ACLI member companies manage $8.5 trillion invested in the U.S. economy — and most people have never heard of them. Chavern joined Brody Mullins and Lisa to talk about what it cost the industry to fly under the radar (hint: $24 billion), why conventional wisdom in Washington is now dangerous, and the one thing nobody in power is thinking about.

If you’ve been following how Washington really works — and why the old playbook keeps failing — this is the conversation to catch.

Drops Tuesday. [SUBSCRIBE LINK]

Wondering if your communications strategy is keeping up with the current environment? Start with the Comms Checkup. (https://fridayreporter.com/comms-checkup)

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That’s where my conversation with Jeff Dool…

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“There are so few pathways for young people to come to D.C. and to do so especially if they don’t have family money, if they can’t afford to sort of take a risk.”

“Our politics have become sort of yet another fandom, yet another entertainment arena. And I don’t think that’s particularly healthy from a civic perspective.”

“The ability to go out and find facts in the real world is going to end up being more valuable than ever.”

TAKEAWAY

In a media moment full of doom and gloom, Alyssa’s clearest argument is an optimistic one: the same tools that have destabilized the old journalism business model are about to unlock a generation of journalists whose instincts were never fully matched by the platforms available to them. The nerds are coming — and they’re going to be incredible.

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Not because of what we know about it. Because of what we don’t.

By now, most politically engaged people have followed the story of Congressman Tom Kean Jr.’s extended absence from Congress and the campaign trail while dealing with a health issue. By all accounts, he’s recovering and intends to seek reelection, which is welcome news. What I find fascinating isn’t the health story itself. It’s the fact that in a political environment where virtually nothing stays private, so little information has emerged about one of the most recognizable political figures in New Jersey.

That observation immediately brought me back to another New Jersey political mystery. For years, the best-kept secret in the state was the identity of Wally Edge. Political insiders read him, candidates worried about him and reporters chased him. While political operatives spent countless hours trying to figure out who was behind the byline. Everybody knew Wally Edge. Nobody knew it was David Wildstein.

Today, of course, everyone knows David. His New Jersey Globe has become required reading for anyone trying to understand New Jersey politics. When I interviewed him several years ago for The Friday Reporter, he was already running the Globe. But like many people who spent time in and around New Jersey politics, I first knew him as Wally Edge, the anonymous observer who always seemed to know what was happening before everyone else.

Back then, the mystery was David Wildstein. Today, the mystery is Tom Kean Jr.

What makes the Kean story so unusual is that it runs contrary to everything I learned during my years in New Jersey politics. Before moving to Washington, I spent nearly a decade working on campaigns, serving in government and lobbying in Trenton. That’s long enough to understand how information actually moves through the state. Contrary to popular belief, New Jersey politics isn’t fueled by gossip as much as it’s fueled by relationships. The same people have known one another for years, sometimes decades. They’ve worked campaigns together, served in administrations together and competed against one another often enough to know where all the bodies are buried. Information moves quickly because those relationships exist.

But relationships don’t just spread information. They also create trust.

That’s the part I keep coming back to when I think about Tom Kean Jr. We’re talking about a sitting member of Congress representing a district that could help determine control of the House. We’re talking about someone carrying one of the most recognizable names in New Jersey politics. Under ordinary circumstances, months of absence from Congress, public events and campaign activity would generate an endless stream of leaks and anonymous sourcing. Instead, remarkably little has surfaced. In fact, the only reporter who appears to have spoken directly with Kean during much of this period was David Wildstein, which is a fitting twist given his place in New Jersey political history.

The simplest explanation may also be the most New Jersey explanation. The Keans have occupied a unique place in the state’s political culture for generations. Tom Kean Sr. built one of the most respected political brands in modern New Jersey history, earning goodwill that extended far beyond Republican circles. Whether you agreed with him politically or not, he was viewed as someone who approached public life with seriousness, discipline and decency.

People often assume New Jersey politics is incapable of keeping a secret because it is so intensely political. My experience has been almost the opposite. New Jersey can keep a secret when the people involved decide it’s worth keeping. The same network of relationships that can spread information across the state in a matter of hours can also close ranks when circumstances call for it. Looking at the Kean story, I can’t help but wonder if that’s exactly what happened.

As someone who spent years in New Jersey politics and now watches it from Washington, that’s the part I find most interesting. That beneath all the noise, New Jersey remains a relationship business.

For years, the best-kept secret in New Jersey politics was the identity of Wally Edge. The Tom Kean Jr. story may be the closest thing we’ve had since.

That’s this episode.

Deirdre Walsh has been covering Capitol Hill since 2006 — CNN first, then NPR, now NOTUS, where she’s helping lead a newsroom that is genuinely doing something different. I’ve known Deirdre for years, and this is one of those conversations where I kept thinking: more people should hear this.

We got into a lot of things. How being a parent changed the stories she pitched — when Congress was debating a social media bill and she was simultaneously fighting her teenager about Discord, she knew that story from the inside in a way no briefing book could give her. The camaraderie of the Capitol Hill press corps — the informal COVID pool, the shared files, the reporter-to-reporter trust that outsiders almost never see. The shrinking number of members she can trust not to spin her, and why that matters more than it might seem.

And a few things that surprised even me. There is a pickleball court on the fifth floor of the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Ted Cruz plays basketball there. Kirsten Gillibrand plays tennis. The Pickleball Caucus has converted it twice a week. I did not know this.

But the story I keep thinking about is the STOCK Act loophole she cracked in 2012. She covered the bill for months. A source offhandedly mentioned that the House and Senate were interpreting the rules differently. She started pulling on that thread with her colleague Dana Bash. What they found: one chamber’s interpretation let congressional spouses trade on insider knowledge without ever having to disclose it. They reported it. Congress closed the loophole a few days later. “You always dream of making Congress react to your reporting,” she said. That’s the dream and she lived it.

The advice she carries from her first job — watching Judy Woodruff prepare — is simple: do the work you can control. Be ready. Then adjust.

That one lands.

If you haven’t been paying close attention to what’s happening over there, now is the time to start. In a moment when most Washington newsrooms are contracting — the Washington Post went from roughly 1,000 to 400 people in three years — NOTUS is doing the opposite. It’s attracting some of the best reporters in the business, investing in a serious fellows program, and breaking news every week.

This week, I sat down with two of its newest and most high-profile additions: Kadia Goba, who came to NOTUS from the Post (via BuzzFeed News), and Paul Kane, who spent 19 years and three months at the Post before the February 4th layoffs became what he called his “before and after” moment.

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Both of them cover Capitol Hill every day. And both of them see things most people miss.

PK’s framing stuck with me: the public already has a brutally low opinion of Congress — a 10% approval rating in Gallup. But even with that as the baseline, most people still don’t understand how little is actually getting accomplished. Last year was the lowest legislative output in recorded history. The Senate spent three-quarters of its time processing executive nominations. The noise of apparent conflict gives the impression that things are happening. They aren’t.

The counterintuitive insight that surprised me most: the Freedom Caucus — the most conservative bloc in the House — are actually among the biggest supporters of the mainstream press. They beeline for Manu Raju’s camera after every vote. They give reporters their cell numbers. If Speaker Johnson ever tried to curtail press access, PK says the Freedom Caucus would revolt. I believe him.

There’s also a genuinely hopeful note in this conversation. The incoming freshman classes of 2026 weren’t in Washington on January 6th. They don’t carry the same scar tissue. PK thinks that matters. So do I.

It’s a conversation that left me more optimistic about journalism — and more clear-eyed about Congress — than I’ve been in a while.

Watch the full episode on YouTube

I sat down with Chad Peace, the voter advocate and attorney behind the More Choice initiative and the Independent Voter Project. If you’ve heard of California’s top-two primary — the system where the two highest vote-getters in a primary advance to the general, regardless of party — Chad was one of the architects. He’s spent years in courtrooms and state legislatures arguing for something that sounds deceptively simple: that the right to vote should belong to you, the individual, not to the party you join.

The conversation that stuck with me was about incentives. Right now, our election system rewards division. You don’t have to win by being good — you can win by making your opponent look terrible. That’s not a bug in the system. It’s the design. And it’s why we keep electing people who are better at tearing things down than building consensus.

More Choice — Chad’s proposed next step beyond the top-two — would advance four or more candidates to November and give voters the ability to rank their preferences. The idea is simple: if second- and third-place votes matter, you can’t win just by going negative. You have to actually persuade people who don’t already agree with you. That changes the calculus completely.

I also appreciated how clear-eyed Chad is about the opposition. Both parties — left and right — want to get rid of the top-two. They call it a “jungle primary” (a term he correctly identifies as deliberately pejorative). Their solution? Go back to closed primaries, where party members pick the candidates and everyone else chooses from whatever’s left in November.

His response: that’s not reform. That’s consolidating power.

Chad grew up between a Republican family on his mom’s side and a Kentucky Democrat on his father’s. They never fought at the dinner table. They respected each other. He believes most voters are actually like that — closer to the middle than our political system reflects. The system just isn’t built to show it.

This one is worth your time, whether you follow election reform closely or you just found yourself standing in a voting booth last November thinking: really? These are my only options?

Full episode is on YouTube now.

— Lisa

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I wanted to give teams a way to answer that question honestly. So I built one.

The Comms Checkup is a structured self-assessment built around five pillars of effective association communications. You score your program channel by channel, find out exactly where the gaps are, and get specific recommended next steps — pillar by pillar.

It includes a 12-page framework guide, a scoring worksheet and an action guide. You can work through the whole thing in an afternoon. Find The Comms Checkup here.

If you are a paid subscriber to this newsletter, reply “checkup” and I will send you a discount code.

If you know a communications director, executive director or senior staff member at a trade association or nonprofit who could use an honest look at their program — forward this along.

Lisa

I’ve worked with Kasia personally. She is the real thing. And bringing her onto The Friday Reporter felt long overdue, because what she does for founders and executives is genuinely hard to describe until you experience it — and I wanted to try.

We talked about a lot in this episode. Why most systems fail solo entrepreneurs (hint: they built it for someone else’s business). How to actually integrate AI without generating what Kasia very accurately calls “slop.” And the thing I’ve gotten the most value from in our work together: how to have the hard conversations you’ve been avoiding.

Her framework for that is deceptively simple. Make the decision before you go in. Strip to one fact. Then stop talking. She said something I think about every time I’m about to have a difficult conversation: your job is not to manage the other person’s emotions. Your job is to stay grounded enough to have the conversation at all.

There’s a story near the end about a client who had been avoiding a phone call for two weeks — a conflict of interest situation with real money on the line. Kasia helped her prepare, and she made the call that night. Three minutes. No blowup. No fallout. And the outcome was better than if she’d taken the new client in the first place. That’s not magic. That’s just what happens when you stop rehearsing and start doing the actual work.

This one is for every founder who is running — really running — and can’t quite figure out why the battery never feels full.

Two weeks. Four conversations. Two shows. And the same question threading through all of it: what happens when technology moves faster than the institutions built to govern it?

I didn’t plan for that to be the theme. It just kept showing up.

THE FRIDAY REPORTER

Kathryn Mitchell left Capitol Hill to help build the $50 billion CHIPS for America program at the Department of Commerce — from scratch. “Moving to CHIPS was a risk,” she told me, “and it paid off.” Now she’s at DLA Piper, helping clients — some working out of literal garages — navigate the semiconductor ecosystem her old program was built to create. The line that stayed with me: “AI can’t fix the whole challenge we face.” The physical world still has to build the fabs, clear the permits, sign the contracts. The bipartisan CHIPS Act passed under Biden; it’s being implemented under Trump. Two very different approaches. She’s watching Congress closely.

Then Matthew Cutts of Dentons came in and told me something I’ve been chewing on since: Congress is now approaching AI the way it should have approached social media — with collective urgency, because every member remembers getting caught behind. That shared institutional memory is quietly producing unusual bipartisan alignment. He also made the boardroom point plainly: CEOs who used to treat Washington as a nuisance have learned — sometimes painfully — that this administration can move a company’s stock price. Political retaliation isn’t hypothetical anymore. It’s in the risk model.

THE DECIDERS

Tom Emmer became the first sitting member of Congress to join The Deciders. The House Majority Whip describes his job the way a coach would: “It’s the best coaching job I’ve ever been entrusted with. Your job is to put people in a position where they can be successful.” Then he told us about the phrase that changed how he thinks about counting votes: “kamikaze politicians.” Members who used to threaten to fly the plane into the building, he said, “now will fly the plane into the building.” That’s the room he works in every day.

And then there’s Linda Moore. The CEO of TechNet joins Brody and me on The Deciders this Tuesday — and paid subscribers are hearing this first.

Moore’s team is tracking more than 1,000 AI-related bills across 50 states right now. Eight regional executive directors embedded in the state capitals that matter most. A 50-state advocacy program, 25 different issue sets — from hardware and software to drones, fintech, and autonomous vehicles — with an 89% legislative success rate this year. Her warning: “Adoption of AI is lagging here in the U.S. compared to other parts of the world.” Fear and misunderstanding are slowing things down. Her answer isn’t a press release. It’s presence.

Here’s the thread I keep pulling on: four conversations, four vantage points — a semiconductor lawyer, a corporate strategist, a congressional vote-counter, and a 50-state tech advocate — all describing the same collision. Technology is outrunning the institutions designed to govern it. The people doing something about that gap don’t usually make the front page. They’re the ones I’m trying to find.

🎧 The Friday Reporter with Kathryn Mitchell → [link]

🎧 The Friday Reporter with Matthew Cutts → [link]

🎧 The Deciders with Tom Emmer → [link]

🎧 The Deciders with Linda Moore → drops Tuesday, May 19 — paid subscribers get an early link!

You’re receiving this because you subscribed. Forward it to someone in the room where these decisions are being made.

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While the headlines suggest gridlock and dysfunction, Cutts offers a more nuanced—and surprisingly hopeful—view: much of the real work is happening out of sight, where relationships, preparation, and bipartisan problem-solving still shape outcomes.

The conversation explores how CEOs are recalibrating their approach to government, why the next political shift is already influencing boardroom strategy, and how emerging policy battles—from AI to crypto—are moving faster than the institutions built to regulate them.

Key Takeaways

• The real action in Washington is off-camera
  Committee work, relationship-building, and early positioning are driving outcomes long before issues reach the headlines.

• Government is now a core business risk
  CEOs are paying closer attention to Washington than ever before, as policy decisions increasingly impact bottom lines in real time.

• 2026 is already shaping strategy today
  Companies are preparing now for a potential shift in House control—and the policy and oversight changes that could follow.

• New policy battles are outpacing the system
  AI and crypto are forcing bipartisan alignment in unexpected ways, even as Congress struggles to keep up with the speed of innovation.

Why This Conversation Matters

This episode pulls back the curtain on how influence really works in Washington today. It’s not just about ideology—it’s about timing, preparation, and understanding where decisions are made before they become public.

For anyone working at the intersection of business, policy, or communications, this conversation is a reminder: if you’re only following the headlines, you’re already behind.

Kathryn spent nearly a decade in government, moving from Capitol Hill to the Pentagon to the Department of Commerce, where she served as chief of staff for the CHIPS R&D office at NIST. She helped stand up the $50 billion CHIPS for America program — essentially from scratch. Earlier this year she moved to DLA Piper, where she now helps tech companies navigate the government landscape she used to sit inside.

This conversation covers a lot of ground. We talked about the origin story of the Chips and Science Act — passed bipartisan under Biden, now being implemented differently under Trump — and what Kathryn is watching to gauge whether the U.S. is actually getting this right. (She says we won’t know for a decade or two. But she knows exactly what signals to track right now.)

We also got into something I find genuinely fascinating: the role of relationship-building in Washington. Before you can change a policy, before you can land a government contract, before your innovation can make it out of the garage and into a lab — you build the relationships. That’s what Kathryn does every day for her clients, and she explains why it’s the foundation of everything else.

A few things I’m still thinking about from this conversation:

Her point that AI and semiconductors are “inexplicably tied” — but that AI won’t solve the physical-world challenges of building fabs, navigating permitting, or standing up domestic production. That nuance matters a lot right now.

Her career advice: “Wear your honors lightly.” Don’t aim to be the smartest person in the room. Aim to be the one who keeps learning. I’m going to borrow that one.

And her lightning round answer on Washington: “It is both a marathon and a sprint every day.” That about sums it up.

This episode drops today — wherever you listen to podcasts. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did recording it.

— Lisa

The best conversations I have — whether on The Friday Reporter or The Deciders — tend to happen in the space between what’s being reported and what’s actually going on. This week gave me two of them.

THE FRIDAY REPORTER

Holly Otterbein at Axios is covering a presidential race that most political media hasn’t started paying attention to yet. The 2028 Democratic pre-primary is already underway — candidates are in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina right now — and Holly is one of the only reporters in the field. While she’s there, she’s also watching something subtler: AI and campaigns are already entangled in ways that most coverage has barely touched. When a voter asks a chatbot who to vote for, campaigns want to influence that answer. It’s SEO for LLMs. Nobody’s writing that story yet, either. Holly is.

She also had one of the most clear-eyed takes I’ve heard on Kamala Harris: she’s the most underestimated 2028 candidate in the field, and a lot of DC Democrats are deliberately looking the other way. The early polling among Black Democratic voters tells a different story.

THE DECIDERS

Patrick Dorton joins Brody Mullins and me on The Deciders Tuesday — and he arrived with a story I hadn’t heard before. In the 1990s, Dorton deliberately leaked the contents of a private Senate Democratic caucus meeting to The Washington Post. The purpose: expose senators quietly criticizing President Clinton behind closed doors and protect his boss, Senator Tom Harkin. “The White House certainly was appreciative,” he told us. Dianne Feinstein was not.

Dorton is the Founder and CEO of Rational360, and his career — Clinton White House, chief spokesman for Arthur Andersen during the Enron collapse, two decades of navigating corporate clients through Washington — is a masterclass in how influence actually gets applied. His message for anyone operating in D.C. right now: conservative media is no longer a niche strategy. Those reporters have the cell phone numbers of the president and vice president. If you’re not thinking about that lever, you’re already behind.

Two conversations. Two shows. One thread: the people who get ahead are the ones paying attention to the story before everyone else notices.

🎧 The Friday Reporter with Holly Otterbein → [link]

🎧 The Deciders with Patrick Dorton → [Preview link — drops Tuesday, May 5]

Sign up here to get early access

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In this conversation, Holly breaks down the fault lines fracturing the Democratic Party right now: it’s not just progressive versus moderate anymore. It’s generational, regional, ideological, and increasingly shaped by the Israel-Gaza divide. She explains why Kamala Harris is more of a 2028 factor than Washington insiders want to admit, why Gavin Newsom may be the only Democrat who truly understands the attention economy, and why the Maine Senate primary is a perfect case study in everything the party is wrestling with at once.

Holly also goes deep on a story she wants to keep digging into: AI in campaigns. Democrats, she says, are behind — and the race to shape what chatbots say about candidates may be the new search engine optimization. Plus, the quiet pivot among 2028 hopefuls on AI data centers: yesterday’s economic win is becoming today’s political liability.

And on the craft of political journalism itself — how do you stay independent when you’re embedded in the vortex of a campaign? Holly shares the advice that’s stuck with her since she started covering presidential races.

Subscribe to Axios 2028 — Holly’s Sunday newsletter — by searching “Axios 2028,” and follow her on X at @HollyOtterbein.

For more than twenty years, I’ve been attending the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Every year I come home and tell my husband to remind me how exhausting it is. Every year he does. Every year I go back — because it’s where I get to see my favorite journalists and communications executives in one place, and that still means something to me.

This year I skipped the dinner itself and attended the Substack First Amendment event instead. The room was full of writers and creatives collaborating in real time — until news came through about the incident at the dinner and then the event went into lockdown. We all turned to each other and our phones, waiting to hear that our colleagues were okay. So incredibly grateful that they were.

It was a reminder that we work close to power and close to risk. That hotel has its own history with both.

On The Friday Reporter

Madison Mills, Axios — Episode published April 25

Most of the AI coverage you see is written from one of two zip codes: Silicon Valley or lower Manhattan. Madison Mills covers AI for Axios — but the story she keeps finding doesn’t live in either of those places.

It lives in the small-town bank making a loan to a local trucking company. In the construction firm that took on debt during the buildout boom. In the regional lender whose balance sheet looks perfectly ordinary — until you trace the chain of who borrowed from whom, and for what.

Madison came to the AI beat from the Wall Street beat, which means she knows how to follow the money, and she knows the gap between what investors say publicly and what they actually believe. We talked about what finance executives are telling her off the record right now about fraud risk — conversations she describes as “a very scary picture” — and why the risks most people are worried about may be the ones easiest to see. The hidden ones are harder to find. And they’re closer to home.

We also got into the jobs debate, entry-level hiring, and the question she keeps putting to the AI labs themselves: when are you actually going to be profitable? The answer matters to a lot more people than the labs themselves.

🎤 Listen to the episode → [link]

Coming Tuesday on The Deciders

Hester Peirce, SEC Commissioner — Episode drops April 29

Here’s a number worth sitting with: only a small percentage of Americans have real access to the kinds of investments where wealth is actually built. Private markets — the funds, the deals, the opportunities that generate the highest returns — have historically been reserved for people who already have money. Everyone else is on the outside of the rope line looking in.

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce thinks that’s wrong. And she’s been one of the most persistent voices inside the agency for changing it.

When Brody Mullins and I sat down with Commissioner Peirce for The Deciders, the conversation kept returning to a version of the same question: who gets to participate? She’s been outspoken about the accredited investor rules that keep most Americans out of private markets, arguing that ordinary people — and she’s used the word “resentment” to describe what she hears from retail investors who can’t get in — are smart, thoughtful, and capable of making their own decisions about where to put their money.

“The expectation should be that they will bear the consequences of bad decisions that they make,” she told The Deciders. That accountability argument cuts both ways. If people are going to bear the downside, they deserve a shot at the upside too.

It’s worth listening to this conversation right after the Madison Mills episode of The Friday Reporter. Madison mapped out how ordinary Americans are already quietly exposed to the risks of the AI economy — through their banks, their employers, their communities — without having meaningfully participated in the gains. Commissioner Peirce is trying to change the architecture that creates that imbalance.

The conversation also covers her work on the SEC’s Crypto Taskforce, where digital assets represent one of the clearest opportunities to expand who gets access to what. And she tells a story about her grandfather’s deeply held opinion about watermelon that somehow became her framework for thinking about financial privacy — which turns out to be a good illustration of exactly how she approaches her work: taking something that sounds complicated and regulatory, and finding the human truth inside it.

🎤 The Deciders with Hester Peirce drops Tuesday, April 29 → Preview [link]

Sign up here to get early access

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That’s the lens she’s bringing to the AI story. And the picture it reveals is one most of the tech coverage is missing entirely.

We talked about the hidden financial exposure in the AI buildout — the small-town bank loans to truckers and construction companies that don’t look like AI bets on paper, but absolutely are. We got into what Wall Street sources are telling her off the record right now about fraud risk, and why she describes those conversations as “a very scary picture.” And we dug into the trillion-dollar question she keeps putting to the AI labs themselves: when are you actually going to be profitable?

We also ended up in a really honest conversation about the jobs debate — why she’s skeptical when public companies attribute layoffs to AI, what’s actually happening with entry-level hiring, and why some of the most enthusiastic AI adopters she’s encountering are the most senior people in the room.

Madison is one of the smartest reporters working this beat. I think you’ll want to listen twice.

Find Madison at Axios — she co-authors the AI Plus newsletter Monday through Thursday — and on Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn.

This was one of those weeks.

On The Friday Reporter, I sat down with Colin Demarest, who writes the Axios Future of Defense newsletter and has been covering the Iran conflict since the first strike. At one point I asked him where the center of information actually lives right now. His answer: most Pentagon inquiries get referred to the White House. Ask the Navy about one of its own ships, he said, and you’ll be told to ask the White House. You can read into that what you like. I’ve been reading into it ever since.

Colin’s beat is the space between the official statement and the operational reality — drone dominance theory meeting a downed F-15E, a defense industrial base with factories but no appropriations to fill them. He doesn’t editorialize. He’s a careful reporter. But the gap he describes is unmistakable.

On Tuesday, The Deciders drops a conversation I’ve been looking forward to for weeks: Rohit Chopra, the CFPB Chair Donald Trump fired, now at Harvard Kennedy School. Chopra spent years inside one of Washington’s most powerful regulatory agencies watching it close — and sometimes fail to close — the distance between the law and its enforcement. Brody Mullins and I asked him the question we ask every guest: what’s the one thing Washington still isn’t thinking about? His answer is worth clearing your Tuesday commute for.

Two conversations. Two institutions — the Pentagon and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The same question running underneath both: what’s the distance between what they’re saying and what’s actually happening?

Some weeks this column writes itself.

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Listen to The Friday Reporter with Colin Demarest:

The Deciders with Rohit Chopra drops Tuesday — subscribe so you don’t miss it: The Deciders

— Lisa

P.S. Colin also writes Axios Future of Defense, out every Wednesday. If you’re not reading it, this week is a good time to start — the Iran conflict coverage is some of the sharpest in the business.

Then Iran shot down an American fighter jet.

Colin Demarest has been covering the future of defense at Axios long enough to know the gap between Pentagon strategy and battlefield reality. As the author of the Future of Defense newsletter, he’s been inside the Iran conflict coverage since the first strike — tracking new weapons systems in their first real-world test, watching war costs climb past $16 billion and rising.

We get into whether drone dominance is actually delivering, what the U.S. dismissal of Ukraine’s anti-drone technology offer tells us about how Washington processes advice from allies who’ve been in the fight, and whether the defense industrial base can sustain a long war.

The future of defense isn’t theoretical anymore.

Part Three of the April Axios takeover of The Friday Reporter.

That’s not a contract dispute, it’s a new kind of power struggle. And it’s reshaping the entire AI industry.

Maria Curi is the AI+Government reporter at Axios and the author of the newsletter that drives tech policy conversations across Washington. She breaks down how the Defense Department is using procurement as policy — and why the stakes extend far beyond one company’s government contract.

We get into who actually controls AI governance in this administration, what the Pentagon-Anthropic standoff means for every AI lab now doing business with the federal government, and the question Maria says nobody is asking yet — but should be.

It’s Week Two of the April Axios takeover of The Friday Reporter.

I was gob smacked.

Here I was with someone I’ve known my entire life, watching the same news, asking me if it was really all that serious. The gap between us in that moment has never been that wide. Inside this city, the norms matter because we’ve organized our professional lives around them. In Ocean County, those norms have been gone long before Trump arrived. To her and her family, career politicians are all corrupt and the system is rigged. So, whether someone is “presidential” doesn’t register the same when your baseline assumption is that this is the way it’s always been.

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I’ve been trying to figure out how we got here, and I keep landing in the same place: local media and the absence of it. There was a time when my friend in Ocean County would have been reading the Ocean County Observer, a paper that covered the things that touched her life — the school board, the water quality, the shops closing on Main Street. Local politics felt personal because local information was personal.

The Observer is still there. But it’s owned by Gannett now. And it shows.

It was well-timed, then, that last Friday I published a conversation on the podcast with the executive editor of Axios Local, about exactly this — the news deserts spreading across the country and what communities lose when local journalism disappears. Holly’s argument is that it isn’t just a paper that goes away; it’s accountability, and the shared sense that what happens close to home is worth paying attention to.

I thought about that conversation a lot sitting in my friend’s living room. What fills the space left by local journalism is a national news cycle that never turns off, and consumed long enough, it doesn’t sharpen your political instincts so much as dull them — until the behavior that has people inside the Beltway genuinely rattled just lands differently out there, because it reads as yet another chapter in a story they’ve been watching for years.

We didn’t get here because voters stopped caring. We got here because we stopped giving them something worth caring about close to home. That’s what keeps me up at night — not the next election cycle, but the world we built that made this one feel inevitable.