April 15, 2026

Trump's NLRB Doesn't Want to Investigate Worker Complaints

The agency tasked with protecting workers is making it harder for them to submit complaints and letting employers break the law.

https://prospect.org/2026/04/15/trump-national-labor-relations-board-nlrb-investigate-worker-complaints/


Credit: Creativeye99/iStock

Last year, the number of workers covered by a union contract rose to 16.5 million, the highest raw total since 2009. In theory, this increased representation should mean the National Labor Relations Board—the federal agency that protects the right of private-sector employees to organize, and adjudicates alleged unfair labor practices (ULPs)—will be awfully busy. For an agency that has long suffered from a workforce and inflation-adjusted budget decline, the growth of the organized workforce should coincide with agency leadership pushing for more capacity and resources to alleviate its backlog and manage new cases in a timely fashion.

This, however, is antithetical to the Trump administration’s bilious anti-worker animus—witness the desire to put federal workers “in trauma”—as well as its general hostility to the federal administrative state. So, rather than taking steps to handle its current caseload, NLRB General Counsel Crystal Carey is taking a different tack: choking off the number of cases that reach the agency by increasing the burden of filing complaints in the first place. As a result, employers who violate labor law are getting off scot-free.

Even before Carey started this, the NLRB was in a severe capacity crisis. The agency, which was founded with the explicit intent to be stronger in protecting worker rights and more encouraging of good-faith bargaining compared to its predecessor, was an early target of the administration’s attacks on independent agencies. The Board had been without a quorum for the majority of last year following President Trump’s unprecedented firing of Democratic board member Gwynne Wilcox, preventing the agency from issuing rulings until two Trump appointees were confirmed in December. (By statute, the NLRB requires three of its five board slots to be filled to make binding rulings.) As a result, cases piled up, peaking at 591 in January 2026—and that’s just the ones awaiting a final decision from the Board. The agency also has 17,000 open ULP investigations, more than half of which are over six months old, according to acting Associate General Counsel William Cowen.

The agency is ill-equipped to handle such a backlog, let alone the influx of cases that will likely accompany more than 460,000 additional union-represented workers. The administration has not shown any intention to change that. Last year, with full knowledge of the backlog they faced, the NLRB requested funding for just 1,152 full-time employees for fiscal year 2026 (FY26). This is nearly a hundred fewer employees than the prior year and 500 fewer than requested a decade ago for FY16, despite a higher combined intake of ULP and representation cases. To make matters worse, since Trump’s inauguration the agency had lost 196 employees, counterbalanced by only seven hires, according to the latest data from the Office of Personnel Management in January. Funding levels tell a similar story. Trump’s NLRB requested $285 million for FY26, down $14 million from FY25. This is a significant decrease from the FY16 budget in real terms, which would be over $381 million in today’s dollars.

snip

April 15, 2026

Inside ICE's $12 Million Plan To Map Immigrants' "Patterns Of Life"

Immigration officials will spend $12.2 million to deploy Project SAFE HAVEN, an AI geotracking tool that “transforms the way we identify, locate, and map illegal migrants.”

https://www.levernews.com/inside-ices-12-million-plan-to-map-immigrants-patterns-of-life/

https://archive.ph/uOUC6


(AP Photo/Gregory Bull and Pexels/Maik Poblocki, Efe Burak Baydar, Markus Spiske)

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) just inked a $12.2 million contract for an artificial intelligence tool that claims to map out immigrants’ daily routines, habits, and real-time location and categorize them as potential threats, per procurement records reviewed by The Lever. Dubbed “Project SAFE HAVEN,” the product is advertised by defense vendor Edge Ops LLC as a “question-based AI interface” that uses “persistent passive data collection” to map “patterns of life,” a surveillance tactic that ICE says will identify the “habitual locations, routes, and behavioral patterns” of its targets.

Additional features of the technology described in procurement documents include real-time location tracking and analysis that will categorize individuals and groups as affiliated with ostensible criminal organizations, such as gangs or cartels. That includes building “target profiles” that track individuals’ activity by linking data obtained from Wi-Fi network connections and mobile smart devices, such as cellphones and smartwatches. A promotional blurb for the tool on Edge Ops LLC’s website claims that Project SAFE HAVEN “transforms the way we identify, locate, and map illegal migrants.” ICE’s purchase of the tool was made public in federal procurement records released this week.

Under the Trump administration, the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, has been granted a multi-billion-dollar slush fund, which it is using to build out its surveillance dragnet. The agency has already amassed a vast arsenal of surveillance tools that can monitor everything from the location of hundreds of millions of phones to real-time social media content. In this case, Project SAFE HAVEN was purchased specifically for the Homeland Security Task Force National Coordination Center, a hub for information sharing between ICE, the U.S. military, and other federal agencies.

As The Intercept reported in February, little is known about this center's operations. Testimony from federal officials indicates that the entity serves as the primary coordinating hub for the regional homeland security task forces that have proliferated under the Trump administration, and which are supposedly “combating cartels” and other criminal organizations. These task forces involve collaboration between ICE and other federal agencies, including the Pentagon and the FBI. As of last month, ICE had allocated $440 million to the homeland security task force program, per Office of Management and Budget records reviewed by The Lever.

snip

April 15, 2026

Pete Shelley🖤- Homosapien [1981] [magnums extended mix] + Homosapien (Elongated Dancepartydubmix)

Pete Shelley - Homosapien (Elongated Dancepartydubmix)


English singer, songwriter and guitarist, born 17 April 1955 in Leigh, Lancashire. Died from a heart attack 6 December 2018 in Tallinn, Estonia, where he lived. Lead singer of the seminal punk band Buzzcocks, Pete Shelley embarked on a solo career in the early 80s. Working with producers Martin Rushent and Stephen Hague he crafted dance floor friendly synth pop.

Label: Island Records – 12WIP 6720, Genetic Records (2) – 12 WIP 6720
Format: Vinyl, 12", 45 RPM, Single, Stereo
Country: UK
Released: 1981
Genre: Electronic
Style: New Wave, Synth-pop
















Pete Shelley’s Homosapien Revisited

Much has been written in the days since Pete Shelley's passing about his deft touch when it came to human sexuality. Yet his most honest statement should feature predominantly in his legacy…

https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/reissue-of-the-week/pete-shelley-the-buzzcocks-homosapien-review/



Little about Pete Shelley’s solo career was conventional. Sky Yen, was technically his first solo album, in that it was an album and that the record’s sky blue, graph paper sleeve came emblazoned with his name, but it was actually recorded in March of 1974, a year before Shelley and Howard Devoto even decided to form a band. The record consists of two pieces, each twenty-minutes and forty-five seconds in length. It was performed on a purpose-built oscillator, the objective being to create a soundtrack for one of Devoto’s student films. Shelley reportedly used his own sweat to manipulate the circuitry.



Sky Yen owes a little to Shelley’s much proclaimed love of Can. There’s a bit of early-Kraftwerk in there alongside shades of John Cage. He said it was influenced by the Cluster and Tangerine Dream, groups he’d heard played by John Peel. It’s amateurish stuff, really. Few would have ever heard it if Shelley hadn’t decided to release it on his own, short lived Groovy Records in 1980. It was one of just a handful of releases that included the soundtrack LP Hangahar by Sally Timms and Lindsay Lee – on which Shelley makes a guest appearance – and an album called Free Agents by Eric Random, Francis Cookson and Barry Adamson. Sky Yen sold out of its original pressing of 1,000 but god knows what Buzzcocks fans thought of it.

In reality, 1981’s Homosapien was Shelley’s first solo album proper, in that it was an album and that the record’s modernist sleeve (the musician sat amongst a statue of the Egyptian god Anubis, a Commodore PET computer, a red telephone, an erect telescope) came emblazoned not only with his name, but contained actual songs! Still, it’s most likely that Buzzcocks fans, drawn to the Bolton born band by their almost peerless run of perfect rapid-fire punk between 1977 and 1979, were again more confused – this time by ping pong drum machines and lusty electro pop – than they were enthralled by Shelley publicly exploring his growing interest in electronic music.

Again, the majority of Homosapien’s songs predate the Buzzcocks. Shelley had planned to mould the core of his band’s fourth album – the follow up to 1979’s uneven A Different Kind Of Tension – from this handful of songs that had been kicking around since his late teens. The band even rehearsed them and tried to lay them down with producer Martin Rushent in Manchester’s Pluto Studios. Yet this was a beleaguered Buzzcocks who had recorded and released three albums of exceptional quality within two years but were worn down by what they perceived as a lack of financial support from their label EMI. Concerned that the sessions were proving unproductive, Rushent called time and suggested to Shelley he retreat to his newly built Genetic Sound studio at his home in Streatley, Berkshire. The songs created here would ultimately become a solo album. The Buzzcocks wouldn’t release another record for fourteen-years.



snip

April 15, 2026

Capital Ideas: Two books on the history of capitalism provide lessons for how to tame it.

https://prospect.org/2026/04/03/apr-2026-magazine-capital-ideas-beckert-cassidy-reviews/


Credit: Illustration by Lindsay Ballant

Capitalism: A Global History
By Sven Beckert
Penguin Press

Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI
By John Cassidy
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The wreckage of the postwar economy of broad prosperity, intensified by the Democratic embrace of neoliberalism by Presidents Carter, Clinton, and Obama, created the backlash that led directly to Donald Trump. Why did the highly regulated and egalitarian capitalism established by the New Deal slip its political moorings? Is there something inherent in capitalism that defeats democratic efforts to housebreak it? Or was the turn to neoliberalism that began in the 1970s mainly the result of bad leadership and bad luck? As a reader of the Prospect, you will have some thoughts on these questions. If you’ve studied political economy, your views may be informed by Smith or Marx, Veblen or Gramsci, Keynes or Polanyi.



Some of the classics on capitalism are witty and compelling, while others are dense and daunting. If you didn’t get around to reading them in the original, you can curl up with two superb recent books, John Cassidy’s Capitalism and Its Critics and Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History. Cassidy, The New Yorker’s lead writer on economic topics, has written the more concise book of the two, though it clocks in at 518 pages. The book is entirely accessible to a lay reader, and a pleasure to read a few chapters at a time. Even if you thought you were pretty familiar with Marx or Keynes, I guarantee that you will learn something new. Other names will likely be new to you, as they were to me (and I thought I knew this literature pretty well). My generation used to call books like this a pony—an elegant cheat sheet. It will spare you from reading tens of thousands of pages of the originals, and make you feel very well-read indeed. It may even stimulate you to read some of the originals yourself.



Beckert writes his own grand history, at almost 1,100 pages. An economic historian best known for his Pulitzer finalist Empire of Cotton, Beckert provides more detail than most readers will want, except as a reference work. There are plenty of what my book club calls skip-’ems. But if you have mastered the art of skim reading, Beckert is also well worth your time. Beckert begins with small islands of pre-capitalist commercialism, such as the port city of Aden on the Red Sea in the 12th century. In ports like this, “a new kind of trader rose to prominence—traders who did not travel with their goods.” These traders, “the world’s first capitalists” in Beckert’s telling, “demonstrated that large profits could be had from controlling flexible, fungible capital,” using “market-based exchanges.” Until about 1600, these small islands of capitalist exchange were contained in a larger sea of dominant feudal, church, and monarchic economic relations. Capitalist merchants operated at the sufferance of pre-capitalist rulers.



What caused capitalism to take over? Beckert cites the breakdown of hereditary monarchies, worker shortages caused by plagues, and the riches that capitalists provided, coupled with the monarchs’ insatiable need for new resources in an era marked by incessant wars. For both Beckert and Cassidy, the key drivers of the capitalist breakout were imperial conquest and slavery. Cassidy invokes Adam Smith, a stringent critic of the 18th-century capitalists who worked hand in glove with European governments to plunder Asia and Africa. They did so via state-protected monopolies such as the Dutch East India Company and the British East India Company. In South America, the prime mover was the Spanish crown. “At the particular time the discoveries were made,” Smith said, “the superiority of force happened to be so great on the side of the Europeans that they were enabled to commit with impunity every sort of injustice in those remote countries.”

snip

April 14, 2026

A Really Bad Week for the Global Right

Today on TAP: And what is it about Christian nationalism that looks to produce kleptocratic regimes?

https://prospect.org/2026/04/14/really-bad-week-for-global-right-trump-orban/


Credit: Denes Erdos/AP Photo

By any empirically based metric, this has been a lousy week for the global right. Hungarian voters overwhelmingly repudiated their Christian nationalist kleptocratic prime minister, Viktor Orbán. Here at home, Donald Trump took ownership of the Strait of Hormuz blockade, ensuring the continued rise of oil and gas prices at a time when the foremost concern of American voters is the unaffordability of life’s essentials.

Sensing he’d left something undone, Trump also accused the pope of being “soft on crime” (hey, it worked against Michael Dukakis; why not the pope?). And just in case he still retained the support of those right-wing Catholics who’d railed against Francis and were holding their tongues against Leo, not to mention the Protestant evangelicals who’ve never quite made their peace with Catholics, he then decided to post an image on Truth Social that depicted himself as Christ the Healer. The 1960s comic Mort Sahl would always interject a line into his act: “Is there anyone I haven’t offended?” Sahl never offered that line up, however, as a political strategy.

Trump’s supporters are disproportionately evangelical Protestants, so attacking the pope merely harked back to the classic evangelical fear of satanic popery (the main reason, along with that hardy perennial of antisemitism, that the U.S. banned immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe from 1924 through 1965). But equating himself with Jesus was a bridge too far even for many evangelicals. Trump was compelled to take down that Truth Social post, though if he now looks at it at all askance, I suspect it’s because he realizes he should have identified himself with God the Father, who was made of sterner stuff than his Son, who was way softer on crime (“Let him who is without sin cast the first stone”) than Leo, or, for that matter, Dukakis.

In looking at the defeat of Orbán, there are enough parallels with the current state of American politics to make Republicans even more nervous than they already are. For one thing, discontent with the stagnating Hungarian economy was widespread, and heightened by voters’ awareness that Orbán had redistributed the nation’s wealth both upward and to his cronies, whom he’d turned into oligarchs. There are some parallels to this here at home. Trump’s cultivation of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and their ilk, and the deals he’s cut with Silicon Valley billionaires to support a rapid and unregulated expansion of their AI ventures (wildly unpopular with the public at large, fearful of jobless futures and data centers in their backyards), from which, he surely hopes, his family will get a cut—all this is in sync with the kleptocratic policies of Orbán and, for that matter, Orbán’s other great champion, Vladimir Putin.

snip

April 14, 2026

The Faltering War Economy: Trump's war craters the economy in multiple ways, even if it somehow ends soon.

https://prospect.org/2026/04/14/faltering-war-economy-inflation-gas-prices-trump/


Gas prices in Los Angeles, April 7, 2026. President Trump has conceded that prices may not go back to where they were by the midterm elections. Credit: Damian Dovarganes/AP Photo

On Friday, the Labor Department reported inflation numbers for March. Inflation, driven by the Iran war, broke out of its recent well-behaved pattern, as consumer prices rose by an annual rate of 3.3 percent, almost a full point above its February rate. The April report will surely be worse. But that was only the headline. Retail gas prices were up 21.2 percent and have continued to rise in April; and other goods dependent on oil are up as well. And the problem isn’t just prices but shortages, as detailed in our new series Aftermath about the economic consequences of the war.

With higher prices, consumers have less disposable income. Real hourly earnings were down 0.6 percent in March. Consumer pessimism leads to further reluctance to spend. The University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index fell to its lowest level on record. The initial April reading, of 47.6, was down almost 11 percent and well below last April. The employment picture has been weak as well. The monthly unemployment rate has bounced around, but job creation is well below trend. The average rate of job growth over the past six months is under 20,000 a month, down from over 100,000 a month before President Trump took office. And artificial intelligence will also eat into employment, whether because of legitimate productivity gains or because hiring managers use it as an excuse to cut jobs.

The one area of job growth is the health care sector. But that’s mostly a sign of sickness, reflecting the gross inefficiency of our for-profit health care system. With Trump’s war on immigrants, employers are having a hard time filling many service-sector jobs, raising costs. There is a name for this overall picture: stagflation, which refers to the improbable simultaneous combination of rising inflation and rising unemployment. This in turn leaves the Federal Reserve with no good options. If the Fed runs true to form, it will give priority to trying to damp down inflation by raising interest rates, which will slow the economy further and put people out of work.

At the Fed’s last meeting, on March 17-18, despite Trump’s pressure to cut rates, only one member of the Federal Open Market Committee voted for a rate cut. At the next meeting, on April 28-29, there could be rate increases. Price increases driven by an external shock, in this case the price of oil, violate the usual connection between inflation and unemployment. Inflation is high and rising not because the economy is running too hot, but because of a sudden spike in the cost of one major input that cycles into other price increases. That same price increase weakens the economy and adds to unemployment. If the Fed raises interest rates, that will only further crater the economy.

snip

April 14, 2026

Khan vs. Cutter: A Tale of Two Careers. It was the age of corruption, and maybe, it was also the age of integrity.

https://prospect.org/2026/04/14/khan-vs-cutter-tale-of-two-careers/


Lina Khan (left) and Stephanie Cutter. Credit: Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA via AP Images, Charles Rex Arbogast/AP Photo

In early April, Stephanie Cutter, a former senior adviser to the 2024 Harris campaign and former Obama deputy campaign manager, was announced as a policy adviser for the prediction market firm Kalshi, where she will presumably work alongside Kalshi’s strategic adviser, Donald Trump Jr. In addition to her new gig, Kalshi has hired Precision Strategies, the communications firm Cutter co-founded, where she currently works as managing partner. Precision Strategies will help bolster the quasi-gambling firm’s presence in Washington as lawmakers become increasingly skeptical of the prediction markets industry. So far, so revolving door.

Cutter’s announcement, however, was not the only high-profile career move from a prominent Democratic insider last week. The very same day, Lina Khan, the former progressive chair of the Federal Trade Commission, unveiled her role heading the new Center for Law and the Economy at Columbia University, a brand-new institution “dedicated to advancing the study, practice, and implementation of laws and policies that structure the U.S. economy.” The center will also feature Lev Menand, who worked in the Department of the Treasury under the Obama administration, and Tim Wu, a former special assistant to president Joe Biden on the National Economic Council, and a leading figure in efforts to rekindle antitrust enforcement.

Khan’s center aims not only to produce scholarly work, but also to help train law students from schools around the country on the importance of economic policymaking. It offers an alternative vision of what post-government employment can offer for public servants actually dedicated to serving the public interest.

The two stories make for an interesting contrast. Cutter’s new position spinning Kalshi as “one of the rare tech platforms that take a regulatory first approach”—a dubious statement to say the least, as the company is reliant upon the Trump administration crushing state regulation of the firm while it faces criminal charges from the state of Arizona—is not her first trip through the revolving door. After leaving the Obama administration in 2011, Cutter worked for the president’s re-election campaign before going on to co-found Precision Strategies along with future Biden campaign manager and Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon. Though O’Malley Dillon would leave the firm in 2019 to work for the Beto O’Rourke presidential campaign and later the 2020 Biden campaign, she evidently maintained a relationship with Cutter, who was brought on to advise the Harris campaign that Dillon chaired in 2024.

snip

April 14, 2026

Trump's Kiss of Life

Canada’s Mark Carney, Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen, and maybe even Britain’s Keir Starmer can thank Trump for reviving their sagging fortunes. Viktor Orbán, not so much.

https://prospect.org/2026/04/13/trumps-kiss-of-life-carney-frederiksen-starmer-orban/


Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, right, takes part in a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister of Denmark Mette Frederiksen, at the Canadian embassy in Paris, January 6, 2026. Credit: Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press via AP

On Sunday, Hungarian voters overwhelmingly repudiated Viktor Orbán, Donald Trump’s favorite European leader, despite extensive gerrymandering and substantial control of the media. In a record turnout, the opposition Tisza Party won more than two-thirds of the parliamentary seats, enough to reverse changes to the constitution Orbán made during his tenure. Five days before the election, Trump sent JD Vance to Budapest, where Vance spoke at an Orbán rally, declaring, “We have got to get Viktor Orbán re-elected as prime minister of Hungary, don’t we?” This was followed by a Trump social media post pledging, “We are excited to invest in the future Prosperity that will be generated by Orbán’s continued Leadership!” The Trump bear hug backfired. For most politicians outside MAGA-land, even fellow autocrats like Orbán, Trump’s endorsement is the kiss of death.

But for his opponents in other Western democracies, the chance to resist Trump has been the kiss of life. Consider Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister. She was in very big trouble for re-election until Trump threw her a lifeline in the form of his lunatic threat to invade Greenland. Frederiksen, a Social Democrat, rallied Danish pride and stood up to Trump. “If the United States decides to attack another NATO country, then everything would stop—that includes NATO and therefore post–World War II security,” she warned. She organized all the major European leaders to support the Danes. Her coalition narrowly won a surprise victory in the March 24 election. Trump, mired in Iran, has stopped talking about Greenland, at least for now.

Or take the case of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. Two years ago, Carney was known mainly as a central banker (of both Canada and Britain), with no experience in politics. Today, he is the most popular Canadian since maybe Wayne Gretzky. When Carney won the Liberal Party election in March 2025 to succeed the increasingly unpopular Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the Liberals were in big trouble. The Conservative Party candidate, Pierre Poilievre, a Canadian Trump wannabe, was leading in the polls. But then Trump turned Carney into a national hero. Trump proposed annexing Canada as the 51st state. The controversy and strong opposition to Trump propelled the Liberals back into office, with Carney as prime minister.

Speaking directly to Trump, in a May 2025 Oval Office meeting, Carney pointedly said, “As you know from real estate, there are some places that are never for sale.” Canada, he added, is “not for sale, won’t be for sale, ever.” After Carney commenced trade negotiations with China, Trump imposed tariffs on Canada of 100 percent. Carney retaliated. Public opinion has shifted to the Liberals at a record rate. Today, Carney’s approval ratings are around 58 percent. The Canadians used to be our docile good neighbor. Thanks to Trump, they have found a new national purpose and pride. When Carney and the Liberals won in April 2025, they fell just short of a parliamentary majority, and he had to lead a minority government. Today, there are three by-elections for Parliament and Carney’s Liberals are poised to gain an absolute majority.

snip

April 14, 2026

Congressional Black Caucus to Support Spying Powers Used on BLM Activists

The Congressional Black Caucus will support the clean reauthorization of FISA Section 702, a warrantless surveillance authority that has been used to spy on African Americans.

https://prospect.org/2026/04/13/congressional-black-caucus-support-spying-powers-blm-activists-fisa-702/


Credit: Sue Ogrocki/AP Photo

This week, the Congressional Black Caucus will quietly support an effort to reauthorize surveillance powers that were used to spy on Black Lives Matter activists in 2020, the Prospect has learned. According to multiple congressional sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity, CBC support for the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) comes after Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), the powerful ranking member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, successfully lobbied CBC leadership to stand down on reforming the vast intelligence authority.

Section 702 grants U.S. intelligence agencies the authority to collect communications data on foreign intelligence targets abroad. In practice, however, it has allowed those agencies to amass troves of data on American citizens. The National Security Agency (NSA) is one of many FISA authorities with warrantless access to Americans’ communications data, which the agency has been known to purchase from U.S.-based companies. Privacy advocates like the Brennan Center for Justice contend that the intelligence community’s efforts to reduce the number of U.S. person queries completed under Section 702 only reflect known searches, as the FBI has “neither tracked nor audited these queries as required by law.”

According to The New York Times, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) greenlit the 702 program’s annual recertification in a classified ruling last month. The decision permits FISA authorities to collect communications data through March 2027, regardless of whether Congress extends the statute underpinning Section 702, which is set to expire on April 20. But the presiding judge also raised red flags in the ruling, according to the Times, communicating that there are serious problems with the way intelligence agencies use Section 702 tools to collect communications on American citizens. The judge, as part of the reauthorization, ordered changes to the way Section 702 data is filtered to produce intelligence on U.S. citizens.

The Prospect can report that on March 26, staff on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence received notification of this red flag. In the following weeks, HPSCI staff briefed Democrats in both classified and unclassified settings on the necessity of reauthorizing Section 702. But during both briefings, HPSCI staffers failed to alert Democrats about the FISC’s concerns with collection of U.S. citizen data. Despite the bipartisan push from many of his colleagues to reform Section 702 and to restrict spying powers now in the hands of Donald Trump, Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT), the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, has worked behind the scenes to encourage Democrats to support a clean reauthorization, while repeating the same hawkish talking points about the urgency of a clean reauthorization. In March, Meeks told The Hill that after speaking with Himes, he would support the clean reauthorization of 702.

snip

April 13, 2026

How the Iran War Threatens the AI Economy: Supply chain disruptions threaten the flow of computer chips, which power AI

models.

https://prospect.org/2026/04/13/how-iran-war-threatens-ai-economy-semiconductors-supply-chain-strait-hormuz/


Credit: PhonlamaiPhoto/iStock

Nearly 50 days into the Iran war, disruptions to the global energy supply chain continue to grow. Though the U.S., Iran, and Israel agreed to a fragile cease-fire on April 7, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, Iran hopes to continue charging tolls, and the global economy is still a long way from normal.

Fossil fuels, abundant in the Gulf countries, are essential ingredients for countless goods—the helium that powers MRI machines, the fertilizer that boosts crops, and of course the gas that powers cars. Fossil fuels are also critical to the production of semiconductors, the building blocks for all modern technology. A breakdown in production would not only strain supplies of consumer and commercial electronics, but could seriously disrupt the growth of AI computing capacity at a time when firms are funneling hundreds of billions of dollars into data center construction.

The majority of the world’s chips are produced in Asia. Taiwan, home of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), is a powerhouse, the sole producer of certain high-end chips, and the primary supplier of companies like Apple, Nvidia, and Qualcomm. Other semiconductor fabrication plants are located in South Korea and throughout Southeast Asia. Chips made in Asia are then shipped across the world to power AI systems, video game consoles, weapons systems, smart dishwashers, laptops, and many of the other pieces of technology that are ubiquitous in Americans’ personal and professional lives.

Though semiconductors are produced in East and Southeast Asia, many of the raw materials needed for the intensive, precise manufacturing process come from the Middle East. Chips are produced in dustless clean rooms that are some 10,000 times cleaner than outside air, and the process requires dozens upon dozens of chemical components like bromine, helium, and sulfuric acid.

snip