Category: Uncategorized

An unusually large majority of Americans agree that the recent scenes of Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in Minneapolis are disturbing.

Federal immigration agents have deployed with weapons and tactics more commonly associated with military operations than with civilian law enforcement. The federal government has sidelined state and local officials, and it has cut them out of investigations into whether state and local law has been violated.

It’s understandable to look at what’s happening and reach a familiar conclusion: This looks like a slide into authoritarianism.

There is no question that the threat of democratic backsliding is real. President Donald Trump has long treated federal authority not as a shared constitutional set of rules and obligations but as a personal instrument of control.

In my research on the presidency and state power, including my latest book with Sidney Milkis, “Subverting the Republic,” I have argued that the Trump administration has systematically weakened the norms and practices that once constrained executive power – often by turning federalism itself into a weapon of national administrative power.

But there is another possibility worth taking seriously, one that cuts against Americans’ instincts at moments like this. What if what America is seeing is not institutional collapse but institutional friction: the system doing what it was designed to do, even if it looks ugly when it does it?

For many Americans, federalism is little more than a civics term – something about states’ rights or decentralization.

In practice, however, federalism functions less as a clean division of authority and more as a system for managing conflict among multiple governments with overlapping jurisdiction. Federalism does not block national authority. It ensures that national decisions are subject to challenge, delay and revision by other levels of government.

Dividing up authority

At its core, federalism works through a small number of institutional mechanics – concrete ways of keeping authority divided, exposed and contestable. Minneapolis shows each of them in action.

First, there’s what’s called “jurisdictional overlap.”

State, local and federal authorities all claim the right to govern the same people and places. In Minneapolis, that overlap is unavoidable: Federal immigration agents, state law enforcement, city officials and county prosecutors all assert authority over the same streets, residents and incidents. And they disagree sharply about how that authority should be exercised.

Second, there’s institutional rivalry.

Because authority is divided, no single level of government can fully monopolize legitimacy. And that creates tension. That rivalry is visible in the refusal of state and local officials across the country to simply defer to federal enforcement.

Instead, governors, mayors and attorneys general have turned to courts, demanded access to evidence and challenged efforts to exclude them from investigations. That’s evident in Minneapolis and also in states that have witnessed the administration’s deployment of National Guard troops against the will of their Democratic governors.

It’s easy to imagine a world where state and local prosecutors would not have to jump through so many procedural hoops to get access to evidence for the death of citizens within their jurisdiction. But consider the alternative.

If state and local officials were barred without consent from seeking evidence – the absence of federalism – or if local institutions had no standing to contest how national power is exercised there, federal authority would operate not just forcefully but without meaningful political constraint.

Third, confrontation is local and place-specific.

Federalism pushes conflict into the open. Power struggles become visible, noisy and politically costly. What is easy to miss is why this matters.

Federalism was necessary at the time of the Constitution’s creation because Americans did not share a single political identity. They could not decide whether they were members of one big community or many small communities.

In maintaining their state governments and creating a new federal government, they chose to be both at the same time. And although American politics nationalized to a remarkable degree over the 20th century, federal authority is still exercised in concrete places. Federal authority still must contend with communities that have civic identities and whose moral expectations may differ sharply from those assumed by national actors.

In Minneapolis it has collided with a political community that does not experience federal immigration enforcement as ordinary law enforcement.

The chaos of federalism

Federalism is not designed to keep things calm. It is designed to keep power unsettled – so that authority cannot move smoothly, silently or all at once.

By dividing responsibility and encouraging overlap, federalism ensures that power has to push, explain and defend itself at every step.

“A little chaos,” the scholar Daniel Elazar has said, “is a good thing!”

As chaos goes, though, federalism is more often credited for Trump’s ascent. He won the presidency through the Electoral College – a federalist institution that allocates power by state rather than by national popular vote, rewarding geographically concentrated support even without a national majority.

Partisan redistricting, which takes place in the states, further amplifies that advantage by insulating Republicans in Congress from electoral backlash. And decentralized election administration – in which local officials control voter registration, ballot access and certification – can produce vulnerabilities that Trump has exploited in contesting state certification processes and pressuring local election officials after close losses.

Forceful but accountable

It’s helpful to also understand how Minneapolis is different from the most well-known instances of aggressive federal power imposed on unwilling states: the civil rights era.

Then, too, national authority was asserted forcefully. Federal marshals escorted the Black student James Meredith into the University of Mississippi in 1962 over the objections of state officials and local crowds. In Little Rock in 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent in U.S. Army troops after Gov. Orval Faubus attempted to block the racial integration of Central High School.

Violence accompanied these interventions. Riots broke out in Oxford, Mississippi. Protesters and bystanders were killed in clashes with police and federal authorities in Birmingham and Selma, Alabama.

What mattered during the civil rights era was not widespread agreement at the outset – nationwide resistance to integration was fierce and sustained. Rather, it was the way federal authority was exercised through existing constitutional channels.

Presidents acted through courts, statutes and recognizable chains of command. State resistance triggered formal responses. Federal power was forceful, but it remained legible, bounded and institutionally accountable.

Those interventions eventually gained public acceptance. But in that process, federalism was tarnished by its association with Southern racism and recast as an obstacle to progress rather than the institutional framework through which progress was contested and enforced.

After the civil rights era, many Americans came to assume that national power would normally be aligned with progressive moral aims – and that when it was, federalism was a problem to be overcome.

Minneapolis exposes the fragility of that assumption. Federalism does not distinguish between good and bad causes. It does not certify power because history is “on the right side.” It simply keeps power contestable.

When national authority is exercised without broad moral agreement, federalism does not stop it. It only prevents it from settling quietly.

Why talk about federalism now, at a time of widespread public indignation?

Because in the long arc of federalism’s development, it has routinely proven to be the last point in our constitutional system where power runs into opposition. And when authority no longer encounters rival institutions and politically independent officials, authoritarianism stops being an abstraction.

Nicholas Jacobs does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

In 2009, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency formally declared that greenhouse gas emissions, including from vehicles and fossil fuel power plants, endanger public health and welfare. The decision, known as the endangerment finding, was based on years of evidence, and it has underpinned EPA actions on climate change ever since.

The Trump administration now wants to tear up that finding as it tries to roll back climate regulations on everything from vehicles to industries.

But the move might not be as simple as the administration hopes.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin sent a proposed rule to the White House Office of Management and Budget in early January 2026 to rescind the endangerment finding. Now, a Washington Post report suggests, action on it may be delayed over concerns that the move wouldn’t withstand legal challenges.

Cracks in the administration’s plan are already evident. On Jan. 30, a federal judge ruled that the Department of Energy violated the law when it handpicked five researchers to write the climate science review that the EPA is using to defend its plan. The ruling doesn’t necessarily stop the EPA, but it raises questions.

There’s no question that if the EPA does rescind the endangerment finding that the move would be challenged in court. The world just lived through the three hottest years on record, evidence of worsening climate change is stronger now than ever before, and people across the U.S. are increasingly experiencing the harm firsthand.

Several legal issues have the potential to stop the EPA’s effort. They include emails submitted in a court case that suggest political appointees sought to direct the scientific review.

To understand how we got here, it helps to look at history for some context.

The Supreme Court started it

The endangerment finding stemmed from a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA.

The court found that various greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, were “pollutants covered by the Clean Air Act,” and it gave the EPA an explicit set of instructions.

The court wrote that the “EPA must determine whether or not emissions from new motor vehicles cause or contribute to air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.”

But the Supreme Court did not order the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Only if the EPA found that emissions were harmful would the agency be required, by law, “to establish national ambient air quality standards for certain common and widespread pollutants based on the latest science” – meaning greenhouse gases.

The EPA was required to follow formal procedures – including reviewing the scientific research, assessing the risks and taking public comment – and then determine whether the observed and projected harms were sufficient to justify publishing an “endangerment finding.”

That process took two years. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced on Dec. 7, 2009, that the then-current and projected concentrations of six key greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride – threatened the public health and welfare of current and future generations.

Challenges to the finding erupted immediately.

Jackson denied 10 petitions received in 2009-2010 that called on the administration to reconsider the finding.

On June 26, 2012, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld the endangerment finding and regulations that the EPA had issued under the Clean Air Act for passenger vehicles and permitting procedures for stationary sources, such as power plants.

This latest challenge is different.

It came directly from the Trump administration without going through normal channels. It was, though, entirely consistent with both the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan for the Trump administration and President Donald Trump’s dismissive perspective on climate risk.

Trump’s burden of proof

To legally reverse the 2009 finding, the agency must go through the same evaluation process as before. According to conditions outlined in the Clean Air Act, the reversal of the 2009 finding must be justified by a thorough and complete review of the current science and not just be political posturing.

That’s a tough task.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright has talked publicly about how he handpicked the five researchers who wrote the scientific research review. A judge has now found that the effort violated the 1972 Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires that agency-chosen panels providing policy advice to the government conduct their work in public.

All five members of the committee had been outspoken critics of mainstream climate science. Their report, released in summer 2025, was widely criticized for inaccuracies in what they referenced and its failure to represent the current science.

Scientific research available today clearly shows that greenhouse gas emissions harm public health and welfare. Importantly, evidence collected since 2009 is even stronger now than it was when the first endangerment finding was written, approved and implemented.

For example, a 2025 review by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine determined that the evidence supporting the endangerment finding is even stronger today than it was in 2009. A 2019 peer-reviewed assessment of the evidence related to greenhouse gas emissions’ role in climate change came to the same conclusion.

The Sixth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a report produced by hundreds of scientists from around the world, found in 2023 that “adverse impacts of human-caused climate change will continue to intensify.”

In other words, greenhouse gas emissions were causing harm in 2009, and the harm is worse now and will be even worse in the future without steps to reduce emissions.

In public comments on the Department of Energy’s problematic 2025 review, a group of climate experts from around the world reached the same conclusion, adding that the Department of Energy’s Climate Working Group review “fails to adequately represent this reality.”

What happens if EPA does drop the endangerment finding

As an economist who has studied the effects of climate change for over 40 years, I am concerned that the EPA rescinding the endangerment finding on the basis of faulty scientific assessment would lead to faster efforts to roll back U.S. climate regulations meant to slow climate change.

It would also give the administration cover for further actions that would defund more science programs, stop the collection of valuable data, freeze hiring and discourage a generation of emerging science talent.

Cases typically take years to wind through the courts. Unless a judge issued an injunction, I would expect to see a continuing retreat from efforts to reduce climate change while the court process plays out.

I see no scenario in which a legal challenge doesn’t end up before the Supreme Court. I would hope that both the enormous amount of scientific evidence and the words in the preamble of the U.S. Constitution would have some significant sway in the court’s considerations. It starts, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union,” and includes in its list of principles, “promote the general Welfare.”

Gary W. Yohe does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

The U.S. Department of State has announced that starting on Jan. 21, 2026, it has indefinitely stopped issuing immigrant visas for people from 75 countries, claiming concerns that some immigrants may rely on public benefits once they get to the United States.

While applications may still be processed, no immigrant visas will be issued during the pause, including family-based visas for U.S. citizens to sponsor their parents.

This focus leaves little room for recognizing the unpaid caregiving and everyday family support provided by immigrant parents already living in the U.S., support that allows others, including their U.S. citizen children, to remain employed and households to stay stable.

Family-based immigration, particularly visas that allow U.S. citizens to sponsor their parents, strengthens social capital: the networks of care and shared responsibility that allow people to work, stay healthy and raise children who become productive members of society. Weakening these networks risks undermining the social foundations of long-term economic growth.

As a scholar who studies family relationship dynamics and social capital, I have observed how these family ties are not simply private family matters but a public good that sustains community well-being. When parents are present, families are better able to share child care, navigate illness and remain economically active.

Family reunification as social infrastructure

The United States offers no national paid family leave, unlike countries such as Finland and Hungary, which guarantee paid time off to care for children, aging parents or ill family members. Instead, the U.S. provides only unpaid leave under federal law.

Consequently, many families rely on informal caregiving to balance work and care. Research shows that when adequate support is unavailable, workers, especially parents, are more likely to reduce hours or leave the labor force altogether.

This strain is widespread across the U.S.: Roughly 63 million Americans, nearly 1 in 4 adults, provide unpaid care for a family member with a serious health condition or disability, in addition to unpaid child care.

Sponsored immigrant parents often become part of this informal care system. They provide child care, prepare meals and supervise children.

In many U.S. states, the cost of child care now exceeds in-state college tuition, pushing families to reduce formal care or rely on relatives.

Family reunification, therefore, functions as social infrastructure, filling gaps that markets and public systems do not, a role family scholars have emphasized.

Decades of research illustrates this dynamic. In their book “Immigrant America,” sociologists Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut show that immigrant families often rely on close family ties when government support is limited.

Families also pool resources by living together and combining time, skills and income to cover basic needs. These arrangements help households cope with job instability, illness and long work hours. They also reduce reliance on formal child care and paid domestic labor.

Economic development does not happen in isolation from family life. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s framework on measuring well-being emphasizes that economic performance, health, social connections and family support are interconnected rather than separate policy domains. When people are supported and less stressed, they are healthier and more productive.

Sociologist James Coleman similarly has noted that children raised in stable, supportive households are more likely to succeed in school and contribute meaningfully as adults. Family reunification, therefore, is an investment in the social relationships that underpin economic prosperity.

Social capital and child development

Immigrant grandparents and extended kin often play an active role in children’s lives. They help with learning, language development and daily routines.

This kind of family involvement also helps explain what scholars call the “immigrant paradox,” in which many immigrant children achieve better-than-expected academic and emotional results despite socioeconomic challenges.

As of 2023, about 19 million U.S. children, roughly 1 in 4, have at least one parent who is an immigrant. Therefore, policies that restrict family reunification shape the everyday environments in which millions of children grow up. This influences the support they receive at home and the workforce they will help build as adults.

Social capital is not public dependency

Concerns raised by federal policymakers that immigrants will become a “burden on taxpayers” shape restrictions on family-based immigration. These concerns are reflected in federal policy through the Department of Homeland Security’s public charge rule, which allows immigration officials to assess whether applicants are likely to rely primarily on government assistance such as cash welfare or long-term public support for basic needs.

However, analyses of 2022 U.S. Census data show that immigrants overall use public assistance at lower rates than native-born Americans.

In practice, family reunification is less about public dependency and more about sustaining the relationships that allow families and the economy to function.

The question for policymakers is not whether the U.S. can afford to support family reunification, but whether it can afford not to. In a country facing caregiver shortages, rising parental stress and limited public care infrastructure, investing in social capital through family reunification may be one of the most effective and overlooked ways to support long-term economic growth.

Sothy Eng does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

The Trump administration says federal agents have “absolute immunity” from prosecution in Minneapolis. Department of Justice and Homeland Security officials have indicated that criminal investigations into the killings by immigration agents of Minneapolis protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti are inappropriate, declaring that both were domestic terrorists.

The killing of Good and Pretti raises legal, tactical and policy questions regarding law enforcement practices by federal agents.

In December 2025, the Department of Homeland Security launched “Operation Metro Surge” to enforce immigration laws in Minneapolis. The operation is being conducted by federal agents with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. One of the stated goals of Metro Surge is to arrest the “worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens.”

Metro Surge has also affected the lives of U.S. citizens, including citizens protesting immigration enforcement efforts. On Jan. 7, 2026, Good – a 37-year-old U.S. citizen and mother of three – was shot and killed in her vehicle by an ICE agent on a residential street in Minneapolis. On Jan. 24, 2026, CBP agents shot and killed 37-year-old Pretti, a U.S. citizen, on a public street in Minneapolis.

As a policing scholar and former FBI special agent, I believe these cases illustrate how some federal agents are engaging with the public in a way that undermines established principles of policing and constitutional law.

Law of deadly force

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects the “right of the people to be secure in their persons … against unreasonable … seizures.” A law enforcement officer’s use of force – including deadly force – is considered in law to be a seizure and must be reasonable.

In the 1989 decision Graham v. Connor, the U.S. Supreme Court construed the objective “reasonableness” of force based upon “the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.” The court explained “reasonableness” in light of the idea that police officers must sometimes make “split-second” judgments.

In Tennessee v. Garner, the Supreme Court in 1985 established that the use of deadly force to prevent the escape of a fleeing suspect is unreasonable unless the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.

These legal principles form the basis of DHS deadly force policy, which is similar to the policy I followed as an FBI agent: Law enforcement officers, or LEOs, “may use deadly force only when the LEO has a reasonable belief that the subject of such force poses an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury to the LEO or to another person.”

The legal question raised by the Good and Pretti killings is whether the officers had a reasonable belief that Good and Pretti posed an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury to the officers.

Moments before the ICE agent killed Good, the agent walked around Good’s parked vehicle filming Good with his phone in one hand. Good, sitting behind the wheel in her car, says “That’s fine dude, I’m not mad at you.”

As the shooting agent positions himself in front of Good’s vehicle, a second agent walks quickly toward Good’s vehicle and tries to open the door and reach inside. Good turns her steering wheel and tries to drive away – what a law enforcement agent could interpret as potentially an act of fleeing. The agent in front of Good’s vehicle shoots Good three times as she drives by him. He then mutters, “f-cking b-tch,” and walks away from Good’s crashed vehicle. There is dispute about whether Good’s vehicle grazed the agent.

Moments before Pretti was killed by federal agents, he was standing in a public street when agents approached him and sprayed him with a chemical agent. Pretti’s hands are visible and show that he is holding a cellphone.

The agents wrestle Pretti to the ground and repeatedly beat him with an object. Pretti is not seen brandishing a firearm. However, an agent approaches Pretti during the scuffle and appears to remove a firearm from Pretti’s waistband. Shortly thereafter, agents shoot Pretti 10 times. Pretti had kicked the taillight of a law enforcement vehicle – and was then tackled and tear-gassed by agents – 11 days before he was killed.

Some former federal prosecutors argue that these facts in the Good and Pretti cases warrant a thorough criminal investigation regarding whether federal agents illegally used lethal force in the killings. The central legal question is whether the evidence shows that the agents reasonably feared for their lives, or whether they acted unlawfully out of anger, frustration, retaliation or some other unjustified mental state.

Tactics, policy and split-second decisions

Beyond legal questions, Operation Metro Surge raises tactical and policy questions about DHS law enforcement practices.

State, local and federal law enforcement officers are required to follow firearms safety rules. While training at the FBI Academy at Quantico, I was required to learn and follow the cardinal safety rules, which include (1) treating all firearms as loaded, (2) keeping firearms pointed in a safe direction and (3) keeping one’s finger off the trigger until one is ready to press it.

These rules help keep officers and the public safe, including by preventing unintentional discharges of firearms.

There were multiple bystanders and officers in the immediate vicinity of both the Good and the Pretti shootings. That raised risks associated with unintentional discharges and jeopardizing officers’ ability to meet the requirement to respect human life.

DHS officers specifically are also required to “employ tactics and techniques that effectively bring an incident under control while promoting the safety of LEOs and the public,” which includes avoiding “intentionally and unreasonably placing themselves in positions in which they have no alternative to using deadly force.”

In both the Good and the Pretti cases, federal agents placed themselves in poor tactical positions that increased the likelihood of using deadly force.

When feasible, DHS agents are required to issue a verbal warning to comply with the agent’s instructions. Agents rushed to physically remove Good from her vehicle and similarly rushed to push Pretti off the street and then spray him with a chemical agent. There is reason to think the agents could have taken a more measured, composed and communicative approach to de-escalate the situation.

These tactical and policy principles reveal that the legal analysis of an agent’s “split-second” decision to use deadly force is not the only issue raised by these cases. Analysis of the seconds and minutes leading to the use of force is also crucial.

Warriors in the community

ICE and CBP federal agents are not police officers. However, they are law enforcement officers engaged in policing. Operation Metro Surge has made these agents highly visible.

Instead of the more traditional, methodical and long-term investigations they normally conduct, federal agents are now routinely taking on more of a traditional police role in the public eye. This role ranges from managing traffic violations to maintaining order during chaotic public protests.

Although the surge has brought these agents closer to a traditional police role, they are pursuing a militarized warrior model of policing.

Masked federal agents in tactical gear roaming the streets of Minneapolis blur the line between civilian and military policing. Coupled with events such as the killings of Good and Pretti, it is unsurprising that public trust is eroding not only in federal law enforcement agencies such as ICE but also in police departments generally.

Policing is difficult work under any circumstance. If federal agents continue to increase their interactions with the public, I believe they will need to embrace tactics from community policing and what is called procedurally just models of policing. These models emphasize building popular legitimacy by reinforcing relationships – through honest cooperation and partnership between law enforcement officers and the public.

The rule of law

Publicly available facts and evidence raise significant questions about whether federal agents acted contrary to established principles of policing and constitutional law in the deaths of Good and Pretti.

The rule of law is a cornerstone of liberal democracies that limits the exercise of discretionary or arbitrary power by government officials. This idea includes holding officials accountable when there is evidence of unauthorized uses of power. A thorough investigation into DHS tactics, I believe, is necessary to preserve the rule of law.

Luke William Hunt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Tens of millions of Americans have now seen video of the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis. The activities organized in response have not been initiated by outside agitators or left-wing zealots, but, rather, by everyday Americans protesting the tactics of federal agents in that city.

These community members are communicating over encrypted messaging apps such as Signal and using their cellphones to record Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol officers. Some have been using apps such as ICEBlock to help monitor ICE activities. They are using 3D printers to mass-produce whistles for community members to blow to alert each other when federal agents are in the area.

While the technology in some of these instances is new, this pattern – grassroots activists using the latest technology literally at their fingertips – is older than the republic itself. As a legal scholar who has studied American social movements and their relationship to technology, I see that what regular Americans in Minneapolis are doing is part of a very American tradition: building on trusted interpersonal relationships by harnessing the most recent technology to supercharge their organizing.

From Colonial era to the Civil Rights Movement

As the first stirrings of the American revolutionary spirit emerged in the 1770s, leaders formed the committees of correspondence to coordinate among the Colonies and in 1774 formed the Continental Congress. They harnessed the power of the printing press to promote tracts such as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. One of the first acts of the new Congress was to create what it called the Constitutional Post, a mail system from the Maine territories to Georgia that enabled the colonists to communicate safely, out of reach of loyalist postmasters.

And the date Americans will be celebrating in 2026 as the 250th anniversary of the United States, July 4, commemorates when the drafters of the Declaration of Independence sent the final document to John Dunlap, rebel printer. In other words, what we celebrate as the birth of our nation is when the founders pressed “send.”

In the 1830s, as the battle over slavery in the new nation began to emerge, a new type of printing press, one powered by steam, helped supercharge the abolitionist movement. It could print antislavery broadsides much more rapidly and cheaply than manual presses.

The introduction of the telegraph in 1848 helped launch the women’s rights movement, spreading word of its convention in Seneca Falls, New York, while similar meetings had not quite caught the public’s imagination.

Fast-forward over 100 years in U.S. history to the Civil Rights Movement. Leaders of that movement embraced and harnessed the power of a new technology – television – and worked to create opportunities for broadcast media to beam images of authorities attacking young people in Birmingham, Alabama, and marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge outside Selma, Alabama, into living rooms across the United States. The images galvanized support for legislation such as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

Social movements today

Today, new technologies and capabilities such as the smartphone and social media are making it easier for activists – and even those who have never seen themselves as activists – to get involved and help their neighbors. But it’s important not to mistake the method of communication for a movement. Indeed, without people behind the smartphones or as members of a group chat, there is no movement.

And what is happening in Minneapolis and in places across the country is still people organizing. Mutual aid networks are sprouting up nearly everywhere that immigration enforcement agents are amassed to carry out the Trump administration’s deportation policies, helped but not supplanted by technology. These technologies are important tools to support and catalyze the on-the-ground work.

It’s also important for advocates and would-be advocates to know the limits of such technologies and the risks that they can pose. These tools can sap a movement of energy, such as when someone posts a meme or “likes” a message on a social media platform and thinks they have done their part to support a grassroots effort.

There are also risks with any of these digital technologies, something the founders realized when they created their independent postal system. That is, use of these tools can also facilitate surveillance, expose networks to disruption and make people vulnerable to doxing or worse: charges that they are aiding and abetting criminal behavior.

Technology and trust

Most importantly, while technological tools might facilitate communication, they are no substitute for trust, the type of trust that can be forged only in face-to-face encounters. And that’s another thing that activists across American history have known since before the nation’s founding.

Until the late 1960s, groups participating in the work of democracy have often formed themselves into what political scientist Theda Skocpol calls “translocal networks”: collectives organized into local chapters connected to state, regional and even national networks.

It was in those local chapters where Americans practiced what French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville described in his visit to the United States in the 1830s as uniquely American: the “infinite art” of association and organizing. Americans used this practice to solve all manner of local problems. The local manifestations of those groups would often then engage in larger campaigns, whether to promote women’s rights in the 19th century or civil rights in the 20th.

Today’s technologies are reigniting the kind of grassroots activism that is deeply rooted in trust and solidarity, one block, one text message, one video at a time. It is also a profoundly American method of protest, infused with and catalyzed – but not replaced – by the technology such movements embrace.

Ray Brescia does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Minneapolis residents say they feel besieged under what some are calling a fascist occupation. Thousands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been swarming a city whose vast majority in 2024 did not vote for Donald Trump – or for a paramilitary roundup of its diverse population.

Tragically, two residents have been killed by federal agents. Consequently, social media is aflame with comparisons of Trump’s immigration enforcers to Hitler’s Gestapo.

While comparisons to Hitler’s fascist regime are becoming common, I’d argue that it may be even more fitting to compare the present moment to a less-remembered but longer-lasting fascist regime: that of Francisco Franco, dictator of Spain from 1936 until his death in 1975.

In 2016, critics warned that Trump’s campaign rhetoric was grounded in textbook fascism, exhibiting signs such as racism, sexism and misogyny, nationalism, propaganda and more. In return, critics were met with intense backlash, accused of being hysterical or overly dramatic.

Now, even normally sober voices are sounding the alarm that America may be falling to fascist rule.

As a scholar of Spanish culture, I, too, see troubling parallels between Franco’s Spain and Trump’s America.

Putting them side by side, I believe, provides insightful tools that are needed to understand the magnitude of what’s at risk today.

Franco’s rise and reign

The Falange party started off as a a small extremist party on the margins of Spanish society, a society deeply troubled with political and economic instability. The party primarily preached a radical nationalism, a highly exclusive way to be and act Spanish. Traditional gender roles, monolingualism and Catholicism rallied people by offering absolutist comfort during uncertain times. Quickly, the Falange grew in power and prevalence until, ultimately, it moved mainstream.

By 1936, the party had garnered enough support from the Catholic Church, the military, and wealthy landowners and businessmen that a sizable amount of the population accepted Gen. Francisco Franco’s coup d’etat: a military crusade of sorts that sought to stop the perceived anarchy of liberals living in godless cities. His slogan, “¡Una, Grande, Libre!,” or “one, great, free,” mobilized people who shared the Falange’s anxieties.

Like the Falange, MAGA, the wing of the U.S. Republican Party named after Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again,” repeatedly vilifies the left, who mostly live in cities, as godless anarchists who live like vermin.

Once in power, the Francoist regime commissioned a secret police force, the Political-Social Brigade – known as the BPS – to “clean up house.” The BPS was charged with suppressing or killing any political, social, cultural or linguistic dissidents.

Weakening resistance

Franco not only weaponized the military but also proverbially enlisted the Catholic Church. He colluded with the clergy to convince parishioners, especially women, of their divine duty to multiply, instill nationalist Catholic values in their children, and thus reproduce ideological replicas of both the state and the church. From the pulpit, homemakers were extolled as “ángeles del hogar” and “heroínas de la patria,” or “angels of the home” and “heroines of the homeland.”

Together, Franco and the church constructed consent for social restrictions, including outlawing or criminalizing abortion, contraception, divorce, work by women and other women’s rights, along with even tolerating uxoricide, or the killing of wives, for their perceived sexual transgressions.

Some scholars contend that the repealing of women’s reproductive rights is the first step away from a fully democratic society. For this reason and more, many are concerned about the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent overturning of Roe v. Wade.

The #tradwife social media trend involves far-right platforms echoing Francoist-style ideologies of submission, restriction, dependence and white male dominance. One of TikTok’s most popular tradwife influencers, for instance, posted that “there is no higher calling than being a wife and a mother for a woman.” She also questioned young women attending college and rebuked, on air, wives who deny their husbands sexual intimacy.

Weakening the economy

Economically, Franco implemented autarkic policies, a system of limited trade designed to isolate Spain and protect it from anti-Spanish influences. He utilized high tariffs, strict quotas, border controls and currency manipulation, effectively impoverishing the nation and vastly enriching himself and his cronies.

These policies flew under the motto “¡Arriba España!,” or “Up Spain.” They nearly immediately triggered more than a decade of suffering known as the “hunger years.” An estimated 200,000 Spaniards died from famine and disease.

Under the slogan “America First” – Trump’s mutable but aggressive tariff regime – the $1 billion or more in personal wealth he’s accumulated while in office, along with his repeated attempts to cut nutrition benefits in blue states and his administration’s anti-vaccine policies may appear to be disconnected. But together, they galvanize an autarkic strategy that threatens to debilitate the country’s health.

Weakening the mind

Franco’s dictatorship systematically purged, exiled and repressed the country’s intellectual class. Many were forced to emigrate. Those who stayed in the country, such as the artist Joan Miró, were forced to bury their messages deeply within symbols and metaphor to evade censorship.

Currently in the U.S., banned books, banned words and phrases, and the slashing of academic and research funding across disciplines are causing the U.S. to experience “brain drain,” an exodus of members of the nation’s highly educated and skilled classes.

Furthermore, Franco conjoined the church, the state and education into one. I am tracking analogous moves in the U.S. The conservative group Turning Point USA has an educational division whose goal is to ‘reclaim” K-12 curriculum with white Christian nationalism.

Ongoing legislation that mandates public classrooms to display the Ten Commandments similarly violates religious freedom guarantees ratified in the constitution.

Drawing comparisons

Trump has frequently expressed admiration for contemporary dictators and last week stated that “sometimes you need a dictator.”

It is true that his tactics do not perfectly mirror Francoism or any other past fascist regime. But the work of civil rights scholar Michelle Alexander reminds us that systems of control do not disappear. They morph, evolve and adapt to sneak into modern contexts in less detectable ways. I see fascism like this.

Consider some of the recent activities in Minneapolis, and ask how they would be described if they were taking place in any other country.

Unidentified masked individuals in unmarked cars are forcibly entering homes without judicial warrants. These agents are killing, shooting and roughing up people, sometimes while handcuffed. They are tear-gassing peaceful protesters, assaulting and killing legal observers, and throwing flash grenades at bystanders. They are disappearing people of color, including four Native Americans and a toddler as young as 2, shipping them off to detention centers where allegations of abuse, neglect, sexual assault and even homicide are now frequent.

Government officials have spun deceptive narratives, or worse, lied about the administration’s actions.

In the wake of the public and political backlash following the killing of Alex Pretti, Trump signaled he would reduce immigration enforcement operations] in Minneapolis, only to turn around and have Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth authorize the use of an old military base near St. Paul, suggesting potential escalation, not de-escalation. Saying one thing while doing the opposite is a classic fascist trick warned about in history and literature alike.

The world has seen these tactics before. History shows the precedent and then supplies the bad ending. Comparing past Francoism to present Trumpism connects the past to the present and warns us about what could come.

Rachelle Wilson Tollemar does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Most of the Trump administration’s legal disputes involving the firing of high-level officials deal with the scope of presidential power.

On Jan. 21, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in one of the most significant cases of this kind to date. It was brought by Lisa Cook, a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. The Fed serves as the U.S. central bank and sets monetary policy – including a key interest rate that influences borrowing costs.

President Joe Biden nominated Cook in 2022, and she was sworn in in May of that year.

President Donald Trump fired her on Aug. 25, 2025, but a lower court temporarily reinstated Cook to her role on Sept. 9.

Based on the oral arguments, a majority of the court’s justices seem inclined to protect the Fed’s independence by treating this case as an employment dispute. As a law professor who specializes in employment law and follows the Supreme Court, I can explain how that might play out.

Why Cook’s case matters

To be sure, this is not a typical employment law case because Cook has far more legal rights to her job than most American workers.

The vast majority of U.S. workers are employed “at-will” – meaning they can be fired for any reason and severed from their jobs with no advance notice. Cook’s position is covered by the Federal Reserve Act, which states that board members will be appointed by the president to 14-year terms and can be terminated by the president, but only for “cause.”

A federal judge presiding over the case in the District of Columbia also ruled that Cook was entitled to “due process” before her termination – meaning some notice, an explanation of the evidence against her and an opportunity to respond.

Cook’s lawsuit has outsized importance because the Fed’s board oversees the Federal Reserve.

As former Fed governors explained in a friend-of-the-court brief, “effective monetary policy requires a commitment to long-term goals,” and the lengthy 14-year terms of board members “are designed to insulate” them “from short-term political pressures.”

In another brief to the court, economists also expressed concern that a loss of independence could undermine the dollar’s status as a global reserve currency, which tends to protect the U.S. during global shocks.

These concerns appear to be shared by the Supreme Court. During oral argument, for example, Justice Brett Kavanaugh repeatedly pressed the government’s lawyer to concede – and articulate – the importance of Fed independence, grilling him as if he were a first-year law student.

In a 2009 law review article, Kavanaugh wrote that it “may be worthwhile to insulate” the Federal Reserve Board “from direct presidential oversight.”

What can count as cause for firing someone?

The Department of Justice announced in September 2025 that it was investigating Cook for allegedly making false statements on mortgage applications in 2021. Cook has denied those allegations.

As law professor Jed Shugarman has observed, it’s possible that the court will not rule on Cook’s case beyond allowing the lower court to proceed to a final decision. This would be the most cautious approach, since multiple justices pointed out that the facts about Cook’s alleged wrongdoing were not fully developed.

If the Supreme Court offers legal guidance to the lower court, the question of what counts as cause under the Federal Reserve Act is far from clear. The statute does not define the term, which lacks a clear meaning.

Modern American employment law starts from the baseline assumption of at-will status, where cause doesn’t matter because workers can be terminated for any reason. The rare employment contracts that promise termination for cause – like for executives, football coaches or workers who belong to unions – spell out what cause means in the contract.

When must an offense occur if an official is to be fired over it?

The reference to termination for cause appeared in the original 1913 Federal Reserve Act. But it was taken out in 1933 and then added back in 1935 after a series of lengthy Senate hearings on Fed independence. To decide what the cause provision means for Cook today, the justices may delve into what cause meant back in 1935.

As I note in “The Master-Servant Doctrine: How Old Legal Rules Haunt the Modern Workplace,” my 2025 book, standards for conduct justifying termination have changed over time.

According to an influential study by law professors Jane Manners and Lev Menand, the historical meaning of cause for federal agency heads was based on “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”

The U.S. District Court applied this definition to Cook’s case, and inferred that cause only meant acts committed after she was appointed to the Fed’s Board of Governors. An act that predates the official’s Senate confirmation, the court explained, “has never been a basis for removal.”

At oral argument, the Supreme Court’s justices also focused on Congress’ purpose in enacting the firing-for-cause rule: to protect Fed independence from other branches of government.

This interpretation would, at minimum, protect Cook and other Fed governors from being fired due to policy differences with a president, such as Trump’s repeated complaints over the frequency and size of the Fed’s interest rate cuts.

An interpretation of this sort could be similar to antidiscrimination law or whistleblower law, which make it illegal for employers to fire someone for a fake or a flimsy reason to cover up their true motive – such as discrimination or retaliation.

What counts as due process?

As a matter of constitutional law, government workers who can only be terminated for cause have the right to receive “due process” from their employer prior to termination.

This process is known as a “Loudermill” hearing – named after the leading case on point – which generally consists of a presentation of the evidence against the worker and the opportunity to respond.

The lower court ruled that Cook had not been provided due process. At the Supreme Court, the government’s attorney tried to argue that Cook was given the equivalent of a Loudermill hearing, based on a Truth Social post that Trump made on Aug. 20, 2025, calling for her to resign. It was linked to apparent evidence in a news report about mortgage applications Cook filed in 2021.

The attorney argued that the five-day delay between Trump’s first post and Cook’s firing gave her an opportunity to respond.

Some Supreme Court justices expressed skepticism that social media posts can satisfy the Loudermill standard. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, for example, pointedly asked, “Why couldn’t those resources (used to litigate the case) have been put into a hearing?”

Yet I also got the sense that some justices, especially Kavanaugh, seemed reluctant to hang their hat on due process alone.

A hearing and an opportunity to respond – without a meaningful definition of “cause” – wouldn’t limit the reasons a member of the Fed could be terminated. It would only require a president to go through the motions of showing how he or she reached a foregone conclusion.

And, in my view, that is no substitute for independence.

Elizabeth C. Tippett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

From coast to coast, groups of people are springing up to protect members of their communities as Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents threaten them with violent enforcement.

In Portland, Oregon, community volunteers have delivered food boxes to migrant families scared to leave their homes. In Portland, Maine, nearly a thousand people turned out for a virtual American Civil Liberties Union “Know Your Rights” training event. And in Minneapolis and St. Paul, volunteers have formed networks to give warning with whistles and phone apps when ICE is prowling the streets.

As someone who for two decades has studied nonviolent movements in war zones, I see many parallels between these movements abroad and those that have been organized recently across the U.S. The communities I have studied – from Colombia to the Philippines to Syria – teach lessons about surviving in the midst of danger that Americans have been discovering instinctively over the past year.

These experiences show that protection of their neighbors is possible. Violence can bring feelings of fear, isolation and powerlessness, but unity can overcome fear, and nonviolence and discipline are key for denying the powerful pretexts for further escalation and harm.

But at the same time, the deaths of Americans Renée Good and Alex Pretti, who were part of a nonviolent movement and were killed by immigration agents in Minneapolis, make it clear that acting to protect neighbors requires courage, and prospects are not always certain.

Here are the core lessons I have learned from the people and the groups I have researched.

1. Organizing is the first step

Community organizing is the act of building social ties, setting decision-making procedures, sharing information and coordinating activities.

In Colombia, I found that it was the more organized communities with vibrant local councils that were better able to protect themselves by avoiding or opposing violence when caught between heavily armed insurgents, paramilitaries and state forces. These organizations provide reassurance to the more hesitant and encourage more people to join in.

America has a strong civic culture and history of organizing, dating back to the Civil Rights Movement and long before, and Minnesota is known for its strong social cohesion. It’s no wonder so many Minnesotans, as well as Chicagoans, Angelenos and other Americans have organized to aid their neighbors and press for justice.

Make no mistake, the act of organizing itself is powerful. I found that insights from the combatants of armed conflicts shed light on this. A former insurgent I interviewed in Colombia quoted to me an adage of Aristotle and Shakespeare: “A single swallow doesn’t make a summer” – meaning there’s safety in numbers.

A mass of people on its own can shift the calculus and behavior of those with weapons and deter them. It’s why there are now many visuals of ICE agents leaving the scene when outnumbered by community members.

2. Adopting nonviolent strategies

Organizing also enables communities to adopt nonviolent methods for accountability and protection without ratcheting up conflict.

These strategies are less political or partisan, since there is usually consensus around promoting safety, which makes it difficult for political figures to oppose. While recent polling on presidential approval and immigration policy still shows a partisan split, ICE is widely unpopular, and a large majority opposes its aggressive tactics.

Americans have taken up many of these nonviolent strategies. They have established early warning networks just as communities did in the Democratic Republic of Congo to guard against attacks by the Lord’s Resistance Army rebel group.

Whether with whistles or WhatsApp, such networks of protectors are sharing information with each other to identify threats and come to each other’s aid.

3. Setting up safe zones

Communities in places such as the Philippines have also set up safe zones or “peace zones” to publicize their desire to keep violence away from their residents. This is akin to the declaration of “sanctuary cities” in the U.S. for the issue of immigration.

Communities may also apply different kinds of pressure on armed aggressors. While protest is the most visible approach, dialogue is also possible. Pressure can take the form of persuasion as well as shaming to make trigger-happy agents think twice about what they’re doing and use restraint.

In the U.S., protectors have shown great creativity when it comes to exerting pressure. Grandmas and priests are visible symbols who have influence through their moral and spiritual status. The use of humor and farce – such as protesters dressed in frog suits – can help to de-escalate tensions.

It may not always seem like it, but reputations and concerns about accountability matter, even to bullies. That’s why ICE agents don’t want to be seen enacting violence. Hence the face masks, the snatching of protesters’ phones and the misleading statements by officials about violent encounters.

4. Finding the facts

In the “fog of war,” the powerful may try to twist the facts and mislead and stigmatize communities and individuals to create pretexts for even greater uses of force.

In Colombia and Afghanistan, armed groups falsely accused individuals of being enemy collaborators. Communities addressed this by conducting their own investigations of those accused, after which community elders could vouch for them.

In the U.S., Americans are recording cellphone videos and collecting community evidence to counter official lies, such as accusations of domestic terrorism – and for future efforts to pursue accountability.

Standing up for others

Finally, what’s known as “accompaniment” is also important.

For example, international humanitarian staff and volunteers have gone to communities in places such as Colombia, Guatemala and South Sudan to let armed groups know that outsiders are watching them and acting as unarmed bodyguards for human rights defenders.

In the U.S., volunteers, citizens and religious leaders have used their less vulnerable social statuses to stand up for noncitizens who are under threat, even positioning themselves between immigration agents and those who may be at risk. People from around the country have also sent messages and traveled in solidarity to the cities and states where operations have been carried out.

Yet that can have consequences even for those who believe themselves less likely to be attacked. An ICE agent on Sept. 19, 2025, shot a clergyman in the head with a pepper ball while he was protesting at an ICE detention facility in Chicago.

Acting to protect oneself, other people and communities can involve risks. But civil society has power, too, and many communities in war zones in other countries have outlasted their oppressors. Americans are learning and doing what civilians in war zones worldwide have done for decades, while also writing their own story in the process.

Oliver Kaplan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

When I worked for the Environmental Protection Agency in the 2010s as an Obama administration appointee, I helped write and review dozens of regulations under the Clean Air Act. They included some groundbreaking rules, such as setting national air quality standards for ozone and fine particulate matter.

For each rule, we considered the costs to industry if the rule went into effect – and also the benefits to people’s health.

Study after study had demonstrated that being exposed to increased air pollution leads to more asthma attacks, more cardiovascular disease and people dying sooner than they would have otherwise. The flip side is obvious: Lower air pollution means fewer asthma attacks, fewer heart problems and longer lives.

To use this information in making decisions, we needed to have a way to compare the costs of additional pollution controls to industry, and ultimately, to consumers, against the benefits to public health. A balanced approach meant putting a dollar value on health benefits and weighing them against the seemingly more easily, though not always accurately, predicted costs of complying with the regulations.

We were able to make these decisions because environmental economists since the 1980s have developed and continually improved robust methodologies to quantify the costs to society of air pollution’s effect on human health, such as workdays lost and hospital visits.

Now, however, the Trump administration is dropping one whole side of that cost-benefit equation. The EPA wrote in January 2026 that it will stop quantifying the health benefits when assessing the monetary impact of new pollution regulations and regulation changes involving pollutants that contribute to ozone, or smog, and fine particulate matter, known as PM2.5.

The result leaves government decision-makers without a way to clearly compare regulatory costs to health benefits. It will almost certainly lead to an increase in harmful pollution that America has made so much progress reducing over the decades.

Cost-benefit rules go back to Ronald Reagan

The requirement that agencies conduct a thorough cost-benefit analysis dates back to President Ronald Reagan’s efforts to cut regulatory costs in the 1980s.

In 1981, Reagan issued an executive order requiring cost-benefit analysis for every economically significant regulation. He wrote that, to the extent permitted by law, “Regulatory action shall not be undertaken unless the potential benefits to society for the regulation outweigh the potential costs to society.”

In 1993, President Bill Clinton issued another executive order, EO 12866, which to this day governs federal agency rulemaking. It states: “In deciding whether and how to regulate, agencies should assess all costs and benefits of available regulatory alternatives. … Costs and benefits shall be understood to include both quantifiable measures (to the fullest extent that these can be usefully estimated) and qualitative measures of costs and benefits that are difficult to quantify, but nevertheless essential to consider.”

Quantifying human health benefits

In response to these directives, environmental economists have generated rigorous, peer-reviewed and data-driven methods and studies to inform both sides of the cost-benefit equation over the past four decades.

Estimating costs seems like it would be relatively straightforward, even if not always precisely on the money. Industry provides the EPA with predictions of costs for control technology and construction. Public review processes allow other experts to opine on those estimates and offer additional information.

For a system as complex as the power grid, however, it’s a lot more complicated. Starting in the 1990s, the EPA developed the Integrated Planning Model, a complex, systemwide model used to evaluate the cost and emissions impacts of proposed policies affecting power plants. That model has been improved and updated, and has repeatedly undergone peer review in the years since.

On the health benefits side, in 2003, EPA economists developed the Environmental Benefits Mapping and Analysis Program, which uses a wide range of air quality data to assess changes in health effects and estimates the monetized value of avoiding those health effects.

For example, when the EPA was developing carbon pollution standards for power plants in 2024, it estimated that the rule would cost industry US$0.98 billion a year while delivering $6.3 billion in annual health benefits. The benefit calculation includes the value of avoiding approximately 1,200 premature deaths; 870 hospital and emergency room visits; 1,900 cases of asthma onset; 360,000 cases of asthma symptoms; 48,000 school absence days; and 57,000 lost work days.

The EPA has used these toolsets and others for many regulatory decisions, such as determining how protective air quality standards should be or how much mercury coal-fired power plants should be permitted to emit. Its reports have documented continual refinement of modeling tools and use of more comprehensive data for calculating both costs and benefits.

Not every health benefit can be monetized, as the EPA often acknowledges in its regulatory impacts assessments. But we know from years of studies that lower levels of ozone and fine particles in the air we breathe mean fewer heart attacks, asthma cases and greater longevity.

The Trump EPA’s deregulation sledgehammer

The U.S. EPA upended the practice of monetizing health costs in January 2026. In a few paragraphs of a final rulemaking about emissions from combustion turbines, the EPA stated that it would no longer quantify the health benefits associated with reduced exposure to ozone and PM2.5.

The agency said that it does not deny that exposure to air pollution adversely affects human health, including shortening people’s lives. But, it says, it now believes the analytical methods used to quantify health benefits from reduced air pollution are not sufficiently supported by the underlying science and have provided a false sense of precision.

As a result, the EPA decided it will no longer include any quantification of benefits, though it will consider qualitative effects.

Understanding the qualitative effects is useful. But for the purposes of an actual rule, what matters is what gets quantified.

The new decision hands a sledgehammer to deregulators because in the world of cost-benefit analysis, if an impact isn’t monetized, it doesn’t exist.

What does this mean?

Under this new approach, the EPA will be able to justify more air pollution and less public health protection when it issues Clean Air Act rules.

Analysis of new or revised rules under the Clean Air Act will explain how much it would cost industry to comply with control requirements, and how much that might increase the cost of electricity, for example. But they will not balance those costs against the very real benefits to people associated with fewer hospital or doctor visits, less medication, fewer missed school or workdays, and longer life.

Costs will easily outweigh benefits in this new format, and it will be easy for officials to justify ending regulations that help improve public health across America.

I know the idea of putting a dollar value on extra years of human life can be uncomfortable. But without it, the cost for industry to comply with the regulation – for reducing power plant emissions that can make people sick, for example – is the only number that will count.

Janet McCabe worked in the U.S. EPA Office of Air and Radiation from 2009 to 2017 and was EPA’s deputy administrator from 2021 to 2024. She is a volunteer with the Environmental Protection Network.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation