Category: Notes from the Field

Notes from the Field — August 21, 2026 The Center for American Progress ran the numbers on National Guard deployments the administration credited with cutting crime in Washington, Memphis, and Los Angeles. The finding wasn’t close: crime had already been falling in all three cities before the deployments started, and the rate of decline didn’t…

Notes from the Field — August 25, 2026 The program had one job: before a strike goes out, ask who’s standing where. After the strike, count who was actually there. It’s not a philosophical mission. It’s a targeting input, gathered by people stationed inside the regional commands whose job was to know the ground well…

Notes from the Field — August 19, 2026 In a Los Angeles courtroom this week, Mark Zuckerberg was shown a 2015 email he wrote to himself: a goal to raise the time users spend on Meta’s products by twelve percent within three years. He was shown a 2019 internal report, commissioned by his own company,…

Notes from the Field — August 18, 2026 Last fall, the government asked the public what it thought of opening forty-five million acres of national forest — a third of the entire National Forest System — to logging, mining, and new roads. More than 625,000 people answered. Ninety-nine percent said no. A Pew survey found…

Notes from the Field — August 21, 2026 Stars and Stripes has covered the American military since the Civil War. Federal law guarantees its editorial independence — half its funding comes from the Pentagon, and the statute exists specifically so that funding relationship never becomes an editorial one. On Friday, the Pentagon fired its publisher,…

Notes from the Field — August 18, 2026 An inspector general’s whole job is to look at the room from outside it. That’s the design: independent of the agency it audits, insulated from the political appointees whose decisions it might have to question, answerable to Congress rather than to the person it’s investigating. Take that…

Notes from the Field — August 7, 2026 A president cannot fire a Federal Reserve governor because he dislikes her decisions. That protection has a name — “for cause” — and for most of a century it has meant one specific thing: proven misconduct, not policy disagreement. In June, the Supreme Court confirmed the protection…

Notes from the Field — August 3, 2026 Delegates in New York are negotiating this week to fix a system built, deliberately, without them in the room. This week, delegates from around the world are in New York negotiating a UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation — an attempt to fix a system that…

Notes from the Field — August 3, 2026 Two Republican senators forced the retreat. Nobody closed the door it walked through. Start with what actually happened, because the settling of it matters more than the headline. Earlier this year, a sitting president sued his own Justice Department — the agency he leads, suing itself, on…

Notes from the Field — August 6, 2026 A federal agency proposes to remove the floor and calls it a foundation. Head Start has run on the same basic promise since 1965: a minimum floor beneath the country’s poorest children, set once, checked continuously. On August 6, the Department of Health and Human Services proposed…