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Berlin said it would increase its budget by one fifth in 2027 compared to this year.

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A report for the UK government warned Beijing could restrict exports or use disruptive attacks to disable already installed technology.

The World Bank estimated that a prolonged closure of the strait could drive energy prices up by almost a quarter.

If what James Comey did is illegal and worthy of prosecution, then absolutely no criticism of Trump is now legal.

Every few months, the Trump administration says that it will make a greater effort to denaturalize American citizens. Last week, The New York Times reported that the Justice Department plans to start the process for formally denaturalizing more than 300 current U.S. citizens, which would be the largest single push for citizenship stripping in modern American history.Any attack on the integrity of American citizenship is concerning. The administration’s denaturalization threats often provoke a strong response from the president’s opponents and critics. But it is also important to calibrate one’s level of concern by understanding what the Trump administration can and can’t do about denaturalization in the first place.For one thing, the Trump administration cannot denaturalize a natural-born citizen—that is, someone who acquired citizenship at birth by virtue of being born on U.S. soil or by being born to a U.S. citizen. The Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause, which was enacted during Reconstruction in 1869, sought to place the scope of American citizenship beyond the limits of normal political debate for all time. (I’ll come back to this to discuss Trump’s recent attacks on birthright citizenship later.)Second, there are strict legal and constitutional limits on when and how the United States can denaturalize a naturalized U.S. citizen. This was not always the case. During the first Red Scare in the late 1910s, for example, the Wilson administration targeted Russian American anarchist activist Emma Goldman for her antiwar and anti-conscription efforts. Federal officials invalidated her husband’s naturalized citizenship for alleged fraud, then argued that her acquisition of citizenship through marriage to him was now invalid as well. She accepted deportation to the newly founded Soviet Union in 1919.In the late 1930s, Congress and the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration sought to clarify when and how someone could lose their U.S. citizenship. The Nationality Act of 1940 was drafted to harmonize dozens of different provisions that had been enacted piecemeal over the preceding decades. In the new law, Congress laid out a variety of circumstances in which a U.S. citizen could be deemed to have renounced their U.S. citizenship. The Supreme Court later summarized those conditions as follows:The chapter relating to “Loss of Nationality” provided that any citizen should “lose his nationality” by becoming naturalized in a foreign country; taking an oath of allegiance to a foreign state; entering or serving in the armed forces of a foreign state; being employed by a foreign government in a post for which only nationals of that country are eligible; voting in a foreign political election or plebiscite; using a passport of a foreign state as a national thereof; formally renouncing American citizenship before a consular officer abroad; deserting the armed forces of the United States in wartime (upon conviction by court martial); if a naturalized citizen, residing in the state of his former nationality or birth for two years if he thereby acquires the nationality of that state; or, if a naturalized citizen, residing in the state of his former nationality or birth for three years.The most important provision, at least for constitutional law purposes, was the restriction on voting in foreign elections. The Supreme Court initially upheld it in the 1958 case Perez v. Brownell. That case centered on Clemente Martinez Perez, a Texas-born man who had fled to Mexico to avoid registering for the draft during World War II. He then sought to evade the consequences by reentering the United States multiple times on agricultural visas, claiming to be a natural-born Mexican citizen.When the U.S. sought to deport Perez to Mexico in the early 1950s, he invoked his natural-born U.S. citizenship to try to remain in the country. A federal district court ruled that Perez had forfeited his U.S. citizenship by voting in a Mexican election, and the Supreme Court agreed on appeal. The justices concluded that Congress’s powers to regulate U.S. foreign relations included the power to revoke citizenship for U.S. citizens who voted overseas.Justice Felix Frankfurter’s opinion for the court blandly took the government’s assertions at face value. “Experience amply attests that, in this day of extensive international travel, rapid communication and widespread use of propaganda, the activities of the citizens of one nation when in another country can easily cause serious embarrassments to the government of their own country as well as to their fellow citizens,” he wrote.It is impossible to reconcile the citizenship clause’s absolutist text—and its lack of a mechanism for depriving someone of U.S. citizenship—with the Perez decision’s reliance on “experience” or its focus on whether a U.S. citizen’s activities cause “serious embarrassments to the government.” Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing in dissent from Perez, laid out the fundamental importance of American citizenship in plain, civic-republican terms.Citizenship is man’s basic right, for it is nothing less than the right to have rights. Remove this priceless possession and there remains a stateless person, disgraced and degraded in the eyes of his countrymen. He has no lawful claim to protection from any nation, and no nation may assert rights on his behalf. His very existence is at the sufferance of the state within whose borders he happens to be. In this country, the expatriate would presumably enjoy, at most, only the limited rights and privileges of aliens, and, like the alien, he might even be subject to deportation, and thereby deprived of the right to assert any rights. This government was not established with power to decree this fate.The Supreme Court corrected its error and embraced Warren’s reasoning in the 1967 case Afroyim v. Rusk. Beys Afroyim, a Polish-born man who had been a U.S. citizen since 1926, traveled to Israel in 1950 and voted in its Knesset elections in 1951. Roughly a decade later, in 1960, Afroyim submitted an application to renew his U.S. passport. The State Department refused his renewal request on the grounds that he had forfeited his U.S. citizenship by voting in an Israeli election.In response, Afroyim filed a lawsuit against the State Department. He argued that the refusal both violated his due-process rights and ran contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause. He had a much more receptive audience at the Supreme Court than Perez did. Justice Hugo Black, writing for the court in Afroyim, noted that Perez “has been a source of controversy and confusion ever since” it was decided. Since then, he explained, the Supreme Court had “consistently invalidated on a case-by-case basis various other statutory sections providing for involuntary expatriation” and also “refused to hold that citizens can be expatriated without their voluntary renunciation of citizenship.”In Afroyim, the Supreme Court finally overturned Perez and imposed clear limits on denaturalization. “This power cannot, as Perez indicated, be sustained as an implied attribute of sovereignty possessed by all nations,” Black concluded. “Other nations are governed by their own constitutions, if any, and we can draw no support from theirs. In our country the people are sovereign and the Government cannot sever its relationship to the people by taking away their citizenship.”Afroyim was one of the Warren court’s most quietly influential decisions. By ruling that Congress could not involuntarily deprive U.S. citizenship, the court essentially held that it is impossible to lose U.S. citizenship unless you take multiple concrete steps to do so at a U.S. embassy. Roughly 5,000 people do this every year, with a slight uptick in the Trump era. It also ended an era where the government often sought to punish dissidents and political activists with the loss of citizenship and eventual deportation.As a result of the court’s ruling, the only lawful way to be deprived of U.S. citizenship is if you are found to have lied during the naturalization process. Something that is obtained through fraud, Congress has declared and the courts have held, is not legitimately obtained at all. Logically, this also rules out the loss of U.S. citizenship for natural-born citizens. The Trump administration’s denaturalization efforts fall into this category. The Times reported last week that the Trump administration identified and hopes to denaturalize 384 current U.S. citizens. This number requires context in two ways. On one hand, it would represent a significant jump in denaturalizations. The federal government only pursued an average of 11 denaturalization cases each year from 1990 to 2017, the year Trump took office. On the other, it would be a drop in the bucket of total naturalizations. Roughly 7.9 million immigrants obtained U.S. citizenship over the last decade, according to U.S. immigration officials.Suffice it to say, it is extremely unlikely that there is some great, hidden number of fraudulent naturalizations waiting to be uncovered by the Trump administration. Obtaining U.S. citizenship is often an exhausting, decade-long process that requires a whirlwind of interviews, tests, applications, and so on. The reality is that very few people lie or defraud the government during the denaturalization process. An Obama-era review that cross-checked fingerprint records from past deportations and those of newly minted U.S. citizens found fewer than one thousand matches out of tens of millions of naturalizations over the past few decades.The Trump administration also cannot denaturalize someone by fiat. There are plenty of areas of federal immigration law where the executive branch can wield arbitrary and unchecked power, but denaturalization is not one of them. The Justice Department must charge a defendant with “knowingly procur[ing], contrary to law, [their] naturalization” and obtain a conviction before a federal jury. Only when convicted by a jury can a defendant be denaturalized. As I’ve noted before, juries have been a potent check on the Trump administration’s misconduct.Sometimes the Trump administration does dubiously legal things in the hope of shifting the law by obtaining a favorable ruling from the Supreme Court. But the Supreme Court has already signaled to Trump that it is uninterested in making it easier to denaturalize someone. In the 2017 case Maslenjak v. United States, the government convicted a Serbian-born woman of lying to immigration officials about her husband’s role in the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s in general and, more specifically, the Srebrenica massacre.Federal prosecutors had argued that they only needed to prove that the defendant made a false statement in the course of their naturalization process, regardless of whether it was relevant to the outcome. Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the unanimous court, instead held that the government “must establish that an illegal act by the defendant played some role in her acquisition of citizenship.” It was not enough to merely lie, she explained; the government must prove that the defendant “lied about facts that would have mattered to an immigration official, because they would have justified denying naturalization or would predictably have led to other facts warranting that result.”That decision matters in two ways. First, it prevents federal prosecutors from using frivolous falsehoods or inaccuracies to deprive someone of their citizenship. Chief Justice John Roberts feared during oral arguments that a defendant who forgot to mention a speeding ticket could later be subject to denaturalization for having done so. That may have seemed an absurd scenario at the time, but could be more plausible amid the Trump administration’s all-out war on the nation’s legal immigration system. Second, it signaled, amid the backdrop of Trump’s first ascent to power and his unprecedented (at the time) attacks on immigration, that the Supreme Court would not reflexively widen the government’s existing denaturalization powers.This brings us back to the great caveat I mentioned earlier: the future of birthright citizenship. The Supreme Court is currently weighing an executive order issued by Trump on Inauguration Day last year that purports to deny U.S. citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil to undocumented immigrants or temporary visa holders. It represents the greatest attack on U.S. citizenship’s integrity since the high court’s disastrous ruling in Dred Scott.The executive order is plainly forbidden by the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause and more than a century or precedent and practice. A medley of right-wing legal scholars have spent the last year constructing a nonsensical theory to reinterpret that clause. But at oral arguments in Trump v. Barbara, a majority of Supreme Court justices appeared somewhere between skeptical of or hostile to these efforts. A final ruling is expected sometime before the court’s summer recess at the beginning of July.If the court were to weaken birthright citizenship in any way in its Barbara ruling, even as some sort of internal compromise to reject Trump’s executive order, it would fundamentally alter this entire legal and constitutional calculus. Just as the court’s ruling in Maslenjak signaled an unwillingness to expand denaturalization, such a ruling in Barbara would be seen as a willingness to further narrow other aspects of U.S. citizenship. If the Supreme Court stands its ground, then the Trump administration’s denaturalization campaign will remain firmly constrained by law and precedent, as well.

Last month, congressional Republicans introduced legislation to shield Big Oil companies from liability for their role in the climate crisis. This was just the latest in the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to escape accountability for delaying our clean energy transition through decades of climate deception.Meanwhile, millions of Americans are already experiencing climate-related heat waves, fires, floods, and droughts—disasters that Big Oil companies were predicting decades ago, with internal warnings of “globally catastrophic” climate harms that would threaten “man’s comfort and survival,” create “more storms, more droughts, more deluges,” and cause “death due to thermal extremes.”In his most recent novel, Vigil, George Saunders grapples with these questions of climate denial and accountability through the story of K.J. Boone, a dying Big Oil executive who is visited in his final hours by Jill, a spirit whose task is to comfort people transitioning to the afterlife.It’s a supernatural premise, but the question at the heart of the novel is a pressing one: How should we balance accountability and mercy, even in cases—like Big Oil’s climate deception—where profound evil has been committed? It’s a markedly different question from those I’ve focused on in my career working to make fossil fuel companies pay for their climate crimes. In my conversation with Saunders, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed this tension, as well as the value of empathy in organizing, the role of art in social change, and what comfort looks like on a planet that’s already locked into severe climate catastrophe. Aaron Regunberg: Vigil takes us inside the head of a climate-denying Big Oil executive at the end of his life. Did you have hopes for what effect the novel might have on readers?George Saunders: When I started, there was an overlay of, “Well, I’m 67, what’s the most urgent thing happening in the universe? Climate change.” But I realized that while climate change is in this book, it’s not about climate change. The goal, I guess, is really just to wake a reader up a little bit—to make a person more aware of the world around them, to maybe feel a little more fond of the world.Now that I’m done with it, I can see that it’s an agitating book for a lot of people. Some people really loved it, some hated it. And that’s kind of a first for me. That’s sort of a nice accomplishment, at this late stage—to do something slightly new, even if it’s annoying.“Now that I’m done with it, I can see that it’s an agitating book for a lot of people. Some people really loved it, some hated it.”A.R.: There was so much I loved about this book. But I was really upset by the ending.G.S.: I think a lot of people either thought, “Oh it’s the most beautiful ending” or, “I hate it.” Tell me what got under your skin.A.R.: We live in a world that has been so corroded by elite impunity. So to watch K.J. Boone, who during his lifetime took no responsibility for Big Oil’s climate denial, finally face the prospect of punishment in the afterlife, only to then see Jill swoop in and save him at the last minute—it’s kind of like my favorite writer looked into my brain and conjured up my literal worst nightmare.G.S.: But can I say … you’re missing a step. Because yes, in life, he couldn’t make any repentance, and he dies a dick. But then when he’s free of his body, suddenly he sees the horror that he’s done. So given that in the fictional world this transformation happens, now the question is, do you still want to kick that guy? I would argue I don’t want to kick him anymore.A.R.: I think there still needs to be punishment.G.S.: In the real world I agree with you—if you could rouse him up and put him on his feet and march him to jail, I’m all for that.A.R.: Jill has this extreme perspective on moral responsibility, that we are all “inevitable occurrences”—products of our birth and environment—and that therefore to pass judgment on someone for doing anything is absurd. Another character, the Frenchman, asks, “Do you really believe it? That bad and good are the same?” I’ve heard you say that both Jill and the Frenchman’s perspectives are true, despite being at odds.G.S.: I think that idea of an “inevitable occurrence” is probably demonstrably true by logic, if you look at eternity. But it’s very uncomfortable. And you can’t live like that. I think basically we all live with both those ideas alive in us all the time. So for example, when somebody offends you, part of your mind goes, “Well, that sucks, but you know, given who he is, I get it,” and you move slightly in the direction of mercy. And at the same time, when somebody rears back their fist to hit you, if you can get a quick left hook in, you do that. So I think the book is uncomfortable because it’s kind of making it a binary. And the reason it’s a binary is because … she’s dead.A.R.: Dying kind of fucks with your head a bit, huh?G.S.: Yeah, it does. At least the people in these bardo realms, they are in extremity. But for me, Jill’s idea is correct, and the other idea is correct, and we’re always negotiating between the two. Because otherwise, why mercy? Why try to understand somebody? If everybody is infinitely malleable and can completely fix their shit, why don’t they? And therefore you don’t have to be merciful, you just call them on it.A.R.: You’ve talked about how empathy does not dull our action against bad actors, but in fact can sharpen it. I’m skeptical that this idea applies when it comes to a K.J. Boone–type figure, like the executives at ExxonMobil. Because these companies are not going to be persuaded to do the right thing—they need to be forced.G.S.: I agree. But I would say you are doing the Jill thing in your climate accountability work, because you’re looking at the problem, you’re looking at the villain, with curiosity, and you’re saying, “That approach doesn’t work, but this one might.”What I would argue for is “Know thy enemy”—and nothing’s off the table at that point. So it’s not about kid gloves but about informing oneself and not impeding your understanding with some preexisting agenda. For example, if you are an activist and you say, “This Big Oil CEO is Satan embodied, and he’s in the back room eating human flesh,” well, you’ve imagined the enemy incorrectly, and I would imagine then your actions would be inefficient. Whereas if you have a complete understanding of who that person is, with empathy underneath it, you’re going to have a sharper idea of what must be done.A.R.: I guess my perspective is we already know what must be done. I think most of our problems are not technical in nature, they’re political—we know the solutions, it’s just a question of overcoming the interests opposed to them. From that perspective, there can be utility in caricature—and even, I’d argue, truth to it, because a lot of these guys do, by any reasonable approximation, look a lot like Satan eating human flesh.G.S.: I defer to you on that because you’re the one who’s active in this. For me, if you took that approach in fiction, I think what would happen is somebody would get about five pages in and go, “Oh, Saunders, he’s pedantically putting his liberal beliefs into the story, I don’t want to read anymore.”Now, in some of my stories I do take a caricature approach and nail the evil guys. And that’s really satisfying to do. That can be done depending on the point of view you’re telling the story with. If I’m narrating a guy from inside, I can’t exactly say, “I’m Satan incarnate.” Every book has a problem, and this book’s “problem”—its dominant feature—was point of view.It’s funny, because as we were going back and forth over email I thought, “Oh, you were actually in my book!” There was a scene where somebody came to K.J. Boone’s house who had your deep understanding of the issues and your political viewpoint, and at one point Jill came into his mind and we got the whole story. That was very satisfying because I could say to the reader, “Dear reader, here’s what I think. I’m on your side.” But the bottom dropped out of the book at that point. It felt like an authorial trick. Because it was.A.R.: You’ve said before that moralizing can make the bottom drop out of literature. But where’s the line? There are works of great literature, like, say, The Grapes of Wrath, that I would describe as moralizing, but they’re still incredible art. I would describe some of your work that way. I can’t help but read “Escape From Spiderhead” as moralizing against our carceral system, or Pastoralia as moralizing against capitalist exploitation. But they’re also perfect works of literature.G.S.: The best answer to your question would be to read In Dubious Battle, the book Steinbeck wrote before The Grapes of Wrath. That book is full of convenient situations that prove the viewpoint of the writer. It’s so inflamed with Steinbeck’s political views that you don’t buy it. Steinbeck learned from that, and so in The Grapes of Wrath you imbibe the socialism from within because it’s completely sensible in that world he created.It doesn’t mean that fiction can’t have a moral position and produce feeling, but it has to be done honestly. For me it has a little bit to do with not trying too hard, or not being too sure of what you’re trying to say.A.R.: So when you were writing Pastoralia, you didn’t have it in your head from the beginning that it was going to be about capitalist exploitation?G.S.: No, no, it literally was a dream I had that I was back at my old job, with my office mate, and we were in caveman suits. That was it. But that theme is so much a part of who I am. Like, at rest, I’m a socialist—I’ve been deeply wounded by a lot of stuff I’ve seen in my life and if I don’t block that out it just manifests.A.R.: What should be the role of literature and art in sparking social change?“A beautiful work of art will sometimes spark change, just because the primary ingredient of a work of art is truth.”G.S.: Well, my honest answer—that I don’t always live by—is that I don’t think an artist should think about that intention directly. Let the art do what it wants to do. But a beautiful work of art will sometimes spark change, just because the primary ingredient of a work of art is truth. Like Chekhov said, “If you show a man how he really is, he will change.” Likewise a culture. But the work has to be truthful.A.R.: Right now across the country there are organizers working to make polluters pay for climate costs; there are lawsuits targeting Big Oil for their deception. My day job is advocating for prosecution of these bad actors. Do you think Vigil has lessons for those of us pursuing climate accountability in the real world?G.S.: Honestly, I don’t think so. I think you don’t need a lesson from me on that. You know what you’re doing, and it’s righteous, and so I don’t think you need a lesson from me on that. I really don’t.A.R.: Jill’s role is to comfort people at the end. Thanks to the real-life K.J. Boones, humanity is in a perilous position when it comes to climate—we are closing in on tipping points that already lock us into some truly world-shattering nightmares. I’m curious what you think the role of comfort is in that context?G.S.: That’s the question of the book. My answer, as a person and a citizen is, “Raise hell, and don’t deny anything.” If the wolf’s outside the door and you go, “Oh, it’s probably a poodle,” that’s not comfort. I think comfort and radical action are the same thing at this point. That’s the only source of comfort there could possibly be, and everything else is just placating.

For an uncomfortably long time on Monday, two lawmakers shouted at one another about climate change in a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing about the Trump administration’s proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency. One was EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin. The other was 83-year-old Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, a Democrat from Connecticut. The spat did what Zeldin seemingly hoped it would: generate a viral moment for his boss and his boss’s base. It also helpfully distracted attention away from the ostensible purpose of the hearing: to discuss why Zeldin and the Trump administration want to cut in half the budget of the agency charged with protecting the country’s air and water. It makes sense that Zeldin was eager to evade substantive questions about an EPA tenure spent giving generous giveaways to polluters, dismantling independent research, and hemorrhaging staff. He also didn’t talk too much about the White House’s plan to slash the EPA’s budget down to just $4.2 billion. Zeldin’s record, that is, has already earned the ire of Make American Healthy Again activists. This is an especially volatile week to court more of it. The Supreme Court and Congress are both hearing arguments this week about glyphosate—the active ingredient in the weedkiller Roundup, produced by the German chemicals giant Bayer AG. Several scientific studies have linked glyphosate to cancer, and it’s accordingly one of the MAHA movement’s least favorite substances.No doubt Zeldin would rather be seen going toe-to-toe with an octogenarian than being confronted with the fact that his agency got a personal thank-you from Bayer for its work on glyphosate. Unfortunately for Zeldin, that confrontation was captured on camera too.It would be easy for that to get lost in the news this week, or even in the flurry of glyphosate-related news. The Supreme Court is hearing oral argument in a case that could grant Bayer blanket immunity from being sued over glyphosate, and let the company off the hook for tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of lawsuits that claim Roundup caused non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The House is also due to take up this year’s Farm Bill, which currently includes a provision that would likewise bar states and courts from penalizing or holding “liable any entity for failing to comply with requirements that would require labeling or packaging that is in addition to or different from the labeling or packaging approved by the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.”Glyphosate has become an understandable cause célèbre for MAHA, and its advocates are rallying in Washington this week. For months now, they’ve been railing against Zeldin and other Republicans for awarding top positions and regulatory concessions to some of the country’s biggest polluters. At the end of March, some three dozen MAHA leaders sent a tensely worded letter to Zeldin chastising the EPA for continuing to “approve, expand, and normalize chemical exposures that directly undermine that goal, driven by the chemical industry lobbyists who occupy senior leadership positions at the agency.” The group went on to state several specific demands to enact a “real MAHA agenda” at the EPA, largely focused on controlling harmful pesticides and microplastics. Even if MAHA’s beliefs and electoral potency remain up for debate, Republicans are certainly responsive to their concerns. This week’s dispute over glyphosate could spark the biggest showdown yet in an emerging MAGA-MAHA split. The Trump administration has enthusiastically supported Bayer’s case not just for legal immunity but to produce and distribute even more glyphosate and phosphorous—two Bayer-made products. Trump signed an executive order in February invoking the Korean War–era Defense Production Act to deem their manufacturing “critical to the national defense.” The order also protects companies that make glyphosate and phosphorus from lawsuits related to materials or products produced in accordance with the act, i.e., glyphosate and phosphorous. Trump’s Justice Department has enthusiastically supported Bayer in its case before the Supreme Court—and received a crucial assist from Zeldin’s EPA.Asked about this issue on Tuesday afternoon, Zeldin was considerably more subdued than he was when bickering with DeLauro. In her line of questioning, toward the end of the hearing, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez drilled Zeldin over his agency’s communications with Bayer. “Administrator Zeldin,” she asked, “have you ever participated in a meeting with Bayer where you discussed the legal or litigation issues that the company was facing?” Zeldin stated that he had only had a “brief meet and greet, and that topic did not come up.” Again, Ocasio-Cortez asked whether the EPA had discussed the issue with Bayer. Zeldin doubled down. “I’m telling you 100 percent absolutely. Maybe there was some brainstorming that was done beforehand of potential topics, but that topic was not brought up.” She then presented an internal EPA email from last June, obtained by the Center for Biological Diversity via the Freedom of Information Act. The email shows Zeldin’s senior adviser for agriculture and rural affairs—Henry Turner Bridgforth—discussing his conversation with Bayer in advance of the company’s June 17 meeting with senior agency officials. “After talking with Bayer’s team,” Bridgforth tells some of Zeldin’s top aides, including EPA general counsel Sean Donahue, “they are going to bring up some legal/judicial issues.” Among the list of “Discussion Topics” included in Bridgforth’s subsequent memo was “Glyphosate: Bayer will want an update on EPA reg review, as well as give some updates of their own.” Another discussion item is “Supreme Court Action: Bayer will give an update to the Administrator on where they stand in litigation and labeling options.” The final discussion included in the memo is “Thanks: Bayer will provide a small thanks for updating the glyphosate web page and work on MAHA.”The Center for Biological Diversity noted back in March, the EPA only updated its glyphosate web page once during that time, in May 2025. The change reflected the agency’s decision to withdraw its 2022 letter stating that California could require language on pesticide labels for products containing glyphosate—warning of cancer risk—so long as those labels also stated that the EPA did not agree with that conclusion. The Biden administration’s stance revised a Trump 1.0-era crackdown targeting California’s decision to label glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans,” in line with the findings of the World Health Organization’s International Agency on the Research for Cancer, or IARC.As Ocasio-Cortez pointed out while questioning Zeldin, Bayer’s argument to the Supreme Court relies heavily on the fact that—because these sorts of state-level warnings are now prohibited—the federal government’s assessment that Roundup is safe should insulate it from lawsuits over its failure to disclose that product’s cancer risk. Essentially, Bayer is arguing that glyphosate is legally safe because the EPA said it was in 2020. And because disclosures about those risks no longer exist, Bayer argues that it can’t be sued for having failed to disclose cancer risks under state laws nullified by the EPA. Trump’s solicitor general filed a brief last December supporting Bayer’s position that federal law preempts states from adding warnings on pesticide labels beyond those established by the EPA. The solicitor general filed another in March further stating its support for that position. That second brief is supported by EPA general counsel Sean Donahue, who Bridgforth requested to attend the meeting with Bayer.In response to Ocasio-Cortez’s questioning, Zeldin stumbled over a few words about an ongoing EPA assessment of glyphosate before being asked to respond in writing. The EPA has until October 1 to complete its review of glyphosate, which theoretically could conclude that it causes cancer. By that time, as Bayer is certainly aware, Congress already may have passed the Farm Bill’s protections for glyphosate and SCOTUS may have decided to grant Bayer blanket legal immunity.If gripes about glyphosate were coming just from environmentalists (or cancer patients), then Zeldin might have an easier time brushing them off. But Republicans seem genuinely alarmed by the prospect that the MAHA base that was on their side when it came to vaccines could turn against the party’s deregulatory agenda. MAHA leaders’ letter to Zeldin from March spelled out several demands, largely focused on controlling harmful pesticides and microplastics: conducting an emergency review of pesticides banned elsewhere, closing loopholes for pesticides registration, shutting the “revolving door” between the EPA and polluting industries, protecting people from microplastics in drinking water, and enacting “a moratorium on permitting for new plastic production facilities and expansions of existing facilities.” To meet these demands would undoubtedly enrage petrochemical companies and lobbyists that have been loyal Republican donors. In the 2024 election cycle, nearly 70 percent of campaign contributions from the American Chemistry Council, an industry lobby group, went to Republicans. Counting only contributions to political action committees, or PACs, that cycle, the split is even more dramatic: 77 percent of the ACC’s PAC donations went to Republican-aligned PACs.This tension has yielded some awkward posturing from Zeldin and other officials eager to keep both MAHA and polluters happy. The EPA, for instance, recently broadcast plans to allegedly “unmake” plastic waste by supporting questionable technology known as “advanced recycling,” which uses chemicals to break down certain types of plastics. Typically, that happens through a process called pyrolysis. Petrochemical producers and lobby groups have advertised these expensive, polluting methods as preferable alternatives to policies that might actually force them to limit the production of plastics—a vanishingly small percentage of which (less than 10 percent) has ever been recycled. As ProPublica has reported, no more than 10 percent of plastics produced using pyrolysis are actually recycled. Such oil-intensive processes have been found to release carcinogens, such as benzene and dioxins, into the atmosphere. Advanced recycling facilities have traditionally been regulated as incinerators under the Clean Air Act. Undergirding the EPA’s promotion of advanced recycling is a change long pushed by the American Chemistry Council that would instead regulate advanced recycling facilities as “manufacturing.” The change would mean that those facilities would have to account for fewer pollutants. And as the Natural Resources Defense Council’s John Walke told ABC News, the process by which the EPA is going about this could amount to an “immediate deregulation” of these facilities, “leaving a gap where no federal emissions standards would apply.”Earlier this month, Zeldin and Kennedy announced “landmark, coordinated actions to address microplastics contamination.” In reality, they placed microplastics on a list of substances (the Contaminate Candidate List) that might eventually be considered contaminants, and then might at some point be regulated. Often, however, substances that end up on this list are never regulated. “This is the first step in a process that almost always leads to not regulating,” Suzanne Novak—a senior attorney and director of drinking water advocacy at Earthjustice—told Inside Climate News. The alliance between MAHA types and the GOP has always been strange. Why did MAHA think its priorities could be defended by a party that has never exactly been shy about its loyalty to the corporate polluters? Whether or not MAHA supporters break up with the party—and whether or not those votes actually end up mattering—Lee Zeldin’s EPA has given them plenty to be angry about.

As prediction markets rise in popularity and notoriety, several news outlets have recently engaged in partnerships with the most prominent of these companies, raising questions about how and why media organizations would want to become entangled with an industry essentially predicated on gambling. Depending on who you ask, these relationships could be ultimately benign—or they could become yet another domino in the cascading decline in the public trust of the media.Prediction markets allow participants to bet on the specific outcomes of real-world events. The two largest players in this industry are Kalshi and Polymarket. In recent months, Kalshi has struck deals with such outlets as CNBC, CNN, and Fox News, among others, while Polymarket has established partnerships with Dow Jones and Substack.There are a few reasons news organizations might want to engage in these partnerships, including the possibility of financial benefits. In theory, these relationships are akin to those between news organizations and traditional advertisers. That means the relationship would be subject to the traditional barriers that separate the business side of a media outlet from its editorial side. In this way, the inclusion of prediction market data in news coverage does not mean that the outlet would diminish its coverage of that industry or treat it uncritically, in the same way that a newsletter sponsored by Aetna wouldn’t necessarily go easy on pharmaceutical companies.“For as long as there’s been advertising in the news, we understand that there’s this firewall between editorial and advertising. And if that breaks down, then there’s a lack of trust in the journalism that’s being done,” said Dustin Gouker, the author of a newsletter on prediction markets. But what’s different about the partnerships between Kalshi and Polymarket and news outlets, continued Gouker, is that this data may be directly inserted into the news, without a clear indication to readers that the information is sponsored.Meanwhile, the benefit for prediction markets is pretty clear: It raises their profile among an audience who might not otherwise be aware of them. According to one recent poll commissioned by the investment firm Paradigm, 51 percent of voters said they have not heard, seen, or read something about prediction markets in the past year. Given that prediction market use is still low among the larger population, the promotion of these companies on news sites can help acculturate Americans to the idea that these are useful tools with institutional support.These partnerships could also potentially help prediction markets in future legal arguments, if they need to make the case that there is added societal benefit to their product. Several states have filed lawsuits against prediction markets, alleging that they violate state gaming laws. The Trump administration has pushed back, suing some states for trying to regulate the industry. As prediction markets engage in these legal proceedings, the legitimacy offered by a partnership with news outlets might bolster their case.“The case that the prediction markets can make is, ‘Oh, look at the value we provide to society. Go on CNBC, go on CNN, go on Fox. Look at our integrated platforms. We are augmenting the news. We are making the news better. We are giving viewers a more accurate depiction of what the public thinks is going to happen in events,’” hypothesized Jonathan Cohen, who leads gambling policy at the American Institute for Boys and Men, or AIBM.There’s very little detail available about what most of these partnerships might ultimately entail or how they might evolve over time. Fox News has said it will not rely on Kalshi for its elections coverage. CNBC is disclaiming that it has a small stake in Kalshi for its stories related to prediction markets; according to a recent press release, a “Kalshi ticker will run alongside segments of CNBC’s on-air programming” and the firm “will also launch a CNBC page on its site, featuring CNBC-selected markets.” The details of CNN’s partnership with Kalshi are perhaps the most transparent; CNN will integrate graphics of Kalshi’s data into its reporting, include a “real-time news ticker” for stories involving Kalshi data, and obtain “access to Kalshi’s real-time political, news, and cultural data for developing key storylines and visuals,” according to the December press release announcing the relationship.Indeed, the “really cool graphics” may be a key aspect of why news outlets are partnering with prediction markets, said Steve Ruddock, a gambling industry consultant and the editor in chief of the Gaming Law Review. He compared it to the charts that polling experts will pull up in their coverage on public opinion during news segments.“That’s all from internal polling, and aggregating other external polls,” Ruddock said. “Prediction markets are just another layer of that.”But even if the partnership is limited to integration of graphics or predictions on the weather or sports, there could still be the perception of an unethical entanglement between news outlet and prediction market that could further erode trust in the media. For example, a viewer could become convinced that a reporter bet in favor of a certain outcome on a prediction market and then adjusted their news coverage to ensure that outcome.“The only reason to watch a news organization is because you can trust it,” said Jonathan Cohen, who has also written a book on sports gambling. “Any sliver of doubt [in] your news organization because it is somehow beholden to gambling interests … those feel like sort of Faustian bargains to me.”Part of the issue is that prediction markets have hyped themselves as, well, presenters of predictions that will come to pass. Shayne Coplan, the CEO of Polymarket, has said that prediction markets are a “global truth machine.” But if, say, prediction markets give Democrats a 75 percent chance of taking back the House of Representatives in  the midterm elections, that doesn’t mean it’s a sure thing—there’s still a 25 percent chance it could remain in Republican hands.As a whole, the user base of prediction markets accounts for only a very small part of the American population. An NBC News poll released in March found that only 3 percent of Americans are investing in prediction markets. Younger men are also disproportionately more likely to participate in betting markets as opposed to other demographics. A recent poll by AIBM found that in the past six months, 26 percent of young men respondents reported using at least one sports betting, daily fantasy sports, prediction market, or other gambling platform, as compared to 14 percent of the general population.There are other characteristics that make prediction market usage less representative of the general population, as well. Molly White, a cryptocurrency and technology industry researcher, said that because Polymarket is a cryptocurrency-based market, its event contracts can often “function less as public sentiment about an outcome actually happening, and more as what the crypto community would like to have happen.”Moreover, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission had blocked Polymarket’s use in the U.S. between 2022 and late 2025. During this time, it actually expanded dramatically on a global level, and the second Trump administration eased restrictions on Polymarket, which counts Donald Trump Jr. among its investors. (Trump Jr. is also a paid adviser to Kalshi.) Polymarket is now legal to use on a federal level, but some states have engaged in lawsuits against prediction markets—including Polymarket and Kalshi—with the goal of preventing these companies from serving their residents. There is very little regulation of prediction markets as a whole.The AIBM poll also found that young men, as well as the general public, view prediction markets as closer to gambling than investments. As such, news consumers might find the idea of a collaboration between media organizations and prediction markets distasteful.“I think there’s this general distaste for prediction markets among a substantial portion of the American public, where people don’t really want to see what they view as gambling alongside their sober news coverage,” said White. Still, some research indicates that prediction markets may be more accurate than polls because only a tiny subset of people, even within that small portion of the larger population, are setting prices. A recent research paper by scholars from the London Business School and Yale University found that the success of prediction markets is less due to the “wisdom of the crowd” but instead largely sourced from the actions of a small minority of informed traders representing fewer than 4 percent of all accounts.“It’s a snapshot in time. This is what the probability of something happening in real time is. And I think that’s valuable,” said Gouker.It’s also possible that a major scandal with Kalshi or Polymarket could have no effect at all on trust in the media. “If the prediction markets go away tomorrow, does anything really change for the news organization? Probably not,” said Ruddock. “It wouldn’t be any different than if a polling organization got caught fudging data, or using incorrect metrics. It’s basically, ‘This is a third party that we’re using for information. If there’s a scandal at that [company], hey, that’s not us.’”But in the long term, news outlets may be bolstering what could eventually be their competition. The websites for Kalshi and Polymarket already present themselves as pseudo-news sites, with verticals on such topics as politics, sports, and economics, as well as “trending” markets. Even though Polymarket has a history of amplifying false information on its social media pages, Coplan has referred to it as “News 2.0.” Legitimizing these markets could, down the line, further erode the relevance of traditional news.“[Prediction markets] are trying to make themselves an invaluable part of the ecosystem of media and finance,” Gouker said. “Just them being embedded into the media is part of the journey as they try to get to that point of mass adoption.”