Rarely in recent politics has there been a bigger disconnect between the public perception of an organization and reality than there is between base Democrats and the Democratic National Committee.

Go on any online forum, and you will see progressives decry “the DNC” as a corrupt bastion of the insider establishment politics that has become toxic to so many primary voters. Meanwhile, DNC Chair Ken Martin has come under heavy fire from nearly the entire Washington, D.C. establishment for supposed failures of leadership and fundraising.

But the truth of the DNC is far different.

Let’s start with Ken Martin. As I wrote a few weeks ago, his leadership at the DNC has resulted in a bonanza of record-breaking fundraising for the out-of-power party. (Again, for the record, I’m a DNC member and supported Martin’s bid to chair the party.) Yes, the DNC is in debt, but that is because it has made wise and effective investments in state parties and local organizing, many of which have already paid dividends in successful election outcomes. Few will remember or care about the DNC’s debt if the party retakes Congress and holds Trump accountable.

While a stunning 31-0 record in state legislative flips reflects national political dynamics more than any DNC strategy, local Democrats are also enjoying significant successes. Even with tailwinds, flipping local mayorships, city councils, and school boards in red states requires a party infrastructure that capitalizes on these moments to wage organized campaigns and get out the vote. The Martin administration has raised $20 million in 2026—a 30 percent increase from the same period in 2018. The DNC’s donation of $22,500 per month to each state party ensures Democrats in these states have the funding to invest in organizers and infrastructure and flip winnable seats in wave elections.

Meanwhile, the DNC is not what its progressive critics allege. At the DNC’s meeting in Austin earlier this month (which I attended as a voting member), the party did three big things of note: it passed a resolution calling to abolish ICE, rejected an amendment that would have banned ranked-choice voting in the 2028 primary, and adopted an early state primary calendar that arguably gives progressive candidates a much more viable path to the nomination than they have had in recent memory. Resolutions give legislators a non-binding sense of direction, and the DNC passed resolutions to both reform and abolish ICE, giving candidates flexibility in their own messaging. The calendar adds much greater diversity across ethnicity, age, and class lines without giving any one coalition excessive power to determine the nominee. States with younger, more diverse, and more progressive electorates will have the opportunity to determine the final nominee after South Carolina winnows the field.

These are not just good outcomes for progressive politics and good government reforms. They also reflect directly on Martin’s different leadership style. Under him, the DNC is behaving less like an autocratic party machine, and more like a small-d democracy receiving input from organizers on the ground across the country.

One of Martin’s reforms (central to what DNC members like myself had sought in a new party chair) was to promise that all kinds of DNC members, from the ranks of national appointments, state party leaders, and members elected by state party grassroots, would have a bigger say instead of being a rubber stamp for decisions by leadership and those close to it.

Overturning the Ranked Choice Voting amendment serves as a good example. Partly due to reforms spearheaded by Martin, the membership of the Rules and Bylaws Committee was expanded to include members beyond those appointed by the chair. This resulted in a more diverse (and divided) committee. It adopted a rule preventing states from using ranked-choice voting in the 2028 primaries by a razor-thin margin, despite objections from many other members elected by state parties. The proposed rule was unpopular with the broader membership, which organized against it before it came to the floor.

Rather than put his thumb on the scale in either direction, Chair Martin oversaw the process. An agreement was ultimately reached: The proponents moved to strike out their own proposed ban, and the membership overwhelmingly voted in agreement through a transparent, democratic process. This is what a healthy, from-the-ground-up political culture looks like.

This is a far cry from the stereotype many progressives have of a top-down DNC that stymies progressives and ensures establishment moderates have an inside track. The current version of the DNC functions exactly as progressives have long wanted—with input from all stakeholders, and with the membership—mostly elected by state and local leaders—having the final say in a democratic process.

This is not to say that the DNC can’t do better, or that Martin has made no mistakes. There is always room for improvement. But insofar as there has been wasteful spending and ineffective organizing against Trump, the DNC itself is not the main culprit. And insofar as progressives have reason to grouse at the politics of congressional party leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, it is not the DNC that is to blame. Indeed, the other organizations in left-of-center spaces could take a few pointers from Martin and his revitalization of the party.

The post I’m a DNC Committee Member. The Party Isn’t Broken appeared first on Washington Monthly.

As the head of President Donald Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” billionaire Elon Musk wielded power for a scant four months. But it was long enough to scar the federal government for potentially decades. 

More than 250,000 federal workers have lost or left their jobs as a result of mass layoffs, including nuclear safety engineers, hurricane researchers, cybersecurity experts, and many other workers vital to Americans’ health and safety. 

DOGE also ran roughshod over government data, including the Social Security Administration’s massive database of Americans’ personal information. According to a whistleblower complaint filed late last summer, DOGE personnel allegedly copied government data into a private cloud server, risking the security of Americans’ Social Security numbers, addresses, and employment history. “It is absolutely terrifying,” says Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and the founding director of the Brookings Center for Effective Public Management. 

Kamarck is also the author of numerous books and was the leader of President Bill Clinton’s “Reinventing Government” initiative in 1993. She recently wrote a report for the think tank Third Way, “The DOGE Time Bombs,” warning of the many risks created by DOGE’s activities. She also argues for a better path to government reform. 

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The full interview is available at Spotify, YouTube, and iTunes. 

*** 

Anne Kim: You’re no stranger to the idea of downsizing government. After President Clinton promised that the “era of big government is over,” he launched “Reinventing Government” and tapped you to run it. But Reinventing Government was definitely not DOGE. Tell us more about what that initiative was and how it was different from what this administration has undertaken.

Elaine Kamarck: It was a very different operation in that we looked at the government agency by agency and started with the question of function: What is this agency supposed to be doing? Is it doing it as well as it could? Is it doing it as efficiently as it could? And we found lots of places to cut.

There were lots of old regulations that just didn’t make any sense anymore—there were regulations left over from Congressional reports from the 1960s that could be trimmed. We came into office in 1993, and the World Wide Web was just beginning. So we had the advantage of this great new technology, plus we had Al Gore. If there ever was an early adapter of technology, it was Al Gore. 

Let me give you a simple example. A lot of people won’t realize this, but in 1993, if you wanted to get a passport, you had to call up a passport agency. Maybe you got a recorded message, but probably you had to wait to talk to somebody, or you had to go someplace. And then you’d find out you needed this and that and the other thing, et cetera. 

Nobody does that anymore. We do it all online. When you start to think about the vast amount of government information that got put online between 1993 and today, you realize that’s why the federal workforce has remained constant even though you know they’re serving more people. We had the advantage of the internet, but we did it with the thought: Is this going to serve the citizen better? 

DOGE was a completely random and weird operation, frankly, and every time I look back on it, it’s even weirder. They came in with no interest in what the agency did. They just came in and used algorithms and databases to cut people. 

For instance, they went to air traffic control. That’s an agency that Americans care a lot about. You screw up our airplane traffic, and boy, citizens get mad. The first rumor that goes out is they’re going to cut air traffic controllers, and everybody goes nuts because they know what that means. That means delays. 

So it’s no coincidence that Sean Patrick Duffy—the Secretary of Transportation—was the first person to take on Elon Musk in front of the president. He yelled at him and said, “Look, you can’t cut air traffic controllers.” And Musk said, “No, no, no, no, we won’t do that.” Well, they didn’t do that, but what did they do? They cut people who are in the ecosystem that supports air traffic controllers. 

An air traffic controller without a good security system, a good communications system, or a good radar system is like a soldier going into battle with no guns. It was a terribly random and fundamentally careless attempt at cutting government. 

Anne Kim: Now before we return to a more fulsome attack on what DOGE has done, is there anything that DOGE accomplished that you think was okay or defensible in any way?

Elaine Kamarck: There was nothing that was defensible. It was too random, it was too wild. But it folded relatively quickly. Musk left in the spring of 2025, and most of the people left. There were only about 128 people working on it to begin with, compared to the many, many more people working in the Clinton administration.

The federal government has had significant IT problems, and a lot of the people who were recruited to DOGE were out of the high tech world. [If they had been] helping with some of the IT issues in the government, that would [have been] a very good thing. That’s what I thought they would initially do. But then they started doing all this crazy stuff—this random walk through the federal government that made no sense.

Anne Kim: You alluded just now to the very small number of people involved in DOGE. How was that different from Reinventing Government? 

Elaine Kamarck: Between inauguration day and April 1993, we recruited 400 people from the government who were seconded to the White House to work on this project. In other words, they were being paid by their agencies. They kept their pay, they kept their benefits, etc., and they were brought into the White House to work on this. 

The people who were brought in were assigned to an agency, but they were not allowed to work on their own agency because they would bring with them the prejudices of that agency. 

So if you worked at HUD, you might get assigned to work at the Department of Education. If you worked at the NSC [National Security Council], you might get assigned to work at State or Defense or something like that. We had a very intense process of identifying problems in the agency, mostly problems with performance.

We did in fact save a fair amount of money as we went along because a lot of performance issues were caused by old fashioned bureaucratic stuff we could redesign.

Anne Kim: Let’s turn now to your report for Third Way on the DOGE “time bombs,” as you put it. There are the long-term time bombs you talk about, but I feel we have to talk about a short-term time bomb too, so to speak. I’ll just say one word: “Salad.”

Elaine Kamarck: Lettuce, right. Exactly.

Ever since I published that report with Third Way, I’ve been keeping a list of new time bombs, and the two that have hit most recently are the food poisoning from lettuce and the Ebola crisis in Africa, which we’ve seemed to have gotten a handle on, but it was scary at first because all the infrastructure to track Ebola has been dismantled. 

So, on the lettuce question, this took much longer than it usually does to identify the source. It’s usually 24 to 48 hours, and they know what it is. And if you think about it, this isn’t something a computer can do. 

One of the problems with the DOGE team is that they were all techie guys. How do you track down an outbreak on lettuce? Well, you’ve got to go interview as many people as you can, find who got sick, and you’ve got to talk to them. You’ve got to ask them: “When did you get sick? What did you eat? Where did you eat it?” It’s a very people-intensive process, and if you fire all the people who know how to do this, it’s not exactly easy to put it all back together again. 

Anne Kim: Your report for Third Way highlighted six different areas where Americans’ health and safety and security are really going to be at risk [because of DOGE]. I have to say it was hard to choose which are the most frightening of the risks that we’re facing, but let’s start with the Social Security database. What are you worried about?

Elaine Kamarck: I am really worried about Social Security. This is so foundational to our economy and to the structure of American families. One of the reasons that Americans have some money to send their kids to college is that they’re not paying for the hospital bills of their parents. Yes, there’s also Medicare, but they’re not paying as much support because of Social Security. So this affects three generations of Americans. 

The databases are mammoth and had been well protected. But the first thing that happened was that the DOGE team went into Social Security, and they got access to the databases, which had never been permitted by any political appointee. 

There is now an investigation going on by the House Oversight Committee into whether or not the DOGE people took these mammoth databases and used them illegally and against protocol to give the data to private companies. And that’s just horrible. Your information, mine, our grandparents’, our parents’, everybody is in this mammoth [database].

They did this because Social Security is the biggest piece of the budget. They were convinced that somehow Social Security was filled with fraud and that they could get huge savings. They went running to the White House to say, “Wow, we found people 125 years old in the Social Security database.”

Now, what was the story here? The story was something called “Numident.” Numident is the massive database of every person in America since 1936 who has ever had a Social Security number. That’s gazillions of people. And a lot of those people who had Social Security numbers never got benefits.

[For example,] children died, especially back then. If children die when they’re 10 years old, they might have had a number, but they never got benefits. Some people maybe never worked, so they never got benefits. Having a number doesn’t equal having benefits. That was the first mistake that they made. 

The second mistake, which was quickly pointed out by other techies, is that there were a lot of people, particularly from earlier years, who didn’t know their birth date. People who were old in 1936 were likely not born in a hospital—they were born at home. So there wasn’t really an accurate record of their birthdate. When people didn’t know their birth date, the Social Security Administration just gave them a birthdate—I think it was 1875 or something like that—and there were a lot of people like that. 

Trump then talked about these hundred-plus year olds getting Social Security checks, but it was completely bogus. The way you know it’s bogus is that it was a great story at the time. Trump told it well and had everybody laughing and I’m sure a lot of Americans were thinking, “My God, what a mess.” But it has never been told again by the president because the whole thing was just total baloney.

What is now worrying people is who has that data and what they’ve done with it. Will that data show up somehow in some company somewhere that is managing to take advantage of that data to sell things, to explore people’s backgrounds, or to even enter into the Social Security system and just decide that they don’t get benefits?

It’s a huge problem, and it’s going to take a long time for House Oversight to get through it. And if any of these allegations are proven, people will go to jail. These are serious, serious problems. And again, it’s the scope and centrality of Social Security to our economy that makes this so difficult to even comprehend.

Anne Kim: This sentence in your report frightened me a lot: “Imagine the opportunity for identity theft if the data is compromised. Not just Social Security, but every verification system in the country would be at risk.” You also wrote that there are huge national security risks because enemies could use the list to micro-target disinformation campaigns or to create an enemies list. This is going way beyond what ads show up in your feed or just getting your email address sold.

Elaine Kamarck: Most people don’t realize that when you apply for benefits, you open up with Social Security an entire database of every place you’ve ever worked and how much in Social Security taxes you’ve paid.

Imagine taking an enemies list and editing their employment history. So there you are, you’re 67 years old, you think you want to get your Social Security, and guess what? Five of the jobs that you had are not there. They’ve been erased. 

It’s terrifying. It is absolutely terrifying. The unfettered access, the way that they went about this, and their misunderstanding of the system—deliberate or not—really has the potential to affect us for a long time.

Anne Kim: Another issue you write about is the reliability of the grid. And that is also on people’s minds this summer because of data centers and the heat. Can you talk about how DOGE has jeopardized Americans’ access to affordable and reliable power?

Elaine Kamarck: Well, their politics were such that they wrote these algorithms looking for anything related to climate change. That was their big bugaboo. The problem with that is that a lot of the things that were labeled “climate change” were really about modernizing the grid so that electricity would be efficiently delivered, et cetera. 

So what happened is that the grid was collateral damage. When they were looking to get rid of all references to climate change, they got rid of lots of research and grants into the grid, and that is going to be a huge problem. Americans’ electricity bills are already high. They’re going to get higher. And as you say, now we have this added problem of the electricity the data centers are using. It’s awful.

Anne Kim: As long as we’re on the topic of weather, we’re headed into hurricane season, and there’s a big storm forming as we are recording this. So on this front, so to speak, what are you worried about this year?

Elaine Kamarck: Well, there’s two pieces of it. There’s NOAA and FEMA. NOAA is all about weather, and again, this is not something some algorithm can do. You actually need human beings in different parts of the country to launch the weather balloons to get data from the atmosphere and bring it back. Then you need other human beings to put it all together. Again, with the help of the computers, but you need people doing this. 

Once the emergency happens, then it goes over to FEMA. And the first thing the Trump administration did when they came in is they said they wanted to abolish FEMA. Now why would you want to do that? For example, an important thing about FEMA is that it gets you help when your first responders can’t. 

I once wrote a paper some time ago about when first responders are victims. So in Hurricane Katrina, there were EMTs, there were policemen, there were firefighters, et cetera, who were stuck in their houses. They were climbing on their own roofs. They were trying to protect their families. They were victims. 

That’s why FEMA is so important. When the electricity trucks go down, and the people who put the wires back up can’t get out of their house, then somebody has to come from a neighboring state. Up here in New England, every time we’ve had a big storm, the first thing you see is if you’re in Massachusetts are trucks from Connecticut, Maine, and Rhode Island. 

In other words, everybody who hasn’t been hit is coordinated, and all that coordination happens through FEMA. The fact that they even contemplated [abolishing FEMA] said to me there was no understanding of how the system works and how crucial it is.

Anne Kim: Now, in case people aren’t curled up in a fetal position already or diving under the covers, there’s one more major problem in your report I want to flag, and that is the nation’s capacity to anticipate and respond to potential terror attacks. This is yet another area where it seems really hard to overstate just how vulnerable we might be. What’s happened? 

Elaine Kamarck: Well, the big thing they did, which David Ignatius has written about, and he’s probably our best source on intelligence matters, is they cut spies.

We have in the U.S. intelligence community massive information gathering capacity. We listen to everybody’s phone calls around the world. We have databases. We’re looking at huge amounts of information. But you need a human brain to connect the dots. And sometimes you need human intelligence to assess, for instance, not just capacity but intent. Do they intend to do this? Are they going do this? Or is this just something that somebody’s brainstorming about somewhere? And you need spies.

The bottom line is you need human intelligence to put together all the other sources of intelligence that we have. Once you cut spies, you’re in trouble. And that’s exactly what they’re doing. 

The other thing that’s kind of amusing here is that no matter how you feel about DEI—diversity, equity, and inclusion—of all the places where you want DEI, it’s at the CIA. 

Because let’s face it, I’m sure there are white Caucasian people in the world who would like to blow us up, but there are other people in the world—people of color—that also want to do us harm. You can’t decide ahead of time that you don’t want to have a person with this background and this language capacity and this skin color in a spy capacity; you need everybody. 

Anne Kim: Can all of this damage be undone by the next administration? Or are we talking about a multi-administration project? How do you see the rebuilding process, provided that we have the opportunity to take that on?

Elaine Kamarck: I think it’s hard, but it can be done. If you have people running these agencies who in fact care about the performance of the agency, then I think you will be able to rebuild them. And in fact I do give credit to some of the cabinet secretaries in the Trump administration. 

DOGE got in there in January and February while the cabinet secretaries were having their congressional hearings, so the DOGE kids were home alone. Nobody was there to say to them, “You can’t do that. Do you know what’ll happen?” Or to take it to the White House and get the White House to say, “Stop that. That’s crazy. It’s going to cause us problems.”

Once the cabinet secretaries started to get into their jobs, I think a lot of them realized—and I gave the example of Sean Patrick Duffy, the transportation secretary—a lot of them realized, “Wait a minute, these guys have the potential to really screw things up. And if things get really screwed up, guess who gets blamed? Me.” And then indirectly also the president, right? Because when something collapses, we all say, “Hey, why didn’t the president fix this or know this?” 

So I think that the cabinet secretaries, even in the Trump administration, have stopped the extensive damage that DOGE was doing. If we’d continued another year at the pace they were starting in February 2025, I think they would have really destroyed the government. 

At this point, I think that if you have a different administration, if you have cabinet secretaries—Republican or Democrat—who care about government performance and aren’t into this weird ideology that things should just be cut, I think we can rebuild. 

Anne Kim: You once wrote that trust in government requires two foundational pillars—competence and care—neither of which the current administration is showing. This is a slightly different question from the task of rebuilding government, but I’m wondering what advice you have for the next administration—provided they are competent and they care—about how to restore public trust in government.

Elaine Kamarck: The first thing they have to do is show that they are reforming the government. You can’t just go back to the Biden administration. That won’t convince anybody of anything. 

You have to go agency by agency and say, “Here’s what we’re fixing, and here’s how we’re doing it.” One of the things we learned in Reinventing Government is that people weren’t always interested in the details. However, when you said you’re doing it, they were awfully glad, and Bill Clinton in 1996 got a lot of kudos for it. The public wants it done. And I think if the cabinet secretaries are simply saying, “We’re going to fix this, this, and this,” it’ll build a lot of political capital for the president and begin restoring trust.

I’ll end with one final thing. If you look at that Pew chart about trust in government that everybody looks at from time to time, starting in the 1960s, it’s just a downward slope, right? But there is a period of time in the 1990s when trust in government goes up, and that was during the Clinton administration. So it can be done. 

The post DOGE Is Done, But the Wreckage Remains appeared first on Washington Monthly.

This is a sneak peek from the Washington Monthly’s upcoming College Guide and Rankings issue. Subscribe to our newsletter to be notified when the full issue is released.

Of all the broken promises haunting American society, affordable college is high on the list. The Baby Boomers emerged from adolescence into a newly built system of low-price public universities. Instead of spiffing up the place for the next generation, they left behind a garbage pile of tax revolts and fiscal neglect. Cash-starved colleges jacked up tuition and saddled the following generations with more than a trillion dollars in student loans.  

The system got by for a while on macroeconomic good fortune—the collapse of the blue-collar manufacturing economy meant people who wanted a decent job had little choice but to borrow whatever colleges decided to charge, and the forces of globalization that shuttered midwestern factories also brought a wave of foreign students to American campuses. But the post-Great Recession demographic reality of declining birthrates is an existential threat to hundreds of venerable colleges. Others have used public budget cuts as an excuse to shift away from their historic mission to serve all students and instead compete in the lucrative winner-takes-all private market for helping the ruling class pass social capital and financial opportunity along to their kids.  

The post-Obama years were a lost decade for fixing this problem. The first Trump administration mostly ignored higher learning, except for the part where they stuffed the U.S. Department of Education full of people who had spent their careers leading or lobbying for shady for-profit colleges. Joe Biden put forth a worthy plan for free community college that was shanked by moderate Democrats in the Senate. He spent the rest of his presidency pushing an ambitious and catastrophically extralegal loan forgiveness agenda that was reduced to rubble by the Supreme Court. Trump II launched a scorched-earth campaign against research universities, and research generally, as a barely disguised front in the larger culture war. Meanwhile, a whole new generation of ordinary students are paying too much money to attend colleges that often don’t provide the education they need.

The time has come for something new. The next president has an opportunity to put the best system of colleges and universities in the world back onto a solid foundation of shared purpose and public support. The way to do that is surprisingly uncomplicated. We don’t need to invent any elaborate new mechanisms or schemes. We just have to take a tried-and-true idea that already worked once to build the American middle class, and retool it for the modern age. 

THE PLAN

Most students attend public colleges and universities that get some of their revenue from state and local governments. The rest of the revenue comes from tuition, often subsidized by federal grants and loans. At private schools, tuition is the whole game. 

There are two big problems with this arrangement. First, states have proved to be unreliable supporters of their own public colleges. When budgets get tight, they often yank money out of the university system because they know tuition can fill the gap. Second, the mammoth federal aid system, which tops $150 billion annually when veterans’ benefits and tax credits are factored in, comes with almost no strings attached. Colleges are free to charge what they please and there is very little accountability for how much students actually learn.  

The system needs a third, stabilizing leg, in the form of direct federal subsidies to colleges and universities that agree to adopt transparent, affordable prices. Here’s how it would work: Congress would offer a fixed amount of money—say, $10,000—for every student who enrolls at any accredited college, public or private nonprofit, that agrees to the following: 

1. Adopt a uniform tuition schedule where college is free for students from families that earn at or below the median household income—currently about $80,000—and relatively inexpensive for everyone else. Tuition would start low and gradually increase to $10,000 for the wealthiest families, which is still less than the average public university charges today, and far below what elite private schools cost. In-state and out-of-state students would pay the same price. Everybody would benefit. 
2. Students also need to pay for books, room, and board. Lower-income students could cover these costs with federal Pell Grants. Others might need scholarships or small loans. Participating colleges would use a standardized form to provide financial aid award letters, in the same way that car dealers all use the same, federally mandated sticker to display prices. 
3. Every college that participates in the system would agree to accept all transfer credits from every other college that participates in the system. The majority of four-year graduates today earn credits from more than one college, but transfer credits are often lost and discounted along the way, a kind of hidden tax on the time and money of students who have little of either to spare. 
4. The government spends pennies on education research for every dollar spent studying health care. The lack of enough research on best practices is one reason so many students enroll in college but don’t succeed there—more than 37 million working-age people are currently labeled by the census as having “some college, no credential.” In addition to direct college subsidies, Congress would provide new research money to the federal Institute of Education Sciences, which was recently vandalized by DOGE. Crucially, participating colleges would be required to open their books and classrooms for research.  

That’s it. That’s the plan. If it seems too short and simple, your brain may have been pickled by decades of exposure to needlessly complex neoliberal market-based schemes and various “submerged state” enterprises whose fiendishly complicated mechanisms rob them of efficacy and political support. This is just a federally financed version of the world-renowned public higher education system that we already created and that we already know works. Here’s some money; now serve the public, do a good job, and keep prices low.  

Still, it’s worth addressing some questions that naturally arise.  

Wouldn’t this effectively be a federal takeover of American higher education? 

Not at all. First, it would be completely voluntary. Individual colleges and universities would choose whether to join the network, and could leave at any time. Second, aside from requiring colleges to accept transfer credits from other participating institutions, Washington would have no say over colleges’ governance or curriculum. Those decisions would remain with faculty, leadership, trustees, and state lawmakers, as they are today.  

Why not just make college free for everyone? 

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are among those who have proposed universal free college legislation. They proceed from the same spirit as this plan but run aground on several major unaddressed realities about the way American higher education actually works.  

To start, they only make public colleges and universities free. America has a large and diverse ecosystem of private nonprofit colleges, most of which enroll primarily middle- and working-class undergraduates. They’re not rich, and neither are their students. Many have anchored their local communities for more than a century and have deep roots in religious practice and social justice, including about half of historically Black institutions. Today, economic and demographic pressures are driving a growing number of private colleges into bankruptcy. This plan would help them, too.  

The only way to instantly make every college free without hurting their capacity to educate is to give them an amount of money equal to what they’re currently raising in tuition. The problem is that individual states vary widely in how much they subsidize colleges and, therefore, how much colleges charge. Tuition is much higher in stingy states. A simple tuition-replacement scheme would effectively reward states that have skimped on supporting higher education and penalize states that have done the right thing by keeping costs low. That would be morally terrible and a nonstarter in Congress.

There is also a class of elite public universities that does not want to be free. They don’t even want to be affordable. They’re easy to identify—just turn on your television on a Saturday between August and December. The major-conference football heavyweights, particularly the goliath Big Ten and SEC, are basically private already. They charge market-rate prices to out-of-state students (the University of Michigan is now over $60,000 per year), who often compose the majority of the student body. A $10,000 federal subsidy wouldn’t come close to making up the revenue these universities would lose, and it’s a waste of public resources to subsidize the tuition of, say, wealthy Texans who spend untold sums on their outfits for ’Bama rush.  

That’s why participation in the plan is voluntary. Individual colleges decide for themselves whether to sign up. This also helps avoid the “Obamacare problem”—despite huge federal subsidies, 10 states still haven’t expanded Medicaid under the 2010 Affordable Care Act, and the Supreme Court says they can’t be compelled to do so. Keeping the decision local lowers the political temperature and allows states to keep control over their public systems. 

What about student loan forgiveness? 

There remains a strong ethical and policy case for helping former students who were victimized by the aforementioned Boomer abandonment of affordable higher education. It’s hard enough to start a family and a career in an era of spiraling housing and child care costs; unaffordable loans can make the difficult impossible. There is a subset of debtors who have decades-old balances or small loans from predatory for-profit schools. Normal lenders would have written off those debts a long time ago and the federal government should, too.  

The problem with the Biden-era approach to loan forgiveness was that (in addition to being illegal according to the six Republican members of the Supreme Court) it metastasized into an all-encompassing plan for higher education affordability itself. The details are too byzantine and bizarre to summarize here, but suffice it to say that by the final, waning days of the Biden presidency, a set of proposed regulations largely driven by left-wing advocacy groups had become so outlandishly complicated and eye-poppingly expensive that they chaotically self-organized into something very simple: We would make higher education affordable by allowing colleges to charge whatever prices they liked, giving students large federal loans to pay those prices, and then, subject to a great deal of paperwork, not making them pay the loans back. This is truly deranged public policy—substitute “health care” and “hospitals” into that sentence and see how you feel. Giving indiscriminate six-figure grants to graduate students might also not be the optimal strategy for expanding the Democratic political coalition.  

How much would it cost? 

It depends on how many colleges sign up. Presumably, anyone currently pulling in less than the equivalent of $10,000 per student in tuition revenue would have a strong incentive to participate, which includes pretty much all community colleges and a significant number of regional public four-year universities that have a similar mission to educate students who mostly live nearby.  

The fact that this would represent a net increase in revenue for such colleges is one of the best things about the plan. While the challenge of higher education has been relentlessly framed in terms of affordability, the real problem for many colleges is capacity. Community colleges are already cheap for most students and free for many. What they lack are facilities, equipment, fairly paid faculty, and the kind of research-proven support services that help students thrive and earn degrees. Free college isn’t worth much if the education isn’t any good. This plan will give institutions with the hardest job in higher education more money to succeed.  

The price tag surely runs into the tens of billions of dollars per year. But keep in mind that without the plan, the student loan system will continue to run on autopilot, issuing bad debt that the taxpayers will never recover. The choice isn’t whether to pay—it’s whether to pay in a way that’s smart and targeted or haphazard and dumb. 

What are some other reasons why this is a good idea? 

Trump’s jihad against the Ivy League had little to do with higher education and everything to do with the cultural resentments that animate the MAGA coalition. The “compact” the administration offered colleges in 2025 had no takers because it was a hodgepodge of self-contradictory free speech limitations and anti-diversity provisions masterminded by some guy from a Jeffrey Epstein–tainted private equity fund. But some kind of new bargain between the federal government and higher education is a good idea. While industries gravitate toward all-money/no-accountability policies, they are better served in the long run by durable arrangements that truly serve the public interest and thus bolster public support.  

If enough colleges join the network, they will become more than the sum of their parts. Students will have access to a huge array of in-person and online classes offered by hundreds of public and nonprofit institutions—effectively, a “public option” for an online ecosystem that has been dominated by for-profit colleges of dubious quality and ruinous price. Education researchers will have enough information to drive lasting improvements across the system.  

This plan would also shift the weight of public resources and attention away from the elite private colleges and sports powerhouses that are doing just fine on their own and concentrate on the institutions that actually educate the large majority of all American students. They are located in nearly every congressional district, in red states and blue. They are very normal and local and filled with people doing ordinary and necessary things like training the teachers who educate your children and the nurses who care for your mom. If you saw a clip on social media of someone saying something particularly irksome or enraging on a college campus, it probably didn’t happen at one of those places.  

If they are neglected and abandoned, they won’t be replaced by anything nearly as good. The plan to help them isn’t complicated, because needless complexity is the devil’s way of fooling you into believing you can’t have the world you deserve. We can do better, and we can do it now.  

The post A Radically Simple Plan to Fix Higher Education appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In most elections of the past, a win is a win, whatever the margin. Not this time. The difference between a Blue Wave and a narrow Democratic victory matters immensely.

A Blue Wave means that 2027 will mark the effective end of the Trump presidency, with the final two years still full of rancor and horrible executive orders, but the focus shifting to jailing Trumpsters for defying congressional subpoenas and other forms of accountability. By contrast, a narrow Democratic victory that Trump obviously won’t accept means a crippling constitutional crisis over who controls Congress.

I see three ways Republicans avoid a blowout:

• A horrifying external event that Trump somehow handles surprisingly well;

• The 1,000 Justice Department “monitors” Trump is dispatching to polling places stealing the election, with the help of a Supreme Court that “foments chaos” (in the words of last week’s dissent by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson) in mail-in voting;

• The hundreds of millions pumped into the campaign by Elon Musk and other billionaires blunting a fuzzy Democratic message.

We cannot predict the first; I’ve written a scenario about the second; so let’s focus for a moment on the third, which requires Democrats to avoid the DSA tag and hang Trump around the neck of their opponents in memorable ways that compensate for being outspent.

That shouldn’t be too hard. The Democrats’ message is obvious. Yes, they need to run on bread-and-butter issues, stress corruption and data centers where relevant and offer a positive vision. But all of that is in the context of reminding voters of how Trump has let them down.

Every midterm election is a referendum on the incumbent president, and his party almost always loses seats.The only exceptions, in sixth-year midterms, are Thomas Jefferson in 1806 (when his gains were slight) and Bill Clinton in 1998 (when voters backed Democrats to signal opposition to Clinton’s impeachment). This year is looking a lot like 2006, when Democrats in the sixth year of George W. Bush’s presidency picked up five seats in the Senate and 31 in the House.

How unpopular is Trump? Paging Richard Nixon in 1974 and Jimmy Carter in 1979. He’s entering their territory. We’re talking 33-34 percent approval ratings nationally.

That’s where Trump is in Maine and why you see Susan Collins desperately trying to prove her independence by opposing Trump on the U.S.-Canadian trade pact, mail-in ballots, and Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general.

To make Trump’s stench spread to Collins, Troy Jackson is criticizing her for voting with Trump 95 percent of the time. That’s actually lower than every other incumbent Republican senator running for reelection. One study showed that 89 percent of Republican lawmakers backed Trump 100 percent of the time on key votes.

The big question is how to make this craven congressional voting behavior—a cult-like obedience that’s infuriating in the present and will puzzle historians in the future—an indelible part of the campaign. Charging that “my opponent voted with Trump 98 percent of the time on issues that hurt you” is necessary but not sufficient.

Democrats require something a little stickier. More memorable. They need The Scarlet Letter, the “A” Hester Prynne is forced to wear on her chest in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic novel. It’s probably better that most voters haven’t read the book, because the “A” in this campaign is not for adultery (except in Ken Paxton’s case, and that of a couple of House candidates); it’s the grade these Republicans—including Collins—are giving Donald Trump.

To understand how effective this grading system can be for Democrats, consider Barack Obama’s terrific speech last fall at a rally for New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Mikie Sherrill, who went on to win a much bigger victory than expected. Obama ridiculed her opponent, Jack Ciattarelli, for giving Trump an “A” for his performance in office. “I know there’s been grade inflation, but, really, an ‘A?’” Obama said with a smile. “Is this the best we could do?”

Now, not every Democrat should run hard against Trump. It depends on the state and district. James Talarico in Texas and Mary Peltola in Alaska, for instance, are rightly steering clear of harsh anti-Trump rhetoric. But imagine Jackson turning to Collins in the Maine debate, or Sherrod Brown to Jon Husted in the Ohio debate, or Roy Cooper to Michael Whatley in the North Carolina debate—the list goes on and applies to dozens of House races, too—and asking what grade their Republican opponent gives Trump.

The answer will usually be some variation of “I don’t give grades.” The Democrat then says, “Well, in every school in this state, anything above 93 or 94 on a test gives you an ‘A.’ So let’s be clear: You are giving Donald Trump an ‘A’ as president. Not a ‘B’ or even a ‘B-plus.’ I know there’s been grade inflation, but really, is that the best we can do?”

Let’s make this the Scarlet Letter Election. Even the color is right.

The post The Scarlet Letter Midterms appeared first on Washington Monthly.

On Sunday, The New York Times’ Carl Hulse penned a comparison of the 2026 and 2006 midterm elections, as the latter produced a Blue Wave so big that Democrats took control of the House and Senate. Hulse summed up the similarities: “The war in the Middle East is increasingly unpopular. So is the president as his numbers dip perilously — a common development in the sixth year of a presidency. Congressional Republicans are embroiled in unsavory scandals. Americans are shelling out big bucks for gas while economic anxiety runs high.” 

Hulse notes the parallels are not perfect, with 2026 shaped by social media, deepening political polarization, and aggressive redistricting. But there’s one more striking difference: the Republican Party’s choice of foil. 

In 2006, Republicans took aim at then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. In February of that year, at a House Republican retreat, the National Republican Congressional Committee produced a Star Wars-themed parody video featuring “Darth Nancy” leading “the evil Democratic empire.” As the midterm campaign progressed, Republicans tagged Pelosi as a “just plain scary” “San Francisco liberal” pushing a “radical plan to advance the homosexual agenda” and “tax-and-spend, soft-on-security” policies.  

The political logic was sound. Pelosi was in line to become Speaker if Democrats won a House majority. The Democratic candidates running in competitive congressional districts were largely more moderate than Pelosi. Therefore, Republicans had good reason to try to tar those candidates as beholden to Pelosi.  

Still, it didn’t work. Voters were too upset with George W. Bush, the quagmire in Iraq, the mishandling of Hurricane Katrina, the unwanted attempt to privatize Social Security, the scandals, and the gas prices. Conservatives were too discredited to gin up fears about liberalism.  

In 2026, Republicans are returning to the familiar ploy of creating a leftist boogeyman to stave off a rising Blue Wave. But instead of linking candidates to the person in line to be the next Speaker, Hakeem Jeffries, Republicans are targeting a Twitch streamer who has been involved in only a handful of congressional races: Hasan Piker. 

That may be a little oversimplified. It’s not as if Piker is featured in every single ad produced by GOP campaign arms. (Although Fox News, arguably an unofficial GOP campaign arm, has aired 224 broadcasts about Piker in August, compared to 44 about the war with Iran.) It would be more accurate to describe the GOP’s main foil as “socialism” with incendiary clips of Piker used to sharpen the caricature. 

Take this ad with the tagline “Stop Socialism, Stop Democrats,” released by the National Republican Congressional Committee after the Michigan primary. The video features a collection of clips from Democratic candidates associated with the Democratic Socialists of America alongside a clip of Piker saying, “Murder those motherf***ers in the streets, let the streets soak in their f***ing red capitalist blood.” (Another clip is shown of a lesser-known leader of the DSA declaring, “Our goal is communism.”)  

Preceding those clips is one of a mild-mannered Jeffries rhetorically asking, “What do you think we are going to be able to do when we’re in the majority?” Republicans have no clips of Jeffries saying anything incendiary or aligning himself with the DSA. In fact, earlier this month Jeffries said, “I don’t support the DSA agenda.”  

The GOP can’t dust off its Pelosi playbook and apply it to Jeffries. Freaking out about a “New York liberal” isn’t going to rile voters up when there are bona fide socialists attracting attention. It also doesn’t help Republicans stoke fear about a Speaker Jeffries when Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner met with Jeffries to discuss potential areas of legislative compromise and propose a bipartisan meeting with the White House Chief of Staff. (Some Democrats are livid at Jeffries about having a chummy meeting with a corrupt Trump family member. But Republicans are the ones who should be upset that, 10 weeks before Election Day, Trump’s inner circle is tacitly acknowledging Democrats are on the cusp of winning the House.) 

And remember, the Pelosi playbook didn’t even work 20 years ago. When the party in power is deeply unpopular, stoking fears about opposition leaders is very difficult. Stoking fears about potential backbenchers and their online boosters is an even bigger stretch.  

The outsized focus on Piker overlooks that the vast majority of the Democratic candidates have had nothing to do with him. He has campaigned alongside or hosted on his Twitch stream a few House primary winners—Adam Hamawy (New Jersey-12), Melat Kiros (Colorado-01), Donavan McKinney (Michigan-13), and Chris Rabb (Pennsylvania-03)—as well as Senate primary winner Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan and Ashia Wahab, who just won a special election to represent California’s 14th congressional district. (Will Lawrence, who won the House primary in Michigan’s 7th district, flattered Piker on video and asked to be a Twitch guest.) But several of his preferred candidates lost primary races this year, including Francesca Hong (Wisconsin Governor), Tom Steyer (California Governor), Julie Gonzales (Colorado-U.S. Senate), Saikat Chakrabarti (California-11), Cori Bush (Missouri-01), and Oliver Larkin (Florida-25). 

Because the incorrigible Piker streams for several hours every day, he continues to make controversial statements and create opportunities for Republicans. Over the weekend, Piker posted a picture of the pro-Israel Democratic nominee for Michigan’s 11th congressional district, Jeremy Moss, and said, “if Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone’s going to … take action—not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.”  

As some interpreted the comment as blaming pro-Israel Jews for any future antisemitic violence, El-Sayed saw the need to release a statement saying “nobody speaks for this campaign besides me and my campaign spokespeople” and suggesting others should not “make this race about a Twitch streamer.” His Republican opponent Mike Rogers, arguing the statement didn’t go far enough, charged El-Sayed with not having “the guts to disavow his running mate.” 

Jeffries took the opportunity to push back on Piker with a statement on X that didn’t mention the streamer’s name but did address the substance of the controversial remarks: “The malicious claim that American Jews are inviting violence against themselves is dangerous and antisemitic. There is zero justification for threats against the safety of our Jewish brothers and sisters at a moment of rising hate. We will fight the cancer of antisemitism with the fierce urgency of now.” 

El-Sayed is in the trickiest position of any Democrat. Most others who sought and received Piker’s support are running in deep blue districts, and Piker can’t say much that would risk their chances in November. El-Sayed, however, needs to fully reunify the Democratic Party after a bruising primary as well as woo swing voters to win his closely divided state. In turn, he is now trying to downplay his association with Piker without making a complete break.  

Still, being in a tricky position is not necessarily a fatal position. We don’t know yet if the Blue Wave is big enough to render El-Sayed’s past campaigning with Piker immaterial to the final outcome.  

The rest of the Democratic Party, if the 2006 midterm campaign teaches us anything, has little to fear about the Republican Party’s attempt to spotlight Piker’s antics. When one party is in power, a midterm election is a referendum on that party’s record. With voters palpably disgusted with the Republican record, all the available scare tactics aren’t enough to change the subject.  

The post How 2026 Is Not Like 2006  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Washington is unnerved these days about budget deficits and the national debt. Deficit angst comes along periodically, often as a pretext for cutting social spending. This time, however, there’s genuine cause for alarm.  

Outsized deficits are par for the course when the economy is in recession or reeling from a shock like the pandemic or the financial collapse; most of the time, Washington has managed to keep deficits human-scale. Setting aside recessions, deficits as a share of GDP averaged 1.5 percent from the 1950s through the 1970s, shot up briefly to 4.0 percent of GDP in the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan slashed taxes and beefed up defense, and returned to an average of 1.1 percent in the 1990s, including four years of surpluses. They ticked up again to 2.2 percent of GDP in the 2000s and 3.3 percent in the 2010s—again from two rounds of outsized tax cuts and Pentagon spending increases.  

Now we’ve entered new territory. Since 2022, we’ve run up $7.4 trillion in deficits averaging 6 percent of GDP through four years of expansion, including a bumper $2 trillion deficit this year. If we include the post-pandemic spending in 2021, deficits have averaged 7 percent of GDP.  

One doleful result: Our national debt now tops $40 trillion, including $32.2 trillion held by private and foreign government investors. That part alone is more than the combined national debts of China, the European Union, and Great Britain. 

Such outsized deficits and national debt didn’t just “happen.” Successive presidents and congresses made them happen, principally by repeatedly cutting taxes and giving out blank checks for defense.  

On taxes, we’re indisputably global outliers. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reports that U.S. taxes at all levels totaled 25.6 percent of GDP in 2023—and that was before President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Budget-Busting Bill reduced federal revenues by $4.5 trillion over 10 years. We pay a smaller share in taxes than 30 of the world’s 36 other developed countries, and none of those lower-tax nations—Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ireland, Mexico, and Turkey—resemble us economically.  

We’re also global outliers on military spending. Last year, the Pentagon budget topped $954 billion. That’s $50 billion more than the combined defense spending of China, Russia, Germany, India, Great Britain, and Ukraine. It’s still not enough for Donald Trump, who wants $1.5 trillion for defense next year. 

The answer to our outsized deficits and debt, of course, is to address the source, by raising revenues and cutting defense spending. That’s what Bill Clinton did and balanced the budget and produced four hefty budget surpluses in the 1990s. Far from hobbling the economy, GDP and incomes grew faster under Clinton’s policies than during any presidency in the past half-century.  

Yet, since Clinton, no one else has even tried. Trump and his economic minions certainly believe that deficits don’t matter. They assume there will always be eager buyers of U.S. government securities on whatever terms the Treasury sets. Truth be told, the proponents on the left of “modern monetary theory” spun the same fairy tale for Joe Biden’s administration as it ran up $3.5 trillion in deficits in his last two years in office. 

In real life, public finance is more challenging—and riskier—than either side would have people believe. Every dollar of deficit financing comes from somebody’s savings, and Americans save so little we end up depending on foreign savings. This year, when the Treasury will have to attract $2 trillion for this year’s deficit, all private savings in America—the personal savings of individuals plus the retained earnings of businesses—will total only $2.2 trillion.  

That’s only the beginning of the Treasury’s task because it also must refinance about one-third of the $32.2 trillion in national debt held by investors that comes due each year. That’s another $10 to $11 trillion. Under normal conditions, most of those investors—mainly foreign and U.S. banks, insurance companies, pension funds, and the like—“roll over” their maturing Treasury securities. They’ll use the proceeds to buy the new, similar securities.  

There’s a catch. The Treasury must provide a competitive return with virtually no risk, and our outsized deficits and debt now make it difficult. 

When our deficits and national debt were manageable, global investors were confident that the government of the world’s richest, most productive economy could always find the resources to pay its debts. The U.S. economy also consistently grew at a higher rate than the blended interest rate on our debts, so investors felt secure that the Treasury could handle the carrying costs of any new deficits.  

Even when U.S. presidents have badly mismanaged the economy—heads up, George W. Bush—global investors have been ready to finance our deficits and debts at reasonable rates because they were confident we would never default. But today’s rising inflation, along with outsized deficits and debt, presents a variant of that risk because it reduces the value of the securities once investors buy them.  

Even worse, today’s inflation isn’t a byproduct of an unanticipated economic shock. It’s the direct result of deliberate policy blunders—Trump’s tariffs and bungled war on Iran, along with his pressure campaign on the Federal Reserve to cut short-term interest rates, even at the risk of more inflation.  

So, global investors are sending us a clear message: Our deficits and debt are so big—and our policymaking so erratic—that they no longer trust us to pay our debts without reducing the burden by engineering or tolerating more inflation. That’s why the market yield on 30-year U.S. Treasury bonds has reached its highest levels in more than two decades. 

Even so, Donald Trump isn’t listening, and his senior economic officials seem unable to grasp the problem. Last week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent responded to rising bond yields with a ham-handed attempt to manipulate the bond market. The Treasury planned to buy $4 trillion in U.S. Treasury bonds, assuming an artificial burst in demand would push up bond prices and reduce yields. 

It’s an addled version of the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing program (QE) under President Barack Obama. Back then, it was designed to stimulate credit in a sputtering economy with near-zero interest rates and low inflation. This time, inflation and interest rates are both elevated—and rising. How will Bessent pay for his $4 trillion buying spree? The Treasury and the Fed will have to create the credit—in effect, print a lot of money—that will only keep inflation rising.  

As those who remember basic economics would expect, Bessent’s gambit not only failed; it pushed rates up. Those yields are the market’s vote of no confidence in Trump’s economic team and especially Kevin Warsh, the new chair of the Federal Reserve.  

Unless the administration gets its head around the deficit and debt, global investor confidence in U.S. policymaking and Treasury securities could continue to erode and reach the point where investors start cashing in their U.S. investments. That’s a scenario for an economic crash. 

Trump may be hopeless, but we’re not helpless. The Democrats have an opening to announce a serious program to puncture the ballooning deficits, especially if they take Congress in November.  

Bill Clinton provided the blueprint, and I can take you through it because I pulled together the budget and tax program for his 1992 campaign. When he entered the White House in 1993, the deficit was $255 billion ($588 billion in today’s dollars) and projected to increase. It would have been higher, but George H. W. Bush had raised excise taxes and income taxes on high-income people in 1990. 

Clinton convinced Democrats in Congress to double down with larger tax increases for wealthy people, raised the corporate tax rate, increased Medicare taxes for wealthy people, and hiked the federal gasoline tax. It worked: Those changes, along with strong economic growth, increased federal revenues 54 percent after inflation over his two terms. Clinton also convinced Democrats to cut defense spending by 12 percent on a sustained basis, another first.  

Five years later, the federal budget was in surplus; and from 1998 to 2001, the surpluses totaled $559 billion ($1.1 trillion in today’s dollars). Investors took note, and the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury bond fell 3.3 percentage points from 1990 to 1998.  

Critics on the left today dismiss Clinton’s balanced budget program for, in Robert Kuttner’s baseless claims, “widening inequality, diminished economic security, and reduced confidence in the ability of government to aid its citizens.” Those charges are nonsense.  

But Clinton’s policies didn’t slow the economy; they produced the strongest economic growth in a half-century. Real GDP grew at an average annual rate of 4.0 percent, outstripping Reagan (3.5 percent), Bush-1 (2.3 percent), Bush-2 (2.2 percent), Obama (1.7 percent), Trump in his first term (1.5 percent), Biden (3.6 percent), and year one of Trump’s second term (2.1 percent). Real median income also increased more than under Clinton’s two predecessors and five successors, and unemployment fell from 6.9 percent to 4.0 percent.  

Clinton also didn’t sacrifice social spending to balance the budget. Adjusted for inflation, spending on domestic discretionary programs grew 10 percent, spending for income security programs including welfare grew 15 percent, Medicaid spending rose 37 percent, and the poverty rate fell from 15.1 percent to 11.3 percent, the sharpest decline of any postwar president. 

Following Clinton’s model shouldn’t be a heavy lift for Democrats, since substantial majorities of Americans support higher taxes on wealthy Americans and corporations and cutbacks in defense spending. Clinton also grasped that controlling the deficit was a political precondition for public support for progressive initiatives. That’s an insight the next Democratic administration should take to heart before undertaking, as it will find it must, the immense challenges of restoring Social Security’s solvency, ensuring healthcare for everybody, and aggressively promoting a clean energy society.  

The post What Donald Trump Could Learn from Bill Clinton About the Bond Market   appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Since last April, according to government data, the number of people getting help from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—often referred to as food stamps—has dropped by more than 5.3 million people, including more than 1.5 million children.  

In Florida, Georgia, and Louisiana, the declines have been greater than 20 percent, and in Arizona, the number of beneficiaries has plummeted by more than half.  

No, the nation has not miraculously solved its hunger problem. If anything, food insecurity has worsened in the last year, thanks to persistent inflation and economic uncertainty resulting from the Trump administration’s policies. In a July Washington Post/Ipsos survey, 66 percent of Americans said groceries are “unaffordable.”  

The real reason for this precipitous drop in food aid? Paperwork.  

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), passed by the GOP-led Congress last year, dramatically expanded work reporting requirements on SNAP beneficiaries and imposed harsh penalties on states with high “error rates” in approving or calculating benefits. One analysis concluded that as many as 41 states could end up losing federal SNAP funding under these new rules. In response, states have built a thicket of bureaucracy to shield themselves from punishment. Applicants and beneficiaries now face mountains of tedious, high-stakes paperwork to document their eligibility. “Everything is just 10 times more difficult,” one SNAP recipient who lost her benefits due to a paperwork error told The New York Times. 

According to the proponents of these requirements, this additional documentation safeguards against the “fraud” that President Donald Trump and his Republican allies allege is widespread, ensuring that benefits flow only to the “deserving” (or so the argument goes).  

In reality, the new rules are a shabby cover for drastic cuts to the public safety net. The OBBBA’s changes to SNAP will reduce federal spending on the program by about $186 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. But rather than cut benefits directly—thereby risking accusations of cruelty—Republicans in Congress resorted to the subterfuge of bureaucratic hassle. It’s a common ploy, writes the journalist Annie Lowrey in her important new book on the uses and abuses of bureaucracy to control citizens’ access to government services. “Politicians use administrative burdens to discourage, dissuade, or preclude activities they cannot or do not want to ban through the legislative process,” she writes in The Time Tax: How Government Wastes Our Time—And How to Fix It.  

Using a wealth of anecdotes gleaned from interviews with ordinary citizens, Lowrey, a staff writer at The Atlantic, catalogs the endless variety of soul-sucking bureaucratic humiliations heaped on Americans in their interactions with government, whether it’s filing taxes, starting a business, accessing medical care, or registering to vote.  

This is what she calls the “time tax”— “a levy of paperwork, effort, delay, and aggravation imposed on citizens in exchange for rights and benefits that are putatively theirs.” Cumulatively, Lowrey reports, Americans spend 12 billion hours a year filling out government forms. “At prevailing wages, this uncompensated labor is worth $430 billion a year,” she continues. These burdens fall disproportionately on low-income Americans, whom the government only grudgingly seeks to help. “Administrative complexity is a way the government creates and conveys stigma,” Lowrey writes. “The paperwork burden imposed on an applicant acts as a proxy for the financial burden an enrollee supposedly imposes on the state.”  

As one of the nation’s foremost journalists covering poverty and inequality, Lowrey masterfully shows how the time tax helps to trap low-income Americans in poverty. Her subjects spend hours applying for benefits, only to be denied for making insignificant errors or mistakes made by the state. In one instance, Lowrey tells of a single mother, Marcella Patino, who, without reliable Internet access, struggled to fill out complex work reporting forms online. Patino lost her Medicaid benefits when the state of Utah mistakenly logged a job switch as her holding two jobs at once. Another paperwork snafu led to her losing cash assistance, and she ultimately fell behind on her rent.  

Citing the sociologists Pamela Herd and Daniel Moynihan, Lowrey identifies four distinct costs imposed by administrative burdens. First are research costs, meaning the time it takes to figure out how a program works or the obligations that are due. This could include, for instance, researching eligibility requirements for a tax benefit, or how to apply for a Pell grant. Next come compliance costs, such as the hours recipients spend filling out work reporting forms so they don’t lose access to food stamps or Medicaid. There are also “redemption” costs, or the time it takes to access a benefit or exercise a right. Getting a tax refund, for instance, is surprisingly difficult for people who do not have bank accounts and can’t get direct deposits. In many instances, taxpayers end up paying a tax preparation company to open a temporary account to receive a refund. (This is something I wrote about in my book, Poverty for Profit.) The final category of costs is psychic—the despair and rage people feel in dealing with a rigid, uncaring bureaucracy. These costs, Lowrey theorizes, are a significant contributor to the public’s mistrust of government.  

Lowrey reserves the bulk of her condemnation for conservatives and their weaponization of bureaucracy against the poor. She also calls out the GOP for its hypocrisy in railing against “big government” while at the same time expanding its reach into the intimate details of low-income Americans’ lives.  

Yet liberals, prodigious time tax creators themselves, don’t escape unscathed. Democrats, Lowrey argues, “love too-complicated-by-half means-tested measures, like tax credits for rural broadband users and grants for people struggling with the cost of air-conditioning. They load straightforward initiatives up with so many conditions and chokepoints that they fail to deliver, if they ever get off the ground.” (In this regard, The Time Tax echoes the argument of Abundance, the blockbuster book by Lowrey’s husband, The New York Times’s Ezra Klein, about the growth-choking impacts of often well-meaning regulation. Where Abundance looks at the macro-economic impacts of over-governance, The Time Tax takes this problem to the micro level of individual and household burdens.) 

But if anyone is especially guilty of hiking time tax, it is Trump. When Elon Musk rampaged through government with his “Department of Government Efficiency,” the billionaire’s stated goals were to improve government performance and eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy. Trump and DOGE have, in fact, done the opposite, Lowrey argues. The administration eliminated promising efforts like the IRS’s Direct File initiative and increased paperwork burdens on citizens and corporations. Even goodies like “no tax on tips” (which is not even accurate) have “made the tax code more complicated and contingent,” Lowrey writes.  

Lowrey concludes The Time Tax with a bold agenda for reducing time taxes. She argues, for instance, that Medicaid should operate as a single federal program, like Medicare, rather than be administered by the states. She also calls for ending work requirements and automatic income verification so people can easily “cross-enroll” in programs for which they’re eligible.  

Perhaps paradoxically, this agenda’s very boldness causes it to fall short. The forces that Lowrey identifies as having led to the creation of the time tax—Congress’s love of complexity, our parsimony toward the poor, our fixation on who is “deserving”—seem impossible to dislodge in this moment.  

Nevertheless, Lowrey does the nation a great service in identifying a root cause of government dysfunction and public distrust. While Congress is often conscious of the more obvious fiscal burdens it demands of taxpayers, policymakers all too often ignore the invisible tax on time. 

The post Death by a Thousand Papercuts appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has temporarily allowed President Donald Trump to continue construction of a 90,000-square-foot White House ballroom to replace the East Wing he demolished last fall. The order has no expiration date, but it will expire after the full court reconvenes in the fall. 

Administrative orders are usually intended to freeze the status quo pending hearing and decision. But this order reshapes the status quo, since construction of the ballroom will continue while the learned justices consider whether construction of the planned ballroom can proceed. One would have to do a full box score of Roberts Court opinions and rulings, but, reading the tealeaves, when this court goes along with a lower court, it usually denies an administrative stay. When it grants an administrative stay, it’s more likely than not to reverse the court below and side with the petitioner, in this case Donald Trump. This one has that feeling to it. Maybe the Court will find the gumption to buck the president as it did in the tariffs case or by refusing his appeals to overturn judgments favor of E. Jean Carroll or in its rejection of Trump’s efforts to reverse more than 150 years of birthright citizenship, but I tend to doubt it. 

Praising the Roberts decision on Truth Social, Trump gloated, “The Military/Ballroom Complex being built on the hallowed grounds of the White House, which is so vital for National Security, will be THE GREATEST OF ITS KIND!”  

A new report on Sunday from The Washington Post undercut the national security argument, noting that an extensive nuclear bunker was completed during the Barack Obama administration The president “has claimed that the White House needs a massive new ballroom because it would provide him and future presidents with a secure, hardened facility,” the Post reported. “But former officials say the argument fails to acknowledge that the presidential complex already has one.” 

The ballroom is a monstrosity, illegally paid for largely with public funds and without Congress’s consent. According to renowned architectural critic Paul Goldberger, writing in The New York Times, the plans reveal “a ballroom that is an enormous, banal box in a vaguely classical style that, if it goes forward, will overwhelm the White House and block the view between the White House and the Capitol that has been one of Washington’s signature vistas for more than two centuries.” Goldberger’s tone was one of alarm, framing the project as emblematic of a presidency that prioritizes spectacle over architectural restraint and historical continuity. 

In the play Fiddler on the Roof, the character Tevya sings of what he would do if he were rich. Among other things: 

I’d build a big, tall house with rooms by the dozen
Right in the middle of the town
A fine tin roof with real wooden floors below
There would be one long staircase just going up.
And one even longer coming down.
And one more leading nowhere, just for show 

The most recent renderings include a similar excess, a staircase “just for show.” The drawings revert to earlier plans for the building’s design, restoring a grand staircase on the addition’s south side that was derided as a frivolous adornment that led to no entryway. 

Lower court judges have ruled that the president exceeded his authority by moving ahead the construction without approval from Congress. Even so, they had allowed the project to continue in recent months while litigation was underway. 

Roberts’s order did not provide a timeline for when the court would act next, stating only that a lower-court ruling against the Trump administration was paused “pending further order of the undersigned or of the court.” Perhaps Roberts texted his eight colleagues and was highly confident the majority would vote to let construction proceed. 

Trump initially promoted the ballroom, estimated to cost $400 million, as a much-needed expansion to properly host visiting dignitaries who have been relegated to tents outdoors because of the lack of such space—more than four times larger than the ballroom he built at Mar-a-Lago. 

But realizing how legally vulnerable the project is without congressional approval, Trump swiveled to the position that the above-ground ballroom is linked like a pilot ship on a whale to a Führerbunker to be built beneath with a national security component.  

When Trump asked the justices to intervene last week, he referred to the project on social media as a “Military Complex.” He called it “vital to our National Security, and the Safety of all Presidents.” He shared opinion essays from conservative outlets, including one with the message: “SCOTUS needs to stop courts putting the president’s security at risk.” 

The president’s lawyers have submitted sworn statements to the Supreme Court from top national security officials, including Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Jay Clayton, the new director of national intelligence. They warned that halting the construction would put the president and his family at risk and said the renovations were urgently needed to protect against possible attacks.  

Trump’s former Attorney General Bill Barr, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, not surprisingly, sided with Trump’s position. I say not surprisingly since Barr endorsed Todd Blanche for attorney general, possibly accomplishing Blanche’s narrow Senate confirmation. Barr thinks that the National Trust for Historic Preservation lacks standing to bring the case, an argument rejected by the lower courts. He argues that courts should exercise “restraint” and refrain from “imposing their policy preferences and usurping the powers of the executive and legislative branches.”—a wise prescription that hasn’t stopped the Roberts court in the past.  

But Barr sidesteps the issue. No president has ever undertaken a major renovation of the White House such as the Trump ballroom without congressional approval.  

Solicitor General D. John Sauer said as of August 14 the project was 65 percent complete and that it was essentially too late to turn back. By the time the Supreme Court is ready to determine the matter, the project may be 80 percent done, and it will be so wasteful to demolish the partial construction and rebuild after congressional approval that the controversy will become moot. Turning tide is always costly. Bottom-line, the Court will likely permit construction to proceed. 

The temporary order from Chief Justice Roberts came two weeks after a three-judge appeals court panel in Washington issued a lengthy 2-to-1 ruling that said Congress had not “ceded unfettered authority to the executive branch to dramatically redesign, reshape and reconstruct the White House — the People’s House — to fit a particular president’s desires.” 

But the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit had agreed to pause its order until Friday, and construction has continued in the interim. 

The National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States, a nonprofit chartered by Congress to guard public buildings, brought the challenge to the project. The group said the president had resisted oversight in violation of the Constitution and federal law, which gave Congress the power to decide which structures can be built on federal property in Washington. 

In a statement on Friday, the organization said of the Supreme Court’s order: “To be clear, this is not a final decision on the merits of the government’s stay application, and we await further action.” Lots of luck. 

When Fox News host Jesse Watters asked Trump what was really behind the controversial project, he responded, “It’s a monument. I’m building a monument to myself – because no one else will.” 

There is more to the issue than Donald Trump’s self-valorization. It is what this inveterate corruption does to the morale of the American people, and to America’s reputation all over the world. 

Peggy Noonan, the conservative columnist who wrote speeches for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, who knows a thing or two about the building, writing in her Wall Street Journal column, sagely observed that, “Corruption is more dangerous, has a more deteriorating effect, than bad policy. Bad policy can be reversed. Corruption works its way into a system and changes its nature.”

The post The Roberts Court: Poised to Bless the Trump Ballroom appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Just three days after the U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly to advance the late Senator Lindsey Graham’s sweeping sanctions bill designed to force Russia to end the war in Ukraine, Vice President JD Vance called Ukrainian President Zelensky and asked him to stop bombarding oil tankers and terminals in the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk.  

A key backer of the Graham bill, Republican Katie Britt of Alabama, defended the statute passionately on the Senate floor. “We’re going to cut off the flow of money to [Russian dictator Vladimir] Putin,” Britt declared emphatically. But the international partnership that owns the tankers and terminals Vance asked Zelensky to spare, the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), generates more than $1.4 billion a year for, among others, the Russian Federation, which owns or controls nearly a 50-percent share.  

It’s not technically Russian oil that passes through the CPC’s thousand-mile pipeline and sprawling terminal complex—it’s crude from the vast oilfields in western Kazakhstan. But Russia profits handsomely from dividends, transit tariffs, and port fees. What’s complicated—and the reason Vance picked up the phone—is that U.S. energy giants Chevron and ExxonMobil also own significant shares of the Caspian pipeline. 

The timing of Vance’s call made for some confusing U.S. double-speak. But the episode underscores that sanctions are a tricky tool, especially when the target is a country like Russia deeply entwined across the global economy. As one of the world’s largest crude producers, vying for the top spot with Saudi Arabia and the United States, Russia is too connected to fail—which is why the West has had so much trouble using sanctions to punish it for the war in Ukraine without damaging Western interests, too.  

No one, Democrat or Republican, mentioned these challenges when the Senate passed the Graham bill by a whopping 86-11 last month. On the contrary, most lawmakers seemed supremely confident the measure would cripple the Russian war machine and end the conflict in Ukraine. Republican Senator Todd Young of Indiana was a little more honest, calling the legislation “an important moral signal” to the long-suffering Ukrainian people. But virtually no leader, in Ukraine or the U.S., went so far as to question the Senate’s hyperbolic promises. 

Part of the problem is that the Graham bill isn’t just a package of sanctions—it’s also a far-reaching tariff measure, giving President Donald Trump sweeping powers to impose 100 percent import duties on goods from countries deemed to be aiding the Russian war effort. The 11 senators, Democrat and Republican, who opposed the legislation were driven primarily by concern about this unprecedented transfer of tariff authority from the legislature to an executive branch that has imposed levies promiscuously and without legal authority.  

The question for the House, where the package heads next: Can lawmakers preserve and perhaps strengthen the sanctions while limiting the all-but-unchecked tariff power the bill hands the president?  

Developed over 18 months of bipartisan politicking and negotiations with Trump officials, the Graham package bundles language and ideas from a wide variety of other legislative proposals and executive actions, including by the Biden White House.  

A core goal—and it’s among the bill’s greatest strengths—is to codify measures mandated by the previous administration. Between 2022 and 2025, the Biden White House and Treasury Department levied more than 6,500 individual Russia-related sanctions—on politicians, military leaders, banks, companies, businessmen, oligarchs, and third countries supplying Russian arms makers with semiconductors, microelectronic circuitry, high-precision machine tools, and other essential technology. But virtually none of these restrictions were enshrined in law.  

“By codifying them,” Maia Nikoladze, deputy director of the Economic Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council, explains, “the Graham package ensures they cannot be revoked or diluted” by a less enthusiastic administration.  

Importantly, the Graham bill also doubles down on sanctions imposed by the European Union and United Kingdom—measures designed to address the issue of a Russia that’s too connected to fail. 

The West has struggled for four and a half years to find a way to limit the oil revenues Moscow counts on to pay for its war of aggression in Ukraine without restricting the supply of Russian crude so severely that it triggers a global energy crisis. 

In the months after the invasion of Ukraine, the G7’s best answer was an oil price cap, the brainchild of then-U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Under the cap, first imposed in December 2022, Russia could continue selling oil and was expected to remain a top global supplier. But Western maritime shipping services and insurance companies were prohibited from facilitating Russian cargoes selling at above an agreed price limit—originally $60 a barrel.  

It was an ingenious idea that didn’t work. Moscow’s end run was to amass a vast “shadow fleet” of aging oil tankers that sail without insurance and under false flags, exporting Russian crude primarily to Asian customers, who often pay nearly as much as European buyers paid before the war.  

By mid-2026, estimates suggested Russia was shipping oil on more than 1,000 shadow tankers. Although most Asian importers pretend to comply with the cap’s cost restrictions, many falsify the price they pay. The upshot: Today, almost four years after the cap was imposed, taxes levied on Moscow’s global oil revenue account for some 25 percent of the Russian government’s budget. 

Still, despite this disappointing outcome, neither the EU nor the UK have given up on cracking down. Their principal strategy has been to try to keep up with the growth of the shadow fleet by continually imposing restrictions on illicit tankers, banning them from entering European ports and receiving financial services from European providers.  

It’s a strategy worthy of the ancient Greek king Sisyphus, doomed to rolling a boulder up a hill and watching it roll back down every time it nears the top. The EU passes new sanctions packages every few months over growing opposition from increasingly recalcitrant member states. The most recent package, approved in July, was the 21st since February 2022. 

The bloc is currently sanctioning nearly 700 tankers; the UK more than 600. Both Brussels and London have also significantly lowered their price caps. Both ceilings are now set at $44.10 per barrel—a limit that adjusts automatically over time as global prices change.  

What Europe shrewdly recognizes: There can be no perfect, airtight sanctions against a state as large and well connected as Russia. But it still pays to punish Moscow with every tool at hand, raising the cost Putin pays to prolong the war. 

If the Graham package passes and is enforced as intended, it will align Washington’s relatively anemic shadow fleet sanctions—we currently designate fewer than 200 ships, according to the Brookings Institution—with Europe’s far more stringent restrictions. The only catch: As negotiated with the White House, the bill’s language leaves implementation to the discretion of the president, who may or may not follow Europe’s lead. 

The past two years offer a troubling preview of just how Trump is likely to use his presidential enforcement authority—for both the sanctions and the tariffs in the Graham bill. 

Trump officials signaled their view of Russia sanctions early on, in February 2025, when the Justice Department dismantled the interagency Task Force KleptoCapture charged with enforcing restrictions on the Kremlin and its allied oligarchs. Since then, the administration has largely left the Biden-era sanctions regime in place but, crucially, has done nothing to keep it current with Moscow’s unrelenting efforts to evade it.  

The Biden approach was a little like Europe’s. Whenever a Russian entity found a way to skirt an American prohibition by shunting business or other activity to, say, a smaller firm or alternative official, the U.S. Treasury Department added those new offenders to its target list.  

The classic example was banks. Treasury first sanctioned Russian banks, but when third-country financial institutions stepped in to take over their business, the U.S. designated them too—imposing 111 sets of new sanctions between February 2022 and January 2025. The Atlantic Council’s Nikoladze dubs this approach “sanctions enforcement by more sanctions.” What made it effective—significantly more effective than anything Europe has done—was America’s global financial reach and the power of the dollar. 

The Trump administration has deviated sharply from the Biden approach. In nearly two years in office, it has added no new individuals, no new banks, and no new shadow tankers to the U.S. sanctions blacklist.  

The one exception to this neglect: In October 2025, the Treasury Department placed Russian energy giants Rosneft and Lukoil on the sanctions list, freezing their U.S. assets and banning Americans from doing business with them. This was a significant step, albeit weakened by a raft of waivers and extended deadlines in the 10 months since.  

Far more often, when pressed on sanctions, administration officials have offered excuses and bluster. “[We want to wait and] see where the peace talks go,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrote to Congress in February. “I am ready to do major sanctions on Russia,” the president posted on Truth Social just over a year ago, “when all NATO nations stop buying oil from Russia.” (In fact, European imports of Russian oil have dropped dramatically since 2022.)  

Ideally, the final version of the Graham package would tweak the sanctions provisions to require more compliance with European and UK standards, while curtailing the measure’s expansive tariff authority. The administration held a hard line through nearly a year of negotiations with the bill’s Senate sponsors—so the House may find it difficult to limit the power it hands the president. But even a few guardrails could make a difference. 

As passed by the Senate, the Graham bill significantly expands the president’s tariff authority with two vaguely worded clauses open to interpretation and misinterpretation.  

The package opens the door to imposing “up to 100 percent” levies on the world’s top five importers of Russian oil and the top five countries “facilitating Russian oil sanctions evasion.” The problem: Reliable sources differ on even the seemingly simple question of which five nations are the biggest importers—and the bill says nothing about the methodology that should be used to determine them or how to interpret the far more nebulous, catch-all clause about countries “facilitating evasion.” 

“Why are we handing matches to a pyromaniac?” my colleague Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, asks incredulously. By his own admission, Trump has never met a tariff he didn’t like, and he has shown scant hesitation to deploy them. The Supreme Court reined in some of his levying of import duties under a previous statute.  

Among guardrails the House should consider: a more specific description of what it means to “facilitate evasion”—we should be going after countries like Panama and Liberia that allow shadow tankers to sail under their flags with minimal oversight. Lawmakers could also strengthen the language encouraging the White House to align U.S. shadow fleet sanctions with those of the EU and UK. Perhaps most important—the most significant guardrail—would be requiring congressional approval for any tariffs imposed under the bill. 

An overwhelming bipartisan Senate vote for punishing Russia’s aggression in Ukraine is an important step by any measure—despite the gap between lawmakers’ heady confidence and the inherently Sisyphean nature of economic sanctions against a global power like Russia. Every step, no matter how small, to raise the price Putin pays for the war is a step worth taking.  

Still, responsible lawmakers should think twice before they let the temptation of virtue signaling get the better of them, handing a well-known abuser like Donald Trump a virtual carte blanche to impose tariffs.

The post Beyond Virtue Signaling on Ukraine and Russia appeared first on Washington Monthly.

“The driver weaponized his vehicle and drove toward the officer.”  

I’ve heard that language before.  

In less than one week this summer, ICE agents fatally shot two men in moving vehicles—25-year-old Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, and 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston. In both cases, Homeland Security said the drivers had “weaponized” their vehicles against officers.

Less than a month earlier, on June 14, 2026, police responded to a reported shoplifting outside a Walmart in Senatobia, Mississippi. Vellesiya Wiley waited in the passenger seat of her friend’s car with her one-year-old son, Kohen, on her lap.  

Wiley’s friend returned with a bag of diapers and began backing out of the parking spot. An officer fired into the car multiple times, according to news reports. One bullet fatally struck Kohen.

Police said “officers encountered two subjects and a juvenile child fleeing from the store into a vehicle. [They] attempted to stop the vehicle, but the driver drove in the direction of the officers, almost striking one.”

Different agencies, different states, the same assertion: the vehicle was coming at the officer.  

For the last five years, I’ve analyzed police interviews, autopsies, forensic reports, press statements, and video evidence from shootings into moving vehicles. I’ve also interviewed dozens of mothers who lost children in police shootings. In city after city, I began to recognize the same language—not necessarily in the shootings themselves, but in the official accounts that followed them.  

Cars can, of course, be deadly weapons, and officers sometimes face drivers who are genuinely trying to hit them. The issue is not that police describe those threats. It is that, in the chaotic hours after a shooting, a department can present an officer’s account of the most disputed moment as an established fact.   

Every police shooting is chaotic, and officials often must speak before they know everything. The problem is that a preliminary account does not always remain preliminary. Since the official version usually arrives first—and carries the authority of the state—later evidence often has to dislodge a story already lodged in the public mind.

In Mississippi, Wiley remembers her son’s shooting differently. “I raised my baby up trying to show them that he was in the car,” she said.

Wiley recalled the officers stood on the right side of the car as her friend steered left. An independent review concluded a bullet entered the right side of Kohen’s chest and exited the left.

On January 20, 2018, in Overland Park, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City, the call went out to police: “J-21 attempt,” code for attempted suicide.  

“I’m familiar with that kid,” one police officer radioed back.

John Albers, 17, struggled with ADHD and depression. He had begun to make some impulsive decisions.  

That night, two officers arrived at the Albers home for a welfare check. Across the street, a neighbor’s Ring doorbell camera captured what happened next.

A thin line of light appeared beneath the garage door. Officer Clayton Jenison raised his weapon and moved toward the driveway. The garage door continued to rise.  

A silver minivan’s reverse lights came on, and the van rolled backward onto the driveway. On a police dashcam positioned to the left of the van, Jenison appeared to stand directly behind the vehicle. The Ring camera showed a different angle: Jenison remained to the right of the minivan at all times.  

“Stop!” Jenison shouted.  

The tires rolled. No sudden acceleration. No lurch. Just movement.  

Jenison fired. Two shots flashed in the darkness. Glass shattered.  

The minivan paused, then continued backward into a reverse J-turn around the officer. Its back end swung into the street until the van rolled back onto the Albers front lawn, headlights facing the street.  

Jenison pivoted, tracking the vehicle, and fired eleven more shots as it circled him.  

In his videotaped interview with police detectives, Jenison said, “I thought he was going to run me over.” Forensic analysis showed him standing six feet to the right of the van when he fired his first shot and nineteen feet away when he fired his thirteenth.  

An hour after the shooting, before John’s father, Steve Albers, knew what had happened, an officer asked him, “Why did John park the van backward in the garage?”  

Steve didn’t understand.  

The officer rephrased: “Any reason he might want to park it so he could drive forward into the street? Why he might need to get out fast?”   

Steve shifted his gaze from the officer to the open garage, not knowing his son had, in fact, reversed rather than driven forward.  

“Any idea why he’d try to run over an officer?”  

“Wait,” Steve replied, puzzled at the implication. “What’s going on here?”  

That evening, Overland Park police released a statement:  

“As the responding officers approached the residence to make contact, the garage door opened, and a vehicle exited the garage, moving rapidly toward one of the responding officers.”

The disputed perception in Jenison’s interview—“I thought he was going to run me over”—had become, in the department’s public account, a statement of fact: the vehicle was “moving rapidly toward” him.  

Psychologists call part of what happens next the primacy effect: information encountered first can shape how later information is interpreted. Once the public hears that a driver accelerated toward an officer, contradictory evidence may have to fight uphill simply because it arrived second.  

At a press conference one month after the shooting, District Attorney Steve Howe played only the left-side police dashcam video. “Suddenly, the garage door opened,” he said. “The minivan backed up toward the officer who was standing directly behind it. John Albers rapidly drove the car toward the officer.”

Howe made no mention of the Ring doorcam video.  

The minivan “performed a wild J-turn,” he continued, “and in a split second, the officer went from a position of safety to once again being directly in the path of a van that was accelerating toward him.”  

The official explanation again turned on the same disputed fact: where the officer stood in relation to the vehicle.  

John’s autopsy, completed one week after Howe’s press conference, showed that the bullets traveled from right to left through his head and neck. Forensic analysis determined the bullets shattered the passenger-side windows of the minivan; the rear window and front windshield remained intact.  

The first account matters beyond any single case. A 2022 National Bureau of Economic Research study found that television news outlets more often used language that obscured responsibility after police killings than after civilian killings, especially in cases involving unarmed victims who did not flee. Researchers traced that language most often to police departments’ initial accounts. Participants exposed to such language were less likely to hold officers morally responsible or to demand accountability.

The pattern predates Albers. In 2010, after Officer Aaron Hess fatally shot 20-year-old Daniel “D.J.” Henry Jr. outside a college bar in Pleasantville, New York, police said Henry had sped toward Hess and struck him with his car.  

Witnesses, passengers, and video later challenged that account, saying Henry had followed an officer’s order to move the car forward slowly and had not accelerated toward Hess.

A 2021 New York Times investigation found that over five years, police killed more than 400 drivers or passengers who were not wielding a gun or knife and were not being pursued for a violent crime—more than one death every week.

When an official narrative takes hold, a victim’s family can spend months or years trying to catch up to it. By the time contradictory evidence emerges, the first account may already have framed the questions journalists, prosecutors, and the public are asking.  

On January 7, 2026, an ICE officer in Minneapolis killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three. Federal officials said she had “weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them.” An independent autopsy later concluded that one bullet entered Good’s left temple and exited the right side of her head.

Unlike many local police departments, Homeland Security did not frame Good’s shooting as the beginning of an ongoing investigation. Officials instead used sweeping language about her intent. But in this case, the government’s account did not go uncontested for long: citizens uploaded cellphone videos in real time, allowing the public to compare official claims with other evidence almost immediately.  

But Good’s shooting remains the anomaly. The surge of ICE agents in Minneapolis, the violence, and the round-ups of law-abiding immigrants had already brought out dozens of protesters and cell phone coverage to that residential street. At least three videos emerged within minutes of the shooting. So ordinary citizens, in real time, were able to break the government’s monopoly on the first narrative. Officials no longer controlled the story or the evidence.  

What happens in cases where no Ring camera, dashcam, or cellphone video exists to compete with the first account? One could argue that when independent videos aren’t immediately available, the official account deserves even more caution—not less.  

The first story still matters. Officers deserve the opportunity to explain what happened, and the public deserves timely, accurate information. But departments can distinguish what they know from what an involved officer says.  

“The driver weaponized his vehicle” is a finding. “The officer believed the vehicle was driving toward him” is an account awaiting verification. Initial statements should mark the opening of an investigation, not its close.  

I can no longer read an initial press release the way I once did. I still read the first story. I just don’t mistake it for the last. 

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