Category: Notes from the Field

Notes from the Field — July 31, 2026 I. The rush Bankers have a phrase for what’s happening right now: “now or never.” A $67 billion utility merger between NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy. A $53 billion bid for PayPal. A $29 billion restaurant-supply acquisition. All moving at a pace that would have been unthinkable…

Notes from the Field — July 27, 2026 For sixty years, if you were a Black manager passed over for promotion or a pregnant worker quietly sidelined, there was one place your suspicion could go looking for company: a federal spreadsheet. Every company with a hundred or more employees had to report, once a year,…

Notes from the Field — July 30, 2026 Congress gave itself a clock in 1973. It runs sixty days. If a president sends troops into hostilities without a declaration of war, the clock starts, and when it runs out, the troops are supposed to come home unless Congress says otherwise. That’s the whole idea. Not…

Notes from the Field — July 16, 2026 On July 16, the European Commission ordered Google to open eleven features of the Android operating system — the ones Gemini uses to listen for its wake word, read a user’s screen, and act inside other apps — to any competing AI assistant that wants them. Before…

Notes from the Field — July 23, 2026 On July 21 and 22, within a day of each other, two federal agencies stopped doing something they’d each done for decades: counting, and asking. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission voted 2-1 to stop requiring the roughly 73,000 employers who file it — companies with 100 or…

Notes from the Field — July 15, 2026 SpaceX went public this year at a valuation north of a trillion dollars. Elon Musk owns 42 percent of the company. He controls 79 percent of the vote. The bylaws are written so that removing him as CEO requires his own consent — meaning, functionally, the only…

Notes from the Field — July 13, 2026 In January, Donald Trump sued the IRS for $10 billion. In May, he won — a settlement giving him and his family sweeping immunity from audits, plus a $1.8 billion fund to compensate alleged victims of government “weaponization.” He sued an agency he oversees as president, and…

Notes from the Field — July 13, 2026 Since the 1940s, American science has run on one basic bargain: the government pays, and scientists — not politicians — decide what’s worth testing. Peer review is the whole mechanism. It’s not glamorous. It’s also why the system caught bad research and funded good research regardless of…

Notes from the Field — July 11, 2026 By the second week of July, the federal government’s only agency built to run elections had nobody in the room. Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland were fired. Christy McCormick was allowed to resign. The Election Assistance Commission — a four-member board Congress designed so no party could…

Notes from the Field — July 10, 2026 For fifty years, if a company destroyed the place where an endangered species lived, that counted as harming the species — even if not one animal was directly touched. The Supreme Court upheld that reading in 1995, in Babbitt v. Sweet Home, over the objections of timber…