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Insurance companies claim higher prices are justified by higher risks, but we found they are keeping more of our premium dollars than ever. And last year, they made record profits.

TRANSCRIPT

JASON MINOTT, HOMEOWNER: Looking at the bill. I was like, ‘Whoa.’ I was dumbfounded. And I’m just thinking, why is it so expensive? What can we do?

SAM BLACK, MORE PERFECT UNION: Since 2020, the cost of insurance for your car or your home has shot up, more than twice as much as inflation.

BLACK: The usual explanation is that we live in a more dangerous world, so all of us have to pay for increased risks. But that doesn’t explain this: Last year, the insurance industry made record profits.

It made me wonder: Are the higher insurance prices we’re paying really necessary?

JANE KIM, CANDIDATE FOR CALIFORNIA’S INSURANCE COMMISSIONER: There’s this huge profit margin.

BRIAN SHEARER, FORMER ASSISTANT DIRECTOR OF POLICY PLANNING AT THE CONSUMER FINANCIAL PROTECTION BUREAU: They’re basically price gouging the climate crisis.

BLACK: I spoke to policyholders and insurance experts, and found another story: Of billion-dollar companies that figured out how to exploit our legitimate fears, while increasingly failing to protect us.

JAMES FANNIN, CHURCH BISHOP OF CHRISTIAN WORSHIP CENTER: We, in good faith, do what we do, expecting the system to work. Does anybody care about us?

BLACK: With Americans now spending a record $1 trillion a year to pay for property and casualty insurance, where is all that money going? And how can we fix this system so that we can get insurance that actually works, at a cost we can afford?

Since taking office, President Donald Trump aggressively pushed for widespread AI integration to the benefit of not only his campaign and inauguration donors, but his own personal finances.

Trump has invested millions of dollars in Big Tech companies, like Microsoft and Meta, that are all-in on the artificial intelligence boom. And since taking office, he has embraced the Silicon Valley interests and Big Tech moguls that have rallied behind his presidency.

Digging through Trump’s financial disclosures, More Perfect Union also uncovered how Trump stands to financially benefit from all the suppliers that make the data center boom possible.

U.S. companies spent more than $44 billion on data center construction in the first fiscal quarter of 2026. Data center developers hope to build nearly 3,000 more complexes beginning in 2028 — with a $2.48 trillion investment value by the end of the decade.

For the last two years, Trump has been quietly buying up millions in AI industry “stealth buys” — the companies that are essential to build out the AI boom — according to his publicly released financial disclosures. These companies offer specialized construction skills, sell water cooling technology, and supply the fiber optics infrastructure that data centers need to work, among other industry-specific products and services.

All in all, Trump traded stocks in at least 25 companies linked to data center construction or real estate leasing. At the end of last year, Trump had up to $25 million invested in these kinds of firms, and he’s made dozens of trades on them this year while his administration has continued to roll out even more pro-AI policy.

This includes firms like Amphenol, a leading “picks-and-shovels” supplier for AI data centers. This year alone, Trump has bought and sold up to $2.78 million in the company’s stock — and that stock has more than doubled in value since he took office.

Trump has also invested in Arista Networks, which designs software for Hyperscale Data Center systems. Last year, Trump disclosed owning up to $1.38 million in stock in the company. This year, he’s bought and sold up to $1.6 million more.

Trane, a company that supplies industrial cooling systems for data centers, has also benefited from the boom. Trump owned nearly a million dollars in their stock last year, and traded another half-million so far in 2026.

This pattern follows for AECOM, the same engineering company that designed Trump’s ballroom also designs hyperscale data centers. Trump’s also invested in Texas Instruments, which designs the technology for data centers; Linde PLC, the chemicals company that makes data center fabrication materials; Fortive Corporation, which provides electrical, fiber, and network testing critical to data center operations; Expand Energy Corporation, which is using its Appalachian Basin to produce LNG for data centers, and many others.

Between April and May, Trump purchased four shares in Crown Castle Inc. Crown Castle partnered with Available Infrastructure to build a $5 billion AI-powered cloud storage for data centers called Project Qestrel. By the end of 2026, companies aim to deploy the project at 1,000 sites across 30 states.

Similarly, Trump traded stock in PulteGroup, an Nvidia partner testing a pilot program by the California-based startup SPAN to place mini data center nodes on residential property.

Back in May, Trump purchased stock in Vistra Corporation and Xcel Energy, both of which are involved in upcoming Meta data centers.

Trump maintains that he does not personally make these trades, but has also admitted that his sons are involved in his trades and benefit from insider trading.

Meanwhile, Trump has been directing his agencies to ease federal permitting for data center construction, to allow data centers to build their own gas-fired power plants and to connect to the grid, to skip environmental regulations around clean air and clean water, to be exempted from the same Big Tech-facing tariffs that other industries pay, among other moves.

The AI boom has benefited from the Trump administration’s embrace of the industry and regulatory changes to support that — all while the president himself stands to benefit.

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Big Tech claims AI data centers don’t use much water. We found them indirectly consuming 10 times that amount.

TRANSCRIPT

DAN LIEBERMAN, MORE PERFECT UNION: There’s long been a fight over who gets priority when it comes to water in the American West. The arrival of data centers just made it a lot more complicated.

JERRY PACHECO, BORDER INDUSTRIAL ASSOCIATION: I would ask the farmers, why do they keep planting more pecan orchards? That is a bigger water user than the data center.

ROBERTO ROQUE, PECAN FARMER: I hope that those people who support the data centers can eat computer chips, because where are they going to get their food from?

LIEBERMAN: Driven by local tax breaks and an industry-wide space race to build, these companies promise they won’t add to the water burden.

LIEBERMAN: But is that really true?

There’s a web of private equity billionaires with ties to Israel and shadowy corporate armies who stand to profit off never-ending conflict.

We investigated Trump’s Board of Peace.

TRANSCRIPT

SALWA SHAMEEM, MORE PERFECT UNION: For nearly three years, we watched a livestreamed genocide unfold in Gaza. But on the world’s stage, a very different vision was being shared.

SHAMEEM: Billion-dollar pledges followed. Powerful world leaders signed on. Even FIFA pledged $50 million for a Gaza football stadium. And in July, President Trump’s Board of Peace announced a tentative peace agreement for Gaza. But that’s where things start to get murky.

There’s a World Bank fund that was supposed to hold billions for Gaza’s reconstruction. The balance? Zero. And at least some of the money that was supposed to go to the fund? Diverted into a private J.P. Morgan account. It’s not clear who controls the account, why it exists, or how the funds are being used.

So I did what we always do: I followed the networks of money, and I took a closer look at the men inside the Board. I spoke with insiders, including an ex-Blackwater mercenary

MORGAN LERETTE, FORMER BLACKWATER MERCENARY: I joined Blackwater because I wanted to make money and I wanted my adventure.

SHAMEEM: The deeper I went, the more unsettling the picture became. Because Gaza doesn’t just look like a place to be rebuilt. It looks like a testing ground for a new kind of control, and it could just be the start.

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Marc Andreessen blasts regulation — yet government cash built his fortune and antitrust laws saved his company.

His fairy tale promises abundance for all, but returns only flow upward.

TRANSCRIPT

SEAN MORROW, MORE PERFECT UNION: There’s a new powerhouse of political spending in town — bigger than the Koch brothers, than Elon Musk, George Soros, or Sam Altman, and without the name recognition of any of those, and it isn’t even a person, it’s a company: Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z.

By May, they’d already put $115.5 million into political spending. a16z is led by Ben Horowitz, and this guy: Marc Andreessen.

MORROW: Andreessen is an investor, so we should examine his political spending like an investor. What does he hope to get as a return on this investment? Because his ideal future is a bit… concerning.

MORROW: Which is, of course, a period immediately followed by a decade of economic depression and destitution. And he told us how he wants to build it, in a now pretty famous blogpost manifesto that lays out his bad guys, his good guys, and the ideal world he says he wants to build; his very own happy ending, almost like… a fairy tale.

It’s called “The Techno Optimist Manifesto,” and it promises a future of ‘abundance’ spurred by technology. And like any great fairy tale, it involves a battle between good and evil, heroes and “enemies.” Really, there’s literally a section called “The Enemy.”

Those enemies include: “sustainability, stakeholder capitalism” — that’s when companies take into consideration everyone they affect, not just shareholders — “risk management, ethics, the limits of growth, collectivism” — that’s just when society works together, and you care about other people — “social responsibility, and safety.”

Andreessen says these enemies are ideas, not people, but they’re all pro-people ideas, right? And we’ll get to that.

But there are some enemies that we can agree on: “corruption, regulatory capture, monopolies, cartels, playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences, speech control and thought control.”

I’m totally on board. That’s big bad wolf stuff we can all agree should be vanquished by a knight in shining armor. But is Andreessen, and the plan he outlines in his little fairy tale, the knight we need?

Can someone deeply linked to the modern privatized surveillance state really have a problem with using 1984 as an instruction manual?

So, let’s start this fairy tale at the end…

Trump’s DHS is buying shuttered prisons from GEO Group to turn them into immigration detention centers, while installing GEO Group executives in his administration.

This week, ICE and GEO Group released a plan to convert the shuttered Rivers Correctional Institution in Winton, North Carolina into a 1,400-bed detention facility — creating one of the biggest detention centers on the East Coast.

Under GEO Group’s operation, the facility underwent a class action lawsuit for routinely denying detainees medical care, leading to serious injuries and death before its closure in 2021.

On July 13, ICE announced a $500 million, five-year contract with GEO Group to turn the closed Big Horn Correctional Facility into an 1,100-bed detention facility, doubling the occupancy of the state’s largest detention center.

GEO Group estimates $85 million in annual revenue in its first full year of operation.

DHS began contracting private prison companies GEO Group and CoreCivic to take over shuttered prisons for conversion last year.

Trump’s immigration policies have been great for business: GEO Group saw a 700% increase in profit from 2024 to 2025, with 48% of its total revenue coming from ICE contracts.

It’s also good for Trump. In 2025, Trump traded between $281k and $990k in GEO Group and CoreCivic stocks.

GEO Group donated $500k to Trump’s inauguration while its PAC gave $1 million to the pro-Trump MAGA Inc. in 2024. The company’s founder and CEO each contributed over $11k to Trump’s Save America PAC.

Trump also appointed former GEO Group executives to head America’s deportation machine. In June, David Venturella, a former GEO Group executive, was appointed as acting director of ICE. Trump’s twice-acting border czar Tom Homan was also a paid consultant for GEO Group.

Former DHS advisor and Trump ally Corey Lewandowski asked GEO Group’s founder for payment in exchange for “protecting and growing” the company’s DHS contracts.

The Department of Homeland Security has seemingly abandoned its initial plan to transform warehouses into detention centers — now reviving shuttered private prisons as ICE facilities.

GEO Group gets paid, Trump continues his deportation machine, and hard-working Americans get a detention center in their backyard.

The biggest election in America is next Tuesday in Michigan, and the debate, as usual, is about electability. We put Abdul El-Sayed’s ideas to the test with real voters.

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TRANSCRIPT

TOM FILAR, FORD EMPLOYEE: Abolish ICE. I have a hard time with that.

ALEXIS MADSEN, SERVICE-DISABLED VETERAN: I know that Medicare for all would be very difficult. Why is now the time?

RACHEL SELLARS: Does he support the continued existence of Jews in Israel-Palestine?

JOSH MILLER-LEWIS, MORE PERFECT UNION: All eyes are on Michigan, where Abdul El-Sayed is on the verge of a massive upset in the Senate Democratic primary, campaigning on issues that were previously deemed too radical.

ABDUL EL-SAYED, MICHIGAN SENATE CANDIDATE: I’m running on three things: Money outta politics, money in your pocket, Medicare for all.

MILLER-LEWIS: The argument against him is, as usual, about electability.

[MANU RAJU, CNN NEWS CLIP: The electability issue that is really the central question here]

MILLER-LEWIS: The establishment pick is Haley Stevens – who is backed by over $30 million from AIPAC.

[HALEY STEVENS, MS NOW CLIP: No one wants Abdul to win more than the Republicans. They think they can beat him in November.

MILLER-LEWIS: But in an era where an increasing number of Americans feel politically homeless, what does electability actually mean?

JIMMY IZZO, AUTO WORKER: I have a lot of concerns with the Democratic Party

MADSEN: I feel scared to call myself a Democrat.

LINA SAAD, CLINICAL PHARMACIST: I no longer consider myself either a Republican or a Democrat.

MILLER-LEWIS: And can a progressive agenda really win in a purple state like Michigan?

EL-SAYED: What’s my coalition? It’s people who are sick and tired of being sick and tired.

MILLER-LEWIS: We gathered voters with diverse political views to put EL-SAYED’s message to the test.

IZZO: I come from a fourth-generation auto worker family. A lot of what we hear from Democrats is like a lot of lip service when, in actuality, they don’t really follow through on anything that they really say.

MADSEN: I am a service disabled veteran. I would previously describe myself politically as more Republican leaning.

SAAD: I have voted Republican in the past. I feel like the mainstream media is very biased, and I do respect a lot of the independent journalists, including Tucker Carlson.

SELLARS: My political views have evolved over time.

IBRAHIM DUHAINI: Donald Trump did visit Dearborn, and he said that he will try his best to end wars in the Middle East. We accepted his, you know, pledge.

MILLER-LEWIS: Have you ever voted for a Republican?

FILAR: Yes. Many times. More often than Democrat.

[EL-SAYED ENTERS THE ROUNDTABLE]

EL-SAYED: Hey everybody. How are you? So good to see you guys. Alexis, nice to meet you. Ibrahim, very nice to meet you. Thank you so much for taking the time to be out here. I really appreciate you.

MEDICARE FOR ALL

MILLER-LEWIS: Let’s begin with Medicare for All because that is, you know, one of the most important issues in this race.

EL-SAYED: I went to medical school, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this system, wrote a whole book on it, and ultimately realized that the biggest challenge is not making the math work. The biggest challenge is not architecting the system. The biggest challenge is creating the political will to get there.

I want you to imagine that next to your insurance card, you had another card, and that card was your Medicare card. It came to you the day you were born. And it didn’t matter if you turn 26 or get married or get divorced or get a job or lost a job; that you could get healthcare with it. That’s what Medicare for All is.

IZZO: My uncle, he had a precarious health situation, and he put off getting treatment for a while, and he ended up passing away from stomach cancer. I just think that really goes to show how far gone the system stands as it is right now.

EL-SAYED: Most people just put off having to do anything, because the financial burden of actually getting the healthcare you need is more anxiety-provoking than the possibility of being very sick. Now, the current system that we live under allows all of the corporations who make money off of our healthcare system to spend money to elect people who will then turn around and protect the industry.

And they’ve, in effect, manufactured a bipartisan consensus that tells us we can’t have guaranteed healthcare through Medicare for all. This is the question I always get: ‘What doctor? How you gonna pay for it?’

Just remember, we already pay for it. Every single dollar that goes to the back pocket of an insurance CEO, every single dollar that goes to a pharmaceutical company, every single dollar comes from where? One of our pockets. Every single one.

And because you don’t have to worry about that health insurance CEO’s exorbitant salary, now all of a sudden, the overhead of that system goes down. That’s the vision of Medicare for all. We could have it if we actually were willing to fight for it.

SAAD: My name is Lina, I’m a clinical pharmacist. There’s one patient that was not able to afford her oral therapy at the time. And we relied on giving her samples that we would get from drug companies. And I would literally take it and drive it to her on my way home. So how can we incorporate the pharmaceutical aspect into Medicare for all as well?

EL-SAYED: One of the most important things we could do is negotiate prescription drug prices. Medicare becomes the buyer of all prescription drugs on behalf of all of us. And so it can use its power purchasing on behalf of the 350 million people in this country to start bringing those rates down.

Here’s the other crazy thing about pharma: almost every pharmaceutical that has come to market in the last decade has had its roots in NIH-funded research. You know who paid for that? We did. Then some private company comes and buys the rights to this thing, then they get to sell it back to the taxpayer at a ridiculous rate. And that’s insane to me.

IZZO: My mom’s from Canada originally, and it seems like the motive there is to keep the people healthy.

EL-SAYED: So what we really want is prevention. I’ll be honest with you, I actually agree with MAHA on a lot of things. Most people are like, ‘wait, what?’ They’re right about a lot of the problems. The solutions are bat shit crazy, but they’re right about a lot of the problems.

I think we need to stop selling huge amounts of ultra-processed foods in ways that have us subsidizing them via a whole bunch of programs when what we really want is people to be eating healthy foods in the first place, right?

But in our current system, let’s be clear, a lot of people make a lot of money off of people getting sick.

FILAR: I’ve been working for Ford Motor Company for 31 years now. I’ve had it nice being a UAW member that I’ve had health insurance my entire career. I find myself as a parent of a child with autism; I’m coming towards the end of my career. So that’s one of my biggest fears: where the care will be in place for him.

I typically hold more libertarian views on something like this. So, would we be doing like a single payer system?

EL-SAYED: It would be single payer, and what I want is that the government basically guarantees your health insurance, and that allows the healthcare providers to go out and say, ‘look, if I can provide a better service, then I should win more patients.’

But it shouldn’t be that your health insurance says, ‘No, here’s who’s in network and here’s who’s out of network. So you’re gonna go here, and you’re gonna like it.’

And I think there’s a couple of pieces that, that we need to institutionalize. Number one, the governance of this system can’t just change on a dime because you have a new president, right? And so the governance would have to live somewhere similar to the kind that we offer in the Fed, right? So the governance would have to sit under, but separate from, the executive branch in a certain way.

We’re the richest, most powerful country in the history of the world. And, you know, we fight wars for no reason. But whenever we talk about providing healthcare, everyone’s like, ‘well, I don’t know if we could do it.’

Well, it’s a choice. These are policy choices. I would rather not spend a trillion dollars on war. I’d rather spend that money on healthcare and schools and infrastructure.

MILLER-LEWIS: The U.S. relationship with Israel has become a flashpoint in this race.

[EL-SAYED, ABC NEWS CLIP: The question about Israel isn’t about the theoretical right to exist of a country that exists. The question about Israel is, do they have a right to our tax dollars?]

MILLER-LEWIS: AIPAC is spending 30 million tens of millions of dollars to defeat El-Sayed, its ‘largest single-race investment ever.’

AIPAC AD: [EL-SAYED is] Too radical for Michigan. Too radical for the U.S. Senate.

MILLER-LEWIS: And his opponent, Haley Stevens, has made her commitment to Israel very clear.

[STEVENS AIPAC AD: Hello from Israel. I will continue to fight for Israel’s existence. Israel comes to me in my dreams.]

MILLER-LEWIS: But most voters believe the U.S. is too supportive of Israel, according to a recent AP poll. So will El-Sayed’s message actually get him more votes in Michigan?

ISRAEL & AIPAC

MILLER-LEWIS, TO EL-SAYED: As a U.S. senator, how would you seek to reorient U.S. foreign policy?

EL-SAYED: I don’t believe in unconditional foreign military aid to anyone. I don’t pay my taxes every year to be like, ‘Man, I can’t wait for Israel to get a new tank.’

And then when it comes to Israel’s own behavior, I think we need to engage them consistent with what they have done. They have perpetrated genocide, and before that they were perpetrating apartheid, right? They lobbied to move us into a war. Now they’re trying to annex southern Lebanon. Like I just think that any other country that behaved that way would be treated as a rogue nation because they’re violating international law.

SELLARS: A fear that a lot of American Jews have when they hear messaging against the state of Israel is that that is a slippery slope towards Jews don’t belong in Israel-Palestine.

EL-SAYED: I recognize that land is a land that a lot of people have lived on, right? The most recent inhabitants before 1948 were the Palestinian people, but also historically the Jewish people.

The problem though is that the implicit public policy of our government has been to aid, arm, and abet Israel’s current government to the exclusion of the right to peace, dignity, and self-determination for Palestinian people, right?

SELLARS: What would you say to people who are worried that withdrawing defense funding to Israel would make American Jews less safe here at home?

EL-SAYED: This idea that the things that we’re doing with our tax dollars to backstop a foreign government somehow makes Jewish folk more safe here — that doesn’t make sense to me.

I start from a position of principle, which is to say that Jewish Americans are not the same as AIPAC and Israel. That Jewish Americans deserve to live their lives unfettered and unencumbered by discrimination or hate and that we have to fight together to build in America where that antisemitism is stamped out.

DUHAINI: There is the largest Arab-American community here in Michigan, and mostly are from Southern Lebanon. My dad [was] building this dream home for all of us as brothers and sisters, and it vanished, in like, in a couple of seconds. And the soldiers were laughing about demolishing the whole village. As an American citizen, I’m paying taxes for this government to bomb and kill us. For what?

EL-SAYED: I appreciate you lifting your voice, and I’m sorry about your family’s experience. What is happening in southern Lebanon right now is frankly an abomination. I intend to be a voice in the U.S. Senate to consistently advocate for our principles, and that we apply them everywhere and that we apply them consistently.

MADSEN: Do you think that it’s harder to change things so we’re not being proactive anymore? Like, it’s easier just to let things keep going, like Israel AIPAC; is it just the easy way out?

EL-SAYED: I’m threatening a system of power that says, you just go along to get along. The real issue in our politics is not right versus left. It’s not like progressive versus conservative. It’s not Democrat-Republican. It’s people who are locked out of our healthcare, our housing, our economy, versus the people doing the locking out. I just want to always be on the side of the people who are locked out.

In theory, my opponent in this race is Haley Stevens. My real opponent in this race is Chuck Schumer, every corporate PAC, AIPAC. They will run your name in the mud. They will lie about you, they’ll lie about their opponent. It doesn’t matter as long as they maintain a control on power.

MILLER-LEWIS: One of the biggest attacks on El-Sayed right now is that he will lose to Republican Mike Rogers. The Democratic establishment thinks that Stevens ties to the Obama administration and her history as a U.S. Representative since 2018 make her a safer bet.

But recent polls slightly favor El-Sayed’s chances against Rogers.

ELECTABILITY

IZZO: I haven’t decided who I’m gonna vote for for sure. I do think Stevens polls a lot better with like the older demographic who are much more likely to vote. I think Haley would have a better chance to beat [ROGERS].

MILLER-LEWIS: Does that impact how you’re gonna decide to vote?

IZZO: Yes, for sure.

IZZO, TO THE ROUNDTABLE: When it comes to being against Mike Rogers, I want to hear how you can get your message out to people when you are facing these odds of people spending millions and millions of dollars that you don’t necessarily have.

EL-SAYED: You beat Mike Rogers because you build something that embodies the hope and the joy that you want to have for the future. This is a guy who voted to raise prescription drug prices, I don’t know how many times. Then he helped to architect the opioid epidemic. He took $700,000 from the pharma industry.

They’re gonna spend a whole lot of money trying to call me some combination between a communist and a terrorist. And I’m gonna sit out there and be like, ‘yeah, well, he’s corrupt as hell.’

Now I get it. I’m brown, I’m Muslim, I got a name you probably can’t pronounce, right? But I was born and raised here, and I’ve taken the time to, to serve and listen. So I think that’s how we beat him.

FILAR: I do question [El-Sayed’s] ability to win against a Republican. I feel that some of his beliefs turn off a large portion of the population. Listening to his comments that he would like to abolish ice. I have a hard time with that.

[EL-SAYED ANTI-ICE CLIP: I’m Abdul El-Sayed, the only Senate candidate for abolishing ICE, and I approve this message.]

ABOLISH ICE

MILLER-LEWIS: A lot of people in this room, Abolish ICE is one where they are a little bit confused about what it means. Lina, you expressed some questions about what Abdul’s immigration policy looks like.

SAAD: I think we can put ICE to better use to protect our borders and protect Americans. How can we draw that fine line between utilizing this federal agency versus allowing them to go rogue as they’ve done recently?

EL-SAYED: Here’s the thing. So I’ve run government agencies and once they take on a certain culture, it is really hard to change the culture, really, really, really hard. So under Trump, he started to recruit people who specifically came to ICE not to specifically enforce immigration policy, but they’re against immigration.

The whole subtext of this is that Donald Trump sold this fallacy to people where he understood that people were in pain. You’re out of a job, you’re out of a home. You can’t afford your healthcare. And his answer was a simple one: Well, you’re out of a job. It’s ‘cause the immigrant took your job. Out of a home? Immigrants living in your home. Out of healthcare? Immigrants took your healthcare. And so he turned immigrants into the answer to everybody’s problems. And then he built out ICE as a way of demonizing immigration itself.

ICE itself has become a rogue agency based on a premise that is inconsistent with both the Constitution and the ideals of our country. We don’t need it. In fact, we didn’t have it before 2002. America’s a lot older than 2002. So the notion that we can’t protect our southern border, or we can’t enforce immigration policy without ICE, is just not true.

You get rid of the agency, you fire all the people in it, and then you ask yourself, what would you want to build that actually achieved the goals that we have to keep a safe and secure southern border, to create a very clear pathway to citizenship for people, right? And in the cases where you have people who should not be here and do bad things, that you are very targeted in your enforcement, rather than making a show out of enforcing to tell all immigrants that they don’t belong here.

SAAD: That’s very, very enlightening. Thank you.

MADSEN: ‘Cause I think this goes to like ICE and other things that like, our politics are so black and white. How do you change that narrative? ‘Cause we need to recognize each other as like people again.

EL-SAYED: The problem with too many Democrats is it’s too easy to point and say, ‘Trump bad. I’m against Trump. You should vote for me.’ And you’re like, ‘Well, from a policy standpoint, are you really for me?’ You’re taking the money from all the worst people. So, what would happen if we actually built a movement about what could be good?

When we start talking to folks who might have voted for Trump for a whole bunch of different reasons to be like, ‘All right, is your life better now? Do you have better healthcare? Do you have better access to a job? Can you afford a home? If no, here’s an opportunity.’ Let’s focus on that.

Right, so I just really appreciate you guys having this conversation that’s like the lifeblood of what we do in our civics and is really enlightening. Thank you, guys. Appreciate you all.

MILLER-LEWIS: Did Abdul change your mind on any issues?

SAAD: Yeah, definitely on the ICE issue.

FILAR: I think the way that Abdul spoke about Medicare For All as far as it being a plausible and a tangible goal was pretty enlightening and I plan to vote for Abdul.

SELLARS: I think that Abdul did change my mind about what I feel like I can expect from a politician who really believes what they say.

MADSEN: Him taking a stance on something, even if it’s strong and people consider it maybe too strong; I think taking a stance means something.

IZZO: It’s an election. Anybody could lose. Haley Stevens could lose. And I’d rather, you know, vote for somebody who I agree with on their policy points rather than somebody who I just think is against Trump.

I’ve got my mail-in ballot at home. I’m gonna go home and fill it out and mail it in for Abdul El-Sayed

MILLER-LEWIS: The narrative in the media is that El-Sayed’s policies are too radical to win. But with these voters — who largely distrust both parties — his ideas broke through. El-Sayed won’t be able to sit down with every skeptical voter in the state, though. So I asked him what he thinks his path to victory in November looks like.

MILLER-LEWIS, TO EL-SAYED: You talked to a bunch of voters who had voted for Trump, many who identified as Republican for a long time, and they all left the conversation yesterday saying that they’re gonna vote for you.

Are there issues beyond sort of Medicare for all, which is at your core, that you think have the potential to win over disaffected Trump voters in a general election?

EL-SAYED: Corporate monopoly. The corruption of our food system, the role of AI in society, the onslaught of data centers- you think about who’s taking money from these corporations. Unfortunately, it’s Democrats and Republicans.

I always wonder why there’s so much opposition to this in the Democratic Party. I keep coming back to the same answer, which is it’s just laziness. It’s laziness, and it’s this sort of elitism. The laziness part is, ‘Well, if we can’t get money from corporations, then we’re actually gonna have to have a message and go talk about our message anywhere and everywhere.’ I’ve done 450 public events. I challenge my opponent in this race to say how many events she’s done, where she’s actually taking questions. You gotta do the work it turns out.

And then the elitism part is, ‘Well, the corporations are rich, and they throw the fanciest parties, and if I don’t take their money, I’m not gonna be invited to the party.’ I’m like, ‘Fuck your party. Who cares?’ You got the best room on the Titanic and don’t realize that the whole Titanic’s about to go down. I don’t know, man. I really struggle to like, to understand the psychology of it.

MILLER-LEWIS: Yeah. It seems to me that you are interested in something deeper than just winning this election. That it is actually fighting for some sort of change.

EL-SAYED: Losing this primary is not the worst outcome for me. The worst outcome is that I get the job and I fail to deliver. That’s the worst outcome. So I don’t want to fight for the job and, in the process, hamstring myself from doing the work. I don’t want to have been one of those senators that, you know, you had this power, and then you sold out, and then you can’t even account for why you were there.

So right now you’ve got the choice between three candidates, two of us in this primary and then one in the general. There’s only one of us who has never taken money from Blue Cross Blue Shield. Only one of us who doesn’t wanna send your money abroad to drop bombs on other people and wants to keep it here to invest in your kids. There’s only one of us. So which do you pick?

1 in 5 regret their choice to vote for President Donald Trump — now a Democrat could win them back. We sat down with Bobby Pulido and Latino Trump voters. Some voted for him 3x, but they say prices are too high and ICE is out of control.

TRANSCRIPT

NICK VALENCIA, MORE PERFECT UNION: There’s been a lot of talk about … “The Latino Vote.” Every single election in my lifetime, political pundits have spent a lot of time and money trying to analyze the motivations of Latino voters. But we’re going to do something different. We’re going to go out on the ground in the Rio Grande Valley to actually talk to voters.

VALENCIA: 1 in 5 Latino men regret voting for President Trump. That’s you.

EFRAIN GOMEZ JR., BUSINESS OWNER: It’s probably higher than that.

VALENCIA: That’s you. That’s you.

MARIO GUERRERO, BUSINESS OWNER: People are under stress. People are trying to figure out how to put food on the table.

COMMUNITY MEMBERS: The prices of food and the prices of gas and the price of everything keeps going up and up and up and up.

ROBERT DELIR, RETIRED: They’ve seen politicians promise this or that or the other, and they’ve seen politicians turn on those promises. ]

VALENCIA: It’s true that Latinos have shifted dramatically towards Trump in the last two elections. With Latino men, it’s even more dramatic. And, it’s also true that just two years into Trump’s second term, Latino voters could be shifting back again. But, there’s a much deeper story going on that the mainstream media and the leadership of both parties isn’t telling you.

Democrats might be confident they’re winning Latinos back this time but, what happens after this one election if they don’t deliver on their promises? That question might be coming to a head right here in Texas’ 15th district.

The incumbent is Monica De La Cruz, a Republican. Her challenger is new to politics: Bobby Pulido, a Tejano star who retired from his music career to run for office. He’s an unconventional Democrat bringing a shock to the system of South Texas politics.

So what is it about him?

We travelled deep into the conservative heart of the district and sat Pulido down with Latinos who voted for Trump but don’t like what they see. And we watched as Pulido made his pitch to get their vote and give them a convenient pathway into the Democratic Party.

MARIO GUERRERO, BUSINESS OWNER: During the Biden administration, the government just was off, man. It looked weak. It just didn’t look strong, man.

VALENCIA: Mario grew up in the Valley. He runs a construction company. It’s been a family business for years. He voted for Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024.

GUERRERO: Mom was making dinner, and Dad was in the living room watching TV. And one of the shows that I would watch with Dad was The Apprentice. I believe we were conditioned to keep seeing him, right? And there’s a certain group of people that like to see success. I like success, man. I like success, and I like for people to be successful.

ROBERT DELIR, RETIRED: I voted for Trump during his first term

VALENCIA: Robert also lives in the Rio Grande Valley. Like many of his neighbors, up until recently he was a Trump voter.

DELIR: He promised a whole lot of stuff, and I fell for it, you know. ‘Oh, the country is going to get better. He’s going to bring this economy back, and we’re going to be where we need to be.’

VALENCIA: Texas’s 15th district stretches from the Rio Grande Valley up to the suburbs of San Antonio. It is more than 80% Hispanic and predominantly working-class. It moved significantly right in 2020 and 2024, especially amongst Latino men.

Mario and Robert now think differently about Trump’s success.

[TRUMP CLIP: We’re going to win so much, you may even get tired of winning. And you’ll say ‘please, please, it’s too much winning.’]

GUERRERO: Tired of winning would be that the market is stable. Prices and materials for construction are reasonable. People are able to build product and move it out. People are able to give work to the workers that they’ve had. The workers can work without any sort of worry that they can’t even go to the job site because they might be harassed by a state trooper or a police officer here in the city because they’re going to call ICE on them.

[NEWS CLIP: New tonight, experts say ICE is intensifying operations across the country. Sources NBC News almost 10,000 people have been arrested in just five days.}

VALENCIA: How much of what you’ve seen with President Trump’s mass deportation policy has had an impact on you shifting away from the Republican Party?

DELIR: Oh my God.

VALENCIA: A lot?

DELIR: I could not in any good conscience vote or support a Republican candidate.

GUERRERO: We are a border town, and we have people that have been here for 15, 20 years that have been providing a life for their families. And I believe that we need to respect that as a country. And unfortunately, when Mr. Trump started doing what he was doing, I had never seen the level of anxiety that I saw. I had never seen business owners call me at the level where it’s like, ‘We can’t get people to go to work.’

VALENCIA: You had this video that went viral

GUERRERO, ON VIDEO: Mr. Trump, you’re supposed to be our hero, man. But I don’t understand how this makes any sense for anyone.

VALENCIA: Tell me about it.

GUERRERO: It was a cry for help, man. It was a cry for help because I wasn’t seeing our local politicians stressing the amount of impact this is having on our economy — on our builders. And when I wasn’t seeing our politicians, from our mayors to our commissioners, raising awareness that they are picking up people, literally picking them up with proper documentation to be here, why are you our leader?

DELIR: When we’re out on the expressway and we’re out there with our signs protesting and stuff, 95, 96 percent of the response we get from people are positive.

VALENCIA: What would have been like, you know, maybe during Trump 1.0.

DELIR: Oh my gosh.

VALENCIA: Would you even have been out there?

DELIR: No. And I would have laughed at the people that would have gone out there.

VALENCIA: You might be asking yourself, ‘why did these guys vote for Trump if they’re upset about his immigration policy? He was very open about what he wanted to do.’ Well, the flip side is they have a lot of disagreements with Democrats on this issue too.

GUERRERO: The reason I was, you know, inclined to vote for Trump was because during the Biden administration, what we saw was a huge influx of immigrants at our Border. I believe we live in the best country in the world. We have billionaires that could throw rockets into the sky. So why is it that we don’t have a secure border?

VALENCIA: In this political vacuum created by distrust of how both Trump and Democrats have approached the border and the economy, a new political contender has stepped forward.

Last year, Democrat Bobby Pulido launched a campaign for Texas’ 15th Congressional District, taking on Republican incumbent Monica De La Cruz.

Bobby was born and raised in Edinburg, Texas. He rose to fame as a successful Tejano musician before deciding to enter politics.

VALENCIA, TO PULIDO: I would love for you to introduce yourself to people that may not know who you are.

BOBBY PULIDO, CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATE: I spent 30 years singing. But before that, I was a Texas boy stater in high school. I studied political science at Saint Mary’s University. I have been very, very politically engaged, albeit not publicly, this whole time.

VALENCIA: He is now making the case for his candidacy as a Democrat in a Trump-supporting region.

PULIDO: It’s a K-shaped economy. There’s definitely more people falling into poverty than not.

VALENCIA: How do you see that reflected here in the Valley?

PULIDO: People are struggling.

VALENCIA: Businesses closing? Gas prices going up?

PULIDO: Absolutely. Yeah. And we as Democrats have not really talked about the prosperity issue. What are we doing to talk about anything that’s economically related? Nothing.

VALENCIA: To find out whether Bobby’s economic message was connecting with voters who felt abandoned by both political parties, we brought together Bobby, Mario, and several local residents for a roundtable discussion about Pulido’s candidacy and the challenges facing the region.

EFRAIN GOMEZ JR.: So my name is Efrain Gomez Junior. I’m from Donna, Texas, a little small town here in the [Rio Grande Valley]. I’m a construction owner. I’m here as a two-time Trump supporter.

RUBEN RUIZ JR., LAND DEVELOPER: My name is Ruben Ruiz Jr. I’m a land developer, builder also here in the Valley. I’ve been doing this for 24 years now. I am a Republican. I voted Republican for many years.

GUERRERO: My name is Mario Guerrero. I voted for Mr. Trump every time he was on the ballot.

VALENCIA: What are some of the biggest issues that voters are facing here right now?

GOMEZ: My wife is a healthcare professional. Ask me if I have healthcare.

VALENCIA: Do you have healthcare?

GOMEZ: I don’t.

GUERRERO: And they just made a billionaire a trillionaire. They just made that happen. So now Elon’s going to go ahead and buy the rest of Boca Chica.

GOMEZ: Meanwhile, I’m adding water to my soap bottle just to make it last longer.

PULIDO: The Rio Grande Valley was a farming community. The one thing that unites us all is that we come from nothing. And one thing that unites us is we always want our kids to do better than what we’ve done. And right now that’s not happening.

VALENCIA: In 2024, Donald Trump successfully courted working-class Latino voters by prioritizing the economy and border security, but many of those same voters are now starting to feel disillusioned.

VALENCIA, TO PARTICIPANTS: 1 in 5 Latino men regret voting for President Trump.

[GOMEZ, RUIZ, and GUERRERO raise their hands.}

GOMEZ: It’s probably higher than that.

VALENCIA: That’s you, that’s you, that’s you. How did that happen? How did you go from being ardent Trump supporters to now not?

RUIZ: Everything he promised, he forgot about. So, yes, I regret voting for him.

VALENCIA: But this is a conservative place — South Texas.

GOMEZ: We’re conservative, but when you start, like, you start attacking our family, we’re such a tight-knit community that you’re attacking our families.

VALENCIA: As Bobby told us, he’s campaigning on economic issues, and those are cutting through to these voters. But immigration is on top of their minds too. And the way they tell it, the two issues are deeply connected as the ICE crackdowns have had a major economic impact on this district and their businesses.

PULIDO: It’s not only that they’re getting out people that are undocumented, they go and detain people with legal U.S. green cards.

RUIZ: They detain naturalized citizens, okay?. So how can you — I mean, they did the paperwork. They did everything right. Why [are] you detaining them?

GUERRERO: They’re scaring people, bro. That’s the thing. And then because people are scared, they’re afraid to go to the job site.

PULIDO: That’s right, a community that is living in fear and paralyzed is not a community that can function, right? When the thing was getting bad, and they were raiding everybody, work just went to a standstill.

If you’re somebody that’s in that business and you say, man, ‘I got a loan out on this project, and I can’t get it going, I need somebody to, at least a shoulder to cry on or go, hey, let me see what I can do.’ Whatever. The last thing you want is for somebody to ignore you.

VALENCIA: There’s still a little trepidation about whether or not Bobby will go and be the Bobby of the Rio Grande when he goes to Washington, D.C. Do you guys worry about that at all? That he’ll switch up on you?

GUERRERO: Now that we know that we can go to Washington at any time, I’m just going to show up at Bobby’s office like, ‘yo, let’s go have lunch.’ I’m being serious — we’ll bring the Valley to you.

VALENCIA: Pulido’s opponent, incumbent Congresswoman Monica De La Cruz, has represented Texas’ 15th Congressional District since 2023. De La Cruz has attacked Bobby’s past as a Tejano star, saying,

[DE LA CRUZ CLIP: South Texas isn’t just a stop on a comeback tour for me.]

VALENCIA: And for some voters, these attacks are resonating.

VOTER 1: I’m real skeptical of people that pop up out of nowhere.

VALENCIA: And that’s Bobby’s story?

VOTER 1: Yeah, you just popped up out of nowhere. Where’s your public service? Where did you go? What did you do?

VOTER 2: I had never heard of him even considering politics, you know, and for him to now be in the race. Well, you know, I mean…

VALENCIA: Kind of surprising?

VOTER 2: Well, you know, because now it’s not going to be him. It’s going to be all his backing, you know, the people that are actually pulling the strings. They got somebody with a good name. You know, he’s very popular.

VALENCIA: What are the issues that voters here care about that Pulido might be missing, or uninformed on.

VOTER 1: I just think they want him to sing. You know, sing. But I mean, you know, are you going to have the Valley’s best interest in mind?

GUERRERO: The person he’s running against is Monica de La Cruz. Why didn’t they — I’m pretty sure people have said this many times, ‘she should have stuck to signing insurances.’ That’s what she did.

I want a politician to understand who we are, what our community is built off of. There’s not one building in the Valley that has not been touched by an immigrant hand. We need representatives to understand that. And we do have that, except for one.

VALENCIA: Despite broad community concern, Monica De La Cruz has continued to vote for funding increases for ICE and border security. Just last month, she voted to pass the Secure America Act, a bill backed by the Trump administration which allocated nearly $70 billion specifically to ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

PULIDO: My biggest issue with her [DE LA CRUZ] is that she does not understand. There’s so many people that I know that have so many questions and have been calling for a town hall forever. They just have questions. They just want, like, answers. Do something.Like, she’s really, like, absent.

VALENCIA: In March, Monica De La Cruz released a campaign video criticizing Pulido, arguing —

[DE LA CRUZ CLIP: This election isn’t about who you want performing at your niece’s quinceañera.]

VALENCIA: The Pulido campaign capitalized on the remark, and promptly put out an open call for invitations to perform at quinceañeras. They received over 1,000 responses in the first 24 hours. We tagged along with Bobby to several of these quinceañeras to get a firsthand look.

[PULIDO performs at a quinceañera.]

VALENCIA: Why go into politics at a time where people don’t trust politicians at an astronomical percentage?

PULIDO: I don’t blame them.

VALENCIA: You want to change that?

PULIDO: Yes, because — because the thing is like, most politicians go in there and it’s just all about their party loyalty. People want you to put them before your party. Don’t worry about the party, worry about us.

[PULIDO sings at a quinceañera.]

VALENCIA: As my time in Texas ended, I kept going back to what I heard in the roundtable. These guys who voted for Trump were opposed to the current administration’s crackdown, and that’s part of what’s motivating them to vote for Bobby. But, they’re also not solidly Democratic voters now.

RUIZ: We don’t want the chaos anymore. We don’t want chaos, period.

GUERRERO: Well, we have chaos right now, you know what I’m saying? It’s like we went from one extreme to another.

VALENCIA: That means there’s a gap wide open beyond this one candidate. And Democrats should be paying attention to this race, not just because Bobby is an unconventional candidate, but because these voters are wrestling with a tension that neither party has been able to solve.

VALENCIA: Next election, you could be up for grabs again if Pulido doesn’t deliver on his promises or in his word?

GUERRERO: I mean, I think that anyone would be.

By Lucy Dean Stockton, More Perfect Union

The Department of Justice just dismissed a years-long criminal probe investigating potentially life-threatening contamination at an Abbott Laboratories facility, an Illinois-based health care and technology company that donated more than $500,000 to President Donald Trump’s inauguration funds and has extensive financial connections to one of Trump’s top cabinet members.

The DOJ this week confirmed that it had dismissed its investigation into potential negligence from Abbott Laboratories, which manufactures popular formula brand Similac, over ​its mismanagement of a baby formula production facility that potentially endangered infants’ lives — and may be connected to two infant deaths.

The probe, which began under the Biden administration, followed an incident in which regulators discovered potentially deadly bacteria on equipment in the facility in February 2022. The facility resumed production in June of that year, but tight industry concentration strained the baby formula market, contributing to a national shortage in 2022, which forced families to seek assistance from food banks, friends and doctor’s offices.

According to reporting from The Wall Street Journal, some DOJ prosecutors believed they had evidence to criminally charge the company, but the agency’s top decision-makers closed the probe instead, now opting to pursue financial clawbacks and civil penalties.

Abbott faced another legal battle in January 2023, when Biden’s Federal Trade Commission began formally investigating the company for collusion in the baby formula market. The agency alleged that Abbott may have colluded in bidding for contracts with the USDA’s Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) food assistance program. The company is also facing legal penalties of nearly $500 million in a Missouri lawsuit related to its formula for premature infants.

Abbott previously won a $750 million federal contract in 2020 to deliver 150 million COVID-19 rapid test kits, and won another under Biden. In his first term, Trump’s administration also fought on behalf of the baby formula industry, arguing against international resolutions that would have limited companies’ ability to advertise and sell baby formula abroad, threatening Abbott’s part in a $70 billion global industry. Last May, Trump publicly celebrated Abbott’s $500 million investment in its Illinois and Texas manufacturing facilities as a step towards reviving American drug manufacturing.

In the 2024 election, Abbott’s former CEO Miles White — who stepped down from the company in 2021 after a 38-year tenure — chaired former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum’s presidential campaign. White, Abbott employees and their families gave $4 million in donations to the Best Of America PAC, which was created to support Burgum’s presidential run. Of that, White gave at least $2 million. In February 2025, Burgum was confirmed as Trump’s Secretary of the Interior.

Abbott also donated at least $35,000 to Trump’s inaugural event in 2016, and White publicly expressed he was “optimistic” about Trump’s presidency.

No unopened, distributed Abbott baby formula products have ​tested positive for the bacteria that sickened the babies, an Abbott spokesperson told More Perfect Union in an email. Abbott declined to comment on the company’s political donations.

We brought AOC to deep red Georgia to talk data centers. What we found: a data center rebellion, with people willing to radically shift their politics. One conservative voter said: “If there’s a chance that anything can be done, I feel like she’s gonna be the one to do it.”

TRANSCRIPT:

TINA SHEPHERD: When the blasting started, it went on a couple of months. My sister-in-law’s ceiling came crashing down.

PATRICIA SHEPHERD: Nobody from Amazon has bothered to say one word. It was three blasts a day, seven days a week, for months.

REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: This is unbelievable.

DAN LIEBERMAN VOICEOVER: What happens when you take Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the heart of the data center revolt?

AOC: And they’re just trying to say that no one should cover this?

PATRICIA: Yes. And I’m sorry, but I’m on a Social Security check. I can’t afford to do that.

AOC: You didn’t blow up your ceiling!

PATRICIA: No, I didn’t.

DAN VO: We wanted to know how voters who feel politically homeless …

DAN: Raise your hand if your electricity bill has gone up and your water bill is gone up.

DAN VO: … from the Black suburbs of Atlanta…

AOC: Are the local politicians supportive?

PAMELA FELDER: No!

DAN VO: ...to conservative rural communities …

SARAH KING: This is not a party issue. This is a people issue.

AOC: That’s right.

SARAH: So it doesn’t matter what party you are, it’s wrong.

DAN VO: … how are voters going to respond to a democratic socialist from New York?

AOC: People want to call me “woke”? Whatever. This is about power.

DAN VO: With the Trump administration pushing for more data centers...

TRUMP: The AI race is a big deal... the construction of colossal data centers... we have to get this built.

DAN VO: ...where does that leave regular people like Beverly Morris?

BEVERLY MORRIS: I feel trapped because I have no way out.

DAN VO: How is the backlash against a data center boom the key to unlocking America’s politics?

AOC: We’ve never been more polarized. I just think we got to show up in these places and see these things for ourselves.

DAN: Well, do you want to show us there’s been some damage to your house?

PAMELA: Of course. Yeah, sure, come on in.

DAN VO: Pamela Felder purchased her dream home three years ago.

PAMELA: So the first time of shifting I saw was the crack in my porch, all the way across.

AOC: Right here, wow.

DAN VO: All was well until explosive blasts started to shake her home earlier this year.

PAMELA: It sounded like someone picked up my house and went boom. A week after that, that’s when I started seeing cracks all throughout my house. And I found out they’re putting a data center in my backyard.

DAN VO: The two-million-square-foot hyperscale data center is being built less than a mile from Pamela’s home.

PAMELA: You can still see where the paint is ripped all the way up my stairs. I noticed the ceiling — the crack crossed there.

AOC: My dad worked in construction. So if I look like I’m really sticking my nose in here it’s because I’m taking a real look.

AOC: And your neighbors are experiencing the same thing.

PAMELA: We’re all sending letters out to the blasting company.

AOC: And what are they saying when they deny it?

PAMELA: They say my house was settling.

AOC: Oh, so everyone here is settling at the same time?

PAMELA: At the same time.

DAN VO: Pamela’s neighbor also came by and insisted we see a giant sinkhole she said was caused by the blasts.

JANET ROBINSON: Makes you want to cry. That no one’s listening. Why a data center? Why now? Why here?

DAN VO: Unprecedented amounts of money are behind the race to build. Meta is investing $600 billion in data center infrastructure through 2028. OpenAI has pledged over $400 billion. Even the real estate company responsible for this site just closed a $3.25 billion funding round.

AOC: If these tech folks love these data centers so much, put it in your backyard.

PAMELA: That’s right. Put it away from people’s homes.

AOC: This is why we’re saying we need to slow the roll on this — because they’re moving fast. We’re just saying pause it so that we can move forward in a more just way.

PAMELA: That’s right.

AOC: And a fair way for everybody.

DAN VO: But far from the Black suburbs of Atlanta is much Trumpier country, and the idea of AOC isn’t as enthusiastically received.

ROBERT LYTTEN: There’s some really extreme liberal views out there.

DAN VO: Before they met her, I asked folks what they knew about AOC’s politics.

ROBERT: Just from an overall view, very fringe left.

SARAH: I’m probably a lot more conservative than she is.

DAN: How are your politics evolving?

CONNIE LYTTEN: They’re evolving!

BEVERLY: I’m not real impressed with the politics on either side.

DAN VO: We first met Beverly Morris and her husband Jeff last year, when they showed us how the construction of a 2.5-million-square-foot Meta data center is contaminating their drinking water, a charge which Meta denies.

BEVERLY: This is my cold water pressure in the kitchen.

DAN: You can see the sediment from the data center.

BEVERLY: And this is what’s in all of the pipes, too. They should be responsible for that, not us.

DAN: When we were here last year with them, Meta was still building this data center. Now it’s operational.

BEVERLY: I worry about using the water for everything. I don’t use the water for cooking anymore. I did for a while, you know, I thought, you know, I’ve got to use it. I wouldn’t drink it. I haven’t drank the water here in years.

AOC: This is my view but it should be a right for you to be able to turn on your tap and drink what comes out of it.

DAN VO: The Morrises aren’t alone. Other residents also came to us with stories of their contaminated water.

LINDSEY WILSON: This is the sediment it’s picking up. The cold water pressure everywhere is pretty bad. You cannot take a shower and wash dishes, or take a shower and fill up the horse’s water.

CHRIS WILSON: Our refrigerator broke. Our HVAC broke. We have issues with the pool. Anything that’s water-related, we have issues with. This is the filter from the filtration system after we pull it out.

AOC: And you used to change those filters once a year, or?

CHRIS: Yeah.

LINDSAY: Typical people are probably six months to a year.

AOC: And now you’re doing it once a month?

LINDSEY: Yes.

AOC: And now you feel stuck, right? You feel like — even if you wanted to leave, you can’t?

LINDSEY: Not and be able to get the value that we put into our home.

DAN: Let’s keep going down the line. Connie?

CONNIE: Our fight is in Coweta County. We just had a large parcel of land rezoned for a data center, but we don’t know who it is yet that’s coming.

TINA: And I’m Tina. I live in Oxford, Georgia. It’s the Amazon data center.

SARAH: We’re not just fighting Facebook or Amazon or any of these data centers. That’s not who we’re fighting. We’re fighting the entire institution that allows it.

AOC: They think people aren’t paying attention. This is usually what happens. They’ll go sniffing around. I say it’s like they’re jiggling every door handle to see what county they can push these things through on.

SARAH: It is necessary. I understand the need for all of this. But the manner in which they’re going about it is not only wrong, it doesn’t even make sense.

CONNIE: I don’t blame Amazon. I don’t blame those businesses. I blame our government. That’s who is supposed to be taking care of us. My commissioner should’ve been looking after our community. Our governor should be looking after our state. Like, it goes up. A business is a business. It’s about making money. They don’t care what they’re doing to people. That’s a shame.

AOC: That’s the way it is.

SARAH: We appreciate you taking the time to come here, because until someone from the national level gets really serious about it, nothing’s going to happen.

AOC: We should be starting congressional investigations on the effect of these, and figuring out with precision how we protect our water supplies, how we protect your power bills and water bills, and keep people from getting sick.

DAN VO: Fifty miles away from the Morrises, a group of residents successfully pushed for a moratorium on a 95-acre data center project.

TERRENCE BROOKS: And wait a minute, where do I know you from?

AOC: I’m a congresswoman from New York.

TERRENCE: Oh! Come here. Yeah, you’re my girl.

CAROLE HUTCHERSON: We organized because we know what we want in our community. And they did not anticipate when they had the board of commissioners meeting that hundreds us were going to show up. And they couldn’t deny us. They had to stop and say, wait a minute.

DAN VO: Across the country, more than 50 local data center moratoriums have already been enacted, with dozens more proposed or under consideration across the U.S. But this patchwork approach has left a lot of communities vulnerable.

ALAINA REAVES: We’re in a neighborhood that’s in unincorporated Clayton County. But just over the fence line is the city limits of Forest Park, and that is where the facility is being built.

AOC: Wow, okay. So the county has a moratorium, but the city does not?

ALAINA: Correct.

AOC: Wow. And so ethe city, even though the city’s inside the county, it’s not covered?

ALAINA: Correct.

AOC: Talk about a loophole.

DAN VO: For now, the local fight continues.

CAROL: The community has said we want walkability in our neighborhoods, we want clean air, we want clean water. But we have to keep fighting. It’s like a continual fight. It’s like we’re surrounded by piranhas, you know, that just keep trying to pick at us, but we just kep fighting.

DAN VO: In March 2026, AOC and Senator Bernie Sanders introduced legislation at the federal level called the AI Data Center Moratorium Act — both a response to growing opposition to these facilities and a push to establish a nationwide policy about their construction.

AOC: Our responsibility is to take care of people. And that is what we’re here to do today.

ROUNDTABLE PARTICIPANT: What you’re proposing is a national moratorium?

AOC: It’s not the same thing as an outright ban, but it’s saying we need to meet some basic protections for people. We need some guarantees on your water, on the air that you breathe. We need to make sure that the jobs that are wiped out, that there’s a plan for that and we’re not just leaving people, you know, out to try. And we need to just have some really basic common sense protections for people.

DAN VO: The bill would require a building moratorium until the federal government passes laws mitigating job losses, preventing utility rate hikes, and establishing environmental protections, among other things. The question is whether this is enough to persuade conservative voters to support someone far across the political aisle.

DAN: Do you think the people here could get behind someone like AOC and her ideas for AI and data centers?

SARAH: I think they would get behind anyone who was going to fight for their right to clean water and to live their life without dealing with this.

AOC: Now tide on this is starting to turn. The politics on this, because everyday people are starting to catch on to what’s going on.

ROBERT: She may be on the left, but on the data center issue she seems more centered and genuinely concerned about people. And that’s refreshing to hear.

DAN: How do you wrap your head around addressing this at the national level?

AOC: We need to put people first. And we need those protections to be ironclad and guaranteed before we can have a conversation about what does and doesn’t get constructed.

DAN: Do you think that this is an issue that could maybe pull our country together?

CONNIE: I don’t know if it’s going to pull our government all together. It’s pulling the people together.

BEVERLY: If there is a chance that anything can be done, I feel like she is going to be the one to do it.

DAN VO: Days later, AOC showed Beverly’s water samples to an EPA water official testifying before her committee.

AOC: I have a jar right here. The only difference between the clean water and this was that data center. I have another one as well. This is what the drinking water now looks like next to that data center. And I think both of us can agree that neither one of these things are drinkable.

JESSICA KRAMER, Assistant Administrator, EPA Water: As soon as I get back to the office, I will be looking into exactly what you’ve just talked about. Because anywhere, whatever type of construction it is, it is a priority to ensure that water quality standards established by the EPA are being met.

DAN: There are a lot of people with a lot of money who don’t want to see this thing slow down. They’re like, ‘The train is moving fast, we can’t afford to stop, doesn’t matter, we’ll figure it out later.

AOC: I’ve been in a lot of political fights that have seemed insurmountable before that we’ve won. I just don’t believe in impossible. If you think something’s impossible, that’s an imagination problem.

Here’s how it starts.

The checkout clerk will offer you 10% off your purchase in order to join the store’s free loyalty program.

Or the airline says you can accrue miles or points on your flight, all in exchange for your personal information like email address, phone number, and consent for the company to build a profile on you. It’s designed to feel irresistible, but really, it’s like a Trojan horse. Once inside, the company can experiment with rewards, segment customers by willingness to pay, and steadily ratchet up data extraction.

A Consumer Reports investigation revealed that Kroger collects such vast amounts of data that it builds profiles of its customers, including income, gender, household size, and education level — and it sells that data to tobacco firms, financial companies, and data brokers. Home Depot captures internet activity, including browsing history and in-store Wi-Fi usage. Macy’s tracks customers’ license numbers, search history, and even ethnic origin and sells it to data brokers.

It’s all part of an emerging industry: how to hack your brain. Because companies invest a lot in these programs, they expect a big return on their investment. They’re increasingly charging for the privilege to participate in these loyalty programs. A big strategy? Take something that customers took for granted, like ad-free videos or lounge access, and then gussy it up like it’s a premium perk. Or simply, steadily raise the price of membership over time. And they’ll degrade the program too — devaluing points, limiting redemption options, and curtailing benefits. Meanwhile, companies make loyalty programs hard to leave, or sticky. In other words, coerced loyalty.

By now you’re fully caught in the company’s trap, which means that they flip the bargain, making you — the customer in the loyalty program — pay more than you would’ve outside of it. The result is a wholesale transfer of wealth from consumers to corporations.

How do we stop it? I called up Stephanie Nguyen, who wrote the report exposing the scheme, to find out.

Stephanie Nguyen: States have passed laws to protect privacy and stop predators, but many carve out loyalty programs from those protections. That loophole needs to be closed. That means real discounts, transparent terms, and limited data collection. States can act now to protect loyalty programs and stop surveillance pricing.

By Lucy Dean Stockton, More Perfect Union

President Donald Trump recently said, on camera, “I don’t want to drive housing prices down. I want to drive housing prices up for people who own their homes.” And he’s getting his wish.

As the Iran War threatens the global economy, one of the United States’ biggest economic pain points could soon get even worse: the nation’s housing crisis. The newly-released Producer Price Index data from the Federal Reserve revealed that the average cost for raw and intermediary goods tracked within the nation’s supply chain had increased more than 6 percent since April 2025, with many products making huge price leaps in the last two months. Between tariffs and the higher gas prices caused by the Iran War, some of these numbers have jumped by nearly 50 percent.

Such significant price jumps have already been measured in the Consumer Price Index — a similar metric which tracks the price of consumer goods — which shows an increase of 3.8 percent since this time last year. Consumers are already feeling these effects: Housing costs are already up more than 3 percent since last year, food is up about 3 percent, airline fares have risen nearly 21 percent. New polling from Gallup shows that Americans’ confidence in the economy is its lowest since 2022 — 49 percent of Americans rank the economy as “poor.”

The effects of higher Producer Price Index numbers, meanwhile, will be felt further down the line, for every industry – including construction, which experts predict could have dire consequences for housing costs.

Concrete, used for foundations, is up just 3 percent. But the average cost of delivering that concrete is up 20 percent. Iron and steel prices are up 4.5 percent. Copper, used for wiring and electricity is up 26 percent. Softwood lumber for plywood is up 12 percent since last year, though that’s because Trump more than doubled tariffs on Canadian lumber. Asphalt, used for driveways and roofing, were up 29 percent this month. And diesel fuel, which is used to manufacture and deliver everything, shot up 12 percent this month after a 42 percent increase last month.

The increased cost of raw and intermediary construction materials means it’s more expensive to build housing, discouraging new construction and putting projects on pause. Ken Simonson, a building trade economist with Associated General Contractors of America, which represents general contractors across the construction industry, told More Perfect Union that “the implications are dire for construction.” Simonson explained that the economic shocks of the war and tariffs are “a slow-moving issue even though the price increases are happening rapidly.” And they will likely get far worse.

“Projects will be canceled or at least deferred in the hope that prices come back down,” Simonson said.

Ultimately, the squeeze on construction materials could push housing costs even higher. Though estimates vary, experts suggest that the United States could require anywhere from 3.7 million to 5.5 million more houses to fill the housing supply gap. If those houses aren’t built, it could raise prices even higher for existing homes, which are already out of reach for 70 percent of Americans who want to own homes but cannot afford to.

A continued supply shortage of houses will likely keep people renting for longer and increase competition for a tight rental market, trends which are already squeezing Americans’ budgets.

President Donald Trump’s executive orders on election administration would create significant — and in many cases, insurmountable — barriers for working- and middle- class Americans to voting, according to a new poll from More Perfect Union and Blue Rose Research.

In his second term, Trump has taken aggressive steps to attempt to restrict voting. In March 2025, he signed an executive order to require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. A more recent executive order would create a national database of voters and instruct the USPS to limit who receives mail-in ballots. (The March 2025 executive order was blocked in August, while litigation has been filed in response to the executive order pertaining to mail-in voting.)

Trump also continues to demand that Congress pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, a bill that would radically limit voter registration and which experts say would be the most restrictive federal voting legislation in history.

The poll, which surveyed 3,129 registered voters between April 16 and April 27, found that the proof of citizenship requirements pushed by Trump set a bar for voter registration that most voters would struggle to meet. Just 26% of voters said that they have an up-to-date passport, while nearly a third of voters (32%) said that requiring a passport to register would make it more difficult or prevent them from voting.

Nearly half of voters (46%) said that the $130 fee to purchase a new passport would be a financial burden. Two-thirds of lower-income voters said the $130 cost would be a barrier and nearly half (47%) reported it would prevent or deter them from registering and voting altogether. Among middle-income voters, just over half (53%) said that the price would cause them issues, including just over a third (36%) who said it would make them less likely or unable to vote.

More than a third (35%) of high-income voters also said the $130 fee might cause them problems, including 25% who would be less likely or unable to vote.

The results show that voters with less education would be more affected by the additional restrictions. More than half (53%) of non-college voters would have trouble with the cost and nearly 4 in 10 (39%) would be less likely or unable to vote. Among college- educated voters: 37% would have some difficulty with the $130 cost. Additionally, 25% of college-educated voters would be less likely to vote (9%) or unable to vote (16%).

Awareness of these proposed executive orders increases with income: 57% of lower-income voters were aware of the order, whereas 65% of upper-income voters had heard about them.

There is also a stark partisan divide when it comes to awareness about Trump’s actions on voting: 34% of Kamala Harris voters said they’d heard a lot about the executive orders, whereas just 23% of Trump voters said the same.

Opinions about the two orders, along with the SAVE Act, are more uniform: nearly half of both lower and upper-income voters (48% and 49% respectively) believe it would have a negative impact, compared to just over a third (35% and 38%) who foresee positive results.

By Lucy Dean Stockton, More Perfect Union

In recent years, the Pentagon has welcomed new contracting processes that pad military contractors’ profits — a trend that is now being turbocharged under President Donald Trump, and the military-industrial complex is thrilled.

Typically, when the government buys a product or service, it uses competitive contracts to ensure that taxpayers get a fair price. But in the last few decades, the Department of Defense — with the blessing of bipartisan lawmakers — has embraced alternative processes that let contractors circumvent many of the mandated regulations governing Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) contracts, like accounting standards, cost negotiations, and intellectual property rights limitations. This means that some agencies have been empowered to negotiate terms that look closer to normal business contracts, but often offer a worse deal for U.S. taxpayers.

“The Pentagon is increasingly relying on rapid acquisition pathways that subvert competition to acquire weapons,” Julia Gledhill, a research analyst at the Stimson Center, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit focused on global peace, told More Perfect Union. “Legislators have totally kneecapped the Pentagon’s ability to negotiate contracts with military contractors, meaning that both the military and taxpayers are being fleeced by these companies.”

These alternative contracting mechanisms, including “non-traditional contracting” and “Other Transaction Authority” (OTA) procurement, have vastly expanded over the last decade within agencies like the DOD and the Department of Homeland Security. This has corrupted a process that was originally designed to produce narrow contracts for innovative products into a major acquisition vehicle for basic procurement from well-established military contractors as well.

In 2025, these kinds of OTA contracts amounted to more than $18 billion in government spending. Across the board, it means that prototyping agreements have become much more common and expensive than basic procurement agreements.

“ The OTA is an existing vehicle that, if they expand it, it helps speed the money out the door.” Bill Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told More Perfect Union. “It’s less record keeping, less scrutiny, and it’s the perfect vehicle for lining the pockets of both the old and the new contractors.”

In April 2025, Trump signaled that he would accelerate the shift towards rapid acquisition processes through an executive order to overhaul the DOD’s procurement process. The order specifically requested that the new processes “expedite acquisitions…including a first preference for commercial solutions and a general preference for Other Transactions Authority.”

And the military-industrial complex is loving it. On an April 23 earnings call, Lockheed Martin President Jim Taiclet called the Iran War and the Trump administration’s focus on “agility” in military contracting, “a golden opportunity right now based on who’s in government, their experience, their willingness to change the demand that they have for what we do and our partners in our industry do.”

“We can move the contracting system from this FAR cost — Federal Acquisition Regulation -based, cost-based Truth [in] Negotiation Act burden that we’ve all had — and move it more towards a commercial contracting system,” Taiclet told investors. Venture-backed investors, he said, “are helping us and the government get out of our traditions and into a more agile contracting scenario.”

Lockheed Martin has won nearly $50 billion in government contracts since 2008, more than 97 percent of which were with the Department of Defense. The last quarter of 2025 represented their biggest season of contracts ever. In 2024, they were the fourth-highest awarded OTA contract recipient with the Defense Department, just behind peer weapons manufacturer Northrop Grumman.

Last year, Lockheed Martin spent more than $15 million lobbying lawmakers, including on “acquisition policy,” among other issues.

Lockheed Martin did not respond to More Perfect Union’s request for comment.

Northrop Grumman executives echoed the excitement about the expansion of OTAs. On an April 22 earnings call, Northrop Grumman President Kathy Warden told investors that the company is “seeing more use of OTAs and other nontraditional contracting mechanisms.”

These contracts have been lucrative for the defense company and its subsidiaries, which won nearly $7 billion in total Defense Department contracts in 2025.

“I don’t see a desire by the department to push industry profitability down,” Warden told shareholders. “I see a real alignment here and an opportunity for us to work with the department to create better economics for industry and the government.”

Northrop Grumman spent more than $8 million lobbying on acquisition policy, including specific lobbying on Streamlining Procurement for Effective Execution and Delivery Act of 2025, which expands the use of OTAs in military procurement.

Northrop Grumman did not respond to a request for comment.

Other military contractors, like L3Harris Technologies, an American defense technology company, echoed this sentiment.

“I have to give the Department of War credit for their innovative approach to acquisition here,” L3Harris Technologies Chairman Christopher Kubasik told investors on an April 30 earnings call. “What is going on now has never been done in the history of our country, and they are going fast. We and the rest of the defense industrial base are keeping up with them to the best of our ability. I think it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

L3Harris Technologies won $318 million in OTA contracts last year, the 6th highest of any military contractor. They were awarded $7.6 billion in total government contracts last year.

Defense contractors’ profit margins already far outpace most other industries by as much as four times. While typical commercial industry profits sit around 6 percent, many military contractors see profits of at least 15 percent, paid almost entirely by U.S. taxpayers. Military contractors have received more than half of all Pentagon spending since 2020. And as the industry has grown more consolidated, the remaining companies are exercising even more power over the Pentagon.

The defense industry spends tens of millions of dollars lobbying the government each year. In 2025, the industry collectively spent a record-breaking $198 million to influence lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

Last year, the Pentagon failed its financial audit for the eighth consecutive year, after auditors found significant accounting errors, missing information, and billions of dollars unaccounted for. It remains the only major U.S. federal agency that has never passed an audit.

“We’re experiencing one of the biggest military spending buildups in American history,” Gledhill said. “So you can imagine that a combination of a $1.5 trillion military budget and a less competitive, less accountable weapons acquisition process is really the perfect recipe for fleecing the American people in the name of weapons production and procurement.”

The use of OTAs may also become particularly useful for the DOD as it launches Trump’s Golden Dome Project, which the Congressional Budget Office estimated this week could cost up to $1.2 trillion over 20 years. The project, which is heavily reliant on satellites, would likely benefit from Trump’s Dec. 18, 2025 outer space-focused executive order in which he urged agencies to act with “a first preference for commercial solutions and a general preference for Other Transactions Authority or Space Act Agreements” to promote streamlined acquisitions.

By Lucy Dean Stockton, More Perfect Union

President Trump has claimed many times that his mass deportation efforts will boost economic prospects for America’s working class. But the Department of Homeland Security’s recent spending spree on Immigration and Customs Enforcement warehouses may actually be padding the margins of some of the world’s largest financial institutions at the expense of taxpayers, according to financial records viewed by More Perfect Union.

DHS, which oversees ICE, has sought to acquire $38 billion worth of warehouses around the country to expand immigrant detention to hold more than 92,000 people. Records show that the federal government has already spent $1 billion so far this year to acquire dozens of warehouses, although newly-appointed DHS Secretary and former Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) has temporarily paused these deals and signaled that the agency will review the purchases.

Data compiled by the activist group Project Salt Box demonstrates that some of these purchases were made at many times their estimated market valuation, and that the sales involve some of the world’s largest investors.

“In several of the ICE warehouse purchases Project Salt Box reviewed through property records, financing documents and lien filings, the properties were owned by institutional real estate funds and financed with bank debt, and when the federal government purchased the properties, those sales coincided with loans being paid off and liens being released,” said Michael Wriston, a researcher at Project Salt Box.

In other words, some of these warehouse sales are effectively acting as a vehicle for these institutions to sell off otherwise distressed assets and profit from taxpayer-funded investment.

Examples of overpayment for these warehouses are numerous. In Social Circle, Georgia, DHS paid almost $129 million for a property previously valued at $29 million, a 333 percent overpayment. In Surprise, Arizona, a warehouse previously valued at nearly $12 million in 2023 was purchased for $70 million, a nearly 500 percent markup. And in Socorro, Texas, a property previously valued at $11 million sold for $123 million, a 1000 percent increase.

One warehouse that DHS acquired in Tremont, Pennsylvania was formerly a Big Lots distribution center that sat empty after the company went bankrupt in 2024. Its ownership was transferred to a subsidiary of a real estate fund managed by investment firm Blue Owl Capital, a major New York City-based private equity group, and was sold to DHS for $119 million, at double its estimated market value.

Blue Owl Capital, which manages an estimated $157 billion in assets, is heavily invested in artificial intelligence, software, and financial services. Its owners heavily donated last election cycle to Republican congressional groups, and one of its directors, Edward D’Alelio, previously served on the board of Trump Entertainment Resorts.

The Tremont warehouse is not Blue Owl’s first foray into ICE contracting. Through their real estate subsidiary, the private equity group owns a parcel of warehouses, including one in Durant, Oklahoma, that was recently the subject of sustained local opposition against ICE from Oklahoma City residents. That warehouse was ultimately bought by the Choctaw Nation in subversion of DHS’s planned purchase.

At least 33 members of the Trump administration reported investing in Blue Owl’s various private equity funds, including President Donald Trump — who holds more than $5 million in investments — and John Russell McGranahan, who previously served as general counsel at the General Services Administration until November 2025, the agency that typically brokers these types of government real estate deals.

Blue Owl did not respond to a request for comment.

Another proposed facility in Williamsport, Maryland, a rural county in the Western part of the state, would convert a long-vacant warehouse into a 1,500-bed ICE detention center. The warehouse had served as a series of failed food processing and industrial facilities and was most recently owned by Fundrise, a direct-access alternative asset manager that allows investors to buy a portion of a property. But the facility never took off, and its owners consistently considered its continued vacancy a liability on their financial disclosures filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. In late 2025, Goldman Sachs intervened by refinancing the property as part of a $352 million loan, just months before the property was sold to the Department of Homeland Security.

Goldman Sachs was also the former majority owner of a 470,000-square-foot vacant industrial warehouse in Roxbury, New Jersey, that was purchased by ICE in February for $129.3 million — 137 percent over value, according to Project Salt Box.

Goldman Sachs has had close ties to Trump, particularly in his first term. This includes Gary David Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs, who served as the National Economic Council Director and Steve Mnuchin, former Goldman Sachs Chief Information Officer, who served as the Treasury Secretary. Former Goldman Sachs employees have also been appointed to Trump’s cabinet in his second term and advised on his transition.

“As a lender, we are not involved in the operations and management of the portfolios of assets we lend to. Those decisions are made by the owners of those assets,” a Goldman Sachs representative told More Perfect Union. “We are also not involved with the sales process of individual assets and would not share in the profit of an asset’s sale if there were one.”

Another new 10,000-bed warehouse project in Salt Lake City, Utah, has received significant pushback from the city’s mayor for its proposed water use as the mountain city faces down a historic drought. Before that facility was purchased by DHS on March 11 for $145 million — more than 50 percent over its estimated market valuation — the warehouse belonged to Deutsche Bank through a series of subsidiaries.

Germany-based Deutsche Bank has conducted extensive business with the Trump family, loaning him a cumulative estimated $2.5 billion over the past two decades, and continuing to make loans to him even after he sued them for a loan he defaulted on. The institution has also come under scrutiny for its ties to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who held around 40 accounts with the multinational bank.

In effect, a Deutsche Bank subsidiary may be pocketing nearly $50 million in extra taxpayer cash. Deutsche Bank declined to comment for this story.

On March 30, 54 Congressional Democrats launched an investigation into the government contractors, real estate brokers, and property owners potentially profiting from the fast-tracked expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s massive new warehouse detention facilities. They noted the secretive, rushed deals, and staggering overpayments for warehouses far beyond their market valuation.

In their letter, lawmakers also identified multiple conflicts of interest between Trump’s cabinet and ICE’s private contractors, an abuse of the defense-focused contracting system used to acquire these facilities, and inappropriate non-disclosure agreements signed with local officials.

Public records obtained from state agencies show that some of the most profitable and powerful companies in the U.S. are also among the largest employers of workers who rely on food assistance.

In state after state, data received by More Perfect Union through open records requests list giant retailers and gig-economy companies among those with the most workers enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), giving a window into how taxpayer-funded public assistance is being used as de facto wage subsidies for some of the wealthiest American corporations.

We requested data from all 50 states, and after nearly two months of correspondence received information from four: Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, and Washington. An additional state, Massachusetts, released similar information to the Boston Globe last year, and is also analyzed in this report. Most of the other states either flatly rejected our requests or said they did not maintain such records, while Texas referred the request to its attorney general, and Utah requested a fee of $5,652 for the data.

In each of the states for which we have data, two companies are among the top four employers of SNAP recipients: Amazon and Walmart. Ranked by revenue, Amazon and Walmart are also the two largest companies in the world.

Amazon’s reliance on public subsidies for its underpaid labor force has been well known for years. In 2023, researchers at the University of Illinois conducted a survey of Amazon warehouse workers across 42 states and found that 33% of those surveyed had used public assistance programs in the previous three months, including 23% who had used SNAP. Eighty-nine percent of the survey respondents said they work at least 30 hours per week, the threshold used by the Internal Revenue Service for determining if someone is considered a full-time worker.

Walmart not only relies on SNAP to make up for its low wages, but it also benefits more than any other company from people using food stamps to buy their groceries. According to a Numerator survey covering the 12 months ending July 31, 2025, Walmart is the largest retailer for SNAP benefit redemption in the U.S., receiving 25.8% of all SNAP dollars.

Other companies that frequently appear at the top of the state lists include McDonald’s, DoorDash, Uber, Dollar Tree, and Dollar General. The dollar stores accept SNAP, so are double-dipping in the same way as Walmart. DoorDash and Uber have fought efforts to reclassify their workers as employees through aggressive lobbying and political spending, most notably spending tens of millions of dollars each in 2020 to pass a California ballot proposition that exempted app-based drivers from a recently enacted state law designed to grant them employee status and minimum wage protections.

Here’s what we heard back from the states that responded:

In Colorado, self-employed workers make up the largest portion of SNAP recipients, followed by Amazon, Walmart, and several of the other companies that frequent the top state lists. The Denver-based grocery chain King Soopers is also near the top of the list, with more than a thousand employees in the state on food stamps.

The data we received from Illinois is current as of Jan. 30, 2026 and shows that the home health care company Help at Home tops the list with more than 5,000 employees on SNAP, followed by Walmart with about 4,500.

In Michigan, the top employers of SNAP participants are Walmart, supermarket chain Meijer, Amazon, and McDonald’s. Close behind them is the Michigan-based Corewell Health.

In Washington, where the state minimum wage is the highest in the country, supermarket chain Safeway tops the list of employers with SNAP recipients in their workforce, followed by home health care intermediary Public Partnerships and temporary staffing company Express Employment.

Massachusetts did not respond to our public records request, but the Boston Globe obtained data from the state earlier this year and found that, beyond the usual suspects, other top SNAP beneficiary employers include grocery store Stop & Shop, social services organization Tempus Unlimited, and non-profit healthcare company Mass General Brigham.

Watch More Perfect Union’s video reporting on this issue here.

Across the country, Americans have noticed decreasing food quality at countless restaurants. The culprit? One giant corporation that’s taking over the food distribution industry.

Market power in the food production industry is being concentrated among fewer and fewer distributors. One of the largest players in the industry, Sysco, has long been developing an outsized share of the market since forming in 1969, when nine regional food distributors merged together. According to experts, the company has since followed a playbook of relentless acquisitions and exploitative business practices to acquire over 150 companies.

“The scary thing about Sysco was it didn’t become this giant through organic growth, but instead it became a giant through relentless acquisitions that went unchecked,” Austin Frerick, an expert in agricultural and antitrust policy, told More Perfect Union.

As Sysco’s market power has increased, so has its leverage over regional buyers and workers. Sysco has allegedly used its consolidated buying power to pressure producers into accepting the lowest rates possible and to chip away at regulations. During COVID, for example, Sysco passed inflation on to its customers, while increasing its earnings to the tune of 159 percent.

“Sysco’s continuously lobbying year after year to deregulate the trucking industry,” Frerick said. “And what we’ve seen since the 1980s is trucking wages are down nearly 40 percent.”

To achieve its cost-cutting measures, Sysco has repeatedly partnered with producers that have some of the most exploitative production models in the food industry. According to an investigation from Outlaw Ocean Project, Sysco previously partnered with Chinese companies that have been accused of using forced Uyghur and North Korean labor. The company also sources its berries from Driscoll, which has been accused of widespread wage theft. Sysco sources much of its meat from Tyson, which has been accused of child labor violations and animal cruelty and recently agreed to an $85 million settlement after it was accused of illegally conspiring to limit pork supply.

Restaurant owners often have few options for redress when having issues with Sysco, such as late deliveries, crushed eggs, and swapping ingredients without informing restaurants.

And as the industry continues to consolidate, these issues will likely be exacerbated. Sysco already tried to buy their largest competitor, U.S. Foods, but the attempted acquisition was struck down by the Federal Trade Commission. Two of its largest competitors, however, are attempting a megamerger that could provide even fewer options to small restaurants seeking food suppliers.

For a deeper dive into how Sysco developed its market dominance and the company’s exploitative labor practices, watch the video below:

Reporting by Alec Opperman. See below for a full transcript of the video.

—

ALEC OPPERMAN, More Perfect Union: I’ve had a sense that lots of restaurants are starting to taste the same. And maybe you, too, have had a sense that something is amiss. So I wanted to test a hypothesis with my coworkers, that you can be served the same exact food…

ALEC: Can I just get the jalapeño poppers?

ALEC, VO: From totally different restaurants.

IAN MCKENNA, More Perfect Union: The fried pickles.

ALEC: Can I get the fried pickles?

ALEC, VO: But made in the same factory, whether you wanted it or not.

ALEC: Can I get the funnel cake fries?

ALEC: Here’s the question behind this test. Are we trapped into eating the same mediocre food from New York to Alaska, and if so, why? And who’s behind it? That’s the mystery we’re going to unpack today.

ALEC: To get to the bottom of it, first, I went to Harlan, Iowa, woke up at 5am, to talk to a restaurant owner about how they get their food.

ELLEN WALSH ROSEMAN, Milk and Honey: I’m Ellen Walsh Roseman, and I own Milk and Honey.

ALEC: The thing is, Ellen’s restaurant does it differently than most restaurants in 2025. She showed me how she makes something from scratch for french toast. She uses a distributor to get most base ingredients, the milk from a local dairy, and the eggs from a local farm, Ellen’s. The bread is brioche that the restaurant makes from scratch. From there, the brioche gets baked, cut, dipped in homemade custard, griddled and served to you, the customer, or luckily enough, me.

ALEC: It’s very good.

ALEC: It’s not just the french toast. Ellen tries to work with as many local producers as possible.

ELLEN: This is our country skillet, and this is the local sourdough bread from a bakery in Omaha.

ALEC: But for many restaurants, sourcing local ingredients like this is getting harder and harder. Ellen’s distributor is regional and employee-owned. But if you’re a restaurant owner, especially in a rural area, you might just have one or two distributors to choose from. There’s a good chance one of them is a company called Sysco. And they are suspect number one for my deep fried mystery. To hash out that suspicion, I spoke to Austin Frerick, author of the book Barons, who explained the profound way Sysco is shaping the way we eat out.

AUSTIN FRERICK, Antitrust and Food Industry Expert: The innovation of Sysco was I was the first national company to essentially offer everything a restaurant needs.

ALEC: Back in the day, someone like Ellen might have one distributor for butter and another for eggs, but Sysco is what’s called a broadliner, supplying…

AUSTIN: Everything from paper products to meat and produce.

CLAIRE KELLOWAY, Journalist, Open Markets Institute: Sysco was a merger of nine different wholesale restaurant distributors with kind of the explicit goal of making a national player.

ALEC: That was in 1969. Fast forward to today, and Sysco has grown so much that it really only has two other competitors in the national space. Among them, Sysco is the largest, and even a decade ago, controlled an estimated 35% of the market, and this year, their gross profit hit $15 billion.

AUSTIN: The scary thing about Sysco was it didn’t become this giant through organic growth, but instead it became a giant through relentless acquisitions that went unchecked.

CLAIRE: They’ve acquired over 150 companies to become really one of the only national broadline distributors for restaurants.

ALEC: And this growth, I learned, is deeply changing the way we eat from farm to table.

ALEC: Let’s start with the farm part. Ellen tries to work with as many local producers as possible, even when it’s more expensive. Sysco, on the other hand, operates with the biggest producers at massive scales to eke out savings. Producers that often have some of the most exploitative production models. Sysco gets their berries from companies like Driscoll.

AUSTIN: Driscoll has basically took the Nike sweatshop model and applied it to berry production.

ALEC: And chicken from companies like Tyson.

AUSTIN: Tyson’s applied a sharecropping model to meat production.

ALEC: If you used a national distributor, could you get the Omaha sourdough? Could you get…

ELLEN: No.

ALEC: And why is that?

ELLEN: A lot of local distributors or local producers are not able to tap into regional distribution. The volume and production quantities is too high.

ALEC: Sysco scours the globe for a good deal, and there’s reason to be concerned about how they’re getting some of those deals.

AUSTIN: Seafood is the best example of this. Many providers to Sysco have been accused of engaging in slave labor.

ALEC: That includes forced Uyghur and North Korean labor in China.

AUSTIN: Basically any dark part of the food system has moved offshore, which makes policing it really, really hard to do.

ALEC: But Sysco doesn’t just source. Shrimp and strawberries. They have their own line of mass-manufactured frozen foods, everything from sourdough and brioche to, as I learned from researching this, jalapeño poppers, other fried appetizers and desserts. Frozen food, it turns out, isn’t just a facet of the Sysco business model. It drives it.

AUSTIN: I don’t think Americans appreciate that frozen food allows these long, exploitive supply chains.

ALEC: In the early 2000s, Sysco was buying jalapeño poppers assembled in Mexico for well below minimum wage and shipped frozen all over the country.

AUSTIN: It allows a race to the bottom in terms of labor standards and pay.

ALEC: So the food we ordered could have come to a distribution center like this, frozen, shipped to restaurants across the country, then dumped into a fryer, and now the truckers driving those shipments, they’re also getting squeezed by Sysco.

AUSTIN: Sysco’s continuously lobbying year after year to deregulate the trucking industry, and what we’ve seen since the 1980s is trucking wages are down nearly 40%.

ALEC: After the food is unloaded off of trucks, it gets cooked up and put on your plate, and Sysco’s dominance means the food on that plate is increasingly the same and increasingly worse.

ALEC: Do you think regional variety is disappearing?

ELLEN: Yeah, I would say so.

ALEC: You’ve probably had a Sysco meal without even realizing it. They offer everything from these sad bread rolls to Wagyu beef burger patties. If you’ve ever spent time in a hospital or a prison, you might have had a meal off of a Sysco truck. And if you pay attention, they’re everywhere. And so, it’s getting harder and harder to avoid getting the exact same frozen meal at your local diner or brewery. It probably won’t taste that great either.

ALEC: If you were to buy pre-made brioche from one of the big national distributors…

ELLEN: They probably will try to keep things cheap. So like, they’re probably not going to use butter.

ALEC: So they’ll use, like, a canola oil, or shortening, or something like that?

ELLEN: And then, like, their sugar might be like processed sugar, like a high-fructose corn syrup, kind of thing.

ELLEN: Austin found a story of a Pennsylvania diner whose burgers weren’t frying the same on the grill. When the owner investigated, he realized the patties now contained soy protein filler. Sysco and their competitors are flooding restaurants with ultra processed food like this.

ALEC: Now you might expect that with a deep fried cheddar jalapeño popper, but maybe less so with something like bread.

AUSTIN: The irony is, you could be a diner in a small town in Iowa surrounded by some of the world’s best farmland, and yet nothing on the menu is coming from around you. It’s low quality products produced by people being exploited outside the national borders.

ALEC: The system isn’t exactly working out for restaurant owners or local distributors, either. With the competition bought out, Sysco has more leverage to arbitrarily raise prices. During COVID, for instance, they used their market power to pass on inflation to their customers and increase their earnings by 159%. Sysco’s CEO even said on an earnings call that they had no intention of competing on price.

CLAIRE: Smaller restaurants have almost no negotiating power with Sysco, and so if you are in a rural area where there, you know, aren’t any other distributors, then restaurants really don’t have many options at all. As we’ve lost some of that regional wholesale infrastructure, we also see the loss of local businesses, local farms and a regional food system.

ALEC: In general, restaurant owners have little recourse when Sysco screws them over. Complaints are rampant about late deliveries, crushed eggs below stacks of boxes, even swapping ingredients without informing restaurants. As the industry continues to consolidate, these issues will only get worse. Sysco already tried to buy their largest competitor, U.S. Foods, but was shut down by the FTC. Now Sysco’s two largest competitors are signaling they might try to merge. In an environment where the biggest companies aggressively push out competition, it makes sense. It also means restaurants will have even less choice than they already do, and farmers will have less bargaining power when selling their food.

CLAIRE: The most aggressive, you know, gold standard thing that an antitrust enforcer could do would be to look at some of these deals and say, maybe we went too far, like maybe we let Sysco acquire too many companies, and we should unwind some of those and break up Sysco. That’s something that we’ve seen antitrust enforcers take on with past deals like Ticketmaster.

ALEC: The FTC could also block future acquisitions, and states and federal regulators could scrutinize discount programs that people like Claire and Austin suspect Sysco is using to drive out the competition. But what about my mission to get the same food in entirely different states? We ordered a mix of jalapeño poppers, fried pickles and funnel cake fries in Nebraska, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and in Alaska.

ALEC (with jalapeño popper): All right.

ALEC: Moment of truth.

ALEC: Jalapeño popper. Never been to this restaurant, never been to the city, but it just tastes like something I’ve had 100 times

ALEC: In Omaha, I’m pretty sure I got the Sysco brand Jalapeño Popper, though, to be fair, their main competitor sells almost the same thing. The one that I got in Brooklyn was clearly different than that one, and was a little bit better.

ALEC: Here in New Jersey, I ordered funnel cake fries. They seem exactly the same as the ones I got in Omaha. A fellow producer also ordered them in Philadelphia, and another in Anchorage, they look pretty similar. I also ordered some fried pickles, which is what my fellow producer ordered in Philly. They’re clearly different. One is chips, one is spears, but there’s a chance that I got these Sysco pickle spears. Don’t get me wrong, you’ve probably had a frozen Sysco meal and thought it was totally fine, but the point is, in this giant food system, something is being lost, regional variety, local jobs, local businesses and just having a unique meal, a meal that’s different.

ALEC: We are always interested in stories about how corporations are changing the world around us. If you have the inside scoop on any part of the food industry, drop us a line at stories [at] perfect union [dot] us. Thanks for watching.

Democratic oyster farmer Graham Platner is the candidate best positioned to defeat Maine’s incumbent senator, Republican Susan Collins, in next year’s midterm election, according to a new poll of 500 likely voters conducted by Zenith Research for More Perfect Union.

In the initial ballot, Platner and Collins, who is running for her sixth term, start out tied. Governor Janet Mills, a Democrat who is rumored to launch a Senate run next week, holds a 5-point lead over Collins in the initial poll. After respondents were shown short biographies for both candidates, however, Platner leads Collins by 14 points, while Mills leads Collins by 8 points.

Platner outperforms Mills most with young voters, independents, rural voters, men, and gun owners.

Collins is deeply unpopular with Maine voters, who give her a 39% job approval rating (including 28% that strongly disapprove). She has a 53% approval rating among Republicans, with just 18% saying they “strongly approve” of her job performance.

The 77-year-old Mills is also a very familiar figure to voters in Maine and has been in elected office since 1980. She was first elected to the state House in 2022 and later served for eight years as state’s attorney general. Mills is now in her second term as governor and provokes a polarized response from voters. Among all voters, 48% approve of her work as governor, while 45% disapprove. Among independents, 51% disapprove and just 40% approve.

Platner is a military veteran and oyster farmer making his first run for public office. He has enjoyed a strong start to his campaign but trails in name recognition. Less than half of voters polled have heard of the 40-year-old newcomer.

The 45% of voters who have heard of Platner, however, feel overwhelmingly positive about him, due in large part to a viral launch video and a barnstorming tour of Maine that has included appearances with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. Platner’s approval rating is +12 among voters who have heard enough about him to form an opinion. 15% of voters are neutral.

While Mills has governed as a political moderate during her decades in office, Platner is running as a populist outsider, channeling public anger at vast economic inequality, corporate abuses, and political corruption.

Platner is a proponent of a Medicare for All health care system, a position that 72% of voters in Maine support. He has voiced support for a billionaires tax, which is supported by 79% of Mainers (52% strongly support); and he has refused to accept donations from corporate PACs, which was similarly popular with the poll’s respondents. 54% say such a stance would make them more likely to support a candidate.

Full results from the poll will be released on Monday.

There’s a predatory lending scheme that’s been gaining traction, and it could be lurking in your doctor’s office.

Companies like Synchrony’s CareCredit offer medical credit cards to financially vulnerable patients who can’t afford to pay for their medical expenses out-of-pocket. But what’s typically presented as a financial life vest can end up leaving patients saddled with debt — and some critics argue that’s largely by design.

As the name suggests, patients sign up for medical credit cards through their health care providers. Providers sign on with a financial institution, like Synchrony’s CareCredit, to set up a payment platform. When patients are unable to afford their treatment costs, providers can sign them up for a credit card to cover the payment.

But this has led to some providers engaging in deceptive and predatory lending practices. According to David Zhao, an attorney at Public Counsel, some patients have been signed up in the exam chair or while under anesthesia — and some were signed up without even filling out a form themselves.

“I wasn’t taken to a desk. I wasn’t taken out of there. It was all done in the dental chair. You know, with—she had the clipboard waiting,” Della Ann Maciel, who was signed up for a medical credit card, told More Perfect Union.

Once these patients are signed up, they can be forced to grapple with eye-watering interest payments, sometimes even if they’re paying according to the company’s minimum payment policy. That’s because these credit card companies often utilize deferred interest plans.

“There’s a promotional period, typically 6 to 18 months, where there’s zero interest, and then at the end of that period, if a patient hasn’t paid that entire amount off, then that deferred interest actually reactivates,” April Kuenhoff, attorney at the National Consumer Law Center told More Perfect Union. “And so then they would have to pay off any remaining balance plus interest that would’ve accrued from the very start, from the day one of paying off that card.”

That’s what happened to David. “The minimum payments that they were suggesting for me actually would not result in me avoiding that huge APR at the end of the year,” he told us. “So [they were] setting me up for failure here.”

Patients who sign up for a CareCredit card online today would see a rate of 33 percent.

As a result, patients are often saddled with debt, and are sometimes sued by CareCredit. In the case of Victoria Mangram, a lawsuit occurred without any treatment taking place. After rejecting a procedure because it was too costly, Victoria’s providers signed her up for CareCredit. Roughly a year later, she was told that Synchrony Bank had already paid her dentist and that she owed them for the costs.

“Synchrony Bank gave their money straight to [the dentist]. I said, ‘that’s between you two, not me.’ But my credit is ruined,” Mangram told More Perfect Union.

For a deeper dive into how these deceptive practices work, how patients have been affected, and some of the organizations that are fighting back, watch the full report below.

Reporting by Ian McKenna. See below for a full transcript of the video.

—

DELLA ANN MACIEL: I’m walking out of there. I signed my life away. I’m like, wait a minute, what the hell — What did I do?

VOICEOVER: Della is one of 100 million Americans with medical debt, but hers is a little different.

DELLA: Here comes a girl with a clipboard. She goes, “Well, we’re gonna see if we can set you up with a CareCredit card.” And I go, “CareCredit?”

VO: She was signed up in the dentist chair by dental office staff for a credit card.

DELLA: I believe it’s just a scam.

VO: As health care becomes increasingly unaffordable for working families, medical credit cards are marketing themselves as a perfect solution.

[AD]: It’s our stress free credit card… flexible credit card… the CareCredit card…

VO: So are medical credit cards the cure? Well, for many, they aren’t.

NEWS: …that, in many cases, patients who use these products end up worse off.

DELLA: My credit is ruined. I feel like I’m being scammed.

MARTHA: They just squeeze us for every little bit of interest they make us pay.

VO: This is how multi billion dollar banks force their way into your medical

exam room.

DAVID ZHAO, Attorney at People’s Counsel: There should be no door in the doctor’s office that opens to a bank

VO: And the damage they can do once they’re in there,

APRIL KUENHOFF, Attorney at National Consumer Law Center: Egregious behavior like signing people up when they were in the dentist chair…

DAVID: Being signed up while under anesthesia…

APRIL: being charged for services that actually weren’t received.

MARTHA: What they are doing is outrageous. They are taking advantage of the fact that we need these procedures.

DAVID: I myself was the victim of a predatory medical lending practice at a dentist’s office back in 2018.

VO: David Zhao is an attorney in Los Angeles, where he provides community legal services for those affected by medical credit products. At a routine teeth cleaning, David was told he would need a costly treatment,

DAVID: But they did tell me that I could enter a zero interest payment plan. I remember that wording specifically with the dentist to cover the cost of this, like gum treatment, but it turned out I had been signed up for a credit card. I did not know that this had happened until a couple weeks later, when the CareCredit arrived in the mail and I reviewed some of the paperwork the dentist had given me and realized I had been charged over $1,000 onto that credit card immediately, and that was a Synchrony bank credit card called CareCredit.

APRIL: CareCredit really has dominated the market specifically for medical credit cards.

VO: April Kuhnhoff is a senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center.

APRIL: Unlike general purpose credit cards, they’re typically offered by medical providers, dentist, veterinarian, certain types of clinics, and they’re offered in order to allow an extension of credit for that medical procedure at that particular facility

VO: in 2024, Synchrony Financial, which owns CareCredit, took in $3.7 billion in interest in fees from health and wellness loans.

DELLA: This is the bill that I get. And you know, it tells you about all of this other stuff that if you don’t pay, you know, the percentage is very, very high. So, yeah, it’s $1,000 in debt.

VO: Della Ann Maciel was told that she needed teeth removed and a bone graft, a dental procedure that would not be covered by her insurance. She said she was encouraged to open a CareCredit card.

DELLA: And I go, “so what if I don’t do it?” And he says, the dentist man comes back and says, Well, you won’t, we won’t be able to do it, you know, and I’m going, well, shoot, well, okay, it was to where I was in so much pain, I went ahead and did it. I wasn’t taken to a desk. I wasn’t taken out of there. It was all done in the dental chair.

VO: In a statement to More Perfect Union, Synchrony Financial said that its contracts prohibit providers from presenting financing solutions to patients while they are being treated or while they are experiencing any type of duress or impairment.

DAVID: Every single one of the cases we take on, the person is signed up while they’re in the dental chair, examination chair.

VO: The National Consumer Law Center’s report on the medical credit card industry details a number of other problems collected through a survey of consumer advocates.

APRIL: We also saw reports in our survey about people who are actually fraudulently representing people’s income in order to qualify them for financial products, people being charged by that provider for services that actually weren’t received.

VICTORIA MANGRAM: This just goes on. I have so many synchronous, synchrony and synchrony, synchronous, synchronous, just goes on and on. I have files and files of these people.

VO: Victoria Mangram went to the dentist for a consultation for teeth pain in 2022.

VICTORIA: And they stated I needed all my teeth removed, and gave me a price that was outrageous, that I knew I couldn’t afford, and they said, Well, you can apply for CareCredit.

VO: Victoria decided not to go through with the procedure at that dental office. What she didn’t know was that the cost of the procedure was already charged to a CareCredit account in her name.

VICTORIA: Months passed, I was done with them, and I was still researching other people, you know? And so that’s when I started receiving mail about me owing. And I was like, I don’t owe anything. I’m still walking around with my teeth all jacked up, you know?

VO: She’s now being sued for the cost of the procedure she didn’t get.

VICTORIA: So then I’m laying in my little abode one morning and bam, bam, bam. I’m like, what? And I go in my little box that I’m in here, “You’ve been served.” Oh, my God.

VO: Victoria thought dental staff were just checking if she was eligible, not actually applying for CareCredit. Consumer confusion like this is understandable when medical professionals are tasked with marketing financial products to patients.

APRIL: And so that can be an initial problem: Staff who aren’t necessarily trained or experts in financial products being the ones who are your point of contact as you’re discussing or reading about this product. So they might tell you incorrect things or explain something incorrectly.

VO: A synchrony spokesperson said that providers are trained through online modules before being allowed to offer CareCredit products, and are required to retrain every two years. CareCredit is accepted in more than 270,000 providers’ offices and health focused retail locations in the United States.

DAVID: It really worries me that there are all these cards being offered by people who are not financial professionals, and to consumers who are there to get medical treatment. They’re worried about the fact that they have debilitating pain in their mouth. And so even that, to me, is like a form of duress, where, if you’re in so much pain, how can you make a reasoned, rational decision about your financial future at the same time? It’s pretty ridiculous.

VO: And turning doctors and nurses and clinic staff into credit card reps sounds ridiculous too. So why is it happening?

DR. LUKE MESSEC, Emergency Physician and Medical Debt Historian: So there’s always this problem in medicine, in American medicine, in particular, where patients are expected to pay at the point of care, and because that payment is expected, then when the patient can’t afford it, then the question becomes, who foots the bill?

VO: Dr. Luke Messick is an emergency physician and medical debt historian.

LUKE: What’s happened in the last 30 to 40 years is the rise of these middlemen that promise hospitals and doctors prompt payment by taking the debt off of their books quickly and entirely. Care Credit and Synchrony is one of them.

VO: The private insurance model of American healthcare can be frustrating for patients, but it can also cause administrative burden and financial strain for providers. That’s what could make products like CareCredit so appealing, where insurance could take weeks to pay providers, CareCredit promises payments in two business days. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has warned that in many cases, patients who use medical credit products end up worse off, because of less favorable terms than generic credit cards, like higher interest rates and provisions like deferred interest.

DAVID: So what we’re looking at is a copy of my CareCredit contract from 2018 which is what I was handed in the dental chair. And this is where the deferred interest is hidden in the contract.

VO: Under a deferred interest payment plan, a customer would pay no interest during the promotional 6, 12, 18 or 24 month term. If they paid it off in the promotional period, they would have gotten it truly interest free. But if they didn’t…

DAVID: Even if there was like, literally just one cent left on the card, what they would do is kick in a deferred interest plan where like, 27% would be charged on the card of the initial amount that had been put on the card, so not on the remaining balance.

VO: Say, I had a one year deferred interest plan for $2,500. And I’m paying $200 a month. By the end of the plan, I still have $100 left on my loan, but at 25% APR, I now automatically owe more than $300 in interest right away.

DAVID: And then that would start to compound at the higher interest rate.

VO: Patients applying online for CareCredit today would get 33% APR on a deferred interest

plan.

DAVID: Then they say that minimum monthly payments are required, but that if you make the minimum monthly payments, it may or may not actually pay off the full amount. So the minimum payments that they’re suggesting for me actually would not result in me avoiding that huge APR at the end of the year. So kind of setting me up for failure here.

VO: According to the NCLC report, 47% of surveyed consumer advocates said they had clients who were told they were getting a 0% interest plan when it was actually a deferred interest credit card.

DAVID: Other practices that we’ll see though, are the up charging. So for example, once a medical provider is able to get someone signed up for one of these credit cards, they will start adding things to the credit card. So for example, a goodie bag.

MARTHA: This is everything that came in my $500 kit.

PRODUCER: And does it seem like all of this is actually worth $500?

VO: Martha Castro went for a routine dental cleaning in 2022.

DAVID: Her case is particularly troubling, because she was actually signed up for CareCredit in the dental examination chair while she had local anesthesia applied, and she was handed forms while she could not feel her mouth.

MARTHA: I told the dental hygienist, “I think the anesthesia is wearing off. I’m diabetic and I’m worried about how much you are giving me.” She said, “The dentist is coming, don’t worry. We’ll just put a little more in.” They must’ve administered the anesthesia three times.

VO: When she realized the goodie bag she didn’t ask for actually cost her $500, she tried to return it.

MARTHA: I called the card and told them not to pay for this because I didn’t want it. I told them, “Don’t pay it.” They said they had already paid for it.

VO: Synchrony Financial says that consumers are provided a variety of clear and conspicuous disclosures as part of the application process, and that about 80% of cardholders with a deferred interest plan pay off their balance before the end of the promotional period.

DAVID: I think the fact that people are able to pay it off doesn’t mean that the practices aren’t predatory. Some people just have the financial resources to do so.

VO: Martha decided to just pay off the charge for the goodie bag, which she never used to avoid being sued.

MARTHA: They take advantage of the fact that people don’t have the time to really read all the terms and that they don’t really explain it very well.

VO: Della decided that she too would pay it off for the sake of her credit score.

DELLA: You know, on a fixed income, I’m paying 167 a month. You know, it’s a big chunk out of my little money.

VO: Victoria’s court date is set for March 2026. David is helping with her case.

VICTORIA: You can’t fight this alone. These are billion dollar companies doing whatever they can to the poor.

VO: Some states have already tried to implement protections against predatory medical credit card practices like requiring patients to fill out their own credit card application forms, or banning the promotion of third party financing in treatment areas, or banning deferred interest credit products for providers entirely. But these piecemeal solutions don’t really get to the root of the problem.

DAVID: The biggest crack is the for-profit healthcare system, our insurance system, that leaves open this door for people to have to finance privately, things that could be, you know, important for their health. In a perfect world, people should have medically necessary treatment covered by their insurance. They should not have to resort to a private lender and doctors shouldn’t have to deal with any of this. There should be no door in the doctor’s office that opens to a bank.

VO: Thank you so much for watching our video. If you’d like to see more stories like this one, be sure to like and subscribe to the channel to get more More Perfect Union in your feed. And if you have any ideas for stories that you would like for us to investigate, just drop them in the comments below.

As the name suggests, patients sign up for medical credit cards through their health care providers. Providers sign on with a financial institution, like Synchrony’s CareCredit, to set up a payment platform. When patients are unable to afford their treatment costs, providers can sign them up for a credit card to cover the payment.

But this has led to some providers engaging in deceptive and predatory lending practices. According to David Zhao, an attorney at Public Counsel, some patients have been signed up in the exam chair or while under anesthesia — and some were signed up without even filling out a form themselves.

“I wasn’t taken to a desk. I wasn’t taken out of there. It was all done in the dental chair. You know, with—she had the clipboard waiting,” Della Ann Maciel, who was signed up for a medical credit card, told More Perfect Union.

Once these patients are signed up, they could be forced to grapple with eye-watering interest payments, sometimes even if they are paying according to the company’s minimum payment policy. That’s because these credit card companies often utilize deferred interest plans.

“There’s a promotional period, typically 6 to 18 months, where there’s 0 interest, and then at the end of that period, if a patient hasn’t paid that entire amount off, then that deferred interest actually reactivates,” April Kuenhoff, attorney at the National Consumer Law Center told More Perfect Union. “And so then they would have to pay off any remaining balance plus interest that would’ve accrued from the very start, from the day one of paying off that card.”

That’s what happened to David. “The minimum payments that they were suggesting for me actually would not result in me avoiding that huge APR at the end of the year,” he told us. “So [they were] setting me up for failure here.”

Patients who sign up for a CareCredit card online today would see a rate of 33 percent.

As a result, patients are often saddled with debt, and are sometimes sued by CareCredit. In the case of Victoria Mangram, lawsuits can occur without any treatment taking place. After rejecting a procedure because it was too costly, Victoria’s providers signed her up for CareCredit. Roughly a year later, she was told that Synchrony Bank had already paid her dentist and that she owed them for the costs.

“Synchrony Bank gave their money straight to [the dentist]. I said, ‘that’s between you two, not me.’ But my credit is ruined,” Mangram told More Perfect Union.

For a deeper dive into how these deceptive practices work, how patients have been affected, and some of the organizations trying to fight back against these predatory lenders, watch the full report below.

Reporting by Ian McKenna. See below for a full transcript of the video.

—

DELLA ANN MACIEL: I’m walking out of there. I signed my life away. I’m like, wait a minute, what the hell — What did I do?

VOICEOVER: Della is one of 100 million Americans with medical debt, but hers is a little different.

DELLA: Here comes a girl with a clipboard. She goes, “Well, we’re gonna see if we can set you up with a CareCredit card.” And I go, “CareCredit?”

VO: She was signed up in the dentist chair by dental office staff for a credit card.

DELLA: I believe it’s just a scam.

VO: As health care becomes increasingly unaffordable for working families, medical credit cards are marketing themselves as a perfect solution.

[AD]: It’s our stress free credit card… flexible credit card… the CareCredit card…

VO: So are medical credit cards the cure? Well, for many, they aren’t.

NEWS: …that, in many cases, patients who use these products end up worse off.

DELLA: My credit is ruined. I feel like I’m being scammed.

MARTHA: They just squeeze us for every little bit of interest they make us pay.

VO: This is how multi billion dollar banks force their way into your medical

exam room.

DAVID ZHAO, Attorney at People’s Counsel: There should be no door in the doctor’s office that opens to a bank

VO: And the damage they can do once they’re in there,

APRIL KUENHOFF, Attorney at National Consumer Law Center: Egregious behavior like signing people up when they were in the dentist chair…

DAVID: Being signed up while under anesthesia…

APRIL: being charged for services that actually weren’t received.

MARTHA: What they are doing is outrageous. They are taking advantage of the fact that we need these procedures.

DAVID: I myself was the victim of a predatory medical lending practice at a dentist’s office back in 2018.

VO: David Zhao is an attorney in Los Angeles, where he provides community legal services for those affected by medical credit products. At a routine teeth cleaning, David was told he would need a costly treatment,

DAVID: But they did tell me that I could enter a zero interest payment plan. I remember that wording specifically with the dentist to cover the cost of this, like gum treatment, but it turned out I had been signed up for a credit card. I did not know that this had happened until a couple weeks later, when the CareCredit arrived in the mail and I reviewed some of the paperwork the dentist had given me and realized I had been charged over $1,000 onto that credit card immediately, and that was a Synchrony bank credit card called CareCredit.

APRIL: CareCredit really has dominated the market specifically for medical credit cards.

VO: April Kuhnhoff is a senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center.

APRIL: Unlike general purpose credit cards, they’re typically offered by medical providers, dentist, veterinarian, certain types of clinics, and they’re offered in order to allow an extension of credit for that medical procedure at that particular facility

VO: in 2024, Synchrony Financial, which owns CareCredit, took in $3.7 billion in interest in fees from health and wellness loans.

DELLA: This is the bill that I get. And you know, it tells you about all of this other stuff that if you don’t pay, you know, the percentage is very, very high. So, yeah, it’s $1,000 in debt.

VO: Della Ann Maciel was told that she needed teeth removed and a bone graft, a dental procedure that would not be covered by her insurance. She said she was encouraged to open a CareCredit card.

DELLA: And I go, “so what if I don’t do it?” And he says, the dentist man comes back and says, Well, you won’t, we won’t be able to do it, you know, and I’m going, well, shoot, well, okay, it was to where I was in so much pain, I went ahead and did it. I wasn’t taken to a desk. I wasn’t taken out of there. It was all done in the dental chair.

VO: In a statement to More Perfect Union, Synchrony Financial said that its contracts prohibit providers from presenting financing solutions to patients while they are being treated or while they are experiencing any type of duress or impairment.

DAVID: Every single one of the cases we take on, the person is signed up while they’re in the dental chair, examination chair.

VO: The National Consumer Law Center’s report on the medical credit card industry details a number of other problems collected through a survey of consumer advocates.

APRIL: We also saw reports in our survey about people who are actually fraudulently representing people’s income in order to qualify them for financial products, people being charged by that provider for services that actually weren’t received.

VICTORIA MANGRAM: This just goes on. I have so many synchronous, synchrony and synchrony, synchronous, synchronous, just goes on and on. I have files and files of these people.

VO: Victoria Mangram went to the dentist for a consultation for teeth pain in 2022.

VICTORIA: And they stated I needed all my teeth removed, and gave me a price that was outrageous, that I knew I couldn’t afford, and they said, Well, you can apply for CareCredit.

VO: Victoria decided not to go through with the procedure at that dental office. What she didn’t know was that the cost of the procedure was already charged to a CareCredit account in her name.

VICTORIA: Months passed, I was done with them, and I was still researching other people, you know? And so that’s when I started receiving mail about me owing. And I was like, I don’t owe anything. I’m still walking around with my teeth all jacked up, you know?

VO: She’s now being sued for the cost of the procedure she didn’t get.

VICTORIA: So then I’m laying in my little abode one morning and bam, bam, bam. I’m like, what? And I go in my little box that I’m in here, “You’ve been served.” Oh, my God.

VO: Victoria thought dental staff were just checking if she was eligible, not actually applying for CareCredit. Consumer confusion like this is understandable when medical professionals are tasked with marketing financial products to patients.

APRIL: And so that can be an initial problem: Staff who aren’t necessarily trained or experts in financial products being the ones who are your point of contact as you’re discussing or reading about this product. So they might tell you incorrect things or explain something incorrectly.

VO: A synchrony spokesperson said that providers are trained through online modules before being allowed to offer CareCredit products, and are required to retrain every two years. CareCredit is accepted in more than 270,000 providers’ offices and health focused retail locations in the United States.

DAVID: It really worries me that there are all these cards being offered by people who are not financial professionals, and to consumers who are there to get medical treatment. They’re worried about the fact that they have debilitating pain in their mouth. And so even that, to me, is like a form of duress, where, if you’re in so much pain, how can you make a reasoned, rational decision about your financial future at the same time? It’s pretty ridiculous.

VO: And turning doctors and nurses and clinic staff into credit card reps sounds ridiculous too. So why is it happening?

DR. LUKE MESSEC, Emergency Physician and Medical Debt Historian: So there’s always this problem in medicine, in American medicine, in particular, where patients are expected to pay at the point of care, and because that payment is expected, then when the patient can’t afford it, then the question becomes, who foots the bill?

VO: Dr. Luke Messick is an emergency physician and medical debt historian.

LUKE: What’s happened in the last 30 to 40 years is the rise of these middlemen that promise hospitals and doctors prompt payment by taking the debt off of their books quickly and entirely. Care Credit and Synchrony is one of them.

VO: The private insurance model of American healthcare can be frustrating for patients, but it can also cause administrative burden and financial strain for providers. That’s what could make products like CareCredit so appealing, where insurance could take weeks to pay providers, CareCredit promises payments in two business days. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has warned that in many cases, patients who use medical credit products end up worse off, because of less favorable terms than generic credit cards, like higher interest rates and provisions like deferred interest.

DAVID: So what we’re looking at is a copy of my CareCredit contract from 2018 which is what I was handed in the dental chair. And this is where the deferred interest is hidden in the contract.

VO: Under a deferred interest payment plan, a customer would pay no interest during the promotional 6, 12, 18 or 24 month term. If they paid it off in the promotional period, they would have gotten it truly interest free. But if they didn’t…

DAVID: Even if there was like, literally just one cent left on the card, what they would do is kick in a deferred interest plan where like, 27% would be charged on the card of the initial amount that had been put on the card, so not on the remaining balance.

VO: Say, I had a one year deferred interest plan for $2,500. And I’m paying $200 a month. By the end of the plan, I still have $100 left on my loan, but at 25% APR, I now automatically owe more than $300 in interest right away.

DAVID: And then that would start to compound at the higher interest rate.

VO: Patients applying online for CareCredit today would get 33% APR on a deferred interest

plan.

DAVID: Then they say that minimum monthly payments are required, but that if you make the minimum monthly payments, it may or may not actually pay off the full amount. So the minimum payments that they’re suggesting for me actually would not result in me avoiding that huge APR at the end of the year. So kind of setting me up for failure here.

VO: According to the NCLC report, 47% of surveyed consumer advocates said they had clients who were told they were getting a 0% interest plan when it was actually a deferred interest credit card.

DAVID: Other practices that we’ll see though, are the up charging. So for example, once a medical provider is able to get someone signed up for one of these credit cards, they will start adding things to the credit card. So for example, a goodie bag.

MARTHA: This is everything that came in my $500 kit.

PRODUCER: And does it seem like all of this is actually worth $500?

VO: Martha Castro went for a routine dental cleaning in 2022.

DAVID: Her case is particularly troubling, because she was actually signed up for CareCredit in the dental examination chair while she had local anesthesia applied, and she was handed forms while she could not feel her mouth.

MARTHA: I told the dental hygienist, “I think the anesthesia is wearing off. I’m diabetic and I’m worried about how much you are giving me.” She said, “The dentist is coming, don’t worry. We’ll just put a little more in.” They must’ve administered the anesthesia three times.

VO: When she realized the goodie bag she didn’t ask for actually cost her $500, she tried to return it.

MARTHA: I called the card and told them not to pay for this because I didn’t want it. I told them, “Don’t pay it.” They said they had already paid for it.

VO: Synchrony Financial says that consumers are provided a variety of clear and conspicuous disclosures as part of the application process, and that about 80% of cardholders with a deferred interest plan pay off their balance before the end of the promotional period.

DAVID: I think the fact that people are able to pay it off doesn’t mean that the practices aren’t predatory. Some people just have the financial resources to do so.

VO: Martha decided to just pay off the charge for the goodie bag, which she never used to avoid being sued.

MARTHA: They take advantage of the fact that people don’t have the time to really read all the terms and that they don’t really explain it very well.

VO: Della decided that she too would pay it off for the sake of her credit score.

DELLA: You know, on a fixed income, I’m paying 167 a month. You know, it’s a big chunk out of my little money.

VO: Victoria’s court date is set for March 2026. David is helping with her case.

VICTORIA: You can’t fight this alone. These are billion dollar companies doing whatever they can to the poor.

VO: Some states have already tried to implement protections against predatory medical credit card practices like requiring patients to fill out their own credit card application forms, or banning the promotion of third party financing in treatment areas, or banning deferred interest credit products for providers entirely. But these piecemeal solutions don’t really get to the root of the problem.

DAVID: The biggest crack is the for-profit healthcare system, our insurance system, that leaves open this door for people to have to finance privately, things that could be, you know, important for their health. In a perfect world, people should have medically necessary treatment covered by their insurance. They should not have to resort to a private lender and doctors shouldn’t have to deal with any of this. There should be no door in the doctor’s office that opens to a bank.

VO: Thank you so much for watching our video. If you’d like to see more stories like this one, be sure to like and subscribe to the channel to get more More Perfect Union in your feed. And if you have any ideas for stories that you would like for us to investigate, just drop them in the comments below.

On everything from housing and education, to gas pipelines, asset managers and private equity firms have been snapping up essential infrastructure at an alarming pace. And now, they could be coming for your utility company.

BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is trying to acquire Minnesota Power, a regional utility company that provides power to approximately 150,000 people in the state. If it succeeds, critics warn, there could be far-reaching consequences for the community, potentially driving up already-soaring utility costs and throwing a wrench in state decarbonization goals.

“There’s no requirement that they pursue this clean energy vision that the current executives in Minnesota Power have laid out,” Minnesota State Senator Jen McEwen told More Perfect Union. “We’re going into this sale on promises without any teeth in the guarantee that it’ll actually be carried forward.”

Just over a year ago, More Perfect Union released an investigation that dug into how BlackRock and other major asset managers have wormed their way into nearly every facet of Americans’ economic lives. Twelve days after the video’s release, BlackRock acquired Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), an infrastructure investment firm that acquires stakes in water and waste systems, transportation, and airports.

Now, in a bid to increase their acquisition of so-called “real assets,” GIP is making a foray into the utility market, with its first target the Midwest. In a proposed $6.2 billion deal in conjunction with the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, GIP is attempting to buy the investment firm Allete, which owns Minnesota Power.

Under Minnesota law, utilities are considered a regulated monopoly. In order for the deal to go through, final approval would have to come from the state’s five-member Public Utilities Commission before there’s any transfer of ownership, making the acquisition of power companies a bit more difficult than other deals that private equity firms and asset managers have struck. But some experts have argued that the monopolistic nature of the industry makes it an attractive option for investors seeking to cash in.

“One of the biggest incentives financially for potentially taking over a utility is the fact that utilities in regulated states such as Minnesota have a captive rate base. They have captive customers,” Alissa Jean Schafer, climate director of the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, told More Perfect Union. “Having a group of customers that have nowhere else to turn for access to electricity, that is a very attractive financial proposition.”

This isn’t just speculation. There are several examples of utility rate hikes after power companies are acquired by asset managers, which can often lead to rate hikes and layoffs. After Michigan’s Upper Peninsula Power Company was acquired by a private equity firm in 2014, residents experienced multiple rate hikes.

“The sales pitch [of the takeover] sounds pretty similar to the sales pitch that BlackRock is making to Minnesota Power, specifically, the private equity firm is promising to give capital to the utility so that the utility can do what it wants to do,” Schafer said. “But what happened with UPPCO is after the private equity firm took it over, shortly thereafter, they raised the bills. Since 2014, UPPCO being owned by private equity has seen four bill hikes.”

If the deal goes through, it could set a precedent for the future acquisition of public goods by massive firms like BlackRock. For a deeper look into this attempted acquisition and the local efforts trying to stop it, watch the video below.

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If you live in Minnesota, you can take action by emailing the Minnesota PUC about the BlackRock takeover at consumer.puc@state.mn.us and learn more about the problem of private equity at pestakeholder.org/energy.

For actions from the general public, contact Governor Walz by submitting a comment via this form: https://mn.gov/governor/connect/conta or calling his office at 651-201-3400 with a simple message: Don’t let this deal get approved by the MN PUC.

Reporting by Gabriella Spielberg and Sean Morrow. See below for a full transcript of the video:

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GABRIELLA SPIELBERG, MPU: This power plant is at the center of a battle between finance giants and the American people over who controls the basic necessities of everyday life. Almost exactly a year ago, we made a video about BlackRock, and remember how last time I was like, ‘calm down, guys, they don’t own the whole world. It depends on how you define ‘own,’ blah, blah, blah.’ Well, okay, that video was about how they invest in stocks. But what if I told you there’s a whole other side to this story, where they’re getting a lot closer to controlling some of the most critical parts of our everyday lives.

GABRIELLA: Just 12 days after we released that video, BlackRock acquired global infrastructure partners, and since that deal, they’ve been a lot more involved in infrastructure. You might have heard stuff like how they bought the Panama Canal, but now there’s another deal you might not have heard about. They’re trying to buy Minnesota Power, a company that owns this power plant and provides power to 150,000 people. This is a type of investment in what they like to call ‘real assets,’ which is finance code for literally anything tangible, basically everything we need to survive, like housing infrastructure and the land those things are built on. This is a test case for companies like BlackRock expanding into industries that we use every day, things like water, hospitals and electricity. And if they haven’t already, they could be coming to your town soon. So why is BlackRock trying to change course, and what will it mean if they succeed?

BOB TAMMEN: Last summer, I scattered my wife’s ashes on the South Kawishiwi river. I don’t want BlackRock to own it.

GABRIELLA: So, BlackRock bought Global Infrastructure Partners, which is a big investment fund that itself buys up things like water and waste systems, transportation companies and even large shares of entire airports. If you’ve flown in or out of London, congratulations. You’re probably a customer of GIP.

GABRIELLA: So BlackRock owns Global Infrastructure Partners, which is trying to buy Allete, which owns Minnesota Power, which owns infrastructure like power plants, dams and the land they’re on. But since people need power, it’s not that easy, even for BlackRock, and there’s a somewhat democratic process involved. This is state senator Jen McEwen, who represents many of the people who would be affected by the buyout.

JEN MCEWEN, MINNESOTA STATE SENATOR: Wisely and correctly, we have a public utilities commission, at the very least, to try to provide some regulatory oversight for these entities that have this monopoly over providing this essential service.

GABRIELLA: Usually, when private equity and asset managers buy stuff, they just do it behind closed doors, but because people would literally die without power, it’s considered a critical service, and therefore a regulated monopoly under Minnesota law.

GARNER MOFFAT, CITY COUNCIL MEMBER, Superior, WI: BlackRock doesn’t necessarily have the same amount of reporting responsibilities as a publicly traded corporation. We’ve had a lack of transparency already regarding our rates and the quality of services in our community in Superior.

GARNER: That ability to access that data would be decreased by the purchase, which would be a huge problem.

GABRIELLA: The community has made it clear that they oppose the deal, and a judge has already recommended against it. But it doesn’t end there. The final approval is going to come from the Public Utility Commission, a board made up of just five people appointed by the Governor. This could have huge implications for anyone who uses basic utilities like electricity or water, i.e. the things that keep us from freezing to death in the woods, because if they realize it’s profitable, nothing will stop them.

GABRIELLA, Duluth, Minnesota: I didn’t want to just sit around at my desk, so I came out here to Duluth to talk to some community members and leaders and hear what they had to say about the buyout. I went on a hike with longtime Minnesota Power employee and customer, Bob Tammen.

BOB: I should have asked if you want a walking stick. I got an extra walking stick. At your age, you don’t need a walking stick.

BOB: So I helped install the power lines that haul electricity from this powerhouse to my kitchen. This dam, the land we’re standing on right here, it’ll all go to the control of BlackRock.

GABRIELLA: Bob took us on a hike in the Boundary Waters to see some of the infrastructure that would be sold. He’s been canoeing out here for decades. But power plants, lines and dams aren’t all the GIP, and by extension, BlackRock, would get in the deal.

BOB: What concerns me about BlackRock purchasing Minnesota Power is that Minnesota Power owns a large amount of land where we’re parked right now. They own a lot of real estate. Some of that real estate has minerals. So if BlackRock acquires ownership of those minerals, will they develop those minerals for the long term benefit of northern Minnesota, or will they develop those minerals for the short term profit of BlackRock?

GABRIELLA: Back in Duluth, people were pretty concerned about their communities and bills.

HUDSON KINGSTON, Legal Director, CURE MN: We depend on Minnesota Power, for our regional economy, for our heat, for transportation, and indeed, for our clean water. We need this company to continue to make long term investments in our community. But that’s not what this acquisition is about. This acquisition is about maximizing short term profit.

JEN: There’s a whole host of decisions that they’re going to be making, and those decisions will no longer necessarily be just motivated by the board of directors working on behalf of the shareholders for Minnesota Power, a broad portfolio of people. It will just be these two private equity companies.

JEN: If the Minnesota PUC does a good job, and is able to hold down rate increases, the only outcome that I can imagine is that these two owners will say, well, we’re not making as much money as we thought we were going to make from this thing, and they’re going to sell it. And then who do they sell it to?

GABRIELLA: And this kind of thing has happened before in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, with a power company called UPPCO. This is Alissa Jean Schafer, the director of climate and energy at the Private Equity Stakeholder Project.

ALISSA JEAN SCHAFER, Dir. of Climate and Energy at Private Equity Stakeholder Project: If we look at Northern Michigan, there’s a utility called the Upper Peninsula Power Company, or UPPCO. This was acquired by a private equity firm in 2014.

NEWS CLIP: UPPCO Customers have seen a spike in their rates many say they can’t afford.

ALISSA: After the private equity firm took it over, shortly thereafter, they raised the bills. A couple years later, bills went up again, then that private equity firm sold it to a different private equity firm. Once the new private equity owners were in control, they raised bills again. Since 2014, UPPCO, being owned by private equity, has seen four bill hikes.

GABRIELLA: There’s nothing stopping BlackRock from doing the same thing in Minnesota. And in addition to bill hikes, it could even trample existing laws.

NEWS CLIP: Well today, Governor Walz signed a bill that requires utility companies to provide 100% carbon free electricity by 2040.

GABRIELLA: But after the deal goes through, we don’t know if BlackRock will follow those laws. Their size and capital imbue them with the power to basically ignore this kind of thing. To them, the fees are chump change. And who do you think is more powerful? The Minnesota State legislature or BlackRock?

JEN: There’s no requirement that they pursue this clean energy vision. We’re going into the sale on promises.

GABRIELLA: But remember, BlackRock isn’t directly purchasing Minnesota Power. Global Infrastructure Partners is purchasing its parent company, Allete, which also owns Superior Water, Light and Power just over the border in Wisconsin.

GARNER: So we’ve been looking at double digit rate increases every two years, and our rates are already some of the highest in the entire state, and that’s not a coincidence.

GABRIELLA: So let’s zoom out for a minute. If you saw my last video about BlackRock, you know that they don’t really own everything, they just have a small percentage of ownership in everything, specifically publicly listed companies that you could buy shares of too. But this buyout shows a general shift in strategy. They’re looking to fully own or majority-own entire infrastructure systems by taking those companies off the public stock market altogether. And while BlackRock’s just been dipping their toes into real assets, and it’s still a relatively small slice of their giant portfolio, there have been some big players in this game for a while now.

GABRIELLA: Brookfield is the biggest owner of real assets, and real assets are the bread and butter of BlackRock’s doppelgänger, Blackstone. Even though Blackstone is overall smaller, they’re actually much more efficient at generating returns for their investors. So of course, BlackRock is now looking for their piece of the pie. Here are the totally not frightening categories of things these asset managers are trying to get as much control of and profit out of as possible: Water, farmland, housing, transportation, schools and hospitals and energy and telecommunications, including data centers. So that makes the list really all the things I, for one, wouldn’t last very long without. I don’t know about you, but I personally love food, housing, electricity and water, and want affordable access to it. Check out this house. It has lines bringing in electricity and phone and internet. It has pipes bringing water in and out. Roads bring in food and tenants pay rent. BlackRock wants a cut of all of those things.

ALISSA: In addition to potentially raising customers’ bills, they might be looking for ways to cut costs. This could look like a reduction in the job force, it could look at, like, reduction in operation and maintenance.

PROTESTOR: If you don’t have enough people to do a job, you know, you’re going to get people hurt.

GABRIELLA: And the Minnesota Power case is just one point on the map. If we zoom out, there’s a larger cycle we’re already in. Here’s the playbook. Asset managers buy the thing, often using debt, massive loans they get just because they’re already rich. Then they run the thing as cheaply as possible for a few years, and finally sell it, often to another asset manager or private equity firm, and ideally at a large profit. This is super profitable for guys like Larry Fink, but not so much for anyone who relies on the thing they bought. And there’s a reason necessities like apartment buildings, water and parking are all at the heart of this. They’re things where even if you maybe kind of have a choice to use a different provider, it’s logistically pretty hard or downright impossible. For BlackRock, that’s basically free money.

ALISSA: Utilities in regulated states such as Minnesota have a captive rate base. They have captive customers. Having a group of customers that have nowhere else to turn for access to electricity, that is a very attractive financial proposition.

GABRIELLA: So how exactly do these deals work? They bank on you not understanding, so let’s try to understand. Usually, they’ll set up an investment fund and give it a snazzy name like ‘BlackRock Global infrastructure Fund Four,’ and then they’ll get a bunch of big companies to sign on to invest with them. The asset manager itself will invest a little bit too, just to show everyone else they have some skin in the game, but usually only between one and 5 percent. And then the investment fund, this thing they just made up, like a group project for supervillains, goes and buys the thing. Investing is always about risk, but BlackRock’s risk to itself is minimized, because when they take out loans, they borrow against the company they’re buying, not themselves.

GABRIELLA: That’s like if I bought a Honda Civic on a loan, and then the car was in debt instead of me. And when that’s a public utility, it’s the customers, or taxpayers, even, paying off that debt for them. This means you’re not just paying for power or water or whatever. You’re also paying off an asset manager’s loan from a bank, which, if they default on, will sink the company they’re buying, but not the asset manager that took out the loan in the first place.

GABRIELLA: Isn’t it so cool how if you or I default on our student loans or medical debt, it can ruin our lives, but if bestie Larry, I don’t know, flubs an airport and can’t pay back $700 million dollars, the captain just gets to walk away from the ship? Love that for us.

GABRIELLA: Now apply this to housing and roads and tolls and everything. When this happens on a huge scale, what that means is that none of these companies exist to serve customers, they exist to maintain stuff that asset managers then own and rent back to us, and often, all these resources are intertwined. One reason BlackRock wants more control over energy is something we’ve all been hearing a lot about lately, America’s favorite rainbow copyright infringement machine. We’re in the midst of an arms race for who can own the most data center infrastructure, and never put it past BlackRock to try to get their pound of flesh. And if this isn’t already a problem in your area, buckle up.

ALISSA: It appears that BlackRock is moving very aggressively to insert themselves at just about every angle of the supply chain when it comes to AI and data centers, and that includes everything from the data center development itself, to the computer software, computer hardware, and now with this move into local utility companies, possibly even the power company that would be powering those data centers.

GABRIELLA: You don’t need to take Alissa Jean’s word for it. Here’s BlackRock’s own Larry Fink.

BRIAN SULLIVAN, CNBC Interview: We need energy, but we also need the last mile. We need a power line that goes from the energy source to the energy user. There’s only so much BlackRock can do about that.

LARRY FINK, CNBC Interview: This is really important to unlock, and if we can’t unlock that, we’re not going to grow. If we’re not going to unlock this, it’s going to be harder and harder to build out these AI data centers.

JEN: It just creates a lot more burden on our state. Are we going to have to have the fight at the state level to try to take on these private equity, trillion dollar investors who own more than the state of Minnesota?

GABRIELLA: So to come back to the literally eternal question, does BlackRock own your life? Kinda. They certainly want to. And this mode of ownership provides them way more direct control and profit than stock portfolios do. It also gives them a much more direct relationship with you and your bank account. Just because your bill doesn’t say BlackRock power, doesn’t mean they don’t get your money.

GARNER: The Public Works Committee over there has approved a contract to work with a consultant to help us look at the feasibility of purchasing our utility assets from superior water, light and power.

JEN: I’d like to see us moving in the direction of having more ownership distributed amongst the community, but what we’re moving toward is even more corporate consolidation, even more toward a monopoly model, even more toward a model where the control over this essential service is separated from our community, and the decisions that are made about it are going to be out of our hands.

GABRIELLA: But it doesn’t have to be this way. And everybody I spoke to seemed to want pretty much the same thing. In Wisconsin, they’re even trying to buy their power company back to get out of this BlackRock situation so that they won’t have to go through this kind of thing again.

BOB: We should remember that even though we might live a long way apart, we’re still all neighbors. Our grid is all connected together. We have a little powerhouse here. It’s connected into the grid that goes all over the United States, and generally, if people are good neighbors, everybody is careful that they don’t take more power than the grid can handle. The system works. I think we should all be good neighbors. We should have local control, local communication, and be neighbors on a national level.

GABRIELLA: The final hearing for the buyout is on September 25 and the actual decision is set to be made on October 3. So if you live in Minnesota or Wisconsin, now’s a great time to talk to your representatives and go to those meetings.

GABRIELLA: Thank you to the advocacy groups working on this issue: Cure, Sierra Club, private equity stakeholder project, and the Citizen’s Utility Board. And thank you for watching, and don’t forget to like and subscribe and send us your story ideas at stories@perfectunion.us.