It’s that time of year again.

Every January 1, the Future Perfect team makes forecasts for the events we think will (or won’t) happen over the next 365 days. And every December 31, we go back over those predictions and tally up how we did.

All of our predictions were made positively — as in, something will happen — and came with probabilities attached, which are meant to indicate our relative confidence in the forecast. To simplify scoring, predictions that came with a higher than 50 percent probability that proved out, or with a probability below 50 percent that did not prove out, were marked as “correct call.” Those that came with a higher than 50 percent probability that did not prove out, or with a lower than 50 percent probability that did prove out, were marked “incorrect call.”

If for some reason the forecast could not be resolved — such as, random example here, a new US government chose to delay putting out data or a report that would have clarified the question — we marked it as undecided.

The scorecard? Nineteen correct, four incorrect, and two undecided works out to a winning percentage of .800, if we count ties as half a win. (That would put us a tad over the 1906 Chicago Cubs, who recorded the best single-season winning percentage in major league baseball history. Hopefully this doesn’t mean we’ll be cursed for a century.)

As always, the point is less to keep score than to get better at forecasting by identifying where we’ve succeeded, where we’ve failed — and maybe where we need to take some more chances. Fortunately, we’ll have another shot tomorrow, when we publish our 2026 forecasts. —Bryan Walsh

The United States

Congress passes a major tariff bill (20 percent) — CORRECT CALL

2025 certainly did not lack for tariff news, but almost all of it came from the Trump administration, which used executive powers to impose sweeping new duties on most countries on Earth, and from the Supreme Court as it weighed whether any of that was legal.

There was some speculation at the start of 2025 that the need for new revenue in Republicans’ big tax bill would lead it to include some Trump-y tariffs. That didn’t happen, mostly because it didn’t need to happen: President Donald Trump could just impose the tariffs unilaterally, or try to at least. As I wrote in my initial prediction, “the odds that Trump does new tariffs using presidential authority are nearly 100 percent.” If anything, “nearly” 100 percent was an underestimate. —Dylan Matthews

Trump dissolves the Department of Education (5 percent) — CORRECT CALL

Let’s check the fine print: This prediction would’ve resolved true if Congress passed a law formally abolishing the Department of Education. That did not happen in 2025, so the prediction stands.

What Trump did do is issue an executive order instructing the Secretary of Education to, “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.” What has followed are sweeping staff cuts that it’s fair to call a gutting of the department, with various court challenges that in July culminated in a Supreme Court ruling in favor of the administration, at least for the time being. One major pending fight is over the legality of the department moving its functions to other parts of the federal government.

But again, read the fine print. The administration’s solicitor general, in his Supreme Court filing in June, stated, “The government has been crystal clear in acknowledging that only Congress can eliminate the Department of Education.” What the administration did were simply layoffs, not the closure of a legally created government agency. While the Trump team is clearly trying to have it both ways here, I’m inclined to trust their lawyer — they did not dissolve the department. —DM

The Affordable Care Act is repealed (30 percent) — CORRECT CALL

This is another one where the fine print matters. In my initial prediction, I wrote that a bill “repealing the ACA” 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 conditions

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act certainly satisfies the first two of these requirements. Per the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s breakdown, the bill includes $1.1 trillion in cuts to health care programs over a decade. The vast majority of those cuts go to Medicaid, by imposing work requirements, limiting “provider taxes,” and other changes. But about $226 billion in cuts go to the Affordable Care Act’s exchange-based coverage, mostly by making certain immigrants ineligible.

But squeezing Medicaid and the exchanges is, at most, cutting the Affordable Care Act, not repealing it. Trump and Congress did not change the employer mandate for health insurance, or allow ACA funds to go into health savings accounts, or, crucially, eliminate protections for people with preexisting conditions or limits on hiking premiums based on age. In my book, that means the ACA has yet to be repealed. —DM

Jerome Powell will no longer be Fed chair (10 percent) — CORRECT CALL

Trump would love nothing more than to fire Jerome Powell, who was first appointed chair of the Federal Reserve by some fiendish anti-MAGA president named Donald Trump way back in 2017. Powell has been open about the way Trump’s tariffs, by hiking prices, are slowing the Fed’s process of lowering interest rates, and the president does not like that one bit.

In April, Trump said Powell’s “termination cannot come fast enough!” In July, he showed off a letter he had written, but not filed, firing Powell. In November, he told reporters he wanted to fire Powell, but people like Treasury Secretary Steve Bessent are “holding me back.” And in August, Trump attempted to fire Fed governor Lisa Cook, a move the Supreme Court has blocked but which was, among other things, a clear threat to Powell that he could be next.

Yet here Powell is, still chair of the Fed. Actually removing him, or trying, proved too rich for Trump’s blood. Powell’s term as chair ends in May 2026, meaning Trump will pick his successor, but it appears he’ll be able to stay in charge until then. He can also keep his post as a regular governor on the board until January 2028, if he wants it. —DM

Trump will have a positive favorability rating (25 percent) — CORRECT CALL

Let’s go to the graph, folks:

Everyone’s polling average is a little different, but basically every one looks like this from Nate Silver: Trump began his presidency slightly above water, but now Americans disapprove of him by a healthy margin (13 points here). The Economist’s average shows him as less popular than either President Joe Biden or Trump himself in term one were at this point in their presidencies.

Being below water at this point has become pretty normal for presidents in the 21st century, so there wasn’t much courage in me predicting Trump would be more disliked than liked. But it’s interesting to me that the speed of the decline has picked up in recent months. I would’ve guessed that Trump’s most-disliked period would’ve been the height of DOGE, but it’s been the period when his ties to Jeffrey Epstein were most under question. —DM

Musk and Trump are still friends at the end of the year (40 percent) — CORRECT CALL

Only two men can tell us if Elon Musk and Trump are truly, as of December 2025, “friends.” But the formal definition I used here is that they stop being friends “if one or the other publicly and unambiguously disparages his counterpart at least three times” over the year. And buddy…

Those Musk tweets are now deleted, and there appears to have been some degree of rapprochement in the ensuing months. But as predicted, there was a massive blow-up in their relationship, centered around the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and, implicitly, the failure of Musk’s DOGE to do anything to actually reduce federal spending. While it does seem as if they’ve made an attempt to patch things up, what’s clear is that their bond is much weaker than it was on January 1.........

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