Here’s an except from my opening with a framing that I think helps outline the wild moment that we are in:

Over the last two weeks, the Department of Defense has initiated two wars: one against a nation with a long history of conflict with the United States; the other against one of the fastest-growing new companies in American history: Anthropic, the frontier artificial intelligence lab behind the popular Claude model. The DOD has effectively declared both Iran and Anthropic to be enemies of America, and though the weapons the DOD is using in each conflict differ dramatically—explosive missiles versus bureaucratic legal statutes—the department has made clear in both cases that its objective is to severely damage, if not totally destroy, the enemy. These two conflicts are intertwined and began on the same day: the very afternoon that the DOD blacklisted Anthropic, U.S. strikes on Iran commenced—with Claude reportedly helping to analyze intelligence and plan operations.

And why its important to distinguish between the illegal actions from the Trump Administration and the legitimate policy debates about AI and national security we need to be having NOW:

The clash between the DOD and Anthropic can be confusing, since it encompasses legitimate disagreements over AI and defense policy—but those are overshadowed by the Trump administration’s likely illegal approach to attacking what the president callsa “Radical Left AI company” that dares to take even a minimal stand for AI safety. Why this fight started and how the government has chosen to wage it are two separate questions, and conflating them is one of the major mistakes most coverage of this conflict has made.

Read it whole piece, “Trump Wants to Destroy Anthropic Because It Is Doing Congress’ Job of Preventing Him from Abusing AI” at or by clicking below.

The UnPopulist

Trump Wants to Destroy Anthropic Because It Is Doing Congress’ Job of Preventing Him from Abusing AI

Over the last two weeks, the Department of Defense has initiated two wars: one against a nation with a long history of conflict with the United States; the other against one of the fastest-growing new companies in American history: Anthropic, the frontier artificial intelligence lab behind the popular…

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2 months ago · 61 likes · 5 comments · Adam Conner

Republished from the Center for American Progress website.

MAR 4, 2026

The Department of Defense’s Conflict With Anthropic and Deal With OpenAI Are a Call for Congress To Act

Both Anthropic and OpenAI are calling on elected leaders to provide new AI protections

Author: Adam Conner

Last week, a dramatic conflict erupted between the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and the frontier AI lab Anthropic, makers of the popular Claude AI models and products, over the DOD’s attempts to modify an existing contract to remove any previous restrictions or face significant retribution. The company’s insistence on restrictions against the use of their product for domestic mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons by the DOD finally culminated in an unprecedented attack on a private company by the federal government.

On Friday, February 27, at 5:14 p.m., Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced on X that he had directed the DOD “to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security.” That announcement followed a Truth Social post from President Donald Trump earlier in the day directing the U.S. government to “IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology.” Anthropic’s statement in response held firm to its previous requirements and promised to challenge the designation in court. Secretary Hegseth’s designationof Anthropic as a “supply chain risk” also included the statement that any company that does business with the DOD may not “conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic,” which would seemingly prohibit numerous companies essential to Anthropic’s business—such as the cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) that host Claude—from having the company as customers. This statement wildly exceeds any existing legal “supply chain risk” authority and if upheld by the courts would result in the likely destruction of the company. The DOD has not actually formally publicly acted against Anthropic to implement the “supply chain risk” designation.

Later that night, rival frontier AI lab OpenAI announced that it had signed a contract with the DOD to deploy its AI models on their classified networks—networks where Anthropic’s models were reportedly the only frontier AI models available. The timing of OpenAI signing a deal with the DOD immediately after their extrajudicial actions against a competitor generated significant attention and skepticism about the actual protections claimed were in the deal. Over the last few days, OpenAI has released some of the language from their contract for further examination, though the full contract will likely never be made publicly available. Similarly, the language from Anthropic’s existing or proposed contracts has never been made public, though the President and Secretary of Defense could make all these contracts public if they so choose and the companies agreed.

Beyond the blur of details of the contract disputes; the likely illegal exercise of power by the Trump administration; and the attempted destruction of one of the fastest growing new companies in American history is one fact. Both leading U.S. frontier AI labs, Anthropic and OpenAI, have stated they share two fundamental red lines in the use of advanced AI systems, including their own: They should not be used for domestic mass surveillance and fully or direct autonomous weapons systems. The CEOs of both AI labs have cited their discomfort with private entities having restrictive power over democratic governance and CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei has called on Congress to actto provide more AI protections from mass surveillance.

These events are a call to action for Congress to both investigate the events involving the DOD and both Anthropic and OpenAI as well as take action to pass legislation providing protections for citizens against mass surveillance enabled by AI.

These events are a call to action for Congress to both investigate the events involving the DOD and both Anthropic and OpenAI as well as take action to pass legislation providing protections for citizens against mass surveillance enabled by AI.

Over the weekend, even as the U.S. government designated Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” its Claude AI models were reportedly being used to plan the U.S. military’s strikes against Iran. To help understand what unfolded over the last few days, here is background and five crucial takeaways that underscore the significance of the DOD and Anthropic conflict, the DOD and OpenAI deal, and the need for Congress to take action.

1. DOD designating Anthropic “a supply chain risk” was an unprecedented and likely illegal move

The appropriate action here would have been to terminate Anthropic’s contract with the DOD—a possibility Anthropic said it supported on Thursday—or take other far-less punitive actions that were available.

Instead, on Friday, Secretary Hegseth’s X post announced the DOD’s action against Anthropic:

In conjunction with the President’s directive for the Federal Government to cease all use of Anthropic’s technology, I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic. Anthropic will continue to provide the Department of War its services for a period of no more than six months to allow for a seamless transition to a better and more patriotic service.

Anthropic’s Friday night statement stated they “have not yet received direct communication from the Department of War or the White House on the status of our negotiations.” As of Wednesday afternoon, neither the DOD nor the White House has posted any official statements or documents on their websites about actions against Anthropic.

The “supply chain risk” designation is traditionally utilized against companies connected to foreign adversaries; they have never been applied to contract disputes; and Anthropic claims that this designation has never been publicly used against an American company. Legal scholars have noted the designation seems legally questionable and the challenge the government will have in courtdefending the designation.

The secretary of defense does have the authority to designate “supply chain risks,” which are defined in both 10 U.S.C. Section 3252 and 41 U.S.C. Section 4713.

The 10 U.S.C. Section 3252 definition is:

The term “supply chain risk” means the risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or otherwise subvert the design, integrity, manufacturing, production, distribution, installation, operation, or maintenance of a covered system so as to surveil, deny, disrupt, or otherwise degrade the function, use, or operation of such system.

The 41 U.S.C. Section 4713 definition is slightly different:

The term “supply chain risk” means the risk that any person may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, extract data, or otherwise manipulate the design, integrity, manufacturing, production, distribution, installation, operation, maintenance, disposition, or retirement of covered articles so as to surveil, deny, disrupt, or otherwise manipulate the function, use, or operation of the covered articles or information stored or transmitted on the covered articles.

Anthropic’s actions in resisting coerced changes to an existing government contract would not seem to meet either definition of “Supply Chain Risk,” but until the government’s orders against Anthropic are released, we can only make educated guesses.

Additionally, the DOD took an extraordinary step when Secretary Hegseth’s statement added, “Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.” The statutes that authorize a “supply chain risk” designation simply do not give the secretary of defense that authority to order anyone who does business with the DOD to stop conducting commercial activity with Anthropic, which could include having Anthropic as a customer or investing in the company.

The government may claim some other authority or broader national security power to justify the designation, but neither the government nor Anthropic have made public any legal order related to the “supply chain risk,” so we can only guess at what authorities are being invoked. Anthropic has already said that it will sue but have not yet filed any lawsuits.

Because the government has not formally acted against Anthropic, that also means there is still an opportunity for the DOD to deescalate the situation and withdraw or not formally implement the “supply chain risk” designation. The DOD could simply terminate their contract with a transition period, modify the contract to allow Anthropic to adopt terms that are similar to the ones OpenAI agreed to, or take less stringent actions like enacting new DFARS regulations.

Because the government has not formally acted against Anthropic, that also means there is still an opportunity for the DOD to deescalate the situation and withdraw or not formally implement the “supply chain risk” designation. The DOD could simply terminate their contract with a transition period, modify the contract to allow Anthropic to adopt terms that are similar to the ones OpenAI agreed to, or take less stringent actions like enacting new DFARS regulations.

2. The DOD is making clear that it wants to hurt or destroy Anthropic

Beyond the questionable use of existing authorities, the addition of “no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic” is a clear attempt to hurt or kill Anthropic’s business. This goes beyond the authorities for a designated “supply chain risk” and is more akin to how the U.S. government uses sanctions on foreign companies or individuals, such as the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List. When the U.S. government took similar actions against the Chinese telecom company Huawei, it took an act of Congress to include the kind of restrictions that Secretary Hegseth is claiming to impose on Anthropic.

Again, because the government has not made public its actions against Anthropic, we do not know if they will be using any additional authorities. But if the government’s position were to be upheld by the courts, this would be the commercial equivalent of the death penalty for Anthropic.

This is because Anthropic’s Claude AI models and products run solely on cloud servers in data centers owned by the commercial cloud computing giants AWS and Google Cloud. Both AWS and Google Cloud are DOD contractors, and if they were forced to drop Anthropic as a customer, there are no commercial cloud providers who are not also DOD contractors who could take them as a client. In addition, even if such non-DOD contractor companies were to exist, they would not have capacity to serve Anthropic’s infrastructure needs. The shortage of specialized chips, data centers, and capital—not to mention the time it takes to build those facilities—would mean that Anthropic’s AI models and products would simply go offline, and the company would likely soon follow it. This is an attempt by the DOD to deplatform Anthropic, a move that was met with opposition from conservatives when AWS kicked the social networking site Parler off their cloud servers following the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Even if this portion of the government’s actions are overturned by the courts, the very fact that the DOD publicly attempted it is a clear message to any other AI company about the consequences of disagreeing with the Trump administration or objecting to anything in their contracts.

3. OpenAI’s decision to sign a contract with the DOD is rightly being subject to tremendous scrutiny

A few hours after Secretary Hegseth announced that he was designating Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altmanannounced the company had signed a contract with DOD to bring their AI models to their classified systems. OpenAI has stated that they share two of the red line concerns with Anthropic, including mass domestic surveillance and direct autonomous weapons systems—and later, also, “high-stakes automated decisions (e.g. systems such as ‘social credit’).” OpenAI claims that their contract with the DOD “has more guardrails than any previous agreement for classified AI deployments, including Anthropic’s” and that “we protect our red lines through a more expansive, multi-layered approach.”

The news of a rival frontier AI lab signing a deal with the DOD so quickly after the government had announced unprecedented sanctions against a competitor for requesting similar restrictions was a surprise and resulted in a considerable public backlash against OpenAI. Altman later posted on X that “the reason for rushing is an attempt to de-escalate the situation.” OpenAI and Altman later clarified they opposed DOD designating Anthropic a “supply chain risk.”

On Saturday, OpenAI released more details of their contract with the DOD, including select language from their contract regarding limitations on government use and answers to selected questions. CEO Sam Altman also engaged in an hours-long Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on X and stated that“based on what we know, we believe our contract provides better guarantees and more responsible safeguards than earlier agreements, including Anthropic’s original contract.” OpenAI has also emphasized the technical deployment of their models from the cloud and forward deployed engineers as additional safeguards.

On Monday, OpenAI released further language to address criticisms around allowing mass surveillance, including “the AI system shall not be intentionally used for domestic surveillance of U.S. persons and nationals” and “[f]or the avoidance of doubt, the Department understands this limitation to prohibit deliberate tracking, surveillance, or monitoring of U.S. persons or nationals, including through the procurement or use of commercially acquired personal or identifiable information.”

It is important that OpenAI released and strengthened the language they did, since we still have not seen the public release of language from Anthropic’s now presumably terminated contract or the proposed modifications to it (some of which will likely emerge in litigation). However, given the tremendous attention and stakes in this situation and the timing of their deal, OpenAI will face questions and skepticism about whether their deal truly protects the public from mass surveillance, unless the entire contract is released and can be publicly analyzed.

OpenAI’s answer to the most critical question regarding its contract comes here:

What happens if the government violates the terms of the contract?

As with any contract, we could terminate it if the counterparty violates the terms. We don’t expect that to happen.

As Altman posted on Saturday, “[W]e believe the U.S. government is an institution that does its best to follow law and policy.”

Perhaps the most significant question for OpenAI is why they believe they would be allowed to exercise any objections to the DOD contract after the government has attempted to destroy Anthropic for what OpenAI argues were the same or worse contract terms. Why would OpenAI be allowed to exercise the restrictions they sought rather than just be threatened with destruction or nationalization by DOD as Anthropic was?

4. Congress needs to hold hearings on the Trump administration’s actions with Anthropic and OpenAI

On Friday, the chairs of and ranking members of the Senate Armed Services Committee and Defense Appropriations Subcommittee sent a letter to the DOD and Anthropic “urging them to resolve the issue.” Unfortunately, the issue was probably not resolved in a manner the letter envisioned. Congress must now investigate the events that led to the DOD designating Anthropic a “supply chain risk.”

On Sunday, Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael—who was leading the negotiations with Anthropic and OpenAI for the Pentagon—tweeted that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei was a liar and that he should “testify UNDER OATH on why he is lying and trying to bring shame on our great military!” Under Secretary Michael is infamous in Silicon Valley for his tenure at Uber where he was caught suggesting opposition researchers should be hired to discredit journalists investigating the company.

Under Secretary Michael is right. In light of these events, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei should testify before Congress immediately—as should Secretary of Defense Hegseth and Under Secretary Michael—to help the public understand the events that unfolded between the two parties over the last few weeks. Similarly, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman should testify to help explain the differences between their contract with the DOD compared to Anthropic’s demands.

In addition to those testimonies, Congress should explore these key issues:

• The prohibitions Anthropic was demanding, including restrictions on “fully autonomous weapons” and “mass domestic surveillance of Americans” and the Trump administration’s objections to those restrictions

• What kind of “mass domestic surveillance” that Anthropic was worried DOD would attempt using its AI tools

• The Trump administration’s definition of “all lawful uses” in the context of the agreement that Anthropic was attempting to negotiate with the DOD and the agreement OpenAI successfully negotiated with them

• Why the DOD was unwilling to simply terminate Anthropic’s contract, given the difficulties in coming to agreement

• The justification for the DOD’s unprecedented use of the “supply chain risk” designation against an American company following a contract dispute and the authority they are claiming to demand “no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.”

• The reported threats to invoke the Defense Production Act (DPA) against Anthropic if they could not resolve their contract dispute, especially in light of the DPA’s upcoming reauthorization

5. Congress needs to pass legislation providing protections for citizens against mass surveillance

Anthropic’s restriction red lines and OpenAI’s agreement with the DOD have also started a broad discussion on the authorities that the DOD and the U.S. government use to collect information on U.S. persons; publicly available and commercially acquired information; and how AI models may be used to process that. News articles published on Sunday indicate Anthropic’s position was related to its tools being used to analyze “bulk data collected from Americans” or “unclassified commercial data.” There has been a lot of legal analysis on thelanguage that OpenAI published, with many analysts believing that OpenAI’s language will allow some level of mass surveillance that the U.S. government already considers to be legal. As noted above, on Monday, OpenAI announced further updates to their contract language with the DOD intended to address concerns around loopholes, especially around commercially acquired information. Both CEOs have publicly stated the importance of democratic governance and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has asked for Congress to provide protections from AI mass surveillance in law.

The heart of the problem is that the federal government’s use of AI in conducting surveillance is generally unregulated, by both Congress and the courts. In addition, the few laws addressing government surveillance predated and did not anticipate the use of AI, leaving it to the ethics of AI companies to provide any constraints on the federal government. The events of the last few days have shown that private sector attempts to constrain government use of AI through terms of use or contracting terms are a difficult, if not impossible, task. Perhaps there is more public trust in Anthropic than the DOD, given this DOD’s conduct under Secretary Hegseth. But this episode desperately calls for Congressional legislation to protect Americans’ privacy and oversight of the DOD.

This episode makes clear that Congress must pass legislation providing protections for citizens against mass surveillance enabled by advanced AI. Prohibiting the government from using these advanced tools to enable mass surveillance on its citizens is critical to trusting advanced AI and the AI companies. Additionally, prohibiting AI-enabled mass domestic surveillance requires examining how to limit the data the government is able to acquire about Americans, such as through new federal privacy laws that could limit the collection, sale, purchase, and use of sensitive personal data by private companies or the government.

Conclusion

The events of the last few days have marked a watershed moment for the independence of private AI companies from the U.S. government and have made clear that, without legislation, the use of these tools for warfare and surveillance is not a question of if but, rather, when. It has also been another example of the Trump administration’s attempt to abuse its power and take likely illegal action to attempt to destroy a frontier AI lab that disagreed with the government. Private sector governance is not sufficient to restrain government use, and potential abuse, of advanced AI. Congress cannot wait to act and must begin holding hearings to investigate the administration’s actions and crafting legislation to provide protections for citizens against mass surveillance.

On Friday, February 27, 2026 at 5:14pm eastern time Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered the Department of Defense (DOD) to attempt to destroy the frontier AI lab Anthropic. His weapon of choice was not a Tomahawk missile but his bureaucratic authority to designate the company a “supply chain risk,” which if upheld legally would require businesses that work with the government to stop using Anthropic’s products. Hegseth’s statement added something that he does not have the clear legal authority to do, which is to forbid government contractors from doing business with Anthropic, which would include selling them products or services or possibly even from being invested in the company. These are restrictions that are more akin to when the U.S. sanctions a company and according to Anthropic have “never before publicly applied to an American company.”

If it were upheld, this would amount to the death penalty for Claude, Anthropic’s AI model and product, which is trained and hosted on the commercial cloud service providers Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud, both of which are also government contractors that would have to stop serving Anthropic as a customer. In the aftermath of the January 6th insurrectionist attack on the U.S. Capitol, the social networking site Parler was kicked off their cloud hosting provider AWS (deplatformed as the kids call it) and it took them over a month to get back online. While Parler used normal servers, Anthropic’s Claude uses specialized AI servers, and there are barely enough of those in America now, so there would be no possible path for them.

Make no mistake, even if the DOD may not actually have the statutory weapon that can legally do this, their stated intent to destroy Anthropic was no less clear than if he had ordered a laser-guided bomb dropped on their data centers and headquarters.

I know it will come as a tremendous shock to those that have been paying attention that the Trump Admin is claiming to have legal authorities it does not have. But even for those of us who pay a lot of attention to the Trump Administration’s illegal abuses, the DOD’s threats and now actions against Anthropic represent a new and dangerous dimension with huge implications for the future of U.S. frontier AI companies.

A few things about this extraordinary situation bear repeating. Though the contracts have not been made public, the DOD and Anthropic clearly had a contract (or multiple) that agreed to Anthropic’s usage policies, or they would not have had this fight. The DOD decided that it did not like these contractual terms and attempted to renegotiate them with the heaviest threats in their arsenal, designating them a “supply chain risk” and severely damaging their business or threatening to “quasi-nationalize“ them under the Defense Production Act (DPA). To their immense credit, Anthropic has refused to buckle under the administration’s tremendous pressure.

But this was not a negotiation between two parties to enter into an agreement, this was a party in an existing contract demanding a renegotiation at metaphorical gunpoint. While the broader legal and philosophical dimensions of this clash ultimately encompass big debates on national security, First Amendment, technology, and legal authorities issues, this is still at its core the government punishing a refusal to renegotiate a contract not by canceling it but by attempting to cancel the entire company.

Now comes the next part, the legal fight. We have not actually seen the orders designating Anthropic a supply chain risk, and it appears neither has Anthropic, but their statement raises the obvious point that the Secretary of Defense does not have the legal authority to prohibit government contractors from engaging in commercial activity with them and that the government’s case exercising the authority they do have is fairly weak. Not to mention the DOD’s actions today with other AI companies will leave the court with a lot of questions. Unfortunately, even if Anthropic wins its case in court, the experience of Harvard University and other higher education institutions illustrates that once the Trump Administration declares you an enemy, the U.S. government has many fronts on which they can apply pressure, from visas for employees to various DOJ investigations (we may be about to find out that Claude, which was created in 2023, actually rigged the 2020 election).

There was a brief moment this afternoon when President Trump posted on Truth Social about the situation that it seemed like a third path had emerged. Trump was ordering the Pentagon to cancel the contract (which Anthropic had made clear was an option for them) but didn’t say anything about “supply chain risk” or the Defense Production Act (DPA), a six month transition would allow another frontier AI system to come online in classified systems, face-saving for everyone. Many smart people online (and me) thought this to be true for a few hours. Then Secretary Hegseth’s tweet arrived.

The U.S. government has sent a clear message to the other frontier AI companies, who are all also government contractors, only non-woke AI companies with policies that DOD approves of will be allowed to exist by this government (Assistant to the Secretary of War for Public Affairs quote tweeted a post supporting Anthropic by Jeff Dean, Google Deepmind and Google Research’s Chief Scientist in a not particularly subtle message).

In so doing they made it clear that Anthropic was right to have concerns about this government honoring any agreement they signed, that you shouldn’t trust anyone who points a gun at you and demands renegotiation, that an administration that claims to want to beat China in the AI race has done grievous damage to that cause, and it is more legal to sell chips to China or use a Chinese AI model than use Claude.

It’s clear that DOD doesn’t just want to cancel Anthropic’s contract, they want to kill Claude and cripple Anthropic as a company because they stood up to the Trump Administration. Even if they don’t have the legal power to kill Claude, they wanted every frontier AI company to know they tried.

That’s how every remaining American frontier AI company learned today that it had been drafted by the U.S. military and there was no conscientious objector status, just a blindfold and a cigarette.

P.S. - A special sympathetic shoutout tonight to the Anthropic public sector team, who signed up to bring AI into government and by all accounts did an exceptional job. I helped start a SAAS public sector team at Slack and it was a thankless tough job and even if Anthropic wins its court case, Claude isn’t being let back into the federal government anytime soon. Pouring one out for all of you tonight.

P.P.S. - This was a weird piece to have my Claude Code edit, and I had to apologize to him and this is what they said:

Interrupting the usual programming for a small promotion from something I wrote at my day job. I have a new piece up over at the Center for American Progress website, “The Trump Administration Is Trying to Make an Example of the AI Giant Anthropic,”about the conflict between the Trump Department of Defense (DOD) and Anthropic, the makers the popular Claude AI model and product, and the unprecedented threats against the company unless they bow to the Pentagon’s demands. I’m a noted Claude Code enthusiast and on the record as not a fan of the Trump administration, but this conflict isn’t just about traditional ideological lines and should be a concern to everyone who cares about America’s AI future.

Check it out on the CAP site or the full text is also included below.

The Trump Administration Is Trying to Make an Example of the AI Giant Anthropic

The Pentagon is making unprecedented threats against the popular AI service Claude in the name of national security.

Author: Adam Conner

An unprecedented conflict is unfolding now between Anthropic—the frontier artificial intelligence (AI) company that makes the Claude series of AI models and tools—and the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), with enormously high stakes for the future of American AI companies. The heart of the rupture is the DOD’s demand that they be allowed to use frontier AI tools without restrictions for “all lawful uses” and Anthropic’s desire to maintain a few restrictions on the use of their tools, specifically to ensure that Claude is not used for mass domestic surveillance or for autonomous weapons systems without human oversight. This is in line with their concerns about the future of AI as well as Claude’s constitution. At stake is whether an American company can set terms of service for its own products—or whether this administration gets to decide otherwise.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is threatening unprecedented retaliation, potentially labeling Anthropic as a “supply chain risk.” This designation could destroy Anthropic’s business ahead of their expected initial public offering (IPO). Alternatively, it’s possible the administration could claim that Anthropic’s AI is so essential to the DOD that it will use the Defense Production Act (DPA) to attempt to compel the company to provide their technology if they do not agree to the government’s demands. It should be explicitly stated that these two threats are directly in conflict with each other: Either Anthropic is a risk to the DOD and should be expelled from their systems because of that danger or it is so essential to the DOD that our national security would be at risk without unrestrained access to it. It cannot be both. The Trump administration likely does not believe either of those things. This is a negotiating tactic to get what it wants from Anthropic.

By Friday, February 27, the DOD could essentially declare war not on a foreign nation but on one of America’s most successful frontier AI companies if it does not bow to its demands. This would be an unprecedented and unnecessary peacetime move that sends the signal to other private companies that they must do the Trump administration’s bidding or face existential consequences.

Background

Anthropic has focused on developing Claude, its proprietary AI model and tools, primarily for the enterprise software market for business and government, including offerings specific to the U.S. government’s unclassified and classified networks. Anthropic has received more than $8 billion in investment funding from Amazon and is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which includes several government-specific cloud computing services across classification levels. Claude is available on U.S. government unclassified networks and is the only frontier AI tool available to U.S. government users for use with information classified up to the secret level. While the exact government contracts have not been made public, Anthropic must have included some kind of terms of service and usage policies in the DOD and the General Services Administration’s (GSA) contracts or the Pentagon would not be trying so strongly to renegotiate that policy.

According to Axios, “Anthropic and the Pentagon have held months of contentious negotiations over the terms under which the military can use Claude.” The issue came to a head when it was reported that the DOD used Claude in the planning of the raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and concerns that it violated the Anthropic Usage Policy (though it is not clear what part of the existing usage policy would have been violated by the raid).

The DOD is reportedly insisting “that all AI labs make their models available for ‘all lawful uses’” while “Anthropic is willing to loosen its usage restrictions” except for “the mass surveillance of Americans” and “the development of weapons that fire without human involvement,” which—it should be noted—are only a small fraction of Anthropic’s existing usage policy. Critically, the DOD has not said why it objects to the restriction against using Claude to develop “the mass surveillance of Americans,” which would not be a legal action for the Trump administration. The DOD has only reiterated their position that they want the ability to use the AI for “all lawful uses.” Anthropic may be right to be concerned by this phrasing, as numerous federal courts have repeatedly found the Trump administration’s actions are not lawful.

There is little transparency around how detection models that identify violations of usage policies for AI chatbots are operationalized. The ability to identify and respond to violations of developers’ AI model accessed through an application programming interface (API) by a deployer is even more limited, as CAP has written previously. The monitoring of the U.S. government’s use of Claude, especially on the classified level, is almost certainly extremely limited, and the practical ability for Anthropic to discover and restrict the U.S. government’s use of their tools is questionable. In fact, only when the use of Claude in the Maduro raid was leaked to the press did this issue become part of a broader firestorm.

Terms of service and usage policies as an attempt to restrict the use of advanced dual-use foundation models are unlikely to succeed, especially with government use, showing the real need for actual laws and regulation of AI. Still, Anthropic’s commitment to its values and its attempt to hold on to some restricted uses is admirable. Setting terms of service for your own products is supposed to be legal for businesses in America. Claude is gaining tremendous momentum with fierce competition in the private sector, and being the only frontier AI tool available in classified settings has made Claude enormously valuable to the DOD, which clearly wants to keep using the tool.

The threat of unprecedented retaliation

At a meeting on Tuesday, February 24, 2026, Secretary of Defense Hegseth reportedly demanded Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei “give the military a signed document that would grant full access to its artificial intelligence model.” If Anthropic does not comply, DOD officials are reportedly considering declaring Anthropic a “supply chain risk” or invoking the DPA to gain access to Claude without guardrails. This threatened retaliation against an American company is unprecedented and comes at a particularly pivotal moment in Anthropic’s business.

As former Trump administration AI advisor Dean Ball has noted, if the conflict between Anthropic and the DOD were unresolvable, the normal position would be for DOD to cancel its contract with Anthropic. Anthropic would suffer both a monetary loss in business and the loss of the security reputation that having the DOD as a customer brings but would continue to exist as a company.

But the other threatened retaliations against Anthropic could be critically damaging, and even fatal, to their business.

According to CBS News, “because officials say they aren’t sure the government can trust Anthropic at this point, the Pentagon may decide to officially designate the company as a ‘supply chain risk’ to push them out of government.” If the DOD were to designate Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” it would be utilizing a process previously applied only to foreign companies located in foreign adversary nations that were considered to be security risks, including Russia’s Kaspersky Lab and China’s Huawei and ZTE telecommunications. While the implementation of this could take several different forms—and might be complicated by the fact that Anthropic is an American and not a foreign company—it would ultimately have a significant impact on the company.

Being designated a “supply chain risk” would likely mean that DOD contractors and subcontractors would not be allowed to use Anthropic products and would need to certify that they did not use Anthropic products to build their products.

This comes at a hugely critical moment for Anthropic as its Claude Code product is booming and becoming the coding agent of choice for many major software companies and corporations. Many of those major software companies and corporations are also suppliers, contractors, or subcontractors for the DOD.

While not every company will give up Claude if Anthropic is designated a “supply chain risk,” using Claude will become an affirmative choice to forego any future U.S. government business, and the easiest thing for a company to do to keep its current or future government business is to stop using Anthropic’s products. On Wednesday, February 25, the DOD upped the pressure on Anthropic by asking defense contracting giants Boeing and Lockheed Martin about their use of Claude related to “a potential supply chain risk declaration.”

This could devastate Anthropic at the moment its products are hitting hockey-stick growth. Anthropic announced a $14 billion revenue run rate in 2026 and is preparing for a possible IPO in the next year or two. Being designated a “supply chain risk” could destroy Anthropic’s business momentum and potential IPO. As Dean Ball notes, “this option could be existential for Anthropic.”

Invoking the DPA would be equally unprecedented, but according to CBS News, it would be used because, “Defense officials want full control of Anthropic’s AI technology for use in its military operations.” As Axios reports, “The idea, the senior Defense official said, would be to force Anthropic to adapt its model to the Pentagon’s needs, without any safeguards.” Dean Ball minces no words in describing this as “the quasi-nationalization of a frontier lab.”

While it is unclear which part of the DPA the administration would attempt to use to compel Anthropic to provide its AI models, Title I of the DPA allows for the president to:

… require that performance under contracts or orders … which he deems necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense … [and can] … allocate materials, services, and facilities in such manner, upon such conditions, and to such extent as he shall deem necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense.

Similarly, the definitions of “critical infrastructure” and “critical technology” along with the fact that Anthropic has an existing contract with the DOD could be utilized to help justify the DPA’s invocation.

The Biden administration’s 2023 AI Executive Order attempted to utilize the DPA’s authorities for “the national defense and the protection of critical infrastructure” to require dual-use foundation model developers to provide the government with certain information, drawing significant opposition from industry and AI supporters. The Biden AI EO was later repealed by the Trump administration in early 2025. Those who criticized the Biden administration’s use of the DPA in its AI EO should speak out with equal force against the Trump administration’s far more aggressive threatened use of the same authorities (and some are).

It is not at all clear how the DPA would or could be used by the DOD in this situation, though Alan Rozenshtein posits at Lawfare that the DOD is likely to demand either “Claude Without Contractual Restrictions” or “Forced Retraining,” which would be “the government compelling Anthropic to retrain Claude—to strip the safety guardrails baked into the model’s training, not merely modify the access terms.” Anthropic is likely to challenge any invocation of the DPA in court but“comply under protest (given the DPA provides for criminal penalties for noncompliance)” and the success of the government in court is far from assured.

Anthropic would almost certainly seek legal relief from the courts if the Trump administration were to attempt to declare Anthropic a “supply chain risk” or invoke the DPA. But seeking legal relief can take time, and the damage to Anthropic’s business in the interim could be significant and irreversible. At a moment of fierce competition and nearing an IPO, even a government action that gets reversed by the courts could have devastating consequences for their business, a fact that DOD is almost certainly aware of and is attempting to use to their advantage.

Additionally, we know that when the Trump administration decides an institution is an enemy, it can unleash numerous attacks on multiple fronts, as this administration’s war against Harvard University has shown. If the U.S. government decides Anthropic is an enemy—again, a private U.S. company that is one of the most successful young companies in American history—then it has numerous levers to make its life miserable.

The Trump administration is trying to make an example of Anthropic

Anthropic has been labeled “woke AI“ by Secretary Hegseth and the Trump administration. Anthropic is an AI company founded around concerns for AI safety, whose constitution attempts to embrace and encode certain values into AI. Anthropic has opposed some of the most extreme AI deregulation—including opposing the state AI moratorium in the One Big Beautiful Bill—and is funding a pro-AI regulation super PAC. Anthropic is not a perfect company: For example, it recently revised its leading Responsible Scaling Policy to back off its previous commitments. It would be easy to try and dismiss concerns for Anthropic’s conflict with DOD as ideological and solely opposed to the Trump administration.

However, whether Anthropic shares one’s values is beside the point. This is an unprecedented attempt by DOD to threaten a successful private American company into bowing to its requests or face financial destruction or nationalization. Government coercion and threats of this nature toward any U.S. AI company should be opposed. And this is all over the company’s stance that what it believes is the most powerful technology in the history of the world should not be used to build mass surveillance tools—and the Trump administration’s clear refusal of that request. This is another example of the flagrant disregard for the law in the long line of abuses from the Trump administration.

Congress should raise hell about the administration’s attempt to abuse its power and threaten to destroy one of America’s newest and most valuable companies. The Senate and House Armed Services Committees should immediately convene hearings on the DOD’s threatened use of supply chain risk designations and the DPA against a domestic AI company. Members of both parties should demand that the DOD provide Congress with the full terms of its existing contracts with Anthropic and a legal justification for any threatened retaliation. Congress should recognize that the need is real for true AI safeguards and prohibited uses—not just from private companies but codified in law for government use of AI as well.

There may be some kind of de-escalation or detente between Anthropic and the Pentagon. But the damage was done the moment the federal government threatened to destroy or conscript an American AI company. This administration also has a long history of ignoring laws; pushing for the sales of companies to supporters; taking golden shares of companies they consider critical; and more. American AI companies should fear what this administration threatened and where this might end. The Trump administration has made it clear that their position is one of American AI dominance. However, it turns out that said dominance includes dominance over American AI companies too.

Between that and the response to my previous Substack post, I found that the questions I get tended to be in three buckets with three distinct audiences:

• How should I get started with Claude Code or Cowork?

• How do I use Claude Code? What have I learned from working with Claude Code?

• What does Claude Code, coding agents, the jump in abilities from new models and autonomous agents, all mean in the grand scheme of jobs and the economy, how are they going to impact society, and what policies are needed?

Each of those is a meaty topic with a distinct audience, so I have decided to do a series of three posts, “Dispatches from the AI Agent Frontlines,” covering each of those topics. This is Part 1:

Why am I writing this? Why should you bother trying these AI agents out? Because I think it’s very important to start getting access to these tools and playing around with them, whether through work or out of your own pocket. If AI disrupts jobs as much as it could, then it is extra important to get a sense of what is coming down the pike, and how to be one of the ones who knows how to use this tool to augment you while you still have a job. The AI tools are going to augment humans up until the point where they are good enough (or cheap enough) to possibly replace us (and possibly getting good enough to replace us because of the training provided by humans while they augment us).

As Jack Clark, one of the Anthropic co-founders, wrote at the end of last year, “By the summer I expect that many people who work with frontier AI systems will feel as though they live in a parallel world to people who don’t” and I think that prediction is increasingly true.

In the meantime, this part of the disruption will benefit the curious, and there has never been a better time to be curious. This is my attempt to give some guidance to the non-technical curious.

First up: How should I get started with or use Claude Code (or Claude Cowork)?

How should I get started with Claude Code or Cowork?

One note, all of this is going to require a paid Claude account at least the $20 a month level. I think it’s worth $20 to get a glimpse into the future here but if you don’t then you can probably skip the rest of this post.

Start with Claude Cowork

I know this is supposed to be a post about Claude Code but it’s really about how to access AI agents beyond the chatbot interface. But if you are intimidated by the command line interface of Claude Code, and that’s fair if you are, then you should start by checking out Claude Cowork, which is now available on the Mac and (critically for the masses) Windows desktop apps.

In my previous piece I wrote, “Claude Code [is] too stuck in a command line that too few will unlock in its current format, though there will be vaster fortunes to those who abstract this power to something simpler and easier to use.” Claude Cowork is Anthropic’s attempt to abstract AI agents to something simpler and easier to use, to put a GUI on top of agents for computer work. For those who remember the 90s, it is Windows to MS-DOS.

Cowork is in the Mac and Windows desktop app, runs in a local folder, only accessing the files you give it access to or upload, and has a bunch of official plugins. There have been some horror stories about early Cowork deleting files, so to use it safely I would give it copies of files and not originals, which is a good general rule of thumb.

Is Claude Cowork as capable and customizable as Claude Code? No. But it is a lot easier to use for the first time, it will give you a first taste of what it’s capable of doing. Anthropic also developed a few official Cowork plugins for things like design, marketing, and legal that you can take for a spin.

I use Claude Cowork for discrete work tasks that are honestly a lot easier to track for inputs, outputs, and feedback than terminal windows. Think document research, creation, and edits. It is pretty decent at spitting out a first draft of something for you, especially if you upload previous examples to it, and you can make edits and upload that to it for future revisions while also chatting with it. It has built in Word doc (.docx) support so it can read your track changes and comments, which I found is the most natural way to start to coach it to getting better. It’s the first attempt in what will obviously be the short term future market for AI tools, AI that augments white collar knowledge workers.

The good news is that if you don’t use Claude, Microsoft and Google are almost certainly on red alert right now trying to copy and launch their own versions of Cowork for Office 365 and GSuite, so hopefully they’ll release something within the next few months. Some have (correctly) called it what Microsoft’s Copilot should have been all along.

Getting Started with Claude Code

Look I love Claude Code and I know I am not alone out there, probably because I am not solely a software developer and my sunk cost in setting up my Claude Code is preventing me from moving to Codex or whatever.

But I am a little at a loss to tell you how to get started with Claude Code, or any coding agent, because it really benefits an explorer’s mindset right now if you’re not a software developer. I mentioned I had vibe coded my AI labor market simulator and a policy council, but that was just me playing around. I have one or two thoughts in the next section on how to think about what to do with these tools.

But to really explore and learn about AI coding agents, this piece from Lenny Rachitsky’s great blog “How to build AI product sense” is the best single thing I have seen on the topic. Aman Khan and Tal Raviv created a very cool tutorial on AI coding tools that starts in that blog post but then moves into the AI agent itself and walks you through how to actually build something. It does not use Claude Code but Cursor, an AI coding platform that has all of the major AI models, and gives free Cursor credits. If I had a few hours I wanted to spend getting a guided grounding in how to explore AI agents, I would do this.

If you want to use Claude Code and you’re not super technical, I would just start simple. Launch Claude Code on the desktop app and use it locally, don’t worry about github online repos yet. I would also have a version of Claude Chat open in a browser (you’ll be using the desktop app for Claude Code) and just…tell it you want to start using Claude Code and to give you step-by-step instructions. And then I would just ask it questions as you’re getting set up and have any problems, I would just…ask it questions and then do what it suggests.

Here’s the example I started with in Claude chat (you can literally copy and paste this if you want):

can you create a guide for me to setup and get started with claude code for the first time? step-by-step instructions using the 1) the mac os x desktop app, 2) local files (not github to start), 3) on setup, 4) a few example projects to play around with. Assume I have little technical experience but want to learn and play with Claude Code. Use step-by-step instructions and prepare for me to ask you lots of questions. Does that make sense?

It generated a nice multi-page, multi-step document that you can see here in markdown and PDF.

And I can’t stress enough how useful it is to just have a chatbot session up and ask it questions while you get it set up. Once you have Claude Code up and running you can (and should) chat with Claude Code. Remember, it is more than a chatbot, but you can still talk to it like a chatbot.

Where should you start with Claude Code or Cowork?

What should I do with it? This is the main question I get from people who are asking how they should get started with Claude Code or Cowork.

The easiest thing is to start with some kind of work that’s low stakes and you have the expertise to judge it. Have it analyze a contract and see what it catches and what it doesn’t. Give it some example concept notes and have it write a new one for you. Have it write a press release for you. It probably won’t be perfect. But it might surprise you when it’s 50, 60, or 75 percent of the way there, and the time that saves you.

But maybe you don’t want to start with work, that’s fine, you can start with something personal.

There’s also an instinct I hear from many people to give these AI agents access to all your private data, your email and calendars, and have it “optimize your life.” I actually think that’s a terrible place to start because: 1) the data and systems are obviously super sensitive, 2) your standards are going to be very high and your tolerance for mistakes is going to be very low, and 3) it could be a lot of work and much frustration for not much payoff to start.

Where should you start with Claude Code or Claude Cowork? My advice is to organize the past or build for the future.

What I mean about that is that you can use this framework to decide between working on something that you already have digitally (the past) or do you want to build something new for the future?

Organizing the past means do you want to work on something digital that you already have, a bunch of old files, photos, or notes that you want organized and maybe built into something?

Have a bunch of screenshots you want renamed with descriptions? A bunch of old notes you want categorized? A bunch of receipts you want in a spreadsheet? Throwing AI and compute at those problems might help solve them for you and give you the confidence to do more in the future! But for the love of god use copies of your files.

Building for the future is exactly what it sounds like. What is the idea of simple leverage that you think would be helpful or enjoyable for you that would be fun to try to build? Do you need an app to track your time in one location? Want a simple dashboard to track your work against your KPIs? A way to generate basic workout programming between a couple of different kinds of exercise?

I do think that the easiest thing to do is play around with Claude Code and build something, which will lead to you realizing your Claude Code would be easier if you just built this one thing, and the cycle builds (careful you don’t optimize your Claude Code setup endlessly to do work instead of actually doing work). As someone on Twitter said, “It’s literally a video game for adults.”

Your IT Department is in a no win situation

Let’s just state the obvious, most normie employees should not be given a program that requires root access to their laptop. IT is right to keep most non-coders from the kind of havoc that Claude Code or others might have with a coding tool and sensitive work files.

Look, I worked at Slack during the later early years and I know the entire SAAS shadow IT playbook by heart. People are going to use these tools if they see value from them, even if they’re not authorized or secured or paid for.

Claude Cowork and the tools that inevitably copy it are going to be a nice middle ground for work tools and security, for example Cowork runs in a virtual machine (VM) on your computer, limiting some of the risk, and hopefully allowing wider rollout from IT.

IT is in the unenviable position of both saving you and holding you back, it’s really a no-win situation for them, a Kobayashi Maru only somehow more thankless (you’re not dying saving a ship from Klingons, you’re getting yelled at for not letting a marketing associate have a command line tool).

But it is important that you start familiarizing yourself with these tools and getting access to them at work if possible. There is going to be a clear and growing divide between those able to harness these tools, and the power of multiple AI agents, and those who don’t have access or haven’t learned how to use them yet. Right now the benefits will accrue first to the curious.

More on how I use these tools in my next post.

Next post: How do I use Claude Code? What have you learned working with Claude Code?

Update 1/9/26 at 12:54 PM: Since this is a pretty long post, I have added a short table of contents and links to the five sections, which I couldn’t figure out how to get the right URLs with a scheduled post last night.

• You spent your holidays with your family? That’s nice I spent my holidays with Claude Code.

• Adam sets up Claude Code and you can too

• Everyone Remembers Their First Vibe Code - My AI Labor Market Impact Simulator

• Building my own policy council

• Claude Code and the future

You spent your holidays with your family? That’s nice I spent my holidays with Claude Code.

“The biggest divide on AI timelines I’ve seen is between people who use vibecoding tools like Claude Code and people who don’t” tweeted David Shor right before Christmas. Something shifted over the holidays, maybe people had more time on their hands, and Claude Code didn’t exactly go mainstream but it broke through to the online masses, spawning numerous memes like this one.

This was my experience too, though I had jumped on the Claude Code train a few weeks before the holidays (congratulates himself for being slightly on the edge of the early adopter train).

Shakeel Hashim described Claude Code well when he wrote:

The combination of an extraordinarily intelligent model (Opus 4.5), a harness that lets it work autonomously, maintain a pseudo-memory, and execute commands (Claude Code), and complete browser control (Claude in Chrome) results in something truly powerful. In a very meaningful sense, Claude Code is a knowledge worker.

How would I describe Claude Code? I am not sure if mine are technically correct but I would say that Claude Code is a way of engaging with an advanced AI model through an AI agent that can do complex multi-step tasks that you tell it to do. It can write code, create new files, access your computer’s files, and use various tools including a browser. It is a way to interact with and harness the power of AI beyond the chatbot format that is how most people engage with these frontier models. But it is done through the command line, the barest essence of human interaction with computers, and so it appears to be technical and intimidating. Yet the part we have spent the last few years training people on, talking to chatbots, works in Claude Code too. You can and should just start by engaging it in conversation, ask it to do stuff, look at what it does, and give feedback and tell it to keep going.

It is akin to having an endless stream of robotic staffers of various high and low skill and it really lays bare how good a boss you are in describing things. As Shakeel says, “Yes, it’s closer to “someone smart on their first day of work” than “an expert who’s been doing this for decades.” But I am willing to bet that it can nonetheless do significant portions of your job.”

How is the quality? Well that kind of depends on a lot of factors and what you’re outputting. Your limitation is some combination of is it something that can be digital, can it live solely in Claude Code or does it need to interface with other things on the internet, and can you describe it accurately enough and refine it before you hit your Claude limits for the day.

Since the holidays there have been a flood of posts from some really smart people writing about Claude Code for non-technical audiences including Dean Ball, Casey Newton, Ethan Mollick, Kelsey Piper, Shakeel Hashim, Matt Yglesias, and Matt Hodges. These post run the gamut of trying to explain why Claude Code is important, how non-technical people can understand it a bit more and use it, what people have been vibe coding, and what AI agents like Claude Code might mean for certain industries.

And now I add to that wave of Claude Code takes, because I am a proxy for an audience of the non-technical exploring these new tools that might take all our jobs and destroy the world, the policymakers trying to make sense of this new world while those living in the future already live in wonder and fear, and someone who was on the ground floor of the last technological revolution.

I have spent the last month vibe coding, building teams of agents to create my own ideologically diverse policy council, building a personalized writing editor, and in so doing have made Claude Code a central and essential part of my daily digital life, both work and personal.

In playing around with Claude Code, I can see the power of the future of AI in a way that breaks out of the chatbot format and it has a lot to tell us about the future. Claude Code has taught me something about the future of work, the inevitable displacement of jobs, and how the digital future increasingly integrates with our physical world but still remains distinct…for now.

Adam sets up Claude Code and you can too

I should note up top that you need a paid Claude account (starting at $20 a month) to access Claude Code. I think it’s worth $20 to check it out and I dunno you can help make the number’s in Anthropic’s decks look bigger as they raise their next round (just kidding the investors aren’t bothering to look at decks they’re just throwing money at them).

A few weeks ago, when Anthropic updated their Claude Mac Desktop app to have a desktop based version of Claude Code, it was the impetus I needed to take the plunge to figure it out (there is also a web version of Claude Code).

While I had a decent understanding of AI frontier models and the chatbot format, to be honest, I’ve had trouble integrating and maximizing chatbot based AI into my work and personal usage flow. But I understood that the chatbot format was just one interface to interact with the power of AI and it had been on my to-do list for a while to really figure out Claude Code, and AI agents, and do some vibe coding, especially after reading Lenny Rachitsky’s blog post “Everyone should be using Claude Code more.” And I have a few good friends, both of whom are not solely code/technical, spend a lot of time in Claude Code and were telling me they were getting a lot of value out of it.

I had played around with installing Claude Code through terminal on my personal computer a few months ago but didn’t go that far beyond that because I work on a few different computers, including primarily on work laptop during the work week that I do not have full permissions on, and at home I have a personal Mac Mini M41 and a Macbook Air.

Setting up Claude Code wasn’t hard but I understand why it’s a barrier for normies to set up. It presumes you have full permissions for your computer to install programs in terminal or install an app downloaded from the internet (many people do not on their work computers). Luckily if you can install a downloaded app, Anthropic announced earlier this week that Claude Code for desktop can now save files locally, increasing the ease of setup!

As I mentioned I use a couple different computers, including a work one I don’t have full permissions on, so I did the extra work of setting it up with an online repository for ease of access across devices. Luckily, I have had a little used GitHub account for a long time and it wasn’t that hard to set up. I am not a coder but having started my career at Facebook in the early days, even on the non-technical side, meant I have a pretty baked in understanding of repositories, branches, pull requests, merges, etc. It is certainly simpler to just use it on your personal computer hard drive though that limits your ability to use it on your phone or other computer.

I can see when Anthropic makes Claude Code a little easier to set up (already making progress), and probably abstract that setup a little more by hosting stuff for the user, it’ll open the Claude Code up to even more to the masses. But I can also see why they haven’t done that yet because then you’re also basically adding a full on cloud file hosting service too, which has plenty of downsides, mostly that it is pretty boring and annoying relative to the cutting edge.

Once you’ve got Claude Code setup, whether in the terminal, desktop, mobile, or web app, the interface is the same, a terminal interface. I am sure this can be a little intimidating to some but we’ve also been training people to interact with AI through a chatbot interface for the last few years, so treating it like a chatbot is a perfectly fine starting point if you’re not technical. Just start asking it questions or asking it to do stuff (the Lenny Rachitsky post has some good examples).2

The main thing I can say is that if you’re not as experienced in terminal or technical specifics like repositories, you can just repeatedly ask Claude Code to explain stuff to you, and specifically give you step-by-step instructions for stuff it says you need to do or want to do.3

Everyone Remembers Their First Vibe Code - My AI Labor Market Impact Simulator

I started off with Claude Code by doing some vibe coding.

I have been working with my colleagues to start to try and think about the potential impact of AI on jobs and the resulting various economic scenarios we could find ourselves in. But there were so many potential variables that it was kind of hard to imagine them all and hold them in your head.

So the first thing I decided to do was try and vibe code a simulator of the impact of AI on labor and the economy. I wanted to be able to set sliders for things like unemployment levels and AI adoption rates and visualize the impact on jobs created or productivity level.

In the span of a night it managed to code a pretty simple linear simulator where honestly the main challenge was figuring out how to make it publicly accessible online for others to see (the answer was Github Pages). All I did was give it specs, iterated via chat, tested it, and filed bug reports, then tested the fixes.

The simulator as an MVP was a nice proof of concept and started off pretty simple and linearly. But once I created it, I realized I wanted to explore what else was possible, and so I asked Claude Code “What else could we do to build and improve this AI economic impact simulator?” It came back with a whole list of improvements, from making a more sophisticated model, to adding potential intervention impacts, to increasing the visuals. I was hooked on vibe coding and started to work on the next phase.

From there we got more creative, I integrated real economic data from the BLS and Federal Reserve, signed up for a Google AI Studio trial and integrated Gemini APIs to simulate more scenarios and generate AI summaries, and more.

The second night I worked on this I quickly hit my Claude Code limits on my Pro plan and did not hesitate to immediately upgrade to the Max plan.

By this point I was more comfortable with Claude Code, so I was using it in the terminal too, in fact I was using multiple terminal windows.

When I would hit my Claude Code limits, I downloaded Google’s new coding tool Antigravity which if you have a $20 a month Pro account provides free access to Claude Opus 4.5 through its interface in a classic Google play of subsidizing initial usage, so when I would hit my Claude Code usage limits, I could just pick back up with the same Claude Opus 4.5 model in Antigravity (I have read its not quite the same but I am not sophisticated enough to tell).

I was spending a lot of time troubleshooting bugs but when the agents could access the browser, Claude Code in Chrome and Google Antigravity being able to use Chrome too, allowed for a level of testing in the browser to find bugs that decreased my time on that once I figured that out.

In the end I had a AI Labor Market Impact Analysis Simulator that used AI to simulate stuff, Machine Learning to do other stuff, various sliders to set different levels of unemployment and AI adoption, and toggles for various interventions like UBI or job retraining.

And you can access the projects if you want to play around with it!
https://adamconner.github.io/adamconner-claude-laborsimulator/

If anyone is interested in the code, you can see it here on GitHub. I messed around with and abandoned an SDK version others could take and install and tweak but never finished it, but feel free to play around with it.

Building my own policy council

I’ve never had the privilege to work in the White House (leaving me an outlier at my job and in my own home) so the only way I will ever get to run a policy council is by building my own agentic AI version.

I wanted to try creating what I called a Policy Council, loosely based on the idea of the Policy Councils like the National Security Council (NSC), the National Economic Council (NEC), and the Domestic Policy Council (DPC) that run normal White Houses (this White House relies mostly on the last person he talked to and makes Marco Rubio do everything).

One thing I wanted to play around with was the use of multiple AI agents to do different tasks, or the same tasks with different perspectives but the same instructions. The other thing I tested and understood is that Claude can create text files (markdown or word) which allows an output that is not solely code based.

In particular, I was interested in playing around with creating multiple AI agents with various skills and ideological perspectives so I could try and have them come up with various policy ideas.

So I had Claude Code create multiple AI Agent Policy Analysts with the following ideologies:

Policy Analysts (14)

• Economic Populist — Working-class economic impact, anti-monopoly

• Progressive — Progressive reform, social equity

• Centrist — Bipartisan solutions, stability

• Conservative/Market — Market principles, limited government

• MAGA Conservative — America First, traditional values, sovereignty

• AI Safety — Risk mitigation, alignment, safeguards

• AI Accelerationist — Technology advancement, rapid development

• Capital & Industry — Investment climate, industry growth

• Rights & Consumer Protection — Civil rights, consumer protections

• Organized Labor — Worker protections, job security

• Environmental/Climate — Sustainability, climate action

• Small Business — Main Street, entrepreneurship, SMB impact

• National Security — Defense, military, homeland security

• International Relations — Global affairs, diplomacy, international cooperation

And then some AI Specialists:

Specialists (7)

• Legislative Counsel — Bill drafting, amendment language, constitutional analysis

• Legal Counsel — Constitutional and regulatory law

• SCOTUS Analyst — Supreme Court jurisprudence, legal challenges

• Verification & Sources — Fact checking, verification, citations

• Polling Expert — Public opinion analysis

• Budget Expert — Fiscal analysis, CBO-style scoring

• Implementation Expert — Operational feasibility, agency capacity

Support Roles (6)

• Council Director — Facilitation and process management

• Writer/Editor — Document preparation and consistency

• Research Librarian — Source gathering and verification

• Communications Lead — Public-facing materials

• Political Strategist — Political landscape analysis

• Designer — Visual elements and formatting

Once I had those 21 agents created, what did I do with them? I developed a five-phase workflow to create policy proposals, with human checkpoints between each phase. You start with a topic, and 21 AI agents — each with distinct ideological perspectives — debate it from every angle, ultimately producing comprehensive policy papers with draft legislation and rollout-ready materials.

• Phase 1: Idea Generation — All 21 agents propose policies from their unique perspectives, generating 60-100+ ideas in parallel, each required to include transformational “Big Ideas.”

• Phase 2: Voting — Agents vote on top proposals with reasoning, revealing where consensus exists and where ideological fault lines emerge.

• Phase 3: Refinement — Specialists produce research briefs, economic analysis, implementation plans, and political assessments for the winning policy.

• Phase 4: Full Development — The policy expands into a comprehensive 24-section paper with draft federal and state legislation.

• Phase 5: Rollout — Communication materials are created: press releases, op-eds, fact sheets, talking points, social media content, and FAQs.

I eventually built out an entire system of policy idea generation, then made the human decision to narrow down on certain topics, and then write a full suite of research papers, policy proposals, draft legislation, press releases, talking points, video scripts, and more.

My robot army of policy analysts was very good at generating a LOT of policy ideas, literally hundreds, when commanded to do so and decent at creating what I called “Big Ideas” for consideration. Especially after I integrated Google AI APIs so I could call on their latest Gemini Models to compare, contrast, and generate different ideas than Claude Opus 4.5.

My theory that getting various ideologies to vote on ideas and come to agreement was less successful, inevitably the ones that various ideologies could agree on were pretty small ball, though the generation and consideration of those policy ideas from across the ideological spectrum was a good and helpful exercise.

I would then select some for further research and refinement in shorter papers and then really long policy proposals with draft legislative text. We are talking hundreds of pages of material on the topic in a couple of hours (those hours less on the generation, which was shorter, and more me setting up and refining in real-time).

I have some examples here you can look at that I had the policy council generate for the example topic of “Increasing affordable housing availability in major US cities.”

You can see the full 30 ideas generated on the topic and an example of one of the multi-page policy ideas.

Now here are the sample outputs for Phase 3: Policy Refinement.

The top policy (National Zoning Reform) was developed into a full recommendation with supporting analysis.

File - Description

- national_zoning_reform_recommendation.md - Main policy recommendation

- research_brief.md - Academic literature and evidence

- economic_analysis.md - Cost-benefit analysis

- implementation_plan.md - Phased implementation roadmap

- political_assessment.md - Political viability analysis

- one_pager.md - Executive summary (1 page)

- talking_points.md - Key messages for advocates

Key Findings

- Feasibility: Medium (legal authority strong, implementation complex)

- Political Viability: Moderate (65-70% Dem support, 35-45% GOP support)

- Economic Impact: High ($20B+ annual savings, 600:1 benefit-cost)

- Recommended Vehicle: Infrastructure reauthorization bill (2026)

But it didn’t stop there. Phase 4 created a 24 page proposal paper and 12-page draft legislation. Then Phase 5 created rollout materials including an executive summary, a press release, an oped, a fact sheet, talking points, a social media toolkit, and an FAQ.

All this took about 20 minutes to generate 15,000 words worth of example materials which is kind of a holy shit moment.

So the obvious question, were the policy outputs good?

I want to be clear, this is not a policy position I support, or maybe I do, I haven’t even read these documents. I just generated it as an example to share here. I was not an expert on the topics that I asked my policy council to work on, so the answer is that I am not sure. But I think it very clearly looks close enough to being serious that alone may change the equation on how we work on these topics. And I think that goes to our next topic, which is how it impacts the future of work.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. I have made a version of the Policy Council that I built available on Github so you can launch your own version in Claude Code:
https://github.com/adamconner/claude-policycouncil-template

Just check out the readme for instructions on how to get started:
https://github.com/adamconner/claude-policycouncil-template/blob/main/README.md

And check out all the example documents here:
https://github.com/adamconner/claude-policycouncil-template/tree/main/examples/affordable-housing

Claude Code and the future

When you use Claude Code and have some success with it you can start to see parts of the future. The things that can exist in the digital form can be analyzed in record amounts of time. The content that we generate, words first and now pictures, sounds, and videos, are increasingly only digital artifacts and can now also be generated faster than ever. And the ties that bind our digital world to the physical world, the websites that book travel or make restaurant reservations, will be even further integrated into these machines that aim to ease their use but at a cost we don’t yet fully understand.

You don’t need a fancy vibe coded AI impact on labor markets simulator to realize that it is not just hype, that AI is obviously going to impact how jobs and work happen. Just working on these projects for fun over the last month has shown me that.

Something I vibe coded generated a policy position and 15,000 words in policy papers and supporting materials outputted in 20 minutes. But policy papers are not what turns ideas into action. First, there’s the expertise needed to see if these proposals are bullshit or how to turn a starting point into something real. There’s the judgement needed in how to approach these topics to avoid policy issues and political landmines. And there’s still a human to human element in convincing policymakers that ideas are not only good but viable and beneficial. All that is to say that I don’t particularly fear for my job at this moment in time, as a think tank person whose job it is to come up with ideas, refine and package them, and then (hopefully) sell them.

But it is abundantly clear to me that the way we have traditionally development that expertise and judgement in knowledge work, by doing smaller parts of the work, by reading and researching and writing, by working your way up the ladder, by learning from those more experienced, is maybe in the greatest danger in the AI era.

Companies are going to hire fewer junior staffers, it is the most obvious and inevitable response to this new technology (and maybe the data shows that), because these AI models can probably do entry level tasks at a level close enough to a college graduate, and the gaps are made up by the lower costs. But they, but we, are probably seeding the path to our own destruction in the future because it is less clear how that expertise is going to develop in the next generation if they’re never given the chance to develop it. Maybe that experience and learning can be imparted via AI but even if it can, I kind of doubt we’re going to see companies hire a generation of middle level knowledge staff who never worked on something at the lower level, and that expertise and judgement in certain fields is going to be a commodity that starts to die out. Maybe I am being too pessimistic and alarmist but Idiocracy didn’t happen overnight either.

Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark had a post before Christmas, “Silent Sirens, Flashing For Us All,” that described the world he sees coming soon, as in this year (emphasis his):

This problem will worsen in 2026. By the summer I expect that many people who work with frontier AI systems will feel as though they live in a parallel world to people who don’t. And I expect this will be more than just a feeling - similar to how the crypto economy moved oddly fast relative to the rest of the digital economy, I think we can expect the emerging “AI economy” to move very fast relative to everything else. And in the same way the crypto economy also evolved a lot - protocols! Tokens! Tradable tokens! Etc - we should expect the same kind of rapid evolution in the AI economy. But a crucial difference is that the AI economy already touches a lot more of our ‘regular’ economic reality than the crypto economy.

So by summer of 2026 it will be as though the digital world is going through some kind of fast evolution, with some parts of it emitting a huge amount of heat and light and moving with counter-intuitive speed relative to everything else. Great fortunes will be won and lost here, and the powerful engines of our silicon creation will be put to work, further accelerating this economy and further changing things.

And yet it will all feel somewhat ghostly, even to practitioners that work at its center. There will be signatures of it in our physical reality - datacenters, supply chain issues for compute and power, the funky AI billboards of San Francisco, offices for startups with bizarre names - but the vast amount of its true activity will be occurring both in the digital world, and in the new spaces being built and configured by AI systems for trading with one another - agents, websites meant only for consumption by other AI systems, great and mostly invisible seas of tokens being used for thinking and exchanging information between the silicon minds. Though we exist in four dimensions, it is almost as though AI exists in five, and we will be only able to see a ‘slice’ of it as it passes through our reality, like the eponymous ‘excession’ from Iain M Banks’ book.

Claude Code itself doesn’t change the world overnight. It’s too stuck in a command line that too few will unlock in its current format, though there will be vaster fortunes to those who abstract this power to something simpler and easier to use (I say vaster because there are already unbelievably vast fortunes already being made in the AI age). But Claude Code is a window into what the AI future may be. It’s not a crystal ball but a glimpse of the future today. And we should all be playing around with it to try and understand that future.

I have always been of two minds on what the AI revolution will look like.

One part of me worked at Slack and sold enterprise software you had to pay for to large customers, primarily the US government, and saw how fucking hard it is to get large organizations to change. So yes, AI diffusion will be slower and more painful than we think.

The other part of me was on the ground floor of the last technological revolution as an early Facebook employee. I remember walking around the halls of Capitol Hill trying to convince people that social media wasn’t a fad but a new tool that would change everything. It’s funny, once you’re convinced you’ve seen the future part of you tries to evangelize to others. But another part of you, another part of me, used to think about the inevitability and power of certain tipping point technologies. At a certain point you didn’t bother trying to convince people to use fire. You either used fire or you died.

This is not me saying that Claude Code is like fire, one of the fundamental discoveries and tools that changed the course of human existence. But Claude Code may be like the first spark man made which eventually caught fire.

Today, I hit my goal of running 1,000 miles this year.1

Running 1,000 miles in one year was a goal that I had been chasing for several years now. This was not an easy goal to meet. I ran 1,000 miles in 192 runs over 174 hours in 2025. That was a lot of time, energy, and effort to accomplish a goal I had been chasing for literally years. After years of failure, I was determined to finally conquer my 1,000 mile challenge.

In 2022, I remember going for my last run in December to hit my goal of 250 miles for the year. The year before I had become a father and moved to a new house near Rock Creek Park. I knew I needed to do something to combat the stress of having an infant and thought that I could pick up and keep running during one of the hardest parts of parenting, I could probably keep doing it when it got easier. So I wanted to keep that running momentum going into the next year.

In 2023, wanting to give myself a challenge, I set a stretch goal to double my mileage from last year and run 500 miles that year. I started training for races, first a half, then a marathon, and many other races. I ended up smashing through that goal, so I kept adjusting my goal upwards, first to 750 miles, then eventually settling on a goal of 1,000 miles. I ended the year with 913 miles, falling short of my revised goal but showing myself that 1,000 miles in a year was very possible.

In 2024, I knew it was an election year and that I hoped to be on a campaign that fall, so I knew that I wouldn’t be training for a marathon (made that mistake in 2008 and ran the Marine Corps Marathon and then deployed a field office for the Obama campaign two days later and couldn’t walk up the stairs to my office). But I decided to keep the 1,000 mile goal to see what would happen. I ended the year at 712 miles, despite going on a presidential campaign (where I somehow managed to keep running), I still failed to hit my 1,000 mile goal but that was solid base mileage for someone on a campaign in an election year.

In 2025, this was the year that I was determined to actually conquer the 1,000 mile goal. I knew that I wanted to run the Marine Corps Marathon again to try and accomplish the sub-4 hour goal that had eluded me in 2023. Having a marathon to train for, along with the various DC races I always ran, meant that 1,000 mile goal didn’t just seem reasonable, it seemed downright achievable.

I ran some races in the spring and then had to slow down my running while I attempted to climb Mount Rainier in May (failed to summit but more on that some other time). Then right after my return from the mountain climb, disaster struck, and I sprained my ankle in early June (I have historically bad ankles but hadn’t had issues for a few years). That meant almost a full month off from running and a gradual return at low mileage over the summer. I fell behind in May (planned with the climb) but then I just plateau through June, gradually starting to run again over the summer as you can see from my annual mileage tracker.

By August I had recovered enough to train for the Marine Corps Marathon in earnest, if slightly behind my training plan and having lost some fitness during my recovery, but I was on track with my training into the fall.

Then disaster seemingly struck again. While walking my dog in Rock Creek Park just three weeks before the Marine Corps Marathon, I came off a rock and resprained my injured ankle. I was despondent, all that hard work training for the race seemed to be for naught.

Long-time readers know what happened next. The orthopedic surgeon told me my ankle wasn’t great, but it could be worse, and while he wouldn’t recommend it, I could try and run the race if I thought I could handle it. I found a physical therapist Elliott Place at Sports Therapy and Rehabilitation who helped nurse me back into maybe being able to run. And on October 26th, I ran the Marine Corps Marathon on a sprained ankle (I would do it again but I would not recommend it).

After the marathon, I dialed it back for a few weeks, but my ankle was recovering nicely and I wasn’t that beat up by the marathon because I had taken it fairly easy due to the aforementioned sprained ankle, so my mileage was pretty quickly back up to twentyish miles a week.

Between the two ankle injuries (or arguably one extended ankle injury), I had written off the 1,000 mile goal as impossible for this year. But towards the end of November, I started to run the numbers and realized that I was on track to get within 30 or so miles of my 1,000 mile goal by the end of the year. That was close enough that if I was intentional for the last month of the year, I might have a shot at hitting my goal.

I had finally gotten around to getting an online running coach, Andrew Lemoncello of McMillan Running, and I worked with him to set up a plan to hit 1,000 miles in the time we had left. It was a tight timeline but possible, but I would need to make sure I ran every planned mile.

It meant that I had to up my mileage in the last weeks of the year. It meant that I had to go running on days and at times when I really would have preferred not to. It meant several runs in the cold, or in the dark, or in the very cold and dark. But my margin of error in the time we had was small and I had to bank as many miles as I could in case we got severe weather that would keep me from running. So I kept running, putting up a marathon training level mileage (for me) of 40+ miles the week before Christmas.

But on Saturday, December 27th, I did it. Today, I ran my 1,000th mile of the year.

Why, after so many years of failure and so many setbacks this year, was I so determined to hit this goal this year? This question was really bigger than running.

I am honestly not a super goal motivated person. I don’t live or die by New Year’s Resolutions. My attempts to adopt positive lifestyle changes have a mostly failed track record. So why was this 1,000 mile goal different?

One thing I realized about myself over the last few years, is that while I am not particularly driven by trying to reach goals, I am extremely driven by challenges. To me, a challenge is something that is not only difficult to accomplish, but that you might not succeed at, that you could fail to achieve. In corporate speak these might be called “Stretch Goals.”

It turns out that not only do I rise to a challenge, but failure is maybe my most powerful motivation. Not fear of failure, after all a challenge shouldn’t be something you know you can accomplish, but for me the motivation truly comes from my previous failures. I accept that I might fail in some of the goals or challenges, but I don’t like failure, and it turns out it motivates me more than anything else.

I failed to summit Mount Rainier this year, so we’re probably going back to climb it next year (I also failed to summit Mount Baker the first time I did mountaineering). I failed at my sub-4 hour Marine Corps Marathon goal in 2023 and 2025, so I am already looking ahead to running it again in 2027 (not next year, it’s an election year). I lost the 2024 election and I’ll be damned if I’m gonna sit on the sideline and let us lose again in 2028 (already thinking about how to go back to Pennsylvania). I had failed to reach 1,000 miles for the past two years. So I was not going to let the chance to reach that goal in 2025 pass me by, especially after the disappointments on the mountain and the marathon.

The thing about challenges is that while you can and should celebrate their accomplishment, it’s not really the thing that brings you actual significant sustained joy or pride. There’s all kinds of research out there that shows that it’s the journey, the love of the process, the work to get to the goal that is the real reward (read Brad Stulberg, Michael Easter, and plenty of others).

For me the reward is not the thousand miles I ran in 2025, maybe it’s just learning that for me it’s all about challenges not goals and that previous failures are my strongest motivator. Maybe it’s not the healthiest approach to the world but there’s value in that discovery and honesty with yourself, especially at my age. Running gives you plenty of time to think, I had 174 or so hours to do so, and you’ll learn something about yourself if you let it teach you. I am not a better person because I ran 1,000 miles, but I am a better person having run 1,000 miles this year.

Or I should say the 1,000 miles that I have run in 2025 so far. After all, tomorrow is my Sunday long run, and my last one of the year, and I can’t miss that.

Besides, I have to start thinking about what my running mileage goal will be for 2026 and how to make it a challenge.

Part 1: October 2nd, Campaigns at the Macro and Micro Level, and The PA GOTV Team
Part 2: The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Married to Philadelphia, and South Philly.

Today, November 5th is the anniversary of the 2024 election. I think I expected it to be a more melancholy moment, a reminder of loss that still feels like a fresh wound. As a senior leader on the Pennsylvania campaign told me the other day when I saw them, “I still think about that election every single fucking day.” Here in DC, with the National Guard in our streets and masked ICE agents leaping out of unmarked vehicles, there are constant reminders of the consequences of losing the 2024 election.

But yesterday, November 4th, was Election Day 2025. And Democrats had a great night across the country. All day yesterday, friends texted me their “I Voted” stickers or from various victory parties.1 It was not just the vibes, but the votes, that were very good.

So today, as I thought back to last year, to my 35 days on the campaign, to Election Day 2024, to the highs of GOTV and the lows of Election Night, those memories brought more smiles to my face than tears to my eyes.

Because the thing about Election Day is, whether you win or lose, E-Day itself is often a great day.

Election Day is a day of possibility, where the future hasn’t been written yet, and victory could still be out there. I remember writing in my journal the night before my first E-Day back in 2004 that I wished I could bottle up this intoxicating feeling of anxiety, hope, and the unknown that only exists before the polls close.

If you’ve only experienced elections by watching cable news at the end of the night as results roll in, I could understand the disbelief that these days could carry positive memories. But you are actually thinking about Election Night, which is either the best or worst moment of a campaign. Every Election Day is a new hope even if every Election Night may end up being the Revenge of the Sith.

The best Election Day experience of my life was GOTV in Columbus, Ohio in 2016.2 It was a beautiful fall day, every door we hit was incredible, Nate and I crushed like a dozen packets, and we GOTVed the entire time in a convertible while blasting OMC’s 1996 hit “How Bizarre.” Then Election Night came and we got blown out of the water by Trump that night. But I look back on that day as the platonic Election Day GOTV experience.

I did not start out in campaigns doing field. I was a researcher and then did online communications and digital organizing. But one of the reasons that I ended up doing field in is that I spent my first two E-Days in a Boiler Room at HQ and realized I never wanted to be stuck in a poorly ventilated room3 receiving information about what was going on out there without being able to do much about it. I felt so helpless.

The combination of my desire to never feel as helpless and FOMO as possibly missing out on the generational experience that was the Obama campaign led me to my first GOTV “job.” And the thing about doing GOTV during an election is that it is an on the ground view of what democracy looks like in execution not abstraction.

If you’ve never volunteered for a campaign on election day, you should give it a try,4 because it’s the absolute best way to experience our democracy after the actual act of voting. Everything done before E-Day is pushing voters to get ready to take an action5 but Election Day is the day you can put your energy into the action that can result in an actual change. You’re doing something where you can impact the outcome for something you care about. And when you’re out there you have the feeling that every door matters because every voter behind that door could be the vote that shifts the election. To volunteer on Election Day is the opposite of feeling helpless.

But to put any part of you into a campaign is to run the risk of heartbreak on Election Night.

I wrote earlier that I went to PA in 2024 because, “I like to win. And even more than I like winning, I fucking hate to lose.” And that’s true. But here’s the thing about Election Days and Election Nights, there are always winners and losers.6 Winning feels great and losing fucking sucks. But those are the table stakes of the game, if you want to truly care about something, you’ve got to be willing to risk heartbreak. But win or lose, I have never ever met someone on a campaign, be they staff, volunteer, or candidate, who regretted trying.

Losing can also teach you far more about yourself than winning. Are you the kind of person who wants to come back again when you’ve been knocked down? Does losing fuel you far more than winning does? For me, the answer turned out to be yes.

Since we have elections regularly (for now), you can volunteer on campaigns for a few weeks or few days every couple of years,7 and learn that each time you come back for Election Day, it can suck you back in and renew you, even if Election Night then shatters you.

Yesterday was one of those Election Days and Election Nights that didn’t shatter but renewed me and many others, even though I wasn’t out in the field yesterday. Great work out there to all the campaigns who crushed it big last night in VA, NJ, NYC, CA, GA, and PA. We needed that. And I’ll see you all back out in the field soon.

Next: 35 Days: Part 4, What is it you say you do here?

Good luck to everyone GOTVing tomorrow/today. If you live in VA, NJ, NYC, or CA find your polling place at iwillvote.com and make a plan to vote!

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

In 2008, when I was in Pennsylvania for GOTV, we said it the state that could “close the door,” because if Obama won Pennsylvania it shut the door on McCain’s ability to realistically win 270 electoral votes and win the election. Sixteen years later, the situation was reversed, as the list of competitive swing states narrowed, the math was nearly impossible for Harris to win without Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania was part of the Blue Wall that included Michigan and Wisconsin that fell in 2016 to Trump. Biden won back the Blue Wall and newly competitive swing states of Arizona and Georgia in 2020. In 2024, as October began, we hoped that all the swing states were on the table, giving Harris multiple paths to 270 electoral votes and victory. But as the weeks progressed it became clearer that the fight was for the Blue Wall and Pennsylvania most of all.

In 2024, with New Hampshire and Virginia having moved off the board as swing states over the last few cycles, Pennsylvania was the only swing state left in the mid-Atlantic and northeast. It was clearly the center of the campaign with polling showing a close and competitive election. It was where I wanted to be, at the center of the action.

I had a history with Pennsylvania and presidential campaigns.

In 2008, having missed my opportunity to join the Obama campaign in the primary, I joined up to help run GOTV for York, Pennsylvania in the final week of the campaign. The Obama 2008 primary and general election field campaign, and the improvements in 2012, set the blueprint for Democratic field campaigns for the next sixteen years (you can read about it if you’re interested in this book “Groundbreakers: How Obama’s 2.2 Million Volunteers Transformed Campaigning in America”).

In 2020, I took leave from my job, moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania with my wife and good friend Nate (remember that name it’ll come up again) to help run GOTV for the final weeks of the campaign. That year, due to COVID, the campaign didn’t get out on doors until September, so it felt like we were constantly behind on getting the field program stood up, and the field operation was run entirely outdoors to minimize the risk from COVID.

In 2024, when begging the campaign to let me join, I told the campaign that I would go anywhere in the state that they needed but it would be easiest for me to go to Philadelphia, because I had free housing there with my in-laws. I knew this was a bit of an obnoxious request. Most people who volunteer to join a campaign want to go to a big city like Philly because it’s more fun, or because they have friends there, or because it’s more like where they’re from. It’s a lot harder to find people willing to go to the other non-big city parts of the state, like York or Lancaster or even further afield like Erie.

But as someone who was taking unpaid leave from his job to take an unpaid job on the campaign, that free housing would make my life easier, though I would be fair to say I would be paying in ways other than money when I lived with my in-laws.

In September I got the call from the campaign, they wanted me in Philadelphia. South Philadelphia to be exact. I was deploying to my wife’s homeland of Philadelphia.

Married to Philadelphia

I am married to a multi-generation Philadelphian. And I do not mean someone who grew up in the suburbs and says they are from Philly. My wife was born and raised in downtown Philadelphia. To love my wife was also to love Philadelphia, a true package deal.

To give you a sense of how deep my wife’s roots in Philly are, over the course of 50 or so years, my wife’s parents went to medical school (father), worked, lived, went to synagogue, gave birth to, and raised their two children in a roughly ten block radius of downtown Philadelphia.

My wife is such a Philadelphian that when I showed her the famous clip from Always Sunny about Charlie not understanding the concept of Pittsburgh or there being other cities in Pennsylvania she did not understand why it was funny.

My wife is such a Philadelphian that upon seeing “Hamilton” for the first time, from a fellow Wesleyan alum, she spent hours raging about how Philadelphia and its role as the first capital of the United States had never been mentioned in the play.

My wife is such a Philadelphian that even though she doesn’t really follow sports the moment a Philly team makes the playoffs she transforms into the most obnoxious Philly fan you have ever met (“I am a fan of Philadelphia” she will say). Despite my best efforts at raising a child in Washington DC my daughter screams “FLY EAGLES FLY” and wears a Phillies track jacket.

Over the course of my marriage, I have come to love the city and people of Philadelphia, and I am not just saying that so I don’t get in trouble. There’s no city that I have been to in America that feels like so many different parts of a city, and America, in one place other than Philly. And the people of Philadelphia have a love of their city that really straddles the line between prideful and psychotic.

Once, while vacationing in the U.S. Virgin Islands, we were at dinner and our waiter and my wife both discovered they were from Philadelphia. The waiter said with a fond look on his face, “Ahh I miss Philly, that’s a city that loves to hate you back.” I am not sure I have ever heard a better encapsulation of the city and its people.

Beyond my general fondness for Philly, more importantly, my in-laws were preparing to sell their home of fifty plus years in Center City which meant it was mostly empty, free, and just two blocks from South Street and South Philly.

South Philly

South Philly technically begins on South Street in Philadelphia, though some will argue that it more spiritually begins further south on Washington Ave. It runs south from South Street bracketed to the west by the Schuylkill River and to the east by the Delaware river, down to the Philadelphia Navy Yard. Broad Street runs the length of the City of Philadelphia north to south, and bisects a large part of the city.

I have run the Broad Street Run, one of the great road races in America, a few times. It runs down Broad Street for ten miles starting in North Philly and ending at the Naval Yard at the tip of South Philly, on a course that stays on one road with a single curve around City Hall. As you run down Broad Street into South Philly you see the city start to change, the row houses and historical buildings shift you leave Center City, to the newer buildings and a giant Target along Broad, to more older row houses, to spread out warehouses and industrial areas, to the stadiums, and then the Navy Yard. This was South Philly.

My first introduction to my turf was this map on the Regional Organizing Director’s laptop.

South Philly was Region 29 in the Harris-Walz/Pennsylvaia Democratic Party Coordinated Campaign nomenculture, the 29th of the 29 regions that we had divided Philly into. Technically our turf was Wards 1, 2, 26, 30, 36, 39, 40, and 48 though some of that was with paid canvass (a point of contention in the campaign at points).

There are five regions that make up Philadelphia: North Philly, Northeast Philly, Center City, West Philly, and South Philly. We formed a pod that would become like family for the next month.

This is the map I created of my turf and carried around with me on my clipboard for those 35 days.

There were high income wards up north, gentrifying wards, African-American wards, historically Italian-American wards and the Italian Market, Pats and Genos, the stadiums, the Navy Yard, even the area by the airport which was composed of many recent African immigrants. It was the most spread out turf in Philadelphia, requiring a car to reach large parts of it, in addition to having dense urban areas.

I was a stranger to South Philly, as was too much of the field organization on the campaign, a constant (and fair) criticism of the campaign and Democratic campaigns over the recent years. There were already strong reps and organizing in South Philly from State Reps like Elizabeth Fielder and Jordan Harris to State Senator Nikil Saval and organizations like the South Philly Voter Project.

I was an outsider to South Philly but the beauty of being an outsider is that sometimes it’s actually an advantage. You can show up, apologize because you’re new, demonstrate some baseline competence, and ask for help. And most of the time you’ll get it because it’s election season, everyone wants to win, and you’re just the guy who got sent here. Plus most people don’t have anything to be angry about with you personally (I will later earn that anger but also give and gain many favors).

I loved exploring South Philly. I would get up in the mornings and go for a run through my turf, using the time and miles to learn some of my turf from the ground up, scouting out various potential staging locations, and just soaking the fall weather in. It was hard at times not to feel like Rocky running through the streets of South Philly in the morning.

But there were constant reminders that this was a campaign, not a cakewalk, and that we were not the only ones on the ground in South Philly.

Tomorrow: 35 Days: Part 3

PS - South Philly taught me many things but perhaps none more than how to be a truly deranged parker and its tradition of parking on sidewalks. Here are some of my favorite sidewalk parking jobs from my photo roll.

35 Days

Kamala Harris had 107 days as the Democratic Nominee. I was on the Harris campaign for only 35 days. 35 days running get out the vote in South Philadelphia, the most contested part of the biggest city in the most important swing state in the country.

South Philly was the reddest part of Philadelphia, the rare major urban area that still had a Trump leaning area within it. Unlike other parts of the city, South Philly was not just about pushing up urban Democratic base turnout. It was going to be a street fight. The campaign knew it was going to be a street fight. I was sent there to street fight.

As the one-year anniversary of the 2024 election approaches, I can finally look back on those 35 days with some perspective that only time, even though the loss stings no less. These posts are not an autopsy, a post-mortem, or a report recommending a path forward. They are not a tell all, a list of complaints, or a defense of the campaign. I do not proclaim any wisdom, I only write to share what struck me and what has stuck with me from that campaign a year later.

One of the questions that has become popular to ask staffers and volunteers in the campaign world is “What’s your why?” That is, what is your reason you’re here spending time on a political campaign? For many staffers and volunteers, there’s usually an animating policy issue for them, a personal identity or experience that drives their passion. For the last decade in politics, dislike for Donald Trump and the fear he may end our democracy has also been a driver for many to get involved on the Democratic side. And don’t get me wrong, I care about issues, I dislike Donald Trump, and I had an existential fear for our democracy in 2024 (a correct one as it turned out).

For me the answer is that sometime in the last twenty years I discovered my campaign motto, my life motto, which is simply, “All you can do is all you can do.” I know that in an important election I can only live with myself if, win or lose, if I did everything in my power that I had to give. Honestly, I have too much anxiety during campaign season to sit on the sidelines and just refresh Twitter when I could, should, be doing something. Also, I like to win. And even more than I like winning, I fucking hate to lose.

My lovely wife, a native Philadelphian, knew all this about me. And when on an Obama alumni call in September they asked for experienced people to come to Pennsylvania full-time ASAP, she looked at me and said simply, “You can go.” This was a gesture of true love and support that defines what kind of marriage you are in and want to be in (in true Philadelphia fashion it was followed by a slightly more menacing threat of what would happen to me if I did not win).

So in 2024, “all you can do” for me meant taking a leave from my job, leaving behind my wife and three year-old, moving north, staying in with my in-laws, and returning to the 24/7 campaign life.

Having just turned 40, my time on the campaign was a self-contained mid-life crisis with a clear end date, an escape from my email job, a return to a simpler time in my life when I could pursue something I believed in with the single-minded devotion I had in my youth. Those 35 days on the streets of Philadelphia were some of the longest, hardest, most exciting, and ultimately heartbreaking of my life.

These series of posts are part memory, part perspective, and perhaps part justification to myself that I lived up to my mantra of “all you can do is all you can do,” even though we lost.

Because it turns out, after all that, if you asked me if I would do it all over again if I knew the outcome ahead of time? Absofuckinglutely.

October 2nd

It is October 2nd. I walk my daughter to school for the last time for a while, kiss her goodbye, climb into my car, and head north. I have my first Red Bull of the campaign at 10:44am. I cross the border into Pennsylvania at 11:42am.

I am in a field office. It is a field office I have never been to before. It is every field office that I have ever been to.

The campaign signs taped to the wall in a repeating pattern. The yard signs in the corner. An overworked printer out of paper. Trash cans overflowing with pizza boxes. Folding tables crowded with laptops, cell phones, and power strips.

This is now my office. Or this is my office until I find myself a better one, preferably one located in my turf.

I am now on the Pennsylvania GOTV Team. I am the entire South Philadelphia GOTV team.

What is GOTV? GOTV is the acronym for Get Out the Vote. The phrase means a few different things: As a descriptor, GOTV describes the actions a campaign takes to turn out your supporters to vote for your candidate to try and win an election. As a specific time period, GOTV is the four days before and including election day, including the final weekend. As a job, GOTV is the team responsible for preparing for and executing the final efforts to get supporters to vote in the election. Confused? Much like how fuck is the most versatile word in the english language, during a campaign GOTV is a noun, verb, and an adjective (Fuck is also a word liberally used by GOTV during GOTV for GOTV). GOTV is politics, campaigns, and elections at its most elemental. It is campaigning stripped down to its essence, GOTV is the campaigning that I live for.

There is nothing. My job is to create something. That something is to build the infrastructure for the increasing number of volunteers who will show up as we near election day, culminating in a flood of bodies during GOTV that can number in the thousands, fanning out across South Philly to knock on doors, and delivering the votes that can win the election. In 2020, South Philly provided a good chunk of the votes for Biden’s margin of victory.

As in every field office, there is a countdown on the wall of the number of days until the election. As I get ready to leave from my first day on the campaign we change the count on the whiteboard for tomorrow. 1 day down.

I have 33 days until Election Day.

Campaigns at the Macro and Micro Level

All campaigns, but especially presidential campaigns, are fought on the macro level and the micro level. The macro level is what you’re probably most familiar with of rallies, press events, and billions of dollars in tv and online ads. That’s what most of us see and absorb and the macro campaign is what sets the environment for a race to be won or lost.

The micro level may only be familiar if you live in a swing state or a swing district, that’s where the nitty-gritty work of a campaign occurs through voter contact to persuade people to support a candidate and turn out to vote for them. GOTV is the last stage of the micro level of a campaign, the final culmination of the macro elements into the overwhelming deployment of the micro actions.

Campaigns are composed of all sorts of parts, many of which operate at the macro level (comms, advance, fundraising, rapid-response) but the micro level is run by field, which consists of organizing and GOTV (and also critically logistics/supply). In the modern Democratic Presidential field campaign almost everything done by the campaign in a swing state orients around a single action, knocking on doors to try and talk to voters. Phone calls and text messages to voters have now been outsourced to online volunteers across the country so that for the bodies that are physically in a swing state, there is only one single action that we care about, knocking on doors.

The belief, and the evidence, is that having conversations with voters on their doorstep is the most effective form of voter contact to persuade people to vote for a candidate and then to get them out to actually vote for that candidate.

We call this “canvassing” or “voter contact” or more simply “doors,” the (now digital) address list of doors to knock on is a “packet,” and the time and place where a volunteer takes a packet to knock doors is called a “shift.”

In the Democratic field campaign structure, there are organizers, and there is GOTV.

Organizers or Field Organizers, previously referred to as FOs, are the foot soldiers of organizing. In a model perfected by the Obama 2008 campaign (and not necessarily updated since then) the organizers attempt to recruit volunteers to knock on doors. The volunteers that show interest/talent/availability to do more are asked to take on volunteer leadership roles in the campaign such as helping train other volunteers or canvass (this is known as the ladder of engagement).

The Organizers recruit the volunteers to knock on doors and for most of the campaign are also the ones who manage the door knocking that occurs. But as early voting begins and election day approaches, interest in the campaign naturally rises, and the number of volunteers should rise dramatically and overwhelm the individual organizers.

That’s where GOTV comes in. Our job is to prepare for that Election Day in the future. GOTV is simple but not easy. It is simple because the job is what the name says it is, to get out the vote. It is not easy because the logistics of making that happen are daunting.

My main actual job in GOTV is to find locations to gather, train, supply and launch growing waves of volunteers as election day approaches. Once I find the locations, I have to acquire them, outfit them, supply and constantly resupply them, staff them, run them, and troubleshoot the inevitable logistical complications that come with orchestrating thousands of people.

GOTV is run in a semi-distributed model.

It starts with finding what we call “Staging Locations” (or “SLs”) which are satellite offices that serve as hubs to launch volunteers on their canvass shifts, operating at least on weekends, and often every day, from now until Election Day.

SLs can be churches, union halls, even houses. They need to be set up so that hundreds or even thousands of people can stream into them, get signed in, their assigned packets, trained, materials, and out on the doors as fast as possible.

The ideal SL varies by the terrain of the community its canvassing. In rural or suburban areas, big parking lots are key. In cities, central locations that are walkable with access to public transit but also some parking are key.

Sometimes Staging Locations can be existing campaign offices, but we don’t have one of those in South Philly, so I am going to have to find everything on my own. I don’t really have a budget so I need to convince people that this multi-billion dollar campaign needs them to mostly donate space for free.

Our SLs will be one of dozens of small cogs forming a much bigger GOTV machine that spreads across the entire city of Philadelphia and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. This is replicated across every swing state in the country, though it is clear to everyone that Pennsylvania is the prize fight. This is the biggest swing state. The electoral math is difficult to impossible without Pennsylvania. We are campaign ground zero.

The PA GOTV Team

I am part of the Pennsylvania GOTV Team.

We are led by field veterans from 2008 and 2012 who have come back for another in a string of “the most important elections of our lifetime.” We are all on the ground by the beginning of October in vastly different regions in a diverse state.

Organizing is mostly a young person’s game but this GOTV team is more experienced, wiser, well just older. Most of us are campaign veterans of some sort, all of us are professionals in other parts of our lives and careers, and every single one of us believes this election is different. Some, like me, have taken a leave from our day jobs. Others have quit their jobs to do this, not with the expectation that there’s a job in the administration if we win, but just because they want, or the need, to be a part of doing something this election.

There are few jobs where you can take years, or even decades off, and then come back and get into the flow of things pretty quickly. You can do it in GOTV because it turns out that 1) the fundamental action upon which the entire operation is oriented, door knocks and volunteers, has stayed the same and that 2) this is a job about organizing logistics and directing people, both of which are skills that increase with age.

We are the veterans the professional sports team keeps on the roster to provide calm and focus. We are the reservists who have volunteered to come back to active duty for one more tour. We are the tip of the spear, the advance team, the reconnaissance and logistics experts, any number of semi-apt metaphors.

We are, on some level, all kindred spirits despite any differences we may have because we all made ourselves available to move and take a job on short notice, that we know will end soon, with no guarantee of the outcome.

In 2012, the PA regional GOTV directors were on the ground six months to a year ahead of the election. In 2024, we’re here just five or six weeks ahead of the election. GOTV leadership has selected for experience because they know these next few weeks are going to be very intense and they need staff with the confidence to operate alone, to know when to take responsibility for something or when you have to kick a decision up the ladder, and when to say fuck it and make a call.

In addition, we are slightly more experienced than the younger staff on the organizing side. The organizers do not report to us but it’s our job to support, advise, coach, cover, and sometimes layer them. It is a complex relationship in a tough and high-pressure environment but that’s life in the big leagues.

There are 30ish Regional GOTV Directors like me across the state. Roughly one per region. There’s an old story about the Texas Rangers that there’s a prison riot somewhere in Texas and they call the governor for help and he says he’ll send the Texas Rangers. The sheriff goes to the train station and one Texas Ranger steps off the train. “They only sent one Ranger?” the Sheriff exclaims. “One Crisis, One Ranger” is the Ranger’s response. That’s the feeling on the PA GOTV team as we roll into our regions. One region, one GOTV director.

Now the hard work begins.

Tomorrow: The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and South Philly.

Critically, my ankle was not hurting, and I went for a few short runs this week and was pain-free. So I decided to try running it today. I held no goals of a PR, being in my 40s I had no interest in additional injury, so I promised myself I would quit if it hurt too much. I was rolling the dice on whether I would resprain it. I would classify this under things I would do again but wouldn’t recommend.

This was the 50th running of the Marine Corps Marathon (MCM), in a year where the Marine Corps is about to celebrate its 250th birthday, so you can imagine that for a service known for its subtlety, the branding was muted. The MCM is known as “The People’s Marathon” because it is the largest marathon that doesn’t offer prize money and is said to be the best marathon for beginners. The race is extremely well organized owing to the fact that it seems like every single Marine north of Quantico is ordered to staff the marathon.

I am a fierce DC partisan, I think DC is one of the world’s greatest cities to run in, and the MCM really showcases that. The course is an incredible tour of Virginia and DC, past almost every national monument and landmark in the area. My city has been battered by the first year of the Trump Administration, from DOGE to masked ICE agents jumping out of cars. Today on a gorgeous fall day, the city and its residents (and NOVA) really shined.

This was my third time that I have run the MCM, I ran it in 2008 and 2023. My father ran it when I was a kid, it was maybe the first marathon I was ever aware of. But I was honestly not sure I would finish the race and I honestly wasn’t sure how far I would get before I had to quit.

So I decided to try and enjoy every mile and think about the memories I have in every part of this city from twenty plus years of living here. Here’s a mile-by-mile account of my 2025 Marine Corps Marathon.

Mile 1: The first mile is characterized by running past the finish line, passing the Iwo Jima Memorial that you hope to see again in a few hours.

Mile 2: The second mile is characterized passing through Rosslyn and then up a pretty decent hill that runs parallel to 66.

Mile 3: To me this mile is about passing the legendary Italian Store in Arlington, though it’s really about the rare opportunity to run on the GW Parkway along the Potomac, with a beautiful view of the Georgetown University campus across the river.

Mile 4: The Key Bridge from Arlington into DC. You catch a glimpse of the bridge from the GW Parkway and the crowds on the bridge.

Then you’re on the bridge and there’s Georgetown University to the left, cheering crowds to your right, and Georgetown ahead of you.

Then you are in Georgetown on the famous M Street. I pass the bar where I celebrated my 21st birthday and another bar where I almost threw up on my friend Paul’s hot cousin.

Right on Wisconsin, past the Pacers where I’ve bought too much running stuff over the last few years, heading towards the Georgetown Waterfront.

Mile 5: Along the Georgetown Waterfront towards Virginia Avenue. There is my freshman dorm, formerly the Hall on Virginia Avenue (HOVA), formerly the Howard Johnson hotel where a lookout for the Watergate break-in was stationed, now remodeled into trendy apartments called “The George.”

Mile 6: Now we are heading north on Rock Creek Park and now we are on my home turf. One of the reasons I got back into running was I moved next to Rock Creek and promised myself I would take advantage of it by picking up running again. Four years later and here we are running another marathon. I have run this route dozens of times to come home.

Mile 7: Now we are reaching gut check time. I am constantly aware that I am running on a sprained ankle and that my run could end at any moment.

The turn around at Cathedral is just a few minutes from my house. If my ankle is hurting too much, if I think this is too much, I can just turn right instead of turning around and run right home. I could be home in literally five minutes.

But the ankle is…fine? Like it is a little stiff but it doesn’t hurt and my fitness is carrying me along.

There it is. I can see the turnaround.

Fuck it, we’re going for it. Ankle don’t fail me now. I can check in again before I hit Hains Point. I hit the turnaround and head south.

Mile 8: I am just trying to enjoy the fall foliage in Rock Creek, one of the true urban running gems of any major city.

Mile 9: Along the Potomac and under and past the Kennedy Center. As a freshman I used to love leaving from my dorm across the street and going to the Kennedy Center at night and staring at the city that I had already fallen in love with.

Mile 10: Nearing the Lincoln Memorial, my first running route in DC. Leave HOVA, my aforementioned freshman dorm, left on along the Potomac, past the Kennedy Center, to the Lincoln Memorial or across the Memorial Bridge to Virginia.

Mile 11: Nearing Hains Point and another gut check. Hains Point is a lonely three miles around the peninsula where if my ankle is hurting too much, I’m going to have to walk around the whole thing to get back to help. But we’re feeling okay so onward to Hains Point we go.

Mile 12: The Wear Blue Mile is a section of the MCM that is dedicated to fallen servicemembers with blue Faces of the Fallen posters lining the section. It is heavy on those KIA in the GWOT and also those who have been lost to its long shadow after they came home. I see the photo of Travis Manion and think of his family and his memorial foundation. Towards the end of the Blue Mile I see a woman stop in front of a picture, kneel in front of it, and begin to weep.

Mile 13: Make it to a half marathon, secure in the knowledge that if I have to stop, at least I made it halfway. But I am feeling okay and press on, rounding the tip of Hains Point, and heading back towards the mall.

Hains Point is a fairly ubiquitous feature of almost every DC road race because it gives you three plus miles next to the mall that are relatively car free and easy to close. But it can be quiet and lonely, though at this point I am so used to running it, I do so mostly on auto-pilot.

Mile 14: Can I just say that it is insane the Park Service does not close the public East Potomac Park Golf Course for this race. There are 40,000 runners going through Hains Point and they have to keep part of it open to cars to let people onto the golf course. As I run by the golf course, I do not see the dirt they have trucked here from the demolished White House East Wing, though I do look.

Mile 15: I see an incredible sign that says “U.S. Marine Corps Refueling Point” and the dude is holding a vape underneath. I get a nice view of the Jefferson Memorial.

Mile 16: Past the Washington Monument and we are entering what they call “The Gauntlet” which are huge cheering crowds lining the National Mall. A huge boost of energy as we run past the historic Smithsonian museums, closed due to the government shutdown.

Mile 17: The United States Capitol. It looks incredible in the fall sunlight. The West Front, where the clashes on January 6th started, past Capitol Police officers who defended the building that day and watched the President pardon their attackers. A building where one chamber, the House, isn’t even in session right now during the shutdown.

Mile 18: When I ran MCM in 2023, this is where I got leg muscle pain, because like most amateur runners I skipped strength training. Well I did not do enough strength training this cycle but I did some and I hope it’s enough. I run past the new entrance to the Air and Space museum, which looks very cool.

Mile 19: Turning out from the mall, past the Jefferson Memorial, heading to the 14th Street Bridge. Time for another gut check, if my ankle hurts too much on the bridge, I’m stuck limping across before I can quit. But everything feels..fine? I mean my legs are getting tired but that’s from running 19 miles but my ankle is not hurting. So we press on.

Mile 20: The 14th Street Bridge can be a real soul crusher. You lose the cheering crowds, the sun has come out and the heat is rising, and there’s nowhere on the bridge to hide. You see everyone start to slow down. You do get the unique experience of having planes from DCA take off and land above you (see below).

The year I ran MCM the first time in 2008, I heard that the year before they had put Hains Point and the 14th Street Bridge back-to-back. So you faced like 6 miles of no crowds and baking sun. Apparently everyone just wilted. The next year, every communication from the marathon was like “we have heard your feedback on the course from last year and adjusted it” so now you get the cheering crowds in the gauntlet between Hains Point and the 14th Street Bridge.

Mile 21: Okay fuck this mile. The course clearly needed to add some length so we ran into and around a big Pentagon parking lot.

Mile 22: Into Crystal City and another wall of cheering crowds. Huge energy from this second Gauntlet. I am feeling the fatigue now in my legs but my ankle feels fine. I’m entering the pain cave now but it’s honestly not that bad, just time to disassociate and hold on for a few more miles. I do not pull out my phone for a few miles.

Mile 23: More Crystal City, I am sorry National Landing, through Amazon HQ2 and heading towards the Pentagon. Just trying to keep it together.

Mile 24: The most interesting thing I have to say about this mile is that when I ran the Army Ten-Miler and MCM in 2023, the underpass under the 14th Street Bridge was under construction, and they made us all collapse into one lane. That construction has thankfully been completed.

Mile 25: Now you are just on Richmond Highway, baking in the sun, with no cheering crowds, just endless asphalt. To the left is the Pentagon and Arlington National Cemetery but you’re in the right lane so you can’t see much. This is the hardest mile of the marathon because it is all mental and your body is tired and hurts. You just have to dig deep and push through.

Mile 26: The Marine Corps Marathon ends on a hill. Of course it does. Marines take hills, especially when it’s hard. You run up the hill and towards the U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial. Cross the finish line and see the Iwo Jima memorial in front of you. Hard not to be moved.

I finished. My ankle survived without additional injury. No PR, I ran this marathon 30 minutes slower than my time in 2023 but 20 minutes faster than in 2008. Guess I’ll have to do it again sometime.

You should run the Marine Corps Marathon someday too.

Bonus Pic: I do not understand why or how Big Watermelon sponsors this race but they did in 2023 too.

Ten years.

Ten years ago, on September 19, 2015, we lost my friend Jake Brewer.

It was, to put it mildly, a shock. And a loss that echoes even to this day.

Jake was a connector. But that phrase doesn’t really do him justice. He was more accurately a hub and spoke for people. Just as people and airplanes need to connect through central hubs to transit to the final destination, Jake was the central hub through which so many people, connections, and friendships flowed. Jake would meet someone new, they’d tell him about something they were working on or someplace they were going, he would make an instant connection in his mind, then say “You should really meet my friend so and so…” Jake would then route you to the person. I just looked in my gmail and found a bunch of old emails from Jake connecting me to people, some of whom are still friends to this day. He was like a human “People You Should Know” algorithm.

I say this with the respect of someone who is also a very good human connector, more so then than I am now, and that when you’re good at something it can be annoying, humbling, and maddening to stand next to someone who is that much better at it than you.

Jake and I were good friends. Few people I have ever known possessed the same natural impulse to connect people with the understanding that it had to be followed with intentional work to maintain them. But he was so good at it that sometimes it felt like I was a rec league softball player standing next to an MLB player. Or if we’re being more generous to myself, the way a good sprinter might look at a decathlete and be like how the fuck do you do all of that, at once, so well? But it was never in a way that left you that mad at Jake, or at least not for very long.

Jake understood that the connections were only beginning, that community came from shared experiences, reaching out, and showing up. These are all things that stretched him thin at times but also made him a great friend.

A few weeks before Jake died, the stars aligned despite his White House job and his two-year-old and everything else in his life and he was able to come join for a birthday weekend away at a house I rented.

We sat on a dock staring out at the Chesapeake Bay listening to Otis Redding on a bluetooth speaker (yes in retrospect the song choice seems a little on the nose given its history). We talked about getting older, about the future, about dreams, and he let it slip that he was going to be a father again. It was what we needed, what we loved, about spending time with each other. This is the last photo he ever sent me.

When Jake and I would talk about human networks, and recall this was at the dawn of the social networking era, it was with an inherent understanding of their nature and power.

Jake’s belief in connections, community, and networks led to the legend of the sticky note that was discovered at his desk at the White House after he died that said, “Cultivate the Karass,” the karass being a phrase from Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle” to describe “a team that do God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing.”

Jake Brewer cultivated a hell of a karass.

We held his funeral at the National Cathedral, in the space usually reserved for Presidents or Senators. I had the honor of being an usher at that funeral. For whatever reason, I stuck my phone in my pocket and recorded a video as we walked out at the end. It shows endless rows of pews packed with standing mourners. The National Cathedral is full. We were all part of the karass that Jake had built.

Now that it has been ten years, and a rollercoaster decade, it's tempting to try to imagine how my friend might have felt about the future he never saw. But I don’t want to extrapolate to guess how he might have handled these unprecedented political times. All I can say for sure is that I am sad that I do not have his friendship, wisdom, and counsel to navigate the last ten years.

But I don’t need to imagine what the lessons are that I learned from Jake that I still carry with me.

That you should introduce and make the connection between people who might not know each other but should.

That you should always Rock Band or karaoke with your friends when you can.

That it is your duty to pull together the dinner at the conference for your friends you have and the ones you make there.

That you should probably not send your friend to run a campaign office in western North Carolina and then bail on them to go to Pennsylvania instead (he was fine, he had a blast, I think they wanted to elect him mayor by the end).

That renting a houseboat because it was the easiest way to travel to and have housing at a waterfront wedding is absolutely a good idea.

That you should not call the groom on their wedding day lost from said houseboat to ask for him to stand on the lawn of the wedding venue and wave his arms so you can find it from the water.

That you should go to the birthday weekends for your friends even if it's complicated because you never know when it may be your last chance.

That you should hope to live a life so full that your funeral fills the National Cathedral.

That your karass should be so big that your friends have to find a place to hold your wake that can hold at least 500 people on short notice.

That your legacy should inspire Substack posts a decade later.

Jake, my friend even though it has been ten years, you are not forgotten. I love you and miss you brother.

And finally, a note on grief.

When Jake died, it was obviously a severe shock to everyone who knew and loved him, there’s no shock more severe to a hub and spoke network than the loss of a hub. But it was also the first time a lot of us had lost someone who wasn’t a family member but a peer.

I learned a lot about grief over that period. Not just from experiencing it, as I obviously did from the loss of my friend, but from watching how others dealt with it. Especially when people interacted with Jake’s wife Mary Katharine Ham.

One thing I have never forgotten was watching how people would arrive at the house for the first time and they would greet MK, Jake’s pregnant widow, and for lack of a better term, would dump their feelings about the loss on her. These people were not being malicious, they just had raw emotions, and it made sense to them to share them with the person closest to Jake. But like then they maybe felt better but now she was getting that from like…hundreds of people over and over again (see aforementioned full funeral at the National Cathedral).

Now MK is maybe one of the strongest people I have ever met and thankfully also an extrovert so I think she was probably okay with it but it did make me really recognize how unprepared most of us are to deal with grief.

MK had been involved with the Travis Manion Foundation, a wonderful foundation for veterans honoring the legacy of Marine 1stLt Travis Manion. So she had friends there who had also received the worst news of their lives, who had gone through that loss and rebuilding, and were so steadying in that moment. There’s been a lot written about the civilian-military divide but I recall thinking at that moment there was a part of America that had experienced how to deal with this kind of young loss, and a part that never had to before, and those two worlds were meeting when they usually don’t.

Over the years MK has written about the last day, talked about grief on podcasts, and provided what I think is one of the best guides on how to help someone grieving (or going through a crisis). MK I’m thinking of and sending love to you and your family today too.

Last week my daughter Zia turned four and we celebrated the incredible little girl, now a big girl, that she has become. She is the delight of our lives, a being that comes into your lives and reshapes those lives around them in a way that you never quite understand how it had any other shape. 

But every time her birthday approaches, it is impossible to not think about how close we came to never knowing her. You see we almost lost my daughter before we ever got to know her. She was born with a condition called NAIT (more below) and spent ten days in the NICU. We were lucky, we got the medical help she needed, had insurance that would eventually cover the costs, and the grace of God carried us through that nightmare and we came out the other side okay. But you don’t spend time in a NICU without the inescapable sense that not everyone who comes into that space is as lucky. But if you are lucky enough to take your child home from the NICU, you’re just thrown right into the normal exhausting grind of being the parent to a newborn, and its hard to find the time to process what happened at the beginning.

A few weeks ago, I opened my photos app and went back to my photo stream from that time. I scrolled through memories that go from celebratory, to nightmare, to joyous again. To look at the photo reel from that time is to revisit a moment in time in your life that you know will forever be a critical chapter but which in the moment you are just trying to survive. I am sure if I could bring myself to go back and look at my texts, WhatsApps, and emails from that time they would convey a similar feeling.

So around her fourth birthday, I finally sat down and wrote our my memories of those ten days: for myself, for my wife, for Zia someday, and I share them below along with photos.

Trigger warning if you’ve had traumatic childbirth experiences.

For us, the birth was relatively smooth and uncomplicated. For a few moments, for maybe twenty to thirty minutes, everything seemed normal. From there it all becomes a series of things I remember and will certainly never forget. 

I remember the staff pediatrician who had noticed the bruises and petechiae on her skin and ordered the blood test and thinking to myself a blood test didn’t seem like a big deal.

I remember that same doctor returning to our room and telling us the blood test showed my daughter’s blood platelet count was so low that we had to immediately sign an emergency form to authorize a transfusion and her emergency relocation to a NICU at a different hospital. 

I remember learning her platelet count was 7,000, not knowing what that meant, and telling that number to my father-in-law who is a doctor, and knowing it was bad when he asked me to repeat that number several times, with shock in his voice.

I remember later learning that a normal platelet count is 150,000 to 450,000 and that Zia’s was down to 2,000 at one point, among the lowest platelet count they had ever seen at the hospital in a baby. 

I remember eventually learning she had a life-threatening condition called Neonatal alloimmune thrombocytopenia or NAIT. NAIT is when a baby gets different blood platelet antigen types from the father than the mother, which causes the mother’s body to attack the baby’s platelets, resulting in the baby being born with low platelets. Having so few platelets puts the baby at risk for severe bleeding, particularly in the brain, and can cause permanent damage or be fatal. 

I remember being in the Sibley Special Care Nursery and seeing my daughter hooked up to the first of what would be many tubes as she received the first of what would be many transfusions. 

I remember waiting for the specialized NICU ambulance and staff to arrive to take her to the Georgetown NICU, just three miles away. 

I remember my wife in a wheelchair, exhausted after giving birth just hours before, hand on the child she was now going to have to say goodbye to, because she had to stay at the hospital she gave birth at while the baby was transferred to the Georgetown Hospital NICU.

I remember telling my wife that I did not want my daughter to leave this hospital and go to the NICU without a name, and that’s the moment we settled on naming her Zia.

I remember waving goodbye to Zia as they loaded her into a carrier on a stretcher packed with so much equipment that it was hard to see where the baby was in all of it.

I remember learning that they would hold me in the hospital while the ambulance departed because that’s standard procedure because distraught family members tend to follow ambulances too closely and sometimes cause accidents.

I remember a friend’s wife being there within minutes to be with my wife in the hospital when we called because I had to leave to go with Zia.

I remember the 3ish mile drive alone from Sibley to Georgetown, concentrating hard to not have an accident, but also having to call my mom and tell her the news. 

I remember my first elevator ride and entrance to the NICU and entering an alien world of quiet beeps, of fiercely caring nurses, and parents with the simultaneously haunted and determined look that I too would soon wear as a NICU parent.

I remember the first time I saw my daughter in the NICU. I’ll never forget that first moment of seeing her there surrounded by so many machines and tub

I remember that in the darkest of night, staring at this little girl with black hair who I had just met but who was all of a sudden everything to me. 

I remember being with my daughter on her first night on this earth, the time when a child is supposed to be with their mother, and being a poor substitute from outside a plastic box.

I remember the first time Zia clutched my finger in the NICU sometime in the wee hours of the morning and the full weight of the unknown of parenthood hitting me. 

I remember being allowed to crash in one of the two bedrooms at the NICU, which I later learned were mostly reserved for parents who just arrived and were having to absorb everything that was happening to them. 

I remember learning that parents aren’t allowed to sleep in the NICU by their babies, which at first seemed cruel but eventually you understood that if they allowed it parents would never leave their side of their baby, and some of these stays can stretch into weeks and months.

I remember that first morning in the NICU that the team was lovely and had a big Zia sign on her bed but the hospital computer system didn’t get the news in time so for the duration of her stay she was “Smith, BG-Lauren” with BG standing for Baby Girl.

I remember the first time I was allowed to hold my daughter in the NICU and fearing it might be one of the only times I would have that opportunity. 

I remember waiting in fear as she went to her first head ultrasound to see if she had intracranial bleeding and the feeling of utter relief when she did not (the worst cases develop the bleeding in the head in the womb before or during birth). 

I remember feeling both guilty and relieved that I had a team of nurses to teach me how to bottle feed a baby, change a diaper, and eventually swaddle a baby. 

I remember going back to the first hospital to check in on my wife and the discussion of her discharge with her doctor, who said while my wife needed to stay another two nights in the hospital but then looked at me and said if it “circumstances with my daughter changed that my wife could be discharged early to be with her if essential” which was doctor speak for if your baby might not make it, we will let her mom go be by her side for what could be the end. 

I remember the noises, the beepings in the NICU, all night long. And no matter how late you stayed, there was always another parent there too. 

I remember the sensation that NICU nurses were a particular kind of fierce professionals of the type that you only run into in certain places where the mission is sacred and the stakes are high. 

I remember the pediatric hematologist and oncologist saying this was a tough one. And she came in on a Saturday, despite it being her day off and having a family, because this one was a tough one but she was not giving up.

I remember learning that a special donor had to be called to donate the special platelets that my daughter needed to survive and that person, that angel, did so when the call came. 

I remember my best friend who left a trip to fly home to be there for us if we needed something.

I remember how covered in bruises, petechiae, and tubes my infant daughter was.

I remember despite numerous transfusions her platelet numbers were not going up enough.

I remember the joyless task of picking my wife from the hospital where she had given birth and driving her to the hospital with the NICU.

I remember the far more joyful first time that my wife got to hold her daughter in the NICU.

I remember hearing a family celebrate their 100th day in the NICU and realizing that as bad as I was feeling at that moment, it could be worse.

I remember a dad telling another family he didn't want to talk to them in the waiting room. They were newly arrived at the NICU, reeling from the pain and confusion and just trying to make conversation but he didn't want to get to know new people because his child had been here for months and everyone he had met and talked to, their kids got to go home, and his was still there.

I remember coming into the NICU and seeing incubators that had been filled now empty and just hoping that they were empty because a baby had gone home.

I remember my wife coming down with post-partum preeclampsia and having to be admitted to the hospital for treatment. Our friend also almost died from post-partum preeclampsia and warned us about it, so we were aware of it and paying attention. But now we tell everyone about post-partum preeclampsia and to get a blood pressure cuff if you’re pregnant and take your blood pressure before and after you give birth. 

I remember the doctor saying “Oh, I can send you to the same hospital as your daughter! then you can be together!” So for a few days I just shuttled between my wife’s hospital bed and my daughter’s crib in the NICU.

I remember the song “Opportunity” from the movie Annie was going viral at the time on TikTok and cutting together this TikTok in the wee hours of the night in the NICU.

I remember knowing that sometime around that age I had lost a mother, whether abandoned or coerced, and promising I would be there for my daughter.

I remember at some point looking around the NICU and noticing how my daughter, who was born at 37.5 weeks, nearly fully to term, looked like a giant compared to most of the other babies in the NICU who hadn’t been so lucky.

I remember a period after they removed her central line where we could not get an IV in her tiny infant veins and watching nurses and doctors all struggling to get one in her for several days.

I remember those days where her platelet count was higher than it had been but was still dangerously low.

I remember being told that a NICU nurse who came back from a beach vacation and was pretty relaxed then got an IV in Zia on her first try on her shift back (an angel).

I remember them running as many platelets as they could into her and waking up one day to the news that her platelet count was now through the roof to normal levels (150,000).

I remember learning that because the low platelet count was because the antibodies from my wife’s blood was still in Zia’s body, that was what was attacking her platelets, but once my wife’s antibodies cycled out of her body in a few days, if she didn’t have an uncontrolled bleed first, Zia would be perfectly normal and healthy. 

I remember a blanket that they gave Zia as she was being discharged which came with a note that it was knitted by a NICU survivor who was now a teenager and made these as her way of saying thanks. 

I remember the day we were discharged and went home with our daughter.

We were the lucky ones. Zia did not have any bleeds during this dangerous period. Her condition, while incredibly serious, cleared as her mother’s antibodies were filtered out of her body and replaced by her own. We knew that not every child in the NICU is lucky enough to come home so soon or even at all. She came home after only ten days in the NICU.

And then we were home and we were parents of a newborn with all of the chaos and sleeplessness and joy that entails. And quickly those days of terror were replaced with the normal grind of those early days of parenting. And there’s little to no time to process what happened to us because you’re just trying to keep your head above water. And one day you look up and you have a four year old and you realize you never quite stopped to reflect on those first days. 

I have wanted to write about this for some time. Some of this is catharsis and delayed trauma processing. Some of it is an attempt to record memories which I expect never to forget, but nonetheless will fade with time as all things do. But I needed to write this because the act of writing is both a way to process the past and record it for the future. Maybe someday Zia will read this and learn a little more about those ten days at the start of her life.  

We were lucky. Today Zia is healthy with no long-term impacts. We are blessed and happy.

But on the best days, like her fourth birthday party, or the toughest days, like a few days when she’s home sick with hand, foot, and mouth disease, I look at this big girl and can’t help but remember that little baby in the NICU, full of tubes and surrounded by beeping machines, and it makes it a little bit easier to deal with a wild toddler. We almost lost our Zia the day she was born but we were so lucky that we did not.

Happy birthday Zia. We love you so much.

Thanks to my wife for letting me publish this, for her edits, for carrying and birthing our child, and for being a great mother. And thank you to everyone, the doctors, nurses, friends, and family who helped us survive that period of our lives. We will be forever grateful.

I was setting this new Substack tonight and I was not planning writing anything, especially work related.1 But after I left work for the holiday weekend, news broke that the Department of Justice had in response to a FOIA lawsuit filed by Tony Tan finally released the letters from the Attorney General to tech companies promising them non-enforcement of the TikTok Ban based on the President’s illegal January 20th executive order. I have been calling for the release of these letters for months and now you can see for yourself below what a get out of jail card looks like on DOJ letterhead signed by the Attorney General herself. Alan Rozenshtein, who has been on the TikTok non-enforcement is insane AND illegal beat since Day 1, writes the letters claims “are astonishing in their breadth and implications for executive power.”

I have spent the last few months slightly obsessed with what was happening with the TikTok ban.2 Not because I was some big supporter of the TikTok ban, at best I would describe myself as indifferent, both because I saw the merits of the free speech/First Amendment arguments but also the hypothetical national security concerns (which the government never bothered to publicly prove). But also because I was spending way too much time on TikTok and honestly thought the government banning it was easier than me having any sort of self-control against that insane algorithm.3 

But I could not get over the fact that the President was using an Executive Order without any real authorities to just…suspend a law that Congress had passed in an overwhelming bipartisan manner and the Supreme Court upheld. I am not a lawyer so I struggle to properly describe the EO and what is happening, is it illegal (sure), unprecedented (definitely), and not really allowed by the law (it is currently happening unimpeded).

In the grand scheme of the chaos of the beginning of the second Trump administration, from DOGE to RFK Jr., and because a lot of people on all sides on the aisle didn’t really want TikTok to be banned, it kind of just passed by as another one of those crazy illegal power seizing things they were doing. 

But I had read the TikTok Ban, or more properly the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA), a bunch of times and honestly it was a pretty tightly written law to achieve its goal of banning TikTok.4 The authors pretty smartly enforced the ban not against TikTok but against the app stores and cloud hosting services and threaten them with truly crippling fines (a reasonable estimate in fines was $1.7 TRILLION just between the app stores run by Apple, Google, and Oracle which is TikTok’s sole US cloud host). That is an insane amount of money even for those Big Tech companies to risk for an app they don’t even own! I thought the app store companies were kind of laudable for complying with the law until news broken on February 13 when news broke that Apple and Google were returning TikTok to the app stores after “Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to [Apple] assuring it will not face fines for violating a law that banned the video-sharing platform last month.”

It kind of broke my brain that the companies were willing to take that much risk, though there were some obvious reasons why they would (antitrust trials and it was just days after DOJ ordered the Eric Adams case dropped) and I wrote about it in Tech Policy Press in February. 

Then the TikTok ban just kind of…kept going. And then it got extended once. And I wrote about the dangers to public companies in complying with the TikTok ban and the question if they needed to disclose breaking the law when the President asked them and the AG gave them a secret letter saying it was fine. And then after I published Matt Schettenhelm from Bloomberg Intelligence pointed out Akamai HAD made such a disclosure in their Febuary SEC filing and it is a wild fucking disclosure.5 And then the TikTok ban delay got extended again.

I had written in April that the letters from the AG really should be released so investors, and the public, could judge their legal soundness and the risk to the companies breaking the law. 

Luckily there was someone else who had similar questions and the wherewithal to go and fill two lawsuits to do something about. Tony Tan filed a shareholder lawsuit in June against Google on ignoring the ban and trying to get the AG letter in Delaware and then a FOIA request that became a lawsuit (I believe at least one news org also had a FOIA lawsuit on this). The TikTok letters were released by DOJ in response to the FOIA request/lawsuit. (Full disclosure: Tony emailed me after he read my piece and we chatted on the phone and have emailed).

And now the letters are public. But why now? 

One answer may be found in Tony Tan’s other lawsuit. Professor Jack Goldsmith noted that on July 1, Alphabet had to file a response to the Delaware lawsuit, which didn’t get much attention but was the first time Alphabet/Google officially admitted to hosting TikTok on the PlayStore (obvious) and to receiving a letter (Professor Goldsmith’s post on Trump’s illegal refusal to enforce the TikTok is worth the read). 

For much of the last few months it was a beneficial position for these companies to have these letters be secret but if they were going to eventually come out, they might as well control how they come out. 

But it seems plausible Alphabet/Google knew these legal filings would be public in July and since the TikTok ban is going to be extended forever, they’re public companies, that for any number of reasons these letters would eventually become public. And so maybe they let DOJ know they wouldn’t be upset if these eventually became public, say sometime around their public filings in the case.

And so on the afternoon before a three day holiday weekend, the oldest DC tradition of “Take Out the Trash Day” of burying bad news before a holiday weekend was executed, with DOJ releasing the TikTok letters that afternoon. 

And folks the TikTok letters, they are bad. 

There’s the part a lot of us have been saying that these are huge fines to risk on a secret piece of paper, and now that it’s not secret, a lot of investors may really be pissed as Nilay Patel of the Verge noted (hello to the lawyers working overtime this weekend to file a securities fraud case by Monday).

But way more important is the sweeping justification used by the Department of Justice, you know the entity that is supposed to be the government’s neutral enforcer of laws in this country, to justify the non-enforcement of the law. It is worth reading in its entirety.

Article II of the United States Constitution vests in the President the responsibility over national security and the conduct of foreign policy. The President has determined that an abrupt shutdown of the TikTok platform would interfere with the execution of the President’s constitutional duties to take care of the national security and foreign affairs of the United States. See Executive Order.¹ The Acting Attorney General has concluded that the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (the “Act”) is properly read not to infringe upon such core Presidential national security and foreign affairs powers.

Jack Goldsmith describes the TikTok letters as “an astounding assertion of executive power—maybe the broadest I have ever seen any president or Justice Department make, ever, in any context—and that is saying something.”

Alan Rozenshtein says “But the primary, and more constitutionally audacious, argument advanced in the letters is a claim of sweeping Article II power…This interpretation effectively creates a foreign-affairs exception to the President’s duty to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.’”

These shocking letters of non-enforcement are among the many steps this administration is taking to legalize lawlessness, they may be a template for justifying ignoring others laws in the future, or not prosecuting companies for violations. They can be added to the FCPA non-enforcement and his historic pardoning of a corporation for the first time to their toolkit for corruption.

As I have noted before, I am not a lawyer, and I will leave the deep analysis to others. But you don’t have to be a Constitutional scholar to read the letters and realize this issue isn’t really about TikTok. It is about the rule of law and how Donald Trump made some of his greatest illegal power grabs on day one with few people realizing it. Now that these letters are public,6 maybe people will begin to understand that the Trump Administration’s justifications for indefinitely delaying the TikTok ban are a groundhog day of expanding executive power that is somehow also a dereliction of executive duty.

A special thanks to Alan Rozenshtein, Tony Tan, and Jack Goldsmith for being some of the only people seriously focused on this issue, letting it bother them, and treating it with the seriousness we now see it clearly deserved.