Video games get dismissed as entertainment too often to be examined as anything else. That’s a mistake with Mario specifically, because the series has quietly modeled a coherent theory of how a community functions without a government doing the functioning for it. This isn’t an argument that Nintendo designers sat down in the 1980s and drafted a political philosophy. They didn’t. They built a platformer that needed a simple, legible world, and the simplest world to build turned out to be one where problems get solved by whoever is closest to them, with whatever tools they happen to have, because that’s how you make a game playable in twenty minutes with a joystick and two buttons. But the fact that this design constraint produced something coherent, something that has held up game after game, decade after decade, is worth taking seriously. Necessity produced a structure, and the structure turns out to describe something true about how functional communities actually operate, whether or not anyone intended it.

This piece isn’t a nostalgia trip, and it isn’t a hot take about video games being secretly political. It’s an attempt to take the Mushroom Kingdom’s design seriously as a model and to ask what it gets right that most real institutions get wrong.

A Kingdom Without an Agency

Start with the obvious fact and don’t rush past it: the Mushroom Kingdom, across the entire run of games, has no visible government apparatus doing the work governments normally do. There’s a princess. There are castles. There’s a vague sense of kingdoms and territories. But there is no standing bureaucracy managing infrastructure, no visible tax collection, no regulatory body inspecting the pipes Mario climbs into, and — this is the important part — no emergency response agency that shows up when Bowser invades. The response to the invasion is not a mobilization order. It’s a plumber who happens to be around and handles it himself.

Compare this to how a real government would design its own founding myth. Every nation-state that has ever produced propaganda has built its origin story around institutions: a wise founder who establishes a system, a body of law, a standing army, an apparatus that persists after the founder is gone and that citizens can rely on because it exists independent of any one person’s continued willingness to act. That’s the whole point of an institution. It doesn’t need a hero because it has procedures.

The Mushroom Kingdom never bothered building that story, and forty years later, it still hasn’t. Every single game resets to the same premise: something has gone wrong, and the response is one guy, walking, jumping, occasionally throwing a fireball, occasionally riding a dinosaur. There is no procedure. There is no agency with a mandate. There is a person who decides to handle it and who is competent enough, or becomes competent enough over the course of the level, to actually handle it.

This is either lazy world-building or the most honest thing a piece of mass entertainment has ever said about how problems actually get solved. The honest answer is probably both, but the second part matters more because it’s true independent of the first. Institutions are supposed to be the thing that shows up when the individual can’t. In the real world, when they’re well-run, they do that job. When they’re badly run, and a great deal of the actual American nonprofit and civic infrastructure right now is badly run, they don’t show up either, and what’s left is the same thing the Mushroom Kingdom has always had: whoever’s closest, walking toward the problem, because somebody has to and nobody else is coming.

A Plumber, Not a Knight

It matters enormously that the person who keeps saving the kingdom is a plumber, and not a knight, a wizard, a soldier, or a prince. Nintendo could have made Mario a member of the royal guard. They could have given him a rank, a uniform, and a chain of command he answers to. Instead, they gave him a trade. He fixes pipes. He understands plumbing well enough that when the kingdom’s actual infrastructure — the warp pipes that move people and goods between places — breaks down or gets colonized by hostile turtles, he’s the guy with the actual skill set to go deal with it.

This is not a small detail. A knight’s authority comes from an institution: a crown, an oath, a rank. A plumber’s authority comes from competence. Nobody deputizes Mario. Nobody swears him in. He goes because he knows how pipes work and because the alternative is nobody going. His legitimacy is entirely a function of what he can actually do, not what he’s been appointed to do.

This is the difference between a credentialed class and a competent one, and it’s a difference that most institutional decay in the real nonprofit and civic sector traces back to directly. An organization that promotes people because they’ve accumulated the right title, sat on the right committee, or occupied a seat long enough eventually ends up staffed by people whose authority has nothing to do with whether they can fix the actual problem in front of them. An organization that keeps its authority tied to demonstrated competence, the way a volunteer fire company still generally does, or the way a Scout troop’s older youth leaders earn their role by having actually done the skills rather than by seniority alone, keeps functioning long after the credentialed version would have seized up.

Mario is a tradesman first. The heroics are downstream of the trade. That ordering is worth noticing because most institutions get it backward: they hand out the authority first and hope the competence follows, and often it doesn’t.

The Block Economy

Play any Mario level with attention, and a strange pattern emerges. The world is dense with resources left behind by nobody in particular, for the use of whoever happens to need them. Coins sit in the open. Mushrooms wait inside blocks that anyone strong enough to jump can access. Fire flowers, stars, extra lives — all of it is just there, unclaimed, undistributed by any central authority, available to whoever arrives with the ability to reach it.

Nobody owns the blocks. Nobody rations the mushrooms. There’s no inventory system tracking who’s entitled to how many coins based on need, income, or prior contribution. The resources exist because previous generations, or unseen benefactors, or simply the logic of the world itself, put something useful within reach of anyone willing to jump for it. This is, functionally, a description of a mutual aid network stripped of every bureaucratic layer that usually accompanies one: no intake form, no eligibility screening, no waiting list, no caseworker. Just supplies, placed by people who understood that someone would eventually need them, retrieved by whoever shows up and does the work of reaching them.

It’s worth sitting with how different this is from how most modern aid actually gets delivered. A food bank in most American cities requires documentation. A housing assistance program requires proof of income, proof of residency, proof of need, and often a months-long wait. These requirements exist for defensible reasons — fraud prevention, limited resources, accountability to funders — but the cumulative effect is a system where help exists in theory and is often functionally unreachable in the moment someone actually needs it. The Mushroom Kingdom’s model is the opposite: help is placed in advance, is available immediately, and requires only that the person needing it be willing to do the work of getting to it. A block isn’t going to hand you a mushroom. You have to jump. But it’s there, right now, with no committee standing between you and it.

This is closer to how a well-run volunteer fire department’s cache of equipment works, or how a properly stocked Repair Café’s parts bin works, or how a Scout troop’s shared gear closet works, than it is to how most institutionalized social services work. Someone stocked the resource in advance, trusting that the people who eventually needed it would be the ones who showed up and used it, without demanding paperwork first. The trust runs in both directions: the system trusts the individual to only take what they need and to put in the effort to get it, and the individual trusts that the resource will actually be there when the moment comes, because someone bothered to place it.

Peach Without a Standing Army

Princess Peach occupies an unusual position for a monarch. She rules — nominally — over a kingdom that gets invaded constantly, and she has essentially no capacity to defend it herself. She has no standing army. She has, at various points, a small retinue of Toads, none of whom are soldiers in any meaningful sense. When Bowser shows up with an actual military force, her entire defensive strategy consists of hoping someone shows up to help.

A monarch this thoroughly undefended should not have survived one invasion, let alone the dozens the series has put her through. And yet the kingdom persists, game after game, not because Peach commands a force capable of repelling Bowser, but because the kingdom operates on a standing assumption that when trouble comes, someone capable will show up and handle it without needing to be conscripted, paid, or ordered to do so.

This is a genuinely unusual model of legitimate authority. Peach’s position isn’t backed by coercive capacity. She can’t compel anyone to fight for her. She has no draft, no taxation to fund a military, and no police force to enforce her rule. Her legitimacy, such as it is, rests entirely on being the person the kingdom has organized itself around, and on the voluntary willingness of individuals to act on her behalf when it matters, for reasons that have nothing to do with being ordered to and everything to do with the kingdom being worth defending.

Governments in the real world generally don’t work this way, and for good structural reasons: coercive authority, the ability to enforce law, defend territory, and adjudicate disputes with actual force behind the ruling, is one of the few things that genuinely requires centralization to function. A neighborhood watch cannot substitute for a court system. A volunteer fire brigade cannot substitute for an actual perimeter defense against an armed invading force. Peach’s kingdom is, in this narrow and specific sense, wildly under-institutionalized for a polity that faces regular existential threats, and if it existed in reality, it would be a case study in state failure.

But that’s exactly what makes the rest of the model worth examining closely. Nearly everything else the kingdom needs — infrastructure repair, resource distribution, disaster response, day-to-day problem solving — gets handled without any coercive apparatus at all, and gets handled well. The one category of function that actually requires centralized force, defense against an armed aggressor, is the one category the kingdom is chronically bad at, and has to keep outsourcing to a volunteer who happens to be good at it. That’s not an accident of bad writing. It’s a reasonably accurate map of where voluntary, decentralized effort tends to succeed and where it tends to fall short. Communities can feed each other, repair each other’s homes, teach each other’s kids to tie knots and start fires safely, and organize disaster response faster than any agency, all without anyone being deputized to do it. What they generally can’t do is stop an army. That’s the boundary line, and the Mushroom Kingdom draws it in almost exactly the right place, even if it draws it by accident.

Bowser’s Army and the Logic of Conquest

Set the Mushroom Kingdom’s voluntary, decentralized approach against Bowser’s operation, and the contrast sharpens into something like an argument. Bowser doesn’t run a kingdom that solves problems as they arise. He runs a conquest apparatus: a standing military force, the Koopa Troop, organized in a strict hierarchy with himself at the top, deployed in coordinated waves across territory he intends to absorb. Every level of a Mario game that isn’t set in the Mushroom Kingdom’s own territory is, structurally, occupied territory — a place Bowser’s forces have taken and garrisoned, with checkpoints, guards, and fortified positions.

This is centralized coercive power doing exactly what centralized coercive power is built to do: expand its own reach, subordinate everything it touches to a single chain of command, and hold territory through force rather than through anyone’s voluntary buy-in. Nobody in the conquered territories chose to be there. The Koopa Troops stationed in a given level aren’t volunteers defending something they value; they’re a garrison, holding ground on behalf of a ruler they answer to because they answer to him, not because the ground is theirs.

The story keeps returning to the same shape: a voluntary, decentralized, radically under-institutionalized kingdom gets menaced by a highly centralized, hierarchical, coercive military force, and wins anyway, not by out-organizing Bowser’s bureaucracy but by having something Bowser’s system structurally cannot produce, which is a person who shows up because he wants to, not because he was ordered to. An occupying army can compel obedience. It cannot compel the kind of effort Mario brings to the job, because that effort isn’t extractable through a chain of command. It has to be freely given, and Bowser’s entire operating model has no mechanism for generating it.

There’s a reason the series never lets Bowser win permanently, and it isn’t just genre convention. A system built entirely on coercion can seize territory, but it can’t generate the kind of voluntary, self-directed problem-solving that actually keeps a place running once you’ve taken it. Bowser can capture Peach’s castle. He can’t capture the thing that made the kingdom worth capturing, which is a population that keeps producing people willing to go fix what’s broken without being told to.

Eight Worlds, No Federal Government

The original Super Mario Bros. is organized into eight worlds, and it’s worth noticing what doesn’t exist to connect them. There’s no central government coordinating a unified defense across all eight. There’s no federal army moving reinforcements between fronts. Each world essentially has to be dealt with on its own terms, one at a time, and the kingdom’s survival depends on someone being willing to work through all eight rather than on any coordinating body directing a comprehensive strategy.

This maps onto something real about how large-scale problems actually tend to get solved at the community level, as opposed to how they get solved on paper. National organizations love to talk about a coordinated, comprehensive strategy. In practice, a national nonprofit’s actual impact usually comes down to whether the specific chapter in a specific town has competent, motivated people running it, not whether headquarters produced a good five-year plan. A Scout troop lives or dies on its own leadership, not on directives from the national office. A volunteer fire company’s readiness depends on the specific people who show up to training in that specific firehouse, not on a state-level coordination document. The overarching structure matters less than most organizational charts would suggest. What matters is whether the local unit, the one actually facing the problem, has someone capable and willing standing in it.

Mario doesn’t get a briefing on grand strategy before World 1. He walks into the first level of the first world and solves the problem in front of him, and then does the same thing seven more times, and the kingdom survives because each of those eight problems got solved by someone willing to solve it, not because a central command structure orchestrated the effort. This is not efficient in any way an operations consultant would recognize. It’s also, repeatedly, the only model that has actually worked, across forty years of games, dozens of invasions, and however many hundred individual levels.

Power-Ups Are Earned, Not Issued

Every meaningful capability Mario gains over the course of a level, he gains by doing something: hitting a block, defeating an enemy, finding a hidden area. Nobody hands him a mushroom because he’s entitled to one. Nobody issues him a fire flower as a baseline benefit of being the protagonist. He starts small — literally, in the small form — and everything he gains, he gains through direct action in the world.

This extends to the loss side of the mechanic too, and the loss side is arguably more instructive than the gain side. Get hit while small, and you die. Get hit while big, and you shrink back down rather than dying outright, buying you another chance. The power-ups function less like permanent entitlements and more like a buffer built from accumulated competence, one that protects you from a single mistake but that you have to rebuild after you spend it. Nothing is permanent. Nothing is guaranteed. The game does not owe you your fire flower back after you lose it. If you want it again, you go get it again.

This is a strikingly honest mechanic for what’s ostensibly a children’s game, and it’s a much more honest mechanic than most institutions manage in real adult life. A great deal of modern organizational culture, particularly in the nonprofit and civic space, has drifted toward treating benefits, titles, and standing as things that, once granted, should be difficult to ever take away regardless of whether the underlying performance or contribution continues to justify them. Mario’s power-up system doesn’t work that way, and the kingdom is better for it. Capability is tied to ongoing action. You don’t get to coast on the fire flower you earned three levels ago. You earn what you have, you can lose what you have, and the way you get it back is by doing the thing again, not by filing an appeal.

Death Has Consequences, and So Does Trying Again

“Thank you, Mario! But our princess is in another castle!” is one of the most quoted lines in the history of video games, and it’s usually remembered as a joke, a twist, a bit of dry humor at the player’s expense. It’s also a remarkably clear statement about how the game understands effort and outcome: you can do everything right, complete the level, defeat what looked like the final obstacle, and still discover the actual job isn’t finished. There’s no consolation prize for having tried hard. There’s no participation credit. The response to genuine, competent effort that falls short of the actual goal is simply: keep going.

Death in a Mario game works the same way. Fall in a pit, touch an enemy while small, run out of time — you don’t get a gentle reset with your progress preserved out of consideration for your feelings. You go back, sometimes to the start of the level, sometimes further, and you do it again. The game is not interested in shielding the player from the consequences of a mistake. It is interested in whether the player will get back up and try the level again, this time with what they learned the first time.

This is, without much disguise, a statement about personal responsibility and the value of retrying rather than being rescued from failure. Nobody in the Mushroom Kingdom is coming to make the level easier because Mario failed it twice. Nobody is lowering the bar. The level is what it is, the obstacle is what it is, and the only path through it is Mario getting better at navigating it, which he does by dying, respawning, and trying again with slightly more information than he had the last time. This is also, not coincidentally, how actual skill acquisition works in the physical world, whether you’re learning to tie a bowline, weld a joint, or drive a boat through a channel: you fail, you note what went wrong, and you go again. An institution that insulates people from that cycle, that makes failure consequence-free or success automatic, isn’t doing anyone a favor. It’s removing the only mechanism that actually builds competence.

Luigi and the Ethics of Showing Up for Someone Else

The two-player mode deserves more credit than it usually gets for saying something coherent about cooperation. Luigi isn’t Mario’s subordinate. He’s not issued orders. He’s not part of a command structure that puts Mario in charge and Luigi in a support role. He’s a second person who shows up to the same problem, brings the same basic competence, and works at the same level alongside his brother because the job is worth doing and an extra set of capable hands makes it more likely to get done.

This is voluntary cooperation between equals, which is a different thing from delegation, and a different thing again from conscription. Nobody assigns Luigi to the mission. He’s not fulfilling a duty imposed on him by rank or office. He shows up because his brother needs help and he’s capable of providing it, and the game doesn’t bother explaining any of this because it doesn’t need explaining. That’s simply what people who are close to each other and both capable of doing something useful tend to do when there’s a problem in front of them.

Compare this to how most organizations formally structure “help.” A volunteer fire department doesn’t run on conscription, but it also doesn’t run on two guys deciding independently, level by level, whether to show up. It runs on training, standing rosters, and a chain of command once the truck rolls. That structure exists for good reason once you’re dealing with something as dangerous as structure fires. But it’s worth noticing what Luigi represents underneath the game mechanics: the most basic and durable form of mutual aid there is, which is one person who’s able to help simply by showing up for another person who needs it, with no institutional apparatus required to make that happen. Every formal mutual aid structure that has ever worked, from a Masonic lodge’s practice of looking after a member’s widow to a Grange hall’s tradition of showing up for a neighbor’s harvest, is built on top of that same basic instinct. The institution formalizes it, gives it consistency, and makes it reliable at scale. It doesn’t invent it. Luigi picking up a controller and walking into World 1-1 next to his brother is the instinct in its rawest form, with none of the formal structure built on top of it yet, and it’s worth remembering that the formal structure is supposed to be in service of that instinct, not a replacement for it.

Yoshi and Alliance Without Subjugation

Yoshi complicates the picture in a useful way. Yoshi isn’t a subject of the kingdom. He isn’t conscripted, isn’t a citizen with an obligation to defend the crown, isn’t part of any command structure at all. He’s a dinosaur from an entirely separate island with his own concerns, who chooses, level by level, to let Mario ride him, help him reach places he couldn’t reach alone, and take hits meant for him.

The relationship dissolves the instant Yoshi gets hit. He runs off. Nobody stops him. There’s no penalty in the game’s moral logic for a Yoshi who decides he’s had enough and leaves. The alliance was voluntary going in, and it stays voluntary the whole way through, including the part where it ends because one party decided it was over.

This is a genuinely different model of alliance than the kind most institutions default to, which tends to bind participation to obligation: you signed up, so you’re in for the duration, regardless of how the situation develops. Yoshi’s arrangement with Mario has no such binding. It’s continuously re-chosen, level by level, hit by hit, and it works precisely because neither party is trapped in it. Mario doesn’t own Yoshi. He borrows Yoshi’s willingness, for as long as Yoshi keeps offering it. A community built entirely on relationships like that would probably be fragile in some ways — nothing is guaranteed to last — but it would also be honest about what it actually has at any given moment, instead of running on the fiction of obligations nobody actually feels anymore.

The Koopalings and the Problem With Inherited Authority

Bowser’s children make an instructive counterexample to everything above, because they represent the one place in the series where authority gets distributed by lineage rather than earned through demonstrated competence, and the results are consistently, almost comically bad. Each Koopaling is handed command of a fortress, an airship, or a chunk of territory, not because they’ve shown any particular aptitude for holding it, but because they’re Bowser’s kids and someone has to be put in charge of the outlying holdings. Every single one of them loses. Every single one of them gets beaten by a plumber with no formal rank at all.

This isn’t a coincidence of game design so much as an accurate prediction of what happens when an organization staffs its leadership roles based on relationship to the person at the top rather than on the basis of who can actually do the job. Bowser’s empire has no shortage of raw resources. It has airships, fortresses, an army, and seemingly unlimited castles to fling around the map. What it doesn’t have is a mechanism for putting the right person in charge of any given piece of it, because the mechanism it uses instead is bloodline, and bloodline doesn’t track competence even a little. The kingdom, by contrast, never promotes anyone. It just waits for whoever’s capable to show up, and that unglamorous, undramatic method keeps winning against an empire with dramatically more territory, more soldiers, and more resources at its disposal.

Most organizational failure in the real world looks a great deal more like the Koopalings than like Bowser losing a straight fight. It isn’t usually the case that the failing organization lacks resources. It’s that the resources are under the control of people who hold their position for reasons that have nothing to do with whether they’re good at the job, and everything to do with tenure, relationships, or the simple fact that nobody with more standing wanted the position badly enough to take it from them. An organization that keeps promoting based on who’s been in the building longest or who’s closest to leadership, rather than on the basis of who actually gets results, is running the Koopaling model and should expect Koopaling results.

Star Coins, Secret Exits, and the Reward for Doing More Than Required

Later entries in the series layered an optional structure on top of the basic one: hidden exits, secret paths, Star Coins tucked into places that require real effort and real attention to find, none of which are necessary to finish a level, all of which unlock additional content, additional worlds, additional capability for players who go looking for them. Nobody is required to find them. The level is completable, start to finish, without ever noticing they exist.

This is a meaningful design choice because it builds a second tier of reward that has nothing to do with meeting the minimum bar and everything to do with exceeding it voluntarily, out of curiosity or thoroughness or a refusal to leave a level until it’s been fully worked. The game never punishes a player for skipping the secret exit. It also never pretends that the player who found it and the player who didn’t got the same thing out of the level. One of them did the minimum required. The other one did more than was asked, and the game quietly rewards that with more world, more capability, more of the game itself.

Most institutions have lost the ability to make this distinction cleanly. A great deal of modern organizational culture has drifted toward treating minimum compliance and genuine extra effort as functionally identical, either because distinguishing between them looks unkind, or because the systems in place aren’t built to notice the difference in the first place. A volunteer who does exactly what’s asked and nothing more, and a volunteer who goes looking for the extra work nobody assigned because they noticed it needed doing, often receive identical recognition, identical thanks, identical standing within the organization. The Mushroom Kingdom’s design doesn’t make that mistake. Finishing the level is fine. Finding the Star Coins is better, and the game says so by giving the player who found them more of everything that follows.

Toad Houses and the Difference Between Charity and Investment

Scattered through several entries in the series are Toad Houses: small, unremarkable buildings, easy to miss, that hand out an item, an extra life, or occasionally nothing useful at all, entirely at random, to whoever walks in. Nobody runs an intake process. Nobody assesses whether the player walking through the door actually needs what’s inside. The house is simply there, stocked, available, indifferent to means-testing, and the player either benefits or doesn’t, depending on what happens to be behind that particular door that day.

It would be easy to read this as identical to the block economy described earlier, but there’s a distinction worth drawing out. The blocks scattered through a level reward the specific effort of jumping and hitting them; they’re tied to the work of getting through the level itself. The Toad House is closer to pure charity: no jumping required, no puzzle to solve, just a door, a resource behind it, and a willingness on the part of whoever stocked it to give it away to whoever happens to walk in, without conditions. The series includes both models side by side and doesn’t seem to think one is more virtuous than the other. Sometimes help is earned through direct effort. Sometimes it’s simply given, no strings, because someone built a house and put something useful inside it and left the door unlocked.

A functioning community generally needs both models running simultaneously, and a lot of institutional argument over the decades has amounted to fighting over which one is legitimate, as though it has to be one or the other. It doesn’t. A repair café that fixes a stranger’s lamp for free, no questions asked, is running the Toad House model, and it’s a perfectly valid one. A mentorship program that requires a kid to show up, put in the work, and earn the next level of responsibility is running the block model, and it’s also a perfectly valid one. The Mushroom Kingdom runs both at once without apparent contradiction, because the two models are answering different questions. One asks what a person needs right now, unconditionally. The other asks what a person is capable of building through their own effort. Both questions matter, and an institution that only knows how to ask one of them is going to fail the people whose actual situation calls for the other.

What the Kingdom Never Needed

It’s worth cataloguing, plainly, everything the Mushroom Kingdom manages to do without across 40 years of games. No tax authority. No welfare office is processing eligibility for the mushrooms sitting in every block. No regulatory body is inspecting the warp pipe network before the public is allowed to use it. No standing professional army. No public works department is repairing the bridges Bowser keeps knocking into lava. No emergency management agency coordinates disaster response after a castle falls. No permitting process for the plumber who walks in and starts fixing the pipes.

None of this is presented as a crisis. It’s presented as simply how the place operates, and the place keeps operating, game after game, because the gap left by all those absent institutions gets filled by individuals who are competent, who show up, and who do the work directly rather than waiting for a process to authorize them to do it. This is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing as a kids’ game not bothering with world-building detail, because it’s a fairly accurate description of how a huge amount of actual, functional civic life in this country has always worked, underneath and alongside the formal institutions: the guy who shows up with a chainsaw after a storm before the county gets a crew out. The volunteer fire company that existed in a rural township decades before that township could afford a paid department. The Scout leader who teaches a kid to read a map and build a fire not because a curriculum requires it but because someone taught him and he’s passing it on. The Repair Café volunteer who fixes a neighbor’s toaster for free on a Saturday because he knows how and the toaster is otherwise headed for a landfill.

None of that requires an agency. Some of it eventually gets formalized into one, and formalization has real benefits: consistency, accountability, the ability to operate at a scale no individual plumber could manage alone. But the formal version only works as long as it stays connected to the underlying instinct the Mushroom Kingdom runs on entirely without formalization: somebody sees a problem, can address it, and goes and addresses it, without waiting to be told it’s their job.

Where the Model Breaks, and Why That’s Instructive

None of this is an argument that the Mushroom Kingdom is a well-run polity, and it’s worth being honest about where the model actually fails, because the failure points are as instructive as the successes. A kingdom that gets successfully invaded on a roughly annual basis, whose head of state has no capacity to defend herself or her territory, and whose entire security posture depends on the continued existence and continued goodwill of one freelance plumber, is a kingdom one bad year away from ceasing to exist. If Mario had been unavailable, sick, or simply uninterested in game forty, the Mushroom Kingdom’s defense plan had no fallback. That’s not resilience. That’s a single point of failure wearing a red hat.

This is the honest limit of what voluntary, decentralized effort can accomplish, and it’s worth stating plainly rather than glossing over in service of a tidier argument. Functions that require genuine coercive capacity — actual defense against an armed and organized aggressor, actual enforcement of contracts and law, actual adjudication of disputes between parties who won’t otherwise resolve them — are not functions a community can reliably supply through goodwill and volunteer competence alone, no matter how deep the bench of capable, willing people happens to be. Bowser’s army doesn’t care how many mushrooms are stocked in how many blocks. It responds to force, and only to force. The Mushroom Kingdom’s survival across dozens of invasions isn’t evidence that it doesn’t need a standing defense. It’s evidence that it has been extraordinarily lucky to keep finding a plumber, and luck is not a plan.

The lesson isn’t that institutions are unnecessary. It’s that most of what institutions actually spend their time and budget doing isn’t the part that requires coercive authority at all, and the Mushroom Kingdom’s design, deliberately or not, keeps drawing attention to that distinction by putting it in relief: everything except the defense of the realm gets handled without an agency, and handled fine. The one category of problem that does require centralized force is the one category the kingdom keeps failing to solve on its own terms, and has to outsource, invasion after invasion, to whoever happens to be willing.

That’s a useful line to draw for anyone thinking seriously about where an actual community’s effort is best spent. Most of what a neighborhood, a town, or a civic organization needs day to day, meals for a sick neighbor, a repaired fence, a kid taught to swim, a fire company that shows up fast because it trains constantly, doesn’t require anyone’s coercive authority. It requires competent people willing to act and a culture that expects them to. The narrower category of things that genuinely do require the state, courts, defense, and enforcement of last resort is real, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of dishonesty. The Mushroom Kingdom gets the first category right for forty years running and never solves the second. Most real communities would do well to notice both halves of that lesson, not just the flattering one.

Coins That Aren’t Money

It’s worth noticing what coins actually do in a Mario game, because it isn’t what money does anywhere else. Collect a hundred of them, and you get an extra life. That’s it. There’s no shop in the original games where Mario trades coins for goods, no market economy, no price system, no way to convert accumulated wealth into anything beyond another chance to keep going. Later entries occasionally add a shop, but even then the exchange is modest and incidental to the core loop, not central to it. The coin is a record of effort and attention, not a medium of exchange.

This is a strange choice for a game otherwise so committed to modeling a functioning world, and it’s worth taking seriously rather than waving off as a limitation of eight-bit design. A world where the accumulated marker of your effort converts directly into more capacity to keep going, rather than into purchasing power over other people’s labor or goods, is a world that has quietly sidestepped one of the more corrosive features of most economies: the ability to convert wealth into leverage over someone else. Mario can’t buy his way past a level. He can’t purchase a shortcut, hire someone else to take the hit for him, or pay to skip the part of the job that’s hard. All the coins in the world get him exactly one thing: another chance to do the work himself.

Something is clarifying in that. A great deal of what goes wrong in real institutions traces back to the moment accumulated resources start buying exemption from the actual work, whether that’s a donor’s money buying influence over a nonprofit’s mission, or an executive’s tenure buying insulation from the accountability a newer employee would face for the same failure. The Mushroom Kingdom’s coins never make that leap. They buffer against failure. They don’t purchase status, don’t purchase authority, don’t purchase a pass on doing the job. Whatever the coin represents, competence, thoroughness, attention to the parts of the level most people rush past, it stays tied to the person who earned it and to the specific kind of second chance it buys, and it never converts into something that lets that person stop doing the work.

A Kingdom That Trains for the Thing It Expects

One detail gets overlooked because it’s structural rather than narrative: the kidnapping happens again. And again. And again, across decades, with a regularity that would be darkly comic if it weren’t so clearly load-bearing to how the kingdom actually functions. Bowser doesn’t invade once and get repelled permanently. He invades, gets repelled, and invades again, on a schedule the kingdom has apparently come to expect, the way a coastal town expects hurricane season or a rural county expects a hard winter.

A kingdom that gets invaded this reliably and this often has, whether the games ever say so directly, organized itself around the expectation of recurring crisis rather than around the fantasy that the last invasion was the last one. Nothing about the Mushroom Kingdom’s posture looks like an institution caught permanently flat-footed. Warp pipes exist throughout the territory, offering fast movement between distant points, which is precisely the kind of infrastructure a place expecting to need rapid response would maintain. Extra lives, the 1-Up mushrooms scattered with the same generosity as everything else in the block economy, exist specifically to buffer against the recurring reality that things are going to go wrong, repeatedly, and that the correct response to going wrong isn’t shock; it’s another attempt.

This is a genuinely different posture than the one most institutions default to after a crisis passes. The instinct, in most organizations, once an emergency has been survived, is to treat it as an aberration: write the after-action report, hold the debrief, and then largely return to business as it was conducted before, on the assumption that the specific crisis just survived is unlikely to recur in the same form. Sometimes that assumption is correct. Often it isn’t, and the organizations that fare worst the second time around are usually the ones that treated the first crisis as a one-off rather than as the first data point in a pattern.

The Mushroom Kingdom never makes that mistake because the games never let it. Every entry resets the premise, but the underlying infrastructure, the pipes, the blocks, the standing cultural expectation that somebody capable will step up, persists between invasions rather than getting dismantled once the immediate threat is gone. This is what a readiness culture actually looks like in practice, as distinct from a readiness culture on paper. It isn’t a binder on a shelf that gets pulled out once a year for a tabletop exercise nobody takes seriously. It’s infrastructure and expectation, maintained continuously, because the threat is understood to be recurring rather than resolved.

Any organization that deals in genuine emergency response, a volunteer fire company, a Coast Guard Auxiliary flotilla, a disaster relief chapter, understands this instinctively, because the alternative gets people killed. You don’t let the truck’s readiness lapse because there hasn’t been a structure fire this month. You don’t let the training certifications go stale because the last storm season was mild. The kingdom’s plumber shows up competent, level after level, invasion after invasion, not because he’s reinventing his skill set from scratch each time, but because the culture around him, the pipes, the blocks, the standing expectation, never stopped assuming he, or someone like him, would be needed again. That’s the difference between an institution that’s actually prepared and one that’s merely recovered.

The Practical Version

Strip away the plumbers and turtles, and the argument underneath is simple enough to write on an index card: most of what a community needs to function day to day doesn’t require a government program, a nonprofit’s five-year strategic plan, or a credentialed professional class standing between a problem and the person capable of solving it. It requires people who know how to do something useful, who are willing to do it without being ordered to, and a culture around them that has stocked enough blocks with enough mushrooms that the next person facing the next problem has something to work with.

That’s what a repair café is. That’s what a volunteer fire company running on its own training and its own equipment cache is. That’s what a Scout troop is, when it’s run well: kids being taught actual skills by adults who learned them the same way, passed down rather than issued from a curriculum office. That’s what the Coast Guard Auxiliary has always been at its core, underneath the uniform and the standardized qualifications: people with boats and competence, showing up voluntarily to do work the Coast Guard proper doesn’t have the hands to do itself. None of these things require an agency to invent them. They require the agency, if one exists at all, to get out of the way of the instinct and occasionally stock a few more blocks.

The Mushroom Kingdom never built a Department of Anything, and it has outlasted every empire Bowser has ever assembled against it, not because it was better organized, but because it never lost the thread between a problem and the person willing to go solve it directly. That’s a low bar for a video game to clear. It’s a much higher bar for an actual civic institution, and most of them, currently, are not clearing it.

None of this requires anyone to romanticize a plumber jumping on turtles. It requires noticing that the design, whatever its origins, keeps landing on the same handful of principles that separate the civic institutions still doing real work from the ones that have become a logo, a mission statement, and a building nobody quite remembers the purpose of. Authority tracks demonstrated competence, not tenure or bloodline. Resources get stocked in advance and made available without a means test standing between the resource and the person who needs it. Voluntary cooperation between equals gets treated as the default, not as a favor owed up a chain of command. Failure has consequences and is followed by another attempt, not by lowering the bar or handing out credit for effort that didn’t get the job done. And the narrow category of problems that actually requires centralized, coercive authority, defense, enforcement, adjudication, gets kept narrow, rather than allowed to metastasize into an excuse for every other function to wait around for permission before acting.

An organization that wanted to actually run on these principles wouldn’t need to reinvent anything. It would need to look at what it’s currently outsourcing to process that used to get handled by a capable person walking straight at the problem, and start handing that responsibility back. It would need to stop promoting people. After all, they’ve been in the room the longest and start promoting people because they’re the ones who show up when the castle’s on fire. It would need to stock its version of the blocks, tools, training, equipment, and know-how in advance, and trust the people who eventually need them to do the work of reaching them, rather than building an intake process that makes the help harder to get than the original problem was to survive. None of that is complicated. Most of it is just unfashionable, in an institutional culture that has spent several decades mistaking process for competence and credentialing for capability.

The kingdom never had the luxury of mistaking one for the other. It couldn’t afford to. It had a plumber, some mushrooms, and a standing expectation that when the castle needed defending, somebody capable would go defend it. That turned out to be enough, more often than any actual government’s five-year strategic plan has ever managed to be.

This is not a proposal to cut benefits. It is a proposal to pay people back what was taken from them and stop taking more. The distinction matters because most Social Security debates are fought over how to keep the machine running a little longer. This one is about turning the machine off and giving people back their money.

The case rests on four claims, each of which can be checked against public record. First, the program is not solvent and cannot be made solvent without either cutting benefits or raising taxes indefinitely, because its finances were built on a structure that requires each generation to be larger and richer than the last. Second, the “trust fund” that supposedly backs your benefit is not a fund in any ordinary sense. It holds no real assets, only government IOUs to itself. Third, you have no legal claim to what you paid in. The Supreme Court settled that question in 1960, and nobody has revisited it since. Fourth, there is a working example of what happens when a community walks away from this system and builds its own. It has been running for over forty years, across three counties in Texas, and it beats Social Security on almost every measurable dimension.

It is worth being precise about what kind of argument this is, because Social Security debates usually collapse into two camps shouting past each other: one insisting the program is sacred and untouchable, the other insisting it is a fraud that should simply vanish along with whatever anyone put into it. Neither position survives contact with the actual numbers. The program is not sacred because Congress has already changed it unilaterally more than once, and the Supreme Court has already ruled that contributors have no legal claim preventing that. It is also not a fraud in the sense that the money simply disappears with nobody accountable for it; it is a tax, spent as promised on the people it was collected from, run on a financing structure that arithmetic has caught up with. The people who paid into that structure for thirty or forty years are owed an honest reckoning, not a shrug. A refund is that reckoning. It treats the money as a debt the government owes its citizens, not a gift the government is free to shrink whenever convenient, and it pays that debt off instead of letting it compound into a larger political crisis with each passing decade.

None of this requires pretending the program did nothing good. It kept millions of elderly Americans out of poverty for ninety years. That is a real accomplishment, and it deserves to be stated plainly before anything else is said. But an accomplishment bought by making promises the money cannot keep is not a program. It is a bet, placed by one generation and called due on the next, and someone eventually has to stop rolling it over.

What Social Security actually is

Start with the plainest fact about the program: it does not save your money. Payroll taxes collected this year pay benefits owed this year. Nothing is invested, nothing compounds, nothing sits in an account with your name on it. The money you paid in 2010 was spent in 2010 on someone else’s retirement check. The money you pay this year will be spent this year, on someone else’s. This is called pay-as-you-go financing, and it is the single most important fact about the program, because it means Social Security’s solvency depends entirely on enough working-age people paying in to cover the retirees drawing out.

For the first several decades, that ratio was overwhelming. In 1950, roughly 16 workers were paying into the system for every one person drawing benefits. That ratio is now under three to one and is heading toward two to one within the working lifetimes of people currently in their thirties. Nobody engineered this collapse. It is simple demographics: people live longer, birth rates fell, and the payer-to-recipient ratio that made the arithmetic work in 1950 is gone and is not coming back.

The people who designed the program in 1935 understood this was a wager on population growth, even if the public framing has always obscured it. Every early beneficiary got a windfall. Ida May Fuller, the first person ever to receive a monthly Social Security check, paid in about $24 over three years of work before Congress cut her first check in January 1940. She lived to ninety-nine and collected tens of thousands of dollars over her lifetime. That was not fraud. It was the design. Somebody has to be first, and being first under a pay-as-you-go system means getting benefits nobody paid for. The problem is that the debt created by that first generation’s windfall never went away. It got passed down, and it grows every year Congress declines to address it, and today’s payroll tax still carries a piece of that original 1935 bill. The Center for Retirement Research at Boston College estimates that roughly three percentage points of the current 12.4 percent payroll tax rate exist purely to cover legacy costs from benefits paid decades ago that were never funded by the recipients who got them.

So when you hear that Social Security has a “trust fund,” understand what that word is doing. The Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Disability Insurance trust funds hold Treasury securities: special-issue government bonds that represent money the government already spent on other things and now owes back to itself. There is no vault. There is no diversified portfolio. There is an accounting entry that says the federal government owes the Social Security Administration a certain amount of money, and the only way to make good on that IOU is to raise taxes, cut spending elsewhere, or borrow more. The 2026 Trustees Report puts the combined balance of those funds at $2.56 trillion, down $160 billion in a single year, because the program is now paying out more than it collects. That combined fund, OASI and DI together, is projected to run dry in the third quarter of 2034. Considered on its own, which is how the law actually treats it, the OASI fund that pays retirement and survivor benefits is projected to be depleted in the fourth quarter of 2032, six years from today.

This is worth sitting with because the word “trust fund” is doing a great deal of rhetorical work that the underlying accounting does not support. When workers pay payroll tax, the Treasury does not set that money aside in any segregated account, invest it in a diversified portfolio, or hold it in reserve against future claims the way a private pension fund or insurance company is legally required to. It spends the money immediately, on current benefit checks and, historically, on whatever else the federal government was spending money on that year, and in exchange credits the trust fund with a special-issue Treasury bond representing an IOU from the general government to the Social Security Administration. That bond earns interest, on paper, but redeeming it to pay a benefit does not create new money. It requires the Treasury to raise the cash some other way: new taxes, new borrowing, or cuts elsewhere in the federal budget. A trust fund that must be refinanced through general taxation or new debt issuance every time it is drawn down is not a fund in the sense any ordinary saver would recognize. It is an accounting fiction layered over a pay-as-you-go tax, and the fiction becomes visible the moment the fund’s balance actually reaches zero, which the trustees themselves now say will happen for the OASI fund in six years.

Depletion does not mean the checks stop. It means the checks get cut automatically, by law, down to whatever level incoming payroll taxes can cover without borrowing. The trustees project that level at 78 percent of scheduled benefits once OASI alone runs dry, or 83 percent if Congress combines OASI with the healthier disability fund, an accounting maneuver that requires new legislation and currently has no legal basis. Either way, the math is the math: the average monthly retirement benefit projected for 2026 is $2,071. A 22 percent cut against that number is roughly $455 a month, gone, from people who are already retired and have no way to make up the difference by going back to work. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has run the state-by-state numbers and found the losses exceed that average in twenty-nine states.

Congress has known this date was coming since at least the early 2010s, when trustees were already projecting depletion somewhere between 2033 and 2036. Every year of inaction narrows the range of fixes and increases the size of whichever fix eventually gets forced through. The Bipartisan Policy Center puts the 75-year shortfall at roughly $30.3 trillion, up from $26 trillion the year before, driven partly by a 2025 tax law that reduced the income-tax revenue flowing into the trust fund from benefit taxation, and partly by demographic assumptions that keep getting revised downward as fertility and net immigration come in lower than projected. The honest way to describe a $30 trillion, 75-year financing gap is that the program as currently structured cannot pay what it has promised, under any set of assumptions anyone currently considers plausible. Fixing it requires some combination of higher payroll taxes, a higher taxable wage ceiling, delayed retirement ages, reduced cost-of-living adjustments, or reduced initial benefits. Every one of those fixes takes money from someone who was told a different number.

The money was never yours to get back

Here is the part of the program most people do not know until it is too late to matter to them personally. In 1960, the Supreme Court decided a case called Flemming v. Nestor. Ephram Nestor had worked in the United States and paid into Social Security for nineteen years. He was deported after the government learned of his past Communist Party membership, and Congress had passed a law stripping benefits from deported individuals in that category. Nestor sued, arguing that stopping his payments after nineteen years of contributions violated his property rights. He lost. The Court held that Social Security taxes are not premiums on an insurance contract and Social Security benefits are not an earned annuity. Contributors have no accrued property right to what they paid in. Congress retains, by explicit statute, the power to amend or repeal the benefit schedule at any time, for any reason, and no contributor has legal recourse when it does.

Nothing has overturned that ruling in the sixty-six years since. It remains the controlling precedent. Every dollar withheld from every paycheck under FICA is, legally, a tax like any other tax, spent by the government like any other tax revenue, and the benefit schedule you were promised is a statutory privilege Congress can change without your consent and without compensating you. You cannot sue for breach of contract because there is no contract. You cannot claim the payments as property because the Court has already ruled they are not property. The entire moral case for keeping Social Security running exactly as promised rests on a promise that has no legal force whatsoever, and the entire practical history of the program is Congress exercising exactly the power Flemming v. Nestor confirmed it holds: raising the retirement age in 1983, taxing benefits for the first time that same year, and adjusting the earnings formula repeatedly since. The program has already been changed unilaterally, multiple times, on people who had no say in the matter and no legal ground to object.

The 1983 amendments are the clearest illustration of that power actually being used against people who had no say in the matter. Facing an immediate solvency crisis, Congress raised the full retirement age in stages from 65 to 67, a change that fell on younger workers who had spent their entire working lives paying in under the assumption of an earlier retirement date. The same package subjected Social Security benefits to federal income tax for the first time in the program’s history, a direct reduction in net benefits for retirees who had never been told, when they were paying in decades earlier, that the government would later tax the very payments it owed them. Both changes were upheld without difficulty because Flemming v. Nestor had already settled that Congress retained the authority to do exactly this. Nobody who paid into the system between 1935 and 1983 was asked whether they consented to a later retirement age or a new tax on their benefits. The changes were simply made, and every dollar collected before those changes had already been spent on someone else’s check, so there was no account balance to point to and no legal claim to assert against the change. That is precisely the vulnerability a refund eliminates. An account balance calculated and distributed today cannot be retroactively taxed away or reduced by a future Congress the way a promised future benefit can, because once distributed, it is the recipient’s own asset, not a line item in next year’s federal budget debate.

Once that fact is on the table, the sentimental argument for preserving the program as an inviolable promise collapses. It was never a promise the law recognized as binding. It was and is a tax-funded transfer program that Congress can adjust, cut, or eliminate at will. The only question left is what happens to the people who paid the tax.

What refunding actually means

That question has an answer, and it is the actual proposal here, not an abstraction. Every worker who has paid FICA taxes into the OASDI system has a wage record. The Social Security Administration already maintains this record for every covered worker in the country, because it is the same record used to calculate benefits under current law. That record, converted into a lifetime running total of contributions with a reasonable rate of return applied, is the basis for a refund.

The mechanics: take each worker’s cumulative payroll tax contributions, employee and employer share combined, since they entered the workforce. Apply a conservative real rate of return, the same 4.8 to 4.9 percent nominal historical return the trust fund itself has earned on its Treasury securities since 1981, according to the Social Security Administration’s own comparative data. That produces a defensible, non-arbitrary account balance for every worker in the country, calculated using the government’s own numbers and the government’s own historical rate of return assumption, not an inflated market projection designed to make the refund look generous. Distribute that balance as a lump sum or, for anyone who wants predictable monthly income instead, an annuitized payout purchased on the open insurance market. Wind down the trust funds, which currently hold $2.56 trillion in Treasury obligations, using that balance as a down payment against the total refund liability, and finance the remainder the same way the government finances every other long-term obligation: bond issuance retired over a multi-decade horizon, exactly as the $30.3 trillion unfunded shortfall would otherwise have to be financed anyway, except this time the money goes to the people who earned it instead of disappearing into a formula nobody controls.

A workable transition needs to run in defined cohorts rather than all at once, both to protect people who built their retirement plans around the current formula and to let the bond market absorb the financing without disruption. A reasonable structure looks like this. Cohort one covers everyone already receiving benefits and everyone within ten years of full retirement age at the time the law passes. This group is paid out under the current benefit formula, in full, for life, funded first from the existing $2.56 trillion trust fund balance and then from a dedicated, ring-fenced bond issue specifically earmarked for this purpose. Nothing changes for them except that their benefit is now backed by a specific, funded obligation rather than an annual appropriations fight and a 2032 depletion date. Cohort two covers everyone between 10 and 30 years from retirement. Their wage records are converted into an account balance using their actual lifetime contributions plus the historical trust fund rate of return, and they choose between an immediate lump sum, a rollover into a qualified private annuity, or a phased distribution timed to their expected retirement date, whichever suits their own planning. Cohort three, everyone more than thirty years from retirement, gets the same account-balance calculation applied going forward on a rolling basis, with the option to take an early partial distribution or let the balance continue accruing interest until they choose to draw it down, but crucially, no new payroll tax is collected from this cohort once the transition begins. The tax disappears from their paycheck permanently, and any future retirement savings are theirs to direct, whether into a private annuity, an employer plan, a mutual aid association, or nothing at all, at their own risk and their own choice.

Administratively, none of this requires inventing new infrastructure. The Social Security Administration already maintains the wage record for every covered worker in the country, because that record is the same one used to calculate benefits under current law. The same actuarial staff that currently projects trust fund depletion dates can calculate account balances using the same wage histories, the same rate-of-return assumptions the trustees already publish, and existing statutory formulas adapted to a lump-sum context rather than an annuity schedule. This is not asking the government to build a system from nothing. It is asking the government to run the calculation it already runs, output the result differently, and then close the books instead of reopening them every year with a new Trustees Report.

This is not free. Nobody serious claims it is. But compare it honestly to the alternative, which is also not free. The $30.3 trillion actuarial shortfall already documented in the 2026 Trustees Report has to be paid somehow, by somebody, under current law, regardless of what anyone does. Congress can pay for it through higher payroll taxes on workers who will retire into a smaller, less generous, means-tested version of the same program. Or the country can pay a comparable amount as a one-time refund, put the account balances directly into the hands of the people the money came from, and end the recurring 12.4 percent tax obligation on every paycheck in America going forward. One version of that bill produces an entitlement program that keeps shrinking every decade Congress fails to act. The other version produces a closed transaction and the largest one-time transfer of financial independence in American history.

The remedy needs a transition structure, not a cliff, and this is where most privatization proposals fail politically because they try to change everything at once. Anyone currently receiving benefits, and anyone within ten years of full retirement age, should be paid out under the current benefit formula, in full, funded first from the existing trust fund balance and then from a dedicated bond issue, because those people built their retirement plans around a specific number and changing that number on short notice is the kind of unilateral rug-pull the program itself has already been guilty of and should not repeat. Everyone else gets the lump-sum or annuitized refund of their actual contributions plus historical return, calculated off their existing wage record, distributed over a phased schedule so the bond market can absorb the issuance without a shock. The payroll tax ends the moment a worker’s transition cohort is fully refunded. No new contributions are collected from that point forward. The tax disappears from paychecks permanently, not just for the people cashed out, but for every future worker who will never pay into a program that no longer exists.

What replaces it

The honest objection to all of this is not the math. It is the fear of what happens to people who take their refund, spend it or invest it badly, and arrive at seventy with nothing. That fear is legitimate, and it deserves a real answer, not a dismissal.

The real answer is that retirement security has never actually depended on a single federal check, and treating it as though it does is precisely the habit that has left Americans more financially fragile, not less. Communities met this need before 1935 and can meet it again, more effectively, because they are not bound by a formula designed for a demographic pyramid that no longer exists.

Fraternal and mutual aid societies did exactly this job for the better part of a century before Social Security existed. By 1920, according to a 1933 federal research committee report, one in three adult American men belonged to a fraternal society. At the movement’s peak in the early twentieth century, these organizations insured roughly 40 million Americans, more than the total population of the entire country at the time of the Civil War, according to figures the American Fraternal Alliance has drawn from congressional testimony and historical enrollment records. The Odd Fellows, the Knights of Pythias, the Ancient Order of United Workmen, and hundreds of ethnic and religious mutual benefit societies built what historian David Beito, in his definitive study of the movement, describes as a genuine parallel welfare state: hospitals, orphanages, homes for the elderly, sick leave, and life insurance, all funded entirely through member dues, all governed by the members who paid them, with no tax collector and no federal formula involved anywhere in the arrangement. These were not charities handing down aid to passive recipients. They were reciprocal institutions built by working-class and immigrant families for themselves, cutting across race, class, and gender lines in ways their reputation as exclusive men’s clubs obscures. The movement declined for exactly the reason the historical record shows: Social Security, employer-provided group insurance, and the GI Bill reduced the financial urgency that had made fraternal membership a necessity rather than a nostalgia. Take away the tax-funded federal substitute, and the underlying need for mutual aid does not disappear. Neither, on the evidence of the roughly 9 million Americans still carrying $380 billion of in-force life insurance through fraternal benefit societies today, has the institutional form entirely disappeared either. It shrank because the government crowded it out, not because it failed at the job.

Credit unions operate on that same principle today: member-owned, member-governed, no shareholders extracting a cut, existing purely to serve the people who fund them. Nothing about either model requires a federal mandate. It requires people choosing to pool risk voluntarily instead of being taxed involuntarily, and it requires the money that would otherwise go to payroll tax to actually stay in a worker’s pocket long enough to be pooled.

The private insurance market already prices exactly the products a refunded worker would need: fixed annuities that convert a lump sum into guaranteed lifetime monthly income, at rates that are transparent, competitive, and shopped across multiple insurers instead of dictated by a single government formula nobody can negotiate. A worker who takes a refund and rolls it directly into a private annuity has purchased the same guaranteed income stream Social Security claims to provide, except backed by an insurer under state regulatory reserve requirements instead of a pay-as-you-go tax on a shrinking pool of future workers. That worker’s benefit is not subject to a 22 percent statutory haircut in 2032 because Congress failed to act. It is a contract, with the accrued property right, Flemming v. Nestor confirmed that Social Security itself does not provide.

For the genuinely vulnerable, the elderly who outlive their savings through bad luck, illness, or family collapse, the correct backstop is not a universal payroll tax on every worker in the country. It is the same layered structure that has always caught people who fall through the cracks of formal systems: family responsibility first, church and community mutual aid second, and a narrow, means-tested residual safety net funded through general revenue and administered close to the people it serves, not a national bureaucracy managing a quarter of the federal budget. This is a smaller, more targeted commitment than what exists today, and it should be. A safety net designed to catch people who actually fall is a fundamentally different and cheaper thing than an entitlement that writes a check to every retiree regardless of need, funded by taxing every paycheck in the country for ninety years running.

The bureaucracy running it

Set the financing question aside for a moment and look at how the program is actually administered, because a promise is only as good as the institution executing it, and the institution has been struggling. As of early 2025, applicants for disability benefits were waiting an average of seven months just to get an eligibility determination, and appeals of denied claims routinely stretched into years. Reporting from early 2026 found the agency was still sitting on more than two million pending disability claims even after a year of improvement efforts, and internal processing centers were carrying millions of pending actions at any given time. SSA’s own blog acknowledged that the agency’s operating budget had shrunk to under one percent of the benefits it pays out, and that four straight years of funding below what the agency requested had driven a 94 percent increase in pending disability claims and tripled the wait time on the toll-free phone line before recent fixes began to claw some of that back.

The agency has since reported real, measurable improvement: wait times on the national phone line down sharply, the disability backlog reduced by roughly a third, hearing wait times cut by months. Credit where it belongs. But independent researchers examining the changes in 2026 found that the fixes leaned heavily on pushing claimants toward AI-driven phone trees and online-only account management, and flagged that this made the system harder to use, not easier, for exactly the population least equipped to navigate it: people with cognitive or psychiatric disabilities, older applicants without reliable internet access, and rural claimants losing access to local field offices as the agency centralizes operations. Watchdog groups have also noted that the agency stopped publishing some of the specific customer-service metrics, like hold times and appointment lead times, that would let the public verify the improvement independently.

None of this is a scandal in the sense of anyone stealing money. It is the ordinary, predictable result of running retirement security for over seventy million Americans through a single centralized federal bureaucracy that answers to Congress’s appropriations schedule rather than to the people depending on it. A worker with a real account at a private insurer or a mutual aid association does not wait seven months for an answer about their own money, because there is no single national queue for them to sit in. Decentralizing retirement security away from one federal agency does not just reduce financial risk. It removes a chokepoint that, on the current record, tens of thousands of disabled and elderly Americans are stuck behind right now, waiting for a bureaucracy to get to their file.

The Galveston evidence

None of this is theoretical. In January 1981, employees of Galveston County, Texas, along with neighboring Matagorda and Brazoria counties, voted to leave Social Security entirely and adopt a private alternative, a window in the law that existed for local government employees until Congress closed it in 1983. Galveston’s own workers voted for it by a margin of roughly three to one. The plan that resulted, commonly called the Alternate Plan, is not what most people picture when they hear “privatize Social Security.” Contributions are pooled, not held in individual brokerage accounts, and invested by the county through group annuity contracts rather than the stock market, specifically to avoid market volatility. Workers do not pick their own investments. The plan is, in the words of the analysts who have studied it since, a banking model rather than an investment model, deliberately conservative.

It has run for over forty years, and the results are not close. Financial planner Rick Gornto, who designed the plan, reported an average annual return of about 6.5 percent over its first twenty-four years. A Government Accountability Office and Social Security Administration joint review from 1999 found the plan’s returns averaged 4.62 percent real, essentially identical to the 4.88 percent real return the Social Security trust fund itself earned over the same 1981 to 1997 period, which is exactly what you would expect since both are conservative, low-risk investment vehicles rather than an aggressive equities play. The benefit comparisons are where Galveston pulls ahead. Using the plan administrator’s own retirement calculations, a worker earning $17,000 a year would draw about $1,036 a month under the Alternate Plan versus $683 under Social Security. A worker earning $51,000 would draw $3,103 versus $1,368. A worker earning $75,000 or more would draw roughly $4,540 versus $1,645. The death benefit under the Galveston plan pays four times the annual salary, up to $215,000, against Social Security’s fixed $255 lump sum, a number that has not been adjusted since 1954 and today covers a rounding error’s worth of funeral costs.

Critics of the Galveston comparison, including analysts at the Center for Retirement Research and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, raise fair points that deserve to be stated rather than waved away. The Galveston plan does not adjust for inflation the way Social Security’s cost-of-living formula does, so its advantage narrows over a long retirement. It offers no spousal or dependent benefits structured the way Social Security’s are. Participation was mandatory for county employees, meaning nobody in Galveston had the option to stay in Social Security instead, which is a legitimate point against holding Galveston up as evidence that individual choice produces good outcomes; the good outcomes there came from a well-designed collective plan, not individual investors picking stocks. And Galveston’s three counties are, relative to the national program, small: only about five thousand employees are covered, so the county walked away from Social Security without being asked to shoulder any of the legacy costs the rest of the country still carries, which is precisely the kind of transition-cost problem any national-scale wind-down has to solve honestly rather than assume away. Every one of these objections is correct, and every one of them describes a design detail to fix in a national plan, an inflation-adjustment mechanism, an optional survivor annuity rider, a properly financed transition, not a reason the underlying approach fails. Galveston proves the model works when it is designed conservatively and administered honestly. It does not prove every implementation detail transfers automatically to national scale, and nobody advocating for this should pretend otherwise.

What Galveston does prove, unambiguously, is that a community can walk away from Social Security, manage its own retirement money through ordinary financial instruments available to anyone, and produce better outcomes for its workers across every income bracket studied, for over four decades, without a single missed payment. Ray Holbrook, the county judge who led the 1981 effort, put it plainly to reporters thirty years later: people wanted some kind of control over their own money, because ultimately it is their money. That is the entire argument in one sentence.

What other countries did instead

The United States is not the only country that ever had to answer the question of how to fund old age at a national scale, and it is worth looking honestly at what other governments chose, because the range of alternatives is wider than “keep Social Security exactly as is” or “nothing at all.”

Australia replaced reliance on a pay-as-you-go government pension with a mandatory, privately managed, individually owned system called superannuation, introduced in 1992. Employers are required to contribute a fixed percentage of each worker’s ordinary earnings, currently 12 percent, into a superannuation fund the worker actually owns. The money is invested in real assets, equities, bonds, and property, not government IOUs. It compounds for decades before retirement, and the worker can see the account balance at any time, the same way an American checks a 401(k). As of early 2026, Australians hold $4.43 trillion in superannuation assets, more than the size of the entire Australian economy, making Australia the fourth-largest holder of pension fund assets on earth despite having a population smaller than Texas. The Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, hardly a libertarian outlet, has published research asking directly whether the American system should adopt the Australian approach, and rated Australia’s retirement system a full letter grade higher than the American one on the Mercer Global Pension Index, specifically because Australia’s is not sitting on a 2033 depletion cliff.

Singapore built something more comprehensive still. The Central Provident Fund, established in 1955, requires mandatory contributions from both employer and employee, currently running up to 37 percent of wages combined for younger workers, into accounts the individual owns outright. The money is not just a retirement fund. It also finances the worker’s own healthcare costs through a linked medical savings account and can be used to purchase a home. Nobody in Singapore is waiting on a trustees’ report to find out whether their money will still be there when they retire, because the money was never spent on someone else’s benefit check in the first place. It sat in an account with their name on it the entire time.

Chile went furthest of all in 1981, converting its pay-as-you-go government pension system entirely into individually owned accounts, managed by private, competing fund administrators, funded by a mandatory 10 percent contribution from wages. Chile’s pension fund assets grew to over 80 percent of the country’s GDP by 2021, an extraordinary pool of real, individually owned capital that simply does not exist anywhere in the American system, where every dollar collected has already been spent. The Chilean model has drawn real criticism over the years, particularly around whether the mandatory contribution rate was ever set high enough to produce adequate retirement income for lower earners, and Chile itself has revisited and adjusted the system multiple times since 1981. That criticism is worth taking seriously, and it reinforces the point made earlier about needing a properly calibrated, progressive structure rather than a flat percentage that shortchanges the workers who most need retirement security. But the core design choice, that retirement money should be owned by the worker in a real account rather than promised by a formula the government can amend at will, is exactly the choice this proposal asks the United States to make, decades later than Chile, Singapore, and Australia already made it.

The common thread across every one of these systems is ownership. A worker in Sydney, Singapore, or Santiago can look at a statement and see an actual balance, built from actual contributions, invested in actual assets, that belongs to them regardless of what any future legislature decides to do. A worker in the United States has a number the Social Security Administration calculates from a formula, backed by a trust fund holding IOUs from the government to itself, protected by no property right the Supreme Court has ever recognized, and subject to a statutory 22 percent haircut arriving on a specific, published date six years from now. These are not comparably secure arrangements. One of them is ownership. The other is a promise the promisor has already stated, in writing, it cannot fully keep.

The genuine accomplishment, stated honestly

None of the above is an argument that Social Security failed at what it set out to do. It succeeded, for a long time, at the specific job of keeping old people out of destitution, and that accomplishment should be stated in full before moving to what comes next.

Before Social Security, elderly poverty in America was a mass phenomenon, not a residual problem affecting a minority who fell through the cracks. The Census Bureau’s own analysis finds that without Social Security benefits, 37.3 percent of adults 65 and older would fall below the official poverty line today, and the Supplemental Poverty Measure puts that counterfactual figure at 47.1 percent. Social Security moved 28.7 million people out of poverty in 2024 alone, more than any other program in the federal government, and the poverty rate among Social Security beneficiaries specifically has run around 8 percent, a fraction of what it would be absent the program. That is a real, measurable, ninety-year accomplishment, and anyone arguing for dissolution owes it an honest accounting rather than a dismissal.

It is also worth being honest about the current trend, because it complicates the story in the other direction. The elderly poverty rate has been climbing, not falling, in recent years: from 9.5 percent in 2020 to 15 percent in 2024 under the Supplemental Poverty Measure, according to the Census Bureau’s most recent annual report, even with Social Security fully in place and paying out. Roughly 9.2 million older Americans are currently living below the poverty line despite the existence of the very program designed to prevent that outcome. Social Security in its current form is not, in 2026, comprehensively solving the problem it was built to solve. It is preventing a worse outcome while a worse outcome grows anyway, which is a very different thing than the program working as advertised, and it is exactly the kind of gap a targeted, means-tested safety net, administered close to the people who need it, is better positioned to close than a universal transfer program spreading the same finite dollars across everyone regardless of need.

It is also worth remembering that Social Security was never the only tool available for this job, only the one the federal government chose to build and then made mandatory for everyone. Before 1935, and for decades alongside Social Security afterward, the same poverty-reduction function was performed, imperfectly but genuinely, by extended family living arrangements, church and denominational aid, and the fraternal mutual benefit societies described earlier, at a fraction of the fiscal footprint and without a single centralized formula setting the terms for the entire country at once. The claim that only a universal federal program can prevent mass elderly poverty is a claim about the twentieth century’s particular political choices, not a law of economics. Countries that built ownership-based systems instead, Australia and Singapore among them, have not produced worse elderly poverty outcomes than the United States; if anything, an actual owned account balance that grows for forty years gives a retiree more certainty about their own resources than a formula subject to a published depletion date and a congressional horse-trading session every few decades.

The honest reading of both facts together is this: the program did real good work for a long time, the current trajectory shows that work degrading even as the program consumes a growing share of federal spending, and the correct response to a safety net that is both expensive and increasingly inadequate is not to keep funding it at greater cost. It is to redesign the safety net around the people who actually need catching, and return the rest of the money to the people who earned it and can manage it better through private, family, and community mechanisms that do not depend on a fixed national formula written for a population pyramid that stopped existing decades ago.

Objections worth taking seriously

A fair accounting of this proposal requires stating the strongest cases against it, not just the weakest ones.

The strongest objection is the elderly poverty argument already discussed above: without a universal program, some share of retirees will mismanage a lump-sum refund, outlive their annuity choice, or simply never build adequate savings due to low lifetime earnings, and the country will have a population of elderly poor with no federal check standing between them and destitution. This is a real risk, and the honest response is that it requires a genuine, funded, means-tested backstop, not the assumption that family and charity alone will catch everyone. Advocates for dissolution who wave this away are not making a serious argument.

The second objection is distributional. The Urban Institute’s lifetime benefit-and-tax modeling shows that lower-lifetime-earners generally receive substantially more in benefits than they paid in taxes, because the benefit formula is progressive by design, while higher earners often pay in more than they receive back. A flat refund of contributions plus historical interest, without that progressive adjustment, would make many lower-income retirees worse off relative to what current law promises them, even though it would make many middle and upper earners better off. A serious version of this proposal has to either accept that trade-off explicitly or build a progressive top-up into the refund calculation for lower lifetime earners, funded from general revenue rather than payroll tax. Pretending the refund is a pure and simple return of “your own money” for every worker obscures the fact that the current system was never actuarially neutral to begin with, and a straight refund changes who wins and who loses.

The third objection is transition risk. Issuing bonds to finance a refund at anything close to national scale, on top of already refinancing the $30.3 trillion actuarial shortfall the program carries under current law, is a nontrivial addition to federal debt markets, and critics reasonably ask whether that issuance could move interest rates or crowd out other borrowing. The answer is that the $30.3 trillion bill exists regardless of what anyone does about it; the honest comparison is not “refund versus no cost” but “refund financed over decades versus the existing law’s own unfunded liability financed the same way,” and reasonable people can disagree about which financing path is less disruptive, but neither path is free.

A fourth objection concerns counterparty risk. A worker who rolls a lump-sum refund into a private annuity is trading a government promise for an insurance company’s promise, and insurance companies can fail. This is also a fair point, and it is already answered by existing infrastructure rather than requiring anything new: every state maintains a guaranty association that backstops annuity contracts up to statutory coverage limits if an insurer becomes insolvent, the same structure that protects bank deposits through the FDIC, and nothing in this proposal prevents strengthening those state guaranty limits specifically for retirees rolling over Social Security refunds, funded by the insurance industry itself rather than a payroll tax on workers. A regulated private annuity market with real reserve requirements and state-backed guaranty coverage is not a riskless proposition, but it is a fundamentally different kind of risk than a pay-as-you-go transfer program that has already told its participants, in an official government report, the exact year it will fail to pay what it promised.

These objections do not defeat the dissolution case . They define what a responsible version of it has to include: a real backstop for the vulnerable, a progressive adjustment mechanism rather than a flat refund, and a transparent accounting of transition costs instead of a claim that the money appears from nowhere. A proposal that addresses all three honestly is stronger than one that ignores them, and the people who benefit most from Social Security’s current design deserve a case made to them directly rather than assumed away.

The choice is already being made

Every year Congress does not act, it is making a choice, and the choice is not neutral. It is choosing to let the automatic benefit cut hit in 2032 rather than address the shortfall head-on. It is choosing to let a new generation of workers keep paying 12.4 percent of every paycheck into a program that has already told them, through the trustees’ own numbers, that they will not receive full value for it. It is choosing to preserve the appearance of an inviolable promise that the Supreme Court settled in 1960 was never a promise at all in any legal sense.

The alternative is not chaos. It is Galveston, scaled and adjusted for the objections that scaling raises, honestly. It is a wage record the government already keeps, converted into a balance the government already knows how to calculate, paid out to the people who earned it, backstopped by a narrower and better-targeted safety net for those who need real protection instead of a universal check for everyone whether they need it or not. It is the end of a tax that takes 12.4 percent of every paycheck in America to fund a program that a Texas county’s own workers voted, three to one, to leave behind forty-five years ago, and have not looked back since.

The people who built this country’s retirement expectations around a federal formula deserve better than a shrinking check in 2032. They deserve their money back, and the freedom to decide, with their families and their communities, what a secure old age actually looks like. That decision was never the government’s to make in the first place. It is time to give it back.

There is a version of this argument that stops at the math: the trust fund runs dry in 2032, the shortfall runs to $30.3 trillion, the fix requires either higher taxes or lower benefits, so why not simply cash people out and be done with it? That version is true as far as it goes, but it understates what is actually at stake. The deeper failure of the current arrangement is not that the arithmetic is broken. Arithmetic gets fixed all the time, through tax increases, benefit formula changes, retirement age adjustments, the usual toolkit Congress has reached for before and will reach for again. The deeper failure is that an entire country built its expectation of a secure old age around a single federal promise that its own Supreme Court ruled, sixty-six years ago, creates no legal right whatsoever, administered by an agency currently taking seven months to answer a disability claim, financed by a structure that requires every future generation to be larger and richer than the one before it in a country where birth rates have been falling for decades. That is not a temporary shortfall. That is a design built for a demographic reality that no longer exists, propped up by faith in a promise the promisor has already told everyone, in writing, it cannot keep in full.

Galveston County did not wait for Washington to fix that design. Three Texas counties looked at the same arithmetic everyone else was looking at in 1980, and instead of trusting a formula, they built something they controlled themselves, insured through ordinary financial instruments, administered by people accountable to the workers who funded it. Forty-five years later, it has paid every benefit it owes, in every category, to every worker covered, without a depletion date, without a Trustees Report, and without a Supreme Court ruling standing between the workers and their money. That is not a utopian thought experiment. It already happened, it is still happening, and it worked. The only remaining question is whether the rest of the country is willing to learn from it before 2032 arrives, or whether it waits for the checks to shrink first and calls that a plan.

This is an explainer and an argument. The explainer part is straightforward: what the strait is, why it matters, what happened when Iran tried to shut it, and what the shutting cost. The argument part is less comfortable, and it is this: a global economy with a single point of failure this large was never a stable arrangement to begin with, and the fix is not a better guarantee from whichever government happens to hold the region’s security umbrella that year. The fix is not depending on the guarantee in the first place.

What and Where

The Strait of Hormuz connects the Arabian Gulf, the body of water most of Iran’s northern coastline sits on, called the Persian Gulf in Iranian and much Western usage, and referred to here as the Arabian Gulf in keeping with the usage of the Arab states on its southern shore, to the Gulf of Oman and, from there, the Arabian Sea and the open ocean. Iran sits on the north side. Oman’s Musandam peninsula sits on the south side, an exclave separated from the rest of the country by the United Arab Emirates. The strait is deep and wide enough to carry the largest crude oil tankers built, which is the whole reason it matters. Every producing country in the Arabian Gulf, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, and Iran itself, has to move the bulk of its oil and gas through this one channel to reach a customer.

Before this year’s war, the U.S. Energy Information Administration put average daily flow through the strait at around 20 to 21 million barrels of oil and petroleum products, roughly a quarter of all seaborne oil traded on earth and about a fifth of total global petroleum consumption. Add liquefied natural gas, most of it loaded in Qatar, and another fifth of the world’s LNG trade passed through the same channel. No other chokepoint on the planet carries that much energy through that little water. The Strait of Malacca, between Indonesia and Malaysia, moves more oil in absolute terms, but it has alternate routes if it’s ever closed. Hormuz does not. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have pipelines that can move a combined few million barrels a day around the strait. Everyone else, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, has no way out except through it.

Before the war, somewhere between 120 and 140 vessels crossed the strait daily, about half of them oil tankers. Roughly 84 percent of the crude that came through went to Asia. China alone took more than a third of it. India, Japan, and South Korea took most of the rest. The United States, by contrast, imported less than a million barrels a day through Hormuz even before its own production boom, and that number had been cut in half again by the time the war started, down to around 7 percent of U.S. crude imports and roughly 2 percent of total U.S. petroleum consumption. This matters for understanding who actually gets hurt when the strait closes. It is not primarily an American problem. It is an Asian problem, a Gulf Arab problem, and a global price problem, in that order.

The exporters on the other end of that trade are just as concentrated. Saudi Arabia alone accounts for roughly 37 to 38 percent of all crude and condensate moved through the strait, according to EIA figures for early 2025. Iraq follows at around 23 percent, the UAE at about 13 percent, with Iran and Kuwait rounding out the top five at roughly 10 percent apiece. That means two countries, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, together account for something like 60 percent of everything moving through the water. Of that whole group, only Saudi Arabia and the UAE have working pipelines that bypass the strait entirely, the Saudi East-West line to the Red Sea and the UAE’s link to its Fujairah terminal on the Gulf of Oman, together carrying a combined capacity of some 6.5 million barrels a day, only a portion of which typically sits unused and ready as backup. Everyone else in the Gulf, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, has no way out that doesn’t run through Hormuz. Iran technically built its own bypass pipeline, the Goreh-Jask line to the Gulf of Oman, back in 2021, but has barely used it since, which tells you something about how much Iran itself has historically valued having an alternative, right up until this year, when having leverage over the main route turned out to matter more than having an exit from it.

Then there’s the gas. Qatar is, on its own, responsible for the overwhelming majority of the roughly one-fifth of global LNG trade that moves through the strait, supplying buyers across Asia and Europe with fuel that, unlike oil, has almost no slack storage capacity built into most receiving countries’ systems. A prolonged interruption to LNG cargoes hits faster and harder than an equivalent interruption to crude, because LNG-importing utilities generally keep only a few weeks of buffer on hand rather than months.

The War

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes on Iran under the name Operation Epic Fury, hitting military sites, nuclear facilities, and Iranian leadership. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in the opening strikes. Iran answered with missile barrages on Israeli cities and on American bases in the Gulf, including installations in the UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain. The fighting spread to Lebanon, where Hezbollah launched rockets into Israel and drew Israeli counterstrikes in return. Within a week, on March 4, Iran declared the Strait of Hormuz closed and said it would attack any ship that tried to cross.

The IRGC backed the declaration with action. It boarded and attacked merchant vessels. It laid mines in the strait. On March 27 it went further, announcing the strait was closed to any ship headed to or from ports belonging to the United States, Israel, or their allies, which in practice meant most of the world’s shipping fleet, since insurers and flag states were not eager to test Iran’s definition of “allies.” Traffic collapsed. Britannica’s account of the period puts the drop at roughly 90 percent within days of the opening strikes, and above 95 percent once Iran made its threats explicit. At the worst point, as few as two tankers a day were still attempting the crossing, against a prewar baseline of well over a hundred. The International Maritime Organization reported in late April that about 20,000 mariners and 2,000 ships were stuck in the Gulf with nowhere to go.

The United States, for its part, blockaded Iranian ports from April 13 to May 29, adding a second layer of disruption on top of Iran’s own mining and harassment campaign. War-risk insurance premiums for ships transiting the strait, which had sat around 0.125 percent of a vessel’s insured value before the strikes, jumped to between 0.2 and 0.4 percent in the days leading up to the war and higher still once it started. For a single very large crude carrier, that is an added cost measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars, per transit, before a barrel of cargo has moved an inch.

President Trump had been warned this could happen. According to reporting on internal briefings, the Joint Chiefs of Staff told him before the February strikes that an attack on Iran could prompt Tehran to close the strait. Trump reportedly dismissed the concern, telling aides Iran would fold rather than close it, and that if Iran did close it, the U.S. military could reopen it by force. Neither prediction held up cleanly. Iran did not fold. And reopening the strait by force turned out to be a slower, messier, more diplomatically expensive project than “the U.S. military will handle it” implied. It took an internationally brokered memorandum of understanding, months of indirect talks in Doha and Islamabad, and it is still not fully resolved as of this writing.

This Has Happened Before

None of this is entirely new, which is itself an argument for taking it seriously rather than treating it as a one-off aberration. From 1984 to 1988, during the last two years of the Iran-Iraq War, the two countries fought what came to be called the Tanker War, a sustained campaign of strikes on merchant shipping in the Gulf. Iraq struck first, hitting Iranian oil terminals and tankers at Kharg Island in an attempt to cripple Iran’s oil income and, not incidentally, to provoke Iran into closing the strait entirely, which Iraqi planners hoped would drag outside powers into the fight against Tehran. Iran took the bait only partway. It struck back at tankers belonging to Iraq and to the Gulf Arab states bankrolling Iraq’s war, but according to research from the University of Texas’s Strauss Center, Iran deliberately stopped short of closing the strait outright, because its own oil-dependent economy, already battered by war, needed that water open as much as anyone’s. By the end of the fighting, Iraq had carried out more than 280 attacks on shipping to Iran’s 168, and more than 30 million tons of cargo had been damaged.

Kuwait, whose tankers took the worst of Iran’s retaliation, asked for outside protection. The Soviet Union answered first, chartering tankers under its own flag. Washington, under Reagan, followed with Operation Earnest Will, reflagging eleven Kuwaiti tankers as American vessels so the U.S. Navy could legally escort them. It became the largest naval convoy operation since World War II, and it was not a clean success story. On the first escort run, the reflagged supertanker Bridgeton struck an Iranian mine that American minesweepers had failed to detect. Three tankers hit mines in the operation’s first month alone. An Iraqi jet, in a separate incident, fired on the USS Stark and killed 37 American sailors, an attack Baghdad blamed on pilot error, which Washington used, somewhat conveniently, to justify leaning harder against Iran instead. The episode ended in tragedy rather than triumph: on July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes mistook Iran Air Flight 655 for an attacking fighter and shot it down, killing all 290 people aboard, most of them civilians, 65 of them children. Iran agreed to a ceasefire with Iraq two weeks later.

The parallels to this year write themselves. Then as now, the fighting was between two other parties before it became a shipping crisis. Then as now, the strait itself became the weapon of choice once direct combat reached a stalemate. Then as now, mines proved to be the tactic outside navies were least prepared for, striking ships under active escort. And then as now, ending the crisis took months of a great power inserting its own ships directly into a minefield, at real cost in ships and sailors, not a clean diplomatic settlement reached from a safe distance.

There is, however, a real difference between 1988 and 2026, and it should discourage anyone hoping history simply repeats on schedule. In the 1980s, Iran was one of two exhausted combatants with every incentive to keep the strait functional for its own sake. In 2026, Iran is the party that unilaterally closed the strait as a deliberate weapon against the country that attacked it, with far less concern for its own oil income, some of which it kept moving anyway through routes and buyers willing to look past sanctions. Military technology has also moved a long way past 1988. Analysts quoted by the Associated Press and Fortune this spring pointed out that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has spent decades adapting to sanctions by operating small, disposable civilian-looking boats, some no larger than a fishing vessel, rigged with heavy machine guns and rocket launchers, that shadow American warships through the strait as a matter of routine. Add cheap drones and short-range missiles, both far more available to Iran now than in the 1980s, and the threat facing any escort mission is harder to manage than the one Earnest Will faced. One risk analyst told Fortune plainly that securing the waterway today is harder than it was during the Tanker War, given how far small-boat and drone tactics have advanced. The U.S. Navy, for its part, decommissioned four of its dedicated minesweepers in the Gulf region just last year, according to reporting relayed by Al Jazeera, leaving a thinner mine-clearing capability than it had going into this crisis.

The lesson from 1988 was that the strait, once closed by force, gets reopened by greater force, at a cost, and life goes back to something resembling normal afterward. The lesson from 2026 looks more like this: the strait gets closed by force, reopening it takes months instead of weeks, the tools available for reopening it have not kept pace with the tools available for closing it, and the closing party has less reason than its 1980s counterpart to hand back the leverage once it has proven the leverage works.

The Law That Is Supposed to Settle This

Freedom of navigation is not just a phrase American officials use when they want a warship to go somewhere. It has a specific legal home, and understanding it explains both why the U.S. keeps insisting the strait must stay open and why Iran keeps insisting it doesn’t have to comply.

The relevant instrument is the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, UNCLOS, finished in 1982 and in force since 1994, ratified by 171 countries plus the European Union. UNCLOS created the modern rulebook for who controls what water and how ships are allowed to move through it. Its central bargain, relevant here, let coastal states extend their territorial waters from 3 nautical miles out to 12, a significant expansion of sovereign control, in exchange for accepting a specific limitation on that control in straits used for international navigation: a right called transit passage. Under transit passage, ships and aircraft of every nation, commercial and military, are entitled to continuous, expeditious passage through a strait like Hormuz, and the coastal states on either side, in this case Iran and Oman, cannot suspend, condition, or impede it. That’s a materially stronger guarantee than the older, more limited standard called innocent passage, which lets a coastal state restrict or interrupt shipping under a broader set of circumstances, including its own security concerns.

Here is the complication, and it is not a small one. Neither Iran nor the United States has ratified UNCLOS. Iran signed it in 1982 but declared at the time that it would only apply the transit passage regime to countries that had themselves ratified the treaty, treating it as what legal scholars call a package deal rather than a standing obligation. Since the U.S. never ratified either, Iran considers itself free to fall back on the older, weaker 1958 Geneva Convention on the Territorial Sea, or on innocent passage more broadly, when dealing with American shipping. The United States, for its part, never ratified UNCLOS mainly over disputes about deep-seabed mining provisions that have nothing to do with the Gulf, but has spent decades arguing that the transit passage rule reflects binding customary international law regardless of formal ratification, a position first staked out under Reagan and enforced ever since through the Navy’s Freedom of Navigation Program. Most international law scholars and legal analysis of the current crisis, including reporting from Chatham House and legal commentary in The Nation, lean toward agreeing with the American position, on the theory that a rule this widely accepted for this long binds everyone whether or not they signed the paperwork. Iran disputes this directly, invoking its long-standing status as what’s called a persistent objector, a country that raised its objection early and has kept raising it consistently enough that even scholars who think transit passage is now customary law generally concede Iran gets an exemption from it.

The upshot is that the freedom of navigation the U.S. insists on, and that the rest of the trading world depends on without ever thinking about it, rests on a body of law neither of the two central antagonists has formally accepted, enforced through customary practice and naval presence rather than through any court either side recognizes as having jurisdiction over it. States that haven’t ratified UNCLOS can’t be hauled before the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. There is no binding referee. When the UN Security Council tried to act on this directly in April, with a resolution condemning Iran’s regulation of the strait and authorizing member states to intervene militarily to reopen it, Russia and China vetoed it. A separate, less confrontational resolution condemning Iran’s actions did pass with support from roughly 140 member states, a real diplomatic rebuke, but a rebuke with no enforcement mechanism attached. That is the structural problem in miniature: the rule the whole global economy quietly depends on is real, widely recognized, and almost certainly correct as a matter of law, and it is also, in practice, unenforceable against a determined objector without someone’s navy doing the enforcing directly, at the cost and risk already described.

This matters for the argument this piece is making, not as a legal footnote but as the clearest illustration of it available. Freedom of navigation through Hormuz isn’t propped up by an international court, a treaty both sides accept, or an institution with real teeth. It’s propped up by American naval power and by the general reluctance of most states to test it, both of which turned out this year to be less absolute than assumed. A guarantee that depends entirely on one government’s navy showing up, backed by a legal theory the other party has spent forty years formally rejecting, was never the kind of guarantee that holds indefinitely. It held for decades because nobody with the will to test it also had the willingness to absorb the cost of testing it. Iran, in 2026, decided the cost was worth it anyway.

Iran’s Refusal to Let Go

This is the part of the story that should worry anyone who assumed the strait would snap back to normal once the shooting stopped. It hasn’t, and Iran does not appear to want it to.

The pattern started early. On April 1, Trump claimed Iran had asked for a ceasefire and said the U.S. would consider it once the strait was, in his words, open, free, and clear. Iran’s foreign ministry called this false. The IRGC was blunter, stating the strait would not be reopened through what it called a ridiculous spectacle staged by the American president. A ceasefire process eventually took shape through Pakistani mediation, with Iran reportedly losing track of some of its own mines while trying to clear a safe channel, according to reporting from NDTV. A memorandum of understanding was finally signed in June, with Trump reportedly putting his signature to it while at the G7 summit in France. It bought sixty days to work out the details. It did not settle the underlying question of who controls passage through the strait.

Iranian officials have been explicit since the ceasefire that they intend to charge a transit fee once the sixty-day window closes, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. Oman may join in collecting it. This is worth sitting with for a second. The declared American position is freedom of navigation, full stop, the transit passage guarantee described above, the same principle the U.S. Navy has enforced in the Gulf for decades. Iran’s position, stated openly by its own negotiators, is that ships will be allowed through, on Iranian terms, for a price Iran sets. Those are not two versions of the same deal. They are two different regimes for who owns the water, and one of them is the regime Iran has spent forty years formally declining to accept.

Iran has already shown what that looks like in practice, and it arrived faster than the sixty-day window even implied. Days after the Islamabad memorandum took effect in mid-June, reopening the strait to commercial traffic, Iran’s Persian Gulf Strait Authority issued binding rules requiring every commercial vessel transiting Hormuz to carry a new category of government-approved hull war insurance, coverage the authority itself would sell. Shipping lawyers quoted in trade press called the requirement a direct violation of the unimpeded-passage guarantee under UNCLOS Article 44, since it amounts to exactly the kind of prior authorization and conditional access that transit passage is supposed to rule out. The insurance was offered free for the moment, but the authority’s own published terms reserved the right to start charging later, and the U.S. Treasury had designated that same authority as an IRGC-linked entity in late May, which means paying it, even for free coverage today, sets up American and allied shippers for a sanctions violation the moment a fee gets attached. In other words: Iran built a mechanism that looks, on paper, like ordinary maritime insurance, but functions as a toll booth with a built-in sanctions trap for anyone who uses the alternative, and it built this mechanism inside the supposedly free sixty-day window the ceasefire was meant to guarantee.

Iran has kept demonstrating that it can enforce its version whenever it wants to. Traffic did recover somewhat through June, helped along by the interim deal and a genuine, if partial, cooling of tensions. Brent crude fell from a March 31 peak near $104 a barrel to under $73 by the end of June, the steepest quarterly drop since the pandemic, as markets priced in the reopening. But the recovery was fragile by design, resting entirely on Iran’s continued willingness to permit it, and Iran kept reminding everyone of that fact. Iranian state media reported a foreign container ship running aground in early July after ignoring Tehran’s designated route, an incident state broadcasters were not shy about using to underline who was still setting the terms. On July 6 and 7, after the U.S. resumed strikes on Iran in response to earlier ship attacks, the IRGC hit at least two commercial vessels in the strait with missiles, a Qatari-flagged LNG carrier and a Saudi-flagged crude tanker among the reported targets. Iran’s own television reported the attack on the LNG vessel had been provoked by the ship ignoring warnings, without Tehran officially claiming responsibility. Even so, traffic data from the tracking firm Kpler showed the strait had not collapsed the way it had in March, logging over a hundred verified crossings across a single weekend even after the missile strikes, evidence that shippers have adapted to operating under continuous risk rather than evidence that the risk is gone.

None of this reads like a country planning to relinquish control of the strait once the paperwork is signed. It reads like a country that discovered, in the space of a few months, that it holds genuine leverage over the global economy and intends to keep some of that leverage regardless of what any memorandum says. Iran’s negotiators have reportedly refused to put its missile arsenal or its regional militia network on the table as part of any settlement, according to CNN’s reporting on the talks, treating both as non-negotiable. A country that will not disarm its missiles is not a country likely to permanently disarm its chokepoint.

There’s a related pattern worth naming, because it shapes how much weight to put on any eventual paper agreement. Iran has spent years building a so-called dark fleet of tankers, ships with disabled tracking transponders, flags of convenience, and ownership structures designed to obscure who is actually moving the cargo, in order to keep exporting oil around Western sanctions. That infrastructure, built over years to evade one set of rules, is precisely the infrastructure a government would keep on hand if it wanted to preserve the option of selectively enforcing, taxing, or blocking passage through the strait regardless of what any American-brokered memorandum says on paper. A country that has already built the tools to move oil quietly around a rules-based system has also built the tools to control access to that system on its own terms when it suits it. Nothing about the ceasefire dismantles that fleet or that infrastructure. It just sits there, available for the next round of leverage.

To be fair to the other side of this argument: talks are, as of this writing, still officially alive. Qatari and Pakistani mediators describe the process as making positive progress. Nobody involved has declared it dead. It’s possible a durable arrangement gets signed that restores something close to normal transit. But “possible” is not the same as “priced in,” and the mine-laying, the missile strikes on tankers, the running port harassment, and the open talk of a transit fee are not the behavior of a party negotiating from a position of eventual full compliance. They are the behavior of a party negotiating from a position of leverage it plans to keep using.

What It Cost, and Who Paid

The New York Times ran the numbers on winners and losers between the war’s start and early May, comparing shipments of oil and fuel against the same period a year earlier. The United States came out ahead by roughly $50 billion in additional export revenue. Russia gained more than $15 billion, on steady export volumes at higher prices. Every Arabian Gulf producer, without exception, saw export volumes fall. Among them, the ones with a way around the strait did better than the ones without. Saudi Arabia, which can push oil overland to the Red Sea, and Oman, which sits on the strait’s open-ocean side by simple geography, saw revenue increase even as volume fell, because higher prices more than made up the difference. Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE, all boxed in with no pipeline alternative, saw both volume and revenue drop. Iran, oddly, saw revenue increase too, in part because it kept moving its own oil even while blocking everyone else’s, a detail worth remembering the next time someone describes the closure as pure self-sacrifice on Iran’s part.

The container trade took its own hit. About 33 million twenty-foot containers move through the Gulf every year to ports across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain, a small slice of global container volume by percentage but a critical one for the region, mostly because of Dubai’s Jebel Ali port, which reroutes cargo across East Africa and South Asia. By early March, tracking firm Kpler counted more than 130 container ships trapped inside the Gulf and another 62 waiting outside the strait, unwilling to enter. When a transshipment hub like Jebel Ali stalls, the disruption doesn’t stay local. It shows up in shipping schedules and warehouse shelves well outside the region.

The price swings tell their own story about how fragile the calm actually was. Brent crude, sitting around $70 a barrel before the February strikes, spiked as high as $119 during the worst of the open fighting in March and April, an increase of roughly 71 percent in a single quarter, according to FactSet data cited by CNN. It then fell back below $73 by the end of June as the interim ceasefire held and traffic partially recovered, the steepest quarterly drop since the pandemic. Even after that drop, a Reuters-referenced spike as talks frayed again in early July pushed Brent back over $106 a barrel for a stretch, according to Al Jazeera’s reporting, while a naval skirmish was still playing out in the strait even with a ceasefire nominally in effect. A commodity that can swing 70 percent in one direction and 40 percent in the other over the course of four months, based entirely on whether one government’s paramilitary force feels like mining a waterway that week, is not a stable input for any economy to plan around, no matter which side of the trade a given country sits on.

The insurance market absorbed its own version of the shock. War-risk premiums, which sat around 0.125 percent of a vessel’s insured value before the war, are the kind of number that looks trivial until you multiply it across a fleet of supertankers making repeated transits, at which point it becomes a meaningful line item in the cost of every barrel that reaches a refinery. Reporting from the period described some shippers negotiating directly with the IRGC for safe passage, at costs reported as high as $2 million per vessel at the war’s peak, a de facto private toll levied by an armed force rather than a state customs agency, and a preview of what a formalized transit fee regime might look like in practice. Shippers who paid that toll once, and lived, are not likely to assume it won’t be demanded again.

Diplomatically, the closure pulled in players with no direct stake in the U.S.-Israel-Iran fight. Australia’s navy chief said in April his forces were ready to help reopen the strait if ordered. Canada issued a statement backing open passage. China, which depends on the strait for a third of its oil, had its own leader personally lobby Saudi Arabia’s crown prince on keeping it open, an unusually direct intervention from Beijing on a security matter outside its own region, and a sign of how little patience China has for a chokepoint problem that hits its own economy this hard. India’s foreign ministry, for its part, welcomed the eventual ceasefire and pressed publicly for unimpeded trade through the strait, a notably direct statement from a government that usually prefers quiet diplomacy on matters involving both Iran and the United States. The United Kingdom hosted a fifty-country conference on reopening the strait in late April and later sent drones, fighter aircraft, and a warship to join an international protection effort. None of these countries had a vote in why the war started. All of them had a stake in how it ended, because all of them depend on water they do not control.

That last point is worth dwelling on, because it is the whole argument in miniature. Fifty nations sending representatives to a conference about reopening a strait none of them administer is fifty governments admitting, in effect, that their own economic stability rests on a decision made by a country actively at war and a paramilitary force answerable to no one outside Tehran. A functioning international system is not supposed to leave that many countries with that little say over something that important. It did here, because it was built that way decades ago and nobody had the occasion to notice how brittle the arrangement was until this spring forced the issue.

Why It Will Not Go Back to What It Was

There’s a temptation, once a ceasefire holds and tanker traffic climbs back toward its old numbers, to treat the crisis as closed and file it under “resolved.” That would be a mistake, for a few concrete reasons.

First, the pricing of risk does not reset just because the shooting stops. Insurers who watched premiums spike to several times their prewar level, and who paid out on tankers actually hit by missiles and mines, do not forget that experience the next time they write a policy for a Gulf transit. Lloyd’s of London did the same thing after the 1980s Tanker War, and Gulf war-risk premiums never fully returned to their pre-1984 baseline even once that conflict ended; underwriters simply built the memory of mined shipping lanes into how they priced the region from then on. There is no reason to expect a different outcome this time, and every reason, given how much more recent and more visually documented this year’s attacks have been, to expect the adjustment to be larger and more durable. Higher baseline war-risk premiums are likely to be a permanent fixture of shipping through Hormuz going forward, a quiet, ongoing tax on global trade that shows up in fuel prices without ever making headlines again.

Second, Iran’s stated intent to charge a transit fee, if it holds, would formalize something the U.S. Navy has spent decades and considerable expense trying to prevent: an Iranian toll booth on international waters. Even a partial version of that arrangement, even one applied selectively, changes the character of the strait from an international waterway policed by norms and naval presence into a corridor where one riparian state extracts rent by threat of force. That is a durable shift in who holds power over the passage, regardless of how the current negotiations are formally described.

Third, buyers remember. China and India built substantial strategic reserves in the run-up to the war, after warning signs accumulated through 2025, and both countries have spent the months since diversifying supply contracts toward producers reachable without crossing the strait, including U.S. Gulf Coast exports and West African crude. Some of that diversification will unwind if things stay calm for a few years. Not all of it will. Once a buyer builds a second source of supply, the second source tends to stick around even after the first source becomes reliable again, because nobody wants to be caught flat-footed twice.

Fourth, and most simply, everyone involved now has direct, recent, personal evidence that the strait can be shut, that shutting it works as a weapon, and that reopening it is not a matter of American resolve alone. Trump was reportedly told this could happen and reportedly assumed it either wouldn’t, or that U.S. force would fix it quickly if it did. Neither assumption survived contact with events. That lesson doesn’t un-teach itself. Every government with oil flowing through Hormuz, and every government buying it on the other end, now knows the chokepoint is real leverage in Iranian hands, not a theoretical one. That knowledge changes long-term planning in Riyadh, Doha, Beijing, and New Delhi whether or not the current ceasefire holds.

Fifth, the war appears to have pushed the Gulf Arab states themselves toward quiet hedging against Iran rather than toward closer alignment with Washington, according to analysis from the Council on Foreign Relations. Few of the Gulf states wanted this war in the first place, and many came away from it more worried that the United States had, in the process of fighting Iran, inadvertently strengthened Iran’s hand over the one resource every Gulf economy depends on. A regional hedge in that direction, non-aggression arrangements between individual Gulf states and Tehran, quieter diplomatic channels that don’t run through Washington, is a rational response to watching the strait get used as a weapon and watching the American security guarantee take months to restore even partial normalcy. It is also a sign that the old assumption, that the U.S. security umbrella over the Gulf is dependable enough to plan an entire regional economy around, took real damage this year regardless of how the current negotiations conclude.

The Navy Cannot Simply Fix This Again

There’s a comforting story available to anyone who wants to believe the strait will eventually return to full normal, and it goes like this: the U.S. Navy handled the Tanker War in the 1980s, it can handle this one too, and once American resolve is fully applied, the chokepoint problem goes away. The reporting from this spring does not support that story.

Torbjorn Soltvedt, an analyst with the risk intelligence firm Verisk Maplecroft, told Fortune in April that securing the strait today is harder than it was during the Tanker War precisely because asymmetric tactics have advanced so much further than the countermeasures built to stop them. Tom Duffy, a former U.S. Navy officer who served during Operation Earnest Will and later spent decades in the Foreign Service, made a related point to the Associated Press: the goals of the 1980s operation were narrow and clearly defined, protect specifically reflagged tankers, while the goals of the current conflict have sprawled into what he described as a kaleidoscope of maximalist aims, regime change among them, that make a clean, bounded naval mission much harder to design. An escort mission only works if everyone agrees on what it’s protecting against and how far it’s allowed to go. Nobody currently agrees on either.

The hardware gap matters too. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has spent years normalizing the use of small, cheap, deniable platforms, fishing-boat-sized craft with machine guns bolted to the bow, backed now by inexpensive drones and short-range missiles that did not exist as a serious threat category in 1988. Meanwhile the U.S. Navy, per reporting relayed through CNN and Al Jazeera, decommissioned four of its dedicated minesweepers assigned to the Arabian Gulf region only last year, leaving a thinner specialized mine-clearing force than the one that struggled to keep pace with Iranian mines forty years ago. Add to that the fact that Iran itself has, by its own admission relayed through state media, lost track of some of the mines it laid this year while trying to clear a path for its own negotiated shipping lanes. A strait that even the country doing the mining can’t fully account for is not a strait any navy can declare clean on a fixed schedule, American promises notwithstanding.

None of this is an argument that the U.S. Navy is incapable or that escort operations are pointless. Operation Earnest Will did eventually work, at real cost, over roughly fourteen months. It’s an argument against treating “the Navy will handle it” as a substitute for reducing exposure to the problem in the first place. A security guarantee that takes over a year to make good on, against an adversary with better weapons than it had the last time, is not the kind of guarantee a global economy should be content to rest a fifth of its energy supply on indefinitely.

The Other Chokepoint

Hormuz is not the only stretch of water this argument runs through, and treating it as an isolated crisis misses how much of the same story has been playing out, quietly, at the other end of the Arabian Peninsula. About 1,300 miles southwest of Hormuz sits the Bab el-Mandeb, a strait barely 18 miles wide at its narrowest point, connecting the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and, through it, the Suez Canal to the Indian Ocean. Before any of this year’s fighting started, something like 10 percent of global seaborne trade moved through the Red Sea corridor, most of it container traffic and a meaningful share of oil headed to Europe. If Hormuz is the drainpipe for Gulf energy, the Bab el-Mandeb is the drainpipe for the shortest sea route between Asia and Europe. Lose it, and a container ship either takes its chances or adds roughly 11,000 nautical miles and ten days to its voyage by going around the Cape of Good Hope, at an added fuel cost of around a million dollars per trip.

Iran-backed Houthi forces in Yemen started doing exactly that math for shippers back in November 2023, launching missiles and drones at vessels they associated with Israel in solidarity with the war in Gaza, then widening the target list to any ship whose owner, operator, or corporate family had called at an Israeli port. According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, the Houthis attacked 178 vessels over roughly two years of the campaign, sinking four ships and killing nine sailors. The worst of it came in July 2025, when Houthi forces sank the bulk carriers Magic Seas and Eternity C off Hodeidah, killing four seafarers between the two sinkings. The economic ripple was enormous even before this year’s war touched the region: the Russell Group estimated roughly $1 trillion in goods were disrupted by Houthi attacks between October 2023 and May 2024 alone, monthly transits through the Suez Canal fell from over 2,000 ships to under 900, and by early 2025 something close to half of all vessels bound from Asia to Europe were routing around Africa rather than risk the Red Sea at all.

When the U.S. and Israel opened their war on Iran this February, the obvious question was whether the Houthis would fully reopen this second front. They mostly didn’t, and the reason is instructive. The Houthis are also fighting their own long-running civil war inside Yemen and, per reporting picked up by Wikipedia’s tracking of the crisis, were reluctant to stretch themselves across multiple simultaneous fights even while making supportive statements about Iran and firing at least one ballistic missile at Israel in late March. They warned repeatedly that a full Bab el-Mandeb closure was “likely” if the war escalated sharply or if Gulf Arab states joined it directly, a threat that functioned as much as leverage as commitment. Even short of a full closure, the threat alone was enough: shipping through the strait stayed well below its already-depressed prewar volume straight through the spring, and a standing U.S. maritime advisory covering the Red Sea, the Bab el-Mandeb, the Gulf of Aden, the Arabian Sea, and the Somali Basin, reissued in March 2026 and still in effect as of this writing, warns that vessels flying flags or carrying corporate links tied to Israel remain live targets. Strikes on the merchant vessels Tavvishi and Norderney in the Gulf of Aden in early June, months after the main Iran war had nominally quieted down, showed the threat was never theoretical to begin with. Houthi leadership called the eventual U.S.-Iran ceasefire a victory for what it termed the Axis of Resistance, while explicitly reserving the right to resume full attacks depending on how things developed.

There’s a second-order consequence to all of this that gets less attention than the missile strikes themselves, and it matters just as much for the argument this piece is making: Somali piracy is back. For roughly the past decade, the naval task forces built to suppress piracy off the Horn of Africa, the European Union’s Operation Atalanta and the multinational Combined Task Force 151 among them, had mostly succeeded, to the point that shippers had grown comfortable treating the threat as a closed chapter. Once the Houthi campaign began in late 2023, those same naval assets and the intelligence and surveillance capacity that supported them got pulled toward the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb, where the more urgent, higher-profile threat to shipping and to Western warships was unfolding. That left a thinner security presence off Somalia at precisely the moment traffic patterns shifted, with more vessels diverting around the Cape of Good Hope and passing closer to the Somali coast than they had in years.

Pirate action groups based in Puntland noticed. By spring 2026, according to reporting picked up by Deutsche Welle and Cyprus Mail, three vessels, the tankers Honour 25 and Eureka and the cargo ship Sward, had been hijacked off Somalia and nearby Yemen within a span of weeks, with 44 seafarers held captive across the three ships and the International Maritime Organization publicly calling for their release. The pirates are, by multiple accounts, considerably better resourced than the last generation that operated in these waters. Analysts at the risk consultancy Castor Vali describe pirate groups using hijacked dhows as motherships, extending their operational range to as far as 900 nautical miles offshore, equipped with GPS, satellite communications, and functioning ransom-negotiation infrastructure on land. A United Nations Panel of Experts assessment, cited by multiple outlets covering the region, went further, describing a transactional arrangement in which the Houthis have supplied weapons and training to the al-Shabaab militant network in exchange for al-Shabaab facilitating and brokering piracy operations along the Puntland coast, a genuinely strange alliance across the Sunni-Shia divide held together by the fact that both sides profit from instability in the same stretch of water. Add in a separate policy shift, a sharp cut to U.S. non-security development aid to Somali coastal communities under the current administration, and the old toolkit for keeping young men out of pirate crews has weakened at the same time the naval toolkit for stopping them once they’re at sea has thinned out.

None of this is a coincidence, and none of it is unrelated to the Hormuz story. It is the same underlying pattern, playing out on a second chokepoint at the same time: a state actor, Iran through its Houthi proxy, discovers that threatening a narrow stretch of water produces outsized leverage over global trade at relatively low cost, and the international response, built for a calmer decade, turns out to have too few ships and too little coordinated authority to cover more than one crisis at a time.

This is where a piece of now-defunct infrastructure is worth naming directly, because it was built for exactly this compound problem and no longer exists to handle it. In 2019, after a string of tanker attacks and seizures in the Gulf widely attributed to Iran, the United States assembled a coalition called the International Maritime Security Construct, known operationally as Coalition Task Force Sentinel, headquartered in Bahrain and built around U.S. Naval Forces Central Command and the Navy’s 5th Fleet, with naval assets contributed by partner nations including the United Kingdom, Australia, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Albania, and later a run of Baltic and other states. Its stated mission, in the words of the officers who stood it up, was to deter state-sponsored malign maritime activity and reassure the merchant shipping industry across precisely the two chokepoints this article has spent the most time on: the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb, along with the wider Arabian Gulf, Gulf of Oman, Gulf of Aden, and southern Red Sea. It worked by pooling large coalition warships to watch the choke points directly, smaller patrol vessels to cover the water between them, and constant maritime awareness communication with the merchant fleet passing through, all under a shared coalition headquarters rather than any single nation’s flag. By the account of the officers who built it, the arrangement produced a real, measurable drop in state-sponsored attacks on merchant shipping in the years after it stood up.

Operational command of the coalition’s task force was eventually handed over to the Royal Saudi Naval Force, a transition that put a Gulf Arab country, rather than the United States or the United Kingdom, in the seat that had run day-to-day coordination since the coalition’s founding. In the years that followed, the construct was wound down, and the dedicated coalition mechanism built specifically to counter state-sponsored malign activity across both Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb at once no longer exists in the form it once did. That is a strange thing to have happened right before both chokepoints turned into live crises simultaneously, one closed by direct Iranian military action, the other kept in a state of chronic low-grade siege by an Iranian proxy, with a piracy resurgence opening up in the gap the naval reshuffling left behind. Whatever the reasoning behind handing the operational lead to Saudi Arabia and subsequently standing the coalition down, the practical result is that the one institution purpose-built to treat Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb as a single, coordinated maritime security problem was not there when both of them needed it at the same time.

A Structural Problem

Here is where the diagnosis needs to widen. The standard framing of this crisis treats it as a failure of diplomacy, or a failure of deterrence, or a failure of whichever administration happened to be making the calls when the missiles started flying. Those framings aren’t wrong, but they miss the deeper design flaw, which is this: the global economy built a single, unavoidable bottleneck for a fifth of its energy supply, routed it through a country actively hostile to the parties depending on it, and then treated the arrangement as stable because it had worked, more or less, for several decades.

That was never a resilient system. It was a system that worked until it didn’t, propped up by the assumption that no one would actually pull the trigger on a closure this costly to everyone, including Iran. 2026 answered that assumption. The strait can be closed. It has been closed. The country doing the closing does not appear inclined to fully give up the leverage, even under direct military pressure and a signed ceasefire. A system with one point of failure that large, sitting inside the territory of a government with every incentive to use it as a weapon, is not a system anyone should want to depend on more than they have to.

This is where the fix stops being a matter for the State Department and starts being a matter for everyone downstream of the pipeline, which is to say, everyone. The reflexive answer to a supply shock like this is more government: a bigger strategic petroleum reserve, more naval escorts, another round of sanctions, another administration promising to secure the region once and for all. Some of that may be necessary in the narrow, genuinely coercive sense, keeping sea lanes open against armed threats is closer to the legitimate core of government than most of what governments actually spend their time on. But “the Navy keeps the strait open” has been the plan for fifty years, and the plan just got tested and came up short for months at a stretch. Betting the next fifty years on the same plan working better next time is not a serious strategy. It’s a hope dressed up as a strategy.

It also mistakes the level at which the actual failure occurred. The failure this spring wasn’t that the U.S. government lacked resolve, or lacked ships, or lacked allies willing to show up to a conference in London. The failure was structural: too much of the world’s daily functioning had been quietly wired through one 21-mile channel, and nobody with the power to change that wiring had much incentive to do so while the channel stayed open. Fixing that after the fact with a bigger reserve and a bigger fleet treats the symptom. It doesn’t touch the underlying design choice, which was letting one government’s paramilitary force hold effective veto power over a fifth of the planet’s energy trade in the first place. That design choice gets made again, quietly, every year that passes without anyone downstream doing something to reduce their own exposure to it.

Building the Alternative

The honest answer is not “trust the next administration to manage the Gulf better.” It’s reducing how much the ordinary functioning of daily life depends on a strip of water controlled, in practice, by whoever is willing to mine it.

Some of that work is already happening, driven not by federal mandate but by plain self-interest at the level of companies, utilities, and communities. Domestic U.S. oil and gas production has grown enough over the past fifteen years that America’s own direct exposure to a Hormuz closure is now a rounding error, well under 10 percent of crude imports even before the war, a fraction of what it was in the 1970s. That shift happened because private firms found it profitable to drill differently, not because Washington decided the country needed less Gulf oil. It’s a useful model for the rest of the fix: resilience built by people with something to lose, not resilience mandated from a committee room.

The same logic applies at smaller scale. A household, a business, or a town that generates a meaningful share of its own power, through rooftop solar, a local cooperative, distributed natural gas turbines, or in the longer run small modular nuclear, is not waiting on a tanker that has to cross a minefield to keep the lights on. A community that has invested in local fuel storage, in weatherization, in genuinely diversified regional suppliers instead of a single low-cost import contract, absorbs a price shock like the one this spring without missing a bill. None of this requires a new federal energy program. It requires the same instinct that built volunteer fire departments and mutual aid societies long before anyone thought to ask government to do it for them: don’t wait for the distant institution to guarantee your supply chain when you can build a shorter, sturdier one yourself.

Credit unions and community development financial institutions have quietly been doing a version of this for decades in the money supply, keeping capital local and accountable instead of routed through institutions with no stake in the outcome if it goes wrong. Energy security could stand to borrow the same instinct. A cooperative that owns its own generation and storage, answerable to the members who depend on it, is not exposed to a decision made by the IRGC in a Doha hotel room. A national grid dependent on imported fuel routed through a single foreign-controlled strait is exposed to exactly that, and has now proven it.

Worth separating out here is the difference between the two levels at which “less dependent” actually operates, because they call for different institutions. The first level is national: refining capacity, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, domestic production, and pipeline infrastructure that lets the largest oil producers bypass the strait entirely. Keeping sea lanes navigable for commerce, and maintaining the reserve as a genuine buffer against a supply shock, sits closer to the legitimate core of what government exists to do, alongside courts and physical security, than most of what federal agencies actually spend their budgets on. There’s a real argument for that reserve staying well stocked and well managed, rather than drawn down for short-term political convenience the way it has been in past administrations. That is a narrow, defensible role, and it’s worth saying so plainly rather than pretending every government function related to energy is equally illegitimate.

The second level, and the one that gets neglected precisely because the first one exists, is everything below the national reserve: the household, the business, the town, the region. This is where waiting on Washington becomes a habit rather than a necessity. A manufacturer that keeps sixty days of fuel on-site instead of relying on just-in-time delivery isn’t doing it because a federal mandate told it to. It’s doing it because the owner watched a tanker get hit by a missile in April and decided the math on carrying extra inventory had changed. A rural electric cooperative that invests in local battery storage and a mix of wind, solar, and gas peaking capacity isn’t executing a climate policy. It’s doing what mutual, member-owned utilities have always done: building buffer against the day the far-off supply gets interrupted, because the people making the decision are the same people who lose power if they guess wrong. That is the difference between an institution accountable to the people it serves and one accountable to a budget cycle and a news cycle.

This is also where the instinct that built volunteer fire departments, granges, and mutual aid societies translates directly. None of those institutions waited for a state agency to decide a town needed fire protection or crop insurance before organizing to provide it. They organized because the people exposed to the risk were the ones best positioned to see it clearly and best motivated to solve it durably, without waiting on a distant office to notice the problem existed. Energy resilience is the same kind of problem. The Gulf states that avoided the worst of this spring, Saudi Arabia with its pipeline to the Red Sea, the UAE with its Fujairah terminal, didn’t build those routes because Washington told them to diversify. They built them because they had already learned, from decades of living next to Iran, that a single chokepoint was a liability they controlled and Iran didn’t. Households, businesses, and towns far from the Gulf can apply the identical logic at a smaller scale: don’t hand your fate to a waterway you have no vote over, when a local backup, however partial, is within reach.

None of this means autarky, and none of it means pretending global trade in energy will or should disappear. Trade through Hormuz will keep happening, because the alternative, moving 20 million barrels a day some other way, doesn’t exist at scale. The point isn’t zero dependence. The point is proportion. A country, a company, or a household that treats the strait as one source among several, buffered by storage, diversified suppliers, and local generation, rides out a closure. One that has built its whole plan around the strait staying open forever gets the kind of spring this year just delivered: price shocks, stranded ships, and a government that discovered its guarantees were worth less than advertised.

The same logic applies to the shipping routes themselves, not just the energy moving through them. A retailer or manufacturer that has spent the past two years building a second supply chain that doesn’t route through the Bab el-Mandeb, even at a real cost premium, was in a far better position this spring than one that treated the Suez shortcut as permanent. The container lines that quietly kept a Cape of Good Hope option warm through 2024 and 2025, even while it cost them time and fuel, were the ones with somewhere to go when Hormuz seized up too and both of the region’s major chokepoints turned hostile in the same calendar year. That is the whole resilience argument in one sentence: the backup route that looks wasteful in a calm year is the one that saves you in a bad one, and nobody hands you that backup route for free. You build it, or you do without it when the water closes.

The Lesson

The Strait of Hormuz is not going to feel the same again to anyone who was paying attention this year. Not to the shipping insurers who now price war risk as a permanent line item instead of a rare exception. Not to the Asian buyers who spent 2026 discovering how fast a fifth of their oil supply can vanish. Not to the Gulf states without a pipeline alternative, who learned exactly how much their economic fate depends on a country that just spent months proving it will use the strait as a weapon rather than surrender it as a formality. And not to the American public, who watched a Joint Chiefs warning about exactly this scenario get waved off, watched the warning prove accurate, and are now being asked to trust that the next guarantee will hold better than the last one did.

It won’t, necessarily. Maybe the current talks produce a lasting deal. Maybe Iran backs off the transit fee. Maybe the strait settles back into something resembling its old rhythm for another decade or two before the next crisis. History gives some reason to expect exactly that kind of uneasy, temporary calm; the Tanker War also ended in a ceasefire, and shipping through the Gulf did eventually resume something like its old volume. But “eventually resumes” is not the same as “goes back to what it was.” Insurance premiums stayed elevated for years after the 1980s fighting stopped. Navies kept a heavier permanent presence in the Gulf from then on. Nobody who lived through it treated the strait as a simple, guaranteed artery again, and the people who ran shipping companies, oil majors, and national reserves built that caution into how they operated for a generation afterward. There is no reason to expect this year’s crisis, fought with better weapons and covered in far more real-time detail, to fade any faster.

None of that changes the structural fact underneath all of it: a fifth of the world’s oil and gas passes through water controlled, in practice, by a government hostile to most of the people depending on that oil and gas, and there is no version of diplomacy that permanently removes that fact from the table. Signing a memorandum doesn’t unmine a strait. It doesn’t unlearn a lesson the IRGC just spent months teaching everyone downstream: that this water is a weapon, that the weapon works, and that the price of using it, so far, has been survivable for Tehran. The only durable answer to a lesson like that is depending on it less, one household, one utility, one community at a time, built by the people who actually bear the cost when the water closes, not promised by the people who happen to be in office when it does. Governments will keep negotiating over the strait because that is what governments do. The rest of us would do well to spend less time waiting on the outcome.

That test is disappearing, on purpose, one product category at a time. It’s disappearing in video games, where Sony and Nintendo have spent the last several years quietly walking away from physical media. It’s disappearing in books, movies, and music, where “purchase” now means “revocable license” and the fine print says so in plain English if you bother to read it. It’s disappearing in cars, where a feature that is bolted into the vehicle at the factory can be switched off by a server in Munich until you agree to pay a monthly fee to switch it back on. It’s disappearing in farm equipment, where a broken sensor on a combine can leave a man standing in his own field, staring at a $500,000 machine he is not permitted to fix. And it’s under quiet pressure in housing, where a growing share of the single-family home stock in some markets has become a financial instrument for a small number of large institutional owners rather than shelter that a family holds free and clear.

None of this happened by accident. Ownership is inconvenient for the modern balance sheet. A thing you own is a thing a company only gets to sell you once. A thing you rent, license, or subscribe to is a thing a company gets to sell you forever, and can take back the moment the terms stop being profitable. The shift from owning to licensing isn’t a technology story. It’s a business model story, dressed up in the language of convenience, and it has been remarkably successful because most people never read the paperwork until the day the thing they thought they owned stops working, disappears from their library, or gets a bill attached to it that wasn’t there yesterday.

This piece is about why that shift matters, why the video game industry is the clearest and most instructive example of it, and what an individual person can actually do about a trend that looks, from where most of us are standing, unstoppable.

It is worth saying plainly, before going further, that this is not a complaint about capitalism, markets, or the profit motive itself. Companies exist to make money, and there is nothing wrong with that. The problem here is narrower and more specific: a business practice that quietly redefines what “buying” a thing means, without the buyer’s informed consent, in a way that transfers risk from the seller to the customer after the money has already changed hands. A farmer who buys a tractor should get a tractor, not a decade-long service relationship with a locked-out diagnostic port. A reader who buys a book should get a book, not a revocable license dressed up in the language of a sale. The dishonesty in the transaction, not the existence of the transaction, is the actual complaint.

It isn’t unstoppable. But stopping it, or even just slowing it down, is not going to come from Sacramento or Brussels. It’s going to come from people making different choices with their own money, forming the habits and small institutions that keep ownership alive at the local level, and refusing to treat “convenient” and “good” as the same word.

Sony, Nintendo, and the quiet death of the disc

Start with the numbers, because the numbers tell the story better than any press release ever will.

In the United States, spending on physical video game software peaked in 2008 at $11.6 billion. By 2025, it had fallen to roughly $1.5 billion, the lowest level recorded since tracking began in 1995, an 87 percent collapse from peak. The steepest single-year drop came in 2024, when physical spending fell 28 percent in twelve months, according to Circana analyst Mat Piscatella, who has tracked the category for years. Globally the story rhymes. Physical game revenue fell roughly 25 percent over three years to about $11 billion in 2024, and on PC, physical media now accounts for about 1 percent of the market. It is, for practical purposes, gone. In the UK, boxed game sales fell 35 percent year over year in 2024 and now make up barely a tenth of new game sales.

That decline was not simply consumers voting with their wallets in a fair fight between two equally available options. It was engineered. Console makers have spent a console generation making the disc-based option progressively less convenient, less complete, and less available, while making the digital option the default, the cheaper option, and eventually, on some hardware, the only option.

Consider what actually happens when you buy a “physical” copy of a big game today. On Nintendo’s new Switch 2, a category of retail product called the Game-Key Card has become common for major third-party releases. The box looks normal. The cartridge looks normal. You take it home, you put it in the console, and the console tells you it now needs to download the actual game over the internet, because the cartridge itself is empty. It’s a key, not a copy. You need an internet connection, you need enough free storage, and you need the servers to still be running, because if Nintendo’s download infrastructure for that title ever goes dark, that “physical” cartridge in your hand becomes an inert piece of plastic with nothing behind it. One enthusiast press outlet summed up the arrangement as managing to combine the worst qualities of physical and digital ownership at once: you still have to carry a cartridge around, and you still don’t actually have the game on it.

Sony’s approach has been more direct: just take the digital purchases back. In 2022, Sony removed hundreds of previously purchased StudioCanal films from PlayStation libraries in Germany and Austria, citing a change in its content licensing arrangements, a year after assuring customers their existing purchases were safe. In December 2023, Sony announced it would delete more than 1,300 seasons of Discovery programming, including Deadliest Catch and MythBusters, from every customer’s library on December 31 of that year, “due to our content licensing arrangements with content providers.” No offer of a refund, no equivalent replacement, just a sentence thanking customers for their continued support on the way out the door. Sony reversed course after the backlash reached the New York Times and California’s legislature, but the reversal was a public relations decision, not a change in the underlying architecture. The architecture still allows Sony to do this whenever it wants, and in the summer of 2026, Sony did it again, announcing the removal of more than 550 purchased films, including Terminator 2, from customer libraries. There is currently no way to back up a purchased PlayStation video file to any device you control. It exists only where Sony permits it to exist, for exactly as long as Sony permits it.

Ubisoft has provided the cleanest case study of what “always online” actually means for ownership. The Crew, an always-online racing game released in 2014, was delisted from digital storefronts in December 2023 and had its servers shut down entirely by March 2024, a decade after release, rendering the game completely unplayable for everyone who had purchased it, with no refunds offered. Ubisoft’s legal position, stated plainly in court filings, is that customers who bought The Crew never bought a game. They bought a license to access a game, a license Ubisoft was always entitled to revoke. That argument sparked a consumer movement called Stop Killing Games, which has since gathered more than 1.3 million verified signatures on a European Citizens’ Initiative, enough to force a formal review by the European Commission, and has drawn lawsuits in both France and the United States. A French consumer association, UFC-Que Choisir, is now suing Ubisoft directly, arguing the company’s terms are deceptive and its contract clauses abusive. A companion effort in the United States, California’s Protect Our Games Act, which would have required 60 days’ notice before a game’s servers went dark and either an offline mode or a refund, failed in the state senate after industry lobbying, with the Entertainment Software Association reportedly arguing, among other things, that the bill could criminalize hobbyists running private Minecraft servers.

Set aside for a moment whether you have ever played The Crew or care about video games at all. The legal argument being made in that courtroom is the argument being made, in slightly different language, in every industry covered in this piece: you did not buy the thing, you bought temporary permission to use the thing, and the company that sold it to you retains the right to take it back whenever its own business needs change. That argument, if it wins, doesn’t stay contained to video games. It’s a template.

Why any of this matters, beyond nostalgia for game boxes

The easy dismissal here is that this is a hobbyist’s complaint, a bunch of grown men upset about cartridges. That dismissal misses the actual stakes, which have nothing to do with nostalgia and everything to do with what it means to possess something free of anyone else’s continuing say-so.

Physical ownership carries a specific legal protection that digital licensing does not: the first sale doctrine. Once you buy a physical copy of a copyrighted work, you’re free to resell it, lend it, give it away, or destroy it, without asking the copyright holder’s permission and without paying them again. That doctrine is why used bookstores, video rental stores, libraries, and GameStop trade-ins have ever been legal at all. It is a genuinely old idea, dating to a 1908 Supreme Court case, and it exists because the courts long ago recognized that a seller who has already been paid once shouldn’t get to control what happens to an object after it leaves their hands.

There is no equivalent doctrine for digital goods, and courts have been unwilling to invent one. In Capitol Records v. ReDigi, a company that tried to build a legal marketplace for reselling used digital music files was sued out of existence, with the courts ruling that transferring a digital file necessarily involves making a copy, which infringes copyright regardless of whether the original is deleted. The practical result is that a digital purchase can never become a used good. It cannot depreciate gracefully into someone else’s hands the way a paperback or a used car does. It can only be revoked, restricted, or abandoned. Amazon’s own current purchase terms for Kindle books state plainly that a customer is buying a license, not a copy, and that license can be modified or restricted at Amazon’s discretion. Amazon proved this wasn’t hypothetical back in 2009, when it remotely deleted purchased copies of Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from customers’ Kindles over a rights dispute, an irony that has never stopped being pointed out and never stopped being true.

This matters for reasons well beyond the annoyance of losing a book or a movie. A right that depends on someone else’s continued goodwill is not a right. It’s a favor, and favors get withdrawn. When ownership becomes licensing, four things change, quietly, underneath the surface of everyday life.

First, permanence disappears. A thing you own exists on your terms, in your closet, on your shelf, until you decide otherwise. A thing you license exists on the licensor’s terms, subject to a business decision you had no part in and no warning about. Your relationship to your own possessions becomes conditional.

Second, resale and lending disappear. The ability to sell what you no longer want or lend what a friend needs is not a convenience. It’s a form of economic self-sufficiency, a small private safety valve that lets people get value back out of things they paid for, and lets other people get access to those things at a price below retail. Kill the secondary market, and you’ve quietly transferred that value entirely to the manufacturer, who now sells every copy at full price to every buyer, forever, with no leakage.

Third, preservation disappears. When Sony deletes a licensed catalog, or Ubisoft kills a server, or Nintendo’s download infrastructure eventually goes dark on some future console nobody’s built yet, the work in question doesn’t become unavailable in some markets. It stops existing, period, for anyone, unless someone broke the law to preserve a copy beforehand. Culture and history, in a digital-license world, exist entirely at the pleasure of whichever corporation currently holds the rights, and corporations do not have a business incentive to preserve things that aren’t currently profitable.

The scale of that loss, once you go looking for it, is startling. The Video Game History Foundation, working with the Software Preservation Network and researchers at the University of Washington, surveyed a random sample of over 1,500 games released in the United States before 2010 and found that only about 13 percent remained available through any legal, easily accessible channel, whether reissue, remaster, or digital re-release. The other 87 percent are simply gone from the legitimate market, retrievable only through piracy or the increasingly difficult work of keeping decades-old hardware alive. That overall figure puts video games behind the survival rate of American silent films and only slightly ahead of pre-World War II audio recordings, which is a genuinely strange place for a $180 billion industry to find itself. The numbers get worse the further you drill down. Less than 3 percent of games released before 1985 are still in print. Only 4.5 percent of the Commodore 64 library survives commercially. And when Nintendo shut down the 3DS eShop, a single corporate decision to flip a switch on a storefront, it wiped out more than half of all commercially available Game Boy family titles in one stroke, because so much of that catalog’s legal availability existed nowhere but on that one server. This is what a licensing-based economy does to a culture’s own memory of itself over time. It doesn’t destroy the culture all at once. It just quietly stops maintaining the archive, because maintaining an archive of something no longer selling isn’t a line item any shareholder is asking to see funded.

Fourth, and this is the one that matters most for how people actually live, dependency replaces self-reliance. Ownership is a small daily exercise in personal sovereignty. It means the tools, media, and machines in your life answer to you and nobody else. Licensing means the tools, media, and machines in your life answer to a company’s terms of service, updated unilaterally, agreed to by a click you don’t remember making. Multiply that arrangement across every category of a person’s material life, their car, their books, their appliances, their farm equipment, and you get a population that has been quietly trained out of the expectation that things should belong to them at all. That is not a small cultural shift. That is the erosion of a habit of mind that underwrites a free and self-governing people: the assumption that a person’s own effort and money entitle them to actual, unconditional possession of the fruits of that effort.

The pattern repeats everywhere you look

Video games are simply the loudest and most well-documented example of a pattern that has already colonized most of the American consumer economy.

Cars. BMW spent from 2020 to 2023 charging a monthly or annual subscription fee to activate heated seats that were already installed in the car at the factory, the hardware fully present and functioning, gated behind a paywall that could be switched on or off remotely. Customer revolt eventually forced BMW to drop the specific heated-seat subscription, with a company sales executive admitting that “user acceptance isn’t that high” when people feel they’re paying twice for something already bolted into their car. But BMW has been explicit that it remains, in its own words, “fully committed” to subscription features generally through its ConnectedDrive platform, and Mercedes-Benz currently sells a $1,200-a-year subscription that unlocks an extra 20 to 24 percent of horsepower on certain electric models, an engine capability the car already physically possesses, gated behind a monthly toll. Industry analysts project the automotive subscription-features market to grow from roughly $9 billion in 2024 to nearly $800 billion by 2032. That is not a market responding to consumer demand. That is a market responding to the discovery that a car, once it’s connected to the internet, can be metered like a utility instead of sold like a possession.

Farm equipment. John Deere and a small number of other manufacturers dominate the market for large tractors and combines, and for over a decade, they have used proprietary onboard computers to prevent farmers and independent mechanics from performing their own repairs, forcing farmers to wait, sometimes days, for an authorized dealer to arrive, at harvest-critical moments when a delay can cost tens of thousands of dollars in lost yield. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s office estimated the cost of Deere’s repair restrictions to farmers at over $4 billion a year. Colorado became the first state to pass a right-to-repair law covering farm equipment, effective January 2024, forcing manufacturers to sell the same diagnostic tools and software access to farmers and independent shops that authorized dealers already have. Deere settled a related class-action suit in 2025 for $99 million, a sum critics noted amounts to less than a dollar an acre across the years the restrictions were in effect, and the FTC, joined by the attorneys general of Illinois and Minnesota, has since sued Deere directly over the practice. As of early 2025, more than a dozen additional states were considering similar legislation, after industry lobbying groups had spent years signing non-binding memoranda of understanding designed specifically to head off actual binding law.

Digital media generally. The Amazon Kindle situation described above is not an isolated incident. It’s the standard model now, formalized. As of late 2025, Amazon’s own purchase language explicitly tells customers they are buying a license, not a book, one Amazon can restrict, modify, or revoke. Amazon has also progressively removed the ability to download and back up purchased ebooks onto a device you control, meaning your “library” exists entirely inside Amazon’s ecosystem, readable only on Amazon’s terms, for as long as Amazon finds it convenient to keep serving it to you.

Music. Music actually offers a useful contrast to everything else in this piece, because for once the data shows people pushing back with their own money, not just complaining about it. The RIAA’s 2024 year-end report put U.S. recorded music revenue at $17.7 billion, and streaming accounted for 84 percent of that, the same as the last three years running. Digital downloads, the era of buying an individual song or album as a file, have all but died on their own. That category brought in $336 million in 2024, down 18 percent from the year before, and now makes up about 2 percent of the market. Back in 2012, it was 43 percent. Buying a digital song, it turns out, never really solved the ownership problem to begin with. It just moved the same license-not-a-copy arrangement into a smaller file. There’s no functioning digital-first sale doctrine for music either, a point the courts made explicit when they shut down ReDigi’s attempt to build a legal resale marketplace for used MP3s. And when Google decided to fold Google Play Music into YouTube Music in 2020, anyone who’d spent a decade buying tracks through the store got a deadline, February 24, 2021, to manually migrate everything or lose it. A purchase, in that arrangement, is really just a countdown clock with better manners than most.

Vinyl is the part of this story worth paying attention to. It has now grown for eighteen straight years, hit $1.4 billion in 2024, the highest number since 1984, and outsold CDs for the third year running, 44 million records to 33 million discs. Nobody is claiming vinyl offers better convenience. It doesn’t. It’s heavier, it scratches, and you can’t take it jogging. What it offers instead is a record that belongs to you, permanently, regardless of what any company does with its servers, its catalog, or its licensing deals. A growing number of people, including plenty who weren’t alive the first time vinyl was popular, have looked at that trade and decided the inconvenience is worth it. That’s not nostalgia. That’s a market quietly telling you what ownership is actually worth once people understand what they’re giving up without it.

Streaming and finished creative work. This is a related but distinct wrinkle worth including, because it shows the same corporate logic operating on culture itself, not just on the individual consumer’s copy of it. In 2022, Warner Bros. Discovery shelved the completed, tested, $90 million Batgirl film entirely, never releasing it anywhere, in order to book it as a tax write-off. A year later, the studio tried the same move with the finished, well-tested Looney Tunes film Coyote vs. Acme, taking an estimated $30 million write-off on a movie that had already screened successfully with audiences, until public backlash and a member of Congress calling the move “predatory and anti-competitive” forced the studio to let the film be shopped to other buyers instead. Disney quietly removed dozens of original movies and series from Disney+ the same year for similar accounting reasons. None of this is about a customer’s individual purchase being revoked. It’s the same underlying principle at one remove: a finished, paid-for piece of culture, work that real people spent years making, can simply be deleted from existence because a balance sheet prefers it that way, and the audience that would have watched it has no more say in the matter than a Kindle owner has over Amazon’s licensing terms. Ownership, in this case, was never even offered. The work belonged to the studio outright, and the studio decided the public would be better off never seeing it at all.

Housing. This one deserves a more careful accounting than the loudest headlines usually give it, because the honest data is more nuanced than the popular narrative, and a serious argument doesn’t need to overstate its case. Institutional investors as a whole own a small fraction of the national single-family housing stock, something on the order of half a percent nationally according to industry and bank research, and the largest player, Blackstone, holds roughly 0.06 percent of all single-family homes in the country. Institutional purchases of single-family homes have actually fallen more than 90 percent since 2022, and some of the largest firms in the space report being net sellers rather than net buyers in the current market. Anyone arguing that a shadowy cabal of Wall Street landlords is single-handedly responsible for the national affordability crisis is not describing the topline numbers accurately.

But the topline national number obscures the part of the story that is real and worth taking seriously: institutional ownership is not evenly distributed. It concentrates hard in specific metro submarkets, particularly across the Sun Belt, where a small number of large operators can own a meaningful share of the starter-home inventory in a given zip code, enough to move local rents and local competition for entry-level buyers even while the national percentage stays tiny. The concern was serious enough that in January 2026 an executive order was signed specifically to restrict large institutional buyers from purchasing single-family homes, a sign that the political pressure around this issue, deserved or not at the national scale, has become bipartisan and real. The deeper and better-supported story isn’t that a small number of large landlords are buying up America. It’s that decades of restrictive zoning, permitting bottlenecks, and construction costs have suppressed new housing supply so severely, an estimated national shortfall in the millions of units, that even a modest, concentrated increase in large-scale buying in undersupplied markets is enough to visibly worsen an affordability crisis that was already structural. The institutional buyer isn’t the root cause. It’s a symptom that shows up faster and more visibly than the slow-moving supply failure underneath it, and it converts what used to be a starter home, a rung on a ladder a family climbed and eventually owned outright, into a permanent rental unit managed by a portfolio company answering to shareholders instead of neighbors.

Software and everything attached to it. Adobe moved its entire product suite to subscription-only pricing over a decade ago, and the rest of the software industry followed almost in lockstep, because a subscription converts a single sale into a regular, renewing revenue stream and, not incidentally, gives the seller leverage to raise the price at will on customers who have already built years of workflow, files, and institutional habit around the product. Printer manufacturers have rolled out ink subscriptions that disable a printer’s ability to print at all if a monthly fee lapses, even if there’s a full cartridge sitting in the machine. Smart home devices and appliances routinely get “bricked,” rendered nonfunctional, when a manufacturer decides to shut down the cloud servers the device depends on to do things a simple mechanical version of the same product would have done without any server at all.

The specifics differ by industry. The underlying move is identical every time: take something that used to be a discrete, finished, owned object, wire it into a server or a subscription the seller controls, and convert a single transaction into a permanent toll booth. Do this widely enough, across cars and books and tractors and homes and kitchen appliances, and you have re-engineered the basic relationship a person has with the material world around them, from ownership to permission.

The economics behind the disappearing act, in plain terms

None of this is mysterious once you look at who benefits and who bears the cost, which is the honest way to read almost any corporate decision that gets dressed up in the language of customer convenience.

A one-time sale of a physical product has a natural ceiling. Sony sells you a disc once. GameStop resells that disc to someone else, and Sony makes nothing on the second sale. The used market, the lending, the trade-ins, all of it represents revenue Sony never sees, revenue that instead flows to the used game store, or to the friend who borrowed your copy for a weekend instead of buying his own. From a publisher’s perspective, a healthy secondary market for physical goods is leakage. It’s money escaping the system.

Digital-only distribution plugs that leak completely. There is no used copy of a digital license. There is no trade-in value, no lending, no garage sale. Every single person who ever plays that game pays full retail price directly to the publisher, with no intermediary and no resale competition ever eating into that revenue. Add a server dependency on top, and the publisher gains a second lever: the ability to sunset the product entirely once it stops being profitable to support, freeing up infrastructure costs with no obligation to the people who already paid, because contractually, per the license terms nobody read, they were never entitled to permanent access in the first place.

The same math runs through every industry in this piece. A car company that sells you a finished, fully-featured vehicle for one price has made all the money on that car it is ever going to make from you, aside from the occasional trip to the dealership for maintenance. A car company that ships the vehicle with hardware capabilities gated behind ongoing subscriptions has converted a single purchase into a permanent revenue stream extending for the life of the vehicle. A publisher that lets you download your ebook to a device you control has given up leverage over you. A publisher that keeps your library trapped inside its own app has guaranteed you’ll keep paying its subscription fee, or keep buying inside its walled garden, indefinitely, because switching costs you everything you already own.

This is the honest, unsentimental explanation for the trend, and it’s worth stating plainly rather than dressing it up as villainy: companies are rational actors pursuing recurring revenue over one-time revenue, because recurring revenue is more predictable, more valuable to shareholders, and structurally more profitable over the long run. Nobody at Sony or John Deere or BMW is twirling a mustache. They are following the incentive that the corporate structure hands them, which is to maximize return, and the frictionless legal environment around digital licensing, combined with a customer base that mostly does not read terms of service, has made squeezing ownership out of the transaction one of the most reliable profit levers available to a modern company. The problem isn’t that these companies are unusually greedy. The problem is that the party deciding to convert ownership into licensing bears none of the cost of that decision. The cost lands entirely on the customer, later, quietly, after the sale is already closed and the money has already changed hands. That mismatch between who benefits and who pays is the whole engine. Fix the mismatch, and the practice becomes far less attractive to engage in.

The legal terrain, and why it mostly favors the seller

It’s worth understanding, briefly and without a law degree, why this has been so easy for companies to pull off, because the honest answer is that the law has simply not kept pace with the technology, and in some places actively works against the consumer.

The first sale doctrine, described earlier, protects the resale of physical copies. It does not extend cleanly to digital goods, because a digital “resale” legally requires copying the file, and copying without authorization is exactly what copyright law exists to prevent. Courts have repeatedly declined to invent a digital equivalent, most notably in the ReDigi case, which shut down a company’s attempt to build a legitimate resale market for digital music.

Separately, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provisions, Section 1201, make it illegal to bypass digital rights management even for otherwise legal purposes, like preserving a game whose servers have gone dark, or repairing a piece of equipment locked behind proprietary software. The Library of Congress grants narrow, temporary exemptions to this rule every three years, covering things like preservation of abandoned online games by libraries and archives, but the exemptions are limited, technical, and inaccessible to an ordinary person trying to keep their own purchased library functional.

Even the legal concept of “ownership” for something as basic as installed software has been narrowed by the courts in ways most people never hear about. In Vernor v. Autodesk, a federal appeals court ruled that a software license can be structured so that a buyer never actually owns their copy at all, no matter how much they paid, as long as the license agreement says clearly enough that the transaction is a license and not a sale, and imposes enough restrictions on transfer and use. That ruling gave every software company, and by extension every company selling anything with software embedded in it, a clean legal roadmap: word the agreement correctly, and the first sale doctrine simply never attaches in the first place. This is why the fine print matters so much more than it used to. It isn’t decorative. It’s the entire legal basis on which a company gets to decide, later, that you never owned what you thought you paid for.

Where the law has moved, it has moved slowly and only under direct public pressure. California’s AB 2426, signed in 2024, now requires digital storefronts to disclose clearly, at the point of sale, that a customer is buying a license rather than permanent ownership, and to avoid using the word “buy” or “purchase” in a way that misleads consumers about what they’re actually getting. It’s a transparency requirement, not a ban on the practice, but it’s a real, if modest, legislative win, and it exists because enough ordinary people got angry enough about Sony’s Discovery deletion to make noise their state legislators eventually had to answer. Colorado’s farm equipment right-to-repair law exists for the same reason: farmers organized, testified, and refused to let the issue die in committee the way it had in Iowa, Missouri, and South Dakota. The Stop Killing Games initiative gathered over 1.3 million verified signatures specifically because enough individual people decided a single lost video game was worth the trouble of formal political organizing.

The throughline in every one of these wins is the same, and it’s worth sitting with, because it’s the actual lesson of this entire piece: the correction did not come from a benevolent regulator noticing a problem and fixing it on its own initiative. It came from ordinary people organizing directly around a shared, concrete grievance, applying sustained pressure through consumer associations, petitions, and lawsuits, until the people with the power to change the rules had no easier option left than to change them. Even then, the wins have been narrow, contested, and frequently rolled back or watered down by industry lobbying, as the failure of California’s Protect Our Games Act demonstrates. Nobody is coming to fix this for you from above. The people who fixed the small pieces of it that have actually been fixed did so from below, by organizing with their neighbors and refusing to accept the terms they were handed.

What individual sovereignty actually requires

Step back from the specific industries for a moment and look at what’s actually being asked of people, across all these categories at once. Own less. Depend more. Trust the server to stay on, the subscription to stay affordable, the corporation’s business priorities to remain aligned with yours indefinitely, with no recourse if any of that changes.

That is a bad trade for an individual to make, not because convenience is worthless, but because dependency without recourse is a specific and recognizable kind of vulnerability. A person who owns their tools, their books, their vehicle, and their home outright can weather a company’s bad quarter, a platform’s business pivot, a manufacturer’s discontinued product line without losing access to the things they’ve already paid for. A person whose entire material life runs through licenses, subscriptions, and server dependencies has handed a dozen different corporations a dozen different levers over their daily functioning, and has to hope none of those companies ever decides, for entirely legal reasons stated in fine print that was agreed to with a single unread click, to pull one.

This isn’t a call to reject modern conveniences and go live off the grid. Digital distribution genuinely does offer real advantages: instant access, lower prices in some cases, no shelf space required, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. The point isn’t that digital is evil and physical is virtuous. The point is that a person should know, clearly, which of the two arrangements they’re entering into, and should default toward ownership whenever ownership is actually available and the stakes are worth it, rather than sliding by default into licensing because licensing was the path of least resistance at the checkout screen.

The deeper point, the one underneath all the specific product categories, is that a society made up of people who own less and depend more is a society that has quietly lost some of its capacity to take care of itself. A person who can fix their own tractor, repair their own appliance, resell their own game collection, or lend a neighbor a book without a corporation’s permission is a person who needs less from distant institutions and can do more, directly, for the people around them. A person locked into a maze of revocable licenses, none of which they fully understand and all of which can change without notice, is a person who has been made more dependent, more passive, and less capable, whether they notice it happening or not. Multiply that condition across a whole population and you get a citizenry that has been trained, product category by product category, to expect less control over its own material life and to accept that loss of control as the ordinary cost of modern convenience. That is a habit of mind, and habits of mind are exactly the kind of thing that determines whether people are capable of solving their own problems together or whether they wait, passively, for someone else to solve those problems for them.

Learn to fix your own stuff

Everything above is a description of a problem. Here is the most direct thing a person can do about it, and it doesn’t require a lawyer, a legislature, or a single click of “I Agree.”

Learn to fix your own stuff.

Not all of it. Nobody is asking you to rebuild a transmission in the driveway on a Tuesday night if you’ve never held a torque wrench. But most repairs are not transmission rebuilds. Most repairs are a stuck screw, a bad sensor, a worn gasket, a loose wire, a part that snapped and needs a replacement snapped back in. iFixit, the online repair database that’s been publishing free step-by-step manuals since 2003, makes a point of saying that if you can change a light bulb, you already have most of the skill required for the most common electronics repairs. That’s not a sales pitch. It’s just true. Repair is mostly patience, the right screwdriver, and a willingness to look something up before assuming it’s beyond you.

This matters for reasons beyond saving money on a service call, though it does that too. Every repair you make yourself is a small, quiet refusal of the entire arrangement described in the rest of this piece. It’s the difference between being a person who depends on a manufacturer’s authorized service department and a person who doesn’t need to ask that manufacturer’s permission for much of anything. The habit compounds. A person who fixes a running toilet stops being afraid of the water shut-off valve. A person who replaces a car battery stops being afraid of the hood. Competence builds on itself, and every skill you pick up makes the next one easier to learn.

The resources already exist, and most of them are free.

Start with iFixit. It hosts more than 44,000 repair guides, covering everything from phone screens to sewing machines to robot vacuums, written by a mix of staff, university partners, and ordinary people who fixed something once and decided to write down how. The organization has also been the loudest advocate for right-to-repair legislation in the country, and their own survey of independent repair shops found that 96 percent of them have had to turn a customer away because a manufacturer withheld the parts, tools, or documentation needed to do the job. That statistic is worth sitting with. It means the barrier to fixing your own things, in a huge number of cases, isn’t a lack of skill on your part. It’s a manufacturer deciding you shouldn’t be allowed to try.

Beyond iFixit, there’s a whole tier of resources most people never think to check. Vehicle manufacturers are required, in many states now, to make service information available to independent shops, and a lot of that same information sits in Haynes and Chilton manuals that have existed since long before the internet did. Appliance manufacturers post parts diagrams and service manuals on their own websites if you look past the marketing pages. YouTube, for all its faults, has become one of the largest repair libraries on earth, and a search for almost any make and model of anything will turn up someone who has already taken the thing apart on camera and shown you where the bodies are buried. None of this requires a subscription. None of it requires permission. It just requires deciding to look before deciding you can’t.

Repair Cafes. If reading a guide alone in your garage isn’t your style, there’s a version of this that comes with company. Repair Cafe International, a nonprofit founded in Amsterdam in 2009, now supports more than 3,800 Repair Cafes across 43 countries, free community events where volunteers with real skills, electricians, seamstresses, bike mechanics, small appliance repair people, sit down with neighbors and fix things together instead of throwing them away. Nobody gets billed. Nobody signs a service agreement. A broken toaster or a torn coat gets fixed at a folding table in a church basement or a library meeting room, and the person who brought it in usually leaves knowing a little more than they did walking in. That’s the whole model. It costs almost nothing to run, and it works because it doesn’t depend on anyone’s permission to exist. A handful of people with the skill and the willingness to share it is the entire infrastructure required.

If there isn’t one near you, start one. The Repair Cafe Foundation will hand you a starter kit and a set of house rules for free. The barrier to entry is a room, a few tables, and a couple of people who already know how to solder or sew.

Share what you learn.

The other half of this is easy to skip, and it shouldn’t be. Once you fix something, tell someone how you did it. Write it down. Take a picture while you’re in there with the case open. iFixit’s own guidance to new users is almost embarrassingly simple: fix something, then teach the repair, because the next person who breaks the same thing shouldn’t have to learn it the hard way twice. That’s the whole model that built a 44,000-guide library out of nothing but people who decided their own hard-won five minutes of troubleshooting was worth writing down for a stranger.

This doesn’t require a website or an audience. It can be your kid watching you replace a faucet cartridge. It can be a text to your neighbor with a photo of the part number that finally worked. It can be standing in the driveway explaining to your brother-in-law why the check engine light doesn’t automatically mean a new car. Knowledge that only lives in one person’s head dies with that person, or at least with their willingness to keep answering the phone. Knowledge that gets shared keeps working long after you’ve moved on to the next broken thing.

Teach the kids, on purpose, through the programs built for exactly this.

This is the part that actually determines whether any of this outlasts the current generation of frustrated adults. A habit of fixing things has to be taught, and it has to be taught early, before convenience culture teaches a kid the opposite lesson first: that broken things simply get replaced, that a service exists for everything, that competence is somebody else’s job.

Scouting programs have understood this for over a century, and the merit badge system is a genuinely well-built piece of infrastructure for teaching it. A Scout can earn the Automotive Maintenance badge by learning to check brakes, change oil, and diagnose a basic electrical fault, using an actual vehicle and an actual owner’s manual, not a simulation. The Home Repairs badge covers patching drywall, fixing a running toilet, replacing an electrical cord, and repairing a doorknob, the exact category of small household failure that sends most adults straight to a service call. Electricity and Electronics cover wiring a circuit and understanding what’s actually happening inside the devices that run a modern house. Farm Mechanics puts a kid in front of a small engine and has them take it apart and get it running again. None of these badges are ceremonial. A counselor has to watch the work happen and sign off that the kid can actually do it, not just describe it.

4-H runs a parallel track through agriculture and mechanics, teaching kids to maintain equipment, work with their hands, and take ownership of a project from start to finish, often literally raising or building something they’re responsible for. FFA does similar work specifically around agricultural mechanics and equipment maintenance, putting students in front of the same kind of machinery that gave rise to the John Deere repair fight described earlier in this piece, except these students are learning to open the hood instead of waiting for a dealer.

None of these programs exist because some committee decided self-reliance was a nice value to put on a pamphlet. They exist because generations of adults who came before us understood, correctly, that competence has to be built deliberately, one supervised repair at a time, or it doesn’t get built at all. A kid who wires a lamp switch under a counselor’s eye at thirteen is a kid who, at thirty, looks at a blinking check-engine light or a dead outlet and thinks “let me take a look” instead of reaching straight for the phone. That instinct is worth more than almost anything else you could hand a young person, and it costs a weekend and a merit badge pamphlet to plant it.

If you’re a parent, a Scout leader, a 4-H volunteer, or just an aunt or uncle with a functioning set of tools, look for the chance to hand a kid a screwdriver and stand there while they figure it out. Let them get it wrong the first time. Let them strip a screw. That’s how the skill actually takes. A kid who’s never been allowed to fail at a repair grows into an adult who’s afraid to try one, and an adult afraid to try one is exactly the customer every industry described earlier in this piece is counting on.

None of this is a complete answer to a global shift in how corporations sell things. It won’t repeal an EULA or bring back a delisted game. But it’s the one piece of the puzzle that doesn’t require anyone’s permission, doesn’t cost much, and gets stronger the more people do it. A community full of people who know how to fix a faucet, wire a lamp, and diagnose a dead battery is a community that needs less from distant service departments and can do more for the people three doors down. That’s not a policy position. It’s just a Saturday afternoon, repeated often enough to become a habit, and passed on to the next kid who’s willing to hold the flashlight.

What can actually be done about it?

None of this requires waiting on Congress, and it shouldn’t, because Congress has shown no particular urgency about the problem and industry lobbying has proven consistently effective at slowing down the state-level efforts that do exist. What follows is a practical list, aimed at what an individual, a family, or a small local group can actually do, starting today, with tools that already exist.

Buy physical when physical is genuinely physical. Not every disc or cartridge on a store shelf is actually complete. Check before buying. Several publishers, notably CD Projekt Red with Cyberpunk 2077’s Ultimate Edition on Switch 2, have made a point of shipping the full game on cartridge with no download required, and some outlets now maintain running lists of which physical releases are complete versus which are empty Game-Key Cards in a box. Reward the publishers doing it right with your money, and let the ones doing it wrong hear about it in reviews and sales figures.

Check for DRM-free options before buying digital. Not all digital purchases are licenses in the worst sense. Storefronts like GOG sell games with no DRM at all, meaning the installer file itself is yours, downloadable, backupable, and playable indefinitely regardless of whether GOG as a company exists in twenty years. The difference between a DRM-free digital purchase and a server-locked one is enormous, and it costs nothing to check before buying.

Read the terms once, deliberately, for anything expensive. Nobody reads the full terms of service for a streaming subscription, and that’s fine. But for a major purchase, a car with software-gated features, a piece of farm or shop equipment, a home appliance with a cloud dependency, spend the ten minutes to find out what you’re actually agreeing to. Search the product name alongside “subscription” or “right to repair” before you buy, not after.

Support right-to-repair legislation at the state level, and show up for it locally. This is the one place where organized, local political pressure has produced real, durable results, Colorado’s farm equipment law being the clearest example. These fights are won county fair booth by county fair booth, farm bureau meeting by farm bureau meeting, not by a national campaign. If you live in a state without a right-to-repair law, your state legislature almost certainly has a bill sitting in committee that needs constituents showing up to testify for it.

Use, join, or start a tool library or repair collective. This is the most direct, most local answer to the entire problem, and it is already happening in communities across the country without waiting on anyone’s permission. A tool library lets neighbors share expensive equipment nobody needs to own individually. A repair cafe gives people with the skill to fix a broken appliance, a torn coat, a wobbly chair, a place to pass that skill along to a neighbor for free, keeping a repairable object out of the landfill and keeping the knowledge of how to fix things alive in the community instead of locked inside a manufacturer’s authorized service network. These institutions solve, at the neighborhood level and through nothing but voluntary cooperation, the exact problem that corporate licensing schemes and consolidated repair monopolies create. They require no legislation to start. They require a few people to decide to do it.

Build and protect a real secondary market wherever you can. Buy used. Sell what you no longer need instead of letting it rot in a closet. Trade with neighbors directly. Every transaction that happens outside a corporate platform, between two people who simply agree on a price, is a small act of economic independence that no terms-of-service update can touch.

Back up what you’re legally permitted to back up, and prefer formats that allow it. Where DRM-free downloads exist, use them and keep local copies on a drive you control, not just in a cloud account someone else administers. This is legal, straightforward, and the single best insurance policy against a company’s future decision to delete something you already paid for.

Support the organizations already fighting this fight, and understand how they won. Stop Killing Games didn’t succeed by asking politely. It succeeded by gathering over a million verified signatures and backing that number up with lawsuits in multiple countries. UFC-Que Choisir didn’t ask Ubisoft nicely; it sued. The farmers who got Colorado’s law passed did it by showing up in person, year after year, after watching four neighboring states let similar bills die in committee. None of these wins were fast, and none of them were free. They were the product of ordinary people organizing directly with each other around a shared, specific grievance, and refusing to let it drop.

Vote with your dollar even when it costs a little more. A publisher that ships a complete game on cartridge, a manufacturer that doesn’t gate hardware you already paid for behind a subscription, a retailer that still sells you something you can actually keep, deserves your business over a competitor doing the opposite, even at a modest price premium. Markets respond to money faster than they respond to complaints.

Teach the next generation the difference between owning and renting, on purpose. Kids growing up now have never known a world where a game, a movie, or a song didn’t just appear on a screen the instant someone wanted it. That’s not their fault, and it’s not something to be preachy about, but it’s worth actually showing a kid the difference between a shelf of books that are theirs no matter what happens to the publisher, and a streaming queue that could vanish overnight if a licensing deal falls through. A kid who understands that difference early grows into an adult who reads the fine print instead of clicking past it.

Choose local, independent repair and sale over the manufacturer’s authorized channel whenever you reasonably can. Every dollar spent at a local repair shop instead of a manufacturer’s service center is a dollar that keeps a skill and a small business alive in your own community, instead of funneling that money back to the same company trying to restrict repair access in the first place. The independent repair economy is a direct, practical alternative to the monopolized one, and it survives only if people actually use it.

Keep receipts, manuals, and documentation for anything expensive and mechanical. This sounds almost too basic to mention, but a well-documented piece of equipment, a car, a tractor, or a major appliance, is easier to repair independently, easier to resell, and easier to defend your rights over if a manufacturer ever disputes your ownership or your right to service it yourself. Ownership that can’t be proven is ownership that’s easy to erode.

Don’t wait for permission to organize. Every legal and legislative win described in this piece started as a handful of people deciding a problem was worth their time before anyone else agreed with them. A repair cafe starts with two or three neighbors and a folding table. A right-to-repair bill starts with a farmer willing to drive to the state capitol and testify on a Tuesday afternoon. A consumer lawsuit starts with someone deciding that a canceled game, a deleted movie, or a bricked appliance was worth the hassle of doing something about, even when the odds looked bad. None of the wins in this piece looked inevitable before they happened. They looked like a small, stubborn group of people who refused to accept the terms they’d been handed.

The larger stakes

Video games are a small thing in the grand scheme of a person’s life, and nobody’s freedom hinges on whether a cartridge has the whole game on it. But the pattern visible in gaming, the deliberate, engineered shift from a one-time sale of a permanent object to a recurring, revocable license for temporary access, is the same pattern showing up in cars, books, farm equipment, appliances, software, and increasingly, in slices of the housing market. It is not a coincidence that it’s happening everywhere at once. It’s the same business logic, discovered independently by industry after industry, because the logic works, and because almost nothing in the current legal or cultural environment pushes back against it hard enough to make it stop working.

What’s actually at stake isn’t any single product category. It’s whether the ordinary material relationship between a person and the things they’ve paid for still means anything, or whether that relationship has been quietly rewritten, industry by industry, into something closer to a lease that can be terminated by the landlord whenever the landlord finds it convenient. A society that lets that rewrite happen without resistance is a society that has traded a portion of its own self-sufficiency for a marginal improvement in convenience, and probably didn’t notice the trade was happening until the bill came due.

The correction, where it’s happened at all, has never come from the top. It has come from people organizing with the people around them, refusing a bad deal in large enough numbers to make refusing it expensive for the company offering it, and rebuilding, in small and unglamorous ways, tool libraries, repair cafes, secondhand markets, state-level right-to-repair coalitions, the habits and local institutions that let a community take care of its own stuff without waiting for permission from a distributor, a licensor, or a server administrator three thousand miles away. It’s a practical project, not a nostalgic one, and it’s already working in the places people have bothered to try it.

Own what you can. Fix what you can. Share what you can with the people around you. And the next time a checkout screen asks you to click “I Agree” without telling you plainly whether you’re buying something or just renting the right to use it for a while, take the extra ten seconds to find out which one it actually is. It’s a small habit, but it adds up.

They had good reasons. This piece lays out the case for why the United States should say no too, without leaning on outrage to make the point. The industry doesn’t need help looking bad. The numbers handle that just fine on their own.

What This Actually Is

Direct-to-consumer, or DTC, pharmaceutical advertising means marketing prescription drugs straight to patients instead of to the doctors who write the prescriptions. It’s an odd category of commerce. Normally, you decide what you’re buying, and you buy it. With a prescription drug, the ad is aimed specifically at you, but the purchase decision belongs to somebody else, your doctor, who never saw the commercial. The ad’s job isn’t to make a sale directly. Its job is to get you to walk into an exam room and ask for a product by name, so a third party can authorize the purchase you were talked into wanting.

That’s an unusual foundation for a $39 billion industry practice. It’s also a strange thing to call ordinary commercial speech, since the whole point is to route around the professional judgment that’s supposed to sit between a consumer and a powerful, sometimes dangerous compound.

It wasn’t always legal in this form. From the 1930s into the 1990s, direct advertising of prescription drugs to the public barely existed, kept in check by the FDA’s brief-summary requirement, which forced any ad to include the full rundown of side effects and contraindications. That requirement ate up so much airtime it functioned as a de facto ban. Then in 1997 the FDA issued draft guidance, finalized in 1999, letting broadcast ads satisfy that obligation through “adequate provision,” meaning companies could point viewers to a website or toll-free number instead of reciting the risks on air. That single regulatory decision is the reason your television now looks the way it does.

The Numbers

Vague complaints about “too many ads” undersell what’s actually happened, so here are some numbers.

Pharmaceutical advertising spending grew from $12.2 billion in 2015 to an estimated $39 billion in 2025, according to AdWeek data cited by industry trade groups. That’s more than triple in a decade, from an industry that tells Congress with a straight face that it can’t afford to lower drug prices.

Direct-to-consumer television advertising alone topped $6 billion in 2024. In the third quarter of 2025, prescription drug TV ad spending hit $1.25 billion, and October set an all-time monthly record: the top ten pharma brands combined spent $307.1 million in a single month. Johnson & Johnson’s Tremfya campaign alone spent an estimated $62.7 million that month, across eleven separate ads. Through early December 2025, pharma and over-the-counter brands had put more than $7 billion into linear TV for the year, up about 16 percent from the year before.

AbbVie spent $1.2 billion across three drugs in 2023, more than half its total advertising and promotion budget. Three drugs. A billion dollars. That’s not a company educating the public. That’s a company that ran the numbers and found the ad campaign outperforms almost anything else it could do with the money.

And it works. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that a 10 percent increase in DTC advertising is tied to a 1 to 2.3 percent increase in overall drug spending, and one study found that a 10 percent increase in DTC spending produced a 5.4 percent bump in product revenue. That’s the actual problem. The ads aren’t failing to move the needle. They’re succeeding at a task that has almost nothing to do with health and everything to do with market share.

The Rest of the World Made a Different Call

New Zealand and the United States are the only two high-income countries on earth that allow unrestricted direct-to-consumer advertising of branded prescription medicines, drug name, condition, all of it. Almost every other country in the world bans this kind of advertising for health products outright.

This isn’t a fringe regulatory quirk. The European Union bans it. Canada bans it. Japan bans it. Australia bans it. The entire developed world, minus one small island nation and the largest economy on the planet, looked at this practice and decided the risk outweighed the benefit. Countries that ban it typically point to distorted drug information, unnecessary prescriptions, and worse prescribing decisions overall.

Even in New Zealand, professional opinion runs against the practice. Both the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners and the New Zealand Medical Association have called for a ban in their own country, without success, for the same reason it persists here: a well-funded industry pushing back. New Zealand’s health ministry has preferred tighter regulation to an outright ban, which tells you plenty about how effective that pushback is, even in a country the size of a mid-sized American state.

Here’s a useful test for whether a domestic practice holds up: check whether every comparable country arrived at the opposite conclusion on its own. When the U.S. and New Zealand stand alone against Germany, France, the UK, Japan, Canada, and Australia, the burden of proof sits with the people defending the American approach.

How the Ads Work

Set the totals aside and look at the mechanics of a typical commercial, because the mechanics make the whole argument.

You know the structure: warm visuals, someone living an appealing life, music that suggests relief, then a recitation of risks delivered fast, often over more pleasant footage, sometimes with on-screen text competing for your attention against the narration. FDA rules require accuracy and require that ads disclose risk information. In practice, this usually means the first half shows people enjoying themselves and the second half delivers a dizzying list of warnings.

That split isn’t an accident of format. It’s a deliberate decision about where to spend your attention, made by people who know exactly how attention works. The pleasant footage isn’t filler around the warnings. The warnings are the toll the advertiser pays to keep running the pleasant footage.

The whole purpose of a drug ad is to sell something, not to educate anyone, and the language gives it away. “A leading treatment for this condition” can be true when there are only two or three drugs for that condition. “No other treatment has been proven better” can describe a drug that performs no better than a cheaper alternative, while the ad conveniently skips the option of taking nothing at all, even though plenty of minor conditions resolve on their own. None of this is lying in a legal sense. It’s built to produce a technically true statement that leaves you with a false impression, which is harder to catch than an outright lie because it survives a fact-check.

One out of every three dollars in pharmaceutical DTC spending in 2024 went toward immunology drugs, chronic, expensive biologics, with fifteen brands each spending at least $10 million on TV ads in that category alone. These aren’t aspirin commercials. These are ads for drugs that can run tens of thousands of dollars a year, aimed at a general audience whose only job in the transaction is to feel enough urgency to bring up a brand name at the next appointment.

The Celebrity Version

Somewhere along the way the industry noticed a famous face beats a soft-focus kayaking scene, and started paying accordingly. In 2020, Nurtec ODT, a migraine drug made by Biohaven and later Pfizer, ran a social campaign with Khloe Kardashian promoting it directly to consumers. She has over 306 million followers on Instagram and pulled in nearly 1.9 million likes across four posts.

Sit with that math. Four posts. No physician involved anywhere in the chain, no mention of how the drug actually stacks up against other migraine treatments, just a famous person telling millions of people a specific product worked for her. That’s the identical playbook used to sell teeth whitening kits, aimed at a prescription drug an audience has no training to evaluate.

Use of social media for pharmaceutical marketing has grown roughly 45 percent year over year, with close to half of digital ad budgets now going to social channels. That growth happened because social platforms skip the “fair balance” risk disclosure a network TV spot is required to run, and until recently nobody was checking. The FDA has now made closing this “digital loophole” an explicit priority, which tells you it had been wide open for a while.

The lesson isn’t that Khloe Kardashian did anything unusual. It’s that the industry moves its money toward whichever channel demands the least honesty, and it will keep doing that until the rules catch up, at which point it finds the next channel. Chasing the loophole one platform at a time isn’t a strategy. It’s a permanent game of whack-a-mole; the industry is better funded to win than any agency is funded to police.

The Loophole That Made It Possible

From 1962, when Congress gave the FDA authority over drug advertising, through the 1990s, the agency required a full brief summary of side effects and contraindications in every ad. That requirement made TV advertising for most drugs impractical, since reciting the full risk profile ate the entire commercial. Whether by design or accident, it worked as a ban.

The 1997 guidance, finalized in 1999, let companies satisfy that obligation through “adequate provision,” meaning they could point viewers elsewhere for the complete risk information rather than say it on air. That’s the loophole reform efforts have targeted ever since. It let advertisers keep the pleasant thirty seconds and outsource the unpleasant part to a website nobody visits.

The industry didn’t sit on that opening. It built an entire creative and media-buying operation around it and has defended that operation with political spending that dwarfs almost every other industry in Washington. Pharmaceutical manufacturers spent more than $102 million on lobbying in just the first six months of 2025. PhRMA, the trade association, logged its highest-ever quarterly lobbying spend in the first quarter of 2025, nearly $13 million in three months. In the 2024 election cycle, the industry spent $151 million on federal lobbying, through 139 companies and 738 lobbyists, close to two-thirds of whom had previously worked in government. Across all of 2024, pharmaceutical and health product companies spent $388.21 million on lobbying, and by mid-2025 they’d already spent $226.78 million, on pace to set a new record.

That’s what defending a loophole looks like when the loophole is worth $39 billion a year. Nobody spends that kind of money guarding a minor regulatory technicality. They spend it guarding the thing that makes the business model work.

Who Pays, and Who Profits

The standard industry line is that DTC advertising educates patients. Compare that to what the industry actually does with its money.

A 2021 study from America’s Health Insurance Plans found seven of the ten largest pharmaceutical companies by revenue spent more on sales and marketing in 2020 than on research and development. Read that last sentence again. The companies telling Congress they need high prices to fund innovation are, in most cases, spending more to sell what they’ve already got than to invent the next thing.

A January 2023 study in JAMA Network found that drugs with “high therapeutic value” account for fewer than a third of all DTC pharmaceutical ads. Most of the money goes toward promoting drugs whose actual advantage over cheaper existing alternatives is modest or unproven, and DTC advertising is specifically linked to more use of higher-cost drugs over generics. You don’t spend a billion dollars advertising a drug that already sells itself. You spend it on the one that needs help competing against something cheaper and equally effective.

Prices tell the same story. Bristol Myers Squibb and Pfizer have spent more than $1 billion in DTC advertising on their blood thinner Eliquis since 2013, while raising its price at least six percent a year for ten straight years. It launched at $250 a month in 2013. By 2022, the monthly list price was $529, more than double. The advertising and the price hikes didn’t happen despite each other. They happened together, because a drug people are trained to ask for by name is a drug that’s harder for insurers and patients to push back on.

One analysis found that taxing or banning DTC ads for just the ten largest pharmaceutical companies could save Americans more than a billion dollars a year, and a separate study found that taxpayers lose more than a billion dollars annually because companies write off these marketing expenses as ordinary business costs. The federal tax code is subsidizing the same commercials that drive up the prices the government spends billions covering through Medicare and Medicaid. The public funds both ends of the transaction, the ad and the eventual bill.

None of this requires believing pharmaceutical companies are uniquely evil. It requires taking their own budget allocations at face value. A company that spends more on marketing than research, aims most of its ad dollars at modest-benefit drugs, and raises prices in step with ad spending is telling you exactly what it’s optimizing for. Not outcomes. Revenue. The ad is the delivery mechanism.

What the Ads Do to the Exam Room

Set price aside and look at what these commercials do to the relationship between a patient and a doctor, because that’s where the real damage lands.

Direct advertising leads patients to ask for drugs they can’t get unless a doctor agrees. It eats into the time a visit spends deciding whether a condition even needs treatment and whether the advertised remedy fits best practice, and the evidence is solid that direct advertising leads to unnecessary and sometimes harmful prescribing.

A doctor’s fifteen minutes is a scarce resource. Every minute spent explaining why a patient doesn’t need the drug from last night’s commercial is a minute not spent on something they actually need. Multiply that across tens of millions of visits a year and you’ve got a quiet tax on the healthcare system’s most limited input, a physician’s attention.

Some studies find DTC advertising talks patients into demanding heavily promoted drugs, leading to worse treatment, with doctors reporting pressure to prescribe brand names simply because a patient mentioned one. One study comparing West Palm Beach, Florida, to Denver, Colorado, found that a 10 percent increase in ad exposure raised total prescriptions by 5 percent in the higher-exposure market. That’s not a correlation dreamed up by critics. That’s the business model performing exactly as designed.

The case study that should end the argument is Vioxx. It was one of the most heavily advertised drugs during its five years on the market, before being pulled worldwide for raising the risk of heart attacks. The manufacturer kept promoting it to the public in the U.S. and New Zealand after its own internal documents showed an increased risk of death. That single fact contains the whole risk of this business model: a company ran feel-good commercials for a drug it privately knew was killing people, because the commercials still sold product, and they could keep running because nobody was policing the underlying claims in real time. A similar pain reliever was pulled from the market after an unexpected rise in heart attacks and strokes, but not before millions had already seen the ad and started taking it.

Fair enough to note there’s a real upside here too. Some viewers see an ad, recognize a symptom they’d been ignoring, and go get checked out. DTC ads can raise awareness of side effects, reduce stigma around conditions like depression or erectile dysfunction, and occasionally catch something the ad wasn’t even about. That’s a genuine benefit and it shouldn’t get waved off. It’s also a strange way to run a public health system, outsourcing preventive-care nudges to a for-profit marketing budget that a functioning primary care system ought to be handling anyway.

The Enforcement Record and What Changed in 2025

For most of the DTC era, enforcement was weak. The number of FDA warning letters against misleading ads held fairly steady before dipping in 2014, and enforcement didn’t pick up at all during the first Trump administration, despite plenty of stated concern about the industry. The agency had the authority. It mostly chose not to use it.

That changed, at least on paper, in September 2025. On September 9, President Trump signed a memorandum directing HHS to require more risk information in drug ads and directing the FDA to enforce the existing advertising law more aggressively. The same day, HHS and FDA announced a “crackdown on deceptive drug advertising,” sending a letter to every single sponsor of an approved drug or biologic and more than a hundred additional letters targeting specific ads the agency considered deceptive. FDA has since released 41 untitled letters and 66 warning letters from that day alone, all alleging false and misleading DTC content.

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. put it plainly: pharmaceutical ads hooked the country on prescription drugs, and the administration intends to require full safety disclosure and break the cycle of overmedicalization. FDA Commissioner Marty Makary said the agency had, for too long, permitted misleading ads that distort the doctor-patient relationship and create demand regardless of clinical necessity.

The main regulatory target is the same adequate provision loophole from 1997. The plan includes rulemaking to eliminate it entirely, plus aggressive enforcement and closing the digital loophole that’s let influencers promote drugs without proper disclosure. The FDA has also pledged to require a full list of risk disclosures in every ad, which would make TV spots considerably longer and more expensive to produce. Novo Nordisk’s recent Ozempic campaign, which runs over two minutes of risk disclosures on streaming platforms, is a preview of what this might look like everywhere if the loophole closes for good.

Worth taking seriously, and worth being honest about the limits. The memorandum stops short of an outright ban, and officials have acknowledged that closing certain gaps, like the rules around telehealth companies advertising compounded drugs, would take an act of Congress, not an executive order. This isn’t the administration’s first swing at this either. Trump’s first term produced a 2019 rule requiring list prices in TV ads, which a federal judge struck down for exceeding HHS’s authority. Reform efforts here have a track record of running into court, and this one will too.

There’s bipartisan appetite behind it regardless of what anyone thinks of the current administration generally. A national survey found 88 percent support for requiring drug companies to disclose how much taxpayer money funded their research, and 86 percent support for requiring companies to list prices in their ads, with roughly equal support across the recent partisan divide. This is one of the rare issues where the public isn’t split along the usual lines. Nearly 80 percent of people surveyed said there are simply too many pharma ads on TV and streaming, and many called the genre’s cheerful imagery unrealistic set against pages of medical warnings. A separate survey found only 43 percent would support a total ban outright, with about a third opposed and a quarter undecided, but 60 percent still wanted risk information made more prominent and simpler, and a quarter wanted less mascot-and-jingle nonsense. Even people cool on an outright ban aren’t asking for more of this. Nobody is.

The Telehealth Wrinkle

One more piece worth flagging, because it shows how the marketing apparatus has already outrun the rules meant to contain it. Telehealth companies selling compounded versions of popular weight-loss drugs have found a gap that traditional pharmaceutical companies can’t use, since compounded drugs aren’t FDA-approved products in the same sense as a branded biologic, and the rules built around approved-drug advertising don’t cleanly apply.

A senior administration official pointed to a Super Bowl ad from a telehealth company promoting compounded weight-loss drugs as exactly the kind of ad the current framework can’t reach. Senators had already written to the FDA earlier in 2025 about a Hims & Hers Super Bowl ad promoting weight-loss drugs from its own pharmacy operation.

This previews what happens if reform focuses narrowly on branded ads while leaving the rest of the ecosystem alone. Close the loophole for AbbVie and Pfizer, and the same marketing impulse just migrates to a telehealth subsidiary selling a compounded version of the same molecule, built from the start to sit outside the rules. Fixing this particular gap needs Congress, since it’s beyond what current law covers. Any serious reform has to cover the practice broadly, not just the specific companies doing it today, or the industry reorganizes around the new rule the way water finds a crack in a foundation.

Why Reform Isn’t Enough

The current federal approach, tighter disclosure, closing the adequate provision loophole, and cracking down on influencers, is worth doing. It’s also not enough, for a simple reason: it treats the harm as a problem of incomplete information rather than a problem of purpose.

Longer disclosures make ads more honest about what a drug can do to you. They don’t change what the ad is for. It’s still built to get an untrained viewer to walk into an exam room and request a specific product by name, ahead of whatever the doctor would have independently recommended. A better-disclosed version of that transaction is still that transaction. You’ve made the manipulation more honest about its own risks. You haven’t removed the manipulation.

European countries kept their bans specifically because of how sensitive drug information is and how DTC advertising distorts it, even alongside strict disclosure rules elsewhere in their systems. The rest of the developed world didn’t decide DTC advertising needed better warning labels. It decided the category doesn’t belong in front of a general audience at all, because persuading a layperson to want a specific prescription drug is incompatible with sound clinical decision-making no matter how the warnings are formatted. A tobacco ad with a bigger warning label is still a tobacco ad. A drug ad with two minutes of side-effect disclosures is still built, from the opening frame, to make you want the drug before you’ve heard a single one of them.

The Objections, Taken Seriously

A fair argument answers its strongest opposition, so here it is.

The First Amendment problem is real. Any ban would face immediate legal challenge, since the Supreme Court has extended First Amendment protection to commercial speech, and pharmaceutical companies would sue under the framework from Central Hudson Gas and Electric Corp. v. Public Service Commission. Industry lawyers are already asking whether the administration’s more aggressive posture, including shifting some cases from civil to criminal review, crosses that line. This is a genuine obstacle, not a talking point. A categorical ban would need to survive real scrutiny and it might lose. Some people who agree entirely with the harms described here still think tighter regulation, not prohibition, is the honest path forward, precisely because a ban may not hold up in court as things currently stand.

The educational-benefit argument has some support. Advocates argue DTC advertising informs and empowers patients and helps them learn about treatments they wouldn’t otherwise consider. There’s truth in it. A commercial for a psoriasis drug has, now and then, prompted someone who assumed nothing could be done about a chronic condition to go ask about it. That value isn’t zero.

Researchers who study this closely are genuinely split. The evidence on DTC advertising is described as roughly balanced, with real support on both sides, which is why most researchers, even ones sympathetic to the harms above, more often recommend tighter rules than an outright ban.

Fair points, and they deserve straight answers rather than a shrug.

On the First Amendment: a ban faces a hard fight, full stop. That doesn’t mean the intermediate steps are foreclosed. Removing the tax deduction for DTC advertising restricts no speech and bans nothing. It just stops asking taxpayers to underwrite the practice, the same way tobacco advertising lost its tax-deductible status decades ago. Mandatory price disclosure compels a factual statement rather than restricting speech, the same category of rule that already survives for cigarette warnings and nutrition labels.

On the educational benefit: it’s real, and it’s small, and it’s being used to justify a delivery system wildly out of proportion to what it delivers. If the actual goal is public education about treatable conditions, that doesn’t require branded advertising for a specific thirty-thousand-dollar-a-year biologic. Public health campaigns and primary care outreach handle that job in every other developed country, none of which seem to have a harder time educating their citizens about psoriasis or heartburn than we do.

On the researchers calling it balanced: that balance holds up when you weigh a real, modest, visible benefit against harms that are diffuse and statistical, higher prescribing costs, marginal overprescribing, worse doctor-patient trust. Spread-thin costs always look smaller in a debate than they are in aggregate. A 10 percent increase in DTC spending producing a 1 to 2.3 percent bump in total drug spending sounds modest until you remember the base is hundreds of billions of dollars, compounding every year as ad spending keeps climbing. Balanced evidence doesn’t mean equal weight. It means there are entries on both sides of the ledger, and once you actually total it, the entries favor pulling the plug.

What Should Actually Happen

Complaining without a remedy is just criticism with footnotes, so here’s an actual agenda, roughly ordered from easiest to hardest.

End the tax deduction. Proposals to stop pharmaceutical companies from writing off marketing costs as ordinary business expenses have been floating around Congress for years, including the Say No to Drug Ads Act, first introduced by Representative Jerrold Nadler in 2002 and reintroduced several times since. This doesn’t require winning a First Amendment fight. It just requires Congress to decide the public shouldn’t be subsidizing a $39 billion ad campaign through the tax code, the same call it made on tobacco decades ago. Most achievable item on this list. Should happen regardless of what else does.

Close the adequate provision loophole permanently, by statute. The current rulemaking effort is a start, but agency guidance can be undone by the next administration in an afternoon. A legislative fix, requiring the full risk profile in the ad itself, would survive a change in the White House.

Mandate price disclosure in every ad. If a company wants to tell you a drug exists, it should have to tell you what it costs. Eighty-six percent of surveyed voters already agree. Nothing kills a beach scene faster than a monthly list price.

Require disclosure of taxpayer-funded research behind advertised drugs. Eighty-eight percent support this too. A lot of foundational drug research traces back to the National Institutes of Health and other public funding. If the public helped pay for the science, the public is entitled to know that when the company asks them to pay again to use it.

Pursue a full ban through legislation, and expect it to be litigated. The Banning Misleading Drug Ads Act is one attempt in this direction, though it hasn’t passed. A full ban, matching what every other developed country already does, is the right end state, and it should come from Congress rather than executive memo, since a statute carries more weight against a First Amendment challenge and forces the debate into public view, where a bipartisan public that already dislikes this industry gets a say.

Restrict paid influencer promotion of prescription drugs immediately, without new legislation. The administration has already signaled it’s headed this way. This is close to the easiest fix on the list, since influencer marketing for prescription drugs is already dishonest under existing false-advertising law. It needs enforcement, not new authority.

A Word on “It’s Just Marketing”

There’s a common defense worth answering directly: advertising is how markets work, and prescription drugs are products like anything else, so why single them out?

Because prescription drugs aren’t products like anything else. That’s the whole reason they’re prescription-only. Medicines get that designation specifically because they carry a real risk of harm if used wrong, unlike over-the-counter drugs, which treat milder conditions where safe use is straightforward. The entire legal setup around prescription medicine exists to put a trained professional’s judgment between a risky substance and a consumer who can’t fully evaluate it alone. That’s not bureaucratic overhead. That’s the safety mechanism.

DTC advertising is built to go around that mechanism. It doesn’t remove the doctor’s signature on the prescription, but it does everything it can to decide what goes on that prescription before the doctor ever weighs in, by manufacturing demand in a mind with no training to judge whether the product is the right call. And it works, which is exactly why billions get spent on it every year.

Compare how we already handle other risky products. Cigarette ads are banned from broadcast TV. Hard liquor ads are heavily restricted, largely by the industry’s own choice, to avoid harsher federal rules. Firearms can’t be advertised the way a car can. American law already accepts that a product’s capacity for serious harm justifies limiting how it’s marketed to a general audience, even when the product stays perfectly legal to sell. Prescription drugs, some carrying the same boxed warnings for death or organ failure that justified those other limits, are the exception. There’s no principled reason for that exception. There’s only a well-funded lobbying operation keeping it in place.

The Bottom Line

The industry’s own numbers make the case better than any outside critic could. Seven of the ten largest pharmaceutical companies spend more on marketing than research. Companies raise prices on their most heavily advertised drugs year after year while spending more to advertise them. Fewer than a third of advertised drugs offer a real advantage over existing alternatives. The industry spends hundreds of millions a year lobbying to keep the arrangement intact. A drug company kept advertising a medication to the public after its own internal documents showed it was raising the risk of death. And the evidence is solid that direct advertising leads to unnecessary and sometimes harmful prescribing, exactly what you’d expect from a system built to make patients demand products their doctors wouldn’t have recommended on their own.

Every other developed country looked at this same set of incentives and decided it wasn’t worth the risk. The United States kept the arrangement, built a $39 billion-a-year industry around it, and is now running a federal cleanup campaign for a mess that was entirely predictable from the start. That campaign is worth supporting. It’s also not a ban, by its own architects’ admission, and a problem this well-funded doesn’t get solved by asking it to disclose its side effects more clearly. It gets solved by turning it off.

Nobody needs to watch a man doing yard work while a narrator describes the risk of liver failure to have a productive conversation with their doctor about cholesterol. The rest of the world figured that out a while ago.

The organization delivering that experience is in serious trouble, and very little of the trouble is accidental. Scouting America, formerly known as the Boy Scouts of America, is an institution with a genuine program that produces measurable results, wrapped inside a national structure that has spent decades making decisions that would embarrass a community college student government. The people at the troop and pack level are largely excellent. The program works when it is delivered well. The problem is everything sitting above the unit level, and some things that sit inside it.

This is not written in celebration. It is written in concern, and in the belief that the organization is worth fixing because what it does, when it does it right, matters. The alternative to honest diagnosis is continued decline. Scouting America is already at roughly 1.25 percent market penetration of American youth — the lowest since around 1923. You do not recover from that by publishing a newsletter.

We are going to cover what the organization gets right, then what it has gotten catastrophically wrong, and then what a realistic path forward looks like. The path forward is not complicated. It requires honesty and a willingness to be competent. Those two things have been in short supply at the national level for a while.

Part One: What Scouting Actually Gets Right

Before anyone accuses this article of being an attack piece, let us establish the record of genuine accomplishment. This is important not as a formality but because the case for fixing Scouting rests on the premise that there is something worth fixing. There is.

The Program Works When It Is Delivered Properly

The core Scouting program is not complicated. Young people join small groups. They learn practical skills. They spend time outdoors. They plan and execute activities with increasing levels of independence. They serve their communities. They are asked to live according to a stated set of values. Over time, through deliberate repetition and escalating challenge, they develop competence, confidence, and character.

Research has repeatedly confirmed that this works. A Baylor University study found that Eagle Scouts were significantly more likely than both non-Scout peers and non-Eagle Scouts to engage in civic activities, volunteer regularly, donate to charitable causes, and demonstrate stronger character development across multiple dimensions. A 2026 Harris Poll survey of more than 3,000 American adults, commissioned by Scouting America, found that Eagle Scouts report roughly twice lower rates of loneliness than their non-Scout peers, along with significantly higher well-being, purpose, and leadership capability. The organization released this study noting it was its first major research effort in nearly fifteen years, which is its own problem we will get to later, but the findings themselves are credible and consistent with prior research.

The mechanism for these outcomes is not mysterious. When a young person is given genuine responsibility, exposed to nature, asked to develop real skills, and held to real standards within a supportive community of peers and adult mentors, that person tends to develop in positive ways. This is not a revolutionary insight. It is what Boy Scouts founder Robert Baden-Powell described in 1908, and it remains true. The genius of Scouting is that it systematized something that used to happen organically in communities that no longer exist in the same form.

The Eagle Scout Rank Is a Credential That Holds Real Weight

In a culture where credentials are often inflated to the point of meaninglessness, the Eagle Scout rank retains genuine signal value. Earning Eagle Scout requires sustained effort over years, not a weekend certification course. It requires demonstrated leadership in the patrol, demonstrated service to the community, and successful completion of an independent service project that must be planned, funded, organized, and executed by the Scout with adult support but not adult management.

Employers still recognize it. Military recruiters give Eagle Scouts an enlistment bump in pay grade. College admissions offices still notice it. The reason for all of this is simple: the rank cannot be faked very easily. You either did the work or you did not. The records exist. The project happened. Other people can verify it. In an era of credentialing theater, that matters.

A 2026 Harris Poll report found that Eagle Scouts were significantly more likely to serve in the Armed Forces than the general population, confirming what the Pentagon has long recognized. The rank consistently produces people who go on to contribute. Neil Armstrong earned Eagle Scout. Gerald Ford earned Eagle Scout. Steven Spielberg earned Eagle Scout. Ross Perot earned Eagle Scout. The list goes on for a very long time. That is not coincidence; it is a result.

The Outdoor Access Is Irreplaceable

Scouting America operates an infrastructure of outdoor access that, at its best, is genuinely irreplaceable. Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico covers more than 140,000 acres of backcountry. The Northern Tier High Adventure base operates in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Florida Sea Base operates in the Florida Keys and the Bahamas. The Summit Bechtel Reserve in West Virginia, whatever its financial problems, sits on over 10,000 acres of the New River Gorge and offers legitimate outdoor adventure at scale.

Below the national level, local councils operate summer camps across the country that give youth access to land, lakes, ranges, and facilities that most families could not afford or access independently. A scout from a low-income urban family can attend a week-long summer camp and learn archery, swimming, first aid, and wilderness skills on land that most wealthy adults never visit. That is real access, and it represents an asset that took generations to build and would take generations to replace.

The Values Framework Is Coherent and Portable

The Scout Oath and Scout Law are not complicated. Be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. Do your duty to God and country. Help other people at all times. Keep yourself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.

You can find objections to the specific wording of almost any of those statements, and people have. But as a portable, memorizable ethical framework for young people, it functions. Scouts who have been in the program for any length of time can usually tell you what the Scout Law says without looking it up. More to the point, they have been asked to apply it in practice, not just recite it. That habit of checking behavior against stated values is, by itself, a useful life skill.

Scouting also provides something that almost no other structured youth activity offers: a multi-year mentorship relationship between trained adult volunteers and young people in a non-transactional context. Most adult-youth interactions in modern life are either family (complex, high-stakes, emotionally loaded) or institutional (coaches who need you to perform, teachers who need you to pass tests). Scouting adults are there for the program. The relationship is built on shared activity and mutual respect rather than performance outcomes. A kid who is struggling in school and fighting with his parents can go to a Scout meeting and be known by adults who are glad to see him for reasons unrelated to his GPA. That is not nothing. That is actually quite a lot.

The Patrol Method Is Genuinely Sophisticated Pedagogy

At the heart of Scouts BSA is the Patrol Method. Scouts are organized into small groups of six to eight young people led by a youth patrol leader, not an adult. The patrol plans its own activities, cooks its own food, and operates as a functional unit. The Scoutmaster and adult committee stay in the background, available but not in charge of the day-to-day program.

This is a remarkably mature model of youth development. Most adult-led youth programs keep adults in control precisely because it is easier and less chaotic. The Patrol Method accepts short-term inefficiency in exchange for long-term development. A patrol leader who makes a bad call and learns from it in the field develops judgment. A patrol leader who watches an adult make all the calls learns to wait for adults to make decisions. Scouting chose the harder model and it is right.

The problem is that the Patrol Method is frequently abandoned in practice because it requires adults to exercise patience and restraint that many find difficult. When this happens, the program degrades immediately. This is a training and culture problem, not a structural one, and it is fixable. But it requires someone to care about fixing it.

Part Two: What Scouting America Has Done Wrong

This is the longer section.

The Sexual Abuse Crisis: A Systemic Moral Failure Hiding Behind Process Language

Let us start with the one that cannot be minimized or contextualized away. The Boy Scouts of America maintained internal records of adult leaders accused of sexual abuse that the organization called its “Ineligible Volunteer Files,” which were sometimes referred to in the press and public consciousness by a more direct name: the “perversion files.” These files stretched back decades. They documented accusations. They were not always shared with law enforcement. The organization, in many documented cases, quietly removed accused leaders from one unit without reporting them to police, a practice that allowed abuse to continue elsewhere.

The scale of what ultimately came to light is staggering. More than 82,000 individuals filed claims of childhood sexual abuse under the BSA’s bankruptcy proceedings. The organization filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2020. A $2.46 billion settlement fund was ultimately approved by bankruptcy courts and went into effect in 2023. Initial payments of $3,500 went to roughly 7,000 survivors who selected expedited disbursement. As of mid-2025, per Wall Street Journal reporting, the total cost of compensating survivors had exceeded $7 billion — more than twice the original settlement estimate — as insurance litigation continued. Non-settling insurers had been billed nearly $7 billion by June 2025, with no payments received from them as of that date.

The individual settlement amounts have been modest for most claimants. As of early 2025, approximately 21,547 claims had been determined, with roughly $164 million paid to about 22,605 survivors. For many survivors, the process has been additionally traumatic — requiring detailed questionnaires, submission of evidence, and retracing abuse they spent decades trying to leave behind. A subset of 144 survivors actively opposed the settlement, arguing it unlawfully shielded non-bankrupt entities including local councils and chartering churches from future liability.

The organization accumulated approximately $329 million in debt by the time of its 2024 audited statements. It sold camps, art, real estate, and equipment to fund the settlement trust. Local councils were required to contribute at least $515 million. Properties that generations of Scouts camped on were sold to satisfy judgments.

The organizational culture that allowed this to happen for so long was not an accident. It was the predictable output of a leadership structure that valued institutional reputation over accountability, that treated volunteering access to children as a management problem rather than a public safety obligation, and that believed quiet removal was a sufficient response to credible abuse allegations. The people who made those decisions were not monsters in most cases. They were administrators applying an institutional logic that prioritized the organization’s public image. That is what makes it instructive. The failure was structural.

It is worth saying plainly: the organization has implemented significant reforms. Mandatory background checks exist now. Youth Protection Training/Safeguarding Youth Training is required for all registered adult volunteers, not optional. Two-deep leadership requirements are heavily enforced. Most of these reforms arrived after public pressure and legal exposure, not before. But they exist, and they are meaningful.

What has not been said plainly enough, at the national level, is: individual board members, council executives, and professional staff who made specific decisions to not report abuse to law enforcement bear responsibility that cannot be managed away through bankruptcy proceedings. Legal liability has been resolved. Moral accountability is a separate matter. That distinction has not been confronted directly. It should be.

The Membership Collapse

At its peak in 1972, the BSA enrolled about 6.5 million young people. As recently as 1998, membership stood at roughly 4.8 million. By the end of 2024, the organization had roughly 1.1 million members, by its own count — and that number was inflated by accounting adjustments that will be discussed shortly. Market penetration of eligible youth is approximately 1.25 percent. That is a number that warrants serious reflection.

The organization and its defenders have attributed this decline to a list of external factors: smartphones, overscheduled families, competing youth sports, cultural changes, the pandemic. These factors are real. They affect every youth organization. They do not explain why Scouting has declined more steeply and more persistently than comparable programs. Girl Scouts, while also facing challenges, has not experienced the same magnitude of collapse. International Scout organizations in many comparable countries have maintained or grown their programs. The external environment is a partial explanation. It is not a sufficient one.

The membership methodology itself has been manipulated. In August 2023, BSA switched from a fixed-membership scheme, where membership periods were tied to calendar-year unit renewal cycles, to a rolling-membership scheme, where individual memberships expire twelve months after joining. This change had administrative merit but created accounting confusion that the organization exploited. Under the rolling scheme, members who quit shortly after joining in fall 2023 remained on the membership rolls through much of 2024 because their twelve-month membership periods had not expired. In October 2024, BSA also quietly extended the “lapsed member” grace period from two months to three months, meaning people who let their memberships expire were counted as members for an additional month. Researchers and independent Scouting observers estimated that as many as 29,000 Scouts included in the December 2024 count would not have been included under the prior counting methodology.

This is what happens when an organization cares more about the number than about what the number measures. You can massage a membership count. You cannot massage whether a child is actually participating in a program that serves them.

The Mormon Church’s departure deserves specific attention because of its scale. For over a century, beginning in 1913, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was BSA’s largest chartered organization. The relationship provided not just members but volunteer leadership, community infrastructure, and cultural legitimacy within a substantial and well-organized community. When the BSA opened Scouts BSA to girls in 2019, the Mormon Church withdrew its entire program participation, ending an association that had produced millions of Scouts and Eagle Scouts. The immediate membership impact was measured in hundreds of thousands. There is no replacement relationship of similar scale on the horizon.

The pandemic accelerated losses already in progress. From 2019 to 2020 alone, membership fell roughly 43 percent, from about 1.97 million to around 1.12 million. Much of this was pandemic-related unit suspension. Much of it was not. Units that went dormant in 2020 often did not come back in 2021 or 2022. The reasons were familiar: adult volunteers who stepped back during the pandemic found other uses for their time and did not return, programs that went on pause lost their rosters, and an organization that depends on active volunteer labor discovered that passive participation is not a substitute.

The decline is not multi-causal in a way that distributes blame evenly across uncontrollable factors. The numbers have been going the wrong direction, with brief exceptions, for most of the last fifty years. The organization has not strung together a sustained multi-year membership recovery in a quarter century. At some point, the most honest explanation is that the product delivery and organizational management are not good enough.

The Debt at the Summit

The Summit Bechtel Family National Scout Reserve in West Virginia is a genuinely spectacular piece of land. Over 10,000 acres adjacent to the New River Gorge, it has whitewater rafting, ziplines, rock climbing, mountain biking, a skate park, shooting sports ranges, and a stadium capable of accommodating tens of thousands. It is impressive. It is also a financial catastrophe.

The decision to build the Summit was made in the mid-2000s by national BSA leadership that was under political pressure related to the organization’s discriminatory membership policies and wanted an alternative to holding National Jamborees at Fort A.P. Hill, a federal military installation where the government’s equal access policies created ongoing tension with BSA’s exclusion of gay members. BSA spent roughly $350 million developing the property, with significant philanthropic support from the Bechtel Foundation ($50 million), Jim Justice ($25 million, prior to his governorship and senatorial career), CONSOL Energy, and others.

The project made sense as a Jamboree site. As a year-round high adventure base generating revenue sufficient to justify its operating costs and debt service, it has not delivered. The facility was designed for a membership that no longer exists at the scale that was projected. In 2023, the Jamboree drew about 15,000 participants — well below expectations and substantially below the 40,000-plus attendance of the 2013 inaugural event. BSA’s 2024 audited statements carried roughly $186 million in bonds financing the Summit, and per analysis of those statements, the facility in 2023 operated at approximately 97 percent below utilization expectations.

97 percent below expectations. That is not a shortfall. That is a facility that is not functioning as planned by nearly any plausible definition of the word “functioning.”

When the Pentagon, under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, threatened to withdraw military support for the Jamboree in 2025, this was not only an ideological dispute. The military has provided logistical support, medical assets, and personnel to Jamborees since 1937. Without that support, the cost and complexity of operating a 15,000-person event in a remote location increases substantially. BSA’s response to the Pentagon’s pressure will be discussed in more detail in the section on political decisions, but the infrastructure dependency itself reflects a financial vulnerability that national leadership created and has not resolved.

Building a world-class outdoor facility sized for 40,000 when you serve a declining membership base of one million, many of whom cannot afford to travel to West Virginia, is a planning failure of notable scale. The decision-makers who authorized this project held positions with titles and responsibilities. They are not anonymous forces of economic history.

The Compensation Problem: Who Gets Paid What

Scouting America is a nonprofit. That does not mean its leadership works for free. The organization’s IRS Form 990 filings show that its top compensation packages in recent years have reached and exceeded $500,000 annually for top national executives. The President/CEO has been compensated at over $521,000 per year, with at least one other executive role exceeding $544,000.

Against this backdrop, the average salary for a District Executive, the frontline professional employee responsible for recruiting volunteers, building unit strength, supporting program delivery, and fundraising in a geographic territory, ranges from roughly $40,000 to $50,000 per year. District Executives are asked to work evenings and weekends as a routine matter because volunteer meetings happen outside business hours. They are effectively on call around the clock. Employee reviews consistently describe a role defined by no work-life balance, constant pressure on fundraising and membership metrics, insufficient support from senior management, and high personal stress. One Indeed reviewer described the job as requiring twelve-hour days with no overtime pay for seasonal employees. Another described constant deadlines with insufficient resources and no clear path to advancement outside a narrow internal track.

Overall BSA salaries average somewhere between $37,000 and $45,000 depending on the data source, with the organization paying roughly 29 percent below the average for comparable nonprofits according to Salary.com analysis. The Glassdoor compensation satisfaction rating for Scouting America employees stands at 2.6 out of 5 stars, which is a polite way of saying that the people who work there feel they are being paid poorly for what they are being asked to do. Which they are.

This is not a minor HR issue. It is a mission-critical problem. Scouting America’s program delivery depends on an infrastructure of professional staff who support volunteers, who in turn serve youth. If the people who support volunteers are underpaid, overworked, and cycling through positions every two to three years, the quality and consistency of volunteer support degrades. Degraded volunteer support means degraded programs. Degraded programs means families don’t stay. Families who don’t stay become former members who do not recommend Scouting to their neighbors.

The turnover rate for District Executives is a number BSA does not publish prominently. Internal Scouting observers and employee reviewers consistently describe a pattern where new executives are expected to perform at full capacity with minimal training, are measured primarily on fundraising and recruitment numbers that may not reflect program quality, and are pressured out or choose to leave after two or three years. The institutional knowledge cost of this churn is immense and invisible on a balance sheet.

The wage disparity between national leadership and frontline staff is not unique to BSA among large nonprofits. But it is particularly stark for an organization that depends on local community trust, grassroots relationship-building, and sustained professional presence in individual communities. You cannot build community relationships from a distance. You cannot retain the professionals who build those relationships by paying them wages that qualify for SNAP in most major metropolitan areas.

The volunteer side of this equation is equally stressed. The unit-level volunteer is unpaid by definition. They contribute evenings, weekends, personal vehicle mileage, out-of-pocket program expenses, and frequently significant emotional labor managing complex group dynamics among children, parents, and fellow volunteers. The expectation placed on the volunteer Scoutmaster or Cubmaster is high: be present at every weekly or biweekly meeting, plan monthly outdoor activities, manage the advancement records, liaise with the district professional, participate in annual committee meetings, handle the recharter, attend volunteer training, and do all of this while holding a full-time job and managing a personal life. For a parent whose child is in the unit, the situation is somewhat natural because they are there anyway. For a volunteer without a child in the unit — often the most valuable volunteers because they are not distracted by their own child’s experience — the commitment is purely motivated by mission, and it is substantial.

Volunteer burnout is real, it is common, and it is predictable. A volunteer who takes on primary unit leadership responsibility without sufficient support, without a functioning unit committee to share the load, without adequate training, and without mentorship from more experienced leaders will burn out within three to five years. When they leave, the unit may close or may degrade to a low-quality holding pattern while waiting for another willing parent to step up.

BSA has known about volunteer burnout as a retention challenge for decades. The research commissioned in the study cited earlier from IUPUI found that volunteer recognition was a meaningful factor in retention — volunteers who received awards were 1.43 times more likely to renew their commitment than those who did not. This is a low-cost intervention that costs primarily attention and organizational follow-through, not money. The organization should implement systematic volunteer recognition at every level more consistently than it currently does, not because recognition is a substitute for support but because it signals to volunteers that their contribution is seen and valued.

The more substantial intervention is reducing administrative burden. Every hour a volunteer spends on paperwork is an hour not spent with Scouts. The recharter process, the advancement documentation requirements, the meeting attendance tracking, the unit financial reporting — all of these have legitimate purposes, but the aggregate burden is not calibrated to what a person giving their free time can sustain indefinitely.

The Structural Disconnect: National vs. Reality

Scouting America’s national organization operates from a campus in Irving, Texas. Between it and the actual Scout unit where an eleven-year-old is tying bowlines, there are at minimum four layers: the national organization, the regional structure, the local council, and the district. Each layer has staff, committees, volunteer leadership structures, communication channels, and paperwork requirements.

The unit-level volunteer is at the bottom of this stack. The unit-level volunteer is also the person who actually delivers the program. This person is typically a parent or community member who has agreed to give their personal time, on evenings and weekends, indefinitely, in exchange for a registration fee, mandatory training requirements, and the privilege of receiving guidance documents that can run to tens of thousands of words.

The BSA’s Guide to Advancement is, by independent analysis, over 100 pages long with five levels of subsections. Volunteers who want to properly administer the advancement program are expected to know and apply this document. The Guide to Safe Scouting, the Health and Safety material, the Charter and Bylaws, the administrative requirements of Scoutbook, the recharter process, the unit financial reporting requirements — each of these represents a legitimate program need, but the aggregate weight of documentation and compliance requirements is not calibrated to what an unpaid volunteer with a full-time job and a family can reasonably absorb.

At the national level, the organization is making decisions about program design, advancement requirements, policy, and organizational structure, and those decisions are mediated through several layers of professional bureaucracy before they reach the volunteer who is supposed to implement them. The feedback loop runs in both directions, at least in theory. In practice, unit-level volunteers have limited formal mechanisms to influence national policy. The organization removed chartered organizations as automatic voting members of local councils in October 2025, a change that, according to analysts covering BSA governance, further insulated the national structure from accountability to the community organizations that are supposed to deliver the program.

This governance structure produces the classic symptoms of institutional capture. The commissioned professional system — the term used for BSA’s career staff — develops its own incentive structures that may or may not align with program quality. Career advancement within BSA is tied to fundraising metrics, membership numbers, and internal relationships, not to whether the units in a given district are running high-quality character development programs. You get what you measure. BSA has been measuring the wrong things for a long time.

One consequence of this disconnect is program quality inconsistency that is nearly impossible to address systematically because it is invisible to national leadership. A Scout unit in one state with an outstanding Scoutmaster and a healthy committee can deliver a program that matches or exceeds the best youth programming available anywhere. A Scout unit in the next county with an untrained leader and no committee to speak of delivers something that is not really Scouting at all — it is kids meeting in a church basement twice a month while adults handle the paperwork. Both units appear in the membership count. Both recharter annually. The national organization cannot meaningfully distinguish them.

The CEO and Leadership Pipeline Problem

The history of BSA’s national CEO positions is a history of career insiders advancing through the ranks of a closed system, occasionally interrupted by external appointments that did not go particularly well. Wayne Brock, who served as CEO from 2012 to 2015, spent forty years in various BSA roles before ascending to the top position and presided over membership declines of approximately 16 percent. His compensation exceeded $1 million over the period. His most substantive achievement during his term was that he was in the position when the ban on gay leaders was finally ended, a change that was forced on the organization by national volunteer leadership rather than driven by the professional executive staff.

The pattern extends backward and forward. CEOs are evaluated on their ability to manage an enormously complex institutional structure and keep the organization from embarrassing itself in the press. The criteria for success do not appear to include measurable improvements in program quality, youth outcomes, or the development experience of unit-level volunteers. The organization has not had a CEO who emerged from a strong track record of program innovation or who came with a demonstrated ability to grow an organization in decline. It has had a series of capable institutional managers navigating an increasingly difficult situation while being paid at the top of the staff compensation range.

The absence of strong executive leadership creates a vacuum. Per independent Scouting analysts, special interest groups and ideologically motivated volunteers have historically filled this vacuum, using BSA’s governance structures to pursue agendas that have little to do with youth program quality and quite a lot to do with cultural politics. This is not a conspiracy. It is what happens when an institution with significant social and symbolic weight has weak leadership at the center.

Training Inadequacy

Walk into almost any outdoor retailer and ask for the most complex thing they sell. They will show you a GPS navigation system, or a technical harness, or a communications radio. They will provide training. There will be a manual, a demonstration, and probably a warranty.

Walk into a Scout troop as a brand-new Scoutmaster and ask what training you need to do. You will be pointed toward an online module called Scoutmaster Position-Specific Training, which is a self-directed e-learning course. You will need to take Introduction to Outdoor Leadership Skills if you plan to take Scouts camping. These courses are available and, in the case of the outdoor skills training, genuinely useful. But they are not sufficient preparation for managing a complex volunteer organization serving thirty or forty children, and the depth of follow-up training and mentorship available is highly variable depending on which council and district you happen to be in.

Wood Badge, BSA’s premier adult leadership training course, is a highly regarded program that simulates patrol leadership within a troop environment and applies adult leadership development principles to the Scouting context. It is typically a two-phase course spanning one weekend in the field and one follow-up period. It is also not required of most leaders, is offered infrequently by most councils, has a significant cost that some volunteers cannot afford, and reaches only a fraction of the registered adult volunteer base.

National Youth Leadership Training, which develops youth leaders in the Patrol Method, is similarly valuable and similarly under-resourced and under-attended relative to the number of units that could benefit from it.

The consequence is a vast discrepancy in leadership quality across units. The best Scout leaders are extraordinary. They have been doing this for years, they deeply understand the Patrol Method and its application, they run outdoor programs that challenge and develop youth in genuine ways, and they build communities that families are genuinely glad to be part of. These leaders exist. Many of them are in your community right now.

The average Scout leader is trying their best with insufficient preparation. They are a parent who stepped up when no one else would, who took the basic online training and learned the rest as they went, who runs meetings that are mostly organized but lack the outdoor adventure component that makes Scouting distinct, and who would do better if better support were available. This is not a criticism of those volunteers. It is a criticism of an organization that depends on them but provides insufficient structural support for their development.

The inadequate training investment at the volunteer level is particularly damaging because Scouting’s model is explicitly volunteer-led. The quality of the volunteer is the quality of the program. An investment in volunteer training is a direct investment in program quality. That this is not treated as the highest funding priority in the organization is evidence of misaligned organizational priorities.

The Political Zigzag

Scouting America has spent the past fifteen years making a series of major policy decisions in response to external political pressure, and then reversing or modifying those decisions in response to different external political pressure. The organization has presented each change as a principled response to evolving values or circumstances. The pattern, viewed in sequence, suggests an organization without a stable governing philosophy, reacting to whoever is applying the most immediate pressure.

In 2013, BSA ended its ban on gay youth members. In 2015, it ended its blanket ban on gay adult leaders, while allowing religiously chartered units to maintain the exclusion. In 2017, it announced it would accept transgender boys. In 2018, it opened Cub Scouts to girls. In 2019, it opened Scouts BSA to girls and renamed that program. In May 2024, it renamed the entire organization from the Boy Scouts of America to Scouting America, describing this as a continuation of its inclusion mission. The new name initializes to “SA” — common shorthand for sexual assault — and the organization, apparently aware of this, quietly prohibited use of the SA abbreviation on its official platforms while never publicly acknowledging the problem.

Then the political environment shifted. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, under the Trump administration, threatened to sever the Pentagon’s century-old partnership with Scouting unless the organization reversed its DEI initiatives and several of its inclusion policies. The military partnership matters considerably, given that it includes logistical support for the National Jamboree, Scout troop access to military installations worldwide, and an enlistment pay-grade benefit for Eagle Scouts who join the military. Faced with the potential loss of this support, BSA moved quickly. The organization discontinued the Citizenship in Society merit badge, introduced a new Military Service merit badge, agreed to implement a policy requiring members to be identified by biological sex at birth, and announced compliance with executive orders targeting DEI programs.

The Citizenship in Society merit badge had been introduced in 2021 as one of BSA’s responses to the racial justice conversations of 2020. It was a merit badge about diversity and equity. It was introduced after months of internal development. It was discontinued in a matter of weeks under political pressure. Neither the introduction nor the discontinuation was the result of a stable program philosophy applied consistently over time.

This is a specific kind of institutional cowardice. It is the cowardice of an organization that does not have clear principles about what it is and what it is for, and therefore responds to each pressure point by giving ground. An organization with a clear, stable mission can engage honestly with pressure from multiple directions and say: here is what we are, here is why, and here is what we will and will not change. BSA has not been able to do that because it does not appear to have a clear, stable mission that rises above a general desire to continue existing.

The membership and demographic consequences of these policy shifts deserve separate consideration from the policy merits. The Mormon Church’s withdrawal of roughly 440,000 members from BSA’s rolls in 2019, following the decision to admit girls into the flagship program, was the single largest membership loss in BSA history. Whether that decision was right is a separate question from whether the organization anticipated the membership impact and had a plan to replace it. The evidence suggests it did not have a plan. A 16,000-member net gain reported in 2024 as evidence of recovery needs to be measured against a loss of hundreds of thousands. The arithmetic is not favorable.

The relationship with the Pentagon reflects a broader pattern of political vulnerability. An organization that depends on federal facilities, military logistical support, and a pay-grade benefit for its Eagle Scout military pipeline is not in a strong negotiating position with any administration that decides to use that leverage. BSA has essentially allowed itself to become politically exposed on both ends: progressive critics attack it for being too slow, conservative critics attack it for being too fast. Neither side is a reliable institutional ally, and BSA’s pattern of responding to whichever voice is loudest means it consistently disappoints both.

The Program Structure Problem

Here is something that international peer organizations figured out decades ago and BSA has not implemented: age-appropriate program spans.

Scouts BSA, the flagship program, runs from ten-year-old fifth-graders through high-school seniors. No school system, sports league, or serious developmental program treats students leaving elementary school and students preparing to graduate as a single coherent audience with the same program needs. BSA does. The Scout who joins as a ten-year-old and the Scout who is seventeen and preparing for college rank advancement are expected to participate in the same units, follow the same requirements, and be served by the same volunteer leadership.

This is administrative convenience masquerading as program design.

World Scout organizations that have maintained healthy membership typically use age spans of three to five years per program section. A ten-year-old in a European Scout organization is in a section with other ten to twelve-year-olds, with programming calibrated to their developmental stage. A fifteen-year-old is in a different section with programming calibrated to adolescent development and growing independence. The transitions between sections are program events, moments of passage that mark genuine developmental advancement.

In BSA, Cub Scouts runs from kindergarten through fifth grade. Scouts BSA runs from fifth grade through high school. The age ranges overlap at fifth grade, and neither program’s design is clearly optimized for the developmental needs of the specific age cohort it primarily serves. Venturing, BSA’s co-ed high-adventure program for ages fourteen through twenty, overlaps extensively with the Scouts BSA age range.

The consequence is programs that serve neither their youngest nor their oldest members particularly well. The ten-year-old joining a troop is developmentally very different from the seventeen-year-old, and a troop structure built primarily around the older Scouts will not serve the new members well. A troop structure built primarily around new members will not retain older Scouts. Most troops default to somewhere in the middle and serve nobody optimally.

BSA has acknowledged some of these issues and has conducted various pilot programs around program restructuring. The “family troop” pilot, which allowed units to function with mixed-gender membership, was extended in late 2025 as a permanent third option alongside the traditional gender-separated structure. These incremental adjustments address symptoms without addressing the underlying program design problem.

Governance Captured by Staff Incentives

The Scouting Maverick, an independent analytical voice on BSA governance, described the BSA’s governance structure accurately and bluntly in late 2025: the organization’s biggest structural problem is that the Scouting movement — families, youth, unit-level volunteers — is effectively walled off from governance. What fills that space is staff incentives.

Here is how the path works. Unit volunteers are represented through chartered organizations, which had been automatic voting members of local councils. Local councils appoint national representatives. National representatives elect the National Executive Board. In October 2025, the National Executive Board eliminated chartered organizations as automatic voting members of local councils. In practical terms, this means that the community organizations — churches, civic clubs, PTAs — that are supposed to be the local embodiment of Scouting’s community-embedded mission no longer have formal governance voice at the council level.

The governance pathway has always been weak. Volunteers who are focused on running their units do not typically have the time or inclination to participate actively in council politics. But there was at least a formal mechanism for community input. That mechanism has been further attenuated. What this leaves is a governance structure that is increasingly self-selecting: boards that appoint boards that elect boards, with minimal accountability to the people the program actually serves.

An organization governed this way will, over time, optimize for the interests of the people making governance decisions rather than the people receiving the program. That means budget decisions favor administrative infrastructure over volunteer support. Career decisions favor internal networking over demonstrated program competence. Policy decisions favor whatever reduces institutional risk to the people in the room rather than whatever is best for youth outcomes.

This is not a scandal. It is a slow organizational deterioration that is indistinguishable from incompetence because, in practice, it produces the same outcomes.

The Brand Situation

The decision to rename the Boy Scouts of America “Scouting America” was presented as an inclusion statement. It coincided with the organization’s 114th birthday in May 2024. The new name was intended to signal that the organization welcomed girls, who had been participating in significant numbers since 2018 and 2019.

Whatever the policy merits of the underlying inclusion decisions, the brand execution was a notable failure of basic due diligence. The new name’s initialism — SA — is widely recognized shorthand for sexual assault. For an organization that had just emerged from the largest sexual abuse bankruptcy in American history, choosing a name whose abbreviation invites this association suggests that no one in the room with approval authority thought to check whether the initialism had prior usage with negative connotations. The organization apparently recognized the problem after the fact, prohibiting the SA abbreviation on its official platforms without publicly acknowledging why.

An organization that is genuinely rebuilding trust after a sexual abuse crisis handles its naming decision carefully. It tests the name with survivors’ advocacy groups. It considers the abbreviated form. It checks what the initials mean. These are not advanced strategic communications tasks. They are basic quality control.

The renaming also solved a problem that the membership data suggests was not the actual source of BSA’s growth challenges. The research on why families do not enroll in Scouting or do not stay does not primarily cite the name “Boy Scouts of America” as a barrier. It cites program quality inconsistency, time demands, cost, and scheduling conflicts with other activities. Rebranding an organization with declining enrollment is a choice that uses organizational energy and generates press coverage. It does not address the reasons families leave.

The Money Flows in Interesting Directions

BSA’s national organization has, according to its 2024 Form 990, provided first-class or charter travel to key employees or officers. This is a reportable item because it represents a departure from standard nonprofit expense management. For an organization that pays district executives $40,000 to $50,000 a year while working them around the clock, and that has $329 million in debt, and that sold camp properties to pay abuse settlement funds, the expenditure of donated dollars on premium travel for executives is a choice that communicates something about organizational values.

The organization is not unique among large nonprofits in this respect. The gap between what executive leadership is paid and what frontline staff is paid characterizes many organizations. But the Scouting context makes it particularly visible because the mission is explicitly about character, thrift, and service. The Scout Law says “thrifty.” It means something. When an organization whose founder listed thrift as a core value of its program is documenting executive charter travel expenses on its federal tax filing, there is a tension that deserves to be named.

Local councils are separate legal entities from the national BSA organization and have their own financial positions, which vary widely. Some councils are well-managed and financially healthy. Others are not. Council consolidations have been ongoing as declining membership reduces the revenue base needed to sustain independent council operations. Each consolidation is presented as an efficiency measure. Cumulatively, they reflect a contraction of the professional infrastructure at the local level — fewer staff serving larger territories, with less local knowledge and community presence.

Part Three: The Way Forward

The problems described above are real. They are also, with significant effort and honest leadership, fixable. The organization has survived worse than its current condition, though not by much. What follows is a set of specific, actionable recommendations organized by priority and category.

These are not motivational suggestions. They are operational recommendations. Whether the people currently in positions of authority at BSA’s national level have the organizational will to implement them is a question this article cannot answer. What we can say is that the alternative to implementing them is continued decline until the organization either undergoes a forced restructuring or ceases to exist in any recognizable form. At 1.25 percent market penetration, there is no comfortable place to land.

Fix the Pay

This is first because it is foundational. You cannot deliver a quality program through volunteers who lack professional support, and you cannot sustain professional support through a workforce that earns wages below the sector median while working hours that exceed the normal full-time employment definition.

The District Executive salary floor should be set at a minimum of $55,000 annually, adjusted for cost of living in high-cost markets, with a clear three-year advancement pathway to $70,000 or above for executives who demonstrate program quality outcomes. This is not a radical suggestion. It is the minimum necessary to recruit from a pool of candidates who have other options.

The funding for this compensation increase has to come from somewhere. The two most defensible sources are: reduction in national staff overhead and reallocation from the executive compensation tier. An organization where frontline staff earn $40,000 and CEOs earn $520,000 has room to compress the ratio. This is not punitive. It is alignment. The people doing the most mission-critical work closest to the youth should not be earning wages that require them to have a second job.

The District Executive role also needs to be redefined. Currently it is primarily a fundraising and recruitment position with program support as a secondary function. The metrics need to change. Program quality indicators — camping nights, outdoor activity frequency, advancement rate, volunteer training completion, unit health assessments — should be primary. Fundraising matters because money is necessary. But an organization that measures its frontline professionals primarily on fundraising will have frontline professionals who are primarily focused on fundraising rather than program quality. You get what you measure.

Fix the Training

Wood Badge should be required for Scoutmasters and Cubmasters within three years of registration, with councils obligated to offer it at accessible costs and convenient times. This is not a radical requirement. It is the minimum professional standard for someone leading a Scout unit.

But training alone does not deliver consistency. What delivers consistency is ongoing coaching and mentorship. Every district should have a corps of experienced Scouter volunteers explicitly recruited and trained to serve as unit coaches — not to run the units, but to support the unit leadership and help them improve. This model exists in pieces in some councils. It is not systematic.

Online training has a role. The position-specific modules are accessible, reasonably well-designed, and can be completed at the volunteer’s convenience. They should not be the primary or sole training pathway for anyone with unit leadership responsibility. They are good for orientation. They are not sufficient for competence.

The national organization should invest meaningfully in creating a library of practical, video-based leadership development resources that unit leaders can access asynchronously. Not a fifty-page PDF. A fifteen-minute video of an experienced Scoutmaster walking through how a patrol leader handles a conflict between two Scouts on a camping trip. A ten-minute video of a Den Leader running a Cub Scout meeting that is genuinely engaging. Practical, observed, real-world. This does not require a major budget. It requires someone at the national level to prioritize it.

Fix the Governance

The October 2025 decision to remove chartered organizations as automatic voting members of local councils should be reversed. This is not a complicated case. An organization that is moated off from the communities it is supposed to serve will, over time, serve itself. The formal governance pathway for community organizations was already weak. Making it weaker does not make the organization more accountable; it makes it less so.

Beyond reversal of that specific decision, BSA needs genuine mechanisms for unit-level volunteer input into program and policy decisions. Not a survey that gets filed. Not a comment form. Actual representative structures where experienced unit volunteers have a formal voice in national program decisions.

The career advancement criteria for BSA’s commissioned professional staff should be explicitly tied to program quality outcomes, not solely to fundraising and membership metrics. This requires someone at the top to define what program quality means and then build measurement systems around it. This is hard. It is also necessary.

Board membership at the national level should include a meaningful representation of people whose primary connection to BSA is as unit-level volunteers or parents of Scouts, not solely as major donors and organizational executives. The people who experience the program from the ground level know things that are invisible from Irving, Texas. They should have formal seats at the table.

Fix the Program Structure

BSA should restructure its program along developmental lines. The current age compression is a liability. The outline of a better structure:

A Cub Scout program for grades K through 3 (ages 5 through 9), focused on basic skills, outdoor introduction, and family-centered activities. A junior program for grades 4 through 6 (ages 9 through 12), focused on skill development and introduction to the Patrol Method in a supervised context. A core Scouting program for grades 7 through 9 (ages 12 through 15), focused on youth-led units, outdoor adventure, and advancement toward a meaningful first-tier recognition. A senior program for grades 10 through 12 and young adults to 21, focused on high adventure, leadership development, expedition-scale outdoor activity, and the Eagle Scout pathway.

Each transition between sections should be a program event, not an administrative transfer. The Scout who moves from one section to the next should experience this as a rite of passage, not a recharter. The world Scouting movement figured this out. BSA can learn from it.

The Patrol Method should be defended aggressively. When national program changes dilute the Patrol Method — when they increase adult control, reduce youth decision-making, or compromise the primacy of the small patrol group as the unit of Scouting experience — those changes should be contested. The Patrol Method is not one of several equally valid approaches. It is the approach. Everything that reinforces it strengthens the program. Everything that compromises it weakens it.

Fix the Debt and the Real Estate

The Summit Bechtel Reserve is a beautiful and genuinely useful facility for what it does best: hosting large-scale Scout events and serving as a premier high-adventure base. The problem is the debt. With $186 million in bonds still outstanding and utilization far below projections, the facility is a fiscal anchor on an organization that is already under financial stress.

The Summit should be treated as what it is: a premier national facility serving a specific high-value program function, not a revenue engine capable of generating income to justify its debt. The debt restructuring or refinancing of the Summit bonds should be a national organizational priority, not deferred until the next leadership team inherits the problem. If the Summit cannot generate sufficient revenue to service its debt, the options are restructuring, additional philanthropic fundraising specifically targeted at debt reduction, or a managed disposition of some portion of the property. All of these options are uncomfortable. Carrying $186 million in debt on a facility operating at 97 percent below expected utilization is worse.

More broadly, BSA should conduct a comprehensive review of its national and council real estate holdings and honestly assess which properties are mission-critical, which are under-utilized, and which should be sold or transferred to better uses. The mission is youth program delivery. The measure of a piece of property is whether it serves that mission in proportion to its cost.

Local councils that are not financially sustainable in their current form should merge sooner rather than later. Delayed consolidations preserve administrative structures at the expense of program delivery. A merged council with sufficient professional staff and financial resources to serve its region well is better than two councils each too thin to do their jobs.

On Politics: Pick a Lane and Stay in It

The clearest recommendation regarding BSA’s political situation is also the hardest to implement: stop responding to political pressure as a primary driver of policy decisions.

This does not mean BSA should be politically inert or culturally isolated. It means that policy decisions about who can participate in Scouting and under what conditions should be made on the basis of the organization’s mission, its understanding of youth development, and its governing documents — and then held consistently unless there is a genuine internal organizational reason to change them.

Policies changed in response to legal threats, government funding leverage, or ideological pressure from any direction are not policies grounded in mission. They are negotiations. Organizations that negotiate their values in response to whoever has leverage at a given moment do not develop the institutional identity or community trust necessary to recover from the kind of decline BSA is experiencing.

The specific political decisions of recent years — the inclusion of gay members and leaders, the opening of programming to girls, the accommodation of transgender members, the reversal of DEI initiatives, the compliance with Hegseth-mandated policy changes — can each be argued on their merits. What cannot be defended is the pattern: a policy is established with stated rationale, external pressure mounts, the policy is reversed or modified with new stated rationale, and the organization presents each change as principled. This is institutional instability dressed up as responsiveness. Families who are evaluating whether to join Scouting are watching. They see an organization that does not know what it stands for.

What BSA stands for should be simple enough to state on one index card: preparing young people for lives of character and service through outdoor adventure, skill development, and community belonging. Every policy decision that comes before the national executive board should be evaluated against that statement. If a policy serves that mission, it belongs. If it is a response to external pressure unrelated to that mission, it does not belong, regardless of which direction the pressure comes from.

This will not make everyone happy. An organization that cannot make everyone happy will, if it is honest about this fact, be able to make something better: a stable, trustworthy institutional identity that families can rely on to be the same thing it was last year and the year before.

Invest Specifically in Communities That Need It

Scouting America has recently spoken about expanding its reach to underserved communities. This is the right instinct for the wrong reasons if it is primarily a membership growth strategy. It is the right instinct for the right reasons if it reflects an honest recognition that Scouting’s program is most valuable to young people who have the least access to outdoor experience, structured mentorship, and skills-based youth programming.

A child in a rural community who attends a school without strong extracurricular programming, in a family that cannot afford private athletic leagues or camps, in a neighborhood where outdoor access is limited, stands to gain more from high-quality Scouting than a child in a well-resourced suburb who has six competing options for structured youth activity on any given day. BSA’s program should prioritize reaching that child.

This requires something more than marketing. It requires subsidizing registration fees where financial barriers exist, actively recruiting adult volunteers from within communities rather than importing them from outside, and adapting the administrative burden of the program to what volunteer leaders in resource-constrained environments can realistically manage. A church in an underserved urban neighborhood should not need a full-time administrator to run a Scout pack. The program should be designed to work with what is available.

Hold Youth Protection to a Higher Standard Than the Law Requires

The reforms implemented post-bankruptcy are meaningful. They should be maintained and strengthened.

The Safeguarding Youth Training requirement should be renewed more frequently than current policy requires. Two-deep leadership should be enforced uniformly. The reporting obligation — the requirement that registered volunteers report suspected abuse to law enforcement, not solely to BSA leadership — should be written into all volunteer agreements explicitly, in plain language, not embedded in a training module that may or may not be retained.

Every council should have a designated Youth Protection Coordinator whose sole job function is monitoring compliance with youth protection standards, reviewing incident reports, and serving as a first point of contact for concerned volunteers or parents. This role should not be a collateral duty assigned to someone who also handles recharters.

The goal is not to eliminate risk, which is not possible. The goal is to ensure that when abuse occurs, it is reported, investigated, and prosecuted immediately rather than managed quietly. That shift in institutional culture from risk management to accountability is the most important change BSA can make, and it is also the one that requires the most sustained leadership will to implement.

Rebuild the Relationship with the Public

BSA’s public reputation has been damaged severely. The sexual abuse crisis, the bankruptcy, the political zigzagging, and the membership decline have collectively reduced public confidence in the institution as a trustworthy guardian of children.

The path back is not a rebranding. It is not a press release. It is not a National Annual Meeting theme. It is ten years of doing the job well, consistently, transparently, and without drama. Every year that passes in which no scandal emerges, in which program quality improves by measurable indicators, in which volunteers feel supported and families feel their children are well-served, is a year in which the reputation rebuilds.

The organization should publish meaningful outcome data annually. Not a membership number that has been adjusted for accounting methodology changes. Actual program quality indicators: camping nights per Scout per year, percentage of units that conducted at least six outdoor activities in the previous twelve months, volunteer training completion rates, Eagle Scout project data, alumni survey data on life outcomes. If the data is good, it demonstrates the mission is being delivered. If the data is not good, it tells the organization where to focus.

Transparency about what went wrong should extend beyond the settlement payments. The BSA published an internal report on its abuse history as part of the bankruptcy proceedings. That report should be widely shared internally and cited specifically in youth protection training so that the institutional memory of the failure is preserved as a learning document rather than buried in legal archives.

Fix the Name, Or At Least the Initialism Problem

The name “Scouting America” is not terrible on its own terms. The problem is the initialism. BSA should stop forbidding use of the “SA” abbreviation and acknowledge directly, in print, why the abbreviation is problematic, and then commit to never using it in official communications. The act of forbidding the abbreviation while pretending the reason for the prohibition does not exist is itself a small illustration of the institutional honesty problem.

More substantively, if the name “Scouting America” was chosen to signal inclusion, then the organization should make sure the program actually delivers that inclusion in practice. A name is only as good as what it describes. If Scouting America is inclusive in name but delivers inconsistent program quality in communities that have historically been underserved by BSA, the name is marketing rather than mission.

Conclusion: The Case for Getting This Right

Here is the argument for why this matters beyond the Scouting community.

There are roughly 74 million young people in the United States. They are growing up with substantially less time in unstructured outdoor environments than any previous generation. They are less likely to have multi-year mentorship relationships with trusted adults outside their families. They are spending more hours in front of screens and fewer hours developing practical skills through physical challenge. They are lonelier than prior generations by measurable survey data. They are less civically engaged. They are, by multiple indicators, struggling with purpose and identity in ways that translate into worse mental health outcomes and weaker social connections in adulthood.

The program that Scouting delivers, at its best, is a direct response to every one of those deficits. It puts young people outside. It gives them real skills. It connects them with adult mentors in a low-pressure, activity-centered relationship. It asks them to be part of a community and to contribute to something beyond themselves. It challenges them physically and asks them to develop resilience. The research supports these outcomes. Eagle Scouts are more civically engaged, more socially connected, less lonely, and more purposeful than their non-Scout peers. These are not trivial differences.

The country needs an organization that can deliver this program at scale. Scouting America, for all its failures and problems, is the most plausible institution to do it. There is no equivalent alternative waiting in the wings. Building the infrastructure — the camps, the training system, the program structure, the volunteer corps — that BSA has accumulated over 116 years would take decades and require resources that no new organization could plausibly assemble.

The argument for fixing Scouting America is therefore not nostalgia. It is not a defense of an institution for the sake of the institution. It is a practical case that the outcomes this organization is capable of producing are needed badly, that the organization possesses unique assets that could deliver those outcomes, and that the alternative to fixing it is losing something that would be enormously difficult to replace.

The people who could fix it are not mysterious. They are the Scoutmasters who are running outstanding troops right now, whose Scouts are camping monthly and learning real skills and developing real character. They are the professional Scouters who are doing the job well despite insufficient pay and insufficient support. They are the parents who stepped up to lead a pack because someone needed to and who are figuring it out one meeting at a time. They are the Eagle Scouts who carry what they learned in Scouting into their careers and communities and families.

Those people know what the program is supposed to be. They know when it is and when it is not. What they need from the national organization is honesty about the problems, competence in addressing them, appropriate compensation for the professional staff who support them, a training system that actually prepares them, and a governance structure that listens to them.

That is not a long list. It is also not what the current national organization has provided consistently. The distance between what BSA is and what it needs to be is real. The question is whether the people holding the institutional authority are willing to do the work required to close it.

The Scouts have a word for that kind of commitment in the face of difficulty. It is in the Scout Oath: brave. The organization should try to be that.

A Note on Institutional Memory and What Gets Lost

One thing not often discussed in organizational analyses of BSA’s decline is what happens to institutional memory when organizations shed staff and consolidate operations rapidly. The District Executive who has worked a given territory for ten years knows which chartered organizations are genuinely committed to their units and which are passive sponsors who sign a recharter without attending a single meeting. They know which volunteer leaders are burning out and need support. They know which units are thriving and why. They know the principal at the middle school who might be willing to host a recruiting night. They know the veteran in the community who would make an outstanding merit badge counselor.

When that District Executive is replaced by a newer employee covering a territory twice the size, at the same or lower salary, none of that knowledge transfers. It exists in someone’s head, and then it is gone. The new executive has to rebuild from scratch in half the time available because they are covering twice the ground. The units suffer. The program suffers. Some units close.

This loss happens quietly, one consolidation at a time, and it does not show up anywhere on BSA’s financial statements. It shows up in the membership trend lines three to five years later, and by then, the executives who made the staffing decisions have moved on, and the cause-and-effect relationship is impossible to document cleanly.

The same phenomenon affects volunteer leadership. BSA units depend on volunteer succession — the experienced Committee Chair who mentors the incoming one, the seasoned Scoutmaster who guides new leaders during their first year. When units go inactive, this succession breaks. When it breaks, the knowledge that would have been passed down is lost. The next time a unit forms in that same church basement, it starts over from the beginning.

This is not a reason to avoid consolidation when consolidation is genuinely necessary. It is a reason to take consolidation seriously as an organizational trauma, to actively manage the knowledge transfer, and to recognize that the cost of the consolidation is higher than the immediate financial calculation suggests.

The LDS Departure Deserves Its Own Analysis

The departure of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from BSA in 2019 and 2020 was the most consequential membership event in the organization’s recent history, and it has been consistently underanalyzed in BSA’s public communications.

At its peak, the LDS church’s relationship with BSA produced an estimated 20 percent or more of total BSA membership. The church had been a chartered organization since 1913 — over a century of partnership. LDS boys participated in Scouting as an integral part of their young men’s programming, meaning that Scouting was essentially automatic for LDS boys of appropriate age. The church provided facilities, volunteer infrastructure, and cultural reinforcement for Scouting that no other chartered organization could match at scale.

When BSA opened Scouts BSA to girls in 2019, the LDS church announced it would develop its own youth programming. The transition was complete by the end of 2019, removing an estimated 400,000 or more youth from BSA’s rolls. The replacement programming the LDS church developed, Children and Youth, is a home-centered, church-supported curriculum that does not involve the outdoor program emphasis or the advancement system that defined BSA Scouting.

BSA’s decision to admit girls to Scouts BSA was made in response to years of family requests and was presented as an expansion of the program. In retrospect, the organization made that decision without a plan to replace the membership it was virtually certain to lose. This is not a commentary on whether the decision was right. It is a commentary on the quality of the strategic analysis that preceded it.

An organization that expects to lose 400,000 members in response to a policy change should have, before implementing that policy change, a concrete plan for recruiting 400,000 alternative members. BSA did not demonstrate that it had such a plan. The small membership gains reported in subsequent years — measured in the tens of thousands — have not begun to replace what was lost.

The LDS departure is also instructive about the role of chartered organizations in BSA’s model. When BSA operated primarily through large, organized institutional partners — the LDS church, major civic organizations, school systems — those partners provided the infrastructure that made Scouting reach families efficiently. As institutional partnership has declined and BSA has become more dependent on smaller, less institutionally organized chartered organizations, the cost and effort of reaching individual families has increased. The economics of the chartered organization model work better at scale than at the current scale.

The Merit Badge System: Strength and Weakness Combined

The merit badge system is one of Scouting’s most recognizable features and one of its most frequently misunderstood. At its best, the merit badge is a structured introduction to a practical skill or area of knowledge, delivered through genuine engagement with a subject matter expert. The Eagle Scout requirement of 21 merit badges, of which 13 are specified, creates a breadth of experience that develops well-rounded competence across outdoor skills, civic knowledge, personal management, first aid, and citizenship.

At its worst, the merit badge system becomes a box-checking exercise where Scouts complete the paperwork for a badge without genuinely engaging with its content. Merit badge counselors who are not invested in the subject, or who are processing large numbers of Scouts through a camp program at high speed, can confer badges on young people who have technically met the stated requirements but have not developed meaningful competence in the underlying subject.

The merit badge mill — a derogatory term used within Scouting to describe summer camp programs that prioritize merit badge throughput over genuine learning — is a real phenomenon. A Scout who attends summer camp and earns eight merit badges in one week has almost certainly not developed the knowledge and skills those badges are supposed to represent, because the time required to develop genuine competence in eight different areas is not available in one week. The badges are technically valid. What they represent is not always valid.

This is not primarily a policy problem. The requirements for each merit badge are published and are not generally weak. The problem is implementation. A merit badge counselor who understands their subject and is committed to genuine learning will use the requirements as a starting point and go further. A merit badge counselor who wants to sign off on paperwork efficiently will use the requirements as a ceiling. The system cannot fully distinguish between these two outcomes.

BSA updated requirements for over 80 merit badges effective January 2026, with a stated focus on connecting badges to modern career pathways and expanding outdoor and practical education components. This is a reasonable approach to keeping the merit badge system relevant. The more pressing need is better preparation and selection of merit badge counselors, which requires both better volunteer recruitment and better council follow-through on who is approved to serve in the role.

The Eagle Scout service project requirement is the most defensible and most difficult component of the Eagle Scout pathway. The project must be planned and executed by the Scout, must benefit a community organization, must be approved before work begins, and must be documented in a project workbook that is reviewed by the district and council before the rank is awarded. This is not a simple requirement and it should not be made simpler. The project represents genuine independent initiative at a scale that requires sustained adult trust and youth competence in equal measure. It is also, arguably, the single element of the Eagle Scout experience most likely to translate directly to career and civic skills in adult life. Project management, resource acquisition, volunteer coordination, timeline management, documentation — these are directly transferable professional capabilities.

Technology: Both the Problem and Possibly Part of the Solution

BSA’s relationship with technology has been awkward. The organization’s administrative systems have been slow to modernize; the transition from Scoutbook to Scoutbook Plus in recent years has generated significant volunteer frustration, and the general administrative burden on unit leaders has not been reduced by the introduction of digital tools, which have largely added digital paperwork to existing analog paperwork rather than replacing it.

At the same time, the organization has done some genuinely useful things online. Position-specific training modules are well-organized and accessible. The merit badge hub provides clear requirements and counselor resources. The Scouts First helpline for reporting abuse concerns operates around the clock and provides a confidential reporting mechanism independent of local council staff.

The potential for technology to reduce administrative burden on volunteers is large and largely unrealized. A volunteer leader spending two hours a month on Scoutbook data entry is a volunteer leader spending two hours a month not on program delivery. Unit recharter processes that require multiple forms, online submissions, and council verification could be dramatically simplified with better system design. If an organization genuinely believes that volunteers are its most precious resource, it should structure every administrative process to minimize the time volunteers spend on administration. Currently, BSA’s systems do not consistently reflect that priority.

There is also an opportunity in technology for volunteer training and peer community that BSA has not fully developed. The best Scout leaders in the country know things that would benefit every Scout leader in the country. A well-designed digital community with video resources, peer discussion, and facilitated mentorship connections could democratize access to the institutional knowledge currently locked inside individual experienced volunteers. This exists in embryonic form in various online Scouting forums. BSA has not built and maintained the kind of authoritative, high-quality digital resource library that would make it genuinely useful.

The generational dimension of technology is also relevant. The parents now enrolling their children in Cub Scouts are millennials and younger Gen X, populations who expect digital-first administrative processes and on-demand access to information. An organization that requires them to dig through a PDF handbook to find a policy, or to email a council office to request a form that should be available online, is not meeting reasonable expectations for how an institution in 2026 should operate. This is not about being trendy. It is about reducing friction for the people the organization needs to attract and retain.

What International Scouting Knows That BSA Does Not

It is worth noting, before arriving at recommendations, that BSA is not Scouting’s only model. The World Organization of the Scout Movement encompasses over 170 national organizations and roughly 57 million members globally. Most of them are growing. The international Scouting community has developed practices and program innovations over the past three decades that BSA has largely not adopted.

The age-banding issue has already been discussed. But there are other differences worth examining.

Many international Scout organizations have developed explicit programming for young people in their late teenage and early adult years that is distinct from their standard Scout program — focused on high-adventure challenge, international exchange, and community development projects of genuine scale. These programs retain older members by offering them something meaningfully different from what they did at twelve. BSA’s Venturing program was designed with a similar intent but has never achieved the scale or profile of its international equivalents.

Many international Scout organizations have also developed more sophisticated community-embedding strategies than BSA currently employs. In countries where Scouting has maintained or grown membership, the Scout unit is typically understood as a community institution — something the neighborhood or town recognizes as its own — rather than a program delivered by a chartered organization that may or may not have meaningful engagement with the unit. The difference is subtle but important. A Scout troop that is seen by the surrounding community as a genuine community asset attracts families organically, receives community support, and survives leadership transitions because the community has a stake in its continuity. A Scout troop that is merely the program offered by a church to its members does not have that resilience.

BSA’s chartered organization model was designed to create this community embedding. In practice, it creates varying degrees of community connection, from genuine integration to nominal sponsorship where the chartered organization signs a form annually without meaningful involvement. The organizations where Scouting has thrived are the ones where the chartered partner is genuinely invested, and BSA has no systematic way to require or incentivize that investment. Chartered organizations can fulfill the minimum requirements of their agreement while providing no active support to the unit, and BSA’s enforcement mechanisms for charter compliance are limited.

The international insight here is that Scouting works best when it is genuinely part of the community fabric, not when it is a program option available in the community. Getting from the second to the first requires sustained community relationship-building by both professional staff and volunteer leadership — the kind of work that the current District Executive compensation and workload structure makes nearly impossible to do well.

BSA’s national leadership should be studying the organizations within the World Scout Movement that have grown their membership over the past twenty years and asking specifically what those organizations do differently. This is not complicated international benchmarking. The WOSM publishes membership data. The organizations that are growing are identifiable. Their program structures and community engagement models are documented and available. Whether BSA’s national leadership has looked seriously at this research is not evident from its public communications.

The Perversion Files and the Institutional Memory Problem

In 2012, BSA was compelled by court order to release more than 20,000 pages of internal documentation covering approximately 1,200 alleged abuse cases between 1965 and 1985. These documents, which had been maintained internally for decades, revealed that BSA leadership had known about abuse by specific individuals, had removed those individuals from their positions, and in many cases had not reported them to law enforcement.

The release of these documents was a significant institutional moment. It established that the abuse crisis was not a matter of a few bad actors operating undetected in a vigilant system. It was a pattern that the organization’s leadership knew about and managed as an internal personnel problem rather than a public safety emergency.

BSA has, since this disclosure, implemented substantial youth protection reforms. The Safeguarding Youth Training program is mandatory for all registered adults and must be renewed every two years. Background checks are required for all adult volunteers. The two-deep leadership requirement prohibits any adult from being alone with a youth. Digital communication guidelines extend these protections to online contact. A 24/7 helpline exists for reporting concerns. These are meaningful reforms, and they reflect genuine institutional change.

What has not happened is a sustained, honest public reckoning with the specific people who made specific decisions that allowed abuse to continue. The bankruptcy settlement resolved the financial liability. The individual board members, council executives, and national staff who knew about specific abusers and chose not to report them to law enforcement are mostly unidentified in the public record. Their decisions are described in systemic terms — “the organization failed to protect youth,” “there were institutional shortcomings” — language that accurately describes what happened while diffusing responsibility so broadly that no individual is accountable for anything specific.

This is a limitation of how large institutions process historical wrongdoing. The language of systemic failure is not inaccurate, but it is incomplete. Systems are operated by people. The decision not to report an accused leader to law enforcement was made by a specific person in a specific moment. Identifying those decisions and those decision-makers, honestly, in the organization’s own institutional history, would be a more complete reckoning than the bankruptcy settlement has produced.

This matters not only for the survivors, for whom it matters enormously, but for the institution. Organizations that have gone through genuine reckoning with historical wrongdoing — not just legal resolution, not just reformed policy, but honest naming of what happened and why — emerge with greater institutional trust than organizations that managed the legal process and moved on. BSA has not completed that reckoning. The settlement is paid. The policies are reformed. The institutional self-examination is incomplete.

Whether the current BSA leadership has the willingness to complete it is uncertain. Whether doing so would be beneficial to the organization’s mission and public trust is not uncertain. It would be. Honest institutions that acknowledge their failures specifically, rather than managing them through settlement agreements and PR strategy, build the kind of credibility that cannot be purchased or branded into existence.

Laying out what is wrong with an organization is the easier task. The harder task is being specific about what would actually change the trajectory.

Membership will not grow because of marketing. The families who are not in Scouting are not primarily unaware of Scouting’s existence. They are aware of it and are either ambivalent or have had an experience with a specific unit that was not good enough to retain them. The two things that consistently drive enrollment and retention are the quality of the specific unit’s program and the quality of the parent and family experience in the first ninety days of participation.

If a family joins a Cub Scout pack and the first three meetings are disorganized, the parent who is trying to help feels unwelcome or confused, and the kid spends forty-five minutes in a fluorescent-lit church basement watching adults sort through paperwork, that family does not come back. This is not a brand problem. It is a product quality problem. The solution is making sure that every unit’s program is good enough in the first ninety days to retain families who were willing to show up once. That requires unit-level quality standards, council-level support for units that are not meeting those standards, and a feedback loop to identify which units are struggling before they lose everyone they recruited.

The research base for what works in youth-serving organizations is not thin. Organizations like the Search Institute have spent decades studying what young people need from developmental contexts and what makes youth programming sticky. BSA should be deeply engaged with that research and should be building program standards and volunteer training around it. There is no evidence that it is doing this systematically.

The organizations that have successfully revitalized Scouting or Scout-adjacent programs in specific markets have done so by doing several things that are less glamorous than a rebrand: hiring experienced program professionals at competitive wages, giving them enough territory to actually know their communities, providing them with high-quality volunteer training resources, setting clear program quality standards, and measuring what actually matters about youth development outcomes. These things are not complicated. They require sustained commitment and willingness to spend money on the right things rather than on the wrong things.

Recruiting matters more than it is currently prioritized. Most Scouting units recruit through passive channels: they show up at a school night, they post a flyer, they hope someone shows up. The units that consistently grow recruit actively, meaning they have volunteers who go into their communities and personally invite specific families, who build relationships with elementary school teachers and coaches and pediatricians and faith leaders, who follow up when a family expresses interest rather than waiting to see if they come back on their own.

The national organization has built tools for this — recruitment templates, talking points, materials — but it has not built a culture in which active recruitment is treated as a primary program responsibility of unit leadership rather than a professional staff function or a once-a-year event. The District Executive who calls the Cubmaster in October to ask about join night numbers is measuring an outcome. What is needed is a year-round conversation about which specific families in the community have been personally invited, what happened when they were invited, and what support the unit needs to convert interest into active membership.

Retention research is even more detailed than recruitment research: families leave in the first ninety days, or they tend to stay for years. The first campout, the first pack meeting where the parent feels like they belong, the first time their kid comes home genuinely excited about something they did — these events determine whether a family becomes a Scouting family or a family that tried Scouting once. Investing in the quality of those early experiences is the highest-leverage retention intervention available.

What this looks like in practice: every new family in a Cub Scout pack should be personally contacted by an existing pack family within the first two weeks. Every new Scout should be assigned a buddy who can help them feel comfortable at meetings. The first campout should be welcoming to parents who are nervous about camping, not intimidating. The program in the first three months should lead with the most engaging, most accessible, most memorable activities the unit does — not with paperwork and uniform inspections.

The Honest Conversation About Boys

Since the BSA’s 2019 decision to open Scouts BSA to girls, there has been an ongoing and largely unresolved conversation within the Scouting community about whether the program optimally serves boys when it is fully integrated or when it offers gender-specific environments.

This is not a simple question, and anyone who tells it to you is simple is either not paying attention or is arguing from ideology rather than evidence. The research on gender-segregated versus integrated youth programming does not produce a unanimous verdict. What it does suggest is that program design, leadership quality, and peer culture matter more than the gender composition of any given group. The best girl troops in BSA are excellent programs. The best boy troops are excellent programs. The worst of each is equally bad.

What the LDS departure established clearly is that there are large communities of families in America for whom a boys-specific Scouting program is deeply important, and for whom the shift to a co-educational model was not merely a point of cultural disagreement but a reason to leave and build something else. BSA has not found a way to serve that constituency while also serving the families who wanted their daughters to have access to the Scouts BSA program. The “family troop” pilot, made permanent in late 2025, is an attempt to allow individual units to make this choice for themselves. Whether it will work is not yet established.

What can be said with confidence is that an organization serving young people should design its programs around the developmental needs of those young people, should be honest with itself about what its research and field experience tell it, and should be willing to offer genuine program differentiation rather than policy compromises that satisfy nobody particularly well.

Final Word: What the Program Deserves

The research says what the research says. A well-run Scout troop does real things for young people: it reduces loneliness, builds civic engagement, develops leadership, and produces adults who are more purposeful and more connected than their peers who did not have that experience. The program works. The data is consistent across multiple independent studies spanning decades.

The consequences of the organization’s failures are therefore not abstract. They are measured in children who do not get the program they could have received, in employees paid inadequately for demanding work, in volunteers who burn out without sufficient support, and in families who try Scouting once and do not return because the experience was not good enough.

The case for fixing this is simple. The alternative is an organization that continues to decline until it either undergoes a forced restructuring from outside or quietly ceases to be relevant. Neither outcome serves the young people who would benefit from a well-delivered Scouting program. There are 74 million of them in this country. Roughly 1 million currently participate. The gap between those two numbers is the measure of the opportunity.

It is worth being specific about what the stakes are in concrete human terms. A young person who participates in high-quality Scouting for five or more years, who earns meaningful rank advancement, who camps regularly, who develops friendships within a patrol, who has adult mentors outside their family who know their name and respect their developing competence — that young person is measurably less lonely, more civically engaged, more purposeful, and more resilient than their peers who did not have that experience. This is not conjecture. It is what the Harris Poll research shows, what the Baylor University research shows, what the Tufts character development research shows. The outcomes are real, and they are significant.

The young people who most need those outcomes are often the ones least likely to access them. A child with two engaged parents, a financially secure household, access to a good school district, and a full slate of extracurricular options has many paths to the kinds of developmental experiences Scouting provides. They do not need Scouting specifically, though they would benefit from it. The child without those resources has far fewer paths. If BSA is genuinely committed to its stated mission of preparing all young people for lives of purpose, the geographic and socioeconomic distribution of its membership should be a primary concern. It has not been treated as one.

The organization has the program. It has the land. It has the infrastructure. It has 116 years of accumulated knowledge about what works in youth development outdoors. What it has consistently lacked is the organizational courage to hold itself accountable to its own standards, to pay the people doing the mission-critical work what that work is worth, to resist the temptation to manage its image while neglecting its substance, and to make decisions based on the mission rather than on whoever has institutional leverage at a given moment.

None of these are particularly heroic requirements. They are basic competencies of organizational management applied to a mission that genuinely matters. The expectation that a 116-year-old organization with over a billion dollars in assets could meet these basic competencies is not unreasonable.

Filling the gap between what Scouting America is and what it is capable of being requires honesty about what has gone wrong, competence in addressing it, and the organizational courage to be what the program teaches young people to be: trustworthy, prepared, and willing to do difficult things because they are the right things.

The Scouts have been told this for 116 years. It would be useful if the people running the organization actually believed it.

What They Get Right

The American Red Cross was founded by Clara Barton in 1881 and has been operating continuously for over 140 years. That alone is not nothing. Most organizations don’t last a decade. The Red Cross has survived wars, depressions, pandemics, congressional investigations, and several of its own CEOs. Some credit for institutional durability is warranted.

Here is what the organization does that is genuinely useful.

Blood supply. The Red Cross collects roughly 40 percent of the nation’s blood supply, serving approximately 2,500 hospitals and transfusion centers. Each year, the organization collects nearly 4.5 million blood donations and more than 1 million platelet donations from roughly 2.3 million volunteer donors. That is a logistical operation of real complexity, subject to Food and Drug Administration oversight and Good Manufacturing Practices. When you go into surgery and blood is on hand, there is a meaningful chance the Red Cross is part of why. That matters.

Volume of response. The Red Cross responds to roughly 65,000 disasters per year, most of them house fires rather than hurricanes. The majority of that work happens at the local level, is invisible to the national news cycle, and gets done correctly. A family loses everything in a fire at 2 a.m. and volunteers show up. This is not glamorous work. It is useful work, and it happens at scale.

Training. The organization trained approximately 5.9 million people in lifesaving skills in 2024 alone. Around 8,000 people receive Red Cross first aid, CPR, and AED training every day. The Red Cross is the nation’s leading provider of health and safety courses. CPR training demonstrably increases cardiac arrest survival rates, and immediate CPR can triple the chance of survival compared to no intervention. That outcome is concrete.

Military family services. The Red Cross provides more than 510,000 services annually to service members, veterans, and their families, including emergency communications, support for wounded warriors, and connection to community resources. Volunteers delivered emergency communications messages to more than 87,000 service members in 2023 alone. The Red Cross is the primary civilian organization authorized to deliver emergency notifications through official military channels.

Scale and reach. Through approximately 230 chapters and a volunteer force of more than 265,000 people, the Red Cross maintains a presence in communities across the country that no private organization of comparable scope can match. The infrastructure is real.

International humanitarian work. Through partnership with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the American Red Cross reaches roughly 120 million people outside the U.S. each year through disease prevention and disaster response activities. The organization’s mandate under the Geneva Conventions gives it access and protection in conflict zones where other organizations cannot operate.

None of this is filler. These functions are valuable, and many people who donate blood, receive disaster assistance, or learn CPR from the Red Cross come away better off for it. That needs to be on the record before anything else.

The organization is also not, as viral social media posts periodically allege, a scam. Charity Navigator and the BBB Wise Giving Alliance both give the Red Cross high ratings for financial accountability. CharityWatch rates it top-tier. The claim that only nine cents of every dollar goes to services is false; the actual program spending rate is closer to 90 percent.

That settled, let’s talk about the problems. Because there are serious ones.

The Problems

The American Red Cross is an organization that does enormous good while simultaneously managing to mislead its donors, underinvest in the people doing the actual work, treat its volunteers poorly, perform disastrously in its most visible moments, obstruct oversight, and spend years assuring the public that none of this is happening. That combination is worth examining closely, because the Red Cross is not going away. Americans send it hundreds of millions of dollars every time a major disaster strikes. The least we can do is understand what we’re actually funding.

Problem One: The Compensation Pyramid

The Red Cross had revenue of $3.2 billion in fiscal year 2023. That is a large organization by any measure, and some executive compensation is reasonable to expect. The question is not whether executives should be paid. The question is whether the pay structure reflects the organization’s stated values.

It does not.

According to IRS Form 990 filings, the 15 most highly compensated employees at the Red Cross received nearly $10 million in compensation in fiscal year 2023. CEO Gail McGovern, who has led the organization since 2008, had a base salary of $550,000, with total compensation reaching $694,000 in 2018 and in the range of approximately $700,000 in subsequent years. Over the seven-year period from 2017 to 2023, her total cumulative compensation was approximately $5 million.

The Red Cross has pushed back on criticism of executive pay, noting that compensation is paid from general operating funds rather than disaster donations, and that competitive pay attracts capable leadership. Both points are fair, to a degree. But they do not address the gap.

The average salary for disaster services roles at the Red Cross runs around $55,000 per year according to aggregated wage data. Entry-level positions run lower. Workers at Glassdoor report disaster specialist roles starting at $40,000 to $50,000, with one reviewer noting the salary “barely covers the basic cost of living.” The ethics office, which handles waste, fraud, and abuse complaints for an organization of roughly 20,000 employees, was composed of just three people as of 2016 Senate findings.

The front-line wage problem came to a head in 2022. A coalition of approximately 3,000 unionized Red Cross workers, represented by AFSCME and allied unions, fought through nearly a year of negotiations to win a 9 percent pay increase and a ratification bonus of up to $1,715 for full-time employees. That fight was necessary because, during the COVID-19 pandemic, these same workers had been sent to collect blood without proper personal protective equipment, were in some cases forced to stay home without pay when they were exposed to COVID on the job, and were facing demands from management to accept a high-deductible health plan that would have significantly raised their premiums and out-of-pocket costs. Workers reported that the conditions were driving trained personnel out of the organization and directly worsening the nation’s blood supply shortage.

That is the picture. Three thousand workers fight for a year to get paid adequately and to keep their health insurance, while fifteen executives divide $10 million.

The Red Cross’s defense, that nonprofit work requires market-rate talent at the top, is a real argument. It is less convincing when the organization simultaneously argues it cannot pay frontline workers a living wage. You can believe either that the mission requires premium compensation or that resources are tight. The organization uses both arguments depending on who is asking.

The diversity composition of this pay structure deserves mention as well. Internal Glassdoor reviews and Form 990 gender analysis from Paddock Post indicate that diversity in the Red Cross workforce is, in one former employee’s phrasing, “bottom heavy, meaning there are lots of employees of color in entry level or lower management roles, but beyond that there’s a steep drop off.” The pay pyramid, in short, concentrates money at the top and distributes the most physically demanding, least compensated work toward the bottom. This is not unique to the Red Cross. It is, however, worth naming.

Problem Two: The Volunteer Problem

The Red Cross depends on volunteers to function. It could not exist without them. By the organization’s own estimates, roughly 90 percent of its workforce is volunteer. There are approximately 265,000 active volunteers at any given time, and during major disasters the number climbs considerably. The organization’s entire delivery model is predicated on mobilizing and retaining these people.

The Red Cross is bad at managing them.

This is not a new observation. Academic analysis of Red Cross volunteer management dating back decades has identified a consistent problem: the organization operates on a “management sphere” model rather than a “volunteer sphere” model. In plain terms, paid staff hold decision-making authority, and volunteers are expected to execute rather than participate. Volunteers who push back, raise concerns, or try to participate in policy decisions have historically been sidelined or removed. One documented case from Northeast Georgia involved the dismissal of three long-term volunteers with a combined 41 years of unpaid service after they attempted to raise governance concerns. When they tried to appeal, Red Cross staff declined to even identify who the relevant volunteer policymakers were so the appeal could be directed appropriately.

More recent accounts from current and former volunteers, aggregated across Glassdoor, Indeed, and ProPublica reporting, paint a consistent picture:

Scheduling is disorganized. Volunteers report confusion about shifts, poor communication from coordinators, and a sense that their time is not respected. One high school volunteer working as a blood donor ambassador in the Greater Chesapeake area described scheduling as “a mess” and volunteer management staff as “very rude.”

Volunteers are not given meaningful authority or information. One former employee noted that the organization “preaches how they respect donors, but after seeing the blatant inefficiency and mismanagement, I’m extremely disappointed.” The same reviewer said the organization “uses nonprofit status as an excuse for serious issues they don’t want to deal with.”

Experienced disaster relief volunteers have been driven out by centralization. ProPublica’s multi-year investigation of the Red Cross found that veteran disaster responders, many with years of field experience, left the organization in significant numbers following management reorganizations that shifted decision-making authority to national headquarters. The result, documented in internal meeting minutes, was a workforce crisis. At a closed-door Red Cross meeting in December 2012, following Superstorm Sandy, officials acknowledged that nearly two-thirds of the volunteers responding had never before provided relief after a large disaster. One top official stated that the “caliber of the people is a major issue.” Another said the organization “didn’t have the kind of sophistication needed for this size job.”

To be clear about what produced that situation: experienced volunteers did not leave because they lost interest in helping people. They left because the organization reorganized them out of meaningful roles, centralized authority away from the field, and replaced institutional knowledge with whatever it could mobilize on short notice.

The volunteer management dysfunction has real consequences. It means the people showing up after disasters are, with some frequency, inexperienced. It means the coordination that experienced responders provide is absent. And it means the Red Cross is constantly rebuilding capability it already had and chose to eliminate.

Poor volunteer retention also creates a public relations incentive to prioritize optics over operations, because an organization that cannot adequately deliver relief has strong motivation to make it appear that it is delivering relief. That incentive, as the next section documents, has been acted on more than once.

Problem Three: The PR Problem and the Sandy Debacle

The most damaging documented episode in the Red Cross’s recent history is its response to Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Isaac in 2012. It is worth covering in detail because the organization’s internal documents, obtained through an investigation by ProPublica and NPR, describe the failure from the inside.

When Isaac hit the Gulf Coast, the Red Cross mobilized hundreds of volunteers and vehicles. Richard Rieckenberg, who oversaw aspects of food, shelter, and supply operations, arrived in Mississippi to find that an official had ordered 80 trucks and emergency response vehicles sent out empty, or carrying only a few snacks. Volunteers “were told to drive around and look like you’re giving disaster relief,” Rieckenberg said. The organization’s concern, he stated, was the “appearance of aid, not actually delivering it.”

After Sandy, volunteers wandered the streets of New York without GPS equipment, trying to find affected neighborhoods. Emergency response vehicles were reportedly diverted for photo opportunities. Internal reports obtained by ProPublica described “multiple systems failed” in logistics and stated that assets had been “diverted for public relations purposes.” In New Jersey’s Bergen County, the Red Cross was, in the words of emergency management officials, simply absent.

Two weeks after Sandy struck, CEO Gail McGovern declared the relief effort “near flawless.” The internal post-mortems conducted in the following weeks described it very differently.

One internal Red Cross document specifically noted that the organization “became focused on making ‘the numbers look good’ and in ‘showing a presence.’” Rieckenberg emailed a Red Cross vice president describing this dynamic in November 2012. When another disaster response chief complained about having emergency vehicles tied up and unavailable, a Red Cross executive from headquarters allegedly responded: “Stop right there. These are not your ERVs. They belong to Gail and she’s going to do whatever she wants with them.”

The Red Cross has disputed elements of this account. But the pattern documented is consistent with what a 2014 internal survey of more than 14,000 employees found: only 39 percent of respondents said they trusted senior leadership. About 40 percent doubted the organization’s commitment to ethical conduct. When other companies asked their employees the same question about organizational ethics, 78 percent on average responded favorably. The Red Cross scored 61 percent. McGovern, in a memo to employees, called that score a “strength.” She was not wrong that it could have been worse. She was wrong to call it strong.

The employee survey is worth pausing on. This was the organization’s own internal assessment, conducted by IBM, surveying more than half of the roughly 25,000 employees. Only 39 percent trusted senior leadership. Only 42 percent believed their ideas and suggestions were valued. Only 35 percent felt supported during organizational change. The Red Cross’s communications director responded to media coverage of the survey by calling it “regrettable” that the results were being used to criticize the organization. That response tells you something.

Problem Four: Haiti

In 2010, a catastrophic earthquake struck Haiti, killing an estimated 230,000 to 316,000 people and displacing 1.5 million. Americans responded generously. The Red Cross raised nearly half a billion dollars, more than any other nonprofit, and pledged to use the funds to help Haitians rebuild.

After five years, the organization’s primary tangible accomplishment in housing, the sector that received more than double the funds of any other area, was six permanent homes.

This finding, reported in a joint investigation by ProPublica and NPR in 2015, was the product of extensive document review and field reporting. What the investigation found was not simply a difficult operating environment, though Haiti is genuinely difficult. What it found was a pattern of self-inflicted failures: constant staff turnover, managers who could not speak French or Creole, a lack of project tracking systems, overhead costs that consumed a third of some project budgets, and an accounting system the organization’s own internal reports described as “complex, yet inaccurate.”

A 2011 internal memo written by the then-director of the Haiti program, Judith St. Fort, described senior managers making “very disturbing” remarks disparaging Haitian employees, including the statement “he is the only hard working one among them.” St. Fort, who is Haitian-American, wrote that the comments included language suggesting Haitian employees in general should not be taken seriously. The Red Cross disputes this characterization.

The organization raised far more money than it had programming to spend responsibly. When the earthquake struck, the Red Cross had a $100 million deficit. The Haiti disaster was described inside the organization as “a spectacular fundraising opportunity,” according to one former official. The Red Cross kept soliciting donations well after it had more than enough for emergency relief, which is its core competency. Doctors Without Borders, in contrast, stopped fundraising after determining it had sufficient funds. The Red Cross continued. The excess money went into programs the organization lacked the capacity to execute.

When congressional investigators from Senator Charles Grassley’s office sought to understand how the nearly $500 million had been spent, the Red Cross could not produce an accounting. The organization claimed that $70 million in “program expenses” had been spent on oversight and evaluation activities. When investigators asked for documentation, none could be provided. Grassley’s investigation found that a full 25 percent of donations, roughly $125 million, had gone to fundraising, management, a contingency fund, and a vague category called “program costs” for which no financial evidence of actual activities existed.

The Red Cross also tried to limit the scope of a Government Accountability Office investigation into its activities. In meetings and correspondence over several months, the Red Cross’s General Counsel questioned the GAO’s legal authority to review the organization’s internal decision-making and funding allocation. The GAO ultimately modified the scope of its inquiry, in part because the Red Cross’s “lack of cooperation led GAO to modify its scope,” according to the Grassley report. The Red Cross denies it refused to cooperate.

Senator Grassley introduced the American Red Cross Transparency Act in 2016 and again in 2019, with bipartisan support, to clarify the GAO’s authority to access Red Cross records and provide enforcement mechanisms. As of the time of writing, it has not passed.

The Red Cross’s response to all of this has been to argue that it has accounted for every dollar, that the critics misrepresent its work, that Haiti is a uniquely difficult operating environment, and that watchdog organizations rate it highly. Some of that is accurate. None of it is responsive to the core finding: the organization raised money it did not know how to spend, spent it in ways it could not track, and then spent years declining to explain the details to the people who donated or the legislators who asked.

Problem Five: Structural Oversight Deficits

The Red Cross occupies an unusual legal position. It operates under a congressional charter and is considered a federal instrumentality, which means it receives benefits unavailable to ordinary nonprofits: tax exemption, tax-deductible donations, federal coordination authority in disaster response, and a designated role under the National Response Framework as co-primary agency for mass care alongside FEMA. The president of the United States is the organization’s honorary chairman.

Given that relationship, the level of federal oversight is remarkably thin.

In 2015, the GAO published a report titled “American Red Cross: Disaster Assistance Would Benefit from Oversight through Regular Federal Evaluation.” Its findings were straightforward: there is no systematic oversight of the Red Cross’s performance or efficiency. The IRS reviews its annual filings. FEMA monitors compliance with grant requirements. The GAO can review involvement in federal programs, though the Red Cross has contested that authority in practice. No agency measures whether the Red Cross’s disaster services meet their objectives. The Red Cross evaluates its own performance internally, through post-disaster “action reviews” that are sporadic, potentially biased, and typically not released to the public.

The GAO recommended that Congress establish a mechanism for regular, external, independent, and publicly disseminated evaluation of the Red Cross’s disaster assistance. Congress has not acted on this recommendation.

The consequence is that the organization most Americans trust to manage disaster donations is accountable primarily to itself. It conducts internal surveys and describes the results as strengths. It conducts internal disaster reviews and declares relief efforts near-flawless. When a Senate investigation finds that it cannot account for a quarter of the money raised for Haiti, it issues a press release saying it disagrees with the findings and provides no new documentation.

This is the structure the Red Cross’s congressional charter has created, and no one in Congress has felt sufficient urgency to fix it.

Problem Six: The PR-First Culture

The behavior documented during Sandy and Isaac was not aberrant. It reflects a culture that, over time, has come to prioritize institutional reputation over operational performance. This is a specific and identifiable failure mode, and it has been documented by people inside the organization.

The pattern has several components:

Self-congratulatory public communication disconnected from internal assessment. McGovern’s “near flawless” characterization of Sandy relief came two weeks after the disaster, while internal meetings were documenting system-wide logistics failures. The gap between what the organization says publicly and what it knows internally is not incidental; it is a management habit.

Fundraising campaigns timed to institutional need rather than donor intent. The Haiti earthquake was an opportunity to erase a $100 million deficit, and the organization took it. The Red Cross continued to raise money for Haiti after it had enough for emergency relief. Donors who gave $25 in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake to help people in tents had their money spent on overhead and programs the organization could not manage. The Red Cross has the legal right to allocate donations broadly. It is worth donors knowing that this is what happens.

Use of emergency assets for visibility rather than relief. The empty trucks in Mississippi. The photo backdrops in New York. The Spirit of America mobile kitchen sent to a donor demonstration when it could have been serving food. These are documented, not alleged. Red Cross officials were angry enough about them to memorialize their complaints in writing at the time.

Suppression of internal dissent. The people who raised concerns about Sandy operations were not thanked. The disaster response chief who complained about having vehicles diverted was told those vehicles “belong to Gail.” Experienced field volunteers who challenged centralization decisions were reorganized out of influence. The Red Cross’s ethics office, responsible for waste, fraud, and abuse at an organization of 20,000 employees, had three people in it.

Problem Seven: The Blood Supply Tension

The blood system deserves its own section because it sits at the center of a structural contradiction the Red Cross has never resolved.

The organization collects blood from voluntary donors, at no cost, then sells it to hospitals on a cost-recovery basis. In 2019, hospitals paid roughly $215 per unit of red blood cells. The Red Cross’s biomedical services division generated $2 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2023, constituting the majority of the organization’s total income. Blood, in short, is the business that funds everything else.

This creates an inherent tension. The Red Cross needs to maintain a sufficiently large and stable blood supply to serve its hospital contracts. It does this through a volunteer donor pool that it also must cultivate, maintain, and appeal to emotionally. When shortages occur, the organization declares emergencies and runs public campaigns. In January 2022, the Red Cross declared its first-ever national blood crisis, noting the supply had fallen due to a 10 percent decline in donations during the pandemic. In January 2026, it declared another severe shortage after supply fell 35 percent in a single month.

The recurring shortage problem raises reasonable questions. The donor pool is aging; roughly 60 percent of blood donations come from people 40 and older, and the Red Cross is not replacing those donors as quickly as it is losing them. The organization acknowledges this. What it has been slower to acknowledge is whether its own operational and compensation practices have contributed to the staffing instability that makes shortage management harder. The 2022 union contract fight occurred directly in the context of front-line workers leaving because of inadequate pay and poor working conditions. Those departures complicated blood collection operations. The Red Cross asked the public to donate more blood while simultaneously fighting its own workers over health insurance.

There is also the matter of the market structure itself. The United States blood system is fragmented between the Red Cross and independent blood centers, a division that dates to post-World War II turf conflicts and has never been resolved into a coherent national strategy. The Red Cross’s share of the market is large enough to make it essential but not large enough to constitute a unified supply chain. Blood shortages in some regions coexist with relative adequacy in others. Regional monopolies in blood banking create price opacity and limit competition in ways that probably do not serve hospitals or patients well. The Red Cross is not solely responsible for this structure, but it has been a beneficiary of it and has done little to advocate for reform.

Problem Eight: The Local-National Divide

The Red Cross operates through a chapter system, and the quality of service varies enormously from one chapter to another. This is both a strength and a weakness.

It is a strength because local chapters often develop genuine community ties, volunteer relationships, and operational knowledge that national headquarters does not have. The disaster responses that work well tend to be ones where experienced local volunteers have established relationships with local emergency management and know the geography.

It is a weakness because the national leadership’s tendency toward centralization has repeatedly undermined those local relationships. A series of reorganizations under McGovern moved decision-making authority to national headquarters, cutting chapters out of operational decisions that they were better positioned to make. Experienced volunteers who objected left. Communities that had built functional local response capacity found that capacity disrupted by national reorganizations designed to create “efficiencies” that the field did not experience as efficient.

The PBS report following Hurricane Katrina, which noted that the Red Cross “came apart within the first week to ten days after Katrina and the money started flowing in,” attributed the failure in part to the organization’s inability to manage at disaster scale. The underlying cause was “underinvestment in management systems, technology, and volunteer training” accumulated over years. The problems did not start with the storm. The storm just made them visible.

National leadership’s instinct to respond to these crises by centralizing further has made the problem worse. The chapter system is the Red Cross’s best mechanism for local effectiveness. It is also the thing that national headquarters has spent the most effort managing from a distance.

What to Do About It

The Red Cross is not going to be replaced. No alternative institution has the scale, the charter, the volunteer base, or the name recognition to substitute for it in the near term. The goal is to fix what can be fixed, and to be honest about what cannot.

Here are the specific changes that would materially improve the organization.

Congress should pass the American Red Cross Transparency Act. This bill has been introduced in 2016, 2017, and 2019 with bipartisan support. It has not passed. It should. The GAO needs clear, enforceable authority to access Red Cross records and evaluate disaster performance. An organization receiving federal coordination authority, federal tax benefits, and presidential imprimatur is not a private charity for purposes of accountability. It is a public-private hybrid that should answer to the public. The Red Cross’s existing resistance to oversight is itself an argument for the legislation.

Congress should mandate regular, independent performance evaluation of Red Cross disaster services. This was the GAO’s recommendation in 2015. It has not been implemented. The Red Cross self-evaluates and does not make most of its assessments public. An external evaluation framework, with measurable standards and public reporting, would create accountability the current system lacks. It would also give donors information they cannot currently get from IRS filings.

The Red Cross board should establish a transparent, tiered executive compensation policy tied to organizational performance and front-line wage parity. This is not a call to eliminate executive compensation. It is a call to make the relationship between the top of the pay scale and the bottom visible and defensible. Right now, executives earning in the hundreds of thousands of dollars oversee an organization where disaster workers report salaries barely covering living costs. That ratio should be publicly explained and publicly justified, not managed through boilerplate about market competitiveness.

The Red Cross should restore meaningful authority to experienced field volunteers and chapter-level staff. The centralization strategy has consistently produced worse outcomes than the decentralized model it replaced. Experienced disaster volunteers are the organization’s institutional memory. When they leave, capability leaves with them. Rebuilding that base requires giving experienced volunteers real roles, real input, and real respect, not assigning them to drive empty trucks. The management literature on volunteer retention is unambiguous: volunteers who participate in decision-making stay, and volunteers who are frozen out leave.

The Red Cross should establish a clear, public policy distinguishing disaster donations from operating funds. When Americans donate after a hurricane, they believe they are funding disaster relief. The Red Cross uses a general fund model that allows donations to flow to overhead, management, and deficit reduction. This is legal. It should be disclosed more clearly and more prominently, not buried in a FAQ. Donors have the right to know where their money goes before they give it.

The blood services division should be managed as a separate operational entity with its own accountability standards, labor practices, and public reporting. Biomedical services is a $2 billion revenue operation. It is not treated with the operational seriousness that scale demands. Workers in that division were fighting for basic compensation and PPE during a public health emergency while the division generated the majority of the Red Cross’s income. That is not a peripheral problem.

Expand and professionalize the ethics and compliance function. Three people handling ethics for 20,000 employees is not a compliance function. It is a gesture toward one. A serious ethics infrastructure requires adequate staffing, independence from operational leadership, and a clear reporting pathway that does not route whistleblower concerns through the people being complained about. The 40 percent of employees who doubted the organization’s commitment to ethical conduct in 2014 did not invent those doubts.

The Red Cross should end the practice of large-scale international fundraising for programs it does not have the technical capacity to execute. Haiti was the clearest demonstration of what happens when the organization raises money at a scale its programming cannot absorb. Raising $500 million and building six houses is not a Haiti problem. It is a Red Cross problem. The organization should either build the international program management capacity to match its fundraising, or it should raise only what it can responsibly spend and direct donors to better-positioned organizations for the rest. Doctors Without Borders made that choice in 2010. It was the right one.

A Final Word

Americans trust the Red Cross because it has been there through the worst things that have happened to them, with a familiar logo and a volunteer who showed up when someone needed to show up. That trust is real, and it is earned, at least in part. The blood supply runs. The trainers train. The disaster teams respond. Most of the time, in most places, the work gets done.

The problem is that the organization has used that trust as a shield against accountability rather than as a mandate to earn it continuously. When internal surveys reveal that 40 percent of employees doubt the leadership’s ethics, the correct response is not to describe a 61 percent favorable rating as a strength. When half a billion dollars goes to Haiti and the housing program produces six homes, the correct response is not to fight congressional investigators for years over what was spent. When empty trucks are sent to drive around New York to make disaster relief appear to be happening, the correct response is not to declare the effort near-flawless.

The American Red Cross does important work. It is also an organization that has made a habit of describing its performance as better than it is, paying its people less than they deserve, managing its volunteers worse than their commitment warrants, spending donor money with insufficient accountability, and resisting the oversight that its size, its charter, and its public role require.

Those are not the behaviors of an organization that trusts the people it serves. They are the behaviors of an organization that trusts its own press releases more than it should.

The fix is not to abolish the Red Cross or stop donating blood. The fix is to insist, legislatively and publicly, that an institution of this stature meet the standards its mission implies. That means independent oversight, fair wages, honest fundraising, competent volunteer management, and the willingness to say, clearly and on the record, what the money actually paid for.

That is not too much to ask of the most trusted name in American disaster relief. It may be the bare minimum.

Sources: IRS Form 990 filings (fiscal years 2021-2023); ProPublica/NPR Special Report on the American Red Cross (2014-2016); U.S. Senate Finance Committee investigation (Sen. Charles Grassley, 2016); GAO-15-565, “American Red Cross: Disaster Assistance Would Benefit from Oversight through Regular Federal Evaluation” (September 2015); American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), “Red Cross Workers Win 9% Pay Increase” (September 2022); American Red Cross Mission & Values page; PBS NewsHour, “American Red Cross Troubles” (2005); PayScale, Glassdoor, Salary.com, and ZipRecruiter compensation data for Red Cross roles; Paddock Post executive compensation analysis (2022-2024); The Week, “The Urgent American Blood Shortage, Explained” (May 2023); American Red Cross press releases and public statements; Congressional Record.

This is not a piece arguing the VFW should go away. The country needs it, or something like it, more than the country currently knows.

This is a piece arguing that the VFW is in serious and compounding trouble, that the trouble is largely self-inflicted, and that the people running it have known for decades exactly what the problems are and have mostly declined to fix them in any sustained way. They have read the obituaries. They have issued press releases acknowledging the crisis. They have formed committees. And then they have mostly continued doing what they were already doing.

That is a different kind of failure than ignorance. It is the failure of institutions that got comfortable with their own decline and found ways to describe it as something other than what it was.

What follows is a full accounting. The membership collapse, the financial fragility, the recurring theft, the political misfires, the history of exclusion that costs the organization members to this day, the generational failure to bring in post-9/11 and female veterans, the governance gaps that allow weak posts to disintegrate quietly until they’re gone. And then, at the end, what can actually be done about it, by real people with real authority who have real decisions to make.

The Numbers Are Not Good, and the Framing Is Sometimes Dishonest

Start with the most basic fact. The VFW peaked at roughly 2.1 million members between 1991 and 1993. By 2023, that number had dropped to 957,000. Under a million members. The organization that once could claim to represent the largest and most powerful cohort of combat veterans in the world now struggles to represent half its former self.

In 2024, the VFW changed how it counted members, combining auxiliary members into its total figures. In December 2025, the combined membership stood at 1.3 million across 5,556 posts worldwide. That number sounds healthier than 957,000 until you understand that it includes nearly 470,000 auxiliary members who are not themselves veterans — they are relatives of veterans who meet VFW eligibility requirements. The underlying veteran membership has not recovered. What changed was how the VFW chose to report it.

In 2019, the organization added nearly 25,000 members to snap what it called a 27-year membership decline, and issued a press release about it. The VFW described this as a significant development. The national commander credited social media and internet outreach. At 1.165 million members at the time, the VFW began its new membership year, quote, “a million less than its peak in 1992, yet significant nonetheless.” The framing here is worth pausing on. An organization that lost a million members in 27 years celebrated gaining 25,000 of them back in a single year. Adding 2.5% of what you lost is not a turnaround. It is a data point. The press release went out anyway.

In Illinois, a state with 260 VFW posts and over 35,000 members, yearly membership has increased only twice since 2015. Posts are merging when they can and closing when they can’t. In 2008, the North Riverside VFW, with around 600 members from absorbing several smaller posts, merged into Berwyn’s. “They’ve got a lot of members, but no one wanted to run for office or do the work required to keep the post open,” said the Illinois VFW’s District 4 commander. That pattern plays out across the country with enough consistency that it constitutes policy, not accident.

The VFW’s Interim Director of National Membership, Corey Hunt, made an observation in 2023 that was both accurate and telling. “We’re not your grandpa’s old VFW any longer,” he said, and explained that with two decades of war behind the country, there is currently the largest eligible pool of veterans for VFW membership in a long time. “So it’s a matter of us going out and getting them, marketing to the younger members.” What he did not fully address is why those eligible veterans are not joining, or why the posts those veterans would join often look exactly like their grandpa’s VFW, just with fewer members.

The Structural Problem Nobody Wants to Name

Before getting into each specific failure area, it helps to understand the basic structure that allows these failures to persist.

The VFW is a confederation. National headquarters in Kansas City sets policy, maintains the legislative office in Washington, accredits service officers, and provides organizational infrastructure. State departments operate between national and local posts. Posts are the actual membership units — the buildings, the bars, the meeting rooms, the officers who sign people up and file claims and run bingo nights and pay the electric bill.

The posts have substantial autonomy. This autonomy is not incidental to the VFW’s structure; it is fundamental to it, preserved in the bylaws and defended for generations as essential to local responsiveness. It is also the source of most of the organization’s worst recurring problems.

A post that does good work benefits from the VFW’s name, its legislative credibility, its service officer training, and its national programs. A post that does bad work, embezzles money, discriminates against eligible members, or simply degrades into a dysfunctional bar with a flagpole out front continues to operate under the same name, damaging the brand and failing the veterans in its community, until someone at the state level intervenes. State intervention is slow, complicated, and often insufficient. By the time a state department acts, the post has often already lost the members who might have turned it around.

The tension between local autonomy and organizational coherence is common to many membership organizations. The VFW has resolved that tension heavily in favor of local autonomy for 125 years, and the results are uneven to a degree that should concern anyone thinking about the organization’s future.

The Financial Model Is a Bar, and Bars Close

Here is something the VFW does not like to say plainly but which is plainly true: a large portion of local posts are financially dependent on selling alcohol. One post in Illinois makes 90% of its revenue from its canteen — its bar. That is not unusual. It is common. Many posts that survive do so because they have a liquor license, a fish fry, a bingo night, or some combination of gambling and cheap beer that generates enough cash flow to keep the building heated and the lights on.

This was a reasonable model in 1955. American social life revolved around the neighborhood tavern and the fraternal hall. The VFW post was a place where veterans could drink together, tell stories, play cards, and feel like themselves in a world that had moved on without them. The bar subsidized the mission and the mission gave the bar a reason to exist. The two things were more or less in balance.

That balance is gone. It has been gone for decades, and the people running these posts know it.

When the bar does well, the post survives. When it doesn’t, the post closes. In Appleton, Wisconsin, a VFW post shut down its bar and restaurant after years of declining traffic. “Years ago we would have a line out the door for our Friday fish fry, but over the years things changed and so we’re at the point where we can’t continue on,” said Post Commander Wayne Martin. In Waterloo, Iowa, VFW Post 1623 dissolved itself after financial struggles that left it in debt and unable to fill even its officer positions. The Iowa state adjutant, Russell Saffell, described the situation directly: “Nobody wanted to run for either of those positions because nobody wants a soup sandwich.”

When COVID hit in 2020, canteen revenue disappeared overnight. VFW Post 7109 in Pearland, Texas, turned to GoFundMe to raise $20,000 to keep the lights on after hall rentals and bar sales stopped entirely. Staff members faced weeks without pay. An organization with 120 years of history asking the internet for beer money is not a sign of institutional health.

A post in Gainesville, Georgia, that had to close its canteen was candid about the underlying problem. Their quartermaster said: “The only function of a bar in a VFW is to raise additional income, which it didn’t do.” He also noted that a significant source of the post’s struggle was a perception problem they couldn’t shake: “There’s a lot of misconceptions, especially in Hall County, that the VFW is just a place to go and drink and get drunk. But the reality is it’s there to help veterans of a foreign war.”

The perception problem and the financial model are related. The VFW raised generations of people on the idea that the post was the bar, and now it can’t get younger veterans through the door because they think the post is the bar. You cannot solve the first problem without solving the second, and you cannot solve the second without confronting the financial dependency that made it so.

The posts that have survived and grown are almost universally ones that diversified their revenue. Gaming licenses in states that permit them. Facility rentals to community organizations. Grants from state and federal sources. Partnerships with local employers and businesses. Aggressive pursuit of nonprofit funding. These are not revolutionary ideas. They are basic nonprofit financial management. The failure is not that these options don’t exist. The failure is that the VFW has not made their adoption a priority at the organizational level in any sustained way.

Board members and post commanders who watched the bar revenue erode over 20 years without building alternative income sources made a choice. That choice has consequences, and the consequences are not abstract. When posts close, veterans in those communities lose access to claims assistance, camaraderie, and a local organization that actually knows their name.

The Embezzlement Problem Is Real, Recurring, and Preventable

Small organizations with significant cash flow, limited oversight, volunteer-run finances, and strong norms against scrutiny of fellow members are not naturally resistant to theft. The VFW is all four of those things at the local level, and the result is a pattern of embezzlement that appears across states and years with enough regularity to constitute a structural failure rather than a series of isolated incidents.

In Lake Havasu City, Arizona, Dennis Dickey served as VFW quartermaster and chief financial officer for seven years before being arrested on felony charges related to the alleged embezzlement of more than $6,000 from the organization. Seven years. The oversight mechanism that was supposed to prevent this, mandatory quarterly trustee audits, clearly did not catch it, or did not catch it in time to prevent significant harm.

In Giles County, Virginia, former VFW Post Commander Dennis Whitlow was charged with felony embezzlement in 2024 after allegedly engineering the sale of the post building for $53,000 and directing those funds for personal use while promising members he would find a new home for the post. He had sold the building in October 2023 and continued telling members everything was fine until it wasn’t. The VFW Department of Virginia released a statement saying it could not comment on pending legal matters but took misappropriation of funds “very seriously.”

In Grand Junction, Colorado, VFW Post 1247 was suspended by the Colorado VFW department in late 2024 after a state investigation found multiple problems serious enough to close the building. The investigating committee chairman declined to specify the causes publicly, saying he was still gathering information and the issues were “too many different reasons.” The post remained closed for months while the investigation continued.

These three cases appeared in news searches across a period of roughly 18 months. They are certainly not the full picture. Small-scale financial misconduct at voluntary organizations is chronically underreported, because the people who would report it are often members themselves, reluctant to harm an institution they believe in, uncertain whether what they’re seeing constitutes actual wrongdoing, or simply unable to navigate a reporting process they don’t understand.

The VFW’s own officer guidance acknowledges the risk directly. The Manual of Procedure states that quartermasters constitute a safeguard for post funds and are so considered by bonding companies in setting premiums. It notes that “laxity in enforcing and complying with the by-laws increases the hazard of loss.” It requires quarterly audits. It acknowledges that trustees conducting those audits are “not always qualified accountants, particularly where large amounts of cash are involved.” Its solution to that last problem is to suggest that posts hire a private accounting firm.

Many posts do not do this. The VFW knows this. Posts continue to be looted at a rate that should embarrass the organization into action. The fix is not complicated: mandatory external financial reviews for any post above a certain annual revenue threshold, standardized reporting requirements with real enforcement, and a clear, accessible process for members who suspect misconduct to report it to the state department without fear of retaliation. These are not expensive reforms. The cost of not implementing them, in stolen money, destroyed posts, and reputational damage, is higher.

The bonding requirement for quartermasters is real, but bonding only compensates for losses after the fact. The point is to prevent them. An organization that processes millions of dollars in aggregate revenue through hundreds of posts, each with its own volunteer treasurer and its own informal oversight culture, needs more than a paper requirement for quarterly audits that volunteer trustees with no accounting background are supposed to conduct.

The PAC Blew Up in 2010 and the Lesson Wasn’t Fully Learned

The VFW has described itself as nonpartisan for many years, and the description is largely accurate as a matter of policy. But in 2010, the VFW Political Action Committee demonstrated what happens when an affiliated body with loose accountability operates under the organization’s name.

Members were outraged over the PAC’s election endorsements, which included Barbara Boxer, Alan Grayson, and Sheila Jackson Lee, while simultaneously declining to endorse veterans running against those same incumbents, including Allen West, an Iraq War veteran running against Ron Klein in Florida, and Ilario Pantano, a former Marine running against Democrat Mike McIntyre in North Carolina. The PAC’s internal logic was straightforward: it had an established practice of endorsing incumbents who had supported veterans’ issues, and in a strong anti-incumbent election year, that practice translated almost entirely into Democratic endorsements. The membership was not interested in the internal logic.

VFW National Commander Richard Eubank acknowledged that “the recent endorsement decisions have, in fact, harmed the VFW’s reputation and future ability to fulfill our mission,” and called on the PAC to withdraw all endorsements. When the PAC publicly refused, Eubank took what he called an unprecedented step and recalled the entire PAC board en masse. He then moved to dissolve the PAC entirely, requiring a membership vote at the next convention.

The PAC was dissolved. The episode surfaced in organizational memory as an example of decisive action by national leadership. What it also demonstrated was that a quasi-independent body operating under the VFW’s brand, with no real-time accountability to the commander-in-chief or the membership, can make decisions that directly contradict the organization’s interests and cannot be overruled until after the damage is done.

The deeper issue is not the specific endorsements. It is the question of what the VFW’s political operation is for. The legislative service, which operates independently of any PAC structure, is genuinely effective. The VFW’s Washington Office testifies before Congress regularly, produces the Veterans Independent Budget in partnership with DAV, and maintains relationships with members of both parties that translate into real legislative wins. The Forever GI Bill. The Blue Water Navy Act. The PACT Act, which opened presumptive benefits for veterans exposed to burn pits and other toxic substances. These are the VFW’s real political achievements, and they came through the legislative operation, not through a PAC endorsing incumbents.

When the VFW’s political activity drifts from legislative advocacy into electoral partisanship, it creates more risk than value. A PAC that can damage the brand in a wave election year is not an asset. It is a liability wrapped in paperwork. The organization learned part of that lesson in 2010 but has never fully reckoned with the underlying question: what does the VFW gain from electoral politics that it could not get by being the most credible veterans’ voice on Capitol Hill, accountable to all elected officials because it endorses none of them?

The History of Exclusion Is Not Ancient History

The VFW sometimes treats its discriminatory history as a regrettable but fully resolved chapter. It is worth being careful about that framing, because the consequences of that history are still unfolding in the organization’s membership numbers and cultural reputation.

Despite their distinguished service record, many VFW posts and departments refused Japanese-American veterans entry after World War II. The national leadership condemned these actions at the time but, as Wikipedia’s well-sourced account notes, the bylaws “promoted autonomy in individual posts and were powerless to prevent the discrimination.” Leadership “could only offer them membership as members-at-large.” Nisei veterans in the Pacific Northwest were unable to find any sympathetic member in district leadership to approve a post charter and ultimately formed their own independent veterans organization. In California, those charters were eventually approved because one man, Alva Fleming, was willing to do what others weren’t. That is how the discrimination ended in California: not through organizational policy, but through one person’s individual decision. That is not a governance structure. That is luck.

Many VFW posts refused Vietnam War veterans membership entirely during the late 1960s and into the 1970s. The rationale offered by incumbent World War II and Korean War members was that Vietnam was a “police action” and therefore not a real war, despite the Korean War also having no formal declaration and also qualifying for VFW eligibility without controversy. Some posts blamed Vietnam veterans for losing the war. This was not universal. Some posts welcomed them. But the practice was widespread enough and consistent enough that the damage was generational. Many Vietnam veterans refused to join the VFW as a result, and decades later, many older posts found themselves struggling to survive as World War II and Korean veterans died, while the Vietnam veterans who might have stabilized the membership base were still staying away.

Joe Orr, a Black Vietnam veteran from North Texas, described what happened when he tried to join VFW posts in Colorado and Texas in the late 1960s. “I was rejected,” he said. “And why? Because of my color. They told me that.” He paid his VFW membership and was then told to leave the clubs. He shared the story publicly in 2019, decades after the fact, because it had never left him. The VFW spokesman who responded apologized on the organization’s behalf and said something gracious: “The loss of Orr not getting into the VFW back in the day was not really his loss. It was our loss for not getting to have a good leader.”

That is true, and the apology is genuine. But it should also be understood that the governance structure permitting that discrimination, the one granting posts near-total local autonomy and giving national leadership no real enforcement mechanism over conduct, was not a design flaw. It was a deliberate choice. And it allowed discrimination to flourish for decades under the VFW’s name with no real accountability until the individual membership of each post chose otherwise.

The organization has not fully reckoned with what that means structurally. The autonomy that allowed posts to refuse Black veterans in the 1960s is the same autonomy that allowed posts to refuse Vietnam veterans in the 1970s, and the same autonomy that allows posts today to treat women veterans with enough rudeness and indifference that those veterans never come back. The principle has not changed. Only the specific harm it produces has evolved.

The Organization Is Failing Women Veterans

Women now constitute the fastest-growing segment of the veteran population. More than two million women in the United States are veterans. Women account for over 30% of new patients at the VA in recent years. The military has been allowing women into an increasingly broad range of roles since the 1970s, and into combat roles since 2013. Women have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan in significant numbers for over two decades. They have been killed, injured, and left with the same range of physical and psychological consequences that male veterans carry.

The VFW is largely failing them, and the failure is not subtle.

Kate Hoit served eight years in the Army Reserves, including a tour in Iraq as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. When she tried to join her local VFW chapter, someone asked whether she needed an application for military spouses instead. She never went back. “I’m not going to go the VFW or the Legion and drink and smoke cigarettes,” she said. “I want to be out in my community.” Her experience was not unique. It was so common that it became a data point cited in multiple academic and policy discussions about why female veterans do not join traditional veterans service organizations.

A female veteran cited in a Center for a New American Security report described what it took to walk through a VFW door for the first time: “It took forever just to build up the courage to walk in. I walked in the door, and the guy behind the bar said, ‘Hey, no soliciting.’ He thought I was there to ask for money or put up a sign, so I left. That was the last time I ever set foot in a VFW.”

The PopSmoke Media analysis of the VFW’s governance noted that of the VFW’s 65 voting members on its governing body, only one was a woman. That figure may have shifted in recent years, but even if the ratio has improved modestly, the underlying leadership representation problem is real and documented. Organizations lead the way their governance says they should. When the governing body is almost entirely men, the programs, the culture, the physical spaces, and the unspoken norms of the organization reflect that.

The cost of this failure is not abstract. Women veterans who don’t join the VFW or organizations like it are not just choosing a different social preference. They are walking away from a network of VA-accredited service officers who know how to file and fight claims, from legislative advocates who understand the disability rating system, from people who know what it’s like to have served and come back and find that the world moved on. The VFW’s service officer network recovered more than $13 billion in VA compensation and pension benefits for veterans in fiscal year 2022. Women who feel unwelcome at VFW posts are not participating in that benefit at the rates they should be.

This is correctable. The VFW does not need to become something it isn’t. It needs to stop being a place where a female Iraq War veteran is assumed to be the spouse before the veteran. That is not a values statement. It is a minimum standard of organizational competence.

Younger Veterans Are Choosing Something Else, and the VFW Still Doesn’t Fully Understand Why

The VFW’s failure to recruit post-9/11 veterans is one of the most discussed problems in veteran service organization circles, and it has been discussed, at length, for over 20 years. The discussion has not produced proportionate results.

Part of the challenge is structural and cannot be solved by better marketing. With an all-volunteer force where less than 1% of the American population serves, the country is producing fewer veterans than it did in the draft era. The VFW was built on a model that assumed roughly every generation would produce a large cohort of combat veterans who would eventually age into the post structure. That model’s assumptions no longer hold. The eligible pool has shrunk, and the VFW cannot recruit people who don’t exist.

But a substantial part of the problem is cultural and organizational, and that part is the VFW’s responsibility.

Post-9/11 veterans described typical experiences at local posts with enough consistency that a pattern emerges. Army veteran Sgt. Matt Pelak, who spent three years in Iraq, said: “It’s just the most depressing place. I can’t imagine a place that is further removed from my generation of veterans.” The posts he visited were dimly lit, populated by veterans 30 years older, and offered an environment that seemed designed for someone else’s era and someone else’s war.

Lieutenant Commander Sean Foertsch, a Navy reservist who served in Afghanistan, described traditional veterans groups as “more interested in being a political player than actually addressing the needs of vets.” He and other younger veterans were gravitating toward organizations like Team Red, White & Blue and The Mission Continues, which focused on community reintegration and physical activity rather than legislative advocacy. “That is where the models of Team RWB and Rubicon seem to gain more traction with younger vets,” Foertsch said. “They are focused on the ‘who’ the veteran is as opposed to the ‘what’ they get from” veterans organizations.

Bryan Allyn, a former Navy petty officer who served in Afghanistan, did not renew his Legion membership after two years because he said the VA has advocates to help him navigate the benefits process and he would rather work with them directly. This is a significant shift from the VFW’s traditional value proposition. The organization built its claim to relevance partly on being the intermediary between veterans and a hostile bureaucracy. As that bureaucracy has become somewhat less hostile, and as other advocacy resources have proliferated, the VFW’s claims assistance advantage has narrowed.

What the newer organizations cannot replicate, and this matters enormously, is the VFW’s nationwide network of VA-accredited service officers, its relationship with Congress, and its ability to recover benefits at scale. In fiscal year 2022, VFW service officers helped recoup more than $13 billion in compensation and pension benefits. In 2018, they helped 526,000 veterans and transitioning service members recover $8.3 billion. Those numbers represent real money for real people who would otherwise have received less than they were owed.

The problem is that the VFW is not leading with this. The story it tells about itself, the one that shows up when a potential young veteran member walks into a local post for the first time, is often a bar story, not a claims story. The framing the VFW uses internally, the canteen model, the fish fry, the corner barstool, is exactly what post-9/11 veterans say they don’t want. The framing the VFW should be using, you served your country, the government owes you money, and we know how to get it, is exactly what those same veterans would find useful.

There is some evidence the organization is beginning to understand this. PBS NewsHour reported in November 2024 that some posts have started gaming communities for younger members, weekly tailgates, and increased community service opportunities, with modest success in membership growth. VFW posts around Columbus, Ohio, were running potluck events and veteran-family social gatherings that bore no resemblance to the traditional post image. Some posts have grown meaningfully by doing exactly what the data says works: building the organization around family and community and service rather than around alcohol and nostalgia.

These are individual success stories. They are not yet organizational policy.

The Governance Problem at the Local Level Is Both Deep and Specific

The VFW is not a hierarchy. It is a confederation with a common brand, a common set of bylaws, and very limited enforcement authority. National headquarters can set standards. It cannot reliably enforce them in the 5,556 posts spread across all 50 states, four territories, and eleven foreign countries. This creates a governance gap that individual posts fall into regularly, and that no one closes until the situation is already bad.

The Waterloo, Iowa, case is instructive. VFW Post 1623 had been struggling financially for an extended period. The Iowa state department sent in a team to help, more than once. “We’ve tried to help them multiple times,” said state adjutant Russell Saffell. “The issues, there’s just too many issues with the post to keep it open.” When both the commander and quartermaster were asked to resign so new officers could stabilize the post, no one would take the positions. The post administratively dissolved itself. “Nobody wanted to run for either of those positions because nobody wants a soup sandwich,” Saffell said.

This is not a story about a bad post or bad members. It is a story about an organizational model that does not provide adequate support to posts before they reach the point of no return. By the time a state team arrives, the post’s reputation in the community has often already deteriorated, the most engaged members have already drifted away, and the financial hole is deep enough that climbing out requires more energy than the remaining membership can generate.

The VFW’s officer guidance is thorough on paper. It requires bonded quartermasters. It mandates quarterly audits. It lays out specific duties for commanders, adjutants, trustees, and service officers. What it does not do is create systematic early-warning mechanisms that bring state-level expertise and support in before a post reaches crisis. The gap between “post is struggling” and “state department intervenes” is too wide, and too many posts fall into it permanently.

An 83-year-old Army Korean War veteran named Robert Skinner, serving as commander of VFW Post 5857 in rural Onaway, Michigan, had only five active members and needed to fill eight board seats. If he couldn’t fill them, the post would have to relinquish control to district leadership, effectively closing. He was alone in a 50-year-old building trying to keep something alive that the organization had not given him the tools to sustain. “About eight years ago, it started to decline, and since then it’s been constant,” he said.

The failure here is not Skinner’s. He is an 83-year-old man doing what he said he would do. The failure is that no one in the VFW’s leadership structure had a plan for helping him recruit the people he needed before the situation became critical.

The DOGE Moment Is the Test the VFW Must Not Fail

This section requires context. In early 2025, the Department of Government Efficiency began executing sweeping cuts across the federal government, including at the Department of Veterans Affairs. The VA canceled hundreds of contracts and initiated mass layoffs of probationary employees. An internal memo proposed cutting roughly 70,000 to 80,000 VA positions, which would have reduced staffing to pre-2019 levels, before the PACT Act expanded presumptive claims for burn pit exposure and other toxic substances.

The VFW acted. VFW National Commander Al Lipphardt publicly called on the administration to stop what he described as indiscriminate mass firings of veterans and VA employees. He testified before a joint session of the congressional veterans’ affairs committees. He called on VFW members to march forth to Capitol Hill. Wisconsin’s VFW adjutant Adam Wallace set up an email hotline for affected VA employees and veterans to document the real effects of the cuts so the VFW could show elected officials what was happening. Wyoming VFW State Commander Justin Tripp, speaking to NBC News about a VA office manager who had been fired despite strong performance reviews, said directly: “I would be concerned with positions that are front-line positions that touch veterans every day. I’d want to make sure that somebody’s at the front door so if a veteran walked in in a crisis, they would be there to help.”

More recently, the VFW has pushed back against legislative proposals that would cut disability compensation for tinnitus and sleep apnea to fund other veterans benefits, warning that such changes could reduce payments by approximately $57 billion over 10 years and affect up to 1.5 million veterans. The VFW’s statement was unambiguous: “Veterans’ benefits are not charity. They are an earned obligation of the nation and part of the promise made through military service. Congress should Honor the Contract.”

This is the VFW doing what it does best: using institutional credibility, relationships on both sides of the aisle, and a large national membership to push back against policy decisions that harm veterans. The legislative operation earned that credibility over more than a century of sustained advocacy. The PACT Act that expanded burn pit benefits exists partly because the VFW spent years advocating for it. The PACT Act’s implementation is now under threat. The VFW is one of the few organizations positioned to defend it effectively.

But the VFW can only do this with members. The legislative operation’s credibility rests on the claim that it represents a significant number of veterans. As membership declines, that claim weakens. A national commander who speaks for 957,000 veterans has less political weight than one who speaks for 2 million. The declining membership is not just an organizational problem. It is an advocacy problem with direct consequences for every veteran in the country, member or not.

This is the argument for fixing the VFW that neither the organization’s critics nor its defenders make clearly enough: the alternative to a functional VFW is not a vacuum. It is a collection of organizations, each legitimate, none with the legislative access and institutional weight that the VFW has built, all trying to advocate for veterans without a common voice. Team RWB runs great events. It does not testify before the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee. The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America does excellent advocacy work for a specific generation. It does not have 125 years of congressional relationships. Wounded Warrior Project provides important services. It does not produce an annual Veterans Independent Budget that Congress references when setting VA funding levels.

The VFW’s problems are real and serious. They are also fixable by people who already have the authority to fix them, if those people choose to use it.

What the Successful Posts Have in Common

Before prescribing fixes, it is worth looking at what is actually working, because the VFW is not uniformly declining. Some posts have grown meaningfully, recruited younger veterans, attracted women, and built financial models that don’t depend on bar receipts. The patterns are worth examining.

Posts that grow tend to share a few characteristics. They are built around service and community activity rather than around social drinking. They have commanders who understand that recruiting a younger veteran requires demonstrating value before asking for dues. They organize around families, not just individuals. They do visible community work that connects them to people who are not veterans but who respect the mission. They are honest about the claims and benefits assistance the VFW can provide, and they lead with that, not with the bar.

Rich Williams, an Air Force Desert Storm veteran, took over VFW Post 2149 in Wood Dale, Illinois, in 2021 after the previous commander stepped down and nobody else would take the job. He inherited seven to ten active members. His explicit goal was to change the culture. Posts that attract younger veterans, he said, do it by building programs around families, not by assuming that veterans want to sit around and drink. This is consistent with what every analysis of VFW membership decline has found, and it is consistent with what younger veterans themselves say when asked.

The Whitehall VFW Post near Columbus, Ohio, draws veterans for weekly tailgates during football season and has built an active community service program. Some posts have created gaming communities for veterans who don’t find value in traditional social formats. A VFW post in Tualatin, Oregon, invested in a new facility with proper equipment and a modern kitchen, named it after a young Marine killed in Afghanistan, and built a community around honoring recent service rather than mourning it.

These posts have not solved the financial model problem permanently. They are still dealing with aging facilities, leadership recruitment challenges, and the basic math of a shrinking eligible pool. But they have demonstrated that the brand is not dead, and that veterans who have options will choose the VFW when the VFW gives them a reason to.

How to Fix It

None of what follows is radical. Most of it has been discussed inside veteran service organizations for years. The failure is not a lack of ideas. It is a lack of sustained organizational will to implement them over the resistance of members and post leaders who prefer the current arrangement, however dysfunctional it may be.

Diversify the revenue model and make that diversification a requirement. The VFW should establish minimum standards for post financial planning that include diversified revenue sources. Any post above a basic threshold should be required to demonstrate that bar and gaming revenue does not exceed a certain percentage of total operating income. This will be resisted. Do it anyway. Posts that have built multiple revenue streams are more stable, more likely to survive disruption, and more likely to look like something other than a bar, which matters for recruitment.

The national organization should develop and distribute a grants toolkit specifically for local posts, identifying federal, state, and private sources available to veteran service organizations, providing template applications, and offering technical assistance to posts that want to pursue them. Most posts do not have anyone on their officer roster who knows how to write a grant application. That is a solvable problem.

Mandate independent financial oversight for posts above a revenue threshold. Any post handling more than a defined annual revenue level should be required to have an external accounting review, not a trustee committee of three volunteers running totals on a printed form. The threshold can be calibrated to the organization’s capacity. Start with the larger posts. Expand over time. The recurring embezzlement pattern in the news demonstrates that the current model is not working. Quarterly trustee audits conducted by people who are not accountants and have no accountability to anyone outside the post are not a control. They are paperwork.

This costs money. The VFW should explore whether state departments can provide accounting support to smaller posts, whether a national fund can subsidize external reviews for posts below the cost threshold, and whether the requirement can be phased in over three years to allow posts to prepare. The cost of not doing this is higher than the cost of doing it.

Create systematic early-warning mechanisms and real support before posts reach crisis. The current model is reactive. States send teams when posts are already in trouble, often too late to reverse the decline. The VFW should establish a proactive outreach system in which state departments conduct regular health assessments of posts, not just respond to crises. Posts below certain membership and financial thresholds should trigger automatic support from the state level, including leadership training, recruitment assistance, and financial planning help, before the situation becomes irreversible.

The national organization should invest more heavily in leadership development. The quartermaster position is the single most critical officer role in post financial integrity, and it is chronically difficult to fill. The VFW should develop specific training and support for this role, identify promising members early, and make it clear that serving in this capacity is valuable and recognized, not a burden to be avoided.

Give national and state leadership real enforcement authority over post conduct. Local autonomy has value. It does not have unlimited value. The VFW needs clear, consistent, and fast-acting authority to intervene when posts discriminate against eligible members, mismanage funds, or fail to meet basic standards of conduct. The current model allows problems to persist too long before intervention, because the authority structure is too diffuse and the intervention process is too slow.

This is a bylaw change. It requires a vote. The membership should be asked to make it, and the case for it should be made explicitly: the autonomy that allowed posts to refuse Black veterans in the 1960s and Vietnam veterans in the 1970s is the same autonomy that allows posts today to turn away female veterans before they can even explain why they’re there. At some point, protecting the brand and protecting the members in each community requires the ability to enforce standards, not just encourage them.

Treat women veterans as the growth constituency they are, not as an afterthought. This means more than updating charter language. The VFW should set measurable goals for female representation in post leadership, in state department leadership, and in the national governing body. It should audit the experience of female veterans at local posts systematically, not just respond to complaints when they surface. It should invest in recruiting female veterans the same way it invested in recruiting post-9/11 veterans generally, with dedicated outreach, specific programs, and visible evidence that the organization takes their service seriously.

The claims and benefits assistance the VFW provides is just as valuable to a female veteran as to a male one. The suicide rate for female veterans is 250% higher than for the civilian population. Women who leave the VFW before they find its service officer network are not just choosing a different social club. They are losing access to resources that can matter to their survival.

Build a real pipeline from active duty service to post membership. The VFW’s Pre-Discharge program already places representatives on or near major military installations to help transitioning service members begin their VA claims process before they leave active duty. This is an excellent model. It should be expanded, better funded, and better connected to local post recruitment. A veteran who meets a VFW service officer at their final installation is a veteran who has a reason to look up their local post when they get home.

The VFW should be showing up at Transition Assistance Program sessions systematically, not opportunistically. It should be in the rooms where separating service members are being told, sometimes for the first time, that they are eligible for disability compensation. It should be the first organization those service members encounter, not the third or fourth. This is a resource allocation question. The VFW has the infrastructure to do this. The question is whether it allocates the money to do it at scale.

Reform the PAC governance permanently or exit electoral politics. The VFW’s most effective political work happens in the legislative office, not through electoral endorsements. If the organization chooses to maintain any form of electoral activity, it should do so with ironclad accountability to the membership, clear and enforceable standards that cannot produce endorsements of candidates widely seen as hostile to veterans, and leadership authority to override decisions before they become public embarrassments rather than after. If those conditions cannot be met reliably, the organization should direct its political capital entirely through the legislative operation, where it has a genuine track record of success.

Invest in the claims and benefits function as the core product. The VFW’s service officer network is its most defensible competitive advantage. It is the thing that newer, hipper organizations cannot replicate because it requires accreditation, training, and sustained institutional relationships with the VA that take years to build. The VFW should talk about this constantly and loudly, particularly to the post-9/11 veterans who are skeptical of the traditional post model. The fish fry is optional. The claims assistance is the mission.

In fiscal year 2022, VFW service officers helped recover more than $13 billion in compensation and pension benefits. That is $13 billion that went to veterans and their families who would otherwise have received less. That number deserves to be on every piece of VFW recruitment material that exists. It deserves to be the first thing a potential member hears when they ask what the VFW does. Instead, the first thing many potential members encounter is a dimly lit bar with a flag over the door.

The Honest Assessment

The VFW is not going to disappear. It has a congressional charter, a Washington office with genuine relationships on both sides of the aisle, a history that connects to nearly every major veterans policy achievement of the last century, and enough posts in enough places that it will persist in some form for a long time. The inertia alone will sustain it for years.

But inertia is not a strategy. An organization that holds its shape while its substance declines is not stable. It is hollow, and hollow things break.

The people who should fix the VFW are the ones currently running it: national commanders, state department leadership, district officers, and post commanders who know exactly what their posts look like and have chosen, year after year, not to force the hard changes. They know the bar model is failing. They know the post culture repels younger veterans. They know women veterans are walking away. They know the embezzlement problem is structural. They know the officer pipeline is drying up. This information is not new. The VFW has been reading its own declinist analyses for 50 years.

The VFW also knows what it’s up against in the current moment. The VA faces pressure that would have seemed unthinkable a few years ago. Thousands of VA employees who helped veterans navigate the claims process have been fired or threatened with firing. Contract cuts have touched programs that support veterans in crisis. Disability rating criteria face proposed changes that could affect over a million veterans. The legislative advocacy function of the VFW has rarely mattered more than it does right now.

An organization at full strength, with broad membership across generations, with financial stability at the post level, with women veterans as active participants and leaders, with post-9/11 veterans who know and trust the service officer network, would be positioned to fight these battles effectively. The VFW that exists today is fighting them with a diminished roster, an aging core, a financial model that depends on beer sales, and a governance structure that cannot enforce its own standards.

At some point, an organization that keeps identifying its problems and declining to solve them has made a choice. The VFW still has time to make a different one. The country would be better off if it did.

That was eighty years ago.

Today, the organization Colmery represented has 1.27 million members, down from a peak of 3.3 million after World War II. It is losing ground every year. As of May 2025, the Legion sat 43,087 members below its count from the same period the year before. Posts are closing. Meeting rooms are empty. Young veterans who came home from Iraq and Afghanistan are joining running clubs and kayak groups instead of showing up at the bar on Thursday night. The organization that once moved Congress to create the most consequential social legislation in American history now struggles to get its own members to show up for meetings.

This is not primarily a demographic problem. It is a leadership problem. It is a structural problem. It is, in more than a few documented cases, a culture problem. And it is a problem that the people in charge of fixing it keep refusing to name directly.

Elizabeth Hartman, a Marine Corps veteran, former post commander of American Legion Post 539 in New Bern, North Carolina, and one of the more useful critics currently writing about veterans organizations, has been documenting these problems in real time. Her Substack publication, All Due Respect, describes the Legion’s inner workings with the subtitle “Welcome to the Circus.” That is not hyperbole. Hartman has reported on internal power plays, legislative inconsistency, the Legion’s awkward relationship with advocacy, and what she calls the slow death of a 100-year-old institution. She has watched the Internal Affairs Commission vote 30-1 to preserve a gender restriction on Auxiliary membership that has no legal basis in IRS code, while simultaneously receiving reports on declining membership numbers. She has tracked how Afghan allies support disappeared from the Legion’s messaging without explanation. She has documented gaming companies circling veteran posts like, in her words, vultures, pushing “new revenue streams” at national conventions while the organization’s community mission quietly erodes.

Hartman eventually left the Legion. Her antics, as she put it, reached their limit. She is not the only one.

This article is about why she and thousands of others are right to be frustrated, what the specific failures are, and what a serious organization would do about them.

The Membership Collapse Is Not Primarily Demographic

When Legion officials are asked about declining membership, they reach first for the demographic argument. Matthew Herndon, the Legion’s membership director, said it plainly in a Fox News interview: the organization has lost more than 700,000 members over the last decade, and the decrease is primarily tied to a shrinking pool of veterans. In 1945, twelve million people served in the U.S. military. Today, there are about 1.3 million active-duty service members. Fewer veterans, fewer potential members. Simple math.

It is not simple math.

The demographic explanation is real, but it is incomplete. If the veteran population shrank and the Legion’s share of that population held steady, the numbers would fall proportionately. What is actually happening is different. Post-9/11 veterans, who now number in the millions and are the largest cohort of living veterans, are joining the Legion at dramatically lower rates than previous generations joined after their wars. These veterans exist. They are eligible. They are choosing not to join.

They are choosing not to join because the Legion has, in many places and in many respects, given them no compelling reason to.

Young veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan came home from a different kind of war than their parents or grandparents did. They came home to a country that had a complex and often uncomfortable relationship with the conflicts they fought. Many of them dealt with visible wounds and invisible ones. They built communities around shared experience, but the communities they built, by preference, looked different from what their grandfathers built. They joined Team Red White and Blue for pickup basketball. They joined GORUCK for ruck marching with strangers. They went kayaking. They built informal peer networks online. What they did not do, in large numbers, was walk into a building that smelled like old carpet and stale beer, sit through a meeting run by Robert’s Rules of Order, and listen to a 74-year-old argue about whether the post should buy new chairs.

That description is unfair to a lot of posts. There are American Legion posts that run excellent programs, attract veterans of all generations, and do serious work in their communities. Hartman’s own Post 539 was one of them. They added a 22-mile hike to raise awareness about veteran suicide. They ran kayaking trips. They built something genuinely useful. What Hartman found when she joined in 2019 was not what the stereotype promised. But the stereotype exists because it is accurate often enough. And what is true is that the national organization has done insufficient work to change the culture that produces it.

The posts that are surviving and growing share one identifiable characteristic. They build their programming around what veterans in their community actually want, rather than what the national organization’s templates suggest they should want. They treat membership as something earned through relevance, not something owed by virtue of having served. They act like organizations that understand why they exist.

The posts that are failing are often the opposite. They have aging leadership that has been in place for a decade. They hold meetings that produce nothing. They rely on bar revenue to keep the lights on and then wonder why they feel like bars. They have nominal membership rolls and active membership that is a fraction of that number. One post member quoted in a 2024 California American Legion op-ed put it plainly: “My current post has a membership of 104, but only 15 to 20 active members.” That is not unusual. It is close to standard.

The national organization could respond to this with urgency. It could study the posts that work, understand what they have in common, and build programs and resources that help struggling posts do the same thing. It has done some of this. It has not done nearly enough.

The Structural Problem: A Confederation That Governs Like a Suggestion

The American Legion is, structurally, a federation. The national organization sets broad policy and has a lobbying apparatus in Washington. Departments operate at the state level. Posts operate locally. Authority flows in a complicated direction.

This structure made sense in 1919 when transportation and communication were primitive and local autonomy was genuinely necessary. It makes less sense now. What it produces, in practice, is an organization where the national body can issue guidance, pass resolutions, and set membership dues, but has limited ability to enforce standards on the posts that actually interact with veterans every day. A post can be dysfunctional, exclusionary, or simply useless, and the national organization’s tools for intervention are limited.

The result is extreme inconsistency. The best Legion posts are genuinely excellent. The worst ones are embarrassments. And there is no real quality control mechanism between those two poles.

Hartman’s reporting on the Internal Affairs Commission is a clear illustration of this structural dysfunction. In early 2026, the Departments of Maryland and Pennsylvania submitted formal resolutions asking the national organization to remove the word “female” from Auxiliary eligibility requirements. The legal argument was straightforward. IRS rules for 501(c)(19) auxiliary organizations permit membership for any relative within two degrees of consanguinity regardless of gender. The Legion had already amended this language in 2019 to replace “wife” with “spouse,” opening ALA membership to male spouses. The precedent for amendment existed. The legal path was open. The VFW expanded its own auxiliary to include male family members in 2015; the VFW Auxiliary now represents nearly 49 percent of VFW membership strength.

The Internal Affairs Commission voted 30-1 to reject the proposal.

This is the same commission that receives regular reports on declining membership. The same commission watching the Auxiliary, with approximately 506,000 members, contract year over year. They looked at the membership numbers, they looked at a legal and precedented path to expansion, and 30 of 31 members voted to leave the wall in place.

The reasons given were not explained publicly. That is a structural problem too. Major governance decisions in the Legion often happen in rooms where the deliberations are not transparent, and the results are communicated as conclusions without reasoning. Members who want to understand why the organization is making the choices it makes are frequently left with nothing but the outcome.

This is not a recipe for member confidence.

The Advocacy Failure: Soft Lobbying Where There Could Be Pressure

The American Legion’s lobbying arm is its most publicly claimed source of institutional value. The case made to every potential member is essentially this: join us, add your number to ours, and together we make Congress listen. The GI Bill is the founding evidence for this claim. The PACT Act, which extended health care coverage to veterans exposed to burn pits and other toxic hazards, is a more recent one. The Legion, alongside other veterans service organizations, pushed hard for the PACT Act when it stalled in 2022, and the pressure worked. President Biden signed it into law.

That is real. The advocacy apparatus is not fictional.

But there are significant gaps between what the Legion claims to stand for and what it is willing to fight for. Hartman identified one clearly in 2024. The Legion’s “Know Before You Go” video for the Washington Conference, which previews the legislative agenda, had quietly removed Afghan allies support from its priorities. There was no explanation, no resolution changing course, no public acknowledgment that the Legion was stepping back from a commitment it had made. The Legion had co-signed letters to Congress calling Afghan allies a “sacred obligation” and a “national security imperative.” Then that language disappeared from the agenda without comment.

Hartman asked the question that should have been asked: since when do veterans run from a fight?

The answer, in the Legion’s case, is: when the fight becomes politically uncomfortable. This is not a new pattern. The organization has, throughout its history, modulated its advocacy based on what it calculated it could win rather than what it believed was right. Elizabeth Hartman made a pointed observation about this in a 2023 LinkedIn post: she heard someone argue at a Legion meeting that the organization should only prioritize legislation that can easily be passed. She called it gut-wrenching. She was right.

The argument for only pursuing easy legislation is the argument of an organization that has forgotten what it is for. The Legion was not founded to pursue legislative victories. It was founded to fight for veterans. Those are not the same thing. A legislative win that comes at the cost of abandoning a harder fight is not a victory. It is a compromise that teaches Congress that the Legion can be waited out.

The organization also has a documented problem with inconsistent messaging on claims fees. Hartman flagged this at the 2024 Washington Conference, urging members to bring that concern directly to Senator Jon Tester’s staff. The Legion’s position on whether veterans should pay fees for initial disability claims has been unclear enough that veteran advocates have had to note the inconsistency publicly. For an organization whose primary legislative function is protecting veterans’ benefits, this is not a minor editorial problem. Clarity on fees for claims is the minimum.

The deeper advocacy failure is cultural. The Legion has, in recent years, adopted the tone and pace of an organization that is more concerned with maintaining access to congressional hearing rooms than with actually using that access to move legislation. Access is not advocacy. Testifying before a committee is not the same as winning. The Legion built its reputation by being willing to fight hard for things that were genuinely difficult. The GI Bill nearly died in conference. The Legion tracked down a congressman in the middle of the night and flew him to Washington to cast the decisive vote. That is what real advocacy looks like.

That version of the Legion would look at the Afghan Adjustment Act, which carried 90 percent public support in polling but kept dying in Congress, and would not quietly remove it from the agenda. It would put it back on the agenda and make Congress uncomfortable.

The Culture Problem: Bars, Cliques, and Bad First Impressions

When a post-9/11 veteran walks into an American Legion post for the first time and feels immediately unwelcome, that veteran rarely comes back. That is not a guess. It is a documented pattern described by Legionnaires themselves. One piece published in the Legion’s own dispatch described the experience: “Some Vietnam War veterans tell of a time when they were not welcomed in posts after they came home.” The problem of bad first impressions is old enough that the organization has written about it at length in its own publications. The understanding that a failed first impression can mean a member lost forever is not a secret inside the Legion. It is written into the narrative of how post-9/11 veterans can and should be welcomed.

And yet it keeps happening.

The culture in too many posts is one of established hierarchy, insider loyalty, and passive resistance to newcomers who do not fit the existing social template. Cliques form around the people who have been there longest. New members show up, are not particularly welcomed, find that the post’s social life centers on a bar where the regulars already know each other, and conclude that the organization is not for them. They are not wrong about the specific post. They may be wrong about the Legion’s potential. But potential does not join organizations. Experiences do.

The bar culture question is genuinely complicated. For many posts, bar revenue is the financial foundation. Without bar income, the post building could not remain open, and without the building, the post could not run programs or host community events. This is a real constraint. The Legion’s reliance on bar and canteen income to subsidize everything else is not irrational given the financial position of most posts.

But the bar has also become a liability. It defines the public perception of what the Legion is. “Just a bunch of old guys at a bar” is a cliche, but cliches exist because they are frequently true. Posts that have deliberately restructured around community programs rather than bar culture, like Post 504 in Lafayette, Louisiana, which removed its bar and shifted focus to veteran services, are growing. Posts that remain primarily bar-centered are often stagnant or declining.

Elizabeth Hartman observed this pattern at the national convention level too. Gaming companies were present in force at the vendor halls of both the VFW and American Legion national conventions, including Arrow International, which sells electronic gaming machines. These companies were pitching slot machine-style technology to veteran posts as a revenue solution. The pitch is understandable from the business side. The concern is organizational. A veteran service organization whose financial survival depends on gaming revenue is an organization that has substituted a revenue model for a mission. Those are different things, and eventually they become incompatible.

The more fundamental culture problem is one of generational friction. The people who run most posts have been doing it for a long time. Some of them are excellent. Some of them are territorial. Hartman encountered a member in North Carolina early in her Legion career who advised her that to be successful, she would need to remove all Korean and Vietnam veterans from her board. He was not joking. She did the opposite, kept three Vietnam veterans as senior advisors, and the post thrived. But the fact that advice like that is given at all, by established members to newcomers, reflects a culture that in some cases values control over effectiveness.

The Legion’s own history illustrates this dynamic at scale. When Elizabeth Hartman arrived and built something good, it was because she refused to take bad advice. Not everyone refuses. Not everyone is persistent enough to find the good posts after a bad first experience. The organization cannot rely on the stubbornness of its best members to compensate for the inhospitability of its worst ones.

The Historical Weight the Legion Refuses to Fully Carry

The American Legion has a complicated relationship with its own past. It wrote the GI Bill, which was one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in American history. It is also true that the GI Bill’s administration was structured in ways that systematically denied its benefits to Black veterans. State-level administration, backed by a Congress that included virulent segregationists like Representative John Rankin, who chaired the House Veterans Committee, meant that the bill’s promises were broken for a significant portion of the people it was supposed to serve.

The Legion did not cause the discriminatory administration of the GI Bill. It did, in documented cases, push back against attempts to gut the bill’s provisions on racial grounds. The midnight flight to bring Representative Gibson to Washington to break a deadlocked conference committee is real, and the intent there was to prevent the unemployment provision from being stripped, which would have harmed Black veterans disproportionately.

But the Legion also built posts on segregated lines for decades. Black veterans who showed up at certain posts were told they had the wrong address. The historical record from the early decades of the organization is not clean. A century of passing resolutions about equality did not produce a century of equal welcome.

A 2021 investigation by The New Republic found that the Legion’s national headquarters had a hallway displaying the portraits of 101 past national commanders, none of whom were Black. The organization had never elected a Black national commander. Black staff at headquarters had been counseled, according to sources in the piece, to be careful when dealing with anyone in Indianapolis. Former legislative director Melissa Bryant, a Black veteran and second-generation Legionnaire, had documented conflicts with headquarters leadership over how to respond to racial justice issues.

The organization’s official line on its racial history is that it passes resolutions affirming equality. It passed such a resolution in 1923. It passed it again in 2017. Passing a resolution is not an acknowledgment. It is not an accounting. And it does not fix a culture in which, well into the modern era, Black veterans and other veterans of color have reported feeling like guests in an organization that is supposed to serve all veterans equally.

This matters for the membership question. The veteran population is not the demographic it was in 1946. It is increasingly diverse. Women now make up approximately 17 percent of active-duty service members. Hispanic Americans serve in the military at rates above their share of the civilian population. The Legion’s leadership structure has historically been overwhelmingly white and male. The first female national commander was not installed until 2017. These are not accusations of intentional exclusion in the present tense. They are documented facts about an organization that has been slow to reflect the population it serves.

An organization that wants to grow its membership has to appeal to the people who might join it. The people who might join it look increasingly like the military itself: diverse, geographically spread, serving in a range of occupations, and not necessarily interested in an organization that feels like it was designed for a specific kind of veteran from a specific era.

The Auxiliary Problem: Gender Restrictions in 2026

The situation with the American Legion Auxiliary is one of the cleaner examples of an institution being wrong about something it has been told it is wrong about, and refusing to change anyway.

The Auxiliary, which has approximately 506,000 members, restricts membership to female relatives of veterans. Sons, fathers, brothers, and grandfathers of veterans cannot join. In 2019, the Legion amended its constitution to replace “wife” with “spouse,” which allowed male spouses of veterans to join the Auxiliary. That amendment required a two-thirds vote at the national convention. The precedent for amending the eligibility language, in other words, exists. It has already been used.

The IRS tax code governing 501(c)(19) organizations, which is what the Auxiliary is, permits membership for any relative within two degrees of consanguinity regardless of gender. There is no legal barrier to expanding Auxiliary membership to male family members of veterans. The VFW expanded its Auxiliary in 2015 to include male family members. Their Auxiliary now represents nearly 49 percent of VFW membership. The practical evidence that expansion works is sitting right there.

In May 2026, the Internal Affairs Commission met to consider resolutions from the Maryland and Pennsylvania departments requesting this change. They voted 30-1 against it.

Hartman’s analysis of this vote is worth noting. The commission that voted to preserve the restriction is the same commission that receives regular reports on declining membership. The people making decisions about who can join are the people presiding over the contraction of the organization. They know the numbers. They voted against expansion anyway.

The Legion’s Auxiliary is a voluntary organization in a voluntary membership market. It is competing against organizations that do not restrict membership by gender. It is losing members. The pool of eligible members is artificially constrained by a rule with no legal basis and no principled justification beyond tradition. The organization that passed a resolution affirming equality in 1923 is in 2026 maintaining a gender restriction on its own auxiliary because a commission voted 30-1 to leave it in place.

Hartman noted that the Internal Affairs Commission’s recommendation is influential but not binding. The Departments of Maryland and Pennsylvania are pursuing the amendment through the national convention, where a two-thirds vote could override the commission. Whether they succeed will depend on whether enough delegates decide that the demographic math matters more than the inertia.

The National Headquarters Problem

An organization’s national headquarters is a useful indicator of where its priorities actually are, as opposed to where it says they are. The American Legion’s headquarters in Indianapolis is, by most accounts, an institution that has had persistent internal culture problems. Leadership at the national level has, according to staff accounts documented in serious journalism, been inconsistently attentive to the concerns of staff members who are not from the demographic majority that has historically run the organization. Decisions about how to respond to major public moments in American life, like the killing of George Floyd in 2020, became internal conflicts in which staff who wanted a clearer statement ran into resistance from national leadership that was reluctant to say anything that might alienate its membership base.

This is not uncommon in large member-driven organizations. When your membership is older, disproportionately white, and broadly conservative, leadership tends to avoid statements that might generate backlash from that base. The political calculus is not irrational. But an organization that manages its public voice primarily to avoid offending its existing members is an organization that has made a decision to stop growing. You cannot attract veterans who do not see themselves reflected in the organization’s public identity if the organization’s public identity is managed to appeal to the members it already has.

The national body also has a documented problem with transparency. When members try to understand why decisions were made, they often cannot find out. Hartman, when she requested on-record comments from the Legion’s internal communications operations about pieces she was writing, did not receive responses that explained the organization’s reasoning. The standard practice appears to be silence, or brief statements that do not engage with the substance of the criticism.

For an organization that has spent decades claiming to speak for veterans and claiming the authority that comes with that claim, the resistance to scrutiny is notable. If the Legion is doing good work, it should be able to explain what it is doing and why. If it cannot explain, or chooses not to, the people asking questions are going to draw their own conclusions.

The Dues and Access Problem

In 2024, the American Legion raised national dues by five dollars. The reaction among members, documented in the comments of the California American Legion’s op-ed on membership, ranged from resignation to open frustration. One long-time member pointed out that a Legion life membership now costs approximately $865, compared to roughly $385 for a VFW life membership. The national organization, members argued in those comments, is completely out of touch with the financial situation of local posts.

The complaint has a specific structure worth noting. The dues go partly to the national organization, partly to the department, and partly to the post. When national raises dues, it takes a larger share of a limited pool of money that members are willing to pay. Posts, which bear the cost of operations and must keep the lights on and the programs running, feel that pinch directly. From the post’s perspective, the national organization is extracting revenue while not providing commensurate value. From a member’s perspective, they are paying more to belong to an organization that is demonstrably smaller and less influential than it used to be.

The national organization’s response to this criticism is to point to programs, services, and advocacy. Some of those things are real. The Legion’s System Worth Saving program, which monitors VA healthcare quality, is genuinely useful. The Washington Conference lobbying effort moves some legislation. The Boys State and Girls State programs have been running for decades and produce real civic education.

But access to actual benefits and services at the local level is highly variable. A member in a well-run post gets a lot. A member in a post with fifteen active members and a leaking roof gets significantly less. National dues are uniform. Value delivered is not.

The Bright Spots, and What They Indicate

It would be dishonest to write this piece without acknowledging that there are American Legion posts doing excellent work. There are also departments that are functioning well, and the national advocacy apparatus, at its best, remains more capable than most alternatives for pushing veterans’ legislation.

Post 539 in New Bern, under Hartman’s command, ran a 22-mile hike for veteran suicide awareness, organized kayak trips for members, held weekly Thursday evening gatherings, and built a board that deliberately included Vietnam-era veterans whose perspective the post needed. The post thrived. Hartman herself, five years out of the Marine Corps and initially skeptical that the Legion was anything more than old men at a bar, became a post commander and then a district commander.

Post 504 in Lafayette, Louisiana, removed its bar and reoriented entirely around veteran services, claims assistance, and community partnerships. It is growing.

Post 1 in Anchorage, Alaska, built family-oriented infrastructure, including a playground and a covered barbecue area, that made the post a genuine destination for veterans with children. The post developed a bond between older and younger veterans that both groups found valuable.

These posts share something. Their leadership decided that the post existed to serve veterans, not the other way around. They did not wait for national to tell them what to do. They looked at their community, figured out what veterans in that community needed, and built programs to meet those needs. They treated membership as a product that had to be earned through value, not claimed through obligation.

The national organization should study these posts with the same seriousness it brings to lobbying. What specifically do they do? What did they change? What did they stop doing? What resources did they need that were not available? The answers to those questions are the reform agenda. It is not complicated. The successful examples exist. The task is to understand them, replicate what can be replicated, and build national programs and support structures that help struggling posts move in the same direction.

What the Legion Should Actually Do

Here is a concrete list. Not a values statement. Not a strategic vision document. Specific things the American Legion’s national leadership and department leadership should do, some of which would require formal action and some of which could begin immediately.

1. Pass the Auxiliary amendment.

The Maryland and Pennsylvania resolutions should be brought to the national convention floor and passed. Male family members of veterans should be eligible to join the American Legion Auxiliary. The IRS code permits it. The VFW has done it. The precedent within the Legion itself exists from the 2019 spouse amendment. The Internal Affairs Commission’s 30-1 vote is not binding. Override it.

2. Stop managing advocacy for comfort.

The Legion’s Washington office should be given a clear mandate: pursue the organization’s stated legislative priorities with the urgency those priorities deserve, regardless of whether the legislation is easy or politically comfortable. Afghan allies support should be back on the agenda. The GUARD Act and related GI Bill parity issues should be front-line priorities. If the Legislature asks what the Legion wants and the Legion equivocates, the Legion gets nothing. If the Legion asks for exactly what veterans need and fights for it, it sometimes gets it. The GI Bill is proof. Fight for the hard things.

3. Build and enforce minimum post standards.

The national organization should develop a clear set of minimum operational standards for active posts. These standards should include baseline programming requirements, financial transparency, meeting regularity, and member outreach activity. Posts that do not meet standards over a defined period should not receive national support resources. Departments should have tools, and the obligation, to intervene in posts that are dysfunctional. The current model, in which a failing post can continue to exist on paper while delivering nothing to veterans in its community, is not acceptable.

4. Create a post evaluation and turnaround program.

Alongside enforcement, there should be support. The Legion should identify its highest-functioning posts, document what they do, and use that knowledge to build a structured turnaround program for struggling ones. This means sending actual people to struggling posts, not just pamphlets. It means giving post commanders access to resources, training, and examples they can actually use. It means treating the revitalization of failing posts as an organizational priority rather than a department-level problem that national doesn’t think about.

5. Redesign the first-impression experience.

Every new member’s first experience with a Legion post matters enormously. The Legion should invest in structured onboarding. When someone walks in the door for the first time, or joins online, there should be a defined process for connecting them to the post, introducing them to programming, and following up. This does not have to be complicated. It has to exist. Right now, too many new members join, hear nothing for months, and quietly let their membership lapse.

6. Diversify national leadership, on purpose.

The pattern of national leadership that has been documented in multiple outlets, overwhelmingly white and male for most of the organization’s 107 years, does not reflect the veteran population. It does not reflect the military. It does not reflect the country. The Legion should make explicit commitments to mentoring and advancing leaders from underrepresented backgrounds, because the kind of organization that is still fighting the same battles about racial history and gender inclusion 50 years from now is not an organization that deserves to survive. And it won’t.

7. Get serious about the bar culture.

Posts that rely primarily on bar and canteen revenue to survive should receive structured support for diversifying their revenue model. The Legion’s national organization should develop resources, including grant guidance, partnership templates, and program design tools, specifically for posts that want to shift their programming orientation. The goal is not to eliminate bars from posts that want them. The goal is to ensure that the bar is not the only thing keeping the post alive, and that the post’s identity is not defined by it.

8. Be transparent about governance decisions.

When the Internal Affairs Commission votes 30-1 against a proposed amendment that has public support among members, the reasoning for that vote should be published. When the national legislative agenda changes, the change should be explained. When headquarters takes a position on a contentious internal matter, that position and its basis should be communicated to members. An organization that asks veterans to trust it with their membership dues and their collective voice owes those veterans enough respect to explain what it is doing with both.

9. Compete for young veterans like they have other options. Because they do.

Every post commander and department leader should internalize one simple fact: a post-9/11 veteran who is not a member of the American Legion is not a member for a reason. That reason can be changed or it cannot, but it has to be identified and engaged. The Legion cannot assume that veterans will join because they served. It has to give them a specific, concrete reason to show up. That means community. It means programming that reflects their lives, not their grandparents’ lives. It means events that families can attend. It means being present in the places where veterans actually are, not just waiting in a hall for them to find you.

10. Recommit publicly to the mission and be honest when the organization falls short of it.

The Legion’s preamble commits to maintaining law and order, promoting peace and goodwill, and defending democracy. Those are not small commitments. They are worth taking seriously. When the organization falls short of them, internally or in its public advocacy, the response should not be silence or press releases. It should be an honest accounting and a credible plan. That is what veterans respond to. Competence and honesty, not branding.

What Is Actually at Stake

The American Legion is not going to disappear tomorrow. It has 1.27 million members and an endowment. The national convention still draws several thousand delegates. The Washington Conference still gets senators in rooms. The organization still has institutional weight that took a century to build.

But weight is not permanent if you stop earning it. The organizations that speak for veterans in Washington carry authority because they can demonstrate that they represent a significant and organized constituency. If the membership number falls far enough, and the member engagement drops far enough, that authority erodes. Congress stops taking the calls as seriously. The hearings still happen, but the pressure behind them diminishes. Legislation that might have passed with a strong Legion push instead dies in committee.

The political consequences are not theoretical. The PACT Act almost failed. Veterans who were exposed to burn pits and toxic chemicals almost did not get the healthcare they were owed. What saved it was organized pressure from veterans service organizations and the veterans themselves. That kind of pressure requires organizations that are large enough, credible enough, and motivated enough to generate it.

An American Legion that is well-run, genuinely inclusive, and seriously committed to its advocacy mission is an organization that has enormous potential to do good. Not inspirational-poster potential. Concrete potential. GI Bill potential. PACT Act potential. Potential to walk into congressional offices with 1.5 or 2 million members behind it and make Congress pay attention.

An American Legion that keeps managing its membership decline with demographic excuses, that keeps voting 30-1 to preserve gender restrictions on its own auxiliary, that keeps softening its advocacy when the fights get hard, that keeps generating bad first impressions for the veterans who walk in the door, is an organization in the process of becoming irrelevant. It will not happen all at once. It will happen post by post and year by year until the organization that wrote the GI Bill on a cocktail napkin is a historical footnote.

That would be a waste of something that still has the capacity to be valuable. The Legion at its best is one of the few institutions in America that bridges generations of veterans and gives them shared institutional voice. That is not a small thing. But you do not preserve it by treating it as a given.

Elizabeth Hartman went through enough with the Legion to eventually leave it. She went on calling herself a Legionnaire who left, not someone who quit. There is a difference. She is still writing about the organization because she believes it matters what happens to it. That is a more generous position than the organization’s current leadership has sometimes deserved.

The question is whether the people inside the institution are willing to do the work that would make that generosity warranted. The answer will not come from a press release or a rebranding exercise. It will come from the 107th National Convention in Louisville, where delegates who understand that the organization is losing will either do something about it, or vote to keep doing what they have been doing.

History does not wait for organizations to figure themselves out. The veteran population is not standing still. The problems veterans face, from VA claims backlogs to predatory claims companies to inadequate mental health resources, are real and ongoing. There is work to be done. The Legion built itself to do that work. Whether it still can is a question only the people inside it can answer.

The napkin and the pen are still on the table.

Those ideas are worth separating from the institution, and always have been.

The Declaration of Independence is not a document about the government. It is a document against one. It argues that governments exist to serve people, not the other way around, and that when a government fails at that task, the people have the right to change it. The men who signed it were not pledging their allegiance to a flag or a state. They were pledging their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to a set of principles. Liberty. Self-determination. The right of a free people to govern themselves. The whole exercise was civic before it was political.

That distinction matters today, because civic engagement in the United States is in genuinely bad shape, and no amount of patriotic bunting is going to fix it.

The Numbers Are Not Flattering

Fewer than half of Americans say they attend a social event in their community even a few times a year. Even fewer volunteer. Only about 28% of Americans say they volunteer through an organization at least a few times a year, and only 33% attend a community meeting. These are not numbers that suggest a republic in robust health.

Young adults are not doing better. A 2023 survey found that 33% of young Americans had no intention of participating civically in 2024 at all, including voting. More than a third of young people reported that voting in the most recent presidential election was not important to them.

The civic literacy problem is arguably worse. A study commissioned ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary found that more than 70% of Americans fail a basic civic literacy quiz. Just half could correctly identify the branch of government where bills become laws. One in three did not know there are three branches of government.

You cannot love a country you do not understand. And you cannot participate in its democracy if you do not know how it works.

Two-thirds of Americans believe that when decisions are made in their communities, it is the usual suspects who show up and dominate the process. Only 7% feel a strong sense of belonging where they live. That is a remarkable figure. One country. 335 million people. Seven percent feel like they belong to their own community.

Something has gone wrong. Not catastrophically, not irrevocably, but measurably and persistently wrong.

What Independence Day Was Actually About

The founders were not nation-builders in the modern sense. They were suspicious of concentrated power because they had lived under it. They built a system full of friction by design, because they did not trust any single person, party, or institution enough to give it unchecked authority. Read the Federalist Papers carefully and you will find less triumphalism than you expect, and considerably more anxiety.

What they counted on, more than any constitutional mechanism, was the active participation of citizens. Not occasional participation. Not showing up every four years to pull a lever and then retreating. Sustained, local, practical engagement in the life of the community.

Alexis de Tocqueville noticed this when he visited the United States in the 1830s. He was a French aristocrat, so voluntary cooperation among ordinary people struck him as genuinely novel. He wrote that “the Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; and in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it be proposed to advance some truth, or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever, at the head of some new undertaking, you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.”

Tocqueville argued that citizens in a democracy rely on associations to bring them into shared concerns with their neighbors and to give them a voice to influence public opinion. He was describing something he observed to be essential to how the American experiment actually functioned. Not the Constitution. Not the presidency. Not the army. Ordinary people, forming voluntary groups, solving problems together.

He concluded that the “art of association” was the “mother science” of American democracy, and that when citizens associate freely, every new need immediately awakens the idea of association.

That is what we used to be good at. It is what we need to be good at again.

The Organizations That Actually Embody the Ideal

When people talk about American greatness, they tend to point upward. The military. The federal government. The presidency. These are visible and easy to name. But the organizations that most embody the American ideal of free people organizing themselves to solve problems are not in Washington. They are in your county.

Start with fire departments. Of the approximately 29,452 fire departments in the United States, 18,873 are all-volunteer and 5,335 are mostly volunteer. Volunteers comprise 65 percent of all firefighters in the country. The time donated by volunteer firefighters saves localities an estimated $46.9 billion per year, reflecting what it would cost to staff those departments with career personnel.

Think about what that means concretely. In the majority of American communities, when a house catches fire, the people who respond are not paid professionals. They are neighbors who chose to do the training, carry the pager, and show up at three in the morning because someone they may have never met needs help. They do not do it for the money. There is no money. They do it because the community cannot function without them, and they have decided that is enough reason.

That is the American ideal in practice. It is not inspiring rhetoric. It is a person climbing out of a warm bed in January.

The picture is not uniformly rosy. The National Fire Protection Association reported that in 2020, there were 676,900 volunteer firefighters in the United States, compared to 897,750 in 1984. That decline of more than 220,000 volunteers occurred while the U.S. population grew from roughly 236 million to over 331 million, meaning volunteerism in the fire service has not kept pace with growth at all. Many rural departments are struggling to recruit. The ones with aging membership rolls are watching the math get steadily worse.

This is what civic decline looks like on the ground. Not a think tank report. A fire truck that cannot be staffed.

Feeding America is another example worth naming. The organization supports tens of millions of people as part of a nationwide network of more than 250 food banks, over 20 statewide food bank associations, and 60,000 agency partners, food pantries, and meal programs. These operations are powered by leaders and volunteers embedded in local communities. When food insecurity rises, as it has in recent years, this network absorbs the pressure. It does not wait for congressional appropriations. It calls its volunteers and gets to work.

The American Red Cross does the same at a different scale. The Red Cross supplies about 40% of the nation’s blood, provides disaster relief, teaches lifesaving skills, and supports veterans and military families. The organization depends on volunteers and the generosity of the American public to carry out its mission. Almost 300,000 volunteers across the country enable the Red Cross to respond to an average of more than 60,000 disasters every year.

Habitat for Humanity puts the work even more literally in people’s hands. It builds and repairs housing for families who need it, powered largely by volunteers who show up without prior construction experience and learn on the job. The organization does not require you to be skilled. It requires you to show up.

These are not charities in the passive donation sense. They are structures that allow people to do useful work together. They are voluntary associations, which is exactly what Tocqueville was describing, and exactly what the founders assumed would form the backbone of a self-governing republic.

America’s 1.3 million charitable nonprofits feed, heal, shelter, educate, inspire, and nurture people of every age, gender, race, and economic status. They foster civic engagement and leadership, drive economic growth, and strengthen the fabric of communities. Every person in the United States benefits from their work, whether they realize it or not.

Most people do not realize it. That is part of the problem.

Scouting, Service, and the Formation of Citizens

Youth-serving organizations deserve particular mention on a day that is nominally about the future of the republic. If civic engagement is declining among adults, the question of what habits young people are being taught should concern anyone paying attention.

Scouting America, which I’ll cover in depth in a future article, remains one of the most sustained experiments in civic formation in American history. At its best, it teaches young people to do hard things in uncomfortable conditions, to take responsibility for each other, to serve their communities without expectation of payment, and to earn trust through demonstrated competence. These are not merely useful skills. They are the specific habits that a self-governing society requires its citizens to have.

The same is true of 4-H, Girls Scouts, Boys and Girls Clubs, youth sports leagues, and the hundreds of community organizations that put young people in situations where they have to cooperate, lead, follow, and contribute something real. These organizations are not babysitters. They are, at their best, civic incubators.

The research supports this. Among young adults, 80% of those who score high on civic knowledge plan to engage in at least one civic activity, versus 40% of low civic knowledge scorers. Civic knowledge predicts civic participation more reliably than almost any other factor. You build civic knowledge by doing civic things. You do civic things in organizations that require it of you.

The absence of these organizations from young people’s lives is not a minor cultural shift. It is a measurable reduction in the civic capacity of the next generation. It matters.

The Failure Mode to Avoid

July 4th has a failure mode, and it is worth naming it directly. The failure mode is treating patriotism as a substitute for participation.

It goes like this: you feel proud to be American. You attend a fireworks display. You post something about freedom. You feel, having done all of this, that you have adequately honored the country. Then you go back to not attending school board meetings, not volunteering at the food bank, not joining anything, and not talking to your neighbors about anything that matters.

This is the civic equivalent of buying a gym membership and then not going. The membership card does not make you fit. The flag pin does not make you a citizen in the meaningful sense.

The decline in voluntary associations is directly connected to the health of democracy. To ward off the top-down decline in democracy, the country needs to foster civic renewal from the bottom up. This requires honoring the timeless questions Tocqueville posed about the relationship between associations and democratic health.

Those questions are not complicated. Are people joining things? Are they showing up? Are they doing work that benefits people beyond themselves? The answers, at the moment, trend unfavorably.

Nationally, the average hours served per volunteer dropped from 96.5 hours per year when tracking began in 2017 to 70 hours in 2023. The median dropped from 40 hours to 24 hours in the same period. Americans are volunteering more often in nominal terms, but doing less when they show up. The trend is toward episodic, low-commitment participation. That is better than nothing, but it is not enough to sustain the infrastructure of civic life.

What the Holiday Could Be

None of this is an argument for cynicism. The country has, at various points, done genuinely remarkable things. The ideals in the Declaration, imperfectly realized and unevenly applied as they have been, are worth celebrating and worth fighting for. The problem is not the ideals. The problem is that we have decoupled the celebration from the obligation.

Independence Day could be something more than fireworks and barbecue. Not instead of those things, but alongside them. It could be an occasion to think about what you are actually doing, at the local and community level, to keep the republic in working order.

This is not a metaphor. The republic requires actual maintenance. It requires people who attend local government meetings and know what is being decided. It requires people who join the volunteer fire department or the search and rescue team or the emergency preparedness committee. It requires people who run the food pantry and staff the crisis hotline and coach the youth sports league and serve on the library board. These positions are not glamorous. They are also not optional if you want the community to function.

Corporate volunteering has risen by 5 percent since 2021, and interest in formal volunteering is rebounding. But many nonprofit organizations are still struggling to recruit volunteers, leaving community needs unmet. The interest exists. The conversion from interest to action is where it breaks down.

That conversion requires deciding to do something specific, rather than feeling vaguely positive about service as a concept. It requires walking into a volunteer fire department and asking what training they need you to complete. It requires calling the food bank and asking what shifts are available. It requires going to the school board meeting even when there is nothing dramatic on the agenda.

These are small acts. They are also, in aggregate, what the country runs on.

A Different Kind of Celebration

Tocqueville was impressed by what he saw in early America because it was genuinely impressive. Ordinary people, without being told to and without being paid to, organized themselves to solve the problems in front of them. They built the institutions that made community life possible. They did it because they understood, on some practical level, that nobody else was going to.

That impulse is still here. It shows up in the volunteer firefighter who responds at 3 a.m. It shows up in the retired schoolteacher tutoring at the library. It shows up in the person who shows up every Saturday at the food bank because the alternative is that families go hungry. It shows up in the Scout leader who takes a dozen teenagers into the woods for a weekend and comes back with something that looks like capable young people.

These people are not waiting for the government to handle it. They are handling it themselves, voluntarily, because that is what free people in a self-governing society are supposed to do.

That is what July 4th is actually about. Not the government. Not the flag, exactly, though the flag is fine. The ideal: that free people, taking responsibility for themselves and each other, can build something worth having.

The question is whether you are building it.

The celebration is warranted. The fireworks are earned. But the birthday party should not distract from the work. The republic does not maintain itself. It never did. It was always the voluntary associations, the local organizations, the people who showed up when they did not have to, who kept the thing running.

They are still out there. They need more people.

That is the most American thing you could do this July.

Every few years, somebody writes a think piece calling Fallout a satire of 1950s optimism. That’s true, but it’s the easy answer, the one people give when they haven’t played past the first vault. The harder truth is this: Fallout isn’t really about the bomb. The bomb is the setup. The series is about what happens to people once the institutions they trusted stop working, and whether the thing that rebuilds afterward is worth living in.

Humanity has been rehearsing an answer to that question since 1945, and it’s not hypothetical. The record on how close we’ve come, how institutions actually behave under stress, and how ordinary people respond to collapse isn’t speculative. It’s documented. Declassified. Peer reviewed. Fallout took that record, exaggerated it for a video game, and held up a mirror that’s more accurate than most people are comfortable admitting.

None of the institutions in that mirror come off well. Governments in Fallout are short-sighted, narrow, and slow to notice their own failures until the failures are load-bearing. Mostly that’s just history with the serial numbers filed off, not the games being cynical for their own sake.

This piece takes the series seriously as a work of social commentary. It uses real history, real science, and real research on disaster behavior to show where the games are dramatizing something true and where they’re taking artistic license. Along the way, it draws on specific lore: Vault 11, Vault 106, the Institute, the Brotherhood of Steel, the New California Republic, Caesar’s Legion, the Children of Atom, because the specifics are where the argument lives. Nobody learns anything from a vague gesture at “post-apocalyptic themes.” They learn from the details.

A note on the method before getting into it. Every historical claim below is drawn from documented sources: government archives, peer-reviewed research, reporting from established outlets, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ own annual assessments. Where the games take liberties with real science, that gets flagged plainly. The goal isn’t to force the games into being right about everything. It’s to figure out which parts of the fiction are actually load-bearing and which parts are just set dressing.

Part One: The Bomb Was Real

Fallout's premise requires the player to accept that the United States and China fought a nuclear war in October 2077. That date is fictional, for now. Everything underneath it isn’t.

By the early 1950s, the United States government had concluded that a Soviet nuclear strike was plausible enough to justify a national education campaign built around a cartoon turtle. “Duck and Cover,” produced by the Federal Civil Defense Administration in 1951, taught schoolchildren to dive under their desks and cover their necks the moment they saw a flash. It was shown to millions of kids over more than a decade. Historians who’ve studied the program note that duck and cover actually offered real protection against a specific threat: the blast and flying debris from the smaller, Hiroshima-scale weapons the Soviets possessed in the early ‘50s. It stopped making sense once thermonuclear weapons entered the picture, but by then the drill had become a fixture of American childhood, alongside fire drills and tornado drills.

The federal government didn’t stop at cartoons. President Truman created the Federal Civil Defense Administration by executive order in December 1950, and it went on to flood the country with something like 400 million pieces of survival literature, maps of evacuation routes, instructions for building a shelter, reassurance that a nuclear attack was survivable if citizens just followed the steps. Congress, however, balked repeatedly at actually funding blast-proof public shelters, judging them too expensive relative to alternatives like missile defense, so for most of the 1950s the operative federal policy, as one historian later put it, amounted to “run like hell”: evacuate on warning of incoming bombers rather than shelter in place.

President Kennedy changed that in 1961, asking Congress for over 200 million dollars to identify, stock, and label fallout shelters in existing buildings, the first and only large-scale federal shelter program the country ever ran. It was a mess. Only about a third of designated shelters actually got stocked with the supplies they were supposed to have. Private shelter construction, the kind Fallout's Vault-Tec parodies directly, only ever reached an estimated one percent of American households, according to period civil defense records. Most families who heard the government’s advice to build a backyard bunker looked at the price tag, roughly 300 dollars for a basic do-it-yourself basement shelter, a real expense for a working family in 1961, and the odds and decided to take their chances instead. Some communities got creative: Greene County, Missouri, designated four separate limestone caves and quarries as public fallout shelters, capable of sheltering nearly 49,000 people underground, because the local geology did for free what a poured-concrete bunker would have cost a fortune to replicate. That’s the real version of a vault: not a purpose-built engineering marvel, but whatever hole in the ground the local Civil Defense director could talk a cave-tour operator into letting the government borrow.

A historian of civil defense, looking back, described the entire multi-decade program as having more psychological value than practical value: its real function was to keep the danger of nuclear war present in the public mind while reassuring people that something, anything, could be done about it. That’s a fairly precise description of what a video game like Fallout does too, just eighty years later and with better production values.

The reason the government pivoted from “duck and cover” toward shelters at all is its own grim data point. In 1954, the United States detonated the Castle Bravo thermonuclear device at Bikini Atoll. It was roughly two and a half times more powerful than expected, and it dropped radioactive fallout, described by witnesses as looking like snow, over more than seven thousand square miles of ocean, sickening Marshall Islanders and the crew of a Japanese fishing boat nearly 300 miles from the blast. That test is the exact moment the American public and its government learned that a nuclear weapon’s danger doesn’t stop at the blast radius. Fallout, the actual physical phenomenon the games are named for, became a household word because of a mistake, not a warning.

Fallout's vaults, in other words, aren’t a wild invention. They’re an exaggeration of a program the U.S. government genuinely ran, badly, on a fraction of the budget the threat justified, while quietly running actual experiments on the citizens it was supposed to protect. More on that shortly.

None of this is ancient history dressed up for a video game’s backstory. As of January 2026, the Doomsday Clock, maintained since 1947 by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (a nonprofit founded by Einstein and Oppenheimer’s own Manhattan Project colleagues), sits at 85 seconds to midnight. That’s the closest it has ever been set in its 79-year history. The Bulletin’s board cited a stalled arms control process, a new arms race dynamic among nuclear states, and a general erosion of the international cooperation that used to slow this stuff down. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute counted roughly 12,187 nuclear warheads in the global inventory as of January 2026, with nearly 4,000 of them deployed and ready, and around 2,100 kept on high operational alert, meaning they could be launched on short notice. Russia and the United States alone hold something like 83 percent of the total.

The point isn’t that a Fallout-style war is imminent. It’s that the premise the franchise runs on, that human civilization built the means of its own annihilation and kept building more of it even after everyone agreed that was a bad idea, is not fiction. It is Tuesday.

And the instinct that produced Vault-Tec, the private company that sold underground survival as a consumer product, hasn’t gone anywhere either. It’s just changed its marketing. Disaster researchers and journalists tracking American preparedness culture put the number of self-identified “preppers” in the United States somewhere between 10 and 25 million people, depending on how strictly the term gets defined, roughly double what it was in 2017. FEMA’s own household survey data shows the share of Americans who could sustain themselves independently for at least 31 days climbing steadily across the last decade, accelerated hard by COVID-era supply shocks. The preparedness gear industry is now worth billions of dollars a year and is projected to keep growing. None of that means the country is about to need bunkers. It means a meaningful slice of the population has quietly concluded that the systems they used to assume would show up in a crisis might not, and has decided to handle that risk themselves rather than wait on an institution to handle it for them. That’s more or less the emotional starting point of every Fallout game: not “the world ended,” but “I stopped assuming someone else would catch me if it did.”

Part Two: Vault-Tec and the Ethics of the Institution

The single best piece of world-building in the entire franchise is the revelation, delivered gradually across multiple games, that most of the vaults were never meant to save anyone. Vault-Tec, the corporation that built them, ran the vault program as a set of controlled social experiments, with the government’s blessing, to study how isolated populations respond to extreme conditions. The people who paid to get in, or were assigned a spot, were told they were buying survival. They were actually buying a data point.

The specific experiments are the kind of detail that makes people roll their eyes if they haven’t looked closely, and then go quiet once they have. Vault 11 was told, every year, that unless the residents voted to sacrifice one person, the vault’s automated systems would kill everyone. It was a lie. The real experiment was to see how long a community would keep killing its own before someone refused. Vault 22 exposed residents to genetically engineered spores meant to accelerate crop growth, which mutated and turned the vault into a horror show. Vault 106 pumped hallucinogenic gas into the air supply and watched the residents lose their minds. Vault 68 populated an entire vault with nine hundred men and one woman, and Vault 69 mirrored it with nine hundred women and one man, a matched pair of experiments in social breakdown under engineered gender ratios. Vault 77 shipped one lone occupant into isolation with nothing but a crate of ventriloquist dummies for company, a study in isolation stripped of even the pretense of a control group. Vault 112 kept its residents in permanent stasis, plugged into a simulation controlled by a man who used the arrangement to torment them for his own amusement, indefinitely, with nobody outside the vault able to intervene because nobody outside the vault knew what was happening inside it. These aren’t throwaway jokes. They’re structured the way an actual unethical human trial is structured: a control variable, a population that can’t leave, and researchers who never have to look their subjects in the eye.

If that sounds too cynical to be realistic, it’s worth knowing that the United States government ran exactly that kind of program, repeatedly, for decades, and mostly on people who had no meaningful way to refuse. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, run by the U.S. Public Health Service from 1932 to 1972, recruited nearly 400 Black sharecroppers with latent syphilis in Alabama under the pretense of free healthcare. They were never told what they had. They were never treated, even after penicillin became the standard cure in 1947. Researchers wanted to observe the untreated course of the disease, so they let it run. The study didn’t end because someone in the Public Health Service developed a conscience. It ended in 1972 because a whistleblower leaked it to the Associated Press.

Around the same period, the CIA ran MKUltra, a set of mind-control experiments involving drugs, sensory deprivation, and psychological manipulation, on subjects who in many documented cases had no idea they were part of a program at all. And in a study most Americans have never heard of, the U.S. government intentionally infected nearly 700 Guatemalan prisoners, soldiers, and psychiatric patients with syphilis between 1946 and 1948 to test whether penicillin could prevent the disease, not just cure it. Some of the infected were never treated at all. President Obama formally apologized for that one in 2010, six decades after it happened, on behalf of a government whose agencies had, by that point, forgotten the study had ever run.

What finally ended the Tuskegee study was its own lesson. It wasn’t an ethics board. There wasn’t one yet. It took a Public Health Service employee named Peter Buxtun raising internal objections for years, getting ignored, and eventually leaking the documents to a reporter in 1972. Only after the Associated Press ran the story did the study stop. The fallout produced the Belmont Report in 1979, which finally laid out the basic principles, informed consent, an honest accounting of risk, and fair selection of who gets studied that now govern human research in the United States. In other words, the guardrails that exist today exist because the guardrails that existed in 1932 failed for forty straight years, and it took a whistleblower and a newspaper to fix it, not the institution correcting itself from the inside.

That’s the real-world model Fallout is drawing from when it has Vault-Tec quietly running a psychological pressure cooker on 11 and calling it civil defense. The lesson isn’t that corporations or governments are cartoonishly evil. It’s narrower and more useful than that: an institution that answers to no one, that treats the people in its care as inputs rather than as people it’s accountable to, will eventually run the experiment, because nothing is stopping it. Vault-Tec didn’t need a mustache-twirling villain at the top. It needed an org chart where nobody at any level was required to answer for what happened to the vault dwellers once the door sealed.

Part Three: Radiation, Real and Imagined

Here’s where the games take real license, and it’s worth being straight about it, because my readers deserve accuracy.

In Fallout, radiation turns people into ghouls, deer into two-headed Rasta’s, and cockroaches into things the size of a dog. Real radiation biology doesn’t work that way. Real fallout is dominated by isotopes like cesium-137 and strontium-90, both of which are dangerous specifically because they mimic biologically useful elements (strontium behaves like calcium and lodges in bone, for instance) and because they have long enough half-lives, about 30 years for both, to keep irradiating an area and the people in it for generations. What radiation actually does to a body is cellular damage: it breaks DNA, causes cancers, damages bone marrow and the gut lining, and in high enough doses kills through radiation sickness within days or weeks. It doesn’t produce hulking mutants with new abilities. It produces cancer wards.

The one place Fallout's exaggeration lines up with a real, if far stranger, phenomenon is Chernobyl. Long-term census research published in Current Biology found no evidence that mammal abundance in the exclusion zone correlates with contamination levels, and found wolf populations running more than seven times higher inside the zone than in comparable uncontaminated reserves nearby. Camera-trap surveys from the University of Georgia confirmed the pattern: elk, wild boar, foxes, and predators moving through the zone in numbers that don’t track radiation dose at all. A 2019 gathering of roughly thirty Chernobyl researchers from across Europe concluded the area now functions as one of the continent’s most important biodiversity hotspots, home to bears, bison, lynx, more than two hundred bird species, and the reintroduced Przewalski’s horse, none of which read the warning signs. Some individual effects are real and documented: certain insects show shortened lifespans and higher parasite loads, and tree fatality was severe in the “Red Forest” nearest the reactor in the weeks after the 1986 meltdown. But the dominant finding, the one that surprised the researchers who went looking for a wasteland and found a nature reserve instead, is that the thing keeping wildlife populations suppressed in most of the world isn’t radiation. It’s us. Take the humans out, even out of one of the most contaminated landscapes on Earth, and the elk come back faster than the cesium decays.

That’s a stranger and more interesting fact than “you become a super mutant,” and it’s the opposite lesson from the one Fallout teaches about radiation and bodies. Fallout's version is Hollywood biology grafted onto Cold War-era horror-comic sensibilities: gamma rays as a magic wand that turns cockroaches into something the size of a dog and turns a man into a hulking green super mutant with new abilities instead of new tumors. Real radiation biology doesn’t work that way. Cesium-137 and strontium-90, the two isotopes that dominate real fallout, are dangerous specifically because they mimic elements the body already uses, strontium behaves like calcium and lodges in bone, and because both carry roughly 30-year half-lives that keep irradiating an area for generations. What radiation actually does at the cellular level is break DNA, damage bone marrow and the gut lining, and in high enough doses, kill through radiation sickness within days. It’s not meant to be a radiation textbook. It’s meant to visualize dread, and it does that job well, even where it takes real liberties with the science to do it. The truth, that removing people is often better for a landscape than removing radiation, is the one detail the games never touch, probably because “the real monster was us all along, and also there were no monsters, just an empty nature preserve” doesn’t make for a great loading screen.

Where the games get the emotional truth right is in what radiation represented to the actual people who lived through the Cold War: an invisible, patient, indiscriminate threat that didn’t respect borders, blast radii, or good intentions. The Castle Bravo test mentioned earlier drifted fallout for hundreds of miles because nobody fully understood wind patterns at that altitude. That unpredictability, the sense that the danger doesn’t stay where you put it, is the one thing Fallout nails without needing to exaggerate a thing.

Part Four: The Scorched Plague, and Why Nobody Saw It Coming Either

Radiation isn’t the only real-world risk Fallout dramatizes. Fallout 76 adds a wrinkle the earlier games didn’t bother with: a second apocalypse, layered on top of the first. The Scorched Plague, spread by a mutated strain that turns the infected into aggressive, burning husks, spreads through West Virginia in the twenty-five years after the bombs fell, on top of a population that’s already down to a fraction of its pre-war size and already lacking anything resembling a functioning public health system. Nobody in the game’s backstory ran a containment plan, because there was nobody left with the authority, the lab capacity, or frankly the trust to run one.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ own 2026 assessment, the one that put the Doomsday Clock at its closest point ever, named biological risk as one of its four core drivers alongside nuclear weapons, climate change, and unregulated AI, citing research into self-replicating “mirror life,” AI tools capable of helping design biological threats, state-sponsored weapons programs, and the deliberate dismantling of U.S. public health infrastructure as compounding factors. A board of Nobel laureates and nuclear policy researchers, in January of this year, named pandemic risk as a live and growing concern in roughly the same breath as nuclear war. Nobody had to invent that one for a video game.

The uncomfortable overlap between Fallout 76‘s premise and the real assessment isn’t that a nuclear war would cause a plague. It’s the underlying structural point both are making: societies that have already had their institutional capacity gutted by one crisis are far worse positioned to handle the next one. A public health system doesn’t come back online the week after a disaster just because people need it to. It requires labs, supply chains, trained staff, and public trust, all four of which erode fast and rebuild slowly. Fallout 76‘s West Virginia doesn’t get a plague because the writers wanted more monsters. It gets one because a population with no functioning health infrastructure and no functioning government is exactly the population a real epidemiologist would expect a fast-spreading pathogen to tear through unchecked, and that’s true whether the crisis before it was a nuclear war or something considerably more mundane. Which raises the obvious question: once the institutions are gone, what do people actually do?

Part Five: What People Actually Do When the Lights Go Out

Pop culture has trained most people to expect that disasters produce panic, looting, and a fast slide into savagery. Fallout plays with this expectation constantly, most obviously through raiders, but the games are actually more nuanced than the stereotype, and so, it turns out, is the real world.

Sociologists have been studying how people behave during actual disasters since Samuel Henry Prince’s 1920 study of the Halifax munitions ship explosion, and the consistent finding across a century of research is that mass panic is rare and mutual aid is common. Researchers call the phenomenon “disaster communitas,” the spontaneous, improvised cooperation that emerges when formal systems break down. Strangers organize rescues. Neighbors pool food. People who never spoke before start running a kitchen together, because someone has to and nobody’s waiting for a form to be filed. Studies of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami found that people with prior disaster experience and a personality disposed toward openness were the most reliable predictors of who stepped up to help, not wealth, not government proximity, not institutional affiliation. The help came from the people, not from the org chart.

What sociologists call “elite panic” is the flip side of that finding, and it’s the part most disaster movies skip. Elite panic is what happens when the people in charge, officials, commanders, anyone with formal authority, assume the public will turn feral, and then act on that assumption in ways that cause actual harm. The clearest documented case is the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, where the mayor authorized troops to shoot suspected looters on sight. Soldiers ended up killing civilians who were doing nothing more sinister than pulling food out of a burning building before it collapsed. The public didn’t create that disaster. The people running the response did, because they panicked about a mob that mostly existed in their own heads.

This is, almost beat for beat, the split Fallout dramatizes across its settlements. Megaton, in Fallout 3, is a scrap-built town that formed voluntarily around an unexploded bomb because a group of survivors decided cooperation beat scattering. Diamond City rebuilt itself inside the shell of Fenway Park with no government mandate behind it, just people who needed walls and were willing to work for them. Novac in New Vegas runs on a rotating night watch, a shared motel, and a giant fiberglass dinosaur nobody particularly needed but nobody wanted to tear down either, because by then it was theirs. These are, in miniature, exactly what the disaster sociology literature describes: voluntary, self-organized mutual aid, formed by people with no formal authority over each other, held together because everyone involved had a direct stake in it working.

Hurricane Katrina in 2005 gave the modern version of the same split. Journalists and disaster researchers who studied the coverage afterward documented a stark difference in how identical behavior got described depending on who was doing it: white residents photographed carrying food out of flooded stores were frequently captioned as “finding supplies,” while Black residents doing the same thing were captioned as “looting.” Meanwhile, on the ground, formal response was in places catastrophically slow and in places actively obstructive, while informal networks, neighbors with boats, church groups, private citizens who drove in with truckloads of water on their own initiative, filled gaps the official response left open for days. That’s elite panic and disaster communitas playing out in the same American city, in living memory, covered by cable news in real time. It’s not ancient sociology. It’s twenty years old.

Set that against the raiders, the game’s stand-in for total social collapse, and the contrast is the whole argument. Raiders aren’t what happens automatically once civilization falls. They’re what happens when a specific group decides cooperation isn’t worth the effort and predation is easier. The wasteland doesn’t force that choice on anyone. Megaton and Diamond City prove the opposite is equally available, and historically, the opposite is what actually shows up more often in the real record. Fallout's raiders exist so the game has a combat system. Its towns exist because the writers, whether they knew the disaster sociology literature or just had good instincts, understood that voluntary cooperation, not command-and-control, is what people reliably build when nobody’s stopping them. Nobody issued Megaton a permit. Nobody sent Diamond City a grant. They got built because the people who needed them were the only ones going to bother.

Part Six: Scarcity Changes People, and We Have the Data to Prove It

Fallout is soaked in resource scarcity. Caps as currency, bottle caps, are a joke about how thin the economy actually is. Water is a plot device across three different games. Food, ammunition, clean drugs, all of it is scarce enough that characters make genuinely ugly choices to get more of it.

Behavioral economists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir spent years studying what scarcity does to the human mind, and their research, published in the book Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, found something specific and well documented: scarcity doesn’t just limit what people have. It taxes cognitive bandwidth. People under severe resource scarcity make worse long-term decisions, not because they’re worse people, but because scarcity consumes the mental capacity that would otherwise go toward planning ahead. It’s the same reason a person who’s chronically short on money makes decisions that look irrational to someone who isn’t, and the same reason a farmer studied before harvest, when cash is tightest, scores measurably worse on cognitive tests than the same farmer studied after harvest, when money’s not the immediate problem.

That’s the raider camp, mechanically. It’s also the cannibal settlements scattered through the games, and it’s the black-market chem trade in every major Fallout city. None of it requires the wasteland to have broken people morally in some abstract sense. It requires sustained scarcity, and the data says sustained scarcity reliably produces exactly the corner-cutting, present-focused, sometimes predatory decision-making the games depict. The wasteland isn’t full of monsters. It’s full of people whose bandwidth got consumed by the daily math of staying alive, some of whom kept their principles anyway, and some of whom didn’t.

What’s worth noticing is which settlements in the games manage to escape that trap. Diamond City has a functioning market and something resembling rule of law. Novac has an actual local economy built around a functioning trade route. The pattern holds in the real disaster literature too: communities that maintain even a thin layer of predictable structure, a market, a shared task, a reason to trust your neighbor tomorrow as much as today, hold together. Communities where scarcity is total and unrelenting, with no path back to stability, are the ones that produce raiders and cannibals, in the game and, per the actual historical record of famine and siege, in reality.

The bottle cap economy itself is worth a second look, because it’s a better piece of economic commentary than it gets credit for. Caps work as currency in the wasteland not because they have any intrinsic value, they’re literally trash, but because enough people agreed to treat them as scarce and tradeable that the agreement became functionally real. Currency anywhere is basically that: a shared fiction that holds exactly as long as enough people keep believing in it and stops working the moment they don’t. The game’s economy collapses into barter and pure scarcity math the instant that shared trust breaks down between factions, which is, again, closer to how real black markets and real famine economies behave than most fiction bothers to get.

Part Seven: Institutions After the Fall, and Why Most of Them Rot

The last two parts were about what individuals and small groups do. This part is about what happens once individuals try to build something bigger, and here’s where Fallout's real sophistication shows up. The series doesn’t offer one model of post-collapse governance and call it good. It offers four or five, lets you live inside each one, and lets the consequences make the argument.

The New California Republic is the closest thing the wasteland has to a restored version of the old United States: elected government, a standing army, a currency, territorial ambition. It’s also, by the time you meet it in New Vegas, badly overextended, running Hoover Dam on a garrison it can barely pay, and treating its annexed territories more like a tax base than a citizenry. Troopers stationed at outposts like Camp McCarran and Camp Forlorn Hope go without proper supply lines while officers back in the Republic’s capital debate procedure. Farmers in the newly annexed territories resent NCR currency requirements and NCR land policy enough that plenty of them would rather take their chances under someone else’s rule, or no rule at all. The game doesn’t portray the NCR as evil. It portrays it as a bureaucracy that outgrew its own competence, the same failure mode that shows up whenever an institution keeps expanding its footprint past the point it can actually deliver on its promises to the people already inside its borders. Ask any small-town fire department that’s been folded into a regional authority three reorganizations removed from anyone who knows the town, and you’ll get a version of the same story, just without the power armor. Bigger doesn’t mean better resourced. It usually just means the resources have farther to travel and more layers to pass through before they reach the person who actually needed them, and something gets skimmed off at every layer along the way.

Caesar’s Legion is the opposite: total centralization, backed by slavery and religious mythology built by one man around himself. Edward Sallow, a former Follower of the Apocalypse who reinvented himself as Caesar, built the Legion by borrowing Roman iconography wholesale, ranks, discipline, and a cult of personal authority, and grafted it onto tribal populations he conquered and absorbed by force. Members who show weakness or disobedience are crucified along the roadside as a visible warning to everyone else who passes, and the Legion runs on the explicit premise that brutal, visible consequences are what hold a fractured society together when nothing else will. It’s efficient in the narrow sense that command decisions happen fast, because exactly one person is making them, and the game lets you see how genuinely appealing that efficiency looks to some of the people living under it, communities that were being raided and starved before the Legion absorbed them, and are, by some brutal accounting, safer and better fed under Caesar’s rule than they were before it. That’s the uncomfortable part Fallout insists you sit with: tyranny sometimes really does deliver short-term order that voluntary systems struggle to match on day one. It’s also, structurally, a dictatorship that will not survive its founder, because nothing underneath Caesar has been built to outlast him, and by the time you meet him in New Vegas, he’s already dying of a brain tumor with no clear successor and several lieutenants who each think the job is theirs. The game is blunt about this. It’s not subtle commentary. It’s the oldest lesson in political science: a system with no distributed authority and no plan for succession is a countdown clock wearing a toga, and the order it offers is only ever as stable as the one man holding it together.

The Institute, introduced in Fallout 4, is the technocratic failure mode, and arguably the most relevant one to write about today. It’s a research organization with genuinely advanced capability, functioning underground beneath Boston, that has decided it knows better than the surface population how the wasteland should be run, and acts on that belief by replacing people with synthetic duplicates and manipulating the world from the shadows without consent from anyone it’s affecting. Its scientists are, individually, often thoughtful and even sympathetic people, parents, researchers who genuinely believe synth labor will eventually rebuild civilization, characters who agonize over specific ethical questions even while the institution around them operates with none. That gap, between decent individuals and an indecent system they collectively staff, is the most realistic thing about the faction. The Institute isn’t stupid. That’s what makes it dangerous. It’s smart people with real capability who concluded that their expertise entitled them to override everyone else’s agency, kidnapping and replacing surface dwellers with programmed doubles for intelligence-gathering purposes, without ever putting that policy up for a vote among the people it affects, because the people it affects were never considered stakeholders in the first place. It’s the same instinct behind Vault-Tec’s experiments, dressed in a lab coat instead of a corporate logo: the assumption that if you’re smart enough and your intentions are framed as good enough, consent becomes optional, and the people being acted upon become subjects of study rather than parties to a decision.

The Enclave, the remnant of the actual pre-war U.S. federal government hiding on an oil rig off the coast, is the bluntest case in the whole franchise, and possibly the most on-the-nose piece of political commentary the series ever attempts. Its leadership genuinely believes it represents the legitimate continuation of the United States, and in Fallout 3 its endgame plan is to poison the Capital Wasteland’s water supply with a modified version of the FEV virus, killing everyone who isn’t already Enclave, on the theory that the wasteland’s population is too contaminated by two centuries of radiation and mutation to be worth saving as part of “real” America. It’s the logical endpoint of an institution that has fully substituted its own continuity for the people it was chartered to serve: the government persists, the citizens it was built to protect are recategorized as the problem. Real governments don’t usually get to test that logic on a national water supply. But the instinct that an institution’s survival and its founding purpose can quietly swap places until nobody inside it notices the difference isn’t science fiction. It’s most of what political scientists mean when they talk about institutional capture.

The Brotherhood of Steel hoards pre-war technology on the theory that ordinary wasteland communities can’t be trusted with it. It’s an old strategy dressed up in power armor. Guilds have hoarded trade knowledge for centuries, controlling who was allowed to become a master craftsman and who stayed a permanent apprentice. The Catholic Church controlled literacy and scriptural interpretation for most of European history for the same stated reason: that the technology, in that case, the technology was ideas, was too dangerous for untrained hands. Medieval medicine ran on a similar logic for generations, guarded by universities and guilds that restricted who could practice, ostensibly to protect patients from quacks, while also protecting a small credentialed class’s monopoly on the knowledge itself. The Brotherhood’s position sounds defensible in isolation, and the games let you sit with a member who genuinely believes it, not a cynic exploiting the policy for personal gain, but someone who’s watched pre-war tech get misused and concluded restriction is the responsible position. In practice, hoarding knowledge under the banner of protecting people from themselves reliably produces a class that holds power and a class that’s kept dependent, and Fallout lets you watch that dynamic play out from both sides of the fence depending on which game you’re in. By the time of Fallout 4, the Brotherhood has hardened from a scholarly order into something closer to a standing army with a technology monopoly, which is usually what happens to any institution that spends long enough treating access control as its primary mission: the control becomes the point, and the original scholarly purpose becomes the justification you recite rather than the thing you’re actually doing day to day.

What ties all four together is this: none of them fail because their founders were cartoonishly wicked. They fail because each one built a structure where power concentrated and accountability didn’t follow it. The NCR’s bureaucrats aren’t accountable to the settlements they annex. Caesar isn’t accountable to anyone, ever, by design. The Institute isn’t accountable to the surface it manipulates. The Brotherhood isn’t accountable to the wastelanders it decides aren’t ready for its technology. Compare that to Megaton or Diamond City, and the structural difference is obvious: those settlements work because the people running them live inside the consequences of their own decisions, and the people affected by those decisions can walk away or push back without going through five layers of command to do it.

Part Eight: The Children of Atom, and What Actual Doomsday Cults Look Like

Scattered through several Fallout games is a fringe religion called the Children of Atom, worshippers who believe the bombs were a divine act of purification and who venerate unexploded ordnance and irradiated craters as holy sites. It reads, on first encounter, like the writers’ idea of a joke: what if people worshipped the thing that ended the world? It’s a better observation than it looks, because history already ran this experiment more than once, and the pattern is remarkably consistent.

On November 18, 1978, more than 900 members of the People’s Temple died at a jungle compound in Guyana called Jonestown, most from cyanide-laced punch, some injected against their will, nearly a third of them children. The group’s leader, Jim Jones, had built the Temple in the 1950s and ‘60s around a genuinely progressive, racially integrated message that drew heavily from poor and Black congregants in Indianapolis and later California. What it became by 1978 was a closed, paranoid, geographically isolated compound where members had signed over their property and Social Security checks, where families were deliberately separated and encouraged to inform on each other, and where Jones had already run “White Night” loyalty drills, mock mass-suicide rehearsals with fake poison, to condition the group before the real one. When a congressman flew in to investigate reports of abuse and was killed trying to leave with defectors, Jones triggered the plan for real.

Strip away the tropical setting and the specifics line up almost exactly with the structure of the Children of Atom: a charismatic authority who reframes catastrophe, or the threat of one, as sacred rather than tragic; a community deliberately cut off from outside information and outside relationships; and a membership that has been walked through the endgame in rehearsal long before it happens for real, so that when it does happen, compliance feels less like a decision and more like muscle memory. Cult researchers call this general pattern coercive control, and it doesn’t require radiation or a fictional setting to work. It requires isolation, a monopoly on information, and enough small submissions stacked on top of each other that a catastrophic one doesn’t feel like a break from the pattern, just the next step in it.

Fallout's satire is gentler than the real history, which is unusual for the series. Nobody in the Children of Atom storylines is running a body count anywhere close to Jonestown’s. But the underlying mechanism, catastrophe reframed as meaning by someone who benefits from you believing it, is drawn from a well-documented real-world playbook, and it’s worth remembering that the actual American case didn’t require an apocalypse to work. It just required isolation and a leader willing to use it.

What’s worth adding, because it’s the detail true crime retrospectives tend to skip, is that a U.S. embassy team interviewed 75 Jonestown residents in the months before the massacre specifically to check whether people were being held against their will, and every single one of them said no. This wasn’t incompetent oversight. It’s the actual mechanism of coercive control working exactly as designed: by the time an outsider gets access to ask the question, the group has already done the work of making the answer come out wrong. The wasteland’s cults get spotted by the player because the player walks in as an outsider with nothing at stake. Real ones get spotted, when they get spotted at all, by someone willing to keep asking after the first reassuring answer.

Part Nine: Ghouls, Super Mutants, and Who Gets to Count as a Person

Cults decide who gets isolated by choice. The wasteland runs a parallel, uglier sorting system for people who never got a choice in the matter at all. Ghouls are irradiated humans who didn’t die; they just kept aging and rotting while staying alive and conscious. Most of the wasteland treats them as barely human, denies them housing, denies them trade, and sometimes hunts them for sport. Super mutants are a product of the Forced Evolutionary Virus (FEV), a pre-war military research project that the Master got his hands on and used to forcibly convert captured humans in the original game. They’re treated as monsters by default regardless of individual behavior or intent.

The Master’s own project deserves a closer look because it’s the series’ clearest depiction of forced ideological conversion rather than simple monster-making. The Master, himself transformed and driven mad by prolonged exposure to the FEV virus in the Mariposa vault beneath the original game’s setting, comes to believe that dunking unwilling humans in the same vats and converting them into super mutants is the only way to end humanity’s cycle of war, on the theory that a unified, physically identical mutant species would have nothing left to fight over. It’s presented, from the Master’s own perspective, as a humanitarian project, forced unity in service of permanent peace, and it’s abducting and permanently altering people who never consented to any of it. It’s the oldest justification totalitarian projects have used for erasing individual difference by force: that uniformity, imposed rather than chosen, is worth the coercion because the alternative is worse. The game doesn’t need you to have read any political theory to get the point. It just needs you to watch the Master explain, calmly and at length, why turning people into copies of each other against their will is actually the kind thing to do.

This is the most overtly allegorical material in the franchise, and it doesn’t require much decoding. Fallout is dramatizing what happens when a society decides a category of people has stopped counting as people, based on appearance rather than conduct. Ghouls like Fallout 3’s Roy Phillips organize because the alternative offered to them, permanent second-class status in the towns they helped build, isn’t survivable long-term. Super mutants like Fallout 3’s Fawkes show individual variation the game insists you notice, because the game wants you to sit with the discomfort of a “monster” who’s more consistent and more honest than most of the humans you meet.

There’s no need to import outside politics to make this land. The games do the work themselves, repeatedly, across two decades of releases, by making the player choose, over and over, whether to extend basic decency to someone the wasteland has decided doesn’t deserve it. Tenpenny Tower in Fallout 3 runs an entire subplot on whether ghouls get to live inside the walls at all, and the “reasonable” residents arguing against it never once frame their position as hatred, they frame it as caution, property values, and keeping things the way they’ve always been, which is exactly how real exclusion usually gets talked about by the people doing the excluding. Underworld, the ghoul settlement built into the ruins of the Museum of History, exists specifically because the alternative, trying to integrate into towns that won’t have them, kept failing. The game is showing its work, not stumbling into an accident of level design.

It’s the oldest test there is, and Fallout keeps handing it back to you, game after game, without ever making it a lecture. It just makes it a choice, and lets you sit with whichever one you picked.

Part Ten: What People Actually Fight For, Once Survival Isn’t Enough

Fallout 3 opens with a father who vanishes to finish a water purification project. Fallout 4 opens with a parent searching for a stolen infant son across a ruined Commonwealth. Strip away the power armor and both games are built on the same premise: once basic survival is handled, or even while it’s still precarious, people don’t stop needing purpose. They go looking for one, and family, or the closest available substitute for it, is usually where they look first.

Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz, wrote about this from direct experience in Man’s Search for Meaning. His observation, drawn from watching who survived the camps and who didn’t, was that people who held onto some concrete reason to keep going, a person waiting for them, a task left unfinished, outlasted people who had lost any sense of a future worth reaching. Survival alone wasn’t enough to keep most people going. It had to be survival for something.

Fallout's player characters are, structurally, doing exactly what Frankl described. The Lone Wanderer isn’t just surviving the Capital Wasteland. He’s finishing his father’s water project. The Sole Survivor isn’t just navigating the Commonwealth. She’s looking for her son. The Courier in New Vegas starts the game with the thinnest possible motive, getting shot in the head and buried in a shallow grave over a poker chip, and the entire arc of that game is watching a character build a reason to keep moving out of what was originally just a grudge, until the grudge turns into an actual stake in whether New Vegas ends up run by the NCR, the Legion, Mr. House, or nobody at all. The game could have made any of these characters a blank survivalist with no stake beyond their own skin, and it would have been a worse game, because it would have missed the actual psychology of how people hold themselves together after everything else has been stripped away.

This shows up at the settlement level too, not just the protagonist’s. Vault 101’s Overseer, in the original Capital Wasteland backstory, keeps his vault sealed and controlled for two hundred years on the argument that the mission, permanent isolation from a dangerous world, still matters more than any individual inside it, and it’s precisely that inherited sense of purpose, decoupled from whether it still serves anyone, that makes the vault a cage rather than a shelter. Compare that to Diamond City’s mayor’s office, a job people actually run for, or the Minutemen faction in Fallout 4, an all-volunteer militia rebuilt from nothing by whoever’s willing to answer the call, and the difference is purpose that answers to the people living inside it versus purpose that answers only to itself. Frankl’s observation from the camps wasn’t just that people needed a reason to survive. It was that the reason had to point outward, toward a person or a task in the world, not inward toward the institution’s own continuation. Vault-Tec’s vaults point inward. Diamond City points outward. That’s the whole difference between a shelter and a trap, and it’s not one the wasteland invented. Purpose isn’t a luxury item that shows up once the basics are covered. It’s often the thing that gets the basics covered in the first place.

Part Eleven: How Close We’ve Actually Come

Fallout's Great War lasted two hours from first launch to global fallout, an exaggeration for pacing, real nuclear exchange plans run longer, but the underlying premise, that the gap between peace and catastrophe can be a matter of minutes and one person’s judgment call, is not an exaggeration at all.

On September 26, 1983, a Soviet early-warning system called Oko reported an incoming American missile launch, then four more. The officer on duty that night, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, had to decide in minutes whether to report a live attack up the chain of command, a report that would very likely have triggered a Soviet retaliatory launch. Petrov judged the alert was a false alarm, reasoning that a genuine first strike wouldn’t consist of just five missiles, and he was right: the system had mistaken sunlight reflecting off high-altitude clouds for a launch. He was later reprimanded for paperwork irregularities rather than praised, and the incident stayed classified for years. It happened three weeks after Soviet forces shot down a Korean civilian airliner, killing 269 people, at one of the tensest moments of the entire Cold War.

Eleven days after Petrov’s shift, NATO ran a command exercise called Able Archer 83 that so closely mimicked the lead-up to a real nuclear strike that Soviet intelligence genuinely believed it might be cover for an actual attack. The Soviet leadership began moving toward a real retaliatory posture, mobilizing forces and readying bombers, before eventually standing down once it became clear the exercise wasn’t real. A single American intelligence officer’s decision not to escalate the U.S. response in kind is credited by some historians with keeping that moment from spiraling further.

Then there’s the Cuban Missile Crisis, and specifically the incident historians consider its closest call: on October 27, 1962, a Soviet submarine near Cuba, out of radio contact and under depth-charge harassment from U.S. naval forces that didn’t know it was carrying a nuclear torpedo, needed unanimous consent from three officers to launch. Two agreed. Vasily Arkhipov didn’t, and the launch never happened. That crisis as a whole lasted thirteen days and is still widely regarded by historians as the closest the world has come to full nuclear exchange, a standoff triggered by the discovery of Soviet missile installations ninety miles off the Florida coast and resolved only after a tense back-channel exchange between Washington and Moscow that neither side fully controlled once it started.

That’s three separate, documented moments where nuclear war didn’t happen because one person in a high-pressure, information-starved room made a judgment call that could easily have gone the other way. Fallout's premise isn’t a wild leap. It’s what happens if Petrov’s reasoning had been off by a few minutes, or if Arkhipov had voted with the other two officers. The technology, the doctrine, and, in Russia's and the United States’ case, most of the warheads, are still here. What kept the last eighty years from becoming a wasteland wasn’t a system working as designed. It was a handful of individuals refusing to pull a trigger they were technically authorized to pull.

Part Twelve: Where the Franchise Is Prophecy and Where It’s Just a Good Story

Give the games credit for what they got right without pretending they predicted the future. Fallout correctly diagnosed that institutions built to protect people can be repurposed to exploit them, that voluntary cooperation outperforms top-down control when the top-down control has no accountability built in, that scarcity degrades judgment in measurable ways, and that meaning, not just survival, is what actually keeps people functional. All four of those are supported by real research, not just narrative instinct.

Where the series takes liberties is mostly cosmetic: the mutation science, the two-hour war, the retro-futurist technology that never updated past 1950s aesthetics because the bombs fell before it could. Those choices exist to make a video game legible and entertaining, not to model an actual nuclear exchange. Nobody should walk away from Fallout thinking radiation produces glowing ghouls, or that a nuclear war would leave 1950s jukeboxes running two centuries later on working power. That’s set dressing.

It’s also worth being honest that a real nuclear exchange wouldn’t look like Fallout's two-century-later wasteland at all, and this matters for anyone tempted to treat the games as an actual planning document. Real nuclear winter modeling, the kind that emerged from Cold War-era climate science, suggests the bigger threat to global population in the years immediately following a large-scale exchange wouldn’t be blast, fire, or fallout directly. It would be agricultural collapse from smoke-blocked sunlight disrupting growing seasons worldwide, for years, everywhere, including countries nowhere near the war. Fallout's wasteland is a sun-baked desert two hundred years on. The real version of the first decade after a nuclear war involves a darkened, colder sky and global crop failure well outside the blast radius, a genuinely different and in some ways more frightening scenario than the one any Fallout game depicts, because it doesn’t require living anywhere near a target to be affected by it.

What shouldn’t get filed under set dressing is the institutional critique, because that part isn’t dressed up at all. It’s just accurate, and arguably it’s the part the games spent the least effort disguising, because unlike the mutation science or the two-hour war, nobody involved needed to invent it. Vault-Tec’s experiments are a compressed, gamified version of things that actually happened. The NCR’s overextension, the Institute’s technocratic hubris, the Brotherhood’s knowledge hoarding, the Enclave’s substitution of its own survival for its founding mission, none of that required imagination so much as pattern recognition. The writers just had to have read enough history to notice the shape repeating, and then build a wasteland spacious enough to let each version play out to its logical end without a real-world government stepping in halfway through to prevent it.

Conclusion: What the Wasteland Is Actually Trying to Tell You

Strip the exaggeration off Fallout, and one plain pattern is left standing, repeated across nine mainline games and two decades of writers who agreed on almost nothing else: the institutions fail, and the communities are what hold.

The institutions fail in the same handful of ways, over and over. Vault-Tec built shelters and called it salvation, then ran quiet experiments on the people who trusted it. The NCR grew past the point where its officers still answered to the towns they’d annexed. The Institute had real expertise and decided that expertise entitled it to override everyone else’s consent. The Enclave stopped protecting the people it was chartered to serve and started treating them as the problem. Real history runs the same experiment under different names. MKUltra’s architects, the Public Health Service doctors who let four hundred men die of a curable disease for the sake of a data set, the officials who authorized troops to shoot suspected looters in 1906 San Francisco. None of them were stupid. That’s the point. Competence and good intentions don’t stop an institution from rotting once nobody inside it has to answer to the people it affects.

The communities hold for a plainer reason: the people running them live inside the consequences of their own decisions. Megaton got built because a handful of people with nothing decided cooperation was worth the effort. Diamond City rebuilt a stadium into a town without permission from anyone. Novac ran a night watch that nobody was forced to join. This isn’t the game inventing an optimistic counterweight to the grim stuff. It’s the documented, century-old finding of disaster sociology: when the systems fail, most people don’t turn feral. They turn toward each other. The communities that survive are usually the ones nobody with formal authority built for them.

The Doomsday Clock sits at 85 seconds to midnight as of this writing. Twelve thousand warheads are still in the world’s inventories. The thing standing between that number and a Fallout intro cutscene was never a flawless system. It was a handful of people, mostly unrecognized at the time, who looked at an order they were technically entitled to give and didn’t give it. And it was a much larger number of ordinary people who, when the ground actually opened up under them, built something with their neighbors instead of taking from them.

None of that requires an apocalypse to matter. The disaster sociologists studying Halifax in 1920 weren’t waiting on a bomb to find spontaneous mutual aid. The Public Health Service didn’t need a wasteland to decide that four hundred men’s treatment wasn’t worth the trouble. Jim Jones didn’t need radiation to build a closed information environment and walk nearly a thousand people through their own deaths in rehearsal. Institutions rot the same way with or without the mushroom cloud. Communities hold the same way, too. Fallout just stripped away everything that usually hides the pattern, dressed the lesson up in power armor, vault suits, and bottle caps, and let twenty million people sit still long enough to see it.

This is an organization worth talking about and supporting. This is what the YMCA actually accomplished at its peak, before the mission diffused and the buildings aged and the boardrooms filled with people more comfortable discussing strategy decks than whether the pool filter worked.

The YMCA is still one of the largest nonprofit institutions in the United States. It operates roughly 2,600 facilities, claims to serve 22 million people annually, and sits on billions of dollars in real estate assets accumulated over a century and a half of community investment. It has done more measurable good for more ordinary Americans than most organizations anyone can name.

Which is precisely why what has happened to it matters. The gap between what this organization was built to be and what it has become is not just a nonprofit management story. It is a story about what happens when institutions forget what they are for, when boards stop asking hard questions, when the people making the decisions are insulated from the consequences of those decisions, and when an organization mistakes survival for mission.

That gap is what this article is about. But it is written in the interest of closing it, not in the interest of writing an obituary.

The Membership Problem Is Real and Leadership Made It Worse

Start with the numbers, because that is where the argument has to be grounded.

Before COVID-19, the YMCA was already dealing with declining membership in many markets. The pandemic then hit the organization like a structural exam it was not prepared to pass. In April 2020 alone, the movement lost $400 million in revenue from forced closures. Combined April-May losses exceeded $800 million, and had operations been suspended through the summer, projected losses would have reached $2.5 billion. Across the country, YMCAs furloughed 75 to 90% of employees; the Greater Philadelphia YMCA alone cut 4,000 workers.

These are stunning numbers. But the damage was not distributed evenly, and the pattern of who recovered and who didn’t tells a more complicated story than simply blaming the pandemic.

The YMCA of Greater Charlotte saw total revenue drop 28%, from $100 million in 2019 to $72 million in 2021, losing more than half its members. The Des Moines YMCA shed 6,100 membership units, shrinking from 18,000 to fewer than 12,000, and its budget contracted from $19 million to $14 million. The YMCA of Greater Twin Cities, with normal annual revenue of $168 million, experienced a 30% revenue decline and has reported deficits every year since 2020, laying off 69 employees as recently as September 2024.

That last entry deserves closer examination. The YMCA of the North — formerly the Greater Twin Cities — is the third-largest YMCA in the country. It is not a small, struggling outpost. It is a major regional institution, and it has posted a deficit every single year since 2020. In 2020, the organization had 82,000 members. That number had fallen to 54,000 by 2024. Before the latest layoffs, the organization had 3,900 employees, down from 6,700 workers in 2020. It ran a deficit of $10 million in 2023 and a $10 million deficit in 2022, up from a $7.6 million shortfall in 2021.

Fifty-four thousand members. They lost nearly one in three members and four years later they still haven’t returned to financial equilibrium. The leadership characterizes this as a recovery in progress. The financial statements characterize it as an ongoing crisis.

The pattern of closures continues nationally. The Ransburg YMCA in Indianapolis is closing March 2026 after the YMCA of Greater Indianapolis saw revenue decrease $5.8 million — about 8% — from 2022 to 2024. The Alief Family YMCA in Houston closed May 2025, citing federal funding cuts; it received over 60% of its budget from government sources. The Longmont, Colorado YMCA ended fitness operations in early 2026. Most symbolically, the Central YMCA in London — the world’s original YMCA site — was sold in December 2024 and closed in February 2025 due to unsustainable maintenance costs.

That last one requires a pause. The building where George Williams founded the organization in 1844 — the original YMCA — closed because no one could afford to keep it open. The organization did not find a way to preserve its own birthplace.

The lesson is not that the YMCA should have maintained a museum. The lesson is that an institution in genuine relationship with its own history would have found a way. The failure to do so is a symptom of something larger: an organization that has drifted far enough from its founding purpose that the physical place where that purpose was born became just another liability on a balance sheet.

What would help: Affiliates that are genuinely losing members need to treat it as a diagnostic emergency, not a communications problem. A 34% membership decline is not a message to refine. It is a signal that something in the program, the facility, the pricing, or the community relationship has broken down, and it requires honest internal investigation — including conversations with members who left. The national office should require affiliates to conduct and publish exit surveys and report the results to their boards. Right now, the YMCA has no systematic national mechanism for understanding why members leave. That is not a difficult problem to fix. It is a decision to not fix it.

The Indianapolis Case Is What Institutional Dishonesty Looks Like

The Ransburg YMCA closure is worth lingering on because of how leadership handled the communication around it. Ransburg is on the east side of Indianapolis. It has served a predominantly lower-income community for decades. When the YMCA of Greater Indianapolis announced the closure, a community Facebook group formed within days and attracted nearly 1,700 members. People started asking reasonable questions.

Mirror Indy, a nonprofit news outlet, asked those questions formally. From 2022 to 2024, revenue for the YMCA of Greater Indianapolis decreased by $5.8 million, roughly 8%. In that same period, the YMCA announced a new Westfield location in a wealthier suburban county. Mirror Indy asked how the revenue decline contributed to the closure decision, what role the Westfield expansion played in the financial shortfall, and how much revenue the Westfield location had actually generated versus what was projected.

The organization did not answer those questions. They answered none of them.

The YMCA’s public statement was that closure was “a last resort to help ensure the continued strength of the YMCA system.” That is the language of a bureaucracy protecting itself. The implication is clear: a facility that serves a low-income east-side neighborhood was shuttered partly so the organization could sustain a new suburban location in Hamilton County. The YMCA declined to confirm or deny this. It declined to share how many Ransburg members received financial assistance with their memberships — information directly relevant to understanding which communities the organization actually serves when resources are constrained.

When a nonprofit organization closes a facility in a poor community while expanding into a wealthy one and refuses to explain the decision to the people affected, that is not a communication problem. That is a values problem. The board members and executive directors who made those decisions have names. The YMCA of Greater Indianapolis is led by CEO Gregg Hiland. The board of directors who approved the closure of Ransburg while funding Westfield made that choice. The community deserved a clear answer. They did not get one.

This is particularly damaging because the YMCA’s entire claim to public trust — and to nonprofit tax status — rests on the proposition that it serves the public good. Not the suburban good. Not the good of communities already well-served by alternatives. The original public good, the one George Williams identified: the young men sleeping on streets, the families without resources, the people who have nowhere else to go. Ransburg was that community. Westfield is not.

What would help: Local boards need a written, public community benefit policy that defines which populations the affiliate exists to serve and requires documented justification — available to members and the press — when a facility serving those populations closes. The national office should establish a minimum disclosure standard: any affiliate closing a facility must publish, within 30 days of the announcement, a financial summary explaining the decision, including the performance data for other affiliate locations. The IRS Form 990 makes this information technically available, but a two-year-old tax filing is not the same as honest real-time communication with the community. Make it a condition of national affiliation.

The Pay Gap Is Staggering and Deliberately Maintained

Here is the central financial contradiction of the YMCA: the people who run the organization make very good money, and the people who deliver its actual mission make very little.

At the national level, the YMCA of the USA employs a relatively small staff but compensates its leadership generously. In 2022, 208 employees received $32 million in compensation, an average of $154,000 — up from $144,000 in 2021 and $113,000 the year before. The nine most highly compensated employees received $4.6 million, an average of $500,000 each.

The previous CEO, Kevin Washington, served from 2015 until his retirement in 2021. During his tenure, he received $4 million in compensation over five years. In his final partial year alone, 2021, he received $855,104. For reference, this was the same period during which the organization had furloughed the majority of its frontline workforce across the country, and local affiliates were closing facilities and running multi-million-dollar deficits. The national office was paying its CEO north of $800,000.

There is nothing illegal about this. Nonprofit executive compensation is public record, required to be disclosed on IRS Form 990 filings. But legal is not the same as appropriate, and appropriate is not the same as consistent with the stated mission of an organization that positions itself as a community servant.

The gap between what executives make and what frontline staff earn at the YMCA is not a small discrepancy. Annual salaries at the YMCA typically range from $29,156 for childcare workers to $198,298 for a Chief Financial Officer. The majority of YMCA childcare wages fall between $12.98 and $16.83 per hour. Childcare workers at the YMCA — the people directly responsible for the safety and development of the children the organization says are at the center of its mission — earn wages that in most American cities leave them at or near the poverty line.

This is not an accident of market forces. It is a structural choice. When you pay the people who operate your gyms and teach your swim lessons and supervise your childcare centers poverty wages, you are making a decision about whose time is worth paying for. The YMCA national office pays consultants handsomely: $2.35 million to VML of Kansas City for brand and customer experience, $2.31 million to Mouri Tech for database development, and $995,000 to McKinsey and Company for membership business model consulting — all in a single year, 2021, while the pandemic was still gutting local chapter finances.

The Chicago YMCA demonstrated what this pay structure looks like when workers push back. Service Employees International Union workers struck to illustrate the difficulty of their situation. SEIU Healthcare Illinois and Indiana president Greg Kelley said “half of the workers here make minimum wage — we are talking about workers who in many cases have master’s and bachelor’s degrees.” The YMCA’s poverty-level wages resulted not only in economic hardship for childcare workers but a short-staffing crisis at YMCA-run childcare centers that impacted the quality and availability of care for low-income families. At the time, there were 50 unfilled childcare positions due to high turnover and low wages.

The YMCA’s standard response to this critique is that its pay scale is “consistent with the labor market for childcare staff.” This is true. It is also a deflection. The question is not whether the YMCA pays poorly relative to other childcare providers. The question is whether an organization with $186 million in net assets at the national level alone, paying its top nine executives an average of $500,000 a year, can justify paying the people doing its actual work minimum wage. The answer is that it cannot — not while simultaneously running campaigns about building stronger communities.

The people who spend time with children every day at the YMCA are closer to its founding purpose than any executive in a Chicago office. Their labor is the mission, made physical. Paying them poverty wages is not a structural necessity. It is a priority decision.

What would help: Every affiliate should publish an annual compensation ratio: the ratio of the CEO’s total compensation to the median frontline worker’s total compensation. This is standard practice in many European nonprofit regulatory frameworks and is a far better governance signal than anything a brand consultant will produce. Boards should set a maximum ratio and justify deviations publicly. Affiliates in financial distress that are paying frontline workers near minimum wage while paying executives six figures need to answer — on the record, in their board minutes, which are also public — why the ratio looks the way it does. The national office should require publication of this ratio as a condition of national affiliation. Not as a mandate to cut executive pay, but as a mandate to be honest about the choices being made.

The Facilities Are Old, and Nobody Wants to Say How Old

The YMCA’s real estate portfolio is an asset. It is also a liability that grows more expensive every year it is deferred.

Many buildings were constructed in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, when the organization was at the peak of its community footprint. Those buildings are now between 50 and 75 years old. Buildings reaching 40 to 60 years old face capital investment requirements that many organizations are not prepared for. Hidden infrastructure systems — plumbing, electrical, elevators, HVAC — that were ignored for decades become urgent and expensive simultaneously. The process of replacing them triggers code compliance issues, ADA requirements, and in buildings of that era, the likely presence of asbestos and lead-based paint.

The Arlington, Virginia YMCA is a useful example. Y regulars have reported that maintenance problems like a leaky roof and potholes in the parking lot went unresolved for extended periods. The property’s assessed improvement value fell by about $336,000 since 2023. The organization acknowledged it is “aware of the deferred maintenance needs of our current facility, which is more than 60 years old.”

Aware. The roof has been leaking and the parking lot has been deteriorating, and the official position is awareness.

The Arlington YMCA’s plan to redevelop the property has stalled because the original development partner left and the organization is struggling to secure a new one, citing increased interest rates, construction costs, and tariffs. These are real constraints. They do not change the fact that members are using a deteriorating 60-year-old facility while paying dues that are supposed to fund operations and capital maintenance.

This is the deferred maintenance problem made visible. An organization that did not consistently fund capital reserves over several decades now faces the compounded cost of neglect. The YMCA of Greater Boston has been more transparent about this than most, articulating a specific facilities investment strategy with stated costs and timelines. But Greater Boston is not representative of the network. Most local affiliates operate aging facilities with minimal capital reserves, making decisions based on what they can afford this budget cycle rather than what the building actually requires over a ten-year horizon.

The result is a slow accumulation of deferred problems that eventually force a choice between a costly capital campaign and closure. Many affiliates have been choosing closure. That is the wrong choice almost every time, because a YMCA that closes in a low-income neighborhood is not replaced. The community just goes without.

What would help: Every affiliate should conduct a formal facility condition assessment on a five-year cycle and report the results to the board in writing, with cost projections attached. Many do not. Capital reserves should be funded as a line item in the operating budget, not treated as an optional contribution after surplus. The national office should establish minimum capital reserve standards as a condition of affiliation — a percentage of revenue that must be set aside for facility investment annually. Affiliates that fall below the standard should be required to present a corrective plan to Y-USA. The alternative to doing this is what is already happening: buildings deteriorate until they can no longer be operated, and then they close. Deferred maintenance is a choice that gets made slowly, year by year, until it becomes a crisis that gets made all at once.

The Safety Record Is a Long-Running Institutional Failure

An organization that has operated youth programming for 181 years will inevitably encounter individuals who attempt to use that access to harm children. The question is what the institution did when it had the information to prevent it, and what accountability looks like when the answer is not enough.

The YMCA’s history with child sexual abuse in its programs spans decades. The pattern is not simply that bad actors found their way into an organization that serves children — that happens to any large institution with thousands of staff and volunteers. The pattern is that the YMCA repeatedly failed to act on information it already had.

In Oregon, Christian Galindo pleaded guilty in 2022 to four counts of first-degree sexual abuse of four victims under age 10. Before being hired by the YMCA Eugene in 2019, Galindo had been fired from Head Start and a City of Eugene recreational program due to inappropriate touching of a child. The YMCA Eugene employed him at its after-school care program at Holt Elementary. He was reportedly still employed there during at least one incident.

The man had been fired from two previous jobs involving children for inappropriate touching of a child. The YMCA Eugene hired him anyway. Four children under the age of ten were sexually abused before anyone stopped him. That is not an isolated hiring mistake. That is a background screening and hiring practice so inadequate that a person with a documented history of abusing children walked into a job supervising small children.

An anonymous 56-year-old man filed a sexual abuse lawsuit in 2022 against the YMCA of Pierce and Kitsap Counties, alleging two camp counselors sexually abused him from 1976 to 1979. Following a March 2024 trial, the jury awarded him $7.5 million in damages. The suit accused the camp of “negligent, reckless, and outrageous failure to protect.”

In October 2022, a jury in Erie County, New York awarded a 37-year-old woman $65 million in a Child Victims Act lawsuit against former YMCA counselor James B. Jackson. The plaintiff alleged that Jackson groomed and sexually abused her for more than seven years during the 1990s. One counselor. Seven years. The same victim. The YMCA employed him throughout.

The YMCA did invest in a formal child safety initiative — contracting Praeisdum of Arlington, Texas for $934,500 in 2021 and $1.2 million in 2022. Praeisdum specializes in abuse prevention screening and training for youth-serving organizations. That is a meaningful step. But a nearly $1 million annual contract for abuse prevention consulting is also an acknowledgment that the organization’s internal systems were not adequate. You do not spend that kind of money on outside expertise if you have the problem handled.

The Eugene case is the most instructive. The tools to prevent it existed: standard reference checks, database searches of prior employment terminations, a simple call to Head Start. Someone chose not to make those calls, or made them and didn’t act on the answers. That someone was a hiring manager, supervised by an executive director, accountable to a board. These are people with names and titles, and the legal system has increasingly required them to answer for what happened. That accountability is appropriate. It should not be limited to the courtroom.

What would help: Child-serving YMCA positions should require national criminal background checks, reference verification from all previous youth-serving employers, and — where state law permits — cross-referencing with child abuse registries. These checks should be conducted on staff and volunteers and repeated every three years, not just at hire. The national office should require proof of compliance from every affiliate annually as a condition of affiliation. The consulting relationship with Praeisdum is only as good as the implementation it produces in individual affiliates. Independent compliance audits — not self-reported, not consultant-facilitated — are what make the standard real. Local boards should receive a written safety compliance report at every annual meeting. The cost of doing this correctly is far lower than the cost of one $65 million verdict.

The Competition Has Changed and the YMCA Hasn’t Adapted

The fitness market the YMCA competes in looks nothing like it did 30 years ago.

In the early 1990s, if you wanted access to a pool, a gym floor, group fitness classes, and childcare under one roof, the YMCA was your primary option in most American communities. That is no longer true. The landscape now includes budget chains that have undercut the Y on price, luxury chains that have outcompeted it on quality, and digital platforms that have removed the need for a physical facility entirely for many people.

YMCA memberships average $42 to $77 per month for an individual, with a one-time joining fee of $0 to $110. Planet Fitness memberships start at $15 per month. Planet Fitness does not have a pool or childcare. But for the majority of adults who use a gym primarily for cardio equipment, treadmills, and weights, Planet Fitness costs less than a third of a YMCA membership and is open 24 hours. Anytime Fitness and Orangetheory Fitness merged parent companies in April 2024 to form Purpose Brands, combining over 7,000 locations. That is nearly three times the YMCA’s footprint, in a sector more competitive than it has ever been.

At the high end, Life Time competes directly with the YMCA for high-income family memberships by offering a more modern, upscale version of the same multi-amenity model. Equinox occupies the ultra-luxury tier with a new program at $40,000 per year, with a waitlist of over 1,000 people.

The YMCA sits in the uncomfortable middle. It is too expensive for members who want a cheap gym. It is not modern enough for members who want a premium experience. It carries mission obligations — subsidized memberships, community programs, services for people who can’t pay full price — that for-profit competitors do not share, which makes it structurally more expensive to operate per member.

This is a genuine strategic dilemma, and it is not entirely the YMCA’s fault that the market bifurcated around it. But the organization’s response has been mostly reactive: add classes to compete with boutique studios, invest in branding to seem more modern, close facilities that aren’t generating sufficient revenue. What it has not done is make a clear argument for why its specific combination of offerings — the pool, the childcare, the subsidized access, the community programming — is worth a premium over a $15 gym. That argument exists. It simply hasn’t been made clearly enough to hold members who have other options.

By 2024, 74.1% of YMCA respondents to the Recreation Management industry survey reported facility usage had increased from the prior year, and 70.1% reported higher revenues. The YMCA of Metro Detroit achieved its highest membership growth in over a decade, surpassing 10,000 memberships. Recovery is happening in some markets. But recovery to a still-weakened pre-COVID baseline is not a strategy. It is a slower version of the same problem.

What would help: The YMCA needs to stop competing with Planet Fitness on Planet Fitness’s terms. It cannot win that fight and it should not try. The YMCA’s competitive advantage is everything Planet Fitness does not offer: pools, childcare, youth programming, sliding-scale pricing, community anchoring, and the legitimate ability to say that money spent there stays in the community rather than flowing to a publicly traded company. That is a real value proposition. It needs to be communicated specifically and priced accordingly. Affiliates that are primarily serving as underfunded gyms, with no serious childcare, programming, or community services, should be honest about what they are and consider whether merger with a neighboring affiliate would produce a stronger combined institution. Spreading resources thin across too many underperforming facilities is how you get a network of mediocre buildings. Concentrating them into fewer, stronger facilities is how you compete.

The Government Funding Dependency Is a Structural Vulnerability

The YMCA has grown heavily dependent on government funding, and that dependence has made it vulnerable to political decisions it cannot control.

The Alief Family YMCA in Houston closed in May 2025. It received over 60% of its budget from government sources, and federal funding cuts ended it. When six out of every ten dollars in an operating budget flow from a single source category subject to legislative and executive decisions outside the organization’s control, it is not a sustainable organization. It is a funded program waiting for the funding to end.

This pattern is not unique to Houston. YMCAs across the United States collectively receive over $600 million annually in federal funding, flowing primarily through childcare subsidies, after-school program grants, and nutrition funding. When the political environment shifts — and it has shifted sharply in 2025 and 2026 — organizations built around that funding face sudden existential crises.

The American Rescue Plan Act childcare stabilization grants, which pumped temporary federal money into the childcare sector during and after the pandemic, expired in late 2024. YMCA affiliates that built their childcare program budgets around ARPA stabilization grants are now managing the fallout from their expiration. The ones most exposed are in communities with the least ability to absorb the loss — low-income urban neighborhoods where the alternative to a subsidized YMCA childcare slot is no childcare at all.

The board members and executive directors who structured revenue models around this level of government dependency made a choice. The choice was expedient: federal money is large, relatively predictable in normal times, and requires less ongoing fundraising effort than private donations. “Relatively predictable” is not the same as reliable, as organizations now scrambling to replace lost funding are learning. A financially sound community institution builds diversified revenue. An institution that gets 60% of its budget from federal grants is not financially sound. It is leveraged against politics.

What would help: Affiliates should set a maximum federal funding threshold — no single source of government funding should account for more than 40% of operating revenue, with a clear plan to reduce that to 30% over five years. The plan to get there is diversified fundraising: individual donors, corporate partnerships, major gifts, endowments, foundation grants. Most local YMCAs underinvest dramatically in development capacity because they have relied on government funding to fill the gap. That reliance made sense when the funding was stable. It does not make sense now. Affiliates that are heavily government-funded should be required by their boards to produce a three-year revenue diversification plan, with measurable targets, and report on it quarterly. The YMCA’s community goodwill — and it has substantial goodwill in most markets — is a fundraising asset that most affiliates are not using effectively. That is a choice that can be reversed.

The Mission Has Drifted to the Point of Incoherence

The YMCA was founded in 1844 in London by George Williams, a 22-year-old farmer turned draper who wanted to offer young men an alternative to the hazards of street life. It was a mission organization. The gym came later, as a tool for the mission. The pool came later still. The point was never the facility. The point was what happened to people inside it.

For decades, that priority held. The organization ran employment programs, provided cheap lodging, deployed volunteers into war zones, built facilities for communities that had no alternatives, and generally directed its energy toward people who needed it rather than people who could afford to go somewhere else.

The drift began gradually and then became permanent. In 2010, after more than two years of internal analysis, the YMCA rebranded itself to just “the Y.” The rationale was that the full name had become a barrier to reaching younger and more diverse audiences. The word “Men’s” was exclusionary. “Christian” was limiting. Even “Young” was apparently a problem. The result is that the organization is now named “the Y,” which communicates nothing except the first letter of what it used to be called.

Over the years, the YMCA’s mission statement evolved, using less explicitly Christian language, working to become more ecumenical and open to people of all faiths and none. The World YMCA itself acknowledges that ongoing tension about the organization’s Christian identity continues, with some members feeling it is no longer Christian enough, while others feel it is too Christian. Some parts of the movement now consider themselves secular while others are trying to recover an intentional Christian mission.

The official current mission remains “to put Christian principles into practice through programs that build healthy spirit, mind and body for all.” That sentence appears on the organization’s website. It does not appear to guide much of what the organization actually does. What the organization does, in most communities, is run a moderately priced gym with a pool, some childcare, and a few after-school programs, at varying levels of quality.

This matters not because the YMCA should be a confessional institution in 2026 — that is a separate argument — but because an organization without a clear and defensible sense of what it is cannot make coherent decisions about anything else. When the question is “should we close Ransburg or expand to Westfield?”, an organization with clear values gives a clear answer grounded in those values. An organization trying to be everything to everyone gives a press release and declines further comment.

The mission drift has made the YMCA simultaneously less distinct from its competitors and harder to defend to its donors, its communities, and its own staff. The people at Planet Fitness know what they are selling. The people at Life Time know what they are selling. The YMCA, in too many places, has lost the thread.

What would help: The YMCA does not need another branding exercise. It does not need another mission statement committee. It needs local boards to sit down and answer a specific question: in this community, who needs us most? Not who has historically come through our doors. Who actually needs what only we can provide? A wealthy suburb with three competing fitness facilities and no shortage of childcare options probably doesn’t need a full-service YMCA. A low-income urban neighborhood with one aging public pool and no after-school programs does. The answer to that question should drive every subsequent decision: what programs to run, where to locate facilities, what to charge, who to hire, and what to close. Affiliates that are willing to articulate that clearly — in writing, publicly, accountably — will find that the mission becomes a navigation tool instead of a framed document on a wall.

The Consulting Spend Is Hard to Justify

Return for a moment to the national office’s contractor expenditures in a single year.

In 2021, the YMCA of the USA paid $2.35 million to VML of Kansas City for brand and customer experience, $2.31 million to Mouri Tech for database development and support, $1 million to Open Y for digital transformation, $995,000 to McKinsey and Company for membership business model consulting, and $934,500 to Praeisdum for child safety.

That is roughly $7.5 million in contractor spending at the national office level — not including compensation for the 208 employees who averaged $154,000 each. This was the same year the YMCA of Greater Twin Cities was running a $7.6 million deficit, the YMCA of Greater Charlotte had lost half its members, and local affiliates were laying off frontline workers across the country.

The national office exists to support local affiliates. Its job is to provide resources, expertise, and coordination that individual YMCAs cannot efficiently produce on their own. McKinsey was paid $995,000 to advise on membership business model — at a moment when the network’s membership model was failing visibly, and when the people best positioned to diagnose it were local affiliate staff with direct knowledge of why members were not returning. Whether that consulting engagement produced insights commensurate with its cost is a question Y-USA’s board of directors should be able to answer specifically. Whether they asked is another matter.

The broader issue is a pattern common to large legacy nonprofits facing strategic uncertainty: spend money on outside advisors, brand consultants, and technology platforms. This produces documented activity. It does not reliably produce results. The local affiliates that have recovered from COVID losses did it by rebuilding membership through program quality and community presence — exactly what the consultants describe in presentations and the staff actually deliver in facilities, when they are paid enough to stay.

What would help: The national board of Y-USA should require published outcome reporting for every major consulting engagement, tied to measurable targets established before the engagement begins. What did the McKinsey engagement specifically recommend? What was implemented? What was the measurable effect on membership? These are not unreasonable questions. They are the questions a board is supposed to ask. If the answer is not available, the board has a governance problem that no consultant can fix. The national office budget should be weighted toward direct affiliate support — technical assistance, training, shared services — and away from brand work and management consulting. The brand is only as good as what happens inside the buildings. Invest there first.

The Workforce Crisis Is Ongoing and Largely Self-Inflicted

YMCA employees earn $30,000 annually on average, which is 75% lower than the national salary average of $66,000 per year. The lowest paying job at the YMCA is a childcare attendant at approximately $10,000 annually.

The organization cannot attract and retain qualified staff at those wages. This is not a mystery. An entry-level employee at a large retail chain earns a comparable wage to what the YMCA pays people responsible for the care and development of children. The YMCA then pays a consulting firm nearly a million dollars to study why it has a membership problem, when the answer is partially visible in the quality of the programs that poorly compensated, high-turnover staff can deliver.

The YMCA of the North went from 6,700 employees in 2020 to 3,900 before the September 2024 layoffs. That is a 41 reduction in headcount in an organization whose model requires substantial human labor to operate facilities, run programs, and serve members. The people who remain are doing more work for roughly the same wages.

The childcare crisis is particularly acute. Half of the childcare workers at the Chicago YMCA made minimum wage at the time of the SEIU strike, including workers with bachelor’s and master’s degrees. The resulting turnover created 50 unfilled positions, which in turn disrupted services for the low-income families the organization claimed to prioritize.

The YMCA’s standard defense is that childcare is universally undervalued in the American economy and the organization cannot unilaterally fix market wages. This is partially true. It is also an excuse that conveniently ignores the $500,000 average compensation at the top of the national office. An organization that genuinely could not afford to pay its childcare workers more would not simultaneously be paying its top executives half a million dollars or its brand consultants $2.35 million in a year. The poverty wages at the bottom are not a financial necessity. They are a priority decision. The people who made that decision work in offices. The people who live with its consequences work in classrooms.

The consequences arrive in sequence and they are predictable: high turnover means inconsistent program quality; inconsistent quality means members stop renewing; fewer renewals reduce revenue; reduced revenue triggers more staff cuts. This loop has been running for years and the YMCA has been managing it symptom by symptom rather than addressing the underlying cause.

What would help: Affiliates should set a floor wage for all childcare and direct-service positions, published publicly, and review it annually against local cost-of-living data. The floor should be meaningfully above minimum wage — not a few cents above it. Affiliates that claim they cannot afford to pay a living wage should present their compensation structure to their boards and to their communities and explain specifically what they would have to cut or charge differently to get there. In many cases, the answer involves reducing executive compensation ratios, reducing outside consulting, or increasing dues for members who can afford it while maintaining or expanding subsidized access for those who cannot. These are hard choices. They are the choices the mission requires.

The Governance Structure Makes Accountability Difficult

The YMCA in the United States is not a single organization. It is a network of approximately 2,700 independent 501(c)(3) organizations, each with its own board of directors, its own executive leadership, its own financial structure, and its own relationship — or lack of one — to the national office.

This structure has genuine advantages. Local boards know their communities. Local affiliates can respond to specific needs that a centralized organization would miss. The network is resilient because each node is independent. These are real benefits, and they are part of why the organization has survived as long as it has.

The structure also makes accountability extremely difficult. When the YMCA of Greater Indianapolis closes Ransburg while expanding to Westfield and declines to answer questions about the decision, who is responsible? The local CEO, Gregg Hiland. The local board. Not the national office, which has no operational authority over local affiliates. Not Y-USA, which is a support and resource organization, not a governing body.

When a YMCA affiliate in Eugene hires a man with a documented history of child abuse, who answers for it? The local hiring managers. The local executive director. The local board. Each has some responsibility. Each can point at the others.

This is not unique to the YMCA. It is a governance challenge common to federated nonprofit structures. But the YMCA’s decentralized model combined with its national brand creates a specific problem: the public relates to the YMCA as a single organization while the governance structure prevents unified accountability. When a scandal happens at one affiliate, the brand suffers nationally. When the national office makes spending decisions, local affiliates bear the reputational consequences without meaningful input.

The national board of Y-USA has 28 members. They oversee an organization that claims to serve 22 million people. Their primary tools are persuasion and resource allocation, not authority. The CEOs of local affiliates are largely autonomous. This is a recipe for inconsistency, and inconsistency is exactly what the network delivers: some affiliates are excellent, well-managed, and deeply embedded in their communities. Others are poorly led, financially fragile, and making decisions that harm the people they claim to serve.

What would help: Y-USA should establish a minimum affiliation standard — a set of baseline requirements that every affiliate must meet to use the YMCA name, access national resources, and benefit from the collective brand. These standards should include: published annual compensation ratios, proof of current background screening compliance for child-serving positions, an annual facility condition assessment on file with the board, a written community benefit policy defining the populations the affiliate exists to serve, and a revenue diversification plan for any affiliate receiving more than 40% of its budget from a single government source. Affiliates that fail to meet these standards after a defined remediation period should lose national affiliation — not as punishment, but because a brand without standards is not a brand. It is just a name.

This is not about stripping local autonomy. It is about establishing a minimum floor below which no affiliate operates under the YMCA name. The autonomy to make good decisions is worth preserving. The autonomy to make bad decisions at the public’s expense is not.

The Case for the YMCA, Plainly Stated

The YMCA at its best is one of the most effective community institutions in the country. Not because of what it says about itself, but because of what it actually does in the places where it is working.

The pool that teaches a generation of children to swim — and in the United States, where drowning is a leading cause of accidental death in children under five, swim access is not a luxury. The childcare center that makes it possible for a single parent to hold a job. The after-school program that gives a kid somewhere safe to be for three hours between school dismissal and a parent’s return from work. The gym that an elderly member on a fixed income can actually afford. These things are real, and they are genuinely difficult to replace, and in many communities they do not get replaced when the YMCA closes. The community just goes without.

The YMCA of Metro Detroit is growing. The YMCA of Greater Boston has a transparent facility investment strategy and is executing it. The YMCA of South Florida rebuilt 85% of its pre-COVID membership base by August 2021. There are well-run, community-rooted YMCAs in the US that are demonstrating that the model works when the leadership is honest and the priorities are right.

The problems described in this article are not arguments against the YMCA’s existence. They are arguments for its reform. The organization has earned the benefit of the doubt that comes with 181 years of service. That benefit is not unlimited. But it is real, and it is the foundation on which a better institution can be built.

George Williams started this with eleven people in a room above a drapery shop. They were not trying to build a gym. They were trying to build something that would make a difference to people who had nothing. That impulse is worth recovering. The tools for doing it are available. What has been missing, in too many places, is the will to apply them honestly.

There is no federal law that would protect him. His service is not covered by USERRA. In most states, no applicable statute exists. Nothing about this scenario is illegal. The people making the calls that week — auxiliarists, state defense force members, Civil Air Patrol volunteers, Red Cross disaster responders, community emergency response team members — had no legal floor under their civilian employment. One bad employer decision and years of volunteer service can become a reason you lose your job.

This is the gap we need to close. Not with another unfunded program, not with a recognition ceremony, and not with a strongly worded press release. With law.

What We Actually Have: A Patchwork That Leaves Most Responders Exposed

Let’s start with what federal law actually does.

The Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act, passed by Congress in 1994, is the foundational federal protection for employees who leave civilian jobs to perform military service. USERRA covers members of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, Army Reserve, Naval Reserve, Marine Corps Reserve, Air Force Reserve, Coast Guard Reserve, and the Army and Air National Guard. It covers full-time active service, weekend drills, annual training, and fitness exams. It requires employers to allow unpaid leave, prohibits discrimination or retaliation based on military service, and requires reemployment in the same or equivalent position with the same seniority, status, and pay upon return. USERRA protects the employment rights of individuals who must be voluntarily or involuntarily absent from their civilian employment positions to serve in the U.S. military, and prohibits employers from discriminating against past and present members of the uniformed services.

USERRA applies to all employers, public and private, regardless of size. Its enforcement teeth grew significantly with the passage of the Senator Elizabeth Dole 21st Century Veterans Healthcare and Benefits Improvement Act in January 2025. The Dole Act is the first amendment to USERRA since the 2022 Civilian Reservist Emergency Workforce Act (CREW Act), which extended its coverage to Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) reservists. The Dole Act forbids an employer from taking retaliatory action against an employee for exercising their rights under the law, removes the adverse employment action element to establish retaliation, and increases the amount of money damages that may be awarded against an employer if USERRA is violated, with minimum damages of $50,000 or the total of an employee’s lost wages and benefits.

These are meaningful protections. Now here is the problem.

Service in the Civil Air Patrol and the Coast Guard Auxiliary similarly is not considered “service in the uniformed services” for purposes of USERRA. Consequently, service performed in the Commissioned Corps of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Civil Air Patrol, and the Coast Guard Auxiliary is not protected by USERRA.

State defense forces are also excluded. FEMA Community Emergency Response Teams are excluded. American Red Cross disaster volunteers are excluded. Team Rubicon volunteers, of which there are approximately 180,000 in North America, are excluded. Members of volunteer fire departments and EMS agencies — who provide the overwhelming majority of emergency services in rural and suburban America — have only whatever protections individual states choose to provide, if any.

The CREW Act of 2022 showed that Congress understands how to extend USERRA’s logic beyond the traditional military. The CREW Act extends employment protections under the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA) to Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) reservists who deploy to major disaster sites. The reasoning was sound: a National Guard member called up for hurricane relief had ironclad job protection. But a FEMA reservist responding to the same hurricane had no protection at all. They could lose their job simply for helping disaster victims.

The RAND Corporation, in research supporting the CREW Act, found that expanding USERRA coverage to FEMA reservists would be critical to the recruiting and retention of FEMA reservists and would increase FEMA’s readiness posture and ability to respond to disasters.

Congress accepted that argument for FEMA reservists. The same argument applies, with equal or greater force, to the Coast Guard Auxiliary, the Civil Air Patrol, state defense forces, and credentialed nonprofit disaster relief volunteers. The logic doesn’t stop at a particular badge.

The Organizations Doing the Work Without the Protection

Before making the case for expanded protections, it’s worth being precise about who we’re talking about and what they actually do. These are not hobbyists. These are trained, vetted, uniformed volunteers integrated into the federal and state emergency management framework.

The U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary

The Coast Guard Auxiliary is the uniformed, civilian volunteer component of the United States Coast Guard, established by Congress in 1939. As of 2026, the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary boasts around 18,000 members. Auxiliarists are instrumental in saving around 500 lives a year, aiding 15,000 mariners in distress, performing over 150,000 recreational vessel safety checks, and imparting boating safety knowledge to over half a million learners. The Auxiliary collectively logs over 4.5 million service hours annually.

The dollar value of this labor is not trivial. The Auxiliary saved the Office of Management and Budget (taxpayers) $240 million in the prior year. Every day, over 10,800 hours are logged by Auxiliary volunteers performing on-water boating safety patrols, while 11 distressed boaters are saved and 548 vessel safety checks are conducted.

The Auxiliary’s missions include search and rescue, maritime and aviation observation, homeland security patrols, and support to active-duty Coast Guard units, including crewing vessels, staffing operations centers, and filling administrative and logistics billets. Auxiliary volunteers increase the number of equivalent full-time Coast Guard personnel working at a unit and have the potential to increase retention, as they ease some of the strain on active-duty members. The Coast Guard itself is operating under severe personnel strain: the Coast Guard has reported that it is about 4,800 members short and has missed its recruiting targets for the past four fiscal years.

Auxiliarists wear a uniform. They train to Coast Guard standards. When on federal duty, auxiliarists are deemed federal employees in the context of civil liability. They operate under federal authority. They cannot carry weapons or perform direct law enforcement. But they perform seven of the eleven congressionally mandated missions of the Coast Guard.

And none of that matters under USERRA.

The Civil Air Patrol

The Civil Air Patrol is the official auxiliary of the United States Air Force, established in 1941 and chartered by Congress. It performs three primary missions: emergency services, aerospace education, and cadet programs. In the emergency services role, CAP conducts inland search and rescue missions, disaster relief operations, humanitarian airlift, and counterdrug reconnaissance. CAP has over 60,000 members nationwide, organized into wings by state.

CAP is integrated into the Air Force’s operational structure. During federally declared disasters, CAP is authorized to fly reconnaissance and assessment missions under Air Force direction. Its members are trained, background-checked, uniformed volunteers operating under federal authority with a specific federal mission.

They are also not covered by USERRA. A CAP member who deploys for a week on a hurricane assessment mission, providing aerial photography that guides FEMA’s response, has no federal job protection for doing so. The Air Force benefits. The taxpayer benefits. The Air Force member sitting next to him or her in a different aircraft has full USERRA coverage. The CAP pilot does not.

Several states have recognized this gap and acted. North Dakota prohibits employers from terminating, demoting, or otherwise discriminating against volunteer civilian members of the Civil Air Patrol, and requires employers to allow such employees to be absent from work for up to 20 working days each year because they are responding to a disaster or natural emergency. Maryland requires employers with 15 or more employees to provide at least 15 days per year to respond to an emergency mission of the Maryland Wing of the Civil Air Patrol. California enacted the Civil Air Patrol Employment Protection Act, covering employers with 16 or more employees and providing up to 10 days of unpaid leave for emergency operational missions. Indiana requires employers with 15 to 50 employees to provide up to 15 days, and employers with 51 or more to provide up to 30 days.

These state laws are a reasonable start. But they are not uniform; they apply only within the state, and they vary significantly in scope. A CAP member flying a mission that crosses state lines can return to different levels of protection depending on which state they live in. That is a poor design for a national emergency response capability.

State Defense Forces

State defense forces, also known as state guards or state military reserves, are established by state authority under 32 U.S.C. § 109. They exist to provide states with a military reserve that cannot be federalized, ensuring the state retains some military capability when the National Guard is deployed overseas or to other states.

As of 2023, 23 states and three territories operate active SDFs, comprising approximately 20,000 personnel who focus on homeland security, disaster response, and support to the National Guard without eligibility for federal activation.

The model is consistent across states that maintain active forces. SDF members volunteer their time for training and community support and are only paid when called to state active duty by an authorization from the Governor. Their primary lines of effort typically include administrative and logistics support, cyber network defense, operations center augmentation and interoperable communications, and direct support to the National Guard with medical, chaplain, legal, and public information capabilities.

These are not units sitting in armories waiting for something to happen. State defense forces have supported National Guard operations during hurricanes, wildfires, flooding events, and the COVID-19 pandemic response across multiple states. During major activations, SDF members staff operations centers, manage logistics distribution, support public information operations, and fill billets that free up Guard personnel for more operationally intensive tasks.

These are real missions with real operational significance. The people performing them are volunteers with civilian jobs. When an SDF member gets called to state active duty and goes in uniform to support a flood response operation, their employer has zero federal obligation to hold their job. Some states extend military leave protections to state defense force members. Many do not.

Volunteer Fire and EMS

The numbers here are large enough to constitute an actual public safety crisis, and they have been trending in the wrong direction for four decades.

Volunteers represent approximately 65 percent of all U.S. firefighters (NVFC, 2024), and 82 percent of all U.S. fire departments are volunteer or mostly volunteer. Approximately 30 percent of the U.S. population, concentrated in rural and suburban communities, is protected primarily by volunteer departments.

The decline in volunteer numbers is sustained and significant. Since 2008, the nation’s volunteer fire service has shed an average of 12,000 firefighters per year, falling from about 827,000 members to 635,000 in 2023. At the same time, the number of calls to U.S. fire departments has increased about 70 percent since 2008, from roughly 25 million to 42 million, leaving the remaining volunteers saddled with an ever-increasing workload and fewer resources to address it.

The rural EMS situation is, if anything, more alarming. Nearly one-third of rural EMS agencies across the country are in immediate operational jeopardy, and more than two-thirds of rural EMS directors report difficulty recruiting and retaining volunteers, with a majority describing the problem as unchanged or worsening.

Researchers and fire service organizations point to several interconnected causes for the long-term volunteer decline: time demands from modern training requirements, the rise of two-income households and less flexible work schedules, an aging volunteer base, and increased call volume.

The last item on that list — work schedule flexibility — is directly addressed by employment protection law. A volunteer firefighter who knows their employer can terminate them for responding to a major incident during work hours is a volunteer firefighter who is weighing every call. Some of them will stop answering.

Some states have moved to address this. Virginia SB100, signed into law in April 2026 and effective July 1, 2026, is one recent example. The bill prohibits employers from retaliating against employees who miss work to serve as a volunteer emergency responder, meaning an active member of a recognized volunteer fire department or emergency medical services agency. Employers may not discharge, discipline, threaten, discriminate against, or penalize employees for their service.

That protection is real and it matters. But Virginia SB100 applies only to active responses to emergency alarms or declared states of emergency. It does not cover mandatory training, which can run into dozens of hours per year. It does not cover state defense force members, Coast Guard auxiliarists, or CAP members. It does not establish reemployment rights — only anti-retaliation protections. And it is one state law, not a federal standard.

Nonprofit Disaster Relief Volunteers

The American Red Cross is perhaps the clearest example of a nonprofit organization with quasi-official standing in the national emergency management framework. The Red Cross operates under a congressional charter and has a federal mandate to provide disaster relief. Volunteers constitute about 90 percent of the American Red Cross workforce. Volunteers make it possible to respond to an average of 60,000 disasters every year, most of them home and apartment fires.

Team Rubicon fields approximately 180,000 North American volunteers, predominantly veterans and first responders, who deploy to domestic and international disasters. The organization has responded to every major domestic disaster since its founding in 2010 following the Haiti earthquake, including hurricanes Irene, Sandy, Harvey, Maria, Florence, and Michael, along with floods, tornadoes, and wildfires. They do skilled, coordinated, credentialed work. They do it in uniform. They do it in coordination with FEMA, state emergency management agencies, and other voluntary organizations active in disasters (VOADs).

A Red Cross Disaster Action Team volunteer who deploys to a major hurricane response for ten days has no federal employment protection. There is no USERRA equivalent for credentialed nonprofit disaster relief volunteers operating under federal or state mission assignments. Some employers are understanding. Some are not. The volunteer absorbs the risk.

The Precedent Is Already There. Congress Just Hasn’t Extended It.

The CREW Act established something important beyond its practical effect for FEMA reservists. It established the principle that Congress can extend USERRA-equivalent protections to non-traditional uniformed service, and that doing so makes the national emergency response apparatus more capable and more reliable.

The NDMS precedent goes further. The National Disaster Medical System, operated under the Department of Health and Human Services, deploys volunteer medical professionals during major disasters. NDMS reservists are protected by USERRA. When the NDMS was created, the law made clear that service with the NDMS would be treated as ‘service in the uniformed services’ entitled to USERRA protection. NDMS reservists are, in fact, federal employees who are activated on an episodic intermittent basis to respond to national disasters.

The NDMS model is instructive. NDMS volunteers meet specific qualification requirements — maintaining licensures and certifications, attending training events, remaining medically and physically fit. They are structured, credentialed, and integrated into federal operations. When activated, they receive federal employee status and the protections that come with it.

The Coast Guard Auxiliary already operates under this basic model. Auxiliarists are vetted, trained, uniformed, and credentialed. When on federal duty, they are already deemed federal employees for civil liability purposes. Extending USERRA protections to cover their civilian employment is a modest and logical next step. The same applies to CAP, which operates under Air Force authority and has equivalent credentialing requirements.

What is needed is a framework that defines the category clearly and consistently. The framework should not require membership in any particular organization. It should require meeting a defined standard of training, credentialing, mission authorization, and organizational accountability.

What the Federal Gap Looks Like in Practice

It is worth being concrete about what the absence of federal protection actually means for these volunteers and their employers.

A Coast Guard Auxiliary flotilla commander who is called to deploy with her flotilla during a major flood does not have a reliable legal right to take that time off without employment consequences. She may give her employer advance notice. Her employer may decline to hold her job. She has no USERRA claim. She has no federal remedy. Her only recourse is whatever her state law provides, if her state provides anything, and civil litigation is not a realistic option for most working people.

A Civil Air Patrol member who is activated by the Air Force to fly reconnaissance missions after a hurricane gets in his aircraft and does the mission. He returns home. He goes back to work. His employer, aware that he was gone and that the Air Force had asked him to go, fires him. He can appeal to the state if the state has a CAP protection law. If not, he has a contract claim if there is an employment contract and a creative state tort claim if the facts support it. USERRA does not help him.

A Team Rubicon Greyshirt with ten days of disaster work experience who deploys to support debris removal in a flood-damaged community has no employment protection at all, at any level. He or she is not a government employee, not a member of a uniformed service, and not covered by any federal statute. Their service may be coordinated with FEMA under a mission assignment, paid for with federal disaster dollars, and staffed by veteran volunteers who have completed Team Rubicon’s training certification. None of that creates legal protection for their civilian employment.

A state defense force member called to state active duty by the governor during a declared emergency is a member of the state’s uniformed militia, drilling under military command and performing missions that relieve the National Guard. They have raised their right hand to join the organized militia and agreed to be available when the state calls. Their employer’s obligation to hold their job depends entirely on whether the state has a statute addressing it. Most do not, and those that do typically cover only National Guard members, not SDF volunteers.

These are not edge cases. These are foreseeable situations that occur every time there is a significant disaster, and significant disasters are not becoming less frequent.

The Proposal: A Federal Civilian Emergency Service Protection Act

The solution is not to stretch USERRA’s existing definitions until they break. The solution is to create a parallel structure that applies the same logic — protection for people who perform authorized service in the public interest at personal cost — to the civilian emergency volunteer workforce.

Call it the Civilian Emergency Service Protection Act, or CESPA. Here is what it should contain.

Covered service. CESPA should apply to service performed by members in good standing of: the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary; the Civil Air Patrol; state defense forces established under 32 U.S.C. § 109; Community Emergency Response Teams certified under FEMA’s program; and credentialed volunteers of nationally recognized disaster relief organizations operating under federal mission assignments, including but not limited to the American Red Cross, Team Rubicon, and other FEMA-integrated VOADs.

Qualifying service. Not all volunteer activity should qualify. The protection should attach to: service during a federally or state-declared disaster or emergency; authorized training required to maintain membership and operational qualification; and specific mission activations ordered by competent authority (a Coast Guard district command, the Air Force, a state adjutant general, or a FEMA-authorized mission assignment).

The key principle is that the service must be structured, authorized, and required. Informal volunteerism should not be covered. Service in organizations with defined training standards, credentialing requirements, and command accountability should be. The distinction between NDMS and general disaster volunteers is a good model: NDMS reservists must complete certain requirements such as maintaining licensures and certifications, attending training and other events, and remaining medically and physically fit to qualify for protection as federal employees. Apply that standard to the broader category.

Employment protections. CESPA should mirror USERRA’s core framework:

No employer shall discharge, demote, discipline, or penalize an employee for taking leave to perform covered service, provided the employee gives advance notice when operationally possible.

Upon return from covered service of 30 days or less, the employee shall be reinstated to the same position. For service longer than 30 days, the employer has a few days to provide reemployment. The employee shall be treated as though continuously employed for purposes of seniority, pay, and benefits.

No employer shall be required to pay the employee during covered service, but the employee may use accrued paid leave if they choose.

Health insurance continuation rights similar to USERRA’s 24-month continuation provision should apply.

Pension and retirement plan accrual protections should apply.

Enforcement. CESPA should be enforced by the Department of Labor’s Veterans’ Employment and Training Service (VETS), which already administers USERRA. The same complaint and referral process should apply.

Remedies. Using the Dole Act framework: reinstatement, back pay, liquidated damages for knowing violations with a minimum floor of $50,000, reasonable attorney fees, and injunctive relief.

Notice requirements. Employees should be required to give advance notice of service when operationally possible. For rapid-onset emergencies — a Coast Guard Auxiliary call-out, a fire alarm response, a CAP search and rescue mission with a six-hour activation window — the notice requirement should be relaxed consistent with USERRA’s existing emergency exceptions and the one-hour advance notice model already used in existing state laws.

Small employer provisions. USERRA applies to all employers regardless of size. CESPA should do the same, with the recognition that for very small businesses — fewer than ten employees — case-by-case hardship provisions might be appropriate, similar to the Family and Medical Leave Act’s small employer threshold. But the default should be universal coverage.

Why a Separate Classification Makes Sense

There is a reasonable argument that the simplest path is just to extend USERRA itself to cover CAP, USCG Auxiliary, and state defense forces. That argument has merit and should be explored. The CREW Act demonstrated that Congress can amend USERRA to add new categories. There is no legal barrier to adding the Auxiliary, CAP, and SDFs to the definition of “uniformed services.”

However, a separate statute makes sense for several reasons.

First, USERRA is built around the concept of uniformed military service. CAP and the Coast Guard Auxiliary are civilian auxiliary organizations. They wear uniforms and operate under federal authority, but they are not military services in the traditional sense. Forcing them into USERRA’s framework creates definitional tension and potential litigation over the scope of coverage.

Second, a separate statute can be designed from the outset to cover the broader category of credentialed civilian emergency volunteers, including nonprofit disaster relief organizations. USERRA cannot practically be extended to cover American Red Cross volunteers without significant conceptual revision.

Third, a separate statute allows Congress to calibrate the protections specifically to the civilian emergency context — including provisions for advance notice during rapid-onset events, documentation requirements suited to incident reporting rather than military orders, and coordinated enforcement through agencies already involved in emergency management.

The NDMS model shows how this can work. NDMS volunteer medics receive USERRA-equivalent protection by statute because Congress decided their service was important enough to warrant it. They are not military. They are credentialed civilian volunteers who serve episodically in a structured, federal-authorized capacity. That is exactly what Coast Guard auxiliarists, CAP members, state defense force members, and trained nonprofit disaster volunteers do.

What a Good State Law Looks Like — and Where It Falls Short

Virginia SB100, signed into law on April 6, 2026, and effective July 1, 2026, is a useful case study in what state-level employment protection legislation can accomplish and where its limits lie. The bill prohibits employers from retaliating against employees who serve as volunteer emergency responders during declared emergencies or when responding to emergency alarms. It protects active members in good standing of volunteer fire departments or emergency medical services agencies recognized by their local governments.

Protected employees must provide employers with at least one hour's advance notice before scheduled work and submit incident reports with commander certification upon return. Employers cannot discharge, discipline, threaten, discriminate against, or penalize employees for absences related to emergency response duties, though employers are not required to pay for missed work time. Employees may use accrued vacation or sick leave to cover absences.

The bill provides civil remedies: the court may order an injunction to restrain continued violation, reinstatement to the same position or an equivalent position, and compensation for lost wages, benefits, and other remuneration, together with interest and reasonable attorney fees and costs.

That is a workable framework. But the bill has three significant gaps.

The first is structural. The definition of covered volunteer covers only active members of recognized volunteer fire departments or EMS agencies. State defense force members, Coast Guard auxiliarists, CAP members, CERT volunteers, Red Cross volunteers, and Team Rubicon Greyshirts are all outside the bill’s coverage. Legislatures that pass bills like this have an opportunity to protect the full range of civilian emergency volunteers, and most have not taken it.

The second is coverage type. SB100 is an anti-retaliation statute. It prohibits punishing employees for emergency absences. But it does not establish affirmative reemployment rights. USERRA requires that returning service members be reinstated to the position they would have occupied had they never left — the “escalator principle.” SB100 requires reinstatement to the same or equivalent position but only as a remedy after the fact, not as an affirmative requirement. For short absences, that distinction may not matter much. For longer activations, it can make a real difference.

The third gap is mandatory training. SB100 applies when an employee “actively responds to an emergency alarm or during a state of emergency.” It does not apply during mandatory training. For volunteer firefighters and EMS providers, this matters: training is where they earn and maintain their certifications, and increasingly demanding training requirements are one of the factors driving member attrition. A volunteer who cannot attend evening training drills without risking employer retaliation is a volunteer who may not last.

State laws like this are a step in the right direction. The gaps they leave are the reason Congress needs to establish a federal floor.

The Retention Argument Is the Strongest Argument

There is a values argument here, and it is valid. People who give their time, accept physical risk, and sometimes absorb injury or death in service to their communities should not be made to choose between that service and their livelihood. That argument speaks for itself and does not require elaboration.

But for policymakers who need a practical justification, the retention argument is more immediately compelling.

The volunteer fire and emergency services workforce is in structural decline that decades of effort have not reversed. The number of volunteer firefighters has fallen from about 827,000 in 2008 to 635,000 in 2023, while calls have increased by 70 percent over the same period. The people who would once have made up those ranks — working adults in their thirties and forties — face more constraints on their time than previous generations. Two-income households are the norm. Training requirements have grown substantially. The call volume is higher. The complexity of calls has increased.

According to the Pew Research Center, in 1960, 25 percent of households with children had two working parents. In 2016, that number increased to 66 percent, and it is expected to keep increasing. Every working parent who serves as a volunteer firefighter or auxiliary firefighter is managing competing obligations. An employer who views volunteer emergency service as a workplace liability makes that balancing act harder. A law that eliminates employment risk makes it slightly easier.

The RAND Corporation reached this conclusion for FEMA reservists. Expanding USERRA coverage to FEMA reservists would be critical to the recruiting and retention of FEMA reservists and would increase FEMA’s readiness posture and ability to respond to disasters. The same logic applies to every other category of trained, credentialed emergency volunteer. Employment uncertainty is a documented attrition driver. Reducing it through law is a retention investment.

The Coast Guard’s situation makes this especially acute. By 2025, it was predicted that the Coast Guard would be short almost 6,000 enlisted members and several hundred officers. Active-duty members continue to serve at undermanned, overworked units, straining to compensate for the service-wide 10 percent gap in authorized enlisted end strength. The Auxiliary provides direct relief to this pressure. Auxiliary volunteers increase the number of equivalent full-time Coast Guard personnel working at a unit and have the potential to increase retention, as they ease some of the strain on active-duty members. A policy that makes it harder to recruit and retain Auxiliary members, therefore, has a direct effect on the readiness of the active-duty service.

The taxpayer argument follows naturally. The Auxiliary saves the Office of Management and Budget approximately $240 million per year in labor value. Volunteer fire and EMS services across the country offset hundreds of millions in state and local expenditures annually — labor that taxpayers would otherwise have to fund directly. Every volunteer who leaves the ranks because of employer retaliation or employment uncertainty is a cost externalized onto the public.

The Employer Side of the Equation

An honest discussion of employment protection legislation requires acknowledging the employer’s perspective. Small businesses in particular may find unpredictable absences genuinely disruptive, especially in industries where coverage is difficult to arrange on short notice.

That concern is real. USERRA manages it through proportionality: the protections scale with the length of service, notice requirements are enforced, and documentation is required. Virginia SB100 adds the one-hour advance notice requirement and incident report certification. A properly designed CESPA would do the same.

There are also reasonable exemptions worth considering. Employees designated as essential by statute or contract — air traffic controllers, hospital surgeons on call, power plant operators — represent a genuine category where immediate replacement is impractical. SB100 includes this exception. USERRA has parallel provisions. A CESPA should as well.

What is not a reasonable employer concern is the basic proposition that trained, credentialed emergency volunteers should be able to do their jobs without risking their livelihoods. The employer is not subsidizing the volunteer’s service — the service is unpaid. The employer is being asked to hold a job open for a short period while a vetted, authorized volunteer performs a mission that serves the public. That is a modest ask.

Several states that have enacted Civil Air Patrol protections have included reasonable thresholds — employer size minimums, annual day limits, documentation requirements — that balance the employer’s operational needs against the volunteer’s employment security. That approach is sensible and should be included in any federal legislation.

The Nonprofit Disaster Relief Question

The American Red Cross, Team Rubicon, and equivalent organizations present a harder design question than the uniformed auxiliary services. They are neither government agencies nor quasi-governmental auxiliaries. They are private nonprofit organizations that operate under defined agreements with FEMA and state emergency management agencies.

But the practical question is whether their credentialed disaster volunteers, operating under federal mission assignments, performing work that government agencies would otherwise have to pay for, should have employment protection when they deploy.

The answer should be yes, with the credentialing requirement serving as the limiting principle.

Not every Red Cross volunteer has the same level of training or operational commitment. A volunteer who helps stuff envelopes for a local fundraiser is in a different category from a Disaster Action Team volunteer who has completed disaster relief training, is cleared for deployment, and is activated under a FEMA mission assignment to provide mass care at a shelter. The latter is performing a function that the federal government has determined is essential to disaster response and has agreed to incorporate into its plans and operations.

The same distinction applies to Team Rubicon. A casual supporter who attends a fundraiser is not the same as a Greyshirt who has completed Team Rubicon’s training certification and is deployed under a mission assignment to perform debris removal or recovery work coordinated with state emergency management.

The credentialing framework already exists. VOADs operating under FEMA mission assignments are registered, monitored, and accountable. FEMA has memoranda of agreement with major disaster relief organizations that define the scope of their authorized activities. A Greyshirt on a FEMA-coordinated mission is operating under federal authorization in a manner broadly similar to an NDMS volunteer or a FEMA reservist.

This is not a radical expansion. It is the same logic applied to a wider set of organizations that are already functionally integrated into the federal disaster response system.

A CESPA covering nonprofit disaster volunteers should require: organizational registration with FEMA or FEMA-recognized VOAD status; individual volunteer credentialing through the organization’s program; activation through a documented mission assignment; and documentation of service upon return to employment, consistent with what SB100 and USERRA already require.

What the Law Should Look Like: A Functional Outline

For policymakers or advocates who want a concrete starting point, here is a workable framework for federal legislation.

Short title: Civilian Emergency Service Protection Act (CESPA).

Covered organizations:

• U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary (established under 14 U.S.C. § 901 et seq.)

• Civil Air Patrol (established under 10 U.S.C. § 9491 et seq.)

• State defense forces established under 32 U.S.C. § 109

• FEMA-certified Community Emergency Response Teams (CERT)

• Nationally recognized disaster relief organizations operating under FEMA mission assignments, including Red Cross, Team Rubicon, and FEMA-registered VOADs

• State-recognized volunteer fire departments and EMS agencies (providing a federal floor above existing state-only protections like SB100)

Covered service:

• Activation or deployment during a federally declared major disaster or emergency under the Stafford Act

• Activation during a state-declared emergency under gubernatorial authority

• Mandatory organizational training required to maintain qualification and membership in good standing

• Authorized mission operations under command authority, including Coast Guard district authorizations, Air Force mission assignments, and state adjutant general activations

Employee obligations:

• Advance notice of service to the employer, when operationally practicable. For rapid-onset emergency responses, notice must be given as soon as practicable.

• Documentation of service upon return, including incident reports or activation records and certification by the incident commander or unit officer

• Return to civilian employment within a reasonable period following the conclusion of service, on a schedule consistent with USERRA’s tiered return provisions

Employer obligations:

• Grant unpaid leave for covered service without discharge, demotion, discipline, or any other adverse employment action

• Reinstate the employee to the position they would have occupied upon return, including the same seniority, pay, and benefits

• Continue health insurance coverage per USERRA-equivalent provisions

• Credit continuous service for pension plan accrual

• Not require the employee to use accrued leave during covered service, though the employee may elect to do so

Exemptions:

• Employees designated as essential by statute, contract, or applicable licensing authority, where immediate replacement is impractical, are not covered for duration-limited exceptions

• Employers with fewer than 10 employees may apply for hardship determinations through the Department of Labor, on a case-by-case basis

Enforcement: Department of Labor, Veterans’ Employment and Training Service (VETS), using the same complaint, investigation, and referral process as USERRA.

Remedies: Reinstatement; back pay and benefits with interest; liquidated damages for knowing violations, minimum $50,000; reasonable attorney fees; injunctive relief.

Preemption: CESPA establishes a federal floor. State laws providing greater protections are not preempted.

The Fairness Argument

This article has focused primarily on the practical and policy arguments for employment protection legislation. The retention numbers, the fiscal savings, the gap in the law, the CREW Act precedent, the state-level momentum. These arguments are sound and they should be made.

But there is a simpler argument underneath all of them.

When a Coast Guard Auxiliary member goes out on the water at 2 a.m. to respond to a vessel in distress, they are doing the work of the federal government without federal pay and without federal employment protection. When a CAP pilot climbs into his aircraft to fly grid patterns looking for a missing hiker, he is performing a mission the Air Force has asked him to perform, and the Air Force will not protect his civilian job for doing it. When a state defense force member reports to the Emergency Operations Center during a hurricane because the Governor called the unit up, they are a uniformed member of the state’s organized militia, and their employer is under no obligation to hold their position.

These are people who said yes to a hard thing. They trained. They showed up. They went out. They do not expect to be paid. They expect, reasonably, not to lose their jobs for it.

The country relies on them. The reliance is documented, quantified, and built into every emergency response plan at every level of government. The federal disaster response apparatus would not function without them. The Coast Guard would not meet its mission requirements without the Auxiliary. States would not have emergency surge capacity without their defense forces. Rural communities would not have fire and EMS coverage without volunteers.

We have decided as a country that people who serve in the military should not lose their civilian jobs for doing so. We have decided that FEMA reservists are important enough to extend that protection to them. The logical next step is to extend it to the rest of the civilian emergency workforce that keeps this country functioning when things go badly wrong.

The objections are manageable. The precedent is clear. The need is documented. The cost to the federal budget is minimal — this is a labor law requirement, not an appropriation.

The only thing missing is the legislation.

Conclusion: Close the Gap

Virginia SB100 passed. That matters. One letter, making a specific and documented argument, resulted in a new law that protects volunteer firefighters and EMS providers from employer retaliation. That is how this works.

The next step is broader, harder, and more important. The federal government needs to extend USERRA-equivalent protections to the Coast Guard Auxiliary, the Civil Air Patrol, state defense forces, and credentialed nonprofit disaster relief volunteers. The CREW Act already established the template and the political will. Congress extended USERRA to FEMA reservists in 2022 with bipartisan support because the argument was sound and the need was real.

The argument for extending similar protections to the broader civilian emergency volunteer workforce is equally sound and the need is at least as real. Volunteer numbers are declining. The organizations that depend on them are under capacity pressure. Employment uncertainty is a documented deterrent to volunteering. And the people performing these missions — trained, vetted, uniformed, and operating under federal or state authority — are not a fringe case. They are a core component of how this country manages disaster.

A Civilian Emergency Service Protection Act would not solve the volunteer recruitment and retention crisis by itself. Pay, training requirements, culture, leadership, and community connection all matter. But it would remove one documented barrier: the rational calculation that volunteering is not worth the employment risk.

Removing that barrier is cheap. Replacing the workforce that might leave because of it is not.

Close the gap.

Those numbers have been moving in one direction for a long time, and they are not moving in your favor.

Between 1979 and 2019, the U.S. economy became dramatically more productive. GDP grew. Corporate profits grew. The stock market grew. And yet, according to the Economic Policy Institute, inflation-adjusted pay for the median American worker rose just 13.7 percent over that entire 40-year stretch. The top one percent of earners, in that same period, saw their wages rise 160 percent. The top 0.1 percent saw 345 percent. This divergence is not an accident. It is not the market finding its natural equilibrium. According to economists who have studied the data, it is the result of deliberate policy choices made in the interests of people who already had a great deal of money, at the expense of people who did not.

The Brookings Institution found that after adjusting for inflation, wages in 2017 had only about ten percent more purchasing power than wages in 1973. Ten percent over 44 years. Less than a quarter of a percent per year. Meanwhile, Pew Research documented that by 2016, Americans in the top tenth of the income distribution were earning 8.7 times as much as those at the bottom, compared to 6.9 times in 1970. The gap keeps widening, and nobody in a position to close it seems especially interested in doing so.

On top of the wage picture, consider the cost picture. Average monthly rent in the United States was $1,185 in 2020. It is now $1,700. The consumer price index for groceries was $254 in 2020, even in the middle of a supply chain crisis. It is now $320. Electricity that cost 13 cents per kilowatt hour five years ago now costs 20. If you had $100,000 in a conservative bond-oriented retirement fund in 2020 and saw a 25 percent gain, your actual purchasing power today, after inflation and before taxes, is about $96,830. You made money on paper and lost ground in reality.

This is the environment we are living in. And it matters to understand how we got here, because understanding the mechanism is the only way to figure out what to do about it.

The Machinery of Extraction

The story of how American economic policy evolved from something broadly redistributive into something that systematically concentrates wealth is long and complicated. It involves the Bretton Woods agreement after World War II, which made the dollar the world’s reserve currency and gave the United States extraordinary leverage over global trade. It involves Nixon ending the gold standard in 1971, touching off years of inflation and recession, and then the secret 1974 deal between Treasury Secretary William Simon and the Saudi Kingdom that created the petrodollar system and stabilized American financial dominance by tying global oil trade to the dollar. It involves the deregulation of financial markets, the steady erosion of union bargaining power, and the rise of shareholder primacy as the dominant theory of what corporations are for.

But explaining all of that is a project for economists and historians. For this piece, what matters is the result, which is a system in which the primary economic activity for a large and growing number of powerful actors is not producing anything, but extracting value from things other people built.

Private equity is the clearest example. Consider what happened to Toys R Us. In 2004, the company was profitable. Standard and Poor rated it B+. It had real estate assets, recognizable brand equity, and about $100 million per year available to invest in e-commerce development. Then KKR, Bain Capital, and Vornado Realty Trust acquired it in a leveraged buyout. Within a short time, the company’s interest payments alone were running four times what that reinvestment budget had been, as management fees and dividend recapitalizations consumed over $470 million. Toys R Us never built the e-commerce platform. The debt load made it impossible. The stores closed. Workers were let go. Anchor retail spaces across the country went dark.

This same playbook was run on KB Toys, Sports Authority, and dozens of other companies. The people running these operations were not making mistakes. They understood exactly what they were doing. A profitable business, in the private equity model, is not primarily a producer of goods and services. It is a vehicle for a debt service transaction.

The same logic has moved into healthcare. The Senate Budget Committee’s 2025 report detailed multiple instances of private equity firms adding hundreds of millions of dollars in debt to acquired healthcare facilities, extracting short-term profits, and then walking away as those facilities struggled to function. A 2023 study published in JAMA found that private equity ownership of healthcare facilities was associated with a 25 percent increase in adverse patient events. Hahnemann Hospital in Philadelphia, which had served low-income residents for nearly two centuries, was closed after a private equity acquisition stripped its assets for investor distributions. Steward Health Care, once the largest private equity-operated hospital system in the country, filed for bankruptcy in 2024. Genesis HealthCare followed in 2025. Envision Healthcare collapsed in 2023. At least 20 percent of all for-profit private hospitals in the United States are now owned or operated by private equity firms, according to the American Federation of Teachers.

Then there is housing. After the 2008 financial crisis, Blackstone built and sold off Invitation Homes, becoming the largest owner of single-family homes in the country. The company re-entered the market in 2021, acquiring Home Partners of America and later Tricon Residential. The scale of Blackstone’s current residential portfolio, including single-family homes and apartment units, runs into the hundreds of thousands of units. Blackstone argues that it represents less than one percent of the overall rental market and that its operations improve housing quality and supply. The counterargument, documented by the Pestakeholder Institute, is that at Blackstone’s San Diego properties acquired in 2021, rents increased 38 percent in less than three years, nearly double the 20 percent market average for the region. At some individual buildings, the increases ran north of 70 percent.

The broader housing picture is stark. Fewer homes are being built today than in 1959, despite the U.S. population being nearly twice what it was then. The housing shortage is structural, the result of decades of underbuilding, restrictive zoning, and rising construction costs. Into that shortage, Wall Street has deployed enormous capital, not to add supply but to capture the pricing power that shortage creates. Blackstone’s own president described declining new housing construction as good news in a 2023 earnings call, because it was favorable for values. That is not a landlord looking to solve a problem. That is an investor describing an asset with inelastic demand and constrained supply. Those are the mechanics of a toll booth, not a market.

The technology sector is running a version of the same play. OpenAI, by its own projections, is on track to burn more cash than any company in history. Nvidia invested $100 billion into the company while simultaneously holding a monopoly on the hardware required to build AI infrastructure. OpenAI has secured exclusive purchase agreements for memory components with Samsung, reportedly cornering 40 percent of global DRAM production capacity, making it effectively impossible for consumers or small businesses to build or buy machines that run AI models locally. Microsoft holds a 27 percent equity stake in OpenAI’s for-profit arm, valued at $135 billion, while simultaneously being one of the largest cloud providers that would benefit from AI dependency.

The end state this system is building toward is one where you cannot access information, conduct business, or participate in the digital economy without routing your activity through infrastructure that a small number of companies own. When that transition is complete, the debt gets collected. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is the explicitly stated strategy.

The physical infrastructure of that transition is already landing in communities across the country, and the bill is being handed to the people who live there.

Data Centers: What They Are Not Telling You

The data center is the physical object that houses the AI economy. It is a warehouse the size of several football fields, running 24 hours a day, consuming extraordinary amounts of electricity and water, generating noise, heat, and diesel exhaust from backup generators, and producing relatively few permanent jobs. As of 2024, the average new data center site covered approximately 224 acres, a 144 percent increase in footprint since 2022. The largest campus projects now exceed 1,000 acres. More than 4,000 are already operating in the United States, mostly in Virginia, Texas, and California. Another 3,000 are planned or under construction.

The costs of this infrastructure are not being borne by the companies building it. They are being distributed to the communities that host it.

Residential electricity prices jumped 7.1 percent in 2025, more than double the general inflation rate, and topped 20 percent in some states, according to federal data. Data centers are not the only factor driving those increases, but they are a significant one. A 2024 report from Virginia’s own legislative watchdog agency found that households in that state, which hosts more data centers than anywhere else in the country, could see their monthly electricity bills increase by $14 to $37 as the power grid is upgraded to meet data center demand. That upgrade cost is passed to ratepayers. A single medium-sized data center can consume up to 110 million gallons of water per year for cooling, equivalent to the annual water use of roughly 1,000 households.

In 2025, Americans paid more than $60 billion in electricity rate increases nationwide. Multiple regions showed evidence that data center power procurement contributed directly to those increases. The companies building the data centers are not paying for the new substations, new transmission lines, and new power generation capacity their operations require. Those costs are socialized. The profits are private.

The community impact playbook will be familiar by now. Developers enter non-disclosure agreements with local officials before any public announcement. Eighty percent of Virginia municipalities with existing or proposed data centers had NDAs in place, according to a review of 31 jurisdictions. Public input is limited. Environmental review timelines have been shortened by federal executive order, reducing formal opportunities for communities to object. Zoning approvals for projects that will fundamentally alter the character of rural and agricultural land are frequently decided in half-empty rooms, with the developer’s attorneys present and most affected residents unaware that the meeting is happening.

The jobs argument is made at every zoning hearing. It is mostly not true. A November 2025 study by two business school professors found no clear evidence that data centers stimulate local growth in tech employment. A separate analysis by Food & Water Watch estimated that as few as 23,000 people in the entire United States work in the data center industry. That is a vanishingly small number of permanent jobs in exchange for 300-million-gallon-per-year water draws, billion-dollar electricity subsidies, and the permanent rezoning of farmland.

Here is what happened when communities found out what was actually being proposed.

In Tucson, Arizona, residents discovered a project called Beale’s Project Blue, a proposed data center development that the city had been negotiating largely outside public view. Residents showed up. They attended meetings, wrote op-eds, and organized. On August 6, 2024, in an unscheduled vote, the Tucson City Council voted unanimously to discontinue discussions with the developer. The chamber was packed. People cheered. The Beale executives, apparently having not anticipated that the community would have opinions about a significant water-consuming installation in one of the driest cities in the country, left to boos.

In Indianapolis, Google announced a $1 billion data center project for the southeast side of the city. Residents organized opposition, showed up consistently to city-county council meetings, and made their case. In September 2025, Google’s attorneys appeared before the council and announced the company was withdrawing its rezoning proposal. A resident who had been part of the effort told More Perfect Union: “For a long time, it felt like we were four people with cardboard swords fighting a monster. But tonight it shows that people power still rings.”

In Ohio, a proposal to rezone 300 acres of farmland for data center development generated enough organized opposition that the landowners withdrew the application entirely. In Wisconsin, residents citing concerns about agricultural land loss and water use have pushed state legislators to introduce mandatory quarterly reporting requirements for electricity and water consumption. In Culpeper County, Virginia, a $12 billion data center project was unanimously denied by the planning commission after residents objected to its proximity to a Civil War battlefield and raised concerns about rural preservation.

Between March and June 2025 alone, community opposition led to $98 billion in data center projects being blocked or delayed, according to Data Center Watch. The total blocked or delayed between May 2024 and March 2025 reached $64 billion. These are not symbolic victories. These are billion-dollar infrastructure projects that did not happen because people showed up to meetings, wrote letters, talked to their neighbors, and refused to accept the premise that their community existed as a site for someone else’s infrastructure.

More than 230 state and local environmental organizations sent a letter to Congress in December 2025 demanding a national moratorium on new data center construction until adequate regulations could protect communities. That coalition is bipartisan. Conservative rural landowners who do not want their agricultural county rezoned for server warehouses are sitting next to progressive environmentalists who are concerned about water consumption and diesel generators. The data center fight is one of the cleaner examples of what happens when extraction lands directly in someone’s backyard, and they decide to do something about it.

The opposition to data centers is not organized by any national political party. It is not being funded by any major foundation. It is being conducted by the same people who attend school board meetings, write letters to the editor of local newspapers, and show up when something that affects their community is on a government agenda. It is civic participation in its most basic form, and it is stopping billion-dollar companies from taking what they want.

This matters not just as a feel-good story about community power. It matters as a data point about what is possible when people treat their community as something worth defending rather than something that happens to them.

What Is Actually Being Stolen

There is a study, cited frequently in behavioral economics, called “Income and Emotional Well-being: A Conflict Resolved.” Its findings are worth sitting with. Money and happiness are closely linked to approximately $60,000 to $90,000 in annual income. At that range, a person or family can own a home, save for retirement, start a small business, and absorb setbacks without going into crisis. Above that threshold, the relationship between income and happiness mostly flattens. People making $130,000 a year are, on average, no happier than people making $80,000.

What $60,000 to $90,000 actually buys is not luxury. It buys the capacity to say no when you are mistreated. It buys the freedom to report harassment without immediately becoming homeless. It buys the ability to join a union or attend a city council meeting without worrying that the person with leverage over your job or your landlord will find out. It buys the kind of autonomy that allows you to be a citizen rather than a dependent.

The extraction economy has a specific interest in keeping as many people as possible just below that threshold. A person who cannot afford to miss a paycheck is not a free person. They are a person who will absorb indignity, work unsafe hours, skip necessary medical care, and decline to make noise about any of it because the risk of making noise is too high. The goal of the current system, whether anyone has articulated it precisely or not, is to keep the noise down.

That is what is actually being stolen. Not just money. Autonomy. The capacity for self-determination. The ability to participate in civic life as something other than a consumer.

There Is a Different Way to Organize

This is the part where a certain kind of writer would pivot to a call for government action. Elect better people. Pass better laws. Regulate the private equity firms. Break up the tech companies. These things may or may not happen, and some of them may or may not help. But waiting for governments, which are largely operated by and in the interests of the same actors who built the current system, to voluntarily dismantle it is not a strategy. It is an optimistic theory.

The alternative is civic mutualism.

The term is less dramatic than it sounds. What it describes is the idea that people who share a community have real obligations to one another, that those obligations can be organized into functional institutions, and that those institutions can provide many of the things that the extraction economy either does not provide or provides at an artificially high price. It is not a utopian vision. It is a description of things that already work, have worked for a long time, and are working right now.

Credit unions are the most visible example. As of the fourth quarter of 2025, federally insured credit unions in the United States held $2.43 trillion in assets and served 144.7 million members, according to the National Credit Union Administration. Those members added $38 billion in dividends to their accounts in 2024. A credit union is not a charity. It is a member-owned cooperative financial institution. When it makes money, that money goes back to the members, not to shareholders. Its lending decisions are oriented toward member benefit, not toward extracting maximum interest from people in financial distress. Credit union membership grew by 2.4 million in 2025 alone.

That is not a fringe movement. That is 144 million Americans who have, at least in the domain of banking, chosen an institution that is structurally obligated to serve them over one that is structurally obligated to extract from them. The difference is ownership.

In the Basque Country of Spain, there is a cooperative federation called Mondragon that has been operating since 1956. It employs 70,085 people across 260 cooperatives in 35 countries. In 2024, it reported sales of €11.2 billion and net income of €632 million. The ratio of executive pay to lowest worker pay is capped at 6-to-1. In the United States, that ratio at major corporations averages approximately 344-to-1. When Fagor Appliances, one of Mondragon’s founding cooperatives, went bankrupt in 2013 during the aftermath of the financial crisis, the corporation absorbed 95 percent of the affected workers into other parts of the network. When the 2008 crisis hit, Mondragon worker-owners voted to share the pain through reduced hours rather than layoffs. Of 103 cooperatives created between 1956 and 1986, only three failed, a 97 percent survival rate across three decades. This is not because cooperative economics is magic. It is because when workers own the enterprise, their interests and the enterprise’s interests are the same thing.

In Jackson, Mississippi, Cooperation Jackson is doing something similar at a smaller scale. Their Freedom Farms Cooperative produces organic food for working-class Black residents in a county where more than 61,000 people are food insecure. Their community land trust holds 52 debt-free properties. Their network of worker cooperatives employs local people on terms the workers themselves control. None of this required a billionaire or a government program. It required people organizing around shared needs and building institutions that serve those needs.

Community land trusts offer one of the more direct solutions to the housing problem. A community land trust acquires land and holds it in perpetuity for the benefit of the community, removing it from speculative markets and making it permanently available for affordable housing, community gardens, or other civic purposes. The model is not new. It has been operating in Vermont, Atlanta, New York City, and dozens of other places for decades. It is not complicated. It is simply a decision that some land should be treated as a community resource rather than an investment vehicle.

Self-Help Credit Union, chartered in 1983 in North Carolina, has spent four decades offering affordable loans to low-income families for child care, home ownership, and business development. It has made over $11 billion in financing available to communities that conventional banks routinely redlined out of the credit system. It is a member-owned institution making decisions oriented toward member benefit. It is not a revolutionary concept. It is a cooperative doing what cooperatives do.

The Decline of Civic Life and Why It Matters

There is a connection between economic precarity and civic disengagement that is not intuitive but is well documented.

Formal volunteer participation in the United States fell to 23.2 percent in 2021, the lowest level recorded in nearly two decades, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and AmeriCorps. The percentage of American households donating to charitable organizations declined from 66 percent in 2000 to 49.6 percent in 2018. Economic disadvantage and income inequality, according to research published in Nonprofit Management and Leadership, significantly suppress volunteering. The Great Recession had a persistent dampening effect on civic participation, particularly in communities that had previously been doing well. When economic instability becomes chronic, the Gallup data shows, people have less discretionary time and fewer resources to give.

This is not a coincidence. The same mechanism that extracts financial autonomy also extracts civic participation. A person working two jobs to afford rent in a market where private equity has priced out starter homes is not attending city council meetings. They are not volunteering at the food bank or coaching youth sports or serving on the neighborhood association. They are surviving. And when enough people are just surviving, the institutions of civil society atrophy. The volunteer fire departments lose members. The mutual aid networks thin out. The PTAs go unstaffed. The civic organizations that once served as the connective tissue of American community life quietly collapse.

This is not an accident either. Atomized people who lack community infrastructure are easier to manage. They are less likely to organize. They are more likely to consume rather than participate. They are customers, not citizens.

The number that should be alarming to everyone is this one: more than 30 percent of nonprofits reported difficulties maintaining service levels in 2022 due to declining volunteer numbers, according to the Stanford Social Innovation Review. The organizations that exist to address the gaps left by government and the market are themselves being hollowed out by the same economic pressures that created those gaps.

What Civic Mutualism Actually Requires

This is the part that is harder to write, because it is not primarily about policy or institutions. It is about individuals deciding to behave differently from the way the system encourages them to behave.

The extraction economy needs you to be passive. It needs you to be a consumer of services rather than a producer of community. It needs you to outsource every function of daily life to a platform or a corporation that charges you for it and extracts your data while doing so. It needs you to be too busy, too exhausted, and too financially stretched to participate in the institutions that would give you leverage over your own circumstances. Every hour you spend on a screen consuming content is an hour you did not spend at a neighborhood meeting or a cooperative planning session or a volunteer shift. The atomization is the product.

Civic mutualism begins with the decision to stop being a customer of your own community and start being a participant in it.

This means practical things. It means moving your money from a bank that uses your deposits to extract value from communities like yours to a credit union that is structurally required to reinvest that value in members like you. It means, if you have the capacity, joining or founding a cooperative rather than a conventional business. It means volunteering with organizations that fill gaps the market cannot or will not fill, not because you feel good about it, but because the work needs doing and you are capable of doing it.

It means supporting nonprofits with money and time, not as charity but as infrastructure. The food bank, the legal aid organization, the housing advocacy group, and the workforce development nonprofit are not optional amenities in a healthy community. They are the institutions that keep people functional, that absorb shocks, that advocate for people who cannot afford lobbyists. They are chronically underfunded and understaffed, and they are increasingly being asked to compensate for the failures of systems that were deliberately designed to fail certain people.

It means showing up to city council meetings, school board meetings, planning commission hearings, and zoning variance hearings. The decisions that shape your community’s physical and economic structure are made in rooms that are mostly empty, by elected and appointed officials who are largely accountable to whoever actually shows up. Developers show up. Private equity lobbyists show up. If community members do not show up, the decisions reflect that.

It means the less comfortable thing, too, which is advocating for people who cannot advocate for themselves. The immigrant family that does not speak English well enough to navigate the housing authority bureaucracy. The disabled veteran who does not know that he is entitled to benefits he has never claimed. The elderly woman whose landlord is illegally withholding her security deposit. These people exist in every community. The civic infrastructure of a healthy community does something about them, not because it is required by law but because the members of that community have decided that looking the other way is not acceptable.

None of this is passive. All of it requires deciding that your community’s health is your problem, not someone else’s job.

On Self-Reliance as a Civic Act

There is a tendency in progressive discourse to treat self-reliance as a conservative talking point and mutual aid as a left-wing one, as though these were opposites. They are not. They are the same thing at different scales.

A person who can fix their own plumbing, grow some of their own food, perform basic first aid, and handle their own minor legal matters is a less vulnerable person. They are less dependent on platforms that charge extraction rents for services that used to be handled within families and communities. They are less exposed to the instability of supply chains they cannot control. They have more time and more capacity than someone who must outsource every function of daily life because they have never learned to do any of it themselves.

The skills that used to be transmitted through communities, through 4-H clubs and Scouting programs and church communities and neighborhood associations, are not trivial. They are the substrate of resilience. A child who has learned to cook, to camp, to read a map, to lead a group, to manage a project, to sit with discomfort and work through it is a more capable adult than one who has not. These skills do not primarily serve the individual who has them. They serve the community those individuals inhabit, because communities composed of capable people are more resilient than communities composed of consumers.

Scouting is worth mentioning here because it is an institution that has been quietly doing civic mutualism at scale for over a century, mostly without calling it that. The Scouting model connects young people to outdoor environments, teaches practical skills, develops leadership capacity, and creates a culture of service that is oriented specifically toward community. The merit badge system is, at its core, a curriculum in capability. Service hours are not optional. The requirement exists because service is treated as an obligation, not a preference.

There are hundreds of organizations like this across the country, quietly building the human infrastructure of civic life: volunteer fire and rescue companies, community emergency response teams, Rotary clubs, Kiwanis, local chapters of national service organizations, community gardens, tool libraries, skill-sharing networks, mutual aid collectives. Most of them are perpetually short of volunteers and money. All of them are doing work that serves communities in ways that no government program or private enterprise can replicate, because what they are actually doing is not delivering a service. They are building relationships, and the relationships are the product.

What We Should Throw Out

The consumer mindset has to go. The idea that your relationship to your community is fundamentally that of a customer, entitled to receive services and exempted from the obligation to provide them, is both morally wrong and practically destructive. Communities do not run on entitlement. They run on contributions. The person who only takes and never gives is not participating in a community. They are living in a hotel that doesn’t charge.

The dependency on systems that are explicitly designed to extract from you also has to go, at least where you have alternatives. If your bank is making decisions with your money that are harmful to your community, there is a credit union available. If you can source food from a local cooperative or community-supported agriculture arrangement instead of a chain that uses your grocery data to optimize its pricing models, that option exists. If there is a community organization that needs your particular skills, the lack of participation is a choice, not a constraint.

The idea that voting is the primary form of civic participation also has to go. It matters, and you should do it. But the local nonprofit that provides legal aid to people who cannot afford attorneys has a more direct impact on more lives than the outcome of most elections. The volunteer EMT who shows up in the next 90 seconds is more meaningful in that moment than any policy that gets passed. The neighbor who checks on the elderly woman next door during a heat wave is not waiting for a government program to do it.

The passive acceptance of systems that harm you has to go. When a private equity firm loads a hospital with debt and starts cutting staff, patients die. When a zoning board approves a development that will price out existing residents, those residents are displaced. When a company processes your data in ways that were not disclosed and uses it against your interests, something has been taken from you. The appropriate response to being harmed is not to accept it. It is to organize, to show up, to document, to advocate, and in some cases to build the alternative institution that removes your dependence on the harmful one.

The idea that these problems are too big for individuals to affect also has to go. The current system requires your participation to function. It requires your deposits, your labor, your data, your consumption, and your passivity. Withholding any of those things, particularly at scale, is leverage. The credit union sector has $2.43 trillion in assets because 144.7 million Americans made a decision to bank somewhere that was accountable to them. Mondragon generates over $11 billion in annual revenue because 70,000 people decided to own their workplace. Cooperation Jackson holds 52 debt-free properties in one of the most economically distressed counties in the United States because a group of people decided to organize around their own needs rather than waiting for someone else to address them.

These are not small numbers. They are not marginal experiments. They are working institutions that demonstrate, with evidence, that a different way of organizing economic and civic life is possible and viable.

The Practical Argument

At this point, it is worth being direct about what civic mutualism is not.

It is not a return to some imagined pre-industrial past where communities were self-sufficient, and everyone knew their neighbors, and nobody was poor. That past did not exist.

It is not a political program. It does not require a particular ideology. Conservatives and progressives both have traditions of civic engagement, mutual aid, and community service. The American tradition of voluntarism and civic association is not owned by any political party. Alexis de Tocqueville, observing American life in the 1830s, identified the tendency of Americans to form voluntary associations to address shared needs as one of the distinctive features of the country’s civic culture. That tendency is not a progressive or conservative value. It is an American one when it is functioning.

Civic mutualism is also not a request for sacrifice. It is a reallocation of time and resources toward things that return more value to the people who invest in them. A credit union member earns better interest rates and better loan terms than a customer of a bank that is optimizing for shareholder return. A cooperative worker has more job security and more voice in workplace decisions than an employee of a conventional firm with the same revenue. A person who has participated in building their community’s institutions has relationships and standing in that community that a person who only consumes it does not.

The purely self-interested case for civic mutualism is that it produces communities that are more resilient, more functional, and better able to protect their members from the kinds of shocks the extraction economy is very good at delivering.

The Numbers That Should Motivate You

Producer economy productivity grew 59.7 percent between 1979 and 2019. Median worker compensation grew 13.7 percent. The difference went somewhere. CEO compensation at major American firms rose nearly 1,200 percent between 1978 and 2019, according to the Economic Policy Institute. The labor share of national income fell from 64.5 percent in 1974 to 56.8 percent in 2017. Private equity has spent over $1 trillion acquiring healthcare companies over the past decade. Blackstone controls over 274,000 rental housing units. The data center infrastructure required for the AI transition is projected to cost over $1.7 trillion by 2030, according to Forbes, more than the estimated cost to end world hunger permanently.

These numbers describe a system that has been systematically redirecting the value produced by working people into the accounts of people who do not produce a fucking thing, and which is now accelerating that process through the financialization of healthcare, housing, information, and eventually every other basic need.

The response to this is not despair. The response is to build the institutions that opt out of it, support the organizations that fight it, and participate in the communities that will outlast it.

What to Do

Move your money. Credit unions and community development financial institutions exist in every state. The NCUA’s credit union locator is free and takes five minutes. This is not a political act. It is a decision about who manages your money and in whose interests.

Join or found a cooperative. Worker cooperatives, consumer cooperatives, producer cooperatives, and housing cooperatives all operate on the same basic principle: the people who use the institution own it. The United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives has resources for starting one. The model works.

Volunteer. Not because it will change your feelings but because the organization needs the work done and you are capable of doing it. The food bank, the literacy program, the community emergency response team, the local Scouting troop that is down to three volunteers, the mutual aid collective that lost half its core members to burnout. These organizations are the infrastructure of community resilience, and they are short-staffed.

Show up to meetings. City council. School board. Zoning commission. Planning hearings. Budget hearings. The decisions that shape your community’s future are made there, largely by default, because most people do not attend. Your presence is leverage.

Support community land trusts and housing cooperatives. These are the institutions that permanently remove land from speculative markets and make it available for community benefit. They require capital, organizational capacity, and political support. They are worth all three.

Learn skills and share them. The capacity to be useful to your community is not built by consuming content about it. It is built by doing things, failing at them, getting better at them, and passing the knowledge on. The declining transmission of practical skills from one generation to the next is a civic problem, not just a lifestyle one.

Advocate for people who cannot advocate for themselves. Find out what organizations in your area are doing this work. Legal aid. Disability advocacy. Housing advocacy. Immigration services. Elder care. These organizations are chronically underfunded and understaffed. They need money, time, and people willing to make noise on behalf of people who cannot make noise.

A Final Word on Urgency

There is a hospice nurse named Bronnie Ware who spent years recording the regrets of people at the end of their lives. The most common one, reported by people who had decades of accumulated experience and nothing left to lose by being honest, was this: I wish I dared to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

Nobody at the end of their life wishes they had been a better consumer. Nobody looks back and feels good about the years they spent passive and compliant inside systems that were taking from them. What people regret is the time they did not spend on things that mattered, which in most cases means people, places, and communities they cared about.

The extraction economy has a specific interest in your time. It wants you consuming, scrolling, working extra hours to afford things that used to cost less, and too exhausted at the end of the day to attend a meeting, organize a cooperative, or ask hard questions at a zoning hearing. Every hour you spend moving through systems designed to extract from you is an hour you did not spend building something that belongs to you and your community.

This is not a call for a particular politics. It is a statement about physics. The system described in these pages is not going to reform itself. The people who benefit from it are not going to voluntarily return what they have taken. The government bodies that are supposed to regulate it are largely staffed by people who are either captured by it or too slow to contain it. The technology transition currently underway, if it proceeds as its architects intend, will make the extraction infrastructure more comprehensive and more difficult to avoid than anything that has come before.

None of that requires your despair. It requires your attention and your time, directed at things that are actually worth your time.

The institutions of civic mutualism do not require permission to exist. Credit unions, cooperatives, mutual aid networks, community land trusts, and volunteer organizations do not need the cooperation of the people who benefit from the current arrangement. They need people who are willing to build them, use them, and defend them. They need people who have decided that waiting for someone else to fix the problem is not a strategy.

The evidence that this works is not theoretical. It is $2.43 trillion in credit union assets. It is 70,000 Mondragon workers in 260 cooperatives across 35 countries, earning decent wages with a 6-to-1 pay ratio in an economy where 344-to-1 is considered normal. It is 52 debt-free properties held in community trust in Jackson, Mississippi. It is $98 billion in data center projects stopped by people who showed up to meetings with cardboard signs and refused to leave. It is the volunteer fire company that arrives in four minutes because the people in that community decided, a long time ago, that they were not going to wait for someone else to handle it.

The question is not whether civic mutualism can work. It demonstrably can. The question is whether enough people will decide that the current arrangement is unacceptable and act while they still have the capacity to do so.

Your time is finite. The systems taking from you are counting on you spending it passively.

That is the system working exactly as designed.

Tipping in the United States is no longer a voluntary gesture of appreciation for exceptional service. It is a mandatory social tax, enforced not by law but by the far more powerful mechanisms of guilt and public scrutiny. The screen is turned toward you. The worker is watching. The line is behind you. You tip. Businesses count on it.

This arrangement suits employers extremely well. It suits workers considerably less than advertised. And it is worth being honest about what it actually is: a transfer of responsibility for paying employees from the businesses that employ them to the customers those businesses serve.

But it goes further than that. It goes further than a coffee shop or a restaurant or a hotel checkout screen. This is now a feature of the American economy broadly, creeping into industries where it was never expected and never asked for, exploiting both the workers it claims to support and the customers who fund it. It is a structural problem that benefits the powerful at the expense of everyone else. And it tells us something uncomfortable about the kind of civic culture we have allowed to develop — one where private obligation has quietly replaced shared responsibility, and where guilt has become a more reliable mechanism than accountability.

Where It Came From

Most people treat tipping as a neutral cultural habit, something that evolved naturally over time. It did not.

Tipping proliferated in the United States after the Civil War. Restaurant and hospitality industries hired newly emancipated Black men and women and offered them no wage, leaving them to rely entirely on patrons for pay. The practice was not custom. It was exploitation with a formal name. As Saru Jayaraman, director of the Food Labor Research Center at UC Berkeley, has explained: “After Emancipation, the restaurant lobby demanded the right to hire newly freed slaves, mostly Black women, not pay them anything, and have them live entirely on this new idea that had just come from Europe called a tip.”

The Pullman Company, which ran luxury railcars, hired newly liberated Black men as porters and servers and paid them between $12 and $27.50 a month. The rest of their income depended on whether white passengers chose to leave something. Racism shaped whether they did. The system was not supplemental. It was the whole wage, and whether a worker ate that week came down to the generosity of strangers who had just spent the evening being served by them.

There was a powerful anti-tipping movement in the early 1900s. Critics called it undemocratic and un-American. Six states temporarily banned it. William Scott, writing in 1916, called tipping “a cancer in the breast of democracy.” The movement failed because the restaurant and railway industries lobbied hard to keep a practice that let them avoid paying their workers.

The 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act introduced the first federal minimum wage and deliberately excluded service workers. When those workers were finally included in 1966, Congress created a carve-out just for them: a sub-minimum wage for tipped workers, allowing employers to pay below the floor as long as tips made up the difference. That sub-minimum wage is currently $2.13 per hour. It has not changed since 1991.

This is the system we inherited. Not generosity. Not culture. An unresolved labor debt from the era of Reconstruction, codified into federal law and left to compound for over a century. We do not usually lead with that history when we talk about tipping. We should.

What It Has Become

That original sin is now a sprawling industry. What began as a way to avoid paying a specific, racially targeted workforce has metastasized into the default operating model for a wide swath of American business.

Around 72% of U.S. adults say tipping is expected in more places today than it was five years ago. The phenomenon has a name now: tip creep. Tipping prompts now appear at movie theater concession stands, airport newsstands, self-checkout kiosks, and according to some reports, even at doctors’ offices. In 2024, one survey found that 27% of Americans have been prompted to tip at a fast food drive-through. The POS screen that was once reserved for sit-down restaurants now follows you almost everywhere money changes hands.

Technology accelerated this. Digital payment systems make it trivially easy to insert a tipping prompt into any transaction. One Cornell professor has summarized the business logic plainly: “Asking for a tip is a way of raising prices on the people who are willing or able to pay without raising prices on everyone else.”

Read that sentence twice.

This is not a system designed to support workers. It is a pricing mechanism designed to extract more revenue from customers who feel social pressure to pay it, while businesses set list prices that look lower than the true cost of the transaction. The tip prompt is a hidden surcharge. The screen with the three percentages is not an invitation. It is a bill with soft coercion built in.

It Has Left the Restaurant

The plumber who fixes your burst pipe on a Saturday morning showed up, diagnosed the problem, had the parts, did the work in ninety minutes, and handed you a tablet at the end. Would you like to add a tip?

The auto mechanic who replaced your brake pads, torqued everything to spec, test drove the car, and emailed you the report asks the same thing. So does the HVAC technician who serviced your unit in August. So does the moving company. So does the shuttle driver who got you to the airport on time. So does the physical therapy assistant. So does the veterinary technician who held your dog during a scary procedure.

These are skilled workers. Many of them went through years of training, earned certifications, and carry real liability. A licensed plumber in most states earns a fair hourly wage. The median annual wage for construction and extraction occupations was $58,360 as of May 2024. These are not $2.13-an-hour workers. They are paid professionals doing technical work at negotiated rates. They do not need a gratuity on top of an already-agreed invoice. The tipping prompt in these contexts has nothing to do with supplementing a sub-minimum wage. It is a revenue grab using the aesthetic of generosity.

The rationale that has always been used to justify tipping — that it compensates workers whose wages are legally held below the minimum — does not transfer to a tradesperson billing $120 an hour. What is happening is that the tipping prompt has become a template, copied from an industry where it served a flawed purpose into industries where it serves none except to extract additional money from customers who have already paid the agreed price.

We have allowed the vocabulary of worker solidarity to be repurposed as a business upsell. That is worth being clear-eyed about. And it points to something larger than a payment screen — a broader cultural habit of outsourcing responsibility to individuals rather than building systems that carry it collectively.

The Numbers Are Not in Anyone’s Favor

Sixty-three percent of Americans agree that businesses should pay their employees better rather than relying on tips. Around 65% of consumers say they are tired of tipping. Nearly 90% of Americans believe tipping culture has gone too far, according to a 2025 WalletHub survey.

The public has made its opinion known, consistently and loudly, in survey after survey for years. Nothing has changed, because the people expressing that opinion have no organized mechanism to act on it. Every individual transaction is too small and too socially fraught to resist. The political will to change the underlying wage structure has not materialized. So the screen keeps turning.

For workers, the reality is worse than the cultural debate suggests. Seventy-five percent of restaurant workers live paycheck to paycheck. Among non-management workers, that figure rises to 83%. Nearly all — 97% — report experiencing financial stress. Sixty-one percent have skipped meals to cover expenses. The people serving our food cannot afford to eat.

This is the outcome of tip-dependent compensation: not supplemental income, but the primary wage for workers whose base pay is legally permitted to sit at $2.13 an hour. One industry CEO, reviewing this data, said: “The people serving our meals every day are, in many cases, unable to afford meals themselves. That signals that something is fundamentally broken.”

It is broken by design. The system was built to transfer wage costs from employers to customers, and it has done exactly that for more than a century. The workers caught in the middle get the instability without the upside. A server who relies on tips does not get a raise when business is good. They get a Wednesday lunch shift in February.

The Racial Math Still Does Not Add Up

Women represent 68% of workers in tipped roles. People of color make up nearly half of workers in key tipped industries, well above their share of the overall labor force. Hispanic workers make up 24% of tipped industry employees but only 17% of the overall workforce. In eleven Southern states, the tipped minimum wage is still $2.13 per hour.

Studies have shown that Black servers earn measurably less in tips than their white counterparts for equivalent service. One ice cream shop owner who looked at her own POS data found a clear disparity in tips along racial lines among her staff. Her response was to eliminate tipping, raise the minimum wage to $21 per hour, and add comprehensive benefits. She adjusted prices to cover the cost. Customers did not end up paying more overall.

That is the system working. That is what honest pricing looks like.

The current system does the opposite. It makes worker compensation dependent on customer discretion, and customer discretion has never been racially neutral. The same implicit biases that shape hiring, promotion, and lending also shape tipping. The worker who provides identical service may walk away with less money based on how they look. That is not a peripheral side effect of tipping culture. It is a documented, structural feature of it, rooted in the same post-Civil War labor arrangement that invented the practice.

The subminimum wage is not a neutral economic policy. It has a specific history and a specific demographic impact. Continuing to defend it as tradition requires ignoring what tradition it actually represents.

Where Does the Tip Go, Anyway

Here is a question most people never think to ask: when you tap 20% on that screen, where does that money go?

The answer is: it depends, and you probably have no way of knowing.

In the simplest case, the tip goes to the person who served you. Federal law is clear that employers cannot keep employee tips, and managers and supervisors are prohibited from receiving tips through a pool. On that front, the rules are reasonably protective.

But the path from the register to the worker’s pocket is not always direct. Many establishments use tip pooling, where all tips are combined and redistributed among eligible staff according to a formula you were not shown. Credit card tips are tracked by the POS system and employees typically receive their portion in their paychecks, days later, after taxes are withheld. Under federal law, employers may also deduct credit card processing fees from tips before passing them along. If you tip $10 and the processor charges 3%, the employee legally receives $9.70. Most customers do not know this.

And when a business adds what looks like a tip automatically, that is a different thing entirely. A mandatory service charge is not a tip under federal law. It can legally be used by the business for purposes other than paying the employee who served you. Some businesses use it exactly that way. The line on the receipt that looks like a gratuity may have nothing to do with your server’s paycheck.

So when you tip at the register, the money goes to employees, in some form, at some point, minus fees, split according to a policy you were not shown, arriving on a schedule you do not control. You are told that tipping supports workers. That is largely true. You are not told the mechanics of how, or how much of what you leave actually lands where you intended it.

The Rest of the World Figured This Out

Japan’s service industry is considered among the best in the world. The service is attentive, professional, and consistent. Workers take visible pride in what they do. Nobody tips. Attempting to leave one is received as an awkward gesture, as though you are suggesting the worker did something unexpected rather than their job.

Australia’s minimum wage is $24.10 AUD per hour. Tipping is genuinely optional. Australians tend to show appreciation with a thank you rather than an additional payment. The service remains good. The workers remain paid. The customers know what things cost before they agree to buy them.

Scandinavian countries pay service workers the equivalent of $20 to $30 or more per hour, with five or more weeks of vacation, healthcare, and pension included. The price on the menu is the price you pay. Denmark, by law, requires restaurants to calculate service charges into the cost of their food.

What these countries share is not charity or progressive politics. They share a straightforward agreement between employers, workers, and customers about who owes what to whom. That agreement is enforced by law and reflected in prices. The tip is not needed because the wage was never outsourced.

The U.S. had a chance to go that direction. Anti-tipping movements erupted here more than once. They failed because the industries that benefited from not paying their workers were better organized than the workers themselves. We inherited the result.

This Is a Civic Problem, Not Just an Economic One

Here is the part that does not get said enough.

Tipping culture is not just bad compensation policy. It is a symptom of something broader: a society that has become increasingly comfortable offloading obligation onto individual transactions and calling it virtue. The pattern is not unique to restaurants. It shows up anywhere that responsibility has been allowed to migrate away from the party that actually owns it, down to the person least positioned to push back.

The screen turning toward you at the coffee counter is not an isolated design choice. It is the product of a broader economic and cultural arrangement that has decided, repeatedly, that individual guilt is a more reliable mechanism than accountability. Businesses set the terms. Workers absorb the risk. Customers manage their feelings about it. Nobody in that chain is the right person to solve the underlying problem, but only one of them holds the power to.

A healthy civic culture does not work this way. In a healthy civic culture, the party that benefits from a relationship is the party that bears its costs. The employer who profits from a worker’s labor pays that worker. The business that sets the price of a service includes in that price what it actually costs to deliver. Responsibility sits where it originates — not with the next person who walks through the door holding a credit card.

This matters because civic mutualism — the idea that we each carry our share of what we’ve agreed to — cannot survive being continuously replaced by privatized guilt. Guilt is not accountability. Guilt is what you feel when accountability has been removed from the equation and you’re left holding the tab for someone else’s decision. The worker doesn’t benefit from your guilt. They benefit from a wage.

The organizations I believe in — the civic groups, the nonprofits, the community institutions doing actual work — understand this distinction. The good ones are not asking people to feel bad as a substitute for building something durable. They are building the durable thing. They set honest expectations, honor clear commitments, and put accountability where it belongs. They know that generosity is not a system. It is what you have left over after the obligations are met.

Tipping culture is what you get when the obligations aren’t met and nobody with the power to fix it has any reason to. So the guilt gets distributed, the screen keeps turning, and the structural problem compounds quietly underneath all of it.

What a Tip Should Be

I believe in paying people fairly for what they do. I believe the person who contracted you to do a job is responsible for compensating you for that job. I believe in honest pricing: the number on the invoice should reflect what the thing actually costs to produce, including the labor of the people who made it. I believe in accountability sitting where it belongs.

Tipping culture, as it currently exists, violates all of these principles. It obscures the true cost of goods and services. It transfers the employer’s wage obligation onto the customer through social pressure. It makes worker compensation unpredictable and dependent on stranger behavior. It has documented racial and gender disparities baked into it. It has expanded aggressively into industries where it never made sense. And it is one piece of a larger cultural pattern that prefers the appearance of individual generosity over the structural reforms that would actually solve the problem.

A tip should be what the word originally described: a voluntary expression of genuine appreciation for exceptional service. Something rare. Something earned by a specific person in a specific moment who did something beyond what was expected. Not a default line item. Not a substitute for a wage. Not a screen you stare at while buying a sandwich.

The restaurants, coffee shops, rideshare platforms, plumbers, mechanics, and hotel chains that have built tipping into their business models are not doing their workers a favor. They are doing themselves one. They are externalizing their payroll costs and calling it generosity. The workers who depend on it absorb the risk every time the shift is slow, the customer has a bad day, or a pandemic closes the dining room for three months.

We can do better. Not better in the sense of tipping more or feeling guiltier. Better in the sense of building the structures that remove the need. Pay workers a wage. Price the product honestly. Put accountability where it belongs and leave it there.

Stop turning the screen around. Build the thing that makes the screen unnecessary.

Let the tip be rare enough to mean something when it happens.

This happens constantly in the nonprofit and civic sector. It happens at soup kitchens and housing coalitions and youth programs and civic leagues and volunteer fire departments. It happens at organizations large and small, old and new, urban and rural. And the most maddening part is that it is almost entirely self-inflicted, carried out by people who, in many cases, are more focused on protecting their own positions than on running a functional organization.

This piece will name the problems directly. It will also offer solutions, because solutions are the point. But organizations that want to improve need an honest accounting of what is actually wrong, not a diplomatic softening of failures that have real costs for real people.

The Pay Problem Is a Choice

Start with wages, because wages set the floor for everything else.

The nonprofit sector employs roughly 12.8 million people and accounts for about 10 percent of all private-sector jobs in the United States, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. It is not a small industry. And yet the sector has normalized a compensation model that treats poverty-level wages as evidence of virtue rather than a management failure with consequences.

Those consequences show up in the turnover numbers. The nonprofit sector’s annual staff turnover rate runs at approximately 19 to 21 percent, compared to roughly 12 percent in other sectors. A 2025 survey by the Social Impact Staff Retention Project found that nearly seven in ten nonprofit employees intended to look for a new job that year. The National Council of Nonprofits reported in 2023 that nearly 75 percent of nonprofits had persistent job vacancies, with program and service delivery roles hit especially hard. Seventy-nine percent of survey respondents cited salary competition as a factor affecting their ability to hire.

The human cost is real and often invisible. The institutional knowledge that walks out the door when a case manager leaves after 18 months. The donor relationships that evaporate when a development director burns out. The program continuity collapses when direct service staff turn over faster than clients can form any functional working relationship with them.

The financial cost is measurable. Replacing a single employee costs between 33 and 200 percent of their annual salary, depending on the role. For an organization paying $45,000 for a case manager and replacing that person every year or two, the math is not flattering. The money spent on constant recruitment and onboarding would, in many cases, have covered a meaningful raise.

The critical detail here is that this is a choice. It is not an inevitability. Nonprofit leaders who accept chronic underpayment as a fixed condition of the work without fighting funders, educating boards, or making the financial case for competitive wages are choosing that outcome. They are choosing it repeatedly, year after year, and calling the resulting dysfunction a structural problem rather than a management failure.

The 2024 State of Nonprofits report from the Center for Effective Philanthropy found 95 percent of nonprofit leaders are concerned about staff burnout. One leader quoted in the report put it plainly: “We aren’t able to pay our staff a livable wage, which is the exact goal we are aiming to reach for the clients we serve.” That sentence contains a complete admission of organizational failure dressed up as a lament. The organization was paying poverty wages while its stated mission was fighting poverty. Nobody in a leadership position appeared to find this intolerable enough to change.

Part of the blame belongs to funders and donors who have spent decades enforcing the “overhead myth,” the idea that a well-run nonprofit is one that spends as little as possible on staff and administration. The Stanford Social Innovation Review named the resulting dynamic the “nonprofit starvation cycle”: organizations underinvest in overhead, underpay staff, degrade the quality of the work, and then justify spending even less on the people doing it. But that pressure from outside does not excuse leaders who never push back, never make the case, and never treat the wage problem as one that requires a solution rather than an annual shrug.

Disappearing Into the Building

There is a second failure mode, less discussed and arguably just as costly: the nonprofit that has essentially stopped showing up in the community it claims to serve.

This takes a specific form. The organization runs its programs. It files its reports. It attends its board meetings. It sends out a newsletter that no one reads. And that is it. It has stopped showing up at the city council meeting. It is not at the neighborhood association. It skipped the community health fair. It does not send anyone to the school board forum where decisions affecting its clients are being made. It has retreated into its own building and called the retreat professionalism.

Independent Sector research found that only 31 percent of nonprofits reported engaging in advocacy or lobbying over the last five years. That is less than half the 74 percent that reported doing so as recently as 2000. The sector has substantially withdrawn from public civic life over the course of a generation.

This is partly a leadership failure. Executive directors who are conflict-averse, boards that are nervous about anything that looks political, and staff who are too overextended to attend anything outside their program hours all contribute to the retreat. But in many cases, the real driver is simpler: leadership has decided that showing up in the community is optional, that the organization’s work speaks for itself, and that the relationships and legitimacy that come from civic presence are somebody else’s job to maintain.

Nonprofits that are connected to their communities know things. They know what is actually happening on the ground. They know which problems are getting worse, which services have gaps, and which assumptions in the strategic plan are out of date. Organizations that have pulled back lose that intelligence. They also lose visibility, which over time translates into reduced public trust, reduced volunteer interest, and reduced donor engagement. And then they are surprised when the community does not rally around them during a funding crisis.

The Building Movement Project’s research documents that nonprofit service organizations reach millions of people annually and constitute substantial community infrastructure. That infrastructure choosing to disengage from civic life is not a neutral outcome. It is a failure of institutional responsibility, carried out quietly, one skipped meeting at a time.

The Budget That Does Not Match the Reality

The financial management problems in the nonprofit sector are not primarily stories of outright fraud, though those happen with some regularity. The more common problem is quieter and, in some ways, more corrosive: leaders and boards who do not actually understand the finances of the organization they are running.

Grant-funded organizations routinely accept grants with indirect cost caps of 5 or 10 percent when the actual overhead cost of running the program is closer to 25 or 30 percent. They are performing financial health in the grant application while running a structural deficit in practice. This is not a funding problem. It is a negotiation failure and a governance failure. Organizations that consistently accept terms that guarantee a deficit have made a decision to do so. The funders who set those terms are culpable, but so are the leaders who sign the contracts without fighting back.

Over time, this hollows out the organization. There is no money for technology, staff development, equipment maintenance, or the institutional capacity that makes programs actually function well. And the board, whose job it is to understand and oversee this, frequently does not. Research from the Foundation Group documents that nonprofit boards commonly fail to stay informed and engaged, leading to a lack of oversight, missed deadlines, and uninformed decision-making. A board that does not understand the organization’s actual financial position is not governing. It is a rubber stamp with a fiduciary title.

Incompetent boards are one of the sector’s most persistent problems. They are often populated by people who want the credential, the networking opportunity, or the social status of board membership without the accountability that comes with the role. They approve budgets they have not read. They accept financial reports they do not understand. They defer to the executive director on everything and then act surprised when the organization faces a financial crisis.

The consequences of weak financial management are predictable. Loss of donor trust. Loss of funding. Regulatory scrutiny. Reduced ability to respond to opportunities. These are not abstract risks. They are the outcomes that follow, reliably, from choosing to manage finances without rigor.

The Volunteer Problem Nobody Wants to Address

Volunteers are often treated as a free resource, which is another way of saying they are not treated as a resource at all.

The data on volunteer retention is consistent. The average retention rate across the sector runs around 65 percent, meaning nonprofits lose more than a third of their volunteers every year. Studies on why volunteers leave point repeatedly to the same causes: feeling underappreciated, poor communication, unclear roles, and no sense of connection to actual outcomes. One survey found that 79 percent of employees who quit cited lack of appreciation as a key factor. Volunteers, who are doing the same work for no compensation, respond the same way.

The scale of this failure is significant. Independent Sector’s data puts the average value of a volunteer hour at $33.49 in 2024. Organizations that routinely lose a third of their volunteers annually are discarding substantial donated value through nothing more than poor management. They are burning a resource that people are trying to give them for free.

This happens because many nonprofit leaders regard volunteer management as administrative work, beneath the strategic level, something to be handled by whoever is available rather than treated as a core organizational function. Volunteers show up, get put to work in ways that may or may not match their skills or interests, receive no feedback about whether their contribution mattered, and are not contacted again until the organization needs warm bodies for the next event.

The fix requires intention rather than money. Clear role expectations. Regular communication about impact. Specific recognition of individual contributions. Flexibility in scheduling. These are not complicated asks. They require someone in the organization to treat volunteer retention as a priority worth managing. Many organizations have decided it is not.

The Sacrifice Myth

Underlying most of these failures is a cultural belief in the nonprofit sector that has caused more damage than almost any external pressure: the idea that dedication to a cause should substitute for competent management, fair compensation, and basic organizational functioning.

This belief takes several forms. It surfaces in the leader who expects staff to work 60-hour weeks because the mission matters. It surfaces in the board that approves poverty-level wages because “everyone here knew what they were signing up for.” It surfaces in the volunteer coordinator who is offended when volunteers quit, because they should care more about the cause than about how they are treated. It surfaces in the executive director who resists any scrutiny of their decisions because their heart is “in the right place.”

The Race to Lead 2022 survey, one of the largest datasets on nonprofit staff experience in the United States with more than 12,000 respondents, found that burnout among frontline staff stemmed not primarily from heavy workload but from carrying that workload without recognition, without a voice in decisions, and without any visible path forward. Attrition, the study found, was preventable when organizations created actual cultures of accountability and recognition. Most organizations are not doing that. They are instead relying on the mission to do the motivational work that management is supposed to do.

The staff member who works 60 hours a week at poverty wages and never asks for more is not proof of an organization’s health. They are a countdown clock. When they burn out and leave, which most of them eventually do, the organization will replace them with someone else who will repeat the same cycle. This is not a workforce problem. It is a leadership problem. It is what happens when leaders confuse exploitation with virtue.

What to Do About It

The problems described here are structural, but they are not permanent. Here is what the evidence says actually works.

Pay people adequately. This requires confronting the overhead myth directly with funders, making the financial case for competitive wages to resistant boards, and treating turnover cost data as the financial argument it is. The cost of not paying people fairly is already in the budget. It shows up in recruitment, onboarding, and the compounding institutional knowledge loss from constant turnover. Leaders who claim they cannot afford to pay people adequately should be asked whether they have calculated what the current approach is actually costing them.

Show up in the community. Designate staff time for civic engagement. Attend local government meetings. Join coalitions. Send someone to the forums where decisions affecting the organization’s mission are being made. This is not optional extra work for organizations with capacity to spare. It is part of doing the job, and it builds the trust and legitimacy that sustain the organization over the long term.

Build honest financial management. This means budgeting that reflects actual overhead costs, board members who are trained to read financial statements and are expected to do so, honest negotiation with funders about what programs actually cost, and a diversified funding base. A reserve fund is not hoarding. It is proof that someone in the organization is thinking past the current fiscal year.

Treat volunteers like partners, not props. Set clear expectations at the start. Communicate regularly about the impact of their work. Recognize specific contributions publicly. Ask for feedback and act on it. These things cost very little and have a direct effect on whether volunteers return.

Hold boards accountable for governance. A board populated by people who want the credential without the responsibility is a liability. Organizations should establish clear expectations for board members, provide financial training, and remove members who consistently fail to engage. A board that cannot describe the organization’s financial position is not doing its job.

Reject the sacrifice myth. Stop treating burnout as proof of commitment. Stop accepting poverty wages as an inevitable condition of mission-driven work. The people most harmed by dysfunctional organizational culture are not the leaders who set it. They are the front-line staff, the volunteers, and ultimately the clients and communities the organization exists to serve.

The Accountability Gap

The nonprofit and civic sector does work that matters. It provides services that the government has declined to fund and the market has no incentive to offer. The people doing that work on the front lines are often competent, committed, and underpaid for it.

But the sector has developed a durable habit of insulating its leadership from accountability. Executive directors who run organizations into the ground through bad management often move laterally to other nonprofit leadership roles. Boards that fail in their governance responsibilities face no meaningful consequences. Organizations that consistently underperform on mission are rarely asked hard questions by the funders who keep them operational.

The people who pay for this accountability gap are the staff who burn out and leave, the volunteers who are treated as disposable and stop showing up, and the communities that receive a diminished version of the services they were promised.

The data on what good management looks like in this sector is not hard to find. The harder question is whether the people in positions of nonprofit leadership are willing to be judged by it. Many of them, based on the evidence, have decided they would rather not be.

That decision has a cost. Someone else is paying it.

This argument is comfortable. It places the blame somewhere else. It asks nothing of the people making it.

It’s also completely wrong.

Freemasonry is one of the oldest, most consequential fraternal organizations in the world. It helped shape the intellectual and civic fabric of the country you live in. It carries a philosophy worth preserving, a brotherhood worth cultivating, and a legacy of service worth continuing. The raw material is exceptional. The product, in most American lodges today, is failing.

This article is about what went wrong and what to do about it. It is not written to be comforting. If you want comfortable, there are plenty of fish dinners and stated meetings that will hold that door open for you. But if you’d like your lodge to actually matter to someone twenty years from now, keep reading.

What Masonry Actually Is

Start with the basics, because they’re worth defending.

Freemasonry, at its core, is a system of moral instruction delivered through ritual, symbol, and fraternal obligation. It teaches that a man can improve himself, that he owes something to his community, and that the bonds between men who share a common purpose are worth tending. These are not radical ideas. They are also not trivial ones.

The philosophy draws from Enlightenment thinking, from ancient craft traditions, from the symbolism of stone and architecture. The working tools of a Mason, the square and compass, the plumb and level, are not decorations. Each one is a metaphor made tangible. The square teaches you to act on the square with others. The level reminds you that birth doesn’t make a man better than another. The plumb keeps you upright. The compasses teach you to circumscribe your desires within due bounds. This is not elaborate nonsense. It is practical ethics, delivered in a form that sticks.

The three degrees, Entered Apprentice, Fellowcraft, and Master Mason, take a candidate through a journey that most organizations can’t be bothered to replicate. There is ceremony, memorization, obligation, and a slow cultivation of belonging. You earn your way in. You learn before you are fully received. This matters more than most fraternal groups understand, because investment creates ownership. A man who had to work to join something is more likely to value it than a man who signed a form and paid dues.

The symbolism runs deep. The Temple of Solomon serves as the organizing metaphor for the degrees. Light and darkness. Knowledge and ignorance. The search for what was lost. These are themes that have occupied serious thinkers for centuries. You can read shallow interpretations of them, or you can sit with them long enough to find something worth sitting with. Most Masons who stay do so because they found something in the ritual worth returning to.

The brotherhood is real. Men from different professions, backgrounds, and beliefs, bound by oath and shared experience, do tend to look out for one another. This is not unique to Masonry, but Masonry does it deliberately and structurally. The obligation you take is not symbolic. It is meant to mean something.

Freemasonry is fundamentally a self-improvement, volunteer association that teaches moral, intellectual, and spiritual lessons through its initiation ceremonies. That description, from Mount Vernon’s own historical archive, is accurate. It is also a fair summary of what most Americans are desperately short of. Men joining something. Men being obligated to something beyond themselves. Men sitting with other men who are trying to be better.

The networking is a real benefit, too, though it becomes awkward to say out loud. Throughout American history, the lodge was a place where men of different stations built trust through a common experience. The Masons of the 18th century adhered to liberal democratic principles that included religious toleration, loyalty to local government, and the importance of charity. The lodge was a cross-cutting institution. It bridged class, bridged profession, bridged denomination. This is exactly the kind of social infrastructure that modern sociologists now say is disappearing from American civic life. It turns out Freemasonry was ahead of the curve, built that infrastructure on purpose, and has spent the last fifty years letting it decay.

Then there is charity. Charity is at the core of Freemasonry. It has been since the founding of this great fraternity. The record supports this. By 1725, the Grand Lodge of England had established a central Fund of Charity for Masons and their families. In California in 1850, during a cholera outbreak, Masons raised money and opened a hospital. The Masonic Service Association, formed in 1919, coordinated relief after wars and natural disasters. Shriners Hospitals for Children alone has provided over $1.5 billion in specialized pediatric care since its founding. The hospitals provide care to children with orthopedic conditions, burn injuries, spinal cord injuries, and cleft lip and palate, regardless of the families’ ability to pay. That last part is worth pausing on. Regardless of ability to pay. A fraternal organization built a hospital network that treats sick children for free. This is not a minor thing.

The raw material is strong. It always has been.

The History That Made This Possible

To understand where the lodge is now, you need to know where it came from.

Freemasonry arrived in the American colonies in the 1730s, carried mostly by Scots and English merchants and tradesmen who had already found the fraternity useful in Britain. Boston’s St. John’s Lodge was duly constituted by the Grand Lodge of England in 1732 and remains the oldest lodge in North America.

The timing was not coincidental. Interwoven with the British Enlightenment, Masonic lodges formed throughout Europe and the Americas. The network of Scots, English, and Irish lodges helped knit the British commercial empire together. In the colonies, however, the Masonic ideal of equality before reason sat uneasily with the realities of British rule. Men who met as equals in the lodge, bound to one another by oath rather than by class, tended toward certain conclusions about government and liberty.

During the revolutionary era, Masons of note included George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, James Otis, and Paul Revere. About nine of the fifty-six men who signed the Declaration of Independence were Masons, and about thirteen of the thirty-nine who signed the U.S. Constitution were also Masons. It would be an overstatement to say Masonry built the republic. It would be an understatement to say it had nothing to do with it.

George Washington wore his Masonic apron. He took his first presidential oath on a Bible from St. John’s Lodge. He laid the cornerstone of the Capitol in full Masonic regalia. When Washington replied to the brethren of King David’s Lodge in Newport in 1790, he wrote: “Being persuaded that a just application of the principles on which the Masonic Fraternity is founded must be promotive of private virtue and public prosperity, I shall always be happy to advance the interests of the Society.”

That phrase, private virtue and public prosperity, is as clean a statement of the Masonic mission as you will find. A better man makes a better community. The lodge is where you work on being the better man.

This history matters for two reasons. First, because it is worth knowing. It explains why the lodge was culturally significant for so long and what it stood for. Second, because it is being squandered. Lodges that hold this history and do nothing with it are sitting on a resource they’ve mostly forgotten to use.

The Accusations

Before you can fix the lodge, you have to deal honestly with what people say about it.

The oldest and most durable accusation is that Freemasonry is a secret society running things from behind closed doors. This is not a new claim. It is not even a particularly modern one. People have been making it since the 1820s.

The Anti-Masonry movement grew to become the first third party in the country’s history, permanently altering American politics during a transformative political realignment. Its origin was the disappearance of William Morgan, a New York man who had allegedly been working on a book revealing Masonic secrets. Morgan vanished in 1826. The conspiracy theories surrounding his possible murder set off an anti-Masonic witch hunt that changed the political and social fabric of the United States.

Accusations that Masons forcibly silenced Morgan for threatening to publish lodge secrets energized mass outrage and led to the founding of the Anti-Masonic Party. That event crystallized the narrative that Freemasonry could subvert the rule of law and democratic accountability, converting moral panic into electoral politics and institutional opposition.

The thing is, some Masons behaved badly in response to the Morgan affair. Many Masons began publicly and inexplicably to defend Morgan’s abduction, and many of them were public figures. One former member of the New York Legislature said, “If they are publishing the true secrets of Masonry, we should not think the lives of half a dozen such men as Morgan and Miller of any consequence in suppressing the work.” That kind of response didn’t help. Masonic membership had grown rapidly in the early nineteenth century; it declined sharply during this period. Of the approximately 450 lodges operating in 1825, only about 50 remained by 1834.

So Masonry survived a near-total collapse once before. It’s worth remembering that.

The conspiracy theories have modernized without improving much in accuracy. Today they show up online, in YouTube videos, in forums, attached to broader narratives about global control and hidden elites. The All-Seeing Eye on the dollar bill. The street layout of Washington. Secret handshakes and world domination. Most of these claims, examined with any rigor, don’t hold up. Documentary evidence supports that many Founders were Masons and that the Morgan affair provoked institutional backlash, but there is scant reliable proof of systematic Masonic control of government or global plots.

What the conspiracy theories reveal, though, is something lodges need to take seriously: secrecy creates suspicion. It always has. A lodge that is invisible to its community, that conducts its business quietly behind closed doors and never shows the town what it actually does, is going to remain a target for speculation. The secrets of Masonry, such as they are, are largely ceremonial. The handshakes and passwords are not the management structure of a shadow government. They are, more or less, a method of recognition with historical roots that most Masons themselves find interesting rather than useful. None of this requires defending the conspiracy theories. It does require acknowledging that opacity is a strategic disadvantage in an era when institutions earn trust through demonstrated behavior rather than assumed authority.

The other controversy worth addressing directly is the history of exclusion. When Prince Hall, an abolitionist Black man, attempted to join a lodge in the late 1700s, he was denied despite being a free man. He, along with more than a dozen other Black men, eventually started their own branch of Freemasonry called Prince Hall Freemasonry, which is still active today. Prince Hall Freemasonry is now the largest predominantly African American fraternal organization in the United States, with more than 300,000 members. The fact that it had to exist separately at all is an indictment of mainstream Masonic practice, and lodges that can’t say so plainly will struggle to be taken seriously by people who know the history.

The philosophical promise of Masonry, that a man is judged by his moral character rather than his station, has historically coexisted with racial exclusion. Acknowledging this is not a betrayal of the tradition. It is an honest reading of the record. Lodges that reckon with it honestly will be more credible, not less.

The Decline

Here are the numbers, because they matter.

Masonic membership rose to a historic high of 4,103,161 by 1959. After peaking in 1959, membership began a steady decline. The total number fell from 4,099,219 in 1960 to 3,763,213 in 1970 and 2,531,643 in 1990. In 2000, 1,841,169 members were reported. The most recent published total for 2023 was 869,429 members.

That is a loss of nearly 3.25 million members in sixty years. From more than four million to fewer than nine hundred thousand. In 1959, about 4.5 percent of all American men were Freemasons. In recent years membership has fallen off roughly 75 percent.

The lodges themselves are consolidating. Buildings are being sold. Halls that once hosted hundreds are now struggling to fill a room for stated meetings. One Masonic education officer estimated that the number of actual members who are active is about five percent. Divided among about 2,000 lodges around the United States, that is about 30 members per lodge. Most lodges are not running at anything close to functional capacity. They are maintaining the form of an organization while the substance drains out.

There are multiple causes, and it is worth being precise about them rather than letting everyone pick their favorite villain.

The generational gap is part of it. The Boomers held the stewardship of the fraternity for almost 40 years and shaped it to reflect their values and expectations during this time. Most programs and policies that lodges and Grand Lodges currently have in place were implemented or changed by Boomers. Generation X generally had no interest in joining Freemasonry, or any of their father’s organizations. That gap is a demographic hole that the fraternity has not climbed out of.

The average age of the membership is a problem. The average is now somewhere in the late sixties. A membership that skews that old will shrink through attrition regardless of what else happens. It’s like having a job that pays two thousand a month but your mortgage is three thousand. The outflow is faster than any reasonable inflow can compensate for without structural change.

But there is something more important underneath all of this. Something that would be happening even if every one of these specific problems were resolved. And it is this: the lodge didn’t fail in isolation. It failed as part of a broader American collapse of exactly the kind of institution that lodges represent.

The Bigger Problem

In 2000, Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam published a book called Bowling Alone. The title came from a simple observation: between 1980 and 1998, the total number of bowlers in America increased by 10 percent, while league bowling decreased by 40 percent. People were still bowling. They just weren’t doing it together, in a structured organization, with regular commitments to other people.

Putnam surveys the decline of social capital in the United States since 1950. He describes the reduction in all forms of in-person social intercourse upon which Americans used to found, educate, and enrich the fabric of their social lives. He argues that this undermines the active civic engagement which a strong democracy requires from its citizens.

A decline in measures of social capital, including participation in formal organisations, informal social connectedness, and interpersonal trust, began in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, with a sharp acceleration in the 1980s and 1990s.

The effects of this are not abstract. Putnam identifies that social capital makes collective problems easier to resolve, makes business transactions easier since people trust each other, and results in improved social environments such as safer and more productive neighborhoods. A society with more social capital does better across most measurable dimensions. A society with less of it gets more polarized, more isolated, more expensive to govern, and harder to live in.

The decline was not a phenomenon limited to Freemasonry, but rather part of a broader trend, observable since the 1960s, of declining participation in traditional fraternities, service clubs, and other member-based organizations. The Rotary is down. The Elks are down. The VFW is down. The Knights of Columbus are down. The Lions are down. This is not a Masonic failure specifically. It is a civic infrastructure failure across the board.

Which means, in a strange way, the problem is also the opportunity. If the entire category of civic organization is in decline, and if declining civic organization produces measurable harm to communities and democracy, then any organization capable of rebuilding that civic tissue has something genuinely valuable to offer. It is not just a membership pitch. It is a public health argument.

Putnam and others argue the simple act of joining something like a Masonic lodge is an antidote to the kind of malaise that has gripped our country. That makes Freemasonry and other organizations potentially powerful drivers of social and civic engagement, if enough people are willing to join.

If enough people are willing to join. That conditional is carrying a lot of weight. And it lands the problem squarely back on the lodges themselves.

What the Lodge Got Wrong

This is the part some brothers skip over. They blame television, they blame smartphones, they blame the economy, they blame the general moral decline of society. These things may be contributing factors. They are not the full story.

The rise in membership immediately after the end of both World War I and World War II superficially bloated lodges with inactive members. Lodge leaders eventually considered whether the increase in members meant quantity was supreme over quality. The post-war membership surge brought in a lot of men who came for the fellowship and the networking and the sense of civic duty, but who were not particularly interested in the philosophical core of the institution. Lodges accommodated them, understandably. But over time, the accommodation became the default. The ritual became a box to check rather than an experience worth taking seriously. The lodge became a place where you went to business meetings, paid dues, and ate dinner.

That is not a compelling offer. Most men have enough business meetings.

The lodge also turned inward. The charitable work, historically done in public, became institutional and distant. Writing a check to the Grand Lodge foundation is not the same thing as building a relationship with your community. The Shriners parades, the visible public presence of organized Masonry, became less common and less connected to the surrounding town. The lodge hall, often a beautiful and significant building in the center of older American towns, became a place that most people drove past without knowing what happened inside. Sometimes the Masons themselves weren’t sure.

The secrecy that once signified meaningful ritual became, in many lodges, just opacity. Outsiders didn’t know what the Masons did in there. Often the members didn’t know either, in any substantive sense. The mystery had evaporated, leaving only the inconvenience.

Leadership recycling became a problem. A shortage of worthy and well-qualified candidates has inhibited the orderly flow of succession from chair to chair, thus forcing the recycling of past masters to keep the chairs suitably warm. An organization where the same ten men rotate through the same chairs year after year, conducting the same meeting with the same five attendees, is not a functioning institution. It is a habit.

The fraternity also developed a peculiar relationship with its own standards. Some lodges lowered membership barriers in pursuit of numbers, producing what critics called paper members: men who went through the degrees, paid dues for a year or two, and disappeared. Others became so restrictive in their culture that new members felt unwelcome. Neither approach served the mission.

Then there is the failure to engage the next generation in any meaningful way. Both Millennials and Generation Z are interested in Freemasonry, but much to the fraternity’s frustration, it hasn’t been able to retain them. Young men show up, curious, drawn in by the history and the philosophy and the idea of a serious fraternal organization. Then they attend a meeting and watch nine elderly men argue for forty minutes about the condition of the parking lot, and they don’t come back.

This is a solvable problem. It requires the people currently running lodges to be honest about what they are offering and whether it is worth anyone’s time.

The Fix

The answer is not marketing. The answer is not branding. The answer is not a social media strategy or a recruitment campaign or a Grand Lodge initiative with a catchy name. These things may help at the margins. They will not change the trajectory.

The answer is for Masonic lodges to become integral parts of their communities again. Not through checkbook charity, but through visible, personal, sustained presence. Not through telling people who you are, but through showing them what you do.

Here is what that looks like in practice.

Be present in your community.

Jim Easterling of National Lodge No. 568 in Barberton, Ohio, began selling fried bologna sandwiches at the town’s Mum Festival. Since 2006, the lodge has raised over $175,000 for charity. They are now a title sponsor of the festival. People look for them. They are a part of the community. He reports that what began as a small operation with eight people now has fifty men, women, and children working it because they want to be part of it.

This is not a complicated idea. It is a lodge, showing up in public, being useful, being present. The event isn’t impressive on paper. A fried bologna sandwich stand at a local festival is not a grand gesture. But a lodge that does this every year, consistently, for two decades, becomes part of the fabric of its town. People know who the Masons are. They know where to find them. They know what they care about. That trust is built one year at a time, not announced.

Nevada Lodge No. 13 sponsors Nevada City’s annual Constitution Day Parade each September, the largest such celebration in the West. One lodge, one event, every year, demonstrating publicly that Freemasonry stands for something specific and is willing to invest in it. You can argue about which event your lodge should own. The point is to own one and do it reliably.

Make your building useful to the community.

Most lodge halls are underutilized. Many are underutilized most of the week. A Masonic hall in the center of a small town is a civic asset. Treat it like one. Host community meetings. Let the town council use the space. Partner with the library for literacy programs. Offer meeting space to nonprofits that can’t afford their own. The hall does not lose its character by serving the community. It gains one.

This approach does several things at once. It builds relationships with organizations and individuals who did not previously know you existed. It demonstrates that the lodge is committed to the physical community, not just to its own members. It answers the secrecy question in the most direct way possible: an open door.

Mentor young men deliberately.

The lodge has a formal system for this. It is called the degrees, and it is supposed to involve meaningful engagement with a mentor who guides the candidate through the process and remains in relationship with him afterward. In practice, many lodges treat degree conferral as a production event and then leave the new member to find his own way. He usually doesn’t.

Worshipful Master Don Carter of Mount Lebanon Lodge No. 226 implemented the suggestion to hold a meal before each stated meeting. The meals played a significant role in deepening Masonic ties within the lodge by bringing brothers together to share fraternal bonds. They also created opportunities for potential candidates to join, meet members, and experience the warmth and camaraderie of the lodge firsthand. Simple hospitality, practiced consistently, changed the feel of the lodge. The candidates who encountered that warmth were more likely to stay.

A lodge that runs three degrees a year and loses all three men within eighteen months is not growing. It is processing people. The retention problem is not a pipeline problem. It is a belonging problem. If a new Mason does not have a friend in the lodge within his first year of membership, he will probably leave. This is preventable. It requires existing members to actually talk to new members.

Return the philosophy to the center.

By the early twenty-first century, members increasingly focused on Masonic philosophy, education, and symbolism. Even as membership numbers decreased, members who stayed did so because they found the tradition worth engaging seriously.

The men who survive the attrition, who stay through multiple years and multiple masters and boring stated meetings, tend to be the ones who found something intellectually and morally substantive in the work. The degrees are not incidental decoration on a dinner club. They are the point. A lodge that invests in Masonic education, that takes the symbolism seriously, that treats the ritual as something worth doing well and understanding deeply, gives its members a reason to be there beyond habit.

This means reading. It means discussion. It means inviting speakers who have thought seriously about the tradition. It means treating the stated meeting as more than administrative business and returning some portion of it to the purposes the lodge was actually built for.

Be honest about who you are.

Lodges sometimes try to resolve the secrecy problem by being vague. They say things like, we’re a fraternal organization that does good in the community, without saying much more. This satisfies no one. Curious men who might join want to know what the experience is actually like. Community members want to know what the lodge stands for. Conspiracy theorists will fill the vacuum if you leave one.

You don’t have to reveal the degrees to explain that the degrees are a system of moral instruction built around ritual and symbol. You don’t have to invite the public into a lodge meeting to explain that your lodge meets twice a month, runs a scholarship fund, maintains a building that’s been in the center of this town since 1892, and is looking for men who want to be part of something that predates their grandfather. Say what you do. Say why it matters to you. People will respect this more than calculated mystery.

Let the women in the building.

This does not mean changing who is eligible for the degrees of Masonry, a question with complex jurisdictional dimensions and genuine disagreement among Masons. It means recognizing that a lodge where spouses, daughters, and families feel welcome is a lodge that integrates into people’s actual lives. A man whose wife has never been welcomed into a lodge building, who has never met any of his husband’s lodge brothers, who experiences Masonry as a thing that takes her husband away Tuesday nights, is not going to encourage him to stay active.

Lodges that have found success implementing revitalization programs are fostering inclusivity by involving wives, widows, and potential candidates. The familiarity and ordinariness of social gatherings, whether Saturday breakfasts or annual barbecues, make them so welcoming that they facilitate something extraordinary. These are not complicated innovations. They are applications of basic hospitality to an organization that sometimes forgot to offer any.

Show up when things go wrong.

The charitable history of Masonry was not built through endowments. It was built through men responding personally and directly to need. Masons opened a hospital during a cholera outbreak in 1850 California. Shriners drove cancer patients to treatment appointments. During the 1918 influenza epidemic, the Masonic Homes hospital opened its doors to community members who had no place else to go. During the several months the hospital took community patients, 82 people with no Masonic affiliation received the best treatment possible.

This kind of response, direct and personal and immediate, is what builds institutional credibility. Not a logo on a check. Masons showing up in their aprons because someone needed help and they had the capacity to provide it. Lodges that know their community well enough to identify that need and respond to it are lodges that will be missed when they’re gone.

The Harder Conversation

There are lodges that cannot be fixed. Some are too small, too financially strained, too far gone in attrition to recover. The honest thing to do in those cases is to consolidate. Two dying lodges that join together and commit to a shared future are more likely to build something real than two dying lodges that each preserve their charter number at the cost of all substance.

Consolidation is painful. Men have histories with their lodges, attachments to rooms and rituals and specific chairs where specific brothers once sat. This is worth honoring. It is not worth using as an excuse to avoid a decision that would actually preserve the institution.

The Grand Lodge system in the United States is decentralized by design, which means that innovation happens unevenly. Some Grand Lodges have implemented strong mentoring programs, strong educational standards, and meaningful accountability for lodge health. Others have not. A brother who is committed to the work can work within the system available to him. That means finding the brethren in his jurisdiction who are serious and working with them, regardless of which lodge they call home.

There is also a conversation about what success looks like that the fraternity has not fully resolved. If the purpose is to initiate worthy men into an order and spend time edifying each other while working to be better people in our lives and communities, then a lodge can fulfill that purpose with a smaller membership than the post-war peak. Not every lodge needs to have two hundred members to be a functioning, meaningful institution. A lodge of thirty active men who take the work seriously and are genuinely embedded in their community is worth more than a lodge of three hundred paper members who attend once a year.

The question is whether the thirty active men are actually doing the work, or whether they are thirty men who show up to maintain the habit of the institution without asking what the institution is for.

What This Requires

It requires honesty. Most lodges that are struggling know they are struggling. The conversation about it tends to be circular: we need more members, we can’t get more members without activity, we can’t have more activity without more members. This is a real problem. It is solved by deciding to do something anyway, with the people you have, and trusting that visible action will attract people worth keeping.

It requires patience. Lodge cultures don’t change in a year. A new Worshipful Master who comes in with energy and specific plans, and then hands the chair to someone else who undoes everything, has not accomplished much. The lodges that have turned themselves around are lodges where a small group of committed men sustained a consistent direction across multiple administrations. This is harder than it sounds. It is not impossible.

It requires personal investment. Not dues. Time. Showing up to events that feel unnecessary. Calling a brother you haven’t heard from in a while. Eating dinner with a new candidate before the meeting. Taking the extra hour to understand a symbol or a degree rather than reading the minimum required. None of this is dramatic. All of it compounds.

It requires a willingness to say what the fraternity is for and to hold the lodge accountable to that definition. An organization that cannot articulate its own purpose is hard to defend, hard to recruit for, and hard to be proud of. The purpose is not secret. It is stated in every first degree: to take a good man and make him better, to be a brother to all who share that commitment, and to apply the result in service to your community.

That is a purpose worth organizing around. It is also a purpose that currently goes largely unfulfilled.

The Argument in Plain Language

Freemasonry is an institution with a philosophy that matters, a tradition worth taking seriously, and a civic function that America desperately needs. It is in serious decline, not because the idea failed, but because too many lodges stopped doing the things that made the idea real.

The things that made it real were not meetings. They were not dues collections or officer elections or policy debates at Grand Lodge. They were men, known to their neighbors, trusted by their towns, who showed up when something needed doing. Men who carried a philosophical framework that reminded them what they were supposed to be. Men who took the obligation seriously enough to treat a brother’s need as their own responsibility.

That is what was built. That is what eroded. That is what can be rebuilt.

The community is not going to come to the lodge. The lodge has to go to the community. Not to recruit. Not to advertise. To serve. To be present. To be the kind of institution whose absence would actually be noticed.

Groups like the Masons offer a way to strengthen community, combat loneliness, fight polarization, and maybe even save democracy. That is not Masonic promotional material. That is a Harvard sociologist describing what civic organizations do and why their absence is consequential.

Your lodge can be that. It probably isn’t right now. That is the work.

It is good work. It has been good work for three hundred years. The tools are still in the apron. The question is whether the men wearing it are willing to use them.

Psychologist Jean Twenge has spent her career analyzing generational behavioral data, and when she reviewed the mental health metrics for American teenagers during that period, she later wrote that in all her years of tracking such data, going back to the 1930s, she had never seen anything like it. Major depressive episodes among teens increased by 50 percent in just a few years. The rise of the smartphone, Twenge determined, had disrupted the majority of teens’ lives, including the time they used to spend socializing in person and sleeping.

That was not a fringe observation, and it held up under scrutiny. Between 2011 and 2021, the number of teens and young adults with clinical depression more than doubled, according to national survey data. The critics who initially dismissed Twenge’s hypothesis have since had a harder time doing so.

The federal government eventually reached the same conclusion. In 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a formal advisory on social media and youth mental health. The advisory stated that up to 95 percent of young people aged 13 to 17 report using a social media platform, with nearly two-thirds using it every day and one-third using it almost constantly. Murthy did not stop at an advisory. By 2024, he was calling for warning labels on social media platforms comparable to those on tobacco and alcohol products, calling the mental health crisis among young people an emergency and social media an important contributor.

Warning labels. On social media. From the Surgeon General of the United States. That is where we are.

The CDC has since added its own findings to the record. Approximately 95 percent of high school-aged youth use a social media platform, with approximately one-fifth reporting almost constant use. And the consequences are not subtle. A CDC analysis found that frequent social media use was associated with higher prevalence of students reporting bullying, persistent sadness and depression, and thoughts of suicide. Nearly one in three high school students said they had experienced poor mental health most of the time during the 30 days before the survey, and more than one-third reported persistent sadness or hopelessness lasting two or more weeks.

According to CDC trend data, 22 percent of all U.S. high school students seriously considered attempting suicide in 2021, up from 16 percent in 2011. That is not a rounding error. That is a structural shift in the mental health of an entire generation, happening in near real time, with a documented timeline.

Twenge’s book, 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World, is a practical guide built on this evidence base. Her rules are sensible and achievable: delay smartphones until mid-high school, set firm limits on when and where devices can be used, keep them out of bedrooms, monitor what your kids are doing online, and model the behavior you want to see. These are not radical ideas. They require consistency, which is harder than it sounds. Twenge herself is not anti-smartphone: “This is not about taking the phone away. They are wonderful devices, but it’s limited use.”

The limits are the beginning. What you put in their place is the point.

The Displacement Problem, Quantified

To understand why screens cause harm, you have to understand what they replace. Time is not elastic.

Twenge’s peer-reviewed research, drawing on two nationally representative surveys involving over 506,000 adolescents, found that teens who spent more time on smartphones and social media were more likely to report mental health issues, while teens who spent more time on nonscreen activities including in-person social interaction, sports, exercise, homework, and print media were significantly less likely to report those issues.

The device is not simply a device. It is a substitute for something else. And what it substitutes tends to matter enormously.

Over half of American teenagers report spending four or more hours per day on screens. This pattern corresponds with roughly 27 percent of teens experiencing anxiety symptoms and 26 percent reporting depression. Every major mental health problem Twenge identified when she first raised the alarm has continued to rise in the years since. The trend has not reversed. It has deepened.

Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU, reaches similar conclusions through a complementary framework. His book The Anxious Generation traces what he calls the replacement of a play-based childhood with a phone-based one. Haidt documents that children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults, and that the play-based childhood began declining in the 1980s before being effectively dismantled by the phone-based childhood that arrived in the early 2010s.

The shift away from unsupervised free play toward highly structured schedules has impeded children’s development of crucial life skills and resilience. Overparenting has denied children the opportunities to build coping mechanisms that come from navigating adversity and failure on their own terms.

Both researchers arrive at the same conclusion: as Haidt has written, “If parents don’t replace screen time with real-world experiences involving friends and opportunities for independent activity, then banning devices will feel like pure deprivation, not like a world of opportunities opening up.”

That is the sentence most parenting conversations never reach.

How We Got Here: The Slow Removal of Childhood

The smartphone did not cause this crisis alone. It accelerated and completed a process that had been underway for decades.

In the 1950s and 1960s, school-aged children frequently spent extended periods outdoors unsupervised, biking to friends’ homes, exploring neighborhoods, and walking to school without adult accompaniment. These norms reflected a prevailing view that such autonomy was essential for developing self-reliance, with parents expecting children to resolve minor conflicts and navigate minor risks independently.

That began to change in the late 1970s and continued through the 1980s. Following several highly publicized cases of children who were kidnapped and murdered by strangers, parents began receiving messages that their children were in grave danger if unsupervised anywhere in public. In truth, the kinds of crime that frightened parents were and are extremely rare. The media played them up dramatically, and essentially the whole society bought into this fear.

By the mid-1990s, you risked being accused of negligence if you allowed your kids to play even on the block where you lived or to walk a few blocks to school. This was a cultural shift, not a rational response to actual risk. Crime rates were already falling. The perception of danger rose anyway.

As Boston College psychologist Peter Gray has noted, this is the first time in human history that children have not been free to engage in a wide range of independent activity. Children are designed by evolution to grow up with independence. The social experiment of removing it has obviously failed.

The data supports that reading. Over the past five decades, children have become progressively less free to play, roam, and explore without adult supervision. They are less free to occupy public spaces without a guard, less free to navigate peer conflict without adult intervention, and less free to hold part-time jobs where they can demonstrate responsibility and self-control.

The phone arrived into a childhood that had already been hollowed out. It filled the vacuum efficiently. And it made things significantly worse.

The Case for Nature

The evidence on what actually counteracts these effects is growing, consistent, and increasingly hard to ignore.

A 2024 study from the University of Glasgow, using GPS and accelerometer tracking to measure outdoor exposure with precision, found that children who spent just one hour per day in nature had a 50 percent lower risk of mental health issues. The benefits were even stronger for children from lower-income households.

A separate study published in JAMA Network Open in late 2024 examined what happened when researchers sent children outside during school hours. Spending two hours per week in a natural environment reduced emotional distress among 10- to 12-year-olds, with the greatest improvements observed in children who had the most significant mental health problems before the program began. The intervention was modest. Two hours per week. The results were not.

Research published in the British Journal of Psychiatry drew similar conclusions in a comprehensive meta-review. Nature prescriptions and green social prescribing, where health professionals formally or informally prescribe time outdoors, have shown moderate to large effects on improving depression and anxiety scores in adult populations, with growing interest in extending these approaches to children and adolescents.

Studies on outdoor adventure and experiential education programs specifically designed for youth tell the same story. Research examining the effects of outdoor adventure and experiential education programs found that participants demonstrated significantly higher resilience and significantly lower anxiety, depression, and hopelessness following the programs, with improved overall mental well-being as a measured outcome.

The mechanism here is not mysterious. Nature does not scroll. It does not send notifications. It does not optimize for engagement or exploit the dopamine pathways that app designers have spent billions of dollars learning to manipulate. The outdoors requires actual attention, actual decision-making, and actual effort. A trail does not care about your follower count. A fire that needs starting will wait until you solve the problem. And the weather does not adjust based on your preferences.

Research has linked backcountry and wilderness adventures to improved physical health, self-confidence, resilience, stress management, mental health, leadership, social emotional learning, social connections, and connection to nature. That is a broad set of outcomes from a single category of experience.

Self-Reliance Is a Skill, Not a Personality Trait

There is a persistent tendency to treat self-reliance as something children either have or do not have, as if it were genetic. This is wrong. Self-reliance is a competency. It is built through practice, in real conditions, with real stakes. It cannot be downloaded, it cannot be streamed, and it does not develop in a bedroom.

The question for parents is not simply how to reduce screen time. It is what to fill that space with. The answer needs to be something that demands something of the child.

This is where programs like Scouting America do something genuinely difficult to replicate. The outdoor program gives Scouts opportunities to acquire skills that make them more self-reliant through hiking, canoeing, and challenges they initially believe are beyond their ability. Attributes of character develop as they learn to cooperate under genuine outdoor conditions, including extreme weather, difficult terrain, and circumstances that cannot be resolved by asking someone else for the answer. Scouts plan and carry out activities from start to finish.

The structure of the program matters. It is not simply camping. The advancement system presents a series of surmountable obstacles. Scouts plan their own progress, advance at their own pace, and receive recognition for each achievement. The steps are designed to grow self-reliance and the ability to help others. Advancement is earned through demonstrated competence, not accumulated through time in seat.

That design is not accidental. Baden-Powell built the program around this premise over a century ago because he understood that young people develop capability through graduated challenge, not through observation or instruction alone. The patrol method, in particular, places youth in positions of real responsibility. The junior leader is not performing leadership. They are doing it, with real consequences for their patrol if they fail to plan effectively.

The research on long-term outcomes is substantial and recently updated. Scouting America commissioned The Harris Poll to conduct a study of over 3,100 adults examining the lasting effects of earning Eagle Scout rank, released in June 2026. The findings showed that Eagle Scouts report dramatically lower loneliness and sadness, significantly higher well-being and sense of purpose, stronger leadership capability, and more robust civic engagement than non-Scout peers.

The loneliness numbers deserve particular attention given the current environment. Only 11 percent of Eagle Scouts report frequent loneliness, compared to 23 percent of non-Scouts, even after controlling for income, education, age, and other demographic factors. About 62 percent of Eagle Scouts describe themselves as optimistic about the future.

Recall the earlier statistic: a third of high school students report persistent sadness or hopelessness. The Eagle Scout cohort shows loneliness rates half that of the general non-Scout population. These are adults. The program’s effects are not temporary.

The study also found that 95 percent of Eagle Scouts say they are happy with the person they are today, compared to 82 percent of non-Scouts. That is not a small gap for a survey of this scale.

Nine out of ten non-Scouts surveyed in the same study agreed that Scouting helps young people develop character, respect others, and become more likely to volunteer in their communities. Nearly two-thirds said America would be worse off without Scouting, and more than 70 percent said they would be more likely to trust someone if they knew that person had been a Scout.

That last finding is worth sitting with. People who never participated in the program, who have no personal stake in its reputation, trust Scouts more. That is not brand recognition. That is a track record.

An earlier three-year Tufts University study reinforces the program’s developmental impact at the front end. Researchers surveyed nearly 1,800 Cub Scouts and 400 non-Scouts, starting with no significant differences between the groups in character attributes. By the end of the study, Scouts showed striking improvements across multiple dimensions, with those who attended meetings regularly reporting higher outcomes virtually across the board. Showing up consistently turned out to matter. This will not surprise anyone who has run a troop or coached a youth team, but it is useful to have documented.

The Moral Dimension

Most of this conversation gets framed as a parenting question. It should be understood as something larger.

We have subjected an entire generation to a mass experiment without their consent and without adequate warning. We handed children devices designed by engineers whose stated professional goal was to maximize time on screen, placed those devices in their bedrooms, and then expressed surprise when rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply across the developed world.

The Surgeon General of the United States called it an emergency. The CDC has documented the correlation between social media use and suicidal ideation in teenagers. Researchers across multiple disciplines have spent years building the evidentiary case. The response from the companies whose products drove these outcomes has been, at best, inadequate and, at worst, deliberate obstruction.

Parents are operating in a culture that normalizes constant connectivity for children and treats outdoor independence as a relic. Parents who were kids themselves in the 1980s and 1990s played outside without supervision when crime rates were actually higher than they are today. The perception of danger rose while actual danger fell. We made childhood safer in the physical sense and more dangerous in the psychological sense.

We also eliminated the mechanisms by which children learned to handle difficulty. The transition from unsupervised free play to highly structured adult-managed schedules impeded children’s development of crucial life skills and resilience. Overparenting sheltered children from adversities and failures that constitute a natural and healthy childhood, denying them the opportunities to develop coping mechanisms.

The result is a generation that has been overprotected from the manageable and underprotected from the genuinely harmful. That is a failure of stewardship, and it belongs to adults.

Reversing it requires more than parental rules about screen time, though those rules are necessary and they should be enforced without apology or negotiation. It requires actively rebuilding the conditions under which children develop competence, resilience, and identity. That means real outdoor experience. Real responsibility. Real failure, followed by real recovery. Real work with real consequences.

What This Looks Like in Practice

None of this requires rejecting modern life. Twenge is not anti-technology. Haidt is not either. The argument is about proportion, sequence, and what we prioritize during the specific developmental window when it matters most.

A child who grows up without a smartphone until high school has not been deprived. They have been given time. Time to be bored and figure out what to do about it. Time to build friendships without a mediating screen. Time to develop a self before an algorithm tells them who they should be.

The practical application is simple, if not easy. Set firm limits on when and where devices are used. Enforce them without exception and without negotiation, because the moment you start negotiating, the limit ceases to be a limit. And then, critically, fill the space that opens up with something worth doing.

Get them outside. Sign them up for a troop. Take them camping. Make them cook a meal over a fire and eat it regardless of how it turns out. Give them a trail to navigate with a map and a compass, not a phone. Put them in a patrol with other kids and let the group figure it out, with guidance available but not constant.

As Haidt has described it, the norm we need is more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world, because we cannot meaningfully reduce screen time without giving kids back a childhood where they are doing things, going places, and exploring without constant adult management. Those experiences are much more engaging than an afternoon on Instagram, but only once kids have had the chance to find that out.

The research supports this at every level. One hour per day outside cuts mental health risk in half. Outdoor adventure programs produce measurable reductions in anxiety, depression, and hopelessness. Eagle Scouts report half the loneliness of their non-Scout peers, decades after they left the program. Tufts researchers documented measurable character development in Cub Scouts within three years.

These are not marginal effects. They are substantial, reproducible, and consistent across different methodologies and populations.

As Peter Gray has put it, this is the first time in human history that children have been systematically denied independent activity. They are designed by their nature to grow up with independence. The experiment of removing it has failed.

We know what works. We have the programs. We have the research. We have the trails, the campsites, the merit badge system, and over a century of documented outcomes.

What we need is the willingness to use them.

That tradition is still alive. It is also in trouble.

As of 2026, the Auxiliary counts roughly 18,000 members. That number matters for two reasons. First, it represents a significant drop from the roughly 26,000 members cited in recent years by DHS and the Auxiliary’s own recruitment materials, and older sources put the peak considerably higher. Second, the 18,000 who remain are not evenly distributed across the organization in terms of age, operational readiness, or actual activity. A meaningful portion of current membership is older, less operationally active, and not being replaced at anything close to a sustainable rate. The Auxiliary collectively logs over 4.5 million service hours annually and helps save around 500 lives per year while conducting more than 150,000 vessel safety checks. That output is real and valuable. But it is being produced by a shrinking pool of people who are, on average, getting older every year without enough younger members coming in behind them.

This matters to the Coast Guard in ways that go beyond the Auxiliary itself. The active-duty service is currently operating below its authorized enlisted end-strength by roughly 2,600 personnel even after a better-than-average recruiting year in fiscal 2024. By some projections, the shortfall was approaching 6,000 enlisted members and several hundred officers by 2025. According to a 2023 GAO report, the Coast Guard has needed to temporarily close some stations and decommission ships and patrol boats earlier than planned as a direct consequence of that personnel gap. A 2025 article in Naval Institute Proceedings described the Auxiliary’s potential plainly: the Boat Crew Program alone contributed the equivalent of 104 full-time personnel in 2019 through 199,000 work hours. In a service that is thousands of people short, that math is not trivial. The Auxiliary is not a luxury. It is a structural necessity that is quietly losing capacity at the same moment the active-duty side needs it most.

What follows is a practical guide for addressing that problem from both directions. It covers what is actually wrong, in specific terms, and what both sides need to do about it.

The numbers, honestly

To understand where the Auxiliary is, it helps to understand where it has been and what it has actually produced.

At its wartime peak, the Auxiliary put over 50,000 volunteers into service. Post-9/11 patriotic motivation drove another surge, bringing membership above 30,000 in the early 2000s. The 26,000 figure cited by DHS and Auxiliary recruiting materials represents a more recent plateau. The current estimate of approximately 18,000 represents a decline of nearly a third from that plateau, and the trend has been moving in the wrong direction for long enough that it cannot be attributed to a single cause or a temporary dip.

The Auxiliary collectively dedicates over 4.5 million service hours per year. Members save approximately 500 lives annually, assist 15,000 mariners in distress, conduct more than 150,000 recreational vessel safety checks, and teach boating safety to over half a million students. Every day, Auxiliary volunteers log more than 10,800 hours in on-water boating safety patrol, save an average of 11 distressed boaters, and complete roughly 548 vessel safety checks. One estimate credited the Auxiliary with saving taxpayers approximately $240 million in a single year through equivalent labor contribution.

That is what a functioning Auxiliary produces. The problem is not the mission. The problem is that the population capable of producing that output is contracting, aging, and in some areas not being replenished.

The economic argument is not complicated. The Coast Guard faces personnel shortages severe enough to force station closures and early ship decommissioning. The Auxiliary is a proven mechanism for generating mission-relevant capacity at minimal cost to the federal budget. The question of why that mechanism is not being maintained and grown aggressively is the question this essay is trying to answer.

The mission that doesn’t make the headline: Recreational Boating Safety

Before getting into what is wrong with the Auxiliary, it is worth being clear about what the Auxiliary is primarily for. The operational roles — boat crew, patrol, SAR support, radio watch — tend to dominate the conversation because they are visible and easy to measure. Someone gets rescued. A patrol logs hours on the water. A qualified crew completes a SAR case. These outcomes have names and case numbers and show up in command reports.

The Auxiliary’s primary statutory mission is something different. It is Recreational Boating Safety, the RBS program overseen by the Coast Guard’s Chief of Boating Safety and Chief Director of the Auxiliary, CG-BSX. Public Education. Vessel Safety Checks. Recreational Boating Safety Visitation Program contacts at marinas and boat ramps. These are the Auxiliary’s largest, broadest, and arguably most important contributions to public safety — and they are almost impossible to count in terms of lives saved, because the lives they save were never put at risk to begin with.

This is the indirect save problem, and it deserves serious attention.

Consider the data. According to the Coast Guard’s 2024 recreational boating statistics, approximately 70 percent of fatal boating incidents involved operators who had not received boating safety instruction. Put that number down and let it sit. Seven out of ten people who died on the water in 2024 did not have formal boating safety education. Only 15 percent of deaths occurred on vessels where the operator held a nationally approved boating safety education certificate. Drowning accounted for three-quarters of all boating deaths, and 87 percent of drowning victims were not wearing life jackets.

Every one of those data points represents a gap that the Auxiliary’s RBS mission exists to close. A boater who takes a public education course learns why a life jacket needs to be worn, not just stowed. She learns what operator inattention costs and why it is the leading contributing factor in accidents. She learns what to do in an emergency and what equipment she is required to carry and why. States with mandatory boater education requirements have seen measurable reductions in boating fatalities and injuries over the past two decades. States requiring boating education have seen a 20 percent reduction in fatalities. The Auxiliary is the primary delivery mechanism for in-person, community-based boating education in most parts of the country. That is not a supporting role. That is the mission.

The VSC program operates on the same principle. The Coast Guard recommends boaters get a free Vessel Safety Check from the Auxiliary, which helps ensure they meet federal safety requirements and have the necessary equipment aboard should an emergency arise. A VSC examiner who discovers an expired fire extinguisher, a missing throwable PFD, or a flare kit past its date is not completing a compliance exercise. She is identifying a gap in that vessel’s emergency readiness before the emergency happens. The family that corrects those deficiencies before the Fourth of July weekend does not drown. Nobody writes a press release about it. Nobody files an after-action report. It just doesn’t happen.

This is exactly what makes the RBS mission hard to defend in budget conversations and organizational priority discussions. The SAR case has a file number and a rescue photograph and a grateful survivor. The public education class that prevented the SAR case has none of those things. The VSC that identified a faulty bilge pump before it failed offshore is a line in an annual statistics report, not a story. The boater who took a seamanship course in February and made a sound decision in a squall in August is not in any database. She is just alive.

The Auxiliary’s public education program reaches hundreds of thousands of students annually. Its VSC examiners conduct over 150,000 vessel safety checks per year. Its RBS Visitation Program contacts at marinas, yacht clubs, and boat ramps add another layer of prevention outreach that reaches boaters who would never walk into a classroom. The cumulative public safety impact of all of this activity is enormous. It is also systematically undervalued in discussions of what the Auxiliary does and what happens when the Auxiliary shrinks.

This matters for the membership decline argument in a way that is not always made explicit. When a flotilla loses its qualified public education instructors — through aging out, through members leaving, through failure to train replacements — the courses stop running. When a flotilla loses its vessel examiners, the VSCs in that area decline. The gap does not get filled by anyone else. Active duty does not conduct VSCs at scale. State boating safety programs do not have the manpower. The Auxiliary’s RBS capacity is the Auxiliary’s RBS capacity, and when the Auxiliary contracts, it contracts.

According to the Coast Guard’s annual Recreational Boating Statistics report, operator inexperience and lack of safety education are consistently among the top contributing factors in boating accidents. The Auxiliary exists in large part to address that specific problem in the specific communities where its flotillas operate. It is not a supplement to some other program doing this work. In most places, it is the program.

The RBS mission also has distinct advantages from a membership development perspective that are worth naming. VSC examination, public education instruction, and marina outreach work do not require boat crew qualification, active-duty checkrides, or physical standards that present barriers to older or less physically active members. A retired teacher can become a qualified public education instructor and reach hundreds of students per year. A careful, methodical member who would never crew a patrol boat can qualify as a vessel examiner and conduct dozens of VSCs per season. The RBS mission is accessible, measurable, and locally impactful in ways that matter to communities that may rarely need SAR coverage but where boats are on the water every weekend.

For a declining Auxiliary trying to remain relevant and useful in areas far from active-duty stations, the RBS mission is not a consolation prize. It is the primary value proposition and the most defensible argument for the organization’s continued investment, growth, and support. If you need a reason to rebuild the Auxiliary, the 70 percent of boating fatality victims who never took a safety course is a good one.

What is actually wrong: The honest diagnostic

The Auxiliary’s decline does not have a single cause. It has several, and they compound each other. Treating any one of them in isolation will not fix the problem. The following is a realistic account of what is actually happening.

Membership is old and not being replaced

The Auxiliary has no mandatory maximum age, which is appropriate for a volunteer organization. But an organization that skews old without systematic recruitment of younger members is not just aging — it is gradually losing its operational capacity. Boat crew qualification, patrol operations, hands-on vessel examinations, and physical access to stations all require members who can show up regularly, complete training progressions, and sustain physical readiness. These are harder asks as a membership base ages without refresh.

The populations that have historically supplied the Auxiliary — retired military, boat owners, waterfront professionals — are still available, but they are not being recruited with any consistency or urgency. Meanwhile, the organizational culture in many flotillas has drifted in ways that make it less hospitable to the kinds of people who would bring in the energy and operational readiness the Auxiliary needs.

The culture problem is real and persistent

The Auxiliary’s own Flotilla Procedures Guide tells Flotilla Commanders to combat cliquishness and ensure no one feels like an outsider. The fact that this language appears in official guidance is itself evidence that cliquishness is a recognized problem. The fact that it persists despite that guidance means the policy alone is not solving it.

The specific dynamic looks like this. A flotilla is founded, attracts motivated members, develops a working culture, and over time that culture calcifies around the preferences of whoever ends up in leadership longest. Monthly meetings become social rituals with a predictable cast of characters, a predictable agenda, and a predictable outcome. The same handful of people rotate through the same positions. The institutional knowledge of how things work is held informally by a few long-tenured members and passed on through personal relationship rather than documented process. New members are welcomed at the formal level — they receive their enrollment paperwork, they are introduced at a meeting, they get added to the email list — and then largely left to figure things out on their own.

The social bonds within the long-tenured group are real and not easy to break into. Conversations before and after meetings stay within established circles. The references are to events, people, and decisions from years or decades ago that new members have no context for. A new member who does not own a boat, does not have a personal connection to someone already in the flotilla, and is not interested in spending three meetings learning whose term as Flotilla Commander ended in 2014 will quietly conclude that this organization is not for her.

This is not a character indictment of any individual. Long-tenured members who have dedicated years of service to the Auxiliary deserve respect for that commitment. The problem is not their presence. The problem is the absence of a deliberate system for integrating new members into the working culture of the organization, and the absence of accountability from above when that integration is clearly not happening. Organizations that do not build intentional on-ramps for new members do not usually notice the absence until the membership numbers start declining, and by that point the culture that caused the decline is thoroughly entrenched.

The practical result is that some flotillas have developed a reputation, justified or not, as social clubs for older boaters who happen to wear uniforms. That reputation circulates in the communities where the Auxiliary needs to recruit. Veterans who have done some research and heard this description from others will not show up to a meeting. The people most likely to be excellent Auxiliarists — operationally serious, physically capable, mission-focused — are often the people most likely to walk away from an organization that does not appear to share those values. The Auxiliary loses them before it has a chance to show them what the organization could be.

The recruitment pitch is weak

Most flotillas recruit the way unsuccessful amateur organizations recruit: by waiting for people to wander in. There is no systematic outreach. There is no regular presence in communities where potential members concentrate. There is no clear, compelling pitch that speaks to what a motivated, busy adult actually gets from joining.

The populations most likely to produce excellent Auxiliarists are not mysterious. Veterans understand military structure, hierarchy, and the concept of mission. They respond well to organizations that have clear purposes and defined roles. First responders — firefighters, EMTs, paramedics — operate in high-stakes environments and want meaningful volunteer work that matches their professional seriousness. Former Sea Scouts and JROTC alumni know service culture and are looking for places to continue it. Merchant mariners and commercial fishermen bring professional maritime skills that translate directly into operational roles. Teachers, healthcare workers, IT professionals, and nonprofit operators can fill the staff officer roles — public affairs, operations, training, communications — that keep the machine running. None of these populations are being deliberately targeted by most flotillas.

The pitch, when it exists at all, tends to focus on the Auxiliary’s history, the prestige of the uniform, and the general concept of service. These are real selling points, but they are not sufficient for a working professional in her thirties who has two hours on a Saturday morning and wants to know what she will actually be doing and why it matters. The pitch needs to lead with mission and practical contribution. It can mention the uniform later.

The new-member experience is inadequate

Even when the Auxiliary successfully recruits a new member, it frequently fails to retain them through the early qualification stages. The pipeline from enrollment to operational readiness is genuinely complex. New members progress through Approval Pending, Initially Qualified, and Basically Qualified statuses before they can qualify in most operational roles. Each stage has dependencies on background investigations, coursework, mentors, and in many cases active-duty signoffs that are not consistently available.

A new member who joins a flotilla with genuine enthusiasm and motivation can find herself stuck for months, waiting on a security investigation clearance, trying to find a mentor who will schedule sessions, or waiting for an active-duty checkride opportunity that does not seem to materialize on any predictable schedule. Six months of that and she is done — not publicly, not dramatically, she just stops showing up. She does not tell the Flotilla Commander she is leaving. She just leaves. The flotilla has no systematic way to catch her before she goes because it has no systematic onboarding process to begin with.

The Auxiliary has expanded online training meaningfully — as of 2023, over 30 courses are available through Naval Postgraduate School connections. But online coursework addresses only part of the qualification problem. Hands-on qualification for operational roles requires physical access to equipment, active-duty evaluators or designated QEs, and a training schedule that new members can actually count on. Where that infrastructure is weak, no amount of online coursework gets anyone to qualified status.

Active-duty support is inconsistent

This deserves its own extended treatment, which it receives later in this essay. The short version is that the Auxiliary cannot produce operationally qualified members without active-duty cooperation on training, signoffs, facility access, and mission assignment. Where that cooperation is strong, the local Auxiliary tends to be strong. Where it is weak, the local Auxiliary tends to be weak. The pattern is consistent enough and widespread enough that it cannot be attributed purely to local personality differences. It reflects a structural failure to institutionalize the Auxiliary partnership at the command level.

What the Auxiliary must do for itself

Structural problems need structural solutions. The Auxiliary cannot wait for active duty to fix everything. There are substantial improvements available within the organization’s own control, and they need to happen simultaneously with whatever the active-duty side does. Here is where to start.

Rewrite the pitch

The Auxiliary’s public-facing message needs to lead with mission and practical contribution. Not history. Not tradition. Not uniform prestige. Those things matter to people who are already in the organization. They are not what motivates a 35-year-old Navy veteran who is considering where to put his Saturday mornings, or a 42-year-old EMT who wants to serve her maritime community and is evaluating whether the Auxiliary is worth her time.

The pitch should be something like this: the Coast Guard is thousands of people short. Your community’s waterways need coverage. The Auxiliary trains people to real Coast Guard standards in boating safety, search and rescue support, aids to navigation, communications, public affairs, and administrative support. You will do real work with real accountability, beside people who take it seriously. That is a better pitch for the people who are most likely to become excellent members.

The pitch also needs to be delivered in more places. Every veterans service organization meeting, fire station, maritime business, fishing tournament, yacht club, boat show, marina, and community college with a maritime program is a recruiting opportunity. Most of them go unused. A one-page brief, a clear point of contact, a working flotilla website updated in the last twelve months, and a member willing to show up and talk for fifteen minutes will produce more results than a trifold from 2009 sitting in a station waiting room.

Build a structured new-member experience

Every member who joins a flotilla should receive a clear, written 90-day roadmap within the first two weeks of enrollment. This roadmap should name their assigned mentor, list the specific things they need to complete and in what order, identify the next training milestone and when it is scheduled, and provide a direct contact for questions that do not get answered at monthly meetings.

This is not complicated to build. It requires a template, an assignment process, and a check-in structure. A 30-day phone call from the FC or VFC. A 60-day review of where the member stands in their training progression. A 90-day evaluation of whether they are on track or stuck, and if stuck, a plan for getting unstuck. None of this requires active-duty involvement. The flotilla can build and run it entirely on its own. The fact that most flotillas do not have this is a choice, not a constraint.

The mentor assignment is particularly important. A new member with a named, accessible mentor who takes the role seriously and schedules regular contact is dramatically more likely to complete their qualifications than a new member who is told “ask around and someone will help you.” The Flotilla Procedures Guide already identifies mentorship as a function. The gap is execution.

Set and enforce real activity standards

An Auxiliary membership that costs nothing in terms of active participation is not a membership. It is a mailing list. Every member should be contributing something measurable to the flotilla’s mission output, even if what they contribute is not operational. The Auxiliary has 16 mission categories. VSCs. Public education. Patrol crew. Communications watch. Public affairs. ATON verification. Administrative unit support. There is meaningful work available for members who cannot or do not want to be operational. But the key word is work.

Flotilla commanders should be having honest, direct conversations with members who have not logged a mission activity in six months or more. Not accusatory conversations. Direct ones. The question is simple: what do you want to contribute, and is there a fit? If a member genuinely has nothing to offer and no interest in changing that, releasing them from membership is not unkind. It is honest. And it maintains the credibility of the membership count, which matters for how the Auxiliary presents itself to the active-duty community and to potential recruits.

Confront the clique problem directly

This requires courage from Division and District leadership, because the people running calcified flotillas rarely have internal incentives to reform. The culture that has developed over years is comfortable for them. It is not comfortable for people trying to join.

Division leadership should be conducting regular functional health checks on flotilla operational status, not just compliance reviews. A flotilla that cannot show recent mission output, cannot demonstrate an active new-member pipeline, and cannot document that its training and qualification pathways are actually being used has a problem that no paperwork will fix. Addressing that problem means someone with authority over the flotilla telling its leadership, plainly, that the current trajectory is unacceptable and providing specific performance expectations with a timeline.

The language for this already exists in Auxiliary policy. The Flotilla Procedures Guide is explicit about the obligation to combat cliquishness and treat every member with dignity and inclusion. The problem is not that the policy is missing. The problem is that it is not enforced from above consistently enough to change behavior at the flotilla level.

Diversify the recruitment targets deliberately

The Auxiliary has historically drawn heavily from retired military, boat owners, and waterfront hobbyists. Those populations are still valuable. They are not sufficient.

The deliberate target list should include: veterans of any service branch, particularly those in the 25–50 age range who want to continue serving but are not eligible or interested in reserve service; active first responders in fire, EMS, and law enforcement who have operational mindsets and physical readiness; maritime professionals including merchant mariners, commercial fishermen, harbor pilots, and marine surveyors; educators who can staff public boating safety programs; IT and communications professionals who can support the Auxiliary’s growing technical needs; healthcare workers who can contribute to auxiliary medical readiness roles; and community and nonprofit leaders who can bring skills in public affairs, event coordination, and community outreach.

The Sea Scout connection deserves specific mention. Sea Scout ships operating near Auxiliary flotillas represent a natural pipeline of young people who already understand maritime traditions, know how to work within a uniformed organization, and have been taught the basics of seamanship and service. Flotillas that maintain active relationships with Sea Scout ships and make clear that the Auxiliary is a natural next step for aging-out Sea Scouts will find better recruiting results than those that do not.

Former Coast Guard active duty and Reserve members are another underleveraged pipeline. They already know the organization, already have relevant training, and often retain strong affection for the Coast Guard mission. Many of them do not realize that rejoining as an Auxiliarist is an option. Making that option visible and welcoming those members back with appropriate recognition of their prior service is straightforward and should be deliberate policy.

Maintain a serious digital presence

A flotilla that does not maintain a functional, current web presence and some form of social media activity is invisible to the populations it needs to recruit. This is not optional in 2026. It is table stakes.

A functional web presence means a site that has been updated within the past six months, contains accurate meeting information and a clear enrollment contact, shows recent mission photos or descriptions, and loads on a mobile device. A serious social media presence means posting at least monthly, featuring real mission activity, and responding to questions and comments from the public. Neither of these requires a dedicated staff member. They require a member with basic digital literacy and a commitment to treating the flotilla’s public image as worth maintaining.

The storytelling opportunity here is significant and unused. Auxiliary members do genuinely interesting work. Patrol on the water during a busy holiday weekend. Vessel safety checks that helped a family identify a faulty fire extinguisher before they headed offshore. Boating safety courses that reached children who had never had formal water safety education. ATON verification work that identified a buoy discrepancy before it became a navigation hazard. These stories are available. They are almost never told in ways that reach people outside the flotilla.

What active duty must do

The Auxiliary cannot rebuild itself without active-duty partnership. The relationship is not optional. The Auxiliary’s operational roles — boat crew, patrol, radio watch, ATON support — all require qualification infrastructure that only the active-duty side can provide. The Auxiliary’s mission standing depends on the active-duty community treating it as legitimate, not as a peripheral organization that gets tolerated when convenient and ignored when not.

The GAO has documented the Coast Guard’s personnel shortfall in terms that should make the Auxiliary look like exactly what it is: a partially developed resource that could significantly reduce operational strain if properly supported. According to the GAO, the Coast Guard in fiscal year 2023 lost more than 3,800 enlisted members while recruiting only 3,126, and remained roughly 2,600 enlisted members short of its workforce target even after a stronger fiscal 2024. The consequence has been temporary station closures and early decommissioning of vessels. The Auxiliary, run well, does not solve all of that. But it addresses a meaningful portion of it at essentially zero cost in personnel billets.

The Proceedings article on retention from 2025 was direct: undermanned Coast Guard units need to foster relationships with local flotillas and use the Auxiliary as a source of manpower willing to provide operational and logistical support. Allocating Auxiliarists to these roles mitigates capability gaps and bolsters watch rotations, reducing the burden on active-duty members at under-strength units. The same article noted that nearly half of respondents in the Coast Guard’s 2023 Employee Retention Survey cited organizational leadership as one of the top five factors in their decision to leave the service. An active-duty member who is perpetually short-staffed, whose watch rotation never provides adequate rest, and who cannot get off the station for training or personal reasons is more likely to leave. An Auxiliary that picks up administrative watches, public education, VSC programs, ATON verification, and event coverage directly relieves some of that pressure. The math runs in both directions.

Assign a liaison at every station

Every Coast Guard station should have a designated Auxiliary Liaison — a named, specific individual responsible for maintaining relationships with the Auxiliary units in the area. Not “call the station.” A person, with a name, who attends flotilla meetings, tracks members in training, resolves signoff bottlenecks, and communicates unit needs to Auxiliary leadership. This should be a standing assignment in the command’s battle rhythm, not something that happens to work well when one BM1 personally cares about volunteers.

The liaison role is not glamorous. It is the kind of collateral duty that gets added to whoever has bandwidth, which is another way of saying whoever draws the short straw. That is the wrong framing. The Auxiliary liaison is the primary interface between the Coast Guard unit and a volunteer workforce that, in a properly functioning relationship, generates the equivalent of multiple additional full-time personnel. Managing that relationship well is worth the time investment.

The liaison should attend at least one flotilla or division meeting per quarter. This is not optional. An active-duty member who has never attended a flotilla meeting does not understand who the Auxiliarists are, what they are capable of, or what they need. The meeting attendance is how that knowledge gets built.

The liaison should also maintain a simple tracking document: every Auxiliarist currently in training, what they are working on, what they are waiting for, and who at the station can resolve whatever is blocking them. This does not need to be elaborate. A shared spreadsheet with names, status, and notes is sufficient. The value is that training bottlenecks become visible rather than invisible. Invisible problems do not get solved.

Publish what you actually need

Every sector, station, and ANT should be able to produce a short, plain list of what the Auxiliary can help with this quarter. More patrol coverage during boating season. ATON verification on the upper harbor. Admin watch support two nights per week. Event staffing for the National Safe Boating Week marina visits. Training admin for the upcoming boat crew qualification cycle. A recruiting presence at the fishing tournament in June.

This sounds obvious. It is not being done consistently. What happens instead is that the Auxiliary waits to be asked, the station waits for the Auxiliary to offer, and both sides continue operating in parallel without capturing the potential of the relationship. Publishing needs solves this. It gives Auxiliary leadership something concrete to build programming around and makes the ask explicit rather than theoretical.

The Auxiliary Manual authorizes wide administrative and operational support to Coast Guard units. The point is not to discover new legal authorities. The point is to make actual use of the authorities that already exist, in ways that are visible and measurable.

Make training consistent and predictable

The biggest single thing active duty can do for the Auxiliary is provide reliable, consistent training access. Not occasional training when things line up. Scheduled, predictable training that members can plan around.

This means monthly boat crew signoff opportunities with published dates. It means station familiarization nights before each boating season. It means radio watchstander practical training scheduled on a calendar that members can see. It means published checkride windows so members know when their evaluation is going to happen and can prepare accordingly. It means joint patrol preparation sessions before busy seasons so Auxiliarists and active-duty crew are not meeting each other for the first time on the water.

The current state in many areas is that training happens when an individual active-duty member makes it happen, which means it is dependent on that member’s schedule, motivation, and awareness of the Auxiliary’s needs. When that member rotates, the relationship starts over. That is not a training program. It is an informal arrangement that works for some members and fails others.

The Auxiliary Patrol (AUXPAT) guidance is clear about what training is for: it prepares Auxiliarists to perform safe, effective patrols. The training exists to produce qualified people capable of real missions. It is not a box to check before the organization can claim compliance with its own policies. Building a training pipeline that actually produces qualified people requires scheduled access, designated evaluators, and a timeline that members can see and work toward.

Stop making signoffs a favor

A new member who completes all available coursework, attends every meeting, and does everything right should not spend six months waiting for a checkride that never quite gets scheduled. That member will leave. She will tell others about the experience. The Auxiliary will not get another chance with her.

Signoffs are not a courtesy extended to volunteers. They are how the Coast Guard produces qualified personnel who can fill real mission gaps. The failure to make signoffs consistent and accessible is the failure to invest in the organization’s future capacity. Commands that are chronically understaffed and simultaneously allow Auxiliary training to stagnate are making their own problem worse with a delay built in.

Every station should have a clear policy on who can sign what, when checkride opportunities are scheduled, and what the backup is when the primary evaluator is unavailable. The “ask Bob” system, where one person holds all the signoff relationships and 300 unread emails, is not a system. It is a single point of failure that guarantees delays and frustrated volunteers.

Use Auxiliarists in visible, meaningful roles

The Coast Guard should put Auxiliarists where the public can see them doing competent, mission-relevant work. Marina safety events. Boat shows. Harbor festivals. Fishing tournaments. School safety programs. National Safe Boating Week activities. Regatta patrols. These are roles where Auxiliary presence has direct public safety value and simultaneously communicates the message that the Auxiliary is a real, serious organization doing real work.

Active-duty presence alongside Auxiliarists at these events multiplies the effect. It validates the mission in the eyes of the public. It validates the Auxiliarists’ work in the eyes of the Auxiliarists themselves. And it creates the kind of natural recruiting environment where someone in the crowd watches the operation and asks how to get involved.

One of the Auxiliary’s strongest recruitment arguments is also one of its least frequently made: you can work alongside the United States Coast Guard, in uniform, doing real mission work, without enlisting. For many people who want to serve but have careers, families, or health considerations that preclude active military service, this is a compelling offer. It needs to be made clearly, publicly, and regularly.

Open facility access

A flotilla with no physical connection to its supported station is not an auxiliary. It is an independent boating safety organization that uses a similar uniform. The physical connection matters because it is where training happens, where relationships are built, where Auxiliarists come to understand how the station actually works, and where active-duty members learn to see Auxiliarists as part of the team rather than occasional visitors.

Every station should be providing reasonable access to classrooms, training rooms, the boat ramp, and conference space for flotilla meetings and training sessions. This is not a special accommodation. It is a basic infrastructure investment in the relationship that the Coast Guard depends on for supplemental capacity. Units that lack a working ramp relationship with their local flotilla are forgoing patrol coverage they could have. Units that cannot offer a classroom for flotilla meetings are making themselves less useful to the relationship.

Access also means invitation. Auxiliarists should be included in relevant all-hands meetings, safety standdowns, awards ceremonies, and community events. Not every event. Enough that the relationship is real and visible. An Auxiliarist who has been inside a station, has met the command, and understands how the unit operates is more effective and more committed than one who comes to a boat ramp twice a year and otherwise has no connection to the people they are supposed to be supporting.

Build the ATON partnership deliberately

ATON work is a natural Auxiliary lane and one of the most underutilized opportunities in the relationship. The Coast Guard is responsible for maintaining approximately 49,000 federal aids to navigation and an equivalent number of private aids. The scale of that responsibility makes it physically impossible to inspect all of them with active-duty ANT resources. The ATON guidance is explicit: it is beyond the capability of the Coast Guard to inspect all ATONs and PATONs, and it falls to the Auxiliary to assist in verifying the majority of private aids.

Qualified Aid Verifiers can verify the position and characteristics of PATONs, report discrepancies in federal aids, assist in chart updating for NOAA and the Army Corps of Engineers, and support bridge and waterway observation. This is mission-critical work that requires qualified people to do well. District Waterways Management and ANT units should be building deliberate local Auxiliary teams for this function, coordinating training and qualification for Aid Verifiers, and providing the assignment letters that authorize members to conduct this work year-round.

In practical terms, this means ANT and District Waterways Management (dpw) staff sitting down with local Auxiliary leadership at least once before each operational season, identifying the specific PATONs in the AOR that need annual verification, assigning those verification responsibilities to qualified Aid Verifiers in writing, and building a feedback loop for discrepancy reporting. The AV qualification requires on-the-job training coordinated with the dpw, which means active-duty staff have to invest time upfront to produce Auxiliarists capable of operating independently. That upfront investment generates year-round return on sectors of the waterway that would otherwise get infrequent Coast Guard attention.

The ATON mission has a particular advantage for recruiting purposes: it is not physically demanding in the way that boat crew operations can be, it can be conducted year-round outside the normal patrol season under certain conditions, and it produces clearly measurable outputs. A retired mariner who no longer wants to crew a patrol boat in summer heat can still qualify as an Aid Verifier and contribute meaningfully to the mission. A member who lives on the water year-round and conducts regular boating already has the platform and the opportunity to report discrepancies as a matter of routine. ATON work is a meaningful and legitimate path for members who cannot or do not want to qualify in operational crew roles, and more flotillas should be developing it systematically rather than treating it as a specialty interest.

Make recruiting a joint enterprise

Active-duty recruiting and Auxiliary recruiting operate as separate systems, largely unaware of each other at the local level. This is a missed opportunity for both sides.

A prospective member who contacts a Coast Guard recruiter and is told clearly that the Auxiliary is an option worth exploring — with a specific local flotilla contact, a clear description of what Auxiliarists do, and an honest explanation of how it differs from active duty or Reserve service — is more likely to pursue that contact than someone who hears about the Auxiliary from a trifold in a waiting room. Coast Guard recruiters should be able to describe the Auxiliary accurately and refer prospects who are interested or who do not meet active-duty standards. That is a straightforward training gap with a straightforward fix.

The reverse pipeline matters too. Auxiliary flotillas attract people who might be candidates for active-duty or Reserve service — veterans looking to restart a military career, younger members who discover through Auxiliary service that they want full-time commitment, retired members who want to return in a different capacity. Flotilla leadership should know how to describe the Reserve and active-duty pathways clearly and make warm referrals when members express interest in more intensive service.

Public affairs events where both active-duty and Auxiliary personnel are present create natural recruiting environments for both programs. A joint presence at a marina safety day, a fishing tournament, or a community emergency preparedness event allows each side to reinforce the other. A civilian talking to an active-duty member at a boat show may not be ready to enlist but may be exactly the right person for a flotilla. An Auxiliary member who runs into a young veteran at a VSC event may be the reason that veteran looks into the Reserve. These conversations happen when the people having them know enough about each other’s programs to make them productive.

The pitch to the public should be simple and stated directly: there are multiple ways to serve alongside the Coast Guard, and the Auxiliary is the most accessible. You do not need to enlist. You do not need military experience. You need to be a U.S. citizen, be willing to complete training, and want to do real work. For most American communities within reach of navigable water, there is a flotilla nearby and a mission that needs the kind of people most likely to be reading a recruiting brochure in good faith.

Recognize performance systematically

This is inexpensive and critically important. Volunteers are not paid. Their compensation is purpose, belonging, and the knowledge that their work is seen and valued by the organization they are serving. A unit that consistently uses Auxiliary labor and never formally acknowledges it is communicating something to every Auxiliarist, even if the communication is unintentional. The message is that their contribution is expected but not valued. That message produces attrition.

Recognition does not require money or elaborate ceremony. Letters of appreciation take fifteen minutes to draft and matter significantly to the recipients. A Flotilla Commander who receives a letter from the Commanding Officer of her supported station, acknowledging specific contributions by name, will share that letter with her members. Those members will feel like part of the team. Commandant Letters of Commendation, when earned, carry real weight and require only the willingness to submit the paperwork. Achievement Medal nominations for exceptional contributions are appropriate and available. Public acknowledgments in after-action reports, mentions in command social media posts, and inclusion in unit news items are all low-cost and high-value.

The standard should be that any Auxiliary activity that produces meaningful mission output gets documented and reported through command channels. If Auxiliarists staffed a National Safe Boating Week marina event and conducted 60 VSCs, that goes in the command’s weekly activity report. If an Auxiliarist discovered a PATON discrepancy that would have posed a navigation hazard, that gets noted. If Auxiliary radio watchstanders covered a watch rotation that freed up an active-duty member for mandatory training, that gets counted. Making Auxiliary contributions visible in command reporting creates accountability on both sides. It also creates the record that supports recognition nominations.

The flip side is that recognition requires attention to actual performance. Blanket awards for participation regardless of output cheapen the system and communicate that command has not been paying attention. The goal is specific, earned recognition that reinforces the outputs the Auxiliary needs more of and that tells members who are working hard that the Coast Guard has noticed. That signal, delivered consistently, is more effective at retaining motivated members than almost anything else the active-duty side can do.

Teach standards, not contempt

Active duty should bring professionalism, not condescension. Some Auxiliarists will need sharpening. That is expected and normal in any volunteer organization. The appropriate response is to sharpen them, not to complain about the quality of volunteers while refusing to invest in their training.

An active-duty member who grouses about Auxiliarists not meeting standards while simultaneously making training access difficult, delaying signoffs, and failing to attend any flotilla meetings is not a victim of poor volunteer quality. He is producing the outcome he is complaining about. This is weather reporting dressed up as leadership. It is not useful.

What is useful is teaching radio discipline to an Auxiliarist who needs it. Correcting uniform and bearing standards directly and early. Walking through boat crew expectations before the first patrol. Explaining how the station actually operates, who to call for what, and what the chain of command looks like when things go wrong. These investments take time and pay real dividends. An Auxiliarist who is properly trained and clearly treated as part of the mission will perform at a higher level and will stay in the organization longer.

A 90-day rebuild model

If a station wants to move from managed neglect to a functional Auxiliary partnership, the following framework is a reasonable starting point. It assumes a motivated command and an Auxiliary liaison who takes the assignment seriously. It does not assume unlimited time or resources, because neither exists.

In the first 30 days: Identify every flotilla and division in the station’s AOR. Some commands are surprised to discover how many Auxiliary units are operating in their area with little to no contact with the station. Build that list first. Assign the Auxiliary Liaison and give that person clear written guidance on what the role requires: quarterly meeting attendance minimum, training coordination responsibilities, tracking of members in qualification pipelines, and regular reporting to command on Auxiliary readiness status. Schedule and conduct a joint meeting with Flotilla Commanders, VFCs, and key staff officers including the FSO-OP, FSO-MT, FSO-PA, and FSO-HR. At that meeting, publish the station’s top 10 operational needs where the Auxiliary can contribute, in order of priority. Identify every Auxiliarist currently in some stage of training and build a list of what they are waiting for. Identify specifically which members are stuck in AP or IQ status and what is blocking their progression — security investigation delays, missing mentor contact, unavailable evaluators, unclear requirements. Blocking items that can be addressed by the station should be addressed in the first 30 days.

In days 31 through 60: Run one joint training day with specific qualification work. This should include at minimum one boat crew practical session with evaluation opportunities and one radio watchstander practical session. Schedule the next three checkride windows and deliver those dates in writing to all Flotilla Commanders so members can plan around them. Build a shared public-facing recruiting calendar that includes both active-duty and Auxiliary presence at upcoming community events. Identify three specific operational support opportunities before the boating season peaks — patrol coverage for a specific weekend, ATON verification on a designated waterway sector, admin watch coverage for a specific watch rotation — and assign Auxiliarists to those opportunities with clear coordination instructions. Start a shared training tracker that shows every member in training, their current status, their assigned mentor, their next milestone, and the specific blocking item if they are stuck. This document should be accessible to both the Auxiliary Liaison and to Flotilla leadership.

In days 61 through 90: Put Auxiliarists on actual support missions. At least for the first iteration of each new mission type, an active-duty member should be present. Not to supervise, but to ensure the operational integration is working correctly and to catch any gaps in training that need to be addressed. Complete at least a portion of the delayed signoffs — not all of them necessarily, but visible progress. A new member who was stuck for four months and gets a long-delayed evaluation completed in this period will tell others about the experience. That matters for recruiting. Run one public outreach event with joint active-duty and Auxiliary presence. Submit recognition nominations for members who have earned them during this period. Conduct a short after-action review with Flotilla leadership, specifically asking what worked, what did not, and what the Auxiliary needs that it is not currently getting. Publish the next quarter’s support plan and deliver it to Flotilla Commanders in writing so they can build their own programming around it.

None of this is complicated. All of it requires intentional choices. The 90-day model produces enough early wins and visible progress to demonstrate that the relationship can work, which creates the momentum needed to sustain a genuine partnership over time. The failure mode is treating the 90 days as a one-time project rather than the beginning of a continuous institutional practice.

Measuring what actually matters

The Auxiliary has historically reported success primarily in hours contributed. Hours are easy to count and hard to dispute as evidence of effort. They are also an unreliable indicator of operational impact. A flotilla can log significant hours in meetings, training events, and travel without producing measurable output in any mission category. Hours can mask mediocrity at scale, and they often do.

The measures that actually indicate organizational health are output-based. In recruiting, the relevant numbers are prospects contacted, applications started, members enrolled, and six-month retention rates — because an organization that recruits ten members per year and retains four has a different health profile than one that recruits ten and retains eight. In training, the measures are members who moved from AP or IQ status to qualified operational roles, signoffs completed, and checkrides passed per quarter. In operations, the numbers are patrols completed, qualified crews available for each boating season, and mission hours in actual Coast Guard support roles rather than internal Auxiliary training activities. In recreational boating safety, the output is VSCs completed, public education students reached, marina visits conducted, and public contacts made. In ATON work, it is verifications completed, discrepancies reported, and chart updates submitted, each of which represents a real contribution to navigation safety on specific waterways. In unit support, it is watch hours, administrative tasks completed, and events supported.

An Auxiliary that is performing well in these categories will also have strong hours numbers. An Auxiliary that has only strong hours numbers may or may not be performing well in anything measurable. The distinction matters because it determines whether the Auxiliary is producing actual capacity for the Coast Guard or the appearance of capacity.

Both the Auxiliary and the active-duty side benefit from measuring outputs rather than inputs. For the Auxiliary, it creates accountability within the organization and gives leadership a clear basis for recognizing high performers and having honest conversations with low contributors. For the active-duty side, it creates visibility into what the Auxiliary is actually delivering and makes it easier to calibrate how much investment in training and coordination is justified. A supported unit that knows its flotilla conducted 200 VSCs last season, qualified three new boat crew members, and covered 40 admin watch hours has a clear factual basis for treating that flotilla as a genuine operational asset. A unit that only knows its flotilla logged 500 hours across unspecified activities does not.

The blunt summary

The Auxiliary has declined from its recent peaks because several things went wrong simultaneously and neither side addressed them with urgency. Membership has dropped from the upper 20,000s to roughly 18,000. The remaining membership is aging. Cultural insularity in some flotillas has made those organizations less attractive to the people they most need to recruit. Training access from the active-duty side has been inconsistent enough to frustrate new members and slow qualification pipelines. And the structural relationship between stations and flotillas has been dependent on individual personalities rather than institutional design.

None of this is irreversible. The Auxiliary has been operational since 1939. It has survived dramatic changes in maritime environment, technology, organizational culture, and the nature of American volunteerism. It still produces 4.5 million service hours per year and saves hundreds of lives. The foundation is real. The gap between what the Auxiliary currently produces and what it could produce, given a functional active-duty partnership and serious internal reform, represents one of the most cost-effective capacity improvements available to the Coast Guard.

The Auxiliary needs to recruit deliberately, with specific targets, specific pitches, and structured onboarding for everyone who comes in. It needs to look at flotillas where culture has calcified and hold leadership accountable from the Division level. It needs activity standards that mean something operationally. It needs new-member experiences that produce qualified contributors rather than administrative participants. It needs a digital presence that reflects an active, serious organization doing real work. And it needs to stop relying on passive recruitment and institutional inertia to maintain a membership base that has been visibly declining for years.

The active-duty side needs to designate Auxiliary Liaisons at every station and give those assignments real institutional weight rather than treating them as collateral duty afterthoughts. It needs to publish what it needs from the Auxiliary and then actually use what the Auxiliary delivers. It needs to make training access consistent and predictable rather than dependent on individual motivation or good luck. It needs to make signoffs systematic rather than informal. It needs to put qualified Auxiliarists in visible roles, document their contributions in command reporting, and recognize their performance publicly and specifically. And it needs to treat the Auxiliary as what it legally and organizationally is: a component of the Coast Guard, not an accessory to it.

The number is worth repeating. In 2019, the Auxiliary Boat Crew Program alone produced 199,000 work hours, equivalent to 104 full-time Coast Guard personnel. The active-duty Coast Guard is currently short somewhere between 2,600 and 6,000 people, depending on the accounting. The Auxiliary, operated at its potential across all mission areas, does not fill all of that gap. But it fills a portion of it, at no cost in authorized billets, using people who are motivated to serve and asking only for meaningful work, consistent training, and the basic respect of being treated like they belong.

That is not a complicated ask. The Auxiliary has been making it, in various forms, for 85 years.

It is past time to answer it.

It sounds like a small shift. It’s not. One question builds communities. The other hollows them out, slowly and politely, while everyone involved tells themselves they are simply making reasonable choices.

The evidence of what those reasonable choices have produced is no longer easy to ignore — and it looks remarkably similar whether you are looking at it from London, Sydney, Toronto, or Chicago.

The Numbers

In the United States, Robert Putnam documented the collapse of civic participation in his 2000 book Bowling Alone. Between 1973 and 1994, the share of American adults who served as an officer or committee member for a local club or organization fell by 50 percent. Attendance at club meetings of any kind declined by 58 percent between 1975 and 2000. Formal membership in at least one of sixteen types of voluntary associations fell from 75 percent to 62 percent between 1974 and 2004, according to the U.S. Senate Joint Economic Committee’s Social Capital Project.

Fraternal and civic organizations absorbed the worst of it. The Shriners lost 32 percent of their membership between 1979 and 1996. The Jaycees lost 44 percent. The Elks were down 21 percent from their peak. These are not outliers. They are the pattern.

Youth organizations tell a particularly sharp version of the story. Scouting America — formerly the Boy Scouts of America — peaked at 6.5 million members in 1972. By 1998 it still had 4.8 million. By 2019 that had fallen to under 2 million. Between 2019 and 2021, it lost nearly half its remaining membership, dropping to around 1 million. The organization filed for bankruptcy in 2020 and paid a $2.5 billion settlement over decades of institutional abuse — a scandal that did not emerge from nowhere, but from a culture that prioritized institutional reputation over the safety of the children it was supposed to serve. The Girl Scouts of the USA lost nearly 30 percent of its membership in the same two-year window.

The United States is the most documented case, but it is far from the only one.

In the United Kingdom, the National Council for Voluntary Organisations found that weekly volunteering by adults dropped from 23 percent in 2019 to just 14 percent in 2023 — nearly halved in four years. The Mothers’ Union had 538,000 members in the 1930s and fewer than 100,000 by 2009. Membership in Britain’s main political parties halved between 1960 and 1980, then halved again.

In Australia, the Bureau of Statistics found that participation in civil and political groups fell from 18.7 percent in 2010 to 9.4 percent in 2019. Participation in social groups — sports clubs, hobby groups, community organizations — dropped from 62.5 percent to 50 percent in the same period. Canada and Australia both recorded double-digit percentage drops in volunteering since 2019.

Church attendance, one of the most consistent proxies for community embeddedness across the English-speaking world, has declined across virtually every denomination in every country in this group. In the United States, church membership fell below 50 percent for the first time in Gallup’s eight-decade record in 2020. In 2000, 44 percent of Americans had attended a service in the past seven days. By 2023, that figure was 32 percent.

This is not an American phenomenon. It is a phenomenon of prosperous, consumption-oriented societies that have been doing well enough, for long enough, to believe the infrastructure of community would sustain itself without anyone tending to it.

It won’t.

The Checkbook Substitute

People in these countries did not stop caring about causes. They found a way to care that costs them nothing.

Research from the University of Texas and the University of Wyoming, tracking membership patterns from 1994 to 2004, found that while active membership in civic organizations was declining, checkbook membership was rising. More people were donating to national organizations, signing online petitions, sharing causes on social media. They were consuming the feeling of participation without doing any of the actual work.

This is the consumer mindset applied to civic life. You browse the options. You select the cause that aligns with your values. You complete the transaction. The receipt arrives, conscience intact, schedule uninterrupted, comfort preserved.

What you did not do: sit across from someone you disagree with and work something out. Show up when you didn’t feel like it. Take a turn running a committee nobody wants to chair. Be accountable to a group of people expecting you to be there next week.

There is a related problem that gets discussed even less. Communities and organizations are also damaged from within — not just by the people who leave, but by the people who stay and conduct themselves poorly. The member who takes credit for others’ work. The leader who runs a volunteer organization like a personal domain. The longtime insider who makes newcomers feel unwelcome until they stop coming back. The person who shows up only when there is something to gain and disappears when there is real work to do. These are not minor inconveniences. They are corrosive. A single person of poor character in a position of influence can hollow out years of trust faster than demographic trends ever could. And because civic organizations run on goodwill and volunteer labor, they have limited defenses against it.

The consumer model of civic engagement optimizes for the experience of the participant. The old model optimized for the needs of the community. These are not the same thing, and the gap between them has been widening for sixty years.

The people who built the institutions now struggling to stay open understood something the checkbook generation largely does not: a community is not a service you subscribe to. It is something you are either actively building or passively allowing to decay. There is no neutral position. Every person who opts out shifts a little more weight onto the people who did not. And every person who participates in bad faith shifts weight onto the people who showed up honestly.

A Necessary Honesty About the Institutions Themselves

Before going further, something needs to be said that defenders of civic institutions often avoid.

Some of these organizations have earned their decline.

The fraternal lodge that has not done a meaningful community project in fifteen years, that exists primarily to give its aging members somewhere to gather on Friday nights, that treats new members as an interruption to existing routines — that organization has a membership problem that is partly its own fault. The civic club whose meetings consist of the same twelve people relitigating the same internal disputes, with no outward orientation and no discernible impact on anything beyond its own continuation, is not a victim of public indifference. It is a case study in institutional inertia.

And sometimes the problem is not indifference but conduct. Organizations that tolerated abusive leadership, covered up misconduct, or quietly protected insiders at the expense of members did not just fail the people directly harmed. They burned through the social trust that voluntary organizations depend on. People do not return to places where they were treated badly. They do not recommend those places to their neighbors. They do not tell their children to join. The reputational damage from a decade of looking the other way can outlast the specific incident by a generation.

As Theda Skocpol and others have documented, the civic organizations that thrived historically were not inward-facing social clubs. They were cross-class, outward-oriented institutions that connected local action to broader purpose. The American Legion advocated for the GI Bill. The Fraternal Order of Eagles championed Social Security. The PTA shaped public education policy. These were not groups that met to discuss their own membership numbers. They were groups that used their collective weight to get shit done.

Many of today’s surviving fraternal and civic organizations have lost that outward orientation. Their projects, where they exist, tend to be modest and self-referential. They talk a great deal about how important they are to the community while the community moves on without noticing.

Scouting is not exempt from this critique. The institutional decline of Scouting America is partly a product of consumer-society withdrawal — fewer parents willing to volunteer, fewer kids prioritizing structured commitment over individual recreation. But it is also a product of an organization that spent critical decades managing internal controversies, accumulating legal liability, and making branding decisions while the program itself drifted. A membership dues cost that rose from $10 in 2009 to over $100 today has made Scouting less accessible to the families who might benefit from it most. That is a management failure, not just a cultural one. And the abuse scandal that cost the organization $2.5 billion was not primarily a financial crisis. It was a character crisis — one that accumulated over decades because enough people in enough positions of authority decided that protecting the institution mattered more than protecting the people inside it.

The point is not to dismiss these institutions. It is to say that the argument for civic participation is not an argument for the preservation of any particular organization regardless of its current usefulness or conduct. It is an argument for the function — showing up, contributing, building something larger than yourself, and treating the people around you with basic decency — and that function can only be performed by organizations genuinely committed to it.

The institutions worth defending are the ones still facing outward, and still earning the trust of the people they ask to walk through the door.

What Gets Lost

In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic. About half of American adults reported meaningful experiences of loneliness. A 2024 Gallup survey estimated roughly 52 million American adults struggle with it regularly. One in five reported feeling lonely most of the day.

The health consequences are not abstract. Social isolation increases the risk of premature death by 29 percent — roughly equivalent to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. It raises the risk of heart disease, stroke, and dementia. Among older adults, chronic isolation increases dementia risk by approximately 50 percent. Social isolation among the elderly alone accounts for an estimated $6.7 billion in excess Medicare spending every year in the United States.

These figures are American because that is where the most comprehensive research lives. But the underlying dynamic is not unique to America. Loneliness surveys in the UK, Canada, and Australia consistently show comparable rates. The causes are the same: the structural supports for social connection have been thinning out across all of these societies simultaneously, for the same reasons.

Some of those reasons are systemic. Some are behavioral. A community where people routinely treat each other poorly — where unkindness is unremarkable, where commitments are made and not kept, where looking out for yourself is the only principle anyone trusts — does not hold together. It fragments. The formal organizations go first. Then the informal ones. Then people stop trying, because trying has too often meant being let down by someone who was not holding up their end.

When people are not embedded in communities that look after them, the cost does not disappear. It transfers to public systems — hospitals, emergency services, government programs — that are less efficient, less personal, and far less capable of providing what a neighbor or a fellow member actually can. The National Health Service in Britain, Medicare in Australia, and public health systems everywhere are partly absorbing the cost of a civic life that used to be handled locally, voluntarily, and without an invoice.

The consumer mindset says: I did not cause this person’s situation, so it is not my problem. The math says otherwise. A society in which everyone optimizes for personal convenience and no one invests in the people around them produces a very large bill, and it gets distributed across everyone whether they agreed to pay it or not.

The Ideology Nobody Admits To

The consumer mindset did not arrive with a manifesto. It arrived through a thousand small rationalizations, each one reasonable on its own.

I am too busy. My schedule is complicated. I give money, which is just as good. I will get involved when the kids are older. I do not have the bandwidth right now. There are people better suited to this than me.

Each of these statements is sometimes true. As a general operating philosophy, they add up to a life lived entirely in receipt of what others have built, with nothing flowing back.

The more corrosive version is not the person who withdraws but the person who participates without contributing. Who joins for the status, stays for the social access, and treats every interaction as a transaction to be won. Who volunteers only for the visible work. Who has strong opinions about how things should be run and no interest in doing the running. Who takes more than they give, consistently, and considers this a reasonable arrangement. Who treats the patience and goodwill of others as a resource to be used rather than a trust to be honored.

Every organization has people like this. The healthy ones have enough people of genuine good character to absorb them. The struggling ones often do not. And when the balance tips, something shifts in the culture of the organization that is very hard to reverse. People of integrity notice. They find somewhere else to put their energy, or they stop putting it anywhere. The people who remain are, on average, less committed to the actual mission. The organization becomes less effective and less able to attract people worth having. The decline compounds.

The deeper ideology underneath all of this is the idea that the individual is the primary unit of social life — that personal time, comfort, and preferences are the correct inputs for every decision, that what one owes the people nearby is essentially nothing beyond basic legal compliance, and that character is a private matter with no public consequences.

This worldview is so thoroughly embedded in contemporary culture across the English-speaking world that it barely registers as a worldview. It just feels like common sense. The alternative — that living in a place creates genuine obligations to that place and its people, that some portion of your capacity belongs to your community by default, that how you treat people in ordinary daily interactions compounds over time into something that either holds a community together or pulls it apart — sounds almost quaint.

But it is the premise on which every functioning community in history has been built.

What Membership Actually Does

There is a reason Alexis de Tocqueville spent so much time on voluntary associations when he wrote about democracy in 1835. He was not romanticizing them. He was observing that they did something specific: they trained people in self-governance. In showing up. In being useful. In treating collective problems as personal responsibilities. In conducting themselves in ways that made others willing to work alongside them.

When you join something and stay, you learn to coordinate with people you did not choose. You learn that your preferred outcome is not always the group’s outcome. You develop obligations — the expectation that you will show up even when inconvenient, that you will be accountable to something outside yourself. You are also, whether you intend to be or not, observed. People learn whether you keep your commitments. Whether you behave the same way when no one important is watching. Whether your word means anything. Reputation in a voluntary organization is built slowly and lost quickly, which turns out to be a reasonably accurate model for how it works everywhere else.

Youth organizations, at their best, exist to transmit both the habit of contribution and the standards of conduct that make contribution sustainable. A young person in a well-run program is not just learning how to camp or earn a badge or run a meeting. They are learning what it means to be reliable. To be honest about what they can and cannot do. To take responsibility when something goes wrong rather than finding someone else to carry it. To treat the people around them with consideration rather than using them as props.

These are not soft skills. They are the qualities that determine whether a community functions or fractures. They are learned, or they are not. And the window for learning them is not as wide as people tend to assume.

What Is Not Going to Fix It

Technology is not going to fix it. Online community is real and useful for many things. It is also, structurally, another consumer product. You log on when you want, leave when you are bored, curate your experience, and exit any interaction that becomes uncomfortable. It is connection on demand, which is precisely the wrong model for building the kind of trust that communities run on. Online interaction also tends to strip out the social cues that regulate conduct in person, with predictable results. The friction is the point, and the friction is exactly what the digital environment is designed to eliminate.

Government is not going to fix it. Governments across the English-speaking world have issued strategies, advisories, and frameworks on social cohesion and loneliness. Some of this is useful at the margins. Policy can build infrastructure. It cannot build character. It cannot make someone decide that their neighbors’ problems are, to some meaningful degree, their problems too — or that how they treat those neighbors in ordinary daily life has consequences that extend well beyond themselves.

A campaign is not going to fix it. A hashtag is not going to fix it. None of these things ask anything of you, which is precisely why they are so popular and so consistently ineffective.

And stagnant institutions defending their own existence are not going to fix it either. An organization whose primary purpose has become its own survival, that mistakes continuity for contribution, that tolerates poor conduct because addressing it would cause internal discomfort — that organization is not a solution to civic decline. It is another expression of the same underlying problem.

The Honest Assessment

The civic decline documented here is sixty years old across the societies where it has been measured. The forces that drove it have not reversed. The institutions still holding on are aging faster than they are recruiting.

What does reverse it is people deciding to show up — to organizations worth showing up for, doing work that faces outward, in service of people beyond their own membership roster. People who contribute more than they take. Who behave with integrity when it is inconvenient. Who treat the building of community as a serious obligation, and who understand that their conduct within that community is not a private matter.

Not because it is easy. Not because the organization is perfectly run or the meetings are efficient or the other members are always enjoyable company. Because they live somewhere, and living somewhere has always meant owing something to the people you live among. Not as a vague sentiment. As a practical daily commitment.

The communities where this is still understood are noticeably different from the ones where it stopped being understood. More resilient. More functional. Better at absorbing hard times without coming apart. The difference is not geography or demographics or luck. It is the accumulated result of enough people deciding, over enough time, that they were going to contribute something rather than simply consume what others had built — and that they were going to be the kind of person others could count on while doing it.

That pattern holds whether you are looking at a suburb of Manchester, a neighborhood in Melbourne, a small city in Ontario, or a town in the American Midwest. The problem is the same. So is the solution.

Most people, if they are honest, already know which kind of community they want to live in.

Fewer are willing to be the reason it exists.