Winter storms this year didn’t just freeze roads. They exposed a harder truth: Government can no longer reliably perform the most basic functions of a modern society.

Across the country, public systems failed under predictable stress. In New York, snowstorms everyone saw coming left streets impassable for weeks. In Nashville, an ice storm knocked out power and left more than 100,000 people in the dark for days. In Washington, D.C., officials are still scrambling to contain the largest wastewater spill in city history, with repairs expected to take months.

The resilience America needs will not come from another government task force. It will come from policies that empower Americans to secure their own energy future.

These are not isolated mishaps. They are recurring failures — signs of national decay.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Americans endured an average of 11 hours of power outages in 2024. Eleven hours in the dark in the wealthiest, most technologically advanced country on Earth. Reliability is slipping while electricity prices climb. Families pay more and get less, even as utility companies demand higher rates.

That path is unsustainable for families already stretched thin. It is dangerous for small businesses operating on razor-thin margins. And it is a strategic liability for a country competing with communist China in the AI race.

Artificial intelligence data centers consume electricity on a staggering scale. A single data center campus under construction in Texas is expected to use more power than the city of Chicago. If America intends to lead the world in AI — and defeat China in the defining competition of this century — it first must lead in energy production.

Yet Americans are asking an obvious question: If government can’t plow streets or keep a sewer system running, why should anyone trust it to keep the lights on?

The Trump administration is right to pursue an all-of-the-above energy strategy. We have no choice but to build nuclear, expand natural gas, and unleash domestic production across the board. But large power plants take years — sometimes decades — to come online.

America needs more energy now.

The fastest, cheapest way to add flexible capacity is battery storage.

Home batteries can be bought off the shelf and installed in days. They can be charged by rooftop solar, small-scale generators, or power from the local utility. They store energy when supply is strong and release it when demand spikes. They keep homes running when the grid fails. And when thousands of them are networked together, they can function like a virtual power plant — pushing electricity back onto the grid to stabilize it during emergencies.

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Instead of relying entirely on aging transmission lines and centralized monopoly utilities that repeatedly fail, Americans can build resilience at home and in their neighborhoods. Power generated and stored closer to where it is used means fewer cascading failures, less strain on fragile infrastructure, and a more reliable grid for everyone.

In other words, instead of waiting on distant bureaucracies, Americans can take ownership of their own energy security.

If government can no longer guarantee basic services, it should at least stop blocking the people who can help provide them. Regulators should remove barriers to battery deployment. Market rules that sideline distributed energy should be updated. And Big Tech companies demanding enormous new power loads should help fund home battery programs instead of shifting those costs onto working families.

The resilience America needs will not come from another government task force. It will come from policies that empower the people to secure their own energy future.

This winter delivered the warning. We cannot assume someone else will keep the lights on. But with the right policies, the American people can.

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Most Americans don’t spend much time thinking about health care policy. They don’t have to. They feel it every year when premiums rise, deductibles climb, and another chunk of their paycheck disappears into a system that rarely seems to work in their favor.

American health care is expensive, confusing, and quietly disempowering. Money moves constantly — from workers to employers to insurers to administrators and eventually to providers — but too rarely stays with the people who earned it. When the bills arrive, families are told what they owe, not what they saved or controlled.

A system that won’t let people save for their own medical needs is not protecting them. It is protecting itself.

That should bother us.

Health savings accounts were designed to fix part of this imbalance by giving people something rare in modern health care: ownership. An HSA lets individuals set aside money for medical expenses, invest it if they choose, and carry it with them year after year. The money is theirs. It doesn’t expire. It isn’t reassigned. Institutions do not manage it on their behalf.

Ownership changes behavior. People who control their own money plan differently. They ask questions. They think long-term. They stop acting like passive participants in a system that treats them as cost centers instead of decision-makers.

Yet millions of Americans are barred from opening an HSA.

Not because they don’t need one or cannot afford health care. It’s simply because the law says they are not allowed.

Under federal rules written more than two decades ago, HSA eligibility is tied to a narrow category of insurance plans. As a result, more than 140 million Americans — including many with traditional employer coverage and rising out-of-pocket costs — are blocked from saving for health care the way they save for retirement or education.

In no other area of American life do we accept a rule that says: You may pay continually, but you may not save.

No one is barred from opening a retirement account because of the kind of pension an employer offers. No one is blocked from saving for college because of where a child goes to school. Yet in health care — often the largest and most unpredictable expense a family faces — ownership remains conditional.

That is no accident. It’s the predictable result of a system built around institutions rather than individuals. Complexity gets rewarded. Intermediaries profit from it. Ordinary people are expected to navigate the maze without meaningful control over the dollars they contribute.

Prices often remain opaque until after care is delivered, which means families learn what something costs only when the bill arrives — too late to make an informed choice.

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The result is a system where spending rises, trust erodes, and prevention gets talked about far more than it gets practiced.

Expanding access to health savings accounts would not solve every problem in health care. But it would address one of the most basic ones: the absence of real personal agency.

The fix is not complicated. It requires trusting people with their own money.

Every American should be able to open an HSA, regardless of insurance type.

This is not a call for a new entitlement or government program. HSAs are privately owned accounts. They rely on responsibility, not mandates. They rest on a simple belief: When people have control, most will use it wisely.

That assumption may feel unfashionable in modern policymaking. It still reflects how Americans live. People save for retirement. They save for education. They save for emergencies. Health care should not be the lone exception — especially when the costs are so high and the stakes so personal.

A system that won’t let people save for their own medical needs is not protecting them. It is protecting itself.

If we want health care that costs less and works better, the answer is not more management. It is more ownership.

The real question is not whether Americans can be trusted with their health care savings. It is why we have spent so long pretending they can’t.

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