Oakmont's massive greens will be even bigger when the US Open returns next summer for a 10th time

PITTSBURGH (AP) — Oakmont's already massive greens will be even more daunting when the men's U.S. Open returns next summer for a record 10th time.

The club situated in the northern Pittsburgh suburbs has restored more than 24,000 square feet of green surface over the last two years as part of a renovation guided by golf course architect Gil Hanse.

Hanse initially was brought in to focus on the bunkers. During his trips to the course, he came across photographs from the 1920s and 1930s and noticed the greens used to be much larger before several factors — time and natural erosion most of all — began chipping away at them.

He talked to the club, whose membership enthusiastically agreed the renovations were a chance to make the notoriously fast greens even harder than they were when Dustin Johnson won his first major at Oakmont in 2016.

While the changes this time around won't be quite as visible as they have in the past — Oakmont has spent most of the last 30 years removing thousands of trees in hopes of returning to its wind-swept, links-style roots — the 155 players who will join defending champion Bryson DeChambeau could find pins tucked in places they've never been before during previous Open stops at the venerable course that opened in 1904.

“The greens are the No. 1 defense on the course,” grounds superintendent Mike McCormick said Monday. “Oakmont, in today’s world, it’s not a crazy long golf course. There are several holes out here the players will be hitting wedges into and it puts even more of an emphasis on (the greens).”

The course will play at 7,372 yards as a par 70 in 2025, a tick up from the 7,219 yards it played at in 2016.

One of the new pin options the expanded greens give the USGA is on the 182-yard, par-3 13th hole. Pin placement previously was limited to the left side of the green, with little wiggle room in terms of yardage. Now there are a variety of options, including a back-right pin that sits in the middle of a bowl, rewarding a good shot but almost inaccessible from other portions of the green, particularly the front right.

U.S. Open scores have trended lower of late. Only one of the last eight winners has posted a higher four-round total in relation to par than Johnson's 4-under 276, with the last six champions all finishing at 6-under or better.

Scott Langley, the USGA's senior director of player relations, thinks Oakmont remains one of the stiffest tests because it lacks the kind of shot options places like Pinehurst No. 2 (2024) or Los Angeles Country Club (2023) provide.

“You have strategic width (in those places), you can play the angles more,” Langley said. “There are spots here where you do that. But by and large, Oakmont is you hit a good shot or you don’t. And if you don’t, the penalty is pretty uniform.”

The more notable changes besides the greens are a new-look fairway on the 485-yard, par-4 seventh hole that offers players two choices: play it safe and short to the right but settle for a blind approach or aim left and try to carry a drive 320+ yards over a fairway bunker that if executed correctly lets you see the pin on your approach with a short iron.

Oakmont also rebuilt every hazard and revamped the course’s nearly 200 bunkers while updating the drainage system. The club was hit by nearly 3 inches of rain during the early rounds of the U.S. Open’s last visit, forcing the grounds crew and volunteers to get creative while bailing out the sand traps.

“The bunkers had deteriorated significantly from 2016 to 2022,” McCormick said. “There’s a lot of newer technology and ways to drain bunkers and hold sand and limit contamination. So the club had an opportunity to make sure that the performance of the playing surfaces (remained consistent).”

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This is an overall photo of Oakmont Country Club, in Oakmont, Pa., on Monday, Sept. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

This is the Church Pew trap between the third fairway, top, and fourth fairway, bottom, at Oakmont Country Club, in Oakmont, Pa., on Monday, Sept. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

This is the tenth green at Oakmont Country Club, in Oakmont, Pa.,on Monday, Sept. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

This is the Church Pew trap between the third fairway, right, and fourth fairway, left, at Oakmont Country Club, in Oakmont, Pa., on Monday, Sept. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

This is the ninth green in front of the clubhouse at Oakmont Country Club, in Oakmont, Pa., on Monday, Sept. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

This is the eleventh green at Oakmont Country Club, in Oakmont, Pa., on Monday, Sept. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

This is the twelfth green at Oakmont Country Club, in Oakmont, Pa., on Monday, Sept. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

The thirteenth green gets mowed at Oakmont Country Club, in Oakmont, Pa., on Monday, Sept. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

This is the first green at Oakmont Country Club, in Oakmont, Pa., on Monday, Sept. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

This is the ninth green in front of the clubhouse at Oakmont Country Club, in Oakmont, Pa., on Monday, Sept. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

WASHINGTON (AP) — With characteristic bravado, Donald Trump has vowed that if voters return him to the White House, “inflation will vanish completely."

It’s a message tailored for Americans who are still exasperated by the jump in consumer prices that began 3 1/2 years ago.

Yet most mainstream economists say Trump’s policy proposals wouldn't vanquish inflation. They’d make it worse. They warn that his plans to impose huge tariffs on imported goods, deport millions of migrant workers and demand a voice in the Federal Reserve's interest rate policies would likely send prices surging.

Sixteen Nobel Prize-winning economists signed a letter in June expressing fear that Trump's proposals would “reignite’’ inflation, which has plummeted since peaking at 9.1% in 2022 and is nearly back to the Fed’s 2% target.

Last month, the Peterson Institute for International Economics predicted that Trump’s policies would drive consumer prices sharply higher two years into his second term. Peterson's analysis concluded that inflation, which would otherwise register 1.9% in 2026, would instead jump to between 6% and 9.3% if Trump's economic proposals were adopted.

Many economists aren’t thrilled with Vice President Kamala Harris’ economic agenda, either. They dismiss, for example, her proposal to combat price gouging as an ineffective tool against high grocery prices. But they don’t regard her policies as particularly inflationary.

Moody’s Analytics has estimated that Harris' policies would leave the inflation outlook virtually unchanged, even if she enjoyed a Democratic majority in both chambers of Congress. An unfettered Trump, by contrast, would leave prices higher by 1.1 percentage points in 2025 and 0.8 percentage points in 2026.

Taxes on imports — tariffs — are Trump’s go-to economic policy. He argues that tariffs protect American factory jobs from foreign competition and deliver a host of other benefits.

While in office, Trump started a trade war with China, imposing high tariffs on most Chinese goods. He also raised import taxes on foreign steel and aluminum, washing machines and solar panels. He has grander plans for a second term: Trump wants to impose a 60% tariff on all Chinese goods and a “universal’’ tariff of 10% or 20% on everything else that enters the United States.

Trump insists that the cost of taxing imported goods is absorbed by the foreign countries. The truth is that U.S. importers pay the tariff — and then typically pass along that cost to consumers in the form of higher prices. Americans themselves end up bearing the cost.

Kimberly Clausing and Mary Lovely of the Peterson Institute have calculated that Trump’s proposed 60% tax on Chinese imports and his high-end 20% tariff on everything else would, in combination, impose an after-tax loss on a typical American household of $2,600 a year.

The Trump campaign notes that U.S. inflation remained low even as Trump aggressively imposed tariffs as president.

But Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, said that the magnitude of Trump’s current tariff proposals has vastly changed the calculations. “The Trump tariffs in 2018-19 didn’t have as large an impact as the tariffs were only just over $300 billion in mostly Chinese imports,’’ he said. “The former president is now talking about tariffs on over $3 trillion in imported goods.''

And the inflationary backdrop was different during Trump’s first term when the Fed worried that inflation was too low, not too high.

Trump, who has invoked incendiary rhetoric about immigrants, has promised the “largest deportation operation'' in U.S. history.

Many economists say the increased immigration over the past couple years helped tame inflation while avoiding a recession.

The surge in foreign-born workers has made it easier for fill vacancies. That helps cool inflation by easing the pressure on employers to sharply raise pay and to pass on their higher labor costs by increasing prices.

Net immigration — arrivals minus departures — reached 3.3 million in 2023, more than triple what the government had expected. Employers needed the new arrivals. As the economy roared back from pandemic lockdowns, companies struggled to hire enough workers to keep up with customer orders.

Immigrants filled the gap. Over the past four years, the number of people in the United States who either have a job or are looking for one rose by nearly 8.5 million. Roughly 72% of them were foreign born.

Wendy Edelberg and Tara Watson of the Brookings Institution found that by raising the supply of workers. the influx of immigrants allowed the United States to generate jobs without overheating the economy.

In the past, economists estimated that America’s employers could add no more than 100,000 jobs a month without igniting inflation. But when Edelberg and Watson factored in the immigration surge, they found that monthly job growth could reach 160,000 to 200,000 without exerting upward pressure on prices.

Trump's mass deportations, if carried out, would change everything. The Peterson Institute calculates that the U.S. inflation rate would be 3.5 percentage points higher in 2026 if Trump managed to deport all 8.3 million undocumented immigrant workers thought to be working in the United States.

Trump alarmed many economists in August by saying he would seek to have “a say” in the Fed’s interest rate decisions.

The Fed is the government’s chief inflation-fighter. It attacks high inflation by raising interest rates to restrain borrowing and spending, slow the economy and cool the rate of price increases.

Economic research has found that the Fed and other central banks can properly manage inflation only if they're kept independent of political pressure. That’s because raising rates can cause economic pain — perhaps a recession — so it's anathema to politicians seeking reelection.

As president, Trump frequently hounded Jerome Powell, the Fed chair he had chosen, to lower rates to try to juice the economy. For many economists, Trump's public pressure on Powell exceeded even the attempts that Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon made to push previous Fed chairs to keep rates low — moves that were widely blamed for helping spur the chronic inflation of the late 1960s and ’70s.

The Peterson Institute report found that upending the Fed's independence would increase inflation by 2 percentage points a year.

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Trump's economic plans would worsen inflation, experts say

Trump's economic plans would worsen inflation, experts say

FILE - Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks along the southern border with Mexico, on Aug. 22, 2024, in Sierra Vista, Ariz. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)