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.
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.”
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 …
FURTHER READING
PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:
Defend the Constitution and oppose rule by decree;
Connect tariff policy to growth, work, prices and family budgets, and living standards;
Stand by America’s neighbors and allies;
Offer a positive alternative.
Mr. Lutnick testifies at the Senate Appropriations Committee.
… 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.
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.
Not only did Magyar present Orbán’s 16-year grip on Hungary as corrupt, he argued that the government’s entire structure was self-protecting and unaccountable — and because of this, working against the interests of everyday Hungarians.
Crucially, Magyar did not campaign on turning back the clock to Hungary’s era of pre-2010 economic stability. He argued for rebuilding Hungarian institutions in a way that would make them genuinely work for working families.
Democratic candidates will have to do more than just attack Trump’s character and his policies — which they are undoubtedly good at currently. They need to build a strong case that Trump damaged American institutions and, more importantly, a believable argument that resonates across the country that Democrats are the ones to rebuild them.
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 Experienceand 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.
On CNN’s Early Start, PPI’s Tamar Jacoby discusses how Ukraine continues to fight for their freedom even as President Trump continues to hinder their efforts and mitigates their resources.
FACT: Americans rank 4th in the world for median income, 44th for life expectancy.
THE NUMBERS: U.K. “rank” if it were an American state –
Per capita income:
51st
Life expectancy
1st
WHAT THEY MEAN:
The gloomier sort of Brit has been muttering for 15 years about income comparisons with the United States. Here’s a sample from the London-based Social Market Foundation last year:
“[T]he UK’s failure to match higher incomes across the Atlantic has drawn particular attention and generated greater concern. Almost a decade ago, observers were suggesting that if the UK were an American state it would be the second poorest … More recently, commentators have used the gap to argue that ‘Britain is a developing country,’ or that the ‘hard working US is getting rich while the UK struggles on benefits.’”
Is the United States really that rich? In some ways, yes:
Statisticians at Our World in Data, scrutinizing World Bank stats on incomes and poverty rates, find Americans earning $72.07 in “international dollars” per person each day. Our World’s “international dollar” isn’t the green one in the wallet, but a hypothetical version that they’ve (a) normalized for inflation, (b) used “purchasing power parities” to avoid currency-valuation-based income skews, and (c) taken a “median” rather than a “mean” average to minimize effects of superwealthy individuals. Their list places Americans 4th among 115 countries. See below for some quibbles — they don’t include a few small high-income countries (e.g., Singapore, Kuwait, UAE, Qatar); some of the gap represents longer U.S. working hours rather than higher pay as such; and (see below) the U.S. fares less well on “wealth” than “income.” But nonetheless, $72.07 per day for the median American is a lot — 32% above the median Brit’s $54.55, 70% above Japan’s $42.10, and five times China’s $13.36. So Americans do indeed earn a lot of money. Here’s a sample of Our World’s findings:
Median daily income, international PPP dollars* –
1. Luxembourg
$89.49
2. Norway
$77.76
3. Switzerland
$72.29
4. United States
$72.07
15. United Kingdom
$54.55
25. Japan
$42.10
58. China
$13.32
So World Cup visitors to the U.S. venues this June may be a little envious of American affluence. Americans shouldn’t be spiking any spherical footballs, though. Here’s a mirror-image U.S.-U.K. comparison from gloomy researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore:
“Why has the U.S. fallen behind in health? … Forty years ago, babies born in the U.S. and the U.K. could expect to live to the same age. Today, however, life expectancy is several years shorter on our side of the Atlantic Ocean. What’s going on? In a new analysis of 2023 data from the U.S. and England and Wales, this report finds that differences in four preventable causes of death can explain the entire 2.7-year gap in life expectancy: cardiovascular disease, overdose, motor vehicle crashes, and gun violence.”
So if Americans might earn more money, they have less time to enjoy it. The Centers for Disease Control’s most recent life-expectancy report takes the data through 2024, and finds Americans expecting 79 years at birth. This represents full recovery from the COVID pandemic drop and closes a bit of the transatlantic gap, but still leaves Americans fully two years below the U.K.’s 81-year life expectancy. Flipping the Social Market Foundation’s Brits-at-the-bottom premise, the U.K. would likely tie for first with Hawaii among American states for life expectancy. On a world scale, the World Bank’s full span of cross-country life expectancy comparisons, all from 2024 and excluding micro-states, tax havens, and small dependencies, places the U.S. 44th. Another short table, with more complete stats below:
Japan
84 years
Australia
83 years
UK
81 years
U.S.
79 years
China
78 years
A $72.07 vs. $54.55 daily earnings gap is the equivalent of $6,400 a year. If asked whether they’d sacrifice that to get two more years of life, lots of Americans would probably accept.
Why the difference? Drawing from the JHU report and KFF analysis, the life-expectancy divide appears (a) mainly related to public health and social issues, and (b) possible to close. Two ways to look at this:
1. Causes: Kaiser Foundation researchers point out two big contributors to the gap:
i. Homicides and drug overdoses: About a quarter of the gap vis-à-vis America’s European and Asian peer economies — about six months’ worth of life — reflects higher U.S. rates of firearm crimes and drug overdoses. America’s homicide rate, at 5.8 per 100,000 people annually, compares poorly to Poland’s 1.0 homicides per 100,000 people, the U.K.’s 1.2, and France’s 2.3. Across the Pacific, Singapore’s 0.1 homicides per 100,000 people is the world’s lowest rate, with Japan’s 0.2 and China’s 0.5 not much higher. Likewise, KFF reports that the U.S. rate of death from drug overdoses and alcohol poisoning (as of 2023) was 29 per 100,000 people, about six times the 5 deaths per 100,000 people rate in other high-income countries.
ii. Heart and lung diseases: Most of the rest, about a year’s worth, reflects higher U.S. rates of lung and heart diseases in middle and old age. Here, the main issues appear to be diet, obesity, smoking, and exercise rates.
2. Disparities: The U.S.’s 79-year expectancy is a national median. CDC statisticians haven’t completed their analysis by states and regions, and by race and ethnicity, for 2024, but earlier years are suggestive. As of 2022, state life expectancies varied by eight years, from West Virginia’s 72 years to the European-standard 80 years in Massachusetts and Hawaii. By race and ethnicity (as of 2023), the range is wider still: 70 years for Native Americans, 74 years for African Americans, 78 years for white Americans, a European-standard 81 years for Hispanics (including 82 for Puerto Ricans), and a world-standard 85 years for Asian Americans.
So: The causes are complex social and policy problems, but not totally intractable. The U.S. homicide rate peaked in the 1980s at 11.6 per 100,000 and has since fallen by half. Drug overdose deaths, meanwhile, peaked early in 2023. As treatment has grown more easily available and public awareness campaigns have become more effective, overdose deaths have dropped about 40%. Gaps between states likewise suggest that local policies can have large impacts.
And as far as doleful cross-country comparisons go, Americans are high earners. Doubtless, there are things others can learn from us on that. There’s a lot we can learn as well.
FURTHER READING
PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:
Defend the Constitution and oppose rule by decree;
Connect tariff policy to growth, work, prices and family budgets, and living standards;
Stand by America’s neighbors and allies;
Offer a positive alternative.
U.S./U.K.
Speaking to Congress yesterday, King Charles reflects on the U.S.-UK alliance past and present. (Or video via C-SPAN.)
And UBS’s 2025 Global Wealth Report offers a different perspective. This tries to estimate median “wealth” — that is, the value of someone’s property, savings, and belongings, minus debt — as opposed to income. Their results for Americans don’t quite glitter like the income data: Americans average $124,000 in per-adult wealth, and rank 15th in the world, noticeably below 8th-place Britain’s $176,000. Setting aside tax-haven Luxembourg’s $395,000 as anomalous, UBS reports Australians to be the world’s richest people, with $268,000 in wealth per adult.
For broader context, the World Bank’s full table has life expectancy at birth for 270 countries, territories, and regions. Two European micro-states — Monaco and San Marino — lead the ranking with 86-year life expectancies. Chad and Nigeria are lowest on the table, both with 55. A representative list:
Japan
84 years
Sweden
84 years
Spain
84 years
France
83 years
Italy
83 years
Korea
83 years
Australia
83 years
Canada
82 years
Germany
81 years
UK
81 years
Chile
81 years
High-income average
80 years
Albania
80 years
United States
79 years
China
78 years
Jordan
78 years
Thailand
77 years
Brazil
76 years
Ukraine
75 years
Mexico
75 years
Vietnam
75 years
World average
73 years
Russia
73 years
India
72 years
Senegal
69 years
Pakistan
68 years
Fiji
67 years
South Africa
66 years
Low-income average
65 years
Central African Republic
58 years
Chad
55 years
Nigeria
55 years
ABOUT ED
Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.
Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.
Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.
Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.
Today, America is facing four profound and interrelated challenges:
Social cohesion is eroding on both sides of the political spectrum. Right-wing white nationalists see some citizens as more American than others and have poisoned the discourse by labeling opponents as enemies, while left-wing race essentialists undermine what we have in common as Americans.
Historically, our civic creed has provided the glue that unifies Americans of diverse backgrounds, yet today, young Americans report much less faith in America and in democracy than older Americans.
America’s founders believed education was the safeguard of democracy. Yet our schools have fallen short, as many Americans have demonstrated a troubling tolerance for political leaders who defy long-standing liberal democratic norms.
Paradoxically, figures who show autocratic tendencies are sometimes seen by Americans as particularly patriotic, underlining the need for those who stand firmly for democracy to embrace a proud American identity.
As America grapples with these difficulties, schools and universities offer a crucial opportunity for a better path forward. To counter rising illiberalism, foundations and researchers have pushed for sensible reforms such as enhanced civics instruction and accountability. The more profound challenge, however, lies in shaping a shared American identity.
In his biography of teacher union leader Albert Shanker (1928-1997), Richard Kahlenberg highlights a story told by former Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander. A group of education leaders was stymied when asked a basic question about why America has public schools. Shanker provided a provocative answer: “to teach children what it means to be an American.” Shanker believed that beyond literacy and job skills, public schools must instill shared democratic values to ensure the survival of America’s unique experiment in self-governance. Without this common foundation, Shanker warned, the nation risked fracturing into isolated factions. Because American national identity does not derive from a particular ethnic heritage, he said, the nation’s civic creed is the only thing holding us together. Today, almost three decades after Shanker’s death, America is increasingly divided, and its commitment to common democratic principles has grown weaker.
To address these challenges, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) has launched the American Identity Project, directed by Kahlenberg and guided by a stellar advisory group of prominent Americans, that asks: “As our nation celebrates its 250th birthday, what does it mean to be an American today?” In a highly polarized country, what precisely are the best ideas and aspirational values that bind together what author Heather McGee calls a nation of “ancestral strangers”? In addition, once those American values are identified, what are the best ways to instill them in school children? What exactly should the public schools and colleges be doing to teach a common American identity that inculcates a deep and healthy sense of what Alexis de Tocqueville called “reflective patriotism” that encourages debate about how to live up to the country’s lofty ideals rather than blind loyalty to the nation?
Continue reading about the American Identity Project.
In this episode of Articles of Interest, Ed Gresser discusses the gender disparity in tariff rates, especially how tariff rates on women’s clothing were, on average, 16.7% in 2022 — 2.9 percentage points higher than the 13.6% average tariff rate for men’s clothing.
Apprenticeship does something American education and workforce training policy too rarely gets right. It blends learning and earning instead of forcing people to choose between school and work. National Apprenticeship Week (this year from April 26 to May 2) celebrates this practical but still underused pathway to opportunity.
But the occasion demands more than a celebration. We should put a hard question in front of policymakers: Will the new Workforce Pell program (part of President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act) strengthen apprenticeship or sideline one of the best models we have for linking education to work? That question matters because Workforce Pell could become one of the most important changes in federal aid policy in years.
Under the U.S. Department of Education’s proposed guidelines for implementing Workforce Pell, starting in July 2026 students can use Pell Grants for eligible short-term workforce programs, some as short as eight weeks. The Department has framed the reform as a way to help students complete programs quickly, enter the labor market with less debt, and use stackable credentials as stepping stones to further postsecondary study.
Those are worthy goals. But if Workforce Pell is supposed to back high-value, job-connected education, then apprenticeships should be one of its prime use cases. That’s because an apprenticeship is not just another training program.
