When the British political strategist Deborah Mattinson heard Vice President Kamala Harris boast in the presidential debate about prosecuting transnational gangs, she thought the message was spot on — and that Harris needed to deliver it many, many, many more times.
The former head of strategy for Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who won a landslide election in July, Mattinson was in Washington the week of the debate to meet with Democrats, including advisers to the Harris campaign, and share lessons from the Labor Party’s smashing summer victory. She and Claire Ainsley, Starmer’s former head of policy, urged Democrats to focus intently on winning back working-class voters who had drifted to the right in recent years — toward right-wing populists who seemed more in touch with their economic frustrations and cultural grievances.
“For voters, cost of living and immigration are the two biggest issues,” Ainsley said. “And that’s where they need to focus their attention.”
POLITICO spoke with Mattinson and Ainsley as they were wrapping up their visit to Washington. Harris, they said, was on the right track. But with only weeks left until the election, there was still plenty of work for her to do to defeat former President Donald Trump.
Their advice was not just based on intuition or interpretation of the recent U.K. election. Ainsley is a leader of the Progressive Policy Institute, where she directs a transnational effort to revitalize center-left parties. As part of that effort, the think tank shuttled Labour politicians to Washington earlier this year and the Democratic convention in August, and conducted polling and focus groups in American swing states over the summer.
Health care costs and reproductive health were key topics in Tuesday night’s debate. Vice President Harris presented concrete solutions for managing costs — such as addressing insulin and prescription drug prices and strengthening the ACA — while criticizing Trump for failing to deliver an alternative to the ACA despite promises since 2016. Additionally, Harris delivered impactful critiques by emphasizing Trump’s central role in undermining American women’s reproductive rights. This focus is particularly relevant, given the ongoing strain of high health care costs on American households and Trump’s continued efforts, alongside Republicans, to undermine reproductive health.
A recent Progressive Policy Institute poll reveals that working-class Americans are deeply concerned about soaring health care costs, which they largely blame on drug manufacturers, insurance companies, and hospitals. Key issues include opaque hospital pricing and high drug prices. In response, Harris has pledged to address these concerns as part of her health care platform, which was highlighted in the debate. Her proposals include capping insulin prices, limiting cost-sharing for generic drugs, and expanding Medicare’s ability to negotiate drug prices.
Harris’s evolution from support for Medicare for All to these more prosaic concerns is welcome. This pragmatic approach is likely due to the political decision to tamper the announcement of any major policy reform that would be targeted by the Trump campaign. Harris intends to instead protect and bolster the Affordable Care Act (ACA), along with making the Biden-Harris tax credit enhancements permanent, which are reducing health care premiums by an average of around $800 annually for millions of Americans.
Meanwhile, Trump’s inconsistent stance on repealing and replacing the ACA underscores his lack of seriousness and leadership on the issue, as evidenced by his vague statement during the debate: “I have a concept of a plan” to address or alter the law. Thanks to the ACA, a record percentage of Americans (92%) have access to health insurance. The Biden-Harris admin made an important contribution to this achievement by including enhanced subsidies for the ACA marketplace in its landmark Inflation Reduction Act. A record 21 million people enrolled through the ACA this year alone, reducing the uninsured rate from 16% in 2010 to under 8% today. But health care costs remain exorbitantly expensive, forcing working families to reprioritize their immediate financial needs over preventive or ongoing medical care.
Meanwhile, reproductive health care access remained a critical focus for Harris throughout the debate, as she vowed to reinstate Americans’ reproductive rights that were undermined when Trump’s Supreme Court justices overturned Roe v. Wade. Harris promised to seek national legislation to restore the legal right to abortion; enhance access to contraception; safeguard a woman’s right to access IVF, and repeal the Hyde Amendment. She also promised to continue to advocate for access to FDA-approved abortion drugs and select judges who uphold reproductive freedom.
Trump proved once again that he and the Republican Party are completely out of touch with working-class Americans who are increasingly distressed about the state of abortion access since the end of Roe. Refuting his record and providing faltering answers on reproductive access, Harris swung back, reiterating that Trump should “not be telling a woman what to do with her body.”
In PPI’s Winning Back Working America poll, 56% of participants said they are concerned about abortion access. Trump’s relentless effort to curtail access to reproductive health care is directly opposed to the majority of Americans’ wishes, eroding the foundation of democracy and their personal liberty. Harris and Democrats are aptly appealing to working-class voters, including Independents and Republicans, who are anxious about the fragile state of access to reproductive care in the 2024 election and beyond.
Harris’ focus on reducing health care costs and enhancing reproductive health access in the debate and in her campaign represents a refreshing shift that addresses the concerns of working-class voters. Even those with coverage often encounter substantial out-of-pocket expenses. Similarly, despite some states protecting reproductive freedom, individuals still face barriers and threats from Trump and Republicans seeking to undermine these protections. Harris and Democratic lawmakers present a promising vision for working Americans seeking relief from harmful Republican policies that threaten to increase costs and reduce access to care.
WASHINGTON — As the U.S. seeks to bolster its domestic manufacturing, the role of foreign direct investment (FDI) is more critical than ever, particularly from trusted allies. This insight is at the heart of a new report from the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), titled “The U.S. Wants Manufacturing to Drive Growth. Foreign Friends Can Help.” The report examines the converse of U.S. “friendshoring” in friendly countries: the potential for allied nations like Japan, South Korea, Canada, the UK, and Germany to support U.S. economic growth through investment in sectors ranging from electric vehicles to biopharmaceuticals.
The report, authored by Yuka Hayashi, is the second in a two-part series. The first, “Behind Japan’s U.S. Steel Bid: An Aging, Shrinking Home Market,” provides a fresh perspective on Nippon Steel’s proposed acquisition of U.S. Steel and closely examines the economic realities behind Nippon Steel’s pursuit of the American industrial icon.
The new report highlights how these investments can create high-paying jobs, drive technological innovation, and strengthen America’s position in the global economy. Drawing on examples from states like Ohio, Michigan, and North Carolina, where Japanese companies have built major manufacturing hubs, the study argues that such partnerships are essential to America’s economic future.
“If the U.S. wants to strengthen domestic manufacturing, promoting foreign investment from friendly countries is a smart strategy,” said Hayashi. “Not only does it create good-paying jobs and spur innovation, but it also deepens our economic ties with trusted allies, ensuring that critical industries remain secure.”
The report stresses that the U.S. must be strategic in welcoming investment from allied nations, especially in the context of growing tensions with China. As part of this strategy, the report calls for expanding “friend-shoring” partnerships — moving supply chains to allied nations to ensure resilience and stability.
In light of the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act, both passed in 2022, PPI’s report underscores the opportunity for the U.S. to attract even more foreign investment, particularly in green technology and semiconductor manufacturing. It also warns that protectionist policies could deter friendly nations from further investing in the U.S. economy.
The Progressive Policy Institute (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. Learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Find an expert at PPI and follow us on Twitter.
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Media Contact: Ian O’Keefe – iokeefe@ppionline.org
Harvard’s long-awaited release of the racial demographics of the Class of 2028 — the first admitted after the Supreme Court prohibited colleges from employing racial preferences — defied all the gloomy predictions.
During the nearly nine-year court battle over Harvard’s admissions policies, officials swore that there was no possible way to preserve racial diversity without employing racial preferences in admissions. The data released yesterday makes plain that they were wrong.
As an expert witness for Students for Fair Admissions, I testified that Harvard could take steps — such as increasing preferences for socioeconomic disadvantage — to create healthy levels of racial diversity.
As the world grappled with shortages and soaring prices of energy and food following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the spring of 2022, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen introduced the term “friend-shoring” to describe a new dynamic needed for America’s economic engagement with the world. She called for building and deepening integration among trusted partners to secure supplies of critical raw materials, technologies, and products.
“Let’s do it with countries we know we can count on,” she said in a Washington speech. “Favoring the ‘friend-shoring’ of supply chains to a large number of trusted countries, so we can continue to securely extend market access, will lower the risks to our economy, as well as to our trusted trade partners.”
Yet, when it comes to working with friendly partners seeking to invest in the U.S., Washington’s message has been less than
welcoming. Amid the rise of “America First” economic nationalism, its policies have been inconsistent and muddled, even for companies from the closest allies in Europe and East Asia. Election-year politics have further complicated its stance, casting in doubt the fate of a high-profile pursuit of U.S. Steel by Japan’s top steel maker.
President Biden wants to strengthen American manufacturing. Foreign investors can help speed it up. They have for decades created more jobs, paid higher wages and spent more on factories and equipment than the average U.S. manufacturer. Their spending on research and development has enhanced productivity and accelerated America’s strong innovation.
America’s manufacturing is already starting to benefit as companies from allied nations take up Yellen’s concept and “friend-shore” some of their production to the U.S. Amid growing U.S.-China tensions, South Korea’s LG Energy is building an EV battery plant with Hyundai Motor in Georgia and another with Honda in Ohio, while BMW is adding EV assembly lines to its South Carolina plant. Multi-billion-dollar semiconductor factories are under construction by Samsung in Texas and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing in Arizona.
Yet, after hitting a record $440 billion in 2015, annual flows of foreign direct investment into the U.S. fell sharply — declines economists attribute to technical changes in corporate accounting strategies, as well as a protectionist turn in U.S. trade policy brought by former President Trump.
The pandemic then further lowered inflows. Between 2016 and 2023, the annual value of FDI averaged $256 billion. Investment flows have been helped by Washington’s efforts to bolster green technology and semiconductor manufacturing, but overall fell 28% in 2023 to $145 billion.
With the right set of policies, America can go a long way toward bolstering its domestic economy while strengthening its ties to close allies. To maintain strong alliances, the U.S. must not just talk, but show them it has their back.
Kamala Harris’ presidential acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention promised Americans “an opportunity economy where everyone has the chance to compete and the chance to succeed.” But working-class Americans are glum about their economic position today and what this promise means for them. For example, 2 out of 3 say the working class is worse off today than it was 40 years ago, while only 1 out of 5 say the working class is better off.
That information comes from YouGovsurveys of working-class voters—those without college degrees—conducted for the Progressive Policy Institute’s (PPI) Project on Center Left Renewal. They include a focus on 7 Presidential or Senate battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Montana, New Hampshire, Nevada, and Pennsylvania.
Working-class voters are divided on which political party will advance their interests. Asked who will “put the interests of working-class people first,” 38% said Democrats and 37% said Republicans. When asked which party would be best at “creating economic opportunities for working Americans,” 38% said Republicans and 33% said Democrats. Nearly 1 out of 5 said neither party.
FACT: Arctic sea ice cover is down by 3.2 million square kilometers — an expanse of water as big as India — since 2000.
THE NUMBERS: Carbon dioxide emissions intensity in 2023, in grams per $1 of GDP* –
Country
Value
Iran
54
China
42
Russia
36
Saudi Arabia
34
Canada
26
World Total
24
India
23
United States
19
Indonesia
17
Japan
16
European Union
10
United Kingdom
8
Sweden**
5
Ireland**
5
Singapore**
5
Switzerland**
5
Source: EDGAR, the EU’s “Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research”
** A 4-way tie for lowest emissions intensity rate among major economies.
WHAT THEY MEAN:
The Arctic sea ice expands and contracts like a lung, growing through autumn and winter to a late-March peak, then shrinking back over the summer to a mid-September “minimum.” The 2024 minimum is likely this week. Reviewing their 46 years of data, the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado concludes that it will be the fourth-smallest on record:
“With the waning of sunlight, the pace of sea ice loss in the Arctic is slowing, and the seasonal minimum is expected in mid-September. While a new record low is highly unlikely, extent at the beginning of September is below many recent years. Both the northern and southern Northwest Passage routes have largely cleared of ice, as has the Northern Sea Route. … Antarctic ice extent is approaching its seasonal maximum and is near last year’s record low. Arctic sea ice extent as of August 31 was 4.55 million square kilometers (1.76 million square miles), fourth lowest in the 46-year passive microwave record for that date.”
NSDIC says Arctic ice cover has contracted by about 10% per decade since the millennium. The cumulative loss of ice, averaged over a full year, comes to 3.2 million square kilometers — a space of water about as big as India — and means ice coverage is down about 40% from the 8 million square kms typical of the 1980s. The ice is also (a) thinner — now mostly 2 to 3 meters from top to seawater, which is about half the 5-meter average Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen found on his first-ever Arctic ice transit in 1893 — and (b) younger. In the 1980s, “old” ice four years old or more made up about a third of polar ice volume, and “new” ice less than one year old likewise a third; this decade, about 5% of ice is “old” and 70% “new.”
The diminished polar ice cap is an especially visible reminder that governments and industries have limited time to think and argue. Moving from ice to emissions, statistics from the EU’s EDGAR database — updated Thursday for 2023 emission totals, a day after the NSIDC published its 2024 Arctic minimum estimate — suggest three things. One, worldwide, the “battle” to contain climate change, if “battle” is the right metaphor, is being lost. Two, it’s being lost mostly in large middle-come countries – though carbon emissions from rich countries are now falling, those from China in particular, and also India and some other big countries, more than offset these drops; and three, the “battle” isn’t lost yet. Here’s a summary:
Totals: The number that counts for ice, forests, corals, northern mammals, sea life, arable land, and coastal community safety is the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Here the annual human contribution continues to rise. In 2000, human carbon dioxide emissions came to 25.2 billion tons. The 2023 total was 39.0 billion tons, meaning annual CO2 emissions are up 50% so far this century. Alternatively, since 2020 (an unusually low year because of the COVID pandemic), carbon emissions are up by 2.9 billion tons, or 8%.
Emission by country: Within this big emissions total, smaller country-by-country shares (based on territorial output) have sharply changed. The “developed” world — the U.S. and Canada; the EU, the U.K., Switzerland, Norway, and Iceland; Japan, Taiwan, and Korea; Israel; Australia and New Zealand — has cut annual carbon dioxide emissions by 2.5 billion tons since 2000. Though they are still far from “net zero,” they are trending down at an accelerating pace. Annual CO2 emissions from the rest of the world, though, are up 16 billion tons, including by 9.6 billion tons in China, 2.0 billion tons in India, and about 4.0 billion tons elsewhere. In sum, the growth of Chinese and middle-income country emissions has far outdistanced the “developed” countries’ reduction.
“Emissions intensity”: Against this overall growth of emissions, trends in emissions “intensity”– that is, the amount of carbon produced per dollar of output — offer some reason for guarded optimism. The United States and Europe have not cut emissions by getting poorer but by growing more efficient. In 2000, Americans produced 38 grams of carbon for each dollar of (real, inflation-adjusted) GDP, and EU countries 21 grams. By 2023, the U.S. was down to 19 grams per dollar, and the EU to 10, and the world’s most carbon-efficient economies suggest that there’s still a lot of room to improve. The U.K. and France are at 8 grams of carbon per dollar, Denmark 6 grams, and Sweden, Ireland, Singapore, and Switzerland set the world standard at 5 grams.
This positive trend isn’t unique to the wealthy world: Chinese emissions intensity is down 44% – from 73 grams per dollar in 2000 to a still-high 42 last year since 2000 — and India’s by 24%. In only three of the top 20 emissions sources — Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam — has intensity grown since 2000. Here’s a table summarizing emissions from the largest country sources, including total CO2 emissions in 2023, change in this total since 2000, and change in emissions intensity since 2023, with positive trends colored green and negative ones red:
Country
2023 Emissions (billion tons)
Change 2000-2023
Emissions/GDP ratio change since 2000
World
39.0
+13.3 billion tons
-27%
China
13.3
+9.6
-44%
United States
4.7
-1.2
-50%
India
3.0
+2.0
-24%
EU
2.5
-0.9
-52%
Russia
2.0
+0.4
-36%
Japan
0.9
-0.3
-36%
Iran
0.8
+0.4
+10%
Indonesia
0.7
+0.4
-26%
All other
8.1
-0.2
-44%**
* Using EDGAR data released last week. Other estimates, such as those by IEA, differ slightly but not fundamentally.
** Not available in EDGAR; PPI estimate using World Bank GDP data.
Final point: The Ireland/Singapore/Sweden/Switzerland 5-grams-per-dollar intensity standard is much better than any very large emissions source country has achieved. But their diverse economic mix — Ireland and Singapore with lots of high-end manufacturing and big computer servers; Sweden, Switzerland, and Ireland with big farm and livestock sectors; Sweden with its six auto plants; Switzerland and Singapore as services and logistical centers — suggests that bigger countries should be able to match their record. Had the world’s top 8 emissions sources done so, their emissions would have been 5.8 billion tons rather than 28 billion tons last year, and as a group, they would have been 80% of the way to net zero. So, that’s not an impossible goal, or even an unrealistic one. The ice bulletins say clearly that the ‘battle’ isn’t now being won. But it isn’t yet lost.
German scientist Markus Rex recounts the two-year “MOSAIC” mission, in which a specially equipped icebreaker sealed itself into the Arctic ice in 2022 north of Svalbard, and came out on the other side near Greenland two years later.
Fridtjof Nansen’s wooden Fram did the same thing in the first successful Arctic Ocean research and survey mission, from 1893 to 1896. The Fram bogged down (though it was later recovered); Nansen, after making the first estimates of Arctic ice thickness, ocean depth, and wildlife diversity, got to Greenland by sled and kayak.
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.
WASHINGTON — The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) today published a new report, “Improving Housing for Working Americans,” authored by Richard D. Kahlenberg, Director of Housing Policy and Director of PPI’s American Identity Project. The report tackles the rising housing costs and offers pragmatic solutions to improve affordability for working families across the United States.
This new publication is a key output of PPI’s Campaign for Working America, which was launched earlier this year in partnership with former U.S. Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio. The Campaign aims to develop and test new themes, ideas, and policy proposals that help Democrats and other center-left leaders make a compelling economic offer to working Americans, bridge divides on cultural issues like immigration and education, and rally public support for the defense of democracy and freedom globally.
As part of PPI’s Campaign for Working America, this report highlights the growing housing crisis and outlines several policy recommendations to help alleviate the burden on working-class families. Kahlenberg emphasizes that exclusionary zoning laws, combined with high interest rates, have made housing unaffordable for too many Americans. He calls for reform to break down these barriers and increase the availability of affordable housing.
“Housing affordability is a fundamental issue for millions of working Americans,” said Kahlenberg. “By reducing exclusionary zoning and incentivizing the construction of multi-family homes, we can help lower housing costs, create more inclusive neighborhoods, and provide greater opportunities for working families to thrive. This report offers a roadmap for both federal and state governments to address this urgent problem.”
The report also highlights how exclusionary zoning laws have worsened economic segregation, preventing working families from accessing better housing, schools, and job opportunities. Among the key recommendations are expanding federal incentives like the PRO Housing Pilot Program, enacting the YIMBY Act to promote more inclusive housing policies, passing an Economic Fair Housing Act that would discourage localities from zoning practices that exclude working families, and supporting state-level reforms that legalize multifamily housing.
The report’s findings underscore the need for comprehensive reform at both state and federal levels to create housing solutions that work for all Americans, not just the wealthy.
The Progressive Policy Institute (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. Learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Find an expert at PPI and follow us on Twitter.
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Media Contact: Ian O’Keefe – iokeefe@ppionline.org
The Progressive Policy Institute launched its Campaign for Working America in February 2024. Its mission is to develop and test new themes, ideas, and policy proposals that can help Democrats and other center-left leaders make a new economic offer to working Americans, find common ground on polarizing cultural issues like immigration, crime, and education, and rally public support for defending freedom and democracy in a dangerous world. Acting as Senior Adviser to the Campaign is former U.S. Representative Tim Ryan, who represented northeast Ohio in Congress from 2003 to 2023.
Since 2016, Democrats have suffered severe erosion among non-college white voters and lately have been losing support from Black, Hispanic, and Asian working-class voters as well. Since these voters account for about threequarters of registered voters, basic electoral math dictates that the party will have to do better with them to restore its competitiveness outside metro centers and build lasting governing majorities. The party’s history and legacy point in the same direction: Democrats do best when they champion the economic aspirations and moral outlook of ordinary working Americans.
To help them relocate this political north star and to inform our work on policy innovation, PPI has commissioned a series of YouGov polls on the beliefs and political attitudes of non-college voters, with a particular focus on the battleground states that have decided the outcome of recent national elections.
This report is the first in a series of Campaign Blueprints detailing new ideas that can help Democrats reach across today’s yawning “diploma divide” and reconnect with the working-class voters who have historically been the party’s mainstay.
Introduction
Housing in America is too expensive, and residential areas are increasingly segregated by economic status. For most
Americans, housing is their single biggest expense, and today, it is less affordable than at any time in the last 40 years. Housing prices have tripled since 2000, outpacing wages, which have doubled. The median household needs to devote a whopping 40% of its income to afford the median-priced home.
In the 2024 presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris has put a priority on making housing more affordable. She has correctly pinpointed the central problem — a shortage of housing supply — and outlined a number of policies to help the private and nonprofit sectors produce 3 million new homes. Planting herself firmly in the pro-housing camp, Harris is allied with Yes in My Backyard (YIMBY) forces. By contrast, former president Donald Trump has taken a classic Not in My Backyard
(NIMBY) approach, falsely claiming that federal incentives to produce more housing would somehow “abolish the suburbs.” He banks on addressing the imbalance of housing supply and demand with a fantastical plan to uproot millions of undocumented immigrants and deport them. Economists point out the plan would have the perverse effect of removing many workers who make the construction of new housing possible.
It’s especially important for working Americans that smart housing policies be enacted. Theirs are the families whose budgets are most stretched by surging rents and housing prices and whose children see their opportunities curtailed when rising economic segregation excludes them from the safest neighborhoods with the highest-performing public schools.
On 4 July, against all odds, Labour overturned the most shattering defeat in decades to win a stunning landslide. A talented and energetic party team deserves huge credit for this victory: effective communications, innovative digital output, creative policy culminating in the five missions, organisationally brilliant events and a super-efficient ground force – all under the leadership of campaign director Morgan McSweeney and political leads Pat McFadden and Ellie Reeves.
It was a cohesive campaign united by its sharp, disciplined focus on our very tightly defined “hero voters”. Could a similar single-mindedness help Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump on 5 November?
Just three years before, Labour had suffered the devastating setback of the Hartlepool byelection. While Keir Starmer had made significant strides towards returning Labour to the service of working people in his first year as leader, the party still struggled to embrace a disparate coalition of voters stretching from its base to a wider group of progressive voters and including the “red wall” that had so dramatically abandoned Labour in 2019.
WASHINGTON — The shift toward digital government services is reshaping how Americans interact with public institutions, but a new report from the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) warns that this transformation risks leaving behind millions of vulnerable citizens. Titled “Closing the Digital Verification Divide,” the report, authored by Dr. Michael Mandel, Vice President and Chief Economist at PPI, highlights the urgent need for inclusive identity verification processes to ensure access to government services.
The report reveals that as federal, state, and local governments increasingly digitize their services, the existing digital verification divide is becoming a significant barrier for low-income and marginalized Americans. These individuals often lack the financial and identity documents, such as bank accounts or passports, that are commonly required for digital verification. The report stresses that without targeted interventions, these populations may be unable to access critical services like unemployment benefits, tax records, and social security.
“At every level of government, we’re grappling with how to make access both effective and inclusive for Americans,” said Dr. Michael Mandel. “The digitization of government is essential for making services more efficient, but it must be done in a way that doesn’t widen the divide between those who have easy access to verification and those who don’t. This report outlines actionable steps to ensure that digital government works for every American.”
The report identifies a significant “digital verification divide” that disproportionately affects low-income Americans, rural residents, and marginalized groups, all of whom often lack the documentation required to access digital government services. One key barrier is the reluctance to adopt biometric verification due to privacy and surveillance concerns. This has resulted in the underuse of effective tools that could help bridge the verification divide. The report advocates for the responsible use of biometric systems, integrated with alternative methods like video interviews, to ensure inclusivity.
To address these challenges, the report outlines several policy recommendations. It calls for the adoption of integrated verification systems that combine biometrics with alternative approaches, such as using trusted referees to conduct video interviews for those without traditional forms of identification. It also urges government agencies to follow the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) guidelines, which balance security and accessibility. Finally, the report emphasizes the need for greater support for trusted referees, who can help individuals navigate digital verification, particularly those in low-income or underserved communities.
The report concludes that implementing these recommendations is crucial for closing the digital verification divide and ensuring that all Americans can access the services they need. By making these changes, government agencies can not only improve efficiency but also ensure broader access to digital services in the modern era.
The Progressive Policy Institute (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. Learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Find an expert at PPI and follow us on Twitter.
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Media Contact: Ian O’Keefe – iokeefe@ppionline.org
In the internet era, the digitization of government is essential for the efficient and fair provision of public services. From faster access to unemployment benefits and food stamps to easier taxpayer retrieval of IRS tax records, digitization has the potential to make federal and local government work better, especially for lower-income Americans who need its services the most. It is not an exaggeration to say that “making government work better” requires digitization.
But successful digitization of government was slowed until recently by several factors. First, the “digital access divide” meant that many low-income or rural Americans did not have good enough quality Internet to seamlessly make use of digital government services. As a result, digitization of government ran the risk of widening existing inequities. Moreover, government had to maintain non-digital legacy systems as well as the new digital means of access, driving up the expense of service delivery and undercutting potential cost savings.
True, the original digital access divide has been narrowing. Post-pandemic efforts to bring highspeed broadband internet to everyone, such as the BEAD program, are in the process of successfully reducing the obstacles to access.
However, government agencies face a more subtle but pervasive issue — what we call the “digital verification divide.” Verification is the process by which a user verifies that they are who they say they are. Verification includes identity proofing, in which an individual provides sufficient information (e.g., identity history, credentials, documents) to establish a trusted identity online. That’s a prerequisite for higher levels of authentication, which verifies the identity of a user, process, or device, in order to allow access to more protected resources in an information system.
The process of identity proofing and authentication is especially important when users are trying to tap into government systems that contain sensitive personal data, such as individual accounts at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Social Security Administration (SSA), Federal Student Aid (.gov) or Veterans Administration (VA). If government agencies make verification too easy relative to the risk of the transaction, then the wrong people can get access to sensitive personal data. If agencies make verification too hard relative to the risk of the transaction, then it becomes more difficult for constituents to prove their identity, unnecessarily locking them out of services and data that they are entitled to.
A “digital verification divide” is created by two factors that make it harder for low-income and other Americans with sparse document trails to take advantage of digital government. One issue is that low-income and marginalized Americans are less likely to have bank accounts, mortgages, passports, or any of the accumulation of documentation that most people can use to establish their identity and help authenticate themselves for government systems.
The second issue in closing the digital verification divide is that the use of biometrics for identity verification has been mistakenly conflated with the use of biometrics for
surveillance and law enforcement, which poses a very different set of technological and implementation challenges. A typical identity verification system might use a face-matching algorithm that does a “1 to 1” comparison between an individual’s face and a particular government-issued ID. A law enforcement application, by contrast, might use a facial recognition algorithm that does a “1 to many” comparison between an individual’s face and a database of millions of potential matches.
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) testing has shown a steady reduction in the errors from the sort of face-matching algorithms used for identity verification, with the top-scoring ones performing consistently across demographics. Nevertheless, the continuing debate over the use of biometrics in situations such as surveillance and law enforcement has made policymakers reluctant to mandate biometrics for identity verification.
Closing the digital verification divide should be an important goal of policy, both for equity and efficiency reasons. Enabling government to interact digitally with all citizens in a safe way is essential to move the government into the future. Unfortunately, that progress has been slowed by challenges facing “Login.gov,” the widely-used identity proofing and authentication system originally launched by the General Services Administration (GSA) in 2017. The GSA was faced with conflicting demands: On the one hand,
guidelines issued by NIST required a physical or biometric component to achieve a high level of assurance needed by federal agencies to ensure legitimate access to restricted information or accounts requiring identity verification. On the other hand, the GSA apparently felt pressure to stay away from biometrics.
The result: the GSA ended up significantly misrepresenting the capabilities of Login.gov to the agencies using (and paying for) the system, according to a report released in March 2023 by the GSA Inspector General. GSA officials claimed that Login.gov met NIST guidelines which required a physical or biometric component. But “Login.gov has never included a physical or biometric comparison for its customer agencies,” according to the report, titled “GSA Misled Customers on Login.gov’s Compliance with Digital Identity Standards.” Along the same lines, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration came out in September 2023 with a report raising concerns about Login.gov’s ability to stop the types of fraud experienced by the IRS and other government agencies — though its deployment across agencies continues to expand.
This policy brief will examine new evidence about how government agencies on the federal, state and local levels can digitize without creating or widening a digital verification divide. First, we note that the digitization of government needs to both boost efficiency and promote inclusion in order to meet its goals. Second, the success of
digitization of government requires fair treatment to all individuals who need to log on remotely to public-facing government systems. In practice, this may mean following NIST guidelines that suggest providing an alternative video chat with a “trusted referee” for anyone who chooses and is verifying remotely. Finally, we conclude that with the availability of “trusted referees” or a similar alternative channel, biometric facial verification using leading NIST-tested algorithms can provide a high level of security and strong performance, while closing the digital verification divide.
In particular, an integrated system that includes both biometric face matching and the ability to verify users via alternative channels, such as video chat or in-person, can produce better access to digital government for low-income and other Americans with sparse document trails while limiting fraud. By contrast, an approach that relies only on online records is likely to be both less secure and less inclusive
Summarizing, this policy brief identifies and names a major roadblock to digitization of government on every level, and explains how following the NIST guidelines helps overcome those obstacles. Indeed, misguided opposition to biometrics as part of a well-constructed digital verification process has been slowing down effective digitization, and widening the digital verification divide.
California has found a better path forward in the long-running battle between newspapers and the tech industry. Led by state Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland), the state brokered an agreement that benefits California residents and journalists, while avoiding the unintended consequences of legislation adopted in Australia, Europe, and Canada, and being considered elsewhere in the U.S.
The agreement, which does not require legislation, sets up a News Transformation Fund, totaling $125 million over five years, to be jointly funded by Google, the California state government, and perhaps other tech companies. The fund, which will support journalism in the state, would be overseen by the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
In addition to these subsidies, the agreement provides a framework for a privately funded “National AI Accelerator” that would help develop AI tools for journalism and other industries. Google will maintain and expand its content licensing efforts for Google News Showcase, and continue the Google News Initiative.
Taken together, these three components of the agreement will help California newspapers and other news operations, which have been struggling with economic and journalistic challenges. The economic challenge is to maintain funding for news operations in the face of long-term declines in the price of advertising. Adjusted for inflation, the price for newspaper advertising has dropped roughly 40% since 2007 — good news for advertisers and consumers, but bad news for newspapers and their employees. That’s where the subsidies from the News Transformation Fund will help.
The journalistic challenge is to maintain the relevance of news operations in the face of competition from online influencers, independent podcasters, and other new media born in the digital world. No one knows the best answer, but it’s likely going to require the use of AI to boost the reach of working journalists, and produce innovative streams of news and revenues.
The California agreement is an alternative to cumbersome and unsuccessful legislative attempts in the United States and elsewhere to force tech platforms to pay for their “use” of the news. The California approach avoids bureaucratic collective arbitration mechanisms, as in Australia and Europe, and complex exemption procedures, as in Canada.
Because the funding will be monitored by a board that includes representatives from independent, Black, Latino, and diverse media and labor, it’s more likely to be targeted to underserved populations.
The California agreement sets a model for other states and countries. It’s not perfect, but it brings all the parties to the table in a way that starts to tackle both the economic and journalistic challenges facing the news media.
FACT: Trump-era tariffs raised prices but did not ‘bring manufacturing back’.
THE NUMBERS: Manufacturing share of U.S. GDP –
Year
Percentage
2023
10.3%
2020
10.1%
2016
10.9%
WHAT THEY MEAN:
Here’s Vice Presidential candidate Senator J.D. Vance, pitching higher tariffs in late July and saying no price for toasters would be too high. And there was the same Mr. Vance, a week earlier, denouncing high prices and their toll on middle-class family budgets: “Many of the people that I grew up with can’t afford to pay more for groceries, more for gas, more for rent.”
Visionary poets like Walt Whitman can get away with this sort of thing. (Song of Myself, verse 51: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”.) Politicians struggle. Challenged in a TV interview a few days later, Vance tries hard to have it both ways, with a claim about earlier Trump-era tariffs:
“[M]anufacturing came back and prices went down for American citizens. They went up for the Chinese but went down for our people.”
Is he right? In fact, manufacturing growth slowed down while prices went up. The two main Trump-era tariffs went onto steel and aluminum in March 2018 (“Section 232”), and most Chinese-made goods (“Section 301”) — though toasters were exempted — in three pulses from September 2018 to mid-2019. Overall, this raised average “trade-weighted” U.S. tariff rates from 1.4% to 3.0% as of 2019. Since then, the figure has dropped back to 2.4%, as some purchasing shifted from China to Vietnam and other countries. Here’s the price and output data afterward:
Prices: The U.S. International Trade Commission’s 2023 report on the Trump-era tariffs is the standard source here. It finds prices up for families buying consumer goods and also up for manufacturers, construction firms, and others buying metal. The representative quotes:
Steel and aluminum(pg. 124): “The increase in tariffs on steel and aluminum imports increased the relative price of imports and led consumers of steel and aluminum to increase sourcing from domestic suppliers. This increase in demand for domestic production of steel and aluminum resulted in increases in the price of domestically produced steel and aluminum and the quantity of domestic steel and aluminum production in these industries. However, the higher prices of steel and aluminum translated into higher costs of production inputs for downstream industries. This effect negatively impacted the downstream industries that purchase steel and aluminum because costs increase per unit of production.”
Chinese goods (pg. 145): “[T]he tariffs did not have a significant impact on the price received by Chinese exporters. On the other hand, the elasticity of the importer price with respect to the tariffs is close to one, indicating that importer prices rose about 1 to 1 in response to the tariff increase. This is consistent with the recent work of Amiti et al. (2019), Fajgelbaum et al. (2020), Carvallo et al. (2021), and Jiao et al. (2022), who also largely estimate full pass-through of recent tariff actions from exporters to importers.”
Academic literature, along with reviews by Federal Reserve staff economists, concurs. These generally converge on a finding that the tariffs raised overall U.S. prices in a range of 0.3% to 0.5%, with the highest estimate a bit above 1.0%.
Output: With respect to manufacturing trends afterward, the ITC’s report concludes that (as of 2021) the steel and aluminum tariffs had raised the two metals’ output by about $2.2 billion, and shrunk the output of auto parts, machinery, tools, and other metal-using manufacturers (including household appliances such as toasters) by about $3.5 billion. On net, therefore, an overall slight shrinking of U.S. manufacturing. (They didn’t do a similar estimate of the China tariffs’ impact on consumers and firms buying inputs.)
More broadly, the post-tariff trend has been somewhat slower growth in manufacturing output and employment, though not an overall contraction. The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, which calculates U.S. GDP stats, reports that in 2017, manufacturing made up $2.1 trillion of a $19.6 trillion American economy — that is, industries making planes, cars, semiconductor chips, frozen meat, refined petroleum, medicines, plastics, etc. accounted for 10.9% of overall output just before the tariffs. By 2019, their $2.2 trillion output was 10.5% of a $2.2 trillion economy; after a sharp drop to 10.0% in 2020 during the COVID pandemic, it rebounded to 10.3% in 2023 ($2.29 trillion of a $22.38 trillion economy). So manufacturing continued to grow, but makes up a somewhat smaller part of the U.S. economy than before the Trump-era tariffs.
Alternatively, in terms of “real,” inflation-adjusted growth, U.S. manufacturing grew by $33.5 billion on average per year during the Obama presidency, measuring from the financial crisis low of 2009 to 2017. Since 2018 it has grown by $30.2 billion per year, again slightly more slowly after the tariffs than before.
Employment: The employment story is similar – a slowdown in net manufacturing job creation, and a somewhat smaller share of total employment. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in July of 2017, manufacturers employed 12.5 million of 146.8 working Americans, or 8.5% of all jobs. As of July 2024, the figure is 13.0 million of 158.7 million jobs, or 8.2%. Alternatively, again looking back to the Obama era, from the financial crisis low in mid-2009 to mid-2017, manufacturers added a net of 795,000 jobs. This was an average net gain of 99,500 jobs per year. Since mid-2017, they’ve added another 480,000, for 68,600 jobs per year. Or, in terms of wages, BLS’ stats find manufacturing workers earning about 27 cents more per hour than the national average in 2017 (a 1.0% advantage), and 29 cents per hour less (a 1.0% disadvantage) by 2021.
So: A lot goes into these big numbers – economic shocks and booms, career choices of young workers, innovation and adaptation of new technologies, etc. But the overall data from BEA and BLS make ITC’s conclusion that the 2018/19 tariffs raised prices and slightly shrank U.S. manufacturing look pretty strong. Vance’s backward-looking claims of ‘lower prices’ and ‘coming back’ don’t hold up. You can, however, be pretty confident about his promise that with an added tariff of 10% or 20%, toasters – along with other home appliances, groceries, gas, TV sets, refrigerators, cars, medicine, toothpaste, and consumer goods generally – will cost more.
Vance’s toaster-price rhetoric appears to have contaminated the kitchen-appliance Internet with a moldy spread of opportunistic ‘made-in-USA toaster’ false positives. Discarding these, our search finds that no small home pop-up toasters appear to be made in the United States at the moment. U.S. factories do, however, produce kitchen and other home appliances – according to BLS, about 61,500 people work in appliance production – and several firms (e.g. Tennessee-based Holman Star) make big conveyor-type toasters for restaurants and hotels. They sell for $1,000 and up. Alternatively, the UK’s Dualit makes its “Classic” line by hand in Sussex, starting at £170 (=$222).
BLS on home-appliance industry employment and pay.
And tariffs appear to be making it harder, not easier, to make these things here. From the political right, National Review’s Dominic Pino reports on toasters and American kitchen appliance-makers’ unhappy experience with Trump-era metals tariffs.
One of the triumphs of the Information Revolution is the ability to connect countries, consumers, and businesses around the world. Africa, in particular, is moving into a new stage of connectedness. The 2Africa underwater fiber cable, the world’s largest subsea cable system, is scheduled to be completed in 2024, connecting 30 or so North African and Sub-Saharan African countries with Europe and Asia, and doubling data capacity.
At the same time, data consumption and smartphone penetration have soared. For example, in Nigeria, data consumption rose by 38% in 2023, according to the Nigerian Communications Commission.
One of the biggest beneficiaries of the new data capacity will be Africa’s “App Economy.” The rapidly growing number of smartphone users will be able to more easily use mobile applications to download information and entertainment both domestically and globally.
More important, for Africa, the evolving App Economy is a potent source of future well-paying jobs. The App Economy includes those workers engaged with developing, updating, maintaining, and securing mobile apps, as well as the workers supporting the app developers. As the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) has shown in previous research, the App Economy is booming in many countries at various stages of economic development.
Now it’s Africa’s turn. Nigeria already has 45,000 App Economy jobs, according to PPI’s new estimate (presented in this paper). Egypt, South Africa, and Morocco have 51,000, 15,000, and 9,000 App Economy jobs, respectively. Much more growth is possible with the right policies.
None of these jobs existed 15 years ago, when Apple first opened the App Store on July 10, 2008, in the middle of the global financial crisis. Android Market (which later became Google Play) was announced by Google shortly after. These app stores created a new route through which software developers in any country could write programs for smartphones. These mobile applications — called “apps” — could then be distributed to the rapidly growing number of smartphone users around the world.
The jobs generated by the app stores became an important part of the global economic expansion. Originally, apps were associated with games and social networks, but over the years, apps became critical to every area of the economy: Retail, travel, education, banking, health care, agriculture, and government.
More than that, app development and app stores became a key route by which young people can develop tech skills, either by building their own apps or helping develop apps for global markets. App development is a stepping-stone, if you will, to other aspects of the global digital economy.
In this pioneering paper, we estimate the number of App Economy jobs for two North Africa countries and two sub-Saharan countries where we have sufficient data to make reasonable estimates. We calculate the size of the iOS and Android ecosystems for these countries and compare them to peers adjusting for size. Finally, we also give some examples of App Economy jobs for these four countries, and touch on some policy implications for growth.
Andrii Ryzhov, an assistant chaplain in the Ukrainian army, peers into the back of his battered Volkswagen van on a leafy side street in Kramatorsk, just 15 miles from the front line. These are the tools of his trade: dog-eared cardboard boxes containing packaged food, canned goods, and pocket prayer books, nestled among rolls of camouflage netting and combat gear, including bullet-proof vests.
Ryzhov had telephoned one of his commanders that morning and discovered that the officer was in the hospital—so now he is visiting, unbidden. The chaplain packs a box to take into the clinic across the street: two packages of cookies, a handful of hard candy, dried fruit, and nuts, as well as a copy of the New Testament. “We do whatever we can to support the men, believers, and nonbelievers,” Ryzhov’s fellow chaplain, Serhii Tsoma, explains to me. “And it’s often very simple—cook food, fix cars, tell jokes, whatever makes them feel better.”
I first met Ryzhov in early 2022, not long after Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. His hometown, Irpin, a bedroom community outside of Kyiv, had fought off the first wave of Russian invaders, a show of resistance that stunned Moscow at a time when the Ukrainian capital was expected to fall in days. Most able-bodied residents left Irpin during the monthlong battle. But Ryzhov remained, driving into the shelling day after day to evacuate the elderly and provide humanitarian assistance for those who refused to go.
