“There is nothing I dread so much, as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other.”

John Adams, 1780

Section. 1. The problem

The 2024 federal elections cost about $15.9 billion.¹ Outside groups such as super PACs spent roughly $4.5 billion of it.¹ A member of Congress spends hours every week raising money from the people whose interests they will later vote on.

The courts have made this hard to fix by ordinary law. Since Buckley v. Valeo (1976) and Citizens United (2010), the Supreme Court has treated political spending as protected speech. On June 30, 2026, it struck down limits on party spending coordinated with candidates.²

Section. 2. What we would do

Public financing of every federal campaign. Every qualified candidate for the same office receives the same amount of public money. No private contributions, no self-funding, no super PACs.

Debates as the center of the campaign. Seeing how a candidate handles hard questions in real time is the best test of quality we have. Every publicly funded candidate must debate, under neutral rules, with qualification standards that don’t favor the two major parties.

Equal treatment for every candidate. The same signature threshold to qualify, whatever the candidate’s party, or lack of one.

How a candidate qualifies

Anyone should be able to run for Congress or the presidency without a fortune or a donor list. It has never been cheaper to reach voters, so the first step is free public infrastructure, built and run by election officials, so that no private platform’s algorithm decides which candidates voters can find:

• An official candidate portal. Every declared candidate gets a public page with a statement, platform, and video, listed for voters by district in random order. The listings are open data, so search engines, news outlets, and social media platforms can show every voter every candidate on their ballot.
• Sign online. Registered voters sign a candidate’s qualifying petition on the portal using their voter credentials. It costs the candidate nothing and is far harder to forge than paper: in 2022, Michigan disqualified five candidates for governor after thousands of forged petition signatures were found.³
• An official voter guide. Every declared candidate appears in a guide sent to every voter, as Oregon and Washington already do.
• Open forums. Local election offices host candidate nights where any declared candidate can speak, livestreamed and archived.
• A small seed allowance. Before qualifying, a candidate may spend a capped amount of their own money, around $5,000, for travel, printing, and promotion. Enough to get started; not enough to buy an election.

The presidential threshold follows today’s federal rule, which requires candidates seeking public matching funds to show support in at least 20 states.⁴ Qualifying earns a base grant, paid as reimbursement for documented campaign costs, with unspent money returned. Grants scale with the number of voters an office serves: a fixed base plus a set amount per eligible voter. House districts are roughly equal in population, so House grants are nearly equal everywhere. Senate grants differ widely, because California has roughly 67 times as many people as Wyoming, and every candidate for the same seat receives the same amount. Every funded candidate must appear at public forums across their district or state, and skipping them forfeits funding. A single open primary, with every candidate on one ballot, then narrows the field to the top four regardless of party, and those four receive the full general-election grant. Four finalists give independents and new parties a real path to the general election without crowding the ballot. To make sure the winner has the support of a majority, each state chooses either ranked-choice voting in the general election, as Alaska has used since 2022, or a runoff between the top two when no one wins a majority, as Georgia uses today.⁵ Candidates may list a party preference, but the primary nominates no one on a party’s behalf, the structure the Supreme Court upheld for Washington State’s open primary in 2008.⁶ For president, rotating regional primaries would end any state’s permanent claim to go first.

An enforcer that doesn’t deadlock. The current Federal Election Commission has six members, three from each party, and routinely ties 3–3. We would replace it with an odd-numbered commission including unaffiliated members.

Closing the next door. When campaign donations can no longer buy influence, money will look for access another way, often through officials’ relatives. That’s why this article works only alongside the family-lobbying rule in Article III.

Section. 3. Every voter verified, every voter able

“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.”

Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 4

Americans across parties agree on the basics: 84% support requiring photo ID to vote, including 98% of Republicans, 84% of independents, and 67% of Democrats.⁷ The goal is simple: make it easy to vote and hard to cheat, and keep every choice secret.

• Photo ID at the polls, free to every citizen. Every voter in a federal election shows photo ID. Every state provides a free voter ID card and free help obtaining the documents needed for it. A voter without ID casts a provisional ballot and has until the official canvass to prove identity. Iowa already works this way.
• An ID number on every mail ballot. Every returned mail ballot carries the voter’s driver’s license number, state voter ID number, or the last four digits of their Social Security number, signed under penalty of perjury. Signature matching is subjective; an ID number is not. Any of the three is accepted if it matches any number on the voter’s record, and voters can add numbers to their record at any time. When Texas required a match to a single number on file, 12.4% of mail ballots were rejected in its 2022 primary; the rate fell sharply once forms and voter education improved.⁸
• A cure window. Voters are notified of a fixable error and have until the canvass to correct it, so no eligible vote is lost to a typo.
• Track every ballot. Barcoded ballots and envelopes, with automatic notice to the voter when a ballot is sent, received, accepted, or flagged. If someone returns a ballot in your name, you will know.
• A sealed chain of custody. Only the voter, a family member, postal workers, and election officials may handle a mail ballot; paid ballot collection is banned. Drop boxes are monitored around the clock, and ballots are processed by bipartisan teams.
• Ballots in by Election Day. Every mail ballot must arrive before the polls close.
• Paper and proof. Every vote is cast on paper, and every federal election is confirmed by a risk-limiting audit before results are certified.
• The secret ballot stays secret. The envelope is verified, then separated from the ballot before counting. No record ever links a voter to their choices, because a vote that can be proven can be bought or coerced.

Section. 4. What it takes

The full goal requires a constitutional amendment, because banning outside spending conflicts with the Court’s First Amendment rulings. What Congress can pass now: voluntary public matching funds, full donor disclosure, and debate requirements for publicly funded candidates.

“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

John Adams, defense of the British soldiers at the Boston Massacre trial, 1770 Adams took the most unpopular case in Boston because he believed every man deserved a fair hearing on the evidence.

Section. 5. The honest objections

Return to the Articles

“In free Governments the rulers are the servants, and the people their superiors & sovereigns. For the former therefore to return among the latter was not to degrade but to promote them.”

Benjamin Franklin, Federal Convention, July 26, 1787 Recorded in James Madison’s notes of the Convention.

Section. 1. The proposal

Limit service to twelve years in each chamber: six terms in the House and two in the Senate. Members serving today are grandfathered; the limit applies to everyone newly elected.

Few reforms unite Americans like this one. Polls find 83–87% support, with large majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and independents alike.¹

Section. 2. What it takes

A constitutional amendment. In U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton (1995), the Supreme Court held that neither the states nor Congress can add qualifications for Congress by ordinary law. Until it passes, every candidate we endorse pledges to serve no longer than the limit we propose.

“The second feature I dislike, and greatly dislike, is the abandonment in every instance of the necessity of rotation in office.”

Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, December 20, 1787 Jefferson was objecting chiefly to the lack of a limit on the presidency. “Rotation in office” was the founding generation’s term for term limits.

Section. 3. Making term limits work

States that limited their legislators’ terms found that power shifted toward lobbyists, agencies, and governors, because experienced members left and new ones lacked expertise.² We take that seriously. Term limits must come with a strong, nonpartisan professional staff for Congress, so that new members get their information from experts who work for the public rather than from lobbyists. And Article III closes the revolving door that would otherwise send departing members straight to K Street.

Less time dialing, more time legislating

Term limits mean newer members, but they would also get back the hours they now spend raising money. In 2013, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s model schedule for new members recommended four hours a day of “call time” asking donors for money, and only two hours for committee hearings and floor votes.³ A Minnesota congressman told CBS News that both parties advised new members to spend 30 hours a week in party call centers across the street from the Capitol.⁴ Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle estimated that in the two years before an election, fundraising takes about two-thirds of a lawmaker’s schedule.

Under the publicly financed elections in Article I, that time goes back to the job. A member who spends twelve years studying legislation, holding hearings, and meeting constituents may build more real expertise than a career member who spent a third of every day on the phone with donors. Term limits and public financing work best together: one ends the career, the other ends the treadmill.

Section. 4. The verdict of each generation

“The earth belongs in usufruct to the living.”

Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, September 6, 1789 Jefferson argued that no generation should be bound by the debts and laws of the one before it, and suggested that laws expire after about nineteen years.

Once every twenty years, in June, the ballot would ask Americans one question: should every member of Congress be removed from office? If an overwhelming, nationwide majority says yes, every seat in both houses is filled at that November’s election, and no member who was removed may run in it. Current members serve until January, so the country is never without a Congress, and the five months in between give new candidates time to qualify, debate, and campaign.

The bar is set deliberately high: three-fifths of all votes cast nationwide, and a majority in at least two-thirds of the states. No single party can reach that alone, so the question passes only when Americans across the country agree that Congress has failed. Its real power is the threat. A Congress that knows the question is coming has every reason to work together before it arrives.

There is precedent. Iowa’s constitution asks voters every ten years whether to call a convention to revise it, and New York’s asks every twenty.

Why the people need a lever

Today, Americans can replace one member of Congress at a time, but they have no way to hold Congress accountable as an institution. Congress knows it. When a reform is too popular to vote down openly, it can be loaded with a “poison pill,” a provision added to make the bill fail, or quietly run out of time. In 2026, the Senate blocked a ban on congressional stock trading that 86% of Americans support, and a voter ID and proof-of-citizenship bill on an issue where 84% support photo ID, even after both passed the House. Supporters of the stock ban said it was sunk in part by unrelated provisions attached to it.⁵

The recall changes that calculation. A Congress that blocks what large majorities of both parties want would have to answer for it, not member by member, but all at once. And the closer the next vote comes, the more that matters: a Congress two or four years from the question has every reason to stop playing games with reforms the country has already decided it wants.

Section. 5. The honest objections

“[The House] can make no law which will not have its full operation on themselves and their friends, as well as on the great mass of the society.”

James Madison, Federalist No. 57, 1788

Service in Congress should be like service in the military: an honor you take on for your country, after which you return to private life. It should never be the start of a fortune.

Section. 1. Pay them fairly, and take away the excuse

Members of Congress have earned $174,000 since 2009. Adjusted for inflation, their pay has fallen about a third.¹ The Speaker of the House has defended members trading stocks as a way to supplement that salary. We reject the trade entirely.

• Fair pay, set independently. An independent commission sets congressional pay and indexes it to inflation, so members never vote on their own raises. The Constitution’s 27th Amendment already delays any pay change until after the next election.
• No individual stocks. Members, spouses, and dependent children may hold only broad funds or a blind trust. The House passed a ban in July 2026; in September it fell short in the Senate, where 53 senators voted to advance it but 60 were needed.² 86% of Americans want it.

Section. 2. Close the revolving door

Today, a former member is barred from lobbying former colleagues for only one year after leaving the House and two years after leaving the Senate. That is the road from public service to private wealth. Our rules:

• Five years with no paid lobbying of Congress or any federal agency.
• No jobs with industries you regulated, meaning companies and trade groups under the jurisdiction of every committee and subcommittee you served on.
• Shadow lobbying counts. “Strategic advisors” and “government affairs consultants” who never register as lobbyists but do the same work are covered.
• You can go home. A farmer can return to farming and a doctor to medicine. The ban targets new positions, not the lives members had before.
• It covers senior staff and agency heads too, who are often the most valuable hires for lobbying firms. Cabinet secretaries and senior White House staff face a stricter, lifetime ban (see “Access for sale” below).
• Enforced through pensions and benefits. Violators forfeit congressional retirement benefits, a penalty more durable in court than a criminal employment ban.

Section. 3. Access for sale

“Every new regulation concerning commerce or revenue… presents a new harvest to those who watch the change, and can trace its consequences; a harvest, reared not by themselves, but by the toils and cares of the great body of their fellow-citizens.”

Federalist No. 62, 1788

The first part of the shadow government is access: the lobbyists, relatives, and paid advisers who reach the officials running the country while the public waits outside.

Family members can’t sell access

Publicly financed campaigns take away one way money buys influence. The next thing money tries to buy is proximity. In October 2026, the Financial Times reported that the daughter of the White House chief of staff was a partner at a lobbying firm holding a $35,000-a-month contract with Republika Srpska, a foreign political entity. Senate rules already bar senators’ relatives who are registered lobbyists from lobbying their family member’s office. The executive branch has no such rule.

• No lobbying your relative’s office. Immediate family of the president, vice president, cabinet secretaries, and senior White House staff may not lobby, or be paid to arrange meetings with, that official’s office or agency while the official serves.
• Foreign contracts in daylight. Any contract to represent a foreign government or political entity, held by a firm in which a senior official’s relative is an owner or partner, must be disclosed publicly within 48 hours and reviewed by an inspector general.
• Every administration, every party. The rule applies regardless of who holds power.

Section. 4. Agencies beyond their purpose

“The means of defence against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”

James Madison, Federal Convention, June 29, 1787

The second part of the shadow government is the agencies themselves, acting beyond the purposes Congress gave them, in secret, and in the name of national security. This isn’t theory. It is the documented, declassified record, under administrations of both parties:

• 1945–1959, Operation Paperclip. The military brought more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians to the United States after World War II. Many had been members of the Nazi Party, and some had their records altered so they could pass security screening.³
• 1953–1973, MKUltra. The CIA ran experiments in mind control, including giving drugs such as LSD to Americans who did not know they were being tested. In 1973 the CIA director ordered the program’s files destroyed; it is documented today only because surviving financial records were found in 1977.⁴
• 1956–1971, COINTELPRO. The FBI surveilled, infiltrated, and worked to discredit American political organizations and citizens, from civil rights leaders to antiwar activists. It ended only after activists stole and leaked FBI files in 1971.⁵
• 1962, Operation Northwoods. The Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed staging attacks, including against American targets, and blaming Cuba to justify an invasion. The Kennedy administration rejected the plan. The public learned of it only in 1997, when a federal records board released it.⁶
• 1963, Project Mockingbird. The CIA wiretapped two syndicated Washington columnists for three months to find the sources of their reporting, an operation the public learned of only in 2007.⁷ More broadly, the Church Committee found the CIA had maintained secret relationships with about fifty American journalists,⁵ and reporter Carl Bernstein later reported that more than 400 had carried out assignments for the agency over 25 years.⁸
• 1967–1974, Operation CHAOS. The CIA spied on Americans opposed to the Vietnam War, compiling files on more than 7,000 citizens, although the law creating the agency barred it from domestic security work. A 1975 presidential commission found the program violated that law.⁹
• 1973, the “Family Jewels.” The CIA compiled an internal report of nearly 700 pages on its own potentially illegal activities, from domestic spying to plots involving the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro. It stayed secret until 2007.⁷
• 1975–76, the Church Committee. A Senate investigation documented U.S. involvement in plots to assassinate foreign leaders, including Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba, and decades of illegal domestic spying.¹⁰
• 1985–87, Iran-Contra. Officials secretly sold arms to Iran and diverted part of the proceeds to rebels in Nicaragua, working around a congressional ban on aiding them.¹¹
• 2013: Americans learned the NSA had been collecting records of their phone calls in bulk. Congress ended the program in 2015.
• 2014: The Senate Intelligence Committee found the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation program was more brutal, and less effective, than the agency had told policymakers and the public.¹²
• 2016–2023, Crossfire Hurricane. The FBI opened its investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia on what a special counsel later called “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence,” and relied on an unverified opposition-research dossier, funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party, to win warrants to surveil a former campaign adviser. The Justice Department’s inspector general found 17 significant errors and omissions in those applications, and an FBI lawyer pleaded guilty to altering an email used to renew one.¹³ The inspector general found no evidence that political bias drove the decision to open the case, a conclusion the special counsel disputed.¹⁴ Russia’s interference in the 2016 election was itself real, as a bipartisan Senate investigation confirmed. The failure was the FBI’s: years of investigation and national division built partly on intelligence no one had verified.¹⁵
• 2023: A released court opinion showed the FBI had improperly searched a foreign-intelligence database for information on Americans hundreds of thousands of times.

Almost everything on this list became public because congressional investigators, inspectors general, courts, or records laws forced it into the open. Sunlight works. The question is why Americans must wait decades for it.

The Epstein files

Jeffrey Epstein received a lenient federal plea deal in 2008. For more than fifteen years, under administrations of both parties, the files on his network stayed closed. In February 2025, asked on Fox News whether the Justice Department would release Epstein’s client list, Attorney General Pam Bondi answered: “It’s sitting on my desk right now to review.” Five months later, the Justice Department and FBI announced that their review had found no incriminating “client list” and that no further disclosure was warranted. Bondi then said she had meant the case file generally.¹⁶ Days later, President Trump told a reporter: “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years.”¹⁷

Americans were still talking about it. In November 2025 Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act with near-unanimous support. The Justice Department has since released millions of pages, but members of Congress say the release remains incomplete. The department’s inspector general is reviewing the department’s compliance, and in September 2026 more than 100 members of Congress pressed for the rest.¹⁸

Follow the money

The banks that handled Epstein’s money have settled the civil cases against them. JPMorgan Chase kept him as a client from 1998 to 2013, through his 2006 arrest and 2008 guilty plea. The bank says it began flagging suspicious transactions to the government as early as 2002, and a month after his death in 2019 it filed a report flagging more than $1 billion of his transactions dating back to 2003. JPMorgan says it acted appropriately on what it knew, when it knew it.¹⁹ In 2023 JPMorgan paid $290 million to settle with his victims and $75 million to the U.S. Virgin Islands, weeks before the territory’s case was to go to trial, without admitting liability.²⁰ Deutsche Bank, his bank from 2013 to 2018, paid $75 million to his victims and a $150 million fine to New York regulators over its failures to monitor his accounts and others.²¹

Victims received compensation, and that matters. But the settlements ended the cases before trial, and no bank has faced federal criminal charges over the money that funded Epstein’s crimes. The only banker to face serious consequences, the former head of JPMorgan’s private bank, was barred from the British financial industry for misleading regulators there about the relationship.

The public isn’t wrong to suspect that powerful people protect each other. When the government won’t follow a law it was ordered to follow, the problem isn’t one case. It is a system with no one able to force it open.

Section. 5. How we open the system

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

James Madison, Federalist No. 51, 1788

Section. 6. A government small enough to lead

“Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government… A feeble executive implies a feeble execution of the government.”

Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 70, 1788

Voters elect a president to change course, and the president sends a few thousand appointees to do it. They arrive to run a civilian workforce of about two million people, and they rarely stay long. Studies of Senate-confirmed appointees generally find they serve two to three years, while the career managers below them stay for decades. Running one of these departments is an enormous job, and the system makes it harder than it needs to be:

• Leaders arrive late. Positions requiring Senate confirmation grew from 779 in 1960 to more than 1,200 today, and more than 80 leadership posts sat vacant more than half the time between 2009 and 2023.²⁷
• The law sets the work. A secretary cannot stop doing what statutes require, however many people they remove.
• Cuts without law changes snap back. The Department of Health and Human Services cut its workforce from about 82,000 to 62,000 in 2025, saving roughly $1.8 billion a year in payroll, about a tenth of one percent of what it spends on Medicare and Medicaid. By 2026 it was back to 72,000 and hiring 12,000 more, after court reversals and gaps in work the law still required.²⁸

We don’t claim there is a clean answer. Governing institutions this large is hard under any party. But a leader with two years and a clear mandate should be able to deliver real change, and these reforms would remove the friction that stops them:

The real test of these reforms is whether they let an administration change what government does, not just how many people it employs. Congress controls most of that, which is why the leverage in Articles I and II matters: a Congress freed from fundraising, subject to term limits, and answerable to a generational recall is far more likely to pass a sunset law than the one we have today.

Section. 7. What it takes

All of this is ordinary legislation. Two limits apply: the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause bars prosecutors from using a member’s votes as evidence, so corruption cases must prove the corrupt agreement itself; and a lifetime lobbying ban enforced as a crime would face a First Amendment challenge. That is why members of Congress face a five-year ban, and why the lifetime ban for cabinet secretaries and senior White House staff is a condition of accepting the office, enforced through their pensions and benefits.

“Cherish public credit… avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt… not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burthen which we ourselves ought to bear.”

George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796

Section. 1. Where the money goes

Fiscal year 2026, which ended September 30:¹

Here is the hard truth most politicians won’t say. If we eliminated everything in the last row, every agency, every highway, every court, the government would still borrow about $500 billion a year. Any honest plan has to address Social Security, health care, defense, and revenue.

Interest on the debt, 2016–2026 (billions)

The end of cheap money

For a decade after 2008, interest rates near zero made borrowing almost free, and Washington borrowed as if it would stay that way. Interest cost about 1.5% of GDP in 2021. By 2025 it was over 3%, as debt taken on in the cheap years is refinanced at today’s rates. The Ledger shows the result: spending has drifted up to about 23% of the economy while revenue has stayed near 17%.

That leaves two choices. Washington can shrink its deficits, or it can lean on the Federal Reserve to hold rates down by buying government debt. The Fed already holds about $4.5 trillion in Treasury securities. It stopped shrinking its balance sheet in December 2025 and has been buying short-term Treasury bills since, which it describes as routine reserve management rather than stimulus. The Treasury Secretary himself has warned that too much Fed attention to long-term rates gives the impression of accommodating deficits.

When a central bank finances its own government, the bill tends to arrive as inflation, a hidden tax on savings, wages, and fixed incomes that no one in Congress has to vote for.

Section. 2. Our fiscal rule

“I place economy among the first and most important of republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared.”

Thomas Jefferson to William Plumer, 1816

A strict balanced-budget rule would force deep cuts in every recession, when people can least afford them. Instead, we would set a law that stabilizes the debt as a share of the economy within ten years, with an exception for recessions and declared wars, and an automatic correction if Congress misses the target.

“No State shall… make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts.”

Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 10 This clause limits the states, but it reflects how deeply the founders distrusted paper money.

Sound money. The Federal Reserve may not buy long-term Treasury debt to hold down the government’s borrowing costs, except in an emergency declared by a vote of Congress, and every purchase must be reported publicly. We will also ask Congress to study a rules-based anchor for the dollar, including commodity-linked options. Most economists oppose a return to a strict gold standard, and we want that debate held in the open rather than settled by default.

Taxes paid, and money well spent. Most Americans will pay their share if they believe it is used well. Today about 15 cents of every federal dollar goes to interest on the debt, and health care prices far above those in other wealthy countries consume much of the rest. Fix those, and the case for paying taxes makes itself. Tax incentives should be used sparingly, only for what national security requires, such as domestic energy, minerals, and manufacturing, and always on terms that let every company and technology in those industries compete equally. Tax policy should never pick winners within an industry. Social Security’s earnings cap is on the table in Section 4. And as artificial intelligence moves income from wages toward profits, the tax system must follow the income, or the programs funded by taxes on wages will run short faster (see Article X).

Every taxpayer gets a receipt. Taxes withheld from a paycheck are easy to overlook, and research finds that less visible taxes tend to grow: when toll roads switched to electronic collection, tolls ended up 20 to 40 percent higher than they would otherwise have been.² Every paystub and every tax return should show the full federal tax paid, including the payroll tax employers pay on each worker’s behalf, and where it went, from national defense to interest on the debt.

Section. 3. Lever one: the cost of health care

Medicare and Medicaid cost $1.8 trillion last year, about a quarter of the budget, and they grow faster than the economy because health care prices do. Fix the price of care and you fix much of the budget. The plan is in Article V: competition among hospitals, the same price for the same service wherever it is delivered, honest drug prices, and an end to paying for care that doesn’t help. Paying the same for the same service alone would save Medicare more than $170 billion over ten years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

“Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship.”

Benjamin Franklin, The Way to Wealth, 1758

Section. 4. Lever two: saving Social Security

Social Security isn’t going bankrupt. It is heading for something more specific: an automatic 22% cut to every check in late 2032, because payroll taxes will cover only 78% of promised benefits once the trust fund runs out.⁴ Congress faced the same cliff in 1983 and fixed it with a bipartisan deal that raised the retirement age gradually over decades. It can do so again.

Our commitments. Anyone 55 or older sees no change. Every change phases in over at least twenty years. And the solution is written by a bipartisan commission whose plan gets an up-or-down vote, so neither party can campaign against the other’s fingerprints.

Here are the real options, in plain terms. Any solution will use several of them.

To build your own plan and see how much of the gap each choice closes, use the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s Social Security reformer tool or the scoring published by Social Security’s chief actuary.

Section. 5. A home for the next generation

Posterity is not only about debt. A generation that cannot afford a home cannot build wealth, start families on time, or put down roots. The numbers are the worst on record:⁵

Why. Two forces are working together. First, mortgage rates have stayed above 6% since late 2022, roughly double the rates of the early 2020s, and the deficits described above keep upward pressure on them.⁶ Second, the country has not built enough homes since 2008. Estimates of the shortfall range from about 1.2 million homes to 3.7 million, and as high as 10 million if measured against the building pace before the financial crisis.⁷ Starter homes have nearly disappeared: new houses under 1,400 square feet fell from more than a third of new construction in 1976 to about 7% in 2020.⁷ A builders’ group estimates that regulations at every level of government add about $132,000, or 26%, to the price of a new home, with changes to building codes the largest single item.⁸

Most of the rules that decide what can be built, and where, are set by states and towns, not Washington. That is where the real fixes lie, and states from Montana to Texas have begun loosening them. The federal government can reward that work and stop adding to the cost.

An honest note: making homes affordable for the next generation means home prices that grow more slowly for the people who already own one. That trade-off is real, and we choose the next generation.

Section. 6. Too complex to fail

“To presume a want of motives for such contests… would be to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious.”

Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 6, 1787 The founders built a government on the assumption that human nature does not change. Neither should our rules for money.

The 2008 financial crisis cost millions of Americans their homes, jobs, and savings. The federal commission that investigated it concluded the crisis was avoidable, the product of failed regulation, reckless risk-taking, and a breakdown of accountability.⁹ Banks paid tens of billions of dollars in settlements, including $13 billion from JPMorgan Chase and $16.65 billion from Bank of America, money that came largely from shareholders. Almost no one was held personally accountable; only one senior Wall Street banker went to prison.¹⁰

The financial industry is one of the largest sources of lobbying and campaign money in Washington, and it has worked to unwind the rules written after 2008. In 2018 Congress raised the size at which banks face the strictest oversight from $50 billion to $250 billion in assets, after lobbying that included Silicon Valley Bank’s chief executive. In 2023 Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in one of the largest bank failures in American history, and regulators guaranteed every depositor, insured or not, to stop a panic.¹¹ This is what Articles I and III exist to stop: rules bought by the people they are meant to restrain.

Where the risk lives now

Today taxpayers, not Wall Street, carry most mortgage risk: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae guarantee more than $9 trillion in mortgage securities. The lending itself has moved outside the banks. Nonbank companies originated 68% of home mortgages in early 2026 and service two-thirds of federally backed mortgages, up from 27% in 2014, yet most have no federal regulator overseeing their safety and soundness.¹² Behind them sits a private credit market of about $1.34 trillion, where banks lend to private funds, which lend to mortgage companies, which lend to homebuyers, and no one can easily see who holds the risk at the end of the chain. The 2025 collapses of a subprime auto lender and an auto-parts maker cost several banks hundreds of millions and drew a warning from JPMorgan’s chief executive that more problems were likely hiding.¹³

Section. 7. What it takes

All of it is ordinary law. A balanced-budget amendment is the only binding version of a fiscal rule, because any future Congress can override a statute. We prefer a statutory rule that leaves room for recessions, but we would support an amendment written the same way.

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Benjamin Franklin, Pennsylvania Gazette, 1735 Franklin was writing about fire safety in Philadelphia. The principle travels.

Section. 1. How fast costs have grown

National health spending as a share of the economy, 1960–2024

In 1970 the country spent $353 per person on health care, about $2,850 in today’s dollars. In 2024 it spent $15,474, more than five times as much after adjusting for inflation.¹

From 2005 to 2025, the total cost of care for a typical family of four with employer coverage nearly tripled, up 188%, while wages rose 84%.² Employers still pay about 58% of it, but economists generally find that most of the employer’s share comes out of wages workers would otherwise receive. The rest comes from families directly, and more of it now arrives as a bill rather than a payroll deduction: the share of covered workers facing a deductible of $2,000 or more rose from 19% to 34% between 2015 and 2025.³

An honest note: the total cost of care rose faster than incomes until about 2015, then eased as a share of income as wages grew faster after 2015. But costs have kept rising about 6% a year on average, and 2026 brought the largest increase in more than a decade outside the pandemic years. A typical family’s health care now costs more than a third of median household income, most of it paid in ways the family never sees.²

Section. 2. The problem is prices

The United States spends nearly twice as much on health care as other wealthy countries, but Americans visit doctors and hospitals about as often. The difference is prices, and administrative costs that take 8% of spending here versus 1–3% elsewhere.⁴ Employers and private insurers pay hospitals on average 254% of what Medicare pays for the same care.⁵ Several forces drive that gap. Medicare sets its prices by law, and on average they fall below what hospitals report it costs to treat Medicare patients, while private insurers must negotiate, and a hospital that dominates its local market can demand more.⁶ RAND found that differences in what hospitals charge private insurers are explained far more by market power than by how many Medicare or Medicaid patients a hospital serves.⁵ The leading study of hospital prices found that a hospital with no nearby competitor charges private insurers about 12% more than one facing four or more rivals.⁷

Where the health care dollar goes

Americans spent $5.3 trillion on health care in 2024, $15,474 per person and 18% of the economy.⁸ Private insurance paid about $1.6 trillion, Medicare $1.1 trillion, Medicaid $932 billion, and patients $557 billion out of pocket. By condition, the largest categories are musculoskeletal care such as back pain and arthritis (14% of spending tracked by condition in the most recent full breakdown, from 2016), diabetes and kidney disease (11%), and heart disease and stroke (9%). Cancer, often assumed to be the biggest cost, is under 5%.⁹

Hospital list prices, the “chargemaster,” bear little relationship to cost. In 2013 the average hospital charged $4.32 for every $1 of cost, and some departments, such as anesthesiology and CT scans, more than twenty times cost.¹⁰ Many hospitals estimate what a service costs from what they charge for it, rather than measuring the resources it actually uses, which makes it hard for anyone to know whether a price is fair.

Section. 3. What we would do

Section. 4. A healthier people

“Health must not be sacrificed to learning. A strong body makes the mind strong.”

Thomas Jefferson to Peter Carr, August 19, 1785

Obesity affects 42% of adults and 20% of children, and just over 1 in 3 young adults are too heavy to join the military.¹⁹ In a controlled NIH trial, people ate about 500 more calories a day on an ultra-processed diet than on a minimally processed one with the same nutrients.²⁰

Roughly a quarter of what Americans spend on medical care, $730 billion in 2016 and about $1.2 trillion at today’s spending, traces to risks that people and policy can change: obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, poor diet, and smoking.²¹ Even modest progress is worth hundreds of billions of dollars over time.

Changing the food itself works better than lecturing people. When New York counties restricted trans fats in restaurants, hospitalizations for heart attack and stroke fell 6.2% more than in counties without the rule, without anyone having to change a habit.²²

A healthier population is a stronger and more productive one. We will reform what federal programs buy and serve, from school lunches to military dining, require honest labeling, test what goes into our food, and teach nutrition as a basic life skill, while leaving personal choices to individuals. This is a food and health agenda only; it takes no position on vaccines.

Honest nutrition research. Much of what we “know” about diet comes from observational studies that can’t prove cause and effect. We would fund long-term, tightly controlled feeding studies, free of industry money, so Americans get answers they can trust. We will not promise DNA-based diets: in a rigorous Stanford trial, matching people’s diets to their genes made no difference.²³

An honest note: healthier people live longer, so lifetime health spending falls less than the numbers above suggest.²⁴ We pursue a healthier country because it is stronger and more productive, and because the savings during working years are real.

Section. 5. Care that matches what patients want

Every adult should have easy access to advance directives, and every family to hospice and palliative care. This isn’t about cutting spending at the end of life; most of that spending goes to seriously ill patients whose outcome no one could predict. It is about making sure patients get the care they would choose.

“A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both.”

James Madison to W. T. Barry, August 4, 1822

Section. 1. The facts

In 2022, civics scores fell for the first time in the test’s history.¹ Fewer than one in four eighth graders could demonstrate a working knowledge of the separation of powers, checks and balances, or the purpose of the Bill of Rights. Meanwhile, easy federal credit helped push college prices up for three decades.²

The picture is not all bad. After inflation, what students actually pay in tuition at public four-year colleges has fallen by roughly half since 2012, and a degree still pays off on average, with graduates earning about 60% more than high school graduates.³ The problem is not that college is worthless. It is that many programs, at their current prices, are not worth the debt, and students borrow without knowing which ones.

“Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.”

George Washington, First Annual Message to Congress, January 8, 1790

Section. 2. Math and reading: the scores, the causes, and who should fix them

On this test, about 30 points equals a year of learning.⁴ American math scores rose into the early 2010s, then began falling before the pandemic: in fourth grade since 2011, in eighth grade since 2015. The pandemic turned a slide into a collapse, and average math scores in both grades are now back where they were in 1995.⁴ The lowest-performing students have lost the most, and the gap between strong and struggling students has widened by more than a year of learning since 2011. Countries that once trailed the United States in math now lead it. Science and reading have held up better: on the 2022 PISA exam, American 15-year-olds scored above the international average in reading and science, but below it in math.⁵

Why are scores falling?

There is no settled answer, and anyone who claims one is ahead of the evidence. What the research shows so far:

• Lost school time. Students who rarely missed school scored highest, and those who missed often scored lowest.⁴ Chronic absenteeism rose sharply after the pandemic and remains far above 2019 levels; in Mississippi it rose from 17% to 25% of students.⁶
• Screens. The decline began about when smartphones became universal among teenagers, and students who say classmates’ devices distract them in math class score 15 points lower.⁷ But the first large studies of school phone bans are mixed: a 2026 study of more than 40,000 schools found bans improved well-being but did not raise test scores, while others found modest gains.⁸ Classroom tablets and laptops have barely been studied at all.
• Weaker accountability. Scores began falling around when federal law stopped holding schools to high-stakes testing targets in 2015. Similar declines abroad suggest it is not the whole story.
• How subjects are taught. The strongest evidence points here, because states that changed their teaching saw results.

What works: the states are showing us

In 2013 Mississippi ranked 49th in fourth-grade reading. It retrained its teachers in phonics-based reading instruction, placed literacy coaches in struggling schools, and required third graders to read on grade level before moving on, with tutoring and summer programs for those who could not. By 2024 it ranked ninth, and after accounting for poverty, an Urban Institute analysis ranked it first in the nation in fourth-grade reading and math and eighth-grade math.⁹ Louisiana led the country in reading recovery after the pandemic; Alabama led in math. None of these gains came from Washington.

That is the case for keeping education policy in the states. Fifty states trying different approaches will find what works faster than one federal department, as long as everyone can see the results.

Section. 3. What has already passed, and what is missing

The 2025 budget law already did much of what reformers have sought for years:¹⁰

• Grad PLUS loans ended for new borrowers on July 1, 2026, and graduate borrowing is now capped at $20,500 a year and $100,000 total.
• An earnings test. Undergraduate programs whose graduates earn less than the median high school graduate in their state, in two of three years, lose access to federal loans. Graduate programs must beat the median bachelor’s degree holder.
• Workforce Pell. Since July 1, 2026, Pell Grants can pay for short training programs of 8 to 15 weeks, if graduates show real earnings gains.

We would protect these reforms and finish the job:

From high school straight to a paycheck

About 680,000 Americans are in registered apprenticeships today, nearly double the number in 2015, but the typical apprentice starts in their late twenties, after years of drifting.¹² In Switzerland, Germany, and Austria, as many as 70% of young people begin their careers as apprentices.¹³ According to the Department of Labor, Americans who complete a registered apprenticeship earn an average starting salary of about $80,000, and 93% stay employed, with no student debt.¹²

South Carolina shows what a modest incentive can do. Since 2007 it has offered employers a state tax credit for each registered apprentice, and its apprentices grew from fewer than 800 to more than 33,000. In 2024 it raised the credit to $4,000 per apprentice, or $6,000 for a youth apprentice still in high school.¹⁴ Quality matters as much as numbers, though: a Labor Department study found South Carolina’s apprentices had some of the lowest exit wages in the country.¹⁵ A bipartisan federal bill, the LEAP Act, would offer employers $1,500 for each new apprentice under 25.¹⁶

Section. 4. Civics and personal finance

“I have faith in the people. They will not consent to disunion. The danger is, that they are misled. Let them know the truth and the country is safe.”

Abraham Lincoln, as reported in the Boston Journal, July 1864 Not a founder, but the founders’ faith in an informed people, in the words of the man who saved their Union.

Section. 5. Self-reliance

“I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.”

Benjamin Franklin, 1766

Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are nearly half the federal budget. A generation that saves early, insures wisely, and plans for long-term care will depend less on government in old age. The best evidence says defaults matter more than lectures: automatic enrollment in workplace retirement plans dramatically raises participation, which is why new 401(k) plans must now enroll workers automatically.¹⁸ We would extend automatic enrollment to every employer that offers a plan.

Section. 6. The honest objections

“If a nation expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was & never will be.”

Thomas Jefferson to Charles Yancey, January 6, 1816

“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.”

James Madison, “Political Observations,” 1795

Section. 1. The bill for the last quarter century

Most of the post-9/11 wars were paid for with borrowed money, which is part of why interest on the debt now exceeds the defense budget.¹ The Congressional Budget Office’s estimate for Iran excludes borrowing costs, damage to U.S. bases, and future veterans’ care, and the Pentagon did not cooperate with the budget office’s analysts.² Because Congress never voted dedicated funds for the war, the Pentagon paid for it out of its regular budget.³ CBO also expects the war’s effect on energy prices to raise inflation by half a percentage point in early 2027.

The war has drained the arsenal too. Replacing expended munitions is most of the direct cost, and rebuilding missile interceptor stocks could take at least five years. By September, 69% of Americans said the war had not been worth fighting.

“No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

James Madison, “Political Observations,” 1795

Section. 2. The authority problem

The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war. In practice, Congress has handed it away. The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force is sixty words long. It has been cited to justify operations in at least 22 countries against at least eight organizations, most of which did not exist when it passed.⁴ Congress has not authorized the war with Iran at all.

The 1973 War Powers Resolution was meant to stop this. It gives presidents 60 days to win congressional approval for hostilities, but presidents of both parties have ignored or reinterpreted it, and courts have refused to enforce it.

Section. 3. The military-industrial complex

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address, January 17, 1961 Eisenhower was a five-star general who commanded the Allied invasion of Europe. He gave this warning as he left the presidency.

Sixty-five years later, the influence Eisenhower warned about is measurable:

The revolving door spins constantly. The Government Accountability Office found that the 14 largest contractors employed 1,718 recently departed senior Pentagon officials, generals, admirals, and acquisition officers in 2019.⁵ A 2023 Senate investigation found 672 former officials, officers, and members of Congress working for the top 20 contractors, most of them registered lobbyists.⁶ In 2025 the industry recorded its biggest increase in lobbying spending this century; Lockheed Martin alone spent about $15 million.⁷

Meanwhile, consolidation has left the government with few places to buy from. The Pentagon itself reported in 2022 that 51 major aerospace and defense prime contractors in the 1990s had shrunk to five.⁸ With little competition, prices climb: a 2024 Pentagon inspector general audit found the Air Force overpaid Boeing nearly $1 million for a dozen C-17 spare parts, including soap dispensers marked up 7,943%, more than 80 times the commercial price. The department that buys these weapons has failed every one of its eight financial audits and does not expect to pass one before 2028.⁹

Do we go to war so contractors can profit?

We looked for proof, and we want to be precise about what exists. No investigation has ever shown that the United States went to war in order to enrich a contractor. The Senate’s Nye Committee investigated exactly that question about World War I in 1934–36. It documented enormous profits and aggressive sales practices by arms makers, but could not prove they caused the war.

What is documented is that war is very good business, and that the industry works hard to shape the decisions that lead to it:

• Iraq. KBR, then a subsidiary of Halliburton, received at least $39.5 billion in Iraq-related federal contracts over the decade after the invasion, according to a 2013 Financial Times analysis, many of them awarded without competitive bidding. Vice President Dick Cheney had been Halliburton’s chief executive until 2000. KBR has said it performed with honor in a dangerous and unpredictable environment.
• Iran. Since the war began, Lockheed Martin’s order backlog has grown to a record $230 billion and RTX’s to $289 billion, as the Pentagon restocks the missiles it fired.¹⁰ The administration has asked for a 44% increase in military spending for 2027, bringing the budget near $1.5 trillion. Defense stocks, interestingly, did not soar: the five largest contractors were down slightly in the weeks after the war began.¹¹
• The pattern. Think tanks that take contractor money, and retired officers on contractor payrolls, regularly appear as independent experts in hearings and on television, and current rules do not require them to disclose who pays them.

The danger Eisenhower described was never a conspiracy. It is an industry whose revenue depends on threat, staffed by the people who used to assess the threat, lobbying the people who decide whether to act on it. The incentives point one way, and no one is paid to point the other.

“Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address, January 17, 1961

Section. 4. What we would do

“Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”

Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801 The phrase “entangling alliances” is Jefferson’s, though it is often credited to Washington.

Section. 5. The honest objections

“It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world; so far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it.”

George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796 Washington added that existing commitments should be honored.

“Every nation, with a view to those great objects, ought to endeavour to possess within itself all the essentials of national supply.”

Alexander Hamilton, Report on Manufactures, 1791

Section. 1. What we lost

American manufacturing employment peaked at about 19.4 million jobs in 1979. It averaged about 12.6 million in 2025, roughly 35% lower. The steepest fall came from 2000 to 2010, when manufacturing jobs dropped by a third.¹ The most cited research estimates that competition from Chinese imports cost 2.0 to 2.4 million American jobs between 1999 and 2011, concentrated in towns that never recovered.²

The honest picture is more complicated: manufacturing’s share of jobs had been falling since the 1950s, mostly because factories became more productive, and American factory output is far higher than it was in 1979.³ The danger today is less the number of factory jobs than what we can no longer make at all.

Section. 2. What we depend on

When China restricted rare earth exports in April 2025, automakers abroad cut production within weeks.⁴ Medicine is just as exposed: more than 90% of American prescriptions are generics, India supplies nearly half of them, and India gets about 70% of its active ingredients from China.⁵ In a crisis, the country could find itself short of antibiotics and the magnets in its missiles at the same time.

“Their safety and interest require that they should promote such manufactories as tend to render them independent on others for essential, particularly for military supplies.”

George Washington, First Annual Message to Congress, January 8, 1790 “Independent on” is Washington’s original wording.

Section. 3. Where America has the advantage

In 2025 the United States relied entirely on imports for 16 of the 90 minerals the U.S. Geological Survey tracks, and on imports for more than half its supply of 54.⁶ Much of that dependence is a choice, not a matter of geology. America is rich in many of the minerals that matter most; it has simply stopped developing them.

Geology does set real limits. The United States mines no manganese, and even if every proposed project opened, it would still import nearly all its cobalt and most of its nickel.¹⁰ The honest strategy has three parts: mine at home where the geology supports it; process at home even when the ore comes from allies, since refining, not mining, is where China’s grip is tightest; and stockpile and partner with allies such as Canada and Australia for what America does not have.

The biggest obstacle is time. A new American mine takes an average of 29 years to develop.¹¹ Australia can approve a lithium project in about seven years, and China can approve and build a rare earth processing plant in under five.

Section. 4. What energy actually costs

Cheap, reliable power is the foundation for everything else, and demand is rising fast with new data centers. Here is what it costs to build new power plants in the United States without any tax subsidies:¹²

These figures leave out an important cost. Wind and solar produce power only when the wind blows or the sun shines, so the grid needs backup, and the cost of that backup rises as their share grows.¹²

The fuel is cheap; the plants are not, for now. America produces more natural gas than ever, a record of roughly 120 billion cubic feet a day, at prices in the mid-$3 range per million BTU. But the turbines that burn it are sold out. Only three companies make large gas turbines, and one ordered today from the largest will not arrive until around 2031. Building a new gas plant now takes about five years, up from three and a half in 2023, and costs have roughly tripled: a plant the largest U.S. utility built for $785 per kilowatt in 2022 will cost about $2,400 for 2030.¹³

Exports are a choice. The United States is already the world’s leading exporter of liquefied natural gas, shipping a record 17.4 billion cubic feet a day in the first half of 2026, and its export terminals are running near capacity.¹⁴ More terminals mean more revenue and more leverage with allies. They also mean American households and factories compete with overseas buyers for the same gas, which raises domestic prices somewhat. We favor more exports, chosen deliberately with that trade-off in view.

Permission is the biggest obstacle. Nearly 2,100 gigawatts of proposed power plants, more than the entire existing U.S. grid, are waiting to connect. The typical project finished in 2025 waited 61 months, up from 22 months in 2008, and only 13% of the capacity proposed between 2000 and 2020 was ever built.¹⁵ Full federal environmental reviews for major projects average about four years, and complex projects can take far longer.¹⁶

Section. 5. Nuclear: the long-term backbone

Nuclear plants supply about a fifth of America’s electricity from roughly 100 gigawatts of reactors that run almost around the clock, with no fuel price swings and no emissions. They are the most reliable power we have. The problem is building new ones: the two newest reactors, at Plant Vogtle in Georgia, cost $35 billion, double the original estimate, and came online seven years late.¹⁷

That is starting to change. In 2025 the government set an 18-month deadline for licensing decisions on new reactors and a goal of quadrupling nuclear capacity to 400 gigawatts by 2050. Since then, regulators have approved the first-ever restart of a closed reactor and renewed licenses for 18 reactors representing about 17 gigawatts of power.¹⁷ Many experts doubt the 400-gigawatt goal is reachable, and a deadline set by executive order can be reversed by the next president. It should be written into law.

Nuclear power has its own supply gap: most of the uranium fuel American reactors use is imported, and the country is only now rebuilding its ability to enrich it after banning imports of Russian uranium in 2024. A nuclear backbone requires an American fuel supply.

Section. 6. Where wind fits

Wind divides Americans, and the debate deserves honest numbers. On land, in windy regions, wind is among the cheapest power to build per megawatt-hour, even without subsidies. But it cannot keep the lights on during a calm week, so every wind farm still needs a dependable plant behind it. On a grid with gas plants, wind mostly saves fuel; it does not replace the plants themselves.

There are real costs the price tables leave out. Wind farms take far more land than a gas or nuclear plant producing the same power, and many rural communities object to living among them. Turbines typically last 20 to 25 years, compared with decades for gas plants and 60 years or more for nuclear. Offshore wind costs roughly twice as much as onshore and depends heavily on subsidies.

Our answer is to stop picking winners. Federal wind and solar tax credits now end for projects that did not begin construction by July 4, 2026, or are not in service by the end of 2027.¹⁸ Oil and gas should lose their special tax preferences too. Then every source competes on price, every source pays for the reliability it needs, and the communities that host power plants decide where they go.

Section. 7. What we would do

Our rule: Washington should not pick winners in the energy market. It should back only what national security requires and markets cannot yet finance, such as new nuclear designs, domestic mineral processing, and the factories that make essential equipment. Every exception below meets that test, and every one is temporary.

Section. 8. The honest objections

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.”

Fourth Amendment, 1791

Section. 1. Where things stand

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act lets intelligence agencies collect the communications of foreigners abroad without a warrant. Americans’ messages are swept up whenever they talk to those targets, and the FBI can then search that collection for Americans by name, also without a warrant.

• The 2026 fight. In April, the House passed a three-year renewal, 235 to 191, without a warrant requirement. In June, the Senate blocked a renewal that lacked one.¹ A bipartisan coalition, from libertarian Republicans to progressive Democrats, held the line. Collection continues in the meantime under a court certification that runs into 2027.
• The buying loophole. Agencies can purchase location data and other personal records from commercial data brokers, records they would need a warrant to collect themselves. The House passed a ban in 2024; it has not become law.
• Past abuses. As Article III documents in its history of agencies acting beyond their purpose, a court opinion released in 2023 showed the FBI had improperly searched the 702 database for Americans’ information hundreds of thousands of times.
• No national privacy law. Congress has never passed a comprehensive consumer privacy law. About twenty states have their own, leaving most Americans with no protection over who collects and sells their data.

Americans agree across party lines: in one 2026 poll, 76% said the government should need a warrant to search communications of people in the United States, and 80% wanted Congress to close the data broker loophole.²

Section. 2. The phone in your pocket

Many Americans are convinced their phones listen to their conversations and sell what they hear to advertisers. The truth is both more reassuring and more troubling.

The reassuring part: there is no evidence that phones secretly record conversations around the clock. A Northeastern University study of more than 17,000 Android apps found no secret audio recording, and constant recording would drain batteries and be easy for researchers to detect.³ One company that claimed in 2023 to target ads by “listening” to conversations turned out to be selling ordinary lists bought from data brokers, according to a 2026 Federal Trade Commission settlement.⁴

The troubling part: voice assistants do record when they shouldn’t. Apple paid $95 million to settle claims that Siri recorded private conversations after accidental activations, some reviewed by outside contractors; Google agreed to pay $68 million over similar claims about its assistant. Both companies say the recordings were never used for advertising.⁵ Apple’s settlement equaled roughly nine hours of its profit.

And the reason ads feel like they heard you is real surveillance of a different kind: where your phone goes, what apps you open, what you search, buy, and click, all collected, combined, and sold. Your phone doesn’t need to hear you. It already knows where you’ve been.

Section. 3. What we would do

Section. 4. The honest objections

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Benjamin Franklin, 1755 Written for the Pennsylvania Assembly during a dispute over taxation and defense.

“Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.”

Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816

Section. 1. Where things stand

• No federal law. Congress has passed no comprehensive law governing artificial intelligence.
• A fight over the states. In December 2025, an executive order created a Justice Department task force to challenge state AI laws, and in March 2026 the White House asked Congress to override them.¹ In July 2025, the Senate voted 99 to 1 to strip a ten-year ban on state AI laws from the budget bill.
• States are filling the gap. By mid-2026, 29 states had enacted AI legislation this year alone, much of it on child safety and data centers.² California now requires developers of the most powerful models to disclose their safety practices.

The public wants caution. In Gallup’s polling, 80% want AI safety rules kept even if development slows; 64% tell AP-NORC that AI is moving too fast.³ Early evidence suggests the first jobs affected are entry-level positions in fields like customer service, basic accounting, and routine office work.

Section. 2. What we would do

Section. 3. Work, purpose, and the transition

“Industry pays debts, while despair encreaseth them.”

Benjamin Franklin, The Way to Wealth, 1758

A free society rests on a simple bargain: people contribute their work, and their work earns them a good life. That bargain gives people more than income. It gives them purpose, dignity, and a stake in their communities. No technology should be allowed to quietly break it.

The first signs are already visible. Since generative AI spread, employment for workers aged 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed occupations has fallen 13% relative to other jobs, while employment for experienced workers in the same fields has held steady or grown.⁴ Unemployment among new college graduates reached 5.6% in early 2026.⁵ The change is arriving as jobs that are never posted rather than people who are laid off, which makes it easy to miss until it is well underway.

No one can say which jobs will matter most in twenty years, and we won’t pretend to. What we can do is keep the path into work open, teach young people the skills that last, from reasoning and writing to working with their hands and with other people, and prepare before the change arrives rather than after:

• Support that switches on only when needed. Unemployment support and wage insurance that activate automatically if joblessness in AI-exposed occupations crosses a set threshold, and switch off when it recovers. It costs nothing unless the disruption is real.
• A bridge for homeowners. A standing mortgage forbearance program, modeled on the one that prevented a foreclosure wave during the pandemic, so families do not lose their homes during a temporary loss of income.
• Keep training the next generation. Extend the first-job credit in Article VI to apprenticeships in accounting, law, finance, and other professions, so firms keep developing junior staff even when AI could do the junior work.
• Fund obligations from where income actually is. Social Security and Medicare depend on taxes on wages. If AI shifts income from wages to profits, the tax base must follow it, or those programs run short faster (see Article IV).

Section. 4. The honest objections