If you think that elections are won by vibes, not vision, the latest issue of the Washington Monthly, out today, is not for you. If you’re of the opinion that resisting the Trump administration’s growing authoritarianism should be the overwhelming focus of liberals’ attention and that policy debates are a sideshow at best, this issue of the magazine will try your patience. If you’re sure that Trump will not allow fair elections in the future, this issue of our publication will seem naive. If you’ve concluded that rural and working-class voters are so lost in the fever swamps of conspiracy and resentment that there is nothing the Democratic Party can reasonably do to win them back, this issue will frustrate you. If you believe that Democrats already have the right policy ideas and just need stronger messaging, or a better messenger, then I can suggest some other media outlets that will better suit your inclinations.

The Washington Monthly was founded on the belief that good policy makes good politics—not in every case or every election, but generally and over the long term. We also believe that the flip side is true: Parties that pursue policies that screw average Americans eventually pay a price. Three days after last November’s election, when many of my liberal friends were still so shell-shocked they could barely get out of bed, I wrote that Donald Trump and his MAGA colleagues would make moves that would “horrify the same public that elected them,” and that “the role of this magazine is to get the American people ready with ideas they can use when the opportunity arises.” 

Weeks later we published an entire print issue devoted to “Ten Ideas for the Democratic Party to Help the Working Class, and Itself.” These included having government set prices in the highly consolidated commercial health care market to control soaring costs; providing the growing ranks of the self-employed with portable benefits and relief from monopoly predation; creating a new deal between Washington and universities to make tuition free for moderate-income students; and making ICE raids unnecessary by combining tough restraints on companies that hire undocumented migrants with generous opportunities for those migrants to become legal. 

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In subsequent weeks and months, in print and online, we proposed bringing back “regulated competition” in the airline industry to spur innovation and lower costs to travelers in “flyover” parts of the country. We called for stronger antitrust enforcement to combat corporate “greedflation” in consumer-facing industries from food to financial services. And we took the measure, respectfully but critically, of the new policy ideas being promoted by our friends in the “abundance liberal” movement to address the housing and climate crises by cutting red tape and regulations. 

This latest issue adds more new weapons to our arsenal. Phillip Longman and Gillen Tener Martin offer a creative plan to save Social Security—the solvency of which has been made worse by Trump’s tax and immigration policies—that avoids raising taxes on average Americans, boosts benefits to retirees who need it, and promotes a healthier and more productive America. Suzanne Mettler and Trevor Brown argue that by exacerbating the suffering of rural Americans with tariffs and health care cuts, Trump is creating the same conditions that allowed FDR and Barack Obama to win substantial numbers of rural votes. Zach Marcus makes the case that instead of fighting MAGA in today’s poisonous digital political ecosystem, Democrats should challenge that environment as the root cause of our dysfunctional politics, and vow to be the party that cleans it up. And a group of writers lays out a post-Trump industrial policy for America that incorporates positive aspects of the administration’s approach while rejecting what’s insane. 

This first year of Trump 2.0 is not yet over, but there is already mounting evidence that the public is indeed horrified by most of what the president is doing. His job approval ratings have been steadily underwater since March, and by even greater margins voters hate his tariffs, military deployments to blue cities, cuts to federal medical research, and overall handling of the economy. Meanwhile other recent surveys show strong and broad voter support for policies that take on corporate pricing power of the kind the Monthly has been proposing—with one finding that voters prefer cracking down on corporate price gouging over abundance liberal policy prescriptions by a two-to-one margin. 

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Of course, polls also show that the Democratic Party brand is at least as toxic as the GOP’s. The reason isn’t “messaging” but policy: For decades both parties have presided over a government that consigned the least-affluent 60 percent of Americans to grinding downward mobility. Trump is president because he promised to help those folks by overthrowing the old order with far-reaching, if ill-advised, policies. If (when) he fails, Democrats can win, and possibly win big, but only if they adopt new, equally far-reaching, but smarter policies truly geared toward uplifting that neglected 60 percent. 

If you agree—that Democrats need smart new ideas to win, and they can find them at the Washington Monthly—there’s something you can do to help: Donate to our Fall fundraising drive, which we’re kicking off today. Do it now. Give whatever you can—$25, $50, $100, $1,000. 

Because we’re a nonprofit, we can’t do our work without your support. It also means that your donation is tax-deductible. As a token of our gratitude, if you give $50 or more, we’ll send you a one-year subscription to the print edition of the  Monthly. 

The post How the Democrats Can Play Offense appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Allowing our political discourse to be swallowed up by the internet and spit back out as chewed-up, attention-grabbing “content” has obviously not been good for the American psyche. Unfortunately, in the wake of the 2024 election, the Democratic Party seems to have decided that there’s no path forward except plunging headfirst into the online cesspool.

The DNC recently poured millions into a project called Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan, billed as an effort to “study the syntax, language, and content that gains attention and virality” in male-dominated online spaces. Meanwhile, a startlingly annoying crop of Democratic influencers emerged, teenage boys with resistance-lib politics who mimic online MAGA aesthetics to produce truly terrible videos like “Clueless MAGA Bro Gets SHUT DOWN During Debate.”

Politicians, too, are getting in on the fun. California Governor Gavin Newsom—apparently convinced that the key to being a successful governor is to fill the “liberal Joe Rogan” void—launched a podcast. His debut episode featured the late Charlie Kirk and was so obsequious that Kirk criticized him for being “overly effusive.” Later, after an amicable debate with Steve Bannon, Newsom switched to mocking Donald Trump in posts that mimic the president’s disjointed, braggadocious style. 

As demeaning and debasing as all this is, maybe it’s also part of a necessary correction. The left’s approach in recent election cycles—engaging in digital shaming pile-ons and strong-arming social media companies into moderating speech on their platforms—mostly backfired by convincing millions of Americans that liberals were censorious scolds. But if that strategy proved counterproductive, this frantic attempt to match the online MAGA world’s tactics in an attentional race to the bottom might be just as doomed to fail. 

I’d like to suggest a different approach, one that is already gathering adherents among liberal strategists, grassroots activists, and legal scholars. Instead of accepting the existing digital political battlefield as inevitable, Democrats should challenge it as the root cause of our dysfunctional politics, and vow to be the party that cleans it up.

The core of the issue is that we have a digital economy built on a business model of trapping people in the virtual world for as long as possible. D. Graham Burnett, a historian of science at Princeton University, calls it “human fracking,” where instead of oil, companies are extracting our attention. Should we really be surprised, then, that at the same time the internet is subsuming the real world, what’s emerging around the globe is a convulsive, reactionary politics? Addressing this crisis—rather than fueling it—should be central to the Democrats’ strategy in the digital age. 

There are abundant signs that people want something different. For example, a 2020 Pew survey found that about two-thirds of American adults believe social media is negatively affecting the country’s direction; only one in 10 think it’s helping. Perhaps the most compelling evidence of social media users’ simmering discontent comes from a study conducted by economists at the University of Chicago. Participants were asked how much money they would need to be paid to quit social media. The average answer was around $50. But the participants’ attitudes changed dramatically if asked to imagine that everyone else had already quit. In that case, they would not only give up their accounts—they’d be willing to pay to do so. That exodus may slowly be under way—time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has slightly fallen since, with young people representing the largest decrease.

Thankfully, there are more options in the playbook than to surrender to the internet or simply log off. As the political speech scholar Susan Benesch put it to me, the question Democrats need to answer is this: “Do you want to ape the game the other side is already playing in an environment that is bad for people, or do you want to change the game?” Democrats don’t need to abandon the digital sphere to challenge its terms; in fact, a few of its younger rising stars have shown that liberal messages can gain purchase. But to answer that hunger for reform, while also creating a level playing field for sane, fact-based discourse, Democrats must make a serious political commitment to reforming these technologies that govern our lives and yet remain subject to no meaningful democratic oversight. 

The movement to make online life healthier is already well underway. Currently leading the charge is a growing coalition of parents, scholars, and activists focused on protecting children from the most harmful aspects of the digital world. This movement has also launched a state-by-state campaign to claw back some modicum of digital privacy, with state legislators finally taking steps to curb the relentless surveillance and manipulation of individuals by tech platforms. 

Nearly every expert I spoke with agreed that these crusades offer Democrats a clear strategic opportunity: embrace these efforts, raise the profile of their issues, and campaign on federal legislation that embraces these movements. If the goal is a more dramatic restructuring of digital life, though, these measures must be seen as just the opening moves. The harms that have galvanized these reform movements are symptoms of the broader underlying sickness plaguing the online world.

Right now, MAGA channels much of the anger toward modern life by offering a fantasy of a lost, mythic past. But if Democrats were willing to engage with this dissatisfaction honestly, they could expose the central lie of the movement: Despite all its posturing, MAGA wants nothing more than for you to live your life on a screen. 

Unlike the current race toward the most optimized attentional capture possible—which is also disastrous for our politics by favoring the loudest, most outrageous voices—the lane of reform belongs to Democrats alone. With the right’s online dominance, the political conversions of platform owners like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, and Republican leaders like Donald Trump and J. D. Vance, pathologically online, the GOP is an unlikely reformer. Rather than join the stampede of human frackers, Democrats could be the one force fighting to protect your mind from being mined.

The most obvious place where the online world has impoverished the real one is childhood. Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation documents the teen mental health epidemic that began in the early 2010s, arguing that the “great rewiring of childhood”—the shift from a play-based to a phone-based upbringing—fueled the crisis. Haidt outlines multiple causal pathways linking social media use to mental health harms: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. To safeguard future generations, he proposes four societal norms: no smartphones before high school, no social media before age 16, phone-free schools, and a renewed emphasis on real-world independence and play. 

The book has achieved remarkable success, generating widespread media attention and sparking an eponymous movement attempting to enshrine Haidt’s norms into law. The most effective policy efforts to date have centered on making schools phone-free, with 26 states enacting legislation or executive orders to restrict or ban student cell phone use during the school day. Beyond that, some states have adopted more aggressive measures, banning social media entirely for children under 14 or implementing age verification laws that require parental consent for minors. Other states have taken aim at platform design itself, passing “Kids Codes” that turn on the highest privacy settings as the default for children or prohibiting personalized, algorithmically driven content feeds. Nearly all of these laws have faced legal challenges from NetChoice, the leading tech industry group, which has succeeded in securing injunctions in many cases as the court battles continue. 

Using the judicial system cuts both ways, though. Over the past couple of years, state attorneys general across the country have launched waves of litigation against social media platforms. The immediate outcome of these lawsuits is the exposure of troubling internal communications that reveal how these companies disregard the harms their platforms cause. For example, Kentucky’s lawsuit against TikTok alleges that the company deliberately concealed the app’s addictive design. Internal documents revealed that TikTok identified the habit-forming threshold—260 videos, or about 35 minutes—and linked compulsive use to negative mental health effects. Despite this, it took no meaningful action. A parental control feature, promoted as a safeguard with 60-minute time limits for kids, reduced usage by only 1.5 minutes on average. “Our goal is not to reduce time spent,” one project manager candidly admitted. 

In addition to revealing the true motivations behind platform decisions, these lawsuits could drive real accountability if legislation stalls. Perhaps most significant in this regard is the nearly nationwide lawsuit against Meta for knowingly harming children’s mental health and thus violating consumer protection laws, building on the documents leaked by the whistleblower Frances Haugen in 2021. “Nobody thought there could be a 44-state lawsuit against social media,” Haugen told me. “And now we have a lawsuit comparable to the tobacco lawsuit.” (The lawsuit involved 41 states and Washington, D.C.)

The other reform effort that has gained real traction is the fight for digital privacy. In recent years, data privacy advocates have slowly begun to restrict the surveillance and profiling rampant in the online world. Today, social media platforms and other tech giants engage in nearly limitless online surveillance in order to create a vast informational asymmetry between the internet platforms and their users. If corporations know everything about you—your communications, preferences, habits—it is much easier for them to manipulate you into acting in their best interest. Last year, U.S. internet users had their information shared 107 trillion times—an average of 747 exposures per person, per day.

California is headquarters to most of the companies who pioneered this business model, which is why it was the first state to wise up and pass a comprehensive consumer data privacy law in 2018. To this day, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) remains the nation’s strongest privacy regulation. The CCPA was built around the concept of “data minimization,” which means that companies should only collect and use personal information if it is for a purpose that consumers would reasonably expect. For example, a person using a ride-share app would expect the app to use their location to allow the driver to pick them up and drop them off. The user would not reasonably expect that the app continuously tracks their location well after the ride, learns that they visited a pawn shop, and then sells that information to Google, which in turn might start showing that individual ads for predatory loans.

The effort caught Silicon Valley by surprise and came as a blow to the online platforms who have no interest in scaling back their immense data collection practices. Since then, industry lobbyists and privacy advocates have clashed in state legislatures over how to shape privacy laws. Unlike California’s approach, industry-backed bills typically allow companies to collect personal data without meaningful limits, so long as they disclose it somewhere in a privacy policy. Consumers who want their data must submit individual requests to every entity that holds it (this is in the hundreds or thousands). These laws also deny individuals the right to take companies to court. The tech industry has brought enormous resources to the fight: In 2021 and 2022 alone, 445 lobbyists and firms representing tech giants were active in the 31 states considering privacy legislation. Of the 19 states that have passed privacy laws, the vast majority have adopted industry-backed models. 

But in one of the most high-profile privacy battles to date, the tech industry suffered its first major defeat since California. Maryland state Senator Sara Love, who introduced the privacy bill in 2024 while still in the House of Delegates, said she had never experienced anything like it. “It was exhausting. I have never seen that level of lobbying. Nor had a lot of other legislators,” said Love, who has served in Maryland’s state government since 2019. “The first year lobbyists were telling legislators, ‘You’re not going to get your Starbucks points anymore,’ ” she recalled with a chuckle. “The biggest bunch of malarkey. But they [other state legislators] didn’t understand the technicalities of the bill.” 

This time around Love succeeded in passing the strongest privacy regulation since the CCPA, and now a handful of other states are working on similar laws modeled after California’s or Maryland’s approach. The biggest challenge is in convincing lawmakers that defying Big Tech’s warnings won’t bring the sky crashing down. “Knowing that it can be done helps,” Love reasoned. “The more of us that get these good strong bills, the more that will follow.” 

In The Sirens’ Call, Chris Hayes compares the development of today’s attention economy to the Industrial Revolution. “Attention now exists as a commodity,” he writes, “in the same way labor did in the early years of industrial capitalism … a social system had been erected to coercively extract something from people that had previously, in a deep sense, been theirs.” In fact, Hayes thinks the digital revolution may be even more disruptive because, “unlike land, coal, or capital, which exist outside of us, the chief resource of this age is embedded in our psyches. Extracting it requires cracking into our minds.” 

Much like in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, people today face a collective action problem: Those whose data is being mined have few institutions capable of pushing back against systemic abuse. Just as labor unions and worker protections emerged to confront the excesses of industrial capitalism, we now need digital equivalents to defend users in the age of surveillance capitalism. Rights like the ability to delete your data, to move it between platforms, and to hold companies accountable for their abuse of it should be the starting point. 

One promising step in this direction is the Digital Choices Act (DCA), a law passed in Utah this year. Doug Fiefia, the sponsor of the legislation, was inspired to act after growing disillusioned with the data practices he witnessed during his time at Google Ads. After joining Utah’s state legislature, he proposed a simple idea: Make it possible for users to take their data from one platform to another or delete it from any platform they choose. This kind of data portability could eventually allow users to organize and demand better treatment, backed by the leverage to deprive tech platforms of the data they so desperately need. “What we’re doing is taking back what we never should have given to this industry in the first place: control of our data,” Fiefia explained. “That should always have been ours.” Since Utah passed the DCA, the first legislation of its kind, six other states have reached out to Fiefia to explore introducing similar bills. 

Meanwhile, a group of legal scholars has been pushing for a promising reform called “friction-in-design” regulation. These reformers argue that the tech industry’s obsession with seamless efficiency has stripped users of meaningful choice and enabled what they call the “technosocial engineering of humans.” They propose deliberately designing pauses—like speed bumps in neighborhoods or warning labels on products—to help users reflect, exercise autonomy, and protect their well-being online. Previous attempts to regulate social media have often floundered because they focused on specific types of speech or particular actors, inviting partisan backlash. Friction-in-design offers a politically neutral alternative, one that addresses the underlying dynamics of online harm without censoring content or favoring one viewpoint over another. Just as speed bumps make roads safer without restricting where people can drive, digital friction can reduce harmful online behavior without infringing on free speech. 

There are a vast array of friction-in-design regulations that could curb harmful platform dynamics. Addictive features like infinite scroll (which continuously loads new content so users never reach a natural stopping point) and autoplay (which automatically plays the next video without user input) could be banned outright. Platforms could be forced into imposing automatic time-outs after extended continuous use of the platform. They could also be required to add a short delay after a user posts, likes, or replies to someone else. Content that begins to go viral could be deliberately slowed as it passes certain thresholds. High-reach accounts could be regulated like broadcasters, with posts that reach a certain audience threshold treated as public broadcasts. In the realm of privacy, courts could refuse to enforce automatic contracts and instead require evidence of actual deliberation by consumers. 

When tech platforms have voluntarily adopted some of these measures, they’ve worked. After a wave of gruesome lynchings in India in 2017 and 2018 that were sparked by viral false rumors of child kidnappings, WhatsApp restricted the forwarding of messages that had already been shared five or more times, allowing them to be sent to only one user or group at a time. That minor tweak resulted in the spread of “highly forwarded” messages declining by 70 percent. Of course, platforms are unlikely to adopt these measures on their own, which is why government action is necessary. 

The situation requires many more reforms than the ones that have been outlined here. Aggressive antitrust enforcement to break up the monopolization of the digital economy is crucial. Today’s internet giants have achieved a level of vertical and horizontal integration with few parallels in American history, in large part because previous generations of lawmakers worked hard to prevent it. Even at the height of its power, Ma Bell couldn’t listen to your telephone conversations, learn that you were thinking of buying a house, and then sell that information to banks, which could then cold-call you at dinner with loan offers. Government today could largely eliminate this “surveillance” business model by enforcing existing law—breaking up tech companies’ control of competing social media platforms (like Meta’s ownership of both Facebook and Instagram) and requiring that they follow the same “common carrier” rules that governed previous communications technologies. This would curb a great deal, though not all, of their most exploitative behavior. 

Modifying Section 230, which allows platforms to hide behind total legal immunity even as they algorithmically make editorial decisions, is also important. Beyond that, greater transparency around how algorithms function, and stronger oversight to ensure that they serve the public interest rather than manipulate it, will be key to creating a healthier digital ecosystem. Most major platforms’ algorithms promote the content that gets the most user engagement, which gives undue weight to outrage and misinformation. But those incentives don’t have to be written in stone. Scholars and some smaller platforms are testing out different algorithmic systems, such as “bridging-based ranking,” which sorts internet content using metrics that promote constructive disagreement—such as whether users with opposing views engage with it positively. Documents from Haugen, the Facebook whistle-blower, reveal that the company tested bridging-based ranking in its comments sections, and found that it promoted posts that were “much less likely” to be reported for bullying, hate speech, or violence. But they decided not to implement it widely.

Of course, none of this means Democrats can’t or shouldn’t engage with social media. Politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani have shown that it’s possible to use social media platforms effectively in service of progressive causes. But they are the exception. The structure of the current internet ecosystem overwhelmingly favors reactionary, conspiratorial content. Democratic engagement should be grounded not in mimicking that logic, but in naming the alienation the internet produces and offering a more humane alternative. 

The way we live online is not good for us. The average American now checks their phone 205 times a day, or once every five waking minutes. The average young person today spends 5.5 hours staring at screens, putting them on pace to spend 25 years of their life online. Rates of depression, anxiety, and behavioral addictions have soared; rates of friendship and romantic relationships have plummeted. 

Meanwhile, those in the tech industry want to double down on all of it. Marc Andreessen, cofounder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, is often called Silicon Valley’s “philosopher-king.” He argues that the goal of improving material conditions on Earth is misguided, the folly of those who cannot see past their own “reality privilege”:

A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substances, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date … Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege—their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world … Reality has had 5,000 years to get good, and is clearly still woefully lacking for most people; I don’t think we should wait another 5,000 years to see if it eventually closes the gap. We should build—and we are building—online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in.

It’s hard to imagine a more noxious ideology—or less likable messengers—to run against. To think that the answers to our most existential problems could be found by building ever more seductive online worlds to disappear into is essentially a surrender of faith in the human project. No wonder figures like Peter Thiel hesitate when asked if humanity should even survive. Let MAGA have this bleak vision. And let them own the horror that is our online world. 

Democrats, meanwhile, should start listening to other voices. Zadie Smith, more than a decade ago, wrote that the technology shaping our lives is unworthy of us. We are more interesting than it. We deserve better. It’s time to build something different.

The post Draining the Online Swamp appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The infamous Project 2025 document contains 900-plus pages of ideas for strangling the federal government, many of which Donald Trump’s administration has already implemented. But one huge policy area, accounting for roughly one-quarter of all federal spending, is barely mentioned: Social Security. 

Perhaps that’s because its Heritage Foundation authors knew that Social Security is one of the waning policy points on which the right and left still agree. In 2024, 77 percent of Republicans and 83 percent of Democrats said Social Security benefits should not be reduced in any way. 

Yet how to avoid this is likely to be a major issue in the next presidential election. Already, Social Security’s mounting negative cash flow is adding significantly to the federal government’s overall deficits and need to borrow money from the public but worse is yet to come. In June, the Social Security Administration (SSA) projected that the system’s main trust fund, responsible for financing retirement benefits, will run out of money entirely in little more than seven years, which under current law will force steep, across-the-board benefit cuts. 

Since the SSA’s June forecast, Republican policies have worsened the fiscal outlook for Social Security. Contrary to Trump’s claim that immigrants threaten the program, his clampdown on immigration will cost the trust funds. In 2022, undocumented immigrants contributed an estimated $25.7 billion toward Social Security, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, while typically collecting no benefits. And then there’s the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed by the Republicans in Congress and signed by Trump in July. That bill drains an additional $168 billion in revenue from the main Social Security trust fund by reducing the amount of federal income taxes that affluent Social Security recipients pay on their benefits. Because of this loss of revenue, the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates, future benefits will have to be cut even more than was already in the cards—to a full 24 percent. This amounts to benefit cuts of about $18,100 for a typical dual-earning couple retiring at the start of 2033. Still deeper cuts will be needed in the future. “Policymakers pledging not to touch Social Security are implicitly endorsing these deep benefit cuts,” the committee concluded in its report.

Despite these Republican policy mistakes and the fiscal challenge created by the anomalously large Baby Boom generation, Social Security’s widening cash flow deficits could be closed, at least on paper, simply by increasing the regressive payroll taxes that currently fund the program. According to a 2024 estimate by the Congressional Budget Office, raising payroll taxes from 12.4 to 16.7 percent would be enough to restore the system to long-term solvency. But among the many other downsides to this option, a tax hike of that size on American workers is hardly likely to attract new voters to the Democratic column. 

Fortunately, there is a better way. The fiscal outlook for Social Security may be precarious but it also presents a huge opportunity. It’s possible to save Social Security without raising taxes on the working class, while also providing the system with the revenues it needs in ways that will make Americans healthier and more productive. Better yet, policy changes are available that would significantly improve benefits for middle- and low-income Americans of all generations without compromising the trust fund’s long-term solvency. Whichever party takes advantage of these opportunities first is likely to enjoy enduring political rewards. 

Debate over the future of Social Security should start by grappling with the huge growth of inequality among the elderly. Back when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law in 1935, older Americans were generally far worse off than their middle-aged children, but there was very little inequality among the elderly themselves: For nearly everyone, old age was synonymous with need. 

But today, while inequality has increased within all groups, it has done so especially among older Americans. Part of the explanation is the increasing size and relative wealth of America’s professional classes. For decades, college-educated, upwardly mobile Americans have typically enjoyed a widening income premium over other members of their own generation. And after they retire they also typically receive far larger Social Security benefits while also drawing on far greater assets in the form of tax-subsidized 401(k)s and other pension plans. Adding to the affluence of a substantial share of today’s retirees has been the great inflation in property values over the past generation, which leaves many with substantial windfalls in their home equity. Roughly a fifth of today’s older population belongs to this group. 

But for America’s low- and middle-income workers, the picture is far different. For them, stagnant income and downward mobility have too often been the norm since the 1970s—especially for those who lack a college education—and the older they get, the more financial insecurity they experience.

One measure of the financial precarity facing so many Americans as they age comes from the Federal Reserve. According to its last Survey of Consumer Finances, in 2022, 43 percent of households on the threshold of retirement (ages 55 to 64) had no retirement savings. Among those 65 and over, more than half had none. 

Who are these people? Many are downwardly mobile working-class Americans who lost their jobs and their pensions as America’s financial elites shuttered factories and busted unions during the past 40 years. Others saved up tidy nest eggs but lost them when medical debt forced them into bankruptcy, or when unchecked corporate monopolies snuffed out their family farms and small businesses. Still others borrowed heavily to go to college or to vocational school but could never break free of the compounding encumbrance of student debt. Still more were undone by the repeal of usury laws and the vast spread of credit card delinquency, exploding mortgages, payday lenders, and legalized gambling that wiped out the balance sheets of millions of American households following the deregulation of finance that began in the 1970s. 

According to surveys, almost half of all Americans now describe themselves as living “paycheck to paycheck.” According to a study by Bank of America of its own customers, the percentage living paycheck to paycheck tends to rise with age, peaking at nearly 30 percent among the bank’s Baby Boomer customers. 

And so we have come to a moment in which deep dependence on Social Security in old age is widespread and likely to become more so. People over 50 used to make up 11 percent of the homeless population in the early 1990s; now they account for almost 50 percent—making America’s elderly the fastest-growing segment of its unsheltered population. Today, 27 percent of current beneficiaries rely on their Social Security benefits for more than 90 percent of their monthly income. 

Even among those who are fortunate enough to have retirement savings, their nest eggs are often nowhere near sufficient to finance a secure retirement. In 2025, Vanguard, one of the most popular 401(k) plan providers, found that among its clients approaching retirement age fully half had account balances of less than $95,000. How long will a nest egg of that size last? Suppose you retire at age 65 and begin receiving this year’s average Social Security benefit of $1,800 a month. Suppose, too, that you hold your total annual spending—including rent or a mortgage with property taxes and rapidly rising premiums for Medicare coverage plus other routine costs—down to an inflation-adjusted $50,000 a year. Assuming a 3 percent rate of inflation and a 6 percent return on your investments, you will have no savings left by age 85. 

And this is assuming that you won’t be among the 70 percent of Americans who wind up needing some form of long-term nursing home care—a financial sword of Damocles not covered by Medicare. This is also assuming that Medicare itself will be there for you. On our current course, Medicare’s Hospital Insurance Fund will be running a deficit by 2027 and completely exhausted by 2033—thus forcing either an automatic 11 percent cut in Medicare spending or an infusion of new tax revenue. “The precarity of people that have plans is much greater than I think most people realize, and also isn’t really reflected in the expert debate,” says David John, a senior strategic policy adviser at AARP’s Public Policy Institute.

In debating the future of Social Security, it’s also important to learn from the failed reforms of the past. The last time the country faced a Social Security crisis was in 1983, when, thanks to a deep recession and a long history of paying out more in benefits than participants had contributed in taxes, the system was similarly faced with impending insolvency. The bailout deal struck between President Ronald Reagan and Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neal was widely described at the time by Washington’s power elite as an “artful” compromise between raising taxes and cutting benefits. But while it was an impressive example of bipartisan cooperation by today’s standards, it turned out to be a cynical bargain that failed to ensure that the program would remain solvent beyond the retirement of the first-wave Baby Boomers.

The deal cut the benefits of Americans who were of working age at the time and subsequent generations primarily by raising their retirement age. And it raised taxes—mostly on the same people—by dramatically hiking regressive payroll tax rates and requiring an ever-rising percentage of future retirees to pay income taxes on their benefits. 

A first-order effect of this was to significantly reduce the “money worth” of the deal Social Security offered to successive generations. For example, according to the SSA, a typically one-income couple retiring in 1985 received back lifetime benefits worth 5.4 times more than the present value of the taxes they paid into the system. But thanks mostly to the tax increases and benefit cuts put in place by the 1983 deal, a similar couple retiring in 2014 was entitled to only about three times what they had paid in.

The architects of the 1983 deal insisted that this was the necessary price of saving the system. By cutting benefits and raising taxes, they said, the system would run cash surpluses for many years that would be used to build up the system’s trust fund. In that way, they promised, Social Security could “pre-fund” the cost of the Baby Boomers’ retirement as well as all younger cohorts in the pipeline. 

But this turned out to be a hollow promise. Social Security’s cash flow surpluses weren’t invested in ways that made the next generation more productive and thereby better able to sustain the cost of the system. Instead, they wound up effectively being used to underwrite other government operations, starting with things like the unfunded cost of the Reagan tax cuts and military buildup and the ever-rising cost of paying interest on the national debt. 

For a long time, Social Security’s positive cash flow helped mask the government’s overall increase in debt. Every dollar the Treasury collected from Social Security and used to fund ongoing government activities was supposed to be paid back. But per budget rules, this fact wasn’t accounted for in official measures of the deficit, so the deficits looked much smaller than they actually were, which arguably led to still more borrowing. 

There was a moment late in Bill Clinton’s administration when the country briefly debated whether to put a stop to this pretense. At the time, the government as a whole was running a cash flow surplus, and a debate broke out over what to do with the money. Clinton, in his 1999 State of the Union Address, proposed using roughly two-thirds of the future projected surpluses to shore up the finances of the Social Security trust fund. He also proposed allowing the trustees to earn higher returns by investing at least part of the new money in financial markets, much as state and local pension funds do, rather than just in Treasury notes. And he called for using 11 percent of the projected future surpluses to establish universal savings accounts that would have endowed every American with a vehicle for saving for retirement and other foreseeable needs. 

During the 2000 presidential election, Democratic candidate Al Gore took up these proposals and tried to explain them with an analogy to a “lockbox,” which he said could safely hold money set aside to pay for future benefits. But Gore struggled to get across the urgency and seriousness of the proposal, despite saying “lockbox” seven times in the first debate. A mocking Saturday Night Live skit depicted Gore (played by Darrell Hammond) as explaining, “Now one of the keys to the lockbox would be kept by the president, the other key would be sealed in a small magnetic container and placed under the bumper of the Senate majority leader’s car.”

Gore, of course, lost the election, and the incoming president, George W. Bush, used the projected surpluses as a pretext for enacting giant tax cuts and borrowing to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2011, Obama, against the wishes of some in his own party, floated a “grand bargain” whereby Democrats would have gone along with a scaling back of Social Security cost-of-living adjustments in return for Republicans agreeing to raise taxes on high earners to reduce the deficit. But Republicans rejected the offer, and so both the national debt and the unfunded liabilities of Social Security’s main trust fund continued to mount. The federal government subsequently continued to borrow heavily to pay for Trump’s first round of massive tax cuts during his first term, and then for the massive stimulus spending enacted under Biden to overcome the economic effects of the COVID-19 crisis. 

Then, finally, the screw turned. The reckoning began in 2021 when a critical mass of Baby Boomers began drawing on the system. Social Security’s cash flow surplus turned into a deficit that year as the system started paying out far more money than it was taking in. By now, that deficit has grown so large that the last of the Treasury notes remaining in its main trust fund will be gone by 2033, rendering the fund insolvent and triggering massive automatic benefit cuts. 

Under that scenario, most middle-class Americans born in the mid-1950s can expect, according to estimates by the Urban Institute, to get back little more in retirement benefits than they paid in during their working years. Gen Xers and Millennials will also be affected, but it’s even worse for younger Americans. For those born between 2001 and 2010, median net lifetime taxes paid into the system will far exceed median net lifetime benefits, according to estimates by the Urban Institute. The median white member of Generation Z is projected to lose more than $200,000 on their investment. The median Black or Hispanic Gen-Zer can expect, under current law, to lose more than $86,000.

The lockbox is empty. 

What if, this time, voters were presented with an opportunity for a truly artful compromise, one that preserved the system’s long-term solvency while making both its taxes and benefits fairer and consistent with the common good? If Democrats want to put forth winning strategies in 2026 and 2028, they should be the ones championing such a course—all while keeping the go-broke date front and center and spotlighting the ways in which Republican policies have added to the crisis. 

A key challenge to any reform will be the tension built into the system between social adequacy and individual equity. From the beginning, Social Security has paid the least to those who need benefits most, and most to those who need benefits least. This pattern reflects the original political logic behind the program. FDR was keen for people to experience Social Security as a form of insurance rather than as a form of welfare. That entailed preserving the illusion that each participant paid for their own benefits, which in turn meant that people’s benefits had to at least partially reflect their previous tax contributions.

It’s a point that still needs to be weighed heavily. Certainly, it would be political folly to go straight up against today’s upper-middle-class retirees, especially when most are already receiving a far lower rate of return from Social Security than they could have earned through very safe, private investments. But there are still many measures that Democrats could take to make Social Security better serve the far greater numbers of middle-class and low-income Americans who face very real threats to their security in old age. 

Starting on the revenue side, one step would be to raise the cap on the amount of an individual’s wage income that can be taxed for Social Security. It’s currently capped at $176,100, and rises gradually under current law. But raising it more quickly could go a long way in closing Social Security’s long-term deficit. For example, just increasing the taxable maximum to $291,000 by 2029 could reduce roughly 19 percent of the trust funds’ shortfall over the next 75 years, while affecting only roughly 6 percent of earners. Such a measure would also help to redress the fact that as the rich have grown richer, more and more of their income has escaped Social Security taxes.

Another progressive reform would be to broaden Social Security’s revenue base to include financial returns, which is how most rich people make most of their money. This could be accomplished by requiring high-income filers to pay Social Security taxes on interest, dividends, royalties, capital gains, and rental income. Such taxes would force the well-to-do to bear a fairer share of the cost of financing an aging society. And, of course, there’s always the option of reversing the massive tax cuts Trump has passed for the wealthiest of the wealthy while preserving the more modest reductions his bills gave to lower- and middle-income groups. 

On the benefit side, Social Security could be made more progressive by modifying benefit formulas so that they offer higher returns to low- and middle-income workers. Cost-of-living adjustments, for example, could be recalculated to give more weight to the out-of-pocket medical and other expenses typically incurred by low- and middle-income elders. Another idea in this vein: Require fewer years of formal employment to qualify for Social Security’s minimum benefit and make the minimum higher. Senator Bernie Sanders and Democrats proposed a bill in 2023, the Social Security Expansion Act, that took up many of these tax and benefit measures. It was projected to balance the program’s budget over the next 75 years but died in committee. 

In short, there are a lot of measures Democrats could propose to save the program while also making both its financing and benefit structure fairer. But there’s also room to go beyond this by expanding the system’s tax base into new realms. These could include the use of carbon taxes, digital data taxes, or taxes on pollutants like the plastics we know are living rent-free in our brains (literally). Revenues raised from such sources could not only finance an equitable expansion of Social Security but also help build true abundance and wellness for the next generation. Wouldn’t it be swell if we saved Social Security by means that discourage socially destructive business practices while also preserving our health and that of the planet?

The idea of today’s Republican Party—aligned with leaders across both oil and tech—getting on board with any of the above may seem laughable. But if Trump plans to keep his “unbreakable commitment to protecting and strengthening” Social Security, he will have to do something credible to keep the trust funds solvent and assure his base that the checks will keep flowing. 

Lawmakers should also take aim at the policy failures around private “defined contribution” pensions and other retirement saving vehicles, which have enjoyed massive tax subsidies. Just between 2022 and 2026, they will cost the U.S. Treasury over $2.1 trillion in forgone revenue. But most of the benefits of these subsidies go to higher-income workers while millions of middle- and lower-income Americans received little or no benefit at all because they a) did not have access to a 401(k) through their employer, b) didn’t have enough income to put into one, or c) both. 

Going forward, we need universal pension plans that target their subsidies to those who most need help in building wealth rather than favoring those who already have wealth. We also need mandatory individual savings plans, like those originally proposed by Clinton, that will help less well-off members of the next generation to safely take advantage of the miracle that is compound interest. A provision of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” endows newborn American children with a $1,000 “baby bond.” Though the provision is limited it derives from an idea originally championed by Democrats for providing ordinary Americans with wealth-producing assets. If properly implemented, it could evolve into a safe and universal savings vehicle that benefits all Americans throughout their lives, and that could serve as an important supplement to Social Security in old age. 

Ultimately, Democrats need an approach that goes beyond any set of purely programmatic fixes. They need to be able to tell voters that they are addressing the root causes behind why so many Americans now face insecurity in old age—many of them traceable directly to policy mistakes that both parties, but especially Republicans, made over the last 40-some years. These include a massive retreat from economic and financial regulation that wiped out the net worth of millions of Americans by enabling the spread of predatory lending in housing and education, and of predatory pricing in health care and pharmaceuticals. They include failed “free trade” policies that hollowed out the country’s industrial base and deeply eroded the bargaining power of most blue-collar workers. And they include the failure to make sufficient public investments in core industries and essential infrastructure that are the building blocks of the American Dream. Democrats can reclaim their party’s identity as a champion of the working class by taking up the cause of Social Security in its broadest and original New Deal meaning, which was to build a political economy by and for the people.

The post How Democrats Can Save Social Security—and Win Elections appeared first on Washington Monthly.

With the onset of the Great Depression, the United States appeared on the verge of political revolt in rural areas. For half a century, rural people had felt increasingly marginalized by changes in American society and the economy and ignored by political leaders. A farm crisis in the 1920s inflicted further pain. By 1933, with farmers earning just half what they had in 1919, and when a full one-third had lost their land, rural anger seemed ready to erupt. Edward A. O’Neal, president of the Farm Bureau, predicted at a Senate committee hearing, “Unless something is done we will have revolution in the countryside within twelve months.”

Into that crisis stepped Franklin D. Roosevelt. He oriented his presidential campaign around lower- and middle-income Americans and placed rural communities squarely at the center. He blamed the Depression in part on the farm crisis and laid out a plan for what the historian Sarah T. Phillips called a “rural renaissance” based on electrification of the hinterland and national planning to raise crop prices. When Election Day 1932 came, large numbers of farmers in midwestern Plains states who typically voted Republican threw their support behind FDR, helping deliver not just his victory but also the largest Democratic majorities in Congress up to that point. 

As the New Deal progressed, Roosevelt and the Democrats made good on their promises with an array of programs that lifted farmers’ incomes and living conditions, stabilized small-town banks through the Glass-Steagall Act, and allowed Main Street retailers to compete with chain stores via the Robinson-Patman and Miller-Tydings Acts. Though plenty of small-town voters remained loyal to the GOP, FDR’s New Deal successes helped Democrats remain competitive in rural America for the next half century.

Today, after another decades-long decline in the rural economy, that rough political parity is gone. For the first time in U.S. history, only one political party dominates rural and small-town America, and that is the GOP. Voters in rural counties comprise only about 20 percent of the U.S. electorate. But because institutions like the Senate and the Electoral College overweight small places, Republican dominance of those counties gives the GOP an extra dollop of power—help in winning control of Congress, the presidency, and even the courts—that it could not otherwise command, and that no other party has ever enjoyed. At the same time, it makes winning nationally a much steeper climb for Democrats, and harder for them to govern when they do. 

The Democrats’ weakness among rural voters seems so profound that many pundits and party activists believe that trying to woo them back is a fool’s errand. However understandable, this attitude ignores two truths. 

First, to regain their competitiveness, Democrats don’t need to “win” the rural vote. They must only increase their margins modestly—“lose by less,” as some analysts call it. 

Second, as the Roosevelt era shows, voters’ loyalties can loosen at times of economic distress, and many policies promoted by President Donald Trump and the Republican Party are already wreaking havoc on rural areas. The trade war is harming soybean farmers and threatens many others who export significant amounts of produce. Ramping up deportations—in addition to disrupting communities and families—is diminishing local workforces. Cutting health and food assistance promises to escalate hospital closures and hunger in some of the country’s poorest rural areas. All that has occurred less than a year into Trump’s second term. 

If rural America suffers continuing economic distress over the next one to three years and the Democratic Party invests in the right rural campaign infrastructure, the party could earn more than middling gains in 2028. That’s what happened as recently as 2008, when, during the Great Recession and with the help of Howard Dean’s famous “50-state” campaign strategy, Barack Obama won 53 percent of the popular vote and Democrats took the majority of the most rural districts.

That victory was short lived, and in the years since, increasing numbers of rural Americans, particularly non-Hispanic white people, have come to view the Democratic Party with distrust and disdain. Still, the abject failures of the Trump administration present an opening for Democrats to win back the loyalties of significant numbers of rural voters. As the New Deal teaches us, producing public policies that respond to the needs of rural people must be part of the solution. However, just as important will be investing in long-term party building and organizational renewal at the state and local levels, as this magazine has long argued. Such efforts will be key not only to connecting voters to the policies Democrats produce in the short term, but also to reducing polarization and shoring up local and national democracy over the long haul. 

Why did rural people living in disparate parts of the United States shift in unison to the Republican Party? In our new book, Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy, we address that question by examining data on social, economic, and political developments in all 3,143 counties in the United States from 1976 to 2020. We also conducted interviews with local Democratic and Republican leaders in six states, as well as several former U.S. senators and representatives who represented rural states and districts. 

Many people assume that place-based political polarization is driven by a large divergence in rural and urban Americans’ views about public policy. After examining the highest-quality publicly available public opinion data, we found that to be wrong. 

On questions related to the size of government, rural and urban non-Hispanic white Americans answer very similarly when asked about whether government should increase, decrease, or maintain spending for each of several types of programs. Both groups are generally supportive of spending on education, health care, police, and infrastructure, with only a few percentage points (one to three) separating them. 

Some assume that the rural-urban divide emanates from social issues or the so-called culture wars—issues such as abortion, LGBTQ rights, and gun control—yet even on these issues, the difference in views is underwhelming. Take gun control, for example. We examined several questions—including requiring background checks, banning assault rifles, and other such measures—and found that rural white people, on average, are just eight percentage points less in favor of regulating gun use than their urban peers. 

On abortion, similarly, the gap between rural and urban white people is just 10 percentage points. When we asked local Republican Party leaders which issues energized local voters to support the party, a few mentioned abortion—and specifically a pro-life position—but others did not. One Republican county chair in Michigan, Rick Swenson, told us, “There’s a huge part of the Republican Party that’s just pro-life, period; there’s also a huge part of the Republican Party that feels the issue was decided in 1971 in Roe v. Wade, and that was close enough.” Swenson’s personal stance is that abortion is “none of the government’s business” but, rather, “between a woman, a doctor, and God.” 

Overall, we find no discernable differences in the views of rural and urban Americans on most issues, and only small differences on others. To be sure, the role of such differences can be exacerbated by political elites who reframe issues in particularly sensationalistic ways for electoral gains. But on their own, underlying beliefs about public policy are insufficient to account for the large and increasing partisan and voting gap between rural and urban dwellers nationwide. 

American history suggests, furthermore, that it doesn’t make sense to consider rural people as innately more conservative than urban people. Rural Americans supported the late 19th century’s populist movement in pursuit of economic justice, and it eventually led to several progressive policy achievements. During the 1980s farm crisis, that same spirit infused the mobilization of farmers in the Great Plains states. Conversely, from the 1950s through the 1970s, white reactionary movements against the integration of Black Americans in public schools and busing were based in cities and suburbs—hardly distinguishing them as centers of progressivism. Furthermore, as recently as the early 1990s, rural dwellers voted similarly to urban dwellers nationwide in presidential elections. 

Non-Hispanic white rural and urban Americans do differ dramatically in one regard, however: their attitudes about those in the political party that dominates places apart from where they themselves live. In 2020, when white rural Republicans were asked to rate Democrats on a feeling thermometer from 0 to 100, they offered, on average, a dismal 14 points; white urban Democrats, similarly, put Republicans at 17 points. These low assessments of fellow citizens in the opposing party were far lower than nearly all of the rankings given to other groups: For instance, white rural dwellers put Black Americans at 70, Hispanic Americans at 67, gay men and lesbians at 57, and “illegal” immigrants at 39. In short, rural and urban Americans barely disagree with one another on issues, but they are bitterly divided over politics nonetheless. In order to more fully understand the growing political gulf, we need to look elsewhere. 

In our research we discovered that the rural-urban divide began in the 1990s and early 2000s with the deepening of place-based economic inequality. Deindustrialization and the rise of post-industrial capitalism roiled the landscape, with harmful effects on rural economies. Historically, rural areas have disproportionately relied on farming and extractive industries. Already in the 1980s, many family farms went under, replaced by agribusiness. By the 1990s, technological advances meant that fewer workers were required in gas, coal, and other forms of mining. For a time, jobs in manufacturing, which had migrated out of urban areas, helped soften the blow. But those vanished as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other trade policies prompted companies to shutter their plants and move abroad.

These circumstances often became apparent as we met up with rural political leaders to interview them. Patrice Hawkins is a Democratic county chair in eastern North Carolina. In her county, few public places exist where people can have a quiet conversation, so instead we met for coffee in a fast-food restaurant on a busy strip just off the highway. She explained that the good-paying manufacturing jobs of the past are gone, and now unemployment runs high and more than one in four local residents lives in poverty. Hawkins, a Black woman in her 40s, is among the just roughly one in five rural dwellers over age 25 with a four-year college degree. “I was born here—I never left, unfortunately,” she said with a laugh. “There’s nothing here,” she said, gesturing to the big-box chain stores lining the street—Walmart, Dollar General, and others. “They’re trying to build up all this shopping stuff. No, we gotta have opportunity! You can shop anywhere, but if I ain’t making enough money to buy nothing, what’s the point of having all that?” She noted, “The only lucrative jobs I’ve had are jobs that are outside of the county.” She worked locally for years at a social service agency that paid her only $33,000 a year, despite her degree and years of experience. She finally sought a job in a neighboring county and gained a $15,000 raise by doing so, but it requires a long commute, as is common for many rural people.

Such changes in the rural economy nationwide spurred political change. They left many residents disillusioned with the Democratic Party, breaking with the long-held view of many of their parents and grandparents that the party was the advocate for their interests. Even though Republicans initiated most of the policy shifts that ushered in key changes, several came to fruition when Bill Clinton served as a president, and some high-profile Democrats played leading roles. The Democratic Party therefore seemed responsible. Rural dwellers—particularly those living in counties experiencing job and population decline—began to abandon the party, commencing the rural-urban divide.

Meanwhile, many urban areas became the epicenter of economic growth in the United States. These places boomed in part due to the development of the “knowledge economy”—meaning high-end services involving technology, business services, and finance. They increasingly attracted highly educated Americans, including those from rural places, as their position at the center of the nation’s economic growth was bolstered by policies supported by many Democratic lawmakers. These highly educated urbanites, in turn, became strong supporters of the Democratic Party. 

As the 2000s continued, rural people reacted to what they saw as elite overreach on the part of the Democratic Party. They associated the party with urbanites who were not only more highly educated and held more comfortable lives than themselves, but now seemed to want to impose their preferences nationwide, through the power of government. Characterizing Democrats, Matthew Novak, a Republican county chair in northern Michigan, remarked, “They seem completely detached from how people live here.” It was not so much that rural people disagreed with urbanites all that much on the substance of the issues; rather, they felt that they were subject to policies that were foisted on them by affluent outsiders who knew little about them or their concerns. The ensuing resentment on the part of rural people widened the political gap. 

Some observers have argued that the rural-urban political divide is reducible to racism or xenophobia on the part of rural dwellers. These prejudices have certainly been and remain key organizing features of American politics, and are central threats to democracy in the United States. Cities, moreover, have long been coded by the media and political elites as Black, leading many to suspect that rural resentment of urbanites is just an artifact of racism. 

Our research turns up findings that are more complicated. We find that anti-Black racism attitudes exist among both urban and rural non-Hispanic white Americans at quite similar rates. This is not all that surprising: consider the extensive efforts by white people to use local land regulation to hoard educational and financial opportunities in their neighborhoods. When the rural-urban divide emerged in the 1990s, neither whites’ attitudes about Black Americans nor an increase in immigrants in their counties were related to its growth. In more recent years, however, rural white people began to view the Democratic Party’s policy agenda as catering to Black people, while overlooking their own needs. At this stage, anti-Black racism did play a role in widening the gap, but crucially we find that it was activated by the economic decline in earlier years. The continued rhetoric by President Trump and the Republican Party, describing cities as “chaotic” and “crime ridden,” likely only exacerbates such sentiments. 

A third dimension concurrently cemented the rural-urban divide: organizational dynamics, both those that mobilized rural voters and those that failed to do so. Political party leaders and civic organizations associated with them may help promote political responses to economic, social, or policy changes. They “connect the dots” for citizens, making meaning of events for political purposes, and channeling and promoting political participation. Through such activities, organizations can facilitate and reinforce a new divide among voters. 

Certainly both the Republican and Democratic political party organizations at the local level, like other civic organizations, have been deteriorating for decades, at least since the 1960s. Yet in recent times, the GOP has formed enduring and powerful allegiances with groups that stepped up to interpret developments for citizens, construct shared social and political identities, and mobilize voters. Evangelical churches and local rod and gun clubs, hunting clubs, or shooting ranges affiliated with the National Rifle Association, for example, helped mobilize voters into the Republican Party.

Conversely, the Democratic Party in earlier times benefited from a supportive relationship with organized labor, but to the extent that previously existed in some rural places, it has now largely subsided. State and national organizations of the Democratic Party have failed to provide needed support for rural county organizations, and in many places abandoned them. As a result, the party has been hobbled as a countervailing force to conservative organizations. 

Many pundits assume that the rural-urban divide only emerged once Donald Trump became a presidential candidate in 2015. To the contrary, it is the result of long-running processes that have unfolded over time and interacted with one another. 

Now that the rural-urban divide has been entrenched, what threats does it pose to American democracy? 

The most immediate effect of the rural-urban divide is the transformation of politics into an epic battle of “us” versus “them.” Within rural areas, it means that rank-and-file Democrats face intimidation or marginalization in their communities. Nationwide, it is dividing American society, undermining the cross-cutting social connections that hold people together and soften tensions. While the rural-urban split is by no means the only source of such divisions today, its geographic nature makes it particularly pernicious given the literal distance between those on either side. 

Even more, the rural-urban divide combines with several long-existing U.S. political institutions, most located in the Constitution itself, in ways that further threaten democratic deterioration. These arrangements have always given extra political leverage in less populated places, yet those advantages have never before been consolidated into a single party. Now that an increasingly extreme Republican Party overwhelmingly wins in rural areas nationwide—subjecting residents to one-party government—it can exploit these small yet important advantages to gain more political power than it would otherwise. 

Today the rural-urban divide gives the GOP outsized opportunities to control each of the three branches of national government. Already in the 21st century, two American presidents have lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College, in part because of its rural bias. Meanwhile, the even more skewed nature of the Senate—two senators per state regardless of the now huge disparities in population—grants an extra-large voice to rural Republicans that can be used to block legislation or judicial nominations. In fact, in the 12 times Republicans have held majority power in the Senate in recent decades, only twice did they represent at least 50 percent of the U.S. population.

Since presidents nominate federal judges and the Senate must approve them, furthermore, these factors can permit stacking of the judicial branch by the party winning most states that are more rural than the U.S. population generally. In the current Supreme Court, for example, remarkably most members of the conservative majority—four justices—owe their seats to these arrangements, having been confirmed by a Senate vote representing less than half of the U.S. population. Three of those were nominated by President Donald Trump after he won the 2016 election with a minority of the popular vote. Those justices have proved pivotal in undermining basic pillars of democracy, such as by declaring presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for crimes committed while in office (Trump v. United States), as well as overturning long-standing and popular precedents, such as access to reproductive rights (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization). In short, when rural voters are consolidated in one party, it can permit minority rule. 

The combination of contemporary place-based polarization with long-standing U.S. institutional arrangements is threatening democracy itself. Together, these features can permit the party benefiting from them to further stack the deck in their favor. In time, leaders in that party may be able to change the rules to lock down their power, undermining representative government—as we see with recent efforts by Republicans to insulate themselves from voters through gerrymandering. 

While the rural-urban divide is deeply entrenched, it is not immutable, and at the very least, it need not be so large. In the past, the Democratic Party consisted of a broad coalition between rural and urban voters, united by their concern about economic issues. The New Deal effectively incorporated rural voters by responding to their needs with an array of public policies. President Joe Biden tried to emulate that approach, channeling more policies to distressed rural areas than any president since FDR. Yet, in 2024, Vice President Kamala Harris’s defeat in the presidential election and Democratic losses in the House and Senate suggest that policy alone can’t break through the rural distrust that has been on the rise for several decades now. It’s not enough for experts to formulate policies in Washington and then roll them out in rural places. Tweaks to party messaging will also come up way short. The Democratic Party’s brand in rural areas is simply too tarnished to paper over with new sloganeering. 

If not policies or messaging alone, then what else is needed? We argue that Democrats need to recommit to building the party’s organizational infrastructure around the country, and in rural areas especially. In particular, national leaders need to invest significant time and resources in state and local parties. Volunteers like Hawkins can’t do it on their own. Rather, leaders need to invest in year-round organizers, preferably drawing from the great amount of talent existent in rural areas. 

Party building could have several benefits. For one, strong local parties are better situated to listen and understand what rural people actually need. Moreover, when Democrats are able to advance policies that benefit rural areas in the future, they will need local, trusted ambassadors to point out where those policies came from. And finally, local parties can likely reduce polarization. While it is easy to villainize distant political figures from faraway cities, it is much more difficult to see your literal neighbor as an existential threat to your well-being and way of life. In all of these ways, the political work of organizing can help heal the rifts and bridge the divide. 

We don’t need to look too far back to see how this can happen. Although the rural-urban divide has grown throughout most of the period since the mid-1990s, Democrats managed to claw it back during a brief period in the midst of that time. How they did so is instructive. In 2005 Howard Dean—former governor of Vermont and, importantly, himself a former county chair—became the chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He sent three or four grassroots organizers to every state nationwide, and they made a concerted effort to support the work of county chairs, particularly in rural places. When Election Day came in 2006, Democrats won both chambers of Congress, winning back many rural seats, and won control of more state legislatures than they had since 1994. Then in 2008, rural voters contributed to Barack Obama’s victory, in which he won 53 percent of the national vote, greater than any Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and the party won control of both houses of Congress. Over the next two years, rural Democrats provided crucial votes for legislation, not least for the Affordable Care Act, achieving at last a 60-year goal of extending health coverage to working-age Americans. 

Still today, just under a third of rural Americans on average identify as Democrats. Many rural dwellers, including one-quarter of whom are people of color, are core Democratic Party constituents. The national party needs to reach out to them and offer support. At a minimum, organized efforts in rural places can help statewide Democratic candidates to “lose by less” there, and the extra margin can help them win overall. County chairs we interviewed in Georgia embraced such a strategy when Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff ran for the Senate, and they took pride in their victories, which they knew were aided by stronger-than-usual local margins for Democratic candidates. In some rural places, furthermore, Democrats are more prevalent and could become competitive with Republicans, particularly as the GOP continues to ignore the real needs of local residents. 

Democrats don’t need to change their values to attract more rural voters, but they do need to understand their struggles and engage them in the process of making their communities better off. Following the real pain caused by the Trump administration, Democrats will have an opportunity to build a bigger tent, one that mirrors the electoral arrangements embedded in American institutions. To be ready, they need to learn, once again, to connect with rural Americans. Democracy depends on it.

The post Rural Revival appeared first on Washington Monthly.

For a half century, the most recession-proof story in mainstream journalism has been declaring that college degrees aren’t recession-proof. Every economic downturn produces headlines warning that diplomas have lost—or are losing—their value. “Two things about these stories have remained constant,” Kevin Carey, who currently directs the education policy program at New America, wrote in The New Republic in 2011. “They always feature an over-educated bartender, and they are always wrong.”  

The genre dates back at least to the 1970s, when the Harvard labor economist Richard Freeman warned in his book The Overeducated American that too many people were earning degrees and that their long-term wages would suffer. The New York Times splashed the argument across its front page in 1975: “After generations during which going to college was assumed to be a sure route to the better life, college-educated Americans are losing their economic advantage.” But within the decade, the opposite happened: The wage premium for graduates soared, and it has only gone up more ever since.  

Census Bureau data shows that households headed by a bachelor’s-degree holder earn a median income of $132,700, more than double the $58,410 for those led by someone with only a high school diploma. Over the past two decades, degree-holding households saw real incomes rise by 13 percent, while high school-only households saw virtually no rise. As Carey wrote again in The Atlantic in 2023, that hasn’t stopped the cycle of headlines and sad profiles every time the economic cycle slows down.  

Which brings us to this fall’s entrant. On September 15, The New York Times published a story with the headline “The Newest Face of Long-Term Unemployment? The College Educated.” As of August 2025, there were about 1.9 million Americans classified by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as “long-term unemployed”—roughly 26 percent of all jobless workers. (The BLS defines long-term unemployed as people who are jobless for 27 weeks or more.) A decade ago, only one in five of those classified as long-term unemployed had a college degree. The Times reports that today, it’s closer to one in three, or more than half a million people. Their stories are as affecting as ever: Sean Wittmeyer, profiled in the Times piece, has two master’s degrees, and said he can’t even get hired at his local board game store. “Anyone with a free subscription to Claude, ChatGPT, could do a decent amount of what I could do before,” he lamented.  

AI certainly can’t be what is preventing Wittmeyer from getting a retail job, but something real is happening. Job openings have fallen from 12.1 million in March 2022 to 7.2 million in July 2025. Despite recent cuts, interest rates remain high. Tariffs are sporadic and unpredictable. Federal agencies are being gutted. At the same time, employers are leaning into generative AI tools that automate exactly the kind of entry-level work that young people have historically used to get a foothold: research, drafting, data entry, analysis. OpenAI researchers have documented how ChatGPT can now perform more than 50 percent of tasks across 19 percent of all occupations. It’s the worst-case convergence—short-term economic chaos colliding with long-term technological change.  

The Burning Glass Institute, a nonprofit labor market analytics firm, warns that the bottom rung of the career ladder is eroding. Its July 2025 report found that one year after graduation, 52 percent of the class of 2023 were working in jobs that didn’t require a degree. The report describes a “flipped pyramid”: steady demand for experienced workers paired with shrinking opportunities for new graduates. SignalFire, a venture capital firm, similarly found that between 2019 and 2024, there was a 50 percent decline in new roles for people with less than one year of experience at top tech firms. In sales, design, HR, engineering, and legal departments, the old footholds are vanishing. Add to that a brutal job search process. “Tinderized,” as Annie Lowrey ​​described it in The Atlantic—résumés screened by AI without human input, cookie-cutter cover letters written by AI, and hundreds of applications are disappearing into the ether. It’s no wonder that the Sean Wittmeyers of the world are discouraged.  

So the Times is not wrong to notice the strain. But the narrow focus on college grads risks obscuring the bigger story. The unemployment rate for recent college graduates (4.8 percent in June) is trending upward, but it’s still lower than that of all workers ages 22 to 27 (7.4 percent). In reality, the broader economy is wobbling: August’s 4.3 percent unemployment rate was the highest since 2021. BLS revisions shaved nearly a million jobs off the books between March 2024 and March 2025, ending a 53-month growth streak. Immigrant labor supply has fallen by 1.5 million workers in six months, further contributing to slowdowns in manufacturing and construction, which then reverberate to fields like real estate and architecture. Federal workforce cuts are on pace to eliminate 300,000 jobs by year’s end. In sum: The labor market is cooling for everyone. The present numbers, while sobering, do not tell the story of a collapse in the value of a college degree.  

Demographically, the long-term unemployed still skew less educated, nonwhite, and disabled. The roughly half-million long-term unemployed degree holders constitute less than half a percent of the U.S. labor force. And while college grads do make up a bigger slice of that pool than before, their overall unemployment rate remains far lower than that of workers without a degree. New grads as a group always take a certain amount of time to gain traction. “We graduate a new class of degree holders every year, who typically take seven to nine months to find a job that aligns with their skills,” says Courtney Brown of the Lumina Foundation. In a job market with nearly half as many openings as there were less than three years ago, that ramp-up is simply taking longer, Brown told me.  

History backs this up. The class of 2010 entered the workforce amid the wreckage of the Great Recession, with unemployment above 9 percent and 45 percent of the unemployed classified as long-term unemployed. At the time, they were branded a “lost generation.” Yet within a decade, their cohort’s wage premium over nongraduates had climbed back up even above normal levels, approaching an all-time high. Underemployment spikes for cohorts graduating into weak economies; then it falls as they move into better jobs.  

“The [career] ladder isn’t broken—it’s just being replaced with something that looks a lot flatter,” ​​Heather Doshay, formerly of the venture capital firm SignalFire, told CNBC. Today’s first job might be more technical or specialized—but it’s not inaccessible. “When the internet and email came on the scene as common corporate required skills,” Doshay noted, “new grads were well positioned to become experts by using them in school, and the same absolutely applies here with how accessible AI is.” The key, she said, “will be in how new grads harness their capabilities to become experts so they are seen as desirable tech-savvy workers who are at the forefront of AI’s advances.”  

Wages tend to follow productivity, and the workers best positioned to harness new technologies like AI in today’s economy are, by and large, college graduates. That is one reason degrees continue to command a premium. When the Great Recession hit, millions of Americans lost their jobs, but college graduates were the most likely to be employed at the outset and least likely to be unemployed as the crisis went on.

Economists also caution against declaring AI a job killer just yet. Anders Humlum, an economist at the University of Chicago, points out that predictions about AI’s long-term labor market impact are still highly speculative. “We now have two and a half years of experience with generative AI chatbots diffusing widely throughout the economy,” Humlum told CNBC, and “these tools have not made a significant difference for employment or earnings in any occupation thus far.”  

Universities are responding too—purchasing premium and university-specific services from companies ​​like OpenAI and Anthropic, offering hands-on AI courses, and transforming campuses into training grounds for a more digitally fluent workforce.  

So the education-to-employment conveyor belt might be noisier and slower than in the past, but it’s still moving. AI is reshaping the early stages of careers, not eliminating them entirely. A twenty-year-old can use AI to polish a cover letter, build a pitch deck, or practice job interviews. A designer can generate prototypes, a welder can simulate repairs. Many skills that used to require formal apprenticeship or classroom time are now teachable by machine. As Bruno V. Manno argued recently in the Monthly, AI raises the bar for demonstrated expertise—but it lowers the barrier to acquiring it.  

And if the short-term picture is cloudy, the long-term fundamentals point in the opposite direction. A new Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce report, Falling Behind, projects that by 2032 the U.S. will be short 5.25 million workers with postsecondary credentials, including 4.5 million with a bachelor’s degree or higher. Managers, teachers, nurses, engineers, accountants, and physicians are all on the shortage list. The culprits: Baby Boomer retirements, declining college enrollment and completion, and restrictive immigration policy. Far from being oversupplied with college graduates, the nation is on track for a severe shortage.  

Jobs demanding higher-order human skills—problem solving, communication, leadership—are likely to keep expanding, even in an AI-saturated economy. Those skills are exactly what college educations develop, and what AI cannot replace. That’s consistent with what we already see in the labor market. Even during today’s slowdown, degree holders earn far more, face lower unemployment, and enjoy better long-term prospects than their peers without diplomas. They live longer, are healthier, and are more likely to own homes.  

Why does the myth endure? Not because the reporting is false—the Times is right that more graduates are showing up among the long-term unemployed, and their stories deserve attention. What’s misleading is the leap from moment to meaning: the implication that the degree itself is losing value in the labor market. As Carey wrote almost 15 years ago, “People naturally tend to project current trends into the future, missing the up-and-down nature of the business cycle.” Today’s pain reflects two overlapping shocks: the economic whiplash of Trump’s second term, and AI tools that are rapidly automating the lowest rungs of white-collar work. Those forces make it harder for new graduates to get started—but history and data both show that the long-term premium on higher education is rising, not collapsing. 

Misreading cyclical pain as structural collapse has consequences. It erodes public confidence in higher education. In 2015, 57 percent of Americans said they had “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence” in higher ed. By 2024, that had fallen to 36 percent, while the share expressing little or no confidence more than tripled, to 32 percent. When students absorb the message that college isn’t worth it, whether because of rising costs, wokeness, or the rise of AI, they’re more likely to forgo it. That fuels a cycle that benefits no one: not the student’s long-term health and wages, not the economy that needs more educated workers, and not colleges that depend on enrollment. 

None of this diminishes the difficulty of Sean Wittmeyer’s job search. But it’s worth noting, as the Times buried at the end of its story, that he is now using his design skills to develop and sell board games. The college degree has endured for a reason. What we need isn’t fewer of them, but better-aligned ones: programs tailored to workforce demand, policies that boost affordability and completion, and institutions that help students translate education into opportunity. The bartender with a doctorate will always be good copy. But the degree remains the surest, sturdiest path to prosperity.  

The post No, College Degrees Aren’t Losing Their Value   appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In recent months, Donald Trump’s administration has supplemented its globe-spanning tariffs with bespoke industrial policy deals with U.S. corporations. These include the federal government taking equity stakes in Intel, a “golden share” in U.S. Steel, and profit sharing on Nvidia and AMD’s chip sales in China. The deals have astonished and unnerved economic analysts across the political spectrum. Commentators from The Wall Street Journal editorial page to MSNBC have decried them as “unprecedented” and amounting to “socialism,” “corporatism,” or “state capitalism with American characteristics.”  

In truth, Trump’s actions are rooted in a long history of presidents from both parties taking temporary control or ownership of systemically important companies. However, until now, most of these interventions have been temporary and involved either wartime emergencies or too-big-to-fail corporate collapse. Under Woodrow Wilson, the federal government took temporary ownership of the railroad industry to support troops during World War I. During World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration directed much of the corporate industrial sector. In 1980, Jimmy Carter’s administration extended loan guarantees to Chrysler in exchange for stock warrants. After the company recovered and repaid its loans, the government earned $311 million in capital gains. During the financial crisis, Barack Obama’s administration provided the auto industry with tens of billions of dollars in exchange for equity stakes and commitments for substantial restructuring. 

Trump’s moves also build on recent industrial policy interventions by his and Joe Biden’s administrations. Until now, those policies stopped short of the government seeking direct influence over corporate governance through golden shares or equity stakes. During his first term, Trump primarily conducted industrial policy through targeted tariffs and trade actions to promote American industry, and by jawboning corporations to boost domestic manufacturing. The Biden administration went further, providing computer chip and clean energy companies with hundreds of billions of dollars—and detailed requirements for how they could be spent—as part of a long-term post-neoliberal industrial strategy for national security. Those actions were consistent with, though a major step beyond, Trump’s first-term trade policies, just as Trump’s second-term corporate dealmaking is an advance on Biden’s (even if neither president would admit it).  

So, while Trump’s dealmaking spree is not unprecedented, it ventures into new territory reflecting his strongman tendencies: He has claimed for himself concentrated power to oversee and influence corporate decision-making, authority thus far ceded to him by Congress and the courts. He has operated outside the law through handshake deals that corporations often cannot afford to refuse, endowing the presidency with powerful—and dangerous—economic tools for routine use.  

This is unlikely to be a mere Trump-era aberration. Presidents typically don’t forego inherited powers. Today’s novelty policies may become tomorrow’s precedent, as the last decade has shown. Some elements of industrial policy with Trumpist characteristics may become long-term features of American governance. But Congress and the judiciary should assert democratic and constitutional control over American industrial policy now and in the future to prevent its abuse and, potentially, its collapse.  

Here’s a rundown of Trump’s corporate dealmaking thus far: 

U.S. Steel: In June, the White House greenlit Nippon Steel’s takeover bid for the American steelmaker U.S. Steel. Trump overturned Biden’s blocking of the deal—on the condition that the government receive a “golden share” of the company, allowing it to veto major corporate decisions, such as offshoring jobs and closing plants. 

MP Materials: In July, the Department of Defense announced an investment in MP Materials, the country’s only active producer of certain rare earth minerals used for military equipment. The deal provided government support for the company, guaranteeing a minimum price for its products and providing a guaranteed buyer—the federal government—for all its output for the next 10 years. The feds also extended a $150 million loan and purchased $400 million in company stock, making it MP’s largest shareholder. 

Japan: Also in July, the White House announced a trade deal with Japan that purportedly included Tokyo creating a $550 billion investment fund for the administration to use toward its industrial policy priorities, including energy infrastructure, semiconductor manufacturing, critical mineral supply chains, pharmaceutical production, and shipbuilding. Japan quickly contested the administration’s description of the deal, explaining that the investment fund would be nearly entirely composed of loans the U.S. would need to repay.

Nvidia and AMD: In August, the administration agreed to allow the semiconductor makers Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices to sell certain modified chips in China, reversing national security restrictions. The companies also agreed to give 15 percent of all profits earned in China to the U.S. government. 

Intel: Later that month, the administration took a 10 percent equity stake in the chipmaker Intel. The deal converted billions of dollars in grants the company was due under the CHIPS and Science Act into equity stakes, making the federal government Intel’s largest shareholder. That conversion also, without any legal authority, dispensed with CHIPS Act taxpayer safeguards that required Intel to reach milestones toward completing new domestic manufacturing sites to receive federal funding. 

Trump’s economic interventions bear a number of distinctive qualities that expand on industrial policy precedent, but five stand out.

1. Unilateralism: Trump’s industrial policy has been personalist, flowing from and controlled by the president himself. Unlike the Biden administration, which shepherded industrial policy bills through Congress, Trump relies exclusively on executive action. His industrial policy has at times been colored by favoritism and personal relationships. The Nvidia export agreement, for instance, came after meetings between Trump and CEO Jensen Huang. The president himself asked Huang for a share of the company’s Chinese profits. In other cases, bargained-for benefits have been structured to accrue directly under Trump’s control. The Nippon Steel agreement gave control of the golden share not to the office of the president but to Trump himself; only after he leaves office does the share transfer to the secretaries of treasury and commerce. Finally, the (contested) $550 billion pot from Japan would be, according to Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, a fund to be spent however Trump wished—part of “a national security and economic fund managed by Donald Trump.” 

2. Public ownership in the absence of a fiscal crisis or national security justification: While direct government ownership of industry is not unheard of in American history, the Trump administration has been uniquely eager to wield it as a routine industrial policy tool. The MP Materials and Intel deals both gave the government equity ownership of private companies, and the U.S. Steel approval netted the government special, powerful veto rights over that company’s decision-making. After announcing the (contested) terms of the Japan trade deal, administration officials even contemplated using the deal’s (disputed) investment fund to build government-owned factories that could then be leased to private companies. 

3. Bullying individual companies: Trump has a quid pro quo mentality of wanting a cut of any private gains he feels he has facilitated—he has openly compared his presidential dealmaking to waiving property rights on his real estate for the benefit of a third party, in exchange for a fee. When he agreed to grant Nvidia export licenses to sell modified chips in China, Trump told its chief executive, “If I’m going to do that, I want you to pay us something.” Or as Lutnick described the Intel equity stake, “If we’re going to give you the money, we want a piece of the action.” 

4. Leveraging government power: Beyond just flexing the rhetorical might of the presidential bully pulpit, Trump has used the levers of government to offer firms deals they can’t refuse. The administration has created or exploited bargaining power to induce targeted firms to relent to its demands. Under export control regulations, Nvidia and AMD needed the administration’s permission to sell chips in China, forcing them to acquiesce to Trump’s profit-sharing demand. Nippon Steel could not take over U.S. Steel without approval from the government’s foreign investment review committee. Shortly before Intel agreed to the equity deal, Trump ratcheted up the pressure by calling for its executive to be fired and withholding its CHIPS Act grants.  

Two other examples illustrate Trump’s leverage power plays. In May, he issued an executive order instructing pharmaceutical companies to agree to adhere to “most-favored-nation price targets … to bring prices for American patients in line with comparably developed nations.” The order threatened that the administration would put the squeeze on pharmaceutical companies that don’t comply, through newly authorized competition from drug imports, restrictions on their own exports, antitrust scrutiny, reconsideration of FDA approvals of their drugs, and loss of National Institutes of Health grants. And in August, the administration announced that it would impose high tariffs on semiconductor imports—but would exempt tech companies that made new domestic investment pledges. The administration thus imposed tariffs to create leverage and offered relief from those tariffs to advance its industrial policy goals.

5. Legally dubious boundary pushing: Much of Trump’s industrial policy has operated in legal gray zones. To bypass routine federal contracting and procurement laws that typically require competitive bidding, the administration’s investment in MP Materials relied on a little-used provision of the Defense Production Act authorizing transactions “without regard to the limitations of existing law.” Trump’s profit-sharing deal with Nvidia and AMD flouts prohibitions on export taxes and fees under both the Constitution and federal law. There is also no firm legal basis under the CHIPS Act to convert Intel’s grants into equity (nor was there to withhold its grants in the first place). 

Trump has avoided legal constraints by relying on “regulation by deal,” rather than legislation or agency rulemaking. (He’s also been firing the regulators who would otherwise shape such government interventions.) Companies have acquiesced to White House demands that may not otherwise withstand legal scrutiny to avoid lost business opportunities, the cost and time of litigating against the federal government, and the general ire of the Trump administration. This has insulated much of Trump’s industrial policy from administrative procedure, due process, and judicial review. 

Some elements of Trump’s approach are likely to endure. The wraparound support for MP Materials, for example, could well become a model for how the U.S. government cultivates strategically important domestic production. The type of golden share Trump obtained in U.S. Steel could be on the table for future mitigation agreements between the federal government and foreign companies seeking to invest in critical domestic sectors.  

As I have written for this magazine, there are also compelling reasons for the government to insist on a direct return on its industrial policy investments. Taking equity stakes in semiconductor companies funded by the CHIPS Act was originally a Bernie Sanders proposal. When used in the right context, equity stakes ensure that industrial policy returns upside revenue to the public, instead of merely socializing profits for corporations. 

External trends may also lend Trump’s industrial policy approach greater staying power. As policymakers seek new revenue sources beyond traditional taxation, they may increasingly look to levers like equity stakes, profit-sharing agreements, and royalties. Congress’s tendency toward gridlock and paralysis has long spurred administrations to seek creative executive workarounds, but the courts have increasingly limited the discretion given to the administrative state. That may steer administrations toward regulation-by-deal as a flexible means for the executive branch to regain power from the judiciary. 

It’s not hard to imagine where Trumpist industrial policy may be headed. White House advisers have said they will seek equity stakes in other companies receiving federal grants and loans to seed a sovereign wealth fund. Moreover, if Intel cannot right its ship, it may be forced to revisit previous discussions of spinning off its semiconductor factories to a foreign firm like the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. The Trump administration, which has opposed such a move, could, as Intel’s largest shareholder, dictate the terms of such a deal. (Indeed, the Intel agreement included a poison pill to stymie the sale of its foundries.) Plus, any such sale must win the administration’s approval through the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. One could imagine the administration negotiating on economic and national security grounds for government ownership of Intel’s factories, which could then be leased to another chipmaker.  

Trump’s industrial policy toolkit may empower future administrations with different priorities. For instance, federal policies—steep tariffs and national security exclusions—are sparing U.S. automakers from a flood of low-cost, cutting-edge Chinese electric vehicles. A future administration could condition that continued industry protection on American carmakers offering more affordable low-emissions vehicles and ramping up their research and development investments.  

A future administration could use the specter of the government’s statutory powers to limit or override patents on federally funded technologies to negotiate long-term profit-sharing agreements with artificial intelligence companies. It could also use similar authority to negotiate price reductions from pharmaceutical companies and leverage the Medicare Advantage market to acquire golden shares in health insurance companies, with veto power over major corporate decisions.  

A future Democratic administration could grant targeted tariff reductions to countries or companies that decarbonize their energy grids and production processes—and dangle extra reductions to those that use American-made clean energy technology. It could use the Defense Production Act’s preemption power to expedite clean energy and new housing development around other legal impediments. If the industrial policy arc from the first Trump administration to the Biden administration is any guide, the next Democratic president will make fulsome use of these kinds of Trump-inspired tools.

So sheer inertia may well propel Trumpist industrial policy forward. But there are several stark and urgent reasons Congress and the courts should pump the brakes and reconsider major elements of Trump’s approach. For one, this approach may simply yield worse industrial policy. Absent exceeding care and deliberation, go-it-alone executive branch industrial policy can overreach and implode without the safeguards and democratic legitimacy of operating through Congress. Even if Trump’s deals successfully evade the courts, a subsequent administration could deem some contrary to law and declare them null and void—regulation by deal has far less long-term durability than regulation by regulation, let alone legislation. Such whipsawing will make the U.S. government a less reliable, more tumultuous economic actor. 

For another, elements of Trump’s industrial policy are a recipe for abuse and corruption. Pay-to-play regimes for exporting sensitive technologies to foreign adversaries jeopardize fair competition and national security. Personalist policymaking is a recipe for cronyism, corruption, and favoritism for well-connected dominant firms. As The New York Times reported, Trump’s family was directly benefiting from billions of dollars of investment in its crypto company by the United Arab Emirates—at the same time it agreed to provide the UAE with highly sensitive and valuable advanced semiconductor chips.

It is all too easy to foresee more future gambits redounding to the private benefit of the Trump family (like the Paramount merger with Skydance, which routed $16 million into the Trump presidential library). Moreover, while leverage can be useful for achieving policy aims, marshaling the vast regulatory state as one big pressure cooker to coerce concessions from targeted companies risks undermining other vital policy interests. We’re already seeing that regarding antitrust. Companies seeking merger approvals have won favorable treatment from the Trump administration by making side promises for domestic manufacturing investments. The potential for Trumpist misuse of industrial policy risks poisoning the whole enterprise. 

That’s where Congress and the courts come in—or where they should. Congress was a true coequal branch during the Biden administration’s major industrial policy programs, shaping and passing the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, CHIPS and Science Act, and Inflation Reduction Act through normal legislative processes. It could again instill democratic prerogatives and guardrails for industrial policy. Congress could determine when the government should take equity stakes in private companies. It could set ground rules around taking golden shares, like which corporate decisions may be subject to a government veto and which are off-limits. It could set standards around appropriate uses of revenue-sharing deals with the federal government. It could stipulate where the revenue generated from industry policy investments should go and how it should be spent. It could set rules preventing the government from unduly favoring companies where it has taken equity stakes in competitor firms. It could establish safeguards to ensure that industrial policy is not used to enrich public officials. Meanwhile, the courts may need to revisit legal doctrines like standing to ensure that some party can contest deals of questionable legality, like the Nvidia revenue-sharing agreement or the Intel equity swap.  

If Congress fails to act, it could be understood as blessing Trump’s mode of industrial policy by one-man dealmaking. That doesn’t just invite corruption, but is also a recipe for managerial disaster. The Obama administration’s masterful overhaul of Detroit is arguably less remembered today than the failure of Solyndra. After receiving an Energy Department loan, the solar panel firm’s bankruptcy led to a series of high-profile investigations that ultimately uncovered no criminal wrongdoing or corruption but soured the public on Obama’s nascent clean energy industrial strategy. 

With Trump’s state capitalism, the hands-off market fundamentalism era is over. The question is whether the government’s new terms of engagement with industry will be dominated by the president or deliberated on by Congress and the courts. Acquiescence by the other branches to Trump’s deals, warts and all, risks heralding the unchecked and unbalanced industrial policy of the unitary executive. Activation by them, however, could lead to a whole-of-government effort to sand away the roughest edges of Trump’s approach to craft an industrial policy that is both powerful and responsible to effectively guide the country forward.

The post Trump’s Industrial Policy: What’s Right and Wrong appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In July, Donald Trump’s administration announced a staggering 93.5 percent tariff on Chinese graphite—a material essential to battery production. China not only dominates graphite mining but also controls 96 percent of the global supply of processed anode-grade graphite, a key component of lithium ion batteries. The move sent shockwaves through the already fragile battery supply chain and all but guarantees higher costs for U.S. manufacturers. It’s only the latest in a string of irrational policies that make it harder, not easier, to bring manufacturing back home.

This summer, congressional Republicans passed the president’s massively unpopular budget bill, rolling back Joe Biden’s signature clean energy legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). While much of the attention on the bill’s energy components has focused on the damage to the wind and solar industries, the legislation will also upend the booming battery business, gutting one of the economy’s fastest-growing and strategically vital industries. While the Biden administration made substantial progress in building a domestic battery supply chain, Trump is kneecapping battery manufacturing in the U.S. by crushing demand and hiking up input costs.

The contradictions in Trump’s “America First” strategy are hard to miss: The White House pushes policies to streamline critical minerals production while dismantling the industries that need such minerals; it taxes essential imports without supporting adequate domestic replacements; and it proclaims its mission to bring back American manufacturing jobs while enacting policies that shut down factories.

America’s clean energy transition cannot be stopped, but it can be slowed. Trump and the Republicans have decided to do just that—even if it means fewer jobs, higher prices, and more energy dependence.

The industrial policies passed under Biden ushered in a resurgence in American manufacturing by employing carrots (tax credits) and sticks (tariffs and domestic content requirements). The IRA, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), and the CHIPS Act jump-started a clean energy boom, using targeted public investment to catalyze trillions in private capital.

The Biden administration strategically designed an industrial policy for batteries. Tax credits “derisked” investment and improved the cost-competitiveness of domestic battery manufacturing, while Foreign Entity of Concern (FEOC) provisions penalized companies that continued to rely on imported battery components. Those restrictions were set to tighten gradually, giving American firms more time to build out a domestic supply chain.

It worked. According to the Clean Investment Monitor, Biden’s green industrial strategy tripled quarterly investment in clean manufacturing from 2022 to 2025. Since the IRA was passed, more than 380 clean tech factories have been announced, with 161 already operational. Of the $115 billion in manufacturing investment the IRA attracted, batteries led the way, accounting for 69 percent. In a short time, the Biden incentives made U.S. battery production cost-competitive with China—which dominates over three-quarters of the global battery supply chain—and put the nation on track to meet all of domestic battery demand with a Made in America battery manufacturing industry by 2030.

But then the Republican Party returned to power.

Trump’s signature legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed in July, guts the tax credits that help American manufacturing catch up to China, while his administration continues to impose tariffs in a blunderbuss manner. The main outcome of this so-called economic “strategy” will be higher inflation and persistent shortages of foreign goods and commodities. And the effects of Trump’s tariffs are only beginning to reach consumers.

Since Trump’s inauguration, more than $27 billion of investment in clean energy manufacturing has been canceled, bankrupted, delayed, or scaled back, taking nearly 19,000 jobs. More EV manufacturing facilities, including battery plants, were canceled in the first three months of 2025 than in all 2023 and 2024 combined.

The elimination of the EV tax credit and the EPA’s move to rescind Biden-era tailpipe emissions regulations deals a blow to EV adoption, but it will cripple America’s battery manufacturing. A report by Princeton’s ZERO Lab estimates that not only could these repeals result in the cancellation of an eyepopping 100 percent of planned battery facilities, but they also potentially threaten to shut down up to 72 percent of battery manufacturing plants. Withdraw market incentives, and the market dries up. EV sales could also fall 30 percent by 2027 and 40 percent by 2030. That translates to 8.3 million fewer EVs, and 8.3 million fewer batteries needed to power them.

The IRA didn’t just spur investment in battery manufacturing; it helped create over 133,000 decent blue-collar jobs in battery production in just two years. Within the first five months of Trump’s presidency, more than 6,000 of those jobs were wiped out.

With the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, the nonpartisan energy policy think tank Energy Innovation projects that 31,000 battery jobs will evaporate by 2030. But the more profound tragedy is the number of American jobs—approaching 1 million—in manufacturing, supporting industries, and local economies that will now never materialize.

These aren’t workforce reductions for a dying industry. They are layoffs in the sectors of tomorrow—cuts to a technology that makes a more resilient, affordable energy system for America possible.

Trump and the GOP are doubling down on fossil fuels as the economics of renewables—even paired with the costs of battery storage—make that strategy irrational. Batteries absorb electricity during the day while prices are low and discharge it during peak demand hours, improving grid reliability and cutting energy costs for consumers.

Look at Texas, the country’s largest deregulated electricity market, where battery storage is booming to take advantage of dirt-cheap solar power. The growth of solar and batteries there has significantly reduced the risk of grid emergencies for which the Lone Star State had become infamous. Solar provides power during the hottest hours of the day, while batteries store the excess and release it as the sun sets. In California, where battery capacity has exploded 30-fold since 2018, record discharges of battery power during last year’s extreme heat meant that the state didn’t need to issue a single energy conservation alert.

Ironically, battery storage provides precisely the type of dispatchable energy that Trump administration officials claim they want. A recent report by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a nonprofit regulatory authority that sets and enforces grid reliability standards, found that battery expansion improved overall grid reliability even as the rapid uptake of data centers increases strain on the system.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright has pulled support for long-duration battery storage projects and cut funding for scientific research into advanced battery technologies. As one former senior Department of Energy official told The Guardian, “If you stop any research for next generation solar or battery technology, or wind or geothermal or other pieces, what you’re effectively doing is compromising a huge range of technology that has the potential to reduce costs.”

For all its talk about American energy dominance and lower prices, raising energy costs is exactly what the Trump administration’s policies are accomplishing. Since January, thanks to Trump’s tariffs, short-term battery storage costs have risen 56 percent to 69 percent. Unsurprisingly, deployment of battery storage on the grid is expected to fall 30 percent over the next decade. The Trump administration likes to harp constantly about supporting “affordable, reliable, and secure energy”—they forget to add “as long as it suits my party’s ideological priors.”

This comes as Trump and the GOP rail against U.S. dependence on Chinese batteries and the need to reshore American manufacturing, after passing a bill that decimates the domestic battery industry.

While the final version of the GOP mega bill technically retains the advanced manufacturing tax credit for battery producers, new FEOC rules (read: China) impose unworkable domestic content requirements that make the credits inaccessible. Both complex and overly restrictive, the FEOC provisions will require regulatory guidance from the Treasury Department—a process that took two years under Biden. Until then, it’s unlikely that companies will invest without knowing whether they’ll qualify for the credits.

Meanwhile, the GOP is aggressively deregulating extractive industries. While boosting critical mineral production can support the buildout of a domestic supply chain, it makes little sense to simultaneously undercut the high-value-add industries like battery manufacturing that create the very demand for those minerals.

Yet Trump is doing just that. He has leaned on the Cold War–era Defense Production Act to boost investment in critical mineral production. The Department of the Interior is streamlining permitting processes for lithium mines. Trump strong-armed Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky into granting the U.S. sweeping economic privileges over Ukraine’s mineral resources. However, these resources are critical because they serve the transition to clean energy. Why produce more lithium if not to make more batteries?

Trump announced a 50 percent tariff in July on copper imports, citing the critical need for the conductive metal in everything from semiconductors to ships to batteries. But the U.S. imports 40 percent of its copper, and there’s no alternative path to achieve copper self-sufficiency in the near or long term. Whereas a new battery plant can come online within two years, a new mine can take over 20 years to open up production. In the U.S., the average development time to open a new copper mine takes up to 32 years. Investors can hardly expect American trade policy to remain stable for 30 days, let alone during the remaining three-plus years of Trump’s term in office. Ultimately, the Trump administration and congressional Republicans have been pursuing policies to expand domestic mining, refining, and processing of critical minerals—arguably worthy goals, but not if you’re simultaneously destroying the manufacturing of products derived from such resources. They are ceding the lead in clean tech to China so the U.S. can become a raw materials exporter like so many Third World nations trapped in the cycle of extraction without development.

Justin Wolfers, the University of Michigan economist, accurately sums up Trump’s “plan” to restore U.S. manufacturing: “Raise the price of inputs like steel, aluminum & copper; create shortages of rare earths; invite retaliatory tariffs; cut R&D; raise borrowing costs by blowing out the budget; and … cover it all in a thick cloud of uncertainty.”

The 50 percent tariff on imported steel has doubled the price of domestic steel, yet many companies still import because even inflated foreign steel is cheaper. The nascent American battery industry hasn’t had enough time to relocate its supply chain. China still dominates the global market for key battery components, which U.S. companies must depend on until suitable (and competitive) domestic alternatives emerge. Trump’s on-again, off-again tariff wars don’t guide investment—they paralyze it.

Trump returned to office partly under the dubious promise to “Make America Great Again” by reviving domestic manufacturing and restoring high-wage blue-collar jobs. Now he and the GOP aren’t just breaking that promise, they’re spitting in the face of the Americans who believed them.

The post How to Crush the American Battery Boom appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Since Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance was published, the policy world has debated the causes of our current housing supply drought. Abundance argued that zoning laws are the culprit, as part of its broader thesis calling for liberals to embrace a policy vision oriented around building more of what we need (i.e., “abundance”) primarily through targeted deregulation of private industry and de-proceduralization of government. Other analysts believe that it is consolidation in the housing market that slows development. But both camps aim to expand housing supply, and solutions are not always derived from the causes of the problem. Cancer isn’t caused by the absence of chemo drugs or radiation, but that is often the treatment. Instead of debating causes, focusing on what policy solutions work best might be a better approach.  

At the highest level, there are two competing policy perspectives. On the one hand, the YIMBY approach to increasing housing construction is essentially a passive one: Government should get out of the way of private development by passing zoning reform, making it easier to get permits, eliminating minimum lot size requirements, and reducing or eliminating parking mandates. This group advocates mostly for “upzoning” reform, a version of deregulation that allows landowners to build multiple housing units on property previously zoned for single-family homes.  

An emerging “post-neoliberal” approach, on the other hand, calls for government to take a more active role: an increase in public funding, city planning to build more densely, tax incentives for development, and even public ownership. These tactics can include government spending, but they can also be structured to break even or even generate revenue. A version of this approach, promoted by the nonprofit New Consensus, argues that the best way to build is to set big goals, provide high-level leadership, and mobilize both private industry and government toward those goals (who then find myriad ways to overcome obstacles project by project). A city can use both approaches at the same time, of course. But they differ fundamentally in approach—one involves getting government out of the way, and the other involves more government attention. 

So which method produces more housing? To answer that question, we can look at Washington, D.C., which offers an excellent example of a city that took the post-neoliberal approach. Since before the coronavirus pandemic, D.C. has been in a prolonged housing boom. Between 2019 and 2024, the city sustained an average of nearly 6,700 new units every year. That is a lot for an area containing about 370,000 total housing units and puts Washington consistently on par with the states building the most homes, such as Idaho, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah, Arizona, and Texas. (And there are greater challenges in D.C., including limited space and bureaucratic obstacles from the unique federal government overlay on city governance.) In fact, Washington performed better in the first part of 2025 than Houston, which ConsumerAffairs recently declared the leading city in new construction. Houston permitted and sold more houses by volume, but it is three times bigger than Washington; controlling for population, D.C. did more. As a result of the housing construction boom, rents in D.C. have been rising more moderately than in its surrounding suburbs, where homebuilding has not kept pace. 

Washington was not always a housing boomtown. The current period of housing growth is a result of a policy change at the city level. In 2019, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser announced a housing initiative to use all tools available to the city to promote building. Importantly, Washington announced a benchmark to which it could be held accountable: 36,000 new housing units (12,000 affordable units) by 2025. Washington had built 36,000 units in the prior nine years (4,000 annually), so this was a promise to make a substantial increase. It worked. D.C. overshot and built more than 40,000 units by 2025. 

To increase construction, including affordable housing, the city performed a number of analyses, held town halls, convened teams of experts, and engaged in a significant amount of community engagement. The top-down commitment to housing created an environment in the city government that encouraged and supported new construction. The housing initiative was a miniature version of the agenda that New Consensus advocates. Washington started not with discrete policy proposals, but by setting a bold and measurable goal and mobilizing government and industry toward that goal, assuming that the tone at the top would push everyone to figure out how to break through obstacles to drive individual projects. 

The D.C. government used the $1.3 billion Housing Production Trust Fund to provide cheap loans for affordable housing projects. It rezoned underused industrial or commercial land near transit hubs into high-density residential neighborhoods (a strategy this magazine has advocated for a decade and a half). It built transportation infrastructure to create new neighborhoods in areas that warehouses once dominated. It used the Tax Increment Financing program to borrow against future tax revenue from developments to pay for infrastructure. It entered into Planned Unit Development (PUD) agreements with developers to create zoning exceptions in exchange for various public benefits, like building grocery stores in food deserts or affordable housing (a tactic abundance pundits disparage as “everything-bagel liberalism” that puts a drag on development projects but that actually has a good track record, as Joel Dodge has argued in these pages). The city even purchased land to be bundled and leased to developers, resulting, for example, in the massive new waterfront development on the Potomac. Just this year, Washington took control of the vacant RFK Stadium and a surrounding lot to create a new stadium, commercial space, and 6,000 new housing units (1,800 of which are slated for affordable housing). Perhaps surprisingly, the wide-ranging effort didn’t include uniform city-wide dezoning, upzoning, or permitting reform. 

To be clear, some of these efforts started before 2019, and housing in D.C. is far from perfect. There is a long history of housing discrimination. Not enough affordable housing is built in wealthy neighborhoods, contributing to segregation. Housing costs are still very high—partly because the metro area outside the district is much less effective at building—and the government could be doing more to provide housing assistance to low-income residents. Developers sometimes fail to live up to promises made in a PUD agreement. The costs of building affordable housing are too high. And there are reasonable questions about whether D.C. is getting enough out of its deals with private developers. 

But if we just judge what is most effective at building new housing units, D.C.’s post-neoliberal approach was a success. During the past six years, while most of the country’s new construction was dragging, Washington made a conscious policy change that increased construction from an average of about 4,000 units to about 6,700 units per year. That is a 68 percent increase on average, meaning this is sustained growth, not a short-term surge. 

And D.C.’s stats easily outmatch other cities’ efforts. For example, Portland, Oregon, has a similar population and passed typical YIMBY upzoning reform around the same time. Portland’s initiative allowed landowners to build up to four units on properties previously zoned for single-family homes. The city recently assessed the impact of its reforms and concluded that it was a success because it produced, on average, 467 extra units a year, even though the city’s overall housing construction declined to an average of about 3,172 from 2018 to 2023. 

In fact, I cannot find a single example of a city that used the YIMBY playbook and came even close to the numbers produced by D.C.’s housing initiative. The upzoning initiative in Austin, Texas, allowed only 300 permit applications that could result in new units in the first year. Spokane, Washington’s upzoning reform produced about 80 new units. Minneapolis’s well-known upzoning efforts produced just 1,000 new units in two and a half years. (Other parts of Minneapolis’s plans that resembled D.C.’s approach—rezoning commercial space to create dense apartment housing—have done much better, as the Monthly’s Paul Glastris and Nate Weisberg previously reported.) An Urban Institute study found that upzoning reforms across the country produced, on average, a 0.8 percent increase in housing supply after three to nine years. For comparison, D.C.’s initiative built 16,000 more units in six years than it would have in its prior average construction rate, which is a 4 to 5 percent increase in housing supply. Of course, every city is unique; there are often other countervailing trends, policies, or limitations, and these are not entirely apples-to-apples comparisons. But the numbers still don’t compete with D.C.’s rapid increase in construction.  

The broader policy lesson here is simple. Abundance-minded policymakers should recognize that there is a ceiling on how much private-sector deregulation can achieve, and there are serious trade-offs. The thesis of Abundance is that “we need to build and invent more of what we need.” In certain circumstances, passive deregulation can produce slow and marginal gains, but to satisfy a bold promise to increase supply quickly, we need more than that. Direct public investment, government planning, public options, and mobilization are required to accomplish a bold abundance agenda. 

There are political lessons, too. We often hear that cities in red states are better at building. But D.C. is on par with the best and is the bluest jurisdiction in the country. Perhaps liberal cities wanting to build should first look to successful cities with similar political landscapes for options, rather than conservative jurisdictions dealing with entirely different political considerations. It might surprise many that the champion of post-neoliberal housing in D.C. is the moderate Mayor Bowser, who endorsed Michael Bloomberg for president in 2020. That Bowser, not just Zohran Mamdani, is pursuing this approach to housing policy should show us that an abundance agenda focused on public options and government planning to push major projects—rather than just deregulation—is not a radical vision in 2025.  

The post To Create Abundant Housing, Ignore the YIMBY Playbook appeared first on Washington Monthly.

When Donald Trump returned to the White House last January, one of his earliest declarations was that the United States would begin building ships “very fast, very soon.” But in the ten months since his inauguration, the administration’s actions have not laid the groundwork for a shipbuilding revival. If anything, they have actively undermined the industry’s prospects.  

Unlike many of Trump’s other policy priorities, this one at least addresses a worthy cause. A strong maritime sector underpins everything from trade resilience to military readiness. Merchant ships transport critical cargoes across oceans, transport aid during disasters, and sustain the skilled mariners that the military relies on for sealift in wartime. Yet decades of decline have left American yards with a sliver of the global market, old infrastructure, and a shrinking workforce.  

At first, Trump appeared to recognize the scale of the problem. In March, the administration announced the creation of the Office of Shipbuilding within the National Security Council, billed as the centerpiece of a broader maritime strategy. The following month, an executive order raised hopes for a coordinated industrial policy and a whole-of-government approach. But within months, that effort had collapsed.  

Mike Waltz, the former national security adviser and a central architect of Trump’s shipbuilding executive order, was pushed out for his role in Signalgate, the scandal in which Waltz erroneously added the editor in chief of The Atlantic to a group chat where top administration officials were discussing imminent plans to bomb Yemen. Soon after, Ian Bennitt, the senior director tapped to lead the shipbuilding office, resigned. And because of Trump’s cuts to the NSC, five of seven staffers in the shipbuilding office soon followed. Then, in a clear sign that maritime strategy was no longer a priority, the office was quietly downgraded, moved out of the NSC, and folded into the Office of Management and Budget. 

At the same time, the Maritime Administration, the federal agency most directly responsible for supporting U.S. shipping, remains leaderless. So far, no administrator has been confirmed. Without permanent leadership, MARAD has been unable to set priorities and goals, press for needed resources, or reassure industry stakeholders about the administration’s seriousness.  

A recent Government Accountability Office report underscored the problem, noting that MARAD “cannot determine to what extent [its] programs are effective in growing the U.S. maritime fleet because it has not established measurable goals … or assessed the performance” of its programs. The absence of leadership has prevented the government from exercising its powers to grow maritime capacity.  

That leadership vacuum extends into the training pipeline. The United States currently faces a shortage of thousands of mariners. Nonetheless, the administration has done little to strengthen the maritime pipeline. At the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, New York, the nation’s primary training ground for sealift officers, conditions have deteriorated. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has publicly acknowledged problems ranging from months without hot water in students’ showers to a crumbling library and dorms riddled with mold. But rather than moving swiftly to stabilize the institution, the administration has left the academy without permanent leadership in its top three positions. A school critical to producing the next generation of mariners risks falling further behind, undermining the very workforce any maritime revival depends on. 

Trump-led appropriations bills have also starved maritime capacity. In Trump’s most recent appropriations bill, the Small Shipyard Grant Program, one of the few federal mechanisms for helping grow shipbuilding capacity, received $8.75 million, a record low and less than half of the $21 million it received during the Biden administration.  

For shipyards competing against heavily subsidized foreign rivals, these grants often determine whether they can afford to modernize equipment like cranes and welding machines or fall further behind. Demand for the grants has consistently exceeded supply, with applications surpassing available funds by more than five times. Underfunding the program not only reduces its effectiveness but also signals a retreat at a time when foreign shipyards are receiving significant government support. 

The administration’s erratic policies have also discouraged foreign allies from stepping up to fill the shipbuilding gap. After one of South Korea’s largest shipbuilders, Hanwha Ocean, acquired Philadelphia Shipyard in 2024, Seoul appeared ready to make substantial investments to modernize American yards and train American workers. In fact, during recent bilateral trade negotiations, South Korea signed a nonbinding agreement to direct $150 billion toward U.S. shipbuilding. But Trump quickly undercut the deal. His administration staged a highly publicized immigration raid at a Georgia battery plant operated by South Korean firms, sparking diplomatic tensions and casting significant doubt on the future of the shipbuilding investment. 

Perhaps Trump’s most damaging decisions concern future demand. Historically, American shipyards have thrived during periods of maritime innovation. During World War II, for example, the United States developed oil-powered ships to reduce reliance on British coaling stations. During the early Vietnam War era, the U.S. developed containerization to speed loading and unloading cargo. In the 1960s and ’70s, it developed and built new ship designs, such as the so-called lighter aboard ship, using a new intermodal concept that allowed larger vessels to carry smaller ships on their decks to allow for more efficient cargo transportation. The U.S. also built ships that could carry liquified natural gas. 

A similar opportunity is emerging with “green shipping.” Spurred by the International Maritime Organization’s proposed rules on decarbonization, a wave of orders for cleaner ships is expected in the coming decade. But rather than positioning U.S. yards to compete, Trump is pressuring IMO member nations to scuttle the regulations, eliminating a potential opportunity for the United States to break into the shipbuilding sector. Without new maritime innovation, the U.S. will struggle to enter the current shipbuilding market, on which China has a firm grasp.  

Offshore wind tells a similar story. Under the Biden administration, demand for clean energy spurred U.S. yards to build the specialized vessels the sector requires. For example, a Texas yard completed the nation’s first wind turbine installation vessel, while a Louisiana yard delivered a ship designed to bury the undersea cables that connect offshore farms to the grid. These projects showed how new industries can generate steady work for U.S. shipbuilders. Yet Trump’s rollback of offshore wind programs has abruptly stalled that momentum. With projects canceled or delayed, yards now face shrinking demand for these vessels, casting serious doubt on whether the sector can provide steady work for American builders. 

Trump’s other reckless actions have had significant impacts. For example, the decision to freeze foreign food aid eliminated reliable cargoes for U.S.-flag vessels. That cargo has supplied humanitarian assistance abroad, keeping ships active and mariners employed at home. Instead, critical food aid rotted in warehouses across the United States, while vessels that carried food aid were forced to idle, sidelining mariners. A knock-on effect of sidelining mariners is reducing military readiness. The armed forces depend on commercial mariners and ships to supplement their sealift fleet. As that pool shrinks, so does military readiness. 

Trump’s attempts at revival have been far short of the comprehensive approach needed to revive the maritime industry. He has proposed imposing high fees on Chinese-built and -owned ships calling at U.S. ports. But while these have reduced the Chinese share of the new-build market, they have done little to build domestic capacity. Without consistent demand and supply-side investment from the federal government, the slew of port fees will add little new maritime capacity. The pattern that emerges is one of both neglect and contradiction. The administration has launched offices only to defang them, promised investment only to undercut it, and pointed to growth opportunities only to foreclose them.  

Reviving shipbuilding is achievable. Other advanced economies have sustained competitive industries through predictable investment, robust workforce training, and long-term alignment with global demand trends. China, for example, leveraged decades of government support and industrial planning to become a shipbuilding powerhouse. Trump’s approach has offered the opposite. An industry vital to economic security and national defense lacks clear direction or reliable support. Trump’s declaration that America would soon build ships hasn’t led to action. Instead, his policies have made a revival less likely. 

The post Trump Promised a Shipbuilding Boom. He’s Sinking It Instead appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Lanky and awkward, Nicholas Thompson joined his high school’s indoor track team in his sophomore year. At first, he was just an average runner, but he trained hard, eager to improve. That winter, to his surprise, the coach entered him in a two-mile race at the New England Prep School Championships. Thompson did not anticipate being a top finisher. Indeed, expectations for his performance were so low that no one had bothered to tell him that the dimensions of the course were different from those at his own high school’s track; mid-race, he was puzzled by his own split times, even as he noticed that he was lapping other, more accomplished runners.  

To his astonishment, Thompson set a school record. For the first time, he had not allowed his expectations to determine his performance. Years later, Thompson reflected, “If I had understood how fast I was running, I wouldn’t have been able to run that fast. Because I didn’t know the track, because I didn’t know how long the laps were, I didn’t get scared and shut down my body. I just kept going. To do it, I had to first forget that I couldn’t do it.” 

Today, Nick Thompson is a trailblazer in the worlds of technology journalism and magazine publishing. A former editor at the Washington Monthly, Thompson oversaw The New Yorker’s website before becoming editor in chief of Wired. Now, as the CEO of The Atlantic, he has engineered a remarkable turnaround, steering the magazine to profitability, growing its subscriber base to more than 1 million, and overseeing a hiring spree of Pulitzer Prize–winning writers.  

He is also an exceptional, record-holding long-distance runner, who has achieved his greatest success in his 40s, long after most athletes have hit their prime. At age 44, he completed the Chicago Marathon in 2:29, a speed that elevated him to elite status, ranking him among the world’s fastest runners in his age group. Having achieved his goals as a marathon runner, he set his sights on ultramarathons—races of more than 26 miles. At 46, he set an American age group record for the 50K, and then became the top-ranked runner in the world for his age group for the 50-mile run.  

Thompson’s athletic life—and the way it has fueled his professional success and shaped his personal life—is the focus of The Running Ground, an engrossing, unconventional memoir. The book traces a serpentine course, simultaneously a family history, an autobiography, an inspirational guide to middle age, and, most meaningfully, a meditation on running and its lessons for a life fully lived.  

Thompson frames the book, subtitled “A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports,” around his relationship with his father, W. Scott Thompson, an avid runner and occasional marathoner, who introduced Nick to the sport. One of Thompson’s earliest memories is from the age of seven, when he stood in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge clutching a bottle of orange juice and a fresh pair of sneakers to hand to his dad, who was competing in the New York City Marathon.

In a poignant moment of reflection, Thompson writes, “I run because of my father. Running connects me to my father; it reminds me of my father; and it gives me a way to avoid becoming my father.” 

Thompson paints a vivid and compassionate portrait of Scott Thompson, a complex, flamboyant, inexhaustible figure of tremendous talent and intellect, who emerged from a hardscrabble childhood in rural Oklahoma to become a Rhodes scholar, a White House fellow, and a celebrated academic. But at midlife, the elder Thompson’s life careened off track. He came out of the closet and walked out on his family, including seven-year-old Nick. Thompson writes with remarkable frankness about his father’s foibles during the subsequent decades—Scott was an alcoholic and a self-proclaimed sex addict with a proclivity for very young men. He grew unable to hold a job, and spent his later years living in Asia, where he had fled to avoid the IRS and an unpaid tax bill of over $300,000.  

In Nick’s 20s, the two lived together—more like roommates than father and son—and even collaborated on a book. Their home was a Washington salon, with raucous parties filled with diplomats, congressmen, and young journalists. The two shared professional interests in foreign policy and politics, a passion for music and, most meaningfully, running. Thompson writes, “My father led a deeply complicated and broken life. But he gave me many things, including the gift of running—a gift that opens the world to anyone who accepts it.” 

A love of running connects The Running Ground’s two primary narratives—the father-son memoir, and the story of Thompson’s athletic life. Little in Thompson’s early life foreshadowed the great success he has achieved as a marathoner and ultramarathoner in his 40s. At Stanford, a preseason stress fracture derailed his college running career. After graduation, he returned to the sport, flirting with longer distances, including the occasional marathon. Throughout his 20s, Thompson writes, “running was my unrequited crush. I trained like a dilettante and searched for physiological shortcuts that don’t exist. I humiliated myself in races.” Likewise, Thompson comments wryly that his “professional life was the same goat rodeo as my running. I had fallen in love with journalism. But journalism hadn’t fallen in love with me.” 

At 29, he got serious, about both running and his career. On the brink of quitting journalism and starting law school, he applied for a job as an editor of the technology magazine Wired. A week before enrolling at school, he took a grueling, 20-mile predawn run up Cadillac Mountain in Maine, and returned with a renewed focus. “I had just done the hard thing of running up a mountain,” Thompson told his wife. “And it convinced me that I could do this much harder thing of betting on myself. If I didn’t get the job at Wired, I’d write a book.” He de-matriculated from law school, got the job at Wired, then wrote a book. Then he found a coach, established a training regimen, and focused on achieving a major goal, breaking the three-hour time at the New York City Marathon. But just one year later, two weeks after smashing that goal with a 2:43 time (finishing in 146th place out of 37,000 entrants), he was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Upon recovery, he was determined to repeat that finish, and did so triumphantly two years later, shaving 13 seconds off his personal record. 

Approaching 40, profoundly grateful for his health, and as a busy professional and devoted husband and father, Thompson had little additional time for training and assumed that he had reached his potential as a runner. Even so, he maintained his fitness and speed with remarkable consistency throughout the next decade, completing eight marathons within a minute or two of his pre-cancer time. 

In 2018, at age 43, Thompson received an email from a team at Nike, inviting him to participate in an experimental program to pair “regular” runners with elite coaches, to maximize performance. The email had landed at an opportune moment—Thompson was grieving the death of his father and contemplating the meaning of middle age. 

Thompson’s father had warned him repeatedly that his life would fracture at around age 40. His paternal grandfather’s life had also splintered in middle age, when a scandal derailed his career as a minister. For Thompson, the pattern was a cautionary tale—if middle age was a point of inflection, how might he avoid the fate of his father and grandfather before him?  

Running, he thought, might be the key. Scott Thompson had run his fastest race at age 40, before his life spun out of control. In his 40s and 50s, he continued to run, but sporadically, for shorter distances, and at slower speeds. Still, it was a healthy habit in an increasingly unhealthy life, and offered structure and discipline. Nick recalls, “As my father descended into mania, the days when he ran were the days he kept everything else in control. If he had run more, could he have done more?” 

Thompson committed to the training program. The Nike coaches challenged common assumptions about the inevitability of runners’ declines in their 30s and 40s, pointing to certain biological advantages that come with age, like the strengthening of tendons and the trade-off of speed for endurance. They offered new technologies that sharpened Thompson’s understanding of his gait, and pushed him to collect data that informed his training. They stressed the need for more intense practices—time spent running fast—rather than additional mileage, and the importance of key metrics Thompson had long ignored, along with recommendations for a healthier diet and a nonnegotiable eight hours of sleep.  

Thompson also benefited from the psychological insights of the training program, particularly a theory coined by the sports physiologist Tim Noakes, the “Central Governor Model,” which posits that pain and fatigue can be psychological phenomena, with the unconscious mind seeking to protect the body. This phenomenon explains racers’ ability to sprint at the end of a long race, despite physical exhaustion. Thompson had learned a similar lesson in his high school race 30 years earlier: “We all can go faster. We just need to persuade our brains not to start the subconscious shutdown process right away. But the only thing we can use to trick our brains is our brains. Training becomes a hide-and-seek with oneself.” 

Thompson came to realize that his relatively modest running goals had held him back. Reflecting on the decade following his cancer recovery, he recalled that all he had wanted to do was “to match the Nick I had been before the diagnosis.” The goal was to maintain his prior speed, not exceed it. He recalls, “I hadn’t been able to run a fast marathon in the past because I hadn’t wanted to. Or, more precisely, I hadn’t really cared about going that fast because all I really wanted was something else.”  

Within a year, Thompson had broken his own record in the New York City Marathon by five minutes and then exceeded his highest expectations for the next seven races. He has done so despite training “only” 65 to 70 miles a week, far less than the mileage of a professional marathoner.  

Thompson muses about the reasons for his success—perhaps his body responds to training better than others’, and he has been remarkably free of injuries—but it is hard to escape the conclusion that he simply works harder and smarter than most. To lean on a cliché, Thompson reminds us that we can do hard things. He runs even in the most miserable weather, and regardless of the location—he has run through Times Square at midnight, through cities to the airport, and to black-tie events with a tuxedo tucked in his backpack. He runs despite aches and pains, nausea and fatigue. “The deeper truth,” he reminds readers, is that “you have to learn to run when you hurt, and you have to learn to hurt when you run.”  

Thompson’s own pre-race rituals and preparation offer a window into his own intensity and the arcana of the sport, in which an improvement of just a few seconds can be meaningful. For instance, before each race, Thompson pays careful attention to his feet, clipping his toenails, shaving the hairs on his toes, and applying Vaseline. As an ultramarathoner, he has taught himself to urinate while running. 

The reader is left craving more such details, both about the sport—for instance, that it is tradition for a record-breaker to drink champagne from his sweaty running shoe—and also the ways it has impacted Thompson’s professional life. The reader who comes to this memoir with a familiarity with Thompson’s storied career and reputation for a relentless work ethic and talent for untangling knotty problems will be disappointed by the virtual absence of workplace anecdotes. While he describes his major career pivots (and the long, contemplative runs he often takes while weighing his options), Thompson writes in a too-broad fashion about the ways in which running has improved his professional life. For example, he muses, “I had learned that our minds create limits for us when we’re afraid of failure, not because it’s actually time to slow or stop.” The memoir is filled with similar axioms about the instructive lessons from running, like teaching concentration, the value of discipline, and the need for setting goals, but is disappointingly light on specifics about the impacts on his own professional life.  

Thompson’s prose is lean and spare, like the strides of a runner. At times, he veers into inspirational cliché, but at its best, the writing is almost Zen-like, when he captures the quality of running in nature, perfectly in sync with the rhythm of each step. He describes being so in touch with his body’s rhythms that he can run a mile and, without glancing at his watch, predict the time within a second or two. While most of Thompson’s training is on mundane urban courses, including his daily eight-mile round trip commute, his description of runs among the mountains of New England exude sheer joy: “To run through the Andover bird sanctuary in October is to cross into a Winslow Homer painting. The palette changes subtly each day as the maple trees flip from green to scarlet while the oak trees stubbornly hold on to their russet leaves.” 

Thompson intersperses his own narrative with five excellent chapters profiling other exceptional long-distance runners. The profiles interrupt the biographical flow of the memoir, but they are among the most compelling stories in the book and serve as a reminder that not all runners are motivated by a competitive drive.  

The most interesting of those profiled is Suprabha Beckjord, a world-record-holding ultramarathoner. For 13 years, Beckjord completed the 3,100-mile Self-Transcendence Race, organized by the Indian guru Sri Chinmoy. This astonishing race course—a distance greater than from San Francisco to New York—consists simply of circumnavigating around a public high school occupying a single square block in Queens, New York. Successful runners complete approximately 60 miles per day—day after day, for nearly two months—throughout the hot New York City summer. For Beckjord, the race is one of spiritual transcendence and self-awareness, and the mundane course offers an opportunity to notice the tiniest variations in one’s surroundings—an insect on a tree, a subtle change in the weather, a chip in the sidewalk. 

The Running Ground crackles with big ideas, about intergenerational inheritance, the power of love and forgiveness, the inevitability of aging, the mind-body connection, and the value of hard work. The memoir’s intertwined stories—Thompson’s relationship with his father alongside Thompson’s own journey as a marathon runner hitting his stride midlife—are compelling narratives. There is so much of interest in this lean, slim memoir. The downside is that Thompson races toward the finish line, without offering sufficient time to fully explore each of these individual themes. He writes, “One can run as a way to seek spiritual awakening, and one can run to fulfill ambition. It’s often hard to do both.” Perhaps a memoir, too, is best written as a journey of spiritual awakening, a meandering journey of self-knowledge, rather than a sprint to conclusion.  

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