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The White House declined to comment. Multiple attempts to reach Mr. Mellon and representatives for him were unsuccessful.

It remains unclear how far the donation will go toward covering the salaries of the more than 1.3 million troops who make up the active-duty military. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Trump administration’s 2025 budget requested about $600 billion in total military compensation. A $130 million donation would equal about $100 a service member.

Mr. Mellon, a wealthy banking heir and railroad magnate, is a longtime backer of Mr. Trump and gave tens of millions of dollars to groups supporting the president’s campaign. Last year, he made a $50 million donation to a super PAC supporting Mr. Trump, which was one of the largest single contributions ever disclosed.

A grandson of former Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon, Mr. Mellon was not a prominent Republican donor until Mr. Trump was elected. But in recent years, he has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into supporting Mr. Trump and the Republican Party.

Mr. Mellon, who lives primarily in Wyoming, keeps a low profile despite his prolific political spending. He is also a significant supporter of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who also ran for president last year. Mr. Mellon donated millions to Mr. Kennedy’s presidential campaign and has also given money to his anti-vaccine group, Children’s Health Defense.

The Pentagon said it accepted the donation under the “general gift acceptance authority.”

“The donation was made on the condition that it be used to offset the cost of service members’ salaries and benefits,” Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, said in a statement.

Still, the donation appears to be a potential violation of the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits federal agencies from spending money in excess of congressional appropriations or from accepting voluntary services.

More than three weeks into the government shutdown, the Trump administration has taken a series of unorthodox steps to redirect funds to pay certain government workers.

Mr. Trump has vowed to pay military members, immigration agents, and law enforcement officials even though lawmakers have not approved the money for their wages. Workers in those categories are considered essential and must continue working during the shutdown, although they are entitled to back pay under a 2019 law.

As part of that promise, the president signed an executive order this month directing the Pentagon to use unspent research and development funds to cover troops’ salaries. But congressional leaders have warned that moving funds around is only a temporary fix.

Thousands of federal workers missed their first paycheck this week. About 670,000 workers have been furloughed, according to a tally by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington-based think tank. An additional 730,000 or so are working without pay.

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CNN pundit Van Jones said the “Make America Great Again” movement has been “bamboozled” over the Trump administration’s handling of records relating to disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

“Look, MAGA has been took, had, bamboozled. I don’t know, like — look, you have everything that you just said, every Republican was saying, and now ‘nothing to see here,’” Jones, an ex-adviser to former President Obama, said Monday night on CNN’s “OutFront.”

“So Hakeem Jeffries is 100 percent correct. Either they were lying the whole time, saying they had all the goods on all these rich people, or they’re lying now and covering it up. Either way, if I were in MAGA, I might think to myself, what else are they being dishonest about? Somebody is tricking somebody,” the CNN political commentator told host Erin Burnett. 

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said earlier Monday that the administration should release all of the files related to Epstein. The Democratic leader pointed to two possible scenarios of why the documents related to the case are not public. 

“Option 1: They lied for years. Option 2: They’re engaging in a cover-up. At this point. it seems reasonable that it can only be one of the two things,” Jeffries told reporters at the Capitol. “And so it’s Congress’s responsibility, in a bipartisan way, to ask the questions and try to get answers on behalf of the American people.”

Many MAGA supporters have been outraged over the administration’s posture around the Epstein case, particularly after the FBI and DOJ published a memo earlier this month stating there’s no evidence Epstein had a “client list” and reaffirming that he died by suicide in a jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges. 

Attorney General Pam Bondi has faced strong blowback from the MAGA base. She said during a February Fox News interview that she had the Epstein client list on her desk, comments she clarified earlier this month, saying she meant she had the Epstein case file. Trump has stood by Bondi’s side, praising her on Saturday for doing a “FANTASTIC JOB” and told his backers to move on. 

Jones on Monday used the controversy to knock the Trump administration’s policies.

“Are they being dishonest when they say that there are tens of millions of violent immigrants, and therefore we should have people snatched off the streets? What else should you start asking questions about? Because obviously the people in charge of the Republican Party and the people in the White House are not being honest with you about this,” Jones said.

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I have been with Ayo Edebiri for 15 minutes, tops, and already I’m getting her Pacino.

“What have I been listening to? I’ve been listening to, honestly, the Sonny Boy audiobook,” she tells me, unprompted, after we’ve ducked into her compact car. “You’re literally like, Wait, how is this a book? The way he delivers lines? It’s really shocking. Every actor should listen to that book. He goes—my impression of him is if RFK was raised in the Trump household. It’s like: ‘I had no idea! My mutha…gave me away…for six months…because my fatha’ ”—she takes on here the affect of a very sad clown—“ ‘wasawayinthewar.’ I’m actually going to pull it up.”

The plan for our morning is almost satirically LA: After meeting at 8 a.m. at a matcha place in Highland Park, she’s to drive us to a hiking trail in Angeles National Forest. (She’s an early riser, something that she attributes, in part, to being a former New Yorker: “No matter how early you get up in New York, there’s always somebody who’s either earlier or their day hasn’t finished. But in LA, it’s office hours.”) Dressed in a baseball tee emblazoned with the NBC logo, track pants, a printed headscarf—not unlike the ones she wears as Sydney Adamu, the hyper-competent, superdriven, rather anxious young sous-chef on The Bear, in fact—and Prada sunglasses, she certainly looks the part of a 20-something somebody in the industry, taking the air before she tootles down to Studio City for “meetings,” or whatever actors do. (In reality, Edebiri is due on Hollywood Boulevard later that day for an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!.)

She’s been out here for five or six years—moving from Brooklyn, where she put down roots after attending NYU, when she began writing for television. But it took quite some time for Los Angeles to feel like home. “I don’t really think I started to enjoy living here until last year,” Edebiri says, swirling her iced latte. “I liked it, but I don’t think it really meant anything to me. And I missed a lot of my friends on the East Coast.”

What changed things was hanging out with people like Lionel Boyce, one of her costars on The Bear, and his former Odd Future bandmates Tyler, the Creator, and Travis Bennett—native Angelenos all—who helped her find her footing in the city’s sprawl. (Asked what they like to do when they see each other, Tyler makes his and Edebiri’s milieu sound more like suburban teenagers than very famous adults. “We loiter,” he says. “We’ll sit in the parking lot. We’ll go to someone’s house and play Uno. We’ll eat. It’s just the most normal shit you could think of.”)The strangeness of life in LA this year has also done its part to affirm her sense of community: In January, Edebiri was one of the hundreds of thousands evacuated during the wildfires (her home was ultimately unharmed, but she has friends and colleagues who weren’t so lucky), and at the time of our first interview, downtown LA had recently been under curfew due to the anti-ICE and “No Kings” protests of the days prior.

Edebiri had been out marching over the weekend; the sign she carried—now in her car’s backseat next to Gromit, her dozing Chihuahua mix—reads “Don’t tread on us,” a riff on the Gadsden flag from the Revolutionary War. (Very Boston-native of her, really.)

“It was actually amazing,” she says. “We’re in such a weird empathy drought, which it’s hard not to be—you want to save your own skin. But it’s like, If we’re supposed to be evolved people, we extend care to each other.” And then, in the very same breath: “Do you want sunscreen?”

Raised in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Edebiri is the only child of a Nigerian father and a strictly Pentecostal Barbadian mother. She’s said there was a time when her greatest aspiration was to be a pastor’s wife, but then she got into improv and theater at her public school and started recording episodes of 30 Rock and Conan at home. In college, Edebiri veered from majoring in education to studying dramatic writing at Tisch, meeting, along the way, friends and collaborators like Rachel Sennott, her costar in the 2023 film Bottoms (directed by Emma Seligman, another NYU alum); and Tyler Mitchell, who has now photographed her for this magazine twice. (“We met at a Halloween party,” Edebiri recalls of Mitchell. “I was dressed as Solange on the cover of A Seat at the Table, and he was dressed as Young Frankenstein. And we looked at each other and we said, ‘We are friends.’ ”)

Well-placed writing- and production-assistant jobs, paired with a growing profile in New York’s stand-up comedy scene, led eventually to Edebiri’s first writing credits—on series like the short-lived NBC sitcom Sunnyside, Apple TV+’s Dickinson, Netflix’s Big Mouth, and FX’s What We Do in the Shadows—as well as some supporting and voice-acting roles. But it was appearing on The Bear, which premiered in 2022, that made Edebiri suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, a proper star.

Critics have jabbed at The Bear for competing for awards as a comedy series, when really it walks and talks like a lightly comic drama. Whatever it is, an upshot of its tonal ambiguity has been getting to see someone as obviously, instinctively funny as Edebiri play in every kind of key: delivering punch lines and making wry asides, sure, but anchoring surreal dream sequences and executing sobbing monologues too. “She’s very smart but also silly,” says the actor, writer, and director Will Sharpe, with whom Edebiri will soon star in the Apple TV+ show Prodigies. “She has the ability to be a serious, sophisticated, dramatic actor, but also has funny bones.”

The performance as Sydney has won Edebiri an Emmy, a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a Critics’ Choice Award, among other prizes. So, too, did The Bear—and the deft work of Danielle Goldberg, Edebiri’s stylist and good friend, on all those important red carpets—launch her into the fashion firmament: Suddenly, Edebiri was flitting freely between high-femme silhouettes and looks drawn from menswear, whether in a red satin column from Prada for the 2024 Golden Globes or a floor-length shirtdress and leather tailcoat from Ferragamo for May’s Met Gala. And then, this fall, in a true cool-girl coup, she was named a brand ambassador for Matthieu Blazy’s new Chanel.

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Edebiri wears a Chanel top, necklace, and earring. Fashion Editor: Alex Harrington.Photographed by Tyler Mitchell. Vogue, November 2025.

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The largest dam removal project in US history is finally complete, after crews last week demolished the last of the four dams on the Klamath River. It’s a significant win for tribal nations on the Oregon-California border who for decades have fought to restore the river back to its natural state.

The removal of the four hydroelectric dams — Iron Gate Dam, Copco Dams 1 and 2, and JC Boyle Dam — allows the region’s iconic salmon population to swim freely along the Klamath River and its tributaries, which the species have not been able to do for over a century since the dams were built.

Mark Bransom, chief executive officer of the Klamath River Renewal Corporation, the nonprofit group created to oversee the project, said it was a “celebratory moment,” as his staff members, conservationists, government officials and tribal members gathered and cheered on the bank of the river near where the largest of the dams, Iron Gate, once stood.

Federal regulators approved the plan to raze the dams in 2022. The next year, the smallest of the four dams, Copco No. 2, was removed. Crews then began releasing water from the dams’ reservoirs at the beginning of this year, which was necessary before dismantling the last remaining dams.

The river system has been steeped in controversy: During the recent historic Western drought that dried up the Klamath Basin, an intense water war pitted local farmers against Indigenous tribes, government agencies and conservationists.

But anxiety turned to joy for the Indigenous people who have lived for centuries among the Klamath and its tributaries.

“We all came together in the moment with a feeling that ranged from pure joy to anticipation to excitement,” Bransom told CNN. “For the first time in over 100 years, the river is now back in its historical channel, and I think that was an extraordinarily profound moment for people to actually witness that — the reconnecting of a river.”

The Yurok Tribe in Northern California are known as the “salmon people.” To them, the salmon are sacred species that are central to their culture, diet, and ceremonies. As the story goes, the spirit that created the salmon also created humans, and without the fish, they would cease to exist.

Amy Bowers-Cordalis, a member of and general counsel for the Yurok Tribe, said seeing those dams come down meant “freedom” and the start of the river’s “healing process.”

“The river for Yurok has always been our lifeblood,” Bowers-Cordalis told CNN. Unlike her tribe’s elders, she couldn’t catch as many fish growing up and would see fish carcasses rotting on the banks. “So, restoring the river enables future generations to have a shot at continuing the Yurok fishing way of life.”

Manmade dams, warm water, and prolonged droughts have profoundly altered the river and the ecosystems that rely on it, including most importantly, the salmon population.

Beginning their lives in freshwater systems, like the Klamath River, then traveling out to the salty ocean and back again to their spawning grounds, the chinook and coho salmon face a mix of dangers.

In 2002, a viral outbreak due to warm temperatures and low water killed more than 34,000 fish species, primarily the chinook salmon on the Klamath River. It was a turning point for the Yurok and other tribes in the basin, who regard the salmon as culturally and spiritually significant, to push for the dams’ removal.

The utility company PacifiCorps — a subsidiary of Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway Energy — built the dams in the early to mid-1900s, without tribal consent, to generate electricity for parts of the growing West. But the dams severely disrupted the lifecycle of the salmon, blocking the fish from accessing their historic spawning grounds.

Then there’s the climate crisis: Warm water and drought-fueled water shortages in the Klamath River killed salmon eggs and young fish due to low oxygen and lack of food, and allowed the spread of viruses.

Julie Alexander, senior researcher at Oregon State University, said even without climate change, dam installations still alter the flow regime of rivers, which then changes the water’s temperatures since reservoirs act as thermal units that get warm in the summer.

“This tends to exacerbate pathogens and concentrates the fish so they’re more on top of each other, so you have directly transmitted parasites that can kind of jump from fish to fish,” Alexander told CNN.

Although monumental, the dam demolition project raised concerns over the years about water quality. Built-up sediments stored behind the dam for over a century, potentially containing high levels of organic material, have been released, transforming the river into muddy brown water and harming some of the wildlife in and around it.

But Bransom described it as “short-term pain for long-term gain.”

As for the reason the dams were constructed in the first place — electricity — removing them won’t hurt the power supply much, experts say. Even at full capacity, all four dams produced less than 2% of PacifiCorp’s energy, according to the Klamath River Renewal Corporation.

Up next is ramping up restoration work. Bransom said they plan to put down nearly 16 billion seeds of almost 100 native species across 2,200-acres of land in the Klamath River Basin.

And after more than a century, the fish can now swim freely. Yurok’s Bowers-Cordalis said seeing the river reconnected is a form of giving their land back, which is really the “ultimate reward.”

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Tribal members hug as crews took down what was left of Iron Gate Dam on the Klamath River. A coalition of tribes, local and state authorities joined to make the years-long project a reality. – Carlos Avila Gonzalez/Hearst Newspapers/San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images

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But trade depends on peace and stability. By working to lay the foundation for durable crisis management systems with China, Mr. Trump can secure his legacy as the president who pulled the two powers back from the brink of World War III.

History has shown how superpower confrontation can quickly spiral toward nuclear Armageddon. The 1962 Cuban missile crisis is perhaps the most chilling example.

The United States and China have also come dangerously close to blows.

In 2001, a U.S. Navy spy plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet in the South China Sea. The Chinese pilot was killed, and the American aircraft made an emergency landing on China’s Hainan Island, where the crew was captured. The ensuing 10-day standoff was resolved only after delicate diplomacy that reached the highest levels of the Chinese and U.S. governments.

Whether that kind of crisis resolution can be replicated today is uncertain. China is far more assertive and militarily powerful than it was in 2001, and tensions with the United States are more combustible, amplified by nationalistic pressures on both sides.

The situation between the United States and the Soviet Union was different. Although sworn ideological adversaries, they had the wisdom to put reliable checks and balances in place. They notified each other before missile launches, agreed to a range of transparency requirements so that each side could tell that the other’s activities were exercises, not attacks, and followed safety protocols designed to reduce the chance of run-ins. These safeguards remained functional even when tensions spiked.

The importance of open lines of contact cannot be overestimated.

In 2015 Russia dramatically increased its military presence in Syria. One of the writers of this essay assisted Ash Carter, then the U.S. secretary of defense, and Joe Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in reopening military communication channels with the Russians that had been severed a year earlier after Russia invaded Crimea. We took measures to avoid accidental clashes in Syria, and no such run-ins occurred.

There has been a modest level of military contact between China and the United States over the years, but nothing that resulted in the dependable safeguard systems that existed with the Soviets. And China has repeatedly severed all military exchange out of anger, most recently in 2022 after the visit to Taiwan by Nancy Pelosi as House speaker.

President Joe Biden and Mr. Xi agreed in 2023 to re-establish military dialogue. But that agreement came late in Mr. Biden’s presidency and has failed to fully take root. Communication remains precarious and insufficient, consisting of occasional phone calls between top government or military officials and other sporadic engagement. This fragile framework cannot be counted on to quickly defuse potential accidents in the air and at sea the way regular, predictable contact can, and it remains vulnerable to rupture in tense times.

There have been encouraging recent signs. Last month, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called the Chinese defense minister, Dong Jun, the Trump administration’s first real step toward correcting this military blind spot. But one-off video calls and predictable measures like setting up hotlines are not enough. During the 2001 crisis, the U.S. ambassador to Beijing, Joe Prueher, was unable to reach senior Chinese military officials at the outset: “They didn’t answer my phone call,” he said. And as the former deputy secretary of state Kurt Campbell has put it, past Chinese reluctance to use hotlines means that American calls have “just rung in an empty room for hours upon hours.”

China has hinted at a new readiness to engage. A Chinese military spokesman suggested in late September that Beijing was “open” to pursuing closer military relations with the United States in the name of “greater stability.” In 2017, Mr. Xi himself told General Dunford, the Joint Chiefs chairman, that military ties can act as a stabilizing force in the broader China-U.S. relationship. He was right then, and the point becomes more relevant with each passing day.

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Joeal Calupitan/Associated Press

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Weaver ants’ feet have an incredibly strong grip—individual members of one species can, without slipping, hold an entire dead bird hanging off the edge of a table. And the mighty insects rarely work alone, often teaming up to haul and fold oversized leaves as they build their foliage-filled homes. Scientists have now found that as teams of Asian weaver ants gain more members, they strategically use their grippy feet to become ever more efficient at pulling leaf tips. In contrast to typical human behavior, ants work harder in larger groups than when alone to pull comparatively huge weights.

In a measurable phenomenon called the Ringelmann effect, the more humans join a team, the less effort each individual member tends to exert; researchers generally attribute this to reduced motivation and the difficulty of coordinating more people. “When you’re pulling on a rope, like a tug-of-war, it’s actually less efficient to have more people lined up,” says Macquarie University biologist Chris Reid, co-author on a new study in Current Biology.

Reid and his colleagues connected the tip of a paper leaf to a force-measuring device and filmed weaver ants pulling the tip back across the leaf to fold it. They found single ants pulled 59 times their weight on average, but individuals in groups of 15 pulled 103 times their weight. The more ants were included, the sharper the efficiency increase.

To make this happen, the ants assembled into chains of two to four, one behind the other. The front ants bent their legs and pulled hard at the leaf tip with their mandibles while the rear ants held the leaf still.

The researchers propose these pulling chains could act like force ratchets. The front ants are “active pullers,” and the rear ants are the “passive resisters”—they grab on to the front ants’ bodies, plant their sticky feet firmly on the leaf, and store the forces generated by the front ants so the leaf doesn’t fly backward.

“Examples of true superefficiency are very limited,” says ecologist Scott Powell of George Washington University, who was not involved in the study. Marching army ants, strictly following a pheromone trail to carry heavier loads, are another known example. But along with efficient coordination, weaver ants’ physical traits appear to give them an edge.

These ants’ unusually grippy feet make them “really well adapted to withstanding a strong pulling force in the other direction,” says biologist Helen McCreery of Tufts University, who also was not involved in the study. “The world is full of organisms solving problems in ways that are totally different from the way our brains would think to do it.”

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imageBROKER.com/Alamy Stock Photo

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It is becoming clearer than ever that the rule of law in the White House has depended chiefly on norms — on government lawyers willing to raise objections when merited and to resign in protest if ignored, and on presidents who want to appear law-abiding. This is especially true in an era when party loyalty has defanged the threat of impeachment by Congress, and after the Supreme Court granted presidents immunity from prosecution for crimes committed with official powers.

Every modern president has occasionally taken some aggressive policy step based on a stretched or disputed legal interpretation. But in the past, they and their aides made a point to develop substantive legal theories and to meet public and congressional expectations to explain why they thought their actions were lawful, even if not everyone agreed.

Around 15 years ago, intense legal controversy surrounded President Barack Obama’s drone strikes targeting Al Qaeda militants in ungoverned places where the United States did not have ground troops, like Yemen and tribal Pakistan. Those included the killing of a U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was deemed an operational terrorist leader whose capture was infeasible.

Behind the scenes, Obama administration lawyers wrestled with the scope and limits of how the congressionally authorized armed conflict against Al Qaeda could apply to such scenarios. They developed lengthy and detailed memos citing Supreme Court precedents, and systematically worked through issues of domestic and international law.

The details of its legal rationale became known to Congress and the public not only through unauthorized disclosures and Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, but also because the administration delivered speeches and produced a white paper summarizing its reasoning, which it gave to Congress.

Today, the Trump administration is mostly behaving with audacious transparency about its boat attacks. Mr. Trump has posted surveillance videos of the deadly strikes, talked with relish about how “it is violent and it is very — it’s amazing, the weaponry,” and even acknowledged that he had authorized the C.I.A. to take covert actions in Venezuela.

But administration officials have clammed up when asked for the legal analysis to support their assertion that there is a legal state of armed conflict that makes the killings lawful.

Even in closed-door congressional briefings, according to people familiar with them, officials have provided no detailed legal answers. They are said to have cited drug overdose deaths of Americans, and stated that Mr. Trump decided the country was in an armed conflict with drug cartels. They are also said to have pointed to the part of the Constitution that makes the president the commander in chief of the armed forces, without much further elaboration.

Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and former top Justice Department lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, said Mr. Trump’s actions demonstrated an indifference to law that threatened to hollow it out.

“Nixon tried to keep his criminality secret, and the Bush administration tried to keep the torture secret, and that secrecy acknowledged the norm that these things were wrong,” Professor Goldsmith said. “Trump, as he often does when he is breaking law or norms, is acting publicly and without shame or unease. This is a very successful way to destroy the efficacy of law and norms.”

Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement that Mr. Trump promised during the campaign to take on drug cartels whose actions “resulted in the needless deaths of innocent Americans.” She suggested his “unprecedented action” would continue.

“All of these decisive strikes have been against designated narcoterrorists, as affirmed by U.S. intelligence, bringing deadly poison to our shores, and the president will continue to use every element of American power to stop drugs from flooding into our country and to bring those responsible to justice,” she said.

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The Boring Co., founded by Elon Musk, has begun work on an underground tunnel in Nashville.

Boring’s “Music City Loop” would function like a rideshare. Passengers will ride in individual Tesla cars on a fixed route connecting downtown Nashville to the city’s airport, with possible expansions in the future.

State officials have touted the project as a solution to traffic woes. Others worry about the tunnel’s possible impact on the environment and Nashville’s existing infrastructure.

Here’s everything we know about the project so far.

Function

Currently, the 8-mile journey from the airport to the Music City Convention Center can take anywhere from 12 to 30 minutes during peak traffic times. The Boring Co. estimates the same ride could take as little as 8 minutes with its fleet of underground Teslas.

There are plans for three stops along the Music City Loop: the Nashville International Airport (BNA), the Music City Convention Center, and the Tennessee State Capitol.

Despite talks with several other cities, The Boring Co. only has one other tunnel in operation. The Vegas Loop initially boasted 155 mph rides in self-driving Teslas when it was first announced. Since then, Boring has switched to driver-operated cars for the 2-mile tunnel that currently circles the Vegas strip.

With congestion, Vegas Loop riders have observed a top speed of 40 mph. Nashville’s tunnel would need Tesla drivers to maintain an average speed of 67 mph to deliver on the promise of an 8-minute trip.

In its pitch to Nashville, Boring has been less ambitious about the length and speed of its tunnel rides. Construction, on the other hand, will have a much faster timetable in Music City.

Timeline

The Boring Co. expects a quick turnaround on the project. The company initially estimated that Nashville’s tunnel would be operational by late 2026, but has now adjusted to early 2027.  It’s still an ambitious timeline; it took the company nearly three years to complete a tunnel a tenth of that length in Las Vegas. Other tunnel pitches never got that far. Cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Fort Lauderdale, and Washington D.C. never moved forward on proposed tunnels.

The project is still officially in the planning stages, and The Boring Co. has said that drilling won’t start until the last quarter of the year. However, excavation is already underway at a downtown parking lot.

Government transparency

Fences went up around the state-owned lot before lawmakers officially approved the deal with Boring, a move state officials say is common in construction projects like these.

Members of the State Building Commission, none of whom represent Nashville, voted unanimously to give The Boring Co. a no-cost lease for the tunnel’s starting point. The agreement with the state dictates that Boring has to leave the lot in the same condition or better. If not, the company could be on the hook for the cost of repairing it.

The greenlight came soon after the project was unveiled to the public. Days prior, Gov. Bill Lee and other state Republicans announced the deal, touting that the tunnel would come at no cost to the taxpayer.

“It’s 100% privately funded. There will be no cost to Tennessee taxpayers,” Lee said. “For those that live here, it means that there’ll be less congestion on our roads. There will be less wear and tear on our highways.”

State lawmakers from Nashville disagree. The city’s statehouse delegation has argued that the development will only serve tourists at the expense of locals.

Many, like Rep. Justin Jones, D-Nashville, have criticized the lack of input from both city and state officials who represent Nashville.

“You’re treating us like we’re a colony where you get to dictate to our constituents what is in their best interest. You keep their representation out of meetings,” Jones said. “You don’t even consider the impact to the health and safety of our community.”

State records do not show that there were any environmental reviews of the project — something that has served as a death knell for tunnel proposals in other cities.

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The Boring Co.’s existing tunnel in Las Vegas.

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Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.

In recent weeks, several prominent public health experts have resigned from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, citing concerns about the agency’s shift away from science-based decision-making.

Among them was Demetre Daskalakis, who until recently directed the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. He’s here today to tell us more about what’s going on at the CDC—and what concerned experts are doing to try to keep America healthy.

Thanks so much for, for joining us today.

Demetre Daskalakis: Thanks for having me.

Feltman: So, to start, could you tell me a bit about your former role at the CDC and what you did there?

Daskalakis: I, actually, in my five years at CDC had seven separate roles …

Feltman: Mm.

Daskalakis: So I will just focus on the last two years, where I was the center director for the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

So, you know, CDC is made out of centers—that’s what Centers for Disease Control and Prevention mean—and so the National Center for Immunization Respiratory Diseases, which we’ll call NCIRD for short, is the center that is responsible for a lot of vaccine policy and vaccine-preventable diseases for the country, as well as the jurisdictional immunization programs and the very important Vaccines for Children Program.

Feltman: And how have things been changing there over the last year or so?Daskalakis: I mean, not for the good. I think that with the installation of the new secretary of health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., I was seeing a pretty significant shift away from sort of science-based work, more toward this ideologic, almost authoritarian-style leadership coming from the Health and Human Services secretary that didn’t really value or listen to any expert information or advice

Feltman: You recently resigned, as did several other prominent experts at the CDC. And the feeling in, in a lot of your resignation statements was that you felt that the CDC had become something so different from what it was supposed to be that you could do more work from the outside. What do you think that’s going to look like?

Daskalakis: I mean, unfortunately, I think my resignation letter was a little bit prophetic because, I mean, literally right after I resigned, you know, CDC put up a political manifesto as their mission statement that really, again, was all ideology and very light on science or public health. And then, you know, we’ve seen the Advisory Committee [on] Immunization Practices, where the firewall between science and ideology and politics completely broke down, and I feel like I’m sort of in a unique position: I really understand what is supposed to happen and what the normal process is. And so I feel like one of my main roles outside of CDC is going to be to sort of identify when there are glitches in the Matrix and when there are things happening that are atypical and things that aren’t sort of going through a process that value science before sweeping statements and policies are made. And so I will have that utility for as long as I sort of have the awareness; I can point at the chaos.

Feltman: Yeah, and what do you think some of the solutions look like for public health organizations outside of the CDC to keep America actually healthy [laughs]?

Daskalakis: Yeah, I think that this is, like, the key moment where, as someone who’s worked in governmental public health for over a decade and in health care for two decades-plus, it hurts me to say that I don’t trust what’s coming out of the CDC. And as an infectious disease doctor, when I see patients and I have a question, that’s where I go. And so, unfortunately, I think that we’re seeing the decay of the quality of information, and it’s not, like, a random decay; it is a specifically targeted decay to create an ideology propaganda machine that’s Orwellian, as opposed to a trusted health source …

Feltman: Hmm.

Daskalakis: So I think that the first is that this won’t last forever, but it’s what has to happen for now because of the way leadership is at HHS. So I think that, really, a lot of the onus and responsibility now falls on—I’m gonna call them “para-public health”—paragovernmental organizations that are actually using process and data to sort of generate sort of recommendations and, you know, in effect, replacement policies to make sure that the health machine of the U.S. continues to function even as people are trying to destroy it. I think that the answer is that those organizations are going to have to carry the water for a lot of this. They’re going to need to be the trusted voices for the folks at the front line, whether they’re public health practitioners or medical providers.

And what I hope is that they are forming deeper and stronger alliances so that they are gonna be more unified in what they say, because one of the scary parts is these states that are putting together coalitions, they’re doing the right thing, right—let’s just be clear. But it’s gonna create a tapestry across the U.S. that is about have and have-nots. So your California-Hawaii axis and your, like, Northeast axis, you know, they’re doing great. The question’s gonna be: Is there going to be something for the South and parts of the Midwest that may not have that political will that’s necessary to lift up [that works] to make sure that folks are protected? And if government funding—which could be taken away at any minute, and they have really created some levers where they’re going to be able to potentially pull funding with not a good reason from a lot of jurisdictions—like, how is that gonna play out in places that don’t have tax base to be able to cover what the federal government normally provides?

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