China’s Leader, Under Fire, Says He Led Coronavirus Fight Early On
Amy Qin




a group of people standing in front of a crowd posing for the camera: President Xi Jinping visiting a Beijing neighborhood this past week, in a photograph released by the state news agency Xinhua.Next Slide
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1/4 SLIDES © Pang Xinglei/Xinhua, via Associated Press

President Xi Jinping visiting a Beijing neighborhood this past week, in a photograph released by the state news agency Xinhua.

Under fire for its response to the coronavirus epidemic, China’s authoritarian government appears to be pushing a new account of events that presents President Xi Jinping as taking early action to fight the outbreak that has convulsed the country.


But in doing so, the authorities have acknowledged for the first time that Mr. Xi was aware of the epidemic and involved in the response nearly two weeks before he first spoke publicly about it — and while officials at its epicenter in the city of Wuhan were still playing down its dangers.

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That new account risks drawing the president, China’s most powerful leader in decades, directly into questions about whether top officials did too little, too late.


[Read the latest updates on the coronavirus epidemic here.]

In an internal speech published on Saturday, Mr. Xi said he had “issued demands about the efforts to prevent and control” the coronavirus on Jan. 7, during a meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee, the highest council of the Communist Party, whose sessions are typically cloaked in secrecy.

In the speech, he also said he had authorized the unprecedented lockdown of Wuhan and other cities beginning on Jan. 23.

“I have at every moment monitored the spread of the epidemic and progress in efforts to curtail it, constantly issuing oral orders and also instructions,” Mr. Xi said of his more recent involvement.

Mr. Xi’s advisers may have hoped that publishing the speech, delivered on Feb. 3. would dispel speculation about his recent retreat from public view and reassure his people that he can be trusted to lead them out of the epidemic. The virus so far has officially infected more than 68,000 people and killed more than 1,650 worldwide, the vast majority in mainland China.

“The overall tone of the speech appears to be defensive,” said Minxin Pei, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in California. “He wants to change the narrative, which until this point has been very unfavorable to the top leadership.”

Delivered at a meeting with top party officials, when the epidemic had already spiraled into a national crisis, the speech could expose Mr. Xi to criticism that he didn’t treat the initial threat urgently enough, and make it difficult for him to shift blame onto local officials for what many see as the government’s early mishandling of the epidemic.

The remarks also raise questions about what top leaders knew at the time and what instructions they issued based on that knowledge.


That Mr. Xi convened a meeting of China’s highest political body in early January indicates that the coronavirus was already being seen as a matter of high-level concern — making his subsequent silence even more conspicuous, experts say. An official account of the Jan. 7 Standing Committee meeting issued at the time by Xinhua, the state news agency, made no mention of a discussion of the coronavirus.


“It seems like he’s trying to indicate that ‘we weren’t asleep at the wheel,’” said Jude Blanchette, the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But it comes off like ‘we knew this was a problem, but we weren’t sounding the alarm.’”

In the speech this month, Mr. Xi signaled his displeasure with lower-level bureaucrats for their “shortcomings” in implementing the party’s top-level directives.

In early January, officials in Wuhan were giving open assurances that human-to-human transmission of the virus was unlikely. Some government experts agreed.

“For now, it seems there is no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission,” Xu Jianguo, a senior expert on communicable diseases at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said in an interview in early January with Ta Kung Pao, a Hong Kong newspaper. “This shows that the threat level from this virus is limited.”

The new information places Mr. Xi’s involvement in fighting the epidemic much earlier than was previously known. His earliest public comment on the epidemic came on Jan. 20, when he gave brief instructions that were published in state media.

In the days after Mr. Xi’s Jan. 7 orders were issued, politicians in Wuhan met for the annual meeting of the city’s People’s Congress, its party-controlled legislature. Over that time, the Wuhan health commission’s daily bulletins on the outbreak said repeatedly that there were no new cases of infection, no firm evidence of human-to-human transmission and no infection of medical workers.

But signs were growing that politicians and government experts underestimated the potency of the new coronavirus. On Jan. 9, a 61-year-old man surnamed Zeng died — the earliest confirmed fatality from the virus. Already, some doctors in Wuhan hospitals were worried enough to warn friends and propose special wards for patients showing symptoms of infection.

Even after Mr. Xi made his first public remarks about the epidemic on Jan. 20, he mostly kept it at the bottom of his public agenda. On the day before the Lunar New Year holiday began in late January, he took the stage at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing and declared his success in guiding China through a difficult year — making no mention of the virus that was already spreading fear throughout the country.

As he spoke, Wuhan, a city of 11 million, was going into lockdown mode, in a desperate attempt to stop the virus from spreading.

Mr. Xi’s first public appearance after the lockdown of Wuhan on Jan. 23 came two days later, when he presided over a meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee.

“We’re sure to be able to win in this battle,” he proclaimed.

But in the days after, he all but disappeared from public view, emerging only a handful of times to preside over Communist Party meetings and to meet foreign visitors, including the director-general of the World Health Organization and Cambodia’s autocratic leader Hun Sen. In the meantime, he directed the country’s No. 2 leader, Li Keqiang, to lead the group handling the emergency, effectively turning him into the public face of the response.

For days, Mr. Xi’s absence from public view fueled speculation that he was trying to shield his own reputation by taking a back seat in the fast-unfolding crisis. In the past week, he has returned to center stage in an apparent effort to swat away such talk.

This past week, Mr. Xi went to a neighborhood center in Beijing, a hospital and a center for disease control in what state media billed as a visit to the “front line” of China’s efforts to combat the epidemic. He has yet to visit Hubei, the province at the center of the epidemic.

A few days later, Mr. Xi fired two top Communist Party officials in Hubei, a move intended to calm simmering public anger and contain the political fallout.

By publishing the Feb. 3 speech now, experts say, Mr. Xi appears to be staking his reputation on the outcome of the epidemic fight.

“What’s really interesting in the speech is there’s a lot of the word ‘I’ in it,” said Mr. Blanchette, of Center for Strategic and International Studies. “This is clearly putting himself at the center of Beijing’s response to this while also falling back on the old excuse of blaming cadres for longstanding pathologies of China’s political system.”

The Feb. 3 speech was published by Qiushi, or Seeking Truth, the Communist Party’s top doctrinal journal. It is rare for such an internal speech to be published in full so quickly.

In the speech, Mr. Xi described the efforts to end the epidemic as a “people’s war” and he singled out two key battlegrounds: Hubei Province, where the infections and deaths have been concentrated, and Beijing, the capital.

He also acknowledged that the epidemic and the fight to curtail it were likely to hurt the economy, slowing production and cooling trade.

In response, Mr. Xi said the government would provide financial support for businesses, help migrant workers return to their jobs and step up support for construction projects. He said the blow to consumer spending could be offset by encouraging spending in new areas, such as 5G phone networks, as well as online entertainment and education.

He also emphasized the importance of taking control of the narrative and winning over public opinion at home and abroad.

“There must be closer monitoring and assessment of opinion, proactively speaking out and giving positive guidance,” Mr. Xi said of Chinese public sentiment.

“Seize the initiative and effectively shape international opinion,” he added.

CLIMATE CHANGE
UK issues rare 'danger to life' warning over Storm Dennis
AFP







Slide 1 of 11: A woman struggles with an umbrella in strong winds on the Millennium Bridge, in central London, as Storm Dennis is causing a second weekend of disruption with bad weather wreaking havoc across the UK. (Photo by Dominic Lipinski/PA Images via Getty Images)Next Slide
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1/11 SLIDES © Dominic Lipinski/PA Images/Getty Images

As Storm Dennis sweeps in, the country is bracing itself for widespread weather disruption for the second weekend in a row. Experts have warned that conditions amount to a "perfect storm", with hundreds of homes at risk of flooding.(Pictured) A woman struggles with an umbrella in strong winds on Feb. 15 in central London, as Storm Dennis is causing a second weekend of disruption with bad weather wreaking havoc across the UK.

Slideshow by Photo Services


Storm Dennis swept across Britain on Sunday with the army drafted in to help deal with heavy flooding and high winds, officials warning it could be "life-threatening" in South Wales.

The government weather agency issued a rare red warning for the area, saying there was a risk of "significant impacts from flooding" that included a "danger to life from fast flowing water, extensive flooding to property and road closures".

Almost 200 flood warnings were in place early on Sunday, extending from Scotland's River Tweed to Cornwall in southwest England.

Winds of over 90 miles per hour (150 kilometres per hour) were recorded in Aberdaron, south Wales.

The Ministry of Defence had earlier deployed troops in West Yorkshire, northern England, which suffered badly from flooding caused by last weekend's Storm Ciara.

"Our armed forces are always ready to support local authorities and communities whenever they need it," said defence minister Ben Wallace.

British Airways and easyJet confirmed they had grounded flights, while two bodies were pulled from rough seas off the south England coast on Saturday as the storm barrelled in.

One of the men is assumed to have been the subject of a search triggered when an LPG tanker reported that one of its crew was unaccounted for.

He was last seen several hours earlier.

jwp/jxb

CLIMATE CHANGE
Mississippi braces for flooding amid cresting river

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves declared a state of emergency Saturday amid predictions that a river running in the area around the state capital of Jackson could burst its banks and spark widespread flooding.

Forecasters believe the Pearl River will crest at 38 feet (11.6 meters) Sunday evening to levels not seen in decades, following days of torrential rains across the Southeast. Reeves said the state should prepare for “the third worst flood” in its history.

“This is a historic, unprecedented flood,” Reeves said via Twitter.
Parts of Jackson and suburban Ridgeland were under evacuation orders, and some people had already filled trucks with furniture and other belongings to get out. Reeves said more than 2,400 homes and other structures in and near Jackson could either be inundated or isolated by the rising waters. That includes 1,925 structures in Hinds County, 461 in Rankin County and 31 in Madison Count.

“Have a plan to protect yourself and a plan to protect your loved ones,” Reeves said.

Although the sun was shining Saturday in central Mississippi, Reeves and Mississippi Emergency Management Agency director Greg Michel said people in low-lying areas should not be complacent about leaving because the river was expected to crest at night and remain high for days, with rain in the forecast for Sunday and Monday.

“Do not wait until water gets into your house to evacuate,” Michel urged.

Officials were bracing for what could be the worst flooding in Jackson since 1983. Nicholas Fenner, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Jackson, said the Pearl River crested at 43.2 feet on April 17, 1979 — its highest level. The second-highest level occurred May 5, 1983, when the river got up to 39.58 feet. He also said there was between $500 million and $700 million worth of damage in 1979, which saw 15,000 people evacuated.

The area is currently under blue skies, but Fenner warned residents against complacency.

“Even though the weather has improved, the water will be rising soon. Don’t get lulled into a false sense of security,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Ross Barnett Reservoir is approaching capacity, which led officials to announce that they would begin slowly releasing water at 6 p.m. Saturday. WLBT-TV reported the move is an attempt to keep flooding to a minimum downstream, and to allow extra time for residents to get to higher ground.

John Sigman, manager of the Pearl River Water Supply District, had a phone conference with the National Weather Service and the Army Corp of Engineers on Friday. They said that areas north of the main lake have crested and were beginning to fall and described that as good news.

The crest at the reservoir is now expected Sunday morning. Officials told the television station they are holding their outflow right now at 65,000 cubic feet per second and will hold there for 48 hours, giving people downstream time to get out.



 Provided by Associated Press

The restrooms on the Madison County side of the Ross Barnett Reservoir Spillway Park are about the only structure still visible as floodwaters have covered both sides of the popular fishing and boat landing in central Mississippi, Friday, Feb. 14, 2020. The gates to the Ross Barnett Reservoir Spillway Park are chained closed as floodwaters have covered both sides of the popular fishing and boat landing in Rankin County, Miss., Friday, Feb. 14, 2020. On Sunday, the river is expected to crest at 38 feet. Only twice before has the Pearl River surpassed 38 feet — during the historic floods of 1979 and 1983. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)


A soccer complex in northeast Jackson, Miss., Friday, Feb. 14, 2020, is underwater from flooding. As of Friday afternoon, the Pearl River was at 35.48 feet, which is more than 7 feet above flood stage. (AP Photo/RoSolis)

The next deadly pathogen could come from a rogue scientist. Here’s how we can prevent that.

DNA synthesis is driving innovations in biology. But gaps in screening mechanisms risk the release of deadly pathogens.

By Kelsey Piper Feb 11, 2020

DNA synthesis and assembly, once expensive, is now cheap and widely used for critical biology research. Getty Images/fStop
This story is part of a group of stories called

Finding the best ways to do good.


In the past few years, something new has become possible in biology: cheaply “printing” DNA for insertion into a cell.

That means a scientist who needs a particular DNA sequence to, say, create new bacteria for research can now order that DNA sequence from a lab. That might seem like a niche technology — how many biologists need to custom-print their own DNA? — but DNA synthesis and assembly (as the “printing” process is called) are actually useful for an astonishing variety of research uses, and could have far-reaching implications for how we live. In labs around the world, tons of critically important, valuable biology research is advancing thanks to DNA synthesis, and things look likely to get even better as DNA synthesis gets even cheaper.

But as is often the case when a scientific field gets a lot better at what it does very quickly, progress in DNA synthesis has been so fast that coordination against bad actors has lagged. As a private individual, I can send a DNA sequence I’d like synthesized to dozens of labs around the world that can print it out and send it to me.

But what if I asked them to print for me the genetic code of the influenza that caused the 1918 flu that killed millions of people? What if I sent them the instructions for a new disease that I have reason to believe is dangerous? What if I was doing legitimate research, but my lab didn’t adhere to modern safety standards?

The answer is that a few DNA synthesis companies will send me what I asked for, with no screening to check whether they’re sending out a pathogen that ought to be carefully controlled. (Synthetic DNA is not a live virus, of course; I’d have to be a talented biologist with specialized knowledge, lots of resources, and access to expensive tools to use it maliciously.)

Some companies — including most industry-leading ones — do follow US guidelines that require a background check and also check the DNA sequence against a list of known hazardous ones and would stop me from making this dangerous order — but a recent report found no evidence of any laws requiring laboratories to follow those guidelines in any country in the world. Doing so adds some time and expense to the ordering process, so there is some incentive to cut corners.


That’s why many experts argue that we need to do better. Their proposals on how to fix the system vary, but they all agree on one thing: I shouldn’t be allowed to order myself the 1918 influenza or a new coronavirus off the internet and have it delivered to my home.

And to establish screening for DNA orders on a global scale will take large-scale international coordination — and so far, we have struggled to coordinate even for simpler countermeasures.
How DNA synthesis works

A few decades ago, researchers embarked on the Human Genome Project, which tried to determine the base pairs that make up all of human DNA. It was a 13-year project of enormous scope and complexity. The government had to invest billions of dollars to make it happen.

Since then, the world of genetics has changed. New technology has made us a lot better at scanning — and manipulating — DNA. It now costs about $1,000, instead of billions, to sequence a full human genome. Other critical aspects of genetics research are getting cheaper too.

Of particular importance? DNA synthesis.

When researchers wanted to produce copies of a DNA sequence they’re studying, they used to have no choice but to painstakingly clone an organism with the DNA they want, inserting or removing genes with splicing techniques. Now, that has changed. With today’s techniques, we can artificially build DNA sequences, adding one base pair at a time, in a lab.

The process is fairly cheap and getting cheaper — only about 8 cents per base pair added in this fashion — though it does still add up with something as big as the human genome. But for many smaller projects, getting the DNA you need synthesized is a viable option. If I have on my computer a sequence of DNA which I want to work with in the lab, I can send those instructions to a DNA synthesis service — and they’ll send back the DNA, ready for lab work.

Let’s consider a researcher who has modified the genome of a bacterium so that it will produce human insulin. Just a few years ago, it would have been expensive and an enormous hassle to get her DNA sequence “printed” — all of the base pairs attached in order — so that she could insert it into an organism and start her experiment. Just a few years before that, it would have been basically impossible.

But today, doing this is quite affordable. That’s amazing news for researchers, who can cheaply and quickly order DNA sequences online and get the DNA they asked for delivered straight to them at a reasonable price.

Let’s be clear: This is great news. Advances in our ability to synthesize DNA open lots of avenues for promising new research. Researchers can test custom sequences and arrive at a better understanding of gene sequences and what they do. Progress on this front will make for better medicine, better crops, and better production of proteins we need for industrial processes.

But there’s a critical security problem to be solved as DNA synthesis gets cheaper and easier.
Why screening for dangerous pathogens is hard

Since DNA can be both beneficial and dangerous, experts agree that screening should happen. But most countries don’t have laws or even guidelines on how to do it.

“DNA is an inherently dual-use technology,” James Diggans, who works on biosecurity at the industry-leading Twist Bioscience, told me. What that means is DNA synthesis makes fundamental biology research and lifesaving drug development go faster, but it can also be used to do research that can be potentially deadly for humanity. That’s the problem that biosecurity researchers — in industry, in academia, and in the government — are faced with today: trying to figure out how to make DNA synthesis faster and cheaper for its many beneficial uses while ensuring every printed sequence is screened and hazards are appropriately handled.


Where does policy stand on this? The US government has guidelines intended to prevent dangerous incidents, and If I went to a company like Twist, where Diggans works, and asked for a DNA sequence, they would conduct a background check to determine “Is the customer on a watchlist, are there reasons to worry?” Diggans told me. They’d ensure I had a license and ship only to a legitimate lab.

The next step? “Screen the sequence,” said Diggans — or check my request to compare it to known prohibited pathogens. If they noticed I was requesting a dangerous influenza virus, they would follow up with me to learn more about what I’m researching.

But not every company follows those guidelines (though most synthetic DNA is produced by companies that do abide by them, and the International Gene Synthesis Consortium polices its members). And the guidelines don’t cover short sequences, which are a growing share of biology research.

“The technology has kind of outpaced where the government regulators are,” Diggans told me.

So new screening — and new regulations backing the international use of that screening — is needed. The aim of a new screening regime should be to ensure that requests for DNA are checked to determine whether they contain prohibited, dangerous sequences, without adding too much to the expense of screening and without slowing down legitimate researchers, who should be able to access DNA for their projects cheaply and quickly.

“We have this window of time to get screening right,” Beth Cameron, who works on mechanisms for preventing illicit gene synthesis at the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), told me. NTI is a nonprofit focused on global catastrophic risks and works to prevent attacks and accidents with nuclear, biological, and chemical agents. Last month in Davos, Switzerland, NTI and the World Economic Forum recommended a new international effort to establish a common mechanism for screening DNA orders. The report recommends creating a technical consortium to build and launch that mechanism for use by companies and labs around the world, with the goal of making screening a norm.

The Nuclear Threat Initiative also recommends establishing a new global entity focused on preventing biotechnology catastrophes — a place whose mission is to oversee DNA synthesis screening. Since diseases can spread around the world, and DNA synthesis can be located anywhere, strong international cooperation is needed. Lots of international organizations are working together, but there’s no good institution to coordinate it.
Changing the incentives for DNA synthesis research

Another focus for biosecurity researchers should be on changing the incentives for how research is currently conducted.

Why do some companies choose not to screen? Well, screening is expensive. Comparing extremely long sequences of letters to a large database of prohibited sequences requires a lot of computer runtime. If a potential problem is identified, an expert biologist is needed to suss out whether there’s a real issue. “As DNA screening has gotten cheaper,” Cameron told me, “screening becomes a larger percentage of the cost.”

That puts companies that are doing the right thing at a competitive disadvantage.

So here’s another idea: Make grants for biologists who do research with DNA synthesis contingent on using labs that follow screening guidelines. Most of the grants for DNA research actually comes from the US government. By mandating that scientists only buy their DNA from organizations that are employing state-of-the-art, agreed-upon screening procedures — otherwise they don’t get the grant — we can turn DNA screening from a competitive disadvantage into a competitive advantage, and hopefully drive more labs to get on board.


“Those research dollars should go to companies that screen responsibly,” Diggans told me. With research dollars only going to compliant companies, companies that currently do not screen as encouraged by the US guidelines would likely start complying with them.
New technical approaches to screening

Some researchers think the system could be improved along other dimensions as well.

Kevin Esvelt, at MIT, is one of them. Esvelt led early research on CRISPR gene drives, and he’s been thinking about misuse of biotechnologies for just as long.

He points at a key limitation of even the best proposed screening programs. In order for companies to know what pathogens to screen for, they need to have a database with the DNA sequences of all the dangerous biological agents we know of — so they can cross-check between that database and requests from customers.

But maintaining that database creates some problems. If a new pathogen is added to it, then any bad actor can see that it was added and knows it might be an interesting threat. If a bad actor wants to get dangerous DNA past the screening process, they can review the database and learn whether their sequence will be flagged. That’s why lots of secure systems do not make the details of what test you have to pass publicly available.

There are a few ways to solve this problem. One is to aim to design a comprehensive screening system that is safe even if people have full access to the database of potential hazards.

Esvelt’s proposed solution goes in the other direction, by arranging for the database to be secure and inaccessible. His proposal is the product of work by cryptographers as well as biologists. The line of research has a few elements.

Current DNA screening sometimes requires an expert to review a potential match and determine whether it’s a real match. This is expensive, takes up a lot of time, and requires a database of hazards.

Esvelt and the researchers he works with want to make some major changes. The key idea is that they want to develop a comparison system that counts only exact matches, instead of the “near-matches” counted under current systems. That’d reduce false positives and make it possible to automate screening. It’d also mean we don’t need to compare each new customer request with the full genome of every dangerous biological agent out there. Instead, we can pick some essential segments of dangerous biological agents — segments that those agents couldn’t function without. (We could also find alternate versions of those segments that are predicted to have the same functionality.)

That would ideally mean there’s less to screen for — making screening faster — without missing any dangerous pathogens the old method would have caught. And there wouldn’t be the need for a database of full sequences that could lead to disaster if it fell into the wrong hands. Instead, the database would be distributed and encrypted so no one could access it but everyone could compare sequences to it.
Getting serious about keeping DNA research safe and secure

Not every expert I spoke to was convinced that all the measures above were necessary — or even feasible to get international agreement on. Experts are divided about whether hash matching — Esvelt’s approach — would be an improvement on the current gold standard for screening, IARPA’s Fun GCAT. But all of them agreed that to make progress on DNA research security, screening needs to get faster, cheaper, and better coordinated.


Technological solutions will almost certainly be a significant part of the picture as we make DNA screening safe and cheap enough that it can be universal. (One complication to look out for: The technology is now arriving for biology labs to have their own “bench-top” DNA synthesis. These machines can be equipped from the outset to conduct screening. But if they’re released without any of the capabilities that would make screening possible, it’ll be very hard — perhaps impossible — to retrofit that in later.)

But legal and regulatory changes, and international cooperation, will have to be a significant part of the picture too. “It’s been about coalition building between companies like Twist, nonprofits, and governments internationally,” Diggans told me of Twist’s work on screening.

“Over the last two years, we have seen a tremendous sense of urgency from companies and technical experts in developing a global process,” Cameron said about the NTI Biosecurity Innovation and Risk Reduction Initiative. “But there’s a lot of work to make biosecurity a mainstream part of technology research and development.”

Any technical solution will only make the world safer to the extent that governments and research funders around the world can adopt it and help make it happen.

Trump’s 2021 budget proposal doesn’t stop at the border wall

Immigration detention and the immigration enforcement agencies would get a big boost.

By Nicole Narea@nicolenarea Feb 10, 2020

US President Donald Trump visits the US-Mexico border

fence in Otay Mesa, California, on September 18, 2019.

 Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images


President Donald Trump may be proposing trillions in spending cuts over the next decade in his 2021 budget request — but none of the cuts would affect the immigration enforcement agencies, which would instead get a significant boost.

The president would invest heavily in construction of his southern border wall, expanding immigration detention and staffing up the immigration agencies. It’s another way to show voters that he’s tough on immigration as he goes up for reelection.

During his time in office, Trump has built, layer by layer, impediments in Central America, at the border, in detention centers, and in the immigration courts that have made obtaining asylum nearly impossible.

And he has swept aside former President Barack Obama’s immigration enforcement priorities in favor of vastly expanding immigration detention and prosecuting every immigrant who crosses the border without authorization. The result is a punitive system that treats immigrants as criminals and places them in prolonged detention even if they don’t pose any danger to the public.

His budget proposal for the coming fiscal year would continue to advance that agenda.

The proposal includes $2 billion to construct an additional 82 miles of wall, which is likely to face pushback among the House’s Democratic majority. Trump has already constructed 101 miles of wall and plans to construct an additional 475 miles, according to the proposal, costing an estimated $18.4 billion and making it the most expensive wall of any kind worldwide.

Trump has sparred with Congress for years over funding for the wall, his signature campaign promise from 2016. It even led to a government shutdown in December 2018 after he refused to sign a funding bill that offered anything less than $5 billion for the wall. And after Congress refused to give him what he wanted, he sidestepped Democratic lawmakers and redirected military funds to border wall construction anyway with the Supreme Court’s blessing.


But this year’s funding request goes much further than just Trump’s border wall: It represents a massive expansion of the administration’s immigration enforcement apparatus, of which the wall is only a small part.

Trump would scale up immigration detention and the administration’s capacity to take migrant children into custody. He’s asking for $3.1 billion to increase the capacity of immigration detention centers to house 60,000 people at any given time, even though Congress had previously ordered him to decrease capacity to about 40,000 and the existence of viable alternatives to detention. And he wants $4 billion to care for unaccompanied migrant children once they’re transferred from immigration custody to the Department of Health and Human Services.

His budget proposal also calls for a total of $1.6 billion to significantly increase staffing across the immigration agencies. He would hire another 1,050 Border Patrol officials, more than 4,600 new US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, and 100 new immigration judges in an effort to drive down their over 1 million-case backlog and additional support staff.

He would also allocate a total of $126 million to support his Migrant Protection Protocols, also known as the “remain in Mexico” policy, under which more than 60,000 migrants have been sent back to Mexico to wait on a decision on their asylum applications in the US. The vast majority of that money would go to the operation of temporary tent court facilities in US border towns, where Democrats say migrants affected by MPP aren’t getting fair hearings.
What the administration could be funding instead

While immigration enforcement would get a big boost under Trump’s funding proposal, resources supporting immigrants would get slashed.

Most significantly, the proposal would cut foreign aid by 21 percent. It not only represents an abdication of the US’s obligations to aid Central American countries struggling with their own migration crises, but, as my colleague Alex Ward writes, it could actually deepen those problems.

Hundreds of thousands have fled violence and the lack of economic opportunity in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras — collectively known as Central America’s Northern Triangle — over the past several years.

After Trump froze $450 million in aid to those three countries last year, more migrants from there started arriving at the US border. Last May, the number of migrants apprehended at the southern border, most of which were from Northern Triangle countries, peaked at 130,000 (though those numbers have since declined).

Eric Schwartz, the president of the refugee advocacy group Refugees International, said in a statement that the cuts to international and humanitarian aid defy bipartisan majorities in Congress and would be a “flight from US leadership” on helping the most vulnerable.

“The irony is that President Trump, Secretary [Mike] Pompeo, and others in the Trump administration continually boast about the generosity of the United States,” he said. “It’s high time that their actions match their words.”

Trump’s emphasis on immigration enforcement in his budget proposal also ignores other deficiencies in the immigration system that could be rectified with more funding.

For example, there’s a shortage of asylum officers and translators available to help process migrants at the border, many of whom are forced to live in dangerous, inhumane conditions in Mexico while they wait for an answer on their asylum applications. To deal with the shortage, the administration has instead resorted to appointing US Customs and Border Protection officers to conduct initial asylum screenings, which the American Civil Liberties Union has called a “blatant effort to rig the system against asylum seekers.”

Hiring more asylum officers could help shorten the time migrants have to wait and would improve their access to a fair, non-adversarial process.

There are also about 700,000 immigrants waiting for their naturalization applications to be processed for an average of 10 to 18 months — far longer than the six months they’re supposed to wait under immigration law. Immigrants in the military can have even longer wait times.

It’s no surprise that wait times have skyrocketed since Trump has increased vetting of all legal immigrants. But he hasn’t invested enough in beefing up staffing at US Citizenship and Immigration Services — the agency tasked with processing visa, green card, and citizenship applications — to keep up with the increased workload.

And that’s only a couple of examples of what Trump’s funding to immigration enforcement could do.

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to Jeff Bezos: Overhaul Amazon’s “profit-at-all-costs culture”

Fifteen senators want Amazon to publish worker injury reports. Amazon wants them to come take a warehouse tour.

By Jason Del Rey@DelRey Feb 10, 2020, 6:30pm EST

Protesters hold anti-Amazon banners and placards at a protest against a new Amazon warehouse in France in January 2020. JEAN-CHRISTOPHE VERHAEGEN/AFP via Getty Images


Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and 13 other Democratic US senators have a message for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos: Change your business practices, or else.

In a public letter addressed to Bezos Friday, the senators urged Amazon to “overhaul [the] profit-at-all-costs culture at your company” and implement changes at the online retail giant. They also want Amazon to publish records of serious worker injuries.

“Amazon’s dismal safety record indicates a greater concern for profits than for your own workers’ safety and health,” the letter read.

The letter referenced safety records from Amazon’s warehouse network that appeared to show higher-than-average injury rates, even for the warehousing industry. Those rates were originally disclosed in a November article from the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal group that was published in the Atlantic. Amazon argued at the time that the injury rates reflected its aggressiveness in recording injuries, and a spokesperson reiterated that stance in a statement on Monday.

The letter comes at a time when politicians, activists, and some of Amazon’s own employees have called Amazon out for the pace of work and labor conditions inside its warehouse and delivery networks. The criticism has become increasingly noteworthy as Amazon has expanded its reach into so many aspects of American life, from online retail to entertainment to the delivery of groceries and prescription drugs. Along the way, Bezos, the world’s richest man, has become a target for Warren and Sanders, who frame him and his riches as an example of capitalism gone awry.

“Nothing is more important to us than the safety and well-being of our employees,” Amazon spokesperson Kelly Cheeseman said. “OSHA is on the record as saying that underreporting of injuries is an industry-wide problem, and companies do this to keep their rates low — a former assistant secretary of OSHA estimated that 50 percent or more of severe injuries go unreported. Amazon does the opposite; we take an aggressive stance on recording injuries no matter how big or small. The invitation remains open for any of the Senators to come take a tour — last year over 300,000 people toured an Amazon fulfillment center and we appreciate that they took the time to learn the facts first-hand.”


Cheeseman confirmed to Recode that some of the senators who signed the letter have not taken Amazon up on touring one of its fulfillment centers. She declined to specify how many or which ones.

The letter, whose signatories also included Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), and Kamala Harris (D-CA), included seven other requests. One was to “reduce workers’ quotas and speed requirements,” and another asked Amazon to “cease including bathroom breaks as a ‘time off task,’” stemming from allegations that some Amazon workers have had to relieve themselves in bottles so their performance doesn’t suffer.

At least one of the requests — “Ensure workers ... have a guaranteed way to raise safety and health concerns” — appears to be one that Amazon already offers. On a visit to an Amazon fulfillment center last year, I observed a giant TV screen — called the Voice of Associate board — on which workers anonymously provided feedback to management. One of those pieces of feedback, highlighted in an episode of our Land of the Giants podcast about Amazon, was a worker telling management that they checked themself out of the hospital because they didn’t have someone to fill in for them. Cheeseman said these boards, whether digital screens or old-school whiteboards, are present in all Amazon warehouses.

The senators want a response by February 21.

News of the letter comes as Amazon’s head of communications and policy, Jay Carney, went on the offensive in a New York Times op-ed on Monday. In the piece, Carney argued that the company’s critics should acknowledge that “Amazon is doing many good things — for the economy, and for American workers.” Carney cited Amazon’s 2018 move to raise its minimum pay to $15 an hour as well as its Career Choice program, which “prepays up to 95 percent of tuition and fees — making it almost free for employees to learn new skills.”

He did not cite Amazon worker safety records.

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Why Utah is sending workers to Mexico to buy medicine

The state’s plan to send patients to Mexico to buy cheap drugs is an indictment of US health care.

By Dylan Scott@dylanlscottdylan.scott@vox.com Feb 10, 2020

The insurance plan for Utah government employees decided two years ago it had to do something to curb prescription drug costs. Its solution? Pay for workers to travel to Canada or Mexico to buy the same medications they’d been getting in the United States, just at much lower prices.

Today, the Utah insurer is saving hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on drugs for a handful of patients who need expensive medicines and make the trip abroad to get them. It’s not as much as they were originally hoping for, but enough that paying airfare plus a $500 bonus is still a worthwhile deal for the state to make.

Medical tourism is hardly a new phenomenon. Eight percent of Americans said in a 2016 Kaiser Family Foundation poll that they had purchased prescription drugs outside of the United States. US government surveys have estimated between 150,000 and 320,000 Americans annually name health care as their reason for traveling abroad. Lower costs are usually their motivation.

But to see it so deliberately deployed by a major health insurer as a cost-saving measure is unusual.

”While we have long heard stories of individuals or informal groups of patients crossing the border to buy cheaper drugs, it has not typically been a sanctioned part of the American health insurance system,” Caroline Pearson, senior fellow at NORC at the University of Chicago, told me. “The Utah ... example is the only case that I am aware of.”

Employers and health insurance plans are always looking for ways to cut costs, of course. That’s why they create provider networks in the first place.

Some employers will also send patients outside of their geographic area to high-quality health centers in the interest of lowering costs — according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 16 percent of employers have utilized these so-called “centers of excellence” and of those firms, about one in five will pay for travel and lodging expenses.


”This is just the natural extension, I suppose,” Walid Gellad, director of the Center for Pharmaceutical Policy and Prescribing at the University of Pittsburgh, said. “It is really something that they’re paying people to do this — not just paying for it, but paying people to do it.”

In brief, here is how the Utah government employee program works:

Patients taking one or more of 13 specialty drugs are eligible to participate

They can travel to Vancouver, Canada, or Tijuana, Mexico, to buy their prescriptions

They still make their usual copayments only

The state health insurance plan covers the cost of their airfare, transportation to and from the airport, and lodging if necessary

The state will also pay the patients $500 cash for making the trip

The health insurer works with a Mexico-based pharmacy to arrange the purchases and coordinate travel. From a great Salt Lake Tribune story on the program:

Flying from Salt Lake City to San Diego International Airport takes about two hours. At the base of the baggage claim escalator in San Diego, Javier Ojeda greets first-time patients with a name placard and a driver.

“We never leave [patients’] side,” said Ojeda, general manager of Provide Rx, the pharmacy that works with Hospital Angeles to obtain and dispense specialty drugs for U.S. patients. Provide Rx also makes all travel arrangements, including a motor service staffed by bilingual drivers, who escort patients out of the airport and into a van for the short drive south.

Of course, the only reason it’s worth going through all this trouble for the patients and their insurer is drug prices in the United States are so much higher than anywhere else, including Mexico and Canada.

Here are the international price comparisons for the arthritis medication Humira, one of the 13 drugs that qualify for the Utah program, via a report from House Democrats:

House Ways and Means Committee

So you can see why Utah’s insurance plan is eager to find cheaper prices for these drugs. But it turns out they really needed the $500 cash incentive to get people to take advantage of it.

According to the Tribune, the state insurance plan actually already had a longstanding policy to cover travel costs for patients who journeyed to Tijuana to have certain procedures done (to the same hospital where they now go to get prescriptions filled), but nobody took them up on it. It was the $500 in cash that seemed to make the difference.

It’s important to maintain some context here: Only 10 patients have actually made the trip to Mexico to buy cheaper drugs (though, remember, these are specialty drugs for expensive conditions — they are by definition pretty rare). So it’s not as if Utah is suddenly sending people in droves across the border.

The relatively low uptake means the state has saved “only” $225,000 through the program, not the $1 million they were hoping for, per the Tribune. Still, whatever savings there are can be used to lower premiums for everybody.

This is not a sustainable model for curbing health care costs. There are concerns, like making sure the medications bought in Mexico are safe to use. Gellad pointed out to me that one of the eligible drugs, Enbrel, can increase the risk of infection, so putting those patients on a plane to travel abroad is a risk to be wary of.

But this might be the best of a bunch of bad options until the US gets its house in order.

Throughout the Tribune’s story, consultants who advise employers on international medical tourism are quoted. There aren’t many specifics, but there is clearly a whole cottage industry out there to help US patients find cheaper health care abroad. It is a subtle, or not so subtle, indictment of our current health system.

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Tech billionaires give away billions — but it’s just a small fraction of their staggering wealth

Things look dandy until you dig into the numbers.

By Theodore Schleifer@teddyschleifer Feb 11, 2020

On the surface, tech billionaires are very, very generous people.

But when you dig into the numbers, a more complicated portrait emerges.

New data collected by the Chronicle of Philanthropy offers the best yearly snapshot of the United States’ 50 biggest philanthropists, and it’s no surprise that technologists once again rank among the biggest givers. That’s because they’re also the country’s richest people.

And you need to put those two facts — the scale of their generosity and the scale of their bank accounts — side by side when assessing their commitments to charity. That’s an essential assessment given that billionaires often use their philanthropy to resist attempts by governments to tax more of their wealth, even as some leading Democratic presidential candidates like Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren say they will tax the wealthy more if they’re elected in November.


Let’s not overgeneralize: Eric Schmidt, the largest tech philanthropist of 2019, gave $1.3 billion to charitable efforts. And while I have some concerns about the impact of the things Schmidt is funding, he committed about 9 percent of his net worth to the cause. That’s a lot.

Sheryl Sandberg has a net worth of $1.7 billion, meaning she devoted about 7.5 percent of her money to charitable causes with her $128 million in gifts.


But others on the tech philanthropy leaderboard? The headline figures are big, but they shrivel when put against their net worths.

Mark Zuckerberg gave just about as much as Sandberg to charity, but his $110 million is just 0.2 percent of his total assets, though a spokesperson for Zuckerberg’s personal philanthropy noted that it distributed $420 million in grants to nonprofits in 2019.

That’s 0.2 percent is the same percentage gifted by Sergey Brin, who ranked as the sixth-most generous tech philanthropist in 2019 (and he is putting money behind some innovative efforts).

Pierre Omidyar and Marc Benioff, who consistently rank among the industry’s most generous givers, sat in third and fourth place on the most recent list; both sent out about 3.5 percent of their net worths in 2019. (An Omidyar foundation has provided a grant to fund Recode’s Open Sourced project.)

And keep in mind, these are the country’s most generous donors. There are some major tech philanthropists who would make these donation rates seem like less of a pittance.

To be sure, donating hundreds of millions to charity — regardless of whether it’s motivated by tax reasons, spent on misguided projects, or buys them unmerited PR value — isn’t something that most people can boast of. So it’s easy for outsiders to attack them. But the percentage is important. Philanthropy journalist Marc Gunther points out that, dating back to the biblical notion of tithing, charitable gifts historically were weighed against the person’s resources.

And here’s the ultimate catch: Even as rich people strive to give away their money — some as part of intentional, well-meaning projects like the Giving Pledge — they keep getting richer.

For instance, consider Schmidt. Yes, he gave away $1.3 billion in 2019, cementing him as the country’s second-biggest philanthropist, regardless of industry. But his net worth grew by $3 billion during that same time period.

Brin and Zuckerberg both gave away $110 million in 2019. But Brin’s net worth grew by $14 billion, and Zuckerberg’s grew by $26 billion.

Needless to say, Zuckerberg’s charitable gifts are not making a dent in his attempt to part with all of his money before he dies. The same is true for most of the country’s biggest donors.

VOX SAYS
Mainstream Democrats shouldn’t fear Bernie Sanders

He’d be a strong nominee and a solid president.

By Matthew Yglesias@mattyglesiasmatt@vox.com Feb 11, 2020

Sen. Bernie Sanders in Columbia, South Carolina, January 20, 2020. Sean Rayford/Getty Images


Sen. Bernie Sanders’s win in New Hampshire following his quasi-win in Iowa dashes the Democratic Party establishment’s big hope of the past four years — that he’d just fade away.

Alarm, clearly visible in a range of mainstream Democratic circles over the past several weeks, is now going to kick into overdrive.

But this frame of mind is fundamentally misguided. For all the agita around his all-or-nothing rhetoric, his behavior as a longtime member of Congress (and before that as a mayor) suggests a much more pragmatic approach to actual legislating than some of the wilder “political revolution” rhetoric would suggest.

On the vast majority of issues, a Sanders administration would deliver pretty much the same policy outcomes as any other Democrat. The two biggest exceptions to this, foreign policy and monetary policy, happen to be where Sanders takes issue with an entrenched conventional wisdom that is deeply problematic.

Some of the anti-Sanders sentiment is driven by pique at his followers’ most obnoxious behavior. But it would be better to bring these voters into the tent than leave them outside attacking inward.

Sanders winning the popular vote in the Iowa caucuses is hardly the end of the 2020 Democratic primary. Joe Biden remains a formidable contender; there are many delegate-rich states with larger African American populations that should be more favorable to him, and it’s been known for a long time that the idiosyncrasies of the caucus structure give Sanders an edge he won’t have in future primaries.

And, obviously, nominating a 78-year-old self-described socialist is a risky move and not an outcome that would have been cooked up by political scientists working in an electability lab. But at this point, all the main contenders have some electability risks. Sanders comes with a strong electoral track record in practice, and he brings some unique assets to the table as someone who appeals precisely to the most fractious elements of the anti-Trump coalition.
Sanders has a strong electoral track record

The specter of “socialism” hangs over the Sanders campaign, terrifying mainstream Democrats with the reality that when asked about it by pollsters, most Americans reject the idea. Given that Sanders himself tends to anchor his politics in Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal, it seems as though everyone involved would be better off if he labeled himself a New Deal Democrat and let us revert to the normal pattern where Republicans call mainstream liberals “socialists” and liberals push back rather than accepting an unpopular label.


All that said, in current head-to-head polling matchups with Donald Trump, Sanders does well and is normally winning. Skeptics worry whether that lead will hold up against the sure-to-come cavalcade of attack ads from Trump. It’s a reasonable concern.

But it’s worth underscoring that Sanders’s actual electoral track record in Vermont is strong. Winning elections in Vermont is not, per se, incredibly impressive. There are plenty of left-wing Democrats who win elections while underperforming simply because they run in such blue states (Elizabeth Warren fits that mold), as well as plenty of moderate Democrats who overperform in tough races even while losing (former Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill is a good example).

Sanders, however, overperforms in his easy races. He consistently runs ahead of Democratic presidential nominees in his home state, which suggests he knows how to overcome the “socialist” label, get people to vote for him despite some eccentricities, and even peel off some Republican votes.

He first got to Congress by winning a tough three-way race in 1990, when Vermont was an only slightly blue-leaning state. He went on to consistently run ahead of Democratic presidential campaigns as a candidate for Vermont’s at-large seat in the US House of Representatives.
In 1992, Sanders got 58 percent to Bill Clinton’s 46 percent (it was a strong state for presidential candidate Ross Perot, but Sanders also faced a “third-party” challenge from a Democrat).
In 1996, Sanders got 55 percent to Clinton’s 53 percent.
In 2000, he got 69 percent to Al Gore’s 51 percent.
In 2004, he got 67 percent to John Kerry’s 59 percent.
Sanders got elected to the Senate in 2006, so he wasn’t on the ballot in 2008 or 2016. But in 2012, he won 71 percent to Obama’s 67 percent.

This is not definitive proof of Sanders’s skills. But it would have been easy for Vermonters who had doubts about Sanders to cast meaningless protest votes for his opponents.

Instead, Sanders appears to be able to make lemonade out of the whole “not officially a Democrat” thing by getting the votes of some non-Republicans who backed Perot in the 1990s and, more recently, other third-party candidates such as Jill Stein, Ralph Nader, and Gary Johnson. Indeed, one noteworthy thing about Sanders is that in head-to-head polling matchups against Trump, he tends to do better than you’d expect simply by looking at his favorable ratings.

And, critically, Sanders’s popularity seems to be concentrated among certain blocks of persuadable voters (likely those considering a third-party vote), while a chunk of those who disapprove of Sanders are hardcore partisan Democrats who don’t like his lack of party spirit but will vote for him anyway.
Sanders knows how to govern effectively

Mainstream Democrats also worry at times that Sanders would simply prove too extreme to get things done as president. And, indeed, on occasion his campaign lapses into rhetoric that suggests an unreasonable aversion to compromise.



There is no “middle ground” when it comes to climate policy. If we don't commit to fully transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels, we will doom future generations. Fighting climate change must be our priority, whether fossil fuel billionaires like it or not.— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) May 10, 2019

But it’s worth remembering that Sanders is a 30-year veteran of the US Congress, not a 20-something hardliner with a red rose on his Twitter bio. We can evaluate his actual track record as a politician.

In that capacity, Sanders has sometimes staked out lonely, courageous stands (against the Iraq War or the Defense of Marriage Act, which barred same-sex couples from enjoying the same federal benefits as married couples). He’s also frequently cast meaningless protest votes against big bipartisan compromises that sail through with huge majorities. But he’s never pulled a Freedom Caucus-type stunt and refused to cast a pragmatic vote in favor of half a loaf.


Sanders has always talked about his blue-sky political ideals as something he believed in passionately, but he separated that idealism from his practical legislative work, which was grounded in vote counts. He voted for President Barack Obama’s Children’s Health Insurance Program reauthorization bill in 2009, and again for the Affordable Care Act in 2010. He voted for the Dodd-Frank bill and every other contentious piece of Obama-era legislation.

Indeed, this has been somewhat forgotten in the wake of the 2016 primary campaign: While Obama was in the White House, it was Sen. Elizabeth Warren who attracted the ire of administration officials and congressional leaders by occasionally spiking executive branch nominees or blowing up bipartisan deals.

The policy area in which Sanders has had the most practical influence is veterans-related issues, as he chaired the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee for a two-year span, during which Congress enacted substantive reform to the veterans’ health system.

Given the objective constellation of political forces at the time, this required bipartisan support, so Sanders (working mainly with Republican Sen. John McCain) produced a bipartisan bill that, in exchange for a substantial boost in funding, made some concessions to conservatives in creating “private options” for veterans to seek care outside of the publicly run Department of Veterans Affairs.

It’s fine if you want to be annoyed that Sanders’s self-presentation as a revolutionary who will sweep all practical obstacles aside is at odds with his reality as an experienced legislator who does typical senator stuff in a typical way. But there’s no reason to be worried that Sanders is a deluded radical who doesn’t understand how the government works.
Sanders’s annoying fans count in his favor

One of the odd developments of the social media era is that the extremely online set — which is not most people but does include a huge number of journalists, think tankers, activists, and other influential people — reacts as much to their perceptions of different candidates’ support bases as to the candidates themselves.

MSNBC host Joy Reid, for example, is a frequent Bernieworld antagonist and over the weekend posted a poll showing that Sanders fans were much less likely than Biden or Warren supporters to commit to backing the eventual nominee come what may.



Poll: Will you support the Democratic nominee even if it is not your candidate? #AMJoy pic.twitter.com/Cb1IwxadLT— AM Joy w/Joy Reid (@amjoyshow) February 1, 2020

Her followers, in turn, reacted by castigating Sanders voters as “useless” and “a cult-like following,” while one observed this “looks bad for Sanders.”

John Weaver, one of the leading Never Trump ex-Republican personalities, sniffed, “one of them isn’t a Democrat.”



One of them isn't a Democrat— John Weaver (@jwgop) February 2, 2020

It is all well and good to be annoyed by people who will not commit to voting Trump out of office regardless of the identity of the Democratic Party nominee. But if you are a person who worries about electability, which many highly partisan Democrats are, then you are by definition a person who worries about courting the votes of people who will not commit to voting Trump out of office regardless of the identity of the Democratic Party nominee. The fact that Sanders has unusually strong support among people like that is a strength of his campaign, not a weakness.


Whenever I make this point, mainstream Democrats get grouchy and start grumbling about how you don’t negotiate with terrorists or give in to your toddler when he’s throwing a fit.

Those are funny analogies, but any effort to court swing voters has that same basic structure. Party loyalists are asked to make concessions to the views of people who are not loyalists, precisely because the non-loyalists’ irresponsibility and flightiness gives them more objective leverage. But if you pull it off successfully, what party loyalists get in exchange is partisan electoral victories — exactly the thing that, by definition, is most important to party loyalists.

If you’re a loyalist, it’s natural to feel grumpy about the non-loyalists who love Sanders, but if you’re trying to win the election you need to get the votes of non-loyalists. By the same token, if you’re annoyed by Sanders’s Twitter’s attacks on mainstream Democrats, you’ll start finding them a lot less annoying if he gets the nomination and they start directing that energy against Trump and the GOP.
Sanders has some good ideas

Last but by no means least, some of Sanders’s out-of-the-mainstream ideas are good and correct.

Some of his ideas are not so good, but it’s important to understand that on the vast majority of topics, the policy outputs of a Sanders administration just wouldn’t be that different from those of a Joe Biden or Pete Buttigieg administration. Whether a new president promises continuity with Obama or a break with neoliberalism, the constraints will realistically come from Congress, where the median member is all but certain to be more conservative than anyone in the Democratic field.

On foreign policy, by contrast, the president is less constrained, and Sanders’s real desire to challenge aspects of the bipartisan foreign policy consensus makes a difference. He’s much more critical of Israel than most people in national politics, he’s a leading critic of the alliance with Saudi Arabia, and he’s generally skeptical of America’s expansive military posture.

These ideas are coded as “extreme” in Washington, where there’s significant bipartisan investment in the status quo. But polls show that most voters question the narratives of American exceptionalism, favor a reduced global military footprint and less defense spending, and are skeptical of the merits of profligate arms sales.

In practice, essentially every president ends up governing with more continuity than his campaign rhetoric suggested (Trump hasn’t broken up NATO; Obama never sat down with the leadership of Iran), so the differences are likely to be more modest than the rhetorical ones.

But differences are welcome and needed. The misbegotten invasion of Iraq should have, but largely didn’t, shake up the establishment “blob” that’s obsessed with pursuing US military hegemony and endless entanglements in the Middle East. Recent reporting by the Washington Post revealed that military and political leaders across three administrations have been lying to the public about the course of the war in Afghanistan — and it barely made a dent in domestic politics.

Nobody should have illusions about Sanders somehow unilaterally ushering in a bold new era of world peace, but he is by far the most likely person in the race to push back against expansive militarism — and that’s worth considering.

Foreign policy isn’t the only hidebound institution he is poised to shake up, either.
Pro-worker monetary policy could make a real difference

Monetary policy attracts even less attention in the primary than does foreign policy. But the Washington Post surveyed the candidates’ views on interest rates when it asked whether the Federal Reserve’s current rates are too high. The results were fascinating.


Buttigieg, Biden, and Warren all demurred, citing the dogma that the Federal Reserve should stay independent of politics (though Warren, to her credit, made a strong statement in a subsequent speech on the economy about the need to emphasize full employment).

Sanders, by contrast, offered a clear statement, saying he “disagreed with the Fed’s decision to raise interest rates in 2015-2018” because “raising rates should be done as a last resort, not to fight phantom inflation.”

Sens. Cory Booker and Michael Bennet, two minor candidates who aren’t really seen as Sanders’s fellow travelers when it comes to ideology, had somewhat similar things to say. “Historically, the Federal Reserve raises interest rates when the economy has reached full employment,” Booker said, adding that “our economy’s not there yet.”

Bennet nodded toward independence before saying that the Fed “has often fallen short of its full employment mandate, which has harmed workers, especially those trying to make ends meet.” He also said that his appointees to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors “will prioritize the employment mandate and consider every tool available to meet that mandate.”

Unfortunately, this is a niche issue many people don’t care about. Almost everyone does and should care about “the economy,” though, and the main government institution responsible for the state of “the economy” is the Fed.

What’s more, this is a particularly important issue precisely because it’s a little bit obscure. Any Democratic president’s Environmental Protection Agency director will come from the universe of “people the main environmental groups like and for whom moderate senators are willing to vote,” because that’s how politics works. But there are no strong interest groups that lobby around monetary policy.

A president who wants to install well-qualified people inclined to side with Sanders/Bennet/Booker will probably be able to do so, but a president who doesn’t care (like Obama) will probably end up appointing people whose views are all over the map (which is indeed what happened with Obama).

These aren’t the only two issues in America that matter, but they’re the main ones in which different nominees are likely to lead to different results. Almost everything that’s currently being debated, by contrast, is mostly pointless.
Stop freaking out

At the end of the day, Sanders’s record is not nearly as scary as many establishment Democrats fear. His “revolution” rhetoric doesn’t make sense to me, but he’s been an effective legislator for a long time, and he knows how to get things done — and how hard it is to get them done.

Some of his big ideas are not so hot on the merits, but it’s not worth worrying about them because the political revolution is so unrealistic. And on a couple of issues where the next president will probably have a fair amount of latitude, Sanders breaks from the pack in good ways. He’s perhaps not an ideal electability choice, but his track record on winning elections is solid and his early polling is pretty good. There’s no particular reason to think he’d be weaker than the other three top contenders, and at least some reason to think he’d be stronger.

A Sanders presidency should generate an emphasis on full employment, a tendency to shy away from launching wars, an executive branch that actually tries to enforce environmental protection and civil rights laws, and a situation in which bills that both progressives and moderates can agree on get to become law.


That’s a formula the vast majority of mainstream Democrats should be able to embrace.

Lots of moderate Democrats nonetheless find it annoying that Sanders and some of his followers are so committed to painting mainstream Democrats in such dark hues. And it is annoying! But annoying people won’t stop being annoying if he loses the nomination. If anything, they will be more annoying than ever as some refuse to get enthusiastic about the prospect of beating Trump. But if Sanders wins, partisan Democrats who just want to beat Trump will magically stop finding Sanders superfans annoying — the causes will be aligned, and the vast majority of people who want Trump out of the White House can collaborate in peace.

That leaves us where we started. The president really does have a good deal of latitude in conducting national security policy. If it’s very important to you that the US maintain a hawkish military posture in the Middle East, that’s a good reason to worry a lot about Sanders.

But most likely, a Sanders presidency will simply mean that young progressive activists are less sullen and dyspeptic about the incremental policy gains that would result from any Democrat occupying the presidency. It’ll also mean a foreign policy that errs a bit more on the side of restraint compared with what you’d get from anyone else in the field, as well as an approach to monetary policy that errs a bit more on the side of full employment. That’s a pretty good deal, and you don’t need to be a socialist to see it.