In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Galen Druke and Nate Silver open up the mailbag and answer listener questions about politics and polling. They cover American skepticism of artificial intelligence — according to one poll, only 9 percent of Americans say it will do more good than harm to society — and consider what to make of former president Donald Trump’s gains on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in early Republican presidential primary polling.
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U.S. Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) testifies during his confirmation hearing to be the next Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on March 18, 2026 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Confirmation on Easy Mode: Sen. Mullin’s nomination to lead DHS
Mar 24, 2026
Since arriving in Congress in 2013 Sen. Markwayne Mullin has been known for disappearing for a few weeks to Afghanistan in a putative effort to rescue Americans still there after withdrawal and tried to draw the president of the Teamsters into a fight during a hearing. Ironically, or possibly appropriately, Sean O’Brien, that same president of the Teamsters, endorsed Mullin’s nomination. He has written several laws supporting Native American communities and pediatric cancer research. A Trump loyalist, on January 6, 2021 in the hours after the riot at the Capitol, Mullin voted to change the outcome of the 2020 presidential election by omitting Arizona and Pennsylvania’s votes for Joe Biden.
His work experience prior to his political career was primarily in running his family’s plumbing business after his father became ill. He spent four months as a mixed martial arts fighter with a record of three wins. (He’s also gotten a lot richer while in Congress.)
Now he’s awaiting confirmation in the Senate to be President Trump’s next Secretary of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration agencies, FEMA, TSA, the Coast Guard, the Secret Service, and the cybersecurity agency CISA. (Outgoing DHS secretary Kirsti Noem was fired by Trump in the aftermath of the immigration agencies killing two Minnesota citizens at protests, and DHS is fiscally shut-down while Democrats are demanding immigration agency reform.)
How have nominees been vetted in the past?
In general, under other administrations, nominees had to go through a rigorous background check process focusing on taxes, personal and organizational affiliations, any legal issues and family issues. Nominees have had to fill out an SF-86, a form that allows for security clearances. This standard was already weakened in the first Trump Administration when Trump ordered his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to be given security clearance despite issues with his SF-86 form, and in the second Trump Administration the vetting process has been slimmed down even further. Nominees also respond to detailed questions in writing from senators on the committee handling the nomination.
Committee Hearing and Vote
March 18th’s Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on Mullin’s nomination had three separate tracks.
Most of the GOP senators focused on the fact that DHS remains unfunded 30+ days after its last funding ended.
Sen. Paul (R-KY), the committee chair, took a different tack: he said that Mullin’s approving comments about Paul’s 2017 attack from a neighbor showed that Mullin was a bad choice for an agency that has been notable for its aggressive use of force since the start of the current administration. Also in the course of their back and forth, Mullin claimed that dueling was legal. It’s murder, actually.
(In its earlier years, Congress was a pretty violent place. Legislators often attacked each other physically and in 1838 Rep. Graves killed Rep. Cilley in a duel!)
The third track, coming primarily from Sen. Peters (D-MI), challenged Mullin on his tendency to embellish facts. This track ended up going in a different direction than was perhaps expected. Peters was asking about comments Mullin had made suggesting he had been in combat, yet Mullin has never served in the military in any capacity.
Mullin’s response was that it was related to a “classified” trip he took while serving in the House which involved some kind of very difficult training. Something was wrong with the story: the House does not have the power to classify secrets since classification is a power of the president. Mullin tried to refuse to provide any more information to the senators, but Sen. Paul called his bluff and asked for details to be provided in a room meant for classified topics, called a SCIF. When they came out, Sen. Lankford (R-OK) said that Mullin’s trip was about a whistleblower and was covered by a non-disclosure agreement, not classification. This whole thing was extremely unusual.
A nominee to lead an agency with substantial law enforcement powers and some national security responsibilities who doesn’t know the difference between classification and a non-disclosure agreement, favors violent resolution to disputes (and thinks it’s legal), and tries to avoid actually answering questions about things he brought up himself might have been disqualifying in the past. It’s obviously not anymore.
In the end, Mullin’s performance made no difference. Thursday, March 19, the committee voted to send his nomination to the Senate floor. Sen. Paul was the only Republican voting no, but Sen. Fetterman (D-PA) voted yes, as both had indicated they would in advance, which was enough to pass the committee. Mullin will be approved by the full Senate sometime next week probably. Whether he gets any votes besides Fetterman’s from the Democrats is currently unknown. All Republicans except Paul are expected to vote yes, and that will be enough.
Confirmation on Easy Mode: Sen. Mullin’s nomination to lead DHS was originally published on GovTrack.us and is republished with permission.
Amy West is the GovTrack research and communications manager.
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An analysis of how neoliberalism and elite-driven economic policies fractured American society, fueling populism and distrust—and why national service and citizens’ assemblies may help rebuild civic unity.
Getty Images, Olga Dobrovolska
The Roots of America’s Schism: Elites, Markets, and Distance
Mar 23, 2026
At the height of the 1980s Reagan era, U.S. establishment leaders accepted what can only be described as a Faustian bargain—a trade in which one gains power or advantage by surrendering something essential, much like the legend of Faust, who exchanged his soul for worldly success. In pursuit of GDP growth, the economic model we now call neoliberalism became dominant. Over the following decades, laissez-faire capitalism, characterized by deregulation in a borderless, competitive market, drove the country's deindustrialization. The culmination of this process firmly established the elites as “winners” in the new information-based economy, but seemingly indifferent to the working classes. In a nutshell, in pursuit of their own wealth and power, business and political leaders exhibited an unconditional acceptance of market forces while forsaking the general welfare of millions of Americans and any sense of egalitarianism.
As a consequence of this free market orthodoxy, two distinctive American societies emerged in the subsequent decades. This civic fracturing isolated the “haves” and the “have nots” in their own respective geographic and cognitive bubbles with fewer and fewer opportunities for cultural and physical contact across the divide. Ironically, the COVID mandated social distancing had already settled in by time the pandemic hit.
But here is the reality often overlooked in this societal divorce: It was not the working classes that rejected the establishment, but the reverse. Little by little, the victors of the economic model began discarding the values that still constituted the common good adhesive of the last century. The new bourgeoisie is less belligerent than indifferent to the fate of the masses; less cynical than self-absorbed in its material concerns. As elites prospered, they successfully created an economic, social and cultural milieu blind to the suffering of the working classes.
Today, it is the distancing from "the other" that maintains social order. In this society that isn't really a society, the working classes are at best forgotten, but more often disdained by leaders of both parties (think of Hilary Clinton’s “deplorables” or Mitt Romney’s “takers”).
It is this aspect of today’s American Schism that is fueling the war between the elites and the dispossessed, and thereby crippling America. Having abandoned the very concept of public service, the upper classes are now subject to the cumulated rage manifest in populist movements on both the left and right. The social consequences are enormous: in addition to the suffering of millions of Americans, the loss of trust in our governing institutions are but collateral damage of this war.
In the face of this dilemma, I am convinced that the frequently discussed structural reforms in our political systems will hardly be sufficient to save our republic and will more likely get lost in the maelstrom of our fractured society. If we are to bestow our democratic republic to future generations, in addition to structural reforms, we must lay the foundational elements upon which an endurable republic needs to rest. With our 250th birthday as a reflection point, a rebirth in civic connective tissue across the great divides of present-day America is essential.
In terms of mindset resets or behavioral change within our civic space, two specific initiatives have surfaced recently. While both would require longer term investments, they would do a great deal to foster for future generations the concept that we have more in common than that which tears us apart.
A National Service Program for Youth
Our 18th century founders based the new nation on a creed, which was then reborn in the wake of the civil war. For the republic to endure, building and reinforcing a value system aligned with this common creed is an imperative. Over our 250-year history, we have witnessed formidable leaders accomplish this by nurturing a sense of purpose that has transcended our many differences. But with the media industry and geographical factors fostering isolation across diverse communities today, young people (especially) need to get off their phones and begin building bridges…literally. A national program requiring teens between 17-19 to spend a year or two working on a civic project is one such approach. From infrastructure to health care, so many aspects of our collapsing nation would benefit from targeted support. Moreover, by encouraging teenagers to work in a community vastly different from their own, many could observe first-hand the range of diversity across our nation. Even if not compulsory, it would be hard to imagine how such a program could not be win-win: our nation’s young citizens could build skills on vastly needed projects in exchange for subsequent tuition assistance in a trade or higher education institution. Many states already have local programs and the AmeriCorps and National Civilian Community Corps (NCCC) are good national models that can be built upon and expanded.
Participatory Democracy AKA Citizens’ Assemblies
While many bemoan it, most citizens understand the concept of jury duty. Further, those who actually serve often report it to be a valued experience. We need an analogous program for public policy making in the legislative branch. These assemblies typically consist of randomly selected participants who deliberate on specific issues and propose recommendations to lawmaking leaders.
Whether at the local, state and federal level, too often our existing legislative assemblies are “captured” by big money special interests, and/or subject to the loudest voices in the communities in which they serve. Citizens' Assemblies in France have already gained prominence as a means to involve ordinary citizens in the legislative process. Many prominent organizations are working on these concepts and guides exist detailing how such programs can work.
Structural reforms like open primaries, term limits or reigning in campaign financing are important initiatives and should continue to be pursued. But if we spend all our time and effort playing defense, we will fail to build the bedrock of common ground for future generations.
Seth David Radwell is the author of “American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret to Healing our Nation” winner of last year’s International Book Award for Best General Nonfiction. He is a frequent contributor as a political analyst, and speaker within both the business community and on college campuses both in the U.S. and abroad.
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A deep dive into the growing uncertainty in the U.S. legal immigration system, exploring policy shifts, backlogs, and how procedural instability is reshaping the promise of lawful immigration.
Getty Images, Halfpoint Images
When Immigration Rules Keep Changing, the System Stops Working
Mar 23, 2026
For generations, the United States has framed legal immigration as a kind of social contract. Since 1965, when the Immigration and Nationality Act ended the national-origin quota system, the U.S. has formally opened legal immigration to people from around the world without racial or national-origin preferences. If people from across the globe sought to reunite with family or bring needed skills to the American economy, they were told they would be welcomed. If they sought U.S. citizenship, the country would provide a clear route to reach it.
Follow the procedures, submit the forms, pay the fees, pass the background checks, and your time will come. Legal immigration has never been easy or quick. But the promise has always been that the path exists.
For decades, that process has been central to the country’s immigration narrative. The paperwork is complex, the wait is long, and the costs can be substantial, but the underlying premise has been simple. Follow the rules and the system will eventually produce an answer.
Increasingly, that premise is breaking down.
Across multiple visa categories and legal statuses, immigrants who have spent years navigating the formal process are finding themselves caught in an environment of shifting policies, administrative pauses, reversals, and uncertainty. The problem is no longer just that the process is slow. Instead, the process itself is becoming opaque.
For many applicants, the financial commitment alone is substantial. Filing fees, required medical exams, document translations, and legal assistance can easily exceed $5,000 over the course of an application. Families often structure their lives around these timelines. Job offers, housing decisions, schooling for children, and long-term financial planning are frequently tied to expected milestones in the immigration process.
When those milestones suddenly move or disappear, the consequences ripple outward.
Part of the challenge is sheer scale. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services currently carries a backlog of more than 8 million pending cases across the immigration system. Even when policies are stable, that backlog means applicants often wait years for decisions on visas, work authorization, and green card petitions.
But the backlog alone does not explain the growing uncertainty. In recent months, policy shifts and administrative pauses have created additional instability for people already navigating the legal process.
One example came in December when the State Department paused visa processing for applicants from dozens of countries. The pause was presented as a security review, but for families and employers already waiting in line, it created immediate uncertainty. Applicants who had already submitted paperwork, paid fees, and waited months for interviews suddenly found themselves stuck without any clear timeline for when the process would resume.
For many applicants already inside the system, the most immediate impact is the loss of the ability to work legally. When immigration processing pauses or policies change midstream, employment authorization tied to those applications often lapses while cases remain unresolved. People who followed the rules, paid the required fees, and maintained a valid status can suddenly find themselves unable to continue working in jobs they already hold, whether running a small business, repairing cars, or writing software, simply because the process they relied on has stalled.
The consequences are not abstract. Families who have structured their lives around the expectation of lawful employment can lose their primary source of income overnight. Rent, mortgages, and school tuition do not pause simply because an immigration application does. Employers face sudden disruptions as well, losing workers they have already hired and trained, even though the underlying immigration case is still pending.
For the people involved, it surely feels like the rules changed halfway through the process, because they did. They entered the system under one set of expectations, complied with every requirement, and waited in line as instructed. Then the process stopped moving.
In this environment, even basic questions become difficult to answer. Can someone continue working while waiting for a decision? Should a family keep paying legal fees to pursue an application if the policy framework may shift again? Is a delay temporary, or does it signal a deeper structural change in the program itself? And these days, if someone seeking permanent resident status makes the wrong decision on any of these - whether due to acts of omission or commission - it can result in the family members being placed on an ICE list of people targeted for deportation.
But the broader issue is institutional credibility.
A functioning system requires more than rules written on paper. It requires confidence that those rules will remain stable long enough for participants to act on them. When the framework shifts repeatedly, sometimes affecting people who have already invested years and resources in the process, it creates the perception that compliance offers no clear advantage. If individuals follow established procedures, the institutions administering those procedures will behave in a consistent and predictable way. When that expectation erodes, participation itself becomes riskier. Applicants begin to wonder whether the rules they follow today will still apply tomorrow.
None of this means immigration policy cannot change. Democracies revise laws and regulations in response to elections, court decisions, and evolving public priorities. Immigration policy in particular has always reflected political debate about how many newcomers the country should admit and under what conditions.
But there is an important difference between policy change and procedural instability.
Policy change establishes new rules going forward. Procedural instability alters the environment for people who are already in the system, often after they have invested significant time, money, and personal planning in reliance on the existing framework.
The result is a system that begins to resemble a moving target rather than a structured queue.
At a moment when immigration remains deeply contentious in American politics, restoring clarity to legal pathways would serve multiple purposes. Supporters of immigration reform often argue that expanding lawful avenues reduces pressure on unauthorized migration. Critics frequently emphasize the importance of enforcing existing rules.
Both arguments depend on the same foundation. A legal process must function consistently enough for people to trust it.
Without that consistency, the debate risks losing a critical distinction between lawful participation and rule breaking. When the system itself becomes unpredictable, the promise that following the rules will lead where you want them to begins to lose meaning.
Once that promise weakens, rebuilding confidence in the system becomes far more difficult than maintaining it in the first place. Or perhaps an uneven system with stops and starts that frustrates the people in it so much that they no longer want to be here is an intentional message being sent by those in charge.
Brent McKenzie is a writer and educator based in the United States. He is the creator of Idiots & Charlatans, a watchdog-style website focused on democratic values and climate change. He previously taught in Brussels and has spent the majority of his professional career in educational publishing.
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Photo by BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash
Overbroad AI Export Controls Risk Forfeiting the AI Race
Mar 23, 2026
The nation that wins the global AI race will hold decisive military and economic advantages. That’s why President Trump’s January 2025 AI Action Plan declared: “It is the policy of the United States to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance in order to promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security.”
However, AI global dominance does not just mean producing the best AI systems. It also means that the American “AI Stack” – the layered collection of tools, technologies, and frameworks that organizations use to build, train, deploy, and manage artificial intelligence applications – will become the international standard for this world-changing technology. As such, advancing a commonsense export policy for American AI chips will play a decisive role in determining whether the United States remains embedded at the core of global AI development or is gradually displaced by rival systems.
During the Biden Administration, U.S. policy unfortunately drifted away from an approach that encouraged American technological leadership. In 2024, President Biden signed Executive Order 14110, which wrapped AI development in a bureaucratic maze of political correctness, equity, and government control of virtually every aspect of training and deployment of AI models. And, Biden’s Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) issued last-minute regulations to ban the export of virtually all microchips to China that could be used to develop AI systems.
Biden’s hard ban on AI-capable chips to China was superficially appealing. After all, without chips, China can’t compete with America, right? Wrong. Rather than preserving America’s advantage, blanket export controls on AI capable chips encouraged the emergence of a parallel Chinese technological ecosystem largely beyond U.S. influence and would severely injure US AI companies.
As a result of the ban, China launched an aggressive campaign to replace foreign suppliers. State-backed capital flowed into semiconductor fabrication, chip design, advanced packaging, and AI data-center infrastructure. Chinese firms were encouraged to adopt domestic chips. even though performance lagged Western counterparts, ensuring scale and revenue for Chinese manufacturers. Export controls did not, therefore, freeze China’s AI ecosystem; they reorganized it around domestic Chinese supply chains and used the opportunity to accelerate their competition on the global stage.
Fortunately, Trump has started to right the ship. Since taking office he has revoked Biden’s executive order and lifted the absolute bans on sales of mid-range chips like Nvidia’s H200 chip, allowing them to be sold to highly vetted Chinese buyers. This nuanced approach to chip exports will improve America’s strategic and economic dominance in several ways.
To start, America’s new approach is well designed to thwart the fast development of a competitive Chinese AI ecosystem without surrendering military and strategic dominance in this key technology. It bans export of very high-end AI chips, where the US and its allies enjoy a monopoly. But it allows discretionary export of a lower-class of AI capable chips (for example, the H200 and AMD MI325X chips) to be exported under strict export controls which prevent diversion, mandate Know-Your-Customer protocols, and prohibit any military or intelligence uses.
This lower-class of chips is also about one-tenth as powerful than the top-end chips produced by companies in America and our allies. Yet while the H200 is not Nvidia’s best chip, it still has six times the power of the best AI chip available in China today and is better than any chip that Huawei – the Chinese telecom giant that has served as a domestic alternative to Nvidia – plans to make for at least two years. Now Chinese firms seeking chips have to decide between inferior, costly Chinese chips and much more powerful American exports, taking the wind out of state-based manufacturing efforts in China.
Furthermore, Trump’s policy bolsters the chip manufacturing of the US and its allies. Nvidia, the largest AI/GPU chip manufacturer in the world is no longer hamstrung by exclusion from one of the world’s largest markets and is better to positioned to compete internationally more broadly. This is non-trivial. At around $40,000 per chip, Bloomberg estimates Nvidia has and will lose $10-15 billion a year in lost sales of the H200 chip alone as a result of the chip ban. And it’s not just Nvidia. Biden also cut off Intel, AMD and others from billions in revenue. All this reduces US revenue for R&D, shrinks production runs, increases per unit costs, and gives Chinese firms monopolistic domestic markets, allowing their international expansion.
President Trump’s AI chip export policy supports the larger strategic and economic interests of the US. We may still be the dominant AI figure world-wide, but this is no time to be encouraging the emergence of a competitive AI-stack ecosystem nor to hamstring American companies that are the key to that dominance. That is why we must prioritize speed, scale, and global adoption and resist well-meaning yet misguided efforts like the AI Overwatch Act (H.R. 6875) currently under consideration in Congress. This bill would effectively codify the kind of overbroad export approach President Trump has begun to unwind, undermining the strategic reset now underway.
The surest way to preserve America’s technological edge is not to shrink the commercial base on which it depends, but to expand it. In a long-term strategic competition, staying ahead matters more than trying to hold others back.
Frank D. Francone is a California attorney admitted to the United States Supreme Court bar. He is also a widely published author in Artificial Intelligence, having co-authored a graduate level textbook in machine learning and about fifty peer-reviewed scientific articles in AI and information theory.
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