It was strange and delightful for my social feeds this week to be filled with aurora from all over the United States! It seems that many of you got a better show than what I typically see in Iceland. That same solar storm showed up here too, but unfortunately not until the middle of the night, so I missed it.
This was my last week of classes for the semester and now I’m in a bit of a crunch mode as I study for two exams and write two research papers. This led me to realize how long it’s been since I took a test, which then made me feel old. I had to take the GRE for my application to Carnegie Mellon, but that was 20 years ago and my Masters in Interaction Design was entirely project and thesis-based. Which means my last time taking a test for a class was at Western Michigan in the late ’90s.
I have two exams to prepare for, both of which are formats I’ve never experienced before. My Theories of International Relations class is a 3-hour, closed book, essay-driven exam — four questions, four essays. Whereas my class on Iceland’s Foreign Policy is an oral exam, where I’ll pick a topic out of a hat and speak on it for 15 minutes. My class on Leadership in Small States had writing assignments every week, which were compiled and handed in instead of an exam.
The research papers are for my Arctic classes. Each are 5,000 words and framed around questions of my own choosing:
- Introduction to Arctic Studies: What does the controversy over drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge reveal about competing American visions of the Arctic?
- Arctic Politics in International Context: How are subsea cable networks reshaping sovereignty and geopolitical power in the Arctic?
I shouldn’t be surprised, but this week I saw that Russ Vought has a new tactic to shutter the CFPB for good. It’s based on a bad-faith reading of the language in the Dodd-Frank Act that describes how the agency should be funded. The language in question directs the CFPB budget to come from the “combined earnings of the Federal Reserve System,” and Vought wants to interpret earnings to mean “profit” instead of “revenue.” They see this as some kind of genius move where they can redefine these terms and — proof! — CFPB has no budget and has to shut down, without Congressional approval. It’s not a new idea, they tried to kill the CFPB in 2024 with the same tactic. But back then the Bureau could fight back, whereas now it’s a self-inflicted blow by a criminal executive intent on destroying anything that actually helps people.
I know that CFPB is already effectively dead; every one of my colleagues has been fired or retired. But still, maintaining even the shell of an agency might have helped it come back to life under a new administration. Almost every week I read an article about some issue where people are hurting, that mentions how there’s nobody left to help now that the CFPB has been shuttered. Most recently it was this story in Bloomberg about zombie second mortgages, a topic that was getting a lot of scrutiny last year at CFPB.