Latest news with #politicaldisruption
Yahoo
07-07-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
How Elon Musk's Third Party Gamble Could Succeed
Elon Musk is reentering national politics after a brief hiatus, vowing to disrupt the midterm elections with a new 'America Party' that will contest a narrow set of federal offices and aim to control the balance of power in Congress. It's a daring scheme if Musk commits to it, which is by no means certain. His alliance with President Trump lasted less than a year, his role at DOGE just a few months and his recent vow of abstinence from national politics only days. So what would a serious attempt at this plan look like? The usual third-party fantasy in Washington involves finding unicorn candidates who can claim the ideological center and rally temperate problem-solvers on all sides (see: Unity08, No Labels, Americans Elect, Bloomberg 2016.) This is a recipe for failure in a divided country where most Americans have chosen a side. Musk's plan can only work if he learns from the most successful political disruptors, including Trump on the right and Bernie Sanders on the left, and identifies places where both political parties are neglecting the real preferences of voters. This means not finding a midpoint on a left-right spectrum but rather seizing issues beyond the standard D-versus-R menu. Trump built his political rise on three areas of policy where much of the electorate felt unrepresented: immigration, trade and global security. He rejected Clinton- and Bush-era consensus on all three. For Musk's new party to have a purpose, it must find similar ideological targets of opportunity. Here are three that might make sense: — Championing free trade. Trump shattered U.S. trade policy and reorganized national politics around protectionism. In a way, he was too successful. Now, there is no longer a major party that consistently backs lowering trade restrictions and defends free trade as a force for good. The Republican Party is so deferential to Trump's worldview that even former free-trade conservatives now mouth support for the most aggressive tariff policy in generations. Among Democrats, there are plenty of officials eager to trash Trump's version of protectionism — and far fewer making an affirmative case for free trade. Even the Biden administration tried to coopt rather than roll back MAGA trade policies. This protectionist consensus excludes most has found since 2015 that at least 60 percent of independent voters consistently see foreign trade as an opportunity rather than a threat; this spring, that number stood at 81 percent and even higher among Democrats. This is a fat opportunity for a political disruptor willing to defy regional voting blocs and special interests. — Radical fiscal rebalancing. Most Americans say they worry about government overspending and debt. Neither major party is credible on this issue. The Biden administration grew the size of government, failed to enact promised tax hikes on the wealthy and only proposed raising taxes in the first place to pay for more spending. Republicans, meanwhile, have put tax cuts ahead of fiscal responsibility at every opportunity for a quarter century; Trump's Big Beautiful Bill put America on track to assume trillions in new debt,obscuring that reality with a brazen congressional accounting trick. It is unclear how many Americans would vote for a take-your-medicine party that advocates fiscal austerity, even if that means asking conservatives to raise taxes and left-leaning voters to give up on resurrecting the New Deal era. Perhaps someone should find out. Musk — whose sneering, chainsaw-swinging DOGE theatrics alienated much of the public — is not the ideal figure to test this proposition. Other wild-card outsiders, running for office backed by Musk's money, might connect on this issue. — Securing American technological and scientific supremacy. Both parties say they want the United States to outcompete China and dominate this century. When it comes to scientific research and technological competition, Republicans and Democrats tend to subordinate that goal to factional and cultural politics. The Trump administration's onslaught against elite universities, its crackdown on foreign students and academics and the grant-slashing spree carried out by DOGE have upended some of America's core strategic assets in a global intellectual arms race. In his post-DOGE persona, Musk also blistered Trump's sprawling tax law for 'severely damaging industries of the future' — a reference to the legislation's attempt to throttle growing parts of the clean-energy sector where the United States is already lagging behind China. Democrats have not gone on the attack like this against incubators of innovation. But they have treated investment in technology as a vehicle for other social change, rather than as an end unto itself. Exhibit A is the Biden administration's implementation of the CHIPS Act, when a law aimed at upgrading U.S. semiconductor manufacturing became an instrument for advancing progressive workplace equity policies. And Biden kept tech tycoons like Musk himself at a distance, viewing them as malignant oligarchs despite some obvious overlapping interests. Despite his DOGE record, Musk could be a magnet for this strain of politics: one that says the United States must win the future by amassing all the intellectual and industrial might it can muster, using every available lever of policy — including the tax code, trade deals, immigration policy, energy regulation and more. High-tech research policy is not typical soapbox fare. But American leaders have a history of inspiring voters with scientific goals, separated from other cultural and interest-group politics. John F. Kennedy did not say the United States would put a man on the moon, so long as rockets were built in compliance with Davis-Bacon. Ronald Reagan did not call for scientists to help make nuclear weapons obsolete, provided that no woke postdocs were working in the lab. Is all this an agenda for Musk's America Party? Probably not. It's unclear that the party will exist in any organized form or that Musk is even capable of executing a disciplined political strategy. Still, in an age of churning disorder in U.S. politics, these ideological gaps and blind spots are opportunities for any political entrepreneur — especially one who can freely spend billions of dollars on an electoral experiment.
New York Times
07-07-2025
- Business
- New York Times
It's Hard to Create a Third Party, Even for Elon Musk
Launching a new national political party in the United States may be more difficult than sending a man to Mars. Elon Musk, the world's richest man, who last year was the nation's biggest known political donor, now says that he is trying to do both. But while the effort to achieve interplanetary travel has made slow progress for over 20 years, the past several decades of American politics are littered with abandoned attempts to disrupt the two-party system. It remains to be seen how serious Mr. Musk is about the new political project, and whether it will evolve from musings on his social-media platform to a fact of real life. While he declared on Saturday that 'Today, the America Party is formed,' so far he has yet to register it with the Federal Election Commission. As with many of his tweet-length proclamations, Mr. Musk's plans for the new party are opaque. His private conversations about it so far have been conceptual and not focused on the details of what it would take to bring it to fruition, according to two people briefed on those talks. Some advisers to Mr. Musk who have also been involved in these early talks, however, appear more focused on those details and are soliciting more feedback from experts, according to one of the people. Mr. Musk has said the America Party would be a new entity and would have the goal of disrupting the two major parties' hold on the federal government. Should he eventually tire of the idea, it would not be the first time he offered a grand pronouncement in an X post before either walking it back or letting it wither as he moved on to a new pursuit. Still, some notions that originated as seeming jokes by Mr. Musk — like his early purchase of shares in Twitter — have ended with world-altering investments. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Sun
06-07-2025
- Politics
- The Sun
Trump ‘saddened' to watch Musk ‘go off the rails' after he vowed to launch political party prez says will cause ‘chaos'
DONALD Trump says he is "saddened to watch Elon Musk go completely 'off the rails'" after the Tesla CEO announced he would launch a new political party on Friday. The US president slammed Musk's new 'America Party', arguing third political parties never succeed in the US and only create "complete and total disruption and chaos". It comes after Musk cited a poll in which he asked whether respondents 'want independence from the two-party (some would say uniparty) system' that has dominated US politics for two centuries.
Forbes
11-05-2025
- Science
- Forbes
The NSF Is Being Dismantled — With Broad Implications For The American Economy
Science magazine this week reported the latest development in a growing pattern of political disruption to American science: the National Science Foundation is eliminating all 37 of its research divisions, restructuring its grant-making process, laying off staff and canceling over $1 billion in already-awarded grants. The changes follow the resignation of Director Sethuraman Panchanathan and coincide with a proposed 55% cut to the agency's budget. This is not reform. It is a dismantling. The restructuring is widely seen as a response to political pressure from the executive branch, reflecting a broader effort to align federal science funding with emerging ideological priorities. In addition to diversity-related research, areas such as climate science, vaccination, HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 have all faced deep cuts. This shift has raised concerns within the scientific community about the potential narrowing of research scope and the implications for academic freedom and innovation. The economic consequences of restricting scientific inquiry on this scale could be far-reaching. The Institution That Powers the U.S. Scientific Enterprise For 75 years, the National Science Foundation has been the quiet backbone of American scientific progress. It funds a substantial share of all federally supported basic research outside the biomedical sphere, supporting discoveries in climate science, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and quantum materials among many, many others. Its grants train graduate students, launch early-career faculty and sustain the open, reproducible research that fuels U.S. competitiveness. Yet even as science grows more essential, the federal share of basic research funding has been declining for decades — while private-sector investment has steadily increased. Now, NSF is being taken apart at the institutional level. The elimination of NSF's divisions will remove an essential layer of subject-matter oversight from the grant-making process. Division directors — scientists with deep expertise who currently approve nearly all funding decisions — will lose their authority. Instead, a new layer of review, governed by yet-unnamed officials, may vet proposals for ideological compliance. MORE FOR YOU WWE Backlash 2025 Results, Winners And Grades On May 10 WWE Backlash 2025 Results: John Cena Topples Randy Orton In St. Louis WWE Backlash 2025 Results: Gunther Demolishes Pat McAfee While described as a restructuring, the elimination of division directors effectively centralizes authority over funding decisions, shifting oversight away from subject-matter experts. Jeff Masters, former hurricane scientist with NOAA and co-founder of the popular weather reporting service Weather Underground, wrote on the social media platform Bluesky, 'This isn't about merit or budgets because NSF has a tiny imprint on the federal budget. This is all about controlling information and knowledge.' None of this is to deny that American science could benefit from change. Public research should serve the national interest. It should be transparent, open-access and aligned with real societal needs. Not every idea merits federal support. But there are better ways to modernize the research ecosystem — by improving data-sharing, strengthening accountability, developing special programs and expanding capacity — than by gutting trusted institutions and replacing them with opaque, politicized systems. We need reform, but not this kind. Undercutting Science Undercuts the Economy We also need to be clear about the costs of disinvestment. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas — hardly a partisan institution — finds that nondefense government R&D yields long-run economic returns of 150% to 300% and accounts for roughly a quarter of American productivity growth since World War II. The authors, economists Andrew Fieldhouse and Karel Mertens, conclude bluntly: 'Our findings therefore point to a misallocation of public capital, and substantial underinvestment in nondefense R&D.' There is nothing wasteful or elitist about public investment in science. On the contrary, it is one of the most reliable drivers of shared prosperity — benefiting not just institutions or industries, but society as a whole. Now is the time to expand that commitment, not withdraw from it. A Looming Brain Drain Will Deepen The Crisis And when that investment falters, the consequences are not abstract. They show up in lost talent, missed opportunities and growing scientific gaps. The U.S. has long enjoyed a strategic advantage in the global competition for scientific talent. But that advantage is eroding. The scientific journal Nature recently reported a surge in American scientists seeking jobs abroad, citing funding instability, political interference and lack of institutional support. That's not just a brain drain — it's a signal of systemic distress. The real crisis at the NSF is not inefficiency or ideological drift. It is the abandonment of a national commitment to independent science. That commitment made the U.S. a global leader in innovation, education and discovery. And now, at a moment of historic challenges — from pandemics and climate change to artificial intelligence and national security — America is pulling back. The United States can improve how it funds science. America can do better on transparency, priority setting and community impact. But those are debates for a functioning system. Right now, the entire science ecosystem itself is under threat. The NSF doesn't need to be dismantled. Its investments need to be deepened and directed toward long-term impact. That means restoring its divisions, protecting peer review, rebuilding staff capacity and reaffirming its independence. It means increasing investment, not slashing it. And it means recognizing that science policy is not just about managing budgets — it is about shaping the future.
