Theodore Roosevelt never wrote the Square Deal into a single bill. It was a name reporters gave him after he split the difference between miners and mine owners in the anthracite coal strike of 1902, and he kept using it because it captured what his whole domestic program was doing at once: control of the corporations, protection of the consumer, and conservation of the public land. His own line was a square deal for every man, capital or labor, no crookedness in the dealing. A hundred and twenty years later, the country he was reacting to and the country we are living in are starting to rhyme in ways that are hard to wave off.
The first target was corporations. In 1902 Roosevelt's Justice Department sued the Northern Securities Company, the railroad holding trust J.P. Morgan and James Hill built to lock up rail traffic across the Northwest, under the Sherman Antitrust Act. The Supreme Court ordered it dissolved in 1904. Four years later the Hepburn Act gave the Interstate Commerce Commission real power to set maximum rail rates, not just study them. That was the deal: the state grew actual teeth against the chokepoint industry of the age.
Today's chokepoint industries are cloud computing, search, social distribution, and now the AI infrastructure sitting on top of all three, concentrated in a handful of firms that touch nearly every other business's costs. The enforcement record does not look like 1902 through 1908. The FTC and DOJ closed just 16 significant merger investigations in 2025, the second-lowest total in fifteen years. A federal judge threw out the FTC's monopolization case against Meta in November, ruling the company holds no monopoly power once TikTok and YouTube count as competitors. The Google search case has remedies pending and the ad-tech case remains undecided in both the US and the EU. Wealth concentration moved the other way in the meantime: the top 1 percent held 31.7 percent of household wealth in the third quarter of 2025, the highest share since the Federal Reserve started tracking it in 1989, and roughly the level last seen at the Gilded Age peak Roosevelt was elected to answer.
The second target was the consumer. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle turned public stomachs in early 1906, and that June, Roosevelt signed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, building federal inspection and labeling authority that had not existed before. It was reactive legislating, but it left behind capacity that outlived the scandal that produced it.
Arbitroz has already documented what is happening to that kind of capacity now. The FY2026 budget proposed cutting NIH by 40.6 percent and CDC by 52 percent, GAO found HHS illegally withholding already-appropriated research funds in violation of the Impoundment Control Act, and NIH obligated nearly 8 billion dollars less between February and June 2025 than the same months a year earlier. Roosevelt's model built a new inspection regime from nothing. The current one is defunding an existing regime and not even redirecting the savings anywhere.
The third target, and the one usually treated as his signature, was the public land itself. Across two terms Roosevelt put roughly 230 million acres under some form of federal protection: national forest acreage went from 43 million to 150 million, plus five national parks, the first 18 national monuments under the new Antiquities Act, and the first 55 federal bird and game reservations. He did nearly all of it by executive order, over Western congressmen who wanted the land sold or leased instead.
Since January 2025 the direction has reversed at a pace that outruns his. More than 86 million acres of protections have been eliminated, including close to 40 million acres of national forest roadless-area protection stripped in June 2025. H.R. 1 mandated quarterly oil and gas lease sales on public land regardless of environmental review. The Bureau of Land Management rescinded the 2024 rule that put conservation on equal footing with drilling and grazing, a rule that had drawn 92 percent public support in comment before it was killed. In June 2026 an executive order opened more than 300 million acres of Pacific Ocean national monuments to commercial fishing. That is more acreage stripped of protection in eighteen months than Roosevelt protected in eight years.
There is a fourth thread that never got its own letter but ran under all three: labor had to be treated as a party at the table, not a problem to police. When the 1902 strike threatened to leave the Northeast without coal for winter, Roosevelt broke precedent and invited both the mine owners and the striking union to the White House as something close to equals, then appointed an arbitration commission when the owners balked. The commission's March 1903 award gave miners a 10 percent wage increase and cut the workday from ten hours to nine. It stopped short of recognizing the union, but it treated one as a legitimate actor in a way no president had before.
There is no equivalent leverage point now, because there is barely a labor movement left to convene. Union membership sat at 10.0 percent of wage and salary workers in 2025, and at 5.9 percent in the private sector, both effectively record lows. You cannot broker a square deal between labor and capital when one side has been reduced to a rounding error.
None of this makes the Square Deal a template you could photocopy. Roosevelt was building regulatory capacity that mostly didn't exist yet. The problem now is closer to an existing state being hollowed out on purpose, one budget line and one executive order at a time. A 2026 version would need a Sherman Act revived for platforms instead of railroads, a Hepburn Act for the handful of firms that set the effective price of compute and distribution, a food-and-drug regime that is funded instead of defunded, a public-lands policy that treats conservation as a use of the land rather than an obstacle to one, and a labor policy that gives the executive some actual reason to sit both sides down. Nothing in the current numbers points toward any of that happening on its own.
Not all four threads pull equally hard, and it is worth saying so plainly instead of letting the headline imply one clean rhyme. Conservation is the tightest fit: the same lever, executive orders over federal land, moving at comparable scale in the opposite direction. Antitrust is real but looser. The Sherman Act, the FTC, and the DOJ never went away the way rate authority didn't exist before the Hepburn Act, so this is a story about enforcement intensity, not absent architecture, and defining the relevant market against a search engine or a social platform is genuinely harder than it ever was against a railroad holding company. Consumer protection is the weakest link: food and meat inspection built from nothing in 1906 standing in for research-grant funding cut in 2025 is a plausible cousin of the original pillar, not a match to it. And the wealth number, the top 1 percent back near the Gilded Age peak, is directionally right but measured on two different rulers a century apart. The comparison is worth making. It is four rhymes of different quality stacked under one headline, not a single clean one.
Roosevelt's version of the deal worked partly because it was legible: one trust, one strike, one scandal at a time, each with a clear before and after in the public record. The 2026 numbers are just as legible. They just aren't moving in his direction.