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On Monday, the Supreme Court held oral arguments in the climate deception case Suncor v. Boulder, a case we’ve covered extensively given its outsized stakes, the oil industry’s ties to the Supreme Court bench, and the glaring conflicts of interest that have now disqualified longtime oil investor Justice Alito from participating in the case.

This much is clear: artificial intelligence has permeated just about every corner of the federal government. The Revolving Door Project has been tracking news stories and reports of the Trump administration’s adoption of AI, which has been at turns benign, ridiculous, and dangerous. By the administration’s own measure, forty-one departments and agencies reported 3,611 distinct use cases of AI in 2025.

As the Trump administration continues to expand the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in its operations, we are cataloguing examples of how AI is being deployed by federal agencies to replace human workers and undermine transparency and due process.

Last week, well over 100 million people across the United States and Canada were forced to breathe dangerously unhealthy air, as smoke from hundreds of wildfires in Canada blanketed much of North America. 

Welcome back to Watchdog Weekly. We’ve been busy so far this hurricane season, tracking the literal and metaphorical storms gathering on the horizon as elite immunity spreads its shadow over the American landscape. Here are some of the projects we’ve been working on lately:

Last week, The New York Times published yet another opinion piece arguing that “Democrats Don’t Have to Campaign on Climate Change Anymore,” this one by Syracuse University professor Matt Huber. Fox News’ David Marcus quickly declared victory: “New York Times announces the end of the climate change hoax.”

Last month, when the Supreme Court agreed to grant a petition from two oil companies, Suncor and Exxon, in a long-running dispute over whether the companies can be held liable under state law by Boulder, Colorado, for climate damages ensuing from their corporate misconduct, the most notable sentence was the one that was missing: “Justice Alito took no part in the consideration or decision of this petition.”

Even before we had Trump as Commander in Chief committing unconstitutional strikes on the leaders of foreign nations, and Pete Hegseth as Secretary of War ordering apparent war crimes in the Caribbean, we wrote about the military-industrial complex as a “disaster multiplier” in our era of climate change and interlocking crises. 

Bad Bunny, the most streamed artist in the world for the last four years, has elevated el sapo concho’s profile by transforming the toad into a symbol of Puerto Rico’s imperiled cultural and ecological heritage. At a time of historic institutional cowardice towards combating climate change, he reminds us what the fight is about: nothing less than preserving our treasured places in the world, and those we share them with.

On Monday, Senator Elizabeth Warren gave a speech at the National Press Club about how Democrats can rebuild durable trust with voters, win elections, and enact systemic change. She spoke with energy about how Democrats cannot win back a lasting majority by watering down their economic vision, and how candidates in future elections must “credibly demonstrate that they will take on a rigged system in order to fix it.” In other words, she called for the members of her party to refashion themselves as willing fighters. 

One of the defining characteristics of American life in the twenty-first century is its extreme imbalance: excess amid scarcity. While the world teems with a surplus of disposable consumer goods, essentials like healthcare, housing, education, and energy are prohibitively expensive. Much of this imbalance is by design. Powerful corporations profit from distorting public goods into private commodities, and individual and collective choices are replaced by corporate prescriptions that do not meet our needs. This dynamic is particularly visible in the tech industry forcing artificial intelligence into every corner of our lives, regardless of whether it is wanted.