Ein mögliches rot-grün-rotes Bündnis in Berlin schlägt bundespolitisch hohe Wellen. Während z.B. Grünen-Chef Felix Banaszak vor radikalen Kräften warnt und die Tür zur CDU taktisch offen halten will, ist Friedrich Merz wiederum hart und unerbittlich im Ton gegenüber Grünen und der SPD, wenn es um die Gespräche mit radikalen linken Kräften geht. Rasmus Buchsteiner ordnet ein, wie nun auch in der SPD der Widerstand wächst und Parteichef Lars Klingbeil sich derweil zurückhält.

Die Junge Union fordert derweil drastische Konsequenzen: Eine künftige Berliner Landesregierung soll z.B. von Geheimdienstinformationen des Bundes abgeschnitten werden. Im 200-Sekunden-Interview erklärt der CDU-Abgeordnete Johannes Volkmann, warum er Teile der Berliner Linken als Sicherheitsrisiko sieht und eine politische Ächtung der Partei verlangt.

Auf internationaler Bühne sorgt die Kehrtwende der USA für Entsetzen, nachdem Donald Trump die Sanktionen gegen Russlands Schattenflotte auf Eis gelegt hat. Hans von der Burchard analysiert, wie dieser Schritt Europa sicherheitspolitisch erneut herausfordert und welche Folgen der Wegfall amerikanischer Unterstützung für die Ukraine im nahenden Winter haben könnte.

Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Rixa Fürsen, Maximilian Stascheit und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum Hören – kompakt, international, hintergründig.

Für alle Hauptstadt-Profis: Der Berlin Playbook-Newsletter bietet jeden Morgen die wichtigsten Themen und Einordnungen. Jetzt kostenlos abonnieren.

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Now, former Savannah police officer Amber Harpe was fired in August following a department investigation that found she had shared her Flock login information with her husband, Tyler Harpe, an ICE agent. SPD does not share its Flock data with ICE and said sharing access to the system violated the department's security protocols.

While he had unauthorized access to the system, Tyler Harpe conducted 983 searches related to 97 license plates, which were overwhelmingly registered to Hispanic drivers, according to Savannah's local ABC affiliate, WJCL. The Harpes defended their actions, saying they didn't use access for personal reasons and that …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Carolyn Marvin was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct after blocking the path of an Uber delivery robot and refusing to get out of the way. Marvin told Philadelphia's ABC13 "I know they're taking the jobs of human delivery workers and so, I have been protesting them whenever I saw them by standing in front of them and preventing them from going forward."

Police responded to the scene and asked Marvin to move out of the robot's way. When she refused, they placed her in cuffs and arrested her. The incident was captured on video and has now garnered considerable media attention.

The delivery robots have become a common sight on the …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York's 15th congressional district in the Bronx introduced the Power To The Players Act this week. If passed, the bill would direct the Federal Trade Commission to establish regulations that guarantee consumers ownership of a game when they pay for it, rather than a licensing agreement.

It's increasingly common for games sold to require a connection to a server. Meaning that when a company decides to shut down those servers, the games often become unplayable. Rep. Torres singles out NBA 2K25 as a recent example. 2K will be delisting the game from storefronts at the end of the month and shutting down its servers on …

Read the full story at The Verge.

During a rally on Saturday, October 17th, in Highland Heights, Kentucky, Donald Trump bragged about how much more powerful and influential he was during his second term. While listing off his accomplishments, he mentioned his decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario.

"This is a much more powerful term. I can do stuff that's unbelievable … I called Google, Google Maps. See, Google wouldn't have taken my call in the first term. Now they kiss my ass."

Trump seems to be implying that he convinced Google to reflect the name change personally. That would seem to contradict Google's statement on the matter, in which it said that …

Read the full story at The Verge.

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on autonomous vehicles, policy, and road rules, follow Andrew J. Hawkins. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.

How it started

The first state to pass a law legalizing self-driving cars operating on public roads was Nevada in June 2011 - long before such vehicles were operating on public roads. This was three years before the introduction of Tesla's Autopilot, five years before Waymo spun out of the Google self-driving car project, and seven years before the first commercial robotaxi …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Just ahead of the wider release of Alex Gibney's Musk documentary, TikTok has banned the film's social media account from its platform. TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the film's distributor, Bleecker Street, was informed Friday afternoon that a "permanent suspension" was imminent. Bleecker Street has not yet responded to a request for comment from The Verge.

While TikTok has no official affiliation with Elon Musk, part owner Larry Ellison appears in the film via a text message offering to help Musk fund his Twitter purchase.

Last month, YouTube, Meta, X, and TikTok all face …

Read the full story at The Verge.

In 2024, Elon Musk promised to give away $1 million a day to a randomly selected registered voter in a swing state. That prompted legal challenges, raised questions about its legality, and drew lawsuits from two Arizona residents claiming the lottery was a fraud. Musk has now agreed to settle the two lawsuits filed in Austin, Texas, though the details of the settlement have not been made public.

The plaintiffs claim that when Musk announced the sweepstakes, he falsely claimed the prizes would be awarded randomly. Philadelphia's District Attorney sued to stop the giveaway, claiming that Musk was running an illegal lottery. During a hearing, …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Meta's new terms appear to give it permission to crawl and scrape websites "associated" with the businesses that use its platforms - including online publishers, according to a report from Nieman Lab. The new terms, which go into effect on October 30th, say Meta can use this outside content to "develop, improve, research," and "train" its AI products.

While Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts says that the company is just "consolidating" its commercial and self-serve ad terms, legal experts tell Nieman Lab that this could allow Meta "to argue its commercial terms supersede other blocking instructions," like a site's robots.txt file. That could …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Since gun-rights activist and alt-right-friendly agitator Cody Wilson made the first 3D-printed firearm 13 years ago, he's helped usher in a chaotic era of untraceable ghost guns. Now he's claiming another first: "the first AI-made gun." It's called the WASP.

I stood about 20 feet away as Wilson and his sidekick clamped the WASP to a DIY test mount outside Defense Distributed headquarters in Austin, Texas. The 3D-printed .22 caliber handgun is, in reality, little more than a pistol barrel attached to a spring-loaded plastic box. Its rudimentary design bears a resemblance to Wilson's single-shot 3D-printed "Liberator," albeit with some quint …

Read the full story at The Verge.

BRUSSELS — France and Germany said Friday they had struck a deal to favor European-made cars under a landmark EU industry bill in exchange for weakening a 2035 vehicle emissions target, ending months of wrangling between the bloc’s two biggest economies.

Under the agreement, Germany would accept stricter “Made in Europe” — or local content — requirements for the automotive industry in the proposed Industrial Accelerator Act, a longstanding French demand, while France would back Berlin’s push to relax the EU’s plan to phase out new combustion-engine cars.

The EU’s current target is for companies to reduce emissions from new vehicles by 100% from 2021 levels by 2035, with the possibility to “earn” 10% of emissions leeway through initiatives like offsets and investments.

France and Germany now want to soften the 2035 target to 90% but without having  to offer investments in alternative fuels to compensate the remaining 10%, as proposed by the European Commission.

“This balanced approach will enable the European Union to pursue its climate objectives while strengthening the technological sovereignty, industrial base and international competitiveness of its automotive industry,” the two countries said in a joint statement.

The agreement, first reported by POLITICO in July, was due to have been announced Thursday, during a meeting of EU leaders in Brussels. But it was held up at the last minute by disagreements within Germany’s governing coalition.

“We hope that this Franco-German dynamic can swiftly lead to an agreement with our partners, for our jobs and our industry,” French President Emmanuel Macron said in a post on social media.

An Elysée official on Friday made clear that, under the Franco-German deal, the scope of Made in Europe for automotive can be extended to the U.K. and Switzerland under certain conditions. — addressing a key concern of Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s government ahead of a Nov. 20 U.K.-EU summit in Brussels.

The agreement was reached after the German Social Democratic Party, the junior partner in Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s coalition government, dropped its opposition.

“This is a modern realignment of German industrial policy that places significantly greater emphasis on preserving jobs and production sites,” said German Environment Minister Carsten Schneider, who is from the SPD.

“The clear expectation for German companies is that they will use these new opportunities to make investments and guarantee jobs here in Germany,” he added.

CORRECTION: This article was updated on Oct. 16 after an earlier version misrepresented the figures in the Franco-German proposal on the softening of 2035 targets.

Jamie Dettmer is associate editor and a foreign affairs columnist for POLITICO.

Cast your mind back to last year, when European leaders scrambled back and forth across the Atlantic, seeking to patch up tattered relations between U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

After the Oval Office brawl where a scolded Zelenskyy pushed back against Trump and his vice president before being ejected from the White House, then-U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron led the effort to engineer a call between the pair, during which the Ukrainian president expressed regret about the meeting — but fell short of apologizing.

Likewise, after Trump’s August summit in Alaska with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Starmer and his top security adviser Jonathan Powell worked feverishly alongside other European leaders to rescue the broken relationship between Kyiv and Washington. They even came up with a ceasefire plan and got U.S. buy-in. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte also did some heavy lifting.

But this time, after Trump unveiled a controversial diesel deal with Russia and called — once again — for Zelenskyy to step down, the European reaction has been less febrile. Of course, they have offered Kyiv strong rhetorical support and unveiled more Russia sanctions, but there has been no frantic, panicky outreach effort to Trump to mediate a speedy repair.

Why not?

Because the Trump shock factor is wearing off, hazards Ukraine’s former Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba. “The primary answer is that they have got used to him,” he told POLITICO. “They have all had an immunity shot, and they don’t feel as scared as they did last year.”

“Another reason is they’re drowning in their own problems,” he added. “And I think that first they feel they have to try to figure out how what Trump is doing will impact them — how big their bill will become as a result.”

European leaders are not scrambling like they did last year because Trump is “losing his leverage,” said Lia Quartapelle, an Italian lawmaker from the opposition Democratic Party who is vice chair of the parliament’s Foreign and European Affairs Committee. “We realize he cannot be trusted and we are on our own,” so there’s little point lobbying him.

According to the Financial Times, EU officials plan to urge Zelenskyy to tone down his increasingly sharp remarks about Trump, fearing they are only inflaming the situation. Starmer’s successor, Andy Burnham, is positioning himself as someone who can “lay the ground” for a reconciliation, he explained to the House of Commons Wednesday. 

Nonetheless, the calmer reaction to Trump’s maneuvers stands out, acknowledges Daniel Fried, a former senior U.S. diplomat who served as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs under U.S. President George W. Bush.

“The Europeans seem to have taken Trump’s measure,” Fried told POLITICO. “They want to avoid the worst. They want to mitigate the damage over the next two years while Trump is in office. They do work with people in the Trump administration with whom they can work. And there are such people.” 

Speaking from Warsaw, fresh from attending a recent security conference in the Polish capital, he said the Europeans understand now that much of what Trump does is performative and has a short life span — like the Russian diesel deal, which has a shelf life of two or three days, he said. “I’m not sure it’s going anywhere as it is utterly impractical and legally questionable, and it isn’t clear the Russians actually can supply the diesel,” he said. In other words, why get worked up about it?

Fried said in his conversations with European leaders and officials, he has detected increasing exasperation with the overall inconsistency of the American position: “Trump wants Europe to do more militarily, but it must buy American,” he said. “But we can’t sell to the Europeans because of our needs, so they will have to wait even though they can’t build it themselves. Nonetheless, they have to carry the load in Ukraine without us. That’s utterly inconsistent, and they are exasperated by it.” 

And they’re just tired of having Trump jerk them around, Fried added. “One thing they are trying to avoid is having Trump snap his fingers and they come flying. Because then it looks like they are at Trump’s beck and call and are his supplicants, and they don’t want to do that. Besides, if they fly out and talk him into something, how long will what he agreed to last?”  

Of course, the Europeans can also console themselves with the high chance of Trump reversing himself. “There is a pattern,” said Kuleba. “He launches a cavalry attack … and then retreats. That’s what we saw in February last year. That’s what we saw in November 2025. And that’s what we will see this time too.”

BRUSSELS — EU leaders will go back to the drawing board in November as they race to finalize a deal on the bloc’s next seven-year budget by the end of the year.

During the first day of a two-day summit in Brussels on Thursday, European Council President António Costa announced he was convening an additional gathering on Nov. 26 in a bid to overcome disagreements and lay the ground for a final deal in December. To bring the sides closer to an agreement, he will present new budget figures before the meeting, according to an EU official, who was granted anonymity to discuss the confidential planning.

Costa is pressing leaders to finalize negotiations by the end of the year — before elections in France, Italy and Poland in 2027 threaten to derail the talks.

In a speech to the leaders, Costa warned that going past the end-of-year deadline will delay EU payments to farmers and researchers past Jan. 1, 2028, when the new budget is scheduled to come into force.

If leaders fail to reach a deal in December, the electoral calendar might push an agreement to May or even October 2027, Costa warned leaders in his concluding remarks, according to two EU diplomats briefed on the discussions.

Pressure on governments

Costa’s plan received a major boost on Thursday from French President Emmanuel Macron, who told fellow leaders that he won’t have a political mandate to sign a deal close to the French presidential elections in April 2027.

This is a major reversal for France, which has previously been unwilling to commit to the end-of-year deadline.

Macron’s words put more pressure on governments to advance the talks over the coming weeks — although some cast doubt on his good intentions.

“There are so many elections next year. [French far-right leader Marine] Le Pen herself [said] it’s undemocratic if we were now to agree,” said one EU diplomat.

Just hours before the leaders’ gathering, Le Pen renewed calls to halve France’s contributions to the EU budget if she wins the presidential elections next year.

She said that rushing the budget agreement before the French elections would be “a democratic scandal.”

The new frugal

Costa is stuck between messy domestic politics across Europe and hardening stances among the EU’s 27 leaders.

The so-called frugal EU countries pushing for major budget cuts — Germany, Netherlands, Austria, Sweden, Denmark and Finland — have publicly said that an Irish proposal envisioning €159 billion cuts doesn’t go far enough.

On Thursday, the six hardliners were joined by Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever, who joked in a press conference after the summit that “I’m married to a Dutch person so I’m very frugal also in my personal life.”

However, behind closed doors the budget hardliners employed a more conciliatory tone.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz — the unofficial leader of the frugal camp — said that the Irish proposal has achieved progress despite reductions still being needed, said two EU diplomats briefed on the discussions.

He pointed to EU payouts to poorer regions, as opposed to farmer’s subsidies, as an avenue for cuts.

On the other side of the spectrum, Spanish Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez — who will try to cling on to power in an election on Nov. 29 — insisted that the budget is way too small.

“It is a distribution of misery,” he told fellow leaders during the discussions, according to the diplomats. He was joined by Italy’s right-wing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni — an ideological foe on most issues, but an ally of sorts in the budget battle. She insisted that no further cuts to the budget will be accepted.

To bring sides together closer to a deal, Costa promised to advance progress on EU-wide taxes, or own resources, to finance the next seven-year budget and reduce national contributions.  

He will explore the European Parliament’s proposed taxes on crypto firms, online gambling and tech giants as well as a Greek idea to funnel future national sales of 6G mobile spectrum to the EU budget.

But given the level of opposition, getting EU countries to agree to any of these options will no be no mean feat.

“It is time to be realistic and work on what is plausible and reasonable, instead of wishful thinking,” said another EU diplomat.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump wants to deport a member of Congress. 

What’s happening? On Monday, Homeland Security officers raided the Washington, DC, home of US Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) in an investigation reportedly tied to immigration paperwork filled out by her father when she was a minor.

That was, at the time, more than enough cause for alarm. Trump’s animosity toward Omar, who is Somali-American and an outspoken critic of the administration, is well-known, and the raid is an extraordinary violation of the Justice Department’s usual rule to avoid taking visible action around politically sensitive cases within 60 days of an election. 

On Wednesday evening, however, we learned more about the raid from the Wall Street Journal. The Omar investigation, the Journal reported, is explicitly aimed at stripping Omar of her citizenship — and thus her ability to hold office — and deporting her. 

How would they do that? Omar came to the US as a refugee when she was 12 and became a US citizen when she was 17. The Trump administration’s investigation is said to focus on whether she or her family misrecorded her age in order to more easily gain citizenship. 

The government cannot unilaterally denaturalize a citizen, however; it would have to ask a court to do so.

What’s the context? Historically, it’s rare for the US to strip citizenship from naturalized US citizens. But doing so at volume has been a major, if less visible, priority for the second Trump administration. 

As of earlier this year, NBC News reported, DOJ was targeting hundreds of people for possible denaturalization, and has reportedly hoped to put forward hundreds of new cases per month (though successfully stripping them of citizenship is another matter).

Why does this matter? Trump’s campaign to bend the traditionally nonpartisan DOJ into a tool to punish and harass his enemies has been one of the major stories of his second term. 

Even if it never advances beyond Monday’s raid, an investigation targeting Omar’s citizenship with the eventual goal of deporting her from the US represents a new and even more dangerous evolution of that effort — and it threatens to move the US to a far darker place, where citizenship and the rights it guarantees are predicated on the president’s goodwill.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Hi readers — if you’ll allow me to depart a little from my normal approach to this section, I have a story about politics to share. It’s not, however, about the politics we’re currently dealing with, but about what could be: Democrats’ plan for a quietly ambitious “Project 2029” should they win the White House in 2028. You can read it with a gift link here.

Alternatively, if you’d prefer to just log off, here’s an adorable snow leopard cub with massive paws. Thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow!

President Donald Trump posted a series of photos on Truth Social showing off renovations to the White House - but one of them appears to be modified with AI. The picture, which compares an old White House column to a "restored" one, has several discrepancies and was flagged by Google's AI detector as "made or edited with OpenAI."

As pointed out by users on Reddit, the picture of the "restored" column has an uneven number of steps on both sides of the structure. The number of steps also doesn't match up with the ones in the "before" photo. Additionally, the before and after photos appear nearly identical in angle and detail; the reflection i …

Read the full story at The Verge.

BRUSSELS — France and Germany on Thursday failed to agree a common position on the scope of the bloc’s future “Made in Europe” rules, as well as on greater flexibility for CO2 emissions cuts and the 2035 combustion engine ban. 

The draft quid-pro-quo deal, which was first reported by POLITICO in July, marks a major convergence between the two countries and had been expected to be signed imminently. On Thursday evening, however, the agreement stalled amid opposition from Germany’s Social Democratic Party, the center-left junior partner in the ruling coalition, over concerns it dropped key environmental targets.

“A final agreement has yet to be reached,” a German government spokesperson said.

Earlier this week, French President Emmanuel Macron had suggested the ball was in the German court. “There are political constraints on the other side of the Rhine, and I completely respect coalition discussions,” Macron said Monday on the sidelines of the Paris car show.

Under the terms of the proposed deal, Germany would accept stricter Made in Europe criteria for the automotive sector in the Industrial Accelerator Act, which France has pushed for, in exchange for weakening the combustion engine ban, one of Berlin’s long-term demands.

“In light of the significant technological, economic and geopolitical changes since the existing regulatory framework was established, the Automotive Package should strike a better balance between climate objectives, industrial competitiveness, technological development and the strengthening of European value creation,” the two countries wrote in a draft agreement obtained by POLITICO.

“Based on the Franco-German Ministerial Councils in 2025 and 2026, Germany and France therefore propose a balanced negotiating package combining ambitious CO₂ reduction targets with additional flexibility and targeted incentives for European value creation,” the agreement adds.

Currently, the EU’s target is for companies to reduce combustion engine emissions by 100% from 2021 levels by 2035, with the possibility to ‘earn’ 10% of emissions leeway through initiatives like offsets and investments.

Under the proposed deal, France and Germany want to soften the 2035 target to 90%, and to offer a further 10% leeway in exchange for investments in alternative fuels (for a combined 80%).

Crucially for steel manufacturers and Germany’s leftist SPD, the French-German agreement would axe the green steel investment requirement, removing a key incentive.

“This destroys the lead market for the steel industry,” an industry lobbyist told POLITICO on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive topic. In failing to put pressure on automakers to source green steel, the draft deal makes it a “nice-to-have” extra, they explained.

In a concession to Berlin, the draft agreement stresses that the so-called utility factor — which calculates plug-in hybrid emissions based on how often a vehicle’s electric motor is used vs. its combustion engine — should be calculated on lab-based results rather than real-world data, as required by the Commission. The change will help automakers sell more plug-in hybrids while still reaching the broader emissions targets.

In exchange for these emissions concessions, Germany endorsed France’s demand that the scope of the Made in Europe rules under the bloc’s Industrial Accelerator Act be restricted when it comes to the automotive sector.

The text only covers the EU’s 27 member countries and will be extended to the U.K. under certain conditions.

EU industry chief Stéphane Séjourné told POLITICO on Tuesday that he supported the deal as a way of breaking the impasse, and said the U.K. currently qualifies for Made in Europe. 

The agreement could resolve a stalemate over both the CO2 regulation and the IAA, in which France and Germany have been on opposite sides. “The elements of this combined package should be adopted as soon as possible and at the same time,” the two countries wrote.

The British government welcomed the potential inclusion of the U.K. in the Made in Europe rules for cars. 

“This is a Franco-German proposal and there is still a European process to run, but if confirmed, we welcome the objective to have the U.K. included in the Industrial Accelerator Act, and this would be good news for the British automotive industry and the jobs and investment it supports across the U.K.,” a No. 10 official said in a statement.

If approved, the comprehensive Franco-German deal will still have to be approved by other EU countries and by the European Parliament, which are currently discussing the Industrial Accelerator Act and the automotive package, including emissions targets for automakers.

Carlo Martuscelli, Francesca Micheletti and Graham Lanktree contributed to this report.

The promise of GLP-1 drugs has always depended on people being able to afford them. These drugs still cost hundreds of dollars per month if you’re paying cash, at which point access becomes a privilege: The higher-income executive who wants to trim a few pounds might be able to afford them either way, but the low-income worker who needs the drug to lose significant weight might not be able to afford them — unless their health insurance covers it.

For a while, the trend lines for GLP-1 insurance coverage were positive. As of 2026, roughly two-thirds of private employer plans, which insure half of Americans, were covering GLP-1 medications for weight loss to treat obesity. Over the summer, Medicare launched a new $50-per-month prescription program. The US has struggled with an obesity epidemic for decades, but it looked like powerful drugs to treat it were finally starting to be more seamlessly integrated into the health system.

At least that’s how things appeared earlier this year. But now, private plans are pulling back from GLP-1 coverage. People are being left in the lurch, debating whether to try to pay for these drugs on their own or stop taking medicines they feel are making a real difference for their health.

The dilemma reveals one of the structural flaws in American healthcare. For working-age adults, your insurance depends on your job. Unfortunately, because people no longer stay at the same job for decades, there is not a strong financial incentive for employers to make investments that will benefit your health in the long term — but there is a strong incentive to minimize short-term costs as much as possible. It’s the kind of perverse rationale that could compel employer-sponsored health plans to stop covering a drug that, if taken over the full course of a person’s life, could help them not only lose weight but ultimately reduce their risk of heart disease, kidney disease and other chronic health problems, improving their health and saving all of us money as they get older.

“An employer or an insurer making coverage decisions doesn’t necessarily care if they’re saving Medicare money,” said Dan Sacks, a healthcare economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “That’s a classic problem with the American health insurance system, and it’s certainly salient here.”

This mismatch between what’s good for people’s health and what’s good for the corporate bottom line has long been one of the underlying flaws in the US health system. Now access to GLP-1 drugs is shrinking just as these drugs were starting to make a real dent in the US obesity crisis. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

Why employer-sponsored health plans are suddenly dropping GLP-1 coverage

From the beginning, insurance coverage was the big question hanging over GLP-1s and their potential to revolutionize US healthcare. But recently, it looked like we’d turned a corner.

When I attended the Aspen Ideas: Health festival over the summer, pharmaceutical reps seemed visibly relieved that GLP-1 coverage had been picking up among private insurers. In 2026, about two out of every three employer-sponsored plans were covering some of these drugs for weight management, up from about 20 percent just the year before.

“They’re recognizing that this is an investment in their workforce,” said Laura Steele, who leads the cardiometabolic health unit at Eli Lilly, which manufactures Zepbound and Foundayo. “Yes, there is a budget, and there is a benefit design that every employer has. That’s real. That’s not going away. But they’re also recognizing the overall cost that they’re experiencing by not dealing with this too.”

But as employers and private insurers make coverage decisions for next year, they are suddenly pulling back. At least 10 percent of employer plans that currently cover GLP-1s for weight loss say they are likely to discontinue coverage in 2027, according to one survey by the Business Group on Health — and that number may still increase. A Mercer survey of large employers found that 6 percent had dropped coverage in 2026 and another 5 percent were planning to in 2027 or actively considering it. A separate report from the Health Policy Commission in Massachusetts found that the number of commercially insured people in the state taking a GLP-1 drug had fallen by 50 percent between 2025 and the first quarter of 2026 as private coverage started to drop off. 

Some of the biggest brands in the US are reportedly eliminating or reducing their coverage: PepsiCo, Starbucks, and Lowe’s among them. And their reasons are simple: It’s too expensive. The drugs still carry a high net price tag — $600 or more for a 30-day supply — and potential demand is high (two in every five American adults have obesity). 

When a lot of people start taking an expensive medication all at once, it’s going to raise costs for employer insurance plans — and they have to figure out how to adapt. Insurers set premiums at the start of each year, based on how many people are on the plan and how much healthcare they are expected to need. But if those estimates are off — say, if more people take an expensive GLP-1 drug than the insurer expected — they have to offset those costs somehow, and raising premiums the following year is a common solution. According to one estimate, premiums are projected to grow by 5 to 13 percent due to GLP-1 costs — and the burden of paying those higher premiums is likely to fall on the workers. The employer can also try to limit GLP-1 use by, for example, asking workers to pay more out of pocket for these drugs; according to Mercer, 27 percent of large US employers instituted some kind of utilization controls for GLP-1 drugs over the past year or plan to next year.

They also have the option to simply stop covering these drugs for weight loss altogether — and that’s the route more and more of them are deciding to take. The abrupt reversal has even caught economists like Sacks off guard.

“I was surprised that anyone would do an about-face because I thought they understood the trade-offs well,” Sacks said. “My guess is that it turned out to be more expensive than they anticipated: Take-up is higher, and possibly more people are sticking with it. That’s one reason that you might not want to continue to offer it.”

For employers, the short-term costs of covering a drug often outweigh the long-term benefits that medication may confer, at least from the employer’s POV. One analysis — notably produced by Blue Cross Blue Shield Kansas — concluded that covering GLP-1s for weight loss increased average employee health costs by $7,000 in the first year and another $4,200 in the second, largely due to the cost of the drugs themselves. And yet at the same time, there were no decreases in obesity-related medical events in that time period. Another study from Sacks and his colleagues at Indiana University and the University of South Carolina found that GLP-1 use did not lead to any cost savings over five years.

So in the short term, these employers are arguably making an economically rational decision — but one that may still come at their employees’ expense. “I’m completely screwed,” said one person on Reddit about Cigna’s plans to drop GLP-1 coverage for their own employees. They’re looking at at least $300 for one month’s supply at cash prices. 

They weren’t alone either: “I’m devastated,” said another person, commenting on Starbucks’s decision to stop covering GLP-1 drugs. They said they had an autoimmune condition that had made it difficult to lose weight — until this new class of medicines came along.

Where GLP-1 coverage goes from here

How could we end up here, where it makes good business sense for companies to make a decision that could potentially harm their workers’ health in the long term? It is at least in part a result of the haphazard way the US has ended up insuring people.

When employer-sponsored insurance started to arise in the mid-20th century, eventually becoming the primary way to cover the working-age population, people tended to stay at the same job for a long period of time. In theory, there was a synergy: Companies wanted their workers to stay productive, and so it was worth it for the company to invest in their long-term health via their insurance benefits. And research has found that people who stay with the same company — and the same insurance plan — tend to have better health than those who switch a lot.

But these days, people change jobs all the time or work various gigs to piece together an income. You probably don’t expect to stay at your job for 10 years — and your employer doesn’t expect you to either. Instead, they want to keep their own costs as low as possible in the short term. This leads them to cut GLP-1 coverage, even though doctors do believe that people could benefit tremendously long term from the weight loss these drugs help them achieve and all of its potential health benefits. 

“There are very real health benefits of these drugs,” Sacks told me. “The fact that we don’t find offsets or they’re even more expensive than we thought doesn’t necessarily mean that we shouldn’t cover them.”

In theory, the market is supposed to fix the price problem: Drug companies get a period of exclusivity for the drugs they develop, and then, once that time elapses, cheaper generic versions can come onto the market. But generic semaglutide won’t be available in the US until at least 2031 — and for some versions, the generic competitors aren’t going to debut until the 2040s. Offering GLP-1 coverage could become a competitive advantage for employers, a perk they can offer to entice potential workers as part of their benefits package.

Beyond that, though, the path to more affordable GLP-1s is not immediately obvious right now. A lot of people are already willing to pay cash for these drugs — and that may continue as long as people can afford to do it. But with inflation still steadily rising, these drugs could slip out of reach for more and more Americans.

The government could get involved, but, for now, the federal government’s negotiating authority only covers Medicare, not the private plans that are dropping coverage. Serious healthcare reform is probably off the table until at least 2028, and then only if Democrats win both Congress and the White House and decide to make a healthcare package their legislative priority.

But the lesson of these recent developments is that, at some point, the US may have to look seriously at the underlying problem creating this mess in the first place. A patchwork method of insuring people that privileges short-term cost-cutting over people’s long-term health isn’t a real healthcare system.

BRUSSELS — It was meant to be a debate on how to curb Europe’s soaring energy prices.

But the first session of talks at an EU leaders’ summit in Brussels Thursday quickly descended into a three-hour fight over whether the EU should put a carbon price on driving cars and heating buildings.

The delay got so bad, the roast veal and fig tartlet lunch awaiting European leaders was driven well into the afternoon.

Countries including Italy, Poland, Czechia and Hungary called for ETS2 — an already-legislated law that will put a carbon price on heating and transport from 2028 — to be delayed for two more years. Estonia suggested it could be scrapped altogether.

The push was rejected by a majority of the bloc, with several EU diplomats telling POLITICO it was, as one put it, an “unacceptable” offer. Another said the ETS2 launch date would never be changed. But the debate reflects a growing sense from right-leaning governments that the EU’s ambitious green agenda runs against their push to bring down energy costs. 

While the main topic of today’s discussion was ETS2, its predecessor, the Emissions Trading System — which puts a price on carbon emissions from factories and power plants — was arguably the real target.

Put together, these two emissions trading schemes will be the EU’s most powerful policy tool for bringing down planet-warming emissions.

A proposed reform of the original ETS is currently being debated in the European Parliament and in the Council of the EU. Italy and Poland have been leading a gang of 10 member-countries which have been railing against the ETS since American and Israeli bombs started falling on Iran in March. 

What they want is for the European Commission’s July review of the ETS to be further weakened, even though the proposal already softens carbon restrictions over the next decade to give industry more time to invest in cleaner production methods.

But by framing the ETS as a scourge on household bills, both Warsaw and Rome have found ready audiences at home and abroad. On Monday, hours before a meeting of EU environment ministers convened in Luxembourg, Poland led a meeting of member countries with concerns on the ETS. Their gang, which originally counted 10 countries in March, had now grown to 16.

While Italy and Poland did manage to get Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary and Greece to back their ask for a “reassessment of the ETS2” and to “further postpone its entry into force until at least 2030,” inside the room of European leaders the position mostly fell flat.

Five EU diplomats granted anonymity to discuss the ongoing negotiations said Nordic countries and the Netherlands were firmly against changes to ETS2 — a position backed by France and Germany.

But Paris and Berlin’s long-term reliability as ETS defenders is in doubt. French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz both face threats from the far-right, where the ETS has become a dirty word.

Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland, which is no fan of the ETS, is politically ascendant, having won the largest share of votes in two regional elections in September. In France, with elections only months away in 2027, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally is leading in the polls. 

How Le Pen would deal with the ETS isn’t certain, but Jordan Bardella, the French far-right lawmaker and rising star of National Rally, offered a clue  in recent comments.

“ETS: three letters, an acronym that reeks of detached bureaucracy, with one question that keeps coming up: who’s going to pay?” he said to European Parliament in May.