Eric Giannella

The economy is on the precipice of recession. That’s the clear takeaway from last week’s economic data dump. Consumer spending has flatlined, construction and manufacturing are contracting, and employment is set to fall. And with inflation on the rise, it is tough for the Fed to come to the rescue. Unemployment remains low, but that’s only because labor force growth has gone sideways. The foreign-born workforce is shrinking, and labor force participation is declining. Telling is the economy-wide hiring freeze, particularly for recent graduates, and the decline in hours worked. It’s no mystery why the economy is struggling; blame increasing U.S. tariffs and highly restrictive immigration policy. The tariffs are cutting increasingly deeply into the profits of American companies and the purchasing power of American households. Fewer immigrant workers means a smaller economy. Any notion that the economic data misrepresents the reality of how the economy is performing is way off base. There are revisions to the data, even big revisions, but they universally say the economy is doing worse. That’s because it is. BTW, the DOGE cuts are a key factor in the revisions—not because BLS has cut staff, although that can’t help, but because the government often reports payrolls to BLS late. It didn’t matter when government employment was stable, but now that it’s declining, the cuts are picked up in the revisions.

Trump is panicking because the economic numbers are giving a recession vibe.
From the Chief Economist at Moody's.

Harvard Is Said to Be Open to Spending Up to $500 Million to Resolve Trump Dispute

2/

Compare today's @theharvardcrimson.bsky.social report ( www.thecrimson.com/article/2025... ) with this one in NYT last week, based on unnamed sources:

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/u...

🥗 1-Year % Change in SNAP participation, by state, May 2024-May 2025:
www.datawrapper.de/_/KZegX/
#agsky #econsky

States Have More Data About You Than the Feds Do. Trump Wants to See It.

States know even more about you than the federal government does. The Trump administration is now trying to access that data, too: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/01/u...

This guy really has "it" too. Worth watching in full.

Army Secretary forces West Point to rescind appointment given to Easterly The United States Military Academy abruptly ended the appointment of Jen Easterly to a high-profile academic position in West Point’s Department of Social Sciences, according to a memorandum issued We...

In another episode of “we live in the stupidest timeline,” Jen Easterly, a woman I have (1) never met and (2) did not work for, had her appointment at West Point terminated because Laura Loomer lied about both of us in a tweet.

cyberscoop.com/jen-easterly...

Shout out to the WSJ journalists who reported on Vought’s impoundment by footnote, causing the White House to walk it back. Impact journalism!!

reupping this piece, since the seat that Emil Bove just filled could have been filled by Adeel Mangi last year

Agree.

And it should be an actual campaign promise.

Donald Trump represents an extraordinary degree of personalism in American politics, especially given the traditional power and capacity of the Republican Party and American democracy. A lesson Trump drew from his first term in office is that he needed to better institutionalize mechanisms of personal loyalty to deal with perceived betrayals by both political appointees and career officials. Out of office, Trump supporters continued this project, seeking to restructure governing institutions around personalist criteria centered on loyalty. This process has a series of effects on American institutions: (a) elevating conspiracist messaging where Trump plays a central role, such as QAnon or claims about the 2020 election; (b) promoting anti-statism, particularly toward public institutions, framing them as corrupt in a way that undermines public trust; and (c) mainstreaming new strategies for governing, such as converting career civil servants with tenure protections into at-will political appointees who can be purged.

New open access publication from me in Politics & Policy: How Trump exemplifies personalism in American politics and governance

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Average days held, percent non-criminal, facility phone number, total number of people held

Tracker with stats and contact info for all active ICE detention sites: www.unauthorizedcity.com/facilities

Alert: The Trump administration is quietly slashing new NIH grant awards, and it's not via the budget NIH’s sudden move to multiyear grant funding is forcing shocking cuts in the number of grants funded. This is an effective budget cut. It's bad, folks.

New, from an anonymous NIH insider: Trump is being pushed to spend more NIH money. The White House is ordering NIH to do multi-year budgets for awards. This budget trick means fewer awards, fewer labs funded, and lower paylines for researchers. 🧵
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/alert-the-...

San Franciscans!

This is evil

Incredible. Federal prosecutors are seeing many cases of people accused of assaulting Border Patrol agents being turned down by grand juries!

Los Angeles federal prosecutors are privately saying it’s because CBP agents are just “arresting first and asking questions later.”

Very powerful story, with excellent reporting 👇🏼

Projections show that increasing the birth rate (as if you could) is the wrong way to get more workers A little math shows that increasing the birthrate is a slow, expensive, and ineffective way to get more workers.

Nice explanation from @philipncohen.com on the faults in pronatalism. Even if you could massively & sustainably boost the fertility rate, you'd have to raise those kids! The dependency ratio would get a lot worse for decades before the (small) payoff.

familyinequality.wordpress.com/2025/06/10/p...

… to help “civil servants work more efficiently” & “citizens to navigate public services more effectively”

GDS & USDS did exactly this for 10+ years. A predetermined “solution” is the OPPOSITE of how they worked. They led with & prioritized deep understanding of the problem & the needs of users.

Trump had promised to focus on rounding up immigrants with criminal records during his 2024 election campaign. Government data shows that actual ICE arrests skew heavily towards immigrants without criminal convictions.
www.ft.com/content/bba4...

How Trump’s Big Bad Bill Will Kill Americans What research tells us about how Trump policies are bad for your health

If you had a sense that kicking people off of Medicaid would be bad for their health, that is only scratching the surface of how bad Trump's policies will be for public health in America.

@jbarofsky.bsky.social‬ & @pamherd.bsky.social do a deep dive. 🧵
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/how-trumps...

not everyone in society needs to have taken philosophy 101, but imo our dogshit discourse around AI suggests that it probably should have been mandatory for the elite classes

This is the same reason don't understand the risks of them going after the HHS and state Medicaid data. HC institutions often run eligibility checks on people as a standard process to establish eligibility whether or not they've qualified or ever received services.

It's a giant fishing expedition.

Yes... That would be the scarier big drift. I hope it is changes in what's salient when people say science, but if it's rapid changes in beliefs about how we know what's real, then it feels like anything is up for grabs with the people who changed views...

My hope is that this is more about drift in what we're talking about when we talk about science.

Opinion | Antitrust and the Anti-Vaxxers The Justice Department boosts a theory claiming that similar editorial judgments are collusive. Heard about the First Amendment?

WSJ editorial page:

Antitrust and the Anti-Vaxxers - The Justice Department boosts a theory claiming that similar editorial judgments are collusive. Heard about the First Amendment? www.wsj.com/opinion/chil...

We are doing this. Our governments. Our taxes. Our arms sales.

This is our Holocaust. Our Cambodian killing fields. Our Balkans. Our Rwandan genocide.

We are doing this and history will never forgive us.

Gaza:

looking at the 30+ democracies that have successfully prosecuted heads of state for violating their constitutions over the past 15 years

This is why no one stood up to ask, "Why do we need DOGE when we have an entire Government Accountability Office that is supposed to monitor these things? And if you think actual waste, fraud, and abuse are happening, just tell GAO. They have lots of experience doing what you SAY you want done.

There is already a national SNAP fraud database. It's called eDRS. States also communicate with each other to detect potential double dipping.

This is a case where writing a public comment would have real value. A simple observation is that fraud reduction efforts often find little fraud but instead increase burdens on eligible applicants