Fast Company

Households in the contiguous United States will pay thousands of dollars more for energy through 2040 because of federal policy changes since President Donald Trump returned to office, according to modeling released Friday by a nonpartisan think tank.

The Energy Innovation analysis found that households will pay an average of $6,500 more for energy, cumulatively through 2040. In five states, households will pay roughly $9,000 more: Oregon, Mississippi, South Dakota, Virginia and Wyoming.

The California-based think tank said there will be more demand for natural gas for electricity because the administration is canceling new clean energy projects and there will be more demand for gasoline for transportation because Trump and Congress are revoking policies that encouraged or created incentives for more efficient and lower-emissions vehicles. Higher demand drives prices up.

Electricity bills are already rising faster than inflation in much of the U.S., which is being blamed in some areas on demand from data centers. The Iran war has sent oil and gasoline prices sharply higher, too.

Contrarily, Trump has said his administration’s energy policies will make bills more affordable for families and businesses. White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said Wednesday that lowering electricity prices remains a top priority and Trump is unleashing reliable energy like coal and natural gas to reverse the “catastrophic damage” Democrats did to the power grid by ramping up clean energy. A 2025 Department of Energy report, mandated by Trump, warned of increasing blackouts if the U.S. continued closing coal and natural gas plants.

“Joe Biden created a grid crisis; President Trump is fixing it,” Rogers wrote in an email. “If the Democrats had their way, these costly and unreliable renewable energy projects would still be failing our grid and our communities.”

The Republican president prioritizes fossil fuels to produce electricity, unlike Biden, who saw clean energy as a climate solution.

Analysis examined impact on states solely from federal policy changes

It focused on the sweeping package of tax breaks that slashed funding for clean energy tax credits, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill, Trump signed; environmental rollbacks, including clean air and power plant rules and the revocation of a scientific finding that underpinned the U.S. fight against climate change; the loosening of fuel economy standards and blocking of California’s novel rule banning the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035; and federal actions to stop wind, solar and hydrogen projects.

These changes will result in annual household energy costs rising in every state in the contiguous U.S., plus job losses in 47 of 48 states and losses to the gross domestic product in 46 states, Energy Innovation said. It’s projecting 37,000 additional premature deaths from air pollution, $72 billion in additional healthcare costs and more than 9 billion tons of additional carbon pollution because of the environmental rollbacks. The analysis did not include Alaska or Hawaii because key federal data is not available for those two states, said Robbie Orvis, senior director for modeling and analysis.

Looking at the metrics, Orvis was hard-pressed to find a silver lining.

“Across pretty much every state, things are worse. The outlook now is worse for states and the affordability crisis will be worse because of the combined set of policies,” he said.

Climate Justice Alliance legislative director Mar Zepeda said her Washington, D.C., electric bill increased $200 in the past month. Zepeda said electricity demands from data centers are increasing energy rates, and federal “affordability” policies only exacerbate this.

“They may call it affordability, but affordable for whom and at what cost? Not for regular people,” Zepeda said in an email.

White House says the think tank is partisan

Rogers said it is “irresponsible” to classify Energy Innovation as nonpartisan because its employees have donated to Democrats and worked with Democrats on climate policy.

Spokesman Silvio Marcacci said they work with policymakers who want to cut emissions and lower bills, regardless of party. He said multiple states led by Republicans have used their tool designed to model policies affecting energy use and emissions. Much of their data comes from government sources, including the Energy Information Administration.

Rogers also said states led by Democrats that have embraced aggressive renewable mandates see higher energy costs, notably California and New York. She said this proves Republican policies are working. The conservative think tank, Institute for Energy Research, said in December that blue states have high rates.

However, in the Energy Innovation analysis, three of the five states facing the highest costs have Republican governors, and states that voted for Trump in 2024 will pay an average of $7,000 more in energy spending cumulatively per household, versus $5,800 on average per household in states that voted for Kamala Harris. Its research has found that states with high levels of wind and solar generation, including Republican-led Iowa and Oklahoma, have experienced the lowest rate increases.

The average price residential customers pay for electricity increased over the course of Biden’s term and has continued to rise since Trump returned to office, according to EIA data. Customers paid an average of about 12.6 cents per kilowatt-hour in January 2021 when Biden took office. In January 2025, when Trump returned to office, that price stood at nearly 16 cents per kilowatt-hour. It was 17.45 cents in January 2026 and 18.31 cents in July.

Oregon households’ annual energy spending slated to increase the most

The modeling projects federal policy changes will increase annual energy spending in Oregon by $840 per household in 2035 and $1,200 per household in 2040, with a cumulative $9,300 increase from 2026 to 2040 — the highest of any state.

The Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board advocates for residential utility customers. Executive Director Bob Jenks called those numbers “frightening” because Oregon already has an energy affordability problem. He cited steep rate increases as utilities make upgrades and data centers use more power.

As costs rise, Jenks expects utilities to disconnect more households because people won’t be able to afford their bills.

Jenks said wind and solar are essential for affordable electricity in Oregon, and he wants the federal government to partner with states to develop the energy they need.

“We’re trying to optimize among the resource options we have, and they’re trying to take things away and raise the costs,” he said.

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

—Jennifer McDermott, Associated Press

Jane Doe. 

Across social media, people are posting in solidarity with the young woman implicated in a sexual assault case that has horrified the country. 

The details of the case are chilling: In 2024, seven men, students and members of Cornell University’s Chi Pi fraternity, allegedly drugged and assaulted a 20-year-old woman. In the aftermath, reportedly two of the men were expelled; others had to write an essay as punishment.

Two years after the alleged events, the young woman filed a civil lawsuit against Cornell University, the fraternity, and her own sorority. In the filings she is anonymously identified as “Jane Doe.” 

As the news spread across social media in the last week—following Cornell’s student newspaper breaking the story—the typical dynamics of online discourse ensued. Many have taken to social media to voice their concerns over what is being called the ‘Cornell Seven’ case. Others are using online platforms to try and dox Jane Doe. 

But efforts to uncover the victim’s identity have instead fueled its own sort of movement, leading users on platforms like TikTok, Threads, and X to turn the witch hunt into a collective action of solidarity.

In a clever manipulation of the algorithm, users across platforms have begun flooding timelines with posts from each user claiming to be Jane Doe themselves.

@mommacusses

I am Jane Doe.

♬ original sound – jane

The videos and posts often include phrases like “congrats you found her,” and “it’s me, I’m Jane Doe,” in an effort to trick the algorithm into displaying their content over efforts to uncover the real identity.

The efforts have since coalesced into its own hashtag—#IAmJaneDoe—with thousands of users posting and interacting with one another.

The sudden viral hashtag mimics that of its predecessor: #MeToo. But rather than users taking the tag as a platform to share their own experiences, the phrase is meant to occupy space in the timeline and obfuscate any potential revealing of Jane Doe’s personal information.

But hashtag movements are not the first or only form of collective action on social media, and their success has been varied—as the line between performative activism and genuine contribution becomes increasingly blurred.

Think of the infamous “Blackout Tuesday” black squares that filled Instagram’s timeline in 2020. Meant to convey a user’s support of the Black Lives Matter movement, the collective action was instead met with criticism calling the actions useless; or even worse, actually detrimental to activist efforts by burying critical safety information by flooding hashtags with black squares.

But in other cases, the collective action can be used to benefit victims and survivors beyond just bringing visibility to a case. Take the case of Ingrid Escamilla—a Mexican woman who in 2020 was murdered and had her body disposed of in the sewers by a man she lived with. When leaked graphic images went viral, users instead used the social media algorithm as a way to honor Escamilla.

Instead of resharing images of her mutilated body, users flooded social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram with images of flowers or blue skies with the victim’s name as a caption. In doing so, those searching for the name would immediately see flowers instead of her body.

As the case continues to unfold both in the media and in the legal space, social media users see an opening use the same algorithmic dynamics that fuel our “For You Pages” as a form of collective action.

“It’s really beautiful seeing women on the internet all saying ‘I’m Jane Doe. In fact she’s actually me,'” one user said on X.

Another added, “we are all Jane Doe until none of us are.”

U.S. employers added a disappointing 29,000 jobs and the unemployment rate ticked up last month, the government reported Friday, a month before voters go to the polls in pivotal midterm elections at a time of discontent over the high cost of living and the state of the economy.

Hiring dropped from a revised 133,000 in August, the Labor Department reported. The unemployment rate rose to a still-low 4.2% from 4.1% in August.

Economists had expected September payrolls to come in at 90,000.

Labor Department revisions also shaved 60,000 jobs off combined July and August payrolls. Average hourly wages were up just 3% last year from a year earlier — smallest year-over-year gain since May 2021.

The U.S. job market has proven resilient in the face of a series of shocks — trade wars, persistent inflation, high interest rates and a conflict with Iran that has driven energy prices higher. Friday’s jobs report is the last one that will come out before the Nov. 3 elections that will determine whether President Donald Trump’s Republicans maintain full control of Congress.

Futures for the S&P 500 and Nasdaq composite added to their gains after the data was released, while Treasury yields moved lower. The yield on the 10-year Treasury was 5.17%, down from 5.24% a day earlier.

The U.S. job market has recovered from a dismal 2025, but ordinary Americans remain unhappy about the economy and the high cost of living.

A Thursday poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that only 17% of U.S. adults approve of Trump’s handling of the cost of living. Just 26% approve of his handling of the economy overall, marking a new low.

U.S. consumer confidence dropped this month to the lowest level in more than a decade, according to an index published by the Conference Board. One reason: More than 28% of the respondents told the business think tank that they expect fewer jobs to be available in six months, double the 14% who expect more.

The online jobs site Glassdoor reports that its employee confidence index, based on how workers view prospects for their own companies, dropped last month to the lowest level in records going back to the beginning of 2016, a period that includes a global pandemic. It was the index’s third record low this year.

“Employee confidence has been continuously grinding downward over the last year as workers grow increasingly anxious about everything from layoffs to AI,” said Glassdoor chief economist Daniel Zhao.

The public’s misgivings about jobs partly reflect an odd feature of the current labor market: Employers aren’t laying off many workers, but they aren’t hiring many either. A Labor Department measure of gross hiring — before subtracting those who quit or lose their jobs – has been stuck in a rut for more than two years.

So economists describe a “low-hire, low-fire” job market in which those who have jobs are mostly secure, but jobseekers struggle to find work. In August, the average unemployed person had been out of work for more than six months, the longest average stretch of joblessness since February 2022.

“People know that being laid off is unusually costly right now,” said Glassdoor’s Zhao. “They hear from their friends how long they’ve been out of work and had such a difficult time finding a job. That does make layoffs even more scary than usual.”

In that chilly environment, fewer workers are willing to quit their jobs. “They often feel stuck,” Zhao said. “Workers aren’t finding there’s opportunity on the open market to find a better job – one that pays more or offers better work-life balance.”

—Paul Wiseman, AP Economics Writer

Last month, a recall was initiated for select lots of a pasta product sold at Walmart stores nationwide.

The recall stemmed from concerns that the product could be contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes, a bacterium that can cause serious infection and even death.

Now, the Walmart pasta recall has expanded. Here’s what you need to know.

What’s happened?

On October 1, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published a recall notice about a pasta product.

The product was made by Gias Foods of New York City and sold under Walmart’s Bettergoods brand. However, this is not the first recall notice associated with this product.

Two weeks earlier, on September 15, the original recall of the Gias Foods-produced, Bettergoods-branded pasta was announced.

This original announcement said the recall was limited to only specific lots of the pasta product. However, the new notice posted by the FDA yesterday says that all lots of the Bettergoods pasta product are being recalled.

What is Bettergoods?

Bettergoods is Walmart’s relatively new premium grocery label. As Fast Company reported at the time, Walmart launched the Bettergoods label in 2024 to create a premium private-label brand distinct from its low-cost Great Value brand.

The brand aimed to create a new visual identity for unique products made with higher-quality ingredients—something shoppers with more discretionary dollars would be willing to pay more for.

However, foods sold under the Bettergoods label have been impacted by a few different recalls over the brand’s short lifetime.

Back in October 2024, some of its waffle products were caught up in a larger multi-brand waffle product recall, and just this past August, a Bettergoods Pistachio Nut Butter product was recalled due to Salmonella fears.

What products are being recalled?

For the latest recall, there is only one product involved:

• Name: Bettergoods Authentic Italian Lemon Alfredo Fettuccine
• Size: 22 oz
• UPC: 194346442706

The recall notice states the product is frozen.

The original recall of the product limited units to certain lot numbers. However, the new recall notice says all lot codes of the product are now included in the recall.

Images of the recalled product’s packaging can be found here.

Where was the recalled product sold?

The recalled product was distributed to Walmart stores nationwide.

What is Listeria?

Listeria is a bacterium that can cause a serious infection.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about 1,250 people in the United States contract a Listeria infection each year. Of those, about 172 people die from it, giving the infection a high mortality rate.

While a Listeria infection can affect anyone, the infection is particularly dangerous for certain groups of people, including:

• Pregnant women
• Newborns
• Adults aged 65 or older
• People with weakened immune systems

According to the recall notice, routine sampling by state agriculture services revealed that the recalled pasta may contain the harmful bacteria.

What should I do if I have the recalled product?

You should take the product back to its place of purchase for a refund. You can find out the full details of the recall in the recall notice here.

At 18, one of us—Juan Carlos—arrived at the Spanish indoor archery championship expecting to win. He was shooting better than he ever had. But he was an outsider in the Spanish archery community and was training with unorthodox methods at the time. He and his coach, who came from handball and gymnastics, had been the subject of much criticism.

So he competed to prove a point. From the first arrow he tried to achieve perfection. When he didn’t, it rattled him. By the halfway mark he was thinking about the rankings, about what the critics would say, about everything except the next shot. He finished near last and took the public bus home alone and devastated.

After some reflection, he understood what happened: The harder he had tried, the worse he had shot.

Archers use the phrase “archer’s paradox” for a quirk of arrow flight. We have adopted it for something archers know and rarely say out loud: The more you want to hit the center, the more likely you are to miss. In archery, the mechanism is physical. Pressure creates tension, tension degrades fine motor control, and the archer who is trying too hard grips the bow too tightly, holds their breath, forces the release, and watches the arrow go wide. Elite archers describe their best shots as the ones where they did nothing special. They executed the sequence they had trained and let the arrow go.

If you lead people, the same thing can happen to you, and it shows up in ways you may not recognize as trying harder. You overprepare the answer and stop hearing the question. You fill every silence in a tense meeting because the silence feels like losing control. Or you push for the decision today because leaving without one feels like failure. And when you notice yourself getting tense, you try to fix that too. You tell yourself to stay calm, which is just one more thing to strive for, and your judgment narrows a little further.

You struggle for the same reasons archers do. Under pressure your thinking is part of what is stressed, so instructing yourself to think differently is asking the compromised system to repair itself.

We have helped business leaders recognize and learn how to deal with this problem. Over seven years, more than 400 executives in Michael’s leadership program at IMD [the Switzerland-based business school] have shot arrows in an archery experience led by Juan Carlos. The pattern often shows up. As the desire to win increases and as more people watch, stress increases and performance degrades.

Effort is the wrong lever

Here is what happens to an archer who gets overwhelmed mid-competition. They don’t know what’s wrong or how to fix it, so they try harder, which means second-guessing every element of the shot, which further increases stress. Leaders can end up in a similar spiral. One bad exchange creates doubt, doubt creates tension, tension degrades the next exchange, and the cycle accelerates until you are performing well below what you are capable of.

The instinct to apply more effort under pressure is the most reliable way we know to make your performance worse. Juan Carlos relearned this as both an archer and later as coach. The harder he pushed his own knowledge at the athletes he worked with, the less able they were to find their own, and the dependence he was trying to prevent was the result.

Reframing what you need to do

What works is reframing what you are doing. Archers have three strategies you can adopt.

The first is prioritizing process over outcome. During practice, an archer thinks about the specific elements of the process they want to work on and improve: “This arrow, I’m working on back tension through the release.” Do the same before your next difficult meeting. “I must close this deal” puts your attention on something you can’t control. “I’ll ask questions until I understand their concerns” puts it on something you can. Pick one and write it down before you walk in.

The second is to reset your body. One cycle of a four-second inhale, two-second hold, and six-second exhale slows your heart rate through the vagus nerve. Pulling your shoulders back and down for three seconds does something similar through your posture. Both work because they bypass the thinking that is under stress.

The third is an override for the moments when effort is all you can feel. When Juan Carlos’s whole system was failing under pressure, he had one word, push, which meant commit to the shot and keep moving, because analysis at that point only feeds the freeze. Yours should be the simplest version of your leadership in five words or fewer. Some leaders use “ask the next question,” which shifts you from frozen to active and buys time. Write yours down before you need it, because you won’t compose it in the moment.

Archers learn one more thing over years of competition. Execute your process with full commitment and then accept where the arrow lands. If it misses, notice what happened, let it go, and start over.

Try it once this week. Pick the hardest meeting on your calendar, write one process intention on a card, and take one breath cycle at the door. Afterward, judge yourself on whether you executed your intention. How the meeting went is a separate question, and for now it is the less useful one.

Adapted from The Archer’s Edge: Ancient Wisdom and Modern Practice for Business Leaders, by Michael Watkins and Juan Carlos Holgado (Wiley)

Every founder is subject to burnout, even the founders of a massive lifestyle, retail, and media brand.

Joanna Gaines, co-founder of Magnolia, launched the brand alongside her husband, Chip, nearly 25 years ago. After gaining prominence for renovating houses on the HGTV show Fixer Upper, the two used their company to transform the city of Waco, Texas. They realized they needed to take a break.

On Monday, Gaines discussed how the couple took a three-month hiatus from their business on Hoda Kotb’s Joy 101 podcast. The 48-year-old reflected on her time building the brand and explained why they took the break to embrace the “power of pausing.”

“As far as Magnolia, we’ve been doing this for almost 25 years and we’ve never really stopped. And about three years ago, we stopped seeing vision,” she said on the podcast. “We stopped remembering like, ‘Why are we doing this?’”

The couple ultimately decided that taking a three-month break was the right step to regain sight of the message and intention behind their business. 

“I remember I was like, ‘OK, we’re going to take the summer off,’ which meant disappointing our team, disappointing a lot of things, to just up and leave. So it cost us something,” Gaines told Kotb. “But that three months was time for us to go, ‘We need a break. We need clarity. Why are we building this? What are we doing this for?’ And so that was three years ago.” 

What are some of the signs of burnout?

Allison Schultz, co-founder and coach at Reboot.io and author of The Art of Being Human at Work, told Inc. that the signs of burnout vary from person to person.

“Most folks, when stressed and overwhelmed, show up differently. If you’re overwhelmed, stressed to the max, feel out of touch with your purpose, or haven’t taken care of yourself in a long time, you’re not going to be able to meet the day (and the people you work with) the way you would show up on your best day,” Schultz told Inc.

Melody Wilding, an executive coach and the author of Trust Yourself: Stop Overthinking and Channel Your Emotions for Success at Work, agreed with Schultz, adding that another warning sign is when leaders start to work longer hours, “think about projects constantly, yet get less satisfaction from wins that once energized you.”

She told Inc. that people should look out for repetitive, rigid thought patterns, like: “I can’t stop or I’ll fall behind” or “Everything will fall apart if I step away.”

Jerry Colonna, co-founder and coach at Reboot.io, told Inc. that successful entrepreneurs often struggle to recognize burnout until they’re deep into it, because “so many of the behaviors that produce burnout are precisely the behaviors we reward in entrepreneurs.”

He explained, “We celebrate the founder who works harder, pushes through exhaustion, answers every email, carries everybody’s anxiety, and refuses to quit. We call that grit. Sometimes it is. But sometimes what looks like perseverance from the outside is fear on the inside: fear of disappointing people, fear of losing what we’ve built, fear that if we slow down everything will collapse.”

Paula Davis, founder and CEO of the Stress & Resilience Institute, told Inc. that taking a break can be a strategic decision.

“When you’re in multiple years of growth mode in your business, I think it’s good to take a step back to just recalibrate,” Davis said.

She added that “Joanna said she and Chip needed to reconnect with the why of their business and to assess/take stock of all they had done for the entire 25 years they had been building the business. The three dimensions of burnout are chronic exhaustion, cynicism, and feeling inefficacy—a why-bother-who-cares mentality.  When you start to feel those symptoms, it can take some time for them to reverse course. That’s why catching burnout early is so important.”

Colonna said that leaders can learn to choose to pause instead of pushing through—and that stopping is not the same as quitting. 

“A real pause creates enough distance for us to hear ourselves again. It allows us to distinguish between the needs of the business and the needs of our own frightened, ambitious, approval-seeking selves,” Colonna said. “It can reconnect us with the original intention beneath all the accumulated noise.”

—Lucia Auerbach

This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister website, Inc.com. 

Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.

Independent agencies are claiming a growing share of the industry’s recognition. This year, Rethink was named Ad Age’s 2026 Agency of the Year and won both Independent Agency and Independent Network of the Year at Cannes Lions. Last year, eight of the 11 winners of Adweek’s 2025 Agency of the Year were independent. This reflects a broader shift. Large agencies still produce great work, but size no longer directly correlates with capability.

Independent teams can compete at the highest level because of the agility that comes from keeping the right people close to the work and to their clients, rather than moving through layers, departments, and long approval chains. Strategists, designers, producers, and clients can challenge one another earlier, make decisions faster and build stronger work together.

When I started TOML Collective, the goal was not to create a smaller version of a traditional agency. It was to build something different: a collective where talent came first, creativity was respected, and collaboration was not limited by borders. Today, we have a small core team and a wider network of more than 50 creatives and partners, which allows us to assemble the right team around each brief.

In the years since our founding, these are four things I’ve learned about how a small, independent agency can move the needle faster than large agencies.

1. Clients value attention more than scale.

Scale has obvious benefits. But it can also create distance between the client, the decision-makers, and the people making the work. Clients pay for output, but they also value judgment, attention, speed, and direct access to people who understand their business. Smaller teams can make that relationship much more immediate.

2. Proximity builds trust.

We see the same principle on the client side. For example, in our work with Siebert Financial on its Generational Wealth campaign to make wealth-building more accessible to a new generation of investors required trust from both the audience and client. Younger audiences do not necessarily want another large financial institution talking at them. Building trust with this audience requires teams that understand how younger people think about money, communicate with them directly, and make investing feel more personal and accessible. Proximity also matters on the client side because it gives everyone involved the room to challenge ideas, move quickly, and take creative risks. Trust reduces the distance between people, and judgment determines what you do with that freedom.

3. Shared responsibility creates better work.

Small teams work best when roles are clear and responsibility is shared. Designers should understand the strategy, strategists should care about execution, and clients should help shape the direction rather than simply approve it at the end. When different disciplines challenge one another early, stronger ideas survive and teams catch problems before they reach production. Structure determines what a team can see and how quickly it can respond.

4. AI is making the model more competitive.

AI is accelerating this shift. Small teams can now explore more creative routes, test variations, and produce work at a scale that previously required far larger production structures. But access to AI will not remain an advantage for long, because producing more options is becoming easier while choosing the right one remains difficult. AI can increase a team’s capacity, but it cannot replace taste, trust, or judgment.

FINAL THOUGHTS

The advantage of a small agency is ultimately not its size. It is how closely it can keep clients, talent, decisions, and responsibility to the work. That proximity builds trust and shared ownership, allowing teams to move faster without lowering the bar. Judgment, attention, and proximity are what determine the quality of the work.

Virtyt Pula is the founder and creative lead at TOML Collective.