Harvard Weighs Major Crackdown On “Grade Inflation”
Harvard faculty begin voting Tuesday on what may be the most aggressive effort in decades to curb grade inflation, a long-running issue that has also drawn attention from the White House as it pushes broader higher-ed reforms, according to Bloomberg.
The proposal would cap A grades in undergraduate classes at 20% of students, plus four additional students. The move comes after A grades surged at Harvard: about 60% of grades were A’s in the 2024–25 academic year, more than double the rate in 2006. After administrators pushed for stricter grading last fall, that number dropped to 53%. Faculty have one week to vote, with results expected May 20.
Supporters say grade inflation has made academic distinctions less meaningful. Last year, Harvard seniors needed a 3.989 GPA to earn summa cum laude, and an award traditionally given to one student ended in a 54-way tie. As professor Jason Furman said, “It’s fundamentally dishonest to give the best students in the class the same grade as someone in the bottom half.”
Bloomberg writes that students have strongly opposed the plan, arguing it would increase stress, discourage academic risk-taking, and push students toward easier courses. Nearly 85% of undergraduates surveyed by The Harvard Crimson opposed the proposal. Student leader Caleb Thompson said “people really are against this,” while senior Summer Tan said students are already seeking easier classes instead of more challenging ones.
Some faculty members agree. Scott Duke Kominers warned the policy could discourage ambitious students and make Harvard less attractive to top applicants.
Harvard’s decision could influence other elite schools. Yale recently considered an even stricter proposal for a campus-wide average GPA of 3.0. Earlier efforts at Princeton and Wellesley initially reduced top grades but were eventually reversed after student backlash.
Critics argue schools hesitate to grade more strictly because students could be disadvantaged if peer institutions do not follow. Still, supporters believe Harvard’s prestige could set off broader reform.
If approved, the policy would take effect in fall 2027. Faculty are also voting on allowing some courses to opt out through a satisfactory/unsatisfactory grading system and on replacing GPA with percentile rank for academic honors.
OAKLAND, Calif.—After nearly three weeks of presented evidence, an Oakland jury on May 14 heard final arguments in a high-stakes legal battle that could have profound impacts on the race for artificial intelligence.
Tech moguls Elon Musk and Sam Altman, once friends and partners in a fledgling AI startup with big dreams and a noble mission, are nearing the climax of a bitter feud over the future of an $852 billion company.
Despite a judicial ban on testimony related to AI-induced “extinction” scenarios, references to speculative risks still surfaced during the Oakland courtroom proceedings, appeared in discussions around “risk” and “safety.” Vague promises about the future benefits of an unrealized technology were also touched upon.
On the stand, Tesla CEO Musk told the court, “We don’t want to have a Terminator outcome,” suggesting humanity would be better off with a “Star Trek” future written by Gene Roddenberry, rather than something from the mind of James Cameron.
Musk cofounded OpenAI in 2015 with Altman, President Greg Brockman, and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. At the time, both Musk and Altman expressed grave concerns about the unregulated advancement of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—a hypothetical point at which the machines “outsmart” humans and operate autonomously.
Those concerns, Musk testified, were the express motivation for founding OpenAI: open-source to prevent consolidation of power, and philanthropic to offset the profit-driven AI race.
He sued Altman and Brockman in 2024, alleging they bilked him out of $38 million in donations, then restructured as a for-profit corporation by exclusively licensing their flagship product, ChatGPT, to Microsoft—and in doing so, betrayed their founding mission.
OpenAI and Microsoft deny the allegations, arguing Musk abandoned the company in 2018 to start his own for-profit competitor, xAI, when other founders rejected his bid to take full control of the operation.
Alongside the “preponderance” of evidence that both sides say supports their claims, the trial was just as focused on the two men’s reputations and characters.
“Sam Altman’s credibility is directly at issue in this case,” Steven Molo, an attorney for Musk, said in his closing statement. “The defendants absolutely need you to believe Sam Altman. If you cannot trust him … they do not win.”
Molo questioned Altman earlier this week over a list of employees and colleagues who, both on and off the record, have characterized him as dishonest and opportunistic.
OpenAI attorneys dismissed the tactic as “character assassination.”
Sarah Eddy, an attorney for OpenAI, countered, “Mr. Molo says Sam Altman can’t be trusted, but Mr. Musk is the one whose testimony is contradicted by every other witness and all the documents.”
Altman, Brockman, and others cast Musk as a detached outsider who contributed little if any sweat equity, had fraught relationships with colleagues, and attempted to poach OpenAI’s employees for his other companies.
“The claim is that the Midas touch of Elon Musk made OpenAI what it is today,” William Savitt, an attorney for OpenAI, said in closing arguments.
“Elon, Elon, Elon. ‘It was all me.’ Mr. Musk wants all that credit, but he hasn’t earned [it].
“This requires a touch that he doesn’t have. This is not a bulldozer. … To succeed in AI, as it turns out, all Mr. Musk can do is come to court.”
Savitt pointed out Musk wasn’t present for closing arguments, having jetted off to China earlier in the week with President Donald Trump.
Gesturing at Altman and Brockman, he said: “My clients are here because they care a lot about it. Mr. Musk came to this court for exactly one witness—Mr. Musk. Now he’s in parts unknown.”
Musk, according to the Forbes Billionaire Index, is the wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of around $826 billion. Brockman received equity in the OpenAI corporation worth around $30 billion, and Altman’s net worth is around $3.5 billion.
When Brockman took the stand last week, Molo accused him of plotting to use OpenAI to become a billionaire.
“You had a fiduciary duty [to the nonprofit],” the attorney said. “You took the assets from the nonprofit, you moved them into the for-profit to create this money-making machine that resulted in you having $30 billion.”
Brockman said such was a “deep mischaracterization.” Personal diary entries from late 2017 in which he muses about profits, and about how it would be “morally bankrupt” to “steal the nonprofit” from Musk, he said, were expressions of frustration.
Jurors heard from a parade of Silicon Valley insiders, including all four founders, and from dueling experts on AI safety, nonprofits, business law, and forensic accounting. They watched lawyers pick through reams of internal documents, analyzing complex corporate and financial histories, while private diaries, email, and text threads offered insight on the parties’ underlying motivations and shifting alliances.
“Everyone here has rights, even really rich guys like Elon Musk,” Molo said. “His is a claim that comes from a very deep place inside him, from his passion for this issue.”
During his own testimony, Musk often told the court, “You can’t just steal a charity.”
When his time on the stand came, Altman clapped back, “No, you can’t steal it, but Mr. Musk did try to kill it.”
Altman said on Tuesday that Musk contributed only 28 percent of the nonprofit’s funding from 2015 to 2020, and failed to come through on a $1 billion pledge, leaving the startup with few options.
OpenAI argues its nonprofit foundation is now one of the “best-resourced” in the world, with an equity stake in the company’s for-profit corporation approaching $200 billion—a direct result of $13 billion worth of investments from Microsoft and a 2025 restructure sanctioned by California and Delaware attorneys general.
The details of OpenAI’s journey from a scrappy, underfunded nonprofit to one of the most powerful and valuable AI companies are highly contested. In addition to the power struggle with Musk in 2017 and 2018, it involves a messy 2023 governance shakeup in which Altman and Brockman were briefly ousted and Microsoft was deeply entangled.
By 2017, all parties had agreed they would need vastly more capital and computing power to compete with AI giants such as Google. Various ideas were floated, debated, and discarded—including rolling OpenAI into Tesla and even turning to cryptocurrency. Ultimately, under Altman’s leadership, the company created a for-profit subsidiary in 2018 and, in 2019, partnered with Microsoft. In 2025, OpenAI restructured as a public benefit corporation, which its leaders say remains under the control of the foundation and loyal to the original mission.
The foundation holds an approximately 27 percent equity stake in the corporation; Microsoft owns a 26 percent stake.
Molo argued on Thursday that Microsoft’s investment breached the charitable trust Musk created by enriching its investors and “insiders” at the expense of the nonprofit, and failing to open-source the technology, prioritize AI safety, or follow nonprofit custom and practice.
The $13 billion Microsoft has invested since 2019 dwarfed charitable contributions and weakened OpenAI in its negotiating position with Microsoft, Molo said, resulting in a company focused on commercializing AI, with a gutted charity that does little more than sanitize its reputation.
As for Microsoft, Molo said the company was aware of what OpenAI was doing “every step of the way, they helped them violate their nonprofit mission, that’s aiding and abetting pure and simple.”
OpenAI and Microsoft argued there was never any charitable trust to breach.
Eddy, the OpenAI attorney, argued there were never any strings attached to Musk’s donations to OpenAI, and that he failed to demonstrate that he “properly manifested a specific intent” to devote the trust to a specific purpose, his $38 million in donations going instead to generally further the mission of the nonprofit.
“The specific purposes cannot just be in his head,” Eddy said.
Absent evidence proving this intent and specificity, she said, the plaintiff had resorted to implication and inference.
“It’s all made up,” she said.
As Musk told it, OpenAI’s mission was clear.
“I specifically came up with the idea, the name, recruited key people, taught [them] everything I know, provided the original funding. … It was specifically for a charity that did not benefit any individual person. I could’ve started it as a for-profit, and I chose not to,” Musk said.
He is asking that Altman and Brockman be removed from their leadership positions at OpenAI, and that more than $100 billion be returned to the nonprofit foundation.
In addition to Musk’s three claims—breach of charitable trust, restitution based on unjust enrichment, and, against Microsoft, aiding and abetting a breach of a charitable trust—jurors will decide whether those claims are barred by a statute of limitations.
The jury will begin deliberations on Monday at 8:30 am.
Today’s order is here; the application that was denied is here. The state’s argument for a stay, which the Court rejected, begins thus:
Days before Virginia’s deadline to begin administering the 2026 election for members of the United States House of Representatives, the Supreme Court of Virginia invalidated an amendment to the Commonwealth’s Constitution that authorizes the General Assembly to adopt new congressional maps.
The Court purported to find a procedural flaw in the amendment’s passage and ratification: that the General Assembly failed to pass the amendment prior to the “next general election” before passing it a second time and referring the amendment to the people for their approval. The basis for that holding was the Court’s view that, contrary to the Constitution’s own definition of the term “election” to refer to a single day in November, the term instead encompasses the entire period of early voting beginning in September. Based on that novel and manifestly atextual interpretation, the Court overrode the will of the people who ratified the amendment by ordering the Commonwealth to conduct its election with the congressional districts that the people rejected.
A stay is warranted because the decision by the Supreme Court of Virginia is deeply mistaken on two critical issues of federal law with profound practical importance to the Nation. The decision below violates federal law in two separate ways. First, it predicated its interpretation of the Virginia Constitution on a grave misreading of federal law, which expressly fixes a single day for the “election” of Representatives and Delegates to Congress. See 2 U.S.C. § 7. Where a state court’s decision on purportedly state-law grounds was “interwoven with the federal law,” this Court may intervene to ensure that the state court’s decision complies with federal law. Michigan v. Long, 463 U.S. 1032, 1040 (1983). See also Three Affiliated Tribesof Fort Berthold Rsrv. v. Wold Eng’g, P.C., 467 U.S. 138, 153 (1984) (vacating state supreme court decision whose interpretation of state statute “rest[ed] on a misconception of federal law”).
Second, by rejecting the plain text of the Virginia Constitution’s definition of the term “election” to adopt its own contrary meaning, the Supreme Court of Virginia “transgressed the ordinary bounds of judicial review such that it arrogated to itself the power vested in the state legislature to regulate federal elections.” Moore v. Harper, 600 U.S. 1, 36 (2023) (cleaned up). Either violation is sufficient for this Court to reverse the decision below. Accordingly, there is a “reasonable probability that this Court will grant certiorari and will then reverse the decision below.”
Defendant James O’Keefe is a conservative political activist whose organization, Defendant O’Keefe Media Group (“OMG”), frequently engages in “sting” operations in which its agents use false identities to arrange meetings with individuals affiliated with government, mainstream media, or progressive organizations, and surreptitiously record them with the goal of publishing the subject’s potentially unflattering or controversial statements so as to tarnish the reputations of the subject or their affiliated institution or, in OMG’s words, to “expos[e] corruption.” Plaintiff, a top secret-cleared information systems security consultant to government agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the Office of Director of National Intelligence, fell prey to one such operation in April 2024, during what he thought were two romantic dates with “Jane Doe,” who unbeknownst to Plaintiff, was an OMG employee.
Jane Doe contacted Plaintiff via the Bumble dating app and, during both dates, represented herself as a liberal and pressed him for details on his work, including whether certain government agencies may have surveilled or withheld information from then-former President Donald Trump. In response to this questioning, Plaintiff stated, inter alia, that while “anything was possible” and he could not give Jane Doe a straight answer, he “believed” some information was withheld, and that NSA or CIA “could have” surveilled Trump. {The videos posted by OMG, which Defendants link to in their Motion and which the Court may consider as intrinsic to the Complaint, contain statements that are much more explicit than those alleged in the Complaint (and do not appear to be cut or deceptively edited).}
On the second date, Plaintiff noticed what he thought was a recording device in Jane Doe’s bag (which she had kept on the table during both dates) and asked her whether he was being recorded. In response, she denied that, but then repeatedly refused to allow him to inspect her bag and shortly left the restaurant. Despite this experience, Fseisi later agreed to meet Jane Doe again in the District of Columbia, where he was instead confronted by O’Keefe and a cameraman.
In early May, 2024, OMG made multiple posts on its website and social media accounts which included video footage from the first and second dates and the O’Keefe confrontation that included Plaintiff’s statements to Jane Doe that “we kept information from him [Trump]” (and that the “we” specifically included past CIA Directors Gina Haspel, Mike Pompeo and members of their executive staffs), and showed him responding affirmatively to Jane Doe’s question of whether “the intel community used FISA [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] to spy on Trump and his team.” The posts also included O’Keefe’s commentary on Plaintiff’s statements and other topics related to purported intelligence community activity.
Plaintiff alleges that he suffered various professional repercussions from these publications, chiefly that one or more federal agencies placed a “flag” on his security clearance on an unspecified date, and that he has been rejected from multiple jobs and/or projects on clearance-related grounds, resulting in eight months of unemployment. Plaintiff also alleges, inter alia, “severe emotional distress … [f]ear and terror resulting from death threats directed towards him … [and] damage to his personal and professional reputation.”
Plaintiff sued, but the court rejected his misrepresentation claim:
In Food Lion v. Capital Cities/ABC, Inc. (4th Cir. 1999), two ABC news reporters used false identities to obtain jobs at branches of Food Lion’s grocery store chain in order to investigate the chain’s labor and food handling practices, and after being hired based on misrepresented identities and experience, they used hidden cameras and microphones to gather footage which was aired on a television news broadcast…. [T]he Fourth Circuit … [held that] Food Lion could not recover “publication damages,” which it defined as all damages resulting from the news broadcast itself, because those damages were reputational in nature and thus represented an attempt to circumvent the Sullivan standard for defamation claims by public figures….
All of Plaintiff’s claimed damages arise out of OMG’s publications, however characterized, and are therefore barred under Food Lion. Here, as in Food Lion, OMG’s publications, whether defamatory or “a product of misrepresentation,” were clearly a form of expression (viz., what Plaintiff said and what OMG claimed he said) and did not constitute the breach of a promise as in Cowles…. [T]he Fourth Circuit held that Food Lion was not entitled to publication damages without meeting the Sullivan standard “to give adequate ‘breathing space’ to the freedoms protected by the First Amendment.” Plaintiff’s claims to recover damages, all of which arise out of OMG’s publications, are therefore foreclosed by the First Amendment….
And the court rejected plaintiff’s Federal Wiretap Act claim; the federal law (unlike the laws of some so-called “two-party consent” states) allows secret recording that’s consented to by one party to the communication unless the “communication is intercepted for the purpose of committing any criminal or tortious act in violation of” federal or state law, and the court held this exception doesn’t apply here:
Plaintiff alleges that the recordings were made for the tortious purpose of defaming him; but while he concedes that he does not allege a defamation claim or rely on any defamatory aspect of Defendants’ public statements, he argues that his misrepresentation and conspiracy allegations provide the tortious purpose for the recordings.
The Purpose Provision requires an intent to commit a future tortious act. Here, the relied-upon misrepresentations all occurred before the publication of the recordings (viz: chiefly during the Bumble dating app messaging between Plaintiff and Jane Doe) and were part and parcel of Defendants’ scheme to obtain the recordings, not the purpose for which the recordings were intended to be used. Because Plaintiff has not otherwise plausibly alleged that Defendants intercepted his oral communications with the purpose of committing a subsequent tort or criminal offense, his wiretapping claim must be dismissed.
Earl Neville Mayfield, III (Juris Day PLLC), Benjamin Thomas Barr and Stephen Klein (Barr & Klein PLLC), and Dan Backer (Chalmers, Adams, Backer & Kaufman LLC) represent defendants.
Our politics have been analogized to Veep. A more apt comparison some days is that we are living in a cartoon. Every good cartoon needs a supervillain or three. Our supervillains created millions of jobs, made goods cheaper and far easier to obtain, and revolutionized access to information, among other terrible, terrible things.
I am referring to billionaires. Reasonable people will debate, and disagree on, the best way to sketch out the tax code. Protestations to “tax the rich” have long been central to progressive politics. But last week’s Met Gala was a reminder that there is something else undergirding those calls: what seems like legitimate hatred or, at a minimum, disgust. Why?
The Met Gala, of course, is a convenient backdrop for this kind of criticism: a ludicrous event where many of the ultrarich gather together, hobnob in opulent costume, and, at least in one case, protest their own existence. This year, however, was even more convenient, because the gala was sponsored by our main cartoon villain: Jeff Bezos.
“If Jeff Bezos can drop $10 million to sponsor the Met Gala, he can afford to pay his fair share in taxes,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) in one of the more civil criticisms offered. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) was more pointed:
The reality of American life today: Jeff Bezos, worth $290 billion, spent:
$10 million on the Met Gala $120 million on a penthouse $500 million on a yacht
Meanwhile, he’s planning to throw 600,000 Amazon workers out on the streets and replace them with robots.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) went on to tell comedian Ilana Glazer, worth quite a bit of money herself, that it is simply not possible to earn a billion dollars. “You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth,” she said, “but you can’t earn that.”
The common theme here is that Bezos et al. are, in effect, not just subject to an unfair tax rate. It is that they are evil. He is not paying his “fair share,” he is throwing people out onto the streets, he and others must have abused the law.
Reason‘s Christian Britschgi explained last week why this general outlook betrays economic reality. But it’s also important to interrogate the basic idea that someone is evil because he is rich, which has become common wisdom in certain circles. There are certainly wealthy people who are rotten. Making a product that others want, though, does not make someone a bad egg. Amazon, founded by Bezos, allows people to get items much quicker and often for considerably less money. As of December of last year, the company employed 1.58 million people. He is our cartoon villain?
There are other examples. Sergey Brin and Larry Page gave the world near-unfettered access to information with Google. Maybe it’s even how you found this article. (Thanks.) Steve Jobs effectively put computers in our pockets, facilitating more intimate communication and connection with friends and loved ones near and far. Elon Musk, for all of his controversy, helped pioneer the modern electric vehicle and is investing in technology to help people with neural issues regain function. Why is this never a part of the story?
This ire is not constrained to the yearly Met Gala. Perhaps nothing captures it better than a video New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani filmed last month, standing on the street, sneering while he informed constituents that “today, we’re taxing the rich.” The proposal: a pied-á-terre tax on luxury units whose owners do not live full-time in the city. Why sneering? Because Mamdani was outside of one such unit. He pointed upward at the penthouse and named and shamed its owner, Ken Griffin. Perhaps there is a conversation to be had about an additional tax on high-end, part-time residences. A government leader expressing such revulsion for a constituent is another thing entirely. One of the two men has a lot of audacity, and it is not the private citizen.
Griffin, after all, is a major contributor to the New York economy, though he has reportedly begun scaling back in response to the video. He is also a major philanthropist, having given away billions of dollars. Bezos, meanwhile, recently gave a $100 million donation to a charity funding early childhood education in New York. Will Bernie Sanders add that to his list of Bezos expenditures?
A woman is suing Houston County in southeast Alabama for violating her constitutional rights after she was forced to give birth preterm with no medical assistance in the county jail.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court earlier this week, accuses the county, jail, and officers involved, in part, of deliberate indifference to serious medical needs and the denial of medical care in violation of the 14th Amendment.
Tiffany McElroy was 34 weeks pregnant with a history of preterm labor when she was arrested on May 23, 2024, on chemical endangerment charges, according to the complaint filed on McElroy’s behalf by the nonprofit Pregnancy Justice. The charge, which involves exposing children, including fetuses, to a controlled or chemical substance or drug paraphernalia, stemmed from allegations that McElroy had used substances during her pregnancy.
In the early hours of May 26, 2024, while in Houston County Jail, McElroy alerted the jail staff and officers that her water had broken, according to the suit. Considered a medical emergency when the water breaks before 37 weeks, McElroy and her child were at risk of serious infection, sepsis, and premature birth. But “despite her obvious signs of labor,” reads the complaint, “no one from the jail came to help.”
Instead, McElroy claims that for nearly 24 hours, she received no medical assistance for her preterm labor. Although she met with the jail’s physician assistant and nurse hours after her water had broken, McElroy was only given a diaper and ibuprofen, even though her fetus showed signs of an elevated heart rate. And her repeated pleas to go to the hospital were ignored.
Although pain in her abdomen continued to escalate, and her amniotic fluid continued to leak, McElroy was forced to attend her first court appearance and move about the jail without assistance, reads the complaint.
As McElroy’s labor progressed into the second night, “other women detained in the jail repeatedly alerted jail staff to the emergency…but jail staff rarely responded,” and “made no effort of any kind of emergency medical assessment or assistance,” according to the lawsuit. By the early morning on May 27, 2024, McElory was screaming in pain and began to feel the urge to start pushing.
Still, the jail staff did not act. Indeed, one officer said she was forbidden from calling 911 or assisting McElroy because “she and the jail could be held accountable if anything happened to [McElroy] or her baby,” the lawsuit alleges. And other detained women were threatened with tasing and other punishment for attempting to help McElroy deliver her baby. “Despite these threats,” other women in McElroy’s pod insisted on helping her deliver as her contractions slowed, according to the complaint.
When McElroy’s baby was born, “she was not crying or breathing,” but thanks to the quick thinking of one of the other women to “suction the baby’s mouth and nose three times and stimulat[e] the chest…the baby started breathing,” reads the complaint. It was only after the baby was delivered that officers took McElroy and her baby to the hospital, with one officer telling the women in the pod: “Y’all should’ve pushed that motherfucking baby back in.”
More than 24 hours after her water broke, her preterm baby was transferred to the neonatal intensive care unit, and McElroy was treated for a serious bacterial infection that can be brought on “when the amniotic sac is ruptured for a prolonged period of time,” according to Pregnancy Justice. McElroy also received a blood transfusion due to the amount of blood she lost during the delivery.
“I’m so grateful that my baby and I are here today, and I owe that to other women because the guards treated me like I was less than nothing,” McElroy said in a statement.
The state of Alabama jails more women for endangering their pregnancies than any other state, according to Karen Thompson, the legal director at Pregnancy Justice. “From June 2022 to June 2024…Alabama prosecuted 192 women on pregnancy-related charges, mostly on charges that they used drugs while pregnant,” reports AL.com. Alabama is followed by Oklahoma (112 prosecutions), South Carolina (62), and then Texas and Mississippi (both at just 9), according to an analysis by Pregnancy Justice.
Whether it is wise to use the criminal justice system to incarcerate pregnant women who allegedly ingest substances may be up for debate, but what happened to McElroy was an undeniable violation of her rights and dignity. She faces an unfortunately steep uphill battle to hold the government actors who denied her and her child adequate medical care accountable.
PJM Interconnection, the largest electricity grid operator in the nation, held its annual company meeting in Baltimore earlier this week. For Maryland Democratic Gov. Wes Moore, the event was an opportunity to voice grievances about rising energy costs.
“I am here to say plainly that PJM can—and must—do more for ratepayers,” Moore said, adding that PJM’s system “isn’t working.” Moore’s comments come as the price of residential electricity in the state has reached 22.4 cents per kilowatt-hour. This is 24 percent higher than the national average and 6.4 percent more than last year.
Maryland is not alone. Across the country, residential electricity prices rose by 7.4 percent from February 2025 to February 2026, the most recent month for which federal data are available. While data centers have become an easy scapegoat for rising wholesale prices, there are a range of factors behind these price hikes, including upgrades to aging grids, fluctuating natural gas prices, supply chain constraints, and growing demand that has simply outpaced supply.
As Jeffrey Shields, PJM’s senior manager of external communications, tells Reason, the operator is “working with relentless focus to accelerate the connection of new generation.” Any problems PJM faced with its interconnection process—pilloried by Moore—are a thing of the past, according to Shields.
Facing a backlog of new energy generation and storage projects, PJM closed its interconnection queue in 2022, revamping its process from first-come, first-served to what Shields calls a “cluster” approach, resulting in 811 new generation projects in its first cycle this year.
While Moore castigates PJM, he has consistently supported policies such as price caps and clean energy mandates that distort the market and increase costs for Maryland residents. This includes two bills recently signed by the governor that purport to “protect Maryland families from rising utility costs and make Maryland’s economy more business-friendly” but will likely have the opposite effect.
One of those bills, the Utility RELIEF Act, will allegedly save residents “at least $150 on their energy bills every year.” The law includes $100 million for refunds or credits to ratepayers drawn from the state’s Strategic Energy Investment Fund (SEIF). Another $100 million will go to the Maryland Energy Administration to “conduct a competitive, low-bid auction” for renewable energy projects.
Funded by “alternative compliance payments” from utilities, the SEIF has seen payments grow from $77 million in FY 2022 to $365 million by FY 2025, according to the state’s energy administration.
According to Josh Smith, a senior fellow at the Pacific Legal Foundation, actions like those spelled out in the RELIEF Act “tend to make things more expensive,” deterring suppliers from serving the market.
Another bill touted by the Moore administration, the DECADE Act, will reportedly improve Maryland’s ability to “attract, develop, and grow businesses” through a series of tax credits and carve-outs designed to counter the state’s 3 percent tech tax, which Moore signed into law last May. The bill’s major provisions—including economic development zones, film tax credits, job creation credits, and R&D credits—seem representative of a state government that believes it’s better at allocating capital than the market.
Max Gulker, managing director of technology policy at Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason, says Maryland’s problems require the state to consider expanding existing infrastructure and building new grids.
Easier said than done. The Piedmont Reliability Project, intended to increase the state’s transmission capacity, has faced regulatory and legal challenges from the state since it was first announced in 2024, according to local NBC affiliate WBALTV11. A decision by the state’s utility commission on the project’s viability isn’t expected until 2027.
Maryland has sought to streamline its permitting process for interconnection requests aligned with the state’s clean energy goals. Under the Next Generation Energy Act, eligible applicants can receive permits within 295 days. For a project to be eligible, its greenhouse gas emissions must be lower than those of coal or oil, and it must be capable of generating energy quickly during peak demand.
While this may appear to be a blatant example of the government picking energy winners and losers, such policies are common. As Maryland Public Service Commission Chairman Kumar Barve tells Reason, “all 50 states in the union have incentives for different kinds of energy….There’s not a single free market state in the union, not Texas, not Oklahoma, not anybody.”
And just as Maryland is not the only state to tilt the scales in favor of renewables, Moore is not the only governor to blame PJM for the price hikes from these policies.
In New Jersey—which has long subsidized renewables and, until recently, banned construction of nuclear power plants—Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill has frozen utility rate increases. “I’m going to crack down on PJM, get new energy hooked into the grid, and sue to prevent excessive rate hikes,” she said while on the campaign trail last year.
Rep. Steve Cohen Drops Reelection Bid After Tennessee Redistricting
On Friday Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen of Tennessee announced he is ending his bid for reelection to Congress, capping a nearly 20-year career in the U.S. House. The decision comes days after the Republican-controlled Tennessee legislature approved a new congressional map that dramatically reshapes – and effectively dismantles – his longtime majority-Black 9th District in Memphis.
Cohen, 76, described the moment as “by far the most difficult” in his career as an elected official. He formally requested removal from the ballot for the August primary and stated he would retire from public life at the end of his current term. “The 9th District that they have under these new lines is nothing like the 9th District that I’ve represented,” he said, noting that the redrawn district no longer resembles the community he has served since 2007.
Background on the Redistricting
Tennessee Republicans pushed through the new U.S. House map during a special session in early May 2026, following a recent Supreme Court ruling. The changes split the Memphis-based 9th District – long a Democratic stronghold with a majority African American population – across multiple Republican-leaning districts. Critics, including Democrats and civil rights advocates, called it gerrymandering aimed at diluting Black voting power and eliminating the state’s only Democratic congressional seat ahead of the 2026 midterms.
Cohen and others have filed lawsuits challenging the maps. A judge recently denied a temporary restraining order to block them. Cohen has described the process as a “gangster move” influenced by national Republican strategy under President Donald Trump.
Before redistricting, Cohen faced a competitive Democratic primary challenge from progressive state Rep. Justin Pearson. Pearson has indicated he will continue his campaign in the redrawn 9th District. Cohen’s Memphis residence now falls into the 5th District (currently held by Republican Rep. Andy Ogles), which some see as more competitive. Cohen has endorsed Columbia Mayor Chaz Molder, a Democrat running there.
With current events stirring up global energy prices, corn ethanol is again being dressed up as if it is a domestic energy source and agent of energy security. The truth is that corn ethanol is an energy sump, and that it takes more fossil fuel energy to make a gallon of corn ethanol than a gallon of gasoline. It is time to face this unpleasant truth and the other perverse outcomes achieved by twenty years of misguided policy.
In 2005 and 2007, Congress passed the Energy Policy and Energy Independence and Security Acts that together created the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) program. RFS had three stated objectives: to improve U.S. energy security, to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and to support rural economies and agricultural development. Instead, RFS has increased motor fuel prices, increased food prices, put millions of carbon-sequestering acres of land into intensive cultivation, increased GHG emissions and air pollution, and increased water consumption and pollution. As to energy security, the gallons of U.S. gasoline displaced by federal ethanol blending mandates are being exported to Mexico and other nations. The great success of RFS has been the hand of government transferring wealth from motorists to big ag corporations. It’s past time to stop the economic and chemical absurdity of forcing food to be fuel.
The government wanted biofuels bad, and it got them bad. Under Corn Belt lobbying pressure, Congress cynically waived the need for RFS to achieve actual GHG reductions for all existing corn ethanol biorefineries, plus all that could be built by the end of 2010. The bulk of the corn ethanol produced over the past 20 years and still today comes from these waivered plants. The EPA’s specious 2010 prediction that corn ethanol would achieve a 21% GHG reduction by 2022 was immediately challenged by the National Research Council for not properly counting land-use change and not realistically treating food competition and water use. This panel of experts from the National Academy of Sciences even questioned the viability of the entire concept of reducing GHG with biofuels. The most rigorous and honest estimate by a third party in testimony before Congress used the EPA’s own methodology to show that adding corn ethanol to gasoline has increased GHG emissions by 28% over the pure gasoline baseline with no trajectory to ever recover.
As to energy security, the goal was noble, but the method was irrational. Corn ethanol is critically dependent upon fossil fuels at every stage of production—tractor and truck fuel, fertilizer and pesticides, biorefinery energy and chemicals. Biofuels in general are just a way to put a green fig leaf on petroleum by inefficiently re-routing it through a farm field. While corn ethanol production has plateaued at 15-16 billion gallons for the past 10 years—not coincidentally matching the federal subsidy limit—domestic crude oil production has skyrocketed due to technological innovations that have opened up vast new geological formations to economic production. Despite a raft of federal policies and actions as negative for petroleum as they have been favorable for biofuels, the USA is once again energy self-sufficient and the world’s largest producer of crude oil and natural gas. In 2024, the USA exported 100 billion gallons of refined petroleum. Other countries are burning U.S. gasoline in their cars and producing the same CO2 emissions as if Americans were allowed to use it. The energy security objective for RFS is moot, and it was never achievable with fossil-fuel dependent corn ethanol.
On of the great ironies is that RFS was authorized under the Clean Air Act. The EPA’s own 2010 regulatory impact analysis showed it would increase net air pollution and cause up to 245 more U.S. deaths per year. The EPA also granted corn ethanol a perpetual vapor pressure waiver for smog-causing emissions that it has denied to petroleum. Perhaps worse, ethanol in gasoline enables the hydrocarbons to mix with water and thereby increase ground water and surface water contamination from fuel leaks to a far greater degree than the demonized MTBE it replaced as octane booster, yet EPA continues to ignore this risk completely.
A government program that has strayed so far from its objectives should be terminated. The federal agency in charge of protecting the nation’s environment should not be allowed to administer a program that increases air pollution and stresses on water, land, and climate. Fuel should be fuel and food should be food. Surely Congress can find a better way to genuinely promote U.S. energy security and boost rural economies without imposing the highly regressive tax of increased fuel prices, inflicting such harm to the nation’s air and water resources, and promoting global food insecurity.
India’s Trade Deficit Surges As Energy Import Prices Soar
India’s trade deficit soared in April by more than analysts expected, as the surge in oil and gas prices hiked the Indian energy import bill.
The trade deficit jumped by $8bn from $20.6bn in March to $28.38bn last month, higher than the $26 billion estimate, on a broad-based increase in imports. At the same time, total exports grew by 13.8% in April from a year earlier to hit $43.56 billion.
Oil imports sequentially rose by around 60% MoM likely driven by higher volumes in April (vs. March lows) and higher oil prices.
The value of imports soared as international oil and gas prices jumped amid the Middle East conflict that forced India and every other major crude oil importer to source more expensive supply from producers not dependent on the Strait of Hormuz, which remains closed to most tanker traffic two and a half months after the Iran war began. Meanwhile, petroleum product exports rose by around 48% mom s.a. likely driven by higher exports to Singapore. Gold imports rose sequentially likely driven by higher volume imports of semi-processed gold for refining and higher prices. However, gold imports (in volume terms) may likely decline in May following the government’s import duty hike to 15% from 6%.
Overall non-oil exports remained strong, led by stronger electronics exports. Exports to Saudi Arabia and the UAE recovered in April from its March lows, but remained well below the last year’s levels, while exports to the US increased both sequentially and in year-over-year (yoy) terms. Services trade surplus remained strong at around $21bn, supported by robust services exports.
The widening trade deficit and the soaring energy import bill are pressuring the government’s current account and finances, as the oil supply crisis is already seeping through India’s economy. In the past week, India imposed draconian tariffs on gold imports to defend the currency which has plunged to a record low against the dollar.
Since the war began and cut off over 40% of India’s crude oil flows, those that passed through the Strait of Hormuz, one of the highest-flying economies in Asia has seen its oil import bill soar, investors fleeing the capital market, and the local currency plunging to an all-time low against the U.S. dollar.
Analysts have started to raise inflation estimates and reduce forecasts of this year’s economic growth in India, which is beginning to feel the oil supply shock well beyond the actual disruption of deliveries of oil, LNG, and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), the primary cooking fuel in the world’s most populous country.
The oil shock that the war has created will weigh on India’s economic growth in the current fiscal year to March 2027. BMI, part of Fitch, expects India’s GDP growth to slow to 6.7% in the 2026/2027 fiscal year, down from 7.7% in 2025/2026, largely due to the oil price shock.
