Steve Woll

Within about 15 minutes of each other, two related stories popped up on my phone today. In the first was a story about the recent Trump Administration announcement that all grants from the U.S. Government must be approved by a political appointee, presumably to ensure that the grants meet any political party line requirements, rather than be evaluated against any sort of scientific standard. The devasting impact of the Administration's cuts to medical, climate, weather, and other research...

Just finished reading a sobering article about the last 18 months at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). I never really quite understood why DOGE and administration officials would choose emergency response and disaster assistance as a target, but it is clear that they did, unfortunately with long term negative consequences. With the appointment of new DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and the re-nomination of Cameron Hamilton to head...

A story last night on 60 minutes about insider trading on decisions of war and peace using the new generation of prediction markets started a remarkable 24 hour deluge of alarming and depressing information. With that as a scene setter, today we learned that President Trump's stock trading, supposedly in a blind trust, made over 3600 stock trades in the first quarter of 2026, a rate over 300X his historical average. Stocks his account traded in include Palantir (critical to US war efforts in...