Climate scientists fired by Trump step in to fill U.S. report gap by Evan Bush

 The future of national climate assessments remains murky after the Trump administration dismissed hundreds of scientists.

 More than a year after the Trump administration dismissed hundreds of scientists working on the National Climate Assessment, clouding the landmark publication’s future, many of those researchers and others released Tuesday the first installment of a special collection of climate change findings designed to fill the perceived gap left behind.

The new research commentary, published in scientific journals operated by the American Geophysical Union and American Meteorological Society, is meant to be something of a roadmap for what new climate research scientists should pursue and highlight to the public. As part of the special collection, the two organizations plan to publish additional research studies that state and local groups could use to build their own climate assessments.

“Scientists working on climate change are continuing to do the work,” said Melissa Kenney, a lead author of the report and the director of research at the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment. “We’re stepping in to ensure that we have the research that we need, and that that is going to be available when we’re working with our communities, with our states, and that it will be available if there are future U.S. national climate assessments.”

In April 2025, the Trump administration halted independent scientists’ work on the sixth national assessment — a congressionally mandated report that summarizes the effects of global climate change in the United States — telling hundreds of scientists who had volunteered to contribute that they were no longer needed. The administration also cut funding to the U.S. Global Change Research Program, whose staffers organized the report’s production. The USGCRP website is no longer online. 

 The new report, published in the journals Earth’s Future and the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, was produced by 175 independent climate scientists, including many who had taken part in previous national climate assessments.

The document outlines areas of climate research that the authors think deserve more focus, like the risks of compounding events — when a heat wave follows a hurricane, for example. 

 “We’ve seen this summer instances of high heat coupled with wildfire. We’ve seen extreme precipitation leading to flash floods and electricity outages, and those risks are commonly overwhelming legacy policies and infrastructures,” Kenney said.

The report also notes areas where scientists have made improvements since the fifth and last National Assessment, released in 2023, such as how to characterize flood risk with a better understanding of hurricane rapid intensification and U.S. coastal subsidence.

“It’s been a couple of years since the last U.S. National Climate Assessment, and a lot has progressed,” Kenney said. “We hear what our communities are saying, and they’re telling us they need scientific information. They need us to continue working so that they can better understand the impacts that they are experiencing and what we expect will happen in the future.”

The future of national climate assessments remains murky. 

 

he Global Change Research Act of 1990 requires the USGCRP to submit a report — the National Climate Assessment — to the president and Congress every four years. It has typically contained a summary of science about the physics of climate change, its effects on the United States and how society is adapting. The assessments also contained localized climate predictions for different regions of the United States, which are meant to give the public a better idea of the risks facing their communities.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration appointed Matthew Wielicki to direct the USGCRP. On his personal blog, titled “Irrational Fear,” Wielicki has criticized the scientific consensus on climate change and has criticized media coverage of heat waves being intensified by climate change as “hysteria.”

Wielicki and the White House Office of Science and Technology did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the special collection, the future of the National Climate Assessment and whether the publication would continue.

The Trump administration has also proposed to edit the content of the National Climate Assessment from 2023 to remove discussion of a high-emissions scenario it considers unlikely. Scientists said it was unusual to propose editing a three-year-old report that was produced by hundreds of scientists and already subjected to peer review and public comment — especially when a new version was due so soon. 

 

It's a complete violation of basic scientific best practice,” said Rachel Cleetus, a senior policy director with the Union of Concerned Scientists’ climate and energy program, describing the proposed amendment as “politically motivated” editing. “They’re just advocating coming and proposing to make changes to a report that they were not even authors on.”

It’s not clear what prompted the Trump administration to seek to edit the 2023 climate report. In its public proposal to amend it, the administration said it sought to clarify that federal agencies should not use the high-emissions scenarios to inform planning processes. Wielicki did not respond to questions.

“There’s no requirement for anyone to take any action based on anything in the NCA5. It’s an informational document. It’s intended to help state local governments, corporations and citizens,” said Phil Duffy, the chief scientist at Spark Climate Solutions, who was an adviser to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy during the Biden administration.

The Trump administration has not said whether or not it would produce a sixth assessment. The congressional mandate would suggest the next report is due in 2027, but previous administrations haven’t always met that obligation.

“There’s precedent for not putting out congressionally mandated national climate assessment,” Duffy said. “We would be up to the ninth national climate assessment if they had been put out every four years.” 

 

Since the authors of the sixth assessment were released from duty, large nonprofit science organizations have been preparing for the report’s absence, which they think will leave an information gap for policymakers.

When it first announced the special collection, AGU president Brandon Jones said it was designed not to replace the National Climate Assessment, but an opportunity for researchers to pursue new research that could underpin future assessments in the U.S.

The consequences of climate change are coming into sharper view. 

 

Extreme heat has baked much of the world this summer. July was the hottest month on record in the U.S., according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and many locations set all-time records. Overall, the three months from June through August were the warmest ever recorded for the contiguous United States.

Last year was the third-hottest in modern history, according to Copernicus, the European Union’s climate monitoring service. The past 11 years have been the 11 warmest on record, Copernicus data shows.

Scientists have linked climate change to the rapid intensification of hurricanes, snowpack drought and more intense rainfall and flooding, among other concerns.

The Trump administration has sidelined key climate reports and data; pushed to remove limits on emissions of climate change causing greenhouse gases from vehicles and powerplants; and exited key international agreements to slow or mitigate climate change effects.

The data center backlash is reshaping American politics — one community at a time by Scott Neuman

 

With striking speed, the widespread debate around data centers has become a fault line in American communities, cutting across political parties, splitting constituencies and forging unexpected alliances.

In city halls and county commission chambers, east to west and north to south, people are squaring off against their local representatives.

It starts with distrust

Data centers have "upended politics as we know it," says Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. It's more than a not-in-my-backyard issue, he says — it also reflects existential fears that artificial intelligence will take jobs or eliminate humanity entirely.

 "People just feel like they no longer have control over the technology, [and] that worries them," West says. "This is a real grassroots movement. It's ordinary people all across the country, both Republicans and Democrats."

 For this story, NPR traveled to data center hot spots and spoke to dozens of activists, politicians, developers and everyday Americans.

The picture that emerges is complicated. Data centers have been an economic boon for some communities, helping to lower land taxes and providing jobs. At the same time, the proliferation of secretive deals that often involve elected officials signing nondisclosure agreements has exacerbated suspicions.

 

A recent poll by The Economist and YouGov of nearly 1,600 adults found that about two-thirds of Americans oppose new data center construction in their communities. A rare cocktail of concerns has fueled the opposition, according to Chris Borick, a political science professor at Lehigh University.

"It's aligning interests in ways that aren't traditional," he says. "If you're in power right now and you are dealing with this issue, you have a target on your back."

Elected officials have had to scramble to recalibrate. "It's a recognition that the ground shifted under their feet and they were not ready for that to happen," Borick says.

 

Parties are divided

In Loudoun County, Va., data centers are driving a wedge between fellow Democrats.

On one side is Juli Briskman, a member of Loudoun County's Board of Supervisors, who has led efforts to slow further data center development. On the other is Phyllis Randall, also a Democrat and the board's chair, who has argued in favor of data centers for the tax revenue they bring into the county, even while acknowledging they are "a double-edged sword" for nearby residents.

 

Briskman is running to unseat Randall in next year's primary. She says her opposition to data centers dates back to 2020, when the board was seeing land-use cases seeking to convert residential and flex-industrial properties into the centers.

"I feel like I have been singing this song for a while, and now all of a sudden everyone's grabbing my music and singing along with me," Briskman says. Randall did not respond to NPR's request for comment.

 

Briskman is tapping into a sentiment in her area.

Kasey Hatch lives near Loudoun County's Vantage VA2 data center, which is powered by eight natural-gas-fired turbines. Residents say the turbines produce a constant low-pitched rumble along with a high-frequency whine that has become a major source of noise complaints in the surrounding neighborhoods.

Hatch, an IT infrastructure engineer for a bank who uses AI in her job, says she and her staunchly Republican cousin "never saw eye to eye on politics." But to her surprise, the last time they met, they were "on the same page about everything" when it came to data centers.

 At the grassroots level, that translates into Democrats and Republicans working together on an issue of mutual interest. Nusheen Farahani also lives near VA2 and is part of a group of women organized against the facility who regularly show up at public hearings.

 

I'm a liberal and I'm a Democrat, and the people that are in our little team … not all of them are liberals or Democrats," Farahani says.

A similar story is playing out in Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Indiana, to name just a few, where locally organized groups are uniting against data centers — and elected officials.

According to the Data Center Opposition Report, which tracks grassroots nonprofits on the issue, some 640,000 people are active in the anti-data center movement and 220 new groups sprang up in just the three months from June through August.

They are driven by a feeling that government is part of the problem, according to Ben Green, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan's School of Information. With that comes a real sense of abandonment, he says.

"If the policymakers, if my city council or zoning board or township board and governor, if they're on the side of the companies, who's standing up for me?"

The economic impact

Data centers have been around for a lot longer than the recent AI hype, quietly humming along in the background of the modern internet, powering cloud computing and storing vast amounts of data. AOL set up in Loudoun County, for example, back in the 1990s, giving the tech industry an early beachhead in the county that has only grown due to demand from government agencies in nearby Washington, D.C.

 

To be sure, these facilities have brought economic benefits to the counties where they are located by creating billions of dollars in private investment, construction jobs and a limited number of well-paying positions at the data centers themselves, all the while providing an infusion of tax dollars that have stabilized and even lowered the tax burden for ordinary property owners.

And among the many people NPR spoke to for this story who oppose data centers, nearly all acknowledge using AI in their daily life. Farahani, for example, says she "begrudgingly" uses chatbots for certain tasks "to make things easier."

 

"I really make a concerted effort not to use it very often," she says, adding: "I don't like it to micromanage my life."

In Loudoun County alone, data centers generated about $1.2 billion in property tax revenue in fiscal year 2026, representing around 39% of the county's overall budget.

"We've seen property taxes go down two years in a row, as well as the vehicle tax rate in the county go down," says Dan Diorio, who oversees state policy and government affairs for the Data Center Coalition, the main trade association representing the industry. "That's money directly back into people's pockets made possible by the revenue from the data center industry."

 

Loudoun County confirms that over the past decade its Board of Supervisors reduced the real property tax rate by about 30% as a result of data center revenue, and that vehicle taxes are also down.

However, these facilities come with enormous electricity requirements, and their on-site systems for keeping countless racks of microprocessors cool can also require substantial quantities of water, a particularly sensitive issue in areas facing population growth or periodic drought.

And the tides are turning. It wasn't long ago that state and local governments competed for data centers by offering generous tax incentives, but now several have reversed course. In many places, the burden has suddenly shifted to the data center developers to prove that they are a benefit to the communities where they want to locate.

 

Just last Friday, Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger — who campaigned in 2025 on qualified support for data center expansion — signed an executive order that seeks to put far greater limitations on development.

Across the U.S., at state and local levels, restrictions and moratoriums on data center developments are being put in place. Meanwhile, incumbents of both major parties on county boards in places such as Virginia, Maryland, Missouri, Wisconsin, Michigan, Texas, Tennessee and California are finding themselves on the defensive — or, in some cases, voted out of office — as residents accuse them of putting the interests of data center developers ahead of their communities.

 

Secrecy and NDAs take a toll

In an industry known for going fast and breaking things, Diorio acknowledges it's paying the price for an early lack of transparency. And what NPR heard from officials, political analysts and local residents is that it's the secrecy that has surrounded some developments that has galvanized opposition.

In several states, local elected officials signed nondisclosure agreements with data center developers that have muddied the waters even more.

A study led by Eric Bonds, a sociology professor at the University of Mary Washington, found that in 31 Virginia localities where there was an existing, approved or proposed data center, nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) had been signed for 25 of them.

Vantage Data Centers' senior vice president for public policy, John Stephenson, says he understands that people are angry and says that in hindsight, it would have been better to engage "earlier and more proactively" with residents on issues such as noise and air quality.

"I wish we could have had some of the conversations back then, but to be perfectly honest, we had no reason to think that there would be an issue because we've been building these for a long time," he says.

 

In Bessemer, a suburb of Birmingham, Ala., secrecy has bred voter suspicion. The city's mayor, a four-term incumbent, has been forced into a runoff after he, his chief of staff and the city's attorney signed NDAs that included a clause requiring them to destroy communications considered "confidential" by developers, according to the Southern Environmental Law Center.

In Wisconsin, a grassroots campaign sprang up last year to oppose a $12 billion hyperscale data center in the Madison suburb of DeForest that would cover more than 2 square miles. Ed Morganroth Jr., a member of that campaign, says that the Village Board had negotiated with the developer behind closed doors and that most residents learned of the plan only after hearing that local farmers had agreed to sell their land for the project.

 

"People have put in a lot of effort and written a lot of emails and met with a lot of board members and posted a lot of things on Facebook and inquired a lot [at] village meetings," Morganroth says.

That effort paid off, and the project was abandoned this year.

A canary in the coal mine

In Virginia's Loudoun County, it's too late for citizens to reverse course on the dozens of projects already in the pipeline. However, just last week the board voted to pause new data center applications.

For Briskman, of the Board of Supervisors, Loudoun County is on the front line of the fight. "We are the case study, not just for the region, but for the nation," she says.

 

Just across the state border, in Maryland's Frederick County, there are also signs of distrust — literally. They're scattered across front lawns and street corners proclaiming "no data centers" and chastising state and county officials for their past support of data centers.

Frederick County is trying to learn from the lessons of its neighbor. The county executive has issued a freeze on new data center development until the state can finish a cost-benefit analysis on their impact.

 

But a sprawling, 2,100-acre hyperscale data center campus north of Adamstown that was once home to an Alcoa aluminum-smelting plant is already well underway. For now, the noise it's producing comes from heavy construction equipment, as beeping cranes and earthmovers erect massive concrete and steel structures.

Quantum Frederick is destined to dwarf the relatively tiny, 18-acre Vantage VA2 campus just across the state border.

Steve Black's tree nursery is located about a mile from the incomplete facility. Like Briskman, he views Loudoun County as something of a canary in the coal mine when it comes to unchecked data center development.

"The [Frederick] county government now is square in the middle of a demanding developer and an outraged citizenry," he says.

 Black is a key figure in a nonprofit that has filed requests for documents and even won a lawsuit against the county to get access to emails, letters and documents related to the Quantum Frederick project.

 

He says he has invested an enormous amount of personal time fighting data center expansion. "When I have to go to some council meeting and stay there till midnight … that is all on my time," he says.

Such commitment tracks with what Kathy Cramer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has found. Cramer leads a team of graduate students who attend public hearings and community group meetings and who conduct one-on-one interviews with people about data centers. She says the concerns she's hearing reflect a deep suspicion of government, Big Tech and the economic fairness of such projects.

 

"Data centers have become … a way for people to channel their discontent and resentment about bigger things in society that they're really not happy about," she says.

And for people like Black, this has solidified as political action.

"I have become a single-issue person," he says, but not in a partisan way. "I will help you in your campaign and give you talking points and answer your questions and help you be smart on this.

"Some people are Democrats that I'm supporting and some are Republicans, and it no longer matters to me."

One thing that hasn’t changed in 250 years: Americans’ willingness to get suckered by JONATHAN FAHEY

 

America: land of possibility. And also: land of suckers.

Our enduring belief that anything is possible — whether based in reality or not — has helped the nation become the world’s largest economy. It has also led us to fall head over heels for hucksters and charlatans, again and again.

If so much is possible here in America, who is to say it’s not possible that the next new supplement, device or scheme might make you young, strong, rich or all of the above, all at once?

In 1897, a Baptist minister convinced us that his company could extract gold from the seawater near Lubec, Maine. A company called Bailey Radium Laboratories in East Orange, New Jersey, introduced a hit product in 1925 called Radithor that it advertised as “a cure for the living dead” that could restore vitality and cure impotence.

There was no gold in Maine’s seawater. And Radithor didn’t turn people into Adonis; it poisoned them with radiation.

 

Americans have been suckered by fraudsters so bold that their schemes are now part of everyday speech.

America brought us Clark Stanley, the Rattlesnake King, who sold us what he called “snake oil liniment” that promised to remedy “pain and lameness, for rheumatism, neuralgia, sciatica, sprains, bunions,” cure “partial paralysis of the arms and lower limbs” and “reduce large joints to their natural size.” America helped create Charles Ponzi, who could deliver you 50% profit in just 45 days by investing in stamp coupons.

These old examples are easy to laugh at or be mortified by, but we should be careful: We are as willing as ever to believe claims that, when subjected to even a modicum of common sense, seem ludicrous. Raw milk has special powers? Peptides can make us young again? A blast of vitamins through an IV can flush out your hangover?

 

Why do we keep falling for this stuff? There’s a simple, poignant reason: “People really don’t want to die.”

So says Dr. Lydia Kang, author of a book on medical fads called “Quackery” and associate professor of internal medicine at University of Nebraska Medical Center. There’s a desperation to it. “Everybody has a deep wish to have a long and fruitful life,” she says, “without disability or pain and with your brain intact.”

 

Other experts say there are sociological and evolutionary reasons to be attracted to outlandish and even disproven claims.

This is not uniquely American, of course. But these instincts and tendencies are amplified in America, with its relentless optimism, its spirit of individualism, its lightly regulated capitalism, its desperate ambition to get richer or healthier or prettier, and a desire to get in on the action driven by suspicion: Others surely have gamed the system, so why can’t I?

“It’s sort of a wild wild West cowboy situation,” Kang said. “People are like, ‘Well, if you’re not going to do it, I’m going to do it myself.’”

The truth often doesn’t matter

When we fall for claims or cling to beliefs after they’ve been disproved, we’re not necessarily being stupid.

We don’t have beliefs to create an accurate representation of the world, said Tali Sharot, a neuroscience professor at University College London. Instead, she said, it’s simply “to have beliefs that will get us the most rewards and help us avoid harm. And sometimes those beliefs are the accurate ones, but sometimes they’re not.”

Overconfidence, for example, can land you a mate or a job you aren’t qualified for, she said. People can get a sense of community, support and belonging by believing what others in a group believe. “If it’s a false belief, it doesn’t matter,” Sharot said. 

 Believing that vaccines cause autism, despite conclusive evidence that they don’t, gives families and loved ones something to blame and provides them with support from a group that shares in their anger, fear and pain.

And hope and belief can provide optimism that things could get better, which can in turn at least temporarily improve mood and mental health. “Believing that your future will be better than the past and the present — even if your future will not be better,” Sharot said, “Many times can be optimal.”

The lottery is almost guaranteed to lose you money — it’s a terrible financial decision. People know this. But they also know that a lottery ticket is a little slip of hope, a chance to imagine a richer future. “What you buy for sure is kind of the fun of thinking about it,” she said. “That is something that you are guaranteed to get.”

Our thinking is similar when it comes to the supplements, balms and techniques that promise benefits that are extremely unlikely to materialize. On one hand, they are a tragic waste of hard-earned money and sometimes have negative side effects. On the other hand, “you gain something from trying,” Sharot said, like positive anticipation or excitement.

 Hope produces hype

But these tendencies leave us open to exploitation by companies that want our money. And they are really good at what they do.

Throughout U.S. history, there is a clear pattern: A hint that something might work opens a crack in a door that companies barge through, capturing the desperation — and the paychecks — of people who are hurting, tired or scared.

 

Dr. Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia physician who signed the Declaration of Independence, was frustrated by his inability to save people during a yellow fever epidemic in 1793. He then read autopsy reports that suggested purging and bloodletting could help. So he took it to an extreme, giving the sick high doses of calomel and jalap — a mercury compound and the powdered root of a Mexican plant that together make an extremely potent laxative — while aggressively draining their blood. According to one account: “So much blood was spilled in the front yard that the site became malodorous and buzzed with flies.”

Charles Stanley’s snake oil was fake — the U.S. Bureau of Chemistry in 1916 found that it was mainly mineral oil, with “fatty oil (probably beef fat), capsicum, and possibly a trace of camphor or turpentine.” But he got the idea from Chinese laborers who used oil — from a very specific snake — that did likely have some anti-inflammatory properties.

Radiation did and does have medical uses, opening the door for William J.A. Bailey to market his Radithor as a “health tonic” — until one prominent and enthusiastic customer took so much his jawbone decayed and he died of radiation poisoning.

Gray areas leave regulators and health professionals in a difficult spot: It’s often impossible to say definitively that something doesn’t work, especially without a study that no one is willing to waste precious time and resources on.

In the meantime, companies pounce. “What’s scary is that they will take that hope and they will try to stick it in a bottle and sell it to you at whatever price that they think that you can afford,” Kang said.

Countless supplements and unapproved “treatments” are based on hints of potential benefits in animal studies or small observational studies that can’t prove cause and effect. Today, some longevity seekers are pinning hopes on rapamycin, a drug given to organ transplant patients, that has increased lifespans in yeast, flies and mice.

Some incredibly successful drugs such as insulin and the weight loss drugs Wegovy and Zepbound are peptides, short chains of amino acids that can be made into countless configurations. That is sparking a whole industry that markets other peptides — largely unproven and untested — that are said to increase muscle growth, speed recovery and fight aging. Sound familiar?

True breakthroughs and powerful anecdotes fuel expectation

Of course science, technology and the nation’s relentless economic engine have produced countless true wonders and enduring anecdotes, which in turn softens the ground for credulous thinking.

We can cross the country in a flying metal tube in a few hours. We can tap into nearly all of human knowledge using a small rectangle of metal and glass. Medical advances and especially vaccination — a radical concept, once — have nearly eliminated childhood diseases that killed up to half of children before age 5 when the nation was founded. An American born in 1900 was likely to live until just 47 years old. U.S. life expectancy is now 79, its highest level ever. Who’s to say it can’t double again? Why should there be any limit at all?

We may be more susceptible now than we have ever been. We’re subjected to ever more tantalizing claims, Kang said, now that we have devices in our pockets that deliver an endless stream of hawkers (euphemized as “influencers”) peddling “treatments” and other shortcuts along our 250-year-strong pursuit of happiness.

Social media is excellent at mimicking the type of messaging scientists say our brains are most open to believing: direct, personal appeals from people who look trustworthy and claim to have had personal experience. And in the U.S., it can be an especially appealing alternative to an expensive, impersonal health system that is absurdly hard to navigate.

Even the nation’s top health official, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has promoted or given voice to those advocating or selling unproven treatments and wellness products, including vitamin A as a measles treatment, peptides and raw milk.

“The guard rails are off right now,” Kang says. “It’s actually worse than it has been before, because of social media, because of what’s on the internet, and because the so-called trusted people we’re supposed to be getting advice from are not trustworthy. And I think that puts the American public in far greater danger.”

The great American swindler George C. Parker, who sold the Brooklyn Bridge — more than once — would have loved it. And would he have a deal for you.

___Jonathan Fahey is the global health and science editor for The Associated Press. The Associated Press’ health and science coverage receives financial support from the AP Fund for Journalism and private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

How Imperial Japan turned to the sardine to help build a war machine by Pei-Hsu Lin

 

The sardine went from feeding the nation to oiling the weapons industry. National Maritime Museum of Korea, CC BY-NC

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Empires have risen and fallen in their pursuit of precious resources such as oil, gold, tea or spices. But in the first half of the 20th century, an increasingly assertive Imperial Japan relied on a fishier form of wealth to build its military and industrial base: the sardine.

In Japan, sardines are among a group of fish fondly known as “the people’s fish.” Along with Japanese anchovy and round herring, they are collectively known as “iwashi” and have long been a common ingredient in the Japanese diet, whether consumed raw or used in a variety of dishes.

But this small fish, named in records from early 20th century Imperial Japan as “ma-iwashi,” was more than just food. Beginning with the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan embarked on its modernization project and aggressive empire-making to become an imperial power. Despite being a latecomer to imperialism, through military annexation and invasion Japan took control of large swaths of Asia.

As a scholar studying the history of the Japanese empire, I have profiled the key role of sardines in the making of Japanese imperialism. With a high fat content, a significant portion of the sardine catch was processed into fish oil, serving as a primary raw material for the empire’s war-oriented chemical industry.

From fish oil to dynamite

Prior to the demand for sardines for chemical manufacturing, sardine oil had long been a byproduct of processing the fish into fertilizer. Through the trading company Suzuki Shoten, the smelly oil was originally exported to Europe, where it was turned into a solid, odorless fat through a process called hydrogenation.

The technique was introduced to Japan in the early 1910s. Hydrogenated oil, after chemical processing, would become nitroglycerin – the main ingredient of dynamite.

 

Using fish oil to produce military weapons was not unique to Japan. In fact, it was a trend in imperial warfare during the early 20th century, as seen in Nazi Germany’s wartime operations as well.

Japan’s employment of sardines for this application meant it had to seek such a natural resource beyond its archipelago. For Imperial Japan, the relationship between sardines and its empire-making was twofold: Expanding territory facilitated its larger yield of the fish, which in turn allowed for more oil for the empire’s war apparatus. And placing waters around the Korean peninsula under control was key.

Korea’s ascension

Japan annexed Korea in 1910. But the year 1923 has been recognized as a watershed for sardine fishing in the region. That year, massive schools of sardines were reported off the coast of northern Korea. This was possibly due to ocean current changes following the Great Kanto Earthquake, newfound knowledge of sardines’ value among fishermen, or changes in the sea surface temperature.

With the sardine migratory route along the eastern coast of the Korean peninsula allowing for a nearly year-round fishing season, the colony’s importance within the empire grew as its rich sardine resources became key to Japan’s military ambitions.

Aggressively extracting oil from its iwashi resources, Imperial Japan became the world’s largest harvester of the fish. Its catch in 1931, including yields from colonies such as Korea and Taiwan, which was under Japanese control from 1895 to 1945, accounted for roughly 44% of the global total, according to Japan’s Fisheries Bureau.

As the data showed, the harvest from colonial Korea and the entire Japanese empire were, respectively, nearly three times and 10 times that of the United States, which was second behind Japan that year.

Underscoring the importance of sardine oil as an industrial raw material, a 1939 article in the Dong-A Ilbo newspaper extolled the fish as the “Darling of the Century” as it celebrated a record-breaking catch in North Hamgyong Province of present-day North Korea.

The weaponization of sardines

Sardines went from dinner tables to battlefields and fueled Imperial Japan’s continental aggression, beginning with the 1931 invasion of Manchuria in northeast China and culminating in the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937 – an event that served as a precursor to World War II in Asia.

Dynamite used in both military operations and the full-scale war later were likely sourced from the empire’s sardines.

By then, colonial Korea’s Hungnam region had become the hub that produced such fish-sourced weapons. It centered on the Hungnam Complex, a massive chemical industrial facility that had been established as part of the Chosen Nitrogenous Fertilizer Corporation. Initially built as a chemical fertilizer plant, the complex grew into an expansive establishment encompassing glycerin and explosives factories by 1935.

As a self-sufficient production facility, turning locally caught fish into dynamite using chemicals produced within the same manufacturing center, the Hungnam Complex shortened the supply line for delivering dynamite to Manchuria. Previously it had to be shipped from Japan.

 

With Korea’s ascension from sardine-fishing hub to chemical industrial powerhouse, sardines were no longer the “people’s fish.” Instead, they became the “militarized fish.”

But the weaponization of the fish did not last long into World War II. Studies suggest Imperial Japan’s sardine catch declined drastically and even ceased during the early 1940s, constraining the empire’s military power relying on fisheries resources.

Japan’s defeat in the war ended its imperial ambitions shaped by sardines. But the industrial use of sardines continues today. According to Japanese government statistics cited in a Toyomi Fish Museum article, as recently as 2020 more than 70% of sardines were used for nonedible purposes, such as oil, fertilizer and fish feed.

The story of sardines feeding Japan’s war machine illustrates the convergence of technology, environment and imperialism. Even a tiny fish could be reconfigured as a foundational raw material that fueled a modern empire’s machinery.

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The costs of the Iran war that started on February 28, 2026 extend well beyond the
missiles, bombs, and deployment of personnel and munitions that have totaled upwards of
$29 billion thus far. They also include various economic consequences for the global
economy, such as higher fuel, food, and consumer goods prices, among others. This
research brief highlights the significance of the Iran war in raising the cost of fuel prices.
In association with the Costs of War project, the Climate Solutions Lab at Brown University
recently released an Iran War Energy Cost Tracker that measures the additional financial
burden placed on American consumers by higher gasoline and diesel prices following the
start of the war. It compares actual prices to a "no-war" counterfactual estimate of what
prices would have been had the conflict not occurred.
As of May 18, 2026, our calculations show that Americans have spent over $40 billion on
extra gasoline and diesel costs, above what they had been paying in February. This briefing
asks: what, as a country, could we have spent that money on instead?
What else could $40 billion have been spent on?
The United States’ aggregate extra fuel costs since February 28:
● Could pay for the entire federal Bridge Investment Program announced in 2024 to
repair, restore, and modernize over 10,200 of the nation’s bridges
● Exceed the estimated cost of completely redoing the U.S. air traffic control system
($31.5 billion)
● Are twice (2x) the cost of the Federal EV Charging and Electrification Programs
proposed under two laws passed during the Biden administration ($18.9 billion)
What do these costs mean for U.S. households?
The rising costs of both gasoline and diesel affect American households nationwide. Many
consumers feel gasoline prices directly at the pump. They are also impacted by diesel costs,
because diesel plays an integral role in trucking, shipping, and power generation. American
households ultimately bear these increases through higher prices across the economy.
On average, each U.S. household has paid over $300 more for gasoline and diesel since
February 28, 2026, than it would have without the war. Overall, the higher prices resulting
from this conflict increase the everyday costs of Americans. This data shows that energy
price shocks function as an economy-wide, unacknowledged tax on households, with costs
comparable to large federal programs and policies.
Behind the numbers: Our methodology
We calculate the extra cost each day by comparing actual retail fuel prices (with data from
the American Automobile Association, AAA, and the U.S. Energy Information Agency, EIA)
since the beginning of the war against a no-war counterfactual, that is, an estimate of what
prices would have been without a war. That no-war counterfactual price is estimated based
on the pre-war price and historical daily price changes. Each daily price gap is multiplied by
fuel consumption demand, with data sourced from the EIA to produce a cumulative cost
burden. Both national and state-level calculations are made using this method and are
paired with data from the Census Bureau to find household costs.
For complete details, see our Tracker’s Methodology
For press inquiries, please contact Stephanie Savell at the Costs of War Project or
Professor Jeff Colgan at the Climate Solutions Lab

Donald Trump Jr.’s Bahamas Wedding Was Secretly Bankrolled by Russian Oligarch Close to Putin by Justin Elliott, Brett Murphy, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski

 

The oligarch, Umar Kremlev, spent hundreds of thousands on expenses like renting out a private island. He appears to have met Trump Jr. only recently, but he attended the intimate wedding with a large group of other Russian guests.

 

On May 24, Donald Trump Jr. was celebrating in the Bahamas, as scantily clad dancers in stilettos and sailor caps performed for him and his guests. It was the last night of his wedding, a lavish, three-day party held across a pair of ultra-exclusive private islands. A five-tier funfetti cake had been airlifted in from Florida, and helicopters and seaplanes descended on the islands before guests settled into their oceanfront villas. That night on the beach, Trump Jr. lifted his bride into the air while fireworks launched from a barge over the sea.

“It was everything we dreamed of and more,” his wife later wrote on Instagram.

That dream was heavily funded by a secret benefactor: Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin.

Kremlev footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses, according to records reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with three people familiar with the event. The oligarch paid to rent out one of the private islands, where a reception was held and where guests slept. He also covered other big-ticket items, like the fireworks show, and his team helped plan the event. Kremlev is the head of the International Boxing Association, a scandal-plagued sports group that has been financed by the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. The wedding payments came from an IBA-affiliated entity in Dubai that the boxing association uses for financial transactions.

The guest list numbered around 50. It included Trump Jr.’s brother-in-law Jared Kushner, Eric Trump — and Kremlev, an imposing man with a shaved head who speaks limited English. The oligarch was part of a large group whose presence puzzled other attendees. They sometimes stood off by themselves, speaking Russian.

“It was really small, like, just really close friends,” Trump Jr. later said on his podcast. “Tried to keep it really tight. And it was just awesome.”

Kremlev’s previously unreported relationship with Trump Jr. represents an extraordinary development: a member of Putin’s circle financially supporting the president’s son and gaining intimate access to the Trump family. For a decade, Putin’s government, regarded as a chief adversary of the U.S., has been accused of efforts to influence American elections. Attempts by Russia to make inroads with the Trumps before the 2016 election exploded into controversy that dogged much of the president’s first term.

 

National security experts expressed alarm at Trump Jr. accepting the oligarch’s largesse, saying it raised an urgent question: What motivated Kremlev to spend a fortune cultivating the connection? 

“If I’m paying for your wedding, at some point, you’re going to owe me something,” said Frank Montoya Jr., a retired career FBI official who held senior counterintelligence roles. Oligarchs like Kremlev often act in coordination with the Russian government. While it’s unclear if that happened here, Trump Jr. put himself in a precarious position, Montoya said. “This should be unthinkable for the son of the president. End of story.”

Holden Triplett, who served as Trump’s counterintelligence director on the National Security Council during his first term, said Russian intelligence frequently seeks to build ties with U.S. government officials and their family members. “Money is a tried-and-true method to gain access,” said Triplett, who also worked for the FBI in Moscow.

In the days leading up to Trump Jr.’s wedding, Kremlev was in China as part of the delegation accompanying Putin, according to Chinese state media. The month before, Putin had bestowed him with a state honor, the Order of Friendship. The Ukrainian government has imposed sanctions on Kremlev personally, citing his closeness to Putin and Russian security services.

It’s not clear why Kremlev helped pay for Trump Jr.’s wedding. The men appear to have met only recently. Public reporting suggests Trump Jr. could have afforded it himself, with Forbes recently estimating his net worth at roughly $300 million. 

In response to detailed questions, a spokesperson for Trump Jr. did not dispute the wedding payments from Kremlev. “Umar is a personal friend of Don,” he said. The spokesman said that Kremlev is “not someone he has a business relationship with” and that the men met through a mutual friend in the hunting world and bonded over their love of boxing and the outdoors.

A spokesperson for Trump Jr.’s brother Eric said of Kremlev: “Eric has absolutely no clue who this person is, nor has never heard his name.” 

In a statement, Kremlev’s press office said, “Mr. Kremlev and Mr. Trump Jr have a friendly relationship” and they first met “a couple of years ago.”

The press office described Kremlev as a businessman and philanthropist, adding, “Mr. Kremlev has never discussed political matters with any of his American friends and acquaintances,” including Trump Jr. They said the boxing organization itself did not incur expenses for the wedding but did not comment on the payments from the Dubai entity. The press office also said that when Putin and Kremlev were in China recently, Kremlev was not part of Putin’s “official delegation.”

Kushner, who has been helping lead the U.S. government’s negotiations with Russia over Ukraine, did not respond to requests for comment. The White House and the Russian government did not respond either.

The revelations come as Trump Jr. has emerged as a political power center in his own right. Beloved by the MAGA base, he reportedly played an active role in vetting White House cabinet picks for Trump’s second term and was dubbed his father’s “most essential political adviser” by The Wall Street Journal. “I certainly don’t think I’d be sitting here as the VP nominee without Don’s help,” Vice President JD Vance told the outlet in late 2024.

This account is based on records and interviews with dozens of current and former IBA officials and contractors, wedding attendees and other people in Trump Jr.’s and Kremlev’s circles.

Trump Jr. exchanged vows with socialite Bettina Anderson on a private island that was featured in “Pirates of the Caribbean” and the 2006 James Bond movie “Casino Royale.” They had their first dance on a second private island nearby that can rent for around $100,000 a night, paid for by Kremlev. The company that put on the fireworks display charges around $70,000 for such shows. (Kremlev did not attend the ceremony itself, which was held on the first day and had just 18 guests, Trump Jr.’s spokesperson said.)

 

The atmosphere was Monte Carlo meets frat party — helicopters in and out, a beachside DJ set, beer pong tournaments. One day, the men went spearfishing. Artisans at the London fashion house Safiyaa spent 150 hours embroidering Anderson’s bespoke silk reception outfit. The president’s son had undergone treatment to better define his jawline for the occasion.

Some longtime friends of Trump Jr. told associates they were disappointed not to be invited, though a few of his closest business partners — executives at the Trump family crypto company, World Liberty Financial, and the venture capital firm 1789 Capital — did make the cut. President Trump himself skipped it. (“He’d like me to go, but it’s going to be just a small, little private affair,” the president told reporters beforehand. “I said, you know, this is not good timing for me.”) But many of the guests were immediate family of the bride and groom.

That made the large contingent of Russians all the more conspicuous. “What are they doing here?” one person recalled thinking. At least one of the Russian guests had been with Kremlev on his China trip: Alexander Lagutin, a businessperson who has served in senior roles at a Russian defense contractor and a state-backed energy company. Kremlev’s right hand at the IBA, Elena Sobol, attended the wedding too. 

Since the wedding, the Trumps have released scores of photos and videos of the festivities. While they show many of the guests, the Russians have been absent from all of them. (The top of Kremlev’s head is visible in the back of one group photo posted on Instagram by a friend of the bride.) After the party was over, on his “Triggered” podcast, Trump Jr. emphasized the event’s privacy: “The people that were there — if you’re on that list, you weren’t talking.”

In 2009, Umar Kremlev did not yet exist.

He was in his late 20s, with a criminal record for extortion and battery, still going by his birth name, Umar Lutfulloyev, according to the Russian independent news outlet Proekt. But he was about to rapidly ascend in Russia to a position of wealth and influence, with the help of a powerful friend. (“Mr. Kremlev has a completely clean legal record,” his press office said.)

 

In 2010, he changed his name to Kremlev. He soon joined a Russian government-backed biker gang called the Night Wolves, eventually taking a leadership role, according to news reports. That is what first brought him close to Alexei Rubezhnoi, who now leads Putin’s presidential security service, Proekt reported. In 2017, Kremlev took over the Russian Boxing Federation, after Rubezhnoi personally intervened to put him at the helm.

In 2020, Kremlev became president of the IBA. The association was something akin to FIFA but for boxing and had long overseen the sport in the Olympics. But it had been beset by corruption allegations and was on the brink of insolvency. Kremlev brought money to the table from Gazprom, the state-owned company that operates as an arm of Putin’s government. Gazprom publicly became the IBA’s financial backer, filling its coffers with tens of millions of dollars.

Former high-level IBA officials said that Kremlev had a clear political agenda. “Umar is guided by Putin. It was using the sport for soft political power,” a former IBA board member told ProPublica. “It’s geopolitics. That it’s boxing is just happenstance.” Kremlev, 43, is also heavily involved in an organization called Healthy Fatherland, run by his 23-year-old wife’s twin sister. The group — which promotes healthy eating and youth sports — is under Ukrainian sanctions for its alleged role in a program of abducting Ukrainian children from occupied territories and relocating them under the guise of “rehabilitation.” (Healthy Fatherland did not respond to a request for comment.)

Kremlev’s cozy relationship with the government has made him rich. Putin used the levers of the state to make Kremlev a dominant player in the Russian sports betting industry, according to Proekt, and one of his companies was chosen to operate the national lottery. After Putin nationalized Russia’s largest car dealership company in 2023, Kremlev became the owner of that too.

He now flaunts that wealth through his boisterous public persona. In one video Kremlev posted on social media, he surprises a young mother by giving her a free car. In another, he criticizes his young female aide’s outfit as not feminine enough and makes her change. He shadowboxes with ostriches and brings in celebrities like Rick Ross and Naomi Campbell for IBA events; he praises Stalin and rides private jets.

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. began to indict Russian oligarchs and seize yachts and other assets. Kremlev repeatedly told associates he was worried about being targeted by a U.S. government probe, according to a person close to IBA leadership. “He was very afraid of American sanctions,” the person added. (Kremlev does not appear on public U.S. sanction lists.)

With the business environment in Europe growing more hostile to Russia, Kremlev moved much of the IBA’s operations from Switzerland to the United Arab Emirates. A new Dubai entity, IB Challenger, would later pay wedding expenses for Trump Jr. The current sources of the IBA’s funds are murky, and, in recent years, top executives have given conflicting accounts of the status of its relationship with Gazprom. (Kremlev’s press office told ProPublica the IBA’s sponsorship contract with Gazprom “expired long ago.”) People close to the organization said they understood that its money still comes from Russia.

In 2023, the International Olympic Committee stripped Kremlev’s IBA of its role organizing Olympic boxing. It has cited a host of governance issues and the group’s refusal to “transparently explain the sources of its financing or to explain its full financial dependency, at the time, on a single state-owned company.” 

It was a major setback that deprived the IBA of a key source of its international influence. Kremlev has raged against the Olympic committee ever since and has said that his IBA predecessor, who he blames for the problems, “must be shot.”

Kremlev saw a potential ally in President Trump. After Trump’s second inauguration, in January 2025, Kremlev sent an open letter to the president asking him to look into the Olympic committee’s actions in advance of the 2028 Los Angeles Games. “We look forward with great optimism to the possibility of working together to make the Olympic movement great again,” he wrote.

In September 2025, the IBA brought in Trump Jr. for a panel discussion in Istanbul about boxing. With his then-girlfriend, Anderson, sitting offstage, he criticized transgender women competing in women’s sports and reminisced about watching Saturday night fights as a child. Trump Jr. shared the stage with Kremlev, the boxer Manny Pacquiao and Muhammad Ali’s daughter Rasheda. (Trump Jr.’s spokesperson said he was not paid for the appearance and was already in Turkey for an unrelated event.)

The president’s son had reason to be attuned to the sensitivity of cozying up with a Putin associate, especially while his father navigates the Russia-Ukraine war. Trump Jr.’s June 2016 meeting with a Russian attorney in Trump Tower became a major focus of the Robert Mueller investigation.

The Trump Tower meeting was arranged after an email offering Trump Jr. damaging information about Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Trump Jr. famously responded, “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.” Trump Jr. later dismissed the matter as a “witch hunt,” and the Mueller report concluded that there was not enough evidence to convict him of a crime.

Recently, Kremlev has been working to expand into the U.S. market. In July, his group hosted a bare-knuckle boxing event in Miami, a chance to showcase a particularly bloody form of the sport in which contenders fight without gloves. But the debut was overshadowed when manosphere influencer Andrew Tate, who the IBA had brought in to host, was arrested by U.S. Marshals outside the arena. (Tate is facing rape and sex trafficking charges in the United Kingdom, which he has denied.)

Much about Kremlev’s relationship with Trump Jr., and where it is headed, remains unknown. In a press release after the Istanbul panel, the IBA hinted there was more to come. 

“President Kremlev and Donald Trump Jr made it clear – this alliance will not remain symbolic,” the press release read. “More joint initiatives will follow.”

 

The 3 Mistakes That Doomed the Department of Homeland Security by Garrett M. Graff

 The 9/11 attacks showed we were vulnerable. DHS was the wrong response.

 Americans were badly surprised by the 9/11 attacks. But what would have surprised Americans even more during the fall of 2001, in the wake of the terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, is that al Qaeda never successfully attacked the United States homeland again thereafter.

Twenty-five years later, what might surprise Americans now is how little the major government reorganization meant to prevent attacks — the creation of the Department of Homeland Security — had to do with that remarkable track record of success.

 

In fact, amid President Donald Trump’s ongoing unprecedented use of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection to target cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and Minneapolis, large swaths of the nation today seem more likely to say that they fear DHS itself than terrorists from overseas. Roughly half the country now supports outright abolishing ICE.

Today, as the nation marks the 25^th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, many experts and politicians are calling for radical reforms of the very Cabinet department created to prevent the next attack. I’ve been studying 9/11 and the ways the attacks transformed America and its national security apparatus and in recent months, I’ve been talking to those who helped build and run DHS, including two of its Senate-confirmed secretaries. One of them, surprisingly, now agrees with critics that the department needs to be broken up and rebuilt into something different.

That’s because instead of an ever-vigilant department that defends Americans from pressing terrorism threats, DHS has swelled over the last quarter-century into a giant, sprawling, inchoate amalgam of agencies with an annual budget so vast it exceeds the entire military budgets of all-but four countries — the U.S., China, Russia, and Germany — and larger than the entire annual government budgets of New Zealand, Hungary or the Philippines. Moreover, a department that originally was created to look externally, identifying threats and stopping plots before they could enter the U.S., has instead become increasingly focused on policing U.S. residents.

To understand why DHS has become such a lightning rod for controversy, it pays to revisit what politicians of both parties have gotten right and wrong about homeland security over the last 25 years and reconsider three critical decisions that shaped the department and set it up for failure.

 The morning after 9/11, George W. Bush gathered the nation’s security leaders at the White House in an unlikely venue for such a conversation: the ceremonial Roosevelt Room. “We’re all sitting in the Roosevelt Room, because for the first time we had all these people who worried about internal security,” Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, recalled to me in an interview this summer, noting that 9/11 was the first major attack on contiguous U.S. territory since 1812. “A national security meeting in the Situation Room would not have had a lot of the people that we needed, like the FBI director, the attorney general and the transportation secretary. The Situation Room’s not big enough for all of these people.” At that meeting, Bush delivered a short, crisp order that would become the guiding principle of the government in the days, months and years after 9/11: “Never Again.”

 The Sept. 11 attacks completely rewrote the public understanding and governmental fears of terrorism. Through the 1990s, much of what was labeled “terrorism” was homegrown — like the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, or the decades-long string of mail and package bombs sent by the Unabomber. Events like the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center by Islamic extremists were seen more as the exception rather than the norm. Instead, “terrorism” by anti-American extremists was something that happened overseas — as underscored by al Qaeda’s earlier 1998 attacks against U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, as well as the bombing of the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, in 2000

 The Sept. 11 attacks, though, raised terrorism from background noise to an existential dread. It was clear to the officials leading government at the time that living up to Bush’s mantra would require a new approach. “I don’t think that anybody of my generation — and even older generations — had ever experienced anything like this kind of successful attack, killing over 3,000 Americans. It was worse than Pearl Harbor in numbers and in terms of the fact that the victims were civilians and not even military,” Michael Chertoff, who at the time was head of the criminal division at the Department of Justice and who later became the second secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, told me this summer, when we spoke as part of my podcast, Long Shadow. “It was a real revolution in what the threats were. We needed to re-orchestrate how we secure our people and our property against this kind of attack.”

 

Bush resisted the push for the new Cabinet department for months, believing that he could best coordinate existing departments from a newly created White House Office of Homeland Security, which was created 11 days after 9/11 and first headed by former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge. He hoped to build a homeland security structure akin to the National Security Council, which coordinates interagency work among cabinet departments, and saw a presidential-level office with strong budget responsibilities as the best way to focus disparate agencies and functions.

Yet as evidence mounted about the myriad warning signs that U.S. law enforcement and intelligence had missed leading up to the attacks, congressional pressure for a major reorganization became politically inescapable by 2002.

“There was a recognition that we were too fragmented and that there were a lot of silos and that we needed to find a way to bring together all of the sources of information and all of the expertise to build a capability to prevent acts of terrorism,” Chertoff said.

Exactly what that new structure would look like, though, was very much an open debate. Amid fierce turf battles and lobbying by Cabinet officials and congressional leaders, the very agencies that failed to “connect the dots” ahead of 9/11 — the FBI and the CIA — remained apart from the new Cabinet department. Instead of a sweeping “homeland security” mandate, the new department that emerged from legislative and presidential wrangling and horse-trading in late 2002 might have been better termed the “Department of Border and Transportation Security.”

Jeh Johnson, who served as DHS secretary in the second term of the Obama administration, says the focus at the time the department was founded was more about securing borders than the more nuanced work of preventing terrorism.

 “The thinking was that terrorism was an extraterritorial threat, so let’s consolidate the regulation of all the different ways somebody can enter the country into one Cabinet-level department — land, border patrol, courts, customs, aviation security, air and water, Coast Guard — and throw in a few additional ones in there with it, like the Secret Service and FEMA,” Johnson told me in an interview.

 

Nevertheless, at the time of its creation, DHS was the largest reorganization of government since the creation of the Department of Defense after World War II and brought together all or parts of 22 separate government agencies, from the U.S. Coast Guard, housed in the Transportation Department, and Treasury’s Secret Service to the Immigration and Naturalization Service at the Justice Department to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service and Plum Island Animal Disease Center, as well as FEMA, which had been an independent agency reporting to directly to the president.

The result became the nation’s third-largest Cabinet department, with an amalgamation of organizational cultures that ranged from the U.S. Customs Service and Coast Guard, which date to the first years of the U.S. government in the late 1700s, to the fiercely independent Border Patrol — whose leaders lobbied to keep its traditional green uniform rather than unite under a common CBP blue uniform — to then-entirely new creations like the Transportation Security Administration.

Given that complexity, it’s perhaps not surprising that DHS has struggled ever since to coalesce into one organization with a shared mission and culture — and it shows. DHS’s own workforce has borne the brunt of the mission mismatch; it has consistently ranked at or near the bottom of federal government morale surveys. In the 18 surveys of the U.S. government’s “Best Places to Work” conducted by the non-partisan Partnership for Public Service between 2005 and 2024, DHS ranked last or second-to-last an astounding 13 times among the roughly 20 large government departments.

Many of the agencies reflect deeply troubled internal cultures: Using CBP’s own discipline reports, I calculated earlier this year that 4,913 CBP officers and Border Patrol agents have been arrested for crime, corruption and misconduct from 2005 to 2024 — a total that works out to be one agent or officer arrested every 36 hours for more than two decades, and a number that itself would represent the nation’s fourth-largest civilian police department, equal roughly to the entire size of the Philadelphia police force. While exact statistics are difficult to calculate, it appears that CBP has a misconduct rate five times greater than other federal law enforcement agencies — and that perhaps CBP officers and Border Patrol agents even are arrested at a higher rate per capita than that of the unauthorized immigrant population.

 

While DHS leadership under previous presidents has been largely steady, it has proven a damaging revolving door in both Trump presidencies; the department lacked a Senate-confirmed leader through nearly the entire final two years of Trump’s first term and the administration even struggled to prove in court who was legally in charge of the department. In his second term, DHS secretary Kristi Noem lasted just 14 months before being forced out.

But if DHS has proven itself ill-suited to focus on foreign terrorism, it has become a useful catch-all presidential “Praetorian Guard” across both of Trump’s presidential terms. In his first term, amid the nationwide protests that followed the murder of George Floyd, Trump turned to a dubious legal interpretation to deploy Border Patrol agents and other DHS officers to do battle with protesters in cities like Portland, Oregon. “I don’t need invitations by the state, state mayors or state governors to do our job,” then-acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf told reporters amid the 2020 unrest. “We’re going to do that whether they like us there or not.” In recent days, Trump has launched a nationwide “surge” of ICE agents to investigate voter fraud, a vanishingly rare crime with no clear nexus to ICE’s normal investigative responsibilities.

 Altogether the ranks of DHS have swelled greatly since its creation and fundamentally altered the balance of federal law enforcement; recent government figures show that roughly half of all federal law enforcement officers are now housed inside DHS, while just a third of federal agents and officers are housed in the Department of Justice, which includes the FBI, DEA, and ATF. Today, again, while it’s hard to calculate exact figures given the recent hiring surge by ICE and CBP, DHS may in fact employ as much as 55% to 60% of all federal law enforcement personnel. Last summer’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act funneled billions of fresh dollars into DHS, ICE and CBP, turbocharging their budgets even further. As I calculated earlier this year, the $53 billion procurement and construction budget for CBP alone is equal to the entire 2024 defense expenditures of 10 European countries — Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Finland, Greece, Belgium, Romania, Denmark and Norway.

 Today, 25 years after 9/11, DHS’s core original mission of combating and responding to terrorism seems all-but forgotten in the public eye — and it seems particularly ill-poised to respond to the modern terrorism or national security threats as they currently exist.

While al Qaeda certainly remained dangerous for years after 9/11 — including executing the 2004 Madrid train bombings and the 2005 bus and train bombings in London, remembered as the 7/7 attacks — Osama bin Laden never successfully directed another attack at the U.S. homeland before he was killed in 2011 by a SEAL Team Six raid after intelligence located his secret hideout in Pakistan. (The only al Qaeda-directed attack to hit the U.S. homeland since 2001 was a December 2019 shooting by a Royal Saudi Air Force aviation student at Naval Air Station Pensacola that investigators later determined was directed by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, an affiliate group known as AQAP; the shooter killed three U.S. sailors before being killed by responding sheriff deputies.)

The U.S. did weather a wave of attacks across the mid-2010s by individuals inspired by ISIS, an Islamic extremist group that grew out of the chaos caused by the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, but in the last decade, the primary terrorism threat has become domestic actors — especially far-right white supremacists and mass shooters. DHS has specifically struggled to even name that threat: Then-DHS secretary Janet Napolitano backpedaled after a 2009 intelligence report cited the rising threat of far-right actors and former military veterans.

Elizabeth Neumann, then-DHS assistant secretary for counterterrorism, told me that in Trump’s first term she was startled to realize that there was no one paying attention to the rise of domestic extremists and white supremacists. As she said, “In the analysis field, it takes years for you to gain an understanding of an enemy and their tactics, their techniques, so that you can look at an event and say, this matters or this doesn’t matter. It just turns out there had been nobody working the domestic terrorism beat…. We really felt like we were in the dark.”

 It’s a threat that has grown even more serious in the years since — and yet still remains largely off the radar of DHS. “Most acts of terrorism now — by any objective measure — in this country are from within,” Johnson told me. “There are not a whole lot of DHS cops running around the interior looking for terrorists. That task has always been with the FBI.”

 Looking back, there were three decisions that hobbled DHS’s mission and responsibilities from the start.

The first was FBI director Robert Mueller’s successful argument that the FBI should remain intact. At the time, there was a widespread push to split the bureau into a British-style domestic law enforcement agency, like Scotland Yard, and a domestic intelligence agency, like MI5. The U.S., in fact, is one of the few Western countries that unites its domestic intelligence capabilities along with its equivalent of a national police force. (Canada, for instance, has both the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.) Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, and as evidence mounted of the failures of the FBI and the CIA to communicate successfully and “connect the dots,” many on Capitol Hill called to break the bureau apart. But in a careful, quiet personal lobbying campaign, Mueller made the case that having the bureau’s intelligence and law enforcement capabilities under one roof made the nation safer. Ultimately, congressional leaders acquiesced — largely as a personal endorsement of Mueller, who had taken over the bureau just a week before 9/11 and who had committed to a top-to-bottom reorganization of the bureau.

Second, despite its new labeling as “homeland security” — a phrase all-but born into official Washington lingo in the wake of the 9/11 attacks — the newly formed DHS actually had shockingly little responsibility for combatting terrorism, which mostly remained firmly the purview domestically of the Department of Justice, with its FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Instead, DHS possessed very narrow domestic criminal investigative authorities, mostly focused on customs smuggling and human trafficking (Homeland Security Investigations) and counterfeiting and financial crimes (Secret Service). In fact, despite its name, many of HSI’s most legendary and important investigations and prosecutions have come in cases overseas, focused on cybercrime, transnational organized crime and the smuggling of weapons of mass destruction. As early as 2005, a Washington Post investigation concluded, “To some extent, the department was set up to fail. It was assigned the awesome responsibility of defending the homeland without the investigative, intelligence and military powers of the FBI, CIA and the Pentagon; it was also repeatedly undermined by the White House that initially opposed its creation.”

hird, there was a challenge more visible in retrospect: The new department inherited what would become one of the nation’s most divisive issues — immigration and border security — alongside a whole host of what were traditionally more nonpartisan responsibilities, from FEMA’s disaster relief to the search-and-rescue efforts and navigation aid maintenance of the Coast Guard to the airport security checkpoints of the newly-created TSA, as well as the protection of the nation’s critical civilian infrastructure, from water utilities to government IT networks, of what is now called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. In many countries, these functions are housed in something more like a national civil defense agency. The shortcomings of this model became evident in multiple subsequent crises, including famously during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 when FEMA — which traditionally had reported directly to the White House — struggled to mobilize relief efforts across the government.   

  The result of this organizational mismatch has become an all-too-obvious mission creep — as a department ill-poised to do the thing it was created to do instead became a politically useful and opportunistic cudgel for a president with authoritarian impulses. Across his two terms, Trump has seized political openings and turbocharged DHS’s funding to target not foreign terrorists like al Qaeda or ISIS, but political dissidents and protesters here at home — people Trump himself has repeatedly labeled “terrorists.”

Today, as the country marks the 25^th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, it’s clear to many of even the department’s one-time champions that change and a refocusing is necessary.

 “The positive is we’ve not had another global terrorist attack successful in the U.S. since then —that was job number one. The threats have changed, though; you have cyber threats, biological, and chemical threats and artificial intelligence may pose new threats,” Chertoff told me. “There has to be a certain element of adaptability, and sometimes you have reset where your priorities are. I do think there’s been an overemphasis on being very muscular in terms of deporting people — some of whom may be here legally and some of whom are not. That’s an important mission, but it shouldn’t overwhelm all the other missions because we still live in a dangerous world. These are not times we want to take our eye off mission number one, which is protecting the lives and safety of American citizens.”

 

One of Chertoff’s successors now goes even further: Jeh Johnson so bemoans the current state of DHS and its ongoing management struggles that he now backs the dissolution of the very Cabinet department he once led.

“As I see it, when Congress created DHS, in some respects, they went too far — and in some respects, they went not far enough,” Johnson told me.

Indeed, Johnson, who served as the department’s fourth Senate-confirmed leader, from December 2013 to the final hours of Barack Obama’s presidency in January 2017, recalls that when he met with foreign counterparts, their governments often concentrated federal law enforcement resources inside a structure often known as the Interior Ministry or Home Office.

Now, he argues that both DHS and the Justice Department should be reimagined along similar lines — a move he argues would both improve federal cooperation and reduce infighting, as well as help ensure that the current non-law enforcement portions of DHS receive better leadership and oversight.

Johnson argues that the U.S. would be better served by a “Department of Public Safety” that brought all of the government’s major investigative agencies under one roof — including the FBI, ATF, DEA, U.S. Marshals Service, Secret Service, TSA, CBP and ICE, which includes both its Enforcement and Removal Office and HSI, as well as the protective responsibilities of CISA. As part of that reorganization, he believes FEMA should be returned to standing as an independent agency that can both better respond to presidential needs and also more directly work with state-level leadership.

 “I have seen firsthand how law enforcement agencies compete for space,” Johnson says. “Their jurisdiction does tend to overlap in ways the public does not understand — one agency is always nipping at the heels of the other, and very often who has the case depends on who got there first. A consolidation is in order.”

Johnson’s proposed model suggests also separating the government’s investigators from the prosecutors at the Justice Department — in the same way many states separate district attorneys from police departments at the local level. To him, that split would also limit the possibility of the weaponization of federal prosecution, requiring the assent of not just the attorney general but a second Cabinet leader before cases could be pursued against perceived political enemies.

Calls to undo the mistake of DHS’s creation aren’t exactly new — a one-time DHS official at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute think tank was calling for the department’s end even before its 10th birthday, as did the libertarian CATO Institute. Ahead of the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the ACLU joined in the call for its dismantling, and that was well before Trump sent ICE and CBP en masse into U.S. cities. Yet there are few examples in modern history of a former Cabinet official like Johnson calling for his own former department’s dissolution. Indeed, across Washington, most one-time Cabinet leaders spend the rest of their careers dining out on their prestigious presidential appointments; Johnson, however, tries his hardest now to avoid being publicly recognized as a former DHS official.

 

“The immigration mission has overwhelmed the department,” Johnson said. “If I have a DHS gym bag or a DHS hat, I don’t wear it in public anymore because the immigration mission has become so politically volatile.”

But DHS isn’t shying away from controversy or its combative stance domestically — in fact, this week, as the 25th anniversary of 9/11 approached, current Secretary Markwayne Mullin announced that he was redoing the department’s official seal to reflect that DHS was “at war every single day.”

It’s a striking admission that with the wind-down of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the longest-running of the “9/11 forever wars” appears to be the one we launched here at home, against ourselves.