The Lawfare Podcast

On today's podcast, Executive Editor Natalie Orpett talks with Nick Bednar, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School and a contributing editor at Lawfare. They talk about two Supreme Court cases issued last week that will have a huge impact on the president's authority over agencies that Congress set up to be independent. In Slaughter v. Trump, the Court held that the president has the power to remove members of independent agencies who had previously been understood to have employment protections that forbade the president from firing them. In Cook v. Trump, the Court carved out a special exception to that rule for the Federal Reserve. They discuss Nick's recent article for Lawfare, what the opinions say, what they fail to say, and what it means for the workforce that makes the federal government function.
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Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman sits down with Professor Javier Corrales, Dwight W. Morrow 1895 Professor of Political Science and Department Chair of Political Science at Amherst College, to discuss the Trump administration's efforts to pressure Cuba and support regime change there. They discuss why the Cuban regime stays in power, the effectiveness of different U.S. policy instruments used against Cuba, why Professor Corrales thinks that the Venezuela approach probably would not work in Cuba, and what a post-communist Cuba might look like.
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On this episode of Lawfare Daily, Senior Editor Kate Klonick and Senior Editor Alan Rozenshtein speak with Cory Doctorow—science fiction author, activist, journalist, adviser to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the writer who coined "enshittification"—about his new book, “The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI.” Doctorow argues that the most important thing about the AI boom isn't what the technology can or can't do, but the historic investment bubble and the new arrangements of work being built on top of it—the same analytic lens he brought to platform decay, now turned on AI.
They discuss whether the AI bubble will actually burst or merely deflate, and the unit economics underneath it; the "reverse centaur," the worker conscripted to serve the machine; and how it maps onto a broader culture and questions of AI "knowledge collapse," the human analogue to AI model collapse.
Additional Resources:
Cory Doctorow's daily newsletter, Pluralistic
Ed Zitron, "The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble," (Where's Your Ed At, 2025)
Andrew J. Peterson, "AI and the Problem of Knowledge Collapse" (arXiv, 2024)
Benjamin Recht, “The Irrational Decision: How We Gave Computers the Power to Choose for Us” (Princeton University Press, 2026)
This episode also ran as an episode of Scaling Laws with an introduction from Alan Rozenshtein. Find Scaling Laws on the Lawfare website, and subscribe to never miss an episode.
To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at www.patreon.com/lawfare. You can also support Lawfare by making a one-time donation at https://givebutter.com/lawfare-institute.
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In a live conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with Senior Editors Eric Columbus, Molly Roberts, and Roger Parloff to discuss the Supreme Court’s decisions on TPS for Haitians and Syrians and in an asylum processing case, a federal judge squashing portions of President Trump’s election executive order, John Bolton pleading guilty, an update in the criminal prosecution of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and more.

You can find information on legal challenges to Trump administration actions here. And check out Lawfare’s new homepage on the litigation, new Bluesky account, and new WITOAD merch.

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From June 4, 2016: This week, the Brookings Institution held an event on a new Brookings report on implementation of the Iran Deal:
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) adopted by Iran and the P5+1 partners in July 2015 was an effort not only to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons but also to avert a nuclear arms competition in the Middle East. But uncertainties surrounding the future of the Iran nuclear deal, including the question of what Iran will do when key JCPOA restrictions on its nuclear program expire after 15 years, could provide incentives for some of its neighbors to keep their nuclear options open.
In their Brookings Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Series monograph, “The Iran Nuclear Deal: Prelude to Proliferation in the Middle East?,” Robert Einhorn and Richard Nephew assess the current status of the JCPOA and explore the likelihood that, in the wake of the agreement, regional countries will pursue their own nuclear weapons programs or at least latent nuclear weapons capabilities. Drawing on interviews with senior government officials and non-government experts from the region, they focus in depth on the possible motivations and capabilities of Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates for pursuing nuclear weapons. The monograph also offers recommendations for policies to reinforce the JCPOA and reduce the likelihood that countries of the region will seek nuclear weapons.
On May 31, the Brookings Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative hosted a panel to discuss the impact of the JCPOA on prospects for nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. Brookings Senior Fellow and Deputy Director of Foreign Policy Suzanne Maloney served as moderator. Panelists included H.E. Yousef Al Otaiba, ambassador of the United Arab Emirates to the United States; Derek Chollet, counselor and senior advisor for security and defense policy at the German Marshall Fund; Brookings Senior Fellow Robert Einhorn; and Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellow Richard Nephew.
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