Branded is a weekly column devoted to the intersection of marketing, business, design, and culture.
When a brand goes negative, its usually with a claim that a competitor is somehow inferior. In its recent Super Bowl ad, the telehealth provider Hims & Hers went on the attack against something bigger: the system. Promoting a weight-loss drug positioned as a cheaper Ozempic alternative, the spot dings Big Pharma, and the healthcare industry more generally, as motivated by profits not patients. The ad sparked backlash before it even aired, and the buzz has lingered beyond the big game, fueled partly by criticism from the pharmaceutical business and prominent politicians, among others.
In other words, the brand channeled some of the most anti-establishment vibes darkening the 2025 zeitgeist as a way to make a splashand it seems to be working.
The short-term payoff may seem limited. Hims & Hers is pushing a cheaper, compounded version of semaglutide, the Novo Nordisk drug sold as Wegovy and Ozempic, which have become blockbusters for their weight-loss effects. (Ozempic can cost in excess of $1,000 a month without insurance, while the compounds can cost $200 or less; Hims & Hers doesnt break out revenue from compounds, but has indicated its broader weight-loss category has grown at a rapid clip and is estimated to reach annual revenue of $100 million by the end of this year.) Compounded-drug versions are permitted when regulators deem a marketplace shortage of an original (patented) drug. Wegovy and Ozempic are currently on that listand their creator, Novo Nordisk, has acknowledged that compounding is affecting its businessbut the drugmaker says it has increased its supply, which will eventually curtail Hims & Hers from selling its copycat.
But even when that spike of interest (and presumably sales) runs its course, the company best known for erectile dysfunction, hair-loss, and other treatments has raised its profile to more than just a modern alt-wellness brand. Now its positioning itself as a righteous underdog battling a rigged system on behalf of everyday folk.
The actual spot is remarkable for its largely grim and confrontational tone. With Childish Gambinos brooding anthem as the soundtrack, it quick-cuts through sometimes jarring images to describe an obesity epidemic that leads to half a million deaths each year. A narrator declares: Something is broken. With nods to fattening foods, social media, and pricey drug treatments, it continues, The system wasnt built to help us. It was built to keep us sick and stuck. The final pivot is to Hims & Hers, with its affordable doctor-trusted treatments, formulated in the USA as part of a custom treatment plan. People smile and brandish med vials as the narration concludes: Join us in the fight for a healthy America.
While a rebel pose is a venerable brand trope, its a bit jarring to see it deployed so starkly with healthcare as its target. But maybe it shouldnt be. Years of healthcare consumer frustrations have been a prelude to a year thats already seen a vaccine skeptic confirmed as the head of Health and Human Services, and the alleged killer of a major healthcare executive treated by some as a folk hero. Politically, vows to fight and smash the system (any system) have never been more prominent.
Critics of the ad charged that its (very) small-type disclaimer that the compound-drug versions Hims & Hers offers are not FDA approved was misleading and potentially dangerous. (Brand-name drugs and official generics are more stringently regulated.) They also complained that the ad did not mention potential side effects.
The Partnership for Safe Medicines, a nonprofit group focused on pharmaceutical safety, wrote Super Bowl broadcaster Fox a detailed letter urging the network not to air the ad. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a drug-industry-lobbying firm, said the ad misrepresents the safety and efficacy of knockoff products. Senators Richard Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, and Roger Marshall, a Republican from Kansas, asked the FDA to look into the matter. Numerous media outlets covered the controversy. And Novo Nordisk retaliated with print ads emphasizing the weaker regulationand past problemsaround compounds, asking: Do you really know what youre injecting into your body?
Hims & Hers is not the only company in the health space to respond to the semaglutide shortage, and its not wrong about the prohibitive cost of brand-name versions. But its tone has been unusual, waving away all charges and critiques as not just fake news but, in effect, evidence of persecution. Weve called out the system, and now the system is asking that our ad get taken down, a spokesperson commented; its site touts the ad Big Pharma doesnt want you to see. And the companys share price is up about 15% since just before the Super Bowl, giving it a valuation of more than $10 billion. Hims & Hers may be taking risks and pushing the regulatory envelope, but antagonizing authority doesnt seem to be a side effect of its strategy, its the prescription.
In many ways, architecture is the star of the 2024 film The Brutalist. Nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, the film follows decades of the life and work of László Tóth, an ingenious Bauhaus-trained Hungarian architect who survives the Holocaust and immigrates to the United States to pursue a new life.
Cowritten and directed by Brady Corbet, it’s a fictional story with underpinnings of world and architectural history. The narrative centers around Tóth, played by Academy Award winner Adrien Brody, designing and building a monumental, brutalist-style community center and church-like space for a wealthy and mercurial client.
That building, known in the film as the Institute, does not actually exist as a built project. So production designer Judy Becker had to design it for the film. The final building design showcases brutalism on a grand scale, with large and cascading rectilinear blocks of concrete topped with soaring towers.
“The first thing Brady asked me to do, and this was well before official prep, was to design the Institute,” says Becker, whose production design is among the film’s Oscar nominations. The building is so essential to the story that how it looked ended up guiding the rest of the film’s production. Becker, not the fictional Tóth, is the true architect behind The Brutalist.
[Photo: courtesy A24]
Drawing from a personal passion
Though not a trained architect, Becker drew from decades of interest in art and architectureparticularly the stark concrete modernism of the brutalist styleto bring the Institute to physical form. “The movie seemed kind of tailor-made for me because, for a very long time, I’ve been in love with brutalist architecture,” she says. “Way before there was a group of people that loved brutalist architecture, I loved it.”
Becker’s architecture for The Brutalist was also inspired by the mid-century works of modernist architects trained at the Bauhaus, which the fictional Tóth attended before the outbreak of World War II and his imprisonment at the Buchenwald concentration camp. These biographical details in the script were some of the few aspects guiding the design of the Institute.
[Photo: courtesy A24]
Building an architectural connection to the film’s characters
Two specific architectural details were also drawn directly from the script’s dialog: an aperture in the Institute’s roof and a central altar on which the aperture projects a cross at noon. Revealed in dialog only until the very end of the 3-hour-20-minute film, Becker’s design for the Institute also had to reflect an architectural connection to the two concentration camps where Tóth and his wife, separated during the war, were imprisoned. Much was open to Becker’s interpretation.
[Image: courtesy A24]
“I researched in great detail the architecture of the concentration camps and looked at overhead plans and aerial photographs, and also the interiors of the bunkers where the [people] were imprisoned,” says Becker. “It was very, very useful for me to do that. It was also very emotional, and let’s say stressful and draining, but important.”
Her research also extended to the outbuildings of the concentration camps, including their crematoriums. “Personally, I intended the Institute to look like a gigantic crematorium that was passing as a church,” she says.
[Image: courtesy A24]
Some of these details appear only briefly, or obliquely, in the film. The most comprehensive view the audience is given of the building is a scale model used for a client review and a community meeting. The actual building is shown as a nascent construction site and later as a nearly finished project.
[Image: courtesy A24]
Becker says filming the building was essential to the story, but a challenge to do without actually building it. What ended up in the film is a pastiche of the scale model, sets to show the construction site, and a combination of location shoots that included an abandoned grain silo and an underground reservoir in the city of Budapest. “It was a complicated process,” she says.
Crafting original mid-century work for the Brutalist
Becker’s role as production designer also involved more typical facets of the job, such as set design and location furnishing. But, unique to a film about an architect, she also had to put her mid-century design chops to work creating an avant-garde library space that appears early in the film, as well as Bauhaus-inspired furniture Tóth’s character creates shortly after arriving in the U.S.
[Image: courtesy A24]
“Most of the time, when I did additional research for those periods, it was to avoid imitating anyone,” Becker says. “I didn’t want what László designed to look like another designer.”
[Photo: courtesy A24]
Though Becker says her work as a production designer always involves getting inside the minds of the characters in the film, this project called on her to almost become the actual architect behind the architecture of The Brutalist. “I was really trying hard to make him original, make his work original,” Becker says. “Sometimes, I believe that he did exist! I talk about him as if he was a real person. But he only lives inside of me as a designer.”
Year-end performance reviews can be time-consuming. Yet the end and start of the year is when employees and managers are inundated with a heavy workload. Emotions range from elated to angst-ridden. After all, performance evaluations directly impact professional reputations, salary increases, bonuses, and promotions.
The importance of revisiting objectives
This reality begs the question of just how effective performance evaluations are and what employees can do to balance the scales. A recent SHRM study indicates that roughly 50% of companies employ traditional annual performance evaluation processes based on whether they achieve the goals that they set at the start of the year. A separate MIT study found that both employees and managers rarely review these same goals and objectives throughout the year. These objectives often lie dormant until they suddenly become the basis for high-stakes performance assessments, contributing to employee anxiety around year-end reviews.
There are many negative implications of not revisiting objectives. Employees are less likely to know what their employers expect, which increases the likelihood of missing opportunities to course correct performance throughout the year. Those who don’t actively seek clarity regularly run the risk of missing opportunities for insights and coaching from either managers or mentors that might help them improve and meet unarticulated performance expectations.
Reviewing objectives frequently also helps keep managers apprised of obstacles that surface over time. A recent SHRM study highlights that employees agree these are missed opportunities. Yet only 28% of companies have moved formal performance processes that adopt more frequent reviews of performance goals.
This became a reality for Jennifer, a CTO at a health tech company. After an optimistic team goal setting offsite in February, unexpected regulatory challenges arose in August, derailing their initial plans. Forced to pivot and manage recurring crises, and with minimal interactions to update her traveling manager, Jennifer is headed into her performance discussion worried that her reviewer wont take these obstacles and infrequent updates into consideration.
Failing to meet expectations, especially due to uncontrollable circumstances, can feel threatening. However, it’s also an opportunity for reflection, perspective, learning and practicing better conversational hygiene around future performance.
Here are three strategies to foolproof your performance review.
Shift mindset to progress (rather than goal achievement)
Busy leaders often struggle with binary views of progress, dismissing accomplishments that don’t fully meet original standards. The progress principle suggests that reflecting on smaller wins over shorter time frames can significantly enhance one’s sense of achievement and encourage forward movement when we feel stuck.
By asking good questions, we learn a great deal about smaller accomplishments made throughout the year. For example:
What outcomes were gained from Q1?
How did those outcomes and learnings compound over time to bring new results later on?
These questions dig deep to surface smaller wins people take for granted. Exploring the learning that came from smaller, progressive wins nearly always reveals something more significant. This exercise can serve to restore a sense of self-efficacy and motivation. If employees share their learnings intermittently with the managers, it can dissipate anticipatory anxiety before performance discussions.
Initiating intermittent, informal check-ins with our manager doesnt just provide a mechanism to insights into how performance is progressing. You can use this as an opportunity to discuss and review sudden priority shifts in work and help create mutual understanding of unanticipated roadblocks.
Focus on reasons rather than excuses
Initiating your own discussions about performance well before a scheduled review can be beneficial even if it feels uncomfortable. When individuals openly acknowledge their missteps without prompt, others are more likely to perceive them as responsible and trustworthy.
External obstacles to goals always provide learning opportunities. Its important to provide context when youre discussing missed targets, but avoid explanations that sound like excuses. Instead, frame challenges with self-awareness, ownership and action plans for future improvements. Taking ownership demonstrates responsibility, builds trust and can also offer you a sense of relief before performance discussions.
Use the opportunity to build a better relationship with your manager
A recent study indicates that managers have an outsized impact on their employees well-being. Employees reported that the quality of their relationship with their manager accounts for up to 69% of their mental health, which is the same as a spouse or a partner.
This is why I encourage clients to have more personal, genuine conversations with employees and managers. These discussions provide the opportunity for both parties to discuss mutual needs and discuss any misunderstandings without judgment.
Recently, I offered to conduct year-end stakeholder feedback for a CEO client worried about the consequences of missing full performance on his goals. Id gathered feedback just months before, but instincts told me to do so again.
Board member feedback revealed the oppositethey were impressed with the CEO’s growth and progress, despite not fully meeting initial goals. They appreciated his improvements in previous problem areas and understood the market challenges. These insights prevented unnecessary anxiety about the upcoming review.
Empathy also matters as managers as companies often evaluate them based on their team’s performance. This can be unfair when challenges arise beyond their direct control. Understanding this dynamic is important for both parties. Talking through it gets it out on the table.
Knowing that performance outcomes impact so much, makes having sincere, honest conversations worth the effort. When employees and managers openly discuss progress and small wins frequently, it creates more opportunities for mutual support and adjust objectives for relevancy. Better yet, it’s the perfect opportunity to strengthen relationships while bringing the peace of mind for a fresh start to the year.
In 2019, when the first Trump administration rolled back energy efficiency standards on light bulbs, President Trump said that modern bulbs dont make you look as good,” and as a vain person, thats very important to me.
The color of the light was different in the early 2000s, when blue-ish LED bulbs were hitting the market. But current LEDs can largely replicate the warmth of light from old incandescent bulbs. The price to incandescents is now also equivalent. LEDs can last for 15 years, rather than the one year that an older bulb might have lasted. They also use 75% to 90% less energy, shrinking the carbon footprint of buildings. A homeowner who switches to LEDs throughout their home can save thousands of dollars over the lifetime of the bulbs.
The tech is objectively better for consumers. Now, after Biden had restored lighting standards, Trump wants to roll them back again. But for manufacturers, regardless of policy, the transition has already happened: factories are unlikely to ever go back to making outdated incandescent bulbs, which use a completely different process of production. Signify, the global lighting giant that spun off from Philips, told Fast Company that because the transition to LEDs has been underway for more than a decade, it doesnt expect the trend to reverse.
The industry shift began nearly 20 years ago
The shift began in 2007, when President George W. Bush signed the Energy Independence and Security Act into law. It included new standards that inefficient incandescent light bulbs couldn’t meet. “By default, it forced a transition in the industry to different technologies,” says Kathy Sterio, president of GE Lighting, which was acquired by Savant, a smart home company, in 2020. The shift to LEDs happened in stages since the technology was expensive at first. Before LEDs became dominant, there was a push for CFLs, but consumers didn’t like the twisted shape or the color of the light; halogen lights, another alternative, weren’t nearly as efficient.
[Photo: GE Lighting/Savant]
LEDs had already been on the market. But the law helped accelerate adoption, Sterio says. As production volume increased, prices dropped, helping adoption happen even faster. In 2019, when Trump loosened efficiency requirements, the transition slowed. But the industry’s move to LEDs was already well underway. When Biden tightened the standards again, the full phaseout of incandescent bulbs happened last year. Manufacturing had already dwindled by that point.
Supply chains can’t easily go back
To make LEDs, the lighting industry had to revamp its supply chains. It was heavily invested in incandescent and fluorescent tech; factories needed different equipment to make the new builds. Making LEDs begins at semiconductor factories, where semiconductor material is grown inside high-pressure chambers. Then it’s turned into thin chips and packaged for use in lights that are assembled elsewhere. It’s nothing like the process of making a simple incandescent bulb, which works by heating up metal wires to produce light. When lighting companies switched, their suppliers couldn’t just make a few tweaks to their production lines.
Now, although there are still some Chinese factories making incandescent bulbs for niche applications (and U.S. law allows for some uses outside regular bulbs in homes), the industry has almost entirely moved on. It’s unlikely the remaining factories could handle much additional volume, Sterio says. And because the Bush-era law passed nearly two decades ago, most of the equipment “has long been disassembled,” she says. “It would be very, very difficult to go back to the incandescent world, just in terms of equipment and know-how.”
LEDs are now the dominant type of lighting globally. Most consumers likely don’t even consider the tech inside the bulbs, says Sterio. “The packaging looks the same, the bulbs look the samethe same shape, the same fit, the same color output,” she says. The most noticeable difference: the computer chip inside means that bulbs can be smartprogrammed to change color throughout the day, for example, or to turn on before you get home at night. “I think the LED technology has allowed us to bring a lot more value to your socket than we’ve been able to in the past,” she says.
The walk sign lights up, and youre ready to step off the curb when you hear the blare of an ambulance sirenor the sound of kids screaming, or even some leaves rustling in the wind. How do you make a sensible decision about whether its safe to cross the street when your brain must instantaneously juggle conflicting and related sensory information?
Those decisions are made in the prefrontal cortex. One of the last areas of the brain to mature, its responsible for moment-to-moment reactions. And although researchers have long studied how brain cells process mixed signals, the mechanism has largely remained a mystery.
Finally, new research is providing some insight. Christopher Langdon and Tatiana Engel, neuroscientists at Princeton University, have come up with a mathematical framework to better explain the decision-making process.
In a paper published this week in the journal Nature Neuroscience, the researchers lay out their techniquethe latent circuit modelto understand how a large network of brain activity works, down to individual cells behavior within it.
Back to that crosswalk example. We want to understand how the prefrontal cortex is maintaining current goals while filtering out whats relevant and irrelevant,” Langdon tells Fast Company.
The goal of his and Engel’s research, then, was to understand how the prefrontal cortex filters the irrelevant stimuli, like the rustling leaves, while keeping top of mind whats relevant, namely, crossing the street. (Another classic example of people trying to filter through conflicting information is the Stroop Color and Word Test, in which participants must discern the name of a color when its written in a different color of ink.)
What the pair concluded is that the brains decision-making process, when theres conflicting stimuli, isnt driven by some novel or emergent solution in high-dimensional networks, but rather by classical mechanisms hidden inside of these networks, Langdon says. Its as though a few nerve cell ringleaders are calling the shots and influencing decision-making.
But can this information help us improve our own decision-making? Not necessarily.
The prefrontal cortex is constantly juggling current goals while attempting to suppress other tendenciessay, scrolling the news when you should be working. With a good prefrontal cortex thats working well, you can suppress that tendency,” Langdon says.
Relevancy for machine learning
The Princeton researchers showed that big neural networks can be reduced by filtering out irrelevant information, so that we can better understand how smaller networks work. According to Langdon, this has broader implications, including for the development of large language models used in machine learning.
Large language models may have an enormous number of parameters that are expensive to train and require a lot of energy to use, Langdon explains, so theres a lot of focus on making them smaller by reducing the number of parameters in a way that will still yield the most salient results.
In spirit, Langdon says, thats what we were doing here, but with a different model of neuroscience.
When Dr. David Rabin told me how Apollo Sessions worked, my exact first thought was, poppycock. This was an app, he said, that would turn my iPhone into a healing device using the vibrations of the phones haptic engine. By stimulating the vagus nervea core component of the parasympathetic nervous system responsible for the bodys recovery and relaxation mechanismsusing certain frequencies, this iOS app would make me feel different. It works, he assured me. With trauma patients in clinical settings, he claimed. As someone who is skeptical about wundermedicine by default, I didnt believe it. But as someone who has lived through a few years of a traumatic experience, I was curious. I wanted to try it. And Im glad I did.[Image: Apollo Neuroscience]The science behind ApolloFor 20 years, Rabin has studied chronic stress, focusing on the effects of addiction and trauma on veterans, women, and children. Witnessing the limitations of medication in treating these conditions, he and his colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center began exploring non-drug treatments. They discovered that various techniques, such as soothing touch, music, and talk therapy could induce a state of safety learning in the body, promoting recovery and reducing stress. This exploration led them to experiment with vibrations as a means to trigger the bodys natural relaxation response. Just like music can calm your body or getting a hug can calm your body, we can send soothing vibrations that are like music composed for your touch receptor system in your body to trigger the safety nervous system, Rabin explains.[Image: Apollo Neuroscience]These vibrations, akin to the calming rhythm of ocean waves or a cats purr, activate the vagus nerve. This is a key player in regulating the autonomic nervous system, which controls involuntary bodily functions such as heart rate, digestion, and respiration. By activating the vagus nerve, Apollos vibrations promote a shift towards the parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system, responsible for rest and recovery. This shift counteracts the effects of chronic stress, which often keeps the body in a state of heightened arousal, leading to fatigue, anxiety, and difficulty concentrating. And since the vagus nerve can affect your state in different directions, if you manipulate the frequency of the vibration, you will trigger different physical responses.The teams initial research focused on using this technology to help veterans cope with trauma. However, they soon realized the potential benefits for everyday stress and began testing it on themselves and others in real-world situations. The results were so remarkable that they caught them by surprise: improved sleep, better focus, increased energy, and reduced reliance on stimulants like coffee. Recognizing the transformative potential of this discovery, Rabin and his colleagues decided to keep testing and eventually founded Apollo Neuroscience, a company that packaged what they learned into Apollo Neuro, a consumer wearable that used a haptic engine and software to help anyone destress (it was a finalist in our World Changing Ideas Award 2021).According to Rabin, Apollo Neuros effectiveness is backed by rigorous scientific research. He claims that they have completed eight clinical double-blind, randomized placebo-controlled crossover trials, with more than 1,700 subjects. Three of them are published and five are currently accepted for publication or under peer review for publication in 2025, he says. The company also claims it has 13 more ongoing clinical trials at different hospitals. One of the reviewed studies he shared with me, published in the Journal of Rheumatology, demonstrates that the Apollo wearable device led to significant improvements in fatigue, reduced instances of Raynaud phenomenon (a condition affecting blood flow to extremities), and enhanced overall quality of life, including physical function, mood, sleep, and social participation. The study, which involved participants wearing the device for a minimum of 15 minutes daily for four weeks, showed that the technology was well-tolerated and used far beyond the requested time, with no adverse effects. The iPhone versionBuilding on the success of the wearable device, the company has now launched Apollo Sessions, an iPhone app that delivers a subset of the same therapeutic vibrations without the need for the wearable. The idea of using the always-stressful iPhone vibration for good may seem nuts, but according to Rabin, Apollo Sessions takes the very device that often makes us feel overwhelmed and transforms it into a tool for calm and clarity.Rabinwho is also executive director at The Board of Medicinetells me that the companys mission is to create technology that heals humanity. We designed the wearable to prove that that was possible, he says, and it does [but] not everybody can afford a wearable. Thats when they looked at the haptic engines in phones to see if it was possible to do the same. It worked for the iPhone, he says, but not for Android phones, because they dont have the same level of access to the haptic capabilities of the hardware. While the Apollo Neuro devicewhich is worn on the wrist or anklehas more advanced features thanks to a more powerful haptic engine with a wider range of vibration intensities and patterns, the Apollo Sessions app offers only a subset of these functions. The iPhone Apollo Sessions app makes the core vibration technology accessible to everyone, Rabin says. The wearable has all these advanced AI and sleep benefits the phone does not have. The app focuses on providing daytime relaxation and stress relief, too.[Image: Apollo Neuroscience]Apollo Sessions offers a range of vibration patterns. These Vibesas the company calls temare designed to ease you into different states. Whether you need a boost of energy with Espresso Shot, a calming embrace with Hug, or a moment of relaxation with Relax, Rabin says Apollo Sessions can do that for you. He recommended that I start with the Hug Vibewhich is free to tryby placing the phone on your chest for two to five minutes, preferably in airplane mode with do not disturb enabled, to fully immerse in the experience for that limited time. He also said that I could put it on my yoga mat while I meditate or on the mattress while I go to sleep.Does it actually work?I tried it a few times. And, despite my natural skepticism, it does work. Perhaps it was self-suggestion. Maybe its a placebo effect. But it did what it says it does, especially the calming vibes. So well, in fact, that I asked my own therapist and he explained to me all the science behind this and other similar therapies associated with vibration and rhythm. The Apollo Sessions app is free. You can try the Hug one for two minutes, which should be enough to feel an effect. Or you can subscribe for $9.99 per month to go deeper, unlocking unlimited access to sessions that offer six different Vibes. Rabin says that the plan is to keep expanding this library as their research finds out the effect of other frequencies and vibration patterns.
In another move from the Trump administration aimed at disrupting climate science, the Commerce Department has ordered NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to search grants for climate-change-related terms, signaling that it may work to cancel that funding. Its a move that could threaten a wide array of projectsincluding infrastructure work on bridges and roadsand leaves researchers uncertain about the future of their work.
NOAA is one of the worlds leading climate science agencies, and it funds work on everything from atmospheric studies to wildfires to fishery recovery. NOAA also has funding available through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for habitat restoration, coastal resilience, and weather forecasting.
The Trump administrations directive to search grants for climate terms includes words like climate, climate science, carbon, environmental quality, and pollution. This follows the move from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to search NOAA databases for DEI content.
But terms like diversity could come up in discussions about ecological or biodiversity, researchers sayand climate terms are ubiquitous in everything the agency works on. Youre going to have a hard time finding grant awards that dont mention climate change, simply because of its role in all of these areas of science, says Douglas Price, whose work has focused on grant funding and climate research. It speaks to the blunt-force approach that’s being taken across the government right now.
Infrastructure projects are tied to climate science
By singling out climate-related terminology, all types of NOAA-funded work could be under threat. That includes infrastructure projects that have to take climate impacts into considerationbasically, anything you build, Price says. Anything that uses concrete, steel, asphalt, you have to be looking at extreme heat and extreme precipitation events. If youre going to exclude climate change from the planning and engineering of any sorts of projects, youre making them vulnerable to climate extremes that were seeing with regularity now.
Whether in a tiny, coastal New England town or a major city like New York, infrastructure like roads, bridges, rail lines, and tunnels must consider climate threats. What are the new temperature extremes that we’re going to see? What is the new baseline for 100-year storms? What are the flooding extremes were going to see and how do we size storm sewers? Price says. Infrastructure projects are meant to last decades, so we cant build new bridges, for example, only for the climate extremes were currently experiencing; we have to think about the projected extremes well see in 50 years.
Already, our current infrastructure is at risk. One environmental nonprofit worker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fears that his organization could be targeted by the administration, is concerned about this directive affecting existing agreements. His nonprofit uses funding that comes from other organizations via NOAA grants. One recent project involves designing and building two bridges to replace undersized culverts.
When culverts are too small, the water flowing through them is stronger, which enhances erosion, blocks fish from passing through, and risks washing out structures. These culverts increase the risk of road failure and are barriers to spawning migration for salmon species, the worker says. These projects all explicitly mention climate change and habitat diversity. These phrases are in there because NOAA guidance is to design road crossings to account for anticipated changes due to climate change.
Overall, ignoring climate impacts doesn’t stop them from happeningit just stops us from being prepared. By banning certain terms, Price says, You’re blindfolding yourself and walking into a strange room, and you know that there are lots of sharp objects in that room you can stumble into, but youve chosen to not look for them.
A matter of life and death for at-risk communities
Other NOAA-funded work is more on the nose when it comes to climate change, like mitigation efforts or environmental justice projectsboth specifically on Trumps radar for cuts. This isnt work being done in some lab that has implications for far into the future. Its being applied almost immediately to problems that we face, Price says.
Grants help connect research institutions with vulnerable communities and the government agencies that can provide them resources. That could mean communicating flood risks to coastal communities or ensuring that the recovery efforts for the Los Angeles wildfires arent leaving less-wealthy communities behind.
Or take an impact like extreme heat, which poses special risk for communities with lots of elderly residents or people with disabilities. If we cant understand those risks and where the vulnerabilities are, and if we cant help policymakers come up with ways of getting support to those communities, more people will die when we have extreme heat events than would otherwise, he says.
This holds true for any extreme weather event. The main reason we want to understand climate change and that we want to increase resilience to impacts is because those impacts often are life-and-death matters to people, Price adds. These things arent abstract. They arent a game. Were honestly very concerned about peoples lives in the work that we do.
A cloud of uncertainty for researchers
A larger issue with targeting specific terms like climate or diversity is that it removes them from crucial context. You can’t talk about statistics without talking about bias; you cant talk about IT security without talking about privilege; you can’t talk about any population of humans, animals, or bacteria without talking about population diversity, Price says. Sifting through the results requires a certain understanding of these topics, one that the nonprofit worker doubts young DOGE workers have.
The administrations approach isnt necessarily meant to be productive or exact. Instead, Price notes, its a way of creating a political climate where these topics feel threatened, and if you’re involved with these things, you’re at risk. With agency-level communication largely shut down and ever-changing orders, its difficult to know how this will all proceedwhether grants will actually be cut short, whether the courts will step in, whether researchers need to think about working with Congress. Theres a large cloud of uncertainty around how all of this is being done, he says.
That means many researchers and their institutions are still looking for the best pathway to defend their work. But for climate researchers, antagonism isnt totally new. Climate scientists are quite used to being attacked poltically, Price says. Its just that now the attacks are focused on a particular vulnerability in science in general, which is the way that it is funded by the federal government.
KitchenAid just unveiled its color of the year, a retro, comforting Butter yellow.
While most people are aware of Pantones color of the year program (hello, Mocha Mousse), fewer might be clued in to the fact that the beloved appliance company KitchenAid has been running its own version of the concept since 2017. Each year, KitchenAid picks a trendy new hue to outfit a line of its iconic stand mixers. In 2023, the pick was an electric pink Hibiscus, followed by a powdery Blue Salt in 2024. Now the company is all-in on its nostalgic buttery hue. The new mixer retails online for $499.99.
[Photo: KitchenAid]
A team of analysts from KitchenAids parent company, Whirlpool, work year-round to identify culturally relevant colors for new products. The color of the year program is a way to highlight that workand, conveniently, it taps into the consumer demand for colorful cookware that has helped brands like Our Place and Le Creuset amass loyal followings.
Brittni Pertijs is a color, material, and finish design manager at Whirlpool. She says her team has had their eye on yellow for color of the year since 2019, when mustard first started becoming a popular hue.
The main goal with the color of the year program is to look at the drivers of social cultural trends and filter those through the KitchenAid brand lens, Pertijs says. Then, we forecast how people may want to feel in the year of launchin this case, those feelings were comfort and optimism. From there, we look at our color tracking to identify which tones seem to be emerging and which align best with interior design trends.
[Photo: KitchenAid]
Butter yellow is an apt choice, given that the soft, retro hue is having something of a modern-day revival. Back in December, Pinterest predicted that 2025 would see a resurgence of youthful primary colors in interior design. In January, the platform spotlighted butter yellow as one of its five colors of the year, given that searches for butter yellow on the site were up 115%, while butter yellow nails saw interest spike by 1,835%.
Pertijss team identified their perfect butter yellow shade by collecting a range of potential samples, including a vintage butter knife found in an antique shop. The final hue is somewhat brighter than plain butter, but its just right to evoke the warm and fuzzy feelings of your grandmas 1960s-era kitchen.
Butter is so comforting, yet indulgent, Pertijs says. The soft color has just enough energy to spark that feeling of joy. We literally wrote a love letter to Butter as we were building our inspiration around this years selection.
Young software engineers from Elon Musks Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) continue to infiltrate U.S. government agencies with the stated goal of eliminating what the Trump White House deems wasteful (or woke) spending. Theyre already on the ground at the Labor Department, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and the Department of Veterans Affairs. And theyre spreading further every day.
DOGE has also said it aims to modernize government systems, which implies altering the code within those government systems. That could bring members of the organization face-to-face with something theyve potentially never seen before: COBOL, or common business-oriented language.
COBOL was developed in the 1950s by a private-public partnership that included the Pentagon and IBM. The goal was to create a universal, English-like programming language for business applications. In the decades since, private-sector businesses have moved away from the language. The code is difficult and costly to maintain, and was built for batch processing, which means it doesnt integrate well with more modern cloud-based and real-time applications.
But its a totally different story in Washington, D.C. Indeed, despite a number of modernization pushes in recent decades, the language is still widely used within government mainframe systems that manage all kinds of government financial transactions, from tax payments and refunds to Social Security benefits to Medicare reimbursements.
The systems, if maintained correctly, are extremely reliable. COBOL acts as the glue that holds the components of the mainframe together, the code that orchestrates its work with apps and databases, as one expert told me. The mainframes themselves are loaded with redundancy and fault-tolerance features so they never break down. COBOL-based mainframe systems are also still widely used in regulated industries such as financial services, telecommunications, and healthcare.
Some people worry that Musks young engineers might blunder into the COBOL code base and make changes without understanding the full effects. Normally, any changes to the code underlying government systems has to follow a set of detailed business requirements written by other agency staffers. Any delays or downtime in these systems has direct effects on real peoples lives.
Its also very possible that software engineers and others within the agencies will impress upon Musk and his DOGE advisers the importance of respecting established norms. But Musk and his people are, if anything, unpredictable. Should the DOGE staffers attempt to rewrite sections of the COBOL code, it could lead to unintended consequences, including major disruptions to critical government services. And unintended consequences are very possible, if not probable.
Itll break and then well figure out what to fix
In a way, the COBOL language symbolizes the disconnect of worldviews of the players in the DOGE drama. Maintaining the COBOL code is a process of translating new policies or regulations into detailed business requirements, translating the requirements into computer code, arduously testing the code in a safe environment, putting the final product into production, and documenting its purpose in the system. Since COBOL hasnt been part of the computer science curriculum since the 1990s, the people who do this work are usually older, and their numbers are diminishing.
Musk and the DOGE staff, most of whom are young software engineers from Silicon Valley circles, are used to a very different move fast and break things process, says Don Hon, principal of Very Little Gravitas, which helps governments modernize complex services and products. You look at the way, for example, the early Tesla full self-driving software was put together, and we have a culture in the tech industry of, Let’s hack it together, let’s get something that works well enough, and then it’ll break and then we’ll figure out what to fix, says Hon, who has helped troubleshoot and modernize state and federal government systems, including Medicaid and logistics at the Defense Department.
To be sure, that philosophy has yielded a lot of success for entrepreneurs like Musk in the past, Hon says. But that sort of calculated risk means something very different for government systems on which hundreds of millions of people rely. Engineers whove spent their entire professional life developing consumer-facing software may not be equipped to draw a correct risk profile for implementing changes to a government payments system.
You’ve got someone who might say, What’s one missed Social Security payment or what’s one missed Medicaid payment, because we can fix it later, right? Hon says. What’s one missed federal payment that the states then disperse weekly to, for example, a service provider for social services? (DOGE did not respond to Fast Companys request for comment.)
The COBOL software is brittle. If, for instance, the code is updated with a new policy that conflicts with an existing one, the whole system can crash. Some systems dont have automated testing routines, so software engineers must program tests by hand and go through the time-consuming task of testing new code before it gets implemented. This is complicated by the fact that some parts of the code arent properly documented, so people whove not yet seen itsuch as DOGE engineersmay not know what the code was written to do.
Without whistleblowers from inside the agency, it may be hard to know if the DOGE people are attempting to alter system code. Earlier this month the Trump administration and the Treasury Department claimed that Musk and his cadre of DOGE operatives have merely read only access to government computer systemsand will make no changes to government systems or operations without the express consent of the president. But in a recent court filing, the highest-ranking DOGE point person at the Treasury Department, Thomas Krause, admitted that another DOGE staffer at the department, Marko Elez, had indeed been granted read and write access to the code, allowing him to alter it. (Krause said this access was given by accident.)
Krause also said in the same court filing that his job is to understand how the agencys end-to-end payment systems and financial report tools work, [and] recommend ways to update and modernize those systems. This implies an intet to alter system code. Such an effort could easily touch the COBOL code working within the mainframe systems.
In the court filing, Krause said hes been working closely with Treasury staffers to find ways of advancing Trumps and Musks objectives while still respecting the agencys data privacy and security guidelines. But DOGE officials already pushed out the Treasurys highest-ranking career staffer, David Lebryk, after he refused them access to the agencys payment systems. Krause likely can dispatch any internal objector with one phone call if they dont comply with DOGEs wishes.
But the DOGE team may think twice before firing the veteran staffers who speak COBOL and know where the bodies are buried. In the end, COBOLs incomprehensibility and brittleness may be features, not bugs.
If President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are serious about making the U.S. government more efficient, then Trump needs to reinstate the dozen-plus independent inspectors general who were recently fired from his administration. These independent inspectors were tasked with uncovering waste, fraud, and abuse, and they did it irrespective of White House partisanship and party control.
Not only did the firings break the law but this move also goes against what Americans say they want. Americans overwhelmingly want a more efficient governmenta reality made possible with independent and apolitical inspectors general in each department, versus loyalists disinclined to blow the whistle on their boss.
For background, inspectors general have been around for almost 50 years. They were created when President Jimmy Carter signed into law the Inspector General Act of 1978. Carter described the role of inspectors general then as “perhaps the most important new tools in the fight against fraud. Hes right. With direct access to all department records and agency heads, inspectors general can conduct investigations, issue subpoenas, and hire and control their own staff. Its their independence that makes them so effective.
Currently, there are more than 70 inspector general offices across the federal government. And while a U.S. president is, in fact, allowed to fire an inspector general, terminations have to be communicated to Congress 30 days in advance. Congress strengthened the law recently, requiring any White House to provide detailed reasoning for a firing.
Before Trump places loyalists in these positions, as he did with his cabinet appointees, we must protect the integrity and independence of these inspectors. There are three reasons why we need politically unbiased inspectors who are emboldened in their task of keeping the U.S. government accountable.
1: An independent inspector general is essential in identifying and recovering misspent U.S. taxpayer dollars
These watchdogs are working on Americans behalf. In the most recent annual report by the Council of the Inspectors General, which represents the 70-plus inspector general offices across the federal government, more than $90 billion was identified in potential savings as part of its annual audit. If and when Congress acts on those recommendations, thats a return of $26 for every $1 spent on the inspectors general.
Beyond their recommendations for savings, over the last 10 years inspectors general have been able to claw back more than $140 billion in receivables and recoveries through criminal and civil cases. At the departmental level, the returns from investigations can be substantial. A recent report from the inspector generals office in the Department of Health and Human Services cited almost $4 billion in investigative receivables.
In addition to the permanent inspectors within federal departments, so-called special inspectors can also provide an immediate and targeted review of a government operation. The special inspector general for pandemic recovery, for example, spearheaded 42 indictments and 33 arrests and recovered more than $60 million. The special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, as another example, identified nearly $2 billion in financial benefits, including nearly $645 millio in direct savings and more than $192 million in court-ordered recoveries. There are many examples like this, all across the federal government.
2: Government accountabilityand the act of rooting out waste, fraud, and abuseis historically very bipartisan
Theres a history of bipartisan efforts in Congress to minimize unnecessary federal spending, identify poorly planned and poorly executed programming, and claw back on behalf of the taxpayer wasted dollars by government departments and private industry consultants.
That bipartisanship was on full display shortly before Trump was inaugurated. A week before Trumps firings in January, a bipartisan Inspector General Caucus was launched in Congress to support inspectors in their effort to root out waste, fraud, and abuse within the federal government. And immediately after Trumps firings, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee submitted a bipartisan letter to the White House demanding an explanation.
U.S. polling by Gallup further backs up this bipartisanship in Congress, showing how both Republican and Democratic voters want the U.S. government to be more accountable. Theres bipartisan support for this work, to be clear.
3: Accountability is an essential next step in rebuilding Americans trust in government
Trust in national government in the U.S. is at historically low levels. Any effort to reduce federal inefficiencies and waste will be essential in restoring American voters faith in the system. Having a set of independent watchdogs helps ensure that every politician legitimately walks the campaign talk when elected to office.
Yet Trumps government efficiency campaign promise cant be taken seriously when firing the very independent watchdogs hired to help recover taxpayer dollars, improve efficiencies, reduce redundancies, and zero out waste, fraud, and abuse. Without independent inspectors, we can expect more misspent taxpayer dollars and, as a result, more mistrust.
Going forward, whats clear here is that independent inspectors general are essential to every aspect of a healthy American democracy. To remove them not only reduces citizens trust in government but allows waste, fraud, and abuse to continue unchecked. Its time to reinstate the watchdogs. American taxpayers want it, our democracy demands it, and our trust depends on it.
