WASHINGTON – State and federal prosecutors have charged more than 320 people and uncovered nearly $15 million in false claims in what they described Monday as the largest coordinated takedown of health care fraud schemes in Justice Department history.
Law enforcement seized more than $245 million in cash, luxury vehicles, cryptocurrency, and other assets as prosecutors warned of a growing push by transnational criminal networks to exploit the U.S. health care system. As part of the sweeping crackdown, officials identified perpetrators based in Russia, Eastern Europe, Pakistan, and other countries.
“These criminals didn’t just steal someone else’s money. They stole from you,” Matthew Galeotti, who leads the Justice Department’s criminal division, told reporters Monday. “Every fraudulent claim, every fake billing, every kickback scheme represents money taken directly from the pockets of American taxpayers who fund these essential programs through their hard work and sacrifice.”
The alleged $14.6 billion in fraud is more than twice the previous record in the Justice Department’s annual health care fraud crackdown. It includes nearly 190 federal cases and more than 90 state cases that have been charged or unsealed since June 9. Nearly 100 licensed medical professionals were charged, including 25 doctors, and the government reported $2.9 billion in actual losses.
Among the cases is a $10 billion urinary catheter scheme that authorities say highlights the increasingly sophisticated methods used by transnational criminal organizations. Authorities say the group behind the scheme used foreign straw owners to secretly buy up dozens of medical supply companies and then used stolen identities and confidential health data to file fake Medicare claims.
Nineteen defendants have been charged as part of that investigation — which authorities dubbed Operation Gold Rush — including four people arrested in Estonia and seven people arrested at U.S. airports and at the border with Mexico, prosecutors said. The scheme involved the stolen identities and personal information of more one million Americans, according to the Justice Department.
“It’s not done by small time operators,” said Dr. Mehmet Oz, who leads the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. “These are organized syndicates who are designing to hurt America.”
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OKLAHOMA CITY – Jalen Williams is planning to have surgery on his right wrist after the Oklahoma City forward tore a ligament before the Thunder started their run to a championship, general manager Sam Presti said Monday.
The 24-year-old Williams is expected to be ready for next season, Presti said. Williams was inactive for the final two games of the regular season after playing 36 minutes in a 125-112 victory over Phoenix on April 9.
Williams wrote a brace on the wrist on his shooting hand at times during the playoffs and had it taped during games. He shot just 30% from 3-point range in the playoffs, more than 6% off his percentage during the regular season.
“The part that I’m most impressed with is in our modern era, when someone has a poor performance or they’re not playing to their capability in a game and there’s a lot of attention on it, you often see a little birdie make sure that everybody knows that the player is not 100%,” Presti said during his season-ending meeting with reporters. “Never happened with this guy, not one time. He powered through. He showed incredible mental endurance and security in himself.”
A first-time All-Star in his third season after the Thunder drafted him 12th overall out of Santa Clara in 2022, Williams averaged career bests of 21.6 points, 5.3 rebounds and 5.1 assists.
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COLLEGE STATION, Texas – A new study from Texas A&M University reveals that hospital rooms that have natural elements, such as indoor plants and views of nature, may significantly aid in a patient’s recovery, even when experienced through virtual reality (VR).
The study was conducted by researchers Dr. Courtney Suess, from the Department of Hospitality, Hotel Management, and Tourism, and Dr. Jay Maddock, from the School of Public Health.
According to a press release from the university, they used immersive VR to simulate hospital environments for 188 participants over he age of 18, according to a university news release.
The aim was to see how visual elements in hospital rooms affected relaxation and cognitive restoration in patients experiencing acute stress.
The researchers did this by exposing participants to a traumatic rollercoaster accident and subsequent hospitalization via a VR simulation, the release said.
This was designed to induce acute stress and mimic the psychological stress of real-life injured patients receiving acute care.
Participants evaluated 12 hospital room designs, which varied in terms of window views, the presence of plants and color schemes.
The release said participants were then asked to rate how each room helped them feel relaxed, both mentally and physically.
“Hospital rooms are more than just places for treatment — they’re environments that can either support or hinder healing,” Maddock said. “We wanted to explore how design choices, especially those involving green nature, could make a measurable difference in patient recovery.”
Indoor plants were found to have the highest rating among room attributes for helping patients achieve physical relaxation and mental clarity, the release said.
The next highest rating was green nature visible through the window. Green décor, both in wall paint and artwork, was a positive contributor as well.
“Verdant elements had the strongest overall impact on stress recovery,” Suess said. “But when it came to mental clarity — helping people clear their minds — views not blocked by the hospital envelope and having a deeper view and with visible sky were even more important.”
Participants who reported higher levels of stress after the simulated trauma reported an amplified effect on their relaxation and mental clarity when it came to the presence of natural elements.
According to the release, this study adds to the Stress Recovery Theory (SRT) and Psychoevolutionary Theory (PET). Both suggest that natural environments reduce stress and promote psychological recovery.
The release said this is one of the first studies to compare the relative influence of individual effects when combined in controlled, immersive settings.
According to the release, researchers stated that incorporating design that connects people with nature, also known as biophilic design, could be a high-impact, low-cost strategy for healthcare systems.
“Not every hospital can offer a view of treetops, green landscapes or gardens,” Maddock noted. “But even small changes, like adding potted plants in the room or to a window box on the exterior, and using green tones in the décor, can make a meaningful difference.”
A notable hospital in San Antonio that has incorporated biophilic design into its system is CHRISTUS Children’s Hospital at 333 North Santa Rosa Street.
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CARTERSVILLE, Ga. – When two South Korean companies announced a multibillion-dollar investment to build solar panel and electric battery factories in northwest Georgia, federal subsidies helped close a deal to diversify the local economy.
The factories promised thousands of new jobs, transforming the manufacturing base in Cartersville, once a cotton mill town before an Anheuser-Busch brewery arrived in the 1990s and a tire plant in 2006.
But now Republicans in Congress want to gut the subsidies for projects across the country in a tax cut bill likely days from final passage. President Donald Trump’s signature legislation could harm Cartersville despite it being in overwhelmingly Republican Bartow County, which backed Trump with 75% of the vote all three times he appeared on the ballot.
Both companies say they’re continuing their buildout plans. But Steve Taylor, a Republican who is Bartow County’s lone elected commissioner, says ending the tax credits would be “a little concerning.”
“Those companies came and it gave us a completely different type of industry and manufacturing for our community,” Taylor said.
By some measures, no state may have more to lose than Georgia from such cuts in Trump’s “ Big Beautiful Bill.” Top Georgia Republicans have been mostly silent, while Georgia’s two Democratic U.S. senators are staunchly opposed.
“A vote for this bill is a vote against Georgia’s economy and a vote that will put so much of what we’ve worked so hard to achieve at risk” U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff told The Associated Press.
And few towns have more to lose than Cartersville, the Bartow County seat about 35 miles (55 kilometers) northwest of Atlanta. As the county transforms from rural to suburban, leaders foresee an economic boost from the $5 billion battery factory that Hyundai Motor Group and SK On are building, as well as the $2.3 billion solar panel plant belonging to Qcells, a unit of Hanwha Solutions. Both plants pledge to pay workers an average of $53,000 a year.
Clean energy projects are taking off in Georgia
Georgia’s huge inrush of clean energy projects had already begun before 2022, when then-President Joe Biden signed his signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. But if anything, that rush accelerated. The 33 additional projects announced by the end of 2024 were the most nationwide, according to E2, an environmental business group. Exact figures differ, but projects in Georgia top $20 billion, pledging more than 25,000 jobs.
Buyers of Qcells solar panels get a 40% federal tax credit, including a 10% bonus for domestic content, which would go away under the bill. Qcells itself would still get production tax credits for panels it started producing last year in Cartersville. The bill would also tax companies that buy panels or components from some foreign countries including China. That could help Qcells, but wouldn’t aid domestic producers as much as the domestic content bonus.
When the 1,900-job plant is complete, it will take refined polysilicon, cast it into ingots and then thinly slice ingots into the wafers that become solar cells. Qcells says controlling its own supply chain will let it work more efficiently. Those additional steps would earn the company additional tax credits.
Scott Moskowitz, vice president of market strategy and industry affairs for Qcells, said the company built its first American factory up the road in Dalton during the first Trump administration in response to Trump’s protectionist trade policy. Moskowitz argues that a quick curtailment of federal subsidies undercuts Trump’s goal of bolstering domestic manufacturing, pushing buyers back to Chinese-controlled producers.
Some local Republicans are expressing alarm, with 16 GOP state legislators imploring Congress in a June 17 letter to preserve tax breaks for solar panels.
“We urge you not to weaken the tax credits, as doing so would only harm the manufacturing renaissance in Georgia while creating opportunities for Chinese companies to take over the solar industry,” wrote the Georgia lawmakers, led by Republican state Rep. Matthew Gambill of Cartersville.
Some argue it’s unfair for Congress to pull the rug out after companies relied on the promise of federal support to invest huge sums.
“I would like to think that from a business perspective that when you have agreements in place that you carry those out to fulfillment,” Cartersville Mayor Matt Santini said.
High-ranking Georgia Republicans have been publicly silent
Clean energy projects have overwhelmingly located in Republican-held congressional districts, with a report by Atlas Public Policy finding GOP districts host 77% of planned spending.
But Republican U.S. Rep. Barry Loudermilk, who lives in Bartow County, praised the cuts when they passed the House in May, saying the bill would “unleash American energy stifled by the Democrats’ Green New scam” and lauding expansion of oil, gas and coal production on federal lands.
“Our position is that Congress needs to be the one to decide the future of the IRA,” said Kemp spokesperson Garrison Douglas.
Kemp loves green energy investments and jobs, and even declared that his goal is to make Georgia the “electric mobility capital of America.” But Kemp and Ossoff clash over who should get credit for Georgia’s green energy boom. Kemp sharply disputes that the Biden-era incentives spurred the flood of investment, saying many industries were already on their way before the Inflation Reduction Act was passed.
Unlike his current silence, Kemp vociferously opposed some domestic content requirements that made it hard for Hyundai to access the same tax credits as unionized U.S.-based automakers.
“Just generally speaking, the Inflation Reduction Act picked winners and losers, and we saw that negatively impact our partners,” Douglas said.
All nine of Georgia’s Republican House members voted to support the bill, including U.S. Rep Buddy Carter, who earlier signed a letter supporting green energy subsidies. Carter, who is seeking the GOP nomination to oppose Ossoff for Senate in 2026, represents a coastal district that includes a $7.6 billion Hyundai plant in Ellabell that started production last year.
Hyundai wants to make batteries at what would be a 3,500-employee plant near Cartersville so that Hyundai and Kia buyers can fully take advantage of the $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicles. Those credits would end six months after the bill is enacted under the current version.
The company is publicly sidestepping the current legislative fight. But with American demand for electric vehicles slow to take off, Hyundai now says it will also build gas-electric hybrid vehicles in Ellabell, once projected to make only electric vehicles.
“We remain focused on electrification because we believe it represents a significant long-term opportunity,” Hyundai spokesperson Michael Stewart said in a statement. “At the same time, our business is driven by consumer demand, which is why we continue to offer a full range of powertrains.”
Bartow County leaders say it’s in everyone’s interest to keep the projects on solid footing and that jobs should outweigh politics.
“I don’t know that people are lining up along party lines over this topic,” Santini said.
But Ossoff says partisanship is motivating many Georgia Republicans to turn their backs on the state’s economic interests.
“For national Republicans right now, loyalty to Trump is more important than anything else, and this is what Trump says he wants,” Ossoff said.
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FILE – The music director at the Royal Theatre, Czech conductor Jakub Hrusa, poses for photographs as he was presented at a news conference in the foyer of the Opera in Copenhagen, Denmark, Sept. 30, 2011. (Joachim Adrian/Polfoto via AP, file) (Joachim Adrian)
PRAGUE – The Czech Philharmonic announced Monday that Jakub Hrůša has been selected to become its new chief conductor and music director and will assume full duties in 2028 for an initial five year-term.
He will replace Semyon Bychkov, who took over at the start of the 2018-19 season. He said in a statement he was “overjoyed and deeply honored.”
The 43-year-old Hrůša is currently chief conductor of the Bamberg Symphony in Germany and is set to become the music director of the Royal Opera House in London in September this year.
Hrůša has been a regular guest conductor with the Vienna Philharmonic, Berlin Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic and others.
He has been a principal guest conductor of the Czech Philharmonic since 2018.
Hrůša was named Opus Klassik’s conductor of the year in 2023.
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ENID RODRIGUEZ KNOWS WHAT A DIFFERENCE Medicaid can make, because it’s made a huge difference for her.
Rodriguez, 51, has been working for pretty much her entire life—first in organizations that provided support and therapy to at-risk children, more recently in a small electrical business she helps her husband run while she also takes care of her aging mother. She loved working with children and now is invested in the new enterprise. She even managed to get bachelor’s and master’s degrees (in human services) along the way.
But Rodriguez has never made enough money to pay health insurance premiums. That’s been a big problem because she’s had serious health conditions literally since birth, when she was born prematurely and developed an infection while spending two months in the NICU of a hospital in Puerto Rico.
Severe asthma. Chronic chest and gastric problems. Back pain from a hip injury a few years ago. She could count on a local free clinic to help manage symptoms, to provide preventive care and, frequently, to provide much-appreciated hugs. But Rodriguez also needed specialty care the clinic couldn’t provide. And when an apparent heart attack brought her to the emergency room a few years ago, she ended up with a $20,000 bill she had no way to pay.
All of that changed in late 2023, when North Carolina officially opened its Medicaid program to anybody with incomes below or just above the poverty line—in other words, to people like Rodriguez who were too poor to get insurance on their own but did not qualify for the older, narrower standards North Carolina had for its Medicaid program.
Since then Rodriguez has been able to see those specialists—including one who figured out her chest pains were an upper GI condition, not a heart issue. She’s also getting physical therapy for her old injury, and is on weight-loss medication that doctors think will help with other conditions.
“Medicaid has literally been a lifesaver,” she told me this week, when we met at the Community Care Clinic of Rowan County, where she used to get care. But there was a tinge of anxiety in her voice, because, she said, she is worried the cuts in Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill will leave her without coverage.
Enid Rodriguez (left) outside the Community Care Clinic of Rowan County with its executive director, Krista Woolly. (Photo by Jonathan Cohn)
“I wouldn’t be able to see the cardiologist who makes sure my heart is okay, the gastroenterologist who’s treating my gastrointestinal problems, the weight-loss specialist,” Rodriguez said.
Medicaid isn’t perfect, she said, and she doesn’t expect government programs to provide everything she and her husband need. But, she said, “we shouldn’t have to work fifty-, sixty-hour weeks to pay our bills, and still struggle to take care of ourselves when it comes to our medical expenses.”
But worry she must. Medicaid coverage for millions of Americans like Rodriguez is in jeopardy. In fact, it could be doomed in a matter of days.
THE LEGISLATION THAT DONALD TRUMP is pushing and Republicans are trying to pass by July 4 seeks to cut Medicaid by nearly a trillion dollars over the next ten years, through a variety of changes that could include everything from so-called “work requirements” to complex changes in financing that could directly or indirectly lower the federal government’s contribution to the program.
“Could” is a key word there, because the emerging bill that leaders in the Senate hope to approve by Monday is different from the bill House Republicans approved last month. And some House members are already saying they can’t vote for it.
But Republicans have made threats to tank big bills before, before ultimately falling in line. And there’s a good reason to think they will do so again: Downsizing Medicaid is a longtime goal of many conservatives, who believe society is better off with less government and less government spending. Plus, the bill with the Medicaid cuts also has lots of tax cuts, which pretty much the entire party is desperate to pass.
The public doesn’t seem too enthusiastic about that prospect, based on polls showing Americans already have strong, negative views of the bill, and that they don’t want anybody touching Medicaid. That undoubtedly explains why Trump and his allies keep insisting that they are “strengthening” the program, and downplaying or denying that the cuts would cause harm.
Those claims don’t hold up when the Congressional Budget Office is projecting that nearly 12 million people would end up uninsured if something like the Senate bill becomes law—and when a slew of new academicstudies, like so many earlier ones, suggest that people losing Medicaid are more likely to miss out on medical care, get sick, and in the worst cases die prematurely.
Republicans say the experts making these predictions can’t be trusted. But you don’t need to put stock in academic-style research to grasp what Medicaid has meant to individuals and their communities in recent years—and what its absence could do to those individuals and communities now.
All you need to do is talk with people who know firsthand. And there may be no better place to find them than North Carolina.
NORTH CAROLINA WAS ONE OF THOSE Republican-led states that at first refused to participate in Obamacare’s “Medicaid expansion,” which makes federal funding available to states that widen their Medicaid programs to include many more people living near the poverty line. But advocates in North Carolina kept organizing and lobbying on behalf of expansion, and when popular Democratic governor Roy Cooper came into office in 2017 he made expansion a top priority. Small business owners and hospital leaders eventually became outspoken backers of expansion, helping to persuade key state Republicans to embrace the cause.
In the spring of 2023, the Republican-led legislature passed a bipartisan expansion bill and Cooper signed it. The new program launched on December 1 of that year, with about 300,000 people automatically enrolled. Since then, it has swelled to cover more than 600,000.
But those numbers alone don’t capture the full impact. Expansion has meant new money for providers who serve low-income populations, because now more of their patients can pay their bills.
That’s been especially important for organizations like Blue Ridge Health, a network of clinics in North Carolina’s westernmost counties where the percentage of uninsured patients declined almost overnight from about half to about a third, according to Richard Hudspeth, the system’s director.
Because that shift has increased revenue, Blue Ridge can now offer services like pediatric dentistry and behavioral health that had been practically unavailable in these rural communities before. It has also expanded its overall capacity—which, Hudspeth told me, made a big difference when Hurricane Helene swept through the region last fall.
“There was so much debris, and all these respiratory infections,” said Hudspeth, who is also a family physician and still sees patients. “Having that capacity let people get their lives together quicker, and get back to work too.”
Christopher Vann told me about a similar transformation at CommWell Health, a clinic network on the eastern side of North Carolina where he is vice president of development. Before expansion, about one in ten patients seen by CommWell was on Medicaid; since expansion, it has been about one in four.
The new money, Vann said, has allowed CommWell to focus on reaching patients who were far from clinics, through a combination of transportation and mobile clinics. CommWell has also invested in pediatric services they offer directly to children through the schools.
The communities CommWell serves still have all kinds of unmet needs, Vann said, but expansion “is allowing us to chip away at that mountain.”
At the Rowan clinic, executive director Krista Woolly told me she knows of many patients like Rodriguez, who were finally able to get specialty care once they got onto Medicaid.
Amy Wilson, the Rowan clinic’s medical director, told me “I work really hard to take care of people, but there’s only so much I can do. I can’t take out your gall bladder, I can’t give you chemotherapy, I can’t replace your hip. There are all kinds of things I can’t do post-stroke, or give you physical therapy three times a week.”
“This patient population, they just got access” to those sorts of procedures thanks to Medicaid expansion, Wilson added. But the One Big Beautiful Bill could undo much of that progress. “Are they going to have that all ripped out from them again? They’ve stabilized, evened out, and we’re just going to start all over again?”
SUPPORTERS OF THE GOP BILL frequently claim they are protecting Medicaid, not cutting it. Trump himself has repeated these false claims. On Thursday, for example, he said that under the bill “Medicaid is left alone, it’s left the same.” On Friday, he said that Democratic policies would destroy Medicaid but the Republican bill would make it “better,” or even “perfect.”
It’s about as blatant a lie as you’ll see in politics. And—again—nowhere is the deception more obvious than in North Carolina.
The most obvious reason is that the state law authorizing expansion—the one that passed with bipartisan support two years ago—includes a provision ending expansion if the federal government reduces its contribution to the program or requires substantial new spending by the state. Several features of the GOP bill could trigger that provision, according to an analysis conducted by state officials and reported by North Carolina Health News.
The language of the North Carolina law is sufficiently ambiguous that it’s hard to be sure how this would all play out. The courts could end up deciding that changes in the GOP bill wouldn’t trigger cancellation, or the state legislature could act to amend the law so that expansion could keep going.
But even if the GOP legislation doesn’t force a full rollback of Medicaid expansion in North Carolina, the cuts under discussion could mean hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians will lose coverage—and, in most cases, become uninsured.
The primary reason would be those work requirements, which supporters of the GOP legislation say will make sure able-bodied people don’t take advantage of the system.
The work requirements are one of the few parts of the Republican bill that draw support from a majority of Americans—and even many of the people who work with low-income populations. But those on the front lines say the documentation requirements can be difficult on low-income workers who might lack stable housing, or work in seasonal jobs, or have trouble navigating IT systems.
Front-line workers also wonder what work requirements would mean for the chronically understaffed agencies that handle eligibility paperwork now. The GOP bill would force them to do so more frequently—and to process all the information that goes with verifying employment status.
“In our county, our [local government services agency], people can’t keep up with what they’re doing now, and we’re going to ask them to do—instead of yearly checks—every six month checks,” Woolly said. “I think it’s just going to be a big cluster.”
And while the work requirements in the federal legislation exempt people with disabilities, the current text of the bill doesn’t define that category clearly. It’s quite possible that states, relying on to-be-issued federal guidance, would determine that only people who qualify for Social Security disability insurance qualify. That could leave out all the people who have real, disabling conditions that make work difficult but haven’t gotten on those federal insurance programs because the enrollment process is notoriously difficult.
“Disability is like a black hole,” Kate Daley, a health justice organizer with the advocacy group Down Home NC, told me. “There’s so many hurdles to jump through, and most people get denied for multiple years consecutively before they get approved. . . . If exemptions are going to apply for folks who have a disability determination, but it takes years to get a disability determination, what will that mean for all the folks who haven’t been approved yet?”
It’s a problem that researchers have highlighted repeatedly, and that Daley knows up close. She describes a friend of hers who suffered for years with multiple sclerosis that made it difficult to work but couldn’t obtain Medicaid under the old, stricter criteria because she hadn’t qualified for federal disability insurance.
She finally got coverage when North Carolina expanded Medicaid, Daley said, but not before developing more lesions. “Her MS is being managed now,” Daley said. “But before it was not managed, and that’s gonna likely have an impact on her life.”
Monitor strips that show heart rates and rhythms of patients are secured to a magnetic board in the intensive care unit at Randolph Health in Asheboro, North Carolina in 2022. (Photo: Washington Post / GettyImages)
WHEN YOU ZOOM IN, you’ll see countless other stories like those—stories of individuals and families likely to be harmed if North Carolina curtails its Medicaid expansion. And if you zoom back out, you can see how curtailing Medicaid expansion will harm health care providers. The decline in coverage would reduce the revenue flow into clinics and other safety-net providers, stalling and potentially starting to reverse the expansion of capacity and services that’s meant so much in the neediest part of the state.
Vann mentioned that CommWell recently opened a new, 12,000-square-foot facility offering medical, dental, and behavioral health services. “We may have to scale that back,” he told me. “I would hope that we wouldn’t have to close it, but there could be some really serious conversations about our ability to keep that facility going.”
That would be tough on the patients using those facilities, Vann said, but it would also have ripple effects throughout the community, since clinics like those at CommWell take some of the pressure off of emergency rooms and other providers—and because they employ workers, too.
The potential of Medicaid cuts to reverberate so broadly, especially in more rural areas, is one of the few issues that seem to be giving even some Republicans in Washington pause. Among those raising concerns—privately and publicly—has been Thom Tillis, the incumbent GOP senator from North Carolina who is up for re-election next year.
Tills on Saturday announced that he was voting no on the Senate bill, because of its effects on his state. But while Tillis and a handful of other Republican lawmakers have made a lot of noise about Medicaid cuts going too far, they’ve also signaled they’re willing to live with cuts nearly as big, still on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars.
That would have sweeping, harsh effects on North Carolina—on some of the state’s most vulnerable people, and on the institutions that care for them. But, of course, North Carolina is just one of fifty states in the country. This calamity could soon be felt, to varying degrees, on the other forty-nine, too.
“F1 The Movie” debuted with $55.6 million in North American theaters and $144 million globally over the weekend, according to studio estimates Sunday, handing the tech company easily its biggest opening yet.
But “F1” was Apple’s first foray into summer blockbuster territory. It won a bidding war for the project from much of the production team behind the 2022 box-office smash “Top Gun: Maverick.” Apple then partnered with Warner Bros. to distributed the film starring Brad Pitt, Damson Idris and Kerry Condon.
With a production budget over $200 million, “F1” still has several laps to go to turn a profit. But for now, “F1” is full speed ahead.
“‘F1 The Movie’ puts the pedal to the metal in an impressive overperformance for this original summer movie that had one of the most comprehensive and exciting marketing blitzes in recent memory and it paid off big for the film,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for data firm Comscore.
Car racing movies have often struggled in theaters; crash-and-burn cases include Ron Howard’s “Rush” (2013) and Michael Mann’s “Ferrari” (2023). But “F1” built off of the Formula 1 fandom stirred up by the popular series “Formula 1: Drive to Survive.” And it leaned on “Top Gun: Maverick” director Joseph Kosinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer to deliver another adult-oriented action thrill ride.
Like they did in “Top Gun: Maverick,” the filmmakers sought an adrenaline rush by placing IMAX cameras inside the cockpit in “F1.” IMAX and large-format screens accounted for 55% of in its ticket sales. IMAX, whose screens are much sought-after in the summer, has carved out a three-week run for the movie.
Reviews have been very good for “F1” and audience reaction (an “A” via CinemaScore) was even better. That suggests “F1” could hold up well in the coming weeks despite some formidable coming competition in Universal Pictures’ “Jurassic World Rebirth.”
Universal’s “M3gan 2.0” had been expected to pose a greater challenge to “F1.” Instead, the robot doll sequel didn’t come close to matching the 2022 original’s box-office launch.
“M3gan 2.0” collected $10.2 million in 3,112 theaters. Memes and viral videos helped propel the first “M3gan” to a $30.4 million opening and a total haul of $180 million, all on a $12 million budget.
Still, the Blumhouse Productions horror thriller could wind up profitable. The film, written and directed by Gerald Johnstone, cost a modest $25 million to make. A spinoff titled “Soulm8te” is scheduled for release next year.
M3gan 2.0” ended up in fourth place. The box-office leader of the last two weekends, “How to Train Your Dragon,” slid to second with $19.4 million. The DreamWorks Animation live-action hit from Universal Pictures has surpassed $200 million domestically in three weeks.
After a debut that marked a new low for Pixar, the studio’s “Elio” gathered up $10.7 million in sales in its second weekend. That gives the Walt Disney Co. release a disappointing two-week start of $42.2 million.
Top 10 movies by domestic box office
With final domestic figures being released Monday, this list factors in the estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore:
1. “F1 The Movie,” $55 million.
2. “How to Train Your Dragon,” $19.4 million.
3. “Elio,” $10.7 million.
4. “M3gan 2.0,” $10.2 million.
5. “28 Years Later,” $9.7 million.
6. “Lilo & Stitch,” $6.9 million.
7. “Mission: Impossible — Final Reckoning,” $4.2 million.
8. “Materialists,” $3 million.
9. “Ballerina,” $2.1 million.
10. “Karate Kid: Legends,” $1 million.
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The crash of 2008 was supposed to augur the end of ultraspeculative financial capitalism. But financial actors have actually gone from strength to strength since then, and fictitious capital is a bigger menace to global economic stability than ever.
Signage for a Bitcoin ATM in Barcelona, Spain, on November 11, 2024. (Angel Garcia / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
This is an extract from Freedom for Capital, Not People: The Mont Pèlerin Society and the Origins of the Neoliberal Monetary Order, now available from Verso Books.
Some writers have taken the period since the crisis of financial capitalism in 2008 to mark the “end of neoliberalism” or the advent of “post-neoliberalism.” Others have described it as a “mutant,” “zombie” iteration of a neoliberalism that is in effect “half-dead, half-alive.”
In an era of rising protectionism, right-wing ideology, and deglobalization, neoliberal ideologies have certainly experienced a backlash. But they have also rearticulated themselves by forging new alliances and taking on novel forms. Three dimensions of the current conjuncture are worth highlighting.
<hr />
<h2>The Politics of Money</h2>
Today, as in the 1960s, there is an immense interest in the form that money takes as a central factor in politics and social life. Monetary policy is more than ever a political question of direct concern to people otherwise uninterested in its arcana. There is reason to think that the global system of money and finance is approaching a disruptive threshold of historic significance, with the potential to change how societies invest, insure, and trade.
Of course, the form of money — essentially the socially and politically constructed “promise to pay” — has always fluctuated. What is distinctive about the transformation of money in the early-twenty-first century is, first of all, the proliferation of digital currencies and tokens. Operating in the shadows of hegemonic monetary systems, these cannot simply be seen as tools for bottom-up emancipation pitted against authoritarian central banks and austerity-inducing monetary politics, as is sometimes claimed by their boosters.
Rather, non-fungible tokens, Web3, blockchain technology, crypto, and decentralized autonomous organizations are at the forefront of a financial revolution driven increasingly by transnational platforms and central banks themselves. In the name of flexibility and efficiency, they prefigure the end of physical cash, thereby jeopardizing privacy and further undermining democracy. Such developments signal the exhaustion of the quantitative easing (QE) regime since 2019.
Although they are far too complex to be analyzed in any detail here, they represent one prospectus for the so-called post-neoliberal order, whose features cannot be understood as progressive, promising in some instances to surrender still more authority to the lords of finance themselves, potentially directly by administrative means.
The terms in which this new monetary architecture is discussed recall earlier debates. In the field of digital currencies, for example, the highly restricted, limited, and market-disciplining logic of Bitcoin bears comparison to the built-in scarcity of gold — and if introduced more broadly, could reproduce the logic of the gold standard — while the seemingly endless proliferation of absurdly branded private money over the decade of QE resembles the wild speculation enabled by free-floating exchange rates.
To this familiar opposition, a third pole may be added: central bank digital currency, issued either formally by central banks themselves or — what is functionally equivalent — by the largest private banks. This novel form of money is distinct in that it introduces the prospect of directly imposing socio-political conditions on transactions or penalizing savers through very low interest rates.
It is perhaps for this reason that the more principled neoliberals themselves have joined in to sound the alarm when it comes to some of these innovations. As the historian Adam Tooze has suggested, paraphrasing Antonio Gramsci, “crypto is the morbid symptom of an interregnum, an interregnum in which the gold standard is dead but a fully political money that dares to speak its name has not yet been born.”
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<h2>Exorbitant Privilege</h2>
Another live issue in contemporary discussions is the status of the dollar as the world reserve currency, an “exorbitant privilege” ratified by the shift to floating exchange rates described in this book. The effects of this fateful decision, as a <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="https://www.piie.com/bookstore/2024/floating-exchange-rates-fifty">volume</a> published on its fiftieth anniversary records, “went far beyond the international monetary system and have had momentous geopolitical and political as well as economic and financial implications.”
Today, if dollar hegemony remains intact, ever more voices question its permanence, and with it, the ability of the United States to maintain its unrivaled geopolitical position. In this regard, the present moment echoes that of the 1970s, when monetary policy reflected the jostling between world powers and management of the relations among allies. With the introduction of the BRICS basket of currencies and the prospect of de-dollarization it suggests, in the aftermath of Brexit and the eurozone crisis, forecasts of re-regionalization often turn on monetary policy.
Still, amid chatter of deglobalization and evidence of a fall in capital flows, the share of transactions conducted in dollars has remained relatively stable over the last decades. Nonetheless, the US “dollar creditocracy” is threatened by the internal contradictions of QE, and the US current account and budget deficits continue to exert downward pressure on the dollar, exacerbating resentment of US unilateralism.
Finally, the liberalization of capital movements in the 1970s must be seen as one side of the exhaustion of economic growth across the advanced industrialized countries; both are effects of overaccumulation and declining productivity growth and have taken the form of secular stagnation. The subsequent period has seen a tremendous explosion of fictitious capital, or financial assets that are in essence claims on future production and profit.
The financialization of the post-Fordist era has produced a lopsided economy, where such claims exceed by significant measure the size of the underlying real economy. Its logic is that of a growthless casino, based on transfer and appropriation largely decoupled from real-world use values. Such a top-heavy dynamic was exactly what produced the over-leveraging responsible for the 2008 meltdown.
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<h2>Fictitious Capital</h2>
Pledges to reregulate and curb the power of finance aside, the metastasis of fictitious capital has continued apace. While the use of some assets — those complex instruments at the heart of the housing and financial crisis, such as CDOs — did indeed decline, the overall quantity of fictitious capital has in fact continued to increase. This dynamic is evinced by the outsize importance of the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector and the run-up in prices of housing and art objects as financialized assets.
Trading in global foreign exchange markets — the marketplace that determines the exchange rate for global currencies and that originates in its modern form from abolishing the Bretton Woods system — soared from negligible levels in the 1970s to a nominal value of $620 billion in 1989 and $4.5 trillion in 2008; by 2022 it stood at $7.5 trillion. Such massive flows of money, buoying what some have called a “technofeudal” rentier class, pose a potentially systemic problem given the attendant pressure to seek their realization in the real economy.
In the age of climate overshoot, secular stagnation, and polycrisis, these claims on future production — now far greater than global GDP — create a fundamental dilemma. Given mounting evidence that calls into question the ambition of greening economic growth, efforts to realize future profits of fictitious capital will lead to either unsustainable growth that dangerously destabilizes planetary life or an alternative post-growth scenario, in which societies regain democratic control and turn fictitious capital into stranded assets.
Great Job Matthias Schmelzer & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
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In hindsight I’ll say: I always thought going crazy would be more exciting—roaming the street in a bathrobe, shouting at fruit. Instead I spent a weary season of my life saying representative. Speaking words and numbers to robots. Speaking them again more clearly, waiting, getting disconnected, finally reaching a person but the wrong person, repeating my story, would I mind one more brief hold. May my children never see the emails I sent, or the unhinged delirium with which I pressed 1 for agent.
I was tempted to bury the whole cretinous ordeal, except that I’d looked behind the curtain and vowed to document what I’d seen.
It all began last July, here in San Francisco. I’d been driving to my brother’s house, going about 40 mph, when my family’s newish Ford Escape simply froze: The steering wheel locked, and the power brakes died. I could neither steer the car nor stop it.
I jabbed at the “Power” button while trying to jerk the wheel free—no luck. Glancing ahead, I saw that the road curved to the left a few hundred yards up. I was going to sail off Bayshore Boulevard and over an embankment. I reached for the door handle.
What followed instead was pure anticlimactic luck: Ten feet before the curve in the road, the car drifted to a stop. Vibrating with relief, I clicked on the hazards and my story began.
That afternoon, with the distracted confidence of a man covered by warranty, I had the car towed to our mechanic. (I first tried driving one more time—cautiously—lest the malfunction was a fluke. Within 10 minutes, it happened again.)
“We can see from the computer codes that there was a problem,” the guy told me a few days later. “But we can’t identify the problem.”
Then he asked if I’d like to come pick up the car.
“Won’t it just happen again?” I asked.
“Might,” he said. “Might not.”
I said that sounded like a subpar approach to driving and asked if he might try again to find the problem.
“Look”—annoyed sigh—“we’re not going to just go searching all over the vehicle for it.”
This was in fact a perfect description of what I thought he should do, but there was no persuading him. I took the car to a different mechanic. A third mechanic took a look. When everyone told me the same thing, it started looking like time to replace the car, per the warranty. I called the Ford Customer Relationship Center.
Pinging my way through the phone tree, I was eventually connected with someone named Pamela—my case agent. She absorbed my tale, gave me her extension, and said she’d call back the next day.
Days passed with no calls, nor would she answer mine. I tried to find someone else at Ford and got transferred back to Pamela’s line. By chance—it was all always chance—I finally got connected to someone with substantive information: Unless our vehicle’s malfunction could be replicated and thus identified, the warranty wouldn’t apply.
“But nobody can replicate the malfunction,” I said.
“I understand your frustration.”
Over the days ahead, and then weeks, and then more weeks, I got pulled into a corner of modern existence that you are, of course, familiar with. You know it from dealing with your own car company, or insurance company, or health-care network, or internet provider, or utility provider, or streaming service, or passport office, or DMV, or, or, or. My calls began getting lost, or transferred laterally to someone who needed the story of a previous repair all over again. In time, I could predict the emotional contours of every conversation: the burst of scripted empathy, the endless routing, the promise of finally reaching a manager who—CLICK. Once, I was told that Ford had been emailing me updates; it turned out they’d somehow conjured up an email address for me that bore no relationship to my real one. Weirdly, many of the customer-service and dealership workers I spoke with seemed to forget the whole premise and suggested I resume driving the car.
“Would you put your kids in it?” I’d ask. They were aghast. Not if the steering freezes up!
As consuming as this experience was, I rarely talked about it. It was too banal and tedious to inflict on family or friends. I didn’t even like thinking about it myself. When the time came to plunge into the next round of calls or emails, I’d slip into a self-protective fugue state and silently power through.
Then, one night at a party, a friend mentioned something about a battle with an airline. Immediately she attempted to change the subject.
“It’s boring,” she said. “Disregard.”
On the contrary, I told her, I needed to hear every detail. Tentatively at first, she told me about a family trip to Sweden that had been scuttled by COVID. What followed was a protracted war involving denied airline refunds, unusable vouchers, expired vouchers, and more. Other guests from the party began drifting over. One recounted a recent Verizon nightmare. Another had endured Kafkaesque tech support from Sonos. The stories kept coming: gym-quitting labyrinths, Airbnb hijinks, illogical conversations with the permitting office, confounding interactions with the IRS. People spoke of not just the money lost but the hours, the sanity, the basic sense that sense can prevail.
Taken separately, these hassles and indignities were funny anecdotes. Together, they suggested something unreckoned with. And everyone agreed: It was all somehow getting worse. In 2023 (the most recent year for which data are available), the National Customer Rage Survey showed that American consumers were, well, full of rage. The percentage seeking revenge—revenge!—for their hassles had tripled in just three years.
I decided to de-fugue and start paying attention. Was the impenetrability of these contact centers actually deliberate? (Buying a new product or service sure is seamless.) Why do we so often feel like everything’s broken? And why does it feel more and more like this brokenness is breaking us?
Illustration by Timo Lenzen
Turns out there’s a word for it.
In the 2008 best seller Nudge, the legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein and the economist Richard H. Thaler marshaled behavioral-science research to show how small tweaks could help us make better choices. An updated version of the book includes a section on what they called “sludge”—tortuous administrative demands, endless wait times, and excessive procedural fuss that impede us in our lives.
The whole idea of sludge struck a chord. In the past several years, the topic has attracted a growing body of work. Researchers have shown how sludge leads people to forgo essential benefits and quietly accept outcomes they never would have otherwise chosen. Sunstein had encountered plenty of the stuff working with the Department of Homeland Security and, before that, as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. “People might want to sign their child up for some beneficial program, such as free transportation or free school meals, but the sludge might defeat them,” he wrote in the Duke Law Journal.
The defeat part rang darkly to me. When I started talking with people about their sludge stories, I noticed that almost all ended the same way—with a weary, bedraggled Fuck it. Beholding the sheer unaccountability of the system, they’d pay that erroneous medical bill or give up on contesting that ticket. And this isn’t happening just here and there. Instead, I came to see this as a permanent condition. We are living in the state of Fuck it.
Some of the sludge we submit to is unavoidable—the simple consequence of living in a big, digitized world. But some of it is by design. ProPublica showed in 2023 how Cigna saved millions of dollars by rejecting claims without having doctors read them, knowing that a limited number of customers would endure the process of appeal. (Cigna told ProPublica that its description was “incorrect.”) Later that same year, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ordered Toyota’s motor-financing arm to pay $60 million for alleged misdeeds that included thwarting refunds and deliberately setting up a dead-end hotline for canceling products and services. (The now-diminished bureau canceled the order in May.) As one Harvard Business Review article put it, “Some companies may actually find it profitable to create hassles for complaining customers.”
Sludge can also reduce participation in government programs. According to Stephanie Thum, an adjunct faculty member at the Indiana Institute of Technology who researches and writes about bureaucracy, agencies may use this fact to their advantage. “If you bury a fee waiver or publish a website in legalese rather than plain language, research shows people might stay away,” Thum told me. “If you’re a leader, you might use that knowledge to get rid of administrative friction—or put it in place.”
Fee waivers, rejected claims—sludge pales compared with other global crises, of course. But that might just be its cruelest trick. There was a time when systemic dysfunction felt bold and italicized, and so did our response: We were mad as hell and we weren’t going to take it anymore! Now something more insidious and mundane is at work. The system chips away as much as it crushes, all while reassuring us that that’s just how things go.
The result: We’re exhausted as hell and we’re probably going to keep taking it.
Call Pamela. Call the mechanic. Call the other mechanic. Call that lemon-law lawyer. My exhausted efforts, to the extent I understood them, revolved around getting my car either fixed or replaced and getting the various nodes in the Ford universe to talk with one another. In the middle of work, or dinner, or a kid’s soccer game, I’d peel off to answer a random call, because every now and then it was that one precious update from Ford, informing me that there was no news.
The hope, with all of this, was to burrow my way far enough into the circuitry to locate someone with the authority and inclination to help. Sometimes I got drips of information—the existence of a buyback department at Ford, for instance. Mostly I got nowhere.
The longer this dragged on, the more the matrix seemed to glitch. The dealership where I’d bought the car had no record of the salesman who’d sold it to me. Ford’s internal database, at one point, claimed that I had already picked up the car I was still trying to get them to fix. A mechanic told me, “It’s not that we couldn’t fix it. It’s that we never found the problem, so we were unable to fix it.”
Another mechanic, apparently as delighted by our conversations as I was, grew petulant.
“Driving is a luxury,” he told me without explanation.
Initiating these conversations in the first place: also a luxury, I was learning. For this we have the automatic call distributor to thank. The invention of this device in the mid–20th century allowed for the industrialization of customer service. In lieu of direct contact, calls could be funneled automatically to the next available agent, who would handle each one quickly and methodically.
Contact centers became an industry of their own and, with the rise of offshoring in the ’90s, lurched into a new level of productivity—at least from a corporate perspective. Sure, wait times lengthened, pleasantries grew stilted, and sometimes the new accents were hard to understand. But inefficiency had been conquered, or outsourced to the customer, anyway.
Researching this shift led me to Amas Tenumah. As a college student in Oklahoma, Tenumah had come up with a million-dollar invention: a tool that would translate those agent voices into text, and then convert that text into a digital voice.
“So you’d end up with this robotic conversation,” he told me, “which one could argue may even be worse. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.”
The million dollars didn’t materialize, but connections did. Needing work, he took a telemarketing job at a company called TCIM Services. Rather than transform contact centers, he strapped on a headset and joined one.
The obsession with efficiency in his new field astonished him. Going to the bathroom required a code. Breaks were regulated to the minute. Outwardly he worked in an office, but by any measure it was a factory floor. Overly long “handle time”? He’d get dinged. Too few calls answered? He’d get dinged. Too many escalations to a supervisor? Ding. Ostensibly the goal of customer service is to serve customers. Often enough, its true purpose is to defeat them.
In the two decades after he took that first job, Tenumah rose from agent to manager, ultimately running enormous contact centers around the world. His work took him from Colombia to the Philippines in an endless search for cheap and malleable labor.
When we first spoke, I mentioned that someone at Ford had told me that my case had been closed at my request; I had to go through the whole process of reopening it. Was I imagining things, I asked, or was my lack of progress deliberate?
Tenumah laughed.
“Yes, sludge is often intentional,” he said. “Of course. The goal is to put as much friction between you and whatever the expensive thing is. So the frontline person is given as limited information and authority as possible. And it’s punitive if they connect you to someone who could actually help.”
Helpfulness aside, I mentioned that I frequently felt like I was talking with someone alarmingly indifferent to my plight.
“That’s called good training,” Tenumah said. “What you’re hearing is a human successfully smoothed into a corporate algorithm, conditioned to prioritize policy over people. If you leave humans in their natural state, they start to care about people and listen to nuance, and are less likely to follow the policy.”
For some people, that humanity gets trained out of them. For others, the threat of punishment suppresses it. To keep bosses happy, Tenumah explained, agents develop tricks. If your average handle time is creeping up, hanging up on someone can bring it back down. If you’ve escalated too many times that day, you might “accidentally” transfer a caller back into the queue. Choices higher up the chain also add helpful friction, Tenumah said: Not hiring enough agents leads to longer wait times, which in turn weeds out a percentage of callers. Choosing cheaper telecom carriers leads to poor connection with offshore contact centers; many of the calls disconnect on their own.
“No one says, ‘Let’s do bad service,’” Tenumah told me. “Instead they talk about things like credit percentages”—the number of refunds, rebates, or payouts extended to customers. “My boss would say, ‘We spent a million dollars in credits last month. That needs to come down to 750.’ That number becomes an edict, makes its way down to the agents answering the phones. You just start thinking about what levers you have.”
“Does anyone tell them to pull those levers?” I asked.
“The brilliance of the system is that they don’t have to say it out loud,” Tenumah said. “It’s built into the incentive structure.”
That structure, he said, can be traced to a shift in how companies operate. There was a time when the happiness of existing customers was a sacred metric. CEOs saw the long arc of loyalty as essential to a company’s success. That arc has snapped. Everyone still claims to value customer service, but as the average CEO tenure has shortened, executives have become more focused on delivering quick returns to shareholders and investors. This means prioritizing growth over the satisfaction of customers already on board.
Customers are part of the problem too, Tenumah added.
“We’ve gotten collectively worse at punishing companies we do business with,” he said. He pointed to a deeply unpopular airline whose most dissatisfied customers return only slightly less often than their most satisfied customers. “We as customers have gotten lazy. I joke that all the people who hate shopping at Walmart are usually complaining from inside Walmart.”
In other words, he said, companies feel emboldened to treat us however they want.
“It’s like an abusive relationship. All it takes is a 20 percent–off coupon and you’ll come back.”
As in any dysfunctional relationship, a glimmer of promise arrived just when I was giving up hope. As mysteriously as she’d vanished, Pamela came back one day, and non-updates began to trickle in: My case was still under review; my patience was appreciated.
All of this was starting to remind me of something I’d read. The Simple Sabotage Field Manual was created in 1944 by the Office of Strategic Services, a predecessor to the CIA. The document was intended to spark a wave of nonviolent citizen resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe. “Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions,” advised one passage. “Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.”
I’d encountered the manual in the past, and had thought of it as a quirky old curio. Now I saw it anew, as an up-to-the-minute handbook for corporate America. The “purposeful stupidity” once meant to sabotage enemy regimes has been repurposed to frustrate us—weaponized inefficiency in the name of profit. (I later discovered that Slate’s Rebecca Onion had had this same revelation a full decade ago. Nevertheless the sabotage persists.)
As I waited for news from Ford, I searched for more contact-center agents willing to talk.
Rebecca Harris has fielded calls—mainly for telephone-, internet-, and TV-service companies—since 2007. She calls the work “traumatic.”
“I’d want to do everything I can to help the person on the other end,” she told me. “But I had to pretend that I can’t, because they don’t want me to escalate the call.”
Many customers called because they were feeling pinched by their bill. For a lot of them, a rebate was available. But between the callers and that rebate, the company had installed an expanse of sludge.
“They would outright tell you in training you’re not allowed to give them a rebate offer unless they ask you about it with specific words,” she said. “If they say they’re paying too much money, you couldn’t mention the rebate. Or if the customer was asking about a higher rebate but you knew there was a lower one, they trained us to redirect them to that one.”
Harris told me she’d think about her parents in times like this, and would treat her callers the way she’d want them treated. That didn’t go over well with her managers. “They’d call me in constantly to retrain me,” she said. “I wasn’t meeting the numbers they were asking me to meet, so they weren’t meeting their numbers.”
Supervisors didn’t tell Harris to deceive or thwart customers. But having them get frustrated and give up was the best way to meet those numbers.
Sometimes she’d intentionally drop a call or feign technical trouble: “‘I’m sorry, the call … I can’t … I’m having a hard time hearing y—.’ It was sad. Or sometimes we’d drag out the call enough that they’d get agitated, or say things that got them agitated, and they’d hang up.”
Even if an agent wanted to treat callers more humanely, much of the friction was structural, a longtime contact-center worker named Amayea Maat told me. For one, the different corners of a business were seldom connected, which forced callers to re-explain their problem over and over: more incentive to give up.
“And often they make the IVR”—interactive voice response, the automated phone systems we curse at—“really difficult to get through, so you get frustrated and go online.”
She described working with one government agency that programmed its IVR to simply hang up on people who’d been on hold for a certain amount of time.
There’s a moment in Ford’s hold music—an endless loop of demented hotel-lobby cheer—when the composition seems to speed up. By my 8,000th listen I was sure of it: The tempo rose infinitesimally in this one brief spot. Like the fly painted on men’s-room urinals, this imperfection was clearly engineered to focus my attention—and, in so doing, to distract me from the larger absurdity at hand.
Which is to say, my sanity had begun to fray.
When I set out to document the inner workings of sludge, I had in mind the dull architecture of delays and deferrals. But I had started to notice my own inner workings. The aggravation was adding up, and so was the fatigue. Arguing was exhausting. Being transferred to argue with a different person was exhausting. The illogic was exhausting.
Individually, the calls and emails were blandly substance-free. But together they spoke clearly: You are powerless. I began to wonder: Was the accretion of these exhaustions complicit in the broader hopelessness we seem to be feeling these days? Were these hassles and frictions not just costing us but warping us with a kind of administrative-spiritual defeatism?
Signs of that warping seem to be appearing more and more, as when a Utah man who says he was denied a refund for his apparently defective Subaru crashed the car through the dealership’s door. But most of us wearily combat sludge through the proper channels, however hopeless it seems. A Nebraska man spent two years trying to change the apparently computer-generated name given to his daughter, Unakite Thirteen Hotel, after a bureaucratic error involving her birth certificate. She also hadn’t received a Social Security number—without which she couldn’t receive Medicaid and other services.
In his 2021 follow-up to Nudge, Sludge, Sunstein notes that this constellation of frictions “makes people feel that their time does not matter. In extreme cases, it makes people feel that their lives do not matter.” I asked Sunstein about this depletion. “Suppose that people spend hours on the phone, waiting for help from the Social Security Administration, or seeking to get a license or a permit to do something,” he replied. “They might start to despair, not only because of all that wasted time but because they are being treated as if they just don’t count.”
For Pamela Herd, a social-policy professor at the University of Michigan, sludge became personal when she began navigating services for her daughter, who has a disability. “It’s one thing when I get frustrated at the DMV,” she told me. “It’s another thing when you’re in a position where your kid’s life might be on the line, or your kid’s access to health insurance, or your access to food.”
In 2018, Herd published Administrative Burden: Policymaking by Other Means, with her husband, Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at Michigan. The book examines how bureaucratic quicksand—complex paperwork, confusing procedures—actively stymies policy and access to government services. Rather than mere inefficiencies, the authors argue, a number of these obstacles are deliberate policy tools that discourage participation in programs such as Medicaid, keep people from voting, and limit access to social welfare. Marginalized communities are hit disproportionately.
Throughout my ordeal, it was always clear that I was among the fortunate sludgees. I had the time and flexibility to fight in the first place—to wait on hold, to write follow-up emails. Most people would’ve just agreed to start driving the damn car again. Fuck it.
One of sludge’s most insidious effects is our ever-diminishing trust in institutions, Herd told me. Once that skepticism sets in, it’s not hard for someone like Elon Musk to gut the government under the guise of efficiency. She was on speakerphone as she told me this, driving through the Southwest on vacation with Moynihan. As it happened, something had flown up and hit their windshield just before our conversation, and they were surely headed for a protracted discussion between their rental-car company and their insurance company—a little sludge of their own.
Exasperated as we all are, said Tenumah, the customer-service expert, things are going to get much worse when customer service is fully managed by AI. And, as Moynihan observed, DOGE has already taken our frustration with government inefficiency and perverted it into drastic cuts that also will only further complicate our lives.
But in some corners of academia and government, pushback to sludge is mounting. Regulations like the FTC’s “Click to Cancel” rule seek to eliminate barriers to canceling subscriptions and memberships. And the International Sludge Academy, a new initiative from both the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the government of New South Wales, has promoted the adoption of “sludge audits” around the world. The business research firm Gartner predicts that “the right to talk to a human” will be EU law by 2028.
In the meantime, I’ve developed my own way of responding.
Years before my Ford ordeal, I’d already begun to understand that sludge was doing something to us. It first registered when I noticed a new vein of excuse in the RSVP sphere: “Sorry, love to, but I need to figure out our passport application tonight.” “Sorry, researching new insurance plans.”
The domestic tasks weren’t new; the novelty was all the ways we were drowning in the basic administration of our own lives. I didn’t have a solution. But I had an idea for addressing it. I fired off an email to some friends, and on a Tuesday night, a tradition began.
“Admin Night” isn’t a party. It isn’t laborious taking-care-of-business. It’s both! At the appointed hour, friends come over with beer and a folder of disputed charges, expiring miles, summer-camp paperwork. Five minutes of chitchat, half an hour of quiet admin, rinse, repeat. At the end of each gathering, everyone names a minor bureaucratic victory and the group lets out a supportive cheer.
Admin Night rules. In an era of fraying social ties, it claws back a sliver of hang time. Part of the appeal is simply being able to socialize while plowing through the to-do list—a 21st-century efficiency fetish if ever there was one. But just as satisfying is having this species of modern enervation brought into the light. Learning of sludge’s existence, Thum, the bureaucracy researcher, told me, is the first step in fighting it, and in pushing back against the despair it provokes.
Among sludge’s mysteries is how it can suddenly clear. With no explanation, Pamela called one day to tell me that Ford had decided to buy back my car. She put me in touch with the Reacquired Vehicles Headquarters. From there I was connected to a “repurchase coordinator,” then I was told to wait for another process in “Quality,” and after some haggling over the price they agreed to buy the car back. To Ford’s credit, they gave me a fair offer. But I would’ve accepted a turkey sandwich at that point.
What happens to the car next? I asked. I was told that if returned vehicles could be repaired, they could be resold with disclosures. But was Ford obligated to fix the defect before selling it? No one could give me a clear answer. I pondered options for warning potential buyers. Could I post something to Yelp and hope it somehow got noticed? Hide a note inside the car somewhere? Publish the Vehicle Identification Number—1FMCU0KZ0NUA29474—in a national magazine?
Before I could decide on a solution, I got the call. One hundred eight days after this whole thing began, I borrowed a friend’s car and drove to the San Jose dealership where my Escape had been waiting all this time. When I arrived, a man named Dennis greeted me and we walked to the lot where the car was sitting. I grabbed everything out of the center console, and then we walked back inside.
“What’s going to happen to it?” I asked. “Are they going to resell it?”
Dennis didn’t know, or didn’t seem inclined to discuss. (A Ford communications director named Mike Levine later told The Atlantic that the company does not resell any repurchased vehicles that can’t be fully repaired. Given the confusion I witnessed, I still wonder how they confirm that a car is fully repaired.) I signed some papers, and it was over. The car that wasn’t safe to drive, the process that seemed designed not to work—the whole experience ended not with a bang but with a cashier’s check and a wordless handshake.
When I originally alerted Ford about this article, a spokesperson named Maria told me that my case was not typical and that she was sorry about it. Regarding all the back-and-forth, she said, “that was not seamless.” Levine told The Atlantic that Ford does not “encourage or measure ‘sludge,’” and that “there was zero intent to add ‘sludge’” to my interactions with Ford. He said that the teams I spoke with had needed time to see whether they could replicate the problem with my car, though to my mind that suggests a more concerted effort than what I perceived.
Pamela emailed an apology, too, adding that, given “the experience you had with your vehicle, I do want to extend an offer for a maintenance plan for your vehicle should you decide to purchase a Ford again, as a complimentary gift for your patience with the brand, as I understand this process took a long time.”
We did purchase another vehicle, but it wasn’t a Ford.
Lately I’ve taken to noticing small victories in the war against sludge. That Nebraska dad with the daughter named Unakite Thirteen Hotel? I’m happy to report she was at last given a Social Security number in February, and was on her way to finally, officially, becoming Caroline.
Still, I couldn’t help thinking of all the time her dad lost in that soul-sucking battle.
“It’s been very, very taxing,” he said in an interview.
I understood his frustration.
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FLINT, Mich. – Jeffrey Bell watched as crews dug up and replaced neighbors’ lead water pipes, hoping his mother’s house would be next. Workers told him it wasn’t on their list but probably assigned to another contractor.
With Flint’s lead pipe replacement program winding down this year, Bell and his elderly mother worried the home they share was forgotten. Betty Bell repeatedly called the city while continuing to buy bottled drinking water, as she had for years. Finally someone called to say the water line was fine — records indicate it was checked in 2017. But the Bells hadn’t known that, exemplifying residents’ confusion over a process marred by delays and poor communication.
“I have even more questions now,” Jeffrey Bell said.
About a decade after Flint’s water crisis caused national outrage, replacement of lead water pipes still isn’t finished. Although the city recently said it completed work required under a legal settlement, the agreement didn’t cover vacant homes and allowed owners to refuse, potentially leaving hundreds of pipes in the ground. The state agreed to oversee work on those properties and says it’s determined to finish by fall.
Flint’s missteps offer lessons for municipalities that face a recently imposed federal mandate to replace their own lead service lines. The Trump administration is expected to soon tell a federal appeals court if it will stand by that mandate.
“I think other cities are racing not to be Flint,” said Margie Kelly, a spokesperson with the environmental nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, which reached a settlement with the city to force it to replace lead pipes.
Flint falters
Flint’s crisis was set in motion in 2014, when a state-appointed emergency manager ended a contract with Detroit’s water system and switched to the Flint River to save money. But the state didn’t require treatment to prevent corrosion that caused lead to leach into the water.
High levels of lead eventually were detected in drinking water and children’s blood. Outbreaks of Legionnaires’ disease that killed a dozen people were also linked, in part, to the city’s water.
In 2017, Flint entered into a settlement requiring it to replace all lead pipes and fix dug-up yards for free within three years. Funds were directed first toward homes with known lead lines at the NRDC’s insistence, which meant workers couldn’t tackle neighborhoods systematically. And finding those homes proved challenging because many records were missing or inaccurate — some handwritten on notecards dating to the early 1900s.
“The city’s overall management of the program was ineffective,” and it could have better coordinated work geographically, said Sarah Tallman, an attorney with the NRDC.
That stalled the program and, ultimately, the city had to check every pipe anyway. COVID-19 also slowed work.
Flint Department of Public Works Director Kenneth Miller, who was hired last year, said the city didn’t know how many homeowners had opted out of lead pipe replacement or how many properties had simply been missed as contractors came and went.
“Just like any other organization, people get lax, people stop doing things, people get laid off and the person that used to do it doesn’t do it anymore,” he said.
Because the city didn’t keep accurate records of repairs, a judge ordered officials to visually check thousands of properties that had been excavated.
Yards torn up by contractors sometimes sat that way for months or years. For months, Danyele Darrough’s lawn was a mess and the sidewalk and driveway were covered, she said. Grass seed that workers applied never grew. Finally this spring, nearly three years later, she bought bags of topsoil and seed to fix her lawn herself.
“It was like, yeah, we knew it; we couldn’t trust them,” said Darrough.
Miller said the city now has robust data management, which he recommends to other communities tackling lead lines.
Steep population loss left thousands of vacant homes that will require contractors to cap lead lines where they’re found, said Eric Oswald, drinking water director at Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy.
“The state and the city wanted to absolutely make sure that … we leave no stone unturned,” he said.
Trust is key
In Flint, government at every level caused the lead crisis or delayed fixing it, according to an EPA inspector general report. The scandal damaged trust in government — nearly 700 Flint homeowners declined free lead pipe replacement, the NRDC said.
Flint finally adopted an ordinance last year to prevent homeowners from opting out.
“It’s very difficult to get across the finish line unless you’ve got something to enforce,” Oswald said. Benton Harbor, across the state, implemented a similar provision early on, helping its work move smoothly.
Now officials are working from a list of more than 4,000 properties where there could be a lead line, sending letters and making in-person visits to homes, if needed. Miller said he hopes the outreach will show that customer service is now a priority, but it will take time to rebuild trust.
Some also distrust the Environmental Protection Agency, which in May lifted a long-standing emergency order for Flint water. The agency said it’s now safe to drink from the tap after years of tests showing sharply reduced lead levels.
“We don’t know what to believe,” resident Aonie Gilcreast said at a recent community gathering. “We don’t trust the system” because officials have said “time after time after time …. that everything was fine.”
As other cities and towns start replacing their own lead pipes — there are roughly 9 million in the U.S. — one thing should be top of mind, experts say: Digging them up isn’t just a construction job, but also a test of community trust.
To replace the lines that connect the water main in the street to homes, workers usually must dig in the street and yard, and enter the home. When residents trust local government, they’re more willing to grant that access.
“With lead, as with everything else, the first time people hear from their water utility can’t be when there is a concern,” said Greg Kail, spokesperson at utility industry group American Water Works Association. Instead, it is important for utilities to reach out to residents about what they plan to do and enlist trusted community groups in the effort.
Newark charges forward
Newark, New Jersey, avoided Flint’s pitfalls when facing its own lead crisis.
In 2019, about two years after elevated levels were revealed and with funds available, the mayor said the city would replace more than 20,000 lead pipes at no cost to residents — and do it within three years. But a challenge soon emerged: Newark has lots of renters who couldn’t approve the work.
“We couldn’t get into the houses. We couldn’t find the owners,” said Kareem Adeem, Newark’s water and sewer director. “They don’t live there. They had no interest in taking care of the lead service line.”
So the city passed an ordinance making lead pipe removals mandatory and giving renters permission to approve the work.
Then contractors moved quickly through the city block by block — a lesson learned from Flint.
For the most stubborn holdouts, officials told them when they’d start replacement work and said they’d turn the water off until the resident allowed them to complete it. The threat was enough. They never had to actually turn off anybody’s water, Adeem said.
Sometimes, people would recognize Adeem from TV and he could start a conversation — a crack in a resident’s determination to say no. He worked with trusted community groups, too.
And the decision that ensured people’s property was cleaned up afterward? The contractors weren’t fully paid until they finished the work and fixed any damage.
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