The Dictatorship
Americans’ electric bills are skyrocketing as utilities rake in record profits
This is an adapted excerpt from the May 31 episode of “Velshi.”
Just search “utility companies” under news, and you’ll find a familiar story playing out across the country: report after report of skyrocketing electric bills and mounting public anger with service providers. Out-of-control utility bills have become another aspect of the country’s affordability crisis, driven by an industry operating with too little accountability.
Retail electricity prices rose 7% in 2025 alone, part of a nearly 40% rise since 2021, which makes it the fastest period of electricity price growth on record. The average household’s monthly electric bill has climbed from roughly $121 in 2021 to $156 today, marking a nearly 30% increase that outpaces inflation.
In the words of the American Economic Liberties Project’s Matt Stoller: “Where’s all the f&$*#ing money going?”
Meanwhile, utility companies continue to ask regulators to let them charge even more money. In just the first three months of this year, utility companies sought approval for $9.4 billion in rate increases. That follows a record-setting 2025, when they requested $31 billion, more than double what they sought the year before.
According to the consumer advocacy group Powerlines“Today, nearly 80 million Americans are struggling to pay their utility bills, forgoing basic expenses like food, education, and health care to keep their lights on.”
In the words of the American Economic Liberties Project’s Matt Stoller: “Where’s all the f&$*#ing money going?”
For their part, the utility companies will point to extreme weather, aging infrastructure, the transition to cleaner energy and now the enormous power demands of data centers. And while that is real, it doesn’t add up — and it hasn’t for years. We have been paying more for years.
The government has increased spending on the U.S. transmission system fivefold over the past two decades. But if all that money were actually fixing the grid, why do we keep hearing the grid is unreliable? Why do we keep hearing we need even more?
The answer lies in the utility business model, the part most people never hear about. Most people assume utilities work like ordinary businesses. They don’t. A regulated utility does not primarily make money by selling you electricity at a markup. Nearly every dollar it spends on operating costs is ultimately recovered from customers through rates approved by government regulators.
The real profits come from something else: capital investment.
When a utility builds a power plant, transmission line, substation or other major piece of infrastructure, regulators allow it to recover those costs from customers over decades.
On top of that, the utility earns a guaranteed return on the money it invested. And that return is not trivial; for most investor-owned utilities, it falls somewhere between 9.5% and 11%. Compare that with what you earn in a high-yield savings account today, which is around 4% if you’re lucky.
According to the Energy and Policy Institute, a watchdog group that calls for greater accountability in the utility sector, investor-owned utilities pocketed $244 billion in profit off customers from 2021 through 2024.
Here’s the breakdown of those costs, according to the group’s executive director: “If a customer has a $200 electric bill, something on the order of $30 isn’t paying for electric poles, or wires, or power plants. It’s paying a wealth transfer to Wall Street and the company’s executives.”
Now, it should be noted, this is an analysis that industry groups dispute. But consider the incentives that kind of business model creates. If you’re guaranteed a premium on every dollar you spend, what’s your next move? It is likely not fixing the grid or upgrading aging facilities; it’s spending more dollars.
Build more projects, deploy more capital. Whether those projects are the most efficient solution or even strictly necessary becomes a secondary concern.
That helps explain one of the strangest features of America’s electricity system. As Stoller puts itutilities are “truly paid to fritter away money, to gold-plate and waste.” And, if that’s not bad enough, in some states these same utilities can spend your money on political activities.
According to the Energy and Policy Institutein states where laws prohibit utilities from charging customers for political spending, consumers are saving hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
Meanwhile, you, the average customer, are sitting around believing that paying more will lead to a better grid. That is the implicit bargain behind every rate increase. Customers are told that higher bills today will lead to a more reliable system tomorrow. Yet the opposite complaint seems to be growing louder every year.
The federal organizations responsible for monitoring the nation’s electric system have repeatedly warned that large portions of the country face increasing blackout risks as power demand grows and existing infrastructure ages.
Ultimately, the problem is that the system rewards spending itself: A utility that finds a cheaper solution earns less, and a utility that spends billions building — not fixing — infrastructure earns more.
As Stoller puts it“They are willing to waste $1,000 to send an extra $60 to shareholders.”
Many experts argue that one of the most effective ways to lower costs and improve reliability would be to build more high-voltage transmission lines connecting different regions of the country.
Think of the electric grid as a national marketplace. Some regions have abundant, inexpensive electricity. The Great Plains, for example, have some of the world’s best wind resources. The Southwest has enormous solar potential. Other regions, particularly dense population centers in the Northeast and parts of the Midwest, often face higher electricity costs and tighter supply constraints.
The obvious solution is to move more power between these regions. Done correctly, these projects can lower costs, improve reliability and make the entire system more resilient.
But that requires coordination. Large interstate transmission projects involve multiple states and multiple regulators, more oversight. And crucially, they don’t fit as neatly into the business model that rewards individual utilities for expanding their own assets.
As a result, utilities favor smaller local projects that are easier to approve, easier to build and guaranteed to generate shareholder returns.
Other countries have moved far more aggressively to build long-distance infrastructure capable of moving power across vast regions. Look at Chinawhich has built more than 8,200 miles of high-voltage transmission lines in recent years. The U.S. has built a mere 375.
At this point, you may be wondering: Where are the regulators? After all, utilities don’t operate in a free market. Customers can’t simply switch providers when rates rise.
The entire justification for granting utilities monopoly status is that government regulators are supposed to act on behalf of the public. In theory, that’s the safeguard. In the real world, that has become part of the problem.
Consider a recent example in Pennsylvania. When the Pennsylvania utility PECO — a subsidiary of Exelon, the largest utility in the country — recently asked for a return of nearly 11%far above the national average, it took the governor publicly shaming them to get it withdrawn.
Customers are told that higher bills today will lead to a more reliable system tomorrow. Yet the opposite complaint seems to be growing louder every year.
Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro called PECO’s proposed rate hike “pure greed.” In response, PECO said in a statement that the company “shares Governor Shapiro’s concerns about affordability and remains focused on keeping customer bills as low as possible while continuing to invest in safe and reliable service.”
The rising costs led Shapiro to launch a new watchdog to scrutinize utility profits.
But critics argue that many of the state commissions that are supposed to oversee these utilities have been effectively captured. The revolving door between regulators and utility companies means that today’s watchdog can become tomorrow’s utility executive, and vice versa.
At the same time, utility companies are often permitted to contribute money to the campaigns of officials involved in overseeing them. The result is regulatory capture, with the system increasingly serving the interests of the companies rather than the ratepayers it was designed to protect.
That’s why the industry’s response to virtually every challenge sounds so familiar. Need to strengthen the grid against storms? More spending. Need to accommodate renewable energy? More spending. Need to support artificial intelligence data centers? More spending. Need to improve reliability? More spending. And systems rarely reform themselves when the people involved are benefiting from the status quo.
Most Americans don’t understand the mechanics of rate bases, transmission planning or regulatory capture. They don’t need to. What they understand is that their bills keep rising. They understand that every year seems to bring a new explanation for why prices have to go up again.
For much of the 20th century, utilities were largely run by engineers. Their mission was straightforward: keep the lights on. Today, the system is run by financial engineers focused on returns on their investments.
Allison Detzel contributed.
Ali Velshi is the host of “Velshi,” which airs Saturdays and Sundays on BLN. He has been awarded the National Headliner Award for Business & Consumer Reporting for “How the Wheels Came Off,” a special on the near collapse of the American auto industry. His work on disabled workers and Chicago’s red-light camera scandal in 2016 earned him two News and Documentary Emmy Award nominations, adding to a nomination in 2010 for his terrorism coverage.
Amel Ahmed
Amel Ahmed is a Segment Producer for “Velshi.”
NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump took in nearly $1.2 billion from his crypto businesses last year, a federal filing released Tuesday shows, locking in profits while his investors were socked with losses.
Mere startups when he took the oath of office, the new ventures have now eclipsed in revenue much of his vast property portfolio that took him decades to accumulate. Fueling their rise were billionaire investors and Trump’s own move to quash a federal crackdown on the industry.
Trump got more than $500 million from his World Liberty Financial business selling new crypto products, including “governance tokens,” according to the required annual disclosure report with the Office of Government Ethics. It also showed another crypto business, CIC Digital LLC, took in more than $600 million from sales of souvenir-type “meme” coins stamped with his face.
Both the tokens and the coins have plunged in value since the sales.
Trump also took in millions last year from selling Trump-branded Bibles, sneakers and other small items in another unprecedented move for the presidency. The sale of Trump-branded watches alone brought in $4.7 million.
The 927-page disclosure form paints a stark, if incomplete picture of the massive growth of the president’s wealth since taking office last January through a web of business interests — many of which have benefited from the policy moves of Trump’s own government. Trump has insisted that his sons direct his finances but the arrangement rejects the conflict of interest protections that his recent predecessors in office had instituted.
Forbes estimates Trump’s net worth at $6 billion, up from $2.3 billion in 2024.
The Trump business is growing abroad
The rise of crypto relative to Trump’s property is especially noteworthy because he first rode to office boasting of his property wins. It’s also remarkable because that mainstay business also boomed last year. Trump took in tens of millions in fees from a flurry of new hotel, resort and condo deals overseas that amounts to the biggest property expansion ever in the century since the family business was founded.
Many of those countries were negotiating with the U.S. over tariffs, military aid and other important matters while the family business was striking the deals.
A property in the United Arab Emirates generated $10.4 million for the Trump business last year. One in Saudi Arabia being built by a real estate developer close to the ruling family sent the president’s company $9 million. And one in Bucharest, Romania, and another in Qatar sent him $5 million each.
One of his prominent domestic properties, Mar-a-Lago in Florida, notched big growth last year, too.
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Trump took in $77 million from the property, a 50% jump from the year earlier when he was just another citizen, as heads of state and business people flocked to it in his new term.
The disclosure report doesn’t give profit figures, just revenue, so it’s impossible to know how much he is earning.
Trump is now the billion-dollar crypto man
Trump said Wednesday that most of his gains last year came from the stock market and he’s just riding along with everyone else.
“We’re all profiting,” he said. “I’m profiting because I have a lot of money and a lot of cash.”
But crypto was clearly the big revenue generator last year in part due his own moves since taking office — pushing policies friendly to the industry and reversing a Biden administration regulatory crackdown.
The regulators are still worried. Before Trump’s World Liberty began selling “governance tokens,” they issued warnings about this new kind of crypto asset, saying that unlike stocks, the tokens offer no ownership stake in the issuing company, just voting power on certain corporate policies, and are difficult to value.
Buyers pounced anyway, including a Chinese billionaire who spent $75 million on the tokens and $200 million on the souvenir coins. In February last year, a federal lawsuit charging him with duping investors was paused before being settled for a $10 million fine.
The billionaire, Justin Sun, has repeatedly denied his spending on Trump businesses had anything to do with his federal case, while World Liberty has dismissed the notion of a conflict of interest.
Meanwhile, investors have seen the value of their Trump-tied holdings drop significantly.
The price of World Liberty tokens has fallen 80% since they started trading in September. And the Trump souvenir coins that spiked to more than $74 in the days after launching in January 2025 now sell for $1.68.
The White House says Trump only acts in the public interest
The White House has repeatedly said Trump put his business in a trust managed by his sons and is not involved in its decisions and that there are no ethics issues to discuss.
“Neither the President nor his family has ever engaged — or will ever engage — in conflicts of interest,” spokeswoman Anna Kelly said. “All actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people.”
The Trump umbrella company, the Trump Organization, has said its deals overseas were with private companies, not with governments.
Still, it is difficult to know what is truly private in countries ruled by authoritarians, royal families and one-party governments.
For a new Trump resort in Vietnam, the report shows Trump took in $5 million last year after the ruling Communist Party sent its deputy prime minister to sign off on the deal and, according to The New York Times, pushed farmers off the land to make way for the construction.
Whether the deals played any role in changing U.S. policies in ways these countries sought is nearly impossible to know, but the countries did get what they wanted.
Vietnam got tariff relief. Qatar got access to advanced U.S. technology previously off limits, and Saudi Arabia got U.S. fighter jets it had coveted for years.
___
AP White House reporter Josh Boak contributed from Washington.
It turns out readers still want to learn more about President Donald Trump after all.
“Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” the l atest book on the Trump presidencywritten by political journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, has sold more than 300,000 copies in its opening week, according to publisher Simon & Schuster.
They’re the kind of sales that numerous works about Trump reached during his first term, but had been rare during his second term. Publishers had speculated that the public had tired of Trump books, believing there was little left to know.
The total figures include preorders, print book sales, ebooks, and e-audiobooks and orders that have yet to be fulfilled because of demand, the publishing house said. Simon & Schuster said the book is into its third hard copy printing, with 200,000 copies on order, after it sold out quickly in bookstores and on Amazon. It’s the best first-week clip of any hardcover nonfiction book in 2026.
The book covers the first 14 months of Trump’s second presidency and takes readers inside the West Wing, White House residence and Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, aboard Air Force One and on foreign trips with the president.
Trump, who has a long history with Haberman from her days covering him as a New York City business and society figure, has trashed the book as “mostly made up.” Haberman and Swan are now New York Times reporters.
Their manuscript depicts meticulous details of Trump’s military decisions, how he’s wielded the power of the Justice Department against his political opponents, his conversations with other power players, and the time and attention he’s devoted to remaking the aesthetics and structure of the White House.
The book spells out a thesis that Trump himself believes: Had he not lost the 2020 election, he would not be as powerful in his second term as he is now — emboldening him to trample norms, dismantle established institutions and push the limits of presidential power.
Haberman and Swan have been featured regularly across news talk shows promoting the book and sharing details of their reporting, including a sit-down with Trump in which he boasted about being compared to some of history’s great villains.
Sean Manning, vice president and publisher at Simon & Schuster, said the book “has entered the national conversation” and will hold up as “a work of historic importance.”
As a rule, JD Vance seems to go out of his way to say whatever Donald Trump wants him to say, but from time to time, contradictions emerge between the president and the vice president.
Take the recently passed housing bill, for example, which arrived at the White House earlier this week.
As part of an interview Tuesday night with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, the Ohio Republican said, “Frankly, Laura, I would love it if Democrats were willing — you know, not that they will agree with Republicans all the time — but if they were willing to work with us on lowering housing prices, on lowering gas prices, on actually making the lives of American citizens better. You know, we could have some real bipartisan compromise. That’s not what they’re talking about.”
I realize the vice president must be very busy, but it really isn’t that difficult to keep up with the basics of current events. In this case, when Vance said Democrats are unwilling to work with Republicans on priorities such as “lowering housing prices,” he turned reality on its head. It was literally last week when Democrats offered unanimous support for a bipartisan bill to address housing prices — legislation that members such as Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts helped to write.
Democrats recognized that doing so would offer the GOP some election-season bragging rights, but Democrats did it anyway because they have prioritized governing and “actually making the lives of American citizens better” over partisan considerations.
But Vance didn’t just contradict reality; he also contradicted his boss.
Just one day before the vice president brazenly misled a national television audience, Trump was asked about the pending housing bill. “It’s very bipartisan; that means the Democrats like it,” the president saidwhile acknowledging that he hasn’t yet decided whether to sign it.
In other words, when Vance said policymakers “could have some real bipartisan compromise,” he seemed indifferent to the fact that we’ve already had some real bipartisan compromise — a detail that even Trump was willing to acknowledge a day earlier.
Whether the vice president will suffer for publicly contradicting the president remains to be seen.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
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