2026-10-30 18:00:00
A great deal is at stake in next week’s midterm elections. The partisan makeup of the new Congress will shape future spending bills, congressional investigations, and judicial nominations, among other things.
And yet, the most consequential bill of the next 12 months — and the one that speaks most directly to voters’ concerns about the cost-of-living — might well pass before the new Congress is seated.
The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026 (BAAJA) could dramatically reshape America’s energy system. And the bill’s supporters plan to pass it during the House and Senate’s lame-duck session — the months between next week’s elections and the new Congress’s arrival.
The bill is long and complex, revising the rules governing everything from how ocean-powered turbines are licensed to what some geothermal plants must pay in royalties.
That said, the legislation’s fundamental aim is simple: to make building all forms of energy infrastructure easier.
The BAAJA has united fossil fuel companies and green energy firms in its favor — while cleaving the climate movement in two.
Some climate hawks contend that the legislation pares back vital environmental regulations, while clearing the way for new gas pipelines and power plants that will drive up America’s emissions. “This is not the permitting deal that we were promised,” Jeremy Symons, president of the Center for Energy and Environmental Analysis, told me, citing its “historic environmental protection rollbacks.”
Others insist that the bill is a net-win for decarbonization. In their account, permitting reforms will do more to facilitate a buildout of green energy than to lock in America’s dependence on fossil fuels.
“Fossil is the incumbent technology and fuel mix,” Jane Flegal, a senior fellow at the center-left Searchlight Institute, said. “A system that makes it easier for everyone to build should advantage the nonincumbent.”
I think Flegal’s side has this right. The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act will likely help renewables erode fossil fuels’ share of the electricity market. By itself, the legislation will not ensure a timely transition to a green electricity system. But it will get us a little further down that road, while also making energy more affordable for US consumers — which might well be the midterm electorate’s top priority.
This said, the current draft of the bill does contain one potentially major — and seemingly, accidental — flaw. Assuming Congress fixes that issue, climate hawks should join hands with Big Oil and push for the BAAJA’s imminent passage.
The climate case for permitting reform begins with a simple observation: If you want to decarbonize America’s energy grid, you need to build a metric fudge-ton of new infrastructure.
Today, low-carbon energy sources provide about 43 percent of our nation’s electricity. Thus, even if America embraced “degrowth” — and froze its electricity consumption at current levels — zeroing out the power sector’s carbon emissions would require constructing a gargantuan number of new wind, solar, battery storage, and geothermal (and/or nuclear) projects.
But of course, America is not actually going to freeze its use of electricity. And mainstream climate hawks don’t even want it to. After all, if every SUV owner replaces their gas guzzler with an EV, then demand for electricity will rise. And decarbonizing home heat or heavy industry will have the same effect. Indeed, to an extent, this basic process is already playing out.
“We’re seeing quite rapid demand growth,” Flegal said. “And that is not only — or even primarily — because of data centers. It’s because of broader structural trends toward electrifying our economy and onshoring manufacturing.”
Taking demand growth into account, a study from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) estimated that getting to a carbon-free electric grid by 2035 would require generating roughly 2,000 gigawatts of wind and solar energy; today, we generate roughly 396 gigawatts.
The challenge appears even more formidable when measured in land. According to Princeton’s 2021 Net Zero America estimate, in a “high electrification” scenario, the US will need wind and solar developments that collectively span nearly 600,000 square kilometers of land — roughly the size of California and Washington state combined.
And even this may undersell the scale of the task. Achieving net zero does not only require constructing immense quantities of wind turbines and solar panels — complemented by battery storage and firm power sources like nuclear or geothermal — but also a vast network of new transmission lines.
America’s transmission infrastructure is already inadequate to our current electricity needs. But a carbon-free grid would demand far more high-voltage lines than today’s. This is because fossil fuel plants are more geographically flexible than renewable ones. Per unit of power generated, gas plants require a small fraction of the land that wind and solar do. And in regions with mature pipeline networks, gas plants can be located in a wide range of places. For these reasons, it’s not that difficult to site carbon power facilities near major population centers or existing transmission lines.
By contrast, wind and solar farms need to be located in areas with both favorable weather conditions and a great deal of affordable land. Such sites are often far from the urban areas where electricity is most needed. Therefore, to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy, America will need a lot more transmission lines. According to NREL, to achieve a 100 percent clean electric grid by 2035 would require building between 1,400 and 10,000 miles of high-capacity transmission lines annually; in 2024, America built just 888 miles.
Given all this, a permitting system that’s biased toward stasis is one that’s biased toward fossil fuels: The harder it is to build new power plants and transmission lines, the longer our electric grids will need to rely on carbon energy.
Alas, the current permitting regime does, in fact, make building power infrastructure really hard.
There are myriad regulatory obstacles to energy development at the state, local, and federal levels. But one major hurdle is the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a law that requires federal agencies to study the ecological consequences of projects before authorizing their construction.
When first enacted, NEPA was not intended to dramatically impede infrastructure development. Indeed, the law does not actually hold proposed projects accountable to any particular environmental standard; it merely requires that a thorough study of the relevant ecological effects be carried out.
But litigators successfully turned NEPA into a tool for obstructing projects — one used by both sincere environmentalists and opportunistic NIMBYs. Such lawyers argued that if the government’s study of a development failed to account for some significant environmental impact, then its authorization was invalid and needed to be redone. When courts started accepting this argument, federal agencies began drafting more and more comprehensive environmental impact statements (EIS), in hopes of preempting legal challenges. In the early 1970s, an EIS could be as short as 10 pages; by the 2010s, the average statement had ballooned to 661.
Such extravagant due diligence takes time. As of 2024, the median federal EIS took more than two years to complete. And even so, NEPA lawsuits have continued to flourish.
A Stanford study published in 2023 examining 355 major infrastructure developments found that 28 percent of the projects requiring an EIS ended up facing litigation before construction. And the median NEPA lawsuit takes 19 months to resolve — despite the fact that, in the vast majority of cases, courts ultimately fail to identify any legal flaw requiring a new study, according to an analysis from the Breakthrough Institute. All this doesn’t merely slow projects down; by driving up expected costs, it also prevents many from being pursued in the first place.
A second obstacle to energy development is the exhaustive — yet somewhat anarchic — process for permitting interstate transmission lines. These lines must generally secure approval from authorities in every state whose borders they cross. The federal government already recognizes the impracticality of this arrangement when it comes to natural gas infrastructure: Uncle Sam has claimed the authority to site an interstate natural gas pipeline, in defiance of states’ wishes. But Washington lacks similar powers with respect to transmission projects.
High-voltage lines are further stymied by an absence of procedures for divvying up their costs. Over time, a single transmission project can lower electricity prices across several states. But precisely which jurisdictions will derive the most benefit isn’t always clear ahead of time. And this makes it hard for utilities to agree on how to allocate the lines’ upfront costs, which can nip the developments in the bud.
The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act tackles both of these barriers to energy deployment (along with many others).
To clear the way for new high-voltage lines, the bill empowers the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to overrule states that reject or obstruct new transmission projects. (Technically, FERC already has this authority in certain designated corridors. But current restrictions on this power are so binding that the agency has never actually sited a transmission line over state opposition in practice.)
As importantly, the legislation requires regional grid planners to adopt a common set of methods for estimating which jurisdictions will benefit most from a new transmission line (and thus, how much their respective utilities should chip in for it). This will hopefully foster greater consensus. But if it doesn’t, the bill opens up an alternative path to approval: Developers can go above the regional planners’ heads and ask the federal government to approve the line and impose a cost-allocation scheme.
Meanwhile, the legislation also constrains the reach of NEPA litigation. Under current law, after an environmental review is completed, plaintiffs can file lawsuits over that review’s purported flaws for up to six years. Under the BAAJA, they’d have only 150 days. Plaintiffs would also be required to demonstrate direct harm and show that they raised their objections during the review’s public comment process. Most consequentially, the law forbids judges from freezing projects solely because their environmental impact statements were inadequate. Instead, construction would be allowed to continue while federal agencies corrected their review’s deficiencies.
By reducing our permitting system’s bias toward the status quo, these reforms make the green transition a bit more possible. Renewables are rapidly growing more cost-competitive. And battery technology is steadily advancing. In a world where new energy infrastructure is relatively easy to build, green power has a good chance of dominating grids in the long run.
But there’s also cause for thinking that the BAAJA’s reforms will disproportionately benefit green projects in the near term.
With transmission, the case is simple: When you look at today’s interconnection queue — which is to say, the backlog of projects seeking connection to the grid — you see that wind, solar, and storage (an enabling technology for weather-dependent renewable power) account for nearly 85 percent of pending capacity. Building out transmission infrastructure should reduce such backlogs, primarily benefiting green technologies in the process.
And the NEPA reforms are likely to benefit renewables more than fossil fuels, even in the short run. To see why, consider the following:
For these reasons, carbon energy development probably isn’t as burdened by NEPA as the renewable kind. Gas and coal plants just don’t need as much land in general — and less federally owned western acreage in particular.
According to Daniel Palken, an energy expert at the philanthropy Arnold Ventures, NEPA’s suppressive impact on green development is well-illustrated by any map of wind and solar power in the US. (Disclosure: Vox has received a grant from Arnold Ventures. This story was not funded by that grant, and Vox has full discretion over the content of its reporting.)
“If you look at where the wind and solar congregates, it carefully builds in the negative spaces between where all the federal land is out west,” Palken told me. “Most of the West is de facto off-limits because they just don’t want to go through the process.”
“The NEPA provisions are described as Republican asks,” he added. “But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that they asymmetrically aid renewables.”
More broadly, the notion that a lax permitting environment can enable a rapid expansion of green energy — and with it, a shift away from carbon power — isn’t just some distant hypothetical. Rather, that scenario has already played out in one of America’s most pro-oil states.
Texas has scant federal or state-owned lands, no NEPA-like environmental review process. “They’re the only state where you don’t need siting permission from either the state or localities to site a large energy project,” Palken said. “And they have had very forward-looking, long-range transmission planning policies.”
Thanks in part to this permitting environment, wind and solar power have flourished in the Lone Star State, rendering its electric grid far less carbon-intensive. In 2003, natural gas and coal generated 86 percent of the power on Texas’s main grid, while wind and solar supplied less than 1 percent. By 2025, renewables’ share had soared to nearly 38 percent, while fossil fuels’ had fallen to 54 percent.
To be sure, Texas is no climate hawk’s idea of utopia. Its permissive regulatory regime has enabled a remarkable green buildout. But by failing to regulate carbon pollution, that regime has also allowed a rise in Texas’s overall emissions, as gains in population, prosperity, and industrial investment have led to higher electricity consumption.
Given this, environmentalists reasonably deem permitting reform inadequate for achieving timely decarbonization.
“Clean energy will not win in the marketplace at the scale and speed needed unless fossil fuels are held accountable for their pollution,” Symons, of the Center for Energy and Environmental Analysis, told me. “Gas and clean energy are growing hand in hand.”
Such concerns animate environmentalists’ objections to the current bill. Two of their complaints warrant attention here — the first because it is widely held but unpersuasive, the second because it is compelling but easily addressed.
Environmentalists’ less convincing objection to the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act goes like this: Democrats have no good reason to accept the current legislation’s trade-offs. After all, the party will almost certainly have more power in the next Congress than it does in today’s. With control of the House — and perhaps also the Senate — Democrats would have more leverage in negotiations. And they could use this clout to secure permitting relief for green energy projects without throwing as many bones to Big Oil.
“A system where you’re allowed to build the most economic energy resources with fewer encumbrances, fewer delays, and fewer restrictions is, almost by definition, a more affordable system.”
Daniel Palken, energy expert
But there are a couple of problems with this reasoning. For one, permitting reform will still require President Donald Trump’s sign-off in 2027, even in Democrats’ rosiest midterm scenario. And it isn’t remotely clear that the White House will feel compelled to offer Democrats a more environmentally friendly permitting reform bill just because the party captured Congress (especially since the Democratic majorities will likely be inundating the administration with subpoenas and corruption investigations).
For another, however imperfect the legislation may be, it still creates a permitting environment that’s more favorable to green development than the status quo. If Congress passes permitting reform now, the green buildout will likely be further along by 2029 — or whenever Democrats next take full control of the government, at which point they can tweak permitting and environmental rules how they see fit.
The more compelling critique of the BAAJA concerns its “project certainty” provisions. Ironically, this part of the bill was actually a Democratic priority. And it was conceived as a response to the Trump administration’s capricious cancellation of renewable energy permits.
Essentially, the “project certainty” section would prohibit federal agencies from revoking or modifying previously issued permits — or “otherwise interfering with the construction or operation” of permitted projects, unless they uncover a violation of existing law.
But some environmental lawyers fear that the bill’s language is vague and broad enough to threaten the EPA’s future rulemaking authorities: If a Democratic administration tightened air pollution standards, that might “interfere with the construction or operation” of a permitted gas plant. Courts might therefore rule that such regulations are unlawful.
This is genuinely concerning. But it would also be easy for legislators to preempt this scenario with a few tweaks to the bill’s wording.
“I think there is a pretty narrow technical fix to be made that ensures the project certainty section is doing what the drafters wanted it to do,” Flegal said, “which was not to prevent future regulatory action but just to make it harder to rescind legally issued permits.”
Assuming the “project certainty” details are ironed out, the BAAJA should be good for the climate. And it’s all-but guaranteed to be beneficial for consumers.
According to one analysis, the legislation’s transmission provisions alone would save US households well over $1.1 billion annually on their electric bills.
Further, even the bill’s most regrettable consequences from a climate perspective — such as its facilitation of new natural gas pipelines — would likely be positive for affordability. In particular, such infrastructure could help ease high home heating costs in colder, energy-scarce states like Maine — an issue that some Democratic candidates are explicitly running on.
“A system where you’re allowed to build the most economic energy resources with fewer encumbrances, fewer delays, and fewer restrictions is, almost by definition, a more affordable system,” Palken said.
Thus, to green America’s grid — and save Americans’ money — Congress needs to cut red tape. They should waste little time in doing so.
2026-10-30 05:15:00
This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.
No sooner had early voting started this year than analysts noticed a curious trend: Democratic voters were choosing to vote a lot like…Republicans.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, Democrats who cast their ballots early have most commonly done so by mail. But this year, they’re voting in person, and in huge numbers — even narrowing Republicans’ traditional early voting lead in states like Florida and Texas.
The abrupt shift may have something to do with President Donald Trump’s attempts to undermine the mail voting process, and it almost definitely reflects the anxiety and vigilance that many Americans feel about the midterms this year. In less than a week, they’ll decide which party controls Congress, along with a slew of state and local offices.
The stakes are arguably unusually high: Voters will choose whether to check the power of a president who has bulldozed over historical norms and limits. So as we count down to that momentous and potentially messy day, I’ve been partnering with my colleague Astead Herndon and Vox’s The Midterms, Actually team for a series of weekly editions on the biggest issues shaping the midterms.
Previously, we dug into the ways both parties are changing, the bipartisan backlash to AI and data centers, the politics of high costs, and the changing mood toward Israel. This week, for our final installment, we’re tackling something a little more fundamental: the integrity and security of the voting process itself. It’s a worrying subject, but by no means a hopeless one. Let’s get into it.
Let me begin with a metaphor that may or may not reassure you: Imagine there’s a serial killer outside your house, and they’re trying to get in and kill you.
That’s pretty terrifying, under any circumstance. But also: Your house is an absolute vault. You have reinforced steel doors. You have good locks on all the windows. And the police are actually on its way now.
“I don’t want to understate the threat” of election interference, Benjy Sarlin, Vox’s editorial director of politics said when he relayed this metaphor on the America, Actually podcast last month. But if Trump is the serial killer trying America’s doors and windows…then understand this house is pretty well-defended.
Take mail voting, the issue that has so (literally) moved Democrats this year. You’ll recall that Trump tried to sabotage the practice by implementing new, last-minute rules that would have effectively canceled mail-in voting in some places.
But the Constitution clearly assigns the power to regulate and administer elections to the states and Congress, and courts blocked the administration’s rules. In mid-September, the Supreme Court declined to let them take effect for this election. So there’s one lock made good.
The Trump administration has also demanded unprecedented access to states’ voter rolls, suing 30 states and Washington, DC, to obtain them. Of those cases, courts have dismissed 27 of them (though many dismissals are being appealed).
Earlier this month, the DOJ went further and demanded that California officials set aside the ballots of some 20,000 registered voters that it alleged were likely noncitizens. In the predictable legal battle that followed, courts sided with the state. A federal judge excoriated the administration in an opinion on Wednesday, ruling that the ballot segregation order “would wreak havoc and disrupt the election.” The Trump administration has already appealed the ruling.
Other forms of meddling are possible. Asked in August about declaring a national emergency to impose new voting requirements, Trump replied — unnervingly — that “stranger things have happened.” And the president and his allies have floated drastic measures like deploying federal agents to polling sites or seizing “suspect” ballots, a threat tangible enough that it’s reportedly unsettled a number of FBI agents.
Just last week, the Trump administration attempted to preemptively contest the results in Alaska’s Senate race, claiming that the presence of two Dan Sullivans on the ballot — the incumbent Republican and an independent newcomer — risked confusing voters. The New York Times has since reported that Democrats enticed Dan Sullivan 2.0 to run for exactly that reason. In some corners, the ensuing scandal has raised concerns that Republicans could refuse to seat Democrat Mary Peltola if she wins.
But even that possibility is fairly remote. While there are mechanisms for both state officials and US lawmakers to challenge election results, those procedures are pretty regimented. And any attempts to disrupt voting, vote-counting, or the certification of results would likely face both a flood of lawsuits (which voting groups have already prepped) and a public outcry that could ultimately and lastingly hurt Republicans.
Trump might not care overmuch about democratic norms or the rule of law, but he does likely care about the risks of a longer-term political backlash. To this day, Benjy said, a lot of Republicans still blame Trump for losing them Georgia’s Senate seats: His election denialism after 2020 helped drive huge numbers of Black Georgians to the polls, where they voted in two Democrats.
The number of Democrats voting early and in-person suggests the possibility that a similar dynamic is at play now. In other words, there is real risk — but lots of people are fighting to keep the proverbial bad guys out.
Races to watch:
More from Vox:
➨ Turn on the (early morning) lights. It’s getting darker earlier and earlier these days, and it’s often pitch black when my alarm goes off. That means it’s time for an annual tradition: digging out my bulky, 10,000-lux light box. Bright morning light, from a box or the sun, sets your body’s internal clock and helps regulate your sleep. It can also mitigate seasonal affective disorder, which starts plaguing many sufferers around Halloween.
2026-10-30 04:00:00
Americans want changes to their healthcare, and the candidates in this year’s midterms are making bold promises about how they are going to improve it: Medicare-for-all, or a public health insurance option, or free primary care for everyone. If Democrats win big this year, they could build up momentum to control Congress and the White House in 2029, which could leave them well-positioned to take on the thorny problem of how to fix the US health system.
History suggests that this won’t be easy. For every Affordable Care Act, you have the failed attempt to repeal it or the calamity of the Clinton-era healthcare initiative. Americans want change — but they fear it, too. I’ve spent years reading healthcare polls, talking to voters, attending focus groups. The public’s opinion of the healthcare industry has grown more and more sour, and distrust of the medical establishment is at an all-time high. People are sick of having a broken health system, but they worry that big changes could end up being bad for them.
Even though a meaningful attempt at reform is still years away and universal health care in any form might seem like a progressive pipe dream, the industry is not sitting idly by.
As Democrats have started to roll out policy proposals in anticipation of winning back Congress, the industry has been there to start making its case. In some campaigns, that means backing Republicans, but it also means lobbying Democratic Party leaders to hold the line against their more progressive members who want to push for far-reaching changes.
The question now is: Will their old playbook work? Can the industry convince Democrats to scale back their policy ambitions, or is their grip on Congress loosening?
“The next two years are actually quite pivotal, for doing the groundwork and all the necessary socializing, consensus-building,” said Kim Monk, a former congressional healthcare staffer who co-founded the private-sector research firm Capital Alpha Partners. “That’s the work that gets you to a point where either party decides, okay, this will be on our platform — or not.”
That will be the tug-of-war of the next two years: a PR battle waged between health companies with hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal on one side and progressive lawmakers, activists, and patient advocates on the other that will ultimately determine what’s possible in the next phase of American healthcare.
In the short term, the industry is hedging its bets in the face of a Democratic wave.
Private enterprise has historically backed the Republican Party, but that’s starting to shift. What the healthcare industry values above all else is balance. Democrats operating without any constraints are more likely to impose government regulations on medical companies. But full GOP control comes with its own risks, like the $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts passed as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which has already led to clinics and hospitals laying off staff or even closing facilities altogether.
Our political wellness landscape has shifted: new leaders, shady science, contradictory advice, broken trust, and overwhelming systems. How is anyone supposed to make sense of it all? Vox’s senior correspondent Dylan Scott has been on the health beat for a long time, and every week, he’ll wade into sticky debates, answer fair questions, and contextualize what’s happening in American health care policy. Sign up here.
“At least for the short term, I imagine the healthcare industry would welcome control of Congress by Democrats, creating more predictability, forestalling more cuts in Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, and potentially reversing or delaying some of the cuts that have already been made,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF. “The longer-term political calculus for the healthcare industry is more complicated. Many Democrats are pushing for a bigger role for government in health care.”
In other words, while healthcare companies might welcome a Democratic House as a check on President Donald Trump’s unpredictability, they aren’t necessarily hoping for a massive blue wave that could make significant reforms a serious possibility if Democrats were to win the White House in 2028.
The industry’s MO when it looks like a wave election is brewing is to balance the scales: I reported in 2016 how, in what was looking like a good year for Democrats, the drug industry poured money into the campaigns of Republican candidates by a 6-to-1 margin in competitive races, hoping to stifle the agenda of presumed President Hillary Clinton. (Of course they, like the rest of us, are still susceptible to being wrong.)
And that’s how the industry has been approaching the 2026 election: In many of the pivotal House and Senate races, they are backing the GOP.
As healthcare journalist Merrill Goozner reported last week, the American Hospital Association PAC and PhRMA, a drug industry trade group, have given a combined $14,500 to Republican incumbent Jon Husted and none to his Democratic challenger Sherrod Brown in the historically expensive Ohio Senate race. In Maine, Republican Sen. Susan Collins has received donations from all of the major healthcare trade groups — hospitals, pharma, insurers, and doctors — while her opponent, Democrat Troy Jackson, got none. (He also has sworn off corporate PAC money.) Even in an open race without an incumbent, like the Iowa Senate campaign, the Republican candidate has scored donations from hospitals and pharma, but the Democrat has not, Goozner reported.
If Democrats take the House but not the Senate, that would immediately put a damper on their healthcare reform plans — whereas winning a Senate majority would allow them to start drafting and debating bills in both chambers with an eye toward what could actually pass if they win in 2028 too.
“If there is actually a blue tsunami next week and Democrats get 51-plus [members] in the Senate, that’s a really big deal,” Monk said. “You can’t just say this doesn’t matter because Trump’s going to veto it, because I think it very much becomes a 2028 issue.”
And even as they work to push the next Congress more to their ideological liking, the healthcare industry is preparing for the fight that comes after.
After the midterms wrap up, the next two years in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail will be crucial. The industry is already working to set the terms of the debate and push back against big changes.
Each subset of the industry has its own versions of this argument: Pharma warns that price controls could stifle innovation, insurers warn that coverage mandates will increase premiums, hospitals warn that constraints on their funding could lead to closures and job losses. (There’s a well-known saying among DC insiders that every congressional district has a hospital, making every member potentially susceptible to the industry’s message that new healthcare legislation could result in their own constituents losing their jobs.)
They’ve started by trying to discredit the more sweeping health policy proposals before new members ever arrive in Washington, DC. In Texas, for instance, Republican groups have leaned on an industry-commissioned study to attack Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico for supporting Medicare-for-all, warning that it would lead to cuts for rural hospitals — at least according to an analysis produced by the Partnership for America’s Future, a coalition of industry groups that exists explicitly to oppose Medicare-for-all or a public option. They ran a similar ad against Democrat Janelle Stelson, who’s trying to topple incumbent Rep. Scott Perry in Pennsylvania.
The industry is trying to plant the idea in voters’ minds that these big, bold proposals may sound superficially appealing, but carry significant risks: You could lose your plan, you could lose your doctor, you could pay higher taxes. (And they often have their own studies to back those arguments, like the one cited in this year’s campaign, to counter the evidence offered by advocates in support of reform.) And it might work exactly like it has in the past. As John McDonough, a former congressional healthcare staffer and author of America’s Wrong Turn: US Health Care in the Neoliberal Era, put it to me, the history is clear: “Every comprehensive effort, defeat, and every incremental effort succeeds.” That is in part because of the healthcare industry’s influence and its success in framing the debate.
On top of trying to sway the competitive races, the industry is also trying to keep its most important allies within both parties happy ahead of the midterms. As the Center for Health and Democracy’s data shows, the health insurance industry PACs alone have given tens of thousands of dollars to Democratic and Republican leaders, as well as senior members of the healthcare-focused House and Senate committees.
It’s another hedge, an attempt to keep the members who will decide what’s on the agenda next year on their side. The industry supports reversing the GOP’s massive Medicaid cuts and increasing funding for the ACA marketplaces, two top-priority items for Democrats if they win Congress in the midterms. But they are hoping the party’s leaders will steer their members away from some of their more radical ideas for overhauling healthcare. Because while individual sectors within healthcare may squabble over smaller-scale reforms, the entire industry is united against plans to fundamentally change the US health system. (They are also increasingly owned by the same parent company, as consolidation in the medical sector becomes more and more common.)
“The healthcare industry is all for more people having coverage and stable government financing,” Levitt said, “but will circle the wagons to fight Medicare-for-all.”
Already, whenever Democrats start talking about their health policy ideas, the industry is ready with a response. Last month, as some Democrats announced support for a public insurance option, the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future argued it would reduce access. “A public option is not the answer to the affordability and access challenges patients and families are facing,” said the group’s executive director, Lauren Crawford Shaver.
Meanwhile, the health insurance lobbying group, AHIP, released a 40-page document in October on how to improve affordability and access, using it in part to argue against a public option because it would “stifle competition and threaten the coverage most Americans want to keep.” Centrist Democratic groups who receive industry support have said they are “preparing for war” against Medicare-for-all, according to the news outlet Sludge.
The industry is not omnipotent, however, and the debate could still change if Americans’ healthcare gets worse over the next few years. The US uninsured rate has been on the rise as pandemic protections expire and the costs of healthcare rise for millions. Unless Democrats succeed in stopping the Republican Medicaid and ACA cuts in the OBBBA, that problem is going to get worse — and that could also force Democrats to think bigger about how to fix it.
“I am not sure anyone has fully absorbed how damaging and disruptive that is going to be — including to hospitals and health systems,” Jonathan Oberlander, professor of social medicine at the University of North Carolina and the former editor of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, told me over email. “Large coverage losses will trigger great instability in health politics and perhaps open more of a window to bolder proposals.”
So, will the industry’s arguments still have juice? After the medical industry enjoyed a brief rebound in popularity during the pandemic, 50 percent of Americans say they have a negative view of it, while 37 percent have a positive view, per Gallup. And the appetite for reform is growing: 64 percent of Americans say it is the government’s responsibility to make sure that everyone has healthcare coverage — the highest share at any time, except for the late 2000s, shortly before the ACA became law.
Even the hospital industry, which has long enjoyed more public support than pharma or insurance companies, is seeing its popularity waver: A Families USA poll from August found that an overwhelming 81 percent of Americans thought hospital prices were unreasonable.
“Hospitals have done a great job of pleading poverty on Capitol Hill. ‘We’re probably the only provider who basically has to provide care to whoever shows up. We have no reason to be efficient. Just give us more money,’” Monk said. “I think that argument is wearing a little bit thin.”
2026-10-30 03:00:00
On October 22, Vox co-hosted a screening event honoring the 2026 L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science grant awardees.
The program awards five women scientists postdoctoral grants to advance their research. This year’s recipients work in fields including immunology, planetary science, and ecology. Learn more about the 2026 recipients here.
The evening was emceed by aerospace engineer Aisha Bowe and featured a cocktail reception, a panel discussion and a screening of five documentary profiles produced by Vox Creative. The full profiles can be viewed here.
Applications for the 2027 L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science US program are now open.
2026-10-29 22:15:00
Editor’s note, October 29, 2026, 10:15 am ET: This article was originally published in 2022 and has been updated for Halloween 2026.
With an October 30 birthday, it’s only natural that Kimberly Murphy takes Halloween extremely seriously. A natural redhead, Murphy has dressed up as iconic crimson-haired characters like the Wendy’s mascot and Chuckie from Rugrats, but once she started dating her now-fiancé, Brian, nearly a decade ago, Murphy’s costumes leveled up. A selection of Murphy and Brian’s greatest Halloween hits: Dexter and Dee Dee from Dexter’s Laboratory, Ms. Frizzle and the eponymous bus from The Magic School Bus, Jack and Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas, Tormund and Brienne of Tarth from Game of Thrones, and Shaun White and a snowboard.
“We put my snowboard on his back so I could actually ‘ride’ him,” Murphy, who, regardless of the character’s gender, always dresses as the redhead, says. “It gave a funny, experiential element to the costume.”
This October, the couple, both in their early 30s, is getting married and will be depicting Chucky and Bride of Chucky for Halloween. (You can guess who’ll be donning the white dress.)
In childhood, Halloween is one of the few days of the year when you can wear your most imaginative garb to school and to strangers’ doors. As you get older, that sense of youthful creativity might wane, and figuring out what to wear to a costume party becomes another minor conundrum. Whether you dabble in dress-up or are a cosplay aficionado, conceiving of creative, yet approachable, Halloween attire doesn’t need to be a bewildering or expensive experience. Experts in the art of costuming offer their advice for ideating and executing your best guise so you can take home top honors in this year’s costume contest.
When every character, celebrity, historical figure, animal, pun, and meme is potential costume fodder, homing in on one idea can feel overwhelming. Limitations and parameters are your best friend. Use your own appearance — is there a person or fictional character who has a similar style as you? Vaguely comparable features? — and the media that interested you this year as jumping-off points. Everything from YA novels and nostalgic ‘90s TV shows to extremely local jokes and gags (public transit, sports mascots) to niche memes (hello, Chris Pine astral projecting) are prime inspo.
Is there an alter ego you’re interested in exploring? Cosplayer and photographer Hope Elmekies often dresses up as characters she feels a personal connection to, like Morticia Addams. “I very much felt like I related to [her] because she’s not fitting in,” she says. “I felt that kinship to that character.”
For all of her costumes, Murphy has let her red hair and the height difference between her and her fiancé (she’s 5 feet tall, he’s 6-foot-2) guide her choices. She thinks back to significant pop culture or historical moments that fall under these categories. For example, Murphy flagged Queen’s Gambit as a potential ensemble, due to its buzzworthiness and the fact that the protagonist had red hair. “I take this formulaic approach to Halloween where if it’s unusually small or redheaded,” she says, “that fits my formula of a potential Halloween candidate.”
For group or family costumes, it can be helpful to focus on one shared interest, accessory, or hobby. If you all met in an adult dodgeball league, maybe you want to dress up as dodgeball players. Maybe your group is composed of three couples and you want to do a Grease-inspired collab.
Then, figure out what effect you’d like your costume to have. Is your goal to make everyone laugh? Be the sexy one? Go all-in on minute details? Incorporate a few friends for a group costume? This can help you zero in on an idea.
The location of your Halloween bash can help further narrow down your options, says custom costume maker Correen Borst-Straub of Correen’s Creative Designs. Think about where you’ll wear the getup to determine what’s appropriate. If you’re going to a party in a small apartment, you probably won’t want to wear a huge Marie Antoinette dress, or you might want to think twice about wearing vampire fangs to a costumed fundraiser with a sit-down dinner.
Using popular culture as inspiration may yield a few potential ideas, but if you really want a memorable guise, approach these concepts in an unconventional manner. Many people tend to dress up as the main characters from popular shows, but supporting roles or genre tropes can also be crowd-pleasing attire. For her all-time favorite Halloween costume, Dani Cabot, the manager of New York City vintage boutique Screaming Mimis, dressed up as a virgin sacrifice. “I got bedsheets and a classic cheesy ’70s Roman goddess dress and I got a huge wig, and then a choker that made it look like my throat was slashed,” she says.
Even if you don’t share every physical trait with a character, use your differences to your advantage. Murphy and her fiancé have often dressed up as characters that have historically been depicted as opposite to the couple’s own gender presentation. “Gender is always very subjective,” says Philadelphia-based drag queen VinChelle. “Everyone can express themselves how they want to.” VinChelle frequently performs in looks inspired by Beyoncé and uses the star’s photoshoots as a reference. She’ll then scour fabric stores in Philadelphia or New York City for the garment and works closely with seamstresses to construct the outfit. “Beyoncé’s a glorified drag queen,” she says.
To be clear: This is not an excuse to appropriate other cultures, use makeup to darken your skin, or wear racist costumes. If you’re unsure if a costume is appropriate, run your idea by a few friends first, says Kate Farrier, the wardrobe manager for RWS Entertainment Group, an entertainment and event production company that has produced haunted experiences for the likes of Six Flags Great America, Sea World, and Legoland.
Think about ways you can infuse your personality into popular ideas. Say you want to be a witch or a vampire. What can you do to make the costume feel like you? If your one wardrobe staple is a leather jacket, make your witch persona wear a leather jacket. “If you’re always on your phone, maybe you’re a celebrity vampire, social media vampire,” Farrier says. “Try and make it about something that you always have by bringing your personal items into it because that will make it special for you.”
One year, a shopper at Screaming Mimis spiced up their vampire attire by adding ’70s disco accessories. “They did this insane disco Studio 54 vampire look,” Cabot says. You can also take a character who isn’t particularly known for their fashion, like Pac-Man, and make an interesting garment inspired by their aesthetic.
Another way to differentiate is to make subtle changes to tried-and-true depictions. Borst-Straub has a 25 percent rule; she infuses her creativity into well-known designs so the resulting look is 75 percent true to pop culture and 25 percent her own.
Elmekies gets inspiration by searching her costume idea plus “cosplay” on Pinterest to see how others have approached the concept. Don’t worry about being so niche that everyone has to ask you what you are, Elmekies says. “So, what are you?” is a great icebreaker. “Sometimes when I go out as Belle from Beauty and the Beast, people don’t know who I am necessarily because it’s not a Disney knockoff; it’s more built that you can wear every day,” Elmekies says.
Halloween outfits shouldn’t cost a ton of money. Think about the colors, shapes, and silhouettes needed for a costume to help you identify the look’s building blocks. For a gargoyle look, for example, you’ll need a lot of gray apparel and makeup. “Think about the shapes of things instead of the actual items,” says Ryan Walton, the producer of Halloween experiences for RWS Entertainment Group. “[Say] I need a round hoop-like thing. What can I do that’s round and hoop-like that’s not going to cost me a lot of money and then I can refabricate?”
Scour your closet (or your friends’ closets) for pieces you’ll need. If you’re dressing up as a flapper, dig out a slip dress if you have one. Then, let your accessories and props do all the talking. “So things like jewelry, gloves, stockings, headpieces, masks can really transform a basic into something that’s excellent,” Cabot says.
For any pieces you don’t already own, visit a local vintage or thrift store or indie costume shop to get materials. Workers at these stores can offer expert costuming advice, and by shopping in person, you can be sure you’re getting exactly what you want — no online ordering surprises, Cabot says. Shopping secondhand is also far more sustainable than purchasing a polyester outfit from a big-box store. Chances are you can even incorporate aspects of your ensemble into your regular wardrobe, too.
Ultimately, you’re going to have the best time in an outfit you feel comfortable and confident wearing. Think about how the fabrics and props feel; it’s not worth being constricted by shoes that are impossible to walk in. “You will light up the most when you are wearing something that you love,” VinChelle says. “When I am in my favorite costume, I’m a whole other person.”
Even if you feel like you don’t have the “right” body type for a certain character or look, “you can look at it as this is my character and my character’s just curvy,” Elmekies says. “Realize your character is incredible.”
2026-10-29 20:00:00
Most Americans hate their cable companies. But not the 200,000-odd residents of Chattanooga, Tennessee, a city nestled in the Appalachian foothills.
For many people, the city might seem off the beaten path — enough so that when Spain’s national team chose the city as their base during the FIFA World Cup over the summer, the internet exploded with jeers of incredulity. And yet, as many an urban planner, and certainly many a local, will tell you, Chattanooga is a special place, known not just because the Glenn Miller Orchestra immortalized it as a scenic hub for the choo-choo train.
No, what really has put Chattanooga on the map recently is its ridiculously fast, municipally owned internet.
Unlike almost everywhere else in the country, the fiber-optic cables that keep much of Chattanooga online were laid neither by Comcast nor Spectrum, but by the city itself. In a $220 million gamble, its public power utility, EPB, has helped transform the once struggling post-industrial city into an unlikely marvel of civic reinvention, and an inspiration for many other dozens of copycat towns around the country.
When it debuted in 2010, at one gigabit per second, the city’s ultra-speedy broadband was among the fastest in the world, as fast as global meccas like Hong Kong, and over 200 times faster than the average top-tier offering across the US. “This makes Chattanooga, a mid-sized city in the South,” declared then-Mayor Ron Littlefield to the New York Times, “one of the leading cities in the world in its digital capabilities.”
In the decade and a half since Chattanooga rebranded as “Gig City,” its trademark broadband has proved to be far more than a mere fancy gimmick. It has added billions of dollars to the city’s economy, lured in hundreds of new startups, and, according to EPB, become the single largest source of funding for local public schools, and delighted hundreds of thousands of local customers.
If you’re not a tech company or a prolific streamer, of course, you may not need such intensive internet service. But the city’s broadband service is widely beloved locally for bringing 70 percent of households online at, by far, the lowest price per megabit of bandwidth in the area and quite possibly, among the lowest in the country. Consumer Reports perennially ranks EPB among America’s best providers, a sentiment apparently shared by the legions of Chattanoogans who take to social media to sing EPB’s praises every time it swoops in to fix an outage minutes after a storm hits, or bemoan their loss when they move away and witness the sludgy pace at — and high rates — which the rest of us browse and scroll.
“Chattanooga turned out better than anyone could have hoped,” said Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative, part of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a group that researches locally owned infrastructure, “and the one thing that hasn’t changed are their prices. It’s rare, remarkable even.” That original single-gig service runs $68 per month, and faster speeds aren’t too much more.
But even as the benefits of Chattanooga’s internet supremacy have compounded, public broadband networks like it are still a rarity across the US, which you probably already know if you, like most Americans, have ever sensed your internet growing ever more lethargic, even as your fees climb month after month.
There is a better way, and Chattanooga has long since shown the nation how. For better or worse, the internet drives much of our daily lives and the economy, and what makes the internet possible? Broadband, which is powered by those stiff plastic-sheathed cables filled with strands of thin glass or braids of copper wire, beaming pulses of light or electricity into your modem. And yet, the US has outsourced the provision of this precious public good almost entirely to de facto monopolies that keep our internet slower, more expensive, and above all, more infuriating than it needs to be.
“There was a generation that built water systems and electric systems. There was a generation that built the roads,” Mitchell said. Today, however, “People are just afraid of the idea of the government being ambitious and doing what Chattanooga did.”
Long before Chattanooga grew famous for its broadband, it was known, for a period of time, as “the dirtiest city of America,” a moniker bestowed by Walter Cronkite in 1969.
According to local lore, the moon pie, which originated at a bakery in Chattanooga, came to be when a coal miner asked for a snack “as big as the moon” to sustain him for long shifts down the shaft. The coal he mined fueled the industrial boom that defined Chattanooga until the mid-20th century, when the city’s factories, furnaces, and railroads belched a smog so noxious, it melted women’s nylon stockings off their legs as they walked.
By the 1980s, the city knew it needed to change, seeding a hunger for reinvention that experts told me would come to define its municipally-owned internet. By the 2000s, Chattanooga had more than cleaned up its air and its reputation, building a huge aquarium in the heart of downtown and carefully revitalizing its riverfront and natural areas. But in the early aughts, with the remaining heavy industry in deep retreat, and a fragile recovery threatened by the Great Recession, the city craved a new economic engine.
The city’s EPB, which originated as a municipally owned electric utility in 1935, had already set out to build a smart electrical grid in 2008, retrofitting it with a two-way digital communications system that could detect and fix problems as they arise. This process would involve laying hundreds of miles of new fiber-optic cable lines along existing power lines, monitoring them and relaying information back and forth with operators. But as the EPB laid plans for its new grid-helping fiber, it realized that for roughly the same amount of effort and cost, it could repurpose those cables to also serve as a cutting-edge internet service.
Laying those hundreds of miles of new cables, along every single power line in the city, is an expensive and time-consuming process. But since EPB already had power lines plugging into almost every home and business throughout the city, it didn’t even need permission to get it done. And once the cables are there, there’s no real limit on how much data they can carry, meaning that they’ll work just as well whether they’re relaying the power grid’s data exclusively or if they’re carrying petabytes upon petabytes of data from hundreds of thousands of internet customers. This same quality has made it easy for EPB to pump up the volume of data it offers over the years, eventually allowing it to become the first city in the nation to offer a 25-gigabit-per-second service, which it did for its customers in 2023. More recently, EPB became the first provider nationwide to hook its fiber-optic cables up to a quantum computer — which uses advanced physics to solve mind-bogglingly complex problems — and offer its use to researchers and customers across the city.
“If we’re going to own that fiber communications network to help automate our grid, why not offer that as a service to our customers? We thought, ‘Why not go big? Why not be ambitious?’” Janet Rehberg, CEO of EPB, told me. “People thought we were crazy. And we said, ‘If we can do it, why not?’ So, we did.”
Equipped with a $111 million federal stimulus grant from the recession-era American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, plus about $222 million in municipal bonds, EPB was able to complete the project — initially expected to take a decade — in just two years.
In 2010, Chattanooga became the first city in the nation to offer one-gigabit-per-second fiber optic internet.
“This was a huge shift for our city’s fortunes,” Andy Berke, mayor of Chattanooga from 2013 to 2021, told me. “All of a sudden, we were a place where you could try to discover the next big thing.”
Hundreds of startups flocked to the city for its super-fast broadband, with tech incubators setting up shop in shuttered storefronts and abandoned industrial factories dotted along the city’s downtown. In its first 10 years, EPB’s fiber network brought more than $5.3 billion in economic benefits and 10,420 jobs to the city, about 31 percent of all jobs created during that period, according to a study by the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. This has transformed “the way we thought about ourselves and what we thought was possible technologically,” Berke said.
The broadband investment has long since paid for itself and then some in the fees people pay to access its service. EPB expects to earn about $190 million over the next year alone from its telecommunications and enormously popular internet service, all of which will flow back into the business itself or into the city. As a result, EPB chose not to increase electricity rates at all this year, in stark contrast to much of the rest of the country. And the utility now pays tens of millions of dollars annually straight back into city services, like public schools.
Under Berke’s mayoral administration, the city also integrated EPB into initiatives meant to get more Chattanoogans online. When the pandemic hit, and local schools went virtual, the city built a new program called EdConnect that saw EPB provide free internet to every family with a child who received free or reduced lunches, the first program of its kind nationwide, and one that continues to this day.
“A lot of communities set up something similar during the pandemic, but most of those are done, they kind of faded away. But we made a commitment — our community did — for 10 years, and we’re already discussing what the next 10 years looks like,” said Sammy Lowdermilk, CEO of the Enterprise Center, the nonprofit that administers EdConnect. “We’ve heard from parents using online resources to look for a job, to create resumes, to do medical research. The entire family gets to benefit from it.”
Over the years, Chattanooga’s publicly owned internet has drawn countless city planners and far-flung mayors to Tennessee’s fourth-largest city to learn just how they pulled it off.
But every time one visited Berke in his time in office, and every time he gave one of his “little sales pitches” on EPB’s success, over and over, they’d replied with the same refrain: “Oh, it’s incredible what you’ve done here. I mean, we can’t do it, but it’s great — good for you guys,” he recalled. Many cities don’t have a publicly owned electricity company at the ready as Chattanooga did, and many face significant barriers from state laws that restrict or heavily discourage the development of municipally owned broadband altogether.
“The number one challenge for most infrastructure projects is political. It’s not financial. It’s not conceptual. It’s not technological. It’s the web of difficulties that make it harder to get it done.”
Andy Berke, former mayor of Chattanooga
Nevertheless, some places tried anyway, and many have succeeded — over 700 of them, according to Mitchell’s last count. In Utah, for example, a consortium of cities has spent the past few decades building out a municipally owned fiber network with the bold name Utopia. For many years, said Mitchell, the network suffered from severe financial and legal roadblocks. But even so, Utopia has managed to build out a system that Mitchell calls an “unqualified success” today, bringing tens of thousands of households online across the state.
While only a tiny fraction of all broadband networks nationwide have some level of municipal ownership, strikingly, nine out of ten of the nation’s fastest broadband networks do or are part of a public-private partnership.
However, Chattanooga’s brand of municipally owned broadband hasn’t spread nearly as widely as many people hoped it would, or think it could. And most of that, said Mitchell, can be attributed to the fact that large internet companies like Comcast or AT&T, clearly aware of how dominant well-run municipally owned networks can become, have spent the past several decades fighting to prevent more from coming online.
More than 12 states now have explicit laws barring or restricting cities from offering publicly owned broadband, which has made it difficult for many municipalities to create networks of their own. Even Chattanooga faced a brutal legal challenge when it tried to expand EPB’s coverage to rural and underserviced areas right outside of the city, the result of a 1999 state law meant to restrict municipally owned broadband access.
“The number one challenge for most infrastructure projects is political. It’s not financial. It’s not conceptual. It’s not technological,” said Berke, but rather, it’s a matter of navigating the special interests and lobbyists that dominate the status quo. “It’s the web of difficulties that make it harder to get it done.”
But that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to pull off. Utopia, for example, has withstood a blitz of dark money attack ads likely bankrolled by cable companies in its effort to expand across the state. And in Colorado, hundreds of communities over the years across the state have voted to opt out of a 2005 law banning municipal broadband networks. This momentum ultimately proved strong enough to convince the state legislature to repeal the original ban in 2023.
Even today, broadband remains out of reach in many parts of the country that are either too rural for for-profit networks to build there at all, or where it does exist, locals can’t afford it. Americans consistently pay more for slower service, compared with their counterparts in Europe or Asia.
Combined, those barriers have left tens of millions of American households without internet access. With AI poised to further transform our economy, Chattanooga, it seems increasingly clear, could be among the first few cities outside of Silicon Valley to truly benefit from the biggest technological shift in generations, while many other post-industrial cities seem likely to fall even further behind because they don’t have the right digital infrastructure to thrive in the economy today.
Quietly chugging along on the banks of the Tennessee River, the city is making a case that states and cities should take broadband seriously as a transformational infrastructure that underpins our modern lives much the way the rail lines did in the 19th century or highways did a century later.
Luckily, there are now hundreds of models — from fully public utilities like EPB to Tribal-built broadband networks to public-private partnerships — for cities hoping to carve a publicly owned path to a better internet themselves. Laying coils of fiber-optic cables is still much cheaper and, lawsuits notwithstanding, far easier a feat than building a new highway system or a railway network. But even if it were harder, Chattanooga shows that it would be worth doing. “Projects that are most difficult are also the most rewarding,” as Berke put it. “You have to be willing to take on the status quo — that’s what can transform a community.”
This story was supported by a grant from Arnold Ventures. Vox had full discretion over the content of this reporting.