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Jerome Powell, chairman of the US Federal Reserve, during a news conference following a Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, December 10, 2025. Federal Reserve officials delivered a third consecutive interest-rate reduction and maintained their outlook for just one cut in 2026. | Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images On Sunday evening, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell revealed that the Trump administration has opened a criminal investigation into him, nominally because of a dispute over a renovation of the Fed’s headquarters. The real reason for the investigation is almost certainly that President Donald Trump wants to push Powell out of office and make room for someone more aligned with Trump’s agenda. Trump initially appointed Powell to lead the Fed in 2018, but the president later soured on Powell, because Trump wants the Fed to lower interest rates more quickly than it has. By law, the Federal Reserve is insulated from presidential control, and members of the Fed’s Board of Governors may only be removed by the president “for cause.” This is because the Fed has the power to temporarily stimulate the economy, potentially boosting a president’s approval rating during an election year, but at the cost of much greater economic turmoil down the road. In advance of the 1972 election, for example, President Richard Nixon successfully pressured Fed Chair Arthur Burns to lower interest rates in order to juice up the economy. It worked, at least in the short term, and Nixon won that election in an historic landslide. But Burns’s decision to play along with Nixon is often blamed for the years of “stagflation,” slow economic growth and high inflation, which followed. As University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers told the BBC Sunday night, pressuring a central bank to lower interest rates without justification is “a thing that tin pot dictators do right before starting a hyperinflation and destroying their own economies.” Wolfers listed several other countries where political leaders applied similar pressure to central bank leaders, including Venezuela, Russia, and Zimbabwe. And, for what it is worth, the Supreme Court has signalled pretty clearly that it does not want a repeat of 1972. While the Court’s Republican majority normally believes that Trump should be allowed to fire any leader of a federal agency for any reason, they wrote last May that the Fed has a “distinct historical tradition” that should protect it from presidential control. But, if the Court’s Republicans are troubled by Trump’s attacks on Jerome Powell, they have no one to blame but themselves. In Trump v. United States (2024), the infamous Trump immunity decision, the Republican justices did not merely conclude that Trump is allowed to use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes. They also said that Trump may order the Justice Department to target someone “for an improper purpose.” Trump’s dubious investigation into Powell, in other words, was explicitly licensed by the Supreme Court of the United States. All six of the Court’s Republicans said outright that Trump may order the Justice Department to bring spurious investigations against his political enemies, and that nothing can be done to Trump as a result. The legal theory that made Trump’s attacks on the Fed possible Both the fight over the Federal Reserve’s independence and the fight over whether Trump is immune from the law flow from the same legal theory. The “unitary executive” is the idea that the Constitution vests certain powers in the president that cannot be diminished by either Congress or the judiciary. Until Trump was indicted for his failed attempt to overturn former President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, Supreme Court cases invoking this theory typically focused on whether the president may fire a particular federal official. Proponents of the unitary executive theory believe that leaders of federal agencies typically must be…

An experimental injection could restore the youthfulness of eggs taken from older women.

Traffic is diverted around a detour at Shaw Avenue and Golden State in Fresno, California, as construction on the California High-Speed Rail overpass begins on December 29, 2025. | Craig Kohlruss/The Fresno Bee/Tribune News Service via Getty Images There’s a familiar mood in American life right now, a frustration that feels both personal and ambient. The bridge doesn’t get fixed. The train line doesn’t get finished. The housing never gets built. The permits drag on. The timelines slip. The price tags balloon. And even when everyone agrees in principle that we really, really need to get things done, the system still can’t move. Marc Dunkelman thinks that sense of paralysis isn’t a mystery, and it isn’t just a product of polarization or bad politicians. In his 2025 book Why Nothing Works, he argues that the deeper problem is structural. Over the last half-century, we’ve built a governing regime designed to stop government from doing harm. And it largely succeeded. But it also made government far less able to do good, especially at scale. Progressives, Dunkelman argues, can’t explain away this crisis by pointing only at conservatives and lingering Reagan-era anti-government ideology. If the left wants to use government to solve big problems, it has to be willing to rebuild government’s ability to execute. I invited Dunkelman onto The Gray Area to talk about that tradeoff between democracy’s need for participation and accountability, and its equal need for empowered institutions that can actually deliver. We talk about the founding tension between Jeffersonian suspicion of centralized power and Hamiltonian faith in state capacity, why the mid-20th century was the high point of American “building,” and how well-intended reforms created a procedural thicket where “everyone has a voice” slowly became “everyone has a veto.” As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, which drops every Monday, so listen and follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Your book’s called Why Nothing Works. Are you arguing that America’s broken? I’m trying to connect with people who feel frustrated that a country that used to do big things now seems incapable of doing even the mundane. That frustration feels like a clue that something deeper’s gone wrong in American governance. You frame this as a tension any democracy has to manage: Citizens need a real say, but government also needs enough authority to make big decisions and execute them. You trace that tension back to the founding, and you map it onto Hamilton and Jefferson. What’s the basic story? From the beginning, America’s caught between two impulses; one is fear of centralized power. Jefferson writes the Declaration of Independence out of the sense that a distant bureaucracy is coercing colonists and that freedom means getting out from under that. After independence, the founders built a system under the Articles of Confederation. It’s essentially the anti-empire model: Power is dispersed, there’s no real executive, and any state can effectively veto national action. It’s like a government run entirely by filibuster, except any state can do it. Within a decade, people realized that the system produces chaos. Power’s so dispersed that government can’t function. So they tried again in 1787 with the Constitution, which is an attempt to strike a balance. Hamilton’s side is basically if you want a pluralistic society to make decisions, you need a stronger center. You need institutions that can act. Key takeaways America’s governing problem isn’t just polarization. It’s a structural crisis of capacity, with too many veto points and too little authority to build, implement, and deliver. Progressives helped create today’s procedural state as a rational response to top-down abuses, but those reforms hardened into a system that often blocks even broadly popular projects. Rebuilding trust in government likely…

Après presque une décennie de carrière, la Norvégienne empile les genres (shoegaze, UK Bass, breakbeat, grunge…) dans un rêve fiévreux et flamboyant.