Saturday, September 26, 2026
The Long View
The Senate spent Thursday on two different kinds of majority. A bill rewriting college athletics cleared its procedural hurdle 77 to 22, two days after a 74 to 24 cloture vote on the same motion. A district judgeship cleared cloture 49 to 47 an hour later.
A federal judge has ended the Kansas law that let undocumented students who graduated from Kansas high schools pay in-state tuition. The Justice Department sued, the state's attorney general agreed with the lawsuit, and the judge entered a consent judgment. The governor and a student group asked to defend the law and were refused.
A federal judge in San Francisco has ruled that the Department of Homeland Security acted unlawfully in directing FEMA to cut its workforce roughly in half. The record contained no reasoning for the cut, the officials who discussed it used Signal and deleted the messages, and the judge will now presume those messages would have shown unlawful conduct.
At the Memorial this morning, families will read 2,983 names and the ceremony will hold seven moments of silence. Six mark the attacks. The seventh is for those who have died since, of illnesses traced to the dust — a number that passed the toll of the day itself some years ago and is still rising.
Most federal civilian pay is frozen at 2026 levels next year. Law enforcement gets 3.8 percent and the military gets five to seven. The exceptions are an admission that pay decides who shows up.
An executive order can stop the next transformer at the border on the day it is signed. The equipment already energised across the grid is governed by a different phrase in the same document, and that phrase has no deadline attached.
A 995-millibar coastal low is driving major coastal flooding from the Delmarva to southern New England across multiple high-tide cycles. Emergency declarations cover eight New York counties and eight in New Jersey. Every figure below is tied to the National Weather Service product that carried it and the hour it was issued, because forecasts move and this one has several tide cycles left to run.
Average reading across OECD countries has fallen 28 points since 2015, which the OECD puts at roughly a year and a half of learning. One in five 15-year-olds is now a low performer in all three subjects, up from 16 percent. US reading is down 14 points in three years, near a 25-year low.
More than 700 women are on the ballot for Congress and governor this year, a record. In 36 congressional races both candidates are women. That second number is the one that describes something new, because it is where the variable everybody measures drops out of the contest entirely.
Workers won NLRB elections at the highest rate in decades last year — 93,517 of them, up 19 percent. Union density is 10.0 percent, and 14.7 million members in a workforce of about 147 million. Both numbers are real. One is a flow and the other is a stock, and the arithmetic between them is unforgiving.
Massachusetts asked in April for a major disaster declaration covering a February blizzard that dropped up to 37 inches and cut power to about 290,000 households. The request was denied in July and the appeal denied on Thursday, on the ground that winter weather is not new to the Northeast and federal aid is not a backstop for routine state budgeting.
The state's income tax falls automatically when two revenue conditions are met. In the year to 30 June, General Fund revenue came in more than a billion dollars short of the threshold — the second consecutive miss and the third in four years. It also missed the easier threshold the legislature wrote last year for exactly this situation.
From this week, 95 percent of the National Wildlife Refuge System — about 92 million acres — is open to hunting or fishing, through 1,488 new opportunities across 32 states and more than a thousand changes to federal regulations. Fish and Wildlife Service staffing fell 18 percent between April 2024 and May 2025.
USDA says 64 percent of the 725 staff who have received relocation orders accepted them. Accepting is the only route to requesting a hardship or medical exemption, and refusing means losing the post. The department separately expects to keep no more than 2,000 of 4,600 employees in the capital region.
The Tech Force programme is screening applicants with AI agents that run structured interviews and hand hiring managers a transcript. OPM has issued guidance nudging agencies toward AI in hiring, with human oversight. The interview is not where federal hiring loses its months.
The former FEMA leader who worked to abolish it says the administration has dropped that goal. Meanwhile the agency has shed more than a thousand career staff since 2024, and the mitigation grants that reduce the cost of the next disaster have gone unauthorised for almost every major declaration since February 2025.
Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia were running waiting lists for childcare assistance this spring, against eight states in 2023. Three more simply turned eligible applicants away. Indiana alone had nearly 37,000 children waiting for a benefit they already qualify for.
A Colorado county is closing $12.5m. An Arizona district is cutting five assistant superintendents against a shortfall of nine to eighteen million. A Washington district is down $14m over two years after voters declined a levy. The word covers a transfer that expired, a decline that is permanent and a vote that was lost, and only one of those is fixed by cutting.
New York's overdose deaths are down about 45 percent from 2022. Nationally the figure fell more than 12 percent in a year. It is the largest public health improvement in a decade, and the mechanism behind it is contested — which makes it far easier to lose.
At least eighteen states have stripped local governments of the power to ban second units, and eleven of those laws passed in the last four years. What decides whether the units get built has moved to water, wastewater and the cost of a kitchen.
The government is borrowing at a record pace while policies threaten to narrow the workforce supporting future growth and the federal tax base.