Critics and supporters of the British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer are asking how long he can hold the top job.
More than 80 Labour MPs have now publicly urged Sir Keir to resign immediately or draw up an exit timetable, with four ministers stepping down.
Meanwhile more than 100 Labour MPs have signed a statement opposing a leadership contest. So which side will prevail?
Advanced recycling offers a unique potential solution to the problem of plastic waste. Conventional mechanical recycling is limited by technological and logistical issues, particularly the inability to process plastic waste contaminated by food or oil residue. Mechanical recycling is also not designed to recycle the millions of tons of flexible plastics (e.g., shopping bags and plastic films) generated each year, which means those plastic products must be sent to landfills. Existing recycling initiatives have shown promise, but not at the scale required to meaningfully reduce the amount of plastic waste that ends up in landfills.
A distinct advantage of advanced recycling over mechanical recycling is that, through chemical processes like pyrolysis, advanced recycling facilities can reduce plastics down to the molecular level. This means that a broader range of plastics, including flexible plastics, can be recycled at advanced recycling facilities compared to mechanical ones. Advanced recycling facilities are complementary to existing mechanical recycling facilities: together, both types of facilities form an “all-of-the-above” solution to recycling plastic waste.
In addition to broadening the types of plastic materials that can be recycled, advanced recycling expands the geographical extent of recycling efforts. Advanced recycling technology can be added to oil refineries, integrating plastic waste into their processes as a feedstock. Many existing oil refineries are located in states that historically have had low recycling rates, such as Louisiana, which currently has an estimated total plastic recycling rate of just 6%.
Advanced recycling could deliver economic benefits to municipalities beyond the benefits of plastic waste diversion. Landfills charge a “tipping fee” per ton of waste collected. Because recycling diverts plastic waste away from landfills, advanced recycling could save between $230 million and $328 million in tipping fees per year for municipalities across the U.S. For example, Los Angeles County, CA, could save between $3 to $6 million in tipping fees while Harris County, TX, could save up to $22 million.
Despite the potential environmental and economic benefits of advanced recycling technology, the advanced recycling industry lacks the regulatory framework necessary for a robust market for plastic waste to form. Absent strong economic incentives to collect, sort, and transport waste to advanced recycling facilities, the scale of the industry and its realized benefits will be constrained.
The most important charter school story today isn’t how many students they serve or whether they outperform district schools. While those questions matter, they’re too narrow. National Charter Schools Week invites us to talk about the bigger story of how the charter school idea has reshaped American K–12 public education.
When the charter idea emerged in the early 1990s, it was framed as a way to create independent public schools of choice with more freedom over how they operated but more accountability for what students learned.
In 1999, that goal led National Urban League President Hugh Price to propose that policymakers “charterize all urban schools” to liberate them from “stifling district bureaucracy” and give them “the latitude to operate.”
While charter schools haven’t replaced traditional K–12 public schools, they’ve done something arguably more consequential. They’ve changed what families, educators, and policymakers expect from all public schools. What was a boutique innovation is increasingly a baseline expectation.
Since the Supreme Court struck down Donald Trump’s International Emergency Economic Powers Act tariffs in February, administration officials have been working to revive the levies using different trade laws. They implemented a 10% across-the-board tariff, which the Court of International Trade held illegal on Thursday. But the White House is using another strategy, which descends through the fjords of Norway and puddles of Bangladeshi cement into economic absurdity.
In mid-March, the administration announced it would investigate 16 economies under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which allows Washington to impose tariffs on countries with policies that burden or restrict U.S. commerce.
The targets of this probe, from giants like China and the European Union to little Norway, stand accused of “structural excess capacity.” The phrase isn’t something economic literature explains, but U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer’s office describes it essentially as countries’ producing more manufactured goods than they reasonably ought to. The administration uses the concept to claim that two normal features of economies, including America’s, are predatory.
WASHINGTON (May 8, 2026) — The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) today challenged the Trump administration’s Section 301 investigation into alleged “structural excess capacity” in 16 economies, arguing the probe misuses trade law, rests on economically unsound premises, and lacks evidence of the foreign government practices it purports to address.
Ed Gresser, PPI Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets, delivered the critique during a public hearing before the Section 301 Committee, testifying that senior administration officials have candidly stated the investigation’s true goal is to recreate tariff rates the Supreme Court invalidated in February on constitutional grounds, a purpose Section 301 was never designed to serve.
Gresser systematized three core defects in the USTR’s March 11 Federal Register Notice initiating the probe:
PPI does not support broad tariff increases as economic policy, noting that tariffs function as regressive taxes that disproportionately burden lower-income households and goods-intensive industries, including farming, manufacturing, and construction. Despite administration hopes that higher tariffs would expand U.S. manufacturing, the sector has shed jobs and lost economic share since 2024.
Read and download the testimony here.
Founded in 1989, PPI is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Find an expert and learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Follow us at @ppi.
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Media Contact: Ian O’Keefe – iokeefe@ppionline.org
President Trump promises “monumental” and “spectacular” celebrations this year to mark the 250th anniversary of American independence. For example, on June 14 — his 80th birthday — the White House will host an Ultimate Fighting Championship match.
For this most combative of presidents, nothing honors America like young men punching and kicking the heck out of each other in the Rose Garden.
Despite Trump’s bombastic notions of American greatness — or perhaps because of them — the nation’s deep political fractures cast a pall on its 250th birthday party. Reaching this milestone should be an occasion for reaffirming the nation’s founding precepts and our never-ending struggle to live up to them. Instead, we’re relitigating the most basic question of national identity: What does it mean to be an American?
During the 1976 bicentennial celebration, there wasn’t much controversy about the answer. Both Democrats and Republicans laid claim to the ideals that animated the American Revolution: individual freedom, equality and popular self-rule. Where they differed was in how they interpreted and applied these overarching principles.
But Trump seems to regard them as pious claptrap, a fig leaf for the one thing he does respect: a ruthless will to power. Vice President JD Vance likewise rejects the “creedal” understanding of American identity, which he sees as anchored more firmly in ethnicity, religion and attachment to place than in arid abstractions about liberty and democracy.
Members of the 301 Committee:
Thank you very much for this opportunity to provide comments on behalf of the Progressive Policy Institute on the “Section 301” investigation opened last March 11th, alleging “Structural Excess Capacity” in 16 economies and U.S. trading partners, specifically Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, the European Union, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Norway, Singapore, Switzerland, Thailand, Taiwan, and Vietnam.
The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit think-tank, established in 1989 and led by President Will Marshall, and publishes on a wide range of public policy topics. PPI has participated in U.S. trade policy debates since its founding, through public commentary, Congressional testimony, convenings, and participation in TPSC and U.S. Trade Representative Office hearings. I have served as PPI’s Vice President since 2021, and direct research and publishing on trade policy and global economy topics. Before joining PPI, I served as Assistant USTR for Policy and Economics, with responsibility for overseeing agency economic research and use of trade data, chairing the interagency Trade Policy Staff Committee, and administering the Generalized System of Preferences.
My testimony this morning covers four topics:
• The apparent goal of this investigation, as explained by senior administration officials;
• Its core concept of “structural excess capacity”;
• The relevance of the data points presented in USTR’s March 11 Federal Register Notice as justifying inclusion of the 16 economies; and
• A more appropriate approach if the administration wishes to create new tariff rates.
[…]
“This raises basic questions about the administration’s strategy of taking old laws out of context and using them to try to nullify Congress’s constitutional authority over tariffs,” said Ed Gresser, vice president of the Progressive Policy Institute in D.C., who was a U.S. trade official during the first Trump administration.
[…]
Of the many standing ovations King Charles III received in Congress last week, few were more surprising than the response to his comments about the war in Ukraine. Britain and the United States have stood “shoulder to shoulder” for centuries, he declared, through two world wars, the Cold War, 9-11, and Afghanistan. “Today … that same, unyielding resolve is needed for the defense of Ukraine”—and with that, more than 400 U.S. Senators and Representatives, Democrats and Republicans, leapt to their feet in applause.
But President Donald Trump is determined to go his own way despite the consensus, and there were more signs last week that the U.S. has washed its hands of Kyiv’s four-year-old conflict with Moscow.
First, America’s acting ambassador in Kyiv resigned—the second envoy to quit in just 12 months—citing Washington’s dwindling support for its one-time ally. Then Trump had another friendly 90-minute phone call with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. Apparently forgetting that Moscow has been supplying Iran with intelligence about American targets in the Persian Gulf, the 47th president once again underlined their long friendship and praised the dictator for what Trump sees as his willingness to agree to a Ukraine ceasefire. Speaking later from the Oval Office, Trump reminded reporters that the United States is no longer giving Kyiv American weapons or ammunition, and he dumped responsibility for Ukraine’s future in Europe’s lap.
“We helped [Europe] with Ukraine, and they made a mess [of it],” the president maintained, twisting the historical record to serve his grudge of the moment. “Ukraine has nothing to do with [us]. We’re an ocean apart. It has to do with them.”
| 2026 | 12.70% |
| 2025 | 4.30% |
| 2024 | 4.60% |
| 2023 | 4.70% |
| 2022 | 4.20% |
* USITC Dataweb
Asking the Senate for budget money late last month, Howard Lutnick claims the administration’s first-year policy adventures “dramatically reduced the trade deficit, lowered imports, and increased exports to over $3.4 trillion, a 6% increase from 2024.”
Mr. Lutnick’s stats are rarely precise, and no exception here. Four factual claims in twenty words, two of them wrong, two right.
The errors are on imports and balance, and pretty easy to clear up. Each month, the Census Bureau — a branch of Mr. L’s Department! — publishes the official U.S. trade data. Their most recent report shows that imports rose from $4.1 trillion to $4.3 trillion rather than getting “lower.” Vis-à-vis trade balance, the 2025 deficit was down by 0.2% if you combine goods and services, or up by 2.0% if you count goods alone. Reasonable people can debate whether this is “very slightly down,” “a little bit up,” or “essentially the same.” But either way, it isn’t “dramatic.”
The points about export growth are more interesting — factually correct, but in a strange and unsettling way. The figures, if you look at them in a little detail, turn out mainly to be a sharp rise in transfers of precious metal abroad. That in turn suggests less a useful jump in selling things to foreigners than financial unease, fading confidence, and maybe an exotic form of capital flight. Background –
The Census Bureau statisticians say that last year, American exports (goods and services combined) rose from $3.23 trillion to $3.43 trillion. That, as Mr. Lutnick says, is 6%, or more precisely 6.2%. This makes 2025 exactly the 21st-century median year for export growth, and a bit below the long-term 7.2% export growth average since 1960.
In most cases, a modestly higher export number may be dull, but it means Americans are selling more cars, airplanes, and soybeans abroad, getting more software downloads and movie screenings, etc., and/or that prices have gone up a bit. There’s some of both involved in last year’s figures, but neither farm-and-factory goods nor inflation is the main story. About two thirds of last year’s goods export growth — $68 billion of $117 billion — comes not from ships full of grain, LNG tankers, ro/ros stacked with cars, planes delivering semiconductors to waiting factories, and so forth, but the physical shipment of about 260 tons of gold from U.S. vaults under Wall Street, along with 17 tons of platinum and lots of silver, to London, Zurich, and Hong Kong.
Early data for 2026 show this accelerating. Precious metals (HTS 72) typically make up about 4% of U.S. export values, and reached 7% over the course of 2025. By last February — the most recent month for which full data are up on the USITC’s Dataweb — they had reached 15%, overtaking energy, airplanes, agriculture, cars, chemicals, and other big items as the single largest U.S. export. (Yesterday’s Census trade release adds March figures, and appears about the same.) The jump — the St. Louis Fed presents gold shipments as a classic “hockey stick” graph – appears to reflect a combination of (a) higher prices, (b) investors guessing that precious metals may be better bets than stocks or dollars, and (c) central banks “repatriating” assets, likely thinking the U.S. isn’t as safe a place to hold valuable things as was a couple of years ago. A quick table of February’s top exports:
| Total February 2026 goods exports | $195.1 billion |
| Gold, silver, platinum, precious metal products (HTS 72) | $29.4 billion |
| Energy | $25.2 billion |
| Chemicals (excluding pharmaceuticals) | $16.0 billion |
| Agriculture (USDA definition) | $14.7 billion |
| Airplanes | $12.2 billion |
| Automotive (vehicles and parts) | $10.0 billion |
| Semiconductors | $7.0 billion |
| Pharmaceuticals | $6.9 billion |
So Mr. Lutnick was off on imports and balances. He did get export growth right, though, even though most of it seems to be money leaving the country. And he may well be right to say that Trump administration policies are at least in part responsible. As to whether that’s something to boast about …
PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:
Mr. Lutnick testifies at the Senate Appropriations Committee.
… Census’ monthly trade data has some correctives.
… and the St. Louis Federal Reserves “FRED” database has a classic “hockey stick” gold export graph.
Gold background –
Will the U.S. run out of gold? Not likely. The government owns 8,133 tons and so far hasn’t touched it. Also, the U.S. Geological Survey thinks there’s at least 15,000 tons still underground.
The U.S. Mint explains Fort Knox and the U.S. Bullion Depository.
USGS’ summary of gold production, trade, reserves, and uses as of 2025.
The World Gold Council tallies gold reserves by country
… and recaps prices since 2023.
Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.
Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.
Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.
Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.
For years, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary has long been idolized by MAGA Republicans and served as a point of reference for conservatism around the world. Now that he’s been knocked from power, Democrats could stand to take some lessons from the man responsible, Péter Magyar.
The new prime minister, who ended Orbán’s 16-year rule in Hungary’s April 12 elections, showed that it was possible to take down a corrupt authoritarian in a country where democracy had long been on the ropes. But crucially, he did it with a playbook that seems just as suited for America in the age of Trump as it was for Eastern Europe.
Lesson one? Wage a fight against the corrupt establishment. Magyar previously served in Orbán’s Fidesz government. But he broke with the party and rocketed to fame in 2024 as a whistleblower against official graft and fraud, releasing secret audio that revealed members of Orbán’s circle had interfered with a corruption prosecution case.
He had a flair for spectacle, too: In February, for instance, he filed a public police report accusing the government of surreptitiously recording a “honey trap” sex tape involving him and an ex-girlfriend as a means of blackmail.
College accreditation is one of the least understood and most important issues in higher education. It is the process by which private, nonprofit organizations recognized by the federal government decide whether a college meets basic standards of academic quality, financial stability, and institutional performance. The findings of this process have enormous consequences for the institution, including its ability to access federal student grants and loans. Now that the U.S. Department of Education has completed the opening round of public negotiations over a major accreditation overhaul, accreditation will likely garner more public attention.
The Department’s Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization, or AIM, process is not a modest tune-up of the rules governing the nation’s dozens of regional and national accreditors, such as the Middle States Commission on Higher Education and the Distance Education Accrediting Commission for online schools. The proposed rules, being hammered out by federal officials and the non-federal representatives of key stakeholder groups, are a broad effort to remake accreditation, including more competition among accreditors, fewer barriers for new accreditors, stronger accountability for student outcomes, and a system that’s responsive to taxpayers. One round of negotiations finished in April, and another is scheduled for May.
Those goals are consistent with the Education Department’s February announcement that it was reducing barriers for new accreditors, noting that few new accreditors have received federal recognition in recent decades. The case for reform is not hard to understand. The current system has long been criticized for being insular, process-heavy, and weakly tied to students’ success following graduation.
In the Education Department’s presentation and in the discussion that followed at its week-long opening round of public negotiations held in Washington, D.C., Department officials and the key stakeholder groups repeatedly noted that long-standing regional accreditors still dominate oversight of institutions, enrollment, and federal student-aid dollars. Voluntary switching by institutions from one accreditor to another is rare. And student outcomes vary widely across post-secondary institutions within the same accrediting agencies.
That’s not a trivial indictment. It suggests that accreditation is less an important validation of quality than a cozy arrangement among incumbents. Some of the Education Department’s ideas follow naturally from that diagnosis. These ideas include making it easier for institutions seeking to become accreditors to gain recognition, thus easing the path for colleges to switch accreditors. Another idea: using risk-based institutional reviews to focus federal scrutiny on the institutions that oversee the most student-aid dollars, draw the most complaints, or are growing quickly.
[…]
Then, Ed Gresser, of the left-leaning think tank the Progressive Policy Institute, is expected to argue on Friday that the 301 rests on a flawed premise, warning that producing more than a country consumes “is normal and common” in global trade. He will add that it risks sweeping in countries where exports “appear to be normal cases of comparative advantage” rather than evidence of unfair practices, highlighting apparel production in places like Cambodia.
[…]
President Donald Trump’s revenge campaign of criminal prosecutions against his political enemies is showing no signs of stopping. Just this past week brought new indictments against former FBI Director James Comey, who earned the president’s ire for his role in the Russia investigation, and the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose work fighting hate groups has irked the political right.
It is possible these cases will stumble, just like the administration’s past attempts to turn “Lock her up” into a governing philosophy. Judges and grand juries foiled previous efforts to target Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and the so-called Seditious Six—Democratic lawmakers who filmed a video urging troops to resist illegal orders. Prosecutors also dropped a probe of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell last week in the face of Republican political pressure.
But even if nobody ultimately goes to jail, these investigations and indictments have been far from harmless. They have corroded our justice system by showing it can be wielded as a tool of harassment, intimidation, and vengeance. To undo that damage, we will need reforms that rebuild guardrails against abuse. Trump’s legal minions have been able to intrusively investigate his foes, rummaging through their private information using grand jury subpoenas, and repeatedly presenting charges to grand juries until something—anything—might stick.
They have been able to do this because federal prosecutors wield extraordinary power under a “presumption of regularity”; courts generally assume that the government’s lawyers act in good faith, follow norms of fairness, and keep politics out of charging decisions. That presumption rests on a reputation built over generations that the current administration has shattered.
Then we go to Kyiv, Ukraine to speak with Tamar Jacoby, the Director of the Progressive Policy Institute’s New Ukraine Project. She was a senior writer and justice editor at Newsweek and, before that, the deputy editor of the New York Times op-ed page. She is the author of Displaced: The Ukrainian Refugee Experience and we discuss how yesterday Trump checked in with the boss in and hour and half phone call with Putin and Tamar’s article at The Washington Monthly, “The U.S.-Europe Rift: How Trump’s Iran War is Making it Worse.”
[…]
As Kahlenberg points out, homeowners have legitimate concerns about the risk of eroding property values, heightened congestion and noise, and overtaxed city services.
Kahlenberg argues, however, that we have overindexed on protecting existing homeowners and failed to strike a balance between their needs and those of neighbors who would like to move to our towns. He points out that enacting missing-middle local policies has been shown to have many more upsides, including providing housing for a greater range of family incomes, with few of the most feared downsides (housing value drops, congestion, etc.) materializing.
[…]
