Foreign Influence and a Mayor

Many posts have analyzed how foreign governments try to influence American politics and policy. Russia and China are prominent influencers.

Brittny Mejia and Rebecca Ellis at LAT:

Eileen Wang, an Arcadia city leader facing charges of acting as an illegal foreign agent of China, resigned Monday after reaching an agreement to resolve the federal case.

Wang, who served as mayor of the San Gabriel Valley suburb, entered into a plea agreement with prosecutors over charges that she acted under the control of the People’s Republic of China to promote propaganda in the U.S. between 2020 and 2022, according to court filings.

Wang, who was previously elected to the City Council in November 2022, stepped down as mayor on Monday hours after the plea agreement was unsealed. Arcadia officials and Wang’s attorneys said the conduct described by federal authorities occurred before Wang was elected.

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From late 2020 through at least 2022, Wang worked with Yaoning “Mike” Sun, her former fiance, to run a website called U.S. News Center that branded itself as a news source for Chinese Americans, according to the plea agreement unsealed Monday. Both Wang and Sun “executed directives” from Chinese government officials, posting requested articles and reporting back with screenshots showing how many people viewed the stories, the agreement says.

On June 10, 2021, the agreement says, Wang received a message from a government official about “China’s Stance on the Xinjiang Issue,” which included a link to a letter to the editor in the Los Angeles Times from the consul general of the People’s Republic of China in Los Angeles. The consul general had been responding to a Times editorial supporting a boycott of products made with cotton produced in the Xinjiang region of China.

At the time, news reports were highlighting the Chinese government‘s campaign of incarceration, persecution and “reeducation” of Uyghurs in the Xinjiang province.

“There is no genocide in Xinjiang; there is no such thing as ‘forced labor’ in any production activity, including cotton production. Spreading such rumor is to defame China, destroy Xinjiang’s safety and stability,” read the message from the Chinese government official, according to the plea agreement.

Minutes after receiving the link, Wang posted the article on her website and responded to the Chinese government official with a link to the article on her website, according to the court filing.

“So fast, thank you everyone,” the government official responded, the court records show.

Prosecutors also say Wang edited articles at the request of officials and shared information showing the reach of the posts.

“Thank you leader,” she wrote on Aug. 20, 2021, after being complimented for a post that was viewed more than 15,000 times, according to the plea agreement.

Regulating the Internet

 Bruce Mehlman:

National governments are also considering AI oversight and regulation, but the past three decades of internet policy have shown profoundly different goals & approaches. The U.S. has prioritized innovation, the EU consumer protection, China governmental control. As a result, America has enjoyed the most tech entrepreneurship by a wide margin, but we lack many rules to protect children, contain misinformation or fight fraud

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Neighbors and Inequality

Many posts have discussed social capital, volunteering and civic virtue.

Daniel A. Cox, Jae Grace, Avery Shields, "Strangers Next Door: The Decline of Neighborhood Socializing and the Class Divide in Belonging," AEI 5/5/26 

Key Points

• Since 2012, the percentage of young adults who talk to their neighbors at least a few times per week dropped from 51 percent to 25 percent. Among seniors, the decline was only seven points (63 percent to 56 percent).
• Compared with Americans without a degree, college-educated Americans are more likely to have worked with their neighbors to improve a condition in their community (46 percent vs. 34 percent), spent a social evening with a neighbor (58 percent vs. 46 percent), and exchanged texts or emails with a neighbor (65 percent vs. 45 percent).
• Forty-nine percent of Americans who attend religious services weekly talk to their neighbors regularly, compared with only 31 percent of Americans who never attend religious services.

Executive Summary

The 2025 American Neighbor Survey explores the various ways in which Americans are—and are not—interacting with the people in their immediate communities. In the past decade, the frequency of neighborly interactions has plummeted. This withdrawal has been particularly prevalent among young adults, while seniors have remained more consistently in touch with their neighbors. College-educated Americans also experience stronger neighborhood ties. Compared with Americans who have a high school degree or less, college graduates are more trusting of their neighbors, socialize with them more frequently, and are quicker to rely on them for help in times of need. The report also examines the association between attending religious services and the health of neighborhood ties, finding that more frequent attendees are more engaged neighbors.

Hantavirus and Pandemic Preparedness

Many posts have discussed COVID and pandemic preparedness.

At NYT, Apoorva Mandavilli reports on a hantavirus outbreak:

“We should be able to deal collectively with a hantavirus outbreak much more quickly and effectively than this is happening,” said Stephanie Psaki, the coordinator for global health security during the Biden administration.

“An outbreak of a known pathogen on a cruise ship is a relatively easy scenario,” she said. “It can get much harder than this.”

Because of deep staffing cuts the Trump administration has made to the C.D.C. and other health agencies, the government has far fewer people to respond to outbreaks, from trainees and contractors who can be deployed to do boots-on-the-ground epidemiology to senior leaders who can coordinate responses across the U.S. government and elsewhere. And because President Trump withdrew the country from the World Health Organization, the United States does not receive regular information from member states about emerging health threats.

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Last year, alongside massive cuts to research on mRNA and other vaccines, the Trump administration shuttered a network of research centers focused on preventing pandemics by studying pathogens like hantavirus that can jump from animals to people.

In its 2026 budget request, the administration said it planned to refocus the C.D.C. on outbreak investigations and preparedness. But at the same time, it proposed eliminating about $750 million in preparedness grants that states rely on to cope with natural and man-made disasters including outbreaks. It also zeroed funding for the Hospital Preparedness Program, which strengthens health care systems to respond to emergencies, saying the program “has been wasteful and unfocused.”

The Vatican and the US Government

Many posts have discussed the role of religion in American life.

 Matthew Choi and Dan Merica at WP:

For decades, the Vatican has been a unique partner in U.S. foreign policy. From mediating negotiations with hostile countries like Cuba to coordinating global efforts on combating hunger, the Vatican regularly taps into its singular status as both church and state to help U.S. objectives abroad. The relationship hasn’t always been seamless — past popes have spoken out about American policy — but the alignment on human rights usually overcame any disagreements.

Which makes the latest row between President Donald Trump and Pope Leo XIV all the more extraordinary. The president has ferociously criticized the pope this week, saying the pontiff should stay out of politics. He accused Leo of “endangering a lot of Catholics” for his criticisms of the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, saying the pope would permit Iran to obtain nuclear weapons. Vice President JD Vance has also said the pope should “be careful” in opining on theology when critiquing U.S. foreign policy.

Leo denied that he or the church have ever promoted nuclear weapons and that “should anyone want to criticize me for proclaiming the Gospel, they should do so with the truth.”

The back and forth has led to the lowest point in U.S.-Vatican relations since the two states established formal diplomatic relations in 1984, Vatican officials told our colleague Anthony Faiola. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is Catholic, met with the pope in Vatican City today in what Rubio described as a preplanned meeting that wasn’t driven by the latest rift between the two leaders. But the tension is certain to loom in the background. Anthony and Stefano Pitrelli have more on Rubio’s visit here.

“It’s extraordinary,” Margaret Susan Thompson, a professor of history and political science at Syracuse University, told us of the administration’s rhetoric toward the pope. “To have [Vance] speak out and say, in effect, the pope should mind his own business, and the pope should learn Catholic doctrine, and other members of the administration saying things like, the pope should read the Bible — these are kind of odd statements.”

High Level of Antisemitic Incidents

Many posts have discussed antisemitism and the Israel-Hamas war. 

From the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) :

The year 2025 was the third-highest year on record for antisemitic incidents since the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) began tracking them in 1979.

Each year, the ADL tracks incidents of antisemitic harassment, vandalism and physical assault in the United States in our annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents. While incidents of harassment and vandalism decreased significantly in 2025 from record highs in 2023 and 2024, physical assaults this past year were higher than ever before. In 2025, there was an average of 17 incidents per day, compared to an average of eight incidents per day between 2020 and 2022.

More than two years after October 7, 2023, fundamentally transformed the landscape of antisemitism in America, the data make clear that while the fight against antisemitism and the work that ADL does has yielded measurable progress, the work of tracking, confronting and dismantling antisemitism demands our continued, unwavering vigilance. Rigorous, year-over-year tracking of antisemitic incidents is essential to understand the true size and scope of this threat, identify emerging trends, and measure which efforts are working and where more action is needed.

 

Debt Matters

Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt.

Neil Irwin at Axios reports on federal debt exceeding 100% of GDP.

Catch up quick: The Commerce Department last week reported $31.9 trillion annualized GDP in Q1. That surpasses the $31.4 trillion in debt held by the public on the last day of the quarter.The U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio briefly topped 100% during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when economic activity collapsed. But before that, it hadn't exceeded that ratio since the aftermath of World War II.

The ratio is on track to continue rising, with the Congressional Budget Office projecting it will reach 120% in 2036.

Zoom in: Consider a family with $100,000 in debt and an annual income of $100,000. Is their debt excessive? The answer, of course, is that it depends.If the family ran up that debt due to one-time expenses that won't recur and has a low interest rate, rising income and day-to-day spending in line with what they bring in, they're probably fine.

If, on the other hand, they ran up that debt to support routine living expenses in excess of their earnings and have a high interest rate and stagnant income, it would raise serious alarm bells.

Zoom out: The U.S. government is more like the latter family. The CBO projects federal revenue in the next few years will be 17% to 18% of GDP, while expenditures will be north of 23% of GDP.That gap, of around 6% of GDP, is higher than the CBO's GDP growth projection, which would imply an ever-rising debt-to-GDP ratio.

In those projections, the federal government's interest expenses soar to new heights as a share of the economy — surpassing $1.5 trillion and 4% of GDP in 2031.

That assumes interest rates remain broadly in their current zone, with a 10-year Treasury note yielding about 4.4% — and that bond investors prove willing to continue financing an ever-growing debt at those levels.
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The bottom line: The national debt hitting 100% of GDP isn't a worry in and of itself, and it isn't some magical threshold. What is worrying are the details of how it got there, and what comes next.