Our most read reporting; capital flooding to AI and what it means for the everyday economy; threats to democracy, freedom and human rights, and the hard work of making the future we want.
2025 has been a year of rising prices, nonlinear threats, moral decay, and honest courage, as people facing brutal injustice have resisted with dignity and humanity. We have also seen an unprecedented defunding of human development, humanitarian aid, public health institutions, and scientific research. Policy decisions made by the new federal administration in Washington may have already led directly to more deaths than any decisions taken in any year, since the Second World War.
Tragedies unfolding around the world have worsened, while an apparent speculative stock market bubble—driven by record spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure and by a Trojan horse strategy for marketing and data collection, where people, industries, and even government agencies around the world, find themselves using embedded chatbots from companies they never authorized to interact with their data—could be putting the entire mainstream economy at risk.
2025 saw conclusive evidence that human industry is breaching planetary boundaries, eroding natural capital, and causing ever more costly climate disruption. The US started the year with its second major climate catastrophe in 4 months that was projected to cost $250 billion over time. Millions of people lost their lives to air pollution, while civilians experienced worsening waves of mass killing in conflicts on three continents.
MOST READ
‘The largest IT security breach in history’
Our most read article of 2025 covered the warnings by data security and good governance experts about the risks to personal privacy and national finances and data integrity, from an unprecedented feeding of hundreds of millions of people’s data into still early-stage AI systems.
The Atlantic had reported that IT security specialists who worked on highly sensitive data systems accessed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) at Treasury, Personnel Management, NOAA, and other agencies, describe that access as: “the largest data breach and the largest IT security breach in our country’s history—at least that’s publicly known.”
Another report, from WIRED Magazine, cited an email from the Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service recommending “that DOGE members be placed under insider threat monitoring” and warning: “Continued access to any payment systems by DOGE members, even ‘read only,’ likely poses the single greatest insider threat risk the Bureau of the Fiscal Service has ever faced.”
EPA cancellation of climate policy will cost trillions of dollars & worse
Our next most-read piece focused on the known projected costs of letting climate disruption run wild.
Climate change is not theoretical; it is not an idea or a belief. It is happening right now, in every country and region, and it is already imposing massive damage, loss of life, and cost. The strain on public budgets is already enormous and rapidly worsening.
- From 1980 to 1989, the U.S. spent roughly $220 billion on all natural disasters costing $1 billion or more, combined.
- Between mid-2024 and January 2025, the U.S. experienced two disasters—Hurricane Helene and the Los Angeles fires—that are each projected to cost $250 billion over time.
- More than 20% of the total cost of major disasters since 1980 has come in the last three years. This rate of cost increase is not sustainable.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Financial Stability Oversight Council have both found that unchecked climate change poses a structural threat to the mainstream economy and to national stability, due to numerous cascading risks that will affect households, businesses, and the entire financial system.
HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
USAID delivered for the United States & for global security & wellbeing
The U.S. Agency for International Development had built an incomparable reputation, and real and lasting influence, for the United States, while saving tens of millions of lives and helping to fund important institutions at home that improve lives and livelihoods. Its sudden defunding and dismantling was conservatively estimated to have taken at least 150,000 lives in just two months of non-delivery of contracted aid.
Removing USAID from the arena of local development and world affairs, Donald Trump and Elon Musk handed an incredible amount of power and influence to China, which is pursuing its own less democratically minded version of global development leadership. They are also opening the door to Vladimir Putin’s regime, which has sought to leverage security threats to establish mercenary footholds in key regions.
The dismantling of USAID has created a global humanitarian emergency
An independent, peer-reviewed study found USAID had saved 92 million lives over just two decades. No other form of national investment could do as much to build constructive bonds of trust between nations. And yet, the entire annual budget of USAID, prior to the Trump administration cuts, amounted to less than $80 per person in the U.S.
A careful study finds cuts to USAID investment in humanitarian response, disease prevention, hunger relief, and development, had, by early December, caused 671,667 deaths (218,092 adults and 453,575 children). It is projected 14 million people will die by 2030, as a direct result of the elimination of USAID and other US-funded humanitarian relief and development efforts.
BOTS VS. PEOPLE
What is going on with artificial intelligence?
If little to no publicly available information is fully sourced, fact-checked, and subject to human judgment, even those most skilled at critical thinking might have a hard time sifting through nonsense to detect the most reliable facts and evidence about the state of the world.
In 2025, we have seen the Trump administration—with urging from Elon Musk and other owners of AI services and corporate government contractors—deploying gen AI services to sort through government databases and cull programs and jobs. There have been numerous warnings about the risks inherent in doing so, if only because such systems require sensitive data be transferred over the open internet to third-party servers.
In June, a scathing dissent from Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned that such access to personal data by AI systems likely violates the 1974 Privacy Act and could pose grave and irreversible threats to personal privacy and data security.
Machines do not know what they are doing
There are growing concerns that reliance on AI systems will make people less literate—both in actual terms (less familiar with using letters and words to record, communicate, and access knowledge) and in terms of critical thinking. People who have lost the ability to seek and recall facts and evidence, or to critically parse the flow of information around them, will be less sovereign citizens and so human rights and freedoms—and the quality of applied scientific knowledge—will be degraded.
Each new claim made by those developing frontier technologies must be weighed against:
- How much fantasy is there in the metaphorical language used to assert the value of a given innovation?
- What comparative advantages are being lost for each one that might be gained?
- Who, precisely, is affected by these changes, and how widespread and absolute are they?
- Can we trace the provenance of claims of fact, or is that capacity being erased?
- If the only boundary-setting tool we have is code, do we still know how to write it, or are new AI systems “inventing” a new language beyond our reach?
DEMOCRACY AND HUMAN RIGHTS
‘No Kings’ protests unite 7 million Americans in defense of democracy
The October 18 No Kings protest is now being widely reported as the largest single day of protest in US history. It is worth noting, however, that Britannica cites the first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, as the largest single day of organized civic gathering for a single cause.
Americans agree they do not want a tyrant at the head of their government. To the average American, nothing delegitimizes a leader more than the lust for unreviewable power. As Jamelle Bouie writes, the massive nationwide protests “send a signal to the most disconnected parts of the American public that the president is far from as popular as he says he is… a clear warning to those institutions under pressure from the administration: Bend the knee and lose our business and support.”
The US is living through an administrative coup
Presidents cannot make new law through executive orders, and they cannot use them to exert authorities not granted to the President by the Constitution or by laws compliant with the Constitution. And yet:
- Trump has attempted to void the Constitutionally guaranteed citizenshipof some Americans, despite that action being strictly prohibited by the 14th Amendment.
- Trump is attempting to seize control of all appropriated funds, despite Article I of the Constitution granting sole power of the purse to Congress and those appropriated funds being allocated as a matter of law.
- This attempt to seize all appropriated funds is tied to the crisis surrounding Elon Musk taking over federal personnel records, the Treasury payments system, and USAID.
- Trump is further usurping Congressional authority by imposing tariffs on Canada, without any of the emergency conditions the narrowly delegated tariff authority would require.
In each case, the President is asserting powers that do not exist. Many of Trump’s orders are—to use the words of one federal judge—”blatantly unconstitutional“. Others might appear to fall within the authority granted to the President by law, but violate specific statutes.
THE FUTURE WE WANT
The Resilience Economy is Emerging
Communities everywhere need risk reduction and resilience measures.
Green infrastructure—including soil biomass and well-rooted forests, mangroves in coastal areas prone to tropical storms, and mountain glaciers that serve as stable headwaters for healthy watersheds—is essential for maintaining human security and prosperity. Costs of climate inaction are reaching record levels, so even governments that wish to deprioritize climate action are spending more than ever.
An October 2025 report titled Returns on Resilience found that focused, evidence-based, proactive investment in adaptation and resilience measures will create 280 million new jobs, globally, over the next decade. The market for adaptation and resilience services is expected to reach $1.3 trillion per year by 2030, and vulnerable areas could see a significant economic boost—of 15% or more—as a result.
A new tone for our time: ‘evil will not prevail’
Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost was named Pope on the anniversary of the fall of fascism in Europe. As an Augustinian friar and missionary, he has sought to manifest a tradition in which evidence, truth, learning, and knowledge, are tied to service. In Augustinian teaching, science is an ethical duty, for all of us. We have a duty never to stop asking questions, lest we let assumptions and prejudices do violence to the innocent.
Pope Leo XIV is known by those he served among as a servant leader who was always grateful for the opportunity to live and work among them. In his first remarks as Pope, he thanked those he served with in Chiclayo for always accompanying him on the moral journey of learning and service, and he called on all Catholics to be allies of those in need, and to be part of the joyous work of ensuring that “evil will not prevail.”
FURTHER READING
On the need for civic renewal
- What it means to make America great
- War on free speech & due process escalates
- The most dangerous words
- Civic renewal is the key to solving existential challenges
On science, discovery & wellbeing
- ACCESS to GOOD: The recipe for enduring prosperity
- Advancing science is a Constitutional priority for the U.S.
- Shutting down climate science weakens the United States
- Banned pesticides have been found in clouds
On using technology wisely
- Leading researchers warn we may soon be unable to supervise AI
- Thousands of leaders & innovators call for prohibition on artificial superintelligence
- Questions persist about AI rights & safety
- Adaptive design thinking can rewire systems for success
We hope you will keep reading The Navigator in 2026, and spread the word. Our world is capable of uplifting and liberating all of humankind; we need good information to make it work.
Subscribe for free to receive new posts. Spread the word, or make your own pledge, if you can, to support The Navigator.
Geodesiq Strategies 