Last week, a bill that would give the Treasury Department power to designate a nonprofit as a “terrorist-supporting organization” for supporting pro-Palestine protests was narrowly voted down in Congress. But the saga is far from over. It could still be passed in the coming days.

Called the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, the bill initially was introduced with broad bipartisan support. But after Donald Trump’s reelection, many Democrats flipped, fearing the incoming administration would use the bill not to stop terrorism, but to kneecap Trump’s political enemies.

Funding terrorism is already illegal. Still, all but one Republican in the House backed the bill when it came to a vote last week. There were also 52 Democrats who supported the measure.

Nonprofits such as the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and NAACP came out against the bill in a letter in to House leaders. “These efforts are part of a concerted attack,” they wrote, “on civil society that is targeted at more than just groups involved in the campus protests regarding Gaza.”

Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) has been particularly outspoken against the bill, which he believes could be applied beyond those opposed to Israel’s mass killings in Gaza to pretty much anyone opposed to Trump.

“A university has too many protests against Donald Trump? Terrorists,” McGovern said on the House floor Tuesday. “Environmental groups suing the administration in court? Terrorists. Think tanks that think differently than Donald Trump? Terrorists…Donald Trump says you’re a terrorist, so you’re a terrorist.” 

“This bill has been hijacked and turned into a vehicle to give the incoming administration the ability to revoke the nonprofit status of any advocacy group they want, simply by labeling them as terrorist sympathizers.”

Meet HR 9495: The nonprofit killer. pic.twitter.com/kN6X5Sypwm

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) November 20, 2024

As I wrote last week, the bill shows the ways in which the Biden-era crackdown on pro-Palestine activists sets up the possibility for Trump to take revenge on protesters.

On a day meant to commemorate the transgender people who have been murdered in violent acts of bigotry, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) have united in bringing their transphobia to Congress.

On Wednesday, one day after Mace introduced a resolution to bar trans people from using the bathroom that aligns with their gender identity, Johnson unilaterally announced a policy doing just that. If enforced, the rule will apply to trans people using bathrooms and locker rooms in the Capitol building and House offices.

“Women deserve women’s only spaces,” Johnson told reporters. “And we’re not anti-anyone, we’re pro-woman.”

“It’s always been, I guess, an unwritten policy,” he added, “but now it’s in writing.” In an emailed statement, Johnson said, “It is important to note that each Member office has its own private restroom, and unisex restrooms are available throughout the Capitol.”

The move came on the annually recognized Transgender Day of Remembrance.

Speaker Johnson just now: “Yeah like all House policies it's enforceable. Look, we have single-sex facilities for a reason. Women deserve women's only spaces. And we're not anti-anyone, we're pro-woman. I think it's an important policy for us to continue.” pic.twitter.com/m3FakHHoz7

— Ellis Kim (@elliskkim) November 20, 2024

As I wrote yesterday, although Mace’s resolution does not mention Rep.-elect Sarah McBride by name, Mace said the effort is “absolutely” meant to target McBride, the first openly trans person to be elected to Congress. (Mace has also repeatedly misgendered her on social media.) On Monday, McBride called Mace’s resolution “a blatant attempt from far right-wing extremists to distract from the fact that they have no real solutions to what Americans are facing” and alleged that Mace was “manufacturing culture wars.” After Johnson announced his support for it Wednesday, McBride responded in a lengthy statement posted on X, calling the bathroom ban an “effort to distract from the real issues facing this country.” 

“Like all members, I will follow the rules as outlined by Speaker Johnson, even if I disagree with them,” McBride wrote, adding that she is looking “forward to getting to know my future colleagues on both sides of the aisle.”

Johnson on Wednesday claimed the policy would be enforceable, but did not say how. He also did not commit to including it in the Rules package, which outlines protocol for the House, and which members will vote on at the start of the next session in early January. Mace’s resolution says the House Sergeant-at-Arms would be charged with enforcing the rule; that office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

LGBTQ advocates have since slammed the policy—and questioned how it could even be enforced. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, called Johnson’s announcement “a cruel and unnecessary rule that puts countless staff, interns, and visitors to the U.S. Capitol at risk.” Mace’s resolution specifies it applies to “members, officers, and employees of the House,” but Johnson’s statement is less specific, and therefore potentially broader. It states, “all single-sex facilities…are reserved for individuals of that biological sex.”

Pocan also asked: “Will the Sergeant at Arms post officers in bathrooms? Will everyone who works at the Capitol have to carry around their birth certificate or undergo a genetic test?” Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson said in a statement, “This new cruel and discriminatory policy has nothing to do with helping the American people or addressing their priorities—it’s all about hurting people.”

Mace isn’t stopping with the Capitol bathrooms, though. On Wednesday, she announced she plans to introduce a bill that aims to go further than her resolution does, by seeking to ban trans people from using women’s bathrooms and locker rooms on all federal property. It’s unclear if Johnson will support it. In a statement, Mace said: “The radical Left says I’m a ‘threat.’ You better believe it. And I will shamelessly call you out for putting women and girls in harm’s way.”

While questions over the enforceability of the policy go unanswered, both Mace and her GOP colleague Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) have openly threatened to use physical violence against trans people in Congress who violate the bathroom policy. “It will come to throws—there will be fists if this happens,” Mace told the YouTube personality Michael Knowles on Wednesday.

Johnson’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment about whether or not he condemns the threats of violence from the members.

At least 36 transgender and gender-nonconforming people have been killed in the US over the past year, according to a report by the Human Rights Campaign. On top of that, hundreds of pieces of legislation targeting LGBTQ people have been introduced in state legislatures nationwide, hate crimes against LGBTQ people reported to the FBI have reached record highs, and calls to a suicide crisis line for LGBTQ youth spiked nearly 700 percent the day after Trump’s reelection.

But on these realities, Mace and Johnson seem to have nothing to say.

Update, November 20: This post was updated with a response from McBride.

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) has proven time and time again that she will do nearly anything to make headlines.

But on Monday, she reached a new low, introducing a resolution seeking to bar transgender members and employees in the House of Representatives from using the bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity in the Capitol building. Echoing Republican talking points grounded in paranoia, the resolution alleges that allowing trans women to use women’s bathrooms “jeopardizes the safety and dignity” of cisgender women. It would task the House Sergeant-at-Arms with enforcing the resolution if passed.

The move comes just weeks after Rep.-elect Sarah McBride (D-Del.) became the first openly transgender person to serve in Congress. Though it does not directly mention McBride, the bill represents a clear attempt to attack her: Mace told reporters this explicitly on Tuesday, confirming that the bill is “absolutely” meant to target McBride. And in a post on X after announcing the resolution, Mace said McBride “does not get a say in women’s private spaces.”

McBride appeared to respond to the resolution in a post on X, stating: “Every day Americans go to work with people who have life journeys different than their own and engage with them respectfully, I hope members of Congress can muster that same kindness.” In a follow-up post, McBride called Mace’s effort “a blatant attempt from far right-wing extremists to distract from the fact that they have no real solutions to what Americans are facing. We should be focused on bringing down the cost of housing, health care, and child care, not manufacturing culture wars.”

Other Democratic members also blasted the effort: Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.), the first openly gay person to represent her state in Congress and co-chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, said in a post on X that Mace’s effort was a “petty, hateful distraction,” adding, “There’s no bottom to the cruelty.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio (D-N.Y.) said: “This is not just bigotry, this is just plain bullying.” Laurel Powell, spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, called Mace’s resolution “a political charade by a grown-up bully” and “another warning sign that the incoming anti-equality House majority will continue to focus on targeting LGBTQ+ people rather than the cost of living, price gouging or any of the problems the American people elected them to solve.” And GLAAD CEO Sarah Ellis said in a statement: “Everyone in Congress might try focusing on solutions to improve people’s lives and leading with kindness, and see what progress you might make for every American.”

“Manufacturing culture wars,” as McBride put it, is, indeed, an apt way to describe the transphobic paranoia Mace and supporting members in the GOP appears to be stoking with this resolution—an especially ironic development given that Democrats have been chastised for having been too concerned with trans issues since losing the election.

When it comes to GOP panic about trans people using bathrooms alongside cisgender people, the evidence around the issue does not support the panic. A 2018 study published in the journal Sexual Research and Social Policy found there is no link between trans-inclusive bathroom policies and safety, and that reports of “privacy and safety violations” in bathrooms, changing rooms, and locker rooms are “exceedingly rare.” This is probably why most states—37, plus DC—do not have any laws on the books regulating trans peoples’ use of bathrooms or other facilities, according to the Movement Advancement Project. (Mace’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on that research or other questions for this story.) But these facts have not stopped the GOP from pumping millions of dollars into anti-trans ads and filing hundreds of anti-trans bills in state legislatures across the country.

And as for the claim that it’s trans people who pose a danger to cisgender people in bathrooms? The GOP appears to be the party who poses a physical threat. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) went so far as to reportedly say in a private House GOP Conference meeting that she would fight a transgender woman if she tried to use a women’s bathroom in the House.

For all the drama this is stirring up, though, Mace’s latest effort may not go any further than the headlines: At a press conference Tuesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said, “This is an issue that Congress has never had to address before and we’re going to do that in a deliberate fashion…and we will accommodate the needs of every single person.” He added that he would not commit to including the language of Mace’s resolution in the rules package the House will vote on in early January. A spokesperson for Johnson did not immediately respond to a question about the consequences if Greene fought another member of Congress or the lack of evidence to support Mace’s resolution.

Update, November 19: This post was updated with a statement from GLAAD.

This story was originally published on Judd Legum’s Substack, Popular Information, to which you can subscribe here.

President-elect Donald Trump has appointed Elon Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to head the Department of Government Efficiency. Despite the name, it is not a government department. In fact, it is not part of the government at all. It is a non-governmental commission that will provide advice to the Trump administration.

Musk says he will identify “at least $2 trillion” in savings from the $6.5 trillion federal budget. How will Musk do it? Details are scarce. Musk is recruiting “high-IQ revolutionaries” to work 80-hour weeks for no pay to help him with the task. 

Cutting $2 trillion is impossible politically. But if Musk is serious about cutting government spending and waste there is only one place to start: the defense budget. About half of the discretionary budget—the spending that Congress approves each year—is spent on defense. For the 2024 budget, the amount allocated for the Department of Defense (DOD) exceeded $840 billion. 

The 15 agencies that could not properly account for their finances in the latest audit account for 68 percent of the Pentagon’s budget.

About half of the massive defense budget goes to military contractors, with tens of billions directed to “Big 5” firms—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman. These contractors, according to a “60 Minutes” investigation last year, “overcharge the Pentagon on almost everything the Department of Defense buys.” The misuse of taxpayer dollars became more acute “in the early 2000s when the Pentagon, in another cost-saving move, cut 130,000 employees whose jobs were to negotiate and oversee defense contracts.” Another factor is the consolidation of the defense industry, resulting in less competition for contracts. 

Still, Musk may have a difficult time cutting DoD spending. First, Musk is the CEO of the company, SpaceX, that actively seeks billions in defense contracts. Second, if Musk is able to overcome his conflict-of-interest, defense industry lobbyists will lobby Congress to reverse any planned cuts. Finally, Trump has pledged to increase military spending during his second term. 

“I will provide record funding for our military,” Trump said in a video posted on his campaign website. 

Trump is calling for more defense spending even though defense spending has doubled over the last 20 years. The DOD struggles to accurately account how it spends this gusher of money. For the seventh year in a row, it has failed an independent audit. 

This year’s audit failure means that the DOD has not passed since Congress began mandating the audits in 2018. The 2024 audit, which surveyed 28 separate agencies that operate under the Pentagon’s umbrella, found that 15 agencies failed to provide enough information for the auditors to assess how they handle their money. 

Michael McCord, the Pentagon’s comptroller and chief financial officer, was unfazed by this failure, calling it “expected.” He also argued that because some agencies passed, the audit was actually a success. “So if someone had a report card that is half good and half not good, I don’t know that you call the student or the report card a failure,” McCord told reporters at a press conference on Friday. “We have a lot of work to do, but I think we’re making progress.”

Nine agencies passed their audit and three agency audits are still pending. In 2023, auditors failed 18 agencies.

Eight agencies also did a better job this year of balancing their spending and the amount of cash they have in government accounts. But of those eight, only two agencies actually passed their audit. The other six, while properly accounting for their cash, did not have enough information about their other assets to pass the audit.

Even with the improvements McCord touted, the scope of the Pentagon’s failure to keep track of its assets is still vast. According to the audit, the 15 agencies that could not properly account for their finances make up 44 percent of the Pentagon’s total assets and 68 percent of its budget. This year, the Pentagon held over $4.1 trillion in assets and had a budget of over $840 billion, meaning that auditors were unable to pin down $1.8 trillion in assets and $571 billion of the budget. 

Despite these failures, Congress continues to appropriate more money every year to the DOD. The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act requires the department to pass its audit by 2028, but has no mechanism for penalizing failure. 

McCord insisted that the Pentagon was on track for a clean audit by 2028, but that it would take the cooperation of the incoming Trump administration to reach that goal. If Trump is serious about improving government efficiency, he could push his DOD to do a better job tracking its assets. But if he decides not to, the Pentagon will not face any consequences.

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) has proven time and time again that she will do nearly anything to make headlines.

But on Monday, she reached a new low, introducing a resolution seeking to bar transgender members and employees in the House of Representatives from using the bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity in the Capitol building. Echoing Republican talking points grounded in paranoia, the resolution alleges that allowing trans women to use women’s bathrooms “jeopardizes the safety and dignity” of cisgender women. It would task the House Sergeant-at-Arms with enforcing the resolution if passed.

The move comes just weeks after Rep.-elect Sarah McBride (D-Del.) became the first openly transgender person to serve in Congress. Though it does not directly mention McBride, the bill represents a clear attempt to attack her: Mace told reporters this explicitly on Tuesday, confirming that the bill is “absolutely” meant to target McBride. And in a post on X after announcing the resolution, Mace said McBride “does not get a say in women’s private spaces.”

McBride appeared to respond to the resolution in a post on X, stating: “Every day Americans go to work with people who have life journeys different than their own and engage with them respectfully, I hope members of Congress can muster that same kindness.” In a follow-up post, McBride called Mace’s effort “a blatant attempt from far right-wing extremists to distract from the fact that they have no real solutions to what Americans are facing. We should be focused on bringing down the cost of housing, health care, and child care, not manufacturing culture wars.”

Other Democratic members also blasted the effort: Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.), the first openly gay person to represent her state in Congress and co-chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, said in a post on X that Mace’s effort was a “petty, hateful distraction,” adding, “There’s no bottom to the cruelty.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio (D-N.Y.) said: “This is not just bigotry, this is just plain bullying.” Laurel Powell, spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, called Mace’s resolution “a political charade by a grown-up bully” and “another warning sign that the incoming anti-equality House majority will continue to focus on targeting LGBTQ+ people rather than the cost of living, price gouging or any of the problems the American people elected them to solve.” And GLAAD CEO Sarah Ellis said in a statement: “Everyone in Congress might try focusing on solutions to improve people’s lives and leading with kindness, and see what progress you might make for every American.”

“Manufacturing culture wars,” as McBride put it, is, indeed, an apt way to describe the transphobic paranoia Mace and supporting members in the GOP appears to be stoking with this resolution—an especially ironic development given that Democrats have been chastised for having been too concerned with trans issues since losing the election.

When it comes to GOP panic about trans people using bathrooms alongside cisgender people, the evidence around the issue does not support the panic. A 2018 study published in the journal Sexual Research and Social Policy found there is no link between trans-inclusive bathroom policies and safety, and that reports of “privacy and safety violations” in bathrooms, changing rooms, and locker rooms are “exceedingly rare.” This is probably why most states—37, plus DC—do not have any laws on the books regulating trans peoples’ use of bathrooms or other facilities, according to the Movement Advancement Project. (Mace’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on that research or other questions for this story.) But these facts have not stopped the GOP from pumping millions of dollars into anti-trans ads and filing hundreds of anti-trans bills in state legislatures across the country.

And as for the claim that it’s trans people who pose a danger to cisgender people in bathrooms? The GOP appears to be the party who poses a physical threat. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) went so far as to reportedly say in a private House GOP Conference meeting that she would fight a transgender woman if she tried to use a women’s bathroom in the House.

For all the drama this is stirring up, though, Mace’s latest effort may not go any further than the headlines: At a press conference Tuesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said, “This is an issue that Congress has never had to address before and we’re going to do that in a deliberate fashion…and we will accommodate the needs of every single person.” He added that he would not commit to including the language of Mace’s resolution in the rules package the House will vote on in early January. A spokesperson for Johnson did not immediately respond to a question about the consequences if Greene fought another member of Congress or the lack of evidence to support Mace’s resolution.

Update, November 19: This post was updated with a statement from GLAAD.

This story was originally published on Judd Legum’s Substack, Popular Information, to which you can subscribe here.

President-elect Donald Trump has appointed Elon Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to head the Department of Government Efficiency. Despite the name, it is not a government department. In fact, it is not part of the government at all. It is a non-governmental commission that will provide advice to the Trump administration.

Musk says he will identify “at least $2 trillion” in savings from the $6.5 trillion federal budget. How will Musk do it? Details are scarce. Musk is recruiting “high-IQ revolutionaries” to work 80-hour weeks for no pay to help him with the task. 

Cutting $2 trillion is impossible politically. But if Musk is serious about cutting government spending and waste there is only one place to start: the defense budget. About half of the discretionary budget—the spending that Congress approves each year—is spent on defense. For the 2024 budget, the amount allocated for the Department of Defense (DOD) exceeded $840 billion. 

The 15 agencies that could not properly account for their finances in the latest audit account for 68 percent of the Pentagon’s budget.

About half of the massive defense budget goes to military contractors, with tens of billions directed to “Big 5” firms—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman. These contractors, according to a “60 Minutes” investigation last year, “overcharge the Pentagon on almost everything the Department of Defense buys.” The misuse of taxpayer dollars became more acute “in the early 2000s when the Pentagon, in another cost-saving move, cut 130,000 employees whose jobs were to negotiate and oversee defense contracts.” Another factor is the consolidation of the defense industry, resulting in less competition for contracts. 

Still, Musk may have a difficult time cutting DoD spending. First, Musk is the CEO of the company, SpaceX, that actively seeks billions in defense contracts. Second, if Musk is able to overcome his conflict-of-interest, defense industry lobbyists will lobby Congress to reverse any planned cuts. Finally, Trump has pledged to increase military spending during his second term. 

“I will provide record funding for our military,” Trump said in a video posted on his campaign website. 

Trump is calling for more defense spending even though defense spending has doubled over the last 20 years. The DOD struggles to accurately account how it spends this gusher of money. For the seventh year in a row, it has failed an independent audit. 

This year’s audit failure means that the DOD has not passed since Congress began mandating the audits in 2018. The 2024 audit, which surveyed 28 separate agencies that operate under the Pentagon’s umbrella, found that 15 agencies failed to provide enough information for the auditors to assess how they handle their money. 

Michael McCord, the Pentagon’s comptroller and chief financial officer, was unfazed by this failure, calling it “expected.” He also argued that because some agencies passed, the audit was actually a success. “So if someone had a report card that is half good and half not good, I don’t know that you call the student or the report card a failure,” McCord told reporters at a press conference on Friday. “We have a lot of work to do, but I think we’re making progress.”

Nine agencies passed their audit and three agency audits are still pending. In 2023, auditors failed 18 agencies.

Eight agencies also did a better job this year of balancing their spending and the amount of cash they have in government accounts. But of those eight, only two agencies actually passed their audit. The other six, while properly accounting for their cash, did not have enough information about their other assets to pass the audit.

Even with the improvements McCord touted, the scope of the Pentagon’s failure to keep track of its assets is still vast. According to the audit, the 15 agencies that could not properly account for their finances make up 44 percent of the Pentagon’s total assets and 68 percent of its budget. This year, the Pentagon held over $4.1 trillion in assets and had a budget of over $840 billion, meaning that auditors were unable to pin down $1.8 trillion in assets and $571 billion of the budget. 

Despite these failures, Congress continues to appropriate more money every year to the DOD. The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act requires the department to pass its audit by 2028, but has no mechanism for penalizing failure. 

McCord insisted that the Pentagon was on track for a clean audit by 2028, but that it would take the cooperation of the incoming Trump administration to reach that goal. If Trump is serious about improving government efficiency, he could push his DOD to do a better job tracking its assets. But if he decides not to, the Pentagon will not face any consequences.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has debuted a new—and implausible—reason that the House Ethics Committee’s report into allegations of sexual misconduct and drug use by former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) should not be released: Gaetz is now a private citizen.

In an interview on CNN’s State of the Union with Jake Tapper on Sunday morning, Johnson claimed that since Gaetz resigned from Congress on Wednesday, he does not deserve to be subject to the scrutiny of lawmakers. Yet Johnson neglected to provide the full context: Gaetz resigned shortly after Trump announced he would nominate him for the post of attorney general—which is about as far from “private citizen” as one could get.

“There’s a very important protocol and tradition and rule that we maintain, that the House Ethics Committee’s jurisdiction does not extend to non-members of Congress,” Johnson said. “I think that would be a Pandora’s box. I don’t think we want the House Ethics Committee using all of its vast resources and powers to go after private citizens.”

"The president and I have literally not discussed one word about the ethics report. Not once."

.@SpeakerJohnson lays out why he opposes the release of a House Ethics Committee report on Attorney General pick former Rep. Matt Gaetz. pic.twitter.com/gQbvi7LoMh

— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) November 17, 2024

As Tapper pointed out, Johnson’s claim is untrue: In the past, the committee has released reports focused on former Rep. Bill Boner (R-Tenn.), former Rep. Buz Lukens (R-Ohio), and former Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.), all after their resignations.

Johnson’s latest stance comes after he initially said, at a Wednesday news conference, that he would not be—and could not be—involved in decisions about whether to release the Gaetz report. Two days later, after reportedly spending time with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate, Johnson changed his tune and said he would “strongly request” that the committee not release its findings. That was on Friday, the same day the committee was reportedly set to vote on the matter.

When Tapper asked Johnson if Trump asked him to change his position and advocate against the release of the report, the Speaker denied it. “The president and I have literally not discussed one word about the ethics report, not once,” he claimed.

Whether Gaetz actually stands a chance at running the Department of Justice is uncertain: NBC News reported Saturday that more than half of Senate Republicans, including some in leadership roles, do not believe he’ll survive the Senate confirmation process.

The fact that Johnson is still defending him is ironic for more reasons than one: The House Speaker’s hardcore Christian beliefs—which include urging a return to “18th century values”—are well known. Gaetz, on the other hand, was investigated over sex trafficking allegations by the department Trump has tapped him to lead. (Gaetz has denied the allegations and the DOJ opted not to file charges.)

But when Tapper pressed the issue, asking whether the Republican party still cared about electing leaders who are “moral in their personal lives,” Johnson dodged the question. Trump’s nominees, he declared, “are persons who will shake up the status quo.”

I meet Baba Anwar in a crowded, chaotic market in the city of Lagos, Nigeria. He claims he’s in his early 20s, but he looks 15 or 16. Maybe all of 5 feet tall, he’s wearing plastic flip-flops, shorts, and a filthy “Surf Los Angeles” T-shirt and clutching a printed circuit board from a laptop computer, which he says he found in a trash bin. That’s Anwar’s job, scrounging for discarded electronics in Ikeja Computer Village, one of the world’s biggest and most hectic marketplaces for used, repaired, and refurbished electronic products.

The market fills blocks and blocks of narrow streets, all swarming with people jostling for access to hundreds of tiny stalls and storefronts offering to sell, repair, or accessorize digital machinery—laptops, printers, cellphones, hard drives, wireless routers, and every variety of adapter and cable needed to run them. The cacophony of a thousand open-air negotiations is underlaid with the rumbling of diesel generators, the smell of their exhaust mixing with the aroma of fried foods hawked by sidewalk vendors. Determined motorcyclists and women in brightly colored dresses carrying trays of little buns on their heads thread their way through the crowds.

It’s no place for an in-depth conversation, but with the help of my translator, local journalist Bukola Adebayo, I gather that Anwar arrived here about a year before from his deeply impoverished home state of Kano. “No money at home,” he explains. In Lagos, a pandemoniac megalopolis of more than 15 million, he shares a room with a couple of friends from home, also e-waste scrappers. On a good day, he says, he can make as much as 10,000 naira—about $22 at the time of my visit.

Thousands of Nigerians make a meager living recycling e-waste, a broad category that can consist of just about any discarded item with a plug or a battery. This includes the computers, phones, game controllers, and other digital devices that we use and ditch in ever-growing volumes. The world generates more than 68 million tons of e-waste every year, according to the UN, enough to fill a convoy of trucks stretching right around the equator. By 2030, the total is projected to reach 75 million tons.

Only 22 percent of that e-waste is collected and recycled, the UN estimates. The rest is dumped, burned, or forgotten—particularly in rich countries, where most people have no convenient way to get rid of their old Samsung Galaxy phones, Xbox controllers, and myriad other gadgets. Indeed, every year, humanity is wasting more than $60 billion worth of so-called critical metals—the ones we need not only for electronics, but also for the hardware of renewable energy, from electric vehicle (EV) batteries to wind turbines.

Millions of Americans, like me, spend their workdays on pursuits that lack any physical manifestation beyond the occasional hard-copy book or memo or report. It’s easy to forget that all these livelihoods rely on machines. And that those machines rely on metals torn from the Earth.

Consider your smartphone. Depending on the model, it can contain up to two-thirds of the elements in the periodic table, including dozens of metals. Some are familiar, like the gold and tin in its circuitry and the nickel in its microphone. Others less so: Tiny flecks of indium make the screen sensitive to the touch of a finger. Europium enhances the colors. Neodymium, dysprosium, and terbium are used to build the tiny mechanism that makes your phone vibrate.

Your phone’s battery contains cobalt, lithium, and nickel. Ditto the ones that power your rechargeable drill, Roomba, and electric toothbrush—not to mention our latest modes of transportation, ranging from plug-in scooters and e-bikes to EVs. A Tesla Model S has as much lithium as up to 10,000 smartphones.

The millions of electric cars and trucks hitting the planet’s roads every year don’t spew pollutants directly, but they’ve got a monstrous appetite for electricity, nearly two-thirds of which still comes from burning fossil fuels—about one-third from coal. Harvesting more of our energy from sunlight and wind, as crucial as that is, entails its own Faustian bargain. Capturing, transmitting, storing, and using that cleaner power requires vast numbers of new machines: wind turbines, solar panels, switching stations, power lines, and batteries large and small.

You see where this is going. Our clean energy future, this global drive to save humanity from the ever-worsening ravages of global warming, depends on critical metals. And we’ll be needing more.

A lot more.

In all of human history, we have extracted some 700 million tons of copper from the Earth. To meet our clean energy goals, we’ll have to mine as much again in 20-odd years. By 2050, the International Energy Agency estimates, global demand for cobalt for EVs alone will soar to five times what it was in 2022. Demand for nickel will be 10 times higher. Lithium, 15 times. “The prospect of a rapid increase in demand for critical minerals—well above anything seen previously in most cases—raises huge questions about the availability and reliability of supply,” the agency warns.

Metals are natural products, but the Earth does not relinquish them willingly. Mining conglomerates rip up forests and grasslands and deserts, blasting apart the underlying rock and soil and hauling out the remains. The ore is processed, smelted, and refined using gargantuan, energy-guzzling, pollution-spewing machines and oceans of chemicals. “Mining done wrong can leave centuries of harm,” says Aimee Boulanger, head of the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance, which works with companies to develop more sustainable extraction practices.

“The long lead times for new mining projects pose a serious challenge to scaling up production fast enough to meet growing mineral demand for clean energy technologies.”

The harm is staggering. Metal mining is America’s leading toxic polluter. It has sullied the watersheds of almost half of the rivers in the American West. Chemical leaks and mining runoff foul air and water. The mines also generate mountains of hazardous waste, stored behind dams that have a terrifying tendency to fail. Torrents of poisonous sludge pouring through collapsed tailings dams have contaminated waterways in Brazil, Canada, and elsewhere and killed hundreds of people—in addition to the hundreds, possibly thousands, of miners who die in workplace accidents each year.

To get what they’re after, mining companies devour natural resources on an epic scale. They dig up some 250 tons of ore and waste rock to get just 1 ton of nickel. For copper, the ratio is double that. Just to obtain the metals inside your 4.5-ounce iPhone, 75 pounds of ore had to be pulled up, crushed, and smelted, releasing up to 100 pounds of carbon dioxide. Mining firms also suck up massive quantities of water and deploy fleets of drill rigs, trucks, diggers, and other heavy machinery that collectively belch out up to 7 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

These operations are not popular with the neighbors. Irate locals and Indigenous communities at this moment are fighting proposed critical-metal mines across the United States, in addition to Brazil, Canada, the Philippines, Serbia, and many other countries. At least 320 anti-mining activists have been killed worldwide since 2012—and they are just the ones we know about.

All this said, while researching my book Power Metal, I was surprised to learn that the mining industry no longer gets away—not easily, anyway—with much of the nasty behavior it has been known for. Some collateral damage is inevitable, but a growing awareness of the industry’s history of human rights abuses and dirty environmental practices—as well as public pressure on consumer-facing companies like Apple and Tesla to clean up their supply chains—has made for some real improvements in how big mining firms operate.

Yet even these beneficial developments come with an asterisk: In the 1950s, it took three or four years to bring a new copper mine online in the United States. Now the average windup is 16 years. “The long lead times for new mining projects pose a serious challenge to scaling up production fast enough to meet growing mineral demand for clean energy technologies,” the International Energy Agency warned in 2022.

If this demand can’t be met, the agency added, nations will fail “to achieve the goals in the Paris Agreement,” the 2016 UN treaty aimed at limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels (and from which President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to withdraw—again—during his second term).

And then we’re really in trouble.

It’s a vexing conundrum. In my reporting, I have talked to a wide range of people who are deeply and justifiably concerned about the threats our new mining frenzy will pose to the environment. While acknowledging their fears, I would always ask, “Yes, but what’s the alternative?”

Their answer, almost always, was, “Recycling!”

That may sound straightforward. It isn’t. Metal recycling is a completely different proposition from recycling the paper and glass we toss into our home bins for pickup. It turns out that retrieving valuable raw materials sustainably from electronic products—toasters, iPhones, power cables—is a fiendishly complex endeavor, requiring many steps carried out in many places. Manufacturing those products required a multistep international supply chain. Recycling them requires a reverse supply chain almost as complicated.

Part of the problem is that our devices typically contain only a small amount of any given metal. In developing countries, though, there are lots of people willing to put in the time and effort required to recover that little bit of value—an estimated tens of thousands of e-waste scavengers in Nigeria alone. Some go door to door with pushcarts, offering to take or even buy unwanted electronics. Others, like Anwar, work the secondhand markets, buying bits of broken gear from small businesses or rescuing them from the trash. Many scavengers earn less than the international poverty wage of about $2.15 per day.

I ask Anwar where he’s planning to take his circuit board. “To TJ,” he replies, as if I’d asked him what color the sky is.

TJ is Tijjani Abubakar, an entrepreneur who has built a thriving business turning unwanted electronics into cash. His third-floor office, in a dingy concrete building across a roaring four-lane road from the Ikeja market, is a charnel house of dead mobile phones. At one end of the long, crowded room, two skinny young men with screwdrivers pull phone after phone from a sack and crack them like walnuts. Their practiced fingers pull out the green printed circuit boards and toss them with a clatter onto a growing heap at their feet.

Thousands of such boards gleam flatly under the glaring LED ceiling lights. More young men sit around on plastic stools sorting them into piles and pulling aside those with the most valuable chips. The air is thick with sweat despite the open windows.

At a scuffed wooden desk sits Abubakar himself—a big man with a steady demeanor, lordly in an embroidered brown caftan, red cap, and crisp beard. I await an audience as he fields calls and messages on three different phones and a laptop while negotiating a deal with a couple of visiting traders over an unlabeled bottle of something.

Abubakar, who looks to be in his mid-40s, has been in the trade nearly 20 years. He, too, hails from Kano, where his father sold clothes—“not a rich man,” he tells me in his even baritone. He earned a business degree from a local university and made his way to Lagos, where a friend introduced him to the e-waste business. “We started small, small, small, small,” he says. But getting a foothold was easier then. Scrap was cheap, even free, because few people were willing to pay for it. Then, as the trade mushroomed, deep-pocketed foreign buyers—from India, Lebanon, and, above all, China—began flocking to Nigeria in search of deals.

“Now everybody knows the prices,” Abubakar says. But his business has flourished. He exports several shipping containers full of e-waste every month to buyers in China and Europe. He’s grown wealthy enough to donate textbooks, meals, and cows to families back in Kano. Dead cellphones converted into education and food. Trash into possibilities.

In 2022, some 5.3 billion mobile phones were discarded globally. Placed end to end, they’d reach almost to the moon and back.

Abubakar handles all manner of e-waste, but the phones are his specialty. There is just shy of one mobile account for every one of Nigeria’s 220 million people. “What do I see here?” he asks, indicating his roomful of workers. “I don’t know whether any of these people have a computer. But I know all of them have a phone.” And all of those phones will one day wear out, malfunction, or get tossed by someone eager for a newer model. In 2022, an estimated 5.3 billion mobile phones were discarded worldwide. If you put them end to end, they’d reach almost to the moon and back.

Abubakar deploys a vast network of buyers and pickers to source spent phones from Nigeria and neighboring countries, and occasionally as far away as France. They arrive by truck, train, and in sacks carried by people like Anwar. These precisely engineered products were manufactured in sophisticated, high-tech factories under ultra-clean conditions. Here, they are eviscerated by hand on a grimy concrete pad.

Abubakar estimates he has about 5,000 workers bringing in millions of phones each year. When I express polite skepticism, he rises and gestures for me to follow. A door in the back of the office leads into a warren of rooms filled either with enormous sacks stuffed with phones, people cracking and sorting phones, or bales of circuit boards ready for shipping.

The most desirable components are those circuit boards, etched with copper and often precious metals, including gold, that carry signals among the soldered-on chips and capacitors. The chips are removed for assessment. If they still work, they can be sold for use in refurbished phones. Abubakar shows me a lunch bag-sized sack of Android chips with serial numbers so tiny I can barely make them out. “This bag is worth around $35,000,” he says. A sack of phone cameras—consisting of the lens you see from the outside attached to a strip of metal foil on the inside—is also valuable. Abubakar trains security cameras on his workers to discourage pilfering. He fired someone the week before for stealing chips, he tells me.

None of the phones were made in Nigeria, and their remains won’t stay here either. Extracting the metals therein requires sophisticated and expensive equipment that no facility in Africa has, so Abubakar sells to recyclers in China and Western Europe that do.

The problem of rich countries “dumping” e-waste on poorer ones has received plenty of attention over the past couple of decades. But in West Africa and other parts of the developing world, most e-waste is now generated domestically. The gadgets passing through Abubakar’s facility were largely imported as new or refurbished products, sold to Nigerian consumers, and later discarded. Relatively little goes to waste. If you live on $2 a day, after all, making a dime from a discarded electric toothbrush is worth your effort. The result is that about 75 percent of Nigeria’s e-waste is collected for some kind of recycling. In nearby Ghana, estimates run as high as 95 percent.

The landscape is different in the United States, where fewer than 1 in 6 dead mobile phones is recycled. The same stat holds in Europe, where roughly two-thirds of all e-waste never makes it into official recycling streams. This is “surprising,” says Alexander Batteiger, an e-waste expert with the German development organization GIZ, “because we have fully functioning recycling systems.”

Or maybe not so surprising. Nobody in the rich world, after all, goes house to house asking for old iPhone 6s or Bluetooth speakers. Sure, there are e-waste collection drives at schools and churches, and you can take old electronics to Best Buy or the local hazardous waste facility—but few people bother. Instead, countless millions of phones and laptops and blenders and microwaves accumulate in attics, closets, junk drawers, garages, and, all too often, the dump.

In Africa, businesses like Abubakar’s keep countless tons of toxic trash out of landfills, reduce the need for mining, and create thousands of jobs—hardly a trivial consideration in a nation where nearly two-thirds of people live in poverty. There’s much to celebrate here. But neither is it the whole story.

An hour’s drive from Abubakar’s office, through a maelstrom of Lagos traffic, sits the Katangua dumpsite, a sprawling, teeming maze of tiny workshops, scrapyards, wrecking zones, and slums, loosely built around a mountain of trash at least 20 feet tall.

This colossus is surrounded by a corroded tin fence held up with bits of scrap wood. Plumes of thick black smoke wend upward from within. The squalor here is unfathomable. The ground underfoot consists of churned-up mud and trampled-in plastic trash. Barefoot children wander among shacks of cardboard, plywood, and plastic sheeting. Adebayo, the local journalist helping me out, and I pick our way around huge puddles, following men and women carrying sacks of discarded metals, all of us retreating to the roadside as trucks piled high with aluminum cans and other scrap wallow past.

Practically every type of metal and e-waste is recycled somewhere in this labyrinth. The resourcefulness of the people is as astonishing as the conditions are appalling. At one yard, owner Mohammed Yusuf proudly shows me his aluminum recycling operation. Pickers bring him cans from all over the city, 2 or 3 tons a day. At the rear of the yard, there’s a covered area with a brick-lined, rectangular hole in the ground about the size of a bathtub, and a smell reminiscent of rotting chicken.

At night, Yusuf tells me, his workers fill the hole with cans, melt them down with a gas-powered torch, then scoop the molten metal into molds using a long ladle. This results in silvery, 2-kilogram ingots pure enough to sell to a manufacturer that makes new cans. The process generates intensely toxic fumes and dust, and his workers wear protective masks. “What about the others nearby?” I ask him. Yusuf nods sagely. That’s why they do it at night, he explains, when the people who live near the yard are asleep in their shacks.

Later, squeezing through a gap in the ragged fence, Adebayo and I find ourselves in an open area at the base of the towering garbage pile. There, four young men are tending small fires, burning the coatings off piles of wire to get at the copper inside. The flames are beautiful—deep cupric blues and greens licking up amid the orange. The smoke, thick and oily and reeking of incinerated plastic and rubber, almost certainly carries dioxins, which are known to cause cancer and harm the reproductive system. The men are wearing shorts, T-shirts, and flip-flops—no respirators or other safety gear in sight.

The smoke, thick and oily and reeking of incinerated plastic and rubber, almost certainly carries dioxins, which are known to cause cancer and harm the reproductive system.

Between the open-air smelting, wire burning, and other miscellaneous wrecking, I’m horrified by the thought of how thoroughly poisoned Katangua must be. “Do you worry about breathing the smoke?” I ask one of the burners, a muscular 36-year-old named Alabi Mohammed. He shrugs: “We don’t know any other job. We don’t have any other option.” He’s been living here since he was 8, he says.

There are other harmful recycling practices I don’t see at Katangua. Scrapped circuit boards are a good source of palladium, gold, and silver—according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, a ton of circuit boards contains from 40 to 800 times the amount of gold found in a ton of ore. You can run them through a shredder and ship the fragments to special refineries, typically in Europe or Japan, where the gold is extracted with chemicals. “It’s a precise, mostly clean method of recycling, but it’s also very, very expensive,” author Adam Minter explains in his 2014 book, Junkyard Planet. In many developing countries, he notes, the gold is “removed using highly corrosive acids, often without the benefit of safety equipment for the workers. Once the acids are used up, they’re often dumped in rivers and other open bodies of water.”

The latter poses clear health and environmental hazards, but it’s cheap and easy, just as extracting copper from plastic-coated wires requires no special equipment—only gasoline and matches. Which is why low-wage laborers around the globe risk their lives burning old extension cords or dousing circuit boards with chemicals to retrieve metals that other low-wage workers risked their lives to dig up in the first place. In Guiyu, home to China’s biggest e-waste recycling complex, studies have found extremely high levels of lead and other toxins in the blood of local children. A 2019 study by Toxics Link, an Indian nonprofit, identified more than a dozen unlicensed e-waste recycling “hotspots” around Delhi employing some 50,000 people—unprotected workers exposed to chemical vapors, metallic dusts, and acidic effluents—and where hazardous wastes were improperly dumped.

Spent lithium batteries present their own recycling challenge. They are potentially among the world’s best sources for critical metals—one study found that battery recycling theoretically could satisfy nearly half of global demand for certain metals. Yet only about 5 percent of them get recycled because they are uniquely hard to handle—and dangerous.

Nigeria, for example, is awash in lithium-ion batteries, but no place on the continent recycles them. They need to be exported. Shippers don’t want to take them, however, because of their disturbing tendency to burst into flames when punctured, crushed, or overheated. Battery fires can exceed 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. They also emit toxic gases and are very hard to extinguish. American consumers are asked to bring unwanted lithium batteries to a domestic recycler or a hazardous waste site, and for good reason. Every year, batteries from everything from old Priuses to sex toys cause hundreds of fires in US scrapyards, landfills, and even on garbage trucks, causing millions of dollars in damage. Residents of Fredericktown, Missouri, even had to evacuate their homes earlier this month when a local battery recycling facility exploded dramatically into flames.

Even in developing countries, unwanted batteries often end up in local landfills, where, beyond the fire risk, they leak toxic chemicals. Or unscrupulous exporters mislabel them, bribing port officials to not examine their shipments too closely. “I’ve heard there’s a major fire every six months,” says Eric Frederickson, vice president of operations at Call2Recycle, America’s largest battery-collection organization, “but you never hear about most of them, because they just tip the container over the side of the boat.”

Reinhardt Smit is trying something different. He’s the supply chain director for Closing the Loop, a Netherlands-based startup that aims to recycle phones from Africa using certifiably sound environmental and social methods: no burned cables, battery fires, trashed plastics, or unprotected workers—every step of the process done responsibly, the way Western consumers like it.

In a 2021 pilot project, Closing the Loop collected and sent 5 tons of phones—plastic, batteries, cables, and all—from Nigeria to a Belgian recycler in what it claims was the first such legally sanctioned shipment ever. The project succeeded from a sustainability standpoint, but it was a money-loser. Clean recycling, it turns out, is hideously expensive.

The phones were sourced from Hinckley Recycling, one of Nigeria’s two (yes, only two) fully licensed e-waste handlers. At Hinckley’s compound on the outskirts of Lagos, workers dismantle phones, computers, and TVs in a clean and well-lit warehouse, wearing reflective vests and protective gloves. It’s clearly a safer and more humane workplace than the others I witnessed, but that adds to the cost.

Convincing a shipper to transport the batteries also required a pricey workaround: They were removed from the phones and placed in barrels filled with sand, eliminating the fire danger. But that meant Closing the Loop had to pay extra to transport hundreds of pounds of sand per shipment.

“It is clear that the biggest mine of the future has to be the car that we already built,” Mercedes-Benz Group Chairman Ola Källenius noted in 2021.

Dealing with unwanted materials was another cost. “If I recycle every component in a phone, I lose money,” explains Adrian Clewes, Hinckley’s managing director. Everyone wants copper, for instance, but phones are mostly plastic, which Closing the Loop must pay a recycler to take. Clewes talks about “positive” and “negative” fractions, meaning the profitable components vs. those that cost him money.

Some fractions toggle between positive and negative depending on the prevailing prices. Say you want to sell a bag of circuit boards containing a total of 1 pound of copper. And say it will cost the smelter $2 to extract the metal. If copper is selling for $4 a pound, the smelter can buy the boards for $1 and make a tidy profit. If copper drops to $3, the deal’s off and the boards are sitting in your warehouse. If you have ample space, you can wait for prices to bounce back. If not, maybe you’re tempted to bring those boards to the dump.

Finally, you have your administrative costs. Global regulations preventing rich countries from dumping hazardous waste on poorer ones have, ironically enough, made it harder to get waste out of the poor countries. The Basel Convention, for one, requires any ship carrying e-waste to get approval from the exporting and importing countries and consent from any country where it might dock en route. This creates oceans of red tape. “Observing the Basel notifications can be painful. It takes months,” says Batteiger, the German e-waste expert. “The Basel Convention is valuable—without it, there would be more dumping—but it has the side effect of blocking exports from the developing world to industrialized countries.”

All told, the cost of doing things by the book makes it almost impossible to turn a profit. Smit’s idea is to get green-minded corporations to cover the difference by paying him to recycle one dead African phone for each new phone it buys.

The concept is akin to selling carbon offsets, and it’s gaining some traction. Closing the Loop now operates in some 10 African countries and has collected several million dead electronic devices. Its near-future target is 2 million phones per year, though that’s admittedly a drop in the bucket. “There are 2 billion phones sold every year,” concedes founder Joost de Kluijver. “We can’t collect all that.”

Comparing the efforts of companies like Closing the Loop and those of the “informal” sector in Nigeria and elsewhere, which provides jobs for thousands of desperate people, it’s hard to say which is better. One might ask, better for whom? Unregulated dumping, wire burning, and the lack of safety equipment don’t meet Western environmental and labor standards. But those standards aren’t top of mind for people who can barely feed and house themselves.

There are other geopolitical aspects to the race for critical metals. Russia, for example, is a prodigious exporter of copper, nickel, palladium, and other metals so crucial that they were spared from international sanctions after Vladimir Putin launched his war on Ukraine. And then there’s China, which—via its own resources, lax standards, diplomatic clout, and overseas investments—has come to dominate the global supply chain.

Regardless of origin, most critical metals will at some point pass through China, which controls more than half of global refining capacity for cobalt, graphite (another battery ingredient), and lithium, and almost as much for nickel and copper. Using those metals, its factories pump out most of the world’s solar panels, a hefty share of its wind turbines, and a majority of its EVs. It also produces nearly three-quarters of lithium-ion batteries and recycles far more of them than any other nation. A subsidiary of CATL, China’s biggest battery maker, can now recycle up to 120,000 tons per year and is investing billions in new plants.

Congress, having deemed China’s dominance in these sectors a threat “to economic growth, competitiveness, and national security,” has responded by sinking money into alternative sources. The 2022 infrastructure bill included $7 billion to develop a domestic supply chain for battery minerals, and the Inflation Reduction Act, passed the same year, unlocked billions more to subsidize batteries and EVs manufactured with domestically sourced metals—though some of the funds may be clawed back or left unspent under the new Republican leadership.

“The economics are very challenging…There’s no clear solution on how to get these things out of people’s drawers.”

In the United States and elsewhere, major automakers are partnering with recyclers and even building their own plants, recognizing that old batteries are a cheaper, cleaner, and more appealing source of critical metals than mining is. “It is clear that the biggest mine of the future has to be the car that we already built,” Mercedes-Benz Group Chairman Ola Källenius said at a 2021 climate summit. In remote Nevada, a company called Redwood Materials has built an enormous EV battery recycling operation. Redwood has inked deals with Tesla, Amazon, and Volkswagen and has attracted nearly $2 billion in capital.

Redwood’s main rival is Canada-based Li-Cycle, which had more than 400 employees at the time of my visit. The company partners with commodities giant Glencore and boasts facilities in Arizona, Alabama, New York; Kingston, Ontario; and elsewhere. Earlier this month, Li-Cycle secured a $475 million line of credit from the Department of Energy. It is now capable of processing about 53,000 tons a year of shredded battery material, which consists mainly of copper and aluminum flakes, plus a grainy sludge known as “black mass” that contains cobalt, lithium, and nickel.

At the company’s Kingston headquarters, I get a tour from Ajay Kochhar, a chemical engineer with neatly combed black hair who co-founded Li-Cycle in 2016 with a metallurgist pal. “We heard lots of people say, ‘You guys are too early,’” he tells me with a smile. The company produced its first batch of shredded battery material that year. “It took us three months to get 20 tons,” Kochhar says. Five years later, his company went public at a valuation of almost $1.7 billion. (As of this writing, the number is considerably lower.)

On the day of my visit, an aggregator had delivered a truckload of batteries from laptops, cellphones, and power tools. I watch as the batteries are loaded onto a conveyor belt, where workers strip off plastic casings and packaging and check labels to make sure they are indeed lithium-ion batteries. Further along, the batteries are dumped into a column of water leading to a shredder whose mighty steel teeth rip them into tiny pieces. Any remaining plastic floats to the surface and is skimmed off. The metals are separated in further steps. Breakfast-cereal-sized flakes of copper and aluminum are poured into large, heavy plastic bags, leaving the black mass behind. Li-Cycle currently sells the former metals to companies like Glencore, which make them into ingots. The black mass goes to other firms that use chemicals to extract the remaining metals.

Perhaps the biggest immediate challenge for companies like Li-Cycle, oddly, is a dearth of batteries to shred. It’s mostly pre-consumer factory scrap and defective batteries from manufacturers keeping their conveyers busy. EVs are so new to the market that few have been junked—and even those are often snapped up for uses such as off-grid power storage. Most consumer lithium batteries aren’t collected at all. “We’ve looked at doing the collection ourselves, but the economics are very challenging,” Kochhar told me. “There’s no clear solution on how to get these things out of people’s drawers.”

The sap of Pycnandra acuminata, which grows on the nickel-rich island of New Caledonia, can contain more than 25 percent nickel.

So how can more e-waste be brought into the reverse supply chain? One approach is to shift the onus onto the firms that manufactured the gadgets in the first place, a policy known as “extended producer responsibility.” China and much of Europe have codified this policy in laws that govern not only e-waste, but also glass, plastics, and even cars. Sometimes, it just means charging manufacturers a fee to help cover the downstream recycling costs. In the EU, though, carmakers are responsible for collecting and recycling their own dead vehicles. China, which since 2018 has required manufacturers to collect and recycle lithium-ion batteries, also mandates that new batteries contain minimum amounts of certain recycled materials.

China now recycles at least half of its batteries, according to CATL. “In North America, it’s mainly us and Redwood,” Kochhar says. “There are many more in Europe.” But what’s happening in China, he says, “is way ahead of what we’re doing here.”

As a strictly economic proposition, it’s often cheaper to mine fresh metals than recycle them. And some of the relevant products are tremendously hard to recycle: Less than 5 percent of rare earth magnets are currently recycled, for example, and an estimated 9 in 10 spent solar panels—which cost roughly $20 to $30 to recycle vs. $1 to $2 to bring to the dump—end up in landfills. Ditto the massive blades on wind turbines, of which more than 720,000 tons are projected to be trashed by 2040. The bottom line is that meaningful e-waste recycling in the United States is probably going to require government support.

And why not subsidize? China, our biggest rival in the clean energy sector, offers tax breaks to metal recyclers, even as US taxpayers spend billions subsidizing fossil fuels and mining operations. Under the Biden administration, Congress directed some $370 billion to bolster renewable energy technologies, including nearly $40 billion for nuclear energy and more than $12 billion to promote sales and manufacturing of EVs and their batteries, but has included only a couple of billion toward recycling.

If you’re dissatisfied with your old iPhone 8, there are plenty of people in developing countries who would love to have it.

New technologies might help somewhat. British researchers are working on inexpensive reactors they hope can facilitate recovery of rare earths. In Texas, Apple is testing a robot that can disassemble 200 iPhones per hour to aid in recycling. Mining giant Rio Tinto is experimenting with ways to extract lithium that exists in boron mining waste, and a Canadian startup is working to recover rare earths from tin-mine tailings.

Scientists are even studying plants that can suck up trace metals through their roots and concentrate them in their sap, stems, or leaves. The sap of Pycnandra acuminata, a tree that grows on the nickel-rich Pacific island of New Caledonia, can contain more than 25 percent nickel. Other “hyperaccumulators” slurp up cobalt, lithium, and zinc. Startups are springing up, hoping to capitalize on these special properties, which could also be used to clean up polluted soil.

None of this is a silver bullet. Even if humanity could recover all of the critical metals in use—and we can’t—we’d still have to mine more to meet rising demand. Consider that we now recycle less than 1 percent of the lithium used around the world, and we’ll be mining hard-to-recover rare earths for decades to come. “Nothing—nothing—is 100 percent recyclable, and many things, including things we think are recyclable, like iPhone touch screens, are unrecyclable,” Minter writes in Junkyard Planet. “Everyone from the local junkyard to Apple to the US government would be doing the planet a very big favor if they stopped implying otherwise, and instead conveyed a more realistic picture of what recycling can and can’t do.”

Recycling is important, yes. But it is also utterly insufficient to meet our needs. We tend to think of it as the best alternative to using virgin materials. In fact, it often can be one of the worst. Consider a glass bottle. To recycle it, you have to smash it to pieces, melt down the bits, and mold them into a whole new bottle—an industrial process that requires a lot of energy, time, and expense.

Or you could just wash it and reuse it.

That’s a better alternative—and hardly a new idea. For much of the last century, gas stations, dairies, and other companies sold products in glass bottles that they would later collect, wash, and reuse.

Rendering a phone, car battery, or solar panel down to its constituent metals requires a great deal more energy, cost, and, as we’ve seen, unsafe labor than refurbishing that product. You can buy refurbished computers, phones, and even solar panels online and in some stores. But refurbishing is only really widespread in the developing world. If you’re a North American no longer satisfied with your iPhone 8, there are plenty of people in less-affluent countries who would be happy to take it.

There are important lessons here, and perhaps the most important of all is this: As we look ahead, we will need to start thinking beyond merely replacing fossil fuels with renewables and increasing our supplies of raw materials. Rather, we will need to reshape our relationship to energy and natural resources altogether. That seems like a tall order, but there’s a range of things we can do—as consumers, as voters, as human beings—to assuage the downstream effects of our technological arms race.

Moving forward, our critical metals will come from all sorts of mines and scrapyards and recycling centers around the globe. Some will emerge from new sources, using new methods and technologies. And the choices we make about where and how we get those metals, and who prospers and suffers in the process, are tremendously important. But no less important is the question of how much of all these things we truly need—and how to reduce that need.

We’re lucky in one respect: We’re still only at the beginning of a historic worldwide transition. The key will be figuring out how to make it work without repeating the worst mistakes of the last one.

Follow Vince Beiser’s ongoing reporting at powermetal.substack.com.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has debuted a new—and implausible—reason that the House Ethics Committee’s report into allegations of sexual misconduct and drug use by former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) should not be released: Gaetz is now a private citizen.

In an interview on CNN’s State of the Union with Jake Tapper on Sunday morning, Johnson claimed that since Gaetz resigned from Congress on Wednesday, he does not deserve to be subject to the scrutiny of lawmakers. Yet Johnson neglected to provide the full context: Gaetz resigned shortly after Trump announced he would nominate him for the post of attorney general—which is about as far from “private citizen” as one could get.

“There’s a very important protocol and tradition and rule that we maintain, that the House Ethics Committee’s jurisdiction does not extend to non-members of Congress,” Johnson said. “I think that would be a Pandora’s box. I don’t think we want the House Ethics Committee using all of its vast resources and powers to go after private citizens.”

"The president and I have literally not discussed one word about the ethics report. Not once."

.@SpeakerJohnson lays out why he opposes the release of a House Ethics Committee report on Attorney General pick former Rep. Matt Gaetz. pic.twitter.com/gQbvi7LoMh

— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) November 17, 2024

As Tapper pointed out, Johnson’s claim is untrue: In the past, the committee has released reports focused on former Rep. Bill Boner (R-Tenn.), former Rep. Buz Lukens (R-Ohio), and former Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.), all after their resignations.

Johnson’s latest stance comes after he initially said, at a Wednesday news conference, that he would not be—and could not be—involved in decisions about whether to release the Gaetz report. Two days later, after reportedly spending time with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate, Johnson changed his tune and said he would “strongly request” that the committee not release its findings. That was on Friday, the same day the committee was reportedly set to vote on the matter.

When Tapper asked Johnson if Trump asked him to change his position and advocate against the release of the report, the Speaker denied it. “The president and I have literally not discussed one word about the ethics report, not once,” he claimed.

Whether Gaetz actually stands a chance at running the Department of Justice is uncertain: NBC News reported Saturday that more than half of Senate Republicans, including some in leadership roles, do not believe he’ll survive the Senate confirmation process.

The fact that Johnson is still defending him is ironic for more reasons than one: The House Speaker’s hardcore Christian beliefs—which include urging a return to “18th century values”—are well known. Gaetz, on the other hand, was investigated over sex trafficking allegations by the department Trump has tapped him to lead. (Gaetz has denied the allegations and the DOJ opted not to file charges.)

But when Tapper pressed the issue, asking whether the Republican party still cared about electing leaders who are “moral in their personal lives,” Johnson dodged the question. Trump’s nominees, he declared, “are persons who will shake up the status quo.”

Democrats needed to snap up just four seats in 2024 to gain control of the House of Representatives. But today it became clear Republicans would retain control of the House. The results complete a dismal year for Democrats: The House results nail in a Republican trifecta and ensure President-elect Donald Trump will be able to implement his agenda with limited resistance. 

Republicans saw opportunities in two blue states: New York and California—home to 10 of this year’s toss-ups. Republicans made significant inroads in each state in 2020 and 2022, leading Democrats to prioritize flipping some of those seats back this cycle. Money flowed to the battles. This year, according to OpenSecrets, the two states had five of the top 10 most expensive House races in the country.

In New York, Democrats gained back four seats. But their chances fell in California. Across the country—and perhaps to the surprise of Democrats—many communities of color broadly shifted to the right, often saying the economy was not working for them. As my colleague Noah Lanard reported, two California seats, both largely Latino in the southern part of Central Valley, were drags on the opportunity for Dems to take the House. A district with a significant Asian American population in Orange and Los Angeles counties, as I reported, saw a similar dynamic.

“We’re going to raise an America First banner above this place,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said at a press conference on Capitol Hill, declaring victory on November 12 before more than a dozen seats were decided. 

Johnson mentioned policies of a “common sense” America First agenda, including secure borders, lower costs, and the end to wokeness and gender ideology. 

We’ve published a ton of stories on what might happen—an attack on immigration, a crackdown on transgender rights, a reversal of many Democratic environmental policies, and a rethink on education and college affordability. 

Another element to look out for: tax breaks. Through reconciliation, which allows budget-based bills to pass the Senate and avoid the filibuster with a simple 51-vote majority, Republicans will have the ability to propose and pass policies like tax cuts: Many tax cuts.

Breaks enacted during Trump’s first term will expire at the end of 2025. While the 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act slashed the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21 percent permanently, most tax cuts for households and individuals were short-term. 

According to the Center for American Progress, an independent nonpartisan policy research and advocacy institute, extending Trump’s tax breaks would contribute $400 billion per year to the national debt. Trump has also made other promises such as ending taxation on overtime income, social security benefits, and tips, as well as lowering the corporate tax rate even more, to 15 percent. (The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated some of the additional costs here.)

Despite outgoing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) saying the filibuster will stand the day after Election Day, Trump had repeatedly called for its end in his first term. Republicans could weaken or kill the process and be able to pass any legislation with a simple majority rather than requiring a two-thirds majority to nullify a Democratic filibuster. This would theoretically grant Republican lawmakers the capacity to do whatever they want, creating a sweeping partisan playbook for at least the next two years. It looks less likely after the selection of Sen. John Thune as majority leader.

A Republican majority in both chambers of Congress also prevents Democrats from having any real authority to hold investigations. For the House, committee chairs hold unilateral subpoena power. This would strip Democrats of the ability to conduct inquiries on figures like Trump and those involved in coordinating the storming of the US Capitol. 

With Republicans in control of both chambers of Congress, among the first set of decisions will be how to overhaul much of the Biden administration’s policies in place of Trump’s agenda. 

While Republican lawmakers elect their House and Senate leaders, House Democrats will have to take time to rethink the next steps of their party. 

“The American people have spoken,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told CBS Mornings on November 12. “We’ve got to, as Democrats, work with the incoming administration whenever and wherever possible, and strongly disagree when necessary, and that’s going to be the approach that we take.”

Late Tuesday night, the Associated Press projected Ohio Republican Bernie Moreno defeated Democratic incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown—and with him, any sense that Ohio was still a swing state.

Brown, who served three terms, maintained an edge for most of his US Senate reelection bid against Moreno, a former luxury car dealership owner from Colombia. But in the end, a windfall of cash from national Republican groups boosted Moreno over the top. Just before midnight, Moreno lead Brown by 5 points.

It’s not surprising that a Republican would win a Senate seat in Ohio, but the fact that this particular Republican beat a well-liked incumbent suggests how much Ohio has changed in less than a decade.

As a Rust Belt state devastated by deindustrialization, automation, and in recent years, an epidemic of drug addiction, Ohio tends to gravitate toward candidates who are dutiful in their support for middle-class and working-class voters. But Moreno doesn’t have a pro-worker reputation: As we previously reported, he was found liable for withholding wages from employees and was sanctioned by a judge for disposing of documents relevant to that case. He additionally faced lawsuits from former employees who accused him of racial, gender, and age discrimination. More recently, he’s blocked voters from recording his events by using audio jammers.

Moreno also struggled to refine his message on reproductive rights, a topic 57 percent of Ohio voters said they supported in 2023 when they approved a ballot measure enshrining abortion access. “You know, the left has a lot of single issue voters,” Moreno said in a leaked video from a recent town hall. “Sadly, by the way, there’s a lot of suburban women, a lot of suburban women that are like, ‘Listen, abortion is it. If I can’t have an abortion in this country whenever I want, I will vote for anybody else,'” Moreno mocked. “OK. It’s a little crazy, by the way, but—especially for women that are like past 50, I’m thinking to myself, ‘I don’t think that’s an issue for you.'”

But Moreno did have something Brown could never dream of—nor desire: an endorsement from Donald Trump. That endorsement was likely pivotal for Moreno, says Paul Beck, professor emeritus of political science at Ohio State University. It gave him the edge against state Sen. Matt Dolan, a more traditional Republican who was Moreno’s biggest competition in the primary race. With no political experience and, until recently, not much name recognition, “he doesn’t really have a strong track record” otherwise, Beck says.

While Brown is a political progressive—supporting LGBTQ rights and reproductive freedoms—he has maintained a healthy distance from the rest of his party in recent months. He didn’t campaign with Harris. He stayed home this summer while fellow Democrats threw their celebratory, celebrity-filled nominating convention in Chicago. Brown also garnered the endorsement of the only Republican who ever defeated him in an election: former Ohio Gov. Bob Taft, who bested Brown as he sought reelection as Ohio’s secretary of state in 1990.

Known for sporting union-made suits and driving union-made cars, Brown’s 2024 campaign also attracted long-standing appreciation from prominent labor union leaders. The senator often wears a canary pin on his lapel to symbolize 20th-century coal miners who were subjected to dangerous working conditions before collective bargaining advanced job safety.

His populist persona and these contradictions are the same ones that helped Brown win the Senate seat three times in 2006, 2012, and 2018. It’s not that Brown has changed. It’s that Ohio has.

Ohio used to be a political microcosm of the country. Without fail, between 1964 and 2016, Ohio’s presidential pick was also the nation’s choice of president. The consistency inspired the phrase, “As Ohio goes, so goes the nation.”

In the early 2000s, the state’s population growth began lagging behind the rest of the country. Over time, Ohio became less educated, older, whiter—and, accordingly, redder. When Trump ran in 2016, his brash, America First persona appealed to Ohioans who felt they had been forgotten by elite politicians prioritizing globalism over their kitchen-table issues. In both 2016 and 2020, Trump won the state by more than 8 points. That trend has continued this cycle: As of 11:30 pm ET, Trump was nearly 12 points ahead of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in Ohio.

In the end, Brown’s legislative history and broad coalition of blue-collar devotees couldn’t propel him to a fourth term. In today’s Ohio, only Trump’s support mattered.

This year, the road to take back the House of Representatives runs through California and New York, two states often skipped over when discussing the balance of power in an election year.

In 2022, the GOP showed surprising strength in the two blue stalwarts. They won upsets in each, earning Republicans the majority in the House. This time, Republicans are defending nine competitive races; as of November 1, the Cook Political Report labels these contests either “lean” or a “toss up.” According to the nonpartisan US election analyzer, two New York Republican incumbents are at particular risk: Anthony D’Esposito in NY-04 and Brandon Williams in NY-22.

Both major parties know the states are key. According to a Politico review of Federal Election Commission data, about one-third of independent expenditures in House races have been spent in California and New York—a significant jump from one-fifth in 2022. 

Mother Jones has picked five races, two in New York and three in California, that you should follow on Election Day.

NY-04: A scandalous rematch

Anthony D’Esposito (R) vs. Laura Gillen (D)

In wealthy sections of Nassau County on Long Island, Rep. Anthony D’Esposito faces off once again with Laura Gillen. The district is a historic Republican stronghold that has increasingly turned blue over the last 30 years. Alongside CA-22, it is the most Democratic-leaning congressional district represented by a Republican, with a 2022 Cook Partisan Voting Index of D+5 (meaning it voted five points more Democratic in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections than the national average). 

Turnout is a major issue. At a campaign event for Gillen in October, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries attributed the 2022 loss to voter turnout. According to data from the New York State Board of Elections and the New York Times, only 52 percent of registered Democrats voted for Gillen while roughly 83 percent of registered Republicans backed D’Esposito.

But there may be hope for Democrats this cycle as D’Esposito is embroiled in scandal. In September, the New York Times reported that he gave taxpayer-funded jobs to his lover and his fiancée’s daughter, possibly violating House ethics rules against corruption and nepotism. 

The race’s thin margins have pushed both D’Esposito and Gillen to the center. Gillen has advocated for the Biden administration to strengthen the border given New York City’s struggle to shelter thousands of migrants, even appearing in a campaign ad to promise to “work with anyone from any party to secure our southern border, lock up criminals pushing fentanyl, and stop the migrant crisis.” Meanwhile, D’Esposito has toned down Republican language on reproductive rights, promising in a campaign video that he would never vote for a national abortion ban.

NY-19: The New York race that is about the southern border

Marc Molinaro (R) vs. Josh Riley (D)

Upstate New York sees another rematch—one where Riley lost by only about 4,500 votes in 2022. Like NY-04, the two prominent issues seem to be abortion and immigration. According to CBS News, Riley vows to sponsor the Women’s Health Protection Act, which forms a new legal protection for the right to provide and access abortion care post-Dobbs. Molinaro says that he will support IVF and birth control and will never back an abortion ban. 

Still, according to the New York Times, Rep. Molinaro, once a moderate Republican, has drifted further right—especially on immigration. One of Molinaro’s campaign ads pays special mention to the August arrest of Gianfranco Torres-Navarro, a Peruvian gang leader, in upstate New York, and claims Riley helped write Joe Biden’s border policies that let Torres-Navarro into the country. The Republican congressman wants to close the southern border and deport “illegals with criminal records immediately.” He has also spread conspiracy theories, including that Haitian immigrants had “carved up” Springfield, Ohio, residents’ pets to eat them. 

Like Gillen, Riley has also shifted to the right on immigration, criticizing President Biden’s administration for being soft on law enforcement. He also blamed Molinaro for opposing a bipartisan Senate border security bill proposed earlier in 2024 to limit border crossings. 

CA-13: The test of Democrats’ sway with Latino voters

John Duarte (R) vs. Adam Gray (D)

California’s 13th is a Latino-majority congressional district where both candidates argue that they’re the most moderate. Duarte squeaked by Gray in the 2022 race by 564 votes. But, it could be tougher this year. If the district had existed in 2020 in its current configuration, it would have supported President Biden by 11 percentage points.

My colleague Noah Lanard has a big article on the race, which looks at the potentially massive drop in Latino support for Democrats across California.

In an October debate, Duarte distanced himself from Project 2025 conservatives and pointed out that he’s the lowest-ranking Republican according to Heritage Action, a conservative advocacy group that is a sister organization to The Heritage Foundation. While remaining vague on specific policies, he said, “I stand against the extremes of both parties. I want everyone to be who they are and love who they love. I want women to have choice.”

Gray portrayed himself as a team player with Republicans, boasting his bipartisan voting record, while connecting Duarte to Donald Trump and the most conservative House Republicans.  

The two candidates take similar positions on local policies. According to the Sacramento Bee, they both reject increasing the minimum wage from $16 per hour to $18 per hour via Proposition 32, despite California having the third-highest cost of living, according to World Population Review. The state also has the most number of people experiencing homelessness in the nation and the highest rate of unsheltered people. Both candidates oppose cities deciding their own rent control rules via Proposition 33. 

CA-27: The contest involving space stuff

Mike Garcia (R) vs George Whitesides (D)

Based in northern Los Angeles County, California’s 27th is another prominently Latino district, making up almost half of the district.

According to Roll Call, the area is home to a host of aerospace companies, defense contractors, and manufacturing firms. Whitesides—who is new to politics—was the CEO of Virgin Galactic, a Richard Branson-founded space tourism company. He was also the chief of staff for NASA under Barack Obama. Whitesides is pushing a moderate platform of preserving Social Security and Medicare, as well as reproductive rights. He has targeted Garcia for backing Donald Trump and supporting abortion restrictions.

Democrats previously attacked Garcia following a December 2023 report from the Daily Beast, which found that the Republican incumbent sold up to $50,000 of Boeing stock before a congressional committee he served on released an investigation on 737 aircraft crashes. The news outlet said that Garcia did not disclose the sale until after he won reelection. 

Garcia calls Whitesides an “extreme liberal,” and says he is focused on lowering spending and improving safety and security, including the border. He has led raids on illegal, cartel-operated marijuana growers in the district. 

CA-45: The red-baiting brawl

Michelle Steel (R) vs Derek Tran (D)

California’s 45th congressional district stretches across more than a dozen cities in Orange and Los Angeles counties. According to Politico, the race was not expected to be a toss-up, given the incumbent, Michelle Steel, has been serving in the US House since 2021 and has years of previous experience in local California politics. But, as one of the country’s few majority-minority districts represented by a Republican, Democrats are hopeful that their challenger, Derek Tran, can win. 

Tran, who is Vietnamese American and the son of refugees, may attract voters in Little Saigon, a neighborhood in Orange County home to the largest Vietnamese community outside of Vietnam itself. As I reported in October, this race has become about Asian American and Pacific Islander identity, as they make up about 39 percent of the district’s voting-age residents. This includes a history of colonization, war, and oppression that many Vietnamese immigrants attribute to communist governments in China and Vietnam. 

Red-baiting is thus a significant component of both candidates’ campaigns. 

Vietnamese-language ads accuse Tran of being a communist, bringing up that he has support from “socialists like Bernie Sanders” and has “thousands of dollars of cryptocurrency linked to China.” The Tran campaign ran a Vietnamese Facebook ad in September and October that says Steel’s husband “brought Chinese spies into American politics in exchange for money,” referring to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

This year, America’s largest state is primed to play a key role in deciding who controls the House of Representatives.

Incumbent Mary Peltola (D-Alaska)—the state’s first Native woman elected to Congress and the first Democratic representative in 50 years—will defend her seat in a close race against challenger Nick Begich III. Begich is a software developer, part-owner of a conspiracy-theory publishing company, and the surprise Republican heir to a several-generation Democratic political lineage.

Peltola’s win was a surprise upset in 2022. She beat former vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin on a campaign of “fish, family, and freedom,” promising to “ignore Lower 48 partisanship” and focus on solutions. In Congress, she has been a member of the new “Blue Dog Democrats,” a loose group of 11 Democratic members who push centrist policies.

Alaska uses ranked-choice voting. So, while the winner will almost certainly be Peltola or Begich, the secondary selections of voters who chose minor-candidate voters will matter, too. (The process will also slow down ballot tabulation, meaning we may not know the outcome on Election Day itself.)

In Alaska, rural areas tend to hew to the Democratic Party line, while cities vote red. It’s a place where the top issues aren’t the “culture wars you’ll see downstate,” as Michelle Sparck, director of the nonprofit Get Out The Native Vote, put it. “60 percent of Alaskans do not identify for one party or another.” Instead, the things people are likely to hinge their vote on are much more concrete: fisheries regulation, oil policy, and electric subsidies. 

Overall, Peltola has anchored her campaign on keeping the issues local. At an October 10th debate, she turned a question about immigration into an answer about “outmigration.” For the past 12 years, more Alaskans have left the state than moved there—pushed out by high prices and limited job opportunities. 

“We do need immigration reform,” she said, but “I don’t think that this is necessarily an Alaskan problem. This is definitely a lower 48 problem…Alaska is desperate for workers and we have an outmigration problem in Alaska.”

Peltola has spent most of her time in Congress working on issues immediately relevant to her base: the funding of broadband internet in Alaska’s rural areas, and, of course, fish. Throughout much of the state, subsistence hunters are facing “salmon scarcity” in warming waters, and the state’s fishing industry is losing billions per year.  

And while abortion wasn’t always an issue that could be tackled from the center-leaning position Peltola occupies, she’s made it a cornerstone of her re-election campaign. “Being pregnant and delivering a baby is one of the most lethal things a woman can do in her lifetime,” she said recently. “Myriad things can go wrong, and it is not anyone’s place in DC or in the state legislature to get between a woman and her doctor.” 

Nick Begich and Peltola have a lot in common: they both support military spending in Alaska, the development of a trans-Alaska natural gas pipeline, and Second Amendment rights.

Begich, however, has also said he will not support federal funding for abortions, and has, like many Republican candidates, spent time during debates criticizing the size of the federal budget. The longest paragraph on Begich’s policy-positions webpage is about cryptocurrency’s importance to the future of Alaska. While he talks a lot about the Second Amendment, Peltola is the candidate who’s been endorsed by the National Rifle Association.

John Howe of the Alaskan Independence Party, whose platform includes abolishing all taxation, will likely receive some small percentage of Alaska’s 600,000 votes. And Eric Hafner, who is currently imprisoned in New Jersey for bomb threats, is also running as a Democrat in Alaska, though he has never been there. (Hafner also ran for Congress in Hawaii in 2016 and Oregon in 2018, the latter campaign while on the run from the law.)

Neither the taxation abolisher nor the imprisoned man have much likelihood of winning the race. They might, however, be part of tipping the scales towards Begich, as Republican consultant Matt Shuckerow speculated to the New York Times recently. “The chances of Eric Hafner having an impact on this election are legitimate and real,” he said. “This is an extremely tight race and every vote will count.” If voters pick Howe first and Begich second, for example, their second-place vote would count for more than their first-place one. 

Begich is loyal to his party, and in a state that is technically majority-Republican, that might be enough to win. That technical majority, however, doesn’t tell the whole story. In the 86 percent of Alaska communities that aren’t connected by roads—generally, majority-Native —residents aren’t likely to declare a party affiliation. “Long-term investment in party politics is really the privilege of a road-system people.” Michelle Sparck of Get Out The Native Vote says. Those communities, too, could sway the election. 

But disinvestment in the infrastructure of voting in rural, majority-Indigenous districts can mean low turnout. In 2020, the Northwest Arctic Borough, where 83.8 percent of voting-age residents are Indigenous, had a turnout of only 38 percent. In many cases, counting those votes requires flying ballots into the cities from small, isolated villages in bush planes. “Even if weather wasn’t a barrier, there’s all kinds of systemic barriers that are at play that create a chronic polling problem for a lot of our rural villages,” Sparck said. In Bethel, Peltola’s hometown, 56 percent of voters turned out in 2022. It is a town of 6,000 with only one polling location.  

Alaska’s race is one of only a few that will determine control of the House of Representatives. Since the state only has one House seat, it can’t be gerrymandered—making it a true toss-up in a way few other House districts can be. 

On the final day before the election, Peltola’s social media posts were less focused on Democratic control of the house, though, and more on, once again, fish. “Tomorrow, we choose the future of our fisheries,” Peltola wrote. “Do we work to get back to abundance and keep our communities food secure for generations to come, or do we see our fisheries collapse?”

“When Mary and I were kids, our rivers were lousy with fish,” Sparck, of Get Out The Native Vote, remembered.  “We don’t have that anymore. If we had crickets in Alaska, all you’d hear is crickets out there. And it’s a crying shame that we don’t even have enough fish coming up our rivers anymore for reliable subsistence.  It’s literally under our feet, what is happening with the world.”

A few days before the start of early voting, Michelle Vallejo, a 33-year-old Democrat, was greeting a dozen or so supporters in a shady corner of a municipal park in Edinburg, Texas, when she received a visit from an old friend. The volunteers, who had shown up to grab walk lists and water bottles for a pre-election canvass, were filling her in on the latest developments in their ongoing efforts to protect yard signs from being defaced and removed. Vallejo, who is challenging first-term Republican Rep. Monica de la Cruz in a rematch of one of Texas’ closest US House races last cycle, listened politely, in a blue t-shirt that featured her name between a pair of exclamation marks, and running shoes embossed with the Texas flag.

The guest was US Rep. Sylvia Garcia, who now represents a safely Democratic seat in the Houston area but was raised in the district in rural Jim Wells County. The 74-year-old Garcia has served as both surrogate and life-coach during Vallejo’s short political career. They recently spent three hours together raising money for Vallejo’s campaign over Zoom. Vallejo calls her “My tía, my godmother, my political mom.” Garcia says, “She’s grown as a candidate—you know, like all candidates, she listens to some of my advice, and sometimes she doesn’t.” Today, Garcia had brought a gift—a pink-and-white t-shirt that said “Comadres con Kamala.”

“Comadres love to talk,” Garcia told the volunteers a few minutes later, using an affectionate term for old friends or godmothers. “They love to chisme”—gossip. She urged them to hit the doors with that same energy. Bug family members. Text friends from the carpool pickup line. Check in on ex-boyfriends. “We’ve got to make her campaign and Kamala’s campaign the big chisme for the next 20 days.”

The 15th district, which stretches like a rusty fishhook from the Rio Grande, a few miles south, to the city of Seguin northeast of San Antonio, is a big district with even bigger stakes. Democrats are hoping to flip the seat as part of their quest to take back the House of Representatives this fall. But to do that will require coming to terms with why the district has become so close. Democrats routinely won the area by double digits until 2020, when, thanks to huge swings among Tejano voters, Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez barely held on against an underfunded Republican, de la Cruz. The shifts in the district were stunning: Trump improved his showing in Hidalgo County (which includes Edinburg and McAllen) by 24 points. In rural Brooks County, voters delivered a 34-point improvement to the GOP. Jim Wells went red for the first time since 1972. 

Conservatives hailed a historic demographic realignment in South Texas, and redrew the maps to make the district slightly more Republican. Gonzalez promptly migrated to a neighboring district that is safer but still competitive. With the party on the defensive in 2022, national Democrats triaged Vallejo’s race, and de la Cruz defeated Vallejo by 12,000 votes. But it wasn’t exactly a red wave either. After spending big, Republicans managed to flip just one of the three races they targeted. This cycle, the DCCC believes Vallejo can win, and the campaign has received support on the airwaves from an affiliated outside group, House Majority PAC. The group recently released a survey showing Vallejo just three points behind—within the margin of error. 

The election in the Rio Grande Valley offers a glimpse of just how much the debate over border security has shifted during the Trump years. Criticism of Joe Biden’s border policies have been a potent political issue in the district. And Vallejo, who ran as progressive in her first campaign, has sought to project a tougher image in her second run. It is a test of whether Democrats’ have found a message that works in a border region that, as much as anywhere else, embodies the evolution of both political parties in the Trump era.

From the moment Trump delivered his first remarks of the 2015 campaign, the border—and the wall he planned to build along it—was the symbolic heart of the MAGA movement, and the backlash it engendered. It was a “racist” wall, Texas Rep. Colin Allred said during his first run for Congress, promising to help tear it down himself. It was an “immorality,” said former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Hillary Clinton called it “useless.” Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin, Hakeem Jeffries, and Kamala Harris called it “Medieval.” Activists, and even candidates, talked about abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and of halting the growth of the Border Patrol itself.

But that rhetoric largely ended with Trump’s first term. “We saw the shift as soon as Biden was in office,” says Michelle Serrano, a co-director of Voces Unidas RGV, a non-profit that opposes border “hyper-militarization.” With a Democrat in the Oval Office, many of the policies stayed the same, but the resistance to those policies seemed to fade. “It felt like crazy town,” she told me. “Like nobody was talking about it, even though we were talking about it.”

Now, in Trump’s final campaign, Democrats have completed their transformation. At a recent CNN town hall, Harris mocked the former president for only building “2 percent” of the wall he promised. (Trump built 458 miles, often replacing far less obtrusive earlier barriers with 20-foot steel slats.) Like many Democrats on the ballot this fall, she now touts her support for a Republican-drafted bill that Trump killed, which decoupled border-security funding from comprehensive immigration reform and included $650 million funding to continue wall construction. Harris’ campaign has produced ads touting her tough-on-the-border credentials. One spot even featured footage of the wall that Trump’s administration built. 

Vallejo, who was raised in the district and co-owns a popular flea market with her family in Mission, Texas, ran for the seat last cycle as an unabashed progressive, after being endorsed early on by the political wing of La Unión del Pueblo Entero (LUPE), which was founded by United Farmworkers leaders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta and now organizes on behalf of residents of border colonias. She promised to fight for Medicare for All and campaigned with Bernie Sanders in the final weeks of the campaign. During that race, Vallejo “attacked the border wall as a failure,” Michelle Garcia reported for Mother Jones that year.

Today, no one would necessarily confuse Vallejo with Henry Cuellar, the now-indicted conservative Democratic congressman from Laredo who has spent decades beating a drum for more border-security projects. But her rematch with de la Cruz offers a glimpse of how candidates with more progressive backgrounds are navigating a set of issues that have nudged some Hispanic voters inside and outside the district to the Republican Party. In August, she released an ad saying that “our community is being overwhelmed by the chaos at the border, and it’s time to get serious. I’ll work with Republicans and Democrats to add thousands of new Border Patrol agents—and take on the cartels and human trafficking.”

It ends with her standing on the Rio Grande. “We’ve had enough talk,” Vallejo says. “It’s time to secure the border.”

After the ad came out, Politico reported that some longtime supporters were furious at the law-and-order rhetoric, and that board members of LUPE Votes were even considering pulling their endorsement. The group stuck with her, and has been turning out voters on her behalf.

“There was a response online, but also what we saw at the doors and what we saw among our voters is that it allowed us to take leadership on this issue,” Vallejo told me, after the canvassers had received their instructions and begun to trickle out. “It allowed us to have that conversation about what we actually can do, and we know that you could do both. You could secure the border and also work to implement legislation that’s based on humanity and the reality of what people are experiencing here in our communities. We are a border region. We’re always going to be a border region, and it’s important that we modernize our legislation so that there’s a timely, legal, humane way for people to access citizenship and what they’re seeking when they come asking for help.”

She expresses support for Republican Sen. James Lankford’s bill which would have increased Border Patrol funding and allocated millions of dollars for wall construction. Another ad running in the district, from House Majority PAC, features aerial footage of the border wall while boasting that Vallejo will work with both parties to secure more resources for border protection. When I asked Vallejo what she meant by the phrase “secure the border,” she talked about “the flow of fentanyl and drugs and human trafficking through our ports of entry,” and the need for technology and manpower to “stop the flow of those harmful things into our homes.”

But Vallejo also emphasizes the need to make the judicial process work for immigrants—to “clear up the backlog of people who’ve been living in the shadows for, if not decades, their entire lifetime,” and for “improving access to legal representation.” Unlike some Democrats, she still talks a lot about a “pathway to citizenship” for people who currently lack legal status. 

That message resonates with supporters like Florentino Guerrero, who is now retired after working for 20 years as a customs officer. “I’ve just seen the mess that Trump and even [Vallejo’s] opponent have done here on the border,” he told me. “I started with Bush, right after 9/11. There was no problem on the border. Then eight years with Obama there was more immigrants going back than coming. Then we got Trump and it was chaos—separating families and all that stuff. And he had the majority in Congress to change the immigration laws and he didn’t do it.”

Vallejo’s message is that in all the politicization, the actual needs of her community are given short shrift. And it’s not just about immigration politics. Foremost among those is health care, which she often discusses in personal terms, as someone whose family often traveled across the border for medical attention. Vallejo does not call for “Medicare for all” like she did in her first campaign, but now floats lowering the age of the program to expand coverage described her position as “access to affordable healthcare any way that we could get it.” The campaign, and its backers, have placed a huge emphasis on protecting abortion rights, rejecting old assumptions that Democrats in the region are too socially conservative to be moved by such appeals.

“My own OBGYN told me this year that all of her residents are no longer with her, and that she’s very alarmed for her patients and the women and families that she cares for, because the care just isn’t there anymore,” Vallejo said.

One Vallejo ad features a testimonial from Lauren Miller, a Texas woman who had to flee the state for health care because one of the two twins she was expecting was non-viable.

Eventually, Garcia, Vallejo’s congressional mentor, wandered over to the picnic bench where we were sitting to join the conversation with her newly appointed comadre. Her big thing was that they needed to “knock and drag”—that is, ”we just have to do a better job of dragging people out of their homes or work and to making the time to actually vote.” Even with the new national investments in the race—Democratic groups have outspent Republicans by a more than two-to-one margin—she was “a little disappointed that I didn’t see the heightened activity that I would have wanted.”

“Quite frankly, and I know this will piss off some of my national friends, I just don’t think that they get South Texas,” Garcia complained. She’d spent the previous two days campaigning with Cuellar—who is, improbably, cruising to re-election—and Gonzalez, who faces an expensive rematch with former Republican Rep. Mayra Flores. “You know, they focus so much on New York and California, sometimes maybe Chicago. But what’s good in New York doesn’t necessarily work well here in South Texas.”

When her colleagues did come to the area, it was for one or two days, and their focus was often on “the whole border discussion.” She wanted politicians to pay attention to the way people actually lived and worked in the region, and to understand the value of immigration. Vallejo, who chose her words carefully during our interview, opened up.

“I think that there is a missing voice in the conversation about what is the most effective path forward—immigration challenges, border challenges, they’re not something that you could fix with a tagline, they’re not something that you could fix with a talking point,” Vallejo said. “It’s going to take discussion and it’s going to take nuance to be able to drive forward the solution that we need to serve our families. Our communities are dynamic. They are multi-generational. They’re experiencing many challenges economically, like Congresswoman Garcia said, that are not understood. And that’s why I feel very strongly that we need voices like mine speaking on behalf of my community. Who knows what it’s like to work with our immigrant communities, our multi-generational communities. I myself am a daughter of Mexican immigrants, very proudly, and I know that my family hasn’t been met in the place that they’re at with what we need from our own government, whether that’s local, state or national.”

“And I’m sure she’s going to sponsor my DREAM Act,” Garcia said, jumping in, referring to the long-stalled effort to provide a path to citizenship for undocumented residents who came to the US as children.

“Definitely,” Vallejo said.

On a sunny Saturday afternoon in late October, Janelle Stelson, the Democratic candidate in Pennsylvania’s 10th Congressional District, entered Broad Street Market, a historic food hall in Harrisburg. “If I seem a little off,” she explained to me and another reporter, she had just come from a funeral. But now, grasping campaign signs in one hand, she was looking for breakfast among the Caribbean food stalls and Amish bakeries—and some voters.  

Stelson made her way through the market with relentless friendliness, calling out “hey sister!” with her free hand outstretched. After a decades-long career as a local television anchor, she was a familiar face to many. As Stelson greeted passersby, Richard Utley, a retired government employee, told me that he’s “known Janelle a long time,” both from the evening news and from politics. “She’s got the best chance to beat Scott Perry,” he said.

Stelson has tried to make this race a referendum on Scott Perry, the firebrand conservative and six-term incumbent. She argues that Perry has lost sight of his constituents’ needs and come to exemplify the dysfunction in Congress. “The fact that Washington is broken resonates with everyone,” Stelson told me. “They want somebody who’s going to attend to their basic needs.”

In the market, she talked to voters about issues ranging from the rising cost of living to the shortage of reproductive healthcare providers. As Stelson nimbly navigated conversations, I could see how television journalism could provide transferable skills for electoral politics. As an anchor, she reported on these same issues dozens of times. Stelson had also covered this story before: the story of a political challenger making a case for ousting the incumbent. In her black funeral wear, Stelson was warm and effusive, doling out good sound bites. She expertly framed shots for the news photographer, pivoting so her campaign signs always faced the camera as she cooed over babies, hugged the elderly, and examined cookies.  

Pennsylvania has emerged as the center of the political universe, as both presidential campaigns identified it as crucial to their Electoral College math. Doors are brimming with campaign literature, highways are crowded with competing billboards, and voters inundated with automated texts. In the state’s 10th district, Perry is facing his most difficult race yet, and one that may help to determine whether the GOP can hold onto its slim majority in Congress. 

A retired Pennsylvania Army National Guard brigadier general, Perry made a name for himself as a Trump loyalist and former chair of the far-right House Freedom Caucus. As my colleague David Corn wrote in 2021, a Senate Judiciary Committee report revealed that Perry played a crucial role in former president Donald Trump’s effort to recruit Justice Department officials to investigate and overturn 2020 election results. Though the FBI briefly seized his cell phone, Perry has maintained his innocence and insisted that he was never under investigation. Still, his involvement has been costly—FEC reports show that Perry has spent at least $300,000 from his campaign donations on legal fees. Undeterred, Perry has continued to sow doubts about the 2020 election, and, during his only debate with Stelson, repeated false claims that the post office had illegally shredded mail-in ballots. In response, Stelson reiterated that mail-in voting is a “tried and true method.” 

Perry also made national headlines as the Freedom Caucus made it increasingly difficult for the GOP to govern, threatening government shutdowns over spending bills and forcing Kevin McCarthy through 15 rounds of voting to become Speaker of the House—an ultimately short-lived tenure.    

Perry was initially elected in 2013 to the solidly Republican 4th Congressional District. In 2018, Pennsylvania’s congressional districts were completely redrawn by the state Supreme Court, making Perry’s new 10th district much more competitive, and he was reelected by less than three points. In 2022, the district lines were redrawn once again, though much less dramatically, condensing the district around Harrisburg and York. Perry fended off Democratic challengers in 2020 and 2022, both by around seven points. 

The district is fairly emblematic of the state at large: it is 70 percent white, with a median household income of $75,000 and about 35 percent of residents have at least a bachelor’s degree. Democrats say that the population is shifting in their favor. Cumberland and York counties, which are partially included in the district, are among the fastest growing counties in the state. “We’ve seen a lot of farmland convert to housing,” Matt Roan, chair of the Cumberland County Democratic Committee, said. “These people tend to be younger families with higher levels of education.”

Still, Republicans lead Democrats by almost 6 points in party registration, while 14 percent of registered voters are not affiliated with a political party. Trump won the district by 4 points in 2020, but Pennsylvania’s Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro won the newly redrawn district by 12 points in 2022. That was likely in part because Shapiro’s opponent, Doug Mastriano, ran a chaotic and poorly funded campaign and, despite being a Trump stalwart, was largely abandoned by the national party. “I would not underestimate Scott Perry,” Berwood Yost, director of the Floyd Institute for Public Policy Analysis at Franklin & Marshall College, told me. “He is a polished political operator. He knows his district and knows how to talk to voters here.” 

“I would not underestimate Scott Perry. He is a polished political operator. He knows his district and knows how to talk to voters here.” 

Stelson has run a commanding race against Perry, having significantly outspent and outraised him. Campaign finance reports show that Stelson has raised almost $2.5 million this year to Perry’s $800,000. The Cook Political Report just shifted the race towards Democrats, calling it a “toss up,” and one recent poll had Stelson leading by nine points. National Republicans seem to be concerned. Earlier this month, House Speaker Mike Johnson appeared in the district to campaign on Perry’s behalf. The Congressional Leadership Fund, a Johnson-sponsored super-PAC, has spent more than $2 million on advertising for Perry ahead of Election Day, according to AdImpact. One of the group’s ads frames Stelson’s immigration stance as extreme, citing a candidate Q&A in which Stelson calls for fixing the asylum system and ensuring pathways to citizenship for Dreamers and “those who have been paying taxes for decades.” The ad’s voiceover declares, “Illegals get the invite, we foot the bill. That’s liberal Janelle Stelson.” 

Perry is the only Freedom Caucus member from the Northeast, and he is among the most vulnerable of the hardline Republicans up for reelection this year. Despite this, Perry has largely doubled down on his positions. “Should I just go along with Washington, DC, as most of my other colleagues did, just to moderate myself?” Perry said to the Associated Press for a recent story on the race. “No, I’m going to do the right thing every single time I have the opportunity.”

If Perry can be beat, Democrats are convinced they finally have the right candidate to do so. Stelson spent 26 years as a broadcast journalist at WGAL, an NBC affiliate based in Lancaster, where she became a mainstay on televisions across the Susquehanna Valley. Throughout the campaign, Stelson has leaned on her journalism experience, arguing that it has given her a unique vantage point on the problems afflicting the region. It also gave her a big boost in recognition: voters knew her name and face long before she announced her candidacy. Stelson won a crowded Democratic primary by twenty points, beating a former US Marine and the Democrats’ 2022 candidate, despite concerns that she lives a few miles outside of district lines. (She has promised to move if she wins the election.)

Stelson has attributed her decision to enter politics to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which she covered as the evening news anchor. “I had to look out into the camera and tell every woman watching that her rights have been rolled back 50 years,” Stelson told me as we sat at a picnic bench outside of the market. She ended up buying some cookies and a berry smoothie, which she periodically sipped while we spoke. She described Perry’s reaction to the Dobbs decision as “ecstatic”—he called it a “monumental victory for the unborn” on X—and pointed out that he has co-sponsored a restrictive abortion measure.

“I just realized at some point that I needed to move from the public service of telling about all our issues and concerns,” Stelson said, “to actually trying to do something about them.”

Stelson seems to relish coming off the sidelines and into the political arena. In an interview with Pod Save America’s Jon Lovett, Stelson said that, as a television anchor, she had moderated two of Perry’s previous debates. “I know where his soft underbelly is,” Stelson told Lovett, laughing. “Imma get him.” 

Stelson was a registered Republican until early 2023 and described her voting history to me as “independent”—she told the Washington Post that she had supported both John McCain and Mitt Romney’s presidential bids. This biographical detail has been helpful in convincing voters that she is a moderate Democrat. When I asked where she differed from the Biden administration, she said to me, “I think even in a really good marriage, you’re never going to agree with the other person all the time.” Stelson critiqued the president’s handling of the southern border, telling me that “we have to secure the border” and increase funding for law enforcement agents. 

As surveys show that Americans are increasingly exhausted by and skeptical about the federal government, both candidates have presented themselves as political outsiders. Stelson’s campaign website calls for fewer “career politicians,” and she says there are few better examples of this particular creature of Washington than her opponent, whom she argues has become more interested in “grandstanding” than addressing the needs of his district. She has pointed out that Perry voted against bills funding healthcare for veterans exposed to toxic burn pits and housing homeless veterans—he was the only member of the Pennsylvania delegation to vote against the housing bill. When asked about it during their debate, Perry noted that he had been deployed in Iraq and argued that the bills would have bankrupted the VA, saying, “If everybody’s going to jump off a cliff, are you going to jump off a cliff?”

Perry has long presented himself as a maverick, telling voters in a recent ad that he “didn’t go to Congress to make friends.” He has argued that he is willing to vote his conscience even when it means angering other Republicans. During their debate, Perry defended his history of voting against spending bills, arguing that uncurbed government spending is contributing to inflation. Perry recently told the Atlantic, “When the stuff that is unaffordable, unnecessary, unwanted, outweighs the stuff that we need, I’m going to vote the way I need to.” 

“When the public sees you as this firebrand, controversial figure, making a pitch that ultimately you are constituent-driven becomes challenging,”.

But when your political brand is built on opposition and obstruction, it’s not easy to point to concrete accomplishments. “When the public sees you as this firebrand, controversial figure, making a pitch that ultimately you are constituent-driven becomes challenging,” Christopher Borick, Director of Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion, told me. And Perry has alienated at least some of his Republican base, according to Craig Snyder, a Philadelphia-based consultant who is the director of Republicans Against Perry. The group is funded by the Welcome PAC, which supports moderate Democratic candidates. Snyder said that crossover Republicans will be motivated by a range of issues, from Perry’s election denialism and anti-abortion stance to his “constant support for shutting down the federal government.” 

In addition to appealing to independents, Stelson will need a number of these Republican voters to win. In the time we spent together in Harrisburg, a Democratic stronghold, Stelson encountered no Republican supporters. She likes to say that, “I’m a Republican, and I’m voting for you” are her “favorite words in the English language.” But I did get a sense of how the encounter would go when, outside of the food hall, Stelson met several older women in a tour group from Alabama. “I am running as a Democrat, but I used to be a Republican. So really I’m an American, is what I say,” Stelson told them. “I wish we’d stop this nonsense and work together and get something done.”

In a Southern drawl, one of the women said, “Amen.”

Paris Alexander had been in a destructive relationship for over a decade, learning to tolerate the intolerable even as the abuse progressed—first mental and emotional torment, then physical and sexual torture. Like many survivors, Alexander, who is nonbinary, stayed in the relationship hoping that it would improve. “We stick it out,” they said, “because we think that they’re going to change and come to their senses.” 

Then, one day in September 2020, Alexander’s male partner beat them up and dragged them outside their Providence, Rhode Island, home by their hair. Wandering their neighborhood, covered in blood and desperate to flee, Alexander felt haunted by the years of forced isolation: “I had nowhere to go, no one to turn to,” they recall. A Google search on their phone led them to Sojourner House, which runs the state’s only shelter specifically for LGBTQ victims of intimate partner violence. Almost miraculously, there was some space. Finally, Alexander had caught a break. 

At the shelter, known as RISE, Alexander focused on taking “baby steps” toward independence. They got a library card. They started individual therapy. They joined a weekly virtual LGBTQ support group, where they heard terms like “nonbinary,” “gender-queer,” and “gender fluid” for the first time. Back then, Alexander identified as a transgender woman and felt pressured to “look female as much as possible.” The support group taught them, “You don’t have to be [male or female]—you can just simply be who you are, and that’s okay.” 

RISE is one of three shelters operated by Sojourner House, named for the 19th-century slave-turned-abolitionist Sojourner Truth, who was also an ardent advocate for women’s rights. Since its founding in 1976, the organization has served more than 60,000 people—1,800 last year alone. A small but critical part of this past year’s $7.4 million budget comes from the federal Crime Victims Fund, a pot of money created by the 1984 Victims of Crime Act, also known as VOCA. Across the country, VOCA helps pay for the hotlines survivors call in crisis, the shelters they flee to, and the advocates who accompany them to court and help them heal.

VOCA-supported programs helped almost 8 million people in fiscal year 2022–2023, funding nearly 3 million shelter beds and 2.3 million crisis-hotline calls, according to the Department of Justice. Those services have become more critical since the pandemic, as rates of intimate partner violence have soared, a housing crisis has made it even harder for survivors to flee, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade has given abusers another way to threaten pregnant survivors. But even as the need is growing, VOCA funding has been plummeting—and Congress has failed to act on what many advocates say may be the best hope for a legislative fix.

The current funding crisis is rooted in changes in DOJ policy that date back years. The Crime Victims Fund gets most of its money from financial penalties levied in corporate criminal cases, according to the department. Those fees and fines have been falling as federal prosecutors have pursued more deferred and non-prosecution agreements, which allow defendants more time to pay up or avoid charges entirely if they cooperate with the government. As a result, deposits into the pot shrank from a high of $6.6 billion in 2017 to $1.39 billion in fiscal year 2023. (Because of congressional caps, the actual amount of money disbursed is even lower.) These declines have trickled down to state agencies—which receive VOCA funds based on their state’s population size—and then to eligible programs. Rhode Island, which has one of the smallest populations, has seen a 54 percent drop in VOCA funds since 2017, to $2.9 million in the last fiscal year. California, the most populous state, went from receiving $218.9 million in VOCA funds in 2017 to $87 million over the same period.

Most states, including California, have managed to come up with some funding to offset the federal cuts, but the money is mostly temporary—lasting a year or two max. Fourteen states, including Rhode Island, did not appropriate any money in their most recent budgets to offset the VOCA cuts, I found in my reporting. This past spring, Rhode Island lawmakers proposed $2 million in supplemental funding, but the bill died in committee.

I’ve spent four months trying to understand how these extreme VOCA cuts are affecting domestic violence programs across the United States, doing more than two dozen interviews and tracking down budget data from every state. The picture that has emerged is deeply troubling: Lifesaving services for survivors are struggling to stay afloat, and experts fear what might happen if a long-term funding solution isn’t found.

Law enforcement groups are equally worried. “Without Congressional action, victim service providers will be forced to cut critical services, and many will be forced to close,” more than 700 prosecutors wrote in an open letter to lawmakers in February. “Millions of victims, including abused children and battered women, will be left without access to safety, justice and healing.” But with the November elections looming, Congress’ attention has been focused elsewhere.

The VOCA Fix Act, which President Biden signed into law in 2021, diverted revenue from deferred and non-prosecution agreements to the Crime Victims Fund—but this turned out to be inadequate. This term, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) have proposed a bill to supplement VOCA with funds collected through the False Claims Act, which penalizes defrauding of the government. The legislation has attracted 170 bipartisan co-sponsors in the House but languished in the Senate Judiciary Committee, which Durbin chairs. A spokesperson for Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the committee’s highest-ranking Republican, did not respond to questions about whether the bill will get a hearing. Congress has also punted on Biden’s proposal for a $7.3 billion infusion into the Crime Victims Fund for next year. (The White House did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

“Victims of crime, and specifically, victims of domestic and sexual violence, just are not priorities.”

At a virtual event this week commemorating the 40th anniversary of VOCA, the mood was less than celebratory. “I’m hearing about programs shutting down, positions being cut, victim services being impacted,” Claire Ponder Selib, executive director of the National Organization for Victim Advocacy, told more than 250 attendees. To Vanessa Volz, Sojourner House’s president and CEO, the funding crisis illuminates a harsh reality: “Victims of crime, and specifically, victims of domestic and sexual violence, just are not priorities.” 

Domestic violence hotlines like the one that led Paris Alexander to Sojourner House are among the most critical services that VOCA funds. Because hotlines are the point of entry to a support system that can mean the difference between life and death, slashed budgets can be especially disastrous. Rhode Island’s statewide 24/7 helpline has historically relied almost entirely on VOCA funding—about $118,000 last year, less than half what it received in 2019. More cuts would likely hit the helpline’s overnight shifts hardest. For people who are abused in the dead of night, or who have a small window to seek help while their abusers are sleeping or working, this could be catastrophic.

The Rhode Island helpline routinely gets calls from people in Massachusetts and Connecticut who can’t access services in their own areas—even though both of those states, unlike Rhode Island, have appropriated supplemental funds to offset VOCA cuts. Connecticut’s additional money came from the pandemic-era American Rescue Plan Act, which disappears at the end of this year. Without a new infusion of money, the statewide domestic violence hotline, Safe Connect—which is 100 percent funded by VOCA—will have to drastically cut services, lay off advocates, or even shut down, says Meghan Scanlon, president and CEO of the Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence, which staffs the hotline. “The reality is, as much as we are advocates who don’t want to say ‘no,’ at some point, we’re gonna have to,” she laments. “And that doesn’t feel great.” 

Some of the greatest effects are likely to be felt in programs that serve transgender clients and undocumented immigrants, such as Sojourner House’s RISE shelter and THEIA Project, which supports victims of human trafficking. Hot-button politics around LGBTQ+ and immigrant clienteles make such programs especially difficult to fundraise for, Volz says.

Yet as Alexander’s story shows, immigrant survivors are particularly vulnerable to abuse from partners who exploit their status as another form of control. Despite their strong New England accent that makes them sound as if they had been born and raised in Boston, Alexander originally hails from São Miguel, a lush island in the Azores archipelago of Portugal. When they were 5 years old, they arrived in New Bedford, Massachusetts, with their parents—but without documentation. Their mother secured US citizenship when Alexander was a teenager—a process that automatically made them a citizen, too. But after getting kicked out of the house at 16, and no parental contact over the years, Alexander lacked both identification and proof of their citizenship status. “I became like a ghost,” they recall. In their 20s, they told me, essentially undocumented, they dropped out of cosmetology school and the regular labor force and drifted into sex work.

Sojourner House didn’t just get Alexander out of an abusive relationship. Its VOCA-funded team of immigration advocates helped Alexander secure identification, represented them in immigration proceedings, and prepped them for their citizenship test—a process that took over a year; in March 2022, Alexander was officially sworn in as a US citizen. “We’re really at risk of not being able to continue providing these services at the same level,” Volz notes.

In some places, cuts affecting VOCA-funded legal advocacy services have already been devastating. Judge Shelley Santry, a family court judge in Louisville, Kentucky, used to have advocates in her courtroom every Tuesday, the day she hears domestic violence cases involving people seeking emergency protective orders against their abusers. The advocates—employed by the statewide Center for Women and Families—would bring survivors into a private room after their hearing and explain a new set of risks: “Once the order is entered, it’s really the most dangerous time,” Santry told me. “The perpetrator is losing that control, and that’s when the lethality red flags are elevated.” Recently in Hardin County, 60 miles from Louisville, a man fatally shot his ex-girlfriend and her mother near the courthouse where they had a hearing about an emergency protective order against him. (He also killed himself.)

In Santry’s courtroom, the advocates would help survivors come up with practical strategies to safeguard themselves and their families: keep gas in their cars, charge up their phones, pack emergency bags in case they had to flee. Their in-person presence was essential, says Elizabeth Martin, the center’s president and CEO: “If you aren’t where people are, they’re not necessarily going to reach out to you.”

But over time, the number of advocates in Santry’s courtroom dwindled, and since August 2021, they’ve been completely gone. With VOCA funding for the center plummeting more than 60 percent since 2019, to just over $437,000 last year, Martin was forced to cut her domestic violence staff in half and remove advocates from courtrooms. Now, a court staffer hands out pamphlets and business cards to survivors bearing the center’s name, website, and phone number. Martin only sends an advocate if a survivor asks for one. “They don’t know what they don’t know,” Martin says. “The contact, that personal touch, that involvement has been watered down significantly.”

Lawmakers “need to understand this isn’t a personal problem, this isn’t a family problem—this is all of our problems, and we’ve got to work to eradicate it.” 

Domestic violence groups were grateful when Kentucky legislators allocated $7.1 million in their latest budget to offset VOCA cuts, but say the one-time grant isn’t enough. Without advocates to provide support, “the consequence may be death,” Santry says. In 2020, Kentucky ranked 10th in the nation for domestic violence homicides, according to the Violence Policy Center, with men murdering 46 women across the state. Lawmakers “need to understand this isn’t a personal problem,” Martin says, “this isn’t a family problem—this is all of our problems, and we’ve got to work to eradicate it.” 

California is another state where advocates say lawmakers haven’t done enough to address a steep decline in VOCA funds—down 60 percent since fiscal year 2017. Now domestic violence organizations there are facing a new crisis as they grapple with the repercussions of this summer’s decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson, in which the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority essentially greenlit the criminalization of homelessness.

After a months-long advocacy campaign that drew the support of actress Angelina Jolie, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office scrounged up $103 million in June to supplement the $87 million in federal VOCA funds. That one-year reprieve helped to avert what could have been a catastrophe for VOCA-funded organizations. But then in July, Newsom ordered state agencies to clear out homeless encampments following the Grants Pass ruling. Advocates warned that the decision could be devastating for survivors of intimate partner violence, who struggle to access shelter and housing nationwide—and especially in California, which has the largest population of unhoused people in the United States.

“The reality before [Newsom’s] executive order was that there were not enough DV-specific shelter beds, and just in general, there’s not enough emergency shelter beds,” says Jennifer Willover, housing policy analyst at the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence. Since Newsom’s mandate, Willover adds, domestic violence programs across the state have reported increased calls to their hotlines requesting shelter. In some parts of the state, advocates report that they are spending more time visiting encampments and informing unhoused people of domestic violence-specific services they offer, Willover says. (Newsom’s Office of Emergency Services did not respond to requests for comment.)

Experts see the situation there as a harbinger of what’s to come nationwide: As the National Network to End Domestic Violence and other advocacy groups said after the Grants Pass ruling, “Gender-based violence is a cause and consequence of homelessness, and this ruling will further trap people who are homeless, including survivors, in cycles of poverty and housing insecurity.”

In a report about homelessness in the state published in January by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, nearly one-fifth of cisgender women surveyed said they had experienced intimate partner violence in the six months prior to homelessness, and 40 percent said violence was a reason for leaving their last housing. Many were homeless because of the far-reaching effects of domestic abuse: living in isolation from family and friends and unable to work, their financial resources controlled by their abusers, resulted in intractable poor credit and records of eviction. “There’s a lack of awareness, still, of the fact that there is that intersection of domestic violence and homelessness,” says Leticia Campos, chief programs officer at the Marjaree Mason Center, which serves victims of domestic violence in Fresno County, where the population tops 1 million and the poverty rate is well over the national average. 

Marjaree Mason—established in 1979 and named after a 36-year-old woman murdered by her ex-boyfriend, a sheriff’s deputy with the county—offers a case study of the problems facing VOCA-funded organizations in California post–Grants Pass. Fresno County has the highest number of calls to law enforcement for domestic violence per capita in California, and Marjaree Mason is the county’s only 24/7 domestic violence shelter and service provider. The Fresno City Council allocated $300,000 earlier this year to help the organization fend off the impacts of the years-long decline in VOCA funds, but staff members say they still struggle to meet the needs of survivors.

In June, I visited the VOCA-funded emergency shelter, which can accommodate 140 people. The rooms have bunk beds with colorful, patterned bedspreads, and televisions mounted on the walls, and outside there’s a playground shaded by palm trees. But even before the Supreme Court ruling, getting a bed there wasn’t easy. Empty beds are often filled within hours, Campos says; when I visited, the shelter had been at capacity for three weeks. Survivors who are turned away often have no choice but to return to their abusers. A spokesperson told me that last year, 80 percent of the organization’s clients had no income of their own, and of the ones who did, two-thirds made under $15,000. 

After Newsom issued his executive order, the Fresno County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved an ordinance making “unlawful camping” a misdemeanor punishable by a $500 fine and up to six months in jail. The city of Fresno passed a ban that was even more aggressive: a $1,000 fine and a year behind bars, which took effect in late September. The mayor has said that arrests will be limited to “habitual offenders” and that people will first be offered supportive services, though it’s unclear whether those include referrals for domestic violence treatment.

Staff at Marjaree Mason saw an impact within days of Newsom’s executive order, when the sheriff’s office dropped off an unhoused woman and two children at the drop-in center in the middle of the night after clearing an encampment, according to Joseph Hickman, the center’s interim crisis response manager. “It was very eye-opening to see that it happened that quickly,” Hickman says. “It definitely kind of lit a fire under us.”

The problem, as Campos says, is this: “What should we do when we’re at capacity? Where should we send victims of domestic violence?” Laura Moreno, program manager at the Fresno County Department of Social Services, says those questions point to a broader, county-wide issue. “We don’t have enough shelter beds, period, for the number of people we have on the streets,” she told me. A federally mandated one-day census in Fresno and neighboring Madera counties in January 2023 found nearly 4,500 unhoused people, up 7 percent from the year before. A county spokesperson said outreach teams provide homeless people with relevant resources, including information about Marjaree Mason’s services.

Helping survivors find assistance elsewhere when the shelter is full is a task left to Diana Hernandez, a former 911 dispatcher who joined Marjaree Mason’s staff in September 2021. In her previous job, she told me, she hated having to hang up on callers who were clearly in need but not in the throes of an emergency. Now, as a client navigator, she can talk to survivors who call the hotline for as long as they want, providing them with emotional support and resources. But she can’t always give them what they need most, which is usually a bed.

While we were chatting in her cubicle in June, she received a hotline call from a woman who said she’d been physically assaulted by her boyfriend. She had been living in a car, and needed a safe place to stay. Marjaree Mason’s shelter was full, so Hernandez offered to call homeless shelters in the area to see if they had room. But she also cautioned that those shelters wouldn’t offer advocacy support and legal services specifically for domestic violence victims. Nor would their locations be confidential, like domestic violence shelters’ are. Add to that, most likely they would require residents to leave during the day; Marjaree Mason lets them stay. 

Hernandez gave the woman phone numbers for other local organizations that could provide services, and suggested that she change her passwords on her email and social media accounts, make sure her phone’s location-sharing feature was turned off, and call back on the hotline at any time if she wanted to talk. In such instances, “I try to exhaust my resources,” Hernandez told me after the call ended, “so I know I did everything I could.”

After seven months at RISE, Sojourner House’s LGBTQ shelter, Paris Alexander might have ended up like so many other survivors of intimate partner violence: homeless and back on the street. But because Alexander had been a victim of sex trafficking, they were eligible for assistance through another Sojourner House program offering transitional housing for survivors of human trafficking. The program paid the rent and utilities on a third-floor apartment where Alexander lived while they were sorting through their citizenship problems and unable to work. Without a Social Security number, they couldn’t apply for food stamps or government assistance. Every few weeks, Alexander recalls, a Sojourner House advocate showed up with some food—bread, peanut butter, canned beans. “And that was pretty much what I had to live off of.” 

Alexander finally secured their citizenship in March 2022 and was able to begin searching for permanent housing. Once more, Sojourner House provided vital support. Robin Greene, an advocate who had once been unhoused, also works with trafficking survivors through the organization’s THEIA Project, which includes a VOCA-funded shelter. Greene helped Alexander find an apartment and even convinced the landlord to renovate the space by replacing the floors and covering up cracks and holes in the walls. 

For Greene, ensuring her clients live in comfort is key to helping them stay on the road to recovery. Greene recalls spending time in homeless shelters that were “gross,” “vermin-ridden,” “humiliating,” and “degrading.” At the shelter for trafficking victims, she painted the walls and floors with pops of green, yellow, and purple and adorned the office space with house plants. She mows the front lawn herself. “I want it to look not like a shelter,” she told me when I visited. “I want it to look like a home.” 

Two years after Alexander moved in, their apartment—the same one that Greene helped secure—has become their “sanctuary,” where they live with their two cats, Bast and Isis. They painted the walls yellow, green, and blue; hung up their own artwork; and put some of the house plants Greene brought to life in front of the bay windows in their living room, a daily reminder of someone who helped transform their life.

According to Greene, Alexander represents “the epitome” of what Sojourner House and domestic violence organizations like it can do, if they have the vision, the people—and the funding to support survivors. “Paris was determined to just sit in their little apartment and never come out with their cats,” Greene told me, “but not now.” 

Today, Alexander volunteers with Sojourner House and spreads word of its services within the community. They also volunteer with a trans youth mentorship program, through which they meet weekly with a younger trans mentee, and they host events—including a recent makeup workshop, drawing on their cosmetology background—for trans and nonbinary young people. In November, they’ll host a virtual Friendsgiving hangout—meant to be “a safe and loving space during Thanksgiving,” they said, adding, “the holidays can be a tough time of the year for queer folks.”

Alexander knows firsthand the negative thoughts that can run rampant through survivors’ minds: “We feel like we’re not worthy. We feel like no one cares. We feel like no one understands. You don’t trust that there’s genuine empathy out there.” Empathy, though, tends to be abundant among people who support survivors of domestic violence; what’s in short supply is cash. This is partly why Alexander was eager to tell their story: They want lawmakers to know that VOCA funds have “the power and the ability” to save lives. “I wouldn’t be here today,” they told me, “if it weren’t for the Sojourner House program.”

If you or someone you care about is experiencing or at risk of domestic violence, contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline by texting “start” to 88788 or calling 800-799-SAFE (7233) or going to thehotline.org. The Department of Health and Human Services has also compiled a list of organizations by state.

This article was produced with the support of the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2024 Domestic Violence Impact Reporting Fund.

In an extraordinary monologue Tuesday at a Univision town hall, Donald Trump repeated the lie that the mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6—which he described using the pronoun “we”—was unarmed.

“There were no guns down there. We didn’t have guns. The others had guns, but we didn’t have guns,” Trump said. “That was a day of love.”

That is a lie. The latest evidence showing that Trump’s claim is false came in a guilty plea Wednesday by a Texas man named Roger Preacher. Preacher admitted to carrying a pistol on the grounds of the Capitol on January 6, though he knew that doing so was illegal.

Preacher said that he traveled to Washington with two other men who also brought “pistols and AR-style” rifles on the trip. They drove into Washington on January 6 from a Virginia hotel room with three rifles in a bag, the filing says. They left the bag in the car, but Preacher carried his pistol in “an inside-the-waistband holster “ to the lower West Terrace of the Capitol grounds where he remained for around an hour. Preacher said he believed the other two men “were also carrying firearms on their persons.”

Preacher’s admission adds to the heap of evidence that many people in the crowd outside the Capitol on January 6 had guns. Mother Jones compiled evidence of the many guns among January 6 perpetrators back in 2021, in a report based on public video footage, congressional testimony, and criminal cases.

Because police officers made few arrests on January 6 itself to limit violence, few of the attackers were caught with firearms on them. This has allowed the myth pushed by Trump and his allies that the crowd was unarmed to spread. But numerous cases since have revealed that some rioters carried weapons or, like members of the Oath Keepers militia, stashed arms nearby.

The House January 6 committee’s final report, released in 2022, cited police reports indicating that DC officers spotted numerous people descending on the National Mall that day who appeared to be carrying guns. Police stopped few of them, presumably because they feared being shot.

The committee’s report notes that many Trump supporters who arrived for his speech at the Ellipse that day were armed, and that White House officials, including Trump, knew that.

In testimony to the House committee detailed in its final report, Cassidy Hutchinson, who served as a top aide to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, said that Trump berated a top Secret Service official on January 6 because agents had placed magnetometers around the Ellipse, deterring some of his gun-toting fans from attending. “I don’t fucking care that they have weapons,” Trump said, according to Hutchinson. “They’re not here to hurt me.”

Preacher is one of around 1,500 people charged with crimes related to January 6, among them Trump himself. Special Counsel Jack Smith wrote in a filing on Tuesday that Trump was responsible for the attack. The former president, the filing said, “willfully caused his supporters to obstruct and attempt to obstruct the proceeding by summoning them to Washington, D.C.”

With the Federal Emergency Management Agency reeling from major staffing and funding shortages amid the impact of Hurricane Helene, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) refused on Sunday to commit to reconvening the House before Election Day to aid recovery efforts. In response to a letter from President Biden urging congressional leaders back to replenish federal disaster loan funding, Johnson said during a Fox News Sunday interview that he’d only do so after the election—all but ensuring the funds will run out.

The Small Business Administration’s disaster loan program offers low-interest loans to businesses as well as homeowners and renters in disaster areas, and is often the largest source of disaster recovery funds available to survivors. In the letter, Biden also reiterated the need for more disaster relief funds for FEMA, which he says will otherwise be forced to pause long-term recovery efforts related to previous disasters.

Earlier this year, FEMA was already forced to implement “immediate needs funding” restrictions, which paused funding for previous disasters. It’s very likely, without additional funding, that the agency would have to do so again, which would delay vital recovery projects and repairs that are essential for communities to rebuild and prepare for future crises.

Johnson pointed to the $20 billion Congress allocated for FEMA as part of a stopgap measure—then returned to his previously scheduled attacks on undocumented immigrants, who Johnson inexplicably blamed for the shortfall. While he did acknowledge that the streams of funding for FEMA’s disaster relief efforts are separate from those used to address immigration relief, he also attacked the Biden administration for supposedly “gleefully” reimbursing NGOs for transporting undocumented immigrants across the country. In reality, migrant relief efforts represent less than three percent of FEMA’s total annual budget—and the shortfall would still be there if these efforts stopped. 

In September of this year, as a response to FEMA implementing such restrictions, the National Association of Counties, along with nine other organizations, wrote a letter asking Congress to provide $6.1 billion in additional funding so FEMA could continue long-term recovery efforts. If every dollar spent in the last fiscal year on FEMA’s Shelter and Service Program—which provides migrant support—went to that end, it would still leave a gap of more than $5.3 billion for FEMA to restore its long-term recovery plans.

And while the $20 billion Johnson mentions did allow FEMA to do so, the stopgap measure was just that: the restrictions could easily come back into force as the total cost of Hurricane Helene continues to rise, and as Hurricane Milton—which is expected to be one of the most intense in history—makes landfall in Florida.      

With the Federal Emergency Management Agency reeling from major staffing and funding shortages amid the impact of Hurricane Helene, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) refused on Sunday to commit to reconvening the House before Election Day to aid recovery efforts. In response to a letter from President Biden urging congressional leaders back to replenish federal disaster loan funding, Johnson said during a Fox News Sunday interview that he’d only do so after the election—all but ensuring the funds will run out.

The Small Business Administration’s disaster loan program offers low-interest loans to businesses as well as homeowners and renters in disaster areas, and is often the largest source of disaster recovery funds available to survivors. In the letter, Biden also reiterated the need for more disaster relief funds for FEMA, which he says will otherwise be forced to pause long-term recovery efforts related to previous disasters.

Earlier this year, FEMA was already forced to implement “immediate needs funding” restrictions, which paused funding for previous disasters. It’s very likely, without additional funding, that the agency would have to do so again, which would delay vital recovery projects and repairs that are essential for communities to rebuild and prepare for future crises.

Johnson pointed to the $20 billion Congress allocated for FEMA as part of a stopgap measure—then returned to his previously scheduled attacks on undocumented immigrants, who Johnson inexplicably blamed for the shortfall. While he did acknowledge that the streams of funding for FEMA’s disaster relief efforts are separate from those used to address immigration relief, he also attacked the Biden administration for supposedly “gleefully” reimbursing NGOs for transporting undocumented immigrants across the country. In reality, migrant relief efforts represent less than three percent of FEMA’s total annual budget—and the shortfall would still be there if these efforts stopped. 

In September of this year, as a response to FEMA implementing such restrictions, the National Association of Counties, along with nine other organizations, wrote a letter asking Congress to provide $6.1 billion in additional funding so FEMA could continue long-term recovery efforts. If every dollar spent in the last fiscal year on FEMA’s Shelter and Service Program—which provides migrant support—went to that end, it would still leave a gap of more than $5.3 billion for FEMA to restore its long-term recovery plans.

And while the $20 billion Johnson mentions did allow FEMA to do so, the stopgap measure was just that: the restrictions could easily come back into force as the total cost of Hurricane Helene continues to rise, and as Hurricane Milton—which is expected to be one of the most intense in history—makes landfall in Florida.