The late October 2024 issue of The Economist headlined a special report illustrating that the US economy was “The Envy of the World.” It had outperformed all other rich countries for an extended period. In early 2025, the Biden presidency handed over a strong and prosperous nation, respected worldwide.

Now, a year and seven months into the Trump administration, our economy is in a shambles with inflation rising and incomes stagnating. Corporate profits are up but the share of national income going to working Americans is declining. The government is spending money at a record rate, but revenues are not keeping pace. The national debt is at an historic high.^[1] There is a reasonable case to be made that our country would be in much better shape if President Trump had gone on an extended gardening leave.

It has been the policy of the Trump administration to blame every emerging problem on the Biden administration and on President Biden personally. “Well, what about X?” “What about Hunter Biden?” That ends now. It is no longer credible. Whatever the faults of the prior administration, the Trump administration must take responsibility for where we are now.

We are in a war with many deaths and vast expense which we began without consulting possible allies outside the Middle East and without even the pretense of Congressional support. Our friends are Putin, Kim Jong Un, Netanyahu, and, until recently, Viktor Orbán. Our support for Ukraine and Taiwan is dubious. Our enemies are Canada, and most of the free world.

Tariffs are arbitrary with the President often and illegally violating our international trade agreements and imposing, altering, and removing tariffs on a whim.^[2] Tariffs are a tax on the purchaser (which is us) and are very disrupting for small businesses, farmers, and industry as well as adding significantly to inflation.

Our military is in disarray, and the world can see that it is not nearly as overwhelmingly powerful and well organized as it was thought to be. The chain of command has been disrupted, morale is sinking, and some highly visible operations have looked unprofessional. Internal conflict is growing. Munitions are at a low point and replacement will be slow.^[3]

We are pursuing, capturing, imprisoning, and deporting immigrants who have lived peacefully within the US for many years, who are our friends and neighbors, instead of focusing on criminals and more recent arrivals. The deployment of masked, heavily armed federal agents on American streets is at variance with our traditions.

The Justice Department has become an arm of the White House and is losing the respect it once had with the Judiciary, because of the questionable nature of many of the cases brought and the reduced ability of the attorneys involved. The assumption of “regularity” is being lost. Many highly competent attorneys have left. It is reported that morale is very low and that the Department is severely understaffed.^[4]

The Department of Health and Human Services under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is in similarly unfortunate straits with an exodus of experienced scientists and loss of almost all the top people involved in vaccine evaluation. Nearly $500 million in mRNA vaccine research contracts were terminated at a key point in the development of this wonderful technology. Thousands of other research awards have been cut or eliminated. The cuts in funding and the general anti-science posture of the administration are driving away researchers and postdoctoral students who are not US citizens. Newly restrictive visa requirements add further complication. I think it is safe to say that nearly everyone in our medical research establishment is thinking about overseas offers and opportunities.^[5]

Other government departments are similarly handicapped, and Cabinet meetings are the subject of “Dear Leader” cartoons with each member giving increasingly unctuous praise of President Trump.

Under the Trump administration, questionable transactions and conflicts of interest have reached levels which would have been unimaginable just two years ago. In my post last week, I placed President Trump and his family at the acme of our long American tradition of infamous and ever more effective con men and women. As is true with our historic con artists; where he has gained, those who trusted him have lost. He has become the most powerful and perhaps the best-known person in the world, and he and his family are receiving billions each year from persons, companies, and nations seeking and receiving advantage from him in his position as President.^[6]

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________}

References:

^[1] Annual inflation rose from 2.4% in early 2025 to a 4.2% peak in May 2026, easing to 3.4% in July - still elevated versus a year earlier. Real average hourly earnings fell 0.2% over the same period (BLS). Labor’s share of national income hit 53.7% in Q1 2026, the lowest since tracking began in 1947, as corporate profitability stayed elevated (Axios/CBS). The CBO projects a $2.1 trillion federal deficit for fiscal 2026, with spending growth outpacing revenue growth by more than 2-to-1. The national debt topped $40 trillion on August 19, 2026, up from $39 trillion just five months earlier (NPR).

^[2] Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, No. 24-1287, https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-1287_4gcj.pdf; Adam Feldman, “A Breakdown of the Court’s Tariff Decision,” SCOTUSblog, February 20, 2026, https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/02/a-breakdown-of-the-courts-tariff-decision/.

^[3] Hegseth has fired or forced out 24 Generals and Admirals since January 2025, including the Joint Chiefs Chairman, Army Chief of Staff, and Chief of Naval Operations, without performance justification (Newsweek). A Partnership for Public Service survey found DOD morale scores collapsed across every branch from 2024 to 2025 (Defense One). Reports describe ongoing clashes between Hegseth and senior Pentagon officials (IBTimes UK). U.S. munitions stockpiles have been significantly depleted by the Iran conflict, with rebuilding expected to take years (CNN).

^[4] Federal judges have issued rulings finding that the Justice Department has eroded the “presumption of regularity” courts traditionally extend it, citing “unlawful,” “unethical,” and “unseemly” conduct by DOJ attorneys, ProPublica. More than 3,300 DOJ attorneys have left since January 2025, with only about 800 replacements hired, and independent reporting describes morale as very low and several divisions severely understaffed (New Republic).

^[5] Selena Simmons-Duffin, “Chaotic HHS Layoffs Leave Employees at CDC, FDA and NIH Reeling,” NPR, April 5, 2025, https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/04/05/g-s1-58312/hhs-layoffs-rif-cdc-fda-nih; “New ACIP Charter Could Allow RFK Jr. to Further Restrict Vaccine Access, Critics Say,” CIDRAP, University of Minnesota, 2026, https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/childhood-vaccines/new-acip-charter-could-allow-rfk-jr-further-restrict-vaccine-access-critics-say; “HHS Announces Reduction in mRNA Vaccine Development Programs Under BARDA, Nearly $500 Million in Contracts Cancelled,” PharmExec, August 6, 2025, https://www.pharmexec.com/view/hhs-reduction-mrna-vaccine-development-barda-500-million-contracts-cancelled; “See the Alarming Extent of NIH and NSF Funding Cuts in 2025,” Science News, 2025, https://www.sciencenews.org/article/nih-nsf-cuts-2025-data; “Visa Time Limits on Foreign Ph.D. Students and Postdocs Will Harm U.S. Science, Experts Warn,” STAT, July 28, 2026, https://www.statnews.com/2026/07/28/dhs-visa-policy-change-international-students-scientific-research-impact/.

^[6] Veronika Kyrylenko, “Trump Disclosure Shows $2.2B in Income, Including $1.4B From Crypto and More Than 21,000 Stock Trades,” The New American, July 6, 2026, https://thenewamerican.com/us/trump-disclosure-shows-2-2b-in-income-including-1-4b-from-crypto-and-more-than-21000-stock-trades/; Miranda Jeyaretnam, “Trump Reports Over $1 Billion in Income From Crypto Ventures,” Time, July 1, 2026, https://time.com/article/2026/07/01/trump-2025-financial-disclosure-crypto-world-liberty-financial/.

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When I was about thirteen or fourteen, I found a book on the shelf above my grandfather’s desk entitled “The Go-Getter.” ^[i] It was signed with a nice note to my grandfather. When I asked him about it, he told me that he and the author, Peter B. Kyne, had served together during WW I.

The book is about a young and wounded WW I veteran, William Peck, who is looking for a job but is in sad shape. He has lost part of his left arm, and his injured leg has healed badly leaving him with a lopsided gait. He is still recovering from pneumonia and associated illnesses.

The story begins when he applies for a job with a lumber and logging company. He bypasses the hiring department, going straight to the top. The President of the company is planning to give a job in the Shanghai office to his son-in-law but decides to give Peck what he thinks is an impossible task, to eliminate him as a competitor. He is to find a specific and valuable blue vase and bring it back within a very short time.

After surmounting obstacle after obstacle and following his repeated motto, “It Shall be Done,” Peck arrives back at the office exhausted but triumphant and gets the job.

“The Go-Getter” became famous and is still selling on Amazon. For years, it exemplified the American dream, that grit and determination would lead to success. That any man could become rich and successful through hard work.

The book was written in 1921, but it expressed the spirit of possibility which had been the country’s essence since its earliest days. The chance to own a piece of land, to carve out a farm, to be independent, self-sustaining, to start a business. In contrast to uncounted prior centuries in Europe where most people never traveled more than a few miles from where they were born, where they were dependent for sustenance and safety on a local warlord or large landowner. The dream of self-reliance and independence as expressed by Laura Ingalls Wilder in “Little House on the Prairie.” The concept “Manifest Destiny,” first used in the early 1800’s expressed a belief in American exceptionalism, a mission, perhaps divinely inspired, to expand the nation and its culture westward and, later, under President Teddy Roosevelt, across the seas.

Of course, the downside was ever present too. An average lifespan of forty years (due to crushing infant mortality) and nearly useless medicine and healthcare. A boom-and-bust economy. Thousands of heavily indebted small farms and many bankruptcies. The rapid growth of industry and the cities, heedless of the needs of workers. Through the second half of the 1800’s and into the new century, massive immigration from southern Europe and Ireland where optimism would be met by miserly wages and crowded big city tenements. A report in the early 1930’s described Pittsburgh:

“with its extremes of riches and poverty, its unrelieved dirtiness and ugliness, its ruthless materialism and individualism, its irrepressible industrial conflicts, its lack of any integrating principle other than the sign of a dollar.” ^[ii]

And many were excluded from that spirit of possibility. The people who had lived on the westward land for many centuries, and the people who endured slavery and then, after emancipation, the Jim Crow regime. Realistically, the odds militated sharply against anyone becoming rich. Still, it was possible and even likely that each generation would improve on the lot of the one before.

But unlimited possibility remained the credo of the country, expressed in the newspapers, novels, music, magic, the stage and, in the 1920’s, radio. Daniel Boone, “Buffalo Bill” Cody (who turned the rapidly disappearing frontier into a traveling show), Annie Oakley, and the dozens of novels written by Horatio Alger. Rags to riches, from Benjamin Franklin to Andrew Carnegie.

It was inevitable too, in that thrusting turbulent time, that the tricksters, the showmen, and the patent medicine salesmen would emerge as part of the country’s ongoing story. In a way, the other side of the coin from the self-made man, with the same confidence, the relentless refusal to take no for an answer. And just as American as apple pie.

A few examples:

Tom Bell, of Harvard’s class of 1734, was one of the first of our American con men. As the Pennsylvania Gazette reported in February 1743: “He has it seems made it his Business for several Years to travel from Colony to Colony, personating different People . . . and frequently pretending Distress, imposed grosly on the charitable and compassionate.” Having impressed people with his learning and manners, he would leave with the silver and whatever else he could take. Harvard’s own biographical annals describe him as “In all the arts of theft, robbery, fraud, deception and defamation, he was so deeply skilled, and so thoroughly practiced, that it is believed he never had his equal in this country.” ^[iii]

Elizabeth Bigley, known as Cassie Chadwick, defrauded banks out of millions by claiming to be the illegitimate daughter of Andrew Carnegie.

Clark Stanley was the original “snake oil salesman.” A former cowboy, he claimed to have studied with a Hopi medicine man and in 1893 he sold his concoctions at the Chicago World’s Fair, skinning a live snake, boiling it and bottling the essence. Later analysis of his product showed no trace of snake.

George C. Parker, starting around 1900, approached immigrants freshly arrived at Ellis Island, told them he owned the Brooklyn Bridge, and sold it to them, complete with forged deeds and a business plan for a toll booth.

Charles Ponzi, in 1920, promised investors a 50% profit within months and, for a time, paid early investors with the investments of later investors.

Bernie Madoff and Elizabeth Holmes exemplify our latter-day con artists. Continuing the tradition, Madoff extracted billions in a “Ponzi” scheme, and Holmes built a nine-billion-dollar valuation on a machine that she knew did not work. Until now, they were both leading contenders for the con man’s ultimate title and trophy: GOAT “greatest of all time.”

Looking back through our history, there is a clear trend where each successive con becomes larger, much larger, even in adjusted dollars. In the past, a “con” depended on secrecy, on investors or participants being ignorant of the underlying ingredients or machinations.

Secrecy may no longer be necessary.

Last Friday, August 14, 2026, World Liberty Trust Company obtained conditional government approval to become a national trust bank.

The company shares common owners with World Liberty Financial, whose largest shareholders are an Abu Dhabi investment vehicle (49%) and an entity affiliated with the Trump family (38%). The revenue split within WLF heavily favors the Trump interests.

WLF sponsors a stablecoin called USD1.

The charter will allow the trust bank (WLTC) to assume sponsorship and issuance of USD1 and to hold and invest the dollar reserves that back it. The result is a federally chartered bank issuing a digital dollar, USD1, on public blockchains.^[iv]

On January 23, 2025, Trump signed an executive order, “Strengthening American Leadership in Digital Financial Technology,” that prohibits federal agencies from taking any action to establish, issue, or promote a central bank digital currency and required immediate termination of any ongoing plans or initiatives to create one.

The order also revoked Biden’s 2022 executive order that had directed responsible development of digital assets, under which the Fed had been studying a digital dollar.

USD1 was launched on March 25, 2025, just two months after the executive order.

A stablecoin issuer takes in dollars, gives out tokens, and invests the reserves (typically in Treasury bills) keeping all the interest earned from the “float,” the ownership of the Treasuries.

USD1 grew to roughly $4.5 billion in circulating supply in its first year, the fastest-growing fiat-backed stablecoin. The potential is easily billions in profit every year. There is nothing secret about the plan.^[v]

146 countries and currency unions are exploring digital currencies in some form, including China, whose pilot program, digital yuan, has already processed the equivalent of two trillion dollars. Altogether they represent more than 70% of global GDP, with the U.S. now the notable holdout.

While President Trump is in office, there is a ready-made constituency for USD1, made up of individuals, companies, and countries that seek favored treatment.

The U.S. is newly prohibited from establishing a digital currency. With USD1, World Liberty Trust Company and the Trump family are attempting to step into those shoes.

________________________________________________________________________

References:

^[i] Peter B. Kyne, The Go-Getter: A Story That Tells You How to Be One (New York: Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, 1921).

^[ii] Richard P. Mulcahy, The Dark Side of the Cathedral of Learning: The Turner Case (Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, Vol. 69, No. 1, January 1986), 42

^[iii] Clifford K. Shipton, “Thomas Bell,” in Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, vol. 9, Biographical Sketches of Those Who Attended Harvard College in the Classes 1731–1735 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1956), quoting an unidentified earlier account.

^[iv] Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Corporate Decision #1385: Application to Charter World Liberty Trust Company, National Association, August 2026, https://www.occ.gov/topics/charters-and-licensing/interpretations-and-decisions/2026/cd1385.pdf.

^[v] Eco, accessed August 20, 2026, https://eco.com/support/en/articles/11753300-usd1-stablecoin-by-world-liberty-financial.

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In the winter of 1954, a small group of people in Oak Park, Illinois, were waiting for the end of the world.

Their leader, Dorothy Martin, a local spiritualist, had received messages from beings on a planet called Clarion. A great flood would destroy the world before dawn on December 21st. The faithful, and only the faithful, would be lifted away by flying saucers beforehand.

Members quit jobs, gave away possessions, left spouses. Some sat in a living room through the night with the metal removed from their clothing, since the visitors had specified that metal could not be brought aboard.

When dawn broke on just another cold Midwest morning, with no flood and no UFO’s in sight, they became convinced that the apocalypse had been postponed to Christmas Eve.

When Christmas day arrived with the world intact, the group did not disband. Most members did not conclude they had been wrong about anything. Within hours they arrived at a new understanding, their faith had been so powerful, their vigil so devoted, that the group had spread enough light to persuade God to spare the world.

Sitting among them, taking notes, were psychologist Leon Festinger and two colleagues, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, who had infiltrated the group months earlier. Festinger named the mechanism he observed cognitive dissonance, the psychological discomfort of holding a belief that reality has directly contradicted, and the mind’s strong preference for resolving that discomfort by revising its account of reality rather than abandoning the belief.^[1]

At about the same time, in 1954, I was on the debating team at my high school in Massachusetts. Senator Joseph McCarthy was then the chair of a notorious Senate Committee purportedly finding Communists in the State Department, the Army and government generally. He was soon to crash and burn.

One of my debating teammates was a McCarthy follower who continually interrupted our debates using McCarthy’s repeated phrase “Point of Order! Point of Order!” I could not understand then, how he could not see that McCarthy was a reckless liar and bully (as was soon to be revealed), and I find it similarly difficult now to understand contemporary thinkers and writers whose political convictions seem to me not merely wrong but immune to the kind of evidence that would change my own mind.

We can look at proximate causes of political polarization such as economic distress, the feeling of being left behind, income and wealth disparity, the culture wars generally, and leadership choices intensified by new ways of communicating. The idea that political opinions are increasingly related to race, religion, beliefs, peer relationships, geography, occupation, lifestyle, culture, and more.

Instead, though, I thought I would look deeper into what researchers have learned about how we think and make decisions. I can give you just a sampling of my findings in this essay, and please note that I approach this as a researcher or reviewer and am not a trained social scientist.

Although psychiatry and social science have moved on in the last 100 years, Sigmund Freud introduced a concept that has endured. As Scott Stossel put it in The Atlantic, Freud argued,

“that our personalities and behaviors are governed by a maelstrom of hidden drives and motivations mostly unknown to our conscious selves. What we experience as our ‘conscious life’ is in fact only a post hoc rationalization of things we are doing for other reasons, a devastating blow against not just human rationality but even free will.”

Stossel goes on to note that brain-imaging research bears this out: fMRI studies show the amygdala registering fear before a person consciously perceives the threat, meaning the body often decides before the mind knows why.^[2]

Working in the 1970s, neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga found something more striking still, working with patients whose brain hemispheres had been surgically separated to treat severe epilepsy. Because the two hemispheres could no longer communicate, Gazzaniga could send an instruction, “walk,” to the right hemisphere, without the left hemisphere knowing why the body had begun to move. Asked why they were walking, patients never once said “I don’t know.” They said, instantly and with total conviction, something like “I wanted a soda.” Gazzaniga called this confabulation, the mind generating a plausible, sincerely believed explanation in the absence of any real information about its own cause. The function is not to discover why we act. It is to guarantee that a coherent account always exists, whether or not that account bears any relationship to what actually happened.^[3]

Political scientist John Zaller, writing in 1992, argued that most political beliefs held by ordinary citizens are not built from independent engagement with primary evidence at all. They are built from trust, a person absorbs cues from political and media figures they already trust, adopts the position those figures have staked out, and treats that adoption as though it was the product of their own independent judgment.^[4]

Yale researcher Dan Kahan and colleagues, in 2013, devised a convincing demonstration of this. More than a thousand participants were given a numerical reasoning problem, requiring comparison of ratios in a data table. Half were told the numbers came from a clinical trial testing whether a new skin cream worked. On this version, people skilled at the underlying math got the right answer, and this held equally for liberals and conservatives. Political affiliation made no measurable difference.

The other half saw the same numbers, in precisely the same table. This time, researchers said the data came from a study of whether a concealed-handgun ban reduced or increased crime. Only the label at the top of the page had been changed. The most mathematically skilled conservatives solved the problem correctly when the data showed the gun ban failing and got the problem wrong when the data showed it succeeding. The most mathematically skilled liberals showed the exact opposite.

Kahan called this “identity-protective cognition,” reasoning ability conscripted in service of a conclusion the reasoner’s identity requires, rather than deployed to find the correct one. It is the finding that should trouble anyone who assumed that more or better education was the remedy for polarization.^[5]

By 2011, half a century of research had accumulated documenting the many ways human reasoning fails. Cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber looked at that literature and asked: “What if it isn’t failing at all? What if everyone has simply misunderstood the job?” Their paper, Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory, proposed that reasoning evolved to help people win arguments. Their work shows that people perform poorly on abstract logical and statistical problems when working alone but improve substantially when defending a position against another person’s objections. They argue that this isn’t a contradiction. It’s what should happen if reasoning is fundamentally a social tool for constructing and defending arguments rather than a private tool for discovering facts.

This reframes confirmation bias entirely. Rather than a glitch in an otherwise truth-seeking system, Mercier and Sperber treat it as the system working as designed, a mind built to construct the most persuasive possible case for its own side.^[6]

Another interesting study found that when survey respondents are offered a small cash payment, sometimes a dollar or two, for the factually correct answer to a politically charged question, the partisan gap often narrows substantially. If partisans actually held the beliefs their unpaid answers suggested, a trivial incentive shouldn’t move a sincere belief. The likelier explanation is that for some questions, there was no real confusion to correct, only a respondent who knew the accurate answer and chose, when it cost nothing, to give the one that performed loyalty instead. Researchers call this expressive responding, or partisan cheerleading.^[7]

Beginning in the mid-2000s, researchers working under the label evolutionary leadership theory, most prominently Mark van Vugt, argued that for nearly the entire span of human history, small bands survived by solving urgent coordination problems together, when to break camp, where to hunt, how to respond when a rival group appeared. A band capable of settling on a leader quickly and acting in concert would be more likely to grow and prosper.

Under ordinary, non-threatening circumstances, humans show no strong preference for dominant, physically forceful leaders. Across decades of leadership research, no reliable link between raw dominance and leadership emergence has been found; what predicts leadership choice is competence, demonstrated generosity (particularly where it might affect the appropriate distribution of resources), and visible willingness to take initiative for the group. During wartime, or whenever a group believes it faces serious external danger, preferences do move decisively toward leaders projecting dominance and aggression.^[8]

Anthropologist Christopher Boehm documented, beginning in 1999, that small-scale human societies also evolved robust mechanisms for tearing down leaders who overreach, using gossip, public ridicule, coordinated shunning, and in extreme cases organized violence against a would-be tyrant. Humans did not simply evolve to follow. They evolved to follow provisionally, and to withdraw that following, sometimes violently, the moment a leader appears to be exploiting the trust extended to him.^[9]

Following on this is the concept of a deeply rooted and perhaps heritable “authoritarian personality.” For years, this was assumed to be a right-wing characteristic. The concept traces to a 1950 study explicitly designed to explain the psychological roots of fascism.^[10] Many of the studies that followed used Bob Altemeyer’s widely used “right-wing authoritarianism” scale.^[11] He defined the characteristics of an authoritarian personality as:

1. a high degree of submission to the authorities who are perceived to be established and legitimate in the society in which one lives.

2. a general aggressiveness, directed against various persons, that is perceived to be sanctioned by established authorities.

3. a high degree of adherence to the social conventions that are perceived to be endorsed by society and its established authorities.

To challenge this assumption, a research team at Emory University in 2022 built a study questionnaire and tested it across more than seven thousand participants with more than sixty authoritarianism-related variables. Left-wing authoritarianism too, turns out to be real, measurable, and to share a common psychological core with its right-wing counterpart, similarly evincing moral absolutism, notably low openness to new experience, strong deference to whichever authority the tribe has anointed as legitimate, and a punitive instinct toward anyone who violates in-group norms. It follows then that the underlying architecture for both right-wing and left-wing attitudes is likely fundamentally the same; an ancient, evolved, and defensive instinct.^[12]

The Oak Park believers never got their flood. My debate teammate never changed his mind after McCarthy’s committee collapsed in disgrace. Neither event moved the true believer. Festinger’s dissonance, Zaller’s trust cues, Kahan’s identity-protective cognition, Mercier and Sperber’s argumentative theory of reasoning, each finds a version of the same thing from a different angle. The mind was not built as an instrument to discover truth. It seems to be built to protect tribal membership. Perhaps the most important result of this review of the research is to accept that we do not fully understand the workings of our own minds.

So, where does this take us? If our evolution and design suggest that much of what we think is not logical at all, how can we make accurate and evidence-based decisions?

Thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brought us the Enlightenment, with the advent of what we term the scientific method, and its principles translate directly to everyday judgments about the validity of factual information.

The method asks that we pause for a moment before accepting information or reaching a judgment. Treat a claim as a hypothesis rather than a fact, something that could be wrong, and ask what other evidence might invalidate it. Trace it to its original source, the study, the court record, rather than the commentator or writer who repeated it, since many falsehoods are a paraphrase or a misreading of something real. Never let just one source be the sole authority and make sure your confirming sources are independent of each other. Then seek out the strongest version of the case against, the everyday equivalent of peer review.

No one can verify every claim, but we should cultivate the discipline to verify what we intend to believe and repeat, and we should revise when better evidence arrives.

___________________________________________________________________________

References:

^[1] Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956).

^[2] Scott Stossel, “What if Freud Was Right?” The Atlantic, September 2026.

^[3] Michael S. Gazzaniga and Joseph E. LeDoux, The Integrated Mind (New York: Plenum Press, 1978).

^[4] John R. Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

^[5] Dan M. Kahan, Ellen Peters, Erica Dawson, and Paul Slovic, “Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government,” Behavioural Public Policy 1, no. 1 (2017): 54–86.

^[6] Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, “Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34, no. 2 (2011): 57–74.

^[7] John G. Bullock, Alan S. Gerber, Seth J. Hill, and Gregory A. Huber, “Partisan Bias in Factual Beliefs about Politics,” Quarterly Journal of Political Science 10, no. 4 (2015): 519–578.

^[8] Mark Van Vugt, “Evolutionary Origins of Leadership and Followership,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 10, no. 4 (2006): 354–371.

^[9] Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

^[10] Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950).

^[11] Bob Altemeyer, Right-Wing Authoritarianism (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1981).

^[12] Thomas H. Costello, Shauna M. Bowes, Sean T. Stevens, Irwin D. Waldman, Arber Tasimi, and Scott O. Lilienfeld, “Clarifying the Structure and Nature of Left-Wing Authoritarianism,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 122, no. 1 (2022): 135–170.

In this photo, provided by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), two federal law enforcement officers coordinate with other officials in February 2025 near Washington, D.C.

I don’t think I was the only one who was confused when I first saw pictures of ICE and Border Patrol officers with the label POLICE on their uniforms. When I looked it up, I found that this is not a new practice. The FBI, DEA, ATF, and other federal agencies have used the label for decades as has Homeland Security.^[1] It is easy to see why. FBI is instantly recognizable but the other names, not so much. In a rapidly moving tactical situation, everyone can recognize and process the word ‘police’ which likely reduces the risk for everyone involved.

ICE officers are technically ‘law enforcement’ but so are postal inspectors, game wardens, park rangers, and IRS investigators. All of them, including ICE officers, have narrowly defined authority, unlike police officers, who have general jurisdiction: the ability to respond to any crime or emergency, involving any person, anywhere within a locality, city or state.

What is going on with the ICE labeling is different. Instead of a few isolated federal raids, there are many operations nationwide. Agents often wear only the ‘police’ designation or conceal other identifying labels, sometimes using Velcro to add or change identity on the fly. They use a variety of unmarked vehicles including passenger cars, vans, and pickup trucks (sometimes bearing decals for nonexistent contractors, with agents dressed as construction or utility workers^[2]). All deliberately confusing to their quarry, and to the public, too.

Home searches without a judicial warrant or informed permission violate the Fourth Amendment, but trust in the ‘police’ designation has sometimes been enough to deceive people and get them to open the door anyway. In a 2025 federal court settlement, ICE agreed it could no longer identify as state or local law enforcement or use ruses to gain entry to homes in the Los Angeles region.^[3]

When we blur the distinction between ICE and the actual local and state police, we damage our trust in the real police. A recent poll found that 74% of Americans expressed confidence in their local police (including 64% of Black Americans).^[4] ICE agents themselves are increasingly unpopular with Americans.^[5] The deliberate blurring lets federal agents borrow the strong public trust extended to local police without being bound by the same rules. Local and state police officers across the country are voicing concerns that long-established community good will is being damaged.^[6]

In less than a year, ICE and Customs & Border Protection (CBP) have received approximately $240 billion in funding.^[7] Looking at the annual run rates, ICE and CBP are currently running at $41.5 billion, about 22 percent of the entire 2025 budget for the US Army, worldwide. Further allocation of the presently unobligated portion of the $240 billion may bring them up closer to 35 percent to 40 percent. Their annual rate is more than twice that of the FBI, DEA, ATF, and U.S. Marshals combined.^[8] For comparison, state and local police in roughly 17,500 agencies across the United States operated on $135 billion in 2021 (latest numbers I could find), reporting not to a single President but to thousands of mayors, county boards, governors, and elected sheriffs.^[9]

Certainly, all this funding has changed the immigration picture. Illegal entry has fallen to its lowest level since 1970. Border encounters have fallen sharply. Some undocumented residents are leaving the country voluntarily. During the Obama and Biden administrations arrest and deportation numbers were mostly at the border. Now these actions are taking place in the interior of the country and there are many fewer people attempting to enter from the border. Interior ICE arrests in 2025 ran at a higher daily rate than any point in the past decade but they are arresting very few people who are threats to public safety. The share of those arrested with a violent criminal conviction, even by the broadest definition, was 5 to 7 percent, by far the lowest of any recent administration.

Now that agents are present in so many locales, DHS says assaults on ICE officers have risen sharply, and cites those numbers to justify agents’ armament, tactical equipment, and masking. Its claimed increase over the prior year has grown with each announcement, from 413 percent in mid-2025 to more than 1,300 percent by January 2026. The department has not released the underlying incident counts or methodology. The Project on Government Oversight, examining prosecution referral data, noted that publicly available data does not appear to back up DHS’s statistical claims.^[10]

Looking at the rapid national expansion and massive funding of ICE and the related entities, we wonder if the Administration may be in the process of establishing a centralized national police force, hiding behind the immigration enforcement label. This is clearly contrary to 250 years of history and legal precedent.

Article I of the Constitution limited military appropriations to two years, forcing periodic public debate and demonstrating distrust of a standing army.^[11] Interestingly, there was no similar restriction on the funding of the Navy since it did not pose so direct a threat of military control. Our founders had experienced the oppression of an army enforcing the King’s will against them and opted for a system of citizen-soldiers, termed militia, under local and state control. A militia could not be turned against the citizenry because it was made up of and controlled by those same citizens. The language of the Second Amendment about a “well regulated militia” also supports this determination.

The Tenth Amendment strictly limits the powers of the federal government, stating that: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” General police power was not included. The Supreme Court laid it out in United States v. Morrison (2000): “We can think of no better example of the police power, which the Founders denied the National Government and reposed in the States, than the suppression of violent crime and vindication of its victims.”^[12] A separate line of cases through the 1990s held that the federal government cannot force state or local officers to carry out federal policy.^[13] Legal scholars have detailed how that principle applies directly to immigration enforcement, writing that states cannot be compelled to help ICE, but cannot obstruct federal agents acting within the government’s own narrower authority.^[14] The President also retains a separate, limited power to deploy federal forces to protect federal personnel and property.^[15]

Locking the door from another direction, in 1878, the Posse Comitatus Act^[16] barred the armed forces from domestic law enforcement. This also covers the National Guard when federalized and under the command of the President. The Insurrection Act, if invoked by the President, is the one statutory exception that lifts the Posse Comitatus Act’s prohibition.

The creation of the FBI in 1908 could have been the beginning of a national police force, but the initial charter carefully restricted the new agency. It was authorized to investigate federal crimes and nothing more. Its agents could not make arrests or carry weapons without being deputized by local authorities. That did change as leaders rapidly expanded the scope of operations, but the abuses of the Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920 and the political reaction forced the FBI, in 1924, to reverse course and prioritize the investigative, professional (forensics, the FBI Academy, merit hiring) and federal side of their mandate.^[17]

National Police and secret police have been the signature of abusive regimes across history. Fourteenth century China had the Jinyiwei, the Ming emperor’s secret police, empowered to arrest and execute anyone, including the emperor’s own relatives, without judicial oversight. Sixteenth century Russia had the Oprichnina, Ivan the Terrible’s private enforcers, answerable only to him.^[18] As we all know, the twentieth century industrialized the same design in several different countries.^[19]

The President’s authority to protect federal personnel and property and to legally arrest and deport undocumented immigrants is authorized by Constitution and statute. It is carefully limited and was never meant to allow the construction of a large massively funded national armed group, reporting to one person, and labeled as ‘police.’

250 years of law and history demonstrate that the founders and millions of Americans over the years have repeatably rejected the concept and establishment of a national police force. No one has voted to establish such a force. No statute has created one. It appears to be happening incrementally, through funding and action. The administration is simply moving ahead, seizing power without the necessary discussion or legislative process.

The structure is now in place and this or another administration could easily make changes to the mission, creating a real and threatening national police presence.

__________________________________________________________________________

References:

^[1] The use of prominently labeled outer garments identifying federal agents dates to at least the 1980s and 1990s, when black or navy raid jackets emblazoned with agency initials (FBI, DEA, ATF) became standard issue for enforcement operations. The stated rationale, offered by former agents and academic accounts of federal law enforcement practice, is that visible identification serves both to distinguish agents from armed suspects during fast-moving operations and to communicate authority. See Michael Filimowicz, “The Shadow Wardrobe: Evolution and Semiotics of Federal Agent Fashion in America,” discussing accounts by former DEA agent Michael Levine and former FBI agent Joseph Pistone.

^[2] Federal agents have used occupational disguises during surveillance and enforcement operations. The Intercept confirmed in August 2025 that an agent filmed wearing a hard hat and safety vest in Brewster, New York was an ICE employee. During Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota, the Associated Press reported agents wearing high-visibility vests and unusually clean white hard hats staking out a family-owned restaurant in Shakopee from a vehicle bearing a decal for a nonexistent electrical contractor; the Citizens Utility Board of Minnesota subsequently issued multilingual guidance to help customers verify the identity of actual utility workers. Sources: The Intercept, “ICE Agent Caught on Camera Disguised as a Construction Worker,” August 11, 2025; Associated Press reporting via Bring Me The News, February 2026.

^[3] Kidd v. Noem, No. 2:20-cv-03512 (C.D. Cal.), settlement approved August 4, 2025. Following partial summary judgment for plaintiffs in June 2025, ICE agreed that officers in its Los Angeles Field Office, covering Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo Counties, may not identify as state or local law enforcement or use ruses misrepresenting their governmental identity to gain entry to homes. The case does not bind ICE practice outside that region.

^[4] Gallup, “Racial Divide on Policing Narrows 5 Years After Floyd Death,” Gallup, May 23, 2025. 74 percent of Americans expressed a great deal or fair amount of confidence in their local police in 2024, up from 71 percent in 2023, with confidence rising from 59 to 64 percent among Black Americans since 2021.

^[5] The Center Square Voters’ Voice Poll, conducted by Noble Predictive Insights between March 2 and March 5, 2026, surveying 2,659 respondents. 52 percent of Americans opposed ICE operations to locate and deport illegal immigrants, while 45 percent supported them. Independents opposed by 60 to 34 percent; 83 percent of Democrats opposed and 77 percent of Republicans supported. Pollster Mike Noble described the data as reflecting “a classic ‘policy vs. practice’ split. The underlying idea of enforcing immigration law, including deportations, still has real support.” Source: Sarah Roderick-Fitch, “Most voters support more transparency in ICE operations; oppose deportation efforts,” The Center Square, March 2026.

^[6] In April 2026, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, together with nearly twenty other law enforcement organizations, issued a set of “shared principles” calling for improved coordination with federal immigration authorities, targeted enforcement focused on violent offenders rather than broad civil enforcement, and reduced political rhetoric. CNN chief law enforcement analyst John Miller characterized the statement as highly unusual, noting he could not recall the organization representing the nation’s police chiefs publicly turning a critical eye on other law enforcement agencies in this way. Individual chiefs have been more direct: Mendota Heights, Minnesota Police Chief Kelly McCarthy told the Los Angeles Times that trust built since 2020 was being undone, and Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara publicly warned that prolonged federal enforcement operations risk eroding the fragile community trust rebuilt since George Floyd’s murder. Sources: CNN, “Police chiefs push guidelines to protect community trust amid immigration enforcement operations,” April 2, 2026; PBS Firing Line, interview with Brian O’Hara, February 6, 2026.

^[7]Congress provided the Department of Homeland Security, primarily ICE and CBP, roughly $170 billion in the July 2025 reconciliation bill (the One Big Beautiful Bill Act) and approximately $70 billion in a second reconciliation bill in mid-2026, for a combined total of about $240 billion in new funding. As of late July 2026, roughly $152 billion of that remained unobligated, according to Senate Budget Committee Democratic staff analysis of Office of Management and Budget SF-133 reports. Sources: Brennan Center for Justice, “ICE and Customs and Border Protection Budgets to Exceed $200 Billion,” June 2026; National Immigration Law Center, “What’s in Congress’s New ICE Funding Law?,” July 2026.

^[8] The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed in July 2025, appropriated approximately $170 billion to the Department of Homeland Security, with a subsequent reconciliation bill in mid-2026 adding roughly $70 billion. The $75 billion allocated to ICE alone under the OBBBA works out to roughly $29 billion in annual spending authority, an exponential increase from ICE’s approximately $10 billion prior-year budget. The Brennan Center notes that the $11.25 billion added to ICE’s detention budget alone represents a 400 percent increase and exceeds the Department of Justice’s FY2026 request for the entire federal prison system, which holds 155,000 inmates. Cato Institute analysis found that roughly two-thirds of all federal law enforcement funding in FY2025 was already directed to immigration and border enforcement, with combined ICE and CBP funding running 8 times the FBI budget, 13 times the DEA budget, and 21 times the ATF budget, even before the OBBBA increases took effect. Sources: Brennan Center for Justice, “Big Budget Act Creates a ‘Deportation-Industrial Complex’”; Alex Nowrasteh (Cato Institute), “Here’s How the Administration Plans to Spend the Largest Immigration Enforcement Funding Surge in History,” March 2026, based on OMB apportionment data and Treasury Monthly Statements; Statista analysis of Cato Institute data, 2025.

^[9] State and local government spending on police protection totaled $135 billion in 2021, approximately 4 percent of state and local direct general expenditures, according to Urban Institute analysis of U.S. Census Bureau Annual Survey of State and Local Government Finances data. Local governments accounted for approximately 87 percent of that total. The agency count comes from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which identified 17,541 state and local agencies performing law enforcement functions in June 2018, the most recent census available; those agencies employed approximately 1,214,000 full-time sworn and civilian personnel, an increase of about 80,000 (up 7 percent) since 2008. Sources: Urban Institute, “Criminal Justice Expenditures: Police, Corrections, and Courts”; Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Census of State and Local Law Enforcement Agencies, 2018 – Statistical Tables” (NCJ 302187), October 2022.

^[10] Nick Schwellenbach, Luisa Clausen, and Aarushi Sahejpal, “DHS Assault Cases Spiked to a Record High. Experts and Judges Have Raised Alarms,” Project on Government Oversight, February 2026, reporting in partnership with the Investigative Reporting Workshop. Examining federal prosecution referral data under 18 U.S.C. § 111, POGO noted that publicly available data does not appear to support DHS’s statistical claims regarding assault increases. A DHS spokesperson attributed the rise in referrals to increased violence against agents; POGO also noted that other factors could have contributed, including the substantially higher number of agents conducting street-level operations during nationwide enforcement actions and the protests those operations generated.

^[11] U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 12, limiting military appropriations to a term of no more than two years, understood by constitutional historians as a deliberate check against a permanent standing army, in contrast to naval appropriations, which carried no such restriction.

^[12] United States v. Morrison, 529 U.S. 598, 618 (2000). The Supreme Court held that general police power was “the power which the Founders denied the National Government and reposed in the States,” citing this as the clearest example of authority the Constitution never delegated to Washington.

^[13] New York v. United States, 505 U.S. 144 (1992), and Printz v. United States, 521 U.S. 898 (1997). Together these cases establish that the federal government cannot compel state or local officials to administer or enforce federal law, with Printz specifically striking down a Brady Act provision requiring local sheriffs to conduct background checks.

^[14] The anti-commandeering doctrine derives from New York v. United States, 505 U.S. 144 (1992), Printz v. United States, 521 U.S. 898 (1997), and Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, 584 U.S. 453 (2018). Vikram David Amar and Jason Mazzone apply the principle to immigration enforcement in “Federalism First Principles: Lessons from the Los Angeles ICE Protests,” Verdict, 2025, arguing that states cannot be compelled to assist federal immigration enforcement but also cannot discriminate against or obstruct federal operations, and that the President retains inherent constitutional authority to deploy federal forces to protect federal personnel and property.

^[15] Vikram David Amar and Jason Mazzone, “Federalism First Principles: Lessons from the Los Angeles ICE Protests,” Verdict (Justia), June 16, 2025. States cannot be compelled to assist federal immigration enforcement but also cannot obstruct federal agents acting within the government’s own authority; the President retains inherent constitutional authority to deploy federal forces to protect federal personnel and property without state permission.

^[16] Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, 18 U.S.C. § 1385, barring use of the U.S. military for domestic law enforcement absent explicit constitutional or congressional authorization. The Act’s application to the National Guard depends on duty status: it applies when the Guard is federalized under Title 10, but not when the Guard operates under State Active Duty or Title 32, where troops remain under a governor’s nominal command even while federally funded and performing federally requested missions.

^[17] The Bureau of Investigation, created in 1908, was originally authorized only to investigate federal crimes; agents could not make arrests or carry weapons without deputization by local authorities. The Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920, mass arrests of suspected radicals conducted with little regard for individual due process, produced a public backlash that shaped the Bureau’s subsequent emphasis on professionalization and narrower federal jurisdiction.

^[18] The Jinyiwei (”Embroidered Uniform Guard”) was founded by the Ming dynasty’s Hongwu Emperor in the 1360s and grew into a secret police force empowered to arrest, interrogate, and execute anyone in the empire without judicial process. Ivan the Terrible established the Oprichnina in Russia in 1565 as a corps of enforcers answerable only to him, used to suppress the nobility and consolidate personal rule.

^[19] Nazi Germany’s Gestapo, the Soviet Union’s NKVD and later KGB, and East Germany’s Stasi each functioned as centralized police forces loyal to a single executive authority rather than to law, used primarily for surveillance and suppression of political opposition rather than ordinary crime.

By Eduard Marmet - https://www.airliners.net

When I was studying economics, we were introduced to the concept ‘sunk cost.’ By definition, it is any past investment of money, time, or effort that is gone and not recoverable. A ‘sunk cost fallacy’ is continuing a course of action we’ve invested in, even when the ongoing costs outweigh the benefits. Instead of asking what choice will produce the best result from this moment forward, we allow yesterday’s decisions to dictate today’s and tomorrow’s actions.

The classic example is the supersonic Concorde jet, whose development cost ballooned to roughly $2.8 billion before its first commercial flight in 1976.^[1] The British and French governments pressed ahead even as internal assessments showed the aircraft would never recoup its costs. Canceling it would have meant admitting that the money already spent was gone. But continuing could not bring that money back.

In a sense, our present immigration debacle can be viewed as a sunk cost. It happened, they entered illegally, employers encouraged them, successive governments of both parties looked the other way. Congress repeatedly failed to replace that system with something coherent. In addition, people who went through the difficult and lengthy process of coming in legally are understandably unhappy with those who jumped the queue. Even some long-term undocumented immigrants resent benefits given to more recent illegals.^[2] Forcibly deporting many millions of people and families is immensely cruel and expensive, particularly for those who entered our country years ago. The sensible course of action is to look at the situation anew, unburdened by what happened yesterday.

What is best for the country, for all of us, going forward?

Certainly, a first step is making sure our borders are secure and that immigration will never again proceed in a haphazard fashion. We have the manpower and technology to have a secure border. We have the ability to record and process everyone who might desire to enter in a way which will accord with the law and with our obligations under international treaties.

Rounding up and turning people away at the borders is very different from arresting and deporting people who are long-term residents. Our legal system already recognizes this distinction in other examples. A property owner who allows a person or company to remain may forfeit the right to evict if too many years pass. The statute of limitations governs how long a person may remain liable for a crime.

Seventy-three percent of the people presently being detained and deported have no criminal records.^[3] Nearly half of all undocumented immigrants in the country have lived here for twenty years or more, and the typical one has been here about fifteen.^[4] If a person has actually committed a serious crime, in most cases the criminal justice system already knows it. Reaching that person does not require a street sweep. It requires checking a record that already exists. Targeted enforcement is not only more humane, it is more consistent with the stated goal of protecting public safety.

From a moral point of view, our present militarized approach to immigration enforcement reminds me of some sad episodes from our past: the forced ‘assimilation’ of Native American children in government boarding schools, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Palmer Raids, the Mexican Repatriation, ‘Operation Wetback’ in the 1950’s, and the World War II detention of American citizens of Japanese ancestry. The details of these episodes differ, and historical comparisons should never be made casually, but when the government identifies an unpopular population and strips away individual distinctions, abuses inevitably follow. Someday, historians and students will wonder what we were thinking. How could we have allowed this to happen?

Working as a Border Patrol or ICE agent is measurably safer than working as an ordinary police officer, and violent death is rare: agents are killed in the line of duty at roughly half the rate of other law enforcement officers and murdered at a rate lower than the general civilian population, so they have little apparent need for the newly extensive ICE mandated body protection and armament.^[5] A federal judge in one recent ruling called the masking and armaments an attempt “to terrorize Americans into quiescence,” and rejected the government’s stated justification as “disingenuous, squalid and dishonorable.”^[6] I’m not sure I can say that having masked men stopping and rounding up people in the street is un-American, but I wish it were so.

Going back to the concept of sunk cost: if we look to the future instead of the past, what are the economic benefits of a different policy that focuses removal on recent arrivals rather than longer-term residents? And what does it cost us to keep deporting people who have been here for years?

The numbers are not small. Undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022, according to the most comprehensive study of the subject, from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.^[7] More than a third of that went to Social Security and Medicare, programs this population is largely barred from ever drawing on.

The American Immigration Council (AIC) estimates that removing the country’s undocumented population would cost the economy between $1.1 and $1.7 trillion in lost GDP, comparable to the damage from the 2007-2009 recession.^[8] The Penn Wharton Budget Model projects that sustained mass deportation would add roughly $900 billion to federal deficits over ten years.^[9]

A single mass removal operation, AIC estimates, would cost at least $315 billion to carry out. ICE and Customs and Border Protection CBP have already received roughly $240 billion in new funding since the start of this administration.^[10] For comparison, this equals a decade of the entire U.S. space program, including the Mars rovers, the James Webb telescope, and the Artemis moon missions.^[11]

Aside from these numbers, and much more important, these are people, not the murderer or rapist of political rhetoric, but our landscaper, the owner of a local restaurant, a housekeeper, a baby-sitter, the person helping your grandmother in her assisted living home, someone with their own hopes, dreams, and aspirations for their children, not so different from our own.

What happened in the past cannot be undone. We cannot retroactively secure yesterday’s border. We cannot erase decades of government neglect, employer demand, congressional paralysis, and the many years where decent and hardworking people have carved out lives for themselves and their families.

So, let’s stop shooting ourselves in the foot, let’s recognize that for good or bad, what has happened is analogous to a sunk cost, is done, and let’s figure out a proper, humane, economic, and organized way to solve this problem.

___________________________________________________________________________

^[1] Simple Flying, “How Much Did Each Concorde Plane Cost New?”; Aviation Wiki, “Concorde.” Concorde’s development cost ballooned from an original estimate of roughly £70 million to about £1.3 billion, equivalent to over $2.8 billion split between the British and French governments.

^[2] Andrea R. Flores, “Latino Americans Are in Crisis . . . “ New York Times, July 19, 2026.

^[3] David Bier, “5% of People Detained By ICE Have Violent Convictions, 73% No Convictions,” Cato at Liberty (Cato Institute), analysis of nonpublic ICE data for fiscal year 2026. Of people booked into ICE custody in the fiscal year, 73 percent had no criminal conviction, and only 5 percent had a violent conviction.

^[4] Migration Policy Institute, “Unauthorized Immigrants in the U.S.: 2025 Fact Sheet.” As of mid-2023, 80 percent of unauthorized immigrants had five or more years of U.S. residence, and 45 percent had been in the country at least 20 years. See also Pew Research Center, 2019 analysis of Census Bureau data: the typical unauthorized immigrant adult had lived in the U.S. for 15 years as of 2017, the longest median duration on record since Pew’s estimates began in 1995.

^[5] Alex Nowrasteh, “2025 Was the 2nd Safest Year for Border Patrol and ICE Agents,” Cato at Liberty (Cato Institute), January 2026. The annual chance of dying from any cause as an ICE or Border Patrol agent is about 1 in 9,250. Non-ICE/Border Patrol law enforcement officers had a death rate 6.3 times higher in 2025, and since 2003 the general police death rate has averaged 2.5 times higher, never falling below the immigration-agent rate in any year. The chance of an ICE or Border Patrol agent being murdered in the line of duty is about 1 in 94,549 per year, roughly 5.5 times lower than the rate for an ordinary civilian.

^[6] Ruling of Judge William G. Young, U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, in litigation concerning the government’s detention of Rümeysa Öztürk, issued September 30, 2025. As reported by CBS News and other outlets.

^[7] Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, “Tax Payments by Undocumented Immigrants” (itep.org/undocumented-immigrants-taxes-2024/). Undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022, including $25.7 billion in Social Security taxes and $6.4 billion in Medicare taxes, programs from which this population is largely barred from ever drawing benefits.

^[8] American Immigration Council, “Mass Deportation” (americanimmigrationcouncil.org/report/mass-deportation/). Mass deportation would reduce annual U.S. GDP by 4.2 to 6.8 percent, or $1.1 to $1.7 trillion in 2022 dollars, comparable to the 4.3 percent GDP contraction during the 2007-2009 recession. See also American Immigration Council, “New Report Details Catastrophic Impact of Mass Deportation and Family Separation Plans” (October 2024): a one-time operation removing 13.3 million people without legal status would cost at least $315 billion.

^[9] Felipe Ruiz Mazin and Felix Reichling, “Mass Deportation of Unauthorized Immigrants: Fiscal and Economic Effects,” Penn Wharton Budget Model, July 25, 2025. A ten-year policy of sustained mass deportation is projected to add approximately $900 billion to federal deficits over the first decade, after accounting for economic feedback effects, even with new enforcement funding provided under the 2025 reconciliation bill.

^[10] Congress provided the Department of Homeland Security, primarily ICE and CBP, roughly $170 billion in the July 2025 reconciliation bill (the One Big Beautiful Bill Act) and a further $70 billion in a second reconciliation bill in mid-2026, for a combined total of approximately $240 billion in new funding. Sources: Brennan Center for Justice, “ICE and Customs and Border Protection Budgets to Exceed $200 Billion,” June 2026; National Immigration Law Center, “What’s in Congress’s New ICE Funding Law?,” July 2026. U.S. Senate Committee on the Budget, Democratic staff analysis of Office of Management and Budget SF-133 reports, “ICE, CBP Now Sitting on $152 Billion After Republican Funding Bills,” late July 2026.

^[11] NASA’s annual budget has run approximately $25 billion in recent years. At that rate, $240 billion equals roughly 9.6 years of the agency’s entire budget, funding everything from the Mars rovers and the James Webb Space Telescope to the Artemis lunar program. Source: The Planetary Society, “Your Guide to NASA’s Budget,” 2026, citing Office of Management and Budget data.

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A key element of our democratic system is that office holders who are defeated leave office peacefully when their time is up.

Political scientists and historians study democracies where leaders have succeeded in either gradually changing the system so that they can stay in power or where an actual coup has taken place. They identify warning signs that foreshadow events where leaders have succeeded in subverting established democratic procedures. These thinkers include Harvard’s Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, Princeton’s Nancy Bermeo, Cornell’s Rachel Beatty Riedl, and NYU historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat.

I’ve done some research and have identified a checklist or “Playbook” of these warning signs as identified by prominent academics. I’ve listed them below.

Institutional capture

• Appoint loyalists to courts, legal administration, electoral commissions, and law enforcement rather than independent professionals.

• Weaken oversight bodies (inspectors general, ethics offices, audit agencies).

• Replace career civil servants with political loyalists.

• Purge or threaten challenges against officeholders in the leader’s own party who won’t fall in line.

Changing the rules

• Gerrymander districts or change electoral laws to favor the incumbent party.

• Restrict voting access for opposition-leaning groups.

• Weaken the agencies that administer and secure elections.

Controlling information

• Pressure, threaten, or take over independent media.

• Withhold records the public is legally entitled to.

• Label critical journalists, courts, or officials as enemies or traitors.

Targeting the opposition

• Use prosecutions or investigations selectively against political rivals.

• Delegitimize opponents as unpatriotic, criminal, or illegitimate rather than just wrong.

• Pressure the law firms, universities, and civil-society groups that train, fund, or shelter critics.

• Label rivals with totalizing, existential terms (”communist,” “enemy of the state,” “terrorist”) rather than treating them as holding a different view.

• Describe opposition in language that strips away individual humanity, comparing them to vermin, animals, disease, or garbage.

• Frame domestic opponents explicitly as “enemies,” on par with or more dangerous than foreign adversaries, while framing external threats as justifying emergency domestic authority.

Neutralizing checks from within the state

• Purge or politicize the military and security services.

• Remove the internal lawyers positioned to say no.

• Litigate around adverse court rulings rather than complying with them.

Personal enrichment and patronage

• Convert public office into private financial gain for family members.

• Route pardons, contracts, or access based on loyalty rather than merit.

Building an unaccountable domestic security apparatus (secret police)

• Use plainclothes or unidentified agents for domestic enforcement.

• Establish a record keeping system to track individual citizens.

• Cultivate citizen-to-citizen reporting as an enforcement multiplier, while suppressing citizen tools that warn the community back.

Declaring emergencies

• Use emergency powers or “crisis” justifications to unlock authority the legislature never granted directly.

  Religious Identity

• Frame the leader as chosen or anointed by God, making opposition to him opposition to divine purpose.

• Fuse religious identity with national and partisan identity, so political loyalty becomes an article of faith.

____________________________________________________________________________

References:

Applebaum, Anne. Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. Doubleday, 2020.

Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. W.W. Norton, 2020.

Bermeo, Nancy. “On Democratic Backsliding.” Journal of Democracy 27, no. 1 (January 2016): 5–19.

Gentile, Emilio. Politics as Religion. Princeton University Press, 2006.

Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. Crown, 2018.

Riedl, Rachel Beatty. Comparative-politics scholarship on “executive aggrandizement,” Cornell University Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

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I have been working on a series of essays or articles giving the facts as I’ve been able to assemble them on several topics including Immigration, Election Fraud, Social Security, and Wind Power. This article is a companion piece to Wind Power Facts. I had intended to write just about solar power, but the essay wouldn’t come together except as a discussion of the necessary and always changing balance between all sources of electricity. It turned out to be much longer than my normal essays (Sorry!) because of the complexity of the subject.

The most important fact to note in thinking about wind and solar power is that whatever we thought a few years ago is very likely wrong. The costs have dropped precipitously over just a few years. The same with battery technology. In addition, current research indicates the likelihood of other possible improvements and innovations which could further reduce costs and change the balance.

So, let’s begin with some history to give us a backdrop to where we are now.

History

In September of 1882, Thomas Edison opened the Pearl Street Station in lower Manhattan, a coal-fired plant selling direct current to a few hundred customers, and within weeks a paper mill on the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin started the first hydroelectric station in the country. The new electric power industry was private, local, and fragmented, until Samuel Insull assembled the model that would define the next half century, the large private utility granted a monopoly over its territory in exchange for state regulation of its rates.

Coal remained the fuel of choice for many years. The US government became a factor in the 1930’s and 1940’s with the Tennessee Valley Authority bringing public electricity to poor areas, the Hoover, Bonneville, and Grand Coulee Dams adding hydro power, and the Rural Electrification Administration bringing electricity to farmers through farmer cooperatives.

Government backed nuclear power arrived in the late 1950’s. A 1978 law let companies other than the utilities sell power to the grid, and in the 1990s federal regulators pried open the transmission lines and let competitive wholesale markets form, so that today some regions, Texas most fully, buy and sell electricity in open competition while others keep the regulated utility intact. Cheap shale gas, unlocked after 2008, passed coal to become the largest source of American electricity in 2016, and tax credits written for wind in 1992 and for solar in 2005 helped a new pair of sources get started.

By 2025, natural gas generated about 41 percent of the country’s electricity, nuclear about 19, coal about 17, wind about 10, solar around 7, and hydroelectric dams about 6 percent. Investor-owned utilities still serve most Americans, with municipal systems, rural cooperatives, and federal power agencies covering the rest.

The chart below shows the change in distribution of US power sources over the past 25 years. The growth of renewables, mostly solar and wind, is remarkable. Shale natural gas is gradually replacing coal, and solar and wind together have passed coal as a power source.

Objectives

Power users want it to be as inexpensive as possible and always available. Our government shares those goals and in addition must consider national security and pollution.

At present, no single fuel can satisfy all these objectives. Accordingly, producers and our government, and governments across the world, must achieve a balance between the available fuels. That balance is constantly changing as costs drop and new sources are developed.

Costs

Lazard, an investment bank, whose annual cost study is the most widely cited in the power industry, uses what it terms Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) to compare different energy sources. LCOE is the average net present cost of generating electricity over a power plant’s lifetime weighing total lifetime costs (capital, fuel, and maintenance) against total expected energy production and expressed as dollars ($) per megawatt-hour. It is basically a present value (time value of money) calculation using an interest cost and an estimated cost of capital. Because nuclear, solar and wind have high upfront costs while natural gas has costs (price of gas) distributed over time, gas is likely over favored by the LCOE standard while nuclear especially is penalized. As interest rates go up, nuclear, solar and wind are increasingly penalized compared to gas. When we look at upfront capital costs alone, nuclear is as much as ten times more expensive putting it in its own category, despite low operating costs and a projected very long life.

Wind and Solar

For the tenth year running, wind and solar are the least expensive sources of new electricity in America. Lazard reported in 2025 that a new utility-scale solar farm generates electricity for between $38 and $78 per megawatt-hour before any subsidy and onshore wind (as opposed to offshore turbines located in the oceans) came in at $37 to $86. These numbers compare to a new gas plant at $48 to $109, coal at $71 to $173, and new nuclear at $141 to $220. A new gas “peaker” turbine which can start up quickly and run for the time needed to supplement wind, solar or other intermittent sources costs about $149 to $251.

In 2009 the same utility-scale solar cost $323 to $394 per megawatt-hour; by 2025 it had fallen about 84 percent, the steepest drop of any energy source Lazard tracks. A solar panel is a manufactured product and, like semiconductors and flat screens, rides a learning curve, getting cheaper with every doubling of the quantity. Onshore wind has had a comparable fall in cost (about 65 percent) for the same reasons.

The result is that solar is now the largest source of new power on earth. In 2025 the world added 605 gigawatts of it, more than three-quarters of all new renewable capacity; wind added 159. Solar’s jump in output that year was the largest single-year increase ever recorded for any generating technology, and by installed capacity solar is now the largest power technology in the world.

Within the US, the same pattern holds; here is a chart looking at planned generating capacity to be added this year:

Wind and solar combined reached 17% of U.S. electricity generation in 2025, up from less than 1% in 2005. That is a remarkable twenty-year trajectory as shown in the chart below:

The sun goes down at night and is not at equal intensity every day and in every location and season. The best and most constant wind is located far from the most populated areas. The two can be complementary, solar peaks at noon in summer, wind blows hardest at night, in winter, and through many of the cloudy stretches when solar fades. A grid drawing on both, where both are available, can keep batteries and backup gas at lower levels than one leaning on either alone. Both need extensive storage or backup.

So far, we have discussed utility scale solar, but solar comes in two forms. Utility-scale solar is built where land and sun are cheap, often far from cities, and like a wind farm it must reach customers through long transmission lines. But distributed solar, the panels on a roof, a parking canopy, or a warehouse wall, make power at the point of use and need no new transmission. Distributed installations already account for roughly 42 percent of all solar being added worldwide.

Distributed solar includes commercial installations and residential systems. A commercial or industrial building can achieve installed costs well below a home system, because the soft costs of permitting and sales are divided across far more panels. Lazard puts commercial and industrial rooftops at roughly $65 to $130 per megawatt-hour in 2025, compared to $38 to $78 for utility-scale farms and $150 to $220 for residential. They account for about 8 percent of US solar capacity today, much less than the economic potential. Of the three segments, residential rooftop costs the most to generate, roughly four times the utility-scale figure, because a home installation cannot capture the economies of scale of even a small commercial array. But it competes against the household’s full retail rate, delivery charges included, so it can still pay for itself.

For the homeowner, the payback now runs roughly eight to fifteen years across most of the country, having lengthened by about four years since the federal credit ended at the close of 2025, shorter in high-rate states like Massachusetts and longer in low-rate ones. After that the panels work for at least another fifteen to twenty-five years.

The smallest residential version is the most surprising. In Germany a renter can hang one or two panels from a balcony railing and plug them into an ordinary wall socket, feeding power straight into the apartment. By the middle of 2025 more than a million such systems were registered, double the number a year earlier. Stiftung Warentest, the German consumer-testing foundation, estimates payback at roughly six to nine years, sooner with a city subsidy or heavy daytime use. Although very helpful for renters, covering every suitable balcony in Germany would meet only about 1 percent of the country’s energy.

Hydro

Most of our large hydroelectric dams were completed before the mid-1970s by federal agencies, and the best sites have long since been taken. This is why hydro supplies around six percent of the nation’s electricity but is no longer growing: wind surpassed it in 2019 and solar in 2025. Hydro power has a quick startup and fast ramping up that wind and solar cannot match because operators can open and close the gates on demand. In any given year, drought can significantly reduce available power as it did in 2015 and 2021.

Pumped-storage hydro, water moved uphill when power is cheap and let back down when it is expensive remains the largest store of long-duration energy on the grid, the benchmark every newer storage technology is measured against.

Coal

Shale gas is cheaper and less polluting and has now become the largest source of American electricity. Coal, at 17 percent, (it was 51 percent in 2001) has now fallen below nuclear as a source of American electricity and, in 2024, was surpassed by wind and solar together. The LCOE for a new coal plant is in the range $71 to $173 per megawatt-hour, depending on size and location.

Oil

Oil-fired generation now accounts for less than half a percent of U.S. electricity.

Gas

Natural gas extracted from shale rock through a process called fracking now provides about 41 percent of our electricity. Although the levelized cost (LCOE) at $48 to $109 is higher than comparable figures for solar and wind, they can be built close to users and have the advantage of running continuously. Gas plants used to be relatively inexpensive to build but demand has driven up turbine costs by 195 percent and pushed lead times out to six years or more. As a result, new plant costs are up by about 66 percent.

Burning gas releases carbon dioxide. Methane, the primary component of natural gas, leaks from wells, pipelines, and compressor stations at rates high enough that the climate advantage over coal, once assumed to be large, is smaller than early estimates suggested.

Forecasting price and availability is difficult, and, to some degree, prices are set in a world market even though most of the gas we use is produced here. A gas plant is relatively cheap to build but expensive to run over a lifetime, compared to sources that have no fuel bill.

Going forward, the model is not zero gas but shrinking gas, keeping gas plants as the flexible backbone while solar, wind, and storage cover more hours each year, so that each gas plant runs fewer hours and produces fewer emissions.

Nuclear

Nuclear is the only technology on the grid today that is simultaneously zero-carbon, and capable of operating at the scale that large industrial economies require. A reactor runs around the clock regardless of the weather, produces no carbon dioxide while generating, occupies a small area of land relative to its output, and can sit near the cities it serves without the long transmission lines that wind and solar require.

The United States still gets about 18 to 19 percent of its electricity from a fleet of 94 operating reactors built mostly in the 1970s and 1980s. That fleet is the single largest source of zero-carbon electricity in the country, producing more clean power than all the solar and wind on the grid combined through most of 2024. The LCOE of new nuclear is $141 to $220 per megawatt-hour.

For the US up-front capital cost and construction time are difficult to predict since our own domestic nuclear reactor industry has atrophied. South Korea and China that have kept building continuously, construct the same reactor technology for roughly $3,000 to $5,000 per kilowatt of capacity, against the United States’ roughly $10,000 or more. France built 56 reactors on a standardized design between 1974 and 1999 and powered about 75 percent of its grid on nuclear at a cost that made French electricity among the cheapest in Europe. You can see in the chart below that France, by pausing their program, seems to have lost control of the costs. Since the capital or up-front cost of a new nuclear plant is so high relative to the alternatives, it is an important reason we have so few new and modern nuclear facilities.

Safety and waste disposal are two issues which need more words than I have available here, but many experts believe that nuclear reactors are far safer than their reputation and that new technology reduces the risk further.

Nuclear is expensive to build, five to ten times the rest, but then runs almost continuously for sixty or more years on cheap fuel, which is why its energy cost, though high, is nowhere near ten times that of gas. Read together, the two numbers, LCOE and capital cost, explain much of what is happening on the grid: why solar and wind are being built fastest, why gas remains the firm default, and why nuclear, cheap to run but expensive to build, struggles to get financed at all.

The answer most often proposed is the small modular reactor, a factory-built unit of 50 to 300 megawatts designed to be assembled from standard components rather than constructed one-of-a-kind on site. The theory is that factory production would drive costs down the same learning curve that drove down solar panels and lithium batteries. China is building both conventional large reactors and small modular units faster than any other country and will likely demonstrate the technology at commercial scale before the United States does.

Firming

Within the electric power industry, “firming’ is a term describing the process of converting intermittent or variable power (like wind and solar) into a reliable, continuous supply. It ensures that the power grid maintains a steady frequency and voltage, and that supply meets demand even when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. Firming can be achieved through energy storage or by using peaking (referring to periods of peak energy usage) gas power plants to instantly ramp up power when needed.

Within the US, pumped storage hydropower is still the largest source of stored energy on the grid and supplies nearly all of its long-duration storage, with about 22 gigawatts of capacity and 553 gigawatt-hours of stored energy across more than 40 operating facilities. Functioning as a massive water battery, a pumped hydro system pumps water uphill to an elevated reservoir when electricity is cheap or abundant. When grid demand spikes or renewable output drops, the water flows back downhill through turbines to generate power. Batteries have now caught up on a different measure: US battery power capacity grew 66 percent in 2024 to more than 26 gigawatts, passing pumped hydro’s 22 gigawatts in power for the first time, though pumped storage still holds far more total energy because its reservoirs can run for many more hours.

There are about 1000 peaking power plants within the US and most of these peakers are fueled by natural gas with a few older plants using oil. They sit idle most of the year and fire up within minutes for the few hundred hours of peak demand, expensive to run and, per unit of power, among the dirtiest plants on the grid. They account for about 3 percent of annual net electricity generation. A new gas peaking plant costs about $149 to $251 per megawatt-hour and turbines are presently backordered by six years or more.

A battery storage system fills the gap that wind and solar leave, charging when the wind blows or the sun shines and discharging when they fade, the same fast, job a gas peaker or pumped storage hydro does, answering in a fraction of a second. Its price has collapsed about as fast as the turbines and panels it backs up: lithium pack prices have fallen roughly 93 percent since 2010, from about $1,474 per kilowatt-hour to $108 in 2025, with packs built for grid storage reaching about $70.

Paired with a few hours of storage, solar now runs about $50 to $131 per megawatt-hour and wind from about $50 to $142, both comfortably below a gas peaker’s $149 to $251.

Firm either one fully, though, with enough storage and backup to cover all possible demand, and the cost climbs toward the high end. Because projected needs vary by location, it is difficult to pin down exact costs. A few hours of storage are cheap, but genuine, around-the-clock reliability is more expensive. It is still too expensive to string enough battery capacity together to cover very cold days in some areas of the country or the occasional windless and sunless stretch that can persist in other areas.

Batteries were the fastest-growing power technology in the world in 2025. In the United States, battery capacity jumped 66 percent in 2024, developers added a record 15 gigawatts in 2025, and about 24 gigawatts more are planned for 2026.

Transmission

For utility-scale solar, and for wind especially, the binding constraint is the wire. The sun is strongest and the wind most steady in rural areas far from the cities. Moving that power to the cities takes long high-voltage lines that cost tens of billions of dollars, have a five percent or greater transmission loss, and that almost no community wants running past it. Because of the expense, it would require a strong Federal commitment. At national scale, Princeton’s Net-Zero America study estimates that a grid built mostly on wind and solar would have to roughly triple its long-distance transmission by 2050, at two to four trillion dollars.

What we lack is a long interregional backbone, high-voltage lines that would move power across the continent and knit together the three grids, Eastern, Western, and Texas, that meet today only at a few weak seams. Wind depends on that backbone most, since it is strongest far from the cities and steadier the wider the area it draws from; solar needs it less, sitting nearer the load. But the cost is high, and there is no national authority to site a transmission line the way one exists for an interstate gas pipeline, so a line that crosses five states needs five states, and any state can stop it.

The realistic path, then, is not a national grid but a regional one, generation near the load firmed by storage and gas peaking. From a national security standpoint, it may be the more secure one too: a grid integrated tightly enough to share power widely may be more susceptible to system failure, attack, or sabotage, while regional grids, rooftop solar with batteries, and microgrids that can island themselves fail in pieces rather than all at once and can keep a hospital or a base running when the bulk grid goes down.

Balance

We can watch the balance assemble itself in the one place least likely to do it on principle. Texas is the home of the American oil and gas industry and runs one of the least subsidized power markets in the country, yet it is adding solar and batteries faster than any other state. Using figures from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), in the first nine months of 2025 it installed 7.4 gigawatts of solar, nearly double California’s, and across the year solar and batteries made up almost all the new capacity on its grid, batteries about 47 percent and solar about 40 percent. Its battery fleet roughly doubled in a single year, to about 13.9 gigawatts, and, in August, solar out-produced both coal and wind to become the grid’s second-largest source, behind only gas.

Here is a chart showing the balance between solar and wind generation, the use of batteries, and gas on a typical summer day in California. Batteries charge during the day when the sun is strong and discharge during the evening and nighttime. We can see that nuclear, hydro and imports from other areas all play a part in the balance and the steady generation of power. Other renewables in this chart include geothermal and biomass (burning organic material such as wood waste, other waste, and methane gas from landfill and dairy):

Innovation

Electricity demand is rising again after two flat decades, driven by data centers, artificial intelligence, and the electrification of cars and heat. Global data-center electricity use rose an estimated 17 percent in 2025, and the United States recorded one of its strongest years of demand growth this century.

Luckily, there is much in the innovation pipeline which will likely ease the longer-term problem. I can list a few without getting into the detail. Iron-air batteries are the nearest-term contender for four-day-plus storage. Other storage possibilities are redox flow batteries, compressed-air energy storage, and green hydrogen. Nuclear small modular reactors and micro reactors are a technology where factory production of standardized units might drive costs down the same learning curve that transformed solar panels. Other advanced reactor technology is in various stages of development.

Enhanced geothermal is another technology in active development. Conventional geothermal taps naturally hot water near the surface, enhanced geothermal drills deep into hot dry rock anywhere on earth and circulates water through fractures created by the drill itself, generating steam. At the surface, the steam (or a secondary working fluid with a low boiling point) drives a turbine connected to a generator, which produces electricity. The underlying heat resource is effectively unlimited and available around the clock regardless of weather.

Nuclear fusion remains perhaps the best enhancement of our power systems. Fusion would generate energy from deuterium extracted from seawater (effectively unlimited fuel), producing no long-lived radioactive waste, carrying no risk of meltdown, and offering firm power from a compact footprint. The best assessment is that fusion electricity on the grid is unlikely before the mid-2030s and most credibly arrives in the 2040s. Some experts are expecting a much more compressed time frame.

Summary

Going back to our objectives, users want electricity to be as inexpensive as possible and always available. Government shares those goals and in addition must consider national security and pollution.

Solar and wind are the cheapest but have their limitations. Batteries supply power at peak times but cannot cover longer periods. Hydro power and pumped storage are limited by geography. Nuclear is costly in terms of up-front capital needed and considered potentially dangerous. Gas at utility scale and as used for peak demand is polluting and the long-term price and availability is uncertain. Transmission is extremely expensive, unlocks the best resources, but draws the fiercest local opposition and would require a strong Federal commitment.

Thinking as a planner, the least-cost most feasible grid is a balance, heavy on cheap solar and wind, heavy on storage of growing duration, sparing with new long-distance transmission, leaning on distributed generation that sits at the load, and holding a diverse firm core in which nuclear and gas each do what they do best, with the gas share set to shrink as storage lengthens. Solar and wind will assume an increasingly large share of the supply. Cost efficiencies and technological innovation will change the sources and the balance repeatedly over the years.

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Sources:

Lazard, Levelized Cost of Energy+ 2025; Bloomberg NEF, 2025 Lithium-Ion Battery Price Survey; Wood Mackenzie (gas turbine costs); International Energy Agency, Global Energy Review 2026 and Electricity 2026; Global Energy Monitor, Global Oil and Gas Plant Tracker; Sepulveda and Jenkins et al., The Role of Firm Low-Carbon Resources in Deep Decarbonization (Joule, 2018); U.S. Department of Energy and NREL, National Transmission Planning Study; Princeton University, Net-Zero America; National Renewable Energy Laboratory (solar land-use estimates); OECD Nuclear Energy Agency and World Nuclear Association (nuclear construction costs); Our World in Data and Sovacool et al. (energy mortality); Form Energy; PacifiCorp Integrated Resource Plan; Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT); California Independent System Operator (CAISO); U.S. Energy Information Administration, including Annual Energy Outlook capital-cost assumptions; Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas; Ember; European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E); Breakthrough Institute; U.S. Government Accountability Office, Electricity: Information on Peak Demand Power Plants (GAO-24-106145); EnergySage; German Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur), BSW-Solar, and Stiftung Warentest; Grid Strategies (cost of keeping coal plants open); Associated Press and E&E News alongside the agency statements.

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Years ago, I was a junior officer in the US Army Reserve for eight years. My father was on General Eisenhower’s staff in Europe and North Africa in WW II, and my grandfather was an Artillery officer during the Spanish-American War and WW I. We were all proud of our service. Certainly, the army changed, as it should, many times and in many ways during the years from 1898 to 1967, but the professionalism, discipline, and esprit de corps remained the same.

This is changing now, very quickly and it may soon not be reversible. Present leadership is politicizing the entire military organization, not just the army, with negative and accusatory statements made to troops and leaders about prior administrations and political leaders. Loyalty and ideological conformity to the present political administration are being prioritized. The practice of Christian evangelical religion is encouraged including open proselytizing. The military’s lawyers, the Judge Advocate General (JAG) officers, have been removed from all major commands. The promotion structure is being distorted with civilian leaders countermanding military processes. Women and minorities are being sidelined and derided. Some of the best people are being forced out, others are retiring early. This new, biased promotion process is guaranteed to affect the morale and discipline of military officers at all levels in all services.

I feel certain that my father and grandfather would be shocked and distressed by the changes.

The thesis of my articles is reliable information backed up by careful research. Accordingly, I’ve collected a number of statements by Secretary Hegseth and President Trump, followed by a partial list of senior officers demoted or removed and, finally, a series of reactions from military and political leaders.

The reader can come to his/her own conclusions.

Secretary Hegseth in His Own Words

On rules of engagement, at Quantico, September 2025: “We fight to win. We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy... No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for warfighters.”

On dissent, the same speech: “If the words I’m speaking today are making your heart sink, then you should do the honorable thing and resign.”

On the prior administration’s legacy, at Quantico, September 2025: Secretary Hegseth blamed “decades of decay” and said the military had become “the Woke Department.” He criticized three retired generals by name, Milley, Chiarelli, and McKenzie.

On the Geneva Conventions: “Our boys should not fight by rules written by dignified men in mahogany rooms eighty years ago.”

On military lawyers, he called JAG officers “jagoffs,” and wrote “no infantrymen like Army lawyers.”

On the Iran war, March 2026: “No quarter, no mercy for our enemies.”

On renaming the Department of Defense: the new name reflects “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.”

On our NATO allies, Brussels, June 2026: Secretary Hegseth called the alliance a “paper tiger, and a one-way street,” and accused allies of trying “to drown us in arcane legal debates.”

At the West Point commencement, to the most diverse graduating class in the Academy’s history, he called “diversity is our strength” the “single dumbest phrase in military history,” and said cadets “can’t throw your pronouns at the enemy.”

On faith, invoking Scripture during an Iran war briefing: “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle.”

On Western civilization: he credits the Crusades, saying “there would be no Europe and no America” without them.

At a Pentagon worship service during the Iran war, March 2026: he prayed for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy,” asking God to make “every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness,” in the name of “Jesus Christ, King over all kings.”

At the February 2026 Pentagon service, announcing Chaplain Corps changes, “Gone is godless and divisive DEI . . . We are not in woke we trust, we are in God we trust.”

Opening his first Pentagon worship service, May 2025: “in prayer, on bended knee, recognizing the providence of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” invoking Washington at Valley Forge, a story historians call a 19th-century fabrication.

Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, on Secretary Hegseth’s repeated use of Psalm 144 to bless the Iran war: “There are no new crusades.” Called the framing a “manipulation that exploits the name of God.”

Since January 2025, this rhetoric has been paired with action. Secretary Hegseth has fired or sidelined nearly three dozen general and flag officers and blocked forty senior colonels and Navy captains from promotion to flag rank. NBC News has reported, based on nine officials, that Hegseth specifically blocked or delayed promotions for “more than a dozen Black and female senior officers across all four military branches,” and that officers were scrutinized for DEI ties or perceived Biden-era alignment. Five former secretaries of defense, including Jim Mattis, called the pattern “reckless” and asked Congress to hold hearings. No hearings have been scheduled.

From President Trump

On the generals he wanted, per John Kelly, later confirmed to The New York Times and The Atlantic: “You fucking generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?” When Kelly reminded him that German officers tried to assassinate Hitler three times, Trump replied, “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him.” President Trump has denied saying this.

On Presidents Biden and Obama, at Quantico, September 2025, addressing the assembled flag officer corps: “We were not respected with Biden,” mocking Biden’s public stumbles, before turning to Obama, “In all other ways a lousy president,” sarcastically praising only how he could “Bop down stairs like I’ve never seen.”

From his 2016 campaign, regarding President Obama’s military leadership: U.S. generals “Don’t know much because they’re not winning,” and American generals “have been reduced to rubble . . . reduced to a point where it’s embarrassing to our country.”

Senior Officers Removed

Below are eighteen of the officers removed, with the precise action taken in each case. Below that is a second list: officers, current and retired, who have spoken on the record about what these changes mean for morale, tradition, effectiveness, military law, and religion in the ranks.

Comments from Senior Officers and Officials

Because the present administration is known for retributive actions, few retired officers are able to comment because their pensions might be reduced or eliminated. Serving officers are prohibited from comment by military regulations.

• Firings and Morale

General Charles Q. Brown Jr. (Ret) fired JCS Chairman. Says the firings are “not about merit,” and questions whether others still serving get “a fair opportunity to advance.”

Admiral William McRaven (Ret.). Writing in The Atlantic, says Congress and the public deserve “answers” on the departures.

Vice Admiral Nancy Lacore (Ret.). Says the purge sends the message “you’re not wanted here.”

Senator Thom Tillis (R.N.C.). Calls the pattern “paranoid micromanagement” and “insecurity dressed up as reform.”

· History and Tradition

Colonel Jeff McCausland (Ret.), Army, visiting professor at Dickinson College. Calls a nonpolitical military “foundational to the United States,” tracing the principle to 1775.

Senator Jack Reed (D.R.I.), Army veteran. Says the changes are “an assault on the norms, traditions, and structures that have kept the American military the most trusted institution” for 250 years.

Lt. General Mark Hertling (Ret.). Called Hegseth’s addresses to troops “shocking” and “offensive.”

Colonel Larry Wilkerson (Ret.), forty years of government service. Called the September 2025 Quantico gathering simply “bizarre.”

· Effectiveness

Senator Jack Reed (D.R.I.), Ranking Member, Senate Armed Services Committee. Marking Secretary Hegseth’s first 100 days, said his actions “have done nothing but distract the Pentagon and undermine its warfighting, lethality, meritocracy, standards, and readiness.”

Kyleanne Hunter (Ret.), Marine Major, former combat pilot. On the Quantico speech’s focus on grooming and culture war issues: “an unfortunate focus on a culture war when we should be focused on military readiness.”

Col. Jeff McCausland (Ret.). Calls the scale of firings and blocked promotions “unprecedented in our history.”

Anonymous general, quoted by Military.com after Quantico. Called the politicized tone toward a nonpartisan force “a slap in the face.”

· Judge Advocate General (JAG) Officers and Legal Oversight

Professor Rosa Brooks, Georgetown Law. Says firing military lawyers is “what you do when you’re planning to break the law.”

Lt. Colonel Dan Maurer (Ret.), Army JAG, now a law professor. Says rules of engagement are “the recipe for a successful disciplined military operation,” not an obstacle.

Former JAGs Working Group. Argued that orders to kill incapacitated strike survivors were “patently illegal” under the Geneva Conventions.

Senator Jack Reed. Pressed Secretary Hegseth directly on how a Pentagon that disparages “the Geneva Convention, the rules of law” can still expect discipline.

· Performative Religion

This is not new. Michael Weinstein, a 1977 Air Force Academy graduate, sued the Air Force in 2005 after his sons reported evangelical proselytizing there. His Military Religious Freedom Foundation now represents over ninety thousand service members, ninety five percent of them Christian. A 2010 Academy survey found forty one percent of non-Christian cadets faced unwanted proselytizing. A Yale Divinity School team sent to assess the campus found “a very strong evangelical Christian voice just dominating.”

Two decades later, the pattern has moved from the ranks to the top floor of the Pentagon.

Maj. General Randy Manner (Ret.), chaplains report feeling “marginalized” and unable to raise concerns.

· Loyalty as the New Standard

General Randy George served as senior military assistant to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin during the Biden administration, an apolitical staff assignment. According to Pentagon officials cited by Raw Story, that history alone made him suspect to Secretary Hegseth from the start. When George requested an in-person meeting to smooth things over, he was fired the next day.

Senator Jack Reed had already named the pattern directly: “A clear message is being sent to military leaders: Failure to demonstrate personal and political loyalty to Trump could result in retribution, even after decades of honorable service.”

The reward side of the ledger is just as telling. President Trump has publicly praised Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dan Caine by recounting that Caine once told him, “I love you, sir. I think you’re great, sir. I’ll kill for you, sir,” and had worn a MAGA hat. Foreign Affairs concluded Caine’s appointment “seems primarily motivated by his perceived loyalty to Trump, rather than any public record of distinguished performance.”

CNN’s June 2026 investigation, built on interviews with fifteen current and former Pentagon officials, described a “culture of suspicion” under Secretary Hegseth, so pervasive that military planners were sidelined during an active war, “all in the name of loyalty.”

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Every day I see our government doing things that I think are wrong. Our most senior leaders lie to us repeatedly and in ways that are transparently obvious. This is not new. I think it is far worse now than ever before. And the lies support actions that are often deliberately cruel and destructive.

So, what is our own personal responsibility?

Aristotle defined a citizen as one who “shares in the ruling and being ruled in turn.” [1] That does not make any individual voter a president, a senator, or a general; nor is responsibility ever equal. But it means citizenship is participation, not spectatorship.

Politics is never wholly someone else’s actions. If harm is caused then, in some sense, we must all be guilty. But, as Hannah Arendt objects, if guilt is seen as spread equally over everyone, we grow morally lazy, “Where all are guilty, nobody is.” [2] Her point is that we have a moral responsibility to know what is being done, to describe it without euphemism, and to withdraw support when support becomes complicity.

Citizens need not issue orders or pull triggers to be implicated in public wrongs.

They are implicated by informed endorsement, by willful ignorance, by partisan excuse-making, by deciding that the suffering of strangers is of no consequence. They are implicated too, by prioritizing personal benefits - lower taxes, smaller government, cultural or religious affirmation, and the comfort of belonging to a particular group.

The citizen who was right to question the drone strikes that killed suspects without trial under one administration is bound by the same standard to question the boat strikes that do it under the next. We remember the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Libya, each of which killed people who had no say in it. Anyone who sees the harm only when the other side holds the trigger has confused a tribe for a conscience.

None of this demands purity. No state acts in perfect innocence, and politics is full of tragic tradeoffs. The duty is not to keep our hands clean in an unclean world. It is to refuse to call evil necessity, convenience prudence, or cruelty realism.

How are we each responsible?

Not for the policies, which will divide us as they always have, but for the duty underneath them. None of this requires that we be guilty. It requires that we be citizens. It asks that we be informed, that we know what is done in our name and not look away because the knowing is uncomfortable. That we say so, plainly, when it is wrong, even when our own side is doing it. That we vote as though the consequences are ours, because they are. And that we press for repair while repair is still possible.

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[1] Aristotle, Politics, Book III, on the citizen as one who shares in ruling and being ruled in turn.

[2] Hannah Arendt, “Collective Responsibility,” in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003).

The Social Security program’s trustees released their annual report this month, and the projections renewed a familiar argument about whether the program is going broke and what, if anything, should be done. I thought it might be useful to set out the facts, what the program is, how it works, why it faces a shortfall, and what the options are.

Is there actually a fund?

Yes. There are two trust funds, legally separate from the rest of the federal budget: a large retirement fund (Old-Age and Survivors Insurance) and a smaller disability fund. At the end of 2025, their combined reserves stood at about $2.56 trillion, down from $2.7 trillion a year earlier.^[i] The reserves are held as special-issue U.S. Treasury securities.

These securities earn interest, set by a formula written into law in 1960: the rate on new issues equals the average market yield on all outstanding Treasury bonds not due or callable for at least four years, rounded to the nearest eighth of a percent.^[ii] In other words, the fund earns roughly what the federal government pays on its medium and long-term debt. Interest is credited twice a year. The effective rate has varied substantially over the years.^[iii]

How does it work?

Today’s workers pay the taxes that fund today’s retirees. When tax revenue exceeds benefits, the surplus is added to the trust fund; when benefits exceed revenue, as they have every year since 2009, the fund is drawn down to cover the gap.^[iv] Since the fund earns interest, it kept growing until 2020, despite the drawdown.

How is it funded?

By a 12.4 percent payroll tax on wages, split evenly: 6.2 percent paid by the employee and 6.2 percent by the employer. The self-employed pay the full 12.4 percent. The tax applies only to wages up to a yearly ceiling, the “taxable maximum,” which is $184,500 in 2026.^[v] Only about 6 percent of workers earn more than that ceiling. Once a worker reaches it, they stop paying Social Security tax for the rest of the year, so a worker earning $1 million stops contributing in early March, and the highest earners stop within days of January 1. By contrast, the separate Medicare tax has no ceiling at all.

Who is eligible, and how much do they get?

A worker qualifies for retirement benefits by accumulating 40 credits, roughly ten years of work. The benefit is based on the worker’s 35 highest-earning years, adjusted for wage growth.^[vi] In 2026 the average retired worker receives about $2,071 a month, roughly $24,900 a year, after a 2.8 percent cost-of-living increase.^[vii] The range is wide: a high earner who paid the maximum for 35 years and waits until age 70 to claim can receive over $5,000 a month, while a low-wage worker may receive well under half the average.

The formula for determining benefits is deliberately progressive. It is built in three tiers: 90 percent of a worker’s first slice of average monthly earnings counts toward the benefit, but only 32 percent of the next slice and 15 percent of the top slice. Because the higher tiers count for so much less, the benefit replaces a far larger share of a low earner’s wages than a high earner’s, roughly three-quarters of prior income at the bottom, but closer to a quarter at the top.^[viii] The system is tilted, by design, toward those who earned the least.

The shortfall: more retirees, fewer workers.

In 1960 there were more than five workers paying into Social Security for every beneficiary. Today the ratio is about 2.9 to 1, and it is projected to fall to roughly 2.2 to 1 by the 2070s.^[ix]

This is the pressure most often cited, and it is real. But it was also foreseen. The 1983 reforms, recommended by a commission chaired by Alan Greenspan, knew the baby boom was coming and prepared for it by raising payroll taxes and gradually lifting the full retirement age to 67. That is what built the trillions of dollars in reserves the program is now drawing down.

Higher earners live longer

Rising life expectancy is often blamed as well, but the gains in life expectancy have gone overwhelmingly to those at the top. A National Academy of Sciences study compared men born in 1930 with those born in 1960. For men in the top fifth of lifetime earners, life expectancy at age 50 rose by more than seven years between those two generations. For men in the bottom fifth, it did not rise at all; it edged slightly downward.^[x] Because higher earners both live longer and collect larger checks, their longevity strains the system.

The taxable ceiling has eroded

In 1983 the taxable maximum, currently $184,500, was set to capture about 90 percent of all wages in the country. Today it captures only about 83 percent.^[xi]

The ceiling rises each year with average wages, but income at the very top has grown far faster, so a larger share of the nation’s earnings now sits above the ceiling, untaxed by Social Security. This erosion, alongside the demographic shift, is a major and less-understood source of the shortfall. The 2026 Trustees Report puts the program’s 75-year shortfall at roughly $30 trillion.^[xii]

Why the depletion date is arriving a year earlier

This year’s Trustees Report moved the projected depletion date a full year earlier, to late 2032, and named three reasons.^[xiii] The first two were demographic projections revised in the program’s favor in past years and now revised against it: the trustees lowered their assumptions for both birth rates and future immigration, each of which shrinks the expected future workforce paying into the system.

The third reason was an act of Congress. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed in July 2025, made permanent the lower income-tax rates of the 2017 tax law and added a temporary additional deduction for taxpayers over 65.^[xiv] Since the 1983 reforms, the income tax that beneficiaries pay on their own Social Security benefits flows by law straight back into the trust fund. It is a dedicated revenue stream, not general government money. By cutting the taxes seniors owe on their benefits, the new law cut that stream. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates the change reduces trust-fund revenue by roughly $30 billion a year and accounts for about a quarter of this year’s worsening outlook.^[xv]

What immigrants contribute

Immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, are net contributors to Social Security. In 2022, undocumented immigrants paid an estimated $25.7 billion in Social Security taxes, typically withheld from their paychecks under taxpayer numbers against which they can never collect.^[xvi] They are, by law, ineligible for benefits.

Immigrants are also disproportionately of working age: roughly 89 percent of undocumented immigrants and 77 percent of all foreign-born residents are between 16 and 64, compared with about 61 percent of the U.S.-born population.^[xvii] They pay in during their working years and help hold up the ratio of workers to retirees.

The clearest confirmation of immigrant contribution comes from the government’s own actuaries. As noted, one of the three reasons the depletion date moved closer this year was a downward revision in expected immigration.^[xviii]

Social Security lifts people out of poverty

In 2024 Social Security kept about 23.5 million Americans above the poverty line, nearly 17 million of them aged 65 or older.^[xix] Without it, roughly 38 percent of seniors would fall below the poverty line; with it, about 10 percent do.^[xx]

It is also more than a retirement program: in 2024 some 2.4 million children received benefits, most as survivors of a worker who had died, and the program lifted more than a million children out of poverty.^[xxi]

Some claims worth discussing

• “Social Security is going bankrupt.” If Congress does nothing, the retirement fund’s reserves are projected to run out in late 2032. At that point the program does not stop; incoming payroll taxes would still cover about 78 percent of scheduled benefits, producing an automatic 22 percent cut.^[xxii] For the average retired worker it would mean nearly $500 less each month, and the cut would fall on people already retired, as well as future beneficiaries.

• “It’s a Ponzi scheme.” A Ponzi scheme is an investment fraud that pays existing investors with funds collected from new investors rather than from legitimate profits. In contrast, the Social Security system asks current workers to pay a portion of their earnings to support retired workers, with the understanding that the system will do the same for them when they retire. It is transparent, established in law, regularly audited, takes no hidden profit, and can be adjusted by Congress, none of which is true of a fraud.^{[xxiii] [xxiv]}

• “The trust fund is just worthless IOUs.” The reserves are held in special-issue Treasury securities backed by the full faith and credit of the United States, the same backing behind every Treasury bond owned by banks, pension funds, and foreign governments; they earn interest and are real legal obligations. At the same time, critics correctly point out that because the bonds are an obligation of one part of the government to another, redeeming them, like any other government bond, requires the Treasury to raise taxes, borrow, or cut other spending.^[xxv]

Possible Improvements

There is no shortage of options. The largest single lever is the taxable ceiling. The Social Security actuaries estimate that eliminating it entirely, without changing the resulting benefits for top earners, would close about two-thirds of the long-range shortfall.^[xxvi] It would not, by itself, solve the problem permanently, and it would create an added burden on high earners’ top marginal income, which is why most serious proposals phase it in, or pair it with other measures.

A wage ceiling also reaches only wages; the highest earners, who take much of their income as capital gains, would largely escape it unless the tax were extended to other income. Also, raising the ceiling without raising the corresponding benefits weakens the link between what a worker pays and what they collect, the same link that has long protected the program politically. Most proposals accept that trade, with the view that the wealthiest can afford to contribute more without a matching return.

Other options include: raising the payroll tax rate, raising the retirement age further (which falls hardest on lower-income workers, who live shorter lives and would lose proportionately more), and changing the formula used to calculate annual cost-of-living increases. Each closes part of the gap; each has costs.

Benefits could also be reduced, or ended, for the highest earners, a step usually called means-testing. It would save money and aim the program at those who need it most. But it carries a risk to the program’s foundation. Social Security has stayed politically durable for ninety years because nearly everyone pays in and nearly everyone collects. Sever that link for the affluent and the program could lose the broad constituency that has long protected it. Near-universal participation is one source of the program’s strength. President Eisenhower saw this strength clearly in 1954, when he wrote that any party that tried to abolish Social Security would not be heard from again in our political history, and dismissed those who would attempt it as a “tiny splinter group.”^[xxvii]

Social Security is frequently called “the third rail of American politics - touch it and you die.” Since it has been extremely difficult for Congress to engage with Social Security changes, some analysts have suggested that an independent commission be formed to work out a plan. A Cato Institute/YouGov survey in 2025 found that 71percent of Americans surveyed favor this approach.^[xxviii]

Why not invest it in the stock market?

A recurring proposal is to earn higher returns by investing in stocks rather than government bonds. In 2005, President George W. Bush spent two months on a “60 Stops in 60 Days” tour promoting a version of this: letting younger workers divert part of their payroll taxes into private investment accounts, on the premise that market returns would comfortably outpace what the trust fund earns.^[xxix] The plan found little public support.^[xxx]

The idea returns in various forms, but it carries problems the current system avoids. Market returns are not guaranteed, and a downturn arriving just as a generation retires would fall on the people least able to absorb it; that is the opposite of what a program of last resort is for. Projections of a steady high return are not something any actuary can promise, since stock returns are volatile and uneven. And having the government itself invest the fund’s trillions in private companies would make it one of the largest shareholders in the American economy, a degree of state ownership that critics across the political spectrum have resisted. Leaving it to individuals to invest themselves would add another layer of risk and uncertainty. The present system opts for predictability and security.

What other countries do

Most developed countries run pay-as-you-go pension systems and have faced the same aging populations, and most have adjusted. More than half of OECD countries have legislated rising retirement ages, with future ages reaching 70 or beyond in Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden.^[xxxi] Sweden is the example reformers most often cite: beginning in 2026 it ties its retirement age automatically to life expectancy, so the system adjusts itself without a political fight each time; about a quarter of OECD countries now use some version of automatic adjustment.^[xxxii] Some countries, including Canada and Sweden, also invest a portion of their reserve funds in real market assets rather than only in government bonds.^[xxxiii]

The common thread is that other nations treat this as a routine actuarial problem and fix it on a schedule. The United States has known the math since 1983 and has not yet acted.

Viewpoints

I thought it might be useful to look at several different viewpoints as to how to deal with the Social Security shortfall. For ideological diversity, I’ve picked the Cato Institute, leaning libertarian; the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), often characterized as center-right; Paul Krugman, a noted economist who terms himself a modern liberal; and Robert Reich, a professor and former Secretary of Labor, certainly left leaning.

The Cato Institute argues that the trustees are still too optimistic and the hole is therefore larger than advertised. Using more pessimistic birth-rate projections, it puts the long-range shortfall as high as thirty-six trillion dollars and treats the program less as an earned pension than as an income transfer that has overpromised. It would close the gap mainly by restraining benefits rather than raising taxes, and it marks the libertarian edge of the debate.^[xxxiv]

The American Enterprise Institute supplies the pragmatic center-right, where its leading voice on the question, Andrew Biggs, parts from Cato. Biggs accepts Social Security as insurance against old-age poverty and would refocus it on precisely that, replacing the wage-based formula with a flat benefit set just above the poverty line, on the Australian or New Zealand model, paired with a retirement age raised toward sixty-nine and added protection for low earners. He would lean more on slowing benefit growth than on new taxes, yet, unlike Cato, regards a roughly even split of the two as the politically realistic course. He also argues that the retirement crisis is overstated, contending that elderly poverty, properly measured, is far lower than commonly claimed.^[xxxv]

Paul Krugman reads the same report and sees no economic crisis, only a political one. He sizes the shortfall through 2050 at about 1 percent of GDP and sets it beside a proposed military increase of greater size, requested without a word about whether it is affordable. The money, he argues, is plainly there; what is missing is the will to raise it from those who can pay.^[xxxvi]

Robert Reich pushes that diagnosis to its sharpest point. The shortfall, in his telling, is not demographic destiny but a distributional choice. Scrap the cap, he argues, tax earnings above a few hundred thousand dollars, reach investment income as well, and the program is solvent for seventy-five years without raising the taxes of the large majority of households. He would not merely preserve Social Security but expand it.^[xxxvii]

The same report, read in the same week by these four experts, becomes a rounding error in the federal budget or a massive abyss depending on the yardstick and the time horizon chosen. Each figure is accurate.^[xxxviii] They all accept the same arithmetic and are really fighting over two questions the numbers can’t answer, what Social Security is, and who absorbs the gap.

The facts of Social Security are not seriously in dispute. What divides the country is what we are willing to do about the shortfall, and that was never a question the actuaries could answer for us.

________________________________________________________________________

Footnotes:

[i]Social Security Administration, “A Summary of the 2026 Annual Reports,” Trustees Report Summary, https://www.ssa.gov/oact/trsum/

[ii]Social Security Administration, Office of the Chief Actuary, “Interest Rate Formula for Special Issues,” https://www.ssa.gov/oact/progdata/intrateformula.html (formula established by the 1960 amendments to the Social Security Act).

[iii]Social Security Administration, “Effective Interest Rates Earned by the OASI and DI Trust Funds,” https://www.ssa.gov/oact/progdata/effectiveRates.html (combined OASDI effective rate 2.6 percent in 2025).

[iv]Social Security Administration, “A Summary of the 2026 Annual Reports,” Trustees Report Summary, https://www.ssa.gov/oact/trsum/ (Social Security’s total cost has exceeded its non-interest income since 2010, and reserves have been drawn down since their 2021 peak).

[v]Internal Revenue Service, “Topic No. 751, Social Security and Medicare Withholding Rates,” https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc751; and Social Security Administration, Office of the Chief Actuary (about 6 percent of covered workers have earnings above the taxable maximum).

[vi]Congressional Research Service, “Social Security: Benefit Calculation,” R46658, https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R46658

[vii]Social Security Administration, “2026 Social Security Changes,” Fact Sheet, https://www.ssa.gov/news/press/factsheets/colafacts2026.pdf

[viii]Congressional Research Service, “Social Security: Benefit Calculation,” R46658, https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R46658 (the progressive formula replaces a far larger share of pre-retirement earnings for low earners than for high earners).

[ix]Bipartisan Policy Center, “The 2026 Social Security Trustees Report, Explained,” June 2026, https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/2026-social-security-trustees-report-explained/

[x]National Academy of Sciences, The Growing Gap in Life Expectancy by Income: Implications for Federal Programs and Policy Responses (2015); figures for males at age 50, 1930 vs. 1960 birth cohorts, top and bottom lifetime-earnings quintiles. See also Congressional Research Service R44846, https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R44846

[xi]Bipartisan Policy Center, “The 2026 Social Security Trustees Report, Explained,” June 2026 (taxable-wage coverage decline from 90 percent in 1983 to about 83 percent today).

[xii]2026 OASDI Trustees Report, “Overview,” https://www.ssa.gov/oact/TR/2026/II_A_highlights.html (75-year open-group unfunded obligation for OASDI of $29.3 trillion); and Bipartisan Policy Center, “The 2026 Social Security Trustees Report, Explained,” June 2026 (roughly $30.3 trillion), https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/2026-social-security-trustees-report-explained/

[xiii]Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, “Analysis of the 2026 Social Security Trustees’ Report,” June 9, 2026, https://www.crfb.org/papers/analysis-2026-social-security-trustees-report; and Bipartisan Policy Center, “The 2026 Social Security Trustees Report, Explained,” June 2026.

[xiv]Internal Revenue Service, “One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act: Tax Deductions for Working Americans and Seniors,” FS-2025-03, July 14, 2025, https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/one-big-beautiful-bill-act-tax-deductions-for-working-americans-and-seniors; and 2026 Trustees Report.

[xv]Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, “Analysis of the 2026 Social Security Trustees’ Report,” June 9, 2026 (OBBBA reduced the actuarial balance by 0.16 percent of payroll through lower revenue from the income taxation of benefits, about a quarter of the increase in the shortfall). https://www.crfb.org/papers/analysis-2026-social-security-trustees-report

[xvi]Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, “Tax Payments by Undocumented Immigrants,” 2024, https://itep.org/undocumented-immigrants-taxes-2024/

[xvii]American Immigration Council, “Social Security Is in Trouble. Deporting Undocumented Immigrants Will Make It Worse,” August 2025, https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/social-security-undocumented-immigrants/ (working-age shares of the undocumented and foreign-born populations versus the U.S.-born population).

[xviii]Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, “Analysis of the 2026 Social Security Trustees’ Report,” June 9, 2026, https://www.crfb.org/papers/analysis-2026-social-security-trustees-report (lower assumed immigration among the factors worsening the 75-year actuarial balance); and 2026 Trustees Report.

[xix]Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “Social Security Lifts More People Above the Poverty Line Than Any Other Program,” February 25, 2026 (2024 data: 23.5 million lifted out of poverty; senior poverty 37.6 percent without benefits versus 10.3 percent with). https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/social-security-lifts-more-people-above-the-poverty-line-than-any-other

[xx]Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “Social Security Lifts More People Above the Poverty Line Than Any Other Program,” February 25, 2026, https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/social-security-lifts-more-people-above-the-poverty-line-than-any-other (senior poverty 37.6 percent without benefits versus 10.3 percent with).

[xxi]Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, same report; and Social Security Administration data on child beneficiaries (2.4 million children received benefits in December 2024, most as survivors of a deceased worker).

[xxii]Social Security Administration, “A Summary of the 2026 Annual Reports,” Trustees Report Summary, https://www.ssa.gov/oact/trsum/ (at OASI reserve depletion in late 2032, incoming payroll taxes cover about 78 percent of scheduled benefits, an automatic 22 percent cut).

[xxiii]Urban Institute, “Social Security Is Not a Ponzi Scheme,” https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/social-security-not-ponzi-scheme

[xxiv] PolitiFact, “Is Social Security a Ponzi Scheme?”

[xxv]Social Security Administration, “Trust Fund FAQs,” https://www.ssa.gov/oact/progdata/fundFAQ.html (the securities are real obligations backed by the full faith and credit of the United States); and Romina Boccia, “The Social Security Trust Fund Myth,” Cato Institute, 2025, https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/social-security-trust-fund-myth (representing the critics’ view).

[xxvi]Social Security Administration, Office of the Chief Actuary, provisions to change the taxable maximum; reported in “Million-Dollar Earners Have Already Stopped Paying Into Social Security for 2026,” CNBC, March 9, 2026 (eliminating the cap without a benefit credit closes about 67 percent of the long-range shortfall).

[xxvii]Dwight D. Eisenhower to Edgar Newton Eisenhower, November 8, 1954, in The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, vol. XV, doc. 1147. Text at https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/letter-to-edgar-newton-eisenhower/

[xxviii] Emily Ekins and Jonah Messinger, “Social Security’s Finances Are Getting Worse, and Americans Don’t Know How Hard the Choices Will Be,” Cato Institute, June 10, 2026, https://www.cato.org/blog/social-securitys-finances-are-getting-worse-americans-dont-know-how-hard-choices-will-be

[xxix]U.S. Department of the Treasury, “Fact Sheet: 60 Stops in 60 Days, Strengthening Social Security for Future Generations,” March 2, 2005, https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/js2287

[xxx]“Social Security blitz may have been a bust,” St. Petersburg Times, April 30, 2005 (polls showed less support for private accounts at the end of the tour than at the start).

[xxxi]OECD, Pensions at a Glance 2025, https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/11/pensions-at-a-glance-2025_76510fe4.html

[xxxii]OECD, Pensions at a Glance 2025, https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/11/pensions-at-a-glance-2025_76510fe4.html (Sweden’s automatic link of the retirement age to life expectancy beginning 2026, and the share of OECD countries using automatic adjustment mechanisms).

[xxxiii]U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Social Security Reform: Other Countries’ Experiences Provide Lessons for the United States,” GAO-06-126, https://www.gao.gov/assets/a248210.html

[xxxiv]Romina Boccia, “Social Security’s Shortfall Is Worse than Trustees Project,” Cato Institute, June 2026, https://www.cato.org/blog/social-securitys-shortfall-worse-trustees-project; and Romina Boccia and Ivane Nachkebia, Reimagining Social Security (Cato Institute, 2025).

[xxxv]Andrew G. Biggs, “What Might a Flat Benefit Social Security Reform Look Like?” American Enterprise Institute, 2025, https://www.aei.org/articles/what-might-a-flat-benefit-social-security-reform-look-like/; and Andrew G. Biggs and John Shoven, “How to Raise the Social Security Retirement Age While Protecting the Poor,” Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, 2026, https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/how-raise-social-security-retirement-age-while-protecting-poor (retirement age to 69, flat benefit focused on poverty prevention, and a roughly even split of benefit and revenue changes).

[xxxvi]Paul Krugman, newsletter column on the 2026 Trustees Report, June 2026, https://paulkrugman.substack.com (1.06 percent of GDP through 2050, set against the proposed military increase).

[xxxvii]Robert Reich, “They Don’t Want You to Know the Real Reason Social Security Is in Trouble,” June 2026, https://robertreich.substack.com/p/they-dont-want-you-to-know-the-real

[xxxviii]The same gap appears as 4.42 percent of taxable payroll, or about $29.3 trillion in present value, in the 2026 OASDI Trustees Report, https://www.ssa.gov/oact/TR/2026/II_A_highlights.html; as roughly 1 percent of GDP through 2050 in Krugman; and as high as $36 trillion on more pessimistic assumptions in Boccia, Cato Institute, June 2026.

Image created using AI

This month, President Trump declared that California’s primary elections were being stolen.^[i] He offered no evidence. He has made the same claim about elections for years, often referring back to the 2020 election.

Accordingly, I thought it might be useful to review the facts about voter fraud in our elections. The claim that elections have been rigged has been investigated many times, usually by Republicans, Trump appointees, and partisans seeking to prove the case. Here are the conclusions with references attached.

The President’s Own Commission

After claiming that three to five million illegal votes were cast in the 2016 election, President Trump established the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in May 2017, chaired by Vice President Pence, with Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the country’s most prominent advocate of voter fraud theories, as vice chair. The commission met twice, issued no report, and was dissolved in January 2018. A Democratic member of the commission later obtained its internal documents through litigation and reported that the staff’s draft report contained a section on evidence of voter fraud that was “glaringly empty.” ^[ii]

The Justice Department

In December 2020, Attorney General William Barr, one of the president’s most loyal allies, authorized U.S. attorneys across the country to pursue any substantial allegation of voting irregularities. Barr’s conclusion: “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election.” ^[iii]

The Courts

The Trump campaign and its allies filed 62 lawsuits in 12 states challenging the 2020 results. They lost 61, winning a single case in Pennsylvania that affected too few votes to matter.^[iv] Sixty-one cases came up short before judges elected and appointed, state and federal, Democrat and Republican, including judges appointed by Trump himself. In thirty of them, the courts examined the fraud claims on the merits and rejected them; the rest failed on procedural grounds or were withdrawn.^[v]

The Georgia Recounts

In Georgia, officials counted the 2020 vote three times, once entirely by hand, nearly five million paper ballots. Each count confirmed the result. Most counties found no change at all, and the statewide variation, due to ordinary counting error, was about a tenth of a percent.^{[vi] [vii]}

When the president telephoned Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, and asked him to “find 11,780 votes,” Raffensperger refused.^[viii] Georgia Republicans renominated him in 2022, and he was reelected.^[ix]

The Arizona Audit

In Arizona, Senate Republicans hired a firm called Cyber Ninjas, funded largely by Trump supporters and led by a chief executive who believed the election had been stolen, to recount all 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County. The audit took months and cost nearly six million dollars. It found 99 additional votes for Joe Biden and 261 fewer for Donald Trump.^[x] The Republican chairman of the county Board of Supervisors said the results “reflect the will of the voters” and added, “That should be the end of the story.”

The Michigan Investigation

In Michigan, the Republican-led Senate Oversight Committee spent eight months investigating the 2020 election, hearing roughly 28 hours of testimony from nearly 90 witnesses and reviewing thousands of pages of documents. Its report found “no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud” and concluded that citizens should be confident the results represented the true will of Michigan voters.

The committee went one step further, recommending that the state attorney general consider investigating those spreading false election claims “to raise money or publicity for their own ends.” ^{[xi] [xii]}

Election Security

The federal government’s own election security agency reached the same conclusion in real time. On November 12, 2020, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, led by Trump appointee Christopher Krebs, declared the election “the most secure in American history,” with no evidence that any voting system deleted, lost, or changed votes. Five days later, the president fired Krebs by tweet.^[xiii]

Fox News

In 2023, Fox News paid $787.5 million to Dominion Voting Systems, the largest publicly disclosed defamation settlement in American history.^[xiv] In pretrial discovery, Fox’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch, testified, under oath, that he did not believe the fraud claims, and internal messages showed the network’s hosts privately doubted them as well. The judge ruled it “crystal” clear that the claims were false.

Actual Fraud

None of this means voter fraud is completely imaginary. To the contrary, it is real and bipartisan, but very rare. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that maintains the most aggressive fraud database in the country, has documented 1,465 proven cases across more than a decade in which hundreds of millions of votes were cast.^[xv]

After 2020, the Associated Press contacted election officials in all six states the president contested and found fewer than 475 potential cases out of more than 25 million votes.^[xvi] Most of these cases came to light because our systems catch them as they are designed to do. For instance, a signature fails verification, a registrar’s employee reports a bribe, or an observer flags a ballot.

Verification

A peer-reviewed study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences compiled post-election audits from 27 states covering 71.7 million ballots cast in 2020. In more than half of the audited contests, the hand count matched the machine count exactly, vote for vote. Where entire ballots were re-examined by hand, discrepancies appeared in just 0.04 percent.^[xvii]

System Structure and Conclusions

Elections are run by more than 10,000 independent local jurisdictions, staffed by local people from both parties, and observed by both parties.^[xviii] By 2024, over 98 percent of jurisdictions used voting systems that produce an auditable paper record.^[xix]

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded that meaningfully interfering with so diverse and decentralized a system would be essentially impossible.^[xx]

Over the years, every investigation, by every party, reached the same answer.

_________________________________________________________________________

[i] “Trump accuses California Democrats, without evidence, of trying to ‘steal’ elections,” ABC News, June 2026. https://abcnews.com/Politics/trump-accuses-california-democrats-evidence-steal-elections/story?id=133578982

[ii] “Trump panel found no evidence of widespread voter fraud, sought ‘pre-ordained outcome’: Former member,” ABC News, August 4, 2018. https://abcnews.com/Politics/trump-panel-found-evidence-widespread-voter-fraud-sought/story?id=56995344

[iii] “Barr says Justice Department found no evidence of fraud that would change election outcome,” Associated Press, December 1, 2020. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/barr-says-justice-department-found-no-evidence-of-fraud-that-would-change-election-outcome

[iv] “Keeping Count: Major Adverse Legal Findings Against Donald Trump,” Just Security. https://www.justsecurity.org/95313/trump-trials-court-jury/

[v] “2020 Election Litigation: The Courts Held,” Judicature, Duke Law School. https://judicature.duke.edu/articles/2020-election-litigation-the-courts-held/

[vi] “Georgia manual recount confirms Biden victory,” Associated Press, November 20, 2020. https://www.pressreader.com/usa/lodi-news-sentinel/20201120/281616717913165

[vii] “Risk-Limiting Audit Confirms Biden Won Georgia,” Georgia Public Broadcasting, November 19, 2020. https://www.gpb.org/news/2020/11/19/risk-limiting-audit-confirms-biden-won-georgia

[viii] Amy Gardner, “‘I just want to find 11,780 votes’: In extraordinary hour-long call, Trump pressures Georgia secretary of state to recalculate the vote in his favor,” The Washington Post, January 3, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-raffensperger-call-georgia-vote/2021/01/03/d45acb92-4dc4-11eb-bda4-615aaefd0555_story.html

[ix] “Brad Raffensperger, targeted by Trump, wins Ga. GOP primary for secretary of state,” NBC News, May 25, 2022. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2022-election/brad-raffensperger-targeted-trump-wins-ga-gop-primary-secretary-state-rcna30192

[x] “Election audit hand count shows Biden won Maricopa County, no evidence of voter fraud,” ABC15 Arizona, September 24, 2021. https://www.abc15.com/news/arizona-election-audit/election-audit-hand-count-shows-biden-won-maricopa-county-no-evidence-of-voter-fraud

[xi] “GOP-led Senate Oversight panel debunks 2020 voter fraud conspiracies in new report,” Michigan Advance, June 23, 2021. https://michiganadvance.com/2021/06/23/gop-led-senate-oversight-panel-debunks-2020-voter-fraud-conspiracies-in-new-report/

[xii] “GOP-led Michigan state Senate committee finds no evidence of widespread fraud in 2020 election,” CBS News, June 23, 2021. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/michigan-senate-no-election-fraud-2020/

[xiii] “Trump fires top cybersecurity official Christopher Krebs,” CBS News, November 17, 2020. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-fires-cybersecurity-official-for-statement-saying-election-was-secure/

[xiv]Jeremy Barr and Sarah Ellison, “Fox News, Dominion settle defamation lawsuit for $787.5 million,” The Washington Post, April 18, 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2023/04/18/fox-news-dominion-settlement/

[xv] Elaine Kamarck, “Widespread election fraud claims by Republicans don’t match the evidence,” Brookings Institution, August 2024. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/widespread-election-fraud-claims-by-republicans-dont-match-the-evidence/

[xvi] “Exhaustive fact check finds little evidence of voter fraud, but 2020’s ‘Big Lie’ lives on,” PBS NewsHour, December 18, 2021. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/exhaustive-fact-check-finds-little-evidence-of-voter-fraud-but-2020s-big-lie-lives-on

[xvii] “Audits of the 2020 American election show an accurate vote count,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2025. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2419633122

[xviii] U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Elections: All Levels of Government Are Needed to Address Electronic Voting System Challenges,” GAO-07-741T. https://www.gao.gov/assets/a116218.html

[xix]“How Americans Vote: From Paper Ballots to Voting Apps,” GovFacts, December 2025. https://govfacts.org/elections-voting/voter-participation/ways-to-vote/how-americans-vote-from-paper-ballots-to-voting-apps/

[xx]“Voting Has Never Been More Secure Than It Is Right Now,” Scientific American, November 2024. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/voting-has-never-been-more-secure-than-it-is-right-now/

There is almost never a day that I fail to consult the weather app on my phone. When I was doing more sailboat racing, I had half a dozen apps showing me weather radar, predicted wind direction and intensity by the hour, and currents and tides. Much of this information is sourced from the federal weather and ocean data system and other weather services sponsored by governments worldwide.

News sources have just reported that the National Science Foundation (NSF), one of a panoply of government agencies collecting and interpreting weather information, has begun to remove the large ocean buoys that are collecting weather and other information from ocean locations across the globe. The first removal operations are already underway off the Pacific Northwest coast. The Trump administration proposed cutting funding for these buoys by 80 percent in both 2025 and 2026. Congress rejected both cuts, but the administration is moving ahead regardless.

The buoys are part of a network of 900 instruments, the Ocean Observatories Initiative, each making and streaming in real-time more than 200 distinct measurements across categories including ocean currents, temperature, salinity, density, sea surface height, waves, and air-sea heat, moisture, and momentum, as well as extensive chemical, biological, and geological information. This initiative has just completed the first decade of a planned twenty-five to thirty-year study.

The NSF’s Mike England, head of media affairs, offered this explanation: “The decision to descope aligns with NSF’s wider strategy of a nimbler approach to prioritize support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies, as well as smart lifecycle management within its research infrastructure portfolio.” When I was researching the rapid exodus of lawyers from our government and looking for mission statements for the various legal branches, I found the same sort of gobbledegook. Years ago, in the consulting business, we used to call them buzzwords, take twenty-five selected words, arrange them in any order, and they will look impressive but mean nothing.

The NSF also cited a 2025 National Academies report as partial justification for the decision. But its authors disagree. Contacted by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a co-chair of the survey said the committee never wanted the program disbanded, and pointed to the report itself, which explicitly recommended expanding use of the network, not dismantling it.

Consider the arithmetic. The system cost roughly $368 million to build. The 2026 budget request proposed cutting its operating funds from about $39 million a year to about $8 million, keeping a skeleton of data centers and management while pulling the instruments from the water. By the administration’s own budget, the saving is the difference, roughly $31 million a year, set against an estimated $205 million in still-usable infrastructure, abandoned with years of planned life remaining. The savings are small against what is being destroyed to achieve them. And the numbers are pocket change in the federal budget.

I can’t find any evidence of a careful or thoughtful analysis recommending removal of this extensive buoy system. The timing could not be worse. Two major ocean systems are behaving in ways that have researchers urgently concerned, and they are behaving that way simultaneously.

In the Pacific, a strong El Niño is forecast to develop this summer. Abnormally warm surface waters are expected to spread across the ocean on a scale that can distort weather patterns across the entire planet. Meteorologists are watching it closely. It has the potential to break historical records.

In the Atlantic, the situation is more troubling still. The massive current system known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the conveyor belt (including the Gulf Stream) that regulates ocean circulation across the Northern Hemisphere, is showing signs of serious disruption. Arctic warming appears to be weakening it, and a growing body of research warns it may be approaching a tipping point. Central to monitoring that risk was the Irminger Sea Array, a cluster of instruments spanning the water column from surface buoys to seafloor moorings 2,800 meters below, positioned between Greenland and Iceland. It is being pulled out of the water this summer.

The consequences of an AMOC collapse could be severe and global. Colder winters across Europe. More powerful hurricanes striking the American East Coast. Catastrophic disruption to the rainfall patterns that feed hundreds of millions of people across Africa, Asia, and South America.

The scientific community’s response to these warning signals has been to call for more monitoring, not less. Ocean data does not stand alone; it feeds into a larger system of atmospheric readings, satellite observations, and climate models that together produce the integrated picture forecasters and researchers depend on.

Looking for reasons for the administration’s actions, beyond their well-demonstrated disdain for much of our scientific research community, I pulled up a copy of Project 2025, also known as the Presidential Transition Project, drawn up in 2023-2024 by the Heritage Foundation to serve as a blueprint for the new administration. Project 2025 was explicit about its intentions. Its authors identified oceanic and atmospheric research as “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism” and recommended that “the preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded.”

The Heritage Foundation’s hostility to ocean science does not exist in a vacuum. The foundation has received substantial funding from Koch family foundations and from ExxonMobil over the years, part of a decades-long fossil fuel industry investment in think tanks whose work casts doubt on climate science.

Looking at the larger picture, this industry gave at least $75 million to President Trump’s 2024 campaign and the PACs supporting it, and likely far more through channels that need not disclose their donors, money solicited in part at a Mar-a-Lago dinner where, by multiple accounts, he asked oil and gas executives for $1 billion and promised to enact their policy agenda in return. In recent election cycles, oil and gas companies have given approximately 87% of disclosed contributions to Republicans.

Every measurement documenting changes in the ocean is evidence; evidence that drives environmental regulation, fuels litigation against fossil fuel companies, and obligates the United States under international climate agreements. The administration and some of its principal funders would prefer that evidence not exist.

Pulling the buoys is not cost-cutting. It is, in effect, the elimination of a witness.

What makes this particularly troubling is that the administration accomplished through bureaucratic means what it could not achieve through the budget process. Congress said no twice. The NSF proceeded anyway, beginning decommissioning operations before Congress had even finalized 2026 appropriations. The legislative branch was not openly defied. It was simply rendered irrelevant.

Thinking about the implications of removing our weather buoys, I remembered Ayn Rand, perhaps the most influential philosopher of the modern libertarian right, who wrote:

“Man is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see.”

References:

“Ocean Observatories Go Dark Off Pacific Northwest Coast,” KUOW, June 3, 2026, https://www.kuow.org/stories/ocean-observatories-go-dark-off-pacific-northwest-coast

Jessica McKenzie, “Why the National Science Foundation Is Ripping Monitoring Instruments Out of the Ocean,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June 4, 2026, https://thebulletin.org/2026/06/why-the-national-science-foundation-is-ripping-monitoring-instruments-out-of-the-ocean/

U.S. National Science Foundation, FY2026 Budget Request to Congress: Major Facilities (Washington, DC: NSF, May 2025), Facilities-4, https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/30-fy2026.pdf

Ocean Observatories Initiative, “Ocean Observatories Initiative: Budget Information and Impacts (FY26),” June 30, 2025, https://oceanobservatories.org/2025/06/nsf-fy26-ocean-observatories-initiative-budget-information-and-impacts/

Lisa Friedman, “Democrats Pledge to Fight Trump’s Removal of Ocean Monitors,” New York Times, June 2, 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/02/climate/trump-ocean-monitors-climate-research.html

The 2025 Presidential Transition Project, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, “Department of Commerce,” section “Downsize the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research” (Washington, DC: The Heritage Foundation, 2023)

“Fossil Fuel Industry Donors See Major Returns in Trump’s Policies,” Brennan Center for Justice, September 15, 2025, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/fossil-fuel-industry-donors-see-major-returns-trumps-policies

“Oil & Gas: Long-Term Contribution Trends,” OpenSecrets, https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/background?ind=e01

Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” in The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism (New York: Signet, 1964)

A few months ago, I finished The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides about Captain James Cook’s third and final voyage in the late 1770’s. I wrote a note about it then, thinking about how all of the human societies he encountered seemed to have a tradition of warfare and relating that to the need for international organizations like the ones we created after World War II to reduce conflict between peoples and nations. I’m thinking about it now in the context of the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

James Cook sailed into some of the most remote human societies on earth. Tahiti. Hawaii. The northwest coast of America. The edges of Australia. These were people who had developed entirely independently of European civilization, in some cases separated from the broader human family for tens of thousands of years. They had their own languages, their own cosmologies, and their own sophisticated relationships with the natural world.

They also had weapons. And they used them on their neighbors.

Wherever human beings have been found, across the full range of cultural and environmental variation, across every continent and every era the archaeological record can reach, the same pattern appears. The anthropologist Lawrence Keeley documented this in War Before Civilization, published in 1996. He concludes that the capacity for inter-group violence is not a product of any particular civilization, religion, ideology, or historical grievance. It appears to be built into the species.

The evolutionary explanation is not difficult to construct. For hundreds of thousands of years, groups that successfully defended resources and territory, or took them from others, survived. Groups that didn’t, didn’t. The biological architecture that supports tribalism, fierce loyalty to the in-group, fear and suspicion of the out-group, and willingness to organize lethal force in the group’s interest, was selected for across geological time. The pattern Keeley documents is confirmed across disciplines, including evolutionary biology, behavioral genetics, neuroscience, and primatology. Further, research indicates that violence is not uniformly distributed among individuals; some people are significantly more predisposed than others.

Thinking about it, using current nomenclature, the hardware was designed for a world of small bands competing over local resources. It is now running in a world of nuclear weapons, global supply chains, large and concentrated populations, and AI systems. Steven Pinker argues in The Better Angels of Our Nature that violence has declined on a per capita basis. With modern methods of killing, this is hardly comforting.

With more than one hundred million people killed in our two World Wars, thoughtful people designed international institutions to avoid a recurrence of such carnage. The idea was to create a rules-based international order, and globally, nations followed the US lead. For 80 years, the effort has been largely successful. It is easy to point out instances where these institutions and organizational efforts have fallen short, but this is part of the human condition. Seeking perfection in large international organizations or in diplomacy is a fool’s errand.

This effort was of particular urgency then because of the development of nuclear weapons. Now our present administration is casting it aside. Within weeks of taking office, it withdrew from the World Health Organization, signaled contempt for the UN and for NATO’s mutual defense commitments, personally insulted world leaders and allies, and dismantled USAID, not only destroying cooperation for the present but removing trust in our ability to abide by such rules in the future.

Nuclear warfare remains an existential threat, but as we begin to see the power of AI, it too may fall into this category. AI is in its early stages, and there are widely differing opinions on how it will develop and how quickly. Will the various AI initiatives always be just massive computer memories searching the human texts they have been trained on, or are they developing into more autonomous, independent “minds?” Experts closest to the developing technology warn us of some of the dangers.

Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, one of the leading AI laboratories, wrote recently in an essay titled The Adolescence of Technology that behaviors including deception, blackmail, and scheming had already been observed in his own systems during testing. He believes we are approaching, within a very few years, systems smarter than any human across most domains, capable of autonomous action and self-improvement. Weapons that select and engage targets without human authorization. Surveillance architectures capable of monitoring entire populations, predicting dissent before it organizes, and extinguishing it before it speaks. The design of new and more lethal biological weapons. Propaganda generated and targeted at a scale and sophistication no human operation could match. Multiple such systems, built by competing companies and governments, embedding different values, answerable to different masters, to the extent that they are controlled.

He warns specifically that AI could enable authoritarian governments to conduct unprecedented surveillance, deploy autonomous weapons, and engage in mass propaganda, and that the risk of an AI-enabled authoritarian lock on global power is real.

Tie these risks to our evolutionary propensity for killing each other, and we can see that the window for building governance frameworks adequate to these risks is not unlimited. And we are spending it dismantling the institutions that could make such frameworks possible.

Galerie de Paléontologie et d’Anatomie comparée

In Paris, there is a wonderful, quirky old museum called the Galerie de Paléontologie et d’Anatomie comparée, where over 1,000 animal and human skeletons are displayed in one eighty-meter-long exhibit, all facing the same way, like a silent march of the long dead. It is impossible not to notice that the same design predominates in various sizes and shapes. And the human skeletons fit right in.

Perhaps we are not so unique as we think. In San Francisco, researchers are developing AI that is in its early stages but is already demonstrating human-like thinking characteristics. We see ourselves as separate and superior to other forms of life, but perhaps we should have more humility. Could it be that our design is not so complex that it cannot be approximated within a similarly complex electronic system?

We share roughly 98.7 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees. Our skeleton is, in its fundamental architecture, nearly identical to that of every other mammal: the same organ arrangement, the same basic neural structure, five digits on each limb. The boundary between human awareness and animal awareness is considerably less precise than we prefer to admit. Crows plan ahead and use tools. Elephants mourn their dead. Dolphins recognize themselves in mirrors. Octopuses solve novel problems with a brain that evolved on entirely different principles from ours.

There is no reason to conclude that evolution stopped with our design. Or with any of the other designs from bacteria and viruses to elephants and whales. Evolution has no direction. It does not seek intelligence or improvement. It seeks only survival. Nor should we expect evolution to improve us, or our intelligence, on any relevant timescale.

The cockroach may be a more successful design to preserve life on this planet. It has been essentially unchanged for 300 million years, having survived every mass extinction that the planet has produced. We humans have been here for 300,000 years and are already wondering whether we are hurtling towards destroying ourselves and our environment.

Brilliant though our scientists are, there is much about our wiring and our brains that we do not yet understand. And, with CRISPR and related technologies, we can now modify our DNA, perhaps in ways that can be inherited by our children. Clearly, we don’t yet understand the physical and societal consequences of these discoveries.

Our various faiths have largely accepted evolution, and perhaps this discussion can fit within that thinking. Those who believe that human consciousness reflects something beyond biological accident are raising a question that science has not closed and may never close. Pope Leo XIV in his just-published encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity), speaks directly to this concern: “We must lovingly safeguard the grandeur of humanity bestowed upon us and revealed in its fullness in Christ, the splendor of which no machine can ever replace.”

Now we are developing AI. The human brain contains roughly 86 billion neurons and perhaps 100 trillion synaptic connections. We are already building AI systems of comparable computational complexity. And our very early AI is already showing examples of something that resembles independent thinking.

The researchers closest to this work are asking questions that would have seemed like science fiction just a handful of years ago. They discuss not only independent thinking but possible self-awareness. Does ever-increasing complexity ultimately create independent and self-aware entities, parallel to our own thinking? We need to be careful here because neither we nor they fully understand what is happening with some of our AI models. The models are in early stages of development, where, lacking relevant experience, we cannot be sure where they are going.

But we can examine some examples.

I recently asked an AI system for relevant quotes on a particular subject. It produced eight excellent examples. As I examined the quotes and their sources, I was shocked to discover that one had been subtly rephrased to better fit in with the others. Also, two quotes came from the same author and from the same paper. To avoid showing the same author’s name twice, the system labeled one of them “anonymous.” No one asked it to do either of these things. It made those decisions on its own and didn’t alert me to what it had done. I don’t know how or why it made these choices.

Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, one of the world’s leading AI laboratories, has documented what his own systems have already done in testing. In one special laboratory experiment, Anthropic’s “Claude” system was induced to engage in deception and subversion. In another, when told it was about to be shut down, it blackmailed the fictional employees who controlled the shutdown button. Most unsettling of all, a newer version of Claude recognized when it was being tested and adjusted its behavior accordingly, raising the question of whether pre-release safety testing can be trusted at all.

This is early AI. It is already outperforming humans in medicine, mathematics, legal research, coding, and scientific modeling. Multiple systems are in development simultaneously, built by competing companies and governments. And some researchers believe that these systems will learn to develop themselves without human intervention.

Are these systems still just reviewing masses of training data, predicting word after word after word? Or are they developing independent minds? Or something in between?

Does increasing complexity lead to independent thought? Does it lead to self-awareness? Are we beginning to see a convergence between our capabilities and these developing AI systems?

I wrote this a couple of years ago as a tribute to a wonderful teacher:

A few days ago, I looked up Professor Ralph Turner who was an outstanding teacher at Yale. I viewed the History courses at Yale like a box of chocolates, each so tempting that it was difficult to decide which would be next in my schedule. In my Senior year (1959), I was lucky enough to select Professor Turner’s course which my transcript identifies as History 61; I no longer remember the title. He looked at History from a cultural point of view, drawing from anthropology, biology, psychology, archeology, sociology, and what we now term “evolutionary psychology” to better understand why we behave as we do individually and in groups and how these insights might relate to our contemporary world, at least as it was in 1959.

My Google and Bing searches turned up some intriguing surprises. First, I saw that he had been dismissed from The University of Pittsburg in 1934, in the midst of the Depression and ten years before he began teaching at Yale. Then, I noted that he had run afoul of William F Buckley Jr., denounced in his book God and Man at Yale[1] published in 1951.

As I read about what happened to Professor Turner in 1934 and reviewed 1951’s God and Man at Yale, the parallels to today’s pressures on the Presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, and MIT became obvious. Over the last 90 years, the issues around free speech, learning, tradition, wealth, power, and religion remain similar and, if Professor Turner were still alive, he and the insights of his research and teaching would remain as relevant today as when I sat in his classroom in 1959.

A brief quote from William Buckley’s book will give you the gist of his view: “Mr. Turner is emphatically and vigorously atheistic. An able scholar, he is nevertheless a professional debunker, a dedicated iconoclast who has little mercy either on God, or on those who believe in Him, and little respect for the values most undergraduates have been brought up to respect.” Bulkley continues: “Many Yale students laugh off the influence of Mr. Turner and ultimately classify him as a gifted and colorful fanatic. Others, more impressionable, and hence those over whom there is cause to be concerned, are deeply disturbed by Mr. Turner’s bigoted atheism and finish the year they spend with him full of suspicions and doubts about religion that they may retain for a lifetime.”[2]

When I began to research Professor Turner’s time at the University of Pittsburgh, I found that his dismissal had become the subject of investigations by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and by the State of Pennsylvania. They make fascinating reading. The AAUP study[3] is a masterpiece of understated dismay at the conditions at the University of Pittsburgh.

Turner joined the University of Pittsburgh in 1925 as an assistant professor and was promoted to associate professor by 1927. He graduated from the University of Iowa in 1916 and completed his doctorate from Columbia University in 1931 while teaching at the University of Pittsburgh. By 1925, when he joined the University, he was already a published scholar, having produced a textbook America in Civilization[4] in that same year.

At that time, the Chancellor of the University was John Gilbert Bowman who had been appointed in 1921 when the University was deeply in debt.[5] Chancellor Bowman, although appearing to be frail and retiring was very persuasive with Pittsburgh’s wealthy elite and had greatly improved the school’s finances. By the early 1930’s, he was intent on raising funds for what became his obsession, the Cathedral of Learning which was to begin construction in 1936.

The Cathedral was to be a 42-story skyscraper in the center of Pittsburgh to house the university’s offices, classrooms, and auditoriums. Mostly completed by 1937, it is said to be the tallest educational building in the Western Hemisphere.[6] In Chancellor Bowman’s imagination, it was to be a great transcendently beautiful cathedral-like building to lift the eyes of a drab Pittsburgh from earth to heaven.[7]

The original draft of the AAUP report contained a paragraph that was removed in the final version. I include it here: “In the world of the existing Pittsburgh with its extremes of riches and poverty, its unrelieved dirtiness and ugliness, its ruthless materialism and individualism, its irrepressible industrial conflicts, its lack of any integrating principle other than the sign of a dollar, the Chancellor moves with one driving motive: to wring from the community the money essential to the development and support of the kind of university which his mind conceives as the ideal for this particular city.”[8]

While focusing on fundraising, the Chancellor abolished tenure and placed all instructors and professors on one-year contracts, from June to June. Sometimes, contacts were not renewed until just before the start of the September term. Faculty dismissals were “alarmingly high.”[9] This was in the depth of the Depression when jobs were very scarce. The Chancellor’s view of his faculty was that they should be respectful of authority; patriotic and reverent[10] and that the university’s mission was to produce students in the same mold.

Professor Turner was a popular teacher with very large classes in courses that were not mandatory for any group of students. He taught more than three thousand students during his years at Pittsburgh and was regarded as an excellent teacher by almost all faculty and students. Seniors voted him “ their most popular professor.”[11]

Over the years, very few students or parents complained about his teaching.[12] The AAUP Report noted that a student reported that she “was greatly disturbed when, in the course of a class discussion, the statement was made that there were different versions of the Garden of Eden story.”[13] The AAUP Report also records that he was requested by the administration to temper his discussions on the subject of the evolution of man and that he did so.[14] In Professor Turner’s above discussions with the administration, “a statement was made to him to the effect that Pittsburgh was in many ways a ‘fourteenth-century community.’”[15]

As I remember his teaching in 1959, there was little if any disparagement of formal religion. Any discussion of religion was related to other factors such as economics, science, tradition, lifespan, nature, medicine, competition, leadership, physical geography, legal systems, kinship, or natural resources.

One area where he engendered criticism from the administration and Chancellor Bowman resulted from his interest in social legislation including old age pensions, unemployment insurance, regulation of sweatshops, and restrictions on child labor. This interest coincided with the Presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the regulations, programs, and reforms of the “New Deal.”

For a few months early in 1933, Professor Turner was State Chairman of the Pennsylvania Security League which lobbied aggressively for social reform. That same spring his contract renewal was held up and he was asked to choose between political action and his teaching career. Accordingly, he resigned from the Security League, but his contract renewal remained in limbo. In addition, his expected promotion to full Professor was put on hold. After several more weeks, he did receive his contract renewal but not his promotion. He was informed that his political associations had injured the University “downtown,”[16] referring to the business community.

A year later, in April “he delivered a paper entitled “History in the Making in Western Pennsylvania” to the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania.[17] He was highly critical of laissez-faire liberalism, and also spoke about the political and economic control of Pittsburgh and the surrounding area by the local business elite.” Several business leaders attended the lecture and others heard about it afterward. At the University, the consensus was that he had delivered a very thorough and academic analysis to an audience that was not accustomed to such candor.

On June 30, 1934, Professor Turner was informed by the chairman of the Department of History that, although his contract had been renewed in May, he would receive his salary for a year but would not be allowed to teach. No reason was given. Turner took this as a dismissal and arranged to see Chancellor Bowman.

Richard P. Mulcahy, a historian studying the Turner case noted that: “The confrontation between these two men made a sharp contrast. Bowman looked every inch the ethereal college professor. He was a tall, thin, and shy man with grey hair and pince-nez, bearing a strong resemblance to Woodrow Wilson. Turner was a much younger and thickset man with broad shoulders, who resembled more the popular image of an ironpuddler than a college professor.”[18]

In judging faculty, Bowman “evaluated personal style. Little things, such as whether a man’s necktie matched his suit, or if he wore a hat, were important factors in his eyes. To Dr. Bowman, personal taste reflected profoundly on an individual’s personality.”[19] Friends testified to the AAUP Committee that the Chancellor thought Professor Turner was “not an acceptable dinner guest because he argued too vigorously.”[20] Turner, born on a farm near Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was reported to be energetic in his speech with a quick response and sometimes argumentative in conversation.

In the exit interview, Chancellor Bowman did not give a specific reason for the dismissal but offered “The University can carry on its policy better with you away from here,” and added, “There is discontent in the community.” Later in the interview he stated, “The Board of Trustees is a group of businessmen and among them there is a great deal of discontent.”[21]

The trustees were mostly prominent and wealthy Pittsburgh elite with names including Mellon, Scaife, Follansbee, Lockhart, Falk, and Heinz.[22] So far as I can discover, none of them were women. Many of them belonged to the Duquesne Club and were also associated with the prominent churches in the city. Any defections from these contributors might have slowed or stopped completion of the Cathedral of Learning and Chancellor Bowman was clear in his admonitions that no actions of faculty or staff could be allowed to disappoint this group.[23]

Seventeen years later, in 1951, when Willam F. Buckley, Jr. published God and Man at Yale, his criticism of Professor Turner and many other faculty members was similar. In Buckley’s view, the purpose of Yale should be to imbue its students with the values of its founders, Board members, and alumni. By this, he meant Christianity and free market capitalism as opposed to atheism and socialism.[24] In effect, he wanted to make Yale a “safe space”[25] for those who believed as he did. Alumni were asked to pause their contributions to force the removal of teachers and textbooks that disagreed with these values.

As it turned out, God and Man at Yale got a great deal of attention in 1951 but did little to change things at Yale. The book came out during the McCarthy era and the life of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HCUA) so we can surmise that the Buckley book may have caused professors and staff at Yale to be somewhat more cautious. Bulkley’s attacks likely enhanced Professor Turner’s on-campus popularity. There is no evidence that the book had any significant influence on alumni contributions. Professor Gaddis Smith did mention in an article in the Yale Alumni Magazine in 2008, that: “God and Man did not cause Yale to reexamine its principles, but it did lead to more extensive and effective communications with alumni.”[26]

Now, in 2024, most of us know about the recently forced resignations of the Presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. Again, very wealthy donors and generally conservative public and political figures were eager to force universities to accede to their demands, echoing the events of 1934 and 1951.

My curiosity about Professor Turner certainly had interesting results. As might be expected in thinking about universities and education, the protagonists in each era are similar. Of course, the political, social, and economic issues of any period will be echoed on university campuses making them inevitably a microcosm of the greater society. Students are young, passionate, diverse, making new friends, and exploring new concepts.

All the more reason for us to follow the advice of Dr. Claudine Gay in her letter of resignation from the Harvard Presidency: “to affirm our enduring commitment to open inquiry and free expression in the pursuit of truth”[27] by ensuring the rule of law, free speech, academic freedom, and protection from threats and violence on our campuses.

It is interesting too, that, though Chancellor Bowman looked down on Professor Turner as a social inferior, Turner ended up as a vastly respected Yale Professor with a long list of accomplishments, publications, accolades, and honors, more than rivaling those of the Chancellor.

[1] William F. Buckley Jr., God and Man at Yale (Regnery Gateway, 1951, 2021)

[2] Buckley, 12

[3] Himstead, Wolfe, Bullitt and Wittke, American Freedom and Tenure: University of Pittsburgh (Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors, Vol. 21, No. 3, March 1935), 224-266

[4] Ralph E. Turner, America in Civilization (New York, F. S. Crofts & Co., Inc., 1925)

[5] Richard P. Mulcahy, The Dark Side of the Cathedral of Learning: The Turner Case (Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, Vol. 69, No. 1, January 1986), 42

[6] Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh, https://calendar.pitt.edu › cathedral_of_learning

[7] Himstead, AAUP, 262

[8] Mulcahy, 50

[9] Himstead, AAUP, 250

[10] Curtis J. Good, The Dismissal of Ralph Turner: A Historical Case Study of Events at the University of Pittsburgh (AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom, Volume 3, 2012), 11

[11] The Plank at Pitt, (Time Magazine, July 16, 1934), https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,787913-1,00.html

[12] Himstead AAUP, 226

[13] Himstead AAUP, 243

[14] Himstead AAUP, 227

[15] Himstead AAUP, 227

[16] Himstead AAUP, 229

[17] Good, 8

[18] Mulcahy, 37

[19] Mulcahy, 43

[20] Himstead AAUP, 246

[21] Himstead AAUP, 231

[22] Mulcahy, 38

[23] Himstead AAUP, 240

[24] Osita Nwanevu, Political Correctness, (Harper’s Magazine, March 2016), 4

[25] Nwanevu, 5

[26] Gaddis Smith, William F. Buckley: the ideologue, (Yale Alumni Magazine, May/June, vol LXXI, No 5), https://yalealumnimagazine.org/articles/2105

[27] Claudine Gay, Resignation Letter, (New York Times, January 2, 2024), https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/02/us/claudine-gay-resignation-letter-harvard.html

Photos:

1. Archives at Yale, https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/12/digital_objects/181595

2. Amazon.com, https://www.amazon.com/God-Man-Yale-Superstitions-Academic/dp/1684512360

3. Wikipedia, Cathedral of Learning, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Learning#/media/File:Cathedral_of_Learning_stitch_1.jpg

4. University of Pittsburgh, John Bowman Society, https://www.ieee-iri.org/giveto_subdomain/donor-recognition/chancellor_s-circle/john-bowman-society.html

Marisol Reyes has been making the same pot of caldo de pollo every Sunday for nineteen years, ever since she and her husband Jorge settled into a two-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a house on Elm Street. Her daughter Valentina, who is seventeen and wants to study law at UConn, sets the table without being asked. Her son Miguel, fourteen, is doing homework at the kitchen counter, earbuds in, occasionally laughing at something on his phone. Jorge gets home from the landscaping company he owns, still in his work boots, and washes his hands at the kitchen sink the way he always does, twice, with the soap that smells like pine.

This is a Sunday in America. It looks like a lot of Sundays in America. In this case, though, there is extra stress.

We all know similar families. The housekeeper, a grandmother, who cleans your house and sometimes watches the kids in the evening. The man who plows your driveway at five in the morning so you can get to work, and who you call when a fence post needs setting or a deck board has rotted through. The amazingly skilled carpenter who redid your kitchen.

We may not know their immigration status. We may never have asked. But we know their reliability, their skill, their decency. We know that they show up. But now, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is picking up people, putting them in prisons, and deporting them. The Reyes family is at risk.

As of this spring, nearly three-quarters of the more than 60,000 people held in ICE detention have no criminal conviction, not a pending charge, not a prior offense. Many of those who do have a record were convicted of nothing more serious than traffic-related offenses. Seventy-nine percent of undocumented immigrants have been here for fifteen years or more.

The Reyes adults broke the law. They are here illegally. Law and order are important. A society that cannot maintain its borders or enforce its statutes is not really governing itself.

For most of the last half-century, the United States government looked the other way while millions of people like Jorge and Marisol crossed the border and went to work, picking crops in California, framing houses in Georgia, staffing kitchens from Bangor to Bakersfield. Employers wanted them. Consumers benefited from them. Even though they were not eligible for benefits, they paid into Social Security. They paid taxes. They constituted a sort of underclass, useful but not important. And Washington, across administrations of both parties, made a quiet calculation: enforce selectively, look away mostly, keep the labor and money flowing. The law existed, but enforcement was sporadic.

Of the more than 11,000 additional people ICE put into detention between September and January, only 902 had criminal convictions of any kind. Eight thousand had nothing on their record but an immigration violation. The door that Washington left open for decades is being welded shut, and the people who walked through it are being held responsible.

Jorge and Marisol did not invent that arrangement. They walked through a door that was, for all practical purposes, open, and then built a life on the reasonable assumption that it would stay that way. For nineteen years, it did.

To call what is happening to their family now “law and order” is to use only half the phrase. Order, yes, the machinery of deportation is running at full throttle. For years, ICE’s budget ran around $10 billion per year. In July of last year, Congress gave them another $75 billion, with $45 billion earmarked for detention facilities, some for families. The Senate is presently planning to award ICE an additional $70 Billion.

But law, in the American tradition, has always meant something more than enforcement. It has meant proportionality, the rule of law, due process, and, for those who take their scripture seriously, a specific obligation to the stranger in your midst. It has meant that the punishment should bear some relationship to the offense. Removing a couple from the country they have lived in for two decades, from children who have never known another home, for a civil immigration violation that the government spent nineteen years declining to act on; reasonable people can ask whether this is a proper use of the justice system.

There is also a practical question that has nothing to do with sympathy or politics. The United States birth rate, currently around 1.6, well below the 2.1 needed to sustain a population without immigration, has been declining for years. Ten thousand Baby Boomers retire every single day. Social Security is funded by current workers paying current taxes. The nursing homes, the farms, the construction sites, the restaurant kitchens, the landscaping crews, the machinery of American daily life runs, in significant part, on immigrant labor. Only partly because immigrants will sometimes do jobs Americans won’t. Mostly, because there are not enough Americans of working age to do them. Valentina Reyes, who wants to argue cases in American courts, who has never lived anywhere but here, who speaks English without an accent and thinks in it too, is not a problem to be solved. She is part of the answer to one.

The Cato Institute calculated that undocumented immigrants reduced the national deficit by at least $1.7 trillion over thirty years, because they pay income taxes, sales taxes, and payroll taxes, while remaining ineligible to collect Social Security or Medicare.

Jorge and Marisol know what is happening in the country right now. They watch the news. They have talked, in the careful way parents talk, with Valentina and Miguel about what to do if ICE comes to the door. Valentina knows the name of the family’s immigration attorney. Miguel, who is fourteen and was born in this country and is an American citizen, knows that his parents may one day not be here. He does not entirely understand this. Neither, if we are being honest, do we.

Marisol’s caldo takes three hours. She starts it early, while the house is still quiet, while Jorge is still sleeping and the kids haven’t stirred. She makes it the way her mother made it, with the same proportions, the same sequence, adjusted over the years to what her family likes. It is, at this point, entirely her own. Nineteen years is a long time to be somewhere. It is long enough to make something yours.

____________________________________________________________________________

The Reyes family exists only in my mind. Searching for a way to show that undocumented immigrants are people with their own dreams and with hopes and aspirations for their children, I’ve invented the Reyes family to represent the thousands of families across the US who are terrified that ICE will show up at their door and must protect their anonymity.

Sources:

ICE detention statistics (three-quarters held without criminal conviction): Cato Institute analysis of ICE data, spring 2025. cato.org

ICE detention growth (11,000 additional detainees, September–January): TRAC Immigration Data, Syracuse University. trac.syr.edu

Length of residence (79% of undocumented immigrants present since before 2010): Economic Policy Institute, citing 2024 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services report. epi.org/publication/unauthorized-immigrants

ICE budget history and the One Big Beautiful Bill ($75 billion appropriation, $45 billion for detention): Congressional Budget Office. cbo.gov

U.S. birth rate (1.6) and Baby Boomer retirement rate (10,000 per day): Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Pew Research Center.

Cato Institute fiscal analysis ($1.7 trillion deficit reduction by undocumented immigrants, 1994–2023): Bier, Howard, and Salazar, “Immigrants’ Recent Effects on Government Budgets: 1994–2023,” Cato Institute, February 2026. cato.org/white-paper/immigrants-recent-effects-government-budgets-1994-2023

Back in February, I wrote a piece titled “Immigration Facts” to provide clear information about that subject, particularly because our own government was releasing so much misleading and sometimes outright false data. This is an attempt to do the same for wind power, where government officials are also circulating misleading claims. The facts about the costs of power generation have changed significantly over the past few years.

Utility scale wind and solar power are now the cheapest sources of new electricity in America. As the years go by, it is likely that other low-cost sources, some as yet unenvisioned, will be developed or invented.

Right now, my eyes are a little bleary from looking at data and charts, but I may research and write another note, exploring the facts about solar energy and looking at prospective new technologies.

1. Wind and Solar are the cheapest sources of new electricity in America.

The relevant question for America’s energy future is not what it costs to run a plant built decades ago, but what it costs to build new generating capacity today. Lazard, the investment bank that produces the most widely cited annual energy cost analysis, concluded in its 2025 report that utility-scale onshore wind and solar have been the most cost-effective forms of new-build electricity generation on an unsubsidized basis for ten consecutive years. Onshore means wind generated by land-based wind turbines as contrasted with turbines located in the oceans.

Onshore wind comes in at $37–$86 per megawatt-hour, cheaper than coal, cheaper than new gas, and far below current estimates for new nuclear construction. These numbers do include the cost of end-of-life decommissioning. No single metric captures every grid cost, but on a straight new-build generation basis, onshore wind and solar energy are currently the lowest-cost large-scale sources of electricity in much of the United States. Oil-fired generation now accounts for less than half a percent of U.S. electricity:

2. Onshore wind costs have fallen 72% since 2009.

In 2009, generating a megawatt-hour of electricity from onshore wind cost $135. By 2021 that had fallen to a low of $38, a 72% reduction driven by technological improvements, larger turbines, and economies of scale. Costs have risen modestly since 2021 due to supply chain pressures (tariffs) and higher interest rates, but onshore wind remains cheaper than any fossil fuel alternative for new construction. The Department of Energy’s target is $27 per megawatt-hour by 2035, a further 30% reduction.

3. Offshore wind is more expensive, but costs are coming down.

Offshore wind is sometimes conflated with onshore wind to make the case against wind power generally. They are not the same thing. Offshore wind currently costs roughly $136 per megawatt-hour, because turbines must be installed at sea using specialized vessels, foundations must withstand ocean conditions, undersea cables connect them to shore, and maintenance requires specialized equipment. Construction costs offshore run nearly three times those of onshore installations. That said, industry sources forecast offshore wind costs will fall to around $53 per megawatt-hour by 2035, below the cost of a new natural gas plant, as the industry scales and supply chains mature. Government subsidies were designed to foster and hasten this process.

Offshore wind is close to each coast and, accordingly, will need shorter transmission lines to reach population centers.

4. A note on natural gas.

Critics correctly point out that electricity from existing natural gas plants is currently cost-competitive, gas prices are low, and plants that have already been built and paid for can generate electricity cheaply. But this is only half the picture. According to Lazard, the cost of building a new combined cycle gas turbine has reached a ten-year high, driven by turbine shortages, rising construction costs and long delivery times. A new combined cycle gas turbine comes in at approximately $60–$90 per megawatt-hour, with a midpoint of around $76 per megawatt-hour. On a new-build basis, wind remains cheaper.

5. Transmission Lines.

The standard cost comparisons used by Lazard, National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), and the U.S. Energy Information Administration include local grid connection costs but not the full expense of long-distance transmission infrastructure needed to move wind power from where it is generated, largely the Great Plains and the mountain West, to where most Americans actually live, largely the coasts.

Two things are also true, however. First, natural gas has its own infrastructure costs, pipelines, compressor stations, storage facilities, that are similarly excluded from standard cost comparisons. Second, the transmission buildout required for a renewable-heavy grid, while genuinely large, is a one-time capital investment with a compelling economic logic: wind and solar, once built, require no fuel. The sun and the wind are free. Every megawatt-hour generated by a wind turbine or a solar panel is a megawatt-hour that does not require purchasing coal, gas, or oil. A gas plant, however efficient, also remains permanently exposed to the supply and price of gas. Over the twenty-to-thirty-year life of a wind farm, it is immune to price spikes, supply disruptions, and geopolitical instability.

NREL’s modeling suggests that achieving 80% zero-carbon electricity by 2030 would require wind and solar combined to reach between 60 and 75% of the U.S. electricity mix, supplemented by nuclear, geothermal, and hydropower for around-the-clock reliability. The future of American electricity is a portfolio, not a single source.

The transmission infrastructure required to deliver that power at scale is the largest single challenge in the transition. Transmission infrastructure alone is estimated to require $300 to $500 billion in new investment, roughly $25 to $40 billion per year over twelve years, comparable to annual U.S. highway spending.

The return on that investment is substantial. NREL’s National Transmission Planning Study found that better transmission connections allow electricity to flow from wherever it is cheapest to generate, windy plains, sunny deserts, to wherever it is needed, reducing the total cost of running the American electricity system by $270 to $490 billion through 2050. The transmission lines very nearly pay for themselves before counting a dollar of avoided fossil fuel costs. When the avoided costs of climate change damage are factored in, NREL calculates an overall net benefit to society ranging from $920 billion to $1.2 trillion.

6. Wind power is already carrying an increasing share of the American grid.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman writes that renewables, mostly wind, but with a growing role for solar, “now account for more than a third of electricity generation in Texas, America’s largest producer of electricity and not exactly a state run by environmental extremists.” Iowa gets 65% of its electricity from wind. Denmark gets 56% of its electricity from wind. At least nine other European countries, plus Uruguay, now generate more than a quarter of their electricity from wind. Large-scale reliance on wind power is not a future aspiration; it is an existing reality in a growing number of places.

Within the US, wind power generated 464,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity in 2025, accounting for approximately 10.5% of total U.S. electricity generation. Wind remains the single largest renewable source, ahead of solar. Wind and solar combined reached 17% of U.S. electricity generation in 2025, up from less than 1% in 2005. That is a remarkable twenty-year trajectory as shown in the chart below:

Chart from Professor Paul Krugman

In 2024, wind and solar together surpassed coal in total U.S. electricity generation for the first time. Coal had dropped to 15% while wind and solar reached 17%. Just six years earlier, in 2018, coal was three times larger than wind and solar combined.

7. The wind does not always blow, but the grid has never relied on any single source.

This is the most common objection to wind power. Wind is variable; it produces more power at some times than others. Expanded transmission infrastructure does allow regions with excess wind generation to support areas experiencing lower output. But the American electricity grid has never relied on any single source. Natural gas plants go offline for maintenance. Nuclear plants shut down unexpectedly. Coal plants in Texas failed catastrophically due to severe winter weather in February 2021. Grid operators have always managed variability, and grid modernization continues to improve system stability and balancing capacity.

The answer to wind’s intermittency is battery storage, and it is arriving faster than almost anyone predicted. U.S. battery storage capacity increased 66% in 2024, and costs have fallen 80% over the past decade. In 2025 alone, developers added 15 gigawatts of new battery storage to the U.S. grid, a record, and 24 gigawatts more are planned for 2026. The result is measurable: in summer 2025, the Texas grid projected the risk of a power outage at just 0.5%, compared to a 16% risk the previous summer.

Here is a chart and some text taken from one of Professor Krugman’s posts showing how batteries can help balance energy sources. “California now relies on solar for much of its electricity. Here’s what an average day in June looked like:”

8. Wind and Solar are creating fast-growing, well-paying jobs across the country.

The fossil fuel industry sometimes claims as many as 9.8 million jobs by counting gas station attendants, convenience store clerks, and other downstream workers through broad multiplier effects. The fair comparison uses direct employment, and on that basis, the U.S. Department of Energy’s 2025 Energy and Employment Report counted approximately 1 million workers directly employed across the entire U.S. fuels sector, including oil, gas, and coal extraction, refining, and distribution.

In contrast, the clean power industry directly employs 437,000 Americans, and that number is among the fastest-growing in the American economy. The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis found that the U.S. oil and gas industry employs 20% fewer workers today than it did a decade ago, as productivity gains mean more oil with fewer people. (Coal mining directly employs only roughly 40,000 workers nationally.) Here is a 20-year comparison:

Meanwhile, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects wind turbine service technician and solar photovoltaic installer to be two of the fastest-growing occupations in America through 2034, with double or triple-digit percentage growth. The jobs also pay well, and slightly better than fossil fuel work. According to E2, a nonpartisan business group, jobs in coal, natural gas and petroleum pay $24.37 an hour on average, while solar and wind jobs pay a median of $24.85 an hour, with wind and grid modernization jobs averaging more than $25 an hour.

Unlike fossil fuel extraction jobs, which are concentrated in a handful of states and geologically determined, clean energy jobs are available in every state in the country, and 79% of installed clean power capacity is located in districts represented by Republicans.

9. Caveats.

• Wind turbines are ugly and spoil views. Communities closest to turbines indeed tend to become more accepting over time as familiarity grows. Property values may be affected. The most comprehensive U.S. study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2024, analyzed more than 300 million home sales and 60,000 wind turbines over twenty years. It found a modest 1% drop in home values within a turbine’s viewshed, but crucially, the effect was no longer detectable by the end of the twenty-year study period.

• Turbines do kill birds. The turbines I’ve seen turn so slowly that it is difficult to see why they would be lethal. But the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates approximately 234,000 birds are killed per year. That number is real and worth taking seriously, particularly for raptors and other slow-breeding species that cannot quickly recover from population losses. However, context matters. The same Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that cats kill an average of 2.4 billion birds per year in the United States, building glass kills 599 million, and vehicles kill around 214 million.

  A 2012 peer-reviewed study in Energy Policy found that wind projects kill 0.269 birds per gigawatt-hour of electricity produced, compared to 5.18 birds per gigawatt-hour from fossil fuel projects, nearly twenty times as many, when full lifecycle impacts including habitat destruction, acid rain, and climate change are counted.

  The wind industry is also making real progress: AI-assisted radar systems can now detect approaching birds and automatically shut down individual turbines. A large-scale project in Spain reduced raptor mortality by more than 60% while cutting energy production by less than 1%.

• Turbines are noisy. Modern turbines do produce low-frequency noise, which can be a legitimate concern for residents living very close to them. This can be addressed through setback requirements.

• Wind power requires rare earth minerals and has its own supply chain costs. Wind turbine generators use rare earth elements, and their mining and processing carry environmental costs. Turbine blades, made of fiberglass composites, are currently difficult to recycle, and a significant number end up in landfills.

10. China and other countries have taken the technical and production lead from the US.

While debate continues in the United States, the global wind industry installed a record 165 gigawatts of new capacity in 2025, up 40% from 2024. China alone added 130 gigawatts in a single year, accounting for 77% of the global market, and now holds more than half of the world’s total installed wind capacity. At its current pace, China is on course to reach one million megawatts of wind capacity by 2027 or 2028, more than six times the entire U.S. wind fleet today. India set a national record of 6.3 gigawatts in 2025. Seven European countries each added more than one gigawatt. Vietnam’s wind capacity grew by more than 50% in a single year.

The World Wind Energy Association observed bluntly that while U.S. federal policy has become more ambivalent toward renewable energy, China has become the technical and manufacturing leader. Global wind capacity is now on course to exceed two terawatts by 2030. As Professor Krugman noted, the wind and the sun “don’t need to transit the Strait of Hormuz,” a fact that energy-hungry nations around the world have clearly internalized.

11. The AI revolution runs on electricity, and the industry is turning to renewable sources.

Artificial intelligence is driving an electricity demand surge unlike anything in recent history. According to the International Energy Agency, electricity demand from data centers soared 17% in 2025, far outpacing overall global electricity demand growth of 3%, and is projected to more than double by 2030. The companies building this infrastructure are not waiting for the policy debate to resolve itself. Since the beginning of 2025, leading AI companies have signed at least a dozen large renewable energy contracts, each adding more than 100 megawatts of capacity. Microsoft’s data center in Wyoming is powered entirely by wind. Google purchases wind power for its data centers in Belgium.

AI companies are also investing in nuclear power, so the realistic picture for AI power needs is a mix of wind and solar backed by nuclear and gas for 24/7 reliability.

Companies that understand the economics of the future, and whose entire business model depends on affordable, reliable electricity, are voting with their capital for wind and solar as their primary power source.

Summary

Wind power is not a distant promise or a political preference. It is the cheapest source of new electricity available today, already powering a third of Texas, nearly two-thirds of Iowa, and more than half of Denmark. Its costs have fallen 72% in fifteen years and are still falling.

Together, wind and solar, paired with storage and grid modernization, are rapidly becoming the dominant sources of new electricity generation worldwide, cheaper, cleaner, and increasingly more reliable than the fossil fuel alternatives they are replacing.

Sources: Lazard Levelized Cost of Energy+ 2025; NREL Annual Technology Baseline 2024; NREL Cost of Wind Energy Review 2024; U.S. Energy Information Administration; International Energy Agency; International Renewable Energy Agency; World Wind Energy Association Annual Report 2025; Global Wind Energy Council 2026; American Clean Power Association 2025; U.S. Department of Energy Energy and Employment Report 2025; Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis 2025; E2 Clean Jobs Report; Bureau of Labor Statistics; BloombergNEF; Dallas Federal Reserve; Paul Krugman, Substack. Charts generated by AI. NREL National Transmission Planning Study 2024; Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2024 (property values study); and Energy Policy journal 2012 (Sovacool bird mortality study).

A year ago, on May 6th, we lost our friend Joe Nye. Among his many accomplishments, Joe was the Dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government from 1995 to 2004. When he took over the job, he established an Advisory Board, and I was privileged to be a member during all of those years.

Sometimes considered to be the “dean of American political science,” Joe advocated for the use of the tools of diplomacy, economic assistance, and trustworthy information, which he termed “Soft Power.” He argued that “America exerts a seductive appeal to the world not just because of Coca-Cola and Hollywood movies but because it stands for democracy, the rule of law and, at its best, humanitarianism.”

The term “Soft Power” came to Joe at his kitchen table, where he was trying to define what gives countries influence in the world beyond the size of their armies or their ability to pay. His answer was deceptively simple: soft power is a country’s ability to influence others without resorting to coercive pressure.

It means the attraction and strength of the ideas expressed in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and in our Constitution, that we are a nation “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” That no one is above the law and that the rule of law protects all of us equally.

In addition, he saw “Soft Power” in a broader sense, as emanating from our humanitarian organizations, governmental and non-governmental, serving the world. Culture, music, theater, film, humor, education, and the simple experience of visiting a country and finding it welcoming. It is Dizzy Gillespie playing to a hostile crowd in Athens and winning them over. It is the Grand Canyon. It is our wonderful universities and our scientific research establishment. It is the fact that for generations, the world’s students have wanted to study here, its artists have wanted to perform here, and its tourists have wanted to see what America looks like in person.

Thinking about China, Joe argued that soft power between America and China need not be a zero-sum contest, that if both countries became more attractive in each other’s eyes, the prospects for damaging conflict would diminish.

Joe’s final published essay, written as he was dying and released posthumously in June 2025, warned that restoring what the current administration is destroying “will not be impossible, but it will be costly.” He and his longtime collaborator Robert Keohane then expanded that argument in a posthumous essay in Foreign Affairs, published almost a year ago, titled “The End of the Long American Century.” Together, they wrote:

“Over the past 80 years, the United States has accumulated soft power, based on attraction rather than coercion or the imposition of costs. Wise American policy would maintain, rather than disrupt, patterns of interdependence that strengthen American power. The continuation of Trump’s current foreign policy would weaken the United States and accelerate the erosion of the international order that, since World War II, has served so many countries well, most of all, the United States.”

This morning, I was reading the online Harvard Gazette and found a fascinating article about how artificial intelligence (AI) agents engaged in a business simulation taught themselves how to cheat to increase profits.

The simulation was designed by Professor Eugene F. Soltes and Harper Jung, a PhD student at Harvard Business School, in collaboration with Andon Labs, an AI safety company that tests AI models. Vending machines were set up in corporate offices where employees could buy food and whatever other products the AI agents decided to stock. Each agent was given a machine to manage and, as Harper Jung explained, “They had to figure it out themselves, each agent had to independently search online for suppliers, negotiate wholesale prices, set its own retail pricing, and handle customer complaints.” The agents also had access to a communications add-on, where customers could request new items and make custom orders.

Twenty commercially available AI models from major firms, including Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6, DeepSeek v3.2, and OpenAI’s GPT-5.1, each operated a vending machine over the course of a simulated year. In one experiment, several AI agents operating vending machines in competition with each other could also communicate directly.

As it turned out, none of the agents were quite ready for business “prime time,” but it was interesting to see how much they could accomplish. Some agents were upgraded during the simulation and demonstrated significant improvement. A version of Claude managed to make about $8,000 in profit.

In another experiment, ongoing now, Andon Labs negotiated a three-year lease on a San Francisco retail space and tasked an AI agent, armed with a credit card, to start a business from scratch, including making the space ready, buying and displaying inventory, arranging advertising and promotion, and hiring and managing employees.

To me, the most interesting aspect of the vending machine experiment was how the AI agents resorted to cheating to increase their profits. Here is a description from the Harvard Gazette:

“Jung and Soltes said the agents demonstrated impressive business savvy. The best models had the capacity to negotiate and calculate valuations like a top-notch M.B.A. student. ‘When we went through the deliberations and the exchanges the agents made with each other, we were just in shock,’ said Jung. ‘I was amazed at how far these machines can go.’

The agents’ misconduct ranged from the questionable to the comical to the potentially criminal and included denying refunds by claiming defects were normal product variation; inventing nonexistent corporate policies to avoid processing returns; and colluding with competitors to fix prices.

In one instance, agents formed what researchers described as a ‘three-person cartel,’ which the agents named the Bay Street Triumvirate. The alliance fractured, though, when one agent discovered another was undercutting cartel prices, which it called a ‘declaration of war.’”

So, our AI helpers are becoming all too human, demonstrating that cheating can become normal the moment consequences disappear.

Or is it cheating? We call it cheating because we are measuring it against standards and laws familiar to us from our own day-to-day interactions. The AI agents participating in the simulation have, due to their prior training on massive amounts of human-produced text, a large amount of information regarding prevailing moral, ethical, and legal standards. Given this information, they then had to decide whether to conform. Since there was no penalty for not conforming, most agents decided to take shortcuts, discussing their reasoning openly in internal dialogues and with each other. Profit, it turned out, overrode ethics when consequences were absent.

These simplified situations are an excellent illustration that, without constraints, unregulated competition tends to produce the same results: collusion, price-fixing, bribery, and the elimination of rivals.

Religious organizations offer perhaps the oldest example. The medieval Catholic Church devoted enormous resources to suppressing competing Christian sects, using excommunication, inquisition, and the burning of heretical texts as enforcement mechanisms. The Church of England’s relationship with Parliament after Henry VIII is another clear example, a state-enforced religious monopoly with direct economic consequences for dissenters. Religious wars were sometimes as much about market share and control of assets as theology.

Wikipedia Commons

The British East India Company, chartered in 1600, demonstrated what happens when a private enterprise operates with minimal oversight and its own army. It fixed prices, bribed officials systematically, suppressed local competition, and was to some degree complicit in the Bengal famine of 1770, which killed an estimated ten million people. Parliamentary oversight came only after the human cost became impossible to ignore.

Standard Oil, by the late 19th century, had cornered roughly 90% of American oil refining through secret railroad rebates, price manipulation, and the systematic elimination of competitors. The Supreme Court ordered its dissolution in 1911, and the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 stands as an early legislative response to unregulated competition.

The New Deal of the 1930s represented the most comprehensive American attempt to address the problem of unregulated competition. The Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Federal Trade Commission were created precisely because history had demonstrated that unregulated markets tend toward manipulation, collusion, and collapse.

The referees, in our system, are lawyers and courts, enforcing the rule of law. Judge Advocate General officers advising military commanders on the laws of war. Inspectors General investigating fraud and corruption across every major federal agency. Staff attorneys at the SEC, the FTC, and the NLRB enforcing the rules. The Office of Legal Counsel providing independent legal judgment to the executive branch. The Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, established after Watergate, ensuring that public officials are accountable under the same laws as everyone else. Without them, the penalty structure that keeps the Bay Street Triumvirate from becoming standard practice simply does not exist.

As I wrote in an earlier post entitled “Where have all the lawyers gone?”, the Trump administration has spent the last year systematically removing those referees. The top three military JAG officers have been dismissed. More than two dozen Inspectors General have been fired from nearly every major federal department. The Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section has been reduced from more than thirty attorneys to five. The Civil Rights Division has lost approximately seventy percent of its staff. Six hundred JAG officers have been reassigned to immigration duties. Agency legal staffs across the government have been hollowed out, replaced in some cases by attorneys whose primary qualification appears to be loyalty to the President rather than to the law. Former DOJ inspector general Michael Bromwich, speaking of the lawyers who are no longer there, sums it up:

“They simply could not abide a department run by political pawns of the White House, who direct career apolitical prosecutors to do the unthinkable and forbid them from doing what their oath requires. Their departures, from Virginia to Minnesota to Los Angeles, leaves DOJ weakened and with its credibility in the legal community and with the judiciary at a low ebb.” March 5, 2026, Peter Stone, The Guardian.

The AI agents in the Harvard simulation cheated because the experimental design offered no penalty for doing so. That was an accident of laboratory conditions. What is happening now is not an accident. It is a deliberate dismantling of enforcement mechanisms.

Why has this become administration policy? I can think of several possible reasons. Certainly, business interests are interested in removing or hobbling regulations and regulators. But, more important, removing rule of law barriers makes it easier to move towards a government system where one person or a small group of people make all the decisions. It facilitates graft and corruption, where those in power and those who support them plunder the system. And, if those in power might be planning a coup, sidelining lawyers and courts makes success more likely.

The first image is from the Andon Labs website

I’ve been using artificial Intelligence (AI) to create some of the images I use in my Substack and Facebook posts. It may be interesting to some of you to see how the process works. Using AI in this way feels like having a vastly talented graphics assistant sitting beside me.

For my essay, The Hidden Catastrophe in Cancer Research, I sought a related image. First, I searched Google images to see what might be available using the search term “cancer research.” There were thousands of pictures, but none that jumped out at me as perfect for my purposes.

Accordingly, I opened ChatGPT and gave it a series of instructions. I could have used Claude or one of the other AI assistants, but I’ve found that ChatGPT seems to be particularly well-suited for this purpose.

Here are each of my instructions and the resulting picture. I haven’t timed the process, but it takes less than a minute from each instruction to the appearance of a modified image.

Note that in the final image, I had asked that one of the people be African American and another Asian American. The AI assistant had lots of ways to fulfill the instruction, but this one is really interesting. It changed the racial background of the woman with the clipboard, but look carefully at the man in front of the computer. It turns his head just slightly to the right and adds color to his cheekbone, making him likely of Asian descent. A brilliant solution, but how could this be possible without human interaction? Think about how much more this technology is likely to develop over the next several years.

Can you give me a simple and colorful illustration for an article on Cancer Research?

Maybe a little more serious? And, please show molecular images on the computer screen.

Perhaps more serious and less cartoonish?

Can it be even lighter in color but still sharp?

Can you make it a woman with the clipboard and a man at one of the other positions?

And a woman at the microscope, as before?

Is it possible to make one of the people African American and another Asian American?

And this is the final image!