Category: Uncategorized

PPI Calls for New National Autonomous Vehicle Safety Reporting Framework

Posted on by Alex Terr

WASHINGTON — The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) today released a new report highlighting the need for a national approach for autonomous vehicles (AVs), especially as most regulation is fragmented between states.

The report, titled “Building Trust Through Transparency: A New Federal Framework for Autonomous Vehicle Safety,” and authored by PPI’s Andrew Fung, Senior Economic & Technology Policy Analyst, Alex Kilander, Policy Analyst with PPI’s Center for Funding America’s Future, and Aidan Shannon, PPI Policy Fellow, comes at a time when autonomous vehicles like Waymo continue to traverse American streets in record numbers. While these vehicles can drastically improve road safety, there is a lack of public trust surrounding AVs, threatening the industry’s expansion.

“Public perceptions of autonomous vehicles are still being shaped more by isolated incidents than by comprehensive data,” said Fung. “A unified national safety framework would replace anecdotes with evidence, giving regulators, companies, and the public a shared foundation to assess performance and build trust as the technology scales.”

The report calls for a two-layer approach:

  1. A public-facing dashboard that shows AV crash rates and safety comparisons between AVs and human-driving vehicles
  2. A granular, comprehensive database allowing regulators to gain access to comprehensive, standardized safety statistics needed for rigorous oversight

“Smart, standardized transparency can shift the autonomous vehicle debate from speculation to evidence,” said Kilander. “That shift is critical to improving AV regulation while allowing responsible innovation to move forward.”

Read and download the report here.

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 @ppi.

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

A Smarter Path Forward on Premium Tax Credits

Posted on by Alex Terr

Two weeks ago, Congress let another deadline pass by, failing to act on the year-end expiration of tax subsidies that help millions of Americans afford health insurance. This legislative failure has already begun to hurt Americans, with 1.4 million fewer people enrolling in health insurance plans on the federal marketplace. And despite months of legislative attention, Congress is no closer to a real solution to reduce health care costs for the American people.

Most Democrats are still demanding a three-year extension of the pandemic-era subsidies, with no way to pay for it. But while their plan did advance in the House, it stands no chance in the Senate. Meanwhile, most Republicans are still clueless on health care, unable to offer any real solutions to reduce costs. Even the Senate’s “pragmatic dealmakers” have failed to make progress, with deliberations stuck in the mud. 

It’s time for a compromise like the one that PPI proposed in September. Our plan would strike a sensible middle ground, preserving many benefits for low-income Americans but saving money by targeting subsidies to those who need them most. The subsidies would also be permanent, paid for by cracking down on unfair practices that insurance companies and large hospitals use to overcharge the federal government.

Congress Shouldn’t Repeat the Mistakes that Got Us Here

To understand why a compromise is needed, it’s worth recalling how these enhanced subsidies came to be. In 2021, Democrats temporarily expanded the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) health insurance subsidies as part of their pandemic relief bill. The enhanced tax credits were designed for a health emergency, and were therefore unusually generous. But once the pandemic had subsided and the tax credits were set to expire in 2022, many Democrats argued that they should be made permanent.

To some extent, these Democrats had a point — the enhanced subsidies provided real financial relief and helped push America’s uninsured rate to a record low. They also eliminated the ACA’s “benefit cliff,” which caused enrollees to lose all of their benefits if their income rose above an arbitrary threshold. But moderate Democrats realized that the pandemic-era subsidies were deeply flawed. The benefit formula was skewed toward higher-income enrollees, with some families making over $300,000 per year being eligible for taxpayer support. And a permanent extension would have cost roughly $300 billion over ten years, adding fuel to our ballooning national debt.

At the time, my colleagues at the Progressive Policy Institute called for a permanent compromise. But instead, Congress chose the worst possible approach, extending the full pandemic-era subsidies for three years. Rather than solving the problem, lawmakers guaranteed that it would return in 2025.

A Better Way Forward

While Congress failed to meet its 2025 deadline for action, a bipartisan group of Senators is still hoping to find a solution (and make it retroactive). The details of this plan are still unfinished, but negotiators will surely be tempted to propose a temporary, deficit-financed version of the subsidies — nothing more than a repacked version of the ideas that have failed to gain traction for months. Instead of rehashing failed ideas, negotiators should get behind a sustainable and permanent solution to make health care more affordable.

If Senators are willing to take the second approach, they should turn to PPI’s proposal, which would enact a more affordable version of the subsidies and pay to make them permanent. Our plan would preserve free health insurance for Americans in poverty and would provide more generous support than the original ACA for people earning up to 350% of the federal poverty level. It would also eliminate the ACA’s benefit cliff, meaning middle-income Americans wouldn’t immediately lose all of their tax credits if they receive a modest raise. Crucially, the plan would cost just half as much as the pandemic-era subsidies, generating the greatest savings by scaling back subsidies for upper-income enrollees that don’t need them.

This proposal would be fully paid for through savings in the health-care system. It cuts costs by adopting site-neutral payments in Medicare, ensuring that the program pays the same rate for a procedure regardless of whether it is performed in a doctor’s office or a hospital. It would also crack down on upcoding in Medicare Advantage, the practice in which private insurers make their patients appear sicker than they really are in order to secure higher government reimbursements.

Not only are these proposals smart policy, but they would also undercut the strongest argument against the subsidies — that subsidies, on their own, do not drive down the underlying costs of health care. By cracking down on large hospital systems and insurance companies that siphon money from our medical system, these reforms could do more to reduce costs than any law since the Affordable Care Act.

The stakes are too high for politicians to waste time on unrealistic proposals or temporary fixes. It’s time for Congress to get behind a credible solution to reduce health-care costs and provide long-term security for the millions of Americans who purchase health insurance through the ACA’s marketplace.

Building Trust Through Transparency: A New Federal Framework for Autonomous Vehicle Safety

Posted on by Alex Terr

In October, Waymo, a self-driving car company owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, released its latest safety report from its autonomous ride-hailing service. The data is one of the most extensive public views into self-driving vehicle safety to date, claiming a 91% reduction in serious injury crashes compared to human drivers, alongside fewer airbag deployments, fewer crashes with pedestrian injuries, and zero fatalities. Although the data is self-reported, if autonomous vehicles are truly as safe as Waymo suggests, it would be a major leap forward for safety in a country where road fatalities are a leading cause of death.

Yet despite the potential public health benefits, polls consistently show public trust in autonomous vehicles (AVs) to be remarkably low. A recent survey found just 13% of U.S. drivers said they would trust riding in a self-driving vehicle, while 61% would be afraid to do so. Such fears have given rise to a wave of backlash against the technology, with fierce opposition to the authorization of driverless ride-hailing services in cities and states across the country, along with proposed federal legislation from Senator Josh Hawley that would effectively ban driverless cars nationwide.

Part of what fuels these fears is a lack of easily accessible, comparable, and independent data about AV safety. While the public can access some limited information about AV testing, it is fragmented across federal, state, and local lines, and cannot be directly compared because of differing reporting requirements and platforms. In the absence of high-quality data, eye-catching headlines and anecdotes about negative individual experiences with AVs dominate discourse.

Undoubtedly, AVs raise real questions around liability, jobs, cybersecurity, and ethics. But they also offer immense promise to reduce crashes, improve independence for people underserved by public transit, decongest urban roads, and lower transportation costs. High-quality data should be the foundation of discussion about these complex topics, not anecdotal speculation.

The solution is a unified federal AV reporting standard. We propose a two-layer approach, designed to build public trust and give regulators the details they need to properly oversee safety. First, a straightforward, public-facing dashboard allowing users to view crash rates and compare the safety of AVs directly to human-driven vehicles under various conditions. Second, a granular, comprehensive database accessible to researchers and regulators, giving them the detail needed to shape regulation. Built to preserve flexibility and privacy while limiting reporting burden, this approach focuses on public accessibility while protecting proprietary information and continuing to foster innovation.

Read the full report.

Venezuela oil production is down 75% since 1998

Posted on by Alex Terr

FACT: Venezuela oil production is down 75% since 1998.

THE NUMBERS: Venezuelan GDP (constant 2015 dollars*) –

2024 $42.6 billion
1998 $94.1 billion

* World Bank

WHAT THEY MEAN: 

Assessing last week’s raid on Venezuela and the arrest of Chavista chief Nicolas Maduro, PPI’s National Security Director Peter Juul expects little good to come:

“Now-former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was a brutal dictator whose dreadful politics and policies, largely inherited from his equally autocratic predecessor Hugo Chavez, ran his country into the ground. The U.S. military operation that captured Maduro once again demonstrated the tactical and operational proficiency of the American armed forces. But neither Maduro’s autocratic governance nor the audacity and skill of the U.S. military in executing assigned tasks are the primary issue at hand here: at the whim of one man and with no real explanation or apparent rationale, the United States has launched an unwise and illegitimate military intervention that only undermines American interests and international security.”

What might be next? Trump administration comments and actions suggest three things. First, the admin. expects to “run” Venezuela for some time to come. Second, its apparent plan is to leave Maduro’s “Chavista” subordinates in place and hope they will cooperate with American managers. And third, U.S. and international energy companies will rebuild Venezuela’s oil industry as the basis for the national economy. Some oil data, then a couple of observations on the challenges a plan like this will face:

Venezuela sits on top of a large pool of petroleum. The U.S. Energy Information Administration and OPEC both cite a figure of 303 billion barrels of “proven reserves” of crude oil. This would be the world’s largest reserve, with Saudi Arabia second at 267 billion barrels and Iran third at 209 billion. (The U.S. has about 45 billion.) The two sources diverge a bit on the worldwide reserve total — EIA guesses 1.80 trillion barrels, OPEC 1.57 trillion — but either way, a 300-billion-barrel figure for Venezuela would be a sixth or maybe even a fifth of the world’s currently recoverable crude oil.

A lot of oil, then. But so far it hasn’t done Venezuelans much good – rather the reverse.  Maria Corina Machado’s Nobel Peace Prize address last December explains:

“The concentration of oil revenues in the State created perverse incentives: it gave the government immense power over society which turned into privilege, patronage, and corruption.  … Oil wealth was not used to uplift, but to bind.  Washing machines and refrigerators were handed out on national television to families living on dirt floors, not as progress but as spectacle.  Apartments meant for social housing were handed to a select few as conditional rewards for obedience.   And then came the ruin: Obscene corruption; historic looting. During the regime’s rule, Venezuela received more oil revenue than in the previous century combined. And it was all stolen. Oil money became a tool to purchase loyalty abroad while at home criminal and international terrorist groups fused themselves to the state. The economy collapsed by 80%. Poverty surpassed 86%. Nine million Venezuelans were forced to flee.”

And looking ahead from this point of inflection, there are some good reasons to believe a rebuilding plan centered on energy income isn’t likely to work: challenging at best for objective reasons, relying on partners who probably aren’t very reliable, and maybe the wrong strategic direction in general.

(1) Objective problems: The Chavista governments may have exaggerated the “300 billion barrels” figure for political reasons, so it should be thought of as a “theoretical maximum” rather than a firm number.  And whatever the actual reserve level, Venezuela’s oil is pretty low quality — “heavy” and “sour” as opposed to the “light” and “sweet” refiners usually prefer. (“Heavy” meaning dense, carrying lots of asphalt and tar, harder to pump and transport; “sour” shorthand for high sulfur and sometimes metal content, thus needing more processing to reduce pollutants.)

(2) Likely unreliable partners: The 26 years of “Chavismo” featured regular large diversions of money from the state oil company PdVSA to regime loyalists and overseas clients, firings of skilled but politically independent-minded staff, and decaying infrastructure. So despite large reserves, the machines and wells needed to bring oil out of the ground and to ports are in bad shape. Venezuela’s real-world production is only about 1% of the world total:  810,000 barrels produced per day, down about 75% from 2.7 million barrels in 2014 and 3.1 million in 1998, and a bit less than 1% of the world’s 102.5 million-barrel daily output. Put bluntly, the administration seems to be relying on the people responsible for this to fix it.

(3) Probably the wrong strategy anyway: Venezuela is too reliant on oil. The WTO’s World Trade Profiles reports that oil exports — even in PdVSA’s current decrepit state — accounting for 75% of Venezuela’s $5 billion in exports. For a regional index, energy makes up 50% of Colombia’s $75 billion in total exports, 39% of Ecuador’s $33 billion, and 28% of Trinidad’s $13 billion.  Ms. Machado’s comments on Venezuela’s experience are an extreme case of a general problem: developing countries solely reliant on resource exports risk concentration of power and wealth, internal corruption, and economic “Dutch disease” in which oil revenue inflates currency values and perversely shrinks the more labor-intensive agriculture and manufacturing sectors.

So a plan based on reviving large-scale Venezuelan energy exports, if it works, will be expensive and slow. Relying on the Chavista officials who crippled it over the past quarter-century to fix it now, rather than experts overseen by democratic politicians, makes such a plan likely to fail. And even if it succeeds to some extent, that might make the logical larger goal — a pluralistic economy and society, a democratic political system, cooperative relationships with South American and Caribbean neighbors — harder to achieve. Juul’s skepticism has a pretty strong foundation.

FURTHER READING

PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:

  • Defend the Constitution and oppose rule by decree;
  • Connect tariff policy to growth, work, prices and family budgets, and living standards;
  • Stand by America’s neighbors and allies;
  • Offer a positive alternative.

Venezuela readings, chronological order:

Irish journalist Rory Carroll’s Comandante (2014) examines the Chavez years.

Exiled Venezuelan writer Karina Sainz Borgo’s It Would Be Night in Caracas (2021) has a fictionalized look at Maduro-era life in the capital.

The Journal of Democracy on election thefts in 2013 and 2024.

… and some advice on next steps from exiled academic Juan Miguel Mathews.

Nobel Laureate Maria Corina Machado’s December Nobel Prize lecture.

And PPI’s National Security Director Peter Juul assesses this month’s raid and its likely consequences.

Energy:

PPI’s Energy and Climate Solutions Initiative, featuring Managing Director Neel Brown and Energy and Climate Policy Director Elan Sykes, has energy policy and climate ideas for the United States.

OPEC’s Annual Statistical Bulletins have country-by-country data on reserves, production, trade, refining, operating rigs, etc., from 1999 through 2025.

… or direct to the 2025 edition.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s review of the Venezuelan energy sector.

And some jargon explained:

The Energy Information Administration walks you through “light,” “heavy,” “sour,” and “sweet.” 

Why does oil come in “barrels”? The Engineering and Technology History Wiki has the background. TL/DR: Early drillers in 19th-century Pennsylvania did in fact store their oil in 42-gallon wooden barrels. The U.S. Geological Survey and the Bureau of Mines adopted this as a standard measurement in 1882, and despite logic, the metric system, and real-world use of tankers and pipelines rather than “barrels” to move petroleum, it’s been barrels ever since.

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.

Stop Trump’s Greenland Madness Before it Gets Worse

Posted on by Alex Terr

Madness.

That’s the only way to describe President Trump’s obsession with seizing Greenland by whatever means necessary and no matter the cost. It’s a preoccupation that’s untethered from reality and lacks any rational justification.

Indeed, the shifting rationales offered by the Trump administration for this fixation do not add up and make zero sense.

Take the supposed national security justification for the annexation of Greenland: It’s impossible to say what the United States might gain from such a move because the United States would not gain anything from it. The U.S. military already possesses extensive access to Greenland thanks to the 1951 agreement between Washington and Copenhagen, and the Space Force maintains a base at Pituffik in the territory’s far north that helps monitor for ballistic missile attacks. Moreover, America is already committed to defending Greenland against aggression via Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty. Per that provision — invoked only once in response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the United States — an armed attack on Greenland, an autonomous and self-governing territory under Danish sovereignty, would be considered an attack on the United States itself. What’s more, the Danish government has already made crystal clear its willingness to discuss even deeper security cooperation with the United States in Greenland.

Put bluntly, there is no national security reason for the United States to annex or otherwise assume direct control over Greenland. Even if they could somehow mount a military expedition to Greenland, China and Russia could not “take over” the island without triggering Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty and provoking an American-led military response. It makes absolutely no sense for the U.S. government to idly contemplate destroying the alliance that obliges the United States to come to Greenland’s defense and tearing up a decades-old security agreement that gives the U.S. military wide-ranging access to the island in order to acquire Greenland itself, supposedly for national security purposes.

The mooted economic rationale for acquiring Greenland makes just as little sense. It’s true that Greenland possesses significant reserves of rare earth elements and other critical minerals, but it’s nowhere near the motherlode the Trump administration claims: indeed, the island’s rare earth reserves rank just below those of the United States itself. If American mining companies aren’t operating in Greenland, it’s due to a lack of interest rather than a lack of access: it’s almost certainly cost-prohibitive to mine these minerals given the ice sheet that covers the island, the remoteness of the deposits, and the near-total absence of necessary mining infrastructure. In short, it will take a long time and cost a lot of money to extract these minerals — and there are much easier prospects elsewhere.

Concern about possible Chinese attempts to corner the market for these resources does not justify an American attempt to seize Greenland itself. Such worries ought to motivate the United States to work more closely with Greenland’s own democratic government, Denmark, NATO, and the European Union to both bar Chinese investment in Greenland’s critical minerals and infrastructure, and more importantly, to invest more themselves in Greenland. (Canada and the United Kingdom hold 23 mining licenses each, the most of any one country.) Again, it makes no sense to destroy these relationships in the pursuit of presidential fantasies of territorial expansion.

So why does Trump appear dead-set on annexing Greenland, strategic and economic costs to the United States — to say nothing of America’s allies and the rest of the world — be damned?

Trump’s own ego and personal vanity appear to be a major factor, with the president telling New York Times reporters that ownership of Greenland is what he feels “is psychologically needed for success.” Annexing Greenland, in other words, will make Trump feel like a big man. He also seems to find Greenland a tempting target because — and I wish I were kidding — it looks “massive” on Mercator map projections that exaggerate the size of landmasses near the poles. 

More ominously, though, Trump’s drive to take Greenland any way he can is a logical outgrowth of his gangster-style approach to the world — and in particular his apparent desire to carve the globe up with his idol Vladimir Putin and Chinese dictator Xi Jinping. Echoing Putin’s nauseating pre-war assertions that Ukraine should “bear with” the Kremlin’s brutal impending invasion, “whether you like it or don’t like it,” Trump has vowed to “do something on Greenland  whether they like it or not.”

Congress has options to stop the madness, or at least make it more onerous for the Trump administration to try and make its twisted fantasies of territorial aggrandizement real.

First, Congress can preemptively deny Trump authority to use force or subversion against Greenland. Such a move would absolutely clear that any orders Trump may give to attack, subvert, or otherwise undermine Danish sovereignty over Greenland and Greenland’s own democratic institutions would be prima facie illegal and subject to refusal by responsible military officers and intelligence officials. It would also send a signal to Denmark and other NATO allies that Congress does not approve of Trump’s ambition to seize Greenland and that it lacks democratic legitimacy in the United States itself.

Congress can also explicitly bar the use of any funds to purchase Greenland or engage in any activities meant to subvert or otherwise undermine Danish sovereignty over the island. Last year, President Trump ordered the intelligence community to increase its spying on Greenland, and the Trump administration has reportedly considered sending Greenland residents cash payments of up to $100,000 if they support secession from Denmark and annexation by the United States — efforts that would not be eligible for funding under a Congressional funding band. Again, this move would be as much about sending signals to NATO allies and giving national security professionals strong grounds to refuse illegal orders as anything else.

Senators and representatives can also travel to Greenland, Denmark, and NATO headquarters in Brussels to show solidarity with these nations and the alliance as a whole. Indeed, a nine-member delegation led by Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) and including Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) has already left for Copenhagen to, in Coons’ words, let the Danish government know “we understand the value of the partnership we have long had with them, and in no way seek to interfere in their internal discussions about the status of Greenland.” Once again, such visits would serve notice that Trump’s proposed aggression against Greenland lacks both support and legitimacy in Congress and the United States. Or as Coons put it, “I just think it’s important for us to be heard as strongly supporting NATO and our alliance.”

This list isn’t exhaustive, but it offers Congress a place to start if we hope to stop this insanity before it proceeds any further.

Proposed Credit Card Rate Cap Risks Cutting Off Millions of Borrowers

Posted on by Alex Terr

WASHINGTON — Today, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) issued the following statement in response to the Trump administration’s call for a one-year 10% cap on credit card interest rates:

“After dismissing the affordability crisis as a ‘hoax’ for weeks, President Donald Trump now recognizes that more Americans are facing financial hardship. Unfortunately, the president’s call for a one-year, 10% cap on credit card interest rates would lead to millions of working Americans losing access to traditional sources of credit.

“As outlined in our May report ‘Cutting Credit: How Rate Caps Undermine Access for Working Americans,’ a blunt interest rate ceiling set far below the current market rate will push higher-risk borrowers out of the market and toward more unregulated, predatory options, such as payday loans, subprime mortgages, or high installment loans.

“PPI encourages both the administration and Congress to turn toward smarter ways to reduce the affordability crisis, including enacting sensible permitting reform, reversing the course on the Trump tariffs, and putting an end to the president’s vendetta against renewable energy (in particular, offshore wind power).”

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 @ppi.

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

Manno for The 74: Congress OK’d Pell Grants for Workforce Training. Now, It’s Up to the States

Posted on by Alex Terr

The Pell Grant program for low-income college students was designed for a tidy academic world of 15-week semesters, credit hours and degrees that move at the campus pace. But millions of Americans live in a different place, where the question isn’t “What’s your major?” but “Can I get trained fast enough to start earning before the rent is due?”

Workforce Pell is Washington’s answer. The result of a multi-year, bipartisan effort, the program allows low-income students to use Pell Grants for short-term, job-focused training as well as college.

Now comes the real news and the real test. In December, the U.S. Department of Education’s rulemaking committee reached consensus on proposed regulations for Workforce Pell, which launches July 1. It is up to the states to identify, approve and submit eligible training programs, with the department providing oversight and verification. These programs must demonstrate that they lead to in-demand jobs.

Participating programs will typically last eight to 15 weeks (or as little as 150 hours), catering to adults who can’t pause their lives for a two- or four-year degree. The department’s examples include emergency medical technician and automotive mechanic training, credentials that are directly tied to employment.

This performance element is key, because the U.S. has a long history of short-term programs with glossy marketing and weak payoff. If Workforce Pell becomes an ATM for low-value credentials, it won’t expand opportunity; it will expand regret. So accountability is built into its program eligibility requirements, something unusual in higher education policy.

Read more in The 74.

Canter in The New York Times: How Mississippi Transformed Its Schools From Worst to Best

Posted on by Alex Terr

[…]

How could Mississippi, with its low education spending and high child poverty, pull it off?

It did not do so by relying on some of the most common proposals held up as solutions in education, like reducing class sizes, or dramatically boosting per-student funding.

Rather, the state pushed through a vast list of other changes from the top down, including changing the way reading is taught, in an approach known as the science of reading, but also embracing contentious school accountability policies other states have backed away from.

“Science of reading is really important — it was a key piece of what we did,” said Rachel Canter, the longtime leader of Mississippi First, an education reform group, who now works at the Progressive Policy Institute, a center-left Washington think tank. “But people are missing the forest for the trees if they are only looking at that.”

[…]

Read more in The New York Times

New PPI Report Warns ‘Activist Tax’ is Being Driven by Both Trump and the Climate Left

Posted on by Alex Terr

The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) today released a new report warning that New Jersey’s climate mandates are driving a policy-induced affordability crisis that functions as an “Activist Tax” on households, raising energy costs, straining the power grid, and threatening public support for emissions reduction. As electricity prices surge and clean energy projects stall, the report finds that politically driven mandates are colliding with economic reality in ways that disproportionately burden working families.

The report, titled “New Jersey: Ambitious Goals Meet Reality,” is the second in a PPI series examining how rigid climate mandates and technology-specific requirements can unintentionally impose higher costs on consumers, what the authors describe as an “Activist Tax,” when affordability and grid reliability are treated as secondary concerns.

“New Jersey has already picked the low-hanging fruit,” said Neel Brown, Managing Director at PPI. “What remains are the hardest and most expensive steps, and when policymakers ignore affordability, those costs become an ‘Activist Tax’ paid by working families. That’s how you lose public support for climate action altogether.”

Authored by Brown and John Kemp, an internationally recognized energy markets expert, the report finds that New Jersey’s strong emissions record reflects structural advantages, not recent policy mandates, meaning today’s high-cost requirements deliver diminishing climate returns while increasing the “Activist Tax” on residents.

Despite this strong baseline, the state’s current energy strategy is increasingly strained by rising costs, grid constraints, and stalled clean energy projects. With energy affordability a top focus for Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill, New Jersey faces a critical opportunity to recalibrate its approach before mounting pressures undermine both climate progress and political support.

Key findings from the report include:

  • Left- and right-wing ideological interventions are imposing an “Activist Tax” on New Jersey, with supply constrained by rigid climate mandates and Trump’s war on wind and renewable energy, driving up electricity prices and household energy bills.
  • Electricity prices in NJ surged nearly 20% in 2025, one of the highest increases in the nation, driven by capacity constraints and growing demand from data centers.
  • New Jersey’s emissions per capita (10 tons) and per economic output (137 tons per $1M GDP) are among the lowest in the country, largely due to urban density and a service-based economy, not new energy technologies.
  • The state’s 2050 climate mandates require an 82% cut in building emissions and a 62% cut in electricity generation emissions, calling for a sweeping transformation in home heating and power generation.
  • More than 90% of New Jersey’s electricity still comes from natural gas and nuclear, with minimal deployment of wind or solar. The planned 11 GW of offshore wind is delayed and uncertain following the Trump administration’s suspension of key federal leases.
  • The convergence of rising demand, shrinking supply, and surging costs is threatening the state’s climate timeline and eroding public support, especially among low- and moderate-income households.

The authors argue that rigid technology mandates, premature plant retirements, and politically motivated interventions have imposed what they call an “Activist Tax,” a policy-driven cost burden that ultimately falls on consumers. When affordability erodes, public support for climate policy erodes with it. The report urges policymakers to pivot toward outcome-based policies, prioritize clean, firm baseload power, and treat affordability as a core metric of climate success.

PPI’s analysis offers a roadmap for recalibrating the state’s climate strategy, emphasizing flexibility, affordability protections, and pragmatic planning to sustain momentum toward decarbonization.

Read and download the report here.

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 @ppi.

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

New Jersey: Ambitious Goals Meet Reality

Posted on by Alex Terr

New Jersey’s official narrative on climate action highlights “remarkable progress” toward the legislated goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050. However, a closer inspection of the data reveals that the state’s low per-capita emissions are fundamentally tied to its unique demographic and economic profile rather than a transition to a carbon-free energy grid.

New Jersey has some of the lowest emissions per person and relative to the size of its economy in the nation, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) (see Fig. 1). The state is by far the most densely populated (see Fig. 2), transit use is high, and car use below average, limiting transport emissions. Coal-fired generation has been phased out, and nearly all electricity comes from gas and nuclear, cutting emissions from the power sector (see Fig. 3). Electricity and gas prices are well above average (see Fig. 4), but consumption is low, ensuring total energy spending is among the lowest in the country (see Fig. 5). But like other states in the PJM Interconnection, New Jersey’s power prices have climbed significantly in 2024 and 2025 to the highest in real terms for six years, with further increases expected in 2026, driven by capacity shortages and growing demand from data centers.

Furthermore, the state’s economic output is dominated by professional services and finance, sectors that are not energy-intensive compared to heavy manufacturing. New Jersey’s emissions per $1 million of output (137 tons) are the seventh-lowest in the nation and 35% below the national average (See Fig. 6).

The state has been more successful than most in lowering emissions. Emissions were cut to 91 million metric tons in 2023 from 130 million in 2005. The decline was much faster (2.0% per year) than across the country as a whole (1.2% per year), as gas replaced coal and oil-fired generation and heating systems, while population growth has been slow.

Because of the successful coal generation phaseout and the demographic and economic efficiencies that are already in place, deeper emission reductions are inherently more challenging. The low-hanging fruit, in decarbonization terms, has already been picked. Accordingly, the state’s mandated energy transition is now on a direct collision course with working families’ need for affordable fuel and a reliable grid. Most critically, the transition is increasingly straining energy affordability for residents, as evidenced by a historic electricity rate increase of nearly 20% in 2025, fueled by surging demand from data centers and a constrained regional power market.

Read the full report.

Manno for Fordham Institute: The Education Research Handbook That Never Closes

Posted on by Alex Terr

If you’re a policymaker, district leader, or reporter trying to follow education research, it can feel like drinking from multiple fire hoses at once. One week brings a bold new claim about dual enrollment. Next week, there’s a re-analysis of charter school impacts or a skeptical take on short-term workforce credentials. Meanwhile, state and federal leaders are making billion-dollar bets on exactly these programs, often guided by partial evidence, dated syntheses, or the loudest advocates.

Into that gap steps a new tool with an ambitious mission. It’s called the Live Handbook of Education Policy Research, a digital, constantly updated reference edited by Tulane economist Douglas Harris and published by the Association for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP). It’s been described as a “Wikipedia of K–12 research.” But this one is written and vetted by leading scholars and aimed squarely at practitioners and policymakers.

The handbook’s purpose is straightforward but overdue. It will provide comprehensive, rigorous, objective, and useful reviews of research on major education policy topics. Comprehensive means the chapters pull together the most relevant work across methods and disciplines, rather than relying on a few favored studies. Rigorous means not all studies are treated as equal; authors weigh the strongest causal evidence more heavily. Objective means considering multiple perspectives and connecting the outcomes that researchers study with the educational values they embody, including the level of confidence one can have in the conclusions reached. Finally, useful means the chapters are written for a broad audience—policymakers, journalists, and practitioners—not just other academics.

Read more in Fordham Institute. 

PPI Celebrates Commerce Department Proposal on Mission Authorization and Offers Suggestions for Improvement and Implementation

Posted on by Alex Terr

WASHINGTON — The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) today filed formal comments with the Department of Commerce’s Office of Space Commerce (OSC), praising its draft mission authorization proposal while urging additional tweaks to ensure the U.S. regulatory system is right-sized to encourage the domestic commercial space sector to compete globally.

As China expands its space footprint, outdated and opaque regulatory processes have hampered U.S. commercial space innovation. The OSC’s proposal is a welcome step toward a more predictable, streamlined system, argues Mary Guenther, Head of Space Policy at PPI. 

“This is a welcome step forward to provide regulatory clarity that will help ensure the government isn’t arbitrarily holding American space innovators back, especially as we see rapid advancements in China’s space capabilities,” said Guenther. “While the proposal is not perfect, it represents the best framework yet for advancing innovative U.S. commercial space leadership.”

Guenther outlines four key recommendations to strengthen the proposed regime:

  • Establish clear and efficient timelines, ideally a 60-day processing window with firm deadlines for both the government and applicants
  • Avoid mission-specific regulatory burdens, which add unnecessary red tape and should only be used to comply with international obligations or avoid significant harm to national security
  • Balance security with commercial flexibility, ensuring restrictions are imposed only in cases of “significant harm” to U.S. interests recognizing the national security benefits of a competitive, leading commercial space sector
  • Define an ongoing supervision process, ideally based on self-certification, to verify compliance with approved mission parameters

“Besides these changes to the proposal, it is imperative that the OSC is cautious about the implementation process of the new regime to maximize efficiency and clarity,” Guenther said. “In order for this process to run smoothly, OSC must receive adequate resources and staffing as well as authorizing legislation from Congress.”

Read and download the complete filing here.

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 @ppi.

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

 

PPI’s Filing with the Department of Commerce’s Office of Space Commerce Regarding the Draft Mission Authorization Proposal

Posted on by Alex Terr

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

OSC is prudent to propose standing up a mission authorization regime, as it’s clear that the commercial space industry’s expanding mission set is taxing the existing regulatory regime for space. There needs to be a clear, transparent, and light-touch process for missions not covered by existing regulatory processes to ensure the commercial space industry has the regulatory certainty it needs to continue growing. China’s space sector is gaining capabilities rapidly and, if our domestic industry has any hope of maintaining leadership, the regulatory system for commercial space must carefully balance the need for competitiveness with the need to protect national objectives.

The space community has had near-consensus on what an optimal mission authorization regime should look like for years now via the proposal put forward by the National Space Council’s User Advisory Group (UAG), but governmental proposals to date have not passed muster. Thankfully, the draft proposal put forward by OSC in response to Executive Order 14335 is a strong step forward that largely comports with the near-consensus recommendations. The regime set forth needs a few small tweaks, such as:

1. Clarifying timelines
2. Avoiding requirements specific to given mission types
3. Minding the push/pull commercial space regulatory regimes have with the national
security community
4. Laying out the process for ongoing supervision, preferably on a self-certification basis

Beyond specific tweaks to the proposal, OSC will also have to be cautious about implementation processes and will require additional funding and staffing to carry out this regime should it move forward. However, on the whole, this is a strong proposal that should move forward toward implementation.

Read the full comments.

Digital Competition Enforcement and the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA)

Posted on by Alex Terr

Since the first version of AICOA was introduced in the Senate in 2021, much has happened in the digital tech sector. Decisions in a number of U.S. federal and state digital tech antitrust cases, the industry shakeup around the impact of AI, and the coming of age of the large players give us more clarity on the dynamics of competition. We have also observed the difficulties faced by competition in other countries in implementing laws governing the tech sector. 

Any new version of AICOA is likely to pick up where its predecessor left off, but on a much-changed playing field. From inception, AICOA was an awkward approach to competition oversight of the digital sector in the U.S. It rested on a mix of elements of antitrust enforcement and sector regulation that are not likely to best serve the goals of promoting competition, thus protecting consumer welfare and spurring innovation.

Without question, promoting competition on, and between, digital platforms is a critical goal. But the nuts and bolts of the best policies for achieving it deserve careful thought before digital competition legislation advances in Congress. For now, the concern remains that AICOA created unintended consequences for competition, consumers, and innovation. With that in mind and based on more recent learning, there are a few major issues to watch for in any new version of the bill.

First, AICOA set an arbitrary threshold for determining if a digital platform is covered under the law. As commentators observed at the time, arbitrary thresholds based on a fixed number of subscribers or users can foster perverse incentives for competitors to restrict their internal growth to avoid compliance. Other approaches to thresholds, such as those that are tied to some growth metric, also foster perverse incentives, as well as create a “moving target” that would make compliance difficult. 

Second, the large monopolization cases that are currently pending or that have been decided already in the courts since AICOA was introduced have important implications for any new version of the bill. Those cases are taking years to work through the courts, so one could see how lawmakers may seek to speed things up under a new version. If so, this would likely come at the expense of slowing down other legal matters in the courts, such as price fixing and harmful mergers that have a direct impact on consumer paychecks and pocketbooks.

Finally, the approach outlined under AICOA puts competition enforcement in the digital sector in the netherworld between antitrust enforcement and sector regulation. AICOA required the courts to engage in highly technical inquiries involving the security and functioning of a platform, data privacy and security issues, and the use of nonpublic data. These issues are more in the wheelhouse of an expert sector regulator than the courts. Moreover, the bill did not anticipate how cases brought under the antitrust laws would interact with AICOA, creating uncertainty around competition enforcement in the digital sector and, potentially, in other sectors.

In sum, the concerns that AICOA could have unintended consequences for competition, consumers, and innovation remain. More thought, based on recent developments, experiences in other countries, and the evolution of antitrust cases, is needed to explore the best policy approaches for promoting competition in the digital sector in the U.S.

Manno for Merion West: How the High School Diploma Can Restore Its Credibility

Posted on by Alex Terr

How does a wealthy nation like the United States, which spends more per K-12 and post-secondary student than almost any of its peers, end up with young adults who cannot reliably read a news article, interpret a workplace memo, or follow written instructions?

One answer is that the link between credentials and skills is broken. Over the last decade, as the country’s leaders have increasingly conflated graduation metrics with academic achievement, the number of diplomas climbed even as literacy plummeted.

As Mark Schneider, the former director of the federal Institute for Education Sciences (IES) and commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, observes, “But even as more money gets poured into our education system, student performance has not improved.”

To see what is being lost, it helps to be clear about what “literacy” means in practice. IES, the federal education research agency, distinguishes between task-based and skills-based definitions of literacy: the former emphasizes the everyday reading demands adults face at work, at home, and in the community, while the latter focuses on the underlying knowledge and abilities required to meet those demands, from basic word recognition to higher-level skills such as drawing appropriate inferences from continuous text.

Read more in Merion West.

Misguided Tech Legislation is Still a Bad Idea

Posted on by Alex Terr

The American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) may be emerging for another round of debate — and it’s still a very bad idea. 

In 2022, the Progressive Policy Institute issued reports showing that the original version of AICOA — a piece of legislation aimed to hobble America’s most successful tech companies — was bad for consumers, bad for innovation, and bad for the economy.  

Happily, the legislation did not become law back then, despite the impassioned warnings of its supporters. Meanwhile, the European Union did pass its version of anti-American-tech legislation, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), setting up a type of natural experiment. 

Since then, digital competition in the U.S. has only intensified. New AI companies have been sprouting left and right, led by startups such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks, xAI, Anysphere (owner of Cursor), and Perplexity AI. 

Moreover, the U.S. info/tech sector continues to outperform the rest of the economy. 

  • The U.S.info/tech sector has grown at a 7.5% rate over the past two years, roughly triple the pace of the rest of the U.S. economy. (This includes NAICS 51 AND NAICS 5415).
  • Prices in the U.S. info/tech sector have fallen over the past two years, while continuing to rise in the rest of the economy.
  • Even with the latest rounds of tech layoffs, employment in the info/tech sector, including ecommerce industries, is up almost 900,000 since 2019. That’s an 11.6% gain — more than double the rest of the U.S. private sector.

And what about Europe and its strict regulatory regime? There’s widespread agreement that Europe is lagging in AI and in innovation more generally. European firms account for only 6 out of the top 50 AI startups. The EU information and communication sector is growing at only a 1% annual rate, with no sign of any positive benefits from the DMA.

To be sure, some form of AI regulation is appropriate. But a slightly retooled version of AICOA will only hurt consumers and slow growth, without serving any useful purpose at all.