A much-hyped “Justice for J6” rally on Saturday to support individuals being prosecuted for participating in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was over in little more than an hour.

Inside a crowd that U.S. Capitol Police estimated to be fewer than 450 people, a small group of protestors was dwarfed by a swarm of media and onlookers, and flanked by hundreds of officers in riot gear. The speeches, organized by a previously little-known former campaign staffer for Donald Trump, were short and unremarkable, repeating talking points about the unjust treatment of those charged for their actions on Jan. 6. The crowd chanted “USA!” a few times. While nine members of Congress had been invited to attend the rally, none of them showed.
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But anyone seeking to draw conclusions from the paltry turnout about the future of the right-wing groups that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 is looking in the wrong place. Ahead of the event, there was little evidence of any mobilization to get members of these groups to attend. The largest, including the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, discouraged supporters from coming to D.C., saying it was a “false flag” set up by federal officers to entrap them. Critics may have taken satisfaction in the failure of the crowd to materialize, but any sense of relief is misinformed: the groups that staged the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol have simply shifted their attention closer to home.

More than 600 people have been charged in a sprawling federal investigation in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 riot, driving many of the far-right groups that helped organize it underground. But they haven’t gone away—and repeating the events of Jan. 6 has never been their goal. In the past nine months, many of the same groups have instead been coming together at a more local level. They have gathered at anti-vaccine rallies, QAnon-linked events and community meetings protesting “tyrannical” COVID-19 control measures. They have been congregating on alternative, harder-to-monitor online platforms, urging each other to get over their disappointment about Trump’s defeat and take action into their own hands by running for local office.

Some experts who spoke to TIME compared it to the aftermath of the 1998 Oklahoma City bombing and the subsequent Justice Department crackdown on domestic extremist groups. “These groups go into hiding. A lot of them are kind of laying low and quiet right now,” says Daryl Johnson, a former Department of Homeland Security senior analyst who authored a 2009 report warning of the rise of right-wing extremism in the U.S. “It doesn’t mean that the threat has dissipated, but it’s factionalized.”

This year’s events have only fueled the narratives of some of the more hardened groups that made up the crowd on Jan. 6, including white supremacists and self-styled anti-government militias. Vaccine mandates and other “pandemic-related stressors” have been “driving several plots by domestic violent extremists, and they may contribute to more violence this year,” a DHS bulletin warned in August. The release of 2020 census statistics later that month, which showed that the population of non-Hispanic white Americans had dropped as the country became more diverse, provided endless talking points within white nationalist movements, stoking their “great replacement” fears.

And despite the crumbling of its main premise—that Trump would remain in the White House on Jan. 20—QAnon followers have continued to congregate at large conferences, including one scheduled for next month in Las Vegas. A TIME investigation in April showed how dozens of its adherents, some of whom participated in Jan. 6, have won seats on local school boards and city councils.

“This is a time period in which the hardcore people could get more radical,” says Johnson, noting that the return of mask and vaccination mandates is bringing together regular Americans who see it as an infringement on their rights and creating an opportunity for recruitment in extremist groups. “This is a dangerous time, and while previously these threats were openly visible on social media, now we can’t see everything that’s going on.”

‘This is how we’re going to take back our country.’

Saturday’s rally in Washington was rooted in the idea that the Jan. 6 rioters have been hunted down by a vengeful Democratic administration, a notion that has gained momentum as rightwing media and some elected officials have recast the Capitol attack as a largely peaceful demonstration by pro-Trump demonstrators exercising their First Amendment rights. It’s a message that has resonated in many communities across the country, where people see the rioters’ actions as not criminal but patriotic. “After the next civil war, and when we win, we will be able to write the correct info in our textbooks,” one person wrote on a right-wing forum on Sept. 16. “The future will know who the real patriots are.”

On Saturday, speakers led the small crowd gathered near the U.S. Capitol in chanting the name of Ashli Babbitt, a 35-year-old Air Force veteran and supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory who quickly became a martyr for some far-right groups after she was killed by a police officer on Jan. 6 while trying to breach the inner chamber of the Capitol where lawmakers were sheltering.

Ahead of the “Justice for J6 rally,” furious debates unfolded on right-wing forums and messaging apps over whether or not it was a good idea to attend. One widely-shared meme showed a uniformed agent with an FBI patch poking a figure representing far-right groups with a stick urging them “C’mon, come to DC.” The event was denounced by prominent figures in the movement, including retired Gen. Michael Flynn and former President Donald Trump himself, who called the event “a setup.”

“We need spontaneous rallies to form that they can’t infiltrate,” one user on a pro-Trump message board said on Sept. 17. “What would be far, far more effective is if…you find fellow patriots and simply have a protest at your local town center.” Another agreed: “I think that’s a much stronger message than a televised (and false-flag) event from the middle of the Imperial Capital.”

Others expressed frustration with what they saw as a timid approach. “If there ever has been a time to protest, it’s now, but we’ve been manipulated into this position where people don’t feel safe exercising their rights under the threat of being set-up,” one person posted on a rightwing messaging app. “WHEN will be a better time?”

Ultimately, regardless of the headlines about the rally’s low turnout, the event’s message of keeping up the fight resonated on Saturday far beyond the small crowd in Washington. “This battle doesn’t end today,” Matt Baynard, the former Trump campaign aide who organized the event, told the crowd. “In fact I think this is the beginning…of the ‘America First’ right taking over community organizing in this country.”

Listening to the speech under the shade of a tree by a police line, a man who would only give his first name, Tom, showed TIME text messages from his brother in Olympia, Wash., who planned to attend a local anti-vaccine mandate rally with the Proud Boys and other far-right groups later in the day. “It’s not really about coming here to yell outside the Capitol or the White House,” he said, tapping his phone. “This is how we’re going to take our country back.”

Days after ISIS-K terrorists killed more than 100 Afghans and 13 U.S. troops at Kabul’s airport, the U.S. military obtained intelligence that another attack was imminent. MQ-9 Reaper drones were deployed above the city, running wide race-track patterns day-and-night, hunting for the smallest clue that could potentially prevent another tragedy.

Based on the information that a sedan could be used in the next attack, the drones began following a white Toyota Corolla in a working class neighborhood of Afghanistan’s capital city. Through the planes’ high-resolution cameras, the U.S. military watched the vehicle as it made various stops around Kabul and observed several men pack it with large bundles, which the analysts believed were explosives.
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On Aug. 29, after hours of observation, U.S. commanders felt they had collected enough information to stop what they believed was a suicide bomber preparing to kill American troops finishing the last stages of the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan. A military officer authorized a drone operator to launch a Hellfire missile to obliterate the target. The strike hit the car, the threat was eliminated—or so the military thought.

After two weeks of reviewing the strike and subsequent evidence about what was hit, the Pentagon acknowledged on Friday that the drone strike was a tragic mistake that killed 10 civilians, including seven children. The U.S. military’s admission drew immediate criticism both about the Biden Administration’s hasty withdrawal efforts from Afghanistan and its counterterrorism plan in the absence of a U.S. troop presence there. President Joe Biden himself initially held up the drone strike as an example of success in his so-called “over-the-horizon” strategy to respond to terrorist threats from afar.

Biden has yet to respond publicly to the announcement regarding the mistaken drone strike. But General Kenneth McKenzie, commander of U.S. military operations in the Middle East, held a video teleconference with reporters at the Pentagon on Friday and owned up to the fatal error. “At the time of the strike, I was confident that the strike had averted an imminent threat to our forces at the airport,” McKenzie said. “Our investigation now concludes that the strike was a tragic mistake.”

Under the “over-the-horizon” approach, targeting information and intelligence on suspected terrorist activity in Afghanistan will derive largely from airborne surveillance, captured communications chatter and images captured by drones circling overhead rather than U.S. and partner forces on the ground. As the civilian casualties in Kabul demonstrate, no technology can substitute for having trained eyes on a target.

What the military believed was an ISIS-K operative turned out to be a longtime worker for a U.S. aid group, Zemari Ahmadi, who had no link to the terror group. What the military believed was a terrorist safe house turned out to be a home full of small children. What the military believed were explosives were most likely water bottles.

“I offer my profound condolences to the family and friends of those who were killed,” McKenzie said, adding the U.S. was “exploring the possibility” of payments to compensate the victims’ surviving family members.

The U.S. military typically fails to release details about civilian casualty investigations and, if they do come to light, the results are held and compiled for many months before they are formally released. However, in the days following the airstrike, news organizations including the New York Times and Washington Post published high-profile investigations that contradicted the Pentagon’s initial claims.

McKenzie dismissed the notion that the mistaken drone strike served as any sort of bellwether for the over-the-horizon strategy. Future strikes will have more robust precautions and more certainty, he said; at the time of the Kabul strike, the military felt it was under “imminent threat” of attack and had to attack. “It’ll be different done under different rules of engagement,” he said. “We would have a lot more opportunity probably than we had, under this extreme time pressure to take a look at the target.”

Before such strikes, the U.S. military typically conducts an intelligence “soak” of the target, using drones to watch for days to try to determine a pattern of life and properly discern where civilians live and work and where militants are holed up. Military also usually intercepts communications to determine who they’re looking at. “None of these things were available to us, given the urgent and pressing nature of the imminent threat to our forces,” McKenzie said.

Even in less time constrained circumstances, though, the U.S. government has made mistakes. The targeted-killing drone program targeting terrorist operatives, which is primarily run by the CIA and the U.S. military’s secretive Joint Special Operations Command, has long been accused of inadvertently killing civilians. Numbers vary widely, but according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a London-based organization that has tracked U.S. drone strikes, estimates that between 300 to 909 civilians have been killed in such attacks in Afghanistan since January 2004.

Separately, the Pentagon acknowledges that U.S. airstrikes have killed more than 1,400 civilians across Iraq and Syria, since operations against ISIS began in 2014. Airwars, another London-based nonprofit that tracks civilian casualties in war zones, puts the figure much higher. It estimates about 29,000 innocent people have been killed by U.S.-led air strikes.

“The U.S. military’s initial, stubborn insistence that this was a ‘righteous strike’—despite compelling and immediate evidence to the contrary—raises fundamental questions about why U.S. military commands so routinely ignore reports of tragedies from affected communities,” says Chris Woods, director of Airwars. “It can’t be right that civilians only appear to have accountability when the investigative might of U.S. media giants is brought to bear.”

Other human rights groups said the U.S. military was only admitting responsibility for the civilian casualties in this case because it was widely documented. Drone strikes are often conducted in rural areas far from cameras in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, Libya and Somalia. What about the strikes the American public never sees?

“What makes this tragedy different from so many others during the war in Afghanistan is that because of public attention, the U.S. military has been forced to investigate and apologize, and is exploring making amends,” Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, said in a statement.

“The United States’ record on lethal strikes is generally a refusal to acknowledge families’ devastating losses, weak or non-existent investigations, and no amends whatsoever, even when the evidence of wrongdoing is staring us in the face,” she said. “This strike should be an inflection point and wake-up call at long last.”

In the two decades following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, in the conflicts with al-Qaeda, ISIS and other terrorist groups, the U.S. has taken a very broad view the legal standards that govern military operation overseas, viewing much of the world from Washington as a battlefield. The Biden Administration is now revising U.S. policy governing the use of lethal force against terrorists, but the President has yet to come to a decision even after the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which has drawn fire from Republicans.

The U.S. has left Afghanistan in the hands of the same Taliban militants it overthrew two decades ago, after the group provided safe haven to the al-Qaeda operatives who plotted the 9/11 attacks. Its leaders still maintain close ties to al-Qaeda, and the nascent government being patched together in Kabul is unlikely to be able to contain the resurgence of competing terrorist groups in the region, including ISIS-K, an offshoot of the original Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria.

“The Administration claimed their ‘over-the-horizon capacity’ would work. Instead, we have another failure with deadly consequences,” Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama, the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement. “Mr. President, before more innocent lives are lost, please formulate a counterterrorism plan for Afghanistan.”

There are signs of a potential policy change. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a retired four-star Army general, issued an apology to the families of the drone strike victims for the “horrible mistake.” He signaled an openness to altering future U.S. protocol by announcing a review of all authorities, procedures and processes that might have gone wrong before the Hellfire missile began hurtling toward its target in Kabul, ending the lives of 10 blameless Afghans.

With reporting by Vera Bergengruen/Washington

A private lawyer with links to Democrats and Hillary Clinton was indicted Thursday by Justice Department Special Counsel John Durham over allegations that he made a false statement to the FBI in 2016, as an inquiry into the origins of the bureau’s Russia probe grinds on.

The lawyer, Michael Sussmann, met with the FBI’s then-general counsel in September 2016 to convey information that might have indicated a covert communications channel between the Trump Organization and a Russia-based bank, according to the 27-page indictment.

Sussmann told the FBI official that he wasn’t providing the allegations on behalf of any client, prosecutors said. However, the indictment alleges that “Sussmann assembled and conveyed the allegations to the FBI on behalf of at least two clients, including a U.S. technology executive and the Clinton presidential campaign.”
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The indictment indicates that Durham is pursuing a legal theory that Democratic operatives intentionally fed the Federal Bureau of Investigation information to harm the candidacy of Donald Trump, who by that time was the Republican nominee for president.

The indictment is likely to fuel political grievances by conservatives that Trump was the target of a conspiracy that tried to tie him to Russia. Trump and his supporters have separately made unfounded allegations that FBI officials were part of a plot to harm his candidacy and presidency. Durham’s indictment, however, alleges that the FBI was the victim of a crime and misinformation.

“Michael Sussmann was indicted today because of politics, not facts,” his lawyers, Sean Berkowitz and Michael Bosworth with the law firm Latham and Watkins LLP, said in a statement. “The special counsel appears to be using this indictment to advance a conspiracy theory he has chosen not to actually charge.”

“At its core,” they added, “the special counsel is bringing a false statement charge based on an oral statement allegedly made five years ago to a single witness that is unrecorded and unobserved by anyone else.”

Sussmann was a partner in the law firm Perkins Coie, working in the Washington office. On Thursday evening, the firm said he had resigned.

The FBI investigated the allegations that a computer service at the Trump Organization was communicating with Russian-based Alfa Bank and “ultimately determined that there was insufficient evidence to support the allegations,” according to the indictment.

Durham, then U.S. attorney in Connecticut, was appointed to the special counsel post in April 2019 to look into whether the FBI or intelligence officials committed crimes when they investigated whether anyone associated with Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign conspired with Russia to interfere in that year’s election. Durham was named special counsel by then-Attorney General William Barr in October 2020, a move that allowed his inquiry to continue into the Biden administration.

Trump and his conservative allies have made repeated and unsubstantiated claims that a cabal of “deep state” figures illegally spied on his 2016 campaign and took actions to sabotage his administration after he was elected. Although they’ve been counting on the Durham investigation to uncover scandals to back up their assertions, frustration has grown with the lack of new developments and silence from the special counsel’s office.

“Where’s Durham?” Trump asked in a statement in March, six months after losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden. “Is he a living, breathing human being? Will there ever be a Durham report?”

Durham’s work has now gone on longer than the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who took over the original Russia interference probe in May 2017 and concluded it in March 2019. Critics continue to question the value of Durham’s inquiry and whether it should be shut down.

More than two years in, Durham has secured one guilty plea from a former FBI lawyer who acknowledged falsifying an email when seeking to renew a secret warrant to conduct surveillance on Carter Page, a former Trump campaign aide. The lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, admitted he changed the email to incorrectly say that Page hadn’t been a CIA source. He pleaded guilty last August to falsifying a document.

By comparison, the Mueller investigation resulted in 34 indictments, the conviction of a Trump campaign manager, Paul Manafort, for unrelated financial crimes and a guilty plea from Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, for lying to the FBI. Trump pardoned Manafort and Flynn late last year, before leaving office.

Mueller also documented almost a dozen examples of possible obstruction of justice by Trump, and his investigation exposed a massive criminal conspiracy by Russian operatives to interfere in the 2016 election.

–With assistance from Christopher Opfer.

This article is part of the The DC Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox every weekday.

House Democrats yesterday finished penning a 2,600-page bill that finally outlines the specifics of their ambitious “soft” infrastructure plan that won’t attract a single Republican vote. But no one was really rushing to Schneider’s for bottles of bubbly. For a party ready to spend $3.5 trillion to fund its social policy agenda, there were plenty of glum faces on Capitol Hill.

In fact, one key piece of the legislation—a deal that would finally let Medicare negotiate lower prices with drug companies—fell apart in the Energy and Commerce Committee when three Democrats voted against it. It found resurrection a short time later when Leadership aides literally plucked it from the Energy and Commerce team and delivered it to the Ways and Means Committee for its approval instead. Even there, though, one Democrat voted against it, saying the threat it posed to pharmaceutical companies’ profits would doom it in the Senate. “Every moment we spend debating provisions that will never become law is a moment wasted and will delay much-needed assistance to the American people,” Rep. Stephanie Murphy of Florida later argued.
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Put another way? Brace for some nasty politics over the next two weeks as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tries to get this bill to a vote before the budget year ends on Sept. 30. And those 2,600 pages had better be recyclable.

Democrats can only afford three defectors if they want to usher this bill into law, and they’re perilously close to failure. So far, five centrist Democrats in the House have said they prefer a scaled-back version of the Medicare component. But if Pelosi gives the five centrists that win, she risks losing the support of progressives who are already sour that things like a punitive wealth tax and the end to tax loopholes aren’t present in the current version of the bill.

As it stands now, letting Medicare negotiate drug prices would save the government about $500 billion over the next decade. The scaled-back version doesn’t have an official cost, but a very similar version got its score in the Senate last year: roughly $100 billion in savings. Because Democrats are using a budgeting loophole to help them avoid a filibuster and pass this with bare majorities, that $400 billion gap matters a lot more than on most bills. Scaling back the Medicare savings means they would also have to scale back their overall spending on the bill—a big line in the sand for progressives who say they’ve already compromised too much.

All of this, of course, comes as President Joe Biden and his top aides in the White House have been trying to get Senate centrists onboard. Just yesterday, he met separately with Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, fellow Democrats who have expressed worries about the $3.5 trillion price tag but have been vague about what exactly they want to cut back on. With the Senate evenly divided at 50-50, and Vice President Kamala Harris in position to break the ties to Democrats’ victories, any shenanigans from those two independent thinkers scrambles the whole package.

Oh, and that other bipartisan infrastructure plan that carries $550 billion in new spending? It’s still sitting on the shelf in the House. Pelosi said she’d bring it to the floor only when the bigger—and entirely partisan—bill was ready. And there’s plenty of grumbling about that package, too.

If this is all beginning to sound like a scratched record that keeps repeating, it’s because this has become something of a pattern here in Washington. Things look pretty grim for legislation in town these days, despite Democrats controlling the House, the Senate and the White House. Their margin for error is literally zero, and so hiccups from a half-dozen centrists can forewarn a doomed agenda.

So far, Pelosi has been a master of holding the line on crucial votes and has managed to maneuver her team to victories, including on an earlier pandemic relief package that passed with only Democratic votes. Now she’s trying again, but the clock is ticking, and $3.5 trillion is an eye-popping sum of money that rivals the spending the United States unleashed to close out World War II.

Oh, and one more thing: the nation’s credit card is within weeks of becoming maxed out. And Republicans say they’re not going to up the limit, leaving Democrats to figure out how to do that at the same time. Even though a boost to the debt ceiling will cover money already spent—much of it during the Trump era—the GOP is going to leave Democrats holding this vote alone and won’t “facilitate” any change to D.C.’s borrowing power. Which adds another item to the tricky list of tasks facing Democrats on the Hill over the next two weeks.

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One evening in early June, Leo and his family were able to enjoy a treat they hadn’t experienced in months: a sit-down meal at a restaurant.

At a fried chicken chain in a Compton, California strip mall, they splurged on a few plates of fried rice, each costing under $13.99. The money Leo, 39, makes as a mechanic never seems to satisfy the deluge of bills that pile up on his kitchen counter each month, so the modest meal felt like a luxury. “It made me very happy,” Leo says in Spanish through an interpreter.

The family was only able to afford the meal because Leo is part of a groundbreaking guaranteed income experiment in his city called the Compton Pledge. In regular installments between late 2020 and the end of 2022, Leo and 799 other individuals are receiving up to $7,200 annually to spend however they like. Leo, an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala who TIME has agreed to refer to by a pseudonym to protect his identity, receives quarterly payments of $900.
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The organization running Compton Pledge, called the Fund for Guaranteed Income, is building the technological infrastructure necessary to distribute cash payments on a broad scale and has partnered with an independent research group to study the extent to which a minimum income floor can lift families like Leo’s out of poverty. The pilot, which distributes money derived from private donors, is not just about giving people the ability to buy small indulgences. It’s testing whether giving poor families a financial cushion can have a demonstrable impact on their physical and psychological health, job prospects and communities. And perhaps the biggest question of all: Can these cash infusions transcend their status as a small research project in progressive Los Angeles and someday work as a nationwide program funded by taxpayers?

The theory is gaining momentum in the U.S. Six years ago, there were no programs distributing and studying the effects of providing swaths of Americans no-strings-attached cash, according to Stanford’s Basic Income Lab, an academic hub tracking such programs. But now, pilot programs are taking place in roughly 20 cities around the country, from St. Paul, Minnesota to Paterson, New Jersey, with Compton’s exercise serving as the nation’s largest city-based experiment in terms of number of people served. Most of the programs are philanthropically funded—including Compton’s—and distribute different amounts of money to targeted populations, from Black pregnant women to former foster children to single parents. These laboratories for wealth redistribution all have one thing in common: they give some of society’s poorest and most marginalized people cold-hard cash, and then let them spend it however they want.

There is limited polling on support for nationwide guaranteed income programs, but 45% of Americans supported giving every adult citizen—regardless of employment or income—$1,000 per month, through a subtype of guaranteed income called Universal Basic Income (UBI), according to an August 2020 survey from Pew Research Center. Andrew Yang, who popularized the idea of UBI during his long-shot 2016 presidential campaign, wants the proposed benefit to replace most existing government welfare programs. Most other proponents of a guaranteed income in the U.S., however, resist being lumped in with his plan, believing instead that the cash benefit should supplement other forms of government assistance and target individuals who need it most.

If any form of a national guaranteed income were to advance beyond a talking point, it would mark a striking shift in how Americans view the role of government in society. Less restricted forms of cash assistance largely ended in the 1990s with President Bill Clinton’s welfare reform, as both Republicans and Democrats argued government benefits were disincentivizing work. The country’s social safety net in recent years has offered more limited relief through a patchwork of difficult-to-navigate programs, like food stamps and Section 8 housing vouchers, which often have stringent rules and leave many poor families ineligible. But after a year and a half of the pandemic, three rounds of stimulus checks and a newly expanded child tax credit, proponents of cash-based programs feel the tide turning. “This is an inevitable future,” argues Nika Soon-Shiong, the executive director of the Fund for Guaranteed Income.

Many of the country’s most significant social reform movements have been provoked by national crises, from the Great Depression’s birth of the New Deal to the 2008 financial crisis paving the way for the Affordable Care Act. Even if guaranteed income never catches on, economists and public officials may glean lessons about giving poor families financial breathing room from 2020’s pandemic relief packages and Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion budget proposal, which includes a permanent expansion of the child tax credit and a paid family leave program for new parents. By one measure, U.S. poverty fell in 2020, largely thanks to federal aid aimed at helping people weather the worst financial crisis in decades, the Census Bureau reported in September.

But the window to enact major change closes quickly. Republican lawmakers have raised concerns that Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package is feeding inflationary pressure and inciting labor shortages. It remains unclear whether Democrats will have enough support in Congress to make the assistance efforts they passed this year last beyond 2021. And despite the proliferation of guaranteed income pilots, cementing them beyond experiments funded through charity is proving tremendously politically challenging amid fears that such policies keep low-income Americans on the government dole.

That’s not how Leo sees it. While he used few bucks from Compton Pledge for a fried rice dinner, the rest of it went to more pressing causes: a $250 car diagnostic tool enabling him to take on more mechanic jobs, a college textbook for his 23-year-old stepdaughter Lesley, a few hundred dollars sent to his ailing mother in Guatemala, and payments towards a $3,000 payday loan that has accrued nearly $1,000 in interest fees in less than two years. The extra financial padding hasn’t kept him from needing to work, even through severe pain caused by his gout flare-ups. Leo, who does not have health insurance due to his immigration status, now also faces the daunting prospect of paying down a $10,612.80 hospital bill after a recent emergency room visit for chest pains that a physician linked to stress.

That stress has been building for a long time. Earlier this year, the mounting anxiety brought Leo to a Catholic church in downtown Los Angeles where he begged for a reprieve. “I asked the Virgin Mary for some sort of miracle,” he says from the covered patio outside his home that doubles as his stepson’s bedroom. Asked whether being selected to receive money from Compton Pledge was that miracle he was searching for, Leo replies with a grin: “Cien por ciento.” He feels 100% certain that it was.

‘There were no cockroaches’

Soon-Shiong, a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford, initially planned to launch the Fund for Guaranteed income after completing her thesis on cash transfer systems in India. But the pandemic made her realize people much closer to home needed help—and fast.

“It really felt like there were not enough people thinking about the solution,” Soon-Shiong, the daughter of billionaire business tycoon and Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, tells TIME from her spacious West Hollywood apartment. “But a lot of people talking about the problem.”

She approached Aja Brown, who was finishing her second and final term as Compton’s Mayor, to create a program to bring monetary help to the struggling city, where 29% of inhabitants are Black and 68% are Hispanic or Latino. As Compton’s unemployment rate eclipsed 20% and thousands of residents fell ill with the virus—including many undocumented ones like Leo who lack health insurance—Brown and Soon-Shiong felt compelled to create an inclusive guaranteed income initiative. Unlike some forms of federal assistance, Compton Pledge would be open to undocumented immigrants and formerly incarcerated individuals. And rather than make marginalized people who are wary of giving strangers their home addresses and financial information apply for the program, Brown and Soon-Shiong used an advisory council to help them randomly select the Compton residents, including those the city government might not have records of. Starting in August 2020, Compton Pledge raised $9.2 million from donors including Amazon Studios and the California Wellness Foundation to go directly to the eventual recipients of Compton Pledge.

Compton certainly isn’t the only American city with inadequate resources, but its health and economic deficits are compounded by the absence of well-paying jobs and a high proportion of undocumented immigrants who lack health insurance. “The combination of all that leads to what we have here, which is an epidemic of poorly treated chronic disease,” says Dr. Elaine Batchlor, the CEO of MLK Community Healthcare, a hospital and healthcare system in South Los Angeles. An estimated 40% of adults in the 100,000-person city are considered obese, 12% of the adult population has diabetes, and residents are significantly more likely to die due to lung cancer, cardiovascular disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease compared to the surrounding county’s residents, according to data compiled by the LA County Department of Public Health.

Three out of the four Compton Pledge families TIME interviewed over the first six months they received checks expressed that they are battling some sort of chronic illness. In addition to Leo’s gout, his wife Brenda is diabetic, and their daughter Lesley is an asthmatic. Tiffany Hosley, a 40-year-old former paraeducator for Compton Unified School District, has been unable to work since she had a serious heart attack last October, and her insurance denied coverage for her $988 heart medication. Christine S., a 44-year-old transportation worker who asked TIME not to use her last name because she feared the money she gets from Compton Pledge could cost her other government benefits, also has a daughter with asthma. (Compton Pledge does not expect the funds to impact recipients’ eligibility for existing government support, but has set up a fund to reimburse participants in case they do. It has not had to use those reserves yet.)

The Fund for Guaranteed Income hopes these families can use the cash support to offset some of their medical expenses, and that the funds will also improve the recipients’ physical and mental health. Compton Pledge had promised in early press releases that Jain Family Institute, the independent research group it contracted to measure the success of the pilot, would be publishing data on the impact of the program at regular intervals, but it has not yet done so. Initial findings from a separate guaranteed income pilot in Stockton, California show promise, however. In March, the pilot reported that the recipients of its $500 per-month stipend showed statistically significant improvements in their mental health versus the control group, moving from likely having a mild mental health disorder to likely being mentally well. One year into the two-year pilot, Stockton recipients had spent 37% of their allotments on food, 22% on home goods and personal clothing items, and 11% on utilities. They spent less than 1% on alcohol and tobacco.

Beyond covering their own needs, some of the Compton recipients have committed to using the funds to pay it forward. That’s part of what the program’s organizers hope to demonstrate: that redistributing wealth through direct payments could improve access to education, housing and nutrition; reduce the racial wealth gap; and stimulate economic activity—which in turn can lift up a whole community.

Already, at least two members of the Compton Pledge have used some of their funding to start their own nonprofits. Georgia Horton endured molestation as a child, and after fleeing home with nothing but “five pieces of burnt bologna” she stole off the stove, she was arrested in the late 1980s for a murder she says she didn’t commit. During her 25-year prison stint, she became an evangelist preacher for her fellow inmates, and when she was paroled in 2017, she took that work to the greater Los Angeles area until the pandemic shuttered gathering spaces. The Compton Pledge funds posted to her account at just the right time: Horton was able to put her first $400 monthly allotment towards the tools she needed to preach the gospel virtually—namely, a new HP laptop and a ring light. With subsequent checks, she paid registration and notarization fees to launch a nonprofit, Georgia Horton Ministries, which will lead trauma-informed prison workshops and support other formerly incarcerated people.

Christine S. puts some of the $1,800 she receives quarterly towards feeding homeless individuals in Compton’s historic Lueders Park, inspired by her own past experiences with homelessness. She wants to purchase a mobile shower so homeless people don’t have to use garden hoses like she did. But the money she receives from the experiment has also helped her take her daughter Alex on a vacation to San Diego, where the toddler got to swim in a pool for the first time. “We didn’t have to get a super cheap hotel,” ​​Christine says. “There were no cockroaches.” Without the Compton Pledge money, she says, “I wouldn’t have had the financial ability to do much.”

‘She was getting more money staying home’

A UBI providing every American adult $12,000 per year would cost the U.S. government more than $3.1 trillion per year — a sum equal to roughly 90% of all the money the federal government collected in revenue last year.

Guaranteed income advocates say wealth taxes, such as those advocated by Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, could make the math work—at least for a program that helps very low-income people. And they argue that while it takes money to invest in a larger social safety net, it’s more expensive in the long run not to. Providing health care for uninsured people cost the country roughly $42.4 billion per year between 2015 and 2017, according to an estimate from the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. People who can’t pay rent or other bills are likely to need other services the government will end up paying for, like housing assistance. Poverty is also strongly linked to incarceration, which costs taxpayers at least $80 billion per year.

But conservative economists don’t believe throwing more money at the problem is a solution, especially when the national debt is already $28 trillion. “We’ve been completely irresponsible since the 21st century arrived,” says Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office and president of the center-right American Action Forum. Holtz-Eakin is also worried about free cash feeding inflationary pressure. He says increases in the consumer price index in the last year can at least partially be attributed to the pandemic-era stimulus spending: “There’s no doubt in my mind that the American Rescue Plan and those checks that went out along with the other subsidies fueled the inflation we’ve seen,” he says.

There are political risks, too. Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs, whose small city jumpstarted the recent boom of guaranteed income experiments in 2017, lost reelection to a Republican challenger by 13 points in the Democratic stronghold in 2020 after launching his pilot. Conservative criticism has only intensified as direct cash payments become more mainstream. And if Republicans and moderate Democrats are reluctant to give U.S. citizens free cash, many are sure to express even more opposition to giving this kind of government assistance to undocumented immigrants like Leo: Donald Trump was elected President in 2016 vowing to crack down on illegal immigration, and has falsely claimed undocumented immigrants drain public benefits.

During the height of the pandemic, Trump and many congressional Republicans supported stimulus checks to help Americans make it through the country’s economic collapse. By this spring, Democrats agreed to smaller checks and limited unemployment benefits when members of their own caucus, like Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, demanded the relief be targeted toward those with lower incomes. And once Biden’s stimulus package passed, Republicans pushed back against the pandemic unemployment insurance, expanded child tax credit and other assistance measures. When California approved the nation’s first state-funded guaranteed income project in July, which will dispense $35 million in monthly cash payments to pregnant women and youth who have recently aged out of foster care, Republican Assemblyman Vince Fong of Bakersfield abstained from voting for similar reasons. The cash would “undermine incentives to work and increase dependence on government,” he told the Associated Press.

Some experts say these critiques don’t hold up to reality. “There’s little to no evidence” that the federally passed income support programs are leading to work shortages, says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. Despite 26 states voluntarily ending supplemental unemployment insurance early, there was little difference in their employment numbers and workforce participation rate in July.

But if guaranteed income pilot programs explore how free money helps recipients, they’re also testing the ripple effects on the broader community, and some small businesses in Compton aren’t on board. Nearly half a dozen Compton businesses—including a taco truck, insurance shop, and a Chinese restaurant—told TIME that increased government benefits and cash programs were making it difficult for them to hire workers. “That sign has been out here for six months,” Roland Barsoum, the manager of a local auto insurance outlet, says of a ‘help wanted’ placard in his window. He hired two people to fill the clerical position, but neither lasted more than a few weeks. “One of them stayed for about a month,” he says, “but she was getting more money staying home.”

‘Breathing room’

For all the political pushback, guaranteed income programs are proliferating in the U.S. At least 40 new guaranteed income projects have started or been announced in the last six years.

Many of these new programs are trying to help populations with a specific need or historically marginalized communities. In Cambridge, Mass., for example, the guaranteed income pilot consists of single-caretaker households and is giving more than 100 families $500 per month for 18 months. St. Paul, Minnesota is helping up to 150 families whose finances were negatively impacted by COVID-19 with $500 monthly payments for 18 months. Oakland, Calif. is focusing on non-white residents and offering $500 monthly for 18 months to 600 families earning below the area median income. A group in San Francisco is partnering with the city’s Department of Health to give pregnant Black and Pacific Islander women $1,000 a month for the duration of their pregnancies and at least six months of the child’s life. And in Jackson, Mississippi, the Magnolia Mother’s Trust, now in its third cycle, is giving 100 Black mothers $1,000 for 12 months.

Support from wealthy tech moguls has spurred some of that growth. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey has repeatedly given to guaranteed income projects through his #startsmall initiative, including donations of $15 million to the Open Research Lab (formerly Y Combinator’s UBI project) and $18 million to Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, a group founded by former Stockton Mayor Tubbs that is funding many of the cash experiments. In March, New York University used $3.5 million from Dorsey to launch the Cash Transfer Lab, a center that will study the effect of such policies.

The focus on Black women in several of the programs is not a coincidence. “The data shows that Black women, Black mothers specifically, have been left out of opportunities for not only wealth creation, but opportunities for income in a way that the rest of this country has been allowed to succeed,” says Aisha Nyandoro, the chief executive officer of Springboard To Opportunities, the organization behind Magnolia Mother’s Trust. Black families have the second-highest poverty rate in the U.S. after only Native Americans, with 21.2% living below the poverty line, and 27% of Black families with single mothers living in poverty, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

Proponents say that for guaranteed income programs to most effectively target these populations, they must break the stigma of accepting help that many poor Americans have internalized. In San Francisco, prospective participants said they feared being viewed as “welfare queens,” according to program organizers, and some mothers in Jackson described how important their independence is to their identity.

The promise of some relief from crushing financial stress can outweigh those concerns. “There always comes a time where you’re going to need help,” says Danel Paige, 28, a member of the Jackson program. Throughout the pandemic, she has been working as a Head Start teacher, attending graduate school and taking care of her two children, ages 8 and 3, while their father’s military job keeps him stationed several states away. The money from Magnolia Mother’s Trust has helped her keep up with her electric bill and her car payment, and she’s hoping she can save enough to move to a safer neighborhood after losing a loved one to gun violence earlier this year. “I’m trying to lead a different life for myself,” she says. “This money is a huge part of that decision.”

That Paige is getting closer—but not yet able—to leave her neighborhood isn’t shocking to the guaranteed income advocates who designed these free cash projects. The money was never intended to be a panacea. “It’s not going to solve all of the systemic challenges that this country has,” says Nyandoro.

Poverty persists, as do its root causes. But for the lucky 800 in Compton, the unconditional money is a breath of fresh air in a smog-laden city. “Having a guaranteed income and a poverty floor enables people to have breathing room to make better decisions for their families,” former mayor Brown says, “to be able to spend time to maybe be able to actually go on an interview, to be able to plan a few years in advance instead of having to live paycheck to paycheck.”

Such is the reality for Leo, at least until his quarterly checks stop coming. An extra $3,600 per year won’t pay off his payday loans, get him health insurance, or allow his family to rent a home that wasn’t converted from a former car garage. But the money has loosened the financial noose fastened around their necks. Like an old family mantra promises, they can finally breathe a little easier: “Dios aprieta pero no ahoga,” recites Leo’s daughter Lesley. In English: God squeezes but doesn’t choke.

-With reporting by Mariah Espada and Nik Popli/Washington and Leslie Dickstein/New York.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley took extraordinary steps to try to prevent Donald Trump from using military action to remain in office, according to revelations from a forthcoming book by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. Those actions from months ago are now causing a headache for President Joe Biden: Milley currently sits in the same top position in Biden’s chain of command, and Biden is facing calls to fire him.

Biden and his staff have so far showed no signs of being concerned about Milley’s actions under Trump or the possibility he’d stretched too far the trust between any sitting President and military leaders. “I have great confidence in General Milley,” Biden said Wednesday.
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But Milley’s reported activities to curb Trump—demanding he have visibility in the nuclear strike chain and trying to use a backchannel to cool tensions with an adversary— are raising questions about whether Milley had overstepped his role in a way that undermined the President, and if he might do it again. And they are a reminder that the hot embers of Trump’s slash-and-burn tenure at the top of American democracy are still smoldering under the surface of Biden’s presidency.

According to Woodward and Costa’s reporting, Milley was so alarmed by Trump’s erratic impulses and the possibility Trump may use military action to remain in office after he lost the election that he told fellow generals to include him on any nuclear strike orders from Trump, and assured China’s top military leader the U.S. was not planning an imminent military attack and that he would give China a warning if it was. Those steps are highly unusual. And they speak to the remarkable pressure Trump was putting on the nation’s national security apparatus at the end of his presidency, as he used the levers of power to bolster his failed reelection campaign, and later, his bully pulpit to incite a mob to overturn the legitimate election results.

Aides around Biden believe Milley took those steps at a time when Trump had already shown a pattern of violating democratic norms, such as pressuring his Justice Department to intervene in investigations, criticizing federal judges and using the military to clear civilian protests. The context of Milley’s actions, Biden aides said, is important to note. ”This current President, who follows the Constitution, who’s not fomenting an insurrection, who follows the rule of law, has complete confidence in Chairman Milley and him continuing to serve in his role,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday.

But some with influence in Washington expressed concerns that Milley went too far. Former Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who worked on the National Security Council under President Trump and became a star witness in Trump’s first impeachment hearing, wrote on Twitter that if the anecdotes in the book were true, “Milley must resign.” Florida Senator Marco Rubio told Biden he should fire Milley. In a letter to Biden on Tuesday, Rubio, the top-ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote that Milley “worked to actively undermine the sitting Commander in Chief” and that “threatens to tear apart our nation’s longstanding principle of civilian control of the military.” In a statement Wednesday evening, Trump called Milley “a complete nutjob,” said Milley never informed him of calls to China, and claimed Milley “put our Country in a very dangerous position.”

Col. Dave Butler, a spokesman for Milley, said in a statement Wednesday that Milley’s calls to China were not done in secret. “His calls with the Chinese and others in October and January were in keeping with these duties and responsibilities conveying reassurance in order to maintain strategic stability,” Butler said. Milley did hold a meeting with senior leaders about the nuclear strike protocols, Butler said. “The meeting regarding nuclear weapons protocols was to remind uniformed leaders in the Pentagon of the long-established and robust procedures in light of media reporting on the subject.”

The scrutiny on Milley is only going to amplify. Milley took over his role under Trump in October 2019 and has now been working under Biden in the same position for nearly eight months. He was already scheduled to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee on September 28; while that testimony was supposed to center on the decisions leading to the shambolic Afghanistan withdrawal, he’s now likely to face questions under oath from senators about these revelations.

Some experts say Milley’s extraordinary conduct has to be viewed within the frame of an extraordinarily precarious time. Milley’s reported actions show “how much Trump’s behavior set off really strong alarms in the senior levels of the military as well as in foreign governments,” says Jordan Tama, an associate professor at American University’s School of International Service. “He was trying to prevent something disastrous from happening in an unprecedented context. We can quibble with some of the specific details of how he handled this, but in general, it’s good if our senior military leaders are trying to figure out, when presented with a President like Trump, how to prevent the President from taking steps that could be truly catastrophic.”

But Milley’s actions don’t come without a potential cost to the carefully calibrated machinery governing the relationship between career generals and elected Presidents. “The Joint Chiefs of Staff are designed to provide advice to the President, but that body is not an independent policy actor or implementer on its own,” Tama says. “To the extent that this suggests that the military may act more as a freelancer than it’s supposed to, that is problematic for civil military relations because Presidents really need to see the military as an institution that does not act independently.”

Milley’s behavior may have been unusual, but it wasn’t unprecedented. The steps Milley took are reminiscent of how President Richard Nixon’s military leaders handled their fears that he might give the military politically-motivated orders as his Presidency was unraveling during the Watergate investigation. (The Watergate scandal was a story famously broken by Woodward in his early years as a reporter at the Washington Post.) In the summer of 1974, Nixon’s Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger told the service chiefs that he needed to be informed if they got any orders from the White House, according to a 2007 interview with Schlesinger by Timothy Naftali, former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. Milley may have been trying to put himself in a similar role, as a check against a politically motivated strike that could spin out of control, Naftali says. “It’s a reminder of just how dangerous the Trump Administration was, not just for our domestic politics, but for our world,” Naftali argues.

It’s also a reminder that some of the fires Trump started during his time in the Oval Office are still burning and won’t easily snuff out.

U.S. President Joe Biden suggested the possibility of an in-person meeting with Xi Jinping during a phone call last week, but the Chinese president declined to commit to one as he continues to avoid leaving his country even for major gatherings amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

Biden suggested the two leaders meet at some point in the next few months, according to people familiar with the conversation who were granted anonymity to discuss it. When asked late Tuesday at the White House whether he was disappointed that Xi didn’t want to meet with him, Biden told reporters “not true.”

Xi hasn’t left China for more than 600 days, the longest stint of any Group of 20 leader. Instead, he’s made virtual appearances at events including a summit of leaders from the BRICS nations. He isn’t expected to appear at next week’s United Nations General Assembly in New York either, though Chinese presidents seldom attend those gatherings.
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Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian avoided answering questions at a regular news briefing Wednesday in Beijing on whether Xi had interest in meeting Biden soon. He repeated earlier Chinese statements about the importance of the two sides communicating frequently.

Biden and Xi spoke for about 90 minutes on Sept. 10, their first discussion since February. On the call, Biden urged Xi to cooperate on key issues even as they continue to disagree on other topics, according to a statement from the White House. But the offer of a summit wasn’t disclosed by the White House.

The U.S. has sought to separate issues like climate change from more contentious ones like trade, human rights and democracy in places like Hong Kong, while Beijing has insisted that they must not be separated.

The offer of a meeting was reported earlier by the Financial Times. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan disputed the FT’s characterization of the conversation, saying in a statement that it was “not an accurate portrayal of the call. Period.”

“As we’ve said, the presidents discussed the importance of being able to have private discussions between the two leaders, and we’re going to respect that,” Sullivan added.

—With assistance from Jenny Leonard, Sophia Cai and Philip Glamann.

This article is part of the The DC Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox every weekday.

He wasn’t on the ballot, but ex-President Donald Trump lost Republicans their hopes of recalling California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom.

The result signals bad fortune for the GOP in statewide elections coming this year in Virginia and New Jersey. It may also hint at how Democrats may yet survive the 2022 midterms that even the most optimistic party loyalists anticipate will be very difficult. A toxic Trump could give Democrats an unlikely CPR lesson. And maybe the outcome could warn ambitious Republicans that maybe only Trump himself can rock the MAGA hat with any confidence of success.
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A small but very vocal group of Republicans in California had hoped to boot Newsom from power before his current term ends in early 2023. Newsom’s leadership through COVID-19 led to his vulnerability, and Republicans had hoped to make the most populous state in the country into an early referendum on Democrats’ aggressive policies to mask, vaccinate and regulate in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Newsom’s own flubs—especially ignoring his own mask mandate at swanky Napa restaurant the French Laundry—did little to help what should have been an easy brushback of GOP ambition. As The New York Times’ L.A.-based restaurant critic put it, a meal there is “like macaroni and cheese served in a giant golden egg.”

Ultimately, though, Democrats in the deep-blue state delivered a dodge for Newsom. During the 2020 presidential campaign, only the District of Columbia, Massachusetts and Vermont could claim stronger Democratic support than California, a state that sends 42 Democrats and 11 Republicans to the House of Representatives. Initial fears of complacency among Democrats eventually subsided. And sheer math made it impossible for Republicans to prevail in a state that hasn’t elected a Republican to statewide office since Arnold Schwarzenegger and Steve Poizner in 2006.

That’s not to say Newsom ran a stellar campaign. Here in D.C., there were grumbles early that Newsom wasn’t taking the recall effort seriously. Even his defenders were quick to remind him that then-Gov. Gray Davis in 2003 similarly assumed the state’s liberal hue was powerful enough to reject a recall, and that resulted in Schwarzenegger becoming the state’s 38th governor. Newsom’s allies spent at least $36 million to help him survive—money that no donors had expected to need when the year began and now is unavailable to efforts to hold the governor seats in Pennsylvania and Kansas—or to compete in Arizona, New Hampshire, Florida or Wisconsin. After all, donors aren’t renewable resources.

Democrats ultimately prevailed in California by acknowledging a truth that many old-school Republican Party activists have spent years denying: Trump and the GOP are the same brand these days. The man who identifies himself as “the 45th President of the United States”—and never the former or ex-Commander in Chief—has an iron grip on the Republican Party at the moment. He has made the GOP in his image—so much so that CNN polling released this week shows 59% of Republicans believe that endorsing the very wrong idea that Trump is the rightful president is central to what it means to be a Republican. In other words, as CNN’s Chris Cillizza observes, endorsing The Big Lie is central to the GOP’s political identity.

And there were already signs that Republicans were also prepared to replicate Trump’s sore-loser mentality. Larry Elder, a talk-radio host and the leading candidate in the recall effort, even started to blame election fraud before the first votes were tabulated Tuesday night. It was similar to Trump refusing to accept the results of the 2020 campaign that made him a one-termer. The Big Lie fueled a failed insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, and that belief is going to bring protesters back to Washington this weekend for its potential sequel. There’s no telling what the results will be in Sacramento, where Newsom and a Democratic legislature continue their work even after Elder’s concession.

While Democrats gnash their teeth about Republicans’ continued efforts to undercut faith in legitimate elections, they can find some comfort in this fact: Trump continues to be a disqualifying figure at the polls. In California, Democrats branded Elder as the heir to Trump, and Elder took on the sheen of extremism. Democrats are doing the same in other states right now and are laying the groundwork to deploy the strategy against more Republicans next year. Trumpist candidates may have the imprimatur of Trump—he’s endorsing plenty of them, for sure—but none is as talented as the carnival barker himself. It’s one thing to wear the red MAGA hat, but it’s another to know how it was made. In California, Elder knew how to order it, but he didn’t know how to wear it. If Democrats run this playbook again, there will be a whole lot of Republican candidates on the ballots next year wearing MAGA hats without fully understanding the stench it brings with them.

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On a sticky late August afternoon, Senator Bernie Sanders takes the stage in the state that catapulted him from fringe presidential candidate to progressive hero five years ago.

One need look no further than the masked audience members to see how much has changed since Sanders last campaigned in Iowa on his two presidential runs in 2016 and 2020. The event is outdoors, socially distanced and many in the crowd are wearing face coverings—a clear reminder of the coronavirus pandemic that ground the country to a halt a year and a half ago, killing more than 600,000 Americans and millions of jobs.
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For Sanders, political opportunity has come from tragedy. The pandemic pushed both the country and the Democratic Party to embrace the Vermont Senator’s career-long push for government aid programs. President Joe Biden came into the Oval Office determined to prove that, in the depths of the pandemic and after the chaotic Trump Administration, the government could be a force for good. And when Democrats narrowly reclaimed the Senate last January, Sanders took over the powerful Senate Budget Committee and became a crucial partner to passing Biden’s objectives.

That’s what brought Sanders to Iowa this time around. He reached an agreement with Biden in July for a $3.5 trillion avalanche of federal spending over the next decade that would make childcare and community college more affordable, expand Medicare and authorize a federal paid family leave program—all largely paid for by taxing the wealthy and corporations. Now, he’s trying to sell the budget bill to the public. “We can not only address these awful problems,” he tells the crowd, “but we can move this country forward in a very different and positive direction.”

After three decades in Washington, Sanders is at the height of his powers, and on the cusp of delivering a version of the policies he’s advocated for his entire career. But in order to do that, one of the Senate’s oldest progressive agitators has relied on a timeless legislative skill rarely mentioned in his campaign speeches: compromise. While Sanders initially envisioned a $6 trillion spending bill, he settled for nearly half that in order to get all members of his party on board. “This is the most consequential piece of legislation for working people since the 1930s,” Sanders says in an interview with TIME at a diner in Cedar Rapids, banging his hand on the wooden picnic table between every word for emphasis. “If you’re a progressive who has spent your entire life fighting for working people, fighting for children, fighting for the elderly, fighting for the climate, what you say is, ‘Well, it’s not all that I want.’ We’ve got to continue the fight, but we have accomplished an enormous amount.’”

Progressives watching the process say he is teaching them how to govern, a lesson that could have a longer legacy than the bill. “It’s a necessary maturation of the progressive movement to go from protest to government,” says Joseph Geevarghese, the Executive Director of Our Revolution, a political grassroots organization that grew out of Sanders’ first presidential campaign. “And that’s the process that we’re in the middle of, is learning that we can’t just be outside on the streets raising hell.”

The $3.5 trillion package is far from a done deal, and Sanders will soon face the ultimate test. Committees in the House and Senate are currently drafting language, but with moderate lawmakers in both chambers skeptical of the price tag, it’s becoming increasingly clear that progressives are unlikely to get everything they want. There are weeks of intense negotiations ahead. But if Sanders can get a version of this bill to Biden’s desk, he will have played a key role in passing the most expensive reshaping of the country’s social safety net in over half a decade—and perhaps cemented his own legacy as both firebrand and legislator.

“A lot of heartburn”

As soon as Biden introduced his blueprint for spending on infrastructure and the “care economy” last spring, Sanders began strategizing with progressives in Congress on how to maximize their leverage.

While Sanders wanted a $6 trillion bill, he knew it was unrealistic. He sensed from both his personal relationship with Biden and the policies the President was putting forward—like two years of free community college and universal access to pre-K—that he had a better chance of getting at least some of what he wanted if he was willing to come down on the price.

Throughout the spring, Sanders huddled with the leadership of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) to come up with their five top priorities: investments in home care services and affordable housing; lower drug prices and Medicare eligibility; and creation of climate jobs. Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, the whip of the CPC, recalls meeting with Sanders over a dozen times. “The dollar amounts were really not the focus of the conversation, but more in regards to getting… a bill that meets the moment, and making sure that the Progressive Caucus was using its influence,” she says.

Sanders also pressured the White House: In the Oval Office in July, he pushed Biden to include hearing aids, eyeglasses, and dental coverage in the Medicare expansion, and Biden agreed. “Though it was not in the original Families Plan announced in April, Senator Sanders repeatedly pressed the President to embrace his proposal to expand Medicare coverage for dental, hearing aids, and vision,” says a senior White House aide. “He made that case passionately, strongly in the Oval, and the President gave his full backing.”

Sanders’ strategy, says one Congressional aide familiar with the dynamics of progressive wing, was to “lay out a left flank marker that would then have gravity, and pull the debate to the left.” Progressives credit Sanders with getting what they so far view as a favorable compromise. “I don’t think we would have ended up with three and a half trillion,” the aide says, “If [Sanders] hadn’t done that.”

After weeks of negotiating with both the White House and his own committee, Sanders says the $3.5 trillion number was reached thanks to “a lot of talking and a lot of heartburn.” For him, it’s a mixed bag. Ideas he had been championing for years, like a wealth tax and Medicare for All, were not in there. But other progressive wish list items, like an extension of the child tax credit and tax increases on the wealthy, were included. “All of the major provisions remain in the bill: that is the good news,” he says. “The bad news is, we are not funding them, at this point, for as long a period as I want.”

“We’ve got to be as pragmatic as possible”

Sanders acolytes hope his leadership will pave the way for the progressive movement to become an effective governing force, crafting legislation within the system rather than protesting outside it.

In July, Our Revolution, which according to a spokesperson has over 500,000 members organized in thirty states, rebranded itself as a group of “pragmatic progressives.” Instead of rallying around big ideas like the Green New Deal or Medicare for All, they will now advocate for more incremental changes. During the August recess, they demonstrated in front of moderate lawmakers’ offices—in favor of the $3.5 trillion package. “Our job as organizers is trying to educate people, like, ‘Look, we’ve got to be as pragmatic as possible,” says Geevarghese, the group’s Executive Director. Geevarghese largely credits Sanders with paving that path for the group. “What Bernie has done I think quite artfully as a movement leader is not just throw bombs or issue critiques, but actually get our ideas to be considered seriously and then make… pretty significant progress in advancing them,” he says.

In the coming weeks, that progress could slow. The committees tasked with drafting the components of the legislation have been working furiously to present a complete version for Congress to pass by the end of September at the earliest. Democrats are trying to pass it through a budgetary process called reconciliation, which they can do along party lines. But with such small margins in the House and Senate, and no support from Republicans, there is no room for any defections, and the moderate wing of the party is gearing up for a challenge. West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin has already said the price tag will be a problem. “I, for one, won’t support a $3.5 trillion bill, or anywhere near that level of additional spending, without greater clarity about why Congress chooses to ignore the serious effects inflation and debt have on existing government programs,” he wrote in a September 2nd op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. One Democratic strategist familiar with Senate dynamics predicts that, despite Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s vow that the chamber is moving “full speed ahead” with $3.5 trillion, it may actually have the support of an estimated 30 Senators. “Manchin is just the one sort of taking the arrows right now,” says the strategist. “I would bet a lot of money that the deal comes closer to $2-2.4 trillion [instead of] $3.5 trillion.”

All of that signals more compromise ahead for the progressive wing. The House Ways and Means Committee, for example, which is drafting the Medicare portion of the bill, voted on September 10 to expand hearing, vision and dental benefits under Medicare, but the latter would not be provided until 2028, which is later than Sanders wanted. And even that vote did not get unanimous Democratic support: Rep. Stephanie Murphy of Florida voted against these measures, claiming that the party has not provided an adequate explanation for the cost or funding of these programs. “If you don’t compromise, the bill’s not going to pass, and if the bill doesn’t pass, nothing gets done,” says one Congressional aide associated with the moderate wing of the Democratic party. “You can disagree with Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema all day, but if they say, ‘I will not vote for XYZ, you can’t just ignore that, because the reality is this is going to be a politically tough vote, whether you’re in a tough state or a tough district.”

This will test Sanders’ ability to keep progressive support behind the package as patience frays with continually lowering the cost to appease moderates. Progressive groups like the Sunrise Movement, who want at least $10 trillion, have already deemed the current version inadequate. Members of the CPC are also signaling they’re unwilling to go further. “For us, it’s been really clear that that is the floor, not the ceiling, and that [$3.5 trillion] is considered a compromise by a lot of us,” says Rep. Omar.

Some of the voters Sanders was speaking to in Iowa—many decked out in Bernie campaign gear—seem disappointed, too. “I think this time they need to stand their ground,” an Iowan sporting a Bernie Sanders pin who identified himself as Flavio Hidalgo says after the Cedar Rapids rally. “We should push, not compromise, because that’s what the Democrats usually do, and then we don’t get anything. You get watered down things.” Sanders assures another voter in Cedar Rapids who asks if he would support a lower price tag that there will still be a $3.5 trillion package at the end of the day. “I’ve already compromised,” he said.

The million dollar question—or perhaps the $3.5 trillion question—is where Sanders draws his red line. If the moderates stand their ground and the only way to get these priorities into law is on a smaller scale than he wants, will his pragmatic legislative side prevail over the progressive rabble-rouser? So far, he’s not showing his cards. “If there’s a bill that doesn’t do very much, absolutely I’m prepared to vote no,” he says. “But when you have a bill, yes it does not go anywhere near as far as I would like to go, but it is very very consequential, I’m proud to be supporting it.”

With reporting by Simmone Shah

President Joe Biden implored California voters to send a message to the nation by keeping Gavin Newsom as their governor in Tuesday’s recall election and rejecting a Republican whom he derided as a “the closest thing to a Trump clone I’ve ever seen in your state.”

“The eyes of the nation are on California,” Biden told a rally at Long Beach City College on Monday night. “Because the decision you’re about to make isn’t just going to have a huge impact on California, it’s going to reverberate around the nation, and quite frankly, not a joke, around the world.”

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Again and again, Biden tied the leading Republican candidate, Larry Elder, to former President Donald Trump and his policies.

The president’s stop in Long Beach, part of a tour that includes Idaho and Colorado, was to make the case that the Democratic governor’s leadership was crucial to continue the state’s battles against the coronavirus and climate change.

Newsom appears well-positioned to keep his job, according to surveys.

Democrats are closely watching whether his campaign themes prove successful and can be replicated in mid-term campaigns to protect the party from losing control of the U.S. House and Senate. The incumbent president’s party traditionally loses ground in mid-term elections.

Biden on Monday called Newsom essential to the state’s struggles against the pandemic as well as the devastating wildfires made worse by the effects of climate change.

“By voting no, you’ll be protecting California from another Trump climate denier, who said global warming is quote ‘a crock,’ and depicts it as a myth,” Biden said. (A “no” vote is to keep the governor from being ousted.)

Yet Newsom’s opponents are seizing on his handling of those issues to urge his removal from office.

The state mailed 22 million ballots to voters, who have until Tuesday night to bring them ballots to drop boxes, polling places or county election offices. Ballots returned by mail must be postmarked by Tuesday.

More than 7.9 million ballots had been returned as of Monday, according to Political Data, Inc. Fifty-two percent of those ballots came from registered Democrats and the remainder were nearly evenly split between Republicans and independents.

Democratic leaders have streamed into California in the final days of the campaign.

Vice President Kamala Harris visited Northern California last week to warn that California’s progressive laws on reproductive rights, labor rights and immigration could be reversed with Newsom’s recall. “California, let us send a message to the world that these are the things we stand for, these are the things we fight for, and we will not give up,” she said.

Senators Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar also campaigned in the state.

Recent polls suggest Californians won’t vote to recall the governor they elected in in 2018 by a nearly 24-point margin. Six out of 10 likely voters polled by Emerson College on September 10 and 11 said they oppose his recall and other recent polls have been similar.

Elder, a conservative commentator, had the support of 30% of those surveyed for the Emerson poll, while all other candidates were in the single digits.

Elder, who has attacked Newsom’s handling of various state crises, insists that as governor he would not be an adversary to the Biden administration and would reason with the Democratic super-majority in the California legislature.

Monday’s rally came after Biden had traveled to Boise, Idaho, and the Sacramento area for updates on how federal and state agencies are fighting an especially rough season of wild fires. He will also take an aerial tour of the area south of Lake Tahoe where the Caldor Fire has burned more than 200,000 acres.

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SHANKSVILLE, Pa. — It was just one page in his remarks. But on that sheet, read with the tone of a disappointed grandfather, former President George W. Bush made his message as clear as he could: the threats to America’s democracy can just as easily foment in the homeland as from abroad.

“There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home,” Bush said, his weight shifting to his left foot behind a formal podium planted in a field of wildflowers and death. “But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. And it is our continuing duty to confront them.”
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It was a point that only Bush could make, a figure whose moral authority more Americans respect now than when his own presidency came to a close. It’s impossible not to link Bush’s contempt for the terrorists who 20 years earlier changed the world by hijacking four planes and turning them into missiles and his scorn for the brand of politics unleashed in the era of former President Donald Trump. One group, backed by Osama bin Laden, sought to destroy America by annihilating symbols of its economic, military and political might. The other, egged on by Trump, sought to set aside the results of the 2020 election and beat Congress into giving Trump another term.

The forty-third President’s words, delivered on the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and at the site of Flight 93’s crash that killed all 40 passengers and four hijackers, landed like a punch to the gut on an already emotional day. That one member of the informal fraternity—and, yes, it is still an Only Boys Allowed clubhouse—known as the Presidents Club would openly challenge another says plenty about the contempt that elite group has toward its newest member.

It took Trump to make America miss Bush, who posted a dismal 24% job approval in December of 2008 as his team was boxing up the West Wing to make room for the incoming Obama Administration. Bush left the public arena as the country was struggling to dig out of the Wall Street meltdown, to confront two ongoing wars and to manage a general sense of government incompetence that never really faded after the botched response to Hurricane Katrina. Two-thirds of Americans told Pew that Bush would be remembered more for his failures than his accomplishments. The number of Americans who had a favorable view of the federal government plummeted on his watch.

So, after retreating from Washington to his ranch in Texas and mansion near Dallas, Bush quietly went away. He wrote his surprisingly candid—at least for the genre—memoirs. He took up painting. He struck up a friendship with Michelle Obama. He told Jay Leno in 2013 that eight years in the spotlight was enough for him. “I don’t think it’s good for the country to have a former President criticize his successor,” Bush said.

Bush was not, however, ignorant of politics. To deploy an inside joke in Bush World, he engaged in ”strategery” where it might prove helpful, making a campaign stop in South Carolina for his brother’s failed shot at becoming the third Bush to be President. In the lead-up to Trump’s nomination, Bush told aides that he was concerned for the party. “I’m worried that I will be the last Republican president,” he said. The remark provided a title for one historian’s estimation of the remarkable Bush dynasty and the future of the GOP. He pointedly voted for neither candidate in 2016. And, when it came time to vote four years later, Bush famously said he wrote-in the name of his former Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice.

In the process, the 43rd President has experienced a slow but steady political rehabilitation in the minds of many Americans. When Bush left office, he had a favorable impression in the minds of just 11% of Democrats, according to CNN. By 2018, a year into the Trump era, a majority 54% of Democrats held Bush in a favorable light.

His standing among Republicans is more complicated. That same CNN polling found one-in-four self-described conservatives and one-in-five self-described Republicans carried an unfavorable view of Bush. The last Republican convention he attended was his own re-election, way back in 2004. His spending and military interventions sparked billionaires Charles and David Koch to rally their pals to move from free-market advocacy into direct politics. And lest you believe the Bush dynasty remains the first family of the GOP, remember that Jeb Bush bowed out of the presidential race in South Carolina and George P. Bush, W’s nephew, failed to win the shadow primary for Trump’s support in the Texas Attorney General race next year. George W. Bush may look better than the last President for a lot of Americans, but he’s equally reviled by the Trump Forever crowd. In CNN’s polling, a quarter of Trump supporters say they carry an unfavorable view of Bush.

His father, another President the public came to dislike, followed a similar path of quiet reputational recovery. Bush 41 was parked at a job approval number of 34% on the Election Day that rendered him a one-termer. The elder Bush did not speak at the 2000 Republican convention nominating his son for the White House. He tried to shed the spotlight, even declining to publish a memoir in his post-White House years. But, on days that shook the foundation of the country he served, the elder Bush would speak out, as he did in a joint statement with his son to condemn the anti-Semitism on diplay during a 2017 march in Charlottesville, Va.

The Bushes’ approach is a stark contrast to most former White House residents. Jimmy Carter used his time after the White House to build homes, practice his own brand of diplomacy and support the programs of the Carter Center. Ronald Reagan remained active in Republican Party politics, but with his former Vice President George H.W. Bush in the White House, he largely kept his activism narrow. (He would announce in 1994 an Alzheimer’s diagnosis and retreat from public life.) Bill Clinton, whose legacy had its own reputational challenge after his impeachment, seems to have never slowed down in his post-White House years, working on his family’s foundation around the globe to solve problems with deep-pocketed pals’ cash. And Barack Obama has been traveling the globe with direct political work and working as an active critic of the Trump era. He even inked a lucrative publishing deal with Random House, started a production company with Netflix and hosts a podcast with Bruce Springsteen.

George W. Bush will never win back everyone. For some, the memories of the Florida recount will forever render him an illegitimate usurper. For some, he will forever be a war criminal who took the nation to war under false pretenses. For others, he’s forever going to be the vacationing elitist who at first planned to clear brush on his Texas ranch rather than pay attention to the devastation and death brought by Hurricane Katrina. These are not wounds easily mended by an endearing and meme-worthy fight with a poncho at Trump’s inauguration or passed candies to Michelle Obama at funerals.

But, at 75, Bush seems content to allow history to render its verdict. He is still involved in projects to help veterans and his library in Dallas is a hub for conservative scholarship. But for the most part, Bush is happy to stay out of the fray—unless he sees an opportunity to make a difference, like he did on Saturday in Pennsylvania when he called out members of his own party for their undemocratic impulses.

That Bush picked his moment so carefully is worth noting. The passengers aboard Flight 93 are widely credited with sparing the U.S. Capitol the same fate as the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The hijackers’ extremism failed because ordinary Americans stood together and stopped them. The same cannot be said about the insurrectionists who attacked the same building on Jan. 6. Those extremists breached the Capitol and did lasting damage, both physically and symbolically. The al-Qaeda thugs failed and retreated. The MAGA crowd briefly succeeded and are showing no signs of retreat. Bush knew his warning would get attention. And it deserves every ounce of it.

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The azure sky over lower Manhattan on Saturday morning was eerily similar to the bright morning of Sept. 11, 2001, twenty years before. President Joe Biden stood in a crowd under the canopy of oak trees planted where the World Trade Center towers fell that day, looking up briefly as the sound of a jet engine broke the silence. A single commuter plane could be seen floating in a gap of sky between buildings.

The echoes from that deadly morning opened up old wounds for retired flight attendant Ronald Gillis, 56, who came to the memorial service held to remember his brother Rodney C. Gillis, a New York police sergeant who died trying to help evacuate people from Ground Zero. His brother was in his early thirties when he decided to leave his vehicle and head toward the attack zone. “He didn’t turn away from it,” Gillis says. “He knew he was coming down here. He knew he had to help people.” That, Gillis says, was just how his brother was.
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As the nation grapples with a long and deadly pandemic, a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and a divisive political atmosphere, many who came to the ceremonies held on Saturday at the sites of the 9/11 attacks—in Manhattan, Shanksville, PA, and at the Pentagon in Virginia—were hoping to find some of the strength and solidarity that emerged in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy twenty years ago.

At the ceremony in Shanksville, former President George W. Bush stood on a stage at the memorial site and described how the attacks changed the lives of Americans “all at the same moment.” When it comes to “the unity of America,” he said, “those days seem distant from our own.” Bush, who had been in office less than a year on Sept. 11, 2001, has been widely praised by Republicans and Democrats alike for his efforts to bring the nation together after the attacks, despite the controversial legacy his war on terror would leave.

Looking out at the field where United Flight 93 crashed after desperate passengers banded together to overcome the hijackers, Bush, who has largely retreated from the nation’s political life in recent years, described a “malign force” currently at work in the country that turns “every disagreement into an argument, and every argument into a clash of cultures.” He offered a veiled critique of the violent uprising of Donald Trump supporters at the Capitol Building on Jan. 6: violent extremists abroad and domestic extremists “are children of the same foul spirit,” Bush said, in their “disregard” for human life.

Later in the day, Biden traveled from New York City to Shanksville and laid a wreath of red and white roses at a white marble wall carved with names of those who died on Flight 93. He walked with family members of the dead through the grassy field, lined with goldenrod wildflowers, to a large boulder that marks the spot where the plane fell. He stopped at the Shanksville Volunteer Fire Department to talk with firefighters, families and flight attendants who had gathered for the commemoration. Long tables were set out, and burgers and hot dogs were cooking on a grill.

A reporter asked Biden what he had been thinking about during the day; he said he was thinking about a friend who lost a son when the Twin Towers fell, and about what those who died would make of the heightened level of vitriol in the country.

“Would they think this makes sense for us to be doing this kind of thing where you ride down the street and someone has a sign saying ‘F- so-and-so?’”, said Biden, referring to a banner in New Jersey aimed at him that was seen on Sept. 7 as he toured damage from Hurricane Ida.

Standing outside the firehouse next to a memorial cross built from girders from the fallen World Trade Center, Biden said autocrats running totalitarian states like China and Russia are rooting against the U.S. being able to unify and get things done. That’s one reason why he wants to bring the country together—to prove that democracy can work, he said.

“They think because the world is changing so rapidly and people are so divided, you can’t bring people together in a democracy to get a consensus, and the only ones that are going to be able to succeed are the autocrats,” Biden said. “I think we can do it. We got to do it.”

Biden then flew in Air Force One back to Washington, where he visited the memorial to those lives lost when one of the hijacked planes crashed into the Pentagon. As Biden and First Lady Jill Biden stood, a Marine bugler played taps.

When I deployed to Afghanistan in 2001 to help dismantle the al Qaeda network, I did so with a sense of hope. In the wake of history’s worst terrorist attacks, the United States had resolved to root out evil, and the world had rallied behind us. If ever there were a righteous war, I felt this was it.

Just one year later, in the fall of 2002, al Qaeda and the Taliban were on the verge of not just defeat but extinction. Then America granted them a reprieve. We began moving assets out of Afghanistan in preparation for the disastrous invasion of Iraq. We thus inflicted on ourselves a wound from which we have yet to recover.
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By choosing to fight on two fronts—one of them an ill-conceived travesty—we set ourselves up for failure on both. We squandered the goodwill we had built up since 9/11. And most damaging of all, we played into our enemy’s hands.

Years before the attacks, al Qaeda had laid out its long-term plan. Phase One: Dismantle the Western-led international order. Phase Two: Exploit the resulting power vacuums to build hardline Islamic states. Phase Three: Stitch those states together into a globe-spanning caliphate.

Instead of working to counter that plan, we assisted with it. We marched into Mesopotamia, exactly as predicted in jihadi prophesies. At Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and so-called “black sites” around the world, we made propaganda for them. And we sealed their recruitment bonanza with our ignominious withdrawals from Iraq and now Afghanistan.

We have paid for these epochal mistakes in blood, treasure and prestige. As Western influence has collapsed, chaos has seeped through the Muslim world like blood through a bandage. Large parts of Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan are under the control of anti-American militants. In other words, Phase One of al Qaeda’s grand plan (create power vacuums in the region) is now all but complete—and we did most of the work for them.

Tragically, the War on Terror hollowed out America’s domestic political order, too. We mounted an invasion of Iraq based on outright lies. We abandoned our values to pursue a program of torture that demonstrably did all harm and no good. We mounted an unconstitutional surveillance program that damaged public trust in our institutions. Worst of all, there has never been true accountability for any of these catastrophic policies, nor for the intelligence and political failures that opened the door for 9/11 in the first place.

That marked absence of consequences sent strong messages to opportunist demagogues: If the truth is inconvenient, lie. If the values of a free society get in the way, trash them. The partisan gulf thus grew wider and wider. Not since the darkest days of the Cold War has the cause of liberal democracy been so discredited.

Yet despite 20 years of failure, waste and lies, I have not lost hope. Years ago, I spoke out against torture, not simply to be critical, but because I believed we could set the world on a better path. I still believe it today.

How will we find that path? We must start by seeing the world as it is—not through slogans or theories—recognizing, for example, that while we do need to grapple with “great power” politics, there remains a substantial challenge from non-state actors, too. On that basis, we can begin to craft a genuine long-term strategy to replace the grab-bag of reactive tactics—like invasions and drone strikes—on which we have relied for too long. Instead of seeing only military solutions to our problems, we must take advantage of all our strengths, to include diplomacy, culture, trade, and international development assistance.

Above all, we must view democratic values as a strong foundation on which to build, not an impediment to be overcome. Over the past 20 years, the world has seen America at its worst. If we are to salvage anything from that disaster, we must remember who we are at our best.

Two decades ago, the deadly terror attacks on 9/11 changed nearly all aspects of American life. Culture shifted, imbued with heightened levels of fear. The U.S. launched costly, deadly wars. Congress passed sweeping legislation. The government profiled and watched its own citizens, ushering in a new era of mass surveillance.

One of the most significant—and lasting—changes was a massive expansion of executive power that transformed entire portions of America’s legal landscape. Within months of the attacks, the George W. Bush Administration had authorized spying on Americans, a new secretive military tribunal system, and begun secretly detaining men from Muslim and Arab countries. There have been attempts to roll back some of these policies in the years since, but many post-9/11 developments have remained in place, impacting America’s use of force abroad, immigration and surveillance policies, and the delicate balance of separation of powers.
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These changes altered the way Congress, the judiciary and the President interact—and reshaped the relationship many Americans have with their own government. Administrations took aggressive actions in the name of protecting their citizens, but as revelations emerged detailing some of the abuses that ensued, public distrust in American institutions has risen. One of the defining questions of the post-9/11 legal landscape has become how to negotiate protecting national security with managing swelling presidential power—and rebuilding confidence in American government itself.

“There’s just no [easy] institutional avenue to rein in this accretion of power in the executive branch through the coordination of the three branches,” says Scott Anderson, senior editor of Lawfare who served in the State Department under President Barack Obama. “I think the big question we’re going to face over the next few years is: How do you recalibrate?”

Read more: Twenty Years of Data Shows How America Changed—And Didn’t— After 9/11

It’s clear the changing national security interests over the past 20 years have dramatically reshaped aspects of American law and presidential power. What is less clear is how to interpret those changes.

“The most potent weapon in preventing terrorist attacks is intelligence,” says George Terwilliger, a member of the conservative Federalist Society and the former Deputy Attorney General under President George H. W. Bush. “I think one of the legal legacies of 9/11 is the government’s ability to collect [and analyze] that kind of information…That enhancement has been very important and needs to be maintained.”

But for Debra Perlin, the director of policy and program at the progressive American Constitution Society (ACS), many of those changes are a “cautionary tale” of rash decision-making. “When a president has what appears to be unlimited powers… the only thing holding them back are the norms of the office of the presidency and their own personal accountability,” she says. “Fail-safes that we have all painfully learned can be insufficient.”

Here are some of the key legal arenas that were shaped by 9/11.

Expanded executive power

Shortly after 9/11, the Bush Administration declared a war on terrorism to go after the perpetrators of the deadly attacks. But to execute such a complex war, argued then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, the U.S. would need more tools to gather intelligence.

Beginning in the weeks after 9/11, the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel issued memorandums authorizing a raft of unprecedented executive powers. These included the legality of “enhanced interrogation techniques”—tactics that subsequent Administrations and a years-long Senate investigation later concluded constituted torture.

On Nov. 13, 2001, President Bush also issued an executive order establishing separate military commissions—which would have limited procedural protections, limited review processes, and a high degree of secrecy—to try detainees kept at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

“The government’s core responsibility is to protect American citizens from attack and violence,” argues Terwilliger. “I think there’s a recognition both in legislation and in court decisions that some extreme measures have to be measured against the scope of that core responsibility.”

The executive branch’s assertions didn’t go unchallenged. In 2006’s Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that the military commissions system was unconstitutional because it needed Congressional authorization. But Congress passed the 2006 Military Commissions Act shortly thereafter granting that authority, which marks a crucial dynamic at play in this era: Congress and the Bush Administration worked jointly to expand the White House’s reach in the years after the attacks. “Essentially you saw Congress facilitating the expansion of executive branch power,” says Anderson. “This is, I think, more of the defining separation of powers moment of the post-9/11 era than any sort of unilateral assertion of executive branch power.” Generally speaking, he says, “courts really seemed hesitant for a very long time to second-guess the political branches, so long as they were working together.”

Sometimes other branches of government did step in to rein in the White House. In 2008’s Boumediene v. Bush, for example, the Supreme Court disagreed with both political branches, ruling that the 2006 Military Commissions Act—which included a provision banning foreign detainees labeled “enemy combatants” from challenging their detention in court—was illegal because it unconstitutionally suspended the detainees’ writ of habeas corpus.

Even still, executive power continued to balloon in the years after 9/11, often bolstered by legislation and court rulings.

The Authorization for Use of Military Force

Perhaps the most prominent example of Congress furthering executive authority was its passage of the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) on Sept. 18, 2001—a joint resolution green-lighting the U.S. military to go after the perpetrators of 9/11.

The AUMF included unusually broad language, authorizing force against anyone who “planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.” It was widely popular: only one lawmaker in Congress voted against it: California Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee.

The significance of the AUMF has only grown since its passage. In the past 20 years, multiple presidents have interpreted the AUMF to extend their authority beyond solely targeting al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, to cover operations in Iraq, attacks on ISIS, and numerous military deployments in other countries including Yemen, Somalia and Libya. Just this summer, the Biden Administration executed an airstrike in Somalia—by invoking the AUMF of 2001. To this day the full list of groups covered in the AUMF remains classified, so Americans don’t even know how many operations it authorizes.

Oona Hathaway, a professor of international law at Yale Law School, says that the modern interpretation of the AUMF “massively expanded beyond what Congress initially envisioned.” It also set a dangerous precedent, she argues, “that Congress might pass an authorization that it means to be very narrow or limited, and presidents can interpret those authorities in increasingly broad and creative ways.”

The growth of surveillance

As the War on Terror began, so too did the increase of the U.S. government’s surveillance of its own citizens.

Some programs were launched by the Bush Administration in secret, such as the President’s Surveillance Program (PSP), a set of secret intelligence activities authorized by Bush in 2001. PSP included the warrantless wiretapping of communications of people thought to be connected with al-Qaeda, and the warrantless collecting and mining of Americans’ phone and internet metadata. Codenamed “STELLARWIND,” the program slowly came to light over the following decade, first in a New York Times report in 2005 and more extensively in 2013 when the Washington Post and the Guardian published an internal report leaked by Edward Snowden that detailed the operations.

“For me, the biggest [legacy of 9/11] is the radical increase in government secrecy, and attempts to keep as much government surveillance as possible hidden from the American people,” says Patrick G. Eddington, a senior fellow in homeland security and civil liberties at the libertarian Cato Institute.

Congress also took several steps that furthered surveillance, including passing the Patriot Act in 2001, which drastically expanded surveillance tools used by law enforcement to investigate crimes. Among many controversial provisions, the Act included Section 215, which allowed for the collection of business records or any other “tangible thing” considered “relevant” to an international terrorism, counterespionage, or foreign intelligence investigation. It also included what was known as the “sneak and peek” provision, which allowed law enforcement to search citizens’ homes and offices without notifying them at the time of the search.

“As a result, the government has much more power than it needs, actually, to go after people that have done nothing wrong,” says Russ Feingold, the president of ACS who was the only U.S. senator to vote against the bill during its first vote in 2001, when he served as a Democrat from Wisconsin. Feingold points out that in the 10 years after the Patriot Act, only 1% of cases using the “sneak and peek provision” were terrorism-related.

Predominantly Black and brown communities—and in particular Muslim communities—are most directly impacted by this surveillance. “For many communities of color, especially the Muslim community, the government has deployed extraordinary surveillance and racial profiling,” says Shirin Sinnar, a professor of law at Stanford Law School. “And a lot of this has become routine, and extremely difficult to challenge in court.”

In 2015, Congress passed the USA Freedom Act, which limited certain elements of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, but largely kept it in place. Section 215 expired in 2020, but other aspects of the Patriot Act—such as the “sneak and peek” provision—remain in place to this day.

Remaking the American immigration system

America’s immigration system was dramatically overhauled in the wake of 9/11, once courts and lawmakers began to perceive immigration as a national security issue.

In 2002, Congress created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), incorporating 22 federal agencies in the largest reorganization of the federal government since World War II. Many units of DHS, including the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), were given broad discretion and deep resources to enforce immigration laws both at the border and at the interior of the country.

Many Muslim, Arab and South Asian communities were profiled, targeted and detained under America’s new immigration policies. In the months following the attacks, the government detained over 1,000 men from mainly Arab and Muslim countries. They were arrested secretly and tried in secret hearings, using secret evidence, says Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute. “And [most] of these things were challenged. And because the judges were so deferential [to national security claims]… all of them were upheld.”

DHS launched the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) program, also known as “special registration,” in 2002, which required men of a certain age who were non-citizens from 25 countries—24 of which were Muslim majority—to report to immigration offices to be interviewed, fingerprinted and photographed. According to the New York Times, out of the roughly 85,000 people registered in the program by 2003, only 11 were found to have ties to terrorism. The program was ultimately discontinued in 2011.

More enduring has been the DHS’ Secure Communities program, launched in 2008 under Bush, which formed a database in which federal, state and local law enforcement agencies shared information, including the matching of fingerprints. Now, if an undocumented immigrant is arrested for a traffic violation, ICE would be flagged. “Every single local cop has become [a potential] outpost of the federal immigration authority,” says Chishti. The database allowed for mass levels of deportations never before seen in the U.S., and ultimately led to backlash and the rise of “sanctuary cities” during Donald Trump’s presidency, which help shelter undocumented immigrants.

“The machinery of immigration could not be anywhere as formidable as it is without the policies put in place after 9/11,” says Chishti. “No matter what aspect of immigration policymaking we try to embark on, national security now is this constant checkmate.”

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, it was Joe Biden’s wife Jill who told him on the phone that a second plane had crashed into New York’s Twin Towers.

Biden was on board an Amtrak commuter train from Wilmington and Washington, and when he walked out of the station on Capitol Hill, he saw brown smoke in the sky from the impact of another plane that rammed into the Pentagon across the Potomac River in Virginia. There were concerns that a fourth plane, which passengers would later force down in a field in Shanksville, PA, was headed for the Capitol Building, which was being evacuated. Biden, then a Senator from Delaware, wanted to give a speech from the Senate chamber to show Americans the government was still functioning. Capitol Police refused to let Biden inside, he wrote in his 2007 memoir “Promises to Keep.” Instead, he spoke to an ABC News crew a few blocks away. “Terrorism wins when, in fact, they alter our civil liberties or shut down our institutions,” Biden said.

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Now it’s Biden’s turn as President. And as he presides over solemn commemorations of the September 11 terror attacks on their 20th anniversary, he’s also pushing his Administration to depart from the national security policies that defined the post 9/11 era.

He halted most lethal drone strikes when he came to office, telling operators to loop in the White House on decisions to strike, and initiating a broad review of when such lethal force should be used. He told aides to review the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other detainees are indefinitely imprisoned, with a goal to close it before he leaves office. He called for a new counterterrorism strategy that aims to put more manpower and so-called “over-the-horizon” long-distance military firepower on terror affiliates operating in multiple countries in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. He also broadened U.S. counterterrorism investigations to include more focus on domestic violent extremists, which, after the Jan. 6 attempted insurrection at the Capitol, the FBI rates as the single biggest threat to the homeland. And he decided to pull all U.S. forces out of Afghanistan, a decision that precipitated a rapid takeover of the country by the Taliban in mid-August, likely returning Afghanistan to a similar state—run by fundamentalist religious militants and providing safe harbor for terror groups—as it was before the U.S. invasion twenty years ago.

After a two-decade, three-Administration long focus on terrorism in the Middle East and Central Asia, Biden wants to put more attention on other threats, including the pandemic, climate change, cyber attacks and China’s projection of power, said a White House official, as well as domestic terrorism. The Biden Administration is pressuring social media companies to rethink how videos and information encouraging violent extremism are distributed online, and is looking at ways to respond to the Christchurch Call, which challenges governments to pull down online content that encourages violence. (The initiative was spearheaded by New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and other world leaders after March 2019 terror attacks against two mosques in New Zealand took 51 lives.) One of the biggest shifts in Biden’s strategy, according to the White House official, will be how the U.S. military redirects its resources from prosecuting a land war in Afghanistan to countering China and Russia.

But Biden’s desire to swiftly move on from the war in Afghanistan has already turned deadly, and revealed the old threats still exist. The Aug. 26 attack at the Kabul airport by Islamic State-Khorasan Province that killed 13 U.S. service members has raised the specter that terror groups like the Islamic State and Al Qaeda may once again be able to gain footholds in Afghanistan. “The situation in Afghanistan has reinforced how important and urgent it is to refocus on the threat from terrorism and extremist groups,” says Brett Bruen, a former director of global engagement in the Barack Obama White House. “Despite Biden’s preference to prioritize China and Asia, he’s going to have to balance the challenge of terrorism, and instability across South Asia.”

Read More: ‘Was This All Worth It?’ Grieving the Death of One of the Last U.S. Soldiers Killed in Afghanistan

The head of the Haqqani network, a militant organization that targeted American troops for years in Afghanistan, is now a senior leader of the Taliban. American Mark Frerichs has been held hostage by the Taliban since February 2020. In Afghanistan, twenty years after the U.S. invasion, “we’re actually worse off” now, argues Dalia Fahmy, an associate professor of political science at Long Island University. The U.S. stood by—and maintained negotiating contacts with Taliban leaders—as the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, and now “terrorist organizations, which we had promised would never have geographic space again, will very quickly have geographic space” to operate and plan attacks, she says.

All of which means Biden’s plan to usher in new post-9/11 priorities comes with its own risks. Biden draws on his own personal history with tragedy—his wife and daughter died in a car crash in 1972 and his son Beau died from a brain tumor in 2015—when speaking to Americans during moments of loss. He will honor the pain felt on Sept. 11, 2001 as he visits the sites of each attack on Saturday, even as the country tallies staggering new losses each day from the coronavirus pandemic. COVID-19 took more lives on Sept. 9, 2021 than the 2,977 killed by Al Qaeda skyjackers on Sept. 11, 2001, and has killed more than 650,000 Americans in 18 months. In a country already overwhelmed with death, Biden is determined to ensure that his changing national security policies won’t bring any more. “As we turn the page on the foreign policy that has guided our nation the last two decades,” he said on Aug. 31, the day the last U.S. troops flew out of Afghanistan, “We’ve got to learn from our mistakes.”

The Delta variant has caused a resurgence in COVID-19 cases and deaths, threatening earlier gains made by the Biden Administration in tackling the pandemic. President Biden on Thursday laid out an ambitious comprehensive six-point COVID Action Plan to respond to the variant challenge. It gives appropriate top priority to using executive action to maximize vaccinations and recognizes the direct link between curbing the virus and reopening schools, workplaces, transportation hubs, entertainment venues and other vital segments of our economy.

But on the testing front, despite giving overdue attention to “more available, more affordable and more convenient testing” and committing to procuring 280 million tests, the White House did not seize the moment to deliver a comprehensive national rapid testing plan that would complement its heroic vaccination efforts.
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Accessible at-home rapid testing is a strategic tool that if deployed last year would have reduced COVID-19 transmission to a point of potentially eliminating the virus as a public health threat. A plan to ramp up such testing gained momentum at the start of the Biden Administration and it continued to make headlines in the spring. With no no national strategy, however, states and schools received the funding, but they were left to figure out procurement and protocols alone. Nevertheless, as the administration made vaccines its major focus, it seemed to treat testing as more of a penalty for the unvaccinated, rather than using it as an extra layer of protection and providing peace-of-mind for all. There was never a comprehensive federal plan to assure that supply met growing market demand for a convenient and accurate tool that would signal if people were infectious and enable them to take vital precautions to break chains of household and community transmission.

With the early summer pandemic reprieve and a June recommendation by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) against the need for regular testing for those fully vaccinated, it came as no surprise that Abbott’s highly popular at-home rapid COVID-19 test, the BinaxNow, was projected to be in such low demand that the company instructed its Maine factory to destroy millions of tests before laying off 1,200 workers.

The timing couldn’t have been worse as schools and colleges are now back in person and states are fighting each other for the limited supply of rapid tests. The lack of rapid testing options is causing consternation across a broad swath of the American economy. In a surging fourth wave, virtually all segments of society have had their personal safety unnecessarily jeopardized. This isn’t because people are choosing tests over vaccinations—it’s because they want both.

The newly unveiled Biden COVID Action Plan addresses many of the historical gaps and shortfalls in the deployment of rapid tests. It focuses on expanding production of rapid tests, making them more affordable and accessible, and supports specific use cases in K-12 schools, and sports and entertainment venues. These are all impactful and desirable government interventions. But unless they are managed as elements of a whole-of-government approach, it will fall short of expectations in helping restore our vibrant economy and personal safety and well-being.

One example of the need to take a holistic approach to rapid testing is the unintended disruptive impact of the Biden mandate that workers at large companies get vaccinated or face weekly testing. This may apply to as many as 100 million workers and stands to displace huge unfunded mandated testing costs to the private sector or to the employees themselves. It will also wreak havoc on the national supply chain, limiting test availability for schools and other national priorities as well. The Biden plan allocates $2 billion for 280 million tests. This is a bad deal for American taxpayers. We are over-paying for tests that could be produced for as little as $1 and not getting nearly enough supply on the market to meet the demand.

Read more: Why We Still Need Widespread Rapid Testing Even With Vaccines

The Trump Administration’s Operation Warp Speed for vaccines was successful because the U.S. government recognized early that it had a central catalytic role in harnessing the formidable R&D, manufacturing, commercial expertise and innovation of the private sector. The White House knew that without its leadership and facilitation, market forces alone would not meet the challenge of fast and efficient development, commercialization and use of a leapfrog technology—a pandemic-ending vaccine.

Now we’re at a similar crossroad for rapid testing and we need a U.S. government-led solution that does not rely mainly on market forces to drive COVID-19 policy. Delta is highly contagious in part because viral loads increase very quickly, achieving 1,000 times higher viral load on the first day of detection than earlier variants. Someone can be undetectable in the morning and a super spreader within 24 hours, often before symptoms appear. Inexpensive, easy, fast and accurate at-home tests provide actionable results in minutes, not days. They can be used in or out of the home to provide real-time information on whether someone is infectious. If I’m negative, I go to school; I go to the family birthday party; I go to work. If I’m positive, I stay home and isolate. Individuals, families, parents of schoolchildren, employees, diners—virtually everyone—can markedly increase physical safety and mental well-being by having access to rapid tests. It is a pandemic game-changer.

What does a comprehensive national rapid testing plan look like? It assures sufficient production (hundreds of millions of tests per month—not per year), distribution and access of rapid tests to public and private enterprises and users everywhere, and a robust public health education and marketing campaign that tells people how to use the tests.

The White House proposes to address the supply problem by invoking the Defense Production Act (a policy promise that was announced earlier this year but never came to fruition). Biden’s plan also calls for retailers, such as Amazon, Walmart and Kroger, to sell their tests at a 35% discount, and plans to distribute free tests to homeless shelters and community health centers. But this won’t result in equitable access and use of this life-saving tool for households across the U.S. The current reliance on private sector incentives and mostly retail distribution has caused a two-tier use-case. Those who attend destination weddings can afford to get tested. Those who perform essential services will likely not.

For a nationwide scale-up and distribution of rapid tests, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We can look to the U.K., Germany, and other countries that have massively scaled rapid tests as critical public health tools. We must recognize that rapid testing in a pandemic is a public health good and not medicine. The president, in coordination with the CDC, should consider an executive order ensuring that rapid COVID-19 tests are regulated as public health tools and not medical diagnostics. The Biden Administration should treat this with the same prioritization and focus that the prior administration did for vaccines because it’s a natural complement to Biden’s vaccine mandates. This isn’t an either/or situation. Rapid testing is an insurance policy for the vaccination campaign. Vaccines prevent disease but falter to limit the spread of Delta. Strategic widespread use of rapid tests can limit spread and bring outbreaks crashing down in weeks. This will support the vaccine program—the less community transmission, the fewer chances the virus will have to mutate into more contagious and dangerous variants that challenge vaccine effectiveness. Our approach can’t rely on laboratory-based testing where individuals wait days for results—Delta spreads far too quickly.

The White House should be aware that the idea of accessible rapid testing is quite popular and now in high and growing demand. A public opinion survey recently conducted by Covid Collaborative and HART Research found that most parents (about 70%) would test their child regularly if their child’s school provided at-home rapid tests. About 80% of surveyed adults said it is important to have easy access to at-home rapid tests, and nearly 60% of unvaccinated adults said they would use an at-home rapid test regularly if it was free.

As Delta continues to wreak havoc, we believe this is the White House’s opportunity to arm every American with the tools to know their infectious status and significantly reduce asymptomatic COVID-19 transmission. Twenty months into this pandemic, we can protect ourselves with the vaccines, protect our loved ones with rapid tests, and finally return to life as we knew it— only if we seize the moment.

This article is part of the The DC Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox every weekday.

The world changed on Sept. 11, 2001.

Two decades later, few would argue with that statement. And it probably isn’t the first or last time you’ll read a version of that idea this weekend, as the nation marks the twentieth anniversary of the terrorist attacks. Objectively, after the coordinated attacks on the U.S. that day, the nation’s post-Cold War footing suddenly felt less certain. America’s allies saw the country shed some of its projected invincibility, and its enemies saw the superpower to be more Potemkin than Pax Americana. Those views are as valid today as they were 20 years ago tomorrow, when the intensely blue skies over Washington, D.C., New York City and Shanksville, Pa., turned to smoke.
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But some of the changes sparked by the deadly hijacking of four planes on the East Coast have proven less permanent, particular when it comes to Americans’ own attitudes. Many of the reactionary shifts in public opinion after 9/11 have reverted to pre-attack levels, according to fresh analysis by Pew Research Center. After the attacks, Americans suddenly embraced their neighbors, faith and government, but that didn’t last long. Confidence in journalism hit a high mark in the aftermath of the attacks as Americans couldn’t turn away from the coverage; that trust is long gone. So, too, is the sense of bipartisan potential that rang out from the steps of the U.S. Capitol that day in the form of an impromptu rendition of “God Bless America” sung by members of Congress, while the Pentagon still burned across the Potomac. These days, you can’t even get lawmakers to agree that a mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 with the intention of overturning an election.

Put simply, the America that woke up on Sept. 12, 2001, didn’t stay awake for long. The country either quickly boomeranged to its before footing, as was the case in its lust for war and its sense of community, or continued on the path directed in tragedy, as has been the case in anti-Muslim sentiment that has grown stronger among Republicans since 19 radicalized extremists killed 2,977 people that day. And given more Americans than ever—64%—are telling Gallup that 9/11 forever changed their lives, it’s a feature worth considering.

One of the most dramatic swings has been in America’s sense of national pride, which became rabid after one of its worst days since the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Remember when demand for American flags spiked so high that the United States turned to foreign manufacturers to meet the need? On September 12, 2001, 88,000 U.S. flags were sold in Wal-Mart stores, compared to 6,400 on that day a year earlier. A few weeks later, Karl Rove met with Hollywood execs in Beverly Hills to get the studios on board with the government’s messaging on what would become its Global War on Terror. If you questioned any part of the sweeping response to the tragedy, your patriotism was called into question. Three days after the attacks, Rep. Barbara Lee was the lone vote against going to war in Afghanistan to go after its perpetrators, and she was called a traitor.

Those days of flag-wrapped infallibility are long gone, according to surveys. Pew found 79% of Americans in October of 2001 had displayed an American flag; in a separate survey last year, the organization found just 39% of Americans said they were proud of their country. A staggering 55% of Americans in 2002 told pollsters from The Washington Post that 9/11 had changed the country for the better. Now? Only 33% believe that, and 46% say the country has gotten worse.

Meanwhile, anti-Muslim sentiment among many Americans has gotten worse. One of the finest moments of the presidency of George W. Bush was his visit to Washington’s largest Islamic center just six days after 9/11. There, he declared the United States was not—and never would be—looking at Islam itself as the enemy. It seemed to help; in March of 2001, before the attacks, 45% of Americans told Pew they had a favorable view of Muslims, a number that would grow to 54% by November of that year. But in the intervening period, Bush’s Republican Party hasn’t exactly followed his lead. In 2002, 32% of Republicans agreed with the thesis that Islam encouraged violence. Last month, according to Pew, that number hit 72% support among the GOP.

Terrorism has become a consistently powerful concern for Americans, eclipsed only by the economy during the 2008 financial crisis. In fact, 74% of Americans stil say terrorism should be a top priority for Washington, which means no politicians worth their salt can ignore it, even as individuals’ intense fear seems to have faded along with interest in fighting terrorism overseas. In mid-September 2001, 77% of respondents told Pew that they supported retaliation for the attacks, even with troops on the ground. In May, well before the Biden withdrawal plan from Afghanistan collapsed into chaos, 62% of Americans told Quinnipiac they supported the exit, suggesting that public support for the war was gone even as al-Qaeda remains active in that country.

In an era of social media platforms that spread misinformation, the decline of traditional newsrooms, and the rise of partisan cable screaming, the long view that these 20 years of surveys give should be invaluable to policymakers. And in them, they may even find some hints for what the next 20 years may bring. There are signs, for instance, that trust in institutions continues to fade and comity is a fleeting commodity. But this much is clear: the uptick in comity and community seen 20 years ago this week in the wake of a devastating and brazen attack on U.S. soil proved temporary, while permission to inch away from America’s stated ideals started a slide we’re still dealing with

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About a decade ago, when his mansion in upstate New York started feeling too cramped for all his grandkids, Jules Kroll, the world’s most famous private detective, set out to build a bigger one on a neighboring parcel of land. The owner of the plot sensed an opportunity and tried to jack up the price. So Kroll looked into the neighbor’s past, he recalls with a smile as we stood at the back of the property one morning last spring. “The guy didn’t know who he was dealing with.” In the end, Kroll got the price he wanted.

He also made a point about the industry he pioneered. An investigator’s skills, he says, “are like any other weapons.” They can be used for good, for ill or simply for profit. Since he founded his first investigative firm in 1972, Kroll’s clients have included aggrieved governments, major corporations and a Wall Street fraudster who now resides in prison. His exploits have become like folktales in the industry: the time he found the KGB’s secret bank accounts in Switzerland, or his quest to trace the offshore fortune of Saddam Hussein. His targets have included corrupt politicians, oligarchs and, on at least one occasion, a victim of sexual assault. Some of his investigations have blown up in his face. By his own account, too many.

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So it surprised me to hear through a mutual friend last winter that Kroll was still alive, still at work, and eager to talk to a reporter. He has avoided interviews in recent years, partly because he is known for discretion, but also because his industry has lately been involved in more high-profile scandals than the Mafia. On behalf of one client in 2018, Kroll’s firm was caught using deception to defend the use of asbestos, a known carcinogen. The previous year, it had emerged that various private investigators, including Kroll’s firm, had worked for Harvey Weinstein, the former movie mogul who has since been convicted of rape. Through revelations like these, the industry has become known for using the modern tools of espionage—hacking, surveillance, infiltration, misdirection—in ways that confer power and impunity upon the rich.

This was one of the reasons Kroll wanted to talk. When he first reached out to me in February, he was a few months away from his 80^th birthday, and he clearly had concerns about the way his work had been depicted in the press. “It may not be easy to believe these days,” he says. “But there is some good we can do in the world.”

In Kroll’s telling, the value of being a spy for hire goes beyond making money. Private investigators, Kroll argues, are adept at recovering stolen wealth and finding evidence of crimes that law enforcement has no interest in probing. Given the right incentives, they can act as the bounty hunters of the global economy, Kroll suggests, and even as agents of transparency. “We keep the fish tank clean,” he likes to say, portraying himself and his colleagues as humble snails collecting scum from the glass so that a bit more daylight might reach all the tank’s inhabitants.

The image is colorful but false. Kroll is no gastropod. By reputation, he is ruthless and relentless, an intimidating force within the industry. (Three of Kroll’s competitors declined to speak to me on the record about him.) In person, he presents himself as a gracious family man with a single-minded dedication to finding and revealing the truth. Pressed to talk about the recent scandals in his field, he sticks to a familiar line: mistakes were made, and nobody is perfect. Over the course of several interviews, it seemed clear that the investigator had come forward to burnish his reputation and promote a rosy picture of his work.

To a legion of critics, the ghoulishness of the Weinstein affair alone was reason to deny Kroll that opportunity. Yet his field is only growing, in numbers and in power. As of 2019, there were 36,200 licensed private eyes in the U.S. alone, according to the Department of Labor. So many of them have studied under Kroll that a historian once referred to him as “the Johnny Appleseed” of the private-investigations industry. “We are everywhere,” says one of his former employees and acolytes, Tyler Maroney, who now runs his own investigations firm in New York. “There are thousands of us out there who are Kroll alumni.”

Their work has never been more prominent—or controversial. The last two U.S. presidential elections have both been shaped by the kind of political dirt that private detectives excel at gathering. The 2016 race was tainted by the dossier of lurid claims against Donald Trump, assembled (for a price) by Christopher Steele, a former British spy, and shopped to reporters by a private-intelligence firm before some of its key claims and sources were discredited. In 2020, it was a trove of emails and raunchy photographs belonging to Hunter Biden, leaked to the press in the weeks before Election Day.

Kroll had nothing to do with either controversy, though he says he was approached with a request to disprove the Steele dossier’s allegations against Trump. He declined the job, he told me, because “the incentives were not there.” (His feelings toward Trump may also have had something to do with that decision; a roll of toilet paper in Kroll’s guest bathroom had the former President’s face printed on it.)

Of all the cases he has taken over the past half-century, there are plenty that Kroll regrets. But he offers no apologies on his industry’s behalf, not even for working with Weinstein. It was one bad decision, he told me, in a lifetime of clients. “Are there some sleazy private investigators? Absolutely,” he says. “Do we make mistakes? For sure. But 100,000 cases later, the percentages are pretty good.”

When Kroll came to the door for our first meeting in March, the detective looked tired, his eyes sharp but droopy like a bloodhound’s. He had returned that week from a trip to California, where his youngest son, Nick Kroll, the celebrity comedian, had just had his first child, a boy named Leo. The birth had brought Kroll’s brood of grandchildren to what he calls a baker’s dozen. A digital frame on a side table showed their pictures in a constant loop.

The family milestone might have served as an occasion to consider retirement. But that was far from Kroll’s mind. “When I look in the mirror, obviously I’m not a youthful chap anymore,” Kroll said as we sat down at the dining table where he had camped out during the COVID-19 lockdowns, digging through investigative case files. “But I don’t feel like an old man.”

For many operatives of his generation, Kroll’s name is still synonymous with the service he provides: collecting secrets for a price. Before the advent of Google, older bankers and finance types often invoked it as a verb, as in: make sure to Kroll that guy, find out everything there is to know. The right to use his name in the business of private investigations has been sold and resold. The first buyer was an insurance company, which paid a staggering $1.9 billion for control of Kroll Inc. in 2004. (Kroll walked away with $117 million.) The current owner is a risk-management firm called Duff & Phelps. It has nothing to do with Jules Kroll, but it markets its services under the Kroll name, according to its website, kroll.com. “I now compete against my own name,” the actual Kroll told me.

As we sat in his dining room, Kroll took me through some of his ongoing investigations. One involved a search for the foreign assets of members of the Venezuelan government. For several years, Kroll’s firm, known as K2 Integrity, has been collecting intelligence on regime officials who had moved vast amounts of wealth offshore. “We have actual bank accounts,” Kroll says. “Swiss banks, names of the people, the amounts, the transfers, where they came from. It’s pretty good stuff.”

The intended client for this information was meant to be the government of Juan Guaido, the opposition leader whom the U.S. recognized in 2019 as the acting President of Venezuela. But Guaido’s attempts to topple the ruling regime fizzled, leaving Kroll without a buyer for his dossier of Venezuelan secrets. “We keep waiting for somebody else to sign a contract.” Among the handful of potential clients is the U.S. government, he says.

The Venezuela investigation is the type of work Kroll is keen to highlight: cases that expose kleptocrats, fraudsters and cheats. His early career was defined by such cases, glamorous investigations that support his contention that digging dirt doesn’t always make you dirty. In a pair of assignments in the 1980s, Kroll traced the fortunes that two dictators —Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and Jean-Claude Duvalier of Haiti—had siphoned out of government coffers. His most famous escapade came in 1991, when the government of Kuwait hired him to track down Saddam’s wealth. Along with a team of former detectives, spies and investigative journalists, his firm managed to find more than $6 billion of the Iraqi despot’s money stashed around the world. The following year, the Russian government hired Kroll to find the KGB’s money, which had been spirited out of the country in the months before the Soviet collapse. Kroll delivered.

The news coverage of these cases, including a treatment on 60 Minutes, placed him in the canon of celebrity detectives, alongside Sherlock Holmes and Allen Pinkerton. Newsweek referred to Kroll’s firm as “thug busters.” A write-up in TIME in the spring of 1991 featured a portrait that now hangs on a wall next to Kroll’s family photos; it shows the detective in a pair of suspenders, an unlit cigar in his hand, both arms wrapped around a briefcase full of files.

But despite the mythmaking, his more illustrious clients—the United Nations, say, or the House Foreign Affairs Committee—are the exception. The standard assignments, and the ones that truly built Kroll’s fortune, are undertaken for law firms and corporations, which regularly hire private eyes to gather evidence in legal disputes, run background checks or scope out takeover targets. In the early years, when private investigators “wore a dirty raincoat and smoked cigars and had a fedora,” he says, Kroll’s innovation was to give the business a corporate gloss, offering its services not only to jealous husbands but Fortune 500 companies.

By the 1990s, private investigators had become fixtures of Wall Street, working alongside lawyers and bankers in the board room. At its peak in 2008, Kroll’s company had more than 5,000 employees at offices around the world. When the failure of Wall Street rating agencies contributed to the global financial collapse that year, Kroll founded a rating agency of his own, promising that his powers of investigation would be able to spot the cracks in the system before it fell apart again. This new line of business—rating bonds, stocks and other financial instruments—shifted Kroll’s focus away from his original stock-in-trade just as a new breed of competitors emerged.

The most famous was Black Cube, founded in 2010 by a group of former Israeli intelligence officers. Its approach to investigations was cutthroat. Some of its operatives are known to have hacked their targets. The firm’s most infamous case involves Weinstein, whose lawyers hired Black Cube to go after the mogul’s accusers.

The same lawyers also hired Kroll’s firm, then known as K2 Intelligence, to investigate the Filipina-Italian model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, who had accused Weinstein of groping her. Using public records and sources in Italy, K2 assembled a dossier on Gutierrez in 2015 that included details of her past relationships, along with other information that could be used to discredit her. The firm’s allies and operatives passed this information to the office of the District Attorney in Manhattan. The dirt also reached the New York tabloids, which ran embarrassing stories about Gutierrez. Prosecutors decided not to charge Weinstein that year, citing insufficient evidence.

From the start, Kroll told me, the assignment did not sit well with him. He says he had repeatedly turned down offers of work from Weinstein, whose history as a sexual predator had long been an open secret in his circle. Kroll knew about it. “I warned him,” he says. “I told him that this kind of behavior is going to destroy you.” Still, he agreed to investigate Gutierrez, he says, because it seemed like an insignificant assignment. It took about two weeks to complete, Kroll says, and K2 never worked for Weinstein again.

But the mogul had plenty of other private eyes on his payroll. Among them was a firm called Kroll Inc., which Kroll had founded and led until his departure seven years earlier. Under its new leadership, the eponymous firm picked up the case where K2 had left it. Gutierrez signed a nondisclosure agreement with Weinstein in 2015. Its terms required her to give control of her email accounts and electronic devices to Kroll Inc. According to Ronan Farrow, who first broke the story in The New Yorker, the firm’s operatives then tried to wipe the devices of any evidence against Weinstein.

Jules Kroll says he was not involved in that part of the operation, but he knows the case is a black mark on his name. “It’s an eponymous institution,” he says. “The firm and its founder get conflated.”

Months after Kroll says he turned his back on Weinstein, the mogul turned to Black Cube, which was already known in the industry for crossing ethical lines. (The firm declined to comment.) Apart from allegations of hacking and online harassment, Black Cube employed a practice known as “pre-texting,” in which its operatives use false identities to deceive their targets into revealing information. The firm reportedly used that tactic against one of Weinstein’s accusers, the actress Rose McGowan, and against journalists who were reporting on Weinstein’s history of sexual predation. “These people have no brakes,” Kroll says of Black Cube.

But the criticism sounds hollow. Kroll’s firm has been known to use similar methods. For its client in the asbestos industry, K2 sent an operative to infiltrate a group of anti-asbestos activists by pretending to be a documentary filmmaker. Kroll says that case was another mistake. So was his work for Allen Stanford, a Wall Street financier who was convicted in 2012 for running a massive Ponzi scheme and sentenced to more than a century in prison.

When they add up all these mistakes, Kroll’s critics see a pattern of abuse that needs to be reined in, either through government regulation or public pressure. “Few professions are more deserving of a comeuppance than the smug and morally bankrupt men and women who work as spies-for-hire,” Barry Meier, the reporter who broke the story of the asbestos case in the New York Times, writes in his recently published book, Spooked, which spends nearly 300 pages raking Kroll and his counterparts over the coals.

Kroll declined to be interviewed for that book, and he seems to have little time for Meier’s critique of moral bankruptcy. “It has nothing to do with morality,” he told me about his process for deciding which clients to take. Since the Weinstein scandal, Kroll’s firm has turned away clients accused of sexual harassment or assault. But even that policy, Kroll told me, was a business decision: “It’s just not worth the reputation risk.”

When I pressed Kroll to explain, he brought up even more odious clients who have come to him, asking to investigate judges, prosecutors or other elected officials. “As a practical matter, it just isn’t worth it,” he says. “These people have the ability of taking formal action against you in a way that’s very difficult to deal with.” That, it seems, is where Kroll draws the line.

One day in his library, Kroll was recounting the story of a woman he had once investigated, a former actress in pornographic films, when he realized he had forgotten her name. We were waiting for a photographer to take his picture for this article, as the woman’s story bubbled up in Kroll’s mind, partly as a joke and partly a confession. “She had a very gamy, a very Italian name,” he said as he grasped for it, recalling the bare outlines of the case. The woman, he said, had been married in the early 1990s to a famous and powerful artist, who hired Kroll’s firm during the couple’s divorce, as Kroll put it, “to keep an eye on her.”

The story was such a stereotype of the private-eye genre that it seemed to fill his library with the smell of cheap cigars. The photographer overheard it, looked up from adjusting his spotlights and tossed me a glance that seemed to say, Who is this guy, and why is he telling us this?

More of the details of the case came back to Kroll. We searched for the woman’s name online and quickly found it: Ilona Staller, better known in Italy by her stage name, Cicciolina. “That’s it!” Kroll exclaimed. Staller’s husband at the time was the Neo-Pop artist Jeff Koons, who sought to prevent her from leaving New York with their child. He hired Kroll’s firm to watch their apartment building. (Koons did not respond to a request for comment.) “But she fooled everyone and got away,” Kroll recalled with a laugh. “We totally blew it.”

To Kroll, the case of the artist’s wife was one small escapade in a half-century stuffed with them, a hazy memory that offered a self-deprecating anecdote. But to his target, the experience was indelible.

Staller, who was a member of the Italian parliament during her marriage to Koons, was open to discussing the case with me. The operatives had “monitored all my movements everywhere in America,” she confirmed in an email. She declined to say how she had made her escape. “For me it was a very sad time,” Staller wrote. “Too many sorrows.”

A few years ago, during my stint as a foreign correspondent in Berlin, a private-intelligence operative was making the rounds of the local press corps, pitching stories and documents related to Russian President Vladimir Putin. One of my colleagues from a German magazine arranged for us to meet him at the Hauptbahnhof, the city’s central train station. The operative showed up riding a black motorcycle with an outfit to match and carrying a messenger bag full of files.

Spread out on a table at a Dunkin’ Donuts, the documents looked genuine enough. And the stories they told had a tantalizing cast of spies and other agents of the Kremlin. Still, a lot about the operative seemed off. There was no reliable way to check where his documents originated—had they been hacked?—and no clear answer to the question of his motives. We decided not to pursue the story. Months later, the documents appeared in the press. The guy’s facts had apparently checked out.

The incident came to mind one afternoon in August, when I arrived to meet Jules Kroll’s son and business partner Jeremy at a members-only club in Manhattan. It struck me that the Krolls were in the same business as that operative in Berlin— just in different milieus. The train-station encounter had the feeling of a drug deal; this was a power lunch surrounded by expensive art, with coffee in white china instead of paper cups. Jeremy Kroll drank his with almond milk, looking every bit the high-end private detective, which is to say he looked nothing like a detective at all. “I just want to make the work a little bit more boring,” he told me.

In the decades he has spent working alongside his father, their business has adjusted the services it offers to meet client demand. During the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the family company had gone into the private security business, sending contractors to guard clients in conflict zones. Securing the release of kidnapping victims had also been a staple of their work. “That was a crummy business,” Jeremy says. “It was dangerous.”

It’s no longer on the list of services the business provides. Under Jeremy’s leadership, the company has moved into the cyber realm, offering help to victims of ransomware and training companies in digital security. “The criminal networks have gone from kidnapping people to kidnapping data and extorting businesses,” Jeremy says. “We recover data and systems, not human beings.”

His father, on the other hand, remains in thrall to his vintage vocation: searching for stolen assets on behalf of government clients from around the world. The case that fascinates him most these days involves Mongolia, where officials had been accused of siphoning $250 million into offshore assets. The country’s President, elected in 2017 on a promise to fight corruption, had asked Kroll the following year to find the money and bring it back. Along the way, the detective and his associates could expect to keep 30% of the total they recovered.

It was no charity case, even if Kroll had to take it on spec. But he says he took the assignment not just for the money, but rather to prove his point about the industry. “Could the anticorruption agency in Mongolia do this on their own? They can’t,” he told me. Law enforcement agencies in the U.S. have the know-how and influence to seize illicit wealth from offshore banks. But smaller nations like Mongolia, Kroll argues, can only achieve that with help from private investigators. “We’ve been doing this a long time. It’s a level of expertise they just don’t have.”

When we first spoke last February, the Mongolia case was taking up the bulk of Kroll’s time. He told me about the evidence his team had recently presented to a court in New York City, part of a global quest to freeze and recover the assets. Kroll’s statement to the court describes a system of fronts and proxies that Mongolian officials allegedly used to hide “ill-gotten gains among a web of onshore and offshore companies.” The document links this network to the country’s former prime minister Sukhbaatar Batbold, whose party holds the majority in parliament.

Through his lawyers, Batbold denied the allegations, and said the assets in question do not belong to him. To help him counter the claims, he hired one of the world’s most prestigious law firms, Gibson, Dunn, which set out to undermine Kroll’s investigation by attacking his credibility. When I contacted them to ask about the case, they sent me a list of scandals Kroll has been involved in. The Weinstein affair was at the top of the list.

Kroll brushed off the list as a smokescreen, irrelevant to the substance of the case. “Batbold is trying to dirty me up, so he points to Weinstein,” he told me. But the tactic appeared to be working. Kroll’s contacts in the U.S. media had mostly ignored the Mongolia story, despite his best efforts to argue that the case had deep geopolitical significance. Some of the media accounts that emerged focused not on the corruption allegations but rather on the American sleuth investigating them. Kroll attributed the lack of media interest to Mongolia’s obscurity. He did not dwell on the role that his own reputation could have played.

Nor does he seem overly concerned about the recent calls to regulate the tactics of his industry. Those calls remain muted. None of the investigative firms that worked for Weinstein have faced any punishment tougher than public shaming—what Kroll refers to as “reputation risk.” The idea of forcing private eyes to disclose their clients and tactics to a federal regulator have come up in some recent books and opinion pieces. But no one in government has taken up that idea, which Kroll says wouldn’t work in any case.

“I don’t think regulations make it better,” he told me. “There are bad actors in everything. There are bad actors who are lawyers. There are bad actors who are investigative reporters.” But are there more bad actors now in his business than there were in the days when former cops and spies were paid to search dumpsters for documents or monitor the wives of famous men? Kroll thought about it for a moment. The game, he said, has evolved and matured since its early years.

Its players have certainly adapted. In the wake of the Weinstein scandal, some operatives saw the rise of the #MeToo movement and went to work defending alleged abusers; others began helping firms investigate allegations of abuse. If the trail of a plundering government official goes cold, there are digital thieves to pursue. It is hard to imagine Jules Kroll ever giving up the chase. “I have devoted my professional life to this,” he told me. “That’s what I want on my tombstone.”

With reporting by Mariah Espada, Nik Popli and Simmone Shah

(WASHINGTON) — The White House said Thursday it would withdraw the nomination of a gun-control advocate to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives after nominee David Chipman ran into bipartisan opposition in the Senate.

Chipman’s nomination had stalled for months and he was widely seen as one of the administration’s most contentious nominees. The White House and top Democrats had been pushing to save his nomination for weeks but could not secure the necessary votes, with some Democrats saying privately they would not vote for him.

Despite that, President Joe Biden blamed only Republicans. “He would have been an exemplary director of the ATF,” Biden said in a statement. “Unfortunately, Republicans in Congress have made clear that they intend to use gun crime as a political talking point instead of taking serious steps to address it. That’s why they’ve moved in lockstep to block David Chipman’s confirmation.”
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Chipman is a former federal agent and adviser at the gun control group Giffords. He won praise from advocates for his work pushing for greater regulation and enforcement on ghost guns, overhauling the background check system and moves to reduce the trafficking of illegal firearms.

Read more: Guns in America—What 245 Americans Think About the Issue

But that same advocacy drew opposition from moderate Republicans such as Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, as well as independent Sen. Angus King of Maine, dooming his prospects for confirmation in the 50-50 divided Senate.

In a statement, Chipman said he remained committed to addressing the issue of violent crime and domestic terrorism.

“I knew this confirmation process would be difficult, and while ultimately we weren’t successful, it remains essential that ATF is led by a confirmed director who is accountable to the public and places no special interests before the safety of our children and our communities,” he said.

The withdrawal continues a pattern for Republican and Democratic administrations who have failed to get nominees through the politically fraught process since the director’s position was made confirmable in 2006. Since then, only one nominee, former U.S. Attorney B. Todd Jones has been confirmed. Jones made it through the Senate in 2013 but only after a six-month struggle. Jones was acting director when then-President Barack Obama nominated him in January 2013.

The nomination of Chuck Canterbury, a former president of the Fraternal Order of Police, by then-President Donald Trump was withdrawn in 2020 over Republican concerns about his gun rights stance.

Read more: 21 Americans With Opposing Views on Guns Sat Down to Talk to Each Other. Here’s What They Discovered

The withdrawal of Chipman’s nomination leaves the chief firearm and explosive investigation agency without a confirmed leader at a time when the Biden Administration has made gun violence enforcement a priority, but with limited resources.

Earlier this year Biden announced a series of executive actions aimed at what he called an “epidemic and an international embarrassment” of gun violence in America. The actions amounted to a fraction of the ambitious gun control agenda he proposed as a candidate and underscored his limited power to act alone on guns with difficult politics impeding legislative action on Capitol Hill.

Biden has urged Congress to tackle a number of issues, including expanded background checks and banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. But with an evenly-divided Senate—and any gun control legislation requiring 60 votes to pass—Democrats would have to keep every member of their narrow majority on board while adding 10 Republicans.

A person with knowledge of discussions with Chipman said he had been offered a position at the Department of Justice but turned it down. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.

Little more than three weeks after their rapid sweep to power in Afghanistan, the Taliban has announced the country’s interim government. Comprising high-ranking loyalists and militants with terrorist links, the new, all-male cabinet marks a stark departure from the inclusive government promised by the deputy prime minister, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.

To the surprise of the international community, which expected Baradar, the Taliban’s chief negotiator, to be appointed leader, the Taliban announced Mullah Mohammad Hassan Akhund as the new prime minister.

As leader of the first Taliban government in twenty years, Akhund will set the tone not just for the stability of the country, but for relations between the Taliban and Western powers. He may help decide whether the Taliban becomes a responsible partner for the international community, or the overseers of a pariah state. Here’s what to know about him:
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Where does Mullah Akhund come from?

Akhund hails from Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban. Not much is known about his early life, but he is thought to be one of the founding members of the militant group and was a “close associate and political adviser” to the group’s late leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, according to a UN sanctions report.

An Islamic scholar, Akhund has written several Islamic texts—he is seen as more of a religious, rather than military, leader. Experts describe him as the compromise choice for leader amid reports of in-fighting between hardliners and relatively more moderate members of the Taliban.

What was Akhund’s role in the early days of the Taliban?

During the Taliban’s rule of Afghanistan in 1996-2001, Akhund held senior positions in government, including governor of Kandahar, foreign minister and deputy leader at various points.

According to Thomas Ruttig, co-director of the research group Afghanistan Analysts Network, Akhund was one of the key contacts in Kandahar for the Taliban leadership as well as the UN. During his time as foreign minister he gained a reputation as a choleric figure. “He was quick to blow his fuse,” Ruttig told TIME.

According to reporting by the Associated Press in March 1998, Akhund struck an officer of the UN Development Programme during diplomatic meetings, threw a teapot, and attempted to throw a table at another UN staffer. This incident was the reason that the UN ordered the withdrawal of its expatriate staff in Kandahar on March 23 1998 and suspended its humanitarian activities in the south of the country. The Taliban replaced Akhund as foreign minister.

“Those kinds of stories were well-known when you worked in the UN,” Ruttig said. “If Hassan has not changed his personality since then […] it does not bode well for relations with the international community.”

What happened to Akhund during the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan?

Akhund played a crucial role as head of the Taliban’s decision-making body, the Rahbari Shura council of leaders, which was formed in exile in Pakistan when the group was driven out of power by U.S.-led military intervention in 2001. He held the position for 20 years, earning the respect of the wider movement and the group’s spiritual leader, Haibatullah Akhunzada.

How will Akhund’s government lead Afghanistan?

In an interview with Al Jazeera on Sept. 4, Akhund’s deputy, Mullah Baradar, claimed the Taliban would form an inclusive government. Tuesday’s announcement of the interim cabinet suggests otherwise, according to Gareth Price, a senior research fellow at the think-tank Chatham House. “There are no women, there are no non-Talibans,” Price said. “The makeup of the government is a result of the internal fights in the Taliban, not an outcome of an inclusive political process.”

Of the 33 announced cabinet ministers, the majority are Pashtun. Yet Afghanistan is a diverse state—while a plurality (42%) of the population are ethnically Pashtun, 27% are Tajik and 31% are minorities including the Hazara and Uzbeks.

The Taliban face unprecedented challenges as they assume power of a country dramatically different to the one they ruled two decades ago. “There aren’t really any viable props [to support the economy], apart from opium and methamphetamine, which the Taliban has said it’s not going to sell anymore,” Price said. “And the country was already facing drought and they haven’t got any money. “The Taliban is going to be presiding over a humanitarian crisis.”

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said on Sept. 7 that Afghanistan is facing the collapse of basic services as food and other aid is about to run out. On Aug. 17, the U.S. blocked the Taliban’s access to Afghanistan’s central bank funds.

Yet, while the Taliban know they need international aid, they will not “bow down” to the West so easily, Ruttig told TIME. “It will be tough dealing.”

“The Taliban don’t see themselves in the position that they need to accommodate us, which is understandable given how easily they walked back into power,” Ruttig said.

What does Akhund’s appointment say about Afghanistan’s future?

The new government is a “sign of continuity,” Ruttig said. “The Taliban probably want to show that this is the extension of their, as they see it, illegally overthrown government before 2001.”

Despite the Taliban’s claims of forming an inclusive government, events on the ground paint a different picture. On the day of the announcement of the interim cabinet, Taliban fighters fired shots at a protest of hundreds of people, mainly women, in Kabul.

In the last few weeks the militants have been accused of beheadings, torture, and the rape and kidnap of girls and women. In an interview with the BBC on Aug. 15, a spokesman for the group did not rule out the return of brutal punishments such as amputations and public stonings.

While Akhund certainly has a lot of respect within the Taliban for his long-standing leadership roles, he may not be a figure to unite a divided country — especially in urban areas like Kabul with a young, progressive population. .“Afghanistan has changed,” said Price. “When you’ve had years of freedom, it’s really hard to go back to the opposite.”