New World screwworms arrived in Texas this summer, for the first time since 1976

THE NUMBERS: U.S. invasive-species agency staffing, in FTEs* –

	FY2025	FY2026	FY2027 request
National Marine Fisheries Service	3,089	2,441	1,806
Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service	8,462	8,189	8,129
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service	8,759	7,784	5,861
U.S. Geological Service	7,718	6,696	4,736
National Park Service	18,541	16,039	13,598

* “Full-time equivalent employees,” the standard measure of agency staffing. Data from agency budget justifications; links below.

WHAT THEY MEAN: 

Since the early-June sighting of a New World screwworm in Zavala, TX — America’s first since 1976 — the bugs have turned up in 16 Texas counties and one New Mexico site. A gross but to-the-point look at this unpleasant insect, from the Centers for Disease Control:

“The New World screwworm (NWS), or Cochliomyia hominivorax, is species of parasitic fly that completes part of its lifecycle by feeding on the tissue or flesh of warm-blooded animals and people. NWS flies are attracted to wounds and body openings like the nose, eyes, ears, and mouth, where they lay eggs. The eggs hatch into maggots (larvae) that eat live tissue, causing a worsening, often painful, and foul-smelling wound.  NWS is typically found in South America and parts of the Caribbean. However, the fly has steadily moved northward from South America through every country in Central America, Mexico, and the United States since 2023.”

Pulling back a bit: If they’re now endemic to the U.S., screwworms would be one among 6,500 “invasive species” resident in North America — that is, animals, plants, fungi, microorganisms, etc., arriving in the continent since European settlement in the 1500s. (The native-species count is about 250,000.) Some invaders — say, feral horses — are benign; some, like indoor centipedes, are harmless even though creepy and annoying. Others, like the Burmese pythons in Florida’s wetlands or Asiatic and European earthworms in the Minnesota woods, pose risk to habitat and native wildlife. And a few, like the zebra mussel in the Great Lakes and the screwworm, threaten the economy, public health, or both.

What can be done about them? Some useful international agreements help stop new ones from getting here. As an example, the 2017 International Ballast Convention requires commercial vessels to ditch ballast water in mid-ocean to prevent transcontinental movements of shallow-water clams, shrimp, mussels, seaweed, and fish.

Extirpating invaders after arrival is much harder. Referring to the tens or even hundreds of thousands of Florida pythons, the U.S. Geological Survey sadly concedes that “the odds of eradicating an introduced population of reptiles once it has spread across a large area are very low.” But “very low’ isn’t the same as “impossible” — the New World screwworm itself, in fact, was once a success story, eliminated from the U.S. in 1966 by the release of sterilized male flies in infested zones. And even if eradication is impossible, “containment” is a lot better than “uncontrolled spread.”

All three options — prevention, eradication, containment — require investment in science and human talent in the field. That’s been the job of a battery of high-performance U.S. scientific agencies — the USGS and the Fish and Wildlife Service on remote lands and waterways; the National Marine Fisheries Service in seaports and coastal waters; the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service at airports and border crossing-points; the National Park Service — who do their best to stop invaders at the border, identify new populations, and slow them down once they’ve arrived.

Disinvestment in science and human talent — the trend of the last two years — means more invaders will get through, fewer new populations will be caught early, and new arrivals will do more harm. The Trump administration’s ill-starred “DOGE” experiment last year cut the combined APHIS, NMFS, USGS, and FWS staff by nearly 5000 (from a base just above 28,000), with an especially high toll on young talent. This year’s parent-agency budgets envision cutting 3,360 more positions. The larger National Park Service is down about 2,000 (from 18,000), and the administration hopes to scrap 2,920 more. Local-level impact ranges from scaled-back inspection of incoming cargo at Los Angeles ports and the proposed cancellation of a planned Illinois barrier against Asian carp entry to Lake Michigan, to closure of a Flathead Valley (Montana) U.S. Geological Survey research program on zebra mussels.

Altogether, the U.S. government has diminished scientific capacity, fewer scientists, and less investment in inspection and infrastructure than it had in the summer of 2024. Budgeting proposals suggest continued DOGE-like staff cuts and general bias against the “discretionary spending” budgets scientific agencies need to fulfil their missions and recruit young talent. Against this backdrop, this summer’s Texas screwworms (like, in similar contexts, Pennsylvania’s measles-associated deaths and the spring’s lettuce-borne Cyclospora outbreak) seem less “an unfortunate specific incident” and more “a sign of what’s to come.”

FURTHER READING

Policy overview:

U.S. government invasive species gateway.

Doing their best in adversity: Invasive species policy summaries from the U.S. Geological Survey, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service, National Park Service, and Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.

The International Maritime Bureau explains the International Ballast Convention.

Screwworms:

From APHIS, a description of the fly & the larval worm.

Via CDC, a map of New World screwworm “infested zones” in Texas.

New Mexico’s Department of Agriculture hopes to stop the spread.

Agency staffing:

Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service: FY2025 and FY2027 budget justifications. This year’s requests is down by 60 staff. (More technically, per typical budget usage, 45 “FTE,” full-time equivalent employees.)

National Marine Fisheries Service: FY2025 and FY2027 budget justifications. The 2027 request is down 635 FTEs.

Fish and Wildlife Service: FY2025 and FY2027 budget justifications, with 484 fewer proposed FTEs.

U.S. Geological Service: FY2025 and FY2027 budget justifications, with 1,960 fewer proposed FTEs.

National Park Service: Budget justifications from FY2010 forward, with a proposed 1,441-FTE cut.

Budget big picture:

U.S. fiscal problems originate in aging, tax policy, health insurance, and interest payments. Less “discretionary” spending cannot solve them. In the specific case of science and medicine, disinvestment in vaccination, food safety, and invasive species control typically brings the opposite fiscal-policy result: tiny savings, then larger remediation bills later on. PPI’s 30-year model budget (2024) explains the looming fiscal crisis and the right way to meet it.

And some more invaders:

Earthworms: The suburban gardener loves to see him/her*; the northern forestry manager reacts with consternation and fear. All earthworms north of the Mason-Dixon line are invaders — the last Ice Age froze off all the locals — and in the woods they’re not benign. From the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources:

“All of the terrestrial earthworms in Minnesota are non-native, invasive species from Europe and Asia.  …  Minnesota’s hardwood forests developed in the absence of earthworms. Without worms, fallen leaves decompose slowly, creating a spongy layer of organic ‘duff’. This duff layer is the natural growing environment for native woodland wildflowers. It also provides habitat for ground-dwelling animals and helps prevent soil erosion. Invading earthworms eat the leaves that create the duff layer and are capable of eliminating it completely. Big trees survive, but many young seedlings perish, along with many ferns and wildflowers.”

The 15 worm species in eastern Canada, New England, New York, and the Midwest, mostly descendants of European worms brought in after the Mayflower landing, are chewing their way through the duff layers of the north woods at about 50 feet per year. The newest, the “Asian jumping worm” (a Korean/Japanese native, present on the West Coast since the 19th century), first turned up in Minnesota in 2006 and reached Wisconsin in 2013. Earthworm basics and advice from Minnesota’s Forestry and Wildlife Extension Service.

* Him/her is the correct pronoun; earthworms are naturally hermaphroditic.

Islands: In Hawaii, 282 of 1100 native species are threatened or endangered.  Hawaii’s Invasive Species Council.

Lakes: Michigan’s Asian carp planning council tries to keep the carp out of the Great Lakes.

Spiders: The University of Georgia tentatively concludes that Joro spiders — very large web-weavers, native to Japan, present in Georgia since 2014 — are proving compatible with local arachnids and insects.

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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The Trump administration should not get new tariff authority

THE NUMBERS: U.S. tariff collection on hockey pads, helmets, sticks, pucks & pads –

2025	$40 million
2024	$8 million

WHAT THEY MEAN: 

Assessing the proposed “Lindsey Graham Sanctioning Russia and Ukraine Act” this week, PPI’s experts — Kyiv-based New Ukraine Project Director Tamar Jacoby, Vice President Ed Gresser, National Security Director Danielle Steitz — encourage its effort to strengthen financial sanctions on Russia and limit the ability of its creaky “shadow” fleet of tankers to ferry oil around the world. By contrast, the three pan its tariff measures. As passed by the Senate early this month, these offer the Trump administration a wholly new power to impose tariffs of up to 100% on goods from an uncertain array of countries involved in buying Russian oil or gas, or in some mostly undefined way helping Russian energy get around existing sanctions. (Some explanation below.) PPI comment:

“The bill’s tariff section is unnecessary — the administration already has sanctions power under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act — and dangerous. Unchecked authority to impose new tariffs on vague grounds, after the administration’s extensive and continuing misuse of laws such as Section 301 and Section 232, poses a high risk that Mr. Trump would use it not to pressure Russia but to further harass America’s neighbors and allies, and impose more costs on the American economy.”

The past week’s experience illustrates the point vividly. For quite unclear reasons, the Trump admin. chose last Thursday to detonate a northern-border crisis with Canada, using a never-tested, 97-year-old Hoover administration law (“Section 338”) to impose 50% tariffs on about $20 billion worth of Canadian goods. Having failed to extract concessions, these are now in effect; Canada’s retaliation, targeting an identical amount of American steel, aluminum, seafood, dairy, appliances, and so on, comes after Labor Day.

Setting aside the unquantifiable but likely high strategic/security/etc. cost of alienating a neighbor, and the moral cost of pointlessly picking a fight with a friend, the purely economic shrapnel will hit home. Higher U.S. tariffs mean Americans will pay higher prices for tariffed goods. Higher Canadian tariffs on American goods, since Canada is usually the top buyer of made-in-America manufactured goods and ranks second for farm products, means Canadians will pay more for American goods, likely buy less of them, and U.S. export industries will struggle. Case in point: Canadians buy half of Maine’s lobster catch each year, about 20,000 tons a year, and Tuesday’s Canadian retaliation means they now have to pay a 25% tariff on each crustacean.

Here’s a less obvious example: hockey parents and high school athletic departments in Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, and other northern tier states should expect some price hikes in hockey gear, and prepare themselves for possible spikes in rink fees. A Hockey News discussion last week is a point of departure:

“New tariffs imposed by American President Donald Trump include hockey sticks and equipment. The result will be members of USA Hockey paying more to play the game, which could slow the sport’s record growth in the USA following double Olympic gold and the PWHL’s [Professional Women’s Hockey League] rise. The new 50% tariffs, which will take effect August 19, just before many hockey teams and leagues begin to hit the ice, will make ice hockey significantly more expensive for youth and families looking to get into the sport in the United States.”

How so? Fitting a teen out for the rink is pricey. Think $200 for skates, $70 for a college-quality carbon-fiber stick, $200 for pads, $100 for gloves, $30 for a bucket of pucks, more for goalies. Rink managers, meanwhile, need expensive machinery to smooth their ice (a Zamboni machine runs from $125,000 to $180,000), keep air circulating at the right temperature, and sharpen players’ skates before games. This means teams have to defray ice-time costs through fees. Maine’s middle-school program charges $345 per player plus $55 for association membership; in Alpena, Michigan,  on Thunder Bay — where median family income is $47,500 — youth hockey fees run from $500 for “mites” to $1,000 for teens.

Under the Congressionally authorized “Harmonized Tariff System”, hockey gear is usually free. Last year’s tariffs on Asian consumer goods (where North American hockey equipment firms like CCM and Bauer do most of their assembly) helped hike equipment prices by about 10%. Canadian gear, still exempted then under the “USMCA” duty-free rules, made up about a fifth of U.S. hockey imports last year. That was $25 million worth of pads, helmets, pucks, and sticks. So at face value, Thursday’s 50% tariff will cost American hockey parents and athletic departments about $12 million. If the crisis escalates to the high-priced products rinks need to run — Zambonis get ambiguous treatment under Mr. Trump’s new tariff order — rink operation costs will spike, ice-time prices will follow them up, and team membership fees will rise with them.

Now back to the Russia sanctions and tariff bill.

As Jacoby, Gresser, and Steitz argue, the proposed sanctions will help, and ought to go ahead. (See Jacoby’s deep-dive piece on sanctions this week in the Washington Monthly.) The bill’s tariff clauses, by contrast, are risky rather than useful. They authorize new tariffs of up to 100% on goods from (a) the top-five buyers of Russian oil, (b) the top-five buyers of Russian gas, and (c) a murkily defined top-five “facilitators of energy sanctions evasion.” Complex accounting for energy purchases, and even less precise definitions of “facilitation,” make this authority easy to redirect onto friends and allies. And as this authority would come as part of a newly passed law, rather than one of the 50-to-100-year-old statutes the administration has exhumed for its tariff decrees to date, any resulting tariffs would likely be legally stronger than those the administration has tried so far.

So: On the tariff matters, the main need is (as Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., have proposed) to impose discipline and restore constitutionally appropriate policymaking, by requiring administrations hoping to impose tariffs to get Congressional votes of approval before they can act. For this particular bill, Congress should at minimum require the same for any use of tariff authority — that is, no tariff would go into effect until Congress had voted to approve it — or scrap the tariff piece altogether.

FURTHER READING

Russia sanctions/tariff bill (1):

Legislation text.

PPI’s Tamar Jacoby, Ed Gresser, and Danielle Steitz approve of new sanctions, pan new tariff authority, and call for speeding up military aid to Ukraine.

And from Kyiv, Jacoby’s in-depth assessment in the Washington Monthly this Monday.

A warning:

Trump admin.’s August tariff decree with 50% tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian-made autos and parts, liquor and beer, hockey equipment, machinery, auto parts, etc. For context, U.S. imports of Canadian goods last year totaled $382 billion. The resource side of the trade relationship — fertilizer and energy — is still mostly exempt, except for wood.

Stunned Hockey News staff and readers assess the impact.

Toronto-based BladeTech Hockey explains why high-performance sticks are so expensive. (TL/DR: “materials, manufacturing complexity, R&D amortization, and 2026 tariff impacts.”)

Canada’s retaliation targets American lobsters, air conditioners, cheese, hand tools, steel and cars.
In Lansing, Gov. Whitmer tallies damage-to-date on Michigan inflation and exports.

Last January’s Canadian Broadcasting Corp. report from a worried U.S.-Canada lobster conference.

And alarmed reactions from the Maine political world.

Sanctions/tariff bill (2):

The bill’s sanctions add Russian officials and enterprises to the lists of individuals and industrial sectors covered by financial sanctions; ban U.S. imports of uranium (but not fertilizer, where U.S. imports are running at $200 million a month this year); and ban investment in Russian energy. It isn’t automatic, though, as the bill also allows administrations to waive any of these sanctions.

The tariff piece ‘authorizes’ tariffs of up to 100% on the five countries topping the lists of buyers of Russian gas and Russian oil, and the five countries contributing most (in some vague and undefined way) to energy sanctions evasion. The top three energy buyers are China, India, and Turkey – a running tally from the Finland-based Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air estimates that these three together account for 70% of Russia’s roughly $250 billion in annual energy sales – but the fourth- and fifth-largest buyers aren’t as easy to identify, especially with separate lists for oil and gas. ‘Sanctions evasion’ is not clearly defined, and could be used to target all sorts of countries.

And recommended reading:

Poland’s Institute for International Affairs has some creative thinking on the “shadow fleet” and energy-sanctions policy.

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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FACT: Internet traffic to reach 10 sextillion bytes next year.

THE NUMBERS: Information content of seven communications forms –

 

One-paragraph plain-text email	2,000 bytes
One-paragraph email with hypertext	30,000 bytes
Voice call	200,000 bytes
Photograph	2 million bytes
TikTok video	8 million bytes
Movie	1 billion bytes

WHAT THEY MEAN: 

How much information moves around the world? And how does it travel?

Vocabulary first: Internet-watchers count information flow in “bytes,” a term invented by IBM’s Werner Buchholz in 1961. One byte is the amount of information necessary to portray a single character on a computer screen. Each byte in turn is made of eight “bits”, referring to the “binary digits” — 1 or 0 — used in computer code. The eight-bit rule isn’t required by math or physics; Buchholz and his associates just thought the 256 possible eight-bit strings, from 00000000 to 11111111, would be enough to represent all the necessary letters, numerals, mathematical notations, currency signs, and other keyboard characters.

Following Buchholz’s lead, experts at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures have fended off an uncontrolled proliferation of zeros and commas by inventing new words every decade or so. “Petabyte” and “exabyte,” referring to quadrillions and quintillions of bytes, date to 1982. “Zettabyte,” meaning a sextillion bytes, debuted in 1991 — three years before the World Wide Web went live — and is now the one-digit way to record Internet data traffic.

Data traffic: The International Telecommunications Union’s estimates of annual data flow — all the information moving around the world, across borders and within countries — from last year to the launch of the Internet:

2025	7.9400000 zettabytes
2020	3.7000000 zettabytes
2015	0.8700000 zettabytes
2010	0.2400000 zettabytes
2005	0.0300000 zettabytes
2000	0.0010000 zettabytes
1990	0.0000002 zettabytes

The jump from 0.000002 zettabytes in 1990 to 7.94 zettabytes in 2025 represents a 40 million-fold increase in information flow — voice calls, videos, Zoom sessions, movie downloads, gaming, texting, etc. — from the first website posting in 1989 to the present, mirrored by a fall in the cost of moving it around.

How did this happen? Mainly by stringing a few hundred wires under the oceans.

Cables: The commonly used stat — submarine fiber-optic cables carry about 95%, or possibly 99% — of all data traffic seems slightly squishy. NOAA is confident about it, but Telegeography traces its last verification to a 2015 FCC report, and at least 10,000 satellites have launched since then. But experts are at least confident that while the decade’s satellite deployment filled in lots of Internet dead spots — deserts, remote rural areas, ships at sea, planes in the air — cables still carry the vast majority of the bytes. Here’s their evolution:

1956: The first transatlantic telephone cable — a copper wire named “TAT-1” — went live two months after Buchholz’s “byte” coinage. (Earlier cables dated back to 1858, but transmitted telegraph and Morse code only.) In modern terms, TAT-1 could handle 2.3 megabits of data per second, or about 300,000 bytes. In human terms, that meant a maximum of 36 simultaneous voice calls. The cable owners, a U.S./British/Canadian consortium, charged $12 for a three-minute call. Median income that year was $2,432, or $6.70 per day, so a short U.S.-U.K. call would have cost a typical person nearly two days’ pay.

1988: A generation later, the first fiber-optic submarine cable (TAT-8) had a capacity of 560 megabits per second — 100 times its copper ancestor — and could manage 40,000 simultaneous voice calls. This one had 29 joint U.S., British, Canadian, and European owners. They charged $1.00 per minute at off-peak times, and $2 at peak.

2000: At the millennium, TeleGeography’s second annual Submarine Cable Map recorded 100 active fiber-optic cables, with the four-cornered U.S.-to-Japan “Pacific Crossing,” able to move 640 gigabits of data per second, the top performer. Though voice calls were no longer the glamor product, Pacific Crossing could theoretically have managed 10 million voice calls. Transatlantic calls cost about 10 cents per minute.

2010: Unity Submarine, also a Japan-to-U.S. cable, had a 7.7 terabyte capacity — another tenfold jump, equivalent to 175 million phone conversations. In that glum financial-crisis year, Telegraphy counted 406 operating fiber-optic cables. The FCC gave up on tracking international phone costs, since so many were free with Internet service.

2026: There are now 694 cables. Anjana, a Spain-to-South Carolina wire supposed to go live this fall, can carry 480 terabits of information per second. This is equivalent to 7.5 billion simultaneous conversations, easily enough to accommodate all the people in the world, if all they wanted to talk at the same time. Average Internet access cost in the U.S. (allowing, more or less, all the calls you want, no matter how long) is about $80 per month or $2.65 per day. For someone earning the U.S.’ median income of $65,050 per year, or $178 per day, that would be about seven minutes’ worth of income.

Two thoughts:

Physical: A 10,000-kilometer trans-Pacific giant with a top-of-the-line 24 fiber pairs typically is about an inch in diameter, weighs about 100,000 tons, and costs a bit above $500 million. A short one, for example one crossing the English Channel to connect London and Paris, would weigh about 80 tons and cost around $50 million.

Content: As the byte-content of emails, voice calls, and videos suggests, the information flowing over cables and down satellite beams is mainly video. Per Satellite Today, YouTube videos take up 13% of fiber-optic cable traffic, Netflix shows 10%, Facebook messaging 6%, TikTok videos 4%, and everything else 67%.

FURTHER READING

Cables & data flow:

Telegeography’s Submarine Cable Map.

And the ITU’s estimates of Internet data traffic.

Policy:

Trade: The Bureau of Economic Analysis reports that in 2025, American exports of information and communications services, plus “digitally deliverable services” such as entertainment, news, telemedicine, architectural plans, and so on, came to $959 billion — a bit less than half of the $2.2 trillion in goods exports, and 3% of U.S. GDP.

Policy and its growth impact: Last year’s OECD/WTO review of digital data flows, their growth effects, and the impact of regulation concludes that the best approach (at least from a GDP growth point of view) is “free flow of data combined with clear regulatory policies.” A hypothetical zero-regulation approach — no privacy rules, no content moderation, etc. — forfeits trust and leads to a loss of 0.9% of world GDP, while an open Internet with generally agreed-upon regulatory principles adds 1.8%. “Geoeconomic fragmentation,” like zero-reg, costs 0.9% of world GDP; “data autarky,” an extreme version of geoeconomics, yields a financial-crisis-style loss of 4.5%.

People:

Also from the International Telecommunications Union, a count of Internet users over time:

2026	6.1 billion, three-quarters of humanity
2020	4.7 billion people
2015	3 billion people, as Chinese access surges
2010	2 billion people
2005	1 billion, with rich-country access above 50% and middle-income rising fast
2000	0.36 billion, mostly in rich countries
1995	0.05 billion people, most in the United States

Words:

The International Bureau of Weights and Measures is responsible for order-of-magnitude prefixes, and has already prepared for the next round. After “zettabytes” come “yottabytes.” The next two, coined in 2022 and available whenever needed, are “ronnabyte” for 1 octillion bytes and “quettabyte” for a nonillion bytes. Both date to 2022. The prefixes apply universally — tons, meters, liters, etc. The mass of the Earth, for example, is 6 zettatons, and that of the solar system two ronnatons. The Milky Way, whose mass is about a trillion times the solar system’s, will have to wait for three more prefixes.

The Poughkeepsie Journal’s 2019 obit of the unassuming Mr. Buchholz — a Holocaust survivor, pioneer of transistor-based computing, and “byte” inventor.

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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FACT: Trump administration trade policies have changed minds

THE NUMBERS: Two polls, a decade apart –

July 2026, The Argument: “[Do you] support or oppose free trade agreements with other countries?”

	Support	Oppose	Unsure
All respondents	71%	16%	13%
Self-identified Democrats	81%	7%	12%

June 2015, Pew Research Center: “Would the Trans-Pacific Partnership be a good thing or a bad thing for our country?

	Support	Oppose	Unsure
All respondents	49%	29%	21%
Self-identified Democrats	51%	26%	22%

WHAT THEY MEAN: 

Surveying trade findings in The Argument’s most recent poll, Center for New Liberalism co-founder Jeremiah Johnson finds a sea-change:

“[T]he political momentum that led to increased support for protectionism has stopped. Trump’s use of tariffs has been so lawless, so haphazardly implemented, and so offensive to so many of America’s traditional allies that the public has clearly turned against tariffs and back toward free trade.”

Some background on the last decade’s shifting tide to put The Argument’s survey in perspective –

Our early-2025 Trade Fact look at polling found about 60% of Americans disliking the Trump administration’s “IEEPA” tariff decrees on sight, while about 38% liked them. A second look last February, as the Supreme Court prepared to scrap that round of decrees, found about the same. The trade polls released this summer (though a bit fewer in number than last year’s) suggest a somewhat worse opinion. (Cross-tabs: Democrats overwhelmingly negative throughout; early Republican support weakened a bit; political independents moving from generally negative with a lot of ‘uncertains’” to very negative.) Two samples:

CBS	“Approve” of tariffs	“Disapprove” of tariffs
July 2026	36%	64%
April 2025	42%	58%

 

Economist	“Approve” of tariffs	“Disapprove” of tariffs
July 2026	29%	58%
April 2025	38%	54%

 

The Argument’s poll adds something new to these findings, since it asks not only about tariffs but about a hypothetical alternative — “Do [you] support or oppose free trade agreements with other countries?” — and finds a significant change.

The last time the U.S. government engaged in that sort of thing — trade liberalization, lower trade barriers — was about a decade ago. Rowing back across the waters to the polling of that era, opinion on trade agreements was generally positive but mixed. The Pew Center’s June 2015 survey of attitudes towards the Obama administration’s Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, for example, got this result:

For the U.S., TPP would be good/bad …	Good	Bad	Unsure/Don’t Know
Total	49%	29%	21%
Democrats	51%	26%	22%
Independents	50%	30%	19%
Republicans	43%	34%	23%

 

So among the Americans of 2015, opposition to TPP was a minority position nationally, especially among self-identified Democrats. But it wasn’t a tiny minority, and influential interest groups and NGOs magnified its concerns (or errors) within the political system.

The Americans of 2026, by contrast, have a decade’s experience with elevated tariffs and “postneoliberalism,” and 18 months’ experience with the Depression-style protectionism of Mr. Trump’s second-term tariff decrees. So they have enough to evaluate these policies’ real-world results, and weigh rising prices against the relatively modest Biden-era claims of supply-chain resilience and manufacturing growth through selected “industrial strategies,” and the Trump administration’s more recent, extravagantly hollow promises of “millions and millions” of assembly-line factory jobs, 6% GDP growth, and a “new golden age.” The experience, at least in The Argument’s poll, seems not only to have turned the public against tariffs but dried up opposition to Obama-style trade liberalization:

“I support/oppose new free trade agreements”	Support	Oppose	Unsure
All respondents	71%	16%	13%
Democrats	81%	7%	12%
Independents	66%	12%	22%
Republicans	65%	20%	15%

 

One obvious qualifier on this: TPP was a real thing with lots of specific features to ponder. (And still is, having gone live in 2018 as the “Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement” for 11 Asia-Pacific countries, and added the United Kingdom in 2024.) The Argument’s question, by contrast, is about hypothetical future FTA possibilities without elaboration. So actual FTAs might elicit some more opposition than this polling shows.

But overall, real-world “lived experience” with tariffs and trade barriers, or more jargon-ishly “postneoliberalism” and “economic nationalism”, seems to have had a powerful effect on public opinion. To the extent there was a modest tide of anti-FTA feeling in the 2010s, it seems to have gone out, leaving a few tidepools but no significant opinion reservoirs. The 2015 plurality support for TPP, meanwhile, now looks close to consensus, with Democratic opposition to trade liberalization nearly evaporated and Republican opposition sharply diminished. And the public generally seems to want something very different from what it’s been getting these last few years.

FURTHER READING

PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:

• Defend the Constitution and oppose rule by decree;
• Connect tariff policy to growth, work, prices and family budgets, and living standards;
• Stand by America’s neighbors and allies;
• Offer a positive alternative.

Then and now:

In 2015, Pew sees plurality support for TPP.

In 2026, The Argument finds consensus support for free trade agreements.

And perspectives on the CPTPP from founders Japan, Singapore, Canada, Australia, and Chile, and new member the United Kingdom.

Also then & now:

Trump admin’s April 2, 2025, tariff decree.

Commerce Sec. Lutnick pledges army of “millions and millions” of assembly-line workers in consumer electronics, and more recently predicts 6% GDP growth.

A year later, BLS finds all job growth at a standstill.

… and their colleagues at the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis report 1.5% GDP growth.

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.

FACT: American young people are exceptionally unhappy.

THE NUMBERS: Americans’ “happiness” ranking, relative to 146 other countries, 2023-2025.*

All Americans               23rd
Americans under 30     60th

* World Happiness Survey 2026

WHAT THEY MEAN: 

Summary paragraph from the Kennedy School’s grim 2026 poll of Americans under 30:

“For many 18- to 29-year-olds, the cost of living — especially inflation and housing — defines what they see as a true crisis, while trust in government, elections, and national leadership remains strikingly low. … A pervasive sense of threat is defining everyday life for young Americans, and they are increasingly losing faith. Young people have consistently felt unheard; now they feel unheard and actively in crisis.”

K-School pollsters aren’t alone. UN and Oxford U. researchers tasked with assessing “happiness” find the same thing. Their “World Happiness Survey 2026” (whose figures cover the years 2023-2025) ranks Americans “23rd most happy” among the 147 countries in the survey. At face value, a boring and mediocre ranking — but it gains some texture when the researchers separate their responses by age: young Americans placed a dismal 60th in the world. The 2024 WHR, though slightly dated, provides more detail. Boomers seem very contented in their retirement (or in some cases near-retirement), while their “Gen Z” children and “Gen Alpha” grandchildren are unhappy. The intervening “millennials” and “Gen-Xers” are in between:

“Boomers,” over 65     10th
“Gen-X,” 45-59            17th
Overall                         23rd
“Millennials,” 30-40      42nd
“Gen-Z,” under 30        62nd

America’s unhappy youth aren’t wholly unique. Similar generation gaps, borrowing a boomer term, show up in most high-income countries, especially though not exclusively English-speaking ones. Canadians, for example, rank 25th for happiness; younger Canadians, though, are a dismal 71st. Much the same in the UK, where Brits in general place 29th, but young Brits only 64th; and while New Zealanders are a cheerful 11th in general, young Kiwis place 54th. Elsewhere, the French rankings are 35th and 65th, Swiss 10th and 44th, and Singaporeans 36th and 69th. So to some extent, youth discontent seems widespread.  Three possible explanations, none mutually exclusive:

Technology? The WHR researchers, noting a general decline in young people’s happiness since their survey’s early years, assign a lot of blame to intensive social media use. This view is widely shared, but can’t be the whole story since young people seem happier in some tech-heavy locales. In very-online Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, WHR’s happiness ratings are about the same for young and old.  And in Central and Eastern Europe, young people are usually happier than their elders and peers. Croatians rank 70th for happiness overall, but 11th in the 25-and-younger tier, and similar “relative happiness” among young people turns up in Montenegro, Albania, Bulgaria, and Ukraine.

Demographics and aging costs? Another explanation, focused on wealthy countries, lies in demographics. Since 2000, the count of Americans 65 and up has nearly doubled from 35 million to 66 million. The under-30 count, meanwhile, is up from 119 million to 126 million — only 7 million in total.  Graying is faster still in Europe and Asia. As countries age, well-intentioned and objectively necessary public policies become increasingly powerful engines for shifting income from young to old: Social Security, government pensions, Medicare, veterans’ benefits, etc., must all serve a growing army of older people, while relying on relatively static younger brigades for the finance. This isn’t a problem with an obvious solution — if governments don’t assume health and pension costs, families will have to pick up the cost instead — but it nonetheless places steadily rising financial pressure on the young.

FURTHER READING

FACT: Canada is the top export market for 27 U.S. states.

THE NUMBERS: Canadian share of U.S. state exports*, 2025 –

Maine	41%
Michigan	39%
Wisconsin	31%

* * U.S. Commerce Department, TradeStats Express database

WHAT THEY MEAN: 

Special note: Beginning in August, Trade Facts will be delivered through PPI’s newly launched Substack, “ Radically Pragmatic.” Trade Fact emails will continue as usual, free and with no solicitations.

The Canadian government’s good-neighbor response to last year’s California wildfire crisis:

FURTHER READING

FACT: Merchant fleet shipping capacity has doubled since 2010.

THE NUMBERS: Deadweight tonnage of worldwide merchant shipping fleet* –

2026	2.53 billion tons
2020	2.07 billion tons
2010	1.28 billion tons
2000	0.79 billion tons
1990	0.63 billion tons

* UNCTADStat

WHAT THEY MEAN: 

Special note: Beginning in August, Trade Facts will be delivered through PPI’s newly launched Substack, “Radically Pragmatic.” Trade Fact emails will continue as usual, free and with no solicitations.

A strange proposal from Mr. Trump last week suggests permanent U.S. Navy policing Strait of Hormuz traffic in exchange for a rakeoff:

FURTHER READING

PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:

• Defend the Constitution and oppose rule by decree;
• Connect tariff policy to growth, work, prices and family budgets, and living standards;
• Stand by America’s neighbors and allies;
• Offer a positive alternative.

PPI’s Director of National Security Policy Danielle Steitz, a Joint Staff and House Armed Services Committee alumna, tracks U.S. military and security policy.Centcom reports on Gulf operations.

The U.S. Naval Institute’s Fleet Tracker tells you, more or less, where the Navy ships are.

Commercial vessels:

UNCTAD’s Review of Maritime Transport summarizes the world’s commercial fleet as of 2025.

… and a one-page data update for 2026.

BRS Shipbrokers tallies shipbuilding orderbooks.

The Hanwha Philly Shipyard, Hanwha Oceans’ joint-build project, hopes to revive U.S. civilian
shipbuilding.

Fishing fleets:

UN FAO tallies on the world fishing fleet – about 4.1 million vessels in total, of which 2.5 million have motors, and 45,000 are large vessels of 100 tons or more.

And the “freedom of navigation” backstory:

19th century: Thomas Jefferson’s spirited response (1807) to the U.K.’s Orders in Council during the Napoleonic Wars; Admiral Mahan argues (1890) for a powerful American fleet, as “the necessity of a navy springs from the existence of a peaceful commerce.”

20th century: The second of Wilson’s Fourteen Points (1918), on encouraging peaceful trade, starts with “absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas”; the Atlantic Charter’s seventh clause (1941) states a right for all to “traverse the high seas and oceans without hindrance.”

21st century: The Navy’s 21st-century “FONOPS” (“Freedom of Navigation Operations”) program asserts the right of passage in tense waters.

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.