Oh no, you mean business may have to compete for labor? whatever shall they do.
America "is facing what's projected to become the largest labor shortage in its history," according to experts interviewed by the Washington Post:
Economists warn that the worsening labor problem, due in part to a skills shortage and population shifts, will be vast and reach beyond tech. It "could hobble the American economy for years to come," predicts the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. Lightcast, a labor market data company, calls it "the largest labor shortage the country has ever seen." JPMorgan Chase warns of a national security risk from "a pervasive talent deficit that constrains the nation's capacity to build, compete, and protect its interests." There will be shortages in the tens or even hundreds of thousands of nurses, physicians, teachers, engineers, pharmacists, mental health counselors, construction worker and airplane mechanics — jobs AI generally can't do...
Among the trends that have been leading to this moment: a mismatch between the careers college graduates are pursuing and the jobs employers are struggling to fill. Far fewer students are majoring in health care fields than are needed to meet demand, for instance. "We have pumped so many young people into business and finance" when what's really in demand are graduates in other fields, [said Ron Hetrick, Lightcast's principal economist]. "It's like a factory producing these workers like widgets, even though society is saying, 'We really don't need them.' And the factory just keeps pumping them out." But the principal reason for the looming workforce shortages is much more basic. A protracted decline in birth rates is coinciding with a record wave of retirements, data shows.
From 2024 to 2032, when the last baby boomers sign up for Social Security payments, more than 18 million college-educated workers will leave the labor force while fewer than 14 million enter it, according to the Georgetown center. Meanwhile, even as the number of people with associate and bachelor's degrees falls, the number of jobs requiring them will grow, the center forecasts. That will leave a gap of 4.6 million workers. Lightcast puts the deficit at an even higher 6 million... The effect of population shifts on the supply of talent, with or without degrees, has been compounded by a drop in the proportion of high school graduates choosing to go to college, a sharply reduced rate of immigration, and a growing number of Americans leaving the workforce altogether because of such issues as lack of child care, early retirement, incarceration and substance addiction, according to the Chamber of Commerce.
Three interesting statistics from the article:
U.S. college/university enrollment in 2023 was down by nearly 2 million students since its peak in 2010, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Education Department.
America's low birth rate since 2010 "means the number of college-age Americans is forecast to decline by another 13 percent through 2041."
South Dakota has just 41 workers for every 100 open jobs... while California and nine other states have more workers than jobs, the Chamber of Commerce found.
A ballot measure written by a conservative nonprofit could amend the Colorado Constitution to enshrine fossil fuel companies’ right to sell methane gas and possibly force communities that have tried to eliminate gas appliances from new construction to back away from those efforts.
Advance Colorado, which wrote the measure and led the effort to gather enough signatures to add the measure to the ballot, submitted its petition on June 25 to put Initiative 177, the “Right to Natural Gas,” to voters in November’s state election.
The broad language of the measure—only 60 words in total—makes it difficult to predict how state agencies would implement it if it passes, and many people worry the amendment would endanger Colorado’s ability to reach its climate goals.
When Lorenzo Salgado Araujo arrived at a Houston hospital after being shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Tuesday, he was admitted as a John Doe. The federal agents may not have known his name when they set out to the predominantly Latino East End neighborhood to apprehend immigrants that day, but they were extremely aware of who Salgado was as they stripped him of any form…
With no new data or clear reasoning, a panel of advisors hand-selected by anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. voted last September to strip federal recommendations for a combination shot against measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella (chickenpox). An analysis published today by independent researchers does the work the advisors neglected to do before the vote and, in turn, shows how harmful the decision is to vulnerable US toddlers.
The decision last fall followed clumsy discussion by Kennedy's dubiously qualified advisors, who make up the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most noticeably, their unprompted review of the MMRV vaccine did not include a standard decision-making framework ACIP has historically used to comprehensively evaluate what the change would mean for US children in practice—including basic questions, such as which children would be affected.
Still, the decision meant that private health insurance providers would no longer be required to cover the vaccine, called MMRV. It also meant the shot would no longer be available through a federal program that provides vaccines to about half of American children, mostly from low-income families.
On October 1st, New York City will become the first U.S. city to ban deceptive subscription practices, requiring companies to offer simple cancellation options or face fines of $525 per user subscription, back fees, and additional penalties. The Mamdani administration is also proposing a junk-fee rule requiring sellers, landlords, hotels, and other businesses to "advertise the total price for any good or service, including all mandatory additional charges and fees, up front." The Guardian reports: "People shouldn't have to wait on hold for half an hour or send a certified letter or show up to a store in person in order to cancel" a subscription, said Samuel AA Levine, the city's commissioner of consumer and worker protection, in an interview. The new measures are expected to be announced in a press conference on Friday morning.
The proposed fee rule could have an especially wide impact, sending ripples through New York's expensive housing market, where about 70% of residents rent. Apartment renters in the US face a rising tide of add-on fees such as "boiler management" and "lifestyle" charges from management companies, which make true rental costs hundreds of dollars higher than the price stated on real-estate company websites.
If the proposed renters rule passes after public comment and hearing, any mandatory fees, including annual ones, would need to be included in the stated monthly rental price, Levine said. The current situation creates "a scenario where rather than competing on price, companies are competing on their ability to hide the true price. That's the worst kind of incentive" -- and one that deeply distorts the market, Levine said.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Meta has filed a patent for a system that records your voice and surroundings all day, then uses an AI to analyse your mood. The patent's stated, theoretical goal is for Meta, a company that makes billions of dollars targeting ads at its users based on their data, is to sell users a wearable that tailors workouts for them based on whether they're happy or sad. Patentlyze first noticed the patent which was published on July 2 after Meta filed it back in December of 2025. The filing described an "apparatus" that surveilled a user and their surroundings constantly to craft a better workout. "The audible communications may be associated with contextual factors such as time of day, location, user activity, or digital interaction," the patent said. "The audible communications may be transcribed, and an emotional-state machine learning model may interpret verbal and nonverbal cues to determine emotional indicators."
According to the filing, Meta needs to know when a user laughs or sighs, where they are physically, and what objects they're surrounded by. It would even like to know when you've taken your meds. "The AI assistant may listen to a user(s) at predefined times to hear various types of communication, such as sighs, laughter, and/or the tone(s) of a voice(s)," the patent said. "The AI assistant may use these inputs to quantify the user's emotional state or generate other insights about the user [...] in another example, the AI assistant may take multiple inputs in in addition to audio inputs (e.g., of a user's voice) to provide a summary of emotional trends based on various inputs (e.g., a happier emotional state associated with a particular time of day or at a time when medication is taken, etc.)." The more data it has, the patent explains, the better it could understand a user's moods. "The system increases the precision and reliability of emotional inference by aligning multimodal sensor inputs on synchronized timelines, which creates a novel data structure that supports richer emotional analysis," it said. "These combined features deliver a technical improvement in automated audio interpretation, enabling continuous emotional monitoring on everyday devices."
The emotional-analyzing AI would need far more than just a user's words to determine moods over time. A longer description of the hypothetical training data for the AI included "attributes of thousands of objects" such as a user's books, personal messages, and newspapers. "In some examples, audible communications may include speech (e.g., voice data), sighs, laughter, or other nonverbal sounds associated with an expression(s), an emotion(s), or ideas. In some examples, the audible communications may include the tone(s) of a voice of a user while making the communication(s)," it said. All this data, Meta says, would be in service of tailoring better workouts. Humans, the patent explained, are simply not as good as a machine for this. "Personal trainers cannot provide the level of precision in guidance, such as correcting a pose and/or body movement," it said. "These challenges create a need for a practical approach that uses a single device to observe movement, recommend routines, and provide corrective guidance." "Like other companies, patents at Meta are often filed to disclose concepts that may or may not be implemented, and a granted patent does not guarantee that Meta has pursued or will pursue the technology described," the company said in a statement.
Roberto Serrano, a Brown University economics professor, gave a take-home midterm and it seems most of the students used AI handle the work. Suspicious of cheating, Serrano required the final exam to be taken in-person. For Inside Higher Ed, Emma Whitford charted the discrepancy between high midterm marks against much lower final marks:
Education needs to figure out new ways to grade progress, and students need to figure out how to think deeply for themselves. Unless you’re student number one, in which case you may carry on.
More blatant anti-consumer behavior from the FCC. Carr needs to be removed ASAP.
The Federal Communications Commission will vote to eliminate a rule that requires Internet service providers to list all of their so-called "passthrough" fees on an easily accessible broadband price label. The FCC vote could also make the price labels themselves a bit harder for consumers to find.
ISPs routinely advertise prices much lower than those actually charged to consumers on their monthly bills. One method of raising monthly bill prices above advertised rates is to tack on fees that, ISPs claim, are used to offset charges imposed by local governments.
ISPs would be well within their rights to advertise accurate monthly prices and charge those exact prices on monthly bills. But because ISPs rarely do that, the FCC has required them to make specific price disclosures to consumers for the past decade.
Actual progress, and of course OpenAI/Anthropic/Google will be shitting themselves.
locater16 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum: One morning in 2019, Adebayo Alonge was in a Cape Town hotel room, preparing to demonstrate his startup's AI answer to a serious problem in African health care: counterfeit medication, which kills thousands of people across the continent every year. The RxScanner is a handheld spectrometer that scans a pill with infrared light, then sends the item's molecular profile to an AI model equipped with a pharmaceutical database. In seconds, the AI identifies the medication from its molecular profile -- or reports that it's phony.
Pharmacies were using the system in more than a dozen countries, including Ghana, Kenya, Myanmar, and Alonge's native Nigeria. But that morning in South Africa, it didn't work. "I was shocked," Alonge says... So Alonge immediately asked his engineers to shrink the AI model down to a smaller, low-power, unconnected version that could run entirely on his Android phone. They produced it 2 hours later, and that saved the demo. More importantly, the work birthed a new version of his device, which can authenticate a pill in places without broadband, computers, or even reliable electricity. It also turned Alonge into an advocate for this kind of "small AI." "The article goes on to detail other immediately useful 'small' AI applications without any subscription or billion dollar data centers needed," writes locator16. For example, Bala Murugan and colleagues at Vellore Institute of Technology in India developed a drone-based system that photographs cashew plants and identifies disease-indicating splotches on the plants. The key advantage is that all processing happens on the drone itself, so farmers do not need a computer, broadband connection, or cloud server access.
In a Uruguayan vineyard, researchers developed small-AI systems to identify ant infestations. The article doesn't go deep into the deployment details, but it presents this as another example of a narrow, localized model trained to recognize a specific agricultural threat. Small AI has also been used to detect the presence of malaria-carrying mosquitoes in multiple countries. This is especially useful in regions where public-health teams may lack reliable network access or expensive lab infrastructure, but still need fast, local detection.
In parts of Brazil without access to more complex medical equipment, researchers have used small AI to run electrocardiograms from an Arduino device. The article also describes Marcelo Jose Rovai's work on a TinyML model that generates electrocardiograms in a patient simulator lab. Rovai also describes a newer experiment using an Arduino UNO Q with a Qualcomm chipset. The device runs a language model locally, collects sensor data, and analyzes it to detect tiny pools of water where mosquitoes might breed -- while using only about 3 watts of power.
Again, the irony is just too crazy: a company whose product is only possible due to wholesale theft of everyone else's intellectual property suddenly decides they must be protected.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Anthropic quickly removed a tracker secretly monitoring Claude Code users in China after a security researcher exposed the hidden code and condemned the spyware-like tracking as a "serious breach of user trust." Last week, a web developer known as "Thereallo" was researching privacy issues in Claude Code and was shocked to find that the AI firm was using "prompt steganography" to hide code that tracks Chinese users "in plain sight." This code wasn't malicious, but it was sending information to Anthropic that most users wouldn't detect, relying on shorthand markers to quietly flag users' timezone, proxy, and potential connection to Chinese AI labs that Anthropic has accused of distillation attacks.
On X, Anthropic engineer Thariq Shihipar confirmed that the tracker was added to Claude Code as an "experiment" in March. According to Shihipar, the code "was meant to prevent account abuse from unauthorized resellers and protect against distillation." Regarding the former, The Washington Post found unauthorized retailers have sold access to free models for $1 a month, and pro subscriptions that can cost $100 monthly sell for "as little as $12." Supposedly, Anthropic has "actually been meaning to take this down for a while," Shihipar said of the hidden code, because engineers have "landed stronger mitigations since then."
Privacy advocates were not happy with the explanation, though, warning that the code is evidence that Anthropic is willing to cross lines to surveil users. That's perhaps especially surprising, considering that Anthropic riled the Trump administration by refusing to allow the US government to use Claude to surveil US users. The AI firm has since sued the White House over the clash. The Post suggested that the tracker incident is a sign that US firms like Anthropic are taking "increasingly aggressive measures" to block Chinese AI firms from copying their models. A more defensive stance has apparently become critical. In the past year, Chinese firms have "consistently matched" US firms' model capabilities "within months," the Post reported. Most recently, "a new, free AI model from Chinese company Zhipu AI was better at finding computer vulnerabilities than Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 model, which was released in May," the Post reported.
Well, we don’t have to play the will-he-or-won’t-he game about President Donald Trump’s attendance at the World Cup round of 16 in Seattle, where the United States will face off against Belgium. It turns out that both Trump and Vice President JD Vance are too chickenshit to travel to the terrifying no-go zone of Seattle to watch the game. It’s kind of weird that the White House isn’…
OpenAI is reportedly in early talks to give the U.S. government a 5% stake, potentially alongside similar contributions from other major AI companies. "Such a deal would help improve the industry's relations with the Trump administration and could help garner political support by sharing wealth generated by the AI boom with the public," reports The Guardian. From the report: [OpenAI CEO Sam Altman] and other OpenAI bosses have suggested that each of the biggest AI developers in the US should give 5% to their equity to an investment vehicle such as the Alaska Permanent Fund, a sovereign fund that invests US oil wealth into stocks and pays dividends to the state, the FT reported.
The talks are "conceptual" and in early stages, it said, and any deal could require an act of Congress to implement. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have previously suggested in policy papers that a public or sovereign wealth fund may be required in the future to distribute shares to the public. In April, OpenAI said that a "public wealth fund" could provide "every citizen -- including those not invested in financial markets -- with a stake in AI-driven economic growth." Further reading: Bernie Sanders Unveils $7 Trillion Plan To Give Americans Control of AI Industry
Democratic congressional candidate Melat Kiros speaks to supporters at an election-night watch party after winning the Colorado primary on June 30, 2026, in Denver, Colorado. | Michael Ciaglo/Getty
In many ways, Melat Kiros epitomizes the winds of change sweeping over the Democratic Party.
Kiros is a 29-year-old political newcomer who is disillusioned with the system, who calls ending aid to Israel “the moral question of our time,” and who is backed by the Democratic Socialists of America.
And on Tuesday, she handily defeated a Democratic incumbent who’s held her seat since the year before Kiros was born — Rep. Diana DeGette, of Colorado’s First District.
“This isn’t just about replacing one generation of leaders with another,” Kiros told me in an interview last month. “It’s about replacing it with moral clarity, with urgency, with courage — and making sure that the will of the voters is actually being represented and fought for at the federal level.”
Kiros’s race was closely watched as a test of whether Democratic incumbents outside New York City might be at risk from left-wing challengers — and her victory confirms that, at least in urban districts like her Denver one, they very much are.
DeGette wasn’t the only longtime establishment Democrat to stumble in Colorado’s primaries Tuesday. Sen. Michael Bennet, who was running for governor, lost to the state’s attorney general, Phil Weiser. (Bennet’s term is not up, so he will remain in the Senate next year.) And progressive candidates did well in several congressional and state legislative primaries, too.
Incumbent Sen. John Hickenlooper (D) defeated his progressive challenger, state Sen. Julie Gonzales. But he was only winning by about 10 points as of Wednesday morning — a strikingly close margin against a challenger who’d raised little money, considering how Hickenlooper has been a mainstay of Colorado politics for more than two decades.
The biggest star of the night, however, was Kiros, who sent a 30-year incumbent member of Congress into retirement.
And one way Kiros differs from Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez — the victorious DSA candidates in New York’s primaries last week — is that she doesn’t have a very lengthy record of left activism. In fact, Kiros only joined the DSA during this campaign, after she sought its endorsement.
In requesting their support, though, she had what was deemed to be one unimpeachable credential. Three years prior, as a law firm associate, she’d written an open letter criticizing Israel — and was fired for it.
What was then a career-ending offense became, in the context of this year’s primary elections, something like a badge of honor, winning key endorsers like streamer Hasan Piker over to her side. (“Fired over Palestine, now running for Congress” was the title of one Piker video with her.)
Indeed, Kiros went on a journey similar to that of many in her age cohort: It was the issues of the 2020s — from the pandemic to the disappointing Biden presidency to new Middle East wars — that fed her deepening disillusionment with the Democratic Party, her embrace of democratic socialism, and her own desire to step up and bring about change.
“This is the most anti-incumbent cycle we’ve seen in a really long time,” Kiros told me. “So I think this is an opportunity to change the party in a way that — I don’t think we’ll have another chance like this. To pass it up, I think, is irresponsible.”
Melat Kiros’s politics were formed by the issues of the 2020s
In 2019, the year after Kiros graduated from college, she entered Notre Dame Law School. By her account, her political awakening occurred soon afterward.
“I went to one of the most conservative law schools in the country, which I wasn’t aware of until I got there,” Kiros told me. Amidst the pandemic and the tumultuous events of 2020, Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett — who was a professor at Notre Dame in addition to being a circuit judge — to the Supreme Court.
“I literally watched the Federalist Society handpicking some of my classmates onto the judge track in their decades-long bid to pack the courts,” she said. “It felt like I was witnessing firsthand the powers that be actively working against the interests of working people.”
After that, the pandemic lingered well into Biden’s term, and Kiros said, “I just lost faith in the system, I think a lot of young people did.” To pay off her hefty student loans, she said, she went to work at a “Big Law” firm, Sidley Austin.
Then came Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel — which was followed by both Israel using overwhelming force in Gaza and intense protests in the US over Israel, many of which unfolded on college campuses.
That November, alarmed by scenes at those protests, leading figures in the legal world put together an open letter to law school deans denouncing “rallies calling for the death of Jews and the elimination of the State of Israel.”
The letter included a not-so-veiled warning to law students seeking jobs: “Such anti-Semitic activities would not be tolerated at any of our firms.” More than 100 firms signed it, including Sidley Austin, where Kiros was a second-year associate.
“By chilling future lawyers’ employment prospects for criticism of the Israeli government’s actions and its legitimacy, you are complicit in Israel’s weaponization of anti-Semitism against legitimate concerns for the right of self-determination and the livelihood of the Palestinian people,” Kiros wrote. And she disputed that “calls for the elimination of the Israeli state” — which she interpreted as calls for a one-state solution where both peoples could live “in peace” — were antisemitic.
Her criticism of Israel’s conduct, she told me, stems from her own family history. “I’m from the northern region of Ethiopia, the Tigray region, where a genocide took place just a few years ago,” she told me. “I lost family in genocide there. I protested what was happening there. No one was threatening to fire me or pull my job offers for it.”
Shortly after publishing her open letter, she was fired. In the years afterward, she began pursuing a public policy PhD and worked as a barista.
Then, when Trump won the 2024 election, she became fed up with the Democratic establishment and decided to launch her own unlikely long-shot campaign against DeGette, a longtime progressive member who had been criticized by the left over her prior votes for military aid to Israel.
“I really sincerely believe that primaries are our only opportunity to make the changes that not only need to happen within the Democratic Party, but to address the conditions that led to someone like Trump rising in the first place,” she said.
The campaign soon found a following among similarly minded activists, while DeGette criticized her sharply over Kiros’s associations with Piker and bristled at the race’s focus on Israel. “If the only issue that you care about is this issue, then you should not vote for me,” the DeGette told one person who confronted her earlier this year over a bill on weapon transfers.
What Kiros hopes to achieve in Congress
To Kiros, it’s obvious which policies the country needs. “We know that Medicare-for-all is the answer, we know that housing first is the answer, we know that tuition-free public college is the answer. These are all not only the right thing to do, but the pragmatic and economic and efficient thing to do,” she said. And she added, “We have to end all aid that is being sent to Israel.”
The only explanation for why they hadn’t been adopted already, she said, is money. “It’s all tied to the issue of money in politics,” she said. “The only reason we don’t have those things is because of the billionaires and the corporations that are making way too much money keeping things exactly as they are today.”
Her platform fits in well with the Bernie Sanders left — but, she said, she didn’t consider herself a socialist until after her campaign began. “It wasn’t until I had sought out endorsements from various organizations, including Democratic Socialists, that I really started reckoning with: all these policies I’m calling for are democratic socialism,” she said. She said she was “honored” to have the group’s support, calling them “critical to the success of our field program, and in helping us get the word out about our campaign.”
If elected to Congress — which will almost surely happen, given the overwhelming blue lean of her district — Kiros said her priority would be on making sure Democrats deliver on their promises. She predicted that Democrats would win the House and Senate this cycle, and the White House in 2028: “We’ll take power, the question is what we do with it.”
She said Democrats needed to pass a health care package — including Medicare-for-all, canceling all medical debt, and breaking up big pharmaceutical companies — as well as bills on housing, child care, and elder care.
And on Israel and Gaza, she said, “A supermajority of Democratic voters agree that they no longer want their taxpayers to be funding this genocide. So this is a question of: who does our party serve, the voters or the donors?”
She also seems set to be a thorn in the side of Democratic leadership – she’s said she won’t vote for any leader who accepts corporate PAC money, which, she told Politico after her win, includes Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
Kiros is one of the first of a new generation of politicians who spent nearly their entire adult life in the tumultuous 2020s. We’re only beginning to understand what the political parties will look like when they take over, and there will undoubtedly be leaders with very different perspectives on the same crisis period, just like the polarizing 1960s. But one thing is clear from the anti-incumbent wave this cycle: They’re not going to wait their turn.
Yep, this is the correct conclusion to draw from these opinions: "The Supreme Court is a hostile place for Democrats, it often ignores the law to advance Republican causes, and many of the Republican justices treat even the most settled legal principles with contempt. "
Trans rights supporters gather outside the Supreme Court on January 13, 2026, in Washington, DC. | Heather Diehl/Getty Images
The Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that states may bar transgender women from competing on women’s sports teams at secondary schools, colleges, and universities. More than two dozen states have laws barring trans athletes from competing on teams that do not align with their sex assigned at birth.
The results were not surprising.Two years ago, during oral arguments in another case that ended in a major defeat for transgender rights, Justice Brett Kavanaugh made it very clear how he would vote if anyone brought a case involving trans athletes to his Court.
If trans people were given heightened constitutional protection, similar to the kind of safeguards the Constitution provides against laws that discriminate on the basis of sex, then Kavanaugh worried that trans women would gain a right “to play in women’s and girls’ sports … notwithstanding the competitive fairness and safety issues that have been vocally raised by some female athletes.”
His concerns were amplified by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative Republican who sits close to the center of this very conservative Court, when the Court issued its decision in United States v. Skrmetti (2025). Barrett wrote a concurring opinion arguing that trans people do not enjoy any constitutional protections beyond those enjoyed by any other American.
Both Kavanaugh and Barrett’s statements were a warning to trans litigants about what would happen if they brought the question of whether transgender women may play on women’s sports teams at the high school or college level to the Supreme Court. Yet two of those cases, which were consolidated under the name West Virginia v. B.P.J., wound up before the Supreme Court anyway.
On Tuesday, B.P.J. reached its inevitable conclusion. In an opinion by Kavanaugh, which was joined by all five of the Court’s remaining Republicans, the Court ruled that states may bar trans women from women’s sports. Both of these cases were filed years ago, and the plaintiffs did receive fairly favorable rulings from lower courts, even as justices like Kavanaugh and Barrett dropped hints that those lower court decisions were doomed.
But both the Court, and the Republican Party more generally, have grown much more openly hostile to trans people in the last several years. So it’s been clear for a while that B.P.J. would not end well for trans rights if the case were not settled or dismissed before it reached the justices.
Indeed, the result in B.P.J. was so clearly telegraphed by the Court that one of the plaintiffs took the hint. The Court actually decided two trans sports cases on Tuesday, although they consolidated both into a single opinion. The plaintiff in one of those cases, Lindsay Hecox, made the wise decision to ask the justices to dismiss her case after those justices said they would hear it — though Kavanaugh’s opinion denied this request in a footnote.
Though the three Democratic justices dissented, their dissent was fairly feeble. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who authored the primary dissent, argued that the case should have been sent back down to lower courts to conduct additional factfinding — which may or may not have bolstered the case for trans rights.
B.P.J. does not mean that the battle for trans rights is over. After B.P.J., trans people and their supporters remain free to lobby state and federal lawmakers, to support candidates for elected office who are sympathetic to their causes, and to otherwise try to advance trans rights through the democratic process.
But B.P.J. is a warning that the judiciary is not a friendly forum for trans people. And trans litigants are likely to lose future federal court cases if they continue to ask a Republican-dominated federal judiciary to expand trans rights.
The Supreme Court has handed down one pro-trans decision, and that case was very unlike B.P.J.
Supporters of trans rights had some reason for encouragement when they began their legal journey: The Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, the one major victory the Court has thus far handed to trans people.
But Bostock turned on very different legal issues than B.P.J., making the fight for inclusion in sports a much tougher lift from the outset.
Bostock held that a federal law barring “sex” discrimination in employment prohibits employers from discriminating against LGBTQ people. Though the Court understood the word “sex” to refer to sex assigned at birth (or what Kavanaugh insists on calling “biological sex” throughout his B.P.J. opinion), a majority of the justices concluded that “it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.”
The idea is that if Ralph is able to date Jeanene, but Juanita is not, then Juanita is being treated differently because of her sex. Similarly, if a cisgender male employee may wear stereotypically male clothes, use a male name, and otherwise present as male, then an “employee who was identified as female at birth” must also be allowed to do so, or they are also being discriminated against because of their sex.
But, as Kavanaugh points out in his B.P.J. opinion, while federal law prohibits sex discrimination in employment, it “authorizes separate men’s and women’s sports teams” at high schools and universities. So Bostock does not help trans athletes in a case like B.P.J. because sex discrimination in sports isn’t illegal.
Without Bostock to fall back on, the plaintiffs in B.P.J., who are both trans women who wished to play women’s sports, had to persuade the justices that there is some other reason why they face unlawful discrimination. They wound up arguing that not all trans women should be allowed to play on women’s teams, but only trans women who have received medical treatments that reduce their testosterone levels so that they are at normal levels for cisgender women.
The idea was that there are some trans women who have not gone through male puberty or otherwise do not enjoy a competitive advantage over other women, and that these trans women should be allowed to play women’s sports.
But, as Kavanaugh writes, the law permits states to use the blunt instrument of having one team for men and another team for women, regardless of the fact that some men are less capable athletes than many women. This principle, he argues, carries over regardless of an athlete’s gender identity. As Kavanaugh puts it, “in the distinctive sports context … the States may treat all biological males the same and treat all biological females the same.”
The bottom line, in other words, is that this Court appears unwilling to give trans people any rights that they did not already receive in the Bostock opinion. Trans litigants may sometimes prevail in contexts where sex discrimination is prohibited, but in spaces where the law may discriminate on the basis of sex, it may also discriminate against trans women.
So where can trans people go from here?
In the end, B.P.J. is a reminder that, so long as the Republican Party controls the Supreme Court, liberal political movements have fewer options than conservative ones. Republicans and right-leaning interest groups have the option of filing federal lawsuits asking the courts to bend the law in their favor, while Democrats and left-leaning causes can’t even trust this Court to apply existing precedents that protect their rights.
Again, that doesn’t mean that trans people are cooked. But it does mean that, like all groups that are favored by Democrats and disfavored by Republicans, they are more likely to prevail in forums that are controlled by the Democratic Party.
Indeed, one way that trans rights groups can potentially advance their goals is by changing the makeup of the federal judiciary. If Democrats win control of the Senate this November, they can halt all confirmations of Trump judicial appointees and prevent the federal judiciary from growing even more hostile to liberal causes such as trans rights. If Democrats win the presidency in 2028, they may be able to replace justices who joined Kavanaugh’s B.P.J. opinion with friendlier faces.
US President Donald Trump, right, greets Brett Kavanaugh, associate justice of the US Supreme Court, during a ceremonial swearing-in event in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC. | Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
There is no question in US law that is clearly or more firmly settled than the question of whether people born in the United States are citizens of this country. The 14th Amendment states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
“All persons” means all persons. And, as the Supreme Court reaffirmed on Tuesday, the amendment’s limited exception for people not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States refers only to the small subset of people, like the children of ambassadors, who are not bound by US law at all.
And yet, the decision upholding birthright citizenship, known as Trump v. Barbara, was only 5-4 — a shocking near-miss that leaves the door open to further challenges if future appointees pull the Supreme Court to the right.
It’s notable that a total of six justices did vote against President Donald Trump. While Justice Brett Kavanaugh made the extraordinary claim that the Constitution’s meaning has changed because “significant illegal immigration into the United States is a new circumstance that was largely unknown as of 1868,” he ultimately concluded that a federal statute prevents Trump from canceling people’s citizenship.
Still, that’s four votes against reading the Constitution according to its unambiguous text. And it’s four votes for overruling a Supreme Court opinion that’s been on the books since the 19th century.
Barbara is the most alarming decision that the Court has handed down since it declared that Trump is allowed to commit crimes in 2024. And, if not for the Trump immunity decision, the dissenting justices’ opinions in Barbara would be the gravest judicial attack on the rule of law since the Court upheld Japanese internment in Korematsu v. United States (1944).
And that means that, if Donald Trump gets to replace just one member of the Barbara majority, the United States enters a very dark place.
The majority opinion in Barbara is a straightforward application of existing law
When Judge John Coughenour, a Reagan appointee who was the first judge to block Trump’s attempt to strip citizenship from many Americans born in this country, announced that decision, he said that he’s “been on the bench for over four decades” and he “can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one is.”
It’s not just that the Constitution is clear. The Supreme Court also held more than a century ago, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), that the Constitution means what it says. The question in Barbara, which was whether Trump can simply cancel the citizenship of people born in the US, may be the easiest question that has reached the justices in anyone’s lifetime.
The majority opinion in Barbara was authored by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by all three of his Democratic colleagues, plus Justice Amy Coney Barrett. It is fairly short, clocking in at 26 pages, and it faithfully recites this orthodox view of the 14th Amendment and its history.
As Roberts explains, early US citizenship rules derived from the English common law, which held that children born within the King’s “dominions” were “natural-born subject[s]” of that King and thus were citizens. This rule prevailed in the United States until the Supreme Court’s “odious decision” in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) held that “all those descended from slaves” were not citizens.
The 14th Amendment was enacted in large part to overrule Dred Scott and to restore the English rule. And what of the amendment’s exception for persons not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States? Roberts explains that this means that any “child born on American soil and subject to American law was made an American citizen.”
All of this merely summarizes the same conclusion the Court reached nearly 130 years ago in Wong Kim Ark, which held that a man born to Chinese citizens on US soil was a citizen of the United States. Wong Kim Ark also laid out the modern understanding of the words “subject to the jurisdiction.”
In modern America, this category includes children of foreign diplomats who enjoy diplomatic immunity from US law, as well as the children of soldiers in invading armies. When Wong Kim Ark was decided, it also included many Native Americans — on the theory that these individuals were citizens of their tribal nation and thus a degree removed from US law — although a 1924 law established that tribal citizens are also US citizens.
So that’s what the law has been since the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, and it’s how the Supreme Court has understood the law since at least 1898. And, despite Kavanaugh’s claim that an uptick in immigration has changed the meaning of the Constitution, nothing in the 14th Amendment has changed since then.
So how did this case wind up with a dissent?
While Kavanaugh makes the idiosyncratic claim that the Constitution’s meaning can change depending on how many people immigrate to US soil, the primary dissent, which is authored by Justice Clarence Thomas, relies largely on a theory first advanced by (and later abandoned by) white supremacists in the years prior to Wong Kim Ark.
Briefly, Thomas claims that the 14th Amendment’s citizenship provision applies only to the children of people who are “domiciled” in the US and not to the children of “temporary visitors.” This theory has no basis in the text of the Constitution, which, again, refers to “jurisdiction” and not domicile.
Notably, however, this claim that domicile — a legal term which refers to the intention to remain indefinitely in a particular place — controls citizenship does have an historical pedigree. It is also featured heavily in Trump’s briefs trying to justify his attempt to cancel people’s citizenship. (Justice Neil Gorsuch, for what it’s worth, joins Thomas’s opinion but also suggests that “children born in this country to parents who make their permanent home here” are citizens, which could include children of undocumented immigrants. That attempt to carve out just these children also has no basis in the Constitution’s text.)
In an 1881 book that Trump’s lawyers quote in their brief, the white supremacist lawyer Alexander Porter Morse — the same lawyer who would go on to successfully argue in favor of segregation in Plessy v. Fergusson (1896) — claimed that the 14th Amendment should be read to deny citizenship to “children of foreigners transiently within the United States.”
Interestingly, Morse appears to have abandoned this theory of the 14th Amendment in a speech he gave to the American Bar Association just three years after the publication of his 1881 treatise. In the three intervening years, courts largely rejected Morse’s reading of the amendment, so Morse moved on to other arguments that were more likely to persuade judges. (Those new arguments, of course, did not persuade the Supreme Court in Wong Kim Ark.)
So here we are today, with several justices arguing that the Constitution has been misinterpreted for the last 130 years and that the correct reading is one that white supremacists briefly embraced in the 1880s and then abandoned once they proved unpersuasive to 19th-century judges.
A justice who would prefer the discarded views of a long-dead white supremacist is one hell of a chaos agent to add to the Supreme Court. But now we have several of them, plus Kavanaugh, who apparently believes that constitutional rights can simply disappear if too many immigrants show up.
The one silver lining in all of this is that, for now, there is a five-justice majority for the proposition that the Constitution means what it says. But, if Trump gets to replace just one member of that majority, every provision of the Constitution is potentially in danger.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: On June 26, the County Manager of Henrico County, Virginia, John Vithoulkas, sent an email to thousands of county employees asking them to help the local government conserve electricity. "Beginning July 1st, the rate we pay for electricity used in all Henrico County government and school facilities will increase dramatically -- by 25%, increasing costs by an estimated $5 million next fiscal year. We anticipate more rate increases for electricity in the years ahead," a copy of the email obtained by 404 Media said (emphasis his).
Henrico County is a community of more than 350,000 people in eastern Virginia just outside of Richmond. It also hosts 37 data centers and there are plans to build 17 more, including plans to convert hundreds of acres of Civil War battlefields into data centers. Thanks to its proximity to DC and vast amounts of land, Henrico County became a data center hub seemingly overnight and its services clients big and small. Meta built a data center there in 2017.
"To mitigate the impact of higher electric costs, I am asking that we, collectively, make slight adjustments to conserve electricity across our individual workspaces," Vithoulkas wrote in the email. "Turn off your lights when leaving your workspace, including when you leave for the day. Turn off your computers/laptops at the end of each workday. If your workspace has windows, adjust the blinds to manage heat from sunlight. Unplug any appliances, chargers, or other electrical items when they are not in use. Please limit use of (or refrain altogether from using) space heaters. A typical space heater alone can cost the county from $150 to $300 per year in electricity costs." "Each dollar we can save by conserving electricity is another dollar the county can reinvest into staff and the services we provide our residents," Vithoulkas email said.
A new state law limits Florida communities’ aims to offset greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the global climate and intensifying disasters such as hurricanes.
Specifically, HB 1217 prohibits local governments from pursuing net-zero emissions goals. At least 10 cities and counties have implemented such policies, including Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Orlando, and Leon County, where Tallahassee, the state capital, is located. But the new law will not necessarily upend these policies, said Bradley Marshall, senior attorney at Earthjustice, an advocacy group.
“It’s certainly meant to scare municipalities and local governments from trying to do things to further net-zero policies,” he said. “Now, its exact impact and what it exactly prohibits is probably up for some debate. Things that are adjacent to it—emissions reductions and even climate change reduction policies—on their face will not run afoul at all of a ban on adopting a net zero policy.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has come under fire for going on a European vacation, adding to concerns that he could lose his Senate race and flip the seat to Democratic rival James Talarico. The conservative Daily Mail posted video of Paxton in Dulles Airport boarding a plane en route to Reykjavik, Iceland, alongside conservative Christian influencer Tracy Duhon. Paxton is still legally…
Let’s get this out of the way: There is no world where you can square the Supreme Court’s inherently contradictory Monday decisions in Trump v. Slaughter and Trump v. Cook. On the one hand, President Donald Trump now has the power to fire the principal officers—think commissioners and chairs—of independent agencies, without even the remotest cause, further gutting the administrative state and…
Remember when it seemed like the most monstrous, unprecedented corruption was that, during his first term, President Donald Trump stomped all over the Emoluments Clause by owning a hotel where eager oligarchs and hangers-on could pay to stay? Doesn’t that just seem quaint by comparison to the orgy of corruption that is Trump’s second term? In the latest bit of grift, we’ve got another…
Still horrifying. "only" four justices decided that the GOP gets its policy outcomes regardless of the law.
Fulton County elections workers process absentee ballots at the new Fulton County Elections Hub and Operations Center on November 4, 2024, in Union City, Georgia. | Elijah Nouvelage/AFP via Getty Images
The premise of the Republican Party’s lawsuit in Watson v. Republican National Committee is that three 19th-century federal laws require thousands of lawfully cast ballots to be tossed in the trash — and somehow no one noticed this fact for the better part of two centuries.
In a nonpartisan judiciary, the case would have never reached the Supreme Court. It would have been unanimously rejected by lower courts and ignored by the justices. But, in the highly partisan judiciary that governs President Donald Trump’s America, the Republican Party convinced four justices to sign onto their attempt to trash numerous ballots.
Watson, in other words, is less a victory for democracy and the rule of law than it is a warning of what could come if Trump gets to replace even one more member of the Supreme Court. No reasonable judge could agree with Justice Samuel Alito’s dissent, but four of the Court’s nine justices did so, regardless.
The majority opinion in Watson is straightforward and clearly correct
The case involves three federal laws that set the date for presidential, US House, and US Senate elections. While these statutes were enacted at different times and use different wording, they all do more or less the same thing. The statute governing House races, for example, which was enacted in 1845, provides “the Tuesday next after the 1st Monday in November, in every even numbered year, is established as the day for the election.”
The Republican Party’s argument in Watson (which was also made by the Libertarian Party of Mississippi) is that this law prohibits states from counting absentee ballots that are mailed prior to federally determined Election Day, but that arrive sometime after that date. Mississippi, the defendant in the case, is one of 30 states that allows at least some mailed ballots that arrive after Election Day to be counted. In Mississippi, voters enjoy a five-day grace period, so long as the ballot is mailed prior to the deadline.
It should go without saying that, when Congress set the Election Day in 1845, it did not intend for literally everything involving an election to occur on that day. Prior to an election, states must determine which candidates shall appear on the ballot, print those ballots, distribute them to polling places and individual voters, register voters, and perform numerous other tasks. Many states also allow for early voting.
Similarly, after Election Day, states must finish counting the ballots, verify that its initial count was accurate, certify the results of the election, and perform other various tasks. The premise of the Republican Party’s lawsuit is that the task of gathering the ballots that have already been cast is somehow special, and it must happen on Election Day.
But there’s no legal support for this position. As Justice Amy Coney Barrett writes for herself, her three Democratic colleagues, and Chief Justice John Roberts, when federal law set the date for the “election,” it “set the day when the electorate must make its choice.” Voters must actually cast their ballots by the deadline, but the same deadline does not apply to the ministerial task of gathering all those ballots into a state office where they will be counted.
Moreover, as Barrett points out, other federal laws simply assume that states get to decide what happens to late arriving ballots. The Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, for example, provides that overseas military voters ballots must be delivered to state election officials “not later than the date by which an absentee ballot must be received in order to be counted in the election,” and that the ballot will not count if it arrives after “the deadline for receipt of [that] ballot under State law.”
The fact that Watsonv. Republican National Committee was taken so seriously by the federal judiciary, and ultimately the Supreme Court, is a stain on that institution.
That’s powerful evidence that Congress thought that states, and not a 19th-century federal law, decide the deadline when absentee ballots must arrive.
The most powerful evidence, however, is the fact that, for more than a century, states have counted absentee ballots that arrive after Election Day, and no one has ever thought this was legally problematic. During the Civil War, Barrett writes, Nevada and Rhode Island tasked military officers “with collecting soldiers’ ballots on election day and then sending the ballots to state election officials for counting— which meant that ballots were not received into official custody until after election day.”
Similarly, during the 20th century, numerous states started allowing voters to mail their ballots, and states that permitted late-arriving ballots to be counted were allowed to count them. In the 1940s, for example, seven states enacted new laws allowing some late-arriving ballots to be counted, but “Plaintiffs offer no evidence that any of these laws was ever even challenged under the election-day statutes.”
And it’s not like the federal laws setting Election Day are particularly obscure. Every state complies with these laws, as every single state holds their election on the same day — with some variations to the rules governing early voting, absentee ballots, and similar matters. For more than a century, states across the country have read the federal law, concluded that it permits late-arriving ballots to be counted, and enacted laws that said as much.
But, in Watson, four Republican justices claim that they know better than every lawyer and state lawmaker who read the federal law next to state laws like Mississippi’s and concluded that the state law is permitted.
So what does the dissent actually say?
Much of Alito’s dissent echoes familiar Republican Party arguments that mail-in voting is a bad idea. He spends several pages of his opinion arguing, for example, that if late-arriving ballots are counted, that could lead to a candidate who was down in early returns coming back to win an election. And that would somehow cause people to think that voter fraud was responsible for this flip.
Of course, if the Republican Party thinks this is a good reason to eliminate laws like Mississippi’s, it can always lobby Congress or the Mississippi legislature to do so. But the fact that Alito and his Republican Party think that Mississippi’s law is a bad idea is irrelevant to the question of whether it is preempted by current federal law.
Alito is correct that, prior to the Civil War, elections were typically held on a single day and people who were not present in their home state for that election were out of luck. Absentee balloting did not become widespread until the war, because it was necessary for Union soldiers in the field to cast their ballots.
But the fact that America did not have absentee ballots in 1845 does not mean that, when Congress set the date for elections in that year, it intended to lock in place 180-year-old election practices. As Barrett writes, Alito’s argument boils down to a claim that “because we are governed by 19th-century election-day laws, we are also governed by 19th-century voting practices.” That theory would abolish a host of modern-day practices that did not exist in 1845, including early voting.
The fact that Watson was taken so seriously by the federal judiciary, and ultimately the Supreme Court, is a stain on that institution. The actual premise of this lawsuit is that, because the Republican Party controls six seats on the Supreme Court, it could simply ask the justices to implement their preferred rules for federal elections, and the Court would do so regardless of whether there is any legal support for the GOP’s position.
In the end, however, only four justices concluded that the Republican Party gets anything it wants, regardless of what the law says.
blatant theft. If only there were any consequences.
The pathway that connects the White House residence to the Oval Office has long been paved in Tennessee flagstone. Every president since Harry Truman made the 45-second commute, and made it without complaint, until Donald Trump. The dun rock would not do. Instead, Trump wanted polished African granite, carved in Italy, with a flamed-finish stripe—slightly raised, to prevent slips—running down the middle. As workers tore up the flagstone in March, a reporter asked Trump who was paying for the enhancements. “Paid for by me,” he replied.
But that wasn’t true. Budget documents from the National Park Service that I obtained show that the walkway replacement cost taxpayers $689,232, and is part of a $1.3 million project that included repairing adjacent stone and masonry and providing new hardware for nearby doors. A year earlier, in a separate “Rush project at request of POTUS,” the Park Service spent $347,503 to remove and replace the stucco on the colonnade wall, a project that cleared the way for Trump to affix gold frames and plaques mocking some of his predecessors.
This previously undisclosed spending is part of an enormous shift of taxpayer cash away from national parks around the country and into the Washington area. In order to pay for the president’s projects, the parks have had to cancel needed repairs, slash their budgets, and operate with fewer employees. Taxpayer spending on projects in the National Capital Region has increased 92 percent over the past year, according to the budget documents. The windfall draws on revolving maintenance accounts and more than $100 million in fees collected almost entirely from national parks elsewhere. Trump has ordered the refurbishment of fountains, the lining of the Reflecting Pool, and a $1.6 million Fourth of July fireworks display on the National Mall. He has requested billions more from lawmakers, who thus far have refused. “I’m so proud of Washington, D.C.,” Trump said Wednesday during a meeting in the Oval Office with the secretary-general of NATO. “It’s become one of the hottest cities in the world.”
But as Trump attempts to adorn his immediate surroundings with taxpayer-funded improvements, other parks are going without. Park Service employees I spoke with describe a quiet crisis unfolding as the Interior Department’s regular budget shrinks and political appointees redirect the dwindling funds. More than 900 Park Service projects that were expected to be funded this year never received the money, according to internal records. They include a $1.5 million roof-replacement project at the Yellowstone Center for Resources to halt pest invasions and water leaks, more than $3 million to continue operating the free-bus system in Acadia National Park, and a roughly $424,000 guardrail replacement on the cliff edge of Black Canyon in Colorado’s Gunnison National Park, a project needed to rectify a “significant safety hazard for visitors.”
“The president is prioritizing D.C. at the expense of parks throughout the country,” Emily Douce, a lobbyist for the National Parks Conservation Association, told me. “There is $24 billion of maintenance needs throughout the National Park Service system, and adding these new vanity projects just adds to the need.”
The dozens of pages of budgetary documentation show an $854 million, or 68 percent, decrease in spending on projects in park regions outside the Washington area in the first eight and a half months of fiscal year 2026, compared with the full prior fiscal year. That includes a $235 million decrease in spending in Pacific West parks such as Yosemite, a $254 million decrease in the Intermountain Region parks such as Yellowstone, and a $33 million decrease in Alaska. During that same period, spending around Washington increased by about $100 million, not counting about $310 million in donations that the Park Service received from allies of the president, most of which is going to fund a new White House ballroom.
Park Service staff have been told, in some cases, that their 2026 projects are being defunded because the Trump administration has prioritized America’s 250th birthday and other programs. A Park Service employee who was not authorized to speak publicly told me that some parks and projects have had “nearly 70 percent of their approved anticipated project funds pulled back,” forcing them to delay making crucial repairs to historic structures, hiring interns, and ensuring that trails are wheelchair accessible. “It means that signage and exhibits won’t be improved, youth programs can’t be offered, that a trail is not improved,” the employee said.
In response to my request for comment, a Department of the Interior spokesperson criticized spending by Barack Obama in his first term and boasted about collecting $2.4 million more in park fees during the first three months of this year by raising prices on foreign visitors. “The National Park Service has not only been focused on beautifying the district for the 250th celebrations in our nation’s capital but has also been working on many deferred maintenance projects throughout the country,” the spokesperson, whom the department would not identify, said in a statement.
The White House did not respond to a question about the source of funding for the new West Colonnade paving stones.
A memo distributed in March on behalf of the parks director, Jessica Bowron, warned employees of an “all-hands-on deck approach” for the semiquincentennial events that might make vacation time impossible over the summer. She also made clear that the employees may be required to take leave of their assigned posts for the events. “Resource sharing across parks and regions will be essential, and some staff may be called upon to support incident management teams or other mission-critical assignments,” the memo announced.
Earlier this month, about 400 staff from approximately 180 parks had been redeployed to the Washington region for various tasks related to the nation’s 250th celebrations, according to documents that I obtained. By this week, it had grown to about 450 staff from more than 200 parks. The cost of this deployment was not calculated in the documents. But under the park system’s policies, home parks continue to pay for the eight-hour work days of their redeployed staff, while additional costs such as transportation, overtime, hotels, and a per diem are shouldered by other service accounts.
That loss of staffing comes as many parks are already operating with fewer employees. The Park Service has lost nearly a quarter of its staff since Trump returned to office in 2025, because of terminations, early retirements, and a federal buyout initiated by the Trump administration, according to the National Parks Conservation Association. The Interior Department spokesperson did not dispute the major staffing cuts but attacked the National Parks Conservation Association, a nonpartisan group that advocates for increased national-park funding, for not donating a greater share of its revenue directly to the park system and for its current CEO’s public support of Vice President Harris in the last election.
Trump has proposed reducing the staff at national parks even more. His 2027 budget proposes cutting 3,967 full-time employees, a 31 percent reduction from the 2025 staffing level. The proposal is not popular on Capitol Hill, and unlikely to make it into law. Last month, the Senate rejected Trump’s request for $1 billion for “security enhancements” to the East Wing as it is reconstructed to make way for a new ballroom; Trump had tried to include that funding in an immigration-enforcement supplemental bill. The supplemental request to pay for the Iran war, which was released this week, includes $500 million in Park Service funding for D.C. projects such as a new seawall on the Potomac River. Trump’s 2027 budget calls for $10 billion to continue to beautify the Washington area—a request that was nearly eight times as large as all National Park Service project spending in 2025. In late May, Republicans on the appropriations subcommittee that oversees the Interior budget marked up a version of the president’s budget for consideration by the full committee. Trump’s $10 billion was not included.
In April, Senator Angus King of Maine questioned Interior Secretary Doug Burgum about how the money would be spent. Burgum said it would not go to new projects, such as the 250-foot memorial arch Trump plans to build on the Potomac. But he did not offer details on what projects in the area would require so much funding. “D.C. is like a state, and it’s not just the National Mall,” Burgum said. “It is for the greater capital region.”
Many of the president’s projects are not onetime expenses, but will require increased funding on an ongoing basis. National Park Service managers in March approved using $32,095 from a maintenance account to care for the statues that Trump installed in his retrofitted Rose Garden. “The scope may be expanded in the future to include maintenance of any additional statues that are installed in the garden,” the budget document stated. “Work includes cleaning, waxing, inspection for damage, and minor conservation treatments as needed.”
When Trump began his renovation of the White House complex last year, the president said that he and his donors would bear the cost of his dreams. The Trust for the National Mall raised money to pave over the Rose Garden and put marble in the nearby Palm Room, a way station between the president’s residence and the West Colonnade. But the details of the spending, including price tags and the identity of the donors, have been murky. There are a number of other renovation and decorating projects with no public accounting of the costs: Trump’s marbling of a bathroom in the residence, his relocation of a copy of the Declaration of Independence to the Oval Office, his addition of gold filigree to the walls and coins on many of the internal doors.
Then there’s the most expensive project, the demolition of the East Wing to make way for a ballroom. Trump has been adamant that the new ballroom would not cost the American people anything. “We didn’t ask for any tax money. This is taxpayer free. We have no taxpayer putting up 10 cents,” Trump said on April 1. “The ballroom is a donation.” To date, $300 million of donations have been transferred to the National Park Service for the ballroom, according to the internal Park Service budget documents. But taxpayers will still likely need to chip in to pay for the broader project.
Recently unearthed contractor documents, revealed by The Washington Post, describe the true cost of the East Wing reconstruction as closer to $600 million, with more than half coming from taxpayer-funded accounts managed by the White House Military Office and the Secret Service. The White House budget office released $351.6 million to the Secret Service this month, a transfer first reported by Roll Call. The White House has not confirmed the purpose of the funds, but the transfer happened after senators refused a White House request for $1 billion in funding for the Secret Service for security enhancements at the White House, including the East Wing project. White House spokesperson Davis Ingle described the East Wing project in a statement as “inextricably tied to the security of the President,” and said Trump was coordinating with “the White House Military Office and the United States Secret Service” on design and planning. Ingle said the president and his allies would fund the East Wing project “to the tune of approximately $400 million.”
The next projects on Trump’s agenda also lack clear funding sources or a defined budget. In addition to the memorial arch, Trump intends to rebuild the East Potomac golf course and install a new sculpture garden, and has floated plans to paint the Eisenhower Executive Office Building white, to match the West Wing next door. None of these projects has yet been added to the Park Service budget documents I reviewed.
Another project that is taking shape will be paid for by private donations with supervision by federal park officials: Trump plans to install a new landing pad on the South Lawn of the White House, which would allow the latest model of the president’s Marine One helicopter to take off without burning the grass. According to the budget documents, the project will be funded by a $5 million donation from defense contractor Lockheed Martin—the maker of the new helicopter.
House Speaker Mike Johnson on Friday tried to issue a warning about what’s at stake if Democrats win control of Congress in the November midterms—an outcome that at this point is more likely than not. But his warning was inadvertently a great case for why voters should hand Democrats the reins. “If we were to lose the midterms, heaven forbid, … y’all, impeachment’s not even the biggest…
It was a bad, bad week for immigrants at the nation’s highest court, a naked display of power and xenophobia where the Supreme Court conservatives started with their—well, President Donald Trump’s—desired result and worked backward. In a brutal series of 6-3 decisions, the conservatives upended settled law in favor of making Trump’s brutal anti-immigrant crackdown the law of the land.
Amid an influenza outbreak, major branches of the U.S. military are reinstating mandatory flu vaccines for recruits just over two months after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth threw out the longstanding policy. ABC News reported on Tuesday that recruits for the Army, Navy, and Air Force will be required to take flu shots, and that the Air Force now has set the goal of vaccinating all…
A company founded on wholesale theft of IP does not get to complain when someone else does it to them.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Anthropic has accused the Chinese firm Alibaba of launching the largest attack yet attempting to clone Claude, as China races to match the capabilities of Anthropic's leading model following Mythos' release and subsequent restriction from foreign markets. Ars obtained a June 10 letter sent to Senators Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) one day ahead of a Senate committee hearing on "AI and the American Dream." In the letter, Anthropic shared "new, confidential evidence of the largest campaign to illicitly extract Claude's capabilities we have ever measured."
The attacks occurred between April 22 and June 5, when "operators afliated with Alibaba and Alibaba Qwen, Alibaba's AI lab" allegedly generated "more than 28.8 million exchanges with Claude through almost 25,000 fraudulent accounts," Anthropic said. Violating Claude's terms of service and access restrictions, this campaign "targeted some of Claude's most valuable capabilities, such as agentic reasoning, software engineering, and long-horizon tasks." According to Anthropic, Alibaba evaded detection by "using obfuscation techniques and proxy networks." As Chinese demand for reliable obfuscation techniques increases, Anthropic warned there's already "a growing circumvention economy" to fuel an ever-expanding web of future distillation attacks. [...]
"Alibaba is governed by an independent board, none of whom has any military affiliation," Alibaba said. "Its products and services are built for retail, logistics, and enterprise information technology -- not weapons, defense, or intelligence." Anthropic appears unconvinced, however, that Alibaba isn't working with the Chinese government. In the letter, Anthropic warned that without stronger interventions, these distillation attacks will "help China reach Mythos Preview-level capabilities sooner."
To keep the US ahead of China, Anthropic recommended that Congress pass legislation with three objectives. First, antitrust laws must be updated to allow AI firms to share information about evolving Chinese tactics to deter more threats. Second, the US needs more export controls on chips to hamstring Chinese access to advanced compute so that they simply can't train on US model outputs. That could make conducting distillation attacks pointless, Anthropic suggested. Finally, Congress should pass laws penalizing Chinese labs' "bad behavior" so that it's "more difficult and costly" to rely on distillation attacks to advance Chinese models. Penalties could include limiting Chinese firms from accessing US models or advanced US chips or from relying on data centers outside of China, Anthropic suggested.
More bad faith from the GOP? I'm shocked, just shocked I tell you.
Supporters of gun control and firearm safety measures hold a protest rally outside the Supreme Court on December 2, 2019. | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
On Thursday, the Supreme Court struck down a Hawaii gun law, claiming that it violates the Second Amendment. As is almost always the case in the Court’s Second Amendment decisions, Wolford v. Lopez was decided along party lines. The Republican justices agreed with the Republican Party’s position that gun regulations are bad, while the Democratic justices agreed with the Democratic Party’s position that gun regulations are good.
Regrettably, Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Wolfordv. Lopez relies on the Court’s previous decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022). Bruen is one of the most widely criticized Supreme Court decisions within the federal judiciary itself — in a 2024 dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson quoted a dozen lower court opinions, some of them written by Donald Trump appointees, which warned that judges simply cannot figure out how Bruen is supposed to work.
Briefly, Bruen requires judges hearing Second Amendment disputes to ask whether a modern-day gun law that is being challenged in court is “relevantly similar” to a law that existed when the Constitution was written. The Court has offered little guidance on just how similar the two laws may be, and Alito’s opinion does little to clarify Bruen.
While his opinion spends a great deal of time rehashing past Second Amendment decisions and criticizing Hawaii for enacting many restrictions on gun owners, Alito devotes only six pages to the question of whether the law at issue in Wolford is similar to an old law, and only about three pages on Hawaii’s strongest argument.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion, in other words, that Bruen is not just unworkable, but that it is being used in bad faith by the Republican justices. Hawaii did everything the Supreme Court asked of it in Bruen, but the Republican justices still stuck down their law.
So what does the gun law at issue in Wolford actually do?
The Hawaii gun law at the heart of Wolford is, admittedly, a very aggressive gun regulation. It requires gun owners to get explicit permission from a private business’s owner or manager before they can bring a gun onto that business’s property.
As a practical matter, this law bars guns from nearly all bars, restaurants, shops, gas stations, and other places of business, because few gun owners are going to enter a property unarmed, find the manager, obtain permission to carry their weapon, and then go retrieve it.
So it’s unsurprising that the Republican justices wanted to strike this law down. Again, it’s a very expansive restriction on gun possession. And Bruen, which struck down a New York state law that barred most people from carrying guns in public, made it clear that the Republican justices believe in public carry.
But Wolford presented a big problem for these six Republicans, because, while Hawaii’s law is quite aggressive, it is also very similar to four laws enacted around the time of the founding. As Alito acknowledges in his opinion, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York all had laws in the 1700s that, in the words of the Pennsylvania statute, make it illegal to “carry any gun or hunt on the improved or inclosed lands of any plantation, other than his own,” without securing “license or permission from the owner of such lands or plantation.”
The Court should stop embarrassing itself by handing down Second Amendment decisions that are impossible to take seriously.
Alito downplays these four laws by claiming that they were enacted to prohibit “unauthorized hunting of deer or small game on someone else’s private property,” and thus are different from Hawaii’s law because Hawaii wasn’t concerned about people hunting deer at hotels and gas stations.
In her dissent, Jackson points out that many of these laws had more expansive purposes. She quotes New York’s 1763 law, for example, which states that it was enacted to avoid the “great Danger of the Lives of his Majesty’s Subjects, the Ruin and Destruction of the most valuable Improvements, the grievous Injury of the Proprietors, and the great Discouragement of their Industry.”
Alito’s opinion is also at odds with United States v. Rahimi (2024), the Court’s only post-Bruen decision that upheld a gun law. Rahimi upheld a federal law that bars people subject to domestic violence restraining orders from possessing a gun. The Court reasoned that this modern day law should be upheld because it is sufficiently similar to founding era laws that required “individuals suspected of future misbehavior to post a bond,” money that they would forfeit if they later “broke the peace.”
In Rahimi, in other words, the Court was asked to decide whether a narrow and very sensible federal gun law — one prohibiting people that a court has already determined to be violent from carrying guns — should be upheld. And the Supreme Court upheld it, pointing to a fairly dissimilar founding era law that had little to do with firearms.
In Wolford, by contrast, the Court struck down a more expansive gun regulation, despite the fact that four states enacted nearly identical laws in the 1700s.
Given these two cases, it is difficult to argue that the Republican justices are applying Bruen in good faith. Under Bruen’s completely arbitrary method for determining whether modern-day gun laws are constitutional, Hawaii had a much stronger argument in Wolford than the federal government did in Rahimi. But Rahimi involved a fairly uncontroversial gun regulation that even most Republicans are likely to support, so it was upheld.
Given this arbitrary framework, it is difficult to imagine any gun control law that Republicans oppose will be upheld, no matter how closely it hews to Bruen’s confusing standard. Wolford eliminates any remaining doubt that the historical research demanded by Bruen does not actually play a role in the Court’s decisionmaking.
The Court should stop embarrassing itself by handing down Second Amendment decisions that are impossible to take seriously, and overrule Bruen. Clearly, the justices are not actually deciding these cases based on whether new laws resemble old ones. So they should scrap Bruen and start being honest about what’s actually driving their decisions.
The people stupid enough to need this are not people that should be anywhere near weapons.
The Army, Navy, and Air Force are once again requiring basic trainees to get vaccinated against influenza after the virus quickly swept through an Air Force base in Texas, sickening at least 222 recruits and hospitalizing four.
The outbreak flared just two months after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth abandoned a decades-long requirement for flu shots. The requirement was intended to keep armed forces healthy in their bases, which provide ideally tight conditions for a variety of pathogens, including influenza, to run rampant. Mandates stem from centuries of intertwining histories of militaries, war, and human pathogens that have firmly established the danger that infectious diseases pose to armed forces.
But in April, Hegseth claimed that flu shot requirements were "not rational" and said removing the requirement was "restoring freedom" to military members.
Because we don't live in a functioning democracy anymore
The health-focused news outlet STAT on Tuesday published a bombshell report that suggests President Donald Trump may have used his position of power to obtain a powerful new obesity drug not yet approved by the Food and Drug Administration. According to the report, the FDA in April allowed one 79-year-old man to obtain Eli Lilly’s retatrutide, an experimental weight-loss drug…
