For the sixth year in a row, the staff of Future Perfect convened in December to make predictions about major events in the year to come. Will Congress pass a tariff bill that makes President-elect Donald Trump happy? Will the H5N1 bird flu become an honest-to-god pandemic? Will the war in Ukraine stop? Will a major sports figure get caught up in a gambling scandal?
It’s fun to make predictions about the future, which is part of the reason why we do it so often. But this isn’t just blind guessing. Each prediction comes with a probability attached to it. That gives you a sense of our confidence (high in the case of, say, Charli XCX’s Grammy chances, less so in the case of Iran’s nuclear plans). And don’t make the same mistake that people seem to make every presidential cycle. Even a probability as high as 75 percent or 80 percent doesn’t mean we’re sure something will happen. Rather, it means we think that if we made four or five predictions, we’d expect three or four of them to come true, respectively.
And as we have every year, we’ll be keeping track of how our predictions fared over the course of 2025, and report back to you at the end of December. You can check out how we did in 2024 here. And we’ve done something new this year in partnering with the prediction platform Metaculus. You can check it out here to see how the community there came down on a number of our predictions — and even compete in a prize pool — and click on the individual questions with links to go directly to them on Metaculus. We’ve also added the Metaculus community’s aggregated forecasts as of December 31 for the questions they’ve taken on. —Bryan Walsh
The United States Congress passes a major tariff bill (20 percent)Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign was perhaps the most pro-tariff of any candidate since William McKinley: He promised 60 percent taxes on imports from China, and 10 percent on everywhere else.
In victory he’s only gotten bolder, calling for 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, in flagrant violation of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, a free trade deal made by some past president named Donald Trump.
The bad news for consumers and the world economy is that Trump has substantial discretion to impose tariffs as president without consulting Congress. But that discretion isn’t unlimited, and probably doesn’t permit the kind of 10 percent across-the-board tariff Trump promised. Plus, Republicans want a revenue source to help offset the cost of making Trump’s 2017 tax cuts permanent before they expire at the end of next year. This raises the question: Will Congress pass a tariff measure on its own that not only implements Trump’s ideas, but lets them endure under future presidents?
My guess is no. There was a time in the distant past, let’s call it “2015,” when Republicans were the party of free markets and free trade, and some members of Congress haven’t forgotten that. Early reporting suggests that many GOP figures in the House and Senate are hostile to the idea of including tariffs in a tax package. Republicans can only lose three senators and two House members out of their caucus and still pass bills, which gives them very little margin for error, and makes it very difficult to pass legislation that splits the caucus like tariffs.
Two caveats, though. One, I’m predicting about a tariff bill and not new unilateral tariffs from Trump because I think the odds that Trump does new tariffs using presidential authority are nearly 100 percent. Two, the only reason my estimate isn’t lower is that there’s been some bipartisan interest in a “carbon border adjustment,” or a sort of carbon tax that only applies to imported goods. The idea has gotten Republican support because while it does acknowledge that global warming is real, it also sticks it to foreigners. That’s a tariff, and I think the likeliest kind to make it into a tax package (though I still bet against it). —Dylan Matthews
Metaculus aggregated forecast: 7 percent
Trump dissolves the Department of Education (5 percent)Something I love and hate about American politics is that big weighty-seeming questions, like “Can Donald Trump fulfill his campaign promise to abolish the Department of Education?” turn out to hinge on much weirder and more technical questions, like “Will the Senate parliamentarian rule a departmental reorganization as ineligible for the reconciliation process under the Byrd rule?”
The Department of Education, whose main duties are administering student loans and financial aid for higher-ed institutions and distributing funds (around $39 billion in 2023) to local schools under programs like Title I (for poor districts) and IDEA (for disabled students), was created in a 1979 act of Congress. Passing a normal bill repealing that act would require 60 Senate votes to break a filibuster, which means winning over seven Democrats to the idea, which isn’t going to happen.
So legislation abolishing the department (already written by GOP Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota) would have to pass through budget reconciliation, which lets certain legislation pass with a mere majority in the Senate.
But reconciliation has strict requirements limiting the content of legislation that can be passed that way, and in particular provisions of bills that are only “incidentally” related to the overall level of spending or taxing tend to be struck down by the Senate parliamentarian as contrary to the Byrd rule, the main governing principle behind the reconciliation process.
Rounds’s bill, notably, doesn’t eliminate the Department of Education’s actual functions. It just moves them around. Student loans, for instance, would go to the Treasury Department, and the Department of Labor would get vocational programs. This strikes me as an archetypal example of a change that is merely incidental to the actual level of spending, and that can’t be done with reconciliation.
Will the Senate parliamentarian disagree with me? Possibly. But also, in part because this move is so much more about reorganization than the actual substance of the department’s programs, I am very skeptical that Republicans are going to go to the mat on this one. If they can only win so many fights with the parliamentarian, are they going to prioritize changing the mailing address of the student loan office? I doubt it. —DM
Metaculus aggregated forecast: 4 percent
The Affordable Care Act is repealed (30 percent)From the moment the Affordable Care Act was signed into law on March 23, 2010, the Republican Party has been obsessed with repealing it. They even shut down the government over it. Then, in 2017, the dog finally caught the car: Republicans had both houses of Congress and the presidency, and in theory the opportunity to repeal the law.
They didn’t.
Sure, the tax law that year eliminated the individual mandate to get health insurance, but that turned out to not be as important to getting people coverage as the ACA’s authors thought. The rest of the bill — its dramatic Medicaid expansions, rules protecting people with preexisting conditions and letting young adults stay on their parents’ insurance, subsidies for individuals to buy health insurance if their employer doesn’t provide it — remained intact.
Even “skinny repeal,” a bill that zeroed out only a handful of provisions of the law, failed to pass the Senate when John McCain made his famous thumbs-down gesture, but matters had only even gotten to that point because several other senators didn’t want to vote for sweeping Medicaid cuts, like those entailed by simply repealing the ACA in its entirety.
Will they try again in 2025? I’m skeptical. And here, by “repeal Obamacare,” I don’t even necessarily mean repealing all of it. To qualify as repeal, a bill has to do at least three of the following five things:
Eliminate or reduce the ACA’s Medicaid eligibility or federal funding Eliminate or reduce ACA health insurance tax credit eligibility or amount Eliminate or curtail the mandate for certain employers to provide health coverage for employees. Reducing the penalties will also be considered to be relaxing the mandate. Make it so that ACA subsidies are no longer limited to plans that satisfy the requirements specified in the ACA, including allowing ACA subsidies to be contributed to health savings accounts or similar accounts Eliminate or curtail medical underwriting restrictions, like the ban on considering preexisting conditionsYes, Trump’s budgets and those that his past and future budget chief Russ Vought prepared during the Biden years did propose undoing the ACA’s coverage expansions, and then cutting Medicaid still further. I anticipate they will continue to make these proposals. But I am doubtful that with a much narrower House majority than they had in 2017, and an equally narrow Senate majority, Republicans will be able to pass cuts on a scale that they couldn’t get off the ground eight years ago. —DM
Metaculus aggregated forecast: 10 percent
Jerome Powell is still Fed chair (90 percent)Here are the facts: Jerome Powell’s term as chair of the Federal Reserve expires on May 15, 2026. He has pledged to stay on as chair until that time, though not necessarily to remain as a member of the Board of Governors until his term there expires in 2028. Donald Trump has said he does not plan to fire Powell before that time. Powell has insisted that the president does not legally have the power to fire him before his term is up, and that he will refuse to obey such an order.
In many ways, 90 percent seems too low, because the odds that a 71-year-old man dies in the next year are only 2.9 percent, and I have an easier time envisioning Powell dying in office than acquiescing to a firing.
But I should also fess up to a personal bias here. Jay Powell is, by a wide margin, the greatest chair of the Federal Reserve that the institution has ever had, and perhaps the greatest central banker in any nation of modern times. He prevented Covid from spiraling into a global financial crisis, oversaw an astonishingly rapid recovery of employment and economic growth in the pandemic’s aftermath, and managed a “soft landing” that ended an inflationary episode without having to spark a recession. He is a miraculous figure who we do not deserve, and for my own sanity I need him to stick around. —DM
Metaculus aggregated forecast: 8 percent
Trump will have a positive favorability rating (25 percent)Americans have a charming habit of deciding to like the newly elected president as soon as the election’s over, and Donald Trump’s favorability rating has gone from 8.6 points underwater on Election Day to only 1.9 points negative on December 19. (By “favorability rating,” I mean the difference between the share of voters saying they view him favorably minus the share saying they view him unfavorably. Once he’s president, I’ll count this prediction as resolving to “true” if either his favorability or job approval ratings are positive; while similar, these aren’t exactly the same question.)
But how long do presidential “honeymoon” periods last? Not very long, as it turns out. Back in 2022, FiveThirtyEight’s Geoffrey Skelley and Jean Yi crunched the data and found that Obama, Trump I, and Biden alike all saw their approval ratings dip below 50 percent by the end of the first year (Trump was never even above 50 when he started!):
The two exceptions on the chart are Bill Clinton, who saw a curious fall and then recovery over 1993 that I don’t really understand, and George W. Bush, whose first year included 9/11. I think the odds of another 9/11 are mercifully low, and the trend appears to be toward lower approval for presidents in their first year in recent times.
Moreover, Trump is unusually loathed by a huge segment of the population and is promising massive tariffs that I suspect will prove unpopular once they start raising the prices of everyday household items. So I feel pretty good predicting Trump will be below water at year’s end. —DM
Metaculus aggregated forecast: 17 percent
Elon and Trump are still friends at the end of the year (40 percent)“Still friends” is obviously a subjective category but I like the prediction markets guru Nathan Young’s proposed definition: if one or the other publicly and unambiguously disparages his counterpart at least three times. Luckily for us, Trump and Musk are not subtle or taciturn men, and when they dislike someone they have a tendency to scream that loudly many, many times, so I don’t anticipate it being hard to decide where they stand at the end of 2025.
The list of one-time Trump allies who eventually came to denounce him is too long to include in full here, but let us briefly remember, say, 10: Anthony Scaramucci; Mike Pence; John Kelly; John Bolton; HR McMaster; Stephanie Grisham; Alyssa Farah Griffin; Betsy DeVos; and of course Michael Cohen.
It does not seem like an ambitious prediction that Musk will eventually join their ranks. His role as the head of the new Department of Government Efficiency seems guaranteed to put him on a collision course with Trump’s Cabinet officials and with congressional Republicans, and probably also with his cochair Vivek Ramaswamy. Trump might side with Musk each time — but he’s always been more pragmatic about spending policy than the cut-happy Musk seems, and there are ripe opportunities for conflict.
What if Musk wants to slash Medicare and Social Security, which Trump has promised to defend? What if he wants defense cuts and Trump wants a tougher posture toward China? What if Musk pushes for reconciliation with China, with whose government he is extremely close (Ramaswamy once called Musk “a circus monkey” working for Xi Jinping)?
I won’t predict the exact inciting episode that causes Trump and Musk to fall out. But I feel like I know how these guys operate, and I think it’s more likely than not that they will fall out. —DM
Metaculus aggregated forecast: 35 percent
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s preliminary estimates of US car crash deaths for 2024 will be lower than 40,000 (70 percent)Last year, I correctly predicted that more than 40,000 Americans would be killed by cars in 2023 (according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s estimates, which are released with a lag the following year). Since the 1960s, the US has seen rapid, dramatic progress in cutting its car fatality rate, and 2007 was the last year that over 40,000 Americans were killed by our car-dependent transportation system — until the Covid-19 pandemic.
You would think that fewer people driving would mean fewer car crash deaths, but not so in America, where our dangerously designed roads lead to more speeding and death when there’s less traffic. Ever since, America’s rate of death by cars has sat at levels that should honestly be humiliating for such a rich country.
These numbers are slowly starting to come back down. NHTSA recently estimated that for the first half of 2024, car crash deaths were down 3.2 percent from 2023. If the same trend from 2023 carries over to the second half of 2024, total 2024 car fatalities will come in at a hair under 40,000. It’s far from guaranteed, because car crash patterns vary significantly across different seasons. And that number would still be nothing to write home about — but in a country so thoroughly built around automobiles, getting deaths back under 40,000 would be a milestone worth celebrating. —Marina Bolotnikova
Metaculus aggregated forecast: 81 percent
The world Benjamin Netanyahu is still Israel’s PM at the end of November 2025 (75 percent)What a difference a year makes. In December 2023, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was incredibly unpopular, his image severely damaged by his government’s total failure to anticipate the deadly October 7 attacks by Hamas. Polls indicated his Likud party might win only 17 of 120 seats in Israel’s Knesset. Israel was on its way to becoming an international pariah because of the destructive way it was waging its war in Gaza, and Israelis were furious about the government’s failure to rescue the hostages held by Hamas, even after a November 2023 deal to bring some home. Oh, and Netanyahu was only a few months removed from massive street protests and was facing corruption charges.
Fast-forward to December 2024, and polls suggest Netanyahu’s Likud party would win 25 seats if elections were held today, more than any other party. Israel has all but destroyed Hezbollah, by far its most capable opponent, and has isolated Iran, arguably its most existential threat. After the sudden fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Israel has even captured territory formerly under the Syrian government’s control. And President Joe Biden, who at least occasionally pushed back against Netanyahu, is about to be replaced by President-elect Donald Trump, who has signaled that he will happily give Israel a freer hand in Gaza.
Netanyahu has been prime minister of Israel for roughly 17 of the past 28 years. Every time it seems like he’s in an unwinnable position, he seems to find a way to wriggle out of it. I have every expectation that will continue in 2025. —BW
Metaculus aggregated forecast: 75 percent
Argentina’s yearly inflation is below 30 percent (20 percent)Americans got pretty upset about inflation in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, but we’ve got nothing on our Argentinian friends:
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