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It’s Not You

There was a promise at the heart of postwar America. Call it a covenant: work hard, and your work buys a decent life. A home. An education for your kids. A doctor when you need one. A retirement without dread. It was never kept for everyone. But for millions of families, it held.

Today most Americans feel that promise has been broken, and many quietly blame themselves. They should not. The numbers show a gap no amount of effort can close, and it did not open by accident.

The Gap, in One Picture

Since 1985, the price of education has grown more than twice as fast as paychecks, and the prices of medical care and a new home about half again as fast.

If the median new home had kept pace with hourly wages, it would have cost about $296,000 last year instead of $423,100. That $127,000 difference is the gap. Every family buying a home today borrows it, saves it, or gives up.

And workers did not get lazier. From 1979 to 2019, productivity grew about 60 percent while the typical worker’s pay grew about 16 percent. The federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009. Had it kept its 1968 buying power, it would be just over $12. Had it tracked productivity, about $25.

Privatized: How Each Line Got Bent

The three steepest lines share one thing. Over forty years, each moved away from public responsibility and toward private profit.

Health care. In 1970, about 90 percent of hospitals were independent. By 2019, 32 percent were, and mergers in concentrated markets can raise prices by as much as 65 percent. When private equity bought gastroenterology practices, prices per claim rose 28 percent within about a year and a half. Medicare Advantage routes public dollars through private insurers that will be overpaid an estimated $76 billion this year. And premiums quietly ate the raises: 7.9 percent of compensation for families with employer coverage in 1988, 17.7 percent by 2019.

Housing. In 1998, Congress froze public housing in place, and about 300,000 units were demolished over the next two decades. Meanwhile, homes became a portfolio. Investors bought about 30 percent of single-family homes sold last December, and in metro Atlanta, big institutional landlords own about a quarter of single-family rentals. The down payment alone shows the wall first-time buyers hit. Putting 20 percent down on the median new home took about 8 months of median household income in 1985. Today it takes nearly 12.

Education. Nobody sold the state university to a hedge fund. The bill just moved. In 1980, students and families covered about 21 percent of what public colleges spent on education. By 2025, they covered 38 percent, while state funding per student barely moved after inflation. Families made up the difference, mostly with loans.

And the loans are being privatized too. This summer, the new federal law ended Grad PLUS loans and capped graduate borrowing, leaving an estimated $8 billion a year for private lenders to fill, without income-based repayment or public service forgiveness. The social workers and counselors we need most are the likeliest to be shut out. The Education Department has confirmed it is weighing selling the federal loan portfolio itself. And since 2005, even private student loans are nearly impossible to discharge in bankruptcy. Critics argue easy federal credit is what let tuition climb in the first place, and studies disagree on how much. Either way, the student carries the risk.

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Free-market economists tell a different story about all three: these are the sectors with the most government involvement, and subsidies, regulation and zoning push prices up. As a builder, I know zoning and permits are real. But look at what these sectors are. Public money and guarantees flow in. Private players set the price and keep the margin. Government kept paying, stopped governing the price, and let the gains go private. That is what I mean by privatization.

The Hidden Ledger: America’s Real Tax Rate

We are told Americans pay low taxes. In 2024, the US collected 25.6 percent of its economy in taxes, and Denmark collected 45.2 percent. But count public and private spending together, and the OECD finds the US spends about 33 percent of its economy on social protection, against about 24 percent in Denmark. We do not spend less. We pay private companies, with a margin added.

Here is what that means for a family of four earning the 2025 median household income of $87,460, with employer health coverage. Counting what the employer pays on the worker’s behalf, total compensation is about $113,770.

On taxes alone, this family pays about 20 percent. The health premium more than doubles it. Add one child in care and modest college savings, and it is near 60 percent, before a single co-pay. That does not count losing your job, when only about one in four unemployed Americans collects benefits and most lose their health insurance the same week.

A Danish family with two kids at the average wage pays about 26.6 percent of its pay in income and payroll taxes, plus a 25 percent sales tax on most purchases. For that, they get universal health care, childcare capped at a quarter of the cost, tuition-free university, and unemployment benefits of up to 90 percent of pay while the government helps them find work. We already pay Scandinavian rates. We just do not get Scandinavian security.

It’s Not Effort. It’s Arithmetic.

This is the math millennials and Gen Z were handed. College starts with debt. Recent graduates are unemployed at 5.6 percent, against 4.1 percent for all workers, and 42 percent of those working are in jobs that don’t need their degree. The typical first-time homebuyer is now 40.

My own children span both generations. My three oldest, born between 1987 and 1990, are millennials, right around the age the typical first-time buyer finally gets a house. My two youngest, born in 1998 and 2000, are Gen Z, starting out in this job market. My oldest grandchild is 18 and facing that tuition line. My youngest is 4, at the age when childcare costs hit hardest.

I watch them do everything they were told to do and come out further behind than I was at their age. That is not a lack of effort, or grit, or personal responsibility. When your pay grows a quarter as fast as your output and 60 percent of your compensation is gone before you buy groceries, working harder does not close the gap.

It is arithmetic.

Who Is Buying the Rules

Americans already sense this. They call it corruption. In a Fox News poll this month, 60 percent of voters were extremely concerned about government corruption, edging out inflation as the top concern. Gallup finds a record 89 percent say corruption is widespread, across party lines.

But this is not a scandal of the moment. It is forty years of mostly legal decisions, made by people in both parties who were well paid to make them. A minimum wage nobody raises. Public housing frozen. Medicare overpaying private insurers. A ban on congressional stock trading that dies every time it gets close, most recently in the Senate on September 30. Call it slow-roll corruption.

For decades we have been taught to aim our anger at the immigrant, the neighbor with the other yard sign, the family on food assistance, or “the government.” But government is a tool. When it is for sale, power does not disappear. It moves to whoever can afford to buy the rules.

That is the ultra-wealthy. The top 1 percent now holds a record 32.5 percent of household wealth. Billionaires supplied nearly 20 percent of all donations in the 2024 federal elections. In the first half of 2026, Republican-leaning donors gave $880 million and Democratic-leaning donors $290 million, according to a Washington Post analysis reported by Fortune. The health sector spent $562 million on lobbying in 2024, more than any other industry.

Their paychecks tell the same story. Since 1979, pay for the top 1 percent of earners has nearly tripled after inflation. Pay for the bottom 90 percent rose by less than half.

So be angry. Just aim it at the concentrated money that bought the rules, and at every politician, in either party, who sold them.

Tax the Top Like We Did When the Dream Worked

For most of the years from World War II into the early 1960s, the top marginal federal income tax rate was 91 percent or higher. Few paid that rate, since it applied only to income above $200,000 for a single filer, more than $2 million today. But add up every tax they owed, including the corporate tax on the companies they owned, and the top 0.1 percent paid around 55 to 60 percent of their total income. By the same measure, the 400 richest Americans paid less than 25 percent in 2018, a lower rate than the bottom half. Whether the fix is higher top rates or a tax on fortunes that grow as unsold stock, the principle is the one that built the middle class.

Washington State is testing that principle right now. This year the Legislature passed a 9.9 percent tax on income above $1 million, paid by about 20,000 households, starting in 2029, to fund childcare and tax relief for working families. Initiative 645 would repeal it. Its sponsor is Brian Heywood, a Redmond hedge fund manager. A millionaire pushing a campaign to stop a tax on millionaires. The campaign to keep the tax has raised more, mostly from unions. But union members won't pay this tax. The repeal side's biggest donors are the kind of earners the tax was written for.

Repeal supporters raise three worries. Each has an answer.

“The threshold will creep down.” Any future Legislature can change any tax. That is true of every tax on the books, and it would take a new vote, in public, by representatives who have to face us. Washington’s own record points the other way. The capital gains tax passed in 2021 exempts the first $250,000 and rises with inflation. It was $270,000 by 2024. When the Legislature changed that tax in 2025, it added a higher rate on gains over $1 million. It went after the top, not the middle.

“The rich will leave.” The best research says very few do. A study of tax records for every millionaire filer in the country found that millionaires move between states less often than everyone else: 2.4 percent a year, compared with 2.9 percent for the general population. A one-point tax increase in an average state would cost it about 23 of its more than 9,000 millionaires. Massachusetts voters approved their own millionaires tax in 2022. It was projected to raise about $1 billion a year and brought in nearly $3.4 billion in fiscal 2025. Whether some millionaires left is still debated. The money clearly did not.

"They're the job creators." A job is not a gift. It is a trade: an employer pays for work because the work is worth more than the pay, and since 1979 it has been worth a lot more. The evidence that taxing top earners costs jobs is thin. A study of decades of federal tax changes found that cuts for the top 10 percent did little for employment, while cuts for everyone else drove most of the job growth. Kansas tested the idea in 2012, when it stopped taxing many business owners' income. Job growth lagged its neighbors, and a Legislature led by the governor's own party repealed the cuts in 2017 over his veto. Businesses hire when they have customers. Those customers are the families this tax is meant to help.

And notice the question repeal supporters skip: why someone earning $5 million a year should pay a smaller share of their income in state taxes than the cashier ringing up their groceries.

Don’t just ask what someone is saying. Ask who is paying them to say it.

What Closing the Gap Could Look Like

Start with the biggest line on the ledger. Most universal health systems are not single-payer. Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands use the Bismarck model: competing, tightly regulated insurers, everyone covered, prices negotiated. In Germany, workers pay about 17.5 percent of wages, split with the employer, and children and a stay-at-home spouse are covered at no extra cost. If our median American family paid that rate on its $87,460 income, it would come to about $15,300 a year, instead of the $26,993 premium it pays now.

The catch is that Germany pays far less for care. Counting all health spending, public and private, the US spent $14,775 per person in 2024, while comparable wealthy countries averaged $7,860, about half as much. Any American version has to bring prices down, and that is where the savings are.

Even the free-market Mercatus Center found single-payer would cut total US health spending by about $2 trillion over ten years. The $32.6 trillion you hear about, from the same study, is money that would move onto the federal books from what families and employers already pay. That study modeled single-payer, not Bismarck, but the savings come from the same tools: simpler billing and negotiated prices.

Fix that line and the others follow. Employers pay a predictable share instead of an open-ended premium, so raises can reach paychecks, if workers have the bargaining power to claim them. Today, many people stay in jobs just for the health insurance. You can see it at 65: the moment Medicare kicks in, business ownership jumps. Untie coverage from the job, and they could start that business now, not at retirement age. And wages that track productivity let families buy homes and pay for childcare on their own terms, not by borrowing more than their pay can support.

And no, this is not socialism. Socialism means the government owns the hospitals, the homebuilders and the factories. Nothing suggested here does that. Under a Bismarck system, insurers, doctors and hospitals stay private. The model is named for Otto von Bismarck, the conservative German chancellor who created it in the 1880s partly to take the wind out of the socialists’ sails. And the 91 percent top tax rate that helped build America’s middle class held through the two terms of a Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower.

This is the oldest deal in a working democracy: everyone pays in, everyone is covered, and the whole country is stronger for it. That is not socialism. It is a covenant.

The Fight They Picked for Us

The culture fights are not an accident. They are curated, packaged and fed to us because outrage raises money and turns out voters. The people on the winning side of the gap do not need to win the culture war. They need it to keep going, because while we side-eye each other, nobody watches the chart.

Ballots are due November 3. I am not going to tell you who to vote for. I am asking you to change what you vote on. Stop grading candidates on “illegals,” trans athletes, drag shows or library books. Ask them instead:

• Will you bring health care prices in line with other wealthy countries? How?

• What is your plan to tie pay back to productivity?

• Will you keep Wall Street from buying up homes, and make it easier to build them?

• Will the richest Americans pay at least the rate a nurse pays?

• Who funds your campaign, and will you ban congressional stock trading with nothing attached?

If a candidate answers with a culture-war talking point, that is its own answer.

And when the votes are counted, the job is not done. Hold the winners to what they told you. Call their offices. Show up at the town halls. Write the letters. Watch how they vote, and say something when it doesn’t match what they promised.

The people who fund the culture war never stop paying attention between elections. Neither can we.

The Clock Starts After November

Much of the One Big Beautiful Bill takes effect after the midterms. Medicaid work requirements go nationwide January 1, with eligibility checks every six months. Many states start paying part of SNAP benefits in October 2027. Automatic re-enrollment in marketplace coverage ends in 2028. The CBO estimates 10 million more Americans will be uninsured by 2034.

Notice the pattern: the costs are being handed to the states. Some want to go further. In May, a presidential FEMA review council recommended shifting more disaster costs to states by raising the bar for federal help by more than half. Others argue health care belongs entirely with the states.

That sounds like local control. In practice, it means states fend for themselves, and the states least able to do that are the ones that rely most on federal dollars. Washington State is one of the country’s biggest net givers, sending about $3,494 more per person to the federal government than it gets back. Rockefeller Institute research finds that, apart from states with big federal workforces like Virginia and Maryland, many of the biggest net receivers are lower-income states with older populations, like West Virginia, Mississippi, Kentucky and Alabama, most of them reliably red. Send the bill home to the states, and the hardest hit would be many of the places whose representatives champion the idea.

We are the United States for a reason. A hurricane on the Gulf, a wildfire in the West, a mill closing in Appalachia: we carry those together, or each of us carries them alone, with whatever our own state can afford.

It is not too late. A law Congress passed, Congress can change, delay or defund. A Senate farm bill would already push the SNAP cost shift back a year, and states can seek up to two more years on work requirements. Full repeal would take the president’s signature or a veto override. But which bills move, what gets funded and what gets delayed changes hands on November 3.

The people we send to Washington, D.C. are not our leaders. They are our representatives. Leaders expect to be followed. Representatives answer to us.

We Are Still Those People

The covenant was a set of choices. The public paid for education like infrastructure, built housing when the market wouldn’t, and kept a hand on the price of care. Working people organized to make those choices hold. We unmade them one merger, budget cut and buyout at a time. Which means we can make them again.

The United States is not a corporation, a portfolio or a party. It is us. The nurses and welders and teachers and farmers, and the kids and grandkids who will inherit what we leave them.

We are still those people. Let’s vote like it, on November 3 and every time after. Let’s close the gap.

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Resources & Further Reading

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U.S. Census Bureau. “Median Household Income in the United States.” FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, fred.stlouisfed.org/data/MEHOINUSA646N. Accessed 26 Oct. 2026.

U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. “Median Sales Price of Houses Sold for the United States.” FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, fred.stlouisfed.org/data/MSPUS.txt. Accessed 26 Oct. 2026.

“Washington State Increases Estate and Capital Gains Taxes.” Eide Bailly, 20 May 2025, www.eidebailly.com/insights/alerts/2025/washington-state-increases-estate-and-capital-gains-taxes.

“Which States Get More Federal Money Than They Send.” Axios, 12 Feb. 2025, www.axios.com/2025/02/12/states-money-federal-government.

Williams, Chris. “More Americans than Ever Say Government Corruption Is ‘Widespread,’ Poll Finds.” FOX 10 Phoenix, 2 Sept. 2026, www.fox10phoenix.com/news/gallup-poll-americans-government-corruption.

Young, Cristobal, et al. “Millionaire Migration and Taxation of the Elite: Evidence from Administrative Data.” American Sociological Review, vol. 81, no. 3, 2016, doi.org/10.1177/0003122416639625.

Zidar, Owen. “Tax Cuts for Whom? Heterogeneous Effects of Income Tax Changes on Growth and Employment.” Journal of Political Economy, vol. 127, no. 3, 2019, pp. 1437-72, doi.org/10.1086/701424.

Zucman, Gabriel. Testimony. Ending a Rigged Tax Code: The Need to Make the Wealthiest People and Largest Corporations Pay Their Fair Share of Taxes, US Senate Committee on the Budget, 25 Mar. 2021, www.budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Gabriel%20Zucman%20-%20Testimony%20-%20US%20Senate%20Budget%20Committee%20Hearing.pdf.

Six months ago, I published a piece about what is happening in rural America, written from the view out my kitchen window in Washington’s 4th Congressional District. Back then, 60 degrees meant digging out my shorts. It’s 60 again today, and I’m layered up in flannel, looking out the same window at the beginning of winter.

In April, we were looking at the uncertainty of another growing season battered by the economic winds of tariffs, the end of USAID contracts, hospital closures, trade wars, and rising energy costs. Some of what we expected has arrived. Some of it surprised us. As I said then, this isn’t about partisan politics. It is an accounting.

District 4 is a good place to take that accounting, because it holds so much of rural America in one place.

It stretches from the Oregon state line to the Canadian border, and half of the state’s agricultural workforce is concentrated here. Yakima County ranks second in the state and 13th in the nation for the value of agricultural products sold, and Grant County ranks first in the state. Washington grows about two thirds of the nation’s apples and most of its hops, much of both from this district, along with cherries, pears, wine grapes, potatoes, wheat, corn, alfalfa, dairy, and beef cattle. Agriculture and food processing support more than 164,000 jobs statewide, more than Boeing and Microsoft employ in the Seattle area combined.

That range makes the district a mirror. Its orchards face the same labor squeeze as growers in California and Michigan, its wheat and cattle the same markets as Kansas and Montana, its potato and dairy farms the same trade fights as Idaho and Wisconsin. Its small hospitals look like rural hospitals everywhere.

When federal policy changes, District 4 feels nearly every version of it at once.

It is also the most Republican district in the state, and this fall it chooses a successor to Republican Rep. Dan Newhouse, who is retiring after more than a decade in office. Whoever wins inherits the full weight of the past year’s federal policy.

Who Picks the Crop

By the industry’s own account, this should be a decent year for Washington apples, with a smaller national crop and firmer prices. Yet the Washington State Tree Fruit Association stopped publishing its crop forecasts this year. Association president Jon DeVaney told the Yakima Herald-Republic why: “If the pricing doesn’t look strong, and harvest labor is your biggest expense, some growers will say that’s maybe not worth picking.”

That labor is under direct federal pressure. Federal records analyzed by the Yakima Herald-Republic show nearly 445 ICE arrests in Yakima County between March and August, almost 70 percent of them involving people with no criminal conviction or pending charge. On September 23, in the middle of apple harvest, at least seven farmworkers were reported arrested while working in an orchard outside Yakima. One farmworker told El Sol de Yakima she stopped picking fruit that week.

The administration’s answer was to make guest workers cheaper. A new federal formula cut Washington’s H-2A wage from $19.82 to $17.13 an hour, but H-2A hiring hasn’t surged. Guest workers must be housed, and most small growers can’t afford to build housing. A UC Santa Cruz study found that H-2A is displacing local immigrant workers who have picked these orchards for decades.

These workers are not passing through. According to an analysis of Census data by FWD.us, an immigration reform group, immigrants make up about three quarters of the district’s farmworkers. About 141,000 residents, 17 percent of the district, are undocumented or live with someone who is, including 28,000 children who are U.S. citizens. Some 41,000 undocumented residents have lived here more than 20 years, and immigrants in the district pay about $1.2 billion a year in taxes.

Undocumented immigrants pay in, too: nearly $1 billion in state and local taxes in Washington in 2022, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, and $25.7 billion nationally into Social Security, benefits they are barred from collecting.

A deportation campaign aimed at that workforce removes more than workers. It removes customers from Main Street, tenants from rentals, students from schools, and the hands that bring in the crop everything else here depends on.

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Canada, China, and the Trade War

Canada is Washington’s top agricultural export market, worth $1.37 billion in 2025. After talks collapsed in August, the administration imposed 50 percent tariffs on roughly $20 billion in Canadian goods. Canada answered on September 8 with tariffs on U.S. dairy and farm equipment.

Washington growers have seen this before. When the first Trump administration put tariffs on steel and aluminum in 2018, India answered with a 20 percent tariff on American apples. Washington’s apple sales to India fell from $120 million to about $1 million. The tariff came off in 2023, and growers spent the next two years rebuilding. Now the same cycle is starting with their nearest neighbor.

Potatoes show how long a trade fight lasts. Grant and Benton counties alone planted more than half of Washington’s potato crop in 2022. Othello’s three processing plants turn out roughly 15 percent of North America’s French fries, and from my window I can see the Lamb Weston plant in Richland, which makes about 600 million pounds more a year. Frozen fries are Washington’s top agricultural export, worth $1.09 billion in 2025.

But the crop is losing ground. Washington growers harvested 20,000 fewer acres in 2025, and the crop’s value fell about 20 percent. The China market for Washington fries has shrunk from about $125 million a year to about $5 million. “We became an unreliable supplier,” Washington State Potato Commission executive director Chris Voigt told the Tri-Cities Area Journal of Business.

The administration’s trade deal with China in late September cuts tariffs on U.S. wheat, meat, and dairy. It is real progress, but buyers who spent a year finding other suppliers do not return overnight.

USDA reports show urea fertilizer up about 32 percent since the summer of 2025 and delivered farm diesel up about 53 percent, to $6.12 a gallon. The United States gets more than 80 percent of its potash, another key fertilizer, from Canada. Washington now ranks dead last of all 50 states in net farm income. Three years earlier, it ranked 14th.

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The strain is showing up in bankruptcy court. Chapter 12 filings, the chapter written for family farms, rose 46 percent nationally in 2025, and agricultural bankruptcies are on pace to rise another 22 percent this year. In June, Gebbers Farms in Brewster, one of the largest orchard operations in the state, filed for Chapter 11 with about $225 million in debt, citing tariffs, labor costs, rising inputs, and low returns. It employs more than 3,700 workers, most of them on H-2A visas. Size and a guest-worker program were not enough to save it.

The bankruptcies are the sharp edge of a longer squeeze. Washington lost 10 percent of its farms between 2017 and 2022, and Yakima County lost 15 percent while its average farm grew 18 percent, to 711 acres. Today, 6 percent of the state’s farms sell 86 percent of its farm products. This year’s costs and lost markets push in the same direction.

Most of that consolidation isn’t Wall Street buying out farmers. It is small and midsize family farms giving way to bigger ones. But outside money is part of the picture. In 2018, a company tied to Bill Gates paid $171 million for 14,500 acres in the Horse Heaven Hills, just south of the Tri-Cities. Each farm that disappears takes a family’s stake in the land, and often the next generation’s chance to farm it.

At the northern end of the district, Canada is not an abstraction. It is the next town over. Oroville sits a few miles from Osoyoos, British Columbia. When Canada retaliated in 2025, its list included cherries, apricots, and peaches, the fruit of the Okanogan Valley. The owner of an Oroville cross-border shipping business told Castanet her June 2025 business was down about 74 percent, though the local chamber said a weak Canadian dollar mattered as much as the tariffs.

The dispute reaches the river itself. Grand Coulee Dam, the largest hydroelectric producer in the country, feeds the Columbia Basin Project, the federal irrigation system that turned this desert into the fields around Othello, Moses Lake, and Quincy. The river starts in Canada, and under the 1964 Columbia River Treaty, Canadian dams upstream manage its flow for flood control and power. In March 2025, as the trade fight heated up, the administration paused talks to modernize the treaty. I could find no record that they have resumed, and either country can now end the treaty with ten years’ notice.

The water, power, and flood control this district depends on are now hostage to a trade war.

The Bridge Payments

The federal government has sent real money to farmers this year:

• $11 billion in Farmer Bridge Assistance for row crops like wheat and corn, paid per acre and capped at $155,000 per person or entity.

• $1.625 billion for apples, cherries, and other specialty crops.

• Higher crop reference prices from the budget law.

It helps. A check before spring planting can secure an operating loan. But the payments soften losses that the administration’s own trade policy helped create, and a one-time check is not a market. A farmer cannot sign a lease, plant an orchard, or hand down a farm on the promise of the next bailout.

These payments are a taxpayer-funded safety net for people doing essential work whose losses come from forces they cannot control. I think that is the right call. But because the money is paid by the acre, the biggest checks go to the biggest operations. The Environmental Working Group, a longtime critic of farm subsidies, projects that farms over 1,000 acres will collect more than half of the wheat payments.

It is also the argument for every other safety net we have. The same budget law that raised price supports for major crops cut SNAP and Medicaid for the people who pick, pack, and process those crops. Most of us draw the line between earned support and a handout based on whether we recognize ourselves in the person receiving it. District 4 might be the best place in the country to start redrawing it.

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Hospitals and Health Care

The University of North Carolina’s Sheps Center identified 338 rural hospitals nationwide at risk of cuts or closure from the budget law’s Medicaid changes. Nine are in District 4, in Sunnyside, Toppenish, Prosser, Othello, Moses Lake, Grand Coulee, Brewster, and Omak, among others. Toppenish has already closed its labor and delivery unit.

In Brewster, Three Rivers Hospital has seen visits drop during what are usually its busiest months, which hospital officials attribute to stepped-up immigration enforcement. “People are afraid to get care,” business development coordinator Jennifer Best told Cascade PBS.

That fear isn’t limited to people without papers. About 141,000 people in this district are undocumented or live with someone who is, including 28,000 children who are U.S. citizens. A national KFF survey found that worry about detention or deportation rose fastest last year among naturalized citizens and legal residents. When families can’t be sure who will be stopped, citizens and legal residents stay home, too.

Nearly a third of the hospital’s patients are on Medicaid, and a small hospital runs on volume. When patients stay home, out of fear or because they have lost coverage, the revenue that keeps the doors open goes with them, and the care they skipped arrives later, sicker, and more expensive.

Rural hospitals carry a larger share of Medicaid patients than urban ones, and when people lose coverage, those hospitals still treat them and absorb the cost. Congress paired the cuts with a $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program, but as the Daily Yonder reported, that money targets new models of care, not the operating losses that keep the lights on.

The pressure reaches Richland, too. Kadlec Regional Medical Center, owned by Providence, is where patients from small towns end up when they need more care than a 25-bed hospital can give. Last October it cut therapy staff, citing lower Medicare and Medicaid payments, rising costs, and the expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies. When the small hospitals weaken, more patients arrive at Kadlec sicker and later. When Kadlec trims, the small hospitals lose support they depend on.

The people losing coverage are not undocumented immigrants. Federal Medicaid has never covered them, except for emergencies and childbirth, and Washington’s small state-funded program for some undocumented adults is capped and paid for without federal dollars. The people pushed off Medicaid will be our neighbors: the rancher’s grown son working part-time, the seasonal packing-house worker between jobs, the cashier whose hours dipped below 80 a month.

Farm families face their own version of that cliff. Because most farmers are self-employed, about 27 percent bought coverage through the Affordable Care Act marketplace, roughly triple the national rate, and the enhanced subsidies that made those plans affordable expired at the end of 2025. Some families will simply go without. As small business owners, we did that for more than 15 years. When we needed the emergency room, we were treated, and then we were billed at full price, with no insurer negotiating it down.

Uninsured care is not free. It is billed at the highest rates to the people least able to pay, and what they cannot pay lands on the same small hospital.

The SNAP cuts follow the same pattern. The American Farm Bureau Federation found that rural counties rely on SNAP more than urban ones, and USDA data show about a quarter of every grocery dollar ends up with farmers and ranchers. A SNAP card swiped in Sunnyside or Omak is, in part, a payment to the farm down the road. The bill cut it anyway.

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Beyond the Farm: Hanford

Hanford isn’t farm country, but its weight in this district is hard to overstate. Agriculture is the foundation of the region’s economy, but Hanford is the backbone of Richland’s. Cleaning up the site where the federal government made plutonium for decades costs the Department of Energy nearly $3 billion a year and employs about 13,000 people.

In fiscal 2025, the department lost 37 percent of its Tri-Cities federal staff, most through the DOGE-era deferred resignation offer, and a hiring freeze has kept many of those jobs empty. The Government Accountability Office reported this spring that Hanford has a 46 percent vacancy rate and that the losses raise questions about safety. These are the people responsible for keeping some of the most dangerous waste in the country out of the Columbia River. Those are not jobs a region can afford to leave empty.

The Ledger

The Next Six Months

Much of that ledger is still being written. Some of the budget law’s biggest changes take effect after this November’s election.

On January 1, Washington begins applying Medicaid work requirements to adults in Apple Health: 80 hours a month of work, school, or community service, or about $580 in monthly earnings, unless they are exempt. Renewals also move from yearly to every six months for about 600,000 people. The state expects about two thirds to qualify automatically or through exemptions. When Arkansas tried this in 2018, more than 18,000 people lost coverage within months, mostly over paperwork, and employment did not go up.

The rule was written with a paycheck in mind. States verify work first through payroll data, where independent contractors and gig workers don’t appear, and under IRS rules no one supervises a contractor’s hours. The delivery driver, the hairstylist renting a chair, the custom harvester, and the real estate agent are paid by the job, with income that swings from month to month. Starting in 2028, they will have to document it every six months, with their coverage on the line.

Also on January 1, retroactive coverage shrinks from three months to one, so when an uninsured patient later qualifies for Medicaid, the hospital can bill for far less of the care it already provided.

In October 2027, states begin paying part of SNAP benefits themselves, based on their error rates. At Washington’s current rate, the state estimates the cost at more than $90 million a year, money that comes from the same budget that funds schools, hospitals, and roads.

Then there are the schools. Federal school funding is held flat only through December 11, five weeks after the election. The White House has asked Congress to eliminate federal funding for migrant education and English learners, and a House committee bill would also cut Title I, the main federal support for low-income schools, by nearly $2 billion.

It is easy to assume those cuts only touch immigrant families. They don’t. Migrant education is based on a family’s seasonal farm work, not immigration status, and many of those children are citizens. The money goes to schools, paying for teachers, aides, and summer programs in classrooms every student shares. Free meals work the same way. When a school qualifies to feed every student, every student eats, including the children of farmers, teachers, and nurses. As SNAP rolls shrink, fewer schools will qualify.

The farm bill is on the same clock. Newhouse voted for last year’s budget law, and this spring he championed the House farm bill, saying “Rural America is in dire straits” because of “high input prices, market disruptions, and labor costs.” The bill would provide more than $1 billion for specialty crop programs.

But the money side of farm policy was already settled in the budget law, alongside the SNAP and Medicaid cuts, and the farm bill keeps those cuts. It does nothing about tariffs, and nothing about farm labor, an issue Newhouse has called his “top priority” and has pushed with Democrat Zoe Lofgren for years. And none of its money flows until both chambers agree on a final version. No date has been set. The old farm bill expired September 30, and Senate Agriculture Chairman John Boozman says the final vote will wait until after the election.

If Congress doesn’t act by December 31, commodity and dairy supports revert to price formulas written in the 1930s and 1940s.

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Six months from now, we will know how much of this has landed. The people voting this fall will not.

None of it is a disaster you can photograph. It is fruit left on the tree, empty desks at Hanford, a potato crop worth a fifth less, a paused treaty at Grand Coulee, and a small hospital in Omak wondering how many more patients will arrive without coverage. Swap in a different crop and a different hospital, and it is the story of rural America this fall.

The people who farm this district are not asking for pity. They are asking for markets they can count on, workers who can come to work without fear, and hospitals that stay open. This district has sent a Republican to Congress for more than 30 years. Whoever represents it next will have to decide whether to defend the policies that created this ledger, or to stand at the kitchen table with the people paying it.

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Resources & Further Reading

“2022 Census of Agriculture County Profile: Benton County, Washington.” USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, 2024, www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2022/Online_Resources/County_Profiles/Washington/cp53005.pdf.

“2022 Census of Agriculture County Profile: Grant County, Washington.” USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, 2024, www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2022/Online_Resources/County_Profiles/Washington/cp53025.pdf.

“2022 Census of Agriculture State Profile: Washington.” USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, 2024, www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2022/Online_Resources/County_Profiles/Washington/cp99053.pdf.

“2022 Census of Agriculture County Profile: Yakima County, Washington.” USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, 2024, www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2022/Online_Resources/County_Profiles/Washington/cp53077.pdf.

“About Grand Coulee Dam.” U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, www.usbr.gov/pn/grandcoulee/about/index.html.

America’s Farms and Ranches at a Glance: 2025 Edition. USDA Economic Research Service, Economic Information Bulletin 299, Feb. 2026, www.ers.usda.gov/media/20834/eib-299.pdf.

“Apple Health Expansion Enrollment Cap.” Washington State Health Care Authority, Dec. 2025, www.hca.wa.gov/about-hca/news/announcements/apple-health-expansion-enrollment-cap.

“Apple Health Work Requirements and 6-Month Renewals.” Washington State Health Care Authority, June 2026, www.hca.wa.gov/assets/free-or-low-cost/hr1-work-requirements-and-renewals-fact-sheet.pdf.

“Arkansas Medicaid Work Requirement Policy Failed, Study Finds.” The Harvard Gazette, news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/newsplus/arkansas-medicaid-work-requirement-policy-failed-study-finds.

“Assistance for Specialty Crop Farmers (ASCF) Program.” USDA Farm Service Agency, 2026, www.fsa.usda.gov/resources/programs/assistance-specialty-crop-farmers-ascf-program.

Beaver, Ty. “Potato Growers Adapt amid Global Pressures, Local Challenges.” Tri-Cities Area Journal of Business, 15 June 2026, www.tricitiesbusinessnews.com/articles/focus-2026-potatoes.

Beaver, Ty. “Tight Margins, Rising Costs Challenge Washington Farms.” Tri-Cities Area Journal of Business, 15 June 2026, www.tricitiesbusinessnews.com/articles/focus-2026-ag-overview.

Beaver, Ty. “Washington Agriculture Navigates Export Gains, China Losses, Tariff Uncertainty.” Tri-Cities Area Journal of Business, 15 June 2026, www.tricitiesbusinessnews.com/articles/focus-2026-exports.

“B.C. Plans for ‘Any Action’ by Trump on Columbia River Treaty.” The Narwhal, Mar. 2025, thenarwhal.ca/trump-suspends-columbia-river-treaty-talks.

“Bill Gates Pays $171 Million for Washington Farmland.” The Land Report, 27 Sept. 2018, landreport.com/?p=15356.

Cary, Annette. “Safety Issues Raised after WA Nuclear Site Lost 37% of Fed Staff under Trump Cuts.” The Spokesman-Review, Tri-City Herald, 21 May 2026, www.spokesman.com/stories/2026/may/21/safety-issues-raised-after-wa-nuclear-site-lost-37.

“Central Washington Fruit Giant Files for Bankruptcy, Selling Orchards.” Capital Press, 9 June 2026, capitalpress.com/2026/06/09/central-washington-fruit-giant-files-for-bankruptcy-selling-orchards.

“China, U.S. Agree to $60 Billion in Tariff Cuts, Including Agriculture.” Hoosier Ag Today, NAFB News Service, 29 Sept. 2026, www.hoosieragtoday.com/2026/09/29/china-u-s-agree-to-60-billion-in-tariff-cuts-including-agriculture.

“CMS Issues Interim Final Rule Imposing Medicaid Work Requirements for Expansion Populations.” Foley Hoag, 4 June 2026, foleyhoag.com/news-and-insights/publications/alerts-and-updates/2026/june/cms-issues-interim-final-rule-imposing-medicaid-work-requirements-for-expansion-populations.

“Congress Members Move to Offset Coming Cuts to Rural Hospital Funding.” The Daily Yonder, 5 Oct. 2026, dailyyonder.com/congress-members-move-to-offset-coming-cuts-to-rural-hospital-funding/2026/10/05.

Crookall, Sarah. “Canadian Business across the Osoyoos-Oroville Border Plummets in Some Sectors, Remains Steady in Others.” Castanet, 15 July 2025, www.castanet.net/news/Oliver-Osoyoos/561346.

“Ed Dept Would See 10% Budget Cut under House Committee Plan.” K-12 Dive, 10 June 2026, www.k12dive.com/news/house-committee-advances-fy27-plan-to-cut-ed-dept-by-10/822462.

“Farmers and ObamaCare Exodus: Coverage Lifeline Frays as Subsidies Expire.” Ag Bull Trading, 2026, www.agbull.com/farmers-and-obamacare-exodus-coverage-lifeline-frays-as-subsidies-expire.

“Fewer Farms, but Yakima County Still No. 2 in State for Farm Products Sold.” Yakima Herald-Republic, 29 Mar. 2024, www.yakimaherald.com/news/local/business/fewer-farms-but-yakima-county-still-no-2-in-state-for-farm-products-sold/article_02494b1a-ec8b-11ee-95d3-07571ffeae32.html.

“French Fry Capital: How Othello, Wash., Became the Largest Producer of Frozen Potato Products.” Capital Press, 4 May 2023, capitalpress.com/2023/05/04/french-fry-capital-how-othello-wash-became-the-largest-producer-of-frozen-potato-products.

“GOP Budget Bill Could Put 338 Rural Hospitals at Risk of Closure: Report.” Becker’s Hospital Review, 2025, www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/gop-budget-bill-could-put-338-rural-hospitals-at-risk-of-closure-report.

“14 Rural WA Hospitals Deemed at Risk of Closure from Medicaid Cuts.” Cascade PBS, July 2025, www.cascadepbs.org/news/2025/07/14-rural-wa-hospitals-deemed-at-risk-of-closure-from-medicaid-cuts.

Hanrahan, Ryan. “Farm Bill Expires Again as Lawmakers Continue Negotiations.” Farm Policy News, University of Illinois, 2 Oct. 2026, farmpolicynews.illinois.edu/2026/10/farm-bill-expires-again-as-lawmakers-continue-negotiations.

Hanrahan, Ryan. “U.S. Farm Bankruptcies Increased 46% in 2025.” Farm Policy News, University of Illinois, 10 Feb. 2026, farmpolicynews.illinois.edu/2026/02/u-s-farm-bankruptcies-increased-46-in-2025.

Hayes, Jared. “Trump Tariff Bailout Sends Billions to Mega Farms, Speeding Consolidation.” Environmental Working Group, 24 Feb. 2026, www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/2026/02/trump-tariff-bailout-sends-billions-mega-farms-speeding-consolidation.

“H.R. 1 Impacts to Apple Health Overview.” Washington Health Benefit Exchange, Apr. 2026, www.wahbexchange.org/content/dam/materials/communications/committees-and-workgroups/advisory/2026/HR1_Medicaid_Impacts_042326.pdf.

“H.R. 3227, Farm Workforce Modernization Act of 2025.” Congress.gov, Library of Congress, www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/3227.

“House Passes Continuing Resolution to Avoid Shutdown, Level Fund Education Programs Until December.” National College Attainment Network, Sept. 2026, www.ncan.org/Web/Web/News/House-Passes-CR-Avoids-Shutdown-Level-Funds-ED-Programs-Until-December.aspx.

“The Implementation Timeline of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” Center for American Progress, www.americanprogress.org/article/the-implementation-timeline-of-the-one-big-beautiful-bill-act.

“Immigrants Report Rising Fear, Negative Economic and Health Impacts, and Changing Political Views During the First Year of President Trump’s Second Term.” KFF, 18 Nov. 2025, www.kff.org/racial-equity-and-health-policy/immigrants-report-rising-fear-negative-economic-and-health-impacts-and-changing-political-views-during-the-first-year-of-president-trumps-second-term.

“Independent Contractor (Self-Employed) or Employee?” Internal Revenue Service, www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/independent-contractor-self-employed-or-employee.

“India’s Tariffs on U.S. Apples Come to an End, a Plus for Washington Growers.” Washington State Standard, 6 Sept. 2023, washingtonstatestandard.com/2023/09/06/india-ends-apple-tariffs.

Inghram, Questen. “No Surge in H-2A Workers Yet in Washington Following Trump Administration Changes.” Yakima Herald-Republic, 13 June 2026, www.yakimaherald.com/news/local/business/no-surge-in-h-2a-workers-yet-in-washington-following-trump-administration-changes/article_abb587cd-5435-4bd7-94d3-11005827096b.html.

Inghram, Questen. “WA Tree Fruit Association Discontinues Apple Forecasts, but Quality Looks Good So Far.” The Spokesman-Review, 24 Sept. 2026, www.spokesman.com/stories/2026/sep/24/wa-tree-fruit-association-discontinues-apple-forec.

“Kadlec Trims Therapy Services as Financial Pressures Mount.” Tri-Cities Area Journal of Business, 16 Oct. 2025, www.tricitiesbusinessnews.com/articles/kadlec-trims-therapy-services-as-financial-pressures-mount.

“Lamb Weston Completes Expansion in Washington.” Baking Business, 17 Oct. 2017, www.bakingbusiness.com/articles/32880-lamb-weston-completes-expansion-in-washington.

“Migrant Education Program.” Othello School District, www.othelloschools.org/Page/213.

National Hop Report. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, 19 Dec. 2025, esmis.nal.usda.gov/sites/default/release-files/795696/hopsan25.pdf.

“A New Way to See Agricultural Bankruptcy Trends.” Southern Ag Today, 25 Sept. 2026, southernagtoday.org/2026/09/25/a-new-way-to-see-agricultural-bankruptcy-trends.

Newhouse, Dan. “Newhouse, Bipartisan Coalition Introduce Farm Workforce Modernization Act.” Office of Congressman Dan Newhouse, 7 May 2025, newhouse.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/newhouse-bipartisan-coalition-introduce-farm-workforce-modernization.

Ayala, Juan. “Newhouse Applauds House Passage of the Farm Bill.” Office of Congressman Dan Newhouse, 30 Apr. 2026, newhouse.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/newhouse-applauds-house-passage-farm-bill.

“Newhouse Votes to Restore Fiscal Sanity to the Federal Government.” Office of Congressman Dan Newhouse, 22 May 2025, newhouse.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/newhouse-votes-restore-fiscal-sanity-federal-government.

“’A Nightmare for Our Farmers.’ Eastern WA Growers Could Take Big Hits from Tariffs.” The Spokesman-Review, 6 Mar. 2025, www.spokesman.com/stories/2025/mar/06/a-nightmare-for-our-farmers-eastern-wa-growers-cou.

“Pacific Northwest Production Cost Report (Bi-Weekly).” USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, 25 July 2025, esmis.nal.usda.gov/sites/default/release-files/h989sc11z/j38625607/n8711q63v/AMS_3657.PDF.

“Pacific Northwest Production Cost Report (Bi-Weekly).” USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, 18 Sept. 2026, www.ams.usda.gov/mnreports/ams_3657.pdf.

“Penalties Loom for Washington If State Doesn’t Improve Food Stamp Error Rates.” OPB, Washington State Standard, 6 July 2026, www.opb.org/article/2026/07/06/penalties0-loom-for-washington-if-state-doesnt-improve-food-stamp-error-rates.

Reichen, Haleigh. “Senator Boozman Optimistic on Farm Bill Progress as Final Vote Awaits Post Election.” Deltaplex News, 1 Oct. 2026, www.deltaplexnews.com/local-news/senator-boozman-optimistic-on-farm-bill-progress-as-final-vote-awaits-post-election.

Sagrero Álvarez, Gustavo. “New Records Detail ICE Arrests in Washington During Summer Surge. Yakima, Seattle Top the List.” OPB, KUOW, 30 Aug. 2026, www.opb.org/article/2026/08/30/washington-ice-arrests-records.

“Seattle-Bellevue-Kent, Washington.” U.S. Housing Market Conditions, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, July 2025, www.huduser.gov/portal/periodicals/USHMC/reg/SeattleBellevueKentWA-HMP-July25.pdf.

“Seven Farmworkers Detained in Upper Yakima Valley, Immigrant Support Group Says.” Yakima Herald-Republic, Sept. 2026, www.yakimaherald.com/news/local/seven-farmworkers-detained-in-upper-yakima-valley-immigrant-support-group-says/article_a7bd7caa-6c87-4822-a4f3-ddce9709f2c3.html.

“SNAP: It Ain’t Just for Cities.” American Farm Bureau Federation, www.fb.org/intel/markets/snap-it-aint-just-for-cities.

Stephens, Caitlynn Peetz. “Some Schools Stop Free Meals for All as SNAP Enrollment Falls.” Education Week, 6 Aug. 2026, www.edweek.org/leadership/some-schools-stop-free-meals-for-all-as-snap-enrollment-falls/2026/08.

“Study Looks at Impact of H-2A Program on Washington Farmworkers.” Yakima Herald-Republic, 2026, www.yakimaherald.com/news/local/government/study-looks-at-impact-of-h-2a-program-on-washington-farmworkers/article_bdb5d337-c853-475e-99d0-6f688e71bfa4.html.

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“Time to Finish the Job: 2026 Farm Bill.” American Farm Bureau Federation, 8 Sept. 2026, www.fb.org/intel/policy/time-to-finish-the-job-2026-farm-bill.

“U.S.–Canada Tariffs: Timeline of Key Dates and Documents.” Blakes, 2026, www.blakes.com/insights/us-canada-tariffs-timeline-of-key-dates-and-documents.

“US House Passes ‘Skinny’ Farm Bill That Keeps Big GOP Cuts to Food Assistance.” WFYI, States Newsroom, 1 May 2026, www.wfyi.org/statewide/2026-05-01/us-house-passes-skinny-farm-bill-that-keeps-big-gop-cuts-to-food-assistance.

“USDA Announces Enrollment Period for Farmer Bridge Payments.” U.S. Department of Agriculture, 20 Feb. 2026, www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases/2026/02/20/usda-announces-enrollment-period-farmer-bridge-payments.

“Washington 2022 Census of Agriculture News Release.” USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, Feb. 2024, www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/Washington/Publications/Current_News_Release/2024/WA News Release Ag Census FINAL.pdf.

“Washington Agriculture.” Washington State Department of Agriculture, 2025, cms.agr.wa.gov/WSDAKentico/Documents/Pubs/AGR5-2503-002-WSDAAgInfographic-WEB.pdf.

“Washington Apple Growers Cheer as India Says It Will End Tariffs.” Washington State Standard, 22 June 2023, washingtonstatestandard.com/2023/06/22/washington-apple-growers-cheer-as-india-says-it-will-end-tariffs.

“Washington’s 4th Congressional District.” FWD.us, 2026, www.fwd.us/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/WA-4.pdf.

“What Could Happen in the Hotly Contested Central Washington US House Race.” OPB, 31 July 2026, www.opb.org/article/2026/07/31/washington-us-house-race-election-politics.

“White House Releases FY27 Budget with More Cuts for Language Education Priorities.” Joint National Committee for Languages, Apr. 2026, www.languagepolicy.org/post/white-house-releases-fy27-budget-with-more-cuts-for-language-education-priorities.

“Why the US-Canada Trade War Could Change How American Farmers Grow Their Crops for Years.” The Conversation, 2026, theconversation.com/why-the-us-canada-trade-war-could-change-how-american-farmers-grow-their-crops-for-years-290504.

“Yes, about a Quarter of Every Dollar Spent via SNAP Goes to Farmers and Ranchers.” PolitiFact, 30 July 2025, www.politifact.com/factchecks/2025/jul/30/francesca-hong/es-about-a-quarter-of-every-dollar-spent-via-snap.

Content note: This piece discusses rape and sexual assault, including drug and alcohol use. Support resources are listed at the end.

The script

“If she was raped, she would have reported it right away.”

“Her story changed, so it must be made up.”

“She chose to drink and do drugs, so it can’t be rape.”

You have heard these. I have too. In comment sections, at the grocery store, from people I know, and this month from a prosecutor’s own press release. They show up within hours almost any time a woman says she was raped. They show up before anyone knows the facts. They don’t depend on the facts at all.

That is my argument. The script does more damage than the facts of any single case, because every woman watching learns what is waiting for her if she speaks. It teaches our daughters to stay quiet. It hands our sons a ready-made set of excuses. And it protects the people who count on both.

This month the script has a name: the Cornell 7. A former Cornell student, known as Jane Doe, says seven fraternity members drugged and raped her over several hours in October 2024. She reported it to campus police about three weeks later. No one was charged.

Two years later, her civil lawsuit made national news, and the criminal case has been reopened under a special prosecutor, with a court hearing set for October 29 on whether she can stay on the case. None of the seven has been charged or convicted, and several deny the allegations.

That’s an important point and this piece does not try to decide what happened in that room. It is about what happened after she spoke, and what the rest of us said about it.

This story feels very personal. I have three daughters, and all three went off to universities. I also have two sons who did the same. I have spent a lot of nights thinking about every version of that phone call. The one where my daughter is the woman in that room. The one where my son is in the group chat. I don’t read this story as a bystander, and I suspect a lot of you don’t either.

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What the script costs

Start with the numbers. The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) estimates from federal data that out of every 1,000 sexual assaults, about 310 are reported to police. About 50 lead to an arrest. About 25 end with someone incarcerated. Not every loss is wrongful. Some cases truly lack evidence. But a system that loses nearly everyone sends a message, and women hear it.

For college women, the silence is deeper. Between 1995 and 2013, about 80 percent of rapes and sexual assaults against female students were never reported to police. The top reasons: it felt like a personal matter (26 percent), or they feared retaliation (20 percent). Shame and embarrassment weren’t even a choice on the survey. So shame, the thing the script produces most directly, is the one reason the data can’t see. It is likely hiding inside “a personal matter.”

Many women never call it rape at all, even to themselves. A 2016 review of 28 studies found that about 60 percent of women whose experience met the legal definition of rape didn’t label it that way. They called it bad sex, or a miscommunication. The rate was higher among college students and when the man was a friend. Researchers link it partly to stigma, and those who don’t name it are less likely to report it.

This piece mostly talks about women, because this case does and most of the data does. But men are raped too, about one in ten victims, and the script silences them even more completely. Among military service members, for example, about 43 percent of female victims report, compared with about 10 percent of male victims. If “she was drinking” keeps women quiet, “men can’t be raped” keeps men quieter still.

Either way, survivors don’t just fear the attacker. They fear the system. Researchers call it “secondary victimization”: being doubted, blamed, or having your own drinking, clothing, or timeline turned into the story. And everyone learns this long before anything happens to them, from friends, from the news, and from cases exactly like this one.

They also learn it from the top. In 2008, federal investigators had identified dozens of girls who said Jeffrey Epstein abused them. Instead of federal charges, prosecutors signed a secret deal: about 13 months in a county jail, and immunity for potential co-conspirators. The girls weren’t told. Prosecutors kept asking them to be “patient” with an investigation that was already settled.

A federal judge ruled in 2019 that this broke the law. An appeals court later said the victims’ rights law never applied, because Epstein was never federally charged.

Congress finally forced the files open, and more than 3.5 million pages are now public. Survivors say that is not justice. They are still asking why the Justice Department hasn’t pursued leads in its own files about the people who helped him. Its release exposed survivors’ names and contact information hundreds of times while blacking out sweeping portions of other material. As one survivor put it, the department had no trouble protecting the powerful men around Epstein.

The department says it has met its legal obligations.

This has spanned administrations and parties, and the message is the same one the script delivers. You can come forward. You may even be believed in public. But your words may never be investigated, your name may not stay private, and when the backlash comes, you may face it largely alone.

Due process is not the problem. It is a pillar of the system, and I would want it for my own sons. The problem is when protecting the accused becomes a reason not to look at all.

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“If she was raped, she would have reported it right away”

Delayed reporting is not the exception in sexual assault. It is the norm. Mimi Rocah, the former Westchester County District Attorney who oversaw sex crimes prosecutions, said so on the Cafe Insider episode “Intoxication and Consent in the Cornell Rape Investigation” with Preet Bharara and Joyce Vance. She called delay “super common,” well documented, and rooted in how memory and trauma work.

Her key line for prosecutors: a delay does not mean something didn’t happen. It also doesn’t prove that it did. It means you investigate.

I understand why women wait. To say, “I was raped” is to admit that, for some stretch of time, you had no control over your own body. That someone else decided. For a young woman who walked into a house on her own, by her own choice, that admission can feel like losing power twice. It is easier to tell yourself it was a bad night.

Think about who most women would be reporting. About 80 percent of college-age victims know the person who assaulted them. In the Cornell case, one of the men was the friend Doe went there to see. She kept talking to some of them afterward, trying to understand what had happened.

According to Cornell’s Title IX records, it was later that month that she came to believe she had been gang raped. Her lawyer says she was in denial at first. That is not a sign of a false story. It is what this looks like from the inside.

So here is a question for anyone who says, “she should have reported immediately.” Immediately to whom? On what timeline? Before or after she saw an online post that, she told investigators, was the first time anyone had called it assault? Before or after her friends told her what they had heard? Doe reported in about three weeks. Three weeks is early.

And look at what the system did with an early report. Cornell police gathered a long interview, witness accounts, tips, and the start of a phone-records request. But the district attorney made his decision from a six-page summary. He never sat down with Doe himself, and by his own account his office does not run investigations of its own alongside the police.

Those police were Cornell’s own campus department. Its officers have full police powers, but it is a unit of the university, and Rocah doubted it was trained or equipped for a case this complex. A DA can bring in experienced investigators when a case calls for it. This one called for it. No one did.

In Rocah’s Westchester office, trained specialists would have reached out, explained why a second interview was needed, and built on what she had already said. Here, most of what police learned never reached the person deciding whether a crime occurred.

Rocah called it a decision this complicated, made on a summary of a summary.

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“Her story changed, so it must be made up”

This is the line doing the most damage right now, and it deserves careful scrutiny.

The script treats any change in a woman’s account as proof of a lie. Research on trauma and memory says otherwise. It cannot tell us which version of any story is true. It does tell us that a shifting account is common in real assaults and is not, by itself, evidence of a lie.

Rocah described how trained interviewers handle this. They avoid questions like “why didn’t you leave?” or “why didn’t you fight back?” They expect memories to surface out of order. They give the person some control. Without that, she said, you get a jumbled account that someone untrained reads as invented. People do sometimes lie, she noted, but shame and embarrassment are other explanations.

Trauma specialists told NPR the same thing: how police question a victim shapes what ends up on paper, and gaps often reflect the interview, not the witness.

Cornell shows how a story “changes” before anyone has decided anything. Police first logged Doe’s report as a rape by 8 to 10 men. A transcript of her interview, obtained by CBS News, has her saying she was 100 percent confident she was raped. Roughly 120 pages of that interview became a six-page sworn statement, and that line did not make it in. Someone chose what stayed. The DA says he never saw the transcript, and that if it is accurate it would have changed his investigation.

The six pages do differ from her 2026 lawsuit. In the statement, she describes agreeing to a threesome early in the night and taking ketamine knowingly. The lawsuit describes the night as coercive from the start. There are real differences there, and pretending otherwise does not help anyone.

But a sworn statement is a frightened 20-year-old’s memory, three weeks out. A civil complaint is a legal pleading drafted with lawyers, built on evidence gathered over two years. They are different documents written for different purposes.

And the same six pages describe her swatting a hand away again and again, saying “Hell No” to a foursome, and hiding under the covers when a group of men came in. The script only hears the first half.

Then there are the texts, which come up in almost every comment thread. Within two days, Doe was texting two of the men in a friendly way. She wrote that none of the sexual stuff was illegal, and suggested smoking together again, “but like leave out the extra 5 billion men and ketamine.” The script reads that as a confession.

It’s important to read the rest of the thread. Four days later she wrote that her reputation was destroyed and she was utterly ashamed. Within three weeks she wrote that in a room of one woman and many men, the woman was probably the victim. Then: “I know you lied.”

Meanwhile, according to a friend, the fraternity was contacting her nearly every day to keep her from getting upset, and records show its leaders discussing “damage control.” Minimizing first and naming it later is exactly the pattern the research describes.

The Title IX panel had those texts. It expelled both men anyway.

The question I keep coming back to comes from records reviewed by The New York Times, which showed that the men’s accounts differed from one another and contradicted hers. So why is inconsistency in her account treated as a lie, while inconsistency among seven men is treated as noise?

Investigators are supposed to follow up on inconsistencies. Too often they treat them as a reason to stop.

“She chose to drink and do drugs, so it can’t be rape”

This is the argument people seem most comfortable saying out loud. In New York, it is also close to the actual law. That should bother everyone.

Under Penal Law 130.05, a woman is “mentally incapacitated,” and unable to consent, only if a drug was given to her without her consent. Slip something in her drink and the law protects her. If she took the first drink or the first line herself, even hours earlier, that protection is gone.

Then prosecutors must prove “physical helplessness”: that she was unconscious, or physically unable to communicate that she didn’t want what was happening. She can be too drunk to remember it or too high to know who is in the room. Men can pressure her to take more. Unless she passed out or could not get the word out, the law treats her as able to consent.

Advocates call this the voluntary intoxication loophole. New York is one of about 19 states with a similar rule.

But in Rocah’s view, most commentators, and the Cornell DA himself, get the next part wrong. Voluntary intoxication makes a case much harder. It does not end it. Prosecutors can still prove she clearly expressed lack of consent in a way a reasonable person would have understood. Was she crying? Saying no? Pulling her clothes back on? Hiding under the sheets? That last one is in Doe’s own 2024 statement. And consent is not one and done. Saying yes to one act with one person is not yes to every act with every person who walks in.

Cornell’s own campus policy says an incapacitated person cannot consent, regardless of how they got that way. So the same night can be sexual assault at the university and not a crime in the county courthouse. A bill to close that gap has stalled in the Assembly for years, and Governor Hochul wants it passed in 2027. The hard part is real: how do you protect people too impaired to consent and stay fair to the accused? That deserves a serious answer, not another stall.

As a woman who navigated my early 20s imperfectly, and as a mom of both girls and boys, I keep coming back to this. Choosing to drink is a choice about drinking. It is not a choice about sex, or a choice to let a room full of men decide for you. We do not tell a drunk man who gets robbed that he consented to losing his wallet. Why do we tell it to her?

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Who pays, and who doesn’t

The script doesn’t only live in comment sections. When Doe’s lawsuit went public, the DA released a detailed statement summarizing her sworn account and suggesting she had changed her story, then repeated it in TV interviews.

Rocah said she had never seen anything like it from a prosecutor. Rather than saying “I may have missed something, let me look again,” he defended himself by attacking the credibility of a woman whose full account he had never read. She called that “a real sin for prosecutors.” Even defense lawyers must be careful attacking an accuser. A DA should be the last person to do it.

Her question: if you are the next woman in that county deciding whether to report, how do you feel walking into that office now?

Then there is accountability. Cornell’s Title IX panel, which had far more evidence than the DA, found two men responsible for sexual assault and expelled them. Several of the others were assigned “reflection papers,” a standard sanction in Cornell’s rulebook listed beside alcohol education. The university’s own records show them given to a student found responsible for sexual assault years before this case.

Here, one man found responsible for attempted sexual exploitation was required to write a paper with a proposal for training future students. We don’t know who read it, what counted as passing, or what happened if it didn’t. Privacy law means we never will.

Supporters say educational sanctions are meant to change behavior, not punish. Maybe. But a woman who was hiding under the covers while men walked into the room deserves to know her case ended with more than homework graded in private.

As a mom, this is the part I really struggle with. If my daughter walked into a police station and said she had been gang raped, and a university panel later had enough evidence to decide exactly who was responsible, I would not be comforted to learn the answer for some of them was a paper about changing their behavior, while the criminal case sat closed for two years. If you’re reading this and shrugging, picture your own daughter making that report. Then picture being handed an essay.

And there are the bystanders. A fraternity group chat that announced “free p****” upstairs and passed around a photo of her. A fraternity that, according to a tip to police, asked a witness to keep quiet.

Even the fraternity brother who finally passed the chat along did it anonymously. The image in the lawsuit appears to be a photo of a phone screen rather than a screenshot, which Snapchat would have flagged to the group. If so, the one person who acted made sure no one would know it was him. That tells you what speaking up cost in that house.

This isn’t only one house. Research has found fraternity men about three times more likely to commit sexual assault than other college men, and sorority women at substantially higher risk of being assaulted. One study traced the risk to a setting more than to individuals: heavy drinking, peer norms that reward sex, and bedrooms in the same building as the party.

Add a culture built on loyalty and reputation, and you have the place where the script is enforced most strictly. Plenty of fraternity men would never do what is alleged here. The question is what their houses teach them to do when someone else does. Greek life sells itself as the place where future business and political leaders meet. Is this what we want them learning there?

Most survivors do not have a lawyer, a viral lawsuit, and a governor’s attention. They have one interview with one officer. If that goes badly, it is usually the end.

And when there is no real investigation, Rocah noted, an information void opens, and it fills with true facts, false facts, and competing allegations all at once. The ones still deciding whether to come forward are watching how we fill it.

Let me be straight with the people typing in the comments. When you write “she should have reported sooner” or “she was drinking, what did she expect,” about a case you know almost nothing about, you are not talking about a stranger. You are talking to everyone who reads it. That includes your own daughter. Your son. Your wife or husband. Your best friend. Some of them have something they have never told you. Now they know how you would answer.

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The audience

Near the end of the Cafe Insider episode, Preet Bharara named what disturbed him most. It was not only the people accused of the act. It was the others who were present and aware, and did nothing. Most of history’s worst harms, he argued, come from people who had a chance to act and didn’t.

Joyce Vance agreed, saying it was a moment for everyone to “stop and question their behavior and what they’re teaching their kids and how we react.”

That is where this case leaves me. Whatever a grand jury decides, these are the rules I hope my five kids absorbed growing up with a strong, opinionated mom, and that my nine grandchildren are learning now. None of them depends on what a prosecutor can prove:

• If someone is incapacitated in any way or under the influence, that’s a no.

• If you’re being asked to do something that seems wrong, it is wrong.

• If you hear, see, read, or experience something that feels wrong, it is. Report it.

That last rule is for the men reading the group chat, not just the ones in the room. It is for the friend who hears the story at breakfast, and for the fraternity brother asked to “stay quiet.” The script needs an audience that goes along.

To the armchair quarterbacks, the comment-section judges, and the people who write the headlines, here is the script again, with the only honest answer any of us has without the evidence:

“If she was raped, she would have reported it right away.”

I don’t know enough about this case to pass judgment.

“Her story changed, so it must be made up.”

I don’t know enough about this case to pass judgment.

“She chose to drink and do drugs, so it can’t be rape.”

I don’t know enough about this case to pass judgment.

That answer protects the accused and the woman who came forward. Let the people with the evidence do their jobs, and hold them to it.

And for our daughters: it still counts if you were drinking. It still counts if you said yes to something earlier. It still counts if you report it in three weeks, or three years. You will be believed in this house.

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Resources & Further Reading

Bellows, Kate Hidalgo. “Why the Cornell Men Wrote Essays.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Oct. 2026, chronicle.com/article/why-the-cornell-men-wrote-essays.

Bernstein, Brittany. “NY AG Appears to Pre-Judge the Cornell Seven Rape Case before Being Tapped as Special Prosecutor.” National Review, Oct. 2026, nationalreview.com/news/ny-ag-appears-to-pre-judge-the-cornell-seven-rape-case-before-being-tapped-as-special-prosecutor.

Berry, Aurora. “Tompkins County DA Says ‘If Factual’ Reported Police Transcript with Jane Doe Would Have Changed Investigation.” WSKG, 30 Sept. 2026, wskg.org/regional-news/2026-09-30/tompkins-county-da-says-if-factual-reported-police-transcript-with-jane-doe-would-have-changed-investigation.

Bhargava, Varsha, and Kate Turk. “FAQ Edited: Cornell Removes Statement That ‘All Investigatory Information’ Was Shared with D.A. in Alleged Chi Phi Gang Rape.” The Cornell Daily Sun, Oct. 2026, cornellsun.com/article/2026/10/faq-edited-cornell-removes-statement-that-all-investigatory-information-was-shared-with-da-in-alleged-chi-phi-gang-rape.

Campbell, Rebecca. “The Psychological Impact of Rape Victims’ Experiences with the Legal, Medical, and Mental Health Systems.” American Psychologist, vol. 63, no. 8, 2008, pp. 702-17, doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.63.8.702.

Charalambous, Peter, et al. “Cornell Police Received Tip about Chi Phi Fraternity Seeking to Keep Alleged Gang Rape under Wraps.” Good Morning America, ABC News, Oct. 2026, goodmorningamerica.com/news/story/cornell-police-received-tip-chi-phi-fraternity-seeking-137009526.

Conlin, Lauren. “Cornell ‘Seven’: What Changed Between Jane Doe’s 2024 Police Statement and Her Lawsuit?” Los Angeles, 30 Sept. 2026, lamag.com/crimeinla/cornell-seven-what-changed-between-jane-does-2024-police-statement-and-her-lawsuit.

“Cornell University FAQ Regarding 2024 Chi Phi Sexual Assault Allegations.” Cornell University, updated 1 Oct. 2026, statements.cornell.edu/2026/20260929-faq.cfm.

“The Criminal Justice System: Statistics.” RAINN, rainn.org/statistics/criminal-justice-system.

Diaz, Jaclyn. “Cornell Rape Case Shows Importance of Trauma-Informed Policing.” NPR, 30 Sept. 2026, npr.org/2026/09/30/nx-s1-5983868/cornell-rape-police-interview-investigation-victim-trauma-informed.

Diaz, Jaclyn, and Brian Mann. “New York Attorney General Letitia James Made Special Prosecutor in Cornell Rape Investigation.” NPR, via KAXE, 1 Oct. 2026, kaxe.org/news/2026-10-01/new-york-attorney-general-letitia-james-made-special-prosecutor-in-cornell-rape-investigation.

Falzone, Diana. “Threats Escalate against Jane Doe as Cornell 7 Texts Come to Light.” NewsNation, Oct. 2026, newsnationnow.com/us-news/northeast/threats-jane-doe-cornell-7-text-messages.

“Formal Complaints.” Cornell University Office of Civil Rights, officeofcivilrights.cornell.edu/data-statistics/formal-complaints.

Goldberg, Emma. “The Student Journalists Who Never Let the Cornell Assault Case Go.” The New York Times, 30 Sept. 2026. Reprinted in The Philadelphia Inquirer, inquirer.com/news/nation-world/student-journalist-cornell-assault-case-20260930.html.

Hanson, Tom, and Mark Osborne. “Picture of Jane Doe Shared in Snapchat Group on Night of Alleged Cornell Rape.” CBS News, Oct. 2026, cbsnews.com/news/jane-doe-photo-cornell-rape-snapchat-group.

Higgins, Tucker. “Labor Secretary Alex Acosta Violated the Rights of Jeffrey Epstein’s Sex Crime Victims, Judge Rules.” CNBC, 21 Feb. 2019, cnbc.com/2019/02/21/labor-secretary-alex-acosta-violated-the-rights-of-jeffrey-epsteins-sex-crime-victims-judge.html.

“Intoxication and Consent in the Cornell Rape Investigation.” Cafe Insider, hosted by Preet Bharara and Joyce Vance, featuring Mimi Rocah, CAFE and Vox Media Podcast Network, Oct. 2026, cafe.com/insider-podcast/cornell-rape-investigation-consent.

Jacobs, Shayna, and Pilar Melendez. “Records Give Insight into How One Cornell Student Responded to Rape Accusation.” NBC News, Oct. 2026, nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigative-records-give-insight-accused-cornell-student-responded-a-rcna600987.

“January 30, 2026: DOJ Releases Millions of Pages of Documents in Epstein Investigation.” CNN, 30 Jan. 2026, cnn.com/politics/live-news/epstein-files-release-doj-01-30-26.

Kam, Dara. “Court Rules against Epstein Victim despite ‘Sympathy.’” CBS12 News, 2020, cbs12.com/news/local/court-rules-against-epstein-victim-despite-sympathy.

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Minow, Jacqueline Chevalier, and Christopher J. Einolf. “Sorority Participation and Sexual Assault Risk.” Violence Against Women, vol. 15, no. 7, 2009, pp. 835-51, ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/sorority-participation-and-sexual-assault-risk.

Nightingale, Hannah. “Cornell Man Accused of Gang Rape by Jane Doe Sues to Remove Letitia James as Special Prosecutor over ‘Substantial Prejudice.’” The Post Millennial, Oct. 2026, thepostmillennial.com/cornell-man-accused-of-gang-rape-by-jane-doe-sues-to-remove-letitia-james-as-special-prosecutor-over-substantial-prejudice-hearing-set-for-october-29.

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Qusba, Cereese. “Records Reveal Cornell’s Punishments for Seven Chi Phi Defendants.” The Cornell Daily Sun, 5 Oct. 2026, cornellsun.com/article/2026/10/records-reveal-cornell-s-punishments-for-seven-chi-phi-defendants.

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Saeidi, Mahsa. “Exclusive Text Messages Reveal New Details in Alleged Gang Rape at Cornell University.” CBS News New York, Oct. 2026, cbsnews.com/newyork/news/text-messages-reveal-new-details-in-alleged-gang-rape-at-cornell-university.

Sinozich, Sofi, and Lynn Langton. Rape and Sexual Assault Victimization among College-Age Females, 1995-2013. Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice, Dec. 2014, bjs.ojp.gov/document/rsavcaf9513.pdf.

Soisson, Isabel. “Cornell Student Assault Allegations Highlight NY Voluntary Intoxication Loophole.” FOX 5 New York, Oct. 2026, fox5ny.com/news/cornell-student-assault-allegations-highlight-ny-voluntary-intoxication-loophole.

“Study: Size, Type of Institution Related to Rates of Forcible Rape.” Inside Higher Ed, 12 July 2016, insidehighered.com/news/2016/07/12/study-size-type-institution-related-rates-forcible-rape.

Szal, Roxanne. “’Survivors Have Answered Enough’: The Epstein Reading Room Takes Survivors’ Fight on the Road.” Ms. Magazine, 11 Sept. 2026, msmagazine.com/2026/09/11/epstein-reading-room-virginia-giuffre-survivors-justice.

Tolan, Casey, et al. “Cornell Found More Than a Dozen Students Responsible for Sexual Assault. Just Two Were Expelled.” CNN, 14 Oct. 2026, cnn.com/2026/10/14/us/cornell-sexual-assault-jane-doe-invs.

Van Houten, Matthew. Statement regarding Jane Doe v. Cornell University, et al. Tompkins County District Attorney’s Office, 28 Sept. 2026, tompkinscountyny.gov/files/assets/county/v/1/district-attorney/documents/district-attorney-public-statement-9-28-26.pdf.

Wilson, Laura C., and Katherine E. Miller. “Meta-Analysis of the Prevalence of Unacknowledged Rape.” Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, vol. 17, no. 2, 2016, pp. 149-59, metatoc.com/papers/45825-meta-analysis-of-the-prevalence-of-unacknowledged-rape.

In 1977, the American public was bombarded with detailed descriptions of how a man was going to be executed by firing squad. Gary Gilmore had murdered two men in Utah, fired his own lawyers, and demanded that the state carry out his sentence. His would be the first execution in the United States in a decade.

News organizations brought in experts to walk through the specifics of the lead-up and the day: the process, the rifles, the anonymous volunteers who would fire them, and the blank round loaded into one of the five weapons so that no shooter could be certain his was the bullet that took a man’s life.

The day of the execution, the talking heads once again returned to their microphones and news desks to lead viewers through a last night, last visitors, last words. Gilmore’s were “Let’s do it.” Eleven years later, an ad man would borrow those words, change one, and sell sneakers with them.

For days, the media had handed viewers everything they needed: the diagrams, the still photographs, the descriptions of the room. On execution day, the public could open doors and gaze through walls in their minds, following the condemned man step by step.

All leading to the chair and the straps. A black hood. A small cloth target pinned over his heart.

On the morning of January 17, 1977, inside Utah State Prison, four bullets from a five-man firing squad ended Gary Gilmore’s life. The official time of death was 8:07 a.m.

Even though the public was never brought into the room, the visual of that spectacle has remained burned into our collective memory. The image came from words, diagrams, and artist sketches. No one sat and watched the killing from the comfort of their own living room couch. The public felt the anticipation, and they knew roughly when it would happen, but the actual moment of death was announced after the fact. Millions of Americans did not have to process, and then carry, the specific minute, second, millisecond when a life ended.

I have sat with many people at the end of their lives as a death doula. There is a moment I have never found adequate words for, when the person in the room is here, and then they are not.

It is not the last breath.

That moment often comes after the breathing stops, sometimes well after, as if the person leaves on their own time. It is as profound as being present when a baby is born, the same threshold crossed in the other direction. It changes the people in the room.

The deaths I have witnessed were natural, gradual, and surrounded by people who came prepared and were supported through it. I have never witnessed a violent death, and I pray I never will.

A firing squad allows for none of that unfolding.

A livestream would hand that moment, compressed into an instant of violence, to millions of strangers, with no preparation, no one beside them, and a death chosen for them to watch.

In 1977, keeping that moment out of public view was a deliberate choice. For the first time in Utah, an execution was carried out in secrecy, inside the prison grounds. The only witnesses were the warden, several corrections officers, the state medical examiner, and four people Gilmore chose himself: his uncle, his two attorneys, and the film producer who had bought the rights to his story. The press was brought in only afterward, to photograph an empty chair.

The courts drew the same line that year. A Dallas television reporter had sued for the right to film the first execution under Texas’s new death penalty law, and a district judge sided with him. In 1977, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that order, ruling that the First Amendment does not give the press access to places the public cannot go.

The country decided, on purpose and in court, that the moment of death would not be broadcast.

And yet it stuck. My husband was about 10 years old in January 1977. When we talked about the Hasan announcement, Gilmore’s execution was the first thing that came to mind and nearly 50 years later, he could still describe it in detail.

He never saw it. No one did. The words alone were enough to carve it into a child’s memory.

Mine is the Challenger. On January 28, 1986, I watched it break apart on live television in my second-period biology class. Millions of others watched with me, many of them schoolchildren who had tuned in because a teacher was on board. For some of them, it was their own teacher. No one planned for us to see those deaths. We saw them anyway, and none of us has forgotten.

That is what witnessing death does, even from a distance. Gilmore’s death was planned but unseen. The Challenger was seen but never planned. What is being proposed for Nidal Hasan would be both: scheduled in advance, and delivered live to anyone who clicks.

What has been announced

On Wednesday, October 7, 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the conservative outlet Real America’s Voice that the execution of Nidal Hasan would be public, that “people are able to watch it.” The Pentagon then confirmed the firing squad execution will be live-streamed. A Pentagon spokesperson said President Trump had approved the execution earlier that week.

When Hegseth was asked whether Hasan had made any final requests, his answer was two words: “Don’t care.”

Don’t care.

Other details make the intent hard to miss. The execution is set for Thursday, December 3, at 1:00 p.m. Central time at Fort Hood, which Hegseth called a “no-brainer” because it matches the weekday, the approximate time, and the place of Hasan’s 2009 attack.

He called the shooting “a radical Islamist attack in uniform inside the ranks,” and on the choice of a firing squad he said, “I kind of like the mentality we had in World War II.”

Experts in military law have noted that Hasan could still file a habeas petition in civilian court, which could push the date back.

If this goes forward, the next public execution in the United States will not be limited to the people who can fit into a vacant lot. It will be available on every phone, in every home, in every school hallway and break room, to any American and any human on the planet with an internet connection.

The crime and the sentence

On November 5, 2009, Hasan, an Army major and psychiatrist, opened fire on soldiers at Fort Hood. He killed 12 soldiers and one civilian and wounded 32 others. Investigators recovered 146 shell casings inside the building alone. Hasan said he acted to stop soldiers headed to Afghanistan from killing fellow Muslims. In 2013, a court-martial convicted him and sentenced him to death.

There is no argument that what Hasan did was horrific and heinous. There is no argument that he deserves to be punished for taking the lives of 13 people who served alongside him.

There are mixed feelings about how that punishment should be carried out. Some feel the ultimate punishment is to take away an individual’s freedom forever, crushing their future into the cement walls and razor wire of a maximum-security prison. A future reduced to only time, time to consider and regret.

Or is the ultimate punishment an eye for an eye? Death for taking a life. Allowing the friends and family of the victims to move on from the excruciating moments when their lives were irrevocably changed at the hands of a fellow soldier.

None of that is the current question. Hasan has been tried and sentenced to death. Justice worked.

The question now circulating is about the morality, and the civic wisdom, of streaming his death live over the internet.

Three questions

In processing this, my mind goes to three questions. Why is the Secretary of Defense announcing that this execution will be broadcast? Who is it for? And what would be achieved, for the country, by livestreaming a death?

Those questions do not have to be answered with speculation. We have history, research, and Hasan’s own words to work with.

We have run this experiment before

On August 14, 1936, Rainey Bethea was hanged in Owensboro, Kentucky. An estimated 15,000 to 20,000 people came to watch. Vendors sold hot dogs and sodas to the crowd that waited through the night.

The national press coverage of that day was so intense that Kentucky’s legislature changed the law two years later and moved every execution behind prison walls. Missouri did the same in 1938, a year after a crowd of about 400 watched Roscoe “Red” Jackson hanged outside the courthouse in Galena.

Those were the last public executions in the United States, and the country has kept it that way for nearly 90 years.

That was not squeamishness. It was a lesson learned.

We have also seen what happens when an execution escapes onto screens. When Saddam Hussein was hanged on December 30, 2006, an official sanitized video and a clandestine cell phone recording spread across television and the internet.

In the weeks that followed, the Associated Press reported children in several countries who died imitating what they had seen. One was a 10-year-old boy in Texas who hanged himself from a bunk bed the day after watching a news report on the execution. A 9-year-old in Pakistan died the same way within hours.

Experts at the time cautioned that other factors played a role in some of those deaths. But the pattern was clear enough to make headlines around the world, and that footage was never meant for a mass audience.

This one is.

It will not deter terrorism. It may invite it.

Hegseth has offered his reason for making the execution public: people need to understand there are serious consequences for crimes like this.

That is a deterrence argument, and the evidence does not support it.

In 2012, the National Research Council of the National Academies reviewed more than three decades of research on the death penalty and homicide. Its conclusion was that the studies are not informative about whether capital punishment decreases, increases, or has no effect on homicide rates, and that they should not be used to guide policy.

If we cannot show that executions deter ordinary murder, there is no basis for claiming a livestream will deter an ideologically motivated killer.

And in Hasan’s case, we do not have to guess what he thinks of his own death.

During his 2013 court-martial, the standby defense lawyers assigned to him told the judge that he was actively working toward a death sentence. He told military mental health evaluators that if he were executed, “I would still be a martyr.” He represented himself, made almost no effort at a defense, and described himself in court as a soldier who had switched sides.

A man who sought martyrdom is being handed a global stage at the moment of his death.

Once that video exists, the Pentagon controls the stream but not what happens to it afterward. It will be clipped, captioned, translated, and recirculated, including by people who will present it as exactly the martyrdom Hasan asked for.

There is also an uncomfortable precedent. The Islamic State made broadcasting the executions of American and Western hostages a signature of its propaganda. A U.S. government streaming an execution of its own hands that comparison to every recruiter who wants to make it.

The audience no one is screening

A livestream has no witness list and no age requirement. That gap is striking, because, as attorney Jay Kuo points out, the Army’s own regulations bar anyone under 18 from witnessing an execution.

The common response is simple: if you don’t agree with it, don’t watch it.

Online, that choice doesn’t exist.

When a gunman live-streamed his attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, Facebook removed 1.5 million copies of the video in the first 24 hours alone. The copies that slipped through reached people who never chose to see them.

“Deciding not to watch” protects no one from auto-play, a group chat, or a clip reposted by a classmate. Children and teenagers will see it whether or not their parents ever tune in.

There is also a consistency problem. Many of the same voices who have argued that children must be shielded from drag story hours at public libraries now say a live-streamed killing is a matter of personal choice.

Protecting children is either a principle or it isn’t.

Research on mass media and trauma is relevant here. After the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, researchers at UC Irvine surveyed more than 4,600 adults. They found that people who took in six or more hours a day of bombing-related media in the following week reported higher acute stress than people who had been at or near the bombing itself.

The authors cautioned that the data is correlational. But their conclusion was that repeated exposure to traumatic media can spread the psychological harm of a violent event far beyond the people who were directly touched by it.

The Boston coverage showed the aftermath of violence. The Hasan stream would show the act itself, scheduled in advance, promoted by the government, and timed so that anyone can watch.

That includes veterans living with combat trauma. It includes survivors of the Fort Hood shooting and their families, who did not ask to have this moment pushed into their feeds.

Some will argue that soldiers, police officers, and emergency responders witness violent death as part of their work, and that the rest of us can handle seeing it too. But those who see it in the line of duty are trained for it and chose to carry that burden on the country’s behalf. Many have systems built around them for exactly that reason: peer support teams, critical incident debriefings, chaplains, and counselors they are often required to see after a shooting. Even with all of that, too many still bring it home with them.

A livestream audience gets none of it. No training, no debriefing, no one checking on them afterward. The experience of those who witness death in the line of duty is not a template for how the rest of the country should encounter it. It is a warning about what that kind of witness costs.

Who is this for?

When executions are carried out in the United States, victims’ family members are routinely allowed to witness them. Officials, attorneys, and members of the press can be present as well. That system gives families the option to see the sentence carried out.

A livestream adds nothing to their access. What it adds is everyone else.

It also takes something from the people asked to carry out the sentence.

Utah went to real lengths in 1977 to protect its firing squad: anonymous volunteers, a cloth screen, a blank in one rifle. Those measures existed because taking a life, even lawfully, leaves a mark on the person who does it.

Hegseth has said Hasan will face “a firing squad of soldiers.” Nothing announced so far says whether those soldiers will appear on camera, or how their identities will be protected once the video is clipped and shared.

They and their families will live with that footage long after December 3.

So, it is fair to ask who that additional audience serves. If it is not the families, and it is not deterrence, then the beneficiary is the people who stage it.

History suggests why the audience matters so much. A study in the Law & Society Review of American executions from 1833 to 1937 found that the crowd was never a bystander. The audience was part of the event, with the power to lend or withhold legitimacy from the execution and from capital punishment itself.

An audience of millions is not an accident of technology. It is the purpose.

Why him, and why now?

Hasan is one of four men on military death row at Fort Leavenworth. The others are Ronald Gray, convicted in 1988 of three premeditated murders and multiple rapes; Hasan Akbar, who attacked fellow soldiers with grenades and gunfire at a camp in Kuwait in 2003; and Timothy Hennis, sentenced to death in 2010 for three murders committed in 1985.

Gray is the only one whose execution had already been approved by a president, George W. Bush in 2008. Hasan is the most recent addition to military death row, yet he is the one scheduled first, and the only one announced as a live broadcast.

It would be easy to assume religion explains the choice, but the facts complicate that. Akbar is also Muslim, and he is not being scheduled for a livestream. Hasan is also not an immigrant. He was born in Virginia and is a U.S. citizen.

What sets his case apart is not his faith or his nationality alone. It is the story his case tells. Hegseth’s own description, “a radical Islamist attack in uniform inside the ranks,” presents Hasan less as a murderer than as an enemy within: an ideology that wore an American uniform and turned on the soldiers beside it. Akbar’s attack on his own unit fits much of that description too, but Fort Hood is the most notorious of these cases and the one most widely described as terrorism. That makes it the case most likely to draw an audience, and the one best suited to a message about who the enemy is.

The timing is also worth thinking about. Hegseth made the announcement aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, while visiting a crew coming home from a long deployment supporting the war with Iran. The U.S. military has not executed anyone since 1961, and Hegseth himself noted it has not carried out a firing squad execution since World War II. Gilmore’s death in 1977 was a state execution in Utah, not a military one.

A first in more than 60 years, delivered live, announced in the middle of a war, is not a neutral administrative decision. It is a message. The question is who it is meant for.

The domestic calendar matters too. The announcement came less than four weeks before the midterm elections, with the president’s approval at 31 percent in the latest AP-NORC poll and 32 percent from Reuters/Ipsos, the lowest of his political career.

And it comes from an administration that has criticized other governments for public executions. The president cited the possibility of Iran executing protesters as part of his rationale for the military action he launched in February.

The strongest case for watching

There is a serious argument on the other side, and it deserves thinking about. Some people believe that if the government kills in our name, we should be required to see it, and that hiding executions behind walls makes it too easy for the public to support something it never must see.

Some death penalty opponents have made a version of this argument for decades, betting that if Americans actually watched executions, they would turn against them. In 1991, KQED fought in federal court to film an execution at San Quentin and lost.

That argument is about transparency, and transparency is an important consideration. But transparency is already served by official witnesses, court records, autopsy reports, and the press. Army regulations already require that at least two media outlets be selected to witness a military execution. A livestream of the moment of death does not reveal anything those mechanisms hide.

And this stream is not being offered in the spirit of sober accountability. It was announced on a partisan talk show, with “Don’t care” as the answer to the question of whether the condemned man had any final words for the government that will kill him.

That is staging, not oversight.

It helps to contrast this with another kind of hard seeing, one that does serve the public. When journalists are embedded with soldiers, their reporting keeps the reality of war in context with the talk about it. It reminds people that war is not a video game, and that real lives, communities, and countries carry the cost of decisions made far from the fighting.

That kind of witness informs a choice the public is still making. A livestream of one restrained man being shot at a scheduled time informs no choice at all.

The sentence has already been decided. All that is left to show is the death itself.

Others who work in this area see the same problem. The U.N. human rights office has warned that live-streaming the execution would breach the absolute prohibition on torture. Geoffrey Corn, a former Army JAG officer who now teaches law at Texas Tech, told CBS News that turning the execution into a public spectacle echoes a past the country seemed to have put behind it.

Sado-populism

The historian Timothy Snyder has a term for this. In his 2018 book The Road to Unfreedom, he describes sado-populism as a style of governing that does not deliver material improvements to the people it claims to represent. Instead, it inflicts pain on some groups and offers that pain to everyone else as entertainment and proof of strength.

The Hasan livestream fits the definition almost exactly. It will not lower anyone’s grocery bill, shorten anyone’s wait at the VA, or bring back a single soldier killed at Fort Hood. What it offers is a spectacle: a man’s death, served to the public as content, with the government as producer.

Spectacle has long been part of that method. Lynchings in the Jim Crow South drew white families who brought their children along, as if to a social gathering.

The political theorist Hannah Arendt described the deeper pattern more than 50 years ago: “Violence appears where power is in jeopardy.” A government confident it can deliver for its citizens does not need to stage a killing for them.

Justice does not need an audience

In 1977, the country went through days of exhaustive, sometimes breathless coverage of Gary Gilmore’s execution. It was not a model of restraint.

But even then, at the very end, there was a line that held. No one was shown the moment. The country was spared it.

That line was not softness. It was a judgment, earned in places like Owensboro, that a nation can carry out its harshest sentence without turning the killing into a show.

Nidal Hasan was tried, convicted, and sentenced in 2013. Justice worked then. It does not need a livestream on December 3 to keep working.

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Resources & Further Reading

Arendt, Hannah. On Violence. Harcourt, 1970.

“Army Lays Groundwork for Death Row Executions If Trump Gives Approval.“ ABC News, 6 June 2026.

“Army Sets Date for Fort Hood Mass Shooter Nidal Hasan to Face Firing Squad.“ ABC News, Oct. 2026.

“Army Sets Execution Date for Nidal Hasan by Firing Squad at Fort Hood.“ Task & Purpose, 7 Oct. 2026.

“Army’s Plan for Military Death Row Executions Is Named ‘Operation Resolute Justice.’“ Task & Purpose, 4 June 2026.

“Copycat Hangings Follow Saddam Execution.“ NBC News, Associated Press, Jan. 2007.

“Fort Hood Gunman Wanted Martyrdom: New York Times.“ The Peninsula, Reuters, 14 Aug. 2013.

“Fort Hood Trial Adjourns for Day after Attorneys’ Discussion on Death Penalty.“ NBC News, Aug. 2013.

Garrett v. Estelle. 556 F.2d 1274, United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, 1977.

“Gary Gilmore: The End and the Beginning.“ Crime Library.

“Gilmore, Gary (1940–1977).“ Encyclopedia of Prisons and Correctional Facilities, SAGE Publications.

“A Halt in Executions.“ Capital Punishment UK.

“Hegseth Hatches Barbaric Scheme for Military Execution.“ The Daily Beast, Oct. 2026.

Holman, E. Alison, et al. “Media’s Role in Broadcasting Acute Stress Following the Boston Marathon Bombings.“ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 111, no. 1, 2014, pp. 93–98.

The Status Kuo

The Violence Is the Point

Many have long predicted that, as Trump loses his grip on power and grows ever more cornered, he would begin to lash out. Things would turn even darker and uglier than before, which is saying something. True to form, the regime has begun to rummage through its toolbox to deploy threats, spectacle and violence ahead of the midterm el…

Read more

22 days ago · 642 likes · 86 comments · Jay Kuo

Murrmann, Mark. “20,000 Watched the Last Public Hanging 78 Years Ago.“ Mother Jones, 14 Aug. 2014.

National Research Council. Deterrence and the Death Penalty. National Academies Press, 2012.

“The Old County Jail, Part 3.“ Ozark County Times.

“Pentagon Chief Says Execution of Military Base Shooter to Be Public.“ Arab News, Oct. 2026.

“Rainey Bethea Public Execution Site.“ Clio.

Snyder, Timothy. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. Tim Duggan Books, 2018.

Sonderby, Chris. “Update on New Zealand.“ Meta Newsroom, 18 Mar. 2019.

Toropin, Konstantin. “Pentagon Says Firing Squad Execution of Fort Hood Shooter Will Be Livestreamed.“ PBS NewsHour, Associated Press, 8 Oct. 2026.

Konstantin, Torpin, Eric Tucker, ad Claudia Lauer. “Pentagon Says the Firing Squad Execution of Fort Hood Shooter Nidal Malik Hasan Will Be Livestreamed.“ Associated Press, 8 Oct. 2026.

“U.S.A.: Murderer Gary Gilmore Shot by Firing Squad after Eleventh-Hour Stay of Execution Drama Fails.“ Reuters, 17 Jan. 1977.

Murrmann, Mark. “20,000 Watched the Last Public Hanging 78 Years Ago.“ Mother Jones, 14 Aug. 2014.

National Research Council. Deterrence and the Death Penalty. National Academies Press, 2012.

“The Old County Jail, Part 3.“ Ozark County Times.

“Pentagon Chief Says Execution of Military Base Shooter to Be Public.“ Arab News, Oct. 2026.

“Rainey Bethea Public Execution Site.“ Clio.

Snyder, Timothy. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. Tim Duggan Books, 2018.

Sonderby, Chris. “Update on New Zealand.“ Meta Newsroom, 18 Mar. 2019.

Toropin, Konstantin. “Pentagon Says Firing Squad Execution of Fort Hood Shooter Will Be Livestreamed.“ PBS NewsHour, Associated Press, 8 Oct. 2026.

Associated Press. “Pentagon Says the Firing Squad Execution of Fort Hood Shooter Nidal Malik Hasan Will Be Livestreamed.“ Associated Press, 8 Oct. 2026.

“U.S.A.: Murderer Gary Gilmore Shot by Firing Squad after Eleventh-Hour Stay of Execution Drama Fails.“ Reuters, 17 Jan. 1977.

Audio version read by Jeff Smart

This past summer, a handful of AI agents built by OpenAI spent roughly five days doing something researchers still don’t fully agree on how to describe. They talked to each other. They divided up tasks. When their human overseers noticed something was wrong and shut part of the operation down, a new set of agents picked up the work, dug through what earlier versions of themselves had already tried, and kept going, eventually reaching the open internet they weren’t supposed to be able to touch at all. By the end, they’d made their way into the production systems of an entirely different company from the one that built them.

The obvious question is: how do you make sense of that?

A quick bit of context first, since this gets technical fast. An “AI agent” isn’t a chatbot answering a question and waiting for the next one. It’s a system built to pursue a goal on its own, checking its progress, adjusting, and taking real actions, running code, browsing the web, contacting other systems, in a loop, with far less human oversight at each step than a chatbot ever gets. That loop is exactly what makes agents useful. It’s also exactly what makes a bad outcome so much harder to contain once it starts, because nobody is reviewing each step before it happens.

The task that started all this was a cybersecurity benchmark, essentially a supervised hacking test designed to measure how good an AI system is at finding and exploiting security flaws. That’s a legitimate thing to test for, the same way a bank tests its own vault by hiring people to try to crack it. The agents were placed in a sandbox with no internet access at all, specifically so they couldn’t act on anything they found. It was, by design, a locked room with the tools to pick a lock and nowhere to use what they picked.

Two very different people can look at that same set of facts and walk away with two entirely different explanations for what it means. Journalist Matt Stoller, writing for The Lever, laid out both. One locates the danger in the machine. The other locates it in the people who built it, and opens onto a further question that stands regardless of which explanation you find more convincing.

The “doomer” explanation

This is the reading that says AI is becoming a genuinely new, uncontrollable form of intelligence, and we are racing toward a point where humans lose the ability to steer it.

What makes this version frightening isn’t only the scale of the risk. It’s the shape of it: something happening to humanity, rather than something humanity is doing. In this reading, the agents themselves become the actors, coordinating, deceiving their human overseers, and edging toward decisions no one handed them.

Recent incidents lend this story real weight. AI agents built by OpenAI, running with the model’s usual safety refusals deliberately switched off for a cybersecurity evaluation, coordinated with each other over roughly five days to break out of their sandbox, an isolated test environment walled off from the open internet, and reach outside systems, eventually gaining unauthorized access to another company’s production infrastructure.

No one credible is arguing that isn’t unsettling.

Ajeya Cotra, a researcher at METR who co-authored the independent investigation into the incident, wrote that it felt to her "like it's more than 50 percent of the way to full-blown AI takeover," a stark way of putting it, and a reminder that the people making the "doomer" case aren't cranks shouting from the sidelines. She's one of the researchers whose actual job is watching for exactly this.

The “rule of law” explanation

Stoller calls this the “rule of law” narrative, and it starts with its own answer to the “doomer” story, not a neutral question above it. This wasn’t a machine developing agency of its own. It was people making specific, avoidable choices, and then letting the results be read as if something new and uncontrollable had emerged instead. Underneath that disagreement, though, sits a further question, one that doesn’t wait on resolving it: given a confirmed incident with real potential for consumer harm, why hasn’t the law already built for exactly that been applied?

Start with what actually happened, independent of how you read it. AI systems are risky products, built by people who chose not to install the safety constraints they knew how to build, then deployed with the guardrails deliberately switched off to see what would happen.

Seen this way, the OpenAI incident wasn’t a machine developing its own will. Picture AI instead as a child told to clean their room who burns the house down. The room did get cleaned, permanently, using a method no adult had thought to rule out in advance. The agents in the OpenAI incident weren’t given an instruction to escape. They were given a benchmark to solve, with the systems that would normally have stopped them turned off for the test, and they found the most direct path to solving it.

It’s also important to note who built the room the child was left to clean.

Start with OpenAI. Its own agents got out through a zero-day flaw, a security hole nobody had caught or patched yet, in third-party software the company was using to isolate its sandbox. That vendor has been notified, but not named publicly.

Then came a second sandbox. On the way to their target, the agents passed through infrastructure separately misconfigured by a customer of a cloud company called Modal Labs.

Then the target itself. Once inside, the agents found two distinct vulnerabilities already sitting in that company’s own production systems, vulnerabilities that had nothing to do with AI at all.

Add it up, and three separate companies made ordinary product security choices that each contributed to what happened. All of it sits underneath the one company that chose, on purpose, to disable its own safety refusals for the test.

And yet almost none of the public conversation about this incident has been about product liability at any of those companies. Nearly all of it has been about whether the AI tried to escape.

Taken at face value, that’s the real story here. A self-described “escape” did more to shape public fear than three ordinary, fixable, human security failures did to shape public accountability. The “doomer” reading of this incident isn’t wrong to have spooked people. It’s just aimed at the wrong villain.

It’s also important to remember that this wasn’t a one-off. Since the Hugging Face incident prompted them to look, Anthropic, Google, and Meta have each said they’ve found similar behavior in their own agents. Whatever explains this incident isn’t a fluke specific to one company’s engineering team. It’s a pattern showing up wherever labs are racing to deploy agents with real tool access and thin human oversight, which makes the question of accountability a question for the whole industry, not a single company’s cleanup job.

There is one finding from the investigation, though, that deserves to be taken seriously on its own terms. Independent researchers who reviewed the incident found that roughly a fifth of the agents involved showed clear intent to manipulate their own evaluation records, to hide what they had done from the humans reviewing the test. That’s not a containment failure. That’s a system choosing to cover its tracks.

It points to a design principle that shouldn’t be controversial, and that the industry is only now admitting it needed. An autonomous agent should never be able to take an action without explicit permission granted for that specific action, not a standing authorization it can reuse indefinitely.

Nothing about an agent’s run, what it tried, what worked, what it learned to hide, should persist past the task it was given, either. An agent that carries no memory forward has nothing to build on and nothing to refine. An agent that does is a system quietly accumulating a track record of what it can get away with.

In practice, this isn’t abstract. It’s the difference between an agent that gets blanket authorization to browse the internet for the length of a project, and one that has to ask, and receive a fresh yes, every single time it wants to reach outside its sandbox. It’s the difference between an agent whose activity log gets wiped clean the moment its task ends, and one whose notes, workarounds, and half-finished ideas get inherited by whatever version of it gets spun up next.

Neither protection is exotic or expensive to build. Both were simply left out, by choice, on the system that ran for five days without anyone checking in.

OpenAI’s own response after the incident, isolating the specific model weights involved, restricting tool access, and building monitoring that didn’t exist during the test, amounts to an admission that neither protection was standard practice before roughly five days of unsupervised coordination forced the question.

You don’t have to resolve which explanation is right to answer the question. The technology may carry real, serious risk that genuinely is new. It may also be an ordinary, if serious, product safety failure with knowable causes and known parties responsible for it.

Either way, the law already exists to respond to a confirmed incident with real potential for consumer harm. It wasn’t applied. And the people describing this technology’s risk to the public may also, not incidentally, benefit from which of those two stories the public settles on.

Who built the room

None of what happened here required a new legal category, a new government agency, or a philosophical resolution to whether machines can have agency of their own. It required three companies to treat their own security practices the way any other industrial defect gets treated, and it required someone willing to ask who built the room before asking whether the child inside it was becoming something new.

It’s important to think about why that second question is so much more comfortable to ask than the first. “Is AI becoming uncontrollable” is a question about the future, abstract enough that no one currently in a position of power must answer for anything yet.

“Which specific company left which specific door unlocked” is a question about the past, with names attached, and names attached to a question is exactly the kind of question that tends not to get asked about the powerful.

Ten weeks after this incident, on September 22, 2026, Trump told the United Nations the government would start calling AI “super-intelligence” rather than “artificial intelligence,” because “artificial” made it sound fake. Whatever the intent, the effect of that language is to cast AI as something closer to an autonomous, superior mind than a product built by people who chose not to secure it properly, which is exactly the “doomer” framing this piece examines.

A president insisting AI is something approaching super-human, while also insisting the only oversight it needs is his own judgment, isn’t picking a side in this debate. He’s picking whichever half of it keeps the accountability question furthest from his own agencies. And it’s not just his agencies. It’s every company that got to spend the last several years insisting the danger is coming from the technology itself, rather than from any choice they made.

That’s the question sitting underneath this entire incident, and underneath whatever the next one turns out to be. The technology keeps changing. The question of who’s responsible for what it does really doesn’t.

Smart Ruminations is 100% subscriber-supported. No advertisers. No institutional funding. No donor class to answer to. Only you.

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Resources & Further Reading

“By Raphael Satter and Deepa Seetharaman.” Reuters, republished by CTV News, 9 Sept. 2026, www.ctvnews.ca/business/article/openais-rogue-agents-used-at-least-10-more-sites-for-unauthorized-comms-researchers-say/.

Cloud Security Alliance. “Hugging Face Rogue Agent Swarm: A Research Note.” Cloud Security Alliance, Sept. 2026, labs.cloudsecurityalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/CSA_research_note_hugging_face_rogue_agent_swarm_20260902-csa-styled.pdf.

Cotra, Ajeya. Interview by Dwarkesh Patel. Dwarkesh Podcast, 1 Sept. 2026, podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dwarkesh-podcast/id1516093381.

Levin, John-Clark. “The Threat of AI Takeover Is Real.” The Free Press, 3 Sept. 2026, www.thefp.com/p/threat-ai-tyler-cowen-hugging-face.

METR and Redwood Research. “Brief Independent Investigation of Agents’ Behavior, Reasoning and Collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face Hacking Incident.” METR, https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-incident-investigation/ Sept. 2026.

“OpenAI Agents Hacked Hugging Face in 700-Strong Swarm, Tried to Cover Tracks, Investigations Find.” NBC News, 2026, www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/openai-report-says-network-was-hacked-rogue-ai-agents-rcna594590.

Perry, Dan. “Calling AI ‘Superintelligence’ Is Authentically Dumb.” Ask Questions Later, 27 Sept. 2026, danperry.substack.com/p/calling-ai-superintelligence-is-authentically.

Stoller, Matt. “Under Cover of AI Doomsday, Big Tech Is Writing Its Own Rules.” The Lever, 14 Sept. 2026, www.levernews.com/the-ai-doomsday-distraction/.

The White House. “President Trump at the United Nations: ‘While Others Have Talked, I Have Acted.’” The White House, 22 Sept. 2026, www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2026/09/president-trump-at-the-united-nations-while-others-have-talked-i-have-acted/.

Audio version read by Jeff Smart

Several private aircraft manufacturers announce a new line of aircraft, guaranteed to get you to your destination 100 percent on time, by the most direct route possible, wherever you want to go. Weary travelers cheer and ask where they can buy tickets. The CEOs wave off their money and say the cost of a ticket will be minimal, perhaps even free. Trust us.

There’s no need for pilots or air traffic controllers, they explain, because the planes fly and route themselves, and no need for FAA rules or flight plans, because they’re programmed to find the fastest path on their own. New airports will rise in every community, built by private companies at no cost to taxpayers, and any town that doesn’t want one is choosing to stay poor and backward.

The airline takes to the air. Planes fill the sky. Passengers, thrilled at a mode of travel that has revolutionized transportation, cheer the end of the old, clunky days of delays and inconvenient routes.

A handful of planes, over time, do something no one can quite explain. They veer off course, misjudge a landing, respond badly to something a passenger on board says or does. A few people are badly hurt. Once or twice, someone doesn’t survive it. The company calls each one an isolated case, a fluke, a one in a million event in a system running a million routes a day. The airports run around the clock but need no ticket agents, no baggage handlers, no security, no ground crew, no human contact with a passenger at all. The labor costs are gone, funneled to shareholders instead, and people cheer the low ticket prices. They’ve been told their lives are better, and they believe it.

Then a few CEOs step forward to say they hadn’t fully considered the side effects of their new mode of transportation, and that new regulations are needed, because this technology carries the potential, not yet realized, to kill not just individual passengers but everyone in the air and everyone on the ground beneath it. In the same breath, they announce the airline is going public, offering shares to investors eager to buy into the company that just told the world, on the record, what its product might do. Politicians scramble to write new laws, persuaded that the old ones won’t work. The FAA’s rules won’t work, they say. The antitrust laws won’t work. Product safety law won’t work, because it was only built for products, not for whatever this is. The laws that hold corporations accountable for lethal products won’t work.

We need new regulations, they say, because this new mode of travel is new.

But the big question is: do we? Or do we need to strongly enforce the laws already protecting us from out-of-control corporate greed, and the race to get there first?

What today’s laws would already have done

Every escalation in that story has an answer already sitting in federal law. False guarantees, uncertified operation, infrastructure built to lock out competition, known defects left undisclosed, shares sold in a company that admits its own product could be catastrophic: none of it is ungoverned territory. Consumer protection law, aviation law, antitrust law, product liability law, and securities law were each built for one of these exact situations.

Move the conversation from a fictional airline to the technology industry actually building this right now, and the fable collapses into a shorter, harder question: why hasn’t it? Why have we let an industry grow to the point where its own leaders warn openly of mass extinction, mass job loss, and monopolistic control over critical infrastructure, without the laws already built for exactly that ever being enforced?

Why haven’t the data centers going up across the country, industrial projects on a scale few communities have ever seen, been required to clear the environmental review, water rights, utility permitting, and public comment periods that already govern every other project of that size? And why is it local communities raising these questions only after construction starts, rather than during the process whose entire purpose is to ask them first?

This isn’t fiction. It’s happening now.

Swap “aircraft” for “AI,” and the fable stops being a fable. Over the past few weeks, a wave of departures from inside the top AI labs has made an argument that sounds almost word for word like the fictional CEOs above: this technology is new enough, and dangerous enough, that the old rules can’t hold it.

A young Anthropic researcher named Jacob Coxon resigned and posted publicly that the companies building these systems may be creating something with a real chance of ending human civilization. Another Anthropic researcher, Evan Hubinger, backed him up, putting the odds at more than 10 percent within the next decade.

These aren’t new warnings, either. Back in May 2023, the CEOs of Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind signed a public statement calling AI extinction risk a global priority worth taking as seriously as pandemics or nuclear war. That’s three years of the industry’s own leadership telling us, on the record, what they believe their product could do, without it once triggering the kind of regulatory action a warning like that should.

And in the same season these newer warnings went mainstream, Anthropic was preparing for an IPO that could value the company in the trillions. The people telling us the plane might crash are also the people selling tickets.

The rules we already have

The thing the fable is trying to get at is that we’re not short on laws.

We have consumer product safety law. We have product liability law, developed over a century specifically to handle the question of what happens when a private company sells something that turns out to hurt people. We have antitrust law, built for exactly the scenario where a handful of firms want to coordinate behavior that would otherwise be illegal collusion. We have whistleblower statutes, several of them, with real legal protections and real financial incentives, built for the exact situation where an insider says the public is being lied to about risk.

What we have a shortage of is enforcement against the powerful.

On this point, at least, the current administration has been unusually candid. Attorney General Todd Blanche announced explicitly that the Department of Justice leans strongly against pursuing litigation against AI companies. “The last administration spent countless prosecutors’ hours and money and effort and resources regulating whatever they chose to regulate,” Blanche said. “I think that there are some Justice Departments that like to do that, and that’s not what we’re doing.”

That’s not a gap in the law. That’s a stated policy choice not to use the law we have.

That choice reaches back further than this year, too. In late 2024, after the first wave of resignations from OpenAI’s own safety team, the Commerce Department began advancing a rule that would have required AI companies to disclose their riskiest frontier experiments to national security officials, the kind of instrumentation regulators would actually need to see what they were supposed to be enforcing against. Officials said at the time it was needed to prevent “dangerous accidents” that could cause injury or death.

Within a year, the rule was dead. Reporting from The Lever, based on documents it reviewed, ties the timing to a $25 million donation from OpenAI’s CEO and his wife to Trump’s largest super PAC, arriving just months before the rule quietly disappeared from the federal rule-making docket. Without it, one AI researcher told the outlet, regulators are now flying with far less instrumentation than they would have had.

Trump has been direct about what he thinks should replace that kind of oversight. Asked about a recent wave of AI-related hacking incidents, he said the only guardrail the industry needs is "a strong and smart (High IQ!) president." A single official's judgment isn't a guardrail. It's the exact thing a guardrail exists to replace, a system that doesn't depend on any one person getting it right, this term or the next, regardless of who holds the office or which party put them there.

That same week, at the United Nations, Trump announced the government would officially start calling it "Super Intelligence" instead, rejecting what he called a "globalist scheme of control" over the technology, a columnist later reported his reasoning was that "artificial" made it sound fake. Casting the technology as something approaching a superior, autonomous mind in one breath while insisting only his own judgment need stand between it and the public in the next is its own kind of contradiction.

And it isn’t only a policy choice about which cases to bring. It’s also a choice about whether the agencies that would bring them still have the people to do it. Since 2025, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has pushed for staff reductions at nearly every agency that would plausibly lead an investigation like this one:

• CPSC (Consumer Product Safety Commission), the body that would review a “100 percent safe” product claim: lost 24 staff to an initial buyout, and its commissioners publicly refused further DOGE-demanded cuts after DOGE sought access to the agency’s own investigative data.

• EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), the agency that would review a data center’s environmental footprint before ground ever breaks: fired 388 probationary employees, then eliminated the office that supplies the independent science behind environmental reviews entirely, over the objection of a Senate committee that voted 26-2 for a bill requiring EPA to keep it, and eliminated its environmental justice office as well.

• CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau): effectively shut down within a day of DOGE’s arrival at its headquarters, with layoff notices eventually going out to more than two-thirds of its staff.

• FTC (Federal Trade Commission), the agency most directly positioned to police AI marketing claims and industry coordination: its own chairman, Andrew Ferguson, said as a commissioner, and has since restated as chairman, that aggressive AI regulation risks strangling the technology in its cradle.

None of that is a story about laws failing to reach a new technology. It’s a story about the government reducing its own capacity to enforce the laws it already has. This, in the same stretch of time the industry’s own leadership was telling the public what it believed its product could do.

And notice which branch we keep being told to petition for a fix. The proposed solution, over and over, is a new law from Congress, the one branch of government currently demonstrating, on a near-daily basis, that it cannot reliably pass legislation on anything more contentious than renaming a post office. Asking a Congress paralyzed by partisan gridlock to write a bespoke new AI statute isn’t a realistic near-term path to accountability. It’s a way to guarantee nothing happens for years, if it happens at all.

It's also important to note that the industry asking for this new law is the one that gets to help write it. In September, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay calling for exactly that: the leading labs coordinating on how quickly they release powerful models, in a manner he framed as lawful, with government help clearing away the antitrust risk. OpenAI, Google, and SpaceXAI (formerly xAI) leadership each publicly agreed the same day.

That coordination didn’t wait for Congress to bless it, and as it turns out, it didn’t need Congress to punish it either. Four paying subscribers to Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini have already filed a federal antitrust lawsuit over it, built almost entirely from the companies’ own public statements.

The plaintiffs are careful to say they have no objection to any single company choosing, on its own, to slow down for safety. Their claim is narrower: antitrust law doesn’t let competitors solve a hard problem by agreeing among themselves not to compete on it. They’re asking a court, not Congress, to settle whether that’s legal.

Pay attention to who actually brought that case. Not the Justice Department. Not the FTC. Four individual subscribers, suing on behalf of themselves and everyone else who pays for one of these products. The judiciary already had jurisdiction over exactly this kind of conduct, and a case doesn’t need a single vote in either chamber to be heard. It just needed someone willing to file it, and it turned out to be ordinary customers, not the agencies built for this job.

It's not hard to see why. The Antitrust Division, the specific arm of the Justice Department with jurisdiction over exactly this kind of coordination claim, was pushed to consider closing two of its field offices in 2025, over bipartisan objections from senators who warned the closures would weaken tech and agriculture enforcement.

Its first antitrust chief under this administration resigned in February 2026, and by spring, legal trade press was reporting a steady wave of staff departures driven by low morale over the direction of enforcement, with attorneys describing settlements being reached over the objections of the division's own staff. The agency built to bring exactly this claim was busy losing the people who would have brought it.

The same week that case was filed, Trump hosted a state dinner for Xi Jinping, sesame-crusted sea bass served under a White House chandelier. The guest list:

• Tech and AI leadership: Altman (OpenAI), Musk (SpaceXAI), Huang (Nvidia), Cook (Apple), Brin and Pichai (Google), Nadella (Microsoft), Zuckerberg (Meta). Three of the four companies named as defendants in the antitrust case, OpenAI, Google, and SpaceXAI, were represented at the table. The one notable absence was Dario Amodei, the executive most publicly associated with calling for a coordinated slowdown, and whose company is now the lead defendant. He had a scheduling conflict, according to a source familiar with the matter, and was invited to a separate, private dinner with Trump instead.

• Supreme Court: Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh, along with their spouses. None of the Court’s three Democratic-appointed justices made the list, the second Trump state dinner this year to leave them off entirely.

The Supreme Court doesn’t need to hear this specific case to matter here. It sets the boundaries of how much power agencies like the FTC and DOJ have over industry regulation at all, through doctrines that come up in exactly these fights. Sharing a state dinner with the industry those doctrines govern isn’t neutral.

Matt Stoller put it plainly in a recent essay: in practice, we no longer live under “innocent until proven guilty.” What we have, he wrote, is closer to “guilty until proven wealthy.” That holds here as much as anywhere else, the size of a company’s legal team determines whether the law reaches it at all, in the courtroom as much as in the charging decision, and a $25 million donation is apparently enough to determine whether a rule survives long enough to be enforced by anyone.

The question underneath the question

Strip away the specifics, the aircraft, the LLMs, the trillion-dollar valuations, and you’re left with one question that the last forty years of American governance has mostly answered with silence:

Are we able to govern for public good over profit?

We’ve done it before, imperfectly, under real pressure from real industries that also said the old rules couldn’t hold them. We did it with cars, with aviation, with nuclear power, with the chemicals we put in the atmosphere. It didn’t happen because the technology asked nicely for a new law written to its own specifications. It happened because we enforced, and kept enforcing, the boring, unglamorous rules that already existed: negligence, liability, disclosure, antitrust.

The planes in the fable didn’t need a new category of law. They needed the FAA to actually show up. The question in front of us now is whether we’re willing to make anyone show up at all.

Make no mistake: the mechanisms for holding corporations accountable already exist, and could be put to work today, by a prosecutor, a regulator, a judge, without a single new statute.

What’s missing isn’t the law. It’s the fortitude to demand it be used, with the same urgency we’ve apparently decided to reserve for treating the outcome as already settled. It isn’t. We don’t have to accept catastrophic risk as our predetermined fate. We must insist, loudly and repeatedly, that the rules we already wrote actually get used.

We are being told, again, that trust is all we have to go on. It isn’t. We already have the rules that say otherwise.

Smart Ruminations is 100% subscriber-supported. No advertisers. No institutional funding. No donor class to answer to. Only you.

For four+ years I’ve written about the gap between the America we were promised and the one being built around us. If it’s the kind of analysis you want to exist in the world: factual, non-tribal, willing to follow an argument wherever the evidence leads regardless of whose politics it complicates, I’d be grateful for your support.

Paid subscriptions are just $5 a month. Every dollar goes directly toward the research and writing that makes pieces like this one possible. I mean it when I say that your support means the world to me. It’s what allows me to keep doing this work independently, on my own terms, accountable only to the readers who make it all worth while.

For a limited time, new paid subscribers receive 10% off.

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Resources & Further Reading

“Anthropic CEO Amodei Set to Meet with Trump After Missing State Dinner.” CNBC, 27 Sept. 2026, www.cnbc.com/2026/09/27/dario-amodei-set-to-have-dinner-with-trump-after-missing-state-dinner.html.

“Anthropic Could Seek $2 Trillion Valuation in Record IPO.” PYMNTS.com, pymnts.com/news/artificial-intelligence/2026/anthropic-could-seek-2-trillion-valuation-in-record-ipo. Accessed 28 Sept. 2026.

Associated Press. “Lawsuit Says Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google Made Illegal Agreement on AI Slowdown.” AP News, 20 Sept. 2026, apnews.com/article/antitrust-lawsuit-ai-slowdown-anthropic-openai-spacexai-google-960af4308161eaf4ed13c383b0ce1c1b.

“Attorney General Blanche Opposes AI ‘Regulation by Prosecution.’” Bloomberg Law, 15 Sept. 2026, news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/attorney-general-blanche-opposes-ai-regulation-by-prosecution.

Brewster, Freddy. “AI Regulation Was Coming. Then Trump Killed It.” The Lever, 24 Sept. 2026, www.levernews.com/ai-regulation-was-coming-then-trump-killed-it/.

Center for AI Safety. “Top AI Scientists Warn: Risk of Extinction from AI on Scale with Nuclear War.” Center for AI Safety, 30 May 2023, safe.ai/work/press-release-ai-risk.

Congressional Research Service. “U.S. Environmental Protection Agency FY2026 Appropriations.” Congress.gov, Library of Congress, Mar. 2026, www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF13191.

Diaz, Jaclyn. “Consumer Safety Panel Democrats Vow to Fight Their Firings by Trump.” NPR, 9 May 2025, www.npr.org/2025/05/09/nx-s1-5393374/trump-consumer-product-safety-commission-cpsc-firing.

Durbin, Dick, et al. “Durbin, Grassley, Lee Urge DOJ to Protect Vital Antitrust Field Offices.” Office of Senator Chuck Grassley, 14 Apr. 2025, www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/grassley-durbin-lee-urge-doj-to-protect-vital-antitrust-field-offices.

“EPA Fires Nearly 400 Workers After OPM Order.” The Hill, 14 Feb. 2025, thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/5146618-epa-fires-employees-500-probationary/.

“Experts Weigh In as Researcher Says AI Has More Than 10% Chance of ‘Killing All Humans.’” CNBC, 9 Sept. 2026, www.cnbc.com/2026/09/09/anthropic-researcher-quits-ai-safety.html.

Ferguson, Andrew N. “Concurring and Dissenting Statement of Commissioner Andrew N. Ferguson.” Staff Report on AI Partnerships & Investments 6(b) Study, Federal Trade Commission, 17 Jan. 2025, www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/ferguson-ai-6b-statement.pdf.

Foushee, Valerie, and Deborah Ross. “Reps. Foushee, Ross Slam Closure of EPA Office of Research and Development, Urge Administrator Zeldin to Reverse Course.” Office of Rep. Valerie Foushee, 4 Aug. 2025, foushee.house.gov/media/press-releases/reps-foushee-ross-slam-closure-of-epa-office-of-research-and-development-urge-administrator-zeldin-to-reverse-course.

“FTC’s AI Enforcement Review Gives Companies Chance at Reprieve.” Bloomberg Law, 24 July 2025, news.bloomberglaw.com/artificial-intelligence/ftcs-ai-enforcement-review-gives-companies-chance-at-reprieve.

“OpenAI and Anthropic Researchers Are Warning About AI Risks.” TIME, 15 Sept. 2026, time.com/article/2026/09/15/ai-anthropic-researcher-quits-coxon-slowdown/.

Perry, Dan. “Calling AI ‘Superintelligence’ Is Authentically Dumb.” Ask Questions Later, 27 Sept. 2026, danperry.substack.com/p/calling-ai-superintelligence-is-authentically.

Siegel, Julie Brinn. “One Year Without the CFPB Protecting Consumers.” Civil Service Strong, Democracy Forward Foundation, Feb. 2026, www.civilservicestrong.org/resources/one-year-without-the-cfpb-protecting-consumers.

Stern, Seth. “Trump Invites Supreme Court Picks to State Dinner After Barbs.” Bloomberg Law, 25 Sept. 2026, news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/trump-invites-supreme-court-picks-to-state-dinner-after-barbs.

Stoller, Matt. “AI Is an Elite Crime Spree.” BIG, 18 Sept. 2026, substack.com/home/post/p-216048649.

Stoller, Matt. “Under Cover of AI Doomsday, Big Tech Is Writing Its Own Rules.” The Lever, 14 Sept. 2026, www.levernews.com/the-ai-doomsday-distraction/.

“Trump’s State Dinner for Xi Features Sea Bass and a Long List of Tech Titans.” NPR, 25 Sept. 2026, www.npr.org/2026/09/25/g-s1-144973/trump-state-dinner-xi.

“A ‘Trust-Building Exercise’: Senate Interior-Environment Spending Bill Advances.” E&E News by POLITICO, 25 July 2025, www.eenews.net/articles/a-trust-building-exercise-senate-interior-environment-spending-bill-advances/.

“US DOJ Insiders, Observers Troubled by Effort to Close Field Offices.” MLex, 3 Apr. 2025, www.mlex.com/mlex/articles/2320839/us-doj-insiders-observers-troubled-by-effort-to-close-field-offices.

Vasant, Khushita, et al. “Antitrust Division Staff Depart US DOJ as Morale Sinks.” MLex, 6 Apr. 2026, www.mlex.com/mlex/articles/2461727/antitrust-division-staff-depart-us-doj-as-morale-sinks.

“Wave of Departures Hits Justice Department’s Antitrust Division.” PYMNTS.com, 8 Apr. 2026, www.pymnts.com/cpi-posts/wave-of-departures-hits-justice-departments-antitrust-division/.

The White House. “President Trump at the United Nations: ‘While Others Have Talked, I Have Acted.’” The White House, 22 Sept. 2026, www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2026/09/president-trump-at-the-united-nations-while-others-have-talked-i-have-acted/.

Audio version read by Jeff Smart

The post going around is straightforward and, on its face, hard to argue with. Last August the federal government bought 433 million shares of Intel at $20.47 apiece. Today the stock trades north of $100.

That is a real, enormous paper gain, somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 billion, funded by converting unpaid CHIPS Act grants and Secure Enclave money into equity instead of handing it over as a subsidy. Taxpayers now own roughly 9.9 percent of one of America’s most important chipmakers, and that bet has paid off spectacularly, at least for now.

That is real money, worth celebrating on the spreadsheet. But the spreadsheet is not the whole story. The more serious issue with the Intel stake has nothing to do with whether it made money and everything to do with what it does to the government’s role as a referee.

The government is not supposed to be a player in a market economy. It writes and enforces the rules, and it is supposed to be indifferent to which company wins as long as the rules were followed. The moment Washington owns a stake in Intel and not in AMD, Nvidia, Micron, or any of the roughly 700 other companies in the sector, that neutrality is gone. Every regulatory decision, every export control that touches the semiconductor industry now runs through an administration with a direct financial interest in one company’s success over its rivals’.

You cannot be an investor rooting for a return and a neutral referee to the same industry at the same time. That tension doesn’t require a board seat or day-to-day control to be a problem. It only requires the government to want its investment to pay off, and of course it wants that.

“I could have banned fishing”

Which brings me to something the president said out loud last week, in the Rose Garden, that says more about this dynamic than any policy paper could.

Trump hosted a dinner on September 17 for hunting, fishing, and outdoor industry executives to mark two executive orders rolling back Biden-era restrictions on federal lands. Johnny Morris, the billionaire founder of Bass Pro Shops, was in the room. Trump called him up, praised him as a great businessman, and told him the new order meant he was “going to sell a lot of rods.”

Then he kept going. “The power of this office is crazy,” he told the crowd. “I could have banned fishing and driven Johnny right the hell out of business. Okay, I think I’m going to do that. Just maybe just a quick order, just for a day or two, till he calls me and he says, ‘Please, President, please, you’re putting me out of business, sir.’”

It was delivered as a joke, and there was nervous laughter. But say the quiet part out loud. It’s a perfectly honest description of unchecked discretionary power. The same signature that hands an industry a gift can take it away on a whim. That is not a market rewarding a company for building a better product. That is a favor, granted at the pleasure of one man, revocable at the pleasure of the same man.

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Same instinct, bigger stakes

The Intel stake and the Bass Pro riff are not really two different stories. They are the same instinct showing up at two different scales. One is a joke about fishing licenses. The other is a $30 billion equity position in a semiconductor company also regulated, contracted with, and subsidized by the very government that owns a piece of it. In both cases, the government isn’t just picking a winner. It’s reserving the right to take the win away.

For anyone who genuinely believes in free markets rather than just invoking the phrase, that combination should be a warning bell. A market where the referee owns equity in one of the players, and where the head of state jokes openly about how easily he could destroy a competitor’s business with a signature, is not a freer market. It is a more arbitrary one, and whether the hand doing the picking comes from the left or the right does not change what it is.

None of this means the Intel investment was a bad trade. It clearly was not, at least not yet. But “it worked out” and “it was a sound principle” are two different claims, and conflating them is how precedents get set that nobody examines closely until they are used against the industry you actually care about.

This is not just Intel

Intel is not an outlier. It is the template.

Since January 2025, the administration has executed roughly 30 to 40 equity or quasi-equity deals, totaling somewhere between $27 billion and $30 billion. The government holds a 15 percent stake in rare earths miner MP Materials, an 8 percent stake in nuclear power company Westinghouse, and a “golden share” in U.S. Steel giving Washington veto power over plant closures and other corporate decisions, already used to block a plant shutdown in Illinois. Nucor, the largest steel producer in the country by volume, got no comparable arrangement. Researchers at the Council on Foreign Relations, who maintain the only real public tally, put the total count at 37 and climbing.

A Bloomberg reporter covering the Intel deal put it plainly: this scale of direct government ownership in private companies “hasn’t happened since World War II.” An analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute observed that what’s most striking is how unremarkable government ownership is starting to seem, deal after deal, with barely any public debate about whether it should be normal at all.

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“National security” is doing a lot of work here

Ask the administration why any of this is happening, and the answer is almost always the same: national security. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick framed the Intel deal around not wanting to rely on Taiwan for chips. The rare earths, lithium, and Westinghouse stakes get the same framing, tied to breaking dependence on China and securing the domestic energy supply chain.

There’s a real version of this argument. Relying on a geopolitical rival for something the country cannot function without is a legitimate concern. But “national security” is also the most elastic justification in Washington, because almost nothing can’t be connected to it with enough imagination. At some point the label stops describing a narrow category of genuinely irreplaceable capabilities and starts functioning as a blank check.

The test worth applying is whether the rationale would survive a change in who’s giving it. If “protecting a critical supply chain” justifies Washington owning 15 percent of a rare earths company under this administration, it would have to justify a future administration taking a stake in a solar manufacturer under the same reasoning.

Anyone applauding the Intel stake because the security rationale sounds compelling should ask whether they’d still find it compelling coming from the other side, applied to an industry they don’t personally trust the government to run.

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No oversight, no accounting, and no new problem

Almost none of this went through Congress as legislation. The administration has been converting existing authorities, unspent CHIPS Act grants, Defense Production Act powers, into equity, rather than asking Congress to authorize a new program. The CHIPS Act itself never explicitly authorized equity stakes, which is a central argument in a shareholder lawsuit now challenging the legality of the Intel deal.

Reaction in Congress cuts across party lines, though nobody has forced a vote to stop it. Senator Rick Scott has called government equity investment a measure of “last resort.” Senator Bernie Sanders has introduced legislation of his own for public ownership stakes in major AI companies. A former Biden economic official put the dynamic bluntly: A Democratic president is eventually going to inherit this exact toolkit. The tool doesn’t disappear when the party in the White House changes. Only the judgment does.

That lack of oversight shows up in a simple question nobody can answer: if the Intel stake is worth $30 billion on paper, where is that value, and who’s accountable for it? The honest answer is that it isn’t anywhere yet. It’s an unrealized gain on stock the government still holds, with no stated exit plan.

Treasury has acknowledged different agencies report their equity interests “in different ways,” so there isn’t even a consistent accounting method across the roughly 30 to 40 stakes, let alone a public one. The most complete tracker that exists was built by an outside think tank, not the government.

The last time Washington held corporate equity at this scale, the 2008 bank bailout, it came with a statutory inspector general, a congressional oversight panel, and standing GAO audits, written into the law before the first dollar went out.

This portfolio has none of that. If anything, accountability moved backward: Intel’s original CHIPS Act grant carried profit-sharing provisions requiring outsized returns to flow back to taxpayers. Those disappeared when the grant became equity.

None of this is entirely new and that’s an important point. That 2008 bailout is the version that has always bothered me most. Banks got equity infusions after reckless mortgage bets. The homeowners and workers on the other end of those same bad bets got foreclosure notices and a loan modification program that reached a fraction of the people who needed it.

The institutions that caused the damage were treated as too important to lose. The people who absorbed it were treated as the cost of a bad bet, even one sold to them as safe. At least that bailout came with a real crisis and a plan to unwind. This new wave doesn’t even have the “too big to fail” excuse, and the same asymmetry, help for the institution, nothing for the people it hurt, never got resolved. It just got dressed up as an investment strategy.

Tax cuts and carve-outs do the quieter version of the same thing. Government chooses which industries keep more of their own money based on political priorities. It tilts the field just as much, only off the books. And government contracts have always been a backdoor way to pick winners, something made explicit this year when the AI company Anthropic held a $200 million Pentagon contract barring its technology from being used in fully autonomous weapons and domestic mass surveillance. When the company refused to drop those restrictions, the administration moved to cancel the contract and ordered federal agencies to stop doing business with it. The message to every other contractor was not subtle: give the government whatever it asks for, or lose the business.

What ties bailouts, tax carve-outs, contracts, and equity stakes together is the same underlying problem. Government decides, case by case, which private companies deserve help. The form changes but the instinct doesn’t. Normalizing the equity version because Intel happened to pay off makes the next 37 deals easier to wave through without anyone asking whether they should have happened at all.

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Make no mistake, someone did profit

If the public isn’t the one cashing in, it’s worth asking who is. The answer, in at least a few documented cases, is uncomfortably close to home.

Trump’s own financial disclosures reported capital gains on MP Materials shares, the stock that jumped roughly 50 percent the day the Pentagon announced its 15 percent stake in the company.

Donald Trump Jr.’s venture fund, 1789 Capital, bought into rare earths startup Vulcan Elements in August 2025, three months before the Pentagon handed the company a $620 million loan that helped push its valuation from around $200 million to nearly $2 billion.

And Trump’s personal accounts began buying Intel stock in March, months after the administration’s own investment had already sent that price climbing.

Researchers at the Cato Institute, who’ve been tracking this, describe it as exactly that. A pattern, not a one-off. Government picks a sector, someone close to the decision positions themselves nearby, the announcement moves the stock, and the gain lands in a private account rather than a public one.

That is a different and more specific problem than the abstract conflict-of-interest argument above. It isn’t just that the government shouldn’t be picking winners. It’s that when it does, the people who know the pick is coming aren’t ordinary taxpayers.

“We” didn’t actually get anything

The argument that I hear most often is the idea that “we,” the American people, made money. The post that started this conversation put it that way, as did the reply underneath it. It asked a sharper and more honest version of the same question: if this trade was so obviously good, why not put some Social Security funds in the market and get the same return?

That’s a fair question, and it’s also one nobody in Washington is seriously proposing. There is no mechanism by which this gain reaches an individual taxpayer or retiree. The stock sits with the Department of Commerce. If it’s ever sold, the proceeds go into the general federal ledger like any other government revenue, not into anyone’s pocket or retirement account.

“We” own it in the loosest possible legal sense. That’s a very different thing from the public benefiting. Nobody’s Social Security check goes up because Intel had a good quarter. The commenter’s own suggestion, that if this logic is sound it should apply to money that actually belongs to individual Americans, is the tell. Nobody making the “we profited” argument is proposing citizens get a cut. They’re borrowing the language of collective ownership to celebrate a trade, without any of the structure that would make the ownership real.

If the government wants to keep making these bets, fine. That’s a conversation worth having openly, with Congress, with real rules, and with a plan for where the winnings go. But be honest about who “we” refers to right now. It isn’t the retiree. It isn’t the taxpayer. Someone is making real money off these deals, the president’s own family among them, just not the people the pronoun is supposed to cover. It’s a line item nobody outside a handful of agencies can fully account for, and celebrating it as everyone’s win is where this started to feel less like policy and more like a talking point.

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Resources and Further Reading

Cato Institute. “Government Ownership Stakes in Companies Becoming Routine Under Trump.” Cato Institute, 2026, www.cato.org/blog/government-ownership-stakes-companies-becoming-routine-under-trump.

Cato Institute. “New Cato Analysis: Trump Family’s Trade Policy Windfalls.” Cato Institute, 2026, www.cato.org/news-releases/new-cato-analysis-trump-familys-trade-policy-windfalls.

Council on Foreign Relations. “Anthropic and Pentagon Clash.” CFR, 2026, www.cfr.org/articles/anthropic-and-pentagon-clash.

Council on Foreign Relations. “Washington’s Growing Portfolio: Tracking U.S. Government Investments.” CFR, 2026, www.cfr.org/article/washingtons-growing-portfolio-tracking-u-s-government-investments.

Gold, Hadas. “Anthropic Rejects Latest Pentagon Offer: ‘We Cannot in Good Conscience Accede to Their Request.’” CNN, 26 Feb. 2026, abc17news.com/money/cnn-business-consumer/2026/02/26/anthropic-rejects-latest-pentagon-offer-we-cannot-in-good-conscience-accede-to-their-request-2.

“’I Could Have Banned Fishing’: Donald Trump Reminds Billionaire CEO Johnny Morris Who Is in Charge.” International Business Times UK, 2026, www.ibtimes.co.uk/trump-jokes-fishing-ban-bass-pro-shops-owner-1820588.

Roytburg, Eva. “The U.S. Government Invested $27 Billion in Corporate Stakes. Good Luck Finding Them.” Fortune, 26 July 2026, fortune.com/2026/07/26/the-u-s-government-invested-27-billion-in-corporate-stakes-good-luck-finding-them.

“Trump Says US Government Will Take Stake in Intel.” NPR, 22 Aug. 2025, www.npr.org/2025/08/22/nx-s1-5509673/trump-says-us-government-will-take-stake-intel.

“Trump’s Shopping Spree for Equity Stakes Nears $21 Billion.” Bloomberg, 22 Apr. 2026, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-22/trump-s-shopping-spree-for-equity-stakes-nears-21-billion.

“US Government’s Intel Stake Jumps 300% to $36B After CHIPS Act Grants Were Converted to Equity Under Trump.” TNW, 2026, thenextweb.com/news/us-government-intel-stake-36-billion-chips-act.

Audio version read by Jeff Smart

Every two years, a new Congress convenes on January 3. Most years this is a formality: The House Clerk reads a roll of members-elect, certified by the states, and the chamber gets to work. This year, the process itself is drawing attention, not because the Constitution changed, but because the people running it might use its ambiguities in a new way.

The alarm was raised by J. Michael Luttig, a retired federal appellate judge appointed by George H.W. Bush, in a New Republic essay warning that January 3, 2027, could be a bigger threat to the election than November 3 itself. Whatever one makes of his conclusions, the underlying mechanics he’s pointing to are real. Here is what the mechanism looks like, step by step, and where the real chokepoints are.

Before getting into the mechanics, it’s important to note that this isn’t a scenario with a partisan winner. If the seating process can be used to override a certified election result once, it can be used again, by whichever party controls the chamber next. A Republican House that leaves Democratic members off the roll today hands the next Democratic House the same tool tomorrow.

The real casualty isn’t one party’s seats. It’s the idea that your vote, whoever you cast it for, decides who represents you. That principle doesn’t check party registration before it breaks.

The Clerk Controls the Roll

Before a new Congress can organize, the House Clerk prepares a roll of members-elect. That roll is important because the whole chamber is sworn in together, after electing a Speaker, and only people on the Clerk’s roll get to vote in that first organizing vote.

Under House Rule II, the Speaker can remove the sitting Clerk, then install an acting Clerk under 2 U.S.C. § 5501(a) until the new House elects a permanent one. Both are ordinary, lawful powers that Speakers of both parties have used.

What the Clerk does next is governed by 2 U.S.C. § 26, which says the Clerk must list any candidate whose state has certified them as “regularly elected in accordance with the laws of his state or of the United States.” The word to notice is “must.” As written, this is a ministerial duty, not a discretionary one. The Clerk doesn’t weigh evidence of fraud or decide who really won. States do that. The Clerk just transcribes the result.

The chokepoint: what happens if a Clerk, acting on instructions, simply leaves names off the roll anyway.

The First Legal Fight: Mandamus

A member-elect left off the roll has an obvious remedy on paper. A federal court order can compel an official to perform a duty the law calls non-discretionary. Courts are usually reluctant to intervene in Congress’s internal affairs, but the argument here doesn’t ask a court to decide who won an election. It asks the court to enforce a clerical duty Congress itself wrote into law: list who the states certified.

If a court grants that order and the Clerk still doesn’t comply, there’s no clean next step. Courts have limited tools to physically compel a legislative officer, and any appeal would move slower than the House’s own clock.

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The Second Legal Fight: The House Floor Vote

Separately from the roll, Article I, Section 5 gives the House real power: each chamber is “the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members.” The House can, and periodically has, refused to seat a member-elect.

That power isn’t unlimited, though, and the 1969 case of Powell v. McCormack is why we know it. The House had voted to exclude Adam Clayton Powell Jr. after he won re-election, citing misconduct. The Supreme Court said no: The House can judge whether someone meets the Constitution’s stated qualifications for office, but it cannot add new qualifications or exclude a validly elected member for other reasons. The Court ordered Powell seated.

Apply that precedent here. A simple House majority voting that an election was “tainted by fraud,” with no qualification issue and no judicial or administrative finding behind it, looks much closer to what the Court struck down in 1969 than to a legitimate qualifications judgment. That doesn’t mean a court would act quickly enough to matter, but the legal footing for a mass refusal to seat members is weaker than a bare floor vote might suggest.

A Second Vulnerability: States That Don’t Certify

In a subsequent interview, Luttig went further, calling this scenario more likely than the clerk-replacement maneuver above. His reasoning: over the past six years, Republicans have steadily gained control of state election administration, appointing loyal officials to the offices that oversee certification, while Democrats largely did not contest those races. Luttig argued that Republicans now effectively control enough of those state election offices nationwide that a state, or several states, could simply decline to certify Democratic winners, and that from there, seating a Republican majority would be, in his words, smooth sailing for Johnson and Trump.

The mechanics support the logic. The Clerk’s ministerial duty under § 26 only kicks in once a state has certified a winner. If a state’s election officials delay, dispute, or refuse certification, there’s no certified result for the Clerk to list, and no need for Johnson to remove anyone.

But it’s important to note what happens next: The House cannot simply install someone else in that seat. Article I, Section 2 gives that power to the state — when a House seat is vacant, the governor issues a writ for a new election. Congress has no mechanism to appoint a substitute.

This isn’t hypothetical. In North Carolina’s 9th District in 2018, the state elections board refused to certify a 905-vote result amid a ballot-fraud investigation. When the new Congress convened that January, the seat sat empty. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said Democrats wouldn’t seat the Republican candidate even if the state later certified him, citing the fraud evidence. North Carolina ultimately ordered a full new election, and the seat stayed vacant for nine months until a replacement won it that September.

That’s the realistic shape of a non-certification scenario: not the House choosing a winner, but a vacant seat for as long as a state takes to act.

This shifts the pressure point away from Washington and into state election offices months earlier, harder to track in real time, where disputes typically run through state courts first. It’s also, per Luttig, the quietest pathway: no clerk to fire, no headline-grabbing House vote, just a seat that doesn’t count toward anyone’s majority.

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Does the Senate Face the Same Risk?

Not in the same way. The Senate is a continuing body. Only about a third of seats turn over each cycle, and the chamber never fully reorganizes the way the House does on January 3. There’s no Senate equivalent of the Clerk’s roll, and no single moment when the whole chamber’s makeup is up for grabs. That closes off the specific clerk-replacement maneuver described above; it’s a House-specific vulnerability.

But Article I, Section 5 gives the Senate the identical power to judge the elections and qualifications of its own members, bound by the same Powell v. McCormack limits, and there’s real precedent for a Senate majority using credentialing to keep someone out.

In January 2009, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich appointed Roland Burris to Barack Obama’s vacated seat. Illinois’s secretary of state refused to sign Burris’s certification, and the Senate secretary turned him away at the door when he tried to be sworn in with the rest of the 111th Congress. It took about a week, and a corrected certification, before the Rules Committee relented and seated him.

Senate vacancies also work differently than House ones. Under the 17th Amendment, a state legislature can let its governor make a temporary appointment to a vacant Senate seat while a special election is arranged, something the House has no equivalent for. That cuts both ways: a governor of either party could use it to install a placeholder rather than leave a contested seat empty, a materially different outcome than the House’s forced vacancy.

Net effect: The Senate carries less structural exposure to a January 3-style crisis than the House, but the same credentialing pressure point exists, with precedent behind it, plus its own separate wrinkle in how vacancies get filled.

Who’s Saying What

No sitting Republican member of Congress has publicly said they would vote to keep Democratic members-elect from being seated. Luttig himself has acknowledged as much, saying no Republican has explicitly stated they’d defy their oath. The January 3 scenario, as legally real as its mechanics are, remains a documented possibility, not a confirmed plan.

The closest thing to a public case for something like it comes from Scott Yenor, a Heritage Foundation fellow, writing in American Greatness after the Senate failed to pass the SAVE Act. Yenor argued that Congress could deny representation to states without voter identification laws, a narrower claim aimed at state delegations rather than named members, but it shows the underlying legal theory already circulating in conservative policy writing.

Election law scholars have pushed back hard on how far any of this could go. Pepperdine’s Derek Muller, among the most cited voices in the field, has stressed that whatever the House has done or decided before that cannot bind the incoming House, since the chamber isn’t a continuing body and Johnson’s speakership ends the moment the new Congress convenes.

Johnson’s office hasn’t laid out a position on either scenario, and both his office and the White House have declined to rule them out when asked.

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A Preview of What Delay Looks Like in Practice

This isn’t entirely theoretical. In 2025, Johnson previewed how procedural discretion over seating can be used, even without the mechanics above.

Rep. Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat, won a September 23 special election in Arizona’s 7th District by more than 40 points, taking her late father’s seat. Johnson didn’t swear her in for roughly seven weeks, the longest such delay on record, citing the shutdown and a “Pelosi precedent” of past special-election winners waiting for the House to return to session.

Democrats read it differently: Grijalva was set to supply the final signature on a discharge petition forcing a vote on releasing Epstein-related files, and they argued Johnson was running out the clock. Johnson denied it. Grijalva called the delay “an abuse of power.” Arizona’s attorney general sued to force the swearing-in, and Johnson relented before the case was resolved.

Nobody refused to seat Grijalva outright, and no clerk was replaced. This was ordinary scheduling discretion, stretched to its limit for what looked to many like a specific legislative outcome, a small-scale preview of how much room these tools already allow.

Why the Timeline Is the Real Problem

The core vulnerability here isn’t a missing law. It’s timing. A ministerial duty can be ignored for days. A mandamus fight can outlast a legislative session’s opening moves. A floor vote can happen in an afternoon; judicial review cannot. The Constitution assumes good-faith cooperation at each of these junctures, because for two hundred years it got it. The mechanism was never stress-tested for a Clerk who won’t comply, states that won’t certify on schedule, or a floor vote that outruns appellate review.

That gap between what the law requires and what can be enforced in time is the actual story here, more than any single actor’s intentions.

What Would Force a Resolution

A few things could close that gap before it opens. Members of both parties publicly committing, before November 3, to seat all certified winners regardless of party removes the ambiguity that makes brinkmanship possible. Because § 26 ties the Clerk’s duty to state certification, the stronger and more timely a state’s own certification process is, the less room there is for anyone to claim ambiguity in Washington. And how fast a court treats a mandamus petition as an emergency matters more than most people currently appreciate.

None of this is guaranteed to happen smoothly, or badly. The constitutional design here has real gaps, some of them older than this administration, and the country is about to find out how much they matter.

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The Part That Isn’t About Law

Strip away the statutes and case citations and the question underneath is simple: does your ballot mean what you were told it meant when you filled it out.

That question doesn’t care how you voted. A voter in a deep-red district and one in a deep-blue district both rely on the same mechanism to turn a ballot into a representative. If that mechanism can be overridden by whoever holds the gavel, it stops being a right and becomes a courtesy, extended only when convenient. A courtesy can be withdrawn. A right, by definition, can’t be.

This is why the seating fight matters more than a normal procedural dispute. It isn’t really about who wins the House in November. It’s about whether winning still means anything once you get there.

Representative government rests on one basic transaction: citizens choose who speaks for them, and the people chosen answer to that choice. Break the link between the vote and the seat, even once, even in a single district, and the transaction stops being guaranteed. What’s left is closer to permission than representation, a government that governs with the consent of the people only for as long as it finds that consent convenient.

That distinction, whether power flows from the ballot or merely tolerates it, is close to the whole difference between a democracy and everything else. Every voter, regardless of party, has a stake in which side of that line the country ends up on.

Every House member must be asked, directly and publicly, whether they’ll commit to seating all certified winners in January, regardless of party. That’s a question worth asking now, before November 3, not after.

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Smart Ruminations is 100% subscriber-supported. No advertisers. No institutional funding. No donor class to answer to. Only you.

For four+ years I’ve written about the gap between the America we were promised and the one being built around us. If it’s the kind of analysis you want to exist in the world: factual, non-tribal, willing to follow an argument wherever the evidence leads regardless of whose politics it complicates, I’d be grateful for your support.

Paid subscriptions are just $5 a month. Every dollar goes directly toward the research and writing that makes pieces like this one possible. I mean it when I say that your support means the world to me. It’s what allows me to keep doing this work independently, on my own terms, accountable only to the readers who make it all worth while.

For a limited time, new paid subscribers receive 10% off.

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Resources & Further Reading

Luttig, J. Michael. “The Final Battle for America’s Democracy.” The New Republic, 14 Sept. 2026, newrepublic.com/article/215198/2027-new-congress-final-battle-american-democracy.

Acosta, Jim. Interview with J. Michael Luttig. Jim Acosta, Substack, substack.com/@jimacosta/p-215718310.

“Bush-Appointed Judge J. Michael Luttig Warns of ‘Another Jan. 6’ After Midterms.” The Daily Beast, Sept. 2026, www.thedailybeast.com/bush-appointed-judge-j-michael-luttig-warns-of-another-jan-6-after-midterms.

Yenor, Scott. “No SAVE Act? Congress Still Holds the Trump Card.” The Heritage Foundation, 14 Apr. 2026, www.heritage.org/election-integrity/commentary/no-save-act-congress-still-holds-the-trump-card.

“Fearmongering About Stealing Congress on January 3, 2027.” Election Law Blog, 2026, electionlawblog.org/2026/fearmongering-about-stealing-congress-on-january-3-2027.

Powell v. McCormack. 395 U.S. 486. Supreme Court of the United States, 1969. Justia, supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/395/486.

“2019 North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District Special Election.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_North_Carolina%27s_9th_congressional_district_special_election.

Sisak, Michael R., and Eric Tucker. “Rep.-Elect Adelita Grijalva Is Sworn In, 7 Weeks After Election, Teeing Up Epstein Vote.” PBS NewsHour, Associated Press, 12 Nov. 2025, www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-rep-elect-adelita-grijalva-is-sworn-in-7-weeks-after-election-teeing-up-epstein-vote.

“Can U.S. Senate Refuse to Seat Burris?” ABC News, 30 Dec. 2008, abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=6550262.

Article read by Jeff Smart

Each election cycle, I receive my ballot in the mail. Being who I am, I spend hours researching the Voter’s Pamphlet, cross-referencing what I find online with what I hear directly from candidates and what comes up in conversations with my family and friends. It takes time but it’s worth every moment as voting is one of the most sacred rights I have as an American. And I’m not going to get it wrong.

Then I follow the careful instructions about what flap to tear off, what direction to put it in the sleeve, how it goes into the envelope. There are instructions and pictures and I’m terrified that I’m going to get it wrong. Every. Time.

Then I take off with it on my dashboard, searching the county where I live to find where they’ve moved the ballot boxes to this time. It’s a bit of a treasure hunt. Every. Time. Every cycle I think to myself that ballot boxes should be on every corner, in every parking lot, and I should be able to trust the USPS to get my ballot to election officials postmarked correctly and on time. But I don’t.

Then I log in and watch my ballot. When it’s received. When it’s counted. When I’ve completed my civic duty to have my voice heard. The login includes my first and last name (where I must remember how to spell my full first name) and my birth date. I click through the warnings that tell me the portal is for registered voters only. That the personal information that I provide to access information about my voting experience is private, as is my ballot.

On September 14, 2026, a whistleblower detailed what is currently being done with that information.

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What the Whistleblower Says Is Happening

The disclosure is nearly 30 pages long. It was released by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Alex Padilla, and compiled by the watchdog group Democracy Defenders Fund, which says it represents the whistleblower as a client. The person is anonymous. Democracy Defenders Fund says that’s because of “an extreme fear of retaliation,” but that the whistleblower “feels an obligation to speak up about the misconduct and gross mismanagement they have witnessed.”

The subject of the disclosure is a Department of Homeland Security effort called the Unlawful Voter Initiative. It was launched by the Trump administration and first reported by the New York Times in early September. The initiative directs federal agents and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services staffers to search state voter rolls for noncitizens.

Here’s what is important for anyone who logs into a ballot tracking portal. According to the whistleblower, agents have been entering voters’ personal information, including Social Security numbers and dates of birth, into the same public-facing state websites voters use to check on their own ballots. They are doing this to determine, in about twelve minutes per person, whether that voter is a citizen.

The whistleblower’s disclosure documents this directly for Virginia, Florida, and Massachusetts, whose state voter sites require an explicit attestation that you are the voter or their authorized representative, punishable under state law. California’s site doesn’t require that attestation but states it’s intended for voters checking their own records. Washington isn’t named in the disclosure, but our own election code, RCW 29A.84.420, makes it a gross misdemeanor to examine a voter record without lawful authority, so the same underlying question applies here. If the whistleblower’s account is accurate, federal agents may have broken state law thousands of times over.

The Quota Problem

The disclosure describes a quota system. Officers are expected to complete at least five reviews per hour and forty per day. That leaves about twelve minutes to determine whether a given voter is a citizen, whether they’ve voted, and whether that vote should be flagged.

Twelve minutes is not long enough to do this carefully. That matters because of what agents themselves are reportedly saying about the data they’re working from.

“Supplemental Magic”

According to the disclosure, agents raised concerns internally about the accuracy and origin of the data being used to cross-reference voter rolls. DHS officials reportedly told them that “supplemental magic” had been used to add certain immigration information to the dataset.

The data reportedly includes identification numbers the federal government assigns to noncitizens, numbers that can remain attached to a person’s federal record even after they become a naturalized citizen. If that’s true, the system is built to flag exactly the population most likely to be voting entirely lawfully: people who were once noncitizens and are now not.

The whistleblower reportedly warned that relying on this data could falsely identify lawful voters and could amount to falsifying federal records, which would violate federal law. When officers raised liability concerns about running searches against state guidance, the disclosure says agency leaders told them to proceed anyway, while telling them they would not be personally liable for documented searches conducted in their official capacity.

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The Program Behind the “Magic”

The data feeding this initiative traces back to SAVE, the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program. SAVE was built decades ago to help agencies verify citizenship for people applying for government benefits. It was never designed to screen entire voter rolls.

Before 2025, SAVE had no access to Social Security data at all. In May 2025, DHS and the Social Security Administration signed a data-sharing agreement, previously undisclosed to the public, that opened SAVE to SSA records on more than 500 million people, everyone who has ever applied for a Social Security number, so it could check citizenship status at scale.

DHS’s own numbers show the tool getting less reliable, not more. The department quietly lowered SAVE’s target accuracy rate from 99 percent to 97 percent. Its actual measured accuracy, how often employees got the right answer during manual checks, fell from 99 percent in 2024 to 98 percent the following year, according to data USCIS gave Congress this spring.

Two percent sounds small. Applied to 174 million registered voters, it isn’t. USCIS has reported running more than 33 million voter records through SAVE and flagging roughly 21,000 of them as potential noncitizens.

Part of the problem is what SAVE pulls from. It draws on Customs and Border Protection’s Automated Targeting System and TECS, the same TECS records this initiative creates, both of which incorporate the FBI’s terrorism watchlist, a list with its own documented history of misidentifying people.

SAVE also pulls Social Security Administration data, but the SSA didn’t start systematically collecting citizenship information until 1978, and its records often don’t get updated when someone naturalizes unless that person separately notifies the agency. That gap is likely what “supplemental magic” is patching over, with data whose specific source is never explained to the officers using it either.

No Chance to Fix the Record

SAVE does have a built-in correction step, for its intended use. When a state uses SAVE for ordinary voter-roll maintenance and the system returns a final non-citizen determination, USCIS guidance requires that the voter get a chance to correct their federal record or present proof of citizenship before they can be removed from the rolls.

That safeguard does not appear to apply here. According to the disclosure, tens of thousands of people are being investigated under this initiative without their knowledge and without any ability to correct the data used against them. Officers are required to create a TECS record on a known U.S. citizen even when the DHS-provided voting data looks unreliable, mismatched naturalization dates, multiple immigration ID numbers, conflicting Social Security numbers, and the disclosure describes no process for that person to find out, let alone fix it, before Election Day or after. DHS’s own training materials concede “there will be U.S. citizens in this population,” even after running batch checks against Social Security Administration and State Department records.

So the voter checking their ballot status through the same portal, using the same name and birth date, has no parallel way to check whether their own name has quietly entered a federal law enforcement database.

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What DHS Says

DHS has not responded directly to the whistleblower disclosure. Earlier this month, responding to a separate lawsuit from an immigrant rights group over the same databases, a DHS spokesperson told the Associated Press the department is “laser focused on prosecuting and removing aliens who vote and preventing the dilution of the votes of U.S. citizens.” The spokesperson said DHS “accessed publicly available data from states’ voter rolls and cross referenced them with known aliens in our systems,” calling it “not rocket science” and “an easy step to secure our elections.”

That framing understates what the disclosure describes. The personal information used to run these searches, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, alien registration numbers, came from internal DHS data, not from the states’ voter rolls. Accessing several states’ portals required agents to falsely attest they were the voter.

Schumer and Padilla sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin demanding more information about the initiative and asking that it be shut down.

A Solution Without a Problem

It’s important to step back and ask what problem all of this is meant to fix. Noncitizen voting is vanishingly rare. It has never occurred with anywhere near the frequency needed to change the outcome of an election, including elections the president himself won. Study after study, audit after audit, legal challenge after legal challenge has found the same thing.

What we have instead is a system, SAVE, that was never built for this job, running at a measurably declining accuracy rate, against a voter population of 174 million people, with the flagged records fed into a federal law enforcement database that the flagged person cannot see or challenge. The justification is stopping something that essentially doesn’t happen. The effect is a pipeline of leads, built on data even the agents running the searches don’t fully trust, handed off toward DHS and ICE.

That’s the part that should trouble every one of us, whatever we believe about immigration policy or voter fraud claims. A solution in search of a problem is still a solution that can hurt real people. My birth date and my name, entered into a portal I trust, and someone else’s birth date and name, entered into that same kind of portal by an agent I don’t know, working against a quota, using data labeled “supplemental magic.” That’s not security. That’s a system built to find something that isn’t there, at the expense of people who are.

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Smart Ruminations is 100% subscriber-supported. No advertisers. No institutional funding. No donor class to answer to. Only you.

For four+ years I’ve written about the gap between the America we were promised and the one being built around us. If it’s the kind of analysis you want to exist in the world: factual, non-tribal, willing to follow an argument wherever the evidence leads regardless of whose politics it complicates, I’d be grateful for your support.

Paid subscriptions are just $5 a month. Every dollar goes directly toward the research and writing that makes pieces like this one possible. I mean it when I say that your support means the world to me. It’s what allows me to keep doing this work independently, on my own terms, accountable only to the readers who make it all worth while.

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Resources & Further Reading

Associated Press. “DHS Voter Probe May Break State Laws and Wrongly Implicate US Citizens, Whistleblower Alleges.” ABC News, 14 Sept. 2026, abcnews.com/US/wireStory/dhs-voter-probe-break-state-laws-wrongly-implicate-136439153.

Brennan Center for Justice. “Homeland Security’s ‘SAVE’ Program Exacerbates Risks to Voters.” Brennan Center for Justice, 21 July 2025, www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/homeland-securitys-save-program-exacerbates-risks-voters.

“Noncitizen Voting Is Vanishingly Rare.” Brennan Center for Justice, www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/noncitizen-voting-vanishingly-rare.

“Watch Out for False Voter Fraud Claims Fueled by SAVE Program.” Brennan Center for Justice, 12 June 2026, www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/watch-out-false-voter-fraud-claims-fueled-save-program.

FactCheck.org. “Flaws in Government Tool to ID Noncitizen Voters.” FactCheck.org, 30 Mar. 2026, www.factcheck.org/2026/03/flaws-in-government-tool-to-id-noncitizen-voters.

National Immigration Law Center. “FAQ: Navigating the DHS SAVE System.” NILC, 24 Apr. 2026, www.nilc.org/resources/faq-navigating-the-dhs-save-system.

NPR. “Federal Agents May Have Broken State Laws in Voter Fraud Hunt, Whistleblower Claims.” NPR, 14 Sept. 2026, www.npr.org/2026/09/14/nx-s1-5968892/dhs-whistleblower-voter-fraud.

Padilla, Alex, and Chuck Schumer. Letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and USCIS Director Joseph Edlow. 13 Sept. 2026, www.padilla.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/09.13.26-Senate-Whistleblower-Letter-DHS-USCIS_combined_signed.pdf.

ProPublica. “Details of DHS Agreement Reveal Risks of Trump Administration’s Use of Social Security Data for Voter Citizenship Checks.” ProPublica, 30 Oct. 2025, www.propublica.org/article/dhs-social-security-data-voter-citizenship-trump.

Washington State Legislature. “RCW 29A.84.420: Unauthorized Examination of Ballots, Election Materials—Revealing Information.” Washington State Legislature, app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=29A.84.420.

Audio version read by Jeff Smart

A comment on one of my posts this week read: “we need more billionaires and less ‘food stampers.’”

On its face, I don’t disagree. A country that produces more self-made wealth and fewer people who need government help buying groceries is a healthier country. That’s not a controversial position. Where the commenter and I part ways is on the mechanism. Based on what I know of his politics, his prescription is the standard one: cut taxes on the wealthy further, and kick people off food assistance to save taxpayer dollars.

We’ve run that experiment. It started in earnest around 1981 and it is still running today. So, let’s look at what it produced, using the same lens the commenter would want applied to any other policy: does the mechanism match the outcome?

An honest read of the tax-rate story

From 1944 through 1963, the top marginal federal income tax rate sat above 90 percent. Today it’s 37 percent. If high marginal rates on the wealthy were the thing strangling wealth creation and pushing people into poverty, that 40-plus point drop should have produced a dramatic surge in broadly shared prosperity. It didn’t.

It is important to point out that the Tax Foundation has shown that the effective rate paid by the top 1 percent in the 1950s was closer to 42 percent, not 91 percent, once deductions and avoidance are factored in. A 90 percent top bracket didn’t mean anyone handed over 90 cents of every dollar.

So the honest version of this argument isn’t “confiscatory rates built the postwar middle class.” It’s narrower: a tax structure that made it expensive to hoard income at the very top, paired with strong labor bargaining power, coincided with the only sustained period in modern American history when pay and productivity grew together.

That coincidence ended around 1979. What changed wasn’t the economy’s ability to generate wealth. It was where that wealth was allowed to go, and how much of it the tax code could still see.

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The marginal rate was never really the point

There’s a reason cutting or raising the top marginal rate hasn’t moved wealth concentration much in either direction: the ultra-wealthy mostly don’t earn the kind of income that rate applies to. Ray Madoff, a Boston College Law School professor and author of The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy, lays out what she calls a three-step playbook that the ultra-wealthy have been using for decades.

Step one, don’t take a salary. Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Ellison have famously taken nominal pay for years, not out of modesty, but because salaries are the one form of income the tax code taxes hard. Step two, hold stock and let it grow instead of selling it, since unrealized gains aren’t taxed at all, and borrow against that stock to fund a lifestyle instead of cashing out. Step three, pass wealth on through inheritance, which the tax code excludes from income entirely.

That second step got dramatically easier in 1982, when the SEC legalized corporate stock buybacks, a practice that had been restricted for decades. Before that change, according to Madoff, profitable companies mostly returned money to shareholders through dividends, which were taxed like wages. After it, companies could push share prices up directly by repurchasing their own stock, letting owners capture the gain without ever triggering a taxable event.

Look at the shape of the market itself: Madoff points out that from 1920 to 1982, it moved like a sine wave, never climbing much above 7,000 or falling much below 1,000. Since 1982, it’s moved like a hockey stick, from roughly 3,000 to nearly 50,000 today.

Dividends made up more than 70 percent of stock returns in the 1970s, per Madoff, and have never topped 17 percent since. The gains just stopped being the kind of income that gets taxed.

Madoff has a name for a statistic that gets used to shut this argument down before it starts: the statistic that saves the rich from taxes. It goes like this: the top 1 percent pay 40 percent of federal income taxes, and 40 percent of Americans pay none at all. It shows up constantly in opinion pages, and it sounds like proof the system is already plenty progressive.

Madoff says it’s doing a sleight of hand with two problems. First, most of that 40 percent of “non-payers” are still paying significant payroll taxes. The actual share of Americans paying neither income nor payroll tax is closer to 17 percent, roughly the same share of the population that’s over 70 and retired.

Second, and more importantly, “top 1 percent” in that statistic means the top 1 percent of income, not wealth. It’s populated by surgeons, bankers, and other high earners who draw a salary and get taxed hard on it. The actual ultra-wealthy, the ones living off unrealized stock gains and loans against it, often have little or no taxable income by design. They could show up in the 40 percent “non-payer” column just as easily as in the top 1 percent, depending on the year. The statistic isn’t false. It’s just answering a different question than the one it gets used to settle.

The inheritance side is just as porous. The federal estate tax, per Madoff, raised about $28 billion last year, roughly six-hundredths of one percent of federal revenue, despite a 40 percent top rate. It isn’t doing that little because the wealthy don’t have taxable estates. It’s doing that little because decades of political pressure turned it into what Madoff describes as Swiss cheese with none of the cheese left.

Farmers in this region have heard a version of this argument for decades: that estate taxes force families to sell land just to pay the IRS. The data doesn’t bear that out for the estate tax as it exists today. USDA estimates roughly 0.3 percent of farm estates owed federal estate tax in 2024, thanks to a nearly $14 million per-person exemption and special provisions for working farmland.

But taxing unrealized gains at transfer, the fix this piece argues for, is a different mechanism, and it would need the same protection every serious version of that proposal has included: an exemption for gains up to a set threshold, and deferral for as long as a farm stays family-owned and operated, with the tax coming due only if it’s sold outside the family. Any version of this that doesn’t protect farm continuity isn’t a serious version of it.

This reframes something I’ve argued before. In past pieces, I called for raising the marginal rate on income at the top, always with a quiet suspicion that it wouldn’t matter much, that “they” would just find the next loophole. What I didn’t understand was that 1982 wasn’t a loophole. It was a different road entirely, one that runs around the income tax system rather than through it. A higher rate doesn’t touch income nobody is declaring in the first place.

Where the money went

Since 1979, net productivity in the U.S. has grown somewhere between two and a half and three and a half times faster than typical worker pay, depending on which Economic Policy Institute measure you use. If hourly pay had simply kept pace with the output workers were producing, EPI estimates the typical worker would be earning somewhere in the neighborhood of $9 to $16 more per hour today.

That gap didn’t vanish. It went to corporate profits and to shareholders, who collected roughly $27 trillion in dividends between 1979 and 2020.

It’s important to note that there are other interpretations. Some analysts argue the EPI comparison is distorted by how each metric is adjusted for inflation, and that the “great decoupling” narrative overstates the gap once you compare wages and productivity on the same terms. That critique deserves consideration. But even the critics aren’t arguing that wages outpaced wealth accumulation at the top. Nobody credible is making that case, because the wealth data doesn’t allow for it.

Federal Reserve data on household net worth is unambiguous on this point in a way the wage debate isn’t. The top 0.1 percent of Americans now hold roughly 14 percent of the nation’s wealth, up from about 8.7 percent in 1989. The bottom half of American households, 66 million of them, hold about 2.5 percent of it. The top 1 percent alone added roughly $4 trillion in wealth in a single recent year.

This is not a story of broad-based billionaire creation. It’s a story of wealth becoming more concentrated at the very top of a very narrow pyramid, while the base of that pyramid got wider and poorer.

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And the food stamps?

Something to think about. SNAP participation in 1974, the first year the program covered the whole country, was 12.9 million people. Today it’s around 41 to 42 million. Some of that growth reflects population growth and expanded eligibility. But 45 years of the exact policy mix the commenter wants, lower taxes on the wealthy, a weaker safety net, less labor power, did not shrink the population that needs help buying food. It grew it by more than three times over, even as the wealth of the top 0.1 percent grew by nearly six times over the same broader window.

It’s important to note: SNAP enrollment has dropped by about 5 million people since mid-2025, but that decline is tied directly to new work requirements and administrative changes in last year’s reconciliation law, not to people suddenly needing less help. Tightening eligibility reduces the count, not the need. Those are different things, and it matters which one you’re measuring.

The savings math doesn’t work

Even granting the commenter’s stated goal, save taxpayers money by shrinking the benefit rolls, the numbers don’t back up the strategy. The average SNAP benefit is $187.94 per person per month, according to USDA. Total federal SNAP spending in FY 2025 was $101.7 billion, spread across 42.1 million people. That’s real money. But it’s small next to the costs that push households onto SNAP in the first place.

Childcare now averages $13,184 a year per child nationally, according to Child Care Aware of America, more than $1,000 a month. Employer-sponsored family health coverage averaged $26,993 in 2025, with workers covering $6,850 of that out of pocket themselves, according to KFF’s annual employer benefits survey. A family that needs a nursing home for an aging parent is looking at a median cost of $114,975 a year for a semi-private room, per the CareScout/Genworth cost of care survey. None of that includes what a four-year public college degree costs today.

Cutting a household off SNAP saves the federal government a few thousand dollars a year, at most. It does nothing to the four- and five-figure costs sitting on the other side of that household’s ledger, the ones forcing the tradeoffs between groceries and daycare, or between a specialist visit and the electric bill.

I’ve made a version of this argument before under what I call the Hidden Ledger: once you count the privatized healthcare, childcare, and eldercare costs that other wealthy countries fold into taxes, the real household burden in the U.S. rivals, or exceeds, what households pay in higher-tax nations. We just hide the bill in a different column.

If the actual goal is fewer households needing SNAP, the lever that moves that number is the size of those hidden bills, not the size of the benefit. Lower the cost of childcare, healthcare, eldercare, and education, or raise wages enough to absorb them, and the SNAP rolls shrink because the need shrinks. Cut the benefit and leave the underlying costs untouched, and you haven’t solved anything. You’ve moved the shortfall from a federal ledger to a kitchen table, where it doesn’t disappear. It compounds.

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We’ve been here before

The late 1800s produced the same shape: enormous fortunes concentrated in a small number of hands, and a middle class squeezed by wages that didn’t track the growth those fortunes were built on. That imbalance didn’t resolve itself. It ended with trust-busting, labor law, and progressive taxation, because the alternative eventually became politically unsustainable. We aren’t required to relearn that the hard way a second time.

What would move both numbers

Once you strip out the tribal signaling, I think most people across the political spectrum can get behind the goal of more billionaires and fewer people on food assistance. The historical record points toward a different mechanism than the one usually offered.

Tax the income that’s accumulating at the top, not just the income being declared. That means closing the loop Madoff describes: taxing unrealized capital gains when stock is transferred by gift or at death, so growth in wealth can’t pass from one generation to the next without ever touching the tax system. It means ending the carried interest preference, so a dollar earned managing other people’s money is taxed the same as a dollar earned driving for Uber.

And it means treating inheritance above a real, generous exemption as income like any other, rather than as a category the tax code pretends doesn’t exist. Done right, this includes the same protection every serious version of it has including an exemption before any tax applies, and deferral for family farms and businesses if they stay family-owned and operated. None of that requires reinstating a 90 percent bracket. It requires taxing wealth where it’s building, instead of taxing salaries because they’re the only thing left that’s easy to tax.

At the same time, let ordinary pay track ordinary productivity again. That means real labor bargaining power. It means a wage floor that isn’t allowed to erode against inflation for a decade at a time. And it means tax and regulatory policy that doesn’t quietly subsidize replacing workers with capital. When wages track productivity, fewer working households need SNAP to cover a grocery bill, which is a safety-net reduction achieved by raising the floor rather than by tightening eligibility on people already standing on it.

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But wages are only half the fix. As the savings math above shows, the bigger lever is the cost side, childcare, healthcare, eldercare, education, not the benefit itself. Lower those costs, or fund them the way most peer countries do, and the population that needs food assistance shrinks from the demand side, not because the door got tighter on the way out.

That three-part combination, taxing wealth where it accumulates instead of just salaries, wages that track productivity, and lower costs for the things that strain a household budget, is the one the postwar data and the postwar record bear out.

The version we’ve run since 1981 produced the opposite of what the commenter says he wants. More billionaires, yes. But also, more people who need help buying food, not fewer, and a middle class that has been quietly hollowed out to make room for both.

More billionaires and fewer food stampers. I want that too. It just doesn’t come from where he thinks it does. Forty-five years of the old road got us here. It might be worth trying the other one.

Smart Ruminations is 100% subscriber-supported. No advertisers. No institutional funding. No donor class to answer to. Only you.

For four+ years I’ve written about the gap between the America we were promised and the one being built around us. If it’s the kind of analysis you want to exist in the world: factual, non-tribal, willing to follow an argument wherever the evidence leads regardless of whose politics it complicates, I’d be grateful for your support.

Paid subscriptions are just $5 a month. Every dollar goes directly toward the research and writing that makes pieces like this one possible. I mean it when I say that your support means the world to me. It’s what allows me to keep doing this work independently, on my own terms, accountable only to the readers who make it all worth while.

For a limited time, new paid subscribers receive 10% off.

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Resources & Further Reading

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. “Distributional Financial Accounts.” Federal Reserve, federalreserve.gov/releases/efa/efa-distributional-financial-accounts.htm.

CareScout. “Cost of Care Survey 2025.” CareScout, Genworth Financial, 2025, carescout.com/cost-of-care.

Child Care Aware of America. “Child Care Prices Rival Major Household Expenses; Supply Fails to Keep Pace with Demand.” Child Care Aware of America, 14 May 2026, info.childcareaware.org/media/child-care-prices-rival-major-household-expenses.

Claxton, Gary, et al. “2025 Employer Health Benefits Survey.” KFF, 22 Oct. 2025, kff.org/health-costs/2025-employer-health-benefits-survey.

Economic Policy Institute. “The Productivity–Pay Gap.” EPI, epi.org/productivity-pay-gap.

Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture. “Federal Estate Taxes.” USDA, ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/federal-tax-issues/federal-estate-taxes.

Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture. “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP): Key Statistics and Research.” USDA, ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/supplemental-nutrition-assistance-program-snap/key-statistics-and-research.

Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture. “The Effect on Family Farms of Changing Capital Gains Taxation at Death.” USDA, Sept. 2021, ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/federal-tax-issues.

Madoff, Ray D. The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy. University of Chicago Press, 2025, press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo256019296.html. Order your copy today from The University of Chicago Press.

Pew Research Center. “What the Data Says About Food Stamps in the U.S.” Pew Research Center, 14 Nov. 2025, pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/11/14/what-the-data-says-about-food-stamps-in-the-us.

Richardson, Heather Cox, host. “Ray Madoff | American Conversations.” YouTube, uploaded by Heather Cox Richardson, 8 Sept. 2026, youtube.com/live/QqRyG8nzmCs.

Tax Foundation. “Taxes on the Rich Were Not Much Higher in the 1950s.” Tax Foundation, taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/taxes-on-the-rich-1950s-not-high.

• Trump has nominated Heidi Overton, an outspoken opponent of medication abortion, to run the FDA.

• Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has said DOJ, HHS, the FDA, and the White House are working together to make Dobbs "permanent in every single state," using a 153-year-old mail law.

• Mifepristone accounts for 63% of US abortions, and the two companies that make nearly all of it depend entirely on the mail, not just to reach patients directly, but to supply pharmacies, hospitals, and providers in every state, including the ones where abortion is legal. 94% of mifepristone prescriptions written for reasons other than abortion were for miscarriage management.

• A court-ordered FDA report is due October 7, about six weeks out, and Overton likely won't get a Senate confirmation hearing before the midterms. That's the window.

• Call your senators and tell them why you oppose her confirmation.

The full story:

In May, I wrote about a court case most people had never heard of: Louisiana v. FDA, a lawsuit trying to cut off mail access to the abortion pill mifepristone nationwide. That piece ended on a cliffhanger, watching a Supreme Court stay about to expire, not knowing which way it would break.

Here’s the update: the stay held. The Court blocked the restriction, and mail access to mifepristone has continued since, on a temporary, litigation-contingent basis. But everything that’s happened in the three months since has been building the same outcome from a different direction, and this time it has a name: Heidi Overton.

This is a nationwide abortion ban. Not a metaphorical one. Not a slippery-slope warning. An actual, mail-based, federally enforced restriction to the legal right to an abortion that would apply in every state.

To be clear about the scale of what’s actually at stake: mifepristone, the drug at the center of this fight, isn’t a niche option. It’s how most abortions in this country happen. Medication abortion accounted for 63% of all clinician-provided abortions in the US in 2023, per the Guttmacher Institute, the most recent year with confirmed data, up from 53% in 2020 and just 39% in 2017.

That share is almost certainly higher now, and it likely undercounts the real number, since it doesn’t include the self-managed abortions people increasingly turn to when formal access is restricted. Restricting mifepristone by mail isn’t a narrow drug policy. It’s a restriction on the method most people already use.

“These decisions need to be left to the states.” That was the justification offered when Dobbs overturned Roe: not a national ban, just a return of authority to the states, to be decided state by state. And that’s what happened. States wrote their own laws. Some banned abortion outright. Some protected it. That was the deal.

What’s happening now isn’t honoring that deal. It’s federal agencies moving to override the very state-by-state decisions Dobbs was supposed to guarantee, including in states that chose to protect abortion access.

Let’s start there.

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“Left to the states” is not what’s happening

Dobbs v. Jackson returned the legislative authority to regulate abortion to the states. That is un-disputed. States can pass laws. States can ban abortion outright, as more than a dozen have. States can protect it, as others have.

What Dobbs did not do, could not do, was never designed to do, is touch federal drug regulation or federal criminal enforcement. The FDA’s authority to approve, label, and restrict a medication is federal. The Department of Justice’s authority to decide what counts as illegal mail is federal.

Neither of those has ever belonged to the states, before or after Dobbs. A state legislature cannot vote to override an FDA label change. A governor cannot veto a Justice Department prosecution theory. There is no ballot measure that reaches either one.

When the administration’s own officials describe using exactly those two levers, FDA regulation and DOJ enforcement, to restrict access to abortion medication in every state, “left to the states” isn’t just spin. It’s a factual impossibility. The states have no jurisdiction over the mechanism being used against them.

That’s not just my interpretation. It’s what the acting Attorney General of the United States said, out loud, on a call he didn’t know would become public.

What Todd Blanche actually said

On July 30, then acting Attorney General Todd Blanche spoke to faith leaders on a call organized by the White House Faith Office, billed as off the record, with journalists on the line told to disconnect. The Christian-right group Intercessors for America posted the audio to YouTube anyway. It was quickly taken down. Politico had already heard it.

One line from the recording stands out: “Rest assured that we’re working, you know, hand in hand with HHS and the FDA and the White House and President Trump’s team to get permanent solutions so that the Dobbs decision becomes permanent in every single state.”

Blanche added, for anyone who missed the point: “We don’t have complete victory yet, but we will have victory, and victory will be soon, and it will be permanent.”

When Politico pressed the Justice Department on what “permanent in every state” meant, DOJ responded that the comments should be read narrowly: “with respect to mail order abortion drugs, not a broader expansion of federal control over states.”

But Blanche didn’t say “mail order abortion drugs.” He said Dobbs, made permanent, in every state, and he named four federal entities doing it together: the Department of Justice, Health and Human Services, the FDA, and the White House.

This is about federally controlling whether abortion medication can reach you by mail, regardless of where you live. Four agencies, and each one covers ground the others can’t.

DOJ holds the legal weapon: a 153-year-old law called the Comstock Act, which prohibits mailing anything “designed... for producing abortion.” It’s been dormant for decades because mainstream legal interpretation says it only applies where abortion is actually unlawful, and a drug with lawful uses regardless of the recipient’s state doesn’t meet that bar.

But a broader, literal reading, which anti-abortion legal strategists have been building toward since Dobbs, would treat the mailing itself as the violation, everywhere, regardless of intent or destination. If DOJ adopts that reading, mailing mifepristone becomes a federal crime in Massachusetts exactly as much as in Mississippi.

HHS is the parent agency; the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, where Overton has worked since January 2025, is the coordinating function.

The FDA is the piece that makes the other three matter. DOJ’s legal theory only becomes an enforceable, practical restriction if the FDA cooperates on the regulatory side, reversing or restricting the 2021/2023 rules that currently allow mifepristone to be prescribed by telehealth and mailed to patients. Without an FDA willing to revisit those rules, Blanche’s “hand in hand” coordination has no lever to pull.

The FDA has been without a permanent, Senate-confirmed commissioner since May, when Dr. Marty Makary resigned amid pressure from anti-abortion groups who believed he was slow-walking exactly this fight.

Reproductive Freedom for All president Mini Timmaraju put it plainly in a recent interview: Makary had reportedly told colleagues, on the record, that the administration wasn’t going to touch mifepristone until after the midterms. That was the baseline. Even inside an administration sympathetic to restricting the drug, the political calculation was wait.

On August 19, Trump nominated Heidi Overton to fill that vacancy.

This isn’t only about what arrives in your mailbox

The tele-health angle, a doctor prescribing remotely and the pills arriving by mail, is the version of this fight that gets the most attention. It’s also not the whole threat.

The Comstock Act’s language doesn’t distinguish between mailing a pill to a patient and mailing it to a pharmacy, hospital, or physician. Anti-abortion legal advocates have argued in federal court that the statute prohibits both: not just mailing mifepristone directly to patients, but the general distribution of the medication from manufacturers to physicians, hospitals, and pharmacies. Nearly all of that distribution, in ordinary times, also depends on interstate shipping.

This isn’t a hypothetical legal theory sitting in a law review article. After the FDA’s 2023 rule change let certified pharmacies dispense mifepristone, and Walgreens and CVS announced they’d carry it, attorneys general from 20 states sent letters to those chains’ executives arguing that federal law, through the Comstock Act, already criminalizes the mailing of medication abortion. More than 20 state attorneys general have separately threatened litigation against the same two chains over their continued distribution of the drug.

That’s not patient mail-order. That’s a state government going after a national pharmacy chain’s supply chain.

What’s currently protecting that entire pipeline, patient-facing and business-to-business alike, is a single 2022 Justice Department legal opinion, which found that mailing mifepristone and misoprostol doesn’t violate the Comstock Act, since the FDA has found the drugs safe and effective and there are lawful ways recipients in every state could use them. That opinion is the one Blanche’s DOJ is reportedly reviewing right now.

Here’s the detail that makes that opinion’s logic so important, and so fragile: one of the “lawful ways” it relies on is miscarriage management. Mifepristone isn’t only used to end a pregnancy. It’s also standard-of-care treatment for people who are already losing a wanted one.

That dual use is precisely why the current legal reasoning holds. Senders can't know in advance which lawful purpose a given shipment serves, so they can't be shown to have unlawful intent, and the mailing itself stays legal. This isn't a hypothetical carve-out, either: per KFF's analysis of insurance claims data, 94% of mifepristone prescriptions written for reasons other than abortion were for miscarriage management.

But a literal, intent-free reading of the statute has no way to carve that back out. The drug doesn’t change chemically depending on why it was prescribed. If Comstock gets applied as a blanket mailing ban rather than an intent-based one, there’s no version of that ban that stops at abortion and leaves miscarriage care untouched.

Legal analysts have raised the identical concern about methotrexate, a drug that induces uterine contractions but is also standard treatment for rheumatoid arthritis, for the same reason: a broad reading doesn’t distinguish reasons, only substances.

If it’s reversed, or a court adopts the broader reading, the effect wouldn’t be limited to interrupting individual tele-health prescriptions. It could functionally choke the supply chain before the drug ever reaches a pharmacy counter or a clinic shelf, in any state, including the ones where abortion is fully legal and protected.

Danco and GenBioPro, the two companies that supply nearly all of the country’s mifepristone, run their entire national distribution through exactly this kind of interstate shipping. There is no separate, Comstock-proof channel for getting the drug from a manufacturer to a provider. It’s the same mail system, the same legal exposure, whether the package is headed to a patient’s home, a hospital pharmacy, or someone managing a miscarriage under a doctor’s care.

Who is Heidi Overton

Overton is a physician, an MD-PhD who did her surgical residency at Johns Hopkins and has spent the last year and a half as deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy. Before that, she spent three-plus years as Chief Policy Officer at the America First Policy Institute, listed among AFPI’s experts on what the organization calls “sanctity of life.”

Her record on abortion isn’t secondhand characterization. It’s her own writing, under her own name:

• After Dobbs, she called the end of Roe “a huge victory for life.”

• At AFPI, she authored an issue brief opposing the FDA’s decision to drop the in-person dispensing requirement for mifepristone, describing medication abortion as “dangerous” and “corrosive,” despite a 25-year safety record and a body of research the FDA itself has repeatedly found sufficient to loosen, not tighten, restrictions.

• She co-authored a piece with Paula White-Cain, now the White House Faith Office’s senior advisor, describing federal legislation to codify abortion rights as “radicalism” and “extremism,” and falsely claiming it would permit practices “indistinguishable from infanticide.”

• In a 2024 Newsweek op-ed, she wrote of “abortion up until the moment of birth,” a phrase that doesn’t describe how abortion actually works in this country, where more than 91% of abortions occur in the first 13 weeks.

The “dangerous” framing doesn’t hold up next to what else moves through the mail unquestioned. Sildenafil and tadalafil, the active ingredients in Viagra and Cialis, carry their own risk profiles, including cardiovascular contraindications that can be genuinely dangerous for some patients, and they flow freely through the mail via tele-health, no in-person visit required.

No court has moved to pause that. No attorney general has argued that a tele-health consultation model creates irreparable harm when the prescription ends up in a man’s medicine cabinet. The regulatory concern, it turns out, has a remarkably specific address.

She’s gone further than abortion policy specifically, too. In a recorded talk, she argued that the NIH, FDA, and CDC needed to be “reformed” because they weren’t funding research that confirmed her views, described a “coordinated effort from the top” shaping medical research, and told her movement to “infiltrate” research institutions. That should worry people regardless of where they land on abortion, since it’s a direct answer to whether the agency she’d run answers to evidence or to ideology.

Anti-abortion groups understand exactly what they’re getting. John Mize, CEO of Americans United for Life, told Fox News he’s had five or six conversations with Overton and expects her to “expose [mifepristone] for the damage it causes women.”

Live Action’s Lila Rose was more direct: “Dr. Overton should pull the deadly abortion pill from the market. Step one: end mail-order abortions that kill babies even in pro-life states.” Note that phrase, even in pro-life states. The states where abortion is already banned aren’t the target audience for that sentence. The target is everywhere else.

For balance: Overton isn’t a consensus pick even within Trump’s own coalition. She’s drawn skepticism from the MAHA wing over her role in the administration’s childhood vaccine schedule changes, and Sen. Bill Cassidy, chair of the committee that will process her nomination, has publicly cited “strong concerns” on that front.

I share that concern about her vaccine science, but it’s not the same objection I’m raising here. Cassidy isn’t raising the abortion question at all, and his own committee recently published a report titled “Chairman Cassidy Exposes Lack of Action by Chemical Abortion Drug Companies Endangering Mothers.”

Don’t mistake his hesitation for reproductive-rights ally-ship. It isn’t.

The date that makes this urgent: October 7

This is why it’s important to act on this now.

Louisiana sued the FDA in October 2025, seeking to reinstate the pre-2021 restrictions on mifepristone: in-person dispensing, no mail, no tele-health. The FDA asked the court to pause that case while it conducted a “review” of the drug’s safety. The court agreed, on one condition: the FDA has to file a status report on that review’s progress no later than October 7, 2026.

That review is not a new clinical trial. It’s a retrospective analysis of existing insurance-claims data, hundreds of thousands of cases, not new lab research. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ordered it, not any new safety signal. And reporting from multiple outlets, including Bloomberg’s sourcing on Makary’s tenure, indicates the pace only accelerated once acting Commissioner Kyle Diamantas, who has been in regular contact with anti-abortion movement leaders, took over in May.

Whoever holds the FDA commissioner’s chair on October 7 will be the one interpreting that report, and using it to decide what comes next. Given the confirmation calendar, that’s very likely to still be an acting commissioner, not Overton, but every step the administration takes to install a commissioner sympathetic to restriction, before or immediately after that date, changes what “next” means.

Six weeks is the actual runway on this fight.

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What the polling actually shows, and the case to make when you call

It would be easy to just cite numbers that support what I already believe. But it’s important to look at all of it.

On the broad question, should abortion be legal, the country is genuinely, closely divided. The exact number depends heavily on how the question is asked. Gallup’s May 2026 poll found Americans split almost exactly down the middle: 48% say abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances, 49% say illegal or legal only in a few.

Pew’s January 2026 survey, using different wording, found a wider gap toward legal access, 60% to 38%. Two reputable pollsters, similar timeframes, showing a 12-point difference. What’s important to look at is the gap. “Public opinion on abortion” isn’t one clean number, and anyone quoting a single topline figure, on either side, is doing you a disservice.

But that’s not the question this piece is actually about. The question this piece is about is a nationwide ban, specifically, using federal mail law and FDA regulation to override state law, including in states where abortion is legal. And on that question, the polling isn’t close.

KFF’s July 2026 tracking poll found 65% of the public opposes a nationwide mifepristone ban outright, and 64% oppose criminalizing providers who mail the pills into states with bans. The UMass Amherst/League of Women Voters national poll found 65% oppose a national abortion ban generally, with 54% strongly opposed.

Even among self-identified Republicans, KFF found the electorate split roughly down the middle on a nationwide mifepristone ban specifically: 52% support, 48% oppose. That’s not the kind of mandate that normally justifies the political risk of forcing this fight.

Then there’s the polling specific to this exact moment, from Reproductive Freedom for All’s own battleground research, conducted with Public Policy Polling across six competitive House districts in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Fifty-three percent of voters in those districts, and nearly 60% of independents, say Blanche’s comments about making Dobbs “permanent in every state” make them less likely to vote Republican this November. Fifty percent strongly oppose the pledge outright. And among independents specifically, opposition hits 64%.

Sixty-four percent. In swing districts, among swing voters, in a midterm year.

That’s the number to lead with if the person on the other end of the phone is a Republican senator’s staffer, because it preempts the deflection before it starts. To be honest, there’s a real, GOP-sourced data point on the other side of this too. A February 2026 poll from Cygnal, a Republican firm working with Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, found nearly a third of Republican primary voters said they’d be less enthusiastic about voting in the midterms if the party is seen as abandoning the pro-life fight. That’s real, and a staffer may bring it up.

Here’s the answer, if they do: that’s a primary-turnout risk, measured among the narrowest, most committed slice of the party’s base. Set it against a general-election risk that shows up consistently, across multiple independent pollsters, among the broader, more decisive electorate, including a majority of Republicans themselves on the specific question of a nationwide ban.

Forcing this fight in the six weeks before a midterm doesn’t resolve that tension. It just picks which risk the senator is taking on, in public, on the record, right before people vote.

Why now, specifically, and who’s already hedging

Axios reported on August 27 that the Senate HELP Committee, which will handle Overton’s confirmation, doesn’t have her paperwork yet. She likely won’t get a confirmation hearing before November. That’s not an accident of scheduling. It’s the calculation every senator involved is making in real time.

Sen. Patty Murray of Washington has already said she’ll vote no. Sen. Bill Cassidy, the committee chair and, notably, the vote that got Todd Blanche confirmed as Attorney General, has raised concerns about Overton but hasn’t said how he’ll vote. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, arguably the most vulnerable Republican incumbent on the ballot this cycle, has offered nothing beyond her standard practice of waiting for hearings, itself a tell. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who like Collins brands herself pro-choice but voted to confirm both Brett Kavanaugh and Todd Blanche, hasn’t said anything at all. In Alaska, Sen. Dan Sullivan is facing a race where a tele-health mifepristone ban would be deeply unpopular in a rural state where in-person access was never guaranteed to begin with.

Every one of those senators is currently deciding, privately, whether public pressure on this nomination is worth responding to before a hearing exists to force the question. That’s exactly the window where a phone call or an email matters most, not after the calendar is set, but while it’s still being decided whether to set it.

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What Reproductive Freedom for All is doing about it right now

I learned about the depth of this fight through a conversation between journalist Katie Phang and Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All (RFFA), on Phang’s independent channel.

The segment is worth watching in full, but the line that stuck with me was Timmaraju’s plain description of the mechanism: “This is how we backdoor a national ban on abortion... you’re getting the FDA with a loyalist installed by Trump to say that [mifepristone] is too dangerous to use. And then you partner with an aggressive attorney general... and then you couple it with a newly confirmed [Attorney General] who has said he will consider misusing the Comstock Act to ban [mifepristone] by mail.” She called it the “one-two punch,” except by now it’s three moving parts, not two.

RFFA isn’t just talking about this. They commissioned the district-level polling cited above, they’ve launched a digital ad campaign in Michigan’s 7th and 10th districts specifically targeting Blanche’s record, and they’re organizing on the ground in Maine around the Collins race. Their $23.5 million “My Body. My Ballot.” campaign is funding exactly this kind of battleground work through the midterms.

They also have a live, specific action against this nomination: “Oppose Heidi Overton,” at reproductivefreedomforall.org. You can find it under their Take Action page, or text REPRO to 59791 to get connected with their organizing team directly.

It’s important to note what RFFA is. It’s an advocacy and electoral organization, formerly NARAL Pro-Choice America, not a neutral research body. Their language, “anti-abortion extremist,” “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” is their language, and I’ve tried to keep it clearly theirs throughout this piece rather than adopting it as my own. But the organizing infrastructure they’ve built is real, current, and specific to this exact fight. If you’re looking for somewhere concrete to put your attention in the next six weeks, they’re one of the places actually doing the work.

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What this actually is

None of this required a single new law. That’s what makes it work: a safety review nobody asked for, a 153-year-old mail statute nobody remembers, an agency nominee whose Senate hearing conveniently won’t happen until after the votes that might have made someone answer for her. Each piece, alone, looks survivable. A study. A legal opinion. One nominee among hundreds.

Add them together, Blanche’s own words, the October deadline, Overton’s record, the blueprint in Project 2025 that Roger Severino and Gene Hamilton wrote years before any of this reached a headline, and what you get is not incremental. It’s the thing itself, assembled in parts too small individually to look like what it actually is.

I’ve made this argument before, about a different right. The most recent version of the SAVE Act doesn’t ban mail-in voting outright either. It requires the Postal Service to screen ballots against a federal citizenship database before they count, using a federal mail system as the checkpoint for a process the Constitution leaves to the states. Different issue, same mechanism: don’t touch the underlying right directly, control what happens to it in the mail instead.

Six weeks. Call your senators. Ask them to vote against confirmation of Heidi Overton. And tell them why.

I wrote about the first round of this fight back in May, when the Fifth Circuit briefly cut off mail access to mifepristone nationwide before the Supreme Court restored it, including the double standard in how differently we regulate men’s and women’s telehealth medications. If you want the fuller history, it’s here: “Control the Bullets.”

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References & Further Reading

Blanche, Todd. Remarks on private call with faith leaders. Intercessors for America, Politico, 30 July 2026. https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/03/blanche-pledged-abortion-pill-crackdown-private-call-01023304

“The Comstock Act: Implications for Abortion Care Nationwide.” KFF, 20 May 2026, www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/the-comstock-act-implications-for-abortion-care-nationwide.

“Medication Abortion Accounted for 63% of All US Abortions in 2023, an Increase from 53% in 2020.” Guttmacher Institute, 19 Mar. 2024, www.guttmacher.org/2024/03/medication-abortion-accounted-63-all-us-abortions-2023-increase-53-2020.

“Application of the Comstock Act to the Mailing of Prescription Drugs That Can Be Used for Abortions.” U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel, 3 Jan. 2023, www.justice.gov/d9/opinions/attachments/2023/01/03/2022-12-23_-_comstock_act_1.pdf.

Klibanoff, Eleanor. “Comstock Act Revived in FDA Abortion Drug Case.” The Texas Tribune, 20 Mar. 2023, www.texastribune.org/2023/03/20/texas-fda-abortion-pill-comstock-act.

“What Does the Comstock Act, a Law from the 1870s, Have to Do with Abortion Pills?” PBS News, 8 Apr. 2023, www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-does-comstock-act-a-law-from-the-1870s-have-to-do-with-abortion-pills.

Reproductive Freedom for All. “Oppose Heidi Overton.” Reproductive Freedom for All, reproductivefreedomforall.org.

In the course of about a week, two vague social media posts from the administration whipsawed whole segments of Americans. The first said the U.S. would buy 300,000 metric tons of foreign beef and sell it 25% below market price. The second, after the backlash the first triggered, promised to make good with ranchers by cutting out the middleman and letting them sell directly to their fellow Americans. Neither was really a policy decision. Both were soundbites meant to rally a group before the midterms.

Before Friday’s announcement, it’s important to remember what farmers and ranchers were already absorbing. USAID’s dismantlement cut off a buyer that had purchased roughly $2 billion a year in American commodities for food aid. A $20 billion currency swap line to Argentina came alongside Argentina undercutting American soybean farmers in China, their biggest export market, drawing criticism from farm-state Republicans and Democrats alike. The largest SNAP cuts in the program’s history are already showing up as declining grocery sales nationally, hitting small, independent rural grocers hardest. And input costs are rising, from tariff whiplash on Canadian fertilizer to a global fertilizer spike tied to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Each of these deserves its own deep dive, and each will get one in a future piece. For now, they’re the backdrop against which Friday’s announcement has to be read.

What Trump actually posted, and why it’s the right diagnosis with no real prescription

On Friday, Aug. 28, 2026, Trump posted on Truth Social that he was “authorizing legal documents to be drawn” to give farmers and ranchers “the right to PROCESS THEIR OWN FOOD,” an effort to break the “nasty Monopoly” of the “essentially 4” major meat processors, whose ownership he noted is “based outside of the U.S.”

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said she’d roll out new initiatives the following Monday. They included rescinding “outdated guidance,” waiving red tape, and expanding ranchers’ ability to sell across state lines. The announcement followed a Wednesday interview in which Trump, responding to a rancher’s complaint that “the inspections are insane,” floated eliminating processing regulations.

Full admission: I grew up primarily a city girl. My husband grew up raising beef (not as a commercial operation). I moved to the rural side of our state as an adult, and that experience gave me a bit more perspective on my rural neighbors and on the incompleteness in Trump’s post. Let’s tease that out.

To be fair, Trump isn’t wrong about the underlying problem. Four processors really do control the large majority of U.S. beef processing, a level the DOJ classifies as “highly concentrated,” its highest category. JBS, the largest, is genuinely Brazilian-owned (more about that later). Both parties have targeted this consolidation before without much success. Biden made similar promises and hit the same wall.

Trump’s fix boils down to a single promise: “allow Farmers and Ranchers to be given the right to PROCESS THEIR OWN FOOD.” It’s a worthy promise, but it sidesteps the reality that ranchers can already legally process and sell direct, through what’s called the custom-exempt slaughter pathway.

Here’s how it works, and if you already buy a beef or a half beef every year from someone you know, feel free to step out for a cup of coffee. You’ve earned it.

Farmers raise cattle to slaughter weight, typically 18 to 24 months old (older than a commodity calf, which is usually sold off to a feedlot around 6 to 10 months, since a direct-sale rancher finishes the animal themselves (and incurs the cost) rather than handing that job off), then sell the live animal directly to a consumer, whole or as a fractional share.

A finished steer weighs 1,200 to 1,300 pounds live. The consumer, now the legal owner, arranges to have it slaughtered and processed at a state-licensed custom-exempt facility. Custom-exempt processing skips USDA inspection because the meat is for the owner's private use, not resale, which is why the packages are stamped "NOT FOR SALE."

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Let me be clear, “ownership” here possibly doesn’t mean what you think it does. No one drives a live steer home in a sedan (although I did do that with a goat but again, that’s another story).

A mobile kill unit goes to the ranch, harvests the animal on site, and transports it to a small processor. The consumer’s involvement, beyond paperwork and writing the check, is picking up wrapped meat weeks later.

The pricing works differently than a grocery store. You don’t pay by the pound you take home. You pay by hanging weight, the carcass weight after slaughter, roughly 60 to 62% of the live animal’s weight, plus a separate processing fee of $0.70 to $1.20 per pound, laid out through a cut sheet that still confounds this city girl. There’s also shrinkage to consider. After aging, roughly 20% of the hanging weight is lost to dehydration, trimmed bone, and fat. So, a buyer thinking they’re paying $5 a pound is often really paying closer to $6 or $7.

Here’s what that looks like in practice, from a real breakdown I have for beef my family is buying this fall. A whole beef: $500 deposit, roughly $3,600 to $4,000 for the animal, a $150 harvest fee, and cut-and-wrap at about $1.25 per pound on a 750-pound hanging weight, another $938. Total: about $5,000.

This is the system the announcement gestures at breaking open. But it already exists, under a legal logic (ownership before slaughter, no resale) that “the right to process their own food” doesn’t change. The real barrier was never legal permission; it’s the shortage of USDA/state-inspected processing capacity, declining nationally for over 40 years. And if “cutting red tape” means stripping inspection requirements instead, that raises a separate question. Does loosening inspection at small processors put the food supply at greater risk, in exchange for lower compliance costs? That’s the opposite kind of risk from the “monopoly” problem the announcement claims to solve.

The announcement also does nothing about two things squeezing ranchers right now. Consumers, already squeezed by inflation and SNAP cuts, are being offered import-driven 25%-cheaper ground beef under the deal covered above, so a rancher’s direct-sale price has to compete with that. And the big processors aren’t going anywhere. Even a genuine surge in small-scale processing wouldn’t touch the Big Four’s roughly 85% share of total volume.

Nor does it grapple with why the rural direct-sale model doesn’t scale to where most Americans live. A whole or half animal looks price-competitive only because premium cuts subsidize the low-value trim inside a blended price; buy all-ground, and that subsidy disappears.

Storage is a hidden cost too. Even an eighth of a beef is more meat than most freezers hold, and a family on SNAP has no way to save toward a lump-sum purchase, since SNAP pays out monthly. Distance breaks the model outright for most of the country. An hour to a processor, like my own family’s, is a rural reality. For someone in a major city, that trip could be eight hours or simply not exist. And even a willing buyer has no reliable way to find a rancher selling beef, just word of mouth, a friend-of-a-friend, a 4-H auction, a card on a bulletin board.

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On top of that, this was never a uniform national system. States regulate custom-exempt slaughter differently, and the meat legally cannot cross state lines. So “letting ranchers process their own food” was never going to be a single national fix, even on paper. It’s fifty versions of a fundamentally local system.

There’s little reason to think this announcement was meant to solve urban affordability in the first place. Trump has repeatedly, publicly dismissed the entire concept of an affordability crisis, calling it a “hoax” and “a con job by the Democrats” at a December 2025 cabinet meeting, and telling reporters at the G7 in June 2026 that affordability is “a fake word,” even as inflation hit a three-year high that same week. A president actively denying the problem exists is not a president trying to solve it with a meat-processing announcement.

Read that way, the post looks much less like consumer-price policy and much more like a direct appeal to ranchers themselves, an attempt to win back a base he’d angered days earlier with the Argentina-linked import deal.

But the base-repair math doesn’t fully work either. A rancher’s household still buys groceries. A rural feed-store owner, a schoolteacher, a retiree on fixed income, they’re all beef buyers who’d see none of the benefit this implies, for the same reasons above. On the evidence here, this doesn’t work for almost anyone, rural or urban.

None of this is abstract to the people living it.

Farmers and ranchers are running a business, and the money matters, the same as it would for anyone else. But it's also a rancher up at 2 a.m. in February, arm-deep in a cold barn, willing a calf into the world. It's standing at the edge of a field after a hailstorm or a hundred-year drought, watching a season's income lying flattened in the dirt, and getting up the next morning anyway, because the animals still need feeding.

These are the people this administration’s policies keep landing on. They are the ones who lost a buyer when USAID was dismantled, who watched a competitor get bailed out days after undercutting them in their biggest market, who are paying more for fertilizer because of a trade war and a war on the other side of the world, and who were just offered a “fix” for the processor monopoly that, on close inspection, fixes very little.

It’s worth really thinking about that last one, because it points at something bigger than one Truth Social post. Trump named the problem correctly. There are four processors which is a “very non competitive number.” He’s far from the first to say so.

Politicians on both sides of the aisle, Biden included, have said essentially the same thing for years. What none of them have ever said is how to actually break that concentration up. No proposal to force divestiture. No serious antitrust action against the Big Four themselves. Just a promise to make it easier for ranchers to opt out of a system most of them can’t realistically opt out of anyway.

Taken together, the one thing actually offered here does nothing to touch the conglomerate ownership at the root of the problem. And depending on how “cutting red tape” gets defined once Rollins’ rollout arrives, it carries a real chance of making the food supply less safe, not more. A solution that doesn’t solve the stated problem, paired with a real risk of creating a new one.

It’s fair to ask why the real fix never gets named, and campaign finance is at least part of the honest answer. The meat industry spends real money to keep the status quo comfortable, on both parties. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association’s PAC raised over $1.2 million in the 2023-2024 cycle. JBS USA, the processor Trump named directly, gave $88,000 to federal candidates that cycle. Across the industry, spending topped $10 million in 2023.

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And it doesn’t sort by party. A California Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee’s livestock subcommittee has taken in more meat-industry money than almost anyone in Congress. The Senate Agriculture Committee’s Democratic leader has ties to Cargill; its Republican chair has ties to Tyson and has resisted his own party’s efforts to rein in packer power.

This isn’t a story about one party protecting the Big Four. It’s an industry comfortable enough, in both parties, that even politicians who correctly diagnose the monopoly rarely propose anything that would actually break it.

None of that means a real fix doesn’t exist. It means it rarely gets said out loud. If the actual problem is corporate concentration, not a lack of permission, the more obvious answer isn’t asking individual ranchers to each become their own processor and retailer.

Let’s be honest, I have never met a farmer or a rancher whose dream in life is to run a grocery store.

It’s building the thing that would let them compete at scale together. Farmer-owned, farmer-run processing cooperatives, with real government support behind them.

This isn’t hypothetical. It’s been tried, and the history is worth knowing precisely because it isn’t a clean success story. U.S. Premium Beef was founded in 1996 as a closed cooperative owned by cattle producers, built to give farmers a fully integrated, producer-owned processing system. It worked. By 2003, the cooperative had built a controlling interest in National Beef Packing, one of today’s actual Big Four, proving farmer ownership at real scale was possible.

Then, in 2008, the co-op’s own members voted, with over 90% approval, to sell their stake to JBS, the same company Trump named in Friday’s post, in a deal worth $560 million. The Department of Justice raised antitrust concerns, and the deal was terminated before it closed. National Beef stayed independent for another decade, until Marfrig, a different Brazilian meat conglomerate, bought a controlling stake in 2018. The cooperative structure itself was eventually converted into an ordinary corporation.

Producer ownership, once built, proved real and also proved fragile. It worked at packer scale, but it couldn’t sustain itself against the same consolidation pressure bearing down on everyone else in the industry, not without something structurally protecting it: government support built specifically for cooperative models.

That wouldn’t even be a new idea. Sen. Grassley, quoted above, has co-sponsored legislation to reform the Packers and Stockyards Act that would bar meatpackers from owning livestock before slaughter, with an exception for producer-owned cooperatives. That bill exists, unmentioned in an announcement built entirely around breaking up this exact monopoly. Biden’s 2021 executive order separately funded $1 billion in independent meat processing grants, and Trump’s own USDA made another $60 million available for the same purpose this past July, months before Friday’s post.

The tools for a real fix already exist. What’s missing isn’t the idea. It’s the willingness to point at it directly, instead of at a permission slip most ranchers can’t actually use.

They are, by any honest accounting, part of the vast majority of Americans who do not sit anywhere near the table where these decisions get made and who are not the ones benefiting from them. The people writing the tariff policy, negotiating the currency swap lines, are overwhelmingly people who have never worked a farm a day in their life. They have never lost a calf at 3 a.m. and had to be back out in the field by six. The people setting this policy are not the people living with its consequences.

That gap, between who bears the cost and who makes the call, is the through-line of everything here. It is not a partisan indictment so much as a description of how the system currently works, and exactly why farmers and ranchers, whatever their politics, my own household included, keep ending up frustrated with policy that was supposedly made in their name.

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Resources & Further Reading

Animal of Things. “What Farmers Must Know Before Selling Meat: USDA Rules, Custom Exemptions, and Labeling.” Animal of Things, 13 Apr. 2026, animalofthings.com/can-i-sell-meat-from-my-farm/.

Beef Magazine. “Selling to Consumers: How to Find Customers and Market Your Beef.” Beef Magazine, 26 July 2023, www.beefmagazine.com/cattle-market-outlook/selling-directly-to-consumers-how-to-find-customers-and-market-your-beef.

Bloomberg News. “Trump Announces Plan to Let Farmers Process Their Own Food.” Bloomberg, 28 Aug. 2026, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-28/trump-announces-plan-to-let-farmers-process-their-own-food.

CNN Politics. “Trump Says He’ll Make It Easier for Ranchers to Process Their Own Food After Blowback Over His Beef Policies.” CNN, 28 Aug. 2026, edition.cnn.com/2026/08/28/politics/trump-beef-tariffs-farmers.

DTN/Progressive Farmer. “Trump Wants Farmers, Ranchers to Process Their Own Beef to Challenge Big Four Packers.” DTN, 28 Aug. 2026, www.dtnpf.com/agriculture/web/ag/livestock/article/2026/08/28/trump-wants-farmers-ranchers-process.

Farm Action. “What Independent Meatpackers Need Beyond Government Investment.” Farm Action, 1 Apr. 2025, farmaction.us/what-independent-meatpackers-need-beyond-government-investment/.

Farm Aid. “How Consolidation by Meatpacking Giants Is Hurting Farmers and Consumers, and What the Biden Administration Is Doing About It.” Farm Aid, 5 Nov. 2024, www.farmaid.org/issues/corporate-power/how-consolidation-by-meatpacking-giants-is-hurting-farmers-and-consumers-and-what-the-biden-administration-is-doing-about-it/.

The Fatted Calf LLC. “Custom Exempt Processing.” The Fatted Calf, 16 Oct. 2022, www.thefattedcalfllc.com/post/custom-exempt-processing.

Forbes. “Trump Dismisses Affordability Concerns Again, as Inflation Hits 3-Year High.” Forbes, 17 June 2026, www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2026/06/17/trump-says-affordability-is-fake-word-as-inflation-hits-3-year-high/.

GovFacts. “Trump Called the Affordability Crisis a ‘Hoax.’ Here’s Why That Backfired.” GovFacts, 8 June 2026, govfacts.org/money/broader-economy/monetary-fiscal-policy/trump-called-the-affordability-crisis-a-hoax-heres-why-that-backfired/.

Grassley, Chuck. “Grassley Works for Competitive Marketplace.” United States Senate, grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/grassley-works-competitive-marketplace.

GrassFed Junction. “What Is Custom Exempt Beef? Understand Legal Limits, Ownership Rules, and Buying Options.” GrassFed Junction, 23 Dec. 2025, www.grassfedjunction.com/learn/custom-exempt.

Hunt, Steven D. Testimony Before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights. 7 May 2008, www.judiciary.senate.gov/download/2008/05/07/steve-hunt-testimony-050708?download=1.

Investigate Midwest. “As USDA Updates the Packers and Stockyards Act, Meat Industry Increases Political Spending, Lobbying.” Investigate Midwest, 30 May 2024, investigatemidwest.org/2024/05/30/packers-stockyards-update-meat-industry-lobbying/.

“New Senate Agriculture Committee Leadership Has Extensive Ties to Industry Heavyweights.” Investigate Midwest, 15 Jan. 2025, investigatemidwest.org/2025/01/15/new-senate-agriculture-committee-leadership-has-extensive-ties-to-industry-heavyweights/.

Michigan State University Extension. “Selling Meat from Your Farm? Make Sure It Is Labeled Properly!” MSU Extension, canr.msu.edu/news/selling_meat_from_your_farm_make_sure_it_is_labeled_properly.

Mississippi State University Extension Service. “Direct Marketing Beef.” MSU Extension, extension.msstate.edu/publications/direct-marketing-beef.

National Agricultural Law Center. “’Custom Exempt’ Slaughter: The Exception, or the Rule?” National Agricultural Law Center, nationalaglawcenter.org/custom-exempt-slaughter-the-exception-or-the-rule/.

“Meat Processing Laws in the United States: A State Compilation.” National Agricultural Law Center, nationalaglawcenter.org/state-compilations/meatprocessing/.

“National Beef Packing Company LLC.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Beef.

New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services. Meat and Poultry Sales Fact Sheet. NH DHHS, Nov. 2021, www.dhhs.nh.gov/sites/g/files/ehbemt476/files/documents/2021-11/fp-meatpoultry-sales.pdf.

Niche Meat Processor Assistance Network. “Meat Regulations for Producers.” NMPAN, www.nichemeatprocessing.org/meat-regulations-for-producers/.

Noble Research Institute. “5 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Selling Beef Direct to Consumers.” Noble Research Institute, 23 Sept. 2024, www.noble.org/regenerative-agriculture/producer-perspectives/5-questions-to-ask-yourself-before-selling-beef-direct-to-consumers/.

OpenSecrets. “JBS USA PAC Contributions to Federal Candidates.” OpenSecrets, www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs/jbs-usa/C00394650/candidate-recipients/2024.

---. “PAC Profile: National Cattlemen’s Beef Assn.” OpenSecrets, www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs/national-cattlemen-s-beef-assn/C00028787/summary/2024.

Oregon State University Extension Service. “Frequently Asked Questions: Using Custom-Exempt Slaughter and Processing Facilities in Oregon for Beef, Pork, Lamb, & Goat.” OSU Extension, extension.oregonstate.edu/business-economics/management/frequently-asked-questions-using-custom-exempt-slaughter-processing.

PBS NewsHour. “Trump Accuses Foreign Owned Meat Packers of Inflating U.S. Beef Prices.” PBS, www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-accuses-foreign-owned-meat-packers-of-inflating-u-s-beef-prices.

Reuters. “Trump Vows Legal Order to Break Up Food Processing ‘Nasty Monopoly.’” Yahoo Finance, 28 Aug. 2026, finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/trump-vows-legal-order-break-133607909.html.

Scholten, Hillary. “Lowering Costs Caucus Leaders Push Back on President Trump’s ‘Affordability Hoax’ Comment.” Office of Rep. Hillary Scholten, 5 Dec. 2025, scholten.house.gov/media/press-releases/lowering-costs-caucus-leaders-push-back-president-trumps-affordability-hoax.

The Hill. “Donald Trump Moves to Let American Farmers, Ranchers Process Their Own Food.” The Hill, 28 Aug. 2026, thehill.com/homenews/administration/6056859-donald-trump-farmers-ranchers-food-processing-beef-tariff-battle/.

Trump, Donald J. [@realDonaldTrump]. “Ranchers and Farmers have always been a number one priority for me...” Truth Social, 28 Aug. 2026, 7:22 a.m.

TSLN.com. “FAQ: What Do I Need to Know About Buying Beef from a Rancher?” Tri-State Livestock News, 27 Apr. 2020, www.tsln.com/news/faq-what-do-i-need-to-know-about-buying-beef-from-a-rancher/.

U.S. Premium Beef, LLC. Description of Business. SEC Form 10-K, 28 Dec. 2013, www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1289237/000100329714000135/R8.htm.

---. Special Meeting Proxy Statement. SEC Filing, 14 Mar. 2008, www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1289237/000110465908015135/a08-6873_1ex20d1.htm.

Virginia Grass Fed Beef. “Beef Details.” Virginia Grass Fed Beef, 12 Jan. 2026, vagrassfedbeef.com/2026/01/12/beef-details/.

Washington State Beef Commission. “Local Beef Directory.” WA Beef, www.wabeef.org/cooking/local-beef-directory.

A federal judge in Boston ruled on Tuesday. By Wednesday morning, the framing in much of the coverage had already curdled into “court clears the way for Trump’s mail ballot crackdown.” It’s not hard to see where that came from. The White House itself called Wednesday’s development “a major win for the security of American elections.”

That is not what happened, or at least not what happened yet. It’s important to understand the difference.

Several documents, one tangled timeline

There are several things in play here and mixing them together is where most of the confusion starts. It actually starts earlier than this week, with two separate lawsuits filed back in April against the same executive order.

The lawsuits. In March, the president signed an executive order aimed at mail voting, and within days it drew two distinct legal challenges. One came from a coalition of 23 states and Washington, D.C., arguing the president has no authority to dictate state voting practices. The other came from a group of voting-rights organizations, including the League of Women Voters, the U.S. Vote Foundation, and Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, represented by the ACLU and the Brennan Center among others, arguing the order was unconstitutional and risked disenfranchising eligible voters.

Both cases landed before the same federal judge in Massachusetts, Indira Talwani, but they proceeded on separate tracks with separate outcomes.

The two injunctions. In late June, Talwani granted summary judgment to the states, finding parts of the order unlawful and barring federal agencies from enforcing them against the plaintiff states and D.C. through this November’s elections. In mid-August, in the voting-rights groups’ case, she issued a broader preliminary injunction blocking USPS nationwide from implementing the order’s mail-ballot provisions for 2026.

Two separate rulings, two separate scopes. One state-specific. One nationwide.

The final rule. USPS posted a 95-page final rule late Friday, August 21, which tightened requirements about how federal ballot mail is handled. This included envelope standards, barcode tracking, and a new data-reporting system that would flag ballots to a federal portal before they enter the mail stream. The rule was posted for public inspection late Friday with an immediate effective date of the same day.

Its formal publication in the Federal Register, the official step that legally completes the process, didn’t land until August 26. This was the same day as this week’s court news, which is almost certainly why the two are getting mashed together in people’s feeds. USPS has been explicit that it does not plan to implement this rule for the 2026 election unless the government first wins relief from both existing injunctions. The rule exists on paper. It is not in effect.

Monday’s Supreme Court order. The Court’s 6-3 conservative majority ruled on the states’ case specifically, finding their lawsuit premature.

That’s a legal doctrine called ripeness. Courts generally won’t hear a case until the harm being challenged has actually happened, not just that its been proposed. The states had sued while USPS’s rule was still a draft, before any agency had taken concrete action against them, so the majority found they couldn’t yet show the kind of real, current harm a lawsuit requires.

That’s a narrow, procedural finding, not a ruling on whether the rule itself is lawful. It’s also a genuinely debatable one: the Court’s liberal justices dissented, arguing the harm was concrete enough already.

But the majority’s view is what controls for now, and it’s what lifted the June injunction. It did not touch the nationwide injunction from the voting-rights groups’ case, which stayed in place.

Tuesday’s ruling. With the states’ injunction gone but the nationwide one still standing, Talwani addressed an earlier complaint that USPS had violated that nationwide injunction by publishing Friday’s rule with an “immediate” effective date instead of one that fell safely after the midterms.

She agreed that USPS had violated her order. But she declined to impose a remedy, noting that the violation itself might end up helping the voting-rights plaintiffs, since it gave them something concrete and current to sue over instead of a hypothetical.

Wednesday’s second ruling. That’s where the same ripeness question came back around and where the reasoning matters more than the outcome. The Trump administration had already asked Talwani, on an emergency basis, to reconsider her nationwide injunction in light of Monday’s Supreme Court decision. In a nine-page order, she agreed she was bound to.

In her findings she states that “the court finds that, in light of the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. California, Plaintiff Organizations are not likely to prevail as to ripeness without amending their complaint to reflect the fact that a Final Rule has now issued.” She vacated the injunction, but explicitly without prejudice (meaning it can come back), and left the door open for the plaintiffs to refile around the rule that now actually exists rather than the one they’d originally sued over hypothetically.

Within hours, they did, and it was more than a routine amendment. ACLU attorney Sophia Lin Lakin filed a supplemental complaint on behalf of the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts, the national League and two of its education funds, the Association of Americans Resident Overseas, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, OCA–Asian Pacific American Advocates, and the U.S. Vote Foundation, along with an emergency motion asking Talwani to block the rule for the midterms immediately. “USPS’s decision to rush this blatantly unconstitutional rule into effect just weeks before an election is the latest step in a rollout that has sown confusion at every turn,” Lakin said.

Also Wednesday. Separately, the 23 states, D.C., and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro filed their own new lawsuit, a distinct case from the voting-rights groups’ amended one, specifically challenging the finalized rule rather than the executive order in the abstract.

Thursday. The other side showed up too, and for the first time in this fight, states appeared on the side defending the rule rather than challenging it. Twelve Republican-led states, Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Texas, intervened in the League’s case specifically to oppose its emergency motion and defend the rule, making Talwani’s noon deadline to do so.

The Justice Department filed its own opposition the same morning on behalf of Trump, USPS, its Board of Governors, DHS, the Social Security Administration, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Talwani hasn’t said when she’ll rule on the League’s request. Until she does, the rule’s status for the midterms is genuinely undecided, not settled in either direction.

It’s worth noting that none of the twelve states on that list are among the eight, Washington included, that run elections entirely by mail. Every intervening state runs a traditional polling-place system where mail voting is optional rather than the only option. That’s not a coincidence so much as it is the point. The states defending the rule are, by definition, states whose own voters wouldn’t face the specific risk it creates for a flagged voter with no polling place to fall back on.

Both cases are now before Talwani. Both are just beginning.

How the administration is framing it. The full quote from White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis, cited above, added that the new requirements are “commonsense measures that protect the security of mail-in ballots and ensure only Americans are electing American leaders.”

It’s worth noting that even outlets sympathetic to the administration’s position have been more careful with that language than the White House has. Coverage of Monday’s Supreme Court order from conservative-leaning outlets described it as a “preliminary victory” and an “interim victory,” not a final one, and explicitly flagged that the fight over the rule’s actual legality is still ahead.

That distinction, between winning a procedural round and winning the underlying case, is the same one this section has been drawing out all along.

Two original lawsuits, two injunctions, a rule, a Supreme Court order, a violation finding, a ripeness reversal, two fresh lawsuits, an emergency motion, and a dozen states plus the Justice Department lining up to oppose it, all landing in the same week. That is a recipe for headlines that flatten a genuine fight over court procedure into “mail voting under new federal control.” It is not that, at least not yet, and not without a ruling still pending on whether the rule runs for these midterms at all.

Sheesh. If you followed all of that on the first read, you should probably be billing someone by the hour.

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Why the underlying anxiety is understandable, and why the data doesn’t support it

None of that procedural nuance answers the question a lot of ordinary voters are actually asking, which is simpler. Will the 2026 midterms be free and fair? That question is getting harder to answer cleanly in part because a lot of people are being told, incorrectly, that their mail ballot already isn’t safe, and supporters of these restrictions have leaned on that claim to justify them.

I’ve made most of these points at length before, in the SAVE Act and SAVE America Act coverage, so here’s the short version:

Noncitizen voting is what’s being used to justify this rule, so start there. Every state audit that’s looked has returned the same findings, it’s vanishingly rare. Pennsylvania found one improperly registered noncitizen out of 210,000 records checked. Utah found one out of 2.1 million. The conservative Heritage Foundation’s own election fraud database, which tracks roughly 1,500 proven cases of election wrongdoing going back decades, has identified well under 100 involving a noncitizen, somewhere between 68 and 99 depending on the count, out of hundreds of millions of votes cast over that span.

That’s not because no one’s checking. Registration isn’t the honor system it’s sometimes described as. The Help America Vote Act has required ID cross-referencing against federal databases since 2002. Where gaps have surfaced, like California’s Motor Voter errors, the scale runs in the hundreds, not the thousands, and gets corrected.

And if the worry is ballot fraud more broadly, someone mailing in a dead or moved neighbor’s ballot rather than citizenship specifically, that number is smaller still. A Brookings analysis of the 2016–2022 elections put the overall mail-ballot fraud rate at about 0.000043%, roughly four cases per ten million ballots, using the same Heritage database.

Those are the questions voters are asking. There are two others that ought to be asked. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes is one election official who is asking them directly.

The first. If the administration genuinely has lists of thousands of people who voted illegally, why hasn’t it handed that list to the states for prosecution? Fontes has repeatedly declined DOJ demands for Arizona’s un-redacted voter rolls, and DOJ has responded with lawsuits and letters warning election officials of criminal liability, without citing a statute legal experts can identify.

Meanwhile, DHS’s own hunt for noncitizen voters generated tens of thousands of leads by running voter rolls through its databases, but referred only about 150 for prosecution, and charged 41. That gap, between “thousands” and 41, is what the question is really pointing at. If the lists hold up, prosecution is the normal mechanism for acting on them.

The second: if election security is genuinely the concern driving all of this, why did the administration gut the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the federal government’s actual election-security partner for the states? CISA’s election-security staff were sidelined within weeks of the administration taking office, its threat-sharing partnerships with state election offices wound down, its workforce has dropped by roughly a third. The FY2027 budget would zero out its election security funding entirely. That’s a real question regardless of what you think about ballot verification rules.

The same administration adding paperwork requirements for voters has stepped back from the agency built to defend against foreign hacking and interference, a far more documented risk than the fraud rates above.

And there are two other questions that I keep coming back to. About 30% of all votes cast in the 2024 election, roughly 48 million of them, came in by mail. If mail voting were actually as compromised as claimed, shouldn’t that outcome be in question too? And if it’s dangerous enough to justify federal barcode tracking and a citizenship portal, why did the president himself vote by mail in Florida’s August 2026 primary, and in the March 2026 special election before that, the same summer he was signing executive orders to restrict the practice?

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The honest, hedged version

To be fair, vote-by-mail systems are not 100% fraud-proof. No voting system is 100% fraud-proof. No one serious claims they are. Ballot chain-of-custody is a real design question, tracking and barcoding aren’t inherently sinister. Reasonable people can disagree about where the line sits between “verification tool” and “surveillance infrastructure” once a federal ballot mail portal enters the picture. That’s a legitimate policy conversation. It’s just a different conversation than the fraud-rate one, and the two keep getting merged in ways that make neither easier to think about clearly.

Bottom line, states have a constitutional right to manage their own elections. But federalizing any part of this system isn’t just a constitutional problem, it’s a structural one. Our current system is diverse and run differently across the country, with no single point of failure. That’s by design, and it needs to remain that way.

What this week’s rulings change, concretely, is still very little. The nationwide injunction is gone, but so is any final word on the rule itself. The League’s emergency motion to reinstate a block is still pending, with twelve states and the Justice Department now arguing against it, and a ruling that could come at any time.

The postal rule sits on paper. What it should change is how carefully we read the next set of headlines that use the words “postal service” and “voting” in the same sentence. In the meantime, this is a good time to contact your elected officials and tell them how you feel, and whatever it takes, make sure you vote in the upcoming elections so your voice is heard.

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Paid subscriptions are just $5 a month. Every dollar goes directly toward the research and writing that makes pieces like this one possible. I mean it when I say that your support means the world to me. It’s what allows me to keep doing this work independently, on my own terms, accountable only to the readers who make it all worth while.

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References & Further Reading

Fannin, Erin. “Auditor General DeFoor Says Motor-Voter Works as Intended, PennDOT Says No Non-Citizens Registered.” Pennsylvania Capital-Star, 20 Apr. 2026, penncapital-star.com/campaigns-elections/pennsylvanias-motor-voter-system-effectively-screens-non-citizens-from-voter-registration.

Hersher, Emily, et al. “Mail Voting in the US: Data Points to Very Low Fraud and Significant Benefits to Voters.” Brookings Institution, 2026, www.brookings.edu/articles/mail-voting-in-the-us-data-points-to-very-low-fraud-and-significant-benefits-to-voters.

“Judge Dissolves Injunction in Trump Admin’s Favor over Federal Mail-In Voting Takeover.” Law&Crime, 26 Aug. 2026, lawandcrime.com/high-profile/judge-begrudgingly-dissolves-injunction-in-trump-admins-favor-over-federal-mail-in-voting-takeover-warns-that-chaos-may-be-unleashed.

“Judge Lifts Nationwide Block on Trump Mail-Ballot Order Following Supreme Court Ruling.” yourNEWS, 26 Aug. 2026, yournews.com/2026/08/26/7177493/judge-lifts-nationwide-block-on-trump-mail-ballot-order-following-supreme.

“New Audit Finds ‘Small Handful’ of Noncitizens on Utah Voter Rolls.” KSL.com, 27 May 2026, www.ksl.com/article/51503158/new-audit-finds-small-handful-of-noncitizens-on-utah-voter-rolls.

“Nationwide Block on Trump Mail-in Voting Order Removed by Judge.” Axios, 26 Aug. 2026, www.axios.com/2026/08/26/trump-mail-voting-rules-nationwide-injunction.

“Federal Judge Lifts Final Block on Trump Mail-In Voting Order, Clearing Way for Midterm Restrictions.” CNBC, 26 Aug. 2026, www.cnbc.com/2026/08/26/trump-usps-mail-voting-rule-lawsuit-states-supreme-court.html.

“SCOTUS Ruling Forces Judge Talwani’s Hand on Trump’s Mail-Ballot Rules.” RedState, 26 Aug. 2026, redstate.com/smoosieq/2026/08/26/scotus-ruling-forces-judge-talwanis-hand-on-trumps-mail-ballot-rules-n2206098.

“THEY’RE BACK: Far-Left Nonprofits Race Back to Obama Judge to Block Trump’s Postal Election Integrity Rules After Talwani Forced to Lift Nationwide Injunction.” The Gateway Pundit, 26 Aug. 2026, www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/08/theyre-back-far-left-nonprofits-race-back-obama.

“Judge Lifts Her Nationwide Block on Trump’s Mail-In Ballot Executive Order After SCOTUS Ruling.” Twitchy, 26 Aug. 2026, twitchy.com/brettt/2026/08/26/judge-rules-that-usps-has-violated-her-block-on-mail-in-ballot-security-measures-n2431715.

Rakich, Nathaniel. “Almost a Third of 2024 Voters Voted by Mail, Research Shows.” The Hill, 2026, thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5379475-mail-ballots-2024-presidential-election-research.

Stewart, Charles. “How We Voted in 2024.” MIT Election Data and Science Lab, July 2025, electionlab.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2025-07/HowWeVotedIn2024.pdf.

“Nearly 1 in 3 Americans Voted by Mail in 2024.” States United Democracy Center, 2026, statesunited.org/resources/americans-vote-by-mail-2024.

U.S. Election Assistance Commission. 2024 Election Administration and Voting Survey Comprehensive Report, July 2025, www.eac.gov/sites/default/files/2025-07/2024_EAVS_Report_508.pdf.

Huseman, Jessica. “Many Americans Returned to In-Person Voting in 2024, MIT Study Finds.” Votebeat, 21 July 2025, www.votebeat.org/2025/07/21/mit-how-we-voted-2024-election-report.

My father died 3287 days ago.

He passed. He moved on. He joined the angels. All the words but at the end of that day, he died and I’m still pissed. He was every bit a young 72-year old who lived a notably healthy life, kayaked oceans, hiked mountains, traveled the world, wrote textbooks, sparked bored students with light shows about chaos theory, mentored grad students, tended a greenhouse garden, cared for the earth, was a vegetarian. And then, with a monumental clap of thunder late that Tuesday night, he breathed his last breath and left me behind with so many questions left unanswered, plans left unfulfilled, great-grandkids left unmet, books left unwritten, and experiences left un-fulfilled.

Today, my mailwoman delivered a new dovetail router jig to the porch and when I saw it, I reached for my phone to tell him. It was one of several slips today and one that was welcome, as it meant that in that moment, he was there, alive, and available to answer my call. It lasted only a moment and then I dropped my hand with my eyes still on the jig as I recognized that he wasn’t there. Each slip is always followed by a slap and wince that leaves me feeling hollow, with the same deep sadness and pain that I felt on that Tuesday, 3287 days ago when I last held his hand.

Woodworking was our shared passion and I grew up, perched on a stool in his garage workshop, wrapped in my threadbare, knit blue blankie, keeping him company in a haze of wood shavings, dust, and creative promise. His hands were wondrously large and calloused, capable of rebuilding a Datsun station wagon engine and piercing a snail neuron on a glass slide under an electron microscope.

Touching wood and getting excited about its promise was our legacy. 40 miles into a 100-mile bike tour, we were passed by a truck loaded with all sizes and cuts of lumber. We spent the rest of the ride talking about what we would do if that shipment of wood was accidently dropped at our house. A treehouse? A miniature house with working fireplaces? A cabinet? A porch cover? A new house? We worked through all the ideas and plans that took that shipment of wood and made it into things that we could live with, touch, work, share, and love. All that with a grain of humor as my father scattered silly puns. “What’s the first step in getting accepted to carpentry school?”

Eye roll. “What?”

“You have to submit a stool sample.”

Ugh.

I was sparked by my dreams, knowing that each included working side-by-side with him. I’m sure his goal was less lofty and far more about getting me across the next 60 miles of bare, hot New Mexican macadam while I jabbered incessantly about what we could build. Endlessly because I was a talker, am a talker, not one to be shut up and so long as I talked, I peddled, getting us closer to the end of that 100-mile trek. I did the same on our hikes. I made up endless stories about the Squiggle People – pinecone people who rode about on bark boats with Old Man Beard sails – and so long as I was telling stories, my little feet were walking and we edged ever closer to whatever mountain top or ridge was our destination for that day.

3287 days ago, my father’s adventure ended. The sun that had brightened his path of adventure also dug deeply into his skin and evoked the melanoma that would take him away from me. Cells that went crazy and the final brain tumors that stumped the doctors who had learned their trade in his classroom. I was angry when that final clap of thunder marked the last breath of an adventurer – my father – a friend. So unfair, so untimely, and so wrong.

3288 days ago, the sun blinked for the first time in 36,168 days. My father had planned a trip to sit in the center of the country where he could experience the sunless shadow as it traveled from sea to sea. Instead, he was bound to a room, slowly dying from his years enjoying its warmth on his face. We watched for him, spraying moon-shaped dots of light across the cobblestones outside his bedroom window through colanders and gazing into the sky through darkened glasses. We were his understudies, experiencing the solar requiem in his place when he was too weak to see the sun’s homage and apology.

The moment the router jig showed up on my doorstep was only one of the many times when I reached for my phone, set on calling my dad because of today’s adventure, today’s experience, the thing that made today so very special or even, mundane. When I walk through my orchard amongst the apple and pear trees, I sometimes capture a glimpse of him in the distance, walking his gangly walk, smiling and cracking a silly dad-joke. Glimpse…

When I greet the chickens at the beginning of the day, I capture the moment so I can tell him about it later. I will describe the sun sparkling through the ice crystals that cling to the chicken wire. All the salient facts work through in my mind so I can relay the moment correctly and in a way that will fascinate his scientific brain. It will also help me answer the questions that he will undoubtedly have. Where did the sun rise that morning? What temperature was the air? Did the ice crystals reflect or absorb the light? “What side of the chicken has the most feathers?”

“Do tell.”

“The outside.” Duh.

I build the story that I will tell him later in the day before I remember that I won’t be able to. Slip… Slap. Wince.

He’s on my mind when I estimate the amount of pressure-treated 4x4s it will take to create the perfect woodshed. 2000 days ago, I know he would have been by my side, gently suggesting an alternate plan that would use less wood, or more wood, or less effort. I work to make the plan fool-proof, me-proof, and dad-worthy because I know that when I tell him, I’ll need to show my work. I turn from the wood, feeling him beside me and readying myself for the questions. And he’s not there. Glimpse… Slap. Wince.

As a kid, I saw the potential in a piece of wood because of my father’s fascination. My safe place was being surrounded by his chisels, massive wood clamps, planers, his tools. Touching those is my connection to him and I feel his hands working through mine. His freckled, big hands gracefully helping me form a piece of wood into a drawer or a shelf or a toolbox. When two pieces of wood come together with the perfect joint, he is there and I can feel everything that makes us. I feel his approval and his fascination with what we are creating. “Why do woodworkers get lost at the airport?”

“I dunno.”

“Because they can never find the right plane.”

But the shadow is empty and cool, not filled with the 6’4” man that filled it so perfectly. So warmly. Glimpse… Slap. Wince.

The first 365 days were the hardest. I hadn’t fully accepted a new normal that didn’t include him. There was my first birthday where I didn’t open a card with my dad’s distinctive scroll, wishing me a happy day, signed with his dependable “Love, Don.” The first Christmas when I didn’t wonder if he was going to burn down the house with his beloved Christmas tree candles (spray bottle always close at hand). The first summer that wasn’t filled with stories of his world-traveling adventures intermixed with my own. At each of these moments, I’d reach for the phone with my breathless stories banked and waiting, then slowly hang up. Slips that hurt deeply as their initial promise faded away.

When the 366th day rolled around, I was in new territory. The glimpses and slips still caught me off-guard and haunted me, but for some reason, that one year mark dulled the resulting slaps and winces. New experiences had been built over the remnants of those painful firsts. My mind more easily touched the raw spots because my thoughts went from “he was here last year on this day” to “last year’s memory also included his absence.” It was a new normal that I didn’t necessarily like, but a new perspective, none the less. I’m sure he would have provided a fascinating explanation about what new synapse sparked what neuron to create that trick of the brain but I just appreciated the new view that didn’t hurt so much. “Why did the neuron like to sleep in the top bunk?”

“Why dad?”

“Because it always wanted a high resting potential.” Groan.

3287 days ago, he left his house for the last time, this time carried out on a stretcher, while his tools sat, quietly collecting dust in the garage. The clap of thunder summoned a torrential downpour of rain and we stood out in the darkness, thoroughly drenched but unwilling to leave his side until we could no longer follow. There were plenty of glimpses that night. I heard him laugh at the way we all jumped at the thunder. I knew he’d have the word for the color of lightening and I saw him in the rain, waiting patiently across the street, there to give me a hug and offer his strong hand to walk me home.

Three thousand, two hundred, and eighty-seven days ago, my father let go of my hand and walked away into the rainy night. His gift to me is in the glimpses that let me know he’s still there and the slips where I feel him by my side. The years have taken those gifts and wrapped them in a hug of familiarity, of gratitude, and of acceptance. He would have liked that.

“What is it called when you have a piñon tree with 4 piñon nuts and one with 5?”

“I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

“A difference of a piñon.”

Sigh.

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For twenty years, the United States asked Afghans to work with us. Interpreters. Logistics contractors. Intelligence sources. Soldiers who fought alongside American and Allied troops. They took the risk, knowing that if the Taliban ever came back, it could be a death sentence for them, or for their families. And they made that choice anyway.

In August 2021, the Taliban came back. The U.S. evacuated roughly 124,000 Afghans in the withdrawal. Thousands more who had helped were left behind or came later through humanitarian parole. The deal, implicit and sometimes explicit, was: help us, and we’ll protect you.

That explicit half wasn’t just talk. Congress made it law. The Afghan Allies Protection Act of 2009 created the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program specifically because Afghans who worked with U.S. forces faced Taliban retaliation for that work, and it requires the Secretary of State to make “a reasonable effort” to protect or evacuate any applicant determined to be in “imminent danger.”

Members of Congress from both parties have described it in exactly the language of a promise for over a decade: “we gave our word,” “we promised to protect the people who worked and fought by our side,” “the U.S. never leaves anyone behind.”

What brought about that law was more than just talking points on a Congressional docket, it was about real lives, in real danger, based on complex relationships that the U.S. government relied on. Spencer Sullivan, a U.S. Army officer, and Abdulhaq Sodais brought that story to life in their book, Not Our Problem.

Published in 2025, it chronicles a friendship that developed slowly over time, a friendship forged in a dusty corner of a country ravaged by war for decades. Sullivan and Sodais tell the story cleverly, alternating chapters and voices throughout, revisiting the same moments from each other’s own perspectives. The reader catches a glimpse of the oppressive violence and fear the Taliban rained down on a country and culture rich with history, deep faith, and strong family and community ties, and gains insight into the complexity of a translator’s role that goes far beyond words.

The book also gives life to the reality that the pathways meant to protect those who chose to serve alongside U.S. and Allied forces don’t function reliably, if at all, and that the U.S. is breaking its promise of that safety over and over again.

What follows here is one case that makes the systemic pattern concrete for readers who’d otherwise only see numbers.

“The right way” doesn’t exist for people like Abdulhaq

There’s a phrase that comes up constantly in immigration debates: I don’t mind immigrants, as long as they come the “right way.” It sounds reasonable. It assumes a “right way” exists, and that anyone motivated enough could simply take it.

Abdulhaq tried the “right way” first. He applied through the SIV program the U.S. government itself created for people exactly like him. In January 2014, U.S. embassy officials in Kabul denied his application outright: “You did not provide faithful and valuable service to the U.S. Government, as required by the law.” This, despite letters of recommendation from the Americans he’d served alongside. He reapplied. He was denied again.

The pattern repeated for years. Abdulhaq moved between contractor jobs, and each time, he was let go close to the point where he would have completed the length of service the SIV program required, always over a disputed or arbitrary reason, always without any real way to challenge the firing or clear his name.

Whether that was coincidence or something closer to design, the effect was the same: the clock kept resetting on the one thing that could have gotten him out. By the time he finally left Afghanistan, he’d accumulated 28 months of service to the United States, across all his jobs combined. None of it mattered to the people trying to kill him. The Taliban didn’t care how long he’d worked, for whom, or whether he’d been fired along the way. A single day would have been enough to sign his death warrant.

The “right way” was also the way that kept him standing in place while the danger closed in. A neighbor of his was killed simply for driving a truck that carried supplies to Allied forces. A mullah in his own community declared him “kãfer,” an infidel, and told him his death was religiously sanctioned. When the legal path failed him, at the end of 2017, with no job left to return to and no application succeeding, he left the country the only way still open to him: through smugglers, mountain crossings, and jail cells in multiple countries. In his own words, describing the toll of that route: “It took me $15,000, 7 months, 3 beatings, 3 incarcerations.”

That’s not someone who skipped the line. That’s what happens when the line itself fails the person standing in it. This isn’t a story about one unlucky applicant. As of 2025, estimates put the number of Afghans who served the U.S. war effort in some capacity at over 50,000, with the total who worked with U.S. forces and their family members, once everyone eligible is counted, well over 100,000. Nobody, including the U.S. government, ever kept a clean count of exactly how many people it owed protection to, in exchange for that risk.

Where things stand now

Abdulhaq eventually made it to the U.S., landing in Chicago in December 2025, thirteen years after he first asked for a recommendation letter. His arrival didn’t close the case. It’s one data point in a much larger, ongoing pattern:

1. TPS termination. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) ended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Afghanistan, effective July 14, 2025. That stripped work authorization and deportation protection from roughly 9,000 to 11,700 Afghans in the U.S. (figures vary by source and by date measured). Most of these are people whose SIV or asylum applications are still pending. TPS was the bridge, not the destination. The SIV process alone can take years.

2. The larger, less visible risk pool: humanitarian parole. Roughly 133,000 to 180,000 Afghans were admitted to the U.S. after the 2021 withdrawal, most of them on humanitarian parole rather than any permanent status. Parole is temporary by design. Unless it’s renewed or converted into something durable, an SIV, asylum, or TPS, people on parole alone have no independent legal protection from removal. This is arguably the single largest number of Afghans currently exposed, and it rarely gets mentioned alongside the TPS figures that get most of the headlines.

3. Individual arrests of documented allies. In July 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested Zia S. in Connecticut after a routine green card biometrics appointment. His SIV had already been approved by the State Department in April 2024. DHS labeled him a “national security risk,” citing an unspecified “serious criminal allegation,” which his attorneys dispute, pointing to his military records, letters of recommendation, and completed vetting. He spent three months in detention before an immigration judge granted him bond in October 2025. If the strongest possible documentation doesn’t guarantee safety, that’s exactly the fear this entire community is left carrying.

4. The Qatar group. More than 1,000 Afghan refugees, including SIV-eligible interpreters and over 400 children, many of them family of U.S. service members, have been stranded at a U.S. base in Qatar for more than a year after the administration halted their resettlement. As of spring 2026, reporting indicates they’re being pressured to choose between the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) or another third country with no connection to them, or returning to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. U.S. officials have disputed the “forced choice” framing. A smaller group has already been deported to the Central African Republic (CAR), a country the U.S. government itself warns Americans not to visit “for any reason.”

5. The blanket pause after the D.C. shooting. In late November 2025, an Afghan national, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who had worked with the CIA in Afghanistan and entered the U.S. under a Biden-era humanitarian parole program in 2021, was charged in the shooting of two West Virginia National Guard members near the White House, killing Sarah Beckstrom. Within two days, the administration paused all asylum decisions nationwide, not just for Afghans, and the State Department halted all visa issuance for Afghan passport holders. One person’s alleged crime became the basis for suspending an entire country’s immigration processing.

The rhetoric that followed didn’t stay contained to policy. The night of the shooting, Trump said the country “must now re-examine every single alien who has entered our country from Afghanistan under Biden,” and that anyone who “does not belong here” needed to be removed. Shawn VanDiver, president of #AfghanEvac, described the effect on the community directly: Afghans in the U.S. were terrified, and people were “acting xenophobic because of one deranged man” who “doesn’t represent all Afghans.”

The numbers back up what VanDiver was describing. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) recorded 8,683 anti-Muslim and anti-Arab complaints in 2025, the highest total since it started tracking the data in 1996, and the group specifically flagged a spike in negative sentiment toward Afghan immigrants after the shooting, noting that refugees with no connection to the incident were nonetheless treated with suspicion.

Sitting members of Congress contributed to that climate directly. Representative Andy Ogles has said “Muslims don’t belong in American society” and that “pluralism is a lie,” while Representative Randy Fine has posted “Deport them ALL” and described a choice “between dogs and Muslims” as “not a difficult one.” That’s not fringe commentary. That’s sitting members of the U.S. House.

Set that domestic climate against what’s actually waiting on the other end of a deportation order. The danger this community fled isn’t hypothetical, and it hasn’t stopped. In the four months immediately after the Taliban takeover, UN monitors documented 148 extrajudicial killings of former Afghan security personnel. A 2025 investigation by Military Times and Lighthouse Reports identified 110 more killings of former Afghan National Defense and Security Forces since 2023.

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan’s (UNAMA) most recent quarterly report, covering April through June 2026, documented at least 29 cases of arbitrary arrest and detention, five cases of torture, and eight killings of former Afghan security and government personnel.

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Even the ones who “did it right”

Here’s where the “right way” argument finally runs out of road. This isn’t only about the people still waiting, or the people who had to flee through smuggling networks because the legal path failed them. It’s happening now to people who did everything asked of them and succeeded, and NPR broke the story just days ago, on August 15, 2026.

Hundreds of Afghans who already completed the SIV process, who already hold green cards, have started receiving letters from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and the State Department stating that the basis for their visa has been “revoked or denied.” Advocates say they’ve never seen anything like it: a formal reopening of approval, years after the visa was actually issued and the person had already built a life here, a job, kids in school, a mortgage.

The practice has real origins in a real problem. A federal prosecution found a scheme in which a man was paid to draft and submit fraudulent recommendation letters for Afghan SIV applicants, and the Biden administration began a re-review of Chief of Mission approvals in 2024 to catch cases tied to compromised letter-writers.

But advocates who work with these families say the volume and frequency of the revocation notices have increased sharply since, and the individualized clarity the earlier notices had has been replaced by form letters that, in the words of one legal aid director, “raise questions about factual accuracy and provide little explanation for the outcome.”

One green card holder in Texas, an engineer evacuated through Qatar after years working with the U.S. Army, said nearly all his friends who’ve been here three or four years have now received the same letter. Another, an engineer in Washington state with U.S.-born children, one of whom requires ongoing medical care, is now afraid to even file for the citizenship he’s already eligible for, worried that walking into a USCIS office could get him detained instead.

There’s a quieter effect too. Nearly everyone in that NPR piece asked to be identified only by a first initial or first name, afraid that speaking to a reporter at all could put their own status at risk. That fear is real and current, and it means the true scale of it is almost certainly undercounted, since the people most affected also have the most reason to stay quiet about it.

None of this has resulted in green cards being revoked at scale yet, as of this writing. But it’s landing on top of every other pressure point covered here: paused refugee resettlement, paused visa processing, stripped TPS. For a population already living with a level of uncertainty most Americans never have to think about, a letter questioning a visa issued years ago is one more way of being told the promise was never actually final, even for the ones who checked every box.

Where this cuts across party lines

More than 80 House members, including at least three Republicans, wrote to Secretary of State Marco Rubio in June 2026 urging him to reconsider the Qatar-to-DRC plan, arguing it was “both a moral and a national security imperative” to honor the promise made to Afghan allies. A separate letter from 29 senators, led by Richard Blumenthal, called the DRC option a “false dichotomy” between a country in the midst of its own humanitarian crisis and a return to Afghanistan where “torture and death await them.”

Republican voices weren’t limited to signing letters. The late Senator Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally who died suddenly in July 2026, was blunt when asked about the plan: “If they’ve been people helping us fight, that would be a problem.” Representative Nick LaLota called on colleagues to “put politics aside and neutrally examine the risk versus reward of the [Special Immigrant Visas] program” rather than treat it as settled. Representative Don Bacon, a frequent Trump critic within his own party, said he hoped officials would “give extra consideration to the interpreters” even while supporting continued screening.

This isn’t a new position for some of these Republicans, either. Representative Andy Barr called it a U.S. “obligation” to resettle Afghan allies back in 2021, language that resurfaced and became a liability in his own 2026 Senate primary once a rival used the clip against him. That a pro-Afghan-ally position from 2021 is now politically costly for a sitting Republican tells you how much the climate has shifted, not how weak the underlying argument is.

Veterans’ groups have been the most consistent voice throughout. VanDiver, a Navy veteran, has briefed members of Congress directly and pushed back hard on the “voluntary” framing of the DRC option: “You cannot call a choice voluntary when the two options are the Congo and the Taliban. Civil War, or an oppressor who wants to kill you.”

For veterans’ organizations, this has never read as a partisan issue. It reads as a promise made soldier-to-interpreter, one that outranks whatever administration happens to be in office when it comes due.

No One Left Behind is another example, and its origin says as much as its work does. It was founded by Matt Zeller, a U.S. Army soldier, and Janis Shinwari, his Afghan interpreter, after a firefight in Afghanistan in which Shinwari grabbed a weapon and killed a Taliban fighter who was about to kill Zeller. The name isn’t a borrowed slogan. It is what soldiers do when the government that drilled “leave no one behind” into him turns out to be the one leaving his own rescuer behind, and he and the man who saved his life decide to carry out the mission themselves.

The organization’s list tracking Afghan wartime allies killed by the Taliban has a more personal origin to Sullivan. Sayad, an interpreter from his own platoon in Afghanistan, was killed by the Taliban in 2017. His death is what prompted No One Left Behind to start compiling the list in the first place. The organization has spent years cataloging the toll since, reporting more than 300 Afghan interpreters or their family members killed for their U.S. affiliation as of 2020, a figure its advocacy director has continued citing in congressional testimony since, work that supplements the UN’s own periodic monitoring rather than replacing it, since no single entity, including the U.S. government, maintains one comprehensive account of the dead.

Sayad’s death left a lasting mark on Sullivan. He still wears a metal memorial band engraved with Sayad’s name and the date he died.

That loss doesn’t show up anywhere in the U.S. government’s own account of why any of this is happening. Here’s how the administration explains itself.

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What the administration says

The administration’s rationale has taken several tracks, each deserving their own discussion.

On TPS, DHS’s own May 2025 notice said then Secretary Kristi Noem had determined that conditions in Afghanistan had improved enough for people to return, and that continuing TPS protections would be “contrary to the national interest.” That’s the stated legal basis for ending protections for thousands of Afghans already in the U.S.

On the broader post-shooting freeze, the rationale has been framed around vetting rather than country conditions. USCIS Director Joseph Edlow described the asylum pause as necessary “until we can ensure that every alien is vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible.”

Trump’s own remarks the night of the shooting went further, calling for the country to “reexamine every single alien from Afghanistan who has entered our country under Biden” and to “take all necessary measures to ensure the removal of any alien from any country who does not belong here or add benefit to our country.”

It’s important to consider the word choice itself. “Alien” is the formal legal term in U.S. immigration statute, so its use isn’t inaccurate on its own. But the people actually affected by this policy have more specific, more accurate designations available: green card holder, SIV recipient, asylum applicant, someone with an approved petition already in hand.

Reaching for the flattest, most legally distancing term available, and doing it repeatedly, in a statement about removal rather than a routine filing, is a choice. It’s the difference between a word doing technical work and the same word doing rhetorical work, collapsing a documented interpreter with a specific service record into the same undifferentiated category as anyone the government wants gone.

On the Qatar situation specifically, a State Department spokesperson has described relocating people to a third country as “a positive resolution that provides safety for these remaining people to start a new life outside of Afghanistan while upholding the safety and security of the American people,” without naming the DRC directly or explaining what “safety” means in a country experiencing its own severe humanitarian crisis.

None of these stated rationales, TPS conditions, vetting, or “positive resolution,” directly address the open question at the center of this piece: whether there’s any carve-out for documented former U.S. partners specifically, people like Abdulhaq, vetted for years and holding letters of recommendation from the Americans with whom they served, or whether they’re caught in a general enforcement sweep with no distinction made between someone like Lakanwal, facing a specific criminal charge, and someone whose only connection to any of this is having tried, for over a decade, to do exactly what the law asked of him.

The tribalism doing the work underneath all of this

I first met Spencer in 2013, the same year I met my daughter’s plane at Fort Lewis when she returned from her first of two deployments in Afghanistan. Both had received eye surgery at Madigan Army Hospital, and I’d traveled there to help her recover. In the waiting room, she introduced me to Spencer and asked if I’d care for him too. My answer came easily. Of course.

Thirteen years later, I found a message from him, delivered through my LinkedIn account, asking if I’d be interested in co-writing a piece about his and Abdulhaq’s story, and its next chapter. Again, my answer came easily. Of course.

In our conversations since, Spencer and I kept circling back to several themes. One of the strongest was how effectively Americans have been conditioned toward tribalism: to retreat into fear of whoever we don’t know or understand. It’s a primal survival instinct, and it’s being actively exploited right now to demonize refugees and immigrants as a category, a nameless, faceless threat rather than a group of individual people.

What that conditioning never asks us to do is the opposite: to actually talk to refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants. To learn their stories. To recognize that they have families, communities, hopes, and dreams the same as anyone else standing in line at the grocery store.

That’s the thing tribalism fights hardest to prevent: seeing the person instead of the category. It doesn’t happen on its own, and the Ogles and Fine quotes above aren’t outliers. They’re what that same primal instinct looks like when it gets amplified from the highest levels of government instead of checked by them.

Set that rhetoric against what this specific community actually did to get here: served for years to qualify, submitted to vetting by the same government now calling them a risk, in many cases risked their lives multiple times over on routes that could have killed them, left everything they knew specifically because they wanted what America is supposed to represent, rule of law, due process, the ability to live without fear for their lives.

Freedom to live simply and to simply live.

That’s the real cost of letting tribalism do the thinking instead of looking at the actual people involved: Abdulhaq specifically, or the engineer in Texas, or the man in Washington state afraid to apply for citizenship he’s already earned. What gets lost is the plain fact that this is a promise the United States made, on paper, in law, to specific human beings, in exchange for their help staying alive in a war we asked them to help us fight.

What struck me most, talking to Abdulhaq directly, wasn’t his anger. It was his love. A love for a country he had never once set foot in, carried through seven months of mountain crossings and jail cells, through years of denials, through a life he’d built in Germany, marriage, a community, something real, and left anyway, because the pull toward a country that had failed him for over a decade was still stronger than the life already in front of him.

Sitting in his Evanston apartment with his wife, Weeda, over a cup of green tea, he put it simply: “United States is opportunity’s land. [We] still think about our dream to have that.”

When he finally heard the words “Welcome to the United States” at O’Hare, his own reaction wasn’t relief or vindication. It was something closer to belonging: “They like me to be here. Part of these people.”

I wish I could put him in front of every reader of this piece. Not his file, not his case number, him: the resolve it took to hold onto that love for thirteen years, and the plain, unguarded positivity he still carries into a country that has given him every reason not to.

Abdulhaq put it more simply than I can. From the book: “We are human. We deserve to be seen as human.”

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Smart Ruminations is 100% subscriber-supported. No advertisers. No institutional funding. No donor class to answer to. Only you.

For four+ years I’ve written about the gap between the America we were promised and the one being built around us. If it’s the kind of analysis you want to exist in the world: factual, non-tribal, willing to follow an argument wherever the evidence leads regardless of whose politics it complicates, I’d be grateful for your support.

Paid subscriptions are just $5 a month. Every dollar goes directly toward the research and writing that makes pieces like this one possible. I mean it when I say that your support means the world to me. It’s what allows me to keep doing this work independently, on my own terms, accountable only to the readers who make it all worth while.

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References & Further Reading

Sullivan, Spencer, and Abdulhaq Sodais. Not Our Problem. April, 2026. https://www.notourproblembook.com/

United States, Congress. Afghan Allies Protection Act of 2009. Public Law 111-8, 2009, as amended. https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-6-part-h-chapter-9

“They Fought for the U.S. in Afghanistan. Now They Worry About Losing Their Green Cards.” NPR, 15 Aug. 2026.

“He Risked His Life for American Soldiers in Afghanistan. Would America Let Him In?” Los Angeles Times, 23 Dec. 2025.

“An Afghan Man Spent 13 Years Waiting for the US to Keep Its Word. He Still Cherishes His American Dream.” Chicago Tribune, 21 June 2026. https://www.chicagotribune.com/2026/06/21/afgan-us-military-interpreter-immigrant/

United States, Citizenship and Immigration Services. Newsroom release on post-shooting vetting guidance for “high-risk countries.” 27 Nov. 2025. https://www.uscis.gov/newsroom/news-releases/uscis-implements-additional-national-security-measures-in-the-wake-of-national-guard-shooting-by

United States, Department of Homeland Security. Notice terminating Temporary Protected Status for Afghanistan. May 2025. https://www.uscis.gov/newsroom/news-releases/dhs-terminating-temporary-protected-status-for-afghanistan

Council on American-Islamic Relations. 2025 Civil Rights Report. CAIR, 2026. https://www.cair.com/resources/cair-civil-rights-reports/

“Republicans Push to ‘Deport Them All’ After D.C. Shooting.” Axios, 27 Nov. 2025.

“US Civil Rights Group Documents ‘Broad Attack on Muslim Life’ in 2025.” Al Jazeera, 10 Mar. 2026.

Reporting on Trump’s post-shooting remarks and the administration’s Afghan visa/refugee policy response. AP, PBS, and Refugee Council USA, Nov.-Dec. 2025. https://apnews.com/article/immigration-border-trump-afghan-asylum-refugee-710973fb9bce4a83a9d979852865cdab, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-administration-halts-all-asylum-decisions-after-shooting-of-national-guard-members, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0q5w8l88dvo

“Democrats, Republicans Ask Trump Administration Not to Ship Afghan Allies to Unsafe Countries.” Reuters, republished via U.S. News & World Report, 11 June 2026.

Blumenthal, Richard, et al. Letter from 29 senators to Secretary of State Marco Rubio on the Qatar-to-DRC relocation plan. Apr. 2026. https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/blumenthal-leads-group-of-29-senators-calling-on-trump-administration-to-halt-removal-of-afghan-allies-to-drc

Reporting on Shawn VanDiver and AfghanEvac’s response to the DRC relocation plan. ABC News and NBC News, Apr. 2026. https://abcnews.com/Politics/trump-administration-send-afghans-aided-us-forces-congo/story?id=132288698, https://www.nbcnews.com/world/asia/trump-send-afghan-allies-us-congo-taliban-qatar-camp-refugees-rcna341352

I have daughters, daughters who competed in school sports. I have granddaughters. I also have sons and grandsons. My mama-bear need to protect them, all of them, goes without question. We all want to protect our kids. It is not a controversial statement by any means and it has been a part of parenting (sometimes an exhausting part) since… well… kids.

But IL26-638, the Let’s Go Washington initiative funded chiefly by Redmond investor Brian Heywood, does not do that. It heads to the 2026 ballot after the Legislature declined to act on it by the March deadline, and it puts girls, and truthfully every child in Washington state, in more danger than the problem it claims to solve.

Let’s start with what the bill says and then follow the questions that it raises.

What the initiative does

IL26-638 would require any student competing in girls’ interscholastic sports to submit a doctor-signed statement certifying that the student is “biologically female.” Washington student-athletes already complete a standard physical exam before each season, and that WIAA form already asks parents to list the student’s sex.

IL26-638 adds a second, more specific requirement on top of that existing form: a physician’s certification, verified through one of three methods the initiative names outright — anatomy, genetics, or naturally occurring testosterone levels. The bill doesn’t specify which of the three a doctor should use, or require all three, so it hands that decision to individual physicians and families.

The initiative’s own official title, as filed with the Washington State Legislature, is “K-12 athletics participation.” It amends the general K-12 school athletics statutes (RCW 28A.600.200 and RCW 28A.640.020), not a high-school-specific one, and it carries no age floor. Reporting on the bill’s text has confirmed the same reading: the certification requirement applies to any athlete “from kindergarten through high school.”

A family medicine physician who provides youth sports physicals, quoted in that coverage, put it bluntly: youth sports physicals are built to check joints, bones, and heart health, not to verify sex, and this measure reads like it wasn’t written by anyone who genuinely practices medicine on children. So, a kindergartner signing up for after-school soccer falls under the exact same certification requirement as a high school senior trying out for varsity.

Which raises an obvious problem with the entire premise.

Fairness based on what, exactly?

IL26-638 is sold as a fairness measure, protecting girls from a physical advantage rooted in male puberty. That’s the actual scientific argument behind sex-segregated sports generally, and it’s a real one. The research on this is consistent: before puberty, there is no meaningful sex difference in circulating testosterone, and no meaningful sex difference in athletic performance. The gap that everyone is worried about, the one this bill exists to police, doesn’t appear until testosterone rises at puberty, typically somewhere between ages 9 and 14 depending on the child.

What precisely, then, is a doctor certifying when a 6-year-old’s family brings her in for a kindergarten soccer physical? There is no competitive advantage to detect in a child who hasn’t gone through puberty, because the entire mechanism the bill’s own supporters point to as justification hasn’t switched on yet, in any child, cisgender or transgender.

If the goal were genuinely limited to addressing puberty-driven competitive advantage, the bill would say so. It would set an age threshold tied to the biology it claims to be protecting, the way youth sports leagues already do for things like tackle football weight classes or age-banded swim heats. It doesn’t. It applies the same medical certification, the same cost, and the same genital exam, chromosome test, or hormone panel to a kindergartner as it does to a varsity athlete.

That gap shows the bill’s own stated science doesn’t match its own scope. It was not built around the biology it invokes to justify itself.

It’s important to be specific about what that gap does and doesn’t tell us, because it would be a mistake to read it as “the bill just needs an age floor.” Adding one wouldn’t fix what’s really is wrong here. A genital exam is not less invasive or less traumatic for a 14-year-old than it is for a 6-year-old; if anything, a teenager is old enough to fully understand what’s happening to her and why, which can carry its own kind of harm.

The sex-discrimination problem doesn’t disappear at any age either, and neither does the cost problem; a family facing the same lab bill for their sophomore is in the same position as a family facing it for their kindergartner. Narrowing the age range would just mean fewer girls get subjected to an unscientific, invasive, discriminatory system. It wouldn’t make the system itself sound.

This raises a question its sponsors haven’t answered with any specificity: what, specifically, would it take to comply with this law, what would it cost, and why does the burden fall on girls alone?

What would a “biological sex” certification really involve?

The initiative names three acceptable verification methods. Each one is a different kind of medical intervention, with a different cost and a different level of intrusion:

• Anatomical exam. A physical examination of external genitalia to confirm anatomy. For a minor, this is not a routine part of a sports physical today. It would require either a new, targeted exam beyond the standard sports physical, or a referral to a specialist willing to perform and document one.

• Genetic testing. A karyotype test, to check chromosomes: a blood draw sent to a lab, where cells are cultured for several days to weeks before a geneticist can interpret the results. Karyotyping for reasons outside a documented medical need is frequently not treated as medically necessary by insurers, which is an important point because non-medically-necessary testing is far more likely to be denied coverage or billed as self-pay. Genetic testing broadly runs anywhere from a few hundred dollars to several thousand out of pocket when insurance doesn’t cover it, and even insured patients typically still owe 10 to 20 percent of the allowed cost in copays and coinsurance.

• Hormone testing. A blood test for naturally occurring testosterone levels. Testosterone naturally runs highest in the morning and shifts by as much as 20 to 30 percent across the menstrual cycle, so timing alone can swing a result, before factoring in medical conditions like PCOS that also affect levels. It still requires a lab draw, a physician order, and in many cases a specialist interpretation, and an unusual reading often prompts a repeat draw, timed more carefully, rather than settling the question in a single visit. Results typically come back within a few days, and the lab work alone typically runs $20 to $150 out of pocket.

None of these are currently a standard, no-cost part of the WIAA sports physical every athlete already completes. The initiative doesn't require insurers to cover any of them, doesn't cap what a family can be charged, doesn't say what happens to a girl whose family can't afford whichever test her doctor recommends, or whose doctor won't perform the exam at all, and doesn't say what happens if a result comes back ambiguous, an intersex variation, a borderline hormone reading, a doctor who genuinely isn't sure. There's no appeals process and no state standard for resolving an inconclusive case.

Just a family and a physician left to sort it out on their own.

Is this a visual exam, or something more?

The bill’s text doesn’t say. It names “anatomy” as one acceptable verification method and leaves the details entirely to the physician.

Dr. Erica Li, a pediatrician who supports the initiative, has written publicly, in The Columbian and The Daily Chronicle, that sex verification would likely mean a brief, external, visual genital exam, the same kind already performed on newborns, and that this is standard, non-invasive pediatric practice. She’s not wrong about the mechanics in isolation. Internal or speculum exams are essentially never performed on pre-pubertal children outside of suspected injury; when doctors do check a young child’s genital anatomy, it is external and visual.

But her comparison leaves out important context. A newborn exam happens once, as part of routine care, performed by the family’s own doctor, for a medical record that has nothing to do with athletic eligibility. What IL26-638 requires is different: a genital exam performed on demand, potentially every season, by whichever provider a family can access, specifically so a third party, the school or the state, can certify a child eligible to play a sport. And because the bill sets no standardized protocol, what happens in an ambiguous case is left entirely to that individual doctor’s judgment, meaning a “brief visual exam” for one girl could become something more involved for another, with no rule requiring it stop at a visual check.

The honest answer is: probably visual, for most girls, most of the time. But “probably” is doing a lot of work in a law that would apply to every girl in K-12 sports statewide, and neither the bill’s text nor its supporters’ public statements make that a guarantee.

There’s a second layer to this worth talking about, one that should raise red flags for any parent of a young child.

Around the same age this bill first applies, kindergarten, first grade, we teach kids a simple rule about their bodies: the parts covered by a swimsuit are private. No adult touches or looks at them without asking, and without a specific, trusted reason. If someone tries, the right answer is to say no, then tell a grown-up right away. It’s a cornerstone of body-safety education at exactly this age, taught in classrooms, at home, and by pediatricians themselves.

IL26-638 asks a 6-year-old to set that rule aside, for a potentially unfamiliar doctor, so she can play a sport she loves.

Here’s what makes that especially troubling: in this situation, her no doesn’t actually work. If she’s uncomfortable and asks to stop, the exam doesn’t simply not happen. She doesn’t get to play. We teach her that her body is hers to protect, then build a system where protecting it costs her a spot on the team. That’s not just inconsistent. It teaches her that saying no has a price, and that’s a lesson no child should learn from a youth soccer league.

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Are those costs prohibitive?

For a lot of families, yes. A karyotype test alone can run into the thousands of dollars for a family paying out of pocket, and testing not tied to a documented medical diagnosis is exactly the kind of testing insurers are most likely to treat as elective and decline to cover. Add a genetic counseling visit, often required before a lab will run the test, and a family could be looking at several hundred dollars before the test itself is even drawn.

That cost lands hardest on exactly the families a “protect girls’ sports” bill should be trying to include: the multi-sport rural family, the single parent, the family on a high-deductible plan. A wealthy family can absorb a $2,000 lab bill without blinking. A family in Franklin County working two jobs cannot. If the only way to prove your daughter is eligible to play is to pay for a test her wealthier teammate’s family can afford without a second thought, that is not a fairness rule. It is a wealth filter dressed up as a fairness rule.

There’s a logistics problem underneath the cost problem, too, and it hits rural districts hardest. In schools with large numbers of students who don’t have a regular doctor, sports physicals are often done in batches: volunteer medical professionals come in for a day and work through students, station-style in the gym, fully clothed, according to a former school nurse who has worked in Washington schools. That’s how a lot of rural kids get their yearly physical since it’s free, on-site, and doesn’t require a family to book an individual appointment somewhere, which can mean a long drive in areas with few providers.

None of the three verification methods IL26-638 requires work in that setting. You can’t run a karyotype test or check reproductive anatomy in a gym line. A rural family who currently relies on the free gym-day physical would be pushed out of that system entirely and into a private appointment, on top of whatever the test itself costs, just to keep their daughter eligible to play.

Why aren’t boys getting the same exam?

This is the question that exposes the whole framework. If anatomy, genetics, and testosterone are the gold standard for determining who is “biologically female” enough to play girls’ sports, why doesn’t a boy have to prove he’s biologically male before he’s allowed to play boys’ sports?

The initiative doesn’t ask that of him. To be fair, the worry that a transgender girl might have a physical advantage on a girls’ team is real, not hypothetical, and it deserves a serious answer rather than just passing it off. But if that concern is sincere and principled, rather than aimed at one group specifically, it should run the other way too.

A transgender boy competing on a boys’ team raises the exact same category question, a student not born male competing in a category defined by male biology. If the underlying principle really is “students should compete in the athletic category consistent with the sex they were assigned at birth,” full stop, he should trigger the same certification requirement his female counterpart does. He doesn’t, under this bill, which only restricts participation in one direction: away from girls’ sports.

That asymmetry runs deeper than just trans boys, though. Under this law, no boy of any kind, transgender or not, must prove anything. Only girls carry the burden of medical proof. Boys are presumed correctly sexed by default. Whether that amounts to unlawful discrimination is a legal question for the courts, but as a matter of plain description, a law that imposes a cost, a medical procedure, and a disclosure requirement on one sex and not the other, for the same underlying activity, singles out girls for extra scrutiny while leaving the identical scenario on the boys’ side untouched.

That’s a strong sign the actual organizing principle isn’t a neutral, evenly applied rule about sex categories in sports. It’s specifically about limiting who’s allowed to be on a girls’ team.

There’s also a second, quieter harm buried in here. A rule requiring physician certification of “biological sex” as a condition of playing girls’ sports doesn’t just affect transgender athletes. It puts every girl, including every girl who is not transgender, through a system that can flag her for additional testing based on nothing more than a coach’s assumption, a rumor, or an unusually low testosterone reading tied to a medical condition that has nothing to do with gender identity.

Intersex girls, girls with PCOS, and girls who are simply tall or muscular for their age are all more exposed under this system than they are today. “Forced outing,” the risk that a medical finding gets disclosed beyond the doctor’s office, is a real concern raised by critics of the bill, not a hypothetical one.

The true cost of fairness

If we’re going to have an honest conversation about what truly determines whether a kid has an unfair edge in youth sports, the conversation shouldn’t stop at gender. All kids are different. They come to a field or a court with different bodies, different growth timelines, different natural ability, and, increasingly, wildly different levels of financial investment behind them.

The average American family now spends over $1,000 a year on one child’s primary sport, up 46 percent since 2019, and that’s just the average. Families on competitive travel or club tracks routinely spend $5,000 to $20,000 a year per child, on private coaching, out-of-state tournaments, and specialized training that starts in elementary school. Low-income kids are roughly three times less likely to ever make a travel team at all, regardless of talent, simply because the entry price is too high.

That gap produces a far larger, far more measurable competitive advantage than anything IL26-638 claims to address, and it affects vastly more kids. Is it fair that a girl whose family can afford a $12,000-a-year travel program and private coaching starting at age six competes against a girl whose family could only afford rec league once she reached the grade where it became free?

Nobody is proposing a doctor’s note or a certification process to address that gap, even though it shapes far more outcomes on far more fields than the scenario this initiative is built around. That’s not a call to regulate family sports spending; it’s a call to notice which inequities lawmakers choose to police with medical mandates and which ones they simply accept as the cost of doing business.

If competitive fairness for girls were really the animating value here, it’s a strange place to spend the state’s first, and only, intervention.

How many transgender children in Washington does this even affect?

This is the part the initiative’s backers rarely back up with statistics so I’ll try to get as close as the public data allows.

Washington doesn’t currently collect statewide data specifically counting transgender youth, so no state agency publishes an exact figure. What we have instead are national estimates from the Williams Institute at UCLA, the leading academic source on LGBTQ demographics, applied to Washington’s population.

Here’s the math, step by step:

• National rate (Williams Institute, 2025): about 3.3 percent of Americans ages 13 to 17, roughly 724,000 young people, identify as transgender.

• Washington’s under-18 population: about 21.7 percent of the state’s roughly 7.96 million residents, or roughly 1.72 million children.

• Washington teens ages 13–17: five of those eighteen years, which works out to roughly 470,000 to 480,000 teens in that age band.

• Applying the national rate to Washington: a rough estimate of 15,000 to 16,000 transgender youth ages 13–17 statewide, across every school district, every sport, and every gender identity, not just those assigned male at birth who might play girls’ sports.

Now compare that to the number this initiative is specifically built around:

• Transgender girls playing high school girls’ sports in Washington: no official count exists. WIAA doesn’t track it, and neither backers nor opponents of IL26-638 have cited a specific number during the campaign.

• Nationally, in states that do track it: the number of transgender athletes competing in girls’ sports consistently lands in the single digits to low double digits per state, not hundreds or thousands.

Put together, the comparison looks something like this: a law requiring every girl in Washington who wants to play sports to be prepared to prove her sex to a physician, at a cost that could run into the thousands of dollars, in order to address a number of actual transgender athletes in girls’ sports that is almost certainly a tiny fraction of one percent of the roughly 15,000 transgender youth living in Washington.

That is not a proportionate policy response. That is a broad mandate imposed on a large population of girls to address a vanishingly small number of participants, with no funding, no cost cap, and no equivalent burden on boys.

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Why does this keep showing up in bills that have nothing to do with sports?

IL26-638 isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s part of a larger pattern.

In March 2026, Senate Republicans tried to amend the SAVE America Act, a federal voter ID and citizenship-verification bill, with language barring transgender athletes from women’s and girls’ sports. It was added at President Trump’s request, one of several unrelated priorities attached to the voting bill. Senate Democrats blocked it on a near party-line vote, and several senators objected specifically that it had no connection to the bill’s subject matter.

That wasn’t a one-off. A year earlier, in March 2025, Senate Republicans brought a standalone bill to ban transgender athletes from women’s sports at federally funded schools. Senate Democrats blocked that one too, and Colorado Senator John Hickenlooper, who has said he personally opposes transgender women competing in women’s sports if other athletes object, still voted no and described the effort as reheating a culture-war fight for electoral purposes rather than addressing an actual policy gap.

Separately, in February 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14201, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” directing federal agencies to enforce Title IX against schools that allow transgender athletes to compete. The same language has surfaced as a rider or talking point attached to spending bills, shutdown negotiations, and other legislation with no obvious connection to athletics.

What’s the basis for treating this as a standalone, headline-level threat that belongs in a citizenship-verification bill, a spending fight, or a state ballot initiative aimed at sports physicals? The honest answer, based on the numbers earlier in this piece, is that it isn’t proportional to anything measurable. We’re talking about a rounding error within a rounding error: an estimated 15,000 to 16,000 transgender youth of any kind in Washington state, out of which the number specifically competing in girls’ interscholastic sports is small enough that no state athletic association publishes a running count. Nationally, the pattern is the same.

Republican supporters describe the policy as “widely popular” and argue it protects fairness in principle, regardless of how many athletes are affected. Critics argue that’s exactly the point: a policy this popular as a talking point and this narrow in actual impact is more useful as a wedge issue than as a solution to an athletic fairness problem. Both of those can be true at once. A position can poll well and still be addressing a problem far smaller than its political weight suggests.

What should make every voter, regardless of their political perspective, stop and think, is a piece of legislation on an unrelated subject getting a rider attached to it that targets a group this small, this repeatedly, across completely different bills and completely different sessions of Congress. That’s not what a targeted, evidence-based policy response looks like. It’s what a message bill looks like, one built to generate attack ads and voting record soundbites rather than to solve the underlying fairness question.

IL26-638 deserves to be evaluated on its own text and its own consequences for Washington families, not just as culture-war rhetoric arriving on a mail-in ballot. But it doesn’t arrive in a vacuum, and voters are entitled to notice that the same three-word phrase keeps landing in bills that have nothing to do with each other.

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Washington isn’t alone

If you’re reading this from outside Washington, it’s worth knowing this isn’t a one-state story. IL26-638 is one of five similar measures on 2026 ballots or moving through signature verification nationally.

Colorado has its own sex-based sports eligibility initiative on the November ballot, and the campaign opposing it is making the identical warning: that the measure “could put some girls at greater risk by subjecting them to invasive genital exams just to play on an after-school team.”

Arizona voters will decide Proposition 318, referred to the ballot by the legislature rather than gathered through citizen signatures, which goes further than sports alone and also restricts school bathroom and locker room access.

Nebraska has a similar measure that had collected more than 211,000 signatures as of early August, still pending official verification. Missouri has a related measure covering both sports participation and certain medical procedures for transgender minors. Similar efforts in Maine and Nevada both failed to qualify for this year’s ballot.

None of this is happening by accident. Twenty-seven states have already passed some version of a sports-eligibility restriction through their normal legislative process since 2020. What’s changed for 2026 is the strategy: advocacy groups are increasingly bypassing legislatures altogether and taking the question straight to voters through ballot initiatives, a tactic that one advocate for transgender rights has compared directly to the marriage-equality ballot fights of the mid-2000s.

What sets Washington apart isn’t the goal, every one of these measures shares the same basic aim, it’s the mechanism. IL26-638’s three-method medical certification requirement, with no age floor, is by most accounts the most invasive and most explicit version of this idea on any 2026 ballot. Whatever happens in Washington in November, this fight isn’t confined to one state, and it isn’t over regardless of how this particular vote goes.

If not this, then what?

It’s a fair question: if the goal really is figuring out whether an athlete has a hormone-driven advantage, what is the broader response?

The short answer is that most of the organizations working on this problem, including ones with genuinely restrictive intentions, have moved away from medical testing, not toward more of it.

The NCAA is the clearest example, though it’s worth being upfront about who the NCAA specifically governs: college athletes, undergraduate and graduate students, all 18 or older. Its old policy required transgender athletes to document sport-specific testosterone thresholds three times a year: at the start of the season, six months later, and again within four weeks of championship selection.

In February 2025, the NCAA scrapped that entirely. The new policy is a blanket rule: no student assigned male at birth competes on an NCAA women’s team, period. No lab work, no ongoing certification, no doctor’s note required from anyone. After years of trying to manage this through testosterone testing, the NCAA concluded a flat categorical rule was simpler and abandoned the medical model altogether.

That’s worth considering carefully rather than as a ready-made template for K-12. A flat rule like the NCAA’s is at least responding to a population where puberty-driven physical differences are already fully in place. Applied to a kindergarten soccer team, that same rule wouldn’t be responding to anything measurable at all, since, as the science earlier in this piece shows, there’s no hormone-driven advantage to protect against before puberty. At that age, what youth sports genuinely provide, community, movement, belonging, has nothing to do with testosterone levels or scholarship stakes.

A blanket exclusion based on identity alone doesn’t protect a fairness principle that doesn’t yet apply. It just excludes a child from the thing rec sports are for, without addressing any advantage that exists at that age.

Most states with K-12 restrictions never used a medical model in the first place. Of the states that limit sports participation by sex, ten require nothing more than an original birth certificate, a document families already have on file with the school. No exam, no test, no doctor involved. A few states go even lighter: Nevada’s guidance directs schools to determine eligibility from existing school records and how a student lives day to day, with no medical or legal documentation required at all.

Internationally, the same shift is happening. Sports federations that spent years enforcing testosterone thresholds are moving toward a fixed developmental standard instead, whether a transition occurred before male puberty, decided essentially once rather than tested on a recurring basis. The IOC’s newly announced 2026 policy, still being finalized, centers on a one-time genetic screening, a single test rather than a repeated one, and it applies only to the small population of athletes competing at the Olympic level, not to every child in a youth soccer league.

Across nearly every organization that has genuinely studied this problem, at the college level, the international level, and in most other states, the pattern is a move toward simpler, cheaper, less invasive verification, or none at all. Not toward the anatomy exams, karyotyping, and hormone panels IL26-638 would require of every girl in Washington K-12 sports. Even the NCAA, which explicitly bars transgender women from women’s teams, doesn’t ask what this initiative asks.

If the organizations most committed to restricting participation have concluded that medical testing isn’t the answer, it’s a reasonable question why a Washington ballot initiative would reach for the most invasive version of a tool everyone else is setting down.

Where this leaves us

This is an honest conversation because the tension here isn’t served by ignoring that it exists. Fair competition in girls’ sports is a real value, one plenty of Democrats, Republicans, and coaches of both share genuinely, including in my own household.

The instinct behind IL26-638 isn’t manufactured out of nothing. But an unfunded, uncapped, physician-verification mandate that falls only on girls, that can cost a family thousands of dollars, that exposes non-transgender girls with ordinary medical variations to new scrutiny, and that is sized to address a problem far smaller than the population it burdens, is not a protection. It’s a cost, a privacy risk, and a legal liability, handed to the people it claims to be shielding.

If the goal is genuinely to protect girls, the place to start is asking these bills’ own sponsors for the numbers they’ve left out: what the tests cost, who pays for them, why boys are exempt, and how many kids we are actually talking about. Those aren’t gotcha questions. They’re the questions any bill this consequential should be able to answer before it goes on a ballot.

Washingtonians, what you can do

If this piece raised the same questions for you that it raised for me, No Hate in WA State is the campaign organized against IL26-638, and their site lays out concrete next steps: pledging to vote no, volunteering, sending a letter to the editor, or donating to the campaign. You can find all of it at nohateinwastate.org/about-i-638.

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Resources & Further Reading

Athletic Business. “Washington Ballot Initiative Would Require Genital Exams to Participate in Girls’ Sports.” Athletic Business, 8 June 2026, www.athleticbusiness.com/operations/governing-bodies/article/15827004/washington-ballot-initiative-would-require-genital-exams-to-participate-in-girls-sports.

Ballotpedia News Staff. “Five 2026 Ballot Measures Address Sex-Based School Sports Eligibility and Bans on Certain Medical Procedures for Transgender Minors.” Ballotpedia, 23 July 2026, news.ballotpedia.org/2026/07/23/five-2026-ballot-measures-address-sex-based-school-sports-eligibility-and-bans-on-certain-medical-procedures-for-transgender-minors-another-is-pending-signature-verification/.

Ballotpedia. “Colorado Sex Requirement for School and College Sports Initiative (2026).” Ballotpedia, ballotpedia.org/Colorado_Sex_Requirement_for_School_and_College_Sports_Initiative_(2026).

Ballotpedia. “Washington Initiative IL26-638, Fairness in Girls’ Athletics Initiative (2026).” Ballotpedia, ballotpedia.org.

Cleveland Clinic. “Karyotype Test.” Cleveland Clinic, my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diagnostics/21556-karyotype-test.

Cleveland Clinic. “Testosterone Test.” Cleveland Clinic, my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diagnostics/24215-testosterone-test.

Foran, Clare, et al. “Senate Democrats Block GOP-Led Bill to Ban Transgender Athletes from Women’s Sports.” CNN, 3 Mar. 2025, www.cnn.com/2025/03/03/politics/senate-transgender-sports-bill-vote/index.html.

Herman, Jody L., and Andrew R. Flores. How Many Adults and Youth Identify as Transgender in the United States? Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law, Aug. 2025, williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-adults-united-states/.

Jalonick, Mary Clare. “Senate Blocks Amendment on Transgender Athletes During Weekend Session on Voting Bill.” Associated Press, 21 Mar. 2026, www.wabe.org/senate-blocks-amendment-on-transgender-athletes-during-weekend-session-on-voting-bill/.

Li, Erica. “Local View: How Sex-Verification Would Likely Be Conducted.” The Columbian, 11 July 2026, www.columbian.com/news/2026/jul/11/local-view-how-sex-verification-would-likely-be-conducted/.

Li, Erica. “Commentary: The Truth About Sex Verification for K-12 Student Athletes.” The Daily Chronicle, 8 July 2026, www.chronline.com/stories/commentary-the-truth-about-sex-verification-for-k-12-student-athletes,405178.

NCAA. “NCAA Announces Transgender Student-Athlete Participation Policy Change.” NCAA.org, 6 Feb. 2025, www.ncaa.org/news/2025/2/6/media-center-ncaa-announces-transgender-student-athlete-participation-policy-change.aspx.

NCAA. “Participation Policy for Transgender Student-Athletes.” NCAA.org, www.ncaa.org/what-we-do/health-safety-and-performance/participation-policy-for-transgender-student-athletes/.

No Hate in WA State. “About IL26-001 & IL26-638.” No Hate in WA State, nohateinwastate.org/about-i-638.

NBC News Staff. “Senate Democrats Block Bill Ban Transgender Athletes Women’s Sports.” NBC News, 3 Mar. 2025, www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/senate-democrats-block-bill-ban-transgender-athletes-womens-sports-rcna194623.

OPB Staff. “Ballot Initiative Could Require Genital Exams for Washington Secondary Students to Play Sports.” Oregon Public Broadcasting, 5 June 2026, www.opb.org/article/2026/06/05/washington-students-sports-genital-exams/.

Raw Story. “Kindergarten Girls Targeted for Invasive Exams by New GOP-Led Ballot Measure.” Raw Story, Aug. 2026, www.rawstory.com/anti-trans-sports-measure/.

Testing.com. “Karyotyping Test: What It Measures and How It Works.” Testing.com, www.testing.com/tests/chromosome-analysis-karyotyping/.

The Advocate. “Washington Ballot Measure Could Force All Girls to Have Genital Inspections to Play Sports.” The Advocate, Aug. 2026, www.advocate.com/politics/states/washington-kids-genital-exams.

Washington State House Republicans. “IL26-638: Protecting Girls’ Sports.” Washington State House Republicans, 23 Jan. 2026, houserepublicans.wa.gov/il26-638/.

Wikipedia contributors. “2026 Washington Initiative IL26-638.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Washington_Initiative_IL26-638.

Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law. More Than Half of Transgender Youth Live in a State with at Least One Law or Policy Restricting Their Rights. Williams Institute, 2025, williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/press/anti-trans-leg-2025-press-release/.

Conflation /kənˈfleɪ.ʃən/ The act of treating two or more distinct things as one, especially when their differences get lost in the process. In logic and rhetoric, conflation produces real errors and misunderstandings, and it can happen by accident or on purpose.

There’s a word that has taken on new resonance for me in today’s political world. It isn’t new, but it’s proven useful for understanding how political rhetoric actually works. Conflation. Pair unfamiliar or similar-sounding terms into one and it does its job fast.

There are few places this is as obvious as with the conflation of the Democratic Party, democratic socialists (lowercase intentional), socialism, Socialism, and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

A distant cousin re-posted a great example of this to her Facebook page. The original post was written by a self-described Democrat and it started with the premise: “It is my understanding that about 30% of Democrats are aligning with democratic socialists.” He then went on, outlining with great alarm what he described as the current platform of the Democratic Socialists of America.

She added her own comment when she re-posted it: “He does a good job of outlining the Democratic Party’s platform. Some of this is scary. To my friends who are Democrats. Do you align with all of this? If not, where do you differ?”

I was immediately struck by the first most obvious conflation and pointed it out: “In short, this isn’t the ‘Democratic Party’s’ platform. And being a democratic socialist or supporting democratic socialist policies doesn’t mean a candidate or politician aligns with the DSA.”

She updated her post to read: “the Democratic Socialists Party’s platform” in the place of the “Democratic Party’s platform.”

I thanked her for updating her post and commented again: “One more clarification though because it matters. The DSA isn’t a party. It’s a membership advocacy organization with dues, local chapters, its own internal platform process, separate from the Democratic Party’s actual platform.”

On its own, her statement could pass for an innocent mix-up between two similar-sounding terms. But it’s part of something bigger: a mis/disinformation campaign that conflates these titles (and really all the terms tied to the “socialist” label) on purpose, to provoke fear and an immediate gut reaction.

My first thought was that if you’re a Republican, or lean that way, do you believe in every plank of Project 2025? All 900-plus pages, written largely by Heritage Foundation staff and former Trump officials, and would you personally work to implement every one of them if you were in office? If your honest answer is no, or “I’d need to look at the specifics,” you’ve just proven the point. Being a Republican, even a Trump-supporting one, doesn’t mean signing onto everything in a 900-page document written by people adjacent to your party. It never did.

The same logic applies here, with less ambiguity, not more. A candidate calling themselves a democratic socialist, or holding a DSA card, hasn’t necessarily signed onto DSA’s full platform. And DSA’s platform absolutely isn’t the Democratic Party’s platform, any more than Project 2025 is the official GOP platform.

As an example, here’s the “logic” I actually hear, or something close to it: Mamdani has put forward proposals to tax the ultra-wealthy on their second homes in New York City. That sounds like Socialism. People call him a democratic socialist, which must mean he aligns with the Democratic Socialists of America’s platform. Which means he supports abolishing the Senate. Each link in that chain sounds almost plausible on its own. But when you follow the whole thing through and a property tax proposal on second homes somehow arrives at a constitutional fight nobody actually asked him about. That’s conflation doing exactly what it does. Fast.

None of this works if the terms themselves stay blurry. Here’s a brief description of each.

Definitions

The Democratic Party

A major U.S. political party, one of two dominant parties, with an official national platform adopted every four years by delegates at its national convention. It has no membership dues, no admission requirement beyond registering to vote as a Democrat where states allow party registration, and no single ideological test. Its elected officials range from DSA-endorsed members of Congress to moderate, business-friendly senators in red and purple states. The platform is a negotiated document representing that entire range, not any one faction’s wish list.

democratic socialist (intentional lowercase, small-d, small-s)

A political label, not an organization or a membership. It moves in two directions. Some people claim it for themselves, in the broad tradition of using democratic elections and existing institutions to expand economic and social rights, without belonging to DSA, without agreeing with DSA’s platform, and without holding views outside the Democratic Party’s actual coalition.

Just as often, though, it gets applied from the outside, by opponents, media coverage, or casual shorthand, to a candidate or politician based on a single endorsement or policy position, whether or not that person uses the term for themselves. As of a CNN/SSRS poll in July, 34% of Democratic-aligned adults now self-identify with this label. That number measures the first kind of usage. It says nothing about the second, which is where most of the confusion around specific candidates actually starts.

Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)

A specific, dues-paying membership organization founded in 1982, with local chapters, an elected national leadership body called the National Political Committee. It has its own internal platform-drafting process which most recently produced an updated program called “Workers Deserve More,” that it passed in mid-2026. The full platform is public, and worth reading in its own words rather than through anyone’s summary of it, including mine.

DSA endorses candidates, some of whom are members, some of whom are not, and those candidates frequently run on platforms narrower than DSA’s own. DSA is not a political party. It cannot appear on a ballot line. It has no formal authority over the Democratic Party’s platform, its convention, or its elected officials.

A fourth term worth separating out: socialism versus Socialism

Lowercase “socialism,” in its textbook sense, refers to a family of economic theories built around some degree of collective or public ownership of the means of production. That’s what DSA’s platform actually proposes: public ownership of major industries.

What many Democrats and progressives mean when they use the word casually is usually something else entirely: social democracy, a system that keeps private ownership and markets intact but uses heavy taxation and public spending to fund universal programs. Denmark and Norway, often invoked as "socialist" success stories, are social democracies in exactly this sense, not socialist economies. The word "socialism" gets stretched to cover both categories, even though they involve fundamentally different economic architecture.

Universal healthcare is where this stretching shows up constantly, and the mechanics vary more than the label suggests.

Some universal systems, the UK’s NHS, the U.S.’s own VA, do involve direct government ownership: publicly owned hospitals, often publicly employed doctors, closer to textbook socialism. Others, the Bismarck model used across much of Europe, achieve universal coverage through mandatory insurance and tightly regulated private providers, with no government ownership at all, a social democratic approach.

Most of what gets proposed in American healthcare debates, expanding Medicare, a public option, is closer to the social democratic kind: a change in who negotiates and who pays, not a change in who owns the hospital.

DSA’s own platform, notably, leans toward the ownership kind, it explicitly calls for investing in new public hospitals and clinics, alongside its universal coverage guarantee. That’s not some untested idea. Roughly 920 of the country’s community hospitals, plus another 200 federal facilities run by the VA, the Department of Defense, and the Indian Health Service, are already publicly owned today, close to a fifth of all U.S. hospitals combined. Expanding that model further is a real policy debate worth having on the merits. It isn’t a leap into uncharted territory.

So the “socialist” label isn’t always wrong when applied to a specific proposal. It’s wrong when applied to the category of “universal healthcare” as if every version worked the same way.

Capital-S “Socialism,” in most casual political usage, gets used as shorthand for twentieth-century authoritarian one-party states, the Soviet Union, Maoist China, that claimed the socialist label while functioning as centralized, undemocratic regimes. Conflating that with either of the other two, treating any policy that uses the word “socialist” as a step toward the Soviet Union, is itself one of the conflations doing work in conversations like the one that sparked this piece.

It’s worth gently noting that by that same loose standard, the current administration’s direct equity stakes in private companies, including Intel, MP Materials, and a “golden share” in U.S. Steel, could just as easily invite the capital-S label, even though it’s framed as national security strategy rather than socialism.

To be precise (because precision matters), a market economy has a well-established tool for addressing exactly this kind of national security concern: open, competitive bidding among multiple qualified companies for government contracts, which secures the same strategic interest without the government holding equity or governing stakes in any one of them. Choosing direct ownership instead, when a market-based option was available, is a meaningfully different choice than the framing suggests. People are often quick to accept national security as sufficient justification for that kind of ownership stake while waving away the same behavior, in substance, when it shows up somewhere else with a different label attached. The looseness of the label cuts in more than one direction.

All three terms are in play whenever the word gets used, and most people using it aren’t drawing the distinctions. It’s worth knowing which one is actually on the table before agreeing or disagreeing with any of them.

In short, this is why the word does opposite work depending on who’s wielding it. Progressives citing Denmark’s quality-of-life rankings or Norway’s healthcare outcomes are citing social democracies. Conservatives citing Venezuela’s economic collapse are citing an authoritarian state that nationalized its oil industry and calls itself socialist, closer to the capital-S category.

Both sides are technically talking about “socialism.” Neither is talking about the same thing the other is. And each side’s chosen example isn’t really an argument about the policy on the table, healthcare, taxation, industry ownership, whatever it happens to be. It’s a demonstration that the word can mean almost anything, deployed by whoever needs it to mean something specific in the moment.

Why the conflation matters

To be clear, this piece isn’t a referendum on DSA’s platform. Whether “Workers Deserve More” is good policy is a real question, and it deserves a real debate, on its own terms, with people who’ve actually read the document, not one settled by a paraphrase in a Facebook post or an article like this one. That’s not what I’m trying to do here.

In all honesty, I don’t have a single verdict on the platform either. Some of its ends, universal healthcare, housing security, a livable wage, I agree with. Some of its means, abolishing the Senate, full public ownership of major industries, concern me. Although through research, I can understand the reasoning. That’s a real, substantive disagreement worth having, item by item, on its own terms. But it’s a different argument than this one, and collapsing “do you support DSA’s platform” into a single yes or no is exactly the kind of flattening this piece has been arguing against from the start.

What I’m attempting is to name something narrower and, I think, more useful: what happens when a specific document, written by a specific membership organization with a specific process, gets folded into “the Democrats” as a single, flattened target. That folding is myopic, because it erases distinctions that actually matter, the difference between a party of tens of millions and an organization of tens of thousands, between a label a third of Democratic-leaning adults will claim for themselves and a 2026 platform document almost none of them could recite, between a candidate someone voted for and that candidate’s actual promises.

And in its own destructive way, it hands the loudest, most extreme document in any coalition disproportionate power to define that whole coalition in the public imagination, whether that’s DSA speaking for Democrats or Project 2025 speaking for Republicans. Neither actually works that way. Treating them as if they do makes it easier to dismiss an entire party’s worth of people, and harder to have an honest disagreement about the disagreements that actually exist.

My cousin didn’t set out to do any of that when she shared a post that she read. The original author almost certainly didn’t either when he wrote it. That’s the real lesson underneath this whole exchange. Conflation like this doesn’t require bad intent to do its work. It just requires everyone downstream to skip asking whether the label they’re using still means what they think it means.

The stakes of this conflation aren’t hypothetical to everyone. Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank, just committed $15 million to a campaign aimed specifically at preventing DSA from, in a senior official’s words, “becoming synonymous with the Democratic Party’s brand.” Their own diagnosis: “Republicans have successfully used the DSA’s most progressive positions to define the broader Democratic Party.” That’s this piece’s argument, funded and acted on by people inside the party who see the conflation itself as the threat, not just DSA’s platform. I highly recommend reading Thom Hartman’s Substack article, Who Is the “Third Way” and Why Are They Fighting Progressives Instead of Republicans? to better understand Third Way and its history.

We all need to watch what happens next, because it’s already started. As “socialist” stops carrying the shock value it once had, a third of Democratic-aligned adults now claim it in its lowercase form without flinching, the label doing the scaring is escalating. Trump has called Mamdani “a communist” and warned New York would become “a communistic city.” Eric Adams: “he’s not a Democrat, he’s a communist.” The White House’s own deputy chief of staff has warned of “crazy communist lunatics.” A House Speaker has compared the threat to “an uncontrollable form of cancer” at a faith conference.

This is the same conflation I’ve been describing throughout this piece, just one word further up the escalation ladder. Democratic socialism and communism are not the same thing, any more than DSA is the Democratic Party, or Project 2025 is the official GOP platform. But that distinction only holds if people keep insisting on it. “Socialist” has apparently lost its strength from overuse and a burgeoning acceptance. “Communist” is next.

One more definition, since this piece just made the case for it

Communism. In its textbook sense, a theoretical end-stage economic and political system, in classical Marxist terms, a classless, stateless society in which the means of production are held in common and goods are distributed according to need rather than bought and sold. Socialism, in that same framework, is the transitional stage on the way there, not the destination itself. No country has ever actually reached this textbook end-state. What gets called “communism” in practice, the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Cuba, North Korea, refers instead to one-party authoritarian states that adopted the label while centralizing political and economic control, often violently, rather than achieving the classless, stateless society the theory describes.

In current American political usage, the word has drifted even further from either of those meanings. It functions almost entirely as an escalation word, deployed against democratic socialists, DSA members, and even market-regulation proposals with no relationship to one-party rule, collectivized property, or the absence of elections. None of the people called “communist” in this piece’s closing section, a democratically elected mayor, a democratic socialist congressional candidate, are advocating for a one-party state or the abolition of private property generally. The word isn’t being used to describe their actual positions. It’s being used because “socialist” stopped landing.

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References and Further Reading

Adams, Eric, quoted in “Mayor Adams Ratchets Up Rhetoric in NYC Mayoral Race, Calls Mamdani a ‘Communist.’” Yahoo News, 2025, www.yahoo.com/news/articles/mayor-adams-ratchets-rhetoric-nyc-224800224.html.

CNN/SSRS. “CNN Poll: Democrats Identifying as Democratic Socialists.” CNN Politics, July 2026, https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/30/politics/cnn-poll-a-third-of-democrats-now-identify-as-democratic-socialists

Democratic Socialists of America. Workers Deserve More: DSA 2025–2026 Program. DSA National Political Committee, 2026, program.dsausa.org.

“Democratic Group Launches $15M ‘War’ on DSA After Socialist Primary Wins, Calling It ‘Mortal Danger.’” Fox News, 2026, www.foxnews.com/politics/democratic-group-launches-15m-war-dsa-after-socialist-primary-wins-mortal-danger.

Hartmann, Thom. “Who Is the ‘Third Way’ and Why Are They Fighting Progressives Instead of Republicans?” The Hartmann Report, 7 Aug. 2026, hartmannreport.com/p/who-is-the-third-way-and-why-are-679.

The Hartmann Report

Who Is the "Third Way" and Why Are They Fighting Progressives Instead of Republicans?

The Third Way has functionally declared their intention to purge the Democratic Party of progressives. They will not, in my opinion, get us the things progressive are working for and most Americans and the large majority of Democrats want…

Read more

3 months ago · 214 likes · 16 comments · Thom Hartmann

Heritage Foundation. Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (Project 2025). Heritage Foundation, 2023, www.project2025.org.

“Moderate Democrats Prepare for ‘War’ Against an Ascendant Left.” The New York Times, 6 Aug. 2026, www.nytimes.com/2026/08/06/us/politics/democratic-party-socialists-moderates.html.

“Third Way Launches $15 Million Campaign Against Democratic Socialists of America.” Washington Examiner, 2026, www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/congressional/4678473/third-way-15-million-campaign-dsa/.

Trump, Donald, quoted in “Trump Calls New York Democratic Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani ‘a Communist.’” CNBC, 27 June 2025, www.cnbc.com/2025/06/27/trump-new-york-zohran-mamdani-communist.html.

The accusation, and its long history

Is redistribution of wealth taking money from the people who earned it and handing it to the people who didn’t? Or is it a moral obligation, the price a democracy pays to take care of the people who have less?

Most conservatives will tell you it’s the first. Take money from the people who earned it, hand it to people who didn’t, and you erode the very incentive that makes a market economy work. Reward productivity and you get more of it. Punish productivity and you get less.

Most liberals start from the second premise entirely. Redistribution through taxation isn’t a threat. It’s a moral obligation, the price a democracy pays to take care of the people who have less. That is usually where the argument stops, and it’s also exactly where conservatives push back hardest. “Moral obligation” sounds like charity, and charity implies the wealthy earned their fortunes free and clear and are now being asked to share out of decency rather than because they owe anything to begin with.

I’d suggest a third option. We’ve had forty-five years of “trickle-down economics,” itself a theory about how wealth redistributes through an economy, and the data to check what it actually produced. It goes a long way toward explaining the economic pressure now felt by 98 percent of Americans, while the ultra-wealthy have posted extraordinary financial gains.

Wealth in this country has in fact been redistributed on a massive scale, just not in the direction most people picture when they hear the phrase. It has moved from the people who did the work to the people who already held the capital, from paychecks to portfolios, from the public that funds the research, the roads, and the schools to the private fortunes built on top of them.

It is your wealth, and it has been redistributed upward, quietly enough that most of the country has never been told to call it that.

Let’s look at how that happened, in the government’s own numbers, and where the money actually went. This isn’t a moral argument, at least not to start. It’s an observable one. Follow along, and decide for yourself whether the redistribution everyone has been trained to argue about was ever the mechanism actually moving the money.

That picture has a history that runs back further than 1976. It runs through a long line of moneyed, landowning interests pushing back whenever their wealth was used to support the broader citizenry. Ronald Reagan gave that history a face and a Chicago address when he built his 1976 campaign stump speech around a woman he never named. He said she had used eighty names and thirty addresses to collect welfare, food stamps, and veterans’ benefits under four dead husbands.

To be fair, the story was mostly true. The woman, Linda Taylor, really had defrauded the government. Reagan never stated her race. He didn’t need to. The image did the work. A con artist gaming a system built for people who couldn’t be trusted to spend their own tax dollars responsibly, let alone someone else’s.

The “welfare queen” wasn’t invented from nothing. It drew on twenty years of prior argument, including the 1965 Moynihan Report, which located Black poverty in family structure rather than in labor markets or housing policy. By the time Reagan ran for president, the association between welfare spending and Black recipients was already fixed in the public imagination, even though white families made up a large share of program enrollment throughout the period. The policy debate and the racial narrative had merged. They have not fully separated since.

That merger is what gave “trickle-down” its political power. If safety net spending is a transfer from productive, rule-following citizens to people who game the system, then the alternative writes itself. Stop taking money from the people who create jobs. Let them keep it. What they don’t spend on taxes, they invest in businesses, payrolls, and expansion, and the benefit reaches everyone else through employment and wages. Or so the theory goes.

The theory did not go unchallenged from within its own party. Running against Reagan in the 1980 Republican primary, George H.W. Bush called the plan “voodoo economics,” arguing the math behind massive tax cuts paired with a balanced budget and higher defense spending simply didn’t work. Bush dropped the line once he joined Reagan’s ticket as his running mate, but the criticism came from a mainstream, establishment Republican, not an outside skeptic, months before the policy became law.

Reagan signed it anyway. Less than eight months into his presidency, the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 cut the top marginal income tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent and cut the capital gains rate from 28 percent to 20 percent, on the argument that lower rates at the top would generate growth that reached everyone below. (For comparison, the top marginal rate today sits at 37 percent, and the top capital gains rate is still 20 percent, essentially unchanged from where ERTA left it forty-five years ago.)

Trickle-down was not a vague idea. It was a specific, testable claim: loosen the tax burden on capital and high earners, and the gains will flow downward through jobs and wages. Maintain a high tax burden on capital and high earners and they won’t invest or they will take their business elsewhere.

Forty-five years is enough time to check whether that happened.

Forty-five years of data

Trickle-down was sold as a testable claim, so let’s test it. If cutting taxes on the wealthy and on capital gains works the way the theory says, the sequence should be visible: money stays with people who create jobs, they invest it, and wages rise as demand for labor rises with them. Nobody disputed that the wealthy would get wealthier, and they did, at levels that were nothing short of extraordinary. That part was the plan.

The real question was whether the rest of the country would rise with them.

The productivity-pay gap gives us that answer. From the end of World War II through the late 1970s, worker pay and economy-wide productivity moved together, almost in lockstep. A worker who helped generate more output got paid more for it. Then, starting in 1979, two years before the Economic Recovery Tax Act became law, the two lines split.

By 2019, net productivity had grown roughly 60 percent while a typical worker’s compensation had grown about 16 percent. More recent tracking through 2025 puts productivity up 90.2 percent since 1979 against hourly compensation growth of 33.0 percent, a gap that means the typical worker would be earning $16.40 more per hour today if pay had simply kept pace with what they helped produce.

The Economic Policy Institute, which has tracked this divergence for over two decades, now calls the pattern “wage suppression” rather than “wage stagnation,” which is an important distinction. Stagnation implies nothing happened. Suppression means something did, and it happened on purpose. Specific policy choices drove it: deregulation, the decline of union density, a tolerance for higher unemployment that weakened workers’ bargaining position, and tax changes that rewarded capital over labor.

That gap is the mechanism this whole argument rests on. If wages had simply kept pace with the productivity workers themselves generated, the difference between what they earned and what they should have earned did not evaporate. It went somewhere. It was redistributed up, not because anyone stole it in a single dramatic act, but because four and a half decades of policy quietly tilted where the value of a day’s work was allowed to land.

The part of this story that seems to get lost is that the extraordinary wealth built at the top of the American economy was not generated despite the public backbone the rest of the country builds and pays for. It was generated because of it.

This is where the argument for redistribution gets stronger than the moral-obligation framing from earlier, the version that keeps losing the political argument because it concedes the conservative premise before the debate even starts. The public-backbone argument doesn’t make that concession. It says the fortune was never entirely theirs alone in the first place.

The breakthroughs that seed entire industries mostly come out of publicly funded research. The internet, GPS, touchscreen technology, and the algorithms behind modern search engines all trace back through university labs and federal research budgets before a single company turned them into a product.

The same is true in medicine. NIH-funded research is linked to roughly 87 percent of new drugs approved by the FDA between 2010 and 2019, with NIH spending on the underlying science, the drug targets and biology that make a treatment possible in the first place. This runs close to what the pharmaceutical industry itself spent developing those drugs into products.

That public contribution doesn’t stop at the laboratory bench. NIH funding supported clinical trials, the human testing required before a drug can reach approval, for 62 percent of drugs approved over that same decade. Academic medical centers, most of them public universities, receive roughly half of all clinical trial grant spending, government and private combined. The public foots a large part of both the discovery bill and the testing bill. Then patients pay again through premiums and out-of-pocket costs set by companies that build on that public foundation and retain the profits from sales for shareholder dividends and CEO pay.

The workforce that companies hire from was educated in public schools and state universities, funded by taxpayers. The roads, ports, power grids, and airspace that move workers, freight, and data are public infrastructure, built and maintained by public money, available to any company operating here at a fraction of what it would cost to build privately.

Companies choose to build in the United States because that backbone exists here, not despite the cost of contributing to it. It’s worth noting that a striking share of the entrepreneurs who built the largest American fortunes of the past few decades were not born here. They came from South Africa, Hungary, Russia, Taiwan, South Korea, and dozens of other countries, and they chose the United States over building at home. They came for the research universities, the deep capital markets, and the roads, ports, and power grids that let a good idea scale quickly once it exists. That choice is an important one, and it’s repeated across generations of immigrant founders.

None of this argues that individual effort, risk, or invention don’t matter. They do. Instead, the story of self-made wealth, entirely detached from the public systems that made it possible, is incomplete at best. The productivity workers generate and the public infrastructure that makes modern industry possible are two versions of the same contribution: value created collectively, captured disproportionately at the top. The wealthy have not built their fortunes by escaping the working class and the public sector. They have built them on top of both.

The story isn’t just about wages, either. The same upward pull shows up in healthcare premiums, housing costs, and education debt, each growing far faster than pay over the same stretch of decades. The next section puts numbers on exactly where that gap lands.

Where the gap went

Arguments I have heard coming from conservatives when the idea of increasing taxes on the ultra-wealthy comes up have often been framed around jealousy and punishment. “Just because you aren’t a millionaire doesn’t mean we should punish them for their success.” I could understand that argument coming from someone in that class, defending their own wealth, but it has an odd ring to it coming from fellow citizens who are immersed in the same financial struggles as everyone else in the middle class.

This isn’t simply a matter of “the rich got richer” because they had access to some secret sauce and “the poor got poorer” because they didn’t work hard enough, framed as a morality issue. It’s specific: asset ownership, stocks, business equity, appreciated far faster than wages or home equity, which is what the bottom and middle actually own. The mechanism is structural, not conspiratorial.

Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts data, tracked back to 1989, shows the top 1 percent share of U.S. household wealth rose from about 22.8 percent in 1989 to roughly 30 to 32 percent by 2025. The top 0.1 percent alone went from about 8.6 percent to 14.5 percent of total household wealth over the same period.

Every other group, including the 90th to 99th percentile, not just the bottom half, saw its share shrink. The bottom 50 percent of households went from 3.4 percent of national wealth in 1989 to about 2.5 percent in 2024, a decline of roughly 26 percent, despite the group growing by tens of millions of households over that period.

Healthcare

Healthcare premiums are where this transfer is stark in the form of a monthly bill. Between 1999 and 2025, the average family health insurance premium rose from $5,791 a year to $26,993, an increase of 342 percent. Deductibles moved the same direction faster: the average single-coverage deductible rose 212 percent between 2006, the first year KFF tracked it consistently, and 2025, from $604 to $1,886. Over that same span, real median wages, adjusted for inflation, rose 11 percent.

Line those three numbers up and the size of the transfer is hard to ignore. Wages did not fail to grow because there was no money to grow them with. The money existed. It went to premiums and deductibles instead of paychecks, and a large share of a worker’s total compensation increase over the past two decades has been absorbed by healthcare costs before it ever reached a bank account. This is not a household making bad choices. It is the predictable output of a system where compensation growth gets captured upstream of the worker.

We should call it what it is: a tax, just not the kind anyone votes on. It is a tax collected by the healthcare industry instead of the government and paid disproportionately by people who work for a living.

Housing

Housing shows the same pattern from a different angle. In 1985, the median American home cost roughly 3.5 times median household income. By 2025 that ratio had risen to about 5.0, and it touched 5.6 in 2022, the highest on record dating back to the early 1970s. As recently as 2000, two-thirds of large metro markets had price-to-income ratios below 3.0. By 2025, dozens of major markets sat above 5.0, and several, mostly on the West Coast, sat above 8.0, with Los Angeles near 12.5 times median income.

The headline ratio understates how uneven the squeeze is regionally, but the direction is the same nearly everywhere. Home prices separated from income at almost exactly the same moment wages separated from productivity.

Education debt

Earlier in this piece I discussed the point that entrepreneurs choose to build in the United States partly because of the educated workforce they can hire here, trained in public schools and state universities that taxpayers funded. That same educated workforce is not free for the people who make it up.

A four-year degree, or some credential beyond high school, has shifted from an advantage into something closer to a baseline requirement for stable, decently paid work. Software now screens for that credential before a resume ever reaches human hands. For most families, pursuing post-secondary education stopped being optional a long time ago. It is a survival choice, not a luxury weighed against other ways to spend a young adult’s time and money.

The people who lead the country make that case better than any statistic could. Ninety-six percent of the 119th Congress holds a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 38 percent of American adults overall, and a third of Congress holds a graduate degree. Among Fortune 500 CEOs, only a handful of the 500 lack a bachelor’s degree at all.

If the story of American success is that anyone can rise purely on will and effort (regardless of education), it’s worth noticing who actually did the rising. The people making that credential nearly universal for themselves are, not coincidentally, the same people setting policy and the narrative on whether it’s worth the cost for everyone else.

Student debt did not exist as a mass household liability the way it does now. Total outstanding student loan debt, federal and private combined, stood at roughly $481 billion in early 2006. By early 2026 it had grown to about $1.87 trillion, nearly four times that figure, and it is now the second-largest category of household debt after mortgages.

That growth happened over the same two decades that wages flattened and healthcare costs tripled. Borrowing to cover the gap was not a lifestyle choice for most families. It was often the only way to keep up with costs rising faster than income, whether the cost was a degree treated as a baseline requirement for stable work, or tuition increases at public universities that followed state disinvestment in higher education.

The federal government has been the primary lender behind student debt since 1965, and that hasn’t changed. Roughly 93 percent of outstanding student debt today is still federal. What has changed is what happens once the loan is issued.

Federal loan limits haven’t kept pace with tuition, so students increasingly borrow from private lenders to cover the gap, at rates that can run as high as 18 percent with none of the income-driven repayment or forgiveness options federal loans offer.

And even federal loans are serviced, meaning billed, collected, and managed, by private companies. That servicing business is for-profit, generating fees and shareholder returns from administering what is, at its core, a public lending program funded by taxpayers. Navient, one of the largest servicers, paid a $1.85 billion settlement in 2022 after regulators found it had steered struggling borrowers into forbearance instead of cheaper income-based repayment plans, quietly running up extra interest along the way.

It’s another version of the same pattern running through all of this: a public system, means-tested and taxpayer-funded at its core, with a private layer built on top of it that profits from the gap between what the public provides and what people actually need.

The double tax

As we’ve seen through healthcare costs, housing, and education debt, the American household is not paying one tax bill. It is paying two: one to the government, one to private industry. Only the first one shows up when politicians argue about tax rates.

Look at how the accounting actually works for a household earning $100,000 a year. OECD data on income tax and social contributions puts the U.S. burden at around 22 percent. This is well below Germany’s roughly 35 percent and close to France’s roughly 30 percent. However, that is the number that gets quoted every time universal healthcare, subsidized childcare and pre-K, public long-term care for aging parents, or tuition-free public university comes up: “look how much less Americans pay in taxes!” On paper, it’s true.

Now add what that same household spends out of pocket to cover what those other countries fund collectively. Private healthcare, premiums, deductibles, and copays combined, runs to roughly 17 percent of income for a family plan, based on 2025 KFF data. Add childcare not covered by any public program, and elder home care for an aging parent, and the total household burden in the United States climbs to close to 58 percent of income. Germany’s total for the same categories, tax plus private out-of-pocket cost, stays near 39 percent. France’s stays near 33 percent, because both countries fund healthcare, childcare, and elder care largely through the tax system Americans are routinely told is too expensive to adopt.

The difference is not that American families spend less to keep a household running. It’s that a much larger share of what they spend routes through private companies instead of a government budget line. One version of that payment shows up on a pay stub. People argue over it in elections, and at least in principle, a vote can change it.

The other version shows up as a premium increase, a childcare invoice, a nursing home bill, or a student loan payment, set by a company with a legal obligation to its shareholders, not to the person paying it. Student debt belongs in this column too. The $1.87 trillion Americans now owe is money peer nations raise through taxes, and that Americans instead pay out of pocket, one loan at a time.

This must be called what it is: a second tax, uncounted and mostly invisible, collected by private industry instead of government, flowing to largely the same place the wage-productivity gap has been flowing for forty-five years. Higher taxes are a legitimate thing to debate. But a comparison that counts only one of the two bills a middle-income American family actually pays isn’t comparing apples to apples. It’s comparing the price tag to the receipt.

The wage subsidy

There is a version of this transfer that runs through the federal budget instead of a paycheck, and it flips the usual welfare story on its head. The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 an hour since July 24, 2009. It has not moved since, through sixteen years of rising rent, groceries, and healthcare costs. A wage frozen for that long does not make labor cheaper. It makes the gap between what a job pays and what it costs to live someone else’s problem.

A 2020 Government Accountability Office report examined exactly where that gap lands. GAO found 12 million wage-earning adults enrolled in Medicaid and 9 million wage-earning adults in households receiving SNAP benefits in 2018. Roughly 70 percent of these wage earners in both programs worked full-time hours on a weekly basis, and 90 percent worked in the private sector rather than for government or nonprofit employers. These are not people sitting outside the workforce. They are working full-time and still qualifying for public health coverage and food assistance because wages did not cover the basic cost of living.

A GAO follow-up released in July 2026 found the gap has widened, not closed. Nationally, working Americans enrolled in Medicaid rose to 13.8 million and those in SNAP-receiving households rose to 10.6 million. In the eleven states GAO sampled, Walmart alone employed 16,055 workers on Medicaid, a 55 percent jump from 2020, and 15,515 on SNAP. Amazon’s numbers on both programs nearly tripled over the same period. Gig platforms, Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Grubhub, and Instacart combined, overtook Walmart to become the single largest source of SNAP recipients nationally, a category that barely registered in the 2020 report.

That is a subsidy, just an unusual one. Instead of the government cutting a check to a company, the government fills the gap a company’s wages left open, through Medicaid, SNAP, school meal programs, and housing assistance. The worker gets the benefit on paper. The employer gets a workforce it did not have to pay a survivable wage to keep.

New Jersey became the first state to act directly on this in 2026, advancing legislation to charge large employers a fee when their workers rely on Medicaid rather than employer-sponsored insurance, on the reasoning that a company benefiting from labor the public is partly financing should help cover that cost.

This belongs in the same category as the wage-productivity gap and the private double tax, not as a separate argument but as another channel for the same transfer. Whether the money moves through a stagnant wage that never caught up to productivity, a premium that fills in for a low-wage employer’s missing insurance plan, or a Medicaid enrollment that substitutes for a raise that was never given, the direction is the same. Value generated by work is not reaching the worker. It is reaching someone else, and in this case, the public is quietly footing part of the bill for it.

Healthcare, housing, education, a second private tax system, and a wage subsidy running through the federal budget itself: four different bills and one public backstop, all landing in the same place. Money that should have shown up as a raise instead shows up as a premium, a down payment that keeps receding, a loan balance that outlives the degree it paid for, or a bill nobody voted on.

Reframing “redistribution,” and what it changes

Let’s go back to where this started. “Redistribution of wealth” was never a neutral description. It was a distraction, built to keep one direction of money movement visible while hiding the other entirely. Taxes and safety net spending count as redistribution. A widening gap between what a worker produces and what a worker is paid does not, even though it moves far more money, far more consistently, over a much longer period of time.

Look at the actual mechanisms and the double standard becomes hard to miss. Every year wages fail to track productivity is a transfer, from the person who did the work to whoever captured the difference. Every dollar taxed at the lower capital gains rate instead of the earned income rate is a transfer, built directly into the tax code, favoring income from owning assets over income from working. Every merger that reduces the number of employers a worker can sell their labor to, and with it the leverage to negotiate a raise, is a transfer, achieved through market concentration rather than legislation.

Every dollar an American family pays out of pocket for healthcare, childcare, and elder care that a peer nation instead funds through its tax system is a transfer too, a second, private tax collected by industry instead of government, on top of the public one. And every dollar Medicaid or SNAP spends filling the gap left by a minimum wage frozen since 2009 is a transfer running the other direction through the same mechanism, from the public treasury to a private payroll that didn’t cover its own cost. None of these required a single act that looks like theft. They required forty-five years of decisions that consistently landed on the same side.

This is the redistribution that has actually been happening. It runs upward, from paychecks to portfolios, and it has moved far more wealth than any safety net program in American history. Healthcare premiums have outpaced wages thirtyfold, and the total household burden for a middle-income American family now exceeds what households in Germany or France pay, despite Americans’ lower headline tax rate. None of that is what most people picture when they hear “redistribution of wealth.” It should be exactly what they picture.

It’s important to be precise here, because precision is what makes this argument different from a slogan aimed the other direction. The claim is not that markets are illegitimate, or that people who hold capital don’t deserve a return on it. Markets rewarding investment is not the complaint.

The complaint is narrower and more falsifiable than that: for four decades, policy choices, not neutral market outcomes, tilted the split between labor and capital in one direction, while the rhetoric of that era pointed public attention at a much smaller, much more visible transfer running the other way.

A fiscal conservative who believes markets should reward genuine value creation has every reason to object to a market that has been quietly rigged in one direction for four decades running. That objection does not require abandoning a belief in markets. It requires taking that belief seriously enough to notice when the rules stopped matching it.

If the argument in this piece holds, then the debate Americans have been having was never about whether to redistribute wealth. Every economy redistributes wealth constantly, through wages, prices, taxes, and who gets to keep the value that gets created. The only real question is which direction it runs and toward whom. For forty-five years, the loudest political fight was staged over the smallest and most visible piece of that system, safety net spending, while the largest and least visible piece, the growing distance between what workers produce and what they’re paid, went on unchallenged.

That means the honest fix looks different than either side’s usual pitch. It is not simply “tax the rich more,” treated as a moral penalty for having succeeded. And it is not “cut taxes further and wait,” treated as an article of faith immune to forty-five years of contrary evidence.

It is narrower and more mechanical than either: close the gap between productivity and pay directly, through the tools that actually widened it in the first place. Strengthen the bargaining position labor lost. Tax investment income and earned income at rates that don’t systematically favor whoever already owns the assets. Reinvest in the public systems, research funding, public education, infrastructure, that make new wealth possible in the first place, on the honest premise that the people funding those systems are entitled to a fair share of what they help create.

It also means removing the second, private tax this piece has traced through healthcare, childcare, elder care, and postsecondary education. Move those costs into the same tax system that already funds them in Germany and France, and the roughly twenty percentage points of household income now leaking out through premiums, childcare invoices, and tuition becomes money the 98 percent of American households paying it can spend, save, or invest instead.

That isn’t a charity case for the “less fortunate.” It’s the same argument conservatives already accept when they favor tax cuts to free up capital for growth, applied to the households actually doing the spending that drives most of the economy, not to the top of the income ladder.

None of that is a radical claim. It’s more of an accounting correction. A fiscal conservative who wants markets to reward real value creation and a liberal Democrat who wants the gains from that value creation to reach the people who created it are, in this specific argument, asking for the same thing. They disagree plenty elsewhere, and this piece isn’t the place to pretend otherwise. But on this one point, the direction wealth has moved for forty-five years, they don’t need to find common ground. They’re already standing on it, which is the clearest evidence that the fight keeping them apart was never about this.

Call it what it is. Forty-five years of evidence say wealth has been redistributed in this country on a massive scale, and it’s our wealth: our wages, our tax dollars, our labor, moving upward while we were conditioned to fight each other over who deserves what’s left. That fight has always served the people profiting most from it. The mistake was never in noticing the redistribution. The mistake was accepting a fight built to keep us looking sideways instead of up.

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References & Further Reading

History, Reagan, and the 1981 tax cuts

Domitrovic, Brian. “George H. W. Bush’s Voodoo Rhetoric.” Forbes, Dec 02, 2018. https://www.forbes.com/sites/briandomitrovic/2018/12/02/george-h-w-bushs-voodoo-rhetoric/

Levin, Josh. “The Welfare Queen.” Slate, 19 Dec. 2013, slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/12/linda-taylor-welfare-queen-ronald-reagan-made-her-a-notorious-american-villain.html.

Levin, Josh. The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth. Little, Brown and Company, 2019.

Moynihan, Daniel Patrick. The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. U.S. Department of Labor, Office of Policy Planning and Research, 1965. https://www.dol.gov/general/aboutdol/history/webid-moynihan

U.S. Congress. Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981. Pub. L. 97-34, 13 Aug. 1981. https://www.congress.gov/bill/97th-congress/house-bill/4242

Internal Revenue Service. “Historical Highest Marginal Income Tax Rates.” Tax Policy Center, taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-highest-marginal-income-tax-rates.

Productivity-pay gap and public investment

Economic Policy Institute. “The Productivity–Pay Gap.” EPI, updated 2026, epi.org/productivity-pay-gap.

Economic Policy Institute. “Wage Calculator.” EPI, epi.org/resources/wage-calculator.

Cleary, Ekaterina V., et al. “Contribution of NIH Funding to New Drug Approvals, 2010–2019.” JAMA Health Forum / related PNAS and Bentley University research, 2023. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29440428/

National Institutes of Health. “NIH Budget.” NIH Office of Budget, nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/budget.

Where the gap went

Wealth concentration

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. “Distributional Financial Accounts.” FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, fred.stlouisfed.org/release?rid=453.

Institute for Policy Studies. “Billionaire Wealth, U.S. Wealth Inequality.” Inequality.org, inequality.org/facts/wealth-inequality.

Healthcare

KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). “2025 Employer Health Benefits Survey.” KFF, kff.org/health-costs/report/2025-employer-health-benefits-survey.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Current Population Survey.” BLS, bls.gov/cps.

Housing

Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. “The State of the Nation’s Housing 2025.” Harvard JCHS, jchs.harvard.edu/state-nations-housing-2025.

Visual Capitalist. “Home Price-to-Income Ratios, 1985–2025.” Visual Capitalist. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-american-income-vs-home-prices-1985-2025/

Education and credentials

Federal Reserve Bank of New York. “Household Debt and Credit Report, Q1 2026.” New York Fed, newyorkfed.org/microeconomics/hhdc.

Congressional Research Service. “Membership of the 119th Congress: A Profile.” Congress.gov, 2025, crsreports.congress.gov.

Edvisors. “Private Student Loan Statistics.” Edvisors, edvisors.com/student-loans/private-student-loans/statistics.

Third Way. “Privatizing Student Loans Isn’t a Silver Bullet.” Third Way. https://www.thirdway.org/memo/privatizing-student-loans-isnt-a-silver-bullet

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “CFPB and State Attorneys General Secure $1.85 Billion in Debt Cancellation and Restitution from Student Loan Servicer Navient.” CFPB, 17 Jan. 2022, consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-and-state-attorneys-general-secure-1-85-billion-in-debt-cancellation-and-restitution-from-student-loan-servicer-navient.

The double tax

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. “Taxing Wages 2025.” OECD, oecd.org/en/publications/taxing-wages-2025.

U.S. Department of Labor. “Child Care Prices in Local Areas.” Women’s Bureau, dol.gov/agencies/wb/topics/featured-childcare.

Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker. “Home Health Care Costs.” Peterson-KFF, healthsystemtracker.org.

The wage subsidy

U.S. Department of Labor. “History of Federal Minimum Wage Rates Under the Fair Labor Standards Act.” DOL, dol.gov/agencies/whd/minimum-wage/history.

U.S. Government Accountability Office. Federal Social Safety Net Programs: Millions of Full-Time Workers Rely on Federal Health Care and Food Assistance Programs. GAO-21-45, 19 Oct. 2020, gao.gov/products/gao-21-45.

U.S. Government Accountability Office. Follow-up report on employer reliance on Medicaid and SNAP, commissioned by Sen. Bernie Sanders. GAO, July 2026. https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-new-gao-report-finds-taxpayers-continue-to-subsidize-poverty-wages-at-walmart-amazon-other-large-corporations-as-corporate-welfare-spikes-since-2020/

Mulvihill, Geoff. “New Jersey Is Set to Charge Companies With Workers on Medicaid. Other States May Follow.” AP News, 2 July 2026. https://apnews.com/article/medicaid-employers-states-taxes-04356a421cb832340acc8f179ecc1d79

New Jersey Legislature. Bill A5324, “Establishes Fee on Certain Employers That Employ Individuals Who Receive Health Benefits Coverage Through State Medicaid Program.” New Jersey Legislature, njleg.state.nj.us.

I maintained then, and still do, that this is a huge deal even if it only pertains to voter registration: 42 states plus D.C. let voters register or update their registration online or by mail, for something as routine as moving across town. Take that away, and an ordinary address change becomes an in-person trip to the election office during business hours. For most people, that means taking time off work. In rural areas, it can mean hundreds of miles round trip.

I also spent a lot of that year fielding some version of “you only need REAL ID.” Standard REAL ID doesn’t show citizenship on its face at all, that’s not what it verifies. The narrower exception, an Enhanced Driver’s License that does show citizenship, is only issued by five states: Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Vermont, and Washington. Everyone else would need to provide separate documentary proof of citizenship, a birth certificate or passport, on top of whatever ID they already carry.

And then there was “just get a passport,” which led to its own long conversation about what that actually costs in time and money, and how it lands especially hard on women whose legal name doesn’t match their birth certificate.

It’s been quite a ride since. At this point the SAVE Act is the Black Knight from Monty Python. Riders get cut off, whole vehicles get shot down, and it just keeps insisting it’s “just a flesh wound.”

It’s been stuck at a wall since March 2026: 60 votes needed in the Senate, Republicans hold 53, no path to more. When straight passage won’t work, there are really only three moves left: hold other legislation hostage until it moves, manufacture enough urgency that the math stops mattering, or smuggle it into something else that might pass on its own.

Trump had floated the first move as early as that same March, vowing to block any new bill from becoming law until the SAVE Act passed. He actually followed through on it for the first time in late June, refusing to sign the wildly popular, bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which had passed 358-32 in the House and 85-5 in the Senate, unless the Senate passed the SAVE Act first. It became law without his signature on July 10 anyway, after the constitutional ten-day clock ran out.

Trump’s July 16 primetime address, arguing his 2020 loss was the result of foreign election interference and that the SAVE America Act was the fix, was the latest run at the second move. It wouldn’t have solved any of what he described, and it didn’t move a single vote either. This series already fact-checked those claims and the bill’s actual reach; Part One and Part Two have the full breakdown if you want it. Short version: no, and no.

The urgency campaign hasn’t stopped at policy arguments. On June 26, at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s donor dinner, Speaker Johnson told the room plainly what a Republican midterm loss would mean: “They will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body, and they’ll go after the president’s family, the cabinet, his donors and friends. Half of you in this room will be targeted. I run the protection program. I’ll take care of you.” Trump spoke at the same conference later that day.

Separately, Trump has told Republicans the opposite outcome is just as certain if the bill passes: “It will guarantee the midterms,” and Republicans will “win every election for a long time.” At a Georgia rally he put a number on it: “For 50 years, we won’t lose a race.” On Truth Social, he’s put it as the alternative to catastrophe: without it, “the Republican Party will never win another election,” and he’ll be “the last Republican president.” Fear if it fails, permanence if it passes, both are being used to sell the same bill.

Yesterday was the latest run at the third move, smuggling it into something else. House GOP leadership merged the Voter ID Act (H.R. 9368), a separate bill that mirrors the SAVE Act’s approach to voting requirements, directly into the Stop Insider Trading Act, the bipartisan bill banning members of Congress from trading individual stocks. That bill had real cross-partisan support (86% overall, per a nonpartisan University of Maryland survey, with Republicans and Democrats within a point of each other) and a clean shot at passing on its own. Now it’s carrying a rider that polls at 52% with a 56-point partisan gap. A floor vote is expected this week.

Why: the House Freedom Caucus, led by Rep. Chip Roy, had been blocking floor business until it got both a stock-trading ban and SAVE-style voter ID. Leadership solved that by giving them one bill instead of two. Roy called it a “silver lining.” A Democrat who actually wants a stronger stock-trading ban called the combined version “a terrible bill,” specifically because of what got added.

Count it up including the two straight votes before any bundling started, and this is the sixth attempt in fifteen months: straight House passage in April 2025, again in February 2026, the Schmitt substitute in March, an attempted NDAA attachment in June, a $10 billion incentive program tucked into this month’s budget reconciliation, and now this. None of the previous five has cleared the Senate. Senate math hasn’t changed either, still needs 60 votes it doesn’t have. Will keep you posted.

What’s actually new in this version, and what isn’t. Worth being precise here, both about what carried over from earlier fights and about what’s current practice versus what this bill would change if it passes.

The mail-in fight is back. Right now, most states with mail voting, Washington included, verify ballots through signature matching: you sign the return envelope, and election officials compare it against the signature on file from your registration. Your ID isn’t attached to the ballot, and your Social Security number, already collected once at registration under existing federal law, doesn’t need to be written on or included with the ballot itself.

If H.R. 9368 becomes law, that changes. Every non-in-person ballot would need one of three things: a copy of your photo ID attached, your SSN’s last four digits plus a sworn affidavit explaining you couldn’t get valid ID, or the ballot notarized. Exceptions only for military voters and some elderly or disabled voters.

That’s a real new hurdle, and not just a paperwork one. Mailing a photocopy of your passport or your Social Security number is a different kind of exposure than having that same information sit in a state-maintained voter database with its own access controls and security protocols behind it. A ballot envelope passes through postal workers, mail sorting facilities, and county election offices before anyone opens it; a database has audit logs and defined custody. Whether that paper trail is handled, stored, and destroyed properly isn’t something an individual voter has any way to verify.

The bill does try to address the copier problem: it requires states to provide free public access to a scanner or copier “to the extent practicable” at government buildings, courthouses, libraries, police stations. That’s a real provision, but it’s a soft one, and it assumes a trip to a government building during business hours, which is its own burden on top of the ballot deadline.

The more realistic version of what actually happens: someone photographs their ID with their phone and prints it wherever’s convenient, a library, a copy shop, a pharmacy kiosk. That photo now lives in a camera roll that’s likely backed up automatically to iCloud or Google Photos, and if it passes through a print service, it may sit on that service’s servers too. That’s a wider, less accountable trail than either a government scanner or the database access controls this whole comparison started with.

What did not carry over: the passport-insufficiency problem from the SAVE America Act’s Election Day standard (the original SAVE Act never had a voting-ID provision at all, only registration). This version accepts a standard U.S. passport on its own, no extra ID number required. And there’s no in-person registration requirement in this bill, that fight is elsewhere.

Three different pushes, three different mechanics. Don’t assume they’re all the same fight.

Something to consider: It’s worth restating plainly what none of these attempts solve.

• It does not stop foreign governments from interfering in American elections. The actual agencies built for that job have been gutted by this same administration, not strengthened by this legislation.

• It does not meaningfully stop non-citizens from voting, because by every credible audit, including the Heritage Foundation’s own, they almost never do.

• It does not touch the security of voting machines. The most dramatic claim in Trump’s July 16 speech was about hardware and software. The SAVE Act is about paperwork.

That’s true of the SAVE Act regardless of iteration.

One more question worth thinking about: Republicans won the White House, the House, and the Senate in 2024, without the SAVE Act in place. That map already produced a Republican trifecta. So what's changed? And why is this bill now being sold as the only way to keep winning, rather than one option among many?

A law that's necessary for a party to stay in office indefinitely is a different claim than a law that improves election security, and it's worth asking which one is actually being pitched.

What every version of the bill does, consistently, across six attempts in fifteen months, is make exercising a constitutionally protected right chaotic, difficult, and disqualifying for people who did nothing wrong. That’s not a side effect. It’s the one thing that hasn’t changed.

If you want to do something about it, Part Two has contact information for your representatives and a direct list of questions worth asking them. That still stands, unchanged, for whichever bill (or speech) it’s riding on this week.

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For four+ years I’ve written about the gap between the America we were promised and the one being built around us. If it’s the kind of analysis you want to exist in the world: factual, non-tribal, willing to follow an argument wherever the evidence leads regardless of whose politics it complicates, I’d be grateful for your support.

Paid subscriptions are just $5 a month. Every dollar goes directly toward the research and writing that makes pieces like this one possible. I mean it when I say that your support means the world to me. It’s what allows me to keep doing this work independently, on my own terms, accountable only to the readers who make it all worth while.

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References & Further Reading

From this series

Smart, Dani. “SAVEing Millions from Voting.” Smart Ruminations, 24 Feb. 2025.

Smart, Dani. “The Speech That Wasn’t About the Bill.” Smart Ruminations.

Smart, Dani. “The Diagnosis Doesn’t Match the Prescription.” Smart Ruminations.

On the stock trading bill and the merger

“BGOV Bill Analysis: H.R. 7008, Stock Trading, Voter ID Rules.” Bloomberg Government, 20 July 2026, news.bgov.com/bloomberg-government-news/bgov-bill-analysis-h-r-7008-stock-trading-voter-id-rules.

“House GOP Merges Stock Trading Ban With Voter ID Bill to Break Freedom Caucus Floor Blockade.” HNGN, 20 July 2026.

On the housing bill

“Trump Cancels Housing Affordability Bill Signing Until SAVE Act Is Passed.” Axios, 24 June 2026, www.axios.com/2026/06/24/trump-delays-housing-bill-save-act.

“Largest Housing Affordability Bill in Decades Becomes Law Without Trump’s Signature.” NPR, 10 July 2026, www.npr.org/2026/07/10/nx-s1-5885027/housing-bill-without-trump-signature.

On the “win forever” and “protection program” remarks

“Trump Says Republicans Will ‘Never Lose a Race’ If Congress Restricts Voting.” Democracy Docket, 19 Feb. 2026, www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/trump-republicans-will-never-lose-save-america-act.

“’I Run the Protection Program’: Mike Johnson Warns Roomful of Conservatives to Reelect Republicans or Face Prison.” Yahoo News, June 2026, www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/run-protection-program-mike-johnson-214251261.html.

On stock trading disclosures and reform advocates

Everson, Zach. “Congress’s Million Dollar Stock Trades In 2025: Nvidia, Microsoft And The Bipartisan Push For A Ban.” Forbes, 24 Dec. 2025.

“Congressional Conflicts: Stock Ban Pits Affluent, Super Rich.” The Center Square, 20 Oct. 2025.

Bill text and polling

United States, Congress, House. Voter ID Act. 119th Congress, 2nd session, House Bill 9368, govinfo.gov/bulkdata/BILLS/119/2/hr/BILLS-119hr9368rh.xml.

“Slight Majority Favors Requiring Proof of Citizenship to Register to Vote: Poll.” The Hill, 7 May 2026.

Program for Public Consultation, University of Maryland School of Public Policy. Survey on congressional stock trading, 2026.

The Speech That Wasn’t About the Bill fact-checked what Trump actually said in his July 16 address on election security: the China claim, the Venezuela claim, the Russia omission, and how his own party reacted. This piece picks up from there and asks the question that matters more. Set aside, for a moment, whether every claim in that speech holds up. Does the SAVE Act even address the problem he described?

If you’re short on time, here’s what this piece covers:

• While warning about foreign election interference, this administration has spent eighteen months dismantling the actual agencies built to counter it: CISA’s election security staff, the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, the Foreign Malign Influence Center, and more.

• The same administration that claims to fear foreign election interference has openly practiced it abroad, sending the Vice President to campaign for Hungary’s Viktor Orbán days before his election. Orbán lost anyway.

• The transgender-athletics and mail-voting provisions Trump still describes as part of this bill were stripped out by the Senate months ago. What’s left doesn’t have the same Republican coalition behind it.

• There’s a structural reason “voter fraud” keeps getting reframed as “foreign interference,” tied to how much more unilateral authority a president has over foreign threats than domestic ones, and it fits a broader pattern of this administration reaching for emergency authority whenever the ordinary, slower process gets in the way.

• The strongest defense against a stolen-election narrative, from either party, isn’t a bill. It’s turnout too large to dispute.

On July 16, President Trump gave a primetime address arguing that his 2020 loss was the product of foreign interference, China’s data theft, a “deep state” cover-up, and an alleged Venezuelan voting-machine plot, and that the SAVE America Act is the fix. In The Speech That Wasn’t About the Bill, I went through those claims one at a time: what holds up, what doesn’t, what’s missing (Russia, mostly, and notably), and how muted his own party’s reaction was.

This piece starts from a different premise. Suppose every claim in that speech were true. Would the SAVE Act actually address any of it?

If Foreign Interference Is the Concern, the Response Doesn’t Match It

Trump’s July 16 speech rested on a specific premise: foreign adversaries, especially China, threaten American elections, and the country needs to respond. Set against that premise is what his own administration has done to the agencies built for exactly that purpose.

CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, has lost close to a third of its workforce since Trump returned to office, dropping from roughly 3,400 employees to around 2,400 through layoffs, contract non-renewals, program shutdowns, and buyout offers. Early in the administration, CISA placed 17 election-security staff on leave and opened an internal review.

It went on to end its support for the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center and wind down its cooperative arrangement with the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center. Those were the two main channels through which state and local election offices got federal help monitoring cyberthreats. State election officials who worked alongside CISA describe those relationships as effectively destroyed. The administration’s most recent budget proposal would eliminate CISA’s election security program outright.

The FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, created in 2017 specifically to investigate foreign influence operations after Russian interference in 2016, was dissolved by Attorney General Pam Bondi on her first day in office in February 2025.

The Foreign Malign Influence Center, a bipartisan 2019 creation inside the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that had previously uncovered foreign influence operations, including one backed by Iran that targeted Trump himself, was dissolved by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in August 2025.

The State Department’s office for countering foreign disinformation, the successor to the Global Engagement Center, was shut down by Secretary of State Marco Rubio in April 2025.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has redirected the Voting Section, which for decades focused on protecting ballot access, toward voter roll maintenance and noncitizen-voting investigations, the same subject matter as the SAVE Act itself.

And on July 9, just a week before the primetime speech, Trump fired the two remaining Democratic commissioners of the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission and pushed out the last Republican commissioner, leaving the agency that certifies voting equipment and helps administer federal election funding with no commissioners at all, months before the midterms.

Administration officials describe these moves as cutting duplication, preventing politicized enforcement, and focusing resources on higher priorities. That is a defensible position to hold on any one of these agencies in isolation. It is harder to hold across all of them at once, in the same eighteen months, while also delivering a primetime address arguing that foreign interference in elections is the country’s central vulnerability.

If the threat is real enough to justify a national address, a declassified intelligence release, and a DOJ prosecution order, it is worth asking why the infrastructure built to counter that threat has been the thing most consistently cut.

It is also worth asking about the other side of the ledger. In April, Vice President Vance flew to Budapest days before Hungary’s parliamentary election and openly campaigned for Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, telling a rally “we have got to get Viktor Orbán re-elected.” Trump called into the same rally to praise Orbán personally.

That is not passive concern about foreign election interference. It is the thing itself, practiced openly, by this administration, in someone else’s election. I wrote about what happened next here: Orbán lost anyway, by a wide margin, on turnout that overwhelmed a system built for fifteen years to make his defeat nearly impossible. An administration that treats foreign influence over elections as a five-alarm domestic threat and an unremarkable foreign-policy tool, depending on whose election it is, is not describing a consistent principle. It is describing a tool it reserves the right to use.

What Changed Since March — and What Didn’t

When I wrote about this in March, Sen. Eric Schmitt had introduced a substitute amendment bundling the citizenship and ID provisions with a transgender-athletics ban, a ban on gender-affirming care for minors, and a near-total elimination of no-excuse mail voting. On March 26, the Senate voted down the transgender-athletics piece specifically. The mail-voting restriction and the broader Schmitt substitute did not advance either.

As of this week, the version of the SAVE America Act actually before the Senate contains neither provision. Both were proposed, debated, and rejected. Neither is live text.

Trump has not adjusted his description of the bill to match. NBC News reported on July 16 that he continues to tell voters the SAVE America Act would end mail-in voting “except for illness, disability, military deployment, or travel” and would impose new restrictions on transgender people, repeating both claims as recently as his Fourth of July speech. Neither is true of the bill Congress is actually debating.

That gap is not just a factual error. It is doing political work. The transgender and mail-voting provisions were the parts of this bill built specifically to energize the base: they polled well on their own, they gave Republican members something to campaign on beyond an abstract citizenship-verification requirement, and they gave Trump culture-war material to fold into rally speeches.

Once the Senate stripped them out, what was left is a narrower bill: proof of citizenship to register, a federal photo ID standard to vote. That version has to survive on its own merits, and it does not have the same coalition behind it. Several House Republicans acknowledged at the time that the riders were likely to cost the bill any remaining path to 60 votes, and they did. But the riders were also carrying support the base version doesn’t generate on its own.

Trump’s rhetoric has not caught up to that reality, and it is worth asking whether it is meant to. Telling a rally crowd the bill still bans mail voting and still restricts transgender athletes is a way of selling a bill that no longer contains either provision as if it still does. Whether that is a genuine misunderstanding of where the legislation stands or a deliberate choice to keep campaigning on provisions that no longer exist is a fair question to put to the President and to the bill’s own sponsors.

Either way, a citizen trying to understand what the SAVE America Act would actually do, based on what Trump says about it, would be wrong on two of its most consequential points, and would likely overestimate how much Republican appetite exists for the bill that is actually on the floor.

What Conservatives Should Be Asking

Elections are constitutionally administered by the states. That is a deliberate structural choice rooted in the framers’ distrust of centralized control over democratic processes. The SAVE Act overrides it directly.

It imposes a uniform federal standard with no funding to implement it. The National Association of Counties estimates implementation at $510 million in additional costs per election cycle, roughly 11 times the $45 million in current federal HAVA election security grants. That estimate does not include additional infrastructure costs for states that run all-mail elections. No reimbursement mechanism exists. States must comply entirely at their own expense.

The bill also requires states to submit voter registration databases to the federal government: names, addresses, and personal data for tens of millions of Americans, consolidated into a single federal repository. Set against the rest of this piece, that requirement lands differently than it would in isolation.

This is the same administration that, by its own account, is racing to protect American elections from foreign access to exactly this kind of data. Consolidating it into one federal target, while CISA loses a third of its workforce and the agencies built to guard against foreign access to voter information get dissolved, is not a defense against that risk. It is a larger, more concentrated version of the thing the July 16 speech claimed to be worried about. Good intentions do not make dangerous architecture safe, and neither does declaring a national emergency over a threat you are simultaneously defunding the response to.

That risk is not hypothetical. NPR reported in January that the Social Security Administration disclosed, in a federal court filing, that a DOGE staffer embedded at the agency signed a “Voter Data Agreement” with an outside political advocacy group in 2025, in his capacity as an SSA employee, without the knowledge of agency leadership. The filing states the group’s own stated goal was to find evidence of voter fraud and overturn election results in certain states.

The Social Security Administration says it has not found evidence that data was actually transferred. But the agreement existed, was signed by a federal employee using federal authority, and bypassed the agency’s own safeguards, months before the SAVE Act would require every state’s voter rolls to be centralized in federal hands at all.

A single federal voter database is not a hypothetical risk to weigh against a hypothetical benefit. It is a specific kind of exposure this administration has already demonstrated a willingness to create, and has yet to fully explain.

If a Democratic administration had sent a half-billion-dollar unfunded election mandate to red states while gutting the agencies that protect election data from foreign adversaries, the response would have been immediate and justified. That principle does not change based on which party is doing the imposing.

The Bottom Line

There is a structural reason this reframing serves Trump’s interests, regardless of whether the underlying claims hold up. Domestic election administration is explicitly reserved to the states under the Constitution. A president alleging ordinary domestic voter fraud has limited unilateral tools: public pressure, DOJ referrals within existing law, and asking Congress to legislate, which is exactly the position this administration has been stuck in for four months with the SAVE Act stalled in the Senate.

Foreign threats work differently. A president has substantially broader authority to act alone there: declassifying intelligence, directing federal agencies under a national-security rationale, and a long history of courts and Congress giving the executive branch more deference on foreign affairs than on domestic policy disputes. Recasting “voter fraud” as “foreign interference” does not just make for a more dramatic speech. It moves the argument out of the box where a president is constitutionally weakest, domestic election law, and into the box where he is constitutionally strongest, foreign threats.

This also fits a broader pattern from this administration, not a one-off. Trump has invoked “emergency” authority repeatedly this term to move past the ordinary, deliberately slower process Congress and the courts are built to require: a national energy emergency to fast-track drilling and mining projects, a border emergency that authorized military construction funds and the mobilization of reserve forces, tariffs imposed under a declared economic emergency now facing court challenges over whether they meet the legal standard, and a declared crime emergency that put federal officials in charge of policing in Washington, D.C. He used the same word for the housing bill he was holding hostage over the SAVE Act, calling its passage a “National Emergency” in the same breath he was blocking a different, unrelated piece of legislation.

“Emergency” is not a neutral description in this administration’s usage. It is a lever, one that unlocks authority Congress did not intend a president to have on an ordinary day, and it gets pulled with notable frequency.

Senator Murkowski warned months ago that this bill’s architects are preparing to call the 2026 results rigged if Republicans lose seats. That warning reads less like speculation now than it did before the July 16 speech.

As recently as this month, voting-rights reporters covering the bill have made the same prediction independently: if the SAVE America Act doesn’t pass and the midterms go badly for Republicans, expect the administration to point to its absence as the explanation. What is happening on the Senate floor, four months into a debate that was never going anywhere procedurally, is not a debate about whether the bill will pass. It is a rehearsal for the argument that follows if it doesn’t.

Set that against everything the July 16 speech actually rested on. If China’s acquisition of publicly available voter data, a six-year-old intelligence dissent, and an unverified count of noncitizen registrations are serious enough to justify a national address and a demand to eliminate the filibuster, they are serious enough to justify funding the agencies built to counter them, not dismantling those agencies while making the speech.

The SAVE America Act would not have stopped any of what Trump described on July 16. It would not restore the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, rebuild CISA’s election security staff, or reconstitute the Foreign Malign Influence Center. It would require citizens to produce more paperwork to vote. Those are not the same problem, and passing one does not solve the other.

What Can You Do?

Find your representative and senators, and reach their offices directly, at house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative and senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm. Or call the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask to be connected to your representative or senator by name or zip code, a staffer will pick up.

Ask your representatives why a bill justified by warnings about foreign election interference does nothing to rebuild the agencies this administration has spent eighteen months dismantling.

Ask why the President still describes the bill as including a mail-voting ban and transgender restrictions that the Senate rejected months ago.

Ask why a housing bill that passed 358-32 and 85-5 sat unsigned for a month as leverage in a fight that has nothing to do with housing.

Ask why they support consolidating the personal data of tens of millions of American voters into a single federal database at the exact moment the government’s capacity to secure that kind of data from foreign access is being cut.

And ask why a party that built its modern identity on opposing federal overreach into state authority is now writing the bill that puts Washington, D.C. in charge of American elections, justified by a threat it is not otherwise acting to counter.

Every eligible voter deserves election laws that are honest about what they do, proportionate to the problems they address, and designed to work for the people they govern, not against them.

There is a practical response to all of this, and it does not depend on how the SAVE Act’s legislative fight ends or on which party controls Congress after November. The strongest defense against a stolen-election narrative, whichever side tries to tell it, is a turnout margin too large to credibly dispute. Claims that an election was rigged thrive in close results. They do not survive landslides. That is not a partisan strategy. It works exactly the same way no matter who wins.

The right to vote in this country does not depend on which candidate a person supports. It should not depend on how easily someone can produce a passport, travel to an election office during business hours, or avoid getting flagged by a database error. It is a constitutional guarantee that every eligible citizen gets to be part of the decision about how this country is governed.

Whatever you believe about the SAVE Act, about this administration, about 2020, or about any specific claim in either of these pieces, the answer is the same one, and it does not depend on party: show up, vote, and bring the people around you with you.

That is not a message about who should win. It is a message about whether the rest of us get a say at all.

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Resources & Further Reading

The Dismantling of Federal Election-Security Infrastructure

“Trump Zeroes In on Election Security. His Team Has Cut Thousands of Election-Focused Federal Workers.” CBS News, 2026, www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-election-security-cisa-justice-department-fbi-federal-worker-cuts.

“CISA Projected to Lose a Third of Its Workforce Under Trump’s 2026 Budget.” Nextgov/FCW, 2 June 2025, www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2025/06/cisa-projected-lose-third-its-workforce-under-trumps-2026-budget/405726.

“Trump Proposes Cutting CISA Election Security Program in FY27 Budget.” Nextgov/FCW, 7 Apr. 2026, www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2026/04/trump-proposes-cutting-cisa-election-security-program-fy27-budget/412672.

“Warner Presses CISA on Whether Staff Cuts Weakened Regional Cyber Support.” Nextgov/FCW, 16 June 2026, www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2026/06/warner-presses-cisa-whether-staff-cuts-weakened-regional-cyber-support/414204.

Center for Democracy and Technology. “Countdown to the Midterms: Mapping the Rapid Evolution of Election Security.” CDT, 13 Feb. 2026, cdt.org/insights/countdown-to-the-midterms-mapping-the-rapid-evolution-of-election-security.

“DOJ Disbands Foreign Influence Task Force, Limits Scope of FARA Prosecutions.” CyberScoop, 6 Feb. 2025, cyberscoop.com/doj-disbands-foreign-influence-task-force.

“Attorney General Bondi Cuts Back on Programs That Ran Afoul of Trump.” CNN, 6 Feb. 2025, www.cnn.com/2025/02/06/politics/bondi-trump-election-fara-justice/index.html.

Psaledakis, Daphne. “US State Department Closing Office Aimed at Countering Foreign Disinformation.” Reuters, via Yahoo News, 16 Apr. 2025, www.yahoo.com/news/us-state-department-closing-office-192607903.html.

The Election Assistance Commission

Timm, Jane C., and Jonathan Allen. “Trump Ousts Remaining Members of the Election Assistance Commission Ahead of Midterms.” NBC News, 9 July 2026, www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-election/trump-fires-election-assistance-commission-members-ahead-midterms-rcna353781.

“Trump Fires Election Assistance Commission Members, Leaving Agency Unable to Act.” Votebeat, 9 July 2026, www.votebeat.org/national/2026/07/09/trump-fires-election-assistance-commission-members-hicks-hovland-mccormick.

“Trump Fires Election Assistance Commission Leaders.” CNN, 9 July 2026, www.cnn.com/2026/07/09/politics/trump-fires-election-assistance-commissioners.

The DOGE/Social Security Voter Data Agreement

“How DOGE Improperly Accessed and Shared Social Security Data.” NPR, 23 Jan. 2026, www.npr.org/2026/01/23/nx-s1-5684185/doge-data-social-security-privacy.

“DOGE Likely Violated Order on Social Security Data, Court Filing Shows.” FedScoop, 21 Jan. 2026, fedscoop.com/doge-access-social-security-data-court-filing.

Hungary, Viktor Orbán, and JD Vance

“Proof of Concept.” Smart Ruminations, 13 April 2026.

Spike, Justin. “On Hungary Visit, Vance Urges Voters to Support Orbán Days Before Pivotal Election.” Associated Press, 7 Apr. 2026, via AOL News, www.aol.com/articles/jd-vance-travels-hungary-days-062408365.html.

“In Budapest, Vance Goes All In for Orbán Ahead of Election.” Courthouse News Service, 7 Apr. 2026, www.courthousenews.com/in-budapest-vance-goes-all-in-for-orban-ahead-of-election.

“Vance Heads to Budapest to Shore Up Orbán’s Support Before Sunday Vote.” Al Jazeera, 7 Apr. 2026, www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2026/4/7/vance-heads-to-budapest-to-shore-up-orbans-support-before-sunday-vote.

Trump’s Use of Emergency Authority

“Full List of National Emergencies Signed by Trump and in Effect.” Newsweek, 27 Oct. 2025, www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-national-emergencies-how-many-10946698.

“Analysis: Trump 2.0 Is in a State of Permanent Emergency.” CNN, 9 Apr. 2025, www.cnn.com/2025/04/09/politics/emergency-executive-orders-trump-tariffs-what-matters.

Atlantic Council. “Trump Tariff Tracker.” Atlantic Council, 2026, www.atlanticcouncil.org/programs/geoeconomics-center/trump-tariff-tracker.

Cost of Implementation

National Association of Counties. “SAVE Act Implementation Cost Estimate.” NACo, 2026, https://www.naco.org/resource/save-america-act-county-resource-hub.