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Photos: Saikat Chakrabarti, Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images for Fair Share America
It’s the end of an era. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who counts among her legacies in Congress successfully undercutting the push for Medicare for All, announced last week that she is retiring from Congress. The two-time former speaker of the House made her announcement after Democrats made remarkable gains in nationwide elections, campaigning on affordability and standing up to the Trump administration.
“We are in this era where we need new ideas, we need new leaders, we need people who are going to push the party in a new direction,” says Saikat Chakrabarti, who is running to replace Pelosi and represent San Francisco in Congress, making economic inequality and corporate power the focal point of his politics. This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy speaks to Chakrabarti, the co-founder of the progressive outfit Justice Democrats who helped run the primary campaign of one of its first candidates, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, becoming her first chief of staff.
Answering Lacy’s question as to how he’ll get it done, Chakrabarti says, “In the 1930s, we had a really powerful, far right in this country. We were actually seeing Nazi rallies in Madison Square Garden, it was filling the stadium. And the way we defeated that was FDR came in with the New Deal movement. He built this whole new economy and a whole new society that improved people’s lives so dramatically, it just killed this idea that you need an authoritarian to do it for you.” FDR “wasn’t advocating for going back to a pre-Great Depression era. He was advocating for something new.”
Chakrabarti has been openly calling for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., to be primaried and tells The Intercept that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer should be too, following the end of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, after eight Democratic senators — none who are up for reelection — joined forces with Republicans to pass a spending package.
“My goal, honestly, is to replace a huge part of the Democrat establishment,” says Chakrabarti. “I’m calling for primaries all across the country. … I think we actually have to get in there and be in a position of power where we can do all that, so it’s not going to be this constant compromising with the establishment, trying to figure out how we can push.” He adds, “I tried the pushing strategy — that’s what Justice Democrats was: We were trying to elect people to try to push the Democratic Party to do the right thing. It’s not going to work. We have to replace them.”
Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
Transcript
Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy.
It’s the end of an era.
Nancy Pelosi: I will not be seeking reelection to Congress.
AL: U.S. Representative Nancy Pelosi, who counts among her legacies in Congress successfully undercutting the push for Medicare for All, announced last week that she’s retiring from Congress. The Democrat and two-time former speaker of the House represents one of the country’s most liberal districts: San Francisco, California. And she has done so for nearly 40 years.
Pelosi made her announcement after Democrats made remarkable gains in nationwide elections. One takeaway, as we discussed in last week’s episode, is that voters want leaders who will fight for affordability and stand up to the Trump administration.
The race to replace Pelosi began before she publicly shared that she would not run for reelection. And although the California primary is seven months away, it’s already looking like a crowded and competitive field.
Saikat Chakrabarti was the first to jump into the race for Pelosi’s seat, setting up a challenge from her left.
Chakrabarti co-founded the progressive outfit Justice Democrats and helped run the first campaign and office of one of its first candidates: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
He’s running on a campaign promising to push for universal health care and child care, enact a stock trading ban for members of Congress, cost-of-living issues, and to “stop funding the genocide in Gaza.”
He’s also criticized some of his colleagues in the progressive movement. So how is he positioning himself amid a wave of other primary challengers? And how would he actually fulfill his campaign promises? Saikat Chakrabarti joins me now. Saikat, welcome to the Intercept Briefing.
Saikat Chakrabarti: Hey, thanks for having me.
AL: Saikat, you’ve been described as a bit of a contradiction. You’re independently wealthy; you’re a founding engineer at the payment processing company Stripe; and Business Insider has said, you may be wealthier than Nancy Pelosi, one of the wealthiest members of Congress.
You’ve also made economic inequality and corporate power the focal point of your politics. You ran Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign, became her first chief of staff, and co-founded Justice Democrats.
Most tech millionaires aren’t necessarily also progressive anti-establishment politicians. How do those two identities fit together for you?
Most tech millionaires aren’t necessarily also progressive anti-establishment politicians. How do those two identities fit together for you?
SC: I’d say most tech millionaires are really working toward their own demise as well in the long run. Because, I mean, look, I’ll give you my whole background. I grew up middle class in Texas. I grew up going to public schools. My parents actually grew up fairly poor. My parents are from India. They immigrated here in the 1970s, and my dad was a victim of partition, which was a catastrophic event — we basically split up India along religious lines after the Indian Revolution. And so his family were refugees that had to flee overnight from Bangladesh over to India. And so I grew up with the stories of their struggles. My dad grew up with a family of 12 in a one-bedroom apartment, often didn’t know where his next meal would be coming from.
“The way our economy is set up and has been set for so long is a lottery.”
I’d say my values really come from that — in two ways. Like one, it’s both these values that are shaped by how hard people who are totally capable have to actually work when they get a bad plate handed to them in life. But also just the way our economy is set up and has been set for so long is a lottery. Because at the end of the day, my dad struggled, but he won a lottery ticket; he got a visa to come to America. And I go back to Calcutta and I meet his friends and his family who all had it just as hard or just as hard-working, just as capable people who never made it out.
And so I joined the tech industry back in 2007, or 2009, actually, after college. And it was a time when tech really was being pitched as a solution to a lot of the big problems in the world. I was a completely apolitical person, and I bought it. I did think I was going in to try to solve some big issues. At the time like Muhammad Yunus was doing microfinance to alleviate poverty, yada, yada. And living in San Francisco and seeing unhoused people on the streets while I’m going to my tech job — it just gave me the feeling that maybe I’m actually not solving the problems I really want to work on.
So it sounds really cheesy now, but I quit the tech industry and I wrote a list. I was like, I want to work on inequality, poverty, and climate change. Again, I was not political at all — I was looking at mainly working in nonprofits. And that was around the time Bernie Sanders started running for president. I didn’t know if he had all the answers, but he was talking about those things in a very compelling way.
And so I joined that, and I ended up working on the Bernie campaign. I started a group — Justice Democrats — to recruit people to run on progressive values all around the country. And that’s how I ended up recruiting AOC to run, and ran her campaign, and ended up as her chief of staff.
“I worked hard, but I did not work harder than a teacher or a nurse or the people cleaning our offices did every single day. I just won the startup lottery.”
But I really believe at the end of the day, like a fundamental thing — and this is why I don’t think it is a contradiction — I experienced that lottery economy, that the startup economy really is in San Francisco. It’s this system where you can just hit it big if you just happen to be in the right place at the right time.
That’s what happened to me. And like I worked hard, but I did not work harder than a teacher or a nurse or the people cleaning our offices did every single day. I just won the startup lottery — and that to me is wild to have an economy set like that where you can just win a lottery and never have to work again.
While most people actually running society, working hard to run society, we’re saying, “You’re never going to be able to afford a house. You’re never going to be able to have a secure retirement.” I think a society and economy set up like that is doomed to fail. I think that is the ultimate demise of America.
And I’d say to people who are in my position, who have wealth, who don’t see it that way, who aren’t willing to just accept some taxes on themselves to make an economy that actually works for everybody — you’re being shortsighted because this won’t end up good for you either, if you end up in a society that’s a complete dystopia, that’s completely unequal.
“You’re being shortsighted because this won’t end up good for you either, if you end up in a society that’s a complete dystopia.”
AL: Speaking of the people on whose backs the society runs, as we’re speaking, the longest government shutdown ever is on the verge of ending after eight Democratic senators decided to join forces with Republicans to pass a spending package.
For years, you’ve been critical of Democrats, saying they’re too weak, too compromising, too establishment. Do you think they should have ended the shutdown without a healthcare guarantee?
SC: No. I mean, this has been my main critique of the party for so long. A lot of my critique is on the policies and what they actually want to do and what they want to stand for.
“ Strategically, they preemptively cave.”
But a big part of my critique is, strategically, they preemptively cave, and this was a prime example of that. I mean, not through any leadership by Schumer or Hakeem Jeffries, but we were actually winning on this fight. And it’s not like, I don’t think this is a political fight. We were actually fighting for once to deliver something real for people who are suffering in this economy right now.
This economy sucks, and we’re talking about doubling or tripling people’s health insurance premiums in the middle of this, right? So Democrats were winning that messaging. You saw it in the polling, you saw public sentiment on the shutdown going towards Democrats. And then we’re coming off the back of a massive electoral victory last Tuesday where Donald Trump actually went on TV and said, you know, he was saying part of that was because Republicans were losing the messaging on the shutdown fight. So, I mean, call me naive but honestly, I thought like, “OK, finally we have the leverage, we have the upper hand. Maybe Democrats will realize they can push.”
So watching them cave, I mean, oh my God, why? Like, why? You’re winning. You could have actually delivered something and then you could have gone into the next election and said, “We fought Trump and we won.” Because right now, I think the main reason people don’t want to vote for Democrats — part of it’s the policy, but part of it’s, they’re weak! Do you want to vote for people who aren’t going to get shit done for you? No. So this just proved, I think, that image to a bunch of people.
“I’m not seeing Democrats go out there and persuade the public in the way that I saw Dick Cheney and George Bush persuade the public to go to war in Iraq, which was an actually an unpopular thing to do.”
So no, they absolutely should have kept fighting. I think they could have won. And honestly, my opinion, if we had seen Hakeem Jeffries and Schumer and some of the Democratic leaders actually fighting way more — because my big critique of this whole fight was, I’m not seeing it be front-page news every single day. I’m not seeing Democrats go out there and persuade the public in the way that I saw Dick Cheney and George Bush persuade the public to go to war in Iraq, which was an actually an unpopular thing to do. If we use that sort of tactic, I think we could have ended the shutdown way earlier because Trump’s numbers on this would’ve been plummeting way faster, and we would’ve actually gotten something done for people. That’s the part that pisses me off.
AL: You’re touching a little bit on sort of this tension between the inside-outside strategy versus pushing for everything that you possibly can for responding to constituents. On this topic, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has faced criticism for what some say has been a moderation in her approach: speaking on the DNC stage, saying Kamala Harris worked “tirelessly for a ceasefire” in Gaza. What’s your response to that and how do you see yourself navigating that inside-outside game if you’re elected?
SC: Look, I think, AOC, she’s kind of alone in there, right? Like there’s only a few, a handful of progressives in Congress right now. And I think they’re all trying to do the best they can with a limited amount of power. And that means trying to push the agenda, trying to push from the inside and working with outside organizations to create pressure.
My goal, honestly, is to replace a huge part of the Democrat establishment. I’ve been very clear about that from the start. I’m calling for primaries all across the country. I’m trying to recruit people to run across the country, and I’m talking to folks who are stepping up and challenging the establishment right now across the country. I think we actually have to get in there and be in a position of power where we can do all that so it’s not going to be this constant compromising with the establishment, trying to figure out how we can push.
I tried the pushing strategy — that’s what Justice Democrats was: We were trying to elect people to try to push the Democratic Party to do the right thing. It’s not going to work. We have to replace them. We just have to replace them. And that’s, you know, to me that’s where I’m headed. That’s my politics.
“It’s because the American Dream has been shattered. Children today are not going to do as well as their parents.”
I think it’s not just existential for the party; I think it’s existential for the country. Because ultimately, I think people have been voting for anybody who’s standing for bold, sweeping economic change ever since the Great Recession. I’d say that was why Barack Obama got elected. I think that’s why Donald Trump got elected. And it’s for good reason. It’s because the American Dream has been shattered. Children today are not going to do as well as their parents. People’s wages have been stagnant for decades while the cost of essentials are going up.
And so what we see is people are really open to the kind of change, but all they know is that the status quo is not cutting it. So Trump has a version of what that change is: MAGA. It’s saying, “You can’t afford a house, you can’t afford a secure retirement because of immigrants, because of our attention to people in foreign countries, because of trans people or scientists,” what have you.
And we have to present an actual vision and a plan on the other side, and then deliver on that plan to improve people’s lives. And that’s not going to happen by pushing people to get on the right policies. It’s going to be a whole movement that has to take power and make it happen — put the country on a path to implementing something like that.
AL: In this vein, you have talked openly as you are now about the fact that the first Squad members who came into Congress have only been able to do so much because of a lack of broader organization among progressives. One of the key proposals you’ve been working on for the last few years is what some people are calling the “Green New Deal on steroids” — a successor to the Green New Deal that you led work on as AOC’s chief of staff. What are your plans, and how do you think you can bring them to fruition where other progressive policy priorities have so far failed?
Scott Wiener debates Saikat Chakrabarti and Connie Chan for California’s 11th Congressional District seat at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco, on March 31, 2026. Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez/San Francisco Chronicle via Gett
The leading progressive candidate to replace longtime Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi in Congress is opposing a pair of wealth taxes on the ballot in his state and district: a one-time statewide tax on California billionaires and a local San Francisco tax on the city’s wealthiest businesses and corporations.
California state Sen. Scott Wiener’s opposition might seem uncharacteristic for someone running a progressive campaign, but it’s consistent with the priorities of two top donors to a super PAC backing his candidacy.
Crypto mogul Chris Larsen and venture capitalist Garry Tan — a pair of wealthy Bay Area tech executives funding a pro-Wiener super PAC called Abundant Future — have been outspoken advocates of stopping the taxes, both of which aim to help fill funding gaps in healthcare and social services after the Trump administration’s recent cuts to Medicaid. Larsen has poured millions of dollars into the fight.
The statewide tax, known as the Billionaire Tax Act, would levy a one-time 5 percent tax on the state’s billionaires’ wealth and assets. The local San Francisco proposition, colloquially known as the Overpaid CEO tax, would tax companies whose CEO makes 100 times more than their median worker, which mostly applies to companies with billionaire CEOs. Both will likely be on the ballot in November, as Wiener also hopes to be.
Larsen, the billionaire co-founder and executive chairman of the blockchain service Ripple Labs and now a mainstay in Bay Area political funding, has donated $100,000 to the PAC backing Wiener — the most of any individual donor — and $700,000 opposing the Overpaid CEO tax, according to federal and San Francisco city records. He’s spent far more fighting the statewide billionaires’ tax, sinking $5 million of his own wealth and another $5 million from Ripple into the Golden State Promise PAC, an anti-tax PAC he founded, per state records. Larsen gave an additional $2.5 million to a separate anti-billionaire tax group, Building a Better California, founded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. (Brin has reportedly already left the state to avoid the tax.)
Tan, the CEO of startup incubator Y Combinator, has less money to throw around, but he’s made vocal opposition to the tax measures a key part of his brand. He frequently invokes the specter of billionaires and startups fleeing the state and spreads claims that the statewide tax would mean Google’s founders would owe 50 percent of their stocks, which the tax’s backers have dismissed as false. He’s contributed $25,000 to Abundant Future.
Larsen and Tan likely see their support as “political investments that they expect a return on,” said Jeremy Mack, executive director of Phoenix Project, which tracks corporate spending in San Francisco politics. Wiener owes much of his political strength to the donors who have boosted his housing causes during his state Senate career, including Larsen and Tan. With those backers now animated against the wealth taxes, Mack said that supporting them would be “political suicide” for Wiener.
But Wiener’s opposition to the taxes positions him against the political currents now driving the Democratic Party’s progressive wing. California’s major labor unions, a supermajority of San Francisco’s board of supervisors, and national progressive leaders like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., all support the pair of taxes. Even Pelosi, Wiener’s would-be predecessor and a known moderate, is in favor of the local San Francisco tax. SEIU California, one of the state’s largest labor unions, withdrew its endorsement of Wiener in early April over his opposition to the tax measures.
Both of Wiener’s opponents in the three-way June 2 primary — progressive member of San Francisco’s board of supervisors Connie Chan and Justice Democrats co-founder Saikat Chakrabarti — are in favor of the taxes. Most California voters support the statewide billionaire tax, according to a March poll, including 72 percent of Democratic voters.
“If you look at who is bankrolling [Wiener], he is doing the bidding of massive corporate interest,” Justin Dolezal, a San Francisco bar owner and co-founder with Small Business Forward, an advocacy group that supports both wealth taxes, told The Intercept. “That’s what he’s looking out for, rather than the average, everyday working San Franciscans.”
Wiener’s campaign did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.
“He is doing the bidding of massive corporate interest. That’s what he’s looking out for, rather than the average, everyday working San Franciscans.”
While Wiener in the past has brushed off concerns of corporate backers influencing his policy, saying that he and his wealthiest donors “have agreements and disagreements,” their alignment in opposition against two popular wealth taxes has drawn concern from housing and homelessness advocates, who were already skeptical of Wiener for boosting housing development in the city that they argue favors real estate corporations. The real estate industry was consistently among his top donors during his state Senate elections.
Wiener is a proponent of the “Yes in My Backyard” movement that seeks to address the housing crisis by increasing the housing stock, while opponents criticize it for its emphasis on boosting development rather than redistributing wealth. The movement has morphed over the past several years with the growth of the abundance movement, which is popular among San Francisco’s powerful billionaires and aims to remove regulations and red tape to speed up development.
In addition to being top donors to Abundant Future, Tan and Larsen, along with Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppleman, have been consistent supporters of Wiener’s YIMBY vision. During his decade in the state Senate, Wiener introduced a series of bills that cut regulations to accelerate housing development across the state, a core tenet of YIMBYism and abundance. Critics on the left dismissed his policies as rewards for corporate commercial real estate developers that failed to meet San Francisco and the state’s housing needs, as well as exacerbating gentrification and displacement of its low-income residents. Opponents instead argue for redistribution of wealth, using the housing that already exists and direct investment in services for low-income people.
Confronting challenges over his support from wealthy donors during his campaign for Congress, Wiener often refers to his track record of taking on corporations, such as introducing AI regulation bills, one of which drew the ire of some of his tech backers, including Tan. But earlier this year, Wiener and Tan partnered on a failed state bill that would have restricted Big Tech companies from self-preferencing their products over smaller companies. While Wiener touted the legislation as a way to rein in the likes of Apple and Google, Tan’s company, Y Combinator, likely would have benefited because it helps launch new startups.
Tan has also worked to insulate the tech sector from organized labor, accusing the state’s labor leaders of having the goal of “killing the tech golden goose and taking maximum waste into the budget … until CA ceases to work for everyday Californians.”
Larsen, meanwhile, railed against unions at a San Francisco business event in January, calling on his peers to “start fighting on par with the unions when they propose these absolutely stupid propositions like this crazy CEO tax.” Larsen echoed the message at a separate tech donor gathering Tan hosted months later.
Larsen did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. A spokesperson for Tan told The Intercept to “look at Mr. Tan’s posts on X/Twitter,” where Tan has called the billionaire tax “a destroy tech in California proposition” and the overpaid CEO tax “bad policy wrapped up in anti-billionaire bullshit.”
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Wiener’s legislative record reveals an inconsistent history of supporting progressive taxation. In 2018, he opposed a successful local tax on big businesses to fund homelessness services. Two years later, Wiener supported the first iteration of the CEO tax, the first of its kind nationwide, before it was undone in 2024.
At a candidate forum in January, Wiener said he supported progressive taxes, but he would wait until the Billionaires Tax Act got on the ballot to decide. In April, Wiener said he opposed the local CEO tax, saying he didn’t want to interrupt San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie’s economic recovery agenda and that he would pursue similar progressive tax reform in Congress. And last week, after the state billionaire tax’s backers announced they had the necessary signatures to enter it on the ballot, Wiener said he was also against the statewide tax.
“California already has an unstable boom-bust tax system because of the devaluation of property taxes and reliance increasingly on income taxes on wealthy residents,” Wiener told the San Francisco Standard. He said he disagreed with the approach, especially given that it’s a one-time tax.
“It sounds like a person that’s in opposition, but doesn’t want to be seen as Republican,” said Paul Boden, a longtime advocate for people living unhoused. “It’s the neoliberal justification for continuing down the same neoliberal path since Reagan: that doing something that might impact some wealthy people is bad for all of us.”
“It’s the neoliberal justification for continuing down the same neoliberal path since Reagan: that doing something that might impact some wealthy people is bad for all of us.”
Boden, the executive director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project, has long sparred with Wiener on his housing and homelessness policy. In 2016, when Wiener was a San Francisco board supervisor, Boden spoke out against a letter Wiener wrote to the city’s police chief, which had called for a sweep of homeless encampments amid that year’s winter storms. He has criticized Wiener’s housing policies, arguing they prioritize middle-income San Franciscans over the city’s poor.
The results of Larsen and Tan’s ad spending can already be seen on the airwaves in and around San Francisco. Abundant Future has been running ads and sending mailers that paint Chakrabarti, who is advocating to nationalize AI by turning struggling AI companies into public utilities, as a carpetbagger amid his surge in recent polls. Larsen has said that he supports candidates promoting AI regulation, and he plans to spend millions backing Alex Bores, a New York congressional candidate facing heavy oppositional spending from a PAC backed by openAI.
Larsen-funded ads released by his Golden State Promises PAC aired during California’s recent gubernatorial debate, saying the billionaire tax would “backfire and hurt you.”
Supporters of the local and state wealth taxes argue that more revenue is needed to address California’s shortfall due to federal healthcare funding cuts, which is estimated at a $100 billion loss over the next five years. There are more than 200 billionaires who live in the state, according to Forbes data compiled by tax advocates. Most of the revenue from the one-time state tax would go to healthcare, with some set aside for food assistance at schools and other education programs.
Revenue from San Francisco’s local Overpaid CEO tax — which has been estimated to bring in $250 to $300 million each year — is designed to go to the city’s general fund, with its supporters hoping to invest in healthcare, mental health treatment, and housing support. Larsen and opponents are also funding support for a dueling “poison pill” measure, which would negate the Overpaid CEO tax if approved.
To Mack of the Phoenix Project, this kind of spending is par for the course in politics but should inspire voters to think critically about whom they support.
“The more politicians are in their pockets,” said Mack, referring to wealthy donors, “the less we can expect regular Californian/San Franciscan people’s voices to matter.”
Correction: May 14, 2026, 4:05 p.m. ET A previous version of this article misstated the first name of a San Francisco bar owner and co-founder with Small Business Forward; he is Justin Dolezal, not Jerome.
I’M BEN MUESSIG, The Intercept’s editor-in-chief. It’s been a devastating year for journalism — the worst in modern U.S. history.
We have a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking.
In this most perilous moment for democracy, The Intercept is fighting back. But to do so effectively, we need to grow.
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In interview with Status Coup, an attorney for the woman who accused the president of sexually assaulting her in the early 1980s—and who Trump’s FBI interviewed four times—slams “cover up”.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth testifies before the Senate Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on Defense on May 12, 2026 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
“What we’re seeing is the public experience how more spending does not actually keep them safe,” said a researcher at Brown University’s Costs of War Project.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday released yet another ad pitching President Donald Trump’s proposed $1.5 trillion Pentagonbudget, as new polling showed major skepticism over the idea.
In his latest pitch for the record-breaking defense budget, the former Fox News host insists that “America is not in decline,” even though the US has been unable to compel Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz despite having spent nearly $1 trillion on defense in 2025.
“We remain the strongest military power on Earth,” Hegseth continued. “But that power requires renewal. And with global threats that are constantly evolving, it’s time to make a $1.5 trillion investment.”
The $1.5 trillion investment is a GENERATIONAL DOWN PAYMENT on America’s national defense.
This investment guarantees the United States maintains overwhelming strength and unmatched deterrence against any adversary for generations to come. pic.twitter.com/2zOSlZkzNr
— Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) May 14, 2026
A $1.5 trillion military budget would be over 50% more than the 2025 US defense budget and more than four times the money spent on defense by China, the world’s second-biggest defense spender.
Among other things, Hegseth said that the budget would invest $18 billion into Trump’s proposed “Golden Dome” missile defense shield, which the Congressional Budget Office on Tuesday estimated would cost $1.2 trillion to create, deploy, and operate over the first 20 years of its existence.
Hegseth also said that the Pentagon would be increasing its investment in artificial intelligence by “800%,” although it’s not at the moment clear how well AI helps militaries effectively fight wars.
The defense secretary concluded his video by insisting that “we are expanding our strength, we are restoring our deterrence, and we are putting America first.”
USA Today reported on Thursday that a new poll conducted by ReThink Media and the Costs of War Project at Brown University finds that nearly 60% of Americans think the proposed Trump Pentagon budget is too large, including 40% who say $1.5 trillion is “much too high” to spend on defense.
Breaking the figures down by party, 87% of Democrats said the defense budget was too high, along with 54% of independents, and even 30% of Republicans.
Jennifer Greenburg, a researcher with Brown’s Costs of War Project, told USA Today that Americans were broadly skeptical that plunging more taxpayer money into the Pentagon is really necessary given that the US already doles out more for defense than the next four biggest spenders—China, Russia, Germany, and India—combined.
“In real time, I think what we’re seeing,” said Greenberg, “is the public experience how more spending does not actually keep them safe.”
In a column published by The New York Times on Wednesday, longtime national security reporter Noah Shachtman argued that Hegseth’s $1.5 trillion proposal was “less like a budget and more like a trip to an endless casino buffet” in which the Pentagon spends money in “gut-busting proportions.”
Shachtman also noted that the proposed $1.5 trillion defense budget comes at a time when the Trump administration has wrecked traditional oversight mechanisms, thus making waste and fraud far more likely at a Pentagon that’s never passed an audit.
“One of their early actions was to fire and replace the Pentagon’s inspector general, whose office looks into claims of fraud and abuse in military contracting,” Shachtman explained. “The independent office that tests whether our weapons actually work has been gutted.”
Ben Freeman, director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, argued in an analysis published on Tuesday that Hegseth’s budget pitch at congressional hearings this week was particularly baffling because there is really no imperative behind it on par with the Cold War or the post-9/11 defense buildup.
“Despite presenting no strategic necessity for the largest year-over-year Pentagon spending increase since World War II,” Freeman wrote, “Hegseth repeatedly claimed the $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget was a sound financial decision, arguing in the Senate hearing that ‘at every level we have made it a fiscally responsible budget.’ Yet, the fact is that the entirety of this proposed increase in Pentagon spending would be deficit financed, effectively going on Uncle Sam’s credit card.”
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) speaks during a campaign event with former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander in front of the New York Stock Exchange on April 24, 2026 in New York City.
(Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
“It’s simple: Members of Congress should spend their time in Washington serving the American people, not preparing to cash in big time with a cushy lobbying career after they leave office,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
US Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Rick Scott introduced a bipartisan bill on Thursday to permanently ban members of Congress from becoming lobbyists after leaving office.
Right now, ex-lawmakers are given just a brief “cooling-off” period before they are allowed to return and lobby their former colleagues—one year in the House of Representatives and two years in the Senate.
According to OpenSecrets, about 41% of former members of the 117th Congress have gone on to work for a lobbying firm or client, which Warren (D-Mass.) said raises the prospect that they’re “thinking about how they can make money in their next gig while in office.”
The bill she co-introduced with Scott (R-Fla.), known as the Banning Lobbying And Safeguarding Trust (BLAST) Act, would replace the cooling-off periods with a permanent ban, forbidding former lawmakers from registering as lobbyists or engaging in the activities that would require them to do so.
It also bans ex-congresspeople from making lobbying contracts, which are often used as loopholes to avoid formal registration.
Those who violate the act could face up to five years in prison for knowing and willful violations.
“It’s simple: Members of Congress should spend their time in Washington serving the American people, not preparing to cash in big time with a cushy lobbying career after they leave office,” Warren said. “It’s long past time to close the revolving door that’s corrupted our government and destroyed public trust in elected officials. This bipartisan bill is an important push to get that done.”
While Warren has a long record of seeking to limit the influence of money in politics, Scott’s presence as a cosponsor was a head-scratcher for many observers.
A former healthcare CEO whose company was hit with the largest healthcare‑fraud settlement in US history, he has always been a reliable partner to corporate interests and has been cited as one of the top Republican recipients of fossil fuel and defense industry money.
Nevertheless, Scott described the “revolving door between Capitol Hill and K Street” as a major reason trust in institutions is at an all-time low among Americans.
Regardless of his own intentions, Scott is seizing on a sense of distrust among the American public that is both very real and very bipartisan.
With this coming midterm election cycle expected to be the most expensive in history, 72% of Americans said in a Politico poll released last week that there is “too much money from special interest groups in American elections,” while just 5% disagreed. This belief was virtually equal between Republicans and Democrats.
And while more Democrats (76%) felt it necessary to curb billionaire control of politics, over half of Republican voters (54%) also agreed that billionaires had “too much influence” over elections.
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In the low-profile race for California insurance commissioner, Jane Kim wants to borrow from other countries to solve a crisis in the homeowner’s insurance market.
Jane Kim speaks at the 2026 California Democratic Party State Convention in San Francisco, February 21, 2026. Credit: Jeff Chiu/AP Photo
If you go down the expansive California ballot for the June 2 primary, you will eventually hit the election for state insurance commissioner. The position, which oversees the insurance market for homeowner’s, automotive, business, workers’ compensation, medical malpractice, bail, and other insurance products—but not health insurance, which is almost entirely managed by another agency—is only elected in 11 states, and only in California since a 1988 ballot measure named Prop 103. The time and energy spent by voters on insurance commissioner elections likely trends toward zero.
But that shouldn’t be the case this year. It may be the most important race on the ballot, in fact.
Like many states in an era of more frequent and destructive natural disasters, California is immersed in a homeowner’s insurance crisis. While the state doesn’t require this coverage for homeowners, many lenders won’t issue a mortgage without it. Yet that insurance has become harder to get, and even with it, claims payouts are not always guaranteed. Serial claims delays for the wildfires in Los Angeles County by State Farm, which insures 1 out of every 5 homes in California, has led the Department of Insurance to pursue legal action and potentially suspend State Farm’s license.
But State Farm hasn’t written new policies in California since 2023 and has non-renewed thousands of policies in high-risk parts of the state. That’s part of a trend across the industry, with policy cancellations an ever-present fear. And it signifies the core problem: The remaining insurers have so much leverage in a concentrated market that they can demand rate increases or leniency for claims obstruction as a condition for writing state policies. They are asserting a right to rip homeowners off.
“With climate disaster, the competition is not to lower rates, the competition is to actually cancel coverage on as many risky homes as quickly as you can.”Jane Kim, Working Families Party
Most of the 11 insurance commissioner candidates this year (including state lawmakers Steve Bradford and Ben Allen, businessman Patrick Wolff, and the lone prominent Republican, insurance agent Stacy Korsgaden) are vowing to crack down on foot-dragging on claims and improving policyholder education about their rights. But they also lead with talk of “stabilizing” the insurance market, mainly by bringing in new companies to write policies and allowing for faster approval of rate changes. That’s code for agreeing to the industry’s terms: Let us charge more or we walk. That puts the primary burden for more affordable policies on individuals, through conducting fire resistance retrofits, cutting down nearby flammable trees and underbrush, and so forth. But though many Californians have done this, including through a state incentive program, they have not seen any change in their insurance rates.
One candidate is thinking differently about this, through the lens of market structure. Jane Kim, the state director of the Working Families Party and a former county supervisor in San Francisco, is running on the concept of a single-payer system for over-the-top disaster insurance. Critics and opponents have issued hyperbolic warnings that this would destroy home insurance in the state. But the concept comes out of New Zealand and other countries where it has been relatively successful. And it could offer a way out of the current hostage situation between Californians and their insurers.
KIM WAS EXPECTING TO SPEND THIS YEAR getting the Working Families Party involved in its first gubernatorial campaign since launching in California in 2022. “But we kept going down the ballot and we got fixated on insurance commissioner, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” she told me in an interview at a teriyaki shop near LAX Airport. “Wealth inequality, economic equity, climate justice are all intertwined in this office in a really interesting way.”
Insurance companies should be natural allies to climate advocates just as a matter of financial incentives. Minimizing natural disasters would save insurers money. But in reality, insurance companies make their money by investing premiums before paying out claims, and much of that investment portfolio is tied up in the fossil fuel industry.
So the way insurers manage risk, Kim explains, is by pricing it, which translates into higher monthly payments or canceled policies. “It was probably true in the 1970s, that competition [in home insurance] leads to lower rates,” she said. “Now with climate disaster, the competition is not to lower rates, the competition is to actually cancel coverage on as many risky homes as quickly as you can.” She noted that Texas, despite having effectively no regulation of the insurance industry and a multitude of underwriters practicing, has much higher home insurance rates than California. “It’s just to me mind-boggling, the argument that if you take away protections for consumers, the industry will do a better job.”
The assumption is that insurers are flying out of California and other parts of the country because providing insurance is a losing proposition. But the Federal Insurance Office’s latest report in 2025 shows that the property and casualty industry has experienced double-digit growth in written premiums for three years, and more than doubled net earnings last year, enjoying a return on average equity of 15.9 percent, the highest in a decade. The report cited “strong gains in profitability.” The leading 20 property and casualty insurers reported $69 billion in net income in 2025, up 29 percent year over year. And California plays host to 1 out of every 8 homeowners. There’s money to be made.
Kim’s strategy to spring Californians from the trap the insurance industry has stuck them in is modeled on New Zealand. That country offers public natural disaster insurance, run by the government, as a first layer of coverage for the property in the event of specific events like earthquakes or volcano activity. The government plan covers structural rebuilding but not home contents; anything outside of scope is covered by the private market. France and Spain also have this over-the-top disaster coverage.
California has some entities that resemble this bifurcation but with key weaknesses. For instance, the California Earthquake Authority offers coverage for that specific disaster, but it’s privately run despite being publicly created, and earthquake insurance is not mandatory to get a mortgage, so many go without it. In addition, in the 1960s the state inaugurated FAIR, a guaranteed insurer of last resort for uninsured homeowners that solely offers minimal fire coverage, which is required for mortgages. This is also privately run, with (predictably) very high premiums and claims spread out across all insurers. While intended to be a bridge to more comprehensive coverage, FAIR has become a landing point for hundreds of thousands, leaving those homeowners unprotected from most insurable events other than fire.
Kim’s idea would be to have every homeowner automatically get over-the-top government disaster coverage as part of their home insurance. Premiums would be contoured to property values and risk, and there would only be one risk pool. “What we’re proposing in a single-payer system is that every homeowner who gets insurance would be in one program,” she said.
Much like single-payer health insurance, Kim envisions savings from the nonprofit structure, with no pressure to leak out profits to shareholders or executives and no overhead for marketing. Premium revenue would be investable, and California could use it to bolster renewable energy or other climate-resilient industries. It could also offer financial incentives to policyholders to lower fire and earthquake risk, or invest in state mitigation strategies like controlled burns and firefighting capacity. The hope is that this would lead to fewer claims, aligning incentives between homeowners and insurers.
Many have freaked out about this idea. TheOrange County Registerclaimed it would “destroy California’s market.” But Kim says that it would benefit state insurers by taking one of their biggest costs off their hands. New entrants would see a market where they aren’t responsible for home rebuilding after a fire or earthquake. For existing insurers, “if anything, we’re letting them off the hook after we’ve been paying premiums for decades,” Kim said. “There should be a discussion for how to do this appropriately, whether there’s some kind of exit fee for allowing them to go out of business on a risky part of their portfolio.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks at a Kim campaign event. Credit: Jane Kim for Insurance Commissioner 2026
The insurance commissioner would not be able to mandate a public program of this type on their own; the legislature would have to establish it. But winning the election, Kim believes, would give her a platform to organize around changing the home insurance market. Her experience passing legislation on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and organizing with the Working Families Party offers a road map. “Because of the ambitious nature of our agenda, I am very aware of how this office can galvanize Californians to engage,” she said. “I believe that the only way to pass some of the bigger ideas that we have is with public pressure and scrutiny.”
That doesn’t stop at the single-payer disaster insurance system. Kim wants to put a definitive loss ratio on insurers mandating that they pay a certain percentage of premiums out in claims (65 percent for homeowner’s insurance, 70 percent for auto insurance) or else refund customers the balance to hit the ratio. (This exists in health insurance at the federal level and is called the medical loss ratio; Kim believes the insurance commissioner has existing authority to implement this.) She wants to expand an existing public option for car insurance that is offered to low-income drivers with good records, but that is practically unknown to most state residents. She wants to require six months for any changes in coverage to let homeowners prepare for non-renewal. She wants to freeze rates for a period of time when people file a claim, so that insurers cannot essentially charge people for trying to use their insurance.
Ultimately, the office is a consumer protection agency, an area of policy that has been bolstered in the state by the hiring of former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director Rohit Chopra as head of the Business and Consumer Services Agency. Kim and others in the race want to mandate immediate payouts for contents after total losses rather than forcing itemization, conduct more examinations of bad actors, and provide transparency on how premium money is being spent and how insurers are performing on claims.
“I’ve talked to claim adjusters who believe that anywhere from $1.7 to $3 billion is stolen from Californians every year in claims that these insurers are contractually obligated to pay,” she said. “Why is that not considered the biggest theft? I’m paying for a service, and the moment I need that service … they do everything they can to not actually provide the service.”
Handicapping this election would be a fool’s task, but Kim has support from the Working Families Party (naturally) and endorsements from several labor unions and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). So depending on the results, we could get a test of a radical rethinking of insurance, who it should serve, and how public provision can upend the usual corporate stickup.
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David Dayen is the executive editor of The American Prospect. He is the author of Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power and Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud. He co-hosts the podcast Organized Money with Matt Stoller. He can be reached on Signal at ddayen.90. More by David Dayen
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How a group of rank-and-file retirees in Connecticut successfully organized to restore their right to traditional public Medicare
Connecticut public employees have just won a major victory over Medicare Advantage, the brand name for private-insurer HMO products for seniors. In 2017, in order to save money, Connecticut shifted all state retirees, some 65,000 of them, to Medicare Advantage and denied them the freedom to stay on traditional public Medicare. But now, thanks to rank-and-file protest and organizing, that policy has just been reversed.
A number of insurance companies sponsor Medicare Advantage plans. They have been criticized for using a variety of strategies to maximize profits by stinting on care, including heavy-handed case management, limiting choice of providers, and target-marketing to relatively healthy seniors with gimmicks such as health clubs, thus fragmenting the risk pool.
Worse, lobbying by insurers has led to a formula in which traditional Medicare payers subsidize these private Medicare Advantage plans to the tune of $82 billion over ten years, giving them an artificial price advantage. The plans appear to be great deals—until you get seriously ill.
One Connecticut retiree who was switched to a Medicare Advantage plan, James Russell, a former professor of sociology at Eastern Connecticut State University, did become seriously ill. In 2021, he was diagnosed with a rare form of lung cancer. His preferred hospital, MD Anderson in Texas, was in the network of United Healthcare, the operator of Russell’s Medicare Advantage plan.
After the successful surgery, MD Anderson referred him to a hospital in Portland, Oregon, where Russell now lives, for follow-up chemotherapy. But the Portland hospital was not in the United network, so Russell had pay out of pocket to commute to Texas for his chemo.
Russell was fortunate compared to Gary Bent, another Connecticut state retiree, who in 2022 was denied coverage by his Medicare Advantage plan for intensive rehabilitation recommended by his doctors after a brain surgery left him with severe mobility and cognitive impairments. Bent subsequently died.
Russell got in touch with Bent’s widow, Gloria, and the two founded Connecticut State Employees for Medicare Choice. As Russell told me, the group was unusual because it was entirely rank-and-file. “We were just agitationists, trying to get the unions and the state to do the right thing,” he said. The state’s public employee union leaders had initially supported the shift to Medicare Advantage. They tend to be political allies of Gov. Ned Lamont, a progressive, who faced budget crunches. The shift to Medicare Advantage, effective in 2018, saved the state nearly $1.7 billion over the last five fiscal years, according to estimates from State Comptroller Sean Scanlon. That presumably relieved stress on other outlays dear to public employees.
Gradually, faced with a rebellion of rank-and-file retirees, some union leaders came around. The deal that the retirees made with the state will involve some cost-sharing. “Our strategy was to meet the state halfway,” Russell said.
Final numbers are still being worked out. But the deal will allow any Connecticut retiree who wants traditional Medicare to get it.
In the context of steady market share gains by Medicare Advantage, which now has over half of all people eligible for Medicare, this rare rollback is a major victory. Russell, Gloria Bent, and their group are now in touch with others around the country who want to resist and reverse the insurance industry takeover of America’s most important island of single-payer public health insurance. Robert Kuttner Co-Editor, Co-Founder
Pollution and steam rise from the Miami Fort Power Station situated along the Ohio River near Cincinnati, Ohio, April 7, 2026. Credit: Jason Whitman/NurPhoto via AP
In the second Trump administration, Democrats have been backing away from climate change messaging. Joe Biden apparently got no credit for the Inflation Reduction Act, his marquee climate policy bill, and Trump has since unceremoniously disposed of it.
The Searchlight Institute, a centrist think tank, presented polling last September indicating that while most Americans think climate change is a problem, they don’t think it’s a major one. Therefore, the first step to solving climate change is “don’t say climate change.” Luckily, as Matt Huber points out at The New York Times, tremendous progress in renewable energy means one can accomplish a lot, emissions-wise, without mentioning climate change at all. The “heart of any affordability agenda—housing, energy, transportation—overlaps with the sectors we must decarbonize,” he writes. “When it comes to climate change, for now, it might be better to say nothing at all.”
When it comes to actual politicians running for office this year, perhaps that is a sensible strategy. But in terms of the rest of the broad Democratic coalition, it is not.
It’s not hard to see why climate policy polls poorly: People have been comprehensively misled about it. On one hand, climate activism emerged from the environmental movement, which tends to present measures to protect the environment as posing an inherent trade-off with jobs and growth. If we create some new national park, for instance, then that land won’t be available for aluminum smelters or data centers. (In reality, it is usually not this simple, but that’s the stereotype.)
For the median voter, climate change is seen as a problem but one that will be burdensome to solve.
On the other hand, and much more importantly, right-wing media—heavily funded by fossil fuel interests—has been lying about climate change for decades. They lied for years that it wasn’t happening, then they lied for years that it was “paused,” and now that the problem is undeniably happening all around us, they lie that we can’t do anything about it.
The result is that for the median voter, climate change is seen as a problem but one that will be burdensome to solve. It will mean higher gas and electricity prices, having to buy an expensive electric car, spending tax dollars on infrastructure upgrades, and so on. When times are tough, climate slips down the priority list.
This way of thinking, of course, is not remotely true. Climate change is going to wreck the environment and the economy—indeed, it is already happening. The home insurance markets in Florida and California are in death spirals. Increasingly severe heat waves are killing people and straining the electric grid all across the country. Flooding strikes in more places, and more severely. The same is true of drought. The Colorado River Basin just suffered its driest winter in hundreds of years. The water level on the Colorado’s Lake Powell, the second-largest reservoir in the country, might sink below its power inlet tubesthis summer, and it will almost certainly have to be decommissioned within the next decade.
Conversely, it is now beyond any question that the 21st-century economy will be driven by renewable energy. It is the cheapest form of energy in history, and whoever can figure out how to power their whole economy with it will reap a tremendous harvest of prosperity and health, as the pollution from filth-spewing fossil energy gradually clears.
In a weird stroke of good fortune, Trump’s lunatic misrule provides a perfect context to press the correct argument about climate change: that doing so will help every part of America, from the environment to the economy writ large to Jeffrey Q. Consumer, struggling to pay his bills. Thanks to Trump’s war on Iran having closed the Strait of Hormuz, gas prices are shooting through the roof, followed quickly by food and electricity prices. And thanks to his repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act, China has cemented a massive lead in the technology and industry of the future. They almost can’t believe their luck; a Chinese university recently published a stock-take of his policies in 2025 entitled “Thank Trump.”
It is true that you don’t have to talk about climate change specifically to justify a major climate package. Renewable energy is being deployed at scale, even in the U.S., and EVs are less expensive to run over time because of cheaper fueling and few maintenance requirements. Indeed, in a rapidly growing fraction of the world, EVs are cheaper to purchase up front, too. China is showing how to decarbonize trucking.
But decarbonizing electricity production and transport is not enough. We also need to decarbonize industry and agriculture, and strategies for doing so are not all ready for deployment, particularly in the latter category. As I wrote back during the 2024 campaign, Joe Biden got us maybe halfway where we needed to be with the IRA. Now we don’t even have that foundation to build on.
In short, an immense package of investment and research will be needed to reach the (literally) sunlit uplands where fossil fuels are not needed for anything, aside from maybe chemical production. Given the macroeconomic conditions likely to prevail in 2029—which might be a severe case of stagflation at the rate we’re going, if not a debt crisis—it will most probably be quite painful and disruptive. The American people must be convinced the price is worth it.
That brings me to my most fundamental disagreement with this style of politics: Muzzling yourself because certain topics momentarily don’t poll well is strategically shortsighted and against basic small-d democratic values. As Steve Randy Waldman argues, any democratic system is premised on the idea that politicians and political parties will make honest arguments about what they think should happen. That’s how voters can trust that their choice in an election will be a meaningful one and thereby come to understand the effect of what voting for particular parties will do, which doesn’t happen when parties yank their policies back and forth based on what (invariably biased) polls happen to come in with. “When political parties reshape themselves on the basis of polling, it renders the whole process nonsensical, a kind of infinite regress,” he writes. “It deprives the public of meaningful choice in the name of giving it what it wants.”
More concretely, consider the Gallup poll of approval of interracial marriage. Back in 1954, it came in at just 4 percent. By 2021, that had risen to 94 percent. Why the change? Because generations of ordinary people, activists, and even some politicians—knowing full well they were charging headlong into a storm of public condemnation—argued that in a free country, people ought to be allowed to marry whoever they damn well want.
If civil rights activists had thought like today’s poll-sniffing political consultants, they would have carefully avoided any such hideously unpopular ideas. They would have yelled at Richard and Mildred Loving to avoid raising the dreaded salience of the issue by appealing their conviction for violating Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law to the Supreme Court, no matter how eerily apropos their surname might be. “What are you trying to do, elect more Dixiecrats?” consultants would have bellowed. And interracial marriage might still be illegal to this day.
In the low-profile race for California insurance commissioner, Jane Kim wants to borrow from other countries to solve a crisis in the homeowner’s insurance market.
I hope that you found this article interesting and thought-provoking. The reason we’re able to publish stories like this — free of programmatic ads and never behind a paywall — is because readers like you step up to support our work.
The Prospect doesn’t answer to advertisers or billionaire owners. We answer to you and to our commitment to pursuing the truth, wherever that leads us.
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Ryan Cooper is a senior editor at The American Prospect, and author of How Are You Going to Pay for That?: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics. He was previously a national correspondent for The Week. His work has also appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, and Current Affairs. More by Ryan Cooper
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