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PPI Responds to Clayton Nomination Delay: President Trump is Playing Politics with America’s National Security

Posted on June 17, 2026 by Alex Terr

WASHINGTON (June 17, 2026) — Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) Director of National Security Policy Danielle Steitz released the following statement regarding President Trump’s decision to delay Jay Clayton’s nomination as Director of National Intelligence and to add new conditions to FISA Section 702 extension efforts:

“Two weeks ago, during the middle of bipartisan negotiations on an extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), President Trump announced his intent to appoint Bill Pulte as the acting director of national intelligence. Pulte is a private equity executive with no intelligence, military, or national security experience of any kind – indeed, he’s never even held a security clearance — whose sole qualification appears to be his willingness to abuse his authority to retaliate against Trump’s critics and political adversaries. At present, Pulte remains under investigation by the Government Accountability Office for grossly abusing his authority as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency to initiate fraud probes against such Trump targets as Lisa Cook, Adam Schiff, and Letitia James.

“In naming Pulte as acting DNI and remarking on his hopes that Pulte would use the position to look into ‘rigged elections’ — a clear reference to his loss in the 2020 presidential campaign — Trump made it clear that he prioritized personal grievances over national security, and effectively blew up any chance of preventing Section 702 from lapsing. FISA Section 702 hit its statutory sunset date on June 13, and it remains lapsed as of today — setting the stage for what may be the longest lapse in the history of Section 702.

“This morning’s Truth Social rant from President Trump provides yet another example of his dangerous lack of care for national security. In it, he railed against the Senate’s desire to fast-track confirmation of Jay Clayton, his own nominee, to serve as director of national intelligence. He continued on to decree that he had ‘canceled’ a hearing called by a coequal branch of government, and then absurdly stated that ‘to add a slight bit of intrigue,’ he would not approve a FISA Section 702 extension without passage of the SAVE Act.

“This ‘intrigue’ is nothing more than pure political gamesmanship with national security at stake. Intelligence collection under FISA Section 702 is reliant upon cooperation with US electronic communications service providers like Verizon or Google. Section 702 allows the government to compel providers to share data on targets for specific reasons in exchange for liability immunity; letting Section 702 lapse means that the mechanism to compel that cooperation and the liability immunity both disappear, potentially fracturing cooperation with private businesses who could choose to challenge government directives and deny access to vital information.

“This type of legal uncertainty around the status of a critical authority was absolutely avoidable had Donald Trump not dismantled months of bipartisan negotiations with his irresponsible and indefensible demands. Instead, right as high-profile events like the FIFA World Cup and celebrations around America’s 250th birthday are taking place in the United States, the Intelligence Community is facing tremendous uncertainty around the use of an incredibly valuable tool to counter potential terrorist threats against the U.S. and the American public.

“When the Intelligence Community is not certain that it will have access to the data it needs to keep Americans safe, that should be of paramount concern to any leader. Instead, President Trump has chosen to jeopardize the safety of these events in order to push Congress to pass an entirely unrelated piece of legislation that the president has repeatedly failed to pass on its own merits.

“This behavior is unacceptable and would be unthinkable from any other U.S. president, but is sadly not surprising at all from Trump. Instead, today’s temper tantrum is yet another example of him putting his own priorities above the safety and security of the American people.”

Founded in 1989, PPI is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Find an expert and learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Follow us at @PPI.

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Media Contact: Ian O’Keefe – iokeefe@ppionline.org

Manno for The 74: Faster, Cheaper, Job-Related: Students Demand Flexible Credentials After HS

Posted on June 17, 2026 by Max Sherrill

For generations, college degrees came with a promise. Put in the time. Pay the price. Follow the path. You’ll then receive a bachelor’s that opens doors to work, status and upward mobility.

That promise hasn’t disappeared. But it’s weakened.

Students and working adults still want postsecondary credentials that signal to employers and the wider world that they’re ready for the workforce. What they don’t accept so easily is that this signal must come in the form of a single, expensive, time-consuming college degree.

Increasingly, they’re looking for credentials that cost less, take less time, fit around work and family, and lead more directly to labor-market value. The question is no longer whether higher education is changing. It’s whether colleges can adapt before students adapt without them.

Americans supply over 80% of the Bahamas’ imported goods

Posted on June 17, 2026 by Max Sherrill

FACT: Americans supply over 80% of the Bahamas’ imported goods.

THE NUMBERS:

Likely annual cost to Americans of Trump admin “301” forced labor tariffs	~$100 billion*
Annual value of U.S. imports blocked by CBP on forced labor suspicion	<$1 billion

Assuming 10% and 12.5% tariffs on goods imports, extrapolating from 2025 tariff collection under 10% “IEEPA” tariffs.
** CBP statistics; annual totals vary but average $0.8 billion over the last 8 years.

WHAT THEY MEAN:

Metaphorically shaking his fist at the Supreme Court this past February, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the administration will replace its illegal “International Emergency Economic Powers Act” (“IEEPA”) tariff decrees with new ones using different laws:

“This administration will invoke alternative legal authorities to replace the IEEPA tariffs. We will be leveraging Section 232 [a “national security” law run by the Commerce Department] and Section 301 [see below] tariff authorities that have been validated through thousands of legal challenges.”

One such decree, a 98-page “Section 301” report published by the U.S. Trade Representative Office, showed up two weeks ago. It announced tariffs of 10% and 12.5% on 60 trading partners — Colombia and Korea, the UK and the European Union, Jordan and South Africa, the Bahamas and New Zealand — beginning late July, on the basis of a claim that they don’t do as much as the U.S. to stop trade in goods made using forced labor. Together, they provide about 97% of all U.S. imports, from crude oil and semiconductors to clothes, winter vegetables, flat-screen TVs, hand tools, fertilizer, and dinner plates. Should the decree go into effect, taking its various exceptions (energy, USMCA goods, etc.) into account, it would likely cost American families, farmers, manufacturers, retailers, restaurants, building contractors, and other goods-buyers about $100 billion a year — more than 100 times the $0.8 billion average annual value of goods CBP blocks at U.S. borders on forced-labor suspicion.

As to its legal prospects, Mr. Bessent is correct that some past “Section 301” tariffs were challenged and survived. But no two “301” actions are alike, and the fact that courts allowed earlier ones doesn’t mean they’ll accept this one. Let’s look:

“Section 301,” a trade law dating to 1974, allows the U.S. government to identify “an act, policy, or practice” of a foreign government that in some “unreasonable” way “burdens or restricts U.S. commerce” and use tariff threats as a negotiating tool to fix it. USTR’s complex four-step argument for using it here (setting aside, for now, Bessent’s earlier statement of the administration’s real motive) is –

(i) 54 countries on its list lack a law like the U.S. ban on all imports of goods made with forced
labor. Six more (Canada, Ecuador, Indonesia, the EU, Mexico, Pakistan) do have such laws, but the report says they don’t enforce them as well as the United States does. Therefore,
(ii) manufacturers in these countries may be unwittingly incorporating forced labor goods as inputs, which
(iii) might allow them to produce goods more cheaply than similar American stuff. This, in turn,
(iv) justifies a tariff on any scale the administration wants — in this case, one vastly greater than any estimate of actual forced-labor trade flows.

If this decree is to survive legal challenge this fall, the administration must convince courts of three things:

1. The existence of unreasonable “acts, policies, or practices”: Here, the claim is that the absence of a forced-labor import ban identical to America’s (passed in 1930, updated in 2015) is the same as the presence of the unreasonable “act, policy, or practice” the “Section 301” statute requires. This seems a stretch, but some similar previous efforts — for example, investigations citing weak copyright or patent protection overseas — have held up. Set against this, as former U.S. trade/labor negotiator Desiree LeClercq observes, the investigation’s premise is that the U.S.’ forced-labor program is ideal, which isn’t necessarily so. LeClercq notes, for example, that the EU’s forced-labor law has stronger evidentiary rules than America’s and — unlike the U.S. — not only bans imports from other countries but also exports of goods containing forced labor inputs from Europe. And from a beyond-trade perspective, U.S. forced-labor policy has steadily weakened over the past 18 months, as the Trump administration’s 2025 “DOGE” program abolished most efforts to fight forced labor overseas while cutting the Labor Department’s domestic Wage and Hour Division staff from 1,435 and 974 field inspectors 2024 to a requested 1175 and 611 field investigators this year.

2. The existence of a “burden on commerce”. Should the court accept the first argument, the administration would then need to demonstrate that the “acts, policies, or practices” impose a “burden” of some sort on U.S. commerce. USTR’s report doesn’t seem to do this at all.

First, it doesn’t show that any listed country actually buys any goods made with forced labor. Its 98 pages cite no actual, verified shipment of such goods passing customs in Sri Lanka, Italy, South Africa, Uruguay, or anywhere else. Rather, citing CBP trade-blockage figures and International Labour Organization estimates of the possible scale of forced labor output (as distinct from “trade”), it notes that some forced-labor goods do cross borders, and asserts without proof that other countries likely import more of them than does the United States.

The nadir-of-credibility point is probably its claim about the Bahamas — a small island chain off Florida, population 404,000 — whose modest shipments of goods to the U.S. will now get a 12.5% tariff. (It’s mainly fuel oil, sea crayfish, and sand for Floridian customers.) The report offers no evidence at all that the Bahamas buys any forced labor goods — and since over 80% of the things Bahamians actually do buy from abroad are American*, the stats suggest that if any were made with forced labor, they’re most likely from America itself.

Bahamas imports	Average 2021-2025
Total	$4.6 billion
U.S. share	81%
EU share	11%
All other	8%

* U.S. exports to the Bahamas are principally refined fuels from Texas and Louisiana, and prepared foods from Florida. IMF World Economic Outlook database for Bahamas imports by country; Commerce Department TradeStats Express for U.S. exports to Bahamas by state.

Second, it doesn’t demonstrate that even if a country on the list does unwittingly import forced-labor goods, that would impose any “burden” on U.S. business, labor, or agriculture. Earlier “301” investigations, even in the first Trump administration, tried to demonstrate such “burdens” through specific facts and economic analysis. For example, the 215-page 2017 report on Chinese forced technology transfer and industrial espionage identified policy directives, government agencies assigned to carry them out, and the buildings in which the agencies operated, and then conducted a professional modeling of economic impact, estimating about $50 billion worth of “burden” through captured intellectual property, lost exports, artificial creation of new competitors, and so on.

Nothing like that shows up here. Instead, the report simply asserts that forced-labor production naturally creates a flow of unfairly low-priced goods that displace lawful competitors. This may be true — forced-labor enterprises might want to grab market share by selling at unnaturally low prices — but it also might be wrong, as they might equally want to grab maximum profit by selling at market prices. Only empirical analysis could settle this question, and the report offers none.

In fact, the main current analysis of worldwide forced-labor profit in goods-producing industries — the ILO’s 2024 estimates of $35.4 billion in industry and $5.0 billion in agriculture, cited in the report — suggests the latter is more likely. And CBP’s annual average of $0.8 billion worth of imports a year blocked on forced labor grounds, at roughly 0.02% of the U.S.’s $3.3 trillion annual goods-import total, suggests any economic impact may be too small to measure. Absent a price advantage, forced labor remains an egregious human rights violation and an appropriate policy target, but couldn’t legally justify any “301” tariff — let alone one on a scale so much larger than the actual import blockages.

3. Compliance with Congressional intent. Finally, stepping back a bit, the administration would need to show that it is acting as Congress intended when it wrote up the “301” statute five decades ago. One of the drafters, Alan Wolff – formerly a Deputy USTR and WTO official, now a scholar at the Peterson Institute for International Economics – doubts it can, arguing that the statute doesn’t authorize multi-country investigations or general tariff increases. And per Bessent, the investigation is meant not to solve specific trade-related policy problems, but rather to serve as a pretext for replacing the Congressionally authorized U.S. Harmonized Tariff Schedule by decree with a new tariff system of the administration’s own design. As such, it is perhaps not a real “301” investigation at all, but just Mr. Trump’s third attempt to take an old trade law meant for a very specific purpose, and try to use it to nullify Congress’ constitutional authority over tariff rates.

That’s not what Congress meant these laws to do. Courts so far haven’t applauded attempts to use them that way. And whatever the courts do this time, of course, Congress has the power to protect its authority and restore Constitutionally appropriate management of tariff rates, and can use it whenever it’s ready.

ABOUT ED

Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.

Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.

Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.

Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.

Read the full email and sign up for the Trade Fact of the Week.

Marshall and Kahlenberg in The New York Times: These are the Voters Who Can Keep Democrats From Going Off the Rails

Posted on June 16, 2026 by Max Sherrill

[…]

Posing questions about the changing racial and ideological shifts within the Democratic coalition to Richard Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank, is like throwing meat to a hungry lion.

Kahlenberg immediately replied by email citing four major issues on which “Black voters have indeed become a moderating force compared with white liberals:”

Crime: A 2024 American Enterprise Institute survey found that nonwhite working-class voters opposed reducing police budgets by a 30-point margin, while white liberal college graduates favored reducing police budgets by a 20-point margin.

Elections and socialism: In the 2020 Democratic primary in South Carolina, Black Americans famously supported Joe Biden over socialist Bernie Sanders. In 2025, New York City’s Black voters supported Andrew Cuomo over socialist Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic primary. And in the 2026 Democratic primary for mayor in D.C., socialist candidate Janeese Lewis George leads among white voters by 25 points, while the mainstream Democrat Kenyan R. McDuffie leads among Black voters by five points.

Patriotism: Some 62 percent of Asian Americans, 70 percent of Black Americans and 76 percent of Hispanic Americans said they were “proud to be an American,” compared with just 34 percent of progressive activists.

Racial preferences: When asked if Black people should work their way up “without special favors,” white liberals were about 12 points less likely to agree than Black voters.

The pro-affirmative action stance among many white liberals, in contrast to the moderate positions of Black Democrats, is striking, as Kahlenberg pointed out:

The insistence of white liberals on racial preferences has a very negative effect on Democrats. In a recent study, the political scientists David Broockman of U.C. Berkeley and Joshua Kalla of Yale tested potential policy shifts in 29 different issue areas — including immigration, transgender athletes in women’s sports, and Israel and Gaza — in an attempt to discern what might make skeptical voters consider choosing Democratic candidates.

They found that moving to the center on racial preferences in college admissions was the most electorally fruitful move Democrats could make and that doing so on racial preferences in government contracting was the second most important.

[…]

Will Marshall, the president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute, has been a leader in the struggle to strengthen Democratic centrism for four decades. His take on the evolution of politics over those years:

“In 1988, Jesse Jackson campaigned for the Democratic nomination on a coherent and comprehensive social democratic platform. It thrilled readers of The Nation and would easily have found favor on the European left. But it made Jackson the wrong answer to the big strategic question facing his party then: how to halt the steady defection of more socially traditional blue-collar voters that was unraveling the New Deal majority.

They didn’t see a place for themselves in Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. That’s why he won mostly Southern states with lots of Black voters but struggled in the Wisconsin primary.”

Over the last two decades, Marshall continued in his email, “Democrats essentially have been trading working-class voters for white college grads,” noting “that between the 2012 and 2024 elections, the party’s performance among nonwhite working-class voters fell by 37 points, while improving among white college grads by 17 points.”

Now, Marshall added,

the nonwhite working class has emerged as a force for moderation in U.S. politics. They are leery of the left’s cultural agenda — open borders, permissive prosecutors, the obsession with identity politics and “equity.” They express higher levels of national pride and patriotism. And they aren’t agitating for the replacement of a market economy with democratic socialism.

[…]

Ainsley for Fondation Jean Jaures: The “Third Left”: Sovereign Citizens

Posted on June 16, 2026 by Alex Terr

Each day brings new proof that the old order is crumbling: sometimes a further violation of the international rules and norms that have governed the globalized world for half a century, sometimes an advance in artificial intelligence with no regard for citizens’ safety. Life in the mid-2020s feels like an accelerated collapse. In English, we would say that we are walking on black ice : that invisible ice that forms on the roads, snatches your feet without warning, and against which brakes are useless.

We are experiencing one of the great transformations of our societies, and the left, for the most part, has missed the boat. Incapable of seizing the pivotal moment to steer the change toward a fairer, more humane, and more sustainable order, it watches as the right holds sway on both sides of the Atlantic, despite a few notable electoral victories for the center-left. These victories are often narrow, snatched with meager votes or built on makeshift coalitions, governing against the tide while absorbing the domestic repercussions of global shocks. Every conquest for the center-left matters: it brings to power a government committed to fairness and progress, hostile to the extremism of national populists. The strengthened coordination between center-left parties worldwide is indeed producing tangible electoral results. But these victories often remain marginal, based too much on mobilization against the adversary rather than for a shared vision, which fails to generate lasting support. Beyond tactical successes, the center-left lacks a program capable of defeating nationalist populists for good. It is in this void that the politics of the “third left” can emerge: finally defining what the center-left is and for whom it fights, rather than defining itself by what it doesn’t.

The emerging post-identity “third left” is resolutely turning the page on the identity politics that has plagued a segment of the left and which the right now exploits to sow social and cultural discord. As Renaud Large explains in a collective report ^, this identity politics failed to provide the left with the intellectual framework necessary to adapt to the major transformations of the world; it distanced it from the class politics that fueled collective movements for greater equality. Blind to class, identity politics failed to forge the solidarity necessary for winning coalitions; it even severed ties with working-class communities, which are essential for any lasting electoral base. Advances in the rights of women, racial minorities, and LGBTQ+ people would never have occurred if the debate had remained confined to university campuses. Seeking common interests at the intersection of class and identity remains today a sine qua non condition for greater social equality and the re-establishment of the left as a decisive political force.

Kahlenberg and Lin for Chronicle of Higher Education: Report’s Method Was Not a ‘Word Search’

Posted on June 15, 2026 by Alex Terr

In his opinion piece, “Are Leftist Professors Really Destroying the Academy’s Credibility?” (The Chronicle Review, June 12) Agustín Fuentes claims that a report I co-authored for the Progressive Policy Institute analyzing the leading scholarly journal of American Studies reached its conclusions by conducting something similar to “a DOGE-esque word search to find certain disfavored concepts.”

Not true. Our report, “The Distortion of American Studies: How the Field’s Leading Journal Has Embraced a Worldview as Slanted as Donald Trump’s,” which found that 80 percent of articles in recent years were critical of America, 20 percent neutral, and none positive, makes clear that conducting a word search was insufficient to make a determination of how an article should be categorized.

Mandel in The Atlantic: The Data-Center Panic Is Overblown

Posted on June 12, 2026June 15, 2026 by Alex Terr

“Michael Mandel, the chief economist for the Progressive Policy Institute, told me that employment gains are likely to grow as new data centers attract businesses that use AI. Companies using the technology for advanced applications—such as for autonomous vehicles and medical research—may benefit from proximity to these centers, because information can travel faster from source to user. The margin is imperceptible to most people using Claude or ChatGPT, but for companies that depend on real-time AI-powered decision making at scale, tiny differences in latency matter. The kinds of businesses that will drive the AI economy are thus likely to set up in communities that invest in data centers.”

Ritz in The New York Times: Liberals Must Oppose Nationalizing AI

Posted on June 11, 2026June 12, 2026 by Alex Terr

Senator Bernie Sanders’s proposal to give the public an ownership stake in America’s top A.I. companies is quite alarming. He is not simply advocating a sovereign wealth fund that would help the public capture the benefits of A.I.-generated growth. Those funds normally take small stakes in many companies; Mr. Sanders wants the government to take a major stake in industry leaders, giving it both a share of profits and the power to dictate the company’s behavior.

Unlike the normal left-of-center policies Republicans misconstrue as socialism, government ownership of private enterprise is the textbook definition of it. And how do we know it will stop with A.I.? Mr. Sanders’s claim that the government deserves a stake in companies “built on the collective knowledge” could apply to any business that iterates on government-funded research or uses public infrastructure — which is ultimately almost all of them.

The timing of the proposal is particularly perplexing. Donald Trump has already taken direct stakes in some 20 companies, including U.S. Steel and Intel, in return for favorable policy decisions. Do American leftists really want to suggest officially giving his proto-authoritarian regime control of our most influential businesses? It’s a dangerous, half-baked proposal that no liberal should support.

Read the letter in The New York Times.

Manno for Community College Daily: Five steps to strengthen dual enrollment

Posted on June 11, 2026June 17, 2026 by Max Sherrill

Community colleges have earned their current moment in the sun. While private four-year institutions are seeing enrollment decline and public universities have grown modestly, community colleges have surged. They’ve added 173,000 undergraduate students last fall, nearly double the increase at public four-year schools.

National Student Clearinghouse data also show that undergraduate certificate programs at community colleges grew 12.1% this spring. That’s the fastest growth of any credential type in any sector. Short-term credentials tied to the workforce grew 28% in a single year.

What’s behind this? Cost is part of the answer. At two-year public schools, tuition and fees averaged $4,150 for 2025–26, against $11,950 at four-year public colleges and $45,000 at private institutions.

Workforce relevance is another part. Students want credentials that lead somewhere quickly, and community colleges are delivering them.

Manno for Real Clear Education: The Nation’s Report Card Delivers A Split Verdict That Demands A Civic Response

Posted on June 11, 2026June 17, 2026 by Max Sherrill

The just-released Nation’s Report Card presents two different stories. One carries measured good news. The other warns that time is running out to act. Together, they give an honest snapshot of where American education stands and what needs to happen to improve the life prospects of young people.

The test results come from the Long-Term Trend edition of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, which has measured student achievement in reading and math since the early 1970s. Unlike the main NAEP, which tests 4th and 8th graders every two years, the long-term trend assessment samples 9- and 13-year-olds. Its format is largely unchanged, making it the closest thing the U.S. has to a consistent, decades-long academic record.

The story about 9-year-olds offers cautious grounds for hope. Average scores for this group rose 4 points since 2022, with reading essentially back to pre-COVID levels. More striking, the gains were driven primarily by the lowest-performing students, those at the 10th and 25th percentiles, who had fallen furthest during the pandemic.

In reading, 10th-percentile 9-year-olds gained 8 points since 2022, and in math, 9 points. This reverses the troubling pattern of the 2010s, when achievement gains went almost entirely to top-performing students. That these youngest students, who were still in preschool when COVID arrived and largely escaped its worst educational disruptions, are recovering at all, and that the recovery is reaching the children most in need, is an encouraging signal.

Ritz for Forbes: Trump Is Leaving His Successor A Social Security Time Bomb

Posted on June 11, 2026 by Alex Terr

America’s next president, and the class of senators elected this November, seem all but guaranteed to face the politically perilous task of addressing Social Security’s imminent insolvency before the end of their term. For that, they can thank President Trump.

On Tuesday, the program’s trustees confirmed that its Old Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund is now set to run out of money in 2032 — one year earlier than they previously projected. If policymakers fail to act before then, more than 70 million beneficiaries will face an automatic 22% benefit cut.

Why did the deadline for action move up? Largely because of Trump’s costly tax cuts. The president’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act created a large new deduction for seniors, which put a major dent in one of Social Security’s major revenue sources — the income taxes on benefits paid by higher-income beneficiaries. His restrictionist immigration policy has also reduced revenue coming into the program from payroll taxes paid by foreign-born workers.

Social Security had, of course, been running unsustainable annual budget deficits long before Donald Trump took office. But his actions ensured the clock will run out on this once-in-a-generation budget time bomb before the end of his successor’s first term, and likely when they’ll be in the midst of a re-election campaign.

Toward A New Birth of Patriotism: A Statement from the American Identity Project Advisory Group

Posted on June 11, 2026June 11, 2026 by Alyssa Brown

In 1776, the authors of the Declaration of Independence proclaimed a new republic founded upon revolutionary ideas about individual liberty and political equality. Two hundred and fifty years later, however, many Americans — particularly young Americans — seem disillusioned with the world’s longest-running experiment in representative democracy.

Polling shows a sharp generational divide on questions of patriotism and democracy. A 2025 poll found only 36% of young adults said they are “extremely” or “very” proud to be an American (compared with 65% of those over age 65). In a 2023 poll, nearly one-third of youth agreed that “Democracy is no longer a viable system, and Americans should explore alternative forms of government” (compared to only 5% of those over 65).

There is, of course, a great deal of variation among America’s 50 million young people, and the twin challenges of instilling a love of country and democracy show up differently across class lines. Polling of the broader public finds that college-educated Americans, who are materially blessed, paradoxically express lower levels of patriotism toward their country than working-class Americans. At the same time, low-income and working-class Americans are much less likely to say that democracy is the best form of government.

What explains the loss of enthusiasm for America and its democracy, and what can be done about it? The best empirical evidence suggests a braided cord of explanations.

In an era of deindustrialization, leaders have failed to deliver on the core American promise of social mobility. In 2025, 70% of Americans reported they no longer believe that if you work hard, you’ll get ahead;5 and another survey found skepticism about the American Dream runs particularly high among young Americans. In addition, many Americans have been fed up with the inability of leaders to control the nation’s borders. Unlawful immigration generates a sense of social disorder and chaos and violates a deeply-felt belief that borders have moral significance because a nation’s people owe more to one another than they do to people from other countries. So too, elite failure to prevent the collapse of financial markets and to extricate Americans from foreign wars has further eroded people’s confidence in America and its democracy.

In addition, young Americans have grown up in an age of rising illiberalism on the political right and left. They have witnessed leaders on the right who have resisted the peaceful transfer of power, and articulated a disturbing vision of an America defined mostly by blood and soil. Meanwhile, on the left, many suggest it is acceptable to shout down speakers; that racial and ethnic identities are more important than a shared American identity; that America is defined less by the vision enunciated in 1776 than by white supremacy and the importation of enslaved people in 1619; and that America is more often a force for evil than good in the world. Finally, America’s education system has become so focused on particular identities, “global citizenship,” and careerism that it has failed to convey to young people the extraordinary nature of their civic inheritance. Young people of privilege, facing intense pressure to attend certain schools, secure plum jobs, and adopt certain opinions, lose sight of how fortunate they are to live in the world’s oldest constitutional democracy. Our schools and colleges dwell so heavily on negative aspects of the American story that an astonishing four in 10 Gen Z respondents are more likely to describe the Founders as “villains” than as “heroes.”

Read the full statement from the American Identity Project’s Advisory Group here.

A U.S. “B-2” tourist visa for the World Cup costs $435

Posted on June 10, 2026 by Alex Terr

FACT: A U.S. “B-2” tourist visa for the World Cup costs $435.

THE NUMBERS: International visitor arrivals in the United States –

2025	68.3 million
2024	72.3 million
2023	66.3 million
2022	50.8 million
2021	22.3 million
2020 (pandemic)	19.2 million
2019	79.4 million
2014-2018 average	77.3 million

International Trade Administration, International Visitor Arrivals Program

WHAT THEY MEAN:

The World Cup’s beloved preliminary rituals reach their close this afternoon: the local pols and FIFA eminences denouncing one another as cheapskates and money-grabbers, the irate fans yelling about $1,000-and-up tickets for even the earliest group-stage matches, the confusing and arbitrary stadium name-changes, etc. The first match, Mexico v. South Africa, kicks off tomorrow afternoon on Mexico City’s hybrid-turf pitch, and from then until the July 19th final at “New York-New Jersey Stadium,” the 48 qualifiers play 104 matches — 78 in the U.S., 13 apiece in Canada and Mexico. Administration economists predict the Cup will bring a mini-boom. As you wait for the kickoff, some background on the clash between their hopes and other policies –

Background: The World Bank says tourism supports about $10 trillion in output worldwide — about 9% of global GDP — as travelers take 2 billion annual trips across borders. For the U.S. specifically, the Commerce Department reported about 76 million foreign visitors a year in the 2010s, including two to four million coming for sports events, and calculated the impact at ~3% of U.S. GDP.

If this is still correct, tourism and travel would account for about $900 billion of the $30 trillion U.S. economy, and in principle the Cup matches might add a lot this summer. Few sports events other than the Olympics match the Cup’s blend of global reach and commercial appeal, and both the U.S. government and FIFA expect it will attract 5 to 7 million extra visitors. This spring, the State Department estimated a $17.2 billion GDP boost — like temporarily adding a small island economy like the Bahamas or Jamaica to the U.S. — and 185,000 extra jobs. FIFA’s more cautious estimate assumes (a) international fans will make up 40 percent of match attendees, (b) most will attend multiple matches, and (c) they will stay roughly 12 days while spending about $416 per day. With all this, they get $9.6 billion in extra U.S. GDP and $7.6 billion in tourism-related activity. So in normal times, a noticeable jolt to an economy that needs it. But these times aren’t very normal, and the American tourist economy may need more help than the Cup can give. Three points:

1. Tourism depressed and falling: During the COVID-19 pandemic the U.S’s count of international visitors shriveled, hitting a low of 19 million in 2020 and not getting back above 60 million until 2023. It had mostly rebounded by 2024 — though even then still 5 million below a typical 2010s count — but fell back last year as potential visitors, especially Canadians, reacted against Trump administration tariffs, visa fees, travel bans, and general rhetoric by staying home or going somewhere else. The 2025 count was only 68 million, and the early months of 2026 are about the same. So even if the U.S. government or FIFA predictions pan out, the overall result would not be a boom, but rather a tourism level like that of 2024.

2. Cup trips are getting very expensive. Meanwhile, the early predictions may have been a bit optimistic, as Cup costs started high and have been rising all year. Match tickets are pricy — at the extreme end, a “Category 1” price for the final match hit $10,000 by April and reached $16,000 by May (Disgruntled fan group Football Supporters Europe: “A monumental betrayal of the tradition of the World Cup, ignoring the contribution of supporters to the spectacle it is,” amplified by FIFA “bait advertising” and “pressure-selling tactics”.) Travel costs then spiked in spring, as the Iran war and Strait of Hormuz closure drove up fuel prices. Three Lions fans hoping to see England’s first Cup win since 1966 would have paid $285 for a standard Heathrow-to-JFK economy fare if they booked in February; by April, prices were at $628, plus extra new $10-to-$50 bag charges. As to lodging, hotels around the NY/NJ final venue have lots of rooms but are expensive, and even the special Manhattan-to-stadium train costs over $100. Other venues are squeezed for space — Kansas City, host to Argentina’s group-round matches, has a stadium seating more than 76,000 spectators, but only around 36,000 metro-area hotel rooms.

3. And policy is making travel more difficult. Meanwhile, new visa fees and country-by-country rules make travel to the U.S. more expensive, and often harder, than it was a year ago. Brazilians hoping for the sixth Cup and Argentines confidently expecting a repeat of their overtime 202 2 win; excited fans of first-time entry Uzbekistan traveling from Samarkand; Paraguayans checking in for tomorrow’s 15-hour flight from Asuncion for the Albirroja’s Friday match v. the USMNT in Los Angeles — all must navigate the “B-2” tourist visa labyrinth. The initial DS-160 form expressing interest in such a visa costs a nonrefundable $185. Then comes the real work: securing an in-person interview, often requiring months in high-demand countries; then more paperwork on the purpose of travel, financial capacity, intent to return home, etc.; and finally, if the Consulate says yes, another $250 tacked on as of late 2025 under the grim title “visa integrity fee”. On top of this, fans from Algeria, Cabo Verde, Cote D’Ivoire, Senegal, and Tunisia must now post new “visa bonds” of $5,000 to $15,000, and citizens of two qualified World Cup teams — Haiti and Iran — usually can’t get visas at all.

Even with all the expense and paperwork, the Cup will attract visitors and provide a bump. Maybe less, though, than the administration and FIFA guessed a few months back. For lots of fans, TV and streaming video may be looking like a reasonable second-best.

Special Note: Research and drafting for this week’s Trade Fact by PPI Spring Fellow Madeline Tong. Ms. Tong is a graduating senior at Georgetown University, concentrating in philosophy and economics.

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Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.

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Kahlenberg for Washington Monthly: A Liberal Without the Elitism: Robert Coles, RIP

Posted on June 10, 2026 by Alex Terr

Renowned child psychiatrist Robert Coles, who died June 4, is being lauded as a moral giant and a voice of liberal conscience, which he surely was. But the Harvard professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Children of Crisis was much more than that. He was a liberal without elitism—someone as concerned with the fate of working-class white people as he was with disadvantaged Black Americans. His life illuminates a better path for today’s Democratic Party.

In the early 1980s, as an undergraduate at Harvard, I was mesmerized by Coles’ lectures in his course, “The Literature of Social Reflection,” in which we read Charles Dickens, Ralph Ellison, George Orwell, and Flannery O’Connor. Other students and I were particularly taken by Coles’s moving eyewitness account of school desegregation in the South. Coles lectured about his interactions with a courageous six-year-old Black girl, Ruby Bridges, who helped integrate the New Orleans schools in the face of virulent white hostility. Astonishingly, Coles said, Ruby reacted to taunts and death threats from hateful white segregationists by silently praying for them. The turn-the-other-cheek ethos of Christianity and the power of nonviolent resistance were familiar to all of us cocky undergraduates. But this wasn’t Gandhi or King, but a six-year-old.

The course that Coles taught, dubbed “Guilt 101,” was easy for campus cynics to ridicule, but students flocked to it. I well remember the class during which a member of The Harvard Lampoon burst into the room and, as part of an initiation rite, began imitating the professor’s intense style of lecturing. Coles asked the student to leave, which he did, and then the scholar stood, in pained silence, clearly distressed. After a few moments, a student yelled out from the back row, “We love you, Doc.” Four hundred students jumped to their feet and began to clap furiously.

We Harvard students did love him, but he challenged us, not just academically but by confronting the standard liberalism of Harvard students. I learned this during long conversations with him as part of my research for an undergraduate thesis on Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign. Coles served as an informal adviser to RFK and was fascinated, as so many were, by how Kennedy simultaneously connected with Black Americans, who appreciated his passionate support for civil rights, and with working-class whites, some of whom backed Alabama Governor George Wallace for president four years earlier when he made a surprisingly strong but little remembered candidacy against Lyndon B. Johnson in selected Democratic primaries. Kennedy did this by appealing to shared economic interests. Coles told the candidate, “There is something going on here that has to do with real class politics.” Kennedy appealed to lower-middle-income whites, Coles told me, because they thought, “This guy isn’t going to use us to show those rich Harvard-types what a great guy he is [by labeling us as backward]. He may be for them [African Americans], but he’s for us, too.”

Why New York City doesn’t need muni broadband

Posted on June 9, 2026 by Alex Terr

Politicians of all political stripes can be tempted to invest government funds in enterprises that directly compete with the private sector. PPI believes that such spending is rarely a good idea, especially in the highly competitive area of broadband communications. Too often, well-intentioned municipalities blindly go down the road of believing that they can build (and maintain) a complex network and provide broadband to their residents at a fraction of the cost of existing private companies. Unfortunately, past experience shows that this road is littered with wasted public resources and unhappy consumers.

That’s why we took a skeptical look at a new report from New York City’s Public Advocate, Jumaane D. Williams — one of three citywide elected officials in America’s largest city. In the report, Williams uses a purported crisis in broadband availability and affordability to call for New York to build a multi-billion-dollar “high-speed, low-cost citywide municipal internet service akin to a public utility.”

But such a costly project would be a mistake for New York City and its new mayor, Zohran Mamdani. As we show below, a closer examination of official data shows that virtually every location in the city is already served by multiple high-speed internet providers, with average prices falling or stable in a broadband marketplace that is more competitive than it has ever been. It’s hard to see what would be gained by the costly and ongoing expense of a duplicative government-owned network in the city when networks are already deployed, and prices are dropping. The city has much more important fiscal priorities than laying out billions of dollars for unneeded infrastructure that would take many years to build. Moreover, the transition to this municipal broadband network, as outlined in the report, would disrupt an existing digital equity program that is already (and successfully) providing broadband services to hundreds of thousands of low-income households in New York.

Let’s start with the data. Inexplicably, the Public Advocate report uses out-of-date affordability and availability data in its effort to justify an expensive citywide municipal broadband network and backbone. However, more recent data undercuts the Report’s justifications and conclusions. Specifically, the “2025 Report on the Availability, Reliability, and Cost of High-Speed Broadband Services in New York State,” issued by the New York State Public Service Commission (PSC), provides a more up-to-date picture of broadband affordability and availability in the city. Table 1 describes the availability of high-speed internet service in NYC, meaning at least 100 Mbps download and at least 10 Mbps upload. When taking into account recent deployment data, the first column shows nearly every location in the city is “served”, defined as at least two internet service providers with at least one provider offering high-speed internet service.

The second column shows that virtually every location in the city has more than one high-speed internet provider using wired or fixed wireless. In other words, almost everyone in NYC has a choice of high-speed internet providers. This hardly matches the broadband availability crisis painted by the Public Advocate’s report.

The more recent data also show the price of broadband in NYC is roughly in line with the rest of New York state. The first column of Table 2 reports the average price of 100Mbps internet in the five boroughs and compares it to the median of all New York state counties. We see very little difference. Indeed, the average price of broadband is falling in 4 out of 5 boroughs, and effectively flat in the fifth. The average price of high-speed internet in the Bronx, the poorest borough, has gone down by 12% over the past two years. That’s an achievement which should be lauded! When the data is considered, there’s no sign of a market failure or crisis that would justify spending billions of taxpayer dollars to create another broadband network in the city.

Table 1: High Speed Internet Service in New York City
	Percent of locations served*	Percent of locations with more than one high-speed wired or fixed wireless provider	Number of providers in the county
Bronx	99.86	96.5	11
Brooklyn	99.96	95.9	12
Manhattan	99.31	93.5	11
Queens	99.95	97.1	11
Staten Island	98.60	98.7	4
Average of all New York State counties	97.38	68.2
Data: 2025 Report on the Availability, Reliability, and Cost of High-Speed Broadband Services in New York State
* Served = any location with at least two internet service providers and at least one such provider offers high-speed internet with at least 100 Mbps download and at least 10 Mbps upload.

Table 2. Broadband Prices in NYC
	Average price*	Percent change over the past two years
Bronx	$ 69.79	-12%
Brooklyn	$ 69.03	-8%
Manhattan	$ 55.59	-3%
Queens	$ 62.71	-7%
Staten Island	$ 66.24	1%
Median of all NYS counties	$ 68.74

Data: 2025 Report on the Availability, Reliability, and Cost of High-Speed Broadband Services in New York State
*For the stand-alone internet service with download speed closest to 100 Mbps

The Public Advocate’s report fails to grapple with the real cost of building out a city-wide muni broadband network, in a city with 8.3 million residents, one of the most complex underground infrastructure systems in the world, and no municipal utility to piggyback on. The report acknowledges the fiber backbone will cost more than $2.1 billion, based on an outdated January 2020 estimate. But that estimate predates the massive post-pandemic inflation in construction costs. Moreover, no discussion of the city’s debt capacity or capital budget constraints appears.

The Public Advocate’s report holds up Chattanooga’s muni broadband as a replicable model, but the comparison is deeply misleading. Chattanooga is a mid-sized city with a pre-existing municipal electric utility, suburban density, and a far simpler regulatory environment than New York City.

In addition, the report wants to abandon “Big Apple Connect” — a program provided by Spectrum and Optimum and funded by the City to provide free internet to about 300,000 qualified residents in New York City Housing Authority buildings at a modest cost to the city government. There is no indication that this program fails to deliver; yet, the report wants to close it down. NYC Mesh, the report’s preferred alternative to Big Apple Connect, is a volunteer-run organization with only 2,500 members after more than a decade of operation. It’s hard to imagine how to scale that up.

Too often, well-intentioned state (and federal) policymakers jeopardize a good program or project with a self-destructive devotion to another countervailing objective. One of the biggest disappointments of the Biden Administration was the BEAD program, enacted in 2021 to provide $42 billion in funding to fill in gaps in broadband coverage across the country, and especially rural regions. But when Biden left office at the beginning of 2025, not a single home had been wired with BEAD funds, in large part because well-meaning regulators loaded extra requirements onto the program.

The New York City Public Advocate’s report would lead the citizens of New York City down the same sort of problematic path. Building an unnecessary municipal broadband system in the most crowded city in the country is a recipe for an expensive financial (and political) disaster.

PPI: Next President Must Save Social Security After Trump Policies Accelerated Insolvency

Posted on June 9, 2026 by Alex Terr

WASHINGTON (June 9, 2026) — Social Security’s trustees released their annual report today showing that the program’s Old Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund is projected to be depleted by 2032 – one year earlier than last year’s report. If policymakers don’t act before then, monthly benefits will automatically be cut by 22% in 2032 and those cuts will deepen to more than one-third by the end of the century.

In response, Ben Ritz, Vice President of Policy Development at the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), issued the following statement:

“Today’s trustees report confirms that Donald Trump’s reckless tax and immigration policies have significantly increased Social Security’s shortfall and accelerated its insolvency.

“Now, for the first time in a generation, Social Security’s trustees project the program’s primary trust fund will be depleted during the next presidential administration. The next president, and the class of U.S. Senators elected in November, will have to address the crisis Donald Trump is passing onto them before the end of their term.

“Candidates must start seriously considering how they will protect vulnerable retirees from steep benefit cuts without imposing an undue debt or tax burden on working Americans. They cannot afford to kick the can down the road yet again.”

PPI previously proposed a sweeping package of reforms to strengthen Social Security’s future while making it fairer, more sustainable, and more pro-work as part of a comprehensive budget blueprint.

###

Media Contact: Ian O’Keefe – iokeefe@ppionline.org

PPI Responds to Clayton Nomination Delay: President Trump is Playing Politics with America’s National Security

FACT: Americans supply over 80% of the Bahamas’ imported goods.

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FACT: A U.S. “B-2” tourist visa for the World Cup costs $435.

THE NUMBERS: International visitor arrivals in the United States –

WHAT THEY MEAN:

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