the edit, vol. 14
A year in review: 2025
an audit of how american institutions were tested in 2025—and a blueprint for navigating 2026.
If 2024 was the prelude, 2025 was the performance. It was a year of reckoning—a period where the abstract theories of "disruption" collided with the rigid machinery of the American state. We spent twelve months watching rapid institutional change collide with the slower machinery of American life.
What follows is an audit of a year defined by radical friction and a blueprint for the high-stakes navigation required in 2026.
The 2025 ledger
The Institutional Shakedown
The year began not with a transition, but with an explosion of precedent. On January 20, On January 20, the executive branch issued blanket pardons for approximately 1,500 individuals tied to the January 6 Capitol riot, effectively nullifying the results of one of the largest criminal investigations in the history of the Department of Justice. It was a signal flare: the guardrails were no longer merely being tested; they were being dismantled.
Simultaneously, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy—initiated what it termed a "cleansing" of the federal workforce. By December, the tally of exits reached 271,000—a peacetime reduction of civil servants without historical parallel. While the rhetoric promised a $2 trillion windfall in savings, the ledger told a more stubborn story. Federal spending actually climbed 6%, from $7.135 trillion to $7.558 trillion. The "efficiency" gained was largely a deficit of institutional memory—stalled permits and administrative paralysis that saw both musk and Ramaswamy depart by May, leaving behind embedded personnel within the very agencies they were tasked to shrink.
The Price of Policy
In July, the legislative centerpiece—dubbed the "One Big Beautiful Bill"—landed with the force of a tectonic shift. The law restructured Medicaid (the federal-state health insurance program covering 72 million low-income Americans, pregnant women, children, and disabled individuals) through 80-hour monthly work requirements and $375 billion in provider cuts, set to take effect in 2027. The Congressional Budget Office projected a staggering 12 million people would lose coverage over the coming decade. In rural America, the crisis was immediate; documentation burdens, rather than the work requirements themselves, began starving small-town hospitals of the revenue required to keep their doors open.
On the kitchen table, the "macro" and "micro" economies reached a decisive split. While official inflation cooled to 2.7%, the cumulative weight of the post-2020 era reached a 25% increase in the cost of living. For the average American, "cooling inflation" failed to reflect lived reality when housing costs sat 14% higher and credit card debt swelled to a collective $1.23 trillion.
The trade war further strained the consumer. Tariffs on Chinese goods—reaching levels not seen since 1943—added an estimated $3,800 to the average household's annual expenses. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell pointed directly at these trade barriers as the primary anchor keeping inflation above the 2% target.
The Authority Question
Immigration enforcement moved from rhetoric to a logistical campaign of unprecedented scale. Between January and July, an estimated 1.2 million immigrants exited the workforce—driven by approximately 600,000 formal deportations (combined ICE and CBP removals), fear of raids, and the administration's rescission of work permits for hundreds of thousands of previously protected immigrants. The exodus drained labor from industries already facing critical shortages.
The year also saw a constitutional crisis as the Executive federalized National Guard troops, deploying them into "non-compliant" Democratic-led cities without state consent. The sight of Texas National Guard units in Chicago without gubernatorial approval sparked immediate legal challenges that reached the Supreme Court, which ruled in December that the administration had overstepped its constitutional bounds.
The Fragmentation of Truth
The information crisis that defined the previous decade entered a new phase in 2025: the technological capacity to fabricate reality finally outpaced the average person's ability to detect it. The information ecosystem has shattered. AI-generated deepfakes surged by 900%, with voice-cloning technology now so sophisticated that it requires only three seconds of audio to fabricate convincing false statements. As partisan sorting intensified, the capacity to distinguish authentic media from synthetic propaganda has started eroding beyond the reach of ordinary fact-checking methods.
Finding Signal in the Chaos
In a year that demanded our attention at every turn, the question became: what do we hold onto?
The answer is deceptively simple: attention itself. Not the frantic, doom-scrolling kind that leaves us hollowed out by midnight, but the disciplined gaze—the practice of choosing what deserves our emotional and intellectual bandwidth.
2025 taught us that when institutions fail to provide checks and balances, the informed citizen becomes the final line of defense. This isn't a call to consume every breaking news alert or engage every inflammatory claim. It's the opposite. It's discernment. It's the capacity to distinguish signal from noise, fact from fabrication, genuine crisis from manufactured outrage.
The art of staying informed without becoming consumed requires boundaries. It means selecting trusted sources, fact-checking inflammatory claims before sharing them, and cultivating the rare skill of changing one's mind when presented with evidence. It means acting with grace in the face of hate, responding to blatant lies not with matching vitriol but with stubborn commitment to truth.
This is not passivity. This is strategy. Because the greatest threat to democracy isn't the loudest voice in the room—it's the exhaustion that makes us stop listening altogether.
The 2026 Horizon: Results Over Rhetoric
As we cross the threshold into 2026, the era of theory is over. We have entered the "Empirical Year." With presidential disapproval hovering at 60%, the upcoming midterm elections will serve as the ultimate audit of the public's appetite for disruption.
The key indicators to watch:
The Subsidy Cliff: ACA subsidies expire. Keep an eye out for doubled premiums affecting 22 million Americans.
The Tariff Lag: As pre-tariff inventory runs out, keep an eye out for consumer price increases.
The Fed's Future: Jerome Powell's term ends in May. Keep an eye out for his replacement—it will signal monetary policy's future direction.
Medicaid's Unraveling: Work requirements take full effect. Keep an eye out for coverage losses and rural hospital closures.
The Midterm Referendum: November elections measure appetite for disruption. Keep an eye out for voter turnout in districts most affected by coverage losses.
Workforce Shortages: Immigrant labor exits continue. Keep an eye out for impacts in the most affected sectors.
Synthetic Media: AI-generated disinformation targets midterms. Keep an eye out for how officials respond to deepfakes.
What This Requires of Us
The metrics matter. But data without action is just observation.
November 2026 will ask a simple question: Do the results match the promises? The answer begins with showing up—not just to vote, but to vote informed. That means tracking the indicators above, connecting policy to lived experience, and rejecting the noise that masquerades as analysis.
This is not a call to political exhaustion. It's permission to be strategic. You don't need to follow every news cycle or engage every outrage. The goal is clarity. Verify claims before accepting them. Hold institutions—all of them—accountable to their stated goals.
Engagement without burnout means boundaries. It means choosing reliable sources over reactive ones. It means asking "what changed?" instead of "what was said?" It means voting with evidence.
The work is neither passive nor performative. It's practical. It's showing up in November with a clear understanding of what happened in 2025 and what you want to see in 2027.
The Veritas Standard
The Veritas Edit exists to cut through the noise—not to add to it.
We provide fact-forward analysis without partisan spin. We present evidence, trace policy to outcome, and distinguish between what was promised and what was delivered.
In a landscape designed to overwhelm, we remain committed to clarity. To accuracy. To the belief that informed citizens are the final check on power when institutions fail to provide one.
We'll be here every week—cutting through the chaos, tracking what matters, holding the line on truth.
Stay curious. Stay centered. Stay informed.
Welcome to 2026.
The Veritas Edit
