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<title type="text">Vox</title>
<subtitle type="text">Our world has too much noise and too little context. Vox helps you understand what matters.</subtitle>
<updated>2025-07-03T20:34:27+00:00</updated>
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<entry>
<author>
<name>Bryan Walsh</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[Heart attacks aren’t as fatal as they used to be]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/418849/heart-attack-deaths-cardiovascular-disease-progress-medicine" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=418849</id>
<updated>2025-07-03T15:45:35-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-07-05T08:30:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Future Perfect" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Good News" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Health" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[A day before my 47th birthday last month, I took the subway to Manhattan’s Upper East Side for a coronary artery calcium scan (CAC). For those who haven’t entered the valley of middle age, a CAC is a specialized CT scan that looks for calcium deposits in the heart and its arteries. Unlike in your […]]]></summary>
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Cabinet containing an automatic external defibrillator in Austin, Texas, on March 9, 2023. | Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images </figcaption>
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A day before my 47th birthday last month, I took the subway to Manhattan’s Upper East Side for a coronary artery calcium scan (CAC).
For those who haven’t entered the valley of middle age, a CAC is a <a href="https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/heart-scan/about/pac-20384686#:~:text=A%20coronary%20calcium%20scan%20uses%20a%20series%20of%20X%2Drays,intermediate%2C%20not%20low%20or%20high.">specialized CT scan</a> that looks for calcium deposits in the heart and its arteries. Unlike in your bones, having calcium in your coronary arteries is a bad thing, because it indicates the buildup of plaque comprised of cholesterol, fat, and other lovely things. The higher the calcium score, the more plaque that has built up — and with it, <a href="https://www.houstonmethodist.org/blog/articles/2021/oct/calcium-score-what-is-a-cac-test-do-i-need-one/#:~:text=Wait%2C%20isn't%20calcium%20a,future%20heart%20attack%20or%20stroke.">the higher the risk</a> of heart disease and even heart attacks.
A couple of hours after the test, I received a ping on my phone. My CAC score was 7, which indicated the presence of a small amount of calcified plaque, <a href="https://www.droracle.ai/articles/21304/agatston-score-how-to-interprete">which translates</a> to a “low but non-zero cardiovascular risk.” Put another way, <a href="https://internal.mesa-nhlbi.org/about/procedures/tools/mesa-score-risk-calculator">according to one calculator</a>, it means an approximately 2.1 percent chance of a major adverse cardiovascular event over the next 10 years.
2.1 percent doesn’t sound high — it’s a <a href="https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/data-science/a-priori-probability/">little higher</a> than the chance of pulling an ace of spades from a card deck — but when it comes to major adverse cardiovascular events, 2.1 percent is approximately 100 percent higher than I’d like. That’s how I found myself joining the <a href="https://www.peoplespharmacy.com/articles/do-statins-save-lives-doctors-dont-agree">tens of millions of Americans</a> who are currently on statin drugs, which lower levels of LDL cholesterol (aka the “bad” cholesterol).
I didn’t really want to celebrate my birthday with a numerical reminder of my creeping mortality. But everything about my experience — from the high-tech calcium scan to my doctor’s aggressive statin prescription — explains how the US has made amazing progress against one of our biggest health risks: heart disease, and especially, heart attacks.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">A dramatic drop in heart attack deaths</h2>
A heart attack — which usually occurs when atherosclerotic plaque partially or fully blocks the flow of blood to the heart — used to be close to a death sentence. In 1963, the <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_20/sr20_002acc.pdf" data-type="link" data-id="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_20/sr20_002acc.pdf">death rate from coronary heart disease</a>, which includes heart attacks, <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4830a1.htm" data-type="link" data-id="https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4830a1.htm">peaked</a> in the US, with 290 deaths per 100,000 population. As late as 1970, a man over 65 who was hospitalized with a heart attack <a href="https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2025/06/heart-attack.html?ck_subscriber_id=2771385781&utm_campaign=Heart+attacks+no+longer+leading+cause+of+US+deaths+-+18114390&utm_medium=email&utm_source=convertkit">had only a 60 percent chance</a> of ever leaving that hospital alive.
A sudden cardiac death is the disease equivalent of homicide or a car crash death. It meant someone’s father or husband, wife or mother, was suddenly ripped away without warning. Heart attacks were terrifying.
Yet today, that risk is much less. According to a <a href="https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/JAHA.124.038644">recent study</a> in the Journal of the American Heart Association, the proportion of all deaths attributable to heart attacks plummeted by nearly 90 percent between 1970 and 2022. Over the same period, heart disease as a cause of all adult deaths in the US fell from 41 percent to 24 percent. Today, if a man over 65 is hospitalized with a heart attack, he has a 90 percent chance of leaving the hospital alive.
By my calculations, the improvements in preventing and treating heart attacks between 1970 and 2022 have likely saved tens of millions of lives. So how did we get here?
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">How to save a life</h2>
In 1964, the year after the coronary heart disease death rate peaked, the US surgeon general released a <a href="https://digirepo.nlm.nih.gov/ext/document/101584932X202/PDF/101584932X202.pdf">landmark report</a> on the risks of smoking. It marked the start of a decades-long public health campaign against one of the <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/about/cigarettes-and-cardiovascular-disease.html">biggest contributing factors to cardiovascular disease</a>. 
That campaign has been incredibly successful. In 1970, an estimated 40 percent of Americans smoked. By 2019, that percentage had fallen to 14 percent, and <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/smoking.htm">it keeps declining</a>.
The reduction in smoking has helped lower the number of Americans at risk of a heart attack. So did the development and spread in the 1980s of statins like I’m on now, which make it far easier to manage cholesterol and prevent heart disease. By one estimate, statins <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X%2821%2900572-6/fulltext">save</a> nearly 2 million lives globally each year. 
When heart attacks do occur, the widespread adoption of CPR and the development of portable defibrillators — which only began to become <a href="https://www.aedleader.com/blog/history-of-aeds/#:~:text=The%20First%20Portable%20Defibrillators%20in,in%20UK%20ambulances%20until%201990.">common in the late 1960s</a> —  ensured that more people survived long enough to make it to the hospital. Once there, the development of specialized coronary care units, balloon angioplasty and artery-opening stents made it easier for doctors to rescue a patient suffering an acute cardiac event.
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Our changing heart health deaths</h3>
Despite this progress in stopping heart attacks, <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/heart-disease/data-research/facts-stats/index.html">around 700,000 Americans</a> still die of all forms of heart disease every year, equivalent to 1 in 5 deaths overall. 
Some of this is the unintended result of our medical success. As more patients survive acute heart attacks and <a href="https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-life-expectancy-compare-countries/">life expectancy has risen as a whole</a>, it means more people are living long enough to become vulnerable to other, more chronic forms of heart disease, like heart failure and pulmonary-related heart conditions. While the decline in smoking has reduced a major risk factor for heart disease, Americans are in many other ways much less healthy than they were 50 years ago. The increasing prevalence of <a href="https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and-overweight">obesity</a>, <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/php/data-research/index.html">diabetes</a>, <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/hypertension.htm">hypertension</a>, and <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2731178">sedentary behavior</a> all raise the risk that more Americans will develop some form of potentially fatal heart disease down the line.
Here, GLP-1 inhibitors like Ozempic hold amazing potential to reduce heart disease’s toll. <a href="https://newsroom.heart.org/news/major-cvd-event-risk-cut-by-20-in-adults-without-diabetes-with-overweight-or-obesity">One study</a> found that obese or overweight patients who took a GLP-1 inhibitor for more than three years had a 20 percent lower risk of heart attack, stroke, or death due to cardiovascular disease. Statins have saved millions of lives, yet <a href="https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/127172/cdc_127172_DS1.pdf">tens of millions more Americans</a> could likely benefit from taking the cholesterol-lowering drugs, especially <a href="https://www.heart.org/en/news/2019/08/19/why-do-women-get-cholesterol-lowering-statins-less-frequently-than-men">women, minorities, and people in rural areas</a>.
Lastly, far more Americans could benefit from the kind of advanced screening I received. Only <a href="https://rcastoragev2.blob.core.windows.net/3c9c26e329cc22b38adf73d92e6f530f/PMC8105517.pdf">about 1.5 million Americans</a> received a CAC test in 2017, but clinical guidelines indicate that <a href="https://www.journalofcardiovascularct.com/article/S1934-5925%2816%2930285-4/fulltext">more than 30 million people</a> could benefit from such scans. 
Just as it is with cancer, getting ahead of heart disease is the best way to stay healthy. It’s an astounding accomplishment to have reduced deaths from heart attacks by 90 percent over the past 50-plus years. But even better would be preventing more of us from ever getting to the cardiac brink at all. 
A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. <a href="https://www.vox.com/pages/good-news-newsletter-signup">Sign up here!</a>
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Sean Illing</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[Is ChatGPT killing higher education?]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/the-gray-area/418793/chatgpt-claude-ai-higher-education-cheating" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=418793</id>
<updated>2025-07-03T14:06:26-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-07-05T06:00:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Artificial Intelligence" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Education" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Innovation" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Podcasts" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Policy" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Technology" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="The Gray Area" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[What’s the point of college if no one’s actually doing the work? It’s not a rhetorical question. More and more students are not doing the work. They’re offloading their essays, their homework, even their exams, to AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude. These are not just study aids. They’re doing everything. We’re living in a […]]]></summary>
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<img alt="The text software ChatGPT is seen on a laptop screen." data-caption="" data-portal-copyright="Frank Rumpenhorst/Picture Alliance via Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/07/gettyimages-1246733863.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
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What’s the point of college if no one’s actually doing the work?
It’s not a rhetorical question. More and more students are not doing the work. They’re offloading their essays, their homework, even their exams, to AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude. These are not just study aids. They’re doing everything.
We’re living in a cheating utopia — and professors know it. It’s becoming increasingly common, and faculty are either too burned out or unsupported to do anything about it. And even if they wanted to do something, it’s not clear that there’s anything to be done at this point.
So what are we doing here? 
James Walsh is a features writer for New York magazine’s Intelligencer and the author of the <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/openai-chatgpt-ai-cheating-education-college-students-school.html">most unsettling piece</a> I’ve read about the impact of AI on higher education.
Walsh spent months talking to students and professors who are living through this moment, and what he found isn’t just a story about cheating. It’s a story about ambivalence and disillusionment and despair. A story about what happens when technology moves faster than our institutions can adapt.
I invited Walsh onto <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-gray-area">The Gray Area</a> to talk about what all of this means, not just for the future of college but the future of writing and thinking. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-gray-area">The Gray Area</a> on <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-gray-area-with-sean-illing/id1081584611">Apple Podcasts</a>,<a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6NOJ6IkTb2GWMj1RpmtnxP"> Spotify</a>,<a href="https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-gray-area-with-sean-illing/PC:30793?source=stitcher-sunset"> Pandora</a>, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
<iframe frameborder="0" height="200" src="https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=VMP2820246337" width="100%"></iframe>
Let’s talk about how students are cheating today. How are they using these tools? What’s the process look like?
It depends on the type of student, the type of class, the type of school you’re going to. Whether or not a student can get away with that is a different question, but there are plenty of students who are taking their prompt from their professor, copying and pasting it into ChatGPT and saying, “I need a four to five-page essay,” and copying and pasting that essay without ever reading it. 
One of the funniest examples I came across is a number of professors are using this so-called Trojan horse method where they’re dropping non-sequiturs into their prompts. They mention broccoli or Dua Lipa, or they say something about Finland in the essay prompts just to see if people are copying and pasting the prompts into ChatGPT. If they are, ChatGPT or whatever LLM they’re using will say something random about broccoli or Dua Lipa.
Unless you’re incredibly lazy, it takes just a little effort to cover that up.
Every professor I spoke to said, “So many of my students are using AI and I know that so many more students are using it and I have no idea,” because it can essentially write 70 percent of your essay for you, and if you do that other 30 percent to cover all your tracks and make it your own, it can write you a pretty good essay. 
And there are these platforms, these AI detectors, and there’s a big debate about how effective they are. They will scan an essay and assign some grade, say a 70 percent chance that this is AI-generated. And that’s really just looking at the language and deciding whether or not that language is created by an LLM. 
But it doesn’t account for big ideas. It doesn’t catch the students who are using AI and saying, “What should I write this essay about?” And not doing the actual thinking themselves and then just writing. It’s like paint by numbers at that point.
Did you find that students are relating very differently to all of this? What was the general vibe you got?
It was a pretty wide perspective on AI. I spoke to a student at the University of Wisconsin who said, “I realized AI was a problem last fall, walking into the library and at least half of the students were using ChatGPT.” And it was at that moment that she started thinking about her classroom discussions and some of the essays she was reading. 
The one example she gave that really stuck with me was that she was taking some psych class, and they were talking about attachment theories. She was like, “Attachment theory is something that we should all be able to talk about [from] our own personal experiences. We all have our own attachment theory. We can talk about our relationships with our parents. That should be a great class discussion. And yet I’m sitting here in class and people are referencing studies that we haven’t even covered in class, and it just makes for a really boring and unfulfilling class.” That was the realization for her that something is really wrong. So there are students like that.
And then there are students who feel like they have to use AI because if they’re not using AI, they’re at a disadvantage. Not only that, AI is going to be around no matter what for the rest of their lives. So they feel as if college, to some extent now, is about training them to use AI.
What’s the general professor’s perspective on this? They seem to all share something pretty close to despair.
Yes. Those are primarily the professors in writing-heavy classes or computer science classes. There were professors who I spoke to who actually were really bullish on AI. I spoke to one professor who doesn’t appear in the piece, but she is at UCLA and she teaches comparative literature, and used AI to create her entire textbook for this class this semester. And she says it’s the best class she’s ever had. 
So I think there are some people who are optimistic, [but] she was an outlier in terms of the professors I spoke to. For the most part, professors were, yes, in despair. They don’t know how to police AI usage. And even when they know an essay is AI-generated, the recourse there is really thorny. If you’re going to accuse a student of using AI, there’s no real good way to prove it. And students know this, so they can always deny, deny, deny. And the sheer volume of AI-generated essays or paragraphs is overwhelming. So that, just on the surface level, is extremely frustrating and has a lot of professors down.
Now, if we zoom out and think also about education in general, this raises a lot of really uncomfortable questions for teachers and administrators about the value of each assignment and the value of the degree in general.
How many professors do you think are now just having AI write their lectures?
There’s been a little reporting on this. I don’t know how many are. I know that there are a lot of platforms that are advertising themselves or asking professors to use them more, not just to write lectures, but to grade papers, which of course, as I say in the piece, opens up the very real possibility that right now an AI is grading itself and offering comments on an essay that it wrote. And this is pretty widespread stuff. There are plenty of universities across the country offering teachers this technology. And students love to talk about catching their professors using AI.
I’ve spoken to another couple of professors who are like, I’m nearing retirement, so it’s not my problem, and good luck figuring it out, younger generation. I just don’t think people outside of academia realize what a seismic change is coming. This is something that we’re all going to have to deal with professionally. 
And it’s happening much, much faster than anyone anticipated. I spoke with somebody who works on education at Anthropic, who said, “We expected students to be early adopters and use it a lot. We did not realize how many students would be using it and how often they would be using it.”
Is it your sense that a lot of university administrators are incentivized to not look at this too closely, that it’s better for business to shove it aside?
I do think there’s a vein of AI optimism among a certain type of person, a certain generation, who saw the tech boom and thought, I missed out on that wave, and now I want to adopt. I want to be part of this new wave, this future, this inevitable future that’s coming. They want to adopt the technology and aren’t really picking up on how dangerous it might be.
I used to teach at a university. I still know a lot of people in that world. A lot of them tell me that they feel very much on their own with this, that the administrators are pretty much just saying, Hey, figure it out. And I think it’s revealing that university admins were quickly able, during Covid, for instance, to implement drastic institutional changes to respond to that, but they’re much more content to let the whole AI thing play out.
I think they were super responsive to Covid because it was a threat to the bottom line. They needed to keep the operation running. AI, on the other hand, doesn’t threaten the bottom line in that way, or at least it doesn’t yet. AI is a massive, potentially extinction-level threat to the very idea of higher education, but they seem more comfortable with a degraded education as long as the tuition checks are still cashing. Do you think I’m being too harsh?
I genuinely don’t think that’s too harsh. I think administrators may not fully appreciate the power of AI and exactly what’s happening in the classroom and how prevalent it is. I did speak with many professors who go to administrators or even just older teachers, TAs going to professors and saying, This is a problem. 
I spoke to one TA at a writing course at Iowa who went to his professor, and the professor said, “Just grade it like it was any other paper.” I think they’re just turning a blind eye to it. And that is one of the ways AI is exposing the rot underneath education. 
It’s this system that hasn’t been updated in forever. And in the case of the US higher ed system, it’s like, yeah, for a long time it’s been this transactional experience. You pay X amount of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars, and you get your degree. And what happens in between is not as important.
The universities, in many cases, also have partnerships with AI companies, right?
Right. And what you said about universities can also be said about AI companies. For the most part, these are companies or companies within nonprofits that are trying to capture customers. One of the more dystopian moments was when we were finishing this story, getting ready to completely close it, and I got a push alert that was like, “Google is letting parents know that they have created <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/02/technology/google-gemini-ai-chatbot-kids.html">a chatbot for children under [thirteen years old]</a>.” And it was kind of a disturbing experience, but they are trying to capture these younger customers and build this loyalty.
There’s been <a href="https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-tool-chatgpt-cheating-writing-135b755a">reporting from the Wall Street Journal</a> on OpenAI and how they have been sitting on an AI that would be really, really effective at essentially watermarking their output. And they’ve been sitting on it, they have not released it, and you have to wonder why. And you have to imagine they know that students are using it, and in terms of building loyalty, an AI detector might not be the best thing for their brand.
This is a good time to ask the obligatory question, Are we sure we’re not just old people yelling at clouds here? People have always panicked about new technologies. Hell, Socrates panicked about the written word. How do we know this isn’t just another moral panic?
I think there’s a lot of different ways we could respond to that. It’s not a generational moral panic. This is a tool that’s available, and it’s available to us just as it’s available to students. Society and our culture will decide what the morals are. And that is changing, and the way that the definition of cheating is changing. So who knows? It might be a moral panic toda,y and it won’t be in a year.
However, I think somebody like Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, is one of the people who said, “This is a calculator for words.” And I just don’t really understand how that is compatible with other statements he’s made about AI potentially being lights out for humanity or statements made by people at an Anthropic about the power of AI to potentially be a catastrophic event for humans. And these are the people who are closest and thinking about it the most, of course.
I have spoken to some people who say there is a possibility, and I think there are people who use AI who would back this up, that we’ve maxed out the AI’s potential to supplement essays or writing. That it might not get much better than it is now. And I think that’s a very long shot, one that I would not want to bank on.
Is your biggest fear at this point that we are hurtling toward a post-literate society? I would argue, if we are post-literate, then we’re also post-thinking.
It’s a very scary thought that I try not to dwell in — the idea that my profession and what I’m doing is just feeding the machine, that my most important reader now is a robot, and that there’s going to be fewer and fewer readers is really scary, not just because of subscriptions, but because, as you said, that means fewer and fewer people thinking and engaging with these ideas. 
I think ideas can certainly be expressed in other mediums and that’s exciting, but I don’t think anybody who’s paid attention to the way technology has shaped teen brains over the past decade and a half is thinking, Yeah, we need more of that. And the technology we’re talking about now is orders of magnitude more powerful than the algorithms on Instagram.
<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/if-ai-can-do-your-classwork-why-go-to-college/id1081584611?i=1000715107364">Listen to the rest of the conversation</a> and be sure to follow <a href="https://www.vox.com/thegrayarea">The Gray Area</a> on <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-gray-area-with-sean-illing/id1081584611">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6NOJ6IkTb2GWMj1RpmtnxP">Spotify</a>, <a href="https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-gray-area-with-sean-illing/PC:30793">Pandora</a>, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Peter.Balonon-Rosen</name>
</author>
<author>
<name>Sean Rameswaram</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[The bizarre true story of Disney’s failed US history theme park]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/today-explained-podcast/418895/disneys-america-us-history-theme-park-failed-story" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=418895</id>
<updated>2025-07-03T16:34:27-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-07-04T07:00:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Podcasts" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Today, Explained podcast" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[How we tell the story of the United States — and who’s included in it and how — has been an ongoing battle in the country for decades. It’s one currently being waged by the Trump administration, such as when it scrubbed references to Jackie Robinson and Harriet Tubman from government webpages in the name […]]]></summary>
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How we tell the story of the United States — and who’s included in it and how — has been an ongoing battle in the country for decades. It’s one currently being waged by the Trump administration, such as when it scrubbed references to <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jackie-robinson-department-of-defense-webpage/">Jackie Robinson</a> and <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/06/us/national-parks-underground-railroad-harriet-tubman">Harriet Tubman</a> from government webpages in the name of clamping down on “DEI.”
And in the 1990s, Disney had a particularly zany idea of how to tell the story of America — one that set off a culture war as the company sought to create an amusement park focused on US history, warts and all. 
Disney’s America, the doomed amusement park, would have contained the story of immigration told through the Muppets’ musical-comedy stylings. It would have had sections dedicated to the Industrial Revolution, Native America, and the Civil War. It would, as Disney executives <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1993/11/12/disney-says-va-park-will-be-serious-fun/a1c0ef16-ae33-4d99-a489-3fbfeedd1c7b/">put it</a> at the time, “make you a Civil War soldier. We want to make you feel what it was like to be a slave.”
The ensuing battle over Disney’s America would be one of Disney’s biggest failures — and a precursor to battles we’re still fighting today.
To learn more about what Disney tried to do, what ended up happening, and what it all means, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with historian Jacqui Shine.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/today-explained/id1346207297">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://www.pandora.com/podcast/today-explained/PC:140">Pandora</a>, and <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/3pXx5SXzXwJxnf4A5pWN2A">Spotify</a>.
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Where does this story begin?
It begins with Michael Eisner, who came to Disney as its CEO and chairman in 1984. Eisner is ambitious, aggressive. Over the next 10 years, in what Disney buffs called the Disney Renaissance, the company has this enormous critical and commercial success with a run of animated movies. The juggernaut of this is The Little Mermaid, followed by Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King and Aladdin. 
Maybe high on that supply, Eisner announces this plan for what he calls the Disney decade, which is this broad expansion of the company’s parks and resorts. The most high-profile project here was Euro Disney Resort, which is now Disneyland Paris. And there’s high expectations for the Disney decade and for the success of the Parks program. 
This doesn’t go quite the way that they hope it will. Euro Disney doesn’t do well at opening. It loses nearly a billion dollars in its first year. So the failure of Euro Disney leads the company to want to pivot to more US expansion on smaller park projects. 
In 1991, the head of the parks division brings Eisner and Disney’s president Frank Wells to Colonial Williamsburg. This inspires this plan for a history-themed Disney Park, Disney’s America. 
They want to put it in Virginia because they imagine that it can become part of the DC-area tourist economy, and that a Disney theme park that is about American history will fit really well into this context. This is not a project that was supposed to involve Mickey Mouse or any of the Disney icons. Disney was starting work on Pocahontas.
Eisner says that he was reading a lot about John Smith and Pocahontas and that internally, the company was interested in democracy as a sort of, as a thematic subject.
So Eisner and Disney have an idea of what they don’t want to do, and perhaps more importantly, what they do want to do with this park. To build it, obviously you’re going to need some land. I imagine Disney just didn’t already have a huge parcel of property in northern Virginia-ish. Do they buy some?
They do. Between 1991 and 1993, Disney secretly begins buying up parcels of land in the area through shell companies. The guy who was in charge of buying <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1993/11/12/disneys-land-of-make-believe/51ff351e-a644-4253-9407-7abd62e1c8db/">apparently used a fake persona</a>; this was very undercover, this is all happening secretly. It is also less than five miles from a National Park Service Civil War Battlefield: Manassas. This is a place where about 3,700 men died and where there were about 25,000 total casualties.
They’re doing this secretly. At what point does Manassas find out that Mickey Mouse is buying up their land?
Almost everybody finds out in November 1993 when Disney announces the project.
I think initially people receive this warmly, because Disney’s promising a significant amount of economic development for the region and Disney is promising a complex experience of American history there. The guy who heads the Disney’s America project, Bob Weis, says in the press release they envisioned Disney’s America as a place to debate and discuss the future of our nation and to learn more about the past by living it. 
And they are quick to say that this is a project that is not going to whitewash American history. Eisner is interviewed in the Washington Post the next day. He says that the park will present painful, disturbing, agonizing history. We’re going to be sensitive, but we will not be showing the absolute propaganda of the country. We will show the Civil War with all this racial conflict.
This was a very serious, very powerful, very successful entertainment executive saying, “We’re gonna make a kiddy theme park that will take our most brutal history seriously.”
Yes. And I think, like you, a lot of people had trouble with that contradiction. The day after this press release is issued, Disney holds a press conference in Haymarket. At this presser, Bob Weis, who is the senior vice president of imagineering, which is Disney’s creative division, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1993/11/12/disney-says-va-park-will-be-serious-fun/a1c0ef16-ae33-4d99-a489-3fbfeedd1c7b/">says</a>, “This will be entertaining in the sense that it would leave you something you could mull over. We want to make you a Civil War soldier. We want to make you feel what it was like to be a slave or what it was like to escape through the underground railroad.”
This moment, I think, comes to define this conflict in the public eye. 
It’s such a nutty thing to hear a serious person say. Your kids could come to our theme park, home of Mickey Mouse, and find out what it’s like to be a slave. I imagine at this point, people are just like, “I’m sorry, I’m gonna need some more specifics.”
Yes. They put out a brochure, which is where a lot of the information that we have about what this would’ve been like comes from. 
<figure class="wp-block-pullquote"><blockquote>“Any kind of debate about public history is always going to be about trying to stake some sort of political or ideological claim about the meaning of American history.”</blockquote></figure>
You enter at Crossroads USA, and there you board an 1840s train that takes you first to President Square, which they say celebrates the birth of democracy. It’s about the Revolutionary War.
You follow that to Native America. They say, “guests may visit an Indian village representing such eastern tribes as the Powhatans, or join in a harrowing Lewis and Clark raft expedition through pounding rapids and churning whirlpools.” We’re going to be educating people about Manifest Destiny here.
We move from Native America to the Civil War fort, where they say you’re going to experience the reality of a soldier’s daily life. After the Civil War fort, you go to a section on American immigration. And they’re going to build a replica Ellis Island building. Some sources indicate they would’ve done a show called The Muppets Take America. 
The next section is a factory town called Enterprise that centers on a high-speed adventure ride called the Industrial Revolution. That involves a narrow escape from its fiery vat of molten steel.
Then you go to Victory Field, where guests may parachute from a plane or operate tanks and weapons in combat.
You then hit the last two areas, State Fair and Family Farm, to learn how to make homemade ice cream or milk a cow and even participate in a nearby country wedding, barn dance, and buffet. 
This sounds like one doozy of a brochure. Does it work? Does it convince everyone?
Yes and no.
Does that slow down Michael Eisner? Is he ready to give up?
No. And that is where the fight begins. People hook in, in particular, to this idea that Disney’s going to include some element about American chattel slavery. And he is aggressive about saying, No, we weren’t going to do that. Why would you think that?
He is really persuaded that Disney’s big swing can work, that this idea has value and merit, and that the people who are standing against it are misguided.
At this point, is this fight relegated to Virginia, or is it getting bigger? This is obviously an international company with a huge cultural footprint.
It’s getting bigger. One of the things that contributes to this is that the Washington Post does a lot of coverage of this, which makes it go national. And it starts this debate in editorial pages about whether or not Disney can responsibly represent American history and whether or not the Disneyfication of American history is advisable.
And what happens when national papers, opinion columns start weighing in on this debate? 
A few things happen. In early 1994, a strong coalition of opponents develops, including people who are concerned about preserving the environment there.
But then the historians get involved. The big guns come out when this group called Protect Historic America launches. This is a group of big-name, high-powered academic historians. This group of major figures stepped forward to say they’re concerned about education around the Civil War and about the park’s location near Manassas. In very short order, dozens and dozens of historians volunteer their time to write editorials, to comment to the media. They’re really fired up about this.
I read that this fight also somehow made it to the United States Congress. Why is this even Congress’s business?
This is one of the interesting things that comes out of Senate Energy and Natural Resources subcommittee hearings. The entree into this is that this involves public lands of national importance. Five hundred people come to the Senate hearing, and Eisner’s really combative. He <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1994/06/14/eisner-says-disney-wont-back-down/edafc8a2-5000-40d2-ac20-efd4fdca4c27/">says</a> about the people who are opposed to this, “I sat through many history classes where I read some of their stuff and I didn’t learn anything. It was pretty boring.”
At this point you’ve got historians speaking out about this. You’ve got op-ed columns being written, it sounds like all over the country. You’ve got a hearing on Capitol Hill. Are people out in the streets protesting this somewhere?
They are. Eisner is on the Hill trying to make nice with DC politicians and invites them to a special screening of The Lion King. But when they leave the theater, there are about a hundred protestors outside. Bigger than this though, in September 1994, 3,000 people march on the National Mall to protest Disney’s America.
Nationally, public support for the park has dropped to like 25 percent. At the end of September 1994, the company announces that Disney is withdrawing from the Virginia site. It’s clear that people don’t want it to be sited where it is, and they’re giving up. It’s over for Disney’s America. It is curtains for Disney’s America.
How do you think what happened in the ’90s connects to the kinds of fights we’re having about our history right now?
Any kind of debate about public history is always going to be about trying to stake some sort of political or ideological claim about the meaning of American history. Right now we see this very direct, very aggressive effort to insist on a positivist narrative about American history. 
One of the things that I think people found puzzling about the early days of the Trump administration was that the National Endowment for the Humanities cut an enormous amount of active grants. And they issued new guidelines seeking projects, they say, that instill “an understanding of the founding principles and ideals that make America an exceptional country.” I think partly this is the administration’s backlash to efforts in the last decade to bring a more nuanced and complex understanding to structural oppression in US history.
We fantasize about American history in all kinds of ways, in all kinds of places. I don’t know that Disney in seeking to do that was necessarily doing anything out of step with how we represent the American story.
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</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Sigal Samuel</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[How America forgot the best way to defend its democracy]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/418783/liberal-democracy-value-pluralism-isaiah-berlin" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=418783</id>
<updated>2025-07-03T12:25:17-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-07-04T06:00:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Democracy" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Explainers" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Future Perfect" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Politics" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[Americans aren’t used to having to defend democracy. It’s just been a given for so long. After all, it’s the country’s 249th birthday. But now, with experts warning that US democracy may break down in the next three years, many people feel worried about it — and passionate about protecting it. But how do you […]]]></summary>
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Americans aren’t used to having to defend democracy. It’s just been a given for so long. After all, it’s the country’s 249th birthday. But now, with experts warning that <a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/path-american-authoritarianism-trump">US democracy may break down</a> in the next three years, many people feel <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/07/01/nx-s1-5452297/new-poll-finds-about-three-quarters-of-americans-say-democracy-under-threat">worried about it</a> — and passionate about protecting it.
But how do you defend something when you don’t quite remember the justifications for it? 
Many intellectuals on both the left and right have spent the past decade <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/9/9/20750160/liberalism-trump-putin-socialism-reactionary">attacking America’s liberal democracy</a> — a political system that holds meaningfully free, fair, multiparty elections, and gives citizens plenty of civil liberties and equality before the law. 
On the left, thinkers have criticized liberalism’s economic vision for its emphasis on individual freedom, which they argued feeds exploitation and inequality. On the right, thinkers have taken issue with liberalism’s focus on secularism and individual rights, which they said wrecks traditional values and social cohesion. The common thread is the belief that liberalism’s core premise — the government’s main job is to defend the freedom of the individual to choose their path in life — is wrong.
These arguments gained mainstream success for a time, as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp has <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/9/9/20750160/liberalism-trump-putin-socialism-reactionary">documented</a>. That’s in part because, well, liberalism does have its problems. At a time of <a href="https://www.vox.com/explain-it-to-me/403126/wealth-inequality-class-warfare-billionaires">rising inequality</a> and <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy/2023/5/3/23707936/surgeon-general-loneliness-epidemic-report">rampant social disconnection</a>, it shouldn’t be surprising when some people complain that liberalism is so busy protecting the freedom of the individual that it neglects to tackle collective problems.
But awareness of these problems shouldn’t mean that we give up on liberal democracy. In fact, there are very compelling reasons to want to uphold this political system. Because Americans have gotten used to taking it for granted, many have forgotten how to make the intellectual case for it. 
It’s time to remember. 
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Liberal democracy does have a good defense. It’s called value pluralism.</h2>
When you think of liberalism, you might think of philosophers like <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/">John Locke</a>, <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mill/">John Stuart Mill</a>, or <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/john-rawls-liberalism-and-what-it-means-to-live-a-good-life">John Rawls</a>. But, believe it or not, some people not named John also had very important ideas. 
Prime examples include the Oxford philosopher <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/what-can-isaiah-berlin-tell-us-about-political-freedom-today">Isaiah Berlin</a> and Harvard political theorist <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/discovering-judith-shklars-skeptical-liberalism-of-fear">Judith Shklar</a>, who are strangely underappreciated given their contributions to liberal thought in the Cold War period. Associated thinkers like <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/ENTRIES/williams-bernard/">Bernard Williams</a> and <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/06/24/cosmic-connections-charles-taylor-book-review">Charles Taylor</a> are also worth noting.
Let’s focus on Berlin, though, since he was one of the clearest and greatest defenders of liberal democracy. Born to a Jewish family in the Russian Empire, he experienced the political extremes of the 20th century — the Russian Revolution, the rise of Soviet communism, the Holocaust — and came away with a horror for totalitarian thinking. In all these cases, he argued, the underlying culprit was “monism”: the idea that we can arrive at the true answers to humanity’s central problems and harmoniously combine them into one utopian, perfect society.
For example, in Stalin’s communism, monism took the form of believing that the key is to establish a classless society — even if millions of people had to be killed to achieve that vision. 
If it were possible to have a perfect society, any method of bringing it about would seem justified. <a href="https://isaiah-berlin.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2018-09/Bib.196%20-%20Pursuit%20of%20the%20Ideal%20by%20Isaiah%20Berlin_1.pdf">Berlin writes</a>:
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For if one really believes that such a solution is possible, then surely no cost would be too high to obtain it: to make mankind just and happy and creative and harmonious forever — what could be too high a price to pay for that? To make such an omelette, there is surely no limit to the number of eggs that should be broken — that was the faith of Lenin, of Trotsky, of Mao.
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But this utopian idea is a dangerous illusion. The problem with it, Berlin argued, is that human beings have lots of different values, and they’re not all compatible with each other. In fact, they’re inherently diverse and often in tension with each other. 
Take, for example, justice and mercy. Both of these are equally legitimate values. But rigorous justice won’t always be compatible with mercy; the former would push a court to throw the book at someone for breaking a law, even if no one was harmed and it was a first offense, while the latter would urge for a more forgiving approach. 
Or take liberty and equality. Both beautiful values — “but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs,” <a href="https://isaiah-berlin.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2018-09/Bib.196%20-%20Pursuit%20of%20the%20Ideal%20by%20Isaiah%20Berlin_1.pdf">Berlin writes</a>, “total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted.” The state has to curtail the liberty of those who want to dominate if it cares about making room for equality or social welfare, for feeding the hungry and providing houses for the unhoused.
Some ethical theories, like utilitarianism, try to dissolve these sorts of conflicts by suggesting that all the <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/387570/moral-optimization">different values can be ranked on a single scale</a>; in any given situation, one will produce more units of happiness or pleasure than the other. But Berlin argues that the values are actually incommensurable: attending a Buddhist meditation retreat and eating a slice of chocolate cake might both give you some sort of happiness, but you can’t rank them on a single scale. They are extremely different types of happiness. What’s more, some values can actually make us less happy — think of courage, say, and intellectual honesty or truth-seeking — but are valuable nonetheless. You can’t boil all values down to one “supervalue” and measure everything in terms of it.
If human values are incommensurable and sometimes flat-out incompatible, that means no single political arrangement can satisfy all legitimate human values simultaneously. To put it more simply: We can’t have everything. We’ll always face trade-offs between different goods, and because we’re forced to choose between them, there will always be some loss of value — some good thing left unchosen. 
Berlin says it’s precisely because this is the human condition that we rightly place such a high premium on freedom. If no one can justifiably tell us that their way is the one right way to live — because, according to Berlin’s value pluralism, there can be more than one right answer — then no government can claim to have uncontestable knowledge about the good and foist its vision on us. We should all have a share in making those decisions on the collective level — as we do in a liberal democracy. And on the individual level, we should each have the freedom to choose how we balance between values, how we live our own lives. When others come up with different answers, we should respect their competing perspectives.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Value pluralism is not relativism</h2>
“I do not say, ‘I like my coffee with milk and you like it without; I am in favor of kindness and you prefer concentration camps,’” <a href="https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~vl/notes/berlin.html">Berlin memorably writes</a>. Although he argues that there’s a plurality of values, that doesn’t mean any and every possible value is a legitimate human value. Legitimate values are things that humans have genuine reason to care about as ends in themselves, and that others can see the point in, even if they put less weight on a given value or dispute how it’s being enacted in the world.
Security, for example, is something we all have reason to care about, even though we differ on the lengths the government should go to in order to ensure security. By contrast, if someone said that cruelty is a core value, they’d be laughed out of the room. We can imagine a person valuing cruelty in specific contexts as a means to a greater end, but no human being (except maybe a sociopath) would argue that they value it as an end in itself. As <a href="https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~vl/notes/berlin.html" data-type="link" data-id="https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~vl/notes/berlin.html">Berlin writes</a>:
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The number of human values, of values that I can pursue while maintaining my human semblance, my human character, is finite — let us say 74, or perhaps 122, or 26, but finite, whatever it may be. And the difference it makes is that if a man pursues one of these values, I, who do not, am able to understand why he pursues it or what it would be like, in his circumstances, for me to be induced to pursue it. Hence the possibility of human understanding.
</blockquote>
Contemporary psychologists like Jonathan Haidt have made a similar case. His research suggests that <a href="https://moralfoundations.org/">different people prioritize different moral values</a>. Liberals are those who are especially attuned to the values of care and fairness. Conservatives are those who are also sensitive to the values of loyalty, authority, and sanctity. It’s not like some of these values are “bad” and some are “good.” They’re just different. And even a liberal who strongly disagrees with how a conservative is applying the value of sanctity (for example, as a way to argue that a fetus represents a life and that life is sacred, so abortion should be banned) can appreciate that sanctity is, itself, a fine value.
Berlin anticipated this line of thinking. Although he acknowledges that some disagreements are so severe that people will feel compelled to go to war — he would go to war against Nazi Germany, for example — by and large, “respect between systems of values which are not necessarily hostile to each other is possible,” <a href="https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~vl/notes/berlin.html" data-type="link" data-id="https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~vl/notes/berlin.html">he writes</a>.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Liberalism can’t just be about warding off totalitarianism. Is there more to it?</h2>
Berlin’s analysis offers a highly effective vaccine against totalitarian thinking. That’s a huge point in its favor — and defenders of liberal democracy would do well to resurface it. 
But there’s more to a good society than just warding off totalitarianism — than, to put it in <a href="https://cactus.utahtech.edu/green/B_Readings/I_Berlin%20Two%20Concpets%20of%20Liberty.pdf">Berlin’s own terms</a>, guaranteeing “negative freedoms” (freedom from things like oppression). We also care about “positive freedoms” (freedom to enjoy all the good things in life). In recent years, <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300280128/liberalism-against-itself/">critics have alleged that Berlin and other Cold War liberals</a> neglected that part of the equation.
It’s fair to point out that American liberalism has done a poor job of ensuring things like equality and social connection. But Berlin’s account of value pluralism never pretended to be laying out a timeless prescription for how to balance between different priorities. Just the opposite. He specified that priorities are never absolute. We exist on a seesaw, and as our society’s concrete circumstances change — say, as capitalism goes into hyperdrive and billionaires amass more and more power — we’ll need to repeatedly adjust our stance so we can maintain a decent balance between all the elements of a good life.
And on the global scale, Berlin fully expects that different cultures will keep disagreeing with each other about how much weight to put on the different legitimate human values. He urges us to <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691155937/the-crooked-timber-of-humanity?srsltid=AfmBOoo0MvlznuiQN67zaqAmu6-rohGAXg7zlt1trNOeMS9UcmIfGjYd">view each culture as infinitely precious</a> in its uniqueness, and to see that there may be “as many types of perfection as there are types of culture.” He offers us a positive vision that’s about respecting, and maybe even delighting in, difference.
Nowadays, a new generation of philosophers, including American thinkers influenced by Berlin like <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674447561">Ruth Chang and Elizabeth Anderson</a>, is busy trying to work out the particulars of how to do that in modern society, tackling issues from ongoing <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691158112/the-imperative-of-integration?srsltid=AfmBOorL2irkK5L252Z0ckqi1Oqszobk53620IoAyojWA2a5z5mkTC9y">racial segregation</a> to rapid <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2021/02/how-prevent-ai-taking-over-world">technological change</a>.
But this can’t just be the work of philosophers. If America is going to remain a liberal democracy, everyday Americans need to remember the value of value pluralism.
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</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Christian Paz</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[Trump is about to notch his biggest legislative win — but it could come at a cost]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/politics/418668/trump-bill-reconciliation-unpopular-republican-backlash" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=418668</id>
<updated>2025-07-03T16:01:39-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-07-03T14:50:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Congress" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Donald Trump" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Politics" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[President Donald Trump has achieved his biggest legislative victory yet: his “one big, beautiful bill” — the massive tax– and Medicaid-cutting, immigration and border spending bill that passed the Senate on Tuesday — has now been passed by the House of Representatives. It goes to his desk today to be signed into law. It’s a […]]]></summary>
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<img alt="Donald Trump speaks from the dais of the House of Representatives." data-caption="President Donald Trump speaks during an address to a joint session of Congress at the US Capitol on March 4, 2025. | Allison Robbert/AFP via Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Allison Robbert/AFP via Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/07/gettyimages-2202775461.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
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President Donald Trump speaks during an address to a joint session of Congress at the US Capitol on March 4, 2025. | Allison Robbert/AFP via Getty Images </figcaption>
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President Donald Trump has achieved his biggest legislative victory yet: his “one big, beautiful bill” — the massive<a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/418187/big-beautiful-bill-senate-trump-tax-cut-ai-wind-solar"> tax</a>– and <a href="https://www.vox.com/health-care/418431/big-beautiful-bill-lose-medicaid-trump">Medicaid</a>-cutting, immigration and border spending bill that passed the Senate on Tuesday — has now been passed by the House of Representatives. It goes to his desk today to be signed into law.
It’s a massive piece of legislation, likely to increase the national debt <a href="https://www.crfb.org/blogs/senate-obbba-charts">by</a> <a href="https://www.crfb.org/blogs/senate-obbba-charts">at least</a> <a href="https://apnews.com/article/cbo-trump-tax-bill-republicans-senate-5f591bea21bd95eec45ba90c93c50687">$3 trillion</a>, mostly through tax cuts, and leave 17 million Americans without health coverage — and it’s really <a href="https://www.axios.com/2025/07/01/trump-big-beautiful-bill-polling?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=editorial">unpopular</a>. Majorities in nearly every reputable poll taken this month disapprove of the bill, ranging from 42 percent who oppose the bill in <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/06/17/budget-bill-poll/">an Ipsos poll</a> (compared to 23 percent who support) to 64 percent who oppose it in <a href="https://www.kff.org/medicaid/poll-finding/kff-health-tracking-poll-views-of-the-one-big-beautiful-bill/">a KFF poll</a>.
And if history is any indication, it’s not going to get any better for Trump and the Republicans from here on out. 
In modern American politics, few things are more unpopular with the public than big, messy bills forged under a bright spotlight. That’s especially true of bills passed through a Senate mechanism called “<a href="https://www.vox.com/22242476/senate-filibuster-budget-reconciliation-process">budget reconciliation</a>,” a Senate procedure that allows the governing party to bypass filibuster rules with a simple majority vote. They tend to have a negative effect on presidents and their political parties in the following months as policies are implemented and campaign seasons begin.
Part of that effect is due to the public’s general tendency to dislike any kind of legislation as it gets more publicity and becomes better understood. But reconciliation bills in the modern era seem to create a self-fulfilling prophecy: forcing presidents to be maximally ambitious at the outset, before they lose popular support for the legislation and eventually lose the congressional majorities that delivered passage.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Presidents and their parties tend to be punished after passing big spending bills</h2>
The <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/23/13709518/budget-reconciliation-explained">budget reconciliation</a> process, created in 1974, has gradually been used to accomplish broader and bigger policy goals. Because it offers a workaround for a Senate filibuster, which requires 60 votes to break, it has become the primary way that presidents and their parties implement their economic and social welfare visions.
The public, however, doesn’t tend to reward the governing party after these bills are passed. As political writer and analyst Ron Brownstein recently pointed <a href="https://x.com/RonBrownstein/status/1939161898651656254">out</a>, presidents who successfully pass a major reconciliation bill in the first year of their presidency lose control of Congress, usually the House, the following year.
In 1982, Ronald Reagan lost his governing majority in the House after using reconciliation to pass large spending cuts as part of his Reaganomics vision (the <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/05/17/nx-s1-5400693/reagan-trump-budget-reconciliation">original “big, beautiful” bill</a>). And the pattern would repeat itself for George H.W. Bush (whose reconciliation bill contradicted his campaign promise not to raise taxes), for Bill Clinton in 1994 (deficit reductions and tax reform), for Barack Obama in 2010 (after the passage of the Affordable Care Act), for Trump in 2018 (tax cuts), and for Biden in 2022 (the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act).
The exception in this list of modern presidents is George W. Bush, who did pass a set of tax cuts in a reconciliation bill, but whose approval rating rose after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Increasing polarization, and the general anti-incumbent party energy that tends to run through midterm elections, of course, explains part of this overall popular and electoral backlash. But reconciliation bills themselves seem to intensify this effect.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Why reconciliation bills do so much political damage</h2>
First, there’s the actual substance of these bills, which has been growing in scope over time.
Because they tend to be the first, and likely only, major piece of domestic legislation that can execute a president’s agenda, they are often highly ideological, partisan projects that try to implement as much of a governing party’s vision as possible. 
These highly ideological pieces of legislation, <a href="https://polisci.msu.edu/people/directory/grossmann-matt.html">Matt Grossman</a>, the director of Michigan State University’s Institute for Public Policy and Social Research, and his partners <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1532673X241253813?icid=int.sj-abstract.citing-articles.4">have found</a>, tend to kick into gear a “thermostatic” response from the public — that is, that public opinion moves in the opposite direction of policymaking when the public perceives one side is going too far to the right or left.
Because these bills have actually been growing in reach, from mere tax code adjustments to massive tax-and-spend, program-creating bills, and becoming more ideological projects, the public, in turn, seems to be reacting more harshly.
These big reconciliation bills also run into an issue that afflicts all kinds of legislation: It has a PR problem. <a href="https://www.niskanencenter.org/how-media-coverage-of-congress-limits-policymaking/">Media coverage</a> of proposed legislation tends to emphasize its partisanship, portraying the party in power as pursuing its domestic agenda at all costs and emphasizing that parties are fighting against each other. This elevates process over policy substance. Political scientist <a href="https://pages.charlotte.edu/mary-atkinson/">Mary Layton Atkinson</a> has found that just like campaign reporting is inclined to focus on the horse race, <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo25681072.html">coverage of legislation in Congress and policy debates</a> often focuses on conflict and procedure, adding to a sense in the public mind that Congress is extreme, dysfunctional, and hyperpartisan.
Adding to this dynamic is a quirk of public opinion toward <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227793388_The_Dynamics_of_Partisan_Conflict_on_Congressional_Approval">legislation</a> and <a href="https://journalistsresource.org/politics-and-government/ballot-measures-election-research/">referenda</a>: Proposals tend to get less popular, and <a href="https://calmatters.org/politics/elections/2019/10/ballot-california-polling-trend-slump-fact-check-myth-data">lose public support</a>, between proposal and passage, as the public learns more about the actual content of initiatives and as they <a href="https://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Congressional-Approval.pdf">hear more</a> about the political negotiations and <a href="https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/political-polarization-may-slow-legislation-make-higher-stakes-laws-likelier">struggles</a> taking place behind the scenes as these bills are ironed out.
Lawmakers and key political figures also “tend to highlight the benefits less than the things that they are upset about in the course of negotiations,” Grossman told me. “That [also] occurs when a bill passes: You have the people who are against it saying all the terrible things about it, and actually the people who are for it are often saying, ‘I didn’t get all that I wanted, I would have liked it to be slightly different.’ So the message that comes out of it is actually pretty negative on the whole, because no one is out there saying this is the greatest thing and exactly what they wanted.”
Even with the current One Big Beautiful Bill, polling analysis shows that the public tends not to be very knowledgeable about what is in the legislative package, but gets even more hostile to it <a href="https://www.kff.org/from-drew-altman/clues-from-polling-about-how-opinion-might-change-if-we-had-more-informed-health-policy-debate/?utm_campaign=KFF-Medicaid&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_f3H626I1v1RwaCmJxZsdlNaig8lP5BV4UMoqJhHUZ9lnB_1M4OP1K3vLngoGVrlbBIHhUHeRXH9kWa13TOjaG843z8g&_hsmi=369254535&utm_content=369254535&utm_source=hs_email">once they learn or are provided more information</a> about specific policy details.
Big reconciliation bills exist at the intersection of all three of these public image problems: They tend to be the first major legislative challenge a new president and Congress take on, they suck up all the media’s attention, they direct the public’s attention to one major piece of legislation, and they take a pretty long time to iron out — further extending the timeline in which the bill can get more unpopular.
This worsening perception over time, the public’s frustration with how the sausage is made, and the growing ideological stakes of these bills, all create a kind of feedback loop: Governing parties know that they have limited time and a single shot to implement their vision before experiencing some form of backlash in future elections, so they rush to pass the biggest and boldest bill possible. The cycle repeats itself, worsening public views in the process and increasing polarization. For now, Trump has set a July 4 deadline for signing this bill into law. He looks all but certain to hit that goal. But all signs are pointing to this “beautiful” bill delivering him and his party a big disappointment next year. He’s already unpopular, and when he focuses his and the public’s attention on his actual agenda, <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/417577/trump-paradox-poll-iran-economy-approval-number">it tends not to go well</a>.
Update, July 3, 2:50 pm ET: This article has been updated with news of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s passage by the House of Representatives.

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</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Andrew Prokop</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[What Trump’s massive bill would actually do, explained]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/politics/418599/one-big-beautiful-bill-act-details-explained" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=418599</id>
<updated>2025-07-03T15:50:01-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-07-03T14:45:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Donald Trump" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Policy" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Politics" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[Republicans have just passed President Donald Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, which will cut taxes, slash programs for low-income Americans, ramp up funding for mass deportation, and penalize the solar and wind energy industries. Oh, and it adds enormously to the nation’s debt — but who’s counting? (Independent analysts are, and they estimate it […]]]></summary>
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<img alt="President Trump signing a bill at his desk" data-caption="President Donald Trump signs a bill on June 12, 2025. | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/07/GettyImages-2219160677.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
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President Donald Trump signs a bill on June 12, 2025. | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images </figcaption>
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Republicans have just passed President Donald Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, which will cut taxes, slash programs for low-income Americans, ramp up funding for mass deportation, and penalize the solar and wind energy industries.
Oh, and it adds enormously to the nation’s debt — but who’s counting? (Independent <a href="https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2025/7/1/senate-reconciliation-bill-budget-economic-and-distributional-effects">analysts</a> are, and they <a href="https://www.crfb.org/blogs/cbo-score-shows-senate-obbba-adds-over-39-trillion-debt">estimate</a> it will add at least $3 trillion.)
The sprawling, <a href="https://punchbowl.news/file_3921/">887-page bill</a>, which Trump is expected to sign into law Friday, contains far too many provisions to name here. But to get a better sense of the bill’s impact, it’s worth running down what it does in a few key areas. 
The big picture, though, is that Trump is targeting Democratic or liberal-coded programs and constituencies — programs for the poor, student borrowers, and climate change — to cover part (but nowhere near all) of the cost of his big tax cuts and new spending.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Taxes: The current tax rates stick around – plus there’s some new tax cuts</h2>
The bill makes a <a href="https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/news/2025/jun/tax-changes-in-senate-budget-reconciliation-bill/">variety of changes to tax law</a>, some of which are about keeping tax breaks set to expire soon, others of which are adding new goodies in the tax code.
1) Making the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent: In Trump’s first term, Republicans lowered income and other tax rates with his 2017 tax law. However, in a gimmick to make that law look less costly, the new lower rates they set were scheduled to expire at the end of 2025 — meaning that, if Congress did nothing, practically everyone’s taxes would go up next year.
So the single most consequential thing this bill does, from a budgetary perspective, is making those 2017 tax levels permanent, averting their imminent expiration. 
That saves Americans from an imminent tax hike, but notably, it just keeps the status quo tax levels in place. So, in practice, many people may not perceive this as a new cut to their taxes.
2) New “populist” tax cuts: The bill also creates several new tax breaks meant to fulfill certain Trump 2024 campaign promises, such as “no tax on tips.” There will be <a href="https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/news/2025/jun/tax-changes-in-senate-budget-reconciliation-bill/">new deductions</a> for up to $25,000 in tip income, $12,500 in overtime income, $6,000 <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/07/02/senior-deduction-trump-social-security/">for seniors</a>, and a deduction for interest on loans for <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/02/us/politics/senate-trump-bill-new-car-interest.html">new US-made cars</a>. The bill also creates savings accounts for children called “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/30/upshot/senate-republican-megabill.html">Trump accounts</a>,” in which the government would invest $1,000 per child.
3) Tax cuts for the wealthy and businesses: Wealthy Americans wanting to pay less in taxes have the most to be happy about from this bill, because they benefit hugely from making the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent. 
Other wealthy winners in the bill include owners of <a href="https://www.vox.com/2017/11/28/16709634/pass-through-republican-tax-bill">“pass-through” businesses</a> (partnerships, LLCs, or other business entities that don’t pay the typical corporate income tax); they get their tax cuts in Trump’s 2017 bill made permanent. Some wealthy heirs stand to gain too, as the exemption from the estate tax was raised to inherited estates worth $15 million).
Affluent blue state residents got a big win. The 2017 Trump tax law had sharply limited a deduction that typically benefited them — the state and local <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2021/4/14/22375306/salt-tax-deduction-repeal">(SALT) deduction</a>, which it capped at $10,000. (People in blue states tend to have more state and local taxes they can deduct.) The new bill <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/01/senate-republican-bill-salt-tax.html">raises that</a> limit to $40,000.
Businesses also get some big benefits, as the bill makes three major corporate <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/06/28/republican-senate-trump-tax-immigration-plan/">tax breaks permanent</a>: bonus depreciation, research and development expensing, and a tax break related to interest deduction. 
All this, combined with the cuts for programs for poor people, is why <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/12/upshot/gop-megabill-distribution-poor-rich.html">many</a> <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/30/trump-bill-helps-wealthy-hurts-low-earners-yale-report.html">analysts</a> calculate the impact this bill would be regressive overall — it will end up financially harming low-income Americans, and benefiting the rich the most.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The safety net: Big cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, and student loans</h2>
Trump has repeatedly <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-medicaid-republican-bill-cut-benefits/story?id=121756481">promised that he wouldn’t cut Medicaid</a>, and this bill breaks that promise bigly. Its new work reporting requirements and other changes (such as a limit to the “<a href="https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/5-key-facts-about-medicaid-and-provider-taxes/">provider tax</a>” states may charge) could end up <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/06/29/trump-tax-medicaid-snap/">cutting Medicaid spending</a> by as much as 18 percent. The bill also makes changes to the Affordable Care Act individual insurance marketplaces. Altogether, these provisions would result in 12 million people losing their health insurance, per the <a href="https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/how-will-the-2025-budget-reconciliation-affect-the-aca-medicaid-and-the-uninsured-rate/">Congressional Budget Office</a>.
Food stamps are another target. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) could be cut by <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/06/29/trump-tax-medicaid-snap/">as much as 20 percent</a>, due to new work requirements and new requirements states pay a higher share of the program’s cost. One <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/senate-bill-snap-error-rates-murkowski-alaska_n_68644b9ce4b06a831253f20f">bizarre last-minute provision</a>, aimed at winning over swing vote Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), seemingly gives states an incentive to make erroneous payments, because states with higher payment error rates get to <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/senate-bill-snap-error-rates-murkowski-alaska_n_68644b9ce4b06a831253f20f">delay their cost hikes</a>.
Student loans also come in for <a href="https://www.marketwatch.com/story/gop-megabill-poised-to-change-the-way-americans-borrow-and-repay-student-loans-56c49da3">deep cuts</a>, as the bill overhauls the existing system, ending many repayment plans, requiring borrowers to repay more, and limiting future loan availability. 
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Clean energy: The bill singles out solar and wind for harsh treatment</h2>
Three years ago, with the Inflation Reduction Act, Democrats enacted a swath of new incentives aimed at making the US a clean energy powerhouse. Trump’s new bill moves in the exact opposite direction. It repeals many of Biden’s clean energy benefits, but it doesn’t stop there – it goes further by <a href="https://heatmap.news/politics/senate-big-beautiful-bill">singling out clean energy</a>, particularly solar and wind, for harsh treatment.
Under the bill, new Biden-era tax credits for electric vehicles and energy efficiency will be <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/30/upshot/senate-republican-megabill.html">terminated this year</a>. Biden’s clean electricity production tax credits, meanwhile, will be gradually rolled back, though solar and wind will see their credits vanish more quickly. The bill also requires clean power projects to start using fewer and fewer Chinese-made components, which much of the industry heavily relies on.
Things could be worse, though. A recent draft of the bill included <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/418187/big-beautiful-bill-senate-trump-tax-cut-ai-wind-solar">far harsher policies toward solar and wind</a>, which could have had truly apocalyptic consequences for the industry — but some of them were <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/senate-removes-excise-tax-renewable-energy-industry-trump-domestic-policy-bill/">dropped</a> or <a href="https://x.com/AlexEpstein/status/1940089077409489010">watered down</a> to get the bill through the Senate.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Trump’s new spending goes to the border wall, mass deportation, and the military</h2>
Counterbalancing some of these spending cuts on the safety net and clean energy, Trump’s bill also spends a bunch more money on two of his own top priorities: immigration enforcement in the military.
About $175 billion will be devoted to immigration, including roughly <a href="https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/fact-sheet/house-reconciliation-bill-immigration-border-security/">$50 billion for Trump’s border wall</a> and US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) facilities, $45 billion for expanding the capacity to detain unauthorized immigrants, and $30 billion for enforcement operations. This is a lot of money that will now be devoted to Trump’s “mass deportation” agenda, and the question will now be whether they can put it to use.
The military, meanwhile, will get about $150 billion from the bill, to be used to start construction on Trump’s planned “Golden Dome” missile defense shield, as well as on shipbuilding, <a href="https://www.airandspaceforces.com/pentagon-replenish-munitions-stockpiles-billions-congress/">munitions</a>, and other military priorities.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The debt: It goes up a whole lot</h2>
In the end, Trump’s spending cuts were nowhere near enough to balance out the enormous cost of the tax cuts in this bill. So, estimates suggest, <a href="https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2025/7/1/senate-reconciliation-bill-budget-economic-and-distributional-effects">at least $3 trillion more will be added to the debt</a> if this bill becomes law.
Every president this century has come in with big deficit-increasing bills, dismissing concerns about the debt, and the sky hasn’t yet fallen. But all these years of big spending are adding up, and <a href="https://www.crfb.org/blogs/interest-debt-grow-past-1-trillion-next-year">interest payments on the debt</a> are rising. This could make for a significant drag on the economy in future years and make even more painful cuts necessary.
Republicans are betting that the tax cuts in this bill will juice business and economic activity enough to keep the country happy in the short term — and that the cuts, targeting mainly low-income people or Democratic constituencies, are unlikely to hurt them too much at the ballot box. 
Update: July 3 at 2:45 pm ET: This piece was originally published on July 2 and was updated after the House’s passage of Trump’s spending bill. 
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</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Andrew Prokop</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[Does Trump really not understand his huge bill cuts Medicaid?]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/politics/418843/trump-medicaid-cuts-promise-big-beautiful-bill" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=418843</id>
<updated>2025-07-03T15:51:20-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-07-03T14:30:20-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Donald Trump" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Health" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Policy" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Politics" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Public Health" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[A strange thing happened on the way to Republicans’ passage of their big Medicaid-cutting bill: We learned that President Donald Trump seems unaware the bill will cut Medicaid. Trying to line up support for the bill in a private call Wednesday with House Republicans, Trump offered his advice that, if they want to win elections, […]]]></summary>
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<img alt="President Donald Trump, joined by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and other lawmakers, holds up an executive order he signed" data-caption="President Donald Trump, joined by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and other lawmakers, holds up an executive order he signed in June. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/07/GettyImages-2219880481.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
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President Donald Trump, joined by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and other lawmakers, holds up an executive order he signed in June. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images </figcaption>
</figure>
A strange thing happened on the way to Republicans’ passage of their big Medicaid-cutting bill: We learned that President Donald Trump seems unaware the bill will cut Medicaid.
Trying to line up support for the bill in a private call Wednesday with House Republicans, Trump offered his advice that, if they want to win elections, they shouldn’t touch Medicare or Social Security — or Medicaid. His comments were <a href="https://www.notus.org/congress/reconciliation-timeline-slipping-trump">reported by Riley Rogerson and Reese Gorman of NOTUS</a>.
This is a bizarre thing to say, because Medicaid is the single program <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/30/upshot/senate-republican-megabill.html">being cut the most</a> in the bill. Estimates suggest that its spending could end up cut by <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/06/29/trump-tax-medicaid-snap/">as much as 18 percent</a>, causing about 8 million people to <a href="https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/how-will-the-2025-budget-reconciliation-affect-the-aca-medicaid-and-the-uninsured-rate/">lose Medicaid coverage</a>.
And this isn’t a one-off thing. For months, <a href="https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/05/01/congress/trump-medicaid-johnson-agenda-house-republicans-00320580">Trump has publicly promised to protect Medicaid</a>, and reports have described him as queasy about Congress’s plans to do otherwise. 
This puts Vice President JD Vance, who has talked a big game about changing the GOP to appeal more to low-income voters, in an awkward place. On X this week, he attempted to change the subject from the<a href="https://x.com/JDVance/status/1939889575108686070"> bill’s Medicaid cuts</a>, arguing they were “immaterial” and “minutiae” compared to the immigration enforcement money that really matters.
Privately, many Republicans know differently. “Group texts are blowing up and frantic phone calls are being exchanged among GOP lawmakers alarmed about the Senate Medicaid provisions,” <a href="https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/06/30/congress/megabill-house-medicaid-cuts-00433488">Politico reported</a> this week.
It would be no surprise if Trump and Republicans misled about these cuts in public — GOP officials have <a href="https://www.politico.com/newsletters/inside-congress/2025/07/01/murkowski-slams-brakes-on-megabill-00434737">been claiming</a> that the Medicaid cuts are purely about limiting waste, fraud, and abuse. But the fact that Trump misstated this so blithely in private, to a friendly audience, is more strange. It suggests he truly is unaware what his “big, beautiful bill” will do.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Why the bill ended up cutting Medicaid deeply despite Trump’s repeated promises not to</h2>
To at least try to understand what’s going on here, it’s worth grappling with why this bill cuts Medicaid in the first place.
Trump’s priorities for his bill were tax cuts, immigration enforcement money, and raising the debt ceiling. This is all very expensive, and most of it will just add to the debt. 
But conservatives in the House insisted that at least some spending cuts had to be included, to partially offset the bill’s cost. So GOP leaders searched for cuts that would be sizable — in the hundreds of billions of dollars range. Joe Biden’s clean energy subsidies were one obvious target. 
It’s hard, though, to come up with big cuts that aren’t politically toxic. As budget wonks know, the real money in the federal budget is in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense. Trump had no desire to cut defense, and the Trump-era GOP has deemed the senior-focused Social Security and Medicare politically untouchable.
Medicaid, aimed at low-income people, is a different story. Conservatives have long viewed it, along with food stamps and welfare, with suspicion, arguing that government benefits like these disincentivize work and get exploited by the lazy and undeserving. Medicaid beneficiaries are also believed to be <a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/02/23/1226120645/automatic-voter-registration-medicaid#:~:text=And%20because%20elections%20are%20our,voters%2C%20according%20to%20state%20officials.">less likely to turn out at the polls</a>.
These longstanding conservative arguments have been slow to adjust to the news that Medicaid recipients have been an <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/06/19/trump-medicaid-voters-budget/">increasing share of the Trump coalition</a>, as he’s helped the GOP gain among low-income voters. Many low-income whites in rural areas are <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/02/27/us/politics/medicaid-enrollment.html">on Medicaid</a>, as are low-income Latinos in areas where Trump has done well, such as California’s Central Valley.
That dissuaded congressional Republicans from even more extreme <a href="https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/07/01/congress/rick-scott-medicaid-amendment-pulled-00434753">Medicaid cuts some had wanted</a> — but they still hit the program hard. The Medicaid cuts that made it into the bill were, however, crafted in roundabout ways that Republicans argued were just aimed at waste, fraud, and abuse. 
These included new <a href="https://www.vox.com/health/414045/big-beautiful-bill-congress-trump-medicaid-cuts">work reporting requirements</a>. In theory, a requirement to document your working hours in exchange for coverage may not sound like a cut; in practice, the process will likely be arduous and error-filled and result in many working people losing coverage. 
The bill also limits the “<a href="https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/5-key-facts-about-medicaid-and-provider-taxes/">provider tax</a>” states may change — a key way many states help finance Medicaid, since provider taxes are reimbursed with federal matching funds — among other changes. 
All that added up to hundreds of billions in savings, on paper. But behind those savings is 8 million people losing their Medicaid coverage, as well as a potentially <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/06/30/nx-s1-5451401/republicans-big-bill-could-hit-rural-hospitals-hard">devastating impact on rural hospitals</a> that rely on Medicaid payments.
Trump may not be aware of this, but many in the party are — that’s why <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/02/us/politics/tax-cuts-benefit-cuts.html">they set</a> the most painful Medicaid cuts to happen only after the 2026 midterms. And eventually, many Medicaid recipients will feel the pain, too.
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</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Dylan Scott</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[Republicans now own America’s broken health care system]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/health-care/418431/big-beautiful-bill-lose-medicaid-trump" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=418431</id>
<updated>2025-07-03T15:24:53-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-07-03T14:30:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Congress" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Donald Trump" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Health" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Health Care" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Policy" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Politics" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Public Health" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Trump Administration" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[Republicans in Congress have passed President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” a move that will make major changes to Medicaid through establishing a work requirement for the first time and restricting states’ ability to finance their share of the program’s costs. The Senate approved the plan on Tuesday; the House gave its approval on Thursday. […]]]></summary>
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<![CDATA[
<figure>
<img alt="A desk with a sign reading “One big beautiful bill act” is in front of an empty chair and a row of American flags" data-caption="President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” has big Medicaid cuts. | Alex Wroblewski/AFP via Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Alex Wroblewski/AFP via Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/07/GettyImages-2222675010.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>
President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” has big Medicaid cuts. | Alex Wroblewski/AFP via Getty Images </figcaption>
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Republicans in Congress have passed <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/418314/big-beautiful-bill-trump-republicans-congress">President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,”</a> a move that will make major changes to Medicaid through establishing <a href="https://www.vox.com/health/414045/big-beautiful-bill-congress-trump-medicaid-cuts">a work requirement</a> for the first time and <a href="https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/5-key-facts-about-medicaid-and-provider-taxes/">restricting states’ ability to finance</a> their share of the program’s costs. The Senate approved the plan on Tuesday; the House gave its approval on Thursday. Once the bill receives Trump’s signature, American health care is never going to be the same.
The consequences will be dire. 
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the legislation would <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/29/us/politics/trump-policy-bill-health-insurance-cuts.html">slash Medicaid spending by more than $1 trillion</a> and that nearly 12 million people would lose their health insurance. Senate Republicans added a <a href="https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/07/01/congress/gop-boosts-rural-hospital-fund-00435147">last-minute infusion of funding for rural hospitals</a> to assuage moderates skittish about the Medicaid cuts, but hospitals <a href="https://www.aha.org/press-releases/2025-07-01-aha-statement-senate-passage-one-big-beautiful-bill-act">say</a> the legislation will still be devastating to their business and their patients.
When combined with the expiration of Obamacare subsidies at the end of this year, which were not addressed in the budget bill, and the other regulatory changes being made by the Trump administration, the Republican policy agenda could lead to an estimated <a href="https://www.kff.org/quick-take/about-17-million-more-people-could-be-uninsured-due-to-the-big-beautiful-bill-and-other-policy-changes/">17 million Americans losing health coverage</a> over the next decade, according to the health policy think tank KFF.
Fewer people with health insurance is going to mean fewer people getting medical services, which means more illness and <a href="https://www.vox.com/health/417639/trump-medicaid-health-insurance-big-beautiful-bill">ultimately more deaths</a>. 
One recent analysis by a group of Harvard-affiliated researchers of the House Republicans’ version of the budget bill (which included the same general outline, though some of the provisions have been tweaked in the Senate) concluded that <a href="https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-25-00716">700,000 fewer Americans</a> would have a regular place to get medical care as a result of the bill. Upward of 200,000 fewer people would get their blood cholesterol or blood sugar checked; 139,000 fewer women would get their recommended mammograms. Overall, the authors project that between 8,200 and 24,600 additional Americans would die every year under the Republican plan. Other <a href="https://x.com/YaleSPH/status/1930386347908370779">analyses</a> came to the same conclusion: Millions of Americans will lose health insurance and thousands will die.
After a painful legislative debate in which some of their own members <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12/opinion/josh-hawley-dont-cut-medicaid.html">warned them not to cut Medicaid too deeply</a>, Republicans succeeded in taking a big chunk out of the program to help cover the costs of their bill’s tax cuts. They have, eight years after failing to repeal Obamacare entirely, managed to strike blows to some of its important provisions.
So, for better or worse, they own the health care system now, a system that is a continued source of <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/390111/united-healthcare-ceo-shot-insurance-hospitals-doctors">frustration for most Americans</a> — frustrations that the Republican plan won’t relieve. The next time health care comes up for serious debate in Congress, lawmakers will need to repair the damage that the GOP is doing with its so-called big, beautiful bill.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">How the Republican budget bill will drive up health care costs for everyone</h2>
The effects of the budget bill won’t be limited only to the people on Medicaid and the people whose private insurance costs will increase because of the Obamacare funding cuts. Everyone will experience the consequences of millions of Americans losing health coverage.
When a person loses their health insurance, they are more likely to skip regular medical checkups, which makes it more likely they go to a hospital emergency room when a serious medical problem has gotten so bad that they can’t ignore it any longer. The <a href="https://www.cms.gov/medicare/regulations-guidance/legislation/emergency-medical-treatment-labor-act">hospital is obligated by federal law</a> to take care of them even if they can’t pay for their care.
Those costs are then passed on to other patients. When health care providers negotiate with insurance companies over next year’s rates, they account for the uncompensated care they have to provide. And the fewer people covered by Medicaid, the more uncompensated care hospitals have to cover, the <a href="https://www.americanprogress.org/article/house-republicans-big-beautiful-bill-would-make-health-care-more-expensive-for-americans-with-medicare-and-other-insurance/#:~:text=Last%20month%2C%20House%20Republicans%20passed,people%20with%20job%2Dbased%20coverage.">more costs are going to increase for even people who do have health insurance</a>. Republicans included funding in the bill to try to protect hospitals from the adverse consequences, an acknowledgement of the risk they were taking, but the <a href="https://www.aha.org/press-releases/2025-07-01-aha-statement-senate-passage-one-big-beautiful-bill-act">hospitals themselves are warning</a> that the funding patches are insufficient. If hospitals and doctors’ offices close because their bottom lines are squeezed by this bill, that will <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy/23753724/physician-doctor-shortage-primary-care-medicare-medicaid-rural-health-care-access">make it harder for people to access health care</a>, even if they have an insurance card.
The effects of the Republican budget bill are going to filter through the rest of the health care system and increase costs for everyone. In that sense, the legislation passage marks a new era for US health policy. Since the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, Democrats have primarily been held responsible for the state of the health care system. Sometimes this has been a <a href="https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2011/04/12/healthcare-vote-doomed-13-democrats-in-2010-elections">drag on their political goals</a>. But over time, as the ACA’s benefits became more ingrained, <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/11/7/18070152/midterm-elections-2018-results-trump-obamacare-repeal">health care became a political boon to Democrats</a>.
Going forward, having made these enormous changes, Republicans are going to own the American health care system and all of its problems — the ones they created and the ones that have existed for years.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The BBB’s passage sets the stage for another fight on the future of American health care </h2>
For the past decade-plus, US health care politics have tended to follow a “you break it, you buy it” rule. Democrats discovered this in 2010: Though the Affordable Care Act’s major provisions did not take effect for several years, they saw their popularity plummet quickly as Republicans successfully blamed annual premium increases that would’ve occurred with or without the law on the Democrats and their new health care bill. Voters were persuaded by those arguments, and Democrats lost Congress in the 2010 midterms.
But years later, Americans began to change their perception. As of 2024, <a href="https://www.kff.org/affordable-care-act/press-release/affordable-care-act-marketplace-and-medicaid-expansion-enrollment-reached-a-combined-44-million-in-2024/">44 million Americans</a> were covered through the 2010 health care law and two-thirds of the country say they have a <a href="https://www.kff.org/interactive/kff-health-tracking-poll-the-publics-views-on-the-aca/#?response=Favorable--Unfavorable&aRange=twoYear">favorable view of the ACA</a>. After the GOP’s failed attempt to repeal the law in 2017, the politics of the issue flipped: Democrats scored major wins in the 2018 midterms after successfully campaigning against the GOP’s failed plan to repeal the ACA. Even in the disastrous 2024 election cycle for Democrats, health care policy was still an issue where voters <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/651719/economy-important-issue-2024-presidential-vote.aspx">trusted Kamala Harris more than Trump</a>.
Trump’s <a href="https://www.axios.com/2025/07/01/trump-big-beautiful-bill-polling">One Big Beautiful Bill is already unpopular</a>. <a href="https://www.kff.org/medicaid/poll-finding/kff-health-tracking-poll-public-views-on-potential-changes-to-medicaid/">Medicaid cuts specifically do not poll well</a> with the public, and the program itself is enjoying <a href="https://perryundem.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Post-Election-Health-Care-Poll-Toplines-Results-ONLINE.pdf">the most popularity</a> ever since it was first created in 1965. Those are the ingredients for a serious backlash, especially with <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/28/politics/republican-plans-to-overhaul-medicaid-already-shaking-up-2026-midterms#:~:text=%E2%80%9CEveryone%20is%20going%20to%20be,put%20themselves%20into%20a%20box.%E2%80%9D">government officials</a> and <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/06/30/nx-s1-5451401/republicans-big-bill-could-hit-rural-hospitals-hard">hospitals in red states</a> railing hard against the bill.
Democrats have more work to do on explaining to the public what the bill does and how its implications will be felt by millions of people. Recent polling suggests that <a href="https://x.com/samstein/status/1939710251311255897">many Americans don’t understand the specifics</a>. A contentious debate among Republicans, with several solitary members warning against the consequences of Medicaid cuts, have given politicians on the other side of the aisle good material to work with in making that case: Democrats can pull up <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x94bzp-xfdA">clips of Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC)</a> on the Senate floor, explaining how devastating the bill’s Medicaid provisions would be to conservative voters in Republican-controlled states.
Republicans will try to sell the bill on its tax cuts. But <a href="https://x.com/CoreyHusak/status/1940050104636862791">multiple</a> <a href="https://x.com/riccoja/status/1940057668422660113">analyses</a> have shown the vast majority of the benefits are going to be reserved for people in higher-income brackets. Middle-class and working-class voters will see only marginal tax relief — and if their health care costs increase either because they lose their insurance or because their premiums go up after other people lose insurance, then that relief could quickly be wiped out by increased costs elsewhere. That is the story Democrats will need to tell in the coming campaigns.
Medicaid has served as a safety net for tens of millions of Americans during both the Great Recession of 2008 and since the pandemic recession of 2020. At one point, around <a href="https://www.macpac.gov/news/macpac-releases-2022-edition-of-macstats-medicaid-and-chip-data-book/">90 million Americans</a> — about one in four — were covered by Medicaid. People have become much more familiar with the program and it has <a href="https://www.kff.org/medicaid/poll-finding/kff-health-tracking-poll-public-views-on-potential-changes-to-medicaid/">either directly benefited them or helped somebody that they know</a> at a difficult time.
And difficult times may be coming. Economists have their eyes on <a href="https://www.vox.com/economy/408873/us-recession-trump-tariffs-economist-projection">concerning economic indicators</a> that the world may be heading toward a recession. When a recession hits — that is, after all, inevitable; it’s just the normal cycle of the economy — people will lose their jobs and many of them will also lose their employer-sponsored health insurance. But now, the safety net is far flimsier than it was in previous crises.
Republicans are going to own those consequences. They took a program that had become an essential lifeline for millions of Americans and having schemed to gut the law ever since the Democrats expanded Medicaid through the ACA more than a decade ago, have finally succeeded. This Republican plan was a reaction to their opponent’s most recent policy overhaul; the next Democratic health care plan will need to repair the harms precipitated by the GOP budget bill.
In the meantime, the impetus is on Democrats and truth tellers in the media to help Americans understand what has happened, why it has happened, and what the fallout is going to be. 
Update, July 3, 2:30 pm ET: This story was originally published on July 1 was updated after the House’s passage of the budget reconciliation bill.

]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Eric Levitz</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[California just showed that a better Democratic Party is possible]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/politics/418679/california-ceqa-housing-newsom" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=418679</id>
<updated>2025-07-03T10:47:47-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-07-03T08:00:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Housing" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Policy" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Politics" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[California just demolished a major obstacle to housing construction within its borders — and provided Democrats with a blueprint for better governance nationwide. On Monday, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a pair of housing bills into law. One exempts almost all urban, multifamily housing developments from California’s environmental review procedures. The second makes it easier for […]]]></summary>
<content type="html">
<![CDATA[
<figure>
<img alt="Gavin Newsom smiling." data-caption="California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks during a news conference at Gemperle Orchard on April 16 in Ceres, California. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Justin Sullivan/Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/07/gettyimages-2210604632.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
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California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks during a news conference at Gemperle Orchard on April 16 in Ceres, California. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images </figcaption>
</figure>
California<a href="https://calmatters.org/housing/2025/06/ceqa-urban-development-infill-budget/"> just demolished</a> a major obstacle to housing construction within its borders — and provided Democrats with a blueprint for better governance nationwide.
On Monday, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/30/us/california-environment-newsom-ceqa.html">a pair of housing bills</a> into law. One exempts almost all urban, multifamily housing developments from California’s environmental review procedures. The second makes it easier for cities to change their zoning laws to allow for more homebuilding. 
Both these measures entail restricting the reach of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), a law that requires state and local governments to research and publicize the ecological impacts of any approved construction project. Individuals and groups can then sue to block these developments on the grounds that the government underestimated the project’s true environmental harms. 
At first glance, these events might seem irrelevant to anyone who is neither a Californian nor a massive nerd. But behind the Golden State’s esoteric arguments over regulatory exemptions lie much larger questions — ones that concern the fundamental aims and methods of Democratic policymaking. Namely:
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Is increasing the production of housing and other infrastructure an imperative of progressive politics that must take precedence over other concerns? </li>
<li>Should Democrats judge legislation by how little it offends the party’s allied interest groups or by how much it advances the general public’s needs (as determined by technocratic analysis)?</li>
</ul>
In making it easier to build urban housing — despite the<a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/25/california-democrats-stage-intraparty-war-over-last-minute-push-to-build-more-housing-00425196"> furious objections</a> of some environmental groups and labor unions — California Democrats put material plenty above status quo bias, and the public’s interests above their party’s internal harmony. 
Too often in recent decades, Democrats have <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/405063/ezra-klein-thompson-abundance-book-criticism">embraced the opposite priorities</a>. And this has led blue cities and states to suffer from <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/abundance-americas-next-political-order/682069/">exceptionally large housing shortages</a> while struggling to build <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/09/opinion/musk-trump-doge-abundance-agenda.html">public infrastructure</a> on time and on budget. As a result, Democratic states have <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/11/democrat-states-population-stagnation/680641/">been bleeding population</a>  — and thus, electoral clout — to Republican ones while the public sector has fallen into disrepute.
California just demonstrated that Democrats don’t need to accept these failures. Acquiescing to scarcity — for the sake of avoiding change or intraparty tension — is a choice. Democrats can make a different one. 
<h2 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-none">California Democrats were long hostile to housing development. That’s finally changing.  </h2>
Critics of California’s CEQA reforms didn’t deny their state needs more housing. It might therefore seem fair to cast the debate over those reforms as a referendum on the importance of building more homes. 
But the regulatory regime that the opponents of CEQA reform sought to preserve is the byproduct of an explicitly anti-development strain of progressivism, one that reoriented Democratic politics in the 1970s.
The postwar decades’ rapid economic progress yielded widespread affluence, ecological degradation, and disruptive population growth. Taken together, these forces spurred a backlash to building: Affluence led liberal reformers to see economic development <a href="https://www.perseusbooks.com/titles/marc-j-dunkelman/why-nothing-works/9781541700215/">as less of a priority</a>, environmental decay prompted fears that humanity was swiftly <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300198973/the-bet/">exhausting nature’s bounty</a>, and the swift growth of booming localities led some longtime residents to fear cultural alienation or displacement.
California was ground zero for this anti-growth backlash, as historian Yoni Appelbaum notes in his recent book <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/700580/stuck-by-yoni-appelbaum/">Stuck</a>. The state’s population quintupled between 1920 and 1970. And construction had largely kept pace, with California adding nearly 2 million units in the 1950s alone. As a result, in 1970, the median house in California cost only $197,000 in today’s dollars.
But millions of new people and buildings proved socially disruptive and ecologically costly. Many Californians wished to exclude newcomers from their towns or neighborhoods, so as to preserve their access to parking, the aesthetic character of their area, or the socioeconomic composition of their schools, among other concerns. And anti-growth progressivism provided both a high-minded rationalization for such exclusion and legal tools with which to advance it.
In 1973, consumer advocate Ralph Nader and his team of researchers prepared a report on <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Politics-land-Naders-report-California/dp/0670563269">land-use policy</a> in California. Its overriding recommendation was that the state needed to make it easier for ordinary Californians to block housing construction. As one of the report’s authors explained at a California Assembly hearing, lawmakers needed to guard against both “the overdevelopment of the central cities” and “the sprawl around the cities,” while preserving open land. As Appelbaum notes, this reasoning effectively forbids building any housing, anywhere.
The California Environmental Quality Act emerged out of this intellectual environment. And green groups animated by anti-developed fervor quickly leveraged CEQA to obstruct all manner of housing construction, thereby setting judicial precedents that expanded the law’s reach. The effect has been to greatly increase the amount of time and money necessary for producing a housing unit in California. Local agencies take <a href="https://lao.ca.gov/reports/2015/finance/housing-costs/housing-costs.pdf">an average of 2.5 years</a> to approve housing projects that require an Environmental Impact Report. Lawsuits can then tie up those projects in court for years longer. Over the past decade, CEQA litigation has delayed or blocked <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/signature-environmental-law-hurts-housing/618264/">myriad condo towers</a> in urban centers, the construction of <a href="https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-03-02/california-uc-berkeley-ceqa-housing-environment">new dormitories</a> at the University of California Berkeley (on the grounds that the state’s environmental impact statement failed to account for noise pollution), and <a href="https://sf.streetsblog.org/2010/08/06/cyclists-cheer-as-judge-finally-frees-san-francisco-from-bike-injunction">even a bike lane</a> in San Francisco.
CEQA is by no means the primary — let alone, the only — reason why the median price of a California home exceeded $900,000 in 2023. But it is unquestionably a contributor to such scarcity-induced unaffordability. Refusing to amend the law in the face of a devastating housing shortage is a choice, one that reflects tepid concern for facilitating material abundance. 
Anti-growth politics left an especially large mark on California. But its influence is felt nationwide. CEQA is modeled after the National Environmental Policy Act, which enables the litigious to obstruct housing projects across the United States. And many blue states — including Massachusetts, Minnesota, and New York — have their own state-level environmental review laws, which have also deterred housing development. 
In sum, California Democrats’ decision to pare back the state’s environmental review procedures, so as to facilitate more urban housing, represents a shift in the party’s governing philosophy — away from a preoccupation with the harms of development and toward a greater sensitivity to the perils of stasis. Indeed, Newsom made this explicit in his remarks on the legislation, <a href="https://x.com/ArmandDoma/status/1939887298143035783">saying</a>, “It really is about abundance.”
Democrats elsewhere should make a similar ideological adjustment.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-none">California Democrats put the public above “the groups”</h2>
If anti-growth progressivism helped birth CEQA’s excesses, Democrats’ limited appetite for intraparty conflict sustained the law’s defects.
In recent years, the <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/9/24/17896482/building-more-stuff-housing-gentrification-cities">Yes in My Backyard (YIMBY) movement</a> has built an activist <a href="https://cayimby.org/take-local-action/">infrastructure</a> for pro-development reform. And their cause has been buttressed by the energetic advocacy of <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/405063/ezra-klein-thompson-abundance-book-criticism">myriad policy wonks and commentators.</a> One of this year’s best-selling books, <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Abundance/Ezra-Klein/9781668023488">Abundance</a> by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, is dedicated in no small part to making the case against California’s housing policies.
Nevertheless, environmental organizations and labor unions have long boasted far greater scale and influence than “pro-abundance” groups.  
And <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy/2023/8/21/23831121/housing-yimbys-affordable-rent-unions-california">past efforts</a> to curtail CEQA’s reach have attracted vigorous opposition from some greens and unions. Democrats typically responded by scaling back their reform ambitions to better appease those constituencies.
The hostility of green groups and the building trades to CEQA reform is as much instrumental as ideological. Some environmentalists retain the de-growth impulses that characterized the 1970s left. But environmental review lawsuits are also the stock and trade of many green organizations. CEQA litigation provides these groups with a key source of leverage over ecologically irresponsible developers and — for environmental law firms — a vital source of billings.
The building trades unions, meanwhile, see CEQA as a tool for <a href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/california-unions-environmental-law-17279821.php">extracting contracts</a> from housing developers. Such groups have made a practice of pursuing CEQA lawsuits against projects until the builders behind them commit to using union labor.
For these reasons, many environmentalists and labor leaders fiercely condemned this week’s CEQA reforms. At a <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/25/california-democrats-stage-intraparty-war-over-last-minute-push-to-build-more-housing-00425196">hearing in late June</a>, a representative of Sacramento-Sierra’s Building and Construction Trades Council told lawmakers that their bill “will compel our workers to be shackled and start singing chain gang songs.”
Roughly 60 green groups published a letter condemning the legislation as a “backroom Budget Trailer Bill deal that would kill community and environmental protections, even as the people of California are faced with unprecedented federal attacks to their lives and livelihoods.”
The opposition of these organizations was understandable. But it was also misguided, even from the standpoint of protecting California’s environment and aiding its construction workers.
The recently passed CEQA bills did not weaken environmental review for the development of open land, only for multifamily housing in dense urban areas. And facilitating higher rates of housing development in cities is vital for both combating climate change and conserving untouched ecosystems. All else equal, people who live in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/19/climate/emissions-construction-buildings.html">apartment buildings by mass transit</a> have far smaller carbon footprints than those who live in suburban single-family homes. And increasing the availability of housing in urban centers reduces demand for new exurban housing development that eats into open land.
Meanwhile, eroding regulatory obstacles to housing construction is in the interest of skilled tradespeople as a whole. A world where more housing projects are economically viable is one where there is higher demand for construction labor. This makes CEQA reform unambiguously good for the <a href="https://abcsocal.org/nonunion-construction-workforce-tops-87-in-california/">87 percent</a> of California construction workers who do not belong to a union (and thus, derive little direct benefit from the building trades CEQA lawsuits). But policies that grow California’s construction labor force also provide its building trades unions with more opportunities to recruit new members. Recognition of that reality led California’s <a href="https://calmatters.org/housing/2025/06/ceqa-urban-development-infill-budget/">carpenters’ union</a> to back the reforms.
Therefore, if Democrats judged those reforms on the basis of their actual consequences — whether for labor, the environment, or the housing supply — they would conclude that the policies advanced progressive goals. On the other hand, if they judged the legislation by whether it attracted opposition from left-coded interest groups, then they might deem it a regressive challenge to liberal ideals. Too often, Democrats in California and elsewhere have taken the latter approach, effectively outsourcing their policy judgment to their favorite lobbies. But this time, the party opted to prioritize the public interest over coalitional deference.
Importantly, in doing so, California Democrats appeared to demonstrate that their party has more capacity to guide its stakeholders than many realized. In recent years, Democratic legislators have <a href="https://www.slowboring.com/p/from-the-veal-pen-to-the-groups">sometimes credited</a> their questionable strategic and substantive decisions to “the groups” — as though the party were helplessly in thrall to its advocacy organizations. 
But these groups typically lack significant political leverage. Swing voters do not take their marching orders from environmental organizations. And in an era of low union density and <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/378025/trump-harris-2024-election-polls-union-voters">education polarization</a>, the leaders of individual unions often can’t deliver very many votes. 
This does not mean that Democrats should turn their backs on environmentalism or organized labor. To the contrary, the party should seek to <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/9/2/20838782/unions-for-all-seiu-sectoral-bargaining-labor-unions">expand collective bargaining rights</a>, reduce pollution, and promote abundant low-carbon energy. But it should do those things because they are in the interests of ordinary Americans writ large, not because the electoral influence of green groups or building trades unions politically compel them to do so. Of course, all else equal, the party should seek to deliver victories to organizations that support it. But providing such favors should not take precedence over advancing the general public’s welfare.
And pushing back on a group’s demands will rarely cause it to abandon your party entirely. After seeing that Democrats would not abandon CEQA reform, California’s Building Trades Council <a href="https://x.com/CSElmendorf/status/1939927161315434728">switched its position</a> on the legislation to “neutral,” in exchange for trivial concessions.  
<h2 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-none">Rome wasn’t upzoned in a day</h2>
It is important not to overstate what California Democrats have accomplished. Housing construction in the Golden State is still constrained by restrictive zoning laws, various other land-use regulations, elevated interest rates, scarce construction labor, and a president who is hellbent on increasing the cost of <a href="https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/fight-over-lumber-tariffs-could-reshape-future-us-home-building">lumber</a> and <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/06/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-increases-section-232-tariffs-on-steel-and-aluminum/">steel</a>. Combine these constraints on housing supply with the grotesque income inequalities of cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, and you get a recipe for a sustained housing crunch. CEQA reform should reduce the cost and timelines of urban homebuilding. But it will not, by itself, render California affordable.
Democrats cannot choose to eliminate all of blue America’s scarcities overnight. What they can do is prize the pursuit of material abundance over the avoidance of disruptive development and intraparty strife. And California just provided the party with a model for doing precisely that.
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</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Anna North</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[Can kids still have lazy summers?]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/life/418586/kids-summer-phones-youtube-millennials-boredom" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=418586</id>
<updated>2025-07-02T14:46:45-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-07-03T07:45:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Family" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Life" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Relationships" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Technology" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions. As a millennial, I had my fair share of ’90s summers. I rode my bike, I read, I spent a lot of time doing nothing. My friends from home like to tell the story of the time they […]]]></summary>
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<img alt="" data-caption="Is boredom over?" data-portal-copyright="" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/07/GettyImages-1401347145.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
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Is boredom over? </figcaption>
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This story originally appeared in <a href="https://www.vox.com/family/369020/kids-children-generation-alpha-gen-school" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Kids Today</a>, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. <a href="https://www.vox.com/pages/kids-today-newsletter-policy-childhood-policy-culture" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Sign up here for future editions</a>.
As a millennial, I had my fair share of <a href="https://www.thecut.com/article/is-90s-summer-possible-for-kids.html">’90s summers</a>. I rode my bike, I read, I spent a lot of time doing nothing. My friends from home like to tell the story of the time they came by my house unannounced and I was staring at a wall (I was thinking).
Now, as a parent myself, I’ve been highly invested in the discourse over whether it’s possible for kids to have a “’90s summer” in 2025. This year, some parents are opting for fewer camps and activities in favor of more good old-fashioned hanging around, an approach also described as “<a href="https://www.thecut.com/article/no-camp-for-kids-wild-summer.html">wild summer</a>” or “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/08/style/summer-camp-kids-do-nothing.html">kid-rotting</a>.”
On the one hand, sounds nice! I liked my summers as a kid, and I’d love to give my kids more <a href="https://www.vox.com/23759898/kids-children-parenting-play-anxiety-mental-health">unstructured playtime</a> to help them build their independence and self-reliance (and save me money and time <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-06-01/rising-2023-summer-camp-costs-show-waitlists-have-usurped-fun?embedded-checkout=true">signing up for summer camp</a>).
On the other hand, what exactly are they going to do with that unstructured time? Like a <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/09/12/despite-challenges-at-home-and-work-most-working-moms-and-dads-say-being-employed-is-whats-best-for-them/">majority of parents today</a>, I work full time, and although my job has some flexibility, I can’t always be available to supervise potion-making, monster-hunting, or any of my kids’ other cute but messy leisure activities. Nor can I just leave them to fend for themselves: Norms have changed to make sending kids outside to play til the streetlights come on more difficult than it used to be, though those changes <a href="https://www.vox.com/23759898/kids-children-parenting-play-anxiety-mental-health">started before the ’90s</a>. The rise of smartphones and tablets has also transformed downtime forever; as <a href="https://www.thecut.com/article/is-90s-summer-possible-for-kids.html">Kathryn Jezer-Morton asks</a> at The Cut, “Is it really possible to have a ’90s summer when YouTube Shorts exist?”
After talking to experts and kids about phones and free time, I can tell you that the short answer to this question is no. But the long answer is more complicated, and a bit more reassuring. Yes, kids today reach for their devices a lot. But especially as they get older, they do know how to put them down. And hearing from them about their lives made me rethink what my ’90s summers really looked like, and what I want for my kids.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Kids’ free time is different now</h2>
Parents aren’t imagining the differences between the ’90s and today, Brinleigh Murphy-Reuter, program administrator at the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital, told me. For one thing, kids just have less downtime than they used to — they’re involved in more activities outside of school, as parents try to prepare them for an increasingly competitive <a href="https://www.vox.com/life/390714/college-applications-early-decision-date-acceptance-admission">college application process</a>. They’re also more heavily supervised than in decades past, thanks to <a href="https://www.vox.com/23759898/kids-children-parenting-play-anxiety-mental-health">concerns about child kidnapping</a> and other safety issues that began to ramp up in the ’80s and continues today.
Free time also looks different. “If you go back to the ’80s or early ’90s, the most prized artifact kids owned was a bicycle,” Ruslan Slutsky, an education professor at the University of Toledo who studies play, told me. Today, “the bike has been replaced by a cell phone.”
The average kid gets a phone at the age of 10, Murphy-Reuter said. Tablet use starts even earlier, with more than half of <a href="https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/research/report/2025-common-sense-census-web-2.pdf">kids getting their own device</a> by age 4. If kids are at home and not involved in some kind of structured activity, chances are “they’re on some kind of digital device,” Slutsky said.
It’s not as though all millennials had idyllic, screen-free summers — some of my best July memories involve <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106115/">Rocko’s Modern Life</a>, for example. But kids’ screen time is qualitatively different now. 
According to a Common Sense Media report published in 2025, 35 percent of <a href="https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/research/report/2025-common-sense-census-web-2.pdf">viewing for kids up to the age of 8 was full-length streaming TV shows</a>, while 32 percent was on platforms like YouTube. Sixteen percent were short-form videos like TikToks, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts. Only 6 percent of kids’ viewing was live TV, which honestly seems high (I am not sure my children have ever seen a live TV broadcast).
It’s not completely clear that YouTube is worse for kids than old-fashioned TV, but it can certainly feel worse. As Jezer-Morton puts it, “kid rotting in the ’90s was Nintendo and MTV; today’s version is slop-engineered for maximum in-app time spent.”
It is undeniably true that in the ’90s, you’d sometimes run out of stuff to watch and be forced to go outside or call a friend. Streaming means that for my kids’ generation, there is always more TV. 
And the ubiquity of phones in both kids’ and adults’ lives has made enforcing screen time limits more difficult. “It’s tough to take away something that they have become so dependent on,” Slutsky said.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Older kids can be remarkably savvy about their screen time</h2>
That’s the bad news.
The good news is that a lot of what kids do on their devices isn’t actually watching YouTube — it’s gaming. Kids in the Common Sense survey spent 60 percent of their screen time playing games, and just 26 percent watching TV or video apps.
Gaming can actually have a lot of benefits for kids, experts say. “Video games can support relationship building and resiliency” and “can help to develop complex, critical thinking skills,” Murphy-Reuter said. Some research has found that educational media is actually more helpful to kids if it’s interactive, making an <a href="https://slate.com/human-interest/2024/04/tv-ipad-screentime-differences-kids.html">iPad better than a TV</a> under certain circumstances, according to psychologist Jacqueline Nesi.
“Just because it’s on a screen doesn’t mean it’s not still fulfilling the same goals that unstructured play used to fulfill,” Murphy-Reuter told me. “It just might be fulfilling it in a way that is new.”
Meanwhile, kids — especially older teens — are actually capable of putting down their phones. Akshaya, 18, one of the hosts of the podcast <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/4BtXjjXb4QE6Pi4zdZHBLp?si=c2522e823dc64e9e&nd=1&dlsi=63ca7f84e2c44a18&ueid=ed2e6b8e640c2cee9adf147a528b6b0d&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Kids%20Today%205/15&utm_term=Kids%20Today">Behind the Screens</a>, told me she’d been spending her summer meeting up with friends and playing pickleball. “I spend a lot of my days hanging out outside,” she said.
Her cohost Tanisha, also 18 and a graduating senior, said she and her friends had been “trying to spend as much IRL time as we can while we’re still together this summer.” She, Tanisha, and their other cohost Joanne, also 18, have been enjoying unstructured summers for years — though they had internships last summer, none of them has been to camp since elementary school.
Joanne does worry that the ubiquity of short videos on her phone has affected her attention span. “I feel like it’s easy to just kind of zone out, or stop paying attention when someone’s talking,” she said.
At the same time, she and her cohosts have all taken steps to reduce their own device use. Tanisha deleted Instagram during college application season. Akshaya put downtime restrictions on her phone after noticing how often she was on it. “In my free time, if I ever feel like I’m doomscrolling, like I’ve been on social media for too long, I usually try to set a specific time when I’ll get off my phone,” she said.
Overall, 47 percent of kids have used tools or apps to <a href="https://digitalwellnesslab.org/wp-content/uploads/Pulse-Survey-School-Phone-Policies-May-2025.pdf">manage their own phone use</a>, Murphy-Reuter told me. 
The sense I got from talking to Tanisha, Joanne, and Akshaya — and that I’ve gotten in interviews with teenagers and experts over the last year — is that teens can be quite sophisticated about phones. They know, just as we do, that the devices can make you feel gross and steal your day, and they take steps to mitigate those effects, without getting rid of the devices entirely.
Kids “really are very much in this digital space,” Murphy-Reuter said. And many of them are adept at navigating that space — sometimes more adept than adults who entered it later in life.
All that said, Tanisha, Joanne, and Akshaya are 18 years old, and talking to them made me realize that “wild summer,” at least of the unsupervised variety, may just be easier to accomplish for older kids. I can’t quite imagine letting my 7-year-old “rot” this summer. Yes, he’d want to watch way too much Gravity Falls, but he’d also just want to talk to me and play with me — normal kid stuff that’s not very compatible with adults getting work done.
It’s certainly possible that kids were more self-reliant — more able to occupy themselves with pretend play or outdoor shenanigans for long stretches of time — before they had devices. But I’m not sure how much more.
While writing this story, I realized that the lazy, biking, wall-staring summers of my youth all took place in high school. Before that, I went to camp. 
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">What I’m reading</h2>
The Trump administration is declining to release <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/01/us/trump-education-funds.html">almost $7 billion in federal funding</a> for after-school and summer programs, jeopardizing support for 1.4 million kids, most of them low-income, around the country.
An American teen writes about <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/29/health/dutch-kids-happiest-essay-wellness">why Dutch kids are some of the happiest</a> in the world: It might be because they have a lot of freedom.
A <a href="https://www.edsurge.com/news/2025-06-30-could-podcasts-fix-screen-time-woes-for-children">new study</a> of <a href="https://www.vox.com/life/391437/kids-podcast-top-2024-reading-literacy">podcast listening</a> among low-income families found that the medium fostered creative play and conversations among kids and family members, which are good for child development.
Sometimes my older kid likes to go back to picture books. Recently we’ve been reading <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/704745/i-want-to-be-spaghetti-by-kiera-wright-ruiz-illustrated-by-claudia-lam/">I Want to Be Spaghetti!</a> It’s an extremely cute story about a package of ramen who learns self-confidence.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">From my inbox</h2>
A quick programming note: I will be out on vacation for the next two weeks, so you won’t be hearing from me next week. You will get a summery edition of this newsletter on Thursday, July 17, so stay tuned. And if there’s anything you’d especially like me to cover when I get back, drop me a line at anna.north@vox.com!
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