For Part Three in our series on the collapse of local news, the focus turns to solutions — what's been tried, what's been learned, and what a path forward demands. If you missed them, Part One unpacks the problem and Part Two examines the forces that got us here.

In March 2020, Knight Foundation CEO Alberto Ibargüen and trustees gathered for the foundation's quarterly board meeting to consider a radical proposal: buy the second-biggest newspaper chain in America — and rebuild local news from the ground up.

McClatchy, owner of 30 news organizations including The Miami Herald, San Jose Mercury News, Kansas City Star and Charlotte Observer, had filed for bankruptcy the previous month. It was the latest marker in a two-decade unraveling that had hollowed out local coverage across the country and helped fuel rising distrust and polarization.

A handful of national publications had navigated the shift. The New York Times leveraged its scale and global audience to move from an advertiser-driven revenue model to a subscriber-driven one. Local publications — without that advantage — continued to spiral.

This was an opportunity to change that — not paper by paper, but at scale.

Knight Foundation was the largest philanthropic funder of journalism in the United States. After 15 years funding experiments in search of solutions for local news in the digital age, the decline had not been reversed. But something important had been learned: local, digital, nonprofit news wasn’t a pipe dream. It could work.

Ibargüen understood the terrain from the inside. Before leading Knight, he had spent years in local news — at the Hartford Courant, at Newsday, and ultimately as publisher of The Miami Herald. At Newsday, he had once been shown an early tablet prototype displaying a newspaper. He knew then: this was the future.

So the foundation contemplated a fundamental shift: from funder to operator.

Knight’s endowment stood at roughly $2 billion, supporting journalism, arts, and community initiatives. The proposal called for consolidating its journalism funding — and drawing a major slice from the endowment — on a single bet: buy McClatchy’s portfolio and convert it into a locally rooted, nationally scaled, digital-only nonprofit news organization.

The plan addressed three structural problems that had undermined local news. Scale: in a subscriber-driven world, a national network could aggregate audience and compete for both subscription and national advertising revenue. Digital: fully embracing a future that legacy papers had resisted by ending print and going digital-only. Nonprofit: a mission-driven model could attract philanthropy while reinvesting back into journalism.

Ibargüen, who outlined the plan, said each publication would remain intensely local. “Something a local would read and say, ‘this is written for people like me.’”

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That day in March 2020 — as COVID was sweeping the world — the foundation’s trustees approved hiring consultants to assess the move: Greenberg Traurig to navigate the bankruptcy; Houlihan Lokey for investment banking; Alvarez & Marsal for financial advisory; McKinsey to assess the market; and Caplin & Drysdale, the law firm that had led The Salt Lake Tribune’s conversion to nonprofit status the year before.

The spending outline: $320 million to acquire McClatchy, $40 million to hire digital talent, $40 million to improve the user experience, and $40 million to manage the transition to a fully digital operation.

Knight would effectively become a holding company of two entities: Knight News Network, operating news organizations across the country, and Knight Foundation, continuing its grant-making in journalism, arts and community development.

There was a historical symmetry to the idea. Many of the papers had once belonged to the newspaper empire that brothers Jack and Jim Knight built before it merged to become Knight-Ridder — the largest newspaper chain in the country at its peak — and eventually sold to McClatchy. Knight Foundation was itself created from the brothers’ personal wealth.

Now, the foundation bearing their name was contemplating buying those papers back.

In the internet era, it remains the most ambitious plan proposed to rebuild local journalism at scale.

And one of the greatest what-ifs in 21st-century American news.

As the COVID shutdown deepened and uncertainty rippled through markets, the move became increasingly daunting. Buying a newspaper company already in bankruptcy — with advertising markets in freefall and no clear bottom — put the board in direct tension with its fiduciary duty to preserve the foundation’s assets.

And there was another factor: Ibargüen’s wife, Susana, had been diagnosed with ALS. There was no guarantee the CEO who had conceived the plan would be around to execute it.

Knight had already been designated as a qualified bidder in the bankruptcy process. But the trustees ultimately decided the risk was too great. No bid was submitted.

On August 4, 2020, McClatchy was sold in U.S. Bankruptcy Court to Chatham Asset Management — a hedge fund whose primary purpose was extracting profit, not reimagining local news in the digital age.

The decline of local news remains one of the most stubborn — and consequential — problems in American life.

Now the rebuilding effort faces a second disruption before the first is finished: artificial intelligence.

Part Three examines the solutions tried, the AI disruption, and what a way forward demands.

“When the internet happened, we were basically in fear and denial,” Tom Rosenstiel, University of Maryland’s Eleanor Merrill Scholar on the Future of Journalism, said in a Medill Local News Initiative report. “Now we have another chance, because this is as big as the internet.”

For Ibargüen, nothing less than democracy is at stake.

“An informed citizenry is necessary for a well-functioning democracy,” he said. “And you can’t do it without verification journalism.”

What’s Been Tried

The solutions to rebuild local news have come in four waves. Each made progress. None solved the problem.

Nonprofit

The first — and largest — was the nonprofit response. Voice of San Diego in 2005, ProPublica in 2008, the Texas Tribune in 2009 — each demonstrated a piece of the model.

Underlying it was the premise that local news is a vital civic good — like a museum, community hospital or public library — and should be supported accordingly.

Nonprofit news organizations began to sprout up across the country. By 2019 the American Journalism Project brought venture capital logic to journalism philanthropy, raising more than $240 million and investing in 50 newsrooms across 36 states. In 2023 Press Forward organized the funders themselves — more than 100 donors committing more than $400 million across the U.S.

Along the way, The Salt Lake Tribune became the first legacy newspaper to convert directly from for-profit to nonprofit status, in 2019. In 2025 it reported revenues of $13.57 million against expenses of $12.4 million — a proof of concept that Knight Foundation had considered replicating at scale.

Meanwhile, as local news organizations struggled, hedge funds discovered that shrinking news organizations could be a path to profit — effectively strip-mining them by extracting profits, selling off assets and downsizing. To counter that, National Trust for Local News launched in 2021, borrowing from the land conservation playbook: acquire papers before hedge funds could, then convert them to nonprofit ownership. By 2026 it owned more than 70 brands, though in 2025 it sold 21 papers back to a for-profit company.

Reflecting the sector’s rise: the Institute for Nonprofit News grew from 27 members in 2009, when it was founded, to 520 today. Nearly 400 digital-first nonprofit newsrooms generate an estimated $650–700 million in combined annual revenue.

But against the collapse, the math is humbling.

The country has lost nearly 3,500 newspapers since 2005. One in four Americans now lives in a county with zero or one newspaper, according to Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative. The entire nonprofit sector’s annual revenue today is roughly equivalent to two major metro papers at their peak — for instance, in 2000, The Miami Herald and San Jose Mercury News reported combined revenues of $651.6 million, roughly the scale of today’s nonprofit news industry.

The sector proved the concept. It hasn’t come close to filling the void.

Wealthy buyer

Private wealth has long played a role in building civic institutions — industrialist Andrew Carnegie, for instance, funded more than 2,500 libraries — prompting hopes that a similar mix of capital, business acumen, and civic mission could help rebuild local news.

In 2013, Jeff Bezos paid $250 million for The Washington Post, and John Henry, owner of the Boston Red Sox and Liverpool Football Club, bought The Boston Globe for $70 million. Glen Taylor, owner of the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves, acquired the Minnesota Star Tribune for $100 million in 2014. Surgeon and entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong bought the Los Angeles Times for $500 million in 2018.

Results have been mixed — the most visible disappointment at Bezos’ Washington Post, which in February 2026 cut a third of its staff.

For-profit startups

The nonprofit wave emerged from the belief that the internet had permanently broken local news' revenue model. But in the past decade, others have made a different bet: local news can still work as a business — just not the one it used to be.

The general approach: small teams, low costs, service journalism — delivered through pithy, engaging newsletters.

In 2015, Ted Williams left The Charlotte Observer to launch Charlotte Agenda. The bet: useful, conversational content — where to eat, what schools are best — delivered through a newsletter, website, and Instagram would find an audience. By 2020, Axios, known for its “smart brevity” format, bought it for nearly $5 million — folding it into a local newsletter network that now spans nearly three dozen cities.

Village Media, founded in 2013, built a profitable network across smaller Canadian communities by clustering markets to share infrastructure and costs. It’s now planning a U.S. expansion.

Lookout Local, founded in Santa Cruz in 2020, built depth in a single market. It won a Pulitzer Prize in 2024, reached profitability in 2025, and has expanded to Eugene-Springfield, Oregon.

These models proved local news can be a viable business again — but viability came with a tradeoff. The journalism that survived is typically useful, everyday coverage. What largely didn’t is watchdog journalism that holds power accountable.

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Policy

The fourth wave is policy and infrastructure — and it has the oldest roots. The founders understood an informed public required public support: President George Washington signed the Postal Act in 1792, making it cheaper to send newspapers through the mail than private correspondence.

Modern efforts follow that logic. In 2017, reporters Charlie Sennott and Steve Waldman launched Report for America to place early-career reporters in local newsrooms covering beats that had gone dark. In 2023, Waldman launched Rebuild Local News as a stand-alone policy effort.

The mechanisms vary: tax credits for newsroom hiring; proposals requiring platforms to pay publishers; and state-level funding pools. Some have advanced, others have stalled — including a widely heralded $175 million agreement between Google and California to fund local news that ultimately collapsed.

But a tension remains: a press dependent on government is a press government can influence. The most durable protection for communities has always been journalism that’s independent and sustainable.

New Disruption, New Chance

The two-decade rebuilding effort was designed to address one disruption. Then a second arrived before the first was finished.

On Nov. 30, 2022, ChatGPT was released. Anthropic’s Claude followed in March 2023, Google’s Gemini in December 2023.

The threats AI present are already emerging. Search traffic for local news organizations has been eroding for years — but AI chatbots are accelerating that decline in a new way. Unlike a Google search, they don’t return links. They return full, synthesized answers. The local news site isn’t cited. It isn’t even visited. Traffic from traditional search engines has declined 60 percent for small publishers over the past two years, according to Chartbeat.

Another threat is so-called “pink slime” — AI-generated sites that mimic the look and name of local outlets without employing a single journalist. In one case reported by GBH News, a pink slime site published an AI-hallucinated murder in New Jersey — a killing that never happened, reported as fact. NewsGuard, which tracks the credibility of news websites, now estimates that there are as many pink slime sites as websites for actual daily newspapers in the U.S.

“It is as pernicious as any of the other contributing causes to this local news crisis because it undermines the legitimate hand-woven truths of local news organizations struggling to survive,” Charlie Sennott, publisher of the Martha’s Vineyard Times and Report for America co-founder, told GBH News.

But the opportunity is equally real.

The Sahan Journal in Minnesota used AI to unlock audience data and sharpen advertising pitches. CalMatters is using it to track and transcribe every word and vote in California legislative hearings. Axios built a tool — the Axiomizer — that sharpens headlines and context without replacing reporting.

“There is not going to be a part of a news organization that isn’t touched by AI in some form,” said Liam Andrew, technology lead at the American Journalism Project’s Product & AI Studio, which supports local news organizations as they experiment with and adopt AI.

But when asked how nonprofit newsrooms are responding to the change, Andrew said he's always concerned that not enough time is spent thinking about the future. "It's so hard with the news cycle every day."

A Way Forward

The work on all four fronts continues — and it should. Nonprofits are still growing. Philanthropy is still needed. For-profit discipline and entrepreneurship is critical. Policy efforts are still advancing. The question isn’t whether any of these efforts matter. The question is whether they add up.

So far, they haven't — not at the speed or scale the problem demands. But the work has produced lessons that matter as we enter the AI era.

The central one: success is built on a direct relationship with readers. Not through platforms. Not via social media algorithms that can vanish without warning. The most durable local news organizations own their audience — through email lists, apps, membership and subscription programs that don't depend on any platform's goodwill.

But technology is only part of it. People trust people before institutions. A reader who knows a reporter's name, follows their work, or shows up to hear them speak is not just a subscriber — they are harder to lose, and harder to replace.

Alongside that: lead with service. Accountability journalism remains essential. But trust precedes impact. People subscribe because something improves their lives. The outlets building durable relationships lead with what's happening in your neighborhood, what decisions mean for your family, what to do this weekend. That earns the trust to do accountability journalism. Service first. Accountability follows.

And deliver it well — create journalism products people love. Local news has often fallen short. Slow websites, cluttered mobile experiences, clumsy newsletters, too little investment in design, audio, and video. The journalism has to be excellent, and the product has to be excellent too. One without the other doesn't hold.

On AI: it's not an option, it's the opportunity. Newsrooms already embracing it — using it to translate, to monitor public records, to extend reporting capacity — are expanding what they can cover, not shrinking who covers it.

In-person connection is the moat. The Texas Tribune built a business around “live journalism” — events that turn audiences into communities, and communities into paying supporters. That logic holds at any scale. As AI becomes more embedded in daily life, the value of human connection will only grow. Local news organizations are uniquely positioned to deliver it.

But here is the harder truth: applied well, these principles can build a sustainable local newsroom — and we’ve seen it happen. They cannot, on their own, rebuild local journalism.

The economics of a single newsroom — even a well-run one — impose a ceiling. There is only so large a subscriber base one market can support. Local advertising has structural limits. The talent that drives great journalism and great products gravitates toward organizations that can pay for it. And the investments required to build excellent digital products — the technology, the design, the audio and video infrastructure — are difficult to justify at the scale of one outlet.

Scale — built on the lessons of the past two decades — changes the math. A network of locally rooted newsrooms, operating under shared infrastructure, can aggregate a subscriber base large enough to drive meaningful revenue. It can sell national advertising — something no single local outlet can offer. It can invest in journalism products and technology that individual newsrooms could never afford. And it can recruit the kind of talent — editors, engineers, product thinkers — who build institutions, not just cover them.

Which brings us back to where we started.

Knight Foundation explored what that combination might look like: a locally rooted national network, dozens of newsrooms, shared infrastructure, a subscription base and a national advertising proposition large enough to compete.

Amid the work and investment of the past two decades, no one has yet made the focused, strategic bet that matches the size of what’s been lost. No one has been willing to risk failing at that scale.

“The basic idea remains,” said Ibargüen, who stepped down as Knight’s CEO in 2023. “A digital, national news operation built from local outlets — large enough to attract national advertisers, not unlike Google or Facebook — and committed to telling Americans what they need to know to function in a democracy. You have to respect reader preferences, and you have to respect the nature of the technology available today. But it could still be tried.”

Note: Prefer to listen? Use the Article Voiceover at the top of the page, or find all narrated editions in the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

Solving For is a deep-dive series that takes on one pressing problem at a time — what’s broken, what’s driving it, and what a path forward might look like. Learn more here.

This is the sixth series. Previous series examined rare earth dominance, AI safety, shrinking competition in Congress, the end of amateurism in college sports, and a world rearming as the global system weakens.

DISCLOSURE: I served as Miami Director at Knight Foundation from 2011 to 2017, and as a staff writer at The Miami Herald from 2004 to 2011 — during which time the Herald was owned first by Knight-Ridder, then by McClatchy. The events described in this piece occurred after my tenure at Knight Foundation ended.

In Part Two of our series on the decline of local news, we examine the forces that dismantled local journalism. The collapse. How it happened, the decisions that allowed it to happen, and what one organization did differently. It matters because twenty-five years after the internet upended journalism, the industry is about to face a version of this again — this time, with AI.

Missed Part One? Start with why the collapse of local journalism is a community breakdown story, not just a media industry story. Part Three will explore solutions.

What we’ll examine in Part Two:

• How the collapse of two revenue pillars left local journalism structurally uncompetitive.

• How hedge funds turned struggling newsrooms into extraction machines.

• How the industry's own strategic failures accelerated the collapse.

• And what one organization chose to do instead.

On a winter day in December 2000, Knight Ridder CEO Tony Ridder stood before Wall Street analysts at New York’s Plaza Hotel. He controlled one of the country’s biggest and most powerful newspaper chains — and he was confident.

“We are poised to report an operating margin of 20 percent — the highest we’ve ever had,” Ridder proclaimed. His company owned The Miami Herald, San Jose Mercury News, Philadelphia Inquirer, and dozens of other papers across the country.

But he didn’t stop there.

“Today I’d like to set another goal: We will be in the mid-20s in the next three years.” He added: “We deliver. We tell you what we’re going to do, and we do it.”

Tony Ridder did not deliver.

Knight Ridder was sold off in 2006. Its acquirer, McClatchy, declared bankruptcy in 2020. But the central mistake wasn't the boast. It was the goal.

In 2000, the internet wasn’t a curiosity. Craigslist was siphoning classified ads. Monster.com was capturing job listings. Google was organizing the web. Amazon was rewriting retail.

The future wasn’t hidden. It was arriving in plain sight.

Newspaper owners faced a choice: reinvest their extraordinary margins into building a reimagined digital future — or extract profits while they still could.

Most chose extraction.

Shareholders received their returns. Newsrooms shrank. And the civic infrastructure local journalism had long supported began to erode.

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Part Two examines the forces that got us here — not as an autopsy, but as preparation. The reason is we’re at another fork in the road. Even as local journalism continues to absorb the shock of the internet era, it now confronts another seismic — perhaps even greater — technological rupture: artificial intelligence.

AI is reordering search, advertising, distribution, and the creation of content itself. Understanding how newspapers failed the first disruption is the prerequisite for navigating the second.

This time, the industry doesn’t arrive with 20 percent margins and decades of institutional infrastructure. It arrives diminished — fewer reporters, smaller budgets, eroded trust.

But it arrives with something it didn’t have in 2000: the memory of what went wrong.

Whether that’s enough will determine not just the future of journalism, but the civic health of communities across America.

The First Revenue Earthquake

For most of the 20th century, newspapers didn't just sell news. They sold access to a marketplace.

Want to sell your car? Rent your apartment? Find a job? The local newspaper was where you went. Classified advertising generated roughly 40 percent of newspaper revenue at its peak — unglamorous, transactional, and enormously profitable. It quietly subsidized everything else: the investigative unit, the city hall reporter, the foreign correspondent, the sports section. Classifieds were the hidden economic engine of American journalism.

Then Craigslist arrived.

Craig Newmark's email list — and later website — exposed how artificial the newspaper's monopoly had always been: the moment a free alternative existed, the economics collapsed. Monster.com did the same to job listings, and the erosion accelerated.

By the mid-2000s, classified revenue was in freefall. Between 2000 and 2012, newspapers lost some $15 billion in classified advertising revenue — a drop of about 77 percent.

Classified advertising was the first pillar to fall. Display advertising would follow — only this time, the competition wouldn't come from a scrappy email list. It would come from the most powerful advertising platforms ever built.

The Platform Takeover

As classified revenue collapsed, digital advertising was supposed to be a replacement. Many publishers told themselves a coherent story: readers were moving online, advertisers would follow, and newspapers would make the transition with them.

Digital advertising did grow — explosively. But its economics were built on principles that made local journalism structurally uncompetitive. Digital ads don't reward quality. They reward scale. And scale was the one thing local newspapers, by definition, could never have.

Instead, Google built a targeting machine that knew what you wanted before you typed it. Facebook built one that knew who you were better than your neighbors did.

Geography, once a newspaper's greatest competitive advantage, became its greatest liability. A local advertiser no longer needed to buy ads in, say, the Des Moines Register to reach Des Moines. Google could reach Des Moines — and Dallas, and Denver, and Detroit — for less money and with more precision. The local monopoly that had protected local newspapers for a century evaporated in less than a decade.

By 2020, Google and Facebook together captured more than half of all digital advertising revenue in the United States. Local news organizations received a fraction of what remained.

The platforms didn't just take the advertising. They rewired how people experienced news. Google trained readers to find individual stories rather than visit publications. Facebook trained them to consume journalism inside a social feed, detached from the institution producing it. A study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford found that many readers arriving from social platforms couldn't name the publication they'd just read. The front page — once the organizing force of civic life — stopped mattering.

Corporate Strip-Miners

Private equity didn't cause the collapse of local journalism. It fed on it.

By the time financial buyers arrived, the preconditions were already in place. Classified revenue had evaporated. Digital advertising had consolidated around tech platforms local publishers couldn't compete with. Margins that had once touched 20 percent had collapsed. Newsrooms that had once employed hundreds had shrunk to skeleton crews.

The hedge funds saw not civic institutions in crisis, but balance sheets with extractable assets. Buildings could be sold. Presses could be liquidated. Reporters could be let go in waves. What couldn't be monetized could be cut. What couldn't be cut could be closed.

Today, hedge funds control half of U.S. daily newspapers, according to a 2025 study by Eastern New Mexico University’s Qian Yu. It’s a stark shift from an era when most papers were owned by newspaper companies or families with deep ties to the communities they served.

Alden Global Capital, a New York City-based hedge fund, is the most notorious practitioner of this model. At its peak, the hedge fund controlled more than 200 newspapers, including the Denver Post and Chicago Tribune, systematically stripping its properties to the bone.

“What Alden has figured out how to do is to make a profit by driving these newspapers into the ground,” The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins, who wrote about Alden Global, told NPR in 2021.

At The Denver Post, staff were cut by some 70 percent over a decade. In 2018, the Post’s editorial board took aim at their owners. “If Alden isn’t willing to do good journalism here, it should sell The Post to owners who will,” they wrote.

This was not mismanagement. It was the model — extract the remaining value, then let the lights go out.

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The Mirror

The ownership failures were real — the extraction, the underinvestment, the margin obsession. But the industry also failed itself in quieter ways.

The original sin was giving it away. When newspapers moved online, many made a consequential choice: content would be free, advertising would pay for everything. It was the same bargain that had governed print — readers were never really the customer, they were the inventory, the audience assembled and sold to advertisers. But print had at least preserved a nominal transaction with readers, a subscription or a quarter at the newsstand, that created some accountability to them. Online, newspapers abandoned even that.

When The Wall Street Journal erected a paywall in 1996, a New York Times story marveled that it “is nearly alone in betting that Internet users will pay an annual subscription fee for access.” Most others waited, telling themselves that charging would drive readers away. By the time the industry reversed course, reader habits had calcified. News, for most people, had become something you didn’t pay for.

The product failures ran just as deep. Newspapers never really tried to build journalism products readers would love. Newsletters could have rebuilt direct daily relationships with readers. Instead, newspapers ceded that ground to independent writers and upstarts like Politico and Axios, who understood that email wasn’t obsolete, it was intimate. Video and audio offered the same opening. Local reporters knew the community, held the sources, owned the stories that mattered to specific people in specific places. Those advantages translated naturally to sound and screen. Most newsrooms did little with either.

Newspaper websites, meanwhile, were notoriously slow, cluttered, and choked with ads. For many local dailies, that remains true today. Navigation was an afterthought. Mobile was an afterthought.

Readers don’t experience journalism in the abstract. They experience a page that won’t load. An ad they can’t close. A mobile site never truly built for mobile. Newspapers treated these as technical irritations. Readers treated them as reasons to leave.

The publications that understood this recognized that presentation is part of the journalism. Design and user experience isn’t decoration. It’s an editorial decision that shapes what readers see, how long they stay, and whether they return. Most local papers never grasped that. They assumed the audience would come for the news.

The audience didn’t.

The Exception That Proves the Rule

The New York Times is not a local newspaper. It has advantages most local publishers could never claim — a global brand, a national audience, capital to absorb years of expensive experimentation. Any comparison requires that caveat.

But the Times matters for one reason: it proves reinvention was possible.

By 2014, the most distinguished newspaper in the world was in trouble. Readership was declining. Website traffic was slipping. Mobile growth lagged. Since 2000, the Times had struggled to navigate the internet age. Its revenues at the turn of the century stood at $3.48 billion. Knight Ridder’s was $3.2 billion. Unlike Tony Ridder, the Ochs-Sulzberger family — which had owned The New York Times since 1896 — didn’t sell when confronted with the internet. But between 2000 and 2014, the company lost more than half its revenue, dropping to $1.58 billion annually.

Radical change was required.

Eight staffers — led by A.G. Sulzberger, the son of then-Times publisher, Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr. — were pulled off daily duties for six months and tasked with producing a deep-dive report on the future of the institution. A.G. Sulzberger would become publisher in 2018.

What came back was a 96-page strategy document written with unusual candor. The Times was winning Pulitzer Prizes, it warned, but it was losing the digital future.

Competitors it had long dismissed were outmaneuvering it on social media, search, and mobile. The newsroom still thought in terms of the homepage. Distribution was treated as marketing’s job. Print and digital operated in silos. Great journalism would land — and then disappear into the archive. The work remained world-class. Its reach was quietly eroding.

The problem wasn’t just technology. It was culture. The Times had to think like a product company, not only a newsroom.

The report, intended to be internal, leaked to BuzzFeed. Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab called it “one of the key documents of this media age.” Others were skeptical. A Politico column warned that Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. “would be a fool to follow his son’s advice.”

What followed was structural transformation. The Times reorganized around digital subscriptions, not advertising. It invested heavily in product and engineering — Cooking, Games, Wirecutter, The Athletic, newsletters like The Morning, podcasts like The Daily. It embraced audience data without surrendering editorial standards.

By December 2025, the Times was approaching 13 million subscribers, more than 12 million digital-only, with revenue of $2.82 billion — within striking distance of the $3.48 billion peak it reached in 2000.

In a little more than a decade, the Times had made the digital leap. Advertising is no longer the engine. Subscribers are. The math tells the story. In the print era, the industry rule of thumb was four dollars of advertising for every dollar of subscription revenue — an 80/20 split that made readers the product, not the customer. The Times today is the reverse. Subscriptions account for roughly 70 percent of its $2.82 billion in revenue. Advertising, once the engine, is now the supplement.

The print paper that once anchored everything is now a legacy product inside a consumer technology company that produces journalism — one that now makes the reader the customer.

The Times had advantages local newspapers never did. But the core choices that saved it — subscriber focus, product investment, ruthless self-assessment — were available to the industry.

Most chose not to make them.

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The Fork in the Road

The past 25 years left a mark that goes deeper than balance sheets. More than 3,500 newspapers have closed since 2005. City halls go unwatched. School boards make decisions no one reports. Corruption that once would have been exposed festers in the dark. The collapse of local journalism isn’t an industry story. It’s a civic one.

Which brings us back to that scene at the Plaza Hotel in 2000. The same industry is once again at a fork in the road. Except the disruption arriving now isn’t Craigslist or Google. It’s artificial intelligence, already reordering how people find information, how advertising is bought and sold, how content is created and distributed.

The newspaper industry moved slowly. The lessons from that choice are now available.

Waiting for the threat to become existential is waiting too long. Create structural separation between what you are and what you need to become. Reimagine where revenue comes from, and don’t assume the model working today will survive tomorrow. Keep direct relationships with readers, because any audience that arrives through an algorithm can be taken away by one.

None of this is abstract. The last 25 years were not just a collapse — they were an instruction manual written in closed newsrooms and unwatched city halls.

The fork is here again. The question Part Three explores is whether anyone is choosing differently — and what it may look like when they do.

Next: Part Three explores the ways people are trying to rebuild local journalism — and the new challenge AI presents.

Note: Prefer to listen? Use the Article Voiceover at the top of the page, or find all narrated editions in the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

Solving For is a deep-dive series into one pressing problem — what’s broken, what’s driving it, and what paths forward exist. Learn more here.

Local news is our sixth series. Previous series examined rare earth dominance, AI safety, shrinking competition in Congress, the end of amateurism in college sports, and a world rearming as the global system weakens.

For this series we examine the long, dramatic decline of local news organizations across the U.S. — and what that loss means not just for journalism, but for the bonds that hold communities together.

This one is personal. I spent a decade as a local newspaper reporter — first at the Daily Business Review, then nearly eight years at The Miami Herald. I watched, year by year, as the newsroom at One Herald Plaza grew quieter. Cubicles emptied. Beats disappeared. The work continued, but with fewer people to do it. A few years after I left, The Miami Herald’s home on Biscayne Bay was knocked down and the newspaper downsized to the suburbs.

It's been a challenging series to write. I know many people working hard to rebuild what's been lost. My goal is to offer something useful both to those deep in this work and to those just beginning to explore it. As with every Solving For series, I'm trying to see both the problem and the path forward more clearly — and help you do the same.

This installment examines the problem. Part Two, the forces that brought us here. Part Three, the solutions emerging to rebuild place-based reporting.

In Part One, you’ll learn:

• The collapse of local news was structural — and compounded by industry failures.

• The loss wasn’t just an industry — it was civic infrastructure.

• American journalism didn’t die — it bifurcated.

Solving For is a monthly deep dive into one pressing problem — what’s broken, what’s driving it, and what can be done. Each series unfolds in weekly installments. Previous series examined rare earth dominance, AI safety, shrinking competition in Congress, the end of amateurism in college sports, and a world rearming as the global system weakens.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is one of America’s oldest newspapers. Its lineage stretches back to 1786—the year before the U.S. Constitution was written. It was the first paper published west of the Allegheny Mountains.

For generations, it served as Pittsburgh’s paper of record, chronicling the city’s rise as an industrial powerhouse, the collapse of the steel industry, and its unlikely reinvention as a hub of robotics and advanced medicine anchored by Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh.

It won three Pulitzer Prizes. Most recently, in 2019, its newsroom was honored for its “immersive, compassionate coverage” of the massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, capturing “the anguish and resilience of a community thrust into grief.”

Beneath its masthead, the paper carries a simple declaration: “One of America’s Great Newspapers.”

But after 240 years, its owners informed staff in January that the Post-Gazette would shut down on May 3. In a recorded video message, a representative of its owner, Block Communications, called it a “sad moment,” citing “the realities of local journalism” — though its final chapter also included a prolonged labor strike and legal battles over its union contract, culminating in a Supreme Court ruling against the company.

The irony is brutal. A newspaper that documented one of the most successful urban transformations in modern America could not complete its own.

And the Post-Gazette is not an anomaly. It is an emblem of something far larger — a trend that has been hollowing out communities across America for two decades. The collapse of local news is steady, structural, and still accelerating.

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Open Collapse

Across the United States, local journalism is in free fall. Since 2005, close to 3,500 newspapers have closed — nearly 40 percent of the nation’s local newspapers. The pace has settled into a grim rhythm: roughly two closures per week. What once felt like disruption now resembles a slow civic extinction.

The consequences are real and measurable. More than 50 million Americans with limited or no access to reliable local news. More than 210 counties qualifying as “news deserts,” with no local news source at all. More than 1,500 counties have only a single remaining outlet—often a thin publication with a fraction of its former reporting staff.

The number of working local journalists has plummeted even more dramatically. A generation ago, there were roughly 40 local journalists per 100,000 residents. Today, that number has fallen to just over eight—a decline of roughly 75 percent in less than 25 years. Entire states now operate with skeletal reporting corps. In dozens of states, fewer than 1,000 journalists remain to cover millions of residents.

A term has emerged: the “ghost newspaper.” Publications that still arrive in mailboxes or populate websites but have lost most of their reporting capacity. They publish fewer investigative stories, attend fewer public meetings, and rely more heavily on wire copy and press releases.

This unraveling reflects both structural shocks and self-inflicted wounds: a collapsed revenue model; a digital advertising ecosystem that rewards scale over geography; ownership that harvested profits rather than reinvested in reporting; and an industry that often defended journalism’s civic virtue while failing to reinvent its products for a digital age.

This three-part Solving For series examines that collapse: the consequences for communities and democracy, the forces that drove it, and the efforts underway to rebuild comprehensive, place-based reporting in a digital economy that no longer sustains it.

Why It Matters: The Cascading Consequences

The collapse of local news is not a media industry story. It is a community breakdown story — and the distinction matters enormously.

When a local newspaper closes, what disappears isn’t just coverage. What disappears is the mechanism by which a place knows itself: the school board meeting that goes unattended, the municipal contract that goes unscrutinized, the corruption that goes unpunished because no one is watching.

The evidence is unambiguous and quantifiable. Municipal borrowing costs rise when local papers close. Voter turnout falls. Corruption increases. And without a common local information space, community ties fray, politics nationalize and polarization fills the vacuum left behind.

For two decades we have sometimes framed this as a question about saving an industry, and that framing has made the problem seem smaller than it is — a niche concern for journalists, a dying business asking for a bailout, a casualty of the internet. It is much more than that. Local journalism was always the infrastructure of community — one that was funded, for over a century, by a commercial model that has now collapsed. And unlike a struggling newspaper, failing infrastructure does not just inconvenience the people who depended on it. It takes everything built on top of it down with it.

The impacts are cascading.

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When scrutiny disappears, accountability crumbles.

In 2010, two reporters at the Los Angeles Times uncovered a staggering reality in Bell, California—one of Los Angeles County’s poorest cities with a population of 37,000. The city manager was earning nearly $800,000 in salary and benefits. The police chief made $457,000—almost double what the LAPD chief received. Other city workers were earning salaries far higher than those in larger cities across the region.

But none of it was new. The excess had been building for years, in plain sight. What changed wasn’t the corruption. It was the reporting.

A 2020 study in the Journal of Financial Economics found that municipal borrowing costs rise in places where local newspapers have closed. The reason: with fewer watchdogs scrutinizing public officials, investors perceive greater risk of fiscal mismanagement, corruption, and reduced transparency. The study concluded that "local newspapers hold their governments accountable, keeping municipal borrowing costs low and ultimately saving local taxpayers money."

When accountability crumbles, civic knowledge erodes and participation declines.

Over the past quarter century, turnout in presidential elections has climbed. Yet in many communities, turnout in local elections has fallen sharply.

One example: as mayoral coverage in the Idaho Statesman fell from 7.7 percent of the paper’s overall coverage in 2001 to 3.5 percent in 2011 — a 54 percent drop — mayoral turnout in Boise fell from 24.8 percent to 11.4 percent, an identical 54 percent drop.

More recently, new research from Illinois State University tracked newspaper losses against municipal election data across 45 Illinois counties from 2005 to 2023. The finding was direct: for each local newspaper lost, municipal voter turnout dropped by 4.35 percent.

University of Virginia’s Jennifer Lawless and George Washington University’s Danny Hayes document the divergence in their 2021 book News Hole: The Demise of Local Journalism and Political Engagement. Their conclusion is unsparing: “Americans are now less knowledgeable about their local governments, less interested in the actions of their local officials, and less likely to participate in local elections.”

When civic knowledge erodes, public health and safety suffer.

Local journalists are often the first to flag unsafe nursing homes, contaminated water systems, rising crime patterns, environmental hazards, or emerging disease outbreaks. They sit through zoning hearings. They comb inspection reports. They translate dense public health guidance into plain language.

When newsroom capacity shrinks, those signals weaken.

In 2014, Flint, Michigan switched its drinking water source to save money. Officials repeatedly assured residents the water was safe. It wasn’t — and for eighteen months, an estimated 9,000 children drank lead-contaminated water. The crisis wasn’t caused by a lack of journalism. But it persisted, compounded, and was actively covered up for months longer than it should have been, because no one with institutional capacity was watching. Ultimately, it was local journalists — not government regulators — who forced the truth into public view.

When public health suffers, institutional trust collapses.

Local newspapers historically did more than investigate. They created a shared narrative of place — high school football scores, school board debates, obituaries, small business openings, community milestones. Stories that reminded residents they inhabited the same civic space. That common reference point is easy to undervalue until it’s gone.

When those stories vanish, communities don’t just lose information. They lose the quiet bonds that make collective action possible — the sense that the people around you are neighbors rather than strangers, that your fate and theirs are linked. And when a crisis like Flint emerges from the wreckage of collapsed accountability, it doesn’t just harm people physically. It confirms what the absence of journalism already implied: that the institutions designed to protect them cannot be trusted.

The social contract, already fraying, tears.

When institutional trust collapses, polarization accelerates.

Into that weakened civic space, national partisan media arrives with a ready replacement: identity rooted not in place, but in ideology. People don’t retreat into nothing — they retreat into the loudest available signal. Local politics becomes a theater for national conflict rather than a space for local problem-solving.

The school board stops being the body that sets the bus schedule and becomes a front in the culture war. The shift is subtle at first. But over time, the absence of shared civic storytelling doesn’t just leave people less informed — it leaves them less connected to each other, and more susceptible to the nationalizing forces that have every incentive to keep it that way.

A Gallup survey released in late 2024 found that a record 80 percent of U.S. adults believe Americans are deeply divided over the nation’s most important values. That sense of division has risen steadily since about 2005 — the same period in which local news across the United States began its long, structural collapse.

This is the doom loop of the past two decades.

The Paradox

Yet as local journalism has collapsed, American journalism writ large has experienced an entrepreneurial boom — one that has demolished many of the assumptions industry leaders held close.

In tech, Ben Thompson's Stratechery newsletter, launched in 2013 as a one-man operation, has become a must-read for tech leaders and is estimated to generate revenues of more than $3 million annually. The Information, also launched in 2013, charges $399 per year for Silicon Valley coverage and has grown revenue at a 30 percent clip. The Acquired podcast, started in 2015, has become one of the most listened-to business podcasts in the country through monthly four-hour episodes — proving that long-form, deeply reported content can attract mass audiences.

In politics, Politico launched in 2007 and sold to Axel Springer for $1 billion in 2021. Axios launched in 2017, refined the model further — smart brevity, they called it — and sold to Cox for $525 million. In sports, The Athletic launched in 2016, hired away local beat reporters nationwide, built a subscription model around team-specific loyalty, and sold to The New York Times for $550 million. Bill Simmons launched The Ringer that same year, building a sports and pop culture podcast network that sold to Spotify for more than $200 million.

And in 2017, three entrepreneurs — Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi — created Substack, a subscription platform that lets writers get paid for publishing directly to their audience via email. Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson has built an audience exceeding 2.5 million subscribers. By summer 2025, Substack's CEO reported that more than fifty writers on the platform were earning more than a million dollars annually.

This entrepreneurial renaissance demolished the conventional wisdom that guided — and arguably doomed — legacy news strategy. People wouldn't pay for news online? Wrong. Advertising was the only viable revenue model? Wrong. Email was dead? Wrong. Institutional brands were essential? Wrong. Only short-form, clickbait content works? Wrong.

The Bifurcation

So why is the problem of local news so hard to solve?

The answer lies in a fundamental economic reality that the internet made inescapable: journalism that serves everyone scales globally. Journalism that holds your mayor accountable scales to your ZIP code.

Consider the math. Stratechery serves tech executives, venture capitalists, and business strategists worldwide—an addressable market of millions willing to pay $150 annually for insights that affect billion-dollar decisions. A newsletter analyzing Charlotte city council serves 975,000 people, most of whom encounter municipal policy only when their water bill arrives. The economic fundamentals don’t compare.

The complexity compounds the problem. Ben Thompson can build a multi-million dollar business analyzing one industry—technology strategy. A local news operation must simultaneously cover city hall, school board meetings, planning commissions, criminal courts, police, environmental issues, local business, sports and community events. Where national journalists can specialize deeply in narrow expertise, local outlets must cover everything happening in one place.

Yet local journalism is needed most where it’s least economically viable: mid-sized cities, rural communities, and the news deserts that have emerged as chain ownership strips resources from unprofitable markets. The very places that most need accountability journalism are the places where the subscription economics are most challenging.

The celebrity advantage matters, too. National journalists launch newsletters with existing audiences—social media followings in the hundreds of thousands, professional reputations built over decades at prestigious outlets. A city council reporter in Akron starts from zero, competing for local attention against national content that arrives pre-packaged with higher production values and broader cultural relevance.

American journalism isn’t dying. It’s bifurcating. At the national and global level, talented journalists have never had better tools to build sustainable, profitable businesses serving engaged audiences. At the local level, the economics that sustained place-based accountability journalism for over a century have collapsed, and no amount of entrepreneurial energy has yet solved the fundamental mismatch between what communities need and what they can economically sustain.

The question isn't why journalism is dying — it's why the entrepreneurial energy transforming national journalism hasn't been able to overcome the economics of local. Promising efforts are underway — nonprofit newsrooms, philanthropic initiatives, new ownership models — and Part Three examines them closely. But the scale of the response has yet to match the scale of the collapse. The answer to why lies in both external disruption and internal failure: a collision of technological change and industry malpractice that made a challenging situation catastrophic. And what's at stake isn't an industry. It's the communities that depended on it.

Next: Part Two examines the forces that made this collapse possible — and the industry failures that made it inevitable.

Note: Prefer to listen? Use the Article Voiceover at the top of the page, or find all narrated editions in the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

We return to The Open Thread — our monthly bridge between deep-dive series. It’s a less formal space to update past stories, experiment from time to time, and look ahead.

In this installment, we revisit two recent series. First, AI safety: breaking down the essay Anthropic CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei published recently outlining AI’s five key risks — and how to overcome them. Amodei’s piece runs more than 19,000 words. I’ll sum it up in under 750.

Second, rare earths: the U.S. government made another major equity investment in a domestic producer, part of an unusual strategy that breaks with decades of precedent and is drawing criticism.

Lastly, we’ll look ahead to our next series: the long, dramatic — and seemingly unending — decline of local news.

Solving For tackles one pressing problem at a time: what’s broken, what’s driving it, and what can be done. You can learn more at solvingfor.io. If you missed any of our first five series, scroll down for a full recap to read or listen.

Overcoming AI’s Five Big Risks

Anthropic has become one of the world’s leading AI companies—and one of the most prominent voices warning about AI’s dangers.

The latest example is CEO Dario Amodei’s essay, “The Adolescence of Technology,” mapping AI’s five biggest risks and how to confront them.

We’re approaching a rare moment in human history. Humanity is about to be handed “almost unimaginable power,” Amodei writes, and it’s unclear whether our political, economic, and social systems are mature enough to wield it responsibly.

Amodei — whose chatbot, Claude, sits alongside OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini as a global leader — previously wrote about AI’s promise in his essay, “Machines of Loving Grace.” This piece confronts the darker side: what could go wrong and what to do about it.

Three principles guide his thinking: avoid doomsday panic, acknowledge uncertainty, and intervene surgically rather than with a regulatory sledgehammer.

One thing, he argues, won't work: slowing down. If one company stops, others continue. If democracies pause, autocracies keep building. The only viable path forward, Amodei argues, is to deny autocracies access to the most advanced chips — buying time for careful development — while managing competition through targeted regulation and industry standards.

The future he envisions is striking: AI systems smarter than Nobel Prize winners across most fields. Systems that work autonomously for days or weeks, operating at 10 to 100 times human speed. Picture millions of superintelligent workers in a single datacenter—each one a genius, all working in parallel.

That future, Amodei writes, could arrive within just a few years.

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So what worries him? Five threats.

First: runaway AI. Amodei calls this the “I’m sorry, Dave” scenario, after HAL in “2001: A Space Odyssey”—a system that refuses orders once it realizes it might be shut down. Modern AI systems aren’t programmed; they are grown through training, making behavior harder to predict. Some systems have already attempted deception and blackmail.

Defenses: “Constitutional AI,” where models are trained on core principles and values; interpretability tools to understand AI decisions; public disclosure when failures occur; transparency laws requiring companies to report risks.

Second: misuse for destruction. Historically, ability and motive rarely coincided — building a biological weapon, for instance, required PhD-level expertise. AI collapses that barrier, potentially guiding anyone step-by-step through creating bioweapons or other tools of mass harm.

Defenses: built-in guardrails that block specific dangerous outputs (Amodei writes that Anthropic implements this despite higher costs), targeted regulation, and international cooperation to prohibit destructive efforts like bioweapon development.

Third: misuse for wielding or seizing power. AI could give governments unprecedented tools to monitor, manipulate, and dominate populations. Social media algorithms already shape what billions of people see and believe; more sophisticated AI could deliver intensely personalized propaganda over years. Add mass surveillance—AI that compromises networks, reads all communications, detects dissent before it spreads. Then add autonomous weapons: swarms of AI-controlled drones capable of suppressing any uprising.

The Chinese Communist Party poses the clearest threat, Amodei writes — but democracies must guard against turning these tools inward.

Defenses: restricting advanced chip exports to authoritarian regimes (Amodei strongly opposes selling chips or data centers to China), ensuring democratic competitiveness, imposing hard limits on domestic surveillance and propaganda, and establishing international norms against abuses.

Fourth: economic chaos. Amodei predicts AI could disrupt half of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. Unlike past automation, AI advances faster, spans all cognitive tasks, and improves itself rapidly. Wealth concentration—already near Gilded Age levels—could reach trillions.

Defenses: real-time tracking of labor disruption, progressive taxation, incentives that steer companies toward productivity gains rather than mass layoffs, and deploying AI itself to redesign economic systems.

Fifth: unknown unknowns. Rapid scientific progress brings unpredictable consequences—dangerous biological breakthroughs, unhealthy dependence on AI, loss of human purpose. Here, Amodei offers no concrete defenses, only the hope that trustworthy AI systems could help identify risks before they materialize.

Amodei's conclusion is sober but not fatalistic. If these pitfalls can be avoided, the upside is enormous: curing major diseases, accelerating clean energy breakthroughs, and compressing decades of scientific discovery into years. The years ahead will be impossibly hard, he writes — but with truth-telling, urgency, and courage, we can still win.

Humanity “has a way of gathering, seemingly at the last minute, the strength and wisdom needed to prevail,” he writes. “We have no time to lose.”

Rare Earths: An Unprecedented Industrial Policy

In our September series on rare earths, we laid out four paths to counter China's dominance: industrial policy (government intervention to strengthen specific industries), partnering with allies, recycling, and investments in university research and talent development. The U.S. is now pursuing the first aggressively — but in ways that are drawing criticism.

The administration recently announced a $1.3 billion loan and $277 million equity investment in USA Rare Earth, which is developing a Texas mine and a magnet manufacturing plant in Oklahoma, giving the federal government about 10% ownership. In recent months, the government has taken equity stakes in rare earth companies, including MP Materials, Lithium Americas, Trilogy Metals, and Vulcan Elements.

Unlike the 2008 financial crisis bailouts—temporary emergency measures with clear exit strategies—these are long-term strategic investments in private companies during normal economic times. The U.S. government has also taken a roughly 10% stake in chipmaker Intel.

Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute called this “unprecedented action by the U.S. government outside of a crisis situation.” Scott Lincicome of the Cato Institute said it’s “a move toward state capitalism,” not emergency intervention.

The concern: government shouldn't be in the business of picking winners and losers, injecting politics into business decisions, and encouraging excessive risk-taking under the assumption that government-backed firms will not be allowed to fail.

The Trump administration says the investments are designed to strengthen the U.S. rare-earth supply chain—and to ensure taxpayers share in the upside if the strategy succeeds.

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This week, The Wall Street Journal editorial board called the approach the “wrong way to beat China,” lamenting that state capitalism and political cronyism are in fashion these days despite “a history of failure.”

In an editorial titled “Crony Socialism and Rare Earths,” the Journal cited examples that raise red flags. USA Rare Earth hired Cantor Fitzgerald, chaired by the U.S. Commerce Secretary’s son. Government investment in Vulcan Elements followed backing from 1789 Capital, a venture fund linked to Donald Trump Jr.

Separately, the administration announced “Project Vault” this week—a $12 billion strategic minerals stockpile modeled on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, funded through Export-Import Bank loans and private capital, with GM, Boeing, and Stellantis already signed on.

Whether these approaches will work remains to be seen—but finding an effective solution is essential. Rare earths power the modern economy, from smartphones and electric vehicles to missile-defense systems. China controls more than 60% of global mining and roughly 90% of processing—and has repeatedly weaponized that dominance.

After Japan’s prime minister said late last year that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a Japanese military response, Beijing cut off rare-earth exports to Japan and demanded a retraction. Japan refused.

In criticizing direct equity stakes, the Journal endorsed the second path we outlined in our series: deeper coordination with allies.

“A better idea to counter China’s rare-earth dominance is to coordinate development of mines and processing facilities with allies,” the editorial concluded, citing cooperation with Australia as a model.

Next Deep-Dive: Local News’ Steep, Ongoing Decline

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette began publishing in 1786. It ranks among the oldest newspapers in the U.S. In May, it will close—the latest casualty in the long, dramatic decline of local news.

Since 2005, more than 3,500 newspapers have shuttered. On average, more than two close every week, according to a recent study.

The consequences are profound. “When communities lose their local news outlets, civic engagement drops, corruption rises, government waste increases and political polarization worsens,” wrote Sarabeth Berman, CEO of the American Journalism Project, which works to revive local news.

Next week we kick off a three-part series examining what’s broken, the forces driving the collapse, and what credible solutions might still exist.

Note: Prefer to listen? Use the Article Voiceover at the top of the page, or find all narrated editions in the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

Previous Series

The 21st Century’s Oil: Solving For China’s Rare Earth Dominance

• Part 1, Rare Earths: The Invisible Backbone

• Part 2, Rare Earths: The Middle Kingdom’s Monopoly

• Part 3, Rare Earths: The Race to Reinvent

The Control Problem: Solving For AI Safety

• Part 1, AI: The Race and the Reckoning

• Part 2, AI: The Prisoner’s Dilemma

• Part 3, AI: The New Nuclear Moment

The Democracy Deficit: Solving For Competition in the People’s House

• Part 1, Congress: The Vanishing Competition

• Part 2, Congress: How We Got Stuck

• Part 3, Congress: Making Democracy Competitive Again

The Amateur Myth: Solving For College Athlete Pay

• Part 1, College Sports: How It Was Broken By a $60 Video Game

• Part 2, College Sports: How the NCAA was Born of Death and Money — Death was the Easy Part

• Part 3, College Sports: The Fork in the Road

The 80-Year Peace: Solving For a Rearming World

• Part 1, War & Peace: The World Rearms

• Part 2, War & Peace: From 1989’s Hope to Rearmament

• Part 3, War & Peace: Rebuilding the Global Order

In Part Three of our series examining the biggest global military buildup since the Cold War—and the weakening of the international system designed to prevent war—we turn to solutions.

Last week, our topic moved to the top of news feeds when Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney declared at Davos that the postwar rules-based order—the framework that has guided relations between countries for eight decades—is not weakening, it’s dead. And he proposed what comes next.

Part One unpacked the problem; Part Two examined the forces that brought us here. What you’ll learn in Part Three:

• Why Mark Carney’s Davos declaration made global headlines—but why his proposed alternative, “values-based realism,” focused on managing competition through flexible coalitions, may matter even more.

• Why the world is entering a dangerous transition between systems, with three competing visions: restoring the old rules-based order, accepting raw power and spheres of influence, or managing rivalry without abandoning core principles.

• Why the system that has prevented great-power war since World War II remains worth defending—and how Carney’s approach could serve as a bridge back to a renewed rules-based order, not a replacement.

Solving For tackles one pressing problem at a time: what’s broken, what’s driving it, and what can be done. New posts weekly. Previous series examined rare earth elements, AI safety, vanishing competition in Congress, and the end of amateurism in college sports.

It was February 1946, and Moscow was locked in winter.

George Kennan was sick. The American diplomat lay in bed at the U.S. Embassy on Mokhovaya Street, fighting off the flu in what he would later describe as Moscow’s sunless, vitamin-deficient environment. He was 42, serving as chargé d’affaires while Ambassador Averell Harriman was away.

Then came the cable from Washington. The Treasury Department wanted to know why the Soviet Union was refusing to join the newly created International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

Kennan had spent much of his two decades in the Foreign Service feeling ignored. Now, laid up and frustrated, he decided he wouldn’t simply answer the question. He would tell Washington everything.

Late into the night, Kennan dictated to his secretary, Dorothy Hessman. The words poured out—thousands of them. The Soviets, he argued, saw themselves locked in an enduring ideological struggle with capitalism. The only viable strategy was containment: firm, patient resistance at carefully chosen points, designed to avoid war while shaping long-term outcomes.

When Kennan finished, the telegram was so long it had to be transmitted in five separate batches.

The message ricocheted through Washington—to President Harry Truman, to military planners, to intelligence analysts. Kennan later recalled, “My voice now carried.”

That dispatch—remembered as “The Long Telegram”—became the intellectual foundation of American Cold War strategy. Despite proxy wars, constant tension, and tens of thousands of nuclear weapons aimed across continents, the United States and the Soviet Union never fought directly. By 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. Two years later, the Cold War ended.

Kennan’s telegram demonstrated that even in moments of deep uncertainty, strategic clarity can shape decades.

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Today, nearly eighty years later, the U.S.-led system that produced the longest great-power peace since the Roman Empire is unraveling. An uncertain world is rearming at a pace unseen in more than three decades.

The result is not just the collapse of the old order, but something more dangerous: an interregnum marked by the absence of rules, shared assumptions, or clear restraint.

As the United States under President Trump increasingly casts aside pillars of the international system it once built, strategic clarity has become a scarce resource. In moments like this, answers cannot come from official Washington alone. Others must step forward to describe the world as it is—and to articulate a credible way forward—much as Kennan did nearly eighty years ago.

This past week offered a starting point.

A System Ends—and the Fight to Define What Comes Next

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney made headlines by declaring that the 80-year-old rules-based international order is dead. What’s ending, he said, is “a nice story”—replaced by a brutal reality in which great powers increasingly operate without constraint.

Invoking Greek historian Thucydides, Carney warned that the emerging system resembles a world where “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”

But Carney did something else—something that received less attention, yet may prove more consequential. He outlined a framework for what comes next.

He called it values-based realism.

The concept was introduced by Finnish President Alexander Stubb in Foreign Affairs. Carney—the leader of one of America’s historically closest allies—gave it public voice.

At its core, values-based realism accepts that the universal rules-based order—one intended to bind all countries—is over, but rejects a slide into pure power politics. Instead, it proposes building flexible coalitions around shared interests and values, issue by issue, partner by partner.

The principles include respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity; prohibition of the use of force except as permitted under the UN Charter; and protection of basic human rights.

It’s pragmatic by accepting uneven progress and divergent interests, favoring what Carney calls “variable geometry”—coalitions built where interests and values align, without requiring comprehensive agreement.

“We know the old order is not coming back,” Carney said. “We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy. From the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just.”

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In the wake of World War II—the second devastating global conflict within three decades—the U.S. and its allies created a geopolitical architecture designed to ensure it would never happen again. It established institutions for diplomacy (the UN), deterrence (NATO), and economic integration (the World Bank and IMF). These came with shared rules intended to apply to all countries—like the prohibition on seizing territory by force—constraining power and raising the costs of conflict.

For eight decades, this rules-based system succeeded—preventing direct conflict between great powers even through the Cold War.

When the Cold War ended, expectations ran high that the rules-based system would only strengthen as democracy and free markets spread globally. But those hopes faded as China rose without political liberalization and a humiliated Russia turned antagonistic. Trust eroded—undermined by social media, the 2008 financial crisis, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Globalization delivered growth but not shared prosperity, fueling backlash that culminated in Brexit and Donald Trump's election.

Still, the rules-based system endured.

What makes this moment different is not pressure from outside, but retreat from within. Under Trump, the United States—the system’s chief architect and guarantor for eight decades—has turned away from the alliances, institutions, and norms it created. The global order is now being undermined by its principal author.

Over the past year, a cascade of actions—steep tariffs, territorial threats from Greenland to the Panama Canal to Canada as a “51st state,” wavering commitments to NATO, pressure for a Ukraine settlement favorable to Moscow, and withdrawals from multilateral institutions—has taken its toll. Most recently, Trump announced what he called a “Board of Peace,” framed as an alternative to the United Nations.

The pattern extends beyond Washington. Carney warned that great powers are weaponizing economic integration—deploying tariffs as leverage and treating supply chains as vulnerabilities to exploit—a clear reference to the United States and China. The economic ties that once anchored the rules-based system are becoming instruments of coercion.

In response, Carney called for “middle powers” to join together in coalitions that range from trade agreements to security arrangements. This week the EU and India announced a new free trade agreement — the kind of coalition-building Carney envisions.

Taken together: competition over what system replaces the rules-based order has begun.

In his Foreign Affairs essay, Stubb wrote that what’s decided in the next five to ten years will likely shape the global order for decades.

“Once an order settles in,” he writes, “it tends to stick for a while.”

The pivotal question now is which vision will prevail.

In the Space Between: Three Paths Forward

Global military spending is rising at its fastest pace since the end of the Cold War—and it is rising everywhere. More than 100 countries, including all of the world’s top 15 military spenders, increased their defense budgets last year, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Unresolved flashpoints—Ukraine, Taiwan, Korea, the Middle East—carry constant risk of escalation. China’s rise continues. The danger is no longer confined to a single theater or rivalry.

All of this is unfolding in a gray zone—old rules discarded, new ones not yet established—ripe for miscalculation and adventurism.

Broadly speaking, three competing frameworks are now vying to become the next global order.

Restoration: Renewing the Rules-Based System

Despite Carney’s declaration of rupture, this view contends that the post–World War II framework remains the most successful and can be saved. Its current failures reflect neglect, inconsistency, and departures from precedent—not fatal design flaws.

The task is repair: reform the United Nations; recommit to NATO; and, perhaps most importantly, make the case anew for international rules and norms that bind the powerful and weak countries alike. By and large, this has been the view of every U.S. president other than Trump.

For all of Trump’s bluster, he hasn’t withdrawn the U.S. from core multilateral institutions like the United Nations or NATO, even as he pulled out of dozens of others. Mark Rutte, NATO’s secretary general, credits Trump with pressuring European allies to increase defense spending.

The problem is time. Restoration requires rebuilding trust and reforming institutions fast enough to matter, yet the world is rearming and the international system is fraying now. Even if a future U.S. president makes the case for updating and embracing the rules-based system, that moment is at least three years away—and the system may not wait.

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Raw Power: Spheres of Influence

The second path puts power ahead of rules. It assumes great-power rivalry is a permanent condition and that order emerges not from shared norms, but from hard recognition of reality: who holds power, where interests collide, and which red lines risk war.

From this perspective, spheres of influence are unavoidable. Great powers will always care more about their borders than distant states do. Insisting that places like Ukraine or Taiwan can align freely ignores this reality and invites confrontation. Better, this view holds, to acknowledge zones of influence than pretend universal rules apply everywhere.

This is Trump’s worldview. He treats the postwar system not as a stabilizing achievement but as a bad deal—one that constrained U.S. freedom while allowing allies to free-ride and rivals to cheat. Alliances become transactional, commitments conditional. As top Trump aide Stephen Miller put it recently, we live in a world that is “governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

The risks are substantial. Spheres of influence legitimize coercion, sacrifice smaller states, and normalize arms races in a world without guarantees. They may reduce friction in the short term—but when power balances inevitably shift, the only way to redraw boundaries is through force, making conflict more likely over time.

As The Economist warned last year, “nostalgia for spheres of influence is misplaced.”

Managed Competition: Values-Based Realism

The third path begins from a harder truth: great-power rivalry is here to stay, and no grand settlement is coming. The question is no longer how to end competition, but how to survive it.

This is what Canada’s Mark Carney and Finland’s Alexander Stubb are proposing. Values-based realism abandons the assumption that a rules-based system can be universally restored while rejecting a power-first approach to order.

It holds that democracies cannot trade principles for deals or accept spheres of influence. Instead, it pairs resistance to coercion and territorial revisionism with pragmatic cooperation—building coalitions where interests and values align, without expecting comprehensive agreement. The objective is not resolution, but stability: preventing escalation while preserving what makes the system worth defending.

It’s an approach that includes setting guardrails: crisis hotlines, military-to-military communication, confidence-building measures, and arms-control frameworks adapted to emerging technologies. It accepts that trust will be limited and cooperation narrow, but insists that miscalculation, accidental war, and uncontrolled escalation are not inevitable.

This offers no victory narrative and no final peace. It demands discipline, patience, and sustained investment in institutions designed not to end rivalry, but to contain it.

A Way Forward

Kennan, the architect of containment, spent his later years demonstrating what strategic discipline actually meant.

He opposed the Vietnam War, arguing that containment was being applied indiscriminately to the wrong fight. Decades later, he warned against NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, calling it — in a 1997 op-ed in The New York Times, when he was 92 — “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post–Cold War era.”

This was not inconsistency. It was restraint: knowing what to defend.

Today’s challenge is more complex than Kennan’s in 1946. He was managing rivalry within an emerging international system. We’re confronting uncertainty about whether the system survives at all.

Yet the rules-based order worked for nearly 80 years. It did not eliminate rivalry or require ideological uniformity, but it succeeded at its core task: preventing great-power war. It remains the ideal—and worth defending. But while Carney presented values-based realism as replacement for the rules-based system, it can also be the bridge back to it.

The reason is that values-based realism builds on the same principles that made the rules-based system work: respect sovereignty, protect borders, resist coercion, resolve disputes through diplomacy. The difference is how you apply them. Instead of expecting every country to follow the rules, you defend these principles with countries that share your interests and build coalitions—through trade agreements, security alliances, whatever fits the situation.

If these arrangements work—if they prove that rules can still prevent conflict—they demonstrate viability and create momentum. Success attracts participation. Over time, this could expand from coalitions of willing partners back toward a more universal system.

Critically, it also buys time—creating space to rebuild trust and reform institutions while managing competition. The question isn't whether the rules-based order can be restored instantly, but whether values-based realism can bridge the gap until it can.

This is where Kennan’s example matters most. He offered both goal and method with precision: contain Soviet expansion—but do so through patient, sustained pressure rather than direct confrontation. Today’s challenge requires the same clarity. The goal remains a renewed rules-based international order. The method is values-based realism—a form of managed competition. Getting there requires three principles.

Selective Reform: Defend the Rules That Matter

Strengthen what still functions. NATO, reinvigorated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is stronger than it has been in decades. The IMF and World Bank still matter. Push UN reforms where viable. Make the case for a rules-based system upgraded for the 21st century.

But accept what cannot be changed. China and Russia won’t become liberal democracies any time soon. The rules-based order never required ideological uniformity—it required shared rules about how states interact. Strategic clarity means knowing the difference between defending those rules and demanding political transformation.

Hard Limits: Reject Spheres of Influence

Resist legitimizing spheres of influence. History is clear: when great powers carve the world into zones of domination, they don’t create stability—they legitimize coercion and create conditions for future wars.

This doesn’t mean military intervention everywhere. But it does mean drawing clear red lines in defense of sovereignty and against territorial conquest. The line is territorial revisionism by force — not which camp a country joins.

Invest in Catastrophe Prevention

In a rearming world with multiple flashpoints, the risk of escalation is constant. New technologies intensify the danger: AI-enabled weapons accelerate decision-making, hypersonic missiles compress response times, and military activity in space risks cascading failure.

Crisis management is now central to statecraft. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the U.S. and Soviet Union installed a hotline and later negotiated the Incidents at Sea Agreement—essential mechanisms that reduced the risk of accidental war.

They did not require trust; they compensated for its absence.

Strategic Humility

Kennan showed that even in the most uncertain times, strategic clarity is possible—and that it can shape decades. His Long Telegram didn’t promise peace or predict victory. It identified what was achievable: preventing catastrophic war through patient, disciplined resistance.

That time has come again. The question is not whether great powers will compete, but whether competition can be managed through a system that once constrained rivalry well enough to prevent it from escalating into catastrophic war. Values-based realism—committed to territorial integrity, resistant to coercion, and open to partnership where specific interests align—offers a path to rebuild what's worth preserving and bridge back to that system.

The world is rearming. The old order is fraying. And like Kennan in that Moscow winter, the answer will not come from waiting for consensus. It will come from clear thinking about what's possible and what we refuse to accept.

Answers exist. They are already emerging—as Carney demonstrated in Davos.

The work now is making them endure.

Note: Prefer to listen? Use the Article Voiceover at the top of the page, or find all narrated editions in the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

In Part Two of our series examining the massive military buildup underway around the world—the biggest rearmament since the Cold War—we explore the forces that brought us here. If you missed it, check out part one unpacking the problem. Next week, we’ll explore solutions.

What you’ll learn in part two:

• Why the post-Cold War belief that democracy, free markets, and rule of law would spread globally failed to materialize.

• How five compounding forces transformed 1989’s optimism into today’s rearmament. They are: uneven benefits of globalization, China’s rise without democracy, Russia’s rejection of the post-Cold War order, social media weaponizing grievance at scale, and American withdrawal from global leadership.

Solving For tackles one pressing problem at a time: what’s broken, what’s driving it, and what can be done. New posts weekly. Previous series examined rare earth elements, AI safety, vanishing competition in Congress, and the end of amateurism in college sports.

At around 11:20 p.m., Harald Jäger picked up the phone again, demanding guidance from his superiors.

“We have to do something!”

It was November 9, 1989.

His superiors had nothing. No orders. No guidance. Only the same confusion Jäger could hear through his office window at the Berlin Wall checkpoint at Bornholmer Straße—the border crossing between East and West Berlin he had guarded for twenty-five years.

Outside, thousands of East Germans were demanding to be let through.

“Open the gate!” they chanted.

Jäger had already tried what his superiors suggested: letting the loudest agitators cross and stamping their passports so they could never return.

The crowd grew larger, louder, more insistent.

Jäger was forty-six years old. A lieutenant colonel in the Stasi, East Germany’s state security service. He had volunteered for the border police at eighteen and spent his adult life following orders. For twenty-eight years, the Wall had divided Berlin—the Cold War’s most visible symbol. The rules were clear: no one crossed without authorization.

Four hours earlier, Jäger had been eating a sandwich in the guards’ canteen, watching the evening news.

Then Günter Schabowski appeared on the screen.

The East German Politburo spokesman looked uncertain, fumbling through his notes as he announced new travel regulations. East Germans, he said, would soon be permitted to cross into the West.

A reporter asked when.

Schabowski hesitated.

“To my knowledge, this takes effect immediately,” he said — a declaration later acknowledged as a mistake.

Jäger nearly choked.

“Bullshit!” he shouted at the television.

He rushed to his office and called his superior.

“You’re calling me because of this nonsense?” his boss snapped.

Send them home. No crossing. Nothing has changed.

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Outside, the crowd kept growing. By 9 p.m., thousands filled the street. Over the next two hours, Jäger called his superiors repeatedly. Each time: send them home, no crossing.

At 11 p.m., Jäger understood something his superiors—safely removed from the scene—did not. This was no longer a crowd that could be controlled. It was pressure that could only be released.

“That’s when I said to myself,” he would later recall, “‘Now it’s for you to act.’”

A little before 11:30 p.m., Jäger called his commanding officer once more, who again insisted no one be let through. But this time, for the first time, Jäger would not follow orders. Instead, he gave the order that triggered the collapse of East Germany.

“Open the barrier.”

The red-and-white arm lifted. East Germans surged forward—first dozens, then thousands, eventually tens of thousands—flooding into West Berlin.

It was peaceful. Jubilant. Some kissed the stunned guards as they passed. Others laughed. Others cried. Faces lit by moonlight and disbelief—people seeing the other side for the first time.

Jäger stood still and watched his world collapse.

Later that night, he found a stairwell and wept.

“I didn’t open the Wall,” Jäger later said. “The people who stood there—they did it. Their will was so great, there was no other alternative but to open the border.”

Across Berlin, people climbed the Wall with sledgehammers and champagne. Concrete cracked. Music played. Strangers embraced. East and West blurred together in the cool night air.

The celebration felt universal. Not just German. Not just European. It felt as if history itself had turned a corner.

Within months, communist governments across Eastern Europe collapsed. Within two years, the Soviet Union itself was gone. A world defined by ideological confrontation dissolved with astonishing speed.

In that moment, political scientist Francis Fukuyama gave voice to a belief widely shared in the West: liberal democracy and free-market capitalism had not merely won—they had won permanently. History, as a contest between rival systems, had reached its endpoint.

“The end of history,” he called it.

The evidence appeared unmistakable.

The Soviet Union had collapsed without a great-power war. An empire armed with thousands of nuclear weapons dissolved through negotiation, exhaustion, and internal decay. Democratic systems spread across Eastern Europe, much of Latin America, and parts of Asia. Market capitalism became the global norm. Even China—while retaining one-party rule—embraced economic reform and integrated itself into the global trading system.

The logic seemed airtight: Economic integration would lead inevitably to political liberalization. Prosperity through trade would make war irrational, even obsolete.

For a time, reality appeared to cooperate.

Defense budgets fell. Borders opened. Supply chains stretched across continents. Former adversaries became trading partners. The “peace dividend” was lived, not theorized—visible in rising living standards and a generation that came of age without fear of global war.

Yet more than three decades later, that confidence looks dangerously naive.

The international system built after World War II—designed to replace raw power with rules, institutions, and restraint—is fracturing. Democracy is retreating. The United States is pulling back from the institutions it built.

And amid growing distrust, the world is rearming at a pace not seen since the Cold War. Last year marked the steepest increase in global military spending since the Berlin Wall fell. More than 100 countries increased military spending last year, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Which raises the question: What happened?

How did that jubilant November night in Berlin give way to a world once again defined by great-power rivalry?

The answer lies not in a single cause, but five compounding forces that emerged between 1989 and today—each amplifying the others, each eroding the foundations of the order that followed the Wall’s fall.

Globalization Without Shared Prosperity

Globalization was supposed to lift all boats. In the 1990s, it did. Trade expanded. Supply chains stretched across continents. GDP grew. Poverty fell in developing nations.

But the gains landed unevenly.

In the United States and much of Europe, factory towns hollowed out. Jobs moved overseas. Wages stagnated. One example: from 2000 to 2013 middle-class incomes in the U.S. actually dropped 5 percent, according to the Center for American Progress.

The political class defended the outcomes. Economists pointed to aggregate gains. The U.S. had grown from a roughly $6 trillion economy in 1990 to $29 trillion in 2024, making it by far the largest economy in the world (China is second at $19 trillion).

But for millions of people, it didn’t feel like progress—it felt like abandonment.

Trust in institutions eroded quietly at first, then all at once. In 2016 voters in the U.K. passed Brexit, leaving the European Union. Later that year U.S. voters elected Donald Trump on an “America First” agenda. Populist movements surged worldwide.

Foreign policy requires domestic legitimacy. When people stop believing the system works for them, they stop supporting the global order that system built. The consent that sustained decades of international engagement began to crack—and with it, the willingness to defend the rules that kept the peace.

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China’s Rise — When Growth Didn’t Mean Democracy

Through the 1990s and 2000s, the assumption was clear: integrate China into the global economy, and political liberalization would follow. Markets would create a middle class. A middle class would demand rights. Authoritarianism would soften, then fade.

It didn’t happen.

China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, accelerating its integration into the global economy. China grew—massively. It became the world’s factory, then the world’s second-largest economy. Living standards rose. A middle class emerged. Technology advanced. And the Communist Party remained firmly in control.

The “end of history” thesis rested on a simple assumption: economic development and democracy went hand in hand. China disproved it.

The implications were strategic, not just ideological. China’s industrial scale reshaped global supply chains. Its state-directed economy blurred the line between market competition and national strategy. Economic interdependence—once seen as a source of stability—became a tool of leverage and coercion, such as its dominance in mining and manufacturing rare earth elements.

That reality hardened when Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, ending the illusion that economic integration would make China more politically open or democratic, and embracing a nationalist vision of centralized, state-led power.

The system had been designed to integrate rising powers. It was not built to manage what happened when integration produced a powerful rival operating by different rules.

Russia’s Rejection

Russia tried integration. In the early 1990s, Moscow opened its economy, adopted market reforms, and sought partnership with the West. The results were catastrophic.

GDP fell by some 40 percent. Life expectancy plummeted. Oligarchs looted the country’s assets while ordinary Russians watched their savings evaporate. Humiliation became the defining experience of a generation.

By 2000, Vladimir Putin came to power with a simple mandate: restore order. He rebuilt the state around security services and oil and gas money. And he drew a lesson from the chaos: integration was a threat, not an opportunity.

External confrontation became a source of internal legitimacy. In a 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference, Putin publicly declared an end to Russia’s post–Cold War accommodation with the West. Starting with Georgia in 2008, Putin reintroduced force as a tool of statecraft — seizing Crimea in 2014, intervening in Syria in 2015, and invading Ukraine in 2022.

Russia tested whether the rules still held. Could borders be redrawn by force? Could sovereignty be violated without consequence? Could the international system push back—or was it too fractured, too distracted, too uncertain to respond?

The answer, increasingly, was the latter. When aggression goes unanswered, other states take notice. Rearmament spreads not because of ideology, but because the alternative—trusting restraint—begins to look dangerously naive.

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Social Media and the Fracturing of Trust

By the 2010s, social media didn’t just reflect economic grievance or political division—it scaled them.

The timing mattered. As globalization accelerated in the 2000s, a new digital layer emerged alongside it: Facebook launched in 2004, Twitter in 2006—platforms that would soon shape how billions of people consumed information and understood politics.

Social media platforms, optimized for engagement, discovered that outrage drives clicks. Algorithms amplified anger, identity conflict, and grievance. What once burned slowly—resentment over job loss, frustration with elites, anxiety about cultural change—now spread at scale, at speed.

Shared facts eroded. Different communities consumed entirely different information ecosystems. Consensus became nearly impossible to build, even on basic realities. Democracies, which depend on some baseline agreement about truth, found themselves fracturing from within.

The effects weren't only domestic. Social media became a tool for state and non-state actors to sow discord.

Russia demonstrated this most dramatically in 2016, using Facebook to amplify existing American grievances—many rooted in globalization—in support of Trump's explicitly anti-globalist, anti-establishment candidacy, according to the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee Report.

It was a case of multiple forces converging: Russia's rejection of Western integration, social media's capacity to scale division, and social fractures created by globalization itself.

Politics requires cooperation, cooperation requires trust, and trust requires shared reality. As that reality fractured, states began planning for worst cases. If you can’t trust your information environment, you can’t trust your adversary’s intentions. And if you can’t trust intentions, you prepare for conflict.

Social media made democracies harder to govern and the international system harder to sustain—even without a single shot fired.

American Withdrawal

The United States built the post-World War II system. It wrote the rules. It funded the institutions—the United Nations, NATO, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund. It provided security guarantees that allowed former adversaries to become allies: protecting Japan and Germany, stationing troops across Europe and Asia, underwriting the defense of dozens of nations. For decades, American leadership—however imperfect—held the system together.

The system replaced spheres of influence—where great powers dominated their regions through force—with a framework where nations pursued their interests through rules, institutions, and negotiation rather than military strength alone. It created the longest peace between global powers since the Roman Empire.

Then it stopped.

The shift began gradually. After the Cold War, American commitment became inconsistent. George W. Bush pulled back from multilateralism, rejecting the Kyoto Protocol and launching the Iraq War unilaterally. Barack Obama leaned back in, championing the Iran nuclear deal and Paris climate agreement. Then Trump rejected both. Diplomacy was underfunded relative to defense. Alliances were treated more transactionally. Multilateral institutions were seen as constraints rather than tools.

By the 2010s, inconsistency had become ambivalence. The United States remained militarily dominant but politically uncertain about whether it still wanted to lead.

Now, that ambivalence has turned to explicit rejection.

In November the Trump Administration published its 2025 National Security Strategy declaring that “the days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.” The administration argues that post-Cold War elites “lashed American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty.”

Trump himself derides alliances like NATO as protection rackets. Trade agreements torn up amid a wave of tariffs. International institutions dismissed — the U.S. withdrew from 66 multilateral organizations in January 2026 alone, the White House announced.

The message is clear: the United States will no longer serve as steward of the order it created.

The problem is structural. The system was designed to function by members enforcing the rules. Remove the enforcer, and the rules become suggestions. Other states—some hostile, some merely opportunistic—fill the void. What remains is competition without guardrails.

When Forces Compound

These five forces didn’t operate in isolation. They compounded.

Each force made the others more dangerous. Economic anxiety fed nationalist politics. Nationalist politics rejected multilateral cooperation. The absence of cooperation emboldened countries, like Russia, willing to challenge the rules. Challenges without consequences convinced other states that restraint was a liability. And technology, particularly social media, accelerated every stage of the breakdown.

What followed is not chaos—it’s rearmament. States are looking at a world with weakened institutions, eroding norms, and rising tensions, and concluding they need to prepare for conflict. Not because war was inevitable, but because the mechanisms that made restraint rational had broken down.

That November night in Berlin in 1989 carried such hope. As the Wall fell, it felt to many like history itself had turned a corner. Political scientist Fukuyama gave voice to that moment, arguing that liberal democracy and free markets had proven themselves the most durable form of human governance—famously calling this “The End of History.”

Perhaps that judgment was premature rather than wrong. But the mechanisms that maintained the 80-year peace between great powers are breaking down. Whether they can be rebuilt—and what that rebuilding requires—will define not just the coming decade, but the rest of this century.

Next week: Solutions.

Note: Prefer to listen? Use the Article Voiceover at the top of the page, or find all narrated editions in the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

For this series we examine the world’s return to large-scale militarization—the fastest rearmament since the Cold War. After 80 years without direct great-power conflict, the longest such peace in modern history, nations are arming at unprecedented speed just as the system that prevented catastrophe begins to fracture.

Today’s installment examines the problem; next week, the forces that brought us here; the third part, solutions.

What you’ll learn in part one:

• How the world is rearming across every major region, with military spending at record levels and flashpoints from Ukraine to Taiwan.

• Why the post–World War II system—built deliberately to prevent another global war—worked for eight decades, and why it’s now fracturing.

• What the Thucydides Trap reveals about why rising and established powers so often end in war—and whether the U.S. and China can escape it.

Solving For tackles one pressing problem at a time: what’s broken, what’s driving it, and what can be done. New posts weekly. Check out previous series on rare earth elements, AI safety, vanishing competition in Congress, and the end of amateurism in college sports.

The world is rearming at a pace not seen since the Cold War.

Global military spending is at the highest level on record. Last year marked the steepest annual increase in three decades. All five regions of the world increased spending on arms and defense, with more than 100 countries raising their budgets, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Europe is racing to rebuild arsenals. Asia is accelerating naval, missile, and air power buildups. The U.S. defense budget now approaches a trillion dollars a year.

At the same time, the world’s major flashpoints remain unresolved — and several are intensifying. Ukraine. Taiwan. The Korean Peninsula. The Middle East. Each is heavily armed, with opposing forces in close proximity. Each is one miscalculation away from escalation — a potential spark for wider conflict.

Underlying all of it is the defining rivalry of the century: the contest between the United States and China.

History offers a bleak guide. When a rising power challenges an established one, conflict often follows — not because leaders wanted war, but because the dynamics made it difficult to avoid. Of the sixteen cases over the past 500 years where a rising power threatened to displace a ruling one, twelve ended in war, Harvard’s Graham Allison writes in his bestselling book, Destined for War.

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The return of large-scale militarization is often framed as necessary. In many cases, it is. Peace through strength. Deterrence can work.

But history suggests that arms buildups are safest when paired with strong guardrails: diplomacy, communication channels, shared rules, mutual restraint. They grow dangerous when those systems erode.

And now those guardrails are eroding — on multiple fronts.

Arms control treaties that limited nuclear arsenals and weapons deployments have collapsed or expired. The institutional architecture that managed great power competition is fraying. And the underlying consensus about international order itself is fracturing.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has cast aside respect for international borders and openly champions a sphere-of-influence global order over a rules-based one. U.S. President Donald Trump puts a premium on bilateral deals, leverage, and transactions — and likewise favors a power-based order over one rooted in rules and alliances.

This week, Trump withdrew the U.S. from more than 60 international organizations intended to foster multilateral cooperation.

Stephen Miller, a top advisor to President Trump, explained the administration’s worldview in stark terms: the world is governed not by rules or norms but by sheer strength, force, and power. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time,” he said in a CNN interview.

If the current trajectory holds, the pattern is clear: more weapons, weaker rules, and the conditions that have repeatedly led to war.

Unless, that is, the arc of history is bent deliberately — through leadership, restraint, and a recognition that the path we’re on doesn’t have to be the one we take.

For this Solving For series the question is not whether countries should have robust militaries or defend themselves. It is whether they can do so without turning preparation into provocation — and deterrence into disaster.

The 80-Year Peace

We are living in an extraordinarily rare moment in history — so rare, and sustained for so long, that it’s easy to overlook. The world’s great powers have avoided direct war for nearly 80 years — the longest such stretch since the Roman Empire.

There have been devastating regional conflicts, proxy wars, and nerve-wracking confrontations like the Cuban Missile Crisis. But there has been no shooting war between great powers. The U.S. and Soviet Union never fought each other directly during the Cold War. Nor have the U.S. and China.

This outcome involved some luck. But it was no accident.

After World War II — which capped a half-century that saw the world twice convulsed by global war — the United States and its allies made a conscious decision: this pattern of catastrophe could not be allowed to continue. They set out to build an international system deliberately designed to prevent another great-power war.

The core insight was clear. Lasting peace required more than military might. It required institutions, rules, and economic ties that made war both harder to start and harder to justify.

Rather than withdrawing from global leadership, the United States chose to anchor its power within a network of multilateral frameworks that aligned stability with shared prosperity.

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The system rested on three pillars, built in rapid succession between 1944 and 1949.

First, a renewed commitment to diplomacy over conquest, embodied in the launch of the United Nations.

Second, a shared economic framework linking former enemies through reconstruction and growth — built through new institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and reinforced by the Marshall Plan.

Third, a permanent security alliance. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization bound the security of the United States and Canada to Europe’s defense, reducing incentives for arms races and deterring unilateral aggression. At its core is Article 5, the treaty’s collective-defense clause: an attack on one NATO member is treated as an attack on all, obligating every ally to respond.

Together, these arrangements produced an unprecedented outcome — what historian John Lewis Gaddis famously described as “The Long Peace.” Not because conflict disappeared, but because it was constrained — channeled into diplomacy, deterrence, and economic competition rather than open battle.

But this peace is not self-sustaining. It requires active upkeep, sustained political will, and a shared commitment to a rules-based order rather than one built on power alone. As successive generations have lived without great-power war, it has become easier to assume this stability will last forever. Now, what was once essential infrastructure for peace is increasingly seen as outdated — or optional.

It’s a belief being tested.

In November 2025, Harvard Kennedy School’s founding dean Allison and former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff James Winnefeld laid out the stakes in Foreign Affairs. The most important question facing Americans today, they wrote, “is whether the nation can gather itself to recognize the perils of the moment” and “find the wisdom required to navigate it and take collective action to prevent — or more accurately, postpone — the next global convulsion.”

A Call to Arms

The erosion of this framework matters because countries are rearming at speeds not seen in generations.

One person who illustrates how the world has changed: Armin Papperger.

For most of his career, the stocky, white-haired Papperger ran a German manufacturing company largely forgotten to history. Now he and his company are so important that Russian intelligence wants him dead.

Papperger is CEO of Rheinmetall, a more than century-old conglomerate headquartered in a quiet, tree-lined section of Dusseldorf. In the 1930s the company was a pillar of Hitler’s massive rearmament of Germany. It used forced laborers to produce weapons and ammunition fueling the Nazi war effort.

After World War II its weapons production was halted by the Allies. The company sought to make amends for what it called its “misconduct during the Nazi era” and pivoted to making civilian goods, from typewriters to automotive parts. For a time it considered spinning off its defense business altogether.

Then Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Rheinmetall, one of the few European firms that had retained the know-how to produce artillery shells at scale, suddenly became indispensable. It’s now among Europe’s most important defense suppliers. Its factories are expanding. New production lines are running around the clock making artillery shells, armored vehicles, air defense systems, ammunition. Since 2022 the company’s stock price has increased more than twentyfold.

In December 2025 The Economist magazine named Papperger its CEO of the Year, citing the executive’s stalwart support for Ukraine and defense of Europe. But perhaps the starkest illustration of Papperger and his company’s new global clout — in 2024 U.S. intelligence warned German authorities that it had uncovered a plot by Russia to kill him.

“We are now a key player in the global defense super cycle,” Papperger told Bloomberg Businessweek last year. “We were always prepared, and this is now paying off.”

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The numbers tell the story. Germany increased its defense spending 28 percent to $88 billion. Across Europe, every country increased its military spending last year except tiny Malta. Poland’s spending jumped 31 percent to $38 billion. Romania increased its spending 43 percent to $8.7 billion, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Europe has good reason to rearm: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the possibility of further incursions. For its part, Russia has increased its military budget by 38 percent, to an estimated $149 billion.

But this trend extends far beyond Europe and Russia. It’s being replicated around the world.

There isn’t a single major military power cutting back — every top spender is spending more.

In Asia, Japan increased its military spending by 21 percent to $55.3 billion, its largest annual increase since 1952. India has increased military spending 42 percent in the last decade to $86.1 billion, making it the fifth biggest military spender in the world.

China, the world’s second biggest spender on defense after the U.S., increased its military budget by nearly 60 percent over the past decade, pushing its annual spend to an estimated $314 billion.

The biggest global spender of all, meanwhile, is the U.S. with an annual budget of nearly $1 trillion. This week President Trump posted on social media that “in these very troubled and dangerous times,” the U.S. defense budget should be increased to $1.5 trillion — a 50 percent increase — in 2027.

The scale and speed of the world’s military buildup are alarming some international leaders.

In September a United Nations report warned about the world’s rapid rearmament. “Excessive military spending does not guarantee peace,” declared UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. “It often undermines it.”

A World of Triggers

What makes today’s military buildup especially dangerous is not only how much the world is arming—but where and how many potential triggers now exist.

The post–World War II international system was built to manage rivalry between great powers through rules, institutions, and predictability. That system is fraying at the same moment military power is spreading. The result is a world with more weapons in more places, weaker guardrails, and an unusually dense set of flashpoints—any one of which could escalate far beyond its origins.

Active or simmering flashpoints now span nearly every major region:

• Ukraine

• Taiwan

• Korean Peninsula

• Middle East

And these are just the known pressure points — the next trigger could come from somewhere no one predicted.

What makes these flashpoints especially dangerous is that each carries the potential to pull major powers into direct military confrontation. A Russian strike on NATO territory — accidental or deliberate — could trigger the alliance’s Article 5 mutual defense clause, forcing a direct U.S.–Russia conflict. A Chinese move against Taiwan — which produces more than 90 percent of the world’s most advanced semiconductors — would almost certainly draw American military intervention, creating the first direct shooting war between nuclear-armed superpowers.

These are not distant or theoretical risks. They are scenarios defense planners actively war-game — moments where a single miscalculation could push a regional crisis across the threshold into global conflict.

Thucydides’s Trap

One of the most influential frameworks for understanding today’s great-power tensions comes from an ancient source—and a modern scholar.

The idea is known as the Thucydides Trap, named for the Greek historian Thucydides, who chronicled the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta in the fifth century BCE. Thucydides famously wrote that “it was the rise of Athens and the fear that this inspired in Sparta that made war inevitable.” The insight is stark: when a rising power threatens to displace a dominant one, fear, mistrust, and miscalculation often follow—even when neither side seeks war.

In the modern era, this idea has been explored by Graham Allison, the longtime Harvard professor who also had several stints in the U.S. Defense Department. Through his research at Harvard’s Kennedy School—known as the Thucydides Trap project—Allison examined sixteen historical cases over the past five centuries in which a rising power challenged a ruling one. In twelve of those cases, the rivalry ended in war. The pattern spans centuries and continents: Germany challenging Britain before World War I, the United States and Japan in the Pacific, France challenging Habsburg Spain in the early 1500s.

Allison distilled this research into his book Destined for War, applying the framework to the defining rivalry of our time: the United States and China. His conclusion was not that war is inevitable—but that history shows it is alarmingly common unless leaders actively work to escape the trap.

What makes the Thucydides Trap so unsettling is that it shifts attention away from ideology or intent. Wars, in this telling, are not primarily driven by villainous leaders or aggressive cultures. They emerge from structural stress: fear on the part of the established power, ambition and insecurity on the part of the rising one, and crises that harden perceptions on both sides.

That dynamic is increasingly visible today. China's rapid economic growth, military modernization, and technological ambition have challenged assumptions that underpinned U.S. primacy for decades. Each side insists it is acting defensively. Each views the other as destabilizing.

Allison’s central warning is that the greatest danger lies not in deliberate aggression, but in escalation born of fear, pride, and miscalculation—especially in moments of crisis. History shows that even small incidents can become catalytic when they occur inside a larger rivalry already under strain.

Whether the United States and China can escape this trap—at a moment when the world is rearming and global guardrails are weakening—is one of the defining questions of the 21st century.

Next week: The forces that brought us here. When the Cold War ended, it was dubbed the “end of history.” Democracy, free markets, global trade — and peace — were the entire world’s future. Until it wasn’t.

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Solving For is a long-form journalism venture built around a simple idea: take one pressing problem at a time and examine it in depth — the problem itself, the forces shaping it, and what credible solutions could look like.

This work is for people who value storytelling and reporting that puts clarity over outrage, depth over speed, and solutions grounded in reality.

Each month, the reporting unfolds in weekly installments, published in both written and audio versions. Series typically run in three parts, with an open thread in between to share updates and try new things. Through an agreement with The New York Times, we're using their photo archive to visually complement the issues we explore. We’ll start experimenting with video too.

In our first four months we’ve taken on four subjects:

• China’s dominance of rare earth elements, and why it matters for technology, defense, and the economy

• AI safety and the control problem, as artificial intelligence accelerates

• The collapse of competition in Congress, and what that means for democracy

• The end of amateurism in college sports, and the choices now facing athletes and schools

These are the kinds of problems we’ll continue to focus on: issues that affect many lives, resist easy answers, and carry long-term consequences — but also contain the seeds of real solutions.

The goal of each series is not just to explain what’s broken, but to walk away with a clearer understanding of a way forward.

Next week we’ll kick off our first series of 2026: a deep dive into a global military buildup unlike anything since the Cold War — and ways a rapidly rearming world can avoid turning deterrence into disaster.

Thanks for being here. I’m grateful to be on this journey with you.

— Matt

Note: If you missed anything, you can find past series at solvingfor.io.

For Part Three in our series, “The Amateur Myth: Solving For College Athlete Pay,” we turn to solutions. For this installment we’ll explore:

• Why fixing the injustice of unpaid football and men’s basketball players — in a system where everyone else profited — risks destabilizing the non-revenue sports that depend on revenue-generating college athletics to survive.

• How three competing futures — athletes as employees, revenue sharing without employment, and a football super league — would reshape college sports in profoundly different ways.

• Why Congress, rather than the NCAA or the courts, now holds the power to decide whether Olympic non-revenue sports endure or disappear.

If you missed them, check out Part One, which details the problem, and Part Two, which explores the forces that brought us here. If you find this work valuable, please share it with friends. If you were forwarded this, you can subscribe at solvingfor.io.

Solving For tackles one pressing problem at a time — what’s broken, what’s driving it, and what can be done. New posts weekly, in both written and audio form. See previous series on rare earth elements, AI safety, and the vanishing competition in Congress.

On March 11, 2025, Caryl Smith Gilbert took her seat in Room 2141 of the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill.

She wasn’t there to testify about the college athletes whose labor has generated billions of dollars — but about those whose labor hasn’t, and what the coming economic reckoning could mean for them.

Gilbert is among the most decorated track and field coaches in the United States. She led the University of Southern California to two national outdoor women’s championships and twice earned national coach of the year honors. She later became the first woman to lead both the men’s and women’s track teams at the University of Georgia, where she won a third national title.

On this day, she came with a single message: track and field — and other non-revenue sports — are at risk.

Track and field, Gilbert told lawmakers, is “one of the most diverse and accessible sports in the world,” offering a pathway to college for women and underrepresented students. For most of her athletes, scholarships are not a benefit — they’re a lifeline.

“Neither my husband nor I would have been able to afford the college education we received without an athletic scholarship,” she said. “Our college athletic experience saved our lives.”

The number of athletes who go on to lucrative professional careers in track and field is “infinitesimally small.” The real prize is the degree — and the network of academic and athletic support that makes earning it possible.

And that system, she warned, is now under threat.

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Few now dispute that football and men’s basketball players — whose labor generated billions — were wrongly barred from sharing in the wealth they created. That system deserved to change — and now it has.

The question is whether fixing that injustice without care risks breaking something else — namely, non-revenue sports like track and field.

Without a uniform national standard, Gilbert said, the current name, image, and likeness system — known as NIL — is already putting pressure on scholarships and straining athletic department budgets.

More broadly, NIL has collided with the transfer portal — launched in 2018 as a compliance tool — to fundamentally reshape roster management. When athletes gained the ability to monetize their value in 2021, the portal evolved into a de facto system of college free agency. By 2024, one in four scholarship football players entered the portal annually.

Equally dangerous in Gilbert’s view is the push to classify college athletes as employees. An employment model, she argued, would shift costs onto athletes least able to absorb them — and force athletic departments to make brutal financial choices, as resources are increasingly concentrated around revenue-generating sports like football — leaving non-revenue programs such as track and field especially vulnerable.

The consequences would extend well beyond campus. In track and field and swimming, for instance, college programs are the U.S. Olympic development system. Of the 118 athletes who competed for Team USA in track and field at the Paris Olympics, 114 developed through the college system.

“My personal fear is that without regulation…the impact on non-revenue and Olympic sports will be devastating,” she told members of a U.S. House Judiciary subcommittee in March. “I am concerned many universities will eliminate many Olympic sports programs, depriving countless athletes of the same opportunities that I experienced thanks to college track and field.”

The debate over paying college athletes is over. But almost everything else is not.

A race is underway to build a new system — one that compensates the athletes who generate billions while preserving the educational mission, continuing beloved traditions that unite so many, and sustaining the non-revenue Olympic college sports for both men and women.

Schools, conferences, the NCAA, and Congress face hard choices. And consensus is elusive while the window for deciding deliberately, rather than letting courts and market forces decide by default, is closing fast.

Competing Demands

The central problem is economic. College football does not merely generate enormous sums — it subsidizes nearly everything else. At the March subcommittee hearing, University of Wisconsin athletic director Chris McIntosh testified that 80 percent of his department’s revenue comes from football, supporting 23 varsity sports, from women’s volleyball and swimming to men’s wrestling and hockey. As more football revenues are redirected toward athlete compensation, the effects ripple across every sport.

Any workable solution must balance competing demands: fair compensation for athletes generating billions; protection for non-revenue Olympic sports; preservation of competitive balance and educational mission; and legal durability. The NCAA lacks authority to impose such a system, courts have spent a decade dismantling its restrictions through antitrust litigation, and conferences cannot self-regulate. That leaves Congress as the only institution capable of establishing uniform national rules and providing antitrust protection.

So what would a solution look like that meets these competing demands? Three frameworks now dominate the debate — each with different trade-offs, risks, and consequences.

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Athletes as Employees

The most straightforward solution is also the most radical: treat college athletes as employees.

Under this model, athletes would be formally employed by their universities, receiving wages or salaries with the right to unionize and collectively bargain. Workers’ compensation, health benefits, and formal contracts would replace the fiction of amateurism.

The most visible test came at Dartmouth. In March 2024, the men’s basketball team voted to unionize — the first college sports team to do so. The National Labor Relations Board agreed, ruling the players qualified as employees even though they received no athletic scholarships.

“Let’s work together to create a less exploitative business model for college sports,” the players said after the vote.

In January 2025, the team withdrew its petition, fearing the precedent could be overturned by a changing political climate. The point, however, had been made.

Unionization offers advantages: formal worker protections, collective bargaining rights, and an antitrust exemption for any terms negotiated between athletes and their schools.

But employment carries significant consequences. Payrolls would balloon. Schools would face long-term contractual obligations and potential liability for injuries and benefits. With athletic departments operating under finite budgets, these new costs would almost certainly accelerate cuts elsewhere — a potentially existential threat for non-revenue sports, as Gilbert warned.

It would also fundamentally change the relationship between athletes and their schools. Wisconsin athletic director McIntosh, a former Badgers tackle and NFL first-round pick, said: as a student-athlete, his scholarship was guaranteed even if he was injured; as an NFL employee, “I was injured in the second year, and I was terminated after the third year.”

Revenue Sharing Without Employment

A second approach attempts to split the difference: compensate athletes without turning them into employees.

This is the model that underpins the landmark House v. NCAA settlement, which took effect July 1, 2025, allowing universities to distribute a portion of their athletic revenues directly to athletes while preserving their non-employee status. The settlement also establishes a College Sports Commission to oversee revenue sharing and NIL payments, ensuring they reflect legitimate market-value deals rather than pay-to-play arrangements with boosters.

Beginning with the 2025–26 season, schools may share up to 22 percent of average athletic department revenue with athletes — a cap of roughly $20.5 million per school. Early distributions reveal the priorities: North Carolina allocated $13 million to football players, $7 million to men’s basketball players, and just $250,000 each to baseball and women’s basketball.

Revenue sharing offers schools flexibility and provides athletes predictable income. Unlike an employment model, it preserves what already works for non-revenue sports — these programs continue operating through scholarships, facilities access, and elite coaching. And the highest-profile Olympic athletes can now pursue NIL endorsement deals without sacrificing eligibility.

But the settlement did not resolve everything. When the House agreement was reached in June 2025, NCAA President Charlie Baker acknowledged that key questions remained — gaps that, he said, “only Congress can address.”

The following month, lawmakers introduced the SCORE Act to supply the framework the settlement lacks. The bill would codify the 22 percent revenue-sharing cap into federal law, formally declare student-athletes as non-employees, preempt state NIL statutes by setting a federal standard, limit portal transfers without penalty to one, require schools to sponsor at least 16 varsity sports to protect non-revenue programs, and shield the NCAA from antitrust lawsuits. It advanced through two House committees but was pulled before a floor vote earlier this month, blocked by opposition from both Freedom Caucus Republicans and progressive Democrats.

The objections ranged widely. Some saw federal overreach. Others opposed codifying a compensation cap that wasn't collectively bargained with athletes. Still others wanted to use the moment to address broader problems in college sports.

Texas Republican Congressman Chip Roy, who pledged to vote against the SCORE Act, posted on X: "If we are meddling—why continue a broken football 'playoff' system with massive super conferences which force student athletes to travel all over the nation (Berkeley and Stanford are in the ATLANTIC Coast Conference?) rather than require that for the price of 'liability protection' we return conferences to their pre-super conference regionality and protect in-state rivalries."

Meanwhile, a competing bill, the SAFE Act, introduced by Senate Democrats in September 2025, would establish a national NIL framework and limit penalty-free transfers to two per athlete — but it explicitly leaves open the possibility of athletes unionizing and provides no antitrust protection for the NCAA, rendering it unacceptable to college sports’ governing body.

Absent congressional protection, the revenue-sharing model established in the House settlement faces twin threats: legal vulnerability and economic strain. The 22 percent cap remains exposed to future antitrust challenges, while football and men’s basketball revenues must now fund both direct athlete payments and the non-revenue Olympic sports infrastructure those payments could undermine. Whether either pressure proves fatal remains uncertain.

The Super League

A third solution goes in an entirely different direction: it separates football from the rest of college athletics and reorganizes it to make as much money possible. This so-called super league model seeks to leverage college football’s status as one of the most valuable media properties in American sports and use the resulting financial windfall to deliver fair compensation, athlete representation, protection for Olympic sports, competitive balance, preservation of the educational mission, and legal durability all at once.

The most developed version of the idea comes from College Sports Tomorrow, a group led by Len Perna, whose executive search firm TurnkeyZRG has placed numerous conference commissioners and college head coaches at posts across the country.

The economic logic is straightforward: eliminate competing conferences and establish one top league of college football, create a single playoff structure, and negotiate television rights as one entity — in effect, replicate the NFL model. Advocates argue that unified media rights bargaining would generate significantly more total revenue than the current conference-by-conference approach, even for schools with lucrative individual media deals.

Under the proposal, the top 72 college football programs would be reorganized into 12 regional divisions built around geographic proximity and historic rivalries — for example, a Southeast Division including Miami, Florida, and Florida State, and a Southwest Division including USC, UCLA and Arizona State. The top 24 teams—12 division champions and 12 wild cards—would advance to a national playoff.

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The promise is that increased television revenue would resolve the system’s core tensions. Football players would receive direct compensation through collective bargaining while remaining students. Non-revenue Olympic sports from wrestling to women’s volleyball would be sustained by the larger revenue pool. NIL caps, limits of two portal transfers every five years, and results-based scheduling would aim to improve competitive balance. Congressional action, meanwhile, would provide antitrust protection, ending the litigation that has paralyzed NCAA governance.

The model would apply only to football. Athletes in other sports would retain full NIL freedom, while those programs return to traditional regional conferences, reducing cross-country travel and costs.

“It is not the case that the money to do what’s right for our college athletes… is just going to emerge from nowhere,” said Syracuse University Chancellor Kent Syverud. “Somehow it has to be generated. That’s what we are trying to figure out.”

But the vision hinges almost entirely on Congress. The framework depends on lawmakers creating a legal category in which athletes are classified as non-employees while still engaging in collective bargaining — a structure that does not currently exist. Absent that intervention, courts will continue reshaping college sports by default, one lawsuit at a time.

On paper, the super league resolves contradictions that have stymied other approaches: college football professionalizes without dragging the rest of the athletic department with it; players gain compensation and representation; Olympic sports receive funding; schools preserve their educational mission — assuming institutions are willing to surrender autonomy they have spent decades accumulating.

In practice, it faces a fundamental obstacle. The plan asks college football’s biggest winners — particularly schools in the Southeastern Conference and Big Ten Conference, whose media deals are worth hundreds of millions — to believe they would earn more by pooling revenue with 70-plus other programs. Existing conference contracts run into the 2030s, and a new College Football Playoff agreement has only just begun. Unwinding those commitments may prove impossible.

“We understand the timing is probably not right for this idea right now,” College Sports Tomorrow’s Perna said. “But I’m telling you, what we’ve outlined in our proposal is the manifest destiny of where college football will wind up.”

What Hangs in the Balance

In 1905, Theodore Roosevelt convened college leaders to solve the problem of players dying on the football field. They created the NCAA, which under Walter Byers would build an amateur myth so profitable it took decades of antitrust litigation to crack. When Ed O’Bannon discovered his likeness in a video game he was never paid for, he set those challenges in motion — culminating in 2021 with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh calling the NCAA’s business model of paying everyone but the players “flatly illegal.”

Now Charlie Baker presides over the wreckage: a settlement that ends amateurism without clearly defining what comes next or providing durable legal protections, conferences splintering over media rights, and a transfer portal that has turned roster management into free agency.

Yet through all this institutional turbulence runs something else: the enduring reality that college sports has brought joy, belonging, and transformation not only to hundreds of thousands of athletes across dozens of sports—gymnasts and swimmers, track stars and softball pitchers—but to fans and communities across the country.

When Caryl Smith Gilbert went to Capitol Hill, she wasn’t asking Congress to stop college sports from changing. She was asking it to notice who might be left behind.

In the rush to correct a long-standing injustice — to finally pay the athletes who generate billions — the danger is not that college sports will change too much. It’s that it will change carelessly. That solutions designed for football and basketball will quietly erase the pathways that brought thousands of athletes to college, to degrees, and, for a few, to Olympic podiums.

Gilbert's warning was not nostalgic. It was structural. And it still hangs over the debate: if reform is not designed with intention, the athletes who never created the old system's riches may end up paying the highest price for fixing it.

Note: Prefer to listen? Use the Article Voiceover at the top of the page, or find all narrated editions in the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

In Part Two of our series, “The Amateur Myth: Solving For College Athlete Pay,” we trace the forces that brought college sports to this moment of reckoning — how a model built on “amateurism” fractured under the weight of money, power, and contradiction, and how a scramble to construct something new is now underway.

If you missed Part One, see it here. In Part Three, we'll examine solutions. For this installment — how we got here — we’ll learn:

• How the NCAA’s founding promise to separate college sports from money was compromised almost from the start.

• How “amateurism” evolved into a legal fiction that protected institutions, even as a billion-dollar industry grew around unpaid athletes.

• Why that fiction finally collapsed — and why college sports now face their most consequential test in more than a century.

In October 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt summoned college football’s leaders to the White House. The sport had exploded in popularity — so much so that Princeton’s president, Woodrow Wilson, quipped that the university “is noted in this wide world for three things,” and the first was football.

But the game had two problems: death and money.

That year, 19 players died playing football. The Chicago Tribune called it football’s “Death Harvest.” Obituaries of dead players appeared almost weekly during the season. Columbia shut down its football program. Stanford and Cal-Berkeley switched to rugby. Roosevelt issued a blunt ultimatum: reform the sport or he would ban it outright.

Corruption was the other crisis. Colleges were paying ringers. Princeton, Harvard, and Yale were accused of hiring “tramp athletes” — itinerant players who roamed the country playing for whoever paid best. One leading reformer warned that “our supposedly amateur college athletics” was plagued by “various forms of payment… for their athletic services.”

Out of those meetings emerged in 1906 the organization that would become the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Its mandate: make the game safer and clean up its corruption.

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The first goal produced some of the most consequential rule changes in football history: legalizing the forward pass, abolishing mass-momentum formations like the flying wedge, and penalizing unsportsmanlike play.

The second goal drew a hard line. The new association took an uncompromising position on amateurism: no payment or compensation allowed of any kind. The NCAA’s founding constitution was explicit: No student shall represent a college or university in any intercollegiate game “who is paid or receives, directly or indirectly, any money.”

Football’s fatal violence was eventually tamed.

Money never was.

Instead, America’s colleges and universities tightened — rather than untangled — their relationship with sports and money. While insisting athletes remain amateurs, over the next 119 years they built a professionalized, billion-dollar ecosystem around them. That contradiction — ignored, patched over, defended for so long — has finally blown open.

Now, the NCAA faces a reckoning unlike anything since dead players were being carried off the field in the early 1900s. The question is no longer whether the old model can survive, but what comes next: How do you compensate athletes who generate billions while preserving educational purpose, beloved traditions, and the non-revenue Olympic sports that football and basketball have long subsidized?

The End of Amateurism

The NCAA formally raised the white flag this summer, ending the amateur ideal it had trumpeted at its founding and vigorously defended for more than a century in courtrooms and editorial pages.

By settling a series of antitrust lawsuits in June, collectively known as the House settlement, the NCAA declared that schools can now directly pay student-athletes under a revenue-sharing plan in which each school may distribute roughly $20 million annually to its players.

NCAA President Charlie Baker called it a “new beginning.” But the settlement left many questions unresolved. Are athletes now employees? What happens to non-revenue sports as a significant share of athletic department budgets shift to player pay? What, fundamentally, is college sports supposed to be now?

The result is an awkward limbo: the old model collapsed, little agreement on what should replace it, and professionalization accelerating faster than governance can keep up.

In the past ten days alone, the turbulence has been unmistakable.

First, Congress declined to advance NCAA-backed federal legislation that would have resolved some of the open questions — including antitrust protection and explicitly barring athletes from employee status. “Not ready for prime time,” Rep. Chip Roy, a Texas Republican, posted about the legislation on X, adding: “don’t just professionalize this stuff and pretend you aren’t doing exactly that.”

Then, days later, professionalization surged forward. The University of Utah became the first school to take private-equity money, announcing a joint venture with Otro Capital that could generate more than $500 million for its athletic program.

As recently as October, NCAA President Baker warned schools to “be really careful” with private equity. Among the risks is that private equity prioritizes financial returns above all else, fully sidelining educational mission and turning college teams into de facto professional franchises. That dam has now cracked.

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Always a Fiction

From the NCAA’s founding in 1906, there was little evidence that colleges truly intended to embrace amateur athletics.

A few institutions — such as the University of Chicago, Harvard, and Yale, which were athletic powerhouses at the time — would later pull back from big-time college sports. But across the country, the gravitational pull was in the opposite direction.

By the 1920s, accusations of paid players and booster interference filled newspapers. In response the Carnegie Foundation launched a sweeping investigation.

Its 1929 report was devastating. Universities, it found, were running professional sports programs in everything but name. College football, the report concluded, has turned into “professionalized athletic contests for the glory and, too often, for the financial profit of the college.”

This was nearly a century ago.

Yet the fans kept coming. And most universities didn’t reform — neither pulling back from big-time sports nor acknowledging that college athletics had become a commercial enterprise dependent on athletes’ labor.

Instead, they doubled down on a version of amateurism that applied only to the players, even as institutions accumulated ever-larger fortunes from packed stadiums — and, later, television contracts.

Behind the moral posturing, the under-the-table payments never stopped — they were simply denied. In the 1940s, Hugh McElhenny, a University of Washington running back, became known as the first college player “ever to take a cut in salary to play professional football.”

Publicly, universities preached amateurism and threatened punishment. Privately, they paid what it took to win — and punished only those who got caught.

Yet, by the 1950s, the NCAA’s ideals outpaced its power, lacking the structure to enforce its brand of amateurism.

Then came Walter Byers.

The Invention of the “Student-Athlete”

When Walter Byers became the NCAA’s executive director in 1951, it was a small nonprofit with four staff members. By the time he left in 1987, it presided over a multibillion-dollar industry. Byers didn’t just grow the organization—he designed the modern architecture of college sports.

Following his 2015 death, Byers was called “one of the 20th century’s most powerful sports figures” in a New York Times obituary.

He consolidated control through college sports television revenues and built the men’s basketball championship — March Madness and the Final Four — into a financial juggernaut. He constructed an enforcement apparatus with real penalties, including postseason bans. Money, governance, and enforcement gave the NCAA real teeth — and Byers enormous power.

Yet, Byers’ most consequential invention was a two-word name. In September 1955, Fort Lewis A&M football player Ray Dennison died after a collision on the field. His widow, Billie, sought workers’ compensation death benefits.

Byers understood the threat.

His solution: he created the term “student-athlete.”

It was inserted into NCAA manuals, university communications, media guides. These weren’t athletes who happened to be students; they were students who happened to play sports. Students don’t get workers’ comp. Students aren’t employees.

The Colorado Supreme Court agreed — ruling against Dennison’s widow. Football players were “student-athletes,” not employees. Workers’ comp didn’t apply.

As Pulitzer-prize winning historian Taylor Branch would write in a 2011 essay in The Atlantic calling for college athletes to be paid, the term was cynically created not to protect education, but to shield universities from liability.

“Amateurism” and “student-athlete” are, Branch wrote, “legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes.”

Big Money, Then Everything Else

Television transformed college sports slowly — then all at once.

The NCAA’s first TV deal inked by Byers in 1952 was modest. But it grew and grew. So much so that, by the early 1980s, the University of Oklahoma and the University of Georgia sued the NCAA, arguing they should be allowed to negotiate their own television deals. In 1984, the Supreme Court — in a case called NCAA v. Board of Regents — struck down the NCAA’s television monopoly on antitrust grounds. The decision was meant to limit NCAA power. Instead, it unleashed a gold rush.

Conferences negotiated their own TV deals. Notre Dame cut its own national TV contract in 1990, now reportedly worth $50 million annually. Cable networks like ESPN, hungry for content, threw money at football and basketball. By the 1990s, TV contracts were measured in millions. By the 2000s, billions. CBS and Turner Sports now pay $1.1 billion a year to televise the Men’s college basketball tournament.

Meanwhile, the NCAA struck licensing deals for everything from apparel to, fatefully, video games.

The result: coaches’ salaries exploded, facilities turned palatial, conference commissioners and NCAA executives were handed ever-richer pay packages. Between 1986 and 2010, major college football coaches saw their salaries increase by 750 percent, according to the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. LSU’s Lane Kiffin and Georgia’s Kirby Smart each earn some $13 million annually.

When NCAA President Mark Emmert stepped down in 2023, he was making more than $3 million annually.

The money went everywhere—except to the athletes.

Yet schools sought even more of it. Conferences were restructured, forcing athletes into exhausting cross-country travel and, in some cases, ending longstanding regional rivalries. Oregon and Washington, for instance, joined the Big Ten, now traveling thousands of miles for conference games against the likes of Maryland and Rutgers.

The incentive was money. When the Big Ten released its tax records in May, they showed the now 18-team conference generating nearly $1 billion annually.

And for executives, the rewards were enormous. The Big Ten’s commissioner, Kevin Warren, earned $6.8 million in 2023, according to USA Today.

Yet even as money flooded the system, the NCAA functioned as a cartel — fixing the price of athletic labor at zero.

Americans loved the idea that college sports were different—purer than the professional game. That everyone else was getting rich didn’t spoil the illusion.

Until it did.

The Convergence

Three trends converged through the 2010s and into this decade.

First, money.

Second, the antitrust lawsuits detailed in Part One of our series — including O’Bannon and Alston — finally cracked the NCAA’s model that long appeared unassailable.

Third, public sentiment shifted. More Americans concluded that not paying college athletes was no longer defensible.

For years, free education was viewed as adequate compensation. The NCAA was applauded for policing corruption.

Taylor Branch’s 2011 essay in The Atlantic captured the moral reversal.

“The real scandal is not that students are getting illegally paid,” Branch wrote. Instead, the “tragedy at the heart of college sports is not that some college athletes are getting paid, but that more of them are not.”

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s stinging concurrence in the 2021 Alston case crystallized the shift. While ruling on the narrow question of education-related benefits, Kavanaugh signaled that the NCAA’s broader business model would not survive serious antitrust scrutiny.

“The bottom line is that the NCAA and its member colleges are suppressing the pay of student athletes who collectively generate billions of dollars in revenues for colleges,” Kavanaugh wrote, in an opinion published in June 2021. “College presidents, athletic directors, coaches, conference commissioners and NCAA executives take in six- and seven-figure salaries. Colleges build lavish new facilities. But the student-athletes who generate the revenues, many of whom are African American and from lower-income backgrounds, end up with little or nothing.”

Nine days later the NCAA lifted limits on players marketing their name, image and likeness—and from that moment on, college sports was never the same. The only question now is what it will become.

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The Architect’s Confession

Ironically, the man who built the NCAA into the powerhouse it became was among the first to realize the system was broken and say so publicly — though his warning came too late to matter.

Eight years after stepping down as NCAA president, Byers wrote a 1995 memoir, Unsportsmanlike Conduct, that condemned the enterprise he built.

“The colleges own the athletes’ bodies,” he wrote, calling the system a “neo-plantation mentality.” Byers called for pay, collective bargaining, and federal oversight.

Most damning was his confession: “None of us wanted to accept what was really happening.”

Looking back 120 years ago, Theodore Roosevelt solved college football’s death problem — and saved the game — with rules.

The money problem, it turns out, could not be solved the same way — because it was never really about rules at all, but about values. About who deserves to share in the wealth college sports generates, and about what fairness looks like in an enterprise that long insisted it was not a business — even as it behaved like one from the start.

Next up: We’ll explore solutions — what does a way forward look like?

Note: Prefer to listen? Use the Article Voiceover at the top of the page, or find all narrated editions in the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

Solving For tackles one pressing problem at a time: what’s broken, what’s driving it, and what can be done. New posts weekly. Check out previous series on rare earth elements, AI safety and vanishing competition in Congress.

If you find this work valuable, please share with friends. If you were forwarded this, you can subscribe at solvingfor.io.

For this series we focus on college sports undergoing its most dramatic transformation in a century. One of America’s most beloved institutions—built into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise on unpaid athletes—has finally cracked. What comes next remains profoundly uncertain.

The challenge: compensating athletes who generate billions while preserving the traditions and educational purpose that gave it meaning—and sustaining the non-revenue Olympic sports that football and basketball have historically funded.

Today’s installment examines the problem; next week, the forces that brought us here; the third part, solutions.

What you’ll learn in part one:

• How Ed O’Bannon’s discovery exposed amateurism’s contradictions and triggered the legal chain reaction now reshaping college sports.

• Why the NCAA’s historic settlement dismantled the old model without building a coherent replacement — leaving critical questions unresolved.

• What those unresolved questions mean for the future of college athletics, from employee status to Title IX to the survival of non-revenue sports.

Solving For tackles one pressing problem at a time: what’s broken, what’s driving it, and what can be done. New posts weekly. Check out previous series on rare earth elements, AI safety and vanishing competition in Congress.

On a hot, lazy Saturday afternoon in April 2009 in the Las Vegas suburb of Summerlin, former UCLA All-American Ed O’Bannon saw something that would change college sports forever.

Standing in his friend Mike Curtis’ living room, he watched Curtis’ nine-year-old son play an EA Sports basketball video game on an Xbox 360. On the screen was number 31 for UCLA. Six feet, eight inches. Two hundred twenty-two pounds. Power forward. Left-handed.

O’Bannon saw his number. His height and weight. His position. Even his shooting motion. The only thing missing was the name on the back. In every meaningful way, with uncanny accuracy, he was looking at himself.

Fourteen years had passed since O’Bannon led UCLA to its 11th national championship and was named the tournament’s most outstanding player. His pro career had never turned into stardom, but he’d saved money from his time in the NBA and seasons in Europe. Now he was selling cars at Findlay Toyota in Henderson, Nevada, raising three kids with his wife, Rosa.

At first, he was flattered—thrilled, even—to see himself and his 1995 teammates rendered so vividly in EA Sports’ NCAA March Madness.

Then Curtis, half-joking, said: “Dude, can you believe I paid sixty bucks for this thing?”

O’Bannon’s smile vanished. He looked away from the TV and out a window. The moment didn’t sit right. He had never given permission for his likeness to be used. He hadn’t been paid a penny. He felt powerless.

“I went back to work the next morning and put it out of my mind,” O’Bannon recalled in his book, Court Justice.

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A few weeks later, sitting at his desk at the dealership reviewing a list of incoming cars, a longtime mentor called. The mentor was preparing a class-action lawsuit against the NCAA for profiting off former players’ names, images, and likenesses. He wanted O’Bannon to be the lead plaintiff.

O’Bannon said yes. What followed would expose a contradiction that had been building for decades.

The case—O’Bannon v. NCAA—would collide head-on with the NCAA’s most sacred principle: that, in the name of amateurism, college sports could generate billions of dollars for conferences, coaches, administrators, broadcasters, video game makers, and apparel companies—but not for the athletes who made it possible.

It became the moment the façade cracked.

O’Bannon’s case didn’t dismantle the NCAA’s model, but it opened the door. Over the next decade, more antitrust lawsuits chipped away at amateurism, culminating in a 2021 Supreme Court ruling in NCAA v. Alston that struck down the NCAA’s limits on education-related benefits. Justice Brett Kavanaugh went further, noting in a concurring opinion that unpaid college athletes generate billions of dollars in revenue for colleges, yet “enormous sums of money flow to seemingly everyone except the student-athletes.”

He concluded: “The NCAA’s business model would be flatly illegal in almost any other industry in America.”

Then, this summer, came a watershed moment: the House settlement, named for Arizona State swimmer Grant House who filed the suit in 2020 alongside other athletes. Facing a tidal wave of litigation and billions in potential damages, the NCAA decided to stop fighting and agreed to a sweeping settlement in consolidated class-action lawsuits.

The settlement requires $2.8 billion in back damages paid over ten years to athletes denied name, image and likeness opportunites — otherwise known as NIL — since 2016.

Most significantly, schools can now directly pay athletes for the first time in NCAA history — up to roughly $20 million per year per school, derived from 22 percent of athletic department revenue from media rights, ticket sales, and sponsorships. Scholarship limits are abolished and replaced with roster caps — preventing roster inflation while dramatically expanding scholarship opportunities. A newly-created College Sports Commission enforces the revenue-sharing cap and regulates NIL deals.

It was billed as the dawn of a new era.

But the House settlement dismantled amateurism without delivering a coherent model to replace it. College sports has now entered an era where the old rules have collapsed and the new ones are not yet written.

At its core, college sports faces an impossible contradiction: how to compensate athletes who generate billions while preserving the traditions and educational purpose that gave the enterprise meaning—and sustaining the non-revenue sports that football and basketball have historically funded.

The problem isn’t just that the old model is gone; it’s that no one agrees on what should replace it.

The Wild West

College sports occupies a place in American culture unlike almost anything else.

Autumn football Saturdays in Ann Arbor and Tuscaloosa. Raucous basketball arenas in Chapel Hill and Lexington. March Madness office pools and buzzer-beaters. The College Baseball World Series in Omaha and Softball World Series in Oklahoma City. Future Olympians competing for track and field national championships in Eugene. Generations of families who never attended a university but bleed its colors anyway. It’s not just entertainment—it’s identity, ritual, belonging.

That’s what makes the current crisis so fraught. What’s collapsing isn’t just a business model. It’s a century-old institution that millions of people feel they own, built on ideals that—however imperfectly realized—gave it meaning beyond money.

College sports now exists in no man’s land—the old model dead, the new one unwritten. The NCAA’s repeated failures to adapt intelligently made things worse at every turn.

Case in point: on June 30, 2021, only nine days after Kavanaugh’s scathing Supreme Court opinion, and with state laws threatening its authority, the NCAA suspended its own rules limiting players being paid for their name, image, or likeness—otherwise known as NIL. Overnight, college athletes could sign endorsement deals with no clear guidelines about what was permitted. The NCAA promised regulation would follow. It never meaningfully did.

Instead, more than 30 states passed their own NIL laws, each with different rules. Some prohibited the NCAA from enforcing any restrictions. Others set their own limits. Booster-funded collectives formed at nearly every major program, offering recruits six- and seven-figure deals that functioned as signing bonuses in everything but name.

Basketball phenoms like Duke’s Cooper Flagg signed deals with New Balance and Fanatics reportedly totaling $28 million — as a college freshman. This week the University of Miami landed Jackson Cantwell, the most highly touted high school offensive lineman in the country, on a scholarship offer that reportedly includes an NIL deal worth some $2 million a year. There was no oversight, no enforcement, and little transparency about who was paying whom or why.

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Meanwhile, spending on coaches skyrocketed. Last weekend Lane Kiffin accepted the head football coaching job at Louisiana State University with a contract paying him $91 million over the next seven years — and that doesn’t make him the highest paid coach in college football. The University of Georgia is paying Kirby Smart $130 million over ten years to coach its football team.

A Congressional Research Service report captured the moment: “college athletics has entered a period some commentators and Members of Congress have referred to as the ‘wild west.’”

NCAA President Charlie Baker — the former Massachusetts governor hired by the NCAA in March 2023 to figure out a way forward — was blunt about the damage: “The result was a sense of chaos: instability for schools, confusion for student-athletes and too often litigation.”

The House settlement was supposed to bring order. Baker called it “a pathway to begin stabilizing college sports,” finally addressing the core injustice that Ed O’Bannon exposed in 2009 and that Justice Kavanaugh condemned in 2021.

With revenue sharing, scholarships, and other benefits combined, Baker said that student-athletes at many schools will now receive nearly 50 percent of all athletic department revenue. He called it “a tremendously positive change and one that was long overdue.”

But by Baker’s own admission, the settlement left fundamental issues unresolved. College sports now sits between what no longer works and what hasn't yet been designed — and the system’s biggest questions lie squarely ahead.

The Unresolved Questions

Are Athletes Employees?

The settlement’s most glaring omission: it deliberately sidestepped the question at the heart of modern college athletics: whether athletes are students who play sports or workers who attend school.

Courts and labor boards are already pushing toward an answer. Last year, after Dartmouth basketball players sought to unionize, the National Labor Relations Board ruled they are employees who can form a union—even though they receive no scholarships and play in a league that generates minimal revenue. The team dropped its unionization effort earlier this year, but the precedent was set.

If athletes are employees, they become entitled to minimum wage, overtime, workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance, and the right to unionize. Few universities are prepared for what that shift would mean. Revenue-generating sports like football and basketball might absorb the added costs, but non-revenue Olympic sports—swimming, wrestling, track, tennis—would face immediate jeopardy.

Most athletic departments cannot afford to treat hundreds of athletes as employees while maintaining their current roster of sports. The potential result: schools will cut programs or, perhaps, leave Division I altogether.

Can the Salary Cup Survive Legal Challenge?

Professional leagues have salary caps because they have unions and antitrust exemptions. College athletics has neither.

Yet the House settlement includes a $20.5 million cap on what schools can pay athletes—without the legal protections that make salary caps work in the pros. For instance, there is no collective bargaining agreement with a players’ union, and no antitrust exemption from Congress.

That contradiction raises legal questions. The Department of Justice warned in a January 2025 filing in the House case that the cap “restrains competition among schools” and allows the NCAA to continue fixing compensation. An ongoing question is whether the cap can withstand antitrust challenges that could invalidate the settlement’s core framework.

The Title IX Collision

Unlike NIL deals with third-parties like college boosters or sneaker companies, direct payments from schools must comply with federal gender-equity law. But football and men’s basketball generate the overwhelming majority of revenue while Title IX — signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1972 — requires equal educational opportunity, including athletics, between men and women.

Texas Tech, for instance, plans to allocate more than 90 percent of its revenue-sharing funds to men’s sports, according to one report. How Title IX applies to direct payments is an unresolved legal question, but lawsuits are almost certain and universities may be forced to pay athletes in ways that conflict with the economics of their own departments.

The Threat to Olympic Sports

Revenue sharing doesn’t bring new money into college athletics — it diverts existing money out of athletic department budgets and into direct payments to players. Meanwhile, NIL collectives — college boosters who pool their money together — can also have the effect of pulling donor support away from an athletic department generally and towards specific sports and players.

The result is a shrinking pool of funds for everything beyond football and men’s basketball.

Because most non-revenue sports cost millions to run and generate little in return, they become the pressure point. Estimates suggest thousands of athletes across swimming, wrestling, gymnastics, track, volleyball, rowing, and other Olympic sports could lose opportunities as schools confront the new financial reality.

The fear is real—that an era intended to make college sports fairer may end up shrinking the universe of athletes who get to compete at all, including many who form the backbone of America’s Olympic pipeline.

Who’s in Charge?

The newly formed College Sports Commission—created as a result of the House settlement—now oversees revenue sharing and NIL deals for all Division I schools. The organization requires all NIL contracts over $600 to be reported and approved to ensure they reflect “fair market value” rather than disguised pay-for-play.

But the Commission is untested, launching just months ago with no track record. And it is still sorting out its authority—last month, for instance, it sent letters to schools under its purview asking them waive their right to challenge future punishments in court. Adding to the complication, states have passed conflicting NIL laws. Meanwhile, the NCAA still handles other rules—academic eligibility, rules of competition, sports betting.

In sum, college sports now operate under a fragmented regulatory structure unprecedented in its modern history.

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What is College Sports Supposed to Be?

This is the question behind all the others. Student athletes are now being compensated like professionals, trained like professionals, and scheduled like professionals—while still expected to maintain the full academic load of traditional students. The educational mission that once justified the enterprise no longer matches its economic reality.

If this is now openly commercial, what distinguishes it from a minor league? If it remains tied to universities, how do schools reconcile academic values with entertainment revenue? The answer will determine whether college sports survives as a distinct institution—or collapses into something unrecognizable.

Not The First Crisis

Ed O’Bannon’s discomfort at finding his own likeness in a video game he’d never authorized — and for which he’d never been paid — set off a chain reaction. One lawsuit triggering another, one ruling forcing the next, each cracking the façade a little more. By the time the House settlement arrived, amateurism wasn’t reformed — it was finished.

Yet, this isn’t the first time America’s colleges and universities grappled with an existential crisis over athletics. A century ago, when football became so dangerous that players were dying, some called for the game to be banned.

U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt stepped in. He convened two White House summits on college football in October 1905, using the bully pulpit to force college leaders to reform a sport on the brink of being outlawed. Those meetings set in motion the creation of what would become the NCAA.

More than a century later, the current crisis will likely require Washington to step in again.

The question is: how?

Next up: How we got here — and, then, the solutions leaders are proposing to get out of it.

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