• My Gen Alpha sister's Christmas list highlights the cyclical nature of teen fashion choices.
• Y2K brands like Ed Hardy and Hollister have caught her 15-year-old eye this year.
• Her wish list aligns with some Gen Alpha trends and the recent surge of brands like UGG.

Every year, my 15-year-old sister sends my family her Christmas list, and it gives me a snapshot into the hallways of high schools for Gen Alpha.

As the youngest of three sisters, she sends the list to our mom, our eldest sister, and me to divvy up how we see fit. I've come to expect it to be long and detailed down to the exact style and color she's looking for.

However, this year I was caught off guard by the presence of some brands that my 30-year-old sister and I, a 26-year-old, were obsessed with at her age. Fashion is cyclical, but it's always interesting to see it unfold in real time, even if it makes me feel like I'm ancient.

My little sister is a dancer, so I wasn't shocked to see workout gear from popular athleisure brands, such as Lululemon, Alo, and Nike. The big surprises came from her requests for items I hadn't thought about since middle school. She asked for Victoria's Secret vanilla-scented body mist, flair leggings, and Ed Hardy sweatsuits, which were hot when I was growing up, for example.

Brands like Hollister and UGG have each had a strong year in 2025, with double-digit year-over-year sales growth in their most recent quarters. They're making big comebacks with Gen Alpha teens, according to Piper Sandler's semi-annual Taking Stock With Teens survey, published in April.

My sister is no different, with multiple styles of UGG shoes and a specific Hollister item making the long list.

Although a lot of the items sparked nostalgia for me — the Nike Elite backpack was a must-have when I was growing up — she also requested some brands that have popped off more recently. Fast-fashion brand PrettyLittleThing and Kim Kardashian's Skims are still establishing themselves as go-to options for young shoppers, such as my sister, for example.

Here's the full list of what my sister wants to see under the tree this year.

• Pink iPad
• Light pink Beats Studio Pro headphones
• Lululemon exercise set
• Lululemon backpack and keychain
• Skims tops
• Nike Elite backpack (pink or black)
• Black Alo workout set
• Nike workout gear (socks, leggings, and a jacket)
• Pink Stanley tumbler
• Victoria's Secret flair leggings and jacket
• Bare Vanilla Victoria's Secret body mist
• Goddess by Burberry perfume
• Carolina Herrera Good Girl Blush perfume
• Pandora bracelet
• UGG shoes (mini, slippers, or Lowmel)
• "NOOO PLATFORM Tazz Uggs"
• PrettyLittleThing set
• Ed Hardy sweatsuit (pink, red, white, black)
• Light pink Moon Boots
• Deer print blanket
• Hollister pink puffer jacket
• Ferrero Rocher chocolate

Her one caveat: We don't have to buy everything on the list. Thank goodness.

• Kirsty Craig was named a Tech Fellow at BlackRock, one of the firm's highest technical honors.
• She helped build Asimov, an agentic AI platform for the firm's investors.
• Craig, the only woman to become a fellow this year, said her advocacy has informed her success.

For 15 years, BlackRock's Kirsty Craig has operated as a kind of "translator" inside the world's largest asset manager, sitting between portfolio managers making big bets and engineers building the systems that help inform those decisions to get both sides aligned on driving returns.

This skill set is part of what earned Craig, head of research, data, and AI strategy for portfolio management tech, the title of Tech Fellow, one of the firm's high technological distinctions, held by only two dozen of its thousands of engineers. Craig is one of five new fellows that the firm announced on December 16, recognized for supercharging the asset manager's investment team. This year, she is the only woman and the only fellow who works outside of Aladdin, the lucrative spine of BlackRock's investment technology.

When it comes to her impact on how $13.5 trillion money manager BlackRock uses AI, Craig said she's especially proud of her role in Asimov, the agentic AI platform for the firm's fundamental equity business. The "virtual investment analyst" was unveiled by Chief Operating Officer Rob Goldstein at the firm's investor day in June.

It leverages AI to automate workflows and research, as many firms race to adopt the technology to speed up what were once monthslong investment processes.

Now, as a fellow, Craig is even more embedded in BlackRock's efforts to stay ahead, as the firm continues to center on technological prowess.

'Tip of the spear'

At first, Craig wasn't sure she'd become a tech fellow, largely because her work is different than most of the other fellows who work squarely within BlackRock's data analytics and risk platform, Aladdin. Her team of around 60 software engineers, data engineers, and data scientists "sits at the horizontal" across various investment capabilities to help drive investment research.

She found out about the honor at the beginning of the month when a meeting was added to her calendar.

When she heard the news, Craig started by telling the manager who had nominated her, her sponsor during the application process, her team, and her family, "but they've got no idea what it means," she told Business Insider.

Nish Ajitsaria, BlackRock's co-head of Aladdin product engineering and the co-executive sponsor of the fellows program, said that existing tech fellows knew Craig not only for her innovation with AI in investing, but for her collaborative efforts. He described Craig as an "AI native," and added that her team is at the "tip of the spear" when it comes to applying AI to investment.

Craig's time at different offices — Edinburgh, San Francisco, and now Philadelphia — has, she thinks, given her a strong foundation of horizontal leadership across teams.

"I am responsible for really trying to find the dial movers across data, AI, and technology that really help our investment pillars drive investment research," she said of her work.

Craig has learned how to communicate with both investors and Aladdin technologists, and said that building deep trust with both groups has been key to her success.

"If you put both of those different personalities or personas together, quite often they're talking above or below each other. They struggle to connect. So for me, it's really been being able to translate both and then come up with a strategy in the middle," she said.

Visible leadership

For Craig, being a woman in a position of visible leadership is "a huge honor." Of the 24 tech fellows, five are women, including Craig. Women make up 43.8% of BlackRock's global workforce and 33.1% of senior leadership, according to data from January 1, 2025, posted on the firm's site.

Craig said being involved in BlackRock's women and LGBTQ+ resource groups has informed her other work at the firm, especially in how they've taught her how to collaborate with people from across divisions and explain complicated topics.

"If anything has probably helped me with, one, building my network; two, softer presentation skills; and then three, around how to communicate with impact," Craig said. With the title, she hopes to help more junior female technologists "lean in."

For Ajitsaria, it's also important to have a diversity of expertise in the program and ensure that fellows represent all arms of BlackRock.

Expectations beyond the title

When it comes to driving technology strategy itself, Craig said she's excited to keep figuring out how to leverage AI in active investing. Right now, her team is thinking about how to expand the scope of agentic research, potentially to areas like fixed income and macro investing.

As she continues to soak up the news, Craig is also preparing for a very different big life change. Her partner is scheduled to give birth in early January, so, with the due date mere weeks away, Craig said they've kept all celebrating fairly tame so far.

"We did go out for a meal. Nothing has been purchased, apart from cribs and bottles," she said. "Definitely some more celebrating will be done post January 6."

• Where does Wall Street like to eat lunch?
• We set out to find some of the hot spots — besides all of the slop bowl chains.
• Favorites ranged from fine dining to casual delis.

For lunch on most days, the average Wall Streeter might opt for what has affectionately come to be known as a slop bowl. Think Cava, Chipotle, Sweetgreen: $18 for some combination of vegetables, chicken, and rice.

But on occasion, either with clients or colleagues, New York's finance workforce still likes to spend their midday break somewhere that's not a fast-casual chain.

I asked around to find out what some of their favorite spots are these days.

While the list below is by no means exhaustive — there are over 23,000 restaurants in New York — it offers a glimpse into where Wall Street likes to eat, from high-end joints to deli counters.

• The CMO at Monday.com has held executive marketing roles at Google, Amazon, and Vimeo.
• Harris Beber said he uses 3 P's to determine if a job is the right fit: people, product, and position.
• The CMO said he uses those criteria so he doesn't get swayed by whatever offer is in front of him.

It's human nature to reach for the shiny object in front of you — but Monday.com's CMO says it's worth pausing before you accept the first job offer that comes along.

Harris Beber has acted as the CMO of Vimeo, Global CMO of Google Workspace, and also held marketing executive positions at other companies including Amazon. He's no stranger to changing jobs — and he believes switching roles can be the right move when the work no longer feels fulfilling.

In the past, Beber told Business Insider that he's explored new roles in times when he was doing really well at work but feeling unfulfilled. That feeling can't last forever, he said.

"Eventually your work will suffer, your performance will suffer, and it doesn't end well for anyone," Beber said.

To avoid acting out of desperation or necessity, Beber said he tries to map out his next role before he gets to the point of needing a new job. The CMO said it's important to know your criteria for success when thinking about what's next.

"What is really important to you? What are your non-starters? And if you can look at those objectively, then when you have opportunities, you can measure it against something objective," Beber said.

He said he's used 3 P's to determine if his last few roles were the right fit: people, product, and position.

In regards to the first P, Beber said he tries to evaluate whether the people he's going to work with are right for him. He said it's "not easy to get up every day" and work with people you don't like or who don't treat others well.

In one job, Beber said he worked for a difficult leader who yelled, "put intense pressure" on the team, and treated him and others poorly. He said he would never work in that kind of environment again.

Beyond working with respectful coworkers, Beber said it's also important to make sure that the people you work alongside have complementary skills that will help you work well together.

If you're a marketer, when it comes to evaluating the product you're selling, Beber said, it's important to understand the user base and product offerings.

"Do you care about it? Does it excite you? It's really hard to sell something to other people if you don't understand it or aren't excited by it," the CMO said.

Beber said he made the mistake of once taking the wrong role at a sports tech startup. He said he really liked the people, but he's "not a sports person," and didn't understand the product. Beber said he ultimately didn't find happiness in that job.

When it comes to evaluating the position, Beber said he wants to find a role where he feels aligned and can add value to the company.

"Is what I'm great at? What the company needs?" Beber said.

Beber said he's felt the most fulfilled in his career when those three criteria line up. People are "really good at selling themselves" on why an opportunity seems perfect in the moment, he said, which is why measuring the offer against something objective is critical.

When someone makes you a job offer, "they're going to tell you every reason why you're perfect for the role and why it's going to be great," Beber said. "But as anyone goes into a new role, very rarely is it exactly what you thought it would be."

In 2020, the Department of Health and Human Services released "Healthy People 2030," a set of objectives designed to improve the nation's health outcomes. This year, at the halfway point, Business Insider decided to check how the country was doing against its goals.

One topic stood out. When it came to reducing low-risk cesarean sections, the US was "getting worse," a bright red banner warned.

"It's a cesarean epidemic," said Dr. Emiliano Chavira, a practicing obstetrician and maternal-fetal medicine specialist in Los Angeles. "There's a minimization of what the long-term risks are, what's happening to our public health, and how this affects mothers."

The more we dug, the more we realized there was a gap between the procedure's public perception as a routine, normal part of giving birth and what experts were saying. We set out to figure out why.

We also wanted to better understand the complexity involved in a procedure that can be life-saving and is also performed around double the rate the World Health Organization says is "ideal" for maternal and infant health.

We interviewed more than 30 practicing and retired obstetricians, nurse midwives, and labor and delivery nurses. We spoke with more than 25 academics who study C-section rates and maternal health outcomes.

Because hospitals don't always publicly disclose how frequently their doctors perform C-sections, we compiled our own data. We requested information from every state and Washington, DC. By the time of publication, we had answers from 29 states and DC. We compiled findings from over 1,700 hospitals.

We learned that doctors delivering babies have to make tough calls, and that the immediate and widespread availability of cesarean surgeries is critical to safe maternal care.

At the same time, dozens of providers told Business Insider that concerns for the health and safety of women and their newborns aren't the only influences. Doctors told us they performed C-sections because they feared lawsuits, or because there weren't enough staff, available beds, or time to support safe vaginal deliveries.

In reviewing decades of research, Business Insider also learned that indirect financial incentives appear to drive higher C-section rates since the surgeries are more profitable, cost-effective, and perceived to be more protective in the event of a lawsuit.

These interviews and our data analysis underlined a common theme: Too many C-sections endanger the health of women and their newborns, but a higher C-section rate appears to be better for a hospital's bottom line.

First, we set out to get C-section rate data from hospitals across the US

Early in our reporting, we learned that the rate at which doctors performed C-sections in the US skyrocketed since the late 1960s, when the surgery first became widespread. It tripled within the first decade, then doubled again by the early 2000s.

We wondered if elective C-sections were driving up the rate, and then found that only about 2.5% of babies are delivered in the US that way.

We learned that researchers in the 2000s found that pregnant women in the US are increasingly older, more likely to be obese, and are more frequently diagnosed with other complications, such as diabetes — all factors increase the chance that a baby will be most safely delivered by C-section.

That didn't explain one of the most surprising lessons: Doctors at different hospitals perform C-sections at wildly different rates, studies repeatedly found.

Controlling for a constellation of factors — hospital obstetric care levels, delivery volume, urban or rural location, maternal age, race, health, and income — multiple studies show one of the biggest risks for undergoing a medically unnecessary C-section is the hospital a woman delivers in.

A woman looking for the C-section rate at her nearby hospital may not find it. Some hospitals voluntarily disclose their rates in response to annual consumer surveys; many do not. Business Insider set out to build a more complete picture.

State health departments collect data on all babies born in their state, including when, where, and whether they're born vaginally or by cesarean surgery. Business Insider requested this data from all 50 states and Washington, DC.

Eleven states would not produce data that identified individual hospitals. Of those, 10 — Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Idaho, Missouri, Nebraska, and South Dakota — said the data was confidential by department policy or state law. The Louisiana Department of Health said the state does not track C-section rates by hospital, the only state in the country to say this.

Twenty-eight states require a formal public records or data request, sometimes for fees that reach $1,500. By the time of publication, 18 states and Washington, DC, produced data for Business Insider.

Kentucky's first-time and low-risk C-section hospital rates produced state-wide averages that differed significantly from those reported by federal agencies, so Business Insider excluded them from our analysis.

Eleven states release C-section rates by hospital on publicly accessible websites, which Business Insider pulled directly.

In total, 29 states and Washington, DC, provided at least one of three types of C-section rates for hospitals that delivered, on average, 100 or more babies a year: overall, first-time, and low-risk.

All regions produced hospitals' overall C-section rates, which include women undergoing their first C-sections and women who have undergone the procedure before.

Twenty-three states and Washington, DC, produced first-time C-section rates at 1,242 hospitals. We analyzed this rate because maternal health experts stress the importance of limiting first-time surgeries. Her first surgery almost always leads to others, which in turn increases her risk of developing more severe complications.

Eighteen states and Washington, DC, provided low-risk, or NTSV, C-section rates at 1,097 hospitals. Experts look at the rate doctors perform surgeries on women with low-risk, NTSV pregnancies — women who are pregnant for the first time, are at full term, are not delivering twins, and whose babies are head-down rather than breech — since they are the least likely to require surgery to most safely deliver their babies.

Relying on expert guidance, Business Insider considered low-risk C-section rates to be the most authoritative for comparing across different hospitals. Women with low-risk pregnancies may still have other complications, such as preeclampsia, which would most likely require a C-section to safely deliver their newborns. Experts overwhelmingly agree that low-risk C-section rates are still the best available metric.

For states that did not produce low-risk C-section rates by hospital, Business Insider relied on first-time C-section rates. If neither low-risk nor first-time C-section rates were available, we used the overall C-section rate.

In total, we analyzed at least one of three types of C-section rates from 1,744 hospitals that collectively delivered an average of over 2.6 million babies annually — around 70% of the babies born nationwide each year.

Nearly one in three were delivered by C-section, Business Insider's data shows, around the same as the national C-section rate over the last two decades.

Then we calculated each hospital's average C-section rates

Health departments provided annual C-section rate data over different time periods. Twenty-six states and Washington, DC, provided data for at least five years, all since 2018. Florida's data is the oldest, ranging from 2015 to 2019. Public websites for California and New York each provided one year of hospital C-section rates in 2024 and 2022, respectively. Hospital C-section rates may have since changed.

Guided by input from maternal health experts, Business Insider calculated individual hospital overall, first-time, and low-risk C-section rates as an average over all years provided. This helped ensure that the rates we examined weren't outliers.

Since we used a hospital's average, the rates Business Insider used may still reflect higher rates for hospitals with some years of high C-section rates, even where they have worked to curb their C-section rates year-over-year.

Next, we mapped the hospitals' locations and compared their C-section rates to others close by

We found that hospital average C-section rates swung to extremes, dipping as low as 4% overall at a hospital in Alaska and as high as 62% overall at a hospital in Florida.

To track how individual hospitals impact care, we first matched each hospital to addresses in the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' hospital general information database. Using the latitude and longitude of each address, Business Insider then deployed a Python programming script that used geospatial data to identify each hospital's nearest neighboring hospital in our dataset.

Next, we compared C-section rates across each hospital and its nearest neighbor. Business Insider identified hundreds of hospitals with higher rates than the next closest hospital, including 158 hospitals with an average low-risk C-section rate at least 25% higher than that of the next closest hospital.

Business Insider created a searchable map, which, for the first time, maps hospitals across 29 states and Washington, DC, and makes C-section rates publicly available to compare across nearby hospitals.

Hospitals change ownership — and names — frequently. Business Insider used the hospital name provided by each state's department of health. Hospital names in our database may have since changed.

We determined whether a hospital was for-profit, and whether that impacted C-section rates

What's the difference between neighboring hospitals with wildly different C-section rates? Decades of studies show a correlation between profits and higher C-section rates. Dozens of doctors, nurse-midwives, and labor and delivery nurses told us hospitals looking to maximize revenues and keep operating expenses low are indirectly incentivized to keep surgery rates high.

To investigate further, Business Insider used the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' hospital general information data to determine if a hospital is nonprofit, for-profit, or public. Business Insider used SEC filings, court filings, and previous news coverage to further determine and confirm operational model and ownership of individual hospitals across the 29 states and Washington, DC.

Business Insider also confirmed that the hospital's operational model had not changed at some point during the analyzed data period. If it had, we factored that change into the analysis.

We found that across nearly all 29 states and Washington, DC, for-profit hospitals, on average, performed C-sections at higher rates than other hospitals. Collectively, for-profit hospitals across Business Insider's analysis overall had a 20% higher first-time C-section rate and a 14% higher low-risk C-section rate than other hospitals.

C-sections are more profitable and more cost-effective than vaginal deliveries, experts and repeated studies found. Our findings are consistent with many studies that found that indirect financial incentives appear to drive higher C-section rates.

In the spring of 2016, obstetrician Dr. Jesanna Cooper's practice hired a nurse-midwife to deliver babies at Princeton Baptist Medical Center, a hospital in Birmingham, Alabama. The nurse-midwife was the center's first in about 20 years.

The impact on care was transformative, said Cooper, who practiced at Princeton Baptist for nearly a decade. She learned to safely support far more vaginal deliveries, and the number of C-sections she performed soon plummeted, she said.

Cooper wasn't alone. Between 2018 and 2023, doctors at Princeton Baptist on average cut into fewer than one in six women with low-risk pregnancies, according to data analyzed by Business Insider. The hospital's average rate in those years was nearly half of Alabama's statewide average, and dramatically lower than all of Birmingham's other hospitals, according to Business Insider's analysis.

The success was bitterly won. Delivering more babies vaginally was a years-long, "all-out, knock-down fight" against the hospital's administrators and the momentum of the US medical system, Cooper said. It was a fight for more staff; a fight for more time and beds for laboring women; and a fight against a medical system that rewards a different metric: profit.

Though C-sections can be vital, often life-saving surgeries, they're a frequently overused major abdominal surgery. US doctors perform them at double the rate the World Health Organization says is "ideal" for maternal and infant health, and nearly twice the rate of Finland and Sweden.

Women aren't asking for more C-sections; 2.5% of US babies are born by elective C-section each year. Instead, experts say, C-sections are more lucrative and cost-effective than vaginal deliveries, and are perceived to be more protective in the event of an expensive malpractice lawsuit. Hospital systems looking to maximize revenues and keep operating costs low are indirectly incentivized to keep surgery rates high.

How each hospital is run dramatically impacts how many surgeries its doctors perform, and C-section rates can swing wildly from hospital to hospital.

To track this, Business Insider analyzed C-section rates at over 1,700 hospitals with an average of at least 100 births each year, from 29 states and Washington, DC.

At hundreds of hospitals in Business Insider's analysis, surgeons performed C-sections at far higher rates than doctors practicing at the nearest neighboring hospital, likely serving similar patient populations.

The data suggests that for-profit healthcare systems appear more susceptible to high rates.

Vijay Chaudhuri, a vice president of Hudson Regional Health, the parent company of Hudson Regional Hospital, now known as Secaucus University Hospital, told Business Insider that the hospital closed its labor and delivery department in April, 2023, and did not otherwise respond to Business Insider's reporting.

Dr. Manuel Alvarez, who oversees care at Palisades Medical Center, said hospital leadership made a concerted effort to lower C-section rates and safely support more vaginal births, which included routine monthly trainings, evidence-based care protocols, and promoting a workplace culture more supportive of vaginal deliveries.

"The rate of C-sections is something we have been addressing," a spokesperson for East Los Angeles Doctors Hospital's parent company said in a statement to Business Insider. The spokesperson said the hospital planned to close its obstetrics department in January 2026 "due to declining deliveries over the last year."

Spokespeople for Providence Memorial, Las Palmas Medical Center, Adventist Health White Memorial, and Merit Health Biloxi, now known as Memorial Hospital Biloxi, did not respond to Business Insider's queries by phone and email.

Doctors delivering babies make tough calls. The stakes are high, doctors told Business Insider, and a routine delivery can quickly turn into an emergency that requires immediate surgery.

Many providers also told Business Insider that C-sections are often performed because doctors fear the crushing expense, professional damage, and personal distress suffered in a malpractice lawsuit. C-sections are perceived to be more protective in the event of a lawsuit alleging injury to a baby. Obstetricians are among the doctors most likely to face a legal threat at least once in their career, a 2023 study found, and a lawsuit filed over the serious harm or death of a baby can result in tens of millions of dollars in jury awards.

Business Insider's reporting showed that C-section rates aren't intractable. Experts said that rates can safely come down at hospitals that prioritize making careful, evidence-based changes.

"Some providers say this is too big for me," Cooper said, "but some try to fight it."

At Princeton Baptist, Cooper and the labor and delivery team fought to safely support more women to deliver vaginally. For a while, they won.

The most common inpatient surgery in America

C-sections are the most common inpatient surgery in the country. More than 32% of all babies born in the US are delivered by C-section. Many could likely have been avoided, maternal health experts say. One large study estimates that up to 19% of all births should be C-sections to protect women and their babies, leaving as many as 13% possibly performed needlessly in the US.

That suggests that around one in 10 pregnant women in the US — as many as half a million women each year — undergoes a medically unnecessary C-section, leaving her at higher risk of blood clots, hemorrhages, infections, and more likely to develop dangerous complications in future pregnancies.

Not all hospitals perform these surgeries evenly. Cesarean surgery rates across US hospitals swing to extremes, dipping as low as 4% overall at a hospital in Alaska and as high as 62% overall at a hospital in Florida, according to Business Insider's analysis.

At Princeton Baptist in Birmingham, Cooper and her colleagues maintained one of the lowest rates of C-sections performed on women with low-risk pregnancies — those who are pregnant for the first time, are at full term, are not delivering twins, and whose babies are head-down rather than breech — of any hospital in Business Insider's analysis.

In many ways, it was an outlier.

The hospital is located in a low-income, Black-majority neighborhood of Birmingham, Alabama. Nationwide, Black women are more likely than other women to undergo medically unnecessary C-sections.

Cooper credited most of their success to working with midwives. Across the US, women with low-risk pregnancies cared for by midwives have better health outcomes and lower chance of undergoing a C-section, according to several recent studies.

Cooper also said she and other providers at Princeton Baptist had enough staff and available beds to support women in long vaginal deliveries.

"If you don't have enough nurses, you don't have enough beds, or you don't have space for women to labor," said Cooper, "you're going to do things that increase the risk of a section."

Dr. Manuel Alvarez, who also chairs obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive science at Hackensack University Medical Center and the Hackensack-Meridian School of Medicine, said his hospitals track individual and share provider C-section rates, hold routine monthly trainings on supporting vaginal deliveries for doctors and nurses, and implemented evidence-based protocols to ensure "women have the best chance of a vaginal delivery."

All doctors ordering a C-section must first consult with a nurse and another doctor, he said, which helps promote a workplace culture more supportive of vaginal deliveries.

Dozens of other hospitals maintained strikingly high C-section rates. Doctors at Valley Baptist Medical Center — Brownsville, a for-profit hospital in Brownsville, Texas, delivered over half of the 14,500 babies born at the hospital by C-section between 2018 and 2024, Business Insider's analysis showed. Of those, nearly 3,600 babies were delivered to women who underwent a C-section for the first time.

Experts look to prevent first-time C-sections, since they almost always result in more. At Valley Baptist, 99% of pregnant women with one or more prior C-sections underwent another over the same seven-year period.

Some hospitals treat women with high-risk pregnancies and may have a higher overall or first-time C-section rate to best protect the lives and safety of those women and their newborns. To better evaluate a hospital's potential for performing medically unnecessary C-sections, experts and federal health agencies look at the rate doctors perform C-sections on women with low-risk pregnancies, since they're the least likely to require surgery to safely deliver their babies.

Women with low-risk pregnancies may still be obese, be older, or have other complications, such as preeclampsia, which may mean delivering their babies by C-section is safest. Still, dozens of experts told Business Insider that low-risk pregnancies are the most useful metric for evaluating the quality of a hospital's maternal care.

At Valley Baptist, doctors performed C-sections on half of all women with low-risk pregnancies, on average, over seven years. That's double the low-risk C-section rate of the next closest hospital, less than 5 miles away.

Valley Baptist's spokesperson did not respond to Business Insider's queries by phone and email.

Large swings in low-risk C-section rates underline the dramatic influence a hospital has on women in its care. Controlling for a constellation of factors — hospital obstetric care levels, delivery volume, urban or rural location, maternal age, race, health, and income — multiple studies show one of the biggest risks for undergoing a medically unnecessary C-section is the hospital a woman delivers in.

Our first-of-its-kind map allows users to search hospitals across these regions and makes C-section rates publicly available to compare across nearby hospitals.

'That all goes back to money'

In the American medical system, money dominates care. Most US hospitals operate as "fee-for-service," meaning they bill and garner reimbursements for each service they provide. Each baby they deliver nets reimbursable fees.

A C-section performed by an obstetrician is more highly reimbursed than a vaginal delivery. In 2020, the surgery averaged around $17,000 in insurance reimbursements, compared to just under $11,500 for vaginal birth, according to a 2022 study.

The surgery is also more cost-effective. Hospitals maximize reimbursements from labor by keeping delivery volume high, according to former hospital administrators and recent industry analysis. The more babies delivered, the higher the collective payout.

For hospitals and providers looking to increase delivery efficiency, it's simple math. A vaginal delivery can take days, while a C-section takes less than an hour.

Those indirect incentives appear most acute at for-profit hospitals motivated to deliver higher shareholder returns. Across nearly all states in Business Insider's analysis, surgeons at for-profit hospitals perform C-sections at higher rates, on average, than other hospitals. Overall, for every 1000 women with low-risk pregnancies, around 289 will undergo a C-section at for-profit hospitals, compared with 254 women at all other hospitals — a 14% increase.

Acceptable outcomes, acceptable cost

There are proven, evidence-based strategies for hospitals to safely reduce unnecessary C-sections.

In April 2025, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommended that hospitals safely lower low-risk C-section rates by fostering a workplace culture more supportive of vaginal birth. This means hospital leadership commits to standard, evidence-based protocols for common diagnoses that lead to C-sections, like when labor has "failed to progress," or interpreting electronic fetal heart rate monitors, which decades of research show can trigger unnecessary C-sections when misread.

Hospital staffing also matters. C-section rates were 11% lower in hospitals with enough staff to assign at least one nurse to care for every woman in labor, according to one large study. Many hospitals don't employ enough nurses to reach that benchmark. Nurse salaries are among a hospital's most significant costs, making up around 30% of all facility expenditures. Hospitals hoping to trim staff overhead may cut nursing staff first. For-profit hospitals employ markedly fewer nurses for every patient in their care than other hospitals, according to a 2025 study.

In 2020, Newsweek and US News & World Report named Princeton Baptist one of the top maternity hospitals in the country, one of only two hospitals in Alabama to achieve the distinction.

That quality of care didn't balance the cost.

Princeton Baptist saw a 70% increase in the number of babies doctors delivered there between 2018 to 2022. To generate even more revenue, Cooper said she brought in significantly more pregnant women with private insurance to increase reimbursements.

It still wasn't enough. To avoid C-sections, Cooper said, she needed available hospital beds and enough nursing staff to support a woman as she labored for up to three days. That's far more hospital overhead for a vaginal birth that's ultimately less lucrative than a C-section that takes less than an hour.

"There is so much systemic pressure to get more people delivered so you can get the next person in," Cooper said. "And that all goes back to money." Ultimately, the price was too high.

In 2023, Tenet Healthcare, one of the largest for-profit medical systems in the US and then Princeton Baptist's majority owner, closed the hospital's labor and delivery department. Nationwide, more than 500 hospitals have closed their labor and delivery departments since 2010.

Tenet diverted all remaining deliveries to nearby Brookwood Medical Center, a much larger hospital that delivered five times the number of babies as Princeton Baptist each year.

Doctors at Brookwood performed low-risk C-sections at double the rate, on average, as Princeton Baptist, Business Insider's data showed. In 2024, Brookwood doctors operated on nearly one in three women with low-risk pregnancies — among the highest low-risk C-section rates in the state.

David McKinney, the spokesperson for Orlando Health, the parent company of Brookwood and Princeton Baptist as of late 2024, referred Business Insider's questions to Tenet. Multiple Tenet spokespeople did not respond to Business Insider's queries.

In the end, the fight overwhelmed Cooper. Exhausted and burned out, she left the practice in late 2022, less than a year before Princeton Baptist closed the labor and delivery department's doors.

"It's hard to be an outsider in your own field," she said. "It's a hard enough field to be in anyway."

Without intervention, hospital C-section rates almost always rebound to meet the demands of the US medical system, said Dr. Steven L. Clark, an obstetrician at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, who has studied the US C-section rate over decades.

It's economics, Clark said: "This is the rate which gives the American population acceptable outcomes for acceptable cost."

In most states, hospitals are not required by law to participate in initiatives aimed at safely lowering C-section rates. When left to themselves, hospitals rarely prioritize reducing medically unnecessary cesareans, more than a dozen healthcare providers and two former hospital administrators told Business Insider. Most default to concern for their bottom lines.

But not always.

States including California, Iowa, and New Jersey have successfully supported more vaginal deliveries at hospitals participating in state-led initiatives to improve maternal care.

At the beginning of 2025, dozens of Alabama hospitals volunteered to participate in a state-led initiative to safely lower their collective first-time C-section rate by 20% by 2027. Brookwood, under new management by Orlando Health, is among them. The hospital with the highest low-risk C-section rate in the state is not.

Have a tip? Contact Hannah Beckler via email at hbeckler@businessinsider.com or Signal at hbeckler.72. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• AI can do amazing things. It also fails at basic stuff, all the time.
• That's not a temporary state of things. We'll be dealing with that dichotomy for a long time.
• Which makes predictions about what AI is going to do to work, and everything else, very hard to make.

Sometimes I use ChatGPT and it seems stunningly obvious that AI is going to have a transformative effect on my life. I use it more every day.

And other times I find myself yelling at ChatGPT in ALL CAPS, because it can't do basic, simple tasks — ones I could reasonably farm out to a 5th grader. Or even worse: It can't do basic tasks but won't tell me it can't do them, and tries to fudge a result instead. And that makes me wary of using it again.

Does this sound familiar?

It turns out that the AI business has a great term for this dichotomy: "The jagged frontier," coined in a 2023 research paper. Here's another way of putting it, via Reuters:

"It might be a Ferrari in math but a donkey at putting things in your calendar," said Anastasios Angelopoulos, the CEO and cofounder of LMArena, a popular benchmarking tool."

That quote comes from a report looking at the struggles various businesses have had implementing AI in their work. It's a theme we've been hearing a lot about over the last few months, like the MIT study that found that 95% of companies were getting "zero return" on their AI investment.

This issue is core to the "Is AI a bubble and when will it pop?" question, of course. Which is a very important question, with some $2 trillion in investment in play.

But I think it's not the only question: The tech isn't going away, so many of us are unquestionably going to be using AI in all kinds of ways, no matter what.

So a more practical question is: What kind of tasks can AI do reliably well today — reliably enough that businesses (and the rest of us) can use it day in and day out — and which ones are going to take a while to sort out? And which ones may never be something we can hand over to AI?

This is a pretty good summary of the ongoing experiments we're working out in real time, right now.

• Amy Smith faced unemployment and depression after losing her HR management job at 57.
• She struggled financially, relying on food stamps and selling belongings to make ends meet.
• Persistence led her to a new HR role, teaching her resilience and appreciation for stability.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Amy Smith, a 59-year-old HR professional based in the Kansas City metro area. It's been edited for length and clarity.

I had spent the majority of my career in HR when I got laid off from my six-figure management job.

Over the next year and a half, I went from living in an apartment with all the bells and whistles, not even thinking about money, to going on food stamps, selling my belongings, and moving into a friend's basement — all because I couldn't find a job. At 57, I couldn't help but feel like my age was working against me in the market.

The rejections took a toll on me, and I fell into a depression. I just had this feeling that everything was closing in on top of me. Some days, it even felt hard to breathe.

After 20 months of job searching, I landed a role as an HR generalist that I love. If I could go back, I'd tell myself one thing to make my unemployment experience easier: Just get up.

The job hunt felt hopeless for months

In September 2023, I received a call from my boss saying he bank where I worked was restructuring, and my role would be eliminated the following month. I felt extremely disappointed, but I had been restructured from a previous role at the start of the pandemic, and it took me a few months to find a new job. I figured this time around it would take me at most 60 days.

I applied to any HR position I could find, even entry-level coordinator roles on job boards like LinkedIn and Indeed. The response was rejection after rejection. I even hired a professional résumé writer for help. It was $450 that I didn't have, but I was striking out so much on my own that I thought I'd give it a try.

It was another kick in the gut when I sent the new résumé to my recruiter friend, and she took one look at it and said, "You got taken, honey." She told me my original résumé was better.

When I would get interviews, I often made it through the initial screening and the phone interview, but it seemed like once I got to the in-person phase, I would get a call saying they went with another candidate. I'm not a spring chicken, so that's where I believe ageism came in.

The rejections were taking me lower and lower. I deleted the spreadsheet where I tracked my applications because I couldn't take looking at it anymore.

I fell into a depression and struggled to get out of bed

By the end of the year, I couldn't afford to buy my grandbabies any Christmas presents, and I was devastated.

I stopped changing my clothes. I'd stay in my pajamas all day and maybe run a brush through my hair. Most nights, I would sit in the dark and just stare — no TV, no lights, nothing. I didn't want to look at my computer, answer my phone, or even climb out of bed.

Once February 2024 came around, my unemployment ran out, and I had to apply for food stamps. I remember bawling to myself. I just had this overwhelming feeling that I didn't know what to do.

Then a point came when I thought to myself, "This isn't you." I told myself, "Get up, brush your teeth, brush your hair, and walk outside." I started forcing myself to leave the apartment every day. At first, it was just to grab the mail, then I started walking around outside my apartment complex to get some fresh air. It was about finding the determination to crawl out of that hole of depression, even just for five seconds at a time.

I took on odd jobs and sold household items, but it wasn't enough to save my apartment

The next month, I started looking for work in my area and got hired to sell used cars. I had to sell cars that I knew weren't good quality, so on top of battling depression, I felt like I was taking advantage of customers. After a few months, I couldn't emotionally take it anymore, so I quit. I worked a few other odd jobs, including at a convenience store and another car dealership.

In August of 2024, I started selling any items I could on Facebook Marketplace, from furniture to my CPAP machine, to make rent. It wasn't enough, and I ended up getting turned over to collections for the rent a month before my lease ended.

I packed up whatever I could fit in my SUV and moved to Florida to stay with family for a few months before coming back to Kansas City to live with some friends in the mother-in-law's quarters in the basement, which is where I am now. I'm forever grateful for them and their support, but I still battle with the fact that I'm now 59 and don't have my own home.

I appreciate everything so much more after finding a new job

A few months after moving back to Kansas City, I applied to an HR position at a health insurance company and went through a few rounds of interviews. I thought it went great, but I heard crickets.

I followed up multiple times and was clear that I wanted the job. Eventually, I got hired. The CEO told me it was my persistence throughout the interview process that won him over. It's been fantastic since I walked in the door.

I didn't feel it at the time, but the man upstairs has a plan for everything. This tough period of unemployment led me to where I am today, and I learned a valuable lesson in humility. I appreciate everything I have now, and I'm motivated to work even harder to get back the things that are important, such as my savings and retirement funds, my own place, and even my self-worth.

Here's what I would tell myself if I could go back

If I could talk to the version of me that was struggling most, I'd tell her to get out of bed, brush your teeth, and get out of your pajamas, even if it's just to put on a t-shirt and some jeans. Pushing myself to do something every day is what helped shake me out of my depression.

Take a deep breath and know that at the end of the day, you've got it and you're strong enough to get through anything that's coming at you. Don't give up on yourself because you're worth it.

Do you have a story to share about navigating long-term unemployment? If so, please reach out to the reporter at tmartinelli@businessinsider.com.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella views AI as an existential threat, a once-in-a-generation opportunity, and a chance to cement his legacy at the top of the tech industry.

The mission is both personal and professional for the Nadella, who is pushing the company to rethink how it operates at every level. That's according to internal Microsoft documents obtained by Business Insider, and interviews with leaders, managers, and other employees at the software giant.

Sweeping organizational shifts include high-profile executive changes and mandates for teams to work faster and leaner — all designed to consolidate power around AI leaders and radically reshape how the company builds and funds its products.

"Satya is pushing on intensity and urgency," one Microsoft executive told Business Insider. That's putting pressure on some Microsoft veterans to decide whether they want to stay and commit to the mountain of work it's going to take to complete Nadella's AI revolution.

"You've gotta be asking yourself how much longer you want to do this," this executive added.

Nadella is having conversations with executives to sign on for the transformation, or leave, people familiar with the matter said. Many of these people asked not to be identified discussing sensitive matters, although one top executive spoke openly with Business Insider about the CEO's overhaul and Microsoft's AI future.

Nadella's new technical focus

Nadella this year appointed a new CEO of Microsoft's commercial business to free up time to focus on the technical work necessary for his AI ambitions.

According to an internal memo, Nadella also started a weekly AI accelerator meeting and corresponding Teams channel to speed the pace of AI work and get more ideas from across the company.

Executives do not present in these new meetings. Instead, lower-level technical employees are encouraged to speak and share what they're seeing from the AI trenches. This is designed to avoid top-down AI leadership, and is intentionally a bit messy and chaotic, according to people familiar with the new approach.

Other major executive changes are looming. Three Microsoft executives told Business Insider that longtime Office and Windows boss Rajesh Jha has been mulling retirement. Insiders are also chattering about the possibility that Charlie Bell, who runs Microsoft cybersecurity, could retire.

Microsoft's spokesman Frank Shaw said the company does not expect any changes in the short term to its senior leadership team, of which Bell and Jha are both members.

Althoff's rise

Microsoft recently promoted Judson Althoff, its longtime sales chief, to an expanded role as CEO of the company's commercial business.

Althoff's promotion is intended to give Nadella and the company's engineering leaders more time to focus on AI, according to an internal memo viewed by Business Insider, which described this moment as "a tectonic AI platform shift."

Nadella has shifted to saying the company is in the "middle innings" rather than the "early innings" of AI, a cricket term, and started saying he wants to see the game through, one of the people said.

"This will also allow our engineering leaders and me to be laser focused on our highest ambition technical work — across our datacenter buildout, systems architecture, AI science, and product innovation — to lead with intensity and pace in this generational platform shift," Nadella wrote.

Practically, that's meant Althoff is spending more time as the face of Microsoft at events such as the recent Ignite conference, the first one in Nadella's tenure when the company CEO didn't deliver the keynote.

One executive told Business Insider the move seems to be paying off so far by giving Nadella "extra bandwidth to really lead the company in learning, leveraging, and building AI."

"Satya is 100% engaged with leading the company to learn and embrace AI," this person said. "The Judson move was brilliant. It actually allows Satya more time to advance the company in its AI journey. Satya spends a good amount of time in meetings you could characterize as AI learning, product, and engineering."

New marching orders

Nadella recently announced new marching orders for executives in another Teams channel, this one exclusively for Microsoft corporate vice presidents and above. The CEO said the company is at a turning point at least as significant as the shift to cloud computing and needs to completely rethink its business model.

"We all have to work and act like ICs in our own orgs, constantly learning and unlearning," Nadella wrote, referring to Individual Contributors, someone who is focused on technical work rather than managing people.

"I chuckle a bit each time someone sends me a note about talking to a friend at an AI start-up, about how differently they're working, how agile, focused, fast they are," the CEO added. "The reality is that this work is also happening right here at Microsoft under our noses! It's our jobs as leaders to seek this out, empower it, cultivate it, and learn from our own early in career talent who are reinventing the new production function!!"

Production function, explained

Asha Sharma, Microsoft CoreAI product president, who joined in 2024, said the company has shifted its operations dramatically in her short tenure. Nadella's new "production function" is about using AI to radically change how the company creates, builds, and delivers products and services.

When she joined, the AI industry would crank out a big new foundation model roughly every six months. Then, releases happened every six weeks. Today, AI is changing so quickly that it's forcing Microsoft to rethink not just its products but the entire way software is made, Sharma said in an interview arranged by the company.

For decades, software development has worked like an assembly line. You take a set of inputs — people, time, resources — and transform them into output. Scaling production required scaling those inputs.

"AI breaks that relationship," she said.

AI agents, data, and intelligence now act as a new type of scalable unit that can generate software, insights, and decisions without a corresponding increase in engineering hours or budget. That means the marginal cost of creating something new drops dramatically, Sharma explained, and teams can now spend more on "judgment, taste, and problem-solving."

Leadership evolution

With so much changing, it's natural that leadership evolves — and Microsoft insiders expect more changes at the top.

Jha, a veteran executive who oversees famous Microsoft products such as Office and Windows, has been mulling retirement, according to three executives who spoke to Business Insider.

Still, one of these executives noted that Jha has a newfound excitement about the company's AI potential, so he could stick around for Nadella's new intense era.

If Jha leaves, LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky might succeed him, these executives said. Roslansky has been running LinkedIn since 2020 and Microsoft recently expanded Roslansky's role to include Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and the Microsoft 365 Copilot application, according to an internal announcement from Nadella in June.

Roslansky started reporting to Jha for his new duties as executive vice president of Office, and to Nadella in his capacity as LinkedIn CEO, according to organizational charts viewed by Business Insider.

Charles Lamanna, president of the business and industry Copilot group responsible for building AI tools like low-code applications, also moved to report to Jha at the time, and is taking on a bigger profile within the company, the people said.

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• Troops are scrubbing their social media amid fears over a Pentagon crackdown on political speech.
• "I had to take my pronouns off my LinkedIn," a Marine sergeant told Business Insider.
• Pentagon leaders have said their moves are intended to depoliticize the military.

Pentagon leadership's intensifying scrutiny of speech that is critical of conservatives and the Trump administration is fueling anxiety in the ranks and has some service members scrambling to protect their careers.

In interviews with Business Insider, troops and legal advisors detailed how behavior has changed amid the recent crackdown, which has some facing administrative actions that can end a career without a court-martial.

• A service member deleted his social media post that called the US attacks on boats in the Caribbean lawless after someone at his command saw it.

• A field-grade officer deactivated their Facebook and avoids responding to colleagues who text news articles, worried about being baited into criticizing the Trump administration.

• An enlisted Marine says a mentor warned her to erase any public-facing support for progressive causes.

"I had to take my pronouns off my LinkedIn. I've scrubbed everything that has ever mentioned or supported" LGBTQ causes, the Marine sergeant told Business Insider. She said her mentor warned that Pentagon officials may be looking for "anything that could be construed as contrary to the vision that the current administration has."

These individual acts of self-censorship mirror a broader chill sweeping the ranks, especially as the crackdown has burst into the open at the highest levels. Tensions flared again this week as the Defense Department said it was launching a command investigation of Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly after a preliminary review of his video urging troops to defy unlawful orders.

The Trump administration says it has a prerogative to police speech it deems offensive or inappropriate, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said the administration's policies are intended "to rip out the politics" from the services. Some experts on military law say the scrutiny and its repercussions are an abuse of the military's authority.

One of the flashpoints has been the September murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Top Pentagon leaders have said it's "unacceptable" for troops "to celebrate or mock" the killing.

After Kirk's killing, some service members said things online like "glad he's dead." Others criticized his rhetoric or, more broadly, complained about Trump administration policies or conservatives. In one case, a colonel was suspended for lamenting to friends the angry arguments that followed Kirk's death.

More than 120 service members have been investigated for political comments since Kirk's death, according to a tally reported by The Washington Post.

Nearly a dozen military-law experts told Business Insider the punishments generally wouldn't hold up in a military courtroom because they lack the elements of speech crimes, such as "contemptuous" words against an elected leader, or because the comments were unrelated to the military and not said in uniform.

"What we're seeing now is abuse of speech restrictions," said Rachel VanLandingham, a Southwestern Law School professor and retired Air Force JAG who is an expert on military speech.

"Our service members understand that their rights are more restricted within the military. Now they're being chilled into giving up the rights they actually do have," she said. "It's unprecedented."

A wide range of allegations

Military leaders have disclosed that they are tracking "unprofessional" social media use. An October message from the Navy secretary encouraged sailors and Marines to "refrain from social media engagement" about official government or military policies.

"This is more than just policing manners," said Frank Rosenblatt, a professor at the Mississippi College School of Law and a retired Army JAG. "A wider muzzling of the military seems to really serve what they're trying to do — identify these deep state people who are not politically trustworthy."

The Uniform Code of Military Justice imposes some restrictions on troops, criminalizing speech that disrespects officers and civilian leaders, or that undermines the obedience necessary to carry out orders. Troops retain many First Amendment protections; hate speech, for instance, is lawful unless it has a military connection, such as if it was uttered on a base or warship.

The hunt for speech crimes is fueling suspicion and distrust among some. The field-grade officer who shut down her Facebook said she now worries that a casual remark could brand her as liberal and thus politically suspect.

She has begun scrutinizing parts of her career she never imagined — where her office is located, who works nearby, whether to respond to articles shared in group chats, and even whether to travel with coworkers she doesn't know well.

"It just takes one person to flag you as disloyal to end your career — or worse," said the officer, who asked for anonymity to avoid official retaliation.

'You better be careful'

Don C. King, a civilian defense attorney, said he got a call recently from a worried service member. They'd written a social media post critical of the Trump administration's lethal attacks on suspected drug-smuggling boats near Venezuela. Someone at their command saw it and told them, "'Hey, you better be careful with your social media.'"

"I've been in the military my entire adult life, over 30 years, and I've never seen any of the services or DoD scout social media for what it considers to be inappropriate speech," said King, who retired as a Navy JAG in 2022 and owns the King Military Law firm specializing in military clients.

The allegations against rank-and-file troops are unfolding in the military's administrative system, which can discipline troops and end careers outside of public court proceedings.

"These cases are early, and both the government and the affected individuals are figuring out how they want to fight," said Eugene R. Fidell, an influential military law expert and senior research scholar at Yale. "The simple wear and tear of having to defend and try to overturn one of these administrative sanctions is itself a punishment."

First Amendment restrictions on troops stem from the military's apolitical role and its reliance on obedience to orders. Officers can face criminal penalties for "contemptuous" words about the president, as can all personnel for disrespecting a senior officer. However, troops can comment politically, donate to a campaign, or display bumper stickers. Their protections are strongest when their comments are in a personal capacity, made out of uniform and without any hint of official endorsement.

Social media can amplify a service member's comments far beyond a bumper sticker, regardless of intention. That poses higher risks that the military as an institution could be seen as backing a political party or objective, said Peter Feaver, a professor of political science at Duke University who authored a 2023 book, "Thanks For Your Service," about how high confidence in the military has depended on beliefs about its competence and its avoidance of partisan politics.

"The military is becoming combatants in the culture wars," he said. Part of the way to change that, he said, "requires the military not to sound like they're culture warriors."

"So you may have a right to say it, but it wouldn't be right to say it," he added.

Military law criminalizes conduct that disgraces an officer or damages good order and discipline; however, case law has set a high bar when the conduct at issue is purely private speech otherwise protected by the First Amendment.

Brent Sadler, a defense expert at a leading conservative think tank, said speech monitoring is justified to enforce the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

"The issue is more about professionalism and protecting any appearance of the military interfering with political-civil control," said Sadler, a retired Navy captain and senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

"I do think numerous conservatives in the military have been persecuted legally and professionally," he said, pointing to the 8,000 troops kicked out for refusing the COVID vaccine mandate before the Pentagon rescinded it in 2023.

Mark Jensen, a former Army JAG who retired earlier this year, said the Pentagon's policing has expanded over the past few months from "despicable" speech about Kirk, to rebukes of his politics, to advocacy for transgender people, to criticism of the Trump administration.

Jensen represents four military clients and a civilian who face punishment for their speech. The fact that some of the allegations are public is the result of an anti-"woke" online army that publishes hearsay and leaked comments on sites like X.

On top of being "smeared," Jensen said, these troops undergo the stress of an investigation, a relief if they're in leadership, a poor evaluation, a reprimand by a general, and face a review that can reduce their rank.

"It's like a 1-2-3-4-5 punch," Jensen said. "All of it with minimal due process."

Kelly is not the only veteran to unexpectedly face punishment. In one recent case, an ex-soldier on the inactive reserve — a roster of those who can be reactivated in a national emergency — told a civilian attorney he was investigated by military officials for a private social media post, the attorney said.

"Even when people are in the normal reserves, the regulations are pretty clear that conduct in a civilian capacity shouldn't be punished in a military capacity," said Cody Harnish, a private defense attorney and former Army JAG who specializes in UCMJ cases.

"They're way out of their depth here."

Staff writer Kelsey Baker contributed to this report.