Weekly Perspective

 

  The Unraveling of RFK Jr. The HHS Secretary’s disastrous CNN interview spotlights the risks of a presidency that refuses to admit mistakes. Adam Kinzinger Aug 4 ∙        Note: Video for paid subsribers follows article. On Sunday, the secretary of Health and Human Services ranted like a madman on national television during the country’s worst measles outbreak in 35 years. Was he furious about the children suffering from a virus whose spread is largely preventable? Of course not. Instead, what drew HHS Secretary Kennedy’s ire was CNN’s Dana Bash asking whether Donald Trump deserved any blame for how he handled COVID. Kennedy refused to say yes. Instead, he blamed Anthony Fauci, governors, and the press. Bash reminded him that Trump was the president at the time and that Kennedy wrote in 2024 that Trump had “let bureaucrats like Anthony Fauci shut down the entire country.” Kennedy went back to blaming Fauci. That was the least alarming part of the interview. A fe...

  Why Goldman Sachs Research Expects the Fed to Remain on Hold in 2026 Ahead of this week’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting, markets were signaling the most uncertainty in three decades about whether policymakers would hike, according to David Mericle , chief US economist in Goldman Sachs Research. In the end, the meeting was “somewhat anticlimactic,” Mericle writes in a report. The FOMC held rates steady but issued no guidance on the future direction of rates and no details on the committee’s interpretation of the impact of inflation. “ We had expected that most FOMC voters would not want to hike because the June inflation data showed substantial improvement relative to prior months, ” Mericle writes. Kevin Warsh, who became chairman of the Federal Reserve in May, made several comments in his press conference after the FOMC meeting that Goldman Sachs Research interpreted as dovish, Mericle writes. Warsh appeared to downplay artificial intelligence-related price pressu...

 

(Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/ The Bulwark | Photos: Shutterstock) A VAGUELY OMINOUS BUT LITTLE-NOTICED regulatory filing issued in late June could have a profound impact on business, immigrants, and the balance of power in our country. The filing was a notification that the Trump administration had drafted new rules governing the decennial census . The actual specifics of those new rules remain scant. But from conversations I’ve been having with people close to the process, it is widely expected that the administration will try to recategorize millions of immigrants (both unauthorized and legal) as not actually living here in the United States. Why would they do that? For several reasons. The first is a longstanding animus that the president and his top aides have to the immigrant population. The administration has unleashed unprecedented border crackdowns and interior enforcement measures in the service of a vast project of mass deportation. Through the census, it can continue...