This ancient bit of ingenuity keeps carbon trapped for thousands of years

For all its plant and animal life aboveground, the Amazon rainforest’s soils are surprisingly poor in nutrients necessary for growing food. Thousands of years ago, the region’s Indigenous peoples solved this problem by creating “terra preta” from table scraps and charcoal and tucking it away in the hostile soil.

Today, that ancient bit of ingenuity is a powerful climate solution. As biomass like trees and crops grow, they sequester carbon in their leaves and branches. Heat that biomass up without fully consuming it and it turns to nearly pure carbon known as biochar, which farmers soak in compost or fertilizer to “charge” it with nutrients, then add to their soils. That simultaneously improves crop yields and better retains water, all while locking carbon away from the atmosphere. Rising demand from farmers and big business is expected to push the global market for biochar from $600 million two years ago to $3 billion this year.

How do you save a rainforest? Leave it alone

The nagging question, though, is exactly how long that carbon stays in the soil. A new study adds to a growing body of evidence that scientists have been underestimating the staying power of biochar, meaning the technology is actually an even more powerful way to store carbon than previously thought. “I’m talking about over 90 percent very easily surviving multi-thousands of years,” said Hamed Sanei, a professor of organic carbon geochemistry at Denmark’s Aarhus University and lead author of the paper published in the journal Biochar. The research suggests that biochar is much more resilient than currently calculated by researchers. “The current model that we’re talking about is saying 30 percent of almost all biochar that’s being produced will be gone in 100 years.”

Nailing down exactly how long biochar can hold onto carbon is crucial for the carbon-removal credit industry, where companies like Microsoft and Google fund projects to draw carbon out of the atmosphere. These credits reached 8 million metric tons of carbon in 2024, a 78 percent jump from the prior year. So scientists have been running experiments monitoring how microbes degrade biochar over a few years in soil, then extrapolating that over longer time scales. Doing that sort of modeling, the U.N.-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other research groups have reckoned that after a century, between 63 and 82 percent of the biochar will stay in the ground.

"The new research is really unlocking this 1,000-year argument."

The critical clue for Sanei was a naturally occurring material called inertinite, a stable form of organic carbon in Earth’s crust, formed when wildfires char forests and the burned vegetation fossilizes. Biochar is just the result of humans replicating that process: If the biomass is exposed to sufficiently high temperatures — over 1,000 degrees F is ideal — the carbon should transform into a material that soil microbes struggle to digest, which is how the charred plants in inertinite were able to last long enough to fossilize. Much as humans eat food off dishes instead of eating the dishes themselves, bacteria and fungi choose to eat organic matter like leaves over biochar. “It’s kind of like if you have a nice piece of cake and they bring it to us on a plate, we’re going to eat the cake,” Sanei said. “If we are very hungry, we eat it much faster. But still, we’re not going to eat the plate.”

Much as inertinite survived over vast stretches of geologic time, biochar should be able to last for millennia, Sanei and his coauthors calculate. The fact that scientists are finding intact biochar in the Amazon’s ancient terra preta suggests that it’s happening. “Biochar is already a compelling solution,” said Thomas A. Trabold, a sustainability scientist at the Rochester Institute of Technology and CEO of Cinterest, a company developing biochar technology. “This data just suggests that the benefits are even greater than we already assumed.”

Not all biochar is created equal, though. For one, woody biomass turns to better biochar because it has a higher carbon content than leafy material or grass. And the higher the temperatures used in the manufacturing process, the better chance that carbon will stay in the soil. The local climate matters, too, as warmer soils lead to more microbial activity that can degrade biochar.

Still, by carefully controlling the production of biochar, companies can produce a material that they know contains a given amount of carbon. This becomes a carbon removal credit, which companies buy to show they’re investing in removing carbon from the atmosphere (even if they’re not doing all they can to reduce their own emissions). Most carbon removal credits have a standard time frame of 100 years, according to Erica Dorr, who leads the climate team at Riverse, a carbon crediting platform in France. But if scientists are now talking about biochar lasting for thousands of years instead of centuries, that makes it more appealing for corporations buying credits, Dorr said.

“It wasn’t very interesting to issue a 500-year or 1,000-year biochar removal credit, because the model would tell us that there’s not much remaining after that long,” Dorr said. “Now, the new research is really unlocking this 1,000-year argument.”

That would put biochar on par with other carbon removal techniques like direct air capture, in which giant machines suck carbon out of the air and pump it underground. But direct air capture remains expensive, and the technology is nowhere near widespread enough to put a meaningful dent in carbon emissions. Biochar, on the other hand, is a proven technique that’s been used for thousands of years, capable of improving agriculture and, according to this new research, locking carbon away for millennia.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

about climate change

The FCC’s MAGA standard: Target Trump’s enemies, let Fox News off the hook

Chair Brendan Carr of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), President Donald Trump’s “censure-in-chief,” is waging a war on the First Amendment and freedom of the press by investigating all of the president's perceived enemies and the major media networks, while letting Fox News and Rupert Murdoch off the hook.

The selective weaponization of the FCC against media outlets that President Trump dislikes by threatening to revoke their licenses is not only unprecedented and dangerous but also beyond hypocritical. The fact is that only Fox’s leadership has repeatedly violated the character qualifications required for broadcast licensees.

In 2023, the Media and Democracy Project (MAD) and its allies, former FOX executives and FCC officials, asked the FCC to deny the renewal of a Fox-owned local broadcast station’s license. The groups alleged that senior management of Fox Corporation — including Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch — manipulated their audience by knowingly broadcasting false news about the 2020 election. How do we know? The factual findings in the Dominion case confirmed that Fox repeatedly made false statements. In my opinion, they undermined our democracy and contributed to the Jan. 6 insurrection.

The commission responded by taking the rare step of opening the issue for public comment. But over 550 days later in the waning moments of the Biden administration, the FCC’s Media Bureau grouped together MAD’s petition with politically motivated complaints against ABC, CBS and NBC and dismissed them all stating it was an attempt to thwart the weaponization of “the licensing authority of the FCC in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment.”

We can see how well this preemptive maneuver turned out because Chairman Carr immediately reinstated the complaints against ABC, CBS and NBC, but not MAGA’s favorite network, FOX.

Even before he had assumed the position of chair, Carr was leveraging the FCC’s power to coerce Paramount/CBS over the “60 Minutes” transcript. Now, the FCC chairman is digging into ABC’s debate moderation, NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” guest appearances and CBS’s “60 Minutes” — but won’t touch Fox.

Carr is twisting the FCC’s “public interest” and “character” standards into partisan tools. ABC is accused of bias in moderating a presidential debate because it pointed out a few of Trump’s lies. The CBS case is second-guessing editorial decisions on “60 Minutes,” and NBC is incorrectly accused of violating the equal time rule. None one of which is based on court findings.

Despite the current political climate and the FCC’s alarming attacks on the First Amendment, we decided to appeal. Why? We are right on the facts.Plus, our appeal will demonstrate the difference between our petition and the flimsy cases that Carr has embraced and can be used to strengthen the rules preventing the weaponization of free speech.

The Murdochs’ and Fox’s lies about the election contributed to the Jan. 6 insurrection in the Capitol and duped millions of Americans into believing that the election was stolen. These actions shocked the conscience and grievously damaged the country. We believe strongly that the only way to protect our democracy and the FCC from further weaponization is to establish a bright-line test to provide clear guidance for when an evidentiary hearing is required in a broadcast license renewal.

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Our petition can be used to protect First Amendment rights by establishing that the courts should adjudicate questions of defamation and free speech, not partisan political appointees. Once adjudicated, it is up to the FCC to determine the proper consequences for a broadcast licensee’s actions through an evidentiary hearing where the facts can be collected and thoroughly reviewed. By relying on court adjudication, the FCC would be protecting against politically motivated complaints such as those brought by the Center for American Rights.

Some argue that Fox News is a cable outlet and that the FCC has no jurisdiction over cable television. But this argument ignores the fact that the Communications Act of 1934 and subsequent FCC rulemaking impose character requirements on broadcast licensees. Congress decided that owning and operating a broadcast station on the public airwaves is not a right — it’s a public trust. Never before has the commission been confronted with so much evidence attached to a petition that clearly shows that an FCC broadcast licensee undermined that trust.

It is also important to note that Fox’s actions are not protected by the First Amendment. Preeminent First Amendment champion Floyd Abrams settled that debate by filing in support of MAD’s petition.

Fox and Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch demonstrate why those standards are needed. Before Fox settled the Dominion defamation case for $787.5 million, the judge found it knowingly spread falsehoods. In my opinion, those actions damaged public confidence in elections and those decisions were made to protect the company's profits.

Carr must stop playing political games and ignoring a case against Fox that is based on judicial rulings showing egregious behavior. To serve the public and defend free speech, the commission should use MAD’s Fox petition to erect bright-line protection against the misuse and abuse of the commission's rules.

about this topic

Slouching toward Mount McKinley: Trump and the end of the American century

In the weeks leading up to the recent presidential inauguration in Washington, this country and an anxious world expected many different things from what might be called, to borrow the title of a famed William Butler Yeats poem, "The Second Coming" of Donald J. Trump.

But nobody expected this. Nobody at all.

“We will restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley where it should be and where it belongs,” President Trump announced to a burst of applause during his inaugural address on Jan. 20. Continuing his celebration of a decidedly mediocre president, best known for taking this country on an ill-advised turn towards colonial conquest, Trump added: “President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent — he was a natural businessman — and gave Teddy Roosevelt the money for many of the great things he did including the Panama Canal which has foolishly been given to the country of Panama after the United States… spent more money than ever spent on a project before and lost 38,000 lives in the building of the Panama Canal.”

Moving on from such fractured facts and scrambled history, Trump suggested the foreign policy principles that would guide his new administration, or to quote that poem, the "rough beast" as it "slouches towards" Mount McKinley "to be born."

Trump's imperialist acid flashback: Is his Club Gaza dream for real?

Then, to another round of applause, he added ominously: "We have been treated very badly from this foolish gift that should have never been made, and Panama's promise to us has been broken. The purpose of our deal and the spirit of our treaty has been totally violated. American ships are being severely overcharged and not treated fairly in any way, shape, or form… And above all, China is operating the Panama Canal. And we didn’t give it to China. We gave it to Panama, and we’re taking it back."

In a quick segue, the president then promised to act with a “courage, vigor and vitality” that would lead the nation “to new heights of victory and success,” presumedly via a McKinley-esque policy of tariffs, territorial conquest and great-power diplomacy.

Remembering William McKinley

Since President William McKinley’s once-upon-a-time mediocrity was exceeded only by his present-day obscurity, few observers grasped the real significance of Trump’s remarks. To correct such a critical oversight, it’s important to ask two significant questions: Who was William McKinley and how might his legacy influence current American foreign policy? In fact, Trump and his key advisers are planning to use McKinley’s Gilded Age imperialism as their guide, even their inspiration, for overturning the liberal internationalism that has marked American foreign policy for the past 80 years.

After an otherwise undistinguished career in Congress crowned by the passage of the McKinley Tariff of 1890 with record-high import duties, he won the presidency in 1896 thanks to the influence of Mark Hanna, a wealthy industrialist — the 19th-century equivalent of a present-day tech billionaire — who tithed his fellow millionaires to create a war chest that would fund the country’s costliest political campaign up to that time. In doing so, Hanna ushered in the modern era of professional electioneering. That campaign also carried American political satire to new heights as, typically, a withering political cartoon caricatured a monstrously bloated Hanna, reclining on money bags given by millionaires like banker J.P. Morgan, declaring, “I am confident. The Working Men Are with Us.” (Sound familiar?)

As president from 1897 to 1901, McKinley enacted record-high tariffs and used the brief Spanish-American War of 1898 to seize a colonial empire of islands stretching halfway around the world from Puerto Rico to the Philippines. Instead of crowning the country with an imperial glory akin to Great Britain’s, those conquests actually plunged it into the bloody Philippine-American War, replete with torture and massacres.

Trump and his key advisers are planning to use McKinley’s Gilded Age imperialism as their guide, even their inspiration, for overturning the liberal internationalism that has marked American foreign policy for the past 80 years.

Rather than curtail his ill-fated colonial venture and free the Philippines, McKinley claimed he had gone “down on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for light and guidance.” As it happened, his God evidently told him to conquer and colonize, something that he arranged in great-power bilateral talks with Spain that determined the fate of millions of Cubans and Filipinos, even though they had been fighting Spanish colonial rule for years to win their freedom.

At the price of several hundred thousand dead Filipinos, those conquests did indeed elevate the United States into the ranks of the great powers whose might made right — a status made manifest (as in destiny) when McKinley’s vice president and successor Theodore Roosevelt pushed rival European empires out of South America, wrested the Panama Canal Zone from Colombia, and won the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering an end to the Russo-Japanese War.

With surprising speed, however, this country’s leaders came to spurn McKinley’s embrace of a colonial empire with its costly, complicated occupation of overseas territories. Just a year after he seized the Philippine islands, his secretary of state called for an “open door” in China (where the U.S. had no territorial claims) that would, for the next 50 years, allow all powers equal access to that country’s consumer markets.

After 1909, Secretary of State Philander Knox, one of the founders of the United States Steel Corporation, pursued a program of "dollar diplomacy" that promoted American power through overseas investments rather than territorial conquests. According to historian William Appleman Williams, an imperial version of commerce and capital “became the central feature of American foreign policy in the 20th century,” as the country’s economic power “seeped, then trickled, and finally flooded into the more developed nations and their colonies until, by 1939, America’s economic expansion encompassed the globe.”

Emerging from World War II, a conflict against the Axis powers — Germany, Italy and Japan — that had seized empires in Europe, Africa and Asia by military conquest, Washington built a new world order that would be defined in the U.N. Charter of 1945, guaranteeing all nations the right to independence and inviolable sovereignty. As Europe’s colonial empires collapsed amid rebellions and revolutions, Washington ascended to unprecedented global power marked by three key attributes —alliances like NATO that treated allies as peer powers, free trade without tariff barriers and ironclad assurance of inviolable sovereignty. This unique form of global power and influence (which involved the seizure of no more territory) would remain the guiding genius of American imperial global hegemony. At least that remained true until this January.

The past as prologue

Although none of us were quick to grasp the full implications of that inaugural invocation of McKinley’s ghost, Donald Trump was indeed signaling just what he planned to do as president. Leaving aside the painfully obvious parallels (like Elon Musk as a latter-day Mark Hanna), Trump’s foreign policy has already proved a surprising throwback to a McKinley-esque version of great-power politics marked by the urge to take territories, impose tariffs and conclude diplomatic deals.

Let’s start with the territorial dimension of Trump’s ongoing transformation of U.S. foreign policy. Just as McKinley moved to seize an empire of scattered islands instead of whole countries like the Congo or China, so Donald Trump has cast his realtor’s eye on an unlikely portfolio of foreign properties. Take the Panama Canal. In his first trip as secretary of state, Marco Rubio swept into Panama City where he warned its president to reduce Chinese influence over the canal or face “potential retaliation from the United States.” In Washington, Trump backed his emissary’s threats, saying: “China is running the Panama Canal… and we’re going to take it back, or something very powerful is going to happen.” Panama’s president, José Raúl Mulino, promptly pushed back, stating that Washington’s claim about China was “quite simply [an] intolerable falsehood,” but also quickly tried to placate Trump by withdrawing from Beijing’s global Belt and Road Initiative. The reaction among our Latin American neighbors to this modern edition of gunboat diplomacy was, to say the least, decidedly negative.

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Next on Washington’s neocolonial shopping list was Greenland. On his sixth day in office, Trump told the press aboard Air Force One: “I think Greenland will be worked out with us. I think we’re going to have it. And I think the people want to be with us.” Invoking that thawing island’s mineral wealth, he added: “I don’t know really what claim Denmark has to it. But it would be a very unfriendly act if they didn’t allow that to happen because it’s for protection of the free world. It’s not for us, it’s for the free world.” In a whirlwind diplomatic offensive around the capitals of Europe to counter Trump’s claims, Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen won strong support from the Nordic nations, France and Germany, whose then-leader, Olaf Scholz, insisted that “borders must not be moved by force.”

After roiling relations with America’s closest allies in Europe and Latin America, Trump topped that off with his spur-of-the-moment neocolonial claim to the Gaza strip during a Feb. 4 news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too,” Trump announced to Netanyahu’s slack-jawed amazement. “We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous, unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings. Level it out.” After relocating two million Palestinian residents to “one, two, three, four, five, seven, eight, 12” sites in places like Jordan or Egypt, the U.S. would, Trump added, “take over that piece and we’re going to develop it, create thousands and thousands of jobs, and it’ll be something that the entire Middle East can be very proud of.” Warming to his extemporaneous version of imperial diplomacy, Trump praised his own idea for potentially creating a “Riviera of the Middle East” in Gaza, which would become “one of the greatest and most spectacular developments of its kind on Earth.”

Just as McKinley moved to seize an empire of scattered islands instead of whole countries like the Congo or China, so Trump has cast his realtor's eye on an unlikely portfolio of foreign properties.

The international backlash to his urge for a latter-day colonial land grab came hard and fast. Apart from near-universal condemnation from Asia and Europe, Washington’s key Middle Eastern allies — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Jordan — all expressed, as the Saudi Foreign Ministry put it, a “firm rejection of any infringement on the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people.” When Jordan’s King Abdullah visited the White House a week later, Trump pressed hard for his Gaza plan but the king refused to take part and, in a formal statement, “reiterated Jordan’s steadfast position against the displacement of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.”

Setting aside Trump’s often jocular calls for Canada to become America’s “51st state,” none of his neocolonial claims, even if successfully accomplished, would make the slightest difference to this country’s security or prosperity. Think about it. America already dominates the Panama Canal’s shipping traffic (with 73% of the total) and a restoration of sovereignty over the Canal Zone would change nothing. Similarly, Washington has long had the only major military base in Greenland and its continued presence there is guaranteed by the NATO alliance, which includes Denmark. As for Gaza, it would be the money sink from hell.

Yet there is some method to the seeming madness of the president’s erratic musings. As part of his reversion to the great-power politics of the Victorian age, all of his territorial claims are sending a chilling message: America’s role as arbiter and defender of what was once known as a “rules-based international order,” enshrined in the U.N. Charter, is over. Henceforth, all-American nationalism will Trump — yes, that’s the word! — any pretense to internationalism.

Meet Tariff Man

The second key facet of Trump’s attack on the liberal international order, tariffs, is already proving so much more complicated and contradictory than he might ever have imagined. After World War II, a key feature of the liberal international order created through the U.N. Charter was a global trade regime designed to prevent a recurrence of the disastrous protective tariffs (and “tariff wars” that went with them) which deepened the devastating Great Depression of the 1930s. While the World Trade Organization sets the rules for the enormous volume of international commerce, localized treaties like the European Union and NAFTA have produced both economic efficiency and prosperity for their respective regions. And while Trump hasn’t yet withdrawn from the WTO, as he has from the World Health Organization and the Paris climate accords, don’t count on it not happening.

On the campaign trail last year, candidate Trump advocated an “all tariff policy” that would impose duties on imports so high they could even, he claimed, replace the income tax in funding the government. During his first two weeks in office, Trump promptly imposed a 25% duty on all imports from Canada and Mexico. Since North America has the world’s most integrated industrial economy, he was, in effect, imposing U.S. tariffs on the United States, too. With the thunderclouds of an economic crisis rumbling on the horizon, he “paused” those tariffs in a matter of days, only to plunge ahead with a 10% tariff on all Chinese goods and a 25% duty on aluminum and steel imports, including those from Canada and Mexico, and threats of reciprocal tariffs on all comers.

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As an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute warned, “Introducing large increases in the prices of imported goods could breathe new life into some of the inflationary embers.” Indeed, a sudden spike in inflation seemed to put an instant crimp on his tariff strategy. Even though the U.S. economy’s integration with regional and global markets is now light years away from the McKinley Tariff of 1890, Trump seems determined to push tariffs of all sorts, no matter the economic damage to American business or the costs for ordinary consumers.

A return to great-power politics?

Consider an attempted return to the great-power politics of the Victorian age as the final plank in Donald Trump’s remaking of American foreign policy. Setting aside the sovereignty enshrined in the U.N. Charter that seats all nations, large and small, as equals in the General Assembly, he prefers to deal privately with peer autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un.

Back in 1898, McKinley’s deal-making in Paris on behalf of uninvited Cubans and Filipinos was typical of that imperial age. He was only following in the footsteps of Germany’s Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who had, in 1885, led his fellow European imperialists in carving up the entire continent of Africa during closed-door chats at his Berlin residence. That conference, among other things, turned the Congo over to Belgium’s King Leopold II, who soon killed off half its population to extract its latex rubber, the “black gold” of that day.

Trump’s deal-making over the Russo-Ukraine War seems a genuine reversion to such great-power diplomacy. The new administration’s first Cabinet member to visit Ukraine, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, arrived in Kyiv on Feb. 12 with a proposal that might have made King Leopold blush. In a blunt bit of imperial diplomacy, the secretary gave Ukraine’s president exactly one hour to sign over a full 50% of his country’s vast store of rare minerals, the value of which Trump estimated at $500 billion, as nothing more than a back payment for military aid already received from the Biden administration. In exchange, Bessent offered no security guarantees and no commitments to additional arms, prompting Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to publicly reject the overture.

On Feb. 12, Trump also launched peace talks for Ukraine through a “lengthy and highly productive” phone call with Putin, agreeing that “our respective teams start negotiations immediately.” Within days, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that “returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective” and Trump himself added that NATO membership for Kyiv was equally unrealistic — in effect, making what a senior Swedish diplomat called “very major concessions” to Moscow even before the talks started. And in the imperial tradition of great powers deciding the fate of smaller nations, the opening peace talks in Saudi Arabia on Feb. 18 were a bilateral Russo-American affair, without any Ukrainians or Europeans present.

Setting aside the sovereignty enshrined in the U.N. Charter that seats all nations as equals, Trump prefers to deal privately with peer autocrats like Russia's Vladimir Putin, China's Xi Jinping and North Korea's Kim Jong-un.

In response to his exclusion, Zelenskyy insisted that “we cannot recognize any… agreements about us without us.” He later added, “The old days are over when America supported Europe just because it always had.” Trump shot back that Zelenskyy, whom he branded a “dictator,” had “better move fast” to make peace “or he is not going to have a Country left.” He then pressured Ukraine to sign over $500 billion in minerals without any U.S. security guarantees, a classic neocolonial resource grab that he reluctantly modified by dropping that extortionate dollar limit just in time for Zelenskyy to visit the White House. While witnessing this major rupture to the once-close cooperation of the NATO alliance, European leaders convened “an emergency summit” in Paris on Feb. 17, which aimed, said British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, “to ensure we keep the U.S. and Europe together.”

Well, don’t count on it, not in the new age of Donald Trump.

Clearly, we are at the threshold of epochal change. In the words of the Yeats poem, "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world… Surely some revelation is at hand."

Indeed, that revelation is likely to be not just the end of the liberal international order but the accelerated decline of U.S. global power, which had, over the past 80 years, become inextricably interwoven with that order’s free trade, close alliances and rules of inviolable sovereignty. If these tempestuous first weeks of Trump’s second term are any indication, the next four years will bring unnecessary conflicts and avoidable suffering for so much of the world.

about Trump's dreams of empire

SpaceX Starship explodes during test flight, causing ground stops at four Florida airports

A SpaceX launch test went awry on Thursday when the company’s Starship dramatically exploded on the craft’s eighth test flight.

"Space launch debris" led the Federal Aviation Administration to temporarily halt flights at four of Florida’s busiest airports in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach and Orlando on Thursday. The FAA announced that it was “requiring SpaceX to perform a mishap investigation” in a Thursday night statement. The agency, a target of SpaceX owner Elon Musk's federal government-slashing DOGE, will keep SpaceX Starship flights grounded until the investigation wraps.

It was the second failure in a row for the company, following a Starship explosion in January during the probe’s seventh test flight.

SpaceX launch plans paused by FAA after rocket failure

SpaceX acknowledged the failed launch in a post to X.

"During Starship's ascent burn, the vehicle experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly and contact was lost. Our team immediately began coordination with safety officials to implement pre-planned contingency responses," the company wrote. "We will review the data from today's flight test to better understand root cause. As always, success comes from what we learn, and today’s flight will offer additional lessons to improve Starship's reliability."

Musk, who posts to his social media platform X nearly 100 times per day, has remained silent on the failed launch.

about SpaceX

“An affront to the First Amendment”: CBS moves to dismiss Trump’s “60 Minutes” suit

CBS parent company Paramount moved to dismiss a lawsuit lobbed by President Donald Trump over an allegedly unfair "60 Minutes” interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris.

In a pair of Thursday motions, Paramount argued the suit should be dismissed for multiple reasons. One motion argued filing in the Northern District of Texas venue was a blatant attempt at "forum shopping." The other argued that the suit should be tossed on First Amendment grounds.

“This lawsuit is an affront to the First Amendment and is without basis in law or fact,” attorneys for Paramount wrote in the latter motion. “They not only ask for $20 billion in damages but also seek an order directing how a news organization may exercise its editorial judgment in the future.”

As for the Texas court in which Trump filed suit, Paramount alleges that “none of the Defendants is subject to personal jurisdiction in Texas on these claims. CBS Broadcasting Inc. is a New York corporation, CBS Interactive Inc. and Paramount Global are Delaware corporations, and all three have their principal place of business in New York.”

ABC News capitulates to Donald Trump. Is this the future of American media?

The network released the full, unedited interview with Harris last month amid pressure from Trump’s FCC. But the president doubled down on the speech-chilling assault, telling reporters that edits to the interview “probably did affect the election” in his second term’s first Cabinet meeting.

The network's opposition to the suit sets them apart from other news organizations in Trump's second term. Disney-owned ABC News settled a $15 million suit late last year after Trump’s election win, apologizing for host George Stephanopoulos’ on-air claim that Trump had been found “liable for rape.”

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta also settled a $25 million suit stemming from its removal of Trump’s accounts for violating the platform's terms of service.

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“An American president is not a king”: Judge reverses Trump’s firing of NLRB member

A federal judge ruled that President Donald Trump illegally fired National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox in January, ordering the Biden appointee be reinstated to the five-seat board, which has lacked a quorum since her removal.

The January firings of Wilcox and NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo were an early test of the Trump administration’s power. Though the law specifies a board member can only be fired for “neglect of duty or malfeasance in office,” Trump dismissed Wilcox via email and named right-wing board member Marvin Kaplan as chair.

U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell ruled on Thursday that Wilcox’s firing was unlawful, declaring the Trump-supplied pink slip "null and void.” Wilcox, whose term is set to run until late 2028, would give Democrats a 2-1 majority on the panel.

“I can’t give prophylactic restraining orders": Chutkan declines request for "broad" block on DOGE

“The president seems intent on pushing the bounds of his office and exercising his power in a manner violative of clear statutory law to test how much the courts will accept the notion of a presidency that is supreme,” Howell wrote in her 36-page opinion.

The order not only reinstates Wilcox on the board but demands the Trump administration follow protocol should it try to remove Wilcox again.

“An American president is not a king… his power to remove federal officers and honest civil servants like plaintiff is not absolute,” she wrote. “Kaplan, as well as his subordinates, agents, and employees, are enjoined, during plaintiff's term as a member of the NLRB, from removing plaintiff from her office without cause or in any way treating plaintiff as having been removed from office, from impeding in any way her ability to fulfill her duties as a member of the NLRB.”

about the Trump administration's court cases

“Don’t think I’m a criminal”: Crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried maintains innocence from prison

Convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried shared his opinions on life behind bars in a new interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

The founder of the scammy cryptocurrency exchange FTX spoke to Carlson from the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York. Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison last March for defrauding customers on his crpyto exchange to the tune of billions of dollars. Still, he maintains his innocence.

"I don't think I'm a criminal," he shared.

SBF described the infamous prison as "sort of dystopian," but added that he was keeping busy.

“I’ve, you know, started reading novels again. I play some chess, and I work on my legal case to the extent I can,” he said.

Cryptocurrency was always a scam — powered by white male privilege

The former FTX boss also spoke on another notorious Metropolitan Detention Center detainee: Sean “Diddy” Combs. SBF said that the rapper and mogul was "kind."

“I’ve only seen one one piece of him which is, you know, Diddy in prison,” he said. “He's been kind to people in the unit. He's been kind to me.”

“If someone told me three years ago that, Oh, you’d be hanging out with Diddy every day, I’d be like, That’s interesting; I wonder how that’s going to happen,” Bankman-Fried added. “I guess he gets into crypto or something.”

The former Fox News anchor also asked the fraudster, who donated tens of millions to Democratic politicians in the years leading up to his arrest, why he figures it is that the party didn’t bail him out.

“You gave so much to Democrats that I kind of thought they would rescue you in the end. Where were your friends in the Democratic Party?” Carlson asked.

“One fact that might be relevant is that in 2020, I was center-left. I gave to Biden’s campaign, I was optimistic he’d be a sort of solid center-left president,” Bankman-Fried said, adding that he was “shocked… not in a good direction” by the Biden administration and its stances on crypto. “By late 2022, I was giving to Republicans privately as much as Democrats. That started becoming known right around FTX’s collapse, so that probably played a role.”

Some of his biggest criticisms of the Biden administration, he says, centered on its heavy-handed crypto regulations and oversight plans. He told Carlson the crypto industry would “hopefully” be in better hands under the Donald Trump administration, one which has welcomed crypto titans with open arms.

“You look at what the Trump administration said, you know, going into office. There are a lot of good things. There are a lot of things that, you know, were very different from the stance that the Biden administration took, that guys around the SEC took,” Bankman-Fried said.

Watch the full interview below:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN1CR2dyfo8

about this topic

McDonald’s is getting an AI “makeover” to ensure order accuracy and enhance its workers’ experience

McDonald’s is revamping its 43,000 restaurants with AI-powered technology as part of a new initiative to better the in-restaurant experience for its customers and workers, the fast-food chain’s Chief Information Officer Brian Rice told The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.

“Our restaurants, frankly, can be very stressful. We have customers at the counter, we have customers at our drive-through, couriers coming in for delivery, delivery at curbside. That’s a lot to deal with for our crew,” Rice said. “Technology solutions will alleviate the stress.”

Back in Dec. 2023, McDonald’s partnered with Google Cloud to advance the chain’s technology across thousands of restaurants worldwide. Such advancements were made to the McDonald’s mobile app along with its self-service kiosks, which received a handful of complaints from customers online.

How the push for the "right to repair" may result in working McDonald's ice cream machines

“We see tremendous opportunity for growth in our digital business and our partnership with Google Cloud allows us to capitalize on this by leveraging our size and scale to build capabilities and implement solutions at unmatched speeds,” Rice said at the time, per a news release. “Connecting our restaurants worldwide to millions of datapoints across our digital ecosystem means tools get sharper, models get smarter, restaurants become easier to operate, and most importantly, the overall experience for our customers and crew gets even better.”

In his Wednesday interview, Rice said McDonald’s is implementing edge computing, which “can be a faster, cheaper option than sending data to the cloud,” per the WSJ. The technology setup can help predict when kitchen equipment, like fryers and McDonald’s McFlurry ice cream machines, will break down, Rice explained. It can also offer “franchisees a ‘real-time’ view into how their restaurants are operating” and “analyze that data for early signs of a maintenance problem,” the WSJ reported.

McDonald’s hopes the new technology will help grow its number of customers from 175 million to 250 million by 2027.

about McDonald's:

“Scalpel not hatchet”: Trump clarifies to Cabinet that Musk can’t fire employees

President Donald Trump placed guardrails on Elon Musk's slapdash crusade against federal spending, clarifying to his administration that the DOGE head doesn't have the authority to fire staff.

Trump convened Cabinet leaders on Thursday to spell out the official parameters of the billionaire’s cost-cutting role, per Politico. Trump reportedly clarified that Musk’s team had the power to make policy and staffing recommendations, not final employment decisions. Two Trump administration officials told the outlet Musk was present at the cabinet meeting.

Cabinet secretaries had previously been forced to navigate directives from Musk with little guidance from Trump. Sources told Politico that Musk agreed with Trump’s move to rein in his vaguely defined government oversight group and accepted that DOGE had made some mistakes.

In a post to Truth Social, Trump painted the meeting as a success and promised regular meetings to keep the Cabinet abreast of DOGE's work.

"DOGE has been an incredible success, and now that we have my Cabinet in place, I have instructed the Secretaries and Leadership to work with DOGE on Cost Cutting measures and Staffing," he wrote. "As the Secretaries learn about, and understand, the people working for the various Departments, they can be very precise as to who will remain, and who will go. We say the 'scalpel' rather than the 'hatchet.' The combination of them, Elon, DOGE, and other great people will be able to do things at a historic level."

“Front row seats to a coup”: Trump and Musk gut NOAA and EPA, raising alarm among scientists

The clarification from the Trump administration comes roughly two weeks after a message from the Office of Personnel Management, seeming at Musk's behest, arrived in the inboxes of millions of federal workers. That email demanded they summarize their recent accomplishments or face termination.

“Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” Musk said on X, though Trump appointees at the FBI, Department of State and other agencies instructed employees not to respond to the email.

Musk’s wide mandate to fire workers with little department consultation up to this point has reportedly made Trump allies uneasy. Congressional Republicans demanded earlier this week that Musk scale back or seek input on his onslaught against the federal government, as constituents flood GOP town halls with tough questions on DOGE.

about DOGE

Republicans move to repeal Biden’s CFPB rule capping overdraft fees

Republicans in Congress are trying to overturn a Biden-era rule that would slash excessive overdraft fees charged by big banks.

The House Financial Services Committee voted Wednesday to repeal the rule, which limits most big bank overdraft charges to $5, down from the standard $35 per transaction. Similar legislation has been introduced in the Senate.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced the rule in December, estimating it would save consumers $5 billion a year and give them more transparent and safer lines of credit.

Trump's CFPB drops lawsuit against big banks over alleged Zelle fraud

“Members of Congress should side with voters who are struggling with high prices, not Wells Fargo, Chase and other big banks that reap billions in profits from hidden fees on people trying to make ends meet,” Lauren Saunders, associate director of the National Consumer Law Center, said in a statement. “The CFPB’s overdraft fee rule will stop exploitative practices by big banks, improve transparency, and put $5 billion back into the pockets of everyday people.”

Opponents of the rule say the CFPB overstepped its authority. In a statement, the House Financial Service Committee said the rule hurts banks and consumers because “lawful and contractually agreed upon payment incentives promote financial discipline and responsibility.”

“The Biden Administration’s CFPB routinely targeted legitimate payment incentives and practices in pursuit of political headlines over sound policies,” Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott (R-South Carolina) said in a statement. “The overdraft rule was yet another example — many consumers rely on overdraft services to make ends meet and limiting this practice will push Americans to riskier financial products.”

But according to a statement filed by the National Consumer Law Center, big banks would be allowed to continue charging fees that are far higher than the actual cost of covering a transaction, multiple times per day. Many banks manipulate the timing of deposits and withdrawals to maximize fees, charging customers even when they have enough money for an approved transaction, the group said.

“Polling is clear: People think $35 overdraft fees are unfair, and banks shouldn’t trick you into paying a $35 fee on the average $23 debit card overdraft repaid in 3 days,” Saunders said.

about personal finance

Trump suspends tariffs on most imports from Mexico, Canada

New tariffs that began this week on most imports from Mexico and Canada have been suspended until April 2.

Trump signed executive orders Thursday that suspend the 25% tariffs on goods traded under the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, which covers most U.S. imports from those countries, The New York Times reported.

Earlier Thursday, Trump posted on social media the tariffs would be suspended on imports from Mexico, adding that his relationship with President Claudia Sheinbaum "has been a very good one." His post did not mention Canada.

Sheinbaum said his decision came after she showed him how the country had limited the amount of fentanyl flowing into the U.S., The Times reported. Fentanyl was one of the reasons Trump gave for the tariffs.

"It may be too late": Inflation fears spike as Trump pushes tariffs

The round of tariffs began Tuesday and included an increase from 10% to 20% on imports from China.

On Wednesday, Trump granted U.S. automakers that trade under the North American free trade agreement a one-month exemption following concerns raised by Ford, General Motors and Stellantis. The three automakers said the levies are unsustainable for domestic car manufacturing, The Associated Press reported.

Ford CEO Jim Farley had previously described tariffs as “devastating.” Asked if the 30-day suspension was enough for the industry to adjust, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt relayed Trump’s words to the automakers.

“He told them that they should get on it, start investing, start moving, shift production here to the United States of America where they will pay no tariff,” Leavitt said.

Trump defended his tariffs as they began, according to The Times, claiming they are needed to protect “the soul of our country.” He has acknowledged they could cause prices to rise for Americans.

“Tariffs are about making America rich again and making America great again, and it is happening and it will happen rather quickly,” he said. “There will be a little disturbance, but we are OK with that. It won’t be much.”

Experts worry the tariffs affect international trade agreements and America's relationship with its allies.

“This is a day where the United States stopped seeing trade as force for mutual benefit, and began seeing it as a tool of economic warfare,” Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told The Times, describing the duties as “a fundamental attack on the economic well being of our closest neighbors.”

about tariffs

Republicans, joined by 10 Democrats, censure Al Green for disrupting Trump’s State of the Union

The House voted 224-198 on Thursday to censure Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, for disrupting President Donald Trump's joint address to Congress Tuesday night.

Ten Democrats joined Republicans in the rebuke, and two members, including Green, voted present. Democrats had attempted on Wednesday to block the censure measure but failed. The vote comes as the already-fractured party grapples with how best to voice their opposition to the president and Republicans' policies while outnumbered in both chambers of Congress.

According to the Clerk for the House of Representatives, Democrats who voted to censure Green include: Reps. Ami Bera and Jim Costa, D-Calif.; Ed Case, D-Hawaii; Laura Gillen and Tom Suozzi, D-N.Y.; Jim Himes, D-Conn.; Chrissy Houlahan, D-Penn.; Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio; Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla.; and Marie Perez, D-Wash.

Trump's speech to Congress makes it clear: They're coming for Social Security

In a statement following Thursday's vote, Suozzi said that Americans' focus being on the removal from the address of a congressman rather than on the pressing issues of protecting Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, rising costs and "fixing immigration" is "not helpful." He added that he's "serious" about building bipartisan coalitions to tackle those issues.

"Both parties must hold themselves to the same standards we expect from the other side," Suozzi said. "I am angry about plenty that the president is doing and what he said the other night, but the punch, counterpunch is not working."

Green interrupted Trump's speech after the president referred to his electoral victory as a "mandate" from the American people. He repeatedly shouted that Trump has "no mandate to cut Medicaid" while pointing his gilded cane toward the podium.

After the 11-term Democrat's third interjection and prior warnings to maintain decorum, House Speaker Mike Johnson ordered the sergeant-at-arms to remove Green from the chamber. His ejection was met with cheers from his Republican colleagues.

Lawmakers have previously interrupted a presidential address but were not removed from the chamber. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., both interrupted then President Joe Biden's speech in 2022. Greene also interjected during Biden's 2024 State of the Union address.

After Thursday's censure vote, the Texas congressman was called to the well for a public reading of the censure resolution. He and other surrounding Democrats began singing the civil rights anthem, "We Shall Overcome," but the session devolved into a screaming match after Johnson finished the reading, according to ABC News.

Following his ejection Tuesday, Green told reporters that he was working on articles of impeachment against the president and did not know if he would face any formal punishment.

"It's worth it to let people know that there are some people who are going to stand up," he added.

about the Democratic Party

“I can’t be loved by everyone. I’m not Ina Garten”: How Antoni Porowski got over his critics

Antoni Porowski is ready to talk about the guacamole. "Look," he says now, "it affected me at the beginning in a really big way."

Back in 2018, when the Montreal native debuted on a rebooted "Queer Eye," he and his castmates became an overnight cultural phenomenon. Yet, along with the fame and the accolades (The show has gone on to win 11 Emmy Awards), there came a deeply Porowski-centered discourse. As he shepherded the makeover candidates of those early episodes, the question of whether or not Porowski could cook soon arose.

"He’s preparing food a child would make," Bowen Yang complained in Vulture, while sites like Junkee and Mashable "investigated" his culinary skills and Out called his guacamole "blasphemous." Porowski weathered the skepticism good-naturedly, going on to write a best-selling cookbook and becoming an enduring fan favorite on the show.

Yet behind the scenes, he now admits he was wrestling with the desire to prove that "I can actually make a proper mirepoix with my eyes closed." After taking in some good advice from his therapist and his showrunner, however, he says he was able to remember that it's not about showing off his skills, "It's about being of service to the person who we're with for such a short amount of time."

While Porowski is still doing that service with the rest of the Fab Five (Season 9, with new cast member Jeremiah Brent, released on Netflix in December), he talked to me about his new show for National Geographic, "No Taste Like Home with Antoni Porowski." The series is an apt fit for the personable 40-year-old, a mix of cooking, travel and tears — as this time he goes around the globe with a collection of equally charming celebrities, including James Marsden, Florence Pugh and Issa Rae, tracing their roots from their family kitchens.

Porowski opened up to us about the inspiration for — and timeliness of — "No Taste Like Home," a show about the immigrant experience and "leaning into really embracing diversity." And, in his trademark forthright style, he also shared about his first brush with Taylor Swift, accepting that he's not Ina Garten and moving past his "pathological need to be seen."

Watch our "Salon Talks" here, or read it below to learn more about Porowski's experience becoming an overnight star, the hardest he cried while making "No Taste Like Home" and why he's hoping for more seasons of "Queer Eye."

The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Let's start with this lovely show, where you and six of the best-looking people in the world go to these beautiful places and eat beautiful food, but there's a real depth and heart to it.

The irony is that you're describing the beautiful optics of a National Geographic show and all this stunning talent and everything, but it was a deeply personal journey. We started with every single one of these guests by asking them about a dish that shaped them growing up, something that they remember from childhood. It could be either from a special occasion, like a family holiday, or it could be just a normal weekly night meal that their mom or their dad or their grandparent made for them.

We go to their country of origin. We explore their family history through food. We unpack the dish. We look at what was going on culturally, politically and socially at the time. Then, we hone in with an incredible research team. I can take zero credit for [the] three to six months of research on every single episode to uncover all these people in their family that they didn't even know existed.

Why use food as the through line for connecting to our ancestors, the things they went through and the struggles they endured?

As a jumping-off point, it's literally how I navigate the universe. It's how I was raised to be. When I go to someone's house, I immediately look through their fridge. It's like looking through their diary, and asking people about their relationship with it, because it tells you about the type of lives that they lead now. It can tell you about provenance, about where they come from and their ancestry, and it also dictates where we're heading, as well. It's so much more than just the dish. It is this historical, deeply emotional thing that we all have. Every single person has their own version of that, no matter how humble or how complicated the dish is.

For the show's six guests, food becomes a way to find out things about themselves they never knew. Was there a moment on this journey that you felt, "Maybe we've gone too far. Maybe we're going to touch a nerve in someone that we can't untouch?"

Hats off to all of them. None of them knew what we were doing on a daily basis. They knew which city we were going to be in, but they truly signed up for a mystery.

I think for actors especially, who are used to having lines to rehearse and certain start and end times, it took them a day to shed that a little bit. I kept on reminding them, "I only want this to feel like a gift for you. I want this to be something that you're able to pass on."

"We are all the descendants of immigrants… I feel like a lot of people are forgetting that right now."

Where I was a little anxious was with the Awkwafina episode. It was such a sensitive subject matter. Her mother was South Korean. She'd lost her when she was four years old, and she hadn't been back to South Korea since. I definitely wanted to provide her with a little bit more information, but even then you never really know what you're going to uncover. We started with this dish that her paternal grandmother made for her. Her paternal grandmother is Chinese-American, but she made her this traditional South Korean dish jajangmyeon, so that Nora would remember her mom.

Then, halfway through the episode, we're learning about this beautiful soup with thin pieces of beef that's rehydrated with dry kelp. When Nora smelled the scent that was coming off the pot, she remembered that smell from when she was a kid. You learn that in Korean history, mothers prepare this for themselves to heal themselves after they give birth, and also teach it to their daughters. It was linked to mythology because they used to watch whales giving birth and being depleted of iron, [and then] eating kelp. It is just such a loaded, beautiful thing.

I cried so hard by the end of it. Nora actually had to take care of me, which I was so embarrassed about because this was about her, but that's just what a great person she was. It was a journey that she wanted to go on. It's one of those classic things in life where you know that you have to get through something that you want to, but it's painful, as well. But what's on the other side can be beautiful, what you end up discovering. That was just a shining example of that in action.

This show feels very topical right now because it's interrogating the idea of home — where we are in the world and where we come from. What do you think a show like this has to say about helping us understand that right now?

Every single person on the show including myself, and you at some point, we are all the descendants of immigrants. It's something that touches a chord with me because I feel like a lot of people are forgetting that right now. We have to remember that we're all here because of other people who've made great sacrifices. It's just about leaning into embracing that diversity — not just tolerating it or accepting it, but seeing it for the beauty that it has and the gifts that all of us have.

I joke with my friends a lot about generational trauma, it's our favorite topic of conversation for all my therapized friends. But I feel like we don't talk enough about generational gifts. Why are we the way that we are? Why am I so obsessed with food? I don't know, I can tell you why my parents are, but I haven't gone back a few generations.

Where we're at as a culture right now, we're just at these polar opposites, and no one's stepping toward the center. To find universal threads gives me a bit of hope for the next four years and beyond.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

You work with the United Nations Food Program in places like Senegal, where you took Issa Rae. Tell me about what that work is and what you're doing, especially now at a moment when so many federal programs are being cut off.

That all came to be just from my time in Senegal. They had reached out and asked if I would ever consider going back. I was like, "Let's go yesterday."

We made an announcement about a donation at Global Citizen [Festival] in Central Park this past summer. Then we started having conversations about how we could work together in a meaningful way. What touched me about their work is they deal with the fortification of rice to make sure the kids get the nutrients and minerals that they need. Specifically [they are] keeping girls in school long enough so that they not only learn sustainable harvesting and agriculture practices, but take lessons on how to prepare food back home that they can teach their parents. Keeping them in school assures them the highest chance of getting a job later on.

As much of a dumpster fire as this country is right now, It's important to also remember that there's a whole world out there. Selfishly, in a very personal way, it reminds me that there are people who are thriving, who are suffering, who are living, loving and doing all of that outside of this bubble that I'm in New York. It's a good perspective-building exercise, and it's important for a lot of people to just pay attention to what's going on out there in the world, too.

Speaking of the dumpster fire, how are you doing my Canadian friend? As someone from north of the border, what is going through your mind these days?

Well, I do like to joke that I still maintain my Canadian citizenship, even though I love this country so much. It's afforded me a life beyond my wildest dreams. But it's one of those reminders where I have to reposition my thinking into the realization that the people are not the government. There are a lot of people who have certainly led us to where we are right now. At the same time, others have different values. It's definitely scary. Humor is very helpful to me.

"The thing my therapist told me from the get-go was, 'This is going to be one of your biggest life lessons.'"

I hope Canada remains independent and part of the Commonwealth moving forward. I just don't see that as a possibility of changing. And I think Trudeau said some really smart words to that effect. But it's just very weird, and it's very strange, and I laugh about it. Then when I sit in my feelings, it's like, "Okay, this is actually pretty terrifying." I'm at this weird Catch-22 and being torn in two different directions of, "You can't take this too seriously. Keep one foot in front of the other and focus on the things that I can control," but also paying attention to very scary things that are happening.

"Queer Eye" premiered during the first Trump administration and made a big splash. What feels different now about this show, about the need for it, about the audience for it, about the message for it, eight years later?

For me, it's knowing the difference between the things I can control and the things I can't control. I'm still part of "Queer Eye." The show is continuing. I hope we get another season, maybe five more. What I can control is the ability to tell diverse stories through food and offer people a platform to be able to do that.

In Vegas, we decided to take the perspective of, "Yes, it's this big neon colossus, but it's a living, breathing city with people who keep it alive, who have lost so much during the pandemic." And now, back to immigrants whose rights are being taken away and families are being separated.

It's important to tell those stories because we have to take concepts to the people who don't understand. Behind those concepts there are living, breathing individuals who are doing the best that they can with the resources that they have or don't. I feel like it's a renewed sense of responsibility.

"Queer Eye" star Bobby Berk empowers you to design for wellness: "Your home is like a phone charger"

When the show first debuted, a lot of people didn't understand what you were doing. This is not "MasterChef." You're trying to teach people who maybe don't know how to cook. How did you feel about all of the different reactions and critiques?

Let's get into it, the guacamole. Look, it affected me at the beginning in a big way. The thing my therapist told me from the get-go was, "This is going to be one of your biggest life lessons. Because as someone who really cares what people think about him, you're going to have to learn how to re-navigate your attention and take the good with the not-so-good."

People are entitled to their opinions. I can't be loved by everyone. I'm not Ina Garten. None of us are, unfortunately. I can credit our showrunner, Jen Lane, because I came back after a lot had happened in seasons one and two, and I wanted to make a cassoulet when I was back in Kansas City. She's like, "Ant, what are you doing showing a recipe that has 18 different ingredients and is going to be a whole day in front of the stove? Also, how are we going to film this? Is this you actually wanting to serve the person that we're helping this week, or is this your ego right now?" I was like, "You're right."

It's a reminder to just meet people where they're at, because it's so easy for me to just get fueled by, "I need to show them that I can make a proper mirepoix with my eyes closed." Not that I would ever want to do that with my eyes closed, but anyway. It's about being of service to the person who we're with for such a short amount of time. It's just staying in my lane and learning to get rid of the clutter, which I've gotten so much better at. I'm so much better at not looking at comments anymore. Thank goodness.

"Once your anonymity is gone, it's gone. It's going to be a very complex, beautiful, sad, heartbreaking, devastating, joyous, thrilling journey. But once it's gone, it's gone."

"Queer Eye" made overnight stars of all of you. You were a guy working, acting, when suddenly, boom, you're on a show and people know who you are, have thoughts about you, love you. What is that like to take all that on immediately and do it with four other people at the same time?

On one end, yes, it was overnight, but at the same time, I internally scoff a little because it was 10 years in the making. I was planning a completely different trajectory for my career. Life is what happens when you're making plans. On one end, it was like, "No, it took a while to get here," but on another front, it did feel like it happened almost instantly.

I remember we finished seasons one and two, which we filmed simultaneously in Atlanta, and then I had this five-month gap of not really being able to work, so I decided to take Italian lessons. The day that a publication announced our names, I went from 500 followers to like 70,000. My notifications were on my phone so it was glowing until the battery just died.

The day when the show launched, Netflix didn't tell us the ad spend that they put towards the billboards. We were driving towards "Good Morning America" early in the morning, and then all of a sudden, Tan noticed, "Wait, we're on that billboard on that bus stop." I was like, "No, wait. We're on that one, as well." It was on every single one. Then, leading to Times Square, we were on double jumbotrons. I remember this sense of shock and fear, like, "What have I done? I'm not anonymous anymore. My face is out there." I was like, "Ant, but you've wanted this since you were a little kid." [The] pathological need to be seen because you're the youngest of three.

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A mentor of mine compared this whole overnight syndrome of suddenly being so exposed, he was like, "It's like losing your virginity. Once your anonymity is gone, it's gone. It's going to be a very complex, beautiful, sad, heartbreaking, devastating, joyous, thrilling journey. But once it's gone, it's gone. You just have to mourn that and accept this new normal of who you are."

My thing was, "I don't want to change. I'm going to stay exactly the same." I thought I was being humble and evolved. A friend in my board of directors, my trusted circle, was like, "No, you have to accept the fact that your entire life is changing, and how you navigate and the decisions you make. It's going to come with beautiful things and things that are going to be more challenging to deal with. But it's this."

You started as an actor. We know that you were in "You Need to Calm Down" with Taylor Swift back in 2019, but that was not your first brush with her. You also auditioned for a role in the "Blank Space" music video. What was that like?

I didn't meet her because she wasn't at the casting, understandably. She's a very busy woman dominating everything that she does with such grace and dignity. She's just amazing. But I was auditioning. I was with another agency. I was still waiting tables at Bond Street, and I got a casting call for a music video. We only found out what it was when I got called back. They put us in all these different scenarios where I was running away from a lion and acting scared, and I went back for the second one. Then I didn't get it. It all worked out.

Maybe it prepared me for when we got the call [in 2019], and they were like, "Taylor wants you to be in her new music video." It relieved a bit of the tension. Everything does happen in life the way that it's supposed to. That's a good reminder, especially for me today. It might not make sense at the time, but when you look back, it's going to be like, "Yeah, that was all your higher power's plan," or whoever it is that you worship. Let time do its thing.

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Trump may revoke legal status for 240,000 Ukrainian refugees, clearing way for deportations

President Donald Trump is planning to revoke temporary legal status for more than 240,000 Ukrainian civilians who fled their war-torn country and were allowed into the United States under temporary humanitarian parole programs, a senior Trump official and three other sources told Reuters.

After the news broke, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, while insisting the report was "fake news," confirmed that revoking Ukrainians' legal status is under consideration, saying only that "no decision has been made at this time."

The move would be a first step in a process that could subject immigrants to fast-track deportation proceedings, according to an internal ICE email obtained by Reuters. It's part of a broader effort by the Department of Homeland Security to "terminate all categorical parole programs" per an executive order, under which 1.8 million refugees were able to find relatively safe haven in the U,S. In addition to the Ukrainians, 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans also in line to have their status revoked this month.

Trump's Ukraine peace "plan": A massive betrayal of America's friends — like me

The mass revocation had been planned by the Trump administration before the president's feud with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky last week, sources said. It comes as the U.S. has also halted intelligence and weapons sharing with its former ally.

The Trump administration's approach towards Ukrainian refugees is remarkably different from how officials, including South African-born Elon Musk, have talked about white South Africans who they claim are being persecuted by their government or wealthy foreigners willing to pay $5 million for a "gold card."

Meanwhile, Afghan refugees, including former military, intelligence and government personnel whose lives would be endangered due to the assistance they provided to U.S. forces, are already being subjected to an ICE crackdown.

"When someone stands shoulder to shoulder with American troops and puts his life in danger…" one former Afghan intelligence officer told Reuters in a phone call from an ICE detention center, his voice shaking. "I wasn't expecting this behavior from them. I wasn't."

Deported Ukrainians too face danger and potentially harrowing conditions, as Russian forces continue to launch offensives by land and air, often intentionally targeting civilians. Trump has said that he wants to see both sides reach a peace deal, but it's not clear how long it will take and what he will demand Ukraine gives up to its invader.

about Trump v. Ukraine

The art of cooking for strangers (and the occasional carbonara disaster)

When the carbonara starts to scramble, your egg is already cooked.

At that point, adding pasta water and pulling it off the heat are your only options to save it. But if you’re aiming for the silky-smooth texture of a perfect emulsion, you’ve already missed your window.

Life is filled with regrets.

I could have tempered the eggs with more pasta water. I should have let the pan cool down more. I would have slowly brought the heat back up.

* * *

From the hostel terrace, we can see the Basilica of St. John Lateran, its imposing statues of Christ, John the Baptist, and John the Evangelist rising above the rooftops.

It’s a beautiful summer evening to be outside for dinner. My dinner guests — fellow backpackers — set eight places at the table with an assortment of mismatched silverware pulled from kitchen drawers. At the window, ready to be served: insalata estiva, a tangle of arugula with pistachios, figs and blue cheese, dressed in lemon and pecorino. The main course: sea bass roasted with lemon and herbs. Seared zucchini on the side.

My 10-year carbonara journey

I love cooking. It’s both a practical skill, to feed oneself and others — and a kind of alchemy. Simple ingredients transform into explosions of flavor. But there’s also a magic in bringing people to the table, in food and conversation folding together into something larger than the meal itself. I’ve seen my mother do it countless times in our home on Long Island. At every opportunity, she’d invite friends, old and new, to gather around a table laden with soulful flavor. It was an expression of love. She taught me to speak in the same language.

Kitchens are often the site of merriment. It’s a cultural trait shared by most, if not all, of humankind. Complete strangers can become fast friends over a good meal. That commonality is well understood among backpackers, and when I travel, I relish in fueling those memorable experiences. But that wasn’t my original intention.

Rome was the last stop on my whirlwind summer in Europe. I had sailed from Kalmar, Sweden, to Saint-Pol-de-Léon, France. I had met up with friends from other far-flung adventures in Paris and Barcelona. The cheapest flight home was out of Rome, and BCN to FCO was only about $70.

When I checked into the Osso Busso hostel, I was already impressed by the rooms, the common areas, and the complimentary happy hour drink token. But when I scouted the kitchen, I was blown away.

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Perhaps I should have predicted that the kitchen would be at the heart of a hostel in Italy. Food is revered here, a cultural touchstone for the whole nation. Even still, I didn’t expect shelves stocked with pasta and tomato sauce. Fresh, seasonal fruits and vegetables stacked in hampers. Wicker baskets stuffed with alliums and aromatics. All for free. Two ovens, eight induction tops, two sinks with four basins. Three types of oil, two kinds of salt, two full-size refrigerators. I could cook dinner for a 16-bed room without even leaving for groceries.

Luxury can be simple.

I was inspired. Early the next morning, I rented an e-scooter and rattled through cobblestone streets to a market. Back home, I’m strict about shopping with a list. If I forget something, I spiral into negative self-talk on the way back to the store. But here, buoyed by the well-stocked cupboard, I could trust my senses of smell and taste, the recommendations of vendors and a touch of intuition.

The first stop was the fishmonger. I admired but disregarded the octopus — too much of an ordeal. I considered the monkfish, the mackerel, the cockles. Fresh seafood on ice reminded me of my childhood. My mom would take my younger brother and me to Flushing, Queens, for groceries, depositing us in front of the fish tanks while she moved with snappy efficiency through produce and specialty goods. We gawked at the sea creatures — lobsters, soft-shell turtles, wriggling live eels — while she filled the cart.

The fishmonger and I haggled over the sea bass. She assured me of its quality, and I confirmed it: shiny eyes, bright red gills, firm, smooth skin. She agreed to clean it and keep it on ice while I finished shopping.

Lemons in Italy are wonderful, and in the summer, they’re at their best. They were destined to be stuffed into the sea bass, along with parsley, oil, and garlic. Roasted in the oven on a bed of onions, the fish would be perfect.

The foreboding carbonara was brewing in my mind — enticed by ingredients of splendid quality; guanciale, pecorino and fresh eggs. How could I not spar a round with one of Rome’s four great pastas when I was at its doorstep?

"How could I not spar a round with one of Rome’s four great pastas when I was at its doorstep?"

I pondered the squash blossoms — delicate, delicious, undeniably seasonal. I could have stuffed them with meat, cheese, and herbs, battered them lightly, and deep-fried them. But despite the hostel’s well-equipped kitchen, I wasn’t sure I wanted to mess with a huge pot of hot oil.

Instead, figs. Green, sweet, crunchy. The vendor handed me a sample, and I was charmed. I bought two boxes.

I added a scoop of pistachios — another Italian specialty — and tossed arugula and a wedge of blue cheese into my bag. The salad would balance sweetness with crunch, bite and funk.

The kitchen was chaotic, as kitchens always are, but many hands made for light work. Hungry travelers were eager to contribute. Like a conductor, I set them to manageable tasks. Wash produce. Grate cheese. Refill my Aperol Spritz.

The fish went into the oven quickly. The salad, easy enough. But the carbonara? The true test.

I mixed eggs and pecorino to a wet sand consistency. I added the rendered guanciale fat for extra flavor and set the toasted bits aside. The pasta was a touch underdone—perfect timing. But the pan was too hot. The eggs should have been tempered with pasta water, or combined off heat. I swooped in with corrective maneuvers, but alas. Lament! Passable.

When it all came together, relief.

Guests brought bottles of wine to share. We served generous portions. I always make extra — food never goes to waste in a hostel.

We gave a portion to a curious Brazilian woman. She returned with a clean plate and a ravenous appreciation. She spoke rapid, expressive Portuguese, and another Brazilian translated.

“She says you cook with the same love as her grandmother.”

We hugged. I was a touch bashful. There is no greater compliment than to be compared to a grandmother.

She insisted, full of passion. I was delighted to accept.

After the meal, hands reached out to help wash dishes. I gratefully — and gluttonously — relaxed, accepting a cigarette, a lighter, another pour of wine. We chatted about our hometowns, our past travels, the adventures yet to come. We boasted. We joked. We flirted. We lit more cigarettes.

Food has an incredible place in our hearts. Across cultures, beyond language, at the core of all humanity, there is a plate of warm food at a table with warm people. Cooking in other countries has taught me about a nation’s values, its history, its way of life. Cooking for strangers in hostels has taught me that kindness is appreciated. What is given returns.

Heart is an international currency, and its conversion rate is highly favorable in the kitchen.

Next time you travel, consider cooking as a way to experience the broad, foreign flavors and the vast, familiar depths of human generosity.

As for me? I’ll be back in the kitchen to practice. When I return to Italy, I want to be ready.

about this topic

When it comes to hosting, this “Top Chef” doesn’t “do fussy.” Here’s how to enjoy easy entertaining

When Kelsey Barnard Clark won the sixteenth season of "Top Chef," set in Kentucky, she clinched victory with a dish that defied fine dining expectations: cornbread and buttermilk with crawfish, boiled peanuts, cucumber and watermelon.

She still references it as one of her proudest dishes from the show, telling me, "This was based on a very old-school Southern dish, and I didn’t know if it would resonate with the judges. It’s a very humble, simple dish and I truly believe that’s why I won."

For Barnard Clark, the high-stakes intensity of "Top Chef" contrasts sharply with the approach outlined in her new cookbook and the ease of her Alabama kitchen. Over the years, she has refined her ability to maximize flavor, entertain with warmth, and host with effortless charm—melding fine dining techniques with her own personal style to create food that feels like home.

"Top Chef" Joe Flamm wants you to taste the Adriatic: Where Italian and Croatian flavors meet

One of the guiding philosophies of KBC—both her restaurant and herself—is "we don't do fussy." As she puts it, "I was trained in very fine dining, and while I love and appreciate the food, I like to dial it back. I always bring comfort and homeyness to my food." That philosophy permeates her cookbooks, television appearances and the dishes she serves at KBC in Dothan, Alabama.

Kelsey Barnard Clark (Photo by Antonis Achilleos)

Her latest cookbook, “Southern Get-Togethers,” is an unfussy guide to making guests feel welcome. "While my debut focused on recipes and more in-depth insights, this new book is more of a guide—a 'how-to' on throwing parties and bringing people together," she explains.

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Bright, convivial, and packed with thoughtfully curated recipes, “Southern Get-Togethers” celebrates her love of entertaining. "One of the things I cherish most about living in the South is the joy of opening my home to friends and family," she says. "The pandemic only deepened my appreciation for these gatherings, showing how important they really are."

Southern Get-Togethers: A Guide To Hosting Unforgettable Gatherings by Kelsey Barnard Clark (Courtesy of Chronicle Books/Photos by Antonis Achilleos)

Another major milestone in Barnard Clark’s career was being named a James Beard semi-finalist last year in the Best Chef: South category. "It's always nice to be recognized by such a highly respected organization," she says. "It's humbling to represent the South, especially the state of Alabama, and I will never take that for granted." That pride in her Southern roots is evident throughout Southern Get-Togethers and on the KBC menu, where dishes like Snapper Pontchartrain showcase a "perfect marriage of classic, rich cuisine rooted in Southern ingredients."

When it comes to television, would she return for another round of "Top Chef"? "I don't ever shy away from a little competition," she says. The biggest lesson she took away from the experience? "Always do the thing that scares you the most."

Barnard Clark’s favorite culinary memories revolve around being in the kitchen with loved ones and watching chefs push creative boundaries. As for practical kitchen advice, she emphasizes reducing food waste: "When you're cooking, don’t focus on following the recipe — just think about how you can make something from the scraps."

As for what’s next? She’s keeping her options open. "I would love the opportunity to host a show, and I have several business ventures I'm eager to see come to fruition!"

about this topic

Trump’s CFPB drops lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo over Zelle fraud

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has dropped its lawsuit against the operator of peer-to-peer payment network Zelle and three big banks that use it.

The lawsuit, filed in December, accused Zelle’s parent company, Early Warning Services, along with JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo of improperly handling fraud complaints and denying victims reimbursement, per CNBC. In a filing on Tuesday, the CFPB announced the dismissal of the case “with prejudice." The agency under the Trump administration has dropped other Biden-era cases in a similar manner and agreed to not pursue them again, making it unlikely that victims will see their funds recovered, former CFPB head of enforcement Eric Halperin told CNBC.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau won't be deleted, Trump administration says

Lindsey Johnson, president of the Consumers Bankers Association, said in a statement that "banks have consistently followed the law in offering services through Zelle."

“In a time when fraud and scam activity is surging … we look forward to moving past finger-pointing and political grandstanding and instead working constructively with policymakers to counter the root causes of these threats," Johnson said.

Originally launched as an alternative to PayPal and Venmo, Zelle has quickly become one of the most popular payment apps, facilitating over $1 trillion in transactions.

The CFPB's lawsuit said not all of those were legitimate, and customers of JPMorgan, Bank of America and Wells Fargo who use Zelle lost a collective $870 million on the platform over the last seven years. When fraud victims reached out for assistance, the banks were largely unhelpful, the CFPB alleged; in some cases, victims were told to simply ask for their money back from the scammers.

The decision to drop the case comes as the CFPB, now led by White House budget director Russell Vought, has dropped multiple enforcement actions and faces internal upheaval over mass firings.

about personal finance

“This isn’t just a job to us”: Fired federal workers decry the Trump-Musk assault on government

Federal workers are pushing back on President Donald Trump’s claims about the state of the country and the mass firing spree under his watch, warning it will undermine communities and leave people across the country with diminished access to the services that they rely on.

At the news conference Wednesday, Paul Osadebe, a union steward with the American Federation of Government Employees Local 476, said that Trump’s lengthy State of the Union speech this week was but his latest attempt to “distract and to pit Americans against each other.”

In his own remarks, he highlighted how Trump scapegoated transgender Americans and immigrants while neglecting to discuss topics like affordable housing. He said that Americans will have a harder time interacting with the federal government’s programs because of Trump.

"System collapse": Ex-Social Security chief warns DOGE may cause "interruption of benefits"

“One thing I want to focus on is that the federal government has offices all across the country. These are offices that are created so that people in local areas can get help directly from someone from their community. In their community. They don't have to talk to someone from DC,” Osadebe said. “They can talk to someone in rural Idaho who's there to help them, and those are the exact people [whose] offices are being closed. You will not be able to get local help.”

Chris Wicker, former deputy director of Minnesota’s small business administration office, who attended Tuesday night’s address as a guest of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., noted that Trump didn’t do anything to comfort veterans across the country, who are watching the administration make drastic cuts to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“I didn't hear anything about how I, as a veteran, I'm going to expect continuation of benefits at my local VA,” Wickler said. "I didn't hear anything about how this business plan of gutting the Federal workforce is still going to be able to sustain important services in my community of Minneapolis, Minnesota. And so I had the unique opportunity to sit in front of what was basically a campaign rally and hear the same policy repetitions that we've been listening to this entire time.”

Wickler later added that some 30% of federal workers are veterans and that most of the federal employees working in rural areas work for either the VA or the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“This means these job cuts will hit rural Americans the hardest — people who already have limited access to resources. It also means veterans who depend on federal services will be some of the most severely affected. If you want to know who will bear the long-term effects of these layoffs, look at the most vulnerable people in your community — the ones who need the most support from a government that’s supposed to safeguard the well-being of its people,” Wickler said.

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Tiffany Montes, a recently fired National Parks Service worker, noted how Trump made no acknowledgement that his mass firing spree has thrown droves of former federal workers' lives into uncertainty.

“I just wanted to hear him say, "Hey, we'll do something for you guys," or just anything. But the whole time, all I did — all I saw — was him speaking to one side of the room, barely acknowledging the other side,” Montes said.

Montes went on to say that other Americans would feel Trump’s cuts when they go to visit national parks this summer and services are cut, or when they are unable to because of staffing shortfalls. She said many of her former coworkers are now looking at opportunities outside the federal government.

“Right now, people are terrified. Talking to my old coworkers, they’re just waiting—waiting for the next mass layoff to hit. They have no idea if they’re next because there’s no real logic behind who is being fired. A lot of them are already looking for other jobs, but there aren't always many options,” Montes said.

Allusion Lacko, a former child nutrition researcher at the USDA Food and Nutrition Service, said in response to Trump’s speech that "he perpetuated the myth that we are some kind of unaccountable bureaucracy. But I worked with some of the most talented and dedicated professionals, people who showed up to work every day because … this isn’t just a job to us. We’re dedicated to this work.”

Lacko went on to say that Trump’s mass firings at the USDA go against his stated goal of keeping “our children healthy and strong.” She described how the severe cuts happening under the Trump administration would ripple through the American economy.

“The mass layoffs of federal workers aren’t happening in isolation. The federal government provides a huge number of contracts and grants to other organizations, which also support jobs,” Lacko said. "For example, USAID wasn’t just shuttered — every organization that received grants from USAID lost funding, too. I know people who worked at NGOs that had to lay off 80% of their employees overnight because their federal contracts were cut."

about the DOGE agenda

Trump’s speech was the pinnacle of MAGA. Now what?

For the lovers and the haters, Donald Trump’s speech before a joint session of Congress Tuesday night was the pinnacle of MAGA.

It was long (nearly 100 minutes), divisive, jarring and filled with lies, drama, pathos and poignancy. It featured several swipes at his perceived enemies and wild bleating cheers from his favorite sycophants. In other words, it was a typical Donald Trump speech. It’s length alone qualifies it for the record books and Donny loves that idea.

And while those who cheer Donny are happily onboard once again — without thought, observation, reflection, want or need — millions of others are left shaking their head and idly wondering if being struck by an asteroid would be all that bad. For if nothing else, after six weeks of unfettered Donald Trump in the White House it is easy to see why he filed for bankruptcy six times.

Down in the hollowed out rural towns across the country, people can relate to bankruptcy. My mother-in-law (God rest her soul) told her family on a few occasions about her cousin who, during the Great Depression, may or may not have walked over the hill with several members of the farm who were headed to the same fate Wilbur in “Charlotte’s Web” was destined to encounter. After walking over the hill, this cousin by the last name of Walton made his way south to Arkansas and created an empire based on the profit from selling those pigs at market.

My mother-in-law would wink at this point and say, “that was my cousin Sam Walton. That’s what they say anyway.” According to my mother-in-law. Walmart was founded by her wayward cousin after stealing a bunch of the family’s pigs and running away with the money. Somehow it fits. They struggled. He got the pork. Makes a good story anyway, and people love a good story — often it seems at the expense of the facts.

Trump's speech to Congress makes it clear: They're coming for Social Security

Walmart has been the pig that devoured most of the small communities across the country, killing Mom and Pop businesses and promoting a homogeneity of thought and buying habits that politicians and other businesses would manipulate for years to come. It also contributed to economic suffering and perhaps the rising construction of meth labs across rural America.

My mother-in-law saw it and didn’t savor it. Today Donald Trump has taught generations of Walmart customers the real enemy is the Democrats from those big cities where no one worships god, people are hired by the color of their skin — as long as they’re Black — and nobody likes Kid Rock or Lee Greenwood.

By any standards it was a Herculean speaking engagement and while he was lying, dividing, angering and vilifying those he didn’t like, he did it so darn well. Of course, not having to worry about whether or not you’re telling the truth is key when you’re working on your performance. Forget those nasty and brutish facts. Sell. Sell. Sell.

I have in-laws and cousins — huge Trump supporters — who always ask the rest of the family when they’ll get over the TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome). I’m told they’re “fixin’ to get tired” of what they perceive is an overabundance of scrutiny of a man they also believe was sent by God. I, on the other hand, am the guy who would ask why God would send Trump if he has locusts at his command.

There are a huge number of people who support Donald Trump who never listen to him. They quit doing so long ago. They got the message. They’ll defend the message. Sad it is that they don’t actually understand the message. They have heard what they want and need no more.

So, to the point, I don’t know if there’s anyone in the country who is ready for more Donald Trump speeches. His vice president apparently tunes him out and has insulted him — which I think is pretty rich from a guy who looks like he has tattooed eyeliner, but what do I know? Donald Trump continues to dominate the news and the Republican Party with his audacity, large personality and a stunning ability to lie with a straight face. We know he’s lying. Still millions continue to believe him. He can tell a lie quicker and with greater depth than the most accomplished Hollywood actor — at least to the WWE fans who even enjoy his awkward and disturbing dance moves. He has never witnessed half of what he claims, and happily invents facts to support his obtuse and inerudite opinions.

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Question: Why, at the end of the day, would anyone seek out an opinion from someone who did not witness an event that you did witness? Imagine someone choosing to listen to a person who only got their information second or third hand through social and traditional media outlets versus someone who actually attended the event?

“Hey, how was the P. Diddy party?”

“Oh it was great. It featured an opera, finger sandwiches and a glorious reading from Shakespeare, the Bible and a wonderful musical interpretation of Bach.”

“How do you know?”

“Oh, I saw it on TikTok.”

“But I was there. It was a freak out. They ran out of baby oil again.”

“You’re obviously biased.”

Thus is the logic and rhetoric of the MAGA supporter who will continue to be impressed by Donald with no direct access to him or the facts. It’s why millions believe there was no insurrection; Donny said so. Those who know him and most who have worked with him have a completely different opinion of him. Most everyone agrees, however, that whatever else he is — and the invectives are voluminous — he remains a formidable public figure. The same can be said of every other narcissistic political leader throughout history.

Some believe that admitting Trump is a formidable public opponent is the mark of a less intelligent and certainly a less courageous human being. Others do not care. “Get into Good Trouble,” is their smiling retort to any form of authority. Somewhere John Lewis is smiling. This group is almost universally hated for their ability to criticize both sides of the aisle with an “I don’t give a damn” attitude. Some laugh at it and others take umbrage with the criticism thus proving they really do give a damn.

Then there are the partisans. The extreme partisans are a factor in both political parties, though the Democrats who admit to fallibilities would have you believe the Republican Party is far worse and that to compare the two is insulting and evidence of a closeted member of the Trump Gold Club offering testimony. (Yes, such a thing actually exists and for a small donation of your choosing you too can become a happy member. We even have the classic, pink and dark MAGA hats for sale at a good price. And when you buy two you can get a pair of Gold Trump Christmas ornaments.)

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The Republicans, on the other hand, do not admit to fallibilities. It is a party that represents a growing number of Americans and may soon be the majority political party simply because of its ability to circle the wagons and support a convicted felon. Turns out there are a lot of people who would side with Darth Vader, the evil Queen, Voldemort and Thanos. The problem is Musk is trying to play Tony Stark when he’s actually Loki — and he hasn’t got the chops for either role.

For those who donate money and those who play minion roles to Trump in the Republican Party, the dark secret is this: None of them would spend any length of time socially with the guy unless they absolutely had to do so. There are the odd exceptions. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., would put on pom poms and a 60s cheerleader outfit and show up in spurs to lead team Trump in a chorus of “V-I-C-T-O-R-Y” that’s the MAGA battle cry! We Want Victory! Yay!” She and Musk could do a tag-team chainsaw/pom pom music special and rake in the money. Meanwhile, Greene’s paramour would show up shouting questions like, “Mr. President! How do you make rainbows shoot out of your ass? Why are you the best man who ever existed? Can I take a selfie with you?”

No one can upstage Trump, however, and he proved that at his congressional pep rally. Sure, he faded at the end of his time on stage, but who could blame him. By any standards it was a Herculean speaking engagement and while he was lying, dividing, angering and vilifying those he didn’t like, he did it so darn well. Of course, not having to worry about whether or not you’re telling the truth is key when you’re working on your performance. Forget those nasty and brutish facts: Sell. Sell. Sell.

The president got laughs. The president got tears. Man, he was on a tear. But two key moments show where we’re really at these days: in a crevice that leads to a chasm.

Moments after Speaker of the House Mike Johnson expelled Texas Congressman Al Green (love his music), removed (I know he’s not the musician, relax) for waving his cane and shouting Trump down, saying, “You don’t have a mandate to eliminate Medicaid,” Trump championed free speech. It brought about memories of Vice President Vance traveling to Germany to lecture our former European allies on the value of free speech while Trump was back home kicking the Associated Press out of the in-town press pool.

The second event occurred later in his congressional speech, when Trump vilified “unelected bureaucrats” who run government. He boasted that he has drained the deep state and got rid of them. I guess he forgot about Elon Musk. Trump supporters said Trump was talking about middle managers, but I think it’s far more frightening if the guy running the show, either Elon Trump or Donald Musk, are unelected bureaucrats. Some will make the argument that neither one of them were elected, but I’m not going there.

Where I am going is on down the road. Not much to see here boys. The fans are going wild, the naysayers are saying nay and the rest of us are left holding the bag. It’s a big steaming bag of excrement that used to be the United States.

Whether we use it to fertilize a resurgent democracy, or throw it in everyone’s face, including our own, is really up to us. It all depends on whether you surrender to Donald.

I still favor John Lewis. Good trouble it is.

about Trump's second term so far

The biggest threat to privacy is not Elon Musk

“People are scrambling” to figure out if Elon Musk’s programmers have accessed their private information, explained a federal intelligence employee to HuffPost. About a week earlier, a Forbes headline read “Elon Musk And DOGE’s Access To Student Loan Data Raises Concern.” That same day a CNN headline read “Homeland Security Secretary Noem says DOGE team has access to agency data.” A week later an NBC headline read “Top Social Security official steps down after disagreement with DOGE over sensitive data.” These news reports referenced a few of the federal government computer systems that billionaire Elon Musk and his team accessed, at the behest of President Donald Trump, under the auspices of making the government more efficient. In defending the project, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said of Musk on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” “What he’s finding with his algorithms, crawling through the data of the Social Security system, is enormous amounts of fraud, waste, and abuse.” While much of the media attention focused on lauding Musk from the right and chiding him from the left, there was a dearth of discourse about how ubiquitous data collection, not Musk or his team, is the biggest threat to people’s privacy.

The modern digital economy thrives on the destruction of privacy. Many of the technologies we rely on today— from GPS to the internet to touchscreens — were originally funded by the U.S. government for wartime surveillance and communication. In the post-Cold War era, these innovations were commercialized, leading to the rise of Silicon Valley. However, it was the aftermath of September 11, 2001 (9/11) that solidified the partnership between Big Tech and the government. Under the guise of national security, the federal government responded to the attacks of 9/11 with new laws that enabled mass data collection. As a result, Big Tech companies gained enormous power by supplying data to intelligence agencies. The result was a surveillance capitalist economy, where user data became the most valuable commodity.

As data collection expanded, private industries recognized its immense value. Insurers, landlords, advertisers, police departments, social safety net providers, and even educational institutions sought access to user information to refine their models and maximize profits. The internet’s so-called “free services” were merely a front for mass surveillance. Everything from driving in a car to checking into a hotel to making reservations at a restaurant to vacuums and televisions with so-called smart technology collect behavioral data, often without clear user consent. This obsession with data fueled predictive analytics allows tech companies to anticipate and manipulate consumer behavior.

Your government slashed consumer protections. Now what?

Furthermore, the line between corporate and governmental surveillance is often blurred, as many of the corporations whose profits derive from data collection have contracts with the federal government to collect citizens’ data. Indeed, in 2013, a government contractor turned whistleblower named Edward Snowden exposed the extent of mass surveillance, revealing how intelligence agencies, colluding with Big Tech, exploited legal loopholes to spy on citizens. Such practices skirt constitutional protections of privacy from government by allowing surveillance by proxy from corporations who are financially dependent on government contracts and favorable regulatory and tax policies. In the process, privacy became nearly obsolete.

Despite congressional hearings and public outcry, lawmakers often demonstrated a lack of understanding—or worse, complicity — in the rapid erosion of privacy. Indeed, instead of addressing the core issues Snowden raised, the media and political establishment focused on Snowden himself, painting him as a traitor while ignoring the broader implications of his disclosures. More recently, lawmakers’ indifference to domestic spying was evident in the hypocritical scrutiny of the non-U.S. owned social media platform TikTok. While concerns about foreign surveillance at the hands of TikTok are valid, the same criticisms — regarding data collection, addictive algorithms, and manipulation — can and should be applied equally to US-based tech giants like Amazon, Facebook and Google. Yet, these companies face far less scrutiny from Congress. The companies also work with the federal government on surveillance, data collection and content moderation.

Some dismiss the dangers of mass surveillance with the shallow argument: I’m not doing anything wrong, so why should I care? Thinkers like George Orwell and Hannah Arendt addressed this question decades ago, noting that the erosion of privacy is a hallmark of exploitative systems — such as plantation slavery, totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany and patriarchy.

Surveillance also poses a unique danger because what is legal today may become illegal tomorrow. For instance, people in states with trigger laws suddenly found that seeking or even discussing abortion became a crime overnight following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. A crime that was difficult to avoid for people who had given their health information to big-tech through supposed health apps that monitor menstrual cycles.

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Importantly, the harms of surveillance are not limited to those accused of wrongdoing. Victims of stalking and those living with undocumented individuals depend on privacy for their safety and stability. Successful social movements — such as the labor, women’s rights, and civil rights movements — relied on privacy to strategically organize, communicate, and mobilize without interference or suppression from those in power. Additionally, corporations exploit data collection to justify inflating costs — such as rent and insurance — while limiting access to essential services for low-income communities. Similarly, LGBTQ+ youth and young people questioning or exploring their sexuality, who may not yet be out, run the risk of being even more subjugated.

Worse, data analytics tools are far from neutral; they reflect the biases of their creators. Studies show these tools disproportionately misclassify people of color as criminals, creating additional barriers for already marginalized groups.

Big Tech has masterfully convinced users that they are more powerful than they truly are, selling the illusion of connection, activism, and democracy — even as its products fuel division and democratic decline. Worse, these companies have shown a willingness to bend to power, embracing anti-disinformation and DEI policies under Democratic leadership, only to abandon it all with a Republican administration.

The panic over Elon Musk’s control of vast user data proved that no single entity should wield that much power. But users do have real power, and they must wield it to pressure both government and tech giants to protect privacy and end exploitative data collection. If the U.S. is to remain a democracy — where laws are enforced and truly reflect the will of the people — a Privacy Bill of Rights is a crucial first step. This framework should include:

Data Dividend: A federal law requiring companies to compensate citizens for their harvested data. Surveillance capitalism, companies may find, is too expensive to sustain at market rate.
Right to Be Erased: Citizens must have the right to demand the deletion of their personal data. This includes strict penalties for unauthorized data collection and bans on coercive data-for-access policies.
Decentralization of Data: Strict laws must prevent data from being collected, shared, or stored without a citizen’s explicit consent.
Surveillance-Free Zones: Cars, hotels, schools, homes, and other personal spaces must be declared surveillance-free zones, making digital surveillance in these areas illegal. Some argue that surveillance enhances safety, but true security comes from better policing—not from surrendering fundamental privacy rights. After all, what are the police protecting if your rights are already gone?
Opt-Out Protections: Privacy should never be the price of admission for using essential services. It must be illegal for companies to mandate data collection as a condition of access, with severe penalties for violations.

A Privacy Bill of Rights isn’t just an abstract ideal — it’s a necessary safeguard against corporate overreach and government intrusion. Today, politicians and media figures decry Big Tech’s overreach, yet they spent years enabling it. Real accountability, therefore, will not come from the institutions upholding the status quo. It must be demanded by the independent journalists, activists and ordinary citizens who have long sounded the alarm.

about Trump, Musk and DOGE

“Not fit to have a job”: Trump victim-blames veterans, workers for his war on the economy

It's starting to look like Donald Trump is deliberately wrecking the economy. As Robert Kuttner at the American Prospect wrote this week, "no other president has gone out of his way to create a collapse," but there's no other way to interpret Trump's actions. Pointless tariffs will only jack up inflation. Illegally shutting down much of the federal government and laying off thousands at random will suck money out of the economy, forcing a recession. Both consumer confidence and the stock market are diving and a likely surge in unemployment — driven in no small part by Elon Musk recklessly firing federal workers without regard for law or necessity — will make it worse. And if all these federal cuts lead, as expected, to people not getting Social Security checks or health coverage, the disaster will likely spiral.

Kuttner can't decide if Trump wants the economy to crash or if his actions are "based on sheer ignorance and impulsivity." Trump, however, indicated malicious intent during his seemingly endless speech in front of Congress on Tuesday night. Trump mocked the fears over imminent inflation by sneering that it's merely "a little disturbance." It's a familiar rhetorical move of his to paint his victims as whiners. In this case, however, his victims include most Americans, who aren't independently wealthy and can't simply afford rising costs and massive job losses.

Trump mocked the fears over imminent inflation by sneering that it's merely "a little disturbance." It's a familiar rhetorical move of his to paint his victims as whiners.

It's an understatement to call it "unprecedented" to have a president who hates most Americans, including his own voters, and wants them to suffer. But, as Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times persuasively argued Wednesday, Trump's psychology makes it explicable. Trump's "every executive function exists to satisfy his ego," Bouie wrote. He continues to whine on a near-daily basis about losing the 2020 election. "[I]t stands to reason that Trump would want revenge against the public," Bouie concluded, adding that Trump is now undergoing "a retribution campaign against the American people." Thomas Edsall of the New York Times spoke with psychologists who confirmed Bouie's layman understanding of Trump's disordered mental state. They affirmed that Trump suffers from "a congenital sense of entitlement," whose personality is like that of "street toughs, bullies, abusive husbands and hate-crime perpetrators." Even in the 2024 election, he didn't get over 50% of the vote. It makes sense that, after nearly a decade of most Americans rejecting him, a malignant narcissist like Trump would detest Americans categorically, and wish nothing more than to punish them all.

As for his supporters, there's good reason Trump enjoys hurting them, as well. One of his favorite moves is to humiliate people who are dumb enough to fawn over him. Even during Tuesday's speech, he reminded us he loves to kick someone in the face after they bent to kiss his feet. After congratulating Marco Rubio for getting the secretary of state job — for which Rubio had to repeatedly prostrate himself — Trump threatened him. "Good luck, Marco. Now we know who to blame if anything goes wrong," Trump said, relishing one more bit of public shaming of a man who has done so much to flatter him.

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Like most abusers, Trump's go-to move when challenged is to blame his victims. Unlike most abusers, however, Trump has a small army of spinmeisters and apologists who will echo his victim-blaming rhetoric. As the economic damage starts to balloon out, the number of people who will be told that they brought this on themselves will grow — likely until most Americans are being blamed for what Trump inflicted on them.

"Perhaps they’re not fit to have a job at this moment," argued Trump's lawyer, Alina Habba, when asked by a reporter Tuesday about veterans who are being fired in Musk's sweeping layoffs of federal workers. An estimated one-third of federal workers are veterans.

Alina Habba on veterans who have been fired from government jobs: "Perhaps they're not fit to have a job at this moment."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 4, 2025 at 1:34 PM

Habba did offer some throat-clearing about "we care about veterans," but was focused mainly on painting veterans as lazy, claiming they're "not willing to come to work." This is straight-up gaslighting. All reporting shows the federal layoffs are indiscriminate, without performance review or auditing. Musk and his "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE) keep mass-firing people, only to freak out and beg them to come back when it's revealed their jobs were not, in fact, inessential. This happened to people who maintain nuclear weapons. On Tuesday, 180 fired CDC workers were ordered to return to work. In other cases, Musk admits the jobs were essential — such as with people who prevent Ebola transmission — but "forgets" to restore the funding. Many fired federal workers have produced years of stellar performance reviews. Many were fired right after a promotion.

Not that Trump's minions care if their victim-blaming makes sense. Trump's Agriculture Secretary, Brooke Rollins, raised eyebrows this week when she suggested that the solution to soaring egg prices is for Americans to buy backyard chickens. "We've got chickens in our backyard," she told Fox News. "People are sort of looking around and thinking, 'Wow, maybe I could get a chicken in my backyard. And it's awesome!"

JD Vance's bombast tells us where MAGA is going

Trump’s Sec of Agriculture Brooke Rollins says the solution to high egg prices for Americans is to get some chickens and raise them in your backyard.

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— Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) March 3, 2025 at 6:41 PM

This wasn't just a one-off statement, either. In the Wall Street Journal, Rollins wrote an op-ed arguing, "We also want to make it easier for families to raise backyard chickens." In reality, it's not government regulations preventing most Americans from setting up a chicken farm in their backyard. Most people don't want to do that or don't have the room. But it would be foolish to regard Rollins' suggestion as a good-faith idea. Instead, this should be seen as more victim-blaming. The implication is that if $8 for a dozen eggs is too expensive for you, it's your fault for not having the foresight to set up your own chicken coop — one that's magically immune, no less, from bird flu.

The foundation for the victim-blaming administration was laid most thoroughly during Robert Kennedy's confirmation hearing to be secretary of Health and Human Services. Throughout, Kennedy repeatedly blamed not the health insurance companies or failing infrastructure for soaring health care costs, but patients themselves. He insisted both that "chronic illness" was the sole cause of excessive health care spending and that most chronic illnesses were based on people's personal failures. He especially focused on the idea that his esoteric diet ideas — which include consuming a lot of fried foods, which doctors definitely don't recommend — will fix it all, with the implication that no other medical interventions are needed.

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Kennedy's victim-blaming attitude looks increasingly like it will be the standard response of the Trump administration to all their failures, especially the economic disaster that Trump is inducing. Most alarming so far is how Trump teed up an excuse to take away Social Security checks from elderly people on Tuesday night. He went on an extended rant falsely accusing millions of recipients of defrauding the government, claiming that the system shows millions of people over 110 years old are drawing checks. This lie, which Musk also likes to repeat, has been thoroughly and repeatedly debunked. But it also doesn't make sense. If you were going to defraud the Social Security Administration, why would you pretend to be 120 years old? Wouldn't a fraudster come up with a fake identity that's more likely to pass notice, such as a 75-year-old?

As usual, however, making sense is not the point. The Social Security lie was concocted for a sole and obvious reason: as an excuse when people's Social Security checks stop showing up. The threat of this is not a distant one, either. Musk has heavily targeted Social Security offices for closures, and Democrats are warning that, when you "don’t have people to write the checks," the checks won't come. Former Social Security chief Martin O'Malley told CNBC he worries that, within the next few months, the U.S. is "going to see the system collapse and an interruption of benefits." The myth of millions of "fake" people on the rolls suggests Musk and Trump anticipate this collapse, too. They're already teeing up their excuse when payments disappear, which is that the recipients were "frauds" and needed to be cut.

Victim-blaming comes naturally to Trump, especially in response to the over two dozen women who have accused him of sexual abuse. In that case, it often works for him, because there's so much sexism in American society that people are ready to believe a woman who allows herself to be alone with a man deserves whatever violence he inflicts on her. But there may be limits to American tolerance for victim-blaming, especially when the victim pool encompasses the vast majority of Americans. Economic collapse is especially hard to blame on the little guys, instead of the person in charge, especially one like Trump, who rejected all sound advice like "tariffs cause inflation" and "mass unemployment is bad."

Personally, I think Trump is tanking the economy on purpose, because he's a narcissist who has decided to punish Americans for failing to show him the deference he feels he deserves. But even if one chalks his behavior up to stupidity instead of malice, the outcome is the same. The economy is likely to crash and, when it does, Trump will blame anyone but himself. How many people believe him is the only question left outstanding.

about this topic

Where did U.S. public health go wrong?

I chose a career in public health because of its power to improve lives, as the field did in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by controlling infectious diseases such as cholera and tuberculosis. I was fortunate to begin my career as a program analyst at the National Institutes of Health working to streamline funding allocation decisions. Over the past few weeks, it has been painful to witness the White House issuing directives curtailing federal funding, communications disparaging public health leaders, and directives to fire staff at numerous federal public health agencies, including NIH. Like many public health professionals, I fear what will happen next.

These attacks on public health efforts — and the feelings of anger and frustration from Covid-19 policy failures — have sent me searching for how the field fell from its glory years over a century ago. Where exactly did we go wrong?

U.S. public health efforts began in a vastly different era. In 19th century New York City, for example, diarrhea was a larger health threat than cancer or heart disease. And across the U.S., it was common for families to lose multiple children before their fifth birthday. Medicine offered little reprieve. Doctors’ orders could be more harmful than beneficial, and hospitals were only for the lower classes, while the wealthy received medical care at home.

Is America a death cult?

In the period after the Civil War, many states and cities founded public health departments with an objective to prevent disease, especially because medical treatments were so ineffective. Boosted by the discovery of germ theory in the mid-1800s, these departments prevented disease through large-scale projects. They supported implementing water sanitation, trash removal services, housing regulations, and plumbing standards, along with distributing pasteurized milk to poor families and educating the public about personal hygiene.

The enormous success of this work changed patterns of disease — a process now known as the epidemiological transition. Though national metrics are unavailable, data from New York City show that the death rate fell 60 percent between 1875 and 1925. And from 1880 to 1920, life expectancy increased from 36 to 53 years. If the same proportional rise had occurred in the last 40 years, U.S. life expectancy in 2025 would be 110. The era was described as the “golden age” of public health. The improvements were due primarily to decreasing deaths from communicable diseases — at least one of which declined by 99 percent. However, as fewer people died from communicable diseases, more deaths were due to chronic diseases such as cancer and cardiovascular disease — the same health issues we see today.

Public health of the time was not equipped to address chronic disease. Early germ theory did not point to solutions, and the interventions used to control communicable diseases — clean water, clean cities, and vaccinations — were not effective. The idea of risk factors and the importance of diet and exercise were still being developed and not widely understood. Public health professionals needed to find new solutions.

In 1926, Charles-Edward Amory Winslow, a professor of public health at Yale and president of the American Public Health Association, envisioned a new approach in his speech at the society’s annual meeting. Winslow said public health was at a “crossroads,” noting that “the major problems of public health have fundamentally changed in 50 years,” and told the association “we must adopt new methods if we are to meet it with any measure of success.” According to Winslow: “Future progress in the reduction of mortality and in the promotion of health and efficiency depends chiefly upon the application of medical science to the early diagnosis and preventive treatment of disease.” Winslow saw a way forward if public health could work with health care providers to improve preventative interventions.

Public health went wrong when it failed to integrate medical services to address the new rise in chronic disease between the 1930s and early 1950s.

However, he noted that medical services had not reached a “wholly ideal status,” saying problems were caused by physicians who were too individualistic, lack of access in some areas, and people hesitating to seek preventative services because of the cost. Winslow told public health officers that it was their “primary responsibility to work out in cooperation with the medical profession a wise solution of this problem,” and said it was their duty to ensure their communities have access to appropriate medical care.

Unfortunately, Winslow’s hopes were never achieved. Public health went wrong when it failed to integrate medical services to address the new rise in chronic disease between the 1930s and early 1950s.

Serious attempts were made, mainly by Thomas Parran Jr., U.S. Surgeon General from 1936 to 1948, whose most heinous failure, however, was support for the infamous Tuskegee Experiment and equally horrific research in Guatemala. Parran had served in the U.S. Public Health Service since 1917 and was a confidante of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. A bit of a national celebrity, he was one of the most well-known surgeons general due to writing a bestselling book on syphilis and having a speech pulled from the radio for insisting on saying “syphilis.”

Parran saw medicine and public health as “two facets of a unit problem” and pushed for their integration like Winslow recommended. During negotiations for New Deal legislation in the mid-1930s, a national health insurance program was under intense discussion, and Parran made a last-second push to add funding for public health departments. While insurance was kept out of the final draft of what would become the 1935 Social Security Act, due to opposition from the American Medical Association, Parran’s advocacy won an increase federal funding for state and local health departments.

A few years later, in July 1938, Roosevelt’s health staff organized a conference to discuss health insurance policy options and laid out a five-point National Health Program that included federal grants for state public health departments, hospital construction, medical care for the needy, general medical care programs, and disability insurance. Parran spoke at the conference about the need to think beyond “the separateness of preventative and curative efforts to reduce death and disease” because all health efforts “are parts of the same entity.” Sen. Robert Wagner from New York introduced a bill modeled on the program in 1939, but Germany’s invasion of Poland pushed it off the agenda.

President Harry Truman, however, resurrected a version of the National Health Program in a policy announcement to Congress in November 1945 and added provisions for funding medical education and medical research. Parran was so enthusiastic that he instructed his staff to treat Truman’s plan as official policy and made speeches in support. Three members of Congress introduced a new version of a previous bill, based on Truman’s idea, but again, it faced strong opposition from the AMA over national health insurance. While one point in the bill — federal funding for hospital construction — became law in 1946, Truman’s hopes for systemic health reform fell apart for good after a midterm elections loss.

By the 1950s, public health advocates shrunk their goals to only one part of the original five-point plan: funding for state and local public health departments. Hugh R. Leavell, chair of the APHA executive board, testified before a House committee in 1951 in support of “local health units,” an idea that had been developing since at least 1945. However, a draft of the bill would only provide funding to departments that did not provide medical care. Leavell sought to remove this requirement, but the issue split support, and despite the APHA’s efforts, the bill failed again.

It is a tragic irony that the current anger and frustration at public health stems from a communicable disease response — the basis for our original success.

Public health struggled after the failures to integrate medical services and guarantee federal funding. In 1926, Winslow told APHA that they were at a “crossroads,” yet 30 years later the APHA conference was still debating, “Where Are We Going in Public Health?” Federal funding for state public health departments declined through the 1950s, while money was poured into the newly reorganized NIH to find out how to curtail chronic disease. Health care and public health drifted further apart. The major advances in health care policy in the 1960s, Medicare and Medicaid, bypassed state public health departments. Efforts in the 1970s to use public health departments as a centralized health planner failed.

By the 1980s, the public health system was in “disarray” by admission of its own internal experts in a major national report. Although there have been small wins since then, there have never been reform efforts as large as under Parran. Data show the significance of these failures: Life expectancy in the U.S. increased by 22 years between 1900 and 1952 (from 47 to 69 years) but by only eight years since then, and it has consistently lagged behind many other countries since 1980.

Things could have been different. Had the National Health Program passed, our response to Covid-19 would have been improved by more access to care, better clinical data, better health care resource sharing, and perhaps more trust. It is a tragic irony that the current anger and frustration at public health stems from a communicable disease response — the basis for our original success.

As we enter an era when archetypical public health efforts, such as vaccines and pasteurized milk, are questioned, how we got here matters. As activist Rebeca Solnit wrote, citing her friend Julian Aguon, “Hope does not come from knowing the future; it comes from knowing the past.” The past shows that the way to a healthier nation is more, not fewer, public health initiatives. I hope we learn that lesson.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

about public health

Your government slashed consumer protections. Now what?

In the same way people don’t think about their plumbing until a deathly stench rises from their shower drain, most of us have gotten used to the safeguards afforded by the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — we’ve got backup if there’s a problem.

Among its service to American consumers: returning more than $21 billion to 205 million people; saving more than $5 billion by capping bank fees; fielding more than 6.8 million complaints about medical debt, student loan repayment and credit reporting; returning $183 million to veterans and service members for violations of the Military Lending Act; and removing $49 billion in medical collections from credit reports (anything under $500 cannot be included). Higher credit scores mean better rates and easier approvals on loans, credit cards and rentals.

The Trump administration has frozen the work of the CFPB (though there have been conflicting messages from the president himself), but only Congress can officially shut it down. It is funded by the nonpartisan Federal Reserve board to insulate it from politically driven fluctuations, and its fate hinges on a lawsuit brought by the National Employees Treasury Union that covers CFPB staff. A coalition of 23 state attorneys general submitted an amicus brief, arguing that shutting the bureau would cause catastrophic harm to consumers if oversight is left to the states.

The "financial motive" behind SCOTUS case aimed at killing consumer bureau

“The Trump Administration’s takeover of the CFPB is an effort to destroy the agency responsible for overseeing the mortgage markets, stopping predatory debt collectors, and preventing American families from being exploited by big banks and payday lenders,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta in a statement. “From sharing complaints and trend data, to providing training, and partnering on joint investigations and litigations, the loss of CFPB’s partnership has devastating and deep implications for California and households across the nation."

The Bureau was created in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown after fiscal institutions extended too much risky credit to folks who were unable to repay and went wild with mortgage rates and fees, which sank real estate markets and sent people into stratospheric amounts of debt. Signed into law in 2010 and enacted in 2011 as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the CFPB has since established national bulwarks for consumers against high fees for credit cards, payday loans and banking transactions and overdrafts.

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But actually, the CFPB was a great investment that put money back in people’s pockets. Since its inception, taxpayers spent $7.6 billion on the CFPB, but the Bureau returned $21 billion to consumers — about $2.76 for each dollar spent, said Mallory SoRelle, an assistant professor at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy and the author of Democracy Declined: The Failed Politics of Consumer Financial Protection.

“But those numbers don’t account for the money that consumers save from the agency rulemaking, complaint handling, educational activities, or other supervisory activities, so it would be a conservative estimate," she said. "For example, the agency’s own estimates suggest that the 2024 overdraft rule alone could save consumers $5 billion each year — significantly increasing the return on investment from just one single rule. Even if the actual savings ended up being lower, that is a huge potential return.”

“The agency has returned over $20 billion to consumers since its founding — protecting Americans from junk fees, medical debt, and predatory lending. President Trump campaigned on capping credit card interest rates at 10% and lowering costs for Americans. [Trump] needs a strong CFPB and a strong CFPB Director to do that. But if President Trump and Republicans decide to cower to Wall Street billionaires and destroy the agency, they will have a fight on their hands,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said in a statement. Warren was one of the CFPB’s original champions.

Who’s looking out for consumers now?

SoRelle said that while there are agencies that have consumer divisions, their primary mission is to prioritize the profitability and soundness of financial institutions — such as the FDIC and the Federal Reserve — not the people they serve. The “low bar” of protections, in fact, helped usher in the financial crisis of 2008.

"The agency has returned over $20 billion to consumers since its founding — protecting Americans from junk fees, medical debt, and predatory lending"

“There were these existing agencies, but they were adopting pretty weak consumer financial protections,” SoRelle said, “They weren't really as engaged with some of the enforcement actions that were needed to keep on top of those protections.”

Consumers can also wield power by choosing financial products, especially through credit unions, that are more consumer friendly. And read the fine print, carefully. “I don't think it's fair to say that all of these financial institutions are out to defraud people, but it's also true that there are a lot of financial institutions that have historically engaged in practices that break the law, that engaged in discriminatory practices or unfair practices, or are simply focused on profits and are charging fees that are disproportionately hard for certain types of people to pay for,” SoRelle said.

It's expensive to be poor. For many, the problem isn’t so much lack of financial knowledge as having poor credit and fewer options, falling into murderous interest rates and deeper debt via payday loans and overdraft fees.

What’s next?

Financial payment services are ramping up — especially peer-to-peer payments across social media and “buy now, pay later” services — without much regulation. “Nobody's really quite clear who has oversight over them,” SoRelle said. “We're not really sure if some of these products count as credit or if maybe there's something else.” Without the CFPB, new platforms and services may escape a regulatory eye.

"If you value the work that the CFPB does, and you want your pocketbook protected, then you’ve got to show up for it the way that it would show up for you"

Some states, however, may step in, depending on how seriously they take consumer protection, creating a patchwork of regulations across the country. “If you live in a state where the government is deciding to regulate these more stringently, you are going to have more protection,” SoRelle said.

“For now, the complaint database of the CFPB is still available and people should file complaints there. The CFPB historically has done a really good job of trying to help consumers navigate those complaints,” SoRelle said. She advised folks to also leverage their state’s attorney general’s office and any other consumer protection apparatus available.

SoRelle urged people to reach out to their elected officials to support the full restoration of the CFPB.

“If you value the work that the CFPB does, and you want your pocketbook protected, then you’ve got to show up for it the way that it would show up for you. And that means contacting your elected officials to tell them to stop what's happening,” she said.

about personal finance

“Identity fraud”: Proposed Texas state law would make identifying as transgender a felony

The Texas state legislature may soon consider whether transgender Texans can be charged with a felony for identifying as their preferred gender.

A bill proposed by Houston-area Rep. Tom Oliverson asks to amend the state penal code to create a new crime of "gender identity fraud." Under the act, a person could be charged with a felony for "identifying the person's biological sex as the opposite of the biological sex assigned to the person at birth" while dealing with either government entities or employers. The charge carries a punishment of up to two years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Oliverson's name is regularly affixed to some of the most hateful legislation coming out of the Lone Star State. He authored the state House's version of a bill to ban gender-affirming care for minors in the state. That bill was signed into law in the summer of 2023 and took effect later that year. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has since sued several doctors for allegedly providing care to transgender youth.

Experts warn of "chilling" effect of Texas attorney general suing doctors over gender-affirming care

While the bill doesn't have a co-sponsor or any planned hearings in the legislature as of this writing, it's one small piece of continued attacks on trans people in red states and nationally.

Late last year, the Texas Department of Public Safety announced that it would not change sex markers on state-issued driver's licenses for any reason other than "clerical errors." Upon taking office, President Donald Trump floated a raft of anti-trans executive orders that barred transgender people from the United States military and ordered the federal government to cease recognition of transgender and nonbinary identities.

That's not to say that conservatives are racking up easy wins. Trump's decrees have been countered with a barrage of lawsuits and judge's orders, and the removal of references to transgender people on Stonewall National Monument's webpage led to protests outside of the storied LGBTQ+ landmark.

about Texas' attacks on transgender people