In a Massachusetts cellar in 1873, Lydia Pinkham first brewed the elixir that would make her famous. The dirt-brown liquid, made from herbs including black cohosh and pleurisy root, contained somewhere between 18 and 22 percent alcohol—meant as a preservative, of course. Within a couple of years, Pinkham was selling her tonic at $1 a bottle to treat “women’s weaknesses.” Got the blues? How about inflammation, falling of the womb, or painful menstruation? Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound was the solution. Pinkham’s matronly smile, printed on labels and advertisements, became as well known as Mona Lisa’s.

Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound was one of thousands of popular and lucrative patent medicines—health concoctions dreamed up by chemists, housewives, and entrepreneurs—that took the United States by storm in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These products promised to treat virtually any ailment and didn’t have to reveal their recipes. Many contained alcohol, cocaine, morphine, or other active ingredients that ranged from dubious to dangerous. Dr. Guild’s Green Mountain Asthmatic Compound was available in cigarette form and included the poisonous plant belladonna. Early versions of Wampole’s Vaginal Cones, sold as a vaginal antiseptic and deodorizer, contained picric acid, a toxic compound used as an explosive during World War I. Patent-medicine advertisements were unavoidable; by the 1870s, 25 percent of all advertising was for patent medicines.

After the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed in 1906, the newly created Food and Drug Administration cracked down on miracle elixirs. But one American industry is still keeping the spirit of patent medicine alive: dietary supplements. In the U.S., vitamins, botanicals, and other supplements are minimally regulated. Some can improve people’s health or address specific conditions, but many, like the medicines of old, contain untested or dangerous ingredients. Nevertheless, three-quarters of Americans take at least one. Some take far more. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the longtime conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist who’s awaiting Senate confirmation to run the Department of Health and Human Services, has said he takes a “fistful” of vitamins each day. Kennedy has in recent years championed dietary supplements and decried their “suppression” by the FDA—an agency he would oversee as health secretary. Now he’s poised to bring America’s ever-growing supplement enthusiasm to the White House and supercharge the patent-medicine revival.  

The newly created FDA eventually required all pharmaceutical drugs—substances intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease—to be demonstrably safe and effective before they could be sold. But dietary supplements, as we call them now, were never subject to that degree of scrutiny. Vitamins were sold with little interference until the “megadosing” trend of the late 1970s and ’80s, which began after the chemist Linus Pauling started claiming that large amounts of vitamin C could stave off cancer and other diseases. The FDA announced its intention to regulate vitamins, but the public (and the supplement industry) revolted. Mel Gibson starred in a television ad in which he was arrested at home for having a bottle of Vitamin C, and more than 2.5 million people participated in a “Save Our Supplements” letter-writing campaign. Congress stepped in, passing the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, which officially exempted dietary supplements from the regulations that medications are subject to.

Since then, the FDA has generally not been responsible for any premarket review of dietary supplements, and manufacturers have not usually had to reveal their ingredients. “It’s basically an honor system where manufacturers need to declare that their products are safe,” says S. Bryn Austin, a social epidemiologist and behavioral scientist at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. The agency will get involved only if something goes wrong after the supplement starts being sold. As long as they disclose that the FDA hasn’t evaluated their claims, and that those claims don’t involve disease, supplement makers can say that their product will do anything to the structure or function of the body. You can say that a supplement improves cognition, for example, but not that it treats ADHD. These claims don’t have to be supported with any evidence in humans, animals, or petri dishes.

In 1994, the dietary-supplement industry was valued at $4 billion. By 2020, it had ballooned to $40 billion. Patent-medicine creators once toured their products in traveling medicine shows and made trading cards that people collected, exchanged, and pasted into scrapbooks; today, supplement companies sponsor popular podcasts, Instagram stories are overrun with supplement ads, and influencers make millions selling their own branded supplements. The combination of modern wellness culture with lax regulations has left Americans with 19th-century-like problems: Pieter Cohen, an associate professor of medicine at Cambridge Health Alliance, has found a methamphetamine analogue in a workout supplement, and omberacetam, a Russian drug for traumatic brain injuries and mood disorders, in a product marketed to help with memory.

Last year, Kennedy accused the FDA of suppressing vitamins and other alternative health products that fall into the dietary-supplement category. But “there is no truth about the FDA being at war on supplements over the last several decades,” Cohen told me. “In fact, they have taken an extremely passive, inactive approach.” Experts have repeatedly argued that the FDA needs more authority to investigate and act on supplements, not less. And yet, Kennedy continues to champion the industry. He told the podcaster Lex Fridman that he takes so many vitamins, “I couldn’t even remember them all.” Kennedy has vocally opposed additives in food and conflicts of interest in the pharmaceutical industry, but has failed to mention the dangerous additives in dietary supplements and the profits to be made in the supplement market. (Neither Kennedy nor a representative from the MAHA PAC responded to a request for comment.)

In an already permissive environment, Kennedy’s confirmation could signal to supplement manufacturers that anything goes, Cohen said. If the little regulation that the FDA is responsible for now—surveilling supplements after they’re on the market—lapses, more adulterated and mislabeled supplements could line store shelves. And Americans might well pour even more of our money into the industry, egged on by the wellness influencer charged with protecting our health and loudly warning that most of our food and drug supply is harmful. Kennedy might even try to get in on the supplement rush himself. Yesterday, The Washington Post reported that, according to documents filed to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Kennedy applied to trademark MAHA last year, which would allow him to sell, among other things, MAHA-branded supplements and vitamins. (He transferred ownership of the application to an LLC in December. Kennedy’s team did not respond to the Post.)

A truly unleashed supplement industry would have plenty of tools at its disposal with which to seduce customers. Austin studies dietary supplements that make claims related to weight loss, muscle building, “cleansing,” and detoxing, many of which are marketed to not just adults, but teenagers too. “Those types of products, in particular, play on people’s insecurities,” she told me. They also purport to ease common forms of bodily or mental distress that can’t be quickly addressed by traditional medical care. Reducing stress is hard, but ordering the latest cortisol-reducing gummy on TikTok Shop is easy. Your doctor can’t force vegetables into your diet, but a monthly subscription of powdered greens can.

Judy Z. Segal, a professor emerita at the University of British Columbia who has analyzed patent-medicine trading cards from the 19th and 20th centuries, told me that supplement-marketing strategies “have not changed that much since the patent-medicine era.” Patent medicines appealed to ambient, relatable complaints; one ad for Burdock’s Blood Bitters asserted that there were “thousands of females in America who suffer untold miseries from chronic diseases common to their sex.” And the makers of patent medicine, like many modern supplement companies, used friendly spokespeople and customer testimonials while positioning their products as preventive care; according to one ad for Hartshorn’s Sarsaparilla, “The first deviation from perfect health should receive attention.”

In 1905, the muckraker Samuel Hopkins Adams lamented that “gullible America” was so eager to “swallow huge quantities of alcohol, an appalling amount of opiates and narcotics, a wide assortment of varied drugs ranging from powerful and dangerous heart depressants to insidious liver stimulants; and, far in excess of all other ingredients, undiluted fraud.” Compounds and elixirs go by different names now—nootropics, detoxes, adaptogens—but if Adams walked down any supplement aisle or browsed Amazon, he’d still find plenty of cure-alls. He could even pick up a bottle of Lydia E. Pinkham’s Herbal Supplement, which is sold as an aid for menstruation and menopause. Pinkham’s face smiles at buyers from the label, though its advertised benefits are now accompanied by a tiny disclaimer: “This statement has not been evaluated by the FDA.”

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a newsletter in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.

Earlier this week, almost overnight, the American tech industry entered a full-on panic. The latest version of DeepSeek, an AI model from a Chinese start-up of the same name, appeared to equal OpenAI’s most advanced program, o1. On Monday, DeepSeek overtook ChatGPT as the No. 1 free app on Apple’s mobile-app store in the United States.

So far, China has lagged the U.S. in the AI race. DeepSeek suggests that the country has gained significant ground: The chatbot was built more quickly and with less money than analogous models in the U.S., and also appears to use less computing power. Software developers using DeepSeek pay roughly 95 percent less per word than they do with OpenAI’s top model. One prominent AI executive wrote that DeepSeek was a “wake up call for America.” Because DeepSeek appears to be cheaper and more efficient than similarly capable American AI models, the tech industry’s enormous investments in computer chips and data centers have been thrown into doubt—so much that the top AI chipmaker, Nvidia, lost $600 billion in market value on Monday, the largest single-day drop in U.S. history. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said that it was “invigorating to have a new competitor” and that, in response, the company would move up some new software announcements. (Yesterday morning, OpenAI said that it is investigating whether DeepSeek used ChatGPT outputs to train its own model.)

But many prominent American researchers and tech executives celebrated DeepSeek, as well. That’s because “the most notable feature of DeepSeek may be not that it is Chinese, but that it is relatively open,” I wrote on Monday. Whereas the top American AI labs at OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic have kept their technology top-secret, DeepSeek published an in-depth technical report and is allowing anybody to download and modify the program’s code. “Being democratic—in the sense of vesting power in software developers and users—is precisely what has made DeepSeek a success,” I wrote. Start-ups and researchers love this relative transparency. In theory, competitors can use DeepSeek’s code and research to rapidly catch up to OpenAI with far fewer resources—you might not need colossal data centers to get to the front of the AI race. (The Atlantic recently entered into a corporate partnership with OpenAI.) However, there’s substantial uncertainty about just how much cheaper DeepSeek was to build, based on reports about the start-up’s hardware acquisitions and uncertainty about how the model was trained.

Meanwhile, for national-security hawks, the fear is that an open-source program that won’t answer questions about the Tiananmen Square protests could become a global technological touchpoint. DeepSeek could face similar privacy concerns as TikTok: Already, the U.S. Navy has banned its use, citing security concerns.

Any predictions, for now, are highly speculative. The global AI race is far from over, and forthcoming products from Silicon Valley could leap ahead once again. At the very least, U.S. tech companies may have to reconsider whether the best way to build AI is by keeping their models a secret.

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

China’s DeepSeek Surprise

By Matteo Wong

One week ago, a new and formidable challenger for OpenAI’s throne emerged. A Chinese AI start-up, DeepSeek, launched a model that appeared to match the most powerful version of ChatGPT but, at least according to its creator, was a fraction of the cost to build. The program, called DeepSeek-R1, has incited plenty of concern: Ultrapowerful Chinese AI models are exactly what many leaders of American AI companies feared when they, and more recently President Donald Trump, have sounded alarms about a technological race between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. This is a “wake up call for America,” Alexandr Wang, the CEO of Scale AI, commented on social media.

But at the same time, many Americans—including much of the tech industry—appear to be lauding this Chinese AI. As of this morning, DeepSeek had overtaken ChatGPT as the top free application on Apple’s mobile-app store in the United States. Researchers, executives, and investors have been heaping on praise. The new DeepSeek model “is one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I’ve ever seen,” the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, an outspoken supporter of Trump, wrote on X. The program shows “the power of open research,” Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, wrote online.

Read the full article.

What to Read Next

The GPT era is already ending: “The release of o1, in particular, has provided the clearest glimpse yet at what sort of synthetic ‘intelligence’ the start-up and companies following its lead believe they are building,” I wrote in December. The new AI panic: “The obsession with frontier models has now collided with mounting panic about China, fully intertwining ideas for the models’ regulation with national-security concerns,” Karen Hao wrote in 2023.

P.S.

After several major tech executives announced their support for Donald Trump, many liberal internet users are now alleging that they are being censored on certain social-media platforms. “To some, this pattern was as unmistakable as it was malicious,” my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany writes. “Social media was turning against Democrats.” And they are panicking.

— Matteo

Donald Trump likes to tell his supporters that he’s a fighter, a fearless champion who always has their back. Such guarantees, however, apparently do not apply to people who worked for him when they’re threatened by foreign assassins. Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, former National Security Adviser John Bolton, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and the former Pompeo aide Brian Hook have all been targeted by Trump for political retribution. They are also being targeted by the Iranians, but the regime in Tehran has marked them all for death.

The president may be spoiling for a fight with career bureaucrats and “woke” professors, but when it comes to Iranian assassins, he is willing to walk away from men who carried out his orders. Milley, Bolton, Pompeo, and Hook all served in Trump’s first administration—he appointed them to their posts—and they were part of the Trump national-security team when the United States killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in a strike in January 2020. In 2022, an Iranian national was arrested and charged with trying to arrange Bolton’s murder, and American intelligence believes that other officials—including Trump himself—have been targeted by Iran because of their involvement in killing Soleimani.

The Biden administration briefed the incoming Trump administration on these threats and on the security details it had authorized to protect Bolton and others. Last week, Trump removed the details protecting Bolton, Pompeo, and Hook; yesterday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth removed the guards around Milley and announced that he would be investigating Milley for undermining the chain of command during Trump’s first term. Trump also revoked the security clearances held by all four men.

[From the November 2023 issue: The patriot]

The revocation of security clearances is petty, but it harms the administration more than it does any of these men. Retaining a clearance helps former federal employees find work in the consulting world, and it is typical to hold on to them after leaving government service. (I was offered the opportunity to keep mine when I left the Naval War College.) But at more senior levels, clearances allow people in government to get advice from former leaders. Some of these people could have been of significant help to Trump’s staff during a crisis, although Trump himself is unlikely to care about that possibility.

Removing the security details, however, could have deadly consequences. The Iranians seem determined to seek revenge for the killing of Soleimani, and sooner or later, they might succeed. (“The Iranians are not good but they’re very enthusiastic,” a former Pentagon official said in October. “And of course, they’ve only got to get lucky once.”) And the Iranians aren’t the only threat out there; the Russians have no compunctions about attacking people in their home country, often using gruesome methods.

Trump takes such threats very seriously where he is concerned. When Biden officials alerted Trump to the danger from Iran, Trump asked for more security from the U.S. government, and during his campaign, according to The New York Times, he even asked that military assets be assigned to protect him, something usually provided only to sitting presidents.

Lesser mortals, however, must fend for themselves: Trump and Hegseth not only took away the security details of these former policy makers but did so with significant publicity, almost as if to broadcast to America’s enemies that anyone who wanted to settle scores with these officials would get no trouble from the current White House. (Trump also canceled protection for 84-year-old Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has been the target of multiple threats from other Americans.) Trump despises critics such as Bolton and Milley, and it is unsurprising that he has no obvious issue subjecting them to physical danger. But even some Republicans —who should be used to this kind of vengefulness from the leader of their party—have been shocked, and are trying to get Trump to reverse course. They are particularly concerned about Pompeo and Hook, loyalists whose lives have been placed in jeopardy for sins that are known only to the president.

[Read: Trump can’t escape the laws of political gravity]

In another time, Americans would rally to protect their own from the agents of one of their most dedicated enemies. Today, most citizens seem either unaware or unperturbed that the president of the United States is exposing his own former staff to immense risks. Nevertheless, it should be said clearly and without equivocation: President Trump will bear direct responsibility for any harm that could come to these people from foreign actors.

This is far more than Trump’s usual pettiness. He has always considered the oath of federal service to be little more than an oath of loyalty to him, and he has always been willing to threaten his opponents. (In 2018, he apparently considered handing Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, over to Moscow, a move that provoked a level of outrage that seems quaint today.) Trump’s message in this second term is that friends and subordinates are literally disposable if they cross him: He will not only humiliate and fire them, but he will also subject them to actual physical danger.

This escalation of Trump’s vindictiveness should serve as a very personal warning to anyone willing to work for him in his second term. Senior officials at the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA, the National Security Council, and other organizations are routinely asked to go head-to-head with representatives of some of the most dangerous nations on the planet, and to contribute to operations against those regimes. In the past, such officials could do so knowing that their own government would do everything it could to keep them—and their family—safe from foreign agents. As one of Bolton’s former deputies, Charles Kupperman, told the Times: “Trump’s national security team must provide guidance based on their assessment of what needs to be done to protect America without regard to their personal security.”

Good luck with that. No one who works in defense or national-security affairs can assume that, when Trump orders them to cross America’s many enemies in the world, he will protect them from foreign vengeance. Trump has now made clear that he will abandon people who have taken risks in the service of the United States—even those who were following his own orders—if they happen to displease him. (Or, in the case of Pompeo and Hook, for no apparent reason at all.) Hegseth, for his part, may have no real idea what he’s done, and may merely be courting favor from a boss who has elevated him far beyond his abilities. But Trump knows better; he is himself the survivor of an assassination attempt, and no level of security was enough when he thought the Iranians were gunning for him.

People still considering whether to serve Trump can have no illusions about what awaits them. True leaders take responsibility for their team. Trump is no such leader; he will, on a whim, place other Americans in danger and then, as he famously put it in his previous term, take no responsibility at all.

You might be forgiven for forgetting—ever so briefly—that Donald Trump is president of the United States. Sometimes it seems like he does, too.

In the middle of the night, as news about the plane crash at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport was breaking, Trump posted on Truth Social:

The airplane was on a perfect and routine line of approach to the airport. The helicopter was going straight at the airplane for an extended period of time. It is a CLEAR NIGHT, the lights on the plane were blazing, why didn’t the helicopter go up or down, or turn. Why didn’t the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane. This is a bad situation that looks like it should have been prevented. NOT GOOD!!!

He raises some valid points—ones that many people might be wondering about themselves. The difference between them and him is that he is the leader of the federal government, able to marshal unparalleled resources to get answers about a horror that happened just two and a half miles from his home. He’s the commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces, and the crash involved an Army helicopter. But Trump isn’t really interested in doing things. Like Chauncey Gardiner, the simple-minded protagonist of Being There, he likes to watch.

This morning, Trump held an astonishing briefing at the White House where he and his aides unspooled racist speculation, suggesting (without any evidence) that underqualified workers hired under DEI programs had caused the accident. “We do not know what led to this crash, but we have some very strong ideas and opinions, and I think we’ll state those opinions now,” Trump said, and he did. Vice President J. D. Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth criticized diversity efforts from the lectern as well. (Trump also misrepresented Federal Aviation Administration programs.) Trump insisted that he wasn’t getting ahead of the investigation by speculating, and that he could tell diversity was to blame because of “common sense.”

Trump also paused to accuse former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg of “bullshit,” and narrated videos and information he’d seen in the news, interspersing his personal observations as a helicopter owner and passenger. “The people in the helicopter should have seen where they were going,” Trump said. At times, he appeared to blame both the helicopter pilots and air-traffic control. Perhaps it would be better to actually gather some information, but Trump is more interested in pontificating.

The pilots, DEI, air-traffic controllers, Buttigieg—the only common thread appeared to be that everyone was to blame, except for Trump himself.

No one could reasonably hold Trump responsible for the crash, just 10 days into his term—though that is the bar he has often tried to set. “I alone can fix it,” he has assured Americans, telling them that he personally can master and control the government in a way no one else can. He promised to be a dictator, though only on day one. Yet even while discounting his bluster, it would be nice to see the president doing something more than watching cable news and posting about it.

If he’s not going to do that, he could offer some consolation. Almost exactly 39 years ago, after the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger, President Ronald Reagan memorably described how the astronauts aboard had “‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’” Trump is giving us “NOT GOOD!!!”

Though exasperating, this passivity is no surprise. It was a running theme of Trump’s first administration and is already back in the second. In May 2016, Trump reportedly offered fellow Republican John Kasich a chance to be vice president, in charge of domestic and foreign policy; Trump would be in charge of “making America great again.” During Hurricane Harvey, in 2017, he struggled to show empathy for victims or do more than gawk at (and tweet about) the destruction. A few months later, he tried half-heartedly to do more after Hurricane Maria, producing the indelible visual of the president tossing paper towels to victims, like a giveaway at a minor-league baseball game.

[Read: That time Trump threw paper towels at Puerto Ricans]

Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and Trump ally, has claimed that Trump wasn’t even running the government during his first term. During the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, Matt Yglesias notes, Trump was more interested in offering punditry on how the government was doing than acting like the head of the executive branch. And on January 6, 2021, according to federal prosecutors, Trump sat at the White House watching the violent sacking of the Capitol and doing nothing to stop it.

This approach to governance—or refusal to approach it, rather—is inextricably tied to Trump’s Gardiner-like obsession with television. The president watches hours of news every day, and if reports from inside the White House didn’t bear witness to this, his all-hours social-media posts would. Because he has little grounding in the issues facing the government and little interest in reading, television frequently seems to set his agenda. Political allies learned that the best way to get a message to Trump was to appear on Fox News. (Trolls, similarly, learned that a good way to rankle him was to take out ads on the channel.) Trump has used the Fox roster as a hiring pool for his administration.

One vignette from the first Trump administration illustrates the dynamic. In April 2019, as the White House was juggling half a dozen serious controversies, Trump called into Fox & Friends and yakked at length about whatever happened to be on his mind until even the hosts couldn’t take it any longer. Finally, Brian Kilmeade cut in and brought things to a close. “We could talk all day, but looks like you have a million things to do,” he said. Trump didn’t appear concerned about it.

[Read: Donald Trump calls in to Fox & Friends]

What’s odd is that even as Trump acts so passively, his administration is moving quickly to seize unprecedented powers for the presidency. In part, that’s because of the ideological commitments of his aides, but Trump also has a curious view of presidential power as an à la carte thing. He’s very interested in acquiring and flexing power to control the justice system, punish his enemies, and crack down on immigration, but he’d just as soon get the federal government out of the emergency-management business.

The presidency is not a spectator sport, though. At the end of Being There (spoiler alert), a group of political advisers conspires to put Chauncey Gardiner forward as the next president. The movie’s central joke is that the childlike, TV-obsessed protagonist has inadvertently fooled the nation’s most powerful circles into believing that he is profound, simply by stating directly what little he sees and understands. Joke’s on us.

Yesterday, the United States suffered the first fatal crash of a U.S. airliner in 16 years. American Airlines Flight 5342, a regional jetliner, originated in Wichita, Kansas. Just before landing at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in northern Virginia, it collided with a military helicopter over the Potomac River. Scores of people were feared dead late Tuesday. Authorities haven’t yet determined the cause of the collision. The National Transportation Safety Board will lead an investigation, hoping to determine what happened and prevent any similar accidents in the future.

There is no reason to believe that the dramatic changes to the federal government made by the Trump administration, or the chaos they introduced, played any role in this tragedy. But the success of regulators in improving the safety of commercial aviation is among the great triumphs of the last half-century. And in its first week in office, the Trump administration did take one unrelated step that suggests a cavalier disregard for the consequences of politicizing those efforts: it dismissed all of the members of the federal Aviation Security Advisory Committee, a body which advised the Transportation Security Administration.

“The aviation security committee, which was mandated by Congress after the 1988 PanAm 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, will technically continue to exist but it won’t have any members to carry out the work of examining safety issues at airlines and airports,” the Associated Press reported last week. “Before Tuesday, the group included representatives of all the key groups in the industry — including the airlines and major unions — as well as members of a group associated with the victims of the PanAm 103 bombing. The vast majority of the group’s recommendations were adopted over the years.”

My colleague James Fallows, a longtime pilot who has reported on aviation for decades, noted yesterday that dismantling the committee one week ago “wasn’t part of tonight’s tragedy,” but argued that it is a thoughtless destruction of a taken-for-granted institution that will erode safety over time, when the United States should instead be conserving the gains of recent decades. Pointing his readers to a list of the board’s former members, Fallows wrote that it “was collaborative; it combined public, private, military, civilian, academic, and other institutions to pool knowledge; it avoided blame; but it focused relentlessly on lessons learned.”

I favor a smaller federal government, and will likely cheer some cuts that the Trump Administration makes. My hope is for a bureaucracy that does fewer things and does them well.

But aviation safety in America is the envy of the world––it’s among the few things that was working well, having improved significantly in recent decades under a status quo that Trump is disrupting. To what end? Perhaps the Trump administration has some compelling rationale that it hasn’t shared for disbanding the Aviation Security Advisory Committee. If so, it should speak up.

Instead, a Department of Homeland Security official offered a vague and unpersuasive statement to Aviation International News: “The Department of Homeland Security will no longer tolerate any advisory committee which pushes agendas that attempt to undermine its national security mission, the President’s agenda, or Constitutional rights of Americans,” he said.

Congress should demand better answers, for the sake of the due diligence that airline safety warrants, and because stripping a mandated board of all its members would seem to thwart its legitimate power with a technicality. If Congress judges that the board is still useful, it should use the power of the purse to force its restoration, rather than giving in to the president.

Will Republicans, who hold a majority in the House and the Senate, jealously guard the legislature’s powers and diligently discharge its oversight responsibilities? Perhaps not. Deferring to presidents from one’s own party is a bipartisan sin, however derelict it makes legislators in their duties. While Trump undoubtedly has a popular mandate for aspects of his agenda, however, no voter sent him to Washington to end an aviation safety committee. He is owed no deference on that move.

Trump is making a lot of changes very quickly. If GOP legislators won’t probe this one to see if it is arbitrary or ill-considered, it’s hard to imagine what will spur them to exercise their oversight responsibilities––after all, most members of Congress are frequent flyers.

Members of the United States figure skating community were on board an aeroplane that crashed near Washington DC, the country's governing organisation for the sport says.