ABOUT THIS PODCAST 🔗
Uncover the fascinating stories behind the political decisions that shape our world. Each episode takes you inside the rooms where power is wielded, revealing the human drama and strategic calculations that drive government action.
Hosts:
Update frequency:
weekly
Average audio length:
24 minutes
Has sponsors
English
United States
83 episodes
since April 16, 2026
episodic
LATEST EPISODE 🔗
Nobody elected the actuaries, but they may be the most consequential financial officials in local government — the consultants who set the assumptions that determine what cities owe their retirees, often by decades. We trace how optimistic discount rates became a mechanism for politicians to make p…
PREVIOUS EPISODES 🔗
When the federal government sues a city over its police department, the settlement that follows can bind that city for decades — governed not by elected officials, but by a court-appointed monitor whose authority expires on no fixed schedule and answers to almost no one. This episode traces how con…
Single-family zoning wasn't an accident of urban planning — it was a deliberate political construction, and the machinery built to enforce it has calcified into one of the most effective wealth-transfer mechanisms in American governance. This episode traces how local zoning boards became capture-pr…
State and local pension systems are sitting on trillions in unfunded liabilities — and the people responsible for managing them have spent decades using optimistic investment-return assumptions to make the hole look smaller than it is. We trace how pension actuaries, union negotiators, and elected …
Dozens of American cities aren't actually run by their mayors or city councils — they're run by decades-old federal court agreements that nobody can figure out how to escape. We trace how consent decrees, originally a civil rights enforcement tool, became permanent shadow governments overseeing pol…
A single federal environmental review can bury a project for a decade — not because anyone decided to kill it, but because nobody has to decide anything at all. This week we dig into NEPA, the 1970 law that was supposed to protect the environment and instead became the Swiss Army knife of obstructi…
The electromagnetic spectrum is a finite public resource worth hundreds of billions of dollars — and most Americans have no idea the federal government is sitting on vast stretches of it, locked away by agencies that haven't meaningfully used their allocations in decades. We trace how spectrum auct…
FEMA's flood maps are supposed to tell you whether your house might wash away — instead, they've become one of the most consequential and least scrutinized tools in American governance, quietly dictating property values, municipal budgets, and which communities get federal lifelines after disasters…
When the federal government rides into a city after a policing scandal, it doesn't just investigate — it moves in permanently through a legal instrument called a consent decree that can run for decades with no exit in sight. We trace how these agreements became a shadow governance system, who the c…
Before any major legislation lives or dies on the Senate floor, it has to survive a number and that number comes from a small, technically nonpartisan office most Americans couldn't find on a map. We dig into how the CBO's cost estimates have been weaponized, gamed, and quietly lobbied to kill bill…
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