Christopher Nolan's adaptation of "The Odyssey" is now in theaters, and millions of Americans are watching a story that is roughly 2,700 years old in its poetic form and perhaps 3,200 years old in its historical core. Most of them will assume they are watching pure fantasy. Gods, monsters, a decade of wandering, a wooden horse. Surely none of it happened. That assumption is understandable, and it is wrong in the way that matters most. Behind the myth stands a real city, a real war, and one of the most astonishing feats of memory in human history. Understanding how the Greeks preserved that memory across five centuries without writing a single narrative history should change how we think about our own inherited stories, including the American founding, and about the people who make careers out of tearing such stories down.

The City the Skeptics Said Never Existed

Begin with the fact the skeptics got wrong. For generations, sophisticated opinion held that Troy was a fable, a city as imaginary as Atlantis. Then Frank Calvert pointed Heinrich Schliemann at a mound in northwestern Turkey called Hisarlık, and in 1870 the digging began. Schliemann was a romantic and a vandal. He cut a brutal trench through the mound and identified the wrong layer as Priam's city, missing the mark by roughly a millennium. But the central traditional claim survived every correction. There really was a wealthy, fortified Bronze Age city exactly where the tradition placed it, 4.8 kilometers from the southern entrance to the Dardanelles, overlooking the Trojan plain. Later excavation revealed 23 wall sections, 11 gates, and five bastions, plus a lower town of roughly 30 hectares ringed by a defensive ditch traced for 930 meters. The layer known as Troy VIIa burned violently around 1180 BCE, its destruction environment littered with spearpoints, arrowheads, and a cache of 157 sling stones. This was not a literary phantom. It was a strategic city at a chokepoint, and it died by fire at precisely the moment the Greek tradition remembers a catastrophic sack.

The Hittites Recorded a Conflict Over Troy

The documentary evidence is even more remarkable. The Hittite empire, the Anatolian superpower of the Late Bronze Age, kept diplomatic archives at its capital, and 26 surviving tablets refer to a western power called Ahhiyawa, which most specialists identify with the Mycenaean Greek world. The same archives know a city called Wilusa, which corresponds to the Greek Wilios, or Ilios, the very name Homer uses for Troy. Around 1300 BCE a Hittite king signed a treaty with a ruler of Wilusa named Alaksandu. Homer's Paris carries the alternate name Alexandros. A ruler bearing essentially the right name governed the right city in the right era. Another Hittite letter, addressed to the king of Ahhiyawa, recalls "the matter of Wilusa concerning which he and I were hostile to one another." Read that sentence slowly. It is a Bronze Age diplomatic archive remembering a great power dispute over Troy, written by neither Greeks nor poets. The Cambridge Guide to Homer counts at least 4 wars fought in Troy's vicinity between the 15th and 12th centuries BCE. The tradition did not invent a war. If anything, it compressed several.

How a War Survived Centuries Without Writing

So the city was real and the conflict cycle was real. Now comes the deeper mystery, the one worth an op-ed rather than a trivia answer. "The Iliad" and "Odyssey" reached their recognizable form in the late 8th century BCE. Troy VIIa fell around 1180 BCE. That is a gap of four to five centuries during which the Greeks had no historians, no chronicles, and for most of the period no writing at all. The Mycenaean palaces had used a script called Linear B, but when Michael Ventris deciphered it in 1952 and found it to be, in his words, a difficult and archaic Greek, but Greek nevertheless, the tablets turned out to contain no stories. They were inventories, tax records, lists of livestock and personnel, the paperwork of palace bureaucrats. Roughly 1,000 tablets from Pylos, written by at least 30 scribes, survive only because the fire that destroyed the palace baked the clay. When the palaces burned, literacy itself vanished from Greece for centuries. How, then, did the memory of the war survive?

Homer’s Formulas Were a Living Archive

The answer came from an American scholar named Milman Parry, and it is one of the great intellectual discoveries of the 20th century. Parry noticed that Homer's poetry is built from an enormous interlocking system of repeated phrases. Swift-footed Achilles. The wine-dark sea. Hector of the shining helm. These formulas are not lazy clichés. They are a compositional technology, a system so vast and so efficient that no single poet could have invented it. Parry concluded that the technique could only have been created and used by oral poets, generations of trained singers who learned an inherited repertoire of phrases, scenes, and story patterns, and who recomposed the tradition in every performance. He and Albert Lord then proved the mechanism by recording living oral poets in the Balkans doing exactly this, composing epics thousands of lines long without writing a word. The formulas function as a living archive. Once a name, a title, or an object is embedded in a metrically useful phrase, singers transmit it faithfully long after they have forgotten what it originally meant.

Fossils of the Bronze Age Inside the Poems

The proof sits in the poems themselves like fossils in limestone. In Book 10 of the Iliad, Homer describes a helmet plated with rows of boar's tusks. No such helmet existed in Homer's own century. It is a distinctively Mycenaean object, known from excavations and from a British Museum seal dated to roughly 1600 to 1400 BCE, obsolete for half a millennium before the Iliad was composed. Homer had never seen one. The tradition remembered it for him. The same is true of political vocabulary. Homer calls Agamemnon anax andrōn, lord of men, and the Linear B tablets reveal that wanax was the authentic Mycenaean title for a paramount king, a word already archaic in Homer's day. The poets preserved the org chart of a dead civilization. They preserved place names that match the palace sites archaeology later uncovered. Thucydides, the founder of realist history, took the tradition seriously enough to argue that Agamemnon assembled his coalition not because of romantic oaths but because he surpassed his contemporaries in power and naval strength, an analysis that fits the palatial world of the tablets almost perfectly.

Poetry Wrapped Around a Historical Core

None of this means Homer is a stenographer. Athena did not walk the battlefield, and no one can verify the carpentry of a giant horse. The epics are cultural fossils, poetry wrapped around a genuine core. The tradition fused separate campaigns and generations into a single 10-year war, gave the conflict a memorable grievance in Helen, and converted a violent breach of the city's defenses into the unforgettable image of the horse. But the skeleton is historical. The city, the location, the fortifications, the Mycenaean contact, the repeated wars, the names, the titles, the equipment, the fire around 1180 BCE. Independent lines of evidence converge, and convergence is how history is actually established.

What Troy Teaches America About Memory

Here is where the ancient story becomes an American argument. Every healthy civilization runs on inherited memory. The Greeks had no archives after the collapse, so they entrusted their history to singers, and the singers kept faith across 500 years. We have every archive imaginable, libraries, film, the papers of the founders preserved down to the grocery lists, and yet we are governed by an academic and media class that treats our founding stories primarily as material for debunking. The fashionable posture is that Washington was merely a slaveholder, that 1776 was a false front for 1619, that the Constitution was a property scheme, that patriotic memory is propaganda for the credulous. This posture presents itself as sophistication. It is actually the same error the Troy skeptics made, the assumption that because a tradition contains idealization it must contain no truth, and it does to the republic what centuries of sneering did to Homer, it teaches a people to discard the inheritence that binds them together.

Tradition Should Be Tested, Not Burned

The Troy story offers the correct model. Tradition should be tested, not worshipped and not burned. Schliemann's chronology was wrong, and archaeology corrected him without discrediting the tradition that sent him to the right hill. Likewise, honest scholarship has deepened our picture of the founding, including its contradictions, without any need to poison the well. The founders themselves would have understood the distinction, they were raised on Homer and Plutarch, they knew that a nation's stories are its operating system, and they deliberately built a story worth transmitting. A shared pride in 1776 is not a lie agreed upon. It is the American equivalent of the singer's formula, the mechanism by which a free people remembers what it is and why it is worth defending. Strip that away and you do not get a more truthful citzenry. You get an amnesiac one, and amnesiac nations do not remain nations long.

Civilizations Are Mortal. Memory Is Their Immortality.

Homer knew this better than anyone, because his poems are not victory songs. Troy fell around 1180 BCE, and within a generation or two the victors' own palaces burned, the Hittite empire dissolved, and the entire Late Bronze Age order collapsed. Agamemnon came home to a knife. Odysseus came home alone. The singers who preserved the war knew that the civilization which won it had not survived it, which is why the epics read as elegies rather than triumphs. That is the final lesson Nolan's audiences should carry out of the theater. Civilizations are mortal, memory is the only immortality they get, and the people who tend the memory, the singers then and the honest historians and patriotic citizens now, are not sentimentalists. They are the archive. The Greeks kept faith with a real war for 500 years through nothing but trained human voices. Americans, with every advantage of documentation, owe our own founding at least the same fidelity.

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The Yale-led preprint turns disputed assumptions about drugs, hospitals, administration, and fraud into a blockbuster projection.

Imagine a man who tells you his renovation will cost $40,000. You ask how he knows. He explains that he assumed the lumber would be half price, the electrician would work at the rate his brother-in-law once charged, the permits would be waived, and the old wiring would pass inspection. He then added the figures and came up with $40,000. The arithmetic is correct. Nobody has learned what the renovation will cost.

Last month, five researchers led by Alison Galvani of Yale posted a preprint to medRxiv titled Projected economic gains and lives saved under universal healthcare in the United States.

It reports that adopting a single-payer system would save the country $1.041 trillion a year and prevent 114,174 deaths. Those numbers have already begun their journey through the press, as large round figures tend to do.

Five Assumptions Produce a Trillion Dollar Headline

The paper's own authors call their method a "stepwise accounting framework," which is an honest description of a procedure that adds assumed reductions to a national spending total and reports the remainder. The work is a static, one-year spreadsheet, and the largest inputs to that spreadsheet are precisely the questions in dispute. They begin with $5.2786 trillion in 2024 national health expenditures, then subtract $377.5 billion for lower drug prices, $295.6 billion for paying every provider at Medicare rates, $286.3 billion for reduced administration, $285.7 billion for reduced fraudulent billing, and $100 billion for emergency and inpatient care they presume would become unnecessary. Those five deductions alone total $1.345 trillion. After adding back some utilization and dental spending, the headline appears. Five policy hopes have been entered as line items, and their sum has been announced as a projection.

An Increase in Spending Becomes a Fraud Dividend

The $285.7 billion attributed to reduced fraud rests on a 2003 Health Affairs study of Taiwan's transition to national health insurance. That study did not find an 8% reduction in fraud. It found the opposite direction entirely. Its authors calculated a residual rate of spending growth after adjusting for population, aging, prices, and income, and that residual jumped to nearly 8% in 1995, the year universal coverage began, which they attributed to the expansion of insurance itself. They were looking at leftover growth once the ordinary drivers had been stripped away. They then wrote plainly that the residual mixed insurance effects, cost controls, technology, production efficiency, and unknown factors were present, and that they could not isolate the individual components. A number describing an unexplained increase in spending has been relabeled as a recoverable fraud dividend and applied to the American system. That single move accounts for 27.4% of the entire headline.

Drug Savings Double What the Source Reports

The pharmaceutical cut fails by scope. The preprint applies a 51% price reduction across a consolidated category that includes drugs administered as part of other medical services. The study it cites, produced by several of the same authors, estimates $184 billion in total national savings from international reference pricing on outpatient prescription drugs, and its 51% figure applies specifically to private insurers. The corresponding reductions for Medicare, Medicaid, and out-of-pocket spending are different numbers. Taking the private-insurer rate, applying it to a broader base, and arriving at $377.5 billion produces a result roughly 2.05 times what the authors' own source reports. Correct that single entry and the $1.041 trillion falls to $847.7 billion before anything else is touched.

A Rebuttal Is Cited as Support

Overhead, in this model, compresses across the entire system to Medicare's current ratio, a $286.3 billion deduction, and the citation is Avik Roy's fiscal analysis at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity. Anyone who reads that analysis will find it arguing the reverse. Roy calls the standard Medicare-versus-private overhead comparison "highly flawed," notes that Medicare's low ratio partly reflects the enormous denominator created by an elderly population's spending, and explains that administration performs necessary work including claims review, care management, and fraud prevention. He quotes Urban Institute researchers who conclude that 3% of administrative spending would be insufficient for a national program. The preprint has cited a rebuttal as though it were an endorsement.

You Cannot Fire the Auditors and Collect the Audits

The same model assumes that administrative spending collapses and that fraud recovery simultaneously reaches $285.7 billion. Auditing claims, investigating anomalous billing, conducting medical-necessity reviews, pursuing recoveries, and defending appeals are administrative activities. You cannot fire the auditors and collect the audits. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services further warns that improper payment measurement "is not a measure of fraud," and reported that 77.17% of Medicaid improper payments in fiscal year 2025 involved insufficient documentation rather than anything indicative of fraud or abuse. The Government Accountability Office reported this year that CMS still lacks detailed corrective action plans, carries a backlog of risk adjustment audits, and has not completed a comprehensive fraud risk assessment. Detection is not recovery, and paperwork errors are not crimes.

The Emergency Room Assumption Failed a Randomized Test

The $100 billion taken for avoidable hospital use is a hope entered as a fact. Timely primary care, on this theory, makes emergency and inpatient visits unnecessary, and the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment tested that hope under close to ideal conditions. Oregon allocated Medicaid slots by lottery in 2008, thereby creating a genuine randomized comparison among roughly 25,000 people. Coverage was not handed to the already healthy or withheld from the already sick because a lottery determined the assignments. Coverage raised emergency department use by 0.41 visits per person, or 40%, including visits for conditions ordinarily treatable in a primary care office. Lowering the price of care tends to increase use of all care. Whatever one concludes from Oregon, no one is entitled to enter the favorable outcome on the ledger as though it had already occurred.

Medicare Rates Cannot Make Provider Responses Disappear

Medicare rates for every hospital and physician are treated as $295.6 billion in national savings, and provider responses are explicitly excluded from the model. The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission found that hospitals' fee-for-service Medicare margin was roughly negative 13% in fiscal 2023, that a quarter of hospitals already ran all-payer operating margins below negative 4%, and that even hospitals it judged relatively efficient posted a median Medicare margin of negative 2%. Those figures describe hospitals that are already losing money at the public rate. Some lose money on every payer at once, and even the efficient ones remain underwater on Medicare. The Congressional Budget Office, when it modeled single-payer options seriously, did not assume universal acceptance of Medicare rates. It used hospital payments at 123% or 142% of Medicare and physician payments at 111% or 120%. A model may make closures, service line cuts, and workforce departures vanish by assumption. Patients in rural counties cannot.

The Mortality Estimate Rests on an Invented Category

Of the 114,174 deaths, 29,631 are attributed to underinsurance, and the paper concedes in its own text that direct mortality estimates for the underinsured are not available. The authors therefore construct a hazard ratio of 1.25 by interpolating from survey data on cost-related forgone care, and they report the resulting death count to the nearest individual. Underinsurance, as the Commonwealth Fund defines it, is a financial classification triggered by out-of-pocket costs or deductibles crossing a share of household income. It is not a validated mortality stratum. Skipping a dental cleaning does not carry the same risk as skipping a cardiac medication, yet both can push a household across the same income threshold and into the same interpolated death count. Another 51,311 deaths come from a seperate forecast about 2025 policy changes, and of those, 31,200 concern prescription drug assistance and nursing home staffing rules rather than anyone losing insurance at all. The assumed multiplier plus the separate forecast make up 70.9% of the headline.

The remaining 33,232 deaths rest on a hazard ratio of 1.40, taken from a 2009 study of adults surveyed between 1986 and 1994, with a confidence interval of 1.06 to 1.84 that the preprint does not carry into its final number. A 2025 review in the Annual Review of Public Health does find credible causal evidence that gaining coverage reduces mortality. That same review deliberately excluded studies of exactly the design the preprint leans on, baseline cohort comparisons of insured and uninsured people, on the grounds that they cannot rule out selection on unobserved health. The best evidence for coverage does not license this particular arithmetic.

The Model Does Not Model the Bill

The paper does not model the bill it invokes. The Medicare for All Act of 2025 pays hospitals and skilled nursing facilities through negotiated quarterly global budgets rather than Medicare service rates. It eliminates nearly all patient cost sharing, which would raise demand among the privately insured and existing Medicare beneficiaries, populations CBO estimates would increase utilization by 8% to 14% and 4% to 12%, respectively, and which the preprint's utilization line simply omits. It requires at least 1% of the national health budget for up to five years to assist displaced administrative workers, roughly $42.4 billion annually at the paper's own spending level, which the model carries at zero, and it includes vision and hearing benefits the authors leave out while asserting the cost would be modest. The deepest confusion of all is the treatment of national health expenditures as though they were the federal budget, when CBO found that federal subsidies would rise by $1.5 trillion to $3 trillion in 2030 under every option it examined, so the preprint's closing claim that the plan "requires no new discovery to implement, only enactment" arrives with no tax schedule, no state maintenance-of-effort analysis, and no transition budget attached.

Advocacy Wearing a Lab Coat

Galvani served as an informal unpaid adviser to Bernie Sanders's Senate office while it drafted Medicare for All legislation, a fact disclosed in her team's 2020 Lancet paper, and in July 2025 she testified before the Senate HELP Committee in favor of the Sanders proposal while citing her own group's savings and mortality estimates. The research team is composed largely of infectious disease modelers, with no hospital finance specialist, health actuary, program integrity investigator, or tax economist among them. That composition explains why the model is fluent in attributable fractions and silent on hospital margins, payment architecture, and federal finance. What it produces is engaged advocacy research, published without peer review, in support of a bill its lead author helped shape and has publically championed.

Remove Four Assumptions, and 84% of the Savings Vanish

Strip the four most contestable deductions, and roughly 84% of the savings evaporate. The paper shows what its authors believe single payer could accomplish if a series of favorable assumptions all held at once, which the citations already on the page give reason to doubt. At the end of the day, the paper is advocacy posing as academic research.

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Personnel power has two halves. One half is the power to remove an officer who will not carry out the president's program. The other half is the power to install an officer who will. On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court settled the first half for good. In Trump v. Slaughter, by a vote of 6 to 3, the Court struck down the FTC's for-cause removal protections, overruled the 91-year-old Humphrey's Executor precedent, and confirmed that the president may fire any officer who wields executive power, for any reason or none. The second half is where the fight now moves. In 2024 I published an op-ed titled "The FVRA Playbook: Trump's Legal Path to Installing Gaetz and Hegseth Over Senate Objections." This piece is an update to that one, because the law has since shifted beneath it in the president's favor. What follows is the argument for the sequel: aggressive, lawful use of the FVRA and the recess appointment power to complete what the Court began.

Start with what Slaughter actually held. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, was blunt about the 1935 precedent he was burying. "Humphrey's framework, in short, has not withstood the test of time," he wrote, and then, in the line that ends the era, "If anything more is left of Humphrey's, we overrule it." The operative principle is simple: subordinates who exercise the president's power are subject to removal by him. Roberts noted that the modern FTC enforces some 80 statutes touching nearly every corner of the economy, which demolishes the old fiction that the agency was merely quasi-judicial. The Court carved out the Federal Reserve in the companion case, Trump v. Cook. Everything else within the president's general administrative control, roughly two dozen multi-member agencies Congress had designed to be independent, is now his to command.

Do not take my word for the scale of the ruling. Take the dissent's. Justice Sotomayor wrote that the decision "reshapes our Government" and shifts "tremendous power over broad swaths of American life into the president's hands." Strip away the alarm and what remains is a factual description of the mandate the president now holds. Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley Law and the left's most cited constitutional scholar, conceded that "agency independence is now gone." When Chemerinsky says the war is over, the war is over. Justice Gorsuch, concurring, stated the sequel thesis in a single sentence: "The fourth branch's powers still exist; they have just been reassigned to the president."

That last line identifies the problem. Reassigned power is not the same as exercised power. Power needs hands, and hands means personnel. Ilya Shapiro of the Manhattan Institute put the underlying theory well: the buck should stop with the president, not with boards of unaccountable bureaucrats, and if the people dislike how an agency enforces the law, they should be able to blame and replace the man they elected. This is not a Federalist Society invention. It is Hamilton's design. "Energy in the executive is the leading character in the definition of good government," he wrote in "Federalist No. 70," and an executive starved of officers has no energy.

Now the second half comes into view. The Senate has weaponized the confirmation process to deny the president the officers the Constitution now says answer to him alone. The numbers come from the Brookings Institution, which is no friend of this administration. Trump sent 450 nominations to the Senate in the first 300 days of his second term, yet his nominees have faced the longest average confirmation delay of any president since Reagan, 145 days. That is more than 5.5 times the 26-day average under Reagan and more than double the 68-day average of Trump's own first term. In the first 200 days, only seven nominees were confirmed without cloture being invoked, and every single nominee required a final recorded vote, an all-time high per Brookings scholar Chris Piper. This is not vetting. It is a filibuster of the executive branch itself.

The backlog compounds the delay. By mid-2025 the Senate faced a queue of 161 nominees, most of them lower-level positions that past Senates cleared by voice vote or unanimous consent. Of the more than 800 key roles tracked by the Partnership for Public Service, more than 270 have no nominee and about 100 have a nominee awaiting a vote, and across the last four administrations fewer than 50% of Senate-confirmed positions in major agencies were filled within the president's first year. The Partnership's own verdict: the system is badly broken and worsening with each president.

One arithmetic collision captures the absurdity. Brookings projects that if delays follow the historical pattern, the average confirmation delay will reach 237 days by the two-year mark. The FVRA's basic window for acting service is 210 days. Read those numbers together: the Senate now takes longer to confirm an officer than the law allows an acting officer to serve. Even Brookings concedes the perverse incentive this creates. Why wait nearly 5 months on average when the law lets you seat someone today?

Which brings us to the tools, and it matters that neither of them is novel. The FVRA is not a loophole. It is Congress' own statute, passed in 1998, for keeping the government running when confirmation stalls. Per the Congressional Research Service, three classes of people may serve as acting officers: the first assistant to the vacant office by default, or, at the President's direction, a senior official of the agency or any Senate-confirmed official from anywhere in the government. The clock math favors a White House that plans. The 210-day window tolls while a first or second nomination is pending, and a rejected or withdrawn nomination starts a fresh clock. The Senate Republican Policy Committee's own explainer confirms that an acting official can serve well over a year if a nomination is pending. That timeline is not a creative legal theory; it is the Republican conference's own policy shop talking.

The courts have already blessed the core move. When CFPB Director Richard Cordray resigned in 2017 and tried to install his own deputy as acting director, President Trump named Mick Mulvaney under the FVRA instead. The deputy sued and, in English v. Trump, the federal district court in DC held that the President could choose the FVRA route over the agency-specific statute. The Office of Legal Counsel agreed. That case is the strategy's proof of concept.

The first term also taught the crucial lesson, through failure. The administration installed Ken Cuccinelli atop USCIS by creating a new "principal deputy" position after the vacancy arose, and Judge Randolph Moss ruled the appointment illegal because a first assistant must already be in the first-assistant office when the vacancy occurs. A judge reached the same conclusion in 2025 regarding Alina Habba's U.S. Attorney appointment. The lesson is not that the FVRA fails. The lesson is that sequencing wins: install the deputy first, create the vacancy second. Post-Slaughter, the president can lawfully create the vacancy at any moment of his choosing, by at-will removal. The Court did not merely remove a constitutional obstacle; it repaired the single procedural weakness in the first-term playbook. Cuccinelli was the beta test. Slaughter shipped the product.

Will an acting government actually function? We ran that experiment. Stanford law professor Anne Joseph O'Connell documented 30 acting secretaries in Trump's first term, with acting officials serving a combined 2,736 days across 22 Cabinet-level jobs, more than 7 years. The government did not collapse. The president himself said in 2019 that he liked "acting" because it gave him flexibility, and the precedent has now been established, tested, and survived, so the panic that will greet the sequel is a panic about something that already occured without incident.

The second tool is older than the FVRA by two centuries. A recess appointee serves until the end of the next Senate session, roughly a year or more. Consider who has used it boldly. In December 1903, Theodore Roosevelt treated the split-second between two Senate sessions as a recess and installed more than 160 officers, including one the Senate had been blocking, and the appointments stood. Dwight Eisenhower placed Earl Warren on the Supreme Court by recess appointment in 1953, and Warren presided as Chief Justice, deciding cases, for 5 months before the Senate confirmed him. Ike did it again with Brennan in 1956 and Stewart in 1958. If recess appointments were legitimate for three lifetime seats on the highest court in the land, a 12-month stint running an executive agency will survive the fainting couch.

The obstacle to recess appointments is not the Democrats, it is us, the pro forma sessions that keep the Senate technically open are gaveled in by a Republican senator acting on Majority Leader Thune's orders. Thune has admitted that an extended recess to allow appointments is "on the table," and he can afford only 3 defections from his conference. Senator Roger Marshall has said the quiet part plainly: "The Senate should immediately adjourn and let President Trump use recess appointments to enact the agenda 77M Americans voted for." Senator Tom Cotton framed the choice for the minority: easy way or hard way. And if the two chambers disagree on adjournment, Article II, Section 3 lets the President adjourn Congress himself, a never-used but textually explicit power. The votes exist if leadership wants them to exist.

Some will call all of this an assault on norms. Notice what the objection concedes. Nothing in the sequel strategy requires a single novel legal theory. The removal power is now constitutional bedrock. The FVRA is a statute Congress wrote. The recess power sits in the constitutional text and carries the fingerprints of Roosevelt and Eisenhower. Slaughter did the novel work; the rest is execution. The genuinely novel practice here is the Senate's, a chamber demanding cloture on every nominee down to the most minor posts, something no Senate in American history did to any prior president.

In November 2024, 77 million Americans voted for a president and a program. The Court has now affirmed that the officers who carry out that program answer to him alone. A president who can constitutionally fire anyone but cannot practically hire anyone holds a hollow victory, and Hamilton would have recognized the condition instantly: an executive without energy, which is to say a government without accountability. The second half of the personnel war is there for the taking, with the statute book open and the precedents lined up. All that remains is the will to use them.

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Consider a model home. A builder puts up 200 houses in a new subdivision and finishes exactly one of them to perfection, with good countertops, landscaping, furniture staged by a professional, and lightbulbs all matching. Nothing about that house is fake. You can walk through it, open the cabinets, stand in the shower. The deception, if there is one, lies entirely in the inference the builder wants you to draw, namely that the other 199 houses will be like this one. The model home is real and unrepresentative at the same time, and those two properties are not in tension. They are the whole point.

New York Is Building Five Model Homes

New York City is building five model homes and calling them grocery stores. Conservatives should understand this before the ribbon is cut, because most of us are preparing to fight the wrong battle. The standard right-of-center prediction is that municipal groceries will produce surly clerks, bare shelves, rotting produce, and a quiet bankruptcy two years in. That prediction is reasonable if you look at Baldwin, Florida, which absorbed its town grocery in 2019 and gave up in 2024, or at Kansas City, which spent roughly $17 million on Sun Fresh Market and watched it close in August of 2025 after stretches of empty shelving and security problems. Those cases are instructive. They are also, I think, about to become a trap.

David Friedberg said as much on the "All-In Podcast," and the remark deserves more attention than it received. His warning was that the stores would not fail in the visible way conservatives expect, and would instead "create an incredible success story for socialism," complete with flattering coverage, contented employees, and demands that other cities copy the model. He was right, and the reason he was right is written into the city's own procurement documents. New York has studied the American failure cases and designed around every one of them.

Private Operators, Public Risk

Start with who runs the stores. The July 2026 operator request for proposals does not contemplate a municipal department learning to buy lettuce. It solicits experienced private grocers with urban track records, existing wholesale relationships, functioning logistics, merchandising systems, and back office infrastructure, and it gives preference to bidders willing to take all five locations at once. The city supplies capital, real estate, and political cover. The private operator supplies competence. This is not socialism in the textbook sense, where the state seizes the means of production and then discovers it cannot run them. It is something cleverer. Execution is privatized, losses are socialized, and credit is monopolized.

New York Eliminated the Costs That Kill Grocery Stores

Then look at what the operator does not have to pay. The city funds construction. The operator pays no rent. The operator pays no property taxes. Where discounted prices generate an operating deficit, the city covers it through what the RFP calls affordability payments, and additional performance payments may be available for hitting targets on customer satisfaction, employee retention, merchandising, and stocking levels. Rent, taxes, capital, and losses are the four horsemen that kill grocery stores. New York has shot all four before the doors open.

The 30% Discount Is Not Storewide

The discount itself is engineered with equal care. The advertised 30% reduction applies not to everything but to a defined Core Basket, all fresh produce, meat, and seafood, plus roughly 20 categories of staples like eggs, dairy, bread, beans, oil, and cereal. Everything outside that basket can be priced at ordinary New York retail. The city projects that the average shopper's total bill falls about 15%, something on the order of $90 a month, or $1,000 a year. So the headline number is 30%, the experienced number is 15%, and the difference is quietly financed by normally priced goods that customers buy on the same trip. That is a loss leader strategy, which private grocers use constantly. The novelty here is that the loss is underwritten by taxpayers rather than by the rest of the store.

Grocery Profits Cannot Finance the Savings

Now the arithmetic that ought to end the debate but won't. Food retailing runs on margins that would embarrass a lemonade stand. The Food Industry Association put average food retailer profit margins at 2.1% in 2025. NYU Stern's January 2026 dataset put grocery net margins at 1.32%, and lease-adjusted after-tax margins at 1.50%. Gross margin across the industry was 26.31%. Read those figures against a 30% discount, and the conclusion is unavoidable. Eliminating private profit entirely, confiscating every dollar the greedy supermarket owner takes home, would lower your grocery bill by something like 1% or 2%. The Core Basket discount is roughly 20 times that, and it exceeds the industry's entire gross margin. Ryan Bourne and Nathan Miller at Cato reached the same place by the same route. The money does not come from squeezing profiteers, because there is not enough profit there to squeeze. It comes from you.

New York Can Afford to Manufacture Success

Here a puzzled reader might object that this is precisely why the program will collapse. If the economics are that bad, surely the bill comes due. But this is where the scale of New York changes everything. The adopted fiscal year 2027 city budget is $125.8 billion. The mayor has committed $70 million in capital for the five stores, which is 0.0556% of a single year's budget, about five and a half basis points. Suppose each store loses $10 million a year, a generous assumption for a 15,000-square-foot location. That is $50 million annually, under 4 basis points. Scale to 20 stores losing $10 million each and you reach $200 million, still less than a quarter of 1%. A private chain treats a $50 million loss as an extinction event. A political movement can treat the identical number as a media buy.

That is the sentence conservatives need to internalize. The loss is not the failure. The loss is the advertising budget.

The Grocery Store Is Also a Political Brand

And New York is buying the advertising too. Before it selected a grocery operator, the city procured a design firm to build the brand, covering visual identity, signage, private label, store architecture, and customer experience, with the mayor explaining that the goal was to bring "public excellence" to life. The operator RFP then requires multi-channel marketing, coordinated press engagement, citywide campaigns, public price comparisons against private competitors, message alignment with the city, and limited edition merchandise to build brand affinity. Set aside the groceries for a moment and notice what is actually being purchased here. A recognizable government brand. A permanent association between that brand and low prices. A physical set where a television crew can film a mother saying she saved $90. And a constituency of shoppers, employees, unions, and suppliers with a personal stake in defending the program.

None of that requires anyone to lie. The savings will be real, the shelves will be full, the cashier's health insurance will be real, and the store will very likely be beautiful. What is false is the inference, and only the inference. The city's own RFP states that the program "will prove that government can make healthy food more affordable" and serve as a model for future public programs. That is not a conservative accusation about motive. That is the city announcing, in a procurement document, that it is running a demonstration.

The Long History of Subsidized Showcases

History is unkind to those who mistake demonstrations for evidence. Mao's Dazhai was celebrated as proof that collectivism and revolutionary spirit could transform Chinese agriculture, and roughly 20,000 pilgrims a day passed through it in the early 1970s while other regions were ordered to copy its methods regardless of soil or terrain. After the model was discredited in 1980, it emerged that Dazhai had recieved extensive help from the People's Liberation Army and had used heavy machinery all along, which the propaganda had simply deleted from the story so that the achievement could be attributed to ideology instead of to the tractors. Soviet Intourist did something gentler and more effective, curating routes and factories and apartments and cheerful citizens for foreign visitors, showing them nothing fabricated and everything selected. Chávez's Mercal network really did sell food 25% to 40% below market to a third of Venezuela's population, funded by roughly $24 million a month in oil revenue, and the later CLAP boxes were candid enough that the administrator told Reuters they had "helped us stop a social explosion and enabled us to win elections and to keep winning them." The pattern in each case is identical. Concentrate resources on a visible site, shield it from ordinary constraints, curate what the observer sees, display the output while hiding the input, and generalize the exception into a law.

Conservatives Should Demand Accounting, Not Predict Failure

So what should the right actually do? Not predict a fiasco. If we spend two years insisting the shelves will empty and New Yorkers walk into a clean store with cheap chicken and a friendly cashier, we will have handed the other side its argument and forfeited ours. The correct posture is not prophecy but accounting. Demand, now, before the first store opens, an audited store-level profit and loss statement, capital depreciation charged against operations, imputed market rent and property tax, total subsidy per transaction, taxpayer dollars spent per $1 of customer savings, central marketing and administrative costs, stockout rates and purchase restrictions, and a count of the bodegas and independent grocers that open or close within a mile. The published performance metrics measure sales, satisfaction, and stocking. They do not measure what each shopping trip costs the public.

Cheap Groceries Are Not Efficient Groceries

Everything turns on one distinction, and it is worth stating plainly. A taxpayer-funded store can sell groceries cheaply. That does not show it can produce groceries cheaply. The first is a transfer, the second is efficiency, and the entire political argument depends on the public confusing them. Five stores out of more than 1,100 grocers and some 10,000 bodegas is less than half of 1% of the city's food retail. It is not a system. It is a showroom, and the model home is always the nicest house on the street.

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