EACH YEAR FOR a few frigid days in January volunteers fan out across cities, towns and rural areas to try to count every homeless person in America. The method is admittedly flawed: cities do their counting in different ways, and many homeless people are transient or hide away in subterranean tunnels and under highway overpasses. Researchers think the result is an undercount. But this “point in time” survey offers the most complete picture of homelessness that exists in America today. The results for January 2024, released on December 27th, offer bleak news: the number of homeless people in the country had risen to the highest level on record.

IT IS not hard to construct a scenario in which Donald Trump’s plans to “Make America Healthy Again” (or MAHA) do the opposite of that. His proposed secretary of health, Robert F. Kennedy junior, is one of the country’s more prominent vaccine sceptics. The man who would be in charge of the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which provides health coverage for two in five Americans, would be Mehmet Oz, a TV doctor who has talked about the medical benefits of communicating with the dead and invited a Reiki healer to assist him during surgery. Dave Weldon, a former congressman and doctor, who has also cast doubt on the safety of vaccines, would lead the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which oversees the country’s vaccine schedules. Unless the Nixon-to-China theory applies to public health, these are not the people America would want in charge of public health in a pandemic—or even just a regular epidemic.

TO KEEP Mark Zuckerberg safe, Meta has spent at least $23m annually on bodyguards, home security and other support during the last three years. To protect Warren Buffett, another high-profile billionaire, but a famously frugal one, Berkshire Hathaway laid out just over $300,000 in 2023. In between those budgets, boards at America’s large public companies make diverse investments to protect bosses, according to filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The range of spending indicates a lack of C-suite consensus about what is necessary.