If Democrats win the House, and possibly the Senate, a result nonpartisan analysts call plausible, they would gain the power to bring new Ukraine aid to a vote and to push back on President Donald Trump’s deals easing pressure on Russia, Reuters reports in an analysis of how US foreign policy could shift.
The stakes are concrete. Trump has largely halted direct US aid to Ukraine, which lawmakers of both parties had backed, and its current supplies run from packages passed under his predecessor.
Weeks ago, he also waived the sanctions on Russian energy that Congress had written into law and struck a deal to bring Russian diesel back to the market, angering Republicans and Democrats alike.
What a Democratic Congress could do for Ukraine
With both chambers, Democrats could put new Ukraine aid on the floor, and given the bipartisan support such aid has drawn, it could pass with the two-thirds majorities needed to override a Trump veto.
Other steps could be taken, too. Representative Gregory Meeks of New York, in line to chair the House Foreign Affairs Committee if his party wins control, has already introduced bipartisan legislation to block Trump’s plan to return Russian diesel to the global market.
Democrats are also readier than Trump’s Republicans to rein in military spending. They blocked his request for an unprecedented 67% rise in the military budget, to $1.5 trillion, in the Senate, and many say they will try to restore the foreign aid he has withheld or canceled.
The limits of a slice of power
The leverage has limits. Even with both chambers, Democrats would still face a president who can veto, and overriding him would require two-thirds of each chamber. The pattern has already been visible in Iran: Trump launched that war on 28 February without congressional approval, and when a War Powers resolution passed with a handful of Republican votes, his administration ignored it.
On a Sunday morning in October 2019, the chief of the virus ecology unit at the National Institutes of Health’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories emailed a postdoctoral scientist in his lab with an idea.
Vincent Munster and his postdoc, Michael Letko, had spent that year building a system to rapidly test whether dozens of SARS-related bat coronaviruses could infect human cells.
That week, Munster read a new preprint from prominent virologists Vineet Menachery and Ralph Baric’s lab groups showing that the protease trypsin could unlock entry for certain coronaviruses that otherwise would not infect human cells.
Letko had forwarded him the paper two days earlier with the note, “Seems like more groups will be converging on this idea soon.”
“You should be able to make S with a more broader cleavage signature (like furin-like) to enhance infectivity,” Munster wrote back on Oct. 6, 2019. “You can include a motif like this R-X-[K/R]-R↓ Might be cool to get some synthesized.”
In virology parlance, “S” is the coronavirus spike protein, which allows the virus to latch onto the cells it infects, and R-X-[K/R]-R is a furin cleavage site motif, which can make viruses better able to infect cells and spread.
Munster was suggesting that his postdoc engineer a furin site into a coronavirus spike protein to make it more infectious.
Eleven weeks later, a coronavirus carrying a similar furin cleavage site emerged in Wuhan, China, spawning the COVID-19 pandemic. It remains the only known sarbecovirus, the SARS-related group of coronaviruses that Munster and Letko were then screening, to have one.
The email exchange has never been made public before. It appears in a 270-page batch of records recently released by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to U.S. Right to Know in response to a request made under the Freedom of Information Act.
The request sought specific correspondence from Munster’s lab in Hamilton, Montana, from March 2019 through Jan. 22, 2020, the date when his group published one of the first papers showing that the new coronavirus used a human cell receptor called ACE2 as a doorway into cells.
Two new threads run through the records: Weeks before the pandemic began, a senior NIH virologist proposed in writing to build into a SARS-like spike protein the feature that would become the central argument for COVID-19’s laboratory origin: a furin cleavage site.
And, through the same year, his lab was asking virus hunters for unpublished bat coronavirus spike sequences, and getting them, including from researchers in the U.S.-funded consortium called PREDICT, whose New York-based lead partner, EcoHealth Alliance, had a long-standing collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) to collect and study SARS-related viruses.
Each goes to a different key point in the origins debate. The furin cleavage site is the single genetic feature most cited in the arguments that SARS-CoV-2 did not arise entirely in nature.
Unpublished sequences are the other: because the pandemic virus matches nothing in the published scientific literature, most laboratory-origin scenarios depend on some lab having held a virus the rest of the world had never seen.
Nothing in the records shows that Letko followed through on Munster’s suggestion to insert a furin cleavage site in a SARS spike protein, however. In fact, the furin cleavage site found in SARS-CoV-2 differs from the motif, or short sequence of amino acids, that Munster suggested.
Nor do the documents indicate that Rocky Mountain Labs possessed SARS-CoV-2 or a close relative, or that either Munster or Letko directly communicated with researchers in Wuhan while working on their project.
Their research also used synthetic gene fragments, not live viruses, employing particles that cannot replicate or spread. Such work generally poses lower biosafety risks.
The two then-unpublished bat virus spike sequences obtained from PREDICT, one from Malaysia and one from Uganda and Rwanda, are also too distantly related to SARS-CoV-2 to have given rise to it.
Letko, who is now an associate professor at Washington State University, declined to comment for this story, saying in an email “(y)ou will write what you write, regardless of the truth or what I have to say.”
Munster did not respond to requests for comment. He was indicted earlier this year for bringing mpox specimens into the U.S. without proper documentation and giving false statements to law enforcement officials as part of unrelated NIH research. He has pleaded not guilty.
The NIH press office also declined to answer questions about why the agency had not previously told the public that its scientists had solicited and obtained unpublished SARS-like coronavirus spike sequences, or proposed inserting a furin cleavage site into a SARS-like spike, before the pandemic.
Converging on the idea
Munster’s suggestion to add a furin cleavage site is the second known instance of scientists proposing to insert this distinguishing feature into a SARS or SARS-like spike within roughly two years before COVID-19 emerged.
In 2018, EcoHealth Alliance, Baric’s lab and researchers at the WIV had proposed the same kind of modification to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), in work that would have used live, replicating viruses. Their application, known as the DEFUSE proposal, was denied.
The concept is notable because the furin cleavage site that helped the virus cause the pandemic has become central to the debate over the pandemic’s origins.
Some proponents of a laboratory origin view DEFUSE as a blueprint for creating SARS-CoV-2, while prominent supporters of a natural origin have argued that deliberately engineering such a feature would have been unlikely and unnecessarily cumbersome. Munster’s email gives the lab-origin supporters another example of such a furin site proposal.
The revelation about Munster’s lab seeking unpublished sequences speaks to a different issue in the COVID-19 origins debate.
Because SARS-CoV-2 descends from no virus previously described in the scientific literature, any scenario in which it was engineered requires assuming that some laboratory held SARS-related sequences that had never been made public.
In a 2021 review of SARS-CoV-2 in Cell by 21scientists called that implausible. “There is no rational experimental reason why a new genetic system would be developed using an unknown and unpublished virus,” they wrote.
But the records show a U.S. government laboratory doing just that two years earlier.
Letko’s platform was a new genetic system, and he sought unpublished sequences precisely because they were unpublished. Sharing them, he wrote in April 2019, “will surely increase the impact of our story by providing a proof of principle with unpublished sequences.”
Researchers in the U.S.-funded virus hunting program supplied two within eight weeks. One of the researchers, Simon Anthony, was also an author of the Cell review.
Alina Chan, a molecular biologist who has advocated for a thorough investigation of laboratory origin scenarios, recently reviewed the Munster-Letko email records at the request of U.S. Right To Know.
“What this shows is that different groups of virologists were converging on the idea of inserting cleavage sites in the spikes of potentially dangerous coronaviruses,” she said.
“Assuming a lab origin of COVID-19, if a lab in Wuhan hadn’t caused the pandemic, it’s plausible that a lab in the U.S. would’ve eventually followed the same path.”
Soliciting sequences
Munster’s emailed proposal didn’t come out of the blue. He and Letko were in the middle of a yearlong research project that the newly released records document from its start.
Seven months earlier, in March 2019, Munster and Letko set out to answer a question: of the hundreds of SARS-related coronaviruses in research databases worldwide, which ones could infect people?
Letko built a workaround that he and Munster described as a “rapid and scalable platform,” according to the records.
Rather than build each virus individually, they took only the receptor-binding domain — the fragment of the spike that grips onto the host cell’s receptor — and spliced it into a SARS-CoV spike backbone.
They then loaded these chimeric spikes onto harmless reporter particles and used them to infect cells expressing hACE2, the receptor SARS-CoV uses to enter the human airway.
A glow from the bioluminescent enzyme luciferase indicated successful cell entry. With Letko’s method, what typically had taken months to test now took about three weeks.
The limiting ingredient to test their method was the spike sequences. Letko had exhausted the SARS-like sequences already published. So, he and Munster started looking for others that hadn’t been, the records show.
On March 8, 2019, Munster emailed EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, Vice President Kevin Olival and Columbia University virologist Simon Anthony, attaching a confidential abstract with a chart and figures illustrating their project.
“While we have now tested all of the variation(sic) currently published for lineage B beta-coronaviruses for their ability to enter primate cells, we are seeking additional, unpublished lineage B beta coronavirus sequences to test in our platform,” Munster wrote.
He asked them not to circulate the attachment, because the work was “still unpublished and quite competitive.”
Of the three recipients, only Anthony, then one of the core leaders on PREDICT, appears in the released correspondence. He replied later that evening: “Hey! Looks super cool.”
Two months of negotiation followed, the emails show. On April 5, Letko thanked Anthony “for agreeing to share betacoronavirus lineage B spike sequences with us,” adding that unpublished material “will surely increase the impact of our story.”
On May 2, Anthony reported back from a PREDICT meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia. His team had detected “around 5 or 6 novel 2b viruses,” he wrote, but had “only managed to get spikes for 2 of them so far.”
Because neither had been published, Letko’s paper “would be the first report of these viruses in the literature,” so long as he credited PREDICT and its partners as co-authors, Anthony said.
Letko agreed. Two days later, Anthony sent the sequences. He identified them as PREDICT_CoV-51, isolate PDF-0663, from Malaysia (which Anthony described as “SUPER divergent. Could be really interesting,”) and PREDICT_CoV-43, from Uganda and Rwanda.
“Absolutely stellar!” Munster replied. “Will keep you posted on the results!”
Anthony was generally correct. A small fragment of the Malaysian virus had been deposited in GenBank, the NIH’s public sequence database, in 2016, and referenced the following year in a survey paper Anthony co-authored with Daszak and others. But neither its full spike sequence nor its complete genome was public.
Nothing at all was public about the African virus. In neither case could anyone outside PREDICT obtain the spike sequence, the part that determines whether a virus can enter human cells and the only part Letko’s platform could use.
A step further
Five months later, after reading the new preprint about trypsin, Munster proposed taking Letko’s project a step further.
For a coronavirus to infect a host cell, binding the receptor is only the first step. The spike must then be cut open by one of the host’s own enzymes before the virus can fuse with the cell and get inside. These enzymes that cut protein apart are called proteases, and each one targets different spots.
The protease a spike is built for largely determines what tissues it can infect. SARS-CoV depends on proteases that are not available everywhere in the body. Furin, however, is expressed in the cells of most tissues.
The Menachery-Baric preprint that sparked Munster’s idea had shown that adding trypsin from the outside could unlock entry into human cells for coronaviruses that otherwise couldn’t infect them.
Trypsin is a far less selective protease, cutting a protein after common amino acids rather than requiring a particular short sequence, or motif. What Munster proposed to Letko — engineering a furin site into the spike itself — would let the virus cut itself open.
Instead of waiting for an outside enzyme to do the job, a furin site could clear the hurdle in one step to “enhance infectivity,” as Munster wrote.
The idea had been proposed before.
EcoHealth Alliance submitted the DEFUSE proposal to DARPA, under a program called PREventing EMerging Pathogenic Threats, or PREEMPT. Its key partners included Baric’s laboratory at the University of North Carolina (UNC) and Zhengli Shi, the leading coronavirologist at the Wuhan lab.
The proposal aimed to introduce human-specific proteolytic cleavage sites, including furin sites, into SARS-related bat coronavirus spikes to evaluate and enhance their ability to infect human cells. DARPA declined to fund it, faulting the proposal over the risks of “gain-of-function” research.
Munster was not named on the proposal submitted to DARPA. But according to official congressional correspondence, he had been part of the DEFUSE team two months earlier.
In April 2024, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), then ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, wrote to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and DARPA saying he had obtained documents showing that “Vincent Munster of NIAID’s [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] Rocky Mountain Laboratory was listed as a partner in the DEFUSE proposal presented at the PREEMPT Proposers Day,” a January 2018 DARPA event at which Daszak pitched the project to representatives of at least 15 federal agencies.
Rocky Mountain Laboratories, Paul wrote, “was at one point listed as a partner” alongside the WIV, UNC, Columbia University’s Lipkin Lab and Duke-NUS, a disclosure Paul said appeared to contradict former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci’s testimony to Congress that NIH knew nothing of DEFUSE.
By the time the proposal reached DARPA that March, Munster and his lab were off it; the final list of partners included EcoHealth, the WIV, UNC, Duke-NUS, the USGS National Wildlife Health Center and Palo Alto Research Center.
Paul demanded from HHS records of “all communications between Vincent Munster and any individual from EcoHealth Alliance, WIV, University of North Carolina, Columbia University, or Duke-NUS.” Paul has not released his underlying documents, and neither HHS nor DARPA has publicly answered his requests.
The newly released NIH records show that about a year after DEFUSE was submitted, Munster asked EcoHealth for unpublished sarbecovirus sequences; that he received them from a virologist at Columbia’s Center for Infection and Immunity, the center Ian Lipkin directs; and that in October 2019 he proposed building a spike with a furin-like cleavage site to enhance infectivity.
Steven E. Massey, a professor of bioinformatics at the University of Puerto Rico and a researcher with DRASTIC, the independent group that first published the DEFUSE proposal, called Munster’s suggestion “significant,” saying it “shows the [furin site] idea was circulating outside the EHA-WIV-UNC group,” a reference to EcoHealth Alliance, the WIV and UNC.
Munster’s email does not mention DEFUSE. His idea appears instead as a reaction to the Menachery-Baric preprint, framed as a potential next experiment for his and Letko’s work.
And the motif he proposed is not the one found in the pandemic virus that emerged less than three months later. SARS-CoV-2’s site has alanine where Munster’s pattern called for lysine or arginine.
A suboptimal site
That difference is key. The furin site in SARS-CoV-2 substantially improves the virus’s ability to enter human airway cells and is widely regarded as a major contributor to its transmissibility. Its absence from every other sarbecovirus found in nature is also one of the observations lab-origin proponents cite most often.
The 2021 review in Cell also directly addressed whether the site could have been engineered. Its authors, including Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry and Simon, argued that the site’s own sequence weighs against a lab design.
SARS-CoV-2’s motif, RRAR, “does not match its canonical form (R-X-R/K-R),” they wrote, and is “suboptimal” compared with those of other human coronaviruses.
“There is no logical reason why an engineered virus would utilize such a suboptimal furin cleavage site, which would entail such an unusual and needlessly complex feat of genetic engineering,” the paper stated.
The only prior work inserting a furin site at that position in a SARS-CoV spike, they noted, had used an optimal sequence in a pseudotype system.
Massey disputes that framing. He said excessively efficient cleavage can destabilize the spike and reduce the virus’s ability to enter cells, so a site that looks suboptimal on paper may not be suboptimal for the virus.
The newly released records show Munster reasoning along the Cell authors’ lines nearly two years before their review appeared. The motif he proposed matches the canonical form they describe, not the one the pandemic virus carries, and his lab ran a pseudotype system of the kind they cite.
Read one way, the email corroborates their logic: that a scientist contemplating a furin-like site reached for the textbook motif, and SARS-CoV-2 does not have it.
Read another way, it establishes something the review did not address: by October 2019 the idea of adding such a furin cleavage site to a SARS-related spike to enhance infectivity was circulating not only in an unfunded DARPA proposal but also inside an NIH laboratory.
What was published
When Chinese scientists ultimately posted the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus spreading in Wuhan on Jan. 10, 2020, Letko and Munster had everything they needed to test it in their system.
The platform did not require a live virus, only the sequence of the small piece of the spike that latches onto a human cell. Within hours of the sequence going up, Neeltje van Doremalen, another scientist in Munster’s lab, pasted it into an email to Letko and Munster.
Letko expected results by Jan. 26 or 27. They came back ahead of schedule. On Jan. 21, Munster decided where to send the final manuscript showing their research. “Nature it is,” he wrote to Letko. “Lets(sic) do 2 authors and speed this up.”
The paper went out that afternoon, to Nature and to the preprint serverbioRxiv. Only 12 days had passed since the sequence appeared online.
The lab made the new method’s speed its selling point. Their method “reduces the time from the sequence being published to having real in vitro data to under 12 days,” the cover letter told Nature’s editors, “allowing the scientific community to gain critical information on virus tropism in almost real-time with the outbreak.”
The work drew notice at the top of NIAID.
“First data from my lab confirming ACE2 as the receptor for 2019-NCoV,” Munster emailed an NIAID coronavirus response list that afternoon.
Greg Folkers, then chief of staff to then-NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, replied: “When this hits bioRxiv might be worth a tweet.”
The paper that was submitted gives no sign that Letko took up Munster’s suggestion to engineer a cleavage site into a spike. But it does show that the scientists used the protease trypsin rather than the furin Munster had proposed.
The paper’s second figure is titled, “Trypsin enhances lineage B entry in various cell lines.” It reports that bat coronavirus spikes that could not get into human, primate or pig cells on their own did get in once the particles were bathed in the enzyme.
The trypsin experiments appear nowhere in the project before Munster and Letko’s October exchange about the Menachery-Baric preprint. They are also absent from the abstract that Munster previously circulated in the spring. The published paper cites the Menachery-Baric preprint that sparked their exchange conversation.
Neither of the sequences that Anthony sent in May 2019 appears in the paper, and neither he nor PREDICT are acknowledged. The only trace of PREDICT in the 18-page manuscript is a footnote citation.
The panel of viruses the paper did report testing consisted of 29 receptor-binding domains obtained from a public database administered by the NIH.
One of the two viruses resurfaced a year later, when Columbia’s Center for Infection and Immunity deposited its complete genome in GenBank on July 6, 2020, five and a half months after the preprint that was to have carried it.
In February 2021, the bat coronavirus from Uganda and Rwanda also appeared in the journal Virus Evolution, in a study of how SARS-related viruses acquired the ability to use the human ACE2 receptor.
Letko was second author, Munster was listed near the end, Anthony was the senior author and the Ugandan and Rwandan field scientists and PREDICT leadership were included as co-authors, as Anthony had said in 2019 would be required. Run through Letko’s platform, the virus could not enter human cells through ACE2 at all.
The Malaysian virus, which Anthony had called the more interesting of the two, has never appeared in a published study. Nothing in the records says why. Anthony, now a professor at the University of California, Davis, did not respond to requests for comment.
On May 24, 2021, two years after he emailed the virus’s spike sequence to the Montana lab, Columbia deposited its complete genome in GenBank on behalf of the PREDICT consortium, crediting Malaysia’s Sabah Wildlife Department and EcoHealth Alliance.
Lewis Kamb is an investigative reporter who specializes in using freedom of information laws and public records to uncover wrongdoing and hold the powerful accountable.
PM insists threatening economic outlook is result of developments that don't have to do with Israel, but rivals say his government's policies are to blame
Democrats have campaigned on lowering living costs and holding the Trump administration accountable. This is a look at their to-do list if they win the majority.
Should they win in November, top House Democrats are planning a shock-and-awe legislative sprint to demonstrate within hours of taking power that they are passing bills to deliver on their promises.
The first lady, who is positioning herself as an intermediary between two warring nations as her husband sides with Russia, said the agreement would allow residents to evacuate.
“It was abundantly clear that without my intervention, the possibility to bring humanitarian aid into the city and to evacuate the elderly would be impossible,” Melania Trump, the first lady, said in a statement.
Israel’s war has disrupted every stage of breast cancer care, from early diagnosis and identifying tumour characteristics to treatment and follow-up. Only a handful of hospitals can still provide these services.
Ukraine has received more than 50,000 rounds of 20-mm ammunition from Denmark for the onboard cannons of its F-16 fighter jets, with Ukrainian pilots already using the rounds to intercept Russian jet-powered Geran attack drones, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said.
The accelerated delivery addresses a key need in Ukraine’s air defense as Russia increasingly deploys faster jet-powered drones that challenge conventional interceptors. Ukraine has also relied on F-16 cannons when stocks of air-to-air missiles are limited, making ammunition supplies important to keeping the aircraft effective against incoming aerial threats.
Denmark responds to ammunition request
The Defense Ministry thanked Denmark for responding quickly to Ukraine’s request for additional ammunition, saying the delivery directly strengthens the country’s air defenses and helps protect civilians from Russian aerial attacks.
The delivery follows a broader effort by Ukraine’s European partners to replenish F-16 cannon ammunition. On October 2, it was reported that Spain, Belgium, and Poland were also sending 20-mm rounds for Ukrainian F-16s to counter Russia’s jet-powered drones.
Belgium is also expanding its support for Ukraine’s F-16 fleet. On 16 October, Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever pledged to deliver 10 F-16s by the end of 2026, up from three previously planned, and discussed supplying additional ammunition, including 20-mm rounds produced by Belgian defense company FN Herstal.
Jet-powered drones pose a growing challenge
Russia’s faster attack drones are harder to intercept than older, propeller-driven Shahed-type models. Their speed gives air defenders less time to respond and makes them more difficult for many interceptor drones and conventional short-range weapons to catch.
Ukraine’s air-to-air missile shortages have also increased the importance of F-16 cannon ammunition. Ukrainian pilots have sometimes relied on their aircraft’s built-in 20-mm cannon when air-to-air missiles are scarce.
Explore further
Ukraine’s F-16s are so short of Western missiles that pilots fall back on jet’s built-in M61A1 Vulcan cannon, which risks killing civilians below
The threat from jet-powered drones is growing. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in late September that Ukraine was intercepting about 55% of Russia’s jet-powered drones, compared with more than 90% of older models.
Denmark’s ammunition delivery gives Ukrainian F-16 pilots more rounds to engage these faster targets, as Ukraine works to strengthen its defenses against Russia’s expanding drone campaign.
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First delivered to Ukraine in 2024, the U.S.-made jets have become a key part of the country's defenses against Russian attacks on its rear areas, particularly jet-powered drones.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth barred all Pentagon staff from using undisclosed information to place wagers on forthcoming U.S. military action using betting platforms and prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket. “Make no mistake why this matters. Our enemies watch movements in these markets,” Hegseth said in a memo, first obtained by CBS News. “When an American…
Israel is preventing thousands of Palestinian farmers in the West Bank from reaching their olive trees, while settlers harvest their crops. 90 per cent of Gaza’s two million olive trees have been destroyed since October 2023
French economist Gabriel Zucman has come to California bearing a familiar French solution to a fiscal problem: another tax.
Once based at the University of California, Berkeley, Zucman is back and campaigning for Proposition 40, which would impose an allegedly one-time 5 percent tax on the net worth of Californians worth more than $1 billion. Zucman, who coauthored the proposition, estimates that the tax could raise about $100 billion and claims that 90 percent of the proceeds would go to health care.
The California Legislative Analyst's office is far more cautious, saying it would raise only "tens of billions" and could cause a long-term loss of income-tax revenue as wealthy people leave the state with the companies they created.
I've written plenty about why wealth taxes are economically destructive, administratively nightmarish, and unlikely to achieve anything close to what their advocates promise. But Zucman's prescription is wrong for a more fundamental reason, as his (and my) native country shows: Raising taxes to fuel ever-larger demands for government spending is a recipe for disaster.
Unless you've been living in a remote cave recently, you've likely seen all the protests and destruction in France. But do you know why it's happening?
As another economist, Paul Krugman, rightly noted back in 2017, "France offers a social safety net beyond the wildest dreams of U.S. progressives: guaranteed high-quality health care for all, generous paid leave for new parents, universal pre-K, and much more."
For decades, France has answered any perceived desire with government spending, then responded to the resulting fiscal problem by seeking new revenue sources. Today, French government spending consumes roughly 58 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).
Krugman gloated that France wasn't suffering social collapse and speculated that it was due to all the spending. He certainly can't say that anymore. In fact, he is now worried that France may be on the precipice of a debt crisis. The truth is that France hasn't done well for some time, even when Krugman cheered its spending.
One of the groups in the street today, young people, has faced widespread unemployment for a long time. The youth unemployment rate in France (ages 15-24) has hovered between 17 percent and 27 percent since 2000. In the second quarter of 2026, it was 21.6 percent, against 14.8 percent in the Eurozone and 9.9 percent in the U.S.
French people also pay some of the highest taxes in the developed world, and they're not happy with the return. The government already takes more than 52 percent of the country's output in revenue, runs deficits exceeding 5 percent of GDP, and has accumulated debt approaching 120 percent of GDP. Nonetheless, French students complain that the government is shortchanging schools, while everyone sees that it is shortchanging its army and police.
The students aren't wrong to feel left out. At The Two Cents Substack, Hoover Institution scholar Hanno Lustig calculates that, between 1995 and 2024, spending on social protection and health (most of which benefits older people) rose from 53.1 percent to 58.7 percent of all French government spending. The share devoted to education, defense, and public order fell from 15.2 percent to 13.7 percent. Transportation fell from 5.3 percent to 3.8 percent.
In other words, France has built an enormous welfare state, much of it devoted to older citizens, while letting other state capacities and basic services fall apart. As transfers of wealth swallow a larger share of the budget, everything else gets squeezed.
That is the fiscal ratchet Californians should worry about when Zucman tells them Proposition 40 is necessary to "save" health care. Proponents claim Washington "cut" Medicaid, but that language is misleading. California's deficit started long before any Washington spending reductions. Besides, federal Medicaid spending isn't falling—not even close. The Congressional Budget Office estimates it will reach $708 billion in 2026, 8 percent more than in 2025. What Washington did in the 2025 budget reconciliation law was reduce Medicaid's future growth relative to previous projections, partly by changing eligibility and enrollment rules and financing arrangements.
This is how the ratchet works. Once the government projects a spending increase, anything less becomes a cut. And once Washington fails to finance the entire projected increase, Californians are told that Sacramento must backfill the missing money. And how should it do that? Conveniently, by creating an entirely new tax.
France has run this experiment for decades. It has an incredibly generous welfare state paid for with very high taxes; it's even tried a wealth tax and has a value-added tax, yet somehow it's never enough. Its welfare state has not eliminated scarcity. It has merely transferred the job of rationing scarce resources to politicians.
Zucman looks at California and sees hundreds of billions of dollars of private wealth waiting to solve a public finance problem. Californians should look across the Atlantic and ask a different question: What happens after politicians decide that every spending adjustment can be delayed until tomorrow by finding another pot of private wealth?
France should not be sending California tax advice. It should be sending a warning.
Costs are spiking for the millions of Americans who rely on workplace-sponsored health insurance, according to a survey released Thursday, with small businesses and their employees being hit especially hard. The average cost of a family plan increased by 5 percent, topping $28,000 this year, according to the annual Employer Health Benefits Survey from KFF.…
The arrangement might allow Ukraine to use NATO's existing procurement system and supplier network rather than negotiating each purchase independently.
New surveys show that increases in premiums and deductibles are forcing people to forgo treatments or doctor’s visits while budgets are strained by higher food and gas prices.
The European Parliament has demanded €225 billion for the European Union’s foreign policy and development programmes between 2028 and 2034, challenging proposals by member states to reduce spending under the bloc’s next long-term budget.
The Parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Development committees approved their negotiating position on the Global Europe Instrument on Monday, 19 October, by 63 votes to 27, with five abstentions. The proposed allocation represents an increase of €25 billion over the European Commission’s original €200 billion proposal.
The decision comes as negotiations over the wider 2028–2034 EU budget have become increasingly contentious, with Germany and several other net contributors opposing higher expenditure while Brussels faces mounting demands for defence, industrial investment, enlargement and support for Ukraine.
Parliament rejects proposed reductions
Under the position adopted by the parliamentary committees, at least €25 billion would be reserved for humanitarian assistance. MEPs also want dedicated funding for reconstruction in Gaza and financial support for countries seeking EU membership.
The committees are proposing that 20 per cent of official development assistance should be directed towards human development, alongside stronger provisions covering democracy, human rights and the rule of law.
Global Europe is intended to consolidate several existing financing instruments into a single framework governing much of the Union’s external expenditure. The programme would finance activities ranging from development cooperation and humanitarian assistance to economic partnerships and support for countries preparing to join the EU.
The Commission introduced the original €200 billion proposal in July 2025. However, subsequent negotiations among member states have raised the prospect of substantial reductions.
Germany, the Netherlands and several Nordic countries have argued that the next budget must reflect the financial constraints facing national governments. Their objections have complicated efforts to accommodate additional spending on European security and economic competitiveness.
The European Parliament has taken a different position, maintaining that reducing external expenditure would restrict the Union’s ability to operate internationally when European security and economic interests increasingly depend on developments beyond its borders.
Ukraine and enlargement funding
The parliamentary proposal would preserve support for Ukraine while seeking to prevent assistance connected with Russia’s invasion from reducing resources available to other partner countries.
Ukraine’s reconstruction, institutional reforms and integration with European markets will require substantial financing over the coming years. However, the precise allocation will depend on negotiations over the wider budget and the financing arrangements eventually approved.
For candidate countries, MEPs want clearer incentives linking EU assistance to progress on political and economic reforms. The proposed framework would also provide Brussels with greater powers to suspend funding where democratic standards, human rights or judicial independence deteriorate.
A separate provision would permit the Commission to suspend payments where partner countries seriously fail to meet obligations concerning the readmission of their nationals.
That measure reflects the growing connection between the EU’s development policy and its migration objectives. Brussels has increasingly sought cooperation on returns and border management as part of agreements with countries receiving European assistance.
The committees have also called for stronger parliamentary supervision of Global Europe, including more detailed reporting by the Commission and regular discussions with the commissioners responsible for implementation.
Difficult negotiations ahead
The financial disagreement extends well beyond external policy. The overall seven-year budget remains contested, particularly over agricultural subsidies, regional development funds, defence investment and repayment of borrowing undertaken during the coronavirus pandemic.
As EU Today previously reported, a group of 17 member states has opposed reductions in agricultural and cohesion spending, adding further pressure to negotiations.
The Parliament’s proposed €225 billion allocation has not been agreed by governments and does not constitute an approved spending commitment.
The committees also approved a mandate for negotiations with the Council, although their position still requires endorsement by the full Parliament, provisionally expected in November.
Meanwhile, member states must settle their own negotiating position, including the financial ceilings governing the programme.
The eventual settlement will determine how much Brussels can spend on development cooperation, humanitarian operations and international partnerships after 2027, and how those commitments can be reconciled with the EU’s expanding domestic financial obligations.
Belgium plans to deliver 10 F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine by the end of 2026, Prime Minister Bart De Wever announced on 16 October, raising the expected number from three amid delays in transferring the aircraft.
The expanded commitment comes as Ukraine faces sustained Russian drone and missile attacks and needs additional combat aircraft to strengthen its air defenses.
De Wever made the announcement at a press conference in Brussels alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Anadolu Agency reported. He said Belgium’s deliveries had fallen behind schedule because its new US-made F-35 fighter jets arrived later than expected.
Belgium also discussed supplying more ammunition for Ukraine’s F-16s.
F-16 deliveries delayed by F-35 schedule
“We will deliver 10 this year,” De Wever said, explaining that delays in receiving Belgium’s F-35s had held up the transfer of its F-16s. The new aircraft are now beginning to arrive, allowing Belgium to move forward with deliveries to Ukraine.
Zelenskyy confirmed that Kyiv expects additional F-16s from Belgium by the end of the year and thanked Brussels for the agreement.
The announcement marks an increase from Belgium’s previously reported plan to send three F-16s to Ukraine by the end of 2026. The new figure would more than triple the number expected under that earlier commitment.
F-16s to help counter Russian jet-powered drones
De Wever said Ukraine urgently needs operational fighter jets and described the F-16 as one of the few weapons capable of effectively countering Russian jet-powered drones.
The aircraft can also intercept cruise missiles and other aerial targets, while carrying out electronic warfare and combat missions. Ukraine received its first F-16s in 2024 after allies agreed to supply the aircraft and train Ukrainian pilots.
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Belgium rushes three F-16s to Ukraine as Russia expands its drone and missile assault
Belgium discusses ammunition and financial support
Zelenskyy and De Wever also discussed supplying additional ammunition for Ukraine’s F-16s, including 20 mm rounds produced by Belgian defense company FN Herstal.
The leaders also reportedly discussed Ukraine’s financial needs, though neither provided details on potential next steps. Belgium remains at the center of discussions over frozen Russian assets, as Brussels hosts Euroclear, which holds a large share of the immobilized funds.
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