Two Cheers for Socialism

 A number of posts have discussed socialism.

 Lydia Saad at Gallup:

Forty-three percent of Americans now have a positive view of socialism, marking the first time this figure has exceeded 39% in Gallup’s trend since 2010. Socialism still trails capitalism and free enterprise in public favorability but now ranks ahead of big business. Small business remains the clear leader among the five economic concepts tested, with 95% viewing it positively.

Gallup has measured Americans’ overall views of these five economic concepts periodically since 2010, with the latest update conducted Aug. 3-24.

Over the longer term, Americans have become less positive about most of the market-oriented concepts Gallup tracks. Since 2010, positive views of big business have fallen by 14 percentage points, free enterprise by nine points and capitalism by six points. Small business is the exception, with views of it unchanged. Meanwhile, positive impressions of socialism have risen by seven points.

 

Ticking Debt Bomb

 Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt.

Zachary Basu at Axios:

Zoom in: President Trump said in 2016 that he could eliminate what was then roughly $19 trillion in national debt within eight years. On Tuesday, the debt crossed $40 trillion, after growing by $3 trillion in the past year alone.About $32 trillion is owed to investors and other outside holders. The rest is debt the government owes to its own accounts, including Social Security and other federal trust funds.

Treasury must refinance $9.7 trillion in debt coming due this fiscal year while covering a deficit the Congressional Budget Office now projects at roughly $2.1 trillion.

That creates a punishing cycle: Old debt comes due, Washington replaces it with more expensive debt, and the resulting interest bill feeds future deficits.CBO projects annual deficits will average $2.4 trillion through 2036, pushing debt held by the public to 120% of GDP — above the record set after World War II.
...

The big picture: America's debt burden is approaching the point where it starts reshaping household finances, presidential politics and the country's economic choices.Long-term Treasury yields have climbed to their highest levels since 2007, raising borrowing costs across the economy — from mortgages to business loans — and making Washington's own debt more expensive to refinance.

Social Security's retirement trust fund is projected to run dry in late 2032, during the final months of the next president's first term.

Medicare's hospital trust fund follows in the second quarter of 2033.

Between the lines: Trump and Elon Musk promised to break Washington's addiction to debt without forcing Americans to swallow painful sacrifices.Musk launched DOGE with ambitions of cutting as much as $2 trillion from federal spending. Its final public tally claimed just $215 billion in savings — barely a tenth of that goal.

A federal audit released this month found billions in unsupported or inaccurate savings claims, including $27.4 billion tied to contracts that were still active.

Boomers Cling to Wealth and Power

Many posts have discussed demographic trends, especially the decline of births and the aging of the population.

Bruce Mehlman:

The first of the Baby Boomer generation turns 80 this year, with the fourth and likely last of the Baby Boomer Presidents well-into his second term. Leadership will eventually pass to younger generations. But Boomers still hold much of the wealth and many of the offices, and they appear in no hurry to hand things over. A brief look at generational inheritance.

...

Decades of rising earnings and asset values left Baby Boomers and older Americans holding nearly two-thirds of assets. And the wealth has outlasted the traditional handoff: Americans are living and working longer, while judges, Senators, House members and CEOs are markedly older than they were a generation ago.

Older generations are also sticking around longer in government & business… the average age of judges, Senators, House members & CEOs climbed for four decades and remains at or near record highs.

Government Ownership of the Means of Production, Continued

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state..."-- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto

Jonathan Hillman at the Council on Foreign Relations:

Washington’s latest and boldest experiment in industrial policy is a renewed willingness to take equity stakes. Since January 2025, the U.S. government has announced investments worth $27.6 billion across thirty-seven deals involving direct ownership, broadening a toolkit that has traditionally focused on grants, loans, and tax incentives. The Department of Commerce leads the way with twenty four announced deals, including taking a 10 percent stake in Intel. The Development Finance Corporation, the United States’ development bank, has pledged six equity transactions in critical minerals, energy, and infrastructure. The Department of Defense has disclosed seven deals, and the Department of Energy has participated in two.

Return to this page for the Government Deal Tracker. 

Kit Pulliam at Moneywise:

The government owning equity in private companies is unusual, to say the least. And experts say that the way the Trump administration is approaching equity could be easy to abuse.

"The federal government has powers no private shareholder possesses," said Tad DeHaven, policy analyst at the Cato Institute, in an email to Moneywise. "A government that owns the players cannot be trusted to call the game fairly."

...

While it is unusual, the U.S. government holding equity in private companies has occurred before. But there's one big difference in past ownership deals compared to these new ones.

"It hasn't been normal for Washington to accumulate stakes in otherwise private companies as a routine economic policy tool," DeHaven said. He says that several administrations — including the Carter, Bush, and Obama administrations — have accumulated stakes in companies during emergencies, such as during the Great Recession or after 9/11.

"Whatever one thinks of those interventions, they were justified as emergency stabilization measures and generally intended to be unwound," DeHaven said. "The second Trump administration is doing something quite different."

Implementation and Public Groceries

Many posts have discussed public administration.

New York's Mayor Mamdani wants to set up public grocery stores.  As usual, good intentions crash into the reality of implementation.

California businessman Nick Kokonas at X:

I downloaded and reviewed NYC's grocery store RFP... as someone who has built biz's and bought a lot of food... wow.

Forget for a moment whether or not the govt should own a grocery store. Let's review the doc instead. Here you go... /1

NYC strongly prefers bidders who commit to all 5 stores. But 3 of the 5 sites haven’t been identified. Bidders are supposed to price unknown stores in unknown neighborhoods by assuming they’re “about 15,000 sq ft.” Absurd.

Bidders get preference for operating all 5 stores, presumably b/c scale lowers costs. But NYC awards each store separately, so an all-5 bidder may win only 1. They want scale pricing while refusing to award scale.

The stores must use a “limited SKU” model. They must also carry full grocery departments, household goods, culturally specific products, plus kosher, halal, vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free and diabetic options. Pick one.

The RFP says stores won’t have deli counters or on-site food prep. Then its Core Basket includes chicken salad, egg salad, potato salad, fruit salad and other deli-prepared foods. So, a deli w/o a deli. Oh... you're going to ship them in every day prepared. Gotcha...

NYC chooses and pays for the design, equipment, refrigeration and fitout. The operator pays utilities, maintenance, cleaning and security. So NYC makes the capital decisions while someone else pays for the consequences. That's how they control the goalposts.

The “best” bid promises 30% discounts, best-in-class wages/benefits, local sourcing, sustainability, community programs and full-time jobs. Then 20% of the score goes to whoever claims they need the least subsidy. Lowballing is the strategy.... and then cost overruns are guar.

Core Basket discounts must be universal “sticker prices,” not promotions. Then the operator must create a membership card to “implement the discount program.” Which is it? Universal shelf price or an ID card system -- btw, also says it's available to all people...

and it doesn't even properly target their goals b/c the subsidy isn’t targeted. No means test. Anyone can shop there. So taxpayers will subsidize groceries for affluent shoppers who happen to live nearby, while needy families elsewhere get zero.

I always *thought* that this was a terrible idea. They could much better help people with $$ and hey, there are already programs that they could expand. But after reading -- now I *know* it's a ridiculous idea. We have an efficient system... just change the outcomes.

so naturally one asks -- why would they *want* to build crappy grocery stores that have conflicting goals and will be mismanaged? Because either that's the goal... or else they have no idea how to actually craft an RFP or run a business.

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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Gallup and the Business of Polling

 Many posts have discussed the problems of surveying public opinion in the 21st century.

Natalie Jackson at National Journal explains why Gallup has stopped polling presidential approval after decades of doing so.  She writes that Gallup was still conducting such polls by telephone, including cellphones -- an expensive practice.

Unlike many public pollsters who use expensive, high-quality methodologies, Gallup is a for-profit company. This is not your grandparents’ Gallup—it has evolved into a global research consultancy. Its website advertises services for clients with nary a mention of U.S. politics.

It’s worth mentioning Gallup has a lot of federal contracts, which could factor into a business decision about presidential approval with a president who likes to sue pollsters. The benefits of publishing presidential approval numbers might still outweigh the risks if there were money to be made from doing it. Yet that isn’t the case in today’s political polling environment. From a business perspective, it is an expensive money drain.

Other pollsters using expensive methodologies—mostly colleges and universities, media, or nonprofits—are not dependent on turning a profit directly from their polling. They are trying to generate attention, clicks, ratings, or reputational perks, or simply provide a public service. Some private pollsters release data publicly so that they will be listed in aggregates to bolster their name recognition. Gallup doesn’t need to do that.

Presidential approval numbers, in particular, are worth less than they used to be. Every poll gets put into aggregates with dozens of other surveys and is forgotten about within a few hours. Every now and then, Gallup’s numbers get widespread attention as a new high or low, but we are decades past the time when the company was offering something in its approval ratings that couldn’t be found elsewhere—except for the decades’ worth of comparative data going back to the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration.

Gallup’s decision isn’t out of nowhere. The company has pulled back from public political polling over the last decade or so, including its decision in 2015 to no longer survey on the presidential election horse race after underestimating the strength of President Obama’s 2012 reelection win. Pew Research also discontinued releasing horse-race questions for the 2016 race, explicitly saying, “Putting resources toward an already saturated market doesn’t make much sense for us.”

Essentially, both Gallup and Pew made a calculation: Why take on the reputational risk of a miss when so many other polls are out there? By 2015, the prevailing logic had become to ignore individual polls and look at aggregates and forecasts anyway.

Government Ownership of the Means of Production

Friedrich Engels:  "The proletariat seizes the public power, and by means of this transforms the socialized means of production, slipping from the hands of the bourgeoisie, into public property."

On December 9, Tad DeHaven wrote at The Dispatch:

The first Trump administration ushered in a new era of industrial policy, attempting to reshape the macroeconomic landscape through the use of tariffs. The Biden administration built upon its predecessor’s interventions, championing massive subsidies for the semiconductor and green energy industries. In his second term, Trump has raised the tariff ante and taken an alarming step further by directly inserting the federal government into the corporate boardroom.

Over the past six months, the administration has unilaterally engineered a series of deals that give the federal government ownership stakes in a portfolio of private companies. It’s a seismic and disturbing development in federal policymaking—and it’s not done. Congressional Republicans, who would be foaming at the mouth were this occurring under a Democratic administration, have thus far chosen to sit on their hands.

Here’s a quick recap:

• June: Trump issues an executive order allowing Japan’s Nippon Steel to purchase U.S. Steel in exchange for a “golden share,” giving the president extensive control over U.S. Steel’s operations.
• July: The government becomes the largest shareholder in MP Materials, a company that produces rare earth metals.
• August: The administration announces that the government is taking a 10 percent equity stake in Intel, becoming the storied American semiconductor company’s largest single shareholder.
• September: An equity deal is reached with Lithium America, including a share of its joint venture with General Motors on the Thacker Pass lithium project in Nevada.
• October: The U.S. acquires stakes in Canadian-based Trilogy Metals, inserting the government into a joint venture with Australia’s South32 to develop the Ambler mining district in Alaska.
• October: A deal is reached with the Canadian owners of Westinghouse to finance nuclear reactors in exchange for the government receiving a share of future profits, with an option to require an initial public offering of Westinghouse and convert the profit share into a 20 percent ownership stake.
• November: The U.S. acquires stakes in rare-earth magnet manufacturer Vulcan Elements, alongside a complementary agreement with rare-earth processor ReElement Technologies that includes warrants giving the government the right to buy stock later.

Last week, the White House announced a preliminary agreement to acquire a stake in xLight, a startup developing technology to enhance extreme ultraviolet lithography ma

Trump administration officials have made it clear that more deals are forthcoming. Potential targets include defense contractors, quantum-computing companies, and, according to Reuters, “deals across up to 30 industries, involving dozens of companies deemed critical to national or economic security.”

The News About the News is Still Bad

Many posts have dealt with media problems such as ghost newspapers and news deserts.

Zach Metzger at Medill Northwestern:

Our first State of Local News report, published in 2016, examined the local news landscape across America over the previous 10 years, taking data from 2005 as its starting point. Now, in the project’s 10th year, we are able to look back through the past two decades and see dramatic transformations in the ecosystem of local news. Almost 40% of all local U.S. newspapers have vanished, leaving 50 million Americans with limited or no access to a reliable source of local news. This trend continues to impact the media industry and audiences nationwide. Newspapers are disappearing at the same rate as in 2024; more than 130 papers shut down in the past year alone. Newspaper employment is sliding steadily downward. And although there has been some growth in stand-alone and network digital sites, these startups remain heavily centralized in urban areas, and they have not been appearing fast enough to offset the losses elsewhere. As a result, news deserts – areas with extremely limited access to local news – continue to grow. In 2005, just over 150 counties lacked a source of local news; today, there are more than 210. Meanwhile, the journalism industry faces new and intensified challenges including: shrinking circulation and steep losses of revenue from changes to search and the adoption of AI technologies, while political attacks against public broadcasters threaten to leave large swaths of rural America without local news.

 From the press release:

Key findings from the Medill study: 

• The number of news desert counties rose to 213 in 2025, a jump from 206 in last year’s report. In another 1,524 counties, there’s only one remaining news source. Taken together, some 50 million Americans have limited to no access to local news. Twenty years ago, there were about 150 news desert counties, with about 37 million Americans at the time living in news deserts.

• The rise in news deserts was accompanied by an increase in newspaper closures, which ticked up to 136 this past year, a rate of more than two per week. Medill tracked 130 in last year’s report.

• In a marked departure, most of this year’s closures came at smaller, independently owned newspapers — not those controlled by large chains — signaling that an increasing number of long-time family publishers are surrendering to economic pressures.

• Total jobs at newspapers slumped 7% in the past year. The industry has now lost more than three-quarters of its jobs since 2005.

• More than 200 newspapers changed hands in the past year, down from the number of transactions last year but still a torrid pace by historical standards.

• Nearly 300 public radio stations and more than 100 public television stations are producing local reporting. In nine counties, public radio is the sole news source, making those areas especially vulnerable to becoming news deserts in coming months.

• Utilizing predictive modeling created by the school’s Spiegel Research Center, the Medill team found 250 counties at high risk of becoming news deserts over the next decade.

• Web traffic to 100 of the largest newspapers has plummeted more than 45% in the past four years, according to a Medill analysis of data tracked by the media analytics company Comscore.

• The report counted more than 300 local news startups in the past five years across virtually every state, demonstrating a surge of entrepreneurship that has come along with a wave of philanthropic support. The vast majority of those startups, however, are in metro areas, leaving rural and less affluent areas further behind.

• The number of local news sites that are part of larger national networks is continuing to multiply. This year, there are 849 sites across 54 separate networks, up 14% from the 742 individual sites across 23 networks. This growth illustrates the increasingly prominent role of digital network sites on the local news landscape.

Colbert: Good Night, and Good Luck

Politicians have various ways of exerting pressure on the mass media.

Brian Stelter and Dan Heching, CNN:

In a shocking move, CBS is ending “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” next year, and apparently exiting the late-night television business altogether.

The network, citing financial pressures, said the cancellation will take effect in May 2026, the normal end of the broadcast TV season.

The decision is particularly surprising because “The Late Show” is typically the highest-rated show in late-night. And the timing is bound to raise questions because it comes just two weeks after the parent company of CBS, Paramount, settled a lawsuit lodged by President Trump against CBS News.

The settlement – and Paramount’s pending merger with Skydance Media – spurred speculation about Colbert’s future at CBS. Colbert, after all, is one of the staunchest critics of Trump on television.

Colbert alluded to the online worrying about his fate when he returned from vacation on Monday night. He condemned the Paramount settlement on air, likening it to a “big fat bribe,” and he joked that his new mustache would protect him from the corporation: “Okay, okay, but how are they going to put pressure on Stephen Colbert… if they can’t find him?”

 

Press Freedom: W and L

Michael M. Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullin at NYT:

CBS News entered a new period of turmoil on Tuesday after the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” Bill Owens, said he would resign from the long-running Sunday news program, citing encroachments on his journalistic independence.

In an extraordinary declaration, Mr. Owens — only the third person to run the program in its 57-year history — told his staff in a memo that “over the past months, it has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was right for ‘60 Minutes,’ right for the audience.”

“So, having defended this show — and what we stand for — from every angle, over time with everything I could, I am stepping aside so the show can move forward,” he wrote in the memo, which was obtained by The New York Times.

“60 Minutes” has faced mounting pressure in recent months from both President Trump, who sued CBS for $10 billion and has accused the program of “unlawful and illegal behavior,” and its own corporate ownership at Paramount, the parent company of CBS

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Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, is eager to secure the Trump administration’s approval for a multibillion-dollar sale of her company to Skydance, a company run by the son of the tech billionaire Larry Ellison. She has expressed a desire to settle Mr. Trump’s case, which stems from what the president has called a deceptively edited interview in October with Vice President Kamala Harris that aired on “60 Minutes.”

Katie Robertson and David Enrich at NYT:

A federal jury on Tuesday ruled against Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and Republican vice-presidential nominee, in her yearslong defamation lawsuit against The New York Times. The jury reached the verdict after two hours of deliberations.

Ms. Palin sued The Times in 2017 after the newspaper published — and then swiftly corrected and apologized for — an editorial that wrongly suggested she had incited a deadly shooting in Arizona years earlier.

The case became a bellwether for battles over press freedoms and media bias in the Trump era, with Ms. Palin’s lawyers saying they hoped to use it to attack a decades-old Supreme Court precedent that makes it harder for public figures to sue news outlets for defamation.

This is the second time a federal jury has concluded that The Times was not liable for defaming Ms. Palin in its editorial. The case first went to trial in 2022, and both the jury and the judge ruled in favor of The Times. But last year, a federal appeals court invalidated those decisions, setting the stage for this month’s retrial.

State Push Against Incumbent Administration

Many posts have discussed federalism.

 Bruce Mehlman:

States Increasingly Battle Washington, Further Squeezing Business. Regardless of whether activist pressure returns, #resistance will come from blue states. U.S. states are increasingly all red or all blue… 38 of 50 have complete one party control in 2025. Ambitious governors and attorney generals fight Washington whenever their party does not hold the White House via competing policy initiatives or lawsuits, often pressuring businesses to “take a side” and/or develop different products / services for red America vs blue America.

 

Magazines

Traditional magazines focusing on news and politics have crashed.  Of the top 100 American magazines by circulation, the biggest in this category is Time -- in 26th place.

 Mattie Kahn at NYT:

The media business might be in free fall, but in Issaquah, Wash., the merriest band of magazine makers in America drives to Costco headquarters and sets about producing a monthly print periodical that is delivered to more households across the United States than Better Homes & Gardens, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic combined.

And it’s growing. Each month, 15.4 million copies of Costco Connection are mailed out to “executive” members, who pay double the yearly membership fee of $65 for the magazine and other perks. (Another 300,000 are distributed via Costco warehouses.) Its reach is so vast that Costco Connection is now the nation’s third largest magazine by print circulation, behind AARP: The Magazine and The AARP Bulletin.

Civic Illiteracy

From the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation:

A comprehensive new study from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation reveals an alarming truth just three years shy of America’s 250th anniversary—the nation’s civic knowledge is badly lagging. The national survey, which examined responses from 2,000 registered voters, also shows that while Americans lack basic understanding of government, trust in business remains strong.

The survey finds more than 70% of Americans fail a basic civic literacy quiz on topics like the three branches of government, the number of Supreme Court justices, and other basic functions of our democracy. Just half were able to correctly name the branch of government where bills become laws. 

While two thirds of Americans say they studied civics in high school, just 25% say they are “very confident” they could explain how our system of government works. 

“As we approach our semiquincentennial in 2026, this report amounts to a five-alarm fire drill for the civic health of the nation,” said Hilary Crow, head of the U.S. Chamber Foundation’s The Civic Trust®. “While Americans across backgrounds value civic participation in theory, we are sorely lacking in the basic knowledge that translates values into informed, engaged citizenship.”

 Among the major red flags: 

• Only 46% of respondents believe the U.S. is performing well on the vital need to understand our system of government—a gap of 49 percentage points from the 95% who call it important for the nation's success. 
• One in three did not know there are three branches of government. 
• More than half did not know the number of members in the House of Representatives. 

“Put plainly, you can't fix what you don't understand,” Crow said. “Without reversing these deficiencies in understanding how our government works, we are risking the long-term health of our civic culture and democracy itself. That’s why we’re so committed to the National Civics Bee® and other civics literacy programs." 

Workplaces seen as rare spaces of unity and civility

The study also highlights deep wells of unity around core civic values, and an openness to businesses playing a role in supporting citizenship.

More than 75% of adults in the U.S. view political division in the country and government as a major problem. Yet just 19% see significant political tensions at their jobs.  

Nearly half of respondents said workplaces should take the primary role in defusing divide, over government bodies. 

“As the bonds holding our civic culture together fray, places of work stand out as sanctuaries where Americans still connect across differences,” Crow said. “The data speak clearly – people welcome employers’ help in ensuring politics don't infect these essential spaces.” 

Specifically, the survey reveals: 

• More than 80% of respondents hold positive views of large and small businesses alike.
• 82% agree businesses can play an “important role” in bringing people together. 
• 93% would react positively if companies publicly tried “improving our country.” 

As trusted institutions, there’s an opportunity for business leaders to drive significant impact in elevating civics as a national priority – for the current workforce and for the next generation. Only 38% of Americans believe children today are prepared to fulfill their roles as informed, active citizens. Business leaders must partner with educators in steering a new generation toward constructive civic participation. 

“With our social fabric strained, the business community is being called upon to be a thread that can knit us back together,” Crow concluded.

AI Fellows on the Hill

Many posts have discussed the political uses of philanthropy. 

Brendan Bordelon at Politico:

Top tech companies with major stakes in artificial intelligence are channeling money through a venerable science nonprofit to help fund fellows working on AI policy in key Senate offices, adding to the roster of government staffers across Washington whose salaries are being paid by tech billionaires and others with direct interests in AI regulation.

The new “rapid response cohort” of congressional AI fellows is run by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Washington-based nonprofit, with substantial support from Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, IBM and Nvidia, according to the AAAS. It comes on top of the network of AI fellows funded by Open Philanthropy, a group financed by billionaire Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.

The six rapid response fellows, including five with PhDs and two who held prior positions at big tech firms, operate from the offices of two of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s top three lieutenants on AI legislation — Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) — as well as the Senate Banking Committee and the offices of Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.).

Alongside the Open Philanthropy fellows — and hundreds of outside-funded fellows throughout the government, including many with links to the tech industry — the six AI staffers in the industry-funded rapid response cohort are helping shape how key players in Congress approach the debate over when and how to regulate AI, at a time when many Americans are deeply skeptical of the industry.

The apparent conflict of tech-funded figures working inside the Capitol Hill offices at the forefront of AI policy worries some tech experts, who fear Congress could be distracted from rules that would protect the public from biased, discriminatory or inaccurate AI systems.

DEI Backlash

Many posts have dealt with racial issues.

 Emily Peck at Axios:

U.S. companies' diversity, equity and inclusion efforts are losing momentum this year after the Supreme Court's June affirmative action ruling, per a consulting firm's new report.

Why it matters: The slowdown is a reversal from the explosion in corporate DEI after George Floyd's killing pushed companies to act to address racial inequality."

• 2023 has undeniably shifted the DEI landscape for years to come," write the authors of a report out Monday from DEI consulting firm Paradigm.
• "External forces are no longer pushing companies to invest in DEI; instead, in some cases, external forces are pushing back on companies' investment in DEI."

...

Meanwhile: In a letter this summer, 13 Republican state attorneys general urged Fortune 100 companies to take another look at their DEI programs in the wake of the court's decision.The letter takes aim at "explicit racial quotas in hiring, recruiting retention, promotion and advancement."

Between the lines: The lawsuits and letters "will have significant downstream consequences for DEI for years to come," per the Paradigm report.