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Jamestown Foundation Posts Commentary: Technical Analysis Reveals Connected Smart TV Security Risks
WASHINGTON, Feb. 21 -- The Jamestown Foundation posted the following commentary on Feb. 20, 2026, by John Costello, senior analyst for cyber and East Asia at Flashpoint, in its China Brief:* * *
Technical Analysis Reveals Connected Smart TV Security Risks
Executive Summary:
* Smart televisions manufactured by firms in the People's Republic of China (PRC) present national security risks across three categories: intelligence and surveillance, denial and disruption, and influence and manipulation. Risk profiles vary significantly by service model and manufacturer.
* The degree of original equipment ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Feb. 21 -- The Jamestown Foundation posted the following commentary on Feb. 20, 2026, by John Costello, senior analyst for cyber and East Asia at Flashpoint, in its China Brief: * * * Technical Analysis Reveals Connected Smart TV Security Risks Executive Summary: * Smart televisions manufactured by firms in the People's Republic of China (PRC) present national security risks across three categories: intelligence and surveillance, denial and disruption, and influence and manipulation. Risk profiles vary significantly by service model and manufacturer. * The degree of original equipmentmanufacturer (OEM) control over the device stack ranges from total (proprietary platforms like Hisense's VIDAA) to partial but irreducible (platform partner models with Google, Amazon, or Roku), with the original design manufacturer (ODM) white-label model introducing an additional layer of supply chain opacity.
* Data collection through automatic content recognition, OEM telemetry, and ecosystem linkages is extensive, and data residency claims are frequently contradicted or left ambiguous by the manufacturers' own privacy policies and technical infrastructure.
* The most consequential OEM capability is not data collection but the ability to modify device behavior at scale through over-the-air firmware updates, a privileged access point governed by engineering teams operating under PRC jurisdiction.
* PRC television manufacturers are expanding rapidly into adjacent smart home ecosystems, content services, and companion applications, transforming a discrete device risk into a persistent household-embedded data infrastructure whose complexity will grow increasingly difficult to govern.
At the technology trade show CES 2025, Chinese firm Hisense unveiled an "Urban Governance Platform" alongside its consumer electronics lineup. The platform, built by Hisense TransTech, a subsidiary founded in 1998, uses proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) chipsets and big data analytics to optimize traffic flow, streamline public transit, manage disaster prevention, and coordinate public safety operations. It is already deployed across 169 Chinese cities: in Qingdao, train schedules automatically adjust during rush hour based on crowd monitoring, traffic lights adapt based on pedestrian flow detection, and bus routes optimize in real time (Hisense USA, December 18, 2024; Yanko Design, December 19, 2024).
The same company whose AI-powered surveillance and governance technology is embedded in the infrastructure of numerous Chinese cities is also one of the world's largest television manufacturers. A state-owned enterprise operating under Qingdao's state-owned assets supervision and administration commission (SASAC), Hisense sells internet-connected smart televisions to tens of millions of American households. These devices run proprietary software, collect behavioral data, and receive firmware updates from engineering teams in Qingdao. Hisense is not unique. Television manufacturers in the People's Republic of China (PRC) have steadily extended their technical reach across the global TV market through acquisitions, licensing agreements, and original design manufacturer (ODM) relationships, often behind Western brand names.
The technical architecture of PRC-connected smart televisions may present risks to U.S. national security, even if these risks vary across manufacturers, service models, and device categories. The first three installments of this series built the case for examining these risks in layers. Part one documented the strategic policy cascade, from Premier Wen Jiabao's 2009 designation of the "Internet of Things" (IoT) as a "strategic emerging industry" through to the 2024 notice by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) on "Intelligent Connection of Everything", which has driven PRC dominance in global IoT manufacturing (China Brief, July 25, 2025). Part two mapped the policy toolkit: state-owned telecom networks, protected domestic markets, standards diplomacy, and Digital Silk Road infrastructure bundling (China Brief, August 7, 2025). Part three descended to the organizational level: CCP party cells embedded in every major manufacturer, Data Security Law obligations requiring cooperation with state security, and specific documented vulnerabilities in devices manufactured by the firms TCL and Skyworth (China Brief, September 19, 2025). This fourth installment turns to the technical substrate: the device architecture, service models, data flows, and OEM capabilities that determine what these risks look like in practice.
A Framework for Connected Device Risk
Connected devices present three broad categories of national security risk. The first, intelligence and surveillance, involves the collection and exfiltration of data for espionage, behavioral profiling, or intelligence advantage. For smart TVs, this encompasses viewing habits captured through automatic content recognition (ACR), device fingerprints on local networks, voice recordings, app usage patterns, and household composition inferences derived from cross-device IP matching. The second, denial and disruption, involves degradation or manipulation of device function, ranging from individually bricking a device to coordinating firmware-level changes across large installed bases via over-the-air (OTA) update mechanisms. The third, influence and manipulation, involves shaping the information environment through content placement, factory-default app configurations, and preferential surfacing. This last category is less acute today, as content on smart TVs is largely dictated by third-party streaming apps. But it is growing more relevant as PRC manufacturers launch their own streaming services and content platforms.
These three risk categories do not operate in isolation. A device that collects household behavioral data (intelligence) could also serve as a vector for network disruption (denial) or as a platform for content manipulation (influence). And consequences cascade: a compromised smart TV affects not just the immediate user but the local network, linked smart home devices, and, at scale, potentially millions of households simultaneously. For consumer devices, these second order and aggregate consequences are where the real national security risk lies. But they are also the hardest to quantify.
Understanding where smart TVs fit in the broader landscape of connected devices is essential to assessing their risk profile. Connected devices exist on a spectrum. At one end sit commodity IoT products, such as thermostats, light bulbs, and basic sensors, with commoditized supply chains and minimal service-model complexity. At the other end are specialized systems like industrial control systems (ICS-SCADA) and telecom backbone equipment, with differentiated supply chains, known end-use environments, and consequence profiles that are visceral and quantifiable. Smart TVs occupy an uncomfortable middle ground. They have the service-model complexity of general-purpose computing devices, comprising multiple operating systems, app ecosystems, partner relationships, update pipelines, and advertising networks, but also the low-auditability and low-user-vigilance characteristics of commodity IoT. Consumers do not think of TVs as computers. They rarely check permissions, seldom update firmware manually, and do not run endpoint security software on them.
This distinction between scope-driven and scale-driven risk matters for policy. Specialized systems lend themselves to scope-driven assessment, which focuses on the consequences of a compromised device in a specific environment, evaluated against known operational contexts. The conventional ICTS risk assessment tooling, which includes entity lists, CFIUS review, and critical infrastructure frameworks, was designed for this mode. Consumer devices, by contrast, are scale-driven: supply chains are commoditized and opaque, there is no specific application context, and the primary drivers of consequences are market penetration, corporate and supply chain consolidation, and aggregate effect across all deployed devices. This is the analytical gap where smart TVs have been under-examined.
The analysis that follows applies two complementary lenses. The first is the adversary's perspective, which focuses on intent, access, and capability; in other words, what a state actor wants to do, what legal and structural access it possesses, and what the technical architecture enables. The second is the defender's perspective, which looks at threat, vulnerability, and consequence. Building on the preceding installments in this series, these are evaluated by examining devices' technical architecture and assessing additional risks that scaling brings via market penetration.
Smart TV Technical Architecture and Risk Surface
A smart television is built in layers. At the base sits the hardware and firmware layer: the system-on-chip (SoC), flash storage, network interfaces, and the boot chain that sequences from ROM boot through bootloader and trusted execution environment to the operating system kernel. Above that is the operating system itself: Google TV, Amazon Fire TV, Roku OS, or a proprietary Linux-based platform like Hisense's VIDAA or Skyworth's Coolita. The middleware layer sits between the operating system (OS) and the user-facing applications, and includes media codecs, digital rights management, hardware abstraction, voice assistant integration, and, critically, the device management and telemetry services where original equipment manufacturer (OEM) data collection lives. The top layer is the application environment: app stores, runtimes, sandboxing, and update channels. Each layer has a different owner, and the boundaries between them define the risk surface.
What matters for risk assessment is not the layers themselves but who controls each one and under what governance framework. That question is answered not by the device's brand or price point but by its service model. PRC-manufactured smart TVs generally follow one of three archetypes, each with a distinct risk profile.
* Proprietary OEM operating system: The manufacturer maintains control across every layer of the stack. Hisense's VIDAA platform is the clearest example. VIDAA is a Linux-based OS developed, maintained, and governed entirely by Hisense (Spyro-soft, May 22, 2025). The company controls the boot chain, kernel, middleware, application store, update pipeline, and data collection services. There is no external platform partner providing independent audit, sandboxing governance, or update oversight. If Hisense, a state-owned enterprise, is directed or pressured to modify device behavior, there are no structural firebreaks in the software stack to prevent it. VIDAA is now the second-largest smart TV operating system globally, powering approximately 30 million televisions across more than 180 countries (NextTV, June 10, 2025). In the United States, Hisense deploys VIDAA on select models while using Google TV or Roku on others, a dual-stack strategy that complicates per-device risk assessment but does not eliminate VIDAA exposure.
* Platform-partner model: This model introduces meaningful structural boundaries. When TCL ships a Google TV, Google controls the operating system, app store, and core middleware, while TCL retains control over the hardware, firmware, bootloader, and a vendor-specific partition within the Android software build that includes the OEM's telemetry, device management, and launcher customizations. Google's Play Protect and verified boot concepts provide some assurance at the OS and app layers, and TCL's vendor partition is approved during the certification process. But the extent of ongoing audit--what Google actually inspects in TCL's vendor partition, how frequently, and with what rigor--is deal-specific and not publicly documented. Roku TV and Fire TV impose similar but not identical boundaries, with Roku generally retaining much tighter platform-level control and Fire TV governance varying by OEM agreement. The platform partner model reduces the OEM's unilateral control over the software stack, but the firebreaks are partial: the OEM still controls the hardware and firmware layers beneath the platform, and its privileged middleware runs with elevated permissions on the device.
* ODM or "white-label" model: This model introduces a much different kind of product and branding opacity. Tongfang, a Tsinghua University spin-off now 21 percent owned by China National Nuclear Corporation, the state-owned enterprise in charge of the country's civilian and military nuclear programs, manufactures televisions sold under the Westinghouse, Element, and formerly Seiki brand names (VentureBeat, January 3, 2017; MarketScreener, accessed February 20). When those devices run Amazon's Fire TV, the platform controls most of the software stack and consumer data flows terminate at Amazon, not Tongfang. But Tongfang designed the hardware, including SoC selection, board layout, network interfaces, and low-level firmware. that provenance is invisible to the consumer. A shopper buying an Element TV at Walmart has no indication that the device was designed and manufactured by a SASAC-affiliated Chinese state enterprise.
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Table 1: Per-Manufacturer Technical Summary
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The common thread across all three archetypes is that the OEM--or, in the ODM case, the hardware integrator--retains some irreducible level of control. Even in the most constrained platform-partner arrangement, the manufacturer controls the physical device, the boot chain, and at least some privileged firmware. Given this fact, key questions for consideration must answer how deep such access runs, what governance measures constrain it, what is visible to partners and end-users, and what degree anyone outside the manufacturer is in a position to audit or verify claims.
Data Collection, Storage, and Access
Smart TVs collect data through three overlapping channels. The first and most scrutinized is automatic content recognition (ACR), a technology that captures what is displayed on screen and matches it against content databases to identify viewing behavior. TCL deploys ACR through a partnership with Samba TV, a privately held U.S. company whose technology is integrated at the chipset level across 24 smart TV brands and claims reach into 111 million American households (Samba TV, January 5, 2023, accessed February 19). Hisense deploys ACR through an exclusive global partnership with Nexxen (formerly Tremor International), renewed in August 2025 through at least 2029, which grants Nexxen direct access to viewing data collected through the VIDAA platform (GlobeNewsWire, October 26, 2021; Nexxen IR, August 11, 2025). Hisense's own Enhanced Viewing Service privacy notice names Nexxen as the ACR provider and describes how ACR-derived analytics can target advertisements on "other devices" sharing a household IP address (Hisense USA, March 1, 2025). Skyworth's former ACR partner, Gozen Data, a Beijing-based firm, went further: its software scanned local networks every ten minutes, collecting not just viewing data but device names, IP addresses, network interface identifiers, and the names of nearby WiFi networks--well beyond the television itself (The Register, May 4, 2021; EDN China, April 28, 2021). Skyworth terminated the partnership in May 2021 after public disclosure, but the incident illustrates how third-party data services embedded in smart TVs can operate well outside their stated scope. The second channel is OEM telemetry: device diagnostics, app usage, network environment data, and crash reports collected by privileged, pre-installed applications that the user typically cannot remove. The third is ecosystem data. Hisense's privacy policy, for instance, explicitly describes using ACR-derived analytics to target advertisements on "other devices" sharing a household IP address, extending the television's data collection surface to phones, tablets, and laptops in the home.
Where that data resides--and who can access it--is much harder to pin down than it should be. Privacy policies and infrastructure evidence tell different stories depending on the company, the product line, and the vintage of the policy. Hisense's current U.S. Data Protection Policy states that its servers are "currently located in the United States of America," and DNS analysis confirms at least some infrastructure resolves to Amazon Web Services in Oregon (Hisense USA, April 30, 2023). But an older Hisense smart TV policy that is still within the lifecycle of devices in consumer homes explicitly permitted transfer of personal information to the PRC (Hisense USA, January 1, 2020). TCL's global smart TV privacy notice reserves the right to "transfer, storage and process your information within and outside of your country," while its corporate privacy policy states that personal data "will be transferred and stored in Mainland China" (TCL Tech, October 15, 2024). Skyworth's Coolita OS policy is unusually transparent: cloud services are deployed in India and Germany, but "maintenance operations in China may access" data stored in those locations. This represents an explicit PRC access pathway regardless of where primary storage sits (Coolita, 2021).
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Table 2: Data Residency Risk Summary
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The practical reality is that corporate domicile alone is an unreliable indicator of data residency. More actionable signals include named partners in privacy notices, service hostnames embedded in firmware and applications, and where those hostnames resolve, such as their cloud provider, geographic region, and network owner. This kind of infrastructure-level analysis reveals that even when a manufacturer claims U.S.-based hosting, the policy language often reserves broad cross-border transfer rights, and the specific location of consumer telemetry databases frequently goes unspecified. The gap between what privacy policies say and what the technical infrastructure does is itself a risk factor. And for PRC-connected manufacturers operating under article 35 of the Data Security Law and article 7 of the National Intelligence Law, that gap takes on a different character than it would for a Western company with similar ambiguity. Deeper questions, such as the full scope of data collected, the infrastructure supporting its storage and processing, internal retention and sharing practices, and the identity of all downstream recipients, can ultimately only be answered by the companies themselves. This is where governments typically step in, whether through subpoena authority in the context of a national security investigation or a CFIUS transaction review. Absent a law requiring detailed disclosure of data collection, retention, use, and sale as a condition of participation in the U.S. market, the burden of discovery rests entirely on investigative authorities, an approach that is inherently reactive and limited to the cases that happen to attract scrutiny.
The Scale Problem
Smart televisions occupy an uncomfortable position in the national security landscape. They are not the specialized, scope-driven systems (like telecom backbone equipment, industrial control systems, or military platforms) that conventionally attract threat assessment and mitigation. High-profile devices in the most sensitive environments tend to receive the most attention, and for good reason: each compromised device in those contexts can produce outsized, cascading consequences, and the line separating tolerable risk from unacceptable exposure is comparatively clear. Defending critical infrastructure against supply chain compromise is a challenging but tractable problem--one that existing authorities like the Covered List published by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the Department of Defense's list of Chinese military companies (the CMC list), FASC, ICTS, and others are at least in part intended to address. Other, more outbound programs like the Commerce Department's Entity List can relieve some supply chain pressure in the long run, but do little to address dependence at home. Still, though, each of these programs only prohibit and constrain when a national security risk presents itself, at which point a commodity product has already achieved the market share and ecosystem diversity that makes its removal difficult and costly. There are few measures to shape these companies and their offerings as requirement of market participation.
Commodity consumer devices present the inverse problem. The risk scope of any individual smart television is small. No single compromised TV in a suburban household is likely to produce a national security crisis. But smart TVs are not assessed individually--they are deployed at scale, across tens of millions of households, collecting behavioral data, receiving firmware updates, and integrating into expanding ecosystems of connected devices. The risk is measured in the aggregate: a composite net exposure where each device contributes a small quantum of intelligence value, surveillance access, or disruption potential that, summed across an installed base of this size, becomes unfathomably large. And the televisions themselves are only part of the picture. The companies that manufacture them are building outward, expanding into adjacent smart home ecosystems, content platforms, and companion applications, while simultaneously growing their market share through channels that attract little public scrutiny: OEM licensing agreements, white-label partnerships, and ODM arrangements that embed PRC-engineered software stacks in devices sold under other brands. The scale grows, largely in silence.
At the core of this challenge is an uncomfortable asymmetry. Not every Chinese company is a national security threat, but any Chinese company could become one. This probability increases as a firm's market share, privileged access to user data, and potential usefulness as an intelligence asset grow. PRC law does not permit the kind of refusal or disclosure that would allow external observers to distinguish between a manufacturer that has been co-opted and one that has not--and no independent judiciary exists to check legal or operational overreach by state authorities. This is not a statement about intent; it is a structural observation about the legal and political environment in which these companies operate. Unfortunately, it is precisely the scale and market penetration that make these firms strategically significant that also makes a ban or "rip and replace" approach practically difficult or cost-prohibitive. The fifth and final installment in this series will examine the shifting risk dynamics of the smart television ecosystem--OEM capabilities, supply chain opacity, regulatory gaps, and the expansion trajectory that is transforming a bounded device-level risk into an open-ended one--and consider key challenges and considerations for governing it.
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John Costello is a Senior Analyst for Cyber and East Asia at Flashpoint.
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Original text here: https://jamestown.org/connected-smart-tv-security-risks/
[Category: ThinkTank]
Hudson Institute Issues Commentary to National Interest: Taking Out the Trans-Siberian Railway Bridge Could Cripple Russia's War Machine
WASHINGTON, Feb. 21 -- Hudson Institute, a research organization that says it promotes leadership for a secure, free and prosperous future, issued the following excerpts of a commentary on Feb. 20, 2026, by senior fellow Luke Coffey and nonresident senior fellow Can Kasapoglu to the National Interest:* * *
Taking Out the Trans-Siberian Railway Bridge Could Cripple Russia's War Machine
After more than a year of pursuing a negotiated track to bring Russia's invasion of Ukraine to a fair conclusion, it is clear that Russian leader Vladimir Putin has no real interest in reaching an agreement. Throughout ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Feb. 21 -- Hudson Institute, a research organization that says it promotes leadership for a secure, free and prosperous future, issued the following excerpts of a commentary on Feb. 20, 2026, by senior fellow Luke Coffey and nonresident senior fellow Can Kasapoglu to the National Interest: * * * Taking Out the Trans-Siberian Railway Bridge Could Cripple Russia's War Machine After more than a year of pursuing a negotiated track to bring Russia's invasion of Ukraine to a fair conclusion, it is clear that Russian leader Vladimir Putin has no real interest in reaching an agreement. Throughoutthis period, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly demonstrated his country's willingness to pursue peace, agreeing to every ceasefire proposal, confidence-building measure, and exploratory dialogue put forward by US President Donald Trump. Putin, by contrast, has stalled, delayed, and engaged in talks only to prolong the conflict rather than resolve it.
Russia has learned that negotiations can be used as a weapon--buying time, exhausting Western patience, and hoping that divisions in the transatlantic community continue to grow. As long as the costs of continuing the war remain manageable, the Kremlin has little incentive to negotiate in good faith. If Trump wants to change Moscow's calculus, Russia must be made to feel that the price of war is becoming unacceptably high.
Read in The National Interest (https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/taking-out-the-trans-siberian-railway-bridge-could-cripple-russias-war-machine).
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Luke Coffey is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute. His work analyzes national security and foreign policy, with a focus on Europe, Eurasia, NATO, and transatlantic relations.
Can Kasapoglu is a nonresident senior fellow at Hudson Institute. His work at Hudson focuses on political-military affairs in the Middle East, North Africa, and former Soviet regions.
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Original text here: https://www.hudson.org/defense-strategy/taking-out-trans-siberian-railway-bridge-could-cripple-russias-war-machine-luke-coffey-can-kasapoglu
[Category: ThinkTank]
Capital Research Center Issues InfluenceWatch Wrapup on Feb. 20, 2026
WASHINGTON, Feb. 21 -- The Capital Research Center issued the following InfluenceWatch wrapup on Feb. 20, 2026:* * *
By Jonathan Harsh
InfluenceWatch, a project of Capital Research Center, is a comprehensive and ever-evolving compilation of our research into the numerous advocacy groups, foundations, and donors working to influence the public policy process. The website offers transparency into these influencers' funding, motives, and connections while providing insight often neglected by other watchdog groups.
The information compiled in InfluenceWatch gives news outlets and other interested ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Feb. 21 -- The Capital Research Center issued the following InfluenceWatch wrapup on Feb. 20, 2026: * * * By Jonathan Harsh InfluenceWatch, a project of Capital Research Center, is a comprehensive and ever-evolving compilation of our research into the numerous advocacy groups, foundations, and donors working to influence the public policy process. The website offers transparency into these influencers' funding, motives, and connections while providing insight often neglected by other watchdog groups. The information compiled in InfluenceWatch gives news outlets and other interestedparties research to use in reporting on significant topics that are often overlooked by the American public.
CRC is pleased to present some of the most significant additions to InfluenceWatch in the past week:
* The Center for American Liberty (CAL) is a right-of-center organization that engages in public advocacy and litigation on cases related to freedom of speech, religious freedoms, parental rights, and claims of discrimination. It has received funding from the Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund, the Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program, and the National Christian Charitable Foundation. As of 2026 CAL's founder, Harmeet Dhillon, is the U.S. Assistant Attorney General in the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division for the Second Trump Administration.
* The VF Foundation is the private grantmaking foundation of the VF Corporation, a publicly-traded outdoor apparel and footwear company. According to its website, the foundation's program areas include "Thriving Outside, Protecting Our Planet, Powering Potential and Humanitarian Relief." Organizations that have received funding from the VF Foundation include the Trust for Public Land, the United Nations Foundation, the National Forest Foundation, the Nature Conservancy, the Biomimicry Institute, and the World Wildlife Fund.
* Textron Inc. is a conglomerate known for aviation, defense, and industrial products. Its reported revenue in 2025 was approximately $14.8 billion. Between 2008 and 2025, the company was awarded over 62,000 contracts from U.S. government agencies including the Department of Defense, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Commerce, and the Department of Justice.
* The International Wilderness Leadership Foundation, also known as the WILD Foundation or WILD, is a conservation group that advocates for left-of-center environmental policies. Its listed partner organizations include the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, Parks Canada, the National Commission of Natural Protected Areas in Mexico, the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, and the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service. Its 2024 donors included the Hillman Family Foundations, ImpactAssets Inc, the Chicago Community Trust, the Schmidt Family Foundation, the Tides Foundation, and the Amalgamated Charitable Foundation.
* The Giniw Collective is a left-of-center activist group that advocates for "land defense, decolonization, and carrying our words into action." In 2024, it was one of over 400 groups to sign a letter calling on energy company Energy Transfer to drop its lawsuit against Greenpeace over its role in helping to fund and organize the Dakota Access Pipeline protests between 2016 and 2017. The Giniw Collective has received funding through its parent organization Unkitawa, including from the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, the Common Counsel Foundation, and ImpactAssets.
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Jonathan Harsh holds a master's degree in political science from James Madison University and a bachelor's degree in political science from Beloit College. He edits entries and content of the InfluenceWatch website and contributes new content.
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Original text here: https://capitalresearch.org/article/influencewatch-friday-02-20-2026/
[Category: ThinkTank]
Capital Research Center Issues Commentary: Great Union Inflection Point or Dead Cat Bounce? Parsing the 2025 BLS Union Members Survey
WASHINGTON, Feb. 21 -- The Capital Research Center issued the following commentary on Feb. 20, 2026, by Michael Watson, research director and managing editor for InfluenceWatch:* * *
Great union inflection point or dead cat bounce? Parsing the 2025 BLS union members survey
Union membership ticked back up to 10.0 percent in 2025 in the federal government's shutdown-affected survey data. Don't expect this to herald a resurgence in trade unionism.
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Every year, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics releases survey data on union membership in the United States. In recent years, the release has ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Feb. 21 -- The Capital Research Center issued the following commentary on Feb. 20, 2026, by Michael Watson, research director and managing editor for InfluenceWatch: * * * Great union inflection point or dead cat bounce? Parsing the 2025 BLS union members survey Union membership ticked back up to 10.0 percent in 2025 in the federal government's shutdown-affected survey data. Don't expect this to herald a resurgence in trade unionism. * Every year, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics releases survey data on union membership in the United States. In recent years, the release hasbeen a source of mirth and gloating for opponents of organized labor (including your correspondent), as they put to rest breathless media reporting on organized labor's Miami Dolphins-style predictions that "this is our year." But this year, the government shutdown-affected survey showed union density trended up; has the ghost of Don Shula come to lead the Fish back to the Promised Land?
No. Don Shula is not coming to save the Dolphins. And there's no evidence that Big Labor is rising again either.
By the numbers
The headline bump in union density, the proportion of the workforce consisting of union members, isn't much of one: From 9.9 percent to 10.0 percent, which the BLS press release characterizes as "little changed from the prior year." Most importantly, the private-sector union-membership rate did not budge, remaining at 5.9 percent, and the total number of private-sector union members (7.4 million) was nearly passed by government-worker total (7.3 million) for the first time since the 2020 pandemic year.
Most is otherwise roughly as it was last year, when we used the BLS report to interrogate who actually constitutes Big Labor. But there's more, as Washington Post editorialist Dominic Pino posted to the website formerly known as Twitter (I have cleaned up the formatting and omitted quotations):
* For the first time ever, the federal government employs more union members than the entire manufacturing sector.
* Local government is by far the largest employer of union members.
* State government is second.
* 7% of transportation and utilities workers... 88.9% of construction workers... 92.3% of manufacturing workers... and 95.3% of mining and extraction workers... ...are not union members.
A pertinent question
Based on data like the data Pino highlights, last year I wrote:
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The Current American Plurality that elected the present federal government is deeply interested in advancing the interests of men without college degrees. This is because many of them are men without college degrees: Exit pollsters broke down white voters without degrees by sex and found 69 percent of white men without a degree voted Republican compared with 57 percent of white voters overall. This has made policy entrepreneurs interested in serving (and perhaps one day leading) the Current American Plurality, especially susceptible to the special-interest politics of Teamsters Union boss Sean O'Brien and other, less Everything Leftist union bosses who offer strengthening Big Labor as a way to help that group.
But there's a problem with that, and readers who have made it this far can probably already guess the problem from the information already presented. Labor union members are not much more male than the workforce as a whole, and other data show that they tend to be better educated. The BLS reports that men's unionization rate is 0.7 percentage points higher than women. That ends up meaning that while 51.75 percent of the workforce is male, 53.5 percent of union members are--not a huge difference.
I concluded:
If the Current American Plurality wants to hold together, it will need to find ways to support workers as a whole, not cheaply chase the union members that BLS and other data reveal to be unripe for recruitment by throwing more traditional members of the coalition under the bus. The Taft-Hartley Consensus approach to labor relations, which Republicans have advanced for 80 years, offers the opportunity for those workers who freely choose to organize unions to continue to do so while protecting the rights of workers who choose not to form unions or choose to work independently. It should not be cheaply abandoned in service to myths about whom the conservative movement is seeking to court.
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It is time to heed those warnings, and to their credit, some are. Manhattan Institute president Reihan Salam commented, "Part of why it's so absurd when Republicans decide they should swear allegiance to the leadership of the Teamsters" in response to Pino highlighting how low unionization is in various manual-labor industries.
The supposed "demand" on the right for appeasement of Big Labor comes from politicians hunting for political support for union bosses (an old, and failed, Republican tradition) and nonprofit groups funded by a gigantic progressive foundation based in San Francisco. It is not grassroots, and the BLS numbers on who union members are show why.
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Michael Watson
Michael is Research Director for Capital Research Center and serves as the managing editor for InfluenceWatch.
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[Category: ThinkTank]
American Action Forum Issues Commentary: U.S.-India Energy Trade Deal - Is It Achievable?
WASHINGTON, Feb. 21 -- The American Action Forum issued the following commentary on Feb. 20, 2026, by Shuting Pomerleau, director of energy and environmental policy, and trade policy analyst Jacob Jensen:* * *
U.S.-India Energy Trade Deal: Is It Achievable?
Executive Summary
* The United States and India have reached a trade agreement in which India is expected to purchase $500 billion worth of goods including energy, technology, and other products from the United States over the next five years.
* In 2025, U.S. goods exports to India were nearly $39 billion, with energy exports accounting ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Feb. 21 -- The American Action Forum issued the following commentary on Feb. 20, 2026, by Shuting Pomerleau, director of energy and environmental policy, and trade policy analyst Jacob Jensen: * * * U.S.-India Energy Trade Deal: Is It Achievable? Executive Summary * The United States and India have reached a trade agreement in which India is expected to purchase $500 billion worth of goods including energy, technology, and other products from the United States over the next five years. * In 2025, U.S. goods exports to India were nearly $39 billion, with energy exports accountingfor about a third of the total. Based on historical trends, these exports are projected to total $261 billion over the next five years, leaving a $239 billion gap relative to the trade deal's target; even if India doubled its U.S.-imports growth rate, a $152 billion gap would remain.
* This insight summarizes the U.S.-India trade deal, analyzes the energy market dynamics between the two nations, and explains why India is unlikely to meet the trade deal's target - whether through total imports from the United States, or the specific goods outlined in the agreement.
Introduction
The United States and India have reached a trade agreement in which India is intended to purchase $500 billion worth of goods including energy, technology, and other products from the United States over the next five years. This deal also eliminates the 25-percent U.S. punitive tariffs on India that had been put in place to discourage the country's purchase of Russian oil.
Total U.S. goods exports to India were just shy of $39 billion in 2025, and are projected to reach about $261 billion over the next five years. But this would leave a massive U.S. import shortage of $239 billion for India to fulfill the trade deal. Even if India were to double the growth rate of its goods imports from the United States, there would still be a $152-billion gap.
This insight summarizes the U.S.-India trade deal, analyzes the energy market dynamics between the two nations, and explains why India is unlikely to meet the deal's ambitious target - whether through total imports from the United States, or the specific goods outlined in the agreement.
The U.S.-India Trade Agreement
On February 9, the White House released a fact sheet on the recently announced what it billed as a "historic trade deal" with India that "will open up India's market of over 1.4 billion people to American products." According to the document, India "intends to buy more American products and purchase over $500 billion of U.S. energy, information and communication technology, coal, and other products" over the next five years.
The fact sheet is light on details and does not specify which energy products would be purchased or a purchase amount by product category. Whether this includes natural gas, oil, or other energy-related products remains to be seen.
The U.S.-India joint statement released on February 6 provided a slightly more detailed description of the "framework for an interim agreement" the two countries have reached. Its key provisions are: 1) India intends to purchase "$500 billion of U.S. energy products, aircraft and aircraft parts, precious metals, technology products, and coking coal over the next 5 years"; and 2) the United States intends to eliminate the 25-percent punitive tariffs on India which had been put in place to discourage the country's purchases of Russian oil. Within the agreement, India has committed to stop purchasing Russian oil by swapping these imports with those of the United States and potentially Venezuela.
U.S.-India Trade
Total bilateral trade
The trade relationship between the United States and India has experienced steady growth over the past decade, with total bilateral trade increasing by roughly 135 percent. In 2025, estimated U.S. goods exports to India are estimated to have totaled just under $39 billion, while U.S. imports from India were close to $105 billion, both of which were a notable uptick from 2024. The primary U.S. export categories to India have been precious metals, mineral fuels, aircraft, mechanical appliances, machinery, and medical instruments. Since 2018, the number-one U.S. export category has been mineral fuels and other energy related products. The top U.S. import categories from India include electrical equipment, pharmaceuticals, precious metals, and organic chemicals. and organic chemicals.
Energy Trade
In 2024, the United States exported $11.4 billion worth of energy products to India, representing 33 percent of total U.S. exports to India. This amount only accounted for about 3 percent of total U.S. energy exports, however. Based on data from January to November, energy exports to India in 2025 are expected to have been $12.8 billion.
The largest categories of U.S. energy exports included crude petroleum, coking coal, and natural gas. As displayed in Figure 1, U.S. energy exports to India have remained relatively flat since 2022 despite a large growth spurt between 2015-2021.
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[View Chart 1 in the link at bottom.]
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In 2023, India imported nearly 40 percent of its crude oil from Russia at approximately 1.8 million barrels per day. This was a drastic increase compared to 2021 before Russia's invasion of Ukraine when India imported just 2.5 percent of its oil or 100,000 barrels per day from Russia (see Figure 2).
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[View Chart 2 in the link at bottom.]
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The primary reason for this increase was that Russian oil was sanctioned by both the United States and European Union, meaning Russia heavily discounted the price of its oil to those that would make the purchase. For instance, discounts were between $20 to $25 per barrel at the onset of the war in Ukraine and are currently at around $12. As of February 2026, Russia has widened the discount offered to China to about $9, likely to incentivize Chinese buyers to replace lower sales to India.
By comparison, just 4 percent of India's crude oil came from the United States. Furthermore, 14 percent of its liquified natural gas (LNG) imports and 8 percent of its coal imports came from the United States. India primarily imports LNG from Qatar (50 percent) and coal from Indonesia (42 percent) while Russia has not been a significant supplier of these specific energy products.
Trade Deal Practicality
The Trump Administration's objective to export $500 billion to India within five years is a tall order and likely an impractical target to achieve based on historical export growth rates. Over the past decade, both the average and median annual growth in U.S. exports to India has been right around 10 percent. This means that over the next five years, total U.S. exports to India are expected to total $261 billion, representing a $239 billion gap (see Figure 3 and Figure 4). Even if U.S. exports to India grow by double the historical rate over the next five years, there would still be a $152 billion gap. Notably, these figures represent the sum of all U.S. exports to India rather than the discrete product categories identified in the trade deal, which suggests the U.S.-India trade agreement is more of a symbolic and political agreement than a realistic and binding trade pact.
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[View Chart 3 in the link at bottom.]
[View Chart 4 in the link at bottom.]
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India's Energy Consumption
In 2023, India ranked the third globally in terms of its total energy consumption, behind China and the United States. In 2024, India surpassed the United States to become the second-largest energy consumer in the world.
India has substantial demand for fossil fuel, which accounted for almost 95 percent of its energy consumption in 2023. In that year coal accounted for 59 percent of its energy consumption, petroleum and other liquids, 29 percent, and natural gas, 6 percent. The country consumed only a small amount of clean energy, with renewables at 4 percent and nuclear energy at 2 percent. In the same year, it was the world's third-highest consumer of petroleum and other liquids, and the fourth-biggest importer of LNG.
As shown in Figure 5, India has been relying on imports for most of its energy consumption. Its petroleum and other liquids production were flat from 2014-2023, while energy imports and total energy consumption trended steadily upward from 2020-2023.
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[View Chart 5 in the link at bottom.]
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Despite its large coal deposits and status as one of the world's top coal energy producers, India imports coal to meet its soaring electricity demand. It is estimated that coal will continue to be the major energy source for power generation in India through 2030.
About one quarter of India's coal consumption is for industrial purposes such as manufacturing steel. The coal used for generating power--thermal coal-- is different from metallurgical or coking coal, which is used to make steel. Coking coal typically contains more carbon than thermal coal.
Although India has vast coal reserves, it has a significant shortage of coking coal. More than 90 percent of India's consumption of coking coal comes from imports. As the second-largest producer of crude steel, India plans to double its steel production between now and 2030. India's coking coal imports are estimated to reach 160 million tons by 2030. Top countries exporting coking coal to India include Australia, the United States, and Russia.
India's large demand for coking coal and a lack of domestic production capabilities give the United States an opportunity to continue to grow its exports of coking coal to the country. This may explain why coking coal is specifically mentioned in the joint statement as one product that India intends to purchase from the United States. The U.S. coal energy industry currently has strong support from the administration through a series of executive orders and a production tax credit included in the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Conclusion
Given the U.S.-India energy market dynamics and trade relationship, it is unlikely that India will be able to achieve the intended imports target within the next five years. The trade deal's $500 billion number for the selected traded products seems to be symbolic rather than practical.
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Shuting Pomerleau is the Director of Energy and Environmental Policy at the American Action Forum
Jacob Jensen is the Trade Policy Analyst at the American Action Forum.
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Original text here: https://www.americanactionforum.org/insight/u-s-india-energy-trade-deal-is-it-achievable/
[Category: Think Tank]
America First Policy Institute Issues Commentary to Townhall: Transparency Is Public Safety - Medicaid Oversight and Honest Governance Matter
WASHINGTON, Feb. 21 -- The America First Policy Institute issued the following excerpts of a commentary on Feb. 20, 2026, by political strategist Zach Freimark to Townhall:* * *
Transparency Is Public Safety: Medicaid Oversight and Honest Governance Matter
On March 7, 2025, 39-year-old Rick Clemmer was found dead in his East Side St. Paul, Minnesota apartment after several days without contact from medical providers paid to oversee his care. The medical examiner attributed his death to an enlarged heart. But for his mother, Mickey Clemmer, that explanation left the most troubling question unanswered: ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Feb. 21 -- The America First Policy Institute issued the following excerpts of a commentary on Feb. 20, 2026, by political strategist Zach Freimark to Townhall: * * * Transparency Is Public Safety: Medicaid Oversight and Honest Governance Matter On March 7, 2025, 39-year-old Rick Clemmer was found dead in his East Side St. Paul, Minnesota apartment after several days without contact from medical providers paid to oversee his care. The medical examiner attributed his death to an enlarged heart. But for his mother, Mickey Clemmer, that explanation left the most troubling question unanswered:how did a man enrolled in a Medicaid-funded program designed to provide daily supervision end up entirely alone?
Rick Clemmer had long struggled with severe mental illness and substance-use disorder. For most of his adult life, he lived in regulated environments where court-ordered treatment plans and routine monitoring helped keep him stable. In the summer of 2024, he transitioned to independent housing through Minnesota's Integrated Community Supports (ICS) program--a Medicaid benefit intended to provide daily, one-on-one assistance with medication adherence, safety checks, meal preparation, and basic household management for individuals with complex behavioral health needs.
According to reported billing records, his provider, Ultimate Home Health Services LLC, charged Medicaid roughly $462 per day--equivalent to about 12 hours of care. That is more than double the average daily Medicaid expenditure per beneficiary in Minnesota. Yet according to family accounts, those services were never delivered. Clemmer died unnoticed while payments continued. His mother has described the episode not as a paperwork failure, but as abandonment financed by taxpayer dollars.
To read the full article, click here (https://townhall.com/columnists/zachary-freimark/2026/02/20/transparency-is-public-safety-medicaid-oversight-and-honest-governance-matter-n2671528).
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Zach Freimark is a seasoned political strategist and lifelong Minnesotan, born and raised in Stillwater.
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Original text here: https://www.americafirstpolicy.com/issues/transparency-is-public-safety-medicaid-oversight-and-honest-governance-matter
[Category: ThinkTank]
AFPI Responds to SCOTUS Ruling in Learning Resources vs. Trump
WASHINGTON, Feb. 21 -- The America First Policy Institute issued the following statement on Feb. 20, 2026:* * *
AFPI Responds to SCOTUS Ruling in Learning Resources v. Trump
Today, Leigh Ann O'Neill, Chief Legal Affairs Officer at the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), issued the following statement in response to the Supreme Court's decision in Learning Resources v. Trump:
"AFPI strongly supports the America First trade agenda and President Trump's authority to defend American workers and supply chains. For decades, foreign competitors have exploited unfair trade practices while Washington ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Feb. 21 -- The America First Policy Institute issued the following statement on Feb. 20, 2026: * * * AFPI Responds to SCOTUS Ruling in Learning Resources v. Trump Today, Leigh Ann O'Neill, Chief Legal Affairs Officer at the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), issued the following statement in response to the Supreme Court's decision in Learning Resources v. Trump: "AFPI strongly supports the America First trade agenda and President Trump's authority to defend American workers and supply chains. For decades, foreign competitors have exploited unfair trade practices while Washingtonlooked the other way. President Trump changed that, and American workers are better off because of it.
While we disagree with the Court's ruling regarding presidential authority under IEEPA, this decision does not weaken the case for tariffs or the President's broader authority to use them. As AFPI argued in an amicus brief, the President retains clear authority to impose tariffs under other laws, including Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930. AFPI will continue to support the use of every lawful tool available to put American workers first. America First trade policies work, and we will continue fighting to ensure they endure."
In his dissenting opinion, Justice Kavanaugh referenced the president's authority to issue tariffs under Section 338 and concluded, "So the Court's decision is not likely to greatly restrict Presidential tariff authority going forward."
AFPI proudly stands with President Trump on this issue and remains committed to advancing new policy solutions to strengthen American workers and build the strongest economy in the world.
Read AFPI's commentary on preserving the successes of IEEPA, available here (https://www.americafirstpolicy.com/issues/preserving-liberation-day-successes).
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Original text here: https://www.americafirstpolicy.com/issues/afpi-responds-to-scotus-ruling-in-learning-resources-v-trump
[Category: ThinkTank]