Sam Bagenstos
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sbagen.bsky.social
Sam Bagenstos
@sbagen.bsky.social
34K followers 2.3K following 2.8K posts
Personal account. Personal views. Frank G. Millard Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School & Arlene Susan Kohn Professor of Social Policy, University of Michigan Ford School of Public Policy. Former General Counsel, HHS and OMB.
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sbagen.bsky.social
What @ruthbenghiat.bsky.social says here.

www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/how-... Syndicate Newsletter
Many of the world’s most notorious dictators have carried their countries toward ruin, such as by slashing public assistance (Chile’s Augusto Pinochet), appropriating funds for themselves and their cronies (Congo’s Mobutu Sese Seko, Libya’s Muammar el-Qaddafi, and Putin), or engaging in catastrophic wars or revolutionary campaigns (Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and Mao Zedong). But the Trump administration is unusual in its apparent commitment to destroying the pillars of America’s long-term prosperity – education, health, research, and climate policy – and decimating trust in, and goodwill toward, the US abroad.
December 7, 2025 at 11:54 AM
sbagen.bsky.social
Our terrific crew of Dem candidates for AG, speaking right now at the Washtenaw County Dems meeting.
December 6, 2025 at 3:46 PM
sbagen.bsky.social
Thank you, @wyden.senate.gov . Quite so. www.finance.senate.gov/ranking-memb...
“There is blood on the hands of Donald Trump, Robert Kennedy, and every Republican who has allowed this sham to go on for far too long,” Wyden said. “When kids die unnecessarily and once-eradicated diseases darken the doors of terrified families and pediatricians, Americans will know who is responsible. There’s still time to disarm the radical anti-vaccine activists who are wrenching American public health backwards by a generation, but time is running out.”
December 5, 2025 at 5:49 PM
sbagen.bsky.social
Amen. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
A reason that the U.S. became the world’s biomedical leader—indeed, a reason that it emerged from the Cold War victorious—is that democratic governance allows for a level of self-correction that authoritarianism does not. Bad ideas can be beaten back at the ballot box, in the public square, and through the halls of Congress. The country is under no obligation to tolerate institutionalized quackery or elected officials who, through feckless appeals and half measures, have become complicit in it. Truly making America healthy will involve more than removing an asterisk. It will require turning the page.
November 30, 2025 at 2:14 PM
sbagen.bsky.social
NGL, I think my Thanksgiving spread (with an assist from my wife on the squash and my daughter on the salad and dessert) totally crushes Karoline Leavitt's.
A table set for six with a bunch of food on it. The same table, with the same food, from another angle.
November 29, 2025 at 8:53 PM
sbagen.bsky.social
I've read only 16 of the Times' 100 most notable books of 2025. I feel like a failure. Sigh.
The covers of 16 books.
November 27, 2025 at 1:44 AM
sbagen.bsky.social
RFK beclowns Bill Cassidy again. www.theatlantic.com/health/2025/...
Technically, the statement “Vaccines do not cause autism” has not been removed from the CDC website. Instead, it has been appended with an asterisk, which is explained at the bottom of the page: “The header ‘Vaccines do not cause autism’ has not been removed due to an agreement with the chair of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee that it would remain on the CDC website.” That asterisk is an obvious farce, because the page is now devoted to undermining the scientific consensus. “‘Vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim,” the site now states, despite the fact that multiple large studies have found no such association. The site notes that reviews on the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine concluded that there is no association between the MMR vaccine and autism—but goes on to criticize those reviews as methodologically flawed. It also asserts that the rise in autism rates “correlates with the rise in the number of vaccines given to infants.”
November 21, 2025 at 10:36 AM
sbagen.bsky.social
What perfect album came out the year you turned 16?
The cover of Billy Bragg's album Talking with the Taxman About Poetry.
November 17, 2025 at 1:07 AM
sbagen.bsky.social
Thank you, politico playbook, for explaining why the Dems' huge win last night is bad for Dems, actually.
These are tumultuous times for the Democrats, as POLITICO’s Alex Burns writes in a must-read analysis this morning. A year on from the 2024 election, the party of Joe Biden looks radically changed. A self-declared socialist is the wildly popular mayor of New York City; and on the west coast, Democratic gerrymandering suddenly has mass support. “Politics now moves at such an astonishing speed,” Alex writes, “that it is easy to miss what a revealing shift this is for a party that spent much of the last decade trumpeting contented, self-soothing slogans about how America was already great,
November 5, 2025 at 11:23 AM
sbagen.bsky.social
You need to superimpose one of these on that picture.
Appeal to heaven flag.
November 5, 2025 at 3:52 AM
sbagen.bsky.social
Very excited to be at the premiere of #sexradicalmovie. A docudrama about the Construction Act. You can stream it here: bit.ly/sexradicalstream. Read about it here: www.andykirshner.com/sexradical.
A photo of a movie screen with a still advertising the movie "Sex Radical."
October 30, 2025 at 11:54 PM
sbagen.bsky.social
Per @politico.com , the lobbyists are basically treating Article I as dead.
Lobbyists interviewed for the piece describe the old levers of influence and intelligence as increasingly broken, starting with Congress. “Congress has basically taken itself out of the equation,” said Rich Gold, who heads Holland & Knight’s public policy and regulation group. “There is a perception that Democrats have not fought back, and Republicans have basically ceded all their authority to the president.”
October 20, 2025 at 9:13 AM
sbagen.bsky.social
I guess I'm not the only one at this march who thinks the Article I branch needs to stand up.
Sign reading "We the People will never forget the a-holes in Congress who kept quiet."
October 18, 2025 at 5:50 PM
sbagen.bsky.social
Greetings from the Ypsilanti No Kings March!
People protesting.
October 18, 2025 at 5:15 PM
sbagen.bsky.social
This guy in his Canadian Tuxedo begs to differ.
Blonde haired white guy with glasses wearing a jean jacket over a denim shirt.
October 14, 2025 at 5:30 PM
sbagen.bsky.social
Today's NYT Morning newsletter does a good job explaining the failures of Trump's supposedly anti-crime surge. But this framing is unconscionable. Trump doesn't believe that crimes should be prosecuted at all, much less "to the max," against himself or his supporters.
This is the president's vision for law enforcement. He believes crimes should be prosecuted to the max, and that more-level violations set a permissive climate for nastier ones.
September 29, 2025 at 11:07 AM
sbagen.bsky.social
This is a ridiculously broad understanding of the President's foreign affairs powers -- that the Executive Branch experiences "harms to [its] conduct of foreign affairs" when it is must spend foreign aid money appropriated in a bill signed by the President. Whither Congress's power of the purse?
And, on the record before the Court, the asserted harms to the Executive’s conduct of foreign affairs appear to outweigh the potential harm faced by respondents.
September 26, 2025 at 9:03 PM
sbagen.bsky.social
Love to see Reps. Don Bacon, Judy Chu, and colleagues demanding auto-apportionment language for NASA funding in the CR. s3.amazonaws.com/quorum-pdf-l...
Congress should require NASA apportionments to continue at a rate commensurate with FY 2025/2024 and prevent OMB and NASA from prematurely making dramatic programmatic changes absent the input and consent of Congress.
September 17, 2025 at 2:24 PM
sbagen.bsky.social
As a two-time former DOJ-er, I'm vicariously ashamed.
In Friday’s opinion, Judge Alsup chided the administration over its conduct in the monthslong case. He said the government’s evidence was a “sham” that included documents unrelated to the case, leaving a reader “with the feeling that he is being led, blindfolded, along a carefully plotted path through a dense, unseen wood.” “Here and there, he may hear a rustle in the trees, feel the dark silhouette of a towering form or intuit some other hint at the forest beyond. But never is he afforded an unfettered view of the landscape through which he passes,” Judge Alsup wrote. In some cases, he said, the government offered “fabricated” context and “ersatz” evidence. He called some prosecutor conduct “chicanery,” echoing observations he had shared at times during the case.
September 14, 2025 at 12:21 AM
sbagen.bsky.social
Indeed it was illegal. But we can thank SCOTUS for making full relief impossible.
The ruling did not call on the government to return the fired probationary employees to their jobs, as would be the “ordinary course,” Judge William H. Alsup of the Northern District of California wrote in a 38-page opinion. Because the Supreme Court allowed the administration to continue its purge for months while the case proceeded, he said, “too much water has now passed under the bridge.”
September 14, 2025 at 12:18 AM
sbagen.bsky.social
And this is beyond parody.
“I was told that apparently the administration is going through past grants and two words were flagged: One was transition and one was privilege,” Klenz said. “Transition — transitioning from childhood to adulthood. Privilege came up because a parent wrote a glowing review of staff that said what a privilege it was to work with them.” ProPublica obtained a copy of the grant application and confirmed that those words were included.
September 10, 2025 at 9:52 PM
sbagen.bsky.social
The way to stop discrimination based on race is to stop discriminating based on race, amirite?

From Justice Sotomayor's dissent:
The Government, and now the concurrence, has all but declared that all Latinos, U. S. citizens or not, who work low wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction.
September 8, 2025 at 3:48 PM
sbagen.bsky.social
Indeed, if you take seriously the point Klein makes here, you would conclude that Senate Dems' failure to use their leverage in March played a role in empowering Trump to makr further authoritarian moves, to the point where a few months later we're talking about "consolidation."
People do what others do. Each law firm that bent the knee to Trump made it harder for the next firm to say no. The universities that fell to Trump created the same problem — that’s why it mattered when Harvard fought back. Everyone in society — every person, every institution — is a node of coordination. And if you look at Democrats in Congress right now, the signal they’re sending is not to take any risks. Everything is normal. Just wait for the election. I think sending that signal is a mistake.
September 7, 2025 at 12:38 PM
sbagen.bsky.social
Really excited to have a full draft of this piece I'm presenting in a few weeks at the Wash. U. Law Review symposium on Taxing, Spending, and the Constitution. The conference is being held four days before government funding runs out, so what I say will be both timely and in flux!
Photo of the first page of a draft article entitled "The Crisis of Appropriations Law" by Samuel R. Bagenstos.
September 1, 2025 at 9:31 PM
sbagen.bsky.social
Extreme Salvador Allende energy in this quote from a "Trump adviser' about Maduro.
"He might be stuck because the Cubans around him won't let him leave," said another Trump adviser. "So he might just leave in a body bag."
August 29, 2025 at 9:57 AM