An ambient walk through the Vietnam Veterans Memorial grounds in Washington D.C.
This piece originally appeared on the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
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The Trump Administration Is Losing Its Fight to Take Over Elections
Aug 21, 2026
The Trump administration has expended significant resources trying to meddle in elections ahead of the midterms. This coordinated campaign includes attempts to limit who can vote, wrestle away states’ authority over elections, and undermine public confidence in election outcomes. So far, virtually everything the administration has tried has been blocked by courts, failed in Congress, or simply fizzled out.
Currently, the administration is 0–21 in its court cases seeking to amass state voter data. In dozens of states, election officials from both parties have refused to turn over their complete voter rolls, which contain confidential personal information, to the Justice Department. Federal courts from Arizona to Maine have thrown out the department’s lawsuits, ruling that the federal government lacks the power to force states to hand over this data on a mass scale.
Both of Trump’s executive orders aiming to overhaul election rules have also failed in court. The first one purported to require people to show a passport or another document proving citizenship to register to vote using the federal voter registration form. Several courts have blocked the policy. The second executive order would have the U.S. Postal Service refuse to deliver the mail ballots of voters who aren’t on new, ill-defined lists that states and USPS would be asked to create. In June, a court prevented it from taking effect. (The Brennan Center represents parties in lawsuits against both executive orders.) These cases are on appeal, but courts have consistently held that the Constitution gives the president no authority to regulate elections.
In a separate case, a court ruled that the administration may not expand the use of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, a federal database, to comb through state voter rolls for potential noncitizens. This is an important ruling because the program is incomplete and likely to incorrectly flag citizens for removal from the rolls. Voting by noncitizens is already illegal and extremely rare.
The administration’s losses extend beyond the courtroom. In the halls of Congress, President Trump has consistently demanded passage of the unpopular SAVE Act — legislation that would require Americans to show a passport or birth certificate in order to register to vote. If passed, the bill could block tens of millions of eligible American citizens from voting. So far, that effort remains stalled in the face of nationwide public opposition.
Another prong of the administration’s attack on elections is to demonize and prosecute election officials who refuse to go along with its schemes. The Justice Department recently sent a letter threatening jail time for officials in states that don’t tighten their voting rules under the guise of preventing noncitizens from casting ballots. The secretary of homeland security also claimed that officials who didn’t follow the administration’s instructions to remove voters from the rolls could go to prison. The point of these threats is to intimidate election officials into voluntarily enacting the policies Trump can’t get passed in Congress or approved by courts.
Attempted prosecutions of political adversaries have failed in other contexts. The administration shattered prosecutorial norms to charge New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey. A judge threw out the charges and rebuked the lawyer (one of Trump’s former personal lawyers who had no criminal law experience) who brought them, while another judge found she may have committed misconduct. Comey now faces a second prosecution over arranging seashells into the pattern “86 47,” which prosecutors say is a threat to Trump (the 47th president). That, too, seems likely to fail, and his lawyers have accused prosecutors of making false statements to obtain warrants.
The crumbling of the cases against James and Comey shows the emptiness of Trump and his allies’ similar threats against election officials. They promised to prosecute those who dispute his election lies, yet they have no cases with a serious chance of ending in a conviction. That’s not to say this tactic has no impact — defending against even a baseless prosecution can be extremely costly and stressful — but prosecutions based on conspiracy theories aren’t resulting in convictions.
One place where the administration is trying to forge ahead with this tactic is in Fulton County, Georgia. In January, FBI agents seized documents from election offices on the basis of debunked claims of fraud in the 2020 election. Reports indicate that Trump spoke to the agents after they conducted the raid, an unprecedented occurrence, which suggests the mission was politically motivated. All known evidence refutes the notion of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, and most likely this, too, won’t prove the salacious allegations.
Last month, Trump gave a speech on elections that underscored his desperation for a win before the upcoming midterms. After promising to reveal “shocking” information about the 2020 election being “rigged,” Trump instead merely repeated years-old conspiracy theories and claimed vague “intelligence” showed “vulnerabilities” in election systems.
Trump’s losses in the battle to take over elections don’t mean there hasn’t been collateral damage. False claims about inadequate election security have been a driving factor in states enacting well over a hundred voting laws during the last five years. Every time Trump cries foul or demonizes election workers, it causes more Americans to question legitimate election results. Nor is the fight over elections over. Trump and his allies may try increasingly aggressive maneuvers before or after Election Day, such as seizing voting machines or refusing to certify results — even though those tactics are against the law.
During Trump’s second term, the courts, election officials, Congress, and the people themselves have shown the strength to stand up to a president who wishes to trample the election system and cement his power. In the months to come, we must keep up the fight.
The Trump Administration Is Losing Its Fight to Take Over Elections was originally published by the Brennan Center and is republished with permission.
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Peptides like BPC-157, MOTS-c and Semax are surging in popularity despite limited human evidence. Here’s why FDA regulation, research and safety matter.
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Millions Using Unapproved Peptides as FDA Debates Regulation
Aug 20, 2026
Peptides, the short chains of amino acids that help regulate biological functions, have become the latest obsession in health, fitness, and longevity.
Online clinics and wellness influencers promote them as ways to heal injuries, reduce inflammation, improve metabolism, sharpen thinking, and slow aging.
Today, these substances are part of a growing gray market. A recent Forbes report estimates millions of Americans are injecting unapproved peptides, often purchased from suppliers in China whose manufacturing quality, purity, and contents are difficult to verify.
Federal regulators now face a milestone decision: whether six popular — but experimental — peptides should be made available through licensed compounding pharmacies, which customize medications for patients based on physicians’ prescriptions.
The financial stakes of this decision are substantial. If the FDA authorizes them, analysts at Leerink Partners estimate that telehealth sales of these peptides could approach $2.2 billion in 2027.
The FDA Debate: To Authorize Or Not
Last month, the Food and Drug Administration’s Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee narrowly recommended adding six experimental peptides — BPC-157, KPV, TB-500, MOTS-c, Epitalon, and Semax — to the Section 503A Bulks List. This designation identifies ingredients that pharmacies can use to prepare compounded medications.
The committee’s recommendation drew scrutiny for two reasons. First, FDA staff cited insufficient evidence about the safety and effectiveness of the six peptides. Second, at least six newly added members had ties to peptide-related businesses or medical practices, which prompted FDA officials to raise concerns about potential conflicts of interest.
No decision date is set. It could be days or months before a final ruling.
Why ‘Yes’ Or ‘No’ Isn’t The Right Answer
The central problem is that whether the FDA approves or rejects the advisory committee recommendations, Americans won’t know whether these peptides are effective or safe. Scientific research is needed to answer both questions.
If the peptides improve health, more patients would benefit from using them. If they are ineffective or dangerous, people need to be warned.
Neither the previous administration nor the current one has created a credible way to generate those answers. Under the Biden administration, regulators effectively barred these peptides from being sold in the United States. That policy, along with stepped-up enforcement against suppliers and pharmacies, did not eliminate demand. Large numbers of Americans continued obtaining the peptides online from gray-market and overseas sources.
The Trump administration, with HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. among the most prominent supporters of peptides, appears poised to move to the opposite extreme by permitting broad access through licensed compounding pharmacies.
Either way, doctors won’t have sufficient research data to determine whether to recommend these peptides or limit their use.
What The Six Peptides Do (And Don’t Do)
There are thousands of biological and synthetic peptides. Many occur naturally in the body and act as chemical messengers, influencing metabolism, inflammation, reproduction, and other physiological processes.
More than 100 peptide drugs are currently FDA-approved in the U.S., including insulin and GLP-1 drugs for diabetes and obesity.
For the six peptides now under final consideration by FDA leadership, public enthusiasm has advanced much faster than the science:
1. BPC-157 is promoted for gastrointestinal conditions, injury recovery and tissue repair.
2. KPV is marketed for inflammation, wound healing, and skin conditions.
3. TB-500 is promoted for healing muscle and tendon injuries.
4. MOTS-c is marketed for metabolic health, weight loss, exercise performance, and healthy aging.
5. Epitalon is promoted for sleep and longevity, including claims that it lengthens telomeres.
6. Semax is promoted for migraines, cognition, and neurological conditions.
Across all six, high-quality human evidence remains limited. Much of the available research consists of animal studies and limited human trials without control groups. As a result, patients can’t determine whether their benefits will outweigh their risks.
A Better Federal Strategy
Supporters of FDA authorization point out that Americans already use these substances. Acquiring them through physicians and regulated U.S. compounding pharmacies would be safer than relying on gray-market suppliers.
Critics argue that expanded access would encourage far more Americans to use products, despite uncertainty about their benefits and long-term risks.
The FDA won’t resolve these competing concerns with a simple yes-or-no choice. If it authorizes these substances, the best path would be to pair that decision with a federally coordinated research program.
The NIH could lead a one-year research effort, with FDA and CDC contributing regulatory and safety-surveillance expertise.
- People already using the peptides would continue receiving them if they agreed to submit data on their health and any adverse events.
- New patients would gain access under a scientific double-blind research protocol. Researchers would conduct controlled clinical trials of individual peptides for specific medical uses (with appropriate comparison groups to evaluate efficacy and short-term safety).
- At the end of one year, the FDA could review the findings and decide whether to continue the research expectations and expand or restrict access based on the data.
Although a one-year program would not answer every question, particularly about rare or long-term risks, it would generate far more evidence than exists today.
This type of approach has precedent. The federal government has previously linked access or coverage for certain treatments to participation in research when important questions remained unanswered. Medicare, for example, used “coverage with evidence development” for certain Alzheimer’s treatments, requiring qualifying patients to participate in approved studies.
Companies that stand to profit from expanded access to peptides should help finance the research. That principle also has precedent: pharmaceutical and medical-device companies already pay FDA user fees that support product review and certain post-market safety activities.
Both Democratic and Republican administrations have failed to resolve basic questions about the safety and efficacy of the six peptides. The best path now is to pair regulated access with scientific research.
Robert Pearl, the author of “ChatGPT, MD,” teaches at both the Stanford University School of Medicine and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is a former CEO of The Permanente Medical Group.
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American Social Unrest
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Political Conduct Still Matters, But Not How You Might Think
Aug 20, 2026
When Graham Platner’s senate campaign imploded last month, the first thing that came to mind was a comment by one of his campaign strategists, who also advises many other major political figures today. They said, “Part of our thesis here is that people do not want their candidates grown in vats… they want people who do not look and sound like the vat-grown people who’ve been leading this country off the cliff for the past century.”
Meanwhile, the Democratic primary for a Michigan Senate seat has been defined by candidates endlessly taking shots and hurling insults at each another. If recent history is a guide, things will only get nastier and more divisive in Michigan and elsewhere from here until November.
It’s all playing out against a backdrop of voices claiming Americans want a different kind of politician right now: “fighters.” Indeed, the Platner campaign staffer also said many Americans are willing to overlook personal integrity and other key values if they think their “fighter” can win.
It’s a dangerous bargain. It’s also dead wrong.
I’ve written before how I believe Americans are stuck in a fight or flight mode. They’re disgusted that their concerns are being ignored. They’re angry, exhausted, even disoriented by all the acrimony, division, and noise engulfing politics right now. When you're in that headspace, it’s natural to gravitate toward candidates who come out swinging and embrace a “take no prisoners” approach.
It is leading candidates and their consultants to raise money off of fear, stoke Americans’ anxieties for their own gain, and seek to win at all costs. We can’t go on like this.
Some will no doubt note how today’s political fights pale in comparison to the kind of campaigns that riddle American history right back to our founding. The elections of 1800 and 1828 must rank as some of the nastiest and most divisive elections in history. But history isn’t destiny. Nor did earlier campaigns contend with 24/7 news, social media, and AI.
Part of being American is having aspirations and striving toward ideals. It can seem that Americans have given up on those ideals and are giving in to an “anything goes” approach. But based on my travels across the country, they have not.
There’s a better way.
Some two decades ago, The Harwood Institute, with support from the Pew Charitable Trusts, deeply engaged Americans nationwide—from Baltimore to Louisville to Fresno—around the question, “What are your aspirations for our politics?” When it came to political candidates, Americans named these five factors:
- Tell us who you are—tell us what inspires you to seek office, what your values are, who supports you and why, and about your past.
- Know us—genuinely know how people in your community live and the challenges they face; show a deep understanding of people and their concerns.
- Explain where you stand—offer a vision for what you want to achieve and why, without overblown promises, and put the tough issues and trade-offs on the table.
- Be forthright—tell us what you’re about from the start and take on questions and challengers in direct, honest, straightforward ways.
- Set the right tone—pursue a tone that is respectful, not mean-spirited or negative.
These are different from simply saying we need more civility in public discourse; and no one should confuse them with the kind of kumbayah politics that some groups promote. Americans told us they wanted tough-minded, give-and-take campaigns, but ones that focused on what matters to them and strengthened our civic culture.
We turned these aspirations into a “Political Conduct Barometer” that people all across the country used as a type of scorecard to measure whether or not candidates were meeting their aspirations and contributing to a more productive culture.
Let me be clear: the vast majority of politicians today would fail the political conduct test on every measure. The thing is, as I’ve crisscrossed the country engaging Americans of all political persuasions, these five factors, while being obscured by all the current noise, remain people’s aspirations for political conduct today.
Platner’s strategist was right about one thing: people are looking for something different. They just deserve better than swapping one kind of inauthenticity for another.
Now is not the time to surrender to a politics that further destroys hope and will indeed lead us off the cliff. People’s yearning for a different political culture in this country grows by the day. We cannot let politicians and their consultants take our politics hostage. Americans want something better.
Rich Harwood is the president and founder of The Harwood Institute.
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How tax cuts, deregulation and weakened unions helped shift the U.S. from the postwar Great Compression to today’s Great Divide—and examine the Gomory-Baumol corporate tax proposal as an alternative.
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Affordability Crisis: From The Great Compression to the Great Divide
Aug 20, 2026
Trickle-down policies facilitated the transition from the mid-20th century "Great Compression “characterized by low-wage inequality and strong labor unions—to the "Great Divide" by shifting the economic focus from mass purchasing power to capital accumulation through massive tax cuts and deregulation.
The Great Compression
Following World War II, the United States experienced an unprecedented period of economic egalitarianism. Propelled by the G.I. Bill, the rise of powerful labor unions, and a heavily progressive tax code, the income gap between the wealthiest Americans and the working class shrank dramatically.
During this era, the economy heavily subsidized upward mobility. A single-income household could comfortably afford a starter home, a vehicle, and higher education without incurring generational debt. The post-war consensus was rooted in the idea that productivity growth and wage increases moved in lockstep.
During the Great Compression (Mid-1940s to the late 1970s), heavy progressive taxation, strong labor unions, and robust minimum wage policies actively reduced inequality. High marginal tax rates (often around 80%) kept executive compensation in check, while strong unions and a surge in demand for moderate-skilled labor allowed the bottom 90% of earners to experience wage growth that kept pace with economic productivity. During this era, homeownership, higher education, and healthcare were widely accessible on a single middle-class income.
However, the stagflation of the 1970s paved the way for supply-side economics. This "trickle-down" philosophy was built on the premise that slashing top marginal tax rates and easing corporate regulations would unleash private investment, ultimately generating widespread job creation and tax revenues.
The Great Divide
The Great Compression reversed in 1980, marking the beginning of the Great Divide (often called the Great Divergence). Policy shifts, including sharply lowered top marginal tax rates and capital gains taxes, financial deregulation, and weakened union protections, led to explosive income and wealth gains for the top 1%, while median wages stagnated. Between 1979 and 2022, the top 1% doubled their share of national income.
This hollowing out of the middle class severely damaged baseline affordability:
The Productivity-Wage Gap: From 1979 to the present, U.S. worker productivity has soared by over 83%, but median wages have increased by only about 29%. Workers are producing vastly more value but receiving a shrinking share of it.
Soaring Essential Costs: Prices for housing, higher education, and childcare have dramatically outpaced wage growth. The burden of essential living expenses has skyrocketed. The cost of living dominates public concern, with items like electricity (up 21% since 2020), healthcare, and groceries stretching family budgets to the breaking point.
Systemic Market Constraints: Modern affordability is heavily exacerbated by corporate consolidation and restrictive zoning laws, which severely limit the supply of housing and healthcare while inflating everyday expenses.
Housing and Real Estate: Home prices have doubled relative to annual household incomes since the 1950s. Over ten million American households, roughly 25% of all renters, spend more than half of their monthly income just on rent. The housing shortage—estimated at up to ten million units—has led to fierce competition, with institutional investors exacerbating the scarcity of entry-level starter homes.
Debt-Driven Lifestyles: As housing prices were bid up by high earners, middle-class Americans took on higher levels of household debt just to maintain a traditional standard of living.
The Wealth Gap: The divide is starkly visible in asset ownership. While the upper tiers of society have built unprecedented net worths through soaring equity and real estate markets, a significant portion of the population lives paycheck to paycheck, relying on debt just to maintain a baseline standard of living.
The erosion of the middle class is traceable to the affluent reshaping political and economic structures in their favor. Addressing this crisis requires shifting the economic paradigm. One such paradigm shift is a corporate tax proposal by Ralph Gomory (American applied mathematician and former IBM executive), developed alongside economist William Baumol. The Gomory- Baumol tax proposal centers on using a sliding-scale corporate income tax to reward companies that create high-value-added jobs within the United States, aimed at realigning corporate profit-seeking motives with national economic health, specifically fighting offshoring and boosting domestic productivity.
Productivity-Indexed Corporate Tax Rates
Rather than charging a flat corporate tax rate, The Gomory- Baumol proposes tying a company's federal income tax rate directly to its value added per full-time equivalent (FTE) domestic employee.
High Value-Add: Corporations that yield high productivity and high-paying jobs in the U.S. would receive a sharply reduced tax rate.
Low Value-Add: Corporations relying heavily on low-productivity work or offshored functions would face a significantly higher corporate tax rate.
Revenue-Neutral Implementation
The proposal is structured to be revenue-neutral for the federal government. It does not intend to raise or lower the overall corporate tax burden on the macro economy. Instead, it shifts the financial burden away from domestically innovative companies and onto companies that fail to invest in the U.S. workforce.
Realigning Corporate Incentives
The foundational objective of this tax plan is structural reform. The authors maintain that modern corporate boards are legally bound to maximize shareholder value, which often mandates offshoring jobs to lower costs. By altering the tax code, their proposal makes it in the direct financial interest of corporate directors to invest heavily in the skills and output of domestic workers.
Hugh J. Campbell, Jr., CPA, is a Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) professional and a student of W. Edwards Deming, the American statistician often credited as the catalyst for the Japanese economic miracle after WWII.
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