The American Prospect, #346

Working Class Hero

By David Dayen

Rep. Greg Casar on rebuilding the Democratic base

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16 Organizing to Win

Greg Casar wants to do for Democrats what he did for construction workers in Texas. By David Dayen

24 The Illusion of Choice

Republicans say that VA patients can get equivalent private-sector care anywhere in the U.S. Here’s a 50-state reality check. By Suzanne Gordon

32 The Premature Guide to Post-Trump Reform

American history offers three general strategies of repair and renewal. By Paul Starr

40

Fantasy Football on the Anacostia

Nearly everybody wants the NFL’s Commanders back in Washington—but is the price too steep for the struggling city? By Gabrielle Gurley

48 Sugar Rush

Indiana is among several states restricting the purchase of sugary foods with nutrition assistance funds. Is this about health, or punishing poor people? By Emma Janssen

Before we even hit the six-month mark

of his second term, Donald Trump essentially completed his legislative agenda for the next four years. That agenda is known as An Act to Provide for Reconciliation Pursuant to Title II of H. Con. Res. 14, so named after Chuck Schumer, who in an act of boldness that set the political world absolutely ablaze, knocked out Trump’s preferred title, the absurd “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” But despite being only one law, the 2025 budget law is every bit as expansive as the achievements of the last several presidents, maybe combined.

We followed the winding road of this process from origin to final passage at prospect.org. We called it “Trump’s Beautiful Disaster.” But you could also call it the Old Deal. The rollbacks of Medicaid and food assistance and student loans push the country back toward the 1950s, before these Great Society accomplishments were put into law. The huge funding increases for immigration enforcement and the military recall the Reagan-era defense mobilization. The continued flattening and erasing of the income tax, particularly for corporations and the wealthy and their heirs, who can freely pass on dynastic wealth to their progeny, harks back to the era before the 16th Amendment, ratified in 1913.

The ramifications of the Old Deal becoming law will be felt by every American, something we work through in the pages of this issue. The Medicaid cuts, along with the movement toward privatization of the veterans health care system, will exacerbate an existing crisis of medical provider shortages, as Suzanne Gordon outlines for us. Food assistance rollbacks are combining with a new, suspicious interest from red states in what people on that assistance are allowed to buy; Emma Janssen traveled to Indiana to report on that. And the bulking up of Immigration and Customs Enforcement into one of the world’s biggest military units will not only trigger a surge of new surveillance technologies at the border, as James Baratta explains, but will damage America’s home care system, which, as Whitney Wimbish notes, is largely immigrant-led.

And of course, the upheaval of the present will lead to new thinking about the future. Paul Starr outlines proposals for how to dig out of the Trump catastrophe, taking lessons from our history. And I profiled the man who just might organize that renewal: Texas Rep. Greg Casar, the chair of the Progressive Caucus in only his second term in Congress, who is using his labor background to help restore the Democratic Party to its roots defending the working class, which can help prevent the rise of authoritarians who promise the world and deliver nothing.

“Make America Great Again” was always a backward-looking formulation. The future lies in understanding what Trump took away, and building something more appealing to a population desperate for leadership. That’s what we’re chronicling in this issue. – David Dayen

EXECUTIVE EDITOR DAVID DAYEN

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PROSPEC TS

RYAN

COOPER

The Bleak Future of Trumponomics

Since the early 1980s,

America has seen a consistent budgetary pattern: Republicans blow up the deficit with tax cuts for the rich and military spending, and Democrats subsequently cut down on borrowing with tax hikes and spending cuts.

History is set to repeat again. On July 4, Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act was signed into law. It’s a hyped-up edition of the same old Republican dogma. It contains the largest cuts to Medicaid and SNAP benefits in history, which do not even come close to compensating for giant tax cuts, mostly for the rich. It would increase the national debt by $3.3 trillion by 2034; if we assume that all the tax cuts will be made permanent (a certainty if Republicans have anything to say about it), the total is over $5.5 trillion.

For decades now, Republicans have internalized the idea that “deficits don’t matter,” to quote then-Vice President Dick Cheney. In his day, Cheney was mostly right—neither Reagan’s, Bush’s, nor Trump’s firstterm antics had any directly damaging effect on the broader economy. Inequality skyrocketed, but there were no debt crises. Indeed, Trump’s 2017 cut arguably helped stimulate spending and drive down unemployment, albeit in a highly inefficient manner, in an economy that hadn’t recovered from the Great Recession.

But this time might be different. Key to Cheney’s assumption was not just the fact that Democrats would clean up the mess later, but also the dollar’s role as the global reserve currency. Since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, turbulent economic times have reliably led to a flight to the safety of dollars and U.S. government debt. That creates a consistent demand for dollar-based assets, so countries and businesses can settle international transactions, and build up exchange reserves to defend against potential currency crises.

That assumption is now being called into question. Trump’s wildly erratic behavior, abolishing whole federal agencies by fiat and yanking up and down tariffs at random via social media post, has created vast turbulence in the international economy. But instead of a flight to dollar safety, since Trump has taken office, interest rates on 10and 30-year Treasury bonds are up modestly, while the dollar’s value has fallen about 15 percent against the euro, and about 10 percent against the pound and yen.

This suggests that a new economic order is taking shape, after the keystone nation of the global economy decided to elect an unhinged maniac, again. Absent some kind of reckoning with MAGA on par with

President Grant’s all-out assault on the Ku Klux Klan in the 1870s, America will never live this down, and all future administrations will be burdened with Trump’s legacy of lower growth, lower employment, higher inflation, higher interest rates, and a dramatically higher cost of financing the national debt.

Ronald Reagan’s deficits were primarily caused by high interest rates, stemming from the Federal Reserve’s efforts to tame inflation. Bill Clinton achieved a short budget surplus in the late 1990s in part from some tax hikes on the rich, but mainly by lucking into a long economic boom. George W. Bush took that surplus and handed it to the rich; but much larger deficits later in his term were caused by the 2008 economic crash, which cratered revenue and required an expensive bailout. Barack Obama passed an inadequate stimulus, but quickly pivoted to austerity by 2010, and subsequently deficits fell, though slowly.

Trump repeated the Bush pattern, except faster. He passed a large tax cut for the rich in 2017, then finished his first term with a pandemic-fueled economic crash, made worse by catastrophic mismanagement. Democrats and Republicans in Congress drew up the CARES Act, by far the most generous policy for the poor and working class in American history, which Trump signed. That and other pandemic rescues drove skyrocketing borrowing.

Biden learned from Obama’s mistakes with a much larger stimulus, which drove the fastest economic recovery from a deep recession in American history. Thereafter deficits fell, but as Biden did not raise taxes much, deficits stabilized at about 6 percent of GDP. As the Fed raised rates to combat rising inflation, interest payments as a share of GDP rose to 3.8 percent by late 2024, the highest level since 1998. In 2024, interest on the debt grew larger than the military budget.

It’s important to emphasize here that the austerity mindset that budgets should be balanced if possible, and every dollar of new spending must be “paid for” with taxes, is both economically illiterate and hugely damaging to the American economy. The Obama pivot was driven in part by a panicked frenzy among the D.C. establishment, even though unemployment was still at 10 percent. Austerity was a major reason why Democrats got killed in the midterms that

year, and why the economy suffered a lost decade of chronically slow growth and high unemployment. The problem with Republican deficits is not so much that they happened, but that they were spent on tax cuts for the rich rather than productive investments in, say, renewable energy.

In addition, as the issuer of the global reserve currency, America has an obligation to provide dollar assets. As Michael Pettis and Matthew Klein argue in their book Trade Wars Are Class Wars , if the government won’t provide them in the form of Treasury bonds, demand for other dollar assets will drive up its value, tanking American exports and widening the trade deficit.

Indeed, the dollar’s reserve status is partly to blame for America’s chronically large trade deficit. As economist Paul Krugman points out, much of these deficits have been financed by foreign investment in the U.S. If those investors lose confidence in America, they might pull back, similar to a “sudden stop” crisis that countries like Argentina and Portugal have faced.

There are built-in shock absorbers in place for a country as critical to the global economy as America. But those guardrails are buckling.

First off, all that foreign investment is denominated in U.S. currency. “That means that a sharp depreciation of the dollar will by itself bring the international investment position back into balance,” economist J.W. Mason said in an interview. Second, America still has the great benefit of borrowing in a currency that it controls. That means the Federal Reserve has control of the interest rate—it can always print money to increase or decrease rates to any level it wishes (at least above zero). “When it comes to sovereign debt in its own currency, the power of a central bank is like that of the God of the Old Testament,” said Mason.

But depreciating the dollar would come at the cost of higher inflation from higher import costs, and a major reduction in investment. And cutting rates, as Trump has called for, conflicts with the Fed’s dual mandate to ensure full employment and price stability. Interest payments are a skyrocketing share of the government budget in part because of the Fed’s rate hikes to fight the inflation of 2022-2024. Chair Jerome Powell cut rates in 2024, but since Trump took office, has hesitated to cut further.

Inflation has persisted at about half a point above the Fed’s 2 percent target. This limits the Fed’s freedom of action.

Trump has regularly attacked Powell for not cutting rates, and might fill the Fed board with toadies to do the job. But rate cuts, combined with other factors, would boost inflation even more. Tariffs are already spiking some prices. New home prices are likely to rise as Trump is deporting so many construction workers. The enormous tax cuts will drive up borrowing, as will the cost of rolling over existing debt, some $14 trillion of which must be refinanced over the next three years. IRS cuts carried out by DOGE , with the obvious goal of preventing audits of wealthy tax cheats, will further cut revenue by an estimated $500 billion this year alone; that’s more money out there to be spent. As a result of all of this, either interest rates will have to stay high, or prices will keep rising.

Weakening demand for the dollar could create a kind of depreciation on its own. But the modest fall in the dollar so far is nothing like a currency flight. Indeed, there is no viable global currency benchmark to replace the dollar, nor one on the horizon. The only realistic candidates are China or the European Union, but China would have to abandon its currency con trol system and open up its capital mar kets so foreigners could get ren minbi, while the EU would have to get over its congeni tal allergy to bor rowing and issue trillions in euro bonds. Neither looks at all likely.

fered from American dominance through sometimes undeserved sanctions, and access to the Fed’s swap lines was highly unfair to poorer nations, by and large using the dollar was a smart move. Now Trump is making that look risky and foolish. How is the world supposed to trust a nation degenerate enough to elect an ultracorrupt lunatic who is tearing up the global trade system designed by and for America itself—twice? If Trump is willing to threaten wars of conquest against two separate NATO allies (Canada and Denmark), who knows who else he might sanction? And even if he is replaced with a Democrat who undoes his policy, they might be replaced by a Trump-like figure again.

So while dollars will continue to be used around the world, I expect a steady erosion in the dollar’s hegemonic status, with a greater share of foreign exchange using a basket of other currencies—the euro, the

Still, the unquestioned faith in the dollar has been shaken, and for good reason. So many countries and institutions were willing to use dollars because America, by and large, was trustworthy. It granted ready access to dollars and took steps to preserve their value. The Fed even acted as a global lender of last resort during the 2008 crash and the pandemic, allowing central banks in the EU, U.K., Switzerland, and Japan to access “swap lines” where they could get dollars by exchanging their own currencies.

Though many people and countries suf-

ery from the pandemic crash, at least in terms of GDP and employment. Almost every country suffered from similar inflation, but American prices stabilized faster, thanks to higher production rather than crushed demand, and growth outstripped that of every other major developed nation.

Trumponomics, by contrast, will produce the opposite: a poorer, weaker America, with structurally higher prices, dedicating a large and growing share of its economy to financing debt created by Republican tax cuts for the rich. And it will all be entirely self-inflicted. n

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NOTEBOOK

Cowboys and Algorithms

Dragnet surveillance has bedeviled border communities for years. The rest of America is next.

By James Baratta

Santa Cruz County, Arizona, is the smallest county in the Grand Canyon State, but its location makes it significant. Home to more than 50,000 people, the vast majority of whom identify as Hispanic or Latino, the county is located in the southernmost part of central Arizona and shares a 54-mile stretch of border with the Mexican state of Sonora.

Along this stretch of land is Nogales, the county’s administrative seat and a major port of entry into the United States; millions of people and billions of dollars in trade pass through it every year. Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, are bisected by a demarcation line established by the purchase, six years after the Mexican-American War, of Mexican land by the United States. But the sister cities—collectively referred to as

Ambos Nogales—comprise a single urban area characterized by high levels of crossborder interaction and a common culture.

Today, the line bifurcating Nogales and other border communities is over- and undergirded by a militarized and surveillance-driven security apparatus. The latter established a foothold under the Obama and Biden administrations “as a more humane alternative to other border enforcement methods, such as building walls or putting children in cages,” Petra Molnar, associate director of the Refugee Law Lab at York University, writes in The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence . “People will still arrive, but they’re going to take more circuitous routes to try to avoid surveillance, leading to an exponential increase of deaths,” she told the Prospect

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection

Drones, like the ones being piloted here by Customs and Border Protection officers, are part of the surveillance dragnet at the border.

(CBP) spokesperson denied this, telling the Prospect that “preventing the loss of life is core to our mission, and CBP personnel endeavor to rescue those in distress, a particularly important mission in the harsh environments along the southwest border.”

In 2017, the agency established the Missing Migrant Program, an initiative focused on preventing deaths during attempted border crossings. However, according to CBP’s own data, migration-related deaths in the borderlands surged by 57 percent between October 2021 and September 2022.

Prevention through deterrence has been central to the bipartisan border security project for decades. Today, “the way it manifests itself visibly is just like East Germany,” Santa Cruz County Sheriff David Hathaway said in an interview with the Prospect “Walls don’t just keep people out. They keep people in.”

Walls are but one ingredient in the borderlands’ mix of barriers. In recent years, autonomous surveillance towers, drones, spy blimps, license plate readers, and motionactivated cameras have also been put in place. In the borderlands, no one is free from the ever-expanding surveillance and data collection nexus operated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Federal agents have spent years perfecting a range of techniques and technologies that undermine civil liberties, all with the goal of sustaining the surveillance-driven immigration enforcement apparatus. The nearly ubiquitous surveillance has produced what is known as the panopticon effect.

“The panopticon [effect] is, of course, you think that they’re watching you, but they might not be,” Todd Miller, author of Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders, told the Prospect. “Like in the prison system, a camera could be there, but it might be turned off and no one’s looking, but psychologically, you think people are watching you.”

Nothing screams panopticon quite like CBP ’s Tethered Aerostat Radar System (TARS), semi-stationary blimps providing low-altitude surveillance of the U.S.-Mexico border, Florida Keys, and Puerto Rico. TARS operators relay surveillance data to DHS, law enforcement, and military partners. Since the 2010s, CBP has contracted with British defense contractor QinetiQ and with Peraton—a private equity–owned national-security company based in Virginia—to maintain the program. The agency has dumped hundreds of millions of dollars into TARS. Last year, it also deployed a new aerostat in the Florida Keys amid “upticks in transportation avenues and conveyances for illegal smuggling, fishing, and immigration activities,” according to the agency’s website.

On March 6, the Senate passed the Coast Guard Authorization Act, instructing the U.S. Coast Guard and CBP to procure blimpbased surveillance systems for deployment in additional areas of operation. The move came one day after an aerostat at South Padre Island in Texas broke free and, after drifting hundreds of miles, crash-landed on a ranch property outside Dallas.

Runaway spy blimps aside, license plate readers (LPR s) can also be found throughout the borderlands. These devices, some of which are covert, capture images of license plates and convert those images into data.

CBP uses that data to identify vehicles believed to be linked to cross-border crimes. LPR s also produce real-time alerts to allow CBP and other federal agencies to intercept suspicious vehicles.

For Hathaway, a self-described “big, tall gringo,” LPR s are part and parcel of dragnet surveillance in the borderlands. “I drive in a car with Arizona license plates, but I will get pulled over,” he told the Prospect.

Autonomous surveillance towers installed by CBP in the borderlands are the most visible manifestation of smart border technology to date, with the agency describing them as “a partner that never sleeps, never needs to take a coffee break, never even blinks.” CBP has received more than $700 million in federal funding for its surveillance tower program since 2017. Over the next decade or so, it will spend approximately $68 million to expand the program by upgrading existing towers and constructing hundreds more.

In early April, CBP unveiled plans to integrate machine-learning capabilities into the existing surveillance towers. First reported by The Intercept, modernizing these towers will facilitate automatic detection of anyone and anything moving near the Tucson-area border zone in Arizona. CBP has also tasked Google with operating “a central repository for video surveillance data,” supported by MAGE, a cloud computing platform. As part of the project, CBP is also partnering with IBM and Equitus, which will provide the software needed to collect visual data. That data will be stored on the agency’s Google Cloud.

The CBP spokesperson told the Prospect that technology affords the agency “persistent surveillance of the border region,” which reduces the need for manpower on the border and provides greater coverage to interdict migrant crossings, which have dropped significantly under the Trump administration.

But for residents of border communities, surveillance towers loom not just physically but mentally, creating a sense of perpetual observation while eroding any semblance of privacy. “They’re scanning the whole community and … zooming in on just regular day-to-day people going about their life,” Hathaway said.

On their nightly walks along the border, David and Karen Hathaway see more than just a star-studded sky; they often spot

a CBP -operated Predator B drone flying above. The drone is manufactured by General Atomics, a major defense contractor for the U.S. military. As Miller points out, the very same firms that “have been selling their products to the military now have another branch market for border surveillance.”

In September 2024, Hathaway testified before the House Committee on Homeland Security, telling lawmakers that he and other residents of border communities would prefer not to see their quiet neighborhoods “turned into a police state or a war zone.” During our interview, he reflected on an ordeal his wife had experienced when the two of them were returning home from the Mexican side of the border.

CBP uses facial biometrics for identity verification purposes at land border crossings, snapping pictures of travelers in pedestrian lanes before allowing them to pass through. The agency leverages one-to-one facial recognition technology to compare people’s facial features with the photos in their travel documents. According to CBP’s website, this ostensibly creates a “more seamless, secure, and safer travel experience,” but that wasn’t the case for Karen Hathaway. When she had her picture taken, the matching system spit out a red flag.

Hathaway figured it was an anomaly, as both of them have passports and regularly travel across the border, but the authorities promptly escorted Karen Hathaway to a room where she was detained and had her cellphone taken away. “Eventually that episode ends, but the next time we crossed there was a red flag in the computer that [says] this person has been detained before, so it automatically creates another red flag every time,” he said.

It later occurred to his wife that, in her passport photo, she did not have glasses on. Hathaway told the Prospect she now avoids wearing glasses and tries to mimic the hairstyle from her passport photo prior to re-entry. “I think that’s a real, graphic

Prevention through deterrence has been central to the bipartisan border security project for decades.

demonstration of this kind of surveillance state that’s run amok down here,” he said. Procurement documents reviewed by the Prospect reveal CBP’s intent to expand its error-prone identity verification system to land vehicles with the goal of collecting drivers’ and passengers’ facial biometrics. Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the capturing of biometrics that might be used for other purposes later on “a grave concern.” Moreover, given that “lots of people who live in the Mexican cities on the other side have special passes that allow them to cross regularly into the U.S.,” expanding the identity verification system to land vehicles may provide another avenue for CBP to entangle residents of cross-border communities in its technological dragnet.

When CBP seizes electronic devices at the border during questioning or detention, the agency engages in a widely used intelligence practice known as document and media exploitation (DOMEX). This practice involves the scraping and analysis of contents from phones and laptops. The contents of those devices are then combined with data from myriad sources, including government

databases, social media, and other records. There are minimal restrictions on what CBP can extract from electronic devices and how it may use that information. The agency’s own directive indicates that border agents may retain records from seized devices upon establishing probable cause or if “the information relates to immigration, customs, and other enforcement matters.” The bar is equally low for intelligence-sharing with other agencies.

The DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A), which provides intelligence support to CBP and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), “has a mandate as broad as the rest of the department,” said Spencer Reynolds, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice. The civilian intelligence-sharing arm of DHS has gained a reputation for targeting journalists and activists , and running large-scale collection operations in coercive environments like immigrant detention centers and jails.

“The office analyzes contents of phones or laptops seized by agencies like CBP and ICE, comparing them with personal data to create detailed pictures of people, their social networks, and their habits,” Reynolds told the Prospect. “I&A’s risks are particularly

high under an administration that is making good on its promises to go after critics and immigrants.”

In June, ICE released a notice of intent to sole-source a training contract to Magnet Forensics, a digital investigations software development company. Its platform includes Magnet Graykey, a smartphone-cracking software capable of providing “same-day access to the latest iOS and Android devices— often in under one hour,” its website states.

For its part, CBP announced in May plans to renew its contract with Cellebrite, an Israeli digital forensics company with a long-standing history of partnerships with local law enforcement and DHS. Similarly to Graykey, Cellebrite’s flagship tool—the Universal Forensic Extraction Device—allows clients to extract data from a broad range of electronic devices.

Intelligence-sharing is at the heart of I&A’s broad-based mission. It was also the focus of an executive order handed down by President Trump in March. Since then, his administration has been laying the groundwork for a large-scale strategic partnership with Peter Thiel’s Palantir. In recent months, the data analytics software giant

The border wall at El Camino del Diablo (The Devil’s Highway) in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert

has secured nearly a billion dollars in government contracts and re-ups.

On April 10, ICE disclosed that it had tapped Thiel’s company to develop a prototype for ImmigrationOS, a program designed to track people who are self-deporting and accelerate the agency’s targeting of those it is seeking to deport. Palantir, which began partnering with ICE in the early 2010s, currently operates a case management system for the agency. As 404 Media reported, its database enables ICE “to search for and filter people by hundreds of different, highly specific categories,” ranging from physical characteristics to LPR data.

Three days before ICE revealed its re-up with Palantir, the agency entered into a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The memo shredded taxpayer privacy protections and granted ICE permission to request sensitive information from the IRS on individuals facing deportation. It was a stark departure from IRS best practices, which previously had emphasized neutrality and set a high bar for information-sharing with law enforcement. Prior to the finalization of the memo, top officials at the agency—including former acting IRS commissioner Melanie Krause, a Trump appointee—resigned in protest of the agreement, alleging it would violate taxpayer privacy laws.

On April 11, WIRED exposed Palantir’s collaboration with Elon Musk’s now-discredited Department of Government Efficiency to develop a “mega API” for accessing IRS records and sharing them throughout the federal government. This came after DHS and at least three other agencies had partnered with Palantir for access to its flagship data analytics platform, Foundry.

The idea of centralizing extensive data on all Americans prompted sharp bipartisan pushback . In a June 17 letter to Palantir chief executive officer Alex Karp, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and nine other Democratic lawmakers voiced opposition to the IRS mega-database, describing it as a “surveillance nightmare that raises a host of legal concerns.”

Further opening the floodgates to unprecedented data sharing, the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC)—a lesser-known data broker with a chokehold on the market for information-sharing in the aviation industry—secured a sole-source contract from ICE to provide software services in May, procurement documents seen by the Prospect

On the border, surveillance towers create a sense of perpetual observation while eroding any semblance of privacy.

In recent months, Peter Thiel’s Palantir has secured nearly a billion dollars in government contracts.

show. The U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Department of the Treasury, and CBP have also contracted with ARC, which will sell an assortment of airline passengers’ travel data to ICE for immigration enforcement purposes.

Funding for the border-industrial complex has steadily increased over the past decade, and private-sector partners of all stripes have been eager to cash in. Some, like IBM and Google, are household names, but others are as obscure as they are numerous.

Researchers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been tracking the growing number of small-time players making their foray into the industry, documenting hundreds of tech companies that specialize in everything from biometrics to unattended ground sensors (which can detect footsteps).

The chilling effect of border authorities and immigration agents scooping up just about anyone suspected of crimmigration has reverberated across the country. The rise of indiscriminate enforcement activities—CBP raiding places of work and masked ICE agents detaining people at immigration courts and Home Depots—signals a nationwide implementation of the surveillancedriven immigration enforcement apparatus.

“Just because it’s happening at the border doesn’t mean it’s going to stay at the border,” Molnar told the Prospect. “We all need to pay attention to what happens in the border and in migration because it actually impacts all of us.” n

Caregivers, Taken Away

Mass deportations are worsening the staffing crisis in the direct care industry, threatening the lives of the elderly and people with disabilities.

By Whitney Curry Wimbish

Nelly Prieto’s home care clients are already afraid. Who will take care of them if they lose her as a caregiver? What will replace the services she provides? The 18-year home care veteran, patient transporter, and immigrant advocate in Washington state said the answers break her heart: no one, and nothing.

For years, the direct care industry, which provides home and community-based services for the elderly and people with disabilities, has struggled to hire and retain workers, and drew heavily from documented and undocumented immigrants.

But now, thanks to President Trump’s racist regime and mass deportations, that workforce will shrink even more, just as American society is rapidly aging.

For the next five years, 10,000 people will turn 65 years old every day, according to AARP. By 2040, the number of people aged 80 to 85, who are the likeliest to need direct care, will reach 14 million, a 111 percent increase from 2022, according to federal data. If Trump’s deportation policies stand, there won’t be enough caregivers to meet the demand for help.

“A lot of clients really are going to lose their lives,” Prieto told the Prospect. She knows that firsthand. When one of Prie -

to’s clients could no longer use her services because of an insurance change, there was no one else to look after her. “They couldn’t get another provider and my client was left alone. And when she was finally found, she had been left alone for so many days that she was wrapped up in her clothes with her own feces,” Prieto said. The woman was rushed to the hospital. But by then, “she said she didn’t want to live anymore,” and shortly afterward died.

Prieto had cared for the woman for two years. Her voice broke while telling the story.

Advocates, workers, and researchers said the ripple effects of Trump’s deportation

Ten thousand Americans turn 65 years old every day, spiking the need for caregivers who in many cases are immigrants.

policies on the care industry are dire. People who need care but have no one to help them will suffer alone and struggle to maintain their quality of life; some will lose their homes and be driven onto the streets.

Americans 50 years and older are the fastest-growing group of people experiencing homelessness, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness. The number of Americans aged 50 or older who are experiencing homelessness is expected to triple in the next five years.

Not only older Americans will feel the pain, said Alison Chandra, a pediatric home health nurse in Utah, who accompanies young clients to school and provides constant care “that keeps them safe and loved at home, instead of in institutions.” She has accompanied one client to school each day since kindergarten and is starting fourth grade with him next year. “I’m the reason why he’s in a class with his peers, with his friends, with his community, where he belongs,” said Chandra, who is also a health care and disability justice advocate. The child could go to an institution. But then he wouldn’t get hugs from his neighbor, or see friends from his church, or just exist as a kid. “What’s better for a child?” she said.

“A lot of the clients, they don’t want to let you go, they don’t know how to get along with another caregiver.”

Without available caregivers, family members will need to look after their elderly and disabled relatives. More Americans every day become part of the “sandwich generation,” raising children while caring for parents (or even the “club sandwich generation” if they have a grandparent or great-grandparent needing care). Family members may find the effort so demanding that they abandon their jobs; but in addition to the economic impact, trying to care for a loved one can be emotionally harrowing, especially for someone without proper training.

“It takes a long time to get to know your client, because every client has different medical issues. If you’re not trained as a home care provider to handle those issues you’re not going to know how,” Prieto said.

As with other industries that rely on immigrants, including construction, farming, hospitality, household work, and meat processing, mass deportations could bring direct care work to a standstill. Documented immigrants make up 28 percent of the overall direct care workers, who provide hands-on personal care to people with disabilities and chronic conditions and the elderly, such as bathing, dressing, and eating. Documented immigrants make up 32 percent of home care workers specifically, who provide that care in people’s homes, said Kezia Scales, vice president of research and evaluation at care industry researcher and advocate PHI.

There’s no definitive data on the number of undocumented workers in the sector.

The American Immigration Council puts the figure at almost 7 percent of the home health aide workforce and 4.4 percent of all

ICE raids and deportations will increase after the GOP budget bill devoted $170 billion to immigration control.

personal care aides, but advocates say the number is likely much higher. Those are the workers most at risk in Trump’s America, Scales said, but Trump is also targeting legal immigrants, revoking immigrants’ right to work, and attacking U.S. citizens, too.

“A lot of immigrant direct care workers would not be directly impacted by deportation orders because they have work authorization, but what we think is very likely is that the broader chilling effect of these incredibly drastic and punitive actions will impact [them] as well because many of them live in households with mixed immigration status,” Scales said. A likely scenario is that workers will leave formal employment and provide care services under the table, which leaves workers and patients alike with fewer protections.

“Generally the widespread fear and uncertainty caused by these deportation orders will make individuals leave the workforce, maybe to go into the gray market where they can work under the radar or leave the workforce all together,” Scales

said. “What we’ll really see is a contraction of the workforce altogether as those with whatever documentation status opt out because it’s just too uncertain.”

It wouldn’t take much to upend the industry, said elder law attorney Harry Margolis, founder of Margolis Bloom & D’Agostino and writer for the Squared Away blog published by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

“The way economics works, you don’t need a huge change to create a huge problem,” Margolis said. “If you cut the availability of caregivers by 10 percent … it’s going to create huge problems.”

The direct care industry is already contending with huge workforce problems. Though direct care added 1.6 million new jobs over the last decade to stand at five million as of 2023, according to PHI, workers don’t stick around for long. Federal data puts the median hourly wage at $16.78; PHI data shows almost 40 percent of caregivers live in low-income households, and almost half rely on Medicaid, cash transfers, nutrition assistance, or other forms of public help.

The days are physically and emotionally demanding, and the job comes with “heavy workloads, scheduling challenges, inadequate supervision, and limited training and career advancement prospects,” PHI said. There is no comprehensive data on care industry turnover, the group said, but assessments of specific jobs give a clue of the sector’s employee retention. Last year, PHI estimated 80 percent turnover in home care. Between 2017 and 2018, the median annual turnover for nursing assistants in nursing homes was almost 100 percent.

“Because these are low-paid, low-technical-skill, high-personal-skill, high-humanskill jobs, they’re staffed by people who don’t have a lot of bargaining power in the economy, and those are often immigrants,” Margolis said. “And if we make it harder for them to be here or harder for them to work … it’s going to be harder and harder to find care when you need it.”

Direct care added 1.6 million new jobs over the last decade, but workers don’t stick around for long.

The industry expects to add more than 860,000 new jobs between 2022 and 2032, the largest growth of any job sector in the country. But workers and advocates say open positions stay unfilled for months, and when someone does get hired, there’s no guarantee that they’ll stay.

“The situation is accelerating because we have more and more people who need the care, and we haven’t figured out how to both increase the supply of workers to meet that need and rationalize services or modernize services in ways that would improve efficiency,” Scales said.

In January, Trump revoked the guidelines that had earlier forbidden ICE to raid “sensitive areas,” leaving those in schools, places of worship, and hospitals and care facilities vulnerable to immigration raids. Immigration advocates also expect a sharp increase in I-9 audits, “silent raids,” in which federal agents check whether employees have work authorization. The two attacks can bleed into each other, said Marisa Díaz, immigration worker justice program director at the National Employment Law Project.

“What we’re seeing is that even in cases where ICE goes to a workplace to initiate an I-9 audit, we’ve seen a trend where they’ll use that to talk to workers and try to arrest them,” Díaz said. Under the last Trump administration, I-9 audits hit a record high of 6,454, quadruple the number under the Obama administration. There will be at least that many again, Díaz expects.

“There are cases that have been reported in Maryland, Arizona, Texas, and Louisiana, where ICE arrived at a workplace with a Notice of Inspection … it’s not a warrant of any kind, it does not give ICE the right to talk to anyone,” Díaz said. “But they use it as an excuse to talk to workers and arrest them on the spot.”

It’s impossible to quantify the effect for patients when they lose a caregiver, especially if the loss is because of a raid, said Sam Brooks, director of public policy at the National Consumer Voice for Quality LongTerm Care.

“We’re concerned, certainly, that workers that are there now will not want to go to work for fear of being caught up in these raids, but it also has a horrible effect on the residents,” Brooks said. “Imagine if police just wantonly came in and took a resident or a worker, imagine how you would feel … the trauma on people getting care there is severe.”

While Chandra, the nurse and advocate in Utah, is not at risk of deportation herself, she has seen the fear among those she’s connected to through the wider medical community via the nonprofit Heterotaxy Connection, an organization focusing on a condition her son has.

“Just speaking to clinicians in our research consortium, their postdoc students are being stopped on the street and questioned,” she said. “It is medicine as a whole that’s being threatened in this country.”

The result is a crisis at all levels of the medical industry, said Dr. Brett Lewis, resident physician at Boston Medical Center, the largest safety-net hospital in the region.

“From my standpoint, everyone is terrified. My patients are forgoing prenatal care because they’re afraid to come in to the clinic, to the hospital because they’re afraid they’re going to be picked up by ICE on the way. They’re afraid to pick up their blood pressure medications. Staff are afraid, certified nursing assistants, custodial staff who are literally making our hospital run are afraid to come in to work,” she said. In Boston, Lewis explained, many patients and employees are Haitian immigrants, and the Trump administration’s revocation of Temporary Protected Status, which allowed Haitians to stay in the U.S. and work, has caused havoc in the health care community.

SEIU Executive Vice President Leslie Frane sees the deadly GOP spending law as creating far more problems for people needing care and the immigrant workforce. Along with Lewis, Prieto, and hundreds of union members, Frane was in Washington, D.C., this summer to fight unsuccessfully against the legislation. It imposes nearly $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and supercharges Trump’s deportation goals, with $170 billion for immigration control, including tripling Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s budget to nearly $30 billion and adding $45 billion for new detention centers.

“It is no coincidence that when Republicans wanted to find money to fund tax cuts for the wealthy, Medicaid is where they went first,” Frane said. “It’s partly because it’s a big budget item. But, frankly, it’s also because the people who rely on Medicaid for care are working people, poor people, seniors, people with disabilities. They are among the most vulnerable people in our society and they are the people that Republicans consider expendable.” n

PHOTO ESSAY

ICEINL.A.

For more than a month, Los Angeles has been under siege from federal operations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE detained over 1,600 people just in a 16-day stretch in June, inspiring alternating bouts of anger, fear, and protest. President Trump deployed the National Guard and even U.S. Marines to counter demonstrations supporting the city’s immigrants, but community members have not stopped speaking out and confronting ICE raids when they see them.

Rian Dundon is a photographer who spent several days on the ground in Los Angeles taking pictures of scenes throughout the city: the protesters, the Marines, and the vibrant culture of Los Angeles that has shined through in these demonstrations. We present them as a snapshot of life in a city under authoritarian attack by Donald Trump and Stephen Miller.

This story was co-published and supported by the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Funding has been made possible by The Puffin Foundation. —David Dayen

To see more photos in the series, visit prospect.org/ ICEinLAPhotos.

SCENES OF A CITY UNDER SIEGE

BY RIAN DUNDON

Clockwise from upper left: A security PSA featuring U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem screens in the arrivals hall of LAX on June 19, 2025.

Protester on Sunset Boulevard, June 21, 2025

U.S. Marines idle outside the Wilshire Federal Building in West Los Angeles, June 22, 2025.

An empty sidewalk in Downtown L.A. the morning of a nearby immigration sting in the Fashion District, where escalating raids have caused business to slow, June 24, 2025.

A handwritten memorial marks the site where three people were arrested in an immigration sting a few hours earlier, Pasadena, June 21, 2025.

Protesters rally outside the Metropolitan Detention Center, June 19, 2025.

Organizing to Win

Greg Casar wants to do for Democrats what he did for construction workers in Texas.

By David Dayen

It was 97 degrees outside, and Greg Casar was in a fragrance store, looking for an envelope.

He had marched on that June evening with about 30 workers from two restaurants owned by the mogul Stephen Starr. They stopped first at St. Anselm, a steakhouse in the historic Union Market District in Northeast Washington, D.C., where 85 percent of the workers signed cards seeking union representation and later won an election. But the STARR Restaurant Group argued that the election was void because the Trump administration’s National Labor Relations Board had only two of its five seats filled, one less than a quorum, and therefore could not certify the results.

Casar, a second-term congressmember from Austin, Texas, had visited St. Anselm once before, in February, and the STARR Group’s leadership promised him then that it would honor employee wishes. But St. Anselm and another restaurant, Pastis, not only broke that promise; they started reducing hours, changing work rules, and even firing union-supporting workers. “I haven’t had a raise in two years,” one baker told

Casar at a meetup before the march. “I can barely afford my rent.”

St. Anselm workers had signed a petition demanding wage hikes and union recognition. But the hostess told Casar she was not authorized to accept anything related to the labor dispute. Casar had experienced these indignities from management a million times as a labor organizer. It wasn’t going to deter him.

“Sometimes one of the tactics that our restaurant uses is to make us feel small and powerless,” said Bridget, a baker at St. Anselm. “Having a member of Congress there … makes us feel as if what we’re doing is legitimate.”

Casar suggested that they could seal the petition in an envelope for the hostess to deliver to her superiors. That was deemed acceptable. Now they needed the envelope.

The fragrance store was next door. “A weird fact about me is, really strong perfume gives me a little lightheadedness, I hate it,” Casar said later. “So actually going into there, I was like, I gotta get in and out.” The mission proved unsuccessful. But someone fashioned a sheet of loose-leaf paper

into an envelope, stuck the petition inside, and the hostess took it. Chants of “¡Si se puede!” broke out among the mostly Spanish-speaking workers.

Casar was 1,500 miles from his constituents. It was the hottest day of the year so far in D.C. He was on his own time. There were no TV cameras. I was the only press.

A couple of days later, in his Capitol Hill office, Casar told me the march was “the most fun I had all week, man! … It’s a whole lot better than sitting in a committee hearing.” He believed his presence, as the second-highest ranking Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee, could make a difference in the unionization fight. But secondarily, he considered it a way to stay grounded, outside the trappings of power and in solidarity with the kind of people who brought him to Washington. “We need more congressmen and -women,” Casar told me, “who feel more comfortable marching into a fancy D.C. restaurant with a union than mingling inside of one with lobbyists.”

In January, Casar, who is 36 and just three years removed from serving on the Austin City Council, took over as the tenth

chair in the history of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. It was an inauspicious moment to be a leader on the left in Washington. Donald Trump had just swept back into the presidency, winning dramatic gains in many urban precincts represented by many CPC members. Many big liberal cities were under assault from ICE raids and threats to federal funding. Notwithstanding the cautious, business-friendly Kamala

Harris campaign, centrist Democrats had already decided to blame progressives for her loss and every other loss of the past halfcentury, forming new groups and fundraising schemes to steer the party to the right.

What bothered Casar most was waning support for Democrats from working-class voters, something he had seen firsthand on the campaign trail for Harris. He saw it as an existential crisis for the party of the

New Deal and Great Society, predicated on fighting for the common man and woman.

“If we become a party of upper-income people, then I think we’re toast because we become a contradiction in and of ourselves as a party,” he said.

This year, Casar has focused squarely on reviving Democrats’ populist roots, while trusting that such positioning can play across the ideological divide. While the CPC has typ-

Casar has always approached political work with the same mindset forged as a labor organizer.

Texas is the most dangerous state in the nation for workers, particularly construction workers.

ically tended to its own membership in policy development and political strategy, Casar has pitched frontliners and swing-district members on his anti-oligarchy message.

And the CPC is plotting to introduce what they call the “battleship bill,” a funhousemirror version of the Gingrich Contract with America in 1994, designed to be used for campaigning in every contested district in the 2026 midterms, and as a set of deliverables after taking power. While the specifics have not been finalized, it’s likely to include measures on fighting corruption in D.C., lowering costs at the pharmacy counter, expanding Social Security benefits, and raising taxes on the rich. “It’s a moment where we can actually lead on it but bring the entire caucus along with us,” Casar said.

It’s an audacious strategy, given the low esteem in which Democrats are held by the voting public. The belief that the many cats in the Democratic coalition can be herded toward a singular goal may be even more foolhardy. But organizers focus on what brings people together instead of what drives them apart, and prioritize winning tangible gains over winning an argument. Casar has done this from his earliest years in politics, when he was in the struggle with perhaps the most marginalized people in the entire country—and helping them prevail.

Greg Casar was born in Houston to immigrant parents from Mexico, yet not acquainted with squalor: His father was a physician, and he studied at prep schools. But he grew up amid protests against the Bush administration’s war in Iraq and rallies for comprehensive immigration reform. He entered college at the University of Virginia thinking he wanted to be a teacher, but quickly learned the realities of American life. “So many students in the high schools where we would go in to volunteer teach are getting driven to school in the cars that they’re sleeping in at night with parents,” Casar said. He found a different passion: ensuring everyone had a fair shot.

Organizing for living wages for campus employees later took him back to Texas, as a summer intern with Workers Defense Project, a research outlet and worker center for primarily Latino and immigrant construction workers. Texas is the most dangerous state in the nation for workers—5,165 died on the job throughout the 2010s—and the only state without universal workers’ compensation. Construction work is particularly brutal and disproportionately conducted by Latinos, many of them undocumented.

“Especially in a place like Texas that is notoriously anti-union and anti-immigration, we weren’t going to have the power

to individually shape policy agendas,” said Emily Timm, a co-founder of Workers Defense. So organizers developed coalitions with churches, neighborhood groups, environmentalists—whoever shared their interests. And although worker centers traditionally had standoffish relationships with unions, Workers Defense actively sought them out. “Workers Defense and Greg made a priority to engage in deep conversation and joint organizing that built a powerful force in Austin,” said Rick Levy, president of the Texas AFL- CIO

Timm hired Casar as an intern in 2010, and he jumped into a campaign to secure mandatory rest and water breaks on construction sites. After a worker died from a heart attack a mile from the Workers Defense offices in Austin, the group held a vigil, worked with labor allies, and pressed the city council, sharing stories of accidents and deaths in the Texas heat. By the end of that first summer, Austin had approved the first right-to-water breaks in the South. (In 2023, Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a law overturning local worker protections, but it was ruled unconstitutional and is now working through appeals courts.)

After graduating, Casar returned to Austin full-time, becoming Workers Defense’s policy director and witnessing the power of

DAVID

J.

“He’s not just interested in symbolic victories,” said one of Casar’s colleagues. “He’s about what is going to deliver a victory for working people.”

unified working people. “We were organizing sometimes workers that had started a wildcat strike on their own and then came to us to be like, ‘Hey, we all just walked off the job, what do we do next?’” he told me. At weekly Tuesday night meetings, Casar communed with workers, helping them document safety violations and recover stolen wages, with back pay often presented on the spot to raucous applause.

“He really understood how engaging people around working conditions, the most basic economic needs of their day-to-day lives, was such a powerful motivator to bring people together,” Timm said.

A major initiative involved community benefit agreements on projects receiving government subsidies and tax breaks, to ensure that the jobs created would be good jobs. One incident stood out. White Lodging was a developer building a 34-story Marriott near the Austin convention center. In exchange for $3.8 million in tax incentives and fee waivers, White Lodging promised to pay prevailing, union-scale wages to construction workers. But Workers Defense heard from members that they weren’t making these wages.

Casar then discovered that assistant city manager Rudy Garza had signed a secret agreement with White Lodging to pay some workers below prevailing wages, as long as the overall project met “anticipated targeted average wage rates.” Garza left government shortly thereafter and, according to Casar, founded an engineering company that benefited from the hotel project. Workers Defense demanded a meeting with Austin’s mayor

over the secret agreement. “They’re like, ‘Well, we keep our promises that we signed off on this piece of paper,’” Casar said. “We keep our promises to the developer, not we keep our promises to the workers or to the law.”

The outcry led to a city council hearing, where a group of housekeepers showed up wearing “I support White Lodging” stickers. Several of the housekeepers were friends or relatives of the construction workers; Casar talked to the housekeepers in Spanish and found out they were being paid for their time, and were offered higher wages to side with White Lodging. Casar flipped the housekeepers, and unified opposition to undercutting workers.

After two years, the city council revoked White Lodging’s incentive deal. But Casar was frustrated. “This should not have been so damn hard,” he said. His allies thought they needed someone closer to the power, able to organize the council the way they organized workers. One supporter of Casar’s likened it to “salts,” experienced organizers who get hired at workplaces to coordinate unionization efforts. As Casar remembers it, she said to him, “You need to go be our salt on city council.”

Casar’s opportunity arose in 2014 when Austin became the last big city to switch from at-large to geographic districts. Before then, the council “all came from the downtown Austin area, because that area had the greatest voter turnout,” said Steve Adler, who served two terms as Austin’s mayor from 2015 to 2023. That tilted priorities toward business and commercial real estate interests. But only one incumbent was re-elected in 2014; all the downtown councilmembers had to run against one another. Casar won election in predominantly poor, nonwhite District 4, and at 25 became the city’s youngest and likely most leftist councilmember ever.

He approached government work with an organizer mindset. “This world is replete with politicians who are politicians only,” said José Garza, who was executive director at Workers Defense Project at the time. “I quickly realized Greg was a lot more than that. Greg always gave not just Workers Defense but the progressive movement in Austin direction. He gave us guidance. Strategic vision.”

Casar wrote legislation making Austin the first municipality in the South to provide paid sick leave for all workers, while finding lawmakers in other Texas cities to spread the idea. He secured “fair chance” hiring, bringing together labor and criminal justice reformers to ban businesses from asking prospective workers if they had previously been incarcerated. He helped win livingwage increases, including for subcontractors who had historically been left out. The first unions for hotel workers and nurses in Austin were established with his support.

“He’s not just interested in symbolic victories,” Timm said. “He’s about what is going to win and deliver a victory for working people.”

Yet Casar’s initiatives to defy state immigration policy and make Austin a “Freedom City,” end a citywide homeless camping ban, and reallocate police department funds courted controversy in hard-right Texas. Conservatives caricatured his ideas and forced policy reversals. Police budgets were restored by the state legislature; the camping ban was reinstituted by Austin voters; even the paid sick leave ordinance was struck down in the courts.

Adler saw Casar as principled, despite attracting criticism. “He built a reputation for being kind of radical but was not,” he said. “He finds the path to bring along the greatest number of votes and achieve on his values, even if it’s not the path he would take.”

Early on, Adler asked Casar to chair the council’s Planning and Housing Committee. “Everyone told me that was just political suicide,” he told me. “And it felt like it, because we made so many people mad.” On one side were developers wanting to raze neighborhoods and usher in luxury housing; on the other were Not In My Backyard activists opposed to housing stock that disrupted neighborhood character. Casar listened to the fast-growing city’s one million residents, and their need for a better and less expensive place to live.

The showpiece was a bond for acquiring land and building affordable housing, which some city leaders wanted to top out at $100 million. Casar successfully raised that to $250 million, the largest in Texas history, and voters approved it with 73 percent of the vote in 2018. A subsequent transit bond had even more housing funding. He followed that up with an ordinance called “Affordability Unlocked,” which eliminated parking mandates, minimum lot sizes, setbacks, height limits, and other zoning require -

ments, as long as 50 percent of the development project was reserved for affordable units. All affordable housing torn down for new development had to be replaced onefor-one with affordable units. A separate measure enabled more accessory dwelling units on lots throughout the city.

“We broke through with saying we need more housing but at all different levels of income,” Casar said. “But that doesn’t mean that you go and knock down the existing working-class apartments that you have to put a glitzy tower on top of it.”

A broader zoning code rewrite failed in the council and then in the courts. But Casar’s changes did facilitate thousands of new housing units in Austin. In 2022, there were 18 new homes permitted in Austin for every 1,000 residents, more than seven times the rate of Los Angeles and San Francisco.

That last statistic came from the Ezra Klein/Derek Thompson book Abundance , which criticized blue-state housing policy and held up Texas as an alternative. But it rarely gets mentioned that the architect of housing changes in Austin is the head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. And it certainly doesn’t mention his role in empowering the tenant rights movement in the city.

After helping residents at mobile home parks end forced electricity shutoffs and rescind eviction notices, Casar added funding in the city budget to stand up what would become Building and Strengthening Tenant Action (BASTA , the Spanish word for “Enough!”), which organizes tenant associations across Austin, educating renters on their rights and negotiating solutions with landlords. “It was really that initial support and vision that Greg and his team had that created the project,” said Shoshana Krieger, BASTA’s project director.

Working on housing left Casar with a nuanced assessment of abundance. He agrees with and has demonstrated the importance of increasing state capacity and delivering benefits for constituents quickly and universally. “If you want to add another bathroom into your house because your aging parents are moving in with you, and it takes two years to get done, that is dumb,” he said.

Yet he forcefully rejected “people that want to use abundance framing as an excuse to usher in the 1988 Republican platform into the Democratic platform.” And he named names, going after writer Josh Barro

for saying onstage at the centrist gathering WelcomeFest that abundance necessarily means disempowering unions. “I think we have to become the pro-worker, anti-billionaire party,” Casar said. “And I think there are those folks that want the abundance frame to supersede that.”

On the same June day as WelcomeFest— which Casar prefers to call WalmartFest because of its partial funding from the Walton Foundation—he questioned Education Secretary Linda McMahon, the wrestling family tycoon with a net worth of $3.2 billion, at a House committee hearing. Casar asked McMahon how much she would personally benefit from the Republican budget bill extending the Trump tax cuts. “I’ve not sat down and worked with my accountants,” McMahon replied, and when pressed, she dismissed the “ridiculous line of questioning.”

“I think we have to become the pro-worker, anti-billionaire party,” Casar said.

and relatable to someone working 12 hours a day on a construction site. If Democrats propose universal child care, he said, just cap the cost to a percentage of income, for everyone, without an extra form or a means test, and get it running within a short period of time, unlike the Democrats’ prescription drug price negotiations, which passed in 2022 and whose lower prices don’t begin to come online until 2026.

“No, it’s not ridiculous because here’s what’s important,” Casar countered. “There are families watching at home from my district that could lose their health care … And what it’s paying for is, overwhelmingly, tax cuts for the wealthiest people in the country.” Republican committee chair Tim Walberg (R-MI) tried to halt the questioning, and McMahon bobbed and weaved. But Casar made his point: Billionaires didn’t even know how many millions they would reap from creating devastation among the nation’s poor.

Later that day, Casar made an appearance at the Center for American Progress, discussing how to win back working-class voters. The other panelist was Rep. Nikki Budzinski (D-IL), vice chair for policy at the New Democrat Coalition, the largest caucus in Congress for the party’s moderate wing. In contrast to the leftist-bashing at WelcomeFest, these two representatives from separate poles of the party spent most of the panel agreeing with one another.

“To me it’s not a left-right issue, we’ve got to run directly toward working-class people,” Casar said at the panel. “We’ve got to make their concerns central to who we are as a party, central to our policy, central to the way that we talk about issues.”

Budzinski followed by proposing a “middle of the night” test: The party should prioritize subjects that keep families awake, like grocery prices or child care. Casar supplemented it with a “construction site” test: Those priorities should be explainable

There does seem to be some consensus that Democrats need to rediscover their purpose as a party. “Whether you’re talking about AOC or Vicente Gonzalez, and that’s the entire spectrum of Latino Democrats, both of them believe in economic populism,” said Chuck Rocha, Democratic strategist and former Bernie Sanders adviser. Rocha called it “a uniting thing. It can bring together all sides of the party.”

With his labor organizing background, Casar is seen as someone who can authentically deliver that message. “Greg’s values around that are solid, they didn’t develop after the election,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), Casar’s predecessor as Progressive Caucus chair. Levy, of the Texas AFL- CIO, believes that Democrats allowed an opening to Republicans by straying from workingclass concerns, and marching with unionizing workers, as Casar has done in Austin and Washington, sends an important message. “The way to attract swing voters is not to say, ‘We’ll be your friend, we don’t believe in anything,’” Levy said. “It’s saying, ‘This is the way to make your life better.’”

To suggest that Democrats learned their lesson and now have one voice on economic issues would be far too optimistic. The prescription drug price lag wasn’t due to bureaucracy so much as oligarchy, as Casar acknowledged to me. Democratic allies of the pharmaceutical industry succeeded in delaying the price effects so companies could enjoy a few more years of unfettered profits. Those forces inside the party haven’t

withered away. Some of them congregated at WelcomeFest, up the street from Casar and Budzinski’s less well-attended gathering. Some of them funded the Center for American Progress, where Casar and Budzinski were speaking.

Casar nevertheless insisted that the days of Chuck Schumer happily trading one bluecollar voter for two affluent suburban voters are over. He suggested a generational split: Democrats who came of age through the financial crisis and COVID, who experienced inflation as the culmination of a cost-of-living crisis, who watched their leaders deliver piecemeal reforms that didn’t resonate with the electorate, are ready to cast aside the old politics. “They are young and newer, they’re happy to get uninvited from Big Pharma dinner but win their election campaigning on cutting their profits,” he said.

He doesn’t pivot every political development to the price of eggs. He has forcefully condemned ICE roundups as undermining all Americans’ civil rights. When Trump bombed Iranian nuclear sites, he was among the first to call the strikes illegal. And though Democratic Socialists of America unendorsed his first campaign for Congress for refusing to support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement in Israel, Casar has supported

a cease-fire in Gaza since the first month of the war, and opposed offensive weapons transfers to Israel.

But he can channel those values into America’s economic divides. At a stop on Bernie Sanders’s “Fighting Oligarchy” tour in McAllen, Texas, Casar marveled at “these right-wing politicians—they eat food cooked by immigrants, they get their fancy cars cleaned by immigrants, they do their corrupt deals in buildings engineered, built, and maintained by immigrants—then they have the gall to turn around and say immigrants are the problem.”

In March, Casar participated in an afternoon of House floor speeches that brought New Dems, Blue Dogs, and progressives together to promote economic patriotism and demand a stronger alternative to Trump. The project reinforced a challenge to the Democratic leadership to shed status quo governance and reinvent the brand. Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-PA), who represents a swing district in and around Pittsburgh, coordinated the speeches. “It’s about taking back the fight for the American dream and opportunity,” Deluzio told me.

Casar’s speech focused on corruption, recalling his past battles in Austin as a labor organizer. “We didn’t win by going on bended knee and begging big corporations

In June, Casar confronted restaurant management in D.C. on behalf of workers fired for seeking a union.

for better treatment. We did it by unifying working people around some basic ideas … and this is what we need the Democratic Party to be all about.”

Jayapal knew of Casar through Local Progress, the network of state and local lawmakers where he served as a co-chair. After his election to Congress in 2022, she installed him as caucus whip. “I wanted somebody who was really grounded in the experience of standing up for working people,” she said. “I felt like he would have a great future.”

The chaotic, dysfunctional Republicanled House of Representatives of 2023-2024 offered no possibility for progressive victories. But Casar did his best to stand out. He pushed the Biden administration to propose nationwide heat safety protections, an echo of his first win at Workers Defense, by holding a thirst strike on the Capitol steps on a scorching July day. Biden’s Department of Labor did propose a rule, but it wasn’t completed before Trump took over.

Casar served on the House Agriculture Committee last year. After learning about 13-year-olds with “glittered school backpacks” working overnight shifts at meatpacking facilities, he proposed an amendment to the farm bill banning companies from federal contracts if they vio -

lated the decades-old ban on child labor. The initial pushback came not from Republicans, but from older committee staff, arguing the amendment would put frontline members in a tough spot with industry. “So then I went and spoke individually with every single member,” Casar explained. “And they all said to me, go ahead and run it, I’ll vote for your amendment.”

At the hearing, Republicans were flustered, voting down the amendment and reduced to arguing that the price of beef would go up if meatpackers couldn’t hire children. The same skittish committee staff told Casar that was the best moment in the markup. “Sometimes in these institutions there’s just built-in hesitancy and built-in caution of not pissing anybody off,” Casar told me. “But if you don’t piss anybody off then you’re probably not doing much.”

During the 2024 elections, Casar was dispatched to working-class Latino communities as a surrogate. And he knew the election was over when an HVAC worker in Nevada told him that Trump was a jerk, but he might at least help him work year-round, while Democrats were focused on “other stuff,” which the man eventually admitted meant LGBT rights. Casar realized Democrats had to organize a bigger base, by letting workers know the party stood for them economically before anything else.

When Jayapal was termed out as CPC chair, Casar took over, and at the caucus’s first meeting, he read from Franklin Roosevelt’s 1936 renomination speech, which introduced the term “economic royalists” to the nation, describing the forces of oligarchy aligned against him. “The privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself,” Roosevelt said 89 years ago. But he could have been talking about 2025.

After the loss, House Democrats assembled for a listening session, where party leaders took solace that, in a challenging inflationary environment, they did better than incumbent center-left parties in Europe. “I was like, what about right next door?” Casar said, pointing to the Morena party’s re-election victory in Mexico. Casar cited two elements that he felt drove that win: the outgoing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, dramatically increased senior pensions, and he communicated regularly to the public about his results. Casar took this lesson: “In a moment of massive cynicism in our democratic system, we have got to do things that will make a big difference.”

Casar was itching for a fight, and Elon Musk fell into his lap.

Musk is a quasi-constituent—the Tesla Gigafactory in Austin, where Cybertrucks are made and where the CEO sleeps on occasion, is inside Casar’s congressional district. But when the world’s richest man embedded in government to advance his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative, threatening the careers of millions of federal workers and the lives of hundreds of millions who depend on U.S. government services, the reaction from Democrats was mixed. Some wanted to cozy up to a man who spent a fortune electing Donald Trump; others joined the “DOGE caucus” and found ways to agree that government could cut back some waste.

Not all Democrats were on board with Casar’s “Fire Elon Musk” campaign—until it worked.

Casar disagreed, internally to his colleagues and in public. His organizing vehicle, unveiled within two weeks of the inauguration, was a simple line: “Fire Elon Musk.” Casar remembers deploying the phrase at a rally in front of the Department of Labor, and “the place lit on fire.”

To an almost comical degree, Casar took every opportunity to keep up the pressure, in press conferences, hearings, media appearances, and rallies. “We went after him every single day to try to drag down not only his popularity but Trump’s popularity with him,” he said. Casar perfected a talking point that Musk’s companies (like SpaceX and Starlink) were earning $8 million a day in federal government contracts; pretty soon, that figure was coming out of the mouths of the Democratic leadership. He exposed every example of Musk’s selfenrichment. And he pointed to a statutory obligation: As a “special government employee,” Musk could only work in the executive branch for 130 days in any calendar year. The deadline was May 30, and Casar led dozens of Democrats demanding that Musk follow the law.

The failures of DOGE to make much

TOM WILLIAMS

“He’s gone from spending time with construction workers to millionaire members of Congress … but Greg has not let any of that change him.”

impact on government spending, while causing counterproductive chaos at home and abroad, had much to do with Musk’s plummeting approval ratings. But a Democrat pointing out the inherent corruption in oligarchical government didn’t hurt. Some anonymous Democrats whispered that antagonizing Musk would trigger a backlash, and that the focus was misplaced. The test of this was the Wisconsin state supreme court race in April, where Musk spent heavily on the Republicans. Democrats won the swing-state seat by double digits.

“Those voices suddenly shut up really fast when we won,” Casar said, laughing. And though earlier, the White House dismissed the May 30 end date for Musk, that’s precisely when he left. Casar saw it as proof of his theory of Democrats needing to return to populism. “I think taking the richest man in the world out of running the government himself is a pretty big win for a Democratic Party lost in the woods … If Democrats are willing to name a villain, be interesting and make news, we can actually win over public sentiment.”

Casar has traveled widely in his quest to rebuild the Democrats’ blue-collar base. He’s ventured into red America on the Fighting Oligarchy tour, and held town halls in the districts of Freedom Caucus Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) and swing-seat freshman Rep. Gabe Evans (R-CO), who was there in spirit as a cardboard cutout with chicken legs. Casar has organized fellow CPC members to do “Democrats Show Up” town halls

in GOP districts, and dozens more have been planned.

After hearing from Evans’s worried constituents about Medicaid cuts, Casar read their letters in front of Evans’s office, and even directly confronted Evans, who claimed that the Republican mega-bill did not slash Medicaid. “It’s getting cut by a trillion dollars,” Casar replied.

“I recognize some of the viewers at home disagree with me on a variety of social issues,” Casar said on Fox News in March, “but I think we can agree that Republican members of Congress have no business going along with Elon Musk slashing Social Security, destroying Medicaid and Medicare, firing veterans, all to give out tax breaks to billionaires.” He told the conservative audience that “this should be the new message of the Democratic Party,” on Fox and even on Trump’s Truth Social. These efforts did not sway Republicans from passing their mega-bill, which represents the largest regression of the social safety net in history, while also adding those billionaire tax breaks. But rather than mourn, Casar sees an opening to organize, in the wake of Republicans betraying the same working-class people they rallied to their side last year.

In advance of next year’s midterms, the Progressive Caucus is devising a “battleship bill,” full of economic-policy proposals that are popular across America yet prevented from passage by corporate resistance. Caucus members recently discussed the concept at a daylong retreat.

While CPC task forces will finalize the contents, Casar expected it to include a longstalled idea that would ban members of Congress from trading stocks, and he discussed other possibilities, like scrapping the cap on Social Security payroll taxes and limiting prescription drug prices to the levels paid across the border in Canada. Based on some of his recent comments, the agenda will also feature planks about breaking up monopolies, reducing big money’s effect on politics, promoting unionization and protecting workers, and expanding benefits for seniors.

“He’s creating a process that is creating buy-in with a really wide swath of members,” said Elizabeth Wilkins, president of the Roosevelt Institute. “Not as this is the Greg Casar Show but lifting up other members, building coalitions.”

The CPC hasn’t really tried in its history to advance an agenda to unify the whole party. It has often authored “flagship” bills like Medicare for All or the Green New Deal, things that define what it means to be a progressive and point to where Democrats should go in the future. But the battleship bill is an agenda for next year.

Casar pitched me on it. “The idea is to campaign on these issues in both blue and purple districts, win the election, and then pass these things soon after we win the majority,” he said. “And then if Trump doesn’t sign them, then we’ve established the platform upon which candidates can run for president … and then if we win a trifecta, actually pass them.”

Passing the legislation, in Casar’s conception, is as important as the campaign, even if in 2027 nothing good will get past Trump’s veto pen. “There are some members that say, ‘Why are you making me walk the plank. Why are you making me vote for something that will piss off the money donors, that’s never going to become law?’ The reason you do it is to show people that you campaigned on something and were serious and passed it. And then you can tell them who they need to unelect for it to go into effect.”

At a time when outside strategists are readying a Project 2029, the CPC-led bid to build trust with the electorate has a different feel. The success of Zohran Mamdani in New York City suggests that Democratic voters want something to believe in, and they want to see the politicians they support actually deliver on bold policies. Casar is following that script.

“Sometimes when you hear ‘I want to find things to run on we can all run on,’ that is code for [something] that the billionaires won’t get mad at us,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who has supported Casar since his first congressional campaign and appeared with him at rallies. “For Greg, what it means is let’s do something real … And that makes Greg more dangerous to the wealth class in this country.”

Organizing the Democratic caucus may be difficult. But José Garza, who is now Austin’s district attorney, thinks Casar is ready for the challenge. “He’s gone from spending time with construction workers to millionaire members of Congress,” Garza said. “But Greg has not let any of that change him. He figures out a way to change the culture around him.” n

THE ILLUSION OF CHOICE

Republicans say that VA patients can get equivalent private-sector care anywhere in the U.S. Here’s a 50-state reality check.

By Suzanne Gordon ILLUSTRATION BY ROB DOBI

At his confirmation hearing in January of 2025, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins, a former congressman from Georgia, assured the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee of his commitment to provide specialized, high-quality medical care for the roughly nine million veterans enrolled in the nation’s largest and only truly integrated public health care system, the Veterans Health Administration (VHA).

But Collins, a chaplain in the Air Force Reserve, also explained that his mandate from President Trump is to make it “easier for veterans to get their health care when and where it’s most convenient for them,” by giving them greater choice between inhouse and outsourced care. To do this, he planned to lean on the network of 1.7 million private-sector providers who are part of the Veterans Community Care Program

(VCCP), created by the VA MISSION Act of 2018. Annual reimbursement of these nonVHA doctors, therapists, hospitals, and clinics now costs the federal government more than $30 billion per year, nearly one-third of the VA’s entire direct care budget.

Collins’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 calls for a 50 percent increase in VHA spending on private care and a 17 percent reduction in direct care funding. And Collins has taken other steps consistent with the goal of downsizing direct service provision and boosting the VHA’s reliance on outside vendors.

Republicans in Congress routinely assert that veterans can easily find better and faster treatment outside the VHA . That’s because they assume that we have enough hospitals, primary care providers, specialty physicians, and mental health therapists to

care for the country’s current patient load of 330 million nonveteran Americans, let alone nine million more veterans.

To test the accuracy of these claims, the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute (VHPI) partnered with the Prospect on a survey of the U.S. health care landscape in all 50 states. State by state, we looked at the data on the current available supply of primary care providers, mental health professionals, and hospitals, particularly in the rural (and remote rural) areas where about one-quarter of all veterans, or about 4.7 million, reside, with 2.8 million of them enrolled in the VHA.

This analysis reveals a system that cannot provide even basic medical and mental health services to nonveteran patients. Hundreds of hospitals in America’s rural counties and underserved areas have curtailed critical services or closed entirely. And thousands of counties across America are experiencing significant health provider shortages, according to federal data.

The dramatic shortfall in capacity in our

VA patients receive a full spectrum of coordinated care to deal with the unique needs of those who served in combat.

nation’s health system will get even worse with the passage of President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. On top of unilaterally imposed cuts that are already crippling the nation’s academic medical centers, the law, signed on July 4, will impose over a trillion dollars of cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. Around 17 million people are expected to lose their health insurance due to Trump’s policies, guaranteeing increased uncompensated care at emergency rooms. States will also have less money to fund their Medicaid programs. All of this will lead to additional hospital closures and more shortages of health care personnel.

Yet, at precisely this moment, President Trump, VA Secretary Collins, and Republicans in Congress also want to send more veteran patients into an already troubled private-sector system, while depleting that system of the resources necessary to absorb this extra load. The idea that this will work well is shaped more by ideology than reality.

One longtime VA expert observed: “Imag-

ining that you can add more complex VA patients into a private-sector system that will be reeling from, and contracting because of, funding cuts is nothing short of delusional.”

A Case Study in Coordinated Care

“Will Smith,” whom I have given a pseudonym for reasons of medical privacy, is a 75-year-old Army vet who fought in the Vietnam War. Because of his combat exposure, Smith struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after leaving the military. Thanks to VHA therapists and many years of peer group support, he no longer abuses alcohol or prescription drugs.

Like other Vietnam vets exposed to Agent Orange, he has diabetes, which has led to chronic heart problems and kidney disease. Because of the heavy backpacks he carried “in country,” he also suffers from osteoarthritis in his hips and knees, severely limiting his mobility. To get around, he depends on an electric wheelchair provided by the VA. He takes 18 different drugs (all deliv-

More than 89 percent of counties in the United States are officially designated Health Professional Shortage Areas.

ered free of charge) to help control multiple “co-morbidities.”

Smith’s primary care physician (who chose to remain anonymous, because in the current environment, saying anything good about a system the doctor’s bosses want to close could get the doctor fired) is responsible for coordinating with numerous specialty providers at the large VA medical center where Smith gets his care. The PCP consults regularly with Smith’s cardiologist, pulmonologist, nephrologist, and everyone else dealing with his physical and mental health problems, which have included suicidal ideation.

Smith’s Patient Aligned Care Team includes a medical resident who is training at the VA, like tens of thousands around the country. An RN, a licensed vocational nurse, and a medical service assistant—all of whom have known Smith for years—help make sure that he schedules and shows up for his appointments. A clinical pharmacist monitors Smith’s use of medications to ensure that he’s taking his pills correctly: some with food, some in the morning and not at night.

Smith’s doctor schedules 60-minute, in-person visits with Smith every three months and a telehealth appointment every six weeks. In between these consultations, Smith’s weight and blood pressure are checked daily through a VA telemonitoring service, which sends alerts to his care team if worrisome changes are detected. There is no patient fee for this service. If Smith needs equipment essential to facilitate his care, like a laptop, iPad, or smartphone, the VA also provides it, free of charge.

The VA’s integrated health service provides Smith with acupuncture and chiropractic sessions to help him manage chronic pain. When able, Smith tries to attend a

chair yoga class, one of many such offerings that include popular mindfulness meditation sessions.

Our pseudonymous Will Smith is not an outlier, in terms of his complex care needs. As a 2016 RAND report confirmed, “VA providers are likely to be treating a sicker population with more chronic conditions, such as cancer, diabetes, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), than the population expected by civilian providers.”

A 2021 report from Brown University’s Cost of War Project underscored that the open-ended global war on terror has produced the most disabled cohort of veterans in American history. Nearly two million veterans of post-9/11 wars have paid a heavy price for their military duty. About 40 percent have a service-related disability, compared to 25 percent of all veterans of World War II, the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, and the first Gulf War, who came back injured in some form.

As congressional hearings and debate before passage of the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act revealed, hundreds of thousands suffer from longterm illnesses stemming from exposure to burn pits in the Middle East or poisoned groundwater at U.S. military bases around the country, like Camp Lejeune.

Veterans who rely on the VA for health care are also more economically disadvantaged than most other patients in the U.S., with the exception of Medicaid recipients. As one study found, they tend to be less educated and have lower household incomes. According to VA data, about 50 percent of veterans have a personal annual income of $50,000 or less; less than 5 percent, mainly former officers, have an annual income of $200,000 or more.

Whether they live in urban or rural America, veterans steered away from the VA through expanded outsourcing will become “customers” of private health care networks that are quite different from what they are used to. As the Commonwealth Fund points out, the health outcomes in the non-VA system include one of the industrialized world’s highest suicide rates and the highest rate of avoidable mortality, as well as fewer hospital beds, physician visits, and even practicing doctors than other equivalent countries have.

Access Problems

Although access to primary care is widely recognized as central to “health equity and care access,” more than 89 percent of coun-

ties in the United States are officially designated primary care Health Professional Shortage Areas (HPSA s). About 80 million Americans, nearly one-quarter of the total population, live in areas without enough primary care providers.

As a result, almost all of America’s rural counties are at significant risk of poorer health, with residents of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Texas at even greater risk. Rural America contains about 25 percent of the veteran population.

The numbers are staggering. Arizona will face a shortage of 8,280 physicians by 2030, according to the Cicero Institute; Texas will need 20,420 more physicians by that year. Many of Louisiana’s parishes have only one or two full-time primary care physicians, and nearly half of Kentucky’s primary care physicians work in just two of its 120 counties. Fifty-two of Montana’s 56 counties have serious shortages of primary care providers; every county in Idaho, South Dakota, and Wyoming has severe shortages of mental health providers. In rural areas of Colorado east of Denver, there is only one primary care physician for every 5,636 residents.

Long-standing nationwide shortages of primary care providers make it difficult for primary care practices to take on new patients. In 2023, for example, the VA announced a “historic public-private partnership” between the VA and the University of Pennsylvania Health System. The collaboration was intended to try to replace the closure of VA facilities in Philadelphia and Coatesville, which served thousands of patients.

So, two years ago, the Prospect played secret shopper to assess the availability of primary care appointments for new patients at Penn Med. The system’s primary care website revealed that a significant number of affiliated practices were closed to new patients. We then called a sample of the primary care practices whose patient panels were listed as still open, only to discover that to get a first appointment would take four or five months.

There are, of course, wait times at the VA. We know what they are, because the VA actually calculates and publicly posts them. One of the only ways to find equivalent information about private-sector wait times is to actually wait for the survey published periodically by the private consulting company AMN Healthcare (formerly Merritt Hawkins). Even this data is severely limited. AMN collects

wait time data from only six medical specialties—cardiology, family practice, orthopedic surgeons, obstetrics/ gynecology, dermatology, and gastroenterology—in only 15 different major metropolitan areas.

The data is not reassuring. AMN ’s 2025 survey found that, since 2022, the average wait time for physician appointments increased by 19 percent, with the average time for an appointment at 31 days. The average wait for an appointment with a family practice physician is 23.5 days with a high of 207; for a cardiologist, the wait could be on average 32.7 days, with a high of 175 days. A woman could spend on average 41.8 days, or a high of 231 days, waiting for an ob/ gyn appointment. Someone worried about a suspicious blotch on their face could wait up to 291 days to have a dermatologist tell them if it was malignant.

We can expect these manpower shortages and wait times to skyrocket in the next decade, due in part to the aging of the physician workforce. Physicians aged 65 or older make up 20 percent of the clinical physician

workforce, and those between ages 55 and 64 are 22 percent. A significant number of physicians, then, will reach retirement age within the next decade.

Unless current conditions change, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) reports that by 2036, the U.S. will face a shortage of between 20,200 and 40,400 primary care physicians, between 10,100 and 19,900 physicians for surgical specialties, and potentially 5,500 physicians for medical specialties. A 2020 study from several researchers is even more stark: The U.S. shortage in physicians of all kinds will hit 139,160 by 2030.

Mental Health Shortages

When it comes to care for mental health conditions, which 41 percent of the veteran population struggle with, non-VA patient access is already very limited, and that’s an understatement.

In most states, only a handful of counties have even a minimal capacity to deal with nonveterans’ mental health issues, making it hard to imagine that the pri -

vate-sector system could address the complex mental health conditions of veterans like Will Smith.

In the United States, 123 million people, over one-third of the population, live in a Mental Health Professional Shortage Area. In rural counties, 81 percent do not have a single psychiatric nurse practitioner and 65 percent do not have a single psychiatrist. This may help explain why the suicide rate in rural communities is between 18.3 and 20.5 per 100,000 residents, about 50 percent

The aging of the physician workforce means that America needs tens of thousands of new doctors in the next decade.

Percentage of state rural hospitals at risk of closure

higher than the rate in urban areas.

Americans with low incomes, and not coincidentally more mental health and substance abuse problems than those in the general population, have even more trouble finding needed care. According to a report from the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission (MACPAC), 50 percent of Medicaid enrollees with a serious mental illness are unable to access care, because only about one-third of psychiatrists accept new Medicaid patients.

Even in those urban areas that seem to be well stocked with licensed mental health professionals, 6 in 10 psychologists may not accept new patients, and one-third of psychologists and 45 percent of psychiatrists may not accept insurance of any kind. This means that even patients with good insurance may be unable to get mental health treatment unless they can pay for it out of pocket.

The cost of mental health evaluations and treatment can vary enormously depending on the area of the country, from $65 to as much as $250 per session. When the Prospect inquired about how much it would cost for a session of cognitive behavioral therapy, a gold-standard evidence- based treatment that is widely

used at the VA in treating PTSD, insomnia, and many other problems, we found that therapists in the Bay Area could charge between $235 and $500 an hour. Almost no one we queried would accept health insurance for CBT treatment. Given the low incomes of most VA patients, they would be out of luck if the VA became just another insurance company.

If a veteran needs psychiatric hospitalization outside of the VA, they may find themselves similarly out of luck. Closures of VA psychiatric inpatient beds are reportedly a problem in some facilities. Along with increasing hospital closures guaranteed by Medicaid and other health care funding cuts, this will pit veterans and nonveterans in a no-win contest for an already inadequate number of psychiatric beds throughout the U.S.

According to a recent report by the American Psychiatric Association, the number of beds available to acutely ill psychiatric patients has dropped significantly in the past 60 years. Patients having an acute mental health crisis can be forced to languish on a gurney in an emergency department hallway, sometimes for several days, or in the worst-case scenarios end

up homeless or in jail. Prisons too often become the mental health patient warehouse of last resort.

Rural Hospital Closings

Even before federal cuts of $1.042 trillion from the Medicaid program, the situation for hospitals in rural America was dire. The Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform (CHQPR) notes that in the last decade, over 100 rural hospitals have closed. Since 2005, Texas has lost 25 rural hospitals, the most in the nation, and Tennessee has lost 15.

The CHQPR report estimates that more than 700 rural hospitals, one-third of all rural hospitals in the United States, are at risk of closing. In Arkansas (64 percent), Hawaii (62 percent), Vermont (62 percent), Alabama (60 percent), Oklahoma (60 percent), New York (58 percent), Texas (56 percent), and Mississippi (54 percent), at least half of all rural hospitals are at risk. Over 90 percent of rural hospitals in Florida report operating losses, along with 83 percent of rural hospitals in Wyoming.

Rural hospitals that have yet to close are cutting back services. According to a report from health care research group Chartis, “293 rural hospitals stopped offering OB services between 2011 and 2023, while 424 ceased chemotherapy services between 2014 and 2023.” Two-thirds of all rural hospitals in Oklahoma cut services in the last year; 60 percent of rural hospitals in Mississippi cut services.

In July 2025, Becker’s Hospital Review noted that 18 hospitals and emergency departments had closed this year alone. Hospitals and emergency departments in Alabama, Pennsylvania, Texas, Ohio, Missouri, Maine, New York, Florida, Oklahoma, and Washington, D.C., were shuttered.

This is all before the deep Medicaid cuts contained in the Trump budget law. Due to those cuts, the National Rural Health Association (NRHA) estimates that rural hospitals will lose almost $70 billion over the next ten years. A $50 billion rural hospital fund embedded in the law cannot cover the damage to an already fragile system, and the NRHA predicts many hospitals will close. One, in Curtis, Nebraska, population 900, already has, citing the looming Medicaid cuts.

Georgia and Kansas

The Chartis report on the state of rural health care specifically highlighted the plight of rural veterans: “Rural hospital closures and

declining access to community care could potentially hinder the intended benefits of policies such as the MISSION Act.”

That is in fact what is happening in two of the states surveyed in our report: Georgia, whose former representative Doug Collins is now VA secretary, and Kansas, whose Republican senator Jerry Moran serves as chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.

If Georgia’s 339,000 veterans enrolled in VA coverage are pushed into the private sector, they will enter a health care market where the physician-to-patient ratio is 23 percent worse than the national average. Overall, Georgia ranks in the bottom half of states for primary care and physician availability. A 2020 study of primary care shortages found that many residents of Georgia are extremely vulnerable to poor health outcomes because they live in poverty, which leads to more serious medical conditions that often go untreated.

Of Georgia’s 159 counties, nine have partial shortages of primary care providers, while 134 have severe shortages. Only 16

register no PCP shortages. Even in many of the counties without shortages, primary care practices can be overburdened and/or closed to new patients. Plus, Georgia will be short 8,012 physicians by 2030.

The mental health situation in Georgia is even bleaker. Of Georgia’s 159 counties, 152 have a severe shortage of mental health providers. Only six counties register no shortages; however, in these counties many mental health professionals may not be open for business to patients who can’t pay out of pocket. KFF estimates that 33.9 percent of Georgia residents report symptoms of anxiety or depression, which may be untreated because of shortages of mental health professionals. The rate of deaths from drug overdoses in Georgia has doubled over the past ten years, and its suicide rates are higher than the national average.

Since 2015, Georgia has lost nine rural hospitals, and another 20, representing 28 percent of the state’s rural hospitals, are at risk of closure, with 13 percent at immediate risk.

When we turn to Jerry Moran’s Kansas, the situation is all too familiar. Should more

Severe health provider shortages plague the home states of Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee chair Jerry Moran (R-KS) and VA Secretary Doug Collins (R-GA).

of the 86,000 Kansas veterans enrolled in the VA move into the private sector, they will find that 71 of the state’s 105 counties have severe shortages of primary care providers. Even in the 34 counties that do not register shortages, many practices may be overburdened and/or closed to new patients. According to one report, the “shortage of Kansas doctors has major impact on the health of its citizens. Rural Kansans face the prospect of more chronic disease, greater morbidity from their chronic conditions, and a higher mortality rate than their urban counterparts. The lack of primary care physicians compounds the impact this has on individuals and communities.”

Only four of Kansas’s 105 counties, all near Topeka and Kansas City, don’t register severe shortages of mental health professionals. There are only 314 licensed psychologists and only 300 psychiatrists to serve the state’s nearly three million residents. As we’ve seen, many may not accept new patients, or may restrict new patients to those who can pay out of pocket. The situation is also compounded by the fact that 6

Most Americans have fewer and fewer health care choices, and are about to pay more for even less.

out of 10 Kansas psychiatrists are over 55, thus nearing retirement.

This is one of the reasons why the more than 37 percent of Kansas residents who suffer from depression or anxiety disorder have trouble accessing treatment. The rate of deaths due to drug overdoses has more than tripled in the last decade, and the suicide rate is also higher than the national average.

The crisis in the state’s hospitals is one of the worst in the nation. Kansas, Chartis reports, is one of seven states tied for the hospitals with the greatest loss of inpatient care in the country, and it also ties with another four when it comes to states with the highest number of vulnerable hospitals in the country. Of Kansas’s 100 rural hospitals, 89 have lost services, 66 are at risk of closing, and 29 are at risk of immediate closure. Kansas also has the honor of being one of the three states in the nation with the highest loss of rural OB units in the country.

A Chaotic Restructuring

During his first six months on the job, Collins ordered the illegal mass firing of 2,400 VA probationary employees. He developed a plan to cut 15 percent of his agency’s workforce by late 2025, and canceled hundreds of contracts with researchers whose work also supports patient care. He ended remote work arrangements and ordered mental health care providers to report back to facilities not properly set up for telehealth work. This chaotic restructuring, driven by the Trump-created Department of Government Efficiency, has led to widespread workplace disruption, rapidly cratering morale, and uncertainty for thousands of career employees at the VA.

If VA services or facilities are cut around the country, shortages of primary care providers, medical specialists, and mental health professionals will increase. That’s because the VA plays a pivotal but largely unrecognized role in our system of training

health care professionals, through educational partnerships with 90 percent of U.S. medical schools. Congress allocates funding so that the VA can train about 75,000 medical students and residents at the VA every year. The Association of American Medical Colleges has called the VA an “irreplaceable component of the U.S. medical education and research enterprise.”

The VA also trains 60 other categories of health care professionals, including nurses, and optometrists, and pharmacists, and psychologists. The VA, which is the single largest employer of psychologists in the country, trains 1 in 5 of the nations’ future Ph.D.s in psychology. The continued existence of these professional training programs depends, however, on the VA having enough patients to provide trainees with enough of a diversity of clinical experiences, as well as enough expert staff to educate and monitor trainees.

If too many patients are sent out of the system or there aren’t enough staff to teach trainees, training programs won’t be accredited and will end. Former VA undersecretary for health Kenneth W. Kizer believes this could “have widespread effects on the provision of care in the United States, and could exacerbate health care professional shortages.”

But when veterans groups, VA patients and their families, or caregivers protested these changes, Republicans in Congress dismissed their concerns. According to House Veterans’ Affairs Committee chairman Mike Bost (R-IL), the “VA bureaucracy” itself “poses a greater danger to the health of our veterans than the illnesses they seek treatment for.”

Bost and other Republicans in Congress have introduced multiple bills that would greatly expand the outsourcing authorized by the MISSION Act seven years ago. For example, Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Tim Sheehy (R-MT), Roger Wicker (R-MS), and Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) have sponsored the Veterans Health Care Freedom Act , to “provide veterans with greater autonomy to access the care they need.” This legislation goes beyond recent patient referral rule changes made by Collins. It would allow veterans to make appointments with private-sector providers in the VCCP without any prior consultation with or authorization from their in-house provider.

Other red-state Republicans, who also represent many veterans in rural areas,

have jumped on the bandwagon. Earlier this year, Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) joined Sheehy as a co-sponsor of the Critical Access for Veterans Care Act. Their bill would steer more veterans toward “health care services at their local rural hospital or clinic under the VCCP.”

That movement of patients into privatesector care, along with the significant funding resources being taken out of the system by Medicaid and Affordable Care Act cuts, will push a system on the brink of collapse at both ends.

Conclusion

The nation’s nine million veterans enrolled in the VA health care system have been largely sheltered from the everyday realities of a deeply flawed private-sector market. They may not like having to wait for an appointment or having to travel an hour to a VA community-based outpatient clinic. But once enrolled in the VHA , veterans receive care that is of higher quality, with shorter wait times, than non-VA patients receive. While the average American, if they are insured, may have access to medical treatment, few have ever experienced the kind of wraparound services that are routinely provided to veterans like Will Smith.

In 2016, conservative writer and co-chair of the Koch brothers–funded “Fixing Veterans’ Healthcare Task Force” Avik Roy argued in The New York Times that “veterans should enjoy the same health care options as all Americans.” He claimed that ordinary Americans were far better off, because they could take advantage of a “vast array of private health care and coverage options that are denied” to veterans. As our state analysis demonstrates, nothing could be further from the truth. Most Americans have fewer and fewer health care choices, and are about to pay more for even less. And if VA privatization continues, veterans like Will Smith will lose the one option they say they most value: a health care system in which Americans have invested for over a century and that has more than fulfilled its promise to care for those who have borne the battle. n

Suzanne Gordon is a senior policy analyst at the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute and co-author, with Jasper Craven, of Our Veterans: Winners, Losers, Friends, and Enemies on the New Terrain of Veterans Affairs (Duke University Press).

THE PREMATURE GUIDE TO Post-Trump Reform

American history offers three general strategies of repair and renewal.

By Paul Starr

Donald Trump is teaching us about the limitations of America’s constitutional system. We may have believed that the Constitution’s separation of powers, checks and balances, and guarantees of rights would protect us from a president with authoritarian and corrupt ambitions. But the framework we have counted on is failing.

Trump’s abuses of his office have met no effective opposition from the other branches of government. As he has overreached his executive powers, Congress has done nothing to deter him, and the Supreme Court has done more to embolden than to contain him. In his first term, the “adults” Trump appointed to top positions had some cautionary influence on him, but he has now thrown off restraints and surrounded himself with sycophants, enablers, and ideologues. Only half a year into a second term, he is acting, in the words of the conservative former federal judge J. Michael Luttig, with “utter contempt for the Constitution and laws of the United States.”

Trump governs like a monarch, issuing proclamations—143 executive orders in his first hundred days—

that assume he has unilateral power to abolish federal agencies, nullify or suspend laws, impound congressionally authorized spending, and defy the Constitution. He has attacked universities and law firms, denying them due process and demanding concessions to which the government has no right; sent noncitizens to foreign gulags, also without due process; deployed the military in an American city based on the false claim that protests were out of control; and launched a trade war against practically the entire world, partner and rival countries alike, based on a fictitious economic emergency. The world, even his own party, hangs on his whims, unsure what he will do next.

These usurpations have enabled Trump to turn the White House and his private clubs into an itinerant royal court, where people come to beg for favors and he basks in their subservience and exploits the presidency for profit. Most dangerously, he has appointed partisans to top positions in the Justice Department and FBI and singled out enemies for them to investigate and prosecute, while he pardons supporters for their crimes.

Trump has governed like a monarch, but the coequal branches of government have done nothing to stop him.

His use of the presidency for personal ends is undisguised; the corruption is open and at an unprecedented scale.

The theory of American government, in Madison’s phrase, is that ambition will counter ambition, but that theory isn’t working. Presidents once had to respect the institutional prerogatives of Congress, jealously guarded by members of their own party as much as by the opposition. Now, Trump and his MAGA movement have cowed Republican legislators. As Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) has said, “We are all afraid … retaliation is real.”

In addition to protests in the streets and in the states, the efforts to stop Trump’s abuses have turned to the federal judiciary, “the last obstacle to a president with designs on tyrannical rule,” as Judge Luttig puts it. But although the lower courts have often ruled against Trump, the final disposition of the most important of those cases rests with a Supreme Court that is only a frail basis of hope for thwarting his ambitions. The Court has given Trump’s challengers a few victories, but with a 6-3 conservative supermajority since 2020, the Court’s right wing has been more of an aid to Trump than

a thorn in his side, much less an effective check on his transgressions.

The Court has emboldened Trump through its ruling on presidential immunity a year ago, and through a series of decisions striking down limits on presidential powers. In the case concerning Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, the Court declared that presidents have “absolute” or at least “presumptive” immunity from the criminal law for all “official acts,” which it defined so broadly that “unofficial” conduct was reduced “almost to a nullity,” as Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it in her dissent. The Court thereby virtually eliminated whatever deterrent power the criminal law may have had on presidential malfeasance. It identified the government’s prosecutorial powers as an area of absolute immunity (making it seemingly impossible to charge a president with obstruction of justice) and declared that courts cannot consider the president’s motive for any official act (making it impossible to charge bribery). The justices finally gave some confirmation to Richard Nixon’s famous line: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

The Court has also signaled its intentions to strike down limits on Trump’s ability to control what have long been treated as independent agencies. As Congress expanded the functions of the federal government after the Gilded Age, it established agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission with a degree of independence from the president. To protect that relative autonomy, Congress set staggered, fixed terms longer than four years for commissioners and other appointees and denied the president the authority to fire those officials at will.

Ninety years ago, in Humphrey’s Executor, the Supreme Court upheld that framework. As Justice Elena Kagan observes, “Humphrey’s undergirds a significant feature of American governance: bipartisan administrative bodies carrying out expertise-based functions with a measure of independence from presidential control.” Rejecting the claim that the FTC interferes with “the executive power,” Humphrey’s affirmed the authority of Congress to establish such “quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial” bodies and to forbid the removal of their leaders except for cause.

In his second term, however, Trump has nonetheless fired many members of federal boards and commissions, concededly without cause. In an unsigned, two-page order this May, the Court’s conservative majority temporarily allowed Trump’s firings to stand in a case involving the appeal of two such officials, one at the National Labor Relations Board and the other at the Merit Systems Protection Board. Citing the first sentence of the Constitution’s Article II vesting the “executive power” in the president, the Court declared that its order “reflects our judgment that the Government is likely to show that both the NLRB and MSPB exercise considerable executive power.” But it said that it wasn’t contemplating applying that judgment to the Federal Reserve Bank, an exception for which it failed to give a convincing rationale. While deferring its final decision to a full argument, the Court never cited Humphrey’s Executor, which it was effectively overturning, nor did it acknowledge that it was reducing the power of Congress as it enlarged presidential powers. The Court gave Trump grounds for believing, as he put it in his first term, “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president .”

The very way in which the Court made its decision—without a full briefing and argument by both sides—legitimized a “move

The Court has emboldened Trump in two critical ways: through its ruling on presidential immunity and through decisions striking down limits on presidential powers.

fast and break things” ethos in constitutional law, as University of Pennsylvania law professor Kate Shaw pointed out. That was also true of a ruling handed down in June concerning a federal judge’s injunction pausing national enforcement of Trump’s executive order canceling the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. The Court effectively said to Trump: Go ahead, take the law into your own hands, and we’ll get to the constitutional issue later.

The decision ending nationwide injunctions has far-reaching implications for the many cases in which lower-level courts have paused orders by Trump that blatantly violate the law. It requires those who are trying to block an executive order that limits or eliminates a legal right to go through the more complex process of filing a class action lawsuit if the ruling is to take effect for others besides the immediate parties. As a result, it may enable the president to suspend rights and create a new de facto reality until the Supreme Court gets around to resolving what may be a protracted legal battle.

Among the world’s major nations, the United States has one of the oldest and most rigid written constitutions, rarely altered through amendments because the requirements for ratification are so high. The survival of the written Constitution would have been impossible if not for unwritten norms of restraint that most presidents have respected, and for the countervailing power of the other branches.

Trump has shown how vulnerable the government is to a descent into authoritarian rule when the president is contemptuous of the norms, Congress is under his thumb, and the Court is an accomplice. Under Trump and the Roberts Court, the power of the state has become concentrated to an extraordinary degree in one man. This is not the system most Americans believe the Constitution established.

The immediate task for the opposition to Trump is to use every available legal means of appeal and political mobilization to stop or slow him down. But there must be a long-run agenda too. Trump’s actions are not popular, and they are likely, sooner or later, to blow up and produce a reaction. As distant as a postTrump future may now seem, we should look ahead to a time when Americans are ready to repair both the harm done by Trump and the institutions that have allowed it.

History offers three models for institutional repair: changing the laws, changing the Supreme Court, or amending the Constitution. The first is the post-Watergate model, which primarily involves codifying unwritten norms in legislation and executive branch rules. The second is the politically treacherous path of judicial reform. The third, amending the Constitution, is only a dim possibility but still useful to consider, because some of the problems highlighted by Trump lie in the Constitution itself.

Besides the passage of the Bill of Rights in the nation’s first years, there have been two other eras of major change through constitutional revision: Reconstruction after the Civil War and the Progressive Era in the early 20th century. Each period saw the passage of three democratizing constitutional amendments. The Reconstruction amendments abolished slavery, guaranteed birthright citizenship and equal protection of the laws, and declared that the franchise could not be denied on the basis of race. The Progressive Era amendments introduced popular election of senators, authorized an income tax, and declared that the franchise could not be denied on the basis of sex. In thinking about the future, we might ask: What package of amendments in a post-Trump America might strengthen American democracy again?

I present these three models in order of escalating difficulty and therefore call them “levels” of reform, but reforms at even the first level would be hard. If you think these are impossible, consider them a measure of how deep a hole we’re in. But then remember that’s how many Americans have felt at other dark moments in our history.

Level 1: The Post-Watergate Model

The spate of reforms adopted in the 1970s after the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation provide the most direct precedent for controlling presidential aggrandizement. The Watergate investigations revealed a wide range of abuses under Nixon, including the enlistment of the Justice Department and IRS in attacks on political enemies, obstruction of justice by the president, and bribery of the president through secret campaign slush funds and contributions in exchange for political favors. The scandal also created an opportunity to address related problems such as presidential impoundment of congres-

sionally appropriated funds, ill-defined presidential emergency powers, domestic surveillance by the intelligence agencies, and the erosion of Congress’s war powers.

The post-Watergate reforms did not aim to enfeeble the presidency. They reflected a broad consensus about the need to restore trust in government and aimed to increase governmental transparency, curb corruption, and strengthen the role the Constitution assigned to Congress. In his 1974 book The Imperial Presidency, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. captured the spirit of the reforms: “We need a strong presidency—but a strong presidency within the Constitution.” This has obvious resonance today.

Not all the post-Watergate reforms survived. The 1974 campaign finance legislation that aimed to limit the corrupting influence of money in politics was almost entirely undone by the Supreme Court, through its long line of decisions from Buckley v. Valeo in 1976 to Citizens United in 2010. The law providing for independent special prosecutors was not renewed in 1999; authority to name special prosecutors reverted to the attorney general. But “on most issues,” as Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith has said, “the reforms succeeded for almost five decades in reducing executive branch corruption” and enhancing government transparency and the rule of law.

Much of the post-Watergate legislation sought to limit the unilateral and arbitrary power of the president. The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 reasserted Congress’s power of the purse and limited the president’s ability to refuse to spend money Congress had appropriated. The National Emergencies Act of 1976 canceled all existing emergencies, established rules for the president to declare an emergency and obtain special powers under certain statutes, and enabled Congress to terminate an emergency and end those powers. The Privacy Act of 1974 and the Tax Reform Act of 1976 limited the disclosure of government-collected personal information and the sharing of that information among agencies.

The Inspector General Act of 1978 created the first offices of inspector general within federal agencies—there are now 73 of them—to conduct audits and investigations and identify fraud, abuses, and inefficiencies to be reported directly to Congress. The Ethics in Government Act of 1978 established a centralized federal office, the

Office of Government Ethics, to oversee federal ethics rules, including financial disclosure requirements for the president, other high-level federal officials, and members of Congress. The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 created the Merit Systems Protection Board, providing, among other things, the first protections for whistleblowers against retaliation (later strengthened in the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989).

Besides signing these legislative measures, Nixon’s successors adopted changes in executive branch rules to address concerns raised by Watergate. For example, rules for contacts between the White House and Justice Department barred the president from directing individual investigations and prosecutions. The ethics laws regarding financial conflicts of interest of senior government officials did not apply to the president or vice president (except for financial disclosure rules), but presidents generally agreed to abide by the same conflict-of-interest norms as if the laws applied to them. Presidential candidates and presidents from Watergate until Trump also complied with a public norm to disclose their taxes, although no law required them to do that either.

By claiming there was pervasive corruption in previous administrations, Trump has implicitly disparaged the post-Watergate reforms and helped justify running roughshod over them. During his 2016 campaign and first term, he found he could get away with ignoring the norms to disclose his taxes and to avoid financial conflicts of interest. He now acts as though the anticorruption laws and limits on presidential power do not exist.

The list of Trump’s assaults on the post-Watergate reforms grows month by month. He has shut down federal agencies by impounding funds appropriated by Congress (and now intends to challenge the constitutionality of the 1974 Impoundment Control Act). He has removed 17 inspectors general without cause or notice to Congress (after firing five of them in 2020) and gutted the offices within the executive branch that were established to provide legal oversight, enforce ethics rules, and investigate public corruption. After Watergate, Congress established ten-year terms for directors of the FBI; in his two terms, Trump has fired FBI directors twice before their terms were over. In violation of the War Powers Resolution of 1973, he bombed Iran in June without even seeking a fig leaf of congressional

authorization for the use of force. (The Senate, agreeing to its irrelevance, voted down a war powers resolution requiring its consent for any further hostilities toward Iran.) By executive order, Trump has simply stopped enforcing another of the post-Watergate laws, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977, which bars U.S. companies from bribing foreign officials for business.

The Constitution requires the president to “take care” that the laws are “faithfully executed.” By no stretch of the imagination is Trump taking that care with the anticorruption laws, or the laws that require him to seek authority from Congress.

A post-Trump legislative agenda could begin by reinforcing the post-Watergate laws and reaffirming the public purposes that motivated them. Congress could strengthen the enforcement provisions of the Impoundment Control Act. In light of the Supreme Court’s ruling about the president’s power to remove executive branch officials, Congress could put inspectors general out of the president’s reach and under its own protection as part of the Government Accountability Office, a congressional agency (although Trump has tried to control congressional agencies too).

Congress could also enact a new National Emergencies Act that would limit the ability of presidents to declare forever emergencies. In 1983, the Supreme Court struck

A post-Trump legislative agenda could begin by reinforcing the post-Watergate laws and reaffirming the public purposes that motivated them.

Democrats must be as determined as Republicans to avoid indefinite conservative judicial rule.

down the provisions in the 1976 act that enabled a single chamber of Congress to withhold consent for an emergency’s continuance. Under the Court’s decision, Congress now must have a two-thirds majority in each house to overcome a presidential veto and end an emergency. As Josh Chafetz of Georgetown Law School suggested recently in an unpublished paper, a new Emergencies Act could—like the original 1976 act— terminate all existing emergencies and end lurking emergency powers in statutes that Congress no longer thinks necessary. Most important, it could establish new sunset provisions. Emergencies would end within a short period (perhaps 60 days) and be nonrenewable unless approved under expedited procedures by a joint resolution of Congress. Those provisions, as Chafetz argues, would afford presidents short-term powers in genuine emergencies but ensure that Congress retains the power to make lasting policy. Congress could also pass legislation to deter presidents from criminal actions despite the Supreme Court’s immunity decision. As Goldsmith and Bob Bauer pointed out in their 2020 book After Trump, a president typically cannot carry out wrongdoing without the aid of subordinates. Congress could pass legislation providing that in a trial of a subordinate, no federal court could

recognize as a defense the fact that the subordinate acted on instructions of the president or on the president’s behalf. Congress could also challenge the Court’s immunity decision by making it a crime for a president to use the pardon power corruptly in return for something of value, or to protect a subordinate in the commission of a crime.

Legislation could also make explicit that the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause applies to the president, and that income or gifts from foreign sources require congressional consent. Unlike the Domestic Emoluments Cause, which specifically names the president, the bar against foreign emoluments reads: “no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States] shall, without the Consent of Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” Although legislation passed by Congress in 1966 assumed the clause applied to the president, some legal analysts dispute the point. The Supreme Court will ultimately resolve it.

During Trump’s first term, the Court managed to duck a decision about whether Trump’s income from foreign visitors to his hotels violated the Foreign Emoluments Clause. That nondecision has now emboldened Trump to take money from abroad

on a grand scale, through his crypto business and Trump Organization contracts for building resorts, and even in the form of a jet plane destined for his post-presidential personal use. Congress needs to assert its consent power. Legislation could spell out procedures for presidents to obtain congressional consent and what they would have to do if Congress refused it. As Goldsmith and Bauer suggested in 2020, Congress should also make explicit that while in office no president may participate in a private business interest. Far from making radical departures, a Congress that took these steps would mostly be codifying preTrump norms. Level 1 post-Trump would be post-Watergate II.

Trump’s corruption and overreach pose a more serious threat to democracy than Nixon’s, in part because Congress and the Supreme Court are not standing up against Trump as they did against Nixon. Congress won’t necessarily remain in MAGA Republican hands, but the current Supreme Court has a potential for self-perpetuating partisan control that post-Trump reform needs to confront.

Level 2: Changing the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court ostensibly provides nonpartisan justice, but for years it has been

wielding a right-wing Republican veto over the U.S. government (or in Trump’s case, flashing a green light). The potential for judicial entrenchment lies fundamentally in the lifetime appointments that enable justices to retire when the president in office belongs to the same party as the one who appointed them. Democratic-appointed justices have not held a majority on the Court since January 1972, and because Jimmy Carter made no appointments, Republican presidents had ten consecutive nominations from 1969 to 1991. Although some appointees did not fulfill conservative hopes, enough chose to retire during Republican administrations to give the party a continuing advantage.

Yet that advantage wouldn’t have been sufficient to keep control of the Court; Republicans also played “constitutional hardball,” the tough-minded pursuit of power through means that violate public norms but are not illegal. When Justice Antonin Scalia’s sudden death in February 2016 threatened to flip majority control, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell ignored previous norms and blocked Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland on the flimsy grounds that it was an election year. McConnell’s hardball then paid off in 2017 when Trump was able to fill Scalia’s seat with Neil Gorsuch. But in September 2020, when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, McConnell saw no problem with accelerating the confirmation of Trump’s nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, just days before an election Trump would go on to lose.

If previous norms had held, Barack Obama would have filled Scalia’s seat and Joe Biden would have filled Ginsburg’s, giving Democratic appointees a 5-4 majority— in which case Trump would likely not have been shielded from criminal prosecution.

Republican-appointed justices have also entrenched themselves in the Court’s majority by favoring Republican interests in cases with large and unambiguous electoral consequences. What is striking about these electorally pivotal cases—Bush v. Gore, which settled the 2000 election; Shelby County v. Holder, the 2013 case overturning a critical part of the Voting Rights Act; and Trump v. United States, the 2024 immunity decision—is that none had a conservative doctrinal rationale. Instead, to support their decisions the justices invoked ad hoc criteria without a basis in constitutional text that they consistently followed.

The whole pattern has been circular:

Republican presidents appointed a majority of the sitting justices, and the justices have returned the favor. By protecting Republican political power at moments when that power was at stake, they have also entrenched their own control of the law.

Unless Democrats are prepared to live indefinitely under Republican judicial rule, they are going to have to be as determined as Republicans have been to gain a Supreme Court majority. To do so, they will need to follow a strategy that involves both constitutional hardball and constitutional reform.

The size of the Supreme Court is not fixed by the Constitution and has been changed in the past through ordinary legislation. Between 1863 and 1869, Republicans changed the Court’s size three times: first adding a tenth seat to give Abraham Lincoln an extra appointment; then cutting the Court to seven to deny Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, appointments; and, finally, re-enlarging the Court to nine to enable Ulysses Grant to fill two seats. Hardball has a long history.

In 1937, faced with judicial vetoes of New Deal programs, Franklin Roosevelt also proposed changing the Court’s size. He wanted to add six justices but hadn’t laid down the foundation for that step in his landslide re-election the year before. Yet while Congress didn’t approve the expansion, Roosevelt won his struggle with the Court when one justice switched positions on New Deal legislation.

If and when Democrats again control the White House and Congress, they will have to play hardball to get out from under Republican judicial vetoes by what is now a right-wing supermajority. They could pass a short-term increase in the size of the Court to give themselves a majority by adding four additional seats, while at the same time setting term limits for the justices. Judicial reform is politically treacherous because it invites tit-for-tat changes in the Court, but Republican overreach on the Court has left Democrats little choice, and term limits provide the means of a settlement.

There has been some dispute as to whether Congress could establish term limits for Supreme Court justices by ordinary legislation or would need to send an amendment to the states for ratification. The optimal strategy, if the votes allowed it, would be to try doing both. Under term-limits legislation, the justices would continue to have lifetime appointments to the bench, but

a strategy that involves both constitutional hardball and constitutional reform.

they would rotate off the Supreme Court to appellate courts after a fixed term of, say, 18 years. Each president would then have two Supreme Court appointments per four-year presidential term. The sitting justices might well rule that a law limiting their service on the Supreme Court is unconstitutional. But that self-interested decision in favor of two unpopular ideas—gerontocracy and juristocracy—could help get the term-limits amendment ratified by the states.

Level 3: Amending the Constitution

The likely need of constitutional change to set term limits for Supreme Court justices brings us to the third and most difficult level of reform—amending the Constitution itself.

Executive coups have become the principal form of democratic breakdown around the world. Elected leaders use their positions to deny the opposition an equal chance to win the next election. The U.S. government is now at risk of exactly this authoritarian transformation.

The central problem is that the Constitution provides no real deterrent to presidential aggrandizement and malfeasance. At the heart of the failure is that presidential impeachment is almost always an empty threat. The requirement of a two-thirds vote for a conviction is high enough that loyalists in a president’s party ordinarily have enough votes for an acquittal. No president has ever been removed from office through a trial in the Senate. We can’t even be sure that Nixon would have been convicted if he had fought impeachment.

The Senate’s inability to convict Trump for his efforts to prevent the peaceful transfer of power and incite an assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, raises an

additional problem of deterrence. Some Republicans who voted to acquit, including McConnell, said they did so because he was out of office by the time the trial took place. McConnell may have expected Trump would face a criminal trial. But in Trump v. United States, the Court declared that presidents enjoy absolute immunity in their “core” areas of authority, including their role in charge of the Justice Department and as commander in chief. Together, the Senate acquittal and the Court’s ruling drastically reduce the risk of any legal accountability for an attempted executive coup at the end of a president’s term.

The Constitution’s unqualified pardon power creates additional problems. As Trump has shown, a president unrestrained by public norms can pardon supporters who have violated the law on the president’s behalf. Before leaving office, a president could issue blanket pardons to aides and other supporters and a self-pardon. Although a self-pardon violates basic norms of justice, the Constitution is silent on the subject.

In addition to an amendment setting fixed terms for the Supreme Court, we need what might be called “The President Is Not Above the Law Amendment.” The first of several clauses would restrict the pardon power by declaring that federal courts would not recognize as valid any self-pardon, any pardon to members of a president’s own family, any pardon to a subordinate for the commission of a crime, or any pardon corruptly given in exchange for something of value, including the withholding of testimony.

The overall purpose of The President Is Not Above the Law Amendment would be to restore the law’s power to deter presidential malfeasance involving official acts. Another clause would declare that the president is not immune from prosecution for obstruction of justice, bribery, and other crimes, and set out the method for empowering a special prosecutor in such cases. But it would also establish that any indictment would remain under seal, the statute of limitations would not toll, and the prosecution would not proceed until the president was out of office. (As an alternative, the amendment might use the mechanism of the 25th Amendment, empowering the cabinet to require the president to step aside while the vice president serves as acting president until the criminal charges are resolved.)

To create a credible deterrent, The Presi-

dent Is Not Above the Law Amendment would also have a third clause, reducing the vote needed for an impeachment conviction from two-thirds of the Senate to three-fifths. Finally, a fourth clause would explicitly state that the president is subject to the Foreign Emoluments Clause and cannot participate in any private business interest while in office.

In addition to amendments setting fixed terms for Supreme Court justices and restoring deterrence against presidential malfeasance, we need a third amendment to restore the checks on presidential power that Congress originally created through independent agencies. The basic idea would be to constitutionalize the relative independence of independent agencies and to codify the post-Watergate norms limiting the president’s partisan use of ostensibly nonpartisan government powers.

As Mark Tushnet, a professor at Harvard Law School, explains in his 2021 book, The New Fourth Branch: Institutions for Protecting Constitutional Democracy, some modern constitutions try to thwart antidemocratic leaders by locating functions such as election administration and anticorruption investigations in a nonpartisan fourth branch. That would be a hard case to make in the American context, but an amendment could approximate a democracy-protecting branch by explicitly giving Congress the power to set fixed, staggered terms for agency leaders; barring the president from removing those leaders except for causes enumerated by statute; and creating a firewall between the presidency and individual investigations, indictments, and prosecutions (an executive equivalent of the Constitution’s bar against bills of attainder).

With three and a half years remaining in Trump’s second term and the possibility that JD Vance or another MAGA Republican may succeed Trump, the assaults on constitutional democracy are by no means over. From 2021 to 2025, President Biden and Congress did not seize the opportunity to enact legislation to deal with the institutional problems that Trump’s first term had already revealed, except for a revision of the Electoral Count Act. Democrats also did not have the necessary consensus or nerve to undertake judicial reform.

The same thing may happen if the Trump era ends in January 2029. Urgent economic, public-health, or international problems

may dominate the post-Trump agenda, and Congress and the new administration may again just move on without addressing the deeper constitutional vulnerabilities that Trump has exposed.

It is hard to be optimistic about such changes, and even writing about them may seem not only premature but naïve. But a president with uncontrolled powers who surrounds himself with obsequious aides and right-wing ideologues is a recipe for a train wreck.

Constitutionalism is a source of strength because the kind of unilateral, capricious, and corrupt rule that Trump represents is ultimately destructive of both freedom and the underpinnings of government itself, including the public trust. Schlesinger was right to argue, “We need a strong presidency—but a strong presidency within the Constitution,” but I would now put the point more sharply: We can have both freedom and a capable government only within a strengthened Constitution.

In the founding era, Americans wrote and ratified a constitution with a far more powerful national government than had existed under the Articles of Confederation—but we immediately constrained that new government with the Bill of Rights. The early American republic thereby established both a more powerful nation-state and more stringent limits on its power. In the 20th century, Americans did the same thing. We enlarged the functions and power of the national government but constrained that power by establishing stronger guarantees of civil liberties and equal protection of the laws, and through the post-Watergate reforms controlling corruption and limiting the president’s unilateral powers.

This is what we have to do again. As I argued in my book Freedom’s Power, we need a powerful and capable government, but limited power is more powerful than unlimited power.

If conservatives eventually remember that they believe in constitutional restraints on the executive, they will likely say the cause of the troubles Trump produced lies in the growth and power of the federal government. But we need a new version of what has always been the American constitutional answer: a strong government with strong internal checks as well as the check of free thought, a free civil society, robust public debate, and fair elections. There is a staggering amount of work to rebuild that system after the damage that Trump is doing to it. n

FANTASY FOOTBALL ON THE ANACOSTIA

Nearly everybody wants the NFL’s

By Gabrielle

Commanders

Gurley

back in Washington—but is the price too steep for the struggling city?

For ten years, Mayor Muriel Bowser has worked on her passion project: bringing the Washington Commanders “back home” to the District of Columbia to a new stadium that would rise up phoenixlike from the old one due east of the U.S. Capitol.

Long-suffering Commanders fans have wandered in the wilderness for decades, waiting for someone, anyone, to turn around the fortunes of a franchise that once won three Super Bowls but then turned into a national embarrassment. Losing seasons piled up courtesy of a team owner scarred by sexual harassment accusations, financial improprieties, and a clueless attachment to the team’s insulting former name.

So deep was fans’ disgust with owner Dan Snyder, a wealthy Marylander, that fans rarely speak his

Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium sits rusting on the banks of the Anacostia River. D.C. leaders want a new stadium and entertainment district on the site.

name out loud unless it’s accompanied by a short expletive of Germanic origin. Forced out of the National Football League, he paid a multimillion-dollar fine for his numerous transgressions, and fled to Britain.

Bowser, a native Washingtonian, understands all of this in her bones. First elected in 2015 and now in her third term, she knows that bringing the team back from Maryland will appeal to her constituents’ civic pride and stoke public support for a new stadium in the nation’s capital. What owner would want to stay in the team’s suburban outpost when he could demolish the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium—a rusting 1960s-era clamshell on the banks of the Anacostia River—and erect a new stateof-the-art stadium/entertainment district on the site?

Josh Harris, another wealthy son of the DMV, materialized two years ago with $6 billion and change, to gain admission to the rarified spaces inhabited by NFL owners. For the D.C. faithful, the private equity titan’s purchase fired up the wayback machine and the mid-’80s and ’90s glory days of the Hogs, the Fun Bunch, and Doug Williams, the first African American quarterback to win a Super Bowl, and today a Commanders senior adviser. Last season, with a rookie superstar quarterback, Jayden Daniels, and a new coaching staff, the Commanders made it to the NFC title game in January. More memorable than the loss to the Philadelphia Eagles was the team’s first winning season since 1991.

As the District of Columbia remains legally subservient to the federal government, the mayor needed to convince the federal government to turn the site over to the city. Her decade of persistence paid off. At the end of 2024, Congress handed Bowser a 99-year lease for the National Park Service–controlled parcels.

Bowser and Harris, the Commanders managing partner, now talk about the proposed stadium and entertainment district deal with the easy familiarity of people believing themselves well on their way to getting what they want. “Now that the legislation has passed the Congress,” Bowser told an Economic Club of Washington audience in May, “we’re no longer limited to only a football stadium but housing, an entertainment district, parks and recreation, and wonderful connections to the Anacostia River.”

If and when a new stadium gets built—

though it may be more “when” than “if”— Bowser can say she made it so. “She’s selling it as legacy,” says Neil deMause, a sports economics journalist who edits Field of Schemes, a site that analyzes public subsidies for professional sports facilities. “It’s just selling it as a gift to fans. Some of that [legacy-building] is at work with Josh Harris as well, since he is from the area originally.”

The not yet signed, sealed, and delivered deal, however, is coming under fresh scrutiny for a simple reason: Washington needs a much better deal.

Ten years is a long time for a mayor of a large American city to have been thinking about what this major policy decision should look like. It’s long enough to have found out what the city’s residents actually want, not just what fans or the billionaire owners want. It’s also long enough to come up with a “highest and best use” for the nearly 200 acres the site encompasses, and it’s more than long enough to decide if the site could anchor something other than a stadium—like 15,000 homes in a new neighborhood, homes that a modestly paid worker could afford, complemented by retail necessities like a supermarket and other food-centered options.

In April, Bowser and the Commanders released a “ term sheet ,” an initial memorandum of understanding, about the RFK Stadium campus. Under its proposed terms, the Commanders and the District would fund the new stadium’s construction. Even though the city is already suffering a major budget crisis, the mayor has decided that the team shouldn’t pay property taxes or sales taxes. Only at the eleventh hour in June did the Council of the District of Columbia finally decide to pump the brakes and conduct studies.

There’s a widely held assumption that Washington is recession-proof. More precisely, it’s more recession-resistant. But the unleashing of the Department of Government Efficiency by the Trump administration has decimated Washington’s federal government workforce that powers the capital’s economy. As this politically created recession bears down on the city, leading to a possible exodus of fired federal workers, giving up the major revenue opportunities that a better deal would provide seems unwise at best.

Bragging rights to an NFL team or “sports capital” status won’t feed, house, clothe,

THE

UNLEASHING

OF THE DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY HAS DECIMATED WASHINGTON’S FEDERAL GOVERNMENT WORKFORCE THAT POWERS THE CAPITAL’S ECONOMY.

educate, transport, or otherwise sustain District residents. Particularly when economic signals, from higher unemployment rates to a real estate market suddenly flush with single-family homes and condos, point to stressful fiscal times ahead.

Why is such a raw deal even on the table when the city has what Harris desperately wants: a Washington address? “I’m happy to see the D.C. Council exercising a bit more leverage,” says Ebony Payne, the Ward 7 Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner for Kingman Park, the neighborhood at the gates of RFK . “But the deal doesn’t just need a few tweaks here and there. The entire deal needs to be reworked and reimagined.”

A hypothetical commercial real estate listing might describe the RFK Stadium campus this way:

“Due east of the U.S. Capitol are 180 acres of very desirable waterfront property on the Anacostia River, ripe for state-of-the-art development. Originally zoned for an athletic mega-facility, new parameters allow expanded mixed-use opportunities including rental housing, restaurants, hotels, and recreation facilities. Adjacent to residential neighborhoods, the DC Armory, the D.C. Jail, “The Fields” recreation area, and parklands. On-site demolition of existing athletic mega-facility already in progress. Motivated leaseholder offers sublease with generous terms. Generational opportunity. Serious inquiries only.”

“The right question here is, what would you offer if there were no stadium deal or no stadium in the picture; if D.C. treated this like another large development lot, and opened it up for an RFP and said, we’re going to do the infrastructure on this?” says Geoffrey Propheter, an associate professor of

public affairs at the University of Colorado Denver. “We’re going to pay a couple hundred million dollars and prepare this land, and we’re willing to make some investments in it as well. What would you offer? What would you want to bring, and how much would you be willing to pay?”

Economists who slice and dice stadium financing agree that the dealmakers selling stadiums feed on equal measures of civic pride and the fears that the team may leave town. DeMause says that in the era that produced RFK Stadium, cities, counties, or states would merely loan the funds and the team would pay the money back.

“You can argue about whether it’s a good use of public money to loan money to teams, but at least the public is being made whole, right?” he says. “The problem is, since, real-

ly, the late ’80s, the landscape has just completely changed. It’s no longer the public puts up the money and then we [the team that locates there] pay rent. It’s the public puts up the money, and then we don’t give the public anything.”

The Bowser administration doesn’t see these investments the same way. The mayor’s office declined a request for an interview; City Administrator Kevin Donahue responded with a statement. “Mayor Bowser and the District have a proven record of investing in sports facilities that have in turn transformed entire neighborhoods, generated new tax revenue, and supported the creation of new housing and amenities … But our partnership with the Commanders is not just about a football stadium—it’s about delivering opportuni -

ties for DC residents and businesses and unlocking 180 acres along the Anacostia River at RFK .”

The mayor and the Commanders envision a 65,000-seat facility complete with a roof, team administrative offices, and parking facilities, built in two phases, to accommodate 8,000 spaces. The District of Columbia would provide $1.1 billion to construct the stadium, and the Commanders would contribute $2.7 billion above and beyond the city’s contribution.

The facility would open in the fall of 2030. Thirty percent of the area would be designated for parks and recreation use. Housing and other commercial facilities would be located in a designated zone with plans for up to 800 hotel rooms and 6,500 units of rental housing; at least 30 percent

Mayor Muriel Bowser (right), pictured with Commanders managing partner Josh Harris, has been working on a D.C. football stadium for ten years.

of those units would be affordable. The project would create 14,000 construction jobs, which are temporary, and 2,000 permanent jobs.

What the team pays for coming home is where the deal becomes surreal. The team would pay an annual rent of one dollar over the initial 30-year period for each lease: the stadium lease, the team administrative offices lease, and two parking facilities leases, with four consecutive, five-year renewals.

The commercial development lease is 60 years with three consecutive renewal options of ten years each. The annual rent on the commercial development parcel is also one dollar for the first 27 years. In year 28, the rent increases to less than full market value through year 32, when the rent can max out to full market value.

What isn’t even covered by the agreement are the services the city must provide to service the stadium itself, such as police, firefighters, and EMTs.

Not only does the term sheet put Washington at a fiscal disadvantage from opening day, it also complicates its existing dealings with teams in the District that do pay rent. The MLB Washington Nationals pay $5.5 million each year to rent Nationals Park. Monumental Sports & Entertainment’s Ted Leonsis, the owner of the Washington Wizards (NBA) and the Capitals (NHL), signed a $515 million pact to stay in town after a proposed move to Alexandria, Virginia. That plan antagonized both the community and a key Virginia Senate leader whom Leonsis and Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) failed to consult. The two teams will pay $1.5 million in rent this year. (Major League Soccer’s D.C. United appears to have launched the era of one-dollar rents .)

Expect teams paying significantly more today to come looking for discounts tomorrow if the Commanders’ deal goes through. There’s also no PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes) agreement with the Commanders of the sort the city has with other developments.

Washington also won’t see a cent from ancillary activities at the stadium. The Commanders keep all operating revenues from stadium-based advertising (both interior and exterior), including from naming rights, sponsorships, premium seating, ticket proceeds, and food, beverage, and merchandise sales. The team also keeps all the

revenues from the parking facility (which has to be ready by the opening in 2030), while the District cannot impose sales or use tax on parking or storage fees in the parking garages. It also cannot impose a sales tax on personal seat licenses, an annual fee that an individual must pay in order to buy season tickets.

“The District may not be paying for the stadium [construction costs, which it shares with the team], but it gives up two to six times more in rent it could collect if it leased that land to someone else closer to market price, rather than this rent discount that is being proposed,” says Propheter. “It’s the rent terms that just makes this so different and dramatically more expensive as far as subsidies go, than anything else in the country. That is what makes this stand out from the stadium itself.”

“It’s hard to wrap my head around just how big these numbers get,” Propheter continues. “It almost feels like this is Monopoly money. It’s not even real, but it is unfortunately real. So, $6 billion is the low end [of what the deal will cost]. The high end is something above $20 billion; you could build your own stadium multiple times for that amount.”

The economic impact study commissioned by the mayor’s office isn’t any more uplifting. Some of the numbers do not appear to jibe with the term sheet that specifies, for example, that the team “receives and retains Stadium operating revenues” from merchandise and food and beverage, while the report asserts the opposite: that “in-stadium spending” would go to the city. It’s also difficult to take a study seriously that includes disclaimers like “All information provided to us was not verified and was assumed to be correct.” Nor is the report signed by a company official but by “CSL International,” the firm behind the study. Two professional sports teams, the New York Yankees and the Dallas Cowboys, hold ownership stakes in the company, which is not known for its analytical rigor.

“That is the quintessential economic impact study for a stadium,” says Dennis Coates, a University of Maryland economics professor. “Lots of glossy bullshit, but no details on how anything was computed or justification for any of the assumptions that they make.”

Had the authors of the National Capital Planning Commission’s 2006 “ RFK Stadi-

um Site Redevelopment Study” been able to follow through on transforming the area into an eastern gateway to the city, the Washington Commanders’ plan would have been moot. The planners envisioned a large waterfront park with a monument at one end. A museum or another memorial would anchor the other side of the park opposite the DC Armory.

The area would be connected by pedestrian and bike paths along open spaces and recreation fields. Residences and neighborhood retail with restaurants, cafés, bookstores, as well as dry cleaners and other neighborhood services–oriented stores, were planned. The planners came up with four designs and held two months of community meetings. But the only project that was ever completed was The Fields, the recreational facilities for team sports like soccer and other activities. That area opened shortly before the pandemic.

A mid-May town hall meeting in Deanwood, an African American neighborhood across the Anacostia River from the stadium, showcased the split on the project. One set of residents complained about the misplaced priorities in a city that, for starters, lacks housing that working families can afford and has yet to replace lead pipelines. African American businesspeople supporting the project wanted to make sure that they get “to be on the team” and reap the benefits that they missed out on with past megaprojects.

But most Washingtonians have been strangely silent about a new stadium, which would be one of the biggest public-private infrastructure investments the city has ever seen. Nearly 60 percent of respondents oppose the deal, according to a June poll commissioned by the hotel and hospitality union UNITE HERE . An earlier Washington Post-Schar School poll found

DEALMAKERS SELLING STADIUMS FEED ON EQUAL MEASURES OF CIVIC PRIDE AND THE FEARS THAT THE TEAM MAY LEAVE TOWN.

Washington Goes for Broke

RFK Memorial Stadium is just a Hail Mary away from the U.S. Capitol

that 55 percent of Washington residents supported the project.

There is none of the citywide outrage that greeted Harris’s other sports facility project, the Philadelphia 76ers plan (Harris is one of the Sixers’ owners) to build an arena next to the city’s Chinatown neighborhood. The D.C. Commanders proposal, by contrast, has specifics that to date have mobilized only individual neighborhoods. Residents of Kingman Park, a historic neighborhood purpose-built for African Americans beginning in the 1920s, are borderline apoplectic about stacked garages for 8,000 vehicles rather than a new Metro stop to alleviate traffic congestion.

“I certainly don’t mind putting money into things that grow how our city moves around the right way,” says Councilmember Charles Allen, who represents the largest ward in the city and doesn’t support the stadium plan. “You’ve got a Metro station that needs to be completely rebuilt. You have the opportunity to add in a new Metro station. Where you build Metro,” he adds, “development follows.”

Councilmember Wendell Felder, a project supporter who represents the stadium area, declined a request for an interview.

To be sure, the proposal doesn’t displace humans, which muffles citywide outrage. Parking and access to recreation are problems that don’t galvanize residents beyond the immediate community. That is slowly starting to shift as the Commanders’ terms begin to circulate around town. Those views may shift again after public hearings slated for the end of July.

The term sheet also sketches out a community benefits agreement process that would include planning for educational and recreation opportunities, and workforce development for formerly incarcerated citizens and community outreach programs for underserved community members—a staple of stadium deals since the L.A. Lakers relocated from Inglewood to downtown Los Angeles in 1999. But the community benefits language in the term sheet is vague and doesn’t match the specific terms of the stadium and commercial zone components.

In response to congressional Republicans’ failure to restore the $1 billion they took from the District’s current budget, Mayor Bowser took advantage of a statutory maneuver to reduce the deficit to $410 billion. But that move did not stave off devastating budget cuts that will force people off health care, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits, housing vouchers, emergency rental assistance, and more.

But in certain respects, choices before the city don’t boil down to deciding between a stadium and a roster of social services. The city will have to pay debt service on the nearly $1 billion capital expenditure it will commit to if the deal goes forward. Debt service payments are capped in the District’s operating budget. What the stadium spending would displace is other capital projects—like a new corrections facility. Social services allocations, which come under a different line item in the budget, are subject to the revenue crunch exacer-

bated by the House’s refusal to restore the city’s funding.

The D.C. Central Detention Facility is long overdue to be replaced. In a July 2024 report, the Office of the D.C. Auditor documented that the half-century-old jail is one of the most overcrowded facilities in the country, with serious issues including an inmate death rate that’s three times the national average, a number of overdoses that’s ten times the average, and 400 reported incidents involving the use of force by staff. As early as 2023, city officials knew that a new jail would cost about $1 billion, that is, roughly the amount that the city plans to put into the stadium under the terms of its proposed deal. Instead, the District now plans to pursue a public-private partnership to build the facility, which would reduce the costs to the city.

In April 2019, after ten years of economic growth, Jeffrey S. DeWitt, then the city’s chief financial officer, warned that the District, depending on the “nature and severity” of the precipitating event, “is not insulated from recessions, and exposure to the negative impacts from a recession is probably growing, however mild or severe that recession may be.”

The Great Recession and the 2001 recession’s impacts on the private sector weren’t as severe in Washington as they were elsewhere, given the countercyclical role that the federal government customarily plays in those circumstances. DeWitt concluded that federal spending helped the city stave

US Capitol East Capitol Street

off more severe downturns both times. He was prescient about the future, however: “Current federal fiscal policy,” he said (it was then year three of the first Trump administration) “makes it unlikely that such increases in federal spending can be counted on in the future.”

That was before Trump’s second-term assaults on the federal workforce. To be sure, the DOGE shocks aren’t wholly unprecedented. In 1993, following the 1990 recession, the Clinton administration laid out its National Partnership for Reinventing Government, its ambitious clapback at the conservative cacophony about the bloated, inefficient federal bureaucracy. Vice President Al Gore headed up the 1990s version of a government efficiency commission, and the administration took a hatchet to the federal workforce: In the space of a year, some 250,000 employees lost their jobs in the pivot from civil servants to less costly contractors.

By the end of the decade, the federal government had shed about 460,000 jobs; the District lost about 47,000 of them, or 7 percent of its workforce. The negative effects that rippled through the D.C. economy remained localized and persisted through the end of the decade. In the 1990s, the city also lost population at a rate higher than in the 1970s after the 1968 riots.

Today’s DOGE cutbacks are a 9.0 on the economic Richter scale for the District: In the first four months of 2025, about 2,400 jobs have been lost. Over the next four years, 32,000 positions could disappear. Houses have surged onto the market and chat rooms are crowded with people crowdsourcing their next steps. States are trying to recruit the cast-off workers, and so are Canada, China, and France, among others.

Which makes it a surreal time for D.C.’s mayor to be pressuring city councilors and trying to coax an increasingly skeptical public with the fiction that bringing home a professional football team means good jobs, housing, and recreation. Even more ludicrous is the fantasy that these jobs will be anything more than a side gig for many people, or put a dent in an unemployment rate that is starting to creep upward.

Washington’s May unemployment rate was 5.9 percent, 1.7 percentage points higher than the national rate.

Unions have their own difficulties with the proposal. On the construction side,

Though some neighborhood groups are organizing against the stadium project, most Washingtonians have been strangely silent.

the Commanders have committed to use a project labor agreement (PLA) to be negotiated with the Baltimore-D.C. Metro Building Trades Council for the stadium and the parking garages. But team officials have refused to sign a PLA on the mixed-use commercial development parcel.

Team officials appear to be banking on their perception that the area’s unions don’t have the political clout of their Philadelphia brethren who secured comprehensive agreements with Harris during the negotiations for a downtown Philadelphia 76ers arena. (Harris later abandoned that project to sign a new agreement with his old landlord, Com-

SEVEN CITY COUNCIL MEMBERS SENT A LETTER TO THE COMMANDERS IN JUNE INDICATING THAT COMPREHENSIVE LABOR AGREEMENTS ARE MUST-HAVES.

cast, to replace the Sixers’ current facility in the South Philadelphia Sports Complex.)

Greg Akerman, the president of the Baltimore-D.C. Metro Building Trades Council, admits that the District is “less of union stronghold than Philly.” But with thousands of construction jobs at stake and seven councilmembers supporting a more comprehensive PLA , he’s not worried: “We’re doing everything we can to make it known to the Commanders that we’re not messing around.”

UNITE HERE Local 25, the metro Washington union representing hotel and hospitality workers, has met with team officials only on a few occasions. They’re still seeking a labor peace agreement that ensures a fair process for workers to organize, which can include company neutrality. “The mayor is letting them [the Commanders] get away with it,” says Paul Schwalb, the executive secretary-treasurer of UNITE HERE Local 25.

Seven city councilmembers, the number needed to move any agreement forward, sent a letter to the Commanders in June indicating that comprehensive labor agreements are must-haves, just as they were in Philadelphia and at other projects in Washington. The Commanders, they made clear, shouldn’t expect otherwise.

There is one episode that lurks in the darkest recesses of the minds of Commanders fans and pols alike: the midnight flight of the Baltimore Colts to Indianapolis some 40 years ago. Colts owner Robert Irsay had wanted a new stadium, but the city didn’t want to meet his demands. Instead, Maryland officials planned to seize the team by eminent domain. But Irsay beat Maryland to the punch, sending tractor trailers to pack up what needed to go and having them drive off to Indianapolis.

Coates, the University of Maryland professor, was a Colts fan who felt Baltimore’s pain from the Maryland suburb of D.C. where he lived at the time. “You could sense this absolute deflation, like depression, settling down over the whole city,” he says. “No mayor wants to be in charge when you know the city’s legacy gets ripped away from it.” And though William Donald Schaefer, Baltimore’s longtime mayor, reportedly cried over it, he finished up as mayor three years later and went on to serve two terms as governor.

Sharon Pratt Kelly, Washington’s first woman mayor, wasn’t so lucky. In 1992, she pushed back against then-owner Jack Kent Cooke’s demands to replace RFK . “How much should a financially strapped city fork over in subsidies,” The Washington Post asked, “to keep this one man from bolting to a suburb?” Not one dime, as it turned out. So the “billionaire bully”—as she called him—took the Washington football team to Landover, Maryland, just five miles east, and Kelly lost her re-election bid.

Rumblings continue about Virginia and Maryland’s interest in the Commanders. Gov. Youngkin hasn’t said anything publicly about the Commanders since his misadventures trying to move the Wizards and the Capitals to his state. Maryland’s position is murkier. The state is in deep fiscal distress, yet Gov. Wes Moore didn’t mention that in June when he told NBC4 Washington, “I want to make sure that that area [Landover] is better than what it is right now—with the Commanders there or not.” Knowing that Josh Harris is happy to negotiate on multiple fronts on any given Sunday, that’s not exactly an emphatic no. In Philly last year, Sixers officials talked about possible moves with the governors of New Jersey and Delaware while working on one deal with Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker and another with Comcast.

The timetable for events like the 2031 FIFA Women’s World Cup (the facilities must be operational before the event) are bearing down on the District and the Commanders. There is also a nonzero chance that Congress or the president could intercede to override any city council decision. At a May news conference announcing Washington as the host for the 2027 NFL Draft, President Trump pronounced RFK “the best site there is” and has offered reminders that “the federal government ultimately controls it.”

Since what you don’t ask for is what you

don’t get afterward when it comes to dealing with professional sports teams, the city council has slowed Bowser’s roll to sign off on the term sheet. If commercial zone development is not formally incentivized or guaranteed, for example—and again, the term sheet’s language is not ironclad—a project might get built or it might fall through, particularly if there’s a major economic downturn. However, council chairman Phil Mendelson has carved out stadium bill funding separate from the city budget, so the money remains available.

As of mid-July, four city councilors are definite yes votes. The agreement needs seven out of 13 councilmembers to move forward. Can they face down a billionaire NFL owner and his allies in higher places? Ed Lazere, a member of the executive committee of No Billionaire’s Playground, a citywide coalition opposing the stadium, believes that the council “will push for a better deal.” But, he says, “the key question is how hard will they fight for a really good deal?”

Another group, Homes Not Stadiums, plans to pursue a citywide ballot initiative to halt the project. If approved by the D.C. Board of Elections, the measure could come up for a vote next year. Which would pose some provocative choices: Bowser appears poised to run for a fourth term.

Should the Commanders’ plan advance, it could set an unwelcome precedent for municipalities. “We have to keep focused on everything that’s below the water, which is going to be billions and billions of dollars in future costs or tax money given up,” says Propheter, the University of Colorado Denver economist. “Because this could really up the ante in terms of what team owners can ask for, and set a standard where the sky’s the limit. It’s no longer a billion dollars here, a billion dollars there. It’s billions and billions of dollars in each shot. There’s going to be a lot of concern about that.”

There is no known universe where a single stadium, or several, spurs the kind of economic development that makes a generational impact on a city, much less a city hovering on the edge of a recession brought on by a never-before-seen implosion of its economic lodestone—the federal government. A mayor can’t fund programs with sports pride. Nothing about the current contours of the Commanders’ parasitic deal with the District changes that. It’s a football fantasy that only an NFL owner could love. n

Between 60 and 65 percent of customers at the Fuerte Meat Market in East Chicago, Indiana, use SNAP benefits.

SUGAR RUSH

Indiana is among several states restricting the purchase of sugary foods with nutrition assistance funds. Is this about health, or punishing poor people?

By Emma Janssen

PHOTOGRAPHS BY GONZALO GUZMAN

GARY, INDIANA – Driving through Northwest Indiana feels a bit like going back in time. Winding roads, barns, and lush green fields in the rural farm communities give way to hulking steel mills, tall smokestacks, massive warehouses, and art deco movie palaces as you hit Gary. Look a little closer, though, and the ’50s ideal of country life leading into the big city becomes hazier. The movie palace, home of the 2002 Miss USA pageant (run by an impresario named Donald Trump), is boarded up, the windows broken. The jobs, or at least most of them, are gone, along with many of the people who worked at them.

Many of those in this region rely on government aid in some way, whether it be farm subsidies or social safety net benefits like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. In Indiana, 1 out of every 11 residents receives SNAP benefits. The state’s staunchly Republican government has made a practice of canceling or defunding safety-net programs, but this year there was a twist. In April, Gov. Mike Braun allied himself with Health

and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again agenda, signing nine executive orders for the Make Indiana Healthy Again initiative.

One of those executive orders empowered the state to submit a waiver request to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), asking for authorization to restrict what low-income Hoosiers who receive SNAP benefits can purchase. In May, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins approved the waiver. Starting in January, SNAP recipients in Indiana won’t be able to use SNAP to buy candy or sugary drinks like soda and some juices.

So far, Indiana is one of six states that have been approved by the USDA to ban sugary foods from SNAP, but experts say that they’re monitoring at least eight others that might follow suit. Earlier this year, eight House Republicans introduced a bill that would do the same thing.

The move is a complicated one, as are so many of the policies that make up the MAHA agenda. It’s true that sugary foods can have quasi-addictive properties and put consumers at risk for chronic illnesses

like diabetes. It’s true that Americans, particularly low-income Americans, have high rates of these food-related chronic illnesses. Ideally, we would have a food system that prioritizes fresh fruits and vegetables over candy bars and sodas.

But SNAP advocates say we don’t live in that world, and further limiting what low-income Americans can buy won’t help get us any closer. And instead of just restricting people to healthy food, the moves in red states could restrict people from finding somewhere to use their SNAP benefits altogether.

It’s also especially difficult to trust Braun, RFK Jr., and other politicians aligned with the Trump administration, after half a year of relentless cuts to the same social safety net programs that are designed to maintain and promote Americans’ health. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Trump’s landmark spending package passed in July, cuts $186 billion from SNAP. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that as many as five million people could lose SNAP benefits. In the same bill, Republicans plan to cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid, a move that would make health care unaffordable for many of these same Americans and decimate rural hospital systems.

Braun has done his fair share of cuts in Indiana, too. After just one year of participating in the federal government’s SUN Bucks program, which gives low-income families with children $120 to buy groceries during the summer, Braun declined to renew the program for this summer. A statement from Indiana’s Family and Social Services Administration didn’t offer a clear explanation, just saying that “necessary groundwork had not been completed” to run the program. The cancellation will leave 700,000 Indiana children hungrier than they were last summer.

Are these the people who will make Indiana, and America, healthy again? Or does this fervor to ban sugary foods from SNAP have an ulterior motive?

As I drove to the farmhouse that serves as the base of operations for the Northwest Indiana Food Council, I was struck by the abundance of food that I saw—fields overflowing with rows of corn, small patches of leafy greens, private greenhouses here and there. But when I spoke to Anne Massie and Becca Tuholski, two farmers and leaders of the Council, they told me that the plenty I

saw didn’t translate to the tables of ordinary people in the region.

The Council was formed in 2015 to address both the economic security of local farmers and the food insecurity of folks in the region. According to Massie, the organization’s president, and Tuholski, the local food access coordinator, the two issues are closely linked.

“You can drive for miles and miles and miles and just be surrounded by corn and soybeans, but there’s not a grocery store in sight,” said Tuholski. “We’re surrounded by food, but it’s not food for us.”

Those corn and soy crops are typically processed into animal feed or turned into ingredients like corn syrup, which then is used to make the same cheap, sweet, ultraprocessed foods that end up on corner-store shelves in Gary’s food deserts: bottles of Coke, Hershey’s bars, tubs of ice cream.

“When we are just subsidizing commodity crops that are turned into sweeteners and processed foods, those are … sometimes the only options in communities where shelf-stable food is all that they have access to,” said Massie. “We would like to see more effort on making healthy food more affordable.”

Before reaching Gary, I stopped in East Chicago, Indiana, a town of 25,000 where a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line. Until 1985, the area was the site of multiple lead smelting facilities; studies have found elevated levels of lead and arsenic in East Chicago’s soil, as well as high lead levels in some residents’ water. Despite the environmental hazards left behind by industry, the town is beautiful, with red-brick storefronts, foxgloves blooming in front yards, and flower pots hanging from lampposts.

The closest major grocery store, an Aldi, is in the next town over, so many East Chicago residents rely on local mom-and-pop grocers. One such shop is Fuerte Meat Market, a Hispanic food shop on one of the main streets. I spoke to the store manager, Bartolo Fuerte, who told me that 60 to 65 percent of his customers pay for their groceries with SNAP, especially between the 5th and 23rd of the month, when Indiana sends out SNAP payments. Fuerte said that customers who use SNAP typically buy a variety of foods: meat from his butcher counter, produce, but also soda (“pop,” to many in the region) and candy.

As for Indiana’s ban on buying sugary drinks and candy with SNAP dollars, Fuerte was a supporter. “It’s bad for my business,

INSTEAD OF JUST RESTRICTING PEOPLE

TO

HEALTHY FOOD, RED STATES COULD RESTRICT PEOPLE FROM FINDING SOMEWHERE TO USE THEIR SNAP BENEFITS ALTOGETHER.

but it’s good for people,” he said. “Soda is like drinking liquor, almost.”

The comparison to alcohol is one that many proponents of the plan echo. SNAP has never allowed the purchase of alcohol, tobacco, or cannabis products. Some, like Laura Schmidt, a professor at the Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, argue that soda should be in that same category. Schmidt wrote in an op-ed that ultra-processed and sugary foods share the addictive qualities of alcohol and tobacco. They were designed to get consumers hooked; in fact, many food producers like Kraft and General Foods were at one time owned by the same tobacco companies that got generations of Americans addicted to cigarettes. To protect consumers from corporate greed, she argues, the government should step in.

Fuerte predicts that the ban will affect his bottom line but again emphasized that the community’s health is his priority: “Whatever the government does for the people, for their health, I have to support it.”

But experts say that the ban could make food insecurity worse by burdening small grocers with new administrative protocols and lower revenues. “We’re talking about the mom-and-pop retailers who are the only entity standing between 90 miles and food,” said Gina Plata-Nino, a food advocate with the Food Research & Action Center. She predicts that some retailers won’t want to update their systems to accommodate the

SNAP changes and may stop accepting SNAP benefits altogether. “It’s incredibly expensive. It’s restricting. Expensive for the states to figure out, expensive for the retailers, and the outcome will be that [fewer grocers] will want to be on the program,” she explained.

The USDA has blocked SNAP cuts on this basis before. In 2010, New York City under then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg tried to implement a ban on sugary drinks for SNAP recipients. The USDA denied New York City’s request, writing that it would be too complex for retailers to implement. “The proposal lacks a clear and practical means to determine product eligibility, which is essential to avoid retailer confusion at point-of-sale and stigma for affected clients,” the USDA’s letter said.

These issues, unsolved and prohibitive in 2010, remain today. Among the six states with approved waivers, there are restrictions on “soda,” “soft drinks,” “energy drinks,” “candy,” and simply “unhealthy drinks.” The descriptions are not consistent, and at the federal level there is no definitive USDA defi-

nition of a “sugary” food. This leaves all kinds of things up to interpretation. Do sports drinks like Gatorade count as “unhealthy drinks”? What about energy drinks or vitamin waters? At what point does fruit juice move from being healthy to unhealthy? Should fruit roll-ups be considered candy? What about chocolate-covered almonds? How many grams of added sugar makes something “sugary”? Though some states have gone into more detail, most haven’t, leaving these questions unanswered.

Without clear definitions and easy pointof-sale protocols, retailers could be forced to police each customer’s purchase, potentially in front of other customers. For some SNAP recipients, the benefits already carry enough stigma. “Part of the reason that people don’t want to be on SNAP is because of the stigmatizing barriers and judgments,” said Plata-Nino. “It’s the reason why people shop at midnight.”

Fuerte Meat Market also serves hot food, with well-priced tacos, tortas, and burritos in a corner by the front registers. But

Cece Cruz, owner of Broadway Food Shop, sees kids in her store asking for candy or ice cream all the time. “So you’re going to just take their treat away?”

SNAP recipients can’t use their benefits on hot prepared foods, including products like rotisserie chickens. Arkansas Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who also banned sugary foods from her state’s SNAP program, said when she announced the ban: “Right now you can use food stamps to buy a soft drink or candy bar from a gas station, but you can’t use them to buy an Arkansasraised hot rotisserie chicken from a grocery store. That’s the definition of crazy.”

To hear Sanders tell it, the addition of rotisserie chicken would help counteract the subtraction of sugary foods from SNAP eligibility. But hot foods like rotisserie chicken weren’t mentioned in the waiver request Sanders sent to the USDA , and USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins only approved the cuts to sugary foods. When the waiver takes effect in January 2026, Arkansas residents still won’t be able to buy hot foods, despite how Sanders sold it.

SNAP advocates like Joelle Johnson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest say that this pattern of only subtracting from SNAP

rather than adding to it betrays Republicans’ true intentions. “If the administration actually wanted to achieve those things—reducing health disparities and reducing diet-related chronic disease—then we should be seeing language around protecting SNAP benefits, increasing SNAP benefits, making sure that people can afford to buy groceries,” she said.

Most of Gary is classified as a food desert by the USDA . Every few miles, there’s a Family Dollar or small corner store, but few with fresh fruit or produce. I stopped in a number of these small grocers, trying to get a sense for the community’s options. In one, 5th Plaza Food Mart & Beauty Supply, the only produce options were a watermelon, two avocados, and two lemons sitting on the grimy bottom shelf of a refrigerator.

Those who live in Gary know this already. I sat down with local advocates Carl Weatherspoon Jr., the vice chair of the Gary Food Council, and Tiara Williams, who helps run a block beautification initiative for the city. Both Weatherspoon and Williams were

born and raised in the city, and we spent a fair chunk of our conversation comparing local grocery options.

“So you’ll have a grocery store here, and you can see that that grocery store is not offering fresh items, and it smells like a pig was slaughtered six days ago right here at the register. Now why is it that way here, but not when you go to [nearby towns] Merrillville or Schererville or Crown Point?” asked Williams wryly. “There’s a common denominator, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

Williams was not so subtly referring to race, and its interwoven relationship with poverty. In the 2020 census, around 80 percent of Gary’s residents were Black, compared to 50 percent in Merrillville and just 7 percent in Crown Point (racial census data wasn’t available for Schererville in 2020). In Gary, 27 percent of Black residents are food insecure.

After decades of being left behind, community activists and workers in Gary, like Weatherspoon and Williams, have long abandoned the hope that the government will act in the best interest of their health,

opting instead to take matters into their own hands. The three of us sat perched on stumps in Gary’s Mystical Farms, a city grant–funded garden built on a vacant lot in a residential neighborhood. We ate calendula flowers (spicy, then sweet), peppermint leaves (cooling), and hibiscus tea that helped mitigate the 90-degree heat and thick humidity. During the hour we sat there, neighbors stopped by to chat; it was clear that the garden was a local gathering place in addition to a spot where residents could harvest free, healthy fruits and vegetables.

“My grandfather had a garden. His grandmother had a garden,” Williams told me, pointing to Weatherspoon. “And that has to do with a lot of our people coming from the South and understanding that you do need to garden. You need to be responsible for your own food, and that’s what they did.”

Williams’s grandfather came to Gary from the South as part of the Great Migration, leaving life as a sharecropper who picked cotton and was kept constantly in debt by landlords. He brought with him a

Gary community activists Carl Weatherspoon (left) and Tiara Williams helped build a community garden so people can be “responsible for [their] own food.”

“WE’RE TARGETING AND BEATING UP A VERY VULNERABLE POPULATION.”

Gina Plata-Nino, Food Research & Action Center

commitment to growing his own food and, according to Williams, was known to drop off greens and tomatoes to his neighbors. “It’s an art that has been lost, unfortunately, but through things like community gardens, where people are willing to educate, the community feels comfortable to come back,” she said.

The hope is that, by building a connection to the land, Gary residents will regain sovereignty over their food ecosystem, eliminating reliance on corner stores and SNAP rules. They’re already seeing progress. “Mr. John across the street, he’ll come over here and get a cucumber or tomato,” said Weatherspoon. “He from Mississippi, he has a garden. Miss Betty and Tia, her granddaughter, they’ll walk down the street and make some cha cha with our hot peppers. It’s delicious. They don’t go to the grocery store.”

When I asked Williams and Weatherspoon what they thought about the sugary foods ban, I wasn’t quite sure what they’d say. They are both so deeply connected to the foods they grow and eat, and adamant about the benefits of eating healthfully. But they both immediately saw the ban as paternalism from people who don’t have the best interest of low-income Hoosiers at heart.

“What do I think about the government regulating what people eat when there is nothing really here to replace it? Well, that’s an injustice in itself,” Williams said. “If you’re not going to address those types of issues, I think punishing the person who receives the SNAP benefits is not the way.”

Back in East Chicago, I spoke to Cece Cruz, the owner of Broadway Food Shop, a holein-the-wall grocer just two blocks away from Fuerte Meat Market. Outside the shop’s front door, an AC unit dripped water into a bucket, working hard against the summer heat.

Cruz’s inventory is mostly dry goods, like beans, pasta, and bread. There’s a small,

refrigerated soda section and an even smaller produce section. Cruz, who has owned the shop for 47 years, told me that some 80 percent of her customers use SNAP. Many of them are single mothers, she said: “They struggle through the month once they get their food stamps and buy what they can.” She often overhears their children asking for candy bars or ice cream. “That’s their treat,” she said. “So you’re going to just take their treat away?”

Though she acknowledged that the ban would likely affect her revenue, she wasn’t terribly worried. She knows that her customers will still need to buy basics like bread and milk and, besides, she feels powerless to change the policy: “We have to go with it. We have no other choice.”

Like Cruz, Plata-Nino is concerned that the policy beats up on those who need the most help, like single mothers trying to feed their children. “We are targeting and beating up at a very vulnerable population. [Sugar consumption] is an issue for all of America,” she said. “Why are you targeting a population that doesn’t have a seat on Capitol Hill?”

It’s true that sugar consumption is not unique to SNAP recipients. Data about what SNAP recipients eat is notoriously difficult to collect; purchasing data is private to grocers. The definitive study on how SNAP recipients eat used data from 2011 and found that “there were no major differences in the expenditure patterns of SNAP and non-SNAP households.” SNAP recipients spent most of their money on meat, poultry, and seafood, and the next biggest category was sweetened beverages. For non-SNAP consumers, sweetened beverages were the fifth-largest category. SNAP households spend 9 percent of their benefits on sweetened beverages, and non-SNAP households spend 7 percent.

Other studies have analyzed how a sugary drink ban could change diabetes and obesity rates. One simulation found that the prevalence of Type 2 diabetes among SNAP recipients could decline by 240,000 people over ten years if the ban were implemented. And sugar consumption is clearly linked to several health problems besides Type 2 diabetes, like heart disease, cavities, and gout.

The SNAP advocates I spoke to don’t deny that excess sugar consumption is harmful; they just disagree that bans like Indiana’s are the right approach to fix it. “There’s a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it,” Johnson said. “I would love to see waiver requests

from states where they’re proposing to design a research pilot that pairs a fruit and vegetable incentive with a sugary beverage disincentive.”

Schmidt, the UCSF sugar researcher, also proposed using savings from the sugar cuts to fund fruit and vegetable incentives, tackling the affordability crisis that keeps many SNAP recipients from eating healthier. Indiana started their fruit and vegetable incentive program, Double Up, in 2020, allowing SNAP recipients to get an extra dollar for every dollar they spend on produce at some retailers and farmers markets, up to $20 per day. I asked Braun’s office whether they planned to expand Double Up alongside their recent cuts, but they declined to respond. Double Up wasn’t mentioned in any of Braun’s Make Indiana Healthy Again executive orders or press conferences.

Massie, the farmer and Food Council leader, wants farmers to sell more produce and Hoosiers to eat more produce—she’s devoted her career to it, after all. But after months of nothing but cuts from both the Trump administration and the state, she’s lost all trust in Indiana to act in the best interest of the community.

She described how the Council had recently made major headway in supporting farmers and low-income residents. The Council had administered the Local Food for Schools Program and the Local Food Purchasing Assistance Program, both of which were USDA grant–funded. The initiatives connected Indiana farmers to lower-income residents through their schools and food banks, raising revenue for farmers and providing nutrition to community members.

The Local Food for Schools Program had brought $1.4 million in revenue for local farmers over just two years. But on March 10, Massie and Tuholski got the news that both programs had been slashed by the federal government. Farmers found out abruptly. Some had already purchased extra materials to prepare for the increased demand from the programs.

From Anne’s front porch, we looked out over the neighboring farms and her own greenhouses, which had just started to yield the season’s first peppers and tomatoes. She seemed angry, or sad, probably both.

“What’s the proactive side of Make America Healthy Again? What’s the proactive side of Make Indiana Healthy Again?” she wondered. “Because all we’re seeing are cuts and rollbacks.” n

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CULTURE

Back to Basics

A new book makes the case for a multigenerational commitment to rebuilding democracy.

By Janet Hook

The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding

By Osita Nwanevu Random House

When anti-Trump forces burst forth in rallies across the country this spring, their quirky “No Kings” battle cry proved to be a stroke of genius, a succinct and nonideological way to protest the president’s authoritarian policies. The remarkable turnout was a

reminder that nothing brings the left and center together quite like Donald Trump, especially as he rides roughshod over the Constitution in his second term.

While it was crystal clear what protesters were fighting against, it was less clear what they were fighting for. Capital-D Democracy? That’s probably what most protesters would say, but the truth is that even before Trump, faith in American democracy was fraying.

Polls show that confidence in our democratic system has been in a decadeslong decline. A Gallup poll published in

early 2025 found that just 34 percent of adults were satisfied with the way our democracy is working. When the firm began polling on the question in 1984, 61 percent were satisfied.

Complaints about the political system are often transient, a passing fury among those who dislike the most recent election results. But Gallup, in a rare finding, reported nearly equal levels of dissatisfaction among Democrats and Republicans in early 2025. Trump’s popular-vote victory in 2024 improved Republicans’ attitude from a year ago, but the poll found nearly two-thirds of them were dissatisfied with our democracy.

Discontent with democracy has deep roots that reach across party lines and national borders. Voters have been ground down by frustration with a gridlocked political system that has failed to deliver on its promises to working people, while catering to the wealthy Books

CULTURE

Calls to save democracy ring hollow when democracy is “a goal unachieved,” Nwanevu writes.

and corporations. And that has provided fertile ground for autocrats—in the U.S. and around the world—who promise to “get things done.”

Osita Nwanevu, a columnist with The Guardian and contributor to The New Republic, is worried that frustration with our political system is fueling broader cynicism about the idea of democracy itself, and that we are losing our grip on why it is a good thing. Bored with superficial political discourse and reporting, Nwanevu has gone back to basics, to define and defend democracy in his first book, The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding.

Nwanevu makes a blunt and provocative argument. “The well-meaning calls to defend ‘our democracy’ elide the reality that for all the progress we’ve made since the Founding in the granting and expan-

sion of political rights, democracy, soundly understood, remains a goal unachieved,” he writes. The Founders never intended America to be a democracy, Nwanevu reminds us, instead favoring a republic built to temper the popular will. Creating a true democracy would require nothing less than rewriting the Constitution, a “new Founding.”

Nwanevu draws on an impressive array of sources, from Plato and ancient Athens to the very latest in academic political theory, to remind us how America’s government is riddled with anti-democratic elements: a Senate that gives disproportionate power to rural (mostly Republican) states; an Electoral College that can override the popular majority in presidential elections; a filibuster that can thwart the Senate’s majority such that senators representing as little as 11 percent of the population can nullify the chamber’s will; a campaign

finance system that empowers the wealthy and corporations.

Indeed, Trump has benefited handsomely from the anti-majoritarian elements of our Constitution, allowing him to rise to power in the first place and to leave his mark for decades to come. In 2016, he won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. After being impeached twice, he escaped being convicted—and being blocked from running again for president—only because the Constitution required a supermajority to do the job. This president—never polling with majority support in his first term—fundamentally reshaped the Supreme Court with three nominees who were confirmed by a Senate whose Republican members represented only a minority of the U.S. population and who blocked Barack Obama from filling an open seat for a year.

Nwanevu also finds anti-democratic

This is a hard time to be calling for a root-andbranch overhaul of our political system.

dynamics throughout our economy, where unions are weak, bosses have wide latitude, and workers lack basic protections and privileges like paid family leave that are found in nearly every other industrialized nation. “We’ve come to accept a level of unaccountable control in our workplaces that we would never accept from a state,” he writes.

It’s a grim picture of the toll taken on democracy by constitutional constraints, political realities, and economic inequality.

Nwanevu’s agenda for change is radical and ambitious, if not especially original. He calls for campaign finance reform, Electoral College overhaul, an end to the filibuster, Supreme Court expansion, ranked-choice voting, labor law reform, worker ownership of companies, and much more. Some of these changes would require amending the Constitution, which he acknowledges is not likely to happen anytime soon and will require the kind of sustained, multigenerational campaign that our political system is not well suited to mounting.

“If all this seems daunting, it should,” he writes. “We are still perhaps generations away from a truly democratic Constitution.”

This is a hard time to be calling for a root-and-branch overhaul of our political system, when the very existence of our admittedly imperfect democracy is facing such a crushing attack by Trump and his Republican Party. It’s a little like proposing renovation of an overgrown garden when a wildfire is closing in on it. Nwanevu says he began working on this book in 2021, a time when, with Democrats controlling the White House and Congress, dreaming of big-picture reforms might not have seemed like such a luxury.

Still, his book carries an important warning for today’s resistance movement. Simply stopping Trump and returning to the preTrump status quo will not get at the root of what has allowed his authoritarian ideas to take root in the first place. Addressing that must start by recognizing the collapsing faith in a political system where money rules and gridlock persists, no matter which party

is in charge. Indeed, in a CNN poll released June 1 that asked which party could “get things done,” just 36 percent said the GOP, 19 percent said the Democrats, and 44 percent, a plurality, said neither party.

That disillusionment with both parties has cleared the way for politicians like Trump who are willing to scrap democratic norms to shake things up, even if only to aggrandize themselves. “Our frustrations with our false democracy have corroded faith in the ideal to the benefit of antidemocratic figures on the right and the interests they serve,” he writes.

Doubts about whether democracy is itself a good thing reach at least as far back as Plato, who thought the ideal ruler was a philosopher king. He saw democracy as dangerous and unstable because it put power in the hands of ill-informed masses who could not be counted on to judge the common good. Today, even Democrats’ faith in democracy may be shaken by Trump’s popularvote victory in 2024, finding new sympathy with the words of H.L. Mencken: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Nwanevu takes issue with these cynical views, as well as contemporary political theorists like Jason Brennan, author of the 2016 book Against Democracy, and other academic democracy skeptics who argue that the average citizen is too disengaged, ignorant, or distracted to make good choices about public policy and candidates. Brennan and others cite poll findings—typically one-off, cherry-picked surveys, as Nwanevu takes pains to point out—showing that most Americans can’t name all three branches of government or more than two of the rights listed in the First Amendment. Brennan calls for an “epistocracy”—government by the most knowledgeable and competent.

Nwanevu is far more optimistic about the wisdom of the masses, arguing that polls making voters look stupid are cherrypicked, that people know their own interests better than an autocrat or governing elite, and that there is a kind of “collective intelligence” that can emerge from group decision-making.

In calling for a “new Founding” of democracy, Nwanevu sees a bigger obstacle not in the relative wisdom of the American public but in their reverence for the Founders and their intent. But he makes quick work of demystifying them. “The

Constitution has us working to address the problems of the twenty-first century through institutions designed by men who would have been dazzled by a lightbulb,” he writes. What’s more, the Founders’ intent has already been overridden many times over: by ending slavery, giving women the right to vote, and providing for direct election of senators, to name just a few.

A bigger obstacle to amending the Constitution is a practical political one: If a constitutional convention were called, it risks being hijacked by a group of conservatives who have gotten a jump on organizing one, under the banner of Convention of States, aiming to advance an agenda of their own to restrain federal spending, taxation, and other powers.

Some of Nwanevu’s proposals don’t require constitutional change, like D.C. statehood, eliminating the filibuster, and expanding voting rights. And some of his ideas are percolating at the state and local level. Seventeen states have joined a compact designed to render the Electoral College impotent. Some 63 jurisdictions have instituted ranked-choice voting.

Even if his ideas seem hopelessly out of reach in the current climate, Nwanevu argues they constitute an agenda that may be more politically potent in the short term. “The political and economic reforms we’ve examined constitute a democratic agenda that stands a better chance of defeating the right than the flimsy and predictable rhetoric their opponents have offered up so far,” he writes. “It contains remedies for institutional problems that have undermined confidence in democracy’s efficacy and bolstered a radical right.”

Maybe. I have doubts about the power of procedural reforms like ending the filibuster and ranked-choice voting to rekindle faith in democracy and fire up voters. But this book remains a helpful reminder that as urgent as it is to rally in opposition to Trump, to find ways to block his policies, and to clip his party’s wings in the midterm elections, it will take much more dramatic changes to build a more democratic American political system. Until that happens, Trumpism may continue to find a home here. n

Janet Hook is a freelance writer who has covered Washington and national politics for over 40 years, most recently for the Los Angeles Times .

CULTURE

Shin Godzilla Will Make You Nostalgic for a Working Government

Back in theaters, this clever sequel pits the radioactive reptile against a flawed (but functioning!) bureaucracy.

By A.A. Dowd

Something emerges from Tokyo Bay. At first, it’s just an appendage, thrashing wildly. If you’re a fan of Japan’s biggest star, you know this tail (and tale) well. But out comes the rest, crawling Tiktaalik-style onto dry land, looking like no creature before it, in the opening minutes of Shin Godzilla . More fishlike than the oversized dinosaurs we’re used to seeing in these movies, it stares with blank, unblinking carp eyes and flops gracelessly forward on its cursed Muppet belly. Even after going bipedal, the beast strikes a singular pose, its jaw nightmarishly unhinged, its skin glowing magma red. This is not your father’s Godzilla. When the monster first breaches the surface, the puny humans just stare. In a Tokyo

conference room, a group of high-ranking officials watch a viral video of that mighty tail rising out of the drink. Paralyzed with fear and confusion, they can only think to do one thing: schedule another meeting. The second room is cozier than the first—all couches and comfy chairs and natural light. It’s a bit like the room where the suits decide which cities to nuke in a different monster movie about a devastating attack on Japan, Christopher Nolan’s scrambled biopic Oppenheimer. Originally released in the downright Jurassic past of 2016, Shin Godzilla largely takes place in such nondescript spaces. Not war rooms so much as offices and lounges, where various government functionaries convene to solve the problem of a rapidly mutating new organism stomping its way across urban Japan. Generally speaking, these kinds of scenes are no one’s favorite

in a Godzilla movie. They’re the vegetables on the plate, the dry turnip we wolf down in exchange for piping hot gyoza, the dialogueheavy interludes that move the plot along in between the main event of cities being spectacularly trampled by a guy in a rubber kaiju suit or the CGI equivalent.

Perversely, the filmmakers here regard the debate as the main course. The film is, like its title attraction, an anomaly. It is not your father’s Godzilla movie either.

On August 14, Shin Godzilla trudges back onto U.S. screens, ready to find the American audience it didn’t nine years ago. But in some respects, this is a strange moment for the movie to resurface. Its novelty goes far beyond the ways it redesigns the world’s favorite radioactive reptile. Using the basic template of a suitmation epic, directors Hideaki Anno and Shinji

Higuchi deliver something more cutting: a satire of government inefficiency, a monster movie that flirts with concluding that the real monster is bureaucracy. Simply put, that’s an idea that lands a little differently in a post-DOGE world.

It’s no mystery why Shin Godzilla is being re-released now; the G-man is having a moment. Last year, his reunion with a simian frenemy—the chintzy, cartoonish, digital-soup blockbuster Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire —ascended to the summit of the spring box office in all its chest-beating glory, extending the American arm of the monster’s kingdom. Meanwhile, and more winningly, there was Godzilla Minus One, from the original Japanese studio behind the titan, Toho. Between the tickets it sold and the Best Visual Effects Oscar it won (a first Academy Award for the series), Minus One confirmed an appetite for some actual ideas, for a Godzilla movie that’s about more than firing up the adolescent lizard brain. It also proved that it was possible to care about the people in these films, maybe even more than the superbly staged destruction. Shin Godzilla , which laid the groundwork for the more grounded approach of Godzilla Minus One, foregrounds its human dimension in a very different way. It might be the talkiest entry in a series that’s never exactly been light on gab. But the script isn’t really interested in the lives or personalities of its sprawling cast of characters. They’re

more like moving parts in a sometimes sputtering machine. And there’s not much melodrama in its rather procedural portrait of imperfectly addressed emergency.

The premise is more or less the same as what the original Godzilla offered seven decades ago: a primal mistake of evolution that threatens to level Japan. The novelty lies in the municipal tunnel vision Anno and Higuchi adopt, the way they primarily tether us to the vantage point of civil servants scrambling to contain an apocalyptic threat.

Rebooting rather than extending from the Ishirō Honda 1954 classic, Shin Godzilla presents the title attraction as an “unprecedented event,” a scary first for Planet Earth. Without a road map for this brand-new kind of crisis, the film’s beleaguered government employees can’t always know where the lines of jurisdiction fall. Whose responsibility is it, exactly, to deal with the skyscraper-sized King of All Monsters? Attempts to mobilize the country’s Special Defense Forces are likewise complicated by official, post-WWII articles in Japan specifying that only an “aggressor country” can be met with military action. Godzilla doesn’t fit that bill.

Stretches of the movie are borderline Strangelovian. The bewildered prime minister holds a press conference to reassure the public that the creature can’t survive on land, only to receive the news mid-remarks that it’s rampaging across town as he speaks. Three expert biologists are brought in to offer insight about this new life-form, but

none are willing to say much out of fear that they’ll damage their professional credibility. At one point, a general laments that firing on Godzilla might anger environmentalists. And then there’s the token American envoy (Satomi Ishihara), a hard-partying nepo baby who wants to nuke the monster out of existence, mostly in service of her political ambitions back home. (Naturally, it’s U.S. nuclear waste that awakens this adaptive version of Toho’s finest in the first place.)

For all its bone-dry humor, Shin Godzilla doesn’t skimp on the mayhem. Anno and Higuchi, both anime veterans, give the sporadic scenes of death and destruction a spooky grandeur, especially when the big guy lets loose his signature atomic death ray—a terrifying echo of the monster’s roots as nuclear annihilation incarnate. And we get no fewer than four new designs for Godzilla himself, all eccentric enough to distinguish them from decades of more traditionally Tyrannosaurus rex-ian incarnations. As in many of the best entries of this long-running series, the blatant budgetary limitations of the technology become strengths, an idiosyncratic alternative to the most state-ofthe-art but unimaginative creature work Hollywood money can buy. This Godzilla’s evolution is a miniature effects coup.

Godzilla himself has been in a state of evolution for most of his career; visually, yes, but also metaphorically. Over 70 years, he’s represented any number of anxieties: nuclear

CULTURE

war, natural disasters, the poisoning of the environment. (The recent American films, meanwhile, turn the King of the Monsters into an ultimate alpha predator, the old god returned to survey and sometimes defend a new world.) Shin Godzilla took more specific inspiration than most, reportedly drawing on the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami of 2011—cataclysmic events it explicitly echoes with images of architectural devastation and overtaxed relief workers. Those parallels give the movie a flush of chilling topicality; not since Honda’s original has Godzilla

by assembling his own team of blunt antiyes men not interested in asking permission, does the tide turn in humanity’s favor. Also crucial to their comeback: every naysaying head of state getting blown to smithereens.

How all this will play for an American viewer in 2025 is another matter. In some respects, Shin Godzilla is eerily attuned to the present day. Nine years ago, it seemed to address a specific string of mismanaged disasters. Today, it can’t help but retroactively mirror the variably botched global response to COVID, a monster much more deadly than any towering beast of land and

clawed so directly at the psychic wounds of a shell-shocked Japan.

To that end, Shin Godzilla doesn’t just evoke a dark, recent chapter of Japanese history. It also absorbs the public criticism of the government’s response to it. What we’re watching is a kind of shadow anatomy of botched crisis management: a disaster movie about how poor coordination, worse leadership, and general buck-passing can make a catastrophe worse. And that’s to say nothing of the standard roadblocks of protocol that convolute the government’s path to victory. “Don’t knock red tape,” one passing bureaucrat says. “It’s the foundation of democracy.” But only when the film’s deputy security hero (Hiroki Hasegawa) begins cutting through that tape, partially

ging procedure—a purgatory of meetings leading into more meetings leading into meetings about meetings. But they’re still part of a working civic ecosystem, with fully staffed and funded agencies trying their best to respond to an emergent threat. It’s an intact government, in so many words, one untouched by a “drain the swamp” head of state or his world’s-richest-man henchman.

What you don’t see in Shin Godzilla is the film’s dream team of disruptors (who even sleep on the floor of the office, à la a certain barely pubescent geek squad of riseand-grind Reddit trolls) destroying every institution standing between the Japanese people and agonizing death by fire-breathing leviathan. There is no bombthrower nicknamed Big Balls handing the Godzilla research task force its walking papers, no kaiju deniers burning down the building before the monster can do it himself. The movie doesn’t capture, it can’t capture, the harsh reality of how healthy skepticism about government inefficiency has been weaponized to cripple and dismantle the whole system. Shin Godzilla comes from a more innocent time, before we knew where this rebellious drive to cut the red tape would really lead.

sea. And the film’s distrust of policies that gum up the works of government, helplessly slowing our response time in moments of urgency, gives it unexpected purchase this summer: Accidentally, Shin Godzilla engages with the “abundance” movement currently gaining traction in Democratic circles—the increasingly popular idea that we need to do away with impediments to progress, to make government faster and simpler in order to get anything done.

But in the wake of DOGE’s devastation, Shin Godzilla suddenly seems a little out of touch with the moment, too. Stateside, it’s difficult to watch right now and not feel a twinge of ambivalence or even nostalgia. Yes, the film’s various politicians and bureaucrats get bogged down in feet-drag-

Maybe “ambivalent” is also the right word for Shin Godzilla, an inventive, deadpan late sequel that breathed new atomic life into the franchise. After all, what starts as a portrait of woefully unprepared crisis management becomes, by the rousing climax, a celebration of science, technology, and organized communal action. You look at the fully functioning government the movie depicts and think, “It’s flawed but it mostly works.” It can handle whatever the world throws at it, be that gale-force winds, deadly diseases, or a monster the size of a mountain. In Shin Godzilla , bureaucracy stinks, but it’s better than the alternative. That’s a truth that gets bigger and clearer by the day, like some toothy abomination growing fast out of the primordial soup. n

A.A. Dowd is a film critic based in Chicago. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone , The Washington Post , and Vulture. Follow @aadowd.bsky.social.

Godzilla has been in a constant state of evolution since its 1954 debut.

International Champions

Apple’s intertwining with China has helped build a tech superpower outside the United States.

By Kainoa Lowman

By Patrick McGee Scribner

When Joe Biden’s Department of Justice sued Apple for antitrust violations in late March 2024, Wall Street’s media arms switched into concerned patriot mode. “Why go after … the crown jewel of American innovation?” CNBC host Becky Quick asked Tim Wu, a Columbia professor and intellectual architect of the Biden antitrust agenda. Couldn’t this suit “change the way we innovate, the way we lead?” Forbes cut to the chase, warning the suit would “weaken the U.S. in its strategic competition with China.”

Such appeals to global competitiveness have emerged as a popular rhetorical defense amid Big Tech’s broader antitrust reckoning. Government cases against Apple, Amazon, Google, and Meta, we are told, will make America more like the overregulated innovation backwater of Europe, and allow a surging Chinese tech sector to overtake Silicon Valley. In the Trump era, this kind of “national champion” argument has had some success, as when the administration bullied Canada in June into rescinding a digital services tax that would have put U.S. Big Tech firms on the hook for billions of dollars in retroactive levies.

Books

As Wu pointed out to Quick, this rhetoric misrepresents the role of antitrust enforcement in the innovation ecosystem. But in the case of Apple specifically, a revelatory

new book challenges an even more foundational assumption of the national champion argument. In the battle for global technological leadership, we should not assume that Apple plays on the American side. Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company, by Financial Times reporter Patrick McGee, is “the first major history of Apple in the 21st century,” and the first-ever history focused on how Apple has manufactured its revolutionary products. Drawing on interviews with over 200 former Apple executives and engineers, as well as previously unreported internal documents, the book goes deep into the evolution of Apple’s supply chain over the last three decades. In so doing, it makes the provocative argument that Apple has not simply benefited from cheap Chinese labor,

Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company

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as widely assumed, but that it has also played an indispensable role in making China the tech superpower it is today.

The narrative begins in the mid-1990s, with Apple at the brink of bankruptcy. An early leader in personal computing, the company has been hemorrhaging market share to standardized personal computer (PC) rivals due to their lower prices, superior distribution, and use of a common operating system, Microsoft Windows, which is prioritized by software developers. Meanwhile, Apple has lost the innovative edge that cemented it as a cult favorite, and lost focus. Its bloated product lineup included mediocre printers, scanners, and cameras.

What happens next, of course, is the stuff of legend, biopics, and biographies. Apple brings back Steve Jobs, who in turn empowers Jony Ive, the brilliant but underutilized design chief (who is now putting his talents to use at OpenAI), to run wild with a new product that will redefine the company, and the PC. The futuristic, translucent-bodied iMac thrills a demo-day crowd. Apple runs its iconic “Think different” ad campaign. The swagger is back. McGee shows that the iMac didn’t just reinvigorate the Apple brand; it marked an inflection point in the company’s manufacturing strategy. PC firms had long ago embraced an “open architecture” approach that involved assembling computers from outsourced, commoditized parts. Apple, arrogantly believing that “nobody could do anything better than it could,” had continued to build custom hardware in-house, mostly in the U.S. (though it did outsource basic components, as well as the assembly of some noncomputer products). But not unrelatedly, the company was strapped for cash, and had been forced to sell off some of its factories. The iMac thus became the first core Apple product to be primarily built by a contract manufacturer.

Apple chose South Korea’s LG to build the iMac’s body, while retaining control over final assembly, test, and pack out (FATP). Apple would continue to play a role in FATP through the early 2000s, when the dot-com crash forced it to sell the remaining manufacturing facilities. But with the launch of the iMac in 1998, Apple abandoned its distinction as the last vertically integrated computer company.

Over the next few years, Apple’s comeback relied on a variety of contract manufacturers operating across the globe. The iMac was built by LG in Korea, Mexico, and

Wales. The 1999 iBook laptop, shaped like a handbag and used by Reese Witherspoon’s character in Legally Blonde, was built by Alpha-Top in Taiwan. The 2002 iMac G4, Apple’s first flat-screen desktop computer, was built by various contractors across six Asian countries, with final assembly handled by Quanta in Taiwan.

Ultimately, the combination of cheap, flexible labor, generous government subsidies, and the abundance of “next door” sub-suppliers in China would prove irresistible to Apple, and the consumer electronics industry as a whole. McGee chronicles how, without any intentional plan, Apple’s manufacturing footprint was “lured” into China one contract at a time over the course of the 2000s. This was primarily the work of a single contractor—Taiwan-headquartered Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn—which time and again presented Cupertino with unbeatable offers, and impressed it with unrivaled efficiency. As one former Apple executive tells McGee: “We just got pulled in.”

It is of course no secret today that Apple devices were made by China-based contract manufacturers by the late 2000s. The true revelations of the book reveal what Apple’s relationship with these manufacturers actually looked like.

Apple’s comeback has been premised on unleashing Jony Ive to boldly reimagine the look and feel of popular electronic devices. But as McGee illustrates in exquisite detail, turning Ive’s concepts into working prototypes required heroic feats of engineering, often involving novel materials, tools, and techniques. And to manufacture these prototypes at scale, “there [was] no supplier out there where we could just send a package of drawings and a pack of specs and get what we wanted,” as one former Apple engineer explains.

In other words, what is typically thought of as “outsourcing” was not an option. To bring to the masses the iMac’s translucent enclosure, the iPhone’s glass touchscreen, or the impossible thinness of the MacBook—and to meet Cupertino’s exacting quality standards— Apple engineers had to get their hands dirty.

For each of Apple’s iconic devices, the company used the same playbook, McGee shows. First, Apple would embed its own engineers in supplier facilities to “co-create” new manufacturing processes for both novel components and final assembly, using cutting-edge machinery often procured by

Apple was “lured” into China throughout the 2000s. Says one former executive, “We just got pulled in.”

Apple itself. Engineers would then remain on-site for months on end, to train contractor employees and troubleshoot production issues alongside them. One former engineer describes the model: “We’re going to use your factory. We’re going to use your people. But we’re going to go in there and use them as our arms and legs.”

Apple in China is chock-full of testimony and anecdotes illustrating the incredible commitment this entailed. Engineers “practically lived in Foxconn for a year” at the start of iMac production; they were stationed “twenty-four hours a day” at LG. Apple sent so many engineers to China that at one point, it convinced United Airlines to begin thrice-weekly direct flights from San Francisco to Chengdu, with the understanding that Apple would spring for enough firstclass seats to make the route profitable. (When COVID hit, the company chartered private jets.) It also implemented a “Divorce Avoidance Program” that involved sending engineers’ families to China and putting them up in fancy hotels if a deployment lasted longer than 30 days.

McGee argues that this playbook, repeated over more than two decades, has constituted a massive financial and “intellectual

investment” in Chinese manufacturing capabilities. Internal Apple documents allow him to quantify this in a few ways. By 2018, the value of Apple-owned equipment in China had reached $13 billion. In 2016, senior Apple executives pledged in a private meeting with top Chinese government officials to invest $275 billion in the country over the next five years—a figure that exceeded “all Canadian and American private investment into Mexico from the signing of NAFTA in 1993 through 2010,” McGee notes. It also represented twice the present-day value of the Marshall Plan, and five times the value of the CHIPS and Science Act, the Biden administration’s relatively successful attempt to reshore semiconductor manufacturing.

However you calculate it, Apple’s investment has paid off for Cupertino, allowing it to tightly control production and ensure quality while minimizing the impact on its balance sheet. Wall Street has rewarded the company handsomely: Between Tim Cook’s 2011 ascension to CEO and 2022, Apple’s market capitalization increased by more than $700 million per day, and Apple became the world’s first $3 trillion company. But the payoff for Beijing, McGee argues, has been even greater.

As Apple has “brought up” contractors and suppliers to form its own customized industrial clusters, McGee explains, the company has gotten itself deeply stuck in China. “With no other nation developing the same skills,” he writes, Apple has grown “dependent on the very capabilities it had created.” Even Apple’s recent—and, according

to McGee, overhyped—foray into India has been achieved largely through Apple’s established China-based partners.

Much of the second half of Apple in China details Cupertino’s “awakening” over the 2010s to the leverage the Chinese Communist Party has over it, and the subsequent efforts to remain in Beijing’s good graces. These efforts include highly publicized instances where Apple helped the Party censor the Chinese internet, but increasingly, Apple has demonstrated its commitment to supporting Xi Jinping’s goal of fostering indigenous technological innovation. Apple has made billion-dollar investments in Chinese startups, established research and development centers in Shanghai, Suzhou, and Shenzhen, and shifted its supply chain away from Taiwanese-owned companies and toward native Chinese ones. Apple served as “the biggest corporate supporter of Made in China 2025,” McGee writes, referring to Beijing’s 2015 initiative to become a global leader in high-value tech manufacturing.

But Apple’s greatest contribution to China’s technological rise has been subtler. Because Apple’s designs tend to set the standard for the smartphone and computer industries, the skills and experience contractors receive from working with the company are so valuable that they are known to work for outrageously low pay, knowing they can subsequently apply what they learn to higher-margin accounts. (While McGee is not able to confirm the veracity of this legend, Luxshare—a native Chinese competitor to Foxconn—supposedly got its foot in the door with Apple by promising to work for no profits at all.) “The reason Apple gets Chinese suppliers to work for them, for zero profits, is because the Apple ops engineer, following Tim Cook’s orders, is sleeping on a mat in their factory and helping them make that line efficient,” a former Apple executive tells McGee. Another recalls that in the early days of its partnership with Apple, Foxconn would maximize learning by rotating its engineers onto Apple projects: “We trained all of them. Then one day we’d be like, ‘Where’d those engineers go?’”

As Apple grew and added redundancy to its supply chain, these benefits spread across the Chinese electronic manufacturing industry. One of McGee’s sources estimates that Apple was at one point embedding engineers into more than 1,600 factories. The ultimate beneficiary of this epic knowledge transfer, McGee argues, has been home -

grown Chinese tech giants such as Huawei and Xiaomi—the very companies now competing with Apple in the global market for premium smartphones—which grew in the 2010s on the strength of their copycat iPhones. “Apple gave birth to the Chinese smartphone industry,” McGee writes. By 2019, Huawei sold more phones than Apple. The strength of McGee’s causal argument can be difficult to evaluate. Weren’t all multinational tech companies operating in China engaged in technology transfer to local firms? How much credit, exactly, does Apple deserve for China’s technological advancements? McGee does present a strong case that Apple’s innovative designs and the massive scale of its operation distinguished it from other multinationals; executives from other companies and independent industry analysts interviewed in the book back him up. Unfortunately, Chinese entrepreneurs are not given the chance to push back on some of the more extreme formulations of McGee’s thesis, some of which entirely discount their achievements. At one point, McGee compares Apple to “Prometheus, handing the Chinese the gift of fire.”

Nevertheless, Apple in China does show without a doubt that Apple has been working in direct opposition to Washington’s interests regarding technological competition with China. So when “national champions” are invoked to protect Apple’s tax status or other benefits, we must ask ourselves which nation it is actually championing.

U.S. efforts to restore high-tech manufacturing are now incredibly uncertain due to the Trump administration’s commitment to roll back Biden-era clean-energy and battery subsidies. But even if America wanted to pursue an industrial revival, an anecdote toward the end of the book hammers home that damage has already been done. During the Obama administration, Apple began assembling Mac Pros at a Texas plant. Internally, sources tell McGee, the ordeal was a disaster. Certain critical manufacturing capabilities had by this point been fully transferred and lost even to Apple’s engineers. When problems arose during production, one says, “we flew people from China to get it fixed. People working for Foxconn.” n

Kainoa Lowman is a communications associate at the American Economic Liberties Project, an anti-monopoly research and advocacy group. He writes for AELP’s newsletter, The Economic Populist.

PARTINGSHOT

The 7 Worst Plans for Gaza

Ideas for a new future in the Middle East

Everybody who happens to not be a Palestinian has a plan for how to reconstruct the Gaza Strip. If it isn’t Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner eyeing the “waterfront property” in the rubble, it’s the Boston Consulting Group working with the institute of disgraced U.K. leader Tony Blair. They’re now floating ideas like selling Gaza land to investors via crypto tokens, developing artificial islands off Gaza’s shores, and creating tax-free zones with names like the “Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone.”

This kind of absurdity makes your friendly neighborhood satire writer sweat over how much it already sounds like a joke. But do not fear, dear reader, I can do this. I can present you with seven even dumber ideas for the future of the Gaza Strip, a place that will now be known as GAZINGA!

#7: Food Assistance

It’s no secret that Israel is not down with international humanitarian relief organizations feeding Palestinians. But in GAZINGA! there will be hundreds of outposts of an international body everyone can support: the International House of Pancakes. It’s a magical nongovernmental organization with syrup and smiley pancakes with banana slices for eyes. And also a place where, just like the aid organizations Israel destroyed, kids eat free!

#6: Transportation

In GAZINGA! tunnels won’t be necessary to transport food, medicine, or building materials. Part of converting the area from the most destitute to the happiest place on Earth is mimicking the real happiest place on Earth, Disneyland. Therefore, tunnels will be converted into log rides, complete with an animatronic history tour of Palestine from the British Mandate to the ethnically cleansed present. It’s a small world after all!

#5: De-radicalization

As a peace-building exercise, the IDF and Hamas will hold a series of sleepovers where everyone must wear their most embarrassing pajamas, eat snacks from mom, and share their crush. Then comes Seven Min-

utes in Heaven, a game where two people sit alone in a dark closet and argue about religion. Or make out. Whichever comes first.

#4: Tourism

Tourism will be crucial to GAZINGA! And we all know what can turn a drive-by town into a drive-to destination: The Guinness Book of World Records. Residents will get to work on weaving the longest scarf (or keffiyeh) in the world. It will stretch from the Egyptian border to the north, and tourists can come and weave a row themselves. As soon as that baby hits the world record, whammy! Just like the largest ball of tape put Louisville, Kentucky, on the map, the longest scarf in the world will surely make GAZINGA! a tourist hot spot.

#3: Checkpoints

The border between Gaza and Egypt, known as the Philadelphi Corridor, has been a site of wanton destruction. But in GAZINGA! the Philadelphi Corridor will be transformed into The Phila-SELFIE-Corridor: an entire

neighborhood devoted to the best lighting and cutest backdrops ever from which to take endless selfies and feel hot. In the Phila-Selfie Corridor, it’s always magic hour and passersby are always willing to take your picture. And they’re single!

#2: Governance

The government in GAZINGA! will be built with special attention to the well-established parameters of the Myers-Briggs personality test. Parliament must be balanced with the right amount of ENFJs with INFPs, and address how unbridled ISTJ energy can be corrosive without the grounding balance of ISFPs. Similarly, legislative sessions must take into account planetary placement by working within positive astrological periods. Voting should not be done while Mercury is in retrograde! Court decisions can only come down when Venus trines Mars, and love and harmony abound. Also, no more Geminis in power. Are we insane?!

#1: Economic Prosperity

The best part of GAZINGA! is that everything, I mean everything, will be free. From the log ride transit system to the selfies to the pancakes to the people. The people will be the most free. You might call it a free, free Palestine.—Francesca Fiorentini

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The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.

—WILLIAM ARTHUR WARD