Kevin Drum 🕸

I've been wondering when we'd start hearing from RFK Jr. now that he's been confirmed, and it turns out today's the day. First off, he's put a 90-day hold on a new oral COVID vaccine: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has paused a multimillion-dollar contract from the Biden administration to create a new COVID-19 vaccine, Fox ...continue reading "RFK Jr. makes his public debut as HHS secretary. Better watch out."

The Kyiv Independent has obtained the full text of the mineral agreement between Ukraine and the US. My translation: There is a fund. The US share of the fund will be "to the extent permissible under applicable United States laws." Details will come later in a Fund Agreement. The fund will collect money contributed to ...continue reading "The mineral wealth agreement explained! Sort of."

There's still not a lot to report, but I'm much better. The doctors are planning to move me from DOU (extra care) to the regular hospital wing either later today or tomorrow. I'm much more alert and active than I was a week ago. And I've started a light bit of daily physical therapy, which ...continue reading "Health update"

I happened to get curious about the size of SpaceX, which includes Starlink as a subsidiary. Here it is: SpaceX is a private company and doesn't report revenue, so this is a collection of estimates from various analysts and media sources. It's not exact, but it's pretty close.

Issuing a permit is the very first step in residential construction. Everything else follows: After the end of the 2022 housing boom, permit issuing settled in at 1.52 million for a while. Then there was something of a collapse in the winter of last year, and permits ever since have averaged about 50,000 less. In ...continue reading "The new homebuilding market remains stagnant"

The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau was created as part of the Dodd-Frank banking reform law passed after the 2008 financial crisis. It's been a considerable success at . . . protecting consumer finances, claiming billions of dollars in various forms of enforcement action, civil penalties, and consumer savings. Republicans have hated it from the start, ...continue reading "Are payment apps really banks? (Hint: yes they are)"

The Elon Musk email fiasco keeps getting weirder and weirder. After a dozen agencies advised their workers not to respond to Musk's email demanding that they justify their jobs, the White House ultimately backed them up: On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt reiterated to reporters that Cabinet secretaries have discretion over whether their ...continue reading "Elon Musk’s great email battle isn’t over yet"

Still catching up with some stuff. Here's the latest on EV sales: Following the great EV collapse of January 2024, sales resumed their old growth rate. However, sales collapsed once again in January 2025, so we'll have to wait to see how quickly they recover.

I have bad news for egg lovers. The average national price of a dozen eggs is already $5 thanks to avian flu.¹ But now the USDA forecasts a 41% additional increase through the end of the year: A year from now you'll probably be paying $7 for a dozen eggs. ¹And possibly for other less ...continue reading "USDA forecasts egg prices are going up, up, up"

Gallup has added Trump 2.0 to its Presidential Approval Center: They have Trump at a 45% job approval this week.

We have supposedly come to an agreement with Ukraine over its mineral wealth: Under the terms of the agreement, Ukraine would pay some proceeds from future mineral resource development into a fund that would invest in projects in Ukraine.... The size of the U.S.’s stake in the fund and joint ownership deals will be hashed ...continue reading "America wants your minerals"

This is going to sound a little dumb after everything that's gone down, but ..... what is actually the point of DOGE? That is, what does Elon Musk think is the point of DOGE? By now it's obvious that Musk has no actual efficiency agenda on tap. He just waltzes into agencies, targets a few ...continue reading "What is Elon Musk really up to?"

Judges are getting angry. Federal District Judge Amir H. Ali ordered the Trump administration to resume USAID payments and he wants it done: During the contentious, 90-minute hearing, Justice Department lawyer Indraneel Sur told Ali he was “not in a position to answer” whether the Trump administration had taken needed steps to allow the assistance ...continue reading "It’s getting surly in Trump v. Everyone"

While I was snoozing away in the hospital last week I missed the latest Truth Social news. Here's the stock price since Election Day: Odd. This is not how it's supposed to work. Trump is now president, so DJT should be increasing smartly. Right? Sure, except for the fact that the performance of DJT continues ...continue reading "Truth Social continues to suck"

Our hero Mike Johnson is getting ready to vote on a House budget resolution today: Johnson (R-Louisiana) is set to put a budget resolution up for a floor vote Tuesday, but is facing a potential revolt from swing-district Republicans wary of cuts to social safety net benefits and fiscal hawks who say the bill’s $2 ...continue reading "It’s time for the budget games to begin"

Of all the things you don't care about, this might top the list: In the corporate world, commercial paper is a small, short-term loan backed by nothing and used as working capital for things like financing payroll or receivables. In the financial world, money-center banks typically issue commercial paper as working capital to fund short-term ...continue reading "The decline of commercial paper"

Here's a list of court orders that have put a halt to various Trump/DOGE firings and spending cuts. It's by no means comprehensive, just everything I could find at the moment. Its purpose is to show that neither Trump nor DOGE are steamrollers. They've had some wins, but they've had a lot of setbacks too. ...continue reading "Trump has suffered a lot of losses in court"

What a weird story. Last year the Biden State Department approved about $500,000 for EVs as diplomatic shuttles. This is . . . I don't know, maybe a dozen cars? Not very many, anyway, especially for a guy who's famously pro-EV. But NPR reports that shortly after Donald Trump took over, a new line item ...continue reading "The strange, short-lived tale of the armored Teslas"

Here's a chart showing airline fatalities over the past century. In 1980, at about the same time that commercial airlines began hiring Black and women pilots, fatalities began a 30-year decline to zero: This is not a smoking gun. Fatalities likely went down for reasons of their own that were unrelated to civil-rights era hiring ...continue reading "Diversity in the air: Don’t worry, everything is fine"

Last year the Biden administration ordered an investigation of unfair practices by China in the commercial shipbuilding industry. It was finished up and released just as Biden left office in January: The report described a top-down, centrally controlled strategy by Beijing that not only puts the U.S. and other countries in a weak competitive position, ...continue reading "It’s time to screw China a bit more"