Did you hear the one about how USAID spent $50 million — or was it $100 million? — providing condoms to Hamas? This claim played a big role in the public relations campaign to rationalize the sudden, illegal dismantling of an agency that provides humanitarian aid to millions of people, and is also a key element of US foreign policy.

Reporters were puzzled by the claim because there didn’t appear to be any evidence. You will be happy to know that the mystery has been solved. Some DOGE staffers noticed that USAID had disbursed grants to local groups trying to limit the spread of sexually transmitted diseases in Gaza. But they didn’t read far enough in to learn that the Gaza in question isn’t the war-ravaged strip; it’s a province in the African nation of Mozambique. Oh well, southern Africa, the Middle East, what’s the difference to the Muskenjugend?

Elon Musk actually admitted the mistake, albeit with minimal grace, during his extraordinary Oval Office press conference with President Trump on Tuesday. (Trump hasn’t acknowledged error.) That conference consisted mainly of Musk pacing around, declaiming, while Trump sat passively at his desk, occasionally expressing agreement. Musk behaved as if he were the actual president and Trump merely a heavily made-up prop.

Anyway, the incident demonstrated the level of care and understanding that DOGE is bringing to its alleged mission of identifying waste, fraud and abuse.

But both Trump and Musk insisted that DOGE has already found billions, maybe tens of billions, of waste and fraud. Here’s a complete list of the specific examples Musk gave during the press conference:

That’s right: Musk has yet to offer any specific examples of government waste. The closest Musk came to specifics was his assertion that DOGE had done

just cursory examination of Social Security, and we got people in there that are 150 years old. Now, do you know anyone that's 150? I don't know. They should be on the Guinness Book of World Records. So that's a case where I think they're probably dead.

Is this true? Can we have some names please? It wouldn’t be a violation of privacy if the people are already dead.

Actually, my personal experience suggests that this story is likely to be false. Someone once tried to impersonate me and collect Social Security payments in my name. The Social Security Administration contacted me, saying that they couldn’t verify my address. So I think SSA would quickly question the identity of an 150-year-old recipient.

Now, we know that there’s huge waste in Medicare, in the form of overpayments to Medicare Advantage plans. Through Medicare Advantage insurance companies have been gaming the system; the Medicare Payments Advisory Commission estimates the annual loss to taxpayers at more than $80 billion, that is, roughly twice USAID’s budget. Oddly, however, this clear example of gigantic fraud isn’t on Musk’s radar.

But back to that Oval Office scene. Musk also asserted that

there are quite a few people in the bureaucracy who have ostensibly a salary of a few hundred thousand dollars, but somehow managed to accrue tens of millions of dollars in net worth while they are in that position, which is what happened at USAID

Is this true? What are these peoples’ stories, if they exist? Sorry, Elon, but why should we believe you when the obvious explanation is that you are taking us for fools?

Of course, given that there are 2 million federal workers, there must be somebody out there who committed fraud. But there’s no reason to think that the waste is significant.

For those of us who have been around for a while, Musk’s evidence-free claims of fraud by federal employees bring back memories of Ronald Reagan’s ranting about welfare queens driving Cadillacs — rants that appear to have had their origin in the story of a single lifelong con artist who was in no way representative of the millions of mothers receiving Aid to Families With Dependent Children.

Yet Reagan’s rant came after AFDC enrollment grew rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s. In contrast, Musk’s vendetta has been launched against a federal work force that has been more or less flat for many decades, and has declined drastically relative to the size of the population it serves:

Source: FRED

So why is Musk obsessed with reducing the federal headcount? Is he just ignorant of the basic facts? Or is all the talk about efficiency cover for a purge intended to replace professional civil servants with political loyalists? Both, if you ask me.

I am, however, sure that Musk knows that DOGE’s efforts to find waste and fraud have come up empty. If he had anything real to talk about, he would.

Whether Trump realizes that Musk is faking it is less clear. But as Tuesday’s event showed, it’s not clear whether Trump matters at this point.

In any case, Musk imagines that he can con the American people, that he can keep his racket going by talking fast and throwing around what sound like big numbers, even as people are dying.

And I wish I were sure that he’s wrong.

MUSICAL CODA

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. Should conjoined twins receive one salary or two?

I recently read this article. The summary is that Abby and Brittany are conjoined twins who are fifth grade teachers. They only draw one salary between the two of them because they occupy one position in their school district. I can’t help but feel like this is a little unfair. I understand that they can only physically occupy one classroom at a time but they are two people with two minds who, presumably, both put work into lesson plans, etc. As an avid reader of your website, I am very curious to hear what your take on this situation is.

It’s true that the school district is benefiting from the position being filled by two people with two different perspectives and potentially two separate sets of strengths. It’s also true that they’re in a single teacher’s role, meaning that the school district would need to use a second teacher’s salary without that putting a teacher in a second classroom. And realistically, if hiring them meant paying two salaries to fill one position, it would significantly limit their job options because a lot of employers simply wouldn’t hire them. I do think you’d have a potential legal problem if the half-salary they’re each earning is less than minimum wage … but otherwise my take is that the whole system we’ve set up for work isn’t cut out to handle conjoined twins!

2. An acquaintance won’t stop contacting me about a job he was rejected for

An acquaintance of mine applied to work at my organization. He got partway through the process and realized through a mutual friend that I work there, so reached out asking if my area was hiring. We are, so I passed his resume along to my manager, as he seemed like a good fit in terms of skills and experience. This landed him an interview. My manager said something was “off” in the interview and he didn’t seem like the right hire, and asked me if I was strongly recommending him. I said no, he’s just an acquaintance. We used to volunteer at the same place for a time a few years ago, but I have never worked with him professionally, nor is he a close friend. So, she informed him we would not be moving forward.

That was two months ago. Since that time, he has contacted both me and my manager repeatedly to “follow up,” including emailing my personal email to ask for advice about how to be reconsidered. My manager told him we were no longer filling the position but he still persists, each time explaining how and why he would make a great addition to the team. After responding politely the first time, I am now ignoring his email. However, we do have mutual friends and I am worried we may run into each other, and in fact I likely will see him at an upcoming event. Do I continue to ghost him? I’m not the hiring manager but he got a very clear “we aren’t moving forward” after the interview. I don’t think he realizes these continued attempts to change my manager’s mind are giving a bad impression.

You’re not obligated to coach this guy, but since you’re likely to run into him, you could respond to his next email with, “I’m sorry this didn’t work out, but that really is the final answer and you should not keep contacting Jane about it — it’s coming across as too pushy and has no chance of changing the decision.” I might add, “Continuing to contact her will be harmful, not helpful.” If he keeps it up even after that, feel free to go back to ignoring him.

3. How to interpret new daily meetings with my boss

I have a fully remote sales job and have been a top performer for the last couple years, though admittedly I have been flagging lately. About a month ago, my boss started scheduling DAILY 30-minute 1-on-1s with me, in addition to our weekly hour. I’m trying to figure out why, and how to respond.

The way he framed it, I’m working with some challenging customers right now and could use the extra support, and this will give us a chance to discuss in detail. This kind of makes sense, but I don’t feel like I really uniquely need support compared to others on the team.

Two other interpretations were: either this is a warning shot that I’m underperforming (though I’m still otherwise being praised and assigned important work) or he’s concerned that I’m considering quitting (there’s been some drama lately and I don’t think I’ll stay forever, but I’m fine for now).

Each interpretation suggests a different approach — if it’s really for my benefit, I should just honestly pick his brain and end early if I don’t need help. If it’s a warning, I need to use the time to show commitment to the work. And if he’s trying to read me, I guess I shouldn’t share any doubts? Since I don’t know why we’re doing this, I try to cover my bases and project a lot of confidence and enthusiasm and progress and frankly, it’s exhausting. Does one of these sound more plausible than the others? What would you do?

Any of those is plausible. Do you have the kind of relationship where you can just ask him? Personally, with a boss I had good rapport with, I’d just say, “Can I ask — are we having extra daily meetings because you’re worried about how I’m approaching these clients? Or is there anything else in my work that’s making you concerned?” And depending on how that went, I might say, “If you think it’s helpful to meet daily, I’ll of course do that, but on my end, it works well to keep our weekly hour and just touch base ad hoc if anything comes up that we need to discuss before that.”

But if you’re not comfortable saying that, then since you say you haven’t been performing at your usual level and there’s room to get back there, the safest avenue is to make sure you’re doing that. If that’s his concern, you’ll be covering it. But that’s not about projecting extra confidence and enthusiasm; it’s about the actual work you’re doing. If his concern is your work quality, projecting enthusiasm alone won’t take care of that.

4. Should cost of living adjustments be prorated based on your start date?

Is it normal for cost of living adjustments to be prorated based on employment start date?

I work for a nonprofit with employees working remotely across the country (I am one of these). I started working here in July 2024, which was the beginning of the org’s fiscal year.

This past fall, the org held town hall meetings to share messaging about the upcoming year: COLA’s would be lower this year, no merit raises, and they revamped how bonuses are done, so no more individual bonuses but rather a team bonus situation. I’m new, so I don’t know how things used to be done and I tried not to worry too much. And of course none of us works at a nonprofit to get rich — I’m biding my time being underpaid just to try to get my federal student loans forgiven.

The COLA emails start coming out in early January. My adjustment is 0.58% and includes a note saying, “This COLA acknowledges the 2024 percentage and exceeds the 2025 projected rise in the Consumer Price Index (CPI), as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), and is intended to help alleviate the impact this may have on you and your family.” I did the math. That’s only $300 more per year, or $12 per pay cycle. I wrote back and asked if there were perhaps an accounting error, and was told that employees who started after October 1, 2023 do not receive the full 2.5% but rather a prorated amount commensurate with their start date. They said the reason for that is that employees hired in that time period “have a salary amount that takes the current CPI into account, whether by the amount offered or the minimum range amount they are brought in at. By providing a prorated amount for the following year, we are balancing out the total amount for COLA between the two calendar years.”

Is this normal? Is this fair? My expenses for the upcoming year are going up way beyond half a percent! There are many things about nonprofit life that make me cry, and the pay is the biggest one of them.

It’s not unusual for cost-of-living adjustments to be prorated in that way. The thinking is what they shared: that the salary you came in at already reflected the cost of living at that time, whereas people who have been with the organization longer had their salaries set under different cost-of-living calculations. Whether or not that’s true is a different question, and would depend on whether the salary band for the job you were hired into had changed in the previous year. But it’s pretty common for them to figure that you accepted the salary as a fair one only six months ago.

5. Federal employee grappling with private sector resume

I’m a federal employee. If you’ve been watching the news this week, there’s a lot going on in the background that’s making life for federal employees very hard right now. Aside from the obvious, they are making several lists of categories of employees, likely trying to figure out how to get rid of as many of us as possible in big sweeps of layoffs and firings at once. (We’ve been told these lists are being provided with names to the White House.) This has pushed me to try to find a private-sector job for the first time in more than 25 years. I know I need to completely overhaul my resume from a federal format where listing your duties is primary to a corporate one where accomplishments are king. What I’m not sure of is my current position, which I started about 4-5 months ago. I’ve done two big things that will eventually make a difference and have numbers behind them, but they’re not there yet. I know you’ve advised folks in the past to leave these shorter stays off resumes, but I’m concerned about it not looking like I’ve had a job since the summer. How would you advise me to handle this? If this weren’t my current position, I’d just leave it off, but I’m stumped here.

Leave your current position on your resume. People will understand why you’re looking right now. And for the two big things you’ve done that don’t have numbers behind them yet, you can still list those! Not all accomplishments can be measured quantitatively, and that’s okay. Just describe as best as you can what you’ve done and what the impact is / why it matters.

Here’s a simple question: Is moderate drinking okay?

Like millions of Americans, I look forward to a glass of wine—sure, occasionally two—while cooking or eating dinner. I strongly believe that an ice-cold pilsner on a hot summer day is, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, suggestive evidence that a divine spirit exists and gets a kick out of seeing us buzzed.

But, like most people, I understand that booze isn’t medicine. I don’t consider a bottle of California cabernet to be the equivalent of a liquid statin. Drinking to excess is dangerous for our bodies and those around us. Having more than three or four drinks a night is strongly related to a host of diseases, including liver cirrhosis, and alcohol addiction is a scourge for those genetically predisposed to dependency.

If the evidence against heavy drinking is clear, the research on my wine-with-dinner habit is a wasteland of confusion and contradiction. This month, the U.S. surgeon general published a new recommendation that all alcohol come with a warning label indicating it increases the risk of cancer. Around the same time, a meta-analysis published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded that moderate alcohol drinking is associated with a longer life. Many scientists scoffed at both of these headlines, claiming that the underlying studies are so flawed that to derive strong conclusions from them would be like trying to make a fine wine out of a bunch of supermarket grapes.

I’ve spent the past few weeks poring over studies, meta-analyses, and commentaries. I’ve crashed my web browser with an oversupply of research-paper tabs. I’ve spoken with researchers and then consulted with other scientists who disagreed with those researchers. And I’ve reached two conclusions. First, my seemingly simple question about moderate drinking may not have a simple answer. Second, I’m not making any plans to give up my nightly glass of wine.

Alcohol ambivalence has been with us for almost as long as alcohol. The notion that booze is enjoyable in small doses and hellish in excess was captured well by Eubulus, a Greek comic poet of the fourth century B.C.E., who wrote that although two bowls of wine brought “love and pleasure,” five led to “shouting,” nine led to “bile,” and 10 produced outright “madness, in that it makes people throw things.”

In the late 20th century, however, conventional wisdom lurched strongly toward the idea that moderate drinking was healthy, especially when the beverage of choice was red wine. In 1991, Morley Safer, a correspondent for CBS, recorded a segment of 60 Minutes titled “The French Paradox,” in which he pointed out that the French filled their stomachs with meat, oil, butter, and other sources of fat, yet managed to live long lives with lower rates of cardiovascular disease than their Northern European peers. “The answer to the riddle, the explanation of the paradox, may lie in this inviting glass” of red wine, Safer told viewers. Following the report, demand for red wine in the U.S. surged.

[Read: America has a drinking problem]

The notion that a glass of red wine every night is akin to medicine wasn’t just embraced by a gullible news media. It was assumed as a matter of scientific fact by many researchers. “The evidence amassed is sufficient to bracket skeptics of alcohol’s protective effects with the doubters of manned lunar landings and members of the flat-Earth society,” the behavioral psychologist and health researcher Tim Stockwell wrote in 2000.

Today, however, Stockwell is himself a flat-earther, so to speak. In the past 25 years, he has spent, he told me, “thousands and thousands of hours” reevaluating studies on alcohol and health. And now he’s convinced, as many other scientists are, that the supposed health benefits of moderate drinking were based on bad research and confounded variables.

A technical term for the so-called French paradox is the “J curve.” When you plot the number of drinks people consume along an X axis and their risk of dying along the Y axis, most observational studies show a shallow dip at about one drink a day for women and two drinks a day for men, suggesting protection against all-cause mortality. Then the line rises—and rises and rises—confirming the idea that excessive drinking is plainly unhealthy. The resulting graph looks like a J, hence the name.

The J-curve thesis suffers from many problems, Stockwell told me. It relies on faulty comparisons between moderate drinkers and nondrinkers. Moderate drinkers tend to be richer, healthier, and more social, while nondrinkers are a motley group that includes people who have never had alcohol (who tend to be poorer), people who quit drinking alcohol because they’re sick, and even recovering alcoholics. In short, many moderate drinkers are healthy for reasons that have nothing to do with drinking, and many nondrinkers are less healthy for reasons that have nothing to do with alcohol abstention.

[Read: Not just sober-curious, but neo-temperate]

When Stockwell and his fellow researchers threw out the observational studies that were beyond salvation and adjusted the rest to account for some of the confounders I listed above, “the J curve disappeared,” he told me. By some interpretations, even a small amount of alcohol—as little as three drinks a week—seemed to increase the risk of cancer and death.

The demise of the J curve is profoundly affecting public-health guidance. In 2011, Canada’s public-health agencies said that men could safely enjoy up to three oversize drinks a night with two abstinent days a week—about 15 drinks a week. In 2023, the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction revised its guidelines to define low-risk drinking as no more than two drinks a week.

Here’s my concern: The end of the J curve has made way for a new emerging conventional wisdom—that moderate drinking is seriously risky—that is also built on flawed studies and potentially overconfident conclusions. The pendulum is swinging from flawed “red wine is basically heart medicine!” TV segments to questionable warnings about the risk of moderate drinking and cancer. After all, we’re still dealing with observational studies that struggle to account for the differences between diverse groups.

[Read: Is a glass of wine harmless? Wrong question.]

In a widely read breakdown of alcohol-health research, the scientist and author Vinay Prasad wrote that the observational research on which scientists are still basing their conclusions suffers from a litany of “old data, shitty data, confounded data, weak definitions, measurement error, multiplicity, time-zero problems, and illogical results.” As he memorably summarized the problem: “A meta-analysis is like a juicer, it only tastes as good as what you put in.” Even folks like Stockwell who are trying to turn the flawed data into useful reviews are like well-meaning chefs, toiling in the kitchen, doing their best to make coq au vin out of a lot of chicken droppings.

The U.S. surgeon general’s new report on alcohol recommended adding a more “prominent” warning label on all alcoholic beverages about cancer risks. The top-line findings were startling. Alcohol contributes to about 100,000 cancer cases and 20,000 cancer deaths each year, the surgeon general said. The guiding motivation sounded honorable. About three-fourths of adults drink once or more a week, and fewer than half of them are aware of the relationship between alcohol and cancer risk.

But many studies linking alcohol to cancer risk are bedeviled by the confounding problems facing many observational studies. For example, a study can find a relationship between moderate alcohol consumption and breast-cancer detection, but moderate consumption is correlated with income, as is access to mammograms.

One of the best-established mechanisms for alcohol being related to cancer is that alcohol breaks down into acetaldehyde in the body, which binds to and damages DNA, increasing the risk that a new cell grows out of control and becomes a cancerous tumor. This mechanism has been demonstrated in animal studies. But, as Prasad points out, we don’t approve drugs based on animal studies alone; many drugs work in mice and fail in clinical trials in humans. Just because we observe a biological mechanism in mice doesn’t mean you should live your life based on the assumption that the same cellular dance is happening inside your body.

[Read: The truth about breast cancer and drinking red wine—or any alcohol]

I’m willing to believe, even in the absence of slam-dunk evidence, that alcohol increases the risk of developing certain types of cancer for certain people. But as the surgeon general’s report itself points out, it’s important to distinguish between “absolute” and “relative” risk. Owning a swimming pool dramatically increases the relative risk that somebody in the house will drown, but the absolute risk of drowning in your backyard swimming pool is blessedly low. In a similar way, some analyses have concluded that even moderate drinking can increase a person’s odds of getting mouth cancer by about 40 percent. But given that the lifetime absolute risk of developing mouth cancer is less than 1 percent, this means one drink a day increases the typical individual’s chance of developing mouth cancer by about 0.3 percentage points. The surgeon general reports that moderate drinking (say, one drink a night) increases the relative risk of breast cancer by 10 percent, but that merely raises the absolute lifetime risk of getting breast cancer from about 11 percent to about 13 percent. Assuming that the math is sound, I think that’s a good thing to know. But if you pass this information along to a friend, I think you can forgive them for saying: Sorry, I like my chardonnay more than I like your two percentage points with a low confidence interval.

Where does this leave us? Not so far from our ancient-Greek friend Eubulus. Thousands of years and hundreds of studies after the Greek poet observed the dubious benefits of too much wine, we have much more data without much more certainty.

In her review of the literature, the economist Emily Oster concluded that “alcohol isn’t especially good for your health.” I think she’s probably right. But life isn’t—or, at least, shouldn’t be—about avoiding every activity with a whisker of risk. Cookies are not good for your health, either, as Oster points out, but only the grouchiest doctors will instruct their healthy patients to foreswear Oreos. Even salubrious activities—trying to bench your bodyweight, getting in a car to hang out with a friend—incur the real possibility of injury.

[Read: A daily drink is almost certainly not going to hurt you]

An appreciation for uncertainty is nice, but it’s not very memorable. I wanted a takeaway about alcohol and health that I could repeat to a friend if they ever ask me to summarize this article in a sentence. So I pressed Tim Stockwell to define his most cautious conclusions in a memorable way, even if I thought he might be overconfident in his caution.

“One drink a day for men or women will reduce your life expectancy on average by about three months,” he said. Moderate drinkers should have in their mind that “every drink reduces your expected longevity by about five minutes.” (The risk compounds for heavier drinkers, he added. “If you drink at a heavier level, two or three drinks a day, that goes up to like 10, 15, 20 minutes per drink—not per drinking day, but per drink.”)

Every drink takes five minutes off your life. Maybe the thought scares you. Personally, I find great comfort in it—even as I suspect it suffers from the same flaws that plague this entire field. Several months ago, I spoke with the Stanford University scientist Euan Ashley, who studies the cellular effects of exercise. He has concluded that every minute of exercise adds five extra minutes of life.

When you put these two statistics together, you get this wonderful bit of rough longevity arithmetic: For moderate drinkers, every drink reduces your life by the same five minutes that one minute of exercise can add back. There’s a motto for healthy moderation: Have a drink? Have a jog.

Even this kind of arithmetic can miss a bigger point. To reduce our existence to a mere game of minutes gained and lost is to squeeze the life out of life. Alcohol is not like a vitamin or pill that we swiftly consume in the solitude of our bathrooms, which can be straightforwardly evaluated in controlled laboratory testing. At best, moderate alcohol consumption is enmeshed in activities that we share with other people: cooking, dinners, parties, celebrations, rituals, get-togethers—life! It is pleasure, and it is people. It is a social mortar for our age of social isolation.

[Read: The anti-social century]

An underrated aspect of the surgeon general’s report is that it is following, rather than trailblazing, a national shift away from alcohol. As recently as 2005, Americans were more likely to say that alcohol was good for their health, instead of bad. Last year, they were more than five times as likely to say it was bad, instead of good. In the first seven months of 2024, alcohol sales volume declined for beer, wine, and spirits. The decline seemed especially pronounced among young people.

To the extent that alcohol carries a serious risk of excess and addiction, less booze in America seems purely positive. But for those without religious or personal objections, healthy drinking is social drinking, and the decline of alcohol seems related to the fact that Americans now spend less time in face-to-face socializing than any period in modern history. That some Americans are trading the blurry haze of intoxication for the crystal clarity of sobriety is a blessing for their minds and guts. But in some cases, they may be trading an ancient drug of socialization for the novel intoxicants of isolation.

In 2016, I was hired to teach skiing at the Park City resort, in Utah. The ultimate fun job: For one winter, I would get paid to do and share my favorite activity.

But I soon realized that although the piste conditions might be great, the working conditions were poor. An early clue was a training video that Vail Resorts, Park City’s owner, showed to employees. It bragged about how the company’s charity organization was helping local residents. The only problem: One of the charity cases was a Vail employee. In other words, the company was obliviously broadcasting how underpaid its own workers were.

That video came to mind last month when I heard that, starting December 27, Park City’s ski patrollers were going on strike to demand higher wages and better treatment. “We are asking all of you to show your support by halting spending at Vail Resorts properties for the duration of this strike,” the union said in an Instagram post. “Do not use Vail-owned rental shops or retail stores. Do not stay in Vail-owned hotels.”

For those unfamiliar with the industry, the union’s decision may have seemed puzzling. People who work on skis tend to love skiing, so why would they want to stop? They’re called ski bums, after all, not ski laborers. But for anyone who has been employed by Vail—and navigated the housing crises that plague resort communities—the union’s pleas are entirely comprehensible. The Park City strike illustrates just how distorted the American ski business has become, both for workers and for visitors. Central to the malaise is one trend: monopolization.

For much of skiing’s history, mountains were locally owned and operated. But over the past few decades, that has changed. In the 1990s, ski resorts began buying other ski resorts. Private-equity firms got in on the act. Soon, these conglomerates were gobbling up one another, creating a small clique of businesses that had control over the industry. Independent mountains still dot the country, but most major resorts now are either owned by or associated with one of two giant corporations: Vail and Alterra.

This consolidation is perhaps the main reason the sticker price of skiing, never cheap, has become exorbitant. With fewer competitors, Vail and Alterra have been free to jack up prices. In 2000, when Mount Snow (where I learned to ski) was owned by a smaller company, the cost of a day pass was about $93 in today’s dollars. Today, the Vail-owned resort charges approximately $150. The pricing at Park City is even steeper. Twenty-five years ago, you could get a three-day ticket for $308 in today’s dollars. Now you’re paying $850.

As a result, skiers tend to buy either Vail’s Epic Pass or Alterra’s Ikon Pass, season tickets that, depending on category, afford varying levels of access to a selection of the companies’ resorts (and, particularly for Ikon, of affiliated ones). These passes offer a better deal than day tickets; in some circumstances, they give better value than the season passes of earlier eras. But they also represent an intricate form of price discrimination filled with disadvantages. Skiers must purchase them before the winter begins. Many of the passes come with restrictions. And, as a lump sum, they’re hardly cheap: The Epic “Northeast Value Pass,” for example, is about $600, and has blackout dates on Vail’s marquee northeastern-U.S. properties. Only the full Epic Pass, priced at roughly $1,000, is limit free.

This new economic model means that visitors have fewer affordable ways to hit the slopes—especially if they ski only on an occasional basis. For instance, newbies may find themselves obliged to buy season passes just to spend a few days learning how to ski. The season-pass imperative also forces skiers of all levels to commit to one of two ecosystems, Epic or Ikon. This constrains people’s choice of where to ski, and makes planning trips with friends harder. What it does allow is conglomerates to keep people ensconced at company properties, buying overpriced food, lodging, and equipment.

Naturally, this strategy has worked well for both Vail and Alterra. Vail’s revenues have increased by 50 percent since my brief spell with the company in 2017. Alterra, a smaller company, is privately held and does not disclose its financials. But Big Ski’s business model works well enough at Alterra’s scale that, last year, it purchased a new ski area in Colorado for more than $100 million.

The system has not worked as well for staff, who remain underpaid. Vail set its minimum wage at $20 in March 2022, after facing staffing shortages and an earlier strike threat by ski patrollers. But that hourly figure is set against the extremely high cost of living in resort towns: In Park City, the median monthly rent is $3,500, which is about what a Vail minimum-wage employee makes working full-time. Meanwhile, Vail’s charity arm continues to brag about helping staff with “hardship relief.”

This is what happens when companies don’t have to compete for labor. Thanks to industry agglomeration, ski-resort workers have only a small number of potential employers, making it harder to switch jobs if they don’t like the way a particular resort treats them. And supervisors can afford to be high-handed. During my tenure, for example, instructors would sometimes have shifts added to their schedule without permission; at other times, they would have shifts canceled after arriving at work—meaning that they’d driven to the mountain only to get sent home without pay.

At the Park City resort, Vail owns a formidable collection of lodges and rental properties, but none of it was allocated to employees in my time. In 2022, the company began working with a separate development to help lease out discounted units for 441 of its staffers—but Vail has hundreds more employees at the resort, so those dormitories and apartments are nowhere near enough to make a very expensive town remotely affordable for most workers. In fact, according to a 2023 University of Utah study, only 12 percent of the community’s workforce live in Park City itself. This housing crisis is one of the main factors behind the strike. To help explain the picketing, Quinn Graves, one of the union’s officials, told New York magazine that most of his colleagues don’t live locally.

Most of the visitors who fly in to ski at Park City probably do not think much about these issues. They are, after all, there for a vacation, not for field research on economic injustice. But this season, they’ve had plenty of opportunity to ponder that: Because most of the resort closed during the patrollers’ strike, visitors had to wait in freezing lines for hours for brief runs down the few slopes Vail managed to keep open with supervisors and patrollers drafted from other mountains. Many of these guests, sick of Park City’s high costs, came down on the side of the strikers. Online, angry customers blasted Vail for refusing to give staff a raise. One person filed a lawsuit against the company in which he bemoaned how ski-ticket prices have risen “exponentially” over the past 10 years. In person, guests chanted “Pay your employees” while waiting to get on lifts.

On January 8, the company listened. It struck a deal to increase average pay for patrollers by $4 an hour and offer better leave policies. “This contract is more than just a win for our team,” Seth Dromgoole, the union’s lead negotiator, said in a statement. “It’s a groundbreaking success in the ski and mountain worker industry.” Other Park City employees, including instructors, have similarly cheered, hoping that the bump will eventually extend to them.

The outcome may encourage other ski-resort workers to organize. The idea of unionizing was bandied about by ski-school workers when I was there, and labor-organization rates have spiked at ski areas. The rationale is compelling: To get a fair deal in the face of corporate consolidation, workers may have to consolidate themselves.

For now, however, what’s on offer to skiers is governed by the unfortunate logic of mountains and monopolies. America has only so many ski areas, and as long as they’re controlled by a couple of conglomerates, the whole experience will continue to go downhill.