We started the year at the Prospect trying to figure out how to cover a regime out for vengeance and dismissive of the law. My contribution was to try and cover what those in power were aiming to do, who was rising to stop them, where they succeeded and where they fell short, and why it all mattered to you. Here are 12 examples chosen from my 217 (at last count) stories of the year.
We Found the $2 Trillion
The year began with Elon Musk and DOGE dominating the headlines. Their mission to slash federal spending was transparently ridiculous and destructive, but I wanted to accept the challenge on their terms, and find the real areas of fat in the federal budget. Spoiler alert: It was completely unrelated to what DOGE eventually targeted in spectacularly unsuccessful fashion. Read the story.
Elon Musk Offers Federal Workers an Unauthorized Buyout
Probationary Federal Employees Targeted for Mass Purge
Social Security Administration Could Cut Half Its Workforce
Vought Restores CFPB Procedure That Sustains Mortgage Markets
Those early days of the Trump second term were so frenzied, the only option was to keep up along with it. There were a lot of Signal chats, a lot of check-ins with sources, a lot of long nights and weekends put into this sampling of stories from the first month, focused mainly on the purge of the institutional memory of the federal government. By September, I wrote that the government had been shut down for months; this was where it began.
The Coup Has Failed
I took a lot of heat for this piece, written just a month or so after the inauguration, on how Trump was poised to create a lot of pain and heartache, but that the blitz to fundamentally change the nature of the U.S. government wasn’t going to triumph. I think the remainder of the year proved me right, with the near-universal acknowledgment of a lame-duck president, a Republican congressional majority on the verge of losing power, and an electorate screaming for something different. Read the story.
Also in my year in good calls: I said Elon Musk had 100 days left in government when he in fact had 100 days left in government; I said House maps wouldn’t save Trump and they aren’t; I said the tariffs were actually economic sanctions in a bid to bully countries and that’s exactly how Trump has approached them.
The Fault Line in Democratic Politics
To the extent that the country was facing a tipping point in 2025, it was because of pure cowardice on the part of institutions with a chance to arrest the authoritarian slide. That included Democrats who refused to even adopt their role as the opposition party. I wrote a lot about that this year, but this was emblematic. In the face of so many arguments about the ideological and policy future of the party, the truth is that voters just wanted anyone to give a damn enough to fight for them. Read the story.
Cries of Defiance and Songs of Joy in Los Angeles
It was hardly surprising to see the people ahead of the political leadership. This dispatch from downtown Los Angeles at the height of the ICE raids and National Guard deployment gave me newfound hope for my city and the community and culture it embraced in defiance of kidnappings and intimidation. Read the story.
Borrowers Besieged
We did a special issue on all the ways that the elimination of consumer protection would lead to a Golden Age of Scams. My contribution focused on how student loan borrowers were particularly vulnerable, beset by sketchy “debt relief” operators, private debt collectors, high-cost bank lenders, valueless for-profit colleges, and some Frankenstein agglomeration of all of these. Read the story.
Republicans Threaten a Hospital Apocalypse
Throughout the spring, I wrote extensively about the Big Beautiful Bill, really the only major legislation of the year and potentially of Trump’s second term. This piece shows how I focused my attention on the direct impact of the legislation on the American people, in this case the consequences for a health care system that continues to crumble around us for everyone but the wealthy. We’ve already seen lots of hospital closures, and as more cuts are implemented this will only worsen; remember this story when you wonder why. Read the story.
Jeffrey Epstein Is a Policy Issue
We have been living through two decades of elite impunity, of a different set of rules for the powerful and well-connected. The Jeffrey Epstein saga is a particularly ugly version of this reality, and that’s why it continues to resonate. We can actually fix this without needing to put new laws on the books, by actually enforcing the law as it exists. Read the story.
Greg Casar Is Organizing to Win
I really enjoyed doing this profile of Greg Casar, the new head of the Progressive Caucus, who brings the mindset of a labor organizer to everything he does in Congress. With Democrats poised to win the midterms in 2026, this 36-year-old second-term House member will suddenly have a lot of power, and it’s important to know his priorities to restore a true party of the working class. Read the story.
The Law That Could Blow Open Trump Antitrust Corruption
The sleeper scandal among hundreds of scandals in the Trump administration concerns the Justice Department auctioning off antitrust and merger enforcement to MAGA-aligned lobbyists. But they got too cute and left open a back door, a way for a federal judge to break open the corruption for all to see. With former DOJ officials eager to blow the whistle and a hearing scheduled for March, this isn’t going away. Read the story.
The AI Bubble Is Bigger Than You Think
The biggest story in the U.S. economy was the incredible burst of infrastructure spending aimed at dominating artificial intelligence. People are coming around to the idea that this is all being built on the financial equivalent of quicksand. This is one of several pieces I wrote looking at the grave potential for yet another unnecessary crisis, which will once again hit you and me much harder than anyone who actually caused it. Read the story.
Prices in the Machine
Affordability is kind of the perfect Democratic buzzword, because there’s no clear policy meaning and it can be used to justify everything. But our December issue looked at the long-term drivers of the cost of living, in an attempt to clarify what needs fixing. To me, that begins with the gradual changes in technology and surveillance that companies have used to maximize profits from pinpointing their customers’ willingness to pay. Read the story.