AI Has Broken High School and College

AI Has Broken High School and College

The Atlantic by Damon Beres / Aug 30

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a newsletter in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.

Another school year is beginning—which means another year of AI-written essays, AI-completed problem sets, and, for teachers, AI-generated curricula. For the first time, seniors in high school have had their entire high-school careers defined to some extent by chatbots. The same applies for seniors in college: ChatGPT released in November 2022, meaning unlike last year’s graduating class, this year’s crop has had generative AI at its fingertips the whole time.

My colleagues Ian Bogost and Lila Shroff both recently wrote articles about these students and the state of AI in education. (Ian, a university professor himself, wrote about college, while Lila wrote about high school.) Their articles were striking: It is clear that AI has been widely adopted, by students and faculty alike, yet the technology has also turned school into a kind of free-for-all.

I asked Lila and Ian to have a brief conversation about their work—and about where AI in education goes from here.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Lila Shroff: We’re a few years into AI in schools. Is the conversation maturing or changing in some way at universities?

Ian Bogost: Professors are less surprised that it exists, but there is maybe a bit of a blind spot to the state of adoption among students. I saw a panic in 2022, 2023—like, Oh my God, this can do anything. Or at least there were questions. Can this do everything? How much is my class at risk? Now I think there’s more of a sense of, Well, this thing still exists, but we have time. We don’t have to worry about it right away. And that might actually be a worse reaction than the original.

Lila: The blind-spot language rings true to the high-school environment too. I spoke to some high schoolers—granted this was quite a small sample—but basically it sounds like everybody is using this all the time for everything.

Ian: Not just for school, right? Anything they want to do, they’re asking ChatGPT now.

Lila: I was a sophomore in college when ChatGPT came out, so I witnessed some of this firsthand. There was much more anxiety—it felt like the rules were unclear. And I think both of our stories touched on the fact that for this incoming class of high-school and college seniors, they’ve barely had any of those four years without ChatGPT. Whatever sort of stigma or confusion that might have been there in earlier years is fading, and it’s becoming very much default and normalized.

Ian: Normalization is the thing that struck me the most. That is not a concept that I think the teachers have wrapped their heads around. Teachers and faculty also have been adopting AI carefully or casually—or maybe even in a more professional way, to write articles or letters of recommendation, which I’ve written about. There’s still this sense that it’s not really a part of their habit.

Lila: I looked into teachers at the K–12 level for the article I wrote. Three in 10 teachers are using AI weekly in some way.

Ian: Some kind of redesign of educational practice might be required, which is easy for me to say in an article. Instead of an answer, I have an approach to thinking about the answer that has been bouncing around in my brain. Are you familiar with the concept in software development called technical debt? In the software world, you make the decision about how to design or implement a system that feels good and right at the time. And maybe you know it’s going to be a bad idea in the long run, but for now, it makes sense and it is convenient. But you never get around to really making it better later on, and so you have all these nonoptimal aspects of your infrastructure.

That’s the state I feel like we’re in, at least in the university. It’s a little different in high school, especially in public high school, with these different regulatory regimes at work. But we accrued all this pedagogical debt, and not just since AI—there are aspects of teaching that we ought to be paying more attention to or doing better, like, this class needs to be smaller, or these kinds of assignments don’t work unless you have a lot of hands-on iterative feedback. We’ve been able to survive under the weight of pedagogical debt, and now something snapped. AI entered the scene and all of those bad or questionable—but understandable—decisions about how to design learning experiences are coming home to roost.

Lila: I agree that AI is a breaking point in education. One answer that seems to be emerging at the high-school level is a more practical, skills-based education. The College Board, for instance, has announced two new AP courses—AP Business and AP Cybersecurity. But there’s another group of people who are really concerned about how overreliance on these tools erodes critical-thinking skills, and maybe that means everyone should go read the classics and write their essays in cursive handwriting.

Ian: My young daughter has been going to this set of classes outside of school where she learned how to wire an outlet. We used to have shop class and metal class, and you could learn a trade, or at least begin to, in high school. A lot of that stuff has been disinvested. We used to touch more things. Now we move symbols around, and that’s kind of it.

I wonder if this all-or-nothing nature of AI use has something to do with that. If you had a place in your day as a high-school or college student where you just got to paint, or got to do on-the-ground work in the community, or apply the work you did in statistics class to solve a real-world problem—maybe that urge to just finish everything as rapidly as possible so you can get onto the next thing in your life would be less acute. The AI problem is a symptom of a bigger cultural illness, in a way.

Lila: Students are using AI exactly as it has been designed, right? They’re just making themselves more productive. If they were doing the same thing in an office, they might be getting a bonus.

Ian: Some of the students I talked to said, Your boss isn’t going to care how you get things done, just that they get done as effectively as possible. And they’re not wrong about that.

Lila: One student I talked to said she felt there was really too much to be done, and it was hard to stay on top of it all. Her message was, maybe slow down the pace of the work and give students more time to do things more richly.

Ian: The college students I talk to, if you slow it all down, they’re more likely to start a new club or practice lacrosse one more day a week. But I do love the idea of a slow-school movement to sort of counteract AI. That doesn’t necessarily mean excluding AI—it just means not filling every moment of every day with quite so much demand.

But you know, this doesn’t feel like the time for a victory of deliberateness and meaning in America. Instead, it just feels like you’re always going to be fighting against the drive to perform even more.

Online Shopping May Never Be the Same

Online Shopping May Never Be the Same

The Atlantic by Ian Bogost / Aug 30

A few years ago, I found the perfect rug for my daughter’s room. It had pink unicorns and flowers. But I scoffed at the price tag on Anthropologie’s website: more than $1,000, plus an additional fee for “white glove delivery.” Then I fired up Etsy. I found a similar product made by a workshop in India that shipped directly from there. It took weeks to arrive, but it was half the price.

Online shopping is a miracle: You can find items of any kind, fit for any purpose, for affordable prices—and shipped from all over the world to your door. But as of today, buying from international sellers has become more expensive for Americans. That’s because President Donald Trump ended the de minimis exemption on imported goods, a loophole that allowed millions of daily packages to enter the country without paying duties. The exemption has been around for a long time—nearly a century—but it took on new import (get it?) in 2016, when the maximum value for untaxed goods rose from $200 to $800. In that moment, the social-media-driven rise of direct-to-consumer e-commerce, drop-shipping, and online-marketplace sales were also accelerating. Ever since, American ports, mailboxes, and homes have been flooded with cheap clothing, electronics, accessories, skin-care products, toys, and a host of other consumer goods.

The de minimis loophole is a big reason e-commerce sites including Shein and Temu could sell you things for so cheap: They shipped straight from China, skirting any tariffs. The White House ended the exemption for goods from China earlier this year, and now de minimis is ending for all countries. That means that many things you might import could become more expensive (on account of the additional taxes) or harder to buy (because sellers won’t bother shipping to the U.S.), or take longer to arrive (because of customs backlogs), or any combination of those. The rug I bought a few years ago would now be subject to a 50 percent import duty, when you factor in tariffs on India. Presuming that cost is passed down to consumers, it’s enough to give a buyer like me pause.

You might not realize how much of the stuff you buy online comes directly from overseas. I didn’t, until I looked closely at my buying habits over the past few years. After all, sites such as Etsy and eBay offer seamless global commerce: A handmade craft object could come from Maine or Myanmar, straight to you. Even Amazon has benefited from de minimis. Various strategies have allowed the retailer’s marketplace suppliers to take advantage of de minimis when they import goods; at other times, when you buy from the big platforms’ sites, those vendors might ship what you ordered directly from abroad, tax free.

[Read: Amazon decides speed isn’t everything]

Buying cheap imported goods has become the best part of online shopping: Not only can you find the best deals from international sellers, but also you can source items to satiate specific hobbies and interests—say, drafting pens from Japan or instrument reeds from Belgium. I found that I had bought a host of stuff, on Etsy and beyond, that took advantage of de minimis, including rubber-tree hippo figurines from Denmark (naturally) and a surprise mandolin from Ireland for my daughter. Those goods would now be subject to an additional tariff. I’ve bought incredibly cheap Chinese- and Japanese-manufactured camera lenses that have fueled a resurgence of photography hobbyism for me and my son; I also bought a detailed and shockingly high-quality Paul Revere costume to help a neighbor’s kid beat her classmates in a school costume contest—a small thing, but one we’ll all remember.

Ah, and then the British faucet doodad. This was a big deal. When I tried to repurpose an old, turn-of-the century washbasin with separate hot and cold water spigots, I couldn’t find a faucet that fit the sink. Sure enough, some vendor in the United Kingdom had a $30 plastic tube that did the trick. International sellers sometimes are the only ones that have what you need, and you don’t need to be a particularly adept shopper to find them. A simple Google search will suffice.

Of course, being able to seamlessly import cheap stuff has also encouraged mindless consumerism. Some imported goods are crap that nobody ever needed, produced at unconscionable labor and environmental costs. My family has a bit of a LEGO habit, and my son took to buying the cheaper Chinese knockoff sets to maximize our, well, brick-building value, I suppose. It felt a little suspect to do this—the sets are direct copies of LEGO designs—and many of them remain in bags in a closet, unbuilt. Surely we didn’t need to import those. Nor the piles of cables, chargers, head lamps, and other low-cost electronic goods that broke after a few uses.

Whether it’s junk or not, Americans have become acclimated to buying a prodigious variety of wares from all over the world. When de minimis fused with global online commerce a decade ago, ordinary buyers like you and me started to see behind the curtain of domestic retailers. Anthropologie’s website touted that the unicorn rug was “exclusive” to its store. But that was never entirely true: Sellers offering the same style with similar materials found a way to reach buyers like me directly, thanks to online commerce and its associated marketplaces. That’s not going to change anytime soon. Instead, buying things will just become more painful. Someone will bear the burden of the new duties, and that someone is likely to be you.

The Trump Administration Will Automate Health Inequities

The Trump Administration Will Automate Health Inequities

The Atlantic by Craig Spencer / Aug 30

The White House’s AI Action Plan, released in July, mentions “health care” only three times. But it is one of the most consequential health policies of the second Trump administration. Its sweeping ambitions for AI—rolling back safeguards, fast-tracking “private-sector-led innovation,” and banning “ideological dogmas such as DEI”—will have long-term consequences for how medicine is practiced, how public health is governed, and who gets left behind.

Already, the Trump administration has purged data from government websites, slashed funding for research on marginalized communities, and pressured government researchers to restrict or retract work that contradicts political ideology. These actions aren’t just symbolic—they shape what gets measured, who gets studied, and which findings get published. Now, those same constraints are moving into the development of AI itself. Under the administration’s policies, developers have a clear incentive to make design choices or pick data sets that won’t provoke political scrutiny.

These signals are shaping the AI systems that will guide medical decision making for decades to come. The accumulation of technical choices that follows—encoded in algorithms, embedded in protocols, and scaled across millions of patients—will cement the particular biases of this moment in time into medicine’s future. And history has shown that once bias is encoded into clinical tools, even obvious harms can take decades to undo—if they’re undone at all.

AI tools were permeating every corner of medicine before the action plan was released: assisting radiologists, processing insurance claims, even communicating on behalf of overworked providers. They’re also being used to fast-track the discovery of new cancer therapies and antibiotics, while advancing precision medicine that helps providers tailor treatments to individual patients. Two-thirds of physicians used AI in 2024—a 78 percent jump from the year prior. Soon, not using AI to help determine diagnoses or treatments could be seen as malpractice.

At the same time, AI’s promise for medicine is limited by the technology’s shortcomings. One health-care AI model confidently hallucinated a nonexistent body part. Another may make doctors’ procedural skills worse. Providers are demanding stronger regulatory oversight of AI tools, and some patients are hesitant to have AI analyze their data.

The stated goal of the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan is to preserve American supremacy in the global AI arms race. But the plan also prompts developers of leading-edge AI models to make products free from “ideological bias” and “designed to pursue objective truth rather than social engineering agendas.” This guidance is murky enough that developers must interpret vague ideological cues, then quietly calibrate what their models can say, show, or even learn to avoid crossing a line that’s never clearly drawn.

Some medical tools incorporate large language models such as ChatGPT. But many AI tools are bespoke and proprietary and rely on narrower sets of medical data. Given how this administration has aimed to restrict data collection at the Department of Health and Human Services and ensure that those data conform to its ideas about gender and race, any health tools developed under Donald Trump’s AI action plan may face pressure to rely on training data that reflects similar principles. (In response to a request for comment, a White House official said in an email that the AI plan and the president’s executive order on scientific integrity together ensure that “scientists in the government use only objective, verifiable data and criteria in scientific decision making and when building and contracting for AI,” and that future clinical tools are “not limited by the political or ideological bias of the day.”)

Models don’t invent the world they govern; they depend on and reflect the data we feed them. That’s what every research scientist learns early on: garbage in, garbage out. And if governments narrow what counts as legitimate health data and research as AI models are built into medical practice, the blind spots won’t just persist; they’ll compound and calcify into the standards of care.

In the United States, gaps in data have already limited the perspective of AI tools. During the first years of COVID, data on race and ethnicity were frequently missing from death and vaccination reports. A review of data sets fed to AI models used during the pandemic found similarly poor representation. Cleaning up these gaps is difficult and expensive—but it’s the best way to ensure the algorithms don’t indelibly incorporate existing inequities into clinical code. After years of advocacy and investment, the U.S. had finally begun to close long-standing gaps in how we track health and who gets counted.

But over the past several months, that type of fragile progress has been deliberately rolled back. At times, CDC web pages have been rewritten to reflect ideology, not epidemiology. The National Institutes of Health halted funding for projects it labeled as “DEI”—despite never defining what that actually includes. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made noise about letting NIH scientists publish only in government-run journals, and demanded the retraction of a rigorous study, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, that found no link between aluminum and autism. (Kennedy has promoted the opposite idea: that such vaccine ingredients are a cause of autism.) And a recent executive order gives political appointees control over research grants, including the power to cancel those that don’t “advance the President’s policy priorities.” Selective erasure of data is becoming the foundation for future health decisions.

American medicine has seen the consequences of building on such a shaky foundation before. Day-to-day practice has long relied on clinical tools that confuse race with biology. Lung-function testing used race corrections derived from slavery-era plantation medicine, leading to widespread underdiagnosis of serious lung disease in Black patients. In 2023, the American Thoracic Society urged the use of a race-neutral approach, yet adoption is uneven, with many labs and devices still defaulting to race-based settings. A kidney-function test used race coefficients that delayed specialty referrals and transplant eligibility. An obstetric calculator factored in race and ethnicity in ways that increased unnecessary Cesarean sections among Black and Hispanic women.

Once race-based adjustments are baked into software defaults, clinical guidelines, and training, they persist—quietly and predictably—for years. Even now, dozens of flawed decision-making tools that rely on outdated assumptions remain in daily use. Medical devices tell a similar story. Pulse oximeters can miss dangerously low oxygen levels in darker-skinned patients. During the COVID pandemic, those readings fed into hospital-triage algorithms—leading to disparities in treatment and trust. Once flawed metrics get embedded into “objective” tools, bias becomes practice, then policy.

When people in power define which data matter and the outputs are unchallenged, the outcomes can be disastrous. In the early 20th century, the founders of modern statistics—Francis Galton, Ronald Fisher, and Karl Pearson—were also architects of the eugenics movement. Galton, who coined the term eugenics, pioneered correlation and regression and used these tools to argue that traits like intelligence and morality were heritable and should be managed through selective breeding. Fisher, often hailed as the “father of modern statistics,” was an active leader in the U.K.’s Eugenics Society and backed its policy of “voluntary” sterilization of those deemed “feeble-minded.” Pearson, creator of the p-value and chi-squared tests, founded the Annals of Eugenics journal and deployed statistical analysis to argue that Jewish immigrants would become a “parasitic race.”

For each of these men—and the broader medical and public-health community that supported the eugenics movement—the veneer of data objectivity helped transform prejudice into policy. In the 1927 case Buck v. Bell, the Supreme Court codified their ideas when it upheld compulsory sterilization in the name of public health. That decision has never been formally overturned.

Many AI proponents argue concerns of bias are overblown. They’ll note that bias has been fretted over for years, and to some extent, they’re right: Bias was always present in AI models, but its effects were more limited—in part because the systems themselves were narrowly deployed. Until recently, the number of AI tools used in medicine was small, and most operated at the margins of health care, not at its core. What’s different now is the speed and the scale of AI’s expansion into this field, at the same time the Trump administration is dismantling guardrails for regulating AI and shaping these models’ future.

Human providers are biased, too, of course. Researchers have found that women’s medical concerns are dismissed more often than men’s, and some white medical students falsely believe Black patients have thicker skin or feel less pain. Human bias and AI bias alike can be addressed through training, transparency, and accountability, but the path for the latter requires accounting for both human fallibility and that of the technology itself. Technical fixes exist—reweighing data, retraining models, and bias audits—but they’re often narrow and opaque. Many advanced AI models—especially large language models—are functionally black boxes: Using them means feeding information in and waiting for outputs. When biases are produced in the computational process, the people who depend on that process are left unaware of when or how they were introduced. That opacity fuels a bias feedback loop: AI amplifies what we put in, then shapes what we take away, leaving humans more biased for having trusted it.

A “move fast and break things” rollout of AI in health care, especially when based on already biased data sets, will encode similar assumptions into models that are enigmatic and self-reinforcing. By the time anyone recognizes the flaws, they won’t just be baked into a formula; they’ll be indelibly built into the infrastructure of care.

Why Is the National Guard in D.C.? Even They Don’t Know.

Why Is the National Guard in D.C.? Even They Don’t Know.

The Atlantic by Ashley Parker / Aug 30

Even the men and women of the National Guard seemed flummoxed, at times, over what exactly they were supposed to be doing in the nation’s capital.

“We’re the president’s patrol, ma’am,” one trio from South Carolina told us when we spotted them along the waterfront and asked what they were up to.

“Just walkin’ around,” replied another gaggle—also strolling along the Potomac.

“Smiling and waving,” a third group, up from West Virginia and stationed along the National Mall, told us.

President Donald Trump’s decision this month to deploy the National Guard to the streets of Washington, D.C., unleashed a torrent of coverage, criticism, and fear, along with a smattering of muted praise from some residents. More than two weeks later, soldiers are still deployed throughout the city, a physical presence amid the capital’s greenery as summer fades into fall. Their mission is ostensibly to stop violent crime, but many here and beyond fear that Washington is being used as a test case—the blueprint for Trump to deploy the National Guard across the country as a paramilitary police force—and that Americans are being conditioned to accept authoritarianism. (Trump seemed to say the quiet part aloud Tuesday in a Cabinet meeting when he declared, “The line is that I’m a dictator,” before claiming that he’s succeeding in halting crime in the city. “So a lot of people say, ‘You know, if that’s the case, I’d rather have a dictator.’”)

Trump’s federalization of the District has several parts: There’s the deployment of more than 2,200 (and counting) Guard members. But there are also the hundreds of federal officers from agencies such as the FBI and DEA who are helping enforce D.C. laws, the immigration-enforcement officers who have been empowered to detain anyone not in the country legally, and the D.C. police force, over which the president has asserted control. Social media has been flooded with alarming videos: masked federal officers violently wrestling a food-delivery driver to the ground, kids having to push through heavily armed officers on their way to elementary school.

The Guardsmen were initially unarmed, but Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Monday ordered them to start carrying their issued weapons. In most cases, it’s a small handgun on their hip. Photos have circulated of Guard members with assault rifles in some Metro stations and on their outdoor patrols. Defense officials told us these weapons are meant to be used only in self-defense.

The occupation has chilled life in the city, especially in neighborhoods with large immigrant populations: quiet playgrounds, empty restaurants, fewer street vendors, fewer food-delivery scooters. Nannies have stayed home, and house cleaners have canceled. Some mixed-status families are keeping their children home from school or skipping work until the federal focus moves on, or they’re leaving home only when absolutely necessary. As D.C. Public Schools reopened this week, some local parent-teacher groups organized impromptu “walking buses”—volunteers willing to help walk to and from school kids whose parents don’t feel safe doing so.

The National Guard has become the face of the occupation even though, for those who feel afraid, it’s in many respects the least of their worries. The Guardsmen themselves have generally behaved more like a notional guard than a national one.

Their sudden appearance brings with it an absurdist sheen—their tasks quotidian (“beautification”), their backdrops farcical (a Dupont Circle Krispy Kreme), their very presence sitcom-esque (as if lifted from an episode of Veep). Alongside a video of troops engaged in light horticulture, one person wondered on social media, “National guardner?” It is not entirely surprising that the Justice Department paralegal who hurled a Subway salami footlong at a Customs and Border Protection officer—declaring, upon his arrest, “I did it. I threw a sandwich”—promptly became an icon of D.C. resistance, his act seeming, in its own implausible way, to epitomize the city’s collective reaction. But the banality of the National Guard’s daily patrols belies a far more complicated reality—for the city’s residents, the men and women of the National Guard, even the nation itself—colored by race, class, immigration status, lived experience, and, of course, personal politics. The absent nannies and house cleaners are a frustrating inconvenience for the families who employ them, but a physical manifestation of the sense of menace that those employees feel.

The photos bouncing around social media and private text chains—of the Guard milling in front of the uber-trendy 14th Street brasserie Le Diplomate, for instance—might be easy fodder for gentle mockery. “National Guard members are deployed in DC to the “crime-ridden” … National Mall? Le Diplomate? Waste of money,” the Senate Judiciary Democrats posted on X Monday. But while homicide rates in D.C. have been declining in recent years, the city’s overall crime statistics offer a far more mixed picture, one in which the threat of violent crime still feels very real to many residents. That Krispy Kreme? Two teens were stabbed in Dupont Circle and one man was shot in June just steps from its entrance, amid the city’s Pride celebrations. And Le Diplomate, with its $41 steak frites and $76 Thursday special (Dover sole meunière)? A shooting in 2021, on a beautiful summer evening, sent diners fleeing. A more recent one this May, just a block away, left one man dead. And a disconcertingly large number of residents have personal crime anecdotes.

During a news conference Wednesday, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser seemed to channel her own ambivalence, and perhaps some of her city’s as well. She credited Trump’s federal law-enforcement surge with reducing crime in the District, but she also expressed concern about the Guard presence and the immigration crackdown. Asked about “nervous Hispanic workers,” she pointedly said that she wanted to “express to them as a neighbor how very sorry I am that they’re living in this terror.”

The particulars are no less complicated for the Guardsmen themselves. When the president first ordered their deployment to the nation’s capital, Pentagon officials told us that some Guard leaders asked: “Is this legal?” After all, the National Guard is usually deployed by governors to combat threats from nature—hurricanes or other natural disasters—or by the president to support U.S. military missions abroad, as it did in Iraq and Afghanistan. When the Guard shows up to protect Americans from fellow Americans, it is under extraordinary circumstances and for a limited mission, such as after the U.S. Capitol riot on January 6, 2021—the last time the government deployed the D.C National Guard to the city to address an emergency.

In their initial doubts, what some Guardsmen were really asking was existential: Are we becoming something different? After all, the National Guard appears to have a new kind of mission, one that began in Los Angeles when Trump federalized the Guard over immigration concerns; moved to D.C. under the auspices of addressing “rampant violence and disorder”; and, according to Trump, could soon expand to Chicago and Baltimore.

This ambiguity not only invites confusion and raises fears of troops conducting more police-like functions, but it also thrusts the National Guard into the middle of political disputes. The more often it is deployed in politically divisive missions—instead of the more routine apolitical assignments to disaster zones—the more perilous the Guard’s standing becomes among the American public.

There is also the concern that the Guard is not actually making much of a difference. To wit: On Wednesday around 3 p.m.—less than a week after Trump declared on social media that “Washington, D.C. is SAFE AGAIN!”—a woman was stabbed near a major intersection along the city’s H Street corridor. Guard members had been passing through the intersection all day, and a trio happened to be finishing lunch on the patio of a taqueria directly across the street when the stabbing happened. Still, the suspect managed to flee. The Guard declined to comment.

“So safe,” a neighborhood resident texted us.

To some—especially undocumented immigrants—the Guard presence is disconcerting at best, terrifying at worst. But to others, they are more curiosity than conquerors, more tourists than tormentors.

“They’re giving ‘Hey, pal’ vibes,” one woman whispered to her companion this week, observing Guardsman ambling along the waterfront.

Often, the Guard presents with a certain Boy Scout earnestness. On Tuesday, military officials shared that the troops had completed “beautification projects,” describing the efforts not unlike a merit-badge mission: First, Guardsmen collected driftwood while clearing the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial. The following day, they turned that wood into mulch and wielded wheelbarrows as they spread it around the Tidal Basin. (Before their weapons orders came down, some—like Cub Scouts in training—were armed with only their trusty metal water bottles, jammed deep into their cargo pockets.)

Hegseth has repeatedly described his desire to create a U.S. military force focused on lethality. But Christopher Le Mon, a former Biden- and Obama-administration national-security official, joked to us that the troops’ landscaping duties seemed more like a focus on “leafality.” The use of troops for such missions is “ridiculous and wasteful,” he said, adding more seriously: “Meanwhile the Chinese military probably is training to invade Taiwan.”

More than half of the troops hail from outside D.C., and the tourism vibe is strong. On Monday, some Guard members sat resting in a patch of shade in front of the Washington Monument, alongside a group of tired schoolchildren. A few minutes later, a different group of Guardsmen boarded a charter bus, as if readying for their next sightseeing stop. At the city’s Wharf, one Guardsman obligingly took a photo of a couple before two of his comrades in arms joined the couple in the picture.

“You guys are so sweet!” the woman enthused.

Yet, again, the reality is far more complicated. Yes, the Guard has demonstrated instances of admirable sweetness; one Capitol Hill resident and father of two recounted to us how troops on the Mall allowed his 4-year-old son to press the buttons on their walkie-talkies. But, this person continued, on Monday he had gotten off the Metro at the Eastern Market stop and found that a group of fare-jumping teens who regularly hop the turnstiles had been halted by a combination of Guardsmen and police officers. He said that he’s long found the fare-hoppers to be a frustration of city living, yet added, “I don’t know that this was a problem that rose to the level of Let’s deploy the National Guard with their long guns.”

A lawyer who lives on Capitol Hill told us that she had observed something different at the Eastern Market stop Monday, when most D.C. public schools opened for the new year: A scrum of moms—or possibly teachers—standing in front of the Guard, holding up signs. “At first I thought the group of women were protesting the Guard,” she told us. “But then I looked at the signs and they literally said things like First day of school! and You got this!”

“It just struck me as an example of why this is such a farce and so unnecessary,” she continued. “This is a community where moms stand outside and encourage kids on the first day of school.” The District, she said, “is not a community that needs to be militarized.”

At Union Station, in the shadow of the Capitol, the troops got a decidedly mixed reaction as we looked on one afternoon this week. Some commuters held up phones as they passed by, recording out of curiosity or for posterity. A woman in workout gear was more confrontational, filming the Guardsmen at close range and repeatedly demanding, “What’s your mission?” Others were quietly supportive: One woman flashed a quick thumbs-up, and another slipped a sentry a rose-colored Vitamin Water.

At one point, a man, head shorn, sidled up to a police officer and a Guardsman to offer explicit praise. The man said that usually at Union Station, “every breath was weed,” but he hasn’t so much as smelled a hint of marijuana smoke since the Guard stationed itself in the area. He said he also normally witnesses at least a handful of fare-jumpers every trip, and enthused that those, too, have disappeared. He hoped the Guardsman were hearing the praise they deserved, he said.

By the time we headed home, after several hours spent wandering the city’s various quadrants, it was clear that almost no one felt particularly good about the arrangement: not the National Guardsmen, many of whom clearly didn’t want to be there, leaving their families and jobs in order to spread mulch and pick up trash; and not the residents, many of whom were furious with the occupation of their city or, worse, terrified of what the military’s presence portended for them and their loved ones. Even those residents who welcomed the troops did so from a place of discontent, so fed up with crime and quality-of-life issues that they felt relieved that someone was finally doing something, anything to help.

Earlier in the day, sitting on a bench at the Wharf, we watched a lone man in fatigues wander by, earbuds in. “Where’s the rest of your trio?” we called out, by now accustomed to seeing Guardsmen in groups of three. “Where are your other two?” He stopped, took out his earbuds, and leaned toward us, revealing the patch on his uniform that stated his military branch.

“I’m Space Force,” he offered cheerily. He looked blissful, as if in the weeks since Trump deployed the military to Washington, he had come to understand that managing the cosmos was less complicated than being responsible for even a few blocks of the capital.

America’s fantasy of home-grown chipmaking

America’s fantasy of home-grown chipmaking

To remain the world’s foremost technological power, the country needs its friends

The Economist, Aug. 21

How low mighty Intel has fallen. Half a century ago the American chipmaker was a byword for the cutting edge; it went on to dominate the market for personal-computer chips and in 2000 briefly became the world’s second-most-valuable company. Yet these days Intel, with a market capitalisation of $100bn, is not even the 15th-most-valuable chip firm, and supplies practically none of the advanced chips used for artificial intelligence (AI). Once an icon of America’s technological and commercial prowess, it has lately been a target for subsidies and protection. As we published this, President Donald Trump was even mulling quasi-nationalisation.

More than ever, semiconductors hold the key to the 21st century. They are increasingly critical for defence; in the ai race between America and China, they could spell the difference between victory and defeat. Even free-traders acknowledge their strategic importance, and worry about the world’s reliance for cutting-edge chips on tsmc and its home of Taiwan, which faces the threat of Chinese invasion. Yet chips also pose a fiendish test for proponents of industrial policy. Their manufacture is a marvel of specialisation, complexity and globalisation. Under those conditions, intervening in markets is prone to fail—as Intel so vividly illustrates.

To see how much can go wrong, consider its woes. Hubris caused the firm to miss both the smartphone and the ai waves, losing out to firms such as Arm, Nvidia and tsmc. Joe Biden’s CHIPS Act, which aimed to spur domestic chipmaking, promised Intel $8bn in grants and up to $12bn in loans. But the company is floundering. A fab in Ohio meant to open this year is now expected to begin operations in the early 2030s. Intel is heavily indebted and generates barely enough cash to keep itself afloat.

 The sums needed to rescue it keep growing. By one estimate Intel will need to invest more than $50bn in the next few years if it is to succeed at making leading-edge chips. Even if the government were to sink that much into the firm, it would have no guarantee of success. The company is said to be struggling with its latest manufacturing process. Its sales are falling and its plight risks becoming even more desperate.

The Biden administration failed with Intel, but Mr Trump could make things worse. He has threatened tariffs on chip imports, and may try to browbeat firms such as Nvidia into using Intel to make semiconductors for them. These measures might buy Intel time but they would be self-defeating for America. Chipmaking is not an end in itself but a critical input America’s tech sector requires to be world-beating. Forcing firms to settle for anything less than the best would blunt their edge.

What should America do? One lesson is not to pin the nation’s hopes on keeping Intel intact. It could sell its fab business to a deep-pocketed investor, such as SoftBank, which has reportedly expressed interest in buying it and this week announced a $2bn investment in Intel. Or it could sell its design arm and pour the proceeds into manufacturing. Intel may fail to catch up with TSMC even then. Either way, the federal government should not throw good money after bad. Taking a stake in Intel would only complicate matters.

That leads to a second lesson: to look beyond Intel and solve other chipmakers’ problems. tsmc is seeking to spread its wings. It is running out of land for giant fabs in Taiwan and its workforce is ageing. It has already pledged to invest $165bn to bring chipmaking to America. A first fab is producing four-nanometre (nm) chips and a second is scheduled to begin making more advanced chips by 2028. Samsung, a South Korean chipmaker that is having more success than Intel, is setting up a fab in Texas. But progress has been slow: Samsung and TSMC have both struggled with a lack of skilled workers and delays in receiving permits.

The last lesson is that, even if domestic chipmaking does make America more resilient, the country cannot shut itself off from the rest of the world. One reason is that the supply chain is highly specialised, with key inputs coming from across the globe, including extreme-ultraviolet lithography machines from the Netherlands and chipmaking tools from Japan. The other is that Taiwan and its security will remain critical. Even by the end of this decade, when tsmc’s third fab in America is due to begin producing 2nm chips, two-thirds of such semiconductors are likely to be made on the island. TSMC’s model is based on innovating at home first, before spreading its advances around the world.

To keep America’s chip supply chains resilient, Mr Trump needs a coherent, thought-through strategy—a tall order for a man who governs by impulse. No wonder he is going in the wrong direction. On Taiwan he has been cavalier, confident that China will not invade on his watch, while failing to offer the island consistent support. His tariffs on all manner of inputs will raise the costs of manufacturing in America; promised duties on chip imports will hurt American customers. He thrives on uncertainty, but chipmakers require stability.

A sensible chip policy would make it attractive to build fabs in America by easing rules over permits and creating programmes to train engineers. Instead of using tariffs as leverage, the government should welcome the imports of machinery and people that support chipmaking. Given the bipartisan consensus on the importance of semiconductors, the administration should seek a policy that has Democratic support—with the promise of continuity from one president to the next.

Economic nationalists should also see the progress of chipmakers in allied countries as a contribution to America’s security. Samsung is aiming to start producing 2nm chips in South Korea later this year. Rapidus, a well-funded chipmaking startup in Japan, is making impressive progress. Both countries have a tradition of manufacturing excellence, and may have a better shot at emulating Taiwan.

The chipmaking industry took decades to evolve. It is built for an age of globalisation. When economic nationalists build their policies on autarky, they are setting themselves a needlessly hard task—if not an impossible one. ■

For subscribers only: to see how we design each week’s cover, sign up to our weekly Cover Story newsletter.