U-turn on early release scheme will create ‘stresses and strains’ on prison system, says former justice secretary
Andy Burnham is taking a “big risk” by seeking to continue running prison capacity to the limit, according to the former justice secretary appointed by Keir Starmer to oversee a review of sentencing.
As parliament resumes on Tuesday, the government will confirm its U-turn on its early release scheme, which would have seen thousands of prisoners released early as part of a plan to ease prison overcrowding.
Critics say the move, which will keep PC Harper’s killers in jail, leaves number of prison spaces ‘too close to the bone’
PC Andrew Harper’s killers will remain behind bars after a critical intervention by Andy Burnham, but the move has led to warnings that overcrowded prisons will be left “one major event away from disaster”.
Announcing a U-turn on the early release scheme after weeks of intense pressure, Burnham said he understood “how strongly people feel about this issue”.
Campaigners welcome plan to bring IPP sentences to a close but say the move is long overdue
Campaigners have hailed Andy Burnham’s pledge to bring an end to indefinite jail terms as “a day that thousands of families have spent years fighting for”.
The prime minister has said he will “end the injustice” of imprisonment for public protection (IPP) sentences during this parliament, meaning people will no longer be trapped indefinitely under a sentence abolished more than a decade ago.
Bridget Phillipson says government would not have to consider releasing prisoners early if Tories had created more capacity
Cells to hold newly arrested people could run out without the early prison release scheme, a minister has said.
Bridget Phillipson defended the plan to address the prison capacity crisis in England and Wales by releasing thousands of prisoners early, which has been criticised by domestic abuse charities, bereaved families and probation officers among others.
A few things are certain in life: death, taxes, LeBron James playing professional basketball — and Americans’ belief that crime is getting worse. Since Gallup began asking about national crime in 1989, a majority of respondents said they thought crime in the US was higher than the year before in every survey year except 2000, 2001, and 2025. Even in that last year, 49 percent still said more crime was happening. It’s perhaps the archetypal example of negativity bias, the mental habit of giving more weight to bad news than good.
Last week, the FBI put some numbers on just how big that bias is. The American murder rate — which peaked in 1980 at 10.2 per 100,000 — fell to an estimated 4.1 per 100,000 people in 2025, matching the rates recorded in 1955 and 1956 for the lowest ever measured in the country. The violent crime rate (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault) fell 9.7 percent, the largest single drop since J. Edgar Hoover was running the bureau in 1936.
That much is known. But what’s not known for sure about the crime drop is almost everything else. Adam Gelb, who runs the Council on Criminal Justice, says that there is no single or easy explanation for the historic lows, while Jeff Asher, the analyst who spotted this decline before nearly everyone else, agrees. For every leading candidate — federal pandemic spending, some normalization after the 2020 social collapse, better violence prevention, even the decline of drinking — there is a corresponding hole.
But there is one American city where researchers can point to a specific program, measure what it did, and put real numbers on it. And it just happens to be the city that spent 50 years — and five award-winning seasons on HBO — as America’s shorthand for murder.
Baltimore recorded more than 300 homicides a year for most of the last decade, and more than 200 for most of the past half-century. In one month, July 2015, 45 people were killed — an astounding figure for a city of just around 600,000 people at the time.
But Baltimore finished 2025 with 133 homicides, the fewest since 1977 and about 60 percent fewer than in 2020. Through the first eight months of this year, the city has seen 60 murders, and the police commissioner’s target is to stay under 100.
What caused this? Three things at once.
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy identifies the few people most likely to shoot or be shot — two groups that heavily overlap — and sends people to their doors with two messages: you are on our radar, and here is housing and job training. Separately, the longer-running Safe Streets program puts outreach workers with real street credibility between disputes, aiming to interrupt them before they become shootings.
That’s the harm reduction element. There’s also a tough-on-crime component. The state’s attorney office says it has secured 2,129 convictions since 2023 across several gun-related violent-crime categories, with over 1,700 of those defendants incarcerated.
Meanwhile, Baltimore’s homicide clearance rate reached 60 percent by mid-2026. Its nonfatal-shooting clearance rate was 54 percent, up more than 12 percentage points from a year earlier. Criminologists have long held that the certainty of being caught deters criminals more than the severity of the sentence, and more successful shooting investigations are a common thread where violence is falling around the country.
How do you tell whether a program worked, or whether a city just got lucky? Drug trials get a control group; cities don’t. Baltimore got one almost by accident: the strategy launched in the city’s Western District in 2022 and nowhere else, which left the rest of the city as a comparison.
That’s what a team of economists and criminologists used. They measured the Western District against Baltimore neighborhoods that hadn’t started the program yet, and over 18 months the number of people shot there, fatally or not, ran about 30 percent below that stand-in. Killings alone fell by a similar share, but deaths are rare enough that chance couldn’t be ruled out. Police made no more arrests than before. Arrests for serious violent crime rose 81 percent.
A second, looser test set the whole city against a composite of other big American cities and put Baltimore’s murder rate about 25 percent below it. The authors are careful with that one: too much changed in Baltimore at once to say how much it the strategy was responsible for.
Murder is contagious
Baltimore’s success is built on two ideas, and they came from two very different places.
The first came from a doctor named Gary Slutkin, who spent the 1980s and early 1990s fighting tuberculosis in San Francisco, cholera in Somali refugee camps, and AIDS across Africa. He came home to Chicago in 1995, a year the city recorded over 800 homicides.
Key takeaways
Americans have told Gallup crime is getting worse in nearly every year since 1989. In 2025 the US murder rate fell to 4.1 per 100,000, tying 1955 and 1956 for the lowest ever measured, and violent crime dropped 9.3 percent — the largest single-year fall since the FBI began national estimates in 1936.
Nobody can say why. Federal pandemic spending, the unwinding of the 2020 collapse, violence prevention programs, Americans drinking less: every leading explanation has a hole in it.
Baltimore isan exception. Because its Group Violence Reduction Strategy launched in one police district first, researchers could measure it against the rest of the city. Shootings there ran about 30 percent lower — and police made no more arrests than before.
When Slutkin examined the city’s shooting maps, they looked familiar. Clustered in space, clustered in time, and spreading case to case — murder resembled the outbreaks he used to fight. Slutkin reasoned that the way to treat violence was to treat it like cholera: find the people most likely to transmit. Interrupt the transmission. Change the conditions that let it spread. Slutkin built the model into a program called CeaseFire, now Cure Violence Global, and its Baltimore descendant is Safe Streets.
The second idea came from a criminologist. David Kennedy, working in Boston in the 1990s, found that 61 gangs with about 1,300 members — under 1 percent of the city’s young people — were tied to at least 60 percent of its youth homicides. Get those people in a room with police, prosecutors, and community elders, tell them plainly what comes next, and the shooting slows down.
That approach is called focused deterrence. Baltimore’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy is a version of it. To see how it works over a longer period of time, take a trip across the Atlantic to Glasgow in Scotland, which in the early 2000s was considered the murder capital of Europe.
In 2005, in the midst of that wave of violence, Glasgow’s Strathclyde Police established a Violence Reduction Unit that operated with a basic thesis: evidence shows that violence can be prevented. Among other interventions, the unit sent trauma surgeons into schools to describe what a blade does to a face and stationed outreach workers at hospital bedsides to reach victims in the vital hours after an attack, the moment when retaliation can still be stopped.
In 2024-25, Scotland recorded 45 homicide victims, the fewest since comparable records began in 1976 and down from 96 two decades earlier. Every case was solved.
Pull the handle
So we have clues to why crime has dropped so much, but not clear conclusions. As successful as Baltimore’s group violence strategy has proved, a 2023 study of a similar street-outreach effort in Boston found no effect whatsoever. And the latest evaluation of Baltimore’s own Safe Streets — 11 sites, each measured against a stand-in version of the same neighborhood without the program — produced numbers that sound terrific but settle very little: youth homicides down 42 percent and youth shootings down 21 percent, but neither is strong enough to rule out chance. And while some sites saw youth homicide fall by as much as 100 percent, two sites saw it rise by 42 and 89 percent.
Some experts, like the UC Irvine criminologist Emily Owens, argue the crime decline has been so widespread and similar — big cities and small, red and blue governments — that the true cause is some larger social change rather than what any one city is doing. Nor can we be sure the fall will continue. Billions in federal pandemic relief money has supported many of the programs that have worked well in places like Baltimore, and that money is already running out. But we can identify one reason why it happened, and learn from that success.
As it happens, Gary Slutkin was not the first doctor to look at a map of the dead and see a pattern in it. In September 1854, a cholera outbreak was killing hundreds of people in London’s Soho district. A doctor named John Snow had mapped the outbreak and saw the dead were clustered disproportionately close to the district’s Broad Street water pump. Snow had a theory that water was connected to the disease and convinced a Soho parish board to remove the handle of the pump.
Nobody in Soho at that moment could have told you what caused cholera. It would only be 29 years later that someone would definitely identify the responsible pathogen, and in doing so, explain why Snow’s intervention worked. But the explanation could wait. The dying stopped that month in Soho, just as it is stopping in Baltimore and around the US today. And that’s what counts.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche attends a Cabinet meeting at Camp David, the presidential retreat, on July 31, 2026. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
For a brief moment late last week, it looked like acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s bid to get the word “acting” removed from his job title was in serious trouble. But that moment appears to have passed, as two key Republican senators just signaled that they will vote to move his nomination forward.
Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Thom Tillis (R-NC) halted Blanche’s nomination because of concerns about a $1.8 billion slush fund that Blanche helped create as the Justice Department’s acting leader, as well as some objections to a collusive deal between President Donald Trump and the IRS that could have shut down tax investigations into Trump, his family, and his businesses. Both senators announced on Monday that they will no longer block the nomination.
Though these two senators, both of whom are retiring in January, did extract some minor concessions from the Department of Justice in return for their votes, they objected to only a small fraction of Blanche’s efforts to transform the DOJ’s lawyers into Trump’s personal advocates and enforcers. The fact that Blanche is likely to be confirmed, despite his sycophancy toward Trump, suggests that any meaningful guardrails on a weaponized Justice Department have ceased to exist.
Cornyn and Tillis both currently serve on the Senate Judiciary Committee. That committee, where Republicans currently have a two-vote majority, was originally scheduled to vote on Blanche’s nomination Thursday — but that vote would have failed if Cornyn and Tillis rejected the nominee. And, now, it’s likely to go ahead.
Cornyn and Tillis’s objections to Blanche were quite narrow in scope. They demanded a written order from Blanche “terminating the anti-weaponization fund,” a reference to the $1.8 billion slush fundthat could be paid out to Trump’s allies, including participants in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Blanche originally established this fund in a May 18 order. On Sunday night, he tweeted out a new document terminating his May 18 order.
For the most part, however, the two senators did not object to Blanche’s broader efforts to weaponize the Justice Department against people who’ve displeased Trump, including the use of law enforcement to cow Trump’s critics. As both deputy attorney general and as acting attorney general, Blanche oversaw several highly dubious prosecutions brought against Trump’s perceived enemies and prominent Democrats.
A video introduced in federal court, for example, indicated that Blanche personally instructed law enforcement officers to arrest Newark’s Democratic Mayor Ras Baraka — an arrest that led a federal magistrate judge to scold the DOJ for “using the immense power of the government to pursue weak cases or to make examples without sufficient cause.” Under Blanche’s oversight, the DOJ’s also brought flimsy charges against individuals like former FBI Director James Comey and New York state Attorney General Letitia James, who investigated Trump for potential wrongdoing.(One minor exception: Tillis did previously pressure Blanche to drop an investigation into former Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell.)
So, while Cornyn and Tillis successfully pushed Blanche to make some small concessions in order to secure their votes in the Judiciary Committee, neither senator appeared interested in a confrontation over Trump and Blanche’s broader efforts to transform the DOJ into a revenge-seeking agency. And now, it appears likely that Blanche will be confirmed — and that those efforts will continue.
What did Blanche actually agree to do in order to get Cornyn and Tillis’s votes?
Earlier this year, Trump, the Trump Organization, and Trump’s two oldest sons sued the IRS, claiming that it failed to prevent a contractor from leaking some of Trump’s tax documents. The president originally demanded a $10 billion payout from the federal government, and the lawsuit triggered widespread concerns about a conflict of interest, because Trump was both the plaintiff and the chief executive of the government he sued.
On May 18, a little over a month after Blanche became the federal government’s top lawyer, Trump (and the other plaintiffs) entered into a “settlement agreement” that did not include a $10 billion payday for Trump but that did include several provisions favorable to Trump, his family, and his companies.
Among other things, the settlement announced the creation of the “anti-weaponization fund,” which would distribute moneyto an unknown group of people who claim they were unfairly targeted by previous administrations based on decisions by five individuals appointed by Blanche. It also included a provision claiming that the IRS (and potentially other federal agencies) is “FOREVER BARRED” from pursuing any claims that “have been or could have been asserted by Plaintiffs” — open-ended language which sparked fears that a wide range of potential investigations into Trump, his family, or his companies could be shut down forever.
So, Blanche walked back the specific order that he signed to establish the $1.8 billion slush fund, but he did not repudiate the part of the settlement that immunizes Trump, his two oldest sons, and the Trump Organization from many tax investigations. According to Tillis, the DOJ merely said that this part of the settlement does not apply to parties (including federal agencies) that were not parties to Trump’s original lawsuit.
Though this deal appeared to have been enough to secure Cornyn and Tillis’s votes, and most likely to ensure Blanche’s confirmation in a Republican Senate, it is unlikely to placate Democrats. As Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) tweeted Tuesday morning, Blanche’s new order “doesn’t prevent payouts to violent insurrectionists in the future,” and it “leaves in place a tax-immunity deal that could help Trump skip taxes on the $2.3 billion he made last year.”
And the question of whether the DOJ may bring politically motivated charges against figures like Baraka, Comey, or James appeared to not even be part of the deal struck between Blanche, Cornyn, and Tillis.
One reason why the two senators exacted such meager concessions may be because they didn’t have a very strong hand to play against Trump. Because Blanche is currently the Senate-confirmed deputy attorney general, he can remain head of the Justice Department, in an acting role, for as long as Trump is president. Indeed, when negotiations between Blanche and the two senators appeared to hit an impasse late last week, Trump threatened to “keep Todd as Acting A.G., and push hard to get the Anti-Weaponization Bill” if Cornyn and Tillis wouldn’t support Blanche.
But that doesn’t change the fact that Blanche’s concessions are thin gruel. His statement on the slush fund merely confirms that “there is no Fund” right now. And, under the terms of the apparent deal reached with Cornyn and Tillis, Trump, his sons, and his primary business still gain broad immunity from a wide range of tax investigations.
So, while Cornyn and Tillis may have given Trump and Blanche a brief scare, they never put up much real resistance to Trump’s nominee.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio at an ASEAN meeting in the Philippines on July 23, 2026. | Ezra Acayan/Getty Images
The International Criminal Court is in the trenches right now.
Last week, its chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, was voted out of his position. In a first-of-its-kind vote, 82 member states decided that he engaged in misconduct and a serious breach of duty. The vote comes after he was accused of sexual misconduct by a female colleague at the ICC, which Khan has denied.
It’s a mess, and it’s hitting the ICC at an inopportune time. On top of this internal turmoil, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently launched an all-out attack on the court.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed earlier this month, Rubio wrote that the Trump administration’s goal is to “dismantle the ICC—brick by brick, if necessary,” citing the possibility that the court could “target” American citizens, such as Border Patrol agents or US soldiers.
The US is not a member of the ICC, and has a history of wariness about the organization.
Beth Van Schaack previously served as the US ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice, a role that led her to work directly with the International Criminal Court. She spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about the decades-long tumultuous relationship between the US and the ICC. And they discuss whether, if the ICC is now weaker than ever, the Trump administration can actually break it for good.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
If the International Criminal Court is charged with dealing with people who have allegedly done very bad things and then trying them, why is the United States not a member?
The United States signed the treaty in the waning days of the Clinton administration, but never submitted it for ratification to the Senate. And one of the concerns is that the final treaty allows for jurisdiction over individuals who may commit crimes on the territory of state parties. And the United States has always been concerned about that principle because we have troop commitments.
Supporters of the court have always said the United States and its personnel are vulnerable regardless of whether you join. If US personnel are committing crimes on the territory of state parties, which we saw in Afghanistan, the response is to do those cases domestically and there’ll be no occasion for the International Criminal Court to consider those matters.
There’ve been peaks and valleys in the relationship between the ICC and the United States. So we’re in a frankly pretty deep valley right now with this new campaign that Secretary Rubio announced.
But back in the Bush administration, there was also very acute concern and it stemmed from this Afghanistan investigation. The Bush administration and Congress both put in place measures that they thought would be protective of US servicemembers. So that was one valley.
Now what’s interesting is in the second term of the Bush administration, many of these measures were dismantled because the Bush administration realized that the court was doing important work in some areas where it also cared about justice — in particular, Darfur.
Then, the Obama administration announced a reset in its relationship with the court, and that’s where I entered the picture. The Obama administration directed various executive agencies to look for ways to support the court where the work that it was doing was consistent with US policy.
Then, we had the first Trump administration, which reversed course almost immediately and eventually imposed sanctions on senior figures, including the prosecutor herself and one of her key aides.
Then, we get to the Biden-Harris administration. They pulled down those sanctions and again launched a reset of the relationship. At that point, there were a number of situations where the court was working, including following the brutal war of aggression by Russia against Ukraine.
Here we saw a remarkable rise of bipartisan support for the work of the court. You had senior Republican figures in Congress supporting the court. The late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) led a resolution that was supporting justice in Ukraine. Secretary Rubio, then Sen. Rubio, joined that resolution. There was new legislation passed that made it easier for the United States to support the work of the court.
Of course, with the second Trump administration, we have reversed course again, and in particular with Rubio’s announcement.
Well, let’s talk about the reversal. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is at one point on board with the ICC, and then recently he vows to dismantle it. What happened here?
It’s not clear what the precipitating event is, to be honest. There is no existential threat at present. Obviously, there’s always the concern that this is some kind of a distraction because matters are not going well in Iran and with respect to the economy — that this is something to pull eyeballs away from those matters onto something that he can look tough in. Is this just kind of red meat for anti-multilateralism or is there something that is not made public that is happening?
Is there anything actually that Marco Rubio or anyone else in the United States at the highest level could do to the International Criminal Court to put an end to it?
The International Criminal Court is part of a larger system of the rules-based order that we’ve been trying to build since World War II. Almost all of our friends and allies are members of this court and they care deeply about its success. They are committed to seeing a system of international criminal justice. So, no is the answer. The United States alone cannot dismantle this court.
Now, it can injure the court and it has already done so. There are already eight ICC judges, including judges who hail from some of our closest allies — France, for example — who have been subjected to brutal sanctions. They can’t use credit cards that pass through New York. They can’t make reservations online because of financial sanctions. They can’t travel to the United States because of travel bans, et cetera. The chief prosecutor and two of his two deputies have been sanctioned. Non-governmental organizations that are involved in human rights in Palestine have been sanctioned and a UN figure has been sanctioned. Those measures are already in place.
What his most recent campaign seems to announce is some diplomatic move to try and convince states to leave the court or to cease their cooperation with the court. And we have seen in recent days a couple of states announcing that they were withdrawing. These are mostly states within Africa, but also Venezuela, subject to investigation by the prosecutor’s office. The United States can certainly injure the court, but there’s no way that we could dismantle the court.
Most Americans don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the International Criminal Court, but they may know it because lately, it has gotten a lot of attention that the court has issued an arrest warrant for [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has said he would like to see Netanyahu arrested if he comes to New York.
Mamdani has said he does not have that power. He cannot order the NYPD to do it, but he would like for it to happen. What are the chances that Benjamin Netanyahu comes to the United States and is arrested?
Pretty close to zero, if not actually zero. This is a matter of federal law and international law. And the Headquarters Agreement between the United States and the United Nations, which placed the headquarters of the UN in New York, basically gives certain privileges and immunities to individuals who are coming to New York to attend official functions.
New Yorkers are a feisty bunch. So when word is out that Benjamin Netanyahu is in New York, can you imagine the protests that would happen? Can you imagine the embarrassment that he might experience when he’s supposed to be giving his remarks at the General Assembly High-level Week where all the heads of states convene to deal with transnational issues and his motorcade is ensnarled in protests protected by the First Amendment, calling for his arrest for various international crimes? If I were his lawyer, I would say, “There’s no chance you’re going to get arrested.” But honestly, it could be a miserable visit, given all of the strong support for accountability in this matter in the United States.
This is a lot of drama for a body that for a long time seems to have avoided a ton of very public drama. So who gets hurt in all of this? Is it the court? Is it the US and its reputation? Where do you think this leads?
Unfortunately, I think everyone comes out not looking great here. The court needs to put in place measures to be able to receive those complaints by witnesses, whistleblowers, victims themselves, process them quickly, but also fairly to all parties involved. The United States looks terrible as well, launching a campaign like this against an international organization whose mandate it is to deliver justice for the worst crimes known to humankind.
Roughly 60 percent of Americans tell pollsters the nation is on the wrong track. A majority say its best years are behind it. | Getty Images
This story was originally published on June 29 in The Highlight. To get access to member-exclusive stories like this every month, become a Vox Member today.
America in the summer of 1976 was not in a good place.
The president who presided over the country’s bicentennial, President Gerald Ford, only had the job because the previous president and vice president had resigned in disgrace, making him the sole US president who was never actually elected. The Vietnam War had ended in defeat and disgrace when Saigon fell the year before, after the deaths of nearly 60,000 American servicemembers. Inflation hit double digits in 1974 and stayed ugly, unemployment sat near 8 percent, and economists had to invent a word — stagflation — for an economy that seemed to encompass the worst of both worlds.
Given all that, you might assume the national mood leading up to the 200th anniversary was grim. And, yet, on July 4, 1976, something strange happened: Americans threw themselves a hell of a party.
And when pollsters asked people how they felt about the country’s future that year, the mood was, improbably, sunny. A Roper survey found more Americans were optimistic than pessimistic about the future by a nearly three to one ratio. More than three-quarters told Gallup the nation had already achieved at least a fair amount of its founding ideals. Somehow, a nation that was in the middle of a genuinely miserable decade looked in the mirror and liked what it saw.
Jump forward 50 years, to this year’s 250th anniversary, and you’ll find the vibes flipped. Roughly 60 percent of Americans tell pollsters the nation is on the wrong track. A majority say its best years are behind it. About three-quarters think today’s children will end up worse off than their parents. Asked a version of that same founding-ideals question from 1976, 77 percent now say the founders would be disappointed in what we’ve become.
But just as they were in 1976, the vibes don’t match reality. Set the mood aside and look only at the numbers, and the country that felt so good in 1976 was, by the most important measures, a worse place to be alive than the country that now feels so terrible on its 250th birthday.
Start with whether you’re alive
Let’s start with the most basic test of how a society is doing: how long its people live.
The US made those gains by stopping some of its worst habits, things that were commonplace in 1976 . You might have seen the Bicentennial celebrations through a cloud of smoke, as cigarettes were woven into ordinary life — on airplanes, in offices, in hospital wards — and roughly 37 percent of adults smoked. Today, it is closer to one in 10, and it keeps falling.
The heart disease and lung cancer that were connected to all that tobacco have receded with it. Add seatbelts and airbags, better trauma care, and cheap drugs that lower cholesterol and blood pressure, and the result is a country where the things that were most likely to kill an American in 1976 are less deadly now.
The America of 1976 sat at the leading edge of a brutal crime wave; the murder rate would peak in 1980 and stay high for more than a decade. By the early 2020s, however, violent crime had fallen back to roughly a 50-year low, and homicide rates this year may end up at a record low. And the single most dangerous thing most Americans do — get behind the wheel of a car — is far less likely to kill them, with the death rate per mile driven now a fraction of what it was at the Bicentennial.
The country got cleaner, and richer, and fairer
In 1976, the air in American cities carried lead, an honest-to-God neurotoxin that was pumped out of every tailpipe of the more than 90 percent of American vehicles that used leaded gasoline.
Rivers literally caught fire: The Cuyahoga in Cleveland had burned so many times it became a national joke, and Lake Erie was widely written off as dead. And things were bad outside Ohio, too. In Los Angeles, the smog got thick enough to keep kids inside at recess and erase the nearby mountains from view.
Since 1970, however, the combined emissions of the six main air pollutants the EPA tracks have fallen 78 percent — even as the economy nearly quadrupled in real terms, the population grew by tens of millions, and Americans drove far more miles. That split, with growth going one way and pollution the other, is one of the least celebrated but most consequential triumphs of the past half-century, the product of legislative efforts and technological response. And lead? It’s essentially disappeared from the air.
And it’s not just economic or environmental statistics that have improved; society advanced, as well. Women now earn the majority of college degrees. The Black poverty rate sits near a record low. Support for same-sex marriage is now the norm — maybe the single biggest social change from 1976, when homosexuality was criminalized in most states. Pick a metric more or less at random, and the line usually runs the right way.
This is not a matter of cherry-picking a few flattering numbers. It is the overwhelming direction of the evidence, across health, wealth, safety, rights, even the basic cleanliness of the physical world an American walks through every day. Measured against its own recent past, the US is in some of the best shape it has ever been.
So what’s with the bad vibes?
A more perfect union doesn’t mean perfect
Well, some things genuinely got worse, and they are not insignificant.
Americans’ faith in their government has collapsed; fewer than one in five now trust Washington to do the right thing, down from solid majorities in the 1960s — and the country is more polarized than it was in 1976. Democratic decline and even collapse is a live threat. Those economic gains I highlighted above have flowed disproportionately upward. The top 1 percent’s share of income, near a historic low in 1976, has since roughly doubled.
Climate change barely registered in 1976. The carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has since climbed from around 330 parts per million to about 427, and warming will only get worse in the future. And buying a home increasingly feels out of reach for many. By 2024, a record share of households spent more than a third of their income on housing. (Notably, though, the percentage of Americans who own a home is slightly higher than it was in 1976, and those homes are much larger on average.)
These are real problems, but they remain exceptions to a broader half-century trend of improvement. And a country that scrubbed the lead from its air and put out smoking can overcome new challenges, as well.
Which brings us back to a tale of two birthdays. In 1976, Americans had less of nearly everything you can count, and, yet, they reported feeling good about the future anyway. In 2026, we have more, and we don’t.
Just as it can be for a person, a country’s mood is a poor instrument; it measures the story we are telling ourselves more than the lives we are actually living. For all our pessimism about the state of the nation, more than three-quarters of Americans say they are satisfied with their own lives.
The Americans crowding New York Harbor in 1976 were cheering a country that was sicker, dirtier, more dangerous, and less free than the one we live in now. But they were right to cheer; the line was already bending the right way, and it kept bending. It turns out a nation can travel a long way, even while it is convinced it is going nowhere.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche appears at his confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill July 15, 2026 in Washington, DC. | Win McNamee/Getty Images
There was an unintentionally revealing moment in acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing last week. After Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) asked Blanche whether he and President Donald Trump are friends, the leader of the United States Department of Justice replied, “I’m his lawyer,” before correcting himself and saying he “was his lawyer.”
Blanche previously defended Trump in three criminal cases brought while the president was out of office, but he is emphatically not supposed to be Trump’s lawyer right now. As acting attorney general — Blanche currently leads the DOJ because the attorney general’s job is vacant and Blanche is the Senate-confirmed deputy attorney general (DAG) — Blanche’s client is the United States, not the person who happens to occupy the White House.
But it’s easy to see why he misspoke: Blanche has largely acted as Trump’s hammer since he was confirmed as the DOJ’s No. 2 official, overseeing numerous prosecutions of Trump’s perceived enemies. Now Trump wants to promote him to the DOJ’s top job — a sign of Trump’s confidence in his former criminal defense lawyer turned personal enforcer.
And he’s put at least five of those criminal defense lawyers in top federal jobs.
Trump’s decision to turn much of his criminal legal team into powerful government officials matters for two big reasons. The first is that two members of that team, Blanche and Solicitor General John Sauer, are leaders within the Justice Department. Next to the military, there is no more fearsome government institution than the DOJ, which has the power to arrest people and try them for federal crimes.
The DOJ is supposed to exercise this authority with restraint — and often with restraints imposed by the Constitution itself — but Blanche has used the Justice Department’s power against Trump’s political enemies who appear to have committed no crime and removed constraints on Trump and his Justice Department, all while Sauer has worked consistently to convince the Supreme Court to remove other constraints on Trump.
Meanwhile, three of Trump’s former criminal lawyers,Emil Bove, Justin Smith, and Matthew Schwartz, now have lifetime appointments as US Court of Appeals judges, placing them one rung on the judicial ladder down from the Supreme Court. The judiciary, of course, is the branch of government that is supposed to prevent the president from breaking the law, so every Trump loyalist appointed to this branch weakens the remaining legal constraints on Trump and his administration.
Trump, of course, isn’t the only president to place close confidants in the Justice Department or the federal bench. President John F. Kennedy famously named his brother attorney general. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Abe Fortas, who represented him in a 1948 election dispute, to the Supreme Court in 1965.
But Trump’s decision to place someone willing to pursue his personal vendettas in charge of the Justice Department is, at the very least, a break with post-Watergate norms established to prevent the DOJ from becoming a political weapon. And Fortas, who resigned in disgrace after fewer than four years on the bench, is more of a cautionary tale than a model of good governance.
Although the current Supreme Court is dominated by conservative Republicans, some of these justices do break with Trump on questions that divide the Republican Party — such as whether Trump should unilaterally impose high tariffs on many nations. But if Trump gets to turn his personal cronies into justices, that could change quickly. A judiciary controlled by MAGA loyalists means that all remaining checks on Trump’s authority could end.Many of his former-lawyers-turned-appointees are already working to make an unchecked Trump administration a reality.
How are Trump’s former personal lawyers already reshaping American legal norms?
But Blanche, Bove, and Sauer have all displayed ruthless cunning in their efforts to advance Trump and his causes.
Blanche has been DAG since March 2025, a role that oversees the federal government’s criminal prosecutions and its 93 regional US attorneys’ offices. He’s led the entire Justice Department since April, after former Attorney General Pam Bondi — another of Trump’s former personal lawyers — left office.
So Blanche oversaw several dubious federal prosecutions targeting people Trump perceives as enemies, including criminal proceedings targeting former FBI Director James Comey and current New York Attorney General Letitia James. There’s also evidence that Blanche has played an unusually direct role in the Justice Department’s decision to bring meritless charges against prominent Democrats.
In May 2025, for example, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, a Democrat, showed up at an ICE detention facility in his New Jersey city and asked to tour it. He was briefly let inside the gate, where he was confronted by about a dozen law enforcement officers and asked to leave, which he did.
But then one of these officers received a phone call. A video, later submitted to a federal court, shows the officer turning to his colleagues after the call and announcing, “We are arresting the mayor right now, per the deputy attorney general of the United States.” That deputy attorney general, of course, was Blanche.(In a September court filing, DOJ confirmed that officers arrested Baraka “after consulting with the Deputy Attorney General.”)
Yet, despite Blanche’s apparent decision to personally order Baraka’s arrest, the DAG forgot to check whether Baraka had actually done something that could support criminal charges. The mayor was only charged with misdemeanor trespassing, and those charges were dismissed two weeks later. At the court hearing formally dropping these charges, a federal magistrate judge admonished prosecutors for “using the immense power of the government to pursue weak cases or to make examples without sufficient cause.”
Blanche also unsuccessfully attempted to establishTrump’s $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization fund,” which would have been used to distribute money to Trump’s allies — including, potentially, Trump supporters who participated in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.Although the fund appears dead after it received bipartisan pushback in Congress, a DOJ press release announcing the fund said it was “established” by the attorney general, a role performed by Blanche, and that the fund would be administered by five people chosen by Blanche.
Before Trump took office, Bove was Blanche’s law partner. Shortly before Bove joined the bench, he briefly served as principal associate deputy attorney general — essentially the DAG’s top deputy, which meant that Bove was Blanche’s right-hand man. In that role, he was often described as Trump’s “enforcer.”
Bove spent only about half a year as Blanche’s lieutenant, but he managed to spark a mini-revolt in one of the Justice Department’s most prestigious offices during his short tenure. After Bove ordered the DOJ to dismiss corruption charges against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams “without prejudice,” a maneuver that would allow the charges to be reinstated if Adams did not cooperate with the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, seven federal prosecutors resigned rather than comply with Bove’s order.
One was Danielle Sassoon, a former law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative icon. Another, Hagan Scotten, wrote in his resignation letter to Bove that “I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.” Scotten clerked for Republican Chief Justice John Roberts and for future Republican Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Meanwhile, a whistleblower complaint by another former DOJ lawyer claims that Bove said, in a meeting about a court decision halting some deportations, “that D.O.J. would need to consider telling the courts ‘fuck you’ and ignore any such order.”
Trump appointed Bove to theUS Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit last September. Federal appeals courts typically spend months deciding cases, so his tenure on the Third Circuit has thus far been less eventful than his time at the DOJ. But there are early signs that he remains loyal to Trump even after moving into an independent branch of government. Bove attended a Trump rally in December, a highly unusual move for judges who are supposed to remain nonpartisan. And the background image on his iPhone is reportedly an image of a defiant Trump raising a fist, or at least it was months after he joined the bench.
Despite these losses, Sauer has an impressive winning record before the Supreme Court, largely because the Court is controlled by six Republicans who are highly sympathetic to Trump and his agenda. This is, after all, the same Court that said that Trump may use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes, after Sauer argued as much.
Sauer has been particularly effective in persuading the Republican justices to block lower court rulings against Trump on the Court’s “shadow docket,” a once rarely used mix of emergency motions and other matters that became a routine part of Supreme Court litigation during Trump’s first term.
So Trump has taken several of his personal lawyers and transformed them into some of the most well-credentialed — and in some cases, the most powerful — figures in the legal profession. Thus far, the evidence suggests that these individuals remain loyal to Trump, even when they move into jobs that are supposed to be nonpartisan. Three of them already have lifetime appointments.
Any nation governed by the rule of law must have government officials who will obey whatever constraints the law imposes — whether they be federal agency leaders who follow the law out of a sense of duty, or judges who rein in executive branch leaders who refuse to do so. Institutions like the Department of Justice also depend on informal norms, many of which are a response to similar abuses of power during the Nixon administration, that have long constrained federal prosecutors.
But Trump’s DOJ is often actively hostile to these norms, and the growing legal power of Trump’s personal lawyers is just the latest example. Their steady reshaping of the judiciary clears the way for a federal government that is not constrained by anything.
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