Open the news right now and the stories seem almost impossibly disconnected.
Russia’s war in Ukraine is changing again. Iran is signaling a willingness to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and resume negotiations. Here at home, hundreds of thousands of health insurance policies have been canceled, the White House is trying to withhold money Congress already approved, and taxpayers are footing the bill for what looks remarkably like a campaign ad.
These sound like different stories. War. Health care. Taxes. Congressional spending. Elections. But underneath all of them is a question I think we should be asking much more often:
Who does this serve?
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Government makes that question easy to lose sight of because government speaks its own language: appropriations, subsidies, sanctions, regulations, eligibility requirements, policy. The words can sound abstract and bureaucratic.
But policy is just the name we give to decisions that eventually arrive in our lives. At the pharmacy counter, at the grocery store, in a classroom, in a hospital, on a battlefield. It shapes what people can afford, what opportunities they have, what dangers they face, what governments choose to reveal and what they try to hide.
Those aren’t abstractions. They’re choices. And elections eventually become those choices. That’s why I keep coming back to the same basic idea about government.
The point is the people.
Government isn’t supposed to exist simply to perpetuate itself. Political power isn’t supposed to be a prize someone wins and then uses to enrich friends, punish enemies or make it harder for anyone else to take that power away.
We create governments because there are things human beings need to accomplish together. We educate children, build roads, keep water clean, respond to disasters, fund research, defend ourselves, maintain courts, protect elections, and create ways to care for people when they need help.
We can disagree — sometimes vehemently — about how government should accomplish those things, how much it should spend, how programs should work and where its authority should end.
That’s democracy.
And there’s something revealing about following the money. A government can say almost anything about what it values. Its budget is harder to spin.
The spending law Congress passed and Trump signed last year makes some of those choices remarkably clear. Over the next decade, Medicaid is projected to lose roughly $1.2 trillion in federal funding, with 13.1 million fewer people enrolled than there otherwise would have been. Food assistance through SNAP is projected to fall by $211 billion, while another $130 billion disappears from Affordable Care Act premium subsidies.
At the same time, the law extended major tax cuts.
And the benefits don’t fall evenly. The Congressional Budget Office found that people near the bottom are expected to have fewer resources because of the law, while those in the middle — and especially those at the top — are expected to have more. The Tax Policy Center estimates that nearly 60 percent of the tax cuts in 2026 will go to the wealthiest 20 percent of households.
That isn’t just budgeting. Someone made a choice about who would be asked to live with less and who would be allowed to keep more. You can call it fiscal policy, tax policy or reform. Eventually I come back to the same question.
Who does this serve?
This week the regime announced that approximately 315,000 Affordable Care Act marketplace enrollments covering more than 760,000 people had been canceled after the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and insurance companies investigated what CMS says were unauthorized enrollments.
Unauthorized enrollments are one story. What’s happening to everyone else is another. Millions of Americans are already facing higher insurance costs while Medicaid, SNAP, and Affordable Care Act subsidies are being cut. The abuse of a system and the dismantling of that system aren’t the same story.
Government isn’t just balancing numbers on a spreadsheet. Those decisions eventually arrive at someone’s kitchen table.
Meanwhile, the same question is playing out in completely different ways around the world.
Russia is adapting its weapons in Ukraine. Its newer jet-powered drones can fly faster and higher than the propeller-driven versions Ukraine became increasingly successful at intercepting. Ukrainian officials say they are stopping only about 60 percent of the newer drones, compared with more than 90 percent of the older models.
Ukraine says it has a $27 billion defense funding gap.
Whether the United States continues helping Ukraine defend itself isn’t an abstract foreign-policy debate to the people sleeping beneath those drones. American elections become American foreign policy. The people we elect decide what our alliances mean, when sanctions are imposed, whether weapons are supplied and whether America helps another democracy resist invasion.
Iran has signaled a willingness to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, one of the most important energy corridors on Earth, and resume negotiations if the United States eases military pressure. The next decision will be about whether we keep escalating or start talking.
And then there’s power itself.
On Friday, the White House moved to withhold more than $800 million that Congress had already appropriated.
The Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse. The administration argues that the programs are wasteful or harmful and is using a rarely invoked procedure to stop the spending. Senator Susan Collins, the Republican chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, called the move illegal and an attempt to undermine Congress’s constitutional authority.
Congress appropriated the money. The White House decided it shouldn’t be spent.
Again: Who gets to decide?
That question is becoming increasingly important as we approach another election. Because while all of these stories are unfolding, the machinery of American democracy is already moving.
And this week, that machinery changed again.
On Friday, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to resume an expanded federal system that states can use to run voter rolls through citizenship and immigration databases.
The system combines citizenship and immigration records with Social Security data and allows states to run large numbers of voters through it at once.
The groups challenging the system say American citizens have already been incorrectly identified as noncitizens. Federal law prohibits systematic voter-roll removals this close to an election, but individualized inquiries can still occur. Their larger concern is that mistakes in a massive federal database can become mistakes in voter records — and eligible Americans can find themselves having to prove a right they already possess.
There’s something unsettling about watching these stories arrive together.
In health care, the government is searching enormous databases for people it says shouldn’t be receiving benefits. In elections, the government is giving states an enormous database to search for people it says shouldn’t be voting.
Behind every record in those databases is a human being. And when government gets that record wrong, the consequences don’t happen to data.
They happen to people.
And there’s another use of government power here that matters.
The regime’s domestic-terrorism strategy identifies anti-capitalism, anti-Americanism and other ideological positions among what it calls recurring motivations associated with political violence. The memorandum directs federal agencies to investigate networks, organizations and funding connected to political violence.
Political belief and political violence are not the same thing.
Criticizing capitalism, a president, or government policy is not violence. Protest is not terrorism simply because the people in power dislike what is being protested.
Those distinctions matter enormously in a democracy, especially when the same government possesses the power to determine public benefits, voter eligibility, federal spending, law-enforcement priorities and which political activity deserves scrutiny.
Which brings me right back to the question running through all of this:
Who does this serve?
Here in Arizona, the deadline to register to vote in the November 3 election is October 5 at 11:59 p.m.
Early voting begins October 7.
If you live somewhere else, your dates may be different. Find them now. Check your registration, know where you vote and what identification your state requires, and if you’re voting by mail, give yourself enough time.
Don’t wait until Election Day to discover there’s a problem.
Because Election Day isn’t really when democracy begins.
By November 3, registration deadlines have passed. Millions of ballots have already been cast. Court cases have determined election rules. District lines have been drawn. Polling locations have been chosen. Election workers have spent months preparing.
Democracy is already happening. And the problems facing the people we elect will still be waiting for them. Because power doesn’t disappear when people stop participating. Someone else simply gets to exercise it.
That’s why voting matters.
Not because a ballot solves everything, and not because democracy begins and ends inside a voting booth.
It doesn’t.
Voting matters because government has enormous power over human lives, and elections are one of the few moments when ordinary people collectively decide who gets to wield that power.
So know what your candidates believe. Know what they’ve actually done. Know who funds them. Know who benefits from the policies they support.
And keep asking the question long after Election Day:
Who does this serve?
Public power should serve the public. That shouldn’t be a radical idea. And when it doesn’t, democracy gives us something extraordinarily important.
The ability to demand something different.
Sources: Congressional Budget Office — Budget and Economic Outlook, Congressional Budget Office — Distributional Effects of the 2025 Reconciliation Act, Tax Policy Center, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Reuters — Ukraine’s Jet-Powered Drone Threat, Reuters — Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, Reuters — Congressional Spending Fight, Associated Press — Government-Funded Trump Advertisement, Supreme Court of the United States — DHS v. League of Women Voters, White House — Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence, Arizona Secretary of State — Early Voting.
The current administration’s intent is to destroy our governing system and replace it with a tyranny. To answer Ben Franklin’s “if you can keep it” with “not only can’t we keep it; we don’t intend to.” These people took essentially the same oath of office I did as a Navy pilot almost 70 years ago to “protect and defend the Constitution.” Their gross violation of that oath is treason, pure and simple. That millions of Americans continue to support their malevolence is one of the most painful experiences of my life.
The road to 2028 is going to be one of the most pivotal in our history. November 3, 2026 will tell us a great deal about how we will need to navigate that distance.
Buckle up. It will be a wild ride, indeed.