The Republic’s New Terms of Service

The Trump administration’s preferred governing idiom is increasingly less statute than invitation with consequences. In higher education, Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s August letter asks state and university leaders to publicly account for their commitments to rigor, research, service, affordability, admissions, intellectual diversity, and job preparation. It is gentler in form than the administration’s failed 2025 compact with colleges, but it arrives after federal investigations targeting diversity programs and amid a notably antagonistic relationship with universities. The Atlantic’s account is here.

This is not quite deregulation. It is a change in the operating system: institutions retain nominal autonomy while being encouraged to demonstrate, publicly and repeatedly, that their autonomy has the correct values installed. Florida’s public colleges and the University of North Carolina system were early respondents, pointing to measures involving protest restrictions, DEI-related policy, civics, grading, AI-era rigor, and national-defense research. The useful political technology is not an order that provokes a clean lawsuit; it is a request that makes refusal look like an admission of guilt.

The same logic runs through the week’s other stories. Trade leverage reaches into Maine’s heating bills and export markets; border construction reaches into local land-use politics; camera networks make public life legible to authorities; and states extract a vast settlement from Meta over alleged harms to children. The argument is no longer merely about whether government is large. It is about who gets to define responsible conduct, and whether that definition is made by Congress, a federal agency, a governor, a platform, or an algorithm that has noticed you walking to the gym.

The cleanest rebuttal to national political abstraction is usually a utility bill. Maine sends 41% of its goods exports to Canada, according to USTR data cited in this Naked Capitalism analysis, and the state relies heavily on Canadian refined fuel. The same account notes that exports to Canada had already fallen nearly 20%, according to a cited local report, while an estimate put the added cost of home heating at $375 per winter. Senator Susan Collins has urged a return to negotiations, a position that is less ideological deviation than geographical literacy.

Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney described late U.S. demands affecting Canada’s outside trade relationships, auto sector, culture, and French-language protections as a sovereignty dispute. That framing matters because the administration’s maximalist bargaining posture does not stop at the border; it converts interdependence into a pressure point. Maine, inconveniently, is where that pressure point has neighbors, employers, fishing exports, fuel tanks, and voters.

Texas offers the inverse lesson. The federal agenda can be loudly pro-growth and still collide with the people expected to host its machinery. A June survey cited in the article found 44% of registered Texas Republicans opposed data centers, while rural respondents opposed a local facility by 62% to 22%. Texas has an extraordinary queue of grid-interconnection requests, about 90% associated with data centers, according to figures attributed to the Texas Tribune. Ken Paxton has also criticized the administration’s Big Bend barrier plan as not smart border security. When even Texas Republicans discover that a data center needs power, water, land, and consent, the politics of abstraction acquire a substation.

Matthew Hatcher’s photo project, We’ve Been Watching You, begins with the banal revelation that a short urban walk can amount to a small parade before machines. His subject is not simply police surveillance, but the built environment of monitoring: cameras, license-plate readers, facial recognition, and the ordinary spaces in which they disappear into the scenery. PetaPixel reports on the project here.

The available numbers are suggestive rather than definitive: Comparitech research cited by the article puts the average U.S. city at 11 cameras per 1,000 people, with Atlanta above 124; Philadelphia reportedly operated 7,000 security cameras in 2024. Proponents point to evidence gathering, emergency response, missing-person cases, and cost. Critics point to privacy erosion, errors, hacking, and abuse. Both can be true, which is why surveillance is so politically durable. A tool that can help find a missing person can also make an unaccountable system more efficient at finding everyone else.

Hatcher’s central observation is the one that spoils the comforting partisan script: this architecture has expanded under Republican and Democratic administrations. That does not absolve any administration of responsibility; it identifies the deeper danger. The state’s appetite for usable information is bipartisan, and the commercial sector has spent years perfecting the collection apparatus. The fight is therefore not over whether the camera is ideological. It is over the rules governing its use, error, retention, access, and appeal—those famously unglamorous safeguards that become fascinating at the exact moment one needs them.

While Washington encourages universities to certify their civic usefulness, 29 states have forced Meta into a far more expensive demonstration of public accountability. Meta agreed to a maximum $16.68 billion settlement over claims that Facebook and Instagram were designed to addict children, misled consumers about safety, and improperly collected children’s data. The company denied wrongdoing. The agreement also requires daily-use limits and nighttime restrictions for child users, along with stronger measures around age-restricted content. Reuters’ report is here.

The settlement ends a federal trial involving claims from California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey, alongside federal children’s-privacy claims by 29 states. It additionally resolves certain Cambridge Analytica-related cases, with California, Illinois, New Mexico, and Washington, D.C., set to receive $459.3 million. None of this establishes the states’ allegations as adjudicated fact; settlements are the legal system’s way of admitting that certainty is expensive. But the size and scope of the agreement show that state attorneys general can still function as a serious counterweight when a national regulator, Congress, or company’s internal conscience has declined the assignment.

There is a neat, if bleak, unity here. Universities are asked to prove they serve the republic. A platform is compelled to alter how it serves children. Border contracts, trade rules, data centers, and camera networks ask communities to bear the physical costs of projects designed elsewhere. Modern American power is increasingly exercised through compliance regimes: declarations, design constraints, procurement, data capture, and settlement terms. The Constitution remains on the wall. The real politics is happening in the checkbox beneath it.