This week at Unbreaking, January 8
Our first briefing of 2026 is an unusually short one, but not because things are quiet. Far from it. Domestic and international news is breaking at a breathtaking rate, but our team is focused on what we can uniquely do. Since we established this project last March, we’ve learned so much about what exactly that is.
- Our earliest conversations about the thing that would become Unbreaking began in late February. We stood up the entire project in just six weeks, launched the website in April, and rolled out pages dedicated to in-depth explainers by May. Those very first issue pages were Transgender Healthcare, Medicaid, and Equality in the Federal Workforce. Pages dedicated to Medical Research Funding, Food Safety, and the US Postal Service followed in June.
- By July, we were publishing weekly updates and summarizing them in this blog. In August we launched our massive Data Security and Immigration pages, which debuted as event timelines, a major breakthrough in how we communicate. We also shared another internal tool for the first time: the Tracker Tracker is a simple spreadsheet, but it curates and honors the many teams on the frontlines of critical data collection. Their work, and that of hundreds of journalists doing original reporting, makes our work possible.
- By September, we had grown from a scrappy little group of seven cofounders to a scrappy big team of more than 100 — an all-volunteer effort. It took all of us to keep publishing new timeline events and maintaining our explainers week after week for the final months of the year. And as the work and our world changed, so did our team. We embrace the idea that each of us contributes what we can, as we can. Unbreaking wouldn’t exist without its extraordinary contributors, and we are so grateful to everyone who has joined us.
- In November, our weekly newsletter matured into its current form, focused more on curation and context to help make sense of the firehose of news and information. And at the end of December, we put down the work for a necessary break.
As we move into the new year, we are excited to roll out timelines for the rest of our existing topics and to launch two brand-new issue pages. Keep an eye out for new timelines on Infectious Disease and Archives & Historical Records in the coming weeks. After that, we’ll make a big push to expand tagging and filtering capacity on timelines across all the pages.
Defiance of authoritarianism takes many forms. Our chosen fight is information overload. In 2026, Unbreaking will be retooling our site and our work to reflect what we need most: approachable issue frames, tightly targeted weekly briefings, and new ways to use and understand the record we’re so carefully building. From our earliest days, we’ve been committed to the idea that tracking the damage caused by this administration matters. We bear witness to the human costs — and to the pushback and resilience work already underway — as essential groundwork for the unbreaking of a functioning democracy. We’re glad to have you with us.
How to help
Unbreaking is run in the spirit of a mutual aid cooperative, with researchers, writers, editors, and community organizers working collaboratively to create and maintain our timelines and explainers. We welcome both experts in government as well as curious and interested observers. You can learn more about our work, make a contribution, or apply to join us.
Please use our stuff
We invite everyone to use and adapt our content for sharing with your readers and communities: everything on our site is available under a CC BY 4.0 license. We welcome translations, adaptations to other formats, and especially encourage organizers and journalists to make use of what we’ve developed. And if you make something with our content, please let us know — we’d love to hear from you.