On Wednesday, the Office of Energy Dominance Financing at the U.S. Department of Energy announced it had closed a $5.1 billion loan package to Alliant Energy—a utility company with over 1.5 million customers across Iowa and Wisconsin—to "lower electricity costs, expand firm power generation, and strengthen grid reliability" in the Midwestern states.
The loan package is part of the Energy Department's response to President Donald Trump's April 2025 executive orderdirecting the agency and its secretary, Chris Wright, to ensure the nation uses "all available power generation resources" to expand and secure America's electric grid amid growing demand.
In a press release, Alliant said the 30-year loan package will finance 1.6 gigawatts of new natural gas generation, 240 megawatts of increased capacity at its existing natural gas facilities, and a gigawatt of energy storage. The loan package will also allow Alliant to add 2 billion cubic feet of liquefied natural gas storage. All told, these upgrades and additions will generate enough electricity to power 2 million homes annually, according to the Energy Department.
Alliant estimates the deal will result in "up to $1.2 billion in cumulative customer savings," as well as the creation of "more than 1,600 local jobs" through construction projects financed by the loans. Of course, some of the savings likely stem from Alliant receiving more favorable loan terms from the Energy Department than it would from an open-market lender.
A report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission outlining the deal's terms shows that the interest rate to be charged on each loan aligns with the government's borrowing costs. However, the markup on each loan will remain a fixed percentage, regardless of whether lending to Alliant becomes riskier or more expensive. Under the deal's terms, Alliant has until May 15, 2056, to repay the loan, but it is only responsible for paying interest until the first principal payment is due in 2052.
The Energy Department said the deal is the Trump administration's 10th financial close and its "sixth and seventh utility financing completed through the Energy Dominance Financing Program." As of September 30, the department had issued $132 billion in loans and guarantees through the program, including $47.5 billion announced in conditional commitments, and disbursed $53.2 billion.
While the Trump administration is taking credit for the deal, the loan is essentially a repackaging of a $3 billion conditional commitment offered by the Biden administration in 2025 as part of its last-ditch effort to spend as much taxpayer money on green projects as possible before Trump took office. Under the terms of the Joe Biden-era deal, Alliant would have used the loan to "finance multiple clean energy and battery energy storage system projects." Instead, the company will now receive an additional $2.1 billion in funding, without the climate goals the Biden administration stipulated.
Gregory Beard, director of the Office of Energy Dominance Financing, said the agency is "putting capital to work." The deal is perhaps better described as the Energy Department usurping a role that should be reserved for private-sector, institutional lenders. "This type of government involvement is only another example of the current Energy Department distorting the power generation market," says Tom Opdyke, director of energy and environmental policy at the R Street Institute.
The agency's meddling seems even more unnecessary given that Alliant's revenue is expected to grow 6.8 percent annually over the next three years, with its profit margins increasing from 18.4 percent to 22.2 percent, according to the stock research and portfolio-tracking platform Simply Wall St.
The timing of the announcement also raises some red flags. While an Alliant spokesperson tells Reason they spent "months reviewing the details and finalizing contracts" before the loan package "was finalized this week," the money is conveniently being directed to energy projects in two fairly competitive states in this year's midterm elections. The Cook Political Report has the Iowa Senate race as a toss-up and several incumbent House Republican seats in Iowa and Wisconsin leaning Democrat.
The loan package could be a ploy to boost Trump's and Republicans' favorability with the electorate in Iowa and Wisconsin by appearing to address a cost-of-living issue high on voters' list of concerns. "Even if that's the case, those things aren't going to happen by Election Day, and voters' opinions aren't likely to shift on the promise of future jobs and savings," says Opdyke. "So it might be too little, too late."
Trump is scheduled to speak this weekend in an Iowa-Wisconsin border town.
Whatever the reasoning, the loan package is effectively a subsidy for Alliant to expand its operations and grow its customer base at a lower cost. It's cronyism that enriches Alliant and disadvantages its competitors, at American taxpayers' expense.
Perceptive citizens of the great state of Alaska may have noticed that there are two Senate candidates on the ballot named Dan Sullivan: the incumbent, Republican Sen. Dan S. Sullivan, and Dan J. Sullivan, a completely unknown person who is not actively campaigning for the seat.
The intention seemed obvious: The false Sullivan is trying to siphon off some votes from the real Sullivan in hopes of benefiting the actual challenger, Democratic candidate Mary Peltola. But while it was clear who stood to gain from this scheme, how this had all been arranged remained unclear. Until now.
The rumors are apparently true: Political strategists working closely with the Peltola campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) explicitly recruited the other Sullivan, according to bombshell reporting by The New York Times. All deny any involvement, but the Times has them dead to rights:
The Times has found, based on interviews and text messages, along with documents prepared for a potential lawsuit against the campaign, that not only did Ms. Peltola's team work with people trying to recruit Mr. Sullivan to run for Senate, but the effort was much broader. The group worked to coax other would-be spoilers into the race, to dilute the incumbent's support and help catapult the Democrat to victory.
The campaign consulted with Jerid Kurtz, a Democratic operative, to find and recruit Sullivan, a retired teacher. Kurtz went so far as to fly to Sullivan's remote Alaskan village and personally convince him to run. Sullivan said he "didn't have any interest in being a politician," but loathed President Donald Trump and was eager to help Democrats win the Senate.
Elisa Rios, Peltola's former campaign manager, willingly admitted all this to the Times, claiming that voters deserved to know the truth; reading between the lines, it seems like she's a disgruntled former employee. However, she reconsidered before publication and asked the Times to disregard her interview. The Times quite reasonably declined. In any case, numerous other staffers confirmed her story.
Trump's Justice Department has filed suit, claiming that the other Sullivan's presence on the ballot would render the election illegitimate if Peltola wins. It seems unlikely the administration will win that argument, and these sorts of tactics are nothing new.
They are still quite contemptible, however. Peltola, who was well aware of the scheme, is trying to trick the people of Alaska into voting for the wrong person so that she's more likely to win. Maybe that's not quite so despicable as Vivek Ramaswamy's ad about Amy Acton, but it's just as dastardly—and much more likely to damage the integrity of the election. Ramaswamy's actions generated significant bipartisan backlash; will Democrats who claim that democracy itself is on the ballot speak up and denounce this?
My home state of Ohio has earned a not-so-nice distinction in the 2026 election: It is the site of "the ugliest" contest in the country. Nasty attack ads have been an ongoing feature of the governor's race between Republican Vivek Ramaswamy and Democrat Amy Acton—piercing many a peaceful Hulu-watching session on my end with allegations that Acton is a pill-popping drunk and Ramaswamy a con man.
But the nastiness reached a whole new level in recent weeks, with the release of a Ramaswamy campaign ad implying that Acton lied about childhood sexual abuse by her stepfather.
Understandably, many Republicans bristled at being viewed as the party that defends accused child rapists. Not Trump. His only regret here is that he didn't get to run an ad like this, he said.
The ad features Acton's mother, Donna Arthur, from whom Acton has been estranged for decades for what seem like very good reasons. When Acton was 12, her mom took her stepfather's side when she accused him of sexually abusing her for years.
In 1978, Acton's stepfather, Cledith Arthur, was arrested and charged with child rape. Records from the case, obtained by Signal Statewide, "also contains a reference to a previous incest charge against Cledith Arthur from 1974…although it's not clear how that case was resolved."
Acton's mom lost custody of both Amy and her brother. But the stepfather was never tried, since he and Acton's mom fled the state. He remained a fugitive—and married to Amy's mother—until he died in 2004.
screenshot of Clip from the Youngstown Vindicator on July 17, 1978
In the new Ramaswamy campaign ad, Acton calls her daughter a liar. "It's not easy for a mother to say this, but Amy has a serious problem. She is a liar," says Arthur in the video. "She lies about her past.…She's lied her entire life. My daughter needs help."
Arthur doesn't outright say "she lied about being molested by her stepfather," but given the historical context here, the implication is pretty clear. In effect, the Ramaswamy campaign has helped Acton's mom accuse her daughter on a national scale of making it all up.
That's despicable, even by political campaigning standards.
And—providing us with some hope for humanity—it also backfired. People roundly condemned the ad and the Ramaswamy campaign for running it. Acton's brother, Philip Stearns, corroborated her story. Even many Republicanshave objectedto the ad.
There are still some lines you don't cross, public figures left and right seemed to agree.
Public figures except President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance.
Telling Republicans to "stop whining" about the ad, Vance said he was getting "a little bit disgusted when I see Republicans across the country who are whining more about that advertisement than they are about what the congressional Democrats and other Democrats want to do to the United States of America."
"Vivek Ramaswamy had the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and calls Amy Acton a liar," Vance continued.
Trump went further, calling the ad "very powerful" and urging the Ramaswamy campaign to keep it up. Trump also criticized the current Ohio governor, Republican Mike DeWine, for calling the ad "deeply troubling."
DeWine is a moderate Republican who, for the most part, adheres to pre-Trump standards of decency. Their differing reactions here seem a perfect microcosm of pre-MAGA and post-MAGA standards for conduct and bounds of acceptability.
DeWine "probably wants a Dumocrat to win," Trump wrote in a Truth Social post last Thursday. "I suggested, on the other hand, that Vivek should keep it up, and let everyone listen to the mother of a defective, dishonest, and incapable Candidate, explain how the daughter is a DISASTER who, uncontrollably, lies, cheats, and steals!"
Talking to reporters that same day, Trump just kept repeating that if an ad had been made with his mom calling him a liar, the press would love it. He stuck to that talking point again and again, acting clueless about the childhood sexual abuse allegations at the center of this whole controversy.
The idea that the president would passionately post about and answer questions about this without knowing the whole story is almost beyond belief. But even if Trump somehow didn't know the full context when he first started talking about it, he was made aware and then kept right on praising the ad.
Trump on Ramaswamy Ad: The mother is calling the daughter a terrible person and a liar. Why would you shield somebody from that? Why would we do that? So I told him, leave it up and say thank you God. I only wish I could have had an ad like that. pic.twitter.com/M2TYz3jhUy
At a campaign rally in Iowa last Thursday, he said, "I only wish I could have had an ad like that against somebody."
Ramaswamy has also defended the ad, saying, "Unfortunately, the person I'm running against does have serial problems with the truth" and that the ad highlights a "pattern" of the "people who are closest to her" telling Ohioans not to vote for her.
But this is no longer just about one candidate's mistake or one campaign's poor judgment. The response from Trump and Vance has raised Ramaswamy's ad into bigger and uglier territory.
"It's actually kind of hard to find a prominent Republican who is defending the ad other than Vivek Ramaswamy himself, Vice President JD Vance and, quite fervently today, President Trump," noted CNN's Kaitlan Collins last Friday.
But Trump and Vance are the leaders of not just the Republican Party but the nation. And as we've seen again and again, Trump's responses tend to set the tone for what will become acceptable among conservatives by and large.
"Vance's acceptance of this campaign ad only breathes life into the disease that we should be seeking to cure," former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie toldThe Washington Post.
Do voters agree?
Whatever happens with Ramaswamy next Tuesday, it will be impossible to know how much of it is related to this ad campaign and how much of it is related to many other possible factors. But it's hard not to look at the Ohio gubernatorial election results now as something of a referendum on what type of political discourse is OK. Are voters over Trump-style belligerence and nastiness? Or do they accept the premise that politics is a war in which no low is too low if it helps you win?
In the News
Release the FISA Ruling: "Two Democratic senators who have long overseen US intelligence say the Trump administration is illegally withholding a secret court's findings from Congress until lawmakers renew a program that lets federal agents read Americans' communications without a warrant," reportsWired:
Seven months ago, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court objected to search filters that let intelligence analysts pull Americans' messages from intercepted data without the approvals, written justifications, or records the law requires. The court approved another year of surveillance anyway. The ruling has never been made public, and Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Adam Schiff of California say the administration's own deadline for releasing it passed in September.
"This opinion details serious abuses of Americans' rights under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and, by law, should have been released before September 13," wrote Wyden and Schiff in a letter to the director of national intelligence and the U.S. Attorney General. "Yet this opinion remains hidden over a month later, suggesting that the administration hopes to secure a renewal of Section 702 while keeping Congress and the public in the dark."
Wishful thinking from Flock. Garrett Langley, the CEO of Flock, told a conference of cops to believe him rather than what's right in front of their eyes. The backlash to Flock "is not real," he said at the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference, per leaked audio obtained by 404 Media:
"Somebody was paying for [the social media posts and] stopped paying for it," Langley said about the many viral posts criticizing his company's technology. "Social media chatter on Flock is down about 95 percent from July. It went down 50 percent last week when Ukraine bombed a Russian data center with a drone. Literally 50 percent overnight. And so look, I'm the last person, my wife as well, she's like 'This is crazy, these people are getting paid to say these things,'" he added, repeating a disproven theory that Ukraine's strikes on Russian data centers had a significant impact on internet bot activity.
"It's anonymous bots, and so it is not real," he continued. "Inorganic activity has led to organic activity, but when I look at protests across the country, it is the same people with the same signs and the same message. That's not normal. That's not organic at all." Langley's comments echo another unsubstantiated theory that said opposition to Flock comes from a far-left network spreading propaganda at the behest of China.
The backlash is widespread and multifaceted. Backlash to Flock "has just exploded, like no other issue that I have seen in my time at the ACLU," Becca Eastwood, deputy policy director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa, told Reason recently.
On Substack
Techlash on the campaign trail. Democrats have been panning data centers in campaign ads, but artificial intelligence was the subject of only a small fraction of ads, notes the Blue Horizon Project, an initiative from Chamber of Progress "to restore tech optimism in the Democratic Party and reset the relationship between Democrats and the technology sector." And when Democrats have focused on AI and data centers, it's been more about economics than general anti-AI sentiment, Dave Vorland writes:
Data centers are the important exception to the lack of ads focused on AI and technology. In AdImpact's tables, they appear among the three leading Democratic advertising topics in 5 of the 21 Toss-Up House races. They are not politically irrelevant, and dismissing the local backlash would be a mistake.
But look more closely at what these ads actually argue. Using AdImpact's data on 2026 campaign spending, ads matching either a tax-language screen or energy message, or both, account for $69.76 million, or 76.2% of all data center advertising.
The race with the highest spending on data centers is the Ohio Senate race, where Democratic spending accounts for $32.10 million. AdImpact's data shows Sherrod Brown's campaign spent over $1.5 million to air a data center ad 3,100 times. The message shows that while he is willing to hit his opponent for the data center tax breaks, his solution is ensuring that data centers don't raise energy costs, an idea that could have been drawn directly from our Data Center Development Playbook.
Vorland points out that "AdImpact's data for 2026 Congressional spending shows that less than $2.5 million went to ads supporting a data-center construction pause, moratorium, ban, or stopping new construction, a minuscule portion of the Democratic ad buy."
Interesting that "let data centers build but don't subsidize them" is the implicit message here. It feels like at least somewhat of a good sign that Democratic candidates don't by-and-large think "ban new data centers" is a message that voters want to hear.
More Sex & Tech News
• An interesting essay in Works in Progress looks at "the rise of prudishness" and what demographics might have to do with it.
• "Technology has advanced for centuries, shuffling workers among occupations, industries, and regions without making human labor obsolete," writes Nathan Smith at Human Progress:
As machinery pushed millions of Americans away from farming over the past century, most workers moved to factories, towns, and cities. They ended up with more comfortable lives than their predecessors plowing the fields. The AI economy will likely follow the same path: destroying jobs while creating better ones.
• The New Jersey Assembly recently advanced a bill that would increase prostitution penalties, and several other prostitution-related criminal justice bills are pending in the Assembly and state Senate. Tara Burns has details.
• Florida's attorney general said he plans to introduce even more stringent social media regulation, even as the state's earlier restrictions on minors using social media are still being challenged in federal court.
• British tech regulator Ofcom says its Online Safety Act isn't actually stopping kids from seeing "harmful content" online. So it wants to do more of it. "Instead of suggesting to repeal the Online Safety Act because it does not seem to be working or because it imperils online freedom, Ofcom's report proposes to broaden the law's scope," writesReason's Meagan O'Rourke.
NEW: The Online Safety Act has been a failure, according to a new report from Ofcom.
Ofcom have found "no significant change" in children encountering harmful content since the law came into effect last July. This is despite the signifigant threats to free speech and privacy.
• "Social media decentralized the information environment and weakened the influence of expert opinion. LLMs are likely to have the opposite effects," writes Dan Williams at Persuasion. "Whereas social media has been a democratizing technology, LLMs are a technocratizing force. They shift influence back towards expert opinion."
• Ten states have no birth centers and eight others only have one, according to a new report from The Commonwealth Fund. "Two dozen centers closed between 2023 and 2026, with some publicly blaming onerous regulations and steep increases in malpractice insurance," notesOhio Capitol Journal.
The House looks pretty likely to go Democrat, but the Senate appears to be more in play. Basically, Democrats need to pick up four seats to get control of it; seven races are considered toss-ups by Cook Political Report as of right now, just a few days before Election Day, but Democrats have leads (within the margin of error) in all of them, despite heavy Republican spending in most.
"If Democrats win all seven races, along with the ones in which they are favored, they would secure their largest Senatemajority since the Obama administration," notesThe Washington Post. "If Republicans win all seven races, they would maintain their current 53-47 majority in the Senate, picking up a Democratic-held seat in Michigan to offset a loss in North Carolina."
The math is less daunting for Democrats than it was at the start of the cycle. They need three of the six Republican-held toss-ups to reach 51, assuming they also hold Michigan, the only Democratic seat on the list. Michigan looks like the GOP's best shot at going on offense, since Mike Rogers cleared the Republican field without a primary while Democrats slugged it out all through August.
Meanwhile, the rest of the map looks like a list of Republican problems rather than Democratic strengths; make of that what you will. Maine is the only Republican seat up this year in a state Trump lost in 2024; Ohio features Sherrod Brown, who lost his seat by just four points in 2024 while Trump carried the state by 11; and Alaska has Mary Peltola, who in 2022 became the first Democrat to represent the state in the House in half a century. Each of these races is close for its own reasons, but the reasons happen to cut one way this year.
Not included in the list of toss-ups—Alaska, Kansas, Maine, Iowa, Michigan, Texas, and Ohio—are Georgia, where Democrat Sen. Jon Ossoff looks likely to win, and New Hampshire, an open seat that anyone could technically take but that looks likely to go Democrat. Toss-up is merely a description of how close races look right now; earlier in the cycle, Georgia and New Hampshire were considered toss-ups, but Democrats are now favored to win. These things aren't static, of course, and different forecasters think about each race differently. Some of the toss-up races are primarily due to one party—frequently Republicans—running really terrible candidates (such as Ken Paxton in Texas, whose prospects we discussed on this week's Reason Roundtable). Other races have their own specific quirks, like in Kansas, where a Democratic Methodist pastor who is broadly liked (with no voting record to ding) is running against a Republican incumbent, who is facing headwinds related to high diesel prices that have raised the cost of running farm equipment and shipping goods, along with beef import tariffs that have pissed off farmers.
It's always possible pollsters are wrong. But most pollsters surveyed by The New York Times—including Nate Silver and Patrick Ruffini, both former guests on my show, Just Asking Questions—seem to believe Democrats will win both the House and Senate.
Scenes from New York: "After a woman said she was raped at knife point in Central Park over the weekend, the police said on Monday that they had stepped up patrols of the park as they searched for an assailant," reportsThe New York Times. "The 39-year-old woman told the police that she was jogging on the east side of the park near East 66th Street shortly before 8:30 p.m. on Saturday when a man dressed in black approached her brandishing a knife. He dragged her into a wooded area, raped her and ran off, the police said." This is the latest in a string of crimes in the area, including the murder of a 63-year-old homeless woman who slept in the park, and a 32-year-old woman who was robbed while riding a bike.
QUICK HITS
"Flávio Bolsonaro fled Brazil for the US hours after losing the presidential election and being ordered to surrender his passports, Folha de S.Paulo reported citing allies of the conservative senator," reportsBloomberg.
"Fox News is suffering a catastrophic drop in viewership, which has plunged to historic lows just before the midterm elections, according to new data. Preliminary Nielsen ratings obtained by Status ahead of their official release show that the Trump-friendly juggernaut is on track to post its lowest-rated month in total day viewers since December 2023, averaging just 1.1 million total viewers throughout October 2026," reportsThe Daily Beast. "Among the key 25-54 demographic coveted by advertisers, the outlet is headed for its lowest-rated month in a quarter-century, averaging a paltry 98,000 viewers. The collapse represents a brutal 27 percent drop in total viewers and a 32 percent dive in the 25-54 demographic compared to last October."
Subprime mortgages for people with bad credit! How could this go wrong?
.@PhillyMayor Cherelle Parker tells @EmilyRPeck that the city hopes to launch its historic mortgage program "before the end of 2026."
"Imagine getting a mortgage, a 30-year commitment, with no PMI," Parker said, and accessible "with less-than-perfect credit." #AxiosLivepic.twitter.com/DDDYMWBMAL
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