With “Doctor Trump” denying he’s Jesus and all the other hideous nonsense assaulting our senses, it’s easy to forget the positive stories coursing through our lives. They are clear signs that MAGA is not the wave of the future.

Yes, when Trump thundered that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” he was trashing our civilization, too. Enlightened societies don’t threaten genocide. That’s what despots do. Witness the “Death to America” slogan of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. On top of all the other stupidities of the war, we are in danger of becoming what we’re trying to fight.

And any good news of this week is tempered by the chilling fact that we still have more than a thousand days to go with this sicko president and his gang of thugs and grifters—nearly as long as the entire Kennedy administration. More bad shit is on the way, every day, and the lickspittle Trump Cabinet will never invoke the 25th Amendment.

So I’m not saying this struggle against authoritarianism is over. What has changed is the deep fear in 2025 about the inevitability of the bad guys winning and a curtain of shamelessness and corruption descending over the West.

Hungarian Patriots

The thumping of Viktor Orbán in Hungary showed that if Democrats stay focused, the worst of our long national nightmare will soon be a memory. That’s because we now have a good idea of how the traumatic American story ends: the way Orbán’s just did, with defeats so crushing they defy the strongman’s criminal intent to reverse them.

Remember, it was Orbán who wrote the playbook on strangling democracy. Over the last decade, he instructed MAGA and right-wing movements worldwide on how to buy off the media, corrupt the courts, slime critics, steal with pride and use fear and threats of violence to run up margins in rigged elections.

Recall how CPAC—the premier Republican organization in the U.S.—actually held one of its big conventions in Budapest. Last week, JD Vance didn’t just praise Orbán; he broke 250 years of precedent and directly campaigned for a foreign candidate—while accusing Ukraine of electoral interference. (I was tempted to put an exclamation point here to emphasize the extreme hypocrisy of doing so but then I’d need to do that at the end of every sentence I write about these goons.)

Then came this moment of historic inspiration. The Hungarian people refused to be intimidated and now the tectonic plates of global politics are shifting.

History shows that global politics are often tidal. If Mussolini had lost power (as he nearly did in 1924) in Italy, Hitler would have had more trouble gaining it in Germany. And if Franco, despite Nazi help, had lost the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Hitler would have had less of the momentum he needed to launch World War II.

It works the other way, too. In the decade after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, more than 50 nations transitioned toward democracy. That’s more than a quarter of all countries on Earth. All of them had weaker democratic muscle memory than we do when they turned in the right direction.

Because we don’t have a parliamentary system, we can’t begin our own transition right now with a vote of no confidence.

But relief is at hand. House Speaker Mike Johnson said in February that if Republicans lose the midterms, “It would be the end of the Trump presidency.” That means we have only six months to go before Trump is the lamest of lame ducks. Then we can begin to hold some of these jokers accountable.

Artemis II

It’s no coincidence that quiet patriots inside NASA named the Artemis II spacecraft Integrity. The glorious mission showed that for all the poison in our public life, we remain a collection of decent people. I tuned in to CNN to watch the splashdown live and found myself glued to the screen for hours as Anderson Cooper chatted with Mark Kelly and other veterans of the Space Shuttle and watched the smiling astronauts emerge, symbols of all that is good about our country. I found it hugely refreshing and I wasn’t alone.

We heard former Space Shuttle astronauts describe the feeling of getting real mayo on a Subway sandwich or sleeping in an Airbnb on the day of their return. It was a good reminder that we still have plenty of idealistic, talented public servants who, even when they’re in space, have their feet on the ground. A charming William Shatner put the Artemis mission in the context of the expeditions of Magellan and Shackleton.

When he was aboard Artemis II, Astronaut Victor Glover, noticing the chord the mission had struck, emailed his friend Mike Massimino:

“Tell the world to keep this energy going. Let’s invest in togetherness.”

Beyond the science, that was the core of the mission. “Earth was just this lifeboat hanging undisturbed in the universe,” Christina Koch recalled of her view from space:

“Planet Earth—you are a crew.”

Describing a mission of “humanity and humility,” Commander Reid Wiseman said:

“You’re not looking at us. We’re a mirror of you. If you like what you see, look a little deeper. This is you.”

The Pope Strikes Back

Pope Leo hopes we see our better selves, too. He may be a White Sox fan (I favor the Cubs) but this pope knew just how to respond to the first attack on a pope by a head of state since the Middle Ages. When Trump tread where even Hitler and Mussolini dared not go (in part because Pope Pius was agnostic on fascism), Leo pivoted to peace—a place where the country and the world are solidly on his side.

And he got off a quip about Truth Social that was no papal bull:

“It’s ironic—the name of the site itself. Say no more.”

Trump lost Catholics by five points to Joe Biden, but he carried them by 20 against Kamala Harris. Now he’s way below 50 percent with Catholics and the polls that show the hemorrhaging were taken before his tiff with the pope.

Our time of salvation will come—if we “invest in togetherness.” And the midterms.

Subscribe to Old Goats with Jonathan Alter, where this article originally appeared.

The post Good News from Hungarians, Astronauts, and the Pope appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The pervasiveness of generative AI sparks as much anxiety on college campuses as it has everywhere else. That’s particularly true for faculty: 90 percent of professors say the use of AI will weaken students’ critical thinking skills, according to one recent survey. Even administrators’ more positive take has diminished, with the share who say AI does “more good than harm” for student learning dropping from 55 percent to 45 percent in the past year. 

No wonder so many other Americans are worried, too, from students, families, and policymakers to anyone who cares about our civic and economic future. When AI is everywhere, what knowledge, skills, and habits will students need to get ahead?  How can graduates be thoughtful, effective, purposeful users of this technology, benefitting from its value rather than becoming its casualties? 

These questions are especially pressing for the liberal arts. A broad education in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, logic, and mathematics fosters abilities that include critical thinking, analytical reasoning, cultural and historical awareness, and communication. With origins in classical Greece and Rome, this rich mixture of subjects and skills was known as the artes liberales—the faculties a free person needs to participate in public life.  

Today’s students might think AI has made the liberal arts irrelevant. Yet this centuries-old educational tradition is precisely what they will need to thrive, personally and professionally, in the age of AI. Only the ability to think critically about fundamental questions, evaluate evidence, analyze complex issues, and form reasoned arguments will equip students to unlock the potential of emerging technologies. 

The growth of coding boot camps in the 2010s—together with a panoply of digital badges and online certificates—convinced would-be education revolutionaries, in Silicon Valley and beyond, that traditional college degrees would soon be obsolete. In a booming tech economy, coding seemed like a fast, targeted, and affordable path to career success. 

But this storyline was too simple. The advent of AI tools quickly showed that coding is among the first skills that smart machines can replace. Employment of computer programmers fell from about 457,000 in 2022 to around 334,000 in 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Surveys—a drop of roughly 27 percent. It’s not the first time automation has destroyed entire categories of jobs. To survive such changes, workers need adaptability and resilience; the lesson isn’t that coding doesn’t matter–it’s that narrow skills can leave you vulnerable. 

College majors in the humanities have plummeted in recent decades. Conversely, STEM disciplines have attracted record numbers of undergraduates, and business remains the most popular major. Nevertheless, surveys show that many employers hire candidates with the general skills often associated with liberal arts graduates, including judgment and adaptability, as well as strategic planning and clear communication. 

These so-called durable skills—the kind needed to gather information, synthesize it, and communicate it—are particularly valuable for anyone who wants to use AI effectively. True, AI’s remarkable capacity is mesmerizing, from passing the bar exam and analyzing medical records to writing music or literary analysis. This may resemble creativity and reasoning. But the human advantage, which liberal arts education still cultivates, remains the ability to scrutinize those outputs: to assess their originality, the rigor of their analysis, and their quality. 

One tech executive, trained as a classicist, notes his start-up employs computer programmers who studied philosophy and music composition as undergraduates. Jonathan McBride, managing director of the global investment firm BlackRock, told an audience of college presidents that his best employees are those who can operate outside of their silos and speak to many different people. “That sounds roughly like a liberal arts education,” he said. 

Nearly 90 percent of employers who responded to the National Association of Colleges and Employers Job Outlook 2025 survey said they seek evidence of job candidates’ problem-solving abilities, while around eight in 10 value strong teamwork and written communication skills. However, NACE surveys also show a large gap between employers’ valuation of abilities like critical thinking and their assessment of students’ proficiency in those areas. There’s clearly room for much more general education in the liberal arts mode. 

In practice, liberal arts classrooms take many forms, from Great Books programs to required writing and quantitative reasoning classes at the large, public institutions attended by most Americans. Too often, unfortunately, undergraduates at rural and regional colleges have less access to seminar-style, humanities-rich classes. But even in community colleges where students pursue safe careers and economic mobility, there’s demand for liberal arts courses. At Austin Community College in Texas, the Great Questions Journey focuses on discussion-based analysis of transformational texts. 

As AI reshapes jobs, the liberal arts may be necessary but not sufficient. Workforce analyst Brent Orrell, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, believes that AI is “hollowing out” precisely those entry-level analytical tasks that have, he notes, “traditionally served as training grounds for professional judgment.” Students may increasingly need to find ways to mix broad reasoning abilities with in-demand targeted skills and hands-on experience to navigate an AI-amplified career. 

For now, some universities are explicitly linking the liberal arts to important career skills—including helping students create useful AI prompts or vet the accuracy and rigor of AI assistants’ work. Back in 2018, the University of Arizona created a bachelor’s degree in applied humanities, connecting the humanities to fields including business, engineering, and medicine. After its introduction, the number of undergraduate humanities majors at the university spiked by 76 percent.  

The liberal arts need not be a hard sell. Many young people are drawn to the big questions they ask. Colleges need not force undergraduates to choose between career preparation and the life of the mind. They can give students the grounding to get the best results from AI by interrogating it rather than leaning on it. 

We don’t know exactly how AI will proliferate and how humans will respond. But giving students the tools to use AI thoughtfully and assess its outputs critically will reduce their anxiety and empower them to make the most of whatever the future brings. 

The post What AI Can’t Do appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Last week, President Donald Trump gave Vice President JD Vance two high-profile foreign policy assignments: travel to Budapest on Tuesday and Wednesday to help save the Hungarian election for Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his right-wing Christian nationalist party, then head over to Islamabad for the weekend to negotiate a final peace agreement with Iran.  

Vance was harshly graded on Sunday. Early in the morning, he announced an impasse with Iran in terse remarks that offered little suggestion of a diplomatic path forward. By the end of the day, Hungarians rejected Vance’s argument that a vote for Orbán is a vote for “sovereignty and democracy, for truth and for the God of our forefathers,” handing the opposition coalition a parliamentary supermajority that throws Orbán out of office and sets up the possibility of a constitutional overhaul.  

To be fair to Vance, these were impossible assignments. Orbán’s party, in power for 16 years, was trailing badly in the polls thanks to a public fed up with corruption and economic stagnation. An American vice president can’t swoop in at the last minute and change the minds of locals while claiming he isn’t meddling in a foreign election.  

The Iranian regime has long earned a reputation for stubborn and patient negotiation. Even Trump grudgingly praised them as “lousy fighters but great negotiators.”  And the regime just proved it has the tenacity to not only remain in power after the assassinations of more than four dozen of its highest officials, including its Supreme Leader, but also gain negotiating leverage with newly seized control of the Strait of Hormuz, which is critical to the global economy. The 41-year-old Vance has only been an elected public official for just under 40 months and has no diplomatic experience. 

Meanwhile, Trump hung out in Miami at an Ultimate Fighting Championship event with the person who is supposed to hold the foreign policy portfolio, Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Iran reportedly requested that Vance—who privately opposed Operation Epic Fury—lead the American negotiating team. But where in The Art of the Deal does it say you should let your adversary pick its negotiating partner?  

In theory, anyone could have been sent to be the face of a likely failure. Why choose Vance? Why set up the vice president to fail? 

Exploring that question is not just mining for schadenfreude. Trump’s difficulty, or disinterest, in grooming an heir apparent threatens his movement’s ability to sustain itself beyond this presidential term. 

Vance is not the first vice president of Trump’s to be put in impossible situations. You probably remember that Mike Pence had the Constitutional task to preside over the ratification of the 2020 election’s Electoral College count. Trump publicly and privately pressured Pence to invoke the authority to reject the electors from several states won by Joe Biden and deny Biden’s victory. When the January 6 mob chanted “hang Mike Pence,” according to testimony given to the House, Trump resisted taking any action to quell the riots and privately shared that Pence “deserves it.” Four years later, the two would run against each other for the 2024 Republican Party presidential nomination. 

But Trump always recognized that Pence, an old-school Ronald Reagan conservative skeptical of protectionism and Russia, wasn’t a full-fledged believer in MAGA. According to American Carnage by Tim Alberta, when Trump learned that his nominee to lead the Central Intelligence Agency criticized him during the 2016 campaign, he vented, “This is what I get for letting Pence pick everyone.” Come 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic overwhelmed America, Trump sidelined his own Health and Human Services Secretary and named Pence the leader of a pandemic task force. Peter Baker and Susan Glasser reported in their book, The Divider, that Pence’s team suspected “the vice president was put in charge just to have someone to blame when everything went bad.” Moreover, Trump wouldn’t let Pence control the task force’s press briefings, hogging the spotlight for himself day after day. A reasonable conclusion to draw is that Trump never tried to set Pence up as his successor, even before January 6 drove a permanent wedge between them. 

Vance, at first, seemed poised to pursue a more rewarding vice-presidential path. He became famous in 2016 during his Hillbilly Elegy book tour as a product of the white working-class who could explain Trump’s appeal to confused liberals while criticizing the candidate. But once Trump was elected and he eyed a political future for himself, Vance rebranded as a Trump loyalist, a social conservative extremist, and cheerleader for far-right anti-European Union political parties across the Atlantic. Vance was promoted to the vice presidency by Trump’s son, Donald Jr., who said he wanted to make sure “those snakes and the liars don’t get those positions of power” where they could constrain the MAGA agenda. As a true believer—or as true as any opportunist can be in TrumpWorld—Trump has every reason to prepare Vance to carry his baton. Right? 

Except we have no reason to believe Trump cares about what happens to other people and institutions once he leaves the political stage. All evidence suggests that Trump cares only about himself and his ability to command attention and wield power. While he seems to have bowed to the Constitution’s two-term limit, such an acknowledgment of reality doesn’t preclude him from trying to be the power behind the throne.  

That would explain why Trump has been publicly toying with both Vance and Rubio, talking them both up as potential successors and ticketmates, not-so-subtly creating a reality TV show drama with two characters competing for a presidential rose. Vice presidents—when they are not running against their old bosses or their old boss’s namesakes—have a perfect record of winning modern presidential primaries, which gives Vance a natural advantage. So to create drama, Trump must periodically knock Vance down a peg. Last week, it was two pegs.  

Trump is not the only recent president who didn’t adequately set up his vice president for an easy succession. In 107 Days, Kamala Harris expresses her belief that—if not quite set up to fail by the president—she was not supported to succeed by the president’s aides. Lamenting her assignment, handed down early in the Biden administration, to solve the “intractable” problem of the “porous border,” Harris wrote, “No one around the president advocated, Give her something she can win with.” [Emphasis original.]  

But the people around the president were likely taking their cues from a president determined to run for a second term, even though during the 2020 campaign, he sold himself as a transitional figure. In Biden’s last days as a candidate in 2024, trying to salvage his campaign after the disastrous debate with Trump, he was still insisting he was uniquely electable, telling ABC News, “I don’t think anybody’s more qualified to be President or win this race than me.” A four-year project of elevating Harris would have undercut such claims.  

Biden’s inability to get out of his own way is particularly tragic since he had built a strong policy foundation worth extending—investing in technology and infrastructure, producing affordable clean energy, employing antitrust tools to tackle rising costs, and standing against Russian imperialism. Trump, in very stark contrast, does not have a coherent set of thoughtful policies—only self-indulgent impulses—which only adds to the challenge of setting up a successor for success. But the reluctance of both to prepare their vice presidents for the immediate future affected their governing choices. It compromised their ability to build durable political coalitions capable of winning consecutive elections and outlasting their own careers.  

One should never discount the possibility that a vice president can eventually get a promotion. Fifteen out of 49 vice presidents have become presidents, nearly one in three. And while nine of the 15 ascended to the presidency because of a presidential election or resignation, three of the last nine presidents who entered office by election were former vice presidents. Becoming vice president provides an expotentially better probability of becoming president than any other position.  

And if you look at the 2028 presidential primary polls today, you will find the people leading each party’s field are vice presidents.  

Of course, neither Vance nor Harris expect a coronation. But if they both earn presidential nominations, Vance’s fresher humiliations and policy failures would likely make his path far more fraught.  

To shore up his future political viability, Vance is looking for opportunities to define himself on his own terms, but Trump will always make that job difficult. In June, Vance will roll out a new memoir, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, about his conversion to Catholicism. He will likely have to spend part of his publicity tour fielding questions about why his president attacked Pope Leo XIV and shared social media images depicting himself as Jesus Christ.  

The post JD Vance Is the Most Mistreated Vice President Since … Well, The Last Two   appeared first on Washington Monthly.

On March 31, Trans Day of Visibility, the Supreme Court issued an 8-to-1 opinion that places conversion therapy bans, meaning legal restrictions on therapy that helps individuals reject same-sex attractions or resist questions of gender identity, in the First Amendment’s line of fire.

Kaley Chiles, a Colorado mental health counselor whose practice includes conversion therapy, sued her state in 2022, arguing that its conversion therapy ban puts her at risk of being investigated by state authorities.   

The lower court ruled against Chiles. It found that Colorado’s ban—similar to laws in 22 other states and the District of Columbia—simply outlawed a disavowed medical treatment, consistent with the state’s obligations to protect public welfare.

The Supreme Court’s eight-justice majority disagreed. They found that “Colorado’s law regulates the content of her speech and goes further to prescribe what views she may and may not express, discriminating on the basis of viewpoint.”

Chiles asked the Supreme Court to address two legal issues: First, whether the conversion therapy ban should be reviewed under a higher level of scrutiny—requiring more compelling reasoning from the state—because of its entanglements with the First Amendment’s free speech protections; and second, to issue a final ruling on the ban rather than sending it back to the lower court for review, should her arguments prevail.

The Court granted Chiles’s first request. The majority found that the lower court did not use the appropriate level of scrutiny given Chiles’s free speech claims. As Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority, the fact that the regulation “falls only on licensed health care professionals does not change the equation. The First Amendment protects the right of all to speak their minds.”

The Court did not grant Chiles’s second request. Rather than overturn the ban itself, the Court remanded the decision back to the lower court for review under strict scrutiny.

The ruling leaves very little room for the ban’s application to talk-based therapy to survive. But it also raises more questions than it answers—questions that will only be resolved through future litigation.

The justices’ decision to weaken Colorado’s ban should come as no surprise. Chiles v. Salazar is one in a growing list of recent Court decisions that has dialed back LGBTQ advancements. In fact, of the five LGBTQ-related decisions that the Court has reviewed in the past six years, only one supports LGBTQ rights: Bostock v. Clayton in 2020, which declared sexuality- or gender-identity-based discrimination a form of sex-based discrimination. 

Clues about the Court’s leanings were obvious during oral arguments—especially among the conservative justices, who seemed ready to accept the notion that conversion therapy bans as applied to mental health practitioners engage in viewpoint discrimination. Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Samuel Alito went one step further by questioning the relevance of medical experts and “standards of care.”

Yet despite the writing on the wall, the decision hits hard for multiple reasons.

First, instead of the usual six-justice conservative majority siding against LGBTQ rights, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined their colleagues, leaving Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to shoulder the dissent alone. 

For LGBTQ advocates, this may sound a new alarm. Does Kagan and Sotomayor’s movement to the right in Chiles signal an era of even greater judicial hostility towards LGBTQ rights?

What can we make of two liberal justices signing onto an opinion that may usher in a resurgence of conversion therapy? Have they sold out the LGBTQ community? Or could there be some plausibly defensible strategic reason for their apparent defection?

There could be: It is possible that Kagan and Sotomayor both saw the potential relevance of Chiles to the Court’s decision last term in Skrmetti v. Tennessee. That case upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care, which has since prompted similar laws in 27 other states.

In her concurrence in Chiles, which is co-signed by Sotomayor, Kagan posits a “hypothetical” statute that “instead of barring talk therapy designed to change a minor’s sexual orientation or gender identity, this law bars therapy affirming those things.” This, the concurrence argues, is a clear example of the state restricting “speech on only one side.” 

Of course, this is not a hypothetical. Although the law under review in Skrmetti bars medical practices that focus on physiological interventions—hormone replacement, puberty delayers, and surgery—some states have since applied their bans to mental health. On March 2, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton declared that his state’s ban on gender-affirming care will be applied to mental health providers. His intent was to send “a clear warning that there will be consequences for any medical professional, whether a doctor or a therapist” who provides “treatment to minors that transitions their birth gender.”

In fact, the executive director of the Texas Behavioral Health Executive Council had been waiting on the Court’s verdict in Chiles to assess how to contend with Paxton’s announcement. Under Kagan’s hypothetical, Chiles provides Texas therapists with critical constitutional protections.

However, this may be cold comfort to LGBTQ advocates. Although the lower court has not yet reviewed Chiles’s claims within a First Amendment framework, states with conversion therapy bans are now considering how to change the legislative language to comply with the ruling while preserving the ban’s core elements.

Second, although the Court describes their task as “a narrow one,” their decision creates an entirely new category of protected speech—one with broad and significant implications.

If mental health therapy now constitutes speech, it is difficult to imagine what language legislators could deploy that would appease the Court’s framework while also preserving statutory restrictions against conversion therapy. Kagan suggests viewpoint-neutral content-based restrictions, which could regulate the topics that are discussed, but not the views that people adopt. These would still raise First Amendment questions (any speech would under Chiles). However, Kagan argues that, with content-only restrictions, the Court may be able to “relax [its] guard.”

But what exactly would this fix entail in the context of medical care? Would it resemble the current movement to restrict content in public education—where more than 10 states have passed statutes barring K-12 and university instructors from addressing “divisive” concepts like gender identity or LGBTQ rights? Or would content restriction for medical speech look different?

If mental health therapy is now speech, will the state (through licensing boards or general welfare legislation) still be able to regulate mental health provision in accordance with standards of care or best practices?

We are in wholly uncharted territory. As Justice Jackson warns, “[f]or the first time, the Supreme Court has interpreted the First Amendment to bless a risk of therapeutic harm to children by limiting the State’s ability to regulate medical providers who treat patients with speech. What’s next?”

By establishing an entirely new arena of speech, the Court has paved new and uncertain pathways for litigation. In this way, Chiles may be to medical speech what Masterpiece Cakeshop was to wedding provider speech: the lose thread that yearns to be pulled.

The post Chiles v. Salazar: A New Frontier of Speech appeared first on Washington Monthly.

John Podesta, President Clinton’s former chief of staff, launched the Center for American Progress in 2003 to serve as a liberal/progressive counterweight to the well-funded right wing think tanks in the nation’s capital. In its first decade, CAP played a key role in bringing the 2010 Affordable Care Act into existence. In its second, it helped thwart Republican efforts to undermine the bill. 

But CAP, like the rest of the Democratic Party establishment, proved incapable of blocking the malevolent second Trump administration from imposing its destructive will on the nation’s health insurance safety net. Rather than seeking outright repeal, which could be blocked in the Senate, the ACA’s Congressional enemies in the GOP followed the playbook drawn up by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 aimed at undermining the legislation with a few well-targeted hatchet blows. 

The result now being implemented are the biggest rollback in publicly-subsidized health insurance coverage in U.S. history. Millions of families have dropped ACA plans this year that were made unaffordable by elimination of the expanded subsidies passed by the Biden administration. Millions more face elimination from the Medicaid rolls over the next few years as the $1 trillion in cuts contained in last year’s tax cut legislation roll out. 

Employer-based private health insurance, which covers more than half the population, faces its own crisis under Trump. The premiums that companies and their workers pay to cover the cost of care plus insurance industry profits and overhead are rising much faster than either inflation or wages. 

As a result, more and more workers are opting into plans with high deductibles and co-pays to reduce the upfront drain on their paychecks, only to find they can’t afford the extra bills they receive when they get sick. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports 42 percent of adults under 65 are now in high-deductible plans with a mean upfront deductible in 2024 of $2,750, which means 50 percent pay at least that much or more before their insurance coverage kicks in. In a nation where 43 percent of the public says it doesn’t have enough money saved to cover a $1,000 expense, that’s not affordable. 

Voters’ biggest worry  

The January KFF tracking poll found two-thirds of the public now considers health care affordability their number one financial worry. It ranks ahead of rising costs for food and groceries, utilities, housing and gas (although that ranking may shift somewhat in the months ahead thanks to Trump dragging the nation into the Iranian quagmire). The silver lining for Democrats is they still out-poll Republicans by 13 percentage points when it comes to whom voters trust to manage the issue. Moreover, 4 in 10 independents say health care costs will play a major role in determining their vote this fall. 

Those trends clearly suggest voters will be open this fall to big, bold solutions that address their number one economic concern. They need to be easily understood, implementable within a relatively short period of time, and directly address their biggest problem, which is unaffordable out-of-pocket costs. 

Alas, that’s not what CAP offered in its initial election year foray into health care policy prescriptions, which it released Wednesday and called “A Patients’ Bill of Rights To Lower Health Care Costs.” It promised “immediate relief on premiums, deductibles, and insurance denials.” 

While it would achieve some of that for some people, their plan falls far short of a comprehensive approach to reining in the provider prices that drive insurance premiums. It fails to set strict limits based on income on what people must pay when they get sick. 

Most of its proposals, while sound, fall safely within the incrementalist tradition that has long dominated mainstream liberals’ approach to health care reform. Unfortunately, they don’t meet the promise of “immediate relief.” Indeed, it will take years for most of CAP’s reforms to show up in peoples’ paychecks. Democrats and reform-minded Republicans would be better served by considering the bolder, simpler, and more politically practical three-point health care reform plan that I laid out in the pages of the Washington Monthly last December and summarize later in this essay. 

The new incrementalist agenda 

The plan touches on all the major issues. It starts by offering a prescription for reining in drug prices by expanding the number of drugs subject to government negotiation, which began during the Biden administration. It would incorporate international pricing into those negotiations, which has been proposed by the Trump administration; and ban mark-ups by pharmacy benefit managers, which is under consideration by the current Congress. It would also extend the Medicare caps on some drug prices (like insulin) to the commercial insurance market. 

To address soaring commercial insurance rates, CAP calls for the creation of a public option on the exchanges for both individuals and employers, which has been a long-standing goal of many Democrats in Congress. They would set provider payment rates for the public option at 200 percent of Medicare rates for hospitals and 130 percent for physicians. Currently, commercial rates average about 250 percent of Medicare rates, which would make the public option highly competitive in many markets and lower premiums for employers and individuals with ACA plans who make the switch. 

The plan would impose both insurer and provider price regulations to further reduce rates. It would set an “affordability standard” for future insurance premium increases by having the government measure the average increase nationwide in spending per private plan enrollee, and require state regulators or the federal government (in states without rate regulation) to roll back premium increases that rose above the benchmark. 

According to the report’s own estimate, this would only affect 14 states’ ACA plans and 11 states’ employer-based plans. Moreover, if the rollback was limited to the average increase, it wouldn’t be very large. The report pointed to Rhode Island, where a model affordability standard reduced overall premiums by 9 percent or $1,000 a year. But they set their annual increase at 1 percent above inflation, which in our current environment would allow a 3.5 percent increase. Increases for private plans have averaged 6-7 percent in recent years, and only through shifting more of the total costs onto workers. 

The CAP proposal would also set a maximum provider price for any service at 300 percent of Medicare rates. This would rein in prices, but only at extreme outliers since the average price compared to Medicare is 50 percentage points below that target. They also call for returning those savings to workers in the form of lower deductibles, which, the report estimated would cut the average deductible by $933 or nearly in half. But, again, this would only be for plans paying extremely high prices and not affect anyone near or below the average. 

The plan seeks to address the broader market by placing additional price caps on insurers and providers. For insurers, it would limit overhead to the level used by the Federal Employees Health Benefits program, which is about 40 percent of usual commercial rates for profits and administrative costs. 

It would also disallow mark-ups for internal transfer pricing, where insurer-owned physician groups and other closely-held providers charge exorbitant prices to their insurance arm in order to drive up premiums and thus profits at employers’ and employees’ expense. As a final gesture, the plan also called for banning insurance company ownership of providers, a move that the plan recognized “would take years to wind through the courts.” 

Hospital price controls would be placed in the hands of the states, and only imposed when hospital prices exceed the statewide median. The cap for those hospitals would be set at inflation plus 1 percent. Given that nearly every hospital service region is considered highly concentrated with either one or two hospitals controlling the entire market in half the regions, the rule would probably affect a solid majority of U.S. hospitals. The CAP report authors estimated this would save premium payers over $1,300 a year, the most significant cost control measure in the report 

Finally, the CAP plan would ban prior authorization. Instead, it would substitute “independent clinical review … grounded in evidence-based clinical guidelines and ‘appropriate use criteria.’” 

It calls on physician groups to develop clinical decision support tools that “physicians could voluntarily query at the point of care to check whether a planned test, procedure, or treatment aligns with evidence-based criteria.” Such tools already exist (Up to Date, for instance). Why they aren’t used is a separate question. For a separate list of “costly and widely overused services,” insurers could submit claims to an independent review board for adjudication within 48 hours.  

Projected savings from the CAP plan: 

Help everyone instead 

The CAP approach to the current affordability crisis violates what I’ve come to call the Robert Reich rule. In a post last fall on his Substack, the former Secretary of Labor cautioned would-be reformers not to push 10-point plans that few will read and even fewer will understand. If people have a problem, he said, address it directly with something that is easily understood. That most often is what succeeds politically. Complexity doesn’t. 

Almost all the proposals in the CAP plan are complex and not easily understood by average voters. They will be hard to explain when they are attacked by providers and insurers with their expensive advertising campaigns about how it will destroy what people have, which is inevitable for any reform that asks the medical industrial complex to give up something without getting anything in return. 

The CAP authors also failed to offer direct relief to householders in the working age population. The benefits are indirect. Moreover, they do not deal at all with the affordability issues facing low- and moderate-income seniors who live on Social Security alone—about 40 percent of the elderly. 

Almost everything in their initial package will require new legislation, which will take at least a year to pass and a year to implement. Cuts in provider prices that lead to insurance premium declines (with regulations requiring those cuts lead to premium declines) will not automatically be shared with employees. Employers determine how those savings will be divided. 

Employers have historically required employees pick up 25 percent of family plans and 20 percent of individual plans. Those percentages have moved around over the years, and even fallen below those levels in some years. But in recent years, employees have been asked to pay a growing share, which has driven more people to choose their employers’ high deductible plans to save money. 

I did not find in the CAP plan any proposal that assures premium savings will be shared fairly between employers and their employees. There is an insurance regulation that could assure that: Setting a cap on what any household pays for health care out of pocket for co-premiums, deductibles and co-pays. 

Some advocacy groups have proposed adopting a cap on out-of-pocket expenses of $5,000 a year. That is still far to high for anyone in the bottom half of the income distribution. The better way to go, which I included in my plan released last December, is a cap set at a percentage of household income that any household should pay for health care in any given year. 

That, too, would require legislation to regulate how employer-based insurance plans (and government plans like Medicare) are structured. But at least it would solve the problem for everyone. It would not depend on price controls or premium savings that will only impact 11 or 14 states; or be limited to outlier prices at individual hospitals; or only affect some drug prices; or several of the other half-measures in the CAP plan that inevitably would be applied unevenly across the country, and, as a result, not solve everyone’s out-of-pocket cost problem. 

The CAP plan also does little to bring hospitals, insurers, and physicians to the table, which if I read Jonathan Cohn’s book The Ten Year War correctly, was crucial to getting the Affordable Care Act passed. Everyone had to give up something to get something, which in the ACA’s case, was turning no-pay patients, a major contributor to uncompensated care and rising insurance premiums, into paying customers. 

The CAP plan is all pain, no gain for health care’s entrenched special interests. In one sense, that fits our populist times. But as a practical matter, it doesn’t seem like a winning strategy. 

I’ve proposed something that is more radical yet holds out the possibility of building a new, broad-based coalition for major reform. In addition to setting a cap on OOP expenses for all, it would dramatically lower premiums by equalizing the prices that providers can charge any payer, whether private or public. This will require government to pay more so that the privately-insured can pay less. This should be financed by capturing some or all of the savings on the employer side—but not from their workers unless it fit under the individual or household cap. 

At the same time, the government, operating either through state regulators or at the national level, should put providers on a budget that grows more slowly than in the past. CAP would impose a dramatic cut on outliers (inflation plus 1 percent). I would peg the growth in budgets to something less than economic growth, which would allow providers to adjust over time to slower spending growth and provide them with the freedom to deploy their financial resources in ways that promote better health and better outcomes so that the slower growth doesn’t result in a stinting on care or rationing. 

Politicians needn’t worry about how to sell provider payment reform to their constituents. That is something they will need to work out with medical industrial complex behind closed doors once they’ve informed everyone the political will to make changes exists. The CAP plan is no different in that regard. 

What they will be able to say is something that can’t be said about the CAP plan: No family will ever again pay more than X percent of their income for health care. That to me sounds like a winning program. 

The post Half a Loaf From the Center for American Progress  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Beaufort County is a small patch in eastern North Carolina. Its county seat, Washington, located on the northern bank of the Pamlico River, has a population of 10,000. It is also the site of the Beaufort County jail, where on August 26, 1974, Joan Little, a 20-year-old Black woman, killed Clarence T. Alligood, her white jailer, with an ice pick. 

She claimed she had killed him in self-defense during an unwanted sexual assault. Her case continues to attract widespread interest, partly because it became a liberal cause célèbre at the time, with civil rights luminaries such as Angela Davis and Ralph Abernathy supporting her.

As it happens, Free Joan Little, a fascinating short documentary about the notorious trial, directed by the acclaimed documentarian Yoruba Richen, and released late last year, is renewing interest in the case.

It was a case only a nimble prosecutor could prove beyond a reasonable doubt. There were no witnesses to the crime, except the defendant. The incident occurred in the middle of the night with no one else present. Security cameras were not functioning. All the prosecution had left was to argue that the killing consummated a plot to engineer her escape: She enticed him into her cell so she could kill him and get out of jail.

Their case primarily depended on circumstantial evidence, which can be as convincing as direct evidence, but juries often struggle to convict a defendant solely on such grounds. The coroner, who found the jailer had been stabbed with an ice pick 11 times, reported that ten of these wounds were defensive, consistent with a struggle. In contrast, the final, fatal wound to the heart was an offensive thrust.

Little was the jail’s only female inmate, serving a 10-year sentence for breaking and entering. She was part of a burglary ring led by her lover. Her brother, also a member of the ring, testified against her at the trial.

Her story, which changed many times, was that the 62-year-old jailer, Clarence Alligood, entered her cell and threatened her with an ice pick to force her to have oral sex with him. She gave in and stated that after he climaxed, he loosened his grip on the pick. She then wrestled it from him, stabbing him defensively. But after ejaculating, why would he have had reason to threaten her further? She had done what he wanted. Immediately after she escaped, however, she told her cousin’s wife the conflicting story that when Alligood started to remove his clothes, she ran for the ice pick and stabbed him.

Prosecutors argued that Little stole the ice pick from the jailer’s desk with the intent to escape. She had access to Alligood’s desk because the jailer permitted her to make phone calls from his office. One might question why the jailer would need an ice pick to coerce Little into a sexual act, as she was completely at his mercy. Besides, his MO, according to the evidence, was to obtain sex for sandwiches, cigarettes, and prison privileges. He did not need an ice pick. She did.

Following the attack, but before her trial, Little escaped from prison and hid out for 10 days in Washington, North Carolina’s Black community, before surrendering. Judges frequently instruct juries that flight is preeminent evidence of guilt and has independent probative force. Little, who took the stand in her own defense, told the jury that she fled because she was afraid she would be killed had she stayed, insisting she had no trust in the criminal justice system in Beaufort County.

The issue was credibility, which is the sole province of the jury. She took the stand to testify on her own behalf. I have heard judges frequently instruct juries that a “defendant who testifies is a person who has an interest in the outcome of the case. You may, however, consider whether an interest in the outcome … affected the truthfulness of the witness’s testimony.” There were reasons to doubt her story, and many weaknesses in her case. She had admittedly lied under oath at her first trial. She made prior inconsistent statements about the night in question. Little had told others that she planned to get out of jail on August 26. She had just learned that her effort to be released on bond had been rejected. Her credibility should have been in doubt. But the jury believed her.

The local press reported that Alligood had been killed “in the line of duty,” but the facts were otherwise. The jailer’s shoes and socks were found outside the open cell door. His corpse was naked from the waist down. In his left hand, he held his trousers; in his right hand, the ice pick.

The autopsy found seminal fluid in his urethra. The medical examiner said this is common when a man dies, but he could not rule out the possibility that the jailer was engaged in sexual activity immediately before death. The prosecutor conceded the sexual activity and tried the case on the issue of motive, contending that possible sexual activity circumstantially buttressed the theory that Little had a premeditated escape plan: entice the jailer, murder him, and escape.

Standard household tools make formidable murder weapons. An assassin murdered Leon Trotsky with an ice pick. Jael, a Hebrew heroine in the Old Testament Book of Judges, murdered Sisera, the general of the Canaanite army, by driving a tent peg through his skull as he slept in her tent, a pivotal act that helped the Israelites defeat their oppressors. She invited Sisera into her tent after his army’s defeat, fulfilling a prophecy and bringing peace to Israel. Little kept a Bible by her bed, with a clipping from the August 6 edition of The Washington Daily News recounting the story of Jael and Sisera. Was the murder premeditated? No one could prove it.

At the trial, two women, former inmates at the prison, offering Me Too-type evidence, testified for Little that the dead jailer had made improper advances, offering sandwiches or cigarettes for sexual favors. The judge might have excluded such “similar act” testimony as prejudicial, as the New York Court of Appeals did in the case of Harvey Weinstein, but he did not.

Little had other breaks. Initially, the grand jury charged her with first-degree murder, which carried a mandatory death sentence in North Carolina’s gas chamber, but the judge dismissed that charge during the trial for lack of evidence of premeditation. Second-degree murder carried a sentence of life imprisonment.

Little’s activist lawyer, Jerry Paul, turned the case into an international incident. Reputable lawyers don’t try their cases in the press. Not the flamboyant Paul. “I decided early that I had to create her totally,” he said. And signaling how he would do it, he revealed his strategy: “I’m not one who objects to pre-trial publicity,” he said.  He surrendered Little to the authorities only after he staged a press conference putting her in front of the media. Paul was a street fighter, and he saw the case as a path to a national reputation. The Joan Little Defense Fund raised $350,000 for her defense. Activist lawyer William Kunstler entered the case. So did civil rights luminaries such as Angela Davis, Julian Bond, Rosa Parks, and Ralph Abernathy.

The case’s drama, as limned by the media, galvanized rights groups across the country, including civil rights, women’s rights, and prisoners’ rights groups. William Griffin, the chief prosecutor, said, “The media shaped this case. There is no doubt about it.”

Although more than a decade had passed since John Lewis crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, there was the lurking suspicion that racism would influence the trial’s outcome.

David M. Milligan, editor of the local weekly, The Beaufort‐Hyde News, rejected the premise:

This is the South. Here’s a rinky‐dink town with its shacks and shanties. You got this old redneck sheriff and this old redneck jailer and this poor little ole colored gal. She’s there in jail, so defenseless, so innocent, and she gets raped and ravaged by this gross jailer, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, she struck out, trying to defend herself. She had to kill the jailer, and now those ignorant old rednecks are gonna get their revenge on her. They’re gonna make her pay for it with her life. Well, that’s not the story at all.

Paul moved for a venue change, claiming Little could not get a fair trial in Washington. The judge transferred the trial to Raleigh, the state capital, because he was concerned about security and media facilities for the crowd attending the case, not because a fair trial was unavailable in Washington. Paul falsely told the press that the judge transferred the case because she could not get a fair trial locally.

Civil rights activists staged a march in Washington on Little’s behalf. There was no violence or controversy about the march: no Bull Connor, and no goons to break up the demonstration. Washington Mayor Max Roebuck gave an interview to James Reston, Jr. of The New York Times. “They’re pushing their own cause,” he said. “I can’t blame them. This is an opportunity for them. I don’t like it, but they’d be foolish not to take advantage of it.”

Milligan told Reston he had little patience for Northern guilt‐transference and would focus on the case at hand: “We’ve got no responsibility for Boston or Harlem. We’ve got to see to it that things are right in our own town. The point is that Joan Little is here.”

It was the first criminal trial in which jury science, as lawyers call it “jury work,” was used to poll a potential jury’s leanings. Jury research in the Raleigh area showed that the jury—consisting of six whites and six Blacks, including seven women—far from being in a lynching mood, would be receptive to Little’s story. And indeed, after receiving instructions and deliberating, the jury just acquitted Joan Little of murder. On August 15, 1975, just under a year after the murder, it took them only an hour to acquit her. She became the first woman in U.S. history to be acquitted for using deadly force to resist sexual assault.

Yoruba describes the outcome in heroic, resistance terms, telling Ms. last year: “There was a bounty on [Little’s] head. She was up against the death penalty. She was a poor Black woman from North Carolina in 1974. All the forces were aligned against her … Even in those moments, … we can fight for justice and … we can come together.” 

That is true. But as a former prosecutor, I noticed some things. Little was a woman constantly on the run. She still had to serve her time for the breaking charge, but days before she was to be granted parole, she inexplicably escaped from prison yet again, only to be recaptured and re-sentenced.

The trial was riddled with ambiguity, the same kind that David Mamet explored in his play Oleanna. It is common for a debate to follow a high-profile conviction. Juries sometimes get it wrong. After all, a verdict is just an opinion with the force of law. There will inevitably be opinions to the contrary.

There are also controversies surrounding high-profile acquittals. Did a clever defense lawyer “throw dust in the jury men’s eyes?” Consider Dan White, the former San Francisco city supervisor who successfully ran the “Twinkie defense,” claiming that his unhealthy diet evidenced his diminished capacity to commit murder. In 1979, White killed San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. He served only six years in prison and committed suicide some 18 months after his release. And then there is the paradigmatic O.J. Simpson case, where a jury found Simpson not guilty of killing his wife and her friend. Social pressures should never influence trial outcomes. Unfortunately, they often do in America.

The jury should base its verdict purely on the evidence presented in court, avoiding passion and prejudice, and this must be a mutual understanding. It is reasonable to suggest that Joan Little was guilty of premeditated murder, having killed the jailer to escape, but the prosecutors failed to prove it. Without public pressure, they might have stood a better chance.

But the verdict in the Little case was hardly a miscarriage of justice. Where there is reasonable doubt, the law requires the jury to acquit. Little’s prosecutor didn’t have the goods. He failed to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The system worked in the South for a Black woman, which itself is a kind of justice after so many decades, even centuries, of Blacks not receiving equal justice under the law. Whether justice triumphed in this particular case, I think, is another question.

And in 2026, a half-century later, the societal and institutional issues raised by Little’s case are still with us. We have an overly incarcerated society, prisoner abuse, exploitation of women’s bodies for money (just look at the recent Jeffrey Epstein document dump from the Department of Justice), racism in the courts, and the death penalty in 27 states, as well as in the federal system, even though it has been abolished in most of the world for damn good reasons. And yes, public pressure continues to influence the outcome of high-profile prosecutions.

After Joan Little’s eventual release from prison in 1979, she had further brushes with the law and disappeared into the shadows. In 1981, Little was shot in New York, but later recovered from her injuries. A month before the shooting, she had found the message, “Death to Joan” scrawled on a mirror in her Brooklyn apartment.

In 1989, she was arrested in New Jersey on charges that included driving a stolen car. She telephoned William Kunstler. She had returned to New York a free woman, but now, the 34-year-old woman, accompanied by a male, was pulled over for driving a car with a missing front license plate and a stolen back license plate, along with additional charges. Since the 1989 arrest, Little has been out of public view. No one knows where she is today, and since the trial, she has never publicly commented on her case or its outcome. But her complicated legacy endures. No one thought she could be acquitted, a young Black woman in the South, but she was. Whether she was guilty or not can be debated. But the jury has spoken.

The post The Mystery of the Joan Little Case appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The headline number from the Trump Administration’s fiscal 2027 budget, released last week, was the eye-watering $1.5 trillion demanded for the “Department of War.”

But that’s not the only problem in this flaming dumpster of a document. If budgets are meant to be blueprints, what Trump is building is a mausoleum for America’s future.

First, let’s be clear: Trump’s budget has no chance of passing Congress as is. In fact, Congress flatly rejected many of the cuts proposed in last year’s plan, such as a 40 percent decrease in funding for the National Institutes of Health. Trump’s 2027 budget proposes similar reductions, and Congress will likely balk again.

Nevertheless, budgets have political and symbolic worth. They communicate a president’s vision and values, as reflected in their spending priorities. President Barack Obama themed his fiscal 2015 budget “Opportunity for All,” while George W. Bush’s 2003 request—in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks—called for “Securing America’s Future.” Budgets are also meticulous documents meant to convey the seriousness with which the nation’s chief executive undertakes his constitutional duties. They typically include a presidential message to Congress, along with hundreds of pages of detailed tables, spreadsheets, and line-by-line accounting of programs, receipts, and outlays. (Manna for budget nerds; torture for the rest of us.)

Trump’s 2027 budget, in contrast, is the equivalent of a giant middle finger, with few details and little care. It does, however, convey a vision—of a pitiless America that beggars its treasury to beat up other countries and the vulnerable. And it reflects the administration’s values—of contempt for Congress and American taxpayers.

• Cruelty is still the point.

To feed the machine of war, Trump’s budget calls for merciless cuts in vital safety net programs, including those that undoubtedly benefit his supporters. Among the administration’s targets for elimination is the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which provides $4 billion a year to help families pay for utilities. Forty percent of LIHEAP households include a senior, and more than a third include someone with a disability. With home heating and cooling bills already soaring, thanks to Trump’s war in Iran, ending LIHEAP would cause serious financial hardship and even risk lives.

Casual cruelty is the throughline of Trump’s budget; compassion has no place in Trump’s America. As another example, the administration proposes to cut $529 million in housing assistance for people with HIV. And too bad if someone ends up homeless as a consequence. Trump would cut $393 million in homeless assistance programs too.

Predictably, the budget reserves its worst vitriol for immigrants. It proposes an $819 million cut in aid for unaccompanied alien children and wants to eliminate the Refugee Resettlement Program altogether. (At the same time, it proposes $28.5 billion for immigration enforcement, including $2.2 billion for detention.)

• Bigotry is elevated to virtue.

Trump’s budget gestures at clothing itself in the righteousness of ending “waste.” But it generally makes little effort to disguise its naked racism and transphobia. It flings the word “woke” as an all-purpose slur—the word appears 34 times in 70 pages. It also systematically targets any federal program it deems solicitous of minorities or transgender Americans.

For instance, it cuts $64 million from the Fair Housing Initiative Program because of grants to “woke nonprofts that promote radical equity policies.” (The program helps enforce the Fair Housing Act, which prohibits discrimination.) It also proposes to eliminate the Minority Business Development Agency, which assists minority entrepreneurs, and the Minority-Serving Institutions program—an important source of support for historically Black colleges and Hispanic-serving institutions. At the same time, the budget proposes an additional $1.3 million “to eliminate discriminatory Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs in public institutions.”

The administration moreover repeatedly scapegoats transgender Americans to justify slashing research grants, housing aid, and other programs. For example, the budget cuts $254 million from the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, citing “gender extremism” as the rationale. The primary purpose of the fund, in fact, is to help banks invest in low-income areas. Since its creation in 1994, it has enjoyed broad bipartisan support.

• Deficits? What deficits?

Underneath all the posturing and invective, Trump’s budget is not even a budget at all. Unlike every other budget submitted to Congress (including those submitted during Trump’s first term), the 2027 plan offers no information on how to pay for things like the $1.5 trillion literal war chest proposed for defense, and what impact this spending will have on the nation’s already bleak finances. As the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget points out, the budget “presents no summary figures for debt or deficits.” It instead offers overly rosy estimates of projected economic growth, presumably to imply that Trump’s plan will somehow pay for itself. (The budget assumes an average real GDP growth rate of 3.0 percent—a benchmark that’s been matched just once since 2005, according to budget expert Eugene Steuerle, and is now even less plausible given the war.)

The administration is either hiding the ball on the cost of its agenda, or it assumes the current GOP-controlled Congress lacks the temerity to ask any questions. It could also simply be unserious, like the president’s one-page “Great American Healthcare Plan.” Even by Trump standards, the 2027 budget is thin gruel. Its summary budget request for the Small Business Administration, for instance, is a single page with three bullet points for the programs the administration wants ended. Regardless of the explanation, the budget’s obvious incompleteness betrays the administration’s highhandedness and lack of care. It’s an insult to both taxpayers and Congress.

But if Congress does indeed swallow Trump’s budget wholesale, it will have earned the contempt Trump has shown.

New at the Monthly…

Hungary’s pivotal test. Hungarian voters head to the polls today to pass judgment on President Viktor Orbán, and the odds of his electoral survival seem bleak. “Large majorities now associate 15 years of Orbán’s Fidesz party rule with the deterioration of health care (67 percent); a growing gap between the rich and poor (63 percent), deterioration of the education system (63 percent), and worsening of the economy (57 percent),” writes Academy of International Affairs Fellow John Austin. Austin also writes that bad news for Orbán also likely spells bad news for Trump, who followed the Hungarian strongman’s playbook and now faces similar voter discontent. Read here.

Genuine insanity. Generous observers may yet ascribe Trump’s threat this week to obliterate Iran as a master stroke of his “Madman Theory” of diplomacy: Act crazy enough, and the other side will always blink first. Politics Editor Bill Scher, however, argues that there’s no method to Trump’s madness. Trump is in fact just honest-to-God, off-his rocker nuts. “I can’t tell you if Trump has early-stage dementia, narcissistic personality disorder, sociopathy, or some other cerebral affliction,” Bill writes. “But we don’t need a specific diagnosis to recognize with our eyes and ears than he is not in a sound state of mind and should not be trusted with command of the United States military.” Bill’s recommendation? Congress needs to grab the keys from Grandpa. Read here.

How Democrats can regain their mojo on education. Republicans have been gaining trust with voters on education—an issue where Democrats have historically had the edge. Internal conflicts between progressives and centrists have allowed this shift, argues FutureEd Executive Director Tom Toch. To heal this rift—and address public education’s very real problems—Tom offers a new consensus agenda Democrats could adopt. Among his ideas: embracing “school choice” through strategies like charters and promoting achievement on the basics. Read here.

The Apprentices. A centuries-old tradition might be the answer to future-proofing tomorrow’s workers from the disruption of AI: apprenticeships. While entry-level white-collar jobs are disappearing by the thousands, apprenticeships can provide a valuable first rung on the ladder, argues the Progressive Policy Institute’s Bruno Manno. Bruno also argues for the restoration of apprenticeship as a vital components of the nation’s “civic infrastructure,” i.e. “systems designed to expand access and prevent opportunities from being limited to the well-connected.” “When the labor market fails to reliably offer an initial foothold, restoring it becomes a civic duty,” Bruno writes. Read here.

Baristas with BAs. More than 40 percent of recent college graduates are “underemployed,” according to the New York Federal Reserve, meaning that they’re holding jobs that do not match their credentials. These over-educated and underpaid workers are the subject of a new book by New York Times journalist Noam Scheiber, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class. Scheiber argues that the rise of this group could bring fresh energy to organized labor, but reviewer Ken Baer sees something even more consequential: the possibility of meaningful higher ed reform. “Higher education, as an industry, has become too expensive, too mercenary, and too irrelevant for far too many,” he writes. Read here.

Plus…

• Journalist and Monthly Advisory Board member Clara Bingham reviews Amy Littlefield’s eye-opening new book, The Killers of Roe, on the decades-long fight to end abortion rights.
• Politics Editor Bill Scher weighs in on the controversy over lefty streamer Hasan Piker’s involvement in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primaries. Bill argues Piker is the wrong litmus test for Democrats.
• Sara Bhatia reviews a new biography of Judy Blume, the author of Forever… and other books that thrilled and scandalized Gen X teens during the Pleistocene Era.
• Monthly Editorial Intern Samantha Powers reveals how innovations in school discipline have become another casualty of Trump’s ill-considered cuts to education funding.
• Stand Together’s Ryan Stowers challenges the orthodoxy of “college for all.”
• University of North Florida professor Bart Welling marvels at the success of the Artemis II mission—achieved despite an administration that doesn’t value competence.

Coda (state of higher ed edition)…

This year’s college acceptances are all officially out, and America’s most elite schools seem to be having a banner year. Yale recently announced that this year’s applicant pool was the second-largest in its history, while Columbia University set an all-time high of 61,031 applications. The University of Virginia said it received a record 82,118 applications this year, while UCLA garnered about 178,000 (including transfers)—making it the most applied-to college in the country.

Yet recent headlines betray the troubles brewing below the surface. Trump’s relentless attacks on higher education are taking a toll, as are his restrictions on immigration. Add to that a weakening economy and a demographic dearth of 18-year-olds (a consequence of the Great Recession), and the landscape of higher ed looks increasingly bleak:

• “The Fortress Falls.” Princeton University—whose endowment per student exceeds Harvard’s—recently announced salary freezes for tenured faculty, a 1 percent increase in staff pay, and departmental budget cuts of up to 10 percent, according to EDULedger.com. University President Christopher Eisgruber also warned of further cuts to come. “‘These are tough times,” he said.
• Major shifts. Indiana’s public colleges are dumping more than 200 degree programs due to low enrollment, reports Chalkbeat. Among the majors on the chopping block at various schools: special education, women’s studies, philosophy, foreign language studies, fine arts … Meanwhile, New York University announced this week the “suspension” of its master’s in journalism program because of “declining enrollment.”
• International losses. Schools like Columbia and Harvard aren’t the ones that are suffering most from Trump’s crackdown on international students. Rather, it’s places like Lewis University, a tiny Catholic college outside Chicago. The New York Times reports that international students used to represent nearly one-fifth of Lewis’s enrollment and were a welcome resource both in diversity and dollars. Now their number may drop below 500, bringing both a sharp decline in enrollment and tuition revenues. It’s a scenario that many smaller schools across the country are starting to see.

There’s no question Princeton will survive its current crisis, but Lewis University may not. And students attending Indiana’s Purdue University may get a very different—and potentially limited—education compared to the alumni of previous generations. Left unchecked, the trends beginning to emerge in higher education could lead to a variation of the K-shaped bifurcation we’re seeing with the economy: Elite schools hold and even grow their edge, while the schools that actually serve the vast majority of American students decline.

Thanks as always for reading and have a great week!

Anne Kim, Senior Editor

The post Trump’s Budget: Cruelty, Contempt, and Endless Debt appeared first on Washington Monthly.

On Thursday, in the exact White House room where President Trump recently addressed the nation about the Iran war, First Lady Melania Trump strode up to the lectern to address a different sort of crisis. Her topic and demeanor were grave; her scripted words meant to convey solemnity. The delivery, however, conveyed a jarring disconnect. 

This is not to litigate the complex web of associations and legal questions swirling around the Jeffrey Epstein case. Those demand their own continuous investigation. But the timing of the First Lady’s rare national address was weird, the formal setting incongruous, and the call for Congress to act befuddling. We will certainly find out more in the coming days, but this piece is not about the Epstein case. This is about what we heard in that room. 

In a different White House, the halting, occasionally misspoken English of a non-native speaking First Lady would be a powerful symbol. It would represent the beautiful, complex tapestry of the American immigrant experience into which my parents were welcomed and thrived (they always mixed up the personal pronouns “he” and “she” when they spoke). A Slovenian accent echoing in the halls of power could be a testament to the idea that America is not defined by perfect diction, but by the striving immigrant spirit of those who come here, learn, assimilate, and ultimately contribute. Melania Trump’s verbal stumbles would be a badge of honor, a reminder of what it takes to start a new life in a new language. 

But not this White House. 

The Trump administration vilifies immigrants, allowing Stephen Miller to make this a central, unifying theme. During Trump 1 and 2, highly-skilled professionals seeking H1B visas are cast as threats to American jobs. International university students, who pay full-freight tuition and add diversity, are viewed with suspicion. Most shockingly, threatened asylum seekers are demonized at the border. Their accents, languages, and struggles are not seen as honorable symbols for an evolving America but, rather, as markers of an invading “other.” 

Enter Melania (as her book is titled). Her presence is not a celebration of the immigrant story; it is hypocrisy. Her speech was peppered with errors that laid this contradiction bare. When she struggled with words like “trival” instead of “trivial;”  “calculating” instead of “circulating,” and “convinced” instead of “convicted,” it highlighted a glaring, two-tiered system for entry and acceptance into America. 

The first America is for the privileged and protected immigrant—the beautiful one who marries wealth and gets an “Einstein visa” for her “unique abilities.” In this America, an accent is an exotic accessory. Your path is smoothed. Your presence may not always be celebrated, but is at least tolerated as a necessary part of the pageant. 

Then there is the America for everyone else. For the unprotected. The engineer from India, the student from China, or the mother fleeing violence in Honduras. Their presence is framed as a burden, not a gift. They are not afforded the luxury of a platform in the White House. Instead, they face bureaucratic barriers and public scorn. 

The First Lady’s performance was a metaphor for the administration’s entire approach. Her apparent disinterest mirrored the administration’s own lack of empathy for others—those who do not fit its narrow, transactional definition of value. The speech was a missed opportunity to connect, show solidarity, or use her unique position to bridge the divides that have only grown during this administration’s ICE raids and border bullying.  

The words on the page were written to protect FLOTUS by denying any Epstein connection. The speech was also ostensibly made to protect the vulnerable. But the person speaking them represented an administration that does the opposite. The message, garbled as it was, came through loud and clear: in this America, some accents are more equal than others. 

The post Melania Speaks: The Eloquence of Hypocrisy  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

On the evening of April Fools’ Day, while walking my dog, I listened to the live Artemis II countdown on my phone and chatted with neighbors as we all strained to see the contrail of the rocket soaring up into the Florida twilight. It would be wrong to say that I had been eagerly awaiting the launch. Among other things, I’m deeply skeptical about the long-term viability and usefulness of crewed space exploration. But, on the other hand, I grew up during the Space Shuttle era, celebrating successful missions and mourning when astronauts, in the words of a poem cited by Ronald Reagan after the Challenger disaster, “slipped the surly bonds of Earth” and “touched the face of God.” At an impressionable age, I read Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff and watched Philip Kaufman’s stirring film version of the book, which celebrates the scrappy, go-for-broke spirit of the early U.S. space program. And my dad was a career Air Force officer who taught me to love all flying things. For old time’s sake, I tuned in to the Artemis launch. 

My emotional reaction to it took me by surprise. The sounds of NASA officials saying “Go” in calm-jazzed voices one by one, followed a few minutes later by the blast of the rocket, triggered something I haven’t experienced in many months and certainly wasn’t expecting to feel on this occasion: pride.  

After all, here was a U.S. federal agency using American tax dollars to pull off a truly astonishing feat of planning, training, and teamwork, to say nothing of the high-stakes science and engineering that went into the mission. Here was a crew that emblematized our diverse nation—and our continent, with Canada being represented by astronaut Jeremy Hansen—far better than the Apollo missions did. And, at the heart of the matter, setting aside all of NASA’s advanced degrees and expertise, here was a group of wild-eyed dreamers and nerds brazenly rebelling against the most fundamental laws of nature and somehow getting away with it—sending four humans safely into orbit around Earth, with every indication that the astronauts would eventually manage to fly further into space than anyone has gone before.  

As I pondered the success of the mission, my sense of pride didn’t diminish, but I started to wonder if a gigantic April Fools’ prank had been played on all of us. How in the world could such a monumental display of valor and skill happen under the Trump administration? 

(True, the U.S. military has also carried out technologically and logistically impressive operations, even with Pete Hegseth at the wheel, but it’s hard to admire a war machine that executes illegal orders, without hesitation or complaint, in the service of Napoleonic hubris.)      

Think about it. The success of any NASA mission depends not just on endless training and testing but on a leadership structure in which any member of the team, at any moment, must feel empowered to sound the alarm if they notice a glitch, however expensive, time-consuming, or embarrassing it might be to address the problem. Toadyism, corruption, nepotism, and an abusive workplace culture at NASA most likely would have resulted in fiery tragedy on April 1. Instead, we got blazing triumph. Somehow, the Artemis II mission succeeded under the same government of the scammers, by the sycophants, and for the rage-tweeters that has brought us Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Karoline Leavitt, Stephen Miller, Kash Patel, and all the rest.     

Somehow, the crew members rocketed into space in the Orion capsule on the Space Launch System from Kennedy Space Center … rather than in the Trump capsule on the Trump Launch System from Trump-Kennedy Space Center.  

Somehow, crowds of people around the country greeted the launch not with protests and lawsuits and conspiracy theories but with IRL cheers of unfeigned excitement.      

Somehow, a crew mostly made up of “firsts”—the first woman (Christina Koch) and person of color (Victor Glover), along with the first non-American (Hansen), to leave low Earth orbit—made it on board the Orion under a president who has prioritized bullying women, people of color, and Canadians.  

Somehow, a program that Mister Access Hollywood approved during his first term ended up being named after a proudly celibate pagan goddess who was worshipped at wild festivals by dancing women and young girls in bear costumes—a goddess who was so furious about being sexually harassed by Actaeon (to put myth in modern terms) that she turned him into a stag and had his own hunting dogs rip him to pieces. 

Somehow, at least as far as we know, Donald Trump and his family did not figure out how to use the Artemis program to steer billions of dollars into their own bank accounts. 

Somehow, the fan of “clean, beautiful coal” and enemy of wind turbines, who has dedicated his second term to shredding and torching the Biden administration’s climate policies, looked at the work NASA did on Artemis during the Biden years and said, “O.K.”  

Somehow, we saw advanced American technology being used for peaceful purposes rather than for killing schoolchildren and teachers in Iran and sowing chaos in the global economy. (But, then, Artemis doesn’t just depend on American technology: Experts from eleven nations are involved in the project, and the Orion is powered by the European Service Module. In other words: Somehow, NASA was able to work with its international partners in a way diametrically opposed to how Trump has been treating his counterparts around the world.)    

How did everything go so right? Perhaps NASA conveniently failed to give the White House updates on Artemis until the rocket was safely off the ground?  

I know—give the devil his due and all that. Trump doesn’t seem to have been caught off-guard by the launch; he devoted a full 36 seconds to it in his prime-time address on April 1 … before blasting off into a diatribe about sending Iran “back to the Stone Ages.” As Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, notes, the president who founded the U.S. Space Force does seem interested in space exploration. However, this is the same president who has made enormous cuts to NASA programs that could help keep Earth habitable, on top of all his other depredations. I would argue that his priorities are bass-ackwards in terms of NASA’s mission, as in so many other areas.  

Still, one way or another, Trump managed to sit on his hands this time. (That, or his minders were able to keep him so busy wrecking other things that he couldn’t Taj Mahal the space operation.) As the kids might say, someone, somewhere in the federal government decided to let NASA cook. And the rest of us were treated to a vision of things we used to take for granted, but that now seem nothing short of magical: competence, courage, pluralism, scientific prowess, and pride. It is a vision that could help us endure with some measure of lunar equanimity whatever misery Trump’s remaining time in office might bring. It is a vision of the nation that existed before and could exist again. Call it one small leap for humankind.       

The post The Miracle and Mystery of Artemis II appeared first on Washington Monthly.

To say that Americans these days are ambivalent and confused about the value of a college degree is an understatement. For instance, according to a survey by the Schultz Family Foundation, traditional college remains the number one post-secondary path parents advise their children to pursue, even though only half of those parents believe a college degree is worth the investment.

The traditional college experience is right for some people, especially those pursuing specialized careers like medicine or law. And while a degree offers knowledge and skills—and a person’s willingness to stretch their mind and apply themselves to rigorous pursuits—it does not define a person’s potential and capabilities, adaptability, or whether they thrive in a rapidly changing economy. The hard knowledge and soft skills people acquire through work, including internships, apprenticeships, and community volunteering, are important, too.

As someone who engages with business, education, and civic leaders about the future of work, I know what happens when we broaden the definition of “job-ready.” As a father of four, I have also witnessed how a young person’s life can be changed by an employer who sees beyond a college credential.

My son Jesse was always ambitious and hardworking, but, as we all do, he had a unique way of learning. The standardized approach to school left him with considerable self-doubt and questions about whether college was the right path. Still, because he was interested in business and had even launched a few startups, Jesse thought a four-year degree was the right choice.

Like so many parents, we did too.

What happened next was heartbreaking. My son struggled. After a single semester, he left school to pursue what he loved: nice clothing. And by that, I mean selling nice clothing. At Nordstrom.

In the retail sector, Jesse flourished. He quickly became one of the store’s top salespeople, was promoted, and put on a leadership development track. He advanced, I am certain, because he loved his work and had aptitudes—people skills, social awareness, and a sense of style that came entirely from his mother—that Nordstrom needed.

One day, my kind and perceptive son saw a customer having a tough time and helped him. That led to a lunch invitation, which turned into a soft interview for a sales position at Cook Medical, a national medical device manufacturer. The leaders at Cook were intrigued by Jesse. Despite no college degree, he had sales success, quality letters of recommendation, and those dazzling people skills. They made him an offer.

Cook’s decision to take a chance on Jesse set in motion companywide changes in hiring practices; it now looks for traits like mindset and aptitude rather than just educational pedigree.

Jesse did not follow the career map that so many families carefully draw, but he excels at Cook, finding success and purpose in selling medical devices that improve people’s lives. And for one company at least, he inspired a rewriting of the talent playbook, creating opportunities for other job seekers.

So, I have a message for parents: A four-year degree from a top-tier university does not guarantee career success or fulfillment. College is just one path. In a world where technology is rapidly changing our jobs and hiring managers question whether college graduates have the skills needed to succeed, parents and young people should examine the range of post-high school options. 

Employers certainly are, and they are embracing new pathways to address the workforce gaps they have experienced over decades.

Camye Mackey, the Atlanta Hawks’ executive vice president and chief people, diversity, and inclusion officer, told me workforce gaps often stem from outdated hiring and retention practices, such as job descriptions that don’t reflect actual needs, limited visibility into how skills transfer across job functions, and automated hiring that may unintentionally screen promising workers out of the talent pool.

To address the NBA franchise’s own gaps, the Hawks focus on each applicant and employee’s strengths—their potential to contribute—and match them with roles where they can have the greatest impact. The organization has also invented pathways that enable teammates to grow, reskill, and access opportunities they may not have previously considered.

Other companies are building infrastructure to “bring the outside in and the inside up,” regardless of whether a person has a degree.

I wish I could take credit for this phrase, but it comes from Missy Hopson at Ochsner Health, a nonprofit health care provider that operates hundreds of hospitals and urgent care centers. Over the last 15 years, Ochsner has constructed a system of training, development, mentorship, and career planning that taps new talent from the communities where it operates—bringing the outside in—then walks alongside employees throughout their career journey, encouraging them to acquire new skills and challenges, allowing them to rise through the organization.

The “outside in, inside up” strategy has led to higher employee retention, greater productivity, and improved patient satisfaction—while changing the lives of thousands of employees.

That last point is important. Employers are not the only ones who benefit from changing how they train and hire. By creating a system that encourages people to explore what gives them passion and purpose, organizations prepare employees to weather technological, cultural, and economic shifts. In an environment where parents and students brim with questions about whether AI will replace today’s jobs, that outcome matters.

Meanwhile, data center innovators in West Texas are creating employment opportunities for people without a college degree.

Texas has the country’s second-largest concentration of data centers, but the region lacked one resource: workers trained to build, operate, and sustain them. Instead of recruiting degreed applicants from outside the region, the Education Design Lab and SkillUp Coalition, along with local employers and educators, created the Texas Flywheel Initiative, which connects residents to the training, employers, and career navigation tools needed to step into these exciting jobs.

The Hawks, Ochsner, and West Texas data companies are not alone. Businesses like IBM, Delta Airlines, Google, and Bank of America have dropped degree requirements for most jobs. Instead, they are finding people who can do the job from day one, who are passionate about the work, and who are adaptable enough to assume new responsibilities as the company, technology, and labor market shift.

These replicable models show that success in emerging, lucrative fields is possible without a four-year degree. I sympathize with parents who are unsure about a non-college career path. But looking at the wonderful life my son Jesse has built, I know what’s possible when employers give talented young people like him a chance to thrive by hiring based on potential, not credentials.

The post Employers Are Moving Beyond Educational Pedigree. It’s Time We All Do appeared first on Washington Monthly.