The Lever - ❤️‍🩹 Thanks, Obama

🔥 On Lever Time: Trump just fired antitrust regulators investigating his corporate boosters — David Sirota speaks with one of them about why he’s taking the president to court.

👇 Spend four minutes reading this 990-word newsletter to learn about: 

• The true legacy of the Affordable Care Act.
• Zuckerberg’s play for immunity.
• Trump’s middle finger to poor senior citizens.
• Voters’ dissatisfaction with the duopoly.

📩 Wall Street is coming for your mail. Former freight shipping magnate and new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has all but handed the Department of Government Efficiency the keys to the Postal Service as Elon Musk sets his sights on privatizing the country’s second-most popular government agency — all to Wall Street’s delight.

• According to the advocacy group, Revolving Door Project, investment bankers are already theorizing about how to best profit from a private takeover of the USPS — including by laying off workers, selling historic Post office buildings, and hiking postage prices.

👀 We see you, Zuck. Just weeks before Delaware’s Democratic governor courted Meta to remain in the state with a flurry of emergency weekend meetings, CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave secret testimony in a separate lawsuit alleging Meta illegally trained its artificial intelligence program with copyrighted material. A new billionaire-backed bill in the state — which lawmakers will likely provide a final vote on this week — “would basically end civil litigation” as a way to hold executives like Zuckerberg accountable and ensure they “don’t just line their own pockets,” an attorney who argues shareholder lawsuits told The Lever.

🤐 Trump admin tells seniors to shut it. While President Donald Trump continues to insist he won’t cut seniors’ benefits, his administration’s attacks on Social Security are growing more brazen. In a damning sign of what’s to come, last week Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick slammed seniors who flag missing Social Security payments as "fraudsters," arguing that legitimate beneficiaries wouldn’t complain about not receiving their monthly check — “whoever screams is the one stealing,” he said.

⛽ Big Oil’s headed South. In yet another escalation in the Lone Star state’s race to the bottom, Texas’s Senate just advanced a bill that would upend the state’s competitive clean energy market by requiring half of all new power plant capacity be ​nonrenewable resources — and power plants relying on solar and wind will have to pay a fee. A previous version of the bill mandated that power plants "use natural gas,” despite Texas leading the country in wind and solar power generation.

Gizmodo (March 21, 2025)

Voters are rejecting the duopoly. The Democratic party is on the verge of a near mutiny — new polling shows 49 percent of the party’s voters disapprove of how Congressional Democrats are handling the second Trump administration, up from 21 points around this time last year. 

Things over in the GOP aren’t looking good either — the handful of Republican lawmakers brave enough to ignore House Speaker Mike Johnson’s suggested pause on public appearances are being confronted with jeers, boos, and angry chants by constituents upset over Elon Musk’s proposed cuts.

In a composite image, former President Barack Obama is superimposed over the Affordable Care Act (AP Photo/Jason Reed, Pool)

The Affordable Care Act’s 15th birthday. Yesterday, former President Barack Obama celebrated the 15-year anniversary of Democrats using their public mandate to block a public, single-payer health insurance option. The law included some long-overdue reforms but it also strengthened the financial and political power of insurance companies.

The death of the public option. Obama campaigned for the U.S. Senate as a proponent of single-payer health care, promising that such a system would be possible once Democrats won power. However, he backed off once elected and pretended he didn’t just campaign on that promise, telling The Lever’s David Sirota he was concerned about protecting insurance industry jobs, and ultimately killing off a public option that could compete with private insurers. Then in 2009, Obama’s new presidential administration officially declared that any single-payer proposals would not be considered in the health care policy debate.  

A plan that originated at the Heritage Foundation. Obama boasted that the ACA was rooted in ideas from Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and the conservative Heritage Foundation. After the law passed, the Heritage Foundation joined with Republicans in pushing to repeal the ACA while attacking its most valuable parts, including the expansion of Medicaid.

Today’s results are, ahem, mixed. Since the ACA’s passage, the number of uninsured Americans has been nearly halved. Simultaneously, the largest insurers have raked in $371 billion of profits as the average employer-based premium for a family has jumped to $26,000 per year — far outpacing increases in workers’ wages. Insurance plans purchased on the ACA exchanges are denying one out of every five medical claims. Moreover, Obamacare has ushered in the consolidation of health care industry conglomerates, giving them more power to fleece consumers on insurance, hospital services, and prescription drugs. 

Even Obama knows the ACA is inadequate. Obama this week asserted that the “ACA is like a starter house: it was a big step forward, but still just a first step.” Two years after he left office, he touted his party’s support of single-payer, saying “Democrats aren’t just running on good old ideas like a higher minimum wage, they’re running on new ideas, Medicare for All.” In his 2020 campaign, former President Joe Biden took up Obama’s promise to create a public option, but once elected, he never mentioned the idea in public again.

TAKE ACTION

Audit Elon Musk! Between SpaceX, Starlink, and Tesla, Musk’s companies have received over $38 billion in taxpayer dollars. The American people deserve an independent audit of Musk’s contracts. Demand an audit of Elon Musk now!

🍳 Eggflation cracking your grocery budget? CNN tested out cheaper substitutes for the humble egg — and you may be surprised by their winner. 

🛻 Tesla was forced to recall almost every single Cybertruck. We laugh to keep from crying.

🌠 A 17-year-old accidentally discovered the “light echo” of a black hole twice as wide as the Milky Way. Ah, high school.

Dear Democrats — nobody wants Joe Biden back. Seriously, nobody.

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