| | | | | | | Presented By General Mills | | | | Axios AM | | By Mike Allen · Aug 23, 2022 | | Good Tuesday morning. Smart Brevity™ count: 1,494 words ... 5½ mins. Edited by Jennifer Koons. 🗳️ Situational awareness: It's primary day in New York, Florida and Oklahoma. | | | | | | 1 big thing: NASA's last stand |  | | | Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios | | | | NASA's Artemis program — which eventually aims to return humans to the Moon's surface for the first time since 1972 — is a test of whether the space agency's old way of exploration can thrive in the modern space age. - Next Monday's launch window for an uncrewed Orion capsule, headed to the Moon and back to Earth, opens at 8:33 a.m. ET, Axios Space author Miriam Kramer reports.
Why it matters: A successful launch of the new moon rocket would help NASA show it's still on the cutting edge of human space exploration, even as SpaceX and other private companies nip at its heels. Reality check: The rocket, the Space Launch System, is billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule. Even a successful first launch won't change that. - "NASA has never been challenged as the best way for the United States to do hard things in space until now," John Logsdon, founder of George Washington University's Space Policy Institute, tells Axios.
🧠 How it works: The launch will test the systems before NASA puts people onboard, and eventually uses the rocket and capsule to deliver people to the lunar surface in 2025. - If this launch fails, experts say it will imperil NASA's entire Artemis program because a failing, over-budget program is far harder to garner political support for.
- "This has to work," Casey Dreier of the Planetary Society tells Axios.
Sign up for our weekly Axios Space newsletter ... Share this story. |     | | | | | | 2. 😷 Fauci interview: "Nothing to hide" | | Anthony Fauci speaks at an international AIDS Conference in 1987 — 35 years ago. Photo: Mark Reinstein/Corbis via Getty Images Anthony Fauci, who's retiring in December after an astonishing 38 years in the same job, tells Axios' Caitlin Owens that his notoriety is attributable to being "right in the eye of the hurricane of some very important emerging infectious disease outbreaks." - Why it matters: Fauci's consistent presence as the public face of COVID response over the last two and a-half years has been a source of comfort for some Americans — and enraged others.
Throughout a career responding to HIV/AIDS, the Zika virus, Ebola and COVID, he said, it's been important to "try and explain [the science] to the American public in a way and a form ... they can really appreciate." - Contemplating a successor, Fauci said: "Whether or not someone else can and wants to do that, I imagine they could."
Fauci has been director of NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984, and also is chief medical adviser to President Biden. - Fauci said yesterday that he'll leave his positions in December "to pursue the next chapter of my career." No successor has been named yet.
🔮 What's next: Fauci told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow last night that he has "been wanting to do things outside of the government ... lecture, write ... encourage young people to go into public service." But Fauci's time in the spotlight likely won't end with his retirement: - Republicans plan to investigate his COVID role if they get control of the House or Senate next year.
"I have never had any problem defending what I've done and I have nothing to hide," Fauci told Axios. "I've testified before the Congress hundreds of times over the last 38 years. I have no trouble testifying before Congress." | | | | | | | | 3. 🎢 Stock spasms |  Data: Yahoo Finance. Chart: Erin Davis/Axios Visuals Choose your news: - Yesterday, the print Wall Street Journal led with a widening "Bounceback Rally" for stocks, with encouraging signs of durability.
- Also yesterday, stocks took their biggest hit in two months, amid concerns that Fed Chair Jerome Powell will have a "hawkish tone" on Friday at an annual symposium in Jackson Hole. (Financial Times)
| | | | | | | | A message from General Mills | | Improving the resilience of agriculture | | |  | | | | General Mills believes that good food comes from good soil. That's why the company is working with farmers to grow food as nature intended. The reason: People and the planet depend on it. Learn how regenerative agriculture can help build a thriving future for all. | | | | | | 4. 🏢 Lonely offices |  | | | Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios | | | | Efforts by CEOs to push workers back to the office are failing, Axios Markets co-author Emily Peck writes. - Why it matters: It's increasingly clear that the world of strictly in-office work is gone.
⚡ Case in point: Some employees at Apple are pushing back against an order from CEO Tim Cook to return to the office three days a week starting next month, the Financial Times reports (subscription). - Cook last week told Apple's Silicon Valley employees they must return to the office three days a week after Labor Day. Cook said he wanted to preserve the "in-person collaboration that is so essential to our culture," according to the report.
A group of Apple workers is circulating a petition protesting the "uniform mandate" and demanding more flexibility. | | | | | | | | 5. 💰 The right's secret $1B war chest | | Leonard Leo speaks at a Federalist Society convention in 2017. Photo: Sait Serkan Gurbuz/AP It's among the largest — if not the largest — contributions ever to a politically focused nonprofit, according to The New York Times, which broke the incredible story: - A conservative nonprofit group chaired by Leonard Leo, the powerful co-chair of the conservative Federalist Society, received a staggering $1.6 billion windfall last year from a little-known mogul.
- The Utah-based group, the Marble Freedom Trust, was formed in 2020 without publicity.
Why it matters: Leo was already one of the most influential operatives in conservative politics, known for landing massive checks. But this donation is in a different universe from where even top-flight fundraisers like Leo usually operate. The money, The Times' Ken Vogel and Shane Goldmacher report, came via Barre Seid, who made a fortune as chair and CEO of an electrical-device manufacturing company in Chicago now known as Tripp Lite. - "Rather than merely giving cash, Mr. Seid donated 100 percent of the shares of Tripp Lite to Mr. Leo's nonprofit group before the company was sold to an Irish conglomerate [Eaton] for $1.65 billion," The Times writes.
Leo said in a statement to Axios, same as one to The Times, that it's "high time for the conservative movement" to go toe to toe with "left-wing philanthropists ... in the fight to defend our constitution and its ideals." - Axios is told the war chest will support causes Leo and his allies have spent decades advocating for, including "rule of law, constitutionalist judges, free markets, religious freedom and conscience rights."
Keep reading (subscription) ... See the tax form of Marble Freedom Trust. | | | | | | | | 6. 🌴 Mar-a-Lago search ignites GOP |  | | | Illustration: Natalie Peeples/Axios | | | | The Mar-a-Lago search ignited a frenzy of conservative social-media activity, and drove tens of thousands of new users to former President Trump's Truth Social app, Axios' Sara Fischer and Stef Kight report. - Downloads spiked to nearly 88,000 the week after the search — more than any other week since the app's launch in early May, according to data shared with Axios by Apptopia, a mobile-apps analytics firm.
- Keep reading.
🚨 The government has recovered more than 300 documents with classified markings from Trump since he left office, the N.Y. Times learned: - A batch the National Archives retrieved in January included more than 150 marked as classified, which "helped trigger the criminal investigation that led F.B.I. agents to swoop into Mar-a-Lago."
| | | | | | | | 7. 📚 Out today: Jared Kushner breaks history |  | | | Cover: Broadside Books | | | | Jared Kushner writes in "Breaking History," his memoir out today, that then-President Trump said ahead of a 2017 summit in Saudi Arabia: - "Jared, this schedule is inhumane. You know you aren't in my will. Why are you trying to kill me?"
Why it matters: Kushner's wife, Ivanka Trump, of course is in the will. - The behind-the-scenes nugget is part of Kushner's account of his four years as one of the most powerful West Wing officials, culminating with the 2020 signing of the Abraham Accords, which Trump called "the dawn of a new Middle East."
In Chapter 22, "No Time for Triumph," Kushner writes that in June 2018, he traveled to Israel to discuss his Middle East plan with then-Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu: But shortly after I landed, Ivanka called me with an urgent update. ... Two months earlier, on April 6, Attorney General Jeff Sessions had issued a press release announcing that he would enforce immigration law with a "zero-tolerance policy" against immigrants who crossed the southern border illegally. "It took about six weeks for the ramifications of [the] policy to filter into the press," Kushner continues. "During that period, DHS separated 2,816 children from their parents or guardians." - "When Trump saw the breaking headlines, he quizzed his team about ... what could be done to end child separation. ... Ivanka ... felt that the president wasn't being well served" by his staff.
"She went to see her father in the Executive Residence and handed him" a draft executive order ending the policy. | | | | | | | | 8. 🖼️ 1 fun thing: "No Photos, Please" | | Cover: Anita Kunz for The New Yorker. Used by kind permission For this week's "Archival Issue" of The New Yorker, resurfacing celebrity profiles back to 1947, painter and illustrator Anita Kunz created this "cheeky modern take" on Leonardo da Vinci's iconic "Mona Lisa." 🍿 Use your free New Yorker click to read interviews with Bob Dylan (1964) ... Louise Brooks (1979) ... or Missy Elliott (1997) ... or about Kim Kardashian's 40th birthday (2020). - It's not in this issue, but I went down the New Yorker rabbit hole and gobbled up Lillian Ross' 1950 classic on an Ernest Hemingway layover in New York.
| | | | | | | | A message from General Mills | | Climate action for a better future | | |  | | | | General Mills is working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30% by 2030 and achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. The reason: The Earth's temperature is racing upwards. Now is the time to build resilience for our planet. Learn how General Mills is taking action to reach its climate commitments. | | | | 📬 Invite your friends to sign up to get their daily essentials — Axios AM, PM and Finish Line. |  | | Are you a fan of this email format? It's called Smart Brevity®. Over 300 orgs use it — in a tool called Axios HQ — to drive productivity with clearer workplace communications. | | | |
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