In today’s edition … Democrats put Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill front and center in midterm races … what the Supreme Court’s decision on federal agencies means for the bureaucracy … but first …
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This is Matthew with a personal update: You’ll be seeing less of me in the newsletter as I switch to a new role focusing on political enterprise reporting. Dan will continue to helm the ship with Alec. Thank you for letting me pop into your inboxes every morning and for all of your helpful and insightful feedback. I’ll still be chiming in to the newsletter from time to time, so keep in touch at [email protected]!
The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, nearly 22 years into what was only meant to be a two-year mission, is falling out of orbit. Without intervention, it will come crashing back to Earth.
The situation could have been ripped from a sci-fi screenplay — and so could the solution NASA devised: launching a three-armed spacecraft to intercept the falling observatory, which carries NASA telescopes, and push it, over the course of about a month, into a higher orbit. It’s a relatively novel strategy — it’s only been done once before, by China four years ago — and one NASA may be forced to use more and more frequently in the coming years.
“Every satellite lower in orbit, a couple hundred miles up or so, 400 miles or so, eventually they’re all going to come down, it’s just a matter of how long,” said John Crassidis, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University at Buffalo and former NASA scientist.
What to do about the increasing number of satellites and many random debris floating around Earth is taking on increased importance under President Donald Trump, who has made ensuring “a future of American dominance in space” a cornerstone of his agenda.
As of 2024, NASA estimated there were more than 45,000 human-made objects orbiting Earth, around 14,500 of which are active satellites. Some of these satellites have boosters built in, so when their missions are completed they can be pushed into a high enough orbit that they’ll never fall back to Earth. But much of the random debris one finds floating in space — old satellites, rocket stages and other parts of spacecraft, things astronauts discard, intentionally and not — do not.
Atmospheric drag can cause objects in a low orbit to lose speed and fall out of orbit. Usually, they then burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, though occasionally pieces make their way to land, or, more frequently, sea. The Earth is 71 percent water, and humans inhabit a fraction of the terra firma, so falling space debris is most likely to land somewhere humans aren’t. But that’s not always the case, like in 2024, when debris from the ISS damaged a Florida family’s home, or 2025, when debris from a SpaceX launch landed in a Polish village.
The amount of space debris has increased sharply in recent years, much of it because of commercial satellites and space programs, raising the likelihood of space debris reaching Earth. The risk to humans is still very, very small. The risk to space missions and satellite activity is not.
Even small bits of debris can damage communications or GPS satellites, and active satellites are having to dodge space debris more and more. Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites had to maneuver around debris 144,000 times in the first half of 2025 alone. These maneuvers cause fuel to be used up more quickly, effectively shortening their lifespans, and cause gaps or errors in data collection in systems that do things like provide early warnings of natural disasters.
These collisions are even more dangerous for manned space travel.
The International Space Station already has to routinely re-route to avoid collisions with space debris. NASA has called off at least one spacewalk because of the dangers posed by debris to astronauts. Launch windows, spacecraft trajectories and the satellite data that make mission planning possible are all affected by the growing cloud of space debris. Manned missions are a key part of Trump’s space efforts — with his desire to see man return to the moon and go to Mars — but the space that astronauts will travel to is radically more crowded than when Apollo 11 made it to the moon in 1969.
“We’ve got to get the astronauts through that debris field if we want to go to the moon or Mars,” Crassidis said. “So we’re putting our astronauts in harm’s way too.”
Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colorado) has led the most significant legislative effort to address the Earth’s orbital dumpster, introducing the bipartisan Orbital Sustainability (ORBITS) Act in the last few sessions of Congress. It passed the Senate unanimously in 2022 and 2023, only to get shelved in the House. It passed out of committee again this year, and Hickenlooper recently introduced the act as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
The bill, in its most recent form, would direct NASA to publish a list of the debris that poses the greatest risk to spacecraft in orbit and develop technology to repurpose or remove space debris from orbit.
“Earth orbits are turning into a junkyard. Space junk and debris pose a real risk to American satellites and jeopardize future space exploration,” Hickenlooper said in a statement to The Washington Post. “Every day we wait is another day that debris piles up.”
Scientists are doing their best to come up with ways to deal with the debris, exploring everything from nets to scoop it up to harpoons to impale it and move it away. At the moment, moving debris either via built-in boosters or another spacecraft is the most reliable method. But some plans show promise, like one to create a giant oven in space that can cook the debris and turn it into fuel.
Even the most promising of these plans are likely still decades out from practical use. But as Crassidis notes: “Today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s reality.”
Saturday is the first anniversary of the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill’s passage, Republicans’ marquee legislation of Trump’s second term. Democrats think it’ll end up helping them more.
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The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the party’s official campaign organization for the House, is running heavily on the legislation going into November, asserting it will be a “political albatross” around the necks of vulnerable Republicans, according to a DCCC memo we saw. The memo cites research by left-leaning firm Navigator that shows a majority of voters have a negative view of the legislation, including in competitive districts. The Washington Post found a plurality (42 percent) of American opposed the bill in a poll taken before it was passed, but many (34 percent) did not have an opinion on the bill at the time.
Democrats blame the legislation for increasing food costs by creating strict work requirements for SNAP and raising health care costs by changing Medicaid rules, likely booting millions of Americans off the program by 2034, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates.
“The bill is a toxic, political liability for every vulnerable House Republican that voted for it,” the memo reads. “Over the next four months, the DCCC will continue to ensure every voter knows it is House Republicans who are responsible for the devastating consequences of the Big Ugly Bill.”
Republicans counter that the legislation was a necessary extension to the 2017 Republican tax cuts that were set to expire at the end of last year. Failure to extend the tax cuts would have led to one of the biggest single tax increases in the country’s history. The party has rebranded the bill the Working Families Tax Cuts Act to focus on its tax benefits, many of which individually polled favorably, including tax credits for tips and overtime.
“We are in a new era of making sure hardworking Americans keep more of what they earn and are paid more for what they do to support their families,” Rep. Beth Van Duyne (R-Texas), chair of the Republican Study Committee’s Budget and Spending Task Force, said during a news conference this week.
Portland Press Herald (Maine): We wrote yesterday about the data center divide on the right. But the issue continues to make news. Bobby Charles, the Republican nominee for governor in Maine, said he would sign a moratorium on building data centers “until more is understood about their potential impact on both electricity draw … AND their impact on water use and impact on rivers in Maine.”
Atlanta Journal Constitution: World Cup watchers were hoping that the fan from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Michel Nkuka Mboladinga, would be a staple of this tournament. The fan who stands for the entire game to honor Congo’s former prime minister Patrice Lumumba, has only been able to attend a match in Mexico after his U.S. visa was denied. Enock Kabwende, an Atlanta resident, has stepped in with his own tribute to Lumumba.
Penn Live (Pennsylvania): It will be a very hot July Fourth. A heat dome is engulfing most American states ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary, raising temperatures dangerously high on a day when most Americans spend time outdoors. Temperatures will hit triple digits in Washington, D.C., where Trump is scheduled to throw a large holiday celebration on the National Mall.
We asked you for help yesterday — and many of you came through, giving us a wealth of ideas for future newsletters.
One suggestion stuck out, and we wanted to highlight it here.
Gary Howarth wrote, “Now that the President can fire the members of the Congressionally established Independent Commissions … are we returning to the 1840s and the spoils system?”
Gary added, “Are there limitations in the enabling legislation that limits the President’s ability to fire all the members of each and every IC and replacing them with his choices? What a windfall for the lobbying industry and corporations who need a friendly ruling — get the President to fire any member who opposes whatever the corporation wants.”
It’s a good question, and one we should look at going forward. For those who don’t know, a spoils system refers to a largely 19th-century practice in which the winner of a presidential election could fire government workers and replace them with their supporters. The practice was largely ended with the passage of the Pendleton Act in 1883, which established a more meritorious pathway to government work.
This ruling does not impact most government jobs, according to the report from Justin Jouvenal, and instead focuses on top positions at roughly two dozen other independent regulatory agencies.
There is still a pseudo-spoils system in American politics, however. Every president fills their administration with supporters, campaign workers, and top donors (just look at the list of diplomats). But it is notably different than what happened in the 1800s.
We hope you all have a great Fourth of July. Simple question this weekend: How do you celebrate the nation’s Independence Day? Do you do anything special or singular? Do you have a unique tradition? Let us and your fellow Early Brief readers know at [email protected].
Thanks for reading. You can follow Dan and Matthew on X: @merica and @matthewichoi.
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