It feels like a century ago that Donald Trump stood on the west front of the U.S. Capitol and was sworn in for a second time, promising to seize the Panama Canal, slap tariffs on the world, dispatch troops to the southern border, and let Elon Musk chop down the federal government. But while the past 11 months have often been exhausting and dispiriting, they’ve also been invigorating for us at the Washington Monthly as we generate new ideas to take on MAGA, never flinch from criticizing liberals and Democrats, and offer reporting and analysis that explains what’s really going on. 

We’re not calling these 11 pieces our best (although they are among them), nor are they among our most widely read (though many are), but they are representative of the continued breadth and inventiveness of this magazine in its 56^th year. 

Of course, it takes readers like you to keep our work going, so we hope, in an age of corporate and consolidating media, you’ll support our non-profit, independent voice. Meanwhile, if you’ve read these before, see how they held up, and if you haven’t, you’re in for a treat. We’re proud of them. 

The post 11 of Our Most Memorable Pieces from 2025  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

When I did my first stint at the Washington Monthly in the 1980s, as a 24-year-old, the magazine was in a ramshackle office near Washington’s Dupont Circle. I worked long hours for $10,000 a year ($28,111 in today’s dollars) as we all did, including Paul Glastris, also in his 20s, who was finishing his tenure at the magazine and is now the editor-in-chief. Our boss, the magazine’s founder Charles Peters, was deeply inspiring, but he could also be, shall we say, infuriating. One night after being up for days, I went to his home amid a snowstorm to drop off copy, leaving it in an old-fashioned steel milk box on his stoop. (These were the earliest days of email. And neither the Monthly nor Charlie had a fax machine.) By the time I made it back to my garret, as sunrise approached, Charlie was calling me to tell me how I’d erred in editing a story about Gary Hart, the senator and presidential candidate. The real scandal, Charlie said, wasn’t that the Coloradan had been photographed with a young woman aboard the yacht named Monkey Business. But that Hart, whom we liked, was cavorting with the Louisiana lobbyist who owned the boat. I can’t remember what subpoint I flubbed. I do remember that I assumed wrongly, but not without reason, given his tone, that I’d been fired. 

The Washington Monthly is always trying to get at the real story, unafraid to say bad things about people we liked or good things about those we opposed. But we can’t do it without your help. Can you make a tax-deductible contribution to keep us going? 

This year was no exception when it came to challenging shibboleths of the left and right. The Monthly broke ground by raising questions about the “abundance” critique of some liberals we admire, such as Ezra Klein, who maintain that red tape and regulation are holding back the country and liberals. While acknowledging that bureaucracy is often burdensome—the Monthly was born with the idea of making government work—we found that other factors, such as monopolies and corporate lobbying, were often bigger drivers of our national dysfunction. See “The Meager Agenda of Abundance Liberals” by Glastris and my colleague Nate Weisberg, and “The Broadband Story Abundance Liberals Like Ezra Klein Got Wrong” by Glastris and Kainoa Lowman. 

Please donate now to the Washington Monthly. We depend on readers like you.  

The Washington Monthly was born 56 years ago during a crisis for liberals. It was 1969. John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier and Lyndon B. Johnson’s had crashed on the shoals of the Vietnam War, riots, and the 1968 presidential election, where the combined vote of Richard Nixon and George Wallace was just under 57 percent. The magazine was born to examine how government should work, where it succeeds, and where it often fails. Peters had been a New Frontiersman and a founder of the Peace Corps. 

When Glastris took over the magazine in 2001, liberals, progressives, and common-sense centrists were on their back foot after the 2000 elections. But he enriched the magazine with a newfound focus on antitrust and sophisticated, big-idea thinking about industrial policy, health care, and international trade. While some in the center pushed for incremental solutions and some on the left advocated big, but bad, ideas, the Monthly fused ideas that were both big and smart. The result was the acclaimed magazine you’re reading today, where a new breed of young editors and some wizened hands like me and Glastris keep this venerable institution going.  

We need your help. The Washington Monthly is a nonprofit, so your donation is entirely tax-deductible. Whatever you can afford helps. For just $50, you’ll receive the magazine’s print edition, going strong since 1969.  

The post When the Country Is in Trouble, the Washington Monthly Is There  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

It feels like a century ago that Donald Trump stood on the west front of the U.S. Capitol and was sworn in for a second time, promising to seize the Panama Canal, slap tariffs on the world, dispatch troops to the southern border, and let Elon Musk chop down the federal government. But while the past 11 months have often been exhausting and dispiriting, they’ve also been invigorating for us at the Washington Monthly as we generate new ideas to take on MAGA, never flinch from criticizing liberals and Democrats, and offer reporting and analysis that explains what’s really going on. 

We’re not calling these 11 pieces our best (although they are among them), nor are they among our most widely read (though many are), but they are representative of the continued breadth and inventiveness of this magazine in its 56^th year. 

Of course, it takes readers like you to keep our work going, so we hope, in an age of corporate and consolidating media, you’ll support our non-profit, independent voice. Meanwhile, if you’ve read these before, see how they held up, and if you haven’t, you’re in for a treat. We’re proud of them. 

The post 11 of Our Most Memorable Pieces from 2025  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Author’s Note: This article was written on the occasion of Charles Peters’s 96th birthday, but we’ve run it a few times, both to celebrate this magazine’s founder but also because—and he more than anyone would appreciate this—it’s proven a compelling fundraising letter, allowing this small publication to thrive in its 56th year. Since Charlie passed away on Thanksgiving 2023, we thought this might be a good moment again to reflect on his vision for the magazine and how it’s evolved under his successor, Editor-in-Chief Paul Glastris, over the past 25 years. —MC

A little over 20 years ago, I made a short film in honor of Charlie Peters, the founding editor of the Washington Monthly. The American Society of Magazine Editors was inducting my old boss and mentor to its Hall of Fame, a kind of Cooperstown of glossies. Held at a glitzy luncheon at New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel, the editors of venerable titles lavishly toasted themselves as the National Magazine Awards were handed out. (In retrospect, it had an end-of-an-era feeling, with 9/11 and the collapse of so many publications in the offing.)

My short film was a precis to Charlie getting his Thalberg. It began with shots of the Time-Life Building, the Newsweek building, and the Condé Nast tower, followed by voiceover narration: “… and this is the Washington Monthly.” Cut to rickety stairs in a dilapidated building over a liquor store in D.C.’s Dupont Circle.

Much of the crowd laughed, getting the contrast—and the improbable story of Charlie and the publication he founded in 1969, which has now survived far longer than many of the slick publications being fêted that day.

Charlie was almost 75 when he was hailed in 2001. Today, he deserves an even bigger toast as he turns 96.

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For those of us lucky enough to have visited with Charlie at his Washington home, we’ve found him physically slower but still sharp—a remarkable achievement for a man born during the Coolidge administration. When I last saw him, we talked about family and Joe Biden. Charlie remembered a moment from my 1997 wedding as if it were a month ago. (His lovely wife, Beth, a former ballerina, appears ageless.) Yes, Charlie’s body shows its age, and he doesn’t get out much, but his mind still glows.

Peters, with the Monthly as his crucible, reshaped the lives of so many young writers, including myself, who would go on to become prominent journalists. They include James Fallows, Jon Meacham, Katherine Boo, Nicholas Lemann, Michelle Cottle, Jonathan Alter, Gregg Easterbrook, Stephanie Mencimer, David Ignatius, Joe Nocera, and Michael Kinsley, another Hall of Fame winner. It wasn’t just that a bevy of smart kids passed through the Washington Monthly, as if it were another ticket to punch between college and The New York Times. It’s that we were transformed. We learned, in Charlie’s phrase, to cover Washington like an anthropologist covers a South Seas island. And not just to cover it with an eye for what’s wrong, but to write about things that work—a task that, especially at the time, most journalists eschewed, fearing that they’d seem opinionated or biased.

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I came under Charlie’s spell in the 1980s, when he hired me as an editor, and we worked in those ratty offices I mentioned (and an earlier set we vacated when the rent got too high). My salary was $10,000 a year—around $26,000 in today’s purchasing power, actually just enough to get by in pre-gentrified Washington. I’d fallen in love with the magazine when I was in college at Columbia in New York City. My best friend, Marc, subscribed, and I got hooked reading his copies.

Eventually, I became so enamored that I habitually raced every month to a nearby luncheonette/newsstand on Morningside Heights, which got the issue a bit ahead of Marc’s. I’d lap it up with scrambled eggs and a bialy. It was funny and irreverent, yes, but also softhearted and hardheaded.

Working for Charlie was not, shall we say, easy. In the days before HR departments were everywhere and the phrase “work-life balance” had become a cliché, Charlie rode us hard. Usually, he had two young editors at a time cranking out a monthly publication, a staff far smaller than even other financially strapped opinion magazines. We’d work for two years and then move on. Why endure the low pay and long hours? Charlie was not a masseur of copy (“Let’s move this paragraph here”) or a Rolodex impresario (“Call Senator So-and-So for comment”). He expressed his ideas in his inimical “rain dance,” a kind of sermon, if you will, in which he’d become increasingly animated about a point he was trying to convey to one of us. His corpus of ideas was fondly referred to as “the gospel.”

I remember one article I suggested about how our culture lacked a Charles Dickens, a first-rate writer with a large audience who could evoke sympathy for the poor, something well needed at the time (it was the Reagan era). Charlie immediately got the idea and elevated it. We need someone who not only sparks empathy with the easily lovable, law-abiding Cratchit of A Christmas Carol, he told me. But also with the criminal, decidedly non-saccharine Artful Dodger of Oliver Twist, which is much more challenging but crucial.

Charlie could also be a tough taskmaster. One night after being up for days, I went to his home amid a snowstorm to drop off copy, leaving it in an old-fashioned steel milk box on his stoop. Fearing getting stuck, my cabbie refused to take me back to the marginal neighborhood where I lived. (This sounds like a Dickensian tale, but these were the earliest days of email. And neither the Monthly nor Charlie had a fax machine.) By the time I made it back to my garret, as sunrise approached, Charlie was calling me to tell me how I’d erred in editing a story about Gary Hart. The real scandal, Charlie said, wasn’t the Colorado senator who had been photographed with a young woman aboard the yacht named Monkey Business. The scandal about the presidential frontrunner transfixed the mainstream media. Charlie understood that the real scandal was Hart, whom we liked, cavorting with the Louisiana lobbyist who owned the boat. I can’t remember what subpoint I flubbed. I do remember that I assumed wrongly, but not without reason, given his tone, that I’d been fired.

At 96, Charlie is still a lodestar guiding me. Part of it is political. He has retained his belief, born of experience during and after the Depression, of how government can change lives for the better. As a supporter of John F. Kennedy in the crucial 1960 West Virginia primary and later as the director of evaluation of the Peace Corps, he saw how politics could inspire and how government succeeded and failed.

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But much of our admiration stems from Charlie’s personal example, and not just because he was a Negroni man decades before the hipsters. So many idealists come to Washington to do good and stay, as the phrase goes, to “do well”—meaning to enrich themselves. Charlie is a huge exception. He paid himself a pittance and lived on the edge of financial ruin to make this magazine work. When Paul Glastris (also a former editor) took over the Monthly in 2001, he kept Charlie’s lessons and ethos (and necessary frugality) and put his own mark on a new range of topics from higher education—with the magazine’s revolutionary college guides—to its powerful reporting on monopolies. As Paul says, all of us have Charlie’s voice in our head, asking, “Is that good enough?”

If you think the Monthly’s brand of solutions-based policy-focused journalism is essential, and if you want to celebrate Charlie’s 96th birthday, there’s something you can do: Make a donation. In fact, do it right now.

As a nonprofit, we cannot do our work without your support. And as a celebration of Charlie Peters, I can’t think of a better gift. Plus, as a token of our gratitude, if you give $50 or more, you’ll receive a free one-year subscription to the print edition of the Washington Monthly.

Note: A version of this article originally appeared in December 2021.

The post Washington Monthly Founder Charlie Peters Died On Thanksgiving Two Years Ago. Why He Still Matters appeared first on Washington Monthly.

When I interviewed for a Washington Monthly internship in March, I was contemplating abandoning journalism, even though I hadn’t finished journalism school. After completing a final summer newsroom stint at the 56-year-old magazine (assuming I was accepted), I’d find a job that paid the bills. “Anything that doesn’t make the world a worse place,” I told myself. 

I was readying to jump ship because the kind of in-depth writing jobs I wanted were rare and, if you could manage to snag one, too financially unstable for those of us with looming student debt. Besides, I’d been told in J-school that nobody reads long-form pieces anymore. And I thought any article I managed to pen was unlikely to reach those who didn’t already agree with me. 

I hadn’t turned gloomy in a vacuum. My journalism master’s program was heavy on professors’ nostalgia for staff writing positions that no longer existed, and award-winning freelancers spilling the beans on commercial copywriting gigs they settled for to make ends meet. It was peppered with the grim bromides for today’s news industry. “Write like no one will read past the third paragraph, because odds are they won’t,” one professor advised. “We don’t do this for the money,” guest speakers explained. “Long-form writing? Paid? On staff? Forget about it,” our mentors pounded into us. While I was there, my favorite teacher left journalism altogether. 

My Monthly summer as a paid intern—many news outfits don’t pay interns–poked holes in my morose preconceptions, revealing glimpses of the sun. Like every newbie here, I fact-checked and worked on my own stories. My first Monthly piece—on how AmeriCorps acts as an antidote to brain drain, inspired by having returned to my rural hometown through a national service program—got a shoutout in Politico’s “Playbook,” meaning that someone buckled in for a 2,000-word-plus piece. And on my second piece, the editors pushed me to appeal to readers who might disagree. The Monthly still believes in the power of persuasion.  

But we can’t do our work without your help. We need reader contributions to keep this 56-year-old magazine going. Please help us.

Working on the Washington Monthly’s annual College Guide, which celebrates underdog universities that focus on educating non-wealthy students over prestige or profit, the Monthly’s core mission became clearer for me. I knew this magazine offered ideas to benefit working-class Americans. What I learned is that the Monthly staff intelligently and relentlessly breathe life into those ideas. Write, and it may come to pass. History backs my superiors’ faith. After two decades of the Washington Monthly College Guide, some universities stopped participating in the U.S. News & World Report rankings, citing the rankings’ bias toward selectivity over affordability and social mobility. In 2023, U.S. News & World Report also revised its college rankings to align more closely with the Monthly’s methodology. This magazine has a time-honored tradition of subtle, meaningful influence. 

Sure, at times, I’ve struggled during my first semester in the Monthly’s J-school. It’s easy to be intimidated by the cast of thinkers this place cultivates, from former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan to TIME correspondent Eric Cortellessa to Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson to my fellow editors today. Moreover, solutions-based policy journalism is a daunting challenge, as the MAGA movement is taking a wrecking ball to the institutions required to enact change.  

But improving today’s grim governance means offering voters better options, and, despite my doomsday career musings, I’ve landed in a place that does just that. “Not many people get to do this in their lives,” our editor-in-chief, Paul Glastris, said recently. He meant to shape national conversations, arming policymakers and constituents alike with ideas for the greater good. Glastris started as an intern, too. 

The Washington Monthly has convinced me to stay the course. I’ll keep faith that great ideas—tested, challenged, and refined—can shape public debate.  

If you think our brand of independent solutions-based journalism, and the opportunity the Monthly provides for young writers to become lifelong journalists, is essential, there’s something you can do: Make a donation.  

As a nonprofit, the Monthly only survives with your support. If you prefer print to screen reading, give $50 or more, and you’ll receive a free one-year subscription to the print edition of the Washington Monthly. Thank you. 

All the best, 

Gillen Tener Martin 

Associate Editor 

The post The Washington Monthly Restored My Faith in Journalism (Jobs)  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

A year ago, I was in my childhood bedroom, firing off job applications and experiencing what I would later write about for the Washington Monthly: that new graduates don’t launch into the labor market; they seep in slowly, usually with dread, even more so during economic downturns like the self-made one America is living through. However, I wrote, the truth is that college graduates are far better positioned than those without a degree. It’s frustrating when you’re the one sending out résumés. Still, it’s precisely the kind of nuanced story the Monthly exists to tell—resistant to the louder, simpler narratives that dominate the news cycle, but essential for policymakers to understand.  

Donate to the Washington Monthly today. 

A year later, I’m still in my childhood bedroom. But thankfully, as the data would predict, I landed a job. And now I’m somehow writing stories, commissioning writers, and helping shape a legendary 56-year-old magazine. 

I’m learning a lot, Monthly-style. My phone often rings, and it’s Paul Glastris, the editor-in-chief, who gives editing notes by phone, usually unannounced. (“You got a second?” means: buckle up.) When I interviewed with him, he asked who I read. I said Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias, assuming it was a safe response for a center-left publication like the Washington Monthly. (It had the added virtue of being true.) Klein is a former Monthly intern after all, touted on our application page. Paul nodded. A few weeks later, when he called and asked me to critique Klein’s “abundance” theory of what ails the country and liberalism, I don’t think he remembered that conversation. 

The piece I wound up co-authoring with Paul in March was the first comprehensive response to the arguments made by abundance liberals like Klein and Yglesias—about housing, energy, and the role of the state. Some 50 stories in other outlets have rehashed our points. 

But that’s how it works when you write for a magazine that’s ahead of the curve. We were the first to dedicate an entire issue responding to the abundance movement, and since then, we’ve continued to strengthen our case with additional reporting and investigations. Other publications are always playing catch-up. 

We don’t just catch ideas early, we catch people, too. My favorite piece I’ve written is a profile of Batya Ungar-Sargon, a pundit many people hadn’t heard of, who has evolved from a left-leaning academic to a social-justice liberal to a MAGA cheerleader. (Matt Cooper, the executive editor, worked at the Monthly when he was my age, suggested the idea, and edited the piece.) She wouldn’t talk to me, but her friend Steve Bannon did. I called her “the first new media star of the second Trump presidency.” To my surprise, Jonathan Chait of The Atlantic and Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC shared the piece, a testament to our small magazine’s reach. Batya is now a CNN contributor and has her own eponymous show on NewsNation.

Donate now to the Washington Monthly. 

What I’ve learned at the Washington Monthly is simple: look where others aren’t. Ask the complex question. Build the case. And then write the hell out of it. Start over and do it again.  

That approach has taken me everywhere. I wrote a piece on New York Democrats’ Election Day wipeout, focusing on candidates like Representative Pat Ryan, who’d figured out how to outperform. I interviewed a lawyer from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau about the gutting of his agency from within. I spoke with Democratic and Republican operatives in Kansas about the parallels between Trump’s second-term policies and Sam Brownback’s disastrous supply-side experiment for a piece that turned out to be prescient. And I’ve managed to insert myself into the debate about the future of the Democratic Party, American liberalism, and MAGA. 

After ten months here, I’m still pinching myself. None of it would’ve happened without this magazine and the chances it takes on young writers, as well as the mentoring it provides them. 

This magazine wouldn’t exist without readers like you. 

If you’ve ever read something in the Monthly and thought, “I haven’t seen that anywhere else,” that’s not an accident. That’s what happens when a magazine with a skeleton staff and a shoestring budget gives young people like me a shot. And when it hits, it hits hard. 

A $50 gift gets you a subscription. A larger one allows us to publish stories that other outlets wouldn’t touch—and means a new crop of writers, restless and eager to prove themselves. 

Please give if you can. 

The post My Washington Monthly Education  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Dear Reader, 

When Legal Affairs Editor Garrett Epps and I launched the Washington Monthly podcast last year, it was a shoestring affair—and still is. If you listen to our earliest episodes—please don’t, actually—you’ll hear uneven audio and cringe at my efforts to channel the honeyed smoothness of my audio hero, Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. (Garrett, however, sounds great.)  

Our first guest and guinea pig was Washington Monthly contributor Peter Shane. The legal scholar warned listeners of President-elect Donald Trump’s threats to use “recess appointments” to install a cabinet—an act that seems only mildly transgressive in retrospect—and that the 47^th president has used aggressively.  

Join the conversation at the Washington Monthly.  

Since then, Garrett and I have spoken with the sharpest legal, political, and economic minds about Trump’s wrecking-ball presidency such as the popular YouTuber Natalie Wynn, who has dissected the allure of conspiracism; journalist Michael Grunwald, whose new book chronicles the environmental destruction caused by agriculture; and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ian Johnson, who offered lessons Americans can learn from China’s dissidents.  

We know that videos and podcasts are how many Americans get their news. We want the Monthly to be among the voices you turn to for fresh thoughts, new ideas about defeating MAGA and promoting a common-sense vision for America, or thoughtful analysis that puts our chaotic world into context. We’re building a community. And that goes for our newsletters, too. 

But we need your help. This is only possible with your support. Your contributions allow us to expand the Monthly’s presence online, on your feeds, and in your headphones. We hope you’ll take a moment to support us with a tax-deductible contribution. Please do it now. For only $50, you get a complimentary year of our print edition. Next year promises to be one of the most consequential in the history of our democracy. Join us. 

All the best, 

Anne Kim 

Senior Editor 

The post A Podcast With Purpose appeared first on Washington Monthly.

As the government shutdown enters its fourth week, the impacts are taking their toll on workers nationwide. The shutdown exacerbates the precarious economic situation for millions of Americans impacted by Trump’s capricious tariff regime. The stock market isn’t yet feeling the pinch, but that is partly because it is buoyed by an AI investment frenzy that looks increasingly like a bubble getting ready to pop. 

Most attention has understandably focused on furloughed government workers, the recently unemployed, and the cruel, partisan cuts Donald Trump’s administration is making in blue states and cities. But another class of workers also suffers greatly from these shocks while receiving little attention: the self-employed. For example, self-employed individuals, small business owners, and their employees make up roughly half of all adults covered by Obamacare, premiums for which are set to skyrocket in January thanks to GOP-imposed cuts that are at the center of the shutdown. As they fight to overturn those cuts, Democrats would be wise to present themselves as champions of these entrepreneurial Americans. But will they? 

According to the last U.S. Census, there are over 16 million self-employed Americans, not including an uncounted number of gig workers and sole proprietors on the economy’s periphery. And as Will Norris wrote earlier this year in a superb piece here at the Washington Monthly, American policy choices seriously disadvantage this large and vital sector of the economy. Gig workers, independent contractors, and other self-employed individuals are subject to punishing monopoly predation and tend to lack employer-provided health care, paid vacations, and other benefits that people who work for larger organizations take for granted.  

They also receive little real support from either political party. Rhetorically, the Democrats pay them little public attention (the 2024 Democratic Party platform mentions “workers” 78 times and “union” 23 times, but “self-employed” workers and “independent contractors” just once each). Meanwhile, the GOP offers them only mendacious lip service. Republicans tend to make massive giveaways to wealthy capital under the guise of helping “small businesses” and “entrepreneurs” who are neither small nor truly innovative. 

Democratic campaigns do sometimes outline policy proposals to spur entrepreneurship. The Harris campaign, for instance, listed a series of proposals aimed at helping small businesses thrive through tax deductions, streamlined regulations, increased access to capital, and so on. But these tend to be small-ball measures with little fanfare that, while potentially effective on the margins, also sound cribbed from a traditional conservative playbook. On the flip side, social Democrats and especially Democratic socialists tend not to emphasize small business and entrepreneurship for obvious reasons. After all, these have long been the darlings of the right, a rhetorical wedge used to increase the power of capital at the expense of labor by putting a mom-and-pop face on big business.  

Democrats could change the script here by offering expansive economic policy on everything from healthcare to housing that Republicans typically decry as socialist, while legitimately pointing out that they are working to benefit actual small businesses, solopreneurs, and the self-employed. It is a dirty secret of economic policy that Republicans explicitly champion an agenda that keeps workers not only less able to organize into a union but also chained to their employers and afraid to strike out on their own, lest they lose access to healthcare, retirement, and other benefits. Since two-thirds of start-up businesses typically fail within ten years, a weak social safety net also jeopardizes the ability of the self-employed to house and feed their family unless they’re privileged enough to have a family trust fund. 

The most obvious place this dynamic appears is in health insurance. One of the most critical functions of the Affordable Care Act was to provide more reasonable healthcare options to the self-employed and microbusinesses. The Republican decision to allow tax credits to expire as part of their big budget bill is the central cause of the shutdown, as Democrats (and even Marjorie Taylor Green!) rightly see it as reckless and inhumane. But Democratic rhetoric on the issue usually—and for good reason—focuses primarily on the most marginalized communities facing disaster, including rural areas typically supportive of Trump. But there is also a wide-open lane here to appeal to around 20 million precarious self-employed Americans paralyzed about what their health insurance options will look like next year, and to do so in a way that could sound equal parts Bernie Sanders and Ronald Reagan. Americans don’t love big business, but they do love hardscrabble microbusiness owners trying to turn a dream into a decent living. 

Trump’s crippling tariffs are perhaps the second most crucial place where Democrats could gain an advantage from a greater emphasis on the self-employed. Consumers feel the pinch from higher prices, and big businesses are hobbled by uncertainty. But microbusinesses and boutiques that rely on low-margin imports are being devastated. Everyone from Etsy sellers to specialized grocers feels the crushing burden of low profit margins flipped upside down by tariffs. And while big businesses can typically wait out uncertainty, many small suppliers and contractors downstream of them are going under as those larger entities put everything on hold, from research and development to distribution. 

The emerging partnership between Trump and corporate oligarchs presents another opportunity for Democrats to stand with small-scale entrepreneurs. The millions of independent merchants who peddle their wares on Amazon have watched in fury as the monopoly platform has raised its share of sales revenue per item from a third in 2016 to 50 percent in 2022, plus additional fees since. Uber drivers have seen that the company increase its take by similar amounts. As Americans have moved from cash to credit cards since the pandemic, small merchants are being eaten alive by high “swipe fees” imposed by the Visa/Mastercard duopoly. By calling for antitrust and other measures to curb this monopoly rent-seeking, Democrats could earn significant goodwill from this suffering class of small entrepreneurs. 

In states and districts where even populist traditional left-liberal rhetoric falls flat, much of the larger agenda of social democracy can be reframed as an engine of real small business and employees without an HR department. More generous social security and pensions are available for those who don’t have the luxury of a large corporate 401(k). Skills training and lower-cost college would allow people who want to pursue their dreams to leave foul and abusive jobs. Subsidized childcare and pre-k make it possible for regular people to be good parents while opening that time-intensive restaurant. And so on. 

Finally, as AI slashes entire professions across the economy and sits on a potentially precarious bubble, even more Americans are likely to try to find independent ways to make ends meet. Conservatives have no answers for them, and Democrats have all too often spoken to the ranks for the current and future self-employed either in the paternalistic language of equity or the arcane white-paper-speak of tax rebates and loan programs. 

There is a better way, a clear policy need, and millions of underserved voters up for grabs. 

The post Government Shutdown Fallout: A Reminder That We Still Need Health Care for Gig Workers, Sole Proprietors  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

“What the f*** are you doing?! Chuck Schumer is a human flat tire.” The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart vented on Monday, after playing a clip of the Senate Minority Leader at a press conference about the government shutdown, telling a lame joke. 

Piling on Schumer is commonplace among Democrats and progressives who long for fresh faces and perennially lament the fighting skills of the party’s leaders. Schumer is old, his social media is weak, and his thinking is obsolete.  

Now, the 74-year-old dared to say about the health policy organization formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation, “New data came out today from KFF, and that is not Kentucky Fried French Fries.” To the guillotine!  

I have not been a reflexive defender of Schumer this year. Just last month, I criticized Schumer’s initial approach to the shutdown, and I thought he was completely off-base criticizing diplomatic talks with Iran. 

But since the shutdown began, what is there to complain about besides bad nightclub material? 

Schumer has kept his Senate Democrats in line. While three broke ranks on the initial vote on the Republican stopgap bill to fund the government, that’s four short of the 60 needed to overcome a filibuster. Schumer hasn’t bled any more since.  

Democratic messaging has been consistent and straightforward. As Schumer said on the Senate floor on Wednesday: “The government is shut down for one reason and one reason only: Donald Trump and the Republicans would rather kick 15 million people off health insurance and raise premiums by thousands and thousands of dollars a year on tens of millions of Americans, rather than sit down and work with Democrats on fixing healthcare.” 

And there is no evidence Democrats are suffering with the public. A poll from The Economist/YouGov sampled between October 4 and 6 found a plurality of 41 percent of American adults primarily blame Donald Trump and the Republicans in Congress for the shutdown, versus 30 percent for the Democrats. Another YouGov poll conducted for CBS News a few days prior reported 39 percent blaming Trump and Republicans compared to 30 percent for congressional Democrats.  

The most important poll number to watch is the congressional generic ballot test, which asks which party’s candidate you plan to support in the next House election. Two such polls have been taken since the shutdown, with Democrats leading by five points in one survey and three in the other. That’s a tick better than the average Democratic lead before the shutdown. So long as Democrats hold steady in the generic ballot, Schumer, as well as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, will likely be able to keep their members in line.  

Schumer has received immense, unsolicited help from President Donald Trump, who had the opportunity to pin all blame on Democrats for instigating a shutdown by making an unrelated demand about health care subsidies. But you can’t blame someone for a shutdown if you say the shutdown is good. “A lot of good can come down from shutdowns,” said Trump ahead of the funding deadline, “We can get rid of a lot of things that we didn’t want.” He followed that with threats to lay off thousands of civil servants. Trump takes more of the blame because he has not just cheered the burning down of the government, but also gleefully proposed pouring more gasoline on the fire.  

I don’t love Schumer’s approach of demanding health care concessions because it lacks an endgame. Last month, I summed up the usual trajectory of the shutdown gambit: “Once public opinion quickly turns, the shutdown agitators invariably realize the shutdown failed to provide negotiating leverage and eventually cave.” This shutdown is playing out differently. Democrats aren’t losing public opinion and have no incentive to cave. However, we have no reason to believe that Trump cares about public opinion—or reopening the government. Perhaps the only thing that could make Trump budge is a realization that renewing the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies before they expire would help Republicans in the midterms. 

Nevertheless, Trump and the Republican majority do not need the Democrats to reopen the government. As both Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (!) and I have observed, Republicans can suspend or eliminate the filibuster. That would allow funding bills to clear Congress on party-line votes. So, I still have difficulty seeing Democrats gaining sufficient negotiating leverage to extract concessions. At the very least, they are not losing any leverage or suffering damage to public opinion as they communicate their core principles and agenda priorities. 

Is the corny, clumsy Chuck Schumer the best face of the Democratic Party? No. But it’s always been a fallacy that any congressional leader, majority or minority, is their party’s face. The congressional leader’s job is to pass good legislation and stop the bad. That mainly involves behind-the-scenes organizing party caucuses, not being a pretty face, and producing shareable social media content.  

Kvetching about Democratic incompetence is as familiar as kvetching about the New York Mets choking. But one clunker of a joke doesn’t mean Democrats are mishandling the shutdown showdown. So far, they’ve performed better than any opposition party in the history of shutdown showdowns.  

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For the past two decades, the Washington Monthly has included in its annual college rankings measures of a university’s research prowess—its record of producing the new scholarship and scholars that drive economic growth and human flourishing. This year, we’ve put those metrics into a separate ranking, the Best Colleges for Research, which appear at the end of this article. It is the only such ranking published by a journalistic outlet—and a necessary one, given the Trump administration’s unprecedented attacks on university research.

There are other reasons why we created this new research ranking. This spring, the organization that categorizes colleges, the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, rewrote its definitions of what constitutes different types of institutions, including major research universities. We also decided this year to compare research universities to other types of institutions, like small liberal arts colleges that focus on teaching rather than research, to see which institutions are best at helping students succeed in their careers and engage as democratic citizens (see Best Colleges for Your Tuition (and Tax) Dollars). The only fair way to do that was to pull our research metrics into their own ranking. 

But most of all, at a time when the Trump administration is decimating funding for academic research, we wanted to illuminate the incredible benefits that America’s research universities provide to the country at large and to the states and regions where they’re located—and the unfathomable damage these cuts are likely to bring. 

Before we delve into the ranking, it’s important to understand how the United States built its world-class system of federally funded university-based research—a system that was neither inevitable nor, as we are now learning, invulnerable. In the early 20th century, Europe was the undisputed engine of scientific discovery. Aspiring top scientists didn’t dream of going to Harvard or Stanford. They went to Göttingen, where Max Born and Werner Heisenberg were pioneering quantum mechanics; to the Sorbonne, where Marie Curie revolutionized chemistry and medicine; or to Cambridge, where Ernest Rutherford and Paul Dirac rewrote the laws of atomic theory. A young New York–born physicist named J. Robert Oppenheimer followed that path—studying at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory before earning his doctorate under Born in 1927. At the time, American universities were respected teaching institutions. But they stood on the periphery of the global scientific frontier.

That changed abruptly when the United States made scientific supremacy a national strategy during World War II. In 1939, Oppenheimer was lecturing at chalkboards at UC Berkeley. Just four years later, as part of the Manhattan Project, the University of California was contracted by the federal government to operate the Los Alamos Laboratory, with Oppenheimer leading thousands of scientists in one of the most ambitious research efforts ever under-taken. It wasn’t just the birth of the atomic bomb. It was also the birth of the modern American research university—powered by a new kind of partnership between public investment and university-led inquiry. For more than 80 years, that system has fueled nearly every major scientific and technological breakthrough of the modern era.

That success was the result of deliberate postwar planning—shaped in large part by Vannevar Bush, the former MIT engineering dean who oversaw wartime science policy. In 1945, Bush submitted a report to President Harry Truman titled Science, the Endless Frontier, which called for sustained federal funding of universities to conduct research both for specific goals—to combat disease, ensure national security, and raise living standards—but also to advance scientific knowledge for its own sake. “Basic research is the pacemaker of technological progress,” he wrote. 

The system was designed to be decentralized, competitive, and entrepreneurial. Unlike European countries, in which most universities are operated at national or regional levels, the United States has a geographically dispersed array of state-owned and private nonprofit colleges and universities. Different federal agencies—the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the National Institutes of Health, and so on—set the broad parameters for grants based on their own agency’s goals. But scholars anywhere in the country could propose specific research projects, and decisions on which would get funding were made not by federal officials but by peer review panels of scholars, also from around the country. The system incentivized states to invest their own tax dollars in their public universities by recruiting top scholars who could win federal research grants and top graduate students who could work on those grants. It was, in short, an American-style, market-based solution to the task of building scientific capacity. 

The scale of this transformation is hard to overstate. Before World War II, federal spending accounted for just 20 percent of all U.S. research and development. By the 1960s, it made up two-thirds. Federal support for university research rose from under $70 million in 1940 (about 1 percent of today’s levels, adjusted for inflation) to more than $20 billion by 2000. By then, American university labs had given the world the polio vaccine, the internet, satellite navigation, the MRI, and much more.

As of 2023, U.S. universities spent over $108 billion on research and development—more than half of it funded by the federal government. That spending underpins not just scientific progress but entire regional economies. It trains the STEM workforce, fuels innovation, and creates good jobs far from the coasts. According to economists across the political spectrum, university-based R&D delivers one of the highest returns on investment of any federal expenditure. It produces breakthroughs, but also pipelines: of talent, of human capital, and of opportunity.

The Best Colleges for Research ranking is like an MRI of that system. It rates 139 institutions that each spend at least $100 million annually on research based on four equally weighted indicators: total research spending, science and engineering PhDs awarded, faculty receiving major national awards, and the share of faculty elected to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 

But a word of warning: This MRI was taken when the patient was at peak health. All the underlying data is from before January of this year, when Donald Trump was inaugurated. Since then, the NDF has frozen or canceled more than 1,700 grants, many of them focused on recruiting more women and racial minorities into STEM fields. The NIH faces proposed cuts of up to 40 percent for the fiscal year 2026 budget—jeopardizing over $10 billion in funding. The Trump administration effectively dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, canceling the billions in grants it once dispensed. The Departments of Energy and Defense have shifted green energy and climate funds elsewhere. And the Department of Education has opened more than 60 campus investigations and frozen billions in grants to universities. Trump officials have also proposed slashing university overhead reimbursements from 50-60 percent to 15 percent—effectively making much research unsupportable. 

The first thing you’ll notice when looking at the ranking is that the three universities at the top of the list—Stanford, MIT, Harvard—are precisely the kind you would target if you were Donald Trump and your aim was to punish elites in blue states. Another prestigious university, fifth-ranked Johns Hopkins, in deep blue Maryland, receives more federal research dollars than any university in the country. Those grant funds allow the institution to support more than 30,000 jobs in Baltimore and run the Applied Physics Laboratory, a critical player in U.S. missile defense and cybersecurity. But since Trump took office for the second time, Johns Hopkins has lost over $800 million in global health research—most of it when DOGE pulled the plug on USAID. The fallout: 600 clinical trials disrupted and vaccine development halted midstream. Consider those libs owned.

The second thing you’ll notice is that it’s not just elite private universities in blue coastal cities that rank highly on the list—and stand to lose big from Trump’s defunding of research universities. Like much of Trump’s second-term agenda, the cuts end up punishing the very people and places he claims to champion.

Five of the top 20 universities (including the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the University of Michigan) as well as two dozen more on the list are in swing states that Trump barely won in 2024 and that will likely determine who wins the presidency in 2028. Nearly 50 other institutions that make up the Best Colleges for Research ranking are in red states, including Texas A&M (number 16), the University of Florida (27), and Purdue University in Indiana (29).

These universities are not just major recipients of federal research dollars. As our ranking shows, many of them outperform Ivy League schools in awarding the STEM PhDs that keep the economy humming and America competitive in the world. (See chart). 

These institutions, most of them public, train the bulk of the engineers who build America’s infrastructure, the chemists who power our labs, and the computer scientists who staff defense contractors and clean energy start-ups. They, too, are facing devastating cuts. Between February and March, DOGE slashed more than $74 million in federal research grants going to 19 colleges and universities in Georgia, including the notoriously woke Georgia Institute of Technology (note to Georgia Tech grads: that’s a joke!). Case Western paused hiring and travel to brace for a projected $39 million loss. Louisiana State University imposed a campus-wide hiring freeze and withheld 2 percent of all department budgets as a buffer. Penn State lost $10 million in grants—halting projects on HIV prevention, cervical cancer vaccines, and diagnostics for newborns. Administrators now advise faculty to strip keywords like diversity and climate from proposals to avoid triggering more cancellations.

A third pattern you might notice is that many of the universities at the top of our ranking are in a handful of the fastest-growing states—California, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, Florida. That’s no coincidence. Remember that the system Vannevar Bush devised created incentives for states to invest in their public university systems. Not all states, however, acted on those incentives with the same intensity and focus. Those that made long-term bets on higher education, built centralized public university management systems, and kept in-state tuition low tended also to garner more federal research dollars and the corresponding economic growth. (See Christopher M. Mullin, “Florida’s Fresh-Squeezed Colleges.”) 

Other, smaller states never made that bet on a similar scale and simply do not have as many options. In places like Montana and Nebraska, the local land grant is often the only serious research institution. As Joseph Parilla, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro, put it, “For a lot of places, [research] is the last remaining economic and innovation engine that gives them relevance in a modern, technology-driven economy.” In other words, federal research funding isn’t just science policy—it’s regional development policy. When it dries up, entire communities, not just institutions, suffer the consequences.

Our ranking reflects a system still running at high capacity. But the damage is already visible, and not just at Ivy League schools. Job offers to new PhDs are being rescinded. Labs are consolidating. Faculty are leaving. 

In Mississippi, a state Trump won by over 22 points, the mayor of Starkville is sounding the alarm. “Every time you touch the university, you, in effect, touch Starkville,” Mayor Lynn Spruill told The New York Times, after Mississippi State lost funding for a USAID aquaculture project. The school, which spent more than $150 million in federal research money last year, is now bracing for deeper cuts to engineering and agriculture programs—key anchors of the local economy.

And as our ranking shows, the consequences won’t be limited to blue states. The very regions Trump claims to fight for—rural America, red America—may be the ones hit hardest. What took 80 years to build won’t take 80 years to unravel. But it may take that long to build again.

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