Buried Ledes | August 2025

I've finally returned from a three-week odyssey across the East Coast—a blur of weddings, family visits, and catching up with friends. Trains, planes, and far too many Ubers carried me through upstate New York, rural Western Massachusetts, Cape Cod beaches, and Brooklyn coworking spaces.

Endless conversations about life, love, work, democracy, technology, and what the future holds. A mini work retreat, visiting a college friend's newborn, and enough lobster rolls to single-handedly impact Maine's GDP.

While ping-ponging between social obligations, I managed to keep up with my inbox and the news cycles spinning faster than my attention span. Another month blurred past. Headlines broke, systems strained, and the usual suspects dominated our collective focus while quieter stories got buried in the noise.

Now I'm back in San Francisco, sorting through a month of buried news while trying to make up with a very annoyed Domino whose resentment is palpable. Three weeks at the dog hotel will do that.

Now that I’m back, it’s time for another edition of Buried Ledes, the standing issue I publish at the end of each month. In Buried Ledes, I dig through the noise to surface the stories that didn’t break through but should have, and I look for the throughline tying them together.

Last month’s theme was infrastructure under siege. This month, the pattern is quieter but no less consequential: the systematic transfer of civic authority from democratic institutions to private companies. Not with dramatic legislation or public debate, but with bureaucratic memos, emergency ordinances, and policy riders.

While the Epstein files dominated the headlines (alongside headlines designed to distract from the Epstein files) America continued to cede control over education, policing, and monetary policy to shareholders and algorithms.

The Department of Education opened the federal funding floodgates for AI in schools this month, issuing guidance that lets districts spend Title I money on AI tutoring systems, personalized learning platforms, and algorithmic college advisors. Going forward, billions in federal dollars can now flow directly to tech companies promising to transform how kids learn.

That guidance came in the form of a Dear Colleague Letter (DCL), something I had to Google and is apparently DC-ism for quietly rewriting the rules without rewriting the law. A DCL is basically a memo with some teeth, it tells schools: "Here's how we expect you to spend federal money if you want to stay in compliance." In this case, it has essentially federalized the AI classroom experiment overnight.

The potential here is genuinely exciting: AI tutors that adapt to individual learning styles, systems that identify struggling students before they fall behind, and tools that make quality education scalable in ways human-only systems simply can't match.

With AI reshaping work faster than any of us can keep up, we need to raise kids who can navigate these tools, not fear them. But there's a crucial distinction between learning how to use AI and being taught by AI. Teaching students to prompt, critique, and collaborate with these systems prepares them for the world they'll actually work in.

What we're funding now goes further: AI systems teaching children, directing coursework, and rendering judgments on aptitude, careers, and worthiness, all without transparency or meaningful human oversight.

We're betting federal dollars on black-box algorithms without requiring even basic disclosures about how they work. The same bureaucrats who can't keep their own databases secure are blessing opaque systems that will shape how millions of children learn, think, and learn to think. And when bias scandals and privacy breaches inevitably hit, it won't be an accident. It will be the predictable outcome of policy that prioritized hype over accountability.

Last week, the New Orleans City Council began debating whether to legalize a system that had already been running in secret for months: a citywide network of cameras scanning faces in real-time and pinging police cellphones when anyone on a watchlist appeared. When The Washington Post exposed the program in May, city officials didn't shut it down; they moved to legalize it. If the ordinance passes, New Orleans will become the first major U.S. city to formally authorize mass biometric surveillance of daily life.

The surveillance state is following the Silicon Valley playbook: ship fast, figure out the legal mumbo-jumbo later. By the time the people start to notice, the technology works, the cameras are installed, and the only question left is whether the legal framework will be adjusted to fit the facts on the ground.

The stakes extend past New Orleans city limits. We are marching towards every sidewalk becoming a checkpoint, every face a data point, every bystander a potential suspect in someone else's crime. The constitutional question of an expectation of privacy in public was long debated, with the "plain view" doctrine holding that if anyone could see you, the state can too.

But this traditional principle is now in direct conflict with the reality of mass digital surveillance. In a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court acknowledged this clash in 2018 in Carpenter v. United States. The Court's decision to require a warrant for long-term cell-site data recognized that while you may willingly expose your location to your cell phone carrier, that information can be so "detailed, encyclopedic, and effortlessly compiled" that it creates an intimate portrait of a person's life.

This is why facial recognition isn't just "seeing." It's permanent recording, instant identification, and scaled algorithmic suspicion. It turns the casual act of walking down the street into a perpetual police lineup.

States that tried to get ahead of the curve (Illinois with its biometric privacy law, California with its temporary bans) struggle to keep up. Those rules were written for security cameras, not AI systems that can scan millions of faces in milliseconds. Without clear national limits, precedent will be set by whichever city codifies it first.

This is how defaults shift. Neither the public nor a legislature ever voted to create real-time biometric surveillance. A private nonprofit built the infrastructure, the police quietly tapped into it, and now the City Council is being asked to bless it after the fact. Once one city codifies this model, it won't stay contained. "Public safety" will become the justification for mass identification everywhere, and once written into local law it will inevitably become the norm.

In January, the White House banned development of a U.S. central bank digital currency. In July, the House passed a bill to block the Federal Reserve from even studying it. And in August, lawmakers went further, embedding that prohibition into the must-pass defense budget, codifying the ban into federal law.

The U.S. is now the only major economy to formally reject a digital currency issued by its central bank.

The stated concern is civil liberties: a government-issued digital dollar could allow Washington to track every transaction in real time. But the effect is more consequential: by forbidding public infrastructure, America has outsourced the future of money to private firms. While China perfects its digital yuan and Europe builds a digital euro, U.S. payment rails will be left to companies like JPMorgan and Circle, corporations answerable to shareholders instead of citizens.

Other nations are building sovereign rails designed to bypass the dollar system entirely while the U.S., by contrast, is betting that private stablecoins will preserve financial dominance and dollar-hegemony. But private rails fragment accountability: they can fail, consolidate, or be captured by a handful of firms. What looks like a hedge against government overreach could erode both U.S. influence abroad and democratic oversight at home.

The Constitution requires public debate for major civic changes. Amendments need supermajorities, laws need votes, treaties need ratification.

But infrastructure needs none of these things.

There’s a crucial difference: Institutions govern through permission while infrastructure governs through defaults.

Congress can pass laws, but those laws must work within existing technological realities. Courts can issue rulings, but those rulings depend on what's technically feasible to enforce. The Executive can set policy, but that policy operates on whatever digital rails, surveillance networks, and algorithmic systems already exist.

Infrastructure creates the universe of political possibility. Once facial recognition cameras blanket a city, the political debate shifts from "Should we have surveillance?" to "How should we regulate the surveillance we already have?" Once private payment rails handle transactions, the question becomes "How do we oversee private money?" not "Should money be public?"

We’re witnessing a full sprint. Private actors have captured democratic institutions, but only temporarily. Soon the midterms will be upon us, Congressional power may flip and Trump will (hopefully) be officially be a lame duck.

But infrastructure is permanent. So while they have institutional power, they're racing to lock in technological defaults that will outlast any political cycle.

Authorize AI in schools while you control Education. Legalize surveillance networks while you control city councils. Ban government digital currency development while you control Congress. Build the rails now, because political winds change while infrastructure endures.

The Constitution was designed to prevent power from concentrating in any single institution. It never anticipated the strategy of using temporary institutional control to create permanent infrastructural advantage.

I'll be honest: a lot of my writing lately has felt like cataloging democracy's quiet surrender to shareholder primacy. But maybe that's not totally fair.

I’m trying to reframe what we're witnessing not as a democratic failure, but a democratic evolution. Traditional institutions move at the speed of committee hearings and budget cycles. They're designed for deliberation, not deployment. Private infrastructure moves at the speed of actual problems.

The question isn't whether this handoff is happening, it clearly is. The question is whether democratic institutions will learn to govern infrastructure as effectively as they've governed institutions.

If they can't, the most important political battles of our time won't happen in Congress or courtrooms, they'll happen in glass conference rooms overlooking the Bay, where civic infrastructure gets designed between kombucha breaks and quarterly earnings calls.

Up and to the right.