Although President Joe Biden’s administration has pledged “unwavering support” for Ukraine, it has been cautious to a fault in practice. The latest example: supplying the Ukrainians with sophisticated long-range missiles but prohibiting their most effective uses.

Since last year, the West has been sending Ukraine British and French long-range missiles, as well as the more versatile U.S.-supplied Army Tactical Missile System, known as ATACMS. Such munitions have proved effective in hitting military facilities in Crimea and elsewhere in occupied Ukraine. Yet the Biden administration has vetoed their use inside Russia itself.

To an extent, this caution is understandable. Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that attacks within Russia would amount to an escalation, and Biden is rightly keen to avoid World War III. Yet a closer analysis of the policy shows that it makes little sense. If Biden wants to help bring this war to an acceptable ending — and he should — he needs to stop vacillating and give Ukraine the arms it needs to defend itself.

For one thing, the restrictions on long-range weapons play directly into Putin’s hands. They create a zone of safety from which Russian troops can launch attacks with impunity. They buy time for the Kremlin to adjust to changes on the battlefield and resupply its own forces while preventing Ukraine from effectively counterattacking. They also amplify Russia’s advantages in manpower and weaponry. In effect, they give Ukraine enough help to prolong the war but not enough to make real progress.

The flaws of this policy were laid bare when Kharkiv came under intense attack earlier this year from forces gathered just across the border. This led the Biden administration to carve out an exception to the rule, allowing Ukraine to strike military targets just inside Russia to thwart attacks. The result was that the offensive was much diminished as Russia scrambled to defend its assets. But while tactically successful, this experiment also highlighted how strategically misguided the larger policy is.

It makes little sense to keep tying Ukraine’s hands. There are, by conservative estimates, hundreds of military targets — including communications centers, training grounds and air bases from which attacks are being launched or resupplied — that long-range missiles could target.

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Of course, Putin’s dark threats of nuclear escalation shouldn’t be ignored. He has repeatedly warned the West about “red lines,” from the supply of battle tanks to aircraft, only to downplay them once they’ve been crossed. That’s entirely logical: The use of tactical nuclear weapons would be a strategic mistake for Putin, giving him no clear battlefield advantage, galvanizing the West and likely losing remaining support from Beijing. And there’s little reason to think that long-range missiles — which, remember, have already been supplied and used within Russian-occupied Ukraine — will be any different.

The Biden administration is right to make its own interests and red lines clear. Western forces should not be deployed to fight in Ukraine, and the use of Western weapons against civilian targets within Russia should be proscribed. But granting Ukraine greater freedom to bring the fight to Putin makes both strategic and moral sense.

It’s reasonable to expect Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to articulate how this latest round of assistance will fit into a plausible strategy to bring an end to the war closer. But only Putin ultimately has the power to end the vast destruction and killing he has unleashed. He must be convinced that that is his best option.

— The Bloomberg Opinion Editorial Board

Donald Trump favors enormous tax cuts while also swearing to protect Social Security and Medicare benefits and promising steep cuts in immigration, which will make retirement programs harder to sustain. This does not work, mathematically, especially in an economy already dealing with inflationary and interest-rate pressure.

Enter Elon Musk. Trump’s latest economic pitch is to say he’ll find the money he needs with a government efficiency commission helmed by Musk, which will wring waste out of the system and deliver the country to budget Nirvana.

It’s a clever gambit, politically. But I have news for Trump and Musk: The federal government is already quite efficient at its main job, which is sending money to old people.

Love or hate Musk, he’s clearly a hard worker whose obsessive product focus has brought success to both Tesla and Space X. His takeover of Twitter has been much less successful from a business standpoint, but he did manage to make huge layoffs in a way that produced much wailing on the left (which Trump undoubtedly sees as a bonus) but ultimately worked out fine (which he probably cares less about). It’s tempting to say that Musk could accomplish the same thing with the federal government — rummage through the books, fire some bureaucrats and offend the right people. The notion of balancing the budget through a crackdown on waste was a staple of 1990s pop culture, in such films as “Dave” and books as “Executive Orders.”

It’s enough to make you wonder why real-world presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton signed deficit-reducing bills comprised of unpopular tax increases and spending cuts. Did they just not know the right accountants?

More likely, this idea keeps coming back not because it’s feasible but because it’s politically expedient.

The No. 1 item on the government’s budget, after all, is Social Security, which is administered with breathtaking efficiency. The next big items are interest on existing debt — not a great use of funds, but also not an efficiency question — and the military, where Trump wants to spend more rather than less.

The other two big domestic items are Medicare and Medicaid. Can they be made to be more efficient? To an extent, of course, it depends what you mean. But the administrative overhead of these programs is very low compared to private insurance, which is in some ways a double-edged sword. Medicare also takes advantage of its large size to insist on paying less to doctors and hospitals than they get from the private sector, which is a pretty efficient strategy. Medicaid pays even lower rates — and as a result many providers refuse to accept it.

The upshot is that there is almost no featherbedding in these programs. The one big opportunity to squeeze costs without reducing services is one President Joe Biden has already partially seized: taking advantage of Medicare’s bulk purchasing power to force the makers of 10 popular prescription drugs to offer lower prices. This initiative could be expanded in a way that would save a bunch more money without meaningfully reducing patients’ access to medication. Conservatives tend to oppose this idea, however, arguing that windfall profits from drugs that hit big are necessary to preserve incentives to invest in R&D efforts.

Without wading into that debate, I would merely observe that “government waste” is often in the eye of the beholder.

A private company such as Tesla or X has a profit-and-loss statement; a given line item is either contributing to revenue or it isn’t. It might be hard to predict whether a given expenditure is or is not a good idea, all things considered, but the terms of the discussion are for the most part straightforward. Such is not the case with, say, Medicare, which is much less likely to deny a claim than private insurance. This is precisely what so many elderly people like about Medicare. Various proposals exist to apply more stringent cost-benefit analysis to Medicare coverage, but doing so would entail creating more bureaucracy rather than less. It’s also what spurred the “death panels” controversy of the Obama years.

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If Musk goes line-by-line through the federal budget, he’ll find that this is far and away the most common situation: There is plenty of room for people to disagree about whether the government should be doing this or that, but there is relatively little pure “waste” in the sense of a Twitter employee who is not contributing to the basic functioning of the service.

Trump has repeatedly promised to eliminate the Department of Education, for example, criticizing federal meddlers sticking their noses in things best left to states and school districts. There certainly is some meddling happening at the department. Mostly, though, it is handing out money, either in the form of student loans or grants to districts. Simply firing all the meddlers won’t cut spending very much. Nor does it make much sense to give away so much money without any oversight — i.e., meddling.

Now, getting the federal government out of financing education altogether really could save some money. But people are going to notice if, say, states need to lay off 5% of their teachers because their federal Title I subsidies go away.

If you take a sufficiently skeptical view of the public sector, pretty much anything — college loans, Head Start, care for the elderly and disabled, the National Park Service — can look like waste. But there is a fundamental difference between making the government more efficient at the things that it does and deciding that it should do fewer things.

The vast majority of federal spending currently goes to just a few functions: national defense, on which Trump wants to increase spending, and taking care of the elderly and sick. This latter undertaking is expensive, and Republicans have traditionally wanted the government to do less of it. Trump’s political successes, such as they are, have largely been built around evading this tradeoff — by cutting taxes but not Social Security or Medicare, securing the support of both the business community and older, working-class cultural conservatives. No amount of auditing can reconcile the hole this leaves in the federal budget.

Matthew Yglesias is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A co-founder of and former columnist for Vox, he writes the Slow Boring blog and newsletter. He is author of “One Billion Americans.”

The organizers of an all-night participatory art event that graced the Twin Cities for the past 15 years have published a book to reflect on the challenges of organizing such an event.

The organizers in question, Northern Lights.mn, shuttered the nonprofit’s doors on June 30. The organization organized the annual event, known as the Northern Spark Festival.

The organization dissolved because of funding challenges, exasperated by the pandemic and ongoing inflation.

“The business model of the organization ceased to function well or at all. And it maybe never worked well. As a nonprofit that was providing very expensive, free programming to the public, we ran out of money, or we projected running out of money,” said Sarah Peters, the former co-director of Northern Lights.mn, in a Zoom interview. “We didn’t want to just dwindle into nothing.”

Over the past year, over 45 contributors collaborated to create a glossary, funded by the McKnight Foundation, consisting of poems, essays, reports, graphics, and photographs of what they learned in the years they organized the event. To learn more about the book, we interviewed Peters (SP) and Ady Olson McNair (AOM), two of the artists who produced Northern Spark as well as the book. Their responses were edited for clarity.

Q. Why did you all decide to write the book?

AOM: One of the things that was really a gift in our decision to sunset is that we were able to foresee that we would not have enough funds to continue, and so we were not in a state of crisis when we decided to sunset. And that gave us this distance where we could kind of plan ahead. We had this year-long sort of gap where we didn’t have our regular programming to do. And all we had to do was focus on this sunset. We didn’t know what we wanted to do yet, but we wanted to do something that was a multivocal reflection of our 17-year history of Northern Lights, and we wanted to create something that we could share with everyone.

Sarah and I got together with the founder and former executive and artistic director, Steve Dietz, as another co-editor of the book, and Matthew Rezac, who was our longtime graphic designer. And we kind of brainstormed, and we gathered a group of 15 artists to help us think through what this thing that we were creating could be, and it turned into this very, very detailed and thorough and very multivocal book. There were 45 contributors who we had worked with throughout the history of Northern Lights, artists and partners and we just kind of want it to be a reflection on the meaning of Northern Lights and how it impacted so many people in the community and how they are continuing to carry their experiences forward with them.

SP: One of the things that’s hard as an organization, is when you are in the everyday operating cycle of making annual programs, it’s hard to have any time to sit back, slow down and reflect. This is a common challenge, and we’re like, we actually have an opportunity to do that. Like, what was this work about? You’re kind of doing that along the way as you’re writing grant narratives, and talking with your colleagues about what your values are. But this was an opportunity for us to think out loud and make visible the kinds of conversations we sat around and had in our office for the 10 years that mostly the three of us, Ady, Steve, and I, were working together.

I don’t even want to call it wisdom, because it sure is wisdom, but like, this is what we thought about. This is what we were trying to figure out. This is what we were trying to do so that the field can discuss it, grapple with it, argue with it, disagree, or maybe find some help in some of that thinking, as we hope people continue to make work in public spaces.

Q. The book has a glossary that is interspersed with photos and essays. Why structure it as such?

AOM: We didn’t want to create the history of the organization, but we did want to include bits and pieces of the history of the organization. We came up with the glossary idea first, and as we were developing the project, we started calling it a messy and interrupted glossary. We knew that we wanted it to be kind of chock full of lots of different directions that you could go, kind of like a choose-your-own adventure. We chose the glossary format so that people’s contributions could be as long or as short as they needed to be, and so that we could highlight certain ideas that were meaningful and placed words and terms with them. Our designer, Matthew Rezac, also wanted to make sure that it felt quite messy, because the work of Northern Lights tended to be pretty messy and not unidirectional.

SP: The glossary idea we got so excited about, because, frankly, it was really overwhelming to think about how to even talk about what our work was, and we often had a practice internally of just keywords that we would use, or the words in our mission statement, were all words that were connected to our values. We started out by just making this great big list of words, and what we realized is by having the writing follow a glossary format, is that we could hold lighter topics, like bicycle, alongside heavier ideas like harm or bigger ideas like community, and have those have equal weight in terms of hierarchy.

Q. What is the takeaway for people who do pick up a copy of the book?

AOM: I think it’s going to be so different for everyone, depending on their relationship with Northern Lights. Maybe for me, just this book was a way of honoring and acknowledging the meaningfulness of the work that we did, and recognizing that it was not just a meaningfulness for one particular group. It wasn’t just meaningful for staff, but it was meaningful for audience members and for volunteers and for partner organizations.

SP: I agree that people are gonna have a million different takeaways. But what I hope is seen by the book is the idea of complexity and interconnection. We put this drawing that I had sketched, not quite on a napkin, but probably on the back of a report printed out or something of all the intertwined components of each of these circles needing attention when making an event as complex as Northern Spark. Really, it was complex, it was beautiful, and it was really hard.

Q: What advice do you have for those who want to organize similar events?

AOM: We’re very proud to be working on a toolkit (http://northern.lights.mn/blog/toolkit-and-bibliography/) for people to use who are doing this kind of work. It’ll be a downloadable Google Drive toolkit that people can access through our website. It has templates of budgets and examples of contracts and a ton of different materials that people can download and then turn into whatever they need.

SP: Look for organizational partners that have the same values and mission and can work with you, because it’s harder, it’s just true that it is harder to pull these things off as individuals rather than organizations. Bureaucratic systems aren’t really designed to talk to individuals. They understand organizations and nonprofits. If you can sort of partner up with an organization that just has that status, it can grease the wheels of bureaucracy a little bit.

Partnering up as a team with other organizations and don’t ever forget the art at the center of it. You could get lost in the bureaucracy very easily and in all of the rest of the details, and they’re important. The production details are how people feel welcomed or experience your event or hear about it, or know how to get there or have food and water once they are there. But keep the art at the center.

There’s also just the total DIY, like, make an event in the park and put it up on social media and invite people to come, right?

AOM: Documentation is super important. We always hired photographers and videographers for our programs. And I think that is one of the things that an organization, a small organization, can add to their portfolio in order to get future grants, in order to work their way up to being able to get a general operating grant. It’s so important that the experience itself is what you want it to be, and is artist focused, and then also, in order to tell the story, it’s really important to be able to share that with people who were not there, so that they can get excited about future events.

Northern Lights

From Agency to Wonder can be purchased at Moon Palace Books in Minneapolis, as well as SubText Books and Next Chapter Books, both in St. Paul. Books can also be borrowed locally from the Hennepin County Library, the St. Paul Public Library, Macalester College Library, Minneapolis College of Art and Design library, the University of Minnesota’s Performing Arts Archive, and the University of Minnesota Anderson and College of Design Libraries. The University of Minnesota Library Publishing Services will also publish a digital edition on Sep. 4. Visit http://northern.lights.mn/blog/northern-lights-mn-from-agency-to-wonder/ for an updated list of locations and a link to the digital edition.

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