A year ago this month, President Donald Trump granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people responsible for the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. When Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political science professor who studies domestic political violence, heard about the pardons, he says he immediately thought it was “going to be the worst thing that happened in the second Trump presidency.” The first year of Trump’s second term has been a blizzard of policies and executive actions that have shattered presidential norms, been challenged in court as unlawful, threatened to remake the federal government, and redefined the limits of presidential power. But Pape argues that Trump’s decision to pardon and set free the January 6 insurrectionists, including hundreds who had been found guilty of assaulting police, could be the most consequential decision of his second term. “There are many ways we could lose our democracy. But the most worrisome way is through political violence,” Pape says. “Because the political violence is what would make the democratic backsliding you’re so used to hearing about irreversible. And then how might that actually happen? You get people willing to fight for Trump.” Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. On this week’s More To The Story, Pape talks with host Al Letson about how America’s transformation to a white minority is fueling the nation’s growing political violence, the remarkable political geography of the insurrectionists, and the glimmers of hope he’s found in his research that democracy can survive this pivotal moment in history. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe. This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Al Letson: Bob, how are you today? Robert Pape: Oh, I’m great. I’m terrific. This is just a great time to be in Chicago. A little cold, but that’s Chicago. I was about to say, great time for you. I’m a Florida boy, so I was just in Chicago, I was like, let me go home. So Bob, I thought I would kind of start off a little bit and kind of give you my background into why I’m really interested about the things that we’re going to be talking about today, right after Charlottesville happened. When I look back now, I feel like it was such a precursor for where we are today. And also I think in 2016 I was looking back and it felt like… Strangely, it felt like Oklahoma City, the bombing in Oklahoma City was a precursor for that. Ever since then, I’ve just really been thinking a lot about where we are as a society and political violence in America. The origins of it, which I think are baked deeply into the country itself. But I’m also very interested on where we’re going, because I believe that leadership plays a big role in that, right? And so when you have leaders that try to walk us back from the edge, we walk back from the edge. When you have leaders that say charge forward, we go over the edge. And it feels like in the last decade or so we’ve been see-sawing between the two things. So let me just say that you are quite right, that political violence has been a big part of our country and this is not something that is in any way new to the last few years. And that’s also why you can think about this when you talk about 2016, going back to 1995, with the Oklahoma City bombing here and thinking about things from the right and militia groups and right-wing political violence. Because that in particular from the seventies through 2016, even afterwards of course, has been a big part of our country and what we’ve experienced. But I just have to say a big but here, it’s not just the same old story. Because starting right around 2016, it would’ve been hard to know this in 2016 and even really 2017, ’18 and ’19, you were there right at the beginning of a new layer, so to speak, of political violence that is growing. It’s not that the old layer went away, which is why it’s been a little bit, I think, mystifying and confusing for some folks, and that’s folks who even cover this pretty closely, like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League and so forth. Because it took a few years before they started to see that there was some new trends emerging, growing political violence. It was getting larger. The old profiles of who was doing the violent attacks were starting to widen. And in many ways that’s scarier and more dangerous than if they’re kind of narrow because we like our villains to be monsters who are far away from us and they couldn’t possibly be living next door to us. Whereas the closer they come, the more edgy it feels. So what you’re really experiencing there is the very beginning of where I date the beginning of our shift to the era of violent populism. We’re in a new world, but it’s a world on top of the old world. The old world didn’t go away. No, no, no. It feels like the old world is really the foundation that this new house of violence has been raised around. All of that that happened in the past was the foundation. And then in 2016, 2017, some people would say 2014, in that timeframe, the scaffolding began to go up and then Trump gets into office and then suddenly it’s a full-blown house that now all of America is living in. Well, if you look at the attacks on African-Americans, on Jews and Hispanics, except for going all the way back to the 1920 race time, except for that, these large-scale attacks have clustered since 2016. Then we have the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018, that’s the largest attack killing, mass killing of Jews ever in the United States. And then we have August, 2019, the attack at the El Paso Walmart killing more Hispanics in a day than has ever been killed in our country. So there’s a pointed wave, if you see what I mean here. And race is certainly playing a role. So when you say how does this tie to the old layer or the existing layer, one of the big foundations here is absolutely race. What’s really sad and really tragic is in this new era of violent populism, that’s a term I like to use because it’s not just the same old, but it’s not quite civil war. In this new era, we’ve seen things move from the fringe where they were bad but happened more or less rarely, to more the mainstream where they’re happening more and more. And our surveys show this, people feel very fearful right now, and there’s actual reason for that. That’s not just media hype. There have been more events. We see them and they are real. We really have a time here that people are, I’m sorry to say, concerned. And there’s reason to be concerned. Yeah, as you say, the thing that pops up in my mind is the fact that white supremacy, which I think for a long time held sway over this country. And then I think that white supremacy in a lot of ways always held onto the power. But there was a time where being a racist was not cool and looked down upon. And so racism, while still evident, still holding people down, it’s built into institutions, all of that. I’m not saying that racism was away, I’m just saying that expressing it openly is now in the mainstream. I mean, we just heard President Trump recently talking about Somalis- Absolutely, yeah. In a very… I mean, just straight up, there is no difference between what he said about Somalis than what a Klansman in the forties in front of a burning cross would say about Black people, like zero difference. Yeah. So the reason I think we are in this new era, because I think you’re right, putting your finger on the mainstreaming of fringe ideas, which we used to think would stay under rocks and so forth, and white supremacy clearly fits that bill. But what I think is important to know is that we are transitioning for the first time in our country’s history from a white majority democracy to a white minority democracy. And social changes like that in other countries around the world, so I’ve studied political violence for 30 years in many countries around the world. Big social changes like that Al, often create super issues with politics, make them more fragile and often lead to political violence. Now, what’s happening in our country is that we’ve been going through a demographic change for quite some time. America up through the 1960s was about 85% white as a country. There was ebbs and flows to be sure. Well, that really started to change bit by bit, drip by drip in the mid 1960s, whereas by 1990 we were 76% white as a country. Today we’re 57% white as a country. In about 10 or 15 years, it depends on mass deportations, and you can see why then that could be an issue, we will become truly a white minority democracy for the first time. And that is one of the big issues we see in our national surveys that helps to explain support for political violence on the right. Because what you’re seeing Al, is the more we are in what I call the tipping point generation for this big demographic shift, the more there are folks on the right, and most of them Trump supporters, mega supporters, who want to stop and actually reverse that shift. Then there of course, once knowing that, there are folks on the left, not everybody on the left, but some on the left that want to keep it going or actually accelerate it a bit for fear that with the mega crowd you won’t get it, the shift will stop altogether. These are major issues and things that really rock politics and then can lead to political violence. Talk to me a little bit about January 6th, when that happened, I’m sure you were watching it on TV. Yeah. What were you thinking as all of it was kind of coming into play? Well, so I was not quite as surprised as some folks, Al. So on October 5th in Chicago, I was on the Talking Head show in Chicago, it’s called Chicago Tonight. So on October 5th, 2020, that was just after the Trump debate where he said to the Proud Boys, stand back, but stand by. Well, the Chicago folks brought me on TV to talk about that, and I said that this was really quite concerning because this has echoes of things we’ve seen in Bosnia with some other leaders that a lot of Americans are just not familiar with, but are really quite worrisome. And I said what this meant was we had to be worried about the counting of the vote, not just ballot day, the day of voting. And we had to be worried about that all the way through January 6th, the certification of the election. But you made a point earlier, Al, about the importance of leaders. This is part of the reason why it’s hard to predict. It’s not a precise science, political violence. I like to use the idea, the analogy of a wildfire when I give talks. When we have wildfires, what we know as scientists is we can measure the size of the combustible material and we know with global warming, the combustible dry wood that could be set afire is getting larger. So you know you’re in wildfire season, but it’s not enough to predict a wildfire because the wildfire’s touched off by an unpredictable set of triggers, a lightning strike, a power line that came down unpredictably. Well, that is also a point about political leaders. So it was really, I did see some sign of this that Donald Trump said too about the Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. And no other president had said anything like that ever before in our history, let’s be clear. And because of my background studying political violence, I could compare that to some playbooks from other leaders in other parts of the world. That said, even I wouldn’t have said, oh yeah, we’re 90% likely to have an event, because who would’ve thought Donald Trump would’ve given the speech at the Ellipse, not just call people to it, it will be wild. His speech at the Ellipse, Al, made it wild. You co-authored a pretty remarkable study that looked at the political geography of January 6th insurrectionists. Can you break down the findings of that paper? Yeah. So one of the things we know when we study as a scholar of political violence, we look at things other people just don’t look at because they just don’t know what’s important. We want to know, where did those people live, where’d they come from? And when you have indictments and then you have the court process in the United States, you get that as a fact. So now it does mean I had to have big research teams. There’s a hundred thousand pages of court documents to go through. But nonetheless, you could actually find this out. And we found out something stunning, Al, and it’s one of the reasons I came back to that issue of demographic change in America. What we found is that first of all, over half of those who stormed the capitol, that 1,576 were doctors, lawyers, accountants, white collar jobs, business owners, flower shop owners, if you’ve been to Washington DC, Al, they stayed at the Willard. I have never stayed at the Willard- Yeah. So my University of Chicago doesn’t provide that benefit. That is crazy to me because I think the general knowledge or what you think is that most of the people that were there were middle class to lower, middle class to poor. At least that’s what I’ve always thought. Yeah, it’s really stunning, Al. So we made some snap judgments on that day in the media that have just stayed with us over and over and over again. So the first is their economic profile. Whoa, these are people with something to lose. Then where did they come from? Well, it turned out they came from all 50 states, but huge numbers from blue states like California and New York. And then we started to look at, well, where are in the states are they coming from? Half of them came from counties won by Joe Biden, blue counties. So then we got even deeper into it. And what’s happening, Al, is they’re coming from the suburbs around the big cities. They’re coming from the suburbs around Chicago, Elmhurst, Schomburg. They’re not coming from the rural parts of Illinois. They’re coming… That’s why we call them suburban rage. They’re coming from the most diversifying parts of America, the counties that are losing the largest share of white population. Back to that issue of population change, these are the people on the front lines of that demographic shift from America is a white majority democracy, to a white minority democracy. These are the counties that will impact where the leadership between Republican and Democrat have either just changed or are about to change. So they are right on the front lines of this demographic change and they are the folks with a lot to lose. And they showed up, some took private planes to get there. This is not the poor part, the white rural rage we’re so used to hearing about. This is well off suburban rage, and it’s important for us to know this, Al, because now we know this with definitiveness here. So it’s not like a hand-wavy guess. And it’s really important because it means you can get much more serious political violence than we’re used to thinking about. Yeah. So what happens, let’s say if circumstances remain as they are, IE, the economy is not doing great, the middle class is getting squeezed and ultimately getting smaller, right? The affordability thing is a real issue. What wins? The first big social change that’s feeding into our plight as a country is this demographic social change. There’s a second one, Al, which is that over the last 30 years, just as we’re having this demographic shift to a white minority democracy, we have been like a tidal wave flowing wealth to the top 1%. And we’ve been flowing wealth to the top 1% of both Republicans and Democrats. And that has been coming out of the bottom 90% of both Republicans and Democrats. Unfortunately, both can be poorer and worse off. Whites can be worse off because of this shift of the wealth to the top 1%. And minorities can be worse off because of the shift. And you might say, well, wait a minute, maybe the American dream, we have social mobility. Well, sorry to say that at the same time, we’re shifting all this money to the top 1%, they’re spending that money to lock up and keep themselves to top 1%. It’s harder to get into that top 1% than it’s ever been in our society. And so what you see is, I just came back from Portland. What you see is a situation in Portland, which is a beautiful place, and wonderful place where ordinary people are constantly talking about how they’re feeling pinched and they’re working three jobs. Yeah. Just to make their middle, even lower middle class mortgages. I mean, this is what’s happening in America and why people have said, well, why does the establishment benefit me? Why shouldn’t I turn a blind eye if somebody’s going to attack the establishment viciously? Because it’s not working for a lot of folks, Al. And what I’m telling you is that you put these two together, you get this big demographic change happening, while you’re also getting a wealth shift like this and putting us in a negative sum society. Whoa, you really now have a cocktail where you’ve got a lot of people very angry, they’re not sure they want to have this shift and new people coming into power. And then on top of that, you have a lot of people that aren’t sure the system is worth saving. I really wanted to dive in on the polls that you’ve been conducting, and one of those, there seems to be a small but growing acceptance of political violence from both Democrats and Republicans. What do you think is driving that? I think these two social changes are underneath it, Al. So in our polls, just to put some numbers here, in 2025, we’ve done a survey in May and we did one in the end of September. So we do them every three or four months. We’ll do one in January I’m sure. And what we found is that on both sides of the political spectrum, high support for political violence. 30% in our most recent survey in September, 30% of Democrats support the use of force to prevent Trump from being president. 30%. 10% of Democrats think the death of Charlie Kirk is acceptable. His assassination was acceptable. These represent millions and millions of adults. That’s a lot of people, you see. What you’re saying is right, we’re seeing it. And I think what you’re really seeing here is as these two changes keep going, this era of violent populism is getting worse. Yeah, I mean, so I’ve seen that Democrats and Republicans are accusing each other of using violent rhetoric. So in your research, what’s actually more common in this modern area where we are right now, is it right wing or left wing on the violent rhetoric, but also who’s actually doing it? So we’ve had, just after the Kirk assassination, your listeners will probably remember and they can Google, we had these dueling studies come out almost instantly, because they’re kind of flash studies and they’re by think tanks in Washington DC. One basically saying there’s more right-wing violence than left. And one saying there’s more left-wing violence than right. Well, I just want your listeners to know that if you go under the hood, so my job is to be like the surgeon and really look at the data. You’re going to be stunned, maybe not so stunned, Al, because you live in the media, to learn the headlines and what’s actually in the content are very different. Both studies essentially have the same, similar findings, although slightly different numbers, which is they’re both going up. They’re both going up. So it’s really not the world that it was either always been one side or now it’s newly the other. So the Trump administration’s rhetoric, JD Vance is wrong to say it’s all coming from the left, but it’s also wrong to say it’s all coming from the right. Now, what I think you’re also seeing, Al, is that the politicians, if left to their own devices, rarely, I’m sorry to say do the right thing, they cater to their own constituents. But there’s some exceptions and they’ve been helpful, I think. There’s two exceptions I want to draw attention to, one who’s a Republican and one who’s a Democrat. On the Democratic side, the person who’s been just spectacular at trying to lower the temperature is Governor Shapiro. He’s a Democrat, the Governor of Pennsylvania. Josh Shapiro has given numerous interviews public, where he has condemned violence on all sides. He’s recognizing, as very few others are, that it’s a problem on both sides. He personally was almost burned to death, only minutes from being burned to death with his family here back in April. So he knows this personally about what’s at stake and he has done a great job, I think in recognizing that here. Now on the Republican side, we have Erika Kirk and what Erika Kirk, of course the wife of Charlie Kirk who was assassinated did, was at Kirk’s funeral, she forgave the shooter. But let’s just be clear, she’s a very powerful voice here. Now, I think we need more of those kind of voices, Al, because you see, they really are figures people pay attention to. They’re listening to people like that. They have personal skin in the game and they can speak with sort of a lens on this few others can. But we need more people to follow in that wake and I wish we had that, and that can actually help as we go forward. And I’m hoping they, both of those people will do more and more events, and others who have been the targets of political violence will come out and do exactly the same thing. I want to go back a little bit to January 6th and just talk about those insurrectionists. So when President Trump pardoned them, what was going through your mind? That it was probably going to be the worst thing that happened in the second Trump presidency. And I know I’m saying quite a bit. I know that he’s insulted every community under the sun many, many, many times. But the reason I’m so concerned about this, Al, is that there are many ways we could lose our democracy, but the most worrisome way is through political violence. You see, because the political violence is what would make the democratic backsliding you’re so used to hearing about, irreversible. And then how might that actually happen? You get people willing to fight for Trump. And already on January 6th, we collected all the public statements on their social media videos, et cetera, et cetera, in their trials about why those people did it. And the biggest reason they did it was Trump told them so, and they say this over and over and over again, I did it because Trump told me to do it. Well, now Trump has not forgiven them, he’s actually helping them. They may be suing the government to get millions of dollars in ‘restitution’. So this is going in a very bad way if you look at this in terms of thinking you’re going to deter people from fighting for Trump. And now of course others are going to know that as well on the other side. So again, this is a very dangerous move. Once he pardoned it, no president in history has ever pardoned people who use violence for him. Yeah. So you have the insurrectionist bucket. But there’s another bucket that I’ve been thinking about a lot and I haven’t heard a lot of people talk about this, and that is that under President Trump, ICE has expanded exponentially. Yep. The amount of money that they get in the budget is- Enormous. Enormous. I’ve never seen an agency ramp up, A, within a term, like so much money and so many people- It is about to become its own army. Right. And Al, what this means concretely is, we really don’t want any ICE agents in liberal cities in October, November, December. We don’t want to be in this world of predicting, well, Trump would never do X, he would never do Y. No, we’ve got real history now to know these are not good ways to think. What we just need to do is we need to recognize that when we have national elections that are actually going to determine the future of who governs our country, you want nothing like those agents who, many of them going to be very loyal to Trump, on the ground. We should already be saying, look, we want this to stop on October 1st to December 31st, 2026, and we want to have a clean separation, so there’s no issue here of intimidation. And why would you say that? It’s because even President Trump, do you really want to go down in history as having intimidated your way to victory? So I think we really need to talk about this as a country, Al. And we really want a clean break here in the three months that will be the election, the run-up to the election, the voting, and then the counting of the vote. In closing, one of the major themes of this conversation has been that America is changing into a white minority. The question that just keeps coming to mind to me is, as somebody who studies this, do you think that America can survive that transition? Well, I am going to argue, and I’m still a little nervous about it, but we are in for a medium, soft landing. Okay. One of the things we see is that every survey we’ve done, 70% to 80% of Americans abhor political violence. And that’s on both sides of the aisle. And I think in many ways there are saving grace and it’s why, Al, when we have public conversations about political violence, what we see in our surveys is that helps to take the temperature down. Because you might worry that, oh, we’ll talk about it, we’ll stir people up and they’ll go… It seems to be the other way around, Al, as best we can tell. That there’s 70% to 80% of the population that really, really doesn’t want to go down this road. They know intuitively this is just a bad idea. This is not going to be good for the country, for their goals. And so they are the anchor of optimism that I think is going to carry us to that medium soft landing here. I think we could help that more if we have some more politicians joining that anchor of optimism. They’re essentially giving voice to the 70%, 80%. And if you look at our no Kings protests, the number of people that have shown up and how peaceful they have been, how peaceful they have been, those are the 70% to 80%, Al. And I think that gives me a lot of hope for the future that we can navigate this peacefully. But again, I’m saying it’s a medium soft landing, doesn’t mean we’re getting off the hook without some more… I’m sorry to say, likely violence, yeah. Listen, I’ll take a medium. I would prefer not at all, but the way things are going, I’ll take the medium. Thank you very much. Bob, Professor Robert Pape, it has been such a delight talking to you. Thank you so much for taking the time out. Well, thank you Al, and thanks for such a thoughtful, great conversation about this. It’s just been wonderful. So thank you very much.

On Sunday night, news broke that the Justice Department has commenced a criminal investigation into Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, an unprecedented move that marked an aggressive escalation of Donald Trump’s ongoing effort to seize more control of the historically independent Fed, which sets monetary policy for the US economy. For months, Trump has expressed frustration with Powell because the Fed has refused to decidedly lower interest rates. The administration claims that this investigation is not retaliation for the president’s dissatisfaction with the Fed, but rather about lies Powell allegedly has told about the $2.5 billion renovation of the Fed’s office building in Washington, DC. In a rare public statement on Sunday night, the usually reserved Powell called out this framing: “The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President,” he said. > Video message from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell: > https://t.co/5dfrkByGyX pic.twitter.com/O4ecNaYaGH > > — Federal Reserve (@federalreserve) January 12, 2026 The investigation has raised concerns among economists and the business world about the potential impact to the US economy if a first-in-history DOJ prosecution against the Fed chair is allowed to move forward—and how it might compare to cases of political intimidation or prosecution of central bankers in other countries, from Turkey to Argentina. > What can history teach us about what happens when a populist strongman with an > idiosyncratic taste for low interest rates undermines central bank > independence? > > — Justin Wolfers (@justinwolfers.bsky.social) 2026-01-12T01:44:26.533Z I spoke to Jason Furman about these questions. A Harvard economist, Furman previously served as President Barack Obama’s chief economist, leading his Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) during Obama’s second term. On Monday, Furman signed on to a statement decrying the Powell investigation that is cosigned by every living former Fed chair, as well as former Treasury secretaries and CEA chairs who’ve served both Democratic and Republican presidents. Our conversation below, edited for length and clarity, explores the importance of central bank independence to strong economies, and the grave consequences that have arisen around the globe when that independence has been compromised. Let’s back up for a second: Why is central bank independence important? If you don’t have an independent central bank, you’re investing enormous power in a president who can abuse it and follow their whims. There are also two broader arguments: Number one is that we have fiat money, which means you can print as much as you want, whenever you want. That is a wonderful, amazing thing to help respond to recessions and prevent depressions, but it also can be really abused and cause a lot of inflation. So, we need some way to make sure that it’s limited. An independent central bank is the way to have your cake and eat it too—a fiat currency that you can use aggressively to respond to recessions, without a huge amount of inflation. Finally, there’s been an awful lot of economics research for several decades now which has documented that the more independent your central bank, the lower your inflation, the lower your interest rates, at no cost at all, in terms of recessions or higher unemployment and the like. So, it really does empirically seem to be a free lunch. The statement you signed on Monday, along with other economists who’ve served at the highest levels of government, is short—just four sentences. One of them says that this attack on Powell is akin to what happens in nations that have far less developed economies than America’s—what you call “emerging markets with weak institutions.” What are some of them? There are examples in other places, though many of them get complicated. In Zimbabwe, they prosecuted the central banker. The central banker probably had messed up pretty badly the way they handled monetary policy, but they also messed it up badly because they listened to the government. So they listened to the government, caused a lot of inflation, and then got prosecuted for it. Indonesia had a case like this, though it’s possible that the central bank actually was somewhat corrupt and had misused money. So when you start looking at cases in emerging markets with weaker institutions, you know, there’s a certain amount of messiness and complexity that differs from the unfortunately simple, clear-cut thing happening the United States right now: Jay Powell is not corrupt. The people prosecuting him are. What happened in these other markets once central bank independence was compromised? > “I don’t think the United States is going to be like Zimbabwe anytime soon, > but the reason it’s not going to be is precisely if we know about those > examples, talk about them, and make sure that they don’t happen here.” In Argentina, they ended up with so much inflation they stopped publishing the data. They had a massive default, a very, very deep recession, and ended up with the largest bailout program in the history of the International Monetary Fund. The poverty rate went up. The unemployment rate went up. This was in 2015, but in 2001, Argentina had a similar recession, and dozens of people were killed in demonstrations related to it. Zimbabwe ended up with inflation in the trillions of percent—just absolutely mind-boggling—and almost complete economic collapse. So these, to me, are very, very extreme warnings for the United States. Of course, I don’t think the United States is going to be like Zimbabwe anytime soon, but the reason it’s not going to be is precisely if we know about those examples, talk about them, and make sure that they don’t happen here. You also mentioned these countries in a post on Bluesky, where you listed governments that have either prosecuted or threatened to prosecute central bankers as political intimidation or punishment for monetary policy. It’s a long list! Is there one country that is a particularly relevant example for what seems to be starting here? The closest analogy to what President Trump is trying to do is what President Recep Erdogan did in Turkey. So Turkey had a relatively high inflation rate. It was in the low double digits, and President Erdogan thought that the way to reduce inflation was to cut interest rates. When his central banker refused, the person was fired. In another case, a central banker was threatened with criminal prosecution and investigated for officially unrelated things—but it was obviously about the choice of monetary policy. That central banker was forced out in the face of this investigation. Then Erdogan got someone along the lines of what he wanted: They cut interest rates dramatically. Inflation took off and rose to 85 percent. There has been a lot of suffering in Turkey in the years since, and a lot of political discontent. The systems that are meant to protect central banks from being overly politicized failed in Turkey, and the result was a very serious crisis for people there. So Erdogan prosecuted central bankers for something unrelated—but it was clearly a punishment for monetary policy the leader didn’t like. That rings true with what is now happening with Powell, where the investigation is ostensibly into his statements about the renovation of the Fed’s DC headquarters.  But how far does that analogy extend? How likely is it that the chain of events turns out like they did in Turkey? I do think the United States is very different from Turkey, and so Trump is much less likely to succeed. There are a few protections here. One is that monetary policy is made by the votes of 12 people on a committee (the Federal Open Market Committee, the Fed’s primary policymaking body), and the chair of that committee is just one of the 12. I think that those 12 people historically often did what the chair told them to do. But they are getting increasingly independent. And if they thought it was Donald Trump trying to tell them what to do, they would get more independent. > “What Donald Trump would love is to be able to change the independence of the > Central Bank tomorrow. To do that, he would need to be able to fire people or > intimidate them into leaving with criminal prosecution.” The second protection is the Senate, which has had way too little backbone over the last year, but when it comes to things that might mess with financial markets and the stock market, you’re seeing a little bit of backbone: Two senators have already come out strongly critical of this, talking about concrete actions they’re going to take to not confirm anyone else to the Fed as long as this [Powell investigation] is going on. And then finally, it’s just hard for me to imagine that US courts would follow through. With [the Justice Department prosecutions of] James Comey and Leticia James, the courts threw those cases out. And if there was a really, truly spurious case here—and this looks like a really, truly spurious case—I have enough faith in the legal system, which has placed some constraints on Trump in general and looks like it’s going to place more constraints when business and the economy are at stake. This is the latest and most dramatic turn in a list of actions the administration has taken to assert more control over the Fed—like Trump’s ongoing court battle to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook. Why do you think the Trump administration is doing this? I think Trump has a deep-seated conviction from decades in the real estate industry that low interest rates let you do more. My guess is the low interest rates help him personally. But I actually don’t think that’s the essential motive here. I think he is capable of all sorts of personal corruption, but in this case, it’s much more a mindset of: You think it’s good for you, you think it’s good for the world, and you think it’s good for a lot of the people around you. So what Donald Trump would love is to be able to change the independence of the Central Bank tomorrow. To do that, he would need to be able to fire people or intimidate them into leaving with criminal prosecution. My guess is the courts will stop that from happening. So then, the threat here is not a sort of instant decapitation—it is a longer-term, patient effort. Even if the courts stop a prosecution from happening, Trump does get one appointment to a vacancy, both Fed governor and chair slot this year. He gets another appointment two years from now. Maybe someone else leaves early, and he gets another appointment. Over six years President Trump and his successor could appoint multiple people and basically use that to take over. If that longer-term takeover happens, how much closer do you think monetary policy gets to some of these extreme emerging market situations that you’ve talked about? I don’t think it’s something that would happen super-fast, but it could last a long time: You know, Argentina was a great economy, and now it’s very different than the United States. And central bank independence really is one of those few items you’d have on the list as to why those two countries are so different. So I don’t know how much closer it gets. It depends on just how rigid the people appointed are. And just how much they’re willing to ignore warning signs in markets—and their own appearance with the public that they would be failing.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On Friday morning, the US House of Representatives approved a bill that would get the Department of Energy (DOE) out of the business of energy standards for mobile homes, also known as manufactured homes, and could set the efficiency requirements back decades.  Advocates say the changes will streamline the regulatory process and keep the upfront costs of manufactured homes down. Critics argue that less efficient homes will cost people more money overall and mostly benefit builders.   “This is not about poor people. This is not about working people,” said Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.), who grew up in a manufactured home, on the House floor before the vote. “This is about doing the bidding of corporations.” The average income of a manufactured home resident is around $40,000, and they “already face disproportionately high energy costs and energy use,” said Johanna Neumann, senior director of the Campaign for 100% Renewable Energy at Environment America. That, she said, is why more stringent energy codes are so important. But the Energy Department, which oversees national energy policy and production, didn’t always have a say over these standards.  Starting in 1974, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, became tasked with setting building codes for manufactured homes. But HUD last updated the relevant energy-efficiency standards in 1994, and they have long lagged behind modern insulation and weatherization practices. So in 2007, Congress assigned that task to the DOE. It still took 15 years and a lawsuit before President Joe Biden’s administration finalized new rules in 2022 that were projected to reduce utility bills in double-wide manufactured homes by an average of $475 a year. Even with higher upfront costs taken into account, the government predicted around $5 billion in avoided energy bills over 30-years. At the time, the manufactured housing industry argued that DOE’s calculations were wrong and that the upfront cost of the home should be the primary metric of affordability. Both the Biden and now Trump administrations have delayed implementation of the rule and compliance deadlines, which still aren’t in effect.  This House legislation would eliminate the DOE rule and return sole regulatory authority to HUD. Lesli Gooch, CEO of the Manufactured Housing Institute, a trade organization, describes it as essentially a process bill aimed at removing bureaucracy that has stood in the way of action. “The paralysis is because you have two different agencies that have been tasked with creating energy standards,” Gooch said. “You can’t build a house to two different sets of blueprints.” Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.), agreed and called the move “commonsense regulatory reform” in a letter urging his colleagues to support the bill. Ultimately, 57 Democrats joined 206 Republicans in voting for the bill, and it now moves to the Senate, where its prospects are uncertain.  If the bill becomes law, however, the only operative benchmark would be HUD’s 1994 code and it could take years to make a new one. While more than half of the roughly 100,000 homes sold in the US each year already meet or exceed the DOE’s 2022 efficiency rules, the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy estimates that tens of thousands are still built to just the outdated standard. “Families are struggling,” said Mark Kresowik, senior policy director at the council, and he does not expect HUD under Trump to move particularly quickly on a fix. “I have not seen this administration lowering energy bills.” For now, though, it’s the Senate’s turn to weigh in.

This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. President Donald Trump has made it clear: His vision for Venezuela’s future involves the US profiting from its oil. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies—the biggest anywhere in the world—go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure,” the president told reporters at a news conference Saturday, following the shocking capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife. But experts caution that a number of realities—including international oil prices and longer-term questions of stability in the country—are likely to make this oil revolution much harder to execute than Trump seems to think. > Trump seems to view the situation almost like “a Settlers of Catan board—you > kidnap the president of Venezuela and, ipso facto, you now control all the > oil.” “The disconnect between the Trump administration and what’s really going on in the oil world, and what American companies want, is huge,” says Lorne Stockman, an analyst with Oil Change International, a clean energy and fossil fuels research and advocacy organization. Venezuela sits on some of the largest oil reserves in the world. But production of oil there has plummeted since the mid 1990s, after President Hugo Chávez nationalized much of the industry. The country was producing just 1.3 million barrels of oil each day in 2018, down from a high of more than 3 million barrels each day in the late 1990s. (The US, the top producer of crude oil in the world, produced an average of 21.7 million barrels each day in 2023.) Sanctions placed on Venezuela during the first Trump administration, meanwhile, have driven production even further down. Trump has repeatedly implied that freeing up all that oil and increasing production would be a boon for the oil and gas industry—and that he expects American oil companies to take the lead. This kind of thinking—a natural offshoot of his “drill, baby, drill” philosophy—is typical for the president. One of Trump’s main critiques of the Iraq war, which he first voiced years before he ran for office, was that the US did not “take the oil” from the region to “reimburse ourselves” for the war. The president views energy geopolitics “almost like the world is a Settlers of Catan board—you kidnap the president of Venezuela and, ipso facto, you now control all the oil,” says Rory Johnston, a Canadian oil market researcher. “I do think he legitimately, to a degree, believes that. It’s not true, but I think that’s an important frame for how he’s justifying and driving the momentum of his policy.” Some Trump administration policies that were intended to boost American oil and gas have actually hurt the industry. US oil producers have repeatedly voiced concerns about how tariffs and a volatile market have contributed to a dramatic decline in global oil prices, which fell 20 percent in 2025—the biggest losses since 2020. Oil and gas companies, like most big industries with a lot of capital invested in infrastructure, value long-term political and financial stability. Any more big, unpredictable shakeups—in supply, regulatory environments, tariffs, or otherwise—could not come at a worse time for American oil. “Right now the oil market’s somewhat oversupplied,” Stockman says. “That’s hurting American companies. The last thing they want is for a massive oil reserve to suddenly be opened up.” A number of both short- and long-term decisions could affect how the US invasion of Venezuela plays out for American oil. First there’s the question of what happens to all the oil Venezuela is currently sitting on. Over the past few months, the administration has significantly ramped up sanctions and blockades on Venezuela, creating a massive glut of oil that hasn’t been able to find its way out of the country. If Trump decides to totally lift sanctions on Venezuela, that surplus could enter the wider market. The most likely buyers are US oil refineries in the Gulf of Mexico, which are close by and equipped to handle the type of oil produced in Venezuela. This could create investment opportunities for oil companies based there. When it comes to developing even more of Venezuela’s oil capacity, things get trickier. While it’s tempting to draw direct lines between the Iraq invasion and Trump’s move against Maduro, the economic conditions for oil, both in the US and abroad, are much different than they were in 2002. Oil supply was tight when the US invaded Iraq, and the shale revolution—which flooded the market with cheap fracked gas and oil from American producers—was still several years away. Now, with oil prices sitting almost as low as they were in the pandemic, most big producers are not drilling with abandon, but picking and choosing where they spend their money. Renewable energy, meanwhile, has become astronomically cheaper than it was in the early 2000s. > “Lots of corruption, poor governance, nationalization… [It’s] gonna take time > for companies to trust again.” “We are entering a world where oil demand growth is slowing,” Stockman says. “Despite what the Trump administration wants, we are in the midst of a transition. No matter where you believe the peak is, whether it’s 2030 or beyond, the peak is coming.” It’s not clear if restarting production in Venezuela will see a guaranteed return on investment for many years. Venezuela’s oil reserves are extra-heavy, requiring extra processing—and cost—to make the oil light enough for transport. Meanwhile, the infrastructure used to produce oil in Venezuela is falling apart after decades of disrepair and neglect. Significantly ramping up production in these circumstances, experts say, will likely take years and tens of millions of dollars. Some major American companies seem poised to profit more immediately from a regime change. Chevron, the only company still operating in Venezuela, could have enough of a foothold to more quickly expand production. ExxonMobil, meanwhile, has poured money into oil fields in nearby Guyana; American control in Venezuela could be helpful in stabilizing those investments over the long term. But as a whole, the industry has shown initial hesitation to a possibly open playing field in Venezuela. Politico reported Saturday that the Trump administration has told oil companies that it expects them to pour money into the country—but industry has been cautious. “The infrastructure currently there is so dilapidated that no one at these companies can adequately assess what is needed to make it operable,” an energy insider told Politico. And oil reserves in a specific region don’t guarantee a stable environment for a massive influx of investment cash—and American oil employees. The New York Times reported Saturday that the Trump administration has for weeks eyed Venezuelan vice president Delcy Rodríguez to replace Maduro, based partly on her management of the oil industry since she was named the nation’s oil minister in 2020. But it’s far from clear if this administration will be able to control a regime change in a way that creates a stable investing environment for big oil companies for the next few decades. That initial plan appears to be unraveling already. On Saturday, Rodríguez, who has been sworn in as Venezuela’s interim leader, denounced US actions there and said that Maduro is the country’s “only president.” Sunday morning, US secretary of state Marco Rubio said on ABC’s This Week that Rodríguez is not the “legitimate” president of Venezuela. “Ultimately,” he said, “legitimacy for their system of government will come about through a period of transition and real elections, which they have not had.” “There’s a lot of history, and I mean that in, like, a capital H kind of weight to it, History,” says Johnston. “Lots of corruption, poor governance, nationalization…That is gonna take time for companies to trust again if they don’t have to. Step one is: Who is now president of Venezuela? We have no idea at this point.” Still, there’s a chance some companies may choose to play ball in the short term. Investors have learned that acceding to Trump’s interests can present financial and regulatory wins, even when the market is not necessarily behind those decisions; companies that don’t follow along, by contrast, could face consequences. On Saturday, The Wall Street Journal reported that a group of hedge fund officials and asset managers were already planning a trip to Venezuela to explore investment opportunities, including ones in energy. “I think there’s going to be a lot of that,” Johnston says. “Is that window dressing for investments, or is that window dressing for the White House? I think there’s gonna be a lot of people wanting to please Trump and say, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s our oil industry now.’”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Last month, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro withdrew from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI (pronounced “Reggie”), a cap-and-trade program that establishes a regional limit on carbon emissions from power plants located in the Northeast. Here’s how RGGI works: Each year, credits allowing the power plants to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide, up to the cap, are auctioned off. The proceeds from these auctions go to RGGI member states, which can reinvest them into clean energy and consumer affordability programs. Crucially, the emissions cap gradually lowers over time, theoretically ensuring that total emissions continue on a downward trend.  Pennsylvania is a giant within the program, because it has higher power sector emissions than all of the other RGGI states—Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and the District of Columbia—combined, so Shapiro’s exit sent shockwaves through the system. The Democrat withdrew from the program as part of a compromise to convince Republicans in the legislature to pass the state’s budget, which has been delayed since June, forcing schools and public transportation to dip into rainy day funds or take on debt to support services. > “To add insult to injury here, we were about to have the answer from the > [state Supreme Court]. And now we never will.” As he signed the withdrawal bill, Shapiro said that state Republicans have used RGGI “as an excuse to stall substantive conversations about energy.” (Though Pennsylvania joined the regional pact in 2022, the move was immediately tied up in litigation, which was ongoing at the time of Shapiro’s withdrawal, meaning the state had yet to actually participate in the auctions.) “Today, that excuse is gone,” Shapiro added. “It’s time to look forward—and I’m going to be aggressive about pushing for policies that create more jobs in the energy sector, bring more clean energy onto the grid, and reduce the cost of energy for Pennsylvanians.” But some other Democrats and environmental advocates argue that the governor has essentially given away the store. “I would describe it as Faustian, except Faust got so much more out of his bargain with the devil,” Nikil Saval, a Democratic state senator, told Spotlight PA. Jackson Morris, senior state policy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that Shapiro lost a chance to claim credit for a substantial environmental victory during a potential presidential run, which he is rumored to be considering.  Democrats “basically got rolled,” said Morris. “The political calculus of all this is baffling.”  Pennsylvania first moved to join RGGI in 2019 through an executive action by then-governor Tom Wolf, a Democrat, but the program attracted pushback from Republicans immediately. A 2022 court order prevented the state from formally joining RGGI that year, and then the Commonwealth Court ruled Wolf’s executive action unconstitutional in 2023. That decision is currently being reconsidered by the state Supreme Court, where Democrats retained their majority in elections last month. But Shapiro’s move renders that process moot. “To add insult to injury here,” said Morris, “we were about to have the answer from the court. And now we never will, because they gave up.”  “It’s not just that we fumbled the ball on the 1-yard line, but then [we] picked it up and ran it into the other end zone,” said Patrick McDonnell, president and CEO of the Pennsylvania environmental group PennFuture. (The governor’s office declined to speak with Grist on the record.)  RGGI has produced about $8.6 billion thus far for participating states. Virginia, fresh off the heels of Democratic governor-elect Abigail Spanberger’s victory, is poised to rejoin the program after being forced out by the current Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin. When Youngkin’s withdrawal was found to be unlawful in court, Spanberger campaigned on returning to the compact. Some are more cautious in their criticism of Shapiro. “This decision [on RGGI] doesn’t feel final to me,” said Dallas Burtraw, a senior fellow at the research nonprofit Resources for the Future. In early 2025, Shapiro unveiled his “Lightning Plan,” a jobs-and-energy proposal that included something called the Pennsylvania Climate Emissions Reduction program. Known as PACER, it’s essentially a Pennsylvania-specific version of RGGI—a cap-and-trade program that gradually reduces emissions, creates tradable carbon credits that would (theoretically) be interchangeable with those of RGGI member states, and reinvests the profits toward lowering consumer electricity costs. “Pennsylvania is an elephant compared to the rest of RGGI,” said Burtraw, explaining the reasons that the state would want to create its own program and later link it to RGGI.  “It would have been amazing to see Pennsylvania join RGGI,” he said. “But I think that we might be setting down a pathway that’s turned out for the better.”  Others are less convinced. Joining RGGI was feasible, they say, only because it was implemented through executive action. The odds of anything like PACER making it through the state’s Republican-controlled senate are slim. “Pennsylvanians need and deserve serious plans to curb greenhouse gas emissions, lower energy bills, and deliver revenue,” said state Senator Saval in a statement to Grist. “So far, senate Republicans have shown little interest in even meager efforts to do any of this. It’s hard to imagine the abrogation of RGGI would help them, as it were, to find religion on this front.”

This story was originally published by The Watch, Radley Balko’s substack publication, to which you can subscribe here. In the 15 years from 2010 through 2024, 375 people in Texas were exonerated after being imprisoned for crimes they did not commit. Of those, 97 received some form of compensation or settlement from the state. Collectively, those 97 people spent more than 1,200 years in prison. The state paid them just under $156 million, or an average of about $130,000 per person per year behind bars. Last year, New York City paid out $205 million to settle 956 lawsuits alleging police abuse. That figure includes about $16 million each to two men who served three decades in prison for a murder they didn’t commit. It also includes people who were wrongly raided and beaten by police, and people who were outright framed by law enforcement. I bring up these figures because, according to multiple reports, Donald Trump is about to order the government to pay him “damages” for the FBI raid on his Mar-a-Lago mansion and for special prosecutor Jack Smith’s two investigations of him—one for stealing, hoarding, and improperly sharing classified documents, and the other for Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. He’s going to pay himself $230 million. So Trump—who didn’t spend a minute behind bars—about to swindle about 50 percent more than the total amount of money paid to the 97 innocent people who were incarcerated for more than 1,200 years in Texas. Or about 12 percent more than the total paid last year to 957 victims of police brutality in New York City. > One key difference between the raid on Trump’s resort and other disputed > police raids I’ve covered: Trump is still alive. I’ve written at length about both police abuse and wrongful convictions. I’ve seen and interviewed and known the people hurt by bad cops and prosecutors. Trump’s payout isn’t just corrupt and cynical, it’s among the most outrageous and infuriating of his many abuses of power. It’s the biggest payout ever for allegations of misconduct by either police or prosecutors. This would be true even if you divided it in half to separate the raid from the investigations. The same man who was immunized from his crimes by the US Supreme Court, was reelected to the most powerful office on the planet, and has openly used the office to enrich himself and his family by billions would now be further abusing his power to declare himself the biggest victim of injustice in American history. It’s just a brazen, stubby, vulgar middle finger at rule of law. Trump originally filed his lawsuit last summer, before he was reelected. Back then, he was asking for a mere $100 million. Two things happened to embolden him. First, Chief Justice John Roberts gave Trump the green light to weaponize the Justice Department for his own benefit. Second, Trump took full advantage of Roberts’s hall pass and filled the top slots at the department with the same attorneys who represented him in both his civil and criminal cases. Let’s first look at how the raid on Mar-a-Lago compares to actually botched police raids. I made a little chart comparing the insane amount of money Trump wants to pay himself to the settlements and jury awards won by real victims. Here are a few things to keep in mind: First, the raid on Mar-a-Lago went down a bit differently than these other raids. In most of the other raids, the police battered down a door during a high-risk, “dynamic entry” operation, then unjustly shot someone inside the home. At Mar-a-Lago, the FBI notified Trump’s security detail to let them know they were coming. In fact, Trump himself was given a warning months ahead of time. They also deliberately conducted the raid when Trump would be out of town to save him any embarrassment. But it gets worse. (Note: I’ll be using this phrase frequently.) Most of those other raids were conducted on little to no evidence—typically on dirty, uncorroborated information from drug informants or random calls to police. In most cases, the police found no evidence of a crime, often because they raided the wrong house. The raid on Mar-a-Lago came after an extensive investigation, and after federal authorities gave Trump multiple opportunities to return the classified documents he had taken. He refused. There’s one other key difference between the raid on Trump’s mansion/golf club/event space and all of these other raids: Trump is still alive. The other people listed below are dead, because they were killed in these raids. The only tangible injury Trump has claimed from the Mar-a-Lago raid is that FBI agents tracked some dirt into his bedroom when they didn’t take off their shoes. Settlements Resulting From Law Enforcement Raids But this is just the harm that Trump claims from the FBI raid. He also claims to have suffered injury from being accused of federal crimes. So let’s also compare the damages Trump is seeking to the damages awarded to people who were wrongly convicted. This, too, won’t be a perfect comparison. But the incongruence only makes the money Trump is demanding all the more obscene. First and foremost, whereas exonerated people have been proven innocent, the evidence against Trump is persuasive. He was never exonerated. Instead, his money, power, and position allowed him avoid a trial. He escaped election charges because the US Supreme Court cloaked him in immunity. And he only escaped trial in the classified documents case by getting himself reelected. No court, prosecutor, or investigative body has declared Trump innocent in either case. And while we like to say that you are presumed innocent until proven guilty, we definitely do not say that you’re entitled to a massive payout if a criminal investigation fails to result in a conviction. > If the $50,000 the typical exoneree gets were the width of a typical city > block, the amount Trump is claiming would be the width of Texas. Currently, about 40 states have laws to compensate the wrongly convicted. These laws vary in how they’re structured, but most pay a predetermined amount of money for each year of incarceration. These annuities ranges from a low of about $18,000 per year in Iowa, to a high of $200,000 per year in Washington, DC. But the most common figure is $50,000. Some states don’t pay the money in a lump sum, and in many the annual payout isn’t heritable. So if the government spent 10 years fighting your exoneration, that’s 10 years of payments neither you nor your family will ever see. Some states also require the wrongly convicted to waive their right to sue in order to collect compensation. So while some exonerees in those states have sued and received multimillion dollar payouts, they took a risk in doing so. They could just as easily have ended up like, say, John Thompson of Louisiana—a man who was wrongly convicted two separate times, spent 14 years on death row, and was nearly executed seven times. A jury awarded Thompson $14 million. Then the Supreme Court threw out the award. Lawsuits also usually take years—sometimes more than a decade—to resolve. If you just got out of prison and are struggling, you’ll get no compensation while your case slogs its way through the courts. Trump will get all of his money at once. He’ll be able to pass it on to his heirs (or just have it buried with him). And he won’t have to wait for a lawsuit to wind through the courts. I also don’t know of any exonerees who were in a position to exploit their charges to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from their supporters, or who wore their charges like a crown to get their old job back. But it gets worse. Trump isn’t stopping with himself. He wants his criminal friends to be paid, too. He has reportedly ordered the DOJ to pay his former national security advisor Michael Flynn $50 million as compensation for the investigation and criminal charges against him. I suspect that if he doesn’t get pushback, we can expect him to pay others, too. I believe the word for this is chutzpah. Flynn is a dangerous QAnon nut who initially pled guilty to lying to the FBI about meeting with members of the Russian government during the 2017 transition. The guilty plea itself was the product of a plea bargain in which the government agreed not to charge Flynn for the other shady things he’d done. For example, Flynn failed to register as a foreign agent while on the payroll of a businessman with close ties to the Turkish government. While advising the incoming Trump administration, Flynn reportedly recommended kidnapping a pro-democracy dissident legally residing in the US and extraditing him to Türkiye at the behest of its authoritarian leader, Recep Erdoğan. Trump had been warned by the Obama administration that Flynn was a national security threat. Yet Trump promptly appointed Flynn to the most sensitive national security position in all of US government. Now Flynn and Trump plan to make you, me, and the rest of the country pay Flynn $50 million. So let’s compare what Trump and Flynn endured—and what they’re paying themselves as compensation—to what people actually wrongly convicted of crimes get in compensation. > So far, no investigative body has determined that Jack Smith’s case against > Trump was political or malicious. But that may not matter. The average person exonerated in 2024 spent 13.5 years behind bars. Prison is obviously psychologically destructive. But it also breaks bodies, and the health care is typically dreadful. People leaving prison have a 50 percent shorter life expectancy than people of similar demographics who never served time. Again, neither Trump nor Flynn were ever incarcerated. Flynn initially pleaded guilty to one charge of lying to the FBI, then retracted his plea. There was then some extended and complicated litigation before Trump ultimately pardoned him. Trump himself was never tried, convicted, or punished for any of the federal charges for which he now wants $230 million. That means both are seeking to be compensated, not for the harm of incarceration, but for damage to their reputations. Again, Trump (a) wore his criminal charges like a badge, (b) exploited the charges to raise a ton of money, and (c) as the charges were pending, was reelected to the most powerful position on the planet. I’m not seeing the harm. If both reported payouts happen, Flynn will be getting $6.25 million per year since he was indicted. Trump will be getting about $100 million per year. Again, the low end of annual compensation for an exoneree is $18,000 per year—of incarceration, not since indictment. The average is $50,000, and the high is $200,000. Here are some ways to visualize these numbers: * If the $50,000 a typical exoneree gets per year were the height of a basketball, what Trump is demanding would be the height of the Empire State Building. * If the $50,000 the typical exoneree gets were the width of a typical city block, the amount Trump is claiming would be the width of the state of Texas. * If the $18,000 the typical exoneree gets in Iowa were the average height of a human being, the amount Trump is claiming would be about the height of Mt. Everest. There actually is a federal law that allows some people who have been acquitted or cleared of federal charges to be compensated. It’s called the Hyde Amendment, and it was passed in 1997. But the Hyde Amendment limits compensation to court and attorney fees. And few people have been able to use it. That’s because merely being acquitted or cleared isn’t enough. You also need to demonstrate that the federal officials investigating or prosecuting were doing so maliciously. A 2010 USA Today report looked at 201 cases in which a federal judge cited prosecutorial misconduct in dismissing criminal charges. Just 13 of those people were able to get compensation under the Hyde Amendment. There isn’t much reason to think it’s any different now. So far, no investigative body has determined that Jack Smith’s case against Trump was political or malicious. No investigative body has found that Smith violated Trump’s constitutional rights. > Trump’s attorneys initially asked for $100 million in punitive damages under > the FTCA—a law that does not allow for punitive damages. But it gets worse! Thanks to immunity policies created by the Supreme Court, even people unambiguously hurt by police or unjustly prosecuted are unlikely to get relief through the courts. The odds of success in such lawsuits are so long and the litigation so costly that, except in absolute slam-dunk cases with sympathetic victims, few attorneys are willing to take them on. This is especially true in cases involving the federal government. It’s all but impossible to sue federal police or prosecutors for constitutional violations. In 1971, the Supreme Court created a path to court in the case Webster Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal Bureau of Narcotics. But the court has consistently narrowed its scope. (It’s gotten so bad that civil rights attorneys sometimes joke that the only way to get these cases in front of a jury is if your client is named Webster Bivens.) The court all but overturned the precedent in the 2022 case Egbert v. Boulet. To understand how this jurisprudence plays out in the real world, consider the case of Hamdi Mohamud. She’s a Minnesota woman who, along with dozens of other people, was framed by a St. Paul police officer. She spent 25 months in custody. The officer was working with a federal human trafficking task force. She framed Mohamud and the others on witness tampering charges in order to protect an informant. There’s no dispute about Mohamud’s innocence. But the federal courts have ruled that state and local police who work on federal task forces get the same protection as federal law enforcement. And so, citing the Supreme Court’s ruling in Egbert, the Eighth Circuit has dismissed Mohamud’s lawsuit, ruling that the officer who framed her was protected not by the already-generous qualified immunity afforded to state and local police, but the broader near-absolute immunity given to federal officers. Mohamud is a far much more sympathetic victim of government overreach than Trump. She has suffered much more harm, and did nothing wrong. Yet not only did her case never get to a jury, she couldn’t even get discovery. The courts ruled that because the officer had immunity, nothing Mohamud’s lawyers might have found, no matter how damning, would have made a difference. There is one other way to sue federal officials: the Federal Tort Claims Act. This law allows plaintiffs to sue the agency that employs the offending officers under federal torts law. But the FTCA is incredibly complicated. It also requires plaintiffs to exhaust all other legal options first. FTCA trials are decided by judges, not juries, and judges tend to be more deferential to law enforcement. But the biggest problem with the FTCA is that it prohibits punitive damages. Civil rights cases are exorbitantly expensive. Attorneys take them knowing that most will be thrown out before they ever get in front of a jury. They put in the considerable investment to investigate and litigate hoping they’ll get one of the handful of cases that results in a large award. Punitive damages are what bump these cases into the millions. Without them, only public interest firms like the ACLU, NAACP, or Institute for Justice would be in a position to take these cases. Had he not been elected president, Trump’s lawsuit against the FBI and DOJ would have been laughed out of court. And as I’ve argued here in the past, not only was Trump not treated poorly, he was given an almost embarrassing amount of deference. The judges in these cases bent over backwards to accommodate him. And given that there’s no evidence his rights were violated, his claim of $230 million in damages would have been scoffed at by the courts and likely brought a reprimand for his attorneys. In his original lawsuit, for example, Trump’s attorneys asked for $100 million in punitive damages under the FTCA—which, again, does not allow for punitive damages. If anyone else tried to claim punitive damages under that law, their attorneys would have been embarrassed by the first judge to read the case. But because Trump now presides over the DOJ, he gets to bypass the courts. That his attorneys badly misstated the law may not matter. The law itself is now irrelevant. > Some January 6ers are now demanding “reparations” similar to the compensation > paid out to exonerees. Some interest groups have hinted at lawsuits asking federal courts to stop any payouts to Trump or Flynn. We’re obviously in uncharted territory here, so who knows how those lawsuits will go. But my hunch is that no matter who brings a lawsuit, the current Supreme Court will rule that they lack standing to sue. The most galling part of all this is that Trump is an enthusiastic supporter of the very laws that make it so difficult for other victims of government abuse to recover damages. During the 2024 campaign he promised over and over that he would confer “immunity” on police officers from criminal and civil liability and any other form of accountability. He has also said that police should be “unshackled” and “unleashed” to “do their jobs.” Trump doesn’t understand the laws and policies that govern police misconduct. But the people around him do. And sure enough, his administration has made clear that they will provide zero oversight and will conduct no civil rights investigations into police abuse. Well, almost no oversight. Trump did fire the FBI agents and federal prosecutors who worked on the cases against him, the cases against his allies, and the cases against the January 6 rioters. In June, Trump also ordered the DOJ to pay just under $5 million to the family of Ashli Babbitt, the woman shot and killed by a Capitol police officer during the January 6 riots. Babbitt was part of the mob attempting to enter the Speaker’s Lobby. She and the mob ignored multiple warnings from police. The officer who shot her has been cleared of any wrongdoing. So had Trump not ordered the payout, the lawsuit by Babbitt’s family almost certainly would have been thrown out of court. Administration officials have also suggested that they might target progressive prosecutors who do try to hold abusive cops accountable, arguing that their investigations are violating the police officers’ civil rights. Trump was campaigning on a promise to make law enforcement immune from any form of liability at the same time his lawsuit against the DOJ and FBI was pending in federal court. He wanted to make it harder to do precisely what his lawsuit sought to do. Yet because he was reelected, he and his allies get to swerve around those laws and accelerate directly to a payout. Ah, but it gets worse. Trump, of course, also pardoned the January 6 rioters and insurrectionists soon after he was inaugurated. So far, at least 22 of those he pardoned have been convicted of unrelated crimes, including home invasion, aggravated kidnapping, aggravated sexual assault, possession of child pornography, sexual assault of a minor, manslaughter, burglary, grand theft, and reckless homicide. One was arrested for surreptitiously filming women at his father’s tanning salon. Another was recently sentenced to life for plotting to murder FBI agents. Yet another was arrested for threatening to kill House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. It probably goes without saying, but if the people Joe Biden or Barack Obama pardoned went on to commit as many new crimes as the January 6ers have, Republicans would be setting the Constitution on fire to strip future presidents of the pardon power. Here’s the fun part: Many of those January 6ers are now seeking refunds for the restitution they were required to pay. Some have been successful, in part because the DOJ hasn’t put up any opposition. In fact, according to my sources, the federal government is encouraging them to seek reimbursement—at the direction of insurrectionist attorney-turned-senior DOJ official Ed Martin. Those sources also tell me some at DOJ are also encouraging January 6ers to seek reimbursement of attorney’s fees under the Hyde Amendment. Many of the rioters hired private attorneys with funding from MAGA nonprofits. This raises the possibility that, if successful, these taxpayer-funded reimbursements could go back to MAGA advocacy groups. And it apparently won’t end with attorneys fees. Some January 6ers are now demanding “reparations” similar to the compensation paid out to exonerees. While there’s some evidence that some of these people may have been overcharged, none were treated differently than anyone else in the federal system. And most of them were, in fact, guilty. Rather famously, many of them documented their own crimes. An attorney for several insurrectionists has pushed for the DOJ to establish a “reparations fund” and a panel to determine which of them should be eligible for damages above and beyond attorney fees. The same lawyer said he believes that Martin is championing this idea within DOJ. But they may not even need Martin. Trump himself has also said he’s open to the idea of a reparations fund for January 6ers. If any January 6er cited Trump’s pardon as proof of their innocence in a claim seeking damages—despite having documented their crimes on social media—they’d be laughed out of court. But they may not need to go to court. If the DOJ decides to support the idea of reparations, I’m not sure there’s much to be done about it. The most innocuous explanation for all of this is that Trump wants to reward his supporters for their loyalty. The more sinister explanation is that he wants to keep them grateful in case he needs them again. On November 17, journalist Amanda Moore broke a story for The Intercept that somehow manages to capture all of this madness in a single headline: Pardoned Capitol Rioter Tried to Hush Child Sex Victim With Promise of Jan. 6 Reparation Money, Police Say But it gets worse. (I promise, that’s the last one.) This brings me to the Republicans’ most recent example of shameless, nakedly corrupt self-dealing: Republican senators tucked a provision into the bill to reopen the government that would allow any senator whose phone records were obtained by Jack Smith to sue the federal government—for $1 million per phone. It appears that eight senators would be authorized to sue. To be clear, Smith did not bug these senators’ phones. With a judge’s authorization, he obtained a record of their ingoing and outgoing calls around January 6, 2021. That’s not only perfectly legal, it’s routine in criminal investigations. Incredibly, the language in the bill applies only to these eight senators. It doesn’t even apply to House members whose records Smith also obtained. At root, the bill seeks to authorize eight of the most powerful people in the world to pay themselves $1 million or more from the US Treasury. The senators snuck this provision into the funding bill because it opens courthouse doors that would be closed to anyone else. Even if Jack Smith had, say, illegally broken into these senators’ homes and held their families at gunpoint, it is, again, almost impossible to sue a federal prosecutor. In short, these are very special boys and girls who want very special rules for themselves. Here’s the thing: If Smith had truly violated their constitutional rights there might be a wisp of a chance that these senators might empathize with others who have been wronged and change the law. (I know, I know. But I wrote a wisp of a chance—and by “wisp” I mean ethereal and vaporous, like Tommy Tuberville’s intellect, or Josh Hawley’s courage.) But these senators know that what Smith did was perfectly legal. So they changed the federal law only to benefit the eight of them—and only for this specific reason. Oh, and one other thing: Most people only get a year to file their civil rights lawsuits. The senators made their special law retroactive to 2022. After public backlash, including from some of their House colleagues who were presumably angry that they weren’t cut in on the action, a few of the eight senators have since publicly stated that they don’t plan to take advantage of the provision. That’s great, I guess. Sorry you got caught! But if they hadn’t intended to help themselves to $1 million in taxpayer funding, they wouldn’t have stuck in the provision and voted for it in the first place. (Note: Some coverage claims the amount is $500,000, but the language allows them to sue for damages at two stages in the charging process.) Only Sen. Lindsey Graham said he definitely plans to sue. Which is extremely Lindsey Graham of him. This week, the House passed a bill to repeal the authorization. But because the original bill containing the authorization is now law, the bill to repeal it must pass the Senate as well. And as we all know, a single senator can block legislation. And sure enough, a single senator is now blocking the body from voting on a bill that would keep him from helping himself to at least $1 million in free money from taxpayers.  Want to guess who he is? Maya Alleruzzo/AP As we continue to see the barrage of videos showing Border Patrol and ICE agents brutalizing undocumented people and US citizens alike, someone inevitably responds that they can’t wait for the victims to sue the agents for everything they have. Those lawsuits just aren’t going to happen. Those cops have been “unleashed” to terrorize as they please. And just in case any of them mistakenly believe that they should show some restraint, Stephen Miller has assured them that they have “immunity.” Meanwhile, if you’re Donald Trump or one of his supporters, you get to crime with impunity knowing that anyone who attempts to hold you accountable for your criming will be punished. As with most things MAGA, it’s tempting to say this is all baldly hypocritical. But it really isn’t. Hypocrisy would mean that Republicans are willing to violate their core principles when convenient. But the party really only has one core principle now: Everything the government does must either benefit Donald Trump and his allies or punish his enemies. And Republicans are more devoted to this single principle than either major party has been devoted to anything in my lifetime. That isn’t hypocrisy. It’s a cult of personality—and the cult leader happens to be the president of the United States.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Zillow, the US’s largest real estate listing site, has removed a feature that allowed people to view a property’s exposure to the climate crisis, following complaints from the industry and some homeowners that it was hurting sales. In September last year, the online real estate marketplace introduced a tool showing the individual risk of wildfire, flood, extreme heat, wind, and poor air quality for 1 million properties it lists, explaining that “climate risks are now a critical factor in home-buying decisions” for many Americans. > “The risk doesn’t go away; it just moves from a pre-purchase decision into a > post-purchase liability.” But Zillow has now deleted this climate index after complaints from real estate agents and some homeowners that the rankings appeared arbitrary, could not be challenged, and harmed house sales. The complaints included those from the California Regional Multiple Listing Service, which oversees a database of property data that Zillow relies upon. Zillow said it remains committed to help Americans make informed decisions about properties, with listings now containing outbound links to the website of First Street, the nonprofit climate risk quantifier that had provided the on-site tool to Zillow. Matthew Eby, founder and chief executive of First Street, said that removing the climate risk information means that many buyers will be “flying blind” in an era when worsening impacts of extreme weather are warping the real estate market in the United States. “The risk doesn’t go away; it just moves from a pre-purchase decision into a post-purchase liability,” Eby said. “Families discover after a flood that they should have purchased flood insurance, or discover after the sale that wildfire insurance is unaffordable or unavailable in their area. “Access to accurate risk information before a purchase isn’t just helpful; it’s essential to protecting consumers and preventing lifelong financial consequences.” Eby claimed that the push to delist the First Street ratings from Zillow is linked to a challenging real estate environment, with a lack of affordable housing and repeated climate-driven disasters that are causing insurers to raise premiums or even flee states such as California. “All of that adds pressure to close sales however possible,” he said. “Climate risk data didn’t suddenly become inconvenient. It became harder to ignore in a stressed market.” > “Brokerage firms know they cannot stop the transmission of climate risk > information because climate impacts are already being felt far and wide.” As the US, along with the rest of the world, has heated up due to the burning of fossil fuels, worsening extreme weather events have taken their toll directly upon people’s homes, as well as other infrastructure. Last year, disasters probably amplified by the climate crisis caused $182 billion in damages, one of the highest on record, according to a government database since taken offline by the Trump administration. As a consequence of these mounting risks, the home insurance required for buyers to obtain a mortgage is becoming scarcer and more expensive across much of the US. These changes are running headlong into an opposing trend whereby more Americans are moving to places such as Florida and the Southwest, which are increasingly beset by threats such as ruinous hurricanes and punishing heatwaves. But assigning climate risks to individual properties has been controversial within the real estate industry, as well as some experts who have questioned whether such judgments can be made at such a granular level. Warnings of such perils deterred some buyers, especially if the home was particularly costly anyway. Last year, a sprawling Florida mansion was put on sale for $295 million, making it the most expensive property in the country and in a place also ranked as one of the most at-risk in the US for flooding. After several cuts to the asking price, the house has been taken off the market. Jesse Keenan, an author and expert in climate risk management at Tulane University, said many scientists and economists have argued that “proprietary risk models that provide highly uncertain assessments can have the perverse effect of undermining the public’s confidence in climate science. “There has been a growing bipartisan recognition that the government should play a more active role in supporting and standardizing risk assessment for properties,” Keenan said. “At the same time, the science is limited in its capacity to assess property-by-property assessments. “I do not believe that this is a sign that the brokerage industry is trying to hide climate risks,” he added. “Brokerage firms know they cannot stop the transmission of climate risk information because climate impacts are already being felt far and wide in the sector.” Eby defended First Street’s methods and accuracy, pointing out that the models used were built on peer-reviewed science and validated against real-world outcomes. “So when claims are made that our models are inaccurate, we ask for evidence,” he said. “To date, all the empirical validation shows our science is working as designed and providing better risk insight than the tools the industry has relied on historically.”

This story was originally published by Canary Media and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. US Rep. Mikie Sherrill won the governor’s race in New Jersey on Tuesday, running on a platform of keeping electricity prices down. Environmental groups see Sherrill’s election as a triumph for the Garden State’s struggling offshore wind sector. Sherrill, a four-term Democrat and a US Navy veteran, arrived on the political scene in 2017 and advocated for offshore wind projects on Capitol Hill. As a gubernatorial candidate, she was one of only three Democrats who explicitly endorsed offshore wind on campaign websites early in the race. Her Republican opponent, Jack Ciattarelli, ran on a promise to ban future offshore wind development. His campaign website sells  “stop offshore wind” tote bags, t-shirts, stickers, and beverage koozies. Sherrill handily beat Ciattarelli, winning 56 percent to 43 percent at press time. “In-state produced power through offshore wind and other renewable technologies is the only path forward to ensure carbon reduction while prioritizing price stability, economic growth, and resource adequacy,” said Paulina O’Connor, executive director of the New Jersey Offshore Wind Alliance, an advocacy group whose work is funded in part by wind developers. > Sherill’s promise to quickly freeze utility rates and push back on federal > overreach signifies a willingness to come out fighting. Sherrill will take office next year without any offshore wind projects operational or under construction along the state’s roughly 130 miles of coastline. That’s in stark contrast to the other East Coast states that, like New Jersey, have incentivized offshore wind development through tax breaks and have planned grid and clean-energy goals around the sector’s growth. Massachusetts, Virginia, New York, and Rhode Island all have installations completed or currently underway. New Jersey’s incumbent Gov. Phil Murphy, also a Democrat, was once a fierce proponent of offshore wind, but has ostensibly distanced himself from the sector in recent months as President Donald Trump’s war on offshore wind proved, in some ways, insurmountable for a lame-duck governor. The Trump administration has frozen the permitting pipeline for all of New Jersey’s earlier-stage offshore projects. Atlantic Shores, the state’s only fully approved wind farm, had one of its federal permits revoked in March by the Environmental Protection Agency. Shell, the project’s codeveloper, officially withdrew from the project last week. As governor, Sherrill’s ability to counter federal anti-wind policies will be limited. But she can make sure the state remains a player in the industry, which is still advancing in nearby New York. In that state, one project, South Fork Wind, is fully operational, and another, Empire Wind, is under construction. Sherrill, for example, could expand funding for programs that train workers for wind jobs. She could increase legal pressure against the Trump administration for obstructing certain projects, as Rhode Island and Connecticut have done. New Jersey’s Attorney General Matthew Platkin, along with 17 other attorneys general, is already suing the Trump administration over its broad-reaching executive order that froze federal permitting for wind power. Her campaign promise to freeze New Jerseyans’ utility rates through a State of Emergency declaration on Day 1 and to push back on federal overreach signifies a willingness to come out fighting. “Governor-elect Sherrill campaigned on the need for bold action to reduce family energy costs. [The American Clean Power Association] welcomes the Governor-elect’s recognition that clean power is key to meeting demand and keeping costs low,” said Jason Grumet, CEO of the trade group, in a statement released shortly after Sherrill’s acceptance speech. In January, Sherrill will take the reins from Murphy, who set New Jersey on a path to building a zero-emissions power grid by 2035 but ultimately failed to generate any new offshore wind power. New Jersey voted on Tuesday for a candidate who aims to keep the state’s climate ambitions alive. The long-held vision of offshore wind turbines being central to these goals endures—for now. 

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Texas’ independent grid is meeting a large portion of the state’s rising electricity demand through its growing fleet of solar facilities, wind power generators and batteries, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA).  In the first nine months of 2025, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) saw record demand on the grid compared with the same period in previous years.  The Texas grid also had the fastest electricity demand growth among US electric grids between 2024 and 2025, a trend expected to continue through next year. ERCOT is tracking more than 200 gigawatts of large load interconnection requests—large energy users like data centers and industrial facilities looking to connect and buy power from Texas’ wholesale electricity market.  Utility-scale solar has led the growing number of renewable energy sources helping ERCOT meet its skyrocketing demand. Together, wind and solar generation met more than one third of ERCOT’s electricity demand in the first nine months of this year, according to the EIA.   > “It wouldn’t be happening if they weren’t also reliable and cost effective.” Solar power has generated 45 terrawatt hours of electricity so far this year—50 percent more than the same period in 2024 and nearly four times more than the same period in 2021.  The availability of solar generation in ERCOT also has reduced the need for gas-fired generation during midday hours, according to the EIA. This energy production comes despite attempts by some Texas lawmakers earlier this year to restrict renewable development across the state. For Dennis Wamsted, an energy analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, ERCOT’s growing share of renewables shows that it’s the preferred resource type when an energy market is open, like Texas’ deregulated market.  “People are going to build solar and wind, and now battery storage, essentially as quickly as they possibly can,” Wamsted said. “It’s economic—it is what customers want.”  ERCOT has become the place to build power projects quickly in the US. Because it’s the grid with the fastest interconnection process, developers are able to get projects online within a few years.  The friendly regulatory environment has made it the norm for some generators to not only sell to the ERCOT market, but to also sell their power privately to companies through power purchase agreements. It allows both the generator and the company to lock in a price, offering them both cost security for years from an otherwise shifting ERCOT market. These options make ERCOT the grid to build renewables in bulk, Wamsted said.  “It wouldn’t be happening if they weren’t also reliable and cost effective,” Wamsted said of renewables. “Nobody’s running out to build something that’s overpriced and can’t be counted on.”  Throughout the next five years, supply should be able to keep up with the quick pace of demand coming to ERCOT, said Nathalie Limandibhratha, BloombergNEF’s US power analyst. But BloombergNEF’s forecasts show that in 10 years, Texas’ supply will no longer be able to keep up. There will be an imbalance if demand continues to march on at the same pace, said Limandibhratha.  While solar and storage are expected to maintain similar growth rates, part of the supply shortfall is due to the decline of thermal energy additions after 2030, Limandibhratha said. Meanwhile, in the last year, BloombergNEF’s forecast for solar and storage was revised upward significantly as the market moves quickly, she said. While natural gas remains the largest source of electricity within ERCOT, meeting 43 percent of 2025 demand, its generation has flattened in recent years, according to the EIA. In the first nine months of 2023 and 2024, natural gas powered 47 percent of the state’s electricity.  Wind generation this year through September totaled 87 terrawatt hours, up 4 percent compared to the same period in 2024 and 36 percent since 2021. This growth comes despite political headwinds against the resource type. In the first days of his second term, President Donald Trump pledged to end new developments of wind energy, and his administration has since taken numerous steps to block projects.  Even with those disruptions and the influx of solar and storage, ERCOT continues to be a leader in securing new wind interconnections, according to a joint report from Wood Mackenzie and the American Clean Power Association published last week. But it’s expected that the Midwest will lead wind installations in 2027 and 2028, surpassing Texas. 

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Last June, record flooding swept through the rural town of Rock Valley, Iowa. As the wall of water began to overtake Chelsie Ver Mulm’s 10-acre plot of land, she rushed into action, rapidly evacuating her family’s gaggle of cows, sheep, chickens, pigs, horses, and goats to higher ground. When the floodwaters receded, Ver Mulm returned to find much of her family’s farm, equipment, and pasture destroyed. In the days and weeks that followed, more than a dozen animals died from stress and diseases contracted from the flood.  From there, the costs of rebuilding continued to climb. Because the flood had ravaged the surrounding areas, Orange Creek Farms also lost many of its customers, who were grappling with damages of their own and could no longer afford to buy local food. All the while, Ver Mulm kept applying to emergency USDA loans and disaster relief programs—only to be denied again and again as the tiny operation confronted burdensome application issues and eligibility restrictions.  Because of the steep costs of recovery, the farm has fallen behind on its bills, and caring for a bigger herd became too expensive. Now, Orange Creek Farms is down from 40 cattle to just four. All told, the flood put the business in a “really, really bad spot,” according to Ver Mulm. So in April, almost a year after the flood, she made a last-ditch effort to turn things around, applying for a USDA Rural Development grant that she was hoping could help them offset their losses and keep the business afloat.  When the government shutdown began more than a month ago, the USDA furloughed the vast majority of the remaining workforce and brought most services to a sudden halt. Ver Mulm still hadn’t heard back about her application—and now the waiting is itself becoming the problem. As the shutdown nears a historic, yet grim, milestone, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that it has already created financial losses of at least $7 billion for the US economy. Battling some of the most consequential impacts of these losses are those who grow and sell the food we eat—especially the farmers and ranchers also dealing with the compounding effects of extreme weather and an eroding federal safety net.  Approximately 20,000 Department of Agriculture staffers have lost their jobs this year—a rapid and radical transformation of the agency resulting in administrative struggles, overworked employees, and significant delays in processing of payments and financial assistance applications. This summer, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins released a controversial reorganization plan that experts expect to result in further staff reductions and a skeleton workforce. The USDA announced last week that approximately 2,100 county-level USDA Farm Service Agency offices would be reopened beginning Thursday, October 23, with two staffers reinstated per office, to help farmers get access to $3 billion in aid from existing programs, though further details about what programs, payments, and services will be resumed and to what extent remain unclear.  All the while, small farmers and ranchers have spent the last 10 months facing off against mounting pressures wrought by major administrative changes to food and agriculture policy that have exacerbated the nation’s exceedingly volatile farm economy. The impact on producers, whose businesses require advance planning—in a time of the year normally filled with finalizing future growing plans, buying seeds and other resources, and shoring up winter reserves—will only grow the longer the shutdown persists. And so will the broader economic and societal ripple effects unfurling nationwide: The Trump administration initially declared that it would not tap into billions of dollars in emergency funding that Congress set aside to maintain the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program during times of crisis. Without that funding, the USDA said that SNAP benefits, used by nearly 42 million Americans who struggle to afford groceries, would be suspended on November 1. (SNAP is also a crucial source of income for many small farmers.) Last week, after more than two dozen states—and, separately, a coalition of local governments, nonprofits, and religious groups—sued the USDA, two federal courts ruled that the department must tap into those contingency funds to cover at least some of the SNAP benefits for November. On Monday, the Trump administration said it would comply, but would not fund the program further—and that there would be only partial payments this month.  Prior to the rulings, Secretary Rollins blamed Democrats for the shutdown and possible loss of benefits for millions of Americans, while stating (falsely) that the department did not have the legal authority to distribute the agency’s contingency funding. In a Friday press conference, she criticized SNAP, remarking that the shutdown exposed a program that, under the purview of the Biden administration, became “so corrupt.”  The USDA did not immediately respond to Grist’s request for comment.  Meanwhile, Hill policymakers have continued to sling accusations across the aisle in their budget standoff over federal healthcare. Trump has urged congressional Republicans to unilaterally end the shutdown by getting rid of the filibuster, an unprecedented move by the president, though many GOP senators remain in support of the rule. If Congress is still at an impasse come early next week, it would mark the longest shutdown in US history. Every day of delay brings more prolonged uncertainty to farmers like Ver Mulm. Even if lawmakers manage to vote to reopen the government in the near future, the second-generation Iowa farmer worries that the backlog USDA staffers will be facing after all the time spent furloughed, compounded by the already-strained workforce, will translate to further bottlenecks.  Over the last year, Ver Mulm has drained her savings to stave off having to sell the farm, living off of credit cards. Now, her credit score is shot, and Orange Creek Farms is on the cusp of insolvency. And with each day that passes with the government remaining in limbo, the small window to save their farm gets smaller. Ver Mulm is emotionally preparing herself for what’s to come—a growing likelihood that her family will soon need to close the chapter on feeding their community. “We’ve exhausted all of our options,” she said. “This grant is our last chance to keep the farm going. It’s our last lifeline.”  This story was updated from the original version to reflect the latest news related to the emergency SNAP funding.