• Trump Is Keeping Coal on Life Support. How Long Can It Last?

    Heading into President Donald Trump’s second term, coal looked like an industry nearing the end of its life. In 2025, however, regulatory rollbacks and surging power demand helped buoy an industry in trouble.

  • ICE Is Using Medicaid Data to Find Out Where Immigrants Live

    A recent court ruling has cleared the way for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to resume using states’ Medicaid data to find people who are in the country illegally. States fear immigrants will shy away from seeking health care.

  • The Trump Administration’s Push for Greenland: What to Know

    U.S. President Donald Trump has cast renewed focus on acquiring Greenland. The administration’s increasingly assertive push to take control of the Danish territory could have significant consequences for both the Arctic and the NATO alliance.

  • Trump’s Stated Reasons for Taking Greenland Are Wrong – but the Tactics Fit with the Plan to Limit China’s Economic Interests

    Trump’s national security rationale doesn’t make sense. Greenland, like the U.S., is a member of NATO, which provides a collective defense pact, meaning member nations will respond to an attack on any alliance member. If Trump’s real interest is blocking China’s access to Greenland’s critical minerals, then his coercive diplomacy is counterproductive in the extreme.

  • Report: Americans Pay for 96% of Trump's Foreign Tariffs

    New research shows Americans are paying almost the entire cost – 96% — of President Donald Trump’s tariffs, directly challenging his repeated assertion that foreign nations absorb the burden.“The claim that foreign countries pay these tariffs is a myth,” said Julian Hinz, research director at the Kiel Institute and one of the authors of the study. “The data show the opposite: Americans are footing the bill.”

  • Supreme Court Is Set to Rule on Constitutionality of Trump Tariffs – but Not Their Wisdom

    The question of whether a policy is legal or constitutional – which the justices are entertaining now with regard to Trump’s tariffs — isn’t the same as whether it’s wise. And as a trade economist, I worry that Trump’s tariffs also pose a threat to “economic democracy” – that is, the process of decision-making that incorporates the viewpoints of everyone affected by the decision.

  • Vaccine Myths That Won’t Die and How to Counter Them—Part 2

    This article and its Part 1 catalogue the debunked myths driving the vaccine skeptics who now run HHS. These myths share four fundamental errors: First, the conflation of temporal association with causation. Second, the confusion of regulatory paperwork with the totality of scientific evidence. Third, the demand for impossible standards. Fourth, the selective citation of evidence. The current political moment has given unprecedented platforms to vaccine skepticism. But politics cannot change biology.

  • Trump Eyes Greenland — but Does the U.S. Actually Need It for National Security?

    Some experts argue that a deal involving Denmark selling or ceding territory to the U.S. would be costly and unnecessary, particularly since the U.S. already has extensive access to Greenland.

  • New Ban Bars Half of Legal Immigrants, Even Citizens’ Spouses and Kids

    The State Department announced it will suspend immigrant visa processing for nationals of 75 countries starting this week. This ban builds on prior bans, and it brings the number of banned nationalities up to 93, or 42 percent of those in the world. Congress specifically barred discrimination based on national origin, but the courts the administration have invented ways around that prohibition.

  • The Sky is Full of Secrets: Glaring Vulnerabilities Discovered in Satellite Communications

    With $800 of off-the-shelf equipment and months worth of patience, a team of U.S. computer scientists set out to find out how well geostationary satellite communications are encrypted. And what they found was shocking.

  • Hybrid Risks Rise as U.S. Withdraws from International Organizations

    The United States’ decision to withdraw from many international organizations risks allowing Beijing and Moscow to further advance their undermining of global stability.

  • U.S. Withdraws from Nonproliferation Center in Ukraine

    Among the 66 international organizations, the Trump Administration has announced its intent to withdraw from the Science and Technology Center in Ukraine (STCU), an internationally funded organization based in Kyiv dedicated to preventing the proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.

  • Vaccine Myths That Won't Die and How to Counter Them—Part 1

    Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, has spent decades promoting vaccine skepticism. He has replaced scientists at different HHS such as CDC and NIH with vaccine skeptics and anti-vaccine activists. They have polluted the information environment with, and base their policy changes on, myths about the supposed risks of vaccines. Each of these myths has been studied extensively. Each has been refuted. And yet each persists, because misinformation travels faster than correction and because these myths tap into fears that are genuinely human.

  • Trump Is Trying to Kill Clean Energy. The Market Has Other Plans.

    The administration’s moves have done real damage to the nation’s ability to fight climate change. But strong countervailing forces — including falling prices for renewables, surging demand for electricity, and aggressive campaigns by states and cities to slash emissions — continue to drive the transition to clean energy. The result is a growing tension between federal policy and market reality, but in many ways, renewables are unstoppable.

  • Security Guards at Vogtle Nuclear Power Plant Demand Vote to Remove SPFPA Union Officials

    The NLRB is the federal agency responsible for enforcing federal labor law, a task that includes administering votes to install (or “certify”) and remove (or “decertify”) unions in workplaces. Security guards at Vogtle have collected enough signatures to prompt the NLR to administer union removal vote.