The Pentagon's Section 1260H list of Chinese military companies was created under the FY2021 NDAA and has been updated annually across administrations. The January 6–7, 2025 additions of Tencent and CATL occurred under the Biden administration, expanding the list to include major consumer-tech, EV, and biotech firms with thin public evidence of military ties, while removal remains difficult and legally uncertain.
The record
Economy & Tax
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The Federal Reserve's federal funds rate is now at 3.50–3.75% after multiple cuts from the 5.25–5.50% peak in 2023. Yet the Breitbart source reports that fears of layoffs remain elevated, diverging from traditional labor-market indicators. According to BLS JOLTS data, job openings stood at 7.6 million in April 2026, while long-term unemployment (27+ weeks) has risen to 2 million — a 524,000 year-over-year increase. The anxiety likely stems from tariff-driven cost increases in goods-producing sectors and unquantified AI disruption, not from monetary policy. The progressive alternative remains rolling back tariffs and strengthening sectoral bargaining.
OpenAI and Anthropic filed confidential IPOs as of May 22 and June 1, 2026. Without SEC-mandated disclosure of independent safety audits, AI-specific risk factors, and governance safeguards such as dual-class stock terms, retail investors face hidden risks. The SEC has authority under the Securities Act to require these disclosures; Congress could clarify statutory authority if needed.
A House Oversight report alleges billions lost in Minnesota's federally funded social programs, but the largest confirmed fraud—a $250 million scheme tied to a single mastermind—is a fraction of the political claims, and no independent investigation has validated the report's full scale.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani's 2025 victory, powered by young voters and a platform of rent freezes and fare-free buses, shows economic survival wins elections. His critique that Democrats have lost sight of working-class issues is backed by research on youth turnout and by an analysis of the One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act, which offers narrow temporary tax breaks while locking in permanent corporate cuts.
Senator Bernie Sanders plans to introduce the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, imposing a one-time 50% equity tax on OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and other leading AI firms to create a sovereign wealth fund that would distribute dividends to every American citizen.
A narrow GOP bill (HR 1234) would ban congressional insider trading on prediction markets but leaves the broader regulatory vacuum intact. Days before introduction, Arizona AG filed criminal charges against Kalshi (March 17, 2026), and the CFTC's first insider trading charge targeted a U.S. Army soldier on Polymarket (April 23, 2026). CBO has not yet scored HR 1234's enforcement costs.
California's proposed one-time wealth tax on billionaires, projected to raise roughly $100 billion by Fiscal Year 2026 according to the initiative's website and ITEP, would allocate 90% of revenue to healthcare and 10% to food assistance or education. The measure is splitting Big Labor, as some unions (e.g., State Building and Construction Trades Council) worry about enforcement via exit taxes or residency rules, while others (e.g., SEIU California) see it as vital for funding public goods.
The 2025 OASI Trustees Report projects full benefits only until 2033, after which automatic cuts of 23% (CRFB and BPC consensus) would hit. The payroll tax cap at $184,500 in 2026 lets high earners stop contributing in January while workers pay all year. Raising or eliminating the cap is a proven fix, yet Congress let the Republican megabill cut SNAP by 2.5 million people (6 percent, July–December 2025 per CBPP) while skewing tax cuts upward.
USDA confirmed the first U.S. case of New World screwworm in a Texas calf in 60 years, revealing gaps in border biosecurity and biocontrol funding that threaten livestock, wildlife, and public health.
Long-term unemployment is surging 45% above 2019 levels, with over 1.8 million Americans out of work for 27+ weeks, imposing severe wage scarring and economic drag that policies focused on headline unemployment rates miss.
The chapter argues further negotiations with China are fruitless and dangerous, urging blanket tariffs, de minimis closure, procurement bans, and financial disengagement to decouple economically. These measures risk regressive consumer price spikes, supply shocks for essential goods (e.g., electronics, medicines), and diplomatic breakdown without guaranteed labor or environmental gains—yet the chapter omits the costs to U.S. households and workers. (Source: Chapter 26, pp 820-822; PIIE on Phase One shortfall; EO on de minimis closure, 2025; Rethink Trade on USMCA job trends)
The SpaceX IPO, as disclosed in its S-1 filing with the SEC, reveals a dual-class voting structure giving insiders 85.1% of voting power and a mandatory arbitration clause barring retail shareholders from suing in court. The valuation is tied to AI ambitions—including the February 2026 acquisition of xAI—but the prospectus shows the company is not profitable, with $18.674 billion in 2025 revenue and a $2.589 billion loss.
Project 2025 proposes tariffs and decoupling from China as an 'existential threat' response, but its sole reliance on trade barriers—without enforceable labor or environmental standards—risks repeating the failed pattern of protectionism without pro-worker policy. The Section 301 tariffs on China, with proposed escalations in 2025, are estimated by Yale Budget Lab to reduce U.S. real GDP growth by -0.5pp in 2025 and -0.9pp in the long run, while alienating allies and leaving workers without the union rights needed to share in any gains.
Project 2025's trade chapter champions the United States Reciprocal Trade Act (USRTA) to replace WTO MFN tariffs with reciprocal tariffs, framing Chinese practices as 'economic aggression'—yet it proposes no enforceable labor or environmental standards in U.S. trade policy. The April 2025 executive order partially implements this vision, but the approach risks higher consumer prices and geopolitical backlash while ignoring the race-to-the-bottom that fair-trade standards would address.
Project 2025 proposed a unilateral U.S. Reciprocal Trade Act (USRTA) to match partner tariffs — projecting $70.6B and $25.3B deficit reductions with China and the EU. The USRTA was never enacted; the Trump administration instead pursued ad hoc tariffs via IEEPA and negotiated a July 2025 US-EU framework. Manufacturing employment declined after reciprocal tariff announcements in April 2025 (source: WCVB report, Feb. 2026), exposing the real cost of tariff-first policy without labor safeguards.
Project 2025’s endorsement of the USRTA promotes reciprocal tariffs as a job-creation mechanism, but independent analyses show negligible trade-balance effects and GDP losses. The proposal omits enforceable labor and environmental standards, risking a race-to-the-bottom that harms the very workers it purports to help.
Project 2025 proposes eliminating the Federal Reserve's dual mandate (maximum employment and price stability), limiting its lender-of-last-resort function, and winding down its balance sheet. These changes would subordinate full employment to inflation control, remove a crisis backstop for the financial system, and accelerate already-ongoing quantitative tightening, with distributive consequences falling disproportionately on workers, low-income households, and small businesses.
Project 2025 frames the Export-Import Bank as an 'asymmetrical warfare tool' against China, ignoring its current profit-generating, deficit-reducing, job-supporting model. While EXIM already operates effectively, this framing risks tilting its mission toward riskier, geopolitically motivated subsidies that would shift costs onto taxpayers and favor large corporations at the expense of small exporters.
Project 2025's EXIM chapter actually counsels against weaponizing the bank for China competition, calling such attempts 'going to fail' (p. 724). Yet the proposal omits distributive safeguards: it risks concentrating subsidies among large exporters like Boeing, ignores domestic-content or union-wage conditions, and fails to pair reauthorization with tax or anti-money-laundering reforms. An economic-democracy alternative would require binding small-business set-asides and a financial-transactions tax.
The Project 2025 trade chapter, authored by Peter Navarro, correctly identifies the trade deficit and Chinese industrial policy as problems but prescribes unilateral tariffs and WTO MFN reform without enforceable labor and environmental standards. The result: manufacturing job losses and higher consumer prices, while the underlying race-to-the-bottom dynamics remain untouched.
Project 2025 proposes abolishing the Export-Import Bank (EXIM), claiming it subsidizes large corporations. In reality, EXIM's small-business financing supports U.S. manufacturers that rely on export credit to compete globally; eliminating it through legislation or defunding would cede market share to foreign export credit agencies, harm small exporters, and eliminate a program that the Congressional Budget Office scored as generating net revenue of $55 million in FY2024.
Project 2025 proposes eliminating or severely curtailing the Export-Import Bank (EXIM), arguing its subsidies merely redistribute jobs and don't boost net exports. As of this writing, no such action has been taken; EXIM continues operations with bipartisan support and a functional board quorum.
Project 2025's SBA agenda would create a 'medium-sized business' classification, freeze the SBA budget, and support the Fair and Open Competition Act (FOCA) and expanded SBREFA panels—moves that structurally advantage large firms, weaken worker protections in federal contracting, and reduce accountability. The SBA's March 2025 reorganization partially aligns with these goals, but the most consequential legislative proposals remain unenacted.
Project 2025's Treasury chapter proposes gutting FinCEN, rolling back Dodd-Frank, and defunding IRS enforcement—moves that have been partially enacted via executive disavowal of the OECD global tax deal (Jan 2025) and House rescission attempts against IRS funding. The distributive consequence: reduced tax compliance on high-income evaders and weakened anti-kleptocracy tools, benefiting wealthy tax avoiders and illicit finance operators at the expense of public revenue and financial integrity.
Project 2025 proposes moving the SBA disaster loan program to another agency or private sector, which would undermine a key safety net for homeowners and small farmers. The same blueprint seeks to gut religious and other eligibility protections, while expanding SBA 7(a) loan guarantees to $50 million for advanced manufacturing—a move that benefits large firms, not the small businesses the agency is meant to serve.
The reframe sources the $3 trillion revenue claim to Senator Warren's campaign page (elizabethwarren.com), but the entry should explicitly note that this is Warren's estimate, not an official CBO score. The two-cent surcharge on fortunes over $50 million is a distinct proposal from the Treasury's billionaires income tax.
Project 2025 proposes repealing Dodd-Frank Titles I (FSOC), II (Orderly Liquidation Authority), and VIII (financial market utilities oversight). As of mid-2025, these are legislative proposals with no active congressional action, not enacted law.
Project 2025's Trade chapter (pp 775-776) is composed almost entirely of endnotes promoting Federal Reserve deregulation, free-banking theory, and a return to the gold standard, citing libertarian monetary scholars and containing zero substantive trade policy proposals. The absence of any mention of enforceable labor standards, supply-chain traceability, or the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act reveals that the chapter's purpose is to advance a deregulatory monetary agenda, not to craft fair trade policy.
Project 2025's Treasury and Fed proposals—withdrawing from the IMF/World Bank, making budget-balance the Treasury's mission while cutting spending and not raising taxes, issuing 50-year bonds to lock in low rates, eliminating the Fed's dual mandate, and loading CFIUS with Pentagon co-chair authority—are all still on paper as of late 2025. They would dismantle full-employment policy, concentrate financial power, weaponize foreign aid as unilateral leverage, and leave workers and small businesses exposed to the next downturn.
Project 2025's Treasury chapter aims to hollow out the IRS by freezing its budget, blocking information reporting, and politicizing career staff — but several of these cuts have already been enacted, including an $80 billion IRA clawback and cancellation of the Direct File pilot, while the IRS workforce has been slashed by 30,000 since 2025.
Project 2025, via its 'Mandate for Leadership' chapter 26, proposes dismantling the Federal Reserve's lender-of-last-resort function through a free-banking system, restoring a gold standard, or adopting a K-Percent Rule—each a radical reordering of U.S. monetary policy that would prioritize financial-sector deregulation over worker protections and systemic stability. None of these proposals have been enacted.
Project 2025 proposes eliminating the Federal Reserve's full-employment mandate, replacing it with a single-minded focus on price stability, and explores a return to the gold standard or a 'free banking' system — a radical deregulation that would hand monetary policy to private banks. None of these proposals have been enacted as of this writing.
Project 2025 proposes gutting FEC enforcement powers, eliminating disclosure requirements for dark money, and weakening campaign finance laws that protect election integrity.
Project 2025 calls for banning the Fed from buying mortgage-backed securities, winding down its balance sheet to pre-2008 levels, and eliminating interest on reserves. These proposals would remove the backstop that stabilizes mortgage rates, raise borrowing costs for everyone, and hand credit allocation entirely to Wall Street.
Project 2025 proposes permanent baby-formula tariff liberalization and mutual-recognition agreements—a plan that would lock in a race to the bottom on safety standards and repeat the 2022 shortage's failures. The real lesson of the formula crisis is that regulatory concentration, not tariffs alone, created the single-point-of-failure. Separately, the CFPB freeze and recidivist-list rollback (already in motion) are distinct threats. This frame focuses on the trade proposal; a separate entry will cover the CFPB actions.
Project 2025 proposes reducing the Federal Trade Commission's independence, narrowing merger guidelines to a short-run price standard, and slashing enforcement resources—reversing the revived antitrust approach of 2021–2024 and entrenching the failed consumer-welfare standard that enabled decades of consolidation.
Shark Tank investor Kevin O'Leary's Stratos Project in Box Elder County—a 40,000-acre, 9-gigawatt AI data center larger than Manhattan—has ignited public revolt over its massive energy and water demands, prompting Utah to tighten rules after residents feared it would drain the Great Salt Lake and strain the grid.
Project 2025 proposes to shrink, commercialize, or effectively eliminate the Export-Import Bank — the U.S. agency that finances exports and competes with China’s state-backed export credit agencies. Without a strong Ex-Im Bank, U.S. workers lose leverage for enforceable labor and environmental standards, while foreign rivals fill the gap with no strings attached.
Project 2025's NTIA chapter would steer federal broadband grants primarily to 5G deployment in rural and exurban areas, deprioritize fiber-optic buildout, press platforms on free speech, fast-track commercial spectrum leasing, and review FirstNet—risking a digital divide that leaves underserved communities with second-class connectivity. Under the Trump administration (inaugurated Jan 20, 2025), these proposals have not been executed but remain active blueprints for future executive action.
Project 2025's trade chapter focuses on tariffs and WTO reform, not consumer protection. Yet the agenda it helped shape is already executing CFPB freeze, open-banking rescission, and junk-fee repeal — actions that transfer billions from consumers to banks.
Project 2025 calls for abolishing the CFPB, claiming it is unconstitutional—a claim the Supreme Court rejected 7-2 in May 2024. While that legal avenue is closed, the plan’s legislative proposals to gut the agency, repeal Section 1071, and hamstring enforcement remain live threats to workers and consumers.
Project 2025 proposes to strip SEC oversight of most digital assets, weaken self-regulatory organization (SRO) accountability, and dismantle the CFPB — actions that would shield crypto and fintech firms from meaningful enforcement, expose investors to fraud, and eliminate the primary consumer protection agency for financial products.
Project 2025's chapter on the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) proposes shifting the agency's mission from business development to 'policy analysis on the evils of socialism and Communism,' while maintaining that MBDA should prioritize 'private sector action over government action.' Although Congress made MBDA permanent in 2021, the proposal could reshape its budget and staffing through appropriations riders or executive orders tied to the Under Secretary's agenda.
A small number of wealthy individuals exploit Roth IRAs—designed for middle-class retirement savings—by contributing private founder shares at near-zero valuation, sheltering billions tax-free. Congress has drafted reform but failed to enact it.
A reported plan to allocate up to 30% of SpaceX's IPO to retail investors—three times the typical 5–10%—is paired with a dual-class voting structure giving insiders 10 votes per share, as reported by Reuters via Motley Fool and Yahoo Finance. This governance imbalance lets insiders extract wealth from retail shareholders, who pay a premium for economic exposure without meaningful control. The April 2024 Macquarie decision eliminated private lawsuits for pure omissions but left SEC enforcement intact, making strict accuracy of any affirmative statements in the prospectus—especially about 'democratizing access'—critical to protecting retail investors.
Democrats' democracy-defense messaging must be paired with tangible economic policies to resonate with voters facing high costs of living; recent Fox News polling from January 2025 shows 72% of voters rate economic conditions negatively, and 90% of them are concerned about prices, creating an opening for proposals like the Congressional Progressive Caucus's New Affordability Agenda.
SpaceX's IPO structure allows insiders to sell shares early via a staggered unlock tied to performance, while passive S&P 500 index funds may be forced to buy ~19% of the public float within six months, insulating early investors from market discipline and raising structural anticompetitive risks for ordinary retirement savers.
SpaceX's IPO structure gives Elon Musk and insiders 10-vote-per-share Class B shares, mandatory arbitration, and restrictions on shareholder proposals — a rigged system that prioritizes insider control over public investor democracy. Texas corporate law is noted in the filing, though its specific link to shielding Musk from activist scrutiny is not confirmed in the source.
The SpaceX IPO, while massive, is structured to enrich insiders and Elon Musk, with an astronomical valuation built on speculative AI revenue rather than current space operations profits, leaving retail investors vulnerable to severe volatility and capital loss.
SEC enforcement actions fell to 456 in FY2025—the lowest in at least 20 years, a 22% decline per Sidley Austin's analysis—while the CFPB formally withdrew its proposed data broker rule via Federal Register notice on May 15, 2025. These moves align with Project 2025's blueprint and directly affect retail investors and consumer privacy, but the draft needs a sourced dollar figure or household impact count.
Flying Goat Cellars, represented by the Goldwater Institute, sues Santa Barbara County over a mandatory 1% assessment on direct-to-consumer wine sales that funds the Santa Barbara County Vintners Association, arguing it violates constitutional protections against compelled speech and association.
Manufacturers have engineered a 'captive repair economy' through parts pairing, software locks, and DMCA overreach — a structural monopoly that extracts costs disproportionately from lower-income households and crushes independent repair shops. State legislatures are now the primary battleground, with 25.75% of Americans covered by enforceable law as of January 1, 2026, rising to at least 35% when Connecticut and Texas rules take effect; federal action has repeatedly collapsed under industry pressure.
EO 14388 continues the suspension of the duty-free de minimis exemption under 19 U.S.C. 1321(a)(2)(C) for all countries and all shipment modes, directing CBP to collect duties on every low-value international shipment regardless of origin, value, or transport method, invoking IEEPA national emergency authority.
Project 2025 proposes centralizing trade and economic policy under direct presidential control by purging advisory committees and career economists, threatening labor protections, democratic accountability, and evidence-based policymaking.