In 2026, nearly 2/3rds of Americans expect prices to keep rising and more than half lack confidence their income will keep up. Yet 73% believe their own personal finances will improve in the year ahead, including nearly nine in ten adults under 30. https://www.verasight.io/reports/america-in-2026

Good report here on how very little TANF funds actually go to supporting low income families. It has become a slush fund for states to spend on things that have little to do with program’s mission. “How a $30 Billion Welfare Program Became a ‘Slush Fund’ for States” www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

“When less than 1% of farm employers are investigated every year, they can act with impunity, knowing that there is a very low likelihood that they will ever be investigated,” one expert said.

Some jawdropping CBP crime statistics here...

🧪 It's been 10 years since Dorothy Bishop and I published a commentary in Nature about the risks of transparency. doi.org/10.1038/529459a 1/10

"Our new analysis shows that it is far more dangerous to be pregnant than to have an abortion, and this gap in mortality risk is even larger than previously recognized.” - lead study author Maria Steenland. In fact, the mortality risk of pregnancy is 44 to 70 times higher than from abortion.

There are 3,800 kids in ICE custody.

Can you imagine trying to learn when your classmates and their parents are disappearing? All of these kids are going to carry trauma for life.

Corporations are extracting billions from America’s safety net and their payday is about to be supercharged by new rules. I lay out how programs like Medicaid have become vulnerable to corporate capture and what we need to build to stop it. @lpeblog.bsky.social lpeproject.org/blog/the-mea...

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If it's too complex for state officials to list the food items that can & cannot be purchased with SNAP under this waiver, how exactly are the stores implementing these rules & the low-income families trying to use their benefits supposed to figure it out? www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/...

After several months of delay, the USDA released the last of its annual reports on food security, showing that 47.9M people in 18.3M households reported having difficulty acquiring food due to lack of resources at some point in 2024. www.cbpp.org/blog/food-in...

Literally everyone who even vaguely knew what a tariff was said this when they were introduced! You don’t need a team of economists to analyze the situation — no one who lives in reality was confused by this!

The “$3 per healthy meal” idea is just another way of saying “poor folks are just doing poverty wrong.” It’s also setting up an argument that SNAP is too generous. 🥗

Could certainly interpret this as being a side effect of election denial messaging. See also my work with @moriahjharman.bsky.social on confidence in elections being lower among Republicans in states Trump claimed were stolen in 2020 vs other states.

I'll be presenting a paper showing that higher levels of confidence that one's own vote will be counted as intended correlates with higher levels of validated turnout among Americans as a whole and among partisans. Confidence that other people's votes will be counted properly doesn't affect turnout.

Kind of wild there has been almost no coverage of the fact that the federal government unleashed chemical weapons against literal kids *at school*. workdaymagazine.org/minneapolis-...

“Mr. Kennedy was also clear that he supports vaccines. He [said] I support the measles vaccine. I support the polio vaccine. I will do nothing as HHS secretary that makes it difficult or discourages people from taking either of those vaccines.’ -United States Senator John Barrasso, MD

#ICYMI: ProPublica obtained records from the Department of Agriculture that detailed the millions of pounds of food, down to the number of eggs, that never reached food banks because of the Trump administration’s cuts to an aid program. (Published Oct. 2025)

It's one thing to read about what's going on. The power of video is how immediate and visceral it makes everything. Watching people desperate for food talk about how their local food pantry can't feed them anymore because of federal cuts is something else: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Krx3...

While pregnant, Tierra Walker had a cascade of health complications that threatened her life. Of more than 90 doctors who were involved in her care, not one offered her an abortion, according to medical records.

This is the first story I ever did that got more than a million views

Today in @jhppl.bsky.social, we show that few Americans express strong concern about H5N1 health risks. That's a problem, because public apathy may impede an already-sluggish policy response to a potential pandemic (as @propublica.org documented this week). read.dukeupress.edu/jhppl/articl...

AI presents a fundamental threat to our ability to use polls to assess public opinion. Bad actors who are able to infiltrate panels can flip close election polls for less than the cost of a Starbucks coffee. Models will also infer and confirm hypotheses in experiments. Current quality checks fail

Some news: tomorrow at 9am, Ted Koppel + CBS Sunday Morning will air a two-part story on the devastating surge of full-time workers being pushed into homelessness. I'll be interviewed along with two families from There Is No Place for Us. It would mean a lot if you'd watch and help spread the word.

Internal documents and former company executives revealed how Cigna doctors rejected patients’ claims without opening their files. “We literally click and submit,” one former company doctor said. (Published March 2023 w/ @capitolforum.bsky.social)

AOC: "It is unconscionable that what we are debating right now is legislation that will give 8 senators over $1 million a piece & we're robbing people of their food assistance & healthcare to pay for it. How can we vote to enrich ourselves by stealing from the American people?"

I consistently share this anecdote any time I hear anyone opine on how the poor spend their money then move on to the fact that UBI experiments pretty solidly indicate that poor people overwhelmingly do not do this when you give them money

There's this story about how CS Lewis was out with a friend and stopped to give a vagrant some money. Lewis's friend chided him, saying "you know he's just to buy liquor with it, right?" Lewis responded, "Well, so was I."

The House has been taking a recess for the past two months, while getting paid. Air traffic controllers typically work 6 day weeks with mandated overtime. AND THEY ARE NOT GETTING PAID.

Today on Can We Still Govern, I got to share new research on how my team at USDS drove around the country in a van to protect Medicaid coverage for millions of Americans after the pandemic - and share some lessons learned for the coming crisis. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/how-a-van-...

Bartels did a study 20+ years ago looking at how much a member of Congress' record coincided with their constituents' views, broken down by income. MCs are a lot more responsive to their wealthier constituents. Think about whom SNAP and flight delays affect. www.russellsage.org/sites/defaul...

Here’s video of federal agents doing a drive by pepper spraying that hit a father and his one-year old on Saturday when the Feds were hitting Little Village and Cicero

“People are blaming republicans for food prices and flight cancellations and health insurance costs and are furious about gilded ballrooms and Gatsby parties and the president is falling asleep on tv and is the most deeply unpopular president in history, time to cave” is a hell of an argument

40 years ago we’d have congressional hearings falsely accusing metal bands of putting backwards messages in their songs that told kids to kill themselves & now we have a planet-killing chatbot that’s all like “bet you won’t commit suicide chickenshit bitch” & the government is like here’s $5 billion

So it turns out... the US air travel system was incredibly, deeply dependent on federal funding to just run day-to-day all this time, to the benefit of private airline shareholders, when everyone thinks that state-run trains are leeching off the government. Weird!

The "Department of Government Efficiency" eliminated the most efficient thing the federal government has come up with in decades. All so a few billionaire donors can make more money.

NEW: Voters have a highly favorable view of SNAP, including 71% of Independents and 69% of Republicans. Voters trust the Democratic Party (51%) more than the Republican Party (43%) to handle SNAP. www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2025/11...

NEW: 12 Mississippi polling places have moved and 4 have been closed ahead of the Nov. 4 legislative special elections, an MFP investigation finds. Counties also have incorrect addresses in the state system for 11 polling places, risking sending some voters to the wrong location.

The welfare state is about dignity, equality, and making people not poor, but as @itsafronomics.bsky.social says/cites here, it’s often also an investment that more than pays for itself

Donald Trump Jr. in 2021: “Those Hunter no-show no-experience board seats didn’t come without an expected return!” Donald Trump Jr. in 2024: Gets $2.8M in stock for joining an advisory board that didn't exist until he joined it. New: me, for @forbes.com 1/

"the FBI director used taxpayer funds in a government shutdown to fly his country singer GF to sing at a Hulk Hogan-founded wrestling event aired on Fox Nation" is not the flashiest Trump-era headline but pound for pound it can compete with any contender

Trump somehow ran and won on inflation despite advocating (and then enacting) every single inflationary policy imaginable. Just a complete failure of the information environment. Now we are literally paying the price.

Worrisome trends in layoffs. Bad news for the economy.

Happy to share that my new book with Jeff Berry and Jim Glaser is now available from @uchicagopress.bsky.social! (preorder elsewhere til 12/2, but available now through Chicago) 🧵 press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Excuse me? So the company the President currently owns is teaming up with a cryptocurrency company to create a prediction market, which will take bets... on things the President himself has quite a lot of control over? Gosh, I'm sure nothing bad will happen. www.ft.com/content/4855...

I’ll echo what many others have said here: if you can, please please please donate to your local food bank. We’ve all seen the headlines. Things are about to get brutal…real bad for a lot of people. Yes in your community. Please save “They voted for this” for later.

Food bank director: “for every meal that a food bank provides, the SNAP program provides nine. There’s no way we can meet that gap.”

Every $1 invested in SNAP generates $1.80 in local economic activity. Without SNAP, that will mean a loss of $15 billion to the US economy just in November alone.