While Elon Musk talks about forming a new political party, some candidates are already running outside the typical ballot lines. Bloomberg Businessweek’s Deena Shanker interviewed Dan Osborn, who just launched his second campaign for Senate in Nebraska. Plus: Businesses and professionals are losing access to reliable government data.

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July seems to be the month for rabble-rousers challenging the US’s two-party system. First was the world’s richest man and onetime uber-MAGA Republican Elon Musk declaring the creation of the “America Party.” Musk torched his fanbase of wealthy, environmentally minded liberals to build a new following among President Donald Trump’s supporters, and then promptly torched that one too. Who will want to join this new party is an open question, but Musk just has so much money, who can say where this thing will go?

Now, we have a very different kind of political candidate breaking with the red-versus-blue system: Dan Osborn, a former union leader at cereal maker Kellogg, a Navy veteran and mechanic, who’s running for the second time against an incumbent Republican as an Independent for Senate in Nebraska. He certainly doesn’t have Musk’s billions, but he does have a political following. In the 2024 race against Deb Fischer he won 47% of the vote—not enough to win the seat, but solidly ahead of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ 39% in the state.

On Tuesday, Osborn announced he’s running again, in 2026, against Republican incumbent Pete Ricketts, the son of the billionaire founder and former chief executive officer of TD Ameritrade.

Osborn at an election night watch party in November in Omaha. Photographer: Bonnie Ryan/AP Photo

Osborn’s campaign kickoff video is heavy on denim shirts and even heavier on the anti-billionaire and anti-corporation message. It opens with a radio voiceover: “Billionaire politician Pete Ricketts votes for historic tax cut for 1%,” referring to President Donald Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill Act. Osborn chastises Ricketts for relying on his family’s fortune instead of earning it himself and accuses him of “trying to buy power in Nebraska,” while waving off the concerns of working Americans. Osborn, on the other hand, says he only got involved in politics “when the corporate bosses came after my co-workers at the factory.” (Not mentioned in the video is that then-Governor Ricketts urged Kellogg back to the negotiating table during the 2021 strike Osborn led.) Now, as Osborn puts it, he’s running against one of the richest guys in the state.

Or maybe he’s running against all the billionaires. When I asked him if there was one message he wanted to get across, he told me bluntly: “Billionaires aren’t going to come and save us.”

For its part, Ricketts’ campaign put out a statement defending his work for Nebraskans, saying that Osborn is “bought and paid for by his liberal, out-of-state, coastal donors,” and that he’ll side with Democrats “to open the border, hike taxes, and stop the America First agenda.”

Osborn has a timely campaign message considering not just Musk’s dominance, but also the billionaire guest list at Trump’s inauguration, which included Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault, Sergey Brin and Miriam Adelson (Nos. 2, 4, 6, 8 and 50 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index), to name a few.

Nearly every question I asked him came back to billionaires and corporations. The cuts to Medicaid and food assistance in Trump’s signature tax and spending legislation? “The billionaires are benefiting from the cuts,” he said. Changes to immigration policy? Osborn points to the meatpackers in Nebraska using immigrant labor. “They enrich themselves, and again, those are the folks that can pay off a senator.” The problems with how we eat? “There’s a Dollar General at the beginning or end of every town in Nebraska,” where shoppers get to choose between “canned food, cookies and chips.” The independent supermarkets are closed, he says, because the laws favor corporations “and not the little guy.” (A Dollar General spokesperson says that its stores “operate alongside local grocers,” include all parts of a healthy meal and the company understands “the importance our stores play in providing affordable and convenient access” to nutritious foods.)   

Osborn says he isn’t looking to play Robin Hood; he just wants to make things fair again and create a “level playing field for every American that wants to work hard and get ahead in this country.”

So, if asked, would he lead Musk’s new party? “No thank you.” If Musk offered to write him a check? “No thank you.”

Despite accusations that he’s a stand-in for Democrats, Osborn’s platform isn’t easy to peg, calling, for example, for fully funding both school lunches and law enforcement. And he agrees with the Trump administration on at least one policy aimed at corporate America. Regarding the company he once worked for, whose refusal to remove artificial dyes from Froot Loops helped spur the Make America Healthy Again movement led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? Does he think Kellogg should take the dyes out of the cereals he once helped make? “Yes, absolutely.”

Related: Italy’s Ferrero Agrees to Buy Kellogg in $3.1 Billion Deal

In Brief

• Donald Trump threatened to impose a 50% tariff on Brazil over its domestic political affairs, the most extreme case yet of the US president weaponizing trade policy to make unrelated demands.
• Linda Yaccarino’s exit as CEO of X follows a long and contentious effort to win over advertisers dismayed by the platform’s direction under Musk’s ownership.
• A growing number of migrants in the US are heading north to seek asylum, even as Canada adopts increasingly restrictive immigration policies of its own.

Data Goes Dark

 Illustration by Bloomberg Businessweek

Doctors are struggling to treat patients with complex sexually transmitted infections as certain types of health data are being purged from public websites. Insurers have lost access to a frequently consulted database of climate and weather disasters. School districts are left to work with a scaled-down version of the nation’s report card, which is critical for setting benchmarks for student achievement and allocating resources.

These datasets are collateral damage in President Donald Trump’s effort to downsize the US government. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency says it’s canceled almost 12,000 contracts totaling about $44 billion in savings, plus billions more in terminated grants. Then there are the hundreds of thousands of government workers who’ve departed through voluntary resignations, firings and other exits, leaving several agencies gutted and gaping holes in others. Among them are linchpins of the sprawling federal statistical system, including the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau, as well as a host of lesser-known offices that research science and engineering, transportation, health and more.

Some data collection was already at risk before Trump reclaimed the White House, largely because of shrinking budgets and staff departures. Government number crunchers have also had to contend with fewer people responding to surveys, rendering efforts to assemble representative datasets more costly and time-consuming—a problem that extends beyond the US. “It’s kind of like turning off a water tap. You get less and less, and we don’t know where it’s going to stop,” says Nancy Potok, who served as US chief statistician in the first Trump administration. “We’re down to a lesser stream of data.”

Experts say economic data is mostly still reliable, but the trend is troublesome, Molly Smith writes. Read on: Trump’s Cuts Are Making Federal Data Disappear

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