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Transcript: Trump Epstein Scandal Takes Damning Turn as Dem Drops Bomb
New Republic • 2 weeks ago

Transcript: Trump Epstein Scandal Takes Damning Turn as Dem Drops Bomb

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the February 25 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent. The Epstein scandal has just taken another bad turn for Donald Trump. NPR reports that the Justice Department has withheld some files relating to charges that Trump potentially abused a minor. And Democratic Congressman Robert Garcia just dropped a bombshell as well, claiming that he’d reviewed DOJ materials personally and can confirm that the DOJ does appear to have withheld critical FBI interviews. What’s really noteworthy here is that we now see the cover-up becoming a significant part of the story in a freshly vivid way. And interestingly, Trump’s constant treatment of DOJ as his own personal law firm could now work against him, since DOJ controls what we learn about what’s in the files. To unravel all this, we’re talking today to University of Michigan law professor Leah Litman, who’s great at decoding this kind of complexity. Leah, great to have you on.Leah Litman: Thanks for having me.Sargent: So let’s just set the table this way: The Epstein files, of course, are the materials amassed via federal investigations into Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophilia and sex trafficking. Leah, can you just walk us through what exactly the law obliges the DOJ to do with regard to these files right now?Litman: So the law obliges DOJ to actually release the files. They are supposed to redact information—particularly the victims’ names—but they are not supposed to be redacting information about the alleged wrongdoers.Now, of course, these files contain reports that aren’t credible. Law enforcement officials receive tips that aren’t credible all the time. What makes this latest revelation, I think, so significant is this is an individual who the FBI opted to interview not once, not twice, not three times—four times. This was a serious, credible enough lead that there were multiple interviews and multiple indications that this individual was telling the truth. And that’s what they chose to cover up.Sargent: And this is what NPR is reporting. So, NPR used a novel trick here: It looked essentially at metadata on the documents to establish that what’s missing from the public release of the files is more than 50 pages of FBI interviews and notes from conversations with the person you just discussed. This is someone who accused Trump of sexual abuse as a minor, decades ago. Can you go into that a little bit more?Litman: Yes. So the allegations are this individual says they met Donald Trump while with Jeffrey Epstein and that, when they were between the ages of 13 to 15, Donald Trump sexually assaulted them.Now, what the NPR story also indicates is this individual made a similar allegation in lawsuits against Epstein in 2019; that this information was in the information that was relevant to Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial and is indeed with the Maxwell trial team; that, again, the FBI interviewed this individual multiple times and the Epstein estate settled with them.So those are all indications that what this individual said was credible enough that it became incorporated into a criminal case against Ghislaine Maxwell—that the DOJ deemed it credible enough that law enforcement, the FBI, deemed it credible enough to interview them multiple times, and that the Epstein estate settled with them. So those are all indications that this is a serious allegation, and the allegation itself is, of course, appalling.I mean, we are dealing with an allegation that the president of the United States is a child rapist. And to say that is alarming and shocking. And this is no longer just a scandal about elite impunity and the president being a pedophile—protecting pedophiles. It is about the president now being an accused pedophile.Sargent: And using his Justice Department to cover it up.Litman: Yes. Exactly. And again, we have seen him use the DOJ to go after political enemies. We’ve seen him use the DOJ to protect himself—dropping the cases that DOJ had elected to bring against him and issuing mass pardons to his supporters, issuing pardons to people who contributed to his campaign or his super PACs, dropping investigations against his friends.Tom Homan allegedly took a bag with $50,000, and that investigation went nowhere. And now it is the president using the DOJ to cover up allegations that he himself engaged in sexual assault of a minor. Sargent: So let’s talk about what we know about the woman. She charged that Trump did this quite disgusting thing involving her in 1983, after she was introduced to Trump by Epstein. The timeline gets a little fuzzy here, but I want to bear down on this point. In the summer of 2025, according to NPR, the FBI internally circulated some Epstein-related allegations that discuss Trump, and one of them involves this woman.And we know that the FBI conducted several interviews with this woman—as you pointed out—but only one of them is in the released files, according to NPR. Just to clarify: What’s being suggested here is that the other several interviews with this woman, potentially about Trump, were not released by the DOJ knowingly. Yes?Litman: Yes, exactly. That is the allegation. The DOJ and FBI, apparently as part of the process of determining which files they were going to release, prepared a slide deck that was distributed within the executive branch that documented allegations against high-profile individuals.They didn’t include all of the allegations—the not-credible ones—against Donald Trump and others, but they included this one. So that’s another indication that they treated this one as more serious. And that’s the one that they are alleged to have culled information and kept the interviews out of the files.Sargent: Right. And so into this steps Congressman Robert Garcia, who’s the ranking Democrat on the Oversight Committee. He put out a statement that’s something of a bombshell. I’m just going to read it.Yesterday, I reviewed unredacted evidence logs at the DOJ. Oversight Democrats can confirm that the DOJ appears to have illegally withheld FBI interviews with the survivor who accused President Trump of heinous crimes. Oversight Democrats will open a parallel investigation into this.Leah, let’s break this up into pieces. When Garcia says there, “I reviewed unredacted evidence logs,” he’s saying that DOJ’s own logs list FBI interviews with this woman that were not in the released files—what you just referenced.Litman: Exactly. He’s saying that the set of Epstein files that is subject to this transparency and disclosure law—that set of files—contains the interviews with this individual where she alleged Donald Trump sexually assaulted her as a minor. That is what he is saying. And he is also confirming that it’s that material that somehow wasn’t released to the public.Sargent: Right. So we’ve basically got a number of sets of eyes on this log confirming this. We’ve got NPR essentially confirming it by using metadata, or whatever technique they used there. And we have Congressman Robert Garcia confirming exactly the same thing. He looked at the logs; it showed a number of interviews with this woman. Those interviews were not in the released files.Litman: Exactly. And that is the cover-up, to the extent it is now the cover-up, that is the scandal. But I don’t want to suggest that it is just the cover-up that is a scandal, because the cover-up is appalling.We have already seen that they are misredacting the documents. They’re not complying with this law, and all of the indications—based on their actions and statements—were they were manipulating this to their political advantage. But I don’t know that we really had evidence or a credible argument that the things they weren’t releasing included allegations of misconduct—not just that Trump knew about Epstein’s misdeeds, not just that Trump was enabling or facilitating it, but that he was participating in it.Again, just to say the statement is shocking. We are dealing now with an allegation that the president of the United States raped and sexually assaulted a child and is now using his Department of Justice to try to cover that up. And we don’t know … Sargent: It’s unbelievable. So, piece number two of what Congressman Garcia said there is this—and presumably, it should be easy to confirm—the GOP chairman of the House Oversight Committee, James Comer, could do exactly what Robert Garcia did: walk in there, look at the logs, and confirm whether the FBI interviews are missing, right?Litman: Yes. Sargent: Obviously, this seems to put a lot of pressure on Republicans, as well, unless I’m missing something.Litman: I mean, I would certainly hope so. And this is just another example of: How much are Republicans in Congress going to lay over and “bend the knee” and allow Donald Trump to run absolute roughshod over laws and Congress’s own powers?Because you’re right. Congress could—if it wanted to, tomorrow—have all of the Oversight members go look at those documents and confirm that the DOJ is illegally withholding material that contains allegations of wrongdoing by the president.Sargent: It sure seems that way, and I suspect that Republicans aren’t going to do that. But let me ask you this: Is there any legal means for forcing DOJ’s hand here, now that such a clear circle seems to have been drawn around specific missing files?Litman: So it’s a little unclear what the legal recourse is, to the extent you’re asking about litigation, because in order to bring suit, you would need to identify a plaintiff who is injured by the failure to disclose those particular files.I am certainly not in a position to speculate about whether the individual who made those allegations would want to bring suit. I’m not, honestly, sure that a court would say that individual even had “standing” to bring suit. And so that leaves us in this situation where you have a law that ostensibly applies to the executive branch, and it’s unclear how that law will be enforced in a world where the majority in Congress doesn’t seem to care.Sargent: Could the White House or DOJ—or both, I guess—use some sort of legal trickery to somehow evade legal responsibility for the release of these particular files?Litman: If you’re asking about legal responsibility in the sense of litigation? Absolutely. They could say whoever brings the lawsuit doesn’t actually have standing to do so. That would allow a court to dismiss the case before they even ascertain whether the Department of Justice is in compliance with this suit. So yes, there are many avenues that they could pursue to try to evade such a ruling.Sargent: What else could they say? Like, something a little more direct than just playing the “standing” card.Litman: They could say there’s no “cause of action.” There is no legal authorization to bring suit. They could say a court doesn’t have the authority to actually order the release of information within the DOJ’s possession.The list goes on. I don’t want to do their jobs for them—since they have crap lawyers and they are also running on a shortage of lawyers—but they could certainly try.Sargent: Right. And so if a court did order the release and the DOJ refused, then it would go up to the Supreme Court, presumably.Litman: Yes.Sargent: OK. So could a Democratic-controlled House subpoena these specific files next year, presuming Democrats win?Litman: Absolutely.Sargent: And then, when the DOJ refuses to release them, go to court to compel it?Litman: Yes, they could. And just to go back to my hobbyhorse—this is part of why the courts matter. Because you can also imagine, even in a world where you have a Congress trying to enforce the law, you can imagine courts—and specifically this Supreme Court—getting in their way.Recall that when Donald Trump was subject to subpoenas by the New York District Attorney’s Office and a grand jury, as well as Congress, the Supreme Court essentially “slow-walked” those cases and injected a legal standard, and required courts to make additional findings that delayed the ability to actually enforce those subpoenas.Sargent: Yeah, so what might that look like? So let’s just imagine a Democratic-controlled House is there in 2027. One of its first acts, I guess, would be to draw up very specific subpoenas, right? Saying “these files”—I mean, there may be many other revelations by the time 2027 rolls around—but just for the sake of argument, they could really be clear and specific and say, Release these, DOJ. What would happen then? How would it unfold? What would the timeline look like? Litman: So the timeline would really be in the lower court’s hands in some ways. And so depending on which court it goes to, you can imagine some judges “slow-walking” it. Think of Judge Aileen Cannon in the obstruction of justice and documents case, who drew out that case for so long it effectively prevented the case from ever going to trial—even though it was one of the more straightforward ones.So it depends a little bit on what court it goes before. Now, once it’s before a court, the president and the DOJ are going to object to those subpoenas, and they will likely argue that the subpoenas raise “separation of powers” concerns because Congress is demanding presidential documents.In the Supreme Court’s opinion that I was alluding to earlier, Trump v. Mazars, the court basically added a bunch of language that suggested, historically, those sort of demands were resolved by the political branches without involving courts. And once you go to court, then the Supreme Court added: Courts can assess the separation of powers considerations as to whether Congress is entitled to the information, or separation of powers considerations instead counsel hesitation and mean the executive branch has some discretion as to whether it can actually disclose them. So that is going to be part of the fight in a world where Democrats retake the House and try to go to court to actually enforce subpoenas.Sargent: And so what sort of timing are we talking about here? I mean, I guess in a sense, if Democrats were to win the White House in 2028, the Democratic president or—well, I guess whoever the Attorney General is—could just release these files, right? Is there any chance at all, presuming there’s a Democratic House, that we see those files sooner than that?Litman: There’s a chance. I would not put it at a very high chance. And again, that is just because of my very low confidence in this Supreme Court’s willingness to actually take seriously Congress’s interest in that information and their ability to enforce subpoenas that are directed against the executive branch.I mean, this court has such an expansive view of presidential power and seems to think that, you know, the acts of investigation and prosecution are such core, exclusive executive prerogatives that they could say Congress isn’t in a position to litigate and enforce that—which, again, is appalling and should trouble us all. But I just kind of want to be real about the problem that this Supreme Court creates.Sargent: What exactly is—or would be—the legal basis for just saying that a congressional subpoena doesn’t count?Litman: What would be the legal basis? I mean, what’s the legal basis for presidential immunity, Greg? That’s not in the Constitution, and yet the Supreme Court found it like magic. I mean, what’s the legal basis for Justice Thomas in the tariffs opinion saying that the president has the powers of a crown?I mean, the president isn’t king, and yet Justice Thomas basically wanted to make him one. And so this Supreme Court has been salivating—foaming at the mouth—to expand presidential power that they are willing to add things to the Constitution that just aren’t there.I mean, at the oral argument in a recent case, Justice Amy Coney Barrett basically said, Well, couldn’t we just adopt the unitary executive theory without actually specifying where in the Constitution it is? And so their willingness to engage in that sort of shooting-from-the-hip, gestalt sense of “this has to be what the Constitution means, but I don’t actually need to explain it,” is part of what we’re working with.Sargent: What would be the ostensible basis? Like, in other words, what would be the Supreme Court’s “cover story,” in this case?Litman: They would say that Article 2 vests the executive power in the president, and that the executive power includes the power to conduct investigations, law enforcement, and prosecutions. And because those are core executive powers, Congress cannot enact laws that force the executive branch’s hand in those matters.Sargent: Boy, I guess that’s certainly possible. Just to wrap this up: Is there a role for whistleblowers here? Is there some other way the files come out? And let’s just really go for it here—do you think the files will come out?Litman: There is absolutely a role for whistleblowers. I mean, we are seeing the importance of whistleblowers with respect to exposing misconduct of ICE and DHS. We have seen the importance of whistleblowers in many other matters, exposing some of the acts of Judge Emil Bove while he was in the Department of Justice.So, yes, whistleblowers could play a significant role. Do I think we are going to see these files in the short term? I don’t think we’re going to see them before the midterms. Do I think we will see them eventually? Yes.But it is just so wild to me that over the last few weeks, it is clear that England is “out-no-kinging” us with respect to the Epstein files. They have actually instituted criminal proceedings against former members of the monarchy. And we are living in a world in which the president is obstructing the release of files mandated by law that potentially implicate him in criminal wrongdoing. And our legal system is so messed up, it’s unclear what the fix is for that. Sargent: Yeah, I mean, that’s the bottom line for me, as well. In other places, people are being held accountable. Here, nobody’s being held accountable.Litman: Yes, exactly. And I don’t want to resign ourselves to that inevitability, but we should acknowledge that accountability here, realistically, requires winning control of the House and likely the White House, as well.Sargent: Which, of course, is a doable thing—even though it probably shouldn’t come down to that.Litman: No, and that’s why we should keep harping on this, right? Because people care about the fact that the president is now accused of sexual assault. People also care about the fact that he is using DOJ to cover up his alleged crimes. And so, in that way—whether it is whistleblowers, public opinion, or public outcry—this stuff matters, even if we can’t go to court to fix it tomorrow.Sargent: We say it on the pod all the time, but if you needed another reason to elect Democrats to control the House, you’re seeing it right now.Folks, if you enjoyed this, make sure to check out Leah’s book on the Supreme Court, which is just as unsparing as the stuff she’s just said here. It’s called Lawless. Leah, it’s always great to talk to you. Thanks for coming on.Litman: Thanks for having me.

Trump’s ICE Is Quietly Stockpiling Weaponry—and It Should Alarm Us All
New Republic • 3 weeks ago

Trump’s ICE Is Quietly Stockpiling Weaponry—and It Should Alarm Us All

The “forever wars” abroad and the global war on terror after the September 11 attacks left behind a long trail of failure, disillusionment, and death—but they also funneled huge sums of taxpayer money to companies that supplied the equipment that made all that destruction possible. That resulted in windfalls for GOP-connected companies, and fueled a massive public-private bureaucracy that grew harder to rein in as it metastasized to monstrous proportions.Something like this is happening again in a different theater of operations: Donald Trump’s campaign of violent mass deportations. It’s becoming its own forever war: It could drag on for years or decades without success. It’s producing misguided military occupations of restive local populations. It has launched a huge arms buildup. And it also has what might be termed its very own war profiteers.To wit: A handful of private companies that manufacture weaponry and ammunition have already inked very lucrative contracts with the Department of Homeland Security, which will provide it with enormous stockpiles of military-style equipment, some to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, according to data from Senator Adam Schiff’s office, which is probing DHS contracts.The pileup of all that equipment hints at a major long-term problem. Just as we saw in the long aftermath of September 11, this new and evolving MAGA terror bureaucracy will expand in grotesque ways. It too will grow less constrained as it amasses more troops—and more firepower.A harrowing glimpse of this future lies in a new report by Schiff that has gotten surprisingly little notice: It finds that Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection have formally approved contracts for at least a whopping $144 million in weapons, ammunition, and other accessories during Trump’s first year. The analysis—based on government contracting data—documents at least a fourfold increase for ICE and a doubling for CBP, relative to 2024, concluding that this will “build a heavily-armed domestic police force.”It’s eye-opening stuff. One ICE contract is with Geissele Automatics for millions of dollars’ worth of “precision long guns and accessories” to support “armed agents” and other ICE operations, Schiff’s report says. This involves an unknown number of Geissele Border Patrol rifles, the report notes, describing this weapon as an “AR-style rifle with military specifications.” CBP contracted for millions of dollars more in rifles, as well.ICE and CBP also contracted with Glock for millions of dollars in handguns and accessories, the report says. Taking all these contracts together, the report starkly concludes: “ICE and CBP have together placed orders to purchase thousands of new high-powered lethal weapons at taxpayer expense.”There’s still more. The report documents ICE and CBP contracts totaling more than $30 million in ammunition and more than $25 million in contracts for the “non-lethal” weapons. That’s not a reassuring description: They include Tasers, pepper spray, and tear gas canisters.In short, we’re looking at a massive stockpiling of weapons that will be in ICE’s and CBP’s possession for years to come. And someone is supplying all that equipment.At my request, Schiff’s office analyzed the contracting data it collected to determine which companies are the top ICE and CBP contractors. Here are the results, per a chart provided by Schiff’s staff:These particular contracts are mostly for small arms (including AR-style rifles), ordnance, ammunition, and related accessories like gun sights and suppressors, Schiff’s office says. A subcategory includes pepper spray, Tasers, tear gas, and other “non-lethal” weaponry.“These contracts expose how DHS has set in motion a massive surge in spending to put even more dangerous weapons in ICE and CBP’s arsenal,” Schiff told me in an emailed statement. “This misuse of taxpayer dollars to maximally arm federal immigration agents, including those with questionable vetting and insufficient training, must end.”ICE, of course, has long been an overly militarized agency, including under Democratic presidents. But under Trump this has escalated dramatically. ICE aims to continue vastly expanding its recruiting, fueled by tens of billions in new federal dollars. And under Trump, this bureaucracy is unshackling itself in fresh ways, conducting warrantless arrests, expanding surveillance capacities, and building an archipelago of enormous new prison camps. In a sense, we’re seeing yet more cancerous growth of the post-September 11 national security bureaucracy, but with a more intensified inward focus. DHS, which was created after September 11, has long had a domestic anti-terror component. But now Trump has supercharged its role as a mass immigrant-expulsion operation that is unleashing violence toward U.S. citizens—and even killing them—while operating with near-total impunity among American populations, which Trump officials openly describe as a good thing.“It’s the transformation of DHS from an entity that protected the homeland from external threats to one increasingly policing American society,” Donald Moynihan, author of an excellent Substack on state capacity, tells me. With this ramped-up stockpiling, Moynihan says, the endgame will be “filling those warehouses with people and using those guns and that technology to control American cities.”The war on terror also teaches us that expanding bureaucracies like these only grow harder to control over time. “Trump is building up a well-funded, poorly trained paramilitary force that could easily take on a life of its own,” says Georgetown national security law expert Rosa Brooks. “Once you have a massive moneymaking machine ginned up, it’s hard to reverse course and turn off the spigot.”The folly and waste of the forever wars, we are endlessly told, enabled Trump to successfully campaign against elites who foolishly sank unlimited blood and treasure into misguided imperial adventures abroad. Yet Trump’s mass deportations constitute their own forever war.This is not meant glibly: Measured in political years, Trump’s mass expulsions actually will seemingly go on forever. Deporting an estimated 14 million people, if it continues at current rates, will take longer than this Trump term followed by two terms of President JD Vance. The scaled-up prison camps, if they materialize, will seemingly have to be packed for years, constituting an ever-expanding immigrant carceral state.Meanwhile, just like the forever wars, this fiasco is also birthing its own captive constituencies and internal political momentum. This includes everyone from the private contractors supplying it to the large population of MAGA-adjacent young (and not so young) men signing up for ICE, which writer John Ganz describes as “an employment program for the Trumpenproletarian mob.”Any entity this hypermaterialized—especially one simultaneously aimed at immigrants—will inevitably attract white nationalists and evolve into a political paramilitary force in thrall to ideologically aligned leaders, as Substacker Brian Beutler explains. This is borne out in ICE recruitment messaging, which explicitly seeks to get recruits invested in the mission of achieving national rejuvenation by employing cleansing ethno-nationalist violence.The stockpiling of weapons underscores the point unnervingly. Now that Trump is feinting toward winding down in Minneapolis, what will be done with all that ideologically fired-up ICE manpower—and all that heavy weaponry? Even a relatively benign answer is alarming. It means more operations like the one in Minneapolis, but packaged with a sheen of new constraints that will simply be shrugged off by the force of this machine’s internal momentum—with more horrors awaiting us.This is a quagmire for Trump, even if he doesn’t know it. Appropriately enough, it has also been created by unprincipled elite folly—only MAGA elites support it, while the American people very much do not. Trump’s approval on immigration, once a foundational political strength, has deteriorated rapidly at moments when ICE dominates our attention. If his forever war continues in its current form—with its bureaucracy metastasizing in unpredictable directions—it will further cripple his presidency. And it’s darkly fitting that it may take down the presidential ambitions of Vance, also a self-proclaimed critic of forever war follies, along with him.

The Trump Administration’s War on Data Has Fresh Casualties
New Republic • 3 weeks ago

The Trump Administration’s War on Data Has Fresh Casualties

The federal government is littered with incomprehensible acronyms representing a host of divisions and agencies. But throughout the civil service there are departments with mission mandates that, while technical—and at times obscure— fulfill specific and frequently critical purposes. The great, lumbering gears of American bureaucracy spin on such offices, making them prime targets in President Donald Trump’s crusade to shrink the federal government. It may be hard to convey how much they matter until they’re under threat.One such acronymic department is the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, or OPRE, an arm of the Administration of Children and Families, or ACF, which is housed within the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS. The OPRE conducts research and evaluation projects to study and assess a slew of ACF initiatives, including Head Start, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Health Profession Opportunity Grants, home visiting, and childcare and welfare programs. It also manages grants and contracts to research these areas, and provides clearinghouses for evidence on the effectiveness of ACF programs.Earlier this month, an internal memo written by Assistant Secretary for Family Support Alex Adams and obtained by The New Republic announced that ACF would decentralize the work of the OPRE and transfer research responsibilities to the specific program offices overseeing child welfare, early childhood development, and family assistance. The functions of the chief data officer at OPRE would transfer to ACF’s Office of Administration, and implementation of the realignment plan would begin by mid-March.OK, that’s a lot of jargon. Why does it actually matter if the ACF, a $70 billion agency, restructures operations for an office with a roughly $150 million budget? Critics of the change argue that placing responsibility for program research on the offices that oversee those initiatives could threaten the impartiality of the evidence, and threaten the future of current evaluation projects.“Without a central support infrastructure to enable rigor and quality and validity and reliability, there can be a dramatic undermining of the types of research that [are] available,” said Nick Hart, the president and CEO of the Data Foundation, a nonpartisan organization that advocates for using open data to improve government functioning. The Data Foundation and the nonprofit organization Results for America released a statement revealing the memo’s existence and condemning it a few days after it was issued by Adams. The change has not yet been publicly announced.OPRE research can be used to determine the efficacy of a program—so if the analysis is being conducted by the actual office administering it, Hart is concerned that the evaluators may be too close to the subject. He likened the situation to an Olympic figure skater being scored by their own coach.“If you create too much gray room for people to judge or question the credibility of the product, it will certainly decay the evaluation function over time,” he continued.Supporters of the work of OPRE note that it has worked closely with relevant program offices since its inception more than 30 years ago. But in an email to the youth policy–focused news outlet The Imprint, former OPRE leader Naomi Goldstein noted that “program offices typically aim to speak with one voice.”There are arguments in favor of centralizing research under the program offices that oversee those initiatives. Emily Putnam-Hornstein, a researcher and professor of social work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said in an email that OPRE has a “tendency to oversell the findings from studies it funds.” She cited a recent OPRE report on the effects of home visiting, saying that it touted as significant “findings that were of absolutely no real-world significance.”“Too many OPRE-funded projects pad the pockets of large research firms, while contributing little usable evidence. Agencies do not need more ‘toolkits,’ ‘conceptual framework briefs,’ ‘info sheets,’ and ‘checklists,’” said Putnam-Hornstein.Some stakeholders have also raised the fear that future projects could be canceled, even though there is no current direct threat to ongoing work, particularly after the Trump administration cut funding for 10 OPRE grants related to research on childcare and early childhood development last year.This week, the Data Foundation was joined by dozens of other nonprofit organizations and research institutions as signatories in an open letter asking HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to halt the restructuring of OPRE, and ensure all ongoing projects are completed. The letter also asks for consultation with Congress, which did not direct the agency to undertake any reorganization.“A decision of this magnitude, affecting an office with decades of institutional knowledge and hundreds of ongoing research and evaluation projects, warrants a deliberative process that engages those who depend on OPRE’s evidence and those who fund its activities through congressional appropriations,” the letter said.The restructuring of the OPRE exists in the larger context of the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the federal government, by slashing funds and through mass federal layoffs. At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, for example, thousands of employees have left the department since Trump took office. Reductions in the workforce for one particular department, the Office of Policy Development and Research, could leave the future of data collection at risk. PD&R provides market data that helps calculate area median income, which in turn is used to inform key federal housing programs, such as the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. It also collects data to establish fair-market rent, which provides a baseline for affordable housing programs.“It’s very similar to OPRE, where there are certain standard things that are done, but they also commission studies; they also accept investigator-initiated projects; they do collaborative projects with researchers who have some funding, and the feds match it,” said Dennis Culhane, a social science researcher at the University of Pennsylvania and the co-director of the Actionable Intelligence for Social Policy initiative, about PD&R. “So there’s tremendous concern that those kinds of wheels in motion are not moving at the moment.”These actions are also part of the administration’s effort to limit the collection of and access to data across the board. One recent casualty was a key annual report on household food insecurity. In September, the Department of Agriculture abruptly announced that it was terminating the report. This data has traditionally been used by federal, state, and local lawmakers to structure nutrition programs, and is relied upon by nonprofits serving food-insecure Americans. The USDA announcement came just two months after Congress passed a law that would dramatically cut federal funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Without information on food insecurity, it will be more difficult to see the impact of these changes to SNAP.“We’re not going to be able to quantify the harm that is going to happen, because we’ve now lost this large piece of data, and there is no other data set and collection of data that reaches this far and this wide,” said Parker Gilkesson Davis, senior policy analyst for the Center on Law and Social Policy. “A lot of people are going to become invisible, and their plight is going to become invisible.… There will be people experiencing hunger in America, and we would have no idea, and no idea how to serve them.”Then there is the potential loss of data that has already been collected. One research project estimates that the federal government has removed thousands of data sets and web pages from public access. Ongoing data collection is also up in the air: For example, the Trump administration has not yet released an annual survey on the state of homelessness in the United States for 2025, which is statutorily required for HUD to determine funding for homelessness programs nationwide. The Trump administration has argued that there is “no standard timeline” to release the report. Culhane said that the report is important for lawmakers to learn who is being particularly affected by homelessness, particularly given that the number of older Americans who are unhoused has increased in recent years.“We need that level of detail to make suggestions to the Congress as to which populations we could be better serving—the elderly, for example, being one very important one,” said Culhane.With federal data collection under siege, the private sector is simply unable to compensate for the breadth of research conducted by the federal government. Although nonprofit organizations and research institutions are able to undertake important projects, they themselves are often reliant on federal data sets. Moreover, these independent researchers lack the infrastructure that the federal government has to collect data on such a massive scale.Which brings us back to the proposed restructuring of the OPRE. Hart noted that the office often contracts with research institutions, but the necessary funding and institutional support is coming from the federal government. “They cannot replace in its entirety—and will never have the resources to replace in its entirety—the quality, the rigor, the breadth of data collection, the breadth of the population coverage that is available from the federal government,” said Hart.

The Abundance Gang Has a Big AI Problem
New Republic • 3 weeks ago

The Abundance Gang Has a Big AI Problem

In early February, Axios reported that “Ezra Klein’s Abundance movement is getting some backup” in the form of a new group: Next American Era, headed by former Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee head, Illinois congresswoman, and longtime Washington insider Cheri Bustos. Bustos’s group, per the report, would be committed to “‘pro-growth,’ deregulatory policies.” This is hardly surprising; for the past several years Bustos has been a literal corporate lobbyist at the extremely Trump-connected outfit Mercury Partners. Mercury saw its profits more than double in 2025 as it sold access to the Trump throne room.Over the course of the three years for which we have lobbying disclosures, Bustos branched out from lobbying overwhelmingly on behalf of agriculture firms and municipal governments to work for energy firms and software behemoths, as well. In particular, Bustos registered as a lobbyist for OpenAI and Larry Ellison’s Oracle, two of the most central companies in the bubblish AI industry that is becoming increasingly omnipresent in our politics, economy, and daily lives. The two firms were also the biggest clients in Bustos’s portfolio; Oracle’s 2025 lobbying expenditures totaled over $11 million, while OpenAI’s were just under $3 million. Bustos’s next-largest clients in 2025 were Korea Zinc and battery manufacturer Gotion, both with around $2.5 million in total lobbying. Facially, it seems odd for someone like Bustos, fresh off a stint of AI lobbying, to launch a centrist 501c(4) and immediately align with the abundance agenda, which generally represents itself as a movement focused on housing and utility transmission permitting. In reality, it’s of a kind with a deep techno-optimist, pro-AI undercurrent that has permeated abundance thought since before Derek Thompson coined the phrase “abundance agenda” in 2022.In the spring of 2025, Thompson and Klein’s tome, Abundance, launched to a firestorm of discourse, both praise and criticism. Nearly a year later, the blaze has lessened—Trumpian destruction of the economy and democracy tends to take the wind out of the sails of cockeyed optimists, after all—but tensions in what writers on both sides (namely, Jonathan Chait and David Sirota) have called the “Democrats’ Civil War” continue to simmer. The abundance ecosystem has tried to develop a “grass-tops” movement, which parlays an elite influence campaign into building a mass constituency. Abundance world has certainly been successful at the first part; with hundreds of millions of dollars (this figure is meant literally, not figuratively) flowing into abundance organizations and Klein playing an intellectual power-broker role within Democratic politics—to the point that it raised eyebrows internally at The New York Times, according to reporting from Axios. But with sitting mayors and governors explicitly name-checking the book and its authors, abundance has thoroughly permeated the political class. It has not, however, been as successful at building a broad-base constituency. (It is perhaps difficult to focus on a gauzy future of plenty when fascist shock troops are loose on the streets, acting with impunity.) Despite Abundance making the New York Times bestseller list (tech tycoon Reid Hoffman sending copies to everyone he knows probably didn’t hurt), Democratic voters have been notably leery about the abundance framework. Polling has shown that the base is far more interested in tackling corporate greed than it is in municipal red tape, and Klein’s attempts to cast himself as a bipartisan mediator in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination have undermined his status as a leading light on the left. At the Abundance 2025 conference, prominent abundance think tanker Alex Trembath of the Breakthrough Institute stood up to forcefully decry any allegations that the movement had been organized by elites, claiming that “abundance is not this astroturfed conspiracy. In fact, just the opposite: Abundance is emergent. Abundance is bottom-up.” He followed this declaration with the romantic sentiment that it was not donors who brought this movement together but fate, saying, “We were not herded and orchestrated: We found each other. The people and ideas in this ballroom pull on strands from multiple fields—think tanks, activists, organizers, elected officials, journalists, philanthropists, technologists, and entrepreneurs and investors.”That is, notably, not what a bottom-up movement is. Grassroots movements are built on a foundation of organizing and mobilizing a mass membership. What Trembath actually described is very clearly a grass-tops strategy. Many people within abundance circles recognize, sometimes even celebrate, this dynamic. It was this very strategy that the Niskanen Center spelled out in its June 2024 manifesto charting how to build a so-called “abundance faction.” The push for a bipartisan grand coalition, also laid out in Niskanen’s manifesto, has not succeeded either. The right flank of the abundance ecosystem has openly embraced some of the most vile parts of Trumpism. In the lead-up to Abundance 2025, the Manhattan Institute’s Charles Lehman, one of the speakers at the conference, called for “deportation abundance.” Even Utah Governor Spencer Cox, who headlined alongside Klein and Thompson, and has a long-standing reputation as a (relatively) compassionate moderate who wants us all to “disagree better,” has veered toward rank partisanship and entrenching the power of an ever more authoritarian Republican Party. Cox moved to pack the Utah Supreme Court in order to gerrymander Salt Lake City, in what was an awfully aggressive approach for anyone who isn’t dead set on preserving the MAGA regime. The gerrymander would have only picked up one seat. But Cox has embraced a cosmic view of politics, where Donald Trump’s survival from an assassination attempt in 2024 was “miraculous,” spinning a borderline messianic interpretation of Trump’s candidacy and saying to Trump, “You, and only you, can be [the] kind of leader” it will take to repair the country. Meanwhile, the Trump officials who were praised by abundance advocates as sage and reasonable, particularly Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, have been anything but. Wright has raised concerns that he is using his post to advance the business interests of the nuclear energy firm Oklo, where he was previously a board member, and is taking point on the American colonial takeover of the Venezuelan oil industry. Burgum is keeping busy cheerleading threats to annex Greenland, ignoring natural disasters in the actual interior, explicitly serving the oil and gas industry, and whitewashing American history by scrubbing any discussion of climate change, colonial violence toward Native Americans, and other stains on our heritage from national parks and monuments. Oh, lest we forget, he also oversaw the removal of the word “transgender” from the Stonewall monument, where his Interior Department recently abortively removed the Pride flag itself.Curtis Yarvin, whom prominent abundance intellectual Steve Teles links to in this piece as the far-right edge of abundance, is considered central to the “new right,” which James Pogue described as “a project to overthrow the thrust of progress, at least such as liberals understand the word.” Yarvin, an antidemocracy nutball who wants to replace the republican system of government with a dictatorship or monarchy, also believes white people are innately more intelligent than other races, and has minimized slavery. Despite this movement being studded by such miscreants and autocratic enablers, abundance is poised to exert significant influence in the near term, especially through a donor class that absolutely loves it and inside organizing like Ezra Klein’s appearance at a major Senate Democratic retreat. But if abundance liberals are to avoid missing the moment and find durable standing within center-left politics, they have to confront a glaring contradiction: their relationship to the AI industry. AI skepticism and populist anger at data centers are surging. But abundance groups are increasingly aligning with deeply unpopular tech-titan pet projects like California Forever, an attempt by Silicon Valley bigwigs to build their own city from scratch between Sacramento and San Francisco. Housing policy group California YIMBY endorsed the plan, which led to California state Senator Christopher Cabaldon expressing confusion at a recent conference. California Forever also sponsored a recent “Festival of Progressive Abundance” in Los Angeles. The Charter Cities Institute, which advocates for the creation of autonomous cities unbound by existing legal code and envisioned as techno-optimist Meccas, sent an open letter to the Trump administration in support of Freedom Cities, alongside researchers at the American Enterprise Institute, or AEI, which is considered an abundance organization in the list maintained by Inclusive Abundance, the ecosystem’s main organizing arm.On top of AEI, there is a host of other broadly pro-tech libertarian think tanks included in the Inclusive Abundance list, such as the (Koch-aligned) Cato Institute, the Cicero Institute (chaired by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale), primary Charles Koch influence operation Americans for Prosperity, and the Federation for American Innovation. FAI alum Michael Kratsios, now the head of the White House Office of Science and Technology, has been an aggressive AI booster and was central to Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s legislation that attempted to create a mechanism to functionally exempt the AI industry from any and all federal regulation. Don’t just take it from me that abundance sometimes is awfully close to tech-libertarians; the Cato Institute itself has said so, and it is generally expert at what libertarianism means.Abundance has been marketed as a movement focused on solving the crisis of housing affordability, but there has always been a distinct techno-optimist bent to the movement that looks favorably on AI and Silicon Valley. In the opening utopian vignette of Abundance, Klein and Thompson identify widely distributed wealth from artificial intelligence as the internal mechanism that enables our supposedly impending sci-fi-flavored future. Klein, in particular, was quite vocal that a major driver of his side of the project was about repairing the frayed relationship between progressives and technology—both the concept itself and the tech industry centered around Silicon Valley. The Abundance 2025 conference, judging by its schedule, had as much programming around AI as it did around housing (there was more directly focusing on energy policy than either, though energy and AI are deeply interconnected). The author of President Trump’s AI Action Plan, Dean Ball (now at FAI), was a featured speaker at the conference, as was NVIDIA’s director of infrastructure policy and multiple other champions of AI.  Moreover, much, if not most, of the funding flowing into abundance organizing is closely linked to powerful Silicon Valley figures. Following the release of Klein and Thompson’s book, Open Philanthropy (another sponsor of the abundance conferences, since rechristened Coefficient Giving), which was launched by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, unveiled a $120 million fund focused on advancing abundance ideas. Half of the fund—$60 million—came from Stripe’s Patrick Collison. Arnold Ventures is a frequent abundance funder, which launched the Abundance Academic Network and a new abundance-flavored Vox vertical, among others. John Arnold made his fortune in energy trading and more recently joined the board of Meta specifically to serve as an energy adviser for data-center buildout. When welcoming Arnold to the board, Mark Zuckerberg said that, “as we focus on building AGI,” Arnold’s “deep experience” in “energy infrastructure will help us execute our long-term vision.”Ever wonder why AI advocates downplay the climate implications of natural gas–fueled AI data centers? Consider Renaissance Philanthropy, an early pro-abundance foundation, which was created with money from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Schmidt has publicly stated that humans will never manage to control climate change, and that our best bet is to pour near-unlimited resources into developing an AI that can solve the issue for us. And Schmidt’s views are hardly niche within the realm of our would-be AI oligarchs.In the most on-the-nose example, Abundance 2025 also had two literal trade associations that represent major tech firms among its sponsors: Chamber of Progress and the New American Industrial Alliance. The former of these is funded by literally every prominent AI firm in the game, from Marc Andreessen’s a16z to Amazon, Apple, Google, OpenAI, NVIDIA, Midjourney, and others. None of this is an aberration: Silicon Valley has been at the forefront of developing abundance thought since its inception. Among the earliest proto-abundance treatises was an essay in The Atlantic co-authored by Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen that called for the launch of a new science dedicated to studying how to achieve progress, which they creatively dubbed “progress studies.” In the seven years since their essay, progress studies has intermingled with other movements, such as effective altruism and rationalism, mainline Koch-style libertarianism, and supply-side progressivism, with a dash of technofascism comprising what Steve Teles has christened the “Dark Abundance” subfaction. The amalgamation of all these strands led to what we now would call the abundance movement (or ecosystem).Cowen, in turn, runs key abundance funder Emergent Ventures, which was launched with a grant from Palantir’s Peter Thiel. Patrick Collison has marshaled part of his fortune to organize an annual retreat for abundance diehards in Sevastopol, California, where those invested in the success of the movement can gather, commiserate, and plan future efforts. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, whose a16z invests heavily in AI, fintech, and crypto, wrote his own call for abundance in 2023, titled “The Techno Optimist Manifesto,” with a whole chapter on “abundance.” Notably, one of Ezra Klein’s early proto-abundance columns built on another viral Andreessen essay.Now, it should be noted that there are some in the abundance ecosystem who have been critical of AI in recent years. Thompson, while an enthusiastic fan of AI, who has been explicit about wanting to convince skeptics, has written about the technology’s downsides; fledgling abundance magazine The Argument (itself frequently techno-optimist and replete with Silicon Valley funding from Arnold, Collison, Open Philanthropy, and Emergent Ventures) has published several good articles that scrutinize the more boondogglish side of Silicon Valley’s latest obsession. Even beyond the array of pro-AI interests lining up behind the abundance agenda, though, the AI industry and the data-center construction boom raise what should be uncomfortable questions for abundance advocates. The movement’s central premise is that we can’t build and that we have created too many veto points that let parochial interests block important construction projects. But the data-center boom clearly shows that we can build. Or at least that mega corporations can when they put their minds to it. Granted, the sets of restrictions that apply to multifamily housing, energy transmission infrastructure, and industrial-scale data centers are all different, but frequently abundance proponents target the exact types of procedural bottlenecks that communities that don’t want data centers are using to block or delay tens of billions of dollars’ worth of them from popping up. In particular, community input meetings, air quality standards, and public interest lawsuits are frequent boogeymen of the abundance framework. But they are now the chief means by which communities are fighting back.The data-center buildout also creates acute examples of why the types of bottlenecks that abundists decry are both absolutely necessary and, sometimes, still too weak. Examples of massive data-center projects being built against the wishes of their neighbors have become commonplace, to the point that foisting nondisclosure agreements upon elected officials over the details of the terms local government is giving to AI companies to build in their communities for economic development is becoming something of an industry standard. Abundance tells us that we struggle to build and that procedural measures like public interest lawsuits, zoning restrictions, and community input meetings are blocking essential public goods. But then, at the same time, it has so far offered no comment on the reality that we are building plenty of data centers, often even while overcoming those democratic processes. In Memphis, when Elon Musk’s xAI started operating without going through the permitting process—potentially illegally—we got a taste of how things work without the “bottlenecks” that figures like Thompson and Klein decry. The data center spewed toxic gas over a community that already bore significant air pollution, and did it without the public even knowing about it; more than a dozen local officials signed NDAs, which led to even some City Council members being completely in the dark about xAI’s operations in the city. Perhaps Musk’s “Colossus” data center couldn’t have been built or would have taken much longer if it hadn’t pulled the wool over the eyes of residents and their government and had actually followed the law. But the flip side is that the progress that those costs have borne is a chatbot that, while it does sometimes fact-check kooky conspiracy claims, declared itself “MechaHitler,” provided planning assistance for a home invasion, removed clothes from people’s pictures on X without their consent, and generated thousands upon thousands of images of child pornography. Thankfully, the only cost for creating such an innovative piece of technology was an entire community being bombarded with toxic emissions that cause cancer and respiratory disease. Data-center expansion is already causing tens of billions of dollars in additional public health costs annually, disproportionately in poor, minority-majority areas like South Memphis. Moreover this type of “behind-the-meter” energy supply is extremely common and trending up. More than three-fourths of the on-site power currently being brought online at data centers is natural gas, which, while its fumes are less toxic than coal’s, still emits large amounts of carcinogenic and toxic pollutants. Even worse, many data centers have diesel backup generators, which are far more detrimental to the health of people living nearby, particularly because of higher levels of nitrogen oxide and PM2.5 particles.Public sentiment is also clearly turning against data centers. While polling indicates that voters are largely agnostic on data-center buildout as a hypothetical, there is a large body of evidence on the underlying elements that shows deep hostility toward the AI industry. Politico and Public First recently found that 37 percent of respondents supported data centers to 28 percent opposed, with another 28 percent neither supporting or opposing, though with a major split along party lines; Democrats narrowly opposed, 36 percent to 33 (27 percent for neither), while Republicans had fairly strong support, 45 percent to 26 (24 percent for neither). This is similar to what NBC found in the summer of 2025, with 44 percent of respondents thinking AI would improve their family’s future versus 42 percent who thought it would make it worse. News site Heatmap found that only 44 percent of respondents supported a data center being built, even less than other types of energy infrastructure, including gas-fired power plants and nuclear reactors. There is also a substantial polling literature that shows Americans are deeply apprehensive of AI generally, although with very different views along gender lines—men tend to be positive about AI, while women are skeptical.  While apathy may be the prevailing mood nationally, with most voters having heard nothing at all about data-center construction, nearly every state or county-level case study available shows massive backlash brewing. Most tellingly, in the places where people have heard about data centers, they detest them. Virginia Democrats vocally ran against data centers last year and scored impressive wins. The 30th district, which includes data-center capital of the world Loudoun County, saw the incumbent Republican ousted by John McAuliff, who worked overtime to tie his opponent to the data centers. Similarly, 2025 saw two statewide spots on the Georgia Public Service Commission flip to Democrats over anger about data-center-fueled energy price hikes, the first statewide races the party had won in decades. State-level polling has shown antipathy in the ever-crucial swing states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. A growing number of localities have also instituted a pause on new data-center construction, including Prince George’s County in Maryland; St. Charles, Missouri; several Atlanta-area counties; and several counties in Indiana. State-level restrictions and moratoria are being debated across the country, from New York to Georgia to California. Given all of that, it’s hardly surprising that Morning Consult has shown that support for banning data-center construction has been surging; just between October and November 2025, the policy went from down by two points to up by five. It is becoming increasingly clear that this moment calls for campaigning on AI skepticism.Abundance proponents, however, seem determined to swim against the current of public opinion. For some, as Eric Levitz implies in Vox, it’s a matter of the muddled picture of public opinion we have. For others, though, abandoning data centers would be like surrendering their raison d’être. Particularly for the groups that emerged out of the “progress studies” movement kick-started by Collison and Cowen’s Atlantic essay, part of the point of abundance has always been to foster a sense of techno-optimism. There is nothing inherent to abundance thought that necessitates AI boosterism. Indeed on a recent podcast, Marshall Kosloff, who emceed Abundance 2025, recalled responding to a question about what the abundance line on AI is: “We want nothing to do with that.” As Austin Ahlman of the Open Markets Institute, one of Kosloff’s guests for the episode, pointed out, such sentiment is “nowhere close to where the status quo is,” where Silicon Valley elites clearly “view this as an easy vehicle for the regulatory structures that they need to very quickly do the AI buildout without any democratic discipline or oversight.”In fact, in its “Abundance Landscape” report, Inclusive Abundance identifies artificial intelligence as one of the five core policy areas. Notably, transit, one of the most common talking points for abundance punditry, is excluded, though IA said it would include it in its 2026 report. Even outside of AI’s own dedicated policy area, the report also includes AI as one of the “opportunities” for abundance energy policy, saying “AI industry leaders and experts agree that this technology will need a tremendous amount of energy going forward. AI and energy experts must collaborate in order to meet the need for more energy.” A similar argument was made by Trembath in an article with Josh Smith of the Abundance Institute. The Abundance Institute itself has also pushed AI very aggressively, including encouraging the White House to attempt to preempt all state-level regulation via executive order. In a bit of profound irony, data-center construction has broken free of the choke points decried by abundance to the point that it is now bidding up land value and resulting in further constraints on the supply of housing, according to reporting from The Wall Street Journal. Now the data-center buildout, as well as being deeply unpopular and undermining the intellectual case for abundance, is directly jeopardizing what is supposed to be the movement’s central animating goal.Elements of abundance raise important questions, particularly about how to build state capacity and the importance of government efficiency to public buy-in for ambitious governance (articulated well in this podcast by Mayor Zohran Mamdani speaking to Derek Thompson). But the framing of these questions is also saddled with an association with the excesses of ambition of Silicon Valley moguls—and their dark, antidemocratic leanings. If it’s hard to get people to say yes to an apartment building in their backyard, it’s doubly so to convince them to site a giant warehouse spewing toxic emissions and spiking their electrical bills in their backyard—especially if the best non-bubblish case for the data center is that it will increase the odds they will be unemployed. 

On the Brink With Iran—Featuring Dalia Dassa Kaye
American Prestige • 3 weeks ago

On the Brink With Iran—Featuring Dalia Dassa Kaye

Daniel Bessner, Derek Davison Derek and Danny are joined by Dalia Dassa Kaye to talk about the decades-long hostility between the US and Iran and the current escalation between the two countries. The post On the Brink With Iran—Featuring Dalia Dassa Kaye appeared first on The Nation.

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