Washington Monthly

Several leaders of the Jubilee of Prayer on the Mall noted that it was being held today because, as Marco Rubio put it, 250 years ago today, “our forefathers gathered for a national day of fasting and prayer.” Actually, what the Continental Congress called for in 1776 was a “day of HUMILIATION, Fasting and Prayer.” 

Humiliation. The modern folks left out that word.

Yes, the declaration approved by the Continental Congress asked God for support in the coming war with Great Britain and thank Him for his previous interventions. But it declared that the “day of humiliation, fasting, and prayer” would allow us to “confess and bewail our manifold sins and transgressions, and, by a sincere repentance and amendment of life, appease his righteous displeasure, and, through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, obtain his pardon and forgiveness.”

I can’t help but think the modern leaders omitted the very Christian concept of ‘humiliation’—let alone bewailing—because they believe that admission of fault is admission of weakness.

One model for proper self-examination was the sermon preached May 17, 1776, by the Rev. John Witherspoon, President of Princeton and soon-to-be-delegate to the Continental Congress. In discussing our sinful nature, he suggested we work on “envy, malice, covetousness and other lusts of man.” Perhaps President Trump could address those.

The Jubilee’s organizers are right about this: the Founders did believe in Divine Providence, and they did ask for God’s intervention, sometimes using explicitly Christian language.

But the Founders did not intend these occasions to be about Owning the Deists by showing that they could audaciously mention God and Jesus, and Jesus some more. Nor were they meant to claim that God forever favored the United States. Rather, the point was to examine ourselves, and become worthy of God’s support.

The post The Missing Word at Trump’s Prayer Rally appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Last month, the Congressional Progressive Caucus unveiled a “New Affordability Agenda,” a package of policy reforms aimed at addressing voters’ cost-of-living concerns. The agenda includes efforts to reduce the costs of childcare, housing, and electricity, among other household expenses. But one plank stood out as surprisingly bold: A proposal for the federal government to engage in the public production of prescription drugs. The Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act, introduced by Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Jan Schakowsky, would allow the federal government to manufacture certain generic drugs and sell them at a discount. Under the bill, a vial of insulin, for example, would drop from $300 to $50.

“We make your prescription drugs cheaper by saying if companies won’t make prescription drugs affordable, we’ll just make them ourselves,” posted Representative Greg Casar, the Texas Democrat and caucus chair. This DIY progressivism builds on action by states from California to New York exploring public production of insulin to ensure access for their residents.

For years, the liberal response to concentrated corporate power has been to regulate it, sue it, or subsidize consumers trapped by it. All those tools have their place. But each approach has limits. Lawsuits take years. Regulation can be fought, weakened, or rolled back by lobbyists. Subsidies can be captured by the very firms whose pricing power made them necessary.

But the Progressive Caucus proposal suggests another way is possible by reviving a forgotten policy tool used to counter concentrated production of critical goods, as my colleague Ganesh Sitaraman and I explain in a new paper: public factories.

Public factories are government-owned production facilities that provide or expand the supply of important goods. Some public factories are government-owned and government-operated (GOGO) facilities; others are owned by the government but operated by a private contractor (GOCO). Like other public options, public factories can provide an alternative to private firms that get away with selling subpar goods at inflated prices. Because they operate as nonprofit enterprises, public factories act as a “yardstick,” as President Franklin D. Roosevelt put it, to both measure private performance and pressure private producers to improve their output and pricing.

As Sitaraman and I explain, there is a long history of policymakers creating public factories. After the Revolutionary War, President George Washington and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton fretted that private arms manufacturers were overcharging the new government for low-quality weapons. They convinced Congress to create armories—public factories for military arms—to secure dependable, affordable supplies. The Springfield armory in particular would go on to develop pioneering advanced manufacturing techniques like interchangeable parts and assembly-line style mass production that helped seed the Second Industrial Revolution. During the Civil War, public factories in the North produced everything from arms to uniforms to drugs like morphine, partly to avoid unscrupulous contractors bilking the government for a wartime windfall. During the Progressive Era, the Navy ran factories producing smokeless powder for artillery and firearms, and armor plates for its then-new steel ships to secure better deals and higher-quality goods than those offered by the private sector.

Public factories were once routinely used to combat monopolies. In the early 1900s, North Dakota established a public flour mill to protect wheat farmers from monopolized out-of-state mills. That public enterprise remains the country’s largest flour mill to this day. Several cities, including New York, San Francisco, and Detroit, created public asphalt plants to counter local “asphalt trusts.” Other cities created municipal ice plants to provide affordable ice to their residents during hot summers without acceding to the “extortionate prices” charged by private ice dealers. After World War II, President Harry S. Truman and Congressional Democrats explored creating public steel mills to counter the steel industry’s self-imposed capacity limitations that constrained postwar consumer abundance.

Public factories could be useful today. Like the price-gouging by military contractors from earlier American history, there is no shortage of industries fleecing the public sector. Pharmaceutical industry concentration and anti-competitive practices, such as patent abuses, have led to high prescription drug prices charged to government healthcare programs, not to mention private insurers and underinsured Americans paying out of pocket. When President Joe Biden’s administration offered incentives for environmentally friendly electric heat pumps, the private equity industry drove increased consolidation across the heat pump supply chain to raise prices and capture more government subsidies. Private equity has also snapped up manufacturers of fire trucks and ambulances, forcing municipalities to pay higher prices or reduce emergency response services.

In other sectors, monopolized production causes economy-wide bottlenecks. Consider electrical transformers. For years, the U.S. has faced severe shortages of critical grid. Years-long wait times for transformers delayed new housing developments, infrastructure projects, and even disaster relief efforts. These shortages are caused, in part, by limited domestic production of a type of steel critical to transformer production. Only one American company—the steelmaker Cleveland-Cliffs—produces the steel needed for transformer production, but not enough to meet demand, leaving transformer manufacturers dependent on imported steel and beset by Trump tariffs. All this has led to increased costs for construction projects requiring grid upgrades.

Ultimately, each concentrated sector produces higher costs for consumers. Monopolized drug pricing leads to higher insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs. Rolled-up heat pump markets lead to higher costs for consumers seeking more efficient energy units. Private equity companies that deliberately cultivate strategic backlogs to charge high prices for emergency response vehicles force households to pay higher property taxes and higher medical bills. Monopoly-induced transformer shortages lead to high-priced supply-constrained housing markets, along with increased household and business energy costs.

Public factories could reduce scarcity and lower prices. As I have proposed elsewhere, a public factory to produce electric steel for transformers can ease bottlenecks across the economy while promoting competition within a concentrated domestic industry.

Public factories could also support fertilizer production disrupted by the Iran War. Since its inception, the Tennessee Valley Authority has had the authority to publicly manufacture agricultural fertilizer—a prerogative it used to develop better fertilizers, which could be reactivated to increase supply and bring competition to an industry with significant consolidation.

Like the public factories of old, the reality—or even just the threat—of the public sector entering an industry could weaken the strategic and economic value of monopoly or roll-up tactics. Once the public factory bazooka is used a few times, it might have an even greater deterrent effect, discouraging corporations from engaging in that kind of anti-competitive conduct in the first place.

Factories can take years to build and come online; using public factories to improve affordability will require moving much faster. To yield near-term supply increases, public factories may need expedited permitting, as Congress did to expedite semiconductor plant construction. The Defense Production Act could also help public factories get faster, priority access to essential equipment and materials.

Americans are frustrated that they have lost control of their own economic destinies. Rising prices and profits consume more of the fruits of their labor, padding someone else’s pockets. That frustration can be addressed by antimonopoly principles, which seek to wrest control of economic power from a few private stakeholders for the public’s benefit. As FDR explained in the context of electricity markets in 1932, the option of direct public production meant that “any community” could “engage in the supplying of” important goods if they “believe that they are unable to obtain adequately low rates or adequately good service from [a] private company.” As the Congressional Progressive Caucus has reminded us, the public can take matters into its own hands to directly produce essential goods at the prices and quality it needs.

The post The Affordability Case for Public Factories appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Billionaires are the apex predators of the modern economy.

They tear up governments, buy politicians, and wreck the planet with carbon-spewing yachts. They control the news and what’s in our feeds. They spend $55 million on lavish weddings while the rest of us struggle to buy groceries and gas.

No wonder then, that billionaire backlash is growing. A majority of California voters, for instance, say they support the “billionaire tax” on the ballot in November. New York City’s mayor is a democratic socialist. Many Americans have begun to question the merits of capitalism; Gallup finds that just 54 percent of Americans see capitalism favorably.

But can capitalism yet be saved? And is it worth saving?

Two ambitious reformers argue yes—provided there’s a radical makeover of what a capitalist economy should achieve.

Nick Hanauer and Eric Beinhocker advocate a philosophy they call “market humanism,” and they’re the subjects of this preview edition of the Monthly podcast, which you can watch below.

Hanauer and Beinhocker don’t want the end of capitalism, or the end of markets. What they’d like to see is better market organization of markets to produce outcomes that benefit humanity (i.e., not more billionaires). It’s a bold, optimistic idea: to elevate “human flourishing” over “efficiency.”

As Beinhocker points out, “activities in the economy that cure cancer versus cause cancer would be treated the same way in GDP, but those two things have a very different impact on human well-being.” Market humanists want markets to reward outcomes that lead to better well-being. “Markets are not natural constructions,” says Hanauer. “They are human built constructions. And the question is not, ‘Are they optimal?’ but ‘Who are they optimal for?’”

Hanauer’s and Beinhocker’s backgrounds are as interesting as their theories. Capitalism has, in fact, been very good to both of them, which makes their about-face on the current system even more intriguing. Hanauer is arguably one of America’s most successful entrepreneurs. He was the first non-family investor in Amazon and the founder of multiple firms, one of which he sold to Microsoft for $6.4 billion. Beinhocker, now a professor at Oxford University, was a McKinsey & Company partner for 18 years.

But they both now see serious flaws in the current structure of the U.S. economy and want to fix it from within. “Markets left to their own devices don’t naturally lead to a healthy middle class,” Beinhocker says.

Nevertheless, is their theory of “market humanism” realistic? Is it feasible? Can companies and other capitalists really let go of the idea that “greed is good”?

Beinhocker and Hanauer make their case in a new treatise, Markets Built for Humans, which I asked about in our interview. They also offer a fuller critique of the current economic paradigm—the so-called “neoliberal consensus”—and describe the kinds of policies that a “market humanist” system would produce.

Let us know if you’re convinced!

New at the Monthly…

Worse than Watergate. Among the many felons pardoned by President Donald Trump so far was former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, sentenced to 45 years in a federal prison for charges related to drug trafficking. If you’ve wondered why Hernández was pardoned, we may now have the answer, thanks to a dedicated—and fearless—group of anonymous Honduran journalists. According to Politics Editor Bill Scher, Trump’s pardon of Hernández was part of an extraordinary plot to undermine left-wing governments in Mexico and Colombia. Hernández’s role, according to these journalists, was to spearhead a propaganda operation sanctioned by Trump to discredit these governments. If true, Hondurasgate makes Watergate look like shoplifting by comparison. Learn the details here.

Undervalued and underpaid. The wages of the nation’s childcare workers are so slow that the cost of attaining credentials to do this work far outweighs the return on investment. The ROI is so low, in fact, that child care credentials would run afoul of new federal earnings tests meant to weed out low-quality programs, says Benazir Rowe, founder of Opportunity Data. But the problem isn’t program quality—it’s the structure of the childcare labor force. And the answer isn’t to carve out childcare programs from these new accountability standards—it’s to raise wages. Read here.

The real reason Spirit Airlines failed. No, it’s not because Joe Biden’s administration blocked a proposed merger with JetBlue, argues Ganesh Sitaraman, the author of Why Flying Is Miserable. Rather, the airline industry’s competitive dynamics make it impossible for smaller airlines to succeed. “It’s time to admit that the industry is more like a public utility than a competitive market,” he writes. “We will not have a stable, reliable airline industry without either taking over the airlines or regulating them like public utilities.” Read here.

Sanitizing death and destruction. During the Iraq War in the early 2000s, the late journalist and etymologist William Safire often called out the Bush administration’s use and abuse of euphemism to hide military failures and sanitize violence. (A retreat, for instance, was a “retrograde movement.”) Journalist James North points out that the Trump administration is engaging in the same kind of linguistic hide-the-ball to downplay the Iran War and pacify the public—something the commentariat seems content to go along with. “Let’s start with the benign-sounding expression took them out to describe what the U.S. and Israel have been doing to Iran’s leaders—when, in fact, our air forces were ‘killing’ them,” he writes. James has plenty more examples of this Orwellian obfuscation. Read here.

Plus…

• Watch a film adaptation of Mark Twain’s “The War Prayer,” directed by our Publisher Emeritus Markos Kounalakis. Twain wrote this piece to protest the jingoism of the Spanish-American War, Markos writes, but it’s as fresh as ever today as the Trump administration calls for its own “crusades” around the world.
• Russell Lemle of the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute offers four ideas for boosting safety at Veterans Administration community clinics, which have lately become a target for violence.
• Former CBS correspondent Marvin Kalb shares intriguing details of his investigation into the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981—and whether the Kremlin was behind the plot (courtesy Compass).
• Contributing writer James Zirin writes that former FBI Director James Comey need not fear being convicted for threatening to kill the president—though the case might just make it to trial.
• Journalist Merrill Goozner shows how soaring hospital prices are driving medical inflation.
• Contributing writer David Masciotra interviews the CEO of EveryLibrary, a nonprofit dedicated to defending public libraries.
• In his Friday column, Bill Scher calls for a truce in the three-way Michigan Senate Democratic primary—lest their internecine fighting paves the way for a GOP victory.

And introducing….

The Washington Monthly has long been a think tank in magazine form. We publish deeply reported content that surfaces promising policy solutions to the country’s greatest problems, but as essays and feature stories, not white papers.

There are times, however, when our reporting and policy ideas are best conveyed on a bigger canvas. That’s why we’re pleased to announce the launch of our new in-house think tank, The Washington Monthly Institute, and the publication of our first research report: AI and the Future of Independent Journalism: The promise and peril of privately controlled data marketplaces for media content.

You’ve made it through another week, and we’re almost a third of the way through Trump’s second term.

As always, thanks for reading, sharing, and subscribing.

See you next Sunday.

Anne Kim, Senior Editor

The post The Capitalists Trying to Fix Capitalism appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Bruising primaries do not always produce weakened nominees. They can usefully vet and stress-test candidates, toughening them up for the general election. Barack Obama in 2008 and Bill Clinton in 1992 are famous examples of Democratic presidential candidates who survived having their dirty laundry aired during the primary season. 

But a divisive contest can hobble a nominee. Ask Hillary Clinton.  

Whether the Democrats’ toughest Senate primaries this year will help or harm nominees won’t be known until November. So far, James Talarico in Texas and Graham Platner in Maine appear in good shape for their fall campaigns, with both leading in the most recently sampled polls (although neither race has been tested in the past month, and Texas Republicans have yet to settle on their nominee). The Iowa primary between Josh Turek and Zach Wahls, both state legislators, is sharp, yet an April poll has each slightly ahead of the presumptive GOP nominee. 

On top of that, Democratic Senate candidates in North Carolina and Alaska are leading in what limited polling we have. (Former North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper became the Democratic nominee without serious primary competition. Alaska’s ranked choice voting system does not have party primaries, but the Democrats have coalesced around former Representative Mary Peltola.) 

The polling data in these mostly red states is in line with the Democratic overperformance we have consistently seen in off-year and special elections since Trump retook office, with the Democratic lead in the generic congressional ballot, which recently cracked six points in the Real Clear Politics average, pointing to a Blue Wave midterm election. 

This makes the Senate poll data coming from Michigan so concerning for Democrats.  

Two sets of general election polls, sampled in late April and early May, give the presumptive Republican nominee—former Representative and 2024 Senate nominee Mike Rogers—a slight edge over all three leading Democrats: Abdul El-Sayed, State Senator Mallory McMorrow, and U.S. Representative Haley Stevens.  

Unlike the contests mentioned above, the Michigan seat in play this November is held by Democrats. (The incumbent, Gary Peters, is retiring.) While Trump won Michigan in 2024, Rogers narrowly lost to Democrat Elissa Slotkin. Michigan Democrats hold all statewide elected offices, and this year’s likely Democratic nominee for governor is leading in polls (despite a third-party campaign from the former mayor of Detroit, who is a Democrat-turned-independent). This is not a red state and shouldn’t flip red during a Blue Wave. Failing to hold it will make the Democrats’ uphill Senate fight—requiring a net gain of four seats on mostly Republican turf—much steeper. 

Why are the three Democratic Senate candidates in Michigan lagging? They are beating the Mackinac Island fudge out of each other.  

Each unofficially represents an ideological faction. El-Sayed is the Democratic Socialists’ candidate, backed by Senator Bernie Sanders and supportive of single-payer health care. McMorrow is the progressive populist, backed by Senator Elizabeth Warren and supportive of a public health insurance option. Stevens is the moderate, tacitly backed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and, while nominally supportive of a public option, doesn’t lean into it nor mention it on her website’s issues page. 

And as I covered last week, the three are divided on Israel. El-Sayed would end all military aid to Israel (in fact, he “opposes directly funding foreign militaries” everywhere). McMorrow would stop selling Israel offensive weapons and has the support of the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” J Street PAC. Stevens defines herself as a “proud pro-Israel Democrat,” and is backed by AIPAC PAC. 

Their differences have fueled a nasty three-way slugfest in which each exploits the other two’s vulnerabilities. Stevens and McMorrow have attacked El-Sayed’s embrace of the controversial influencer Hasan Piker. El-Sayed and McMorrow have hammered Stevens’ ties to AIPAC. El-Sayed and Stevens mocked McMorrow as a transplant who mocked Michigan in deleted tweets. McMorrow’s campaign criticized El-Sayed for claiming he’s a “physician” when, despite earning a Doctor of Medicine degree, he hasn’t practiced. El-Sayed’s campaign has accused McMorrow of belatedly copying his positions. 

No closely contested primary is a love fest. And primary voters should have the opportunity to see candidates deal with crises and carry themselves under fire. But with the three dragging each other down in general election polling, the law of diminishing marginal utility has kicked in.  

Worse, this primary isn’t even close to over; Michigan Democrats don’t vote until August 4. After 12 more weeks of this circular firing squad, while Rogers flies unscathed under the radar, whoever survives the primary may be too damaged—and the Democratic electorate too divided—to win. The opportunistic Rogers, who moved from publicly urging Trump to concede the 2020 election to welcoming election deniers into his campaign, is no pushover. The former congressman lost the 2024 U.S. Senate race by less than half a percentage point.  

No doubt Rogers has his flaws. He owns a Florida mansion, and Democrats have long pointed to it to argue he isn’t really a Michigan resident. In March, he clumsily downplayed the gas price spike caused by Trump’s war against Iran, telling a voter at a campaign event, “We’re gonna be fine, we got plenty of oil.” But such missteps make the Democrats’ weakness in polls against him all the more glaring. Rogers shouldn’t be faring better in Michigan than the Republican incumbent in deep-red Alaska.  

What can Democrats do? Convince El-Sayed, McMorrow, and Stevens to abide by an unofficial non-aggression pact. Of course, they will continue to clash, but they can do strictly on substance, without the sneering and snark that have colored the race. 

The three can’t turn back time. They shouldn’t disavow anything they have said on the record. But those points have been made and do not need belaboring.  

Notably, the attacks haven’t produced a clear primary frontrunner. The Real Clear Politics average, encompassing four polls conducted in the past month, gives El-Sayed a small 4.5-point lead over both his rivals, but with an in-no-way-intimidating 24 percent of the vote. That’s not nearly enough of a lead to prompt either McMorrow or Stevens to drop out.  

Moreover, every poll taken pegs at least one-third of the primary electorate as undecided. The Glengariff Group poll shows at least 40 percent of Democrats “never heard” of any of them (for McMorrow, it’s 60 percent), and that number is probably higher among the general electorate. The more they attack each other, the more voters will be introduced to them in the worst possible way. 

This is a classic collective action problem. Convincing candidates to play nice is inherently difficult, especially as tensions rise as we approach Election Day. No candidate will want to disarm first. An intervention from state party officials, including Governor Gretchen Whitmer, will probably be necessary. (I presume intervention from national Democrats is unlikely to be as welcomed.)  

Having punched each other into a statistical three-way tie, El-Sayed, McMorrow, and Stevens should be able to see that there is nothing to be gained from more fisticuffs. Each has an incentive to introduce themselves to wide swaths of voters on positive grounds. As committed Democrats, they have a shared goal of maximizing the party’s chances of winning in November. Having taken their best shots against each other, it’s time for them to make their best pitches for themselves. 

The post Michigan’s Democratic Senate Primary Needs a Non-Aggression Pact  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

President Donald Trump and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche claim they are worried about hidden homicidal language. Their Department of Justice is prosecuting former FBI Director James Comey, the former FBI Director, for allegedly spelling out 86 as a code word in seashells for murdering the 47th president—even though for more than a century the number has simply meant to stop serving alcohol to an unruly patron, or bar them from a restaurant or tavern. If Comey is convicted, he could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison. 

The Trump/Blanche super sensitivity to allegedly homicidal language is both ludicrous and chilling. But it does raise much larger and genuine truths. Trump, his administration, and mainstream media figures are deploying euphemism to sanitize real and widespread violence in the war against Iran. Let’s start with the benign-sounding expression took them out to describe what the U.S. and Israel have been doing to Iran’s leaders—when, in fact, our air forces were “killing” them. Taking him out is only the worst of several expressions meant to cover up what was really happening in this ugly and illegal war.  

You didn’t just hear take them out from Trump’s allies and mouthpieces in right-wing media. If you watched a stretch of cable television news, even on the supposedly more progressive MS NOW, you would have heard some of the on-air presenters repeat it regularly. By contrast, you rarely, if ever, would stumble across the truth in plain English: “The U.S. and Israel launched this war by assassinating Iran’s leader, along with members of his family, and they continued to kill other top officials.”  

So far, the linguistic dishonesty has gone unnoticed, but George Orwell would have recognized it immediately. His classic 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language,” is a brilliant indictment of how language is used to hide ugly truths. Here are a couple of his examples: “Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: This is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers.” 

Taking them out has a shameful history. I first heard it in the late 1970s, while reporting from southern Africa. In Rhodesia, a Black guerrilla movement was challenging the white minority regime after peaceful efforts at change had failed. White “troopies” openly boasted about how many “terrs,” (short for “terrorists,”) they had “taken out” on their last patrol. The minority regime lost; Rhodesia became independent Zimbabwe in 1980. But, over time, the euphemism has spread. 

All along, the intent has been the same: dehumanize the people you are killing and hide that you are taking human lives.  

Back to Iran. There, taking them out also helps to conceal another truth: “assassinating” foreign leaders is actually prohibited under American law, a fact that was barely reported as the U.S./Israeli attacks continued for weeks. 

There has been more Orwellian language. Decapitate also replaced “kill Iran’s political and military leaders.” The word literally means “cut off their heads,” but probably no one who hears it is visualizing a guillotine. Instead, it sounds somewhat benign, more like a personnel reshuffle in a dysfunctional office.  

Collateral damage to cover up “accidentally killing civilians” appeared during the first Gulf War back in 1990-91. This time around, it at first seemed to have been discarded, but as the U.S./Israeli war shuddered on, you started to hear it again.  

Military assets are another Orwellian example. Its meaning includes “warplanes” and “deadly missiles.” Targets and high-value targets also help to hide the actual human beings whom Israel and the U.S. were killing; by one estimate, 1701 Iranian civilians have already died since the war started. Degrading targets is destroying bridges, damaging electric power plants, and bombing more than 20 Iranian universities and research centers.  

Mowing the grass originated in Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel a decade or so ago. What it means is: “The Israeli army regularly invaded Gaza, killing enough Palestinian people to dampen down resistance, and then left until the ‘grass’ grew back.” But now the euphemism has begun to rear its head in the war against Iran.  

There’s still another Orwellian term—saying boots on the ground when you mean a “military land invasion.” The expression sounds something like an innocent group hike through the Iranian countryside. A euphemistic alternative, ground operations, also seems innocuous.  

In fact, a U.S. invasion would mean hugely increased death and injuries to American soldiers, Iranian defenders, and many more Iranian civilians. The U.S. Army’s M134 machine gun can actually fire between 2000 and 6000 bullets per minute. No doubt the Iranians who would be defending their own country also have similar lethal weapons. Several factors will have contributed if the U.S. and Israel restart their war against Iran. But hiding hard, brutal truths behind Orwellian language will be one of them. 

The post Trump and Blanche’s Orwellian Language and How Much of Washington Echoes It appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this week that consumer prices are racing ahead at an annual rate of 3.8 percent, led by a nearly 30 percent increase in the price of fuel. Medical inflation trailed the national average, rising at a 3.2 percent clip.

Don’t let that composite number for health care fool you. If you dig into the numbers, you’ll find that rising hospital prices are mostly to blame for current medical cost inflation, as they have been for the past decade (see the chart below). Every other sector—pharmaceuticals, physician services, medical commodities—are rising on average at or below 2 percent or what Federal Reserve Board chairman Jerome Powell and previous Fed chairs have considered the ideal target for price growth.

A slight caveat: The prescription drug price increases reported by the BLS may understate its contribution to overall medical inflation. The agency calculates its year-over-year increase mostly from the price increases on existing products, which is usually modest.

The most significant factor driving increased drug spending is the price placed on new products entering the market, which these days can range into hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for new cancer drugs and over $2,000 a year for the latest weight-loss GLP-1s. One in 12 Americans are already taking those drugs to lose weight, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey, while a third of adults say they are interested in taking them.

I’ll do the math for you. Current usage translates into a total cost of about $44 billion a year (that’s calculated at the low price for the pill forms now entering the market; many people and/or their insurers are still paying over $10,000 a year for the first-generation GLP-1s, which are injected). Tripling uptake, which surveys suggest could happen, will cost nearly as much money as the Pentagon says it needs to fight President Trump’s war against Iran.

But even that level of new drug spending will pale besides the rapidly rising cost of hospital care. Average prices for hospital care today are more than 50 percent higher than where they stood a decade ago, according to the BLS. Since hospitals account for a third of all health care spending (more than twice what is spent on drugs), hospitals now generate about 40 percent of the year-over-year increase in the total health care tab.

Higher prices lead to higher profits

Those rapid price increases are now showing up as outsized profits for major hospital chains, which last year dwarfed the profits made by insurers. We don’t hear much about the profits generated by hospital systems because more than three-quarters of all hospital beds in this country are controlled by non-profit systems, which don’t report to the Securities and Exchange Commission. They include religiously affiliated systems, major academic medical centers and high-prestige outfits like the Mayo and Cleveland clinics.

Their executives invariably repeat a slogan I heard for the first time at a conference I attended shortly after becoming editor of Modern Healthcare in 2012. “No margin, no mission,” they’d say when questioned about the “surpluses” reported on the income statements that they send to bond rating agencies.

Their missions varied depending on the locations of their hospitals and background of the system. They included healing the sick, research, providing free care, and helping the community. They are required to report those “community benefits” to the Internal Revenue Service each year to maintain their non-profit status. (Most systems inflate their community benefits by including the difference between Medicaid reimbursement and what they claim is the actual cost of care; but that’s a different story.)

There have been years when average hospital surpluses have been quite narrow, close or even less than the 5 percent target used by most for-profit insurance companies. But when I pulled the 2025 annual filings for 17 large hospital systems (accounting for over a half trillion dollars in revenue), I was stunned to see they earned an average of an 8.5 percent return last year.

As you can see from the next chart, margins at eight of the non-profits surpassed the most profitable publicly-traded company, which is HCA. All reported dollar amounts are in billions:

Meanwhile, health insurers’ after-tax profits dipped well below their 5 percent target:

What is to be done?

The policy wonk world has largely turned to antitrust as the solution to rapidly rising hospital prices. Recent studies conducted by the KFF and Families U.S.A. show that nearly every hospital referral region is dominated by one or two major hospital systems. (There are over 3,400 cities and towns with at least one hospital, but only 306 major hospital referral regions, defined by their ability to offer comprehensive medical services.)

There has been a tremendous amount of consolidation over the past two decades, with major chains gobbling up struggling independent hospitals or merging with other major chains. They’ve also scooped up independent physician practices, ambulatory surgical centers, and established numerous satellite clinics that feed patients into their hospitals when in need of surgeries, tests and chronic disease care.

After passage of the Affordable Care Act, such consolidation was rationalized as necessary to create vertically integrated delivery systems capable of providing greater care coordination that could deliver higher quality care and better outcomes at a lower price. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services launched numerous pilot projects aimed at training health care systems to deliver what became known as accountable care.

Alas, most of those pilot projects failed to save money. Those that did never led to widespread adoption. Hospitals resisted moving away from a fee-for-service model where the more services they delivered, the more revenue they generated, and the more margin they earned to invest in fancier facilities or store in their growing endowments.

Insurers, most of which are now for-profit, saw no reason to tamper with the system since the more hospitals charged them, the more they could charge their employer and individual customers. Since their profits depended on total revenue, the more they were charged, the more they could turn around and charge in premiums, and the more they could make.

Insurers also talked about using population health management techniques to lower costs for the patients. Yet their primary tools turned out to be abusive prior authorization techniques and rampant claims denials, which only served to alienate patients, physicians and hospital administrators without improving health. Indeed, it may have made outcomes worse, even as it increased profits in the short run. When those tools drew massive resistance (they are now being scaled back), it led to rising utilization and a profit collapse, suggesting all their talk about population health management was precisely that — talk.

Many political leaders—ranging from single-payer advocates on the left to the White House on the right—still blame insurance companies for rising costs, and see eliminating them or reining them in as the solution. Given insurers’ abuse of prior authorization, narrow networks and their high overhead, it’s not an unreasonable position, as Larry Levitt pointed out in a commentary published in JAMA Health Forum on Monday. “Removing health insurance companies from the equation—for example, in a Medicare for all system—would reduce administrative costs and profits,” he wrote.

“But the biggest drivers of health spending growth—hospital prices, care that is not always grounded in evidence, and new drugs and medical technologies—would remain,” he concluded. “Some entity must address what health care needs to be covered and at what price. The question is, who do we trust to do that most effectively and fairly?”

As I’ve written repeatedly in recent months (see here, here and here), doctors who work in and within hospitals are best positioned to make decisions about what needs to be done to treat their patients. Couple that with putting hospital administrators under government-run price regulation tied to annual budgets, and you have a recipe for the short-run cost control and long-run affordability that will make universal coverage, which is necessary to eliminate uncompensated care from the system and deliver better population health, possible.

The post Profiting From Inflated Hospital Prices appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Censorship is a national weathervane, indicating an unhealthy society where freedom of thought and expression are under attack, often because of prejudice against those whose appearance, identity, or beliefs are counter to the majority. Libraries are on the front lines in that battle.

The American Library Association reports that 2025 was the worst year for book bans, with 713 attempts to censor library materials. Most of the targets, including the contemporary classic, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, and Malinda Lo’s National Book Award winner, The Last Night at the Telegraph Club, feature characters and plotlines related to queer sexuality. Only three percent of book ban requests began with parents. Most originated with political pressure groups or even elected officials.

I recently spoke with John Chrastka, the executive director of EveryLibrary, about public libraries, book bans, and how libraries represent the aspirations of democracy. EveryLibrary, a non-profit, advocates for library funding, pro-library legislation at the local and state levels, and freedom in the face of book-ban campaigns.

DM: What is the state of public libraries, and what is the state of the effort to maintain freedom of choice?

JC: There are about 17,500 public libraries and about 9,500 administrative units, meaning headquarters buildings and legal jurisdictions. The vast majority are not experiencing book ban challenges and are in a position where the conversation with taxpayers is about how tax dollars serve communities, how we lower barriers to get people the reading material that they want, either for enjoyment or skills building, along with the programming that they want, whether it is something fun (like a magician for kids) or something serious (like how to write a resume). Last year, 94 percent of ballot measures for funding libraries passed. Most people are comfortable with paying taxes to fund libraries because they understand the impact. But we have a small group of libraries that have to fight for the rule of law. The rule of law issue affects censorship and readers’ civil rights because so many book-ban campaigns are about erasure or discrimination against particular types of books about particular types of people. So, we have a lopsided news cycle. Most headlines should say, “Americans love libraries. They are investing in them and using them heavily,” but some libraries fight valiantly to ensure a right to read.

DM: Wonderful to hear some good news for a change. How do you square America’s love for libraries with the rancor surrounding funding for public goods and services?

JC: That is an age-old question in our republic. The thing that comes to mind immediately is the difference between how Americans think of their own public schools and how they think about public education, overall. Look at the work that Phi Beta Kappa has done since the 1950s. They ask people to score their local school. They usually give it a ‘B’ or ‘B+’. When they ask them to grade public education in the U.S., they usually give a ‘C- ‘ or ‘D+.’ The local congressman or congresswoman tends to get reelected until they retire. Approval ratings for Congress are in the 20s or teens. We have a perception of how things are nationally versus locally. It is the same with libraries. Locally, it is a beloved institution. Nationally, the story is about a problem that needs to be addressed regarding censorship. People in good faith are not paying close attention and don’t want to see anything go badly. So, they accept the book banners’ word for it, even though they know there is no problem locally. The books removed by these weaponized and politicized campaigns are not being removed for sincere-belief reasons, but because they are part of larger political campaigns.

DM: Why should Americans pay closer attention to the services that the library provides, and the need to protect those services?

JC: The library is one of the best libertarian arguments for limited government. You might not have expected that answer, but it is. They are a small part of the local budget and a minimal part of the federal budget, yet they create opportunities to read and develop skills. If a child needs access to 1,000 books to learn to read, the library is the place that can provide them. As a nation, we want to see an informed and prosperous citizenry. The library helps us reach that goal with very little taxpayer money. It is the best example of the libertarian ideal. Yet, it is also progressive because people who are not part of the majority get to see themselves honored and reflected on the shelves. It is also conservative, because it preserves communal memory and identity. It is also an embodiment of the Tenth Amendment because states have extraordinary discretion to run the library.

DM: Moving on to the bad news, you’ve said that the book ban campaigns don’t operate in good faith and are politicized. To the average person who thinks book-ban efforts are driven by concerned parents, what is going on?

JC: The First Amendment has five freedoms. One of them is the right to petition the government for various grievances. I have a right to petition the government about a book in the library that I think is a problem. That’s what a book-ban campaign is in the ideal sense. It is as simple as, “I have a problem with this taxpayer-funded thing. So, let’s have a debate about it.” That’s unimpeachable. It’s how government should function. The problem is a situation like in Clay County, Florida, where one person was responsible for 854 book challenges and proudly talks about his role as a disruptor. He’s not even a parent. The Washington Post reported on all book ban challenges in 2023 and found that 11 people were responsible for 62 percent of the requests. This is either a very small group of sincere people who have drunk the Kool-Aid about how books can be dangerous—books, by the way, that have been produced by mainstream publishers, books that have been vetted by lawyers at those publishing companies, books that professional librarians have acquired—or it is part of a social and political movement. There are groups like Mothers [sic] for Liberty and Purple Parents in Indiana, and the governor of Louisiana, who, when running, told supporters, “I want you to report the pornography at your local library to my campaign.”

DM: What’s their agenda?

JC: The agenda around book bans, aside from sincerely held belief, which again, is unimpeachable, is going from different vectors. One is anti-public education or anti-public sector. The book-banning allegation is intended to discredit the institution and its workforce. To say that there is pornography in the libraries and schools is to say that the librarians and teachers are pornographers. In states where there is a charter school movement, we see tremendous attacks with this pornography allegation. It happened in Texas. It was concurrent with the move toward charter school vouchers. It happened in Florida. It is also part of the discriminatory wave out there. It’s anti-gay, anti-trans, and anti-Black. Then there is an interesting corollary to efforts to oppose sex education.

DM: The people of sincere conviction, operating without political organization, are a tiny minority, but real. How do you believe that process should play out?

JC: Two ways. One is a transparent, consultative process about why the book was brought into the library in the first place, how it is relevant to the library’s mission, and how it is relevant to the people for whom it is intended. If it doesn’t pass the tests for harm or obscenity, it should be removed. Sometimes that good-faith approach is instructive. The other option: The person can go to the district attorney’s office. If the book really is obscene, then let’s take it to where it belongs, which is the DA and the courts.

DM: Another controversial aspect: events that take place at libraries, particularly drag queen story hours. What is your position?

JC: The use of the library has two different components. One is programs and events put on by residents and local organizations that use the library as a public forum. They either have space for free or rent space. So, anything short of illegal activity, which includes religious proselytization, raising funds for political candidates, and obscene activities, is part of the public forum. It is a place in the community for citizens’ use. There is nothing illegal about a drag queen story time. It might make people uncomfortable, but it isn’t illegal. Then, there are events put on by the library itself. In some communities, drag queen events are common. In other places, most people have never met a drag queen. Either way, there’s nothing illegal about it. So, if there is a program at the local library that involves reptiles, and Indiana Jones doesn’t like snakes, we shouldn’t stop doing it just because Indiana Jones doesn’t like snakes.

DM: What is EveryLibrary doing to protect libraries against censorship and to protect library funding?

JC: Two ways: One is our FightfortheFirst.org platform. It is for citizens troubled by censorship and discrimination campaigns to organize and fight for the rule of law. We know that, across the 172 local campaigns we’ve helped support in the last few years, we can help put books back on the shelf when citizens are engaged. The other way that we work is to inoculate against them. Most people who serve on a library or school board are not lawyers. They are average citizens working hard to ensure that taxpayers are properly represented and that the laws are implemented. So, we train, coach, guide, and support library leadership, especially citizen-leaders on the board. We want to make sure that the republic is functional in that it follows the law. The allegation that a book is obscene or criminal is very serious. So, we have to make sure that the law is properly understood and applied, because otherwise, it makes people scared, understandably so. Take the allegation seriously, but don’t let a special interest group with a political agenda to defund the library or the school pull the wool over your eyes.

DM: Just so people understand, when there is a library book that is the target of a book ban effort, such as a novel with a transgender protagonist, it is there because of local decision-making. There isn’t any special interest group placing the book on the shelf.

JC: No, absolutely not. A book gets on the shelf because it is a bestseller, because people want to read it. But there are also books relevant to a minority population. That’s one reason why we have 15-20 versions of The Holy Bible on the shelf. You have the King James readers, you have the New American Standard readers, you have people who want to read the Apocrypha…I could keep going. It is all there because it is relevant to the local faith community and local people with inquiries. It is a great example of democracy according to the “live and let live” Hobbesian philosophy. You don’t find a book interesting, but maybe I do. That should be enough in America.

DM: With the horror that we see every day, why should Americans care about the library? Does the library represent something larger than the charming building on the corner?

JC: For those who care about the way that government is structured, and the way our value system is expressed through public policy and budgets, one of the most local expressions of the Constitution is the public library. It’s freedom of speech.  It’s the right to petition. It’s the right to assemble. Libraries are not mentioned in the Constitution. The Tenth Amendment says that the states can organize. So, it comes down to how we want to govern ourselves. How do we express the American ideal? That’s why anyone who is a policy wonk should pay attention to libraries. If we can get the American experiment right with something as prosaic as no-fear, no-favor access to a taxpayer-funded institution like the public library, then maybe we can get the rest of America right.

The post “The Library is One of the Best Libertarian Arguments for Limited Government” appeared first on Washington Monthly.

After weeks in which it appeared likely that the Trump administration would bail out Spirit Airlines—and potentially even other ultra-low cost carriers, including Frontier, Breeze and Avelo—Spirit will shut down operations, joining a long list of airlines that have disappeared from the U.S. market in the last half-century. For Spirit’s employees and customers and for the communities in which it operates, the failure is a tragedy. Commentators on the left and right are busy casting political blame—on the Biden administration for blocking a Spirit-JetBlue merger a few years back, and on the Trump administration, for the War in Iran jacking up oil prices.

But I think most people are thinking about the turbulence in the airline industry wrong.

A common misconception is that Spirit failed (or needed a bailout) because the U.S. Department of Justice under the Biden Administration blocked a proposed merger between the airline and JetBlue. When JetBlue proposed the merger with Spirit, JetBlue had already developed a so-called “partnership” with American Airlines that the Justice Department had challenged and was awaiting trial in federal court. Spirit’s board, wisely, rejected the merger with JetBlue because they thought it was anticompetitive and would violate antitrust laws. This was not rocket science given JetBlue’s plans to raise ticket prices between 24 and 40 percent after a Spirit merger and the incoherence of JetBlue attempting a merger to compete with the bigger airlines while simultaneously trying to partner with one of them.

But JetBlue went ahead anyway. They made a hostile tender offer directly to Spirit’s shareholders, who got greedy and accepted it, even though Spirit’s board advised them against it due to its illegality. There is a way around an otherwise illegal merger, called the “failing firm” defense, which allows a company to say it needs to merge because it will collapse otherwise. But Spirit never made this argument, perhaps because at the time it was not yet failing. The reality of this situation is that JetBlue and Spirit’s shareholders proceeded to attempt a merger, even when they were told it was illegal. It’s not the fault of prosecutors following the law when people do things they know are illegal.

The bigger, more important, question is this: Why do these airlines keep needing to merge and consolidate? And why, every time there’s a crisis, do they need bailouts or go bankrupt? Framing the question that way, this is no longer just about Spirit. The head of United recently proposed buying up American Airlines. And it isn’t like the airline industry has only seen a few mergers in the last half-century. There have been mergers after mergers, decade after decade, leaving fliers with only a handful of airlines today.

So why all the mergers? As I argue in my book, Why Flying is Miserable, the answer is that the airline industry has inherent dynamics that create tendencies toward concentration. Airlines benefit from economies of scale and network effects, which basically means bigger and more consolidated is better. That’s why airlines have moved to hub-and spoke models, with giant fortress hubs like Atlanta or Dallas.

There are also barriers to entry in this sector: airplanes can’t just take off and land wherever they want. The U.S. has a limited number of airports and runways, and slots for takeoff and landing, and gates to park. These constraints are also difficult to get around. While we could more evenly distribute slots or gates, it’s physically impossible for two planes to land or take off on the same runway at the same time. There’s also the problem of destructive competition: when faced with an upstart competitor, big airlines can match their prices, routes, and times of takeoff, and then crush the competition because people will prefer the bigger network to a small airline with a limited route structure.

It’s a fantasy that competition will work in a market with these dynamics. Absent some policy change, we will end up with an unregulated monopoly or duopoly. But this fantasy is just the story that policymakers and the general public were sold in the 1970s, when Congress deregulated the airline industry. Deregulation advocates claimed that competition would work great in airlines. They claimed that there weren’t economies of scale and ignored barriers to entry. One source, cited in an influential Senate report, even claimed there would be upwards of 200 airlines operating competitively in a deregulated market. How wrong they were.

And what about the bailouts? There’s a similar story to be told here about why the airline industry is special. Bigger airlines will be better able to weather crises than small ones. They have lots of resources (including from other business deals, like credit card partnerships) and can make expensive, forward-looking investments. Delta, for example, owns a refinery, specifically so that it would be more resilient against volatile and spiking jet fuel prices. Smaller airlines can’t do that.

There’s a second piece to the bailout story that is just as critical. Air transportation is not a normal business. While it’s sad when the neighborhood coffee shop or restaurant closes and jobs are lost, that one closure doesn’t threaten huge chunks of the American economy. An airline collapse potentially does: in a geographically huge country like the United States, airlines are basic transportation infrastructure. They are essential for commerce, tourism, and connectivity – and their failure can have second and third order effects on businesses and communities writ large. A seasonal tourist town without access to air service could face a local recession or depression if people can’t travel there easily.

When an industry is too-important-to-fail, politicians are going to try to find a way to bail it out, even if the long-term consequence is to create a perverse incentive for the private sector. This is exactly what has happened in banking, most recently in 2008 and in 2023, and it is what has happened with airlines too. The answer to this problem is not more mergers and more bailouts; the answer is to shape the market structure of the industry to deliver a reliable, stable industry that works in the national interest.

There are four ways to solve the problem of tendencies towards concentration in infrastructural services:

(1) Nationalization. A single national air carrier would serve the whole country. That would be highly efficient from the perspective of scale and costs, but it would also mean no competition, and competition can spur innovation and dynamism.

(2) A public option. We could have a one national, public carrier co-exist with the private market. Only the public option carrier would get subsidies, and it would serve the whole country. Other airlines would merge, over time, likely into a monopoly or duopoly. There would still be a measure of competition from the public option. But the public option would need to be heavily subsidized because it would have a duty to serve the whole country (unlike unregulated private carriers), but those places – small cities, mid-sized cities – often have routes that are not profitable, and the big carriers won’t serve them sufficiently well.

(3) Regulated competition. This was the strategy from the 1930s to the 1970s. We had a dozen or so big airlines and regulators managed the network to achieve a kind of Goldilocks approach, with not too much competition or too little, and in a way that all the airlines were consistently profitable and offered reliable, stable service.

(4) Partial regulation. We could impose some market-structure regulations on airlines, but not all of them. For example, we could impose a duty to serve on the biggest airlines, so they have to fly to smaller communities, and we could require a rainy day or bailout fund, so that some of their profits are held for when they will inevitably need a bailout.

Whichever one you prefer, the bottom line is this: If the only way for airlines to survive is to constantly merge or get bailed out by the government—neither of which protects the public interest—then it’s time to admit that the industry is more like a public utility than a competitive market. We will not have a stable, reliable airline industry without either taking over the airlines or regulating them like public utilities.

Subscribe to Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator’s Substack, where this article originally appeared.

The post How to Think About Spirit’s Failure—and the Airline Crisis appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Buried inside President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act—signed on July 4, 2025—are two provisions that have gone mostly unnoticed, yet are already reshaping higher education in real time. Currently, colleges nationwide are conducting audits and reworking budgets to comply with these transformative new rules. 

The first, Workforce Pell, extends Pell Grants to short-term workforce training programs, but only to those that lead to “high-skill, high-wage, in-demand” jobs. The federal government sets a floor of roughly 150 percent of the federal poverty line; state workforce boards decide which specific programs are in demand. The policy shift is already reshaping campus strategy—70 percent of college presidents, including more than half at four-year private nonprofits, told Inside Higher Ed they plan to add or expand short-term credential programs over the next three years, according to its 2026 survey. 

The second is “Do No Harm.” This provision ends federal student loans for college programs whose graduates, four years after leaving school, earn no more than a typical high school graduate in the same state earns. The rule applies to two-year and four-year, public and private, for-profit and nonprofit, and to graduate programs, where the comparison is with bachelor’s degree holders. Do No Harm is the broadest and simplest accountability measure Washington has ever imposed on higher education: a single earnings test applied to every kind of institution at every level of credential. 

The rule is the product of a three-quarters-of-a-century bipartisan effort to bring accountability to higher education. Its premise is simple and popular: If a credential can’t lift its graduates above an earnings benchmark, taxpayers should not pay students to enroll in it. For most programs, that’s a low bar. Human Development and Family Studies—the academic foundation for the early-childhood workforce—is virtually the only program at risk of failing both the “Do No Harm” measure and the Workforce Pell eligibility requirements. And the reason has nothing to do with skills or demand. 

A bachelor’s degree in human development, family studies, and related services earns graduates equivalent to a sub-associate certificate in the same field. One year after leaving school, data show the three credential tracks clustering in a $24,000 to $34,000 band. The bachelor’s wage premium at year one is roughly zero. At year five, it is only about $900, based on the Census Bureau’s Post-Secondary Employment Outcomes file, which links academic records to state unemployment-insurance wage records to track what graduates earn.) 

This is not a niche concern. Over 100,000 students completed a Human Development and Family Studies credential over the past five years at community colleges and four-year universities. Every state covered in the data shows those graduates earning below the living wage for a single adult with no kids. The shortfall runs about $14,000 to $36,000 a year, the smallest in Oklahoma and the largest in New York, where the median bachelor’s graduate earns just 43 percent of what’s needed to cover the cost of living. 

Human Development, Family Studies, and Related Services programs are the academic foundation for the childcare workforce: They study how children develop, and they equip grads with the skills to care for young children outside a K–12 teaching license. The Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley reports that 98 percent of center-based early-childhood teaching staff are women. Including home-based providers, the early-childhood workforce is roughly 2.2 million people. Women’s work has long been priced this way, and the gap has rarely been about skill, demand, value, or credentials. 

Why credentials don’t pay 

Childcare work is one of the lowest-paid occupations in the U.S. The median salary is around $32,000 a year, according to the BLS’s wage survey. A preschool teacher earns about $39,000. Similar developmental work, performed by a kindergarten teacher on a public K-12 payroll, pays about $63,000. The jump is not a skill jump. It is a payer jump. K-12 is publicly funded through mandatory state and local revenue streams. Early childhood is paid for, mostly, out of what parents can afford. In most states, center-based childcare already costs working families more than in-state college tuition. Providers cannot raise tuition, because parents cannot pay more. That is why a bachelor’s degree holder in the field earns no more than a certificate holder. 

What the earnings screen measures 

A high wage acts as a proxy for high demand, since in a working market demand drives wages up. For childcare that proxy fails. On one side, demand is through the roof—and some of it is latent, because when care costs as much as college tuition, families who would use it if the cost fit their budget, decide not to enter the market at all. On the other side, labor supply is choked by what parents can pay, which caps wages, which constrains how many people choose the field in the first place. Both sides need each other, and if they could meet, society would gain enormously, but conditions in most states don’t allow it. 

The earnings screen, meant to flag high-value jobs, misreads this market because of the structural failure described above, which is present in most states. Anyone who has cared for young children knows the work is deeply rewarding and just as physically and mentally demanding. Yet we pay for it as if it were the least useful thing in the economy, even though no one else can get to work without it. 

What it would take to move the wages  

Oklahoma took the first real steps toward addressing it. In 1998, the state legislature folded universal pre-K into the K–12 school funding system—mandating free preschool for every four-year-old, requiring lead teachers to hold a bachelor’s degree and an early childhood credential, and paying them on the K–12 teacher salary scale. Because funding is through a per-pupil formula, not annual appropriations, it has weathered recessions; because the wage is pegged to K–12, it does not bend to what parents can pay. That is why Oklahoma’s Pre-K teachers come closest to a living wage and why early-childhood reformers laud the state. 

But Oklahoma’s model only reaches four-year-olds in publicly funded pre-K—not the rest of the early-childhood workforce caring for infants, toddlers, and three-year-olds, who still rely on parental payment. New Mexico is the first state to apply the same logic across the field. Thanks to state’s sustained investment in wages, subsidies, and the early childhood workforce, both pay and supply have increased. 

From 2019 to 2024, New Mexico led the nation in median annual childcare wage growth, rising 64.6 percent against 32.3 percent nationally. Over the same period, the state’s childcare workforce grew by 64 percent, while the national childcare workforce shrank by 7.4 percent. In November 2025, New Mexico became the first state to offer no-cost universal childcare for every child under five. Supply, demand, and wages all move up together when the state sets the conditions for a functioning market.  

What makes the system work? First, there is a stable funding stream—primarily from oil and gas leases on state-owned land—which New Mexico secured through a constitutional amendment. It shields early-childhood spending from annual budget fights and gives providers multi-year planning horizons. The funding source for this program is state-specific, but the principle—carving out a dedicated, recurring revenue stream—is transferable. Second, New Mexico uses cost-based reimbursement, which prices subsidies against the cost of delivering quality care, not what families can pay. Third, workforce compensation targets are benchmarked to public-school elementary pay scales. These anchor early-childhood educators’ wages instead of leaving them to the market that produced the flat ladder.  

The thing is, in New Mexico, Human Development programs will easily meet the federal earnings screens because graduates’ skills command higher wages. Oklahoma comes closest, but its wage premium is concentrated among public pre-K teachers. Elsewhere, it depends on the credential level and the state. The federal earnings test for Workforce Pell sets a relatively low bar, and most programs clear it; the real question for short-term early-childhood credentials is whether state workforce boards designate the field as “high-skill, high-wage, in-demand.” Because “high wage” is not how one would describe early childhood care, that designation depends on whether boards choose to advocate for the field based on necessity, skill content, and labor demand. Do No Harm, meanwhile, will pull federal loan eligibility from associate’s, bachelor’s, and graduate programs whose graduates earn no more than the relevant comparison group, and in human development, where all three credential tracks cluster in the same earnings band, the rule’s likely effect is to push students toward adjacent credentials like elementary education and reduce the number who pursue higher degrees in the field at all. Soften the rule to spare the field, and you produce debt-burdened graduates whose wages can’t carry their loans. Hold the line, and you shrink an already-thin early-childhood workforce. It looks like a tradeoff. It doesn’t have to be. 

What no accountability rule can fix on its own is the market failure of the early-childhood labor market. It does not function like a normal one: parents cannot pay what the work is worth, and the value it creates accrues largely off the books, to the employers whose workers can show up, to a tax base built on those workers, to the future shaped by children who develop well. None of those beneficiaries pay the people doing the work.  

Do No Harm is already acting as a catalyst, shifting focus from the symptom of low post-graduate earnings to its cause. Now that institutions are being held accountable for what their graduates earn, they have both the obligation and the standing to advocate for graduates whose training and labor produce real social value and ought to command a living wage. The structural changes that raise early-childhood educators’ wages are where this accountability pressure belongs. The right response, then, is not to tailor the rule to spare Human Development programs, and certainly not to repeal yet another hard-won higher-education accountability standard. It falls to state and local lawmakers, workforce boards, early-childhood advocates, policy institutes, and the institutions that train this workforce to figure out, together, how to do what New Mexico did: build the state-specific funding architecture (dedicated revenue, cost-based reimbursement, wage-parity benchmarks) that finally lets the value of the work performed match the value it provides, and gives the dignity of a living wage to the workforce behind the workforce. 

The post Accountability Can Help Fix Childcare Wages  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Now that the Former FBI Director, James Comey, has been indicted a second time, the Donald Trump administration has upped the ante on the president’s nemesis. This time it’s for threatening the life of the president of the United States. His crime? Comey says he came upon a medley of seashells on a North Carolina beach and formed the numbers 86 47. According to the Department of Justice, 47 refers to President Trump, as most people, excepting Trump, believe he is the 47th president of the United States. There is some controversy, however, as to whether 86 means kill him or means something else, like remove him from office. 

There is something about Comey that inspires animosity from the left and right. Former colleagues say he is “a legendary blowhard, an inveterate fibber, and a pretentious prig whose guiding principle is that he alone has access to some mystical code of morality that conveniently justifies his outrageous conduct over the past decade.”  

Democrats hate Comey because he helped swing the 2016 election to Donald Trump by writing a letter to Congress less than two weeks before Election Day that he was resuming his investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails. The letter said the FBI had “learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation” into the private email server that Clinton used as secretary of state, and soon halved Clinton’s lead in the polls, imperiling her position in the Electoral College. The investigation found nothing other than what had already been revealed.  

Comey’s revelation on the eve of an election was a violation of DOJ policy and earned only criticism from the nonpartisan Inspector General and a gaggle of former attorneys general from across the political spectrum.  

Trump has called Comey “scum” and a “dirty cop.” After Trump won the 2016 election, Comey attacked the incoming administration and then crowed about having broken ordinary FBI protocol. A chronic leaker, he found a “personal friend,” who happened to be a law professor, to pipe sensitive FBI information to the media and then argued it wasn’t a leak. Not a leak? As Humpty Dumpty said in Through the Looking Glass, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” 

There is no law against a prosecutor indicting someone he doesn’t like. My boss in the United States Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, the legendary prosecutor Robert M. Morgenthau, said, “A man is not immune from prosecution just because a United States attorney happens not to like him.” But the Comey case is different. 

The bare-boned three-page indictment is about seashells promoted on Instagram with the caption “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.” After he published the image, Comey got a call from the Secret Service. He took down the image and sheepishly posted, “I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me, but I oppose violence of any kind, so I took the post down.” 

I don’t like Comey either, but this indictment should be dismissed, and while it probably will be, I’m not entirely sure.  

Most key, “86 47” is miles away from a criminal threat. “47” plainly refers to Trump. But “86” is open to wide interpretation. I am a child of the 20th century, when the slang term 86 evidently originated. I always associated the expression with being ejected from a saloon or perhaps a sign in a diner advising that the establishment was out of the blue plate special. I never conceived of 86 as a violent act.  Webster’s defines “86” as “to get rid of or run out of (something), not murder or death.” 

Trump, our wordsmith in chief, has said that “86” is a “mob term” for a killing. What mob does he hang out with? He did once upon a time, but quoth the Donald, “nevermore.” 

The trial judge should dismiss the Comey indictment based on the First Amendment stricture against abridging political speech. Title 18, Section 871 of the United States Code criminalizes threatening the life of the president. According to the Department of Justice, a threat is defined as “an avowed present determination or intent to injure.” Some courts have held that the government need not prove that the defendant intended to carry out the threat. Still, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who may use this Comey prosecution to “acting” from his title, may have shot himself in the foot: The Fourth Circuit, where North Carolina is, has not.  

The Fourth Circuit held that “when a true threat against the person of the President is uttered without communication to the President intended, the threat can form a basis for conviction,” but “only if made with a present intention to do injury to the President. The issue of the defendant’s intent is a question of fact for the jury, to be determined from the words themselves and the circumstances surrounding their use.” That could mean a Comey trial. 

In 1968, Robert Watts, a Vietnam War protester, stated: “I am not going [to Vietnam]. If they ever make me carry a rifle, the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J. [the president].” Litigation ensued. The Supreme Court said even that statement about aiming a long gun at the president wasn’t enough to make out a threat. First Amendment-protected political speech, the Court ruled, “is often vituperative, abusive, and inexact”—and Watts’s statement was “political hyperbole,” not a “true threat,” hence not criminal.  

Comey could get the case thrown out under the doctrine of vindictive prosecution. If a defendant can show that his prosecution is retribution for his prior exercise of a legal or constitutional right, then a judge can toss the indictment before trial. 

Trump and Comey are political enemies, and I wish they’d both go away. (That’s not a threat, just a dream.) They relish rubbishing each other. In September 2025, Trump exhorted his then Attorney General Pam Bondi to indict “Comey” (and others) and that “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” Bondi filed a charge of leaking and perjury, but came up empty-handed. The seashells indictment, Comey will argue, is an even more vindictive prosecution.  

Then, there is the doctrine of selective prosecution, ignored by the Stone Age approach of the Trump Justice Department. In 1940, when then Attorney General and later U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson addressed a confab of U.S. Attorneys at the Justice Department, he stressed it was the tradition of American prosecutors not to single out personal enemies for criminal prosecution, meaning he had been singled out for criminal charges, while others who had engaged in similar conduct had not. Innumerable politicians and commentators have uttered the number “86” at the neighborhood bar without being prosecuted, including right-winger Jack Posobiec, who tweeted “86 46” in 2022 regarding President Joe Biden and never went to prison. Todd Blanche lamely said that any comparison between Posobiec’s and Comey is “just completely not true” and that the issues are “different.” Oh, please. 

This second Comey indictment may earn Todd Blanche the veneration of his client, Donald Trump, and if it somehow gets to trial, Trump will milk every day of it. Still, I predict that Comey won’t be convicted, and even if he is, he won’t go to jail for his beach walk. 

The post James Comey Is Insufferable. The Trump Charges Against Him Are Absurd appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Who would want to kill a pope? 

The question raced through my mind on May 13, 1981, when I learned that a Turkish gunman named Mehmet Ali Agca had just shot Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square. This was electrifying news, certain to plunge the Catholic world into gloomy uncertainty and diplomatic chanceries around the globe into a frantic search for answers. One reason for the international tumult was that John Paul II was no ordinary pope. 

I was NBC’s diplomatic correspondent at the time, based in Washington. Immediately, I threw myself into the story, calling a number of key sources in the US government, wondering what they knew. Not very much, as it turned out. At the time, everyone in Washington seemed preoccupied with another attempted assassination: Only six weeks earlier, the new American president, Ronald Reagan, had been shot by John Hinckley, Jr. near the Washington Hilton Hotel. Fortunately, Reagan survived but now faced troubling questions about the attempt on John Paul II’s life. Was there a connection? Did this story contain hidden mysteries? Who would want to kill a pope? 

In the Vatican, the seriously wounded pope was rushed to the nearby Gemelli Clinic. Five hours of emergency surgery followed, and his doctors were still uncertain whether he’d survive. The gunman, who startled worshippers had seized, was handed over to Vatican police. The many hundreds in St. Peter’s Square suddenly felt lost, robbed of their spiritual leader. 

Initial news reports, rocketing around the world, mirrored television’s live coverage. The pontiff had been standing in his white Popemobile, riding through the crowded square, mingling with his adoring flock on this Wednesday afternoon, considering each person a special gift from God. With a smile on his face, he would occasionally stop his cavalcade of faith to chat with an old woman, touch an ecstatic teenager, offer a simple prayer, or even joke with his Hallelujah people. 

Everyone in St. Peter’s Square knew this pope was different. John Paul II was the first non-Italian pontiff in 455 years, the first Polish-born successor to St. Peter, conservative in his theology, daring in his defense of Poland, the communist country nestled uncomfortably alongside an insecure Soviet Union. His nationalism was indistinguishable from his Catholicism, a dangerous combination for anyone, certainly a Polish-born pope, at the height of the Cold War. 

At 5:17 p.m., a hand with a gun rose above the crowd and fired three bullets at the passing pope, hitting him with two of them, one creasing his left hand and shoulder, the other entering his upper abdomen, close to his heart, causing massive lesions and loss of blood. The third bullet wounded two bystanders, American tourists unlikely ever to forget their May 13 visit to the Vatican. 

Agca, the 23-year-old Turkish assassin, already wanted for murder in Turkey, seemed under the circumstances to be remarkably casual about the seriousness of his crime, telling reporters that he meant only to “hurt” the pope, not kill him, and that he was “very sorry for [shooting] the tourists.” He identified himself as an “international terrorist,” who made “no distinction between fascists or communists.” Almost from the moment of his arrest, Agca tried to create the image of a professional killer operating on his own, linked to no specific national or ideological crusade. 

But his effort defied belief, quickly losing credibility. Most observers wondered, more logically, whether he might have been part of a dark conspiracy involving Iranian or Palestinian extremists, neo-fascists in Turkey, or certain communist leaders in Eastern Europe, thrown by the sudden emergence of a Polish pope. 

The story of John Paul II had already fascinated me. I’d been covering Eastern Europe for a long time. I was familiar with recent developments in Poland. I’d heard about the remarkable career of Karol Josef Wojtyła, the talented archbishop of Kraków who, although ambitious, probably never imagined that one day he’d become a pope. When he was selected in October 1978, I was astounded. Why choose a Pole when all of Eastern Europe was already aflame with danger and uncertainty? 

As the first non-Italian pontiff in more than 400 years, he naturally attracted more than his share of attention. He was brilliant and controversial, balancing his fierce commitment to Catholicism with a powerful sense of Polish nationalism. He also attracted critics who later came to believe that, despite his important role in fighting Soviet communism, his traditionalist views—including opposition to birth control and the ordination of women—served as a brake on social progress and helped conceal child sexual abuse within the Church. 

After only eight months as pope, John Paul II decided to visit his homeland. While in Poland, he electrified crowds, bringing hope of freedom and promises of better times, a modern-day Beckett challenging the archaic rules of Soviet communism. He prophesized “some changes are coming. You can feel it.” 

In August 1980, workers in Gdansk, inspired by the pope’s message, organized crippling strikes, demanding an independent trade union (later called Solidarity) and unfettered access to their Catholic church. In the communist world, those demands were unprecedented, and a crackdown seemed imminent, either by Polish security forces or the Soviet army, which had earlier crushed uprisings in East Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. 

But that’s not what happened. I learned that while tensions were dramatically rising in Poland, it was not the Russians who intervened; it was the pope himself. He secretly dispatched a personal envoy to the Kremlin with a handwritten letter in Russian to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, stressing that although he was the head of the Catholic Church, he was also a Polish patriot deeply concerned about the possibility of Soviet intervention. He hoped that intervention would not occur. But if it did, the pope warned, he would return to Poland and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with his people. Given the impact of his recent visit to Poland, it was a warning Brezhnev had to take seriously. 

An American-born priest and Vatican insider, Hillary Franco, told me at the time that “even though the pope belongs to the world, he’s human, right? A man who loves his own country, I am sure the pope will try, and would have tried, everything possible to stop an invasion of his homeland.” 

Throughout this dangerous period, the Soviets conducted military maneuvers on the Polish border, suggesting an invasion could be just around the corner. In late February 1981, while addressing a Communist Party congress in Moscow, Brezhnev thundered menacingly that “the pillars of the socialist state were crumbling in Poland” and “strong action was required.” Surely it would not have surprised any serious observer if he were seen late at night wandering alone through the Kremlin corridors mumbling the Russian equivalent of “will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” Several months later, Agca attempted to assassinate John Paul II. 

My interest in the papal plot only deepened with time. Agca had close ties to a violent ultranationalist organization in Turkey called the Grey Wolves, which played a key role in the illicit smuggling of drugs and arms between Turkey and Bulgaria. The more I learned, the more I believed that Agca was part of a conspiracy managed by Bulgaria, a Soviet puppet state at the time. 

Normally, in the early 1980s, I would have been in a competitive war with other journalists, each struggling to uncover a new nugget of information about Agca’s attempt to kill the pope. But after an initial outburst of coverage, most reporters seemed to lose interest, their focus shifting to other stories of note. As a consequence, the assassination attempt fell off the front pages. For a time, it seemed as if I were the only reporter, aside from Claire Sterling of Reader’s Digest, who displayed any interest in the story. At NBC, I continued to broadcast radio and television reports about the papal plot, and NBC producer Anthony Potter invited me to help research and write a documentary about the event. Thrilled, I accepted, and off we went on an exciting adventure that lasted several months and opened my eyes to the hidden worlds of Vatican politics and global terrorism. 

A few days before I left for Rome, I received an intriguing call from a friend who worked at the Central Intelligence Agency. “Can we meet tonight?” he asked. Strange, I thought, he rarely volunteered any information. Even a weather forecast seemed too sensitive. 

“Sure. Where? When?” 

“At the Watergate,” he whispered. “Outside, near the taxi stand. At 7:00 p.m.” 

We met, and he steered me toward a walk along the Potomac. “You’re going to Rome, I hear.” 

“Yes.” How did he know? 

“At the agency, we got word today, not sure how reliable it is, but I wanted you to know there’s a hit job out on you, coming from somewhere in Eastern Europe.” 

“What?” I was puzzled. 

“A hit job,” he repeated. “I’m not certain the report’s accurate, but it does seem somebody wants to kill you.” Why would anyone want to kill me? My mind raced over details of the papal story. 

“You’re doing stories about shooting the pope, right?” my friend said, as if reading my mind. “The Bulgarians don’t like those stories, and neither do the Russians. They’ve both denied time and again that they had anything to do with the shooting, but you keep linking them to the story.” 

“Yes?” 

“So they may want to frighten you. They may want to stop you from tying them to this story.” It all seemed too far-fetched, I told him. 

“Well, you never know. Most of these threats do end up only as warnings, but…” 

“I’m going to Rome anyway.” 

“Good luck,” he said, patting me on the back. “I just wanted you to know, that’s all.” 

We returned to the Watergate. “Good luck,” he repeated. 

On my way home, I decided not to tell my wife about my friend’s warning. I didn’t really believe it; nor did I believe the Russians, who knew me well, would decide one day to kill me for something I had broadcast. 

Rome proved to be a delightful destination as always, sunny, beautiful, and splendidly historic. I arrived just as stories broke in the Italian press that John Paul II had recuperated from the attempted assassination and was back at work in the Vatican. 

The NBC office was located downtown, a few busy blocks from the Coliseum and only a short taxi ride from the Vatican. On most days, I was busy talking to knowledgeable sources. I tried arranging meetings at historic sites, which, of course, included restaurants in a country where lunch or dinner was special, not just a meal but a culinary work of art. Which restaurant? There’d be a debate. What kind of food? From northern Italy or the boot? Would we sit inside or out? 

Italian friends, diplomats, businessmen, and priests soon helped open a few Vatican doors for me. I met cardinals willing to discuss the attempted assassination, and to do so on camera. In time, I also met a handful of attorneys with superb contacts in the slow-moving universe of Italian jurisprudence. Under pressure, key prosecutors had actually begun to crank into action, investigating Agca’s background in Turkey and, more meaningfully, Bulgaria, where he had spent two months. 

The prosecutors organized Agca’s trials, the first starting in July 1981, the second five years later. Although one headline writer described the first as “the trial of the century,” it was unusually brief, lasting only three days. Agca opened his defense, proclaiming he did not need a lawyer, but the state provided one anyway. Instead, he read a written statement, pockmarked with hyperbole, misdirection, and blatant lies. Against heavy headwinds suggesting conspiracy, he kept emphasizing that he had acted alone, which few lawyers and fewer journalists believed. He was, he kept repeating, an “international killer.” 

One lawyer at the first trial was the experienced Severino Santiapichi, an expert on global terrorism who marveled at Agca’s rhetorical jujitsu. He had “an exceptional ability,” he said, “to mislead the investigations.” Later, Santiapichi told me, “I believe there was a plot behind Agca’s crime, a plot hatched in other places, hatched by other brains.” Agca struck him as one of the central figures in the international conspiracy. 

I also met Francesco Mazzola, at the time, the skilled attorney charged with Italian state security. He took Santiapichi’s judgment two steps further. “Other places,” he believed, were Poland and the Soviet Union; “other brains,” he thought, were anxious communist leaders in Russia. After reviewing the evidence, Mazzola was convinced that Brezhnev, who had recently dispatched Soviet troops to Afghanistan, was considering the same option for Poland. Did he have proof of the Kremlin’s plans? No, he did not, he acknowledged, but believed the circumstantial evidence was becoming increasingly persuasive. 

Covering the Vatican was an absorbing challenge, especially when the subject was a papal plot. In my experience, knowledgeable bishops and cardinals were gracious but reluctant to share information, partly because they did not want to damage their delicate dialogue with the Soviets, a strategy the Germans called Ostpolitik. According to Polish Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, there had been, thanks to the example of John Paul II, “an awakening…a spiritual mobilization” of millions of Catholics in different parts of the Soviet empire, but their political and religious position there was vulnerable. I thought the Vatican was actually trapped between a growing desire to incriminate the Russians in the papal plot publicly and a more compelling need to protect its flock living under communist domination. 

During a long interview with Cardinal Silvio Oddi—a well-informed Vatican official with considerable diplomatic experience—marked on his part by caution and evasion, I asked bluntly, “Then what secret service did this job?” 

Oddi squirmed. “What do you suspect? I’ve gone too far.” 

“Alright,” I continued, “what possible motive could there be behind the attempt to kill a pope?” 

“It could be almost anything. It could be fanaticism. Material self-interest. And perhaps,” Oddi paused, struggling for the words to camouflage what he really wanted to say, “and probably more to the point, international political strategy.” 

“Spell that out for me,” I pressed. 

“What the words mean, political international strategy. You understand well what I mean… This man was not a fool. There’s proof he is an intelligent man. He is a killer, a real professional. He was certainly acting in the name of others.” 

Oddi tried to be helpful. He came as close as any Vatican official to publicly incriminating Moscow but left it to me to point the finger. 

That night, proud of our Oddi interview, Potter invited the NBC News team to dinner in a restaurant not too far from the Vatican. The weather cooperated, and we gathered around a large table, one among many on the crowded sidewalk fronting the restaurant. Looking inside, I couldn’t help but notice there was only one man sitting by himself at a small table in the rear. Everyone else was outside. Throughout the meal, more delicious with each course, the man, with a dark complexion, glasses, and neatly dressed, kept staring at me. After a while, he approached, apologized, and asked in heavily accented English, “Are you Marvin Kalb?” Instantly, my CIA friend’s hit-job warning flashed through my mind. Did he have a gun? Was this to be my last supper? 

“Yes,” I replied, not knowing what else to say, “and who are you?” 

The man handed me a card. “I’m a travel agent,” he said. “I have been for years, but this visit to Rome is purely personal. I’ve always wanted to visit the Vatican.” 

I cast a quick glance at his card. His name was there, likewise his travel agency’s, both located in San Jose, Costa Rica. “So what did you think of the Vatican?” I asked, playing for time. Our conversation widened into polite generalities about travel in Europe. Soon I rose, shook his hand, wished him a pleasant journey, and promised to call him when next I was in Costa Rica. 

“There is so much to see there,” he smiled, backing away and slowly returning to his table. 

Potter, aware of the CIA warning, asked, “What do you make of that?” 

In truth, I didn’t know. I told him that when I got back to my hotel room, I’d call NBC in New York and ask someone on the foreign desk to check the travel agent’s story. Was there a name and agency in San Jose, such as those on his card? An NBC stringer in the capital checked and double-checked. An hour later, he called back. There was no such travel agency in San Jose, he reported; nor was there any such name. 

“What do we do now?” Potter wanted to know. 

“We finish our story and go home,” I told him. 

For me, that meant spending a lot more time in the Vatican learning about a possible conspiracy. For my NBC colleague Bill McLaughlin, who had joined our team, it meant a reporting trip to Turkey, where he lifted the lid on Agca’s life—where he was born, his family, education, and, most importantly to us, his critically important ties to the radical right-wing Gray Wolves. 

Although we tried, neither of us could get into Bulgaria, an inaccessible place for us NBC reporters at the time, but we spent another month exploring the story further in Rome and Ankara. I then returned to Washington, and Potter, McLaughlin, and the camera crew flew back to New York, where the job of pulling all the pieces together began, including writing the documentary, which had always been my responsibility. 

We had discovered a lot. By the time Agca reached St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981, he had already proven his value to the Grey Wolves. He was a trusted gunman, had robbed two banks, for which he was handsomely paid, and he’d murdered Abdi Ipekci, a well-known, liberal newspaper editor critical of the Grey Wolves, for which Agca earned thousands of dollars and front-page coverage. He seemed ready for a major assignment. 

The first two stops on his memorable journey to Rome, secretly organized by the Grey Wolves, were Tehran, then in the grip of the Islamic revolution, and Sofia, the capital of communist Bulgaria, where Agca stayed for seven weeks of intensive preparation. Was he told that he was on a mission to kill John Paul II? Possible but unlikely. He was then only in the opening round of an international conspiracy that was to mushroom over the next nine months into an historic crime. 

It was curious that Agca made no effort to hide during his time in the Bulgarian capital, even though he was a known killer who’d only recently escaped from a Turkish prison. While in Sofia, he lived the life of a footloose tourist, for whom money, liquor, and women were never in short supply. Helping him was Omer Mersan, a key Turkish intermediary between Bulgaria and the Grey Wolves who booked room 911 for him at the fashionable Hotel Vitosha and secured him a Turkish passport in the name of Farouk Ozgun, the same passport Agca had in his pocket when he was arrested in St. Peter’s Square. 

Collaborating with Bulgarian intelligence, the Grey Wolves had arranged for him to slip into tightly controlled Bulgaria without a passport. Such cross-border collaboration was common in the illicit drug-smuggling and gun-running operations both sides had been conducting for years. Could this lucrative backdoor arrangement have taken place without the Soviet KGB knowing about it and, possibly, demanding a slice of the action? Only if you believe in fairy tales. Vladimir Sakharov, a former KGB official who had defected to the West, told me the KGB “knew everything” that Bulgarian intelligence knew, and then some. “Everything,” he stressed. 

In September 1980, with Sofia now behind him, Agca began an extraordinary nine-month odyssey through 12 different European countries without once being arrested, proof of his care and craftiness and police ineffectiveness. From Sofia, carrying $50,000 given to him by Mersan, he journeyed to West Berlin, where he tried to melt into the crowds of Turkish “guest workers,” cheap immigrant laborers allowed into West Germany to fuel its expanding economy. There were 1.6 million such workers. Several times, Agca was recognized. His photo as a killer on the loose had appeared in the German-language edition of the popular Turkish newspaper Milliyet on October 3, November 6, December 11, and December 29. Four times, the German police were informed of Agca’s presence. Four times, the Germans tried to catch him; four times, they failed. 

Assisted by “branch offices” of the Grey Wolves, located all over Western Europe, Agca slipped into Switzerland. While he was in Oldham, a Zurich suburb favored by Turks, the Grey Wolves purchased a Browning 9 mm revolver with serial number 76C23953 from Horst Grillmeier, a trusted Austrian collaborator. They hid it in a railroad luggage department in Milan. It was the gun Agca used during the attack on St. Peter’s Square on May 13. 

In April 1981, after crisscrossing the continent, he finally reached Italy. He went directly to Perugia, a university town, where he enrolled in the University for Foreigners and, as a student, acquired a three-month visa, which he needed for his travel in Italy. He attended only one class, but he had his visa. 

On April 13, Agca went to Rome and checked into the Hotel Torino, where he called a Grey Wolf contact in Hanover, West Germany, presumably for final instructions. While there, he met and conferred with members of the Bulgarian embassy and other Turkish gunmen. Together, they cased St. Peter’s Square, deciding where Agca would stand when he tried to kill the pope. Then, after brief stops in Germany and Switzerland, Agca traveled to Milan, where he checked on the revolver hidden in the railroad luggage department. He then purchased a two-week trip to Mallorca, eager, as much as possible, to avoid detection by the Italian police. He stayed at the Spanish island’s luxurious Hotel Flamboyant but kept to himself. Every morning, he jogged for two hours on the beach. One day, according to Italian prosecutors, he met with a Grey Wolf emissary who confirmed he would be paid 3 million German marks, roughly $1.75 million, to kill a very prominent European. 

On May 9, Agca returned to Milan, where he went to the railroad luggage department to pick up his revolver. He stuffed it into his suitcase and spent the next two days touring the city, meeting no one. 

Early on May 12, he boarded a train to Rome and checked into the Pension Isa, a 15-minute walk from St. Peter’s Square. The room clerk remembered Agca. “He came and went, ‘Good morning, good evening,’ he’d say, and that’s all.” In fact, Agca again met with Bulgarian and Turkish collaborators. They again walked through St. Peter’s Square, took photos, and checked the angle of the sun at a certain hour so Agca could get a better shot. As usual, the Bulgarians gave the final orders. The Turks agreed. Everything seemed set. 

On May 13, Agca got up at 7 a.m. and, after breakfast, took a long walk through Rome. In his pocket was a handwritten note of “things to do”—“Careful with food” was one cautionary reminder; “Wear a cross” was another. At 4 p.m., he approached St. Peter’s Square, already jammed with hundreds of people excitedly waiting for the pope’s Wednesday afternoon appearance. Again, Agca was joined by his Bulgarian and Turkish collaborators. They gathered with hundreds of others, waiting patiently for the pope to pass in his white Popemobile. At 5:17 p.m., as planned, Agca shot John Paul II. 

The documentary I wrote told an exciting and important story. Called “The Man Who Shot the Pope,” it was broadcast on NBC in primetime on September 25, 1982. It received generally excellent reviews, and I was delighted, especially after learning that NBC, gratified by the popular reaction, intended to run an updated version of the program in January 1983, a rare tribute at a network. 

Although the documentary pointed to the Bulgarians and therefore the Soviets as prime movers in the plot to kill the pope, one reviewer stressed that though my “evidence was powerful and convincing,” it was also “circumstantial,” lacking the “hard documentation” needed to prove Brezhnev ordered the papal assassination, or if not Brezhnev himself then one of his deputies, Yuri Andropov, the KGB chief, whose antipathy toward John Paul II was well-known in the communist world. According to this line of reasoning, shared by many US officials, one or the other would have had to order the killing. A written record of this order would have to be somewhere in the Soviet archives and clearly referenced in the documentary. I did not have, nor did I reference, a written record of the order to kill the pope, and I did not believe such a written order ever existed. I still don’t. 

Soviet defectors who had served in the KGB and veteran Western diplomats who had been stationed in Moscow during Soviet rule advised me that it was “highly unlikely” such an order would ever have been written. Or if one had been written that it would have been put in a folder and saved for the historical record. No one would want to have his name officially associated with the order to kill a foreign leader, particularly a spiritual authority such as a pope, even though assassination had been widely practiced by both democratic and authoritarian governments for a long time. Without a written order, an experienced subordinate could still notice a nod, a phrase, a gesture, and then, without fuss, set the train of assassination in motion. In this particular case, it would have been from Moscow to Sofia and from the Grey Wolves to Agca, a secret journey shrouded in lies, cutouts, and confusion, laced with heavy doses of duplicity and denials. 

Recently, the pattern of putting carefully calculated distance between, say, a Brezhnev and an Agca has changed. Now it no longer seems startling to hear a president announce on television or social media that he had ordered the assassination of a foreign leader as a first step toward war. Now, assassination has become an open act of war. Forty-plus years ago, it was still an embarrassment. 

By January 1983, when NBC ran my documentary a second time, the story of the attempted assassination rarely made news, and there seemed to be two reasons. First, the pope had survived the attempt and thrived, his clerical tenure filled with important, eye-catching contributions to Catholicism and Eastern European history until his death in April 2005. While in office, he privately met with Agca and then publicly pardoned him, suggesting to many, “case closed.” Second, the Soviet Union and Bulgaria both vigorously denied any role in Agca’s plot, and no other nation appeared willing to challenge their chorus of denials. Why rock the boat amid a dangerous period of the Cold War? An Italian judge noted, “We all remember that World War I began with shots fired in Sarajevo. No one wanted the third world war to begin with shots fired in St. Peter’s Square.” 

Over the ensuing decades, stories about the papal plot did occasionally appear in major media. There’d be a spark of interest, but nothing more. In Washington, several senators and congressmen demanded the Reagan White House produce a better explanation of the Soviet role in the papal plot than its series of awkward handoffs: “It’s an Italian investigation,” Reagan told a reporter, “and I have great confidence in their abilities.” 

Italian magistrates did indeed preside over a series of trials and investigations, focusing on Agca, whose self-justifications varied like the weather, and a handful of Bulgarian diplomats who hid behind the legal equivalent of “Who, me?” Exasperated, the judges echoed the CIA’s pathetically weak conclusion to its lengthy, still top-secret study of the papal plot. “The event that has been touted as ‘the trial of the century,’” pronounced the CIA’s senior Soviet experts in September 2000, “produced more questions than it did answers. In so doing, it affirmed the view of many that the truth surrounding the attack against the pope may never be known.” 

Only in 2006, a year after the pope died, was there some progress when three Polish scholars launched what became an exhaustive eight-year study of the papal plot, inspired by their own curiosity, an Italian newspaper article, and the judgment of a prominent Italian magistrate. The article appeared in the March 30, 2005, edition of the respected newspaper Corriere della Sera, disclosing that East German Stasi intelligence documents proved there was a “plot orchestrated by the Bulgarians and the KGB, and the East German role (was) to cover their tracks.” The magistrate was the experienced Ferdinando Imposimato, who, after examining the records of the 1986 trial of Agca and a key Bulgarian diplomat, declared he had “no doubts the assassination attempt was ordered by the KGB, who tasked the Bulgarians with it, and they in turn hired the gunman.” 

The three historians were Ewa Koj and Michal Skwara of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance and Andrzej Grajewski, also an editor of Gosc Niedzielny, a Catholic magazine. 

Their research included the examination of literally thousands of Soviet, Bulgarian, East German, and Polish intelligence files, the interviewing of major participants in the plot, and cooperation from many European judiciaries. But, amazingly, even their study, which advanced popular understanding of the assassination attempt, raised few eyebrows. 

The report’s highlights were later recounted in two books, Skwara’s Agca Was Not Alone and Grajewski’s The Pope Had to Die. Both contain fascinating and persuasive insights into the papal plot but, as the critic of my documentary had put it, no “hard documentation” definitively linking either Brezhnev or Andropov to the assassination order. 

The authors had undoubtedly dug diligently into the data year after year, but could not find the order that put the papal plot in motion. Why? Because, in their judgment, too, it never existed in written form. However, their impressive research and rich reservoir of information led to one unmistakable conclusion: It was the Kremlin’s idea to kill the pope. Try as the Russians might to point the finger of guilt at the Grey Wolves, placing the ultimate responsibility for Agca’s crime on the right-wing Turkish Mafia, their effort failed. 

The reasoning also appeared clear. The Russians saw the Polish pope as an unmanageable irritant, a direct threat to communist interests and Soviet security, and he had to be eliminated. Too much was at stake, starting with Brezhnev’s Eastern European empire. Challenging the Soviet Bloc in many different ways, John Paul II had boldly revived the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine; he’d also stimulated religious fervor throughout Eastern Europe, terrifying the USSR’s leaders with his electrifying visit to Poland, which had ignited Solidarity opposition to communist rule in his home country. 

It wasn’t the first time Russia’s rulers believed a Pole was an existential threat. Anti-Catholic and Polish prejudice has been a recurring curse among Russians at least since the Time of Troubles in the early 17th century, a period of political crisis and chaos that saw the rise of foreign pretenders to the throne and Moscow’s occupation by King Sigismund III Vasa of Poland. 

Toward the end of his life, in 2005, John Paul II hoped to reconcile the theological differences between the Vatican and the Russian Orthodox Church. It had become a priority for the failing pontiff. But, even at this time, the Kremlin’s Vladimir Putin stood in his way, claiming all the Vatican really wanted was the chance to proselytize ordinary Russians. Thus, Putin poured cold water on the pontiff’s hope to become the first pope ever to visit Russia. 

In November 1979, a year after John Paul II had helped light the fuse of dramatic change in his homeland, the Kremlin distributed a warning through the communist establishment that the new pope represented “an enemy of peace” and had to be fought, undermined, and removed. At the same time, Andropov was reported to have sent an urgent cable to KGB operatives in Eastern Europe “to obtain all the information possible on how to get physically close to the pope.” It was then left to the former KGB defector Viktor Sheymov to translate the odd Andropov cable into a meaningful, relevant order. “Everyone knew what it meant,” he explained matter-of-factly; “it meant they wanted to assassinate the pope.” 

Not for the first time, the Kremlin had planned the killing of a political opponent. Such directives have surfaced all too frequently in Russian history like embarrassing bloodstains. Putin’s shameful ordering of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s poisoning in 2024—as top experts believe—was only the latest example. 

During the Tehran Conference of World War II Allies in 1943, the usually cynical Soviet leader Joseph Stalin supposedly turned to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at one point and asked a strange question: “How many divisions has the pope?” Whether true or not, the question might more appropriately have been asked by Brezhnev, who could have imagined in a passing nightmare that John Paul II commanded so many divisions he would be able to topple his vast communist empire. More than anything, it seemed, Brezhnev feared the power of freedom and faith, of a determined religious leader supported militarily only by a small contingent of Swiss Guards. 

Note: This essay appeared originally on the Compass Substack.

The post The Secret Plan to Murder a Pope appeared first on Washington Monthly.

A disgraced Central American president—convicted of taking bribes from drug kingpins, including the notorious El Chapo, and using the money to bribe officials and manipulate his elections—is pardoned by the President of the United States so he can spearhead a propaganda operation to undermine the democratically elected presidents of Mexico and Colombia and facilitate his own political comeback. Leaked audio captures him spelling out the plan and revealing that he is working with leaders of the United States, Argentina, and Israel. 

This is neither the screenplay for a reboot of the political thriller 24 nor for the farcical Woody Allen film Bananas. This is real life.  

Last month, a group of anonymous Honduran journalists created the website Hondurasgate.ch and posted audio clips allegedly featuring Juan Orlando Hernández. As you may recall, Hernández was the right-wing president of Honduras until 2022, when he was arrested and extradited to the United States. Federal prosecutors said he facilitated the importation of 400 tons of cocaine into America.  

The Hondurasgate journalists posted a forensic analysis of each clip to prove they are not faked by artificial intelligence. However, the Honduran legislature, controlled by Hernández’s party, approved sending the audio to unnamed “specialized laboratories in the United States” to determine its authenticity. 

Hernández was sentenced to 45 years in prison. He served one. On November 28, Donald Trump announced his intention to pardon Hernández, claiming without evidence that Joe Biden framed Hernández. Two days before the pardon announcement, Trump endorsed Nasry Asfura, the candidate trying to regain the presidency for Hernández’s party. Two days after the pardon announcement, Hondurans voted. After partial returns showed Asfura just barely ahead, Trump baselessly accused the existing Honduran government of fraud. As the vote count dragged on through December, Trump imposed visa restrictions on two election officials from a left-wing party, including Marlon Ochoa, soon after Asfura was declared the winner, though his two main opponents cried foul and complained about Trump’s meddling.  

The following month, according to audio posted to Hondurasgate.ch, Hernández spoke with Asfura and the new vice president María Antonieta Mejía (yes, the Spanish version of Marie Antoinette, I swear I’m not making this up.) 

Hernández asks Asfura to send over $150,000 “because we are going to rent an apartment here and we’re going to set up an office to launch a digital journalism unit. Someone else from here is going to run it for me, from the team of the President of the United States. He’s one of the Republicans helping us. They are going to set up a news site for us where they’re going to release some important data on Manuel Zelaya and Xiomara Castro,” the preceding left-wing Honduran president and her husband (who is also a former president, ousted in a 2009 military coup).  

Hernández also noted the “news site” will be based in the U.S. “so they don’t track us in Honduras,” and will have “dossiers coming against Mexico, dossiers coming against Colombia, and most importantly, against Honduras — in this case against the Zelaya family.” Asfura agrees and offers to give Hernández an additional $150,000 “for yourself,” taken out of the country’s infrastructure department.  

Mexico and Colombia just so happen to have left-wing presidents. In a subsequent call, Hernández tells Vice President Mejía, “I need that liquidity because we are going to set up an office here, with the support of some Republicans, so we can attack and remove the cancer of the left from Honduras and from all Latin America. I was telling President Asfura that we managed to speak with [President of Argentina] Javier Milei, and he is also putting in $350,000. Another big friend of ours from Mexico is also chipping in, just for the Mexican angle.” Mejía promises to “handle the whole arrangement” of $300,000. 

In a March conversation, Hernández told Asfura that he expects to return to the presidency, with Trump’s backing: “I want to believe you won’t push me aside, because thanks to me, you’re sitting in that chair. Mr. President, it’s going to be me. And I expect your support. Because that’s what we agreed with President Trump.” 

According to a January audio clip between Hernández and an unknown interlocutor, the former president gives much of the credit for his release to Benjamin Netanyahu: “The Israeli prime minister is going to back us. We’re very grateful to him. They had a lot to do with it. In fact, they had everything to do with my release and the negotiation.” In March, Hernández claims, “The pardon money didn’t even come from you … it came from a council of rabbis, from people who back Israel, the same people who in the past had backed Yani Rosenthal.” (Rosenthal was a presidential candidate in 2021 for a center-right party, running against Castro and Asfura.) What this “pardon money” paid for and who received it is not clear. 

Before anyone jumps to anti-Semitic conclusions, remember that one of the targets of this apparent operation is Mexico’s President, Claudia Sheinbaum, the first Jewish leader of a nation with a population of over 100 million people. What unites these figures behind Hernández is right-wing ideology, not religion.  

The anonymous Hondurasgate reporters further conclude, citing additional audio clips about business deals involving natural resource development, “As China consolidates its dominance over critical-mineral processing — handling more than 85% of global rare-earth refining — the United States has stepped up its race to lock in control of its zones of influence. The fight is not only about natural resources, but about who controls the supply chains and, above all, who imposes the development model of the western hemisphere.” 

Some of the audio disturbingly portends political violence. Hernández tells a member of the Honduran legislature, “In Honduras, you need force, you need logistics, you need blood. If you want the people under control, you have to crush them. Squeeze them. Counter the violence by generating violence. It’s what President Trump says, and you act as if he’s going to be there forever.” It’s not clear if Trump directly said anything along these lines to Hernández.  

Another clip features Cossette Lopez-Osorio, a member of the country’s election commission aligned with Hernández, plotting against her commission colleague, Marlon Ochoa, whom Trump previously sanctioned. Referring to the possibility of putting Ochoa on trial in the legislature, Lopez-Osorio says to a group, “Tell me how we’re going to move forward without having removed that bastard Marlon from his post. Nothing can be done, nothing can be moved, nothing can be touched; we can’t go anywhere without having a clear position on the political trial.” With such a trial, “he’ll have the prize of being left alone here at the [election commission]. That doesn’t seem right to me. Jail or death. That’s what I’m going to say. Jail or death.”  

Last month, after the legislature approved going forward with the trial, Ochoa fled Honduras, seeking asylum in an undisclosed country. Ochoa posted on X: “They stole the elections, and that is an act of terrorist association that must be investigated. I am an eyewitness. The elite lives in impunity and does not accept reforms. It does not accept a party that asks the powerful to pay taxes. It does not accept that we reject foreign interference . . . Today they order the fabrication of accusations, issue an arrest warrant, and push me into prison, where they plan my death. There is evidence. They pardon the kingpin and, by buying congressmen, condemn the one who fulfills his duty to denounce.” 

What we hear in these audio clips is a scandal worse than Watergate and Iran-Contra combined, arguably worse than the scandal that got Trump impeached the first time, when he threatened to cut off military aid to Ukraine unless it launched an investigation into Joe Biden. Assuming the audio is authentic, Hondurasgate is far more than a threat. Hondurasgate is an elaborate plot well underway. The President of the United States appears to have pardoned a right-wing authoritarian convicted for his part in a massive cocaine trafficking operation in order reinstate him to power in Honduras and undermine left-wing governments in Mexico and Colombia. 

I know we are all numbed by the breadth and depth of Trump’s corrupt behavior. I know this might seem like just one more scandal to add to the pile. I know impeachment and conviction are political non-starters. But none of that is an excuse for American media outlets to ignore a five-alarm fire story.  

Mexican media covered it, even prompting an on-record response from Sheinbaum. (“They may set up an office for dirty campaigns against our government in Honduras with resources from a friendly people through its government, but there will be no dent.”) There’s coverage from media outlets in Spain, Peru, Colombia, and Costa Rica. But nothing in the mainstream American press.  

The most recent coverage of Mexico in The New York Times is about how the U.S. State Department is investigating claims “circulating in conservative media in recent months that Mexican consulates interfere in American politics and encourage mass migration to the United States,” and may shut down some Mexican consulates. Why is such a story being reported without even a mention of evidence of a plot to undermine the Mexican government through illicitly funded propaganda? 

Keeping track of all the insanity in the world is overloading our brain circuits. But don’t look away from Hondurasgate. Latin American democracy, and the political future of a Jewish woman who made history, are under siege. One man has already fled his country for fear of his life. The biggest scandal yet appears to be under our noses and in our ears. 

The post Hondurasgate Looks Worse than Watergate and Iran-Contra Combined appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The United States has long used religious rhetoric to exhort its soldiers into battle. As the current U.S.-Israeli war against Iran cycles through attacks and ceasefires, the rhetoric is disturbingly familiar. The conflict is being framed not just as a strategic necessity, but a moral imperative—a righteous cause blessed from on high. “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth, who in his 2020 book American Crusade points to the Middle East and writes, “we don’t want to fight, but, like our fellow Christians a thousand years ago, we must. We need an American crusade.” Hegseth asked Americans to pray for her soldiers and their victory “in the name of Jesus Christ.” This fusion of piety and patriotism, where God is an active combatant on America’s side, is exactly what animated one of our greatest writers to pen his most devastating critique of war. 

Mark Twain was appalled by the jingoism surrounding the Spanish-American War—the patriotic fervor that sent young men to their deaths while society celebrated the justness of the cause and God’s presumed favor. “The War Prayer” was his protest, a parable so stark and accusatory that he believed it could never be published in his lifetime. As he noted, “Only dead men can tell the whole truth in this world.” He understood that to pray for victory is to simultaneously pray for the ruin of one’s enemy: For shattered homes, orphaned children, and fields sown with blood. 

I came across “The War Prayer” while working as the NBC-Radio/Mutual News Moscow correspondent; it was a well-worn copy in the U.S. Embassy’s lending library. I was traveling with the Soviet military to Afghanistan through Uzbekistan the following day, reporting a story titled “Holy War Without End” for the Los Angeles Times Magazine. The occupation would end months after my visit as factions of Afghan mujahideen moved to eradicate foreign forces, claiming Allah in their corner. Hegseth reminds us that America, too, often relies on religious fervor and divine symbolism to validate war. 

The United States is not the worst combatant to cloak its objectives in divinity. Iran has fought a holy war against America for nearly five decades. Since the 1979 revolution and the U.S. Embassy’s seizure and hostage crisis, the Islamic Republic’s foundational ideology has been one of “jihad” against the “Great Satan” of America and its Western allies. Iranians and their proxies have killed American civilians and soldiers in Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. Tehran’s leaders invoke Allah’s name to justify their actions, promising glory in this life and paradise in the next for his warriors. The language and iconography of their holy war are different, but the appeal to sacred sanction rhymes with Hegseth’s prayers. 

Americans are brought up in a fervent secular belief of church-state separation and are sometimes unaware of how our religious rhetoric resonates. In the raw, emotional days following the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush, always open about his deep personal faith and decent intent, stood on the White House South Lawn and declared, “This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while.” The word “crusade,” with its freighted history, sent shockwaves through the Muslim world. The administration quickly walked it back, but the sentiment had been expressed. Hegseth, for his part, has no reservations about using the phrase. It comes from an impulse rooted deep in the national psyche, one that Twain recognized a century earlier.

Whether called a jihad or a crusade, the language serves the same purpose: to sanctify violence and assure a citizenry that prayers for victory are righteous. It was thus in Twain’s time; so too is it now. My film adaptation of “The War Prayer,” embedded below, aims to strip away this veneer of glory. Twain intended for audiences to understand the second, unspoken part of his prayer—the plea for suffering inextricably linked to the plea for triumph. In our age of surreal politics and televised conflict, Twain’s warning has never been more urgent. His truth, once fit only for the dead, must be told to the living.

The post What Mark Twain Could Teach Pete Hegseth About Holy War appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The Washington Monthly has long been a think tank in magazine form. We publish deeply reported content that surfaces promising policy solutions to the country’s greatest problems, but as essays and feature stories, not white papers.  

There are times, however, when our reporting and policy ideas are best conveyed on a bigger canvas. That’s why we’re pleased to announce the launch of our new in-house think tank, The Washington Monthly Institute, and the publication of our first research report: AI and the Future of Independent Journalism: The promise and peril of privately controlled data marketplaces for media content.  

The report details new technologies that, with proper government regulation, could help small news outlets get paid for the content that artificial intelligence companies have been stealing from them.  

Here’s a summary from the report:

Predatory business practices and failed public policy have made the spread of artificial intelligence a potentially existential threat to journalism. Artificial intelligence companies rely on journalists’ work to train their models while offering little or no compensation. At the same time, AI-generated news summaries divert readers from original reporting. Small, local, and independent publications are especially vulnerable, lacking the resources to pursue legal remedies or negotiate fair terms with AI companies.

Despite numerous public policy proposals, none have been implemented at the federal level, let alone provided meaningful relief to journalists and content creators. New technology could, however, offer an important step toward a solution if properly regulated. Cloudflare, which manages about 20 percent of global web traffic, now makes it harder for AI companies to scrape content from third-party websites without permission or payment. This could reduce the growing market power imbalance between journalists and Big Tech.  

The report was written by Courtney C. Radsch, PhD, director of the Center for Journalism & Liberty at Open Markets Institute, with which we have collaborated on this paper. Radsch’s work has previously appeared in the Washington Monthly magazine. Phillip Longman, a senior editor at the Washington Monthly magazine and policy director at the Open Markets Institute, edited the report. We are grateful to the Lumina Foundation for its support of this project.

Read the full report here.

The post How to Save Independent Journalism from AI appeared first on Washington Monthly.

On Tuesday afternoon, March 17, a distressed veteran named Lawrence Michels walked into the Department of Veterans Affairs community clinic in Jasper, Georgia—a small, quiet town nestled at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Staff escorted him for a mental health consultation with Nic Crews, the clinic’s social work case manager. 

During the appointment, Michels drew a handgun, shot Crews, and fled the building. Local police intercepted him outside and exchanged gunfire, killing him.  

Crews, 34, was airlifted to a hospital and died the following day, leaving a wife, two young children, and a third on the way.  

To friends and colleagues, Crew’s devotion to veterans was unmistakable. His coworker, Joe Mulligan, described him as embodying “a faithful and relentless commitment to serving the mission of providing care to America’s veterans,” and working “with the utmost concern in promoting healing and recovery for our nation’s wounded.” Cody Porter, a close friend since college, said his VA work wasn’t a career but a calling. Porter noted, “He would tell me, ‘My heart just burns with compassion for these guys—for the way that they’ve served, for how much they’ve given up, and just how a lot of these guys are really broken.’” 

Like most of the 1,193 VA community clinics, the Jasper, Georgia, facility had no armed VA police—unlike VA medical centers. Nor did it have a weapons detector —an absence, according to Florence Uzuegbunam, an Atlanta VA nurse practitioner and local National Nurses United associate director, that “would have saved two people—the veteran and Nic.” 

Shortly after the shooting, VA Secretary Doug Collins, who grew up and later served as a U.S. Representative from the neighboring Georgia district, released a statement on X, pledging to “ensure clinic employees get the support they need.” Two days later, following confirmation of Crews’s death, Collins posted again, hailing Crews as a committed VA staffer and reiterating his pledge that “Nicholas’ family, coworkers, and local Veterans have the support they need during this difficult time.” 

Collins never condemned the act itself, nor stated what should have been the bare minimum—that violence against providers is never an acceptable response to health care grievances. He also sent no message through VA channels to his broader workforce about how his office intended to thwart future threats, leaving the response to regional directors. When the Washington Monthly inquired, the VA declined to elaborate.  

VA staff flooded Reddit with comments, denouncing the department’s leadership for not communicating directly with staff and placing the onus for safety and healing on employees. “A social worker was murdered this week,” wrote one. “I’m angry about the canned email from network directors reminding us of active threat training. I don’t want tweets from the VA Secretary or reminders of the Employee Assistance Program (EAP). I want action.”  

The frustration cut deep. “An employee was killed, and all you can think of is that VA employees need to be trained better?” another VA worker wrote. “We would advocate for ourselves tirelessly, and they would give us an extra lecture about how we’re ultimately responsible for our safety—not leadership, not VA.”  

Speaking with the Washington Monthly, one East Coast VA mental health manager said the killing compounded existing trauma: “What happened in Georgia was terrifying. We already felt unsafe doing our jobs without adequate VA police presence. Now this has happened. Honestly, I don’t believe VA leadership would care if something happened to us.” 

Collins’s response stood in contrast to the VA’s strong track record of addressing workplace violence, which the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) defines as “any act or threat of physical violence, harassment, intimidation, or other threatening behavior that occurs at the work site.” Its Workplace Violence Prevention Program dates to 2012, and OSHA recognizes it as a model of best practices for health care settings.  

The program is built on several core elements. Each facility maintains a multidisciplinary Disruptive Behavior Committee (DBC) and a platform where employees can file reports when they believe a patient poses a safety risk. The DBC reviews each case and issues tailored recommendations.  

Under federal regulation, the VA cannot use disruptive behavior alone to deny or terminate care, though it can change how, when, and where care is delivered. The DBC may determine whether a security escort is warranted for a patient’s health care appointments and whether to place a flag in the patient’s record with guidance on how best to handle visits.  

The VA has also crafted and refined a mandatory training curriculum for its employees. Its interventions emphasize de-escalation techniques and the creation of structured, therapeutic environments to help patients manage volatile emotions—an approach linked to lower assault rates.  

Each VA facility also conducts an annual workplace behavioral risk assessment to pinpoint where targeted violence prevention training is most needed. These internal reviews do not address other deficiencies (such as unsecured entrances) or potential remedies.  

Despite the VA’s well-developed framework, serious gaps remain.  

Health care personnel in the United States face workplace violence at four times the rate of employees in other industries, and VA employees are no exception. Between fiscal years 2013 and 2024, incidents involving VA nurses rose 218 percent in inpatient medical/surgical units, 167 percent in nursing homes, 66 percent in inpatient psychiatry units, and 22 percent in emergency departments. This trend is accelerating. VA safety incidents overall increased 42 percent between fiscal years 2023 and 2024. 

The consequences extend beyond those harmed. Health care workers who experience workplace violence have a higher risk of medical errors. More than 40 percent of health care professionals say they are considering leaving their positions within the next year because of safety concerns—a retention crisis that narrows patients’ access to care. 

A chronic shortage of VA police officers is central to the problem. A 2023 VA Office of Inspector General (OIG) report found that the average vacancy rate for VA police officer positions stood at 33 percent nationally; at some facilities, it was 60 percent. Last year’s OIG report found that police are the most frequently named occupational shortage at the VA. 

The scarcity has cascading effects. More than half of VA facilities fail to comply with a mandate requiring a continuous security presence in emergency departments. Surveillance footage goes unmonitored, doors remain unsecured, emergency responses lag, and escorts for at-risk veterans are provided inconsistently. Weapons detectors sit idle for lack of operators.  

The underlying reason for the shortage is easy to identify: VA police compensation lags local law enforcement and other federal agencies. New hires—nearly 90 percent of whom are veterans—must complete a federally accredited law enforcement academy before they can serve. Once they have their credentials, many leave for better-paying positions. Signing bonuses offered by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) last year prompted a surge in departures. An already understaffed force has shrunk further, with total VA police falling by 491 positions between January 2025 and April 2026. 

Most VA community clinics, even sizable ones serving thousands of veterans, have no VA police presence on site. Jim Aldridge—a retired Orlando, Florida, VA police officer with 30 years on the job and former VA agency president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association—shared his personal views with the Washington Monthly, not speaking on behalf of the VA. “Saving money is the reason,” he said. “With limited budgets, most VA directors would rather hire medical professionals. Police officers aren’t highly valued.” 

Meanwhile, the VA has been considering downgrades for 90 percent of its police force following the Office of Personnel Management’s conclusion that police, along with a handful of other positions, are improperly classified. Should that downgrade take effect, an exodus would likely follow. Legislation sponsored by Representative Tim Kennedy, a New York Democrat, would permanently block any such downgrading; it cleared the House Veterans’ Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations in March and is now awaiting full committee consideration.

The gaps extend beyond police staffing into how the VA reports incidents. In 2021, Congress enacted the Deborah Sampson Act, named for a woman who disguised herself as a man to fight in the Revolutionary War. The legislation expanded VA services for women veterans, including a requirement that VA staff report observed instances of sexual harassment and assault. Data broken down by location and type flow annually to Congress. But the VA is not required to convey comparable detail about non-sex-based threats and assaults, leaving lawmakers and advocates unable to address those offenses properly. 

Four reforms would improve workplace safety at the VA.  

Raise police compensation. Recruiting and retaining VA medical center police requires aligning VA officer pay with local law enforcement compensation—using special pay authorities, retirement adjustments, or federal job title reclassification. These are reforms that federal labor unions and police organizations broadly support. The cost would be high, but the investment is essential. 

Station VA police at every community clinic. Crews’s shooting underscores, in the starkest terms, why this staffing expansion is impossible to ignore. 

Collect and publicize more information. Currently, the OIG assesses safety, verifies the implementation of prior recommendations, and issues new ones—but it audits only a portion of facilities. Every VA medical center and clinic needs a regular, comprehensive review. One approach would be to assemble inspection teams composed of national and regional Workplace Violence Prevention Program managers. Findings from these inspections should be made publicly available online, as should the internal data on non-sex-based threats and physical assaults against VA workers. 

Strengthen messaging about conduct. All veterans enrolling in VA health care should receive a document that lays out their rights, the behavioral standards expected of patients toward staff and fellow patients, and the consequences of violating those standards—reinforcing the principle that violence against health care providers is never justifiable.  

Crews’s murder galvanized swift action in Jasper, Georgia—a VA police officer and weapons detector were deployed to the clinic almost immediately. But no VA workplace should wait for tragedy before improving security. Veterans deserve providers who are focused on healing without fear. Those providers, in turn, merit leaders who, true to the military ethos, always “have their six.” 

The post Veterans Affairs: Why Aren’t Its Community Clinics Safer? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

When Hungarians went to the polls last month to defeat the authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, they did so in record numbers. A historic 77.8 percent of voters cast ballots—Hungary’s highest turnout ever.

The last time U.S. voter turnout came close to that level was in 1900 (73.2 percent), when William McKinley beat Williams Jennings Bryan. Since then, presidential elections have typically turned out fewer than two-thirds of voting-age Americans (in the 1980s and ‘90s, it was closer to half). Even in 2024—which had the highest turnout since 1968—just 64.7 percent of Americans voted.

Americans take for granted their right to vote—which is why it’s in such jeopardy today.

At the risk of sounding alarmist, America may have had its last free and fair election in 2024. The Trump administration, together with its Republican allies and conservatives on the Supreme Court, have systematically—and successfully—waged a campaign to disenfranchise large swathes of U.S. voters. America is collapsing toward “competitive authoritarianism”—“electoral competition that is real but unfair,” in the words of democracy scholars Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way.

Racist redistricting. Millions of Black Americans could soon lose their voice in Congress, thanks to the Supreme Court. Last week, the Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, ruling that a majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana was “an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.” This week, the Supreme Court expedited the effective date of its decision—thereby clearing the way for Louisiana to redraw its districts in time for the midterms. Republican Governor Jeff Landry has suspended the primaries, even though 42,000 Louisianans had already cast their ballots.

As many as 19 majority-minority districts could eventually be drawn out of existence, according to the civil rights group Fair Fights Action. On Thursday, Tennessee unveiled a new map that carves up majority-Black Memphis and would likely eliminate its sole majority-minority district. “Not since Jim Crow have we seen this level of systematic disenfranchisement of Black voters,” said Congressional Black Caucus Chair Yvette Clark in a statement.

Burdensome ID requirements. Trump has demanded federal legislation requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote—though noncitizen voting is practically nonexistent. The so-called “SAVE Act” has yet to pass Congress, but some states are moving forward with their own versions. Last month, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the Florida SAVES Act, which requires proof of citizenship and limits the kind of ID that voters can present at the polls (student IDs, for example, would no longer be accepted). Indiana, Kentucky, Montana, Tennessee, Utah and West Virginia have also passed harsher voter ID laws. The Brennan Center for Justice estimates that as many as 21 million Americans lack ready access to a birth certificate or passport, which this type of legislation typically requires. Many married women may also find themselves disenfranchised if their birth certificates don’t match their married names.

Limits on vote by mail. Trump is also trying to limit access to vote by mail—which nearly one in three voters relied on in 2024 to cast their ballots. In an executive order issued in March, Trump decreed that all mail-in ballots must be handled by the U.S. Postal Service, and that only voters on federally approved “state citizenship lists” would be allowed to vote. The National Rural Letter Carriers Association warned that rural voters could be especially burdened. “Any policy that creates confusion, delays, or places barriers in the handling of election mail will fall hardest on those voters who already face the greatest obstacles to accessing in-person voting,” the association said in a statement.

Trump’s attempt to limit vote by mail is likely unlawful. The U.S. Constitution reserves to states the power to govern the “Times, Places, and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives,” and his executive order has already drawn legal challenges. Proof of citizenship requirements are also more likely to disadvantage Republicans, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center (Democrats are more likely to have passports), which means the SAVE Act won’t deliver the partisan benefits Trump assumes it will deliver.

Yet these are small consolations in comparison to the damage that Trump and the GOP have already done, both to Americans’ right to vote but also to their faith in U.S. elections. According to a March PBS News/NPR/Marist survey, more than a third of Americans are “not very confident” or “not at all confident” that their local elections will be fair this fall.

There’s only one solution. Americans must take their cues from the Hungarians. They must vote.

New at the Monthly…

Don’t despair for Pax Americana. In less than a year, Trump has managed to rip up the international alliances that have ensured relative global stability for the last 80 years. But Monthly Editor in Chief Paul Glastris argues that it’s far too early to write the epitaph for a U.S.-led global order. “The same power that makes America capable of doing vast damage also enables it to do great good,” Paul writes in his Editor’s Note for the latest print issue of the Monthly. “The world understands that.” Read here.

And here’s the spring issue, featuring some of our favorite pieces from the last few months:

Too comfortably numb. Many Americans have not only become inured to the idea of political violence—they now welcome it. More than 80 percent of MAGA voters in a new University of California-Davis survey “said the American way of life was disappearing so fast that force may be required to save it,” writes contributing writer Rob Shapiro. Worse, 11 percent said they would personally be willing to use violence against government officials to achieve their aims. But Democrats aren’t exactly all that dovish either; surveys show that they too are becoming more tolerant of political violence. Read here.

College cost confusion. Last week, we reported on an effort by colleges to water down legislation requiring more transparency in tuition pricing and financial aid. That’s a decision colleges may come to regret—new polling from Strada Education shows that a root cause of public anger at higher education is the lack of clarity and simplicity in college financial aid offers. “This confusion about college costs and financial aid appears to be breeding public mistrust about the main interests that motivate institutions,” writes former University of Kentucky provost Michael Nietzel. Many Americans in the Strada survey said they thought colleges cared more about making money than educating students. Read here.

Plus…

• Politics Editor Bill Scher argues that Democrats should stop antagonizing Senator John Fetterman—lest they risk turning his flirtation with the GOP into an elopement. He also warns against turning Democratic primaries into referendums on Middle East policy. Democrats don’t need to preemptively tear themselves apart, he says.
• The Progressive Policy Institute’s Bruno Manno writes about the Trump administration’s plans to remake the college accreditation process—which sounds obscure but could have profound impacts on higher education.
• Contributing writer Jon Alter marvels at the spinelessness of Trump’s latest crop of judicial nominees, all of whom are “staying silent” on the question of whether Trump is constitutionally eligible for a third term (for the record, the answer is “NO.”).
• Contributing writer James Zirin praises King Charles’s recent visit to America.
• Ukraine-based journalist Tamar Jacoby asks if Europe can step up to save Ukraine—since America is not.
• Health policy expert Merrill Goozner bemoans a new “gold standard” for science at the CDC—which has led to the suppression of evidence on vaccine efficacy.

Coda (unaffordability edition)…

While the U.S. stock market continues to defy gravity, low-income families are sliding toward rock bottom. Such is the nature of the Trump economy, and the impact of Trump’s policies on the households least equipped to weather the turmoil he’s unleashed.

This week, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released a study showing the disproportionate impact of higher gas prices on low-income households. While all households are spending more to fill their tanks, researchers found a “K-shaped” pattern in gas consumption, depending on household income. In March 2026, after the initial shock in prices, households earning less than $40,000 cut back their gas consumption by 7 percent—while still spending 12 percent more. Meanwhile, households earning $125,000 or more spent 19 percent more on gas that month—though consumption fell just one percent.

Further hardships are in store for poor Americans when the policy changes included in the “One Big Beautiful Bill” passed last summer start taking effect. Nebrasksa, for instance, is rolling out Medicaid work requirements eight months early, and experts expect that thousands will lose coverage. As many as 4.3 million Americans are no longer receiving food assistance—also likely the result of tougher work requirements included in the OBBB. In addition, Republicans’ refusal to extend tax subsidies for Obamacare have pushed 1.2 million Americans off coverage so far.

For many Americans, “affordability” is an aspiration. “Survival” is the new imperative.

As always, thanks for reading. And please share your thoughts! We want to know what you like, don’t like, and what we can do better.

Have a great week!

Anne Kim, Senior Editor

The post Vote While You Still Can appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Previous administrations, including Donald Trump’s first, usually upheld the ideal that the Food and Drug Administration and other federal health agencies would adhere to the “gold standard” for research.

For the FDA, whose jobs include the approval of new drugs, vaccines, and medical devices, the gold standard meant requiring rigorous clinical studies to prove that experimental products were both efficacious and safe. That usually means a manufacturer has to submit at least two trials, both of which are placebo-controlled and double-blinded (neither patients nor their physicians know if they received the real thing). Patients in the trials are randomly assigned to one group or the other—hence its name, the randomized controlled trial or RCT.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention is charged with monitoring the extent and seriousness of health threats in the United States. Its gold standard is different because it involves epidemiological studies, where researchers measure the extent of a disease and its outcomes in the population by mining medical records or conducting surveys drawn from well-matched cohorts. It often relies on data collected by state and city public health agencies.

In recent weeks, the press has reported that both agencies’ staff scientists have had studies withdrawn from medical journals (the FDA) and an in-house publication (the CDC). On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that “In October, [FDA] scientists were directed to withdraw two COVID-19 vaccine studies that had been accepted for publication in medical journals. In February, top F.D.A. officials did not sign off on submitting abstracts about studies of Shingrix, a shingles vaccine, to a major drug safety conference.”

Two weeks ago, The Washington Post and other publications reported top officials at the CDC refused to allow publication of a study showing the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccine in reducing hospitalizations. It had been scheduled for publication in The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), the agency’s well-regarded in-house journal.

Jay Bhattacharya, who runs the National Institutes of Health and is the interim head of the CDC, defended his decision to deep-six the study in a Post op-ed. “I raised specific concerns about the statistical methodology chosen for the study in question,” he wrote. “These concerns about the test-negative design used go directly to the validity of the study’s conclusion.”

I’ll have more to say on test-negative design in a moment.

A new journal for the CDC

Bhattacharya also announced plans for the agency to launch a peer-reviewed journal “to elevate scientific rigor across all CDC publications,” he wrote. “Peer review remains the gold standard because it subjects findings to independent scrutiny, forces transparency about limitations and strengthens confidence in the results.”

The peer review panels for this new journal, when chosen, will definitely warrant “independent scrutiny.” Should they follow in the footsteps of how the CDC has remolded its vaccine advisory committee, it should provide plenty of grist for the Retraction Watch, which monitors medical and scientific journals for published retractions. The RW website database lists tens of thousands of incidents where peer reviewed failed to catch factual errors, deliberate falsifications, and other misfeasance and malfeasance in the academic journal publication process.

I have served on several peer-review panels. I will never forget the note I received from one author after I made a number of pointed suggestions for improving his study’s conclusions. He thanked me for giving him one of the most comprehensive reviews he had ever received, one that was very helpful in improving the manuscript.

I don’t offer this anecdote to pat myself on the back. It confirmed something I’ve often heard said about peer review. A better name for the process might be “colleague review,” or “friendly review,” or even “ideological fellow-traveler review.” It would be out of character (and I will be pleasantly surprised) if the Trump regime’s CDC sets a higher standard.

“I cannot recall CDC stopping an MMWR report in the publication phase after scientific clearance and editorial review.”

Michael Iademarco, who directed the CDC center that publishes MMWR from 2014 to 2022

Bhattacharya, who trained as an economist and physician at Stanford, has never worked as an epidemiologist or as a practicing physician. But he emerged as an expert during the COVID-19 pandemic by co-authoring the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for allowing the general population to opt out of vaccination while adopting special measures to protect seniors, who were most vulnerable to the disease. The one country that tried that approach (Sweden) quickly abandoned it due to mounting mortality among its working-age population.

His demand for something better than “test-negative” design sounds to me like obfuscating jargon that could be used to call into question most epidemiological research. “The core problem” with that approach, he wrote, “is that, to measure the effectiveness of a vaccine in keeping people out of a hospital (for instance), this method throws away all data about people, vaccinated or not, who are never hospitalized. Instead, it replaces data with unverifiable assumptions, leading to bias. Factors such as prior infection, behavioral differences and who shows up for care can all skew results in ways that are hard to adjust for.”

Yes, all epidemiological studies that compare outcomes among two groups that haven’t been randomized have unmeasured factors that might skew the results. And there’s lots of junk science in the medical literature that makes no attempt to adjust results for unmeasurable factors. Here’s one: Martin Makary’s most recent book (he now runs the FDA) cited a study that “proved” fluoride reduce intelligence by comparing the average IQ scores in two Canadian communities, only one of which had fluoridated water (and slightly lower IQ scores among its school age children).

But most studies, especially those published in reputable journals, attempts to adjust for those unmeasured factors. The Times in its story pointed out that the “test-negative” design has been used in numerous CDC studies over the years and is well accepted in the peer-reviewed medical literature. It was used in a 2021 study on Covid vaccine effectiveness that was published in The New England Journal of Medicine, and in numerous peer-reviewed studies published in journals like JAMA Network Open, The Lancet, and Pediatrics.

The Post, in its story two weeks ago, quoted Michael Iademarco, who directed the CDC center that publishes MMWR from 2014 to 2022, which included Trump’s first term in office. “I cannot recall CDC stopping an MMWR report in the publication phase after scientific clearance and editorial review,” he said.

That is, not until contrarians like Bhattacharya and Makary and the anti-science, anti-vaccine Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took over the agencies that are charged with protecting the public’s health. Now, science is whatever they say it is.

The post Censorship at the FDA, CDC appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The marquee Democratic U.S. Senate primary of the Midwest is being fought over the Middle East.  

As no clear frontrunner has emerged in Michigan, a state with significant Arab and Jewish populations, the three top candidates appear to be pursuing distinct sets of voters in their quest for a plurality.  

U.S. Representative Haley Stevens defines herself as a “proud pro-Israel Democrat” and is backed by AIPAC PAC, which calls itself the “largest pro-Israel PAC in America.” State Senator Mallory McMorrow is supported by J Street PAC, the electoral arm of the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” J Street, which has expressed “strong opposition to both the Iran war and to Israel’s actions in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank.” McMorrow has also sworn off money from AIPAC. Former public health official Abdul El-Sayed has touted the support of influencer Hasan Piker, who said last month, “I would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time.” 

When it comes to the Middle East, they don’t disagree on everything. Each has expressed opposition to the war with Iran. But, as candidates in hotly contested primaries tend to do, they seem eager to focus on their differences.  

Both McMorrow and Stevens attacked El-Sayed for campaigning with Piker. Both McMorrow and El-Sayed have criticized an AIPAC PAC fundraising appeal supporting Stevens in concert with the incumbent Republican from Maine, Susan Collins. In March, when an AIPAC video featured Stevens declaring support for “standing alongside the only democracy in the Middle East,” El-Sayed responded, “Good to know. I stand with Michigan.”  

The conflicts that ravage the Middle East are of enormous importance to human dignity and global stability, and candidates for federal office should share their views on how to resolve them with voters. Yet Democrats should be wary of their primary elections becoming de facto referendums on Middle East policy. 

Campaigns tend to reduce extremely complicated situations to simplistic binary litmus tests. We are already seeing this happen with candidates asked whether they believe Israel is committing genocide and deserves continued military aid. The subtext of such questions is to determine which candidate is on the good guy’s side and which is on the bad guy’s side.  

But good and bad cannot be so cleanly delineated. Both Israelis and Palestinians deserve the human rights of freedom and peace. Both the far-right Israeli government and Hamas, which is still in control of much of Gaza despite last October’s (tenuous and fraying) ceasefire agreement that is supposed to install a technocratic administration, have denied them freedom and peace with their murderous policies.  

If the Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu deserves to be called “genocidal” because over two years its military killed more than 70,000 and displaced 2 million, then one should not hesitate to extend the same to Hamas for killing 1200, three-quarters of whom were civilians, on one day. The difference in scale and duration of their operations is due to the size of their respective arsenals, not the grotesque nature of their objectives. Each renounced the two-state peace process begun 30 years ago by now-diminished entities, the Israeli Labor Party and the Palestinian Fatah party. Each would fully displace or rule over the other, without regard to body count, if given the opportunity.  

Faced with two warring camps uninterested in reconciliation, what America can do to foster peace is hardly obvious, if even possible. Even when there was a two-state peace process, actual peace was elusive, though abandonment of it led to the carnage on and after October 7. Expecting Democrats to coalesce around a perfect white paper solution is unrealistic, since no such white paper exists.  

In turn, what we should expect from Democrats is what we’re seeing—a wide range of positions. If current polling holds, the next Senate Democratic caucus will feature Graham Platner of Maine, who says, “Not a single taxpayer dollar should be spent on arming and defending a country that commits a genocide,” and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who says, “I’m always going to vote whatever supports Israel [be it] military, financial, intelligence.”  

But Democrats need not let Platner, Fetterman, or whoever emerges from the Michigan primary define their party on the Mideast, when most Democrats’ views fall somewhere in between. 

There’s no question that rank-and-file Democrats have been turning away from Israel. According to NBC News, in 2013, Democratic registered voters sympathized with Israelis over Palestinians 45 percent to 13 percent. Today, it’s more than reversed, with 67 percent sympathizing with Palestinians versus 17 percent with Israelis. Moreover, a huge generation gap has opened, with 55 percent of senior citizens expressing “positive” views of Israel and only 13 percent of voters under 35 saying the same. 

However, you get different poll numbers if you compare Israel to Hamas, as the Harvard-Harris poll recently tested. In that poll, Democrats support Israel over Hamas by a wide 66 percent to 34 percent margin. Again, we see a big generation gap, with voters under 25, regardless of party, only modestly siding with Israel over Hamas: 54 percent to 46 percent.  

Perhaps most illustrative of the gradations of public opinion comes from an April poll from The Economist/YouGov, which asked, “Do you favor the U.S. increasing or decreasing military aid to Israel?” and offered a range of options. Democrats were divided, with 23 percent supporting maintaining or increasing aid, 21 percent supporting a decrease, and 35 percent supporting a complete cutoff.  

Foreign policy, however, should not be driven by simplistic poll questions. We need not sympathize with one persecuted people over another. Even though it’s increasingly common to see anti-Israel street protesters chant, “Israel should not exist” and “We don’t want no two states,” the juxtaposition of those slogans reminds us why a two-state solution is the only path to freedom and peace for Palestinians and Israelis. Just as the current one-state arrangement subjugates the stateless Palestinians, the erasure of Israel as a state would subjugate Israelis.

If most Democrats underscore their desire for a resurrection of a two-state peace process that would serve both Israelis and Palestinians, it will be easier to tolerate a range of views within the party on the best way to achieve peace, while also subtly marginalizing untenable, unpopular positions such as an outright embrace of Hamas, however in vogue that might be in radical circles. (Among all respondents in the Harvard-Harris poll, Hamas was deemed “favorable” by just nine percent.) Making it clear that the Democratic big tent has room for differing views would avoid treating the remaining primaries as partywide Mideast policy referendums, after which whichever faction comes out on the short end feels unwelcome in the party.  

After all, Democrats should want to be seen as the party united around making life more affordable for average Americans, not the party unproductively tearing each other apart over the most intractable foreign policy issue of the last 80 years. 

The post So What If the Democrats Are Divided on the Middle East? Embrace It appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Executive Summary

Predatory business practices and failed public policy have made the spread of artificial intelligence a potentially existential threat to journalism. Artificial intelligence companies rely on journalists’ work to train their models while offering little or no compensation. At the same time, AI-generated news summaries divert readers from original reporting. Small, local, and independent publications are especially vulnerable, lacking the resources to pursue legal remedies or negotiate fair terms with AI companies.

Despite numerous public policy proposals, none have been implemented at the federal level, let alone provided meaningful relief to journalists and content creators. New technology could, however, offer an important step toward a solution if properly regulated. Cloudflare, which manages about 20 percent of global web traffic, now makes it harder for AI companies to scrape content from third-party websites without permission or payment. This could reduce the growing market power imbalance between journalists and Big Tech. However, as internet history shows, there are significant downside risks that government policy must address.

Download the full report

Courtney C. Radsch, PhD, is the director of the Center for Journalism & Liberty at Open Markets Institute and a global thought leader on technology, AI, and the media.

Phillip Longman is a senior editor at the Washington Monthly magazine and policy director at the Open Markets Institute.

AI and the Future of Independent Journalism

The post AI and the Future of Independent Journalism appeared first on Washington Monthly.

When King Charles III addressed a joint session of Congress last month, he knocked the cover off the ball, to use a baseball, not a cricket, metaphor. In effect, a highly experienced diplomat, he deftly found a way to feature differences without undercutting a deteriorating relationship. It was the most important visit by a British monarch since 1939, when the King’s grandfather, George VI, visited to build American support for Britain’s looming war effort, the first U.S. visit by an English king. The charming hot dog lunch served by Franklin D. Roosevelt at his Hyde Park, New York, estate helped build public support for the U.K. “KING TRIES HOT DOGS AND ASKS FOR MORE,” pronounced The New York Times. The effort to build public support for Lend-Lease aid to Britain worked.

Today, the relationship between the United States and Britain is troubled. “Special relationship,” a shibboleth coined by Winston Churchill in 1946 to describe the unparalleled political, cultural, economic, and historic ties between the United Kingdom and the United States. On this subject, the King said: “Our defense, intelligence and security ties are hard-wired together through relationships measured not in years, but in decades.” Many have questioned whether anything post-Trump remains of the “special relationship” between the United States and Great Britain. The King reminded us of history:

“Ours is a partnership born out of dispute, but no less strong for it, so perhaps, in this example, we can discern that our nations are in fact instinctively like-minded—a product of the common democratic, legal and social traditions in which our governance is rooted to this day … This, I believe, is the special ingredient in our relationship. As President Trump himself observed during his state visit to Britain last autumn, ‘The bond of kinship and identity between America and the United Kingdom is priceless and eternal. It is irreplaceable and unbreakable.”

The speech, pitched and delivered superbly, was at once witty and warm, with enduring lines. He drew laughter and thunderous applause with a memorable line, “The Founding Fathers were bold and imaginative rebels with a cause.” He knew how to deliver it—low, slow, and with gravitas. I wonder whether he and the Queen ever spent an evening at Windsor Castle watching the James Dean movie that portrays the moral decay of American youth.

Nobody, least of all he, expected his gracefully delivered palpable hits to endure. Perhaps the one that matters most is Ukraine, where he received a standing ovation for his words: “Today, Mr. Speaker, that same, unyielding resolve is needed for the defense of Ukraine and her most courageous people. It is needed to secure a truly just and lasting peace.”

Vice President JD Vance, who in a televised Oval Office meeting in March 2025 had dissed Ukraine for not expressing sufficient thanks for U.S. aid, churlishly lingered in his chair before joining the lawmakers who rose in solidarity.

Charles stressed the importance of the precious rule of law, which he traced back to Magna Carta in 1215:

“The Founding Fathers] carried with them, and carried forward, the great inheritance of the British Enlightenment—as well as the ideals which had an even deeper history in English common law and Magna Carta … the U.S. Supreme Court Historical Society has calculated that Magna Carta is cited in at least 160 Supreme Court cases since 1789, not least as the foundation of the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.”

When he said that “executive power is subject to checks and balances,” there were roars of approbation from the Democrats and howls of execration from the MAGAs.

It is a sad day, and indeed quite humiliating, when a monarch needs to remind us of checks and balances. This King understands a point missed by our Supreme Court: No one in the executive branch of government is above the law, including a self-anointed autocrat consumed with outsized ballrooms, triumphal arches, and having his likeness on the currency.

When it came to climate change, our obtuse Vice President refused to rise with the lawmakers when he made the unexceptionable declaration on our shared responsibility to protect the environment. On what planet is Vance living?

On domestic terrorism, the King said something not sufficiently heard from our political leaders:

“Let me say with unshakeable resolve: such acts of [political] violence will never succeed. Whatever our differences, whatever disagreements we may have, we stand united in our commitment to uphold democracy, to protect all our people from harm, and to salute the courage of those who daily risk their lives in the service of our countries.”

The King also delighted the lawmakers by proclaiming his Christian faith, but then went on to stress interfaith relations and overcoming differences in belief to build community. The British may be a theme park for what once was, lacking in military strength and economic muscle, but they have elegance and eloquence in spades.

Trump claims he is ahead in the polls, but G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers noted that Trump has hit a new low in overall job performance and in his handling of the economy, at -22.2 and -40.3, respectively. The statistics reflect the percentage of people who approve of his handling of an issue minus those who disapprove. Indeed, Morris noted that Trump’s approval rating on the economy, traditionally the bastion of the GOP, is so low it “literally broke the scale of this graph on my data portal.” He’s at a low in several recent polls, hovering around 34 percent approval.

The Good Book says of the deceitful hypocrisy of autocratic leaders like Donald Trump trashing, indicting, and threatening his purported enemies as though they were Russians or North Koreans. “His words were softer than oil, yet they are drawn swords.”

We have much to learn from the King. The monarchy may be an anachronism, but his words were a welcome change from an overweening autocrat.

The post The King’s Visit Couldn’t Save the U.S.-Anglo Relations, But It Didn’t Hurt appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In 1970, Nebraska Senator Roman Hruska defended one of President Nixon’s Supreme Court nominees, Judge G. Harrold Carswell, from charges that he had a mediocre record on the bench. “There are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers,” Hruska famously said. “They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they?”

If only President Trump’s judicial nominees were merely mediocre, like most of those in his first term. Now, Trump is nominating candidates for federal judgeships who run away from the very Constitution they will, if confirmed, swear to apply and uphold.

For more than a decade, we’ve been “shocked but not surprised” by what Trump and his craven lackeys have said and done. It’s important that the shock continues. If it recedes—if we lose our sense of outrage—we’re really in trouble.

Even so, it takes a lot to shock me these days. Trump’s assaults on the body politic—like a boxer with a punching bag—come so fast that it’s impossible to keep up. But every so often, we need to slow down and smell the swill.

So consider this April 29 exchange in the Senate Judiciary Committee between Delaware Senator Chris Coons and John G.E. Marck, a former assistant district attorney in New York City and now the Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas:

SENATOR COONS:

Mr. Marck, if I might, just tell me about the 22nd Amendment. What does it provide?

JOHN G.E. MARCK:

The 22nd Amendment—Senator, my career has mostly been in criminal prosecution. I haven’t had an opportunity to use that one specifically.

COONS:

Anyone able to help him on the 22nd Amendment to the United States Constitution.

ANOTHER JUDICIAL NOMINEE:

Senator, I believe it is the amendment that deals with a two-term limitation.

COONS:

Correct. It states that no person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice.

COONS:

Mr. Marck, is President Trump eligible to run for president again in 2028?

MARCK:

Senator, without considering all the facts and looking at everything depending on what the situation is, this, to me strikes—is more of a hypothetical of something that could…

COONS:

It’s not a hypothetical. Has President Trump been elected president twice?

MARCK:

President Trump has been certified the President of the United States two times.

COONS:

Is he eligible to run for a third term under our Constitution?

MARCK:

I would have to review the actual wording of it.

COONS:

All I need to tell you is that the language of the constitutional amendment makes it clear that no, he is not eligible to run for the third term.

Anybody else brave enough to say that the Constitution of the United States prevents President Trump from seeking a third term? Anybody willing to apply the Constitution by its plain language in the 22nd Amendment?

Nobody.

All right, let’s move on.

Anyone hoping to be a judge must know—and be held to—some basic American history: George Washington declined to run for a third term and that informal precedent was followed until Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II was elected to a third and fourth term. This was not popular, even among many Democrats, so a constitutional amendment was passed and ratified that, with 100 percent clarity, limits a president to two terms.

The Orwellian obtuseness about basic facts is a defining feature of the Trump Administration, as we saw again when Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal moved on to January 6. He asked another nominee, Michael Hendershot: “Was the Capitol attacked on January 6?” Hendershot replied: “It’s a matter of significant political controversy.”

That’s it? This smug young rightwinger who could be on the bench for 50 years thinks there was no attack?

Like earlier Trump nominees to the federal bench and other posts, Marck, Hendershot and two other Trump nominees for the U.S. District Court—Arthur Jones, and Jeffrey Kuntz—all refused to say Joe Biden won the election. Instead, they used the same stock phrase their White House handlers insisted upon: “President Biden was certified the winner.”

Even the committee’s ancient chairman, Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, thought this was stupid. When Senator Richard Blumenthal was speaking, Grassley can be heard on an open mic off camera asking, “What would be wrong if they said Biden won?”

Blumenthal articulated the obvious but nonetheless shocking explanation for “what would be wrong.” He told the cowering, gutless nominees:

“You’re unwilling to use that word [won] because you are afraid. Afraid of what? President Trump? That is exactly what we do not need on the federal bench today. We need jurists who are fearless and strong, not weak and pathetic.”

Blumenthal was speaking slowly, and, I thought, sincerely:

“I can’t tell you how disappointed I am. We can disagree on issues of law. We can disagree on issues of fact, but for you to simply avoid a factual and responsive answer, I think, is a disrespect to this committee as well as to us.”

Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse was more direct:

“I hope you realize how ridiculous the four of you look spouting these preposterous, canned answers in a forum in which you’re supposed to tell the truth and you’re supposed to demonstrate the judicial capacity to make independent factual decisions in hard cases.

If you can’t even sit here and say that Joe Biden won that election or that the Capitol was attacked, what if a hard case comes your way as a judge? Let’s say the Trump administration is bearing down on that. Why would we ever believe that you would give the litigants a fair hearing and a fair decision if the executive branch was leaning in on you [as it’s] leaning on you to give these ridiculous answers today?

It would be nice if you could tell your executive branch handlers: I don’t need to make myself ridiculous at your direction.”

These nominees are backed by Republican senators who mostly have secure seats but prefer to bend the knee, anyway, violating their own oaths to defend the Constitution. Unless something unforeseen happens, the four who appeared on April 29—two from Texas, one from Florida, one from Ohio—will be confirmed on a 12-10 party line vote.

You should know the names of all of the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee so you can remember who thinks it’s OK to have a judge who might try to figure out how to let Trump run again. Maybe Trump will be prevented from trying to do so, but “attention must be paid” (to quote from Death of a Salesman, enjoying another Broadway revival), to which senators could countenance it, and when they’re up for reelection:

• Chuck Grassley (Iowa): 2028
• Lindsey Graham (South Carolina): 2026
• John Cornyn (Texas): 2026
• Ted Cruz (Texas): 2030
• Josh Hawley (Missouri): 2030
• Thom Tillis (North Carolina): Retiring
• John Kennedy (Louisiana): 2028
• Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee): 2030
• Eric Schmitt (Missouri): 2028
• Katie Britt (Alabama): 2028
• Ashley Moody (Florida): (Took Marco Rubio’s seat in 2025)

There’s always a chance that Tillis (who has bouts of integrity) and one other Republican will stand up for the Constitution and the rule of law. We shouldn’t hold our breath, but there’s no point in giving up, either. Let these senators know that they must not vote for nominees who won’t back the Constitution and don’t have the independence to say who won the 2020 election. Those are the absolute minimal standards for a lifetime appointment to the federal bench.

Here is the full video of the hearing.

Subscribe to OLD GOATS with Jonathan Alter, where this article originally appeared.

The post Trump’s Pathetic Court Picks Hit New Low appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Of the many standing ovations King Charles III received in Congress last week, few were more surprising than the response to his comments about the war in Ukraine. Britain and the United States have stood “shoulder to shoulder” for centuries, he declared, through two world wars, the Cold War, 9-11, and Afghanistan. “Today … that same, unyielding resolve is needed for the defense of Ukraine”—and with that, more than 400 U.S. Senators and Representatives, Democrats and Republicans, leapt to their feet in applause. 

But President Donald Trump is determined to go his own way despite the consensus, and there were more signs last week that the U.S. has washed its hands of Kyiv’s four-year-old conflict with Moscow.  

First, America’s acting ambassador in Kyiv resigned—the second envoy to quit in just 12 months—citing Washington’s dwindling support for its one-time ally. Then Trump had another friendly 90-minute phone call with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. Apparently forgetting that Moscow has been supplying Iran with intelligence about American targets in the Persian Gulf, the 47th president once again underlined their long friendship and praised the dictator for what Trump sees as his willingness to agree to a Ukraine ceasefire. Speaking later from the Oval Office, Trump reminded reporters that the United States is no longer giving Kyiv American weapons or ammunition, and he dumped responsibility for Ukraine’s future in Europe’s lap.  

“We helped [Europe] with Ukraine, and they made a mess [of it],” the president maintained, twisting the historical record to serve his grudge of the moment. “Ukraine has nothing to do with [us]. We’re an ocean apart. It has to do with them.” 

The good news for Ukraine: Europe is stepping up. Last month’s Hungarian elections, which drummed former prime minister Viktor Orban out of office, opened the door to renewed European support for Kyiv. It took less than two weeks for the European Union to impose new economic sanctions on Russia and approve a €90 billion loan to cover two-thirds of Ukraine’s core financial needs over the next two years—both steps long blocked by the deposed Hungarian leader. Also critical for Kyiv, Orban’s departure cleared the way for Ukraine to resume its march toward EU membership.  

All this will be harder without the United States. The larger the club enforcing economic sanctions, the more effective they are, and it looks increasingly likely that the new European loan will fall billions short of Ukraine’s growing budget needs. America’s voice will be missed even in the conversation about admitting Ukraine to the EU. Former U.S. ambassador Bridget Brink, among others, played an essential role before she resigned in April 2025, pressing the West to balance support for Kyiv with demands for reform to meet Western standards for democratic governance and the rule of law.  

Europeans see support for Ukraine as an existential imperative—an essential defense against an expanded Russian war of aggression—and they will push ahead alone. But challenges loom. 

Now, with Orban gone, the difficulty of striking a balance between support and tough-love reform requirements is coming back into view, along with a troubling gap between European leaders and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.  

Virtually no European leader questions whether Kyiv should be admitted to the EU. What’s at issue is when and how. Should the normal accession process, which takes on average nine years and in some cases considerably longer, be accelerated for Ukraine? 

In late 2025, EU leadership proposed what it called “reverse enlargement.” Ukraine would formally join the bloc before the end of 2027—part of a ceasefire deal proposed by the Trump administration. But the practical benefits of membership, including voting rights and the substantial subsidies provided by the union’s Common Agricultural Policy and Cohesion Fund, would not take effect until Kyiv met Brussels’ usual extensive reform requirements.  

This first attempt to rebalance rights and responsibilities went too far for most EU member states, and both Berlin and Paris have recently proposed slower, more demanding road maps, starting with what one leaked German document called “symbolic membership.” Zelensky’s barbed response, delivered in the media in late April: “Ukraine does not need symbolic membership in the EU. Ukraine is … not defending Europe symbolically—people are really dying.”  

Zelensky wants recognition of Ukraine’s wartime courage and resilience. Brussels refuses to relax the exacting standards of its “merit-based” accession process. But rhetoric aside, this isn’t—or shouldn’t be—an either-or choice.  

Not all Ukrainians agree with Kyiv’s reported refusal to engage in talks about a middle way, and most hesitant European leaders aren’t acting out of stinginess or hostility toward Ukraine. On the contrary, both Europe and Ukraine will lose if Kyiv enters the bloc without meeting Western political and economic standards. 

Ukrainians’ hunger to join the EU dates back over a decade. Thousands of protesters poured into the streets of Kyiv and other cities in late 2013 when pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych declined to sign an agreement that would advance Ukraine’s membership process. These first “Euromaidan” demonstrators, who carried EU flags and chanted “Ukraine is Europe,” were soon joined by more than a million others whose demands far outstripped formal EU integration. To them, “Europe” was shorthand for a long list of Western ideals: replacing corruption, oligarchy, and Soviet-style authoritarianism with democratic capitalism.  

Eight years later, in 2022, Ukrainians again set their sights on Europe, formally applying for EU membership just four days after the Russian invasion, before most newly enlisted soldiers had been issued rifles. Today, according to a 2025 poll, 86 percent of Ukrainians support joining the union, 15 percentage points more than want to join NATO, the same survey shows. And no wonder—EU accession goes to the core of what the war is all about. 

What these millions of Ukrainians want is not just the trappings of integration, the right to call themselves European or travel freely to Paris and Berlin. They watched membership transform nearby countries from Bulgaria to the Baltics, as Brussels demanded democratic reforms in return for investment. And like their neighbors, Ukrainians see accession as an engine of change that will bring both prosperity and democratic freedoms.  

Ukrainians understand that their country has homework to do—rooting out corruption, curtailing authoritarian government, strengthening democratic institutions, and aligning Ukrainian businesses with Western investment standards—and they fear that a shortcut to membership will short-circuit these reforms.  

“External pressure from the EU, the IMF, and other international partners is the only leverage we have,” explains leading civil society activist Olena Halushka, board member of the influential Anti-Corruption Action Centre.  

She and other reformers remember the essential role Brussels played from spring 2022 through the end of 2024, when Ukraine was required to fulfill seven rigorous “conditions” for EU “candidate status”—the opening of substantive negotiations about membership. The conditions were carefully calibrated and precisely worded—just the ammunition civil society needed to continue its struggle with the corrupt old guard still holding on in government.  

Even as fighting spread across Ukraine, the EU kept the pressure on in Kyiv, calling out backsliding and withholding aid until its conditions were met. But now, Halushka and others complain, Brussels is looking the other way as Ukraine’s wartime government attacks anti-corruption institutions and relaxes standards for judges. The Brussels directorate overseeing EU membership “is not doing enough,” Halushka laments. “[European Commission President Ursula] von der Leyen is not doing enough. They’re focused on geopolitics—on what it will take to win the war—and turning a blind eye.”  

It shouldn’t be beyond Europe—or Europe and Ukraine together—to find a middle way that combines respect and recognition with conditionality. This will take compromises—a flexibility that has been in short supply until now. But there is no alternative. Both sides need Ukrainian accession and must work together to find a way out of the current impasse. 

What’s needed is a break-the-mold, incremental process where the label “EU member” matters less than the practical benefits. The EU cannot and should not waive its merit-based criteria. Before full membership, Kyiv should be required to fulfill all the bloc’s reform requirements, aligning the Ukrainian legal code—criminal statutes, judicial standards, banking regulations, IP protections, pharmaceutical safeguards, environmental law, and more—with EU norms.  

Big-ticket subsidies like cohesion funding and Common Agricultural Policy payouts will have to wait—too many other EU members stand to lose money from sharing this allotted aid with Ukraine. It’s also unclear just how far the process can go while Ukraine is at war. But Brussels can begin to grant Kyiv some financial benefits and access—participation in decision-making bodies if not voting rights—in return for stepwise reform.  

Once this principle—incrementalism and sequenced benefits—has been agreed, there are many ways to proceed. Anti-corruption activist Haluska would like to see a phased approach that starts with what Brussels calls the “fundamentals cluster”—the rule of law, democratic governance, transparent public procurement, and financial controls. Ukraine could earn some of the benefits of membership when reforms are completed, with other, more technical forms of harmonization following more slowly over time.  

German Council on Foreign Relations Associate Fellow Wilfried Jilge prioritizes reforms that spur Ukrainian economic growth—such as strengthening courts with jurisdiction over commercial property. A third approach would focus on what Ukraine can contribute to the EU, including collaborative defense industrial production. Or Brussels could combine elements from all three strategies. 

What can America do to speed up a process that combines timely recognition for Ukraine’s wartime sacrifices with political reforms? We have as much of a stake as Europe has in a democratic, free-market Ukraine anchored in the West and aligned with NATO. But it’s hard to see how we can help if Donald Trump is in the White House, cozying up to Vladimir Putin and dismissing Western ideals. 

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