Philippa Kaur

The United States Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is reportedly using artificial intelligence to surveil federal agency communications for anti-Donald Trump and anti-Elon Musk sentiment.

AI tools now automate firings and assess U.S. federal employees’ sentiment and alignment with the administration’s “mission.” Musk, who has been appointed a “special government employee” by the U.S. president and leads DOGE, has framed these moves as an attempt to cut waste and increase efficiency.

At least one agency, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), has reportedly warned staff to watch what they say, type or do online.

The move has been largely overshadowed by tariff debates and constitutional concerns. But research on AI and governance suggests surveillance may erode the transparency that defines public institutions.

Now, with Musk signalling he may scale back his involvement with DOGE, questions remain about how the system will operate in his absence — and whether anyone will be tasked with dismantling it.

Disruption replaces due process

Musk has presented DOGE as a lean, tech-driven solution to government bloat — a message he has repeated in interviews and on social media. Artificial intelligence, he argues, can cut red tape, trim costs and optimize operations.

However, within federal agencies, AI has been used less to support public servants than to evaluate them — and in some cases, to eliminate them.

Since DOGE assumed control over key functions within the Office of Personnel Management in January, hundreds of federal employees have been dismissed without formal explanation. DOGE also restricted access to cloud systems and sidelined career officials.

DOGE was established by Trump through an executive order on Jan. 20, 2025 and tasked with cutting federal spending.
(Shutterstock)

Concerns over data security soon followed. In March, a federal judge barred DOGE from accessing Treasury systems, citing a “chaotic and haphazard” approach that posed a “realistic danger” of exposing sensitive financial information.

Internally, DOGE operates through tools more familiar to startups than government agencies. Staff use disappearing messages via the Signal messenger app and draft documents in Google Docs rather than approved federal platforms.

Grok, a generative AI chatbot launched by Musk in 2023, has been integrated across departments, though its tasks remain unclear.

How Doge’s AI targets workers

Earlier this year, thousands of federal employees received an email from the Office of Personnel Management asking them to provide five bullet points listing what they accomplished that week. “Failure to respond,” Musk warned on X, “will be taken as a resignation.”

The message triggered uncertainty across departments. Without clear legal guidance, many workers were left guessing whether silence would mean termination. The Department of Justice and several intelligence agencies warned staff not to respond.

Read more:
Musk’s ruthless approach to efficiency is not translating well to the U.S. government

Others, like the U.S Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Department of Transportation, instructed staff to comply with DOGE’s requests. HHS later warned responses could “be read by malign foreign actors.” The EPA distributed template responses to help staff navigate the demand.

The following week, the Office of Personnel Management clarified participation was voluntary. By then, responses had already been processed.

DOGE reportedly planned to feed the responses into a large language model to determine whether an employee was mission-critical. Musk later denied this, describing the exercise as a test “to see if the employee had a pulse.”

DOGE’S algorithms judge allegiance

According to reports, DOGE’s AI tools have now been deployed across agencies to monitor political sentiment of workers. There is no indication that these systems otherwise assess employee competence or efficacy.

Trump administration officials reportedly said some government employees have been informed that DOGE is examining staff for signs of perceived disloyalty to both the Trump administration and Musk himself.

When AI is used in this way — without transparency or clear performance frameworks — it optimizes for compliance rather than capability.

U.S. President Donald Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk talk to reporters on the South Lawn of the White House in March 2025 in Washington, D.C.
(Pool via AP)

AI designed to detect dissent offers little support for the work of public service. Rather than recognizing expertise or ethical judgment, these tools reduce complex decision-making to surface-level signs of loyalty.

Effective collaboration between humans and AI depends on clear boundaries. AI might complement the public service by identifying patterns in data, for example. Humans though must retain authority over context and judgment. When AI polices allegiance, those boundaries collapse, sidelining human skill and integrity.

AI surveillance rewrites workplace behaviour

The inherent limitations of large language models amplify these risks. These models cannot reliably read nuance, navigate ethical grey areas or understand intent. Assigning surveillance or employee evaluations to these systems invites errors.

Worse, such blunt tools force civil servants into self-censorship to avoid misinterpretation. Public service shifts from informed expertise to performative alignment.

For employees, the consequences extend beyond flawed assessments. AI surveillance deployed through tools like Grok and Signal creates uncertainty about how performance is measured and by whom.

As surveillance systems degrade psychological safety, employees disengage and become discouraged. Far from enhancing productivity, covert monitoring erodes trust in both management and mission.

This atmosphere weakens accountability. Whistle-blowing often reflects loyalty to institutional values rather than defiance. By reframing personal beliefs and integrity as disloyalty, DOGE will silence mechanisms that safeguard transparency.

AI surveillance becomes institutional

Musk recently announced his involvement at DOGE “will drop significantly”, likely beginning in May. The move is attributed in part to pressure from Republicans urging Trump to distance himself from Musk, as well as pressure from Tesla investors.

Despite his expected departure, around 100 DOGE employees — and the AI frameworks they manage — will remain embedded across federal departments. Musk’s departure may shift headlines, but it will leave structural risks embedded within federal operations.

Once governments adopt new surveillance tools, they rarely dismantle them, regardless of whether their architect stays to oversee them. With no clear formal oversight beyond presidential discretion, the surveillance system is likely to outlast Musk’s tenure.

Employees monitored for political conformity are less likely to raise concerns, report misconduct or challenge flawed directives.

As human resource protocols are bypassed and oversight is diminished, the balance could shift from policy grounded in principle to regulations grounded in algorithms. Governance risks giving way to control, which could weaken the political neutrality of the civil service. More

Talia Lavin’s Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America is an angry response to the rise of American Christianity’s far-right fringe, which she depicts as a theocratic menace to secular government and liberal freedoms.

As Lavin shows in abundant detail, the US Christian Right adheres to a worldview based around supernatural struggle between good and evil, where “demons make war every day with the better angels of the human spirit”. This is the same mentality as motivated the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, with its hysterical tales of ritual child abuse in service of the Devil. It continues to influence America’s “politics, punditry, and policy”.

Review: Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America – Talia Lavin (Hachette)

Lavin exposes the Christian Right’s political ambitions and social harms, amassing examples to illustrate the point. She cites case after case of apocalyptic fervour, domestic terrorism, patriarchal tyranny, systematic child abuse, anti-science kookiness, and connections with white supremacism.

Her central claim is that significant elements within American evangelicalism want to use state power to impose their version of a Christian social order grounded in ideas of faith, obedience and bodily purity. The Christian Right rejects any spirit of mutual tolerance between religious and secular worldviews, pursuing instead absolute political and cultural dominance.

This absolutism drives efforts to suppress ways of life viewed as rootless and degenerate, dismantle the separation of church and state, and reframe the United States as an inherently Christian nation requiring an explicitly Christian government.

Opposition options

The US is a religious outlier among Western liberal democracies. Australia and many other democratic nations are increasingly, though not entirely, post-Christian societies. Still, the US is militarily and culturally hegemonic. Events there never the leave the rest of us untouched. As its culture wars play out, we should all feel nervous about the outcomes. As Lavin warns, the Christian Right is on the march. So what is the best response?

Lavin calls for an impassioned “cacophony” of resistance to the Christian Right. “In response,” she exhorts, “we must take up a countermarch, thrill to its cacophonic strains, and rise to spurn a faith that has overrun its banks and spilled out into wild and untrammelled hate.”

This prompts a question: is such rhetoric, which has something of its own cacophonous and even fanatical sound, really the best response to America’s would-be theocrats?

Perspectives might vary. There is room for books stuffed with invective against powerful oppressors and with calls to mobilise against them. Responding to the oppressive religiosity of another time, Voltaire urged his readers to “écrasez l’infâme! – crush the infamy!

Such battle cries can fit the moment. Inevitably, however, they call to the already-converted. They have limited persuasive scope.

Pragmatically, it might be crucial to ensure the election of the Democratic Party to political office wherever possible. This would require the party to distance itself from illiberal and unpopular practices, such as identity ideology and cancel culture, which disaffect large portions of the electorate, undermine broad coalition-building, and ultimately weaken the party’s electoral prospects.

A more unifying approach on the American centre-left would prioritise traditional liberal freedoms, alongside a focus on the material welfare of everyday people: jobs, healthcare and economic security. Nothing in the text of Wild Faith suggests that Lavin understands such strategic issues or is able to imagine a more relatable brand of American liberalism.

Nor does she attempt to refute the doctrines of Christianity head-on. In that sense, Wild Faith is not a work of atheistic philosophy or a New Atheist tract. It doesn’t try to nudge along the decline of Christian religious adherence in the US in recent decades (which has possibly levelled off in the last few years).

Nor does Lavin spend much time disputing Christianity’s specific tenets: its doctrine of spiritual salvation through Christ and its stark portrayals of death, judgement, heaven and hell. These core Christian doctrines suggest that we are all in danger of eternal hellfire, but have a chance of eternal bliss. The word “eternal” here conveys the stakes for every soul. In the past, a sense of such huge consequences prompted inquisitors to burn books and heretics.

Lavin expects her readers to treat all such doctrines as absurd. She never explores Christianity’s deeper logic or opposes the religion itself. Instead, she frames members of the Christian Right as something of a rogue outgrowth.

Another obvious response to the Christian Right would be renewed defence of secularism: the once-revolutionary idea that religious authority and state power should be kept apart. Here, there is a rich tradition of thought to draw upon, much of it originating from Christian thinkers in the early centuries of European modernity during a time of religious wars. Indeed, the US as a political construct was shaped, in part, by theories of church and state separation.

On such accounts, the legitimate role of secular rulers is to protect life, liberty and property – and more generally our interests in things of this empirical world – rather than concern themselves with matters of spiritual salvation or enforce any religious moral system for its own sake. Indeed, this idea has inspired many American evangelicals. But in-principle defence of secular government is not within Lavin’s approach.

American Christians in the evangelical Protestant tradition belong to a broad spectrum of churches with varied beliefs and practices. Lavin focuses on a radical fringe, giving an impression that it is typical of the whole.

She details much horrendous conduct, including brutal forms of corporal punishment inspired by manuals such as Michael and Debi Pearl’s To Train Up a Child. She reveals survivors’ memories of “biblical discipline” to dramatic effect. Her samples are drawn from self-selecting ex-evangelicals, whose experiences may not be the norm, though even a small percentage of evangelical Protestants with vicious ideas about child-rearing could disfigure the lives of many helpless children.

‘Many individuals encounter genuine acts of kindness through their churches and find a sense of meaning and belonging.’
Paul Shuang/Shutterstock

Wild Faith could, however, bewilder more typical megachurch families in America’s suburbs, who are loving towards their children and do not recognise themselves in Lavin’s descriptions of torment and abuse. More broadly, the one-sidedness of Lavin’s narrative risks leaving us with a caricature of evangelicals. Even within strict evangelical communities, there is doubtless more at play than she recognises. Many individuals encounter genuine acts of kindness through their churches and find a sense of meaning and belonging.

All these people are exhibited in Wild Faith not as merely wrong, nor as merely dogmatic and hence beyond the reach of rational persuasion (which, indeed, some of them might be). They are shown as alien and monstrous. We needn’t adopt an attitude of what atheist Daniel Dennett called “belief in belief” – that is, rejecting religion for ourselves while commending its virtues to others – to sense that Lavin misses part of the human story.

Clash of dogmatisms

Stylistically, Wild Faith is repetitive and frequently marred by rhetorical excesses. Too often, it seems more like an apoplectic rant than a serious exposé. It’s one thing to denounce child abuse, theocracy, and other such evils. But Lavin goes much further.

For a start, she pervasively ridicules her opponents’ physical looks. Her worst flourishes along these lines – labelling former Donald Trump advisor Steve Bannon a “human yeast infection” or Kristi Noem (who has since been made Trump’s secretary of homeland security) as “South Dakota’s hard-right haircut of a governor” – veer into juvenile mockery. Again, this may appeal to the already-converted, but for anyone else a shorter, tighter, fairer book might have been more persuasive.

Lavin does not seem to recognise any of her own political commitments as being matters of genuine controversy, which gives the impression of an author who is something of an ideologue herself. It suggests that we are witnessing a clash of dogmatisms. There are numerous examples of this, but for the sake of brevity I will confine myself to issues related to abortion.

Lavin does not contemplate that some of her opponents might sincerely view abortion as murder. Yet abortion involves killing an entity that is biologically human. It does not follow automatically that embryos and fetuses are good candidates for our moral consideration – but if not, why not? This at least suggests a need for serious philosophical engagement with abortion’s critics and opponents.

Understandably enough, Lavin mourns the downfall of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court case that interpreted the US Constitution as granting extensive abortion rights. Roe v. Wade was followed by a line of cases that largely preserved its authority. It was eventually overturned by Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), leaving individual state legislatures to decide what criminal restrictions, if any, they might wish to impose.

Disastrous as this was for many women and girls in America’s red states, it is also a reminder that rights built on shaky constitutional foundations might not last forever. Roe v. Wade was always vulnerable to potential challenges, because abortion rights have no direct textual support in the US Constitution, but were established by building inferences on inferences. Indeed, Roe v. Wade encountered criticism even in the 1970s, and even from many supporters of abortion rights.

Lavin does not acknowledge any of this. Finally, she faults Democrats for failing to codify Roe v. Wade in statutory form when they were in office, but she glosses over the formidable (perhaps insurmountable) constitutional and procedural obstacles to any such move.

Activists mark the first anniversary of the US Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, June 23, 2023, Washington DC.
Nathan Howard/AAP

The verdict

Lavin raises a legitimate alarm: a theocratic faction in the US wields disproportionate influence to the point of threatening liberal democracy itself. To bolster that point, she could have cited a wave of recent Supreme Court cases that demonstrate a weakening of constitutional barriers to state-endorsed religion.

Some of these cases might be individually defensible, given their particular facts, but as they accumulate they erode the separation of church and state. By now, little remains of freedom from religion in the US – perhaps no more than protection against the most explicit forms of coercion, such as state-mandated participation in particular religious observances. This leaves unchecked subtler encroachments by religion on secular life.

That situation has been a long time coming and other authors have traversed similar ground to Lavin’s book. One might, for example, compare Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism or Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies.

Goldberg, to her credit, explicitly defends the liberal freedoms of the fundamentalists she exposes and critiques, recognising their rights even as she challenges their theocratic aims. Thus, she states that we can take “a much more vocal stand in defense of evangelical rights when they are unfairly curtailed” – a nuance absent in Lavin’s effort to fire-up supporters and vanquish enemies. Jacoby’s book, meanwhile, situates religious excesses and theocratic temptations within a broader decline of reason in American society.

Both works, though less current than Wild Faith, model a fairness that strengthens their arguments. Lavin’s book benefits from its timeliness, addressing a contemporary landscape of heightened evangelical influence, but it sacrifices objectivity and scholarly depth. It will resonate with Americans who are already frightened by the Christian Right, while alienating many conservatives, or even moderates, who might have been open to concerns about theocracy. More

In Canada, the governing centre-left Liberals had trailed the Conservatives by more than 20 points in January, but now lead by five points and are likely to win a majority of seats at next Monday’s election. Meanwhile, United States President Donald Trump’s ratings in US national polls have dropped to a -5 net approval.

The Canadian election will be held next Monday, with the large majority of polls closing at 11:30am AEST Tuesday. The 343 MPs are elected by first past the post, with 172 seats needed for a majority.

The Liberals had looked doomed to a massive loss for a long time. In early January, the CBC Poll Tracker had given the Conservatives 44% of the vote, the Liberals 20%, the left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP) 19%, the separatist left-wing Quebec Bloc (BQ) 9%, the Greens 4% and the far-right People’s 2%. With these vote shares, the Conservatives would have won a landslide with well over 200 seats.

At the September 2021 election, the Liberals won 160 of the then 338 seats on 32.6% of votes, the Conservatives 119 seats on 33.7%, the BQ 32 seats on 7.6%, the NDP 25 seats on 17.8%, the Greens two seats on 2.3% and the People’s zero seats on 4.9%. he Liberals were short of the 170 seats needed for a majority.

The Liberal vote was more efficiently distributed than the Conservative vote owing to the Conservatives winning safe rural seats by huge margins. The BQ benefited from vote concentration, with all its national vote coming in Quebec, where it won 32.1%.

On January 6, Justin Trudeau, who had been Liberal leader and PM since winning the October 2015 election, announced he would resign these positions once a new Liberal leader was elected. Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of Canada and Bank of England, was overwhelmingly elected Liberal leader on March 9 and replaced Trudeau as PM on March 14.

With the Liberals short of a parliamentary majority, parliament was prorogued for the Liberal leadership election and was due to resume on March 24. Carney is not yet an MP (he will contest Nepean at the election). Possibly owing to these factors, Carney called the election on March 23.

In Tuesday’s update to the CBC Poll Tracker, the Liberals had 43.1% of the vote, the Conservatives 38.4%, the NDP 8.3%, the BQ 5.8% (25.4% in Quebec), the Greens 2.2% and the People’s 1.4%. The Liberals have surged from 24 points behind in early January to their current 4.7-point lead.

Seat point estimates were 191 Liberals (over the 172 needed for a majority), 123 Conservatives, 23 BQ, five NDP and one Green. The tracker gives the Liberals an 80% chance to win a majority of seats and a 15% chance to win the most seats but not a majority.

The Liberal lead over the Conservatives peaked on April 8, when they led by 7.1 points. There has been slight movement back to the Conservatives since, with the French and English leaders’ debates last Wednesday and Thursday possibly assisting the Conservatives.

But the Liberals still lead by nearly five points in the polls five days before the election. With the Liberals’ vote more efficiently distributed, they are the clear favourites to win an election they looked certain to lose by a landslide margin in January.

The Liberals are estimated to win 191 seats in Canadian parliament.
Sean Kilpatrick/AAP

Carney’s replacement of Trudeau has benefited the Liberals, but I believe the most important reason for the Liberals’ poll surge is Trump. Trump’s tariffs against Canada and his talk of making Canada the 51st US state have greatly alienated Canadians and made it more difficult for the more pro-Trump Conservatives.

In an early April YouGov Canadian poll, by 64–25, respondents said the US was unfriendly or an enemy rather than friendly or an ally (50–33 in February). By 84–11, they did not want Canada to become part of the US. If Canadians had been able to vote in the 2024 US presidential election, Kamala Harris would have defeated Donald Trump by 57–18 in this poll.

Trump’s US ratings have fallen well below net zero

In Nate Silver’s aggregate of US national polls, Trump currently has a net approval of -5.4, with 50.8% disapproving and 45.4% approving. At the start of his term, Trump’s net approval was +12, but went negative in mid-March. His ratings fell to their current level soon after Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2.

Silver has presidential approval poll data for previous presidents since Harry Truman (president from 1945–53). Trump’s current net approval is worse than for any other president at this point in their tenure except for Trump’s first term (2017–2021).

Silver also has a net favourability aggregate for Elon Musk that currently gives Musk a net favourable rating of -13.6 (53.0% unfavourable, 39.3% favourable). Musk’s ratings began to drop from about net zero before Trump’s second term commenced on January 20.

G. Elliott Morris used to manage the US poll aggregate site FiveThirtyEight before it was axed. He wrote last Friday that Trump’s net approval on the economy (at -5.8) is worse than at any point in his first term. During his first term, Trump’s net approval on the economy was mostly positive, helping to support his overall ratings. More

As United States President Donald Trump’s tariff announcements wreak havoc on stock markets, concerns are mounting over the possibility of a global financial crisis.

These concerns have intensified amid reports that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by Tesla founder Elon Musk, has set its sights on the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) — the U.S. agency responsible for protecting deposits and administering bank insolvencies.

The targeting of the FDIC appears to mark an escalation in the Trump administration’s efforts to rein in regulatory agencies. In February, an executive order issued issued by Trump expanded his control over independent regulators, including the FDIC.

What sets the FDIC apart from other agencies targeted by DOGE is that it’s not under direct executive authority and it isn’t funded by the U.S. government. Instead, the FDIC is funded through levies on the banks it monitors — a structure designed to insulate it from political pressure.

An escalating campaign over regulation

In February, the FDIC cut 1,000 new and temporary staff as part of DOGE’s broader cuts to the federal bureaucracy. According to a regulatory official, DOGE has reportedly been reviewing the agency’s contracts and staffing.

In December, Trump administration officials reportedly floated abolishing the FDIC with prospective nominees for various bank regulatory appointments.

U.S. President Donald Trump holds an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House on April 9, 2025 in Washington, D.C.
(Pool via AP)

More recently, in February, DOGE and U.S. administration officials attempted to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a separate regulator that was established after the 2008 financial crisis. A judge moved to block this process in late March after finding the administration had acted “completely in violation of law.”

There are also reports suggesting the FDIC’s regulatory and intervention functions could be transferred to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). Unlike the FDIC, the OCC is under the authority of the Treasury Department, therefore lacking the same degree of operational independence. This risks further politicizing decisions on bank regulation or intervention.

Any of these reforms would be a disaster for the stability of the global financial system.

What the FDIC does and why it matters

Deposit insurers like the FDIC cover losses for deposits in the event of a bank failure. In theory, this coverage is capped at $250,000 in the U.S. and $100,000 in Canada. In practice, as the failure of Silicon Valley Bank in 2023 made clear, there is no upper limit to this insurance.

This insurance serves two main purposes. First, it protects everyday people and small businesses from risks taken by their banks. Two, it prevents panic, as it means depositors have no reason to rush to withdraw their money before a bank collapses.

The FDIC and its Canadian equivalent, the Canadian Deposit Insurance Corporation, have the authority to intervene when banks fail, ensuring they are wound down in an orderly fashion without a bailout or broader economic disruption.

During the 2008 financial crisis, few mechanisms other than taxpayer-funded bailouts existed to rescue the financial system. Post-crisis reforms, like the Dodd–Frank Act, granted the FDIC more power help address systemically important bank failures with a broader set of tools. Many of these reforms were negotiated at the international level.

U.S. President Barack Obama, centre, signs the Dodd Frank-Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in a ceremony in the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C., in 2010.
(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation plan that has supported many of DOGE’s interventions, has called to repeal these reforms. Dismantling or undermining the FDIC would strip the U.S. of one of its most effective ways to respond to a financial crisis.

The FDIC also plays a role in monitoring large banks, alongside the Federal Reserve and the OCC. At the international level, the FDIC works with foreign regulators to plan for the possibility of a crisis, and to implement solutions if one occurs.

Global financial system at risk

In 2023, the FDIC failed to prevent the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank largely due to two key reasons: deregulation enacted during the first Trump administration and staffing shortages that existed even before the February cuts.

However, once the FDIC did intervene, it was able to contain the crisis and prevent wider fallout. Weakening the FDIC, as has occurred with other U.S. federal agencies, would greatly reduce its ability to perform this function in the future. Fewer regulators means less oversight and more risk-taking behaviour by financial institutions.

Read more:
What Canada can learn from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank

Limiting the FDIC’s capacity to intervene would effectively return the U.S. to a pre-2008 world in which large banks operated with the expectation of public bailouts. This is a hazard made more dangerous by the fact that many of those banks are much larger and more interconnected than they were back then.

Foreign regulators also rely heavily on the FDIC for information on the health of U.S. banks and U.S.-based subsidiaries of foreign banks. This co-operation was crucial to ensuring a smooth resolution when global bank Credit Suisse failed in 2023. Without a reliable, independent FDIC, these relationships may fall apart, leaving the world with few options to avoid another financial meltdown.

Global financial stability depends, in large part, on U.S. leadership. But recent developments indicate the current administration no longer believes this responsibility is in its best interests. If this view extends to the FDIC’s role in regulating and resolving too-big-to-fail banks, the world faces risks far greater than just volatility in the stock market. More

Last May, on a trip to the United States, world-renowned Israeli–Jewish historian Ilan Pappe was detained by Homeland Security and held for two hours.

Aged 69 at the time, he was, among other things, asked about his views on Hamas and whether Israel’s actions on the Gaza Strip amount to genocide (he said yes). He was then asked to provide phone numbers of his contacts in the Arab–American and Muslim–American communities.

In December, months after his interrogation by Homeland Security in the US, Pappe was removed without explanation from the BBC podcast, The Conflict, about the Middle East on the day he was supposed to record his contribution.

Review: Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic – Ilan Pappe (One World)

Pappe is one of Israel’s “New Historians”, who look for the truth about the 1948 Israeli “war of independence”.

The war began when Israel declared its independence following the partition of Palestine. Though it was quickly recognised by the US, the Soviet Union and other countries, it was immediately attacked by Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. When the war ended in July 1949, the new state controlled one-fifth more territory than the original partition plan, to which it refused to return.

Palestinians mourn the 1948 war as the Nakba: their violent mass displacement and dispossession. (It created about 750,000 Palestinian refugees.)

One of the world’s most prominent scholars of the entwined histories of Israel and Palestine, Pappe is an urgent advocate of Palestinian rights and author of a groundbreaking 2007 book on the formation of the state of Israel, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

Jewish–Israeli historian Ilan Pappe is an urgent advocate of Palestinian rights.
Hossam el-Hamalawy/Flickr, CC BY

His latest book, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic, seeks to understand how a pro-Israel lobby has formed, both in his country of residence, the United Kingdom, and in Israel’s most powerful and ardent supporter, the US.

Pappe’s book is worth heeding: he is both a scholar of the Israel lobby and a recent victim of its attempt to deplatform pro-Palestinian perspectives.

An ‘aggressive’, anxious lobby

This is the story of an “aggressive” lobby that eagerly seeks to stamp out narratives of Palestinian dispossession and suffering – in case they legitimise Palestinian claims for statehood, or attract sympathy for Palestinians’ lack of political and civil rights in the Occupied Territories.

This lobbying force began in the 19th century and took on more concrete forms after 1948. Much of Pappe’s book is devoted to parliamentary lobby groups, such as Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) and Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) in the UK, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in the US. The latter spends considerable resources ensuring the US government aligns with Israeli objectives.

Donald Trump at the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) Policy Conference, 2016.
Shawn Thew/AAP

In this book, Pappe argues the aggressive Israel lobby is beset by anxiety. Few other states are so keen to “convince the world and their own citizens that their existence is legitimate”.

On the anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attacks, Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland, whose mother was born in Israel, wrote:

To most outsiders, Israel is a regional superpower, backed by a global superpower. It is strong and secure. But that is not how it looks from the inside. Israelis see their society as small – the size of New Jersey – besieged and vulnerable.

Explaining this discrepancy, he wrote that while Israel is “a state with a daunting military”, on October 7, Israeli Jews felt “powerless as their ancestors in the shtetl”.

When Pappe writes about the Israel lobby, he is not describing a monolithic entity, but multifaceted “groupings of ideas, individuals and organisations”. When he speaks of the Zionist lobby, he means individuals or groups spreading pro-Israeli propaganda, while seeking to discredit anyone “condemning or criticising Israel or Zionism”. But these groups change their composition, orientation and methods over time, Pappe writes.

His book tells a story of organisations and “committed” individuals who, from the 19th century on, worked to convince policymakers and governments of the need for a Jewish homeland.

Colonialism and apartheid

From the early 20th century, Zionism has adapted to contemporary circumstances. It presented itself as a movement for national self-determination, fitting a “minority rights” model.

Pappe draws on the work of Palestinian–American critic and activist Edward Said to argue Zionism increasingly allied itself to the story of Western modernity and progress. In doing so, he argues, it helped perpetuate Orientalism: a Western understanding of the Arab and Islamic Middle East as underdeveloped and backward.

From the late 19th century, Palestinians were perceived as “at best, an exotic spectacle and, at worst, an ecological nuisance”, Pappe writes. Recently, US President Donald Trump has dismissed Palestinians’ connection to the land in Gaza, calling it a “big real estate site”.

As antiracism has become a cultural norm in the West, Israel, like other nations, has become wary of comparisons to apartheid South Africa. However, those comparisons have existed for a long time. In recent decades, the Israel lobby has amplified claims of antisemitism as a defence against them, “weaponising anti-Semitism to procure public support for Israel”, Pappe argues.

Israel had a close military alliance with apartheid-era South Africa, before the anti-apartheid African National Congress came to power in 1994. Last year, South Africa argued at the International Court of Justice in The Hague that Israel is responsible for apartheid against Palestinians.

In a searing account, Pappe charts an intensive campaign by the Israel lobby against former UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who called for the immediate recognition of a Palestinian state.

The newspaper The Jewish Chronicle, for example, accused Corbyn of associating with “Holocaust deniers, terrorists and some outright anti-Semites”, he writes. Corbyn stepped down in 2019.

In 2020, a report by the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) found the culture within the Labour Party under Corbyn “at best, did not do enough to prevent anti-Semitism and, at worst, could be seen to accept it”.

Antisemitism in the UK Conservative Party gets much lighter treatment, Pappe argues. For example, former frontbencher Jacob Rees-Mogg described Jewish members of his party as “illuminati who are taking power to themselves”. Pappe believes the reason for this discrepancy in treatment is that Corbyn was in a position of power “that could affect British policy towards Israel”.

The Israel lobby intensively campaigned against former UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn (pictured with now prime minister Keir Starmer), Pappe writes.
Matt Dunham/AAP

The lobby and the US

In the book’s second half, Pappe shifts his attention to the US, now Israel’s major geopolitical sponsor. He argues the US is intent on exempting Israel from any reckoning with international law.

He details the emergence of the American Zionist Emergency Council, a forerunner of AIPAC that emerged in the 1950s. These organisations’ early successes included US recognition in 1947 of the UN’s Assembly Resolution 181, which called for the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, with Jerusalem as a separate, internationally governed entity.

This led to the 1948 Arab–Israeli war, which ended with an enlarged and consolidated state of Israel. Rapid US recognition of the new state was another early success for the lobby. Signature achievements include the constant flow of arms and aid to Israel. Another is the US using its position on the United Nations Security Council (and its power and influence more generally) to enable Israel to avoid complying with numerous UN resolutions.

Refugees stream from what was then Palestine on the road to Lebanon, fleeing fighting in the Galilee region in the Arab Israeli war, 1948.
AAP

However, Pappe shows the lobby has by no means always had its way. Since its inception, it has come up against the more sceptical, “pro-Arab” US State Department, which employs Middle East experts who are more sympathetic to its various populations. There have been periods of friction with Israel, including in the 1950s, when the US temporarily suspended economic aid.

Lobbying strategies developed since the 1950s are noteworthy. If the US executive branch of government wavers on unconditional support, the Israel lobby cultivates the Congress. In the UK, the lobby curries favour with MPs in the Labour and Conservative parties, including organising trips to Israel through allied groups, such as Labour Friends of Israel and Conservative Friends of Israel.

In the US, AIPAC funds the campaign of pro-Israel candidates and holds lavish conferences, high on pomp and display, at which legislators and politicians (including Trump, former president Joe Biden and former vice president Mike Pence) profess their identification with Israel.

Mike Pence addresses the annual American Israel Public Affairs Conference in Washington DC, in 2020.
Erik S. Lesseri/AAP

The lobby vs civil society

Pappe argues that the lobby’s cultivation of political elites threatens to widen the gap between political and media elites on one side, and global civil society (trade unions, churches, academic associations, non-government organisations, and activist groups) on the other. We can certainly see this happening today against the backdrop of the current war in Gaza.

In recent decades, dissent over Israel’s actions has also increased within the US Jewish community. A significant segment of the Jewish diaspora is reasserting itself and its progressive values, derived from the Jewish experience of victimisation and statelessness, in relation to Israel.

Pappe draws attention to the emergence in 1996 of Jewish Voice for Peace, which calls itself “the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world”, and the liberal Zionist lobby J Street, which works towards a democratic Jewish homeland in Israel, with a negotiated resolution, agreed to by Israelis and Palestinians.

J Street wants to normalise Israel as a democratic Jewish state committed to a two-state solution, and is uncomfortable with Israel as an occupying power. In its own words, it “rejects any proposal to have Israel and the United States forcibly displace the people of Gaza and/or occupy the Strip”.

Demonstrators from the group Jewish Voice for Peace protest inside Trump Tower in support of Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, in March 2025.
Yuki Iwamura/AAP

Pappe notes that active support for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement is strong in UK civil society. Perhaps this is due to Britain’s postcolonial guilt, after enabling the creation of the state of Israel before then largely vacating the diplomatic field. The UK Israel lobby, which is frequently given voice in the Murdoch media in particular, consistently attempts to align antisemitism and criticism of Israel in the public consciousness.

Disenchanted up close

Despite its current influence, Pappe does not think the lobby’s future as a political force is necessarily guaranteed.

Throughout the book, he insists the Israel lobby is driven, at its heart, by his country’s lack of ethical foundations. As a careful historian, he tellingly believes most of the lobby’s efforts are at war with truth itself.

The Israel lobby, for example, likes to present supporters of the rights of Palestinians as antisemitic. But in fact, they are typically driven by a sense of injustice at the Palestinians’ occupation, and an understanding of their struggle for civil and political rights.

Of course, that’s not to say antisemitism doesn’t exist. And it can exist alongside criticisms of Israel. As Dennis Altman wrote last year, “the passions aroused by Israel’s escalating response to the Hamas attacks have revived centuries-old stereotypes of Jews as both alien and all-powerful” and sometimes “the distinction between opposition to Israel and hatred of Jews becomes blurred”.

Ta Nehisi Coates.
Nina Subin

But the ranks of the disenchanted have included former US President Jimmy Carter and John Lyons, global affairs editor of the ABC and a former Middle East foreign correspondent. Lyons reflected in his book, Balcony Over Jerusalem, on once being “exposed to all the myths pushed by Israel’s lobby groups”. Now, he is a vocal advocate for the rights of Palestinian people, after covering the conflict at close quarters.

For African American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, a May 2023 trip to Palestine opened his eyes to a system he compared to both apartheid and America’s Jim Crow South.

No more plucky underdog

There can be no more talk, Pappe suggests in the final chapter, of an Israeli plucky underdog David, fighting for its life against an Arab Middle Eastern Goliath. Of course, this talk has sustained many of Israel’s supporters since the Holocaust. It relies on a conception of Jewish people as actual or potential victims, regardless of evolving power dynamics.

One of the world’s most respected Holocaust historians, Israeli-American Omer Bartov, warned in November 2023 of “genocidal intent” increased by dehumanising political rhetoric, in Israel’s actions in Gaza.

South Africa’s prosecution of the case of genocide against Israel and recent initiatives by the International Criminal Court to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are further signs the international “shield” that protects Israel from its “violations of justice and humanitarian law” has serious cracks in it, as Pappe argues in the book’s afterword.

In a January interview with Al Jazeera, Pappe described events of the past 15 months as “an attempt by a new leadership of Zionism to complete the work that they started in 1948, namely of taking over officially the whole of historical Palestine and getting rid of as many Palestinians as possible”.

He believes Israel’s military supremacy will increasingly rely on the “extreme right of the Global North”, including the Trump administration, as well as authoritarian and dictatorial regimes in the Global South.

As Israeli colonialism, suppression of the Palestinians and military activity to depopulate Palestinian areas intensifies, Pappe believes Israel will be almost entirely abandoned by what remains of progressive civil society and the educated intelligentsia, including renowned scholars of genocide whose reflections and warnings we should heed. I agree.

It is important Pappe’s book is not ignored, and that we clearly see the Israel lobby’s challenge to free expression and solidarity with the oppressed. More

The US president, Donald Trump, met with far-right activist Laura Loomer in the Oval Office last week. Loomer is a figure so extreme that she is shunned by many, even in Trump’s “make America great again” (Maga) movement.

Hours after their meeting, Trump fired a string of national security officials, including General Timothy D. Haugh, the head of the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command, apparently at Loomer’s request. Trump has said Loomer was not involved in the firings, but also praised her judgment.

Even for a president who has always listened to – and, indeed, echoed – fringe voices, the incident stood out. It served as a reminder that Trump is less constrained than ever before, and that his White House is responsive to his personal whims rather than any deliberative policy-making process.

Gone are the days of Trump’s first administration, when aides would at least try to block the most extreme conspiracy theorists from having access to the president. Now, apparently, even a four-star general (the highest officer rank) like Haugh serves only at the pleasure of figures such as Loomer.

So, who exactly is Loomer? She is, first and foremost, a media influencer – someone who made her name in far-right circles by spreading hate and conspiracy theories.

She calls herself a “proud Islamophobe” and “pro-white nationalism”. She has endorsed claims that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an “inside job”, alleged that the “deep state” manipulates the weather to influence elections, and spread conspiracy theories implying that the FBI let school shootings happen in election years to help the Democrats push gun control.

Loomer’s claims, and her open racism, have sometimes proven too much even for other prominent Maga figures, who prefer to be slightly more subtle in their messaging.

When Loomer said in 2024 that if Kamala Harris won the election, the White House “will smell like curry” and speeches will be “facilitated via a call centre,” she drew push-back from the now vice-president, J.D. Vance, and far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has previously called Loomer ‘mentally unstable’ and a ‘documented liar’.
Michael Reynolds / EPA

But Trump seems to have appreciated Loomer’s commentary all the same. The president has repeatedly praised her in public and backed her unsuccessful run as a Republican candidate for a US House of Representatives seat in Florida in 2020.

Like many other Maga media figures, Loomer has realised that her antics give her direct exposure to a television-obsessed president, and that this exposure can be transformed into access and, ultimately, political power.

Loomer, who is only 31, is entirely a product of the Trump era. As an adult, practically the only conservatism she has known is the conservatism of Maga – openly prejudiced, vindictive, and more a stew of grievance and hatred than a coherent political platform.

Insofar as Loomer advocates for particular policies, they are a crude channeling of these impulses. She has campaigned for a ten-year immigration moratorium and has called for the death penalty for Democrats who oppose Trump.

On a podcast in June 2024 about whether Democrats should be prosecuted and jailed if Trump wins the election over alleged “unscrupulous behaviour,” Loomer said: “Not just jailed, they should get the death penalty. You know, we actually used to have the punishment for treason in this country.”

But the chief way in which Loomer personifies modern American conservatism is her single-minded loyalty to the president. Loyalty to Trump, and fury at the disloyalty of others, is the central component of her identity.

Deep loyalty

This loyalty seems to be both a deeply felt emotion and also a shrewd way of recommending herself to the president. And, more than anything else, it was what landed her in the Oval Office last week.

Loomer’s apparent recommendation that Trump fire a slew of national security officials had its roots in this obsession with loyalty. Many people serving in national security positions in the Trump administration are not card-carrying members of the Maga movement.

This reflects the fact that such positions require deep expertise developed over long apolitical careers in the civil service or military. As the product of a movement that disdains expertise and rationality, few Maga die-hards have the requisite knowledge to do these jobs.

For Loomer, such figures pose a threat. It ought to be emphasised that this is not because people like General Haugh have ever shown open disloyalty to Trump. It is merely that they are not, like Loomer, his fanatical adherents. In her worldview, anything less is unacceptable.

General Haugh was dismissed after Loomer had accused him and his deputy of disloyalty.
Jim Lo Scalzo / EPA

Trump seems to agree, which opens the way to more firings in the future. Sensing her opening, Loomer has declared that she will establish an organisation dedicated to investigating executive branch officials for suspected disloyalty to the president.

Government officials will have to live in fear of being targeted, creating a chilling atmosphere in which pushing back against Trump’s whims becomes impossible.

Loomer’s growing influence also suggests that the Trump White House is becoming more chaotic and unpredictable.

The president’s aides have long claimed that the White House would be run in a controlled fashion this time around, with clear chains of command and questionable outsiders kept away. Loomer’s presence in the Oval Office – at Trump’s personal request – blows that story away.

For her part, Loomer seems to have what she has always wanted: the president’s attention. Where might she direct it next? More

Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in their own Land, which explored the motivations and resentments of working-class conservatives in Louisiana, was named one of six books to help understand Donald Trump’s win by the New York Times when he was first elected president, in 2016. (Another was Hillbilly Elegy, by now vice president JD Vance, published just a few months earlier.)

Since then, Californian progressive sociologist Hochschild has been struggling to understand the appeal of Donald Trump: particularly to white, working-class men, once a strong Democratic constituency. No writer has worked harder to grasp the gut-level appeal that saw Trump win two elections – and in the process, convert the Republican Party into his personal fiefdom.

Review: Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame and the Rise of the Right – Arlie Russell Hochschild (The New Press)

The puzzle is greatest when one contrasts the current billionaire cabinet with the fact much of Trump’s support comes from people who are objectively worse off under his policies – including tariffs. Last week, Oxfam America called them “an attack on the global working class” that will harm working-class families in the United States and “inflame inequality”.

Much of Trump’s support comes from working-class people objectively worse off under his policies – including tariffs.
Michael Arellano/AAP

In Strangers in their own Land, Hochschild called this “the Great Paradox”. Stolen Pride returns to many of that book’s questions, but in a different era – and a US that seems more fragmented, and far angrier than it was in 2016.

Hochschild explores the world of Pikeville, Kentucky, a poor, overwhelmingly white, Trump-supporting city in the heart of Appalachia: in the “whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the country, a region that had rapidly shifted from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party”.

The American dream’s broken promise

One of Hochschild’s subjects is James Browning, a recovering drug user whose hands are tattooed and covered in rings. “There you have it” he says, “I have a shame hand and a pride hand.” This sums up the basic argument of Stolen Pride.

Arlie Russell Hochschild.
Mark Leong/New Press

“Pride and shame,” she writes, “signal the juncture between the identity we hold out to the world, and how the world responds to our identity.” The men she speaks to desperately need a sense of pride, but too often find their failures are the cause of deep shame. The American Dream, after all, teaches them every individual can make it, inherently implying failure is due to individual weakness.

Many of the men she speaks to have experienced unemployment, domestic breakups, jail, alcoholism and drug abuse. (She even manages to speak to one current jail inmate.) Kentucky has one of the highest rates of opioid addiction in the United States – and despite Trump’s attacks on Mexico and Canada, the doctor-prescribed drugs some were addicted to appear to be domestically manufactured.

So many of the men Hochschild interviewed talk of the balance between shame and pride, I began to wonder if they were prompted. On reflection, I suspect this represents Hochschild’s careful selection from a series of very extensive interviews, conducted over roughly six years.

Her emphasis is almost entirely on the men in Pikeville, though a majority of white women also voted for Trump. I would love to see Hochschild explore this further. That so many women can support a convicted sexual predator in a country obsessed with sexual behaviour is one of the mysteries of contemporary American politics.

Hochschild interviewed residents of Pikeville, Kentucky, a poor, overwhelmingly white, Trump-supporting city in the heart of Appalachia.
Howder Family/Flickr, CC BY-NC

By 2021, many Americans – and most Republicans – believed Trump’s claims that he had really won the 2020 election. They saw the rioters at the Capitol on January 6 as heroes defending American democracy. In Trump’s claim the election was stolen, many of those Hochschild interviews saw parallels to what they believed had been stolen from them, by economic and cultural upheavals.

Importantly, many of her respondents saw Trump as a bully — but a bully who stood up for them, against what they perceived as urban liberal elites. When Hillary Clinton spoke of his supporters as “a basket of deplorables”, she reinforced the grievances of people consistently looked down on as “hillbillies” and “rednecks” by people they identified as Democratic elites.

Many saw themselves in Trump’s stolen election, which mirrored what they felt had been stolen from them.
Ross D Franklin/AAP

How ‘deep stories’ inform politics

For Hochschild, there are underlying emotional narratives, which she calls “deep stories”, that inform our political positions.

In Strangers in their Own Land, these were identified as a sense of being overtaken by groups, usually educated women and Black people, who benefited from programs of affirmative action. The second Trump administration’s crusade against “DEI” is playing directly to these grievances. In Stolen Pride, this feeling is strengthened by the sense liberal elites are undermining both traditional values and the ability for individuals to succeed.

Eastern Kentucky is coal country, and Clinton’s ill-worded election-trail claim she would “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business” was a major factor in swinging voters towards Trump. For men who took pride in their work, the collapse of the coal industry produced a sense of shame: strengthened by a strong belief individuals are to blame for their own misfortunes.

Pikeville was also the site of a neo-Nazi march in April 2017, the forerunner of the tragic Unite the Right march in Charlottesville later that year, which resulted in one death and multiple injuries.

Much of the book skilfully explores the preparations for and reactions to the Pikeville march, which seemingly passed without incident. Some 100 white nationalists turned up and were outnumbered by counter protesters, As Hochschild writes, “Very few Pikeville locals were involved on either side”.

Much of the book explores the 2017 Pikeville forereunner to the tragic Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, later that year.
Tasos Katopodis/AAP

Perhaps the most fascinating figure in Hochschild’s book, and evidence of her skill in persuading the most unlikely people to open up in interviews, is Matthew Heimbach, who led the 2017 Pikesville march, identified as a proud Nazi and co-founded the now-defunct neo-Nazi party, Traditionalist Worker Party.

He also co-planned the Charlottesville march, where he railed against “white genocide” and was sued (with other members of the TWP) for his role in it on behalf of Charlottesville victims. He was found guilty on charges of civil conspiracy in 2021.

“Some years later”, he reveals some of his core beliefs are shaken, especially his attitude toward Black Americans, whom he recognises as often sharing the same sense of dispossession that had fuelled his own anger. “I love Russia and I love Putin,” he told Hochschild, “so I looked into moving there.” As Hochschild remarks: “It seemed that Adolf Hitler was to be replaced in his pantheon by Vladimir Putin.”

Transcending the gulf?

Pikesville is also the home of America’s most famous family feud, between the Hatfields and the McCoys. The feud, which lasted many decades from the late 19th century, “began as a dispute over a stolen pig” and “ended as the longest and fiercest clan fight in the nation”. It has been the basis for a dozen movies, virtually all unmemorable. In 2017, a member of the reconciled clans said if they could settle their differences, “there has to be a way for Americans to get back together as one”.

In the last section of the book, Hochschild looks for ways to transcend the apparent gulf that separates blue and red America. Reading the book after Trump’s return to power, this felt sadly inadequate. Yes, as she points out, most voters are more moderate than the politicians on either side. Sadly, this is not sufficient protection against the rise of the authoritarian plutocracy that now seems to have a firm grip on Washington.

Hochschild wrote this book during the Biden administration and the lead-up to the 2024 elections. I assume she finished it before Trump named Vance as his vice president: a man who first came to prominence with his own account of Appalachian pride and shame. Hochschild doesn’t discuss his Hillbilly Elegy, though it is listed in her references.

Hochschild brilliantly captures the pain of men who feel left behind and conveys something of life in rural Kentucky that goes beyond easy stereotypes. I could feel empathy for many of the people she comes across. But I was unpersuaded there is much room for optimism that the appeal of Trump, and those who follow him, will easily be defeated. More

While Australia was busy defending the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme against threats from the United States in recent weeks, another issue related to the supply and trade of medicines was flying under the radar.

Buried on page 19 of the Trump’s administration’s allegations of barriers to trade was a single paragraph related to Australia’s access to generic medicines. These are cheaper alternatives to branded medicines that are no longer under patent.

The US is concerned about how much notice their drug companies have that Australia will introduce a generic version of their product. Once a single generic version of a medicine is listed on the PBS, the price drops. The US argues that lack of advance notice is a barrier to trade.

There is pressure for Australia to emulate aspects of the US system, where drug companies can delay generic copies of their medicines by 30 months.

If the US plays hardball on this issue, perhaps in return for other concessions, this could delay Australia’s access to cheaper generic drugs.

It would also mean significant pressure on Australia’s drug budget, as the government could be forced to pay for the more expensive branded versions to ensure supply.

What’s the current process?

Drug companies use patents to protect their intellectual property and prohibit other manufacturers from copying the drug. The standard patent term in Australia is 20 years, but the time a product is protected by patents can be extended in a number of ways. When patents expire, other companies are able to bring generic versions to market.

A generic manufacturer wanting to market its drug in Australia must apply to the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) for regulatory approval. Before approval is granted, the generic company must provide a certificate to the TGA that states either:

a) that the product will not infringe a valid patent, or

b) that it has notified the patent-holder of its intention to market the product.

The certificate can be provided after the TGA has evaluated the generic – before it grants approval.

If the generic company chooses option “a”, the manufacturer of the patented product may not find out the competing product is going to be launched until after the TGA has approved it.

The patent-holder can then apply for a court order to temporarily stop the generic from coming to market, while legal battles are fought over patent-related issues.

However, if the first generic has already launched and been added to the PBS, it triggers an automatic 25% price drop. This affects all versions of the drug, including the patented product.

In Australia, patented drug companies that try to delay generics by taking legal action without good reason can face penalties and be required to pay compensation.

Patented drug companies don’t like this system. They want to know as early as possible that a generic is planning to launch so they can initiate legal action and prevent or delay generic entry and the associated price reductions.

Is Australia’s system consistent with our trade obligations?

Australia introduced its patent notification system at the request of the US, to comply with the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA). The World Trade Organization doesn’t require patent notification.

Australia’s system is different to that of the United States. But it’s consistent with the rules negotiated between the two countries.

US drug companies have long argued Australia’s system is a barrier to trade. They want Australia to change it to be more like the US system.

Why is the US arguing this is a barrier to trade?

The Trump Administration’s 2025 report on foreign trade barriers states “US and Australian pharmaceutical companies have expressed concerns about delays” in the patent notification process.

The report also mentions US concerns about the potential for penalties and compensation when a patent owner takes legal action against a generic company.

This report reflects long-standing concerns of the US pharmaceutical industry. In March, its drug makers trade association wrote to the US trade representative complaining that “lack of adequate notification” is an unfair trade practice. It argued this creates uncertainty for patent-holders, prevents resolution of patent challenges before generics enter the market, and penalises patented-drug companies for trying to protect their rights.

Medicines Australia, which represents the Australian subsidiaries of many big patented drug makers, echoes these concerns.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says he won’t use the PBS as a bargaining chip in trade negotiations with the US.
Lukas Coch/AAP

What does the US want instead?

The US patent notification system is much more favourable to the patented drug companies than Australia’s.

In the US, the generic company must notify the patented drug company within 20 days of filing an application for approval.

Then, within 45 days of receiving the notification, the patent-holder can ask the regulator to impose a 30-month delay on approval for the generic.

This means there is an automatic 30-month delay on the launch of the generic, unless patents expire in the meantime or the court decides earlier that valid patents aren’t being infringed.

What could happen if Australia bowed to pressure from the US?

Changing Australia’s system to be more like the US would delay generics entering the market in Australia and keep the price of drugs higher for longer.

The quicker generics can be added to the PBS, the less the government pays. When the first generic is listed on the PBS, a 25% price cut is applied to all versions of the product, including the patented version.

Over time, as more generics get added, prices continue to fall. Having plenty of generic competition can eventually result in prices lower than the PBS co-payment, resulting in savings for consumers.

In the longer term, lost savings from timely listing of generics on the PBS would reduce value for money and add cost pressure.

In time, it could also delay savings for consumers from drugs priced below the PBS co-payment.

Both major parties are saying they won’t use the PBS as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the US over tariffs. They also need to resist pressure to slow down access to generic drugs. More