A lot of attention is being paid to William Howard Taft these days, a strange honor for one of the nation’s most mediocre presidents—so mediocre that, in fact, he once jokingly wrote to a friend, “I don’t remember that I was ever president.”

Unlike most mediocre presidents, though, Taft got to enjoy a second life as Chief Justice of the United States, from 1921 to 1930. This role suited him much better, and in it he proved, not just one of the most able stewards the Court has had, but also one of the most influential architects of the presidency in history.

Today, Taft’s influence can be seen in the Roberts Court, which cites his Myers v. U.S. decision in every separation-of-powers opinion it writes. It will undoubtedly soon cite Taft again when it hands down Trump v. Slaughter.

The decision is potentially one of the most important constitutional and administrative law cases in decades. Triggered by President Trump’s early 2025 firing spree that saw hundreds of thousands of government workers lose or leave their jobs, Slaughter will ask the Court to decide whether the FTC’s (Federal Trade Commission) statutory for-cause removal protections violate the separation of powers. At stake is how far the Supreme Court will go in removing job protections of federal employees at the behest of President Trump.

Can Congress protect officers from “the Damocles’ sword of removal” on grounds that their jobs entail sensitive or technical functions requiring insulation from politics? Or must the President possess “all of” the executive power in the name of democracy and good government?

Led by Chief Justice Roberts, a majority seems poised to answer the latter. This Term’s cases will tell us what exceptions to the removal power the judges will tolerate, and whether institutions like the National Labor Relations Board, Merit Systems Protection Board and the Federal Reserve survive in their current form. But there’s no doubt that the Court now sees presidential removal, with just a few tiny exceptions, as the law of our Constitution. And here, Myers is key.

The story of a conflict between a bedridden Woodrow Wilson and an obscure fourth-class postmaster in Portland, Oregon, the “epochal opinion” of Myers broke new ground by constitutionalizing a power (an “unrestricted” one, at that) that past presidents had only asserted in their enduring tug-of-war with Congress. Taft authored the Myers opinion, giving the President new powers to remove officials.

In Taft’s telling, the President’s job requires him to place “implicit faith” in “each member of his official family, and his chief executive subordinates,” and to be able, if ever “he loses confidence in the intelligence, ability, judgment or loyalty of any one of them … to remove him without delay.”

In the ensuing decades, Myers’ reach would be cabined by a series of cases protecting the New Deal state and upholding Congress’s authority to draw up the government as it wished. Yet, like the loaded gun at the start of a Chekhov play, Myers survived, ready to be picked up and fired when the moment was right. That moment has arrived.

The trouble is, Myers’ model of public administration is totally unrealistic (a government of two million officers is certainly nothing like a “family”). And it was not an accurate or complete vision of how President Taft thought about the relationship between the president and the agencies, either.

Shortly after losing the 1912 presidential election, Taft retired to Yale Law School to lick his wounds and take a break from public service. In that time, he produced a series of lectures, later published as Our Chief Magistrate and His Powers, that laid out his theory of the office, not to mention several complaints about its practical shortcomings.

One feature of office that weighed on Taft’s mind was the appointment process. At the time, the president was responsible for nominating some tens of thousands of offices for Senate confirmation.

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Taft had a real problem with appointments: for one, they were a waste of the president’s time (“Why,” he complained, “should the President have his time taken up in a discussion over who shall be postmistress at the town of Devil’s Lake in North Dakota?”). Second, the process made officers into “the football of politics,” with legislators haggling over positions with which to reward supporters. Third, there was no way the president could comment knowledgeably on tens of thousands of candidacies. Finally, if each president set out to reinvent the government each time he took office, the “halt and lack of efficiency” would cripple the government.

Taft gave the example of the State Department, plagued by “entirely unnecessary helplessness” when “competent representatives abroad in our diplomatic service are removed and men of no experience replace them.” Both for time-saving and principled reasons, Taft concluded that the President should appoint no more than a few hundred officers (essentially, the Cabinet, assistant secretaries, judges, generals, admirals, and ambassadors). All others, he wrote, including bureau heads, should be reclassified by Congress as merit employees in the civil service so they could “have a permanent tenure and not change with each administration.”

In light of Myers, these thoughts on appointment are surprising. So, too, are his views on oversight and removal. In reality, President Taft was no hatchet man. He fired cautiously and always in compliance with statutes. Where a statute required “good cause” for removal, as for a customs board, Taft provided notice, held a hearing, and submitted evidence that the statutory predicates for removal had been met. Ironically, the statute Myers later invalidated for allowing the Senate to interfere with removals, the Tenure of Office Act of 1876, was one Taft scrupulously adhered to as president, yielding on proposed removals where the Senate refused to back them.

As it turns out, Taft did not actually run his government as a top-down, command-and-control operation where he served as CEO. More to the point he disliked the aspects of unitary executive as the Trump administration has pursued them and which the Roberts Court relies on Myers to enable: a highly politicized administration that weakens the civil service, firing employees without any demonstration of cause.

Chiefly, this was because he believed such a model was pointless: it was impossible, given government’s complexity, for the president to try to “impose his personality minutely” on its “permanent structure.” More vividly, he wrote,

Presidents may go to the seashore or to the mountains, but the machinery at Washington continues to operate under [an] army of faithful non-commissioned officers, and the great mass of governmental business is uninterrupted.

And this was a good thing! After all, Taft explained, civil servants had “far greater experience” than political appointees, not to mention a “life-long fidelity and efficiency [to their missions] . . . . not rewarded by notices in headlines.” In other words, the president could and should trust experts to do their jobs. He should be able to depart to the beach knowing that government would trundle along under safe hands.

Thus, despite the contemporary unitary mythos of “a single head [of government who is] the focus of public hopes and expectations,” Taft transparently understood the Executive Branch as a “they,” not an “it.” His vision of presidential administration was not unilateral or command-based, but consensual and cooperative: the President might go to the seashore for weeks, or even months, at a time, but he—and the nation—could rest comfortably in the knowledge that, thanks to the honesty and competence of the lower echelons of the civil service, government would go on.

These days, the presidency is in a rough state. Trump’s deep depredations into the civil service cast an ironic pall on Taft’s efforts to reconcile an “unrestricted” removal power with “efficient government,” while for close to two decades now, the Roberts Court has enabled a one-man presidency, and with Slaughter and like cases, they may go further. Has the Roberts Court self-interestedly misinterpreted the former chief justice’s handiwork? Or did Taft himself lack a “coherent mind”? Whatever the truth, there’s no doubt that Chief Justice Taft’s presidency has proved more lasting than President Taft’s ever was.

A question remains, though. Should we run our government by Taft’s theory, or by the government Taft actually ran?

Andrea Scoseria Katz is an Associate Professor of Law at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis. Professor Katz teaches and writes about constitutional law, with a focus on presidential power.

But failures that can be visualized are hard to beat. They tell their own story. That is why I think the Reflecting Pool has caught the public imagination. Endless images and memes of the degradation of the Pool have swept through social media. The stakes seem simultaneously low enough to laugh about, but significant enough to gin up outrage. It is simultaneously funny and symbolic.

It would take a whole other post to highlight the best jokes, but this is certainly my favorite.

That said, I think the Reflecting Pool debacle is mirroring different aspects of Trump’s failure to govern in a competent and accountable way. Here are some themes.

1. From the party of Lincoln to the party of Trump

The Reflecting Pool can be considered an extension of the Lincoln Memorial. It was designed by the same architect, Henry Bacon, and completed in time for the dedication of the Memorial. Bacon designed it to connect America’s two greatest Presidents, Lincoln and Washington, using the pool to tie the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument.

Trump has made clear he is not repairing the Reflecting Pool, but making it his own, promising his vision will make it “the way it’s supposed to be. Much better than it ever was, actually.” The job of the reflecting pool is, well, to reflect its surrounds. It is not supposed be the defining feature, to grab the eye. Even Trump’s idealized and unrealized version of the Pool is a garish defilement of that purpose.

The Republican Party used to refer to itself as The Party of Lincoln. Whatever Lincoln stood for — his ending of slavery, civil war victory, personal integrity, vision and humility — seem distant. The Republican Party today is loyal to one man, and that is Trump.

Trump has repeatedly compared himself to Lincoln. Actual quote: “I believe I am treated worse.” He has made no secret of his goal of displacing Lincoln in the American pantheon. Defacing the Reflecting Pool is one reminder how little regard Trump has for his predecessor.

2. Ignore the underlying problem with a superficial and ugly solution that makes things worse

The Reflecting Pool, like America itself, has real problems. President Obama spent $30 million to fix those problems, but leaky pipes and algae — inherent in a shallow, sun-exposed pool — remain.

The National Parks Service drains and refills the pool each year. A real fix would require an estimated $100 million and more time. Trump had a different solution: A superficial repainting of the base of the Pool, which he labeled “American flag blue.” The underlying problems remain. Meanwhile, projects at the the already underfunded National Park Service are being cut to fund Trump’s DC spending spree.

3. Treat public institutions as personal property

Just as he coated the Oval Office with more faux-gold than an old-school Vegas casino, Trump wanted the Reflecting Pool not to work, but to be unignorably his.

This reflected the pattern of personalism. Trump has treated DC as his personal property. He demolished the East Wing of the White House, and paved over the Rose Garden, and pasted his name on the Kennedy Center without seeking any permission or approval.

Such approval processes ensure that the visual representations of the White House and government property are consistent with the historical traditions of the Capitol. But Trump casts them aside, underlining that we live under a personalist regime defined by the aesthetics of one man.

4. Ignore the rules, reminding people why the rules exist

Trump handed out a no-bid contract to someone he knew, but someone without experience in this type of work. Can he do that, you ask? There are procurement rules to minimize risks of corruption. But Trump invoked an exemption for situations involving the risk of “serious injury, financial or other, to the government.”

In this case, there was no risk of serious injury, financial or other, to the government. Trump simply wanted the pool done for July 4th. The urgency exemption Trump invoked was made for less than 1% of National Park Service contract spending, and was also used for Trump’s confidential no-bid contract to the same firm that is building his ballroom. In their case, the urgent task is fixing ornamental foundations near the White House, which seems less than urgent and more like a way to funnel $17.4 million to a favored contractor.

The Reflecting Pool contracts are just one example of a massive increase in “urgency” exception spending this year, much of it in homeland security. In a normal year, this would be $3-6 billion (pandemic years are obvious exceptions). So far in 2026, it is $28 billion. What this means is that there is an extraordinary increase in money that avoids normal oversight, without an obvious pandemic-like emergency to justify it.

Government has rules, which make it slow. But it also has exemptions for truly urgent cases. Trump has viewed these exemptions as permission slips to do whatever he wants. Previous Presidents mostly took the rules seriously, or were told by their lawyers they needed to. Trump has selected lawyers on the criteria that they will ignore the rules. He has discovered that the American system of government, much like our system of private enterprise, gives a lot of room to someone willing to be sued.

Generally, I’m on the side of giving the executive branch more discretion. Most Americans would probably be fine with the notion that getting the Reflecting Pool in good shape for the 250th anniversary is a good idea, even if it involves bending the rules.

The problem is there was nothing that could be fixed on that timeline, and that Trump exercised his responsibility irresponsibly. And that is exactly what causes the public to become more skeptical of the use of discretionary power, fueling a demand for more rules to constrain it. Its a simple truth of public administration: bad actors fuel the creation of rules that constrain good actors from using power well.

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5. Cronyism - the swamp that Trump built

As with other projects, like the new East Wing ballroom, the projected costs has ballooned. First it was $1.8 million, now it is $16.4 million.

This is one of the guys Trump gave a no-bid contract to.

Now, looks aren’t everything. You might look at me and say “that short Irish guy cannot dunk a basketball.” But…you’d be completely right.

Ok, sometimes things are what they look like. And the contracting “process” here looks as murky as the Reflecting Pool.

The woman beside John Cafaro said she asked to have his picture taken with him because he looked like a comic-book villain. This was at an event at one of Trump’s golf courses. And she was right. Cafaro has two criminal guilty pleas, one for campaign finance violations, the other for bribing a Congressman. Cafaro has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Trump since 2020. He is the owner of Greenwater Services (I’m not kidding), who received a no-bid contract for a water-purification system for the Pool.

The other contract went to Atlantic Industrial Coatings. Trump said they had previously done work at his golf club: “I have a guy who’s unbelievable at doing swimming pools. He looked at it. He called me up. He said, ‘Sir, we can do something on it.’”

Unbelievable indeed. Trump knows a guy. A large guy presumably, who calls him sir. As the Times reported, there was no evidence the firm had worked on even swimming pools, much less a complex project like the Reflecting Pool. The White House later said Trump had no personal relationship with the contractor. This is their first contract with the government.

Both contractors refused to talk about their work, or their connections with Trump, leaving the public in the dark and appropriately suspicious of cronyism.

6. Ignore the experts

Back in early May, when the New York Times delivered an excellent account of the Reflecting Pool, they quoted a representative of the hot-tub industry who pointed out that painting the pool would not solve any problem, and the blue would soon be obscured by green algae.

A predictable mess! It’s actually worse than that. The new blue surface makes green algae the more certain outcome. Rosalina Stancheva Christova, a professor of aquatic ecology at George Mason University told NPR that the new surface made the underlying conditions more friendly to algae growth:

The new, darker interior surface is going to absorb more sunlight. It is going to result in water that's warmer, and that ultimately is going to lead to more prolific algae growth.

The solution to the algae has been Cafaro’s “high-tech nanobubble ozone technology", manually removing algae, pouring chemicals into the water, and now draining the pool again.

Thats right: Trump is literally draining the swamp that he created.

7. Accept no blame, scapegoat those exposing wrongdoing

It is not just the incompetence arising from a personalist regime that is galling; it is the demand to ignore the obvious evidence of failure. We waste time and energy arguing with serial liars who refuse to accept they can ever be held responsible. They use the resources of the federal government to leverage propaganda and threats. Abuse of legal power to silence dissent and threaten critics has been a staple of the Trump administration.

Trump is attempting to insist that his project was undermined not by mismanagement but by vandalism. In a Truth social post, Trump insisted: “it came out great, except for the Vandalism, which we are now fixing.” When asked if contractors were to blame, Trump said:

No, no. We had vandalism. We had a 290, 300 foot slit, right through. Probably a box cutter, or a knife of some kind….Five people are arrested and five people are under investigation.

Trump also claimed fertilizer was added to the water, with no evidence. A New York Times report revealed internal National Park Service documents from a week earlier mostly cast doubt about Trump’s claims. While they found cuts to sections of foam, these did not affect the blue sealant that is now peeling, or the algae foams. Just to underline how bizarre this is, Trump previously said the fix would last for 50 years, that the materials were so strong that “if you had a knife — I don’t want to give anyone ideas — if you had a knife you can’t even cut it.”

PEOPLE ARE BEING ARRESTED IN ORDER TO COVER UP TRUMP’S FAILURES.

But people are really being arrested and ticketed. The US Attorney for DC Jeanne Pirro, says that all such vandals will be fully prosecuted. Even if such prosecutions fail, they upend the lives of those involved, creating legal bills and career risks.

The site has become a tourist attraction in a novel way, as locals, tourists and reporters monitor the shitshow. Some touched and removed detached pieces of the surface material that did not adhere to the pool, a Dollar General version of grabbing a chunk of the Berlin Wall.

This who dared to touch or remove a symbol of Trump’s incompetence were arrested, and scapegoated for that incompetence. David Hearn took this picture of the floating materials, which many others have documented. He was immediately detained by the National Guard and charged with destruction of government property for, by his account, merely touching the materials.

Hearn, a former Olympian, said:

I reached in there, and I was able to grab the end of that flapping piece, the already peeling piece. It was still attached to the bottom. I didn’t remove anything….I didn’t vandalize anything. I didn’t destroy or break or peel anything. By the time I realized what was going on, I was being put in handcuffs.

The stated purpose of placing the National Guard in DC was to reduce violent crime. New research shows that they have not done so. Their presence is symbolic, a reminder that people living in DC do not control their own city: Trump does.

Now the National Guard has been deployed to protect Trump’s mismanagement of the Reflecting Pool, telling tourists and even reporters that they will be arrested if they touch the pool. It is not clear what law, if any, the National Guard is enforcing.

Meanwhile, National Park officials placed a fence around parts of the Pool nominally to prevent vandalism, but really to try to reduce transparency around one of the most visible of Trump’s failures.

Hey, look. Do you want to find someone who actually vandalized the pool? What about the guy who drove a motorcade over a notoriously finicky and delicate surface prone to leaks?

All politicians like to shift blame when they can. But Trump is in a league of his own, frequently relying on conspiracy theories to turn ordinary people into villains. Now, he is treating people who are curious about or mocking his Reflecting Pool as Antifa, or at least the Antifa of MAGA imagination: a pervasive, destructive force.

This is what Trump has always done, of course. Pick a topic. Increase its salience. Demonize anyone against him. Birtherism. Immigration. The Wall. DEI. Covid. It is exhausting.

Is anyone still buying this? Can anyone still gin up the outrage to cheer the prosecution of a DC resident recording the desecration of a national monument? Is anyone still nodding along and saying “yes, the guy in the inflatable pink frog costume is the real threat.”

It is not only that all of this is exhausting. Trump is literally asking everyone to believe him, and not their lying eyes, about the degradation of one of the most potent visual symbols of America. Some will go along, no doubt, but most Americans will be left wondering when they can get a government actually committed to solving real problems, rather than creating them.

Each year, millions of Americans who qualify for public benefits fail to receive them.

Consider health insurance: in 2022, around 15 million people, the bulk of the uninsured population, went without health insurance coverage despite being eligible for free or subsidized coverage through either Medicaid or the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Marketplaces.

This same dynamic exists in other public benefit programs. In a given year, roughly 7 million eligible Americans don’t participate in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and another 5 million don’t claim the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).

These missed benefits add up. Forgone EITC benefits total approximately $7 billion each year. They also address vital needs. Missing out on SNAP benefits means that kids might go hungry. Whether one has health insurance coverage can be a matter of life and death.

So why do so many eligible people lose out on benefits?

One explanation has to do with how programs are administered. Most public benefit programs in the United States require people to opt-in. That means they have to learn about the program, determine whether they qualify, gather the necessary documentation, complete the application, and navigate whatever extra administrative burdens the agency requires, such as an in-person interview or employer verification.

At each step of this process, eligible people fall away. They miss deadlines, lose paperwork, become confused by complex rules, or simply lack the time or know-how to navigate a burdensome process while managing the daily challenges of poverty. What’s worse, means-tested programs require regular redeterminations in which recipients must prove their eligibility anew.

The result is a safety net that catches some but lets many slip through. The recently enacted One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) only compounds this problem, adding myriad new administrative burdens to Medicaid, the ACA Marketplaces, and SNAP. Recent reporting suggests that state agencies are buckling under the weight of these new federal rules.

The Promise of Automatic Enrollment

“Automatic enrollment” is one solution that has attracted attention from policymakers, administrators, and advocates. Automatic enrollment refers to when the government identifies eligible individuals through administrative data and enrolls them without requiring an affirmative application on the individual’s part. As a result, the default goes from opt-in to opt-out.

Psychologists and behavioral economists have long observed that default rules—rules that determine how a person is treated if they don’t make an active choice—tend to have major effects on program enrollment. One recent study found that suspending health insurance auto-enrollment in Massachusetts caused new enrollments to decline by 33 percent, an effect that is an order of magnitude greater than the effects of softer “nudges” such as providing information and assistance and up to twice as large as the impact of Massachusetts’ mandate penalty.

Programs like Medicare Part B and Social Security, which come close to automatically enrolling everyone who is eligible, unsurprisingly boast take-up rates of nearly 100 percent.

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Implementation Challenges

Yet if automatic enrollment is such a powerful intervention, then why hasn’t it been more widely adopted? And how can we implement automatic enrollment more broadly across the safety net?

In a new working paper, Automating the Safety Net, we try to answer these questions by conducting an in-depth comparative evaluation across numerous public benefit programs. We consider both the challenges involved in implementing automatic enrollment as well as how to surmount these challenges. Our analysis is informed by 28 semi-structured interviews with policy experts, technologists, and government officials who work on public benefit administration. We sought out people who have advocated for or helped to implement automatic enrollment, rather than its critics or beneficiaries. As a result, their views capture how practitioners see the terrain, and are not necessarily a verdict on whether automatic enrollment is worth pursuing.

The interviews point to four main challenges:

1. Decentralization. Many federally funded public benefit programs are run by states, territories, tribes, and, in some cases, counties. As a result, any improvement must often be made across multiple systems. One expert described county-level public benefit administration as “one of the biggest hurdles” to automating public benefits. They explained: “If you wanted to make a change to the [Medicaid] ex parte rate, you need to do it 50 times in California. You need to convince 50 different software vendors. . . . It’s just a much harder change management process.” These challenges are compounded by the divergent levels of capacity across states. “Each state has different degrees of sophistication within their program, their systems,” one expert explained.

2. Obtaining necessary data. Automation also requires that the government have the necessary data to determine eligibility and sometimes benefit levels. In theory, agencies can get some of these data from other government programs, but there are challenges to doing so. Perhaps the biggest hurdle is that eligibility rules differ among programs, making the data collected for one program unusable for another.

   Moreover, sometimes governments can’t access the necessary data or the data simply don’t exist. Some benefit applications require an in-person assessment. Others require frequent or detailed information that’s not automatically reported to any government agency, such as monthly or quarterly income data. As one expert succinctly put it, “You can’t automate things you don’t know. And usually there’s something you don’t know.” Governments could purchase relevant data held by private companies, but such efforts would have to grapple with what Luke Farrell recently described as the “means-testing industrial complex.”

3. Administrative capacity. Many of our interviewees also lamented public agencies’ limited capacity, especially at the state level, to build the necessary technology and data systems to improve benefit administration. One expert told us that in the states, “there’s significantly limited resources to undertake tech solutions, including time and human capital and money.” Another expert linked this to the need for more funding, noting that there’s “just not a ton of R&D and innovation funding that happens or trickles to [the] state level for this work.” Not only does this make it harder for government to create new benefit systems, but also it makes it harder to maintain and update them.

4. Fears and values. Beyond the technical and administrative challenges discussed above, automating public benefits requires political support. Most obviously, policymakers must actually view it as a problem that eligible people are not receiving benefits. One interviewee observed that “There’s a massive political challenge: like half of our system thinks that… nobody should have Medicaid ever.”

   Automating enrollment also entails potential risks, both to the public and to enrollees themselves. For example, policymakers have long invoked concerns about “waste, fraud, and abuse” to justify imposing administrative burdens on public benefit programs. More recently, Congressional Republicans repeatedly invoked such concerns to justify enacting the OBBBA, even though that law, apart from the undoubtedly significant SNAP cost-sharing change, contains only a few minor provisions focused on fraud and abuse and though it will mostly serve to disenroll people who are in fact eligible.

   Several interviewees also worried that data shared with the aim of automating enrollment could be used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The potential upsides of administrative data sharing to help people may be checked because of a fear that it will be used in punitive ways.

Four Recommendations to Ease Safety Net Automation

While daunting, these challenges are not insurmountable. As we describe in our article, the United States has, in recent years, taken some promising steps toward automating enrollment across a range of multiple government benefit programs, including the Child Tax Credit, Medicaid, and Summer EBT.

In 2021, the IRS used prior-year tax returns to automatically deliver monthly Child Tax Credit payments to tens of millions of families, helping drive child poverty to a historic low of 5.2%. During the post-pandemic Medicaid unwinding, many states dramatically improved ex parte renewal processes, which kept millions of Americans covered without requiring them to reapply. And the Summer EBT program, made permanent in 2023, was designed from the ground up to use existing SNAP and school-meals data to enroll eligible children without requiring a separate application.

Interviewees suggested several steps legislators and regulators could take to address the challenges described above:

1. Aligning Eligibility Rules. Many experts noted that aligning definitions and eligibility rules across programs would facilitate automatic enrollment. Some also suggested that lawmakers make greater use of adjunctive eligibility, where qualifying for one program automatically qualifies someone for another.

   At least one expert recommended increasing the use of “area-based” eligibility that deems someone eligible based on where they live. One example of this type of approach is the community-eligibility option in the school meals program, wherein a school that serves a large percentage of low-income students can choose to provide free meals to all students without requiring applications.

2. Improving Data Access and Quality. Experts also emphasized the importance of improving agencies’ access to the kind of high-quality data necessary to automate public benefits. Some indicated that new legislation would be necessary to encourage or require agencies to share data with each other. One expert observed that it helps to “be very explicit in new legislation [about] how data can be used.” Another suggested that federal agencies should publish a standard data sharing agreement.

   To fill gaps in existing data, some experts suggested imposing more frequent income reporting requirements. As one expert put it, the government should “require employers to report income data to the federal government at every pay period.” Another expert likewise emphasized the importance of “building more in-house federal data sources” so that states are not as reliant on private companies such as Equifax to provide data to determine whether enrollees are eligible.

3. Increasing State Capacity. Many of our interviewees emphasized the importance of increasing states’ administrative and technical capacity. When asked what steps could facilitate automatic enrollment, one expert put it bluntly: “Increase state capacity for IT projects.” Another expert explained that “there needs to be a legislative-level investment in actually fixing the underlying technical infrastructure of all this stuff.”

   Several experts stressed, in particular, the value of hiring in-house engineers to help run benefit programs. One expert pointed to several states that had recently built up their technological expertise at their agencies, showing it can be done.

4. Building Trust and Facing Fears. One obvious way to build trust is to mitigate, as much as possible, the real risks automatic enrollment poses. Experts offered a few suggestions for how to do this. One expert emphasized the importance of “adopting a significant harm-mitigation strategy” that includes contingencies for when enrollees are improperly enrolled in benefit programs. Another expert recommended limiting the information being shared for automatic enrollment initiatives to “what’s necessary for enrolling someone or establishing that they’re eligible.” For instance, rather than sharing reams of detailed personal data, “you could just have a flag that says [this person is eligible], and all you need to transfer is the flag.”

   But good governance alone isn’t enough to build trust. One problem is that people often don’t notice the benefits government provides. Several experts therefore stressed the importance of communication, both to ensure enrollees know they have coverage and also to build public support and embolden other officials to follow suit.

   Experts also emphasized the importance of political or agency leadership in empowering and motivating civil servants to automate enrollment. For example, one expert recalled how a state official initially declined to implement a program making it easier for people to file state taxes, only to change their mind two weeks later after receiving a call from the Governor asking them to do so.

Automating Enrollment in an Age of Retrenchment

The OBBBA’s impacts are already being felt across the country and millions of Americans must navigate the new administrative burdens it imposes on Medicaid, the ACA exchanges, and SNAP. In addition, the OBBBA’s cost-sharing requirements in SNAP and its restrictions on Medicaid financing create new fiscal challenges for states that are causing them to further restrict access to public benefits programs.

As a result, this may seem like a bad time to consider ambitious strategies to expand access to public benefits. Yet politics can change quickly. When it does, we should be ready. Our law has made promises to people in need. Automatic enrollment may well be our best way to keep them.

Gabriel Scheffler is a Professor of Law at the University of Miami School of Law.

Ariel Jurow Kleiman is a Professor of Law at the USC Gould School of Law.

Andrew Hammond is a Professor of Law and Harry T. Ice Faculty Fellow at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law.

For more on automatic enrollment

To answer this question, we looked more closely. We are academics at the University of Colorado and Harvard who study administrative burdens in the social safety net, particularly the effects of work requirements policies. We are gravely concerned that this ASPE study misrepresents the state of scholarly evidence on the impacts of work requirements and that this will lead to poorly informed and punitive policy decisions in the future. So, we are writing this post to set the record straight.

The report makes two big, dubious claims:

• “Rigorous studies find that work requirements are most likely to increase employment when they combine clear expectations with supports that reduce the cost of finding and maintaining work.”

• “Under varying conditions, including job availability and implementation quality, the policy could reduce poverty by 1.6 to 2.9 million people.”

The report comes as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services CMS unveils regressive new policies on work requirements. It seems designed to provide a patina of intellectual credibility to a policy that most researchers are dubious of. In a press release, CMS touted the findings of this study to stipulate that Medicaid work requirements — which states must impose upon enrollees who have coverage through the ACA’s Medicaid expansion by January 2027 — “could reduce poverty by as much as 2.9 million people.”

To reach these conclusions, the ASPE report briefly summarizes select literature on the efficacy of work requirements. ASPE commissioned a more comprehensive — but still incomplete — literature review from the contract research organization Mathematica, which is linked as a technical appendix.

The report then offers two estimates of the potential impact of Medicaid work requirements on poverty. The assumptions embedded in these models are not supported by either a generous reading of the report’s own literature review, or by our much more comprehensive literature review here.

Glaring omissions from the literature review

We see three big omissions from this ASPE report:

1. Medicaid work requirements were already attempted in the first Trump administration and the research is clear that these work requirements had no positive effect on employment and made participants worse off.

2. The study cherry-picks only a small amount of the full literature on the effects of work requirements and *happens* to only discuss papers that find work requirements to have a positive effect on employment when the literature actually tilts the other way – most studies find no effects of work requirements on employment.

3. One consistent finding across dozens of papers on work requirements is that they reduce program participation among vulnerable individuals and households. This finding is completely ignored.

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Omission 1: The biggest omission from the ASPE Study is any mention or discussion of the most directly related research — studies of the last time Medicaid work requirements were attempted, which occurred in the first Trump administration. In 2018, the administration proposed to let states use demonstration waivers to opt into Medicaid work requirements, which had never been part of the program’s design. But, these waiver-based work requirements were only ever implemented in this period in one state: Arkansas.

Other states had planned to adopt similar policies but were stymied by litigation on the issue (or, in the case of New Hampshire, suspended implementation due to large anticipated coverage losses). This single-state implementation provided researchers a nice “natural experiment” they could use to study the effects of this policy by comparing changes in outcomes of Medicaid participants in Arkansas to other states in this time period.

The Arkansas work requirements were first enforced in June 2018 and were in effect for less than a year before a court suspended the policy; but, this period provided sufficient experience for a small and consistent evidence base. A novel survey fielded in late 2018 found considerable confusion among enrollees about whether the new requirements applied to them and documented significant coverage losses. These coverage losses also substantiated subsequent research using Census data.

The findings of these studies were consistent with the state’s own administrative data. Arkansas had been able to automatically exempt or qualify (that is, deem in-compliance) about two-thirds of people potentially subject to the requirements, but the majority (about 75%) of the people who needed to report on their compliance or exempt status failed to do so; ultimately about 18,000 adults lost coverage. This happened despite the fact that Arkansas used a purely attestation-based model; no one had to produce pay stubs or doctor’s notes — the types of documentation that CMS will require states collect when they can’t use data they already have to exempt or qualify an enrollee.

A follow-up to the first survey, fielded in late 2019, found that Arkansans who had lost Medicaid while work requirements were in effect commonly reported serious problems paying off medical debt and delaying care and medication due to cost.

Importantly, all three peer-reviewed studies consistently found that there was no statistically significant effect of work requirements on employment by those likely to be subject to the policy. In part, this is likely because the overwhelming majority of Medicaid enrollees either already meet the work requirements or meet one of the enumerated exemptions.

In Arkansas, the 2019 follow-up survey found that 95% of the target population was already meeting the requirement in some way. The study using Census data, which had more statistical power to detect changes (due to a larger sample size) similarly found no effect. While the Congressional Budget Office often doesn’t unpack their analyses as much as analysts would like, it is telling that they stated in a June 4 letter to members of lawmakers that “[f]ew of those disenrolled from Medicaid because of the [work requirements] policy would have access to and enroll in employment-based coverage,” suggesting that even Congress’s scorekeepers don’t believe that the policy will move meaningful numbers of people into good jobs with robust benefits.

Despite vocal championing by the first Trump administration, these earlier, opt-in work requirements were ultimately jettisoned by the courts because they were deemed at odds with the core purpose of Medicaid: providing medical care to the needy. In court opinions, the administration was taken to task for failing to consider whether and how work requirements would adversely affect coverage. Simply put, the judge held that if Medicaid’s statutory reason for existing is to provide health insurance to low-income people, there was no way to understand work requirements as advancing that goal. (The reason work requirements are permitted — indeed, required — now is that the underlying statute was changed).

Omission 2: The second omission from the ASPE report is a fuller literature review beyond just the experience of Medicaid work requirements in Arkansas. This study focuses only on evaluations of work requirements under the TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) program and housing benefits. Many of these evaluations were conducted in the 1990s, impacted a different population than those who will be affected by Medicaid work requirements, and the work requirements themselves were very different from those being carried out under Medicaid right now.

“Remember the 90s” is a great policy if you are trying to evoke millennial nostalgia, but not a great ethos for an evidence-based public policy.

For example, Dr. East has worked since fall 2023 to create and update a summary of the literature on work requirements in SNAP with Dr. Lauren Bauer at the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. The studies summarized here focus on a much more similar population, time period, and policy design as the current Medicaid work requirement expansions, relative to the literature reviewed in the ASPE Study. The authors summarize their findings as follows:

Our conclusion from a review of the literature on work requirements is that the best evidence shows they do not increase employment. Moreover, this research finds work requirements cause a large decrease in participation in SNAP. This is concerning because many SNAP recipients, especially those subject to the time limit work requirements, have little safety net to rely on besides SNAP.

Neither this summary, nor the papers it reviews, are included in the ASPE primary report. The technical appendix includes some more contemporary work reviewed by Bauer and East, raising the question of why such work was not of enough interest to the authors to make it into the main report.

Omission 3: The final omission is a lack of discussion of the impacts of work requirements on program participation, which the literature is quite clear about. Work requirements can reduce participation for a number of reasons besides increases in employment: people may want to work but can’t find a job that meets the strict hours requirement, people may satisfy the work requirements or be exempt from them but struggle with the red tape imposed by the work requirements to document work effort or exemption reasons.

The best causal studies of SNAP work requirements find participation drops of 15 to over 50% after work requirements are imposed. Experience with Medicaid work requirements is more limited, but a report by the Urban Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation projected disenrollment rates of 19-37% among working adults subject to the new requirements and more frequent eligibility checks. Recent work by one of the authors of this piece finds that the red tape alone explains a large portion of the disenrollment.

By reducing access to Medicaid, work requirements are likely to increase poverty. In 2024, Medicaid was the third most impactful anti-poverty program after Social Security and Medicare according to the Census Bureau. Recent estimates suggest work requirements could reduce Medicaid enrollment by 3-7 million people by 2028, driving the majority of coverage losses which could total up to 10 million. It’s hard to see how moving millions of people away from an effective anti-poverty program does anything other than worsen poverty.

Flawed models out-of-step with the report’s own literature review

After conducting this flawed literature review, the authors claim to more concretely “estimate” the potential effects of the new Medicaid work requirements policy. They do so by modelling two scenarios under the strong assumption “that applicable adults who do not already meet the requirements (i.e. those not working or studying sufficient hours) increase their work hours to comply.”

The first scenario relies further on the assumption that “all eligible adults enroll, and immediately find adequate employment to meet the requirements.” This is a facially absurd approach; the model assumes sunshine and rainbows, so it yields sunshine and rainbows. Assumptions are important in modeling, but they must be at least grounded by reality if the model is to be taken seriously.

The second scenario attempts to be more realistic by adjusting for incomplete take-up of Medicaid, incomplete take-up of work, and other (less immediately apparent) factors. While not as fanciful as the first model, the resulting estimates are still out-of-step with the most recent and rigorous scholarship on work requirements. Neither model contemplates — or is designed to contemplate — how many working or exempt people might lose coverage because of new paperwork burdens.

In both unrealistic scenarios, the authors estimate that the average annual earnings increase would be $16,780 in households where adults (immediately, frictionlessly) respond to the new policy. This estimate is not only contradicted by the omitted literature described above, but also by the research cited in the report’s own technical appendix. The largest estimated effect of work requirements on long-term earnings included in the review was less than one-tenth of that size ($1,506 in 2018 dollars). This estimate is from a single 1994 cash welfare pilot in Minnesota that, for myriad reasons, might not be expected to generalize to Medicaid work requirements 33 years later.

Critically, the authors of the report — much more so than the authors of the CMS press release linking back to it — offer some high-level clarity about what their report is and what it is not, writing that their results “are simulated calculations, not necessarily what is or will occur in the real world.” Indeed.

Given the research evidence and policy details, we conclude that, in the real world, Medicaid work requirements are much more likely to worsen poverty than to reduce it.

Chloe N. East is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Colorado Denver, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a Non-Resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), and an affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) at the University of Wisconsin. ‪@chloeneast.bsky.social‬

Adrianna McIntyre is an Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Politics in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her research interests include the politics of health reform, barriers to take-up and retention of subsidized health insurance, and program evaluation for health policy. @adrianna.bsky.social

The COVID-19 pandemic wrecked havoc on the lives of many low-income renters. Media headlines in the summer of 2021 warned of two impending challenges.

First: the expiration of the federal eviction moratorium in August 2021, which put many renters behind on rent at risk of eviction.

Second: despite the federal government earmarking over $46 billion in Emergency Rental Assistance (ERA), state and local governments struggled to get the funds to needy renters.

Outlets like The Washington Post and The New York Times reported some state and local governments were facing month-long delays in distributing aid as staff were burdened with an overwhelming number of “onerous” ERA applications, with “bureaucratic missteps” in the process.

Amidst these challenges, our recent research published at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) shows a bright spot: some local governments used innovations to broaden access to rental assistance. Creative use of geographic data substantially increased access to rental assistance while lightening workloads for capacity-strapped local bureaucrats.

While this story unfolded with a specific program (Emergency Rental Assistance) during a particular setting (the COVID-19 pandemic), we think it offers broad lessons that could be applied to a range of social assistance efforts.

The innovation: using neighborhood estimates to supplement self-attested eligibility

One of the most complex rental assistance application requirements for both applicants and staff was verifying that renters fell below the program’s income thresholds. Many renters, lacking access to a computer, were applying on their phones and faced difficulty uploading PDF documentation; others had cash-based employment or unstable work histories.

In response to these challenges, the Treasury Department developed guidelines that enabled local governments to use an innovation called a fact-specific proxy (FSP). An FSP uses publicly available hyperlocal area-level income estimates from the US Census Bureau as a proxy for the tenant’s own income. FSP made qualified renters who signed a binding self-attestation and lived in areas with large shares of low-income residents automatically eligible to apply for ERA, without uploading additional documentation beyond this written attestation to verify their own incomes. It’s an example of how the government can use technology and administrative data to help rather than hurt people.

As the Treasury Department noted, the key ingredient of the FSP was the written attestation: “While a proxy provides reassurance about the probable truth of an applicant’s self-attestation, it is the applicant’s written attestation that in the end assures us of the truth of their stated income.”

FSP enabled housing agency staff to fast-track eligible applications from low-income areas with signed income attestations through a review process with far fewer administrative burdens placed on the applicant and far fewer demands placed on staff that were already overwhelmed. In other words, the innovation was a win-win, reducing burdens on both the clients and the government, rather than shifting frictions between the two parties.

How does it work? The Figure below shows how applicants who (1) self-attested as eligible and (2) resided in FSP zip codes faced fewer burdens to prove eligibility.

What was the impact?

A key challenge with studying innovations to address administrative burdens like the fact-specific proxy is how to establish causality: it would be infeasible and unethical to randomly assign some ERA applicants to face fewer administrative burdens than other applicants.

Our research takes advantage of idiosyncrasies in how the innovation was implemented to generate causal evidence for the effects of reducing administrative burdens. The paper contains more details of the design, but broadly, the proxy was implemented based on strict, zip-code level median household income thresholds. This means we can use observational causal inference techniques to compare outcomes for applicants who are otherwise very similar but who reside in zip codes that fall very close to either side of that statistically arbitrary threshold.

The figure below shows that implementing FSP increased the probability that an applicant was approved for rental assistance by approximately 15 percentage points. Strengthening our confidence in the results is the built-in replication: we find similar effects across two states that implemented the same innovation but in different ways, with different staff members, types of applicants, and other contextual factors.

These results show that two very different jurisdictions were able to implement a burden-reducing change that significantly increased access to help for low-income renters.

We also find that not only did the change increase access to help, it increased the speed at which renters received funds, an important outcome amidst the expiration of the eviction moratorium and mounting rental debt. The figure below, focused on Virginia where agency officials tracked precise application and funding timing, shows that FSP applications spent, on average, about two weeks less being processed than non-FSP applications.

How did FSP produce these changes? Discussions with program staff revealed that FSP not only made things easier for applicants by requiring them to identify and upload fewer complex documents, it also freed up significant staff time that had been devoted to back and forth with applicants trying to obtain valid documents. This underscores how reductions in administrative burdens not only help beneficiaries but can also help reallocate staff attention to the speedy and efficient distribution of funds.

What are the broader lessons?

First, the federal government can enable local burden reduction efforts: the federal government, often cast as an entity that stifles innovation in the safety net, set the conditions for local governments to adopt innovations like the proxy by publishing detailed guidance and spotlighting successful local case studies. This makes administrative burden targeting innovations less risky for local governments because they know they have federal backing.

Second, data creates opportunities: the use of publicly-available data to help target funds—in this case, American Community Survey (ACS) estimates of the income composition within zip codes—is a way to streamline access to support without needing to invest in complicated technological changes to application systems. Governments sometimes discourage and sometimes encourage the use of self-attestations. The use of FSP data provides more confidence in the credibility of those attestations.

Third, automation helps when bandwidth is limited: the results are especially relevant for situations like disaster relief where there is limited staff bandwidth and a premium on the timeliness of funds.

Tyler Simko is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. He specializes in US state and local politics, political geography, policy evaluation, and computational social science. He’s also a former local school board member.

Rebecca Johnson is an Assistant Professor at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy. She has a background in Demography and studies how social service agencies use a mix of data and discretion to allocate scarce resources.

Related stories on government innovations:

The White House proposed new policies governing the federal funding of American science. You’ve already heard about the funding cuts, de facto impoundments of funds, funding freezes to disfavored universities, and cancelation of grants that include the long list of the Trump’s forbidden words.

So how much worse can the new policy be? Scientists are using apocalyptic terms, like “the end of American science as we know it.”

I think the level of alarm is appropriate, but I also want to place it into a broader context. Instinctively, scientists know this policy is not a stand-alone, but the ratcheting of the vice-grips of politicization. Trump has assembled five distinct tactics of politicization that are now starting to work in tandem with one another.

As Trump’s politicization tactics operate together, they begin to generate more interactive effects, reinforcing one another. The creep of politicization seeps into every office and decision, choking any views other than those of Trump and his army of loyalists.

Politicization can mean different things. The classic pre-Trump and mostly bipartisan Presidential tactics of politicization are:

Tactic #1: Centralization of policymaking into the White House, moving power from agencies

Tactic #2: Strategic use of political appointees, moving power away from distrusted career employees

Trump has developed new modes of politicization by adding three tactics:

Tactic #3: Building a personalist regime centered on loyalty to a single person.

Tactic #4: Governing by fear via conspiratorial messaging and threat.

Tactic #5: Weakening the protections of civil servants to effectively make them at will employees.

The nature and the scale of these tactics is really without parallel in US history, even in the spoils era. In the spoils era there was real and endemic corruption. That is occurring now, but in a more damaging and extractive way, disproportionately favoring an inner circle looking to get rich(er), not just the loyal partyman looking for a job.

The US government is also doing a lot more now than it was in the spoils era. Science is a good example. The current US scientific empire is the result of the post World War II set of arrangements that Trump and Vought are now seeking to control and corrupt for their own ends.

Whats in the new politicization of science policy?

Elizabeth Ginexi, leveraging her expertise as a former National Institutes of Health official, offers an excellent detailed breakdown of the new policy.

The bottom line is that Russ Vought, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, wants to move scientific decisions away from the scientists and into the hands of political appointees. I don’t mean the big picture, strategic decisions of American science, which should be political, but the micro-decisions about what is and is not good research.

Trump’s attacks on science have been hampered by frequent court losses. Once the new rule is in place, it becomes much harder to challenge the blocking of grants by the administration. Think of the new rule as a giant license justifying the use of arbitrary and political cancellations of grants, a license that makes it easier for the federal government to bring civil society — universities, nonprofits, and local governments — to heel. Think of it also as a two-branch power grab: courts will have less ability to intervene when the administration effectively impounds funds that Congress has appropriated.

Under the new policy, political appointees determine which grants should be funded, and can cancel them whenever they want. Grants cannot “promote anti-American values” and can be terminated if they are not determined to meet “the public interest” — ambiguous and broad standards that Trump and Vought determine. Grants must meet partisan litmus tests like “demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities” but political identity can also be used in punitive ways: a scientist’s ties to disfavored groups can be used as a basis for cancelling grants. The policy advertises that OMB “may consider an applicant's history of questionable practices based on publicly available and verifiable information.”

Using federal funding to attend scientific conferences, engage with non-US scientists, or communicate to the public or media is actively discouraged.

The policy extends beyond science and scientific agencies to any any agency providing a grant and to non-scientific grantees like nonprofits and local governments. We’ve already seen this administration impound funds during the shutdown and using fraud allegations in clearly partisan ways, targeting blue states. Expect more of the same if the new rule takes hold.

By discouraging the use of indirect costs (“all else being equal, preference for discretionary awards should be given to institutions with lower indirect cost rate”), Vought not just seeks to backdoor a policy that Congress blocked, he also makes it very difficult for any organization to get federal support for administrative costs. Such costs are real, and ones that other donors also don’t want to cover.

While the new policy discourages asking to cover administrative costs, it is also happy to create such costs, such as compelling that grant recipients participate in the DHS E-verify program “to confirm the employment eligibility of employees and contractors hired in or performing work in the United States.”

The peer review process, the cornerstone of scientific rigor, is not just devalued in federal grants processes. Vought also carves out exceptions to public notice when it is in the “national interest.” This creates the potential for a back-door slush fund for favored universities or companies to receive public dollars for research. At the same time OMB would have a credible lever to punish disfavored individuals or institutions by withholding grants.

Here are three big implications of this new policy:

1. This is the complete politicization of federal science and grantmaking. As Ginexi writes: “What OMB is proposing is not a reform of grants management. It is a complete political control apparatus layered over every stage of the federal science funding lifecycle.”

2. This is bad for science, and its bad for America. One thing that actually propelled actual American greatness after World War II was tying large scientific investments into a non-partisan, merit-based process. But that is not the way of Trump, who instead wants to extend tools of control and retribution over science. The new policy is also a tool that further encourages democratic backsliding, by giving Trump one more tool with which he can threaten civil society.

3. This is a proposed rule, so you can offer a comment. I really hope that people beyond the scientific community weigh in. This includes private corporations who benefit from nonpartisan science, such as the flow of PhD talent into their organizations, or breakthroughs they turn into profitable patents. Jeremy Berg provides a template as does Elizabeth Ginexi.

   Elizabeth Ginexi

   What We Need to do NEXT: OMB’s Proposed Federal Financial Assistance Rule (OMB-2026-0034)

   What OMB’s Proposed Federal Financial Assistance Rule Means in Practice…

   Read more

   a month ago · 60 likes · 10 comments · Elizabeth Ginexi

How the creep of politicization operates

What we are seeing with the new science policy illustrates the interactive effect of the different politicization tactics. Vought sitting atop America’s scientific enterprise is a classic example of centralizing authority (tactic #1), away from career scientists and agencies (#2). Demands that science serve one man’s agenda is an example of personalism (tactic #3). Telling scientists that they will lose their grants based on political affiliations fits with the tactic #4 reliance on fear and threats. The career program officers overseeing science (themselves typically PhDs) know from grim experience that pushing back against appointees to defend science will mean being fired or put on administrative leave (tactic #5).

In this context then, dissent within government or the scientific community against not just this policy, but Trump’s government becomes more risky, more costly, and therefore more rare. Science is silenced.

Career leadership expertise across scientific agencies is collapsing

Looking at the bigger picture, Chris Piper of the Partnership for Public Service has been doing incredible real-time research on the creep of politicization across government, especially on the combination of tactics #2 (strategic use of appointees) and #5 (weakening civil service protections to remove them from power). He has documented that Trump is imposing historic numbers of appointees at the same time that he is weakening career leadership in the Senior Executive Service (the most senior officials who by law are not supposed to feature more than 10% appointees).

The data below show the drop in Senior Executive Service in health and science agencies, positions that really require some meaningful understanding of the science underpinning the mission of these agencies.

For example, the threat of a potential pandemic is on the horizon again. Expertise on the spread of deadly diseases is not, contrary to what RFK Jr. might think, something you can pick up from some X posts. I would sleep better at night knowing that there is a layer of competent scientists at CDC that will take the wheel when shit really gets bad. Oh wait, they’ve been purged.

In the meantime, more and more appointees are being placed in scientific agencies. Again, this is a classic pre-Trump form of politicization (tactic #2). But not in these types of positions. Piper points out that between 2009 to 2018, CDC had a single non-Senate confirmed appointee, but now has 12. Does that make you feel more or less confident about our ability to respond to Ebola?

Politicization across the government

This is happening not just in scientific agencies. There are other units where both political parties assumed that expertise and independence was important, and politicization was bad. Such units are also seeing new political appointees added to their ranks. This includes parts of the DOJ, which is being exposed to unprecedented politicization as it becomes the President’s law firm, or IRS, which recently agreed that it was a great idea to give Trump’s most violent supporters $1.8 billion.

The politicization also affects national security, including internal security and the parts of government that oversee our elections. The number of senior career officials has been significantly reduced and the number of appointees has significantly increased.

Increasingly, Trump loyalists control the men with guns across government…

…and the people who decide how legal power is used. Piper notes a 311% increase in the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys, which oversees federal prosecutions. Every time a prosecution in the United States happens now, we must first ask ourselves what role these political actors are playing. We simply have less reason to trust that these processes are serving the public interest rather than the interest of one man.

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As Piper notes, appointees now control the unglamorous but important machinery of government, such as budget, IT offices, and acquisitions. The core function of these offices is not political. But what DOGE taught the Trump administration is that its a lot easier to bypass legal objections to controversial decisions if you control who presses the buttons in the budget and tech offices of government.

Political loyalists are also being put in offices where loyalty is clearly at odds with the core task. For example, Trump has purged Inspectors General, illegally, and then replaced them with loyalists in some offices. Such appointees are simply not credible when it comes to holding the person who appointed them accountable, even though that is their job.

What you can do?

Lets get back Trump’s new policy to politicize science. American science helped America win the 20th century, a bipartisan bet that if you funded smart people and left them alone, they would cure diseases and build industries. That bet paid off for eighty years. Does anyone really think that Russ Vought and co. will do better?

The creep of politicization did not happen overnight. It tightens one appointee, one purged scientist, one cancelled grant at a time, until the machinery that produced vaccines and semiconductors and GPS is producing loyalty tests instead. And it happens more easily when people don’t realize America’s scientific system is being taken apart, or wrongly believe that this destruction is in their interests.

The comment period is open until midnight, July 13. You can submit comments here. If you benefit from American science — and you most assuredly do — you have a stake in this. If you work in a nonprofit and don’t want to work for Russ Vought, you have a stake in this. If you don’t want your local government to have to bend the knee to Trump to receive tax dollars, you have a stake in this. Share with others in your community who need to get involved.

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Scott Kupor, the Director of the Office of Personnel Management, explained why nearly every federal employee should sign a Non Disclosure Agreement

In much of the private sector, employees handling sensitive business or customer information are routinely required to sign confidentiality agreements, and the federal government should not be held to a lower standard.

Set aside the small problem that Kupor — previously a longtime executive at Andreessen Horowitz — does not work in the private sector anymore, and that the public sector has somewhat different normative expectations about transparency than a venture capital fund. There is another problem with his argument: venture capitalists themselves famously refuse to sign NDAs. They know what NDAs are and are not for. They are not, mostly, for protecting genuinely sensitive information.

So what are NDAs for? NDAs are a tool of the powerful to protect themselves by threatening the less powerful. The private sector has used them so promiscuously and so abusively that they should be a warning for the public sector, not a model for it.

Many Americans first found out about NDAs when they learned that Harvey Weinstein used them systematically to hide his pattern of sexual abuse. When state governments restricted the use of NDAs, the type of venture capital-backed firms that Kupor supported started hiring about 8% fewer women per year. Without NDAs to cover patterns of gender discrimination or sexual harassment, the tech world decided to become even more of a boys club.

The proposed rule, would require federal employees to sign an agreement promising not to disclose “non-public, confidential, or proprietary information” or “any sensitive, pre-decisional or deliberative material that is not currently publicly available and should not be disclosed under applicable law.” The administration insists the new policy merely codifies “current legal obligations.” If that were true, there would be no reason to write the rule!

The reason for the new rule is to substantively close off transparency in government. “Pre-decisional or deliberative material that is not currently publicly available” could describe almost every conversation a career employee has with a political appointee. Or internal memos, draft analyses, and the candid advice we have, until very recently, expected federal employees to give without fear. The vagueness is not a drafting flaw. It is the product. Federal employees won’t know what they can say.

Ray Limon, who previously worked at the Office of Personnel Management proposing the new rule wrote the following:

My former employer, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, frames this as simply documenting obligations that already exist. I don’t buy it…It’s a chilling mechanism. My concern is straightforward: language this sweeping will create confusion about what employees can and cannot lawfully disclose — and confusion is a powerful silencer, even when whistleblower protections technically remain on paper. It is the U.S. Office of Special Counsel - not OPM - that has statutory responsibility for enforcing NDA compliance and informing agencies of their obligations…This is one more measure in a sustained effort to tighten control over the federal workforce.

Trump has already shown us what his NDAs are for

We know what Trump’s NDAs are for because he has used them his whole career. The people Trump has compelled to sign NDAs are not the holders of valuable trade secrets. They are his ex-wives. Porn stars he wanted to hush up. The contestants on his television shows. His campaign staff. None of them were sitting on the proprietary formula for Trump Industries.1 They were sitting on unflattering information about him.

Those Trump NDAs were also staggeringly broad. They placed no defined limit on what could or could not be disclosed; that was for Trump to decide, after the fact. They operated in perpetuity.

When a former female campaign officials accused Trump’s 2016 campaign of sexual harassment and sex discrimination, they were hit with massive counter-lawsuits for violating their NDAs, as well as an accompanying campaign of personal harassment. As one of those targeted put it, NDAs are:

representative of the levers of fear that this campaign and administration wield over people. And if this lever of these NDAs is lifted, it is significant not only for the direct effect it has on people who have signed it, but for a general environment of people who are afraid to speak out.

That is the lever the Trump administration now wants to impose across the federal government.

You can’t spell scandal without NDA

The Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Lauren Harper said:

The proposal by the ‘most transparent administration in history’ that millions of federal employees sign a blanket NDA is not just absurd, it’s unnecessary and dangerously secretive…It comes at a time when agency watchdogs are sidelined, FOIA officials are being fired, and leaks to the press — which are the sole reason the public knows about so much of this administration’s misconduct — are being demonized and prosecuted…Its sole intent would be to protect the administration from the leak of embarrassing, politically damaging, or unlawful information.

Go to any credible news site today. There will be a story about wrongdoing in the Trump administration, most of it extraordinary in terms of its scale and lack of precedence. Many of these stories are about abuses of power, or the looting of the treasury that the Trump administration would prefer there be little coverage of in order to rob opposition of their most tool: the information to demand accountability.

For example, the Trump families that their sudden business success with companies that have contracts with the government reflect favoritism. But reporting shows just how much cronyism is occuring.

Or internal documents show that the administration is quietly punishing specific companies, like universities, by withholding the money for grants that have been awarded. There is no policy announcement, but the policy is happening.

If it were up to the Trump administration you would never read these stories. And the new NDAs are designed to stop these stories from being told. Because their goal is to kill oversight and accountability. They know that principled public servants are not revealing confidential information that creates national security risks, but will expose wrongdoing that is running rampant in this administration. So they want to gag them in an effort to kill one of our few remaining mechanisms of oversight.

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The at-will problem

The Trump White House used NDAs in the first term for senior political appointees. The second term has produced its own examples, including in the Department of Defense and for employees overseeing firings at the Department of Veterans Affairs. None of that was the same as what is being proposed now. This is the first serious attempt to draw a single veil of secrecy across the entire federal workforce.

What is also different now is that federal employees, after the dismantling of civil service protections, are effectively at-will, meaning they can be fired on the whim of Trump appointees. An accusation of violating the NDS provides an easy pretext for firing an employee and then setting government lawyers upon them.

This matters. For example, Trump lost his lawsuit against former White House official Omarosa (still feels weird saying that) for violating her NDA, and had to pay her $1.3 million in legal fees. If federal lawyers are the ones prosecuting federal employees, he can treat them as a free law firm, knowing there is no risk on his end. All of the risk is on the federal employee.

That changes what the NDA is. It is not a contract between equals. It is a loyalty oath, enforced with the full weight of federal prosecutorial power, demanded of people who already swore a different oath — to the Constitution. That older oath, the one we asked them to take, said they serve us. The new agreement says they serve Trump. It is part of Trump’s pattern of imposing loyalty tests into his personalist regime.

Max Stier, the President of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Partnership for Public Service said in a statement:

Federal employees already know what they can and cannot disclose to the public. Those obligations are written into law, spelled out in regulation and reinforced through mandatory ethics and disclosure trainings…A blanket, governmentwide NDA does little to meet any pressing need. It seems more intended to make ethical employees think twice before coming forward and to chill the lawful disclosures that hold government accountable. When that happens, the public knows even less about how their government works and how their tax dollars are being spent.

A new culture of governmental secrecy and cover-ups

This is, clearly, more bad news for federal employees whose morale is already at basement levels. But you should care about this even if you are not a public servant, or a journalist looking for a scoop, because the accountability of the federal government depends upon the candor this rule is designed to extinguish. Federal employee confidence that they could report misconduct already dropped from about 72% in 2024 to 22.5% in 2025. Now it will be even lower. The NDAs will protect wrongdoing from exposure.

The survey that collected these numbers featured employees describing a new culture of secrecy that the NDAs will expand. An IRS employee said:

I’ll be honest, [at the] political level, I have minimal confidence that if we reported anything, any misbehavior, that it would be taken care of. In fact, quite honestly, I would fear retribution if we reported an ethical violation of a political level person in the IRS. I would do it anonymously. I’d probably do it through the union. I would not do it through the normal channels.

The administration has already told staff not to write things down, in apparent tension with the Federal Records Act. It has normalized the use of Signal — and not only by Pete Hegseth — to keep government business off the books. At the same time, it is compelling federal workers to install a Trump propaganda app on their phones, a measure that will almost certainly create more security exposure than the NDAs purport to prevent.

Meanwhile, the administration itself leaks promiscuously when leaks serve its narrative. The objective is not less disclosure. It is asymmetric disclosure, privileging Trump’s handpicked leakers, punishing everyone else. The double-standards don’t end there. The Trump administration has also encouraged a culture of snitching. Right wing social media posters can get federal employees they dislike fired, and federal employees are told to report any use of DEI, or anti-Christian bias. It’s secrecy for me, snitching for thee.

The existing rules already restrict federal employees from disclosing classified information and information with national security implications. Those rules have teeth. While the order says it exempts legally whistleblower complaints about waste, fraud, or abuse, it is worth noting the administration is already weakening whistleblower protections and the NDA policy will further chill such speech. To choose to be a whistleblower means your career in government is over and you will be the subject of Trump-driven harassment, creating too high a price for most employees. Even employees who exit but want to draw attention to wrongdoing with some sort of public statement must now worry that they will face a lawsuit.

There is always a debate about what are the appropriate limits of government employees communicating non-public information to the public. For every President, the interest is in withholding information, but in many cases there is a public interest in disclosing it. That public interest becomes a lot stronger in an environment of depleted accountability and mass wrongdoing. That is the environment we have right now. The Trump administration routinely lies about its actions, and has neutered traditional accountability figures like Inspector Generals and General Counsels. It appears to be breaking laws and engaging in massive corruption, but Congress is not investigating.

In this context, silencing public employee voice removes one of the last remaining accountability mechanisms we have.

Moynihan (the other one) was right

One of the top two Moynihans of all time — Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan — wrote about exactly this drift towards the end of his career. In Secrecy: The American Experience, he argued that the American state’s tendency toward classification was a sign not of strength but of fear, a bad sign for our democracy.

Open governments win arguments and self-correct. Closed governments make bad decisions and then cover them up. Does that sound like any administration you might know?

“Secrecy,” he wrote, “is for losers.”

A federal NDA covering “any sensitive, pre-decisional or deliberative material that is not currently publicly available” is a confession. It says: we do not believe what we are doing can survive being seen. It says: we are afraid of our own employees. It says: the employee’s loyalty must be to the King, not the constitution.

As a reminder, all rules are subject to public comment, and the federal government has to read those comments. You can submit a comment on this new rule until June 26. Let them know how you feel! (Guidance on writing a public comment — which is super easy — can be found here).

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His party can’t stop him. The party of Lincoln is now “the party of Donald Trump” acknowledged Lindsey Graham when discussing the primary loss of Senator Bill Cassidy, who voted to impeach Trump. Cassidy was one of a string of Republican incumbents that Trump pushed out of the party, alongside critic Thomas Massie, and Republican Indiana state legislators who opposed redistricting.

A variety of different terms exist to give meaning to the current moment in American governance, some old, some new. Fights over specific terms seem mostly pointless to me, academic in the worst way. What matters is if the language and underlying concepts helps to deepen our understanding of what is going on.

For me personalism has played that role. Drawn from comparative politics studies, personalism centers on parties and systems that serve a single individual. Trump was able to grab the Grand Old Party and purge it of dissent. I don’t think there is a comparable example where a mature and strong political party was so captured.

It is an extraordinary thing, but the Republican Party became more personalist after January 6. The assault on the Capitol served as the ultimate loyalty test. In the aftermath, his critics were purged. Trump didn’t bother appearing in a primary contest, so firm was his hold on the party.

Trump’s second term has been an exercise in embedding the logic of personalism into American government. Mechanically, he has done this via a series of reasonably predictable actions: hiring loyalists who are dependent upon him, weakening the job protections of the career civil service, capturing the justice system to threaten friends and reward enemies, threatening civil society. The loyalist is elevated, the critic disempowered. The process has been aided immeasurably by a Supreme Court who obligingly discovered a constitutional license for a Presidency of extraordinary power precisely at a moment when an authoritarian asked them for it.

The underlying logic of American governance is clear to all: Don’t cross Trump.

In this post I want to focus both on the symbols and substance of personalism, both the theater of toadyism and how personalism is reshaping our government and country.

Here are seven indicators for how Trump has gone from a personalist party to a personalist governing regime.

1. The leader is everywhere

While Republicans made “Obamacare” an epithet, Trump sees the power of putting his names on things, and so we now have TrumpRx. Trump’s name, image and signature are everywhere, draped on government buildings, national park passes, visas, savings accounts, currency, monuments, battleships and passports.

Trump’s followers are free to erect gold statues on private property, but the use of public spaces and resources for the worship of individuals should reflect some collective agreement. Not for Trump. While Presidents have things named after them all the time, this is different in a number of respects.

• Trump is breaking norms intended to convey a republican government, such as the idea that current Presidents are not Kings, and would not have their image or signatures on currency. The Washington Post reported that a federal employee was reassigned after she pointed out it was illegal to put living figures on currency to Trump appointees who wanted to put him on a $250 bill.

• Trump is using his power as President to coerce others to adopt his likeness. In the past, champions of former Presidents might raise campaigns to rename public places. While President, Trump is suggesting that various stadiums, airports, or train stations be named after him — with the implication that he might make life difficult for those who oppose him.

• History is literally being rewritten in public spaces. For example, the National Portrait Gallery removed text alongside Trump’s portrait that mentioned January 6.

• The sheer volume and gaudiness of this campaign. Trump’s personal aesthetic defines public spaces in the nation’s capital, with no meaningful public input. He decides to tear down the East Wing and what should replace it. He decides to turn the reflecting pool into some garish swimming pool color. He decides if DC needs a massive arch. Others might sue, but Trump treats public property as personal property. While the tacky gold decorations in the Oval Office can be removed by a successor, remaking DC into an outdoor Trump casino will be much harder to reverse.

• Whether Trump likes or is welcomed by the institution is irrelevant. Trump is trying to close the Institute of Peace, even as it was renamed the Trump Institute of Peace.

  Trump imposed his name on the Kennedy Center, a beloved DC institution. When artists and audiences stopped coming, Trump closed it in a fit of pique, announcing a remodel for an institution that had just been remodeled. The unwelcome nature of the institutional assault underlines that the renaming are displays of power and coercion.

• Trump’s face now dominates government buildings. “These are my buildings, my departments,” he seems to say. Most chilling is the unfurling of such a banner at the Department of Justice, ending any pretense of a maintaining the separation between the justice system and a wildly corrupt president.

2. The rule of law is secondary to the leader’s whims

Not so long ago, John Adams principle “A government of laws, not of men” was a staple of political discourse, a piece of unassailable rhetoric so undeniable that it could be used to to win neutrals to your argument. We hear this a bit less from the Republican side now.

Trump’s personal defense lawyers run the Department of Justice, and take pains to advertise we are now a government of men — well one man — and not laws that are equally applied. The Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has been personally intervening in the Epstein case to protect Trump. He also recently boasted that every Department of Justice prosecutor and FBI agent who was involved in investigations of Trump were no longer in government, having been fired or pushed out.

The Department of Justice is now Trump’s law firm, used to target his enemies on Trumped-up charges, or those he wants to neutralize or get on his side, such as broad swaths of civil society like law firms or universities. Under this environment, crossing the leader, in the smallest way, means risking the full force of the federal government upon you. Because Trump owns the DOJ, he can tie you up in court forever, at no cost to him.

3. The inner circle has free rein to pillage

In a personalist regime, the government will never investigate Trump, even as he orchestrates unprecedented conflicts of interest and opportunities for corruption. The Trump family has branched out from real estate to crypto, arms manufacturing, and prediction markets — profitable opportunities that remain profitable because other people assume their proximity to power can be used to leverage favored treatment. For example, regulators who raise questions about these businesses can expect to be pushed out of their jobs.

Trump trades stocks for companies he boosts on social media, or who have business with the administration, because conflict of interest policies don’t exist anymore.

It is a free-for-all if you are on Trump’s side. Pardons can be purchased, investigations can be dropped, if you grease the hand of Trump’s inner circle. Appointees who might worry they are breaking the law for Trump can be won over with the promise of a pardon, or a threat of retribution.

Most recently, Trump converted a $10 billion shakedown of the IRS into a proposed $1.776 billion slush fund for Trump supporters who feel insufficiently rewarded for their loyalty, as well as a guarantee that the IRS will not audit him and his family despite deep concerns about Trump’s growing wealth. Imagine if Nixon had demanded that the Watergate burglars receive a massive taxpayer reward and that all future investigations into him and the whole cabal be blocked forever. That is where we are.

The New York Times detailed the negotiations that led to the slush fund, which involved Trump’s personal lawyers negotiating with Trump’s personal lawyers. Who was there to represent the public interest?

On one side of the talks was a Justice Department run by Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general who once served as Mr. Trump’s criminal defense lawyer. On the other were the president’s private lawyers, among them Boris Epshteyn, who was a former client of Mr. Blanche’s.

I think about the January 6th attacker and child sex offender who promised his victims that he would pay them for their silence once his January 6 reparations money came through. That man understood the logic of Trump’s mode of governing better than those of us who still think we live in a functioning democracy.

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4. The routine debasement of other public leaders

It’s not just that Trump posts demeaning AI slop of opposition leaders, or insults them like labeling Hakeem Jeffries as a “low IQ…THUG.” No-one in his own party is exempt. All must participate in their own humiliation.

One through line between Trump’s first and second terms is watching Cabinet meetings devolve into each official trying to top the other in their slathering hyperbolic praise of Trump. Trump enjoys the praise, but such “public displays of personal fealty” also has a purpose, as James Comey wrote:

While the entire world is watching, you do what everyone else around the table does — you talk about how amazing the leader is and what an honor it is to be associated with him….Of course, to stay, you must be seen as on his team, so you make further compromises. You use his language, praise his leadership, tout his commitment to values. And then you are lost. He has eaten your soul.

An analysis by the New York Times shows one in every six sentences uttered at a Cabinet meeting was devoting to flattering Trump or attacking his opponents. And in his second term, the flattery is getting more frequent and more slavish, reflecting Trump’s own claims about his historical greatness.

There are too many examples to list, but when the former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said: “Mr President, I invite you see your big beautiful face on a banner in front of the Department of Labor because you are really the transformational president of the American worker” this set the stage for Trump imposing his image on a government building for the first time.

While it is easy to mock the Cabinet officials involved, this routines of debasement are a pattern we see in authoritarian countries, done to establish the point that there is only one true leader that all must serve.

5. Presidential vibes, not facts, determine our new reality

One downside of a personalist regime is that it creates information bubbles, where the whims of a 79-year old man cannot be questioned, and so becomes the operational reality for our government.

America is at war with Iran. A broadly unpopular war that was pursued with no discussion during the election. Sometimes Trump calls it a war, sometimes he insists its not. Sometimes he says the war is over, and the enemy has surrendered, sometimes he rages at them for their ongoing hostilities. He presents what sounds like extraordinary concessions to Iran as some sort of victory. It depends on the day or the hour, his moods, or considerations such as the need to temporarily juice the stock market.

Cabinet officials and spokespersons routinely engage in nonsense to accommodate these whims, but so too is the entire machinery of the most expensive and sophisticated military force in world history.

How strong is the ethos of Trumpian infallibility? Even retiring Senators, those who disagreed with Trump, refuse to directly criticize his judgment. Tom Tillis seems to have nothing to lose, but when objecting to Trump’s hare-brained scheme to take over Greenland he clarified “To be clear — I’m not critical of the President. I’m critical of the bad advice he’s getting on Greenland.” The King may be all powerful, the smartest man ever, but he cannot be wrong — and so, it is his courtiers who are to blame.

The last thing Republicans want to be seen as is anti-Trump. This intolerance of dissent is familiar to authoritarian regimes, where members of the controlling class can lose their status if another accuses them of not being sufficiently communist or revolutionary enough. For example, if Trump loyalists like John Cornyn are deemed insufficiently loyal to the new generation, they are vulnerable. Here, Representative Luna offers no specifics in her criticism of Cornyn, which is how these things work in personalist regimes: the accusation of insufficient enthusiasm is a sufficient threat. Trump later chose not to endorse Cornyn in his Senate race, saying he “he was not supportive of me when times were tough.” Only absolute loyalty is enough.

6. Conspiratorial ravings become a loyalty test

Its not just military policy that is unchecked by anything other than Trump’s own. mind. It is executive action in multiple other areas. For example, the federal government is now acting as if Trump really won the 2020 election, and was cheated by some shadowy conspiracy theory that now must be investigated. As he auditions to take the job on a permanent basis, the Acting Attorney General says “There's a ton of evidence that the election was rigged. We're very focused on finding out whether the right people voted.” The right people.

All of this is nonsense, of course, but having the FBI raid election centers and take their ballots not only mollifies Trump, it normalizes future federal attacks on election integrity.

Presidential nominees must publicly repudiate reality if they want to ascend in the world. This includes lifetime federal judges or members of the Federal Reserve, incredibly important jobs where integrity and judgement are crucial.

Imagine the King insisted the sky is green. People around him must also insist its green. Most know better. But when asked by skeptics “what color is the sky” they also insist its green, or find a dodge like “it’s a debated topic” or “I don’t want to talk about it” or “the weatherman says its blue.”

Every recent Trump judicial nominee before the Senate who was asked about the 2020 election came up with formulaic dodges, like saying not that Biden won, but was “certified” or “served.” They said it was a political issue they could not comment on — when the outcome was actually decided by courts via dozens of lawsuits. How will they judge future lawsuits from their patron?

Kevin Warsh, the new chair of the Federal Reserve was similarly unwilling to acknowledge that Trump lost. How much backbone will the nominally independent Federal Reserve have when Trump tells it what to do?

7. Only loyalists need apply

It is not enough that evidence of loyalty to Trump has now been written into hiring and promotion policies for civil servants. New hires are getting the message. A couple of months ago, Liberty University Law School told students seeking internship opportunities and full-time opportunities that being “aligned politically with President Trump” was critical, more important than grades. In case there was any confusion, a follow-up email said: “only students who are interested in advancing the President’s initiatives and delivering wins for the American Worker should apply.”

The message — loyalty to one man matters more than anything — is seeping through the minds of anyone looking to work for your government. If you want to take some reason for optimism from the moment, it is that even with openly partisan recruitment pitches, the Department of Justice cannot find enough applicants to offset their purges. Most people don’t want to work in, or live under, a personalist regime.

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What’s missing from that pattern? Any evidence the public wanted this outcome. In fact, the evidence shows the opposite.

Over the past few years, leaders in the federal and many state governments have called on late night hosts like Colbert and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel to be fired, namely for their jokes about President Trump. President Trump advised CBS that Colbert should be “put to sleep” and called on ABC to fire Kimmel. CBS’s canceling of The Late Show came days after Colbert joked about Paramount’s $16 million lawsuit settlement with Trump and was reported to be related to the proposed merger of its parent company, Paramount, with Skydance Media.

New data from a national sample of Americans collected by Wisconsin Communication Elections Study, conducted by the Center for Communication and Civic Renewal that I direct, reveals what the public thinks.

The bottom line: three-quarters of Americans oppose government pressure on TV networks to cancel shows that satirize the powerful.

The survey of 2,000 American adults, administered by YouGov and collected in April of 2026, asked whether people think the government should or should not be able to pressure television networks to cancel shows. 74 percent opposed the idea while only seven percent supported it. The rest had views that were in the middle.

The above figure breaks down the results by political partisanship with the darker bars revealing opposition to the government being able to pressure TV networks to cancel shows and the lighter bars highlighting support for the notion. Democrats were nearly unanimous in their opposition to the idea while nearly six in ten Republicans also opposed it. Independents’ attitudes looked more like Democrats than Republicans with 78 percent opposing government pressure on networks. So while there are partisan differences in perspectives, the opposition to the Trump tactics is bipartisan.

Perhaps even more remarkably, given the high-profile nature of President Trump’s public comments on Colbert, Kimmel, and other late-night hosts, is how little support Trump has from his base on this issue. Only 16 percent of strong Trump supporters favor the idea of the government pressuring networks to change what’s available on our television sets.

The data show that this is a fringe position, even among the most ardent MAGA Republicans.

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Indeed, CBS is far more likely to be angering its viewers than pleasing them by canceling The Late Show. Just as ABC faced intense public rebukes when it suspended Jimmy Kimmel in September, Colbert’s audience soared since the summer 2025 announcement of his cancellation.

And the opposition to government pressuring institutions to punish unpopular speech extends to attitudes about the government telling universities to fire professors who study or say controversial things the government does not like. That same survey found 63 percent of the public opposed to the idea that the government should be able to pressure universities to fire professors. The figure below shows that, once again, more Republicans opposed (40 percent) than supported (25 percent) the notion.

However, the president, Republicans in Congress, and many state governments have been actively attacking universities for a longer time and in a more coordinated way than the complaints about late night satirists. So, it is not surprising that there is a bit more public support for the government pushing universities to fire professors as compared to canceling TV shows. Even so, it is remarkable that the only partisan group that likes the idea of governments pushing universities to fire faculty more than they dislike the idea are strong Trump supporters. More Trump supporters, writ large, oppose the notion (35 percent) than support it (29 percent).

Once again, Independents look more like Democrats as 66 percent of people with no fidelity to either party oppose universities having to face government pressure to can faculty.

These attitudes about speech and firing aren’t isolated — they connect to broader skepticism about government interference in higher education generally. An earlier wave of the same study, conducted in April and May of 2025, asked about public support to the federal government cutting research grants at universities. Only 32 percent of American adults supported the cuts from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, though the partisan split was much starker than it is for attitudes about political pressure on TV networks and universities.

Still, it is noteworthy that decisions to fire nearly four dozen faculty across the country for their comments about the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk as well as the ousting of university leaders at institutions including Harvard University, Columbia University, and the University of Pennsylvania over debates on college campuses about antisemitism and protests over the war in Gaza run counter to a broad principle that most Americans expressed to us in our surveys – that the government should not be in the business of pushing some of our most important national institutions to fire people for the things that they say while doing their jobs.

As Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University Director Jameel Jaffer recently said, “the spirit of liberty is still easy to find in the United States, but you have to look beyond the leadership of elite institutions. Among ordinary citizens, there’s no scarcity of civic courage.”

The public’s voice is clear. Television networks, universities, and indeed all of our institutions would be well served by heeding the people’s civic courage. It is not just the right thing to do – it is backed by the public.

Michael W. Wagner is the William T. Evjue Distinguished Chair for the Wisconsin Idea at the University of Wisconsin where he directs the Center for Communication and Civic Renewal.

In the Wall Street Journal Kim Strassel wrote “The Supreme Court did the country a favor last week with its Louisiana v. Callais decision, clamping down on partisan abuse of the Voting Rights Act and racial redistricting.”

Others went further. For example, the Governor Tate Reeves of Mississippi, who annually declares April as Confederate Heritage month, says that the “reign of terror” of Bennie Thompson, the last remaining Black member of Congress in the state, will be ended because of the Callais decision.

The general impression offered by this viewpoint on the right is that the Court took a principled approach in eliminating the consideration of race in redistricting. The carving up of majority Black districts felt akin to affirmative action — a policy of racial preference from an earlier era no longer deemed necessary. In the long run a colorblind approach would better serve democracy.

The appeal to a colorblind idyll is a staple of the Roberts court, one used to undermine support for minority groups. As Roberts embarked on his attack on any consideration of race in school admissions, he wrote: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

But the rhetorical commitment to a colorblind democracy does not match the facts. The reality is that SCOTUS could have pursued a colorblind approach to American democracy, but didn’t. Instead, the Supreme Court has engineered an outcome where many states with large Black populations who lean overwhelmingly Democratic simply have little chance at democratic representation.

Let me explain what the Court did, and how a new analysis shows how a truly colorblind set of maps — not the ones the Court enabled — would restore the promise of democratic representation.

As I’ve noted before, the Roberts Court has been undermining representative democracy — the basic idea that people’s views should have a reasonable chance of finding representation — since 2010 with Citizens United.

The sequencing of this assault becomes very important to understand. The court adopted a two-step approach to vastly reducing Black representation. Callais was the second step. The first was how the Roberts court treated partisan gerrymandering across a series of cases.

By accepting partisan gerrymandering as a regrettable but inevitable part of American democracy, the courts made racial justifications, rather than broadly democratic justifications, the last basis for maintaining constraint on gerrymandering. So isolated, it became easier to eliminate this last line of defense.

Nothing about this was inevitable. Imagine an alternative scenario, where the courts decided that both racial considerations and partisan gerrymandering were unconstitutional. Commentators like Rubenfeld could still have trumpeted the end of “the racial districting game” but Black and Democratic voters would still have had a realistic chance at representation.

A new analysis at the New York Times by Nate Cohn and Eve Washington adds numbers to the debate. It makes clear how monumental the decision to accept partisan gerrymandering was to blocking a truly colorblind map.

A map that was organized more simply around the non-partisan values of natural geographic settings would preserve a similar number of Democratic and minority-leaning opportunities.

As Cohn and Washington note “a colorblind standard for redistricting would not necessitate a large reduction in Black and Hispanic representation.” Minority voters are not asking for special treatment, but fair treatment in a context where Republicans are intent on minimizing their political preferences.

To provide more of a sense of how this works, think about cities in the south like Nashville or Memphis, which have been cracked into pieces via partisan gerrymandered maps to ensure the majority of voters in any district are White, Republican and conservative. The Supreme Court says all of this is ok, even if it means that major American cities don’t have a single representative in Congress committed to their interests.

To give another example, about 38% of Mississippi residents are Black. They currently have only one Black and Democratic representative among six seats, Bennie Thompson. (Yes, the one accused of engaging in a “reign of terror” by Mississippi’s governor). Soon it will be none. How is this a functional system of democratic representation?

Pretty much any colorblind and non-partisan drawing of the map of Memphis, for example, would ensure a voting base that is majority Black and leans Democratic. The point of partisan gerrymandering is to pervert this natural outcome.

The Roberts Court has presented racial districting as obviously unfair, something to be eliminated despite federal law commanding otherwise, and partisan gerrymandering as the unquestionable natural order of things.

This is nonsense, of course. When partisan gerrymanders are used to undermine minority voters, it has clear racial impact. The court says it can do nothing about that, but it must stop racial districting that seeks to make maps more representative.

This is the height of bad-faith judicial reasoning. The reality is that the courts could have found a reasonable way to constrain partisan gerrymandering. It simply chose not to.

This is not just about the South. When I lived in Wisconsin, one of the biggest hopes was that Justice Kennedy would step with liberal Judges to end one of the most extreme gerrymanders in the country. Kennedy had noted problems with gerrymandering, but wondered what a reasonable formula for fixing it might be in the 2004 Vieth decision:

Technology is both a threat and a promise. On the one hand, if courts refuse to entertain any claims of partisan gerrymandering, the temptation to use partisan favoritism in districting in an unconstitutional manner will grow. On the other hand, these new technologies may produce new methods of analysis that make more evident the precise nature of the burdens gerrymanders impose on the representational rights of voters and parties.

And so, social scientists went to work to identify such a formula, presented in the 2017 Gill v. Whitford case. It was entirely possible to use concepts and data that could limit excessive gerrymandering. But Chief Justice Roberts went out of his way to signal his opposition. It was during Gill v. Whitford oral arguments that Roberts labeled such social science as “sociological gobbledygook” and suggesting that using it would take elections “away from democracy.”

Kennedy followed Roberts cue, and the court decided not to decide, saying plaintiffs lacked standing to sue. The voting rights expert Rick Hasen blamed Kennedy:

Justice Hamlet lives. After a decade and a half of ruminating on how to separate permissible from impermissible consideration of party in redistricting, Justice Kennedy has decided he — or his successor — needs still more time for rumination.

Kennedy is remembered and celebrated for his decision on gay marriage, but he should be remembered and criticized for his dodging the bullet when he could have done something meaningful to protect American democracy. When Kennedy retired soon after, his departure ended the last real chance in our generation that the Supreme Court would address the more and more extreme gerrymanders undermining democracy.

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By 2019, the court had moved firmly to the right when gerrymandering returned to the docket. In Rucho v. Common Cause Chief Justice Roberts found a formula that he was comfortable with: partisan gerrymandering was just politics, and the court could not interfere in politics:

Partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts. Federal judges have no license to reallocate political power between the two major political parties.

If you think this sounds like another dodge — don’t courts reallocate political power all the time? didn’t they just strike down the Voting Rights Act to do so? — then you would be right. The Rucho case involved another extreme gerrymander, designed to ensure that Republicans would win 10 of 13 Congressional seats in North Carolina, where Republicans Congressional candidates won only a slim majority of the state vote share.

Roberts was happy to acknowledge the partisan nature of the gerrymander, and that the maps were unfair. But there was nothing he could do about it! In dissent, Kagan pointed out the problem of telling voters it was a political question when voters were disenfranchised from offering a political solution because of the gerrymandering:

The only way to understand the majority’s opinion is as follows: In the face of grievous harm to democratic governance and flagrant infringements on individuals’ rights — in the face of escalating partisan manipulation whose compatibility with this nation’s values and law no one defends — the majority declines to provide any remedy. For the first time in this nation’s history, the majority declares that it can do nothing about an acknowledged constitutional violation because it has searched high and low and cannot find a workable legal standard to apply.

I asked Kevin Morris, an elections expert at the Brennan Center at NYU, about how important the Rucho decision was. He told me:

When the Roberts Court decided that partisan gerrymandering was beyond the reach of federal courts, they sounded the right notes, saying that it “reasonably seem unjust” and is “incompatible with democratic principles.” But the decision in Rucho created a loophole and introduced a powerful incentive for legislators to cloak racial gerrymanders as partisan ones. By greenlighting partisan gerrymanders and continuing to call racial vote dilution illegal, the Court set up an unavoidable collision in its jurisprudence. Last month’s decision in Callais saw that come to a head; the Voting Rights Act and minority voters around the country were the victims.

Remember, Rucho was not a case about the VRA, but still set the stage for killing the VRA. Alito relied directly on Rucho in his Callais decision. He noted that SCOTUS had accepted partisan gerrymandering in order to invalidate racial considerations:

as far as federal law is concerned, a state legislature may use partisan advantage as a factor in redistricting. And litigants cannot circumvent that rule by dressing their political-gerrymandering claims in racial garb.

People of good faith can agree or disagree if there should be special protections for minority voters. On the one hand, the history of discrimination that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act is undeniable, as is the way that states have weakened Black representation every time part of the VRA is eliminated by the courts. It was the law of the land for a reason. On the other hand, anything framed as preferential treatment is politically difficult to sustain.

My point here is different. If SCOTUS really wanted colorblind and broadly representative maps they could have achieved that goal by addressing partisan gerrymandering. They didn’t. They wanted to end the VRA.

As for the future, every time a defender of Callais emphasizes the need to separate race from redistricting, remember that the best way to do so, the best way to provide a fair and colorblind outcome, would be to end partisan gerrymandering. Will they support that?

In his second term, Trump is pressing on. The US Forest Service will be relocated to Utah amidst a downsizing of research talent.

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently announced that the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) would reorganize its 16 nutrition assistance programs into five regional hubs, to be located in Dallas, Denver, Indianapolis, Kansas City, and Raleigh. This represents a relocation of most of its 1,200 employees from its current headquarters in Alexandria, VA and its seven regional offices.

The Trump Administration has framed relocations like this as a way to bring federal services closer to the people they serve. Critics say that it is an effort to induce more resignations, move federal jobs to red states, and closer to conservative stakeholders who can more easily influence federal employees.

In the case of FNS, what is true? Will these new offices be closer to people receiving SNAP benefits? SNAP is the largest of FNS’s 16 nutrition assistance programs and the one most directly tied to low-income household eligibility, making it a reasonable proxy for where FNS services are most needed.

So, let’s take a look at the data.

FNS’s Current and Future Office Locations

The current FNS structure includes seven regional offices plus the headquarters in Alexandria, VA, which together are located in counties with approximately 3 million households, about 437,000 of whom receive SNAP benefits—a recipiency rate of 14.2 percent. (Data for Robbinsville, NJ, the seventh current office location, were unavailable, so both figures are slight undercounts. Technical Notes are below that explain the data used here.)1

Under the reorganization, those seven offices consolidate into five new hubs plus headquarters. The cities in that new configuration collectively serve about 1.8 million households, of whom approximately 176,000 receive SNAP—a recipiency rate of 9.7 percent, lower than the current footprint.

Source: American Community Survey; Tom McGovern. Notes: According to the USDA, the Atlanta office will provide retailer and compliance operations.

I also merged these city-level data with 2024 presidential election results, by way of context. Most major cities lean Democratic, so the partisan skew in the table below is not surprising. Worth noting, however, is that all five of the new FNS hub cities are located in states that Donald Trump carried in 2024. Only Denver—and Arlington, VA, if included as a skeleton-crew location—sit in states Kamala Harris won.

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What If We Chose Differently?

Obviously, I don’t know how USDA arrived at these five cities. There may be real estate, administrative, or labor market considerations that made them preferable to alternatives.

But the question is worth asking: If the goal is to locate offices closer to SNAP recipients, what would a different set of cities look like?

If we optimized for the sheer number of SNAP-receiving households, we’d end up with the largest cities in the country—New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and so on. That’s a somewhat crude measure. More interesting is what happens if we instead choose cities with the highest share of households receiving SNAP. (Alternatively, we could choose more rural areas that have high shares of SNAP recipients, but those areas tend to have smaller populations, so cities remain the more useful comparison).

Source: American Community Survey.

The table below shows the 50 largest US cities ranked by SNAP recipiency rate. The top five—Detroit, Fresno, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Cleveland—together serve about 1.6 million households, roughly 430,000 of whom receive SNAP benefits, a recipiency rate of 27.6 percent.

The five new FNS hub cities, highlighted in orange in the table, all rank in the bottom 20 cities by this measure. Even two of the current office cities—Boston and Chicago—reach more SNAP recipients, and at higher rates, than most of the new hubs.

Source: American Community Survey; Tom McGovern.

What the Data Say

The stated rationale for relocating FNS regional offices is to bring services closer to the people they serve. But the data tell a more complicated story. The five new hub cities—Indianapolis, Dallas, Denver, Kansas City, and Raleigh— collectively reach fewer households and a lower share of SNAP recipients than the offices they replace. Meanwhile, cities like Detroit, Fresno, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Cleveland—which rank among the highest in SNAP recipiency—are absent from the new map entirely.

None of this is to say the new locations are wrong. Real estate availability, workforce considerations, and operational logistics all matter in decisions like this. And proximity of an office to recipients is only one way to measure how well a federal program serves its constituents.

But if the goal is to be close to the people who rely most on nutrition assistance, the data suggest the new configuration is a step in the wrong direction. The cities with the highest need are largely not the cities getting the offices. The results reinforce suspicions that the relocation is for political reasons, fitting a pattern where Trump has shut off federal resources from blue states. Indeed, 30 of the 50 largest cities shown above are in states Trump carried in 2024, with 8 of the remaining 20 located in California. And already, three-quarters of USDA workers have said they won’t relocate, which is consistent with previous agency moves and will likely have consequences for the quality of processes and services the agency offers.

Dr. Jonathan Schwabish is an economist, author, and data communications expert, and founder of PolicyViz, whose four books and popular PolicyViz Substack newsletter help researchers, analysts, and policymakers communicate data and evidence more clearly and effectively.

The FAFSA form used to be a poster child for administrative burdens, creating a hurdle that families had to overcome if they wanted to get federal financial aid to help pay for college. Many states, as well as most colleges and universities, also use FAFSA information to determine eligibility for state and institutional financial aid.

Some 17-18 million students complete the form each year. Once you add parents and spouses who must provide information for their kids or partners, approximately 40 million people interact with FAFSA annually. So, it should be a no-brainer to make the process simple.

Instead FAFSA has historically been a barrier to entry for many students, especially for the first generation and low-income students who stand to gain the most from higher education. Ask current or former students about their FAFSA experience, and the modal response are groans when they recall the hassles involved. The fearsome reputation of FAFSA as a hurdle to overcome, rather than a helping hand on the way to college, meant students counted themselves out before trying to complete the form.

I work at the National College Attainment Network (NCAN), where most of our member organizations focus on helping first generation and low income students go to college. One of our members, uAspire estimated that simplifying FAFSA would free up one-third of the organization’s advising time. That is time they can use to give the students they serve more help, or to help more students. I used to run hours-long training sessions for college advisors, like those working at uAspire, on the basic FAFSA process, and how to avoid common mistakes, because there were so many places students would get tripped up.

NCAN’s research into why students did not complete the FAFSA showed that 15% were deterred by the length and complexity of the process. That research, using data from Trellis Strategies annual Student Financial Wellness Survey, also showed that nearly half of the students not applying for aid, thought they would not qualify. It was because of these barriers to the students our members serve, that NCAN has long pushed for a simpler, easier FAFSA.

Are you ready for some good news? The lobbying of NCAN members and student groups, and resulting policy proposals and administrative efforts actually made a difference. FAFSA is working better than ever before.

Today, students can complete their FAFSA in as little as 15 minutes. NCAN’s FAFSA Tracker, which uses Department of Education data for completions by high school to create state and national completion rates, shows we are on track for a record completion rate for the high school class of 2026.

As of May 1st, the percentage of high school seniors completing FAFSA has increased by 11.7 percentage points over 2025.

Compared to 2024, the FAFSA process is succeeding across the board, both for high schools with low and high-income students, white students as well as students of color, in rural and urban locations.

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Why Does FAFSA Simplification Matter?

I spent the first six years of my career working in financial aid, primarily running outreach and communications for UCLA’s financial aid office. Trying to help students and families understand our excessively complicated financial aid system, and seeing how complex the process was, is why I ended up moving to federal policy work. It was clear that things like the FAFSA, and many other higher education systems and supports, needed fixing at a macro level

You don’t have to work in financial aid for long to see all the cracks in the system, and FAFSA used to be a Grand Canyon sized crack. When you spend a lot of time helping high schoolers apply for aid, you notice all the friction points that make it harder. If students—especially first-generation students— first experience the financial aid system as burdensome, it becomes much harder to convince them that college is for them.

FAFSA Was a Mess: What Changed?

Passing laws is only the start when it comes to changing how real people experience a public policy change. Implementation matters, a great deal, and the implementation part of FAFSA simplification was so bumpy that it would make a cobblestone road look smooth. The significant improvement, compared to 2024 and 2025, is partly the story of a well-intentioned policy change resulting in an implementation failure, followed by an impressive turnaround.

During his first term, President Donald Trump signed the FUTURE Act into law in 2019 and the FAFSA Simplification Act in 2020. Implementing those laws required a lot of changes to the FAFSA form, the underlying eligibility calculations for the Pell Grant, and most importantly, massive updates to the technology infrastructure that underpins the whole federal financial aid system.

The changes mean that students now only answer 38 questions today, compared to over 100 previously. The eligibility formulas for the Pell Grant were changed, increasing the number of students that qualify for the primary federal grant program that helps low-income students pay for college. Finally, data sharing between ED and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was enhanced, reducing how many students have to send their tax returns into schools for verification—an audit process that was hugely burdensome for students, families, and college financial aid offices.

The redesign, and the need to completely rebuild and update all the backend technology that supports the FAFSA, led to serious delays in the form (usually open on October 1 each year) being released in 2023 and 2024, along with a host of glitches. On top of the delayed launches, students and families faced frequent system outages, students could not make updates to their information for months after initial submission, and colleges had to submit any changes for students individually, rather than by sending large batch files to Department of Education.

A reform process intended to make FAFSA easier instead generated headlines like this one from the New York Times.

Recounting every implementation challenge would require an essay of its own. The National Association of Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA) has a handy timeline of the issues, for those who want to know more.

A highly curated list of what caused all the problems includes:

• A lack of focus on implementation from the Biden administration.

• Massive tech debt at the Department of Education’s’s Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) that had to be fixed. Tech debt is the accumulation of choosing the fastest solutions to a problem over the best long-term solutions. Over time, those choices make it harder and harder to keep things running efficiently.

• Federal technology vendors tasked with upgrading FSA’s systems messing up.

• Congress’ unwillingness to properly fund FSA, in part because of antipathy towards the Biden administration’s attempts to forgive federal student loan debt for some borrowers.

So how did things get fixed? The Biden administration brought in outside help. Jeremy Singer, President of the College Board, was asked to lead the charge. Singer, who has significant experience implementing major IT infrastructure projects, brought in a team of colleagues, including Aaron-Lemon Strauss, who remains at FSA as the Executive Director for FAFSA, after Singer returned to the College Board.

Statecraft has an excellent podcast episode with Singer that delves deep into all the issues and how they were solved. One of the main takeaways is how important it was to have someone consistently in charge of the process. You can’t simply outsource such an important function without having the in-house capacity to make sure the product works. For me, that also shows why career staff are so vital to making government work for everyday people.

Singer, Lemon-Strauss, and the dedicated hard-working team of career federal workers deserve most of the credit for turning FAFSA around.

Building on that turnaround required FSA to maintain consistent staffing of knowledgeable experts . The consistency that the FAFSA team has provided, even as administrations switched, ensured that the work begun during the Biden administration was completed in the Trump administration.

This is one area where the Trump administration maintained state capacity, and can now take some of the credit for a major policy and tech innovation that is making life easier for millions of Americans.

How is FAFSA Simplification Helping Students?

Reducing barriers to college means more students apply and enroll. The benefits of removing FAFSA as an administrative burden are already showing up in application and enrollment data. On top of what looks like a record FAFSA completion year, Common App shows that the number of college applicants for the 2026-27 academic year is 4% higher than the same time last year.

We know that high school seniors who complete the FAFSA are 84 percent likelier to enroll in college immediately after high school. For students from the lowest income quartile, that number leaps to 127 percent likelier to head straight to college.

The data linking FAFSA completion and increased college enrollment rates are correlative rather than causal. But, the link is so strong that it is almost certain that FAFSA completion is helping students see college as a viable path after high school.

The biggest increases in college applications are coming from the students we want to help: first-generation, historically underrepresented and coming from communities with the lowest median incomes. People with fewer resources struggle more with administrative burdens. And so making the financial aid process easier for these students shows that a well-designed universal process can level the playing field and reduce inequality.

Most importantly, more students are eligible for the maximum Pell Grant than ever before, because of eligibility changes that were part of FAFSA simplification.

1.7 million more students were eligible for maximum Pell Grants in the 2025-26 FAFSA cycle, based on NCAN’s analysis of data from the office of Federal Student aid. That increase is a 27 percent jump compared to the 2023-24, the last application cycle before the FAFSA Simplification Act changes were implemented. There has also been an over 1,600% (yes, you are reading that correctly) jump in the number of students eligible for the minimum Pell Grant. These kinds of changes make it clear that removing administrative barriers makes an enormous difference in who gets support, but as importantly whether people who are eligible for support are able to ask for help.

Source: NCAN https://www.ncan.org/Web/Web/News/FAFSA-Simplification-Yielded-1.7-Million-Additional-Pell-Eligible-Students.aspx

FAFSA has come a long way from Lamar Alexander’s unwieldy paper form. There is still more to do when it comes to college access. Fixing FAFSA is only a piece of the puzzle.

Low-income students, and students of color still enroll in and complete college at lower rates than their wealthier peers, so making it easier to apply for aid should be the starting point for continued efforts to narrow the attainment gap between the students who have the most and those with the least.

What fixing the FAFSA shows, even if it took much too long, is that administrative burdens are not inevitable. Barriers can be removed or lowered, when consistent advocacy and political will lead to needed legislative changes, and smart hard working public servants are given the support to effectively implement those changes.

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They’re sure to be disappointed. There’s no going back to politics-as-usual, because it was dead long before Trump. As I show in my new book, The Right-Wing Idea Factory, the rise of dark money and, even more, social media put new forces in charge of American politics.

The grownups aren’t in charge, and there’s no chance that they will be any time soon. In the wild-west rodeo that defines American politics, the top job goes to whoever can stay on top of the bucking bull for at least an election cycle or two. But no one is going to stay there for long.

That’s because of two things. One is that Americans don’t trust any grownup for very long, because we quickly become convinced that they won’t deliver. The other reason rests in the new technology. Some analysts have held out hope that social media can bring people together. It’s become instead a wedge driving us farther apart.

Let’s look at each of these reasons in turn.

No president can deliver on big economic promises

At the core of most elections are big promises on the economy, as James Carville preached to Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential election. “It’s the economy, stupid,” he said. He could add, “It’s always the economy, stupid.”

But the simple fact is that no president can truly deliver on promises about the economy. It’s become global, beyond anyone’s control, as Trump has discovered about the price of gas at the pump. The Federal Reserve is the closest thing we have to a steering wheel, but the president doesn’t rule the Fed, and the Fed itself is frank about the limits on its own power.

Promising to bring down the high price of eggs and beef and beef is tempting. So, too, is the pledge to put people to work. The president can’t really do much about that, however—except screw it up, with decisions that drive inflation up and employment down. And that’s driven trust in government on a steady downward track. From a high point following the 2001 terrorist attacks, trust in government to do what is right, always or most of the time, has slid from 60 percent to 17 percent at the end of 2025.

In February, Gallup found in February that people ranked government as the country’s biggest problem. Confidence in the presidency is embarrassing at 30 percent, but Congress is at the bottom of confidence in American institutions, at just 10 percent.

A little more than a decade ago, a poll found that Congress was less popular than a root canal, colonoscopy, head lice, and Genghis Khan. Nothing has changed since. It’s hard to see how any grownups can turn this around any time soon.

That translates into growing gloom about the future. Gallup found in February that 59 percent of Americans anticipate high-quality lives in five years, the lowest in the survey’s 20-year history.

The false promise of the social media bridge

The unifying promise of social media as a virtual town square, if it ever really existed, has been dashed.

Consider the most popular podcasts, for example. Of the top five on Spotify, three lean to the right, with The Joe Rogan Experience consistently at the top. One is news, produced by The New York Times, though many on the right would suggest it’s left-leaning. Of course, almost no one listens to the other side.

Those on the right, on the other hand, are sure they know what the left is up to: pushing their values down Americans’ throats, in ways that run against traditional American values. One group on the left has started a podcast listening club to tune in to what the right is saying, but as co-founder Nina Harris told an interviewer, “I’m really, really scared, and I just want to figure out what’s happening.” With a gulf that large, it’s little wonder that true crime podcasts are the only safe middle ground.

The sad fact is that Americans don’t much like each other. Among more than two dozen countries in a recent Pew Research Center survey, the US was the only country where a majority of people (53 percent) saw their fellow citizens as morally bad. Compare that with Canada, where 92 percent of the people saw others as morally good.

In a different Pew survey, a growing number of Republicans saw Democrats as immoral (an increase from 47 percent in 2016 to 72 percent in 2022). Democrats felt the same way about Republicans (with an increase from 35 percent to 63 percent). A majority of people who identify with each party saw those in the other party as close-minded, dishonest, and unintelligent.

Media floods Americans with choices, and they choose to go their own very different ways. The closest thing to a unifying social event is the Super Bowl but, in 2026, it only brought about a third of Americans to their televisions, and the Bad Bunny half-time show became a partisan spark point.

Religion has lost its bridging role. In 1952, 75 percent of Americans said that religion was “very important” in their lives, according to Gallup. In 2025, it was 47 percent. Over the same period, the number who said it was “not very important” grew from 5 percent to 28 percent. Now, even among those who are within the same religious denomination, there is partisan disagreement, as a Catholic vice-president entered a war of words with the first American pope.

Even families have become less important as social anchors. The marriage rate has declined, from 69 percent of those over 18 who are married to 50 percent in 2021. Pew concluded a decade ago, “As a result of these changes, there is no longer one dominant family form in the U.S.”

Instead, we increasingly choose to live with others who mirror our views and take our cues from others with whom we already agree. Most Americans live in bubbles, “with virtually no exposure to voters from the other party,” Jacob R. Brown and Ryan D. Enos found. It isn’t necessarily that people check the party registration of neighbors before they move in, but people with similar views tend to seek out similar homes and amenities.

As a result, in terms of where we live and what we listen to and what we believe, Americans are becoming increasingly segregated—by political party. That’s one of the reasons that so many incumbents hail from safe state legislative and congressional districts. Their party leaders draw boundaries to protect their members, and the clumping of the party faithful is making that easier.

Over the last dozen years, Republican state legislative chambers have tended to stay red. The same is true for the Democrats, although they’ve been locked out of more states. That’s one of the big reasons why presidential elections have increasingly boiled down to a small handful of swing states. And all of that will increase with the great redistricting war of 2026, aimed at gerrymandering congressional district boundaries.

So we can’t count on grownups to rescue us. Social media is uber-powerful, but it’s only widening the problem of polarization.

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Who can trust those who don’t deliver?

And then there is the problem deeply embedded in the way Republicans and Democrats both approach government itself. Democrats dream big, but they typically fail to think through how to deliver. That was the problem with the launch of Obamacare, where only six people were able to enroll on the first day. The Obama administration eventually straightened out the problems, but not before the problems of the launch became an anchor that dragged the program down.

And, convinced that government has gotten way too big, Republicans have devoted their energy to bulldozing programs and people. The Trump administration DOGEd its way through government. Elon Musk’s grand experiment slashed more than 400,000 jobs and left the government down 272,000, after federal agencies discovered they needed to refill the positions that had been eliminated.

But cutting government doesn’t deliver the things that people want government to do, from delivering weather warnings on time to making TSA checkpoints run smoothly to catching terrorists before they can act. In fact, the director of the US Office of Personnel Management, Scott Kupor, admitted that “sometimes you over-restructure,” and that the administration now needs to hire people back to fill some of the jobs it eliminated. It’s hard to rebuild on the rubble of what’s been destroyed.

In fact, Trumpism has turned the administration of government upside down. For my take on this, see Trumpism and the Future of Public Administration (Cambridge University Press, 2026), which is available as a free download from May 8 through May 20.

The one thing that progressives and conservatives share is a blind spot for actually making government work. That, as it turns out, not only drives the public’s distrust of government but also points the most important way out of this mess.

In a July 2024 survey by the Partnership for Public Service, “corrupt” was the most common word that respondents used to describe the federal government. And among 18-34 year-olds, the fast-growing and increasingly critical swing vote, just 15 percent trusted the federal government. That’s lower than any other age group. And it’s a worrying sign that the future will be even worse than our present moment.

Escaping the death spiral

The way out of this mess, message-meister Frank Luntz found in a June 2024 collection of focus groups and surveys, begins by recognizing that people want a government that is honest, trustworthy, transparent, in touch, accountable, and respectful, without excuses for why things go wrong.

Of those Luntz surveyed, 24 percent thought that the government did an “inadequate job” of serving the people; 18 percent thought the job was “terrible”; and 16 percent believed that the government was “simply incapable of doing anything at all.”

That’s why we neither grownups nor social media can put Humpty Dumpty back together again. It’s hard to trust a government that people don’t believe is working for them.

But amid this boiling cauldron of problems, there’s one silver lining. Overall, 78 percent of Americans want a federal government that functions effectively, and that’s one thing on which Democrats (89 percent) and Republicans (82 percent) agree. Luntz found that people wanted a government that made them feel respected, appreciated, valued, safe, and secure. People trust a government that convinces them that policymakers have their interests at heart—and that they’re working to produce results that matter to them.

A March 2026 survey reinforces that conclusion. Americans worry most about “the cost of housing, groceries, electricity, and everyday expenses” (79 percent) and are concerned that “political division and dysfunction in Washington” are keeping us from getting there (62 percent). At the top of those they blame: “politicians who’d rather fight than fix problems” (69 percent). What they want: “honesty and integrity” (76 percent) along with “a determination to get things done—even when that means working with the other party” (72 percent). This is precisely the strategy that Francis Fukuyama is leading with a team through Reform for Results. (Full disclosure: I serve on the executive committee of that group.)

And that suggests part one in the escape from democracy’s death spiral: building a government focused laser-like on producing results that matter to people, not entangled in self-aggrandizing politics. That’s a tall order, of course, but we do know how to do it. Luntz found that people like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the TSA, FDA, SNAP, and roads and bridges, because they see—and appreciate—the results.

But delivering them in the era of mega-change is an even taller order, with everything changing at the speed of AI and with government lagging in the tech revolution.

That leads to part two: instead of relying on the grownups, we need to bring in the young ‘uns. We need fresh energy, fresh ideas, fresh technological skills, and fresh ideas about weaving networks.

The Pentagon, for example, for the last decade has run a “Hack the Pentagon” competition, where ethical hackers are turned loose on the department’s IT systems to find vulnerabilities. In the first competition, one hacker found a problem in just 13 minutes. Many of the most successful players had little or no college education.

But many of these successful players don’t have the standard credentials to check off the boxes in the federal government’s hiring process, so they drift off to the private sector. This is starting to change, with the federal government relaxing educational credentials for tech workers.

Uncle Sam is saying, “I want you!”—but “I can’t get you.” These are precisely the people the federal government needs to build a government that produces results, but it struggles to lure them in, especially because the federal government’s hiring system is in desperate need of repair. It takes three times longer for the federal government to hire than a typical private company, and in that time, smart young ‘uns, especially those weighed down by student loans, get snapped up before the federal government can grab them.

Uncle Sam, though, has an even bigger problem. The Partnership for Public Service found that two-thirds of 18-34 year-olds believed that a federal job “is an opportunity to have a positive impact on my community”—but an equal number reported they never considered a federal position. The more politicians trash the government we elect them to lead, the harder it’s going to be to convince ambitious young ‘uns to come to work for the feds.

So we know that it’s foolish to wait for grownups to save us, or to expect that social media will suddenly start drawing us together instead of splitting us apart. But we also know that if the government focuses more on producing results in a trustworthy way, it can draw in the young ‘uns who are the key to escaping the democracy death spiral.

The first step is to stop demonizing the very government we want. It’s an easy, tempting target. But the more we take aim and fire at it, the more we tighten democracy’s death spiral.

Each party, in its idea factory, is producing new ideas and ideologies. The ideas are pushing the parties—and the country—apart, and there’s no question that the right is far better at this than the left, which is having a hard time generating ideas on which anyone agrees. That’s sure to make the death spiral worse.

But there’s hope, captured in an exchange of letters between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who had the fiercest, ongoing political battles in American history. In their last years, however, they came to a consensus around the basic values of America and their hopes for its future.

Jefferson wrote a late-night letter to Adams. “What a Colossus shall we be. I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past. So good night!” Adams replied, “May we be a Barrier against the Returns of Ignorance and Barbarism. What a Colossus Shall We Be!” Their agreement on the goals for the future, Adams concluded, led to a prophecy that “you and I Shall Soon meet and be better Friends than ever.” Meet again they did, when they both died on the same day, 50 years after America’s first Independence Day.

Their shared search for America’s promise pushed aside the differences that had divided them for decades. That’s not a bad thought, as we near the 250th anniversary of that day.

Donald F. Kettl is Professor Emeritus and Former Dean at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. He’s the author of the new book, The Right-Wing Idea Factory (Oxford University Press).

I like this graph.

I’ve used it in articles, classes and presentations to the public. It shows how registration rates between Black and White voters varied in Louisiana since Reconstruction. In a single image, it tells the story of political power and discrimination. Black voters had power, briefly, then it was taken from them. A series of policies that were more or less explicit in their discriminatory purpose worked as intended, disenfranchising Black voters, and some poor White voters along the way.

This ended with the Voting Right Act of 1965, which removed the ability of governments to put in place facially neutral but clearly discriminatory practices, and in doing so ratcheted up Black registration in Louisiana until it matched White voters. This effect was immediate and enduring across the South.

The VRA increased Black political representation…

…which in turn increased Black economic power by opening up previously barred avenues, like public employment.

The reason I like these graphs is that they are clarifying. They cut through the noise. Not much ambiguity about them. They tell you the story of Reconstruction, Redemption, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights era. There might have been political squabbles of the day, most obviously an extraordinary realignment of the two major political parties on racial issues. But the big picture is clear: different eras allowed the use of power either toward equality and honoring the constitution, or toward inequality and discrimination.

Being able to step back and see what is happening is easier in retrospect, of course, But we should be able to see what is in front of us now. The Louisiana v. Callais decision from the Supreme Court decision effectively guts what was left of the VRA. So lets be clear about what is happening.

What did the Supreme Court do to our democracy?

What has been the impact of the Roberts Court on democracy? Wealthy people have more political power than everyone else. Partisan actors have more power to reduce voter choice. Black people and other minority groups are offered fewer protections and less visible political representation.

If this seems like hyperbole, lets review the key decisions.

• With Citizens United in 2010, the Roberts Court killed any meaningful effort to regulate the flow of money in politics.

• The Roberts Court refused to take on gerrymandering when Justice Kennedy was on the court, and then in 2019 said that partisan gerrymandering might be “contrary to democratic principles” but there was nothing they could do about it.

• With the Shelby County decision in 2013, it eliminated the pre-clearance section of the VRA, which meant that districts with a record of discriminating against Blacks would no longer need to get permission from the DOJ for their changes. With the 2021 Brnovich case, they further limited the conditions under which laws that made it harder to vote could be considered as discriminatory.

• Now with Callais, SCOTUS gave state the green light to redistrict majority Black districts out of existence. The Court insisted it is not overturning the Voting Rights Act, but it made the bar for demonstrating such actions are illegal so high as to be impossible.

What happens next?

Immediately after the Callais decision, multiple Southern states moved to change their voting maps to eliminate remaining majority Black districts. People have already started to vote in Louisiana primaries, but the Governor declared a state of emergency to stop the process in order to redraw maps.

Florida’s existing redistricting efforts got a boost. Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi officials have pushed their own plans. In all, eight Southern states could redistrict over a dozen seats by eliminating Black-majority districts.

Some of this appears a little too on-the-nose, as when the state leader by the name of Shad White calls for eliminating the only majority Black district in Mississippi.

Tennessee moved first, carving up Memphis to ensure the city could not meaningfully choose its representative in Congress. This led to an extraordinary image of Justin Pearson, a Democratic member of the Tennessee legislature, being denied entry by the Sargent-at-Arms for a legislative meeting that is redrawing the Congressional district he is running in. The picture could be from 1956, or 1886, but it is from 2026.

This response to Callais was entirely predictable. After Shelby, several states changed their laws, leading to almost 100 more restrictive election laws being adopted. Voter roll purges became more common. Black eligible voters became significantly less likely to vote because of Shelby. The racial turnout gap between White and Black voters grew almost twice as quickly in parts of the country that were previously governed by the VRA.

The Shelby decision was based on the premise that race no longer mattered to electoral laws. That premise was proven wrong, but the court moved ahead this week to continue to ignore race. They also blessed the state that kicked of the redistricting wave. Despite a detailed lower court ruling showing that the Texas map was racially gerrymandered, the Supreme Court gave it the go-ahead.

Democratic states like Virginia and California responded to Texas with their own redistricting plans. The pattern seems clear: our country will be made up of institutions that are designed to not accurately represent voter preferences. Parts of the country defined as red and blue will look even more so, ignoring the sizable number of voters who are not represented by the dominant parties. There will be fewer Black faces in Congress, especially from the parts of the United States that once enslaved Black people.

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Looking for clarity

Political scientists like to talk about polarization and commentators talk about culture wars because that’s the coin of the realm in their respective fields. But those are not really an explanation for the evolution of the Supreme Court, and I think that’s probably reflective that they are generally overused explanations for shifts in power in America.

Here, I’m drawing a bit here from a point made by the political scientist Jake Grumbach.

The graph I showed you at the top of this piece came from the American Political Science Review. Over the last decade, US domestic political scientists found themselves turning to their comparative colleagues or American history to find useful concepts to explain what is going on. (I am as guilty as anyone in this regard). We took democracy for granted, and struggled to explain what was happening right in front of us.

I think there is an equivalent problem in the commentariat. We are living in an era of unprecedented concentration of wealth and power, an era of extraordinary democratic backsliding. When I read blogs on Substack or op-ed pages, this is featured, but not with the sense of frequency and alarm one might expect. People have set up entire new media operations on the premise that now, now is the perfect time to punch left. (The left has plenty of problems, but attacking your democracy is not one of them). Or now is the time to argue that wokeness is the reason for the backlash we are seeing. People should write what they want, but at some point these perspectives are simply failing to engage in real criticism of power or defend American democracy.

Legacy media that have been captured by the emerging billionaire class are not going to challenge these broader trends. The Washington Post said that concerns about the Texas gerrymander was exaggerated, but the response from Virginia, which unlike Texas was at least approved by the public, was a “power grab by Democrats.”

Polarization or culture war explanations don’t explain what has happened to the Supreme Court in recent decades. The banal explanation is that very wealthy groups organized a project to capture the institution through a series of investments into college campuses and the legal profession, such as with the creation of the Federalist Society. They closely vetted SCOTUS candidates, and invested heavily in political spending that was further enabled by the Court. These groups opposed the VRA and elevated those who embraced an anti-democratic view of America. John Roberts made his opposition to the VRA clear as a lawyer with the Reagan administration. Alito might be a culture war crank, but that is not why he and the other five Republicans signed on to a project of weakening American democracy.

What are the solutions?

Step back and look for clarity: it sure looks like Judges nominated by the Republican Party are willing to overturn laws when it helps the Republican Party protect and extend its power. If you take this point seriously, what are the solutions? Vote harder is not a great recommendation if the Court is making voting processes less representative.

The VRA was crowning achievement of the Civil Rights movement, the product of a civil war, constitutional amendments, and intense political and social battles. Its intent was clear. And it was swept away, bit by bit, by a court whose majority was nominated by a President who lost the popular vote and which is historically unpopular.

Justice Kagan’s opinion on the case explained that the Voting Rights Act:

was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers. It ushered in awe-inspiring change, bringing this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality. And it has been repeatedly, and overwhelmingly, reauthorized by the people’s representatives in Congress. Only they have the right to say it is no longer needed—not the Members of this Court. I dissent, then, from this latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.

The VRA was eliminated not because it was no longer necessary, but because it had succeeded in challenging power structures. A court that will do this will eliminate other programs designed to make America more democratic and more fair.

The political scientist Jon Ladd responded to the decision by suggesting we should adjust our expectation that any pro-democracy agendas would be deemed constitutional. If Democrats were able to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, or a national gerrymandering ban, would the Supreme Court allow such policies? Would the Court find a way to block proportional representation? Would they allow the extension of statehood to DC or Puerto Rico?

One of the great cautionary tales of American politics is that Roosevelt’s effort at court packing, which is seen as a dangerous overreach. But today, the conditions are different. “The Supreme Court itself has shown itself to be the enemy of democracy” according to legal scholar Rick Hasen.

Under these conditions, court reform becomes a logical solution. (For a contrary view Steve Vladeck argues that Congress can still make the Supreme Court accountable). It would require more Democrats and more of the general public to buy into the notion that defending democracy requires radical action.

But when the opponents of democracy are radical, the defense has to be clear-eyed. We look at countries like Brazil and South Korea, where leaders have been imprisoned for anti-democratic actions, or Hungary, where there is a purge of Orbanists from government. They recognize the urgency of their moment. Do we?

I was at a conference in Bucharest in Romania last week, a setting which reminds you about the fragility of democracy. On a discussion of democratic backsliding, I proposed the following test:1

Remember when you read a book or watched a movie about the 1930s, and you asked yourself “what would I have done under these conditions?” The answer is: whatever you are doing now.

Work requirements – or more accurately, paperwork requirements – are simply an alternative way for Trump to achieve his real goal: dismantle housing assistance, without receiving Congressional permission to do so. This includes the Housing Choice Voucher program and Project-Based Rental Assistance.

A few months ago HUD unveiled a plan to impose time limits and add work requirements on rental assistance. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that 3.7 million people, including almost two million kids, could lose this support as a result, in a program that only helps about 10 million people. That seems like a pretty effective way to tip vulnerable families into homelessness.

OMB Director Russell Vought has argued that housing support is simply “subsidized irresponsibility.” But as you consider Vought’s judgment, bear in mind he has taken $15 million in development aid from the poorest people in the world, and another $5 million from funding to protect American consumers…to pay for his personal security detail.

If anything, we don’t do nearly enough to ensure children have a roof over their heads. Current estimates are that over 4 million children experience homelessness each year. Only 1 in 4 of those eligible for housing assistance actually receive support.

One can’t overstate the importance of these benefits. They reduce poverty, substantially reduce the risk of homelessness, and have downstream positive effects on people’s health and well-being. Overall, 70 percent of housing assistance recipients are children, the disabled, or older adults.

And the proposed changes come at a time when housing needs have skyrocketed, with ‘worst case’ housing needs (such as low-income families spending more than 50 percent of income on housing) rising by over 30 percent in the last 20 years. But rather than expand housing opportunity, the Trump administration is simply going to cut access to the program.

Housing assistance is already notoriously difficult to obtain. Because there isn’t enough funding to meet needs, most people who ultimately receive these benefits wait years before they get help. Wait times vary across places, but in Alabama the average wait time is 5 years, compared to 2 years in Arizona, 4 years in the District of Columbia, and 3 years in Georgia. Those receiving housing assistance are also tightly monitored, and face bias from landlords.

Work requirements don’t work

Scott Turner, the head of HUD, has justified the proposed rule as enabling self-sufficiency. But thats not what the research says. The main takeaways of this research (described in more detail below) are:

• Work requirements do not increase labor force participation, because people who can work are already working.

• Work requirements cause eligible individuals lose access to public services even if they are working because lots of people struggle with the paperwork.

• While work requirements might exempt some groups (this plan excludes people with a disability or with very young children for example), if these groups also have to demonstrate their exemption status via onerous paperwork, they are still at risk of losing support.

• The housing authorities that administer these programs are already understaffed and overwhelmed with managing existing onerous requirements.

The rule is structured as a waiver, meaning that it allows but does not force owners and housing agencies to adopt work requirements. But as CBPP points out HUD “could pressure housing agencies and private owners to adopt them, including through illegal tactics like those the Trump Administration has used to impose its policy priorities and preferences in other areas.”

Sounds bad? Here is something you can do

HUD is seeking public comment on this new policy. You can write a comment here. No log in. You can enter text, or upload a document.

Deadline is midnight on May 1. You don’t need to read the rule or be an expert. You can use research cited in this blog if you feel like it. Take some of the time you would have spent complaining on social media and do this instead. You can do this in 5 minutes.

The administration has to record support and opposition for the rule, and reach each comment. Make your voice heard! Do you know someone who might care about this policy? Share with them.

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Want more information? Here is a simple guide about the public comment process. Here are more resources about this particular issue that provide comment templates.

One of us (Don) submitted a comment that quoted parts of our recent literature review in the Journal of Economic Perspectives:

Work requirements assume a population of individuals who could be employed, but choose to rely on welfare benefits instead. Moreover, they assume a population that is not already subject to work requirements under other welfare programs. In practice, this population is very small. Additional work requirements do little to spur additional labor force participation. For example, just 6 percent of those on Medicaid are nonemployed and nonelderly clients who would not qualify for an exemption from work requirements, and one-third of those 6 percent are retired (Guth et al. 2023). There is little evidence that work requirements in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program have substantially increased labor force participation. However, such requirements have caused vulnerable groups, such as the homeless and those with chronic health conditions, to lose benefit access (Cook and East 2024; Cuffey, Beatty, and Mykerezi 2022; Gray et al. 2023; Han 2022; Ndumele et al. 2024). For this reason, some safety net advocates characterize work requirements as “work reporting requirements,” to communicate that the consequential aspect of the regulation is the paperwork burdens, not on actual labor force participation.

When Arkansas adopted Medicaid work requirements, 95 percent of those targeted by the program were already employed or should have been exempted due to disability, but the work requirements in the state reduced Medicaid enrollment by 12 percentage points (Sommers et al. 2019). About one-third of those who lost coverage, who were disproportionately those with lower education, were simply unaware of the new requirements. The work requirements did not increase labor force participation. However, half of those who lost Medicaid coverage reported serious problems paying off medical debt, 56 percent delayed care due to cost, and 64 percent delayed taking medications because of cost (Sommers et al. 2020).”

An Administration of Burdens

There are some pretty clear signals that the Trump administration sees burdens as a way to shrink the safety net. Adding work requirements to food, health or housing supports is not just cruel, it is unnecessary and ineffective in encouraging work for the very good reason that people already have strong incentives to work because of the the Earned Income Tax Credit.

Here is another example of the Trump administration’s use of burdens to block access. Automatic renewal is a useful way to manage the hassles of safety net programs, reducing burdens both on state officials and clients, and improving program integrity. But the Trump administration is planning to limit automatic renewal according to the New York Times: “By one estimate, that would remove six million more people, including 1.8 million children, from SNAP.”

In other domains the sheer cruelty of the regime of burdens is hard to fathom. This ProPublica article will make you simultaneously sad and outraged: another proposed Trump policy, initiated by DOGE, would punish up to 400,000 people with disabilities for living with their parents by reducing their Supplemental Security Income benefits.

The story follows families who would be impacted, including Shy’tyra Burton, who was born two months prematurely, and suffers from significant intellectual disabilities. Her Dad works as a sanitation worker, earning about $2,000 a month to take care of her and her siblings. Her SSI would be cut by about a third under the planned change, losing about $330 per month.

The policy would affect people with with Down syndrome, dementia and other disabilities. It would also overwhelm these people, who are typically living with their parents because they cannot manage the demands of life on their own, under a wave of administrative burdens:

If enacted, the change will require intellectually disabled young people like Burton as well as very elderly people to file extensive monthly reports if they want to continue their benefits even at the reduced level. They’ll have to provide details about the property where they live: whether it’s leased or owned, as well as the names of anyone in the home, and whether any of these people has any new income or assets. They’ll also have to include documentation of all household bills and expenses, showing how much they do or don’t contribute personally, as well as financial documents such as bank statements and any pay stubs.

Burton will likely have to make an appointment and report in person at a Social Security field office any time her father’s hours or wages change even slightly; any time she and he switch up how they split utility bills; and any time an adult sibling spends even a few nights at the house and helps her with living expenses. If she doesn’t, she could later receive bills accusing her of having been overpaid by Social Security.

If you have a child with a disability, a large part of your brain is centered on how to ensure they can live a life with dignity and security in a country where the safety net seems to be designed to trip you up. Even with the current supports her father says “I’m still barely managing” to keep his household above water. And now a presidential administration, one where senior figures take turns to loudly emphasize their Christianity, would drown them. Jen Pahlka is fond of saying “paperwork favors the powerful” — the corollary is that “paperwork punishes the powerless.”

More on work requirements

As news erupted across the country on December 4, 2024 that the UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. was killed in New York City, alongside rightful condemnations of violence was an outpouring of frustration with delays and denials of coverage, predominantly at the hands of private health insurers.

To casual observers of the American health care system, it might seem puzzling that in the world’s wealthiest nation, there would be such widespread grievances about barriers to prescribed medical care. But to many Americans – especially those with chronic medical challenges – this only scratched the surface of health care burdens and the intensely political processes driving these barriers.

Every day across America, people learn that they cannot pick up prescribed medication or schedule a test or procedure because their insurer has not provided prior authorization, or required pre-approval for prescribed care.

In prior authorization’s nascency in the 1960s, it was quite narrowly circumscribed, such as requiring physicians to certify the necessity of a continued hospitalization. As health care inflation and soaring Medicare costs intensified cost containment pressures, America expanded its reliance on managed care. With it came new incentives: coverage decisions were made not simply by prescribing physicians (who in fee-for-service arrangements had some degree of perverse incentives to overprescribe), but by entities with fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders and obligations to contain costs and maximize profits.

Utilization guardrails proliferated, ostensibly to mitigate waste. What began as certification of hospital lengths of stay expanded to prior authorization for costly drugs (and even some less costly ones), high-tech imaging, and many surgeries and procedures. What may have begun as an effort to curb overprescribing has resulted in the delay and denial of medically necessary care, along with the imposition of burdensome processes to reverse them. That is the story I tell in my new book, Coverage Denied: How Health Insurers Drive Inequality in the United States, drawing on interviews, a nationwide survey, and administrative data.

The Prevalence of Coverage Denials

Because health insurance is fragmented across public and private payers, precise denial rates are difficult to determine and consequently, most analyses focus on slices of the market. For example, KFF finds that roughly 1 in 5 claims are denied each year by Affordable Care Act marketplace plans, though KFF’s analysis of prior authorization denials by Medicare Advantage plans revealed a lower denial rate of just under 8 percent. And Optum found through analysis of hundreds of millions of claims that the denial rate has increased from 9 percent in 2016 to 12 percent in 2023.

Surveying 1,340 patients nationwide, I found that 36 percent of survey respondents experienced at least one, typically more than one, coverage denial. These denials were for wide-ranging care, from prescription drugs to behavioral health to imaging to surgeries, highlighting the breadth of this practice in modern health care delivery.

Denials can occur pre-treatment (through denial of prior authorization) or post-treatment (a claim denial). Both are destabilizing for the patient and burdensome to rectify, but their effects are felt quite differently: prior authorization can keep care out of reach, while claim denials can jeopardize financial security and drive medical debt. While I do not observe pronounced disparities in susceptibility to being denied in the first place, the administrative and financial burdens of denial fall inequitably, with patients from marginalized backgrounds bearing the brunt of this managed care tool.

The Complexity of the American Health Care System

“Nobody knew health care could be so complicated” understandably elicited derision in a nation whose health care system is defined by complexity, fragmentation, and opacity that all too often strains the capacity of patients and providers alike. Public and private health insurance intertwined through delegated governance, and each insurer maintains its own (and annually changing) formulary and coverage rules, creating prescribing confusion and discontinuities when patients switch plans.

Consequently, all too often, physicians are left prescribing in a “black box,” unsure whether a treatment will be covered, require prior authorization, or be placed on a high cost-sharing tier. While some electronic medical record systems provide real-time information, access is uneven and inconsistencies across insurers reduce the extent to which the information yielded is actionable.

When opacity prevails, coverage barriers follow. And while initial denials are not the final word, what unfurls next is layered administrative burden on patients and physicians alike, contributing to health care rationing by inconvenience.

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Navigating Red Tape in Modern Medicine

The American health care system’s complexity, combined with Americans’ low health insurance literacy, can be a recipe for disaster, producing widespread confusion and consternation as well as delayed or foregone care, not to mention distrust of the health care industry. Frequent denials and cumbersome appeal processes exemplify administrative burden, or the learning, compliance, and psychological costs that combine to make the experience of policy feel onerous.

Denials of coverage can generally be appealed, but at a cost to both patients and physicians. Patients face a number of informational disadvantages that can help explain why KFF reports such low rates of patient appeals in the setting of marketplace plans’ claim denials (only less than 1 percent of which are appealed!) and in the setting of Medicare Advantage prior authorizations (only 11.5 percent of which are appealed).

Patients must know they can appeal, believe it is worthwhile, and understand how to appeal. This information may at first blush seem quite simple, but in practice, it is anything but. And it makes it all the more troubling that an anonymous claims reviewer for Elevance observed, “We’re told denying things is okay because people can appeal.”

Surveying 1,340 U.S. patients, I found that the two most common reasons for not appealing were lack of awareness that appealing was an option and the belief that they would not win. While health insurers must notify patients about the right to appeal, there can be knowledge gaps between patients and their insurers when information is conveyed in fine print or at a very high reading level relative to the average American. For example, while the average American adult reads at around an eighth grade level, ChatGPT estimated that UnitedHealthcare of Arizona’s 13-page appeal process information packet was written at the 13^th grade level, raising the odds that patients – especially those from marginalized backgrounds – may fall through the cracks and lose access to health care.

Doubting one’s ability to win is understandable when imagining the difficulty of an ordinary individual challenging the determination of an insurance giant armed with substantial experience and legal counsel (conjuring arguments illuminated in Marc Galanter’s seminal 1974 analysis of why the “haves” come out ahead of “one-shotter” plaintiffs). What’s more, when asked to estimate the proportion of health insurance appeals that are successful, most survey respondents estimated a rate under 20 percent, when in truth, it’s around a coin flip, with various estimates between 40 percent and 60 percent.

Even once overcoming the informational burdens, the layered process can be onerous on a good day, and patients are rarely having their best day when navigating these insurance processes. What’s more, physicians themselves are mired in burden or must maintain substantial staffing support to offset these burdens (though there are obvious inequities in access to this means for shifting burden).

The physician may need to dedicate some clinic time to play phone tag with the patient’s insurer to engage in a “peer to peer” review of the prescribed care, though the insurer-employed physician is rarely in the appropriate specialty. When this does not result in a reversal of the denial, there is a formal appeal process within the insurer, which may require the submission of additional documentation, some of which may have already been submitted. Ensuing requests for additional documentation may be highly time-sensitive, potentially producing denials due to lack of timely response.

One physician interviewee reflected:

It’s frustrating because you know you’re going to win in the end. You know the criteria. You know the patient qualifies for it. Yet you’re battling week after week, delay after delay for what you know they qualify for because you know the policy.

Patients may need to coordinate among their physician’s office, their insurer, and potentially a specialty pharmacy. They may need to be on hold during the middle of the day, competing with other responsibilities. Patient interviewees spoke of the desperation with which they talked with their insurer, submitted documentation, and took note of every conversation and reference number, even while lying in a hospital bed as one patient, Samantha did amid her protracted battle for a lifesaving bone marrow transplant. Reflecting on this experience, she said:

I learned from an early age, if you want to live, you have to be able to fight these battles. You have to have a level of literacy that is master’s degree or higher in public health or a legal background in order to navigate this. You have to get creative and look for back doors.”

It is little wonder why I find that less affluent patients are less likely than their counterparts to appeal at all, and why marginalized and sicker patients are less likely to prevail in this endeavor. So, while coverage barriers themselves are a widespread American experience, like so many other facets of burden, their effects are felt inequitably, leaving far too many behind, entangled in the red tape of modern medicine as marginalized patients also become more likely to delay or forego medical care (often, though not always with adverse health consequences) and to delay non-medical purchasing to accommodate these unexpected insurance barriers.

Thus, amid America’s successive political choices to increase reliance on managed care, risk has been shifted from health insurers to patients (as well as their physicians) in ways that profoundly shape health and financial security, and that widen existing inequities.

Where We Go from Here

When one patient interviewee recounted her trials navigating access to a life-saving bone marrow transplant, she observed that she had to be her own lawyer multiple times a day and asked, “How is someone’s grandmother supposed to do this? How is someone with four children supposed to navigate this? The deck is stacked against you at every single turn.”

So, where do we go from here?

• California has led the charge in working to strengthen oversight of health insurers’ use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools with which to process claims and prior authorizations, restoring human oversight before the issuance of denials. Enforcement of plain language health insurance communication could reduce knowledge gaps, especially among non-native English speakers and those with lower educational attainment.

• Some states have sought to pare back prior authorization requirements for those with sufficiently low reversal rates of their prescribing decisionmaking, though these policies are administered at a granular level and thus may not deliver on their promise.

• Massachusetts is working toward streamlining and reducing reliance on prior authorization processes across many areas of medicine including primary care. However, any state insurance reforms will be confined to state-regulated health plans due to the constraints of Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) preemption of laws that “relate to” the self-insured health plans in which roughly 100 million Americans are enrolled. Thus, national reform is necessary to comprehensively improve health care access, though federal policies currently tilt toward expanding prior authorization.

If the public outrage in full view in December 2024 revealed anything, it is that experiences of health insurance barriers are anything but aberrations. Rather, they are symptomatic of America’s policy choices to house health insurance delivery in the hands of actors mindful of cost containment and profit maximization, and too often place paperwork between patients and their prescribed care. In Coverage Denied, I show how we arrived at this moment, who gets left behind, and what is required to achieve a health care system in which access to care does not depend on one’s stamina in overcoming red tape.

Miranda Yaver is an Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management at the University of Pittsburgh, where she holds additional appointments in Political Science and the School of Public and International Affairs.

When they roll out their political manifestos, we should take them seriously, if not literally. Public statements by these actors, while often couched in statesmanlike or visionary terms, offer insights into a growing power elite: what they like, what they hate, their enemies, what they felt are entitled to.

These manifestos are relevant for governance, given Silicon Valley’s power via financial resources and platform control, and their embeddedness into government service delivery via grants, tax subsidies and contracts. They are no longer simply contractors, or one more donor class, but a powerful political class onto itself.

For example, when DOGE was announced, your best bet for understanding its purpose and impact was to pay attention to Elon Musk’s anti-government conspiracy ramblings on X, which fueled the elimination of entire agencies. Or Marc Andreessen’s manifesto, which predicted an attack on government services. These manifestos are, of course, riddled with unfounded claims, contradictions and blind spots. Andreessen bemoaned regulatory capture, while embarking on exactly such a program. But even, and perhaps especially, the blind spots are telling.

Some in the broligarchy see themselves as heroic historical figures, the kind of men (its always men) who are on a heroes journey that involves quashing some foes along the way. What if you are the foe? At some point this becomes a sovereignty problem, when the people empowered to manage your government have their own distinct values they are pursuing using the guise of public power and virtue.

The Palantir manifesto

And so we get to Palantir, a tech company that provides support for US government intelligence, immigration, policing, defense, tax preparation, health, revenue collection and logistical functions. Given that range of competencies, they are at the heart of concerns about tech surveillance under an increasingly authoritarian government.

A senior person in the Biden administration assured me that Palantir were seen competent deliverer of contracts. They got stuff done, including with pandemic era logistics in health care. The company grew under Democratic and Republic administrations, but the billion dollar contracts and eye-popping stock valuations did not start to arrive until the second Trump administration. They benefited from a fertile combination of massive increases in immigration and military spending, the rise of AI, and the downsizing of the federal government.

The way in which Palantir grew caused unease within its own ranks. A year ago, some former Palantir employees wrote an open letter about the violation of the company’s prior ethical guardrails.

A Code of Conduct was crafted to uphold democracy, preserve the spirit of free scientific inquiry, and ensure responsible AI development. Guardrails were set to prevent discrimination, disinformation, and abuses of power. These principles have now been violated, and are rapidly being dismantled at Palantir Technologies and across Silicon Valley

The company’s leader Alex Karp released a manifesto, which is actually just excerpts of the “The Technological Republic” written by Karp with help from Nicholas W. Zamiska. I’m not going to go through every point of the manifesto (some of which I am sympathetic to), but do want to focus on a couple of big points

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Can an anti-fascist become a techno-fascist?

A takeaway point is that on the whole, the manifesto’s vision of Palantir is that of a US government and its tech allies as dominant players, unconstrained by accountability. This has caused alarm bells to go off. For example, in a series of posts on Bluesky, Cas Mudde, one of the leading scholars of authoritarianism, was blunt:

The Palentir statement on its desired “Technological Republic” is one of the scariest things I have seen in a while. It is a call for a world dominated by an authoritarian U.S., generated by AI (both the statement and the world), run by tech-surveillance companies. Technofascism pure! Clearly, this disqualifies Palentir as a business partner for any other country than the U.S., not just in defense and security related sector but ANY sector — as information is power. European countries should not just start new collaboration with Palentir, they should divest it ASAP! Democrats should develop an actionable agenda of democratic reform in case they return to power. This cannot be limited to institutional refoms, but must include reigning in the power and wealth of technofascist companies and individuals.

Is it possible that the underlying book, with more room to caveat and explain, is less objectionable. Not so, according to John Ganz, who slogged through the whole thing:

The book is extremely creepy: It becomes clear in the course of reading this “Technological Republic” the authors propose is essentially some kind of merger or acquisition of the United States government by Silicon Valley, a state run by an engineering elite that would be empowered to “ruthlessly” pursue “outcomes.” It’s a proposal for a kind of tech oligarchy: “no public "oversight for me, surveillance for thee.” I contend it’s a work of reactionary modernism.

The manifesto makes a straightforward case that government and Silicon Valley power must be fused in order to defend a peaceful and prosperous way of life for Americans. If we pause with AI we are merely allowing our adversaries gain an upper hand:

The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

The manifesto argues Silicon Valley has invested its efforts in frivolities rather than American military capacity — unlike Palantir! Western values, which are superior to others, must be defended with power:

Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

“Defending the West” is part of Palantir’s DNA. It was never a company that sought to please consumers, but viewed itself as aligning with US military interests. It also works with Israeli military, extending “the West” to a political rather than geographical concept.

Since “The Technological Republic” was published, Karp has gone from being a partial critic of Trump, to a defender. He once declared his “biggest fear is fascism” and that “I always thought if fascism comes, I will be the first or second person on the wall.” So how is he now a Trump donor? How did an anti-fascist become someone seen as authoring a techno-fasicst manifesto?

One of Trump’s extraordinary skills is to recognize and recruit those whose greed and vanity outstrip their principles, and who are happy to shout righteously for a cause they once abhorred. Deregulation, praise and massive contracts are a powerful cocktail to help you forget your commitments, especially when your supposed allies in liberalism are now critical of you. “Being unpopular pays the bills” Karp told a biographer in response to liberal outrage.

Some speculators think Palantir is wildly overvalued due to a Trump bubble where earnings are way out of proportion with stock price, and have tried to short it. Trump praised Palantir when its stock tumbled recently. Right now, the company’s prospects, or at leasts its stock price and leader’s personal wealth, feel increasingly dependent on MAGA’s vision of the world.

But it is uncomfortable to label yourself a sell-out, and so a billionaire anti-fascist write a manifesto about how, yes, they are still defending democracy, and no, they are not working for a fascist. In a thoughtful column, Michelle Goldberg noted that the German politician who was the primary subject of Karp’s dissertation went from being a fascist in the dissertation to a speaker of forbidden truths in “The Technological Republic.” Trump seems to have made the same transition for Karp.

As Palantir becomes engaged in domestic surveillance and immigration enforcement for a government that has repeatedly violated the law, “defending the West” starts to look indistinguishable from bog-standard right-wing ethno-nationalism. As part of a somewhat bizarre critique of his one-time mentor Jurgen Habermas, Karp argued that the structure of public discourse cannot be rational but “must be rooted in a more corporeal and traditional — and indeed national and cultural — source.”

His biographer said that Karp’s views on the West have changed:

Judging by his own words … he does not see multiracial, pluralistic democracy as the thing about the west that should be defended...he sees it much more as just a collection of countries bound by a shared Judeo-Christian heritage, and, to varying degrees, by an attachment to free enterprise. That’s kind of where he is, I think. And it can lead you down some pretty dark paths.

Goldberg’s profile of Karp notes that at one point his reputation as a Democrat, avowed anti-fascist, and bi-racial student activist worked well to dampen Democratic hostility to Palantir when they were in power. Now they are not, Karp has more reason to embrace a different version of his identity. Goldberg concludes: “I was left suspecting that the best explanation for Karp’s journey — as for most of his right-wing billionaire compatriots — is the vulgar materialist one.”

Which public servants deserve accountability, which deserve power and praise?

One striking element of the manifesto is it’s incoherence. At turns it is assertive and dominant, and at other points wheedling in its pleas for grace and tolerance. But if you make some simple assumptions about who the manifesto is talking about, it becomes clearer.

Lets take the following points together since they touch on public service:

8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.
9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.
11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.

18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.

19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.

Again, this is incoherent until you realize that Karp is presenting you with two types of public servants. Civil servants purged under Trump, and the tech elites who venture into government. The former deserve your scorn. The latter — the Alex Karps of the world, the Silicon Valley contractor class — merit your understanding and praise.

Few groups in American public life have suffered more material or reputational damage in the past year than federal civil servants. More than 400,000 employees have left the federal government. For many, they left a dream job, pushed out by people who knew less than they did. They worked under a government where the President declared them to be the deep state, government leaders promised to put them “in trauma” and the President’s supporters often exposed them to harassment campaigns. They were demeaned by bosses who opposed the mission of their organization.

Karp does not have much grace or understanding for this group of public servants. They are overpaid priests. The echo of “will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” may not be intended, but its there. As for the claim that government employees are overpaid, generally, white collar government workers are not overcompensated compared to the public sector, and in some cases forego a significant wage premium. We also spend much more money on contractors than employees, so if you wanted to save money...

Another way to look at this is that billionaires have joined a war on professional administrative class of public servants precisely because of their proximity to formal mechanisms of accountability. Civil servants are sworn to uphold the constitution, report wrongdoing to officials, follow the rules. They are in most respects more accountable than our politicians to ethical and legal requirements, and more difficult to buy off. This makes government slower and more irritating for sure, and puts those officials at odds with the Musks, Andreessens, and Karps of the world, whose vision and interests benefits from reduced oversight and accountability.

I do have some sympathy for the point that procurement processes are unwieldy and political appointees are generally held to a very high standard of scrutiny that often discourages them from participating in government. But frankly, its Democrats who impose those standards, which Trump has abandoned. The Biden administration struggled to get tech elites to join government because of stringent ethical and conflict of interest barriers. The Trump administration has none. Elon Musk made clear that for the chosen few, conflicts of interest no longer exist. New tech hires can stay with their current companies that work with the government.

So the plea for grace for those who enter the public square is not about rules or formal constraints here, but public criticism of power. It has never been easier or potentially more lucrative from the Silicon Valley set to jump into government. The only penalty they face is a social one. While Karp is angry that certain cultures have not been harshly enough criticized, criticism of the consolidation of financial, technological and political power happening in America is off the table.

Public criticism offers one form of accountability. If people violate our laws and norms, should they held accountable? The manifesto’s answers is “yes…for some, not us.” Violent criminals? Yes. Civil servants? Yes. White collar criminals? Well, lets not be hasty? Tech billionaires working for government? That would be “corrosive” for the country.

I’m reminded of the Simpsons character Artie Ziff, Marge’s prom date who later becomes a billionaire. When he asks that Marge not share with others his unwelcome prom night groping, he puts his request for silence in the most virtuous terms possible:

We need to be nicer to the broligarchy….or risk damaging the entire country.

More seriously, how will future Democratic administrations respond to an organization that might have genuinely valuable capacities, but who is not shy about pursuing a hostile ideological agenda and bristles at the slightest accountability.

The merging of people and companies, profit and values

Until relatively recently, Palantir was seen as secretive, criticized more for its connections to founder Peter Thiel than anything Karp said. However, the manifesto is presented as that of Palantir’s, hosted on their website, promoted by their social media. There is no meaningful distinction between the leader, Karp, and the company’s policies, which is an odd thing for a publicly traded company.

Generally its healthy to separate our sometimes weird personal opinions from the organizations we work for. There is a reason that contractors give money to both party and try to limit their ideological stances. They don’t want their values to chase off business. Once those values go beyond internal guidance for employees, and instead become political manifestos, they demand allegiance or opposition.

For example, should a tech company have opinions on military and foreign policy? The manifesto talks about the need to rearm Germany and Japan. Why? Some at the company surely have opinions on this. Others might different opinions. Thats fine. But why should we care about what Palantir thinks?

Similarly, Palantir calls for national military service. This is a common and unfortunate affliction of middle-aged and older men, akin to an interest in the Roman Empire or World War II. Its simply not something you see many men in their 20s promote for obvious I-would-prefer-not-to-die reasons. Charitably, it reflects a sense of a desire for creating shared meaning among the young that the elderly perceive is lacking, or to coerce the elite into sharing the cost of military conflict. Uncharitably, it is the old telling the young how to live and risk their lives.

It is easy to mock Palantir on this. How many of them completed their military service? The may sincerely believe that they are part of the greater military effort via their defense work. Indeed, the Trump administration made some of their executives officers in the Army Reserve. But all of that is beside the point. Why should Palantir have an opinion on this and why should anyone take it seriously?

There are other examples:

The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

As a statement about foreign power, this seems pretty misguided. The US has dissipated its soft power to an extraordinary degree in a rapid period of time. Are we better off for it? We are, as we speak, engaged in a period of hard power and the public does not seem to like its elements — needless wars, tariffs — or its outcomes — higher prices, weakening alliances.

The problem with the manifesto is that Palantir’s worldview and business model are impossible to separate. A world where soft power has real and lasting impact is simply less profitable for a company like Palantir relative to a world where we blow a lot of stuff up. A world featuring an AI arms race is more profitable than a world with AI regulation. A world where Silicon Valley polices domestic crime is more profitable than a world that constrains surveillance on the public. A world with fewer meddlesome government employees is a world where Palantir takes on the administrative reins of the state.

In each of these cases, Palantir takes a stand that is bravely consistent with its bottom line. In an interview with Wired, Karp says that Palantir has put principles before profits, by refusing to work with China and Russia. But I’m skeptical: how exactly can a tech security firm win contracts from the US government while also working with its primary adversaries? When Palantir gets into a fight with the US government akin to Anthropic’s current battle about the use of Claude for violent or unconstitutional ends, they will deserve them more credit.

When the subtext defeats the text

The subtext of the manifesto here is so overwhelming that the text can barely stand up for itself. For example when Karp says:

The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.

…a purely textual interpretation might be that he is commenting on the most powerful man in the world attacking the most visible religious figure in the world. Thats in the news, right? Trump attacks the Pope! A pretty big deal!

But of course, no-one believes that is the intent. Palantir is operating on a series of shared assumptions: that religious intolerance is only a project of the left, despite increasingly open attacks on non-Christian religions from the right; that motivated erosion of individual rights, such as abortions, are not a form of intolerance worth commenting on.

A student who once engaged in Black campus politics now argues that wokeness is a “pagan religion view” inculcated by campuses: “a new religion with sacrifices. Who’s the sacrifice? Me, I’m the sacrifice.” Again, this mix of the powerful preening as victims while blaming woke campuses is bog-standard right-wing fare.

I don’t want to be too critical. Here is a piece of solid advice:

The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed.

Yes. Yes! YES!

Small problem. Its hard to think of any segment of society that has been more guilty of engaging in this than the tech bros. Elon Musk cooked his brain online. Marc Andreessen and others seemingly struggled with being in virtual spaces where their ideas and status were challenged, and rewired their political beliefs as a form of cope.

The Palantir manifesto reflects the worldview not of deep philosophical consideration but of a rotten information environment, one where pluralism and accountability are bad, and coercive power is the necessary and profitable price of freedom. To what degree should our government endorse and support this worldview?

“Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society” according to Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.. But the billions of hours and hundreds of billions of dollars Americans spend on tax reporting are the price we pay for a dysfunctional government unwilling to invest in public interest capacity.

In addition to tariff- and war-induced inflation, Americans can also thank President Trump for allowing this time tax to grow. Trump killed Direct File, a free tax reporting option that IRS had built. Binyamin Appelbaum of the New York Times summed up how I and a lot of other people who care about government services feel:

He has destroyed things that are more important than Direct File, but this one sticks in my craw. It was a straightforward way to make life a little better for a lot of Americans. It was a step toward the kind of easy-to-use, efficient, high-tech government services that everyone claims to want. It worked. And now it’s gone.

What Appelbaum is pointing out that Direct File is not just about whether you save some money at tax time. It is also about whether American government can deliver modern public services in a digital age. One member of the Direct File team I spoke to noted their initial surprise to learn that the US was lagging so far behind other countries when it came to digital tax reporting:

I think that we should have greater ambition to actually do things on the Internet in our government. Just because we’re big and complex and multiple time zones doesn’t mean it’s not possible. So I kind of came with that attitude and was stunned, absolutely stunned to find out that the IRS didn’t offer a free tax filing thing.

Over the last few months I’ve been talking to more than 20 people who worked on the Direct File project, everyone from the top of the policy food chain — like former Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel — to the engineers and designers who worked directly on building the tool itself. This tax season, I’m sharing what I learned. For more detail, you can read a Better Government Lab working paper.

Direct File showed that government could build a high quality tax-reporting digital tool

The idea of reducing tax reporting burdens is not new. Presidents since Reagan made commitments to build something like Direct File before Biden delivered. The logic was clear: you should not have both pay taxes, and pay to complete your legal obligation to report your taxes.

You will never guess who also proposed an IRS app to help for Americans file their taxes.

When I asked those who helped build Direct File about its legacy, a consistent response is that they showed it could be done. Former IRS Commissioner Werfel said “it’s a proof point that the IRS itself can deploy user-friendly paradigm shifting technology in a short turnaround if the preconditions are set up for it to do so.”

The arguments about the technical feasibility about government provided tax-reporting are over. Direct File was small, but it was real and it worked and could have been expanded to tens of millions of taxpayers. Instead, it was killed under DOGE and Trump.

Users loved Direct File:

In 2024, 86% of users said it increased their trust in IRS, not the most beloved of organizations. The Direct File “net promoter score” (a measure of customer satisfaction and loyalty) is 84, well above that of TurboTax, and even Apple. In user surveys conducted by Code for America, 94% prefer Direct File and state equivalents to their previous filing method and 84% said they were “very satisfiedˮwith another 14% being “satisfied” with the product.

Why was Direct File killed?

Without the technical arguments, what are the reasons not to do Direct File? The Trump administration points out that it was not widely used. This is true, but the criticism is a little rich since the Trump administration made no effort to promote the new product it inherited.

The limited use also reflects a strategic choice by the Direct File team to take a “start small, fail small” approach. This was in response to the long shadow of Healthcare.gov, the Obama-era website that rolled out on day 1 without sufficient testing and immediately and very publicly collapsed. Direct File did the opposite — lots of testing, lots of discovery of where users found problems, lots of iterative fixes, improvements, and gradual additions of capability. This approach recognized the political reality that a single big failure would have killed the project. It also matches best practice with how to build a digital product.

It seems more than a little ironic, then, that Direct File was filled by people who said they were bringing tech innovations to government. The fate of Direct File under DOGE was initially unclear. As noted above, Musk talked about building a product that sounded a lot like Direct File, but he also pledged to get rid of the tech unit 18F when someone pointed out they were involved in Direct File

It could be that Musk and DOGE’s intolerance of technologists who did not come from their stable contributed to Direct File’s demise, despite the fact that the Direct File team was doing the sort of thing DOGE said it was going to do: use tech skills to build new products in-house, without relying on expensive contractors.

What we do know is that DOGE officials in IRS initially praised the Direct File team, and reassured them the project would continue — until right before it was cancelled. They changed their tune after meeting with representatives from the private tax preparation industry. Soon after, Direct File was killed.

Intuit, the maker of Turbotax, and other players in the private tax industry poured extraordinary resources into preventing any public option for tax filing. By one measure, Intuit had more lobbyists than the entire Direct File team had employees, and ramped up its spending as Direct File was launched.

The Trump administration says “Direct File had low overall participation and relatively high costs and burdens on the federal government, compared to other free filing options.” I literally wrote the book about administrative burden in the public sector and this has it completely backwards. It is a calculation that only makes sense if you do not value the time and money of citizens, but regard the government doing anything to help the public as a burden.

The average American spends about $290 to file. They also spend about 13 hours, often giving the government information it already has, which works out to another $486 worth of time assuming the average BLS hourly wage.

The Trump administration says that Direct File was too expensive. Compared to what? Direct File cost IRS $16 million in its final year of operation. Between 2021-2025 Intuit also got almost $500 million dollars in federal tax credits.

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Public interest capacity in a democracy

And here I want to make some points about state capacity. I think Direct File tells us about capacity in a couple of ways. First, it reflects whether government can provide digital services that helps the public in a political economy where private sector actors can both make money from those services, and use some of that money to lobby the government to kill a public option.

The Trump administration is building state capacities in certain domains, such as immigration enforcement and surveillance. But if we think about public interest capacity as the ability of the state to generate classic public goods with widely distributed benefits, the Trump administration is largely failing. It is not an exaggeration to say that in order to facilitate a tax cut, your government added administrative burdens to the safety net so that both administrators and the public will spend more time and energy to get less and less from a dysfunctional system. They see value in breaking rather than fixing public services.

Public interest capacity matters to the credibility of democratic systems. The ability of government to competently help the public broadly reinforces liberal democratic systems. Historically, states with administrative capacity centered on merit and impartial public services are less likely to experience democratic breakdowns relative to governments driven by cronyism. The failure to deliver basic public services appears to fuel anti-government populism, even if the populists who benefit end up delivering worse services because they don’t take governance seriously.

The capacity to build digital services

The second capacity point is that Direct File showed us that government can change how it builds such services. The proof of concept that they offered was not just about tax reporting, but about different ways of operating. One team member said: “Direct File was also demonstrating a way of working to the rest of government. This was bringing the US government into the 21st century.”

For people who study or have worked in government there is an emerging conventional wisdom that current modes of operating simply do not work: they are dominated by contractors, cost too much and often don’t deliver. Making it worse, governments traditionally structure contracts in ways that did not allow iterative improvements, and do also not have internal capacity to manage complex tech products built by its contractors.

A member of the Direct File Team described the choice between building internal capacity and

the traditional IRS way: we create a bunch of requirements and we toss it over a fence to a vendor who then builds something and comes back to us in six months, and we see what the product is. We argued pretty hard that that’s not the approach we should be taking. And in fact, we should be building it ourselves in-house…to show that you can build good government technology that doesn’t have to be built by vendors, that it could be built internally within an agency…showing that you can actually transform how this agency works, helping to drive larger changes that would have impacts beyond just Direct File and could help modernize some of the processes and the ways of working.

There is also a better sense of what government should do more of: take ownership of more products in-house, led by smart technologists who actually know how to build, and constantly iterate and improve. Jen Pahlka has labeled a product approach. Direct File represents what is the most visible and ambitious version of the product approach I’ve seen in American government.

Merici Vinton, who helped to lead the Direct File project wrote:

The approach we took to Direct File is the blueprint for future government delivery — multidisciplinary teams, focused on a clear user outcome, delivering in an iterative manner — and while our project might be dead now, you can’t kill a good idea whose time has come.

Private contractors will still play a role in the product approach, but they cannot be in the driver’s seat. For public-facing products in particular, the building needs to incorporate human centered design — constantly looking at user experience, finding and removing pain points. One Treasury employee contrasted working on another project with contractors where:

if you wanted to improve the product, it was this awful game of telephone where you're like totally dependent on, on like a chain of telephone to these contractors who like, may or may not be an A team….They're not really that accountable to you or to the ultimate mission. And it's also just like a kludgy way of operating. Conversely, like the promise of Direct File was to make it a center of gravity not just for itself, but for modernizing the IRS more broadly and for pulling in other parts of the tax system that also needed to be brought into the tax 21st century.

The hollowing out of state capacity

This will be the first tax season after more than 28,000 IRS employees were fired or left, more than 1 in 4 employees, and wants to cut 4,000 staff. Secretary Yellen pointed to the negative effect on IRS capacity: “There is no more money for the IRS. DOGE came in and ruined it.”

After adjusting for inflation, the IRS budget is 40% below its 2010 level, even as it has taken on more responsibilities and serves more taxpayers. And to be clear, this does not save America money: it blows a hole in the deficit. According to the Yale Budget Lab:

The IRS reductions from funding and layoffs have likely resulted in about $861 billion in decreased revenue. The layoffs from actions like DOGE alone have likely resulted in $597.8 billion in decreased revenue over the 2026-2035, and the clawback in IRS funding of $20 billion has likely resulted in $262.8 billion in decreased revenue over the same period.

It remains to be seen how much of an effect this downsizing will have on tax services, but when you are asking HR staff to answer customer service hotlines, the expectations for world-class service will be low.

The cuts had had a very clear effect on Direct File team, which was dismantled, resulting in many skilled technologists leaving government. In all, IRS eliminated about 40% of its tech staff, mostly IRS tech employees who worked outside of Direct File.

One former IRS employee told me that the DOGE official who killed Direct File expressed surprise that people were quitting, asking the team “Who’s gonna do the work?” Because the Direct File team were generally new IRS hires, they were probationary, and so had little job protections, with a widespread expectation that they would be fired as part of broader elimination of probationary employees pursued by DOGE. “No no one ever bothered to talk to them or reverse that sentiment.”

Many who worked on Direct File drew a sharp contrast with DOGE and their approach to building tech products. One point of distinction was DOGE’s seeming disinterest in public interest goals and of the public itself: “if you do not think government has a responsibility to serve people, I think it draws into question how good are you going to be at making government work better for people if you just don’t believe in that underlying principle”

Towards an attitude of wisdom about government reform

Every year I have my students read Karl Weick on sensemaking. One thing I hope sticks with them is what he calls an “attitude of wisdom”: the ability to combine knowledge and doubt, humility with a desire to challenge the status quo. Wisdom involves experience, but also questioning and self-questioning, a willingness to be wrong and adapt.

I thought about the attitude of wisdom when I interviewed Direct File team members. They had to understand the intricacies of the tax code as well as build a good digital product, and noted the tendency of DOGE to underestimate the challenges of managing public services. One put it like this:

I think that anyone who comes into government and wants to make change goes through a period of, like, understanding just how difficult it is to accomplish and just how just what the scope and scale of complexity that you’re dealing with…someone should patent a law that states that the easier a project looks in government, the harder it is to do in reality. The justification being: if it looks really easy and common sense, it means that 20 people have already thought about it and tried it before you, and they’ve all failed because it’s still around…They don’t know what skills are necessary to do this work because I don’t think they understand the complexity of the work. And meanwhile are creating an environment where the people who do know how to do that work either are being forced out by being fired or are not interested in sticking around.

The leads me to propose a paradox of government reform: the simpler a potential change appears, the more likely that it has not been implemented because it features deceptive complexity that others have tried and failed to resolve.

It is also the case that there are often lots of well-pickled myths that contribute to government sclerosis: we can’t do something because we assume we can’t do something, or because one overly-cautious lawyer said we can’t do it years ago.

It can be both true that outsiders underestimate the degree of complexity in changing government, and that insiders overestimate the barriers to change. Sometimes people in government resist change because of an attachment to the status quo, or because the have not tested alternatives. And sometimes they waste a lot of time not learning from failed reforms of the past, repeating the same mistakes.

And this is where an attitude of wisdom would help is knowing the difference between these two scenarios. It is knowing to ask what were the original statutes or rules that generate the constraint — maybe they actually don’t do so. And sometimes it is trusting employees that constraints are real. How do you know the difference?

In the case of the Direct File employees, I don’t think anyone could reasonably accuse them of being attached to the status quo. This is why their testimony of the need to master the complexity of their policy setting feels so striking and credible to me. Maybe DOGE will get around to building great things, but they haven’t so far, even as they pushed out the people that were. They were impatient, and assumed they knew better.

Can we have nice things?

Yes, we can have nice things. We can have a government that builds cool stuff that helps the public. The thing I’ve heard again and again from tech workers in government is the tech is the easy part. Changing the systems in which they work — including procurement and personnel systems — is the bigger lift.

Fixing a political economy where politically powerful actors want them to fail may feel impossible, but the Direct File team gave those actors fewer fig leaves to hide behind. They made the barriers to public interest capacity clearer. One described their hope that Direct File would return in the future:

my hope is that we work to raise the expectations of the political class that make those decisions and that we are fully empowered to do that and that there’s enough of a mass of people to do it as well… that we have really completely reimagined organizations that are just like able to deliver with ambition and scale of Direct File.

A relatively simple account of Direct File is that one presidential administration dedicated political resources and commitment to building a state capacity in tax reporting, while another opposed it. A more sophisticated account considers the role of private interests. The two arguments can be combined: political commitment to public interest capacity was needed to overturn private interest opposition, but the capacities produced are vulnerable to removal if political support is not broad-based.

Long-term private opposition to a public tax option was able to take advantage of a shift to an administration run by officials who doubted the value of public interest projects, and ended the Direct File after consulting with private sector opponents and with little attention to feedback from the public. The Direct File team built a great public interest tool. Then the CEO of an Andreessen-Horowitz-backed start-up, his hedge fund boss, and the private companies that want to kill competition for their products got together and ended it.

Back to the Free File Future

What happens now? Democrats are pushing to reinstate Direct File, and canny Presidential hopefuls might float it in their campaigns to offer a “get shit done” contrast to Trump. The contrast is easy to make, because the Trump administration’s best idea is to go back to the future.

Last year the One Big Beautiful Bill Act directed IRS to look for private partnerships to provide free filing. Folks, we tried this already. It is called the Free File partnership. It has worked poorly for the very good reason that Intuit and other companies ensured that the product was lousy, and used it to redirect customers to their fee-charging products. Indeed, Intuit repaid $141 million to low-income customers for charging them for services advertised as free, and left the Free File partnership after IRS dropped a non-compete clause that blocked Direct File.

Secretary Yellen pointed to the problems of working with the private tax industry as a motivation for Direct File: “And I think the experience maybe we’d had in the past with Intuit or others developing software that the IRS then didn’t control was a negative past experience that suggested doing it in house would be a better way to go.”

And this is the Trump administration solution? Because in America we can’t do the obvious, proven thing to fix problems. We must replay past mistakes, at the public expense, because it is in someone’s private interest to do so.

P.S. Viktor Orban lost his bid to hold power in Hungary yesterday in such a landslide than any attempt to contest the election was not feasible. I wrote in 2024 about how Orban had eroded democracy in Hungary. Pour one out for the right wing intellectuals who Orban paid to boost his political standing and bring these ideas to America: they just lost a generous patron.

While never mentioning Trump or political parties, the show’s second season offers an almost-real time commentary on how policy changes are affecting health — including ICE agents arresting an ER nurse, a MAHA subplot involving turmeric poisoning,1 rural hospital closures, research grants cancelled, and chronic burnout faced by ER workers, our last line of defense in a broken US health care system.

It also provided a window into what will cause millions of Americans to lose their health insurance– as Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill rolls out in 2027.

As last week’s episode unfolded, an adolescent boy is brought into the ER having trouble breathing. He has asthma. His frantic mother explains that she lost Medicaid because renewal forms were sent to her old address, and not forwarded. The family is on the hook for $400 a month for the most affordable medication, but that still does not allow them to purchase the ones he was prescribed. Meanwhile, she is stuck in an administrative rabbit hole — tracking down tax returns and wage documentation that is hard to get given the gig nature of her work — in order to restore their coverage.

This one boy’s story represents a huge problem with Medicaid, one that is – by design– going to cause the largest loss of health insurance coverage in US history. As states begin to implement new Medicaid work requirements in January of 2027, the paperwork hurdles, which already cause chaos for millions of Americans, are about to get a lot worse.

Is this realistic? Yes. Larry Levitt, the Executive Vice President for Health Policy at KFF explained that they had consulted with the show to get the details right while also proposing some other storylines The Pitt could adopt.

How bad is it?

Losing Medicaid coverage–among those still eligible–is a longstanding problem. In The Journal of Economic Perspectives, we provided a specific example:

By the age of five, Abel Sewell had survived cancer and was receiving monthly blood tests to ensure his leukemia had not returned. The tests were covered by TennCare, Tennessee’s Medicaid program, until, at a regular doctor’s visit, his mother discovered that the coverage had lapsed. Abel’s mother spent months fighting to get their coverage restored, ultimately taking out a second months fighting to get their coverage restored, ultimately taking out a second mortgage on their home to manage the mounting health care debt that came from being uninsured. The family very much wanted health services, and were willing to endure significant hardships to get it. Between 2016 and 2019, almost 250,000 children in Tennessee lost coverage. What happened? The Sewells, like many others, said they never received the TennCare renewal forms. Even those who did receive the renewal packets often struggled to complete the 47 pages. Failure to return forms accounted for 67 percent of those who lost coverage, and it seems likely that many of them did not receive the forms due to outdated mailing addresses.

These types of administrative burdens significantly reduce health insurance coverage. It’s incredibly common for people to get kicked off Medicaid–and then to quickly reenroll. For example, among children in 2018, nearly half of those losing coverage regained it within a year—and most were likely still eligible when they lost it.

People need to be aware when it’s time to renew their benefits, and also understand how to actually get through the process. Similar to the mother in the Pitt, because low-income individuals tend to move a lot, beneficiaries often don’t receive notifications that they need to renew.

Knowing you need to renew is just one part of what makes the process so difficult. A recent survey of Medicaid beneficiaries found widespread problems. Almost 60 percent of people renewing their coverage reported problems such as long waits for help, confusion over which documents to submit, and state agencies losing submitted forms and documentation.

There is no shortage of horror stories. Florida was sued by Medicaid beneficiaries who had their coverage terminated, but received notices of that termination which were impossible to decipher. One mother of two received a notification of coverage loss for her entire family, which buried the notice on page 8 of a 12 page document. Her 2 year old, with cystic fibrosis, needs constant medical care. A review of her recorded calls to a help-line noted that she received “conflicting, confusing, and inaccurate information.”

In perhaps one of the more dystopian cases, a blind woman lost her Medicaid coverage because the state sent digital notices to her, instead of her caregiver who handled her paperwork. She couldn’t read the notice. She was one of many eligible beneficiaries who lost coverage, including many postpartum mothers whose insurance is supposed to be maintained for 12 months after the birth of a child.

The coverage loss not only has implications for beneficiaries, it has large implications for overall program costs. People moving on and off the program substantially increases administrative costs, since new enrollments are more onerous than renewing existing clients. By one estimate, churn costs between $400-$600 per person.

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It’s going to get a lot worse

The problem is only going to get worse. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which added work requirements to Medicaid, will be rolled out in January of 2027.

While on the surface, work requirements may seem benign, the reality is that it will tie people up in paperwork that will lead to massive coverage loss. The details of work requirements also do not reflect the reality of a gig or service economy, where hours fluctuate, and documentation might be sparse.

Almost 90 percent of those subject to the work requirements are either exempt or are working. Current projections are that most of the people who will lose coverage will, in fact, still be eligible. In addition to figuring out how to document their employment, a complicated task for people with work lives dominated by unstable employment, multiple jobs, and gig work, beneficiaries will need to recertify twice a year, instead of the current practice of once a year. Prior evidence points to the damage that will result, both in the administrative costs to process these applications, as well as the increased risk that people will erroneously lose coverage.

The Trump Administration is undermining the most feasible solution

There is a way to reduce the coverage loss that comes during renewal processes. States are legally require to attempt automated (ex parte) renewals by drawing on administrative data — such as state tax records — that can verify eligibility. Instead of filling out forms and providing documentation, the state can simply verify your eligibility, automatically reenroll you, based on data they already have on hand.

Indeed, by July of 2024, over half of Medicaid renewals were effectively automated. This compared to less than one-quarter or renewals just a year earlier. The significant improvement was instigated by a series of reforms and capacity supports implemented by the Biden Administration.

The use of these automated processes has the potential to offset significant amounts of coverage loss associated with the new work requirements. But the Trump administration has already made it harder for states to automate renewals by rolling back a series of state administrative flexibilities. Between June and July of 2025 alone — when many policy flexibilities started to expire — ex parte renewals dropped by 6 percentage points.

Conservative organizations have started to target automated Medicaid renewals, arguing it’s “fraud by design.” Conservative states are responding, proposing laws to prevent or limit their Medicaid agencies from doing automated renewals, including bills in Texas and Louisiana.

More broadly, the Trump Administration’s focus on fraud, including in the Medicaid program, will incentivize states to make application and renewal processes harder. The unprecedented withholding of $259 million in Minnesota’s Medicaid funding, despite no meaningful evidence of large scale fraud in the program, is a warning to other states. Indeed, the head of CMS, Dr. Mehmet Oz, has since threatened other states, including Maine, California, Florida, and New York.

We don’t make everyone who gets help paying for their insurance face these burdens

If you’re tempted to think, “Well, it’s not ideal, but sometimes we have to exert a bit of effort to get help,” you might want to consider how most private insurance works. Americans with employer-based health insurance receive large tax subsidies to reduce the costs of that coverage, comparable in scale to spending on Medicaid and CHIP, but don’t face equivalent administrative burdens. Indeed, the role of government is so invisible that most people don’t even realize that it’s subsidizing their insurance in the first place.

If you have employer based coverage, imagine engaging in a process similar to that of Medicaid beneficiaries to obtain your employer based subsidy–complicated applications, confusing requirements for documentation, and hit or miss communication when you need to renew your benefit annually.

What’s coming in January 2027

As states stare down the January 2027 deadline to implement Medicaid work requirements, there is growing concern about their capacity to actually implement them —and the consequences for the public if they fail.

Even with well designed administrative procedures, it will be very difficult to implement work requirements without coverage loss among the eligible. But states are making clear they are struggling to meet the current timeline — and the federal government is doing very little to help. They still haven’t released guidance to states regarding the specific rules they will need to follow to implement them, leaving states guessing, even as the deadline rapidly approaches.

The consequences for the public will be devastating. The story dramatized on The Pitt will become an all-too common occurrence across the American health care system.

As Supreme Court Justices debated whether Trump’s claim that the plain text of the Constitution grants people born in America citizenship, it represents just one more episode in a shameful history of demonizing immigrants. The attitude of the Justices at oral arguments suggests that Trump is destined to lose, despite his unprecedented decision to appear in the courtroom. But the fact that the case went so far despite the plain text of the constitution, ample precedent, and the Fourteenth Amendment framers’ intent, is astonishing.

In defending Trump v Barbara, the case about the constitutionality of Trump’s Executive Order stripping birthright citizenship, Solicitor General John Sauer’s case opens with: “The ‘main object’ of the Citizenship Clause was to grant citizenship to freed slaves and their children, whose allegiance to the United States had generally been established through generations of parental domicile.”

In the oral arguments, Justice Alito went further, suggesting that illegal immigration was not a problem at the time of the Fourteenth Amendment, implying that the lack of a historical record discussing the exemption of immigrants from birthright citizenship is not a problem for Trump’s arguments. Justice Gorsuch stated that there were no immigration laws in the 1860s.

These claims are historically inaccurate.

The Fourteenth Amendment framers meant also to clarify the legal citizenship of free Black people. The under-defined citizenship of the large population of free African Americans before the Civil War had made this group vulnerable to a range of restrictionist state-level migration laws and other forms of racial discrimination. While policymakers of another era may not have thought about immigration in the same way they do today, they were clearly determined to limit the internal migration of free Black Americans, laws that the Fourteenth Amendment helped to wipe away.

In oral argument, the government and the ACLU had different interpretations of the original public meaning of the birthright citizenship clause. Even if Trump’s executive order is defeated, it provides us with an opportunity to revisit the origins of birthright citizenship. While Sauer emphasized an “intent to remain” as a key feature of citizenship, for Black Americans their ability to move around was circumscribed by state laws. Indeed, citizenship was extended to all Black Americans because their internal migration and settlement was previously restricted by state laws before their legal citizenship was clarified.

Today, Americans witness the human misery of the federal government’s ability to run mass migrant detention centers and to commit due process and equal protection violations of immigrants and citizens. The scope and scale of immigration enforcement is enabled by the US government’s control of immigration and the Department of Homeland Security’s eye popping $178 billion dollar budget. This runs contrary to an older and mostly forgotten history of when the federal government did not always control migration. My book Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship—African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants explores the history of migration before the federal government took over from the states in 1888. What form did state migration laws take and what was it like for the people who had to live under these regimes of control?

My research on immigrant experiences spans the colonial period until 1888, identifying the “administrative burdens” they encountered on the way. The use of these administrative burdens is also a clue about how state capacity was used. States with limited administrative capacities used burdens to create pretexts for racial profiling and harassment of politically disfavored groups. This stands in contrast to today, where the federal government is investing in massive new capacities to the same end.

Historical Colonial and State Migration Laws

The US has never been a nation with open borders, even before there was a United States. Phalanxes of laws were on the books as early as the colonial period to recruit and import scarce labor and to ban unwanted migrants (for example Quakers, Catholics, convicts). Other laws were in place to regulate the reluctant labor of European indentured servants and, later, enslaved Africans by requiring paper passes to police their movements. Colonial laws were then carried forward into the US after the founding and replicated by the states in the early republic to the late nineteenth century.

Before the control over international and interstate migration transferred to the federal level in 1888, nineteenth century restrictions on the international and internal mobility and settlement of free Black people was locally managed. Slave and free state governments had laws on the books restricting the mobility and for their ability to stay in the place of their choosing of free Black Americans. Lacking the manpower and financial resources to round up and deport the unwanted population of free Black people, both slave and free states passed laws that created administrative burdens to prevent the formation of large free Black communities.

These racially discriminatory laws were responses by state governments to the increased manumission of enslaved people in the early national period, and their rejection of the formation of large free Black communities. States legislatures claimed that free Black people were incapable of economic self-sufficiency and more prone to criminal activity. Slave states did not want a large free Black population forming that might interact with the enslaved population leading to possible insurrections.

Sub-national management of migration was the norm for a century after the US founding until as late as 1888. Why did that configuration of power last that long? There were decidedly political reasons why states wanted to keep migration policy for themselves. Colonies and then northeastern seaboard states were collecting revenue from head taxes or bonds on poor, sickly, or disabled people who they believed could not economically take care of themselves and would become burdens on their communities. Colonial era laws taxed heavily sick, disabled, or poor people. Those ancient laws were the forerunners of what US immigration law today, which contains a ban based on one’s likelihood to become “a public charge.”

Slave states loathed the idea of federal control over migration because they feared the possibility that the President and national government could deport all their enslaved property. Before the Civil War, any changes made to state laws about voluntary migration would also mean changes to slavery laws as states had regionally-specific reasons for preserving migration laws for themselves. The Supreme Court repeatedly upheld state migration laws based on the legal doctrine of state police powers, which gave states the authority to manage policy areas having to do with health, safety and morals.

In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, free African Americans’ interstate mobility became more difficult as slave and free states passed interlocking laws to restrict their internal migration and settlement. These laws were a blend of outright bans on new Black migration into the state, exile laws mandating African Americans who became free to leave the state (and not return) by a deadline or be re-enslaved, or statutes mandating compliance with administrative burdens to simply stay in a state.

Historian Samantha Seeley explains that Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin attempted “to form a bloc that would not accept African American migrants.” Some of the legal requirements for Black people to stay were grafted onto vagrancy and poor laws, whose main purpose was to prevent the legal settlement of indigent people who might drain public coffers. These laws existed at a time when there were no government safety net anti-poverty programs. The additional intent of poor and vagrancy laws, though, was to minimize formations of large free Black communities.

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“Show Me Your Papers” Laws

Administrative burdens can be racialized. One way that free and slave states alike policed free African American’s mobility was to require them to produce paper documents to prove their right of presence. The requirement of paper documentation was a way during the existence of legalized chattel slavery that white people could distinguish between free Black people and enslaved ones.

Because of the need to police and surveil all African Americans’ mobility and settlement, Black people’s liberty could be as fragile as the pieces of paper they were forced to carry. At a time when there was no xerox or digital technology, free African Americans transported around their former enslavers’ wills manumitting them, affidavits of clerks from slave jurisdictions verifying their freedom, and similar documents. Few had birth certificates. These papers could be lost, stolen, damaged, or simply disbelieved by white people with power. Most white people faced no such burdens, although poor people (of any race) were sometimes required to carry passes and faced heavier scrutiny if they moved around too much or tried to remain in a place where local authorities did not deem them to be legally settled.

Administrative Burdens to Stay in a Jurisdiction

Today we assume the legal right to enter a jurisdiction also means the right to stay there for a time. Before the Reconstruction Amendments, the right to mobility and ability to remain were two different rights—both controlled by state laws.

Slave and free states required that free African Americans go to the local clerk’s office to register themselves and bring proof of how they came to be free in order to legally remain in their jurisdictions. Other states required the payment of exorbitant fees, for example “from $500 to $100” in Virginia before 1793 to stay. Additionally, places like the District of Columbia in 1821 had a law requiring a “license” to stay in addition to producing three “respectable white inhabitants” to verify a free Black American’s financial independence.

As historian Kate Masur writes, “the nation’s internal borders were far more significant for Black people than they were for white people.”

With a crazy quilt of exile and settlement laws, many states used their limited power to restrict Black mobility and their ability to remain. Herd and Moynihan define administrative burdens as the costs that people encounter when they search for information and public services, comply with rules and requirements, and experience the stresses, loss of autonomy, or stigma that some from such encounters. Lacking the administrative capacity to deport a large free African American population or to surround the states’ borders with border patrol agents, states instead use administrative burdens to hamstring their mobility and their desire to set roots or to move around to pursue employment opportunities.

Although there is little evidence that these laws were widely enforced, they provided a pretext for racial profiling and the harassment of all Black people. James Forten, an African American man born free, wrote in Letters from a Man of Color, on a Late Bill Before the Senate of Pennsylvania in 1813 that he objected to state registration and document production requirements for Black people. He argued that such laws would provide the police and slave patrols with excuses “to apprehend any black, whether a vagrant or a man of reputable character who cannot produce a certificate that he has been registered.”

States thus used administrative burdens to make the lives of Black Americans stressful and to cast suspicion on their mere presence. Legislators’ ultimate hope was that African Americans would not remain.

It was not until the Civil War concluded and the Reconstruction Amendments were passed that immigration transitioned to the federal level and immigration laws came to be nationalized. With slavery invalidated by the Thirteenth Amendment, slave states stopped fighting with the federal government for control over international and internal migration.

The end of the Civil War also led to Supreme Court invalidations of northeastern state laws restricting poor, disabled, and sickly migrants. The decoupling of slavery from voluntary migration laws enabled the Supreme Court in a series of cases to strike down northeastern state migration state laws it had previously routinely upheld.

Northeastern states now feared that they would be overrun by people who would become economic drains and started lobbying the US government to assume control over immigration. The federalization and nationalization of immigration controls would start in 1875 and not be completed until 1888.

All the state laws restricting Black mobility and settlement were possible before the Reconstruction Amendments because all African Americans’ (including native-born ones) legal citizenship was under-defined. Although northeastern states claimed Black men as state citizens, the hierarchy between state and US citizenship was unclear.

And here we return to birthright citizenship. The Fourteenth Amendment’s birthright citizenship clause not only states unequivocally that African Americans are US citizens but as national citizens they are entitled to due process and equal protection of the laws.

The Reconstruction Amendments did not come about because of white noblesse oblige. African Americans had long fought back against racist laws that were enabled by their under-defined legal citizenship. They mounted grassroots resistance by organizing through networks of Black churches, newspapers, and conventions to challenge their oppression.

As the Reconstruction Amendments invalidated slavery and confirmed the US citizenship of Black Americans, the state-level migration restrictions were invalidated. Today, immigration controls have transferred to the federal government, with far more administrative capacity than the states ever had.

The federal assumption of immigration power has not meant more freedom. Although grassroots activism by immigrants and their supporters are underway, the challenge to overturn unjust immigration enforcement is larger given the sweep and orbit of federal power now.

Federal Control of Immigration Today

The cost of transitioning immigration controls to the federal government can be measured in profound human suffering. We know today that the Department Homeland Security has, as of February 2026, 68,289 non-citizens in detention. The Transactional Records Access Clearing House that obtains data directly from the federal government, also reports that of those in detention, 73.6% have no criminal convictions. (A violation of immigration law is civil in nature.)

More disturbing than the sheer number of people in immigration detention are the squalid conditions. Sometimes migrants are held up to a year without having the opportunity to see an Immigration Judge. This network of federal migrant detention camps have resulted thus far in 2026 in 11 deaths. In 2025, 31 deaths which was “a two decade high” died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody.

Lest US citizens believe they are immune to DHS’ dragnet; there are disturbing reports of ICE using technology called Mobile Fortify to verify people’s immigration status with facial scans. The technology, which was never authorized by Congress to be used in the interior of the US, can result in wrongful arrests.

Like free Black people before the Civil War who carried the burden of proof to demonstrate that they were not enslaved people to any white person who might ask, the burden of proof today has been borne disproportionately by US citizens and immigrants who are people of color as ICE aggressively tries to meet daily arrest quotas.

ProPublica’s investigation found at least 170 US citizens who had been assaulted and/or detained by ICE. Nicole Foy writes, “Immigration agents do have authority to detain Americans in limited circumstances. Agents can hold people whom they reasonably suspect are in the country illegally. We found more than 50 Americans who were held after agents questioned their citizenship. They were almost all Latino.”

Today we are told by the former head of the Department of Homeland Security that US citizens should be prepared to show proof of citizenship in the interior. The US has returned to a prior era as a “show me your papers” state, selectively enforced against people of color. The past is not quite past, but the form of government power has taken on new dimensions.

Dr. Anna O. Law is the Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights at the City University of New York, Brooklyn College. She researches, writes, and teaches in US constitutional law, US immigration policy history, legal history, and American political development. She is the author of Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship—African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants