Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Chancellor Kamar Samuels announced that New York City public school students may not use student-facing generative AI for the 2026-2027 year. The rule reaches from 2-K through 8th grade and covers nearly 600,000 children, about two-thirds of the system. High schools receive a tightly rationed pilot, capped at 50,000 students citywide and no more than five classes per building. In a system of roughly 280,000 high schoolers, most of them get nothing. Every high school student will instead sit through two 45-minute modules on AI doomer and anti-data center propaganda each year. Companion chatbots are barred in every grade. Teachers may still use the same tools to plan lessons and grade papers. The mayor and the chancellor announced all of this under the banner of putting students first.

Picture a child who adds fractions by adding the denominators. A competent tutor notices the error, shows why the shortcut fails, offers a picture, asks her to try again, and steps back once she has it. If her brother finishes early, the same tutor hands him a harder problem instead of telling him to sit quietly. That is ordinary differentiated instruction, the thing a classroom of 29 cannot reliably do and a family of ordinary means cannot buy by the hour. The city has now told that child she may not have the machine version of that help at school for a year.

Mamdani’s justification at the press conference was blunt. “I have yet to see a study showing that AI is beneficial for students in elementary and middle school.” Mandani may not have looked, but the research is plentiful. Stanford’s education researchers maintain a repository of work on AI in K-12 schooling, and by March of this year it held more than 1,100 studies. From that pile, the Stanford team pulled 20 rigorous causal studies for close review. The pattern is the ordinary one in educational research: real gains under careful design, weaker results under sloppy design, and a reminder that the tool matters less than how a school uses it. It does not argue for a citywide prohibition.

The newer work is harder to wave away on grounds of age or sponsorship. In August, economists at the University of Toronto released results from a two-year randomized experiment in 18 Tennessee middle schools, the exact grades New York just closed. Students given Khan Academy with its Khanmigo AI tutor gained about 1.3 national percentile ranks per term. A companion experiment with more than 6,000 middle schoolers found that adding AI assistance to a math practice platform improved students' ability to recover from their own mistakes. The funders were the Smith Richardson Foundation, Canadian public research councils, and J-PAL at MIT. No chatbot company wrote the check.

The evidence is not limited to adolescents. A randomized study of more than 1,000 students in grades 3 through 6 gave their human tutors an AI copilot that suggested better explanations in real time. Mastery rose 4 points overall and 9 points for children stuck with the weakest tutors, at a computing cost of roughly $20 per tutor per year. In North Carolina, a randomized trial across 63 middle schools and nearly 6,000 students found that structured computerized math feedback raised state test scores by a tenth of a standard deviation a full year after the program ended. In Nigeria, a six-week after-school program using a general-purpose AI assistant produced a 0.31 standard deviation gain, measured on a test the students took without the AI in front of them. At Harvard, a purpose-built AI tutor more than doubled the learning gains of the university’s celebrated active-learning physics classes. Some of these are working papers. Some involve older students. All of them exist. The mayor said he had not seen a study that showed benefit, but I wonder if he bothered to look. He had seen a reason to stall.

The reason the stall costs so much is older than any chatbot. In 1984, the psychologist Benjamin Bloom showed that a child with a personal tutor performed better than 98% of children taught in a conventional classroom. He called it the two-sigma problem because nobody could afford a tutor for every child. A conservative does not need to treat a language model as magic to notice what has changed. A tool that can teach at the pace of the learner, at odd hours, at near-zero marginal cost, is the first plausible mass answer to Bloom’s constraint. It still has to be tested with adults in the room and with exams the student takes unaided. New York made that test illegal for most of its children.

The politics of the decision are not mysterious. Mamdani is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. The most powerful institution in New York education is the United Federation of Teachers, and the UFT’s parent union, the American Federation of Teachers, has already told the country what it wants from the technology. In July 2025, AFT president Randi Weingarten announced a $23 million academy, built with Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic, and housed at UFT headquarters in Manhattan, to train 400,000 teachers, declaring that, with it, “teaching and learning can be enhanced.” Teachers may use the tools to draft a unit and mark a stack of essays. The child sitting in front of the teacher may not use them to learn, which is a rule that protects the teacher’s workflow and denies the student a chance to catch up.

Los Angeles made the same move in the same week. Los Angeles Unified, the second-largest district in the country, blocked generative AI on district devices for students in every grade while leaving teacher access in place. Other large districts are reviewing their rules on the same timetable. A pause can be dressed as prudence. In a school year, it is a 7th grader’s lost instruction, and a 7th grader does not get the year back. Families who can pay will route around the rule. Alpha School’s New York campus, which builds its day around AI-driven personalized instruction at 180 Maiden Lane, charges $65,000 a year. The professional-class child will have the tutor at home whether or not the chancellor permits it at school. The child in a Bronx public school will not. A movement that campaigns in the name of the working class has, in practice, arranged for the working class to learn more slowly than the rich.

The replacement curriculum is the part of the policy that will linger after the year is up. Those two mandatory 45-minute modules are not instruction in how to use a powerful tool, how to check its answers, or how to build something with it. By the city’s own framing, they are lessons in caution and harm. New York banned companion chatbots in every grade, then wrote an hour-and-a-half of high school time whose premise is that the machine and the data center are to be feared. Beijing mandated at least 8 hours of AI education per year for every primary and secondary student beginning last fall, with the work folded into assessments. President Trump’s April 2025 executive order made AI literacy and teacher preparation a national priority on the theory that early exposure “sparks curiosity and creativity.” One government is teaching children to build. New York is teaching them to flinch, and it is doing so on a separate track from the teachers who will receive the $23 million academy downtown.

The standard reply is that the science is young and that caution costs nothing, but every part of that reply is wrong the science is not young it is 1,100 studies deep and growing by the month and caution is the most expensive habit in education because its cost is paid in years a child cannot recover and the people demanding more study will demand still more study when the next round of results arrives because delay was the product. Nobody serious proposed putting an unsupervised chatbot in a kindergarten. What the research supports is supervised, evaluated use, with tests taken unaided so the learning can be seen. That is the experiment Mamdani closed to 600,000 children.

The conservative program is narrower than the rhetoric around it. Let AI into the classroom under a teacher’s eye. Measure what children can do afterward without it. Publish the results, cancel what fails, expand what works, and tell parents the truth about both. Give the public-school child the same kind of paced help the private-school child already buys. AEI’s John Bailey told the Senate last fall that AI “places expertise within reach of anyone willing to learn and apply it.” Expertise for everyone has been the promise of public education since Horace Mann. It has not been this close to a practical form.

Lincoln told Congress in 1862 that as our case is new, we must think anew and act anew. The American child’s case is new in one respect only. For the first time a patient expert can sit at her elbow in every subject, at hours a building cannot staff, at a price a district can bear. New York considered that fact and reserved the tool for union members. Parents in the Bronx cannot buy the Alpha product on Maiden Lane. They can demand that the public school stop treating a $20 tutor-copilot as contraband, measure the child without the machine in front of her, keep what raises the score, and kill what does not. Mamdani chose the pause. That choice is now the record.

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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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