the root of substance abuse disorders.

Economic revitalization would be the second step. Kensington needs significant public and private investment in infrastructure, housing, and job creation initiatives to break the cycle of poverty that perpetuates addiction and despair. Incentivizing local businesses, supporting community ­ led cooperatives, and funding workforce development programs would create pathways to economic stability. Moreover, policies must protect long ­ term residents from displacement, ensuring that redevelopment benefits the existing community rather than pushing vulnerable populations further into the margins.

The third step requires coordination and accountability across all levels of government. Fragmented efforts—whether from NGOs, law enforcement, or local government agencies—must give way to integrated plans driven by deliverables, measurable goals, and transparent oversight. Partnerships between city, state, and federal authorities should align resources toward shared objectives while fostering open dialogue with Kensington’s residents to ensure their voices are central to decision­making. Only through this multilayered collaborative framework can Kensington transform from a symbol of urban blight and crisis into a model for resilience, recovery, and hope. n

Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera is professor in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, specializing in the U.S.-Mexico border, drug trafficking, and migration studies. Sergio Chapa is a freelance journalist and photographer based in Houston as well as the co-author of the book Frontera: A Journey Across the US ­Mexico Border.

CULTURE

Pulled in All Directions

Chris Hayes’s new book argues that the demand for attention has taken over every facet of our lives.

By Rhoda Feng

The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource

By Chris Hayes Penguin Press

In his 1890 work The Principles of Psychology, the philosopher William James observed that “my experience is what I agree to attend to.” James lived during the churn of the Industrial Revolution, a time when locomotives and telegraphs and other new technologies shrank the vastness of the world. But even James’s formidable imagination might have stalled at the thought of hundreds of millions of people carrying pocketsized supercomputers that hijack the mind between breaths.

In The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource , MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes takes James’s insight and runs it through the gauntlet of the digital age. Attention, Hayes argues, is no longer just the fabric of experience—it’s the oil field of the modern economy, drilled, extracted, and sold until even the quietest corners of our consciousness feel the hum of the machinery of capital.

Hayes’s latest book is part warning, part philosophical inquiry, and a valuable contribution to a growing chorus of works that examines the enfeeblement of attention in the digital age. Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants (2016) historicized how commercial interests have monetized attention, tracing the practice from 19th­ century newspapers that peddled salacious or mer­

etricious articles to the nano ­targeting of modern social media platforms. Stand out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy (2018), by James Williams, framed the struggle for attention as the prime moral challenge of our time. Williams, a former Google strategist turned philosopher, advocated for explicit ethical principles in a “Designer’s Oath,” a sort of Hippocratic Oath for technology developers. More recently, Scenes of Attention: Essays on Mind, Time, and the Senses (2023), edited by D. Graham Burnett and Justin E. H. Smith, took a multidisciplinary approach, examining the interplay between attention and practices like pedagogy, Buddhist meditation, and therapy.

Like the above authors, Hayes writes with the urgency of someone keenly aware that the fight for attention is, at its core, a fight for control over our inner lives. He underscores how attention underpins how we think, connect, and experience the world, from the relationships we nurture to the roles we inhabit as workers, consumers, and citizens. And there’s a personal side to it as well: As the host of a cable news show, Hayes admits that “every waking moment of my work life revolves around answering the question of how we capture attention.” Extricating ourselves from this attention carousel would not just rescue ourselves but our world; as Hayes writes, “those who successfully extract [attention] command fortunes, win elections, and topple regimes.”

Enriched by a wealth of historical, empirical, and personal insights, The Sirens’ Call drops anchor first in the late 19th century, when the burgeoning fields of psychology

and advertising began to wrestle with the mechanics of attention. Hayes finds fertile ground in the work of William James, who famously described attention as “the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.” To focus was to withdraw—turning away from the cacophony of competing stimuli to concentrate on what truly mattered.

Following James, later psychologists drew a line between voluntary attention—the deliberate focus we summon for reading, studying, or contemplation—and involuntary attention, which is transitory and reflexive, seized by sudden noises or flashing lights. Hayes also devotes an entire chapter to the idea of social attention , the fundamental need to be seen and acknowledged by others. We’ve all had a form of this experience: You’re at a party, half­listening to someone talk about their weekend, when suddenly you hear your name from across the room, instantly compelling your focus.

The modern attention economy thrives by exploiting both transitory attention— mindless scrolling and procrastination— and social attention, where the internet is like a giant cocktail party where the goal is to hear your name from across the room at every waking moment. Online advertising technology hoovers up vast amounts of individual data to craft highly specific ads that relentlessly target us with personalized messages. In this fashion, the attention economy transforms our innate impulse for connection and “recognition” (a term Hayes borrows from the philosopher Alexandre Kojève) into a mechanism for profit—and undermines our capacity for the sustained, top ­ down focus that drives creativity, relationships, and democratic engagement. In addition to individual attention, there’s collective, or public, attention. The collective gaze, Hayes argues, does not simply mirror shared values but reveals a battleground shaped by those who control the levers of attention. In one chapter, he draws a sobering contrast between the exhaustive search, in 2023, for the five passengers aboard the Titan deep ­ ocean submersible and the muted international response to a capsized migrant boat ferrying hundreds of

men, women, and children. “Money follows attention,” he writes, “and the literal cost of a life depends in no small part on how attention ­ grabbing the death was.” This asymmetry, Hayes argues, is structural, a feature of an economy that rewards spectacle while muffling quieter, systemic crises. Far from leveling the playing field, platforms like X—purported engines of democratized visibility—magnify conflict, driving sensationalism to the forefront while less inflammatory truths dissolve into obscurity. Hayes’s analysis is at its sharpest when he examines the structural design of our digital economy. In discussing social media feeds, Hayes notes that their interface mimics the mechanics of gambling devices: “The main perceptual structure of the most popular social media platforms, ‘the feed,’ moves like a slot machine—scrolling vertically, endlessly.” Wu, in The Attention Merchants, makes a similar point, noting

less a retailer than “an attention and logistics company.” On Amazon, a company’s position in search or control of the oneclick “buy box”—in other words, getting the attention of customers—matters more than the quality or value of the product for sale.

the tendency of social media to dole out positive reinforcements at irregular intervals, hooking users on those ephemeral, virtual rewards. Hayes extends the metaphor, emphasizing that social media’s grip over users is rooted not just in randomness but in the perpetual, low­ effort consumption it fosters in gapless hours. As he writes, these platforms “retain our attention via a structured form of constant stimulus, continuous interruption, never having to do much to hold our attention.”

The Sirens’ Call is particularly critical of Apple, which Hayes credits as the initiator of the current attention era, through the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. (As Hayes points out with some relish, Steve Jobs— who helped unleash the iPhone’s endless distractions—was notorious for his almost ascetic ability to guard his own attention, emphasizing that focus was defined by what one rejects.) Hayes also calls out Amazon—

In an era of ubiquitous screens and relentless notifications, our ability to exercise volition over our own minds has been profoundly compromised. The result, Hayes suggests, is a kind of alienation that recalls Marx’s critique of labor under industrial capitalism. The factory floor, where workers once watched their physical effort morph into profit for someone else, now finds its spiritual successor in the infinite scroll. But the commodity here isn’t labor—it’s the fleeting coherence of our own minds. Attention has never been leveraged so ruthlessly. We glance at a news article, flick to a video, check a notification—all the while ceding slivers of focus to advertisers bidding in algorithmic auctions we can neither see nor resist. If alienation in the industrial age estranged people from the products of their work, this new estrangement cuts deeper, fragmenting the self by siphoning away the quiet spaces where thoughts gather weight. It’s a strange inheritance of the information age: The more seamlessly data flows, the more brittle and atomized our attention has become. Hayes suggests that the seamlessness itself is to blame. Mass culture once heavy with shared moments— Cronkite signing off, a nation tuned to the same prime ­time sitcom—has splintered into a kaleidoscope of micro ­ engagements that compete for our attention. “Fractally reproduced subcultures” is Hayes’s resonant phrase: shards of attention aggregated into something that feels somehow less than the sum of its parts. It’s not just that we’re distracted; it’s that distraction is our reigning structure of feeling. While Hayes doesn’t reference it, Anna Kornbluh’s recent book Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism offers a similar diagnosis, calling out instantaneity as the dominant feature of our social and economic interaction, and even our politics.

If there is a central tension in Hayes’s

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project, it lies in his willingness to implicate the very architecture that sustains his profession. The same networks that beam his monologues into homes on most weeknights are part of the sprawling apparatus that trades on attention. Yet this is precisely where Hayes sharpens his argument. He isn’t perched above the fray, decrying the scrolling masses for their Twitter habits— he’s lashed to the mast, white ­ knuckled against the same siren call.

Reflecting on the early days of his TV career, he vividly recalls the anxiety of seeing his ratings dip while other shows soared. The pressure to hold viewers’ attention led him to recognize how easily a craving for eyeballs can shape editorial decisions. “When you are most worried about losing attention, you get thirsty and desperate and try to grab viewers by the lapels,” he writes. Elsewhere, he reflects on how the omnipresence of screens in his home—cellphones, laptops, TVs— has warped his own habits, causing him to compulsively scroll his phone after work. “It’s a kind of attentional treadmill that is very, very hard to step off of,” he concedes. Whereas Hayes remembers a time when his family would come together to watch shows like Law & Order or The Simpsons, he now notices that during screen time, each of his children sits with a separate device, absorbed in their own bubble.

For all its careful attention to our attentional ailments, The Sirens’ Call is not without minor weaknesses. Hayes’s figuring of attention as a scarce resource—an idea that goes back at least to a 1971 lecture from Nobel Prize ­winning economist Herbert Simon, which Hayes references—is not the most persuasive rhetorical move. While this framing aligns with economic logic—like any commodity in low supply, the value of attention rises because it is finite—it conflates the problem of limited attention with our ability to effectively manage and direct it. As the technology ethicist James Williams has argued, “the main risk information abundance poses is not that one’s attention will be occupied or used up by information … but rather that one will lose control over one’s attentional processes.” The issue, one might say, is less about scarcity than sovereignty.

Hayes’s optimism in the book’s final chapters also feels somewhat forced. He predicts the rise of “alternative attention products,” likening them to organic food or farmers markets. He points to the emer­

Hayes notes the anxiety of capturing attention as a cable

What would it take to shore up our attention in a world dominated by distraction?

gence of “dumb phones,” which have limited connectivity, as evidence of a growing resistance to the siren calls of Silicon Valley. Yet if the attention economy is really as pervasive and insidious as he claims, can niche solutions ever hope to compete? A quick glance at the sales figures for dumb phones—a fraction of the smartphone market—suggests otherwise.

What would it take to shore up our attention in a world dominated by distraction? On an individual level, one could do worse than follow the advice of Goethe, who admonished: “It is in self­limitation that a master first shows himself.” Limiting screen time, taking in the alpine air, or reading a bound book are all ways of erecting barriers between our attention and the “always on” continuity endemic to online existence. But what of collective attention? Short of signing a declaration of un­allegiance to all social media platforms, how might a society cultivate shared attentiveness—a collective ability to hold space for each other’s thoughts and presence without the persistent tug of interruption? Toward the end of his book, Hayes identifies pockets of resistance to the attention economy in grassroots movements

that reclaim individual and collective forms of attention. The Friends of Attention, whose ideas Hayes cites, calls in a manifesto for the emancipation of attention, which “must be sustained to the point of what appears like excess in any given situation.”

Beyond small ­ scale resistance, larger policy shifts and corporate reforms could recalibrate the relationship between technology platforms and their users. Tim Wu, for instance, has proposed restructuring social media giants like Facebook (now calling itself Meta) into public benefit corporations—a shift that would require these companies to prioritize social good alongside profit. James Williams has also advocated for structural interventions that reshape the incentives driving technology design, including redefining the purpose of digital advertising, embedding ethical considerations into the design process from the outset, and creating mechanisms for transparency and accountability that ensure platforms better align with users’ interests—not just their vulnerabilities. Despite being short on policy prescriptions, The Sirens’ Call reminds readers that the reclamation of attention is both a paramount personal challenge—one that calls us to inhabit moments more fully and resist the pull of fragmentation—and an essential societal endeavor. This book deserves yours. 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.

TV host on MSNBC.

Celebrity Fatigue

Glam doesn’t vote. If Democrats must have star power, they should figure out better ways to hitch their stars to campaigns and candidates.

By Gabrielle Gurley

Kamala Harris held her last rally of the presidential campaign season on the night before Election Day at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Tens of thousands of people lined up for the free concert that featured Lady Gaga, Ricky Martin, DJ Jazzy Jeff, Fat Joe, Jazmine Sullivan, and the Roots. The vice president seemed almost tangential to the spectacle: It was pushing midnight before Oprah introduced Harris to make her final case to voters.

Oprah Winfrey (right) greets presidential nominee Kamala Harris on the last night of the 2024 campaign in Philadelphia.

Did a truncated campaign season persuade Harris ­Walz handlers that glitzy unelecteds from the rarified galaxies of Hollywood and the music industry were the fastest and best way to amplify Harris­Walz messaging? It seemed that Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Bad Bunny, Bruce Springsteen, Megan Thee Stallion, Jennifer Lopez, John Legend, Cardi B, Katy Perry, Julia Roberts, Eminem, Robert De Niro, Spike Lee, and Leonardo DiCaprio were everywhere all at once—pumping up crowds at rallies in battleground states or tapping out their versions of joy online.

That star power blinded the HarrisWalz campaign to a powerful miscalculation, one that stalked them all summer and into the fall as they zeroed in on the brightest lights: Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and Bad Bunny. Together, they seemed to constitute a holy grail of good gets. Securing their endorsements, so the thinking appeared to go, would motivate the most sought­after groups in the Democratic base—women, African Americans, and Latinos—and deliver their votes, and the elusive youth vote most of all, to Harris. One by one, the trio signed on: Swift in September, Beyoncé and Bad Bunny in October—days before the election that Harris lost.

In an era of economic hardship and political acrimony, it’s past time for the Democratic Party to recalibrate its relationships with its own millionaire and billionaire celebrities. Beautiful people and free concerts are nice diversions, but they don’t persuade specific groups of voters to cast a ballot for a presidential candidate. That doesn’t mean those can­

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didates, often fangirls and ­boys themselves, will ever swear off celebrity endorsements and the accompanying media attention and dollars they generate. But celebrities have to be deployed in ways that can serve specific goals with tangible outcomes.

“Hope, joy, and hard work missed the mark for the majority of Americans,” says Susan Smocer Platt, Joe Biden’s onetime Senate chief of staff, whose memoir, Love, Politics, and Other Scary Things, looks back on her and her late husband’s Capitol Hill careers. Polls and vote totals make clear that the celebrity endorsements and appearances did not have the results the Harris team anticipated, Platt says. “It got people’s attention for a minute, but it wasn’t enough to get them out, because they weren’t ultimately feeling it, either because of economic insecurity, health reasons, or they have a chip on their shoulder.”

Beyoncé’s proclamation— “I’m not here as a celebrity. I’m not here as a politician. I’m here as a mother”—at Harris’s Houston rally in late October rang hollow. Harris needed to break through the country’s political white noise to sideline Donald Trump and hobble his disinformation network Her campaign decided that the beautiful ones fit the bill. They were certainly prettier than Donald Trump’s nontraditional lineup dominated by macho men and tech gurus.

But the star power on display in these campaign­trail songfests undermined the Democrats by giving the Republicans fleshand­blood examples of what they considered to be Democratic bicoastal elitism. Not even Beyoncé can persuade African Americans disgusted with politics to vote. A slight majority of white women ended up rallying to the MAGA banner again, Taylor Swift notwithstanding. Harris’s California baggage included an entertainment attorney husband who, along with the California fundraising sources that Democrats tap into, only underlined her ties to Hollywood. Joy also proved to be a harder sell for a woman who moved up her state’s political ladder by putting people behind bars.

Donald Trump, the personification of American anger, picked celebrities and influencers like Hulk Hogan, Joe Rogan, and Amber Rose, who could speak to and harness the anger he stoked over high prices, undocumented immigrants, health care costs, red tape, and, perhaps above all, the economic and cultural subordination of blue ­ collar men.

“Although they are equally as wealthy as many of the celebrities that were endorsing her, they really spoke to the working­ class demographics that he was targeting,” says Melvin Williams, an associate professor of communication and media studies at Pace University. “He was really leaning into this emergent population of younger white men and younger men in general, who were very much into bro culture and into alignment with Donald Trump’s natural brand.”

Americans have had enough of politics and celebrities weighing in on political issues.

An early­December Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll saw pluralities of Democrats and independents frowning on professional athletes and celebrities speaking out on politics. Republicans don’t want to hear from them either. Most respondents weren’t particularly enchanted with corporations weighing in, either. Although there wasn’t “a huge spike” in celebrities participating, says Ashley Spillane, president of the social impact consulting firm Impactual, there was more media attention than usual on those that did.

For a time, some of the “soft news” media and social media were suggesting that Taylor Swift somehow held the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for both the Trump and Harris camps. After Swift announced

Not even Beyoncé can persuade African Americans disgusted with politics to vote if they are convinced the system has nothing to offer them.

for Harris last September—“I’ve done my research, and I’ve made my choice. Your research is all yours to do, and the choice is yours to make”—she urged her Instagram followers to register to vote, and several hundred thousand people then visited the vote.gov site, which directs users to individual state voter registration sites. But it’s virtually impossible to know yet whether those fans followed up to register—or cast a ballot, or voted for Harris.

Despite Swift’s overtures for Harris, youth turnout was abysmal. Overall, young women did vote for Harris, but also overall, white women broke for Trump. Again. “Gen Z was going to save us, right?” says E. Michele Ramsey, an assistant professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Penn State University­Berks, where she

Lady Gaga was among the many celebrities who performed in support of Harris in 2024.

teaches a “Taylor Swift, Gender, and Communication” course. “I’m wondering if the Democrats didn’t account for how her social media presence has changed, and what that has meant in terms of impact. There’s not that authenticity in her Instagrams anymore. It’s product. It’s selling. And one of the things we know from research is, if you just use your social media to sell things, you lose authenticity points.”

One Gen Z Harris canvasser, Chris Tuck, appreciated the vice president’s attempts to capture fans’ attention. But young people, he told me during October door ­knocking in Philadelphia, could see through the ploy. “Genuine approaches” to voters, and keeping art and music out of politics, would matter more. “Keeping that separate is important; it’s two different worlds,” he said. “It’s just not realistic.”

To persuade and register impact, a celebrity must be authentic, likable, and relatable—characteristics that are more important than the numbers of followers they have or the concerts they headline. A celebrity’s power of persuasion and impact increases, Platt believes, if they champion a cause or an issue that lines up with a candidate’s vision and the mood of the country.

Swift actually may have had more influence on older millennials who’ve followed her career from the beginning than on younger fans who knew her post­2009 and who couldn’t or didn’t vote in 2024. Ramsey surmises that many fans’ attitudes toward the superstar may have changed after her dustup with Kanye West at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards (where West sparked a longrunning feud after interrupting Swift’s Best Female Video acceptance speech to make the case for Beyoncé). Prior to the event, fans appreciated Taylor’s saying stupid things about herself, and other demonstrations of “kind of like us” authenticity. After the incident, she retreated from social media.

The singer wasn’t strongly identified with any one issue that Harris championed, instead using her clout to stress the power of voting. Others, including Trevor Noah and Billie Eilish, branched into specific areas they’d identified, like working at the polls. In the case of Noah, he has the advantage, as a comedian, of being able to break down his reasoning in an engaging, accessible way so that voters might listen to what he has to offer even if they don’t like what he’s selling.

“It’s impossible to measure the impact any single social media post or single rally

appearance or podcast recording made on an individual voter’s choice,” says Spillane, who analyzed celebrity engagement and civic participation for a Harvard Kennedy School/Ash Center policy brief. “The question that should be asked is did these prominent figures engage more Americans in our democracy and what is the place we see that they have the biggest impact?”

Effective impact goes beyond having surrogates roll up, sing a few songs, hug the candidate, and move on. Rather than assuming that an appearance or a thought bubble from an actor or a singer will persuade a person to vote, presidential campaigns need to focus on kinetic strategies that demystify election processes for young people, older adults, people of color, and new immigrants, be it through voter registration appeals, tech and language assistance, election information distribution, or working at the polls.

“Influential voices, brands and cultural leaders, celebrities have the ability to make civic engagement more accessible to a lot of people who may not otherwise participate in our democracy,” says Spillane. But that requires more than a song or a joke.

As the flashiness of the celebrity in question increases, however, direct public appeals can have negative blowback too. “We have witnessed an overwhelming number of voters walk away and just simply say, this doesn’t have much relevance to

The late Jimmy Carter toured with the Allman Brothers Band to raise money for his campaign in 1976.

me. I care about how things are going to be improved in my individual household and in my community; these people are already rich,” says Williams.

As long as the American political system runs on privately generated dollars, fundraising remains an essential service that celebrities render and candidates can’t do without. A celebrity willing to have their name appear on an invitation designed to attract a small number of well­heeled people who can write large checks and enjoy rubbing elbows with the headliner and similarly minded contributors is a valuable campaign asset.

Perhaps the next Democratic presidential candidate could take a page out of the late President Jimmy Carter’s 1976 campaign playbook. Carter understood the fundraising value of celebrities and the importance of a “genuine approach.” He had an authentic relationship with a group of Macon, Georgia, musicians: the Allman Brothers Band, who did benefit concerts for him. Carter knew that nobody wanted to hear his agenda. The concerts were part of his fundraising strategy—a portion of every concert ticket went to his campaign. At the Providence Civic Center in Rhode Island, he spoke to the audience before the band went on to make a few points: that he was running for president, that he would win, and that he wanted their votes. Then he introduced the band and left the stage to cheers. n

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Bluesky Proves Stagnant Monopolies Are Strangling the Internet

One tiny company has the bloated Facebook empire scrambling to respond.

By Ryan Cooper

One bright spot in the bleak year of 2024 was the rise of Bluesky. As someone who relied greatly on Twitter for news and my career—OK, I may have been somewhat addicted—before Elon Musk bought it and turned it into a snake pit of neo ­Nazi filth, it was nice to see a Twitter­like replacement rise to relative prominence.

I joined in April 2023 as about the 49,000th user. Today, Bluesky has about 27 million users, and seems to be growing healthily. It actually has some notable improvements on Twitter, like the “starter pack” function where users can put together a group

of accounts that one can follow at once (I made a starter pack for Prospect writers, for example), or the “nuclear block” where if one participant in a conversation blocks the other, the entire conversation is zapped. This greatly cuts down on Twitter’s culture of aggressive pile ­ ons and abuse.

Unlike any other big platform, Bluesky does not censor posts with outgoing links. Indeed, it does not have any proprietary “for you” algorithm, instead defaulting to a traditional reverse ­ chronological feed, and allowing users to pick from algorithms that can be developed by others. This has major implications for publishers: Despite its modest size, The Guardian reports that Bluesky traffic has already outstripped that from Twitter, and here at the Prospect Bluesky traffic now regularly matches Twitter and is many times that of Facebook.

This ability to share outside the platform is proving so popular that Facebook’s Twitter clone, Threads, has belatedly altered its algorithm to include more posts from accounts you follow in an attempt to compete. And this disruption is being done on a shoestring budget—

Bluesky has just 20 employees and about $23 million in funding, as compared to Meta’s 70,000+ workers and $156 billion in annual revenue.

It’s strong evidence that there is a large unmet demand for internet systems outside of the control of Big Tech monopolists. I don’t know if there can be a similar option for every walled garden on the internet— it’s hard to dislodge a giant—but there’s no question that there’s a lot of pent ­ up demand.

The history of how the big platforms got big is not that different from the history of any kind of market rollup. Back in the 1990s when the internet was first taking off, there was an explosion of millions of different websites—home pages, forums, blogs, retailers, you name it.

This started to change as technology evolved. In the ’90s, any reasonably clever person could learn how to code a website after a few nights of studying HTML . But as websites became more complicated, creating one quickly outstripped the technical skills of all but the most dedicated hobbyists. It became much easier to simply use someone else’s tools—first site development services like Blogspot or WordPress, and then separate platforms like Facebook and Twitter, where you could establish a presence simply by maintaining an account.

Then, as billions of people got online, network effects started to take hold. Once a critical mass of users ended up on one platform or another, most people joined up to be in the same place. This growth was critically dependent on the American legal structure, particularly Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. When you are hosting your own website, you are legally liable for the content you post on it. A television news program or magazine like the Prospect can be sued if they publish false and damaging claims about someone. (That’s why we fact­ check our reporting.)

Section 230 stipulates that if you own a platform where others post, you are largely immune from lawsuits. Ironically, the idea was to actually encourage content moderation, because at the time there was a fear that websites that did moderate would be legally vulnerable as compared to those that took a totally hands­ off approach. In reality, Section 230 enabled the growth of

The old internet wasn’t perfect, but it used to feel like a place of almost magical potential.

gigantic platform monopolies, which do as little moderation as they can get away with.

This remained true even when the platforms started implementing black­ box, attention­maximizing algorithms that control what their users see. Feeding people content by algorithm is indisputably publishing by any realistic definition—it’s not much different from self­ selecting a bundle of stories and putting them into the morning edition of a newspaper. Yet Section 230 still protects the platforms.

Gradually, most of the vast ecosystem of independent sites died off, replaced by platform accounts. Fast­forward to today, and a handful of monster platforms dominate the internet: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Amazon, Google, and so on. As a rule, they do everything possible to keep you on the platform and scrolling, so they can sell more ads or products.

The results have been a catastrophe for humanity across the globe. The best way to grab and keep attention is inflammatory, anger ­inducing content—above all, hate speech and conspiracy theories. As

Steve Randy Waldman writes, “Section 230 has created artificial and destructive economies of scale.” In the worst cases, as when Facebook barges into poor countries offering free access to its platform but not bothering to hire many (or any) moderators speaking the native languages, the result is an instantaneous explosion in racism and hate crimes. In Myanmar, this proceeded to genocide.

But even in rich countries, social media platforms are associated with a rise in bigotry and violence. In Germany, Facebook use seemed to cause a spike in attacks on refugees. South Korea’s very president attempted a coup and nearly touched off a war with nuclear ­ armed North Korea, reportedly because he cooked his brain on right­wing, Korean­language YouTube.

There are many potential solutions here. As Waldman suggests, we could repeal Section 230, at least for big algorithmic platforms, forcing them to moderate much more heavily so they restore some level of internal responsibility. Or as my colleague David Dayen suggested years ago, we could ban surveillance advertising, and hence make the targeted, algorithmic feed impossible.

Any such change is very unlikely under a Trump presidency. But what Bluesky proves is that the platforms have gotten fat and lazy. Facebook today is a buggy, slow mess with a bewildering user interface and a feed full of AI slop and other garbage. Facebook is even inserting AI­generated chatbots into user feeds, which has spawned mass outrage. Meanwhile, Twitter/X is a fascist hellscape. YouTube is somewhat better, but plainly has some work to do in its non­English­ speaking regions. So the

minute a tiny bridge over the platforms’ moat of market power appeared, a flood of users rushed over it.

The old internet wasn’t perfect, but it used to feel like a place of almost magical potential, where you might stumble over a fascinating new site at any moment, instead of watching in horror as your aunt is driven mad by flat­ earth conspiracies. This internet did not die of its own accord; it was murdered by a handful of mega­billionaires so they could sell ads for chukka boots and washing machines.

Even with the platforms’ overwhelming market dominance, there is an opportunity for a company to establish itself as the nexus for an old­fashioned internet of independent sites. Bluesky may or may not end up there, and at a fraction of Meta’s user base for Facebook and Instagram, it’s not going to topple the leviathans by itself. But it’s the most promising new development online in decades. I hope it develops a monetization strategy that’s not dependent on surveillance advertising; I for one would happily pay a monthly subscription to be the customer rather than the product. But the fact that a company this microscopic has Big Tech behemoths flailing around to compete for the first time in years is a good sign. n

PARTINGSHOT

Donald J. Trump

The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Washington, D.C.

January 20, 2025

Dear Mr. President,

Congratulations on your great big beautiful victory. We shall cut to the chase.

The Earth is round. Maps are flat. When you are looking at a map, the landmasses are not shown entirely in proportion to their ac- tual size, particularly those countries at the top and the bottom of the page.

It’s like if you took a piece of tinfoil, and rolled it over a big ball, and drew on it, and then unfolded it again. What you’d see at the top and bottom of the foil would look much larger than what you drew. (If you don’t know what foil is, ask someone in the kitchen at Mar-a-Lago, they can help you out.)

If you got all that, you’ll now understand that Greenland, while the 12th-largest country by landmass in the world, is not as large as it looks on a map. It is not the size of all of Africa or South America. It is smaller in landmass than the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is part of Africa, or Argentina, which is part of South America. It is less than one-quarter the size of the United States.

There’s less of it every year, in fact. That’s because of this thing called “climate change” you might have heard about. It’s a whole thing.

Also it’s not very green. Really it’s quite cold. Why is it called Greenland then? Well, the Vikings who discovered us wanted to attract settlers. It’s like calling a casino on the Jersey Shore the Trump Taj Mahal to pack people in.

We like it just fine; you get used to it. But if you’re thinking, “Palm Beach, only the size of a continent,” well, that’s not our vibe.

But if you’re looking for a big, big country with a ton of open land, well … have you ever looked at the bottom of the map? I think you’d be very interested in Antarctica.

Yours sincerely, Greenland

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