RFK Jr. has a lot on his plate at the moment as the head of HHS. America is currently dealing with a record breaking outbreak of the measles, for instance. His agency has had a very hard time getting people confirmed for key roles. There’s that whole cyclosporiasis thing going around, which you’ll know you’ve caught it by the simple fact that you won’t be able to stop shitting yourself. There’s a huge self-inflicted talent vacuum at HHS and its child agencies. Pertussis cases are on the rise. Court orders keep blocking Kennedy’s committees.
With all of these crises and chaos, Kennedy became very angry at news reports that he was mostly checked out of the HHS work he should be doing to address all of this. It’s hard to take that anger all that seriously, though, given that Kennedy also became the very first sitting cabinet secretary to host a podcast while in office. And I have to assume it is also a first time a sitting cabinet secretary will — checks notes — host a cooking show with celebrity chefs.
Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has launched a show geared toward teaching Americans how to cook healthy, inexpensive meals.
“Thanks to President Trump, we flipped the food pyramid and put real food back where it belongs: at the center of the American plate,” Kennedy said in a video he posted Wednesday to YouTube touting “The Real Food Show.” “I’m traveling across America, connecting with renowned chefs to show families how to cook delicious, nutritious meals with real ingredients, and all at affordable prices,” the HHS secretary added. “America, it’s time to eat real food. Let’s get cooking.”
Cute. How about instead you travel the country on a mass vaccination campaign for measles? Maybe some lower level member of HHS can rub elbows with celebrity chefs while you, oh, I don’t know, do literally anything concrete when it comes to cyclosporiasis. Maybe you could fill the open roles in your agencies with competent people you can get confirmed by Congress. Or maybe you could get your agencies running smoothly and with high morale.
It’s not that cooking isn’t important. It’s not even that all of Kennedy’s thoughts on food and health are wrong, because they certainly are not. But there is other, real, important work that needs to be done, leadership that needs to be demonstrated, and confidence building that needs to happen with the public. All of that is a better place for the Secretary of HHS to be spending their time, compared with cosplaying as a daytime cooking show host.
Kennedy told USA Today his new cooking show aims to convince Americans that eating healthier does not cost more.
The price of food at home and away from home both rose by 0.2 percent from May to June, according to the consumer price index, a popular measure of inflation.
It’s actually worse than that and looking at the CPI for food on a monthly basis doesn’t tell the whole story. Year over year CPI for food is up by roughly 3%. All of that is to say that if Kennedy wants to focus on the affordability of fresh food, part of the solution would be for him to get his current boss to not play stupid games with tariffs and to stop starting the very foreign wars that he promised to keep us out of.
So, as you continue to see headlines for the very real health issues the country is currently facing, just remember that RFK Jr. is hard at work baking crab cakes and getting his plating skills just right.
On a laptop screen in a dimly lit tent near the Donetsk front, a Ukrainian drone team steers its aircraft into the turret of a Russian T-72 and glimpses the start of an explosion before the picture dissolves into static. The strike is uploaded, verified, and scored against the point value assigned to the tank. The unit climbs a public leaderboard that ranks hundreds of drone teams, and the points are currency: a higher score buys better equipment, faster, from an online marketplace the warfighters compare to Amazon.
Washington is about to decide how the federal government will parcel out access to the most powerful AI, and it is drifting toward concentrating that capability in a few chosen hands, rationed by criteria no one outside the process can see. A country with foreign invaders on its own soil has spent the past year learning to do the reverse—and winning back ground as it does. From Luhansk to Lviv, Ukraine puts its best tools in the hands of whoever can use them and shares what it knows about the enemy as fast as it safely can, openly and by rule.
Behind the leaderboard sits a set of arrangements Ukraine built under fire. A marketplace lets frontline units order drones directly from hundreds of manufacturers, most of them small shops scattered across Ukraine. A procurement cycle that once ran months now takes days, and new designs reach the trenches within about a month of leaving the workbench, because the units doing the fighting, not a distant acquisition office, decide what they need in the field. Furthermore, their feedback goes straight back to the manufacturer, sometimes the same day. Because the manufacturing is dispersed rather than massed, no single Russian strike could ever change much.
Ukraine has been just as willing to share what it learns. Late last month its defense ministry opened a platform called TrophyLab that hands the technical anatomy of captured Russian weapons—schematics, known vulnerabilities, even physical samples—to a deliberately wide circle: allied militaries and intelligence services, and hundreds of Ukrainian and partner-country firms. Access is vetted and revocable, governed by published criteria. The premise is that knowledge of a threat is worth more shared than hoarded. This should be a rule everyone can see, rather than the whims of a distant official.
That combination, wide but rule-bound, is exactly what the executive order the White House issued in June fails to deliver. Faced with AI systems that can now find software flaws faster than any human team, the order promises early access to the most capable models to a few “trusted partners”—a phrase it never defines, routed through a classified process. It calls the arrangement voluntary. In practice it has not been: under national-security and commerce authorities the administration has already restricted, suspended, and then cleared frontier models, with no published criteria anyone outside the process can point to. Ukraine’s leaderboard may be a crude way to run a war, but it is at least a rule—public, legible, the same for every unit.
The deeper problem is what that opacity does. Ukraine found that capability does the most good spread widely, that a defense holds because it has no single point of failure, and that threat intelligence should travel by rule rather than favor. A trusted-partner tier governed by undefined discretion inverts all three: it concentrates the best tools among those already best equipped, builds the very chokepoint Ukraine works to avoid, and turns shared knowledge into something rationed by judgment no one can inspect. The United States already runs sector-based centers for sharing threat intelligence; the question the framework raises is not whether to centralize but whether the flow reaches the defenders who need it or stops at a favored few.
And there are real lessons for the United States. Ukraine’s openness may look like the underdog’s strategy, and the United States is the wealthiest, most powerful country on earth—but national strength does not mean every system is strong. The defenders who most need help are not the money-center banks and wealthy university hospitals; they are smaller institutions that, despite non-specific promises they’ll be helped, seem unlikely to benefit from this system as it’s set up. For them, a head start reserved for the already-strong is no help at all.
Ukraine did not arrive at any of this by design. It was forced into it, and used a mix of openness and clear rules to stop a much larger power in its tracks. Washington has the luxury of choosing on purpose but may be drifting towards a system governed by whims and favoritism rather than clear rules and standards.
Eli Lehrer is president and co-founder of the R Street Institute.
Across the country, federal judges are calling out Department of Justice lawyers, questioning in unprecedented ways whether they can be trusted to tell the truth or uphold centuries-old legal norms.
From Washington, D.C., to Rhode Island to Oregon, federal judges nominated by presidents from both parties, including Donald Trump, have zeroed in on what’s called “the presumption of regularity.” It essentially means that judges must presume that the government — whether it be federal prosecutors, an IRS auditor or an FBI agent — did their jobs according to the rules and in good faith.
Until Trump’s second term, which has seen an exodus of veteran DOJ lawyers and a transformative shift in priorities from issues like enforcing civil rights to instead defending a mass deportation agenda, this foundational tenet had rarely been discussed in federal courtrooms, former judges, lawyers and scholars say. But as Trump’s DOJ exhibits behavior that judges have called “unlawful,” “unethical,” “unseemly” or otherwise dishonest, adherence to that bedrock standard is now being questioned.
ProPublica reviewed hundreds of cases since Trump retook the White House in which judges criticized the actions of DOJ lawyers and found more than 40 in which they explicitly referenced the presumption of regularity. In many cases, judges have expressed frustration that they can no longer take the government at its word.
“Judges simply don’t believe the representations that are being made by United States attorneys, assistant United States attorneys and the like,” said John E. Jones, a former federal judge for the District of Pennsylvania, appointed by President George W. Bush.
“I don’t think in the annals of the Department of Justice, in the history of jurisprudence in the United States, we’ve ever seen anything close to this.”
In Rhode Island in May, Trump-appointed federal Judge Mary McElroy rebuked federal prosecutors’ conduct — saying they withheld information and misrepresented facts — as she quashed their requests for a subpoena in their investigation into a hospital’s care of transgender children. The judge alleged the DOJ had inappropriately claimed its investigation was operating out of Texas to secure subpoenas targeting sensitive medical records of patients in another state and that it falsely claimed the Rhode Island hospital hadn’t communicated with the department.
“The discrepancy between the honorable conduct expected of federal prosecutors and DOJ’s tactics in this case is unsettling,” McElroy wrote. “The Court cannot help but share the sentiment that ‘[t]he presumption of regularity that has previously been extended to [DOJ] that it could be taken at its word — with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes — no longer holds.’”
Judges have emitted a chorus of condemnations against the legal basis for some of Trump’s political agenda, including the mass firings of federal workers, an immigration dragnet that has imprisoned hundreds of U.S. citizens and retribution campaigns against the president’s political enemies.
In doing so, federal judges are imbuing forceful language into their orders in a way that scholars say signals to the Trump administration that the third branch of government is losing trust in the Justice Department.
Federal judges rarely grant interviews, and none of the judges who criticized the Justice Departmentin their orders granted interviews to ProPublica.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the DOJ said its attorneys are “dedicated public servants who represent the United States with integrity, in accordance with their ethical obligations and the law.”
“The Department stands firmly behind the professionalism and good faith of its attorneys,” said spokesperson Kiersten Pels. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Federal judges have found that the government filed statements generated by artificial intelligence that referenced nonexistent case law, wrote briefs that ignored facts and filed declarations with inaccurate dates, the ProPublica review shows.
In one case, the government included documentation claiming a detainee had been convicted of marijuana possession in 2009. That detainee, the judge noted, citing what she called the government’s persistent “sloppiness,” would have been 4 years old.
“This Court will no longer blindly accept statements of fact from [the U.S. government] unless they are made under oath by an individual with personal knowledge,” Judge Christine O’Hearn, a President Joe Biden appointee, wrote in New Jersey while reviewing a writ of habeas corpus petition filed by a man who claimed he was unlawfully imprisoned by immigration officers. O’Hearn accused the government of defying her orders when, instead of releasing the man, Immigration and Customs Enforcement transferred him to a different facility in New York.
In Minnesota, the state’s top political leaders had publicly clashed with the administration following the violent ICE raids that led to the deaths of two U.S. citizens. Then the administration filed a flurry of subpoenas against them.
Last month, Judge Patrick J. Schiltz, who was appointed by George W. Bush and clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, slammed the government’s actions and “spurious claims,” saying the presumption of regularity was being abused.
“Initiating a criminal investigation in order to harass political opponents or to coerce them into taking official action — particularly official action that the federal government cannot directly require those political opponents to take — is a blatantly unlawful and unethical use [of] the grand-jury process,” the judge wrote.
“Breakdown” of a Presumption
The presumption of regularity creates a high bar for those suing the government or defending themselves against it in criminal cases. They often must provide evidence that the government willfully violated a policy or otherwise deviated from its charge — that is, did something irregular — to overcome the standard.
It’s a shield the government wields often, with little notice, and one that is almost always successful. But overcoming that presumption has become increasingly common under Trump’s second term, according to court watchers.
About half of the cases ProPublica identified as questioning the presumption come from districts, including D.C., Maryland and Virginia, where by proximity and jurisdiction many of Trump’s actions are challenged and often heard by Democratic-nominated judges. The Southern District of New York, which has issued repeated rebukes of Trump administration actions, and the Northern District of California, another Democratic stronghold, are other hotbeds of judicial scrutiny.
Last September, D.C. District Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui accused the administration of working around the federal grand jury process, getting an indictment from a state court after prosecutors had failed to get one in his court, which he called “unseemly,” if not “unlawful.” He fired off one of the earliest signs that the presumption itself could come into question.
“This only deepens the growing mistrust of the actions of prosecutors,” the judge wrote. “That is a sentiment that was once unthinkable, but the irregular is now the regular.” While the case was largely managed by assistant U.S. attorney Caelainn Carney, according to court transcripts, Faruqui was aiming his frustration at her bosses, including senior prosecutor Jonathan R. Hornok, and the leadership at DOJ. Neither attorney responded to requests for comment.
Pels, the DOJ spokesperson, told ProPublica that Faruqui “was wrong on the law” and noted that after the government appealed to the district’s chief judge, his order was overruled. “Judge Faruqui has a long-standing documented pattern of editorializing from the bench beyond the scope of the cases before him,” Pels added.
But in recent months, skepticism about the presumption has also come from judges appointed by Republicans, such as McElroy, or in GOP strongholds.
In Indiana, Trump-appointed federal Judge James Patrick Hanlon ordered the release of Salah Sarsour, president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee and a lawful U.S. resident, from ICE custody in March. Sarsour’s lawyers argued the government had targeted him to suppress his First Amendment right to free speech. The DOJ invoked the presumption of regularity and argued his arrest was part of an anti-terrorism dragnet, which the judge threw out.
In the Southern District of Ohio, Judge Michael R. Barrett, appointed by George W. Bush, ordered ICE to release a detainee after concluding the presumption had been overcome because the government hadn’t presented a reasonable argument that the man was a flight risk.
News outlets, including CNN, have documented federal judges’ ire with Trump’s DOJ, and some of the cases under question have been well-publicized, such as the government’s illegal deportation of Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador. In that case, Judge Paula Xinis, a President Barack Obama appointee, criticized the government, saying, “You have taken the presumption of regularity, and you’ve destroyed it.”
Many of the rulings challenged one of Trump’s hallmark efforts: immigration enforcement and deportations.
“The presumption of regularity and integrity previously and routinely afforded to the Executive branch and the United States Attorney’s Office has been undeniably eroded in this jurisdiction and across the country,” O’Hearn wrote in February, noting that the federal government had repeatedly violated court orders in her district and others related to immigration operations.
In another immigration detention case, this one in Washington state, Biden-appointed Judge Lauren King said, “[t]he ‘presumption of regularity’ is dislodged here by the numerous factual errors in Respondents’ filings and by their conflicting representations.”
Jeremy Fogel, executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute and a former federal judge from California, said what’s happening in the courts feels more like a “political conflict” than the normal ebb and flow of the justice system.
“It’s really one branch that is really sort of questioning the legitimacy of the other one,” Fogel said. “I think the judges are trying to stand up for the legitimacy of their branch.”
Just Security, an online law and policy journal, has been tracking cases in which federal judges have admonished Trump’s prosecutors, including those involving the presumption.
“We’re witnessing a breakdown in the ways in which any administration ordinarily carries out its responsibilities, through the Justice Department in particular,” said Ryan Goodman, Just Security’s co-editor-in-chief.
Erosion of Trust, Ethics Inquiries
The erosion of trust from the federal bench comes as Trump has profoundly shifted priorities at the DOJ to align with his political platform: ending civil rights and diversity programs, deporting immigrants and stripping away environmental protections.
Those who deal with DOJ lawyers have noticed the difference in court.
Mitch Bernard, chief counsel at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, has faced off on environmental issues with the DOJ many times. Although they may disagree, he said, he always expected his opponents to be “fair and above board.”
That dynamic is gone, he said.
“I would call it a transformation of the role of the Justice Department,” he said. “There are many different judges in different jurisdictions not only ruling against the government but calling the government out for dishonesty and dissembling, and that’s an extraordinary thing.”
The result, Bernard said, is that “the government will lose more cases as a result of the way the Justice Department is behaving.”
Meanwhile, groups such as his are benefitting from the government brain drain. “We hired 10 litigating attorneys last year,” he said. Of those, eight came from the DOJ.
Judges aren’t just losing faith in the DOJ. Some are pushing to sanction Justice Department lawyers.
This month, Miami federal Judge Kathleen M. Williams ruled that Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS was an improper exercise in self-enrichment, citing the president’s lawyers for a series of misstatements in the case.
The Obama appointee referred the lawyer who brought the president’s case against the IRS, Alejandro Brito, to the Florida Bar for potential disciplinary proceedings. She also forwarded her ruling to disciplinary officials in New York, who had earlier received an ethics complaint about acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.
A DOJ spokesperson called the Blanche case “nothing more than a politically motivated bar complaint, filed by partisan activists who disagree with this Administration’s policies.” Brito did not respond to a request for comment.
In Rhode Island, McElroy referred DOJ lawyers to a review board for possible discipline for their handling of the hospital investigation.
“As citizens, we trust that federal prosecutors, when wielding this awesome power against a state, a company, or certainly against vulnerable children, will play fair and be honest with its counterparts and the judiciary,” McElroy wrote. “DOJ has proven unworthy of this trust at every point in this case.”
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Donald Trump swore he could turn the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool into something he could use to bask in his own reflected glory. Instead, it turned out to be everything we expect from Trump: braggadocio followed by abject failure.
Trump hired some guys he used to do some stuff to his personal pool(s) back in the day. It was a no-bid contract — one that was immediately extolled by Trump as Great Stuff. According to Trump, his personal cabana boys could get the job done right, on time, and under budget.
None of that happened. His boys took to the pool repair, doing their level best to behave like government contractors. Trump then did a Glory Roll across the unfinished sealant with his motorcade to show off for the boys back at the White House. A week or so later, the pool was refilled. For a brief moment, it showed off the “American flag blue” Trump thought was missing from the original fixture. Then it turned into a blend of algae and peeling sealant.
Instead of pulling out his receipts and asking his pool boys whether this reflecting pool refurb was still under warranty, Trump claimed the floating chunks of blue sealant bobbing around in the green muck was the work of vandals. And, of course, he had political appointees willing to press this point on his behalf. Jeanine Pirro — the US Attorney for the District of Columbia — got right on it, arresting former Olympic canoeist David Hearn on felony vandalism charges.
Pirro alleged Hearn had damaged “two square feet of sealant.” Well, it takes $1,000 to make vandalism charges a federal felony. While this damage estimate is subject to federal no-bid contract markup, taking someone down for doing two square feet of damage is insane, especially when Trump is still out there claiming vandals cut a 150-350 foot gash into the pool sealant.
Trump also promised there was proof of his wild allegations — something that would presumably show up as the DOJ attempted to turn vandalism arrests into federal indictments.
A key grand jury witness in a case against a former Olympic canoeist accused of tampering with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool testified that the area was already damaged and would have required repairs regardless, lawyers said in a court filing Monday.
[…]
The witness, who is not identified, was the only person who testified about damages, and said that the property had already been damaged before, authorities say, Hearn stuck his hands in the water, according to Hearn’s team.
Now, for those of you unaware of how grand jury proceedings work (and especially for those MAGA folks who like to show up and be deliberately ignorant), we’ll break this down quickly. A grand jury is not like a regular jury. Its sole purpose is to decide whether or not the government has enough evidence to support an indictment. The accused person is not there, nor are they represented by the lawyers. This is completely non-adversarial. And YET, the government’s witness testified to the grand jury that the pool was already damaged before the accused even arrived on the scene of the alleged crime.
What’s absolutely wild is that the DOJ still got its indictment despite this damning testimony from its own witness. Welcome to Trump Town, I guess. But we’ll see how long this indictment lasts. Hearn’s legal reps have filed a motion demanding copies of grand jury documents because it’s pretty fucking clear some bullshit must have been pulled to get Hearn indicted even though a government witness testified that the pool was already in shambles.
Lawyers for David Hearn, a 67-year-old who represented the United States at three Olympic Games, submitted a court filing seeking access to transcripts of the grand jury testimony as well as the instructions given to the panel that ultimately indicted Hearn, claiming that there were “irregularities” in the proceedings that led to the indictment.
[…]
In the filing, Hearn’s legal team suggests that the jury was not “properly instructed” on the crime Hearn stands accused of, noting specifically that felony destruction of property requires the perpetrator to have caused $1,000 or more of damage. The attorneys pointed to the testimony of the federal government’s own witness, an official from the National Park Service, who suggested that the pool was damaged long before Hearn interacted with the pool and that repairs were already being sought.
The full filing [PDF] by Hearn’s legal team is embedded below. It’s worth a read. And I certainly hope the judge grants this motion because if it contains the sort of stuff these accusations suggest it the documents might contain, this won’t be the first time the Trump administration has been caught cheating even though the process already allows the government to put its prosecutorial thumb on the scales.
Earlier this week we noted how the Trump administration’s unpopular ban on Chinese drones had become a crony capitalist mess, with Brendan Carr and his FCC struggling to fine or ban companies for violations. The ban is a stupid, protectionist mess that has far more to do with coddling the president’s sons’ drone investments than it does protecting national security or consumer privacy.
Right on queue, The Vergehas an interesting feature on just how easy it has been for some companies to bypass the FCC restrictions. The Trump ban was supposed to encourage drone makers to create devices here in the U.S.; but instead companies are simply setting up the laziest fake companies in the U.S, and the Trump FCC appears too short-handed or incompetent to notice.
So the over-arching impact of the ban has been to create a flood of new companies selling popular DJI-made Chinese drones under a litany of new names. They don’t try very hard to disguise them:
“When software developer and journalist Konrad Iturbe began watching FCC databases for those frequencies, he realized that DJI was preparing to play a grand game of Whac-A-Mole in the United States. Well ahead of the December 2025 drone ban, a host of new companies had suddenly appeared selling barely disguised versions of DJI technology. He dubbed them “DJI front companies.”
To pretend these drones are made in the U.S., the companies use fake U.S. front locations to pretend that the drones are assembled here. Again, they’re not trying very hard to disguise them, and most could have been unearthed with basic Google searches:
“But it’s easier than that. Odyssey Robot declared that its drone was designed, developed, and manufactured at 21 Miller Alley Suite 210 in Pasadena, California. Even a basic Google search can show you that’s not the address of a factory — it’s a coworking space called Industrious that explicitly prohibits members from manufacturing anything onsite.
Odyssey Robot also declared that its drones are assembled at eTak Worldwide Corporation in Grand Prairie, Texas. With 80,000 square feet of warehouse space and 15 loading docks, you could theoretically build drones there. But again, a basic Google search would show you that eTak isn’t an assembler; it’s a recycling company that collects e-waste, including old batteries, then sorts and dismantles them.”
Like most of what Trump does, none of this appears thought out very well, and the administration isn’t competent enough to even do basic investigations to enforce its own restrictions. And like elsewhere in the administration, Trumpism rejoices at the idea of dismantling regulators; then throws these weird sorts of complicated demands in their lap expecting productive outcomes.
Again, in a functional world, you’d allow Chinese companies to do business in the United States, but you’d fund, staff, and legally empower your regulators to strictly enforce competition, labor, environmental, and consumer protections. Because that would result in U.S. companies making less money and having to try harder, we instead get this weird jumbled tangle of corruption and buffoonery.
The primary justification for the Trump Chinese drone ban is that these devices pose meaningful privacy and national security risks. But there’s been absolutely no evidence presented by the administration supporting this allegation. There is, however, ample proof that administration greed, corruption, and incompetence has been indistinguishable from a foreign attack.
I will admit it’s always a special kind of fun when a topic we cover here at Techdirt gets the John Oliver treatment. He and his writing team generally gets things right, which helps. And I’m not saying that Oliver and his crew are definitely Techdirt readers, but, well, hi John and crew!
Readers here will recall that I’ve spent the last year or so pointing out that famed gas station and/or supermarket chain, Buc-ee’s, has become the trademark bullying Monster Energy of gas stations. This is a company that doesn’t seem to understand what parody is, and which somehow believes that it alone owns the right to use a cartoon animal, or sometimes human, in a circular logo for any kind of related business to its own.
Well, Oliver dedicated a segment to Buc-ee’s bullying ways on his show this past week and he did not disappoint.
In recent years, it sued Super Fuels in Dallas, whose logo was a brown dog sporting a red cape, a drive-through liquor store in Missouri named Duckees featuring a cartoon duck wearing sunglasses, Choke Canyon Travel Center in Texas over its cartoon alligator wearing a cowboy hat, and Nut Huggers, an Oklahoma-based underwear company with a mascot of a squirrel.
Oliver accused the chain of “outright bullying,” noting that most of the stores have changed their logos because they do not have the resources to fight the Texas giant, which operates more than 50 stores.
And that’s where the real fun starts.
Now, it would be absolutely stupid for Buc-ee’s to actually sue Oliver and HBO over this. The PR would be terrible, it would only give Oliver more attention and generate more headlines about the company being a trademark bully, and it would make the company look very thin-skinned and childish. I’m also relatively certain that’s exactly what will happen.
After all, any such lawsuit wouldn’t even rank in the top 3 of stupid trademark suits that Buc-ee’s has filed. And since they’ve demonstrated that they just can’t help themselves, I imagine we’re going to get more segments about this on Oliver’s show.
This year, Wikipedia is celebrating 25 years as the Internet’s encyclopedia that anyone can edit. In its first decade, the quirky experiment for passionate nerds exploded in popularity. It became a ubiquitous information resource and a homework helper for schoolkids, much to the dismay of skeptical teachers.
In its second decade, amid the public’s growing dissatisfaction with the mangling of facts in popular discourse, it took on a new role as information infrastructure, helping categorize and validate information worldwide. Wired magazine deemed it “the last best place on the internet.” The hope was that the volunteer project could serve as the antidote for misinformation. Platforms from Facebook and Twitter to Alexa and YouTube began embedding Wikipedia material to ensure that users had context for what they read or saw.
That role has become more acute in recent years. Artificial intelligence developers have relied deeply on Wikipedia to train the large language models behind popular chatbots, which weight clean, reasonably reliable information sources more heavily than the rest of the web. Chatbots and AI-powered search engines have intensified Wikipedia’s significance, even as they siphon its readers by answering questions directly, with fewer people going to the source site itself.
But as Wikipedia’s importance – and size – has grown, the size of the volunteer corps that maintains it has not, and the number of volunteer administrators, a key moderation role, has shrunk.
The Wikipedia community is also sensitive to its rising importance, but not in the way you might think. Contributors are keenly aware of political rhetoric that takes aim at their project or threatens volunteers. But the chief effect on volunteers has been a sense of heightened obligation to their global readership, which has gradually increased quality standards.
As a longtime volunteer myself, I’m often taken by the community’s perseverance and the people’s desire, above all, to get on with their work of summarizing the world’s knowledge.
The English language Wikipedia has maintained a reasonably steady number of contributors since 2010 – about 40,000 – yet its size and importance have grown. In 2006, it contained 1 million articles; in May 2025, it passed 7 million. A new issue is an influx of low-qualitycontent generated by large language models.
The steady decrease in administrators is especially concerning. Administrators are a subset of trusted users, elected by the community at large, who are given powers such as the ability to delete articles or block users from editing. Unlike moderators at for-profit platforms, Wikipedia cannot simply hire more administrators. There are slightly more than 800, down from almost 1,800 in 2011, and they’re not all active.
So Wikipedia’s role has grown, but it is held together by a relatively small, shrinking community of unpaid volunteers. To keep up, the community in general and administrators in particular have had to raise their efficiency, making trade-offs between maintaining open participation and raising article quality. These trends and their costs are well documented. They are clearly visible in one of the basic administrator routines: blocking.
Shown the door
Blocking is when an administrator determines that a user is so detrimental to the project that they must be prevented from making any further edits. The blocked user can still read Wikipedia, but cannot change it.
Unlike the opaque moderation systems at the large internet platforms that I normally study as a researcher, such as YouTube or TikTok, nearly every administrative action on Wikipedia is recorded in a public log. I used these logs for a study analyzing all 20 million blocks made on the English language Wikipedia over the past two decades. I looked for patterns in frequency, duration and reasons for a block. I also assessed whether those patterns corresponded to the growing trade-offs between openness and quality.
I found that the frequency of blocks has risen sharply in recent years due to administrators using bots to preemptively block proxies. Proxies are services such as virtual private networks, or VPNs, that people use to conceal their identity, often to facilitate abuse or manipulation on Wikipedia. One of these bots, ST47ProxyBot, was so active that it accounted for the most blocks in the site’s history. Preemptive proxy blocking likely prevents damage, but it can also occasionally stop good-faith contributors. Given the increasing popularity of AI agents and their disruptive potential, this practice is likely to continue to expand.
I then removed proxy blocks from the analysis so I could focus on humans who were blocked and why. In the early years, administrators made the majority of blocks for vandalism: intentionally bad or nonsensical edits. That has shrunk to about a quarter of all blocks today. Blocks have risen for promotional editing and for sockpuppetry — when one person creates multiple accounts to manipulate content. These shifts speak to Wikipedia’s increased prominence as a target for influence.
Signs of stress
What I found most interesting was administrators’ greater use of generalized reasons for blocking, such as “disruption.” Wikipedia defines disruption as “a pattern of editing that disrupts progress toward improving an article or building the encyclopedia.” But citing this can mean nearly anything seen as counterproductive. The trend is partly explained by “disruption” being in a list of boilerplate rationales that administrators can choose from instead of entering a customized reason.
But it’s also the kind of trend I would expect to see in a labor force stretching to keep up. Administrators don’t act arbitrarily, and their actions are publicly logged and closely scrutinized. A loss of trust leads to an administrator losing their position. But to be effective, general explanations for blocks rely on shared understandings that new users may not have. Research on blocked users shows that when a sanction feels vague or unfair, volunteers are more likely to walk away – or dig their heels in – rather than reform. Good for efficiency; bad for bringing new users into the fold.
Blocks are also lasting longer on average. That, together with preemptive blocking and generalized rationales, suggests that the volunteer community is increasingly prioritizing prevention, efficiency and content quality over efforts to rehabilitate new users.
And the work is not spread evenly among the roughly 800 administrators: For many years, the most active 10% of administrators have made about 80% of the blocks. That high number dropped to 37% in 2024, largely due to changed activity by a single prolific administrator.
Bearing the cost
Wikipedia’s openness is part of how its volunteer community grew in the first place. Now that Wikipedia has become infrastructure, that community is rationing openness to preserve quality for readers. If Cory Doctorow’s zeitgeist-capturing idea of platform “enshittification” is fundamentally about ruining the experience of end users for the sake of the shareholders, Wikipedia is attempting something like the opposite. The end-user experience is being preserved, and the people behind the scenes are bearing the cost.
Wikipedia has adapted remarkably well in its evolution from early web experiment to one of the most important global sources of information. The open question, for a resource that so many humans – and now machines – rely on, is how long the volunteer system can keep enduring the cost.
Ryan McGrady is Senior Research Fellow at the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure, UMass Amherst
