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.
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.
Research Brief: The U.S. Energy Cost of the Iran War: Costs of War | Brown University May 18, 2026 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
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 beenfinanced 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 photosand 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 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 25th 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 investigatevoter 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 25th 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.
Fall vaccines against three common respiratory viruses — coronavirus, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus — are now available. In the absence of federal guidance, major medical organizations including the American Academy of Pediatrics, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, American Medical Association and American Academy of Family Physicians have issued recommendations for the shots.
I'm dedicating this edition of The Checkup to explaining that guidance and answering reader questions about who should be vaccinated this fall and when.
"Is there much difference between this year's covid vaccine and last year's?" asked Jenni from Virginia. "I've gotten all the covid shots. My last one was in November 2025. If this year's isn't that different, should I skip it? I'm 76; my husband is 83."
This year's covid-19 vaccine is a bit different from last year's. The updated shots target the XFG subvariant of the JN.1 lineage. Last year's vaccines targeted P.8.1, the variant that was expected to dominate at the time.
The updated vaccine may offer more specific protection against the strains now circulating, but that is not the main reason to get it. The more important reason is that vaccine effectiveness wanes over time.
JAMA recently published a review of the covid vaccine's safety and effectiveness, which concluded that last year's shot reduced the risk of hospitalization by more than 53 percent. Previous studies have shown that protection against infection peaks at about four weeks after vaccination and declines thereafter. Protection against severe disease lasts longer, but that, too, falls significantly after six months.
That's why Jenni and her husband should get this year's covid vaccines: Protection from their shots last November have waned by now. The Food and Drug Administration has approved three vaccines with the updated formulation: two mRNA-based vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, and a protein-based vaccine from Sanofi (previously licensed by Novavax). People 65 and older, as well as those with at least one health condition that increases their risk of severe covid, are eligible. The medical groups are also recommending a second dose of the 2026-27 covid vaccine six months after the first.
"I am a 75-year-old woman who has received the covid vaccine twice a year since it was first made available," wrote Charlotte from Massachusetts. "Over the summer, there were questions about whether an updated vaccine would be issued this fall. Following advice from epidemiologists suggesting that people over 65 should get the 2025-2026 vaccine if it was available, I got last year's shot in August. Now that it appears that there will be a 2026-2027 vaccine released, I'm wondering how long I might have to wait to receive the updated shot."
The 2025-26 formulation should still provide good protection. I recommend that Charlotte wait about three months after her August shot before getting the updated vaccine. She could receive the latest formulation in November just in time for peak effectiveness during the winter holidays, and then another dose in May. That would also leave her on track to receive next year's updated formulation in the late fall or early winter of 2027.
Deborah from Pennsylvania wanted to know if she can wait to receive the covid booster. "I will be on a cruise in November and I want to be as protected as I can be, since I'll be in close quarters with a lot of people," she wrote. "Should I get the covid vaccine now or get it nearer my departure date?"
This depends on her risk and what she wants to prioritize. Covid infections are currently "growing" or "likely growing" in 47 states, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. If Deborah has not received a shot in more than six months and is older or immunocompromised, I would lean toward getting vaccinated now — especially if she is frequently exposed to other people in her work or social activities.
But if she had her last vaccine or recovered from covid within the last six months, or if her exposure is generally low and she wants to maximize protection for the cruise, waiting until about two weeks before departure is also reasonable.
Flu vaccination is a little different: The best timing depends less on a particular high-exposure event and more on the time of year. Unlike covid, which can surge at different times, influenza activity typically peaks between December and February. I recommend getting the flu shot in mid-to-late October, before the season gets underway but late enough for protection to last through the winter.
Recommendations for that shot remain the same as in previous years: Everyone 6 months and older should receive the flu vaccine, with few exceptions. Most people need just one dose. Children between the ages of 6 months and 8 years who are receiving the flu vaccine for the first time or whose vaccination history is incomplete or unknown should receive two doses. Adults 65 and older should receive the enhanced version of the flu vaccine that affords additional protection.
"Please explain what the new flu shot is, which caused some controversy, and how it differs from previous ones," asked Robert from Missouri. "Will it be as effective as the old ones?"
Sarah from Maryland had a similar question: "Now that the new flu vaccine from Moderna is available, do you advise that we get this or the old one?"
For the first time this year, Americans will have two good options for flu vaccination: The first is the traditional flu vaccines, which is made by growing influenza viruses in chicken eggs and then inactivating them so they cannot cause flu. The second, which the FDA recently approved, is an mRNA-based flu vaccine made by Moderna for people 50 and older.
Initial studies suggest that the mRNA vaccine may be slightly more effective than traditional flu vaccines, but we do not yet have enough real-world data to know whether it provides sustained improvement in protection. People who have tolerated mRNA vaccines well may wish to consider this option, though sticking with the traditional flu vaccine is a sound decision, too.
The biggest potential benefit is at the population level. The mRNA technology allows vaccines to be produced more quickly because manufacturers can update the genetic instructions without having to depend on growing large quantities of virus in eggs. Theoretically, this will allow scientists and public health agencies to respond faster to changes in circulating flu strains.
What about the RSV vaccine? Dante from Michigan is among those who asked about this. "My wife and I got the RSV shot last year. Do we need another one this year?"
No. At the moment, the RSV vaccine is recommended as a one-time dose for eligible adults. Those who should receive it include adults 75 and older, people 50 to 74 at increased risk of severe RSV and younger adults with certain conditions that weaken their immune systems. A booster dose may be recommended in the future, but there is not yet enough evidence to support one.
RSV vaccination is also recommended for pregnant women whose babies will be born during RSV seasons, specifically during weeks 32 through 36 of pregnancy. Infants younger than 8 months should receive protective monoclonal antibodies during their first RSV season unless their mother received the vaccine during pregnancy.
Together, these recommendations give patients and clinicians a clear path forward despite uncertainty at the federal level. After all, viruses are still circulating. Clinicians still need to advise patients, and they can now point to consensus guidelines from medical societies. States issuing their own guidance can do the same, and insurers that previously tied coverage to CDC recommendations can and should use these evidence-based recommendations instead.
It's a shame that federal health agencies can no longer be counted on to provide evidence-based guidance on something as crucial as vaccines, but these recommendations provide a necessary stopgap.
Do you have more questions about fall respiratory viruses and vaccines? Please write to me. I will respond to your questions in future editions of The Checkup.
Woody Guthrie was an incredibly prolific songwriter, composing thousands of songs in his lifetime. Many of these, like "The Sinking Of The Reuben James," were based on events that Guthrie read about in news articles. It's likely that Guthrie came across the story of an outlaw named Pretty Boy Floyd, which provided material for this song. Anna Canoni, who is Guthrie's granddaughter, explains: "'Pretty Boy Floyd' is one of Woody's more popular ballads. The outlaw who helped the poor, a Robin Hood story. What Woody would do, he would take newspapers read through the articles and write songs about stories that touched him.
"Pretty Boy Floyd"
If you'll gather 'round me, children
A story I will tell
'Bout Pretty Boy Floyd, an outlaw
Oklahoma knew him well
It was in the town of Shawnee
A Saturday afternoon
His wife beside him in his wagon
As into town they rode
There a deputy sheriff approached him
In a manner rather rude
Vulgar words of anger
An' his wife she overheard
Pretty Boy grabbed a log chain
And the deputy grabbed his gun
In the fight that followed
He laid that deputy down
Then he took to the trees and timber
To live a life of shame
Every crime in Oklahoma
Was added to his name
But a many a starving farmer
The same old story told
How the outlaw paid their mortgage
And saved their little homes
Others tell you 'bout a stranger
That come to beg a meal
Underneath his napkin
Left a thousand dollar bill
It was in Oklahoma City
It was on a Christmas Day
There was a whole car load of groceries
Come with a note to say
Well, you say that I'm an outlaw
You say that I'm a thief
Here's a Christmas dinner
For the families on relief
Yes, as through this world I've wandered
I've seen lots of funny men
Some will rob you with a six-gun
And some with a fountain pen
And as through your life you travel
Yes, as through your life you roam
You won't never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home
Around this time two years ago, Sen. John Fetterman was in high demand on the campaign trail, going county-to-county in Pennsylvania to help Democrats up and down the ballot.
Now, after two years of crossing swords with Democrats and backing some of President Donald Trump’s priorities, he’s nowhere on the stump.
No Democrat in the state wants to be seen with him. His approval ratings are better with Republicans — far better — than they are with Democrats. And a shadow primary of sorts is taking shape for Fetterman’s Senate seat in 2028, even if he runs again.
Fetterman has acknowledged his increasing isolation in the party as he maintains staunch support of Israel’s war in Gaza and criticizes left-wing candidates who are members of the Democratic Socialists of America. He’s often gone his own way in the Senate, voting repeatedly with Republicans to end the shutdown last year while supporting multiple Trump nominations and opposing efforts to end the war in Iran. He cemented that isolation with a video appearance at Wednesday night’s Republican Party convention in Dallas, praising his Republican counterpart, Pennsylvania Sen. David McCormick, and saying he’d work with Trump to “defend the steel way of life.”
“Why am I here talking to you today? Because, well, I’m a common-sense Democrat. I’m always going to stand with America,” Fetterman said, in a video showing him on the roof of his home in Braddock, Pennsylvania, with U.S. Steel’s hulking Edgar Thomson steel mill visible over his shoulder. “I’m going to reject the extremes in socialism and that anti-American way of life.”
Fetterman has fallen out of favor with Pennsylvania Democrats
Still, Fetterman has repeatedly said that he wouldn’t switch parties because of his support for labor unions, LGBT rights and other issues held dear by the left.
“I’m not going to be a Republican, but I’m going to be a Democrat that’s going to have a conversation with whoever is playing it straight,” Fetterman told Fox News host Sean Hannity last week.
Fetterman’s office and political adviser did not return messages seeking comment.Fetterman has been silent about any plans to campaign in Pennsylvania this year, and Democrats say they aren’t asking him for help.
“I absolutely think that Fetterman would bring us more harm than good,” said Lori McFarland, the Democratic Party chair in Lehigh County, which is home to a congressional seat and a state Senate seat that Democrats are trying to flip. “Nobody’s asked to see him, nobody’s requested his presence, and people, quite honestly, they’re mad at him and they don’t want anything to do with him. The local feel here is they feel betrayed by him.”
Polling captures the shift. Only about 2 in 10 registered Democrats in Pennsylvania have a favorable view of Fetterman, according to a New York Times poll from August. That’s a sharp reversal from 2024, when 74% had a positive view. He’s now seen more favorably by Republican voters in the state, with 73% giving him a positive rating. That’s up from 25% a couple years ago.
A Quinnipiac poll from July similarly found most Republicans approve of how Fetterman is handling his job, while most Democrats do not.
Cindy Durian, a Democrat voting in May’s primary in suburban Harrisburg, said she would never vote for Fetterman again.
“I think he might as well change parties, he might as well change from a D to an R,” she said.
Progressive frustration with Fetterman began to emerge in late 2023 with his support for Israel’s war against Hamas. But it’s moved beyond that since Trump took office. Democrats have watched him belittle their attempts to push back on Trump while emerging as a conservative media darling.
“He is antagonizing Democrats, seemingly for pleasure,” said J.J. Abbott, a Democratic strategist.
Fetterman’s dedication to the job has also been called into question. Last year, he began racking up missed votes and missed hearings in the Senate. A meeting in Washington with representatives from a teachers union broke up after he began repeating himself, shouting and slamming his hands on a desk. And he has avoided other meetings and public events, including the funeral for three police officers killed in the line of duty.
Public officials around Pennsylvania say they haven’t seen him in several years. Some can’t remember when they last saw him.
“I couldn’t tell you,” said state Rep. Peter Schweyer of Allentown. “We assumed that when we got him there that we were going to get somebody who’s going to fight for us. And what we got instead was somebody who just disappeared.”
Pennsylvania Democrats have a lot on the line in November
The state has several marquee races this year. Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, seen as a likely presidential candidate in 2028, is running for reelection and leading the party’s efforts to hold a narrow state House majority, capture a state Senate majority for the first time in decades and flip four U.S. House seats.
In one of those competitive U.S. House races, Democrat Bob Harvie is trying to unseat Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick. A campaign spokesperson said Harvie hasn’t asked Fetterman for help.
It’s unclear whether Fetterman will ever return to the campaign trail, or whether he even wants another term in 2028, given that he spends much of his time criticizing his party and the dysfunction of Congress. He often sits alone in the hallway during Senate votes, eschewing conversations with colleagues inside the chamber.
Talk of 2028 among Democrats often turns to several others — Reps. Chris Deluzio and Brendan Boyle and former U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb — who have become outspoken critics of Fetterman.
“I don’t think that Democrats want John Fetterman campaigning for them, and I say that as a guy who’s campaigning with Democrats in the most competitive and toughest districts across Pennsylvania,” Deluzio told The Associated Press.
Deluzio said he’ll decide after the November election whether to run for Senate in 2028. But, he said, “Pennsylvanians elected John Fetterman as a Democrat to the United States Senate. They expect him to be a Democrat in these two years he has left in this term.”
Fetterman says he has a ‘red line’ with his party
While Fetterman has insisted he won’t change parties, he hasn’t ruled it out, saying the Democratic Party becoming anti-Israel would be a “red line” that would force him out.
He’s also become close with Pennsylvania’s other senator, Republican David McCormick, appearing at events alongside him and launching a joint political fundraising committee, an unusual arrangement for senators from opposing parties.
Democrats hold 47 seats in the Senate. If they were to pick up four seats in the election, a Fetterman party-switch could reset the Senate back to a 50-50 split, giving Republicans the majority and putting Vice President JD Vance in a position to break ties.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., in July said he and other Republicans had spoken with Fetterman about the “challenges” he has in the Democratic caucus. “If he ever comes to the conclusion that he’s ready to move, we’d certainly welcome him.”
