The American Prospect, #344

JONATHAN

ROBERT KUTTNER ON THE ASSAULT ON DEI

The Blue State Power Index

How Democrats measure up across the country

Ryan Cooper | David Dayen

Gabrielle Gurley | Emma Janssen

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We reviewed 17 states with Democratic trifectas to see what they did with that power.

Alternately belligerent, self-enriching, militaristic, and realist, Trump’s haphazard path is different from the establishment’s slow road to obliterating Gaza.

Jonathan Guyer

The real targets of the war on DEI include civil rights enforcement, federal outlays that serve Black communities, and Black workers in and out of government.

I’m writing this just after Chuck Schumer decided on surrender as the better part of valor, assembling ten Democratic colleagues in the Senate to supply their votes to a Republican-written government funding bill and avoid a shutdown. The bill will make it easier for Donald Trump to shift money across agencies and cancel disfavored programs, the very thing Schumer warned would happen in a shutdown scenario.

The response was immediate and furious, punctuated by an unusually deep anger from the long-suffering Democratic base. Two things are going on: First, there’s a sense of urgency about dwindling opportunities for the opposition party to contest an authoritarian takeover of the government. And second, there is a recognition that this generation of leadership simply doesn’t have the fortitude for this kind of fight, that they are too cautious, too willing to avoid conflict, too afraid of taking a risk. The rhetoric of saving democracy doesn’t match the action of shrinking from battle.

This is the dividing line in the party at the moment; ideology has taken a back seat to the presence of a pulse, and a spine. And both are in short supply in Washington.

That’s one of the reasons why, for this issue, we wanted to look outside the capital and toward the states. The epicenter of the legal fight against the administration’s hostile takeover of the government can be found among state attorneys general. The epicenter of the nation’s consumer protection, financial regulation, and other enforcement against abuse and theft is the blue states’ departments and agencies, as federal regulation takes a dive for the next four years. The epicenter of progress on labor, on welfare supports, on just about everything for the immediate future is blue America.

So we wanted to see which states might rise to this challenge. Gabrielle Gurley, Ryan Cooper, Emma Janssen , and I looked at the records of the 17 blue states that had Democratic governors and legislatures in 2023-2024, to measure their effectiveness. We found a lot of impressive efforts to make tangible change, but also found many states hamstrung by legacy constraints on taxes, overwhelmed by lobbyist-driven pushback, and too stricken with the same afflictions of national Democrats: the pathological desire to be the adult in the room, the reflexive trimming of the sails. That said, the path forward offers plenty of opportunities to take up the fight, and to protect and defend the public. My view is that the people will find their champions, and those afraid to fight won’t be around long.

In our Notebook section, we highlight some of the key areas where Donald Trump and Elon Musk are ravaging government’s promise: in clean-energy investment, in veterans’ health research, and in sheer federal capacity. We also have a provocative piece from our former managing editor Jonathan Guyer that takes a deep look at the ways in which Trump is upending the establishment drift in the Middle East, for better and worse. Bryan McMahon sees a bubble in the artificial-intelligence boom, another dampening factor to Trump’s economic agenda that could prove dangerous. And Bob Kuttner views Trump’s signature assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion with the moral clarity it deserves.

We invite you to follow us on a daily basis at prospect.org, where we are breaking news and chronicling this hinge point for American democracy.  — David Dayen

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PROSPEC TS

HAROLD MEYERSON

For a Left Nationalism

Donald Trump is giv-

ing nationalism a bad name. It’s time for the left to reclaim it.

Trump’s brand of nationalism is a malignant ideology shared by Viktor Orbán and parties of the European far right. It’s ethnocentric and xenophobic. It’s also autocratic and authoritarian, though those are not necessarily as linked to nationalism as ethnocentrism and xenophobia are.

Trump proclaims a doctrine of “America First,” but his real guiding light is a narcissistic sectarianism: You’re either a Trump follower or the enemy. That makes for a whole lot of Americans, roughly half of the population, whom he casts into the outer darkness, with consequences that already endanger the republic and whose full extent we can’t yet gauge. Nonetheless, under the banner of America First he has sundered alliances, imposed tariffs, and abandoned the soft power and the power of example that has brought generations of immigrants to our shores. It may be his perpetually wounded ego that leads him to trash our relations with Canada—after all, its prime minister has actually said critical things about his policies—but Trump clumps his antagonistic acts under the heading of America First nonetheless.

Given Trump’s appropriation of nationalism, it should come as no surprise that some on the left shudder in horror at the word and the concept. That would be a huge mistake,

for two distinct yet overlapping reasons. First, the working class in every nation is inherently nationalistic and rightly so. If Democrats are ever to regain some of the working-class support that they’ve forfeited, they need to be nationalistic, too. Second, nationalism can be as much a progressive doctrine and practice as it can be a xenophobic one, and it would be well if the left affirmed more audibly and in practice that progressive form of nationalism.

Ever since Marx and Engels concluded The Communist Manifesto with the ringing words “Workers of the world, unite,” the theory, or faith, to which much of the left subscribed posited a global working class, whose allegiance to their respective nations would be eclipsed by their cross-border allegiance to their fellow workers. This faith should have totally collapsed in 1914, when the workers of Europe went to war against each other, and when even many of the left’s own political parties, most prominently the German Social Democrats, voted to go to war against Tsarist Russia. But it should have been clear even in 1848, when Marx and Engels wrote the Manifesto, that nationalism was hardwired into the working class, both industrial and peasant. A half-century earlier, in 1793, revolutionary France built the first mass army to defend the Revolution against the foreign aristocracies that sought to overthrow it, and workers first

flocked to the nationalist banner. As the lyrics to the Marseillaise make clear, French workers fought for a cause that was at once democratic, nationalistic, and xenophobic (that line about the “impure blood” of their enemies has long made that anthem a tad less rousing to some of us).

Democratic and xenophobic values are both inherent in the nationalism of democratic republics; the character of individual nations is partly shaped by the question of which is the more dominant. Whichever it is, however, there are very good reasons why working classes are nationalistic. First, if they live in industrial or postindustrial democracies, it’s the nation-state that, however imperfectly, has given them free public education, retirement incomes, and access to health care (maybe not that last one in the U.S.). Second, they benefited, particularly during the three decades following World War II, from closed national labor markets, with no foreign or domestic workers whom their bosses could employ at a lower wage. (Again, the U.S. is the exceptional nation, as the South has always served as a low-wage— or during slavery, no-wage—destination for their employers.)

Capital has always been more mobile than labor, and after cross-ocean containerization and global communication became firmly established in the 1960s and ’70s, that mobility added a billion lower-wage workers to the world’s labor pool, making many of the same products that workers produced in the postwar democracies. With that, the social contracts that had thrived in the postwar democracies were unceremoniously scrapped. Labor understood what the free-trade agreements of the 1990s would mean for their nation’s workers. When I hear some commentators today arguing that Democrats should move to the right as Bill Clinton did if they want to win working-class votes again, I often don’t hear them say that Democrats should also move to the laborleft, as Bill Clinton decidedly did not when he backed NAFTA and permanent normal trade relations with China. In time, those free-trade policies cost the Democrats as many and probably more working-class votes than Clinton’s “Sister Souljah” speech and abolition of welfare may have gained. The best of those labor leaders fought for a nationalistic, anti-xenophobic, and even global class politics. The anti-corporate freetrade demonstrations that shut down the 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization in

Seattle are chiefly remembered for the young activists who sat down in the city’s streets, blocking all access to the arena where the meetings were being held. But just as remarkable was an outdoor rally of more than 15,000 union members called by the AFL-CIO. The speakers included union leaders from every continent, and labor leaders from perhaps half of the world’s nations were in attendance. I recall one speaker—a worker in a Ford assembly plant in South Africa—who called on Ford to establish uniform labor standards and minimum wage and benefit levels across all of its globe-spanning factories.

That hasn’t come to pass. As almost all labor movements have weakened in their home countries, appeals for global worker solidarity have grown fainter, and have been almost invariably ignored by global corporations. I can think of only two instances where workers in one country significantly helped workers in another. Earlier in this century, the United Steelworkers—a model union in its global sensibilities—prevailed upon one global steelmaking company to put worker representatives on its plant safety committee in one Nigerian steel mill. In a similar vein, Volkswagen, whose corporate board, by German law, is uniquely controlled by a combination of worker and public representatives, declined to oppose the unionization of its workers at a factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which helped the UAW win recognition and a contract at that plant. But these are one-off exceptions to the general rule that unions now barely wield enough clout to help workers in their own country, let alone other lands.

The appeal, then, of an America First policy to workers should come as no surprise, any more than the vote of British workers for Brexit to, in their minds, stop the entry of lower-wage Eastern European workers into British factories and other worksites should surprise. But there’s a labor-friendly version of America First that isn’t based on xenophobia, and it behooves the left to defend and promote it.

the only survey measuring the effect of new factory construction on American counties’ votes in last year’s presidential election found that they had a positive, if very faint, effect. The fact that Biden proved incapable of making an audible case for those factories, and was swamped by right-wing media’s attacks on his spending policies more generally, still didn’t turn public sentiment against the Democrats in those counties where the factory projects had been announced.

New factory construction more than doubled once Biden’s industrial policy was enacted by Congress and federal funding for such projects commenced. No such results were apparent during Trump’s first term as president, despite his America First rhetoric, and there’s little reason to think any tariffs he imposes during his second term will spur a reindustrialization record comparable to Biden’s.

A crucial difference between these two forms of America First nationalism is that Trump’s tariffs create clear losers—workers and consumers, both in foreign lands and here in the U.S.—while Biden’s do not, or do so only secondarily at most. Trump’s America First-ism, like every Trump policy and whim, requires losers and pain; Biden’s America First-ism did not.

The positive side of nationalism is patriotism, and some on the left feel uneasy even with that form of nationalism. Don’t we lag behind most of Europe when it comes to the universal benefits inherent in citizenship, social rights and provision, workers’ rights to form unions, even the freedom to vote? Hasn’t the American empire sided all too often with tyrants or even overthrown democratic regimes that weren’t all that friendly to American capital? What’s to be patriotic about?

That kind of America First-ism was exemplified by President Biden’s industrial policies. Most mainstream commentators scoff at the notion that any form of Bidenomics provides positive lessons for Democrats, but

If the result of such queasiness about nationalism is a desire to match (or even go beyond) the best democratic practices of other nations, that can be done without rejecting America’s premises and promises. Indeed, they’re more effective when they’re specifically rooted in America’s best traditions and creeds.

The vast majority of American reform-

ers took those premises and promises more seriously than their more ethnocentric, sexist, and capitalist-autocratic opponents. They took those premises more seriously even than those premises’ authors: Even though Thomas Jefferson didn’t mean “all men are created equal” to apply to all men and women, generations of reformers took him at his word, not his deeds. When they achieved their victories, most of them called these victories fulfillments of the American dream. It’s no accident that Lincoln’s Gettysburg promise of “a new birth of freedom” begins by invoking Jefferson’s words.

While a cosmopolitanism that appreciates other cultures and nations doesn’t preclude a patriotism for one’s own nation, a cosmopolitanism that denigrates all nationalist beliefs will surely alienate that nation’s workers—and it should. Working within America’s democratic premises establishes a strong claim to inform the nation’s policies, just as working outside them does not. The 1619 Project served as a historical corrective, but as Donald Trump seeks to establish a more autocratic nation, it’s the anti-autocratic premises of 1776 and 1787 (for all the Constitution’s limitations and flaws) that provide the basis for Trump’s resistance, that establish the left’s claims toward a more perfect union. If the left spurns the premises of a democratic nationalism for some form of anti-national cosmopolitanism, the right will sweep in with a xenophobic and ethnocentric nationalism; it already has, in fact. If the contest is between those different kinds of nationalism, however, the battle is joined.

Even as most Americans turned against the Vietnam War, millions of them rejected the appeals of anti-war politicos like George McGovern, because they saw him as linked to an anti-American anti-war movement, and thus (completely incorrectly) as anti-American himself. Chanting for North Vietnam at a time when working-class American soldiers were in battle with them was never going to win over Americans who hated the war but were outraged by those chants. During that time, the great American socialist Norman Thomas, then old and sick, would haul himself to anti-war rallies and counsel his comrades not to burn the flag, but cleanse it instead. Sound advice then, and with the return of Donald Trump, even sounder now. n

NOTEBOOK

Rule by Contractor

DOGE is not about waste and efficiency—it’s about privatization.

By Brett Heinz

Elon Musk spent more than $290 million on last year’s elections, most of which benefited the candidacy of President Donald Trump. The world’s richest man was richly rewarded for his support: a position as presidential adviser and the de facto head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

DOGE has been marketed as an organization aimed at cutting wasteful spending and increasing government efficiency, but it has quickly become apparent that this is not its primary function. Instead, DOGE has spent the first weeks of Trump’s second presidential term haphazardly dismantling the civil service, politically targeting spending that Musk and Trump dislike, centralizing decision-making power in the White House, and causing major disruptions to government operations that will decrease their overall efficiency. Still, one important aspect of this strategy has gone largely unexamined: the elevation of government contractors like Musk into government policymakers.

Musk has acquired much of his tremendous wealth from the government he is now dismantling. Tesla Motors relied on significant support from the Department of Energy, which was criticized as government waste by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. SpaceX continues to receive billions of dollars each year in contract awards from NASA and the Defense Department, representing one of the company’s largest streams of income. Overall, Musk’s business ventures have benefited from more than $38 billion in government support, not including a new contract from the Federal Aviation Administration to upgrade its information technology systems.

To hear Musk describe it, he is part of the solution, not the problem. He has argued that “there’s a vast federal bureaucracy that is implacably opposed to the … president and the Cabinet,” and thus that there is a need for a “thrashing of the bureaucracy as we try to restore democracy and the will of the people.” In this understanding, Musk is

not a money-motivated billionaire riddled with conflicts of interest, but rather a selfless entrepreneur bringing private-sector efficiency to a sclerotic, wasteful government and “the Parasite Class” that depends on it.

This view of government efficiency is impressively backwards. The civil service that Musk is attacking consists of millions of regular workers doing their best to transform the complexities of government into positive outcomes for the American people. The only parasitic class benefiting from government inefficiency consists of for-profit government contractors like Musk, who grow rich off of taxpayer dollars by providing overpriced services to compensate for a lack of state capacity, all while using their billions to rig the system in their favor. Allowing contractors like him to decide how the government spends money is both an affront to democracy and an open invitation to further corruption.

Private-Sector Bureaucracy

Most Americans are unaware of just how much their government has already been privatized. It was estimated in 2017 that more than 40 percent of the people working for the government are not actually government employees. They’re contractors from private-sector companies, hired to take over a particular public-sector task. In some areas of government, contractors run rampant: There were 1.5 contractors for every U.S. soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2019. Although the federal government has been asked to take on more responsibilities over time, the size of its workforce has remained shockingly flat. Federal employment was 4.3 percent of the overall workforce in 1960 and is down to just 1.9 percent today. Even in raw numbers, there were fewer federal employees in 2015 than in 1984. As a general rule, government agencies are understaffed, not bloated.

The gap between our workforce and the increasing demands placed upon it has been filled by a fast-growing industry of government contractors. Between 2013 and 2023, total spending on federal contract awards rose by nearly 65 percent.

Although DOGE’s disruption has unnerved many government contractors about the status of their existing contracts, some view the project with excitement. “We recognize that in the short term there could be some disruption to the market, but in the long term we are really well aligned,” said Booz Allen Hamilton CEO Horacio Rozanski. David Berteau, president of a trade association that represents contractors, sees DOGE as “a tremendous opportunity.” Jennifer Taylor, CEO of the Northern Virginia Technology Council, said that “if we see a trend toward privatesector expansion similar to the Reagan era, our tech ecosystem will be ready to respond.”

One important reason for the trend toward privatization is the long-standing, bipartisan belief in Washington that private-sector contractors are inherently more efficient than government employees. The Reagan administration embraced contracting with open arms, despite early warning signs, and eventually initiated a formal commission on privatization. This was followed up by the “National Partnership for Reinventing Government,” through which President Bill Clinton promised that he would “make our Government work better” with the help of the business world. This private-sector fetish remains strong within the Trump administration, which has encouraged government workers “to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.”

Despite how widespread this perception of contractor efficiency is among policymakers, there has never been much strong evidence for it. In 1994, a Defense Department inspector general report noted that “Federal agencies often contract for services at a cost that is 25 percent to 40 percent greater than if Federal employees had been used to perform the services.” A 2011 report by the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight found that private contractors are often greatly overpaid in comparison to government workers. And in the situations where waste and abuse is identified in government programs, for-profit contractors are often the culprits.

The truth is that federal bureaucrats are

frequently engaged in energetic efforts to make government work better, while for-profit contractors seek to maximize profits by selling the government the lowest-quality goods and services possible at the highest prices possible. Their relentless short-termism and monopsonistic customer base often result in poor product quality, as best displayed by the recent failures of Boeing.

Their inefficiency is only one of many reasons to be skeptical of contractors. Because they are not government agencies, contractors are exempt from transparency requirements like the Freedom of Information Act. They also violate the law with shocking regularity: Contracting giant RTX (formerly known as Raytheon) averages more than five legal penalties a year due to its crimes, ranging from fraud and corruption to illegal arms exports.

King Contractor

Perhaps the greatest danger posed by government contractors is their threat to democracy. Last year, the top ten government contractors in the U.S. spent $70.7 million on lobbying the government that

Elon Musk’s companies have received more than $38 billion in government support over the past two decades.

funds them. They also spent $8.5 million on political contributions to federal candidates last cycle, circumventing the ban on contractor donations through phony “employee PAC s.” Altogether, the ten largest contractors alone spent nearly $148,000 per member of Congress trying to convince the government to buy more of their products.

The reason we have a ban on contractor participation in election campaigns in the first place is simple: Because contractors benefit from public policy, it would be an obvious conflict of interest to allow them to influence public policy. When given the power to shape the government, these companies naturally seek to expand their profits and their power, subsuming all other concerns to enriching their shareholders.

This is not just a theoretical concern. Last year, I co-authored a report with the Quincy Institute’s Ben Freeman examining messages that contractors sent to military policymakers through a unique Pentagon program called the Secretary of Defense Executive Fellowship (SDEF), in which military officers spend nearly a year at a major

corporation (often a government contractor) and then make policy recommendations based on their experiences. Unsurprisingly, we found that contractors used this program to push their agendas on senior military officials, calling for more subsidies, reduced transparency, deregulation of their industries, and more Pentagon privatization.

Fellows at international arms companies called for looser arms export rules. A fellow at McKinsey encouraged the Pentagon to use consultants more often. And a fellow at Elon Musk’s SpaceX argued that the government “could save upwards of a billion dollars a year in launch costs” if they gave more contracts to … SpaceX.

Government contractors used the SDEF program not just to advocate for more outsourcing, but also to advocate for placing more decision-making power in their hands. One SDEF fellow called for the Pentagon to promote “more industry participation in solutions” by creating a “forum of industry CEOs” to “help craft National Security Strategy.” Another argued that the military should “involve industry in [the] ‘problem’ definition.”

DOGE’s early efforts targeted agencies in which Musk’s companies, like SpaceX, had a financial interest.

In other words, this perspective says that contractors should not be limited to trying to solve the government’s problems; they should also be able to decide for government what the problem is in the first place. Contractors don’t want to just take orders from the government, but to function as a para-state capable of influencing the orders that the government gives them. Like Musk’s dream of building self-driving cars, the industry dreams of a self-contracting contractor. Musk himself is test-driving this concept.

The Self-Contracting Contractor

The threats this dynamic poses to democracy have taken on existential importance under Musk’s reign of terror at DOGE . It should not be dismissed as coincidence that many of his early efforts have been focused on government agencies in which he has a financial interest. Although Musk promised to “recuse [him]self” if any of his work at DOGE poses a conflict of interest—a self-regulating contractor—his record so far casts serious doubt upon this pledge.

The first agency targeted by DOGE was the U.S. Agency for International Development, which had been reviewing its relationship with SpaceX as a contractor. Next in line was the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose commitment to consumer welfare made them an obstacle to Musk’s plans for a digital payment service on his social media platform, X.

Two weeks after reports that Musk’s DOGE had infiltrated the State Department, it was

If we truly wanted a more efficient government, it would mean reducing the number of contractors.

revealed that the agency had a purchase order for $400 million for “armored Teslas.” Further reporting showed that the contract was quietly revised and backdated to make it look like it was made during the Biden administration; the order is now on hold.

Musk’s Teslas have been plagued by safety concerns, so DOGE fired government workers responsible for automobile safety. Last year, Musk clashed with the Federal Aviation Administration over fines levied against him; this year, his invasion of the agency was followed up by news that they had agreed to a new contract with his wireless Starlink service, run by SpaceX. In addition, the firing of inspectors general at the Defense Department may have disrupted an investigation into SpaceX’s contracting practices.

Many of these activities should be illegal under U.S. law, which bars federal employees from involving themselves in matters “that will affect [their] own financial interests.” But Musk has never concerned himself with following the law before, and he is not starting now. By labeling him a “special government employee,” the White House is holding him to a lower ethical standard

than most of the government workers that he is firing. And despite all of the concerns about contractor corruption that Musk’s conflicts have raised, some agencies within the Trump administration are seeking even more opportunities for “a stronger private/ government partnership in managing the workforce of the future.”

Musk is the most prominent, but far from the only, government contractor hoping to hijack the Trump upheaval for his own purposes. Peter Thiel, co-founder of the controversial contractor Palantir, has defended the idea of “a political framework that operates outside the checks and balances of representative democracy.” The Trump administration has begun hiring Palantir officials for government roles. Another Trump supporter is Palmer Luckey, the founder of the up-and-coming defense tech contractor Anduril, which fantasizes about “changing the practices and culture” of the Defense Department. Palantir and Anduril have formed a consortium to bid on military contracts together, and in February Anduril took home a $99 million contract with the U.S. Air Force, as well as a $22 billion contract previously granted to Microsoft for virtual reality headsets at the U.S. Army. It is often said that the government should be run “more like a business.” The case of DOGE shows us that the opposite is true. If we truly wanted a more efficient government, it would mean reducing the number of contractors and hiring more civil servants, who are often more cost-efficient and always more accountable and transparent. Instead, Musk is doing the opposite, providing greater opportunities for his businesses and allies to step in and offer overpriced contracting work of a questionable quality.

Unlike a business, a government has responsibility for the well-being of its citizens. Arbitrarily firing thousands of workers to save a few pennies might pass as wisdom when running a website, but it has disastrous results for government. DOGE’s current trajectory would paralyze democratic governance, leaving space for private contractors to fill the void and charge more money for worse work. When the man in charge stands to benefit from this outcome, one cannot help but ask if that was the point all along. n

Brett Heinz is a policy researcher and writer based in Washington, D.C., with a focus on economic justice, political inequality, and U.S. foreign policy.

The Dumbing Down of the VA

Though not as prominent as the NIH, VA researchers play a major role in advancing basic health science. Hundreds of projects have been cut.

By Suzanne Gordon and Steve Early

If you’re interested in the long history of scientific innovation and advances at the Department of Veterans Affairs, you may want to visit the website for the Office of Research and Development before Elon Musk and company delete it. Though few Americans are aware of it, the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) has traditionally served as one of the nation’s largest research powerhouses, along with the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Since 1925, the website relates, taxpayers have funded “the development of microelectronics and robotics to create artificial limbs that look, feel, and work more like natural arms and legs, the creation of the nicotine patch to help people stop smoking, the

invention of the cardiac pacemaker, the first successful liver transplant, the development of the CAT (or CT) scan, and the development of new drugs and treatments for diseases such as HIV/AIDS, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and osteoporosis.”

In 2024, Congress funded $984 million in VA research, which is a pittance compared to the NIH. But VA researchers operate at 102 research sites and are engaged in 7,300 ongoing projects, while publishing more than 10,000 papers in scientific journals last year. VA research also allies with private-sector researchers and contributes to advances, which helps not only veterans but all Americans.

The VA research website appeals to research scientists to join its team. It also asks veterans to volunteer to participate in

ongoing clinical studies that could help not only them but new cohorts of former military service members. An array of ongoing studies include experimental treatments for PTSD and depression, colorectal and lung cancer, or diabetes. “Your participation matters,” the VA promises its veterans.

Well, VA research won’t matter, or even exist, for much longer, if the Trump/Musk scientific demolition derby isn’t reversed. Although the nation has been inundated with news about the administration’s attacks on the NIH and America’s renowned research universities, little attention has been paid to the attack on VA research.

Over the past few weeks, the Trump/ Musk administration and new VA secretary, Doug Collins, have fired hundreds of VA researchers, while canceling, suspending, or disrupting over 370 studies, as well as clinical trials that have been funded by sources outside of the VA like industry and philanthropy. Over 10,000 veterans may have their medical care affected immediately because of this assault on VA research, the National Association of Veterans’ Research and Education Foundations tells the Prospect. “Veterans in the midst of experimental treatments for cancer may have their care abruptly discontinued, and other Veterans with cancer will not have access to the most advanced, life-saving care,” a memo from top VA medical leaders explains.

In a statement, Carl Blake, CEO of Para-

lyzed Veterans of America, told the Prospect that research into veterans with spinal cord injuries like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and multiple sclerosis (MS) has been affected. “We have been alerted that VA researchers working specifically on ALS research have lost funding and that research will stop,” said Blake. “It is beyond comprehension that the federal government would not want to invest in research that could improve and even save the lives of veterans with these conditions.”

Although VA researchers were initially supposed to be exempt from the current federal hiring freeze, the new VA leadership quickly reneged on that promise. Over the past few weeks, they have started to fire researchers, who like those in most other research institutions, do not have permanently funded positions, because research positions are organized differently than ordinary civil service jobs. In the VA, many of these researchers are employed as what are known as series 601 Health Science Specialists, who are on “not to exceed” (NTE) contracts, which are typically renewable every three years depending on the availability of research funds. They are paid out of “soft” money from the VA, or other federal or philanthropic sources.

Currently, VA researchers whose contracts are about to expire are being advised that they will not be renewed, even when funding, for example through extramural grants, is already in place to pay them. Should the VA continue this policy for researchers whose contracts are renewable over the months to come, the entire VA research workforce could be decimated.

As Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), a senior member of the Senate Veterans Affairs’ Committee, wrote in a letter of protest, the Trump administration is “refusing to honor researchers’ three-year, ‘Not to Exceed’ term limits (NTEs) by rolling them over as is standard and is instead immediately dismissing these researchers—who are in the middle of research on topics including mental health, alcohol and opioid withdrawal, cancer treatments, burn pit exposure, prosthetics, diabetic ulcers, and so much else.”

The cuts are part of the government’s crackdown on so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) programs. In the case of VA research, that touches health equity programs that focus on diseases affecting particular communities. But because the

Losing research programs will make the VA less attractive to clinicians who want to both conduct research and work with patients.

DEI concept is so broad and vague, hundreds of programs have been caught up.

As the National Association of Veterans’ Research and Education (NAVRE) Foundations warned, there are now over 200 vacant research positions, including principal investigators and research coordinators who are some of the most respected scientists in the nation. The VA has even blocked the appointment of “without compensation” (WOC) research collaborators funded by VAaffiliated organizations such as universities and nonprofits.

There is no cost savings to be garnered from many of these firings, since these scientists are working on projects that have already been funded. To place a hold on the WOC program also doesn’t save a penny, since WOC researchers aren’t paid by the VA but by affiliated institutions. What is at stake, however, is $35 million in research funds that will be lost if studies and trials are terminated. If the VA has to return funding to external donors, that will also represent a net loss for veterans and for the research community. As one VA researcher who chose to remain anonymous told the Prospect , “Studies that have been halted and are thus partially completed are as good as useless because the data amassed won’t make it to publication. Thus the scientific data already gathered in ongoing studies is at risk.”

On February 14th, the most prominent group of VA medical leaders—the VA Chiefs of Staff Advisory Committee, who represent medical leadership at the system’s 170 VA medical centers—issued a desperate plea for help to Steven Lieberman, acting VA undersecretary for health. “Veterans,” they wrote, “will lose access to clinical trials that are integral to the care of cancer, mental health conditions, and a host of other medical and neurological conditions.” Veterans with conditions that disproportionately impact them will suffer even more if research on

things like “toxic exposures, PTSD, substance use disorders, suicide, heart disease, spinal cord injury, Parkinson disease, dementia, and many others” is compromised.

The chiefs of staff are concerned that losing research programs will make the VA less attractive to clinicians who want to both conduct research and work with patients. Research relies on a support staff of data scientists, laboratory technicians, grant managers, and many more. As programs diminish, that support staff is likely to not be retained, and the ability of a clinician to conduct research on the side becomes less likely. This would have a direct impact on veteran care.

Lieberman responded that VA leaders are taking this “feedback very seriously.”

The VA researcher cited above explained that leaders like Collins, Musk, and Trump ignore (or just don’t care about) the fact that the scientists and clinicians who have been fired are irreplaceable. Many have worked at the VA for decades, amassing knowledge not only about veterans’ unique health conditions but about how to use VA databases, like the VA’s Corporate Data Warehouse (CDW). The CDW contains unparalleled and massive amounts of information, including medical records and cost of care data needed to help make care delivery less costly and more efficient, a goal Elon Musk professes to share.

The researcher explains that the CDW is not at all easy to use. “If, for example, you want to target veterans who have cancer and are still smoking, you have to know how to query an exhaustive list of the relevant diagnostic and treatment codes so you can extract, analyze and interpret the information it contains,” they said.

Some specialized researchers, the staffer continued, also have to master what’s called natural language processing (NLP) in order to make specific queries of open text medical record data. If the average Prospect reader doesn’t understand this, neither do a lot of VA researchers, which is why they work alongside data specialists, many of whom have also been fired.

VA officials have not responded to a request for comment.

As if firing researchers and their support staff weren’t bad enough, the Musk/Trump/ Collins team has placed unprecedented restrictions on communication between VA researchers and their colleagues outside of the department. Researchers are now

VA research developed innovations like artificial limbs, the nicotine patch, the pacemaker, the CAT scan, and more.

required to get approval from VA headquarters in Washington if they want to present at a national conference and exchange information with colleagues outside the agency.

In a truly astonishing development, the VA has even stopped allowing nonVA researchers to attend its renowned VA Health Systems Research Cyberseminar Series. This seminar series, the VA website explains, features “state-of-the art training and special interest sessions via live web conferences and 24/7 on-demand archives presentations.” As is typical of governmentsponsored, taxpayer-funded programs, the seminars have been publicly available to interested parties from all over the country. Its presentations were also archived to facilitate sharing of information and insights. Following the new corporate model, only internal VA researchers can attend such sessions, and the archives have been closed to non-VA investigators.

In the current climate, what is perhaps even more disturbing is that researchers are starting to self-censor, inadvertently

promoting the administration’s misguided agenda. One VA observer told the Prospect that “scientists are holding back on submitting publications about targeted interventions and clinical trials that mention anything to do with health equity.”

This has enormous consequences for improving the lives of all veterans and indeed all Americans. Effectively treating health conditions depends on identifying the various biological, socioeconomic, and even cultural differences that impact how people experience medical problems. If analyzing these differences is no longer permissible because it’s too associated with DEI or wokeness, one former VA official and health researcher says, this will not only set medicine and public health back decades, it will also hurt the very people that make up Trump’s base.

“If you’re a rural white person, your likelihood of getting a kidney transplant or having access to brain-saving emergency stroke care is different than if you are a white person who lives in an urban area. Does this

new policy against anything involving equity mean you can’t study rural white people to improve their access to transplants or emergency stroke care?” If it does, then a lot of rural white Trump supporters are going to suffer.

Veteran advocates, like the nation’s veteran service organizations, have the ability to stop this latest Trump/Musk folly by mobilizing their members to protest irreparably and irrevocably damaging impacts to their health and well-being. So far, congressional protests against basic research cuts have focused on the NIH. But cuts to VA research do not only impact military veterans, but the nation as a whole. n

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

Charging Down

Trump’s energy policy is hurting red states. Do they care?

By Emma Janssen

Ever since Scotland tried to put up wind farms on the Aberdeenshire coast, within sight of Donald Trump’s proposed luxury golf course, nearly 20 years ago, the president has held a grudge against offshore wind. He was primarily mad that it would ruin his coastal view, and secondarily mad after inventing a whole bunch of dubious harms from wind energy; killing birds, for example.

Trump lost that battle with Scotland in court, and now he will have his revenge. But it hasn’t stopped at wind turbines. Trump is on a mission to reverse all of the Biden administration’s support for renewable energy and electrification. The current threats against green energy take many different forms—funding freezes, executive orders, legislative rollbacks—but all have the same chilling effect on renewable-energy projects across the country. And meanwhile, the White House is lending a hand to all manner of fossil fuel projects, from fracked oil to liquefied natural gas, under the bogus claim of an “energy emergency.”

But it turns out that these attacks on renewable energy are hitting red states. Hard. Unfortunately, it’s not clear whether anyone will manage to find out, and even if they do, whether they will care.

The sun-soaked plains of Texas are host to solar farms, while the wind belt stretches from the border with Saskatchewan down to the Lone Star State, creating optimal conditions for harnessing power from turbines. The first new nuclear power plant in decades was constructed in the purple state of Georgia, where a loan given by Biden’s Department of Energy to build a Rivian electric truck plant faces an uncertain future. Tennessee, Ohio, and other red states have been active in electric-vehicle and battery factory construction. Even deep-red Kentucky has an EV battery project under way.

The development of clean-energy sources in red states like Texas, Florida, Iowa, and Oklahoma is spurred on not so much by belief in climate change or the polit -

ical popularity of renewables as by cold hard economic facts. Due in large part to President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), billions in cash and tax incentives have flowed into Republican districts over the past three years, a critical step for leftbehind areas needing to transition to the clean-energy economy that many economic experts consider inevitable.

In addition to the economic calculus, red districts tend to be more rural and, on the whole, have better physical environments for renewable-energy projects. More wind, more sun, and more space make these areas ripe for solar and wind projects. Texas is particularly dominant, with nearly 80 percent more solar, wind, and battery capacity than the next state. In Texas, renewableenergy projects generate $297 million in state and local taxes and supply a quarter of the state’s energy production.

Over his four years in office, Biden announced at least $206 billion in investments into clean-energy manufacturing. A staggering $161 billion of that—nearly 80 percent of the total—went to Republican House districts, and two-thirds of that $161 billion came directly from the IRA , which House and Senate Republicans unanimously opposed.

The year after the IRA passed saw wind, solar, and battery storage provide nearly 16 percent of the country’s electricity, more than double the amount they provided in 2018. Clean power was over 75 percent of all new electricity projects added in 2023. And last year, enough solar panels were made in America to meet all U.S. demand.

Despite the massive boon that renewable energy has brought to red states, Trump has set his sights on reversing those wins through both funding freezes and policy switch-ups. Already, his funding pauses have injected fear and uncertainty into the industry. Now, much of the onus is on states and nonprofits to file suit against the Trump administration, and on Republican lawmakers to stand up for their districts’ energy projects.

On January 27, the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget issued a memo to federal agencies, directing them to freeze all funding. While the directive was reversed just two days later, many of the programs that relied on funding from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) or U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) were left without their contractually obligated funding for a month or more. By February 20, all of the EPA’s grant programs had been unfrozen except for the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion investment to fight the climate crisis. EPA administrator Lee Zeldin has tried to intimidate financial institutions into reversing $20 billion of that fund, despite green banks once being a bipartisan priority. Zeldin has also reportedly signaled that he will eliminate the “endangerment finding” that greenhouse gas emissions harm human health, which would damage any ability to boost clean energy.

The EPA’s Solar for All fund, a $7 billion grant program nested under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, was one of the programs impacted by the freeze. Solar for All creates new or expanded solar programs for low-income Americans, with the goal of lowering electricity costs for those who are burdened the most by their utility bills.

Some families are able to take out loans to add solar to their individual homes, but those projects are often inaccessible for lower-income Americans. Theo Gervais Woodard, the business development manager at Clean Energy Fund of Texas, says that green banks like theirs are able to help some families set up solar, but programs like Solar for All extend those benefits to everyone in the state, including low-income Texans who wouldn’t be able to afford individual solar projects.

In a state where some homes lose power for weeks during the hurricane season and others pay close to half their income per month on their electricity bill in the summertime, large-scale solar projects are a crucial step in making power more reliable and affordable. “We’re talking about a family that has to decide whether to pay their electricity bill this June or pay their car note,” said Woodard. “It shouldn’t be that way. And so this grant money, these federal funds, were designed to address that.”

The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund is

currently being probed by the Department of Justice, which is directing stakeholders to turn over records to the FBI and appear in federal court in late March. On March 8, a coalition of groups that had been promised $7 billion out of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund sued the Trump administration and Citibank, saying that they still have not received their contractually obligated funding.

The suit is one of many legal fights play ing out over the funding freeze. The vast majority of these lawsuits are coming from blue states, though. Right after the OMB memo, two dozen Democrat ic state attorneys general filed suit against the federal government to reverse the funding pause. In mid-February, Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) took matters into his own hands, suing the administration to access $1.2 billion in federal funds owed to the state. He was successful: By the end of Febru ary, Shapiro announced that all of the funds had been released.

But it’s not just the funding freeze that is putting these climate projects, particularly in red states, at risk. Trump’s Federal Highway Administration abruptly suspended its approval of all state Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Deployment Plans, which is functionally a freeze by another name. The suspension blocks $5 billion in funding that would have helped charging station opera tors expand. The Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, which funds cleanenergy innovations (including, ironically, Tesla in 2010), has been under its own freeze since a January 20 secretarial order.

And, through executive order, Trump paused permitting on all offshore wind farm leases, claiming concern for “the impor tance of marine life [and] impacts on ocean currents and wind patterns.” Even wind projects with existing permits are supposed to be reviewed. Industry participants have described this as a “worst-case scenario.” A leaked memo from the American Clean Power Association suggests that solar has been caught up in this as well, with even the early decisions on projects stalled out. There’s also the omnipresent threat of Republicans attempting to repeal the IRA altogether, likely through budget reconciliation. That would be a politically risky move due to the law’s major investments in

Republican-led districts. But Republicans do need significant budget cuts to offset planned tax cuts for billionaires. Altogether, these attacks on renewable energy represent “maybe one of the most egregious examples of Trump looking to claw back money in the name of fiscal prudence but really advancing on an agenda that prioritizes billionaire tax cuts over low-

ering energy costs for hard-working Ameri cans,” said Justin Balik, the senior state program director at Evergreen Action.

Republican pushback to this onslaught has been “piecemeal,” said Balik. Some

Republican lawmakers with major renewable-energy projects in their districts have spoken up. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), for example, was in contact with the EPA and the White House in an attempt to release frozen funds from the EPA’s $5 billion Clean School Bus Program. School districts in Capito’s West Virginia have received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the program to buy electric

Meanwhile, some state lawmakers are doing Trump’s work for him, working to cull renewable-energy projects in their own backyards. There’s a growing effort in Oklahoma, the country’s third-largest generator of wind power, to ban renewable-energy projects altogether. The plan is mostly talk, and the state’s Republican governor Kevin Stitt is open about his support for green energy, so change likely won’t come unless an anti-renewables governor takes over. But state lawmakers just advanced a bill that places more regulations on wind turbine development, signaling a willingness to crack down on the industry.

And in Arizona, the legislature is considering a bill that would restrict new wind farm projects to sites at least 12 miles away from any property zoned for residential use. If passed, the bill would be the most restrictive law limiting wind power in the country, and would remove about 90 percent of Arizona’s land from eligibility for

In August 2024, 18 Republicans penned a letter to Speaker of the House Mike John) urging him not to repeal the IRA , due to its economic benefits in their districts. The message was overall lukewarm, with the second paragraph mentioning that is a “deeply flawed bill” and no real gestures toward using political leverage to protect the law. Similarly, the 80-member House Conservative Climate Caucus says that it will work toward renewable-energy projects, but hasn’t indicated that it will stand up to attacks from other Republicans, including Trump. “Have I drawn a red line yet? No,” said Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-IA) to E&E News.

“No one should bank on Republican elected officials suddenly having an awakening and becoming responsible,” Balik said. n

THE BLUE STATE POWER INDEX

We reviewed 17 states with Democratic trifectas to see what they did with that power.

BY PROSPECT STAFF

For the next four years, the nation’s capital will be the source of a lot of change but not much progress. We’ve already seen mindlessly inefficient executive branch layoffs, massive tax breaks for the wealthy, and deep and relentless cuts to the most critical anti-poverty programs.

This can’t help but filter down to the state level. Cuts to federal education funding and especially Medicaid, a state-federal partnership, will throw state budgets into upheaval and severely hamper their ability to provide assistance and support to their residents. And President Trump always has an eye toward hurting blue states disproportionately; see his cuts to funding for universities in New York and Maryland.

In that hazardous environment, Democrats who control state governorships and legislatures will need to be creative and resourceful to devise an agenda they can be proud to implement and give the party some element of hope. But not all blue states are created equal.

Some state Democratic Parties rose from the machine politics of a bygone era, and that mentality still influences what can get passed. Some pay inordinate attention to home-state industries that are deemed untouchable. Some have institutional and often self-created constraints, whether on taxes or other matters, that impose limits on their ambitions. And other states have the propensity to act boldly and energetically to use their political capital whenever they’re fortunate enough to gain that power.

We thought it would be instructive to look at the 17 states with Democratic governors and Democratic majorities in their state legislatures over the past two years, and study what they actually got done. We wanted to separate those states that took up the challenge of governing from those that were unwilling to use the power they have been bequeathed by the electorate.

The resulting ranking, which we’re calling the Blue

State Power Index, is admittedly highly unscientific. We took into account the margin of Democratic support in the legislature: What a nearly all-Democratic legislature can do should be more than a closely divided one. We thought about what record these states already had in place: If states had already accomplished key elements of a progressive agenda, then they had less to potentially achieve. Given that most states must balance their budgets, we took into account their resources and tax bases: What a state with a poor population can manage to fund is necessarily more constrained than a state with a rich one—especially with Trump administration cuts and threats looming.

What we found was rather interesting. Our topranked state, Minnesota, no longer has a pure Democratic “trifecta”: There is a tie in the state House. Our lowest-ranked state, Rhode Island, has one of the broadest Democratic majorities in the country, yet simply refuses to join other blue states in passing basic protections and economic security for its citizens. States that historically boast of being laboratories of democracy and bellwethers of the nation, like California and New York, fared poorly in our analysis, while more unassuming states like Oregon fared well.

Blue-state governance has not lived up to voters’ expectations, and national electoral results reflect that impatience. Donald Trump won Arizona by a greater margin than Kamala Harris won New Jersey. Democrats need to reverse these trends by exercising their power to improve the lives of their constituents. There are many possibilities for blue states to make strides during the Trump era; we’ll explain those later in this issue. But before laying out what blue states should do, we need to understand what they’ve done.

Let’s go to the rankings:

1. Minnesota

Governor: Tim Walz

During 2023 and 2024, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota put together probably the most impressive record of any state legislature in the past 50 years. With just a one-vote margin in the state Senate, the party passed a sweeping policy package, of which any one provision would count as a major victory in any other state. It included a sweeping expansion of labor rights, including a paid sick day mandate, a ban on noncompete agreements and “captive audience” meetings, and a sectoral

bargaining system for nursing homes. Additionally, they set up a new paid family and medical leave system, passed new protections for abortions and LGBT folks, legalized recreational pot, gave free lunch to all public-school students,

and a number of more minor measures. Gov. Tim Walz had previously had a relatively moderate record in the House, as he represented a Republican-leaning district, but it turned out he had been trimming to fit his district. Though he did veto wage increases for rideshare drivers, the vast majority of the party platform sailed through. Unfortunately, Minnesota Dems lost seats in the 2024 election. At present, Democrats retain a one-vote margin in the Senate, while Republicans and Democrats are tied in the House after a special election on March 11, with control shared between the two parties. Further progressive advances are unlikely until Dems get their trifecta back. –Ryan Cooper

2. Oregon

Governor: Tina Kotek

The first year of Oregon’s legislative session was marred by a boycott: Republicans denied Democrats a quorum and blocked hundreds of bills. But under a new initiative passed by voters in 2022, ten of the boycotters were ineligible to stand for re-election in 2024. Despite the boycott, Oregon managed to fulfill two of Gov. Tina Kotek’s biggest priorities, housing and behavioral health, this past legislative session. A $2 billion housing fund investment in 2023 was followed up by another $112 million last year for emergency shelters, eviction prevention, and more,

as well as $94 million for housing production. A $75 million revolving loan fund provides interest-free loans to local governments to build more, and a $24.5 million repair fund allows for air conditioners and energy upgrades, including heat pumps, in low-income housing. On behavioral health, Oregon made significant investments in

tackling the root causes of drug addiction and expanding treatment, while creating behavioral health community clinics that offer primary care integrated with mental health and substance abuse treatment. The measure also increased mental health provider training and apprenticeships, attacking the supply side of the behavioral health question. The legislature also put licensing restrictions on price-gouging pharmacy benefit managers, but it fell short in an attempt to limit private equity’s involvement in health care. The chief sponsor plans to bring it back this year. In late 2024, Kotek issued a bold executive order requiring union workers on large state construction projects, which has infuriated private industry and prompted lawsuits.

–David Dayen

r: Tina Kotek. State House: 35-25. State Senate: 17-12-1

overnor: Tim Walz. State House: 70-64. State Senate: 34-33.

r: Tina Kotek. State House: 35-25. State Senate: 17-12-1

3. Illinois

Governor: J.B. Pritzker

Illinois Democrats have not quite matched the record of their fellow Midwesterners in Minnesota, but they are doing leagues better than New York or California. In 2023 and 2024, they set up a paid leave system, passed requirements that health insurance cover numerous vital procedures like cancer screening as well as various new health care price controls, allowed noncitizen immigrants to get driver’s licenses and become police officers, imposed various gun control

measures, created new protections for abortion and LGBT rights, along with many other smaller measures. Notably, Gov. Pritzker vetoed almost none of the progressive priorities coming out

of the legislature. He did block a proposal for one company to get an end run around the permitting process for building an electrical transmission line, and a proposed removal of the state’s ban on new nuclear power plants— perhaps inadvisable given the climate implications, but also things state progressives favored. Pritzker has made this progressive record the foundation of a national profile, proclaiming Illinois to be a safe haven from Donald Trump’s violent repression, and he is clearly angling for national office. On balance, it’s a good indication that despite his enormous wealth—he’s worth about $3.7 billion—he’s the real thing.

–Ryan Cooper

4 . Maryland

Governor: Wes Moore

In his first two years in office, Gov. Wes Moore went 26 for 26, proposing and passing 26 pieces of legislation. Targeting uplifting low-income Marylanders, three poverty reduction measures landed in the first bundle of bills he signed: an early boost to the $15 minimum wage as well as an earned income tax credit and a child tax credit. The latter two will together benefit about 440,000 people. To stimulate housing creation, Moore signed legislation in 2024 that included tools to per-

mit construction of manufactured and modular homes in areas once zoned for single-family homes. The pressure for red-tape cutting yielded a transparency initiative requiring state agencies to publish catalogs of permits, licenses, or certificates along with timelines for pro -

cessing and issuing paperwork, and an infrastructure reform streamlined the approval process for industries that rely on backup power generators. Moore also championed a first-in-the-nation paid service year for high school graduates designed to capitalize on opportunities in education, health, IT, and other fields. But billions in transportation cuts, a multibillion-dollar budget deficit going into fiscal 2026, and the pressures posed by the Washington budget and personnel crisis may chip away at the confidence in Moore’s reach-across-theaisle charm, itself a rare commodity that has bought the state’s first Black governor a steady stream of political capital. –Gabrielle Gurley

5. New Jersey

Governor: Phil Murphy

New Jersey has had a governing trifecta since 2018, when Phil Murphy took over from Chris Christie as governor. Since then, the state has made impressive strides to fund public programs and protect its citizens, all while state revenue slows down and spending ramps up. In 2023, a lawmaker raised the alarm that NJ Transit would run out of funding once federal pandemic aid ran dry. By the end of the 2024 legislative session, lawmakers had created the corporate transit fee, a 2.5 percent

surtax on businesses that make over $10 million in profits. Though the tax automatically sunsets in five years, it’s a dedicated funding stream for NJ Transit that will help avoid a massive budget hole. The state has also passed strong spending bills in the 2023 and 2024 ses-

sions. In 2023, they doubled the child tax credit, funneled hundreds of millions into state school aid, and promised property tax credits to elderly residents to encourage them to stay in the state as they age. New Jersey has the highest property taxes of any state. Also in 2023, Gov. Murphy signed a series of three laws aimed at lowering prescription drug prices for some of the most common and crucial medications, including insulin, asthma inhalers, and epinephrine injectors. The laws put in place oversights on drug price negotiators, set caps on out-of-pocket expenses, and require transparency on drug prices. All these moves materially help the lives of New Jersey residents. –Emma Janssen

6. Washington

Governor (2023-2024 session): Jay Inslee

Washington state is one of several blue states hamstrung by tax regulations that reduce the revenue available for state programs: The state has no personal income tax, though a capital gains tax was finally approved in 2021. Lawmakers in 2024 passed a measure reaffirming the ban on income taxes, and restricting local governments from imposing such taxes as well. These no-tax stances cast a long shadow over state government. In other areas, Washington is a model blue state. It has long been a national leader on the care economy. Gov. Inslee

left his mark on environmental policy, and last year state lawmakers joined the cap-and-trade market established by California and Quebec, building a stronger coalition for emission reductions. In 2023, Washington reserved $1 billion for housing, and changed zoning to build “missing middle” homes and accessory dwelling units. The leg -

islature advanced cutting-edge gun safety bills as well, plus a shield law to protect seekers and providers of abortion services or gender-affirming care. But the lack of income taxes creates a strain, and short legislative sessions often leave plenty on the table. Bills that went unaddressed include a cap on annual rent increases, an increase in transit-oriented development, unemployment benefits for workers on strike, and more oversight for hospital mergers. Bob Ferguson was elected governor in 2024, and he has immediately pivoted to austerity, proposing a 6 percent cut across state agencies to deal with looming budget deficits while downplaying any ideas for new revenues. These self-imposed fiscal straitjackets limit Washington’s ambition. –David Dayen

7. Connecticut

Governor: Ned Lamont

In its past two legislative sessions, Connecticut has passed a number of useful bills that will improve the lives of some of the state’s residents, particularly in issues related to the care economy. One example is an omnibus health bill that promises protections for nurses and other health care workers, after two high-profile deaths of care workers in the state’s recent history. The bill also calls for studies on a number of health issues, including loneliness

and illnesses facing nail salon workers. The state also plans to improve nursing home conditions for seniors through a law that prohibits nursing homes from overcrowding. And soon, more

workers will be eligible for sick leave. Despite these care economy successes, the legislature failed to advance bills that would have built transit-oriented housing and protected renters, particularly elderly and disabled renters. Both bills died in the Senate. Overall, the state’s recent record seems lukewarm: Could be worse, but could be a lot stronger. Maybe in 2025 state Democrats will take on more ambitious projects. In February, for example, Gov. Lamont proposed a massive expansion of preschool access by starting a Universal Preschool Endowment fund with the state’s anticipated surpluses. That’s a move in the right direction. –Emma Janssen

8. Maine

Governor: Janet Mills

Determined to stabilize a state that had been devastated by the reign of error of her Republican predecessor Paul LePage, Gov. Janet Mills came into office as the broker of a cautious, middle-ofthe-road agenda. She has consistently steered dollars to the state’s rainy day fund, bringing it to its statutory maximum in 2023, and a budget surplus at the end of fiscal 2024 sent surplus dollars to several budget items, including health insurance for retired Mainers, child care, and transportation. Even though surpluses are the order of the day, Mills has been concerned that state tax revenues are plateauing and unsuccessfully advocated for

moving additional dollars into special reserve funds—even before the chaos unleashed by the Trump administration. When she came into office in 2019, she prioritized fighting the opioid epidemic with a comprehensive menu of solutions, including increasing the number of treatment beds, collecting data, and mandating the distribu -

tion of naloxone free of charge to handle overdoses to local communities, clinics, businesses, schools, and colleges—investments that engaged ordinary residents and a major cultural marker in a small state where many people know someone who has overdosed. The focus made a difference: In 2023, the state saw a nearly 16 percent decrease in opioid deaths. Mills also has been praised for obtaining a second extension of a two-year tuition-and-fee-free community college program for 2024 and 2025 high school graduates, a popular program that has boosted the ranks of qualified workers. A paid family and medical leave for all private and public employees regardless of employer size had been in the works before Mills came into office, but Mills signed the plan— the 13th in the country—into law in 2023. –Gabrielle Gurley

9. New Mexico

Governor: Michelle Lujan Grisham

Grading on a curve, the recent record of New Mexico Democrats can be judged as OK. The party has passed some progressive priorities, with laws that raised the minimum wage to $12 by 2023, protections of voting rights, a waiting period for gun purchases, and a Californiastyle clean-fuel standard. A bill to stand up a paid family and medical leave system did not make it out of the legislature. Gov. Lujan Grisham vetoed many

of her party’s bills, including one to create a civil rights division within the office of the attorney general, a small relaxation on sentences for drug crimes, and a modest increase in education spending. Overall, none of these, from

the successful laws to the bills blocked by vetoes, were particularly ambitious. But one must cut the state party some slack, because New Mexico is one of the poorest states in the country. Its poverty rate of 17.8 percent is the third-highest of any state, just behind Louisiana and Mississippi. Its median household income of $62,125 is more than $30,000 lower than Colorado’s or New Jersey’s. New Mexico Democrats simply do not have a lot of resources to play with— the entire state GDP is about the same size as the government budget of New York City—and so it isn’t exactly surprising to see a lack of big social programs. Could be better, could be worse.

–Ryan Cooper

10. Hawaii

Governor: Josh Green

Much of Hawaii’s legislative session was committed to recovery after wildfires devastated Maui in 2023. Over $200 million was appropriated in the fiscal year 2025 budget for the island, part of a $1 billion overall package, and all families affected by the fires were transitioned into longer-term housing, according to Gov. Josh Green. But legislation to put residents in charge of redevelopment oversight did not pass. And an inordinate amount of the session was focused on “the largest tax cut in state history,” which includes a nearly sixfold increase in the standard deduction and

over $5.6 billion in tax cuts by 2031. The other big initiative was an affordablehousing program. Under an emergency proclamation from Gov. Green prioritizing low-income and workforce housing creation, the legislature passed a zoning reform measure that mandates two additional units on each singlefamily residential lot. In addition, coun -

ties can now prohibit vacation rentals in order to increase residential rental units available to residents, a big step for a state with a large tourism industry. A measure to develop affordable housing specifically for state K-12 teachers also passed. Hawaii has a strong commitment to the environment—its renewable-energy mandate passed in 2015—and last session, the legislature instituted further ocean and seabed protections, while settling a climate lawsuit, brought by children and teens, to decarbonize the entire transportation sector. The state expanded its social welfare system by committing to a Summer EBT program to provide breakfast and lunch to poor students. Hawaii’s deep tax cuts, however, may make it difficult to advance assistance for those in need in the future. –David Dayen

11. Massachusetts

Governor: Maura Healey

Massachusetts can credit its current fiscal health to the Fair Share Amendment, a 2022 ballot initiative that levies a 4 percent surtax on annual incomes over $1 million. The revenues, flowing exclusively to education and transportation, totaled nearly $3 billion in its first two years, exceeding projections. That funding has enabled the Bay State to support a dizzying number of programs: free school meals for every student regardless of income; universal community college; expanded financial aid for public higher education; free regional bus transit fares outside Boston; and operations and additional

funding support for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, the metro Boston system, and much more. State lawmakers have also been shoveling money into the state’s rainy day fund that now stands at more than $8 billion. These cushions allowed Gov. Maura Healey to focus on the state’s housing crisis and pass a $5 billion hous-

Governor: John Carney Jr. (2023-2024 session)

Delaware could be higher on this list if not for its constant prioritization of corporate interests over the interests of actual people. The state has more businesses than people and has long been corporate interest–driven due to its low corporate tax, well-oiled corporate law machine, and light regulations. Perhaps no bill better summarizes this conflict between corporations and people than the 2023 Bond Bill. Though the $1.4 billion funding bill eventually passed, funneling money toward infrastructure projects like road replacements, school projects, and state building upgrades, it faced

a roadblock in the House because Republicans wanted to attach an amendment allowing “artificial entities” like LLC s to vote in municipal elections in the city of Seaford. To end the Republican siege on the vote, Democratic leadership convinced a dozen additional lawmakers to back the amendment to prevent a budget stalemate. “Honestly, it felt like a hostage

ing bond bill, the largest in the state’s history. The legislation is designed to stimulate affordable-housing construction and preservation, new construction, and rehabilitation projects; sustainable and green housing and other grant and incentive programs; a five-year statewide housing planning process; and accessory dwelling units by right in all cities and towns—all of which are a big deal for a state that has long been a NIMBY paradise. Despite these reforms, the housing creation goal of 65,000 units falls far short of meeting the projected shortages and Healey has come in for criticism as immigration and homelessness have strained the emergency shelter system, forcing her to establish Massachusetts residency requirements and place caps on stays.

–Gabrielle Gurley

12. Delaware

situation,” Rep. Madinah Wilson-Anton said at the time after switching her vote to move the amendment through. The Senate ended up rejecting the amendment, but for a state with a Democratic majority, it is a real political failure that such an absurd pro-corporate amendment could threaten the most crucial spending bill of the year. It doesn’t look like the state is changing course anytime soon. This year, Elon Musk moved Tesla’s headquarters from Delaware to try to access his $55 billion proposed pay package that had been blocked by Delaware Chancery Court. And, unsurprisingly, the state is panicking. Both Republicans and Democrats are pushing a state law reform to allow things like Musk’s pay package through. Once again, the corporations are coming out on top in Delaware. –Emma Janssen

13. Colorado

Governor: Jared Polis

By rights, Colorado Democrats should have it easy. Though the state was previously purple, today it is firmly blue, and trending more so with inflows of liberals drawn by its beauty and recreation opportunities. The state is also wealthy, with a median household income of $96,640, and a growing renewable-energy sector. Alas, Colorado Dems are falling well short of their potential. The party did pass large expansions of pre-K, preschool, and education funding, as well as abortion protections, some health care price controls, and reforms to create more housing; but it could not get an assault weapons ban or paid family

leave through the legislature (though the latter later passed as a ballot initiative). Worse, Gov. Polis—who is worth a reported $400 million—vetoed several good bills, including protections against wage theft, a ban on schools using federal grants for uncertified HVAC contractors, and a ban on disciplining workers who refuse to listen to political or religious propaganda at the workplace, infuriating the state’s labor movement.

There are a few reasons why Colorado Dems have disappointed. For one thing, the party has a lot of business-minded centrists who would have been Republicans 20 years ago. As the Colorado Republican Party has lost elections over and over, it has become steadily more deranged, electing lunatics like Lauren Boebert, thus prompting centrists to switch parties. For another, Colorado has an odd combination of Mountain West libertarianism and hippie woo-woo culture that can be seen in Polis’s support for school “choice” and his flirtation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s crackpot health ideas. Colorado Dems lost some seats in the 2024 election, putting them below the supermajority threshold in the House. But some of those losers were the aforementioned centrists, and Polis is term-limited by 2026. The future may be brighter. –Ryan Cooper

14. California

Governor: Gavin Newsom

The most telling development in the last two-year California legislative session was a bill to force Big Tech firms, whose advertising dominance has helped destroy local media, to pay a “link tax” to local journalism outlets for the privilege of showing and profiting off their content. After Google got into the negotiating room, what had been a $500 million annual boost to local news was reduced to $15 million, and state taxpayers will foot the bill for even more dollars to help the richest companies in the world develop artificial intelligence. Under Gavin Newsom, this is what passes for public policy in a state

that prides itself on being a national leader. Though Democrats have as strong a hold on Sacramento as they have had in decades, their legislative output has not kept pace and the consultants and lobbyists who run the state capital have only tightened their grip. The most prominent accomplishment

last year was tightening criminal justice laws in response to a public backlash on crime. California can still be a forwardthinking policy lab: State lawmakers mandated insurance coverage for in vitro fertilization, established a labor board that guaranteed $20 an hour and better conditions for fast-food workers, increased paid sick leave, banned junk fees, and reformed mental health programs. But the structural deficit resulting from a broken tax system that requires a two-thirds vote for changes, something Democrats have but won’t use, makes everything harder, and even the visionary stuff gets stuck: A groundbreaking measure for state production of insulin could end up six years behind schedule, and Gov. Newsom vetoed bills to cap out-of-pocket spending on insulin in the meantime. –David Dayen

15. New York

Governor: Kathy Hochul

her involvement in the no-win case of Gotham’s most embarrassing mayor in decades and proposals—roundly criticized—for “inflation rebates” and other 2026 budget busters, and Hochul’s eroding standing with the legislature and the public promises to keep crumbling as she gears up for a re-election campaign next year.

–Gabrielle Gurley

16. Michigan

Suddenly thrown into the Albany maelstrom in midsummer 2021 after former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s inglorious exit, Gov. Kathy Hochul had to pick up where his administration left off instead of sailing into office with her own agenda. It’s been rocky. New York’s reputation for liberalism doesn’t always hold up in a legislature that is conservative when it comes to more parochial, NIMBY-laden issues like land use. Hochul’s first major proposal, an affordable-housing plan designed to increase new multifamily opportunities, allow accessory dwelling units, and jump-start denser housing near transit rested on tackling entrenched resistance to zoning reforms in stagnant growth areas like suburban New York. The gambit failed spectacularly in 2023 as she failed to overcome the relentless opposition to the heresy of density. She has scored some notable successes, including tightening up marijuana regulations aimed at reducing the number of illegal pot retailers and establishing an independent ethics commission that survived a constitutional challenge from none other than Cuomo. But Hochul bungled the long sought-after New York City congestion pricing program with a temporary “pause,” followed by a 2025 restart and a reduced fee. That miscue emboldened a New York real estate developer-turned-president to threaten to end a program that decreases vehicular traffic and delivers dollars to New York City transit networks. She also vetoed a bill to ban noncompete agreements in 2023, in a sop to Wall Street donors. Add in

The first Democratic trifecta in 40 years in the Great Lakes State started out solidly, with a repeal of an anti-union right-to-work law and a 1931 abortion ban, LGBTQ protections for employment and evictions, expansion of the state’s earned income tax credit, and an energy package that included a 100 percent renewable-energy standard and an office to support a just transition for workers. But then the legislature settled into a trend of handing out corporate subsidies, reaching around $4.7 billion for the two-year session, roughly $500 for every state resident. Google, Microsoft, Ford, and General Motors were among the beneficiaries. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a potential Democratic presidential candidate in 2028, vetoed 13 major bills passed by the Democratic legislature, and rolled back benefits for sick leave and minimum-wage increases in a compromise with Republicans and local businesses. Democrats lost their majority in 2024, and that could be an extended loss: William Lawrence, a statewide organizer with Detroit Action, told the Prospect last December that due to the disappointments in the legislative session, “The leadership is

not going to leave us with anything to work with to re-elect a Democratic legislature in the future.” –David Dayen

17. Rhode Island

Governor: Daniel McKee

Much of Rhode Island’s inability to pass bills that support the general welfare, despite a veto-proof Democratic supermajority in both chambers, is due to the state’s conservative bent and weak gubernatorial leadership. Adam Myers, a professor of political science at Providence College, explained that the state’s Democratic Party has long been more culturally conservative than the national party due to Rhode Island’s large Catholic population. There was a progressive primary surge in 2018 and 2020, but most of that energy has fizzled out and not led to concrete change. State politics is governed by big party bosses who set the agenda and block what they don’t like. That means that many progressive causes—like raising the tipped minimum wage, regulating payday loan lenders, or banning assault weapons—never see the light of day. During the 2024 session, legislators did try to make the state’s lottery-based pre-K universal, but that effort stalled after passing the Senate. Similarly, a universal free school lunch bill stagnated without a clear cause. One of the state’s bigger successes was a package of 13 housing bills spearheaded by Speaker K. Joseph Shekarchi, which make it easier to build by removing some regulations. Only time will tell if progressive lawmakers in the state will be able to push their agenda forward or fall in line with conservative party leadership. –Emma Janssen

Governor:

Gretchen Whitmer

HOW TO USE YOUR POWER

Blue states have many options for progress, if they commit to actually governing.

On March 5, four state attorneys general visited a high school auditorium in Phoenix, to take testimony from people affected, directly or indirectly, by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency’s rampage through the federal government. At this “community impact hearing,” AGs from Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon, and Minnesota, all Democrats, heard from fired VA and Department of Agriculture employees; school superintendents; abortion care and HIV providers who are struggling with funding freezes; navigators who help people connect with federal benefits that may not be there for long; nonprofit leaders in energy efficiency and food security who are seeing the people they serve suffer; and many more. All the speakers articulated the damage to Arizona’s economy and its people.

The AGs framed the event as the bare minimum of small-d democratic responsiveness. “When the federal government and Congress abandon their responsibilities, it falls to us to step up and defend the people that we serve,” said Kris Mayes, the attorney general of Arizona, who hosted the hearing. Added Dan Rayfield, Oregon’s AG: “If the

By David Dayen

president is unwilling to listen to you … we will do it for him.”

The 23 Democrats occupying state Departments of Justice have assembled on daily teleconferences, strategizing counterattacks against what they consider MAGA and DOGE’s shredding of the Constitution and the separation of powers. The day after this hearing, Democratic AGs filed their eighth federal lawsuit against the Trump administration, this one over federal agencies’ intention to institute mass reductions in force without following prescribed statutes. “We have filed the lawsuits and we haven’t lost yet, folks,” Minnesota AG Keith Ellison told the crowd in Phoenix. “We can all get courage from each other.”

At a time when Americans opposed to the Trump-Musk agenda are thirsting for leadership, the crowd’s gratitude toward public servants with a sympathetic ear was palpable. Said Sandy Bahr of the Grand Canyon chapter of the Sierra Club, who detailed the impact of funding cuts to public land management, “Thank you all for being here for Arizonans and people across the United States and pushing back on this harmful agenda.”

The Democratic Party has not had a superlative post-2024 rollout. In a recent poll, only 10 percent of those surveyed believed the party had a good plan for dealing with Donald Trump. Ideological factions, and those split between desiring a showy fight or a quieter approach, are at each other’s throats. At a time when Republicans are savaging the economy, angering the public, and lacking consensus on their agenda as well, it feels like not a single Democrat in the nation’s capital is positioned to capitalize.

But closer to home, in states under Democratic control, there are plenty of opportunities to take aim at Washington’s cruelty, and make real progress for tens of millions of constituents. Part of this involves defending 236 years of constitutional order; part involves taking over the important public protections Trump has nullified, from consumer regulation and privacy rights to economic security and inflation reduction. And blue America can chart a course that all Democrats claim to want: restoring the roots of the party of the working class. In 15 states, they have sufficient numbers in the

legislature to not just talk about their goals, but act on them.

“It’s time to figure out what the next phase is for the Democratic Party, and that’s going to be figured out at the state level,” said Pat Garofalo, director of state and local policy at the American Economic Liberties Project.

This will require blue-state Democrats to pay attention to governing, something that hasn’t always come naturally. Too many leaders on the left seem more comfortable as pundits rather than policymakers, worried more about how their actions will play politically than how many people will be helped. Inattention to governance has proven disastrous, as quality of life in blue states, particularly the ability to climb into and stay in the middle class, has deteriorated.

Some U.S. thought leaders have tagged barriers to building as the culprit behind blue-state failure. Others blame machine Democratic states controlled by big money and a clueless consultant class. But perhaps the biggest problem in blue America today is a reluctance to even have ambition, to carry forward a new idea or a pathbreaking

project. That’s starting to change, as some Democrats build on work that has succeeded at the federal level. But for all the officials who have found their voice defending the value and purpose of government, as much energy and effort needs to go into making government work, starting in the places where voters have elected Democratic representatives to do so.

Much of what rank-and-file Democrats appear to want from their leaders right now is an eagerness to fight. That’s where Democratic AGs come in. Birthright citizenship remains the law, funding freezes have come unfrozen, the Privacy Act of 1974 has been invoked to safeguard personal data, and Elon Musk may be found to be serving illegally in government without Senate confirmation, all due to state AG lawsuits.

In a way, standing up for the country’s basic constitutional structure is the easy part, but the AGs prepared for the fight a year ago, by reading Project 2025, prewriting briefs, and gaming out scenarios. California received a $25 million boost in

funding for government lawsuits in a special session in late 2024; Maryland added a “federal accountability unit” for the cases. Other states could follow their example and earmark some funds for this purpose.

Democrats were also bolstered, ironically, by Republicans. As a brief from researchers at Governing for Impact argues, since Missouri received standing to challenge President Biden’s student debt forgiveness by claiming the policy harmed a state-created entity, blue states could do the same by invoking universities, public hospitals, state-chartered banks, transit agencies, or any other state-created entities that receive federal grants or loans, or are diminished by federal actions.

The legal strategy is critical because of how unilateral federal cuts will shred state budgets on everything from education to health care. There’s been unusual cooperation and determination among the 23 Democratic AGs, and a rhetorical pitch that matches the moment. “What I hear in Washington, D.C., from the president and from Elon Musk,” said Raúl Torrez, attorney

(L-R) State Attorneys General Keith Ellison (D-MN), Dan Rayfield (D-OR), Raúl Torrez (D-NM), and Kris Mayes (D-AZ) at a March 5 community event in Phoenix

BLUE STATE POWER INDEX

general of New Mexico, “is a language that is stripped of any humanity and stripped of any understanding of what truly makes America great.”

Another strategy is to pick up federal workers thrown overboard by DOGE . Several blue states have seized the opportunity to recruit laid-off and disrespected federal workers, which could infuse sorely needed talent into state government operations. Democratic governors in New York, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Hawaii, and even officials in Atlanta and New York City and Honolulu, have reached out to federal workers to fill vacancies.

States might also attack Musk’s wealth. California’s public employee pension fund has been reviewing a request to divest its Tesla stock, which has fallen precipitously in recent weeks, since October. The American Federation of Teachers has asked major asset managers to consider reviewing their investments in Elon Musk’s automaker. State pensions could also do some good with the resulting cash. As Arkadi Gerney and Sarah Knight have explained in these pages, pension funds in blue states could subsequently invest in the kind of companies Trump is demonstrably trying to marginalize, like renewable-energy providers.

With federal workers on board, blue states might also adopt federal functions. Weeks after Musk came for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell established regulations prohibiting junk fees, by forcing price transparency at the beginning of every sale. She used authority under the Massachusetts Consumer Protection Act; most blue states have some version of that law. Minnesota created an anti-fraud unit to scour the state for criminal bad actors, and California even has a CFPB-style agency called the Department of Financial Protection and Innovation, which could pick up the federal slack. Trump’s bank regulators will likely preempt state laws for the largest financial institutions. But the vast majority of financial players can still be held accountable by aggressive state enforcement.

State substitution can become contagious. “Most of the things that the government does, you can create some version of it at the state level,” said Garofalo. If Trump’s antitrust enforcers drop merger challenges or monopolization cases, many of the cases have multistate partners to

Voters won’t take lofty talk about democracy seriously when the action is lacking.

keep them going. Through shield laws and protections for abortion providers, as New York’s Kathy Hochul has been doing, necessary reproductive care can be delivered even in the absence of a federal right. Dozens of states have anti-price-gouging laws that trigger in emergencies, where state leaders can show their commitment to not leave citizens behind.

Blue states are going to be constrained if congressional Republicans slash Medicaid or other programs that they have to backfill, and if Trump continues to wage war on governors he considers enemies. But Democrats in blue America can exercise a unique skill: writing a bill, assembling the necessary votes, obtaining the governor’s signature, and actually implementing the law in a way that constituents feel and appreciate.

When Chris Ward, a California assemblymember from the San Diego area, learned last fall about companies using personal data

gathered from customers to offer them varying prices, he was alarmed. “You don’t know what you don’t know,” Ward told me. “But when you put forward evidence … that different people have been treated differently, it raises their ire. They think they’re seeing a price that is available to them and it’s not.”

So-called surveillance pricing, with origins dating back to the dawn of the web browser, has been growing in prevalence, with marketers touting the use of one’s purchasing history, residence, or even financial data (like the date someone gets their paycheck) to charge each customer the highest possible amount. Smart TVs and other innovations to isolate customers could increase the practice.

Under chair Lina Khan, the Federal Trade Commission was alarmed enough to initiate an investigation into surveillance pricing. But Donald Trump won the election, and Khan’s FTC rushed out some preliminary findings days before she left office,

Perhaps

the biggest problem in blue America today is a reluctance to even have ambition.

signaling uncertainty on whether the investigation would continue.

That’s when Ward took action. He proposed a bill to outright ban surveillance pricing, preventing businesses from using personal, individualized data to adjust the price of goods or services. Individuals or the attorney general would be allowed to sue over the practice. “Knowing that California can lead on this issue, particularly as we do for tech regulation,” he said, “hopefully this becomes model legislation for other states to follow. And when the Federal Trade Commission re-engages, it can become a template.”

Similar legislation has been introduced in Colorado and Illinois. And 13 groups released a comprehensive report for state legislators in February, detailing surveillance pricing scenarios and their harms, and pinpointing both how to leverage existing laws or write new ones to crack down on the practice.

This is part of a growing trend. “A lot of people are trying to build state versions of things Biden did that didn’t get finished or are being undone,” said Garofalo. Eighteen states have introduced legislation to stop rental companies from using aggregated, proprietary data to engage in price-fixing. Every single state has introduced “right to repair” legislation to allow consumers to fix their own equipment; five states have passed laws, and Washington’s House of Representatives just passed their bill, 94-1. Bills to ban junk fees are moving through statehouses as well, and there are dozens of bills across the country to regulate artificial intelligence, three of which have passed in California and Colorado. Khan used one of her last days as FTC chair to encourage New York to pass a law banning unfair and abusive business practices.

These state-level efforts all extend from Biden-era initiatives to promote competi-

tion and weaken corporate power. Oddly, not all blue states take pride in setting a national example, but they will follow the herd. “California and New York, they get real excited about being the first state to do something,” Garofalo said. “I was talking to a Maryland legislator and he said, ‘We’re real comfortable about being the eighth state to do something.’”

High electric bills strain people’s budgets; state lawmakers can constrain the power of monopoly utilities to raise rates. Support for organized labor is near record highs; states can reform their laws to make it easier to organize, particularly in Colorado, where the state’s 1943 Labor Peace Act creates high thresholds for unions to receive dues from all workers at a company who benefit from a collective-bargaining agreement. Affordable housing is desperately needed everywhere, a problem requiring creative solutions, like Seattle’s fund for the construction of social housing.

What’s more, swing states might take inspiration from Democratic actions. In Arizona, where Republicans control the legislature, Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, made a priority out of making school lunches for needy students free. This became a high-profile issue when Minnesota passed a universal school lunch bill, and Gov. Tim Walz took the famous photo with schoolchildren mobbing him. Arizona’s ambitions weren’t quite as high, but the Republican legislature appropriated $3.8 million for free school lunches up to 185 percent of the federal poverty line in 2025, and a bill to extend that into 2026 could move forward.

Governors can also take their own action where appropriate. Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek’s move to mandate project labor agreements in large construction projects gives a major boost to working-class jobs in the state; Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey followed up in mid-March by doing the same thing. Even purple-state governors can act: North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein’s executive order protecting reproductive rights by ordering open access to birth control at state agencies and refusing to investigate doctors who perform abortions shows a degree of courage that is often lacking from state Democratic leaders.

Democratic governors talk a good game about democracy. In a recent New York Times interview, for example, Massachusetts’s Gov. Healey criticized Trump for act-

ing like a king and illegally taking away Congress’s power. Discussing the party’s “brand problem,” Healey said that the Democrats “should be about delivering for everyday Americans.” Gov. Gavin Newsom (at least when not selling out trans people or chatting with right-wing degenerates on his baffling new podcast) has called for the party to grow a spine. “Where the hell is my party, where’s the Democratic Party?” he asked after the Supreme Court ruling eliminating Roe v. Wade. “Why aren’t we standing up more firmly, more resolutely?”

Alas, that talk is not matched with action. In Healey’s state, the Democratic political machine bottles up good ideas supported by huge majorities of residents. Healey herself, according to state observers who talked to my colleague Bob Kuttner, has been governing just like her Republican predecessor. In California, Newsom has wielded his veto pen to block a cap on insulin prices when he can’t get his own public insulin manufacturing program off the ground.

Voters won’t take the lofty talk seriously when the action is lacking. “Show, don’t tell” is a guideline in creative writing for a reason. Republican states recognize this; practically all of them are passing laws to parrot Trump’s deportation plans and cut government spending. But not in Delaware, where state Democrats are pushing hard for a bill Elon Musk’s own lawyers wrote to allow corporate executives to rip off their shareholders. That makes it hard to be the party of the little guy.

“The party has a problem that is part perception and part reality: They don’t know how to govern,” said Garofalo. “It’s really important that Democrats get credibility back and govern effectively in places where they hold power … They have to show they have a governing platform that is effective and popular.”

While it’s not a governing platform per se, what state AGs are doing is at least identifying a government principle: that it should operate within the bounds of the law. In so doing, they are giving voice to an entire class of public servants who testify how government can be effective. “Chaos is not efficient,” Arizona AG Mayes said at that March 5 event. “Slashing jobs, gutting essential services, and leaving communities struggling to pick up the pieces, it is destruction.” Take that defense and turn it into policy, and you just might win some elections on the heels of improving people’s lives. n

THE Trump Factor IN

THE MIDDLE EAST

Before President Trump even took office in January, his personal envoy delivered an unlikely win. Since last spring, President Biden’s diplomats had been unable to get Israel and Hamas to agree to a cease-fire. But Trump’s man, real estate billionaire Steve Witkoff, joined the Biden team’s effort weeks before the inauguration. Witkoff put immense pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, reportedly saying that his relationship with the incoming American president depended on him accepting the deal. After a 96-hour marathon of talks in Qatar, Witkoff clinched a cease-fire and hostage exchange.

In so doing, Trump appeared to make good on his robust outreach to Arab and Muslim voters, who had helped him carry swing states. The campaign promised that Trump would prioritize two things: “an end to the wars, and a lasting peace in the Middle East that is satisfactory to all parties,” Bishara Bahbah, chair of Arab Americans for Trump, told me. And he had already checked off item one.

But weeks into his second term, Trump suggested that the U.S. would forcibly displace Palestinians in Gaza, that the United States would occupy the territory as part of a “Gaza Riviera” plan, full of threats and ethnic cleansing. He doubled down on the idea in an outlandish AI-generated social media post, with him lying on the beach shirtless beside Netanyahu, and a song playing “no more tunnels, no more fear, Trump Gaza is finally here.”

The cease-fire did not hold beyond its first phase, amid Israel’s violations. Israel has also blocked all humanitarian transfers to Palestinians, in what is by any measure of international law a war crime. Among the other seemingly contradictory moves, Trump dismantled most international

assistance with the exception of Israel, where he fast-tracked $12 billion of arms sales and military aid.

I asked Bahbah, who is Palestinian American, how he squares Trump’s cease-fire with the rest of it. “President Trump’s talk about a Riviera of the Middle East and displacement of Palestinians really, really upset the Arab American, Muslim American communities, but at the same time we know that the president was throwing this idea out as a negotiating tool.” It wasn’t offensive enough for him and his group to break with the president. “I don’t see them as really being serious policy statements,” Bahbah says.

With Trump back in the White House, foreign-policy observers are again scrambling to make sense of his unconventional brand of statecraft: how much to take literally versus seriously, whether everything is transactional and personality-driven or whether a broader intent can be surmised. Middle East stakeholders are giving Trump the benefit of the doubt despite his aggressive and outrageous threats against Palestinians, a group that has been subject to what human rights groups call a genocide and of whom millions have already been internally displaced by Israel. There is no Trump doctrine to be gleaned, but there is a Trump factor: this president’s capacity, whether because world leaders fear him or trust him, to bring about definitive, comprehensive, and structural changes that have long-lasting policy effects.

This assessment of Trump is by no means an effort to wishcast him into being a president of peace, or obscure actions that are detrimental to American interests. Instead, this is an acknowledgment that Trump’s approach to Israel and Palestine, even in his first term, fundamentally reshaped American policy. He shattered taboos by moving

Alternately belligerent, selfenriching, militaristic, and realist, Trump’s haphazard path is different from the establishment’s slow road to obliterating Gaza.

By Jonathan Guyer ILLUSTRATION BY JAN FEINDT

the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights, labeling products made in the occupied West Bank as Israeli, withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, and refocusing all U.S. diplomatic efforts on pushing forward normalization deals between Israel and Arab states that cut out Palestinians.

Biden took Trump’s policy and boxed himself in. There was no Trump-proofing of Middle East policy because Biden’s team had largely taken on its predecessor’s strategy. Trump, then, is a product, not a departure, from long-standing American policy.

What’s also clear is that Trump’s varied coalition of appointees, donors, and other informal advisers each want different things from him. Witkoff may be a pragmatist despite a staunch pro-Israel orientation, but Middle East policymaking will nonetheless be contested. Trump has elevated many pro-Israel stalwarts, alongside foreign-policy realists.

But will that mean that the president would stand by should Israel strike Iran’s nuclear program, or perhaps even enable such an escalatory attack? Will Trump facilitate Israel’s mass displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, or the further displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank? What will his emphasis on Israel and Saudi Arabia dealmaking mean for Palestinians, other Arab neighbors, and Americans?

There may be much to disagree with, sometimes vehemently so, about Trump in the Middle East. But as one career official who served during Trump’s first term put it, there’s validity to breaking with the Mideast policy of the establishment, which created an Israeli-Palestinian peace process that has long been on ice and deepened endless destructive wars. “A theme that is consistent between 45 and 47 is that the institutions and norms that we have built up and clung to for quite some time have not been working,” he told me. “They haven’t been working for American interests. They haven’t been working for global stability.”

Everyone is trying to make sense of the gap between Trump’s words and actions. Those around him interpret his remarks with a generosity rarely afforded to any other politician. Witkoff has avoided discussing the Riviera plan and told the American Jewish Committee that Trump is talking this way about Gaza “because for the last four decades, the other ways of thinking have not worked.”

Many observers, particularly Republicans, have been working overtime to ascribe a degree of soundness or clarity to Trump’s often unhinged outbursts. H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser from 2017 to 2018, laid out a framework for interpreting the president at the Council on Foreign Relations. In the Oval Office during his first term, Trump had suggested taking the curious step of bombing fentanyl labs in Mexico. “I don’t think he was really asking me for options to bomb the labs,” McMaster explained. But he was, in essence, saying, “What we’re doing right now is not working. Why don’t you bring me some options?” In other words, while Democrats, progressives, and others call out the dangerous, off-thecuff remarks of the president, his supporters strain to find a kernel of actionable policy.

The only consistency, according to another former national security adviser, John Bolton, is that the president looks after his

own interests and relationships. “His thinking was like an archipelago of dots (like individual real estate deals), leaving the rest of us to discern—or create—policy,” he writes in his White House memoir, The Room Where It Happened. “That had its pros and cons.” It gives room for advisers to advance their own pet projects and also leads to intense infighting, and often stagnation.

Still, many assessments of Trump’s gov-

erning style from the first term are pertinent. The wanton demolition of American foreign assistance worldwide will have major implications not only for Palestinians but also neighboring Middle East countries that have come to rely on American development and humanitarian programs. To

Trump’s varied coalition of appointees, donors, and other informal advisers each want different things from him.

Scenes from an AI-generated video released by the Trump administration imagining Gaza as a tourist destination

understand it all, I keep coming back to the 2018 coinage of Prospect alum Adam Serwer in The Atlantic: The cruelty is the point. Going after the U.S. Agency for International Development shows an eagerness to punish agencies perceived to have a progressive bent. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has claimed, without evidence, that 98 percent of USAID staff had donated to Kamala Harris or another

left-wing candidate. Beyond the effects on some 10,000 federal workers and contractors, the suffering outside the United States will be vast and unprecedented, and certainly detrimental to American soft power in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Note that the International Development Finance Corporation, another federal agency focused on foreign assistance, hasn’t been completely wiped out, likely because it helps companies rather than individuals. Trump’s appointee to run it is Benjamin Black, the son of private equity billionaire Leon Black.

The cruelty similarly seems to be the point of launching a crackdown on Palestine activists, especially on university campuses. ICE’s abduction of Columbia student protester and legal U.S. resident Mahmoud Khalil offers the most extreme example to date. The weaponization of antisemitism claims and the emphasis on law enforcement to limit speech and political activity mirrors Trump’s first-

major speeches of this term was at a Saudi investment summit in Miami, much like his first foreign visit, in 2017, was to Riyadh. In Miami, he told business titans that the kingdom is “a special place with special leaders,” and celebrated its hosting of a U.S.Russia summit in Riyadh. He lambasted “the fake news media” to a crowd convened by the kingdom’s primary sovereign wealth fund, which Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud oversees. It was all the more disturbing considering that the CIA determined that MBS had ordered the torture, killing, and disappearance of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Which is to say, forget human rights, press freedom, and accountability for transnational crimes—core tenets of American foreign policy across administrations of both parties. Elon Musk sat in the front row next to MBS confidant Yassir Al-Rumayyan, who runs the Saudi fund.

term policies like the so-called Muslim ban and the harsh response to Black Lives Matter protesters. It’s worth emphasizing, as the historian Ussama Makdisi has, that the casual racism against Palestinians, as epitomized by the Trump Gaza video, is the “culmination of a bipartisan U.S. consensus that for a century has waged war on the idea that Palestinians deserve equality and freedom.”

It’s no coincidence that one of Trump’s first

does that often, sometimes with good results and sometimes with awful results.”

Trump is willing to push the bounds of taste at every turn in order to stay in the spotlight, using racism and insult comedy to provoke. “There’s a real entertainment angle to everything he does,” a senior defense official from Trump’s first term told me. “He is super entertaining, and his base thinks he is hilarious. It’s not that deep.”

The unpredictability is constant. It’s hard to imagine any other president meeting in the Oval Office with freed Israeli hostages at the same time his envoy is engaging in direct talks with Hamas. “Release all of the Hostages now, not later, and immediately return all of the dead bodies of the people you murdered, or it is OVER for you,” Trump posted in early March on Truth Social. He’s all in on war crimes while being in direct talks with Hamas. He’s all over the place.

Everything is business.

But that also means that Trump likes to throw fresh eyes on everything and explore risky avenues in the hopes of a good payout. “Well, this didn’t work. What about that? What’s the ultimate goal? The ultimate goal is to have a peaceful Middle East. How do we get there? And yeah, he doesn’t care what taboos may be broken,” a former Trump White House official told me. “Corporate America

That unpredictability, as the former career official told me, has a certain methodology to it. “There’s a real art,” he explained, “keeping people off balance, and throwing out at times suggestions that just mix things up and cause people to lose their minds for a little bit, in hopes with following that up with a suggestion that is also really good for the United States.”

And it should be said that the most influ-

ential adviser is always the last person in the room with him.

As President Trump went around the chamber shouting out officials in his speech to Congress in early March, it became clear that Witkoff holds a stature in this administration on par with cabinet leaders. He’s Trump’s personal White House emissary and has his full faith, especially as compared to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “Good luck, Marco,” Trump said in the speech. “Now we know who to blame if anything goes wrong.”

In contrast to setting Rubio up as the fall guy, Trump didn’t mention Witkoff by name but ticked off many of his accomplishments, including the release of American schoolteacher Marc Fogel from Russian prison and the return of Israeli hostages from Gaza, which are admittedly pretty remarkable wins for a first month of the presidency.

Witkoff brings the hard-nosed demeanor of a Harlem landlord who used to carry a sidearm and once kept a copy of the book Tough Jews on his desk. A 1999 New York Observer profile called him a “knifelike man.” Even the piece’s title was evocative: “Steve Witkoff’s Nine Lives: Tough Guys Don’t Fold—They Crawl Back From the Abyss.” He survived boom-and-bust cycles

as he built a real estate empire in Manhattan. But though Witkoff emerges from a traditional pro-Israel background and Trump’s New York developer milieu, pragmatism so far is the defining feature of his diplomacy.

Several sources told me that Witkoff will be the main address for Israel policy, in contrast to Biden, who had several points of contact: Secretary of State Tony Blinken, CIA director Bill Burns, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, and Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk.

But beyond Witkoff running point, there’s not much cohesion to Trump’s Middle East policy—likely by design. “It’s a wide range of voices,” Victoria Coates, a former deputy national security adviser to Trump, said recently at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “That’s what he likes to have around him. He likes to hear from a lot of different people before he makes decisions.” The added caveat, as the writer Sam Adler-Bell recently argued in New York magazine, is that this leads to a Godfatherstyle model of various factions battling for power, none of them quite satisfied and all of them on edge.

Mike Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser, holds traditional pro-Israel views.

A former representative to Florida and a Green Beret, he has assembled a team of career officials and Republican foreign-pol-

icy hands. Among them is longtime Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committee aide Eric Trager, who wrote a 2016 book on the Muslim Brotherhood’s brief stint in power in Egypt.

Iran will be a contentious fault line among Trump’s varied team. Waltz has expressed hawkish dogma on Iran, arguing that the U.S. ought not to stop Israel from launching attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities. This stands in immense contrast to Vice President JD Vance and his advisers, who trend toward realism and strike a different tone entirely.

One fulcrum point is the Defense Department’s number three appointee, who if confirmed will set policy for the entire Pentagon. Elbridge Colby represents the realist strand in Trumpworld. As a strategist, he has argued strongly against attacking Iran, a view he backtracked on in his recent confirmation hearing as pro-Israel hawks lined up against him. He prioritizes a defense architecture centered on Asia and countering China, and thus has downplayed the importance of the Middle East more broadly, questioning the value of maintaining U.S. military bases in Syria and Iraq.

The top Middle East civilian leader at the Pentagon, Michael Dimino, appears to hold a similar worldview. Dimino has written for the Quincy Institute’s web publication,

Real estate developer Steve Witkoff is Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, and his most valued adviser on the topic.

There’s not much cohesion to Trump’s Middle East policy—likely by design.

Responsible Statecraft, on how bombing one’s way out of the Middle East won’t be productive and on the need to apply pressure on Israel to get more aid to Palestinians. “I do think international law has a role to play here,” Dimino told an interviewer about Gaza in November 2023. “I think that the importance of humanitarian aid getting into Gaza and holding our partners accountable, including Israel, on following the laws of armed conflict and the Geneva Conventions, all of that, is really important.”

Secretary of State Rubio has long been close to Republican donor and pro-Israel hawk Miriam Adelson. So far, he has focused on Latin America policy and less so on Israel and Palestine. But Adelson spent $100 million on Trump’s 2024 campaign, and at some point she may want a return on that investment.

Other State Department appointees will likely be more focused on the broader Middle East region, yet their roles may evolve. Ambassador-designate to the United Nations Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) has been one of the more militant vilifiers of pro-Palestinian speech, and she led the charge against university presidents last year. “Antisemitism and anti-Israel hate will not be tolerated on American campuses,” she posted when Trump announced federal funding would be withheld from universities that have protests. She is also a supporter of Israeli expansionism.

In Israel, U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee embodies the evangelical view of Israel. Huckabee is a hardcore Christian Zionist who published a cartoonish The Kids Guide to Israel , which paints Arabs and Palestinians as anti-Israel. He has expressed support, if not enthusiasm, for the expansionist Greater Israel project, and dismissed the idea of Israel’s occupation outright.

But in recent weeks, Huckabee has toned down his rhetoric. “A lot of people don’t understand that there are many Palestinians who live within the boundaries

of Israel,” Huckabee told the evangelical media broadcaster Joel Rosenberg in an interview, “who live quite successfully and who prosper, and they live in peace.” That hasn’t totally precluded Huckabee from saying somewhat scary things like “I think we will see something of biblical proportion happen with [Trump’s] leadership in the Middle East.”

Policy toward Syria and Lebanon remains a wild card. Joel Rayburn has been nominated to serve as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs. A retired military officer shaped by the Iraq War who served in the previous Trump administration in a Syria envoy role, he will likely be leading on Trump’s approach to the post-Assad landscape, which will have major knock-on effects for Israelis and Palestinians, and which the administration has said precious little about so far. Witkoff’s deputy, Morgan Ortagus, is said to be handling Lebanon. She is a Republican operative who founded the Polaris National Security think tank and served in the State Department during Trump’s previous term. Her organization is very hawkish on Iran.

Pro-Israel voices are not just coming from the Adelson camp. “The hyper-online right,” as pundit Erick Erickson calls it, is another constituency on Israel policy. One influential figure may be Jacob Helberg, nominee for a senior economic post at the State Department who emerged from the military and surveillance tech company Palantir, which has been enthusiastically pro-Israel since the October 7 attacks. Helberg has disparaged Palestinian protesters, and played a big role in the campaign to mobilize Silicon Valley titans to support Trump.

Though Elon Musk appears largely focused on gutting government spending and regulations, one wonders whether he might end up playing an influential role on Israel policy. Over the years, he’s become a regular visitor to the country and its high-tech firms, which have played an integral role in the surveillance, targeting, and killing of Palestinians. Musk has also courted Gulf money—he spoke last year at the Saudi investment summit in Riyadh and sat in the front row of Trump’s Miami speech—and the potential business benefits of Trump’s policies may add more urgency to it as a priority. And Musk secretly met with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations days after Trump

won the election, which shows an interest in diplomatic action.

Also contributing to the conflicting range of views is Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who has variously expressed hard-line pro-Israel stances and personally visited the now-ousted Syrian president in 2017 when he was widely considered a pariah and war criminal.

Son-in-law Jared Kushner has no formal role this term, and is just available as an adviser. But this time around, Trump’s kitchen cabinet is not strictly Zionist. Massad Boulos, a Lebanese American businessman and the father-in-law of daughter Tiffany Trump, helped deliver Arab American voters and claimed a senior adviser role.

Trump’s instincts on the Middle East, like everything, can be surprising, which means sometimes he is much more critical of Israel than the typical Republican. The author Peter Beinart pointed out in a recent essay for Jewish Currents that early in the last term, Trump sought concessions from Netanyahu and was not hesitant in criticizing the Israeli leader. (I recently worked as interim editor at Currents.) But ultra-proIsrael advisers in Trump’s inner circle, most notably Kushner, found ways to outmaneuver the president and ensure that the White House’s approach benefited Israel. As Beinart put it, “Even though Trump at times campaigned as a peace candidate who would end Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon, this growing team clearly signals that he’s likely to help Israel make them even more brutal.”

Trump barely touched on the Middle East in his address to a joint session of Congress, perhaps because he wanted to keep expectations low after the first phase of the Israel-Hamas cease-fire. He briefly said his priority was bringing back the Israeli hostages from Gaza. That contrasts with Netanyahu, who has committed to continuing the war, as analysts point out, because it’s politically useful for an Israeli prime minister facing corruption charges. In his remarks, Trump also said he’s intent on expanding normalization deals for Israel in the Arab region. He didn’t name Saudi Arabia outright, but that’s very much the goal, and Palestinians stand to lose the most.

Five years on, the accomplishment of the so-called Abraham Accords between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco that Trump’s team negotiated

is that their diplomatic relations withstood Israel’s mass killing and war crimes. In lived experience for citizens of those three Arab states, the effects are rather limited. These countries were not at war with Israel, and already had many informal links. In a sense, they were more arms deals than peace deals; Israeli military contractors recently tabled at an arms expo in the UAE.

Some analysts have argued that ignoring Palestinians in the accords led to the October 7 attacks. The Biden administration overlooked the Palestinian issue from the outset and kept a single-minded focus on extending that normalization to Saudi Arabia. The Democratic president’s message for Palestinians was that of paltry economic peace for a people who, even before October 7, experienced in 2023 the most deaths of Palestinian children since the United Nations began counting, and no horizon for political change.

The enthusiasm for an Abraham Accord for Saudi Arabia has not dampened, despite the disastrous results in Gaza. Both the Trump I and Biden administrations floated unprecedented inducements for Saudi Arabia, including nuclear-enrichment technology for a civilian program and an extraordinary defense treaty that would offer the kingdom NATO -like protections. Now, Trump seems poised to offer these incentives and more in exchange for MBS establishing diplomatic relations with Israel.

Israeli tech ventures are particularly excited about doing more business in Saudi, but have already found ways to do just that, quietly developing extensive business and military ties: Israel has sold Saudi Arabia a dangerous cyber weapon; Saudi Arabia welcomed Israeli officials to visit the Kingdom. But I’ve been confused by how any of this would serve U.S. interests. Biden’s team said such an arrangement would firmly put Saudi Arabia in the U.S. camp and keep it away from partnering with Russia and China.

For what it’s worth, the great purveyor of foreign-policy realism, Henry Kissinger, wasn’t convinced the U.S. should offer Saudi Arabia so much. “I’m very uneasy,” he told the Council on Foreign Relations in early October 2023, in one of his last public appearances just days before the Hamas attack. “The idea that a third country should pay all the price, and another country should benefit, does not give you much hope for the sincerity” of the agreement.

The gold-standard offer, which for whatever reason has not been resuscitated two decades after its initial proposal, is the Arab Peace Initiative. The Saudi-backed opportunity would provide that all Arab states recognize Israel, in exchange for the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state. Thomas Friedman previewed the idea from MBS’s predecessor in a New York Times column back in 2002, and it’s still one of the most sensible solutions to all this.

MBS did not set out to be the savior of Palestine, but he may decide that such a role would be in his own personal interest and a way to shore up support among his constituencies. He’s evolved on this issue and has called Israel’s offensive a “genocide.” That MBS hosted the first meeting between top Russian and American diplomats since the 2022 start of the Ukraine war suggests the crown prince prizes geopolitical power and maintains some leverage over Trump. Avoiding another conflagration may make Trump willing to put pressure on Netanyahu to get some accommodation for Palestinians, though what MBS may be asking for—Palestinian statehood—is likely not on offer from the Israelis. But it’s an ill fit with Trump’s Gaza Riviera plan. If that was the opening salvo for Mr. Dealmaker, then what does it mean in practice? Bizarrely, it may be a call for the Palestinians to speak up. Coates, now the vice president of the Heritage Foundation, argued at the recent

panel that the Palestinians excluded themselves in Trump’s first term; this time, she argued, they would be better served by coming to the table.

“The question about what we’re going to do about a one-state, a two-state, a threestate, a four-state solution is ultimately going to be up to the Palestinians,” Coates said. “I have said this to every Palestinian that will talk to me over the course of the last eight years: You have your most leverage now; you should use it. President Trump expects you to use it. He expects you to negotiate on your behalf, but you have to engage to get there.”

Somehow, optimism for a pragmatic approach remains despite the “crazy video,” according to an Arab American Republican in Trump’s orbit. His approach is “all about real estate, land, land swaps—land, land, and more land,” they told me. “And it’s about using the negotiation tactics that they’ve learned in their real estate deals to get a peace deal. Both sides have got to give up something to get something. No buyer’s remorse here, you know, haggle until you get to an agreement.”

I was frankly surprised by how sanguine this individual was, considering the brashness of Trump’s remarks, but they saw it as a positive development that the Gaza Riviera comments had already jolted the Arab League into action. Their expedited response to Trump reflected the real

Both Joe Biden and Trump have sought a diplomatic accord between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and its crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Trump the bully, the strongman, may be able to achieve impressive ends through deplorable means.

possibility of popular uprisings spreading across the region in response to the violent displacement of Palestinians and in solidarity with Palestinian rights. It’s not overstating the case to say that Trump could weaken the already brittle regimes in Egypt and Jordan simply by continuing to repeat his comments.

Support for Israel, as evidenced by the rushed arms transfers, will continue, though that hasn’t yet alienated his highlevel Arab American supporters. “I think in the president’s mind, he feels that a secure Israel is an Israel that is capable of making peace,” Bahbah, the Palestinian American campaigner for Trump, told me. But the Arab American base seems much less willing to put up with the president’s rhetoric.

The impact may be more visceral on the ground. “This was obviously one of Trump’s signature negotiating tactics. But that doesn’t mean Israel is walking it back,” explained Tariq Kenney-Shawa of the think tank Al-Shabaka. “Israel continues to telegraph their intentions to move forward with the ethnic cleansing of Gaza by ensuring that it remains unlivable.” The abysmal humanitarian situation demands our attention, all while the Gaza-fication of the occupied West Bank is ongoing, with intensive Israeli military operations and displacement of 40,000 Palestinians.

The failure of the peace process industry in Washington and the Democrats under Biden and Obama to make any significant progress on Israel-Palestine has created a remarkable opening for Trump, and one that he will likely exploit most of all on the proposed Saudi normalization deal. Of course, real estate is a factor as well, one that may work to Trump’s advantage. “They’re all trying to build up their wealth. Look at how, how far, the UAE has come. Saudi has these plans to have tourist resorts and that big city that they’re building, Neom. This all gets in the way,” the former Trump White House official told me.

“The Palestinian issue mucks it all up for them, and so they just want it to go away.”

The focus on Middle East diplomacy and stated commitment toward a Saudi-Israel deal doesn’t mean that the Trump administration won’t nonetheless turn toward militarism. Hard power appears all-important to the president; see his brazen comments on taking over the Panama Canal and Greenland. And though Trump paid lip service toward peace in the campaign, he has often suggested bombing as a solution, reaching for military answers to political problems. Contradictions abound: He may withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq or Syria while reaching for military options in other scenarios. He has already ordered airstrikes on Iraq, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. Trump keeps coming back to “peace through strength,” which incidentally is also a favorite mantra of Netanyahu’s. Some Trump advisers may champion similar chest-thumping to Biden’s team on Israel, with its proclamations that Israel is in its best regional position ever, given the assassinations of Hamas and Hezbollah leadership. This has led to a new hubris around Israel being able to shape the whole Middle East through military outcomes.

But as analyst Omar Rahman of the Middle East Council on Global Affairs explains, Israel’s military strength is unlikely to translate into much. “Even the United States, with all its power, resources, money, and 20 years of occupation in Iraq and in Afghanistan, was unable to determine the outcomes it wanted to see in both of those countries, as the global superpower,” Rahman told me. “So how’s Israel just dropping American-made bombs going to do anything but engender more radicalism and extremism and hate for both Israel and the United States?”

A serious concern is whether Trump would be willing to blow up the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, or the treaty between Israel and Jordan. Rahman notes that Egypt continued its relations with Israel despite the Sabra and Shatila massacres during the Lebanese civil war, and both countries maintained relations throughout the second Intifada. Now, leaders of the UAE have indicated that none of Israel’s obliteration of Gaza has gotten in the way of their Abraham Accord with Israel. Trump the bully, the strongman, the unpredictable leader who wants peace, per-

haps only for his own benefit or for the glory of a Nobel Prize, may be able to achieve impressive ends through deplorable means. He may get countries to accommodate his desires, however irrational, because they don’t want to confront him. He may also leave Israel unrestrained, especially in its military campaigns in Syria and the West Bank.

All of this presents a strange opportunity to refocus on what American interests actually are in the Middle East. Though Trump himself is more Trump First than America First, some advisers are genuinely focused on advancing U.S. interests in the Middle East. There do seem to be enough realists and pragmatists in the administration that Trump may surprise, as he did with the short-lived Israel-Hamas ceasefire. There’s not really space for true optimism, but diplomacy and cease-fires are good things that serve American interests.

Even if Mideast diplomacy is centered in Witkoff’s office, there will be bigger arguments over the presence of American troops, how to engage with Iran, and what a future for Palestine might look like. Witkoff’s visit to Gaza and his colleague, hostage envoy Adam Boehler, talking directly with Hamas shows that his office has both the buy-in and the armor to engage in ways presidential envoys haven’t in recent memory. Beginning a conversation with Iran, for example, could open up further opportunities.

This isn’t to give the president the benefit of the doubt, as so many Republicans have as they trip over themselves to interpret his sometimes grotesque remarks through a policy lens. Progressives may find the administration’s occasional tendency toward realism in the Middle East to be advantageous to American interests, but that should not preclude criticism of policies that cause immense harm, like the immediate halt of humanitarian and development assistance, or the likely imminent implementation of a new Muslim ban.

One key lesson of both Trump’s first term and Biden’s time in the White House is that ignoring Palestine—disregarding the significance of Palestinian rights and its resonance throughout the Arab world—comes at everyone’s peril. Palestinians have to decide what happens to Gaza. n

Jonathan Guyer is program director at the Institute for Global Affairs at Eurasia Group and a contributing editor at the Prospect.

TRUMP’S

On February 21, President Trump removed the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a four-star Air Force general with a distinguished military record named Charles Q. Brown. Gen. Brown was only the second Black officer to chair the Joint Chiefs, the first being Colin Powell more than 30 years ago.

Trump also fired the chief of naval operations, Adm. Lisa Franchetti, and Coast Guard commandant Adm. Linda Fagan, both pioneering women senior officers. The premise was that all three were diversity hires, not competent enough to have been promoted on the merits.

The

real targets

of the war on DEI

include civil rights enforcement, federal outlays that serve Black communities, and Black workers in and out of government.

By Robert Kuttner

Franchetti had headed the Sixth Fleet and U.S. naval forces in Korea. Fagan was previously the commander of the Coast Guard Pacific Area, with prior terms as Coast Guard deputy commandant and commander for operations. Brown had a 40-year career. Entering the Air

Force in 1984 as a fighter pilot, he logged over 3,000 flight hours, including 130 hours in combat. He commanded the Pacific Air Forces, the Air Forces Central Command, and the Air Force Weapons School, as well as the 8th Fighter Wing and the 31st Fighter Wing.

Trump removed four-star general Charles Q. Brown as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, amid claims that he was promoted because of his race.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had long targeted Gen. Brown. “First of all, you gotta fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs,” he said in a podcast in November. In one of his books, Hegseth flatly suggested that Brown was promoted because of his race. “Was it because of his skin color? Or his skill? We’ll never know, but always doubt,” Hegseth wrote. “Since he has made the race card one of his biggest calling cards, it doesn’t really much matter.”

Brown was a particular target because he had chosen to speak out after the police murder of George Floyd. Brown posted a video message to the Air Force titled “Here’s What I’m Thinking About.” He described the pressures that came with being one of the few Black men in his unit. He recalled pushing himself “to perform error-free” as a pilot and officer his whole life, but still facing bias.

To succeed Brown, Trump nominated a retired white three-star general named Dan Caine. A fighter pilot, Caine did some stints at the CIA , as a private entrepreneur, and as a part-time member of the Air National Guard from 2009 to 2016. Trump spoke about first meeting Caine in Iraq, at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2019 and again in 2024, where Trump quoted him as saying, “I love you, sir. I think you’re great, sir. I’ll kill for you, sir.”

Caine has nothing close to Brown’s command record, and it is unheard of to jump a retired three-star general to the top post of chair of the Joint Chiefs. Had this happened in the private sector—a Black man with an impeccable record being fired to open up a spot for an obviously less qualified white man—Brown would have had an open-and-

shut case against racial discrimination as prohibited by the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

All over the government, the supposed war on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is being used as a transparent cover for racism, pure and simple. Any Black or female public official is at risk of being fired as a presumed diversity hire. They are at even more risk if they happen to work in any program having to do with civil rights. We are back to the nearly 400-year era, to echo the title of a book by Ira Katznelson, when affirmative action was white. Because the new racism is cynically couched in the language of rolling back DEI, there has not been the outcry that simple racism should produce.

The insidious nature of the attack on DEI is not just that it targets minorities

The insidious nature of the attack on DEI is not just that it targets minorities and women, but that it undermines ordinary civil rights enforcement.

Employers and trade unions needed to take affirmative steps to actively recruit members of minority groups who had been explicitly barred or tacitly excluded from these informal networks. Johnson did not have the authority to require that all employers make such efforts, but he could require it of federal contractors, which included virtually all large corporations.

Thus, Executive Order 11246 provided that: “The contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.”

servatives has been to argue, picking up on Lyndon Johnson’s “starting line” metaphor, that there may have been a time when affirmative action was defensible. But more than a half-century after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, that time has passed. This was the argument of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger, deciding a complaint brought by a white applicant denied admission to the University of Michigan Law School. O’Connor wrote that carefully designed diversity programs were still constitutionally allowed, but added, “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary …”

and women, but that it undermines ordinary civil rights enforcement. All federal agencies have civil rights offices that enforce basic laws against discrimination. If they are doing their jobs, they can’t avoid talking about race and gender.

Astonishingly, Trump’s initial series of executive orders even revoked President Lyndon Johnson’s Executive Order 11246 of 1965, which was the origin of the federal government’s affirmative action efforts. As Johnson put it in a celebrated commencement address at Howard University in June 1965, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”

Johnson quite reasonably concluded that it wasn’t enough to illegalize outright discrimination in hiring and promotion, as Title VII of the recently enacted 1964 Civil Rights Act did. The labor market had well-worn informal norms and patterns of recruitment. These would not be altered just by posting a sign, “All Welcome.”

The sociologist Mark Granovetter wrote a famous research study in 1973 called “The Strength of Weak Ties,” on how most people actually got jobs. It systematically confirmed what everyone intuitively knew: You got jobs through informal networking. Somebody knew somebody’s cousin, or a neighbor heard that such-and-such an employer was hiring. These informal networks simply excluded Blacks, because they always had.

Very gradually, thanks to affirmative outreach requirements, racial and gender patterns in the labor force became more integrated, though there is ample evidence that Blacks and women are still underrepresented relative to their skill levels in many occupations, especially in supervisory and executive positions. The fact that these patterns vary widely among different corporations is evidence that discrimination persists among some employers.

Affirmative action has long been attacked as reverse discrimination—disguised quotas at the expense of better-qualified whites. In the Bakke case of 1978, Allan Bakke, a white man, sued the University of California medical school at Davis, charging that he had a better academic record than that of several Black students who were accepted under a “special admissions program,” while he was rejected.

The Supreme Court, in a fractured decision, ordered Bakke admitted, but also found that some kinds of affirmative action programs could be justified, if the purpose was “diversity,” a concept wholly invented by Justice Lewis Powell to cobble together a 5-4 majority. But diversity, which has now become both an objective of progressives and a target of conservatives, has nothing to do with the original rationale of affirmative action, which was to offset the lingering disadvantage created by 400 years of slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow. Why give preference to the son of Pakistani or Mexican millionaires, just because they’re “diverse”?

A second, more subtle complaint of con-

Well before the clock on those 25 years ran out, the high court ended affirmative action entirely, in 2023, holding that it amounted to reverse discrimination against whites, in violation of both the 14th Amendment and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But as Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy, a leading scholar of race and the Constitution, points out, efforts at Black uplift have always been resented as discrimination against whites, going back to President Andrew Johnson’s efforts to sabotage Reconstruction. (See sidebar interview with Kennedy, p.47-48.)

If you drill down into how Trump’s assault on DEI affects basic enforcement of civil rights (never mind diversity), one place to look is the crippling of civil rights enforcement by key agencies. For example, the Department of Education has an Office for Civil Rights that normally investigates thousands of complaints. Since Trump took office, that process has ground to a halt. According to an investigation by ProPublica, the only new cases opened by the office’s attorneys have been directed at such Trump priorities as getting rid of gender-neutral bathrooms, banning transgender athletes from women’s sports, and pursuing alleged antisemitism. Since Trump took office, no new cases have been brought in the historic areas of civil rights enforcement, such as discrimination based on race, gender, or national origin. According to ProPublica, about 12,000 complaints were under investigation when Biden left office, yet there has been no follow-up under Trump.

It’s a similar story at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, someone who believes they are the subject of discrimination in hiring, promotion, work assignments, sexual harassment, or other such grievances begins by filing a complaint with the EEOC. If EEOC investigators or attorneys find that the complaint has merit, that can lead to a settlement or litigation.

But on January 28, Trump illegally fired two Democratic EEOC commissioners, Charlotte Burrows and Jocelyn Samuels, leaving the commission without a quorum. Trump also fired the EEOC’s general counsel. In the absence of a quorum and without a general counsel, the EEOC may not bring major new cases that involve patterns of discrimination. Trump’s action was illegal; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 specifies that EEOC commissioners serve for fixed five-year terms. There is no provision that allows the president to remove a commissioner, even “for cause.” (In a similar case, illegally fired National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox— who is Black—was restored to her position by a federal judge, though the Trump administration has appealed.)

In principle, career EEOC staff can continue the commission’s day-to-day work of continuing investigations that are already in progress. In practice, the Republican acting chair has moved to realign the commission’s priorities with the “reverse discrimination” themes and goals of the administration. It has explicitly halted LGBTQ cases for both new and existing complaints.

The EEOC’s Annual Performance Report for fiscal year 2024 gives some sense of the scope of its work and the reality of continuing racial and gender discrimination. In 2024, the commission won nearly $700 million in monetary damages, benefiting some 21,000 claimants. The commission filed 88,531 new charges in 2024. Quite apart from whether the Trump administration explicitly pauses new charges, other executive branch policies, such as a hiring freeze and forced and voluntary resignations, will leave the EEOC with far fewer resources to deal with its existing backlog, much less to bring new cases.

Another prime target is enforcement of nondiscrimination in housing. Despite the Fair Housing Act of 1968, study after study has demonstrated that discrimination in the sale or rental of housing has persisted. The 1968 act itself requires all federal agencies to “administer their programs” in

a manner “affirmatively to further the purposes of” the Fair Housing Act.

In 2015, the Obama administration promulgated the “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” rule through the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), to carry out the purposes of the Fair Housing Act. It requires cities and towns that receive federal money “to create a plan for rectifying fair housing barriers.” But in a tweet posted on July 29, 2020, President Trump said, “I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood … Your housing prices will go up based on the market, and crime will go down. I have rescinded the ObamaBiden AFFH Rule. Enjoy!”

Biden moved to restore the rule, but neglected to finalize it, afraid of giving Trump an opening to claim that Democrats were “destroying the suburbs”—by letting Black people move there. This made it much easier for Trump to rescind it again; what took four years in the first term took a month in the second.

HUD’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity is expecting a reduction in force of a whopping 76 percent. “That should tell you that they are not interested at all in protecting civil rights as it relates to fair housing,” Antonio Gaines, president of AFGE National Council 222, which represents HUD employees, told the Prospect. “You’re going to see landlords violating those rights. There will be no forum to hear those complaints or hold private-sector landlords accountable for these things. It’ll be a regression to the 1960s or ’70s.”

Trump has also found DEI in Biden programs that were racially neutral, and used alleged DEI excesses as grounds for terminating them. As Hassan Ali Kanu reported in the Prospect, a prime example is the environmental justice initiative known as Justice40. The goal was to deliver 40 percent of new federal investments, such as those in the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act, to disadvantaged and low-income communities, regardless of race. On his first day in office, Trump shut down Justice40 as an offensive case of DEI, and separately directed federal agencies to terminate “all DEI, DEIA and ‘environmental justice’ offices,” positions, and programs.

Federal efforts to reform police abuses are yet another victim of Trump’s orders. According to a report from The Washington Post, the

To the extent that government employees work on anything having to do with race, they become high-priority targets.

Trump administration has frozen all ongoing Justice Department civil rights cases. One specific target is Justice Department consent agreements with local police departments to rein in abusive patterns of police behavior. These include a pending consent decree for the Minneapolis Police Department, following their multitude of failures during the George Floyd saga, but a federal judge has punted on the decision in order to allow Attorney General Pam Bondi more time to “familiarize herself with the situation.” Bondi could also upend ongoing Justice Department negotiations and potential litigation to reform the Phoenix Police Department, following a DOJ report which found that Phoenix police systematically harassed Black, Hispanic, and Native American people.

The Department of Justice also shut down the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database (NLEAD), which was a federal effort to track misconduct by law enforcement across the nation. NLEAD was the result of a 2022 Biden executive order that Trump rescinded in his first few days in office.

Meanwhile, another civil rights agency, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, is effectively out of business. The OFCCP was created to enforce Lyndon Johnson’s Executive Order 11246. With Trump’s repeal of the order, there is nothing for OFCCP to do, except maybe to harass government contractors to dump DEI programs. Quite apart from hobbling agencies engaged in explicit civil rights enforcement, Trump’s war on DEI has become a pretext for firing government workers generally. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team has compelled the dismissal of large numbers of civil servants. To the extent that government employees work on anything having to do with race,

A pending consent decree with the Minneapolis Police Department over failures during the

they become high-priority targets. And a disproportionate number of these public workers are Black.

Musk got into an open conflict with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy at a March cabinet meeting over his proposed cuts to the FAA . According to The New York Times, Duffy said: “What am I supposed to do? I have multiple plane crashes to deal with now, and your people want me to fire air traffic controllers?” Musk’s rejoinder, based on no evidence, was that people hired under DEI programs, presumably unqualified, were working in control towers.

Trump’s CIA director John Ratcliffe fired 19 CIA employees who served in roles related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. The workers then filed a lawsuit contesting their firings, pointing out they had been temporarily assigned to carry out civil rights laws

within the intelligence community, including advancing the hiring and promotion of underrepresented minorities. But federal district court Judge Anthony Trenga ruled that while he thinks based on “basic fairness” the employees shouldn’t have been dismissed, nonetheless Ratcliffe had the authority to fire them.

The day after his inauguration for a second term, Trump issued a series of executive orders collectively titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.” This sounds innocent enough because it invokes merit, and who can be opposed to merit?

The order revoked several civil rights and diversity orders from the Obama and Biden presidencies, and directed all agencies of government to “[e]xcise references to DEI

and DEIA principles, under whatever name they may appear, from Federal acquisition, contracting, grants, and financial assistance procedures to streamline those procedures, improve speed and efficiency, lower costs, and comply with civil-rights laws; and terminate all ‘diversity,’ ‘equity,’ ‘equitable decision-making,’ ‘equitable deployment of financial and technical assistance,’ ‘advancing equity,’ and like mandates, requirements, programs, or activities, as appropriate.”

A major target is public education. A supplemental order threatens to revoke federal funding of public schools that accurately teach America’s history of slavery, segregation, and discrimination. This is dressed up as “Ending Racial Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.”

On February 14, the Education Department sent out a “Dear Colleague” letter to educators, asserting that “[e]ducational

George Floyd murder is now on hold.

institutions have toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism’ and advanced discriminatory policies and practices. Proponents of these discriminatory practices have attempted to further justify them—particularly during the last four years—under the banner of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’… smuggling racial stereotypes and explicit race-consciousness into everyday training, programming, and discipline.” The letter warned that teaching this history could cost all schools their federal funding.

In truth, systemic and structural racism is a major aspect of the history of the United States, especially in the slaveholding states. The Trump administration is demanding that schools airbrush that history, in favor of what can only be called indoctrination. To the extent that states and cities with progressive governments stick to their principles and teach the truth, Trump’s agencies get another pretext for trying to deny them funds.

On February 17, the Education Department announced that it was terminating $600 million in grants for teacher training, much of which was targeted to attract and train minority teachers. The department objected that “many of these grants included teacher and staff recruiting strategies implicitly and explicitly based on race,” which was the whole point. The department also complained that some of the training materials “included inappropriate and unnecessary topics such as Critical Race Theory; Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI); social justice activism; ‘anti-racism’; and instruction on white privilege and white supremacy.”

In North Carolina, as result of this order, more than a dozen programs will be terminated, totaling $90 million, including programs to recruit and train teachers for substantially Black communities with severe teacher shortages, as well as programs to cultivate master teachers. Among the grants revoked was a $2.4 million grant over five years for the University of North

Carolina at Chapel Hill to help recruit and train teachers for the Diverse and Resilient Educators Advised through Mentorship (DREAM) program to work in high-needs Durham schools.

Thus the Trump strategy does triple duty. It weakens public education and teacher training, especially in Black communities; it takes funding away from a liberal university; and it warps the accurate teaching of American history in favor of a falsely heroic white narrative.

Trump’s strategy of punishing blue states and destroying habitats where liberals tend to work blends with his perverse distortion of civil rights principles. This poisonous mix came together in the announcement on March 7 that Columbia University would lose $400 million in previously committed federal grants because of its failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment, and that similar treatment of other universities would follow.

Corporate DEI and affirmative action programs were among the first to vanish after Trump’s return to power.

Trump’s strategy of destroying habitats where liberals tend to work blends with his perverse distortion of civil rights principles.

of the antisemitic Proud Boys and other explicit antisemites who follow QAnon. One photo from the January 6th rampage shows a man wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” T-shirt emblazoned with a skull and crossbones, and the phrase “work brings freedom,” a translation of the Auschwitz motto “Arbeit macht frei.”

Trump is a defender of Jews against supposed antisemitism when that’s useful to attack liberal universities, and an ally of the most explicit and vicious antisemites when that happens to be convenient for him.

powerful organizations were performing symbolic identity politics to bolster their reputations without enacting meaningful material reforms,” like unionization or other forms of worker empowerment.

The statement, jointly issued by the Departments of Justice, Education, and Health and Human Services and the General Services Administration, said that the HHS and Education Departments would soon issue stop-work orders to immediately freeze the university’s access to some funds.

Consider what’s at work here. For starters, this is illegal. The federal government has no authority to freeze or take back previously given grants unless fraud is demonstrated. Secondly, the order creates a standard made up out of whole cloth, defining the university’s previous actions to protect Jewish students as inadequate. Given the free-speech and assembly rights of the First Amendment, it’s not at all clear what the university authorities should have done.

The tenuous connection between the university’s conduct and the attempt to freeze or take back the grants is invented and entirely bogus. There is no instance where the Trump administration has shone a similar spotlight on the actions of universities for failing to protect the rights of Blacks, Hispanics, women, or sexual minorities.

The attempt of the far right and the Trump administration to wrap itself in the cause of battling antisemitism is hypocritical and disgusting. This is the same Donald Trump who said of the Charlottesville marauders, whose slogan was “Jews will not replace us,” that there were “very fine people on both sides,” even after antisemitic marchers deliberately crashed a car into a group of peaceful protesters, killing one.

Trump pardoned the January 6th insurrectionists, who included several members

The Christian right embraces the land of Israel out of a theological belief that only when the Jews return to the Holy Land will the Rapture come. Their biblical function fulfilled, Jews, as nonbelievers in Christ, will then go straight to hell. Trump’s alliance with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is every bit as opportunistic and hypocritical. Should it ever become convenient, Trump will turn on the Jews.

Meanwhile, pressed by the administration, major corporations have scrapped DEI programs and affirmative action commitments. They include Accenture, Amazon, Boeing, Citigroup, Deloitte, Disney, Ford, Goldman Sachs, Google, Lowe’s, McDonald’s, Meta, Molson Coors, Paramount, PepsiCo, PwC, Target, and Walmart. Many of these companies are not just getting rid of exaggerated DEI language, but ending entire human resource programs aimed at recruiting and promoting applicants from underrepresented groups.

It’s another example of how the Trump war against DEI becomes a war against basic civil rights. For instance, in February, Paramount’s co-CEOs informed staff that the company will no longer have hiring goals based on race, ethnicity, sex, or gender and that it will stop collecting this data from applicants.

All large corporations have regulatory business with the U.S. government. Ditching DEI is a handy way of ingratiating themselves with Trump. The ease with which DEI was dropped suggests that social responsibility was never a value for these corporations, but a useful fig leaf until it stopped being useful. As Olúfémi Táíwò writes for Slate, “on many levels, elite institutions and

There have been a few corporate holdouts. Delta remains dedicated to its DEI efforts. Chief External Affairs Officer Peter Carter said on an earnings call in January, “DEI is about talent, and that’s been our focus.” Costco continues to uphold its DEI programs. Apple has resisted pressures. Last month, the company’s board of directors asked shareholders to reject a DEI rollback proposal.

Procter & Gamble provided a statement to The Cincinnati Enquirer in February that said equality and inclusion is good for business. “This cannot and will not change,” CEO Jon Moeller declared. “It’s critical to who we are and what we do, to our principles, values and purpose and most importantly to winning.”

Let’s see how long these corporate holdouts manage to hold out.

To put the history of corporate affirmative action in perspective, while many of these efforts were carefully crafted exercises in branding, there is no doubt that corporate affirmative recruitment and promotion efforts, some dating back to the 1960s, did create new opportunities for Black workers and executives, and broke down prejudicial assumptions. Some Fortune 500 companies became good places for Black Americans to work.

The same is true of the military, which was far ahead of civilian America in breaking down racial barriers. And the civil service, about 20 percent Black, became known as a good place for Black professionals to pursue career opportunities. By attacking all three, in the name of combating DEI excesses, Trump is savaging the places where Black people work. It’s racism, pure and simple.

Late in the 2024 presidential campaign, a right-wing group associated with the Trump campaign created a lethal TV ad, which showed a flamboyantly costumed transgender person, intercut with an interview in which Kamala Harris seemed to be saying that she supported gender-altering surgery

for prison inmates at taxpayer expense. The punch line of the ad: “Kamala is for they/ them, President Trump is for you.”

The ads, which had several different variations, were aired more than 30,000 times in every swing state. The Trump campaign used the ads extensively in televised NFL and college football games and NASCAR races. The ads not only identified Harris with one of the most fraught forms of DEI, but made fun of the cultural left’s use of invented language, for those who got the sly reference.

Of all the forms of DEI , the treatment of trans people is one of the most controversial, even among progressives. Democrats and feminists have divided on whether trans people who are born male should be permitted to compete in women’s sports. Nationwide, according to the NCAA , fewer than ten trans people compete in intercollegiate sports out of a total of about 510,000 athletes, but this controversy has consumed disproportionate attention and done disproportionate damage, crowding out the more complex issue of trans rights generally.

The use of the ad and the damage to the Harris campaign raises larger questions. Did the left bring this targeting on itself, by embracing a sometimes exaggerated, easyto-caricature form of DEI that turned out to be more controversial than affirmative action, which had been broadly accepted by the mainstream since the 1960s? And did the demands of the cultural left spill over and damage the Democratic Party?

This is a much trickier question than it seems. It depends on which left and which Democrats you are talking about.

The Black Lives Matter movement, which gained broad currency in the aftermath of the 2020 police killing of George Floyd, aptly pointed out that despite the three great civil rights acts of the 1960s, far too many Black people, especially young Black men, were regularly subjected to police harassment, humiliation, arrest, and brutalization. Middle-class Black drivers were disproportionately pulled over for the crime of Driving While Black. Random testing confirmed that discrimination in housing was still rampant. Blacks at elite universities were presumed to be beneficiaries of racial preferences while legacy admissions of C students were rampant.

Structural racism, in short, persisted. The sadistic killing of George Floyd was impossible to ignore, and it was only one in a long series of police murders of innocent

Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist presumed that even well-meaning whites had to look at their own subconscious racism.

Black men, hardly any of which were punished. Police enjoyed impunity. For a short time, the Black Lives Matter movement had the support of a majority of white people.

Much of the DEI movement was an effort by well-meaning whites to respond to Black demands and express solidarity and sympathy with the still-unfinished business of civil rights. At the extreme, some of it could be silly, as in language policing that invited caricature. Some terms, like “Latinx,” were widely rejected by their intended beneficiaries, as a perversion of Spanish. The word “woke,” long used in the Black community to mean alert to race and racial threats, soon became the latest word to ridicule hyperpolitically correct whites.

In 2019, as support for Black Lives Matter intensified, a Black scholar named Ibram X. Kendi published a perfectly timed book titled How to Be an Antiracist. One of Kendi’s themes was that even well-meaning whites needed to look harder at their own subconscious racism. This became part of a narrative that had currency among Black radicals: You may think that you are an

“ally” of anti-racist efforts, but think again. You are either an active anti-racist or you are a racist. A related theme was that whites who were looking for guidance from Blacks on how to help battle racism were burdening Black people who already had more than enough burdens. Whites needed to figure out their own racism and work in their own communities.

Kendi’s story resonated in some quarters and had elements of truth. But it seemed oblivious to the practical need for interracial coalition if we were serious about making progress. There are just not that many whites of goodwill enlisting as allies in the first place, and even fewer if they are being told that they are racists but don’t know it. All of this was grist for the real racists.

There is no central committee of the cultural left to sort out what themes and narratives make sense and which ones backfire. Activists and writers are free to say and do what they choose. It’s a free country (or at least it was).

To some extent, universities also went

Resisting Trump’s racism is one aspect of the general imperative of resisting Trump.

overboard in their commitment to DEI. At faculty meetings and in classrooms where I teach, a good proportion of my colleagues and students make sure to identify their pronouns. I have never quite gotten the logic of this. Demanding through peer pressure that faculty and students indicate via this code whether they are gay, straight, bi, or trans seems like a way of outing people in a group meeting who may not want to be outed. Why not ask people to disclose their race and religion?

At the peak of the effort to police language, some groups issued lists of forbidden words that bordered on self-parody. One was not supposed to use the term “fieldwork,” because it evokes the work in the cotton fields of slaves—sorry, enslaved people. A Stanford University guide to language even recommended avoiding the word “grandfather,” because it was used in the grandfather clauses of the Jim Crow era designed to prevent Blacks from voting. These insensitive uses of language could be understood as “micro-aggressions.”

It’s one thing to banish the n-word. The latest version of rarified language policing is a form of virtue-signaling and cheap grace. Rather than obedience, it produces eye-rolling, even among good liberals. There are just not enough people in the general public who have sympathy for it. That’s why the “they/them” ad resonated.

If you have a DEI bureaucracy, whether at a university, a corporation, or an agency of the government, its tendency is to keep coming up with more rarified forms of DEI Mandatory training by diversity consultants, at universities and government agen-

cies, may have produced more resentment than heightened sensitivity, even among would-be allies.

To some extent, Biden’s administration embraced a version of DEI that invited backlash. To flag just one example, Biden’s Executive Order 14035 of June 25, 2021, titled “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in the Federal Workforce,” put the entire federal government in the business of promoting forms of DEI that went well beyond affirmative action. In the internal politics of the Democratic Party coalition, this and similar orders are the result of letting constituent groups demand and define maximal policy. Biden provided some fat targets for Trump to gleefully repeal.

What, then, should defenders of civil rights be doing now? Trump’s assault on basic civil rights in the name of ending DEI is not only thinly veiled racism. It is also part of Trump’s larger project of destroying government and punishing states and cities led by Democrats. Resisting Trump’s racism is one aspect of the general imperative of resisting Trump.

Some of this is done in court, some in the court of public opinion. The impact of the war against DEI on basic civil rights needs more attention and condemnation. The efforts to shut down government and target minority and women workers as diversity hires is illegal and will be the subject of litigation that will eventually be resolved by the Supreme Court.

One thing going for the Democrats is Trump’s propensity for overreaching and contradicting himself. It’s too soon to tell whether there will be anything resembling remotely fair elections in 2026 and 2028. If there are, and Democrats can manage more unity than in their early stumbles, there is a decent chance of taking back at least one house of Congress in 2026 and winning the presidency in 2028.

What then? I put the question to one of America’s most respected Black constitutional scholars, professor Randall Kennedy. He teaches at Harvard Law School and is the author of several books, including the authoritative defense of affirmative action,

For Discrimination , and is a former law clerk to Thurgood Marshall.

Kennedy had several thoughts. An edited transcript of our full conversation is included as a sidebar to this article on p.47-48. Although advocates of racial affirmative action have long resisted socioeconomic affirmative action as a weaker second-best, explicitly racial affirmative action has now been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Kennedy told me that he thought socioeconomic affirmative action was now a defensible high ground.

Liberals, Kennedy argued, need to reclaim the basic idea of color blindness, which conservatives have used to pillory preferences. “To be appropriately colorblind is to recognize the full humanity of others free of misleading distractions unleashed by racial mythologies,” he said.

Taking a long view, the never-ending struggle for racial justice has ebbed and flowed, sometimes with allies in government, often with enemies. The first Reconstruction lasted only from Lincoln in 1865 to the withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877. The era of Jim Crow then lasted nearly another century until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the great civil rights acts of the 1960s. That was the Second Reconstruction. But as Kennedy points out, in the debate over the Civil Rights Act of 1964, even though it did no more than prohibit discrimination, its opponents treated the bill as preference for Blacks.

The Second Reconstruction lasted only until Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” shifted the South from a Dixiecrat antiBlack monolith into a Republican one. There was a brief era of biracial governments in the South, with racially liberal governors such as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. But that era came to an end with a right-wing Supreme Court weakening voting rights. When progressives return to government, we need a long-deferred Third Reconstruction, this time with greater attention to coalition politics and a coalition of the decent. n

Research assistance for this article was provided by Nic Suarez.

A CONVERSATION WITH RANDALL KENNEDY

How shall we redeem the deferred promise of civil rights and racial justice?

Randall Kennedy is one of our most eminent scholars of race and the Constitution. He holds the Michael R. Klein chair at Harvard Law School. He is the author of numerous books and law review articles, as well as popular magazine pieces, and served as a law clerk for Judge J. Skelly Wright of the United States Court of Appeals and for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court. He has been a member of The American Prospect board of directors since the late 1990s.

Robert Kuttner: We’ve seen President Trump and his appointees use an attack on supposed excesses of DEI to destroy basic civil rights enforcement and even to purge senior Black and female appointees, on the premise that they must have been unqualified diversity hires. This is a restoration of the crudest form of racism. How should we think about this assault and how can we combat it? DEI may have overreached in some respects. Is there a version of affirmative action that is a more defensible high ground?

Randall Kennedy: DEI didn’t come out of nowhere. It came from a justifiable, indeed admirable, desire to go beyond anti-discrimination—to recruit and welcome and support people affiliated with groups that had long been excluded from coveted positions as students, professors, staffers, employees, and executives. We must not permit reactionaries to induce an amnesia that allows people to forget that, within living memory, racial minorities, women, and LGBTQ folk were openly excluded and marginalized and taunted at leading institutions. In its essentials, DEI has attempted to redress the lingering effects of those terrible wrongs.

Have there been mistakes made under the banner of DEI? Of course! No significant large-scale policy initiative will be free of mistakes. A big mistake made by many DEI bureaucrats has been to use their authority coercively to impose contested modes of thought and speech upon people. In many colleges and universities, for example, hirings and promotions have been conditioned upon candidates submitting statements in which they are required to attest their allegiance to what had become a stultifying DEI ethos that propounds aims deemed to be unquestionable, in a mandatory rhetoric. If I was applying for a teaching position now, for example, the DEI apparatus at many institutions would probably exclude me, openly or covertly, because, among other things, I often use the term “Negro.” The penchant for coerciveness, the unwillingness to be self-critical, and the susceptibility to faddishness displayed by many DEI bureaucrats have made their label toxic not only amongst conservatives and reactionaries; they have also succeeded in alienating a good many liberals.

One of your most important books is titled For Discrimination. It’s a broadspectrum defense of what some people would call reverse discrimination as a necessary counter to the whole legacy of

racism. And now here comes Trump, using DEI as a pretext to undermine the most fundamental kinds of anti-discrimination enforcement and to justify crude racism. What do we do now?

One: We proclaim loudly our goal to create a multiracial democracy freed of the powerful pull of pigmentocracy and all other illegitimate social hierarchies—a society that enables the flourishing of descendants of slaves and slave owners, victims of conquest and conquerors, undocumented and documented immigrants, and people of all faiths and genders and sexual orientations. In other words, we proclaim loudly an updated version of Martin Luther King Jr.’s majestic “I Have a Dream.”

Two: We denounce unequivocally the racism and other bigotries and pathologies that are so much in evidence in the policies propounded by the Trump administration and its backers. The Trump people say that they are sincere allies of equal opportunity who want to rid the landscape of “special privileges” that disadvantage whites. For the most part, that is untrue. For the most part, what we are currently witnessing is a reprise of an old, recurrent syndrome of racial resentment that perceives any efforts to improve the situation of racial minorities—particularly Blacks—as a form of “reverse discrimination.”

Three: We act and speak in ways that show our attentiveness to the imperative need for coalitions. Left-liberals will be unable alone to retake crucial sources of political power: seats on courts, mayoralties, governor -

ships, school board positions, state legislative posts, seats in the House and the Senate, and, of course, the presidency. Left-liberals will have to persuade people to their right on the political spectrum to join them in creating an attractive, flourishing, decent society. Left-liberals cannot afford to gratuitously alienate potential allies. We have erred on this matter, including on issues implicating racial justice. Some of our most militant and vocal activists have done very useful things like put the problem of racist police misconduct on the front pages of newspapers. On the other hand, they have also done very dumb, destructive things like defend looting and contend that a modern society can exist without some agency empowered to restrain criminals, aka police. Those missteps have cost us dearly, contributing to the Trump ascendancy. Four: We maintain a willingness to rethink our positions. Consider, for example, affirmative action. It has, on balance, benefited society by speeding up the process of integrating wrongfully burdened and stigmatized outsiders into important sectors of American life. Those who have been proponents of affirmative action should be proud of what they have been able to accomplish. But affirmative action is merely a vehicle intended to advance social justice. It is not an end in itself. Like all vehicles, affirmative action needs retooling.

There is considerable potency to the complaint that affirmative action is insufficiently attuned to those whom William Julius Wilson called the “truly disadvantaged.” That is because affirmative action tends to help most the most privileged members of beneficiary out-groups. We ought not permit fear and anger at ill-motivated right-wing vilification to prevent us from reconsidering various features of affirmative action. Have

we overinvested in it? I have participated in numerous debates over affirmative action in which the matter at issue was whether a Black student would attend the University of Michigan Law School as opposed to the Michigan State Law School, or attend the Columbia Law School as opposed to the Fordham Law School. If you are a plausible candidate for admission to any of these law schools, you are a college graduate with an impressive record. You stand to fare well in the overall scheme of things. By contrast, I have participated in few debates that focused on the plight of those who don’t graduate from high school, or, if they do graduate, do so with grossly deficient educations that make upward mobility difficult if not impossible. Shouldn’t the “truly disadvantaged” who stand to gain little from any affirmative action plan get more attention than they typically do from progressive activists and intellectuals?

Five: We embrace, protect, and, if need be,

rehabilitate good ideas that progressive forebearers have bequeathed to us. All too often, we have permitted the right to snatch from us attractive images, ideas, and slogans that they have then used effectively in the struggle for public opinion. A few moments ago, I alluded to King’s “I Have a Dream” oration. Many of my progressive students roll their eyes when I laud that great speech. They view it as unattractively sentimental. Meanwhile, ideologues on the right wrap themselves in that speech and assert that its spirit is emblematic of their racial politics. That is an act of grotesque misappropriation. But liberals have facilitated it by neglecting to emphasize sufficiently their allegiance to Kingian universalism. The same is true of a term that is now anathema in many left-liberal precincts—“color-blind.” Liberals eschew the term, while conservatives and even reactionaries extol it. Like many resonant phrases, “color-blind” can mean different things. The right uses it as a cudgel with which to flail at any effort to redress the legacy of racial wrongs, thereby perpetuating an unfair racial status quo. We should, of course, reject that deployment of the term. Rather, we should recall that for a long time “color-blind” was a term that enemies of white supremacy used to repudiate the notion that whiteness should be privileged. It was the watchword of Lydia Maria Child and William Lloyd Garrison and Charles Sumner and Albion Tourgee and Thurgood Marshall and Bayard Rustin and Constance Baker Motley and Martin Luther King Jr. To be appropriately color-blind is to recognize the full humanity of others free of misleading distractions unleashed by racial mythologies.

Liberals have saved the United States before from racial and other vices. They can do so again with intelligent, persistent, skillful collective endeavor. n

Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy

BUBBLE TROUBLE

An AI bubble threatens Silicon Valley, and all of us.

The week of Donald Trump’s inauguration, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, stood tall next to the president as he made a dramatic announcement: the launch of Project Stargate, a $500 billion supercluster in the rolling plains of Texas that would run OpenAI’s massive artificial-intelligence models. Befitting its name, Stargate would dwarf most megaprojects in human history. Even the $100 billion that Altman promised would be deployed “immediately” would be much more expensive than the Manhattan Project ($30 billion in current dollars) and the COVID vaccine’s Operation Warp Speed ($18 billion), rivaling the multiyear construction of the Interstate Highway System ($114 billion). OpenAI would have all the computing infrastructure it needed to complete its ultimate goal of building humanity’s last invention: artificial general intelligence (AGI).

But the reaction to Stargate was muted as Silicon Valley had turned its attention west. A new generative AI model called DeepSeek R1, released by the Chinese hedge

fund High-Flyer, sent a threatening tremor through the balance sheets and investment portfolios of the tech industry. DeepSeek’s latest version, allegedly trained for just $6 million (though this has been contested), matched the performance of OpenAI’s flagship reasoning model o1 at 95 percent lower cost. R1 even learned o1 reasoning techniques, OpenAI’s much-hyped “secret sauce” to allow it to maintain a wide technical lead over other models. Best of all, R1 is open-source down to the model weights, so anyone can download and modify the details of the model themselves for free.

It’s an existential threat to OpenAI’s business model, which depends on using its technical lead to sell the most expensive subscriptions in the industry. It also threatens to pop a speculative bubble around generative AI inflated by the Silicon Valley hype machine, with hundreds of billions at stake.

Venture capital (VC) funds, drunk on a decade of “growth at all costs,” have poured about $200 billion into generative AI. Making matters worse, the stock market’s bull

By Bryan McMahon

run is deeply dependent on the growth of the Big Tech companies fueling the AI bubble. In 2023, 71 percent of the total gains in the S&P 500 were attributable to the “Magnificent Seven”—Apple, Nvidia, Tesla, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft—all of which are among the biggest spenders on AI. Just four—Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta—combined for $246 billion of capital expenditure in 2024 to support the AI build-out. Goldman Sachs expects Big Tech to spend over $1 trillion on chips and data centers to power AI over the next five years. Yet OpenAI, the current market leader, expects to lose $5 billion this year, and its annual losses to swell to $11 billion by 2026. If the AI bubble bursts, it not only threatens to wipe out VC firms in the Valley but also blow a gaping hole in the public markets and cause an economy-wide meltdown.

OPENAI’S EVER-INCREASING COSTS

The basic problem facing Silicon Valley today is, ironically, one of growth. There are no more digital frontiers to conquer.

Big Tech Incinerates Its Fortune

In the style of Georgia O’Keeffe

Art for this story was created with Midjourney 6.1, an AI image generator

The young, pioneering upstarts—Facebook, Google, Amazon—that struck out toward the digital wilderness are now the monopolists, constraining growth with onerous rentier fees they can charge because of their market-making size. The software industry’s spectacular returns from the launch of the internet in the ’90s to the end of the 2010s would never come back, but venture capitalists still chased the chance to invest in the next Facebook or Google. This has led to what AI critic Ed Zitron calls the “rot economy,” in which VCs overhype a series of digital technologies—the blockchain, then cryptocurrencies, then NFTs, and then the metaverse—promising the limitless growth of the early internet companies. According to Zitron, each of these innovations failed to either transform existing industries or become sustainable industries themselves, because the business case at the heart of these technologies was rotten, pushed forward by wasteful, bloated venture investments still selling an endless digital frontier of growth that no longer existed. Enter AGI, the proposed creation of an AI with an intelligence that dwarfs any single person’s and possibly the collective intelligence of

humanity. Once AGI is built, we can easily solve many of the toughest challenges facing humanity: climate change, cancer, new net-zero energy sources.

And no company has pushed the coming of AGI more than OpenAI, which has ridden the hype to incredible heights since its release of generative chatbot ChatGPT. Last year, OpenAI completed a blockbuster funding round, raising $6.6 billion at a valuation of $157 billion, making it the third most valuable startup in the world at the time after SpaceX and ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company. OpenAI, which released ChatGPT in November 2022, now sees 250 million weekly active users and about 11 million paying subscribers for its AI tools. The startup’s monthly revenue hit $300 million in August, up more than 1,700 percent since the start of 2023, and it expects to clear $3.7 billion for the year. By all accounts, this is another world-changing startup on a meteoric rise. Yet take a deeper look at OpenAI’s financial situation and expected future growth, and cracks begin to show.

To start, OpenAI is burning money at an impressive but unsustainable pace. The latest funding round is its third in the last two

years, atypical for a startup, that also included a $4 billion revolving line of credit—a loan on tap, essentially—on top of the $6.6 billion of equity, revealing an insatiable need for investor cash to survive. Despite $3.7 billion in sales this year, OpenAI expects to lose $5 billion due to the stratospheric costs of building and running generative AI models, which includes $4 billion in cloud computing to run their AI models, $3 billion in computing to train the next generation of models, and $1.5 billion for its staff. According to its own numbers, OpenAI loses $2 for every $1 it makes, a red flag for the sustainability of any business. Worse, these costs are expected to increase as ChatGPT gains users and OpenAI seeks to upgrade its foundation model from GPT-4 to GPT-5 sometime in the next six months. Financial documents reviewed by The Information confirm this trajectory as the startup predicts its annual losses will hit $14 billion by 2026. Further, OpenAI sees $100 billion in annual revenue—a number that would rival Nestlé and Target’s returns—as the point at which it will finally break even. For comparison, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, only cleared $100 billion in sales in 2021, 23 years after its founding, yet boasted a portfolio of money-making products, including Google Search, the Android operating system, Gmail, and cloud computing. OpenAI is deeply dependent on hypothetical breakthroughs from future models that unlock more capabilities to boost its subscription price and grow its user base. Its GPT-5 class models and beyond must pull godlike capacities for AI out of the algorithmic ether to create a user base of hundreds of millions of paid subscribers. Yet, with the release of the

Venture capital funds, drunk on a decade of “growth at all costs,” have poured about $200 billion into generative AI.

In the style of Vincent van Gogh

open-source DeepSeek R1 model earlier this month, OpenAI has no moat for its increasingly expensive products. The R1 matched its performance across math, chemistry, and coding tasks, independently learned OpenAI’s reasoning techniques, and can be downloaded, modified, and deployed for free. Why would people continue to pay $20, let alone the $200 tier OpenAI reserves for its latest, greatest models, rather than use something that can deliver the same performance at a 95 percent lower price?

SILICON VALLEY IS ALL IN ON AI Wall Street asked itself the same question after the release of DeepSeek R1 and panicked, wiping more than 15 percent ($600 billion) off Nvidia’s stock price, the largest single-day loss for a company ever. And that’s not the only bad sign Altman received about OpenAI’s future. OpenAI is in talks again to raise more money (less than a year after raising $10 billion) at a proposed $340 billion valuation. In most cases, a startup doubling its valuation would be great news. But for OpenAI, the money may make things worse. It signals a desperate need for cash and puts more pressure on a company that

today loses $2 for every dollar it makes. As Zitron pointed out, at $340 billion, few companies have the liquidity to acquire OpenAI, and public investors expect strong returns and profitability to justify an IPO anywhere near that price. Plus, the latest round of funding is being led by Masayoshi Son, a billionaire investor known more for losing money than making it. Given Son’s Vision Fund’s disastrous investing record, Zitron said, it’s as bearish a signal as you could find. Hanging over all this for OpenAI is the fact that Microsoft’s investments in the company, which run north of $10 billion, are not standard equity investments but “profit participation units” that will convert to debt in a year and a half. It’s not just OpenAI that’s burning through billions. Silicon Valley has hyped AI as the next internet or iPhone, and has invested like it cannot afford to miss out on the next big tech revolution. In 2021, with the last gasp of zero-interest-rate loans paired with trillions in COVID relief spending, venture capitalists poured a record $78.5 billion into the AI space. And, despite a broader slowdown in venture activity, the second quarter of 2024 set the record for quarterly venture investing in AI at $23.3

billion. In fact, 33 percent of VC portfolios are committed to AI, another worrying sign of concentration.

Even so, Big Tech companies are the biggest spenders on AI. While VCs dropped approximately $200 billion into AI between 2021 and 2024, Big Tech is on pace to surpass that amount this year alone. According to Goldman Sachs research, cloud computing giants are expected to plow over $1 trillion over the next five years into graphics processing units (GPUs) and to build data centers to power generative AI. AI is an expensive technology like few before it.

All those racks of GPUs and supercluster data centers need power, and the power industry is also embarking on a once-in-a-generation investment spree to keep up. The scale of expected data centers to power generative AI is difficult to wrap your head around. Oracle recently announced plans to build a gigawatt-scale data center just for AI, powered by a trio of nuclear reactors, while OpenAI pitched the White House on the necessity of five-gigawatt data centers, which would be enough power for about three million homes consumed by a single AI data center. A recent report from McKinsey expects the electricity going to fuel AI data centers will triple from 3 to 4 percent of the country’s electricity to 11 to 12 percent by 2030. The power industry typically grows 2 to 3 percent a year, far too little to meet the predicted jump in demand. McKinsey estimates that power utilities would have to spend $500 billion on top of their planned capital expenditure to keep up with AI needs. If true, this presents a serious bottleneck for not just OpenAI but the expected growth of the AI industry.

WHERE’S THE MONEY, LEBOWSKI?

Between VCs, Big Tech, and power utilities, the bill for generative AI comes out to close to $2 trillion in spending over the next five years alone. Adding all this up, some are starting to question the economic fundamentals of generative AI. Jim Covello, head of global equity research at Goldman Sachs, doubts the technology can recoup what’s been invested as, unlike the internet, it fails to solve complex business problems at a lower cost than what’s available today. Plus, he argues, the most expensive inputs for generative AI, GPUs and energy, are unlikely to decline meaningfully

In the style of Hokusai

for the tech industry over time, given how far demand outstrips supply for both. While AI-fueled coding could definitely boost productivity, it’s hard to see how it could become a multitrillion-dollar industry.

Surveys confirm that for many workers, AI tools like ChatGPT reduce their productivity by increasing the volume of content and steps needed to complete a given task, and by frequently introducing errors that have to be checked and corrected. A study by Uplevel Data Labs tracked 800 software engineers using Copilot on GitHub and found no measurable increase in coding productivity, despite this exact use case being the one pointed to the most by AI companies. And even productivity gains may come at a cost: Microsoft researchers concluded that workers became more productive using generative AI tools but their critical thinking skills declined, presumably because they were offloading the thinking to AI. Looking past the hype, the business case for generative AI two years after the stunning success of ChatGPT appears weaker by the day.

Even worse, as AI expert Gary Marcus pointed out, DeepSeek’s R1 model spells serious trouble for OpenAI and the cloud

giants. The only way OpenAI could hope to recoup the billions it was spending on GPUs to train bigger and bigger models was to maintain a large enough technical lead over other AI companies to justify charging up to $200 for paid subscriptions to its models. That lead just vaporized and was given to the entire industry for free. In response, Altman has already twice cut the prices of his subscriptions in an effort to stay competitive. But without millions of paid subscriptions, it’s difficult to see the pathway to profitability for a company that loses $2 for every $1 it brings in and expects costs to continue to grow approximately tenfold in five years. OpenAI has set $100 billion as its break-even point, which would require it to increase its revenue by a factor of 25 in just five years, an incredible feat of scale that its current business model does not justify.

OpenAI is, however, the perfect kind of growth-at-all-costs story investors need to think still exists—capable of not only achieving Meta- or Amazon-like growth again, but becoming an indispensable part of growth and innovation in every industry in the future, too. No industry could escape, and software would close its jaws around

the world, finally, as Marc Andreessen predicted in 2011.

For his part, Gary Marcus has taken to calling OpenAI the WeWork of AI— WeWork, of course, is the poster boy for wasteful, nearly fraudulent, growth-atall-costs investing that led to a spectacular downfall. Marcus is so confident current approaches cannot take us to the promised land of AGI that he bet Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei $100,000 that AGI would not be achieved by the end of 2027. Without AGI, the valuations of leading AI startups like OpenAI ($340 billion) and Anthropic ($61.5 billion) stop making sense. If GPUs are no longer the most capital-efficient or effective way to build better AI models, then the expected AI computing “supercycle” that the hundreds of billions in capital expenditure is premised on never arrives. Instead, the underlying asset bubble of a multitrilliondollar bet on GPUs as the necessary component to an internet-like era of growth vanishes into thin air.

JUST HOW BIG WILL THE BLAST BE?

OpenAI’s incredible burn rate, the trillions in capital expenditure by cloud giants and utilities to build out the infrastructure necessary to support AI, the supply bottlenecks ahead from the power and semiconductor industries, and the questionable economic gains from these tools all point to a generative AI bubble. Should the bubble burst, startups and venture funds alike face possible extinction, and a big enough drop from the Magnificent Seven could spark skittish markets to panic, leading to wider economic contagion, given how dependent on the growth of the top technology companies the public markets have become.

For many workers, AI tools reduce their productivity by increasing the volume of steps needed to complete a given task.

In the style of Jacob Lawrence

In 2024, the Magnificent Seven were responsible for the lion’s share of the growth of the S&P 500, with the returns of the other 493 companies flat. When Nvidia hit its peak valuation of $3 trillion over the summer, just five of the seven—Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Alphabet, and Amazon—accounted for 29 percent of the total index’s value, surpassing the concentration of the five top technology companies just before the dot-com crash. Nvidia has been on an incredible bull run over the last five years, its shares gaining a dizzying 4,300 percent, reminiscent of how network equipment maker Cisco grew about 4,500 percent in the five years leading up to its peak just before the dot-com crash in 2000. Nvidia and the other Magnificent Seven members are in a codependent relationship when it comes to AI hype. They are Nvidia’s biggest customers, feeding the bull run by pushing demand for GPUs beyond even what chipmaker TSMC can supply. At the moment, Nvidia can pass those prices on to their customers, the only clusters big enough for AI computing. But should demand for AI fall, all seven will tumble with it. For the tech industry, DeepSeek is a threat to its incredible bull run because it proved

three things. First, frontier AI models could be trained much more cheaply and efficiently than the current Silicon Valley approach of building massive models requiring hundreds of thousands of GPUs to train. From a capital perspective, the U.S. strategy is wasteful, relying on at least ten times the investment to make similar model progress. Second, DeepSeek showed you could train a state-of-theart model without the latest GPUs, calling into question the current demand for the latest GPUs that is so hot customers have been facing delays of six months to a year to get their hands on them. Finally, the high valuations of leading AI startups depend on a technical lead in their models to charge prices anywhere near what they need to recoup their computing costs, but that technical lead, enabled by a combination of closed-source models, billions in capital expenditure, and export controls blocking Chinese companies like DeepSeek from accessing the latest GPUs, is gone. Should demand for GPUs fall or even not hit the exponential increases the billions invested are betting on, the bubble will pop.

Given the stock market’s dependence on tech companies for growth, the trigger may not come from the AI industry itself, but

any pullback in spending will crater the current trajectory of the AI industry. Many potential triggers abound: a crypto crash; President Trump’s trade wars with Canada, Mexico, and China; the stated goal to cut more than $1 trillion of government spending by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency; or a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, where nearly 70 percent of the world’s advanced computer chips are manufactured. You can tell Wall Street is worried about a bubble, because Nvidia is hit the hardest by any bearish AI news, and even when the market panic has nothing to do with the tech industry, like when the Japan currency trade happened last summer, the Magnificent Seven suffer punishing losses.

The AI bubble wobbles more precariously by the day. Some bubbles, like that of the dot-com crash, end up being positive in the long run, despite the shortterm economic pain of it bursting. But some, like the 2008 housing bubble, leave permanent scars on the economy and can knock an entire industry off its growth trajectory for years. To date, the U.S. housing industry has not recovered to pre-2008 growth trend lines, a major contributor to the housing crisis gripping the U.S. That is the fire that the tech industry is playing with today.

This is not the Silicon Valley of lore. Venture investors, for all their tech manifestos celebrating “little tech” and entrepreneurship, have come to resemble more traditional financial firms, raising money from pension funds, hedge funds, and sovereign wealth funds. Silicon Valley has gone corporate and managerial; even private equity invests in the Valley today. The fusion of venture capital and Wall Street threatens to bring the unbridled speculation of unregulated finance and the breathless tech industry hype together in a single, massive bubble. Inimical to the old ethos of the Valley and emblematic of a bloated, rotten investing strategy, in Silicon Valley now the money chases founders rather than founders chasing money. Maybe, after the fallout of the AI bubble is felt and the sun sets on Silicon Valley for a bit, the tech world can do a hard reset and return to its more innovative days again. n

Bryan McMahon is an independent researcher and writer covering AI and the tech industry.

In the style of Roy Lichtenstein

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CULTURE

Cold War Kids

Apple’s hit show Severance was originally about the class struggle; Season 2 stifles that in favor of corporate crisis management.

By Aaron Bady

Around the time in the 19th century when Kier Eagan was founding Lumon Industries—in the world of Apple TV+’s Severance—Karl Marx was, in our world, arguing that when people go to work, they cease to be themselves. Does the worker “who for twelve hours weaves, spins, drills, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stones, carries loads, etc. … consider this twelve hours weaving, spinning, drilling, turning, building, shoveling, stone breaking as a manifestation of his life?” He does not, Marx answered. For the worker, “life for him begins where this activity ceases.”

Severance ’s dystopian premise is that

Lumon has created a technology allowing “innie” workers to literally alienate themselves from their non-laboring selves (their “outies”), so they can function as—and consider themselves to be—new and different people, with no knowledge or memory of who they are outside of work, and vice versa. In the show, this is accomplished by a chip inserted into the brain, developed and marketed by a giant Apple-like corporation. And yet Kier Eagan’s original invention, along with the totalizing philosophy that Lumon Industries has brought to life over the past century and a half, turns out to have been a form of quiescence-producing ether, perhaps precursor and inspiration to the “severance”

procedure. Put simply, he invented Marx’s “opiate of the masses.”

It might seem strange that a giant capitalist corporation has made a show literalizing Marxist ideas, and that, over the course of the first season, our protagonists— a quartet of innie office workers engaged in bizarre, nonsensical computer “refining” tasks—not only develop class consciousness as antidote to their indoctrination, but they collectively conspire to rise up against their oppressors. This show, produced by Apple, Inc. (AAPL -4.85%), presents their revolt as wholly intuitive and natural. After all: What have they to lose but their chains?

Severance is actually one of a cohort of shows that emerged from the pandemic, the

(L-R) Tramell Tillman, Zach Cherry, John Turturro, Britt Lower, and Adam Scott in Severance

CULTURE

George Floyd uprising, and the #resistance era of the first Trump presidency with a kind of radical class politics embedded in their premise, something that would at least seem to be sharply at odds with their consolidated corporate-studio creators. In fact, like HBO’s The White Lotus and Disney’s Andor, the first scene in Severance opens with a (metaphorical) corpse who “comes to life” over the course of the season. If the floating body in The White Lotus tells a story of careless rich people and their workingclass victims, and the dead man walking in Andor jump-starts the show’s excavation of how a revolutionary martyr is made, Helly R’s awakening on a conference room table offers an equally potent metaphor for what her corporate masters want a worker to be: an empty, confused vessel to be filled with dogma, exploited and consumed. (“Am I livestock?” she asks, before she knows anything else.) Her first impulse is to attack her manager, a wholly reasonable reaction that crystalizes the first season’s general vibe.

Much has changed, however, in the three years since the first season of Severance aired (to say nothing of the decade since Dan Erickson’s screenplay for that pilot episode caught the eye of Ben Stiller, whose production company would eventually sell the show to Apple). A script written during the Sanders campaign’s surprising success, and produced during the high-water mark of perhaps the largest protest movement in U.S. history, has in the years in which both progressive movements have been mostly crushed become a subtly but distinctly different kind of story.

Season 1 was about the alienation of office life, at a time when many workers-fromhome could perhaps afford some nostalgia for the office. Season 2 opens with a parody of the way corporations attempt to co-opt revolutionary energies with rhetorical gestures and superficial reforms, coming, ironically, as corporations like Apple, whose CEO donated $1 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration, are throwing off the mask. In the immediate aftermath of their partially successful jailbreak attempt, the show’s protagonists are shown a glossy corporate video, celebrating their actions and introducing the new policies and worker amenities Lumon has been inspired—out of the goodness of their hearts—to establish.

It is often the case that television shows start with one premise and migrate, over time, toward another. Their production over time—as the zeitgeist shifts—may be what

most distinguishes television as a storytelling medium: If novels or movies are conceived and produced as singular stories, the pilot episode of a television show is almost always completed years or even decades before anyone even starts to think about what to do with the finale. A show conceived with one set of plans will very often be subtly (or dramatically) transformed, for better or for worse.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing that Severance’s vibe has shifted, but in Season 1, Adam Scott’s Mark S and his three co-workers were workers, in a more basic and Marxist sense. Lumon Industries used surveillance, indoctrination, and torture to break them, and extract from them a form of labor which they could only regard as “mysterious and important” because they had no idea what they were doing, or why. As a dystopian refraction of workplace alienation, the show’s starting point was therefore profoundly critical of what it means to sell your labor to capital. Because our protagonists longed for full and complete lives—struggling for love and to make meaning of their work—their

engraving of Kier

only option was collective struggle, and the formation of a newfound family in the process. They plotted, organized, and rose up to “burn this place to the ground.”

In Season 2, the show not only shifts whose perspectives and stories it prioritizes, but what it seems to be critiquing (if, indeed, it is). The writers efficiently isolate each character off on their own stories, most of which concern a love triangle of some kind. Workers struggle with each other, and innies find their interests in irreconcilable conflict with their outies. Though John Turturro’s Irving and Zach Cherry’s Dylan have compelling subplots, they have almost nothing to do with the main plot, in which only Mark S’s emotional labor turns out to matter. Meanwhile, managerial figures like Milchick, Cobel, and the Eagans are no longer unambiguously menacing (if occasionally comic) villains: By exploring their backstories, struggles, and traumas, Season 2 seems to suggest—sometimes in almost farcically contrived scenarios—that they might be sympathetic allies for the work-

The

Eagan in Lumon Industries’ headquarters resembles the famous side-portrait of Vladimir Lenin.

In Season 2, the show not only shifts whose perspectives and stories it prioritizes, but what it seems to be critiquing.

ing class. If the plotting literally echoes the corporate propaganda it begins with—as the workers’ revolt inspires their supervisors to follow suit and rebel against the C-suite— something crucial has been lost when the show forgets about its workers (or, in the case of Irving and Dylan, literally writes them out of the office). What began as a more Kafkaesque black comedy about workplace anomie, with radical edges, becomes a basically conventional SF thriller.

Moreover, as the world outside the office comes more clearly into view, Lumon Industries feels less like a broad metaphor for capitalism, and more like a uniquely perverse and evil company. Severance ’s world has much in common with ours—shared historical and cultural touchstones include World War I, MILFs, and the state of Delaware— but it takes place in a “sort of an alternate, vaguely now-ish timeline,” as Erickson has said, in which Kier Eagan not only founded Lumon Industries in the late 19th century, but transformed the world in doing so. But while the show’s outies live in a dystopian company town that has no real equivalent in our world (their cars’ license plates read “Kier”), the “severance” procedure is controversial even there, and severed outies are regarded with alternating pity and disgust. Instead of exaggerating our own reality, in order to expose the grotesque violence that we have come to normalize, Lumon is recognized as exceptionally twisted and evil in the show’s own timeline. If Lumon is an exaggerated version of Apple itself—which the show’s creators have stated explicitly—the exaggeration is so great that it makes Apple look, frankly, pretty good by comparison. And however cringey Apple’s self-representations may be—from the 1984 Super Bowl commercial in which the personal computer breaks the spell of a Big Brother–like cult to the more recent, differently wince-inducing framing of the new iPad as the omni-tool constructed by crushing all the others—Lumon’s explicit appeal, in the

world of the show, is not creative tools for living but wouldn’t it be great to turn off your brain? It’s exactly the point that capitalism has never sold itself this way. In the show, nearly every character who isn’t literally an Eagan eventually rejects the sales pitch.

Seeing it this way helped me answer a question that has bugged me from the show’s beginning: Why does this show seem to take place in a kind of capitalist version of the USSR? An engraving of Kier Eagan’s head in Lumon Industries’ mid-century headquarters is unmistakably reminiscent of famous side-portrait of Vladimir Lenin, and Dylan wears what might as well be a Karl Marx mask at one point. A variety of other little Easter eggs are scattered through the show for sharp-eyed viewers to accumulate, from names that line up in evocative ways (“Mark S” sounds like “Marx”; “Kier Eagan” sounds like “Reagan”) to the fact that Mark S wears a Soviet-era Vostok Komandirskie watch. The endlessly wintry backdrop resembles a Siberian climate zone, and there are far too many Slavic names for it to be a coincidence. Meanwhile, the show’s drab, utilitarian cars and pre-digital technology—a nonsensical mix of outdated machinery with futuristic capabilities—nicely evokes the Soviet bloc’s technological lag behind the West (as well as, more generally, the time period when the Cold War burned the hottest).

At the risk of deducing a blueprint for a show that may not even have one—Season 2 ends on a cliffhanger, as usual, a mess left for Season 3’s writers to make sense of—I think Severance asks this question: What if, in the 19th century, a capitalist visionary had taken the historical place that was occupied by Marx in our timeline? And what if the revolution he inspired produced a corporate dystopia instead of a communist one? After all, despite the winking references to Soviet communism embedded in the set design and alluded to in the script, no one within the show ever references the USSR or Marx or Communism; whatever else it may have in common with our reality, the world of Severance does not seem to contain the Bolshevik Revolution, gulags, or the KGB. Instead, we find ourselves watching a familiar narrative about late communism— “cynical workers doing meaningless tasks on outdated technology to fulfill the opaque mandates of a strictly hierarchical organization that doesn’t seem to turn a profit but does justify itself according to a utopian creed,” as someone aptly observed—but this

time, it’s a capitalist Soviet Union. Perhaps outside of the state of Kier, and outside the bounds of the show, the socialist leader of the free world is building a parallel hegemony to that which brought about glasnost?

In any case, the show’s reliance on Cold War tropes and iconography illustrates how inadequate its critical edge is to the state of contemporary capitalism, and state control. Severance may explicitly iterate Marxist concepts, but the show’s actual critique is always reserved for a kind of dystopian capitalism that resembles—especially in folk memory and triumphalist propaganda—the United States’ historic enemy, a communist adversary that did not, in the end, have very much in common with the oligarchs now ascending to the towering heights of the U.S. economy and government.

It may be true that founder-oriented corporate hagiography can tend toward the cultish—and Big Tech companies might resemble mini-states, or even aspire to break away into “network states” that can function as libertarian enclaves—but the substance of Lumon’s authoritarianism is distinctly Soviet bloc–style state control. Its universal surveillance, indoctrination, incarceration, and torture goes far beyond anything any company like Apple has ever been accused of. How much can a critique of communism-with-American-characteristics have to say about the tech oligarchs currently hitting “delete” on the entire concept of government?

After all, our timeline really does have billionaires proposing to put chips in our brains, but Severance ’s Lumon is overt and brutal where contemporary technologies of control disempowerment are subtle, distributed, and algorithmically layered; it is sincere and self-righteous where today’s titans of tech are cynical, ironic, or even unashamedly full of bullshit. In Severance , Lumon is being undone by its true believers, who feel betrayed by their faith in the company (which is perhaps a not wholly inadequate account of what happened to the USSR). But the defining characteristic of our reactionary tech broligarch masters is their sneering, trollish nihilism. As Elon Musk’s relationship with Vladimir Putin hits right on the nose, they resemble the Soviet Union far less than the oligarchy that replaced it and feasted on its corpse, after communism fell. n

Aaron Bady is a writer based in Oakland.

CULTURE

An Abundance of Credulity

They want abundance. But they ignore who profits most from scarcity.

By Hannah Story Brown

Abundance

By Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson Avid Reader Press

Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

By Marc J. Dunkelman PublicAffairs

In the months before the re-election of Donald Trump precipitated our rapid descent into authoritarianism, two books were being written about the idea that progressivism went astray in the 1960s and 1970s. In Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson describe a drift into a “politics of scarcity,” and in Why Nothing Works , Marc Dunkelman calls it a “cultural aversion to power.” Both books ask a pertinent

question: Why doesn’t the government do big, bold things, quickly, to address the pressing issues of our time? We have an abundance of viewpoints and veto points, they argue, but a shortage of affordable housing and transmission lines. Something’s got to give.

The unstated question, of course, is who must give. The problems the authors identify are real, but they largely ignore who benefits from prolonging them. Their vision is of a government that’s more responsive to the public’s needs, but their proposal is to remove already inadequate levers for accountability in political decisionmaking. We should be able to agree that the tools we have to ensure progress and affluence are insufficient, without concluding that the answer is to throw them away. Improving those tools—making them actually fit for purpose—will require keeping them out of the hands of those who would

wield them to exploit us. But that discussion is missing from these books.

Books

The authors are haunted by the expediency of unchecked leadership; how rapidly a place can be remade in the hands of a figure like Robert Moses, or governments like China and Texas. The “unresolved question” for Dunkelman is how to speed things up without “licensing a new generation of imperious, unaccountable power brokers.” Klein and Thompson seem less troubled by this possibility. Dunkelman’s optimism is tempered by lessons of history, while Klein and Thompson’s is unrestrained, but both books come to the same conclusion: There are too many people at the table, too many empowered to say “no.” They want to see regulatory requirements loosened, authority centralized, legal recourse limited. They want someone to just choose

Yet the political landscape has shifted rapidly under the feet of these authors over

Housing construction saw a decade of depression after the financial crisis.

the first several weeks of the second Trump term. Arguing for fewer checks on government action hits very different amid mass firings, unilateral cancellations of appropriated spending, and dissolutions of entire federal agencies. The diagnosis of what constrains the state acting authoritatively to meet public needs—more or less the messy multivocality of democracy—is an ill match for an era of accelerating authoritarianism.

The books argue that the key to restoring trust in government is empowering the government to act decisively. Progressivism’s preoccupation with “the injustices of the present” (Klein and Thompson), or “speaking truth to power” (Dunkelman), has precluded building a state strong enough to meet people’s needs. Yet it is difficult to imagine coming out on the other side of the TrumpMusk madness without a progressivism built around precisely those preoccupations.

No Villains Necessary?

Klein and Thompson want a politics of abundance. Not an abundance of anything and everything, they assure, not an “omnidirectional moreness,” but a course correction from the status quo, which offers “a startling abundance of the goods that can fill a house and a shortage of what’s needed to build a good life.” Who on the left would object to that aspiration?

But it is critical to be accurate about the sources of what Klein and Thompson call the “chosen scarcities” that stratify modern American society. What constrains political action for the public good? Call it industry influence, corporate capture, consolidated power. Call it the societal consequences of the profit motive. Whatever your shorthand, what’s missing from these books is a substantive engagement with the fact that powerful entities profit from the government failing to meet the public’s needs. (It’s worth noting that Dunkelman’s book makes fuller gestures toward this reality than Klein and Thompson’s.)

For example, no climate advocate would argue that we are decarbonizing fast enough, or that the status quo is serving us well. (Though it should be noted that clean-energy installations grew 47 percent in 2024 relative to the previous year, despite protests from abundance advocates that the clean-energy investments of the Biden Inflation Reduction Act were too convoluted.) But who profits from every single year that we fail to meet our climate goals?

Who spends billions of dollars lobbying to make that happen? Who spreads disinformation, pushes false solutions, obstructs congressional investigations, files lawsuits, creates front groups, launches public relations campaigns to oppose new laws and tighter regulations, and elevates politicians who will aid them in this obstruction?

The fossil fuel industry benefits from our current gridlock. It benefits from legislative proposals that “abundance agenda” proponents have backed to weaken existing processes for assessing the environmental impact of the construction of energy infrastructure. And it benefits from “all of the above” energy rhetoric that signals political leaders’ refusal to stand up to corporate power and identify which private-sector goals are aligned with the public interest, and which simply aren’t. The stability of the global climate can’t handle the preservation of the fossil fuel industry.

Policy solutions that take climate change seriously will outrage the people who profit from coal and oil and gas, and those people have money and power. Donald Trump, at a surface level, is following an abundance agenda by removing the implementing regulations of the National Environmental Policy Act, a particular bugaboo for the authors. But he’s doing it in such a way that explicitly favors oil and gas infrastructure by labeling them “emergency” projects.

Housing is also a point of emphasis in these books. We have a serious deficit of home construction, which the authors attribute to nettlesome rules getting in the way of building. They identify an important problem, but neglect the historical hinge point that led to the deficit in 2007. We didn’t have only pro-construction zoning rules before 2007 and a flood of burdensome, anti-building rules afterward. The home construction sector crashed because of the collapse of the housing bubble, driven by the deregulation of housing finance and a securitization machine that broke the market.

This led to a decade of depression in home construction, a mass consolidation of the market, and a loss of technical knowhow and material supply chains. The sclerotic nature of the housing market today benefits incumbents, who buy up and sit on available land and build out slowly to keep prices high. Weakening their power is complementary to the necessary step of fixing zoning. As Brian Callaci and Sandeep Vaheesan framed it broadly for Dissent, “for

those who see housing as a right, the role of the state in structuring markets expands beyond the YIMBY vision of increasing supply at the margin through deregulation.”

Overlooking the question of who benefits from the status quo is especially glaring in a time of unprecedented greed in the halls of power, as a convicted white-collar criminal and the world’s richest man gut and weaponize the federal government, targeting agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of Labor, and the Environmental Protection Agency, which expressly seek to curb private-sector grift and pollution. This will certainly make things move more quickly, but those things include Big Tech payment apps that have no deposit insurance, or gig work for wages artificially depressed by algorithms, or industrial manufacturers that can dispose of chemical runoff into rivers.

Klein and Thompson want “more of what matters”: affordable housing, clean energy, useful technology, lifesaving medicine. Yes, please. But we also need less of what doesn’t matter— predatory landlords, polluting energy, exploitative technology, unaffordable health care. Rules imposed over the last half-century that seek to prevent exploitation and safeguard the public have led to dramatically lower air and water pollution, significantly fewer auto and aviation fatalities, reduced mortality from infectious diseases, fewer deaths and injuries at work, fewer deaths from residential fires, fewer bank failures, and a less volatile economy. Some of us believe those are worthwhile tradeoffs. But industry tends to lobby against the “burdensome costs” of so increasing general well-being, as rulemaking dockets can attest.

In failing to recognize who has vested interests in our unequal economy, the authors don’t seem to recognize that serving the public interest will require political leaders willing to make powerful enemies. The “liberalism that builds” camp, in short, would find more allies among the progressives they criticize if they acknowledged that some things should not, in fact, be built. We need better levers to prevent abuses and better processes for getting public goods built. But the authors refuse to dignify the question of how to prevent existing abuses from worsening if we take away existing guardrails.

A Credulous Agenda Is Easy to Co-Opt

When neoliberals attack perverse government outcomes while ignoring the influ-

CULTURE

ence of corporate America, they legitimize the center-right doctrinaires advocating for small government and deference to entrenched business interests, undermining their own purported goal of rebuilding trust in government.

Today, the buzzwords of Klein and Thompson’s pitch for rewiring the soul of the Democratic Party have rapidly been taken up by right-wing leaders committed to “unleashing” the excesses of private industry. Trump appointees like Doug Burgum and Chris Wright have cloaked their pro-polluter agenda in the rhetoric of “energy abundance.” Elon Musk has gleefully raided and dismantled federal agencies in the name of “government efficiency.” While Klein and Thompson were dreaming of a world in which “AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, and so its profits are shared,” AI companies were stealing the collective knowledge of humanity and hoarding its profits, all while sabotaging our climate goals.

Dreaming of a nimble, decisive, entrepreneurial state, the authors—inadvertently or not—fall prey to the deregulatory gospel that the government should function more like a business. When Burgum took the reins of the Department of the Interior, he promised staff that they wouldn’t have to do any “soulsuckingly boring work” anymore. The devil’s bargain here is that unleashing extractive industry on public lands without oversight or

objection may at least entail less paperwork. This should, one hopes, infuriate Klein and Thompson. The authors argue for more state capacity, not for a bureaucratic husk cowed by censorship, hollowed out by mass firings, and bent toward desultory and corrupt ends. But private interests have always sought to mobilize public resources to fulfill their goals. Reconstructing state capacity after it has been weaponized by the personifications of lawlessness and greed will require rebuilding a crucial muscle of government that these authors overlook: agencies that police the private sector.

Dunkelman asserts that neglecting state capacity got us here in the first place: “When government appears incompetent, voters turn to figures like Donald Trump.” This is part but not all of the story. Much of the incompetence of our political leaders is a choice. They choose not to rock the boat that keeps corporations afloat and keeps returns high for shareholders, while eroding political possibility. If government officials do appear productive and purposeful, they should expect to get the Lina Khan treatment: 126 separate articles in The Wall Street Journal complaining about her hardball tactics against monopolistic corporations. Making powerful enemies on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley may in fact be a useful bellwether for whether you are contributing to making government work.

The stakes of breaking the government are higher than a business going bankrupt—not shareholders losing money, but people losing food, medicine, and even their lives. Consequently, governments must operate with more caution, transparency, and accountability than corporations do. While the government has an important role to play in incentivizing private industry to work toward public ends—as Klein and Thompson put it, to “create space for companies to do what they otherwise cannot”—it will also always be industry’s regulator, enforcing laws meant to protect the public from the same corporations that the government subsidizes and contracts.

Given that dual nature of modern government, the split temperament of progressives that Dunkelman characterizes as both Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian, seeking both freedom from chaos and freedom from tyranny, is inevitable. Progressives want the state to do more of the right thing, and also less of the wrong thing. This balancing act and its attendant trade-offs will never be perfect, never resolved. This is the messiness of democracy, eternally heartening and disheartening. This is the task.

Dunkelman frames the dilemma this way: “[T]here is no way to serve the greater good without exacting some cost on at least someone … Giving everyone a seat at the table doesn’t by any stretch guarantee a mutually agreeable fix. But, as we’ve seen, giving anyone at the table a veto almost ensures that nothing will be accomplished.” Of course, there are always trade-offs; there are always costs borne more by some than others. But the animating spirit of progressivism has always been the insistence that the vulnerable should not shoulder a disproportionate share of the costs.

Regulations have led to dramatically lower air pollution and many other benefits over the past 50 years.

Modern environmental and labor standards resurface periodically in these books as the bogeymen of expedient building. The profit motive of the private sector is never viewed as so dispensable, or so historically particular. If Silent Spring was of a moment, then so too were the doctrines of Milton Friedman. If there are too many seats at the table, then the newcomers to democracy— the ones who had to build their own chair and elbow their way into the smoke-filled room—should not be first out the door. n

Hannah Story Brown is a deputy research director at the Revolving Door Project.

Promiscuous Networks of Care

Two new books about the politics of love stress the importance of intimate relationships as part of organizing for a better world.

By Sarah Jaffe

in a F*cked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together

By Dean Spade Algonquin

By Shon Fay FSG Originals

I’ve been saying for a while that the world, particularly the West, is in a sort of romantic interregnum. The unchallenged reign of heterosexuality is crumbling—fewer marriages, fewer babies, fewer young people identifying as straight—but no one form has become hegemonic in its place. The

gender roles that were still dominant when I was born have been destabilized but not destroyed. Dating sucks, the headlines proclaim, and young people (and the rest of us) are having less sex.

The right is trying to stop the collapse through brute force; witness Donald Trump’s day one executive order that men are men and women should be scared, or the spread of “Don’t say gay” bills. Restoring the (hierarchical) gendered order of things is central to the global far-right project: Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil called the Bible “the toolbox to fix men and women,” and Korea’s now-disgraced Yoon Suk-yeol was referred to as the “incel president.” It’s not working, though—young women continue moving left, the most recent example being the German election,

in which the gender gap was key to the rise of the far right. Korean women started the “4B” movement, a pledge of “no marriage, no kids, no sex, no dating,” which some American women threatened to imitate after Donald Trump’s re-election.

Books

Sex strikes aside, though, what does all this political Sturm und Drang do to our love lives? Two sharp, radical writers have trained their gaze on love in new books, and both insist that love is political . “This book dares us to decide that romance is not separate from our politics of liberation and resistance,” writes Dean Spade in Love in a F*cked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together, a self-help book that would make the fascists’ skin crawl. Spade, a movement lawyer, writer, and

Love

Love in Exile

William Dyce, Francesca da Rimini (1837)

CULTURE

organizer, has published legal scholarship and a short book on mutual aid, but this, his first on a mainstream press, is a guide to better relationships from the standpoint of organizing. Romantic turmoil, Spade points out, can really put a damper on the trust and solidarity necessary for successful struggle: “If we want to build a world organized around care, connection, and freedom, we must combine our work ‘out there’ with rigorous work in our intimate lives.”

Shon Faye’s Love in Exile is a memoir of sorts, a meditation on love through personal and political experience. Faye, the British author of The Transgender Issue, turns from poignant reflection on her own loves and losses to argue that her sense of being locked out of love is, actually, symptomatic of late capitalist culture. “[T]he architecture of contemporary love, from relationships, to parenthood, to sex, to friendship, to personal well-being and even our deeper need for spiritual nourishment and wholeness, is a highly politicized terrain,” she writes. “This is why I have come to consider this profound feeling of unworthiness as a form of exile: an intentional, punitive banishment that serves political ends.”

Spade seems to be addressing people who are already “political,” even pretty far left, but are new to taking love seriously. He makes an argument for “promiscuous” connection as a way to build support systems that can help us survive materially and emotionally, “so that when things change in any one of our relationships or we can’t get what we need from any particular person or group, we can still find the connections we need.”

Faye seems rather to be writing for readers who already take love seriously, but have to be guided to think politically about it. She speaks to those of us still navigating sex and love with straight men at a time when it is easy to think of straight men as the enemy. This tension is all over her book: how to reconcile fear and desire; how to navigate patriarchal and transphobic power dynamics one-on-one; how to understand one’s wants in the midst of so many competing messages. There is, she notes, “very little honest writing on straight women’s erotic lives in contemporary discourse,” and often little reward for such honesty even in one’s own life. Heterosexuality entered crisis without us ever having really understood it.

While Faye goes straight at the specter of heterosexuality, Spade mostly writes around it. He uses the frame of “the romance myth,”

which tells us that (monogamous) romantic relationships are the most important ones, that they will complete us and leave no need (or time) for friendships or other camaraderie. Even feminist and queer critiques of the nuclear family were gradually diverted into yearnings for that family for themselves, as in the fight for gay marriage. “Instead of queers being a threat to the romance myth, we were suddenly offered its particular coercion, sold as ‘freedom,’” Spade writes.

The romance myth tells us that real love is easy and cruises toward marriage (and children) as easily as one rides up a mall escalator. Anyone who doesn’t want those things is flawed, according to this logic. But in reality, Spade writes, “[r]elationships do not need to escalate in a set sequence in order to be meaningful. They don’t even need to escalate at all.” This isn’t an argument for all of us to behave more like fuckboys, but rather to treat everyone—even casual flings—with more care, and in keeping with Spade’s long history of prison-abolitionist work, to fight back against the tendency to discard others. Rather than interpolate everyone into

one singular romance myth, Faye notes that such cultural norms actually leave queer and trans people feeling exiled from love entirely. Faye reminds us that she, a millennial, grew up when it was still illegal, in the wake of Thatcher’s Britain, to “speak about queerness in a positive way in British schools.” Those are the kinds of laws today’s Republicans are bringing back.

Paradoxically, this alienation has been good, in some ways. Queer communities have built alternate structures of care that heterosexuals are just now beginning to learn from, valuing friendship and ongoing connection rather than the stop-start of serial monogamy common to straight daters. But heartbreak, she writes, is actually a great unifier: “My energies had been spent making my experiences, desires, and motivations legible to a society intent on rendering me an oddity. The banal universality of heartbreak came as a unique relief.”

Yet heartbreak has different meanings: It is easy to feel that, as Faye writes, one is a “failed woman” if unpartnered, dumped, or cheerily sleeping around. To move past these

The right is trying to stop the collapse of heterosexuality by brute force.

myths is something we can work on in our personal lives, but with the entire force of the U.S. state currently trying to materially reinforce them—Sean Duffy, Trump’s transportation secretary, wants to prioritize grants and loans to “communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average”—it seems more like magical thinking to advise readers to focus on emotional work.

Love is political, in other words, but it’s material, too.

The “burgeoning belief in the transcendent, quasi-spiritual nature of romantic love,” Faye writes, “coincided with a slow decline of religious belief and the dissolution of certain types of rural community bonds during the industrial revolution.” Love became the new religion, and the individual or the family (as Margaret Thatcher famously proclaimed) became the units worth counting.

For women in the U.S., Western Europe, and the middle classes across the world, recent decades have brought us new economic freedoms that allow us more romantic choice, to a degree. I have outearned every man I’ve been with save one, and that has allowed me to leave a bad relationship more than once (including, in two cases, telling my partner he had to go, because I was the one paying the bills). Yet many of us are still stuck in cities where the rent is too damn high, and that shapes our relationship choices. Peter Kenway of the London think tank New Policy Institute foresaw a possible “Jane Austenstyle marriage market, as millennials without an inheritance try to partner up with millennials who stand to inherit a house.”

There is a history to this era of love, then, and it goes through economic policy as much as cultural norms. Tax structures privilege married couples, and falling wages (and higher housing costs) mean that both members of that couple probably have to bring in income. These are recent developments, part of the neoliberal restructuring of everything, which should remind us that our lives and loves are shaped by capitalist demands, and could be shaped differently. So much romantic advice ignores this history in order to personalize our problems and tell us that, at some level, they come from the kind of person we are. Not a person racialized and gendered by systems of power, but rather someone with an attachment style or a diagnosis or a particular astrological sign. While I’m the last person to tell anyone to avoid psychother-

There is a history to this era of love, and it goes through economic policy as much as cultural norms.

apy, I am leery of a self-help culture that, as Spade notes, flattens out complex ideas into personality types that you can discover by taking a quiz. (Yes, I have a lot of Virgo placements.) Childhood trauma or romantic wounds can certainly shape the ways we respond to one another, but so do the roles we are pushed into by a society once again enamored of crude stereotypes and sweeping political attacks on human rights (like abortion) and benefits (like Medicaid).

We navigate in our personal lives a kind of dialectic between the individual and the social. Can I solely explain my last fight with a lover by reference to patriarchy, or was it what Faye wryly calls “something as obvious as daddy issues”? Like her, I find the latter clichéd, but probably at least a little bit accurate; like her, I struggle to trust men because, well, look at the ones in charge. I relate almost too painfully to her description of “a relationship where the other person did seem willing to try and love me, rather than the idea of me,” and where she “found his love painfully confrontational, which in turn made me engage in deliberate acts of sabotage.” I imagine I’m not the only one.

So what do we do with all of this knowledge? We do have some freedom in our personal lives to decide how we will treat people, to attempt to at least bring our values to bear on our day-to-day interactions and the investments we make in relationships. Spade offers the idea that our “identities are a result of repeated practice rather than natural categories,” which called to mind abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s words on rehearsal—that rather than perfect, “practice makes different.” We practice politically, through our organizing, trying things and learning from failure, and we do so as well interpersonally.

We can, as Spade writes, get better at conflict, a skill so few of us learn at home or at school. “We need skills for being with each other in distress, just as much as we need skills for being with each other in delight,”

he writes. As we attempt to get ourselves out of the corners that Trump and his allies want to paint us into, we need to value accountability, precisely because impunity has been the rule for the powerful for so long.

In his acknowledgments, Spade notes that “any idea can be made simple,” a statement I agree with, to a point. There are moments in his book, though, where the arguments are too simplified. Our ideas of romance and relationships are certainly the products of “cultural scripts,” but in failing to connect those scripts to the structures of real power that produce them, I worry that the book makes it seem too easy to make change. Still, he offers much to chew on, particularly for younger queer readers trying to navigate their own pain amid political repression.

There are no easy answers to relationship questions. We must do the hard work of figuring out what we want in community with others; those promiscuous networks of care might include friends and lovers, life partners, and even that co-worker you don’t like so much but who always shows up to the union meeting. The point is not to replace the heteronormative romance myth with any particular structure—neither gay marriage nor the 20-person polycule is going to defeat the far right for us. Instead, we might, as Spade writes, imagine what it would be like to “treat our friends in the most caring ways we treat our lovers, and our lovers in the best ways we treat our friends.”

Love, at its best, is not simply a way to get one’s “needs met,” as the popular discourse often has it. It is not, as Faye writes, “a resource to be extracted from others.” It is a risk and a challenge, particularly when done outside of the parameters that the right is busily shoring up all around us. But that is precisely what makes it worth doing, even—particularly—as the world is on fire all around us. We cannot live risk-free on this fragile planet, in these explosive political times. We need other people to walk with us through the flames, and to help us make a world in which it is not so damned hard to care about one another. n

Sarah Jaffe is the author of Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Leaves Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone and From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire . Her work has appeared in The New York Times , The Nation , The New Republic , The Atlantic , and many other publications.

PARTINGSHOT

How to Throw a Measles Party to Remember A MAHA mom’s guide

In the year 2000, America bid an NSYNC “Bye Bye Bye” to the measles, the infectious disease that killed 400 to 500 Americans and infected three to four million each year back in the 1950s. But given that 2025 is a year of throwback trends— from baggy bootcut jeans to segregation—this spring, none other than the contagious queen herself, measles, is back to claim her crown.

As a wife, mother to two notfat homeschooled children, and best-selling author of the book Cod Liver: It’s What’s for Dinner, I want to speak to other women currently draped in an alpaca shawl on how to throw a totally adorable party for deliberately infecting your child with a life-threatening disease.

The key to a good measles party is having plenty of beverages to soothe that dry hack and rehydrate after ALL the diarrhea. Think raw milk, fluoride-free water, apple cider vinegar, and of course, urine. But instead of cups, opt for a trough so that the guests can lap up their liquids while also sharing as many germs as possible. Did I mention you don’t need to waste money on food? Your child’s loss of appetite will mean you can skip the pizza or fruit snacks full of HARMFUL ARTIFICIAL DYES, and head for the main course: measles.

gestions: Guess the Spots on Jackie, or Pin the IV on the Patient, or Lick Your Neighbor. For gifts, each child can decorate a jar they’ve brought from home, cough into it, and pass it to the kid on their left. Everyone leaves with something! Mostly measles.

One of the hardest parts about throwing a kids’ party is settling on a theme. Is it going to be trucks or unicorns? Barnyard or outer space? But with measles parties, there’s only one theme: RASH! We’re talking red polka dots on everything, from the napkins to the tablecloth to the raspberry-speckled vanilla

icing on the NON- GMO cake. Remember, no forks allowed. You want each child’s mitts all over those slices of contagion. For decorations, check out my YouTube craft channel for how to make your own paper-mache spike protein piñata, using a balloon and glitter pom-poms. Make sure to fill it with unwrapped homemade candy, to best spread any and all pathogens. No need to spin the children before they take a swing, since they will already be dizzy. In fact, they might need help holding the bat given their loss of strength. But don’t worry: They’ll be jumping in elation as soon as those nibs of kitchen-fermented 102 percent cacao start raining down. Because of encephalitis, make sure party games are super-simple. Here are some sug-

Of course, you can’t call it a party without a little entertainment. Mascots wear masks, and masks prevent infection, so that’s a no-no. But raw-food influencers like the Liver King are readily available for hire, with stunning tricks like downing 16 ounces of uncooked chicken or performing a live coffee enema. For a higher price point, I bet Secretary Kennedy himself would appear and feed your child’s guinea pig to his pet falcon, or maybe even let the kids try heroin. He is truly a marvel.

If you have any hesitation about throwing a measles party, I get it. It’s risky. What if one of your nine children dies? What if that one is Elon’s? But at some point, you have to stop believing in BIG PHARMA’s 97 percent effective measles vaccines and start believing in my All-Natural Supplement and Smoothie Subscription Service to Ensure an Autism-Free Household, starting at just $149.95 a month. Either way, let’s remember it’s our duty as parents with marble counters to help build our community’s NATURAL IMMUNITY by throwing them a measles party to remember. Remember, there’s no “I” in measles, only “Me.”

—Francesca Fiorentini

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