The Brief

The rig operator was stumped. He’d been making good progress, but now something blocked the way forward. The operator, Denny Mong, stared at an unassuming metal tube in the ground — the fossil of an oil well. Spread around it was an array of industrial detritus and steel tools like giant surgical implements, which sunk into the spongy Western Pennsylvania meadow.

Above the hole, Mong’s rig, which towered 50 feet into the air, suspended a vertical ramrod. When it dropped, the ramrod only shot 17 feet into the ground before slamming to a stop. Earlier, Mong had managed to reach more than 500 feet deeper into the well. Then this obstruction, whatever it was, sent him back to the start.

Clearing it — prime suspects included metal casing, rocks, or a tree branch — would allow him to send cement and pea gravel into the hole, which reached hundreds of feet into Appalachian rock formations. Once an active oil well, now it was an environmental nuisance and the target of an ambitious federal cleanup program.

The well needed to be decommissioned, along with at least 21 more spread across woodlands and fields in McKean County, Pennsylvania. The job fell to Mong and other employees of an oil service outfit called Plants & Goodwin, which specializes in plugging so-called orphan wells. Oil and gas companies are supposed to plug and clean up wells that they’ve drilled, but if they go bankrupt or otherwise disappear, that responsibility falls to the state, which then contracts with companies like Plants & Goodwin. If left festering, these wells can leak contaminants into surrounding groundwater or release methane, a greenhouse gas at least 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.

Uncorking a well in this part of Appalachia reveals a blend of oil and gas that has a nauseous maté color and gurgles like witch’s brew. After generations of drilling, the remnants of both vernacular backyard digs and professional oil operations pockmark the land. Since drillers operated for more than a century with little regulatory oversight, documentation of well locations is scarce and cleanup quality is inconsistent.

“Until the 1970s there were no strong plugging standards in place,” said Luke Plants, who heads Plants & Goodwin. “People just shoving tree stumps down a well to plug it, or a cast iron ball or something like that.”

The exact number of orphan wells nationwide is unknown. In late 2021, The Interstate Oil and Gas Commission, a multi-state organization, had more than 130,000 orphan wells on record but estimated that anywhere between 310,000 and 800,000 remained unidentified. That year the federal government took notice, folding $4.7 billion into the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to help states handle their orphan well inventories. The first batch of that money has trickled down to states and has been distributed to contractors like Plants & Goodwin. It’s easily the most funding ever spent to address the problem, but both states and pluggers are now facing hurdles as they begin to identify and plug wells.

The state oil and gas regulators responsible for issuing well-plugging contracts are typically understaffed. As a result, the pace of contract assignment in some states has been inconsistent, making it difficult for plugging companies to staff up and plan ahead. Well pluggers are also few and far between. Since oil operators tend to avoid the costly work of well capping, the service has remained a niche industry. Plugging companies have also struggled to find trained workers, not to mention the specialized equipment required to plug wells. Along the way, some states have handed out millions of dollars in contracts to a subsidiary of an oil company with hundreds of compliance violations.

All the while, the oil and gas industry continues to spawn new orphan wells — magnitudes more than the number being plugged. Between 2015 and 2022, more than 600 oil and gas companies filed for bankruptcy, leaving thousands of wells unplugged. Market downturns affecting oil prices during the mid-2010s pushed many operations to insolvency. And even in times of industry booms, wells near the end of their production lifespans often end up in the hands of small oil patch operators with tight margins. Further, state laws requiring companies to post collateral for their wells in case of bankruptcy are meager. This combination of weak rules and bankruptcies has caused orphan well inventories to balloon. For example, Pennsylvania’s list of 20,000 orphan wells grows by about 400 each year; the state has plugged just 73 wells with the federal money that began to arrive last year.

In the muddy pasture in northwest Pennsylvania, Mong was trying to unclog his way to the well’s bottom. Using a rig attachment called a cherry picker — imagine a four-foot steel clothespin — he worked to spear unknown detritus from the depths. Next to the hole lay 30-foot-long clay-frosted tubes of steel casing already hauled out. After reducing the borehole to a hollow dirt cavern, the pluggers will pour cement until it nearly fills to the surface and top the rest of the way with gravel, insulated by steel casing to protect groundwater. They will then decapitate the casing to a few feet below ground and cover it with dirt.

For the pluggers, the work is a bespoke combination: a little science and a lot of art. Sharp intuition, engineering know-how, grit, and luck imbue each effort. One capping can take anywhere from three days to three months, sometimes costing more than $100,000.

Clifton Lunn is part of the team that, along with Denny Mong, must muscle through the orphaned well blockage.

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Will Peischel

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Grist

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Alot needs to happen to orphan wells before they’re plugged — at least on paper. The state has to identify them, the threat they pose, the costs to plug them, and search for any elusive owner to pin the costs on. And while that’s a process states have handled for many years, most state plugging programs have relatively small budgets and staff compared to the well inventories. Now, federal funding is compelling those programs to exponentially increase the number of well-capping contracts, an impossible task without bigger staffs and nimbler processes.

In a normal year, the California Geologic Energy Management Division (CalGEM), which regulates oil and gas production in the state, might contract plugging for 30 wells. According to former CalGEM employees, decommissioning even that number of wells had the agency running on all cylinders.

“Available staffing for oversight was definitely a major limiting factor,” said Dan Dudak, who was the Southern District Deputy of CalGEM from 2011 to 2020, and now acts as a consultant on well-plugging projects. In just the last five years, the department “lost a lot of their institutional knowledge” in three different leadership changes, he said. Nonetheless, CalGEM revealed an $80 million project last July to cap 378 wells with funding from state and federal money along with industry fees.

Other states also have catching up to do. One 2022 Ohio state audit observed that its Department of Natural Resources struggles to meet orphan well program spending targets, in part due to staffing shortages. “[T]he Division can only increase efforts dedicated to well plugging preparation work as fast as it can recruit, train, and hire permanent employees,” the audit claimed, recommending that the agency double its staff to post plugging contracts in a more timely fashion and consider outsourcing the task of drafting contracts.

Pennsylvania has 70 well inspectors and a tally of around 20,000 orphan wells. According to Neil Shader, spokesperson for the state Department of Environmental Protection, or DEP, the agency is considering hiring more inspectors to increase its oversight. Earlier this year, the state legislature approved a $5.75 million budget increase for DEP, some of which may boost its well plugging contract capacity.

Still, the pace of contract creation in Pennsylvania has put pluggers in a precarious place. Plants said that when Pennsylvania received $25 million in its first batch of federal funding, he staffed up. A torrent of contracts were awarded but then stopped — leading from feast to famine. A six-month gap meant furloughs and mothballing equipment. “It costs contractors a tremendous amount of money to do all that,” he said. “You end up creating an incentive to not scale at all, just stay small.”

Plants & Goodwin, which is headquartered in Bradford, Pennsylvania, has operated as an oil service company since 1970, but it pivoted to specialize in well-plugging operations in 2015.

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To expedite aspects of the contract-drafting process, DEP has signaled that it may outsource some of that work. Meanwhile, Ohio is putting some of its federal money into an expedited process called the Landowner Passover Program, where approved landowners who find orphan wells on their land may act as a surrogate for the state, awarding a contract to a plugger that Ohio will pay for.

Ohio has 44 contractors on its rolls and utilizes a pre-approval process for its pluggers to maintain quality control. Pennsylvania’s DEP is considering adopting its own vetting process, according to Shader, the agency spokesperson. Without it, there is no central parapet to separate under-qualified contractors from federally funded plugging. “There are not enough defined rules in place,” said Plants. “And even the rules that are there don’t get followed so well all the time.”

Not much stands in the way of a corner-cutting contractor. In remote pockets of Appalachia, improperly dumping chemical fluids from a site or shoddy plug job could go unnoticed. “I think it’s even less likely to get checked now,” Plants said. “Because nobody wants to limit the pool of potential well pluggers. We need to get more pluggers involved — whether that plugging is being done correctly or not.”

Last year, Pennsylvania Deputy Secretary Kurt Klapkowski of the DEP’s Office of Oil and Gas Management addressed that anxiety by announcing that parties with significant outstanding violations, such as contractors with a poor service record or operators with environmental infractions, wouldn’t receive state contracts. “I feel pretty confident that we would not be issuing contracts to operators that had significant outstanding violations — either on the contracting side of things or on the environmental protection side,” he said.

For a plugger, non-compliance could mean illegal dumping or improperly sealing a well; for an operator, it might mean abandoning a well without plugging it. But such policies can be difficult to implement when oil and gas companies sometimes operate through a bevy of subsidiaries in multiple states.

In December of last year, the Pennsylvania DEP awarded Next LVL Energy contracts to plug 30 wells in the state. The company is a subsidiary of Diversified Energy, an energy giant that has amassed a massive number of wells at the end of their lives, stoking fears that the company is likely to orphan them. According to one class action lawsuit against Diversified in West Virginia, around 10 percent of its 23,309 wells in the state are technically abandoned but unplugged. Just this year Pennsylvania inspectors slapped the operator with around 300 new or unresolved operational violations. (The state DEP didn’t respond to a request for comment on Next LVL’s contracts.)

Ohio has also given half of its first installment of federal money, $12.5 million, to Next LVL Energy to oversee the plugging of as many as 320 wells. To the southeast, West Virginia has given the company a similar sum to plug 100 wells. Spokespeople for both state environmental agencies defended their decisions, noting that they followed state and federal guidelines while selecting pluggers. “We will keep a close eye on implementation,” said Andy Chow, a spokesperson for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. “Should any violations in this contract be discovered or otherwise come to our attention we will review those actions.”

In West Virginia, Next LVL isn’t plugging any wells associated with Diversified, according to Terry Fletcher, chief communications officer with the state’s Department of Environmental Protection. “At the time the contracts were awarded, Next LVL had no outstanding environmental violations in the state,” he added.

Finding qualified workers for the oil field is no easy feat, either. The last decade has seen drops in oil prices that rendered many fossil fuel companies insolvent, along with a shift to shale exploration, which requires fewer workers. As a result, job openings have dwindled and many qualified workers have left Appalachia.

Plugging wells also requires skilled labor. Thus, the limited number of qualified workers is in high demand. That’s good for wages, but without a large workforce to fill positions as states push out contracts with increasing frequency, another problem arises: “You just get this arms race for the same small pool of workers,” said Plants. “That’s not actually helpful for scaling or expanding the supply side of this business.”

Troy Hadfield (left) uses a forklift to convert the area of a finished orphan well project from a muddy worksite to a walking trail.

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Plants has brought in experienced pluggers from Texas oil fields to help train up a new generation of skilled Pennsylvania hands. “We want to develop a local workforce that understands this work,” he said. But “you can’t just put whole crews of inexperienced people out there.”

There’s a lot of on-the-job training, but that extra work advances his vision. Some of his most recent hires came from area high schools and technical schools, where he has made a pitch: “We want to give you a long-term career.”

Bronson Knapp, who owns Hagen Well Services in Ohio, has faced similar challenges. “The good old farm boy is hard to find,” he said. A worker shortage is one of the reasons Ohio is behind on well pluggings. The state has awarded new contracts even as work from previous contracts hasn’t been completed. “We awarded 380 wells this year, but our contractors are still 400 wells behind us,” said Jason Simmerman, the orphan well program engineer with the state’s Department of Natural Resources.

Rigs used to plug wells can be hard to come by, too. Drilling technology may advance, but orphan well-plugging is frozen in time. The tech required is often vintage, which means pluggers are on the prowl for a shrinking number of rigs that may be older than the wells they plug. It’s not unusual for a plugger in New York to look as far as Texas for a used rig. Mong’s rig was from the 1950s. Another rig at a nearby work site was manufactured in 1981 and welded to the bed of a Vietnam War-era military truck.

Cory Copp stands behind the team’s 1981 well plugging rig, attached to the back of a Vietnam War-era truck.

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Grist

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On the whole, a few recent high school graduates on Plants’ payroll might not seem like bellwethers of a next-generation workforce. But some experts watching the federal orphan well program contend that a well-plugging wave could revive regions whose economic fates are tied to dwindling resource extraction sectors. “The most positive thing that could happen is that we begin to get more companies plugging wells, especially in rural, distressed areas to help their local economies,” said Ted Boettner, a senior researcher at the Ohio River Valley Institute, a think tank focused on economic and environmental sustainability in Appalachia.

“Oil and gas industries have lost thousands of jobs over the last decade,” he told Grist. “This is helping people who lose their jobs” and providing “a way for people to transition into cleaning up this mess of the last 150 years.”

The federal program includes requirements and guidance to help ensure that the work on the ground benefits workers. In order to qualify for funding, states must ensure that plugging contracts meet standards outlined by the Davis-Bacon Act, a federal law that guarantees government-funded labor matches average pay rates for similar work in a region, known as the prevailing wage.

Failure to follow the federal government’s requirement risks its scrutiny. For example, last year the GOP-led Pennsylvania legislature passed a law dictating how much a contractor might receive to plug a well as part of Pennsylvania’s orphan well program. The amounts allocated were a fraction of typical costs, likely leaving contractors unable to pay their workers the prevailing wage. With federal money tied up in the program, the Department of Interior filed a brisk response warning that the law could threaten Pennsylvania’s ability to comply with program standards and that the state could be cut off from federal funding.

In Ohio, Davis-Bacon requirements appear to have an effect on well-capping work not funded by the federal program. Though the Buckeye State doesn’t have any wage requirement for general well-plugging work, cappers who have taken contracts appear to be paying higher wages — whether or not the job is federally funded. “Because nobody wants to make one wage one day and another the next day, our contractors that are working on our federal program are taking that perspective and paying those wages across the board now,” said Simmerman, Ohio’s orphan well program engineer.

After tubing and other detritus are pulled from orphan wells, workers flush out lingering oil and gas with water pulled from giant containers like this one.

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Out west, California is working to nurture a workforce at a much larger scale. Last year, the state legislature passed a law directing the California Workforce Development Board, or CWDB, to launch apprenticeship programs to train new classes of well pluggers. It could become a model for skilled labor creation. Its first pilot program is using the expertise of a Kern County well-capping company, California Legacy Well Services, which is creating a plugging curriculum to fold into existing training provided by Local 12, the International Union of Operating Engineers. As a result, union-affiliated labor will represent part of the well-plugging workforce.

The thinking is two-pronged: access to quality jobs and layoff mitigation. That means offering good work to skilled laborers vulnerable to the energy transition. “So rather than just worry about the loss of jobs, it’s an opportunity to think about the new jobs for trades workers,” said Tim Rainey, executive director of CWDB. The program is in the early stages, but it offers a glimmer of what an effective orphan well program could yield.

Organized labor in California’s oil fields is of two types: industrial unions and trades unions. Members of industrial unions cultivate skills on a worksite, while trades unions learn the ropes through training apprenticeships like the ones CWDB is developing.

A quirk in California law may lock out the industrial unions. The law requires “a skilled and trained workforce” for capping jobs, an innocuous-sounding phrase that refers to highly technical requirements in the state labor code that disqualify oil workers from industrial unions such as the United Steelworkers, or USW.

Norman Rogers, a spokesperson and member of USW Local 675 in Southern California, called the legislative sleight of hand “a control job.” Trades unions “have a larger workforce and are able to influence the political landscape,” he said. “They can have all sorts of people go to lobby.”

By expanding the language to characterize eligible workers as “skilled and trained or covered by a labor management agreement,” the law could tap into tens of thousands of union workers represented by USW, Rogers said.

The question of who dominates the green jobs of tomorrow remains an open one. Despite the many bottlenecks, the orphan well program could be an attractive coda to the fossil fuel era if it benefits workers.

“We drilled the first oil well in America,” said James Kunz, an administrator at the Pennsylvania Foundation for Fair Contracting, who has worked to ensure favorable wages in state capping contracts. “We have the scars of that and a real opportunity.”

Heavy Manners Library, a beloved multipurpose event space on Alvarado Street, is hitting a big milestone. The organization, which hosts classes, music gigs and art exhibits, has outgrown its current location.

Defying the fate that has befallen many small operations in rapidly changing neighborhoods, Heavy Manners is staying in Echo Park.

Yulia Cymbura, head librarian at Heavy Manners Library.

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Dañiel Martinez

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Book by book

Co-founder Matthew James-Wilson came up with the idea for the space while doing research for a book he wanted to write about the evolution of art in the internet age. During the process, he had an epiphany.

Why write just one book when you can provide access to hundreds of them? Why not start a library that doubles as an art space too?

“ You could imagine a gallery show happening in a library, or you could imagine a poetry reading happening in a library,” said James-Wilson.

An illustration by artist Patrick Kyle.

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Mixed media collages from artist Patrick Kyle's "How To Be Mean" exhibit.

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The name “Heavy Manners,” James-Wilson said, pays homage to a concept in reggae music that goes back to '70s deejay Prince Far I’s album Under Heavy Manners.

“ Sort of in reference to British colonial culture imposing this etiquette, or heavy manners, on Jamaican culture,” said James-Wilson.

Heavy Manners was just a couple of shelves when it opened in 2021, but through donations by artists and community members, its stacks grew.

The library has hosted more than 1,000 events, from drawing and sewing lessons to live music shows.

A room in Heavy Manners Library where events and workshops are held.

Interior of Heavy Manners.

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Dañiel Martinez

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A small stage where events are held.

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“The space has taught me, as long as you can keep the calendar full and you can get things that people are excited about, people will share it with more people,” James-Wilson said.

Keep the calendar full

Carly Jean Andrews has been teaching nude figure drawing at Heavy Manners since 2023.

“Yeah, you have all the knowledge in the world on the internet, but it's so much more useful to just come here and have it be really literal,” Andrews said.

Carly Jean Andrews and Bijou Karman, instructors at Heavy Manners, posing in front of one of an art show.

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Bijou Karman teaches clothed figure drawing classes and has published zines and books of her fashion drawings through Heavy Manners.

“Today, I was here hand-assembling one of the books, and Carly was very kindly helping me assemble. It's a very community-oriented space where you actually meet people and learn new things,” said Karman.

Bijou Karman's recent art book "Images De Mode" is displayed near the entrance of the library.

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Changes on the block

Heavy Manners has been looking for more room to grow its library and event offerings.

The dream was to stay in the area and keep its relationship to Echo Park, despite the changes to the neighborhood, starting with the very block where Heavy Manners sits.

A book nook with a bench and a view of the outside street.

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The nearly century-old restaurant Taix is being demolished, while Silverlake Flea, which ran out of the French Bistro’s parking lot, has moved to Atwater Village.

“ It's a construction site that may be ongoing for a long time. You can sort of feel the sense of change happening, just on our block in general,” said James-Wilson.

Luckily, James-Wilson saw a nearby building on Sunset within Heavy Manners' budget and went for it. Their new home, about 400 feet away from the current location, is bigger and more wheelchair accessible. It also has an outdoor area that employees want to convert into a garden, or use for nature-oriented workshops.

Its current space won’t sit vacant though; Whammy Analog Media, a VHS video store expanding from a small backroom to a full-fledged shop, will be taking over.

A shelve with analog media available for check out.

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It takes a village

Recently, Heavy Manners put out a call for volunteers to help move its many books and zines in time for a planned mid-July reopening.

A "Free Zine Library" inside the space.

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“Because it's really close by, I'm kinda hoping to have just sort of a parade of people each carrying a box across the street,” said James-Wilson. “It takes a village to foster something like this, that is not lost on me.”

Various "Heavy Manners Library" prints.

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The newest Air Force One jet, gifted to President Donald Trump from the Qatari government, arrived ahead of schedule Friday to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland.

On Friday afternoon, Trump toured the luxury Boeing 747 plane that initially stirred controversy. The plane was one of the biggest foreign gifts ever received by the U.S. government and raised legal and ethical questions after Qatar offered to replace the presidential jet last year. Trump said last May he'd be "stupid" not to accept the offer. Industry groups originally said the plane could be worth approximately $400 million.

Trump also spoke standing in front of the plane, thanking the Emir of Qatar.

The president praised the workmanship of the plane, describing it as the "world's most luxurious plane." He also called it the "largest Air Force One ever built," adding, "It flies further and faster than any Air Force One."

"This plane was transformed into a flying White House at a level of luxury that nobody's ever seen before, probably even almost outside of an airplane," Trump said. "Nobody's ever seen anything like this, and in only 10 months, a timeframe no one thought possible."

The exterior of the jet is no longer light blue, silver and white — a fixture since the Kennedy administration. Trump unveiled the new red, white and blue color scheme.

"It was time for a change. … Everything was designed good. It was my taste," Trump said, saying that he approved the new color scheme, which reflects the American flag.

The VC-25B Bridge aircraft will now undertake its commissioning flights, what the Air Force calls a "final exam" for the plane. The plane was modified after serving the Qatari Head of State.

"Once these flights are successfully completed, the aircraft is officially 'commissioned' into the active executive airlift fleet and becomes available for presidential missions," an Air Force press release said.

The aircraft from Qatar will "serve as a bridge until the [long-term] VC-25B is delivered," according to earlier communications from the Air Force. The plane was delivered well before expectations. The Air Force originally estimated the plane would be delivered in 2028 but said by modifying requirements it could deliver the first aircraft in 2027. The modifications "were carefully crafted to prioritize mission over aesthetics, leaving much of the previous head of state interior layout minimally changed," the Air Force said.

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Ken Wilsbach praised the delivery.

"Many thought it could not be done, but the United States Air Force was able to execute and provide a secure, reliable airborne command post on an accelerated timeline," he said.

Vice President JD Vance has delayed his trip to Switzerland to negotiate the terms of a peace agreement with Iran on Friday.

It's unclear exactly why the talks were called off at the last minute, with hundreds of journalists already waiting in the alpine city of Lucerne.

But the delay raises questions over the sturdiness of the memorandum of understanding to end the war, signed by President Donald Trump on Wednesday.

It came as Israel continued to heavily bombard Lebanon, despite the agreement promising to end all military operations, including in Lebanon.

Lebanese media said at least 18 were killed in overnight strikes, and Israel said four of its soldiers had been killed in fighting in southern Lebanon.

Here are more details about the agreement and challenges they face in this latest effort to end the conflict:

US lifts naval blockade

There was immediate progress after the preliminary agreement to end the three-and-half month conflict that has killed thousands of people across the Middle East, rocked the global economy and pushed millions more into poverty around the world, according to the United Nations.

The United States lifted its naval blockade on Iran.

The short memorandum of understanding also promises to end military operations on all fronts and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the crucial waterway through which much of the world's oil, gas and fertilizer must pass to reach global markets.

The agreement prompted President Trump to celebrate on Truth Social writing: "Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!"

But there are still many potential pitfalls. Even before the agreement was signed, Trump made its fragility clear: "It's a memorandum of understanding," he said at the G7 summit in France. "If I don't like it, if they don't behave, we'll go right back to dropping bombs right smack in the middle of their head."

The document doesn't solve the underlying reason for why the United States and Israel went to war with Iran. It creates a 60-day window — extendable by mutual agreement — for the two sides to resolve the enmity that goes back many decades.

Israel remains defiant against the deal

The preliminary agreement promises to end all military operations, including in Lebanon. Israel has invaded and taken large swaths of southern Lebanon in an offensive it says is targeting the Iranian-backed militia Hezbollah, which has killed more than 3,800 people, according to Lebanon's Health Ministry.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has made clear that Iran considers Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon essential. "Without the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the territories they occupied during this war, the war has not fully come to an end," Araghchi said.

Israel wasn't involved in the negotiations with Iran — though Trump said at a press conference this week that he had sent Israel a copy of the document before he signed it. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has remained defiant, saying his troops will remain in southern Lebanon for as long as Israel's security requires it.

The conflict in Lebanon is causing an extraordinarily open rift between Trump and Netanyahu. "He's a very difficult guy," Trump said of the Israeli prime minister recently said to The New York Times.

On Thursday, Israel's military released a new map ⁠showing an expanded area of southern Lebanon occupied by its troops, which it describes as a buffer zone.

"Trump's agreement does not bind us," Israel's far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, wrote on social media on Monday. "We are not partners to this agreement that does not ensure our security."

Vice President Vance hit back at critics in the Israeli government, warning at a press conference that "Donald J. Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time."

Trump signed the deal to avoid 'economic catastrophe'

The agreement promises "the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts" — including in Lebanon, where Israel has continued its offensive. Iran and the United States also promise "not to initiate" any further war or operation against each other. Not long after Trump signed the memorandum, U.S. Central Command said Thursday it had ended its naval blockade of ships to and from Iranian ports, as promised in the agreement.

Iranian state media reported the country's national security council will suspend tolls paid by ships for 60 days, per the deal, but that ships must still request Iran's permission — through a newly established Persian Gulf Strait Authority, before passing through the Strait of Hormuz, which was once considered an international waterway.

Increased ship traffic through the strait will come as a relief to Trump, whose approval ratings have been sliding as Americans see soaring gasoline prices and spiking inflation. Last month Trump insisted he doesn't think about Americans' financial situation in his approach to Iran.

But this week he acknowledged at a news conference that he had signed this agreement because he "didn't want to see an economic catastrophe."

The memorandum gives major concessions to Iran

Trump has repeatedly called the Iran nuclear deal — formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — presided over by President Barack Obama in 2015 the "worst deal ever," and Trump abandoned the agreement in his first term in office. But the framework agreement signed this week hands major financial concessions to Iran that could ultimately go much further than the Obama-era arrangement.

The document says the U.S. will work with regional partners to create a fund of "at least $300 billion" for Iran's reconstruction and economic development. Vice President Vance has said Gulf Arab nations would invest that amount.

It also promises that the U.S. will unfreeze Iranian funds and assets that amount potentially to tens of billions of dollars. Mohsen Rezaei, military adviser to Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, told CNN Iran wants to see the release of $24 billion.

These commitments do depend on further negotiations. But the Trump administration also plans to issue sanction waivers to allow Iran to immediately sell its oil. The waiver concedes a major point of potential leverage at the start of these 60-day talks.

And the interim deal also opens the door to ending all U.S. and international sanctions on Iran. Iran has been under a plethora of U.S. sanctions since the 1979 Revolution. The penalties have kept Iran cut off from the global economy, preventing it, for example, from accessing the international banking sector. This new pledge goes far beyond the JCPOA deal, which removed some sanctions in exchange for Iran reducing its stockpile of uranium.

The negotiation over Iran's nuclear program

President Trump has boasted he will achieve a much "better" agreement than the JCPOA. The substantive talks on this are yet to begin, but so far, the commitment Iran has made in the memorandum that it "shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons" is the same promise it has made for years, including in the 2015 nuclear accord.

The details of Iran's nuclear program are complex and technical. The JCPOA was negotiated over years by the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Russia and China, with nuclear physicists and non-proliferation experts, and ran to 159 pages. Trump's framework was negotiated bilaterally by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner — a property developer and the president's son-in-law. An Iranian diplomat who spoke to NPR on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly told NPR they believed the last round of talks with the Trump administration did not progress because "the Americans at the table did not understand the subject."

The U.S. had been negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program before abruptly launching the bombing campaign with Israel on Tehran that began this war on Feb. 28. For this latest round of talks, Witkoff and Kushner visited the national lab in Oak Ridge, Tenn., earlier this month for consultations with a team of technical experts that could play a role in nuclear negotiations with Iran.

Has Iran come out of the war stronger?

Trump began the conflict promising to set conditions for regime change in Iran. "I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand," he told Iranians in a televised address on Feb. 28. "When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take."

It was a nightmare scenario for the Iranian regime, to face down the bombardment from two of the world's most powerful militaries. The war killed more than 3,300 Iranians, according to state media, including top leaders, and pounded the country's infrastructure and armed forces. But the regime's survival, and its ability to target U.S. assets in the region and control the Strait of Hormuz, empowered Iran.

The country has learned "that threatening the Strait of Hormuz works," Bill Cassidy, Republican senator from Louisiana, said in a blistering attack on the Trump administration. He called the offensive against Iran "the worst foreign policy blunder in decades."

Iran's response forced the Trump administration to set aside the goal of regime change to focus on seeking a way to reopen the vital strait.

"The only 'achievement' of the ceasefire is the likely reopening of the Strait of Hormuz — which was open before the war started. And we will apparently pay Iran to do so," Antony Blinken, who was secretary of state under former President Joe Biden, posted on X.

Trump has countered critics by saying on social media that anyone who thinks he hasn't "been tough enough on Iran," when the stock market is high and oil prices are falling, is either jealous, bad or stupid. And Vance called on critics to "have a little bit of faith in the president of the United States."

But in a hard accounting of the war, the facts are undeniable: Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz gave it the leverage to secure from Trump concessions that unlock vast sums of money — even more, potentially, than under Obama.

And regarding Iran's nuclear program, the Iranians so far appear not to have offered Trump any more concessions than they did at the Geneva talks two days before the U.S. and Israel launched their offensive in February.

Now new negotiations are set to begin, and the Iranians will be coming to the table having shown Trump, and the world, the power they can wield over the global economy.

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has witnessed more than a century of American history, in all its heartbreak and majesty. Crowds have gathered around it in protest and in praise, to denounce American wars and hear great voices sing and speak.

Today, it's the center of a slimy controversy.

President Donald Trump said in April he found the water in the reflecting pool "filthy" and "disgusting." He authorized a no-bid contract to resurface the basin of the 2,000-foot long pool and paint it "American flag blue" in time for July 4th celebrations.

"I have a guy who's unbelievable at doing swimming pools," the president crowed, before the National Park Service gave out no-bid contracts for sealing and upgrades.

After weeks of renovation, the project has cost taxpayers more than $14 million and … the reflecting pool looks green. And I mean green. Like the Chicago River on St. Patrick's Day. But that river is dyed green for a day. The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is green because of algae.

Look, algae happens. It's clouded the reflecting pool since it was first filled in 1923. Algae blooms flourish when sunlight falls on warm, sluggish water — like you'd find in a shallow, still pool absorbing the glare and swelter of a Washington, D.C., summer.

But a University of Virginia satellite analysis commissioned by the Washington Post saw more algae in the Reflecting Pool this month than at any other time in the past five years.

The Interior Department says workers have deployed "a state-of-the-art ozone nanobubbler filtration system" to banish the algae.

"President Donald J. Trump is an expert builder who has fixed the reflecting pool for good," spokesperson Kate Martin said in a statement this week, "unlike the failed and extremely costly attempt by Obama and Biden."

That's a reference to a major project during President Barack Obama's first term to stop the pool from sinking and add a filtration system.

In these deeply divisive and partisan times, it's good to remind ourselves that many issues aren't just Republican red or Democratic blue. The Reflecting Pool algae doesn't care about our party lines. It's green, and it's not going anywhere.