I went to a restaurant recently that was for many years an old favorite. Then a fire destroyed much of the kitchen and spoiled the dining room. When it reopened after six years, I returned to find, basically, a new restaurant.

No honey-molasses bread. No famous tahini salad dressing. Servers learning the floor plan on the fly. A kitchen still yearning for consistency. The host welcomed me inside like an old friend, and invited me to indulge in the sameness that had returned. I left after my meal hoping for a different kind of welcome: “We’re glad you are back, but we are new.”

I’ve been thinking about that a lot, because 2025 was a year of transparency — or at least in my line of work, it should start an era of transparency.

In journalism, we are professional find-something-outers. We collect sources and cultivate expertise. And in that process, we put ourselves out there: Here’s who I am, here’s what I know, here’s what I don’t, and here’s how I know it.

Leaning in to those opportunities requires what I call “radical transparency,” and I tried that in different ways this year. I did a lot of social video (and I’m hoping to do more next year), because asking an audience to trust your reporting means showing up in person to share it. I did live-chats with my Washington Post colleagues. I jumped on stage at company events to share how we do what we do. In one case, we shared in real time how we were covering one of the biggest stories of the year, the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. I toyed around with this newsletter, which I’m aiming to use consistently in the year ahead.

In that spirit of that radical transparency, here’s four stories I covered in 2025, and how I’m thinking of covering them in 2026.

📈 The economy, stupid

President Donald Trump and Republicans find themselves in a bit of bind here. Trump ran for a second term specifically conditioning voters to think only as consumers. He asked them to buy a product — his economy and lower prices — that he’d deliver on “Day One,” a la Amazon Prime or fast food.

Well, that has not happened. And in some cases, the opposite has occurred. The excess inflation in the U.S. economy is solely due to Trump’s tariffs, Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell said this month.

So what is the Trump administration to do? How do they satisfy voters ahead of the midterm elections when those voters have been specifically conditioned to expect instant results?

Answer: I’m not sure they can.

I spent much of the year covering Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.” I read the thing — nearly 1,000 pages of cumbersome legislative text — at least three times to deliver the comprehensive summary of what’s in it and how it will shape our country.

I partnered with experts to definitively run the math and show what the new law will mean for your personal economy. How much better or worse off will you be in real dollars and cents?

It’s been nearly half a year since the bill passed, and Republicans are telling voters to hold on a little longer to see its effects. I traveled with Vice President JD Vance to Allentown, Pa., to hear him sell the argument.

The results were mixed: “I promise you there is no person more impatient to solve the affordability crisis than Donald J. Trump,” Vance told voters days after Trump called affordability concerns “a hoax.”

“It’s hard to tell the American public, ‘Trust us, it’s coming,’” Alfredo Ortiz, CEO of the Trump-aligned Job Creators Network, told me.

💥 A bonus to that trip: Vance took questions, and took mine about White House chief of staff Susie Wiles calling him a conspiracy theorist. Take a look at Vance’s answer.

@jacobbogage

“Sometimes I am a conspiracy theorist, but I only believe the conspiracy theories that are true,” Vice President JD Vance told me. #vance #maga #fyp

🏛 The MAGA government

I was at a family memorial luncheon for my Bubbe when a source shared a tip that defined much of my year: DOGE operatives at the IRS were pushing for access to confidential tax information on every person, business and nonprofit in the country.

I left my Bubbe’s memorial early (with the blessing of my mother) to report the scoop.

The next day, I reported that the acting head of the Social Security Administration quit when the same thing happened at her agency. Trump installed a lower-ranking official sympathetic to his administration to facilitate DOGE’s access.

That began a course of reporting about how the Trump administration was using a whole-of-government approach to accomplish an aggressive “mass deportation” campaign and slash social safety net benefits in the name of largely fictionalized “waste, fraud and abuse.”

I scooped that DOGE had hopes to cross-reference taxpayer data against federal benefits rolls, creating a massive data pool that could be used to cut off access to student loan and grant programs and anti-hunger assistance.

Outside of DOGE, the Department of Homeland Security asked the IRS for confidential tax information on people the administration believed to be in the country illegally. The leader of the IRS — the third leader of the agency in five months at the time — quit over the eventual agreement. Another IRS chief left the agency after clashing with administration officials over the program, too.

Months later, a federal judge blocked the data sharing arrangement, holding that it violated taxpayers’ rights and could lead to their “illegal removal from the United States.”

DHS was aiming for 1 million deportations in the first year of Trump’s second term, I reported. The White House came up about 400,000 short, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in December.

Her department purchased its own fleet Boeing 737 passenger jets to allow immigration enforcement officials to conduct deportation flights without private contractors.

Even the U.S. Postal Service joined the effort, using photos of mail items and digital tracking tools to aid in the location and detention of suspected undocumented immigrants.

Every administration tries for whole-of-government approaches to attack policy priorities. The Trump administration is perhaps the most potent recent example, even if many of those approaches violated, or at least came close to violating, federal law.

My colleagues and I expect significant turnover among Cabinet officials in the second year of Trump’s term, especially if Republicans continue to poll poorly ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. How agencies collaborate on these priorities could determine which Cabinet secretaries go, or stay.

⚔️ The MAGA wars

If the Constitution has anything to say about, Donald Trump is a lame duck. And the race to define who will lead the MAGA movement when he leaves the White House is already underway.

The GOP is split on how to handle trade: Trump counts “tariff” as one of his “favorite words,” while conservative traditionalists extoll the virtue of free markets. The Supreme Court — three of the nine justices Trump appointed — also appears skeptical of Trump’s import taxes.

On health care, Trump wants to send the subsidies that prop up Obamacare to individual households, a proposal that experts warn could send insurance markets into a death spiral. Congressional Republicans say they support the idea, but refuse to legislate on it, leaving the GOP’s health care plan right where Trump left it on a presidential debate stage: “concepts of a plan.”

There’s a broader battle, too, between William Buckley-style conservatism and the populist ultra-MAGA movement of Tucker Carlson (who, coincidentally, named his son for Buckley). Much of that is playing out at the Heritage Foundation, the longtime policy brain of the GOP that alternately calls itself the “mothership” and “battleship” of “The Movement.” The group was behind the Project 2025 governing playbook for Trump’s second term.

I reported on a controversial economist from the MAGA side of Heritage who Trump nominated, then dropped, to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

I scooped on a draft Heritage position paper that called for a “Manhattan Project” for more babies. One person familiar with the project called it “social engineering.”

“That paper is not a compromise between the limited government folks and the big government folks,” the person told me. “It is an outright steamrolling of the limited government folks.”

I followed that with the inside story of the revolt within Heritage after Kevin Roberts, the group’s president, defended an interview Carlson conducted with Nick Fuentes, the antisemite Holocaust denier whose sway has grown on the far right. Heritage staffers quit the organization en masse over the controversy.

All these stories — from tariffs to health care to Heritage — are connected around the struggle for the future of American conservatism, I conversation I expect to take center stage in 2026.

📬️ Yes, I’m still writing about the Postal Service

I started writing about the U.S. Postal Service during the covid-19 pandemic, and I’ve been the only mainstream reporter covering the agency in any detail since. The Postal Service isn’t part of my daily coverage anymore, but it’s still important to me, and the country.

I wrote around this time last year that I would watch how the independent officials at the Postal Service — the postmaster general, the chief postal inspector, the USPS’s governing board, the inspector general — would handle political attacks on the agency. Well, we got our answer.

Trump’s team before the president took office considered trying to force out the postmaster general, Louis DeJoy. To protect him and the agency, the governors prepared to take Trump to court if he attempted to seize control of the Postal Service.

Ultimately, Trump mostly got his way. In March, DeJoy resigned after clashes with DOGE operatives at the mail agency. In May, the postal governors hired David Steiner, a member of FedEx’s board, as the next postmaster general. Trump interviewed Steiner and other leading candidates, and told postal industry officials that Steiner was his pick.

During his first term, Trump raged about the rates the Postal Service charged Amazon to deliver billions of packages, and demanded the agency quadruple its prices on e-commerce shippers like “the everything store.” (Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, also owns The Washington Post, my employer.)

Steiner appears poised to do just that, announcing package shippers must bid against one another for access to the mail system. The move is likely to lead Amazon, the agency’s single largest client, to cut ties with the Postal Service and in-source its delivery business.

The Postal Service is in a world of financial hurt. Losing in the neighborhood of $6 billion a year could be an existential threat to the agency, and, in turn, the untold number of businesses and households that rely on a universal mail service.

Any questions?

A recurring feature of the questions I want to answer as I keep reporting. Got questions you want me to chase? Email me: [email protected].

• The Supreme Court appears likely to rule that Trump cannot unilaterally impose tariffs using emergency economic authority? Will Trump abandon his tariff push after such a ruling, or seek alternative ways to tax imports?

• Will the Trump administration pay refunds owed to businesses or individuals that paid tariffs the Supreme Court deems unlawful?

• How vigorously will the White House pursue a policy of issuing “tariff rebate” checks? Is there concern that policy could backfire by acknowledging that tariffs contribute to inflation?

• How will taxpayers’ behavior change (or not change) when they see the effects of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” on their 2026 tax balances and refunds? Will policies like no taxes on tips or no taxes on overtime be popular in terms of their utilization?

• How will the IRS perform during tax season?

• Will Latino and Hispanic taxpayers file taxes or claim the benefits to which they are entitled if immigration officials continue to seek information from the IRS?

• Many officials who were part of DOGE are now permanently embedded in federal agencies. How will those agencies operate now that DOGE has mostly dissolved?

• Will clear leaders emerge atop the MAGA movement? Who will they be and how will they rise to prominence?

• What policy ideas will come to dominate the future of the Republican Party?

• How will Trump respond to increasingly being viewed as a lame duck president?

• How will conservatives grapple with right-wing antisemitism?

• Which institutions will emerge as homes of thought leadership in the post-Trump era?

• How will Postmaster General David Steiner handle political attacks on his agency, especially regarding mail-in voting during the 2026 midterm election?

• Will Congress attempt to legislate on the Postal Service to address its looming financial crisis?

Thanks for spending some time with me and retracing our year. If you found this interesting or valuable, I hope you’ll subscribe to the newsletter, which I’m aiming to use more in 2026.

As always, please keep in touch. Email me at [email protected] and contact me securely on Signal at jacobbogage.87. Follow me on Bluesky: @jacobbogage.bsky.social.