Name one thing Trump has done during the first year of this administration that has received little to no attention yet will have long-term consequences for the country.

Two of the five Americans who received a Nobel prize in Stockholm this month were immigrants. In 2016, the year Donald Trump used his anti-immigrant narrative to first win the presidency, the U.S. had a bumper crop of Nobels: six. Of the winners, five were foreign born. Indeed, in the 21st century, four of every 10 U.S. Nobel winners in physics, chemistry and medicine were immigrants. The accomplishments don’t end with Nobels. Of the Fortune 500 companies, 109 were founded by immigrants. And numerous startups valued at more than $1 billion were started by immigrants.

Foreign students and scholars are a key pipeline for producing this enviable crop of immigrants, as the U.S. has been a reliable magnet for their skills, their enterprise and the fire in their bellies. This reality is in jeopardy, though, due to Trump administration policies: travel bans for nationals of some countries; revocation of visas and deportation proceedings against students for their published opinions or social media posts; extensive vetting for issuing new visas; and a proposal to impose a $100,000 fee for H-1B work visas.

These policies have created anxiety on campus and, according to one report, a 17% percent decline in arriving students this fall. They will likely result in other countries seeking our existing and aspiring international students.

Muzaffar Chishti is a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute.

Bold choices. Risk-taking. Speaking truth to power. To me, these hallmarks of American culture today face profound threat. There’s a kind of retraction everywhere, a recalibration of the bounds of cultural expression in the public sphere. These trends preceded Trump’s presidencies; but he has put his stamp of approval on them, made them his own. He is an accelerant, backed by the awesome machinery of the state.

Words banned from government websites, from arts and culture grants, from scientific research. Visas revoked because of tweets. Media conglomerates fete and fawn for Trump’s personal approval — or are subject to his lawsuits. Satirizing the president can get you kicked off the air. The Smithsonian of the future may not remember “Hair” or RuPaul or “The Vagina Monologues.”

The normalization of a more muted aesthetic is being shaped by fear and threats — much of it internalized. I wonder: Would a newspaper today publish the 1619 Project? Will Hollywood shy away from plots with trans characters? How long before high schools feel comfortable mounting a play about January 6? Or inviting students to again read Toni Morrison or Judy Blume?

We don’t know where this ends. But there is remarkable silence when I ask these types of questions.

Jonathan Friedman is the Sy Syms Managing Director, U.S. Free Expression Programs, at PEN America.

President Trump is committed to unleashing the power of the American economy in many important ways. One that has flown under the radar is the regulatory review process. The president has ordered federal agencies to open their books and to begin a once-in-a-generation review of the rules that American businesses must follow. This effort has the potential to save American businesses billions of dollars annually. The Office of Advocacy at the U.S. Small Business Administration, where I am chief counsel, has flagged 300 individual issues that harm small businesses. I am constantly in conversation with every federal agency on how to make changes on every one of those issues. We’re highlighting the worst offenders on our Small Businesses’ Most Wanted Reform list, and our staff is busy listening to small businesses in person and through our Red Tape Hotline. None of that work would be possible without President Trump’s fearless leadership on cutting red tape.

Casey Mulligan is chief counsel for advocacy at the U.S. Small Business Administration.

Trump has pardoned some seriously dangerous people like the January 6 insurrectionists and cop-beaters who, post-pardon, have gone on to be charged with new offenses, including burglary, child sex abuse and grand theft. Moreover, unlike other presidents, who abided by the Department of Justice’s policy requiring that pardon recipients pay all legal damages to their victims and all legal fines, Trump amazingly has relieved all of his pardonees of their obligation to pay any restitution. He has thus deprived victims and the American taxpayers of more than $1.3 billion in restitution and fines they were entitled to receive from convicted criminals, according to a report from House Judiciary Committee Democrats. Few know about this presidential ripoff for convicted felons but everybody should be aware of it.

Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin represents Maryland’s 8th District in the U.S. House and is the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee.

In broad terms, 2025 has resembled 2017. A lot of noise, bluster, exaggeration and lying that belies the truth that Trump is once again failing. He learned nothing about the importance of competence. Despite becoming more palatable to the experienced Washington Republican establishment, he went from the B-Team of term one to the current F-Team. Pete Hegseth is their captain.

But one difference between the terms? His near complete reliance on the less durable executive order.

Though 2025 has seen the passage of legislation (with such a juvenile name that I refuse to write or speak it) that codified into law some of his priorities, Trump has by and large chosen to use EOs. This week, he signed the executive order that put him over his four-year total from term one. As they say (nobody says it), live by the EO, die by the EO. He is making it as easy for the next Democrat to reverse his orders as it was for him to reverse Obama’s and then later Biden’s.

Taking a demolition ball to the East Wing has become symbolic of much. He did it because he could. But the next guy is only a signature away from taking a wrecking ball to Trump’s legacy. By hand or autopen.

Philippe Reines served as deputy assistant secretary of state under Hillary Clinton and is now a corporate and political-crisis consultant.

One of the most consequential shifts of the first year has been the aggressive recalibration of federal personnel authority. While DOGE drama got most of the headlines, the real long-term impact comes from the deliberate, disciplined changes to how agencies hire and fire, structure teams and execute policy.

Most coverage has focused on individual agency actions, but the broader structural change has been quieter: systematic rewriting of internal governance memos, redefinition of governmental roles and the use of interim leadership authorities to bypass previous civil-service limitations. They have fundamentally altered how the government functions.

Over time, this will shift the balance from a bureaucracy designed to buffer politics to one built for rapid political execution, giving Washington something it has lacked for decades: a government that actually responds to elected leadership and executes with urgency. These reforms will outlast any single specific policy fight.

The long-term result is that future presidents of any party will inherit a federal workforce more directly shaped — and more immediately controlled — by the White House than at any point in modern history, ultimately creating a government that is more efficient, more responsive and more capable of carrying out the president’s agenda.

Alex Vogel is CEO of the Vogel Group.

While the creation and initial activities of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency made news, the media mostly lost interest after Musk announced in April that he was stepping back to focus on his ailing Tesla business and other concerns. Today, the real, underreported story is that DOGE has successfully entrenched itself within the Trump administration and continues to exercise significant, unorthodox power as a parallel civil service.

As a historian of autocracy, I watched with incredulity in early 2025 as Musk’s operatives occupied government buildings — even once blocking members of Congress from entering — and fired thousands of government employees. Just three weeks after the inauguration, they had accessed “at least 15 federal agencies,” ABC News reported. The secrecy that surrounded DOGE operations — and potential for corruption, surveillance and privacy leaks — prompted a September report from the Democratic ranking member of the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, titled “Unchecked and Unaccountable.”

The agency may have been disbanded as a centralized entity, but DOGE continues to have a presence across U.S. government agencies. “They are in fact burrowed into the agencies like ticks,” a USDA source told Wired this month.“DOGE is still happening, by the way,” Musk told Joe Rogan in October. He was in attendance recently when Trump announced the sale of F-35s to Saudi Arabia.

All of this represents an innovation in the autocrat-oligarch relationship. Oligarchs normally operate outside government, buying up media or financial properties that they can leverage in service of the autocrat. Here the oligarch was given the keys to the castle, with lasting consequences for privacy and national security. In this and other ways, the United States is now serving as a laboratory for the next phase of the autocratic playbook.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University.

Environmental deregulation was among the most closely observed policy areas during the first Trump administration. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt routinely garnered headlines as he led the reversal of the Obama administration’s climate policies (and invested in anti-surveillance measures). The second Trump administration’s environmental efforts, led by Lee Zeldin, have been less flashy but more aggressive and consequential. Through a series of presidential proclamations, Trump has granted various industries exemptions from Clean Air Act requirements based on claims that compliance would jeopardize America’s national security. Zeldin’s EPA has gone further than Pruitt’s by seeking to knock out all greenhouse gas regulations under the Clean Air Act via a reversal of the 2009 Endangerment Finding that underlies them. Republicans in Congress advanced the deregulatory agenda in the “One Big Beautiful Bill” by repealing many provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, including the electric vehicle credit, and also by reducing the penalty for failing to comply with auto fuel efficiency standards to $0. The administration argues that it has struck blows for consumer choice and a stronger American industrial base. Most of these actions will, undoubtedly, have to be defended against environmentalists in court, where the first Trump administration’s record on these issues was poor. Whatever judges decide, 2025 will be remembered (by those who noticed) as a pinnacle of aggressive deregulation.

Philip Wallach is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

More attention should be paid to the Trump administration’s all-out attack on American offshore wind at the behest of its fossil fuel donors. In August, the administration issued a stop-work order to illegally kill the Revolution Wind Project off the coast of Rhode Island and Connecticut. The project had received all necessary permits from the federal government and was already 80% complete. President “Stop Work” Trump jeopardized a thousand local union jobs, and he’d hike electric bills for families in Rhode Island and Connecticut by preventing new clean energy from getting onto the grid.

Fortunately, thanks to honest courtrooms and despite Trump’s clownish legal efforts, the project is back on track. The Trump legal effort was so lame, they quietly chose not to appeal the court order blowing it up.

Much work remains to guard against climate change, fight Trump increases in energy prices and protect renewables jobs, as the Great Climate Insurance Crisis sweeps the country. Trump’s stooging for fossil fuel donors will put a heavy affordability burden on Americans, from electricity cost increases to insurance collapses. Voters will notice.

Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse represents Rhode Island.

Most evaluations of the Trump administration focus on the activities of the president or his top-line officials like Cabinet officers or personal advisers, where there is a growing fear that the closer they get to Trump, e.g. Pete Hegseth, the more loyalty rather than competence becomes important.

Yet there are many layers of government that are not in direct contact with the president, and these have two functions. One is to inform the president and then carry out his orders. The second is to carry out their own functions independent of the top.

These people get too little attention, and for them, it is a mixed scorecard. Trump fires too many mid-level officials, so he does not get real information about what he should do, which leads to dangers like his deadly campaign against narco-terrorists (i.e. possible smugglers), where no one checks his behavior. But on the other hand, much work in the agencies is done by top-flight people whom Trump either backs or leaves alone.

That mixture has consequences. Matters go bad where he faces no checks. They go well when he leaves well enough alone. The politics and economics of this information are in tension, because no one knows which set of forces will control.

Richard Epstein is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at New York University and the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.