The Homefront Report: The Things We Choose to Save

At home, we’re learning what’s worth preserving. In Washington, that lesson appears to be going badly.

Washington is having another one of those weeks where destruction is being marketed as maintenance, favors are being introduced as policy, and the rest of us are apparently expected to stand back and admire the craftsmanship. Somewhere between canceled wind projects, election rules being dragged through court, a health secretary’s remarkably selective memory, and Justice Department lawyers warning that the Kennedy Center may eventually need to be demolished, the administration appears to have settled on a governing philosophy in which anything that cannot be controlled, renamed, monetized, or redirected toward the proper people becomes a candidate for the wrecking ball.

Meanwhile, at my house, we are trying to finish things. Last night we removed the form from our epoxy river table, or at least most of it. When we made the original pour last year, we didn’t use enough sealer, which is the sort of mistake that doesn’t announce itself when you make it because that would be helpful. Instead, it waits quietly for months until you are standing over a very large piece of Oregon maple burl with a chisel, wondering why the melamine has apparently entered into a legally binding relationship with the epoxy.

We spent about three hours peeling it away as carefully as possible, chipping at the form little by little so we didn’t damage the table underneath. By the time we stopped, we were covered in sawdust, wood chips and tiny white pieces of what had once been the mold, while my husband’s future desk sat in the middle of the mess, mostly freed from its melamine prison.

It still needs sanding, finishing and plenty of attention before it becomes the desk we imagined when we started it, but there is something deeply satisfying about seeing it emerge again. This table has been sitting unfinished through pregnancy, surgery, gardens, home repairs, financial panic, children growing, jobs changing and approximately seven thousand other projects that apparently believed they were more urgent. Somehow it waited for us.

The kids have rediscovered one of those projects too. Last summer we built them a playhouse in the backyard, another thing that reached the stage of technically existing without ever reaching the stage where we could look at it and say, yes, this is entirely finished and we’ll never need to touch it again. My husband built a climbing wall onto one side and a slide onto the other, and the children loved it enormously until they did what children do and temporarily forgot that one of the greatest structures in human history was standing twenty feet from the back door.

Recently they remembered. The playhouse has once again become the center of civilization, and every evening the children begin lobbying for permission to sleep in it as though I’m rejecting a perfectly ordinary housing arrangement instead of explaining that responsible parenting generally requires bringing your children indoors at night. I tell them no, they make their case, I remind them that we live in the modern world and not inside an illustrated children’s book, and eventually I usher everyone back into the house.

Ezra is a little under the weather today. Last night he was cranky, and this morning he is sleepy, so I will hold him, give him all the hugs he wants, watch for a fever and be there when he needs me. There are days when motherhood requires elaborate logistics, ten separate schedules and the ability to solve three emergencies while locating somebody’s missing shoe, and then there are days when your job is simply to sit still with a warm little body against your chest and pay attention.

Slowing down sounds much easier than it actually is. There is always pressure coming from somewhere, no matter how much I try to avoid it. Perhaps if I turn my phone off and lie very still, all of the responsibilities will assume I have disappeared and politely leave. This seems unlikely, because there will still be children, bills to agonize over, babies to watch, work to finish and husbands with needs of their own.

School starts soon, which brings a strange mixture of relief and grief. There will be a little more quiet in the house, a little more routine, and perhaps Mom and Dad will occasionally complete a sentence without hearing “Hey, I had it first” from another room approximately every fifteen seconds. I am looking forward to that more than I should probably admit. I will also miss them terribly.

Summer is slowly closing around us. I’ll miss the sunny days, the ridiculous tan lines, the late nights, the gardens, the kids running outside and, honestly, even the watering. We live in Oregon, which means there comes a point every year when the rain returns and the garden hoses become decorative objects we vaguely remember using during another geological era. But I can chalk this summer up as one of the best of my life.

I met extraordinary people. I made memories with my family. I found a community that helped me when I needed it, including people who helped us fight for an MRI and people who helped us save our home. We celebrated things I once worried would never happen. We built things, repaired things, finished things we had abandoned and found little pieces of peace in a world that seems increasingly determined to make peace difficult. There’ll still be struggles, bills and doctors and chaos and unfinished projects waiting patiently for us to remember them. But I can sit back and appreciate what we have built.

Then there is the other end of the spectrum, where the administration is deciding it appreciates nothing and everything must burn. The Washington Post reported Thursday that a federal settlement created after the Trump administration pushed German energy company RWE to abandon offshore wind projects is now feeding directly into an enormous fossil-fuel transaction.

RWE is expected to receive $1.2 billion after relinquishing offshore wind leases in New York, California and Louisiana, with the money redirected toward investments in oil, gas or nuclear energy. According to the Post, the company plans to use roughly $900 million of that money to purchase part of a Louisiana liquefied natural gas investment from Stonepeak, a private-equity firm whose CEO, Michael Dorrell, donated about $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee and owns a home near Mar-a-Lago.

The administration says it didn’t choose Stonepeak or direct RWE toward the transaction, which is an important distinction and one I’m sure will comfort everyone enormously as they stare at the remarkable coincidence sitting on the kitchen table. There is already a congressional investigation into the administration’s offshore wind settlements, which reportedly total nearly $4 billion. The basic sequence is difficult to improve upon.

The government moves aggressively against offshore wind, federal money is made available after companies abandon their projects, the money is redirected toward fossil fuels, and nearly a billion dollars of one transaction winds its way toward a firm controlled by a major Trump donor. Some people remove a mold because there is something underneath worth saving. Others apparently remove the renewable energy and discover an LNG terminal.

The administration’s relationship with rules becomes even more flexible once you cross an international border. The Post also reported Thursday on Alejandro Betancourt, a Venezuelan businessman who has become an important intermediary in the Trump administration’s dealings with Venezuela’s oil industry while facing an active money-laundering investigation in Switzerland. According to the Post, Swiss authorities sought assistance from the United States and eventually asked the Justice Department to arrest Betancourt while he was in the country. Senior U.S. officials had also intervened with Swiss authorities concerning the investigation.

Betancourt was not arrested. Instead, according to the reporting, he received a one-year, multiple-entry U.S. visa and has traveled repeatedly to the United States for meetings with administration officials. Betancourt denies wrongdoing and hasn’t been charged with a crime, which is important to say because allegations aren’t convictions and investigations aren’t verdicts. Still, there is something almost artistically Washington about a man being sought by foreign investigators while simultaneously becoming useful enough to the United States government that the doors keep opening. Apparently there are rules, and then there is the executive lounge.

Back home, the administration’s fight over mail voting is becoming considerably less theoretical as the midterm election approaches. A federal judge this week removed the last nationwide injunction blocking Trump’s mail-voting executive order, and the Postal Service says its new federal ballot-mail requirements are now being implemented.

The rules had technically taken effect earlier this month, but enforcement for the 2026 election had been delayed while the injunctions remained in place. With those injunctions now gone, the Postal Service says election officials must begin complying with new requirements governing federal ballot mail, including envelope preparation standards and reporting through a federal ballot-mail portal. In some cases, USPS can refuse to accept outbound federal ballot mail that doesn’t meet those standards.

Oregon and roughly two dozen other states, along with Washington, D.C., are now challenging the Postal Service’s implementation of the policy, while Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read has instructed county election officials to continue administering the election under Oregon law.

That distinction matters because Oregon doesn’t merely dabble in vote-by-mail. We are vote-by-mail. It’s part of how our elections function, and this is no longer a theoretical argument being conducted by constitutional lawyers somewhere in Washington. The rules are now taking effect while election officials are preparing for November and states are racing back into court to determine how much authority the federal government actually has over the process. Eventually, all of these arguments land inside somebody’s mailbox.

The healthcare side of government is providing its own lesson in selective memory. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. repeatedly told senators during his confirmation process that his 2019 trip to Samoa had “nothing to do with vaccines.”

New documents obtained by the Associated Press and The Guardian tell a considerably more complicated story. Before the trip, Kennedy sent Samoa’s prime minister a letter proposing that his team examine questions surrounding the country’s MMR vaccination program. The correspondence reportedly refers to vaccines or vaccination repeatedly and lays out vaccine-related issues Kennedy wanted explored.

It’s worth being precise here because precision is important in journalism. Kennedy was not under oath when he made those comments during the confirmation process, so this isn’t a matter of casually declaring perjury because the internet enjoys a dramatic noun. It is, however, perfectly fair to say that newly released documents contradict the description America’s health secretary gave senators while they were deciding whether to hand him control of one of the most powerful public-health agencies in the world.

Perhaps “nothing to do with vaccines” is one of those phrases whose meaning changes depending upon how many letters mentioning vaccines eventually become public.

And then there is the Kennedy Center, where the metaphor finally gets tired of pretending it’s only a metaphor. The Trump-controlled board has been fighting to put the president’s name on the institution, despite the minor inconvenience that Congress named the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts after John F. Kennedy and a federal judge has already concluded that the board can’t simply rename the building because it feels like it.

That apparently hasn’t ended the discussion. The latest court filings are tied to Trump’s planned renovation of the center and include an extraordinary argument from the Justice Department: if the renovation can’t move forward as envisioned, financial support could collapse, the building could deteriorate and demolition might eventually become necessary. An outdoor amphitheater has even been floated as one possible future alternative.

That argument made its way into court on Thursday, where U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper spent nearly two hours pressing the administration over its latest effort to put Trump’s name back onto the building as early as September 8. Cooper, who already ruled against the earlier naming attempt, appeared openly skeptical and repeatedly returned to the basic question of what Congress intended when it created the Kennedy Center as a memorial to John F. Kennedy.

The administration argued that the new language would merely recognize Trump’s role in the renovation rather than formally rename the institution, which is exactly the sort of distinction that sounds much more persuasive if no one says it out loud. Cooper did not rule from the bench, and he also questioned whether he currently has jurisdiction to stop the inscriptions while the administration appeals his earlier decision.

So, we’ve reached the natural final stage of the naming dispute. The board wants Trump’s name attached to the Kennedy Center. A judge has already said the law doesn’t allow them to simply rename it. The administration is now back in court trying a fresh variation on the same idea, and the judge does not appear charmed. And we are still being warned that, without the administration’s plan, perhaps the Kennedy Center itself eventually can’t survive.

There is a parenting strategy buried in here somewhere. “If I cannot rename the playhouse after myself, I will be forced to consider removing the slide.” Fortunately, my children have not yet discovered federal litigation.

There are things worth repairing even when they’re difficult, there are things worth finishing even when they sat untouched for a year, and there are institutions worth preserving even when they belong to everyone instead of you personally. There are elections worth protecting, public-health systems worth treating honestly, resources worth managing for people who will still be alive long after the next quarterly report, and public buildings worth maintaining without requiring them to become monuments to whoever happens to occupy the White House.

Last night my husband and I spent three hours slowly removing something that had become stubbornly attached to the thing we wanted to save. We could’ve rushed, we could’ve damaged the table, we could have decided the work was irritating and taken a saw to the whole thing. Instead, we sat there with chisels, little by little. Carefully enough to preserve what was underneath. It turns out destruction is usually faster. That doesn’t make it craftsmanship.