Unfazed by President Trump’s non-stop belligerence in last Tuesday’s debate, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden embarked the next morning on a whistle stop tour of Ohio and Pennsylvania — two pivotal states Trump won in 2016 that now seem to be slipping from his grasp.
In addition to their huge importance as presidential battleground states, Pennsylvania and Ohio rank among the top five U.S. states in natural gas production. No wonder Trump keeps trying to convince voters there that the former vice president is a Green New Deal zealot eager to ban drilling for natural gas.
Only it’s not true, and it’s not working. According to a new ALG Research Poll commissioned by the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), Biden is leading Trump in Pennsylvania (50-44) and Ohio (48-46). What’s more, Biden is running significantly ahead of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 performance in the “shale belt” — the gas-producing counties of Southeastern Ohio and Western Pennsylvania that Trump won handily last time.
Donald Trump is a serial vandalizer of America’s democratic ideals and institutions. Last night, his victim was the presidential debate.
Down in the polls and obviously frustrated by events he cannot control – especially the Covid-19 pandemic – Trump was like a disturbed child acting out in school to get attention. He simply could not control himself. He could not restrain himself even for the two minutes Joe Biden was allotted to answer questions.
Instead he interrupted constantly, talking over his opponent with a steady fusillade of taunts, insults and bald-faced lies. Biden correctly called him “unpresidential,” but that doesn’t begin to describe Trump’s sickening behavior last night. Bullying, malicious, ranting incoherently, he sabotaged every attempt at rational argument.
It will be interesting to see how Trump’s legion of apologists and lickspittles try to explain away his deranged performance in Cleveland. If here are any self-respecting conservatives and Republicans left who truly venerate America’s democratic traditions, they must be feeling very queasy this morning.
If Trump lacks the self-discipline to abide by the rules of presidential debates – rules his campaign officials agreed to – there’s no point in inflicting two more of them on the American people. Neither Biden nor the media has any obligation to collude in Trump’s attempts to turn presidential debates into a tawdry theater of demagoguery and abuse.
U.S. voters already know enough about Donald Trump and Joe Biden to make an informed choice in November. The vote can’t come soon enough.
Following last night’s debate, Joe Biden will campaign in Pennsylvania and Ohio, where a new poll released today by the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) shows him leading President Trump. In addition to their huge importance as presidential battleground states, Pennsylvania and Ohio are energy powerhouses that rank among the top five U.S. states in natural gas production.
The poll, commissioned by PPI and conducted by ALG Research, finds Biden ahead by six points in Pennsylvania (50%-44%) and two points in Ohio (48%-46%), despite Trump’s attempts to brand Biden falsely as an opponent of “fracking” and natural gas. Biden also is running ahead of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 performance in the “shale belt” — the gas-producing counties of Southeastern Ohio and Western Pennsylvania.
“Unlike the ‘drill, baby drill’ right and the ‘keep it in the ground” left, voters in midwest states like Pennsylvania and Ohio show a deeply pragmatic streak on energy and climate issues,” said PPI President Will Marshall. “They are not climate deniers like Donald Trump, and they view natural gas as a bridge, not a barrier, to America’s clean energy transition.”
Key poll findings:
71% of Pennsylvania and Ohio voters — and 66% in gas-producing counties — say climate change is a “real and very serious problem.”
Voters oppose a ban on natural gas by an enormous margin — 53 points (74-21%).
Even among liberal leaning groups, there is little appetite for a ban: Democrats, young voters and advanced degree holders oppose a ban by 30, 29 and 55 points respectively.
Voters’ biggest worry about banning gas production is job loss, following by higher energy prices.
Voters do not want to use fossil fuels indefinitely, but they see natural gas as playing an important role in supporting U.S. renewable energy growth over the medium term.
Voters expect it will take a decade or more to end use of natural gas without disruptions to the economy, electric reliability, and energy bills.
Despite Biden’s lead in this poll, voters split over who they trust more on energy issues.
“Voters know where Trump stands on energy, but they aren’t as certain about Biden,” said Marshall. But when it’s described to them, 52% of voters say they support a Biden plan that does not ban fracking, continues to use natural gas and requires the United States to achieve zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Media contact: Carter Christensen, cchristensen@ppionline.org
Appendix B: State Breakdowns on Key Findings:
o Pennsylvania: Voters oppose a natural gas extraction ban by 72-23%.o Ohio: Voters oppose a natural gas extraction ban by 76-19%.
o Pennsylvania: Democrats oppose a ban on natural gas extraction by 59%-32%.o Ohio: Democrats oppose a fracking ban by 65-30%.
o Pennsylvania: The biggest worry associated with banning natural gas is job loss (40%), followed by increased energy prices (20%) and energy shortages (15%).
o Ohio: The biggest worry associated with banning natural gas is job loss (26%), followed by increased energy prices (18%) and energy shortages (15%).
o Pennsylvania: 57% of voters see natural gas as playing an important role in supporting U.S. renewable energy growth over the medium-term.
o Ohio: 53% of voters adhere to this view.
o Pennsylvania: 43% of voters say we should be using more natural gas; 34% say we should be using the same amount of natural gas versus; and, 18% say we should use less natural gas.
o Ohio: 41% of voters say we should be using more natural gas; 37% say we should be using the same amount of natural gas; and, 18% say we should use less natural gas.
Joe Biden’s job in tonight’s debate is actually very simple. It is to constantly remind viewers that Donald Trump isn’t what he claims to be, a radical outsider challenging a corrupt status quo. Trump is the swampy status quo in Washington. He’s an incumbent with a record to defend — and it’s indefensible.
As Bill Clinton likes to say, a presidential campaign is basically a job interview with the American people. Based solely on Trump’s job performance, voters should throw his own tagline back at him: “You’re fired.”
Trump excels at self-promotion, not producing actual results. The glimpse America has gotten at his tax records confirms that he is a clever tax evader (so far) and a lousy businessman. He loses more money than he makes and most of his branding ventures go belly up. Where are the Trump Steaks of yesterday?
But it doesn’t really matter, because Trump’s businesses are simply a means to an end: the glorification of Donald Trump. They provide a platform for Trump to impersonate a business tycoon. The fancy hotels and golf resorts, the now-bankrupt casinos and beauty pageants, the Playmates and private jets — it’s all for show.
Trump’s perverse genius lies in fabricating a loser’s idea of a winner. It’s no accident that his only recent money-maker was playing a capitalist buccaneer on TV.
Now the Trump Show has moved to Washington, where Trump is pretending to be president of the United States. Just as he lacks the patience and skill to effectively manage a business, he has zero interest in the details of governing. What’s his second-term agenda? The further feeding of Trump’s monstrous ego.
How do you debate a carnival barker who hogs the spotlight with a volcanic cascade of lies, abuse, bigotry and wild conspiracy theories? You don’t.
When future generations — or simply young people today — look back at the topics of recent U.S. presidential debates, they will be stunned that America’s political journalists ignored climate change, the issue that will overwhelm most others in coming years. In essence, debate moderators have pretended climate change doesn’t exist.
Not a single question on climate change was asked by any moderators in the three 2016 presidential debates, even though Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton had diametrically opposing views on climate science and policy. The same silence occurred in the previous round of debates in 2012, and also 2000, and 1996. And now climate change has been ruled out as a topic at the first 2020 Presidential debate this Tuesday in Cleveland.
The consequences on American policy of this willful climate silence during debates has been remarkably far-reaching, especially during Donald Trump’s presidency. The U.S. is the only country in the world to leave the Paris Climate Agreement, and Mr. Trump has ignored entreaties by other world leaders to use other means to make progress on the issue. Domestically, the Trump Administration has repealed or attempted to rollback every climate protection it can, especially limits on greenhouse gas emissions from most major sources, including power plants, cars, and oil and gas drilling.
At every turn, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress have bungled the coronavirus pandemic and shortchanged our recovery. For the first month after most programs created by the CARES Act – the last major stimulus bill passed by Congress back in March – expired, the GOP wasted valuable time on half-measures that could not pass and executive orders that do not help. Washington Republicans have now completely abandoned work on further relief measures so they can focus on a partisan gambit to pack the Supreme Court with yet another right-wing justice before voters have a chance to make their voices heard in just five weeks.
It didn’t have to be this way. Back in May, House Democrats passed the $3 trillion HEROES Act that they intended to be a follow-up to the CARES Act. Although the bill had many flaws, it offered a starting point for negotiations. Their Republican counterparts in the Senate, on the other hand, spent two months doing literally nothing to advance any additional relief legislation. It was only a full month after the major provisions in the CARES Act had expired that the Republican-controlled Senate voted on a partisan $500 billion “skinny” stimulus bill, which then failed to pass the chamber. Negotiations have now stalled due to GOP’s insistence on penny-pinching for a critical stimulus bill that, it should be noted, would almost certainly be less expensive than the wasteful $2 trillion tax cut the party enacted at the height of our most recent economic expansion.
In an attempt to cover for his party’s fecklessness, President Trump issued a series of executive orders ostensibly designed to fill the needs for further relief unmet by Congress. But as is too often the case with Trump, these actions were almost entirely superficial – and in some cases, actively harmful to the people supposedly helped. Rather than playing these pointless partisan games, Republicans need to join Democrats at the negotiating table and deliver a real solution for the millions of Americans struggling to survive amidst a global pandemic and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Anyone at Risk of Contracting Coronavirus
The first priority for policymakers must be controlling the pandemic, as our economy cannot fully recover until people feel safe going in public to work or spend money. Adequate testing and tracing are essential to preventing the virus from spreading until a vaccine is found, but delays in test results have already undermined our COVID response. Democrats proposed $75 billion for coronavirus testing and contact tracing as part of their stimulus proposal in the HEROES Act, while Republicans proposed a much-smaller $25 billion investment, including just $16 billion of new funding not reallocated from CARES Act programs. But without a deal, neither side gets any investment – and the virus continues to spread through our communities.
People Who Have Lost Their Jobs
Up to 26 million Americans remain unemployed thanks to the pandemic. In normal times, unemployment benefits typically only cover 34-54 percent of lost wages for a limited period of time. These benefits, however, are woefully insufficient during a prolonged period when few job openings are available to be filled. The CARES Act sought to address this problem by increasing UI benefits by $600/week through the end of July and extending the maximum number of weeks someone could claim unemployment benefits until December.
Democrats proposed to continue the full $600/week until January (or tie the extension of benefits to real economic indicators), while Republicans wanted to replace it with a $300/week supplement through the election). There was a very reasonable middle-ground here, as both sides agreed that supplemental unemployment benefits should not be allowed to expire in their entirety – but because no agreement was reached, that is exactly what happened.
Trump claimed to resolve the problem with an executive order letting states use Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) money to establish a supplement for unemployment insurance. But this approach was riddled with problems: it depended on state unemployment offices, which are already burdened with crushing caseloads and obsolete information technology, to set up new administrative structures, delaying the receipt of benefits. The new supplement was worth only half as much as the one authorized by the CARES Act, and was not made available to low-income workers who receive less than $100/week in normal unemployment benefits. Finally, the FEMA fund only had enough money to fund benefits for six weeks – and required drawing upon funds that will likely be needed to fight wildfires out west and repair damage from hurricanes in the south.
Landlords and Lenders
Failure to adequately support unemployed Americans will have cascading effects throughout the economy. Because the unemployed then cannot spend as much money as usual, the businesses that rely on their patronage also lose income, which hurts workers throughout the broader economy and deepens the recession. They are also more likely to fall behind on payments for rents, utilities, or mortgages. The CARES Act included a temporary moratorium on evictions, but now that it is expired, millions of American families are at risk of losing their homes by the end of the year. Democrats have proposed imposing an even broader moratorium than was included in the CARES Act. The Trump administration, meanwhile, ordered the Centers for Disease Control to enact a limited moratorium on evictions until the end of the year for low- and middle-class renters.
Although a moratorium may give at-risk renters some temporary relief, it fails to resolve the underlying issue: lost income. Trump’s moratorium simply delays the inevitable for any renter who is behind on rent and would otherwise face eviction. Meanwhile, smaller landlords will lose out on income they need to pay for mortgages and property taxes, which puts them at risk of default. Lenders may also face significant losses from landlords and homeowners unable to make their required payments. If Congress were to instead provide adequate income support for people who have lost their incomes in the pandemic, they would ensure people can afford to remain in their homes without creating these new burdens.
Small Businesses and Their Workers
The CARES Act included a Payroll Protection Program (PPP), which gave small- and medium sized-businesses money to retain their workforce. That funding dried up when the program ended on August 8th. Here, Congressional Republicans actually want to be more generous, proposing almost $360 billion in small business support, loans, and employee retention provisions, while Democrats proposed $290 billion. But without a deal, small businesses – many of which are operating in industries, such as dining and hospitality, that have been particularly hurt by the pandemic – have not gotten any more support.
The only support for small businesses in President Trump’s executive orders was a counterproductive payroll tax holiday. Neither party in Congress supported Trump’s previous proposals to temporarily cut the payroll tax, so instead he used his limited authority to defer collection of some payroll taxes until next year. But since workers will still owe that money in 2021, many employers are just withholding the tax anyway. Meanwhile, federal workers – including those in the military – who cannot opt out of deferral are being advised not to spend the money so they aren’t financially flattened by the massive tax bill for back taxes they will receive next year.
State and Local Governments
The coronavirus pandemic has blown a massive hole in the budgets of state and local governments: income and sales taxes are drying up while spending on safety-net programs, such unemployment insurance and Medicaid, have increased dramatically. Because most state and local governments are required to balance their budget, this fiscal squeeze will compel them to cut their budgets right when people and businesses need government support the most.
Although Congress included some aid for state and local governments as part of the CARES Act, it only allowed this money to be spent on new coronavirus-related expenses, not to replace lost revenues. Republicans have proposed to loosen rules on how states could spend this aid, but offered no additional funding. Democrats, meanwhile, included almost $1 trillion in new funding for state and local governments in the HEROES Act.
Many on the right have argued that providing further aid would be a “bailout” for the finances of poorly-managed states, but this criticism is at best deeply misguided. PPI projects that state and local governments will need at least $250 billion in additional support beyond what was already appropriated before the end of 2021 just absorb the pandemic’s financial impacts without making deep cuts to essential services – and this figure could be even higher if the economic impact of this unpredictable crisis is worse than current projections. Rather than argue over an arbitrary dollar amount, Congress can easily address the concerns of both Democrats and Republicans by designing programs that provide aid to state and local governments based on the real pandemic-induced shortfalls realized on their balance sheets.
Parents and Families
The pandemic has taken a particularly brutal toll on parents who are unable to send their children back to school this fall. It is difficult for workers to do their jobs, either remotely or in-person, when they are unable to access child care that they usually could depend on at this time of year. It also poses a special burden on students from low-income families who lack the internet access necessary to participate in online classes.
The good news here is that both parties have proposed about $100 billion in additional support for schools. But they disagree on what it should be used for: the Trump administration would use this money to pressure school districts across the country to return to in-person classes, the even though doing so would be unsafe without the proper public health safeguards in place. The Democrats’ proposal, on the other hand, would also enable schools to stand up high-quality remote learning to keep their students learning while school buildings remain closed.
Unfortunately, these nuances don’t even matter at the moment: because Congress failed to reach a broader agreement, schools have received no additional federal support. Even worse, the looming shortfalls facing state and local budgets are likely to result in deep cuts to education spending (as they did following the 2008 financial crisis), further jeopardizing the long-term opportunities for children and families.
Voters
State and local governments face an unprecedented challenge administering a national election in the midst of a pandemic, made even worse by foreign governments threatening to interfere again like they did in 2016. The HEROES Act included $3.6 billion to support election integrity and vote-by-mail operations to make sure every vote is counted, while the Senate bill included nothing. As we enter the final stretch of what is perhaps the most contentious presidential election in modern history against the backdrop of several overlapping national crises, the failure of federal policymakers to support election infrastructure jeopardizes the bedrock of our democracy.
Conclusion
Although neither party’s proposals have been perfect, only one is making any serious effort to find common ground and support our economy in a time of unprecedented crisis. While House Democrats prepare to vote this week on a new package of proposals that is more moderate than the HEROES Act they passed four months ago, President Trump and Senate Republicans are leaving millions of Americans in the lurch by prioritizing partisan court packing over any further fiscal relief. Democratic candidates for office and all stakeholders, from the worker who is at risk of losing her home along with her unemployment benefits to the parent who cannot save his small business and give his child a decent education at the same time, should pressure Republicans to return to the negotiating table and work in the public interest – or face severe consequences in November.
The Progressive Policy Institute hosted a conversation on how members of the Democratic Party can better protect recent gains made by Black and Brown students while advancing these gains after the 2020 Presidential Election. The conversation surrounded gains made by Black and Brown students, how these gains were made, and more importantly how Democrats can ensure the gains continue under the next Administration.
Speakers:
U.S. Senator Michael Bennet, (D) Colorado
David Osborne, Progressive Policy Institute
Honorable Antonio Villaraigosa, Former Mayor, City of Los Angeles
Keri Rodrigues, National Parents Union
Dr. Howard Fuller, Freedom Coalition for Charter Schools
Moderator: Curtis Valentine, Deputy Director of Reinventing America’s Schools Project.
The Covid-19 crisis has put a spotlight on how archaic government systems are failing to keep up with the times and handle an unexpected surge of applications for public assistance programs. Cybersecurity threats have demonstrated vulnerability in aging government IT systems. New missions and requirements for government technology capability have shown the limitations of 20th century technology systems and resources for addressing 21st century needs.
The scale of the problem is massive. According to our estimates, federal, state and local governments would have needed to spend an accumulated $316 billion more over the past 20 years to have kept up with the growth of software investment per worker in the private sector. This should be viewed as a lower bound on the shortfall in government IT investment, as this figure excludes hardware investments that also should have been made.
Washington needs to build incentives inside government for a technology culture of continuous improvement and innovation to keep up with external technology developments and changes. Absent such a major modernization strategy, government will become less and less functional in our everyday lives. We need a big push to modernize government, using new digital tools not only to deliver services more efficiently, but to reengineer public services to make them more citizen-friendly and empowering.
To meet public expectations for the kind of speed, versatility, accuracy and efficiency that Americans experience in the non-governmental aspects of modern daily life, we must once again reinvent government just as we did 25 years ago at the beginning of the internet age.
Congress has tried to provide critical relief to Americans during the Covid-19 pandemic — passing three phases of disaster relief totaling 13.6 percent of GDP — but the rollout of support has been marred by obsolete IT and bureaucratic culture.1 In June, the House Ways and Means Committee estimated between 30 to 35 million stimulus checks had yet to be issued.2
The initial rounds of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) also were plagued by institutional delays, internal IT system crashes and incomplete, inaccurate and lagging databases. An April 2020 survey by the National Federation of Independent Business found that 28 percent of small business owners were unsuccessful in submitting an application for funds.3 The Small Business Administration’s loan processing system, known as E-Tran, crashed twice in April, frustrating lenders and small business owners seeking relief.45
State governments have also stumbled. For example, unemployment offices have been stretched thin as roughly 58 million Americans have filed claims since March.6 In Washington State, only 41 percent of claims had been paid as of July 30.7 Florida’s unemployment website has crashed repeatedly, with phone calls to the office going unanswered8, and citizens complaining of lengthy delays. Frustrated workers in Oklahoma and Kentucky have camped out overnight in front of unemployment offices for answers.9
Government IT Woes Predate COVID
The COVID-19 crisis is just the latest example of a chronic issue plaguing government programs at the state and federal levels. Poor information technology infrastructure and practices, antiquated and siloed systems, and outdated databases, have led to three main issues: security vulnerabilities, poor user experience and lengthy delays for citizens interacting with their government.
On the question of data security, perhaps the most infamous case is the data breach of the U.S. Office of Personnel and Management (OPM) in 2015 by hackers working for the Chinese military.10 The incident affected 22.1 million Americans and included data on security clearance files, Social Security numbers (SSNs), job assignments, performance evaluations, fingerprints, and financial and health records.
Most disturbingly, data missing from the OPM database could potentially be used by foreign spy services to uncover CIA operatives working under diplomatic cover, as Ellen Nakashima reported for TheWashington Post: “Names that appear on rosters of U.S. embassies but are missing from the OPM records might, through a process of elimination, reveal the identities of CIA operatives serving under diplomatic cover.”11
But while the OPM hack may have attracted the most attention in recent years, it wasn’t even the largest hack of U.S. government data in terms of the number of people affected. As shown in the table below, data breaches of the U.S. Voter Database, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), and the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) each affected more than 50 million Americans.
Table 1: Largest Government Data Breaches
Source: Government Accountability Office
15 In addition to data breaches, government databases are often inaccurate and out of date, leading to ineffective performance. For example, the IRS taxpayer database contains incomplete and aging data, which resulted in improper payments in PPP benefits to large numbers of dead taxpayers, returned payments that were misdirected, and even funds sent abroad to foreign citizens of other countries. 1213
Currently, the U.S. government spends the vast majority of its IT budget on maintaining and operating older legacy systems rather than upgrading and modernizing them. A 2019 Government Accountability Office report found that 80 percent of the $90 billion the federal government planned to spend on IT in 2019 would be used to operate and maintain existing systems.14 As shown in the table below, the report concludes that there are 10 legacy systems most in need of modernization, a few of which are more than 45 years old. One system at the Department of Education still runs on Common Business Oriented Language (COBOL), a programming language first introduced in 1959.
COBOL was originally designed for mainframe computers. While it has mostly died out in the private sector as businesses have transitioned from owning on-premise mainframe computers to renting cloud computing services from Amazon, Microsoft, or Google, COBOL has been in the news recently as government relief programs struggle to cope with surging demand.16
Government systems still rely on this outdated technology for essential services. At the state level, COBOL has been used to keep unemployment insurance programs running continuously for 40 years (34 state unemployment systems still depend on it today).1718 And during the current crisis, New Jersey’s governor put out a call for volunteers fluent in COBOL to help fix the state’s computer systems.19 Data from Indeed, a job listings search engine, showed a massive increase in search interest for “COBOL” in April.20 But there is a real risk these calls for help will go unanswered. COBOL is only the 43rd most popular programming language as of this year and the average age of a COBOL programmer is about 55-years-old.2122
Why haven’t millions of people received their economic impact payments from the IRS yet? COBOL seems to be the culprit there, too. Many Americans encountered error messages (“Payment Status Not Available”) when they tried to find out why they hadn’t received their stimulus check yet.23 The solution? Using only uppercase letters in the form (and if that didn’t solve the issue, people were advised to try abbreviating words like “Street” and “Avenue”).
But the problems are not just limited to outdated programming languages. The IRS has a profoundly outdated and inaccurate taxpayer database and its systems are unable to talk to each other. John Koskinen, the Commissioner of the IRS from 2013 to 2017, testified on multiple occasions in Congress, and made other public statements, about the dangerously outmoded condition of the agency’s IT infrastructure, even citing existing systems that date back to the Kennedy Administration.24
Other government processes are also antiquated. In New York, newly unemployed workers are required to fax in documentation.25 In some states, people can file for unemployment online, but only from a desktop or laptop computer.26 The state websites, it turns out, aren’t mobile-friendly — a significant barrier for the millions of people whose only internet access is via their smartphones.27 And some states, such as Illinois, even shut down their websites for multiple hours every day.28
A Decades-Long Investment Shortfall
These problems with the government’s digital infrastructure didn’t arise overnight. Technical failures of this nature are the inevitable result of an accumulating investment deficit over recent decades. According to a Progressive Policy Institute analysis of Bureau of Economic Analysis data, federal and state government investment in software per worker significantly lags behind private sector investment.2930
As the pandemic recession grinds on, the federal and state governments must invest more in digitizing their operations if they are going to deliver aid faster and more accurately. U.S. officials should study the example of Estonia, which has digitized 99 percent of government services, including online voting, an e-residency platform that allows businesses across the European Union to establish and manage a business online, and a nationwide system of digitally-kept health records.31323334 Estonian officials estimate that digitizing these processes saves the country two percent of its Gross Domestic Product a year in salaries and expenses, roughly what it pays to meet its military obligations to NATO.35
The federal government has a Technology Modernization Fund, but it’s only been allocated $125 million since 2017 when it was created.3637 In its big relief bills (such as the Paycheck Protection Program and the CARES Act), Congress included funds for agencies to upgrade their technology systems. For example, the bills allocated nearly $3 billion to the Small Business Administration that could be used to upgrade and modernize its IT systems. But much of the money has gone to hire outside contractors rather than to acquire new technology. For instance, the Small Business Administration awarded RER Solutions $500 million for data analysis and loan recommendations as part of Covid-19 relief.38 Sufficient in-house technology systems would both limit the potential for breaches to occur and be a more prudent use of taxpayer money rather than continuously “renting” delivery systems.
For too long, the U.S. public sector has been a laggard in adopting the modern digital technologies that the rest of society have. That’s mainly been the result of underinvestment. To close this public-private technology gap, the federal and state governments need to invest more in software and systems improvements to ensure aid is rapidly delivered during the next crisis.
Government IT Needs Both Incremental Modernization and End-to-End Modernization
All of these issues might make it seem like the best approach is to tear everything out root-and-branch and start over. And while end-to-end modernization strategies might make sense in some cases, for the most essential government systems, an incremental strategy is actually best because it minimizes risks to essential services and limits downtime for users. As Alasdair Allan, a computer scientist at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, pointed out, legacy software systems have accumulated decades of solutions to corner cases and bug fixes. Starting from scratch would be a mistake:39
You should (almost) never rewrite from scratch, and (almost) never throw the legacy system away, it is your institutional knowledge. A legacy software system is years of undocumented corner cases, bug fixes, codified procedures, all wrapped inside software.
If you start from scratch you will miss things. There is no guarantee that you will end up in a better situation, just a different one. I have yet to speak to anyone that has been involved with a project to reimplement a large legacy code base from scratch that has anything good to say about the idea. Document, improve the build system, modernise the infrastructure around it. Write tests. But do not throw it away.
Modern programming languages can be used to deliver social services on modern devices (e.g., smartphones) while sitting on top of the existing mainframe servers. This approach would drastically improve the user experience while preserving the accumulated knowledge. But what might this look like in practice and where should the government start?
Start Small: Public-Private Partnerships and Pilot Projects
One area the federal government can look to improve incrementally in terms of delivery via information technology is anti-poverty programs. Low-income families spend inordinate amounts of time and energy running from one social service agency to the next to apply for public assistance. Now, with many offices shut down, social distancing, and intermittent mass transit, that job is harder than ever. The opportunity costs of simply applying for and receiving public support have risen dramatically. We need to use new digital tools to reduce those costs by empowering low income people to apply once online and receive benefits on an ongoing basis.
Over time, government IT systems have accrued a lot of technical debt — the cost of future work caused by choosing an easy, short-term fix.40 Solving these problems won’t be easy. But a step in the right direction would be passing the Health, Opportunity, and Personal Empowerment (HOPE) Act.41
As Joel Berg detailed in a white paper for PPI in 2016, the HOPE Act would jumpstart the modernization of social services with pilot projects and innovation contracts.42
“Currently, low-income families need to navigate a morass of bureaucracy to receive the benefits they need and deserve, including SNAP, WIC, and UI benefits. Filling out the requisite forms often requires waiting in long lines and traveling to far flung offices. For example, for residents of Panola, Alabama, the closest location to get a driver’s license is a 70-minute drive away.For more complicated processes, recipients often need to hire professionals to help them secure financial assistance from the government.
A 2016 PPI study found that low-income workers paid an average of about $400 each to national tax preparation storefront chains in low income neighborhoods.43 A better alternative would be to move all these services online and make them accessible from a single smartphone app.”
Nevertheless, the government — at both the federal and state and local levels — does not have a good track record of building large scale transactional systems. Moreover, poor customer experiences have too often resulted from government attempts to mimic the online transactional processes and consumer interfaces the public has come to expect from their daily experiences with private sector innovations. And as we’ve shown, the government has a big task ahead in fixing its current systems, in terms of financial resources, managerial resources, and tech talent resources.
However, the needs of the country also cannot wait for notoriously lengthy public procurement cycles to solve these problems. Just getting through the phases of systems design, specifications, and competitive procurement for major systems would take 5-10 years, while implementation of awarded contacts would take 5-10 years more, with high risk of obsolescence by the time of deployment. Successful government reinvention will therefore require reinvention of processes and strategies for service delivery in order to rapidly meet public expectations for performance. Innovative public-private partnerships, with appropriate public safeguards, should be a cornerstone methodology for government reinvention in the 21st century.
With all of that in mind, new online service delivery platforms could be provided via multi-sourced public-private partnerships – including those at no cost to either the public treasury or individual users — which would allow the government to harness the private sector’s technology capabilities and IT infrastructure, with a declared objective of creating an environment of continuous innovation and improvement. The government could then create supporting national public communications campaigns, down to the community level, to inform the public about the availability of these service platforms, so the working poor can know there is are free online, government-sponsored and regulated alternatives available to them.
According to Berg, the HOPE Act can help make this better alternative a reality:44
“Here’s how HOPE would work: The President and Congress would need to work together to enact a law that would authorize the federal Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS), Housing and Urban Development, (HUD), Treasury, and Agriculture (USDA) to work together – and to form public/private partnerships with banks, credit unions, and technology companies – to create HOPE accounts and action plans that combine improved technology, streamlined case management, and coordinated access to multiple federal, state, city, and nonprofit programs that already exist. States and localities would initially be asked to participate in pilot projects implementing the accounts and plans, and, if they work, would be required over time to implement them universally.”
The program would only cost $35 million in its initial stages and would go a long way to showing the potential benefits of bringing government tech into the 21st century. As Berg says, “In America, trying to get out of poverty can be a full-time job.”45 In normal times, this is a tragedy. In a pandemic, when tens of millions are at risk of becoming impoverished for the first time in their lives, this is a national emergency.
The HOPE Act can serve as the first step in a radically pragmatic approach to modernizing government IT. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Representative Joe Morelle have been leading the effort to include this bill in the Phase 4 relief package for the COVID crisis and low-income Americans need this change now more than ever.46
A big part of the problem is that government investment in software has not kept pace with the private sector. As Figure 1 shows, real private sector investment in software per full-time equivalent (FTE) worker increased at an annual growth rate of 6.4 percent over the last 20 years. Meanwhile real investment in software per FTE worker grew at a noticeably slower rate of 4.7 percent for federal nondefense, 4.1 percent for federal defense, and 4.1 percent for state and local governments.
If the federal nondefense sector had kept pace with the private sector, software investment in 2019 would be 38 percent, or $10.7 billion higher (Table 2). Software investment in the federal defense sector would be 55 percent higher, and state and local government software investment would be 54 percent higher.
Table 2: The 2019 Software Gap (billions)
Actual software investment
Necessary software investment*
Size of the gap
Federal Nondefense
28.3
39.0
38%
Federal Defense
12.6
19.5
55%
State and Local
20.1
31.0
54%
*assuming that real software investment per FTE had kept up with private sector
Data: BEA, PPI
But that’s not the worst of it. This gap has accumulated over time, as year after year the government has spent less than it should have. According to our estimates, the accumulated shortfall in government software investment since 1999 has totaled $316 billion. As Table 3 shows, federal nondefense, federal defense and state and local governments would have invested an additional $123.6 billion, $89.5 billion, and $102.5 billion, respectively, to match the private sector’s pace over the last 20 years. This should be viewed as a lower bound on the shortfall in government IT investment, as this figure excludes hardware investments that will also need to be made.
Table 3: Accumulated Shortfall in Software Investment, 1999-2019 (Billions)
Federal Nondefense
$123.6
Federal Defense
$89.5
State and Local
$102.5
Total
$315.6
Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis data, author calculations
*See Methodology Appendix
While the task of modernizing government technological capabilities may seem immense, it pales in comparison to the opportunity cost of not acting at all. A Technology CEO Council report highlighting opportunities for innovation in government use of technology estimated the federal government alone could save $1.1 trillion over the next decade in areas like fraud and improper payments prevention, big data and analytics, mobile, and cybersecurity.47 For example, the federal government is forecast to make $117 billion in improper payments in FY 2020 and has made over $1 trillion in improper payments since FY 2012.48 Technology CEO Council estimates “the federal government could reduce improper payments by approximately $270 billion over 10 years” by employing techniques like when IBM implemented predictive analytics for New York State, which resulted in the prevention of $1.2 billion in improper tax refunds.49
Cybersecurity is another area where modern technology can save taxpayer money. A study by the Ponemon Institute found the United States to have the highest average cost for a data breach in 2020 at $8.64 million.50 Public-private partnerships can help federal, state and local governments avoid expensive cybersecurity attacks. IT security company Akamai helped the U.S. State Department move to a secure cloud-based web presence that successfully protected the agency from one of the largest Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on U.S. government websites to date.51
Once again, public-private-partnership is an essential part of a 21st century cyber defense strategy. A good example is the Treasury/IRS Security Summit and ISAC, which was created by IRS Commissioner Koskinen five years ago, in concert with the private sector. This Treasury/IRS initiative has thus far reduced identity theft tax refund fraud by 80.52 This innovative strategy to defend the tax system against international cyber-attacks should be studied as a model for other government agencies who hold sensitive information and billions in public assets.
Conclusion
The Covid-19 pandemic has shed a light on the obsolete systems used by federal, state and local governments to deliver relief. When time was of the essence, the federal government stumbled in delivering stimulus checks and PPP loans efficiently and accurately. State governments were ill-equipped to process the unprecedented surge in unemployment applications. To be sure, government IT issues predate the pandemic, as federal and state systems have been routinely compromised by data breaches.
The root cause of these IT problems is a decades-long shortfall in government infrastructure investment. For example, the overwhelming share of the federal government’s investment in IT is spent on operating and maintaining outdated legacy systems, some of which are more than half a century old. But the solution isn’t to maintain obsolete systems that aren’t secure and don’t serve their purpose anymore; the solution is for governments to invest in modernization and digitization. Governments should start with pilot projects and partner with the private sector where possible. The HOPE Act would represent a down payment on the $316 billion we estimate federal, state and local governments has fallen behind the private sector. Likewise, modern public-private partnership strategies would enable government to leverage private sector investments and infrastructure to apply them to public purpose.
Methodology Appendix
Data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis enables us to calculate real software investment per full-time equivalent worker for the private sector, the federal nondefense sector, the federal defense sector, and the state and local sector. As shown in Figure 1, the growth rate was substantially faster in the private sector compared to the three government sectors.
We then calculated how much higher software investment in the three government sectors would have needed to be in each year since 1999 to match the growth rate of real software investment per FTE in the private sector. We then translated this increase into nominal dollars and summed over the twenty-year period to get the total shortfall. The 2019 figure gives the current gap reported in Table 2.
This estimate should be regarded as a rough measure of the amount of “software debt” that the government has built up. Ordinarily we might not worry about a lack of spending 10 or 15 years ago because of depreciation, but the government has spent far too much money holding legacy database systems together with scotch tape.
The other issue is hardware. The data published by the BEA for government spending on computers includes “consumption expenditures” as well as investment, so it doesn’t quite correspond with private sector investment in computers. It is generally agreed, however, that even in the era of cloud computing that the government needs to modernize its hardware.
Social distancing is essential to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus, but it also reduces opportunities for millions of Americans to earn a wage or buy goods and services from others. As a result, state and local income and sales taxes that fund education, public safety, and other essential services are drying up. Meanwhile, the rising unemployment rate is causing states to spend more on safety-net programs, such as unemployment insurance and Medicaid. Because most state and local governments are required to balance their budget, this fiscal squeeze is compelling them to cut their budgets right when people and businesses need government support the most.
PPI’s Center for Funding America’s Future has developed a tool to help estimate the additional aid state and local governments will need from the federal government over the next two years to compensate for lost economic activity. Users can input an unemployment rate in each quarter through 2021 (the default values for which are based on the Federal Reserve’s September 17th projections) and set the percent of emergency reserves they are comfortable asking states to draw down.
The results show how much money, beyond what Congress has already appropriated, states will need to fund their aid spending and make up for lost revenues without cutting their budgets or raising taxes. The figures only show the change in revenues or spending from what they were before the crisis, without accounting for the lost economic growth that was previously projected to occur in the coming years before the pandemic hit.
PPI currently estimates that state and local governments will need at least $250 billion in additional federal support between now and the end of 2021.
This estimate is based on the latest labor market data and experiences during past recessions, but it is important to note that the unique nature of the current crisis, as well as changes to state fiscal policy or the economy at-large since those recessions, has already meaningfully altered the expected impact on state and local government finances. In fact, our current baseline estimate is significantly smaller than the $500+ billion estimate produced by our calculator when it was first published in May. The biggest reason for the change is that better-than-expected economic news: the current unemployment rate, as well as the projected unemployment rates for future quarters, are below what they were projected to be four months ago.
Given the demonstrated unpredictability of the current economic crisis, PPI’s estimates should be considered a guideline rather than a concrete policy prescription. We strongly encourage congressional lawmakers to design programs that provide aid to state and local governments based on real economic indicators, rather than appropriating a precise amount of money that could easily be significantly larger or significantly smaller than what is needed.
We have also made some important methodological changes to our calculator. We no longer give users the option of including shortfalls in state unemployment insurance systems that are currently set to be recouped under current law from higher taxes that automatically apply to employers who lay off workers, as the unprecedented nature of this crisis has made it difficult to produce credible predictions based on the experiences of past recessions. Additionally, the calculator now includes the cost of supporting K-12 schools, which joins several other new spending needs beyond covering existing shortfalls, such as election security and creating a national state-led testing program (but still does not account for other costs directly related to addressing the pandemic, such as increased spending through public health insurance programs).
In a new paper, the Progressive Policy Institute, working with the National Spectrum Consortium, projects that applications of 5G will create 309,000 manufacturing jobs in the United States over the next 15 years. That’s only a small part of the 4.6 million jobs that 5G is expected to create over that period, according to the paper, “The Third Wave: How 5G Will Drive Job Growth Over the Next Fifteen Years,” which I co-authored with Elliott Long.
The application of 5G to manufacturing is especially important because the new communications technology has the potential to jumpstart a lagging sector. Yes, it feels funny to call manufacturing a lagging sector, but that’s the only way to describe it. Even before the pandemic, labor productivity decreased in 18 of the 21 NAICS 3-digit manufacturing industries in 2019, according to a recent report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Output grew at a crawl.
The benefit of 5G is that it allows a much faster digitization of the physical transformation processes that lie at the heart of manufacturing. A 2019 McKinsey analysis observed that “[f]or decades, factory automation has relied on programmable logic controllers (PLCs) that were physically installed on (or very near) the machines they controlled, and then hard-wired into computer networks to ensure precise, reliable control under extreme conditions. If 5G consistently meets its performance promises, the PLC could be virtualized in the cloud, enabling machines to be controlled wirelessly in real time at a fraction of the current cost.” Not only will costs be lower, but flexibility will be improved.
The Progressive Policy Institute hosted a conversation on how members of the Democratic Party can better protect recent gains made by Black and Brown students while advancing these gains after the 2020 Presidential Election. The conversation surrounded gains made by Black and Brown students, how these gains were made, and more importantly how Democrats can ensure the gains continue under the next Administration.
Speakers:
– U.S. Senator Michael Bennet, (D) Colorado
– David Osborne, Progressive Policy Institute
– Honorable Antonio Villaraigosa, Former Mayor, City of Los Angeles
– Keri Rodrigues, National Parents Union
– Dr. Howard Fuller, Freedom Coalition for Charter Schools
Moderator: Curtis Valentine, Deputy Director of Reinventing America’s Schools Project.
Watch on YouTube here. On the go? Listen to the conversation where you find your podcasts:
5G, because of its low latency and high throughput, won’t just be an evolution in technology, but a revolution. It will open the door to incredible innovation in both the private sector and the government – including augmented and virtual reality, precision agriculture, smart ports, transportation and logistics, autonomous vehicles, connected construction and so much more.
In the United States, it is critically important to understand how this fundamental shift in technology will impact the broader economy, especially at a moment when COVID-19 has caused significant economic disruption and massive job losses nearing Great Depression levels. Key questions include:
How many jobs will be created by the 5G Economy? Will they be focused around traditional technology centers like San Francisco, New York, and Boston, or create new opportunities across the nation? What kinds of jobs will be created?
And for policymakers, what does the U.S. need to do to support efficient allocation of radio spectrum to support this technology development? And should we provide job training to ensure that workers in America can meet the opportunity?
Already the 5G job revolution has begun. Large mobile providers such as AT&T and Verizon are building out new networks across the country. Network companies such as Cisco, CommScope, Mavenir, and L3Harris are hiring 5G system architects, Radio Access Network (RAN) engineers, 5G solution architects, and technical managers in the 5G space.
Technicians and tower climbers are putting up 5G small cells at a rapid pace. This is not the first time that fundamental shifts in networking technologies have created sudden shifts in the economy and job opportunities.
This paper identifies and outlines three waves of wireless-driven job growth (Summary Table 1) in the U.S., and answers major questions about how many jobs will be created, which industries will be affected, where they will be located, and what we can do as a nation to accelerate efforts to meet this challenge.
Wave 1, The Rise of Wireless, covers the period from 1990-2007, as mobile carriers were building out the original wireless networks and cell phones went from a rarity to a necessity. Wave 1 generated roughly 200,000 jobs in the wireless industry.
Wave 2, “The App Economy,” covers the period from 2007 to 2019, which was rooted in the application of wireless to mobile apps via smartphones, rather than in the wireless industry.
Conventional BLS statistics contained no categories for app developers. But a widely cited study by this report’s author, released in early 2012, analyzed detailed data on job postings and estimated that the U.S. App Economy included 466,000 jobs, including workers developing and maintaining mobile apps and the workers supporting them. (1) Follow-up studies showed continued growth in the U.S. App Economy, with the latest figures from September 2019 reporting more than 2.2 million App Economy jobs. (2) This reflects an average growth rate of more than 20 percent annually. The main locus of Wave 2 job growth has been in industries such as entertainment, finance, communications and social networks, whose output can be easily delivered in a digital form (hence “digital industries”).
Wave 3, “The 5G Revolution,” began in 2019 as mobile carriers expanded their initial 5G networks. Wave 3 is generated by the applications of wireless to challenges in physical industries, such as agriculture, energy, construction, manufacturing, transportation, education, healthcare, and government including defense.
In recent years, most of these physical industries have experienced low or negative productivity growth, as well as low spending on telecommunications services.
5G is reversing both of these trends. Faster, more versatile wireless communications are an essential factor in driving productivity gains and creating jobs. Research shows that industries like manufacturing, construction, and healthcare have lagged in digitization, helping explain why productivity growth has been so slow. To increase productivity, physical industries need the ability to gather information from widely dispersed sensors and to use that data to control activities in real time. That’s not possible without faster and more versatile wireless commnications supplied by 5G. And the COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating the shift to many of these use cases.
How many jobs in the US will The 5G Revolution generate?
Unlike Wave 2, which mostly generated “cognitive” tech jobs which required a college education, Wave 3 is rooted in the physical world.
As a result, Wave 3 will also create mixed ‘cognitive-physical” skilled jobs, many of which fall into the category of installers and maintainers. So while App Economy jobs were focused on software development, Wave 3 jobs will drive job growth in dozens of sectors, across the economy in what we would traditionally consider both white collar and blue collar positions. Simply put, the third wave will benefit a wider set of Americans and regions than the second wave did.
For example, healthcare providers already monitor medical equipment like pacemakers remotely. But with 5G, the set of possible athome diagnostics or even interventions will expand greatly, and telehealth installers and maintainers will be a highly valued occupation. Similarly, precision agriculture will require “field sensor technicians,” autonomous vehicles will need a cadre of mechanics, and ecommerce will need people skilled in robotics maintenance.
Using the latest BLS projections as a baseline jumping off point, we estimate that 5G and related technologies will create 4.6 million jobs relative to the baseline in 2034, 15 years after the introduction of 5G in 2019 (which is also, not coincidentally, the peak of the most recent business cycle). These are higher paying jobs that will replace jobs that are lost in a wide range of industries and use cases (Summary Table 2).
In an important sense, 5G job creation is a countervailing force to job destruction from automation and globalization, and critically important in the post-COVID world.
During these tough economic times, we also need to be concerned about the short-term job impact and opportunities that 5G is creating as well. This paper also shows that current 5G build-out and engineering activities are creating 106,000 jobs as of April/May 2020. We estimate the location of these jobs by state. To get this estimate, we use a combination of data from real-time job postings and BLS figures.
What Do Policymakers Need to Do?
Finally, this paper identifies four areas where policymakers should focus to harness the full potential of 5G.
First, more spectrum – mmWave, sub-6, and unlicensed – will be needed for broadband and related applications. The U.S. would benefit greatly from a long-range spectrum plan. While the Trump Administration has directed the Department of Commerce to create a National Spectrum Strategy, it has not yet been released.
A long-range spectrum plan would ensure the resource is allocated wisely, provide certainty to 5G stakeholders, and encourage long-term investment in networks for 5G and beyond.
In addition to spectrum, the U.S. also needs a plan for the adoption of 5G across the government, both defense and civilian. The public sector should be a leader, not a follower.
Third, Congress should be willing to invest heavily in the development of 5G and successor technologies. That’s essential if the U.S. is to keep up with global competition.
And finally, the U.S. should make a significant investment in job training. The U.S. needs to double down on traditional STEM fields and encourage more people in America to go into engineering and math. Beyond that, we need a national skills initiative and mentoring programs to ensure that this new generation of workers will have the training needed to support the cognitive-physical jobs that the 5G Revolution is already beginning to create.
I. THE FIRST TWO WAVES OF WIRELESS JOB CREATION
Wireless technologies are generally divided into generations, each one corresponding to higher speed and increased capabilities. 5G is the current technology being rolled out, with 6G on the horizon, promising even faster speeds and satellite-terrestrial integration.
However, for the purposes of this paper we use a different taxonomy, based on the labor market impact of wireless technologies.
Wave 1: The Rise of Wireless
Commercial mobile radio telephony—what is sometimes called “0G”—was available as a niche service since the late 1940s. (3) It had very little economic impact. The first true commercial portable cellphone, the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, was introduced in 1983, but there were only 5 million cellphone subscribers as of 1990.
But the use of cellular wireless technology rapidly gathered speed after 1990, giving rise to 109 million subscribers as of 2000 and 233 million subscribers as of 2006. Not surprisingly, the need to build out networks, and handle a soaring customer base generated a large number of jobs. The number of people working in the wireless industry went from 36,000 in 1990 to 200,000 in 2000. (4) Wireless employment remained at roughly that level until 2007 (Fig 1).
The first wave of wireless job growth encompasses 2G in the 1990s and 3G and 3G+ in the first half of the 2000s. With 2G data speeds measured in the kilobits, only low-bandwidth applications such as voice, text messages, and email were viable. Running other applications on top of a slow network was almost impossible.
Mobile internet became possible with 3G and 3G+, but it was still not fast enough to make a significant difference.
Wave 1, The Rise of Wireless, was not anticipated in any of the long-run employment projections issued by the BLS in the late 1980s and early 1990s. That’s important, because the BLS projections, issued regularly since the 1960s, are the most widely quoted comprehensive long-run occupational and industry forecasts available. The BLS also maintains the most detailed occupation industry matrix available for the United States.
Yet, the BLS projection methodology typically misses the impact of new technologies. For example, the employment projections issued in 1993 anticipated that telecommunications employment would drop from 912,000 in 1992 to 791,000 in 2000. (5) In reality, telecommunications jobs rose to 1,185,000 in 2000, 50 percent above the projected value (Table 1). (6)
Wave 2: The App Economy
The second wave of wireless jobs, The App Economy, began in 2007 with Apple’s introduction of the iPhone, coupled tightly with the opening of the App Store and Android Market (later renamed Google Play) in 2008. Suddenly mobile phone users had a powerful computer in their pockets that could handle a myriad of applications. The demand for mobile broadband soared. Mobile wireless networks moved from faster versions of 3G to 4G and LTE, as the number of broadband subscriptions soared.
But the second wave of wireless jobs also started with a paradox. Despite the central role of mobile, employment in the wireless industry peaked in 2007 and fell by half by 2019. In 2011, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece with the stark title: “Wireless Jobs Vanish.” (7)
In fact, wireless was creating jobs, but not in the wireless industry. (8) More and more IT professionals were involved in either developing mobile apps, maintaining them after they were on the market, or supporting them with users. For banks and other financial institutions, mobile apps became an important way of supplying their services without having expensive real estate or branch workers. Moreover, mobile apps could use the camera on smartphones to provide services like depositing checks at homes.
Beyond utilitarian tasks like banking, shopping, and travel reservations, apps became the major way that people interacted with their smartphones. We watched videos, listened to music or podcasts, messaged friends, played games, and spent time on social networks. One survey found that adult Americans spent almost three hours per day on their smartphones, and 90 percent of that time was spent on apps. (9)
Conventional BLS statistics contained no categories for app developers. But a widely cited study by this report’s author, released in early 2012, analyzed detailed data on job postings and estimated that the U.S. App Economy included 466,000 jobs, including workers developing and maintaining mobile apps and the workers supporting them. (10) Follow-up studies confirmed continued growth in the U.S. App Economy, with the figures from April 2019 reporting more than 2.2 million App Economy jobs. (11) This reflects an average growth rate of more than 20 percent annually (Table 2).
Other studies have found similar or even higher estimates. For example, a 2018 study from Deloitte estimated 5.7 million App Economy jobs in the U.S., using a different methodology and a much bigger assumption of spillover effects. (12)
The job impact of mobile broadband and the App Economy did show up in the official numbers in a different way: the unexpectedly rapid growth of people working in “computer and mathematical occupations.” “Computer and mathematical occupations” is a broad category that includes data scientists, software developers and engineers, information security specialists, computer support specialists, and database and network administrators.
By contrast, skilled workers who maintain the telecom networks—the people who lay and fix the fiber-optic lines and put up the cellphone towers—are in the “installation, maintenance, and repair” occupations.
The BLS projections in 2007 and 2009 underestimated the expected size of the computer and mathematical workforce in 2019 by roughly 20 percent, or over 1 million workers. But the relevant categories of skilled installers and maintainers were overestimated in the projections. This tilt towards tech jobs is very important for understanding the third wave (Table 3).
II. WAVE 3: THE 5G REVOLUTION
Wave 3 of wireless-driven job growth, The 5G Revolution, began in 2019 as mobile carriers expanded their initial 5G networks, and then continued into 2020. All major carriers in the U.S. — AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile — are heading towards nationwide 5G networks by the end of 2020, according to analysts. (13) The pandemic has made the case for 5G more compelling as many of the use cases for 5G services have been pulled into the present.
Telehealth has become not just optional but a requirement in many medical situations.
Students from kindergarten to graduate school have been forcibly introduced to distance learning. Businesses and governments have been learning how to use virtual meetings, at a much lower cost than flying around the world. Companies have started using robots to help disinfect their stores. (14)
The U.S. military faces its own challenges, as the virus has forced changes in routines to minimize infectiousness and to protect its suppliers. “We believe the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated society’s transition to broadband and digitization by at least a decade,” said one market analyst in March 2020. (15)
Indeed, in the early days of the pandemic, Verizon announced that it was expecting to allocate $17.5- $18.5 billion on capital expenses in 2020, up from its previous guidance of $17-$18 billion. “This effort will accelerate Verizon’s transition to 5G and help support the economy during this period of disruption,” Verizon said in a press release. So far, the pandemic has caused spectrum auctions in Europe to be pushed back. (16) Meanwhile the FCC has not changed its spectrum auction plans for 2020. (17)
Spending on 5G networks is what is known by economists as “autonomous investment”—that is, investment that is not linked to the immediate ups and downs of GDP. (18)
The Extension of Wireless to Physical Industries
Wave 2 was focused on “digital industries,” where the output can be reduced to bits and bytes. This includes games, music, communications, social networks, news, advertising, financial services, and ecommerce purchases of digital goods such as hotel and plane reservations. These digital industries, while important, make up less than 20 percent of the economy. (19) (Formally defined, the digital sector includes computer and electronics manufacturing; ecommerce; software and other publishing; video and audio content; broadcasting; telecommunications; data processing; internet publishing and search; and computer systems design and programming. Slight changes to the boundary of the digital sector does not affect the analysis here).
Wave 3, by contrast, is based on the applications of wireless to the challenges and opportunities in physical industries, such as agriculture, energy, construction, manufacturing, transportation, education, healthcare, and government (including defense).
Physical industry use cases include low-power wireless sensors that must operate for long periods in a field, say, without a battery replacement, or a low-latency connection to a drone or autonomous vehicle.
Table 4 shows the key physical sectors had slow or negative productivity growth during the second wave (in general 1 percent annual productivity growth is adequate and 2 percent is good, so none of these industries made the grade). Slow or negative productivity growth means less competitive industries, weaker wage gains, and lesser quality jobs.
Surprisingly, most of these industries had low and falling spending on telecommunications services, as a share of total output (for most industries, total output can be interpreted as revenues. For defense, total output can be interpreted as spending including accounting for depreciation). (20) For example, in agriculture, the amount spent on telecom services went from a very low 0.16 percent in 2007 to an even lower 0.13 percent. (To provide some context, in 2018 the average telecom share for digital industries was 3.5 percent, and the average telecom share for physical industries was 0.7 percent).
5G is likely to reverse both of these trends. Faster, more versatile wireless communications are an essential factor in driving productivity gains. Research shows that industries like manufacturing, construction, and healthcare have lagged in digitization, helping explain why productivity growth has been so slow. To increase productivity, physical industries need the ability to gather information from widely dispersed sensors and to use that data to control activities in real-time. That’s not possible without faster and more versatile wireless communications supplied by 5G.
The ability to rapidly communicate data and information using 5G will increase productivity gains in both the public and private sectors. And these productivity gains, in turn, will lead to higher revenue, faster wage gains, advances in job quality, and increased international competitiveness.
In 2017, a study from the Technology CEO Council examined the impact 5G will have on productivity growth in the “physical industries” and tax revenues over the next 15 years.21 The report estimated that the physical industries will boost annual economic growth by 0.7 percentage points over the next 15 years, generating an additional $2.7 trillion in annual economic output, $8.6 trillion in wage and salary payments, and $3.9 trillion in federal tax revenue.
The 5G Revolution and Job Growth
The impact of 5G on jobs can be summarized as “network meets the cloud.” That means we can push more capabilities out to the edge, including real-time and near-real-time applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence to the physical world. In many cases, new technologies create new tasks and markets that didn’t exist before. (22) For example, healthcare providers already monitor medical equipment like pacemakers remotely. But with 5G, the set of possible at-home diagnostics or interventions will expand greatly, and telehealth installers and maintainers will be a highly valued occupation.
5G will greatly expand the capabilities of drones in a range of applications from agriculture to military to logistics, especially in conjunction with artificial intelligence. That will expand the market for skilled drone operators, sometimes called “remote-pilots-in-command,” earning as much as $100,000 per year.
The other alternative is that productivity gains will lower costs enough to expand the market, which ends up creating new jobs. (23) That’s what happened in ecommerce. The use of robots in ecommerce fulfillment centers, combined with effective use of data, helped drive down costs low enough to offer consumers fast delivery and easy returns. And the combination of fast delivery and easy returns, in turn, made the ecommerce proposition irresistible to many consumers, because now they could avoid the time and trouble of going to the store, getting the product quickly and simply returning it for free if it didn’t work. The result was a massive shift from unpaid household shopping hours to paid ecommerce fulfillment and delivery hours. (24)
Or consider manufacturing. The pandemic has called into question the wisdom of depending on global supply chains for important medical supplies, and by extension, any parts that one might need in a crisis.
The low-latency high-bandwidth services delivered by 5G can help spur the digitization of the factory floor, boosting productivity and increasing flexibility. (25, 26) The result could be a shift to distributed local manufacturing in the U.S. in the post-COVID era, creating jobs and shortening supply chains.
Table 5 identifies examples of Wave 3 jobs. Unlike Wave 2, which mostly generated “cognitive” tech jobs which required a college education, Wave 3 is rooted in the physical world. As a result, Wave 3 will also create mixed ‘cognitive-physical” skilled jobs, many of which fall into the category of installers and maintainers. In addition, people will continue to play an essential role in the supervision loop of advanced robots.
The types of cognitive jobs listed in Table 5 mainly fall into the broad occupational class of “computer and mathematical occupations.” Relative to the median wage for all occupations, these jobs pay a wage premium of 122 percent.
But Wave 3 will also generate blue-collar jobs that use a combination of manual and problem-solving skills—what we call “cognitive-physical” jobs— which are likely to pay a wage premium as well.
Today, the median wage for telecommunications equipment installers and repairers is 45 percent higher than the overall median wage, according to figures from the BLS. As 5G becomes an integral part of business operations, we would expect such jobs to become more valuable rather than less.
III. QUANTIFYING LONG-TERM 5G-RELATED JOBS
Estimates of job growth spurred by a new technology have to be measured against some baseline. As we noted earlier, the BLS projection methodology typically looks backward, not forward, and has a difficult time dealing with ongoing technological changes. BLS projections have consistently understated the job impact of wireless innovation. In the first wireless wave, jobs in the wireless industry came in 50 percent above projections. In the second wireless wave, the rise of the App Economy drove up demand for computer and mathematical jobs 21 percent above BLS projections as of 2019.
Our fundamental assumption is that unlike the second wave—which was mostly focused on digital industries—the third wave will drive demand for both cognitive and cognitivephysical jobs across the whole range of physical and digital industries. The third wave will therefore benefit a wider set of Americans and regions than the second wave did. We therefore adopt a simple and straightforward approach to estimating the impact of 5G on jobs. We start with the latest BLS industry and occupation projections, issued in September 2019, for the 2018-2028 period. We rebase them to 2019 and extend them to 2034 to get a 15-year projection.
Then we assume that the additional jobs produced by 5G in the third wave, relative to the baseline, are the same magnitude as the additional jobs produced by wireless innovation in the second wave. We then allocate these jobs across industries according to their size, rather than focused on only tech. Finally, we then apply a conservative job multiplier.
Based on these assumptions, we estimate that 5G and related technologies will produce an additional 4.6 million jobs in 2034 relative to the baseline original projected growth of 12.8 million.
When we say ‘additional’ we mean that 5G-driven job growth is an additional factor that the conventional projections do not take into account. In an important sense, 5G job creation is a countervailing force to job destruction from automation and globalization. These are higher paying jobs that will replace jobs that are lost.
Past Reports Projecting 5G impact On Jobs
In 2017, Accenture released a report estimating wireless operators will directly invest $275 billion between 2017 and 2024 in 5G infrastructure, creating up to 3 million jobs and boosting GDP by $500 billion.27 Of the $275 billion investment, $93 billion was estimated to be spent on construction, with the remainder being allocated to network equipment, engineering, and planning. Importantly, the report recognized this growth will be spread across communities of all sizes. “Small to medium-sized cities with a population of 30,000 to 100,000 could see 300 to 1,000 jobs created. In larger cities like Chicago, we could see as many as 90,000 jobs created,” the authors wrote.
More recently, a report on the global economic impact of 5G was released in November 2019 by IHS Markit, updating a 2017 study. (28) This report looked at several measures of 5G impact. First, the report forecast that between 2020 and 2035, global real GDP would grow at an average annual rate of 2.5 percent, with 5G contributing almost 0.2 percent of that growth. Second, the report looked at the seven leading countries for 5G—the United States, China, Japan, Germany, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and France—and found that the collective investment in R&D and capital expenditures by firms that are part of the 5G “value chain” within these countries will average over $235 billion annually, measured in 2016 dollars. The U.S. and China each accounted for about one-quarter of global spending on 5G R&D and capital expenditures. Third, the IHS Markit report estimated that 22 million jobs would be supported by the 5G value chain globally in 2035, with 2.8 million of those jobs in the United States.
Most recently, two economists at NERA Economic Consulting, Jeffrey A. Eisenach and Robert Kulick, estimated the potential job impact of 5G. (29) They found that if 5G adoption followed the path of 4G adoption, then, “at its peak, 5G will contribute approximately 3 million jobs and $635 billion in GDP to the U.S. economy in the fifth year following its introduction.” This employment effect is smaller but faster than the one reported here.
IV. KEY 5G USE CASES
As previously noted, The 5G Revolution will create job opportunities across many sectors and regions in the U.S. In this next section, we identify eight of the most likely use cases that have significant potential for job growth.
1. AGRICULTURE
Agriculture is an industry ripe for transformation. In many areas of the country, it is still heavily dependent on low-cost labor, which may be discouraged because of the pandemic. And as of 2018, only 0.1 percent of agriculture revenues were being spent on telecommunications, a percentage that had dropped slightly since 2007.
Faced with an evolving environment with increasing temperatures and diverging precipitation levels in wet and dry areas, precision agriculture will rely on an interconnected system of low power sensors, integrated equipment, and data—all powered by 5G—to monitor field conditions and maximize yields while efficiently allocating scarce resources such as water. (30)
To best utilize the new technologies, agriculture will have to build and maintain a new tech and telecom infrastructure and the workforce is only now starting to come into existence. This requires both software developers and people to install and maintain the equipment.
For example, as of March 2020, agriculture technology company Farmers Edge was looking for a precision technology specialist to install equipment and software at its growers’ farms in Madison, Wisconsin.
2. CONSTRUCTION
5G plays an essential role in digitizing construction, a key sector which has been plagued by high costs and low productivity in recent decades, especially in public infrastructure. (31) Perhaps not coincidentally, construction is one of the least digitized sectors of the economy. (32)
Since 2000, the cost of construction has risen 118 percent according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. (33) Highways and streets have become 126 percent more expensive for state and local governments to invest in. (34) By comparison, overall prices in the economy have only risen 41 percent over the same time span. (35)
This increase in the relative price of construction helps explain why U.S. infrastructure seems shoddier and worn-out these days.
A 5G communication grid will allow the seamless and flexible integration of automated equipment and skilled workers on a construction site. Structures will go up faster with fewer dangerous errors, and worksites will be safer. Meanwhile, as 5G helps bring down the cost of construction, demand will rise. Both renovation and new building will be cheaper and faster.
3. UTILITIES
Energy use management is an essential use case for 5G. Utilities are already extensive users of information technology within their own operations to monitor power production and distribution. But 5G makes it much easier to connect up smart meters to the grid to give people and businesses better incentives to control their electric use.
This is one sector where our projection methodology may underestimate the number of new 5G-related jobs. If the energy infrastructure shifts over the next 15 years from fossil fuels to low-carbon energy sources, the opportunities for 5G-enabled workers may be very strong.
4. MANUFACTURING
In manufacturing, 5G and digitization will help reduce costs, making domestic manufacturing more competitive. Many manufacturing industries have weak or even negative multifactor productivity growth over the past 20 years. (36) Multifactor productivity growth takes into account the usage of purchased services, energy, capital, and intermediate inputs and is a key measurement of competitiveness. Investment in information technology such as 5G, which manufacturing has lagged in since the early 1990s, will enable new business models that expand markets and enhance domestic competitiveness.
New markets and reinvigorated domestic competitiveness means more jobs in the U.S. Through a combination of digitized distribution, digitized production, and new manufacturing platforms – coined by PPI as the Internet of Goods – a new network of smallbatch and custom goods factories will likely arise. Importantly, these industrial startups will fuel job creation in low-density areas and former industrial hubs like the Midwest and upstate New York, as physical industries like manufacturing dominate these economies. That means more domestic production and less imports. (37)
5. TRANSPORTATION AND WAREHOUSING
5G will transform how people and goods move from point to point and how cities manage traffic. This has major implications for industries ranging from defense and transportation to logistics and delivery.
Low-latency 5G connections will accelerate the roll-out of fully autonomous trucks and cars. But the flip side is that these vehicles will have to be maintained to a very high standard to keep them safe, creating more jobs for skilled technicians, and compensating for the loss of truck driver jobs.
These capabilities depend on the speed of 5G to rapidly relay data. In trucking, a report by McKinsey recognizes, “sixty-five percent of the nation’s consumable goods are trucked to market. With full autonomy, operating costs would decline by about 45 percent, saving the US for-hire trucking industry between $85 billion and $125 billion.” (38) This savings from automated trucking could be passed onto consumers in the form of lower prices. Delivery drones stand to further disrupt how goods are delivered.
And in traffic management, traffic signals will be based on real-time traffic flow rather than timed stoplights. Pittsburgh recently introduced smart traffic lights and saw travel times cut by 25 percent. (39) These innovations reduce the need for drivers and increase the need for maintenance and road workers as driving and delivery become less physically intensive and goods can be moved around the clock.
The creation of new types of jobs is already starting. As of March 2020, transportation services company Transdev Services was hiring a self-driving vehicle operator in San Francisco, California. Technology platform Argo AI was seeking an autonomous vehicle system test specialist responsible for operating its autonomous test platforms in Miami, Florida. And transportation services firm MV Transportation was searching for an autonomous vehicle attendant tasked with ensuring the safe operation of the Autonomous Vehicle in Corpus Christi, Texas.
6. EDUCATION (PUBLIC AND PRIVATE)
Students and teachers at all levels were forced to adopt virtual learning in 2020 because of the pandemic. Reports from the field have been mixed. The technology in many cases was not up to the task, and many students, especially in low-income neighborhoods, were caught on the wrong side of the digital divide. If schools want to engage in virtual learning, they will need a technology like 5G with the bandwidth for students and teachers to fully engage.
A related issue is training of workers on new equipment and processes. As 5G moves into the workplace, it will transform the way that physical industries such as manufacturing and healthcare do business. In order for workers to stay relevant, the training technology has to become 5G-enabled as well.
7. HEALTHCARE
As with education, the pandemic forced healthcare providers to adopt ad hoc telehealth practices without the proper technology. 5G will provide the framework in which providers can truly practice healthcare at a distance. Moreover, 5G is essential to unlocking quality healthcare for rural, low-density areas because of its ability to support real-time high-quality video, transmit large medical images, and enable real-time remote monitoring.
Maintaining the telehealth infrastructure will be a core function at hospitals, which will employ skilled telehealth technicians, just like they have lab technicians and nurses. Clinical information will flow wirelessly into electronic health records, requiring specialized database specialists who are trained in the medical and privacy requirements of these types of data. As of late April, Beth Israel Lahey Health of Beverly, Massachusetts was looking for a “telehealth installer.”
8. GOVERNMENT (EXCEPT EDUCATION)
We can divide the impact of 5G on government into military and civilian uses. On the military side, a March 2020 report from the Congressional Research Service noted: “5G technologies could have a number of potential military applications, particularly for autonomous vehicles, command and control (C2), logistics, maintenance, augmented and virtual reality, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) systems—all of which would benefit from improved data rates and lower latency (time delay).” (40)
In fact, the USDOD has already released several Requests for Prototype Proposals for test beds focusing on AR/VR for training, smart warehouses and dynamic spectrum sharing. All of these potential applications generate new human resource demands as well. As the capabilities of 5G evolve, it becomes more important than ever to best make use of resources, both in terms of equipment and people. For example, as of summer 2020, The Aerospace Corporation was looking for a “5G and Internet of Space Things Wireless Network Engineer” with the ability to obtain a U.S. security clearance.
On the civilian side, “smart cities” development will mean that state and local governments will have to transform all of their services to 5G, from waste collection to police to property tax assessment. And that will, in turn, mean a workforce much more heavily oriented towards maintaining and repairing the necessary telecom equipment.
Where Will Wave 3 Jobs be Located?
Both the first and second wave of wireless jobs were concentrated in dense digital cities like San Francisco, New York and Boston.
Table 7 shows examples of top “digital” areas, as ranked by the share of local GDP coming from the information sector, the financial services sector, and the professional services sector (which includes law, engineering, and accounting, as well as computer programming).
Not surprisingly, the list of the top digital metro areas is headed by New York and San Francisco. There’s one important caveat: for confidentiality reasons, the Bureau of Economic Analysis suppresses some data, so we can’t calculate the digital share for all metro areas.
EXAMPLES OF TOP DIGITAL METRO AREAS
1. Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH
2. Boulder, CO
3. New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA
4. San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA
5. Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA
*Listed alphabetically. Inclusion based on digital share, which measures the share of the information, financial services, and professional services sectors in overall metro GDP Data: BEA
By contrast, Wave 3 will benefit those areas which are more balanced in terms of digital and physical industries. Table 9 shows some examples of such areas. These areas are not tech deserts, for sure, but they are well-positioned to take advantage of the opportunities offered by 5G.
EXAMPLES OF BALANCED DIGITAL/PHYSICAL METRO AREAS
1. Albany-Schenectady-Troy, NY
2. Ann Arbor, MI
3. Baltimore-Columbia-Towson, MD
4. Buffalo-Cheektowaga, NY
5. Cleveland-Elyria, OH
6. Colorado Springs, CO
7. Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI
8. Harrisburg-Carlisle, PA
9. Huntsville, AL
10. Jacksonville, FL
11. Kansas City, MO-KS
12. Lincoln, NE
13. Pittsburgh, PA
14. San Antonio-New Braunfels, TX
*Listed alphabetically. Inclusion based on digital share, which measures the share of the information, financial services, and professional services sectors in overall metro GDP Data: BEA
V. SHORT-TERM SNAPSHOT: THE IMMEDIATE IMPACT OF 5G
So far, we have been discussing the longterm job impact of 5G. But in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we need to be concerned about the short-term job impact as well. In this section, we show that current 5G build-out and engineering activities has already created 106,000 jobs as of April/May 2020 (Table 9).
Estimating 5G Network Build-out Jobs
Network build-out activities, of course, consist of installing 5G small cells around the country, including their backhaul connections. In some cases, the technicians and installers are employed directly by the carriers, while in other cases they are contractors. These are cognitive physical jobs, in the sense that we discussed earlier in the rep
ort. We get data on this employment from two different sources. First, the BLS track
s the number of “Radio, Cellular, and Tower Equipment Installers and Repairers” in its Occupational Employment Statistics (OES). (41) As the name suggests, this category includes the workers who install 5G access points. As of May 2019, the last data available, there were 14,370 workers in this occupational category, with a relative standard error of 5.8 percent. Factoring in a conservative job multiplier, that gives us a net job impact of 43,000.
How are those jobs distributed? The top state according to the BLS data is Texas, followed by New Jersey, California, and Florida. These figures were as of May 2019 and based on several years of rolling surveys (Table 9).
Of course, the location of build-out activity changes over time as providers finish with one area for now and shift their construction activities to other area. To understand current 5G construction activity, we turn to another data source: publicly available job postings. These job postings contain information on the location of jobs and also the skills needed. For example, one company is advertising for a “Tower Top Hand” with 5G experience in the Baltimore area.
The database of job postings that we use comes from Indeed.com, which identifies itself as “the #1 job site in the world.”(42) Indeed’s real-time database of job postings is full-text Booleansearchable, including by title, location and by age of job posting.
We searched for job postings with the terms “tower” or “technician” in the title, and 5G in the body of the posting. This allowed us to identify “hot spots”—metro areas where there was current hiring activity for workers installing 5G networks (Table 11).
As of early May, companies are hiring for tower technicians in areas such as Allentown, Pennsylvania and the Baltimore metro area, as telecom providers extend their 5G networks outside of the densest high-income urban areas. Indeed, local news publications in these areas show evidence of discussions about ongoing deployments. (43)
Current 5G Engineering and Software Jobs
Making 5G a reality will also require hiring in engineering and software development. But unlike cell and tower installers and repairers, there is no obvious BLS occupational category that matches up well to 5G engineers and software developers.
To understand the prevalence and location of 5G engineers and developers, we further analyze the universe of online job postings, using a methodology that was developed to estimate the number and distribution of App Economy jobs.
These job postings contain information on the location of jobs and also the skills needed. For example, in late April and early May 2020, Commscope was advertising for an “Engineer, Principal 5G Systems” in Richardson, Texas. Epsilon Solutions was advertising for a contract “Wireless Core Engineer” to “test, deploy and debug DISH’S standalone 5G network” in Denver, Colorado. And KaRDS Cyber Solutions in Annapolis Junction, Maryland was advertising for a “5G Wireless SME / Senior Systems Engineer Level 6.” This position required a “TS/ SCI clearance with polygraph.
We started by searching for job postings with the words “engineer” or “developer” in the title, with postings aged 30 days or less. This gave us our initial pool of roughly 50,000 postings nationally as of the end of April. Generally speaking, our past research has suggested that searches with no age limit work better, but because of the pandemic-related shutdowns, we decided to focus on the more recent job posts.
Within that pool, roughly 0.6 percent contain the term 5G. By contrast, job postings containing the terms IoT, Android or iOS, or mobile are far more common (Table 12). We then use this share of job postings to estimate the share of jobs (see Appendix). There are roughly 1.75 million engineers, and an equal number of software developers, according to BLS. Taking 0.6 percent of that total comes to roughly 21,000 jobs, and then accounting for the multiplier gives us 63,000 5G-related engineering related jobs.
A First Look at China
We gain some insights into the Chinese 5G labor market through analysis of online job postings in both English and Chinese, as collected by Indeed.com. This approach is limited because of the lack of visibility into hiring by key 5G companies such as Huawei, China Telecom, and Tencent, so we cannot arrive at an overall number. Nevertheless, even a preliminary analysis may be useful.
We consider job postings which include ‘5G’ in the title and were released 30 or fewer days ago. For example, in the U.S., CommScope posted an opening for a 5G Systems Architect. As of August 17, 2020, the U.S. had 85 such new postings, compared with 125 for China. As noted, the China sample is significantly incomplete.
To put these numbers into some context, over the same period, the U.S. had 14370 new postings with ‘software’ in the title, while China had 4137 new postings with ‘software’ in the title (in either Chinese or English). That suggests the intensity of Chinese hiring of 5G personnel, relative to hiring of software personnel overall, is higher than in the U.S.
These jobs are very heavily concentrated in a relatively small number of states. California and Texas by themselves account for almost 50 percent of 5G engineering job postings. This makes sense given the location of the leading companies in the 5G space.
VI. THE KEY INPUT TO 5G JOBS: CAPITAL INVESTMENT AND SPECTRUM ACCESS
5G is a capital-intensive investment by its nature. To realize its benefits, wireless operators must invest in R&D and capital expenditures in engineering and network buildout. In a 2017 study, Accenture estimated wireless operators will invest $275 billion from 2017 to 2024, $93 billion of which will be spent on construction. (44) Indeed, via its Investment Heroes series, PPI estimates the major wireless operators have invested more than $150 billion in the United States since 2016, much of which has gone towards 5G R&D and deployment. (45, 46)
The portion of spectrum to be most used for 5G is divided into two categories: millimeter wave (above 24 GHz) and sub-6 (6 GHz and below). (47, 48) Each of these spectrum ranges will play a vital role in bringing 5G products and services online. While mmWave has the fastest speeds, it has limited range and is not able to tolerate much interference like walls or rain. (49) In the sub-6 spectrum, the range is better than that of the mmWave, but speeds are reduced. While mmWave will be utilized in dense population areas such as downtown areas and stadiums to transmit data, sub-6 will be critical to providing access to IoT products in suburban and rural areas.
Spectrum for commercial use is controlled by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). One of the ways the FCC distributes spectrum is by auctioning licenses, with the proceeds going to the Treasury Department. Since 1994, the U.S. government has raised over $100 billion in revenue from wireless companies participating in FCC spectrum auctions. (50) The FCC’s first 5G spectrum auction, the mmWave of 28 GHz, was conducted in November 2018.51 The FCC followed by auctioning the 24 GHz band in March 2019, and the 37, 39, and 47 GHz bands in December 2019. (52, 53)
Much of the spectrum used by mobile networks to date have been concentrated in the sub-6 bands of 600 MHz to 2.6 GHz. These mid- to low-bands are likely to be used for 5G as well to achieve wider geographical coverage. As of April 2019, the FCC had awarded 716 MHz of spectrum below 3 GHz. (54) Additionally, the FCC has designated the 2.5 GHz band to “be available for commercial use via competitive bidding”. (55) The FCC ran an auction the 3.5 GHz band in July and August 2020. (56) And in February, the FCC ordered satellite operators in the 3.7- 4 GHz range to relocate, freeing the space for reallocation by December 2023. (57)
The other mechanism by which the FCC distributes spectrum is by allowing unlicensed use of certain spectrum – for purposes such as Wi-Fi. Under this regime, operators can use designated airwaves to transmit data without getting permission from the FCC. (58) However, the lack of exclusivity in unlicensed bands means an increased risk of interference. In March 2019, the FCC freed up the 116-123 GHz, 174.8-182 GHz, 185-190 GHz, and the 244-246 GHz bands for unlicensed use. (59) And in April 2020, the FCC proposed rules to make the entire 6 GHz band available for unlicensed use. (60)
International Comparisons of Spectrum Allocations
In April 2019, Analyses Mason released a report summarizing certain countries’ spectrum allocations. (61) The countries had comparable amounts of spectrum below 3 GHz awarded, with the U.S. coming in first at 716 MHz, Australia in second at 690 MHz, Germany at third with 689 MHz, Canada fourth with 648 MHz, and the United Kingdom rounding out the top five with 647 MHz. Asian countries have allocated similar amounts of spectrum below 3 GHz, with Japan at 601 MHz, Hong Kong at 583 MHz, China at 582 MHz, and South Korea at 477 MHz.
Awarded spectrum from 3-24 GHz had greater variation among countries. “Whilst many countries have now awarded over 100MHz of (exclusive nationwide) spectrum to mobile, several countries (China, Italy, and Spain) have awarded 300MHz or more,” the authors write. Following those three countries were South Korea, the U.K., Australia, Japan and Qatar – all with 200 MHz or more allocated. Notably, the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, and Hong Kong had not awarded any of this spectrum as of April 2019. As previously mentioned, sub-6 spectrum is a critical component to delivering new 5G products and services outside of high population density areas because of its ability to travel long distances while still providing 5G speed.
In the mmWave range, only the U.S., South Korea, and Italy had awarded spectrum. The U.S. had awarded 2,500 MHz, South Korea 2,400 MHz, and Italy 1,000 MHz as of April 2019. Other countries in the analysis had mmWave allocations planned, ranging from the second half of 2019 to 2021. The U.S. leads in the total amount auctioned or planned to be auctioned at about 7 GHz, followed closely by China at 6 GHz, and Canada at nearly 5 GHz. Australia, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden and the U.K. all planned to assign around 3 GHz.
A broader February 2020 analysis of countries conducted by Global Mobile Suppliers Association found 40 countries have completed allocations of 5G suitable spectrum since 2015. (62) “A total of 54 countries have announced plans and approximate dates for allocating 5G-suitable frequencies with timelines for completion between now and end-2022,” the authors note.
The economic and national security implications of 5G are why the U.S. needs a long-run spectrum plan. In September 2018, the FCC unveiled its ‘5G FAST’ plan, detailing the previously discussed spectrum that it intends to make available for 5G services. (63) In October 2018, the Trump Administration issued a presidential memorandum directing the Department of Commerce to create a National Spectrum Strategy, but the strategy has not yet been released.
VII. POLICY IMPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSION
There are four important policy issues when it comes to 5G. First, as we have been discussing, is spectrum. As 5G opens up the physical industries to joining the digital economy, it becomes ever more imperative to have a longterm spectrum plan. Unlicensed spectrum, sub-6 spectrum, and mmWave spectrum all serve different purposes in the 5G ecosystem but are critical to realizing the full economic benefits of 5G.
The amount of spectrum suitable for 5G use is limited and thus needs to be allocated efficiently. Policymakers should prioritize a long-term spectrum plan that frees up more licensed and unlicensed spectrum, provides certainty for auctions in terms of cost and scheduling, streamlines government licensing and renewals, and encourages long-term investment in 5G networks.
5G is also critical to national competitiveness and security. As an April 2019 report from the Defense Innovation Board recognizes, leadership in 5G carries economic and national security advantages such as rapid communication systems, enhanced decision-making and strategic capabilities, better technology, standard setting, and job creation. (64) But, as the report notes, the physics of mmWave are challenging. Additionally, the sub-6 band is crowded with incumbent systems and uses, large portions of the spectrum are government owned and commercially limited, and there are concerns the Defense Department could experience reduced capability if it is required to share its sub-6 spectrum. While the Trump Administration has directed the Department of Commerce to create such a National Spectrum Strategy, it has not yet been released. For the U.S. to meet the challenges ahead, a national spectrum plan must carefully balance the government’s needs and what 5G will require in the long-term.
The second policy issue is increased government usage of 5G across both military and civilian activities. The public sector should be a leader in exploring cutting edge uses of 5G in areas like the delivery of government services and battlefield control-and-communications.
Third, Congress should be willing to invest heavily in the development of 5G and successor technologies. That’s essential if the U.S. is to keep up with foreign competitors, who are already focused on the military uses of so called 6G. (65) The federal government must start investing heavily in telecom research and development. The money should be split between nonprofits and for-profit companies, and the goal should be to create a new set of standards that American companies can build on.
And finally, the U.S. should make a significant investment in job training. The U.S. needs to double down on traditional STEM fields and encourage more people in America to go into engineering and math. Beyond that, we need a national skills initiative and mentoring programs to ensure that this new generation of workers will have the training needed to support the cognitive-physical jobs that the 5G Revolution is already beginning to create.
Methodology Appendix
In this paper we estimate both the long-term and short-term job impacts of the 5G Revolution, using different methodologies. Our 15-year estimates build on BLS employment projections, and assume a scenario where the employment impact of 5G is of the same percentage magnitude as the employment impact of Wave 2. The short run current job impact of the 5G build-out is estimated by a combination of BLS data and real-time job postings.
Context There are three main approaches for modeling the occupational impact of new technologies:
1. Consensus-based extrapolation of existing occupation-industry matrix, subject to industry employment constraints
2. Analysis of substitution effects of new technology on existing occupations
3. Modelling of new job creation by new technologies based on analysis of job impact of existing technologies. We call this the “bootstrap” approach.
Occupation-industry matrix In the United States (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2019), Canada (Canada Employment and Social Development Canada,2020), and other OECD countries, the main approach to modeling future occupational growth uses a detailed occupationindustry matrix. Industry growth is projected based on a macroeconomic model and an assumption of full employment, and “small changes” are made in the future coefficients of the occupation-industry matrix.
Because of their size and comprehensiveness, these models tend to be unique for their country. The BLS notes that “there are no comparable projections which are not in some way derived from BLS projections.”
However, such models in practice are not designed to pick up the occupational impact of disruptive technologies or the creation of new occupations. Indeed, the BLS explicitly benchmarks its model against what it calls the “occupational–share naïve model,” where the occupational share doesn’t change over time (BLS 2020).
Substitution effects of new technology
Frey and Osborne (2017) is the best-known example of projecting the potential substitution effects of new technology. By examining the tasks associated with particular occupations, they estimated that about 47 percent of total US employment is at risk of computerization.
However, the authors stress that their models only focus on the substitution effect of new technology, and provide no information at all about the job creation aspects of technology.
However, we make no attempt to forecast future changes in the occupational composition of the labour market. While the 2010-2020 BLS occupational employment projections predict US net employment growth across major occupations, based on historical staffing patterns, we speculate about technology that is in only the early stages of development. This means that historical data on the impact of the technological developments we observe is unavailable. We therefore focus on the impact of computerisation on the mix of jobs that existed in 2010. Our analysis is thus limited to the substitution effect of future computerisation.
For this reason, the substitution effect approach is inappropriate for this project.
Bootstrap approach
What we call the “bootstrap approach” uses the employment effects of previous technological advances to project the impact of future technologies. Shapiro and Hassett (2012) estimated the employment impact of 3G, and used that to project the impact of 4G. Accenture (2017) used the Shapiro-Hassett results for 3G to project the impact of 5G. Eisenbach and Kulik (2020) estimated the employment impact of 4G, and used that to project the impact of 5G.
In this project, we use the bootstrap approach, taking into account the new characteristics of 5G compared to 4G. We model the employment impact of 5G as a deviation from the BLS baseline forecast, based on the observed magnitude of the 4G deviation.
But whereas the employment impact of 4G was completely concentrated in white collar jobs and digital industries, we model the employment impact of 5G as extending to blue-collar jobs that use a combination of manual and problem-solving skills—what we call “cognitivephysical” jobs. Moreover, we model the industry impact of 5G as extending over the entire economy, including physical industries such as manufacturing, agriculture, and defense.
Here’s where the genuinely disruptive nature of 5G comes into play. We expect 5G to enormously increase telecom usage by physical industries, as 5G becomes an integral part of operations. However, as of the 2018 input-output data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, telecom usage is still an extremely low share of intermediate inputs for many industries (see Table 4). As a result, current telecom usage is not a useful guide as to what industries will add workers with 5G.
In addition, to the degree that 5G usage is integrated into operations in physical industries, we would expect that the number of telecom installers and maintainers would increase. That has not yet happened under 4G. Indeed, the number of telecom installers and maintainers fell in 2019, according to BLS data (346K in 2018, versus 315K in 2019).
When dealing with technological trends that have not yet appeared in the official data, it is preferable to adopt the smallest number possible of conservative assumptions. In this case the model uses the employment category of “telecom installers and maintainers” as a proxy for skilled blue-collar, or “cognitive physical” jobs generated by 5G, as described on page 40 of the report. The model uses the employment category of “computer and mathematical occupations” as a proxy for cognitive jobs generated by 5G. And the model distributes the number of 5G jobs across all industries in proportion to their total employment. The model generates a conservative projection of 5G jobs by industry, based on the employment performance of 4G plus a small number of additional assumptions about the difference between 4G and 5G.
We recognize that totally new occupations generated by 5G might fall outside those categories 15 years from now. But given that 5G is just rolling out right now, we don’t have the data necessary, for example, to produce a credible forecast of the number of precision sensor installers that the agriculture sector will need to hire in 2033.
We also note that both the short term and long term models are completely agnostic about whether the 5G networks are built by the current cellular operators or by private enterprise. In fact, that is a strength of the methodology that we use. Industry-specific data was used to analyze Wave 1. But Wave 2 and Wave 3 are modeled based on occupational data which does not reference the cellular operators at all.
Long-term Estimate
The BLS regularly lists projections of employment trends by occupation and industry. As we showed in Tables 1 and 3, these projections underestimated the employment impact of the Wave 1 telecom boom by 50 percent after 10 years. The employment impact of the Wave 2 telecom boom on tech jobs was underestimated by 21 percent after 12 years.
To calculate this underestimate, we applied the projected growth rate of computer and mathematical occupations, derived from the 2007 and 2009 vintage projections, and applied it to the 2007 figure for computer and mathematical occupations from the Current Population Survey (CPS). Then we compared the result to the 2019 figure for computer and mathematical occupations from the CPS. We use the CPS data as the benchmark for the underestimate calculation because it gives the best available measure of the actual growth of tech jobs over time.
The analysis in this paper is based on the employment projections released in September 2019 for the time period 2018-2028. As in the past, these projections clearly do not have a telecom boom built into them. (A new set of projections were released in September 2020, after the analysis of this paper was completed. The new projections do not significantly change the results).
We will use a scenario for 5G jobs which is similar in one major respect to the Wave 2 boom, and different in two other aspects which reflect the particular characteristics of 5G.
As in Wave 2, we estimate that actual computer and mathematical employment (tech jobs) is 20 percent above the baseline BLS projection after 12 years (extending the projections an extra two years). These jobs are a proxy for cognitive jobs. (To be conservative, we use the occupational estimates from the BLS projection report as our 2018 starting point, rather than the somewhat higher CPS figures).
Unlike Wave 2, we estimate that actual number of telecommunications installers and repairers also come in 20 percent above projections after 12 years. These occupations are a proxy for skilled blue-collar, or “cognitive-physical,” jobs.
We allocate the additional jobs proportionally across all industries. By contrast, in Wave 2 the gains mainly came in digital industries.
We also use a conservative job multiplier of 3—that is, two additional indirect jobs for each direct job created by 5G (Bartik and Sotherland, 2019). By contrast, tech jobs are often assumed to create as many as five indirect jobs (MIT Sloane Review, 2012).
Short-term Estimate
We derive the number of “Radio, Cellular, and Tower Equipment Installers and Repairers” from the May 2019 Occupational Employment Statistics (OES). (68) As the name suggests, this category includes the workers who install 5G access points. However, by the nature of network build-out, where tower technicians were working last year may not be where they are working today. So we used the real-time database of job postings maintained by Indeed.com, which identifies itself as “the #1 job site in the world.” (69) Job postings are regularly used by economists as a rich data source. (70) Indeed’s real-time database of job postings is full-text Boolean-searchable, including by title, location and by age of job posting. We searched for job postings with the terms “tower” or “technician” in the title, and “5G” in the body of the posting.
For example, as of early July 2020, a staffing firm was looking for a “Tower Climber Technician” to work on maintaining and repairing 5G networks and based in the Detroit area. That gives us an indication of where mobile carriers or their contractors are hiring.
We also used job posting data to estimate the number of engineers nationally working on 5G projects. We started by searching for job postings with the words “engineer” or “developer” in the title, with postings aged 30 days or less. This gave us our initial pool of roughly 50,000 postings nationally as of the end of April.
Within that pool, roughly 0.6 percent contain the term 5G. The key assumption is the percentage of job postings for engineers and developers that include the term “5G” is a reasonable estimate of the percentage of engineers or developers that are involved in 5G development. Past research has supported this assumption.
Additional References
Accenture. 2017. “Smart Cities: How 5G Can Help Municipalities Become Vibrant Smart Cities.”
Timothy Bartik and Nathan Sotherland. 2019. “Realistic Local Job Multipliers,” WE Upjohn Institute, April 1, 2019.
Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2019. “Projections overview and highlights, 2018–28,” Monthly Labor Review, October 2019.
Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2020a. “Occupational Projections Evaluation: 2008–2018”
Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2020b. “Occupational Employment Statistics,” https://www.bls.gov/oes/
Jeffrey A. Eisenach and Robert Kulick. 2020. “Economic Impacts of Mobile Broadband Innovation: Evidence from the Transition to 4G,” American Enterprise Institute, May 2020.
Employment and Social Development Canada. 2020. “Canadian Occupational Projection System (COPS) – 2019 to 2028 projections.”
Carl B. Frey and Michael A. Osborne. 2017. “The Future Of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs To Computerisation?” Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2017, vol. 114, issue C, 254-280.
AnnElizabeth Konkel. 2020. “Healthcare and Medical Research Postings Decline,” Indeed, July 9, 2020. https://www.hiringlab. org/2020/07/09/healthcare-postings-decline/
MIT Sloan Review. 2012. “The Multiplier Effect of Innovation Jobs,” MIT Sloan Reiew, June 6, 2012. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/themultiplier-effect-of-innovation-jobs/
Robert J. Shapiro and Kevin A. Hassett. 2012. “The Employment Effects of Advances in Internet and Wireless Technology:Evaluating the Transitions from 2G to 3G and from 3G to 4G.”
As U.S. Attorney General William Barr is reportedly rushing to file an antitrust lawsuit against Google, an action that has all the markings of a political vendetta, progressives in the New York state Senate are launching their own campaign against Big Tech.
The Senate Consumer Protection Committee will hold a hearing on Monday to consider a misguided proposal known as the “Twenty-First Century Anti-Trust Act.” The bill would dramatically adjust the purpose of New York’s antitrust laws. Current law aims to prevent price-fixing, while the new proposal would shift the law to a nebulous standard that targets any player assumed to be dominant in the market.
If passed and signed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, this bill would set back innovation in this state.
Over the August recess, I published a paper with Americans For Prosperity (shocking, I know) to highlight where there is bipartisan consensus on telehealth. Since the pandemic began, many telehealth regulations have been lifted and we explained what changes should be made permanent, what changes should go, and what additional policies could make care easier to access remotely.
Sen. Brian Schatz said that our paper demonstrated that, “telehealth is a rare area with strong bipartisan support and it’s here to stay. While we have made some progress in Congress on expanding access to telehealth during this pandemic, we have more work to do to make these changes permanent and allow more patients to continue receiving the critical health care they need wherever they are.”
The coronavirus pandemic is an historic test of the resilience of one of America’s most precious public assets: our public schools. So far, it’s a test we are failing. Tens of millions of children have fallen far behind in their studies. These learning losses will cascade as health fears keep most schools closed this fall – unless schools do a much better job of delivering effective online instruction to all students stranded at home.
As the pandemic continues to spread, it’s hard to imagine a more urgent national imperative than making sure all school districts are equipped to meet this challenge. At stake are the future prospects of 50.8 million public school students—especially those from low-income families, which have been the most severely affected by school closings.
There is no single cause of this failure and no single cure. Access to computers and high-speed internet is obviously essential and should be a priority. However, the core problem is that most schools are still unprepared to deliver quality remote instruction. Most of our large, bureaucratic, overly centralized school systems move too slowly, train their teachers inadequately, and fail to engage too many of their students, as well as their parents.
The U.S. needs a crash program—on a scale equivalent to the 1960s moonshot, but faster—aimed at helping our schools operate virtually, both as a substitute for and an important complement to live instruction. We need a multi-pronged push by elected leaders, school officials, parents and businesses to ensure that every child who needs it has equal access to high-quality remote learning—in 2020 and beyond. We should turn the immediate crisis into an opportunity both to minimize learning loss during the pandemic and to build a strong platform for better teaching and learning for the long term.
Our strategy must be holistic. If the focus is solely on laptops and internet connections, the effort will fail. It must include:
intensive professional development for teachers in online, synchronous teaching and use of available online curricula and resources;
help for teachers and schools in engaging parents — who are, after all, every child’s first teacher;
help for parents whose jobs and other responsibilities make it difficult or impossible to also serve as teachers’ aides at home;
development of new assessment tools to measure the effectiveness of different forms of remote education;
support for students’ social-emotional learning and mental health;
reform of school districts to give schools the flexibility they need to innovate rapidly; and
With our decentralized model of public education, this burden will fall on the shoulders of state and local leaders. Since they are financially strapped by the economic shutdown, however, the federal government must provide emergency funding. As Hoff Varner, a PTA President in Alameda, California, toldTheNew York Times, “If we were a country interested in saving schools the same way we’ve saved airlines and banks, then this is a problem we could solve.”
Instead of problem-solving, President Trump and his party have subjected the country to a needlessly partisan argument over whether or not to physically reopen schools.
Like wearing masks and reopening the economy, reopening the schools should not be a political question. It must depend on whether parents, public health officials, and K-12 leaders believe it is safe for children and teachers in any particular locale to return to the classroom. A mid-July Axios-Ipsos poll showed that 7 in 10 American parents believed in-person classroom instruction was still too risky.
Yet Congressional Republicans are treating the question like another partisan political football. While the GOP Senate bill offered $70 billion for K-12 public schools, Republicans proposed withholding two-thirds of funds from any school district until it submits a plan to the governor providing a detailed timeline for in-person instruction.
This made no sense. Apart from the historical irony of Republicans trying to dictate local school policy from Washington, it could jeopardize the health of millions of students, their parents, and educators. Republican lawmakers must drop their foolish threat to withhold money from schools that don’t physically reopen, and join with Democrats to approve the $70 billion as soon as possible, while also supporting effective public health strategies that will ultimately allow schools to reopen safely.
If that money is distributed by the same formula used last spring for the first $13 billion in federal aid to schools, it would give more money to schools with more low-income students. That will create an enormous opportunity for our urban schools. Using that formula, former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas estimates that Chicago Public Schools, with an operating budget of $6.4 billion a year, will get just over $1 billion in new federal money. That is probably enough to assemble the resources and support across many fronts—if teachers, administrators, school boards, businesses, non-profits, unions, parents, and elected leaders cooperate to dramatically accelerate what to this point has been a slow evolution toward adopting and exploiting the full potential of digitally-enabled remote learning.
What Happened Last Spring
The decisions last spring to send all children home understandably caught America’s 131,000 public, private, and charter K-12 schools off guard. Some districts and schools rose to the challenge; many more did not.
Now teachers’ unions are agitating against both opening schools prematurely and against expectations that they prepare to become full-time online instructors. Unions obviously are right to be concerned about their members’ safety. But the unions can’t have it both ways. If schools stay closed while teachers balk at providing synchronous remote instruction, millions of U.S. children will fall even further behind. Primary and middle schoolers won’t be acquiring the foundational skills – in phonics, reading and arithmetic – they need to become lifetime learners and productive workers.
Data on the spring semester makes it extremely clear that things must change in the fall.
By April 3, three weeks after school districts began shutting down, 76 percent of the 82 large districts studied by the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) still provided no instruction to students. More distressing, by May 22, a third of them still provide no instruction.
But even that finding was overly optimistic. In a later CPRE study of a statistically representative sample of 477 school districts, “We found just one in three districts expect teachers to provide instruction, track student engagement, or monitor academic progress for all students—fewer districts than our initial study suggested,” CRPE reported. “Far too many districts are leaving learning to chance during the coronavirus closures.”
The most damning finding: “Only 14.5 percent of school districts with the highest concentration of students receiving free or reduced-price lunch expect teachers to provide live instruction.”
National student surveys reflected the same disappointing reality: 41 percent of teens did not attend any online or virtual classes; 78 percent reported spending only one to four hours per day on online learning; 32 percent reported two hours or less; and nearly one in four said they were connecting with their teachers less than once a week.
In a survey by YouthTruth, reports CRPE Director Robin Lake, “Only 50 percent of students say they were able to focus on learning and only 41 percent said they were motivated to do schoolwork.”
In sum, about half of U.S. public school students received little or no instruction from March onward.
In the second scenario — the one most likely at this point in many places — students would lose three to four months of learning (beginning in March 2020) if they received “average” remote instruction, seven to 11 months with “lower-quality” remote instruction, and 12 to 14 months if they received no instruction (thanks to a “summer learning loss” that lasted for 17 months).
If districts fail to get their acts together, leaving vulnerable student populations to experience another semester like the one that just ended, millions may never regain their academic footing. Racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps would widen because of disparities in access to devices, internet connections, schools with coherent remote learning plans, live instruction from teachers, and parental supervision (especially in single-parent homes).
This would do lasting damage to students’ personal development and long-term learning prospects, as well as to the US economy as a whole. In 2009, McKinsey estimated the achievement gap between high- and low-income students deprived the U.S. economy of $400 billion to $670 billion a year in productivity. An inadequate online learning response in the coming year will increase that achievement gap.
The Digital Divide
While America’s digital divide has been closing steadily, significant gaps remain. The digital divide has two primary components: broadband adoption and internet-ready computer equipment (generally laptops).
According to the Federal Communication Commission’s latest report, 95 percent of the nation had access to mobile (LTE) coverage in 2018, and nearly 94 percent of the population had access to “advanced” fixed (wireline) broadband. That percentage falls to 77 percent and 72 percent for people living in rural and Tribal areas, respectively. “On average, deployment is highest in census block groups with the highest median household income, the highest population density, and the lowest poverty rate,” the FCC notes.
Almost all (96 percent) students from households earning more than $150,000 had access to a laptop or desktop computer before the pandemic, compared to only half (51 percent) of students in households earning less than $25,000. A recent study on America’s “homework gap” estimates that nearly 17 million U.S. students, especially students of color, lack fixed (wireline) internet access at home.
Before the pandemic about a quarter of Black and Latinx households had not adopted residential broadband, compared to 10 percent of white households and 5 percent of Asian households. Among students whose families earned less than $30,000 annually, 35 percent didn’t have a broadband connection at home; in households earning more than $75,000, just 6 percent had not adopted residential broadband.
According to researchers at the University of Michigan, students who rely mainly on mobile connections lag behind those who have fixed broadband at home:
We find that students who do not have access to the Internet from home or are dependent on a cell phone alone for access perform lower on a range of metrics, including digital skills, homework completion, and grade point average. They are also less likely to intend on completing a college or university degree. A deficit in digital skills compounds many of the inequalities in access and contributes to students performing lower on standardized test scores, such as the SAT, and being less interested in careers related to science, technology, engineering, and math.
The Federal Communications Commission created a “Keep Americans Connected” challenge to broadband operators last March. To date, more than 800 companies and associations have pledged to (1) refrain from terminating internet service to any residential or small business customers because of their temporary inability to pay bills; (2) waive any late fees that residential or small business customers incur as a result of the pandemic; and (3) open their Wi-Fi hotspots to any American who needs them.
The nation’s broadband providers developed new programs and expanded existing programs to help low-wage workers and families that didn’t subscribe to internet at home. For example, Cox Cable offered discounted internet to families with children who qualified for subsidized meals, selected veterans, senior citizens, college students, public housing residents, and families that received rental assistance. Comcast, Spectrum, Optimum, Suddenlink, and others offered free broadband and Wi-Fi access for 60 days to certain customers—for example, students and low-income households.
Some schools and districts engaged with community partners to ensure students had access to high-speed internet. Public libraries offered mobile hotspots. Some school districts converted buses into mobile hotspots and parked them in high-need communities. Alabama has used $10 million in federal relief funds to make every bus in the state a Wi-Fi hotspot.
These efforts need to be continued and expanded, with federal and state support. However, having broadband and devices is simply not enough, as all the data indicate. Even when provided with both, many students simply were unprepared for virtual learning. Ten weeks into the shutdown, the School District of Philadelphiareported that nearly 40 percent of students failed to attend online school on an average day. In Chicago, where 90 percent of public school students had online access, 41 percent logged into an online classroom fewer than three times a week.
There are too many barriers to successful online education that go well beyond just putting a connected laptop in a child’s hands, and those barriers must be broken down. Students must be engaged in learning by their schools and teachers; parents have to support, encourage, and push them; states and school districts must learn how to measure the effectiveness of different remote learning approaches; and districts need to give their schools the flexibility to change their staffing models, budgets, and teaching strategies.
PPI recommends that states, districts, and charter schools focus on the following areas:
Training Teachers
Despite scant experience or training in virtual education, many teachers were thrust overnight into a wrenching transition from face-to-face instruction to online teaching. And most districts were not prepared to train them. Seven out of ten surveyed teachersreported they had not been properly prepared for virtual learning. The Washington Post reported that a survey found 43 percent of school administrators and 57 percent of teachers feeling “overwhelmed” by distance learning instruction.
In New York City, teachers were only given three days of training in online instruction, which for many of them was a first-time-ever introduction to basic learning platforms such as Google Classroom. But few teachers across the country had ever had to figure out how the keep third graders engaged in a Zoom class all day, how to use online content to excite the curiosity of inner city kids, how to grade fairly when some homes had no parent available to assist, or dozens of other challenges. For thousands of dedicated and conscientious teachers, the learning curve toward a new and different style of pedagogy has been steep.
A new survey of 800 educators by EdTech Evidence Exchange and the University of Virginia found that only 27 percent of teachers participated in any kind of formal professional learning for online instruction last spring. About a quarter of teachers reported they covered no new material during the school closings, while more than half said they covered less of the curriculum than they normally do.
Some districts are wisely delaying school openings to allow time to train teachers in remote learning. For instance, Clark County, Nevada’s largest district, delayed the start of school by two weeks to provide teachers 10 full days of professional development.
There are many kinds of educational software already available that schools can use, much of it free. For instance, Summit Public Schools in California has spent the past decade developing and sharing its Summit Learning Program for free with almost 400 other schools around the country. Developed by its teachers and programmed by software engineers provided by Mark Zuckerberg, it is a sophisticated system that uses software and online tools to help kids acquire content knowledge and projects to help them develop their deeper learning skills, such as research, writing, speaking, critical thinking, and teamwork.
Most teachers need intensive training to learn about their instructional options, confer with school leaders and parents about which option best meet their students’ needs, and become comfortable using them. On top of that, teachers need training in how to engage students and keep them engaged—an entirely different challenge during remote education than with a classroom full of children.
Hit especially hard by school closures were the 7.1 million students ages 3-21 who required special education services. Not only did many of them lack computers and residential broadband, but many were cut off from occupational, speech, and physical therapy. Because the hallmark of special education is individualized or small-group support for students with a wide array of unique needs, it is impossible to devise a standard “model” for remote learning. Online programs and computers must be tailored to reflect students’ various disabilities. Some experts believe teachers should also offer one-on-one support to acclimate special needs students to learning by computer and to track their progress.
“Some states allow in-person supports for students with disabilities. In Maryland and California, some providers may visit children’s homes,” reports Beth Hawkins in The 74. “In Washington state, some students can attend meetings and receive services in school buildings with proper social distancing.”
As many parents with pre-schoolers discovered last spring, trying to deliver early learning digitally also can be an exasperating experience for everyone involved. According toeducation researcher Jesse McNeill:
Distance learning presents a particular challenge to early childhood learners. Remote learning strategies that work for older students (e.g., synchronous, hour-long lectures) do not translate to younger students who rely heavily on adult facilitation and cannot pay attention for long periods. In addition, many early childhood learning activities require one-on-one facilitation or small-group interaction, which is difficult to deliver in a distance learning environment.
To surmount such difficulties, pre-K teachers and parents will have to work closely together to develop routines around remote instruction that respect the multiple pressures on working parents, and that also build in opportunities for the face-to-face interactions that young children need.
In short, online learning isn’t simply a matter of parking a teacher in front of a camera and rolling the tape. Everyone – students, teachers, parents and administrators – will need training in new ways to teach and learn.
Engaging and Supporting Parents
The effectiveness of virtual learning often hinges on how engaged parents are in making sure their children participate. In effect, remote learning shifts some of the burden of administering their children’s education from teachers to parents, who also have to navigate their own work responsibilities. One recent study found that 60 percent of teachers say that the lack of parental supervision and support at home is a key reason why students don’t participate in online learning.
Many older and low-income parents lack digital skills (and some lack English language skills) to coach their children on how to learn online. In fact, according to a survey by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, many parents ironically look to their kids to teach them these skills:
Children frequently help their parents use devices that connect to the Internet, such as computers, tablets, and smartphones. Half (53 percent) of all low- and moderate-income parents who use the Internet say that their child helps them, including 63 percent of those whose child is between 10 and 13 years old. Parents with lower educational attainment are more likely to turn to their children for help: 62 percent of those who did not graduate from high school do so, compared with 45 percent of those with a college degree. Hispanic parents are the most likely to say that their child has helped them use Internet-connected devices (63 percent, compared with 45 percent of Whites), but there were no statistically significant differences within the Hispanic community by income, language, or immigrant generation.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that in households with minor children, only about 35 percent of parents are able to telework from home. Since someone has to stay home to take care of the kids, single parents who aren’t able to telework are forced to give up their jobs. Only 19.7 percent of Blacks and 16.2 percent of Latinos can telework and support their children’s learning throughout the day.
Remote learning places a special burden on parents who also happen to be teachers. According to the Brookings Institution, nearly half of public school teachers have children living at home. It’s difficult to deliver online instruction to their students while also helping their children get the most from their online courses – especially if both things are happening at the same time.
Federal funds to help parents afford childcare during the upcoming school year are essential, including support for innovative solutions such as “learning pods” or “pandemic pods.” These are small groups of students who learn together with an in-person teacher or tutor. A Godsend to parents trying to juggle their day jobs while also supervising their childrens’ education, learning pods nonetheless are expensive and families with low and modest incomes should get public help to defray the costs.
Schools also need to engage parents in helping to teach their children, particularly parents without computer skills. In Prince George’s County, Maryland, the school district has created nine Parent Centers throughout the 133,000-student district, where parents can get help with using computers and other challenges. The Centers give parents tips on keeping children engaged, connecting with a Parent Teacher Organization (PTO), and finding the best ways to communicate with teachers and monitor student participation.
A practice of many of the nation’s best charter schools to encourage parental engagement should be widely adopted. Many charters have long sent teachers to visit their students’ homes and asked parents to sign contracts that commit them to supporting the education of their children. Some of the nation’s more innovative school districts, including those in Denver and Washington, D.C., have begun to emulate this practice. Several studies have found that students perform better when teachers actively reach out to their parents.
But not all “family engagement” is equally effective. As many parents know, involvement in a PTA, a potluck dinner at school, or a back-to-school night doesn’t help their kids learn. Research suggests that parents can best help their children by communicating high expectations and the value of learning, monitoring progress and holding their children accountable, supporting learning at home, advocating for them, and guiding their major decisions to college or career.
Some schools and districts actively help parents develop these skills. The Flamboyan Foundation, a leader in this field, has trained thousands of teachers, particularly in Washington, D.C. The training has several purposes, according to Flamboyan’s former executive director, Susan Stevenson: 1) to change teacher beliefs and mindsets about parents, so they see parents as assets and engaging them as part of their responsibility; 2) to build trusting, mutually respectful relationships and two-way communication with families; 3) to help teachers work with parents (and their surrogates), so those parents can help their children succeed in school; 4) and to enable teachers to learn from families about their children, so they can better teach them.
Districts and charter networks should use some of any federal money that arrives to train and pay their teachers to do these things, virtually as well as physically. Funding will also be necessary to provide translators for parents and other caregivers who don’t speak English.
Finally, each school should have a communication plan to ensure parents have access to timely information about available resources. Schools should also createsupport groups for parents of multiple children, parents of special needs students, and parents who are essential workers and cannot stay home to make sure their children are keeping up with their studies.
Assessing Student Progress
As students return to school, whether virtually or in person, using diagnostic tests to assess their current level of content knowledge will be critical to charting a path forward. Without preliminary assessments, schools and parents will lack a yardstick for measuring the gains (or losses) from remote instruction.
Districts and schools will need an injection of federal and state resources and support to design ways to regularly assess how well different forms of remote learning are working, so teachers can continuously improve their offerings. End-of-year tests do not help with this task: schools will need to assess progress every six weeks or so. While some already do that in some form, all will need to learn which forms of assessment work best in a remote-learning environment. For instance, they will need to incorporate student and parent surveys into their assessments, to measure student engagement. And they will need to measure and emphasize academic growth (how much children learn over time), not just proficiency (whether they are at grade level).
Most states already require some form of annual growth measurement, although California’s approach is woeful and some other states could strengthen their methods. Tennessee’s Value-Added Assessment System offers a good model, but districts will need a different approach to measure growth more often than once a year.
Supporting Students’ Social-Emotional Learning and Mental Health
Successful schools help students not just to learn content, but to develop their social-emotional competencies, such as persistence, self-discipline, responsible decision-making, ability to work with others, and ability to set and achieve goals. Like many things, this becomes more challenging in a remote-learning environment.
One key is establishing close relationships between teachers and students. In most successful charter schools, for instance, all students participate in an “advisory” or “family”—a group of 15 or so students with one teacher. They meet regularly and often focus on activities and discussions meant to build social-emotional competencies. The teacher is expected to get to know each student and their family well and to keep track of how they are doing. Many charter school leaders believe that these close relationships—more than any other factor—helped make their transitions to remote learning effective.
The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) has published a guide to enhancing social-emotional learning in this time, which includes many other useful suggestions.
As the pandemic moves through communities, it leaves behind emotional scars. Particularly in communities of color, students grieve the loss or illness of parents and other relatives, in isolation from their friends. In the coming months, more of them will face economic hardship, including eviction from their homes. For some, mental health issues will become acute. Clearly, districts and schools need federal and state funds to hire additional social workers and psychologists who can reach out and work with students and their families dealing with trauma.
ModernizingSchool System Organization
In addition to delivering emergency aid to schools so that our children keep learning during the pandemic, our leaders need to craft a long-term strategy for making our K-12 system more resilient against future pandemics or other shocks. They should pay heed to a key lesson from school districts’ uneven performance last spring: organization matters.
Most of America’s K-12 public schools are organized under a century-old model, in which school districts own and operate all schools within a defined geography and vest authority to make all key decisions in a superintendent and his or her staff, not in school principals.
Centralized, rule-driven, bureaucratic monopolies worked well enough during the Industrial Era, when most graduates would go on to manual labor or stay home and raise kids. But global competition has raised the bar dramatically; today’s graduates must be able to do so much more to earn a decent living. Meanwhile, the pace of change has accelerated and computer technologies have made amazing things possible.
In response, a new model for school organization and governance has begun to emerge, geared to the knowledge economy. Non-hierarchical and decentralized, the new model is built upon school autonomy, strict public accountability, and the ability to choose among very different schools tailored to the diverse needs of children. In the 21st century, success comes from decentralized networks of mission-driven organizations whose customers have choices, not from top-down bureaucracies.
This explains why public charter schools, which are freed from district bureaucracies, educate urban children far more effectively than district schools in most cities. By their fourth year in a charter, urban charter students learn 50 percent more every year than district students with similar demographics and past test scores, according to a study of 41 urban regions by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes.
Free from red tape and bureaucracy, charters are also nimbler than district-operated schools. Recent surveys by the Center for Reinventing Public Education, at the University of Washington, showed that charter management organizations transitioned to distance learning faster and more thoroughly this spring than districts did, on average. They were already more likely to use educational software, to deliver personalized learning, and to engage parents in their children’s learning. CRPE found that many of them quickly redefined teachers’ roles and responsibilities to fit the new reality—using teacher leaders for each grade to lead the redesign of instruction, record sample lessons, and organize professional development for other teachers, for instance.
On the other hand, school districts had the resources to purchase and distribute computers and hotspots quickly, a big advantage. To adapt to remote learning effectively, in other words, school systems needed strong central offices capable of marshaling resources but decentralized operation of individual schools, so empowered principals and teachers can quickly implement remote education and the support systems required for success.
The combination of capable central offices that can steer well and empowered school leaders and teachers who can row effectively is possible in a system of charter schools. But it is also possible in districts that give schools charter-like autonomy. (With this autonomy must come accountability for performance—including potential replacement by a stronger operator—since not all autonomous schools will succeed.)
More than a dozen school districts across the nation are converting significant numbers of their schools to this model. A good example is Indianapolis Public Schools, which has converted a third of its schools to nonprofit organizations with full autonomy and five-year performance agreements. They are called “innovation network schools,” and they include restarts of failing schools, new startups, conversions of district schools, and conversions of charter schools. Since they were launched five years ago, they have been the fastest improving group of schools in the district.
States should create incentives – both carrots and sticks — for districts to do this. In Texas, for instance, the state can appoint a new school board if a district school is rated failing for five years in a row. But districts that recruit nonprofit organizations to operate “partnership schools” get a two-year reprieve from sanctions, plus an average of $1,000 per student per year in extra funding to help turn around those schools.
Because such autonomous schools have more leeway to create innovative approaches to distance learning, other states should pass similar legislation, and Congress should include a financial incentive to encourage states to do so. By devoting as little as $2-3 billion to challenge grants for states that empower and encourage their districts to shift toward a more decentralized model, the federal government could speed up a transition that is underway but moving far too slowly.
Conclusion
The various investments proposed above focus on the immediate need to improve remote learning, but they will benefit students when they return to school buildings as well. Educational software and online resources are incredibly valuable, whether as primary or secondary/homework materials, and the more familiar teachers, students and parents are with them, the better. Parental engagement is an area most schools need to improve rather dramatically, so improvements made during a period of exclusively remote learning will benefit their students as more normal conditions return. Assessment of student progress is already rudimentary at too many schools, so efforts to expand it and make it more sophisticated during the pandemic can help for the long term. The same goes for social-emotional learning and mental health supports. And finally, the need to modernize our century-old operating systems for public education was acute before the pandemic and will remain so afterward.
America’s school districts and charter networks will use some of any forthcoming emergency federal money for technology, and some of it to make their school buildings safer when students return to them. But educational leaders should not ignore the “people” side of the equation. More than anything else, we need more involved parents, teachers with more expertise in using educational software and the Internet, students able to learn because they have support in dealing with the trauma in their lives, and school districts in which the central office can steer effectively but leave the rowing—the operational decisions about hiring, firing, budget, curriculum and school day and year—to those hired to run the school.
President Donald Trump is desperate to make this campaign about anything other than the economic disaster his incompetence has largely caused. But Joe Biden can’t let him do it. Biden’s own robust economic recovery plans must become the Biden-Harris ticket’s key election message.
And no wonder. More than 22 million Americans lost their jobs just in March and April as Donald Trump bungled the COVID crisis, but more than half of those jobs have yet to return. Job growth in July was less than half that of June. And the new August numbers out last Friday being touted by the administration in fact barely make a dent in this new structural unemployment. The actual unemployment rate may be closer to 9% due to misclassification, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics, andover 29 million people were receiving unemployment benefits as of mid-August.
ort. We get data on this employment from two different sources. First, the BLS track
Current 5G Engineering and Software Jobs
