John Minchillo/AP/File

Rioters try to break through a police barrier at the Capitol in Washington, Jan. 6, 2021. Egged on by soon-to-be former President Donald Trump, a crowd of demonstrators demanded that the electoral vote counting be stopped.

In the three years since the breach of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Congress has issued nearly 1,000 pages of official reports about it. Police attacked by rioters have published memoirs. Media outlets have devoted millions of words to the subject. 

More than 1,200 cases have been chugging through federal courts, producing reams of additional evidence. 

But while America may be swimming in facts about Jan. 6, Americans don’t agree on the meaning of that day. Polls show that Democrats and Republicans have always viewed Jan. 6 differently – and those differences have only grown wider with time. A new survey out this week finds that while a narrow majority of Americans think Jan. 6 was “an attack on democracy that should never be forgotten,” only 24% of Republicans hold that view, compared with 86% of Democrats. The percentage of Republicans saying that then-President Donald Trump bears responsibility for the riot has dropped by nearly half since 2021, and fewer agree today that Jan. 6 protesters were “mostly violent,” according to the poll, jointly conducted by The Washington Post and the University of Maryland. 

With a possible Biden-Trump rematch on the horizon, this widening schism could have direct repercussions on this year’s presidential election and beyond. How Americans think about Jan. 6 – in particular, how serious a threat they think it represented, whom they believe was at fault, and whether they see narratives as having been skewed for political purposes – seems likely to shape not just lessons drawn from a historic day but also America’s path forward.

“What’s going on in the present always influences interpretations of the past. But it’s the interpretations of the past that shape how you see the present,” says Alexander Keyssar, a professor of history and social policy at Harvard University. “Societies and nations historically have run into very deep trouble when a majority of the people accept lies about themselves and accept false versions of the history that has brought them to the place they are in.” 

Jonathan Ernst/Reuters/File

U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) carries the committee's final report as he departs after the final public meeting of the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Dec. 19, 2022.

What happened that day?

On Jan. 6, 2021, as Congress was preparing to make Joe Biden’s victory official, tens of thousands of Americans came to Washington in a show of support for then-President Trump. 

Amid the pandemic, changes to state election rules had paved the way for unprecedented levels of mail-in voting, which Mr. Trump had relentlessly criticized. Many of his supporters believed his unfounded claims of massive election fraud, despite the courts repeatedly rejecting those arguments. They wondered how Mr. Trump could have won 11.2 million more votes in 2020 than in 2016, yet still lost the race to Mr. Biden. (Mr. Biden set a record in 2020 for most votes ever won by a presidential candidate.) 

What happened next has been described alternately as a premeditated insurrection, a riot, or a rally that got out of hand. The Electoral College vote count was disrupted for hours, with members of both the Senate and House abruptly evacuated as rioters broke through police barricades and smashed windows and doors, opening the way for hundreds more to stream into the Capitol. More than 140 law enforcement officers were injured in the melee, and several died in the weeks and months to come. At least three protesters also died that day, including one shot by a Capitol Police officer while trying to crawl through a shattered door panel outside the House chamber. 

One challenge in characterizing what happened is that the crowd included a wide range of actors with apparently different intentions. Some came from known extremist groups and brought tactical gear and cans of bear and pepper spray. Others were there with baby strollers and American flags.  

Mr. Trump is among the more than 1,200 defendants charged for their role that day. Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes was convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to 18 years. Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, apprehended in Washington just ahead of Jan. 6, was sentenced to 22 years in September. 

“Today’s sentencing demonstrates that those who attempted to undermine the workings of American democracy will be held criminally accountable,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray, who pledged the bureau would always protect Americans’ First Amendment rights. 

Andrew Harnik/AP/File

People shelter in the House gallery as rioters try to break into the chamber at the U.S. Capitol Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington.

But for the hundreds of those protestors arrested for misdemeanors, many feel those rights have been trampled. 

Dustin and Karla Adams of Hillsdale, Michigan, whose local GOP organized two charter buses to go to Washington for the Jan. 6 rally, spent six minutes in the Capitol, according to the FBI. This September, they were informed they would face misdemeanor charges. They turned themselves in to the FBI and were released on $10,000 unsecured bonds. 

Of the more than 1,200 defendants, only two have been acquitted so far. That can be disheartening to those accused, says the Adamses’ lawyer, Daren Wiseley, in a phone interview. Many have taken plea deals instead of pursuing lengthy and costly litigation against the well-resourced federal government.

“In my opinion, it’s designed to break the spirit,” says Mr. Wiseley, who knew the Adamses prior to Jan. 6 and is taking their case pro bono. 

Jonathan Lewis, a research fellow with the Program on Extremism at George Washington University in D.C., says that for many who truly thought they were on the right side of history, their subsequent arrests and legal woes have fueled a sense of being punished for their political beliefs. 

Still, he adds, the narrative that Jan. 6 defendants are “political prisoners” who have been mistreated is largely unfounded. 

For example, one oft-repeated claim – that many were unjustly kept in solitary confinement – ignores the fact that under pandemic health protocols, the use of solitary detention spiked by 500% across the country, including in the Washington jail where many Jan. 6 prisoners were kept. 

Of the 44% of defendants who have been sentenced so far, about half were sentenced to a month or less in jail, according to an open records analysis by Look Ahead America, a nonprofit that advocates for “rural and blue-collar patriotic Americans.” Only 5% got five years or more. 

Susan Walsh/AP

U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew Graves speaks about the unfolding of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol during a presentation earlier this week in Washington.

Just 1 in 10 cases are closed, however, with many dragging on as defendants and their lawyers seek to challenge how evidence was collected, request more time to obtain and review video footage, or try to get their trials moved out of Washington, where only 5% of voters supported Mr. Trump in 2020. 

Defendants and their allies in Congress and elsewhere have also alleged that they are being treated more harshly than protesters involved in violence during the 2020 racial justice protests. An NBC affiliate in Portland, Oregon, where leftist protesters repeatedly targeted a federal courthouse and clashed with law enforcement, reported in March 2021 that the federal government had quietly dropped a third of cases brought against the protesters.

Jan. 6 defendants have also questioned the applicability of laws used to charge them, including a provision that came out of the Enron Corp. scandal. Known as Section 1512, it carries up to a 20-year sentence for destroying evidence or otherwise obstructing an official proceeding. Last month, prompted by a defendant’s appeal, the Supreme Court agreed to look into whether prosecutors exceeded the provision’s scope by applying it to roughly 300 Jan. 6 cases – including Mr. Trump’s. 

Who is responsible?

A key question working its way through not only legal channels but also the court of public opinion is who is responsible for the violence that day. 

The House committee on Jan. 6 focused on Mr. Trump as the main culprit, blaming him for bringing the country to the brink of a constitutional crisis. According to testimony and records compiled by the committee, Mr. Trump doubled down on claims of election fraud that his inner circle had repeatedly advised him were unfounded, inappropriately pressured state legislators and members of Congress to challenge the results, and – after encouraging his supporters to march to the Capitol on Jan. 6 – watched the violence unfold for hours on TV before taking any meaningful steps to try to stop it.

Chair Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat whose father was prevented from voting by Jim Crow laws, wrote in his forward to the committee’s final report: “Our country has come too far to allow a defeated President to turn himself into a successful tyrant by upending our democratic institutions, fomenting violence, and, as I saw it, opening the door to those in our country whose hatred and bigotry threaten equality and justice for all Americans.”

Others have focused on evidence that members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers came to Washington planning for violence, coordinating for weeks on encrypted platforms and depositing weapons nearby if needed. On their own, the conspirators wouldn’t have been able to break into the Capitol, says Mark Denbeaux, director of Seton Hall Law School Center for Policy and Research and author of the paper “The January 6 insurrectionists: Who they are and what they did.”

Evan Vucci/AP/File

Then-President Donald Trump delivers a statement after rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol building Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington. Mr. Trump is among the more than 1,200 defendants who have been charged for their role that day.

“Conspirators knew there would be a mob there and were relying on that,” he says, adding that many of the people caught up in that mob “were duped.” 

But according to the same Washington Post poll, a quarter of Americans now believe that the government itself instigated the riot – a theory denied by the government but which right-wing media and politicians have persistently raised. A third of Republicans and 44% of Trump voters, said they think that it’s “definitely” or “probably” true that FBI operatives organized and encouraged the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, something the Department of Justice has adamantly denied. By contrast, only 13% of Democratic respondents shared that view.

Experts on domestic extremism say while there are legitimate concerns about the FBI’s use of undercover agents and informants, historically used mainly against left-leaning organizations, they largely don’t apply to Jan. 6. 

Michael German, a former FBI undercover agent who left the bureau in 2004 and is now at the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, says false narratives are often constructed by pointing to a true thing that happened to a different group – such as the use of FBI informants and undercover agents in the 2020 kidnapping plot against Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

“I’ll criticize that technique no matter who it’s targeting,” he says. “But in reality, it’s very rarely targeted against white militants.” 

Steven D’Antuono, who led the FBI’s Detroit field office during the Whitmer plot before being promoted to the D.C. field office, confirmed in an interview this summer with House Republicans that there were informants (“confidential human sources”) in the crowd on Jan. 6, though he said he didn’t know the precise number. 

Defendants and their supporters have persistently raised questions about potential instigators. In particular, they have focused on Ray Epps, a retired Marine and former chapter leader of the Oath Keepers captured on video the night of Jan. 5 encouraging Trump supporters to go into the Capitol, and who can be seen in Jan. 6 video clips near the front lines. Because the DOJ did not charge him until this September, many on the right voiced suspicions that he was working with – and being protected by – federal officials. The FBI denies that it employed Mr. Epps, who has since moved several times, citing death threats. He has sued Fox News for defamation and is reportedly in hiding. He will be sentenced next week.

He told the Jan. 6 committee that he has never worked as a government informant. 

Jose Luis Magana/AP/File

Supporters of then-President Donald Trump climb the west wall of the U.S. Capitol in Washington during protests, Jan. 6, 2021.

“Sincere fear and anger ... makes people malleable to these conspiracy theories,” says Brian Levin, founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. He points to a feeling of diminished status among white working-class males and widespread distrust in government institutions. “When people have less hope, when they don’t understand the dynamics of why change is occurring, it’s easier to foist that onto some perceived evil-doer.”

The meaning for 2024 and beyond

Mr. Lewis of George Washington University says that while the Jan. 6 House committee did a good job delivering a blow-by-blow account of that day’s events, it didn’t do enough to examine root causes or intelligence and security failures. “More broadly, there’s been a failure to look at the uncomfortable realities about what Jan. 6 can tell us about domestic extremism and political violence in the U.S.,” he adds.

Professor Keyssar of Harvard says he worries that the impulse to downplay what happened on Jan. 6 could lead to a greater tolerance for violence going forward. “To accept this Trumpian version of what happened in January 2021 is in effect to accept the violence that occurred there and therefore to accept violence as a form of political protest,” he says. 

When asked how students may read about Jan. 6 in textbooks 100 years from now, he says it’s possible that someday “this entire alarming episode might look like a blip in U.S. history.” But he thinks it’s more likely to be seen as a pivotal moment.

“This is some kind of inflection point in U.S. history,” he says. “And we don’t quite know – we don’t know at all – what the real upshot is going to be.”

Staff writer Sophie Hills contributed reporting.

Joe Biden entered the White House declaring “America is back” – signaling that foreign policy and reestablishing U.S. leadership on the world stage would be key pillars of his presidency.

And for much of his term, Mr. Biden advanced on his commitment as he put his decades of foreign policy experience to good use.

The Biden administration united a divided and cautious Western Europe around the cause of a sovereign and Westward-leaning Ukraine. Mr. Biden rallied a reinvigorated NATO to face the authoritarian threat posed by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

As recently as October, Mr. Biden demonstrated confident leadership when he became the first U.S. president to visit Mideast ally Israel in time of war. As one Israeli pundit noted at the time, he could easily have been elected to any Israeli office he desired that day.

But now suddenly as the president approaches a grueling reelection campaign, foreign policy is not looking so much like his friend.

The war in Ukraine appears stuck in an inconclusive state that is sapping both U.S. public support and congressional support for additional billions of dollars in military and economic assistance.

Even more rapidly, Israel’s war against Hamas has shifted to the negative column for Mr. Biden. Initial strong support for the president’s unbridled pro-Israel stance has given way to dismay over the high and mounting toll the war is taking on Gaza’s civilians – even as concerns grow that Israel could drag the United States into a regional war.

The result is that Mr. Biden’s foreign policy boon is increasingly a bust, some national security experts say.

“Neither of the two big foreign policy events Biden has so closely linked himself to is looking like it’s going to be a great success,” says Michael Desch, founding director of Notre Dame University’s International Security Center in Indiana. “It’s taken the sheen off Biden’s foreign policy image,” he adds, “and instead both Ukraine and the war in Gaza are contributing to a patina of failure around the administration as we enter an election year.”

Yevhen Kotenko/Reuters

A firefighter works at the site of a Russian missile strike, in Kyiv, Ukraine, Jan. 2, 2024.

If foreign policy is now a drag on Mr. Biden’s image and electoral prospects, it can be tied to two overarching factors, some analysts say: an inability to translate his foreign policy urgency into public support, and the sense that a leader who entered politics during the Cold War is pursuing policies of a bygone era.

“Personally, I think Biden’s policies have been great; he’s been measured but at the same time he’s had a vision. He’s saved Ukraine from an authoritarian Russia and put Europe back together, and he’s accomplished that without putting American troops on the ground,” says Lawrence Korb, a former Pentagon official who specializes in national security and foreign policy at the Center for American Progress in Washington.

“But the reality out there is that people don’t see it. The American people are increasingly asking, ‘Why does Ukraine matter to me?’” he adds. “Or they’re saying, ‘Another war in the Middle East?’”

What Americans do see, Mr. Korb says, is the effects of a crisis on their southern border, where thousands of migrants – from Latin America, but as far away as Africa and China – continue to enter the country illegally.

“Seeing all these migrants from all over being bused into their cities, people can relate to that,” he says.

Indeed, while Mr. Biden has so far been unsuccessful at convincing Americans of the critical importance of his foreign policy priorities, Republicans have struck a chord by using the “border issue” to create a link – one detrimental to the president – between foreign and domestic policy, Dr. Desch says.

“[Republicans] have played the illegal immigration issue to their advantage by linking it to Israel and Ukraine aid,” he says. “It resonates with a lot of people when they question sending billions of dollars to secure other countries when we can’t seem to secure our own border.”

Mr. Biden, who entered Congress in 1973, hails from an era when no one from either party would have suggested putting the Cold War on a back burner to advance some popular domestic policy, Mr. Korb notes.

“You see how the Republicans are holding up $100 billion in foreign aid over domestic political issues, and it’s like if during the Cold War one party had said we’re not going to approve a weapons system to keep up with the Soviets until we cut taxes,” he says. “It’s unimaginable.”

Eric Gay/AP

Republican members of Congress look on as migrants cross the Rio Grande at the Texas-Mexico border, in Eagle Pass, Texas, Jan. 3, 2024.

But that may underscore the other challenge President Biden faces in turning his foreign policy outlook to his political favor: His world vision simply may not resonate with many Americans today.

“Biden’s formative experience was in a period that bears almost no resemblance to the one we are in today,” Dr. Desch says. “The asteroid has hit the planet, but he’s still in the dinosaur age.”

When Mr. Biden speaks of a defining battle between democracy and authoritarian rule, he invokes an America that defeated the Soviet Union and turned World War II’s defeated powers, Germany and Japan, into democratic allies. But some question the attraction of that message.

“Unfortunately, a lot of people hear that, and what they think of is getting out of Afghanistan, the mess that was, and how Americans died in the process,” Mr. Korb says. “You can argue [Biden] should get credit for Ukraine and Israel,” he adds, “but that’s not where a lot of people are.”

Some argue that instead where many Americans are is in a mounting isolationism that clashes with Mr. Biden’s global battle for democracy and international law.

But Dr. Desch counters that Americans are not so much interested in “pulling up the drawbridges” as they are in upending the internationalist status quo and getting America a better deal.

“What we see in the insistence that we can’t play Uncle Sugar in Ukraine anymore is a broader sense that business as usual can’t continue,” Dr. Desch says. “Biden’s problem is that in foreign policy as in other areas, he is the quintessential representative of the status quo – and that is sending people looking elsewhere.”

Kaitlin Newman /The Baltimore Banner/AP

Mayor Brandon Scott hosts a vigil in Baltimore this week for the homicide victims of 2023.

The homicide rate in the United States last year dropped more in a single year than it ever has in recorded history.

By quite a bit, too. There were about 13% fewer homicides in the U.S. in 2023 compared with 2022, according to early estimates of crime data. The previous record was a 9% drop in 1996. That means 2,000 fewer people were killed last year, compared with the year before.

“What’s more, every type of [serious crime] with the exception of auto theft is likely down a considerable amount this year [2023] relative to last year [2022],” writes Jeff Asher, co-founder of AH Datalytics, which tracks crime data in 180 cities.

There are some important contexts, however. Last year’s record decline in the homicide rate brings to an end the spikes that occurred during the pandemic years. The homicide rate in 2023 was still slightly more than it was in 2019. But it also was still roughly half of what it was in the early 1990s.

The perception among most Americans, however, is that violent crime remains rampant across the U.S. 

SOURCE:

AH Datalytics, FBI, Gallup

|

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

According to a Gallup poll in November, about 77% of respondents say they believe there was more crime in 2023 than in 2020, yet the numbers don’t show that. In addition, nearly 2 out of 3 Americans say crime in the U.S. is either extremely or very serious – one of the most pessimistic outlooks Gallup has measured.

But U.S. cities are reporting remarkable drops in killings. Detroit reports its fewest number of homicides since 1966. Baltimore, with one of the highest homicide rates in the nation, saw its number fall 23% last year. New Orleans witnessed a 27% drop, Atlanta and Milwaukee both saw a 22% drop, and Houston had a 21% drop. New York saw 12% fewer homicides; Los Angeles, 15%; and Chicago, 13%.

A few cities did see significant increases, however. Memphis, Tennessee, experienced a spike of 31%. Washington and Seattle experienced 20% more, and Dallas 14% more.

“The encouraging drop in violent crime shows that the COVID effect is beginning to wear off,” says Richard Aborn, president of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City. “While very encouraging, we also have to be mindful that crime rates are still above their pre-pandemic levels, and so we need to continue to push for fair and effective public safety strategies. Like with good economic data, the public likely won’t feel safer for some time as improvements in the perception of public safety always lags behind the reality of public safety.”

Christopher Furlong/AP

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak speaks with students working on an electric racing car at the international manufacturing center at University of Warwick in Coventry, England, Sept. 7, 2023. Britain rejoined the European Union’s $100 billion science-sharing program as of Jan. 1, 2024.

Tevva, a British zero-emissions truck manufacturer, isn’t just trying to create a replacement for diesel transports. It’s also serving as a stage for European research.

At least in a manner of speaking. As part of a project organized by Horizon Europe, the European Union’s behemoth scientific research and innovation program, Tevva is working with scientists and companies hailing from both the United Kingdom and the EU to develop the next-generation electric truck.

“And they’ve set some really aggressive objectives, with difficult range and efficiency targets,” says Stuart Cottrell, Tevva’s head of energy services and government partnerships.

Having access to the capabilities of partners from countries such as the Netherlands, Spain, and Greece has helped Tevva see what’s possible in pushing for greater efficiency – hauling more cargo, for greater distances, for less energy. With their zero-emissions trucks as laboratories, Tevva is helping manufacturers demonstrate their capabilities.

“It’s kind of a two-way street. We’re developing a product, while some of them are developing tools,” says Mr. Cottrell. What’s clear is that together they’re pushing the envelope. “This depth of consortium couldn’t have been built solely in the U.K.,” he says.

Courtesy of Tevva

An electric-battery truck sits outside the manufacturing facility of Tevva in London. Tevva is working with scientists and companies hailing from both the United Kingdom and the European Union to develop the next-generation electric truck.

As Britain left the European Union, it strained the bridge between British scientists and their EU counterparts, and severed British access to Horizon Europe, the EU’s behemoth innovation-funding arm and its €95.5 billion ($104.5 billion) coffer. This month, after years of negotiations, the United Kingdom is back as an “associate country” to Horizon Europe, and the world will be better for it, scientists say.

Today’s most pressing issues require the best-trained scientific minds, and those talents are rarely contained within a single country’s borders, says Adrian Smith, president of the Royal Society, the U.K.’s independent science academy.

“If you just take the simple problems, pandemics, climate change, net zero – all of these require major international collaboration. Not just in terms of ideas, but it fundamentally depends on people,” says Dr. Smith. “The whole point of Brexit was Britain going it alone and doing its own stuff, but top-level science is one area where international cooperation is absolutely essential, and you can’t go it alone and be a major scientific power.”

Brexit brain drain

For years, the U.K. was the No. 2 destination for scientists pursuing research, according to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development figures. But “that’s really been damaged by Brexit and the perception of us being cut off from the world,” says Bob Ward, policy director at the London School of Economics’ Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. “Not just in terms of funding and barriers to visas, but the idea that somehow the U.K. is hostile to working with others.”

With Brexit, the U.K. dropped behind both China and the United States. “That’s really anathema to the research spirit. Politicians need to realize that’s not helping the U.K,” says Dr. Ward.

The stats are clear: The U.K. needs Horizon Europe, which has been part of the U.K. scientific framework for decades. Collaboration yields results. More than a third of top U.K. research papers are co-authored with European partners. Conversely, EU programs are cited three times more often compared with member states alone.

“It’s a club, a gang you need to be in if you’re the U.K. We’re not America; we’re not China,” says Dr. Smith, of the Royal Society, about Horizon Europe. “The prestige of being associated with things like the European Research Council Fellowships, being assessed by a huge pool of experts, 30,000 researchers in 30 countries ... as opposed to the alternative which is going it alone ... is pretty unthinkable.”

After Brexit, the U.K. government underwrote projects “unless and until” it was able to again associate with Horizon Europe, Dr. Smith says. Still, that didn’t prevent an exodus of scientists to the EU and to the U.S. Look at those who received Europe Research Council grants, which require EU residency, he says.

“These are the brightest and the best [scientists], these are hugely prestigious awards, and about 1 in 6 [pulled up stakes] from the U.K. and moved to the EU,” says Dr. Smith. “That was very damaging in terms of the loss of clout of people, but also just the general mood music in and around collaboration. Then a lot of researchers in the U.K. found it quite difficult to recruit European Union postdoc researchers.”

The EU also needs U.K. brainpower and institutions. Bringing them back into the EU fold is a “real milestone, a clear win-win for both sides and for global scientific progress,” said EU Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth Iliana Ivanova in a statement. “Together, we can push further and faster.”

Victor Ruiz Caballero/Reuters/File

Astrophysicist David Armstrong's search for Neptune-sized planets orbiting in close proximity to stars relies on work done at the Paranal Observatory, located in Chile's Atacama desert and operated by the European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere.

“The best science is international science”

Perhaps the clearest example of how science demands international cooperation is in astronomy and its related fields.

Astrophysicist David Armstrong is running a Horizon Europe project – which the U.K. stepped in on an emergency basis to fund post-Brexit – to find Neptune-sized planets in extremely close orbit around other stars. That requires a $1.5 billion telescope facility, the clear sky of a Southern Hemispheric location, and scientific brains scattered across continents.

“The entire thing is basically international,” says Dr. Armstrong, a professor at the University of Warwick. “It has to be that way.”

They use a massive telescope observatory that sits in a desert in Chile, and tap star-parameter expertise in Portugal, spectrograph scientists in Switzerland, and other teams in Argentina, the U.S., and Australia.

How did the field evolve to become so globally intertwined? For one, telescopes are expensive, and no country would want to take on that vast budget alone, Dr. Armstrong explains.

“Then you say if we’re going to build this incredible facility, we need to put it in the best possible location, and the best possible location is usually in some other country. Then you get to the sense of, ‘Well, if we’re going to do all of this, you want the best possible science with it.’ If you want different skills, you quite often find the best person for that might be somewhere else.”

“The best science is international science,” says Dr. Ward, the London School of Economics policy director.

“Back in collaboration territory”

Zero-emissions vehicles, tidal energy, and DNA sequencing technology have all been helped along by Horizon Europe projects. Scientists are also looking to restore ocean health and develop climate-neutral cities.

“If you look across all the impacts of science and its applications, some of the major stuff where it required really big investment and big levels of cooperation – many of those grew out of originally EU projects,” says Dr. Smith.

Collaboration also funds science that otherwise might not be tackled, or tackled so soon.

Without it, the world might have had to wait a bit longer for a hydrogen-electric truck, says Mr. Cottrell, Tevva’s partnerships director. Large companies like Volvo may have flocks of in-house researchers, but amid legacy products, shareholders, and profit margins, may not prioritize such ambitious technology.

“Their appetite and their pacing is quite different,” says Mr. Cottrell. “We’re not burdened by any of that stuff, but at the same time, we don’t have the scale to go and make all this happen by ourselves.”

And now that the U.K. is back in with Horizon Europe, some hope that other corridors to the EU blocked by Brexit might reopen.

“I keep hearing signals that people want to begin talking about other collaborations,” says Dr. Smith of the Royal Society. “Instead of being a bitter standoff, we’re back in collaboration territory.”

One bit of good news from 2023 was that the federal government didn’t shut down. Last-minute bipartisan deal-making staved that off.

But in the early days of 2024, the clock is ticking once again. And Shalanda Young, President Joe Biden’s top budget official, isn’t sure that a partial shutdown in two weeks can be prevented.

"I wouldn’t say ‘pessimistic,’ but I’m not optimistic,” Ms. Young, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), said Friday at a Monitor Breakfast for reporters. 

“The rhetoric this week has concerned me that [a shutdown] is the path that House Republicans are headed down,” she added, citing a trip by some 60 GOP representatives to the U.S.-Mexico border led by Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana. 

The crisis at the Southern border, with a record influx of migrants, has added fresh urgency to a $106 billion supplemental bill to support not only border security but also Ukraine, Israel, and the Indo-Pacific. The impasse over the border is threatening passage of legislation to fund the federal government. Some government departments are set to shut down Jan. 19, with the rest, including the Department of Defense, running out of funds Feb. 2. 

Multiple wars abroad have added fresh urgency to U.S. funding demands. Ms. Young stressed that the war in Ukraine, almost two years after the Russian invasion, is “dire.” In Israel, which was brutally attacked by Hamas militants from neighboring Gaza Strip on Oct. 7, U.S. funds are also critical to the country’s defense, U.S. officials say. In the Indo-Pacific, China has made ominous comments about a potential takeover of Taiwan. 

The impasse over government funding comes right as the 2024 presidential primaries are kicking off. And while polls show President Biden’s top two challenges with voters are inflation and the border, foreign policy is also rising in voter consciousness, according to a new poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.  

The C-SPAN recording of the Monitor Breakfast with OMB Director Young can be viewed here. Following are more excerpts from the breakfast, lightly edited for clarity: 

What is the mood like on the White House economic team? And if there is a government shutdown, what's the risk to the economy?

Job numbers have been consistently robust. Inflation has moderated in a way even the [Federal Reserve] recognizes. That doesn't mean we're done with interest rate hikes, but the Fed will make those determinations. The geopolitical space makes me personally nervous. But the indicators we see every month [show] we're on the right path.

Most economists will tell you a shutdown has maybe a 0.01% effect on GDP, and that typically the economy picks up in the next quarter. The one caveat to that statement is governance. We've seen financial institutions, those that are responsible for credit ratings, look at that very closely with regard to the United States’ creditworthiness. And it is concerning that we continue to have a political system that does not show that it works in a smooth way.

U.S. government debt now tops $34 trillion. At what point does carrying so much debt become unsustainable?

We look at more than the sheer number, right? We look at our ability and the cost we pay to service that debt. Clearly with interest rates going up, that always becomes more of a concern.

But from a political standpoint, we've got to get serious here. You cannot fix the debt or the deficit or even get on a path to fixing anything by focusing on the smallest spending amount. All you're doing is hurting people who depend on those discrete programs.

You've heard this president I think more than any other Democratic president be willing to talk about taxes. He's willing to say the corporate tax rate’s too low, that we need to have a minimum tax, that we need to close loopholes for some of our biggest companies. That alone brings in large amounts of revenue that helps fix our debt and deficit problem.

You and Speaker Johnson are both from Louisiana. Can that be helpful in your future dealings?

I did not have the opportunity to know him when I worked in the House. But being from the great state of Louisiana, one finds common ground quickly. So before he sat down during our first time meeting in the Situation Room, I let him know where I was from. I think he took some credit for something I said as [a sign of] a good Louisiana public school education. So you know, that does help forge what is needed in tough situations.

AP Photo/Eric Risberg

The watchtower at the entrance of San Quentin State Prison in California, July 26, 2023. The state is transforming the maximum security facility to focus on preparing inmates to reenter society. Classrooms and community living will replace cells and bars.

In the past three decades, an estimated 2,000 American cities adopted housing policies encouraging or requiring landlords to deny rental dwellings to formerly incarcerated people and evict existing tenants with criminal histories – including 104 municipalities in California. This week the state adopted the first law in the United States banning the practice.

The new measure fits into a broader reconsideration in California and across the U.S. of the relationship between punishment and redemption. That shift recognizes that the rehabilitating aims of justice rest – both behind prison walls and within communities – on seeing the inherent dignity and capacity for good in all individuals irrespective of their worst mistakes.

“If you look at everything that needs to change, yes, it has to happen internally” in the way that prisons prepare inmates to return to society, said Jessica Fernandez, chief of community reentry services for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. But “then you have also to change the mind of the community,” she told the Los Angeles Times days before the new law came into effect.

So-called crime-free housing policies sought to improve safety in multifamily rental blocks in response to drug crises like that of crack cocaine in the early 1990s. A Rand Corp. study in November, however, documented how the policies have instead destabilized low-income, predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. Evictions rose in places where the laws were applied, the report found, while crime rates remained unchanged.

In 2020, Oakland and Berkeley became the first U.S. cities to ban criminal background checks from housing applications. More communities have followed since. A handful of states, such as New York and Illinois, may be poised to enact reforms similar to California’s.

Making it easier for formerly incarcerated people to find stable housing after their release dovetails with a range of ways prison reformers are rethinking the outcomes of incarceration. California and Pennsylvania are transforming prisons to focus on wellness, education, and community living to better equip people in prison for life on the outside. That approach helped Norway cut its recidivism rate from nearly 70% in the 1990s to 20% today.

But reintegrating formerly convicted people in society also requires cultivating trust and empathy where they seek to settle. One way to improve those prospects may involve erasing the walls between life inside and out – even temporarily. A so-called inside-out college program run by the University of Delaware, for example, enables outside students and people in prison to take classes together.

“When I’m in a room on a Monday night with my outside students and my inside students, it’s a classroom, not a cell block, and we’re doing education, not prison,” Daniel O’Connell, senior scientist at the University of Delaware’s Center for Drug and Health Studies, told the National Institute of Justice. “I have my outside students constantly telling me how enlightening it was for them to be part of that experience. And I’ve had inside students who found out that they could sit in a college classroom, participate, be successful, and do the assignments.”

The new California law passed without a dissenting vote. Communities throughout the state may now discover – as students in Delaware did – that their safety involves a recognition of individual worth cultivated on both sides of prison walls.