Worldwide HIV/AIDS mortality down 80% since PEPFAR launch

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Worldwide HIV/AIDS mortality down 80% since PEPFAR launch

Posted on by Alex Terr

FACT: Worldwide HIV/AIDS mortality down 80% since PEPFAR launch.

THE NUMBERS: Eswatini life expectancy at birth –

2023 64
2022 63
2020 60
2015 55
2010 48
2005 44
1989 62

WHAT THEY MEAN: 

On this year’s World AIDS Day: The principal U.S. support program — the “President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief,” or PEPFAR, for short — is a success story with an uncertain future. As a point of entry, here’s one of the countries the HIV/AIDS pandemic hit hardest:

Eswatini is a small inland kingdom of 1.3 million people bordering South Africa and Mozambique. Its HIV-positive rate, 23.4% of adults, is the world’s highest. In the early 2000s, Swazi health officers were counting 11,000 AIDS deaths a year — one in every hundred people – and reported a drop in life expectancy at birth from 62 years to 42. A grim point of comparison suggests how extreme that is: Chinese life expectancy at birth appears to have fallen by 1.5 years during World War II, and by six months during the Great Leap Forward/Cultural Revolution decade from 1959 to 1969.

Pulling back: In the early 2000s, about 40 million people were HIV-positive — 2 million in the United States and other “developed” countries, 25 million in sub-Saharan Africa, 7 million in South and Southeast Asia, 2.1 million in Latin America and the Caribbean, 4 million elsewhere around the world. Over 3 million died annually. UNAIDS’ 2005 report is a reminder:

“Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) has killed more than 25 million people since it was first recognized in 1981, making it one of the most destructive epidemics in recorded history. Despite recent, improved access to antiretroviral treatment and care in many regions of the world, the AIDS epidemic claimed 3.1 million [2.8–3.6 million] lives in 2005; more than half a million (570 000) were children. The total number of people living with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) reached its highest level: an estimated 40.3 million [36.7–45.3 million] people are now living with HIV. Close to 5 million people were newly infected with the virus in 2005.”

Governments and charities attempting to respond in lower-income countries were trying to manage multiple large challenges, each of which made all the others harder to solve:

  • Low patient awareness. Most HIV-positive adults in developing countries were untested and unaware of their status.
  • Medicine scarcity: Antiretroviral triple-drug therapy was launched only in the late 1990s, and availability worldwide was very limited.
  • Difficulty delivering care when patients were aware and medicines available: Millions of potential patients lived in rural areas and large city slums with few clinics and fewer trained nurses and doctors.
  • Finance: Most developing-country health ministries are small and lack the money to meet any one of these practical challenges, let alone all of them at once.

PEPFAR, which the second Bush administration launched in 2003, and the following administrations continued through 2024, has been the U.S.’s big response. Its various national accounts — prevention and education, testing, medicine, orphan and dependent care — and contributions to the Global Fund and UNAIDS combined for just under $7 billion per year during the Biden administration. This was about a third of the world’s $22 billion in total HIV/AIDS support. Taken as a whole, it aimed to support education, make testing widely available, provide large volumes of medicine, and train staff in delivery and care. Run by seven agencies headed by the Global AIDS Coordinator at the State Department, but mainly administered by professional staff and contractors at USAID and the Centers for Disease Control, PEPFAR programs were operating in 120 countries this past January, providing anti-retroviral medicines to 20.1 million people, care and shelter for 7 million orphans, and “PrEP” preventative treatment for 1.5 million people.

Since the launch, treatment has spread to reach nearly 32 million of the 41 million people now believed HIV-positive worldwide. Annual new infection estimates have dropped from 3.4 million to about 1.3 million a year. And mortality is down from the 3 million annual deaths of the early 2000s to about 630,000 per year now. In sum, over its two decades, PEPFAR has earned a plausible claim to the mantle of the postwar Marshall Plan: an ambitious concept on a global scale, efficient practical implementation, and commitment to the common good.

This year, the Trump administration shut down the main PEPFAR administrator, the U.S. Agency for International Development. According to the U.S. government’s aid tallies, American support for global health aid fell from $13.2 billion in FY 2024 to $4.7 billion in 2025. The administration did, though, promise to preserve PEPFAR by shifting program management to the State Department. This has, in fact, happened, though with lots of transitional damage — fired contractors, lost human talent, interrupted care — over the spring and summer, with consequences such as loss of PrEP access for 2.5 million people worldwide, closed clinics in Zimbabwe, and doubling counts of secondary mpox infections in Kenya. Taking into account the much larger drop in U.S. support for health and humanitarian relief, the Gates Foundation predicts a rise in childhood deaths of about 200,000 in 2025. Looking to 2026, the administration’s September strangely titled “America First Global Health Strategy” proposes to continue PEPFAR programs but cut U.S. government spending on them by about $1.7 billion, while asking beneficiary countries to contribute more to close the resulting gaps.

Returning to Eswatini, where U.S. health support has dropped from $75 million in 2024 to $19 million this year: The pandemic is far from over. But measured both by health policy criteria and by real-world results, as of 2024, Eswatini was meeting its main challenges. A 2023 national survey showed 94% of adults with HIV were aware of their status; 97% of them were using antiretroviral medicines, and virus suppression was achieved in 96% of antiretroviral patients. More generally, (a) HIV-positivity rates have dropped from the 29.4% peak in the mid-2010s to this year’s 23.4%; (b) 213,000 Swazi were taking antiretrovirals, as against 500 in 2005; (c) 20,000 are testing each month; (d) AIDS mortality has dropped by 75%, from the 11,000 deaths per year of the early 2000s to 2,600 last year; and (e) national life expectancy in 2023 for the first time exceeded pre-HIV pandemic rates and continues to rise. And two weeks ago, residual PEPFAR money helped add a new treatment — lenacapavir, a twice-yearly injection medicine — to Eswatini’s health program.

On this World AIDS Day, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief has accomplished an astonishing amount of good in its first two decades. PEPFAR authors and the U.S. aid staff who ran the programs should take great pride in their contribution to this 80% drop in mortality. It isn’t finished, and 630,000 deaths is still a very large number. Congress shouldn’t let it stop before it’s done.

FURTHER READING

U.S. government HIV/AIDS page.

… and the PEPFAR site.

Then and now:

UNAIDS’ grim December 2005 report.

And the 2025 edition, noting past progress, the impacts of the closure of USAID, and the risks of declining future support.

Data:

KFF (formerly Kaiser Permanente Foundation) summarizes PEPFAR goals and results.

The World Bank has published HIV/AIDS prevalence rates by country since 1990.

The U.S. government’s PEPFAR data site has numbers. As of today, they’re frozen and given an unsettling asterisk: “data.pepfar.gov is currently undergoing updates and will return soon with refreshed data and interactive dashboards.”

Foreignassistance.gov reports health, humanitarian relief, democracy, food aid, and other U.S. aid spending by country.

PPI on USAID, the 100-year American humanitarian aid tradition, and the Trump administration’s folly.

Eswatini:

2025 status report from the Health Ministry.

A report from the Global Fund.

Updates from the UNAIDS office in Mbabane.

Trump administration and PEPFAR:

The administration’s global health strategy document.

KFF’s analysis.

A mixed assessment from the George W. Bush Presidential Center.

A more critical look — “Tough Times, Tough Choices” — from the Center for Global Development.

And the Gates Foundation fears a rise of 200,000 in childhood deaths.

ABOUT ED

Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.

Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.

Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.

Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.

Read the full email and sign up for the Trade Fact of the Week.

The Parents Over Platforms Act (POPA): A Balanced Approach to Online Child Safety

Posted on by Max Sherrill

Key Polling Data:

  • 70% of parents say that protections should constantly keep minors safe while using apps — not just check their age once at download.
  • A majority of parents believe that a one-time age check at the point of download will not make kids more safe online.
  • Only one in three (34%) believe app store age verification alone will keep kids safe online
  • Over half (54%) of adults say they do not trust apps to keep kids’ age information secure from hackers or other bad actors. 
  • A majority of adults, including 70% of parents, worry that requiring parental approval for every app download creates a “slippery slope” that could restrict access to important information.

Parents are looking for solutions that empower them to make decisions about how to protect their children online. Congress is considering several proposals, varied in their obligations and strategies to keep children safe. But few have aligned closely with the balanced, comprehensive approach that parents prefer, according to a PPI survey. H.R. 6333, the Parents Over Platforms Act (POPA), new bipartisan legislation introduced by Reps. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.) and Erin Houchin (R-Ind.), provides a welcome, more balanced approach.

Parents Want Continuous Protection

Parents want protection that is more than just a one-time check. A PPI survey via Morning Consult, conducted earlier this fall, found that 70% of parents believe protections should be constantly keeping minors safe while using an app. While some proposed legislation, like the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA), places the responsibility for age verification entirely on app stores with a one-time age check, just one in three parents thinks that this app store age verification strategy alone would keep kids safe online.

POPA balances responsibility for verification between app stores and app developers, in line with what parents want. It requires app stores to provide developers with an age signal, and then requires app developers to also require the right safety measures within apps. These developer obligations ensure continuous protection by requiring developers to appropriately restrict high-risk features.

Prioritizing Privacy and Data Protection

Parents also care deeply about privacy. More than half of adults say they don’t trust apps with keeping kids’ info safe from hackers or other bad actors. It’s essential that data collected for age verification purposes isn’t used for other purposes, like targeted advertising. POPA includes protections on the use of age verification data and keeps information collection to a minimum. It also makes sure only apps that need the age signal are receiving the age signal.

Avoiding Parental Consent Fatigue

Age verification methods should also be sustainable and thoughtful in order to avoid consent fatigue. When parents are asked for consent too many times, they can become overwhelmed, accepting terms habitually without considering the details of the request. As experiences with Europe’s privacy regulations have shown, poorly designed consent requests can undermine well-intentioned policy. While some age verification policies like the ASAA risk consent fatigue with high friction consent requests for every download, POPA takes a balanced approach that will keep parents engaged and kids protected by allowing parents to block categories of apps by age rating and enabling app developers to make sure they aren’t visible to minors at all. With 70% of parents worried that requiring parental app approval for every app download could restrict access to important info, selecting a policy that addresses these concerns is critical.

Parental sentiment is clear: we must take action to keep kids safe online. The Parents Over Platforms Act adopts a thoughtful, dual approach to verification, protects privacy, and avoids the pitfall of consent fatigue, while addressing the parental concerns reported in the PPI survey.

See here for a full memo outlining the survey’s findings.

Somehow, Charles Lindbergh Returned

Posted on by Alex Terr

This article originally appeared on Peter Juul’s personal Substack, The Dive.

We’re well beyond the point where we ought to take documents like the Trump administration’s just-released National Security Strategy seriously, at least on a practical level. It’s hard to put much stock in such an embarrassingly sycophantic policy document, especially when the administration itself appears to be little more than a pack of scheming viziers to an increasingly nominal president who himself regularly struggles to stay awake during public appearances.

But it’s beside the point to engage with this document as if it’s a matter of policy, programs, or even strategy. It does no good to point out its incoherence and incontinence, much less ponder how what’s proposed in it might play out in the real world or how, if you stand on your head and squint and read it backwards, it might contain worthwhile ideas. The product of ideologues who fancy themselves world-historical thinkers but evince no real understanding of America or its place in a world permanently changed by revolutions in science, technology, and industry dating back a century and a half now, this national security strategy both betrays American interests overseas and perverts America’s traditional liberal values both at home and abroad.

In short, this national security strategy amounts to nothing less than a declaration of moral bankruptcy — a statement of immoral principle that stands in direct opposition to what America ought to stand for and represent in the world. (As always, it’s the self-styled super-patriot who hates his country the most.) It doesn’t tell us much that we don’t already know about Trump’s foreign policy, but the document does effectively distill the Trump administration’s ongoing renunciation of any real American responsibility for global affairs and international security.

Indeed, it’s a foreign policy that Charles Lindbergh would have loved: a not-quite-explicit tripartite carve-up of the globe with dictators in Europe and Asia, with America selling out its allies in those two parts of the world while building a garrison state in the Western Hemisphere to bully our own neighbors the same way Putin and Xi do theirs. Add dollops of insulting illiberalism, crude dollar diplomacy, and thinly veiled racism, and voila: you’ve reinvented the original America First platform.

In the end, this national security strategy is little more than a manifesto for global gangsterism — or perhaps the longest geopolitical suicide note in history.

Let’s look at some of the specifics: the Trump administration promises to abandon America’s allies in Europe while meddling in their own domestic politics. It parrots the Kremlin’s line on NATO, characterizing the alliance as “perpetually expanding,” while seeking “strategic stability” with Moscow — presumably at the expense of Ukraine and other erstwhile American allies. Combined with a purported 2027 deadline for NATO nations to assume primary responsibility for the alliance’s conventional defenses, a reported lack of communication with key alliance militaries like Germany, and Trump’s own eagerness to sell out Ukraine, the Trump administration seems to be setting the stage for an effective American withdrawal from the Atlantic alliance.

Worse, the Trump administration has made its intent to interfere in European politics on behalf of far-right political parties and, not incidentally, American tech oligarchs quite clear. It employs racist rhetoric to claim that the continent will be “unrecognizable in 20 years,” with certain states “majority non-European” and therefore somehow uncommitted to the NATO alliance. It goes on to assert that it must “regain its civilizational self-confidence,” primarily through the victory of illiberal far-right parties and politicians like Germany’s AfD party and Hungary’s Viktor Orban that the Trump administration views as “political allies” whose success it hopes to encourage.

Like Lindbergh and his original America First movement, this national security strategy focuses monomaniacally on the Western Hemisphere. It casts the challenges in this hemisphere—migration, narco-trafficking, and foreign (presumably Chinese) investment in critical industries — as all-important and all-consuming while tacitly dismissing traditional American strategic priorities in Europe and the Pacific as “peripheral or irrelevant to our own” interests. These priorities, the document heavily implies, were not the consequence of a careful consideration of American interests in a world transformed by science, technology, and industry, but rather the result of deceit by treacherous foreigners who have taken advantage of the United States to further their own interests at America’s expense.

Nor is it hard to see the crude, Putin-style sphere-of-influence logic behind the Trump team’s obsession with Latin America specifically and the Western Hemisphere more generally (at least beyond their obvious preoccupation with immigration). Given the language of this national security strategy, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that Trump — or, more precisely, his perpetually scheming advisers — would like the United States to do in Latin America what Vladimir Putin wants to do in Ukraine and Eastern Europe. We’ve already tasted the rancid fruit of this impulse with Trump’s killing spree in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, where American special operators blow small boats allegedly running drugs out of the water and, in the first instance at least, massacre the survivors.

China, for its part, is seen primarily as a commercial competitor and not a strategic problem or geopolitical challenger. That’s hardly surprising considering the general emptiness of hawkish Republican rhetoric on China, and this strategy sends yet another signal that Trump talks tough but has no appetite for confrontation with Beijing — a message reinforced by his deep-seated antipathy toward American allies like Japan and South Korea.

It all adds up to a morally bankrupt vision of a world carved up between real and would-be dictators to suit their own whims and fantasies, one supremely hostile to America’s long-standing interests as well as its traditional liberal values. Put another way, the Trump administration now seeks precisely the nightmarish world that American presidents have desperately sought to avoid for more than a century.

On the bright side, it’s unlikely this strategy will ever be fully implemented; national security strategies rarely guide any administration’s foreign policy so much as they reflect it. Moreover, the Trump administration has so hollowed out America’s foreign policy and national security apparatus — his team, such as it is, remains confined to a small clique when not farmed out to one of Trump’s former real estate pals—that it remains a mystery as to how they’d execute any strategy the administration might come up with. Secretary of State Marco Rubio continues to serve as acting national security adviser, for instance, presiding over a National Security Council largely denuded of anything resembling real bureaucratic or subject-matter expertise, while America’s military and intelligence agencies have suffered rolling political purges that will likely reduce their own effectiveness over time.

Trump’s attempt to impose gangster rule at home and abroad will eventually, inevitably fail — though it will inflict enormous damage on America and the world along the way. The danger inherent in this national security strategy lies less with the potential that it might be implemented than in the indecent principles upon which it is based and seeks to advance. It exposes the moral rot at the heart of the Trump administration and its foreign policy for all to see, presenting us with yet another manifestation of our wider crisis of national virtue and integrity.

In that respect, however, it may paradoxically prove salutary: this strategy should cause a rededication to the basic moral propositions that make America a worthwhile endeavor, an experiment in liberty and self-government that’s more fragile and endangered now than at any point since World War II. Do we stand for freedom, equality, and democracy in the world? Do we keep faith with ourselves and our friends?

Though he could be quite unsentimental in private conversations, President Franklin D. Roosevelt rightly understood that American foreign policy requires a moral sensibility — a spirit that guides it and makes clear that America stands for more than the prerogatives of raw power and the amoral pursuit of national self-aggrandizement offered actual and aspiring dictators as well as self-proclaimed “realists” throughout recent history. As Roosevelt himself explained, “order among Nations presupposes something enduring—some system of justice under which individuals, over a long period of time, are willing to live. Humanity will never permanently accept a system imposed by conquest and based on slavery.”

America may not be and may never have been the perfect embodiment of its professed liberal ideals of freedom and equality, but that’s both irrelevant and immaterial. But at its best, America has been the main champion of liberal values in a world where they have had few if any powerful defenders and many influential opponents, a standard to which the partisans of human liberty could repair when all else failed. In that regard, then, this national security strategy represents a deep and profound betrayal of America itself—one that must be repudiated in the clearest terms and replaced with a renewed moral vision that Roosevelt and his contemporaries would easily recognize.

There was an idea that was America, and it’s well past time to revive it.

Rebuilding the Arsenal of Democracy

Posted on by Alyssa Brown

America’s defense industry can no longer produce arms and ammunition at the required cost, scale, and speed. Despite some progress in reviving munitions production since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the American defense industry no longer resembles the famed arsenal of democracy that won World War II or the sprawling military-industrial complex that helped keep the peace during the Cold War.

To be sure, America’s defense industry makes some of the world’s finest and most advanced military hardware. But it’s expensive to develop and build that hardware, and since the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon has too often spent enormous sums on gear that takes too long to field and cannot be bought in sufficient quantities — leaving the U.S. military with aging combat aircraft, warships, and other equipment that costs more and more to maintain over time. Some programs like the B-21 stealth bomber have come in below projected costs, but general problems with production speed, scale, and cost remain pervasive across the industry.

And in major armed conflicts like the war in Ukraine, strategy scholar Phillips Payson O’Brien reminds us, “The military equipment with which a country starts a war is normally eaten up in short order, and the war becomes a desperate test to make, repair and recreate military force.”

There’s no silver bullet to fix these issues — they’ve been decades in the making and will require concerted efforts to rectify. But these three core ideas can help guide efforts to make America’s defense industry the arsenal of democracy once again:

  • Send strong, consistent demand signals
  • Work with partners and allies — don’t alienate and antagonize them
  • Reform defense procurement regulations

Read the full policy memo.

Jacoby for The Bulwark: Ukraine Stands Firm

Posted on by Alex Terr

DONALD TRUMP HAS ASSUMED from the start of the war in Ukraine that Russia will win. “You have no cards,” the president told Volodymyr Zelensky when he ambushed the Ukrainian leader in the Oval Office in February, and he repeated the point recently on Air Force One. Asked why the latest U.S. peace proposal would give Russia a huge chunk of land it has been unable to win on the battlefield, Trump told a reporter, “Look, the way [the war is] going . . . it’s just moving in one direction. So eventually that’s land that over the next couple of months might be gotten by Russia anyway.”

Vladimir Putin rushed to underscore the point, boasting when Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, visited Moscow last week that Russian forces had captured the frontline city of Pokrovsk. Many Western observers parrot Putin’s claims about the contested rail hub in eastern Ukraine, arguing that the battle there is a major turning point, giving a Russia a “gateway” to the west and, before long, conquest of all Ukraine. In fact, it’s not clear that Russia has yet taken Pokrovsk—Kyiv maintains it’s still holding on. But even if the town falls in the coming weeks, it hardly means Ukraine is losing the war.

Read more in The Bulwark.

Hegseth Must Go

Posted on by Max Sherrill

If recent news reports are accurate, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth likely issued an illegal order to give no quarter in the first of what are now many likely illegal strikes against alleged narcotics trafficking boats in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific. Already manifestly unfit and unqualified for the job, focused primarily on fighting culture wars and politicizing, and having previously endangered American military personnel by discussing sensitive operational details over an off-the-books group chat, Hegseth may now be guilty of war crimes if not outright murder. 

Congress must now embark on a thorough investigation of these strikes and Hegseth’s potentially criminal role in ordering them. Ultimate responsibility for these immoral and likely illegal military actions rests with President Donald Trump, but Hegseth bears significant responsibility of his own for following and executing Trump’s directives. As secretary of defense, however, Hegseth has the right and duty to refuse manifestly illegal orders from the president — but he has chosen to follow them instead.

Indeed, Trump likely nominated Hegseth as secretary of defense in part because, like Trump, he possesses few if any qualms about ordering the American military to act in direct contravention of the laws of war. As a Fox News television personality during the first Trump term, for instance, Hegseth successfully lobbied President Trump to pardon Eddie Gallagher, a former Navy SEAL accused of war crimes by his fellow SEALs, and defended others charged with or alleged to have ordered similar crimes. His partisan polemics, moreover, seep with barely-concealed contempt for the laws and rules of war. In Hegseth’s telling, America fails to win wars because the U.S. military cannot act like its enemies and commit obvious war crimes with abandon — a morally reprehensible stance that drags America down and damages our standing in the world.

Hegseth also summoned the military’s highest-ranking officers back to the United States in September for a lecture that included, among other things, a promise that the military would no longer have to follow “stupid rules of engagement.” He also reportedly forced Adm. Alvin Holsey, head of U.S. Southern Command, to resign less than a year into his three-year appointment after Holsey expressed doubts about the legality of the Trump administration’s boat strikes — doubts buttressed by the command’s senior military lawyer, whose view that such strikes were illegal was overruled by the Trump administration’s lawyers. 

In a blatant attempt to intimidate critics, moreover, Hegseth has absurdly threatened Senator Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) — a retired Navy pilot and astronaut who flew 39 combat missions during the 1991 Gulf War and piloted four space shuttle missions from 2001 to 2011 — with a court-martial for recording a video with other Congressional Democrats that reminded American servicemembers of their right to refuse illegal orders. Hegseth has acted beneath the dignity of his office in other ways, such as active trolling on social media and provoking a Canadian children’s book publisher to condemn him for using one of their characters in a juvenile AI-generated meme.

Hegseth has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that he has no business holding his present office. In a normal political universe, he would never have been nominated as secretary of defense in the first place. But we live in abnormal times, and President Trump wants Hegseth as his secretary of defense because of their shared disdain for the laws of war and the notion of basic human dignity during armed conflict. Given its general subservience to Trump, this Congress will almost certainly not impeach and remove Hegseth — no matter how much he deserves to be dismissed from office. 

Assuming he remains Secretary of Defense and Democrats retake one or both houses of Congress in next year’s mid-term election, Hegseth’s impeachment and removal from office should be one of a new Democratic majority’s first orders of business. If successful, Hegseth’s impeachment and removal from office will be only the start of accountability for the Trump administration’s lawless and immoral war in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific — but a start must be made.

Moss in The Washington Post: Netflix to buy Warner Bros. Discovery in $83 billion deal

Posted on by Alex Terr

In a memo to Warner Bros. staff, Zaslav said the sale “reflects the realities of an industry undergoing generational change — in how stories are financed, produced, distributed, and discovered.”

“The proposed combination of Warner Bros. and Netflix reflects complementary strengths, more choice and value for consumers, a stronger entertainment industry, increased opportunity for creative talent, and long-term value creation for shareholders,” he wrote. Elements of Warner Bros. Discovery outside the deal, including the cable news channels CNN, TNT Sports and Discovery, will be part of a new stand-alone company called Discovery Global, Zaslav said, which he expected to be squared away by the third quarter of 2026.

The deal would require shareholder approval and regulatory approval from President Donald Trump’s administration. In its regulatory filing disclosing the terms of the deal, Netflix offered a $5.8 billion breakup fee should the deal fall apart as a result of antitrust or other legal challenges. The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment about whether it would challenge the deal.

“Given what is happening in entertainment markets, the DOJ is very likely to take a close look,” said Diana Moss, director of competition policy at the Progressive Policy Institute, a center-left-leaning think tank. “There could be concerns over eliminating head-to-head competition and potential competition.”

Moss noted allegations by liberal lawmakers that the Trump administration interfered in similar mergers, including the Paramount-Skydance deal, to advance the president’s personal agenda. Paramount has said it “has no knowledge of any promises or commitments made to President Trump.” The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Read more in The Washington Post. 

Moss in Time Magazine: How Trump Could Kill the Netflix-Warner Bros. Deal

Posted on by Alex Terr

[…]

Within days of the deal announcement, Trump made clear he would handle it differently from his predecessors. Past presidents have seldom involved themselves in antitrust reviews involving mergers between companies. That’s in part because past Presidents normally separated themselves from decisions made by the Justice Department. Trump has made clear in his second term that the Justice Department answers to him.

Trump’s approach threatens to set “a terrible precedent,” says Diana Moss, former president of the American Antitrust Institute and current vice president at the Progressive Policy Institute. “White House interference in antitrust cases, whether it’s mergers or monopolization cases or other cases, really threatens at the very core due process and the rule of law,” Moss tells TIME.

[…]

Read more in Time.

 

Marshall for The Hill: The Green New Deal Crashes to Earth

Posted on by Alex Terr

Less than a decade ago, young U.S. progressives started agitating for a Green New Deal to combat climate change and usher in a planned economy more planet-friendly than capitalism.

It was a bold, if implausible, demand for a crash program to rid America of fossil fuels. Animating it were decades of increasingly dire prophesies about how global warming is irreversibly impairing life on Earth.

Lecturing world leaders at a 2019 United Nations climate conference, Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg won rapturous applause when she informed her audience, “You have stolen my childhood.”

In the U.S., environmental groups pressured politicians to keep fossil fuels “in the ground” even as advances in fracking technology were unlocking a bonanza of shale oil and gas.

In 2020, first-term Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) stoked a social media frenzy by joining Green New Deal activists in a ‘60s-style sit-in in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) office.

President Joe Biden got with the program, portentously calling climate change “an existential crisis” rising above such humdrum public concerns as spiking inflation and uncontrolled immigration.

Today, however, the Green New Deal seems to have fallen to earth, borne down by the inexorable gravity of economic and political reality. Therein lies a cautionary tale for Democrats about the gulf that separates elite and popular opinion on climate change.

Put simply, green activists have failed to convert America’s non-college majority to their cause. Working class voters recognize the problem but it takes a back seat to their everyday economic and social concerns.

Read more in The Hill

Foreign exchange trading in rubles is down by 96%

Posted on by Alex Terr

FACT: Foreign exchange trading in rubles is down by 96%.

THE NUMBERS: Daily currency exchange* —

             2019              2025 Change
All currencies   $6.58 trillion   $9.60 trillion    +45%
Dollar   $5.81 trillion   $8.56 trillion    +47%
Euro   $2.13 trillion   $2.77 trillion    +30%
Yen   $1.11 trillion   $1.61 trillion    +45%
Renminbi   $0.29 trillion   $0.82 trillion  +187%
Pound   $0.84 trillion   $0.98 trillion    +16%
Ruble   $0.07 trillion   $0.003 trillion     -96%

* Bank of International Settlements 2025 Triennial Central Bank Survey of Foreign Exchange

WHAT THEY MEAN: 

Every three years, the Bank of International Settlements in Basel guesses at how much money currency traders – government ministries and central banks, firms buying and selling across borders, tourists, computerized hedge-fund trading programs — exchange in a day. Their 2025 “Triennial Central Bank Survey of Foreign Exchange,” out in September, reports $9.6 trillion (combining sellers’ earnings with buyers’ payments). Over a full year that comes to almost exactly $3.5 quadrillion. A few particulars:

Dollar role little changed: U.S. dollars figured in 89.2% of the world’s currency exchanges this spring.  This figure has been stable throughout the 21st century, as earlier Triennial Surveys found dollars used in 88.6% of all currency transactions in 2022, a slightly lower 84.9% in financial crisis-plagued 2010, and 89.9% in 2001. Looking at other currencies, the Survey gives some substance to financial-press speculation about the Chinese renminbi’s rising role: renminbi showed up in 2% of currency exchanges in 2013, 4% in 2019, and 7% in 2025. The euro, yen, and pound shares have meanwhile dipped a bit, with euros down from 39% of transactions in 2013 to 31% in 2025, yen from 23% to 17%, and sterling from 13% to 10%.

U.K. the forex center: City of London banks and firms handle 38% of all world currency trades, or about $1 quadrillion worth each year. As context for a twelve-zero number like this — $1,000,000,000,000,000 — “world GDP” is about $120 trillion, so London’s quadrillion in forex turnover is about 10 times the size of the ‘real’ goods and services world economy. New York ranks second with 19%, while Asia’s three big currency trading centers — Singapore, Hong Kong, and Tokyo — have 12%, 7%, and 4% respectively, or 23% combined. Most exchange of major currencies basically track this division of labor, but renminbi trading is a little unusual; it isn’t concentrated in any one place, but instead is roughly evenly divided between London, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, and New York.

Collapse of ruble trading: The survey’s calculations, which show 39 individual currencies as well as worldwide totals, typically show trading levels in any particular currency rising over time, though at different rates. One bright-red exception: under the weight of international sanctions — for example, U.S., UK, EU, and Japanese prohibitions on transactions with the Russian central bank, purchasing of ruble-denominated bonds, and lending to Russian financial institutions — along with Russia’s own currency restrictions, trading in Russian rubles has plunged by 96% since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022.

The actual numbers here: the $72 billion in daily ruble trading in 2019 fell to $13 billion in 2022, and to $3 billion in 2025. As a point of comparison, this $3 billion is just above the $1 billion in daily trading in Argentine pesos and a notch below the $4 billion in Bulgarian lev exchange. By market, ruble trading is down 95% in Singapore, 96.5% in London, 99% in New York, 99.4% in Hong Kong, and 99.9% in Zurich. Those wishing to dispose of rubles do, though, have one notable refuge: ruble trading has grown about 100-fold in the United Arab Emirates — $18 million in 2019, $2.7 billion in 2025 — which now does almost two-thirds of all world ruble trading.

FURTHER READING

BIS’ 2025 Triennial Survey of the $3.5 quadrillion annual, $9.6 trillion daily, world foreign exchange market.

Regulators and sanctions:

The U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority regulates the City of London, the world’s largest currency-exchange center.

Japan’s Finance Ministry imposes new Russia sanctions.

A sanctions brief from the European Council.

And the U.S. Treasury Department monitors dollar exchange rates and explains sanctions on ruble-trading.

And some comparisons:

Then and now: A generation ago, in the last days of the managed-exchange-rate “Bretton Woods System,” currency turnover was a comparatively modest $6 trillion a year, mostly facilitating tourism, debt repayments, and import/export trade. The “floating exchange,” which replaced Bretton Woods, launched in March 1973, has since become the largest market of any sort in human history. The BiS estimates, converted from their “daily turnover” headlines to the annual totals:

2025 $3.502 quadrillion
2022 $2.726 quadrillion
2019 $2.402 quadrillion
2016 $1.849 quadrillion
2010 $1.450 quadrillion
2001 $0.452 quadrillion
1992 $0.298 quadrillion
1970 $0.006 quadrillion

“All the money in the world”: Dividing BiS’s double-entry forex totals in half to make them comparable to trade flows, wealth held in banks and securities, etc., currency trading matches up against world GDP, privately held wealth, circulating money, and goods-services trade like this:

Currency exchange, 2025 $1,750 trillion
Total privately held wealth, 2024  ~$475 trillion
World GDP, 2025    $117 trillion
All physical money in banks, bills, & coins      $50 trillion
All goods/service trade, 2024      $33 trillion
All circulating bills and coins      ~$8 trillion

The WTO’s trade statistics dashboard shows trade in goods at $24.4 trillion last year, and trade in services $8.6 trillion.

The IMF’s World Economic Outlook database has the total global GDP at $117 trillion this year, with the U.S. contributing $30.6 trillion, China $19.4 trillion, the EU $21.2 trillion, Japan $4.3 trillion, the U.K. $4.0 trillion, and all other countries $36 trillion.

UBS’s 2025 Global Wealth Report reviews economic data from 56 countries and territories,* which they believe hold about 92% of all privately held world wealth. (I.e., the value of homes and properties, stocks and bonds, bank deposits, etc., excluding government assets.) They place this total at about $475 trillion, so adding the other 8% would yield a world wealth total of about $515 trillion.

ABOUT ED

Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.

Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.

Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.

Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.

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Testimony: USMCA is Not Broken, Doesn’t Need Major Changes

Posted on by Alyssa Brown

Hearing on Operation of the USMCA (December 3, 2025)

Thank you very much for this opportunity to testify this morning, as the U.S. Trade Representative Office considers the functioning of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement over the past six years in preparation for next July’s scheduled “review.”

By way of introduction, I am Vice President of the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) in Washington, D.C., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit research institution established in 1989, which publishes a wide range of public policy topics. In this position, I oversee PPI’s research and publications on trade and global economy matters. Before joining PPI, I served at USTR from 2015 to 2021 as Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics, with responsibility for overseeing USTR’s economic research and use of trade data, interagency policy coordination, including chairing the interagency Trade Policy Staff Committee, and administration of the Generalized System of Preferences.

The U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, successor to the North American Free Trade Agreement, has been in force since July 1, 2020. As approved by Congress in 2019, its Final Provisions chapter includes a clause directing the U.S., Mexican, and Canadian governments to conduct a “review” after six years — that is, by July 2026 — and decide whether changes to the Agreement might be useful.

Our core view is that USMCA is working reasonably well. It is a very large agreement, spanning many different industries and applying to nearly $2 trillion in U.S. goods and services trade. And like any large human creation, USMCA is by definition imperfect. But it is accomplishing its main goals — facilitating trade in agriculture, services, energy, and manufacturing, helping digital trade channels stay open, encouraging joint work on wildlife trafficking and ocean health, providing Americans with reliable and low-cost consumer goods and industrial supplies, and experimenting with a novel approach to labor issues.

Meanwhile, and quite recently, very large problems unrelated to the agreement have emerged in U.S. trade, generally, and in relations with Canada and Mexico specifically. Since this past February, the Trump administration’s profligate imposition of tariffs, and accompanying threats against Canada and Mexico, have caused a series of genuine crises: damage to the Constitutional separation of powers; erosion of relationships at the core of U.S. national security; and a deteriorating economy as tariffs raise the cost of living for families, sap growth, and diminish the competitiveness of U.S. farming and manufacturing.

The Final Chapter “review” clause entails assessment rather than requiring any particular action. And while in different circumstances it might be useful to look in detail at ways to bring the agreement closer to perfection, in the actual circumstances of 2025 and 2026, policy vis-à-vis Mexico and Canada should focus on ending these self-created crises and mitigating their effects.

If the administration nonetheless wants to proceed with revisions to the agreement, our view is that such a program should come only after three steps:

  • Congressional passage of legislation terminating “emergency” and “national security” tariff decrees under laws like “IEEPA,” “Section 232,” and “Section 301” and requiring votes on any future Presidential imposition of tariffs (or other import limits) with some carefully circumscribed exceptions.
  • Stabilization of North American security by restoring trust, mutual respect, and common interest as the foundation of U.S. policy for America’s neighbors.
  • Restoration of Constitutionally appropriate policymaking, with Congress setting negotiating objectives for any significant changes in USMCA and voting to approve, or not, any resulting accord.

With these done, it would be appropriate, and might be useful, to look closely at the USMCA and see whether broad consensus exists for changes that would improve it. Absent them, we do not believe such a program is currently appropriate.

Read the full testimony.

Brown in The New York Post: Dem-leaning group roasts NY’s green energy law as an ‘undeniable’ failure as customers zapped by soaring costs

Posted on by Alex Terr

The Empire State’s green energy push has been a pie-in-the-sky bust as politicians hit the brakes on their alternate energy goals — and New Yorkers get sticker shock from ever-soaring utility bills, a scathing new report found.

The analysis by the Democratic-leaning think tank the Progressive Policy Institute found a “clear and undeniable pattern of failure” across the most critical mandates of the 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Act.

“New York set bold climate targets, but ignored the economic and technical realities required to achieve them,” said PPI’s report author Neel Brown.

“The result is an energy system that is less reliable, more expensive, and now politically unsustainable. Unless policymakers course correct, the state risks turning a climate leadership story into a cautionary tale,” he added.

Read more in the New York Post. 

EU Space Act Hurts EU and US Space Sectors While Sparing China, New Analysis Finds

Posted on by Alex Terr

WASHINGTON — A new analysis by European Economics, commissioned by the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), finds that the proposed EU Space Act would significantly weaken both the European and American space sectors while leaving China’s rapidly expanding space industry largely unharmed.

The report shows that the initiative would impose substantial new compliance obligations that suppress investment, reduce demand, and undermine innovation across the European market. At the same time, because the United States exports nearly 10 times as many space-related goods to the EU as China does, American firms would face steep new barriers that China would mostly avoid. This analysis supports the arguments presented in PPI’s comments to the European Commission on this initiative, available here.

“This approach harms both sides of the transatlantic partnership just as China is successfully moving toward dominance in space, which has far-reaching implications for broad swaths of modern society,” said Mary Guenther, PPI’s Head of Space Policy. “The EU Space Act burdens Europe’s own companies, hits American firms too, and leaves China with a free pass. That is not a formula for competitiveness or security.”

Key Findings from the European Economics Report:

Effects on the EU space sector

  • Long-term annual investment in the EU space sector would fall by nearly €3.5 billion.
  • Demand for EU space products would decline by roughly 5 percent.
  • R&D spending would fall by 2 to 5 percent as firms scale back amid higher costs.

Effects on the U.S. space sector

  • The compliance burden on U.S. firms, which export almost ten times more space products to the EU than China does, would reduce global competitiveness.
  • Long-term revenue losses for the U.S. space sector could reach €85 million annually.

Effects on China

  • China’s space sector would see minimal impact, despite its state-supported growth and intensifying campaign for global space leadership
  • By imposing costs on European and American firms while sparing Chinese competitors, the initiative creates a strategic imbalance that aids Beijing’s long-term ambitions. This finding aligns with PPI’s April 2025 report on the modern space race between the United States and China, available here.

Guenther added, “Europe has remarkable potential in the space economy, but this proposal adds red tape without delivering clear benefits. The European Commission should go back to the drawing board to develop an approach that strengthens European innovation and competitiveness while preserving cooperation with allies. Instead, the current framework undercuts the West’s shared leadership and creates openings for China that neither side can afford.”

PPI encourages EU policymakers to eliminate technically infeasible or duplicative rules and to avoid measures that function as de facto barriers for trusted foreign partners. A more flexible approach, backed by several member states, would better support investment and competitiveness across the transatlantic space ecosystem. PPI’s full comments to the European Commission on the EU Space Act, which detail these concerns, are available here.

Read and download the report here.

Founded in 1989, PPI is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Find an expert and learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Follow us @PPI. 

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Media Contact: Ian O’Keefe – iokeefe@ppionline.org

Analysis: EU Space Act Weakens Europe and the United States

Posted on by Alex Terr

The European Commission has proposed a new regulation, the EU Space Act, to strengthen safety, resilience, governance, and competitiveness of space activities in the EU market. While the legislation primarily aims to enhance security, sustainability, and regulatory coherence, it also introduces new compliance requirements for firms operating in the European space economy. In its associated impact assessment the EU identifies a range of additional costs imposed on private space businesses across the EU value chain.

This report assesses the economic implications of these measures by exploring the downstream effects of these cost increases on prices, demand, investment activity, research and development, and capital expenditure.

We model these effects not only for individual product segments in the local European space market, but also for US and Chinese exports into the EU.

This report thus provides a first quantitative assessment of how the EU Space Act may affect the competitiveness, investment capacity, and long-term growth prospects of the European space sector, while also quantifying spillover impacts on international exporters to the EU.

The report proceeds in three stages:

  1. We estimate what effects the increases in prices will have on costs, prices, and demanded quantities.
  2. We then estimate how firms will respond to these shifts and what relative effects this will have on profits, investments, research and development spending, and capital expenditure.
  3. Lastly, we map the global space economy and investment activity, to see what the absolute effects in the relevant regions will be in the short- and long-term.

Read the full report.

Jacoby in Joan Esposito Live Local & Progressive: An Update on Ukraine

Posted on by Alex Terr

 

Tamar Jacoby, contributor to Washington Monthly (https://washingtonmonthly.com/author/…)  and the Kyiv-based director of the Progressive Policy Institute’s New Ukraine Project (https://www.progressivepolicy.org/pro…)  and the author of “Displaced: The Ukrainian Refugee Experience.” Her latest article for Washington Monthly is “ Three Lessons From Trump’s Latest Plan for Ukraine (https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/11…) .”