The U.S. Department of Agriculture has posted a notice on its website saying federal food aid will not go out Nov. 1, raising the stakes for families nationwide as the government shutdown drags on.The new notice comes after the Trump administration said it would not tap roughly $5 billion in contingency funds to keep benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly referred to as SNAP, flowing into November. That program helps about 1 in 8 Americans buy groceries.“Bottom line, the well has run dry,” the USDA notice says. “At this time, there will be no benefits issued November 01. We are approaching an inflection point for Senate Democrats.”The shutdown, which began Oct. 1, is now the second-longest on record. While the Republican administration took steps leading up to the shutdown to ensure SNAP benefits were paid this month, the cutoff would expand the impact of the impasse to a wider swath of Americans and some of those most in need unless a political resolution is found in just a few days.The administration blames Democrats, who say they will not agree to reopen the government until Republicans negotiate with them on extending expiring subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. Republicans say Democrats must first agree to reopen the government before negotiation.Democratic lawmakers have written to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins requesting to use contingency funds to cover the bulk of next month’s benefits.But a USDA memo that surfaced Friday says “contingency funds are not legally available to cover regular benefits.” The document says the money is reserved for such things such as helping people in disaster areas.It cited a storm named Melissa, which has strengthened into a major hurricane, as an example of why it’s important to have the money available to mobilize quickly in the event of a disaster.The prospect of families not receiving food aid has deeply concerned states run by both parties.Some states have pledged to keep SNAP benefits flowing even if the federal program halts payments, but there are questions about whether U.S. government directives may allow that to happen. The USDA memo also says states would not be reimbursed for temporarily picking up the cost.Other states are telling SNAP recipients to be ready for the benefits to stop. Arkansas and Oklahoma, for example, are advising recipients to identify food pantries and other groups that help with food.Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., accused Republicans and Trump of not agreeing to negotiate.“The reality is, if they sat down to try to negotiate, we could probably come up with something pretty quickly,” Murphy said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “We could open up the government on Tuesday or Wednesday, and there wouldn’t be any crisis in the food stamp program.”
Adriana Gomez Licon, Associated Press
Flights departing for Los Angeles International Airport were halted briefly due to a staffing shortage at a Southern California air traffic facility, the Federal Aviation Administration said Sunday, when the agency also reported staffing-related delays in Chicago, Washington and Newark, New Jersey.The FAA issued a temporary ground stop at one of the world’s busiest airports soon after U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy predicted that travelers would see more flights delayed and canceled in the coming days as the nation’s air traffic controllers work without pay during the federal government shutdown.During an appearance on the Fox News program “Sunday Morning Futures,” Duffy said more controllers were calling in sick as money worries compound the stress of an already challenging job.“Just yesterday, we had 22 staffing triggers. That’s one of the highest that we have seen in the system since the shutdown began. And that’s a sign that the controllers are wearing thin,” he said.The FAA said planes headed for Los Angeles were held at their originating airports starting at 11:42 a.m. Eastern time, and the agency lifted the ground stop at 1:30 p.m. Eastern time.The hold did not appear to cause continuing problems at LAX; according to flight tracking website FlightAware, Dallas Fort Worth International Airport and Dallas Love Field Airport saw a much bigger share of late arrivals due to what the FAA said were weather and equipment issues.Too few air traffic controllers per shift also caused takeoff and arrival disruptions Sunday at New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International Airport and Teteboro Airport, and at Southwest Florida International Airport in Fort Meyers, Florida, according to the FAA.On Sunday evening, the FAA also slowed traffic into Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and Chicago O’Hare International Airport because of traffic controller staffing.
Associated Press
The USDAs Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) has announced two separate large-scale food recalls due to the same reason: possible contamination with metal fragments.
The first recall was for BBQ pork jerky and the second was for ready-to-eat frozen chicken products. Both notices were posted over the weekend.
In total, a combined 7.1 million pounds of the productswhich were distributed nationwide in both casesare included in the recalls. Heres what you need to know.
2.3 million pounds of BBQ pork jerky recalled
According to a notice posted by FSIS on Friday, October 24, a company called LSI, Inc. of Alpena, South Dakota, is recalling approximately 2.3 million pounds of a ready-to-eat Korean barbecue pork jerky product.
The product had the possibility of being contaminated with pieces of metal, according to the notice. The “wiry metal” fragments, according to the FSIS, were first detected by customers, who contacted the manufacturer.
LSI then found that the metal originated from the conveyor belt used in production, according to the FSIS notice.
The impacted product was sold under the brand name Golden Island.
Of particular concern is that the impacted pork jerky product has a very long shelf life of one year, which means individuals could have the products stored in their pantries now and for a long time to come. Here are the details of the recalled pork jerky product:
Product: 14.5-oz. and 16-oz. plastic pouches containing GOLDEN ISLAND fire-grilled PORK JERKY Korean BARBECUE recipe.
Best by dates: range from October 23, 2025, through September 23, 2026.
Lot numbers: various (see list linked below)
Establishment number: M279A
The FSIS has published the product labels and the full product list on its website.
The items were sold at Costco and Sams Club locations nationwide. Consumers are being urged to check their pantries and to dispose of the recalled products or return them for a refund.
4.9 million pounds of frozen chicken recalled
On Saturday, October 25, FSIS posted another recall notice regarding additional products that may have metal contamination.
This time, approximately 4.9 million pounds of ready-to-eat frozen chicken items from Hormel Foods Corporation were effected.
The products were distributed nationwide to HRI Commercial Food Service locations, which provide food to hotels, restaurants, and other institutions.
The FSIS notice says that these distributions occurred on various dates ranging from February 10, 2025, through September 19, 2025. However, though those dates have passed, as the product involves frozen chicken, it could still be in the freezers of hotels, restaurants, and other institutions.
As with the previous recall above, this recall was also initiated after multiple complaints from food-service customers who reported finding metal in their frozen chicken products.
As with the pork jerky recall, Hormel Foods determined that the metal originated from the conveyor belt used in production, the FSIS notice states.
The recall notice says that the following products are among those included in the recall:
13.9-lb. cases containing Hormel FIRE BRAISED MEATS ALL NATURAL BONELESS CHICKEN THIGH MEAT, with item code 65009 printed on the label.
13.8-lb. cases containing 3-oz.Hormel FIRE BRAISED MEATS ALL NATURAL BONELESS CHICKEN BREAST, with item code 77531 printed on the label.
13.8-lb. cases containing 4-oz.Hormel FIRE BRAISED MEATS ALL NATURAL BONELESS CHICKEN BREAST, with item code 46750 printed on the label.
23.8-lb. cases containing 5-oz.Hormel FIRE BRAISED MEATS ALL NATURAL BONELESS CHICKEN BREAST, with item code 86206 printed on the label.
13.95-lb. cases containing BONELESS CHICKEN BREAST WITH RIB MEAT, with item code 134394 printed on the label.
The labels of the recalled products and a detailed list of the recalled products with packaging dates can be found on the FSIS website. The recalled products have the establishment number P-223 printed on them.
Businesses that have the recalled products in their possession should not serve them; instead, they should throw them away.
“This product is only sold to foodservice customers and cannot be purchased directly by consumers,” Hormel said in a statement. “All customers that may have received the affected product have been properly notified.”
Conveyor belt to blame in both recalls
Of note regarding the two individual recalls, both notices reported that the metal originated from the conveyor belt used in production.
However, it is not known whether the products involved in the two recalls were produced in the same manufacturing facility.
A spokesperson for Hormel Foods Sales sent Fast Company a statement that repeated details included in the recall notice but did not identify the facility.
Fast Company has also reached out to Golden Island and the FSIS for additional details. We’ll update this post if we hear back.
Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself.
Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman faces a rare leadership challenge: He is managing an organization that has announced its intention to spend $200 billion during the next 20 yearsdouble what the organization dispensed in its first 25 yearswhile working to permanently close its doors on December 31, 2045.
Suzman, who joined the foundation in 2007 as director of global development policy, advocacy, and special initiatives, and became CEO in 2020, says the finality and scale of his mandate actually provides clarity and focus. It allows us to be very predictable and reliable for the next two decades, he says. Thats a luxury for a CEO.
With clarity comes focus
The foundation announced it is sunsetting earlier this year, accelerating a shutdown that Suzman says had always been part of the organizations long-term plan. At the time of the announcement, chair and board member Bill Gates said the nonprofit would concentrate its efforts on three areas: ending preventable deaths of mothers and babies, eradicating deadly infectious diseases, and putting millions of people on the path to economic prosperity.
That means some programs will graduate, or be reworked. Some existing initiatives that fall outside the focus areas or may not be achievable by 2045 are moving into new partnerships. For example, the foundations work to foster technology and tools to expand economic opportunity for Americans is now part of NextLadder Ventures, a coalition of philanthropies including Ballmer Group (cofounded by former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer), Valhalla Foundation, Stand Together, and others.
Leadership through change
I asked Suzman about leading a team of more than 2,000 mission-driven employeessome of whom are seeing projects deprioritizedthrough this lengthy transition. He contends that the foundation has always had to make hard choices. When youre part of an institution that has a wider set of goals, there will be trade-offstrade-offs about how we allocate our internal resources, how we allocate Bills voice. We work on this by trying to pull people up to our shared set of goals, he says.
He also echoed a common refrain I hear from virtually every CEO trying to manage an organization through massive change: You can never over-communicate enough, he says. You have to keep driving that message through in every possible channel, internal and external, to help people see the connections and understand that you know how they all come together toward the greater goal of the foundation.
The foundation’s phase out comes in the wake of major changes to its structure. In 2024, Warren Buffett, who has donated $48 billion since 2006, said the foundation would not receive a contribution upon his death. That same year, Melinda French Gates resigned as co-chair after 24 years, receiving $12.5 billion from the foundation for her independent philanthropic work. In January 2025, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was renamed Gates Foundation, with Bill Gates becoming sole chair.
Message to the next generation
The announcement also coincides with challenges to some of the causes the foundation has championed, including vaccines and international aid. Suzman notes that the Gates Foundation is now the largest funder of the World Health Organization (WHO) after President Donald J. Trumps executive order withdrawing from the WHO.
Suzman contends that philanthropy shouldnt solely provide resources for health and humanitarian organizations that governments have historically supported. But he also urges a new generation of business executives and founders to begin their giving journeys.
Im the beneficiary of the amazing generosity of Bill, Warren, and Melinda . . . they themselves frequently talk about how personally fulfilling philanthropy is to them, Suzman says. He adds: We only hope therell be more following our example. The world needs it desperately.”
Sailing into the sunset
Have you ever had to lead the winding down of a company or organization? How did you do it, and how did you keep employees engaged? Send your stories to me at stephaniemehta@mansueto.com for possible use in a future newsletter.
Read more: the business of giving
How to build charitable giving into your business model
Is the era of the benevolent billionaire really over?
The top 50 U.S. donors gave $16.2 billion to charity in 2024
Leaders are praised for seeing around corners and told to skate to where the puck is going. But what if you cant even see your own feet, let alone a puck or a distant corner?
Todays volatility and uncertainty obscure any clear path to the future, and the forecast isnt improving any time soon. In a recent World Economic Forum survey, 52% of experts expect an unsettled two-year horizon, 31% anticipate turbulence, and 5% foresee storms.
Even if the weather were clear, setting a direction of travel is increasingly difficult as leaders face more complex problems with no obvious or easy solution. Close to 60% of business executives admit that they are missing opportunities because they cant make decisions fast enough. However bleak the landscape, there is a way to lead even when you cant see the future. This requires letting go of standard practices and building a new skill.
What No Longer Serves You
Leadership has long meant setting a compelling destination, planning the route, and mobilizing people to move. The classic tool kitforecast, plan, executeassumes a knowable future. With todays complexity, forecasts are guesses and plans expire fast. Leaders who arent shifting away from a predictplanact approach will see their impact erodeand their well-being with it.
The reason sits in the brain. When complexity is high, trying to predict accurately and act decisively strains a leaders cognitive loadthe mental effort required to process information and choose. Its the difference between running on a clear, lit path and running on dark ice with crosswinds: far more effort, far less progress. Add time pressure and constant digital distractions, and cognitive load spikes further.
When cognitive load stays high, brain fog sets in, decision speed drops, details slip, and big-picture comprehension narrows. In short, youre not the leader you intend to be. Its time to work differently.
Awareness: The Quality That Changes How You Lead
We cant control the pace of the world, but we can change how we meet it. We can move from a predict-plan-act approach to a stop-sense-adapt approach. The key to this approach is awareness, the ability to notice what is happeningin yourself, your team, and the larger systemand choose accordingly. With greater awareness, you enhance your perception of emotions, biases, strengths, and limitations and can read the dynamics of the team, the organization, and the market. Rather than constantly seeking answers, you stop, notice, and let answers arise.
Unfortunately, our awareness is often scattered, crowded out by biases, fears, and clouded perceptions. Roughly 45% of our everyday behaviors are habitual (often outside conscious awareness), and our noisy, information-filled world clouds awareness even more. However, the case for building awareness is strong: in recent Potential Project research, teams led by highly aware leaders reported 78% higher trust in the companys leadership, 57% higher psychological safety, and 56% higher commitment to the company.
For leaders, mastering three mindsets makes awareness actionable and achievable: presence to anchor us in the moment, clarity to see options and define a path forward, and adaptability to navigate new paths even when uncomfortable.
Three Mindsets for the Moment
Presence: Stay in the Moment
Presence is the ability to be fully attentive in the momentwith ourselves, the people in front of us, the task at hand, or whats happening around us. Our research indicates that we are distracted even when we think we are paying attention, about 37% of the time. But when we can be present in the moment rather than being pulled by a million thoughts, things slow down and its easier to focus our attention on the things that matter, not just the things that squeak the loudest.
Clarity: Find a Path
Clarity is the ability to rise above uncertainty and chaos rather than trying to solve for them. Its not about having clear answers all of the time, but about having a clear mind that can better find the signal within the noise. Clarity of mind feels spacious and calm. It is the difference between being in the clouds and feeling overwhelmed versus being able to step back into the vastness of the sky and see the clouds more clearly. It is a welcome alternative when nearly 2/3 of leaders say they experience information overload from trying to keep up with texts, chats, emails, and meetings. Clarity helps us to see ways forward, even when it is foggy
Adaptability: Navigate the Path
Adaptability is the ability to shift approaches as things change. Adaptable leaders accept new circumstances or unfamiliar territory with openness rather than holding too tightly to familiar routines or past experiences. Adaptable leaders often believe that change is inevitable, natural, and a source of growth. With a mindset of adaptability, leaders can navigate more confidently down new paths, even when the unfamiliar feels hard.
The marriage of Awareness and AI
As we regularly witness, AI can scan oceans of data, summarize patterns, and surface signals faster than any team. This is a huge advantage for leaders. For example, AI can give us consistent, data-informed feedback on our leadership and correct for blind spots we have about our strengths and weaknesses. AI can synthesize data about how our organization and employees are doing and surface trends, opportunities, and challenges that may have escaped our notice.
However, AI is a leaders advantage only if paired with awareness. Awareness adds the human context machines dont hold: history, social dynamics, values, and the lived experience of people affected by decisions. It also keeps us alert to borrowed biasassumptions in the data or model that would steer us wrong if left unquestioned. Used together, AI expands what we can see; awareness ensures we interpret wisely.
Here are a few ways to start strengthening your skills of awareness, with and without the help of technology:
Dont outsource connection to yourself and others. Take advantage of devices that help monitor your levels of distraction and track heart rate variability, pulse, and stress levels. These can help us be more present with ourselves and take corrective action to be more present with others. But over-relying on devices to tell us how we feel diminishes our capacity for self-awareness. Similarly, using tools for feedback on a team shouldnt prevent you from reading a room, understanding others feelings, and making a connection.
Clear the mental clutter. There is so much already competing with our attention, and the abundance of AI resources can get overwhelming. It is harder to practice awareness when our brains are full. The best approach is a both/and: use AI as a filter and summarizer, for example, but watch that it doesnt tip over into a source of distraction.
Try new things: When we implement new routines or learn new skills, we become more adaptable, capable of seeing habitual patterns and breaking free of them. Experiment with AI-enabled apps that can suppot you in this pursuit in fun and rewarding ways. But dont hesitate to try something very simple like brushing your teeth with your nondominant hand or taking a new route to the grocery store.
You dont need a perfect forecast to leadjust a better beam
When visibility is low, speedor constant actionis not a leadership virtue. Better to change the way you see and respond. Awareness widens your field of view and keeps you oriented to what needs to be doneone confident step at a time. When we stop to be present, sense the signals with clarity, and adapt in short, honest moves, we demonstrate to our teams that we are steering with care.
It feels like they match anything.
Black. Silver. White. Cream. All rendered in gloss and knit. I wasnt sure how the silhouette would look in person when I first saw it in photos from Junya Watanabes Fall/Winter 2024-25 show. But they made my stomach churn in just the right way.
I needed them. And so did a lot of other people.
The New Balance 1906L launched last year, kicking off a new type of shoe: the sneaker loafer, aka (and please never say this term aloud) the snoafer. With a loafer silhouette, technical fabrics, and bouncy foam outsoles, they represented a new mix of formal wear and street style. Nike, Hoka, and Puma all quickly followed suit with snoafers of their own. While in Madrid, I snagged some by Hispanitas for my wifeonly learning that they were the stores last pair as I checked out.
Snoafers did more than redefine what we consider a sneaker since launching last year; they resuscitated loafers more broadly. Karis Munday, an analyst at the fashion trend firm Edited, says loafer sales are up 33% year over year for men and 28% for women this fall, in a surge she doesnt see fizzling out soon. The sneaker-inspired iteration will be a must-have investment, offering a smart-casual solution that serves equally well in a business casual environment as it does for weekend wear, she shares over email, calling the 1906L the blueprint for the industry.
But how did New Balance know it could pull this idea off?
A loafer is a preppy shoe. New Balance has preppy connotations, says Charlotte Lee, the design manager at New Balance who created the 1906L. Its a Venn diagram . . . where the center is the sneaker loafer.
New Balance 1906L [Photo: New Balance]
The evolution of streetwear
Lee is a trained footwear designer who has been at New Balance for over a decade. Shes obsessed with aesthetics and culture, but says shes always been intimidated by the streetwear side of her profession. I still feel like an outsider, even though I’m obviously, well and truly, an insider, she says.
Indeed, once disregarded by the fashion industry, streetweara mash-up of fashion aesthetics stemming from city subcultures like hip-hop and skatehas been on a 20-year ascendancy into mass culture. Now its become part of the lexicon of dress, often dissociated with any cultural origin.
In 2023, I was at the Musinsa Empty shop in Seoul when I pulled a ripped, decaled pair of jeans off the rack and mentioned to the shopkeeper that they had a street vibe. You could trace the pants’ visual lineage to punk rock in London (literal street style), or more recently, to Virgil Ablohs Pyrex Vision, which started by screen-printing on deadstock jeans. The manager looked at me blankly, saying, Thats not street.
Sneakers are the greatest motif in streetwearand theyve very much become the mass-produced art of our time as sculptures molded for our feet. As I debated with designer Jeff Staple recently, theres no certainty that such a motif will keep its relevance. It seems like a dozen new sneakers fill our feeds each day, and no art movement lasts forever. Impressionism and surrealism both burned out within 20 years.
Designing the New Balance 1906L
The 1906L is so interesting because it offers a thesis on how sneakers can evolve to stay relevant. It’s a rare project that was able to cut through the noise to redefine the industry. And perhaps it was Lees point of view, as an insider-outsider who is not too beholden to tradition, that was so crucial in manifesting it. “For me, it’s not just looking at streetwear; it’s looking at all facets of culture to be able to try and inform the shoes I’m working on,” Lee says. “[The 1906L] was born from the concept of integration, the juxtaposition between two worlds: the influence of formal dressing within society and culture, and fashion and trend.”As Lee tracked a bit of buzz around loafersspotting them here and there across the luxury market in the early 2020sshe discovered her perfect juxtaposition for sneakers.
It was an indulgent project for me, because it was cheeky. And it was a bit like, Can we? Can’t we? Shall we? she recalls. But once the concept was in her brain, she realized the form immediately. This is not a flex, but I literally drew one with CAD [computer-aided-design software], she says, laughing.
Truly, her first draft made it to production, minus a few slight adjustments. When she initially presented the design to the team, the response was a rare, simple, unanimous yes. This was 18 months or more before the shoe was actually released.
She says, only upon further reflection on the project, that the shoe solidified so smoothly because it just had to be made this way to feel authentically New Balance. The loafer silhouette already spoke for itself. And the rest was about framing that loafer with New Balance performance DNA.
It had to be mesh initially . . . like, it had to have that kind of classic silver overlay, the 2000s running aesthetic, she says. That was all I needed to do, because I knew then the rest was all New Balance DNA, like identity, and I kind of squished it in and made sure it fit in the shape and within the boundary of what a loafer is.
More probing reveals a touch more thought, however quickly it came together. When I ask why my shoes feel like they match anything in my closet, she notes that was by design. She pulled the blacks, whites, and even the silver in my shoe from New Balances existing line of lifestyle sneakers, like the 1906R. These colors have already been proven for a wide variety of fashion contexts.
riginalGrand [Photo: Cole Haan]
A trend that wont die
Notably, Lee wasnt the first to mash up formal shoes and sneakers. That idea likely belongs to designer Salehe Bembury, who stuck EVA foam on Cole Haan wingtips in 2014 for his riginalGrand, but the concept never quite gelled to reach a larger scale.
Lee had a feeling the shoe would be a hit due to its polarizing, disjointed identity. Loafers are among the most versatile formal shoeone that can be dressed up more than a boat shoebut are also easier to doff and don than a New Balance sneaker. I wear them all the time, not because Im being self-indulgent, but because I’m lazy, she says. Like, you just slip your foot in, and off you go.
But she was also worried that the shoe was arriving too late, and that loafers would already be over by the time it shipped. It turned out to be the opposite.
Were way past launch, and I think it’s still continuing, she says. I think what we’re seeing now is a diversification of integration . . . how can we integrate two worlds that shouldn’t belong, but when they’re in perfect harmony, they do belong?
I actually believe its not just about mashing up two unlikely ideas. I think the snoafer has given us one of the first truly convincing theses on how the sneaker can evolve, and how we can reconcile our penchant for foams with wider, more formal visions of self-expression.
Knwls Air Max Muse [Photo: Nike]
The Knwls Air Max Musea collaboration between Nike and the London fashion house Knwlsfeels like the perfect acceleration of concept. At first glance, you might call it a ballet sneaker, and it is. The ballet sneaker is partly inspired by the ballet flats of dance class, but when you really study where their silhouettes are going on the chunkier end of the outsole equationlike the Muse, youll also see the almost hoofed posture of a Tabi heel, and a smooth shadow of a loafer.
Sneex (created by the founder of Spanx), like other head-on attempts at a high-heel sneaker, are pretty cringe. Id argue thats because they werent refined within the established design language and limitations of the sneaker. Meanwhile, the Muse is basically a heel for the sneaker ageright down to its sharply pointed toe boxand Id suggest the Simone Rocha tracker ballet flat verges toward the same idea.
Today, were witnessing an evolution of the sneaker itself, born from a culture finally prepared to reconcile its technical materials and motifsnot simply as fodder for athletic performance or fashion trend, but as a tradition of design thats essential to craft and culture alike.
Just please dont call it a snoafer.
When I imagine the future of space commerce, the first image that comes to mind is a farmers market on the International Space Station. This doesnt exist yet, but space commerce is a growing industry. The Space Foundation, a nonprofit organization for education and advocacy of space, estimates that the global space economy rose to $613 billion in 2024, up nearly 8% from 2023, and 250 times larger than all business at farmers markets in the United States. This number includes launch vehicles, satellite hardware, and services provided by these space-based assets, such as satellite phone or internet connection.
Companies involved in spaceflight have been around since the start of the space age. By the 1980s, corporate space activity was gaining traction. President Ronald Reagan saw the need for a federal agency to oversee and guide this industry and created the Office of Space Commerce, or OSC.
So what exactly does this office do and why is it important?
As a space scientist, I am interested in how the U.S. regulates commercial activities in space. In addition, I teach a course on space policy. In class, we talk about the OSC and its role in the wider regulatory landscape affecting commercial use of outer space.
The OSCs focus areas
The Office of Space Commerce, an office of about 50 people, exists within the Department of Commerces National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. To paraphrase its mission statement, its chief purpose is to enable a robust U.S. commercial interest in outer space.
OSC has three main focus areas. First, it is the office responsible for licensing and monitoring how private U.S. companies collect and distribute orbit-based images of Earth. There are many companies launching satellites with special cameras to look back down at the Earth these days. Companies offer a variety of data products and services from such imagery, for instance, to improve agricultural land use.
A second primary job of OSC is space advocacy. OSC works with the other U.S. government agencies that also have jurisdiction over commercial use of outer space to make the regulatory environment easier. This includes working with the Federal Aviation Administration on launch licensing, the Federal Communications Commission on radio wavelength usage, and the Environmental Protection Agency on rules about the hazardous chemicals in rocket fuel.
This job also includes coordinating with other countries that allow companies to launch satellites, collect data in orbit, and offer space-based services.
In 2024, for example, the OSC helped revise the U.S. Export Administration Regulations, one of the main documents restricting the shipping of advanced technologies out of the country. This change removed some limitations, allowing American companies to export certain types of spacecraft to three countries: Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
The OSC also coordinates commercial satellites flight paths in near-Earth space, which is its third and largest function. The Department of Defense keeps track of thousands of objects in outer space and issues alerts when the probability of a collision gets high. In 2018, President Donald Trump issued Space Policy Directive-3, which included tasking OSC to take this role over for nongovernment satellitesthat is, those owned by companies, not NASA or the military. The Department of Defense wants out of the job of traffic management involving privately owned satellites, and Trumps directive in 2018 started the process of handing off this task to OSC.
To prevent satellites from colliding, OSC has been developing the traffic coordination system for space, known as TraCSS. It went into beta testing in 2024 and has some of the companies with the largest commercial constellationssuch as SpaceXs Starlinkparticipating. Progress on this has been slower than anticipated, though, and an audit in 2024 revealed that the plan is way behind schedule and perhaps still years away.
Elevating OSC
Deep in the text of Trumps August 13, 2025, executive order called Enabling Competition in the Commercial Space Industry, theres a directive to elevate OSC to report directly to the office of the secretary of Commerce. This would make OSC equivalent to its current overseer, NOAA, with respect to importance and priority within the Department of Commerce. It would give OSC higher stature in setting more of the rules regarding commercial use of space, and it would make space commerce more visible across the broader economy.
So why did Trump include this line about elevating OSC in his August 13 executive order?
Back in 2018, Trump issued Space Policy Directive-2 during his first term, which included a task to create the Space Policy Advancing Commerce Enterprise Administration, or SPACE. SPACE would have been an entity reporting directly to the secretary of Commerce. While it was proposed as a bill in the House of Representatives later that year, it never became law.
The August 13 executive order essentially directs the Department of Commerce to make this move now. Should the secretary of Commerce enact the order, it would bypass the role of Congress in promoting OSC. The 60-day window that Trump placed in the executive order for making this change has closed, but with the government shutdown it is unclear whether the elevation of OSC might still occur.
Troubles for OSC
While all of this sounds good for promoting space as a place for commercial activity, OSC has been under stress in 2025. In February, the Department of Government Efficiency targeted NOAA for cuts, including firing eight people from OSC. Because about half of the people working in OSC are contractors, this represented a 30% reduction of force.
In March, Trumps presidential budget request for the 2026 fiscal year proposed a cut of 85% of the $65 million annual budget of OSC. In July, space industry leaders urged Congress to restore funding to OSC.
The August 13 executive order appeared to be good news for OSC. On September 9, however, Bloomberg reported that the Department of Commerce requested a 40% rescission to OSCs fiscal year 2025 budget.
Rescissions are clawbacks of funds already approved and appropriated by Congress. The promised funding is essentially put on hold. Once proposed by the president, rescissions have to be voted on by both chambers of Congress to be enacted. This must occur within 45 days, or before the end of the fiscal year, which was September 30.
This rescission request came so close to that deadline that Congress did not act to stop it. As a result, OSC lost this funding. The loss could mean additional cutbacks to staff and perhaps even a shrinking of its focus areas.
Will OSC be elevated? Will OSC be restructured or even dismantled? The future is still uncertain for this office.
Michael Liemohn is a professor of climate and space sciences and engineering at the University of Michigan.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
America’s next great riverfront park has just opened in Detroit. Covering 22 acres along the Detroit River, Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Centennial Park is the latest high-profile project to open in a troubled city now on a much-touted rebound. With an $80 million budget buying world class design from two highly regarded firms, it’s a major investment in the city’s public realm. And though a massive embezzlement scandal nearly derailed the project in 2024, the park is now open to the public.
Designed by the landscape architecture firm Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Detroit’s new riverfront park is a multidimensional destination intended to draw people from across the region and the age spectrum. Its postcard highlights are specially designed animal-themed playgrounds, a cityscape-framing allée of cherry trees, a covered basketball pavilion designed by Adjaye Associates, and, most uniquely, a two-acre lagoon fed by the river that gives visitors the rare opportunity to come up close and touch the water.
The project was led by the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy, a nonprofit established in 2003 to reconnect the city with a formerly industrial riverfront that had devolved into abandonment and contamination. In the decades since, the organization has invested more than $300 million building out riverfront parks, public spaces, and a nearly 5.5-mile continuous riverwalk along the water. The site of Ralph C. Wilson Park, just west of downtown, had been an underutilized green space for years but suffered by being cut off from its surroundings by a railyard and a derelict parking lot.
Walking through the park a few weeks before its official opening, Detroit Riverfront Conservancy CEO Ryan Sullivan can’t help but marvel at the transformation. The formerly pancake-flat site had a short life as a public park before construction began in 2022, but the space was barely loved. Before that, it had been a rail turning yard and later the site of the printing press for the Detroit Free Press newspaper. Building this new park required laying at least 18 inches of clean dirt on top of what was less than pristine ground. “It was really a blank slate to reimagine what a park could be in this space,” Sullivan says.
The $80 million park was primarily funded by the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation, established by the late Detroit native and businessman who was the longtime owner of the Buffalo Bills NFL team. A companion park, also funded by the foundation, is currently being built in Buffalo. “Mr. Wilson was a lifelong Detroiter and he loved the city,” says James Tighe, senior director of parks and trails at the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation. “The desire was to make sure that this was representative of the community, but also that it was a world-class destination for the city and for all the residents in the region to enjoy.”
[Photo: Nadir Ali for Detroit Riverfront Conservancy]
A direct connection to water
Dodging workers laying down sod and construction equipment hauling some of the roughly 900 trees planted in the park, Sullivan and Tighe lead me down a pathway leading to one of the park’s main highlights: a striking playground built around the bowl of an artificial hill. Wooden and metal playscapes inspired by Michigan wildlife, custom-designed by the renowned Danish playground designers Monstrum, rise on the hill’s rim and empty down into a central space.
One of the structures, a giant bear holding up a metal tube slide, has become the de facto mascot of the park. Nearby, a splash pad area features mechanical waterworks that kids can use to pump and divert water down pathways and creek-like channels. Another playground, designed for young children, is a short meander away.
“The playgrounds are something that we just lavished a lot of time and attention on,” says Michael Van Valkenburgh, who is for his work designing Brooklyn Bridge Park, Chicago’s converted railline park the 606, and the landscape around the forthcoming Obama Presidential Center. Van Valkenburgh says he’s had a soft spot for playground design since making it his focus in grad school. But he was also keen to make sure the park appealed to more than just kids. “We wanted the park to have things in it that the range of members of a family would need to have to go to the park and spend some serious time there,” he says.
Working with the Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Foundation and the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy, Van Valkenburgh’s firm engaged directly with 21 Detroiters throughout the design process to help shape the park and its offerings. Starting in 2018, these community members, known as the Community Action Team, worked directly with the designers and went on tours of notable parks in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. A clear takeaway from this involvement was the importance of the park as a waterfront experience.
“People wanted to be around the water. They wanted more access to the water,” Sullivan says. “We live in one of the most water abundant places on planet Earth in terms of fresh water. Yet within the city of Detroit, there’s nowhere to actually touch and feel and interact with the water.”
That inspired the idea of bringing river water directly into the park. Van Valkenburgh says the original concept was to create a kind of cove cut upstream from the river, where people could step into the water without fear of falling in and being pulled downstream. But water from the Detroit Rivertechnically a strait between Lake St. Clair and Lake Erieis beset by contamination from an active shipping channel and combined sewer overflows. Instead, the cove became a lagoon, with no direct human access to the river and a pump system that can be plugged up if contamination levels in the river become too high.
Stepping onto the lagoon’s gravel beach, Sullivan points to the wildlife that hasalready made the lagoon and its small internal islands home. Geese pad by and cormorants can be seen poking their heads into the water nearby. Turtles, crawfish, and even a mink have been seen on site. “No confirmed fish sightings yet, but I’m waiting on that,” Sullivan says. The lagoon was given enough depth for any eventual fish populations to survive during winters, when the surface is likely to freeze over. Officials are hopeful this could one day create another recreational attraction in the park: ice skating. “That’s a future opportunity,” Sullivan says.
[Photo: Nadir Ali for Detroit Riverfront Conservancy]
A park for all seasons
For now, the park has plenty else to offer, including a large covered pavilion that holds two NBA-sized basketball courts and space for other programming, as well as a constructed hill that offers panoramic views upstream of the downtown skyline and downstream of the Ambassador Bridge and soon-to-open Gordie Howe International Bridge beyond. The hill also serves as space for winter sledding in a largely flat city.
Making the park work in all seasons was a priority for the designers, and for the community. Van Valkenburgh, who grew up in upstate New York and remembers five foot snow storms, giving kids a place to experience the fun of a white winter was natural. But he also worked to make the park’s design celebrate the unofficial holiday of winter’s end. Cutting across much of the park is a long, straight walkway with views of downtown and the two bridges, and the designers chose to line this walkway with dozens of flowering cherry trees. “No matter how much you love winter, it sucks by the end. It just sucks. It’s like, enough. I love you, but I’m sick of you,” Van Valkenburgh says. “We wanted that explosion of spring.”
One unfortunate but unavoidable element in the park is the existence of a hulking concrete ventilation tower near the center. It’s the above-ground infrastructure of a freight rail tunnel running under the Detroit River to Windsor, Ontario. Standing about five stories tall, it’s an awkward inclusion in an otherwise refined space. But in a way it does help connect the park to its surroundings. It heightens the fact that the park sits adjacent to a rails-to-trails conversion project called the Southwest Greenway, which also connects to the Joe Louis Greenway, a 27-mile loop of trails being built around the city.
The park has one other scar. The park’s construction began in 2022 and was moving forward steadily until news broke in mid-2024 that the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy’s chief financial officer, William A. Smith, had embezzled more than $40 million from the organization over the previous 11 years. (In April, Smith was sentenced to 19 years in prison and ordered to pay roughly $48 million in restitution.)
The revelation was a black eye for the Conservancy and threatened to derail the park project. But according to Tighe, the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation was committed to seeing the project through. Within a week of the news, the foundation issued an emergency grant to the conservancy to ensure work continued on schedule for the October 2025 opening. “It was a long year,” Tighe says.
With the park now complete, and an endowment created to supports its ongoing maintenance, the financial scare from the embezzlement may soon just be a bad memory. For most park visitors, walking just feet from the Detroit River or rushing down one of its slides, there will be no visual clue that all this had the potential of collapsing. “It’s really a miracle when you look around,” Sullivan says.
As AI oozes into daily life, some people are building walls to keep it out for a host of compelling reasons. Theres the anxiety about a technology that requires an immense amount of energy to train and contributes to runaway carbon emissions. There are the myriad privacy concerns: At one point, some ChatGPT conversations were openly available on Google, and for months OpenAI was obligated to retain user chat history amid a lawsuit with The New York Times. Theres the latent ickiness of its manufacturing process, given that the task of sorting and labeling this data has been outsourced and underappreciated. Lest we forget, there’s also the risk of an AI oopsie, including all those accidental acts of plagiarism and hallucinated citations. Relying on these platforms seems to inch toward NPC statusand thats, to put it lightly, a bad vibe.
Then theres that matter of our own dignity. Without our consent, the internet was mined and our collective online lives were transformed into the inputs for a gargantuan machine. Then the companies that did it told us to pay them for the output: a talking information bank spring-loaded with accrued human knowledge but devoid of human specificity. The social media age warped our self-perception, and now the AI era stands to subsume it.
Amanda Hanna-McLeer is working on a documentary about young people who eschew digital platforms. She says her greatest fear of the technology is cognitive offloading through, say, apps like Google Maps, which, she argues, have the effect of eroding our sense of place. People dont know how to get to work on their own, she says. Thats knowledge deferred and eventually lost. As we give ourselves over to large language models, well relinquish even more of our intelligence.
Exposure avoidance
The movement to avoid AI might be a necessary form of cognitive self-preservation. Indeed, these models threaten to neuter our neurons (or at least how we currently use them) at a rapid pace. A recent study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that active users of LLM tech consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.
People are taking steps to avoid exposure. Theres the return of dumbphones, high school Luddite clubs, even a TextEdit renaissance. A friend who is single reports that antipathy toward AI is now a common feature on dating app profilesnot using the tech is a green flag. A small group of people proclaim to avoid using the technology entirely.
But as people unplug from AI, we risk whittling the overwhelming challenge of the tech industrys influence on how we think down to a question of consumer choice. Companies are even building a market niche targeted toward the people who hate the tech.
Even less effective might be cultural signifiers, or showyperhaps unintentionaldeclarations of individual purity from AI. We know the false promise of abstinence-only approaches. Theres real value in prioritizing logging off, and cutting down on individual consumption, but it wont be enough to trigger structural change, Hanna-McLeer tells me.
Of course, the concern that new technologies will make us stupid isnt new. Similar objections arrived, and persist, with social media, television, radioeven writing itself. Socrates worried that the written tradition might degrade our intelligence and recall: Trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, Plato recorded his mentor arguing.
But the biggest challenge is that, at least at the current rate, most people will not be able to opt out of AI. For many, the decision to use or not use the technology will be made by their bosses or the companies they buy stuff from or the platforms that provide them with basic services. Going offline is already a luxury.
As with other harmful things, consumers will know the downsides of deputizing LLMs but will use them all the same. Some people will use them because they are genuinely, extremely useful, and even entertaining. I hope the applications Ive found for these tools take the best of the technology while skirting some of its risks: I try to use the service like a digital bloodhound, deploying the LLMs to automatically flag updates and content that interest me, and before I then review whatever it finds myself. A few argue that eventually AI will liberate us from screens, that other digital toxin.
Misaligned with the business modeland the threat
A consumer-choice model for dealing with AIs most noxious consequences is misaligned with the business modeland the threat. Many integrations of artificial intelligence wont be immediately legible to non- or everyday users: LLM companies are highly interested in enterprise and business-to-business sectors, and theyre even selling their tools to the government.
Theres already a movement to make AI not just a consumer product, but one laced into our digital and physical infrastructure. The technology is most noticeable in app form, but its already embedded in our search engines: Google, once a link indexer, has already transformed into a tool for answering questions with AI. OpenAI, meanwhile, has built a search engine from its chatbot. Apple wants to integrate AI directly into our phones, rendering the large language models an outgrowth of our operating systems.
The movement to curb AIs abuses cannot survive merely on the hope that people will simply choose not to use the technology. Not eating meat, avoiding products laden with conflict minerals, and flipping off the light switch to save energy certainly does something, but not enough. AI asceticism alone does not meet the moment.
The reason to do it anyway is the logic of the Sabbath: We need to remember what its like to occupy, and live in, our own brains.
Amazon is well aware that youre spending hours agonizing over the reviews for seven different near-identical toaster ovens before you actually make a decision. Now, it has an AI feature for thatand we have to admit, its pretty helpful.
Help me decide is a new AI shopping function that rolled out on October 23 across millions of U.S. customers on the Amazon shopping app and mobile browser. It uses large language models and AI tools from Amazon Web Services (AWS) suite of offerings to analyze your shopping history, purchase details, and preferences, and then match those insights with product details and customer reviews to recommend products that you might be most interested in.
Designed to cut down on shopper indecision and usher users straight to the checkout cart, the feature is a smart move for Amazon, and it might make holiday shopping a bit less tortuous for customers. As the worlds most popular online retail site continues to roll out new AI features, its serving as a proving ground for how AI is radically reshaping online shopping as we know it.
How to use Amazon’s new “Help me decide” feature
To try out Help me decide, you can either navigate to the Keep shopping for tab on the Amazon homepage, or just click on a bunch of related products until you see a black pop-up with a sparkle icon.
From there, the tool will select the product that it deems best of your recently viewed based on customer reviews, your personal product criteria, and prices and return rates. Its selection includes an AI-generated summary of why you should commit to its choice, highlighting the most relevant product features and including one stand-out review of the item. At the bottom of the screen, you can also toggle to two other suggestions: one budget pick, on the lower end of the price spectrum, and one upgrade pick, if youre inclined to get spendy.
“Help Me Decide saves you time by using AI to provide product recommendations tailored to your needs after youve been browsing several similar items, giving you confidence in your purchase decision, Daniel Lloyd, vice president of Personalization at Amazon, said in a press release.
I gave the tool a try after spending the past several days window shopping for cat trees that are definitely outside my budget. True to its description, Help me decide picked a tree in the middle of the price range (still $99.98), describing it as the ultimate choice for your furry friends indoor adventure. The summary went on to describe the trees impressive 70-inch height, spacious hammock, and removable top perch that ensures easy cleaning.
Despite the flowery language used in the AI summaries, I found the tool generally helpful and easy to use.
How AI is changing online shopping
The Help me decide add-on is the latest in a growing bevy of AI shopping features from Amazon. These include the companys AI shopping assistant, Rufus; an Interests feature that tracks personalized shopping categories; and AI-generated review highlights that give top notes on customer reactions to products.
Over the past several months, brands including Ralph Lauren and Pinterest have invested in their own AI tools to drive online shopping. Walmart and Sams Club have partnered with OpenAI to allow customers to shop from within the chatbot. And the AI-powered app Daydream is purpose-built to help users find the perfect outfits.
In a recent Adobe Analytics study on holiday shopping behaviors, the company shared that 2024 was the first time it noticed a measurable surge in AI traffic to U.S. retail sites before the holidays. Now, its expecting a major escalation of that trend, estimating that holiday AI traffic to retail sites will rise by 520% in 2025.
AI is quietly rewiring the way we shopboth in subtle ways, like by improving product recommendations, and in more direct ways, like via AI chatbots that can literally shop on behalf of a user. It won’t be long until every part of the online shopping experience is guided, at least in some way, by a dedicated AI model.
