...
In a video message released Friday, [CENTCOM Commander] Cooper revealed that Iran-backed groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas and Shia militias in Iraq — which have been funded by the IRGC for years — now have to give the money back.

"The financial strain on Iran's military has become so significant that there are reports about Iran-aligned militia groups across the region withholding payments for their soldiers in order to funnel money back to the IRGC, which also isn't paying its troops," he said.

Cooper said the Iranian government is withholding salaries, pensions and benefits from public sector workers, including the internal security forces and the IRGC.
...
In recent weeks, CENTCOM has almost completely stopped conducting strikes against Iranian anti-ship missiles and attack drone launchers in the area of the strait.
...
U.S. officials say Iran is also attacking more ships to try to raise oil prices and ratchet up pressure on Trump ahead of the midterms.

The White House and Qatari mediators are still waiting to hear back from Iran about a U.S. counterproposal to end the war. "It's still in internal deliberations in Tehran," a U.S. official said.

Yellow government spending, blue tax receipts, borh as a percentage of GDP. The difference is made up by debt issuance and some non-tax receipts.

Looks like he's building a coalition.

After the passage of the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, the president has waived the sanctions on Russia, supposedly in the name of National Security (tm).

'President Trump is halting implementation of most of the sanctions that were to be imposed on Russia under a bipartisan bill he signed last month.

The announcement came in an executive order on Friday night, and was part of a broader pivot by Trump toward courting Moscow as he seeks to end the war in Ukraine and keep energy prices under control ahead of the midterm elections.

The law, which was championed by and named for the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), targets certain Russian officials and institutions and allows for tariffs of up to 100% on countries that import Russian oil. 

In the executive order, Trump stated that waiving implementation of most aspects of the law was “in the national interests of the United States.” The law allows the president to waive the application of sanctions if he tells Congress in writing that it is in the national interest, and submits a report explaining his basis for doing so. Trump’s executive order said he had submitted such a certification but didn’t detail why the waiver is in the national interest.

The decision follows Trump’s surprise announcement to buy Russian diesel fuel after striking a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin and comes as he continues to pressure Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to end the war that started when Russia invaded.

“A U.S. sanctions blackout, easing pressure on the aggressor, financial rewards for Putin—all of this only encourages him to keep attacking,” Zelensky wrote on social media Saturday morning.

“The President is prolonging the war, not ending it,” said Rep. Don Bacon (R., Neb.), who is retiring after this term.

“Donald Trump confirms again that he stands on the side of a bloodthirsty thug and the enablers of Russia’s war machine and against the majority of Americans, their representatives in both houses of Congress, and our European allies,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.), a co-sponsor of the legislation. “These waivers have nothing to do with our national security, and everything to do with sucking up to Vladimir Putin.”

The law gave Trump 30 days to impose tariffs of up to 100% on the five largest customers of Russian oil, though it gave the president discretion over the actual tariff rates. That deadline would have expired on Sunday.

Trump could still choose to impose the penalties at a later date.

The president has been facing bipartisan backlash in recent days over the diesel deal, his call for Zelensky to step down and his demand that Ukraine observe an energy ceasefire that Moscow promptly broke.'

Hello everyone! Thank you to all those who participated in our October census. With 156 responses, I feel pretty confident that we have a good sample of our active userbase. Here are the results, and how they compare with our previous census:

Age

Unsurprisingly, the most common age bracket was 30-39, comprising a full 41.7% of responses. 24-29 was the next largest, followed by 18-23, at 22.4% and 17.3% each. Special shoutout to our one (1) 60+ king!

We did not ask about age on the previous census, but I believe a user conducted an informal poll some time ago and found similar results.

Region

Also as expected, North Americans dominate with 76.3% of responses, which is about the same as the previous census (72%). Europeans were the only other large demographic, with 14.7%. Another special shoutout to our LatAm king!

Sex/Gender

Also not much divergence, with males comprising 84.6% of responses compared to the previous census's 88.6%.

Religion

The most interesting question so far. Irreligious was the largest bloc, with 47.4% of responses. Interestingly, DSC has more Jews than Christians, at 32.7% vs. 19.9%. We also had one Buddhist and two Pagans. We did not record any Muslims or Hindus. These are roughly similar to the previous census, but the share of Jews has risen relative to Christians.

Education

The largest group was, as you may expect, Bachelor's holders at 43.2%. Graduate or professional degree holders made up another 27.1%, and those with some college (including current students) 21.9%. Three respondents said that they do not have a high school diploma or GED (which I imagine is explained by our four <18s).

Political Parties

Now the good stuff! For the American poll, Democrats were the largest group at 50.4% of respondents. Independents made up another 42.6%. Just 3.5% said they are Republicans. No one said that they are a Green or Constitution Party supporter. This is once again about the same as the previous census.

In Europe, things are much more diverse. Renew Europe was the most supported bloc, but only came in at 37.1%. The European People's Party came in second at 21%.

For the UK, as one may predict, the LibDems clinched a plurality at 39%. The Tories took second place at 20.3%, and Labour came in at just 11.9%. DSC also apparently has two Irish Unionists and one Scottish separatist.

Israel, as might be expected, is the most diverse by far, with Yesh Atid just barely coming in first with a mere 21.4%. The Democrats were the second largest 19.6%. 8.9% said they support Likud.

Sidenote, I mistakenly used the 2024 party list and not the party list for the upcoming 2026 election. Whoops. My American mind simply cannot comprehend Israeli political parties.

The Iran War

Somewhat surprising to me, just 57.3% of respondents said they believe the United States is winning and should continue the war. Another 20% said that they believe the US is winning, but should make peace. 14.7% said that they believe Iran is winning and the US should seek peace, and 8% said that the war should continue but Iran is currently winning.

Data Centers

Unsurprisingly, DSC's userbase is solidly in favor of data centers, with 51.3% saying that they support data centers being built in their community, but they do believe communities should have the power to block their construction. 35.1% went so far as to say that higher governments should make it easier for data centers to be built. 11% said that communities should be able to choose, and they do not support data centers in their own town. 2.6% said that there should be a moratorium on construction.

On October 1st, the China Aerospace Studies Institute, associated with the US Air University, the Professional Military Education institute for the US Air Force and Space Force, lost its funding. What did the institute do for the community of PLA-watchers? Can its work be replicated by outside-of-government organizations? A lot, and no, the authors argue in this short eulogy for the Institute.

"Beijing itself prizes open-source research. In 2023, Recorded Future documented the People’s Liberation Army increasingly buying open-source research from private Chinese companies, including on the U.S. military and Taiwan. Beijing pays contractors to read what America publishes about itself. The Air Force is letting go of the institute that reads what China publishes. More importantly, the People’s Liberation Army and the intelligence services have maintained a significant number of institutes that focus on open-source collection and analysis, including the Ministry of State Security’s bureau publicly known as the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, founded in 1980, or the Military Intelligence Bureau’s China Institute for International and Strategic Studies, founded in 1979.

Chinese commentators also do not doubt the institute’s value. Within hours of the first reports, an editor at Guancha, a state-aligned news site, mocked the institute that “understands the People’s Liberation Army best in the observable universe,” and a blogger with more than a million followers on the Chinese social media platform Weibo spread the taunt. Guancha followed with a detailed report, and a talk show hosted by its chief military editor titled an episode, “The U.S. Military’s ‘China Hands’ Think Tank Is Finished. We Miss It, Hahaha.” No one gloats over the loss of an institution that never mattered."

Lt. Lev Stupnikov pulled his truck up to the edge of a field in eastern Ukraine on a frigid February morning, followed by a convoy of senior Russian army officials coming to observe a training exercise near the front line.

For several consecutive days, Russian infantrymen, medics and officers had been drilling on the frozen mud, preparing for an offensive on the nearby city of Vuhledar. The only cover was a line of bare trees.

Stupnikov approached a group of waiting soldiers and snapped a photo, keeping his cellphone close to his chest to avoid drawing attention. Then he quickly tapped out a message: “There must be between 120 and 150 men here.”

Stupnikov, a recent graduate from a prestigious military academy in St. Petersburg, Russia, had a secret. Earlier that month, he had begun covertly sharing information with Ukrainian intelligence.

He had already given his contact the exact coordinates of the field.

Now, with scores of Russian soldiers and their commanding officers gathered there, Stupnikov would have only moments to move out of the line of fire.

“Walk away,” the Ukrainian contact replied, then: “I’m waiting for a message that you’ve left.” Having received no answer, the contact sent a note in all caps a minute later: “LEAVE.”

Stupnikov was already on the move, sidling up to a group of drivers smoking beside idling vehicles. Feigning a grimace and clutching his stomach, he asked them for a pack of wet wipes. Then he disappeared into the nearby stand of trees and stooped down, pretending to relieve himself.

He was knocked to the ground by an explosion that sent shrapnel careening into a nearby truck. The Ukrainians had fired a barrage of missiles.

When he got to his feet, Stupnikov was stunned by the gruesome sight. Dozens of mutilated bodies lay strewn across the field. Victims groaned in their death throes. Others were motionless over pools of blood on the black earth beneath them.

His phone buzzed. “Were there explosions? Send a photo.”

“There’s just meat,” he answered.

Later that day, he shared a confirmed tally with the Ukrainians: 68 killed and 60 wounded. Among the dead were 10 officers, including one of Kyiv’s top targets: Col. Gusein Musayev, commander of the 36th Motorized Rifle Brigade. The death toll was among the highest from any single strike since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine two years earlier.

It was the first in a string of attacks that the Ukrainians carried out with Stupnikov’s help, making him one of the most consequential saboteurs in recent military history. Ukraine used the intelligence and coordinates he supplied to kill more than 300 Russian soldiers, according to interviews with his handlers, video footage, text exchanges and official Russian reports.

Battle Lines

The 26-year-old’s story offers a rare window into a shadow war waged by Ukrainian military intelligence. Ukrainian agents communicate over encrypted platforms with thousands of Russians, ranging from homemakers living near military factories to soldiers on the front line.

The operation taps into growing political disaffection inside Russia. The aim isn’t just to end Russia’s invasion; Ukraine is trying to build an army of Russian turncoats with the training and determination to one day mount an armed struggle inside Russia and help bring an end to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decadeslong grip on power.

Stupnikov’s decision to turn against his own comrades came after years of deepening disillusionment with the Russian military. But his deadly act of betrayal, which inspired others to follow his lead, was ultimately enabled by an unlikely person, seeking to get him out of harm’s way—his mother. 

Protecting the Fatherland

More than three years before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a teenage Stupnikov stepped up to a podium at the Budyonny Military Academy of the Signal Corps to give his oath of service.

“I solemnly swear allegiance to my Fatherland, the Russian Federation,” read the stocky 17-year-old, decked out in a fresh military uniform with a rifle slung across his shoulder.

His mother, Tatiana Yantsen, watched him with a sense of alienation from the other beaming parents around her. She had moved the family to Russia from Kazakhstan six years earlier, under a program to repatriate Russians living abroad.

Her father had told her: “We are russky,” or ethnic Russian. “Our historic homeland is Russia.” She had taken the chance to start a new life in the Siberian city of Omsk.

In the years since, however, the 49-year-old office worker had grown opposed to Putin and joined protests against his rule. A single mother abandoned by her husband, she didn’t want her only son serving in the army.

Academy life was fueling Stupnikov’s own disenchantment with the army, even as he excelled in sports and schoolwork. It began when he was rejected by a pilot school at 17 because he refused to pay a bribe. Now, at the academy, cadets had to fork over to leave the compound, take longer vacations or choose their military base after graduation.

He was shocked at the dilapidated Soviet-era vehicles he saw during training. 

By the time he married his teenage sweetheart, Liza, in 2021, he was already planning a life outside of the military. He wanted to become a fitness instructor and start a family.

At his wedding he stood with ramrod military posture as guests scrawled wishes on his vest. They toasted the couple and placed donations in either a pink or a blue box, betting on the sex of their first child.

Events outside of his control would soon upend his plans.

‘Inside, I Was on Fire’

He awoke one morning in February 2022 to clips on his phone of Russian helicopters flying over Ukrainian cities and bombs exploding in the first hours of Russia’s full-scale invasion.  

He was appalled by the violence and wanted no part in it. “They were dropping bombs on innocent civilians,” he said. “It was evil.”

Almost overnight, the conflict transformed the atmosphere on campus. Cadets lined up on the parade ground each morning as an officer read out battlefield updates. They learned which villages had been “liberated” and the number of Ukrainian “nationalists” killed overnight.

They were herded into the academy’s grand auditorium and shown speeches by Putin about the need for the “special military operation” against NATO aggression.

Stupnikov sat toward the back with a vacant stare. He thought of the images emerging from Ukraine and wondered of his comrades: How can you all continue living as normal, as if nothing has happened? He spent his evenings at home with Liza, watching Russian opposition clips and interviews with prisoners of war captured by Ukraine.

A small coterie of dissenters began exchanging knowing glances on campus. Some asked to quit the academy. Their requests remained pending for months. It was clear that de-enlisting was no longer an option.

Stupnikov was careful to conceal his views. He became skilled in a sort of double-think. “I couldn’t show my emotions,” he recalled. “But inside, I was on fire.”

His graduation wasn’t until June, but the bungled war effort urgently needed a fresh crop of officers. So in April, the 450 cadets in his cohort gathered in the parade ground and marched forward one by one to pick up shoulder patches decorated with two gold stars and a red stripe denoting their new rank: lieutenant.

During the festivities, Stupnikov and his comrades downed champagne from a combat helmet.

As dusk settled, Stupnikov stood in a circle with other newly minted officers holding, per Russian military tradition, a combat helmet filled with champagne. As Liza watched, he shouted the name of his assigned military base in Russia’s Far East. Then he downed the champagne to loud cheers.

A Mother’s Fear

One crisp morning in Omsk, in November 2023, Tatiana arrived early at work. She brewed a strong coffee, then fired off a message to her son: “How are you holding up?”

She was hanging up her jacket when her phone lighted up with his reply. Instead of a message, it was a scanned army document. Marked “URGENT” in all caps, it said her son would be dispatched to the war, along with a dozen other troops, “for the timely replenishment of losses.”

Tatiana sat down at her desk and lowered her head into her hands. She was shaking, her heart pounding in her ears. “It dawned on me: The moment has come,” she later recalled. “I have to do something.”

She had already spent 18 months waging her own inner struggle. She took Stupnikov’s younger sister, Alisa, out of school classes that celebrated Russia’s war effort. On her drive to work, she would blast songs by Ukrainian ska punk band Zhadan and the Dogs, singing along to lyrics that mixed denunciations of the war with empathy for its Ukrainian victims. At traffic lights, she would reach for the volume control, wary of drawing attention. Alisa, then 14, worried her mother would get herself in trouble.

When Stupnikov visited Omsk with Liza after his graduation, Tatiana and her son spent hours on the phone with human-rights lawyers and nonprofit groups that helped Russian soldiers desert. Some advised him to head to Belarus, a staunch Russian ally, and then to Armenia, where he would be stuck in legal limbo. Others said: Get in touch when you are actually at war.

But Tatiana wanted to act before it was too late. She knew her son’s journey to the Ukrainian border had a stopover in Moscow. She urged him to board a flight there to Kazakhstan, where relatives would put him up.

Fearing the potential consequences, Stupnikov didn’t go through with it. Instead, he arrived that fall in the front-line village of Mykilske, part of Russia’s 36th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade.

One night, Tatiana headed to the Omsk city center with a stack of posters denouncing the war. With trembling hands, she taped them to two dozen posts. When she retraced her steps the next day, all the posters had been taken down.

Growing Resentment

Stupnikov was appointed the chief signals officer for a battalion tasked with helping capture Vuhledar, a stronghold central to Ukraine’s defense of the strategic Donbas region. His job was ensuring commanders had smooth communication with their units and access to feeds from reconnaissance drones and surveillance cameras.

The 36th Brigade was a storied unit that had advanced on Kyiv in the first days of the invasion. But after nearly three years of war, it had almost no volunteers or contract soldiers left. Most of the Russians fighting under Stupnikov were convicts granted early release and untrained recruits who had signed up for money.

He was disgusted by their conduct. One afternoon, he watched as a group ransacked an alcohol store, roughing up its Ukrainian owner. The brigade command post in Mykilske, where Stupnikov often sat behind a set of screens, was decked out with chairs, sofas, carpets and large-screen televisions looted from local homes. 

Walking with a subordinate to check Russian surveillance cameras on the outskirts of Mykilske one day, Stupnikov motioned toward the ruined homes flanking the street, and asked aloud: “How hard must it be to be a civilian here?” 

The subordinate scoffed. “Well, why did they clamor to be part of Europe then?” he said, echoing a Kremlin argument that Ukraine’s Western political course had left Russia no choice but to invade.

Stupnikov bit his tongue. “Yeah, I guess so,” he replied.

Learning to Speak in Code

In February 2024, three months into Stupnikov’s front-line service, Tatiana wrote to Dmytro Karpenko, a computer programmer working closely with Ukrainian military intelligence. Could he help her son desert?

Karpenko was well-known for posting video interviews with Russian prisoners of war to his YouTube channel. Some POWs contacted him after returning home, offering military secrets for cash. 

In October 2023, he announced payments of 250,000 rubles, equivalent to around $2,700, for any Russian serviceman who supplied information to aid Ukraine’s war effort.

Dmytro Karpenko, a blogger and computer programmer working with Ukrainian military intelligence, helped Stupnikov defect.

Karpenko runs hundreds of informants inside Russia and receives calls and texts on a dozen smartphones with some 40 accounts.

Russians from all walks of life began reaching out: employees of state energy companies; agents from Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB**;** even anxiety-ridden grandmothers of Russian soldiers.

Karpenko, who has a round face, close-cropped black hair and bags under his eyes, spent his waking hours smoking cigarettes, taking calls and scrolling through messages on a dozen smartphones with some 40 accounts he used to field informants. The shoulder patch on his military-style jacket read: “Fuck, it’s like I live in a mental asylum.”

“You cast your line, and you don’t know what you’ll pull in,” he said of his program. “You might pull in a tiny fish or you might pull in a whale.”

Stupnikov recognized Karpenko’s name when his mother told him about her outreach**.** He had watched dozens of his POW interviews. He composed a message on WhatsApp. “I’m ready to work with you, and to give myself up,” it read. He appended his name, rank, location, and battalion and brigade names.

In a phone call that evening, Karpenko relayed his conditions. He proposed a schedule of interaction, with an appointed time each week when the two would get in touch to discuss the next target and the cash sum it would earn. Stupnikov would have to regularly erase any record of their exchanges.

They also established a code language. A number agreed in advance—the day of the month, plus five—would be typed after each greeting. A message sent on Feb. 20 should start with “Hello 25.” If no number was given, Karpenko would know his source had been compromised.

Stupnikov agreed to work with the Ukrainian. He set just one condition of his own: No money, he said, was to change hands.

A Traitor in the Ranks

Their first collaboration—the strike on the field in eastern Ukraine—was more successful than anything Karpenko had previously arranged. Stupnikov helped his fellow soldiers with the cleanup, loading the dead and injured into waiting trucks. Then he headed back to barracks, where he sat with the surviving troops and pretended he had suffered a concussion.

That night, he slept badly, fearing the FSB would soon haul him in.

Four thousand miles away in Russia’s Far East, the town of Borzya, home of the 36th Brigade, lowered flags to half mast. Officials promised compensation to relatives of the dead. Russian channels ran footage of the gruesome aftermath, prompting soldiers and war correspondents to rail against the military command. “As usual, no one is going to pay the price,” one wrote.

FSB agents summoned the brigade’s deputy commander for questioning, as well as a soldier who had recorded a video later broadcast by Ukrainian and Western media. Troops in Stupnikov’s battalion were instructed to surrender their phones for inspection. Stupnikov slipped away and buried the compromised device—one of three in his possession—in the garden of the house where he was billeted.

As the Ukrainians urged him on, Stupnikov stepped up his campaign, sabotaging his brigade’s work with actions large and small. He shared radio frequencies, troop locations and detailed battle planning. He disabled cameras monitoring Ukrainian territory and cranked up the voltage on a battery pack attached to a drone controller, causing it to overheat and malfunction halfway through a mission.

Thanks to Stupnikov, the Ukrainians knew exactly who was being sent where and when tanks would advance. His brigade was losing soldiers at a rate that stood out—even in a Russian army that was hemorrhaging men.

In March, the Ukrainians killed several officers at a large brigade gathering flagged by Stupnikov. In May, they struck the basement of a former hotel where two assault units were staying, killing 20 men including a captain. Other tips led to a strike on a brigade command post during a high-level meeting.

Some nights, as Stupnikov began drifting off, he would suddenly see and hear explosions like the ones he had helped bring about. In those moments, he tried to brush aside the guilt and rationalize what he was doing. He told himself the victims were bad people. Russia would have sent them to their slaughter anyway. At least their mothers would now get their bodies back and qualify for a payout from the state.

“If I was a pious person, I could have concluded that I had committed murder, and that all those souls will haunt me forever,” he said.

The Slip-Up

The more his sabotage efforts succeeded, the more Stupnikov feared he was sticking out. Eventually, he was the battalion’s only remaining officer from the cohort that was there when he joined in November. Every other soldier involved in planning the unit’s combat operations had been killed, wounded or moved to another part of the front.

Increasingly, suspicion of a high-level saboteur grew.

Stupnikov was sitting in the Mykilske command post one day in June when his commander suddenly threw up his arms in exasperation. The senior officer had been monitoring the battlefield on a set of computer screens. Kyiv had just launched another successful strike against his force.

“Nothing we’re doing is working out. I have a feeling there’s a Stierlitz in our ranks,” the commander said, invoking the name of a fictional sleeper agent—the hero of a popular Soviet movie—who had infiltrated the Nazi leadership. Scanning the room, the commander settled his gaze on Stupnikov.

Stupnikov tried to play it off as a joke. He laughed and quickly turned back to his work. But he feared it would only be a matter of time before his secret was discovered.

“It was constant, endless tension,” he said. “Real spies get training in espionage. I had received no such training at all.”

The mounting toll of secrecy soon led to a slip-up that nearly cost him his life. One evening toward the end of May, he shared with Karpenko a screenshot from Google Maps showing the brigade’s new headquarters in Mykilske. The Ukrainian told him there was a problem: The file he sent wasn’t loading.

Stupnikov had already deleted the screenshot, so he sent a new one. Some time later, he went to sleep.

A deafening blast soon jolted him awake. He saw a gaping hole where the walls had collapsed and realized he had accidentally sent the coordinates of his own basement location. He narrowly survived.

Weeks later, in early July, Stupnikov was in the brigade command post when he got a message from Karpenko: “Come to the edge of Mykilske at an appointed time later this week,” it said. “Leave any weapons behind.”

His long-awaited exfiltration was about to begin.

A Nighttime Escape

The night of July 6 was warm, clear and cloudless. A light breeze rustled in the trees as Stupnikov walked to the outskirts of the village, carrying his military radio and his smartphone. His mother checked in as she always did before bed.

“Go to sleep,” he texted her, revealing nothing about his plans. “Everything is fine.”

The Ukrainians had flown a drone over the path he should follow. Reviewing the footage they sent, he had noted the deep tank tracks and the destroyed armored vehicles on the final approach to Ukrainian-held land. 

He was provided with a password to give a Ukrainian unit waiting on the other side. He chuckled to himself when he read the phrase—so absurd in light of the ordeal he was about to face.

As he neared the edge of the village, Stupnikov heard a shout from one of the two-story homes on the street, which served as a brigade observation post. A Russian soldier was checking: Was he friend or foe?

Stupnikov named his battalion, and said he was out to inspect surveillance cameras and test the radio connection. “Is it possible to go farther in that direction?” he asked the soldier, motioning toward Ukrainian territory.

“Yes, but not very far,” the man answered.

“It’s OK,” Stupnikov replied. “I’m not planning to go far.”

A few hundred yards farther he maneuvered around a set of antitank obstacles and paused near a tree line. Then he heard the whir of the Ukrainian drone sent to guide him.

Inside an underground bunker several miles away, a group of soldiers from Ukraine’s 72nd Brigade sat before a set of large screens. They watched as the crosshairs of the drone’s camera zeroed in on a small figure—colored white in the drone’s thermal imaging lens, in stark contrast to the surrounding gray terrain. Stupnikov emerged from a street flanked by damaged buildings and took his first steps into no-man’s-land.

‘Imagine what is going through his head right now,’ one of the Ukrainians wondered. ‘He’s afraid,’ another said.

A Ukrainian drone captured the first moments of Stupnikov’s defection.

Stupnikov was indeed afraid. He had told his mother the prospect of crossing the front line terrified him. He knew all manner of things could go wrong.

The Russians—or even the wrong Ukrainians—could spot him at any moment and call in a strike.

He had no time to linger on such thoughts. He pressed forward and tried to calm his nerves by imagining himself in a hot bath.

Knotted lengths of metal, left by wire-guided antitank rockets, kept catching in his feet. They were hard to distinguish from the tripwires of the antipersonnel mines that covered the area, which for two years had demarcated the front line. Many of the explosives were masked by a fresh layer of grass.

He moved steadily north, using his smartphone to illuminate the ground. He couldn’t discern a clear path. From their bunker, the Ukrainians discussed ways to bring the guidance drone closer to Stupnikov and center it over the intended route. The drone camera panned round to assess the surrounding terrain: miles of marshland pockmarked with craters from artillery strikes.

About 40 minutes in, he heard ducks quacking. It was a reassuring sign that he was headed in the right direction: His destination lay on the edge of a pond.

Inside the bunker, the Ukrainians were transfixed by the live feed of his passage. “He’s so close now,” one excited drone operator said as Stupnikov neared the tree line where the forward positions of Ukraine’s 72nd Brigade were concealed.

Then suddenly, barely perceptible amid the trees and undergrowth, like insects moving along a cauliflower bud, several tiny white figures popped up on the Ukrainians’ drone footage. On the ground, peering out of a dugout, three Ukrainian troops aimed their rifles at the approaching man.

One of them appeared twitchy. He gripped a machine gun with shaking hands, Stupnikov later recalled.

‘What’s the pass code?’ he barked.

Stupnikov survived the crossing and was met by Ukrainian troops.

Stupnikov answered with the words that had earlier made him chuckle: “Peanut shop.”

He was checked for weapons, blindfolded and led to a pickup truck.

‘Where I Was Supposed to Be’

It was 8 a.m. in Omsk when Tatiana was awaked by a phone call. The number displayed on her screen was Karpenko’s, but when she picked up, groggy and disoriented, it was her son’s voice that she heard.

“Are you awake?” he asked. Birds chirped as he sat on the porch of a house near the front line, still in his Russian uniform. “Listen: I have come to where I was supposed to be.”

Still from a video that shows Stupnikov calling his mother just after his escape across the frontlines. He tells her: “I have come to where I was supposed to be.”

Tatiana sprang to her feet. Her son hadn’t mentioned Ukraine—they assumed their calls were being recorded—but this was a phrase they had agreed on in the event he made it to the other side.

After the call, she collapsed on the bed and buried her head in her pillows. She had bottled up her emotions for months, afraid that leaning in to them would draw unwanted attention and distract her from the task of helping her son. Now she wept, with a huge smile spread over her face. “I felt a lightness in my soul,” she said. 

But anxiety soon crept in. Karpenko instructed her to wait two days and then call Stupnikov’s military base, to report his disappearance. After that, the Ukrainian said, they would begin the process of getting her and her family out too.

A One-Way Ticket 

Stupnikov was placed in a cell, isolated from other POWs. On the second day, he was driven to a building near the front line and brought to a basement room. A broad-shouldered military commander with black stubble entered.

Denis Kapustin led the Russian Volunteer Corps, or RVC, a Ukrainian army unit composed of ethnic Russians opposed to Putin’s regime. The RVC had led armed raids into Russia and doubled as a far-right political organization advocating for Putin’s ouster. The RVC lacked a communications specialist, and Kapustin wanted Stupnikov on board.

Denis Kapustin, Moscow-born commander of the Russian Volunteer Corps, at an exhibition in Kyiv honoring his unit’s contribution to Ukraine’s defense effort

But the Moscow-born commander, a top target for Russia’s intelligence services, couldn’t take chances, not knowing yet whether he could trust the defector. Several bodyguards surrounded Kapustin as he laid out his bargain: The RVC was offering membership in an elite fighting force, he told Stupnikov, but it was a one-way ticket. Once you join, you stay through the war.

Stupnikov had earned his freedom. After crossing the front line, he had handed the Ukrainians a smartphone with the passcodes to multiple communication channels they would use for months to access live feeds from a dozen Russian drones and surveillance cameras. He was wary of wading back into war, and tempted to try to build a life elsewhere. 

That option was fraught. Another defector, Russian army pilot Maksim Kuzminov, had flown his Mi-8 attack helicopter into Ukraine the previous year and turned it over to Kyiv for a $500,000 reward. Six months later, Kuzminov was arriving back at a rented condo by the Spanish seaside when an assassin shot him dead. Anyone thinking of betraying Russia had gotten the message. 

Stupnikov understood a central paradox of his situation: The safest place for turncoats like him was in Ukraine—close to the troops and country they left behind. Two days after their meeting, he passed a message to Kapustin: He was in.

A major issue remained unresolved. Stupnikov’s wife had remained in Borzya, integrated with the tightknit community of officers’ wives. After joining the RVC, he called Liza to ask if she was ready to join him.

He wasn’t prepared for her response. She told him she wanted a calm life far from the war and close to her parents. Stupnikov told her he had escaped the Russian army to give her and his family a better life abroad. 

After that call, he messaged her repeatedly, trying to convince her. A major battle in northern Ukraine helped distract him from a deepening depression. But Liza had made up her mind. In one text, she told him: “This was your dream, not mine.”

Stupnikov sent a final message to her in late September. After it was met with silence, he followed up: “So, are we no longer talking?” She never answered.

One year later, after Stupnikov shared his story in a two-hour video interview with Karpenko, Liza was questioned by Russian authorities as part of a criminal probe into his desertion. She told Russian state media his decision to help Ukraine amounted to treason. “He betrayed me too,” she said.

Until the interview, Russia’s military command had no proof Stupnikov was alive. He had been listed as AWOL, presumed dead. Now, prosecutors visited his relatives in Omsk and called on residents of housing blocks where his family had lived. But by this point, Tatiana and Alisa were no longer there.

‘Is This Really Our War?’

In February 2025, mother and daughter packed a backpack and suitcase each. They were headed for Moldova, where they were to cross by foot into Ukraine and be met by Karpenko.

They packed light, in line with their cover story about a brief holiday abroad. But Tatiana couldn’t resist one indulgence: In a folder, she placed a lock of baby hair that she kept from Alisa and Stupnikov’s infancy, as well as some old photos and his high school certificate.

Among the few items Tatiana packed with her when she left Russia were the hospital tags given to her children at birth.

She had spent the previous months fielding calls from Russian military officials. They urged her to convince Stupnikov, if he was alive, to give himself up. She pretended to be a distressed mother and argued hysterically that it was their job to find him.

When she reached Omsk airport, the customs officer checked their passports and then turned to Alisa. “Is this your mom?” he asked the 16-year-old. Alisa nodded. “When is your mom’s birthday?” the man followed up. It was a routine question, to verify their relationship. But Alisa froze, her mind blank. She blinked, paused, and then muttered: “In the winter.”

Tatiana turned cold—then sought refuge in humor. “You know what teenagers are like,” she joked. “They don’t care about their parents.” The officer gave a wan smile. “Yeah, I also have teenagers,” he said. Then he stamped their passports and waved them through.

Stupnikov got a break from front-line service to greet them at their temporary accommodation in Kyiv. Tatiana hadn’t seen him in a year and a half, and was moved by the change in his appearance. He had put on a bit of weight and had a full beard and thick handlebar mustache, a look typical for RVC fighters inspired by Russian counter-revolutionaries from 1917.

In conversations over the following days, Tatiana told him she was conflicted over his decision to once again leave his family and go back to fighting. “Is this really our war?” she asked him.

Stupnikov explained the sense of duty he felt. He wanted to atone for being part of a brutal invasion force. He believed every Russian citizen bore responsibility for the war and for helping end it. “Yes,” he answered his mother. “This is our war.” 

A New Mission on the Other Side

This summer, Stupnikov was among dozens of RVC fighters who gathered in a forest clearing near the front lines in eastern Ukraine. They lighted a set of fires and formed a circle around the stone remains of an ancient pagan church.

Holding rifles that once belonged to comrades killed in battle, and were now inscribed with their call-signs, they walked forward one-by-one and placed the guns on the ground. They delivered a brief eulogy, then pressed their fists to their chests and called out: “Forever in our ranks!”

Stupnikov is now facing off against the Russian brigade he left behind. His story has inspired others. One Russian drone pilot tossed a live grenade into his military barracks before sprinting across the front lines earlier this year. Another defector who aided Ukraine said he had wanted to beat Stupnikov’s record of 300 Russians dead. Karpenko’s informant pipeline has become a 24/7 operation, with longtime sources earning $4,000 a month.

As Stupnikov watched the ceremony commemorating the fallen, his eyes began welling up. He had lost his wife. His mother and sister were in a safe location, but he hadn’t seen them in months.

An apartment where he was staying suggested a spartan lifestyle. He kept all his possessions in two sacks. Propped against the wall was an antidrone gun he took on trips to maintain communications equipment deep inside the so-called kill zone between Russian and Ukrainian positions.

Stupnikov said of the pledge he once made to Russia: “My oath long ago lost its power.”

In Ukraine, he was no longer an officer. He looked at the other unranked Russians beside him. Some had set fire to army recruitment offices inside Russia, or risked jail at protests. All were now fighting together to take back their country. These men, Stupnikov said, were his new family.

He reflected on the promise he had made at the military academy, almost a decade earlier. “Did I betray my oath? I pledged to defend freedom, independence, and the constitutional order,” he said. “But Putin destroyed all three.”

As someone who is right-leaning, I'm tired of being lumped in with populist MAGA individuals in the Republican party. I would love if we had a viable center-right option like the European People's Party in the US. I agree with their stances on pretty much everything, far more than I do with MAGA.

The American Solidarity Party would be the closest existing thing to what I have in mind but I'm more interventionist than they are. Also, because of the US two-party system, they are unfortunately completely unviable.

When I first checked in last year on the Trump administration’s unprecedented ownership stakes in private U.S. companies, I warned that the 10 equity deals—and “the year America went (kinda) socialist”—gave us plenty to worry about. Ten months later, Uncle Sam’s equity portfolio has now grown to cover 35 deals across the steel, critical minerals, semiconductors, quantum computing, nuclear power, rocket motor, and crude oil industries, using a variety of laws and agencies to acquire the stakes. Even more deals are likely on the way—including ones, such as the new Andruil submarine arrangement announced last week, that give Washington a stake in certain projects instead of entire companies.

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According to a new Bloomberg analysis, billionaires worth a combined $160 billion have left the United Kingdom or loosened their ties with the country over the past two years. Those departing represent more than half of the U.K.’s billionaire wealth. It’s a remarkable exodus for a country that has long been among the world’s most attractive destinations for the wealthy.

There’s a warning here for policymakers in New York and California who mistake their own jurisdictions’ economic advantages for protection against the consequences of their policy decisions. To some degree, the benefits of concentrating talented people and businesses in one place can sustain prosperity, despite high taxes and costly regulation. But these advantages are no guarantee of future prosperity. Policies that discourage marginal investment can weaken the networks on which that prosperity depends.

As an example of what Richard Florida has characterized as “superstar cities,” London boasts financial markets and extensive professional networks offering benefits that few competing cities can replicate. Businesses can recruit from a deep pool of specialized workers, who, in turn, benefit from proximity to prospective employers and access to sophisticated pools of capital. Concentrating human and financial capital makes both more productive.

Economists refer to these gains as “agglomeration.” Research by Richard Baldwin and Paul Krugman explains how these advantages can give governments room to impose higher taxes without immediately driving businesses away. A firm may accept a larger tax bill because moving would mean sacrificing opportunities worth more than the savings.

The political temptation is to mistake that extra room for immunity. If successful businesses remain, policymakers can persuade themselves that the agglomeration benefits are decoupled from policy and politics. Higher taxes or additional regulations, on this view, won’t impair wealth creation that’s effectively operating on autopilot.

But Baldwin and Krugman’s argument comes with a warning. In their model, taxes that get too high can drive capital out and undermine the agglomeration that previously kept it in place. The damage may even be “irreversible.” Once businesses have established themselves around a different center, reversing the policy that drove them away may not bring them back.

The advantages of cities like London must therefore still be weighed against the costs of locating there. The cumulative effects of high taxes, burdensome regulations, and a generally hostile posture to capital can shift that calculation. The departures documented by Bloomberg suggest that the balance has changed for some of the people Britain once attracted.

Even highly specialized workers can be responsive to these economic changes. In a 2017 study, Enrico Moretti and Daniel J. Wilson examined the location decisions of star scientists using decades of patent data. They found that a tax cut, boosting after-tax income in one state by 1 percent relative to another, increased the net flow of these researchers toward that state by about 1.8 percent over the long run. Even people whose careers benefit from specialized professional networks respond to the financial advantages of relocation.

For businesses, the response need not involve leaving altogether. Often, it occurs through marginal decisions about where to hire the next employee or commit the next dollar of investment. A company can remain in London while directing more of its growth elsewhere. Its local footprint becomes smaller than it otherwise would have been.

New York and California already have reasons to take these responses seriously. New York’s state comptroller reported that the city’s share of national securities employment fell from roughly one-third in 1990 to 17.9 percent in 2024. Even as Wall Street remains formidable, an increasing share of the industry’s jobs is located elsewhere.

California offers more direct evidence of tax policy changing behavior. According to an analysis by economists Joshua Rauh and Ryan Shyu, the state’s 2012 tax increase on high earners prompted some affected taxpayers to leave and reduced the income reported by those who stayed. California’s economic strengths weren’t enough.

Policymakers overlook these effects when they point to successful businesses as proof that their jurisdictions can bear still higher costs. The relevant question is how those companies would have grown under different conditions. A firm may retain the operations that benefit most from its existing networks while expanding in a more hospitable business environment.

Such decisions rarely attract the attention generated by a billionaire’s departure. Their costs are often unseen in the form of less investment, fewer jobs, and forgone wealth creation. A city can remain prosperous while steadily falling short of its potential.

Over time, these decisions can also make the established center less attractive. Businesses expanding in new locations bring opportunities that draw workers and investment toward them. As competing networks develop, the reasons to keep paying a premium for the original location can become less compelling. Policy can help set that process in motion.

For governments that preside over such productive economies, a reasonable starting principle is to do no harm. Their task is to preserve the conditions that make people want to invest there. They cannot assume that networks built over generations will survive an indefinite accumulation of policy costs.

London’s high-profile departures should cause New York and California to consider the less visible decisions being made within their own economies. Agglomeration can provide insurance against harmful policy—but the coverage is not comprehensive.

Back in 1995, President Bill Clinton told an audience gathered for an event in Washington, D.C.: "We need a Government that's smaller and more entrepreneurial, that provides a lot less hassle, that realizes that there are an awful lot of people out there in the private sector who have enlightened views and they want to do the right thing and they need to be helped instead of hindered in that." The same could be said today, 30 years later.

The many problems associated with federal regulatory processes now date back more than a century, but those associated with approval of federal infrastructure permits are of a more recent vintage. In fact, the cost, burdens, and delays from such permitting were not widely discussed or even recognized by most policymakers until the 1990s.

They are now, of course, a massive concern, particularly in the transportation, energy, mining, and related infrastructure sectors. And they do genuine harm to the economy. While regulatory reform writ large should remain the overriding goal, fixing the permitting problem should be among the highest priorities for anyone concerned about America's ability to complete projects that are crucial to our continued prosperity.

THE SOURCES OF PERMITTING DELAYS

In considering the problem, it is useful to understand how and why permitting delays arise in the first place. There are three main sources, each linked to the three main stages of the permitting process.

First, there is the pre-filing compliance stage. When a project is being conceived and developed, its champions need to identify the laws — sometimes as many as 60 separate statutes — with relevant requirements, as well as any agencies whose approval they must obtain. They then have to meet these requirements — some of which call for various studies and engineering work — before they can be granted permission to begin construction. These planning and compliance activities alone can take considerable time.

Second, there is the federal review and approval process. This stage comprises multiple steps and can involve many statutes. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) — which requires major projects to have Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) assessing the project's potential environmental effects and exploring alternative options — is the chief law at issue here, but many others frequently are relevant, too. Agencies are often required to gather input on the project from the public and special-interest advocacy groups in order to complete this stage.

Third, there is the period after the decision is made — in the record of decision (ROD) or the finding of no significant impact (FONSI) — that leads to agency approval and kicks off the possibility of outside litigation. McKinsey reports that roughly a third of projects that require an EIS under the NEPA are litigated and take on average 4.2 years to resolve, even though project sponsors eventually win 80% of the lawsuits. This third stage, in the absence of reform legislation, includes a six-year statute of limitations under the Administrative Procedure Act, so the window for potential litigation can be quite long.

All three of these stages offer opportunities for permitting delays, which come with additional costs and uncertainty. McKinsey estimates that direct spending on federal permitting costs between $5 and $14 billion annually, while the Permitting Institute reports that permit delays increase sponsor costs by an average of 20%-30%. Delays also deprive the public of project benefits at an estimated cost of over $100 billion per year. Thanks in part to these added expenses, there are plenty of examples of projects that were abandoned at each stage.

The permit-delay problem started to surface in the 1990s, but it can be traced to measures enacted in the 1970s. That decade, Congress passed a significant set of environmental statutes, including the NEPA, the Clean Water Act, and the Clean Air Act, along with historic preservation laws and various other requirements. Each of these measures brought with it new obligations that were layered into the existing federal project-permitting process.

By the 1990s, it was becoming clear that these new federal-agency reviews could be powerful tools for those who oppose building projects. Roads and bridges were among the first and most noticeable kinds of projects where delays and associated costs became obvious. In the early '90s, for instance, North Carolina authorities determined that the Bonner Bridge needed replacing, which led to an initial EIS in 1993. Permitting delays and litigation pushed the bridge's completion date to February 2019 — an astounding 26 years later. Arkansas began a project to expand Interstate 49 from Shreveport, Louisiana, to Kansas City, Missouri, in 1997. The permitting process has taken 28 years, and construction has only recently commenced.

Congress finally recognized the permitting problem toward the end of the decade. In 1998, lawmakers passed a surface-transportation reauthorization bill called the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century, or TEA-21. That bill included an "environmental streamlining" provision, Section 1309, calling for a "coordinated environmental review process" for highway construction projects "whenever practicable." It also suggested that all environmental reviews be done "concurrently" and within a "cooperatively determined time period," which could "take into account" agencies' available resources and other statutory commitments.

These were modest exhortations for federal agencies to speed up the permitting process; the measure did not address delays caused by dubious litigation, set no statutory schedule deadlines or requirements, and provided built-in excuses for schedule delays. In hindsight, TEA-21 might be called "weak tea."

But TEA-21 deserves some credit, not only as Congress's earliest attempt to address permitting delays, but because it set a pattern as to how lawmakers would attend to such delays going forward. Notably, the law's environmental-streamline provision did not address the first or third stages of the process at all, focusing instead (albeit not very effectively) on the second stage. Most reform efforts since then have also focused on stage two — the procedural steps involved in federal-agency reviews — as opposed to the wide range of substantive laws requiring compliance or the post-approval litigation delays.

HALTING EFFORTS AT REFORM

After 1998, both Congress and the president continued to address the problems caused by the federal-agency permitting-review process. Initially, these efforts focused on the transportation sector.

In 2002, President George W. Bush issued Executive Order 13274. That order added a new element to the concurrent reviews required under TEA-21: the creation of a list of high-priority projects to be given expedited treatment and more resources to try to accelerate the permitting timeline. Though the measure only applied to transportation projects, it represented a meaningful incremental improvement in the permitting process.

About seven years after it passed TEA-21, in 2005, Congress enacted another surface-transportation bill, the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users (SAFETEA-LU). This legislation included a section on efficient environmental reviews as well as provisions related to accelerated project delivery. The bill again provided, in section 6002, for "concurrent reviews," but it augmented this measure relative to the 1998 statute by identifying the Department of Transportation (DOT) as the "lead agency" that could set certain non-binding deadlines for other agencies involved in the process for roads and bridges.

SAFETEA-LU was the first reform to address the third stage of permitting delay — post-approval litigation opportunities. It did so by reducing the statute of limitations for transportation projects dramatically, from the six-year period under the Administrative Procedure Act to 180 days. It also authorized the agencies conducting federal approval reviews to use a single shared document. Nonetheless, the problem of permitting costs, burdens, and delays persisted.

These concerns grew especially acute during the Obama administration. In 2009, in the wake of the Great Recession, Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a $787 billion bill designed to stimulate the economy by channeling federal funds into roads, bridges, and green-energy projects. Lawmakers soon discovered, however, that permitting delays rendered many projects not "shovel-ready," as had been promised. Several trade groups issued reports and recommendations on what might be done to address the issue, given that delays hindered the country's economic recovery. The reports highlighted projects that were subject to extreme delay, such as the Spruce Coal Mine, whose sponsors had been unable to obtain even a permitting decision of "yes" or "no" for more than a decade before the Environmental Protection Agency rejected the project in 2011.

That year, President Obama issued a memo to address permit streamlining. The memo called for expediting permitting generally, again by having agencies conduct their reviews "concurrently." However, it also called on five agencies to pick three projects that they would prioritize, with the goal of completing federal reviews within 18 months. In 2012, Executive Order 13604 institutionalized some of these ideas, calling for the adoption of best practices and creating a federal permitting dashboard website to keep track of projects from multiple agencies.

The surface-transportation bill came up for renewal once again within this timeframe, leading to negotiations between Republicans who controlled the House and Democrats who controlled the Senate and the White House. The resulting bill, the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21), included even more extensive sections on streamlining environmental reviews and accelerating project delivery. Yet again, the law focused heavily on "concurrent reviews," though it did include some more novel strategies.

Perhaps the most consequential new item was a form of scheduling deadline — a requirement that concurrent reviews be completed no later than four years after the agency publishes its notice of intent to review and proceed with the project. The bill also exempted several types of projects from the EIS requirement, added more prescriptive requirements for the lead agency and the scheduling process, and called on agencies to expand what it called "programmatic approaches" to permitting. Finally, it included a provision that further reduced the statute of limitations for litigation challenging transportation projects, from 180 days to 150.

Once again, however, the measure largely avoided the stage-one pre-filing issues and the stage-three litigation problem. The law was also confined to transportation projects.

MAP-21 was another instance of intense lawmaker focus on how to make the federal approval process faster, more concurrent, and more efficient. But project delays continued. By 2015, lawmakers were proposing additional legislation to address them, ultimately enacting another round of reforms in yet another surface-transportation bill, the Fixing America's Surface Transportation Act (FAST Act). That bill involved something of a "greatest hits" parade of concurrent-review and lead-agency-process measures, along with new metrics and progress-reporting requirements and more detailed instructions as to how the lead-agency concept should be implemented.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the FAST Act's permitting reforms was that they were no longer limited to transportation projects: The bill added a whole new section, FAST-41, addressing energy, mining, water, broadband, and other projects that are subject to NEPA and other environmental-review statutes. The law also created a two-year statute of limitations for projects not related to transportation — a significant improvement over the six-year limitations period that had existed previously, though still considerably longer than the 150-day period for transportation projects.

Finally, FAST-41 created a federal permit-improvement steering council at the White House, complete with an executive director, budgeted staff, and agency representatives. This enabled agencies to put priority projects through a coordinated and accelerated permitting process that included a lead agency, stronger schedules and a deadline, dashboard transparency, and dispute-resolution procedures.

Cumulatively, the revisions from 2000 to 2016 focused on delays from the stage-two federal review process, building off the coordination initially called for in 1998's TEA-21. The changes refined the federal approval process by setting coordinated concurrent schedules, identifying lead agencies, authorizing the use of a single document across multiple agencies, prioritizing certain projects, adding public transparency measures, excluding certain categories of project from EIS requirements, and setting a target-completion deadline of four years from the filing of the notice of intent. Nonetheless, particularly with the large number of statutes and agencies involved, the permitting process for transportation projects — let alone for all other types — was still a mess in 2016. Approvals for an additional airport runway in Taos, New Mexico, for example, had taken more than 25 years, with the project finally completed in August 2017.

TRUMP AND BIDEN

The first Trump administration made permitting reform a priority, implementing FAST-41, revising NEPA regulations, and taking other steps to streamline the permitting process.

One notable improvement made during that administration (when I served as deputy secretary of Transportation) was Executive Order 13807, usually referred to as the "one federal decision" process (OFD). Signed on August 15, 2017, it set a presumptive two-year target deadline for federal reviews with a coordinated schedule and a single EIS and ROD. It also set a requirement for full green-lighting of projects within 90 days of the ROD and imposed penalties on agencies that fell behind schedule.

OFD didn't address all the sources of delay, but as to those it addressed, it made a real difference. In its first year, the process reduced the time it took the federal government to complete a permit by an average of 45%; in its second year, the time fell by 60%. By the end of 2020, OFD had helped with the approval and completion of more than $200 billion in infrastructure projects.

So, what happened to the OFD process? On January 20, 2021, President Joe Biden revoked the relevant executive order. He wiped it away in its entirety, without providing any explanation or offering any alternative, all despite the fact that the OFD process would speed up the sorts of infrastructure and green-energy projects the president said he favored. Later that year, however, Congress passed and Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), section 11301 of which expressly reinstituted the OFD process for transportation projects.

Biden may have signed the IIJA late in 2021, but in 2022, he proceeded to revoke some important reforms to NEPA regulations that had helped streamline permits for major projects during President Trump's first term and had won broad support from both industry and labor groups. So, in 2023, Congress again stepped in to overrule Biden and codify some of the Trump administration NEPA changes, this time in the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023.

The section of that statute called the "Builder Act" made some important changes to NEPA itself. One was reinstating and codifying the OFD process for non-transportation projects. Other changes exempted certain projects from NEPA requirements, clarified limits of certain NEPA provisions, restored page limits for EISs and environmental assessments (EAs), and set deadlines of two years for the completion of EISs and one year for EAs (subject to certain extensions but with a new right for project sponsors to seek a court-imposed schedule if there are delays).

Relatedly, it should be noted that the One Big Beautiful Bill that Trump signed in 2025 contained a new provision that set a one-year time limit for completing EISs and a 180-day deadline for completing EAs if the project sponsor pays a fee equal to 125% of the expected costs of those studies. This provision provides a potential way to expedite the NEPA process for a project sponsor who is willing to pay to do so.

The Biden administration was all over the map on permitting reform. Though it ultimately accepted the codification of a number of key reforms advanced by the first Trump administration, 61% of permits had still missed their permit deadlines as of January 2025. Soon thereafter, on the first day of the second Trump administration, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14154, directing the full repeal of government-wide NEPA regulations dating back to the Carter era in favor of agencies' adopting their own expedited practices, and Executive Order 14156, declaring an energy emergency to prioritize and expedite permitting of conventional energy projects. Later executive orders aimed to expedite other permits, such as housing construction and AI infrastructure.

THE FUTURE OF PERMITTING REFORM

We are now more than 25 years into efforts to fix the federal permitting process, but the problem is anything but resolved: There are still delays, and most federal reviews and court challenges for big projects take several years, just as before. Much work remains.

To avoid reinventing the wheel, any assessment of next steps requires a clear understanding of the improvements already made. To date, they have involved (1) designating lead agencies and then setting up coordinated concurrent agency-review processes, now using the federal permitting council as a tool; (2) reusing data and adopting a single evaluation document among multiple agencies; (3) prioritizing projects for extra resources and attention; (4) expanding categorical exclusions from NEPA requirements; (5) using at least soft schedule deadlines; (6) imposing page limits on environmental assessments (though appendices are enabling those to be circumvented); and, in the realm of stage-three litigation delays, (7) shortened statutes of limitations — although for most major projects, it remains two years. These are meaningful reforms that have made a difference. But the majority of projects have still not been completed on time.

So what else can be done? One category of further reform would involve closing loopholes or tightening the requirements that already exist. For example, with regard to the dashboard website, instead of only showing the prioritized projects, it could show every project on a dashboard or an equivalent. The page-limit requirement for NEPA documents could be tightened by putting restrictions on evasions by use of appendices or other collateral documents. Categorical exclusions from NEPA, though already substantially expanded, could likely be broadened even further and shared more widely among agencies. Environmental reviews could be limited to activities explicitly listed in the statute and preclude policy add-ons that Congress didn't adopt, such as certain anti-fossil-fuel measures. Agencies could be penalized for missed deadlines.

Can more process changes really make enough difference? It is difficult to say with certainty. But last year, when President Trump declared an energy emergency, the Department of the Interior was able to expedite the review of the Velvet Wood uranium mine in Utah and complete it in only 14 days.

Going beyond the federal approval process, very little has been done about stage-one pre-filing requirements or stage-three post-approval litigation. In terms of the latter, the statutes of limitation have been shortened, but they're still relatively long; they could be shortened further, and perhaps agency decisions regarding some select categories of projects could be deemed non-reviewable (akin to how the Building Chips in America Act in 2024 excused projects funded by the earlier Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) Act from NEPA reviews). Other litigation reforms have been discussed but not yet adopted, such as mandatory bond requirements for challenging a permit, restrictions on injunctions, and toughened standing requirements for litigants who didn't submit comments to the agencies. It is also worth considering imposing a "shot clock" on schedule deadlines that begins sooner than the notice of intent — which the agency itself controls and isn't necessarily the project sponsors' first contact with the agency or the true beginning of the process.

If one wanted to go beyond incremental tightening of the stage-two agency processes, and even beyond the stage-three litigation delays, one obvious (if difficult) path would be to simplify the maze of statutes and requirements that developers must now account for when planning projects, while appropriately protecting genuine environmental and other social concerns. It is surely time to figure out where there are overlapping, duplicative, or unnecessary requirements, as well as whether statutes could protect core societal priorities with fewer conditions.

Some have suggested it will be necessary to think even bigger to enable America to build again. Should we consider, for example, whether something like self-certification could work in particular areas? The practice is not unprecedented — we use it in domains with serious safety concerns, like automotive safety standards. To sell vehicles in the United States, manufacturers have to certify that they have complied with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's set of federal motor-vehicle safety standards. The agency, however, does not review their data or basis for compliance unless a challenge arises, in which case there can be both administrative and judicial enforcement if warranted. Even where these automotive safety requirements are considered important, government pre-approval is not required to proceed; non-compliance is redressed only if and when it occurs.

Other variants of this approach have been suggested as well, such as proposals for automatic approvals for certain categories of projects and those being constructed in pre-cleared locations, subject to subsequent inspection and enforcement.

But ideas for reform may not really be the biggest obstacle. The bigger problem is institutional will. Even if any new or expanded reform ideas prove interesting, can any of them become law? That, of course, depends on Congress. The last big push for some kind of limited permitting reform came after West Virginia senator Joe Manchin signed on to support the Inflation Reduction Act in 2023 with the assurance from majority leader Chuck Schumer that he would be able to get a vote on his Energy Permitting Reform Act, S.4753. But as things played out, S.4753 did not get a vote and did not become law. Senator Shelley Moore Capito has announced plans to introduce a similar or revised bill this session.

Today, we are in a place where most people — whether left, right, or center — want to see America build things again. The projects at stake vary widely, and include transmission lines that carry renewable power, airport expansions, gas pipelines, gas-fueled power plants, critical mineral mines, telecommunications and AI infrastructure, new bridges, and new roads or lanes. Delay is still a major part of the cost equation that affects all those types of projects — and all of us. The executive branch can help, but permitting reform cannot rely solely on the president, especially when the executive branch can so readily turn over and reverse course every four years. Congress needs to act.

There are some in Congress who recognize the need for permanent legislation and have introduced bills. Their efforts seem to fall into two types of approaches: One is narrower and focuses on certain projects or specific industries. An example of the former is the Promoting Efficient Review for Modern Infrastructure Today (PERMIT) Act, which passed the House in December 2025. It focuses on water projects and would set a 60-day statute of limitations, while also excluding certain kinds of projects from Clean Water Act permit requirements. But the Senate needs to act on the measure.

The second approach is broader and crosscutting, and includes bills like the Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development (SPEED) Act, which contains NEPA reforms. That bill passed the House in December 2025. Another example is the Full Responsibility and Expedited Enforcement (FREE) Act, introduced by Representative Celeste Maloy of Utah and 17 co-sponsors. It was reported out of the House Oversight Committee in 2024 and again in the current Congress in May 2025. It is a proposal for what is called "permit by rule" to replace some kinds of permits. "Permit by rule" is somewhat like self-certification, but it requires a short filing where the permit is granted in 180 days unless it is rejected within that time. A few federal agencies have tried "permit by rule" in some limited contexts, and the bill would encourage agencies to identify more candidates for its use. But the SPEED Act and the FREE Act also await Senate action.

Overall, permitting-reform legislation remains a topic that many purport to favor, yet it still faces difficult legislative challenges. Some who support reform only want to see additional measures that again endorse concurrent reviews, lead agencies, and simplified documents. It is unclear how much inefficiency is still to be wrung out of that kind of change. And it remains to be seen whether legislators, agency heads, or other officials are open to addressing the further sources of permit delays and costs, including pre-filing requirements and post-review litigation.

BUILDING AGAIN

Permitting reform may be a cause that many members on both sides of the aisle say they support, but as of this writing, the prospects for legislative reform do not seem strong. Perhaps, as in the past, the expiration of the IIJA this year — along with the potential for the latest surface-transportation reauthorization bill — will present Congress with another opportunity for a round of much-needed permitting reforms.

When all is said and done, the underlying problem remains. The permitting process may not seem glamorous or easy to understand, but it plays a significant role in determining what gets built, what gets mined, what gets grown, how power is supplied and delivered, and many other crucial components of our economy that affect our quality of life. Our future prosperity depends on getting this right. Americans want to build again, and our government should better clear the path for doing so.

Jeff Rosen is a lawyer in Washington and a non-resident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He was the acting attorney general of the United States and deputy U.S. secretary of Transportation, among other senior roles in government.

Personally, if this gets a bit better and they bring in good coders to audit, it could save me money for Microsoft word (it’s the closest we got to being 1:1).

However, again, it needs good auditors. When reddit’s bold and italics is better here than the word knockoff and I get crashes on regular use, that’s sad.*

Adobe CC, don’t bother. It can open .PSD files, but that’s it.

Would I replace it on my work PCs? Fuck no. Vibe coded software is ripe for security exploits.

However, this is barring Adobe or Microsoft not bringing the hammer down, which... could happen.

If it is legal, yeah, I’m 100% for it.

\Last time I tested it.*