Edwin Eisendrath is joined by Tamar Jacoby , director of the New Ukraine Project at the Progressive Policy Institute and contributor to Washington Monthly; her latest article is “Could the Tide Be Turning Ukraine?” (The interview was recorded July 30 and aired August 1.)
Category: Uncategorized
Marshall for The Hill: Don’t Panic over Data Centers — Support a Better Path Forward
Less than a year ago, local and state leaders were bragging about the jobs and tax revenue that data centers had brought to their communities. Now, amid a public backlash, many are running from them like scalded dogs.
In January, a Politico poll found that Americans were more receptive than opposed to having data centers built nearby. Six months later, a new survey shows the reverse: 41 percent oppose a data center near them, up from 28 percent in January, while support dropped from 37 to 24 percent.
Data center jitters run especially deep among Democrats. But skepticism also has risen among President Trump’s 2024 voters, who are now split on the issue despite his hyperbolic endorsement of data centers as “big, strong, bold … Money Machines.”
If these growing public qualms lead to a more deliberate, community-building approach to data centers, rather than today’s frenzied digital goldrush, so much the better. But if instead they trigger a panicky rush to freeze all new construction, they will weaken U.S. economic innovation and growth and pass the baton of AI leadership to China.
The sudden cratering of public support for data centers stems from a confluence of popular anxieties. Most important are worries about spiking energy and water bills in host communities and the incipient fear that AI robots might be able to do our jobs better than we can.
Read more in The Hill
PPI Presses FTC on Sysco’s $29 Billion Restaurant Depot Deal, Warns of Higher Food Prices
WASHINGTON (July 31, 2026) — Today, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) sent a letter to Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson urging the agency to be particularly rigorous in its ongoing antitrust review of Sysco’s proposed $29 billion acquisition of Restaurant Depot. PPI argues that the merger would combine the nation’s largest broadline food distributor with the leading cash-and-carry wholesaler.
PPI’s analysis explains that the Sysco-RD merger would create an enormous food distribution ecosystem with the potential to reduce competition, raise food costs for restaurants, and ultimately increase prices for American consumers for food away from home. Protecting competition throughout the food supply chain is essential for affordable food prices for consumers, who are already besieged by high food price inflation.
The letter unpacks how a Sysco-RD merger would have a foot in two critical markets: broadline and cash-and-carry. The merger could entrench or extend Sysco’s significant market power, weakening competitive constraints that currently benefit independent restaurants and consumers. PPI notes that the 2023 U.S. Department of Justice/Federal Trade Commission Merger Guidelines carefully outline this competitive concern.
The result could be less price discipline across broadline and cash-and-carry, while locking customers into the larger Sysco-RD system. In addition to higher prices, the merger could also reduce innovation and service quality and discourage new entrants in food distribution. PPI urges the FTC to carefully scrutinize the merger and take appropriate action to protect competition and consumers.
Read the full letter 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
Canada is the top export market for 27 U.S. states
FACT: Canada is the top export market for 27 U.S. states.
THE NUMBERS: Canadian share of U.S. state exports*, 2025 –
| Maine | 41% |
| Michigan | 39% |
| Wisconsin | 31% |
* * U.S. Commerce Department, TradeStats Express database
WHAT THEY MEAN:
Special note: Beginning in August, Trade Facts will be delivered through PPI’s newly launched Substack, “ Radically Pragmatic.” Trade Fact emails will continue as usual, free and with no solicitations.
The Canadian government’s good-neighbor response to last year’s California wildfire crisis:
“Canadians are grateful for the support and solidarity extended to Canada by the United States during our own challenging wildfire season last year. Team Canada stands ready to reciprocate that support during this time of need. Canada has been working with the Provinces and Territories to ready its support. We have left no stone unturned and are exploring all avenues to offer our support to the people of California. Canadian agencies, including the Canadian Armed Forces, the Canadian Coast Guard, Global Affairs Canada, and Natural Resources Canada, are actively engaged in discussions with the United States Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the U.S. National Interagency Coordination Center (NICC), and the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services and the City of Los Angeles to determine how best to assist in the response and recovery efforts.”
Canada’s support during the California fires was the normal pattern of northern-border life for the past century, not an anomaly. Here’s then-President Reagan signing the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement in 1988:
“Let the 5,000-mile border between Canada and the United States stand as a symbol for the future. No soldier stands guard to protect it. Barbed wire does not deface it. And no invisible barrier of economic suspicion and fear will extend it. Let it forever be not a point of division but a meeting place between great and true friends.”
In pretty sharp contrast to both Canada’s 2025 fire relief mission and Reagan’s vision of North American community, White House lawyers last week “operationalized” Mr. Trump’s bizarre response to Ontario’s summer fire misfortune — a threat to impose tariffs after smoke drifted south across the border — by exhuming a 1930 trade law (“Section 338”) and using it to threaten 50% tariffs on about $20 billion worth of Canadian-made goods. (Cars, liquor, wood products, motorcycles, hockey and gymnastics equipment, etc.) Reframed by White House lawyers and trade officials as a response to supposed Canadian “discrimination” against American products, and then quietly pitched to reporters as a “negotiating leverage” gambit, this will supposedly go into effect around Labor Day. Given these claims of “discrimination”, here’s a look at Canada as a U.S. customer:
Policy: Canadian trade policy is in a sense “discriminatory,” but mostly in favor of American goods. Per the WTO’s “World Tariff Profiles,” Canada’s normal “trade-weighted” tariff average is 3.6% for goods in general, and 15.1% on farm products. Four generations of trade negotiations and signing ceremonies the 1960s — the Reagan-Mulroney “U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement” of 1988, the Johnson-Pearson “Agreement on Auto Trade” in 1968 a generation earlier, the Bush/Clinton/Mulroney/Salinas “North American Free Trade Agreement” of 1993 and the 2019 revision of NAFTA into the “U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement” — do leave a few trade barriers in place. (American trade bureaucrats have snapped lots of pencils and worn holes in many mouse pads over Canadian dairy quotas and movie regulations; to be fair: their Canadian counterparts can call up similar experiences with lumber-subsidy tariffs and “Buy American” purchasing rules.) These arguments, however, have always been financially small pieces of a much larger trade relationship, in which the trade agreements exempt American goods from nearly all Canadian tariffs. Partly mirroring this fact of policy, and partly the pull of geography, Canada matches Mexico as the largest buyer of American goods, and most of the things Canadians buy from abroad are American.
Data: So far this year, StatCanada reports Canadians importing C$357 billion worth of goods, of which C$205 billion, or about 60%, came from American farms, factories, and mines. Or, using American data, Canadians bought $334 billion of last year’s $2.2 trillion in U.S. goods exports — a billion dollars a day, and a seventh of the total.
States: Canadians were the top buyers of goods from 27 U.S. states. This is particularly evident close to the northern border — on top of the Maine, Michigan, and Wisconsin stats above, 39% of Idaho’s $4.6 billion in exports go to Canadian buyers, along with 47% of Montana’s $2.2 billion, and a startling 81% of North Dakota’s $9.4 billion. But large figures show up pretty much everywhere, with Canadians also the top buyers of goods from Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
Agriculture: Canada was just behind Mexico as last year’s second-largest buyer of American farm goods and seafood — $28.7 billion of U.S. agriculture’s $171.5 billion worldwide export total. That’s, among other things, 160,000 tons of U.S.-grown watermelon and 87,000 tons of strawberries, 3,700 tons of pecans, 45,000 tons of mushrooms, 16,000 tons of lobster, 40,000 tons of sausage, and 194,000 tons of rice.
Manufacturing: Canada is the top market for American factory goods, buying $286 billion of American manufacturers’ $1.77 trillion in worldwide sales. This includes one in every four exported U.S. cars and trucks, 1.26 billion liters of paint — enough to fill 500 Olympic pools, 2.4 million tons of makeup and eyeliner, 146,000 home washing machines, 866,000 wrenches, 12,820 MRI machines, and so on through long lists of tech products, consumer goods, planes, chemicals, medicines, and more.
Set against this, the White House’s not-very-accurately-named “Fact Sheet” points out that American wine, beer, and car sales dropped a lot last year. (“From March 2025 to February 2026, Canadian imports of alcoholic beverages decreased by about 81%, or $582 million, compared to the same period in 2024/2025”; “from April 2025 through May 2026, Canadian imports of U.S. motor vehicles decreased by approximately 25%, or $5.6 billion, compared to the same period in 2024/2025”.) They aren’t wrong about this, but there’s an obvious reason: the lost wine sales and the auto strife, and the falling tourism counts as well, are the direct result of Trump administration policy – wrongly accusing Canada of indifference to fentanyl trafficking and threatening a 25% tariff on Canadian goods in February 2025; then imposing “national security” tariffs of 25% and later 50% on Canadian steel, aluminum, and copper, and 25% on automobiles a few months later – and more generally Mr. Trump’s choice to project not good-neighborliness toward Canada but a mix of disrespect, arrogance, self-pity and other qualities that one guesses would have revolted President Reagan.
Nor was Reagan’s take on northern-border life some sort of odd exception. All modern U.S. administrations — those of Roosevelt and Eisenhower, Johnson and Nixon, Clinton, Bush, Obama — were perfectly well aware of the value Americans draw (including in trade, but far from trade only) from a close and trusting relationship with Canada. None had any trouble managing this relationship well. All left it to their successors in good shape. The next president, unfortunately inheriting something quite different, will have lots of repair work to do.
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.
How it was & ought to be:
President Reagan signs the U.S.-Canada FTA, 1988.
Canadian Embassy state-by-state trade and investment summaries.
Canadian government offers assistance to California fire communities.
PPI’s Ed Gresser looks at the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement and this summer’s “review” as of 2026. TL/DR: USMCA isn’t broken, doesn’t need major change.
How it is now:
White House yet again threatens Canada with tariffs.
A calm response from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.
And the Canadian Broadcast Corporation coverage.
And some legal background:
After the collapse of last year’s “IEEPA” tariffs, Mr. Trump has turned to “Section 338” for last week’s threats. An afterthought in the larger 1930 “Smoot-Hawley Tariff” bill, it authorizes presidents to impose tariffs of up to 50% on goods from countries whose policy “discrimination” against American products causes us some commercial damage. And the background: Trade policy historian Douglas Irwin (via NBER) reconstructs the 1920s backstory to Section 338.
If last week’s threats actually go into effect, will they stand up in court? No easy answer, since no previous administration has tried to use this law and legal scholars seem uncertain about (a) whether it actually remains in effect — possibly repealed by Kennedy’s 1962 Trade Act? Maybe made moot by the Ford-era passage of “Section 301” in 1974? — and (b) if it does, whether an administration can use it ad hoc as Mr. Trump is trying to do.
ABOUT ED
Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.
Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.
Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.
Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.
Read the full email and sign up for the Trade Fact of the Week.
Manno for Washington Monthly: The Quiet Redesign of the Bachelor’s Degree
American higher education has a completion problem it doesn’t like to advertise. For decades, the bachelor’s degree came in one shape: four years of typically uninterrupted coursework delivered on one campus. But this model is being dismantled nationwide, with little coordination and even less fanfare, leaving colleges and universities struggling.
The reason is a number that most Americans have never heard. At the start of the 2023-24 academic year, there were 43.1 million individuals who carry some college credit and no credential. This population has grown in every state and the District of Columbia since 2021, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. For decades, the policy answer to this predicament was some version of Try harder, come back.
But that’s changing. State policymakers are quietly rewriting what a bachelor’s degree is, letting community colleges grant them outright, compressing four years into three, and dissolving the line between high school and college altogether. The moves are separate, disconnected, and rarely discussed as a single trend. But together they amount to a wholesale redesign of the undergraduate degree, who provides it, and a real test of whether American higher education can build more than one model for getting a diploma.
Read more in Washington Monthly
Who is Hiring Medicaid Recipients?
Being poor in America is hard. Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) has virtually disappeared in many states. Safety net programs such as Medicaid and SNAP have strict income limits, with participants coming under increased pressure to work. Indeed, a KFF study found that as of 2023, roughly two-thirds of nondisabled non-elderly (NDNE) Medicaid recipients had paid employment.
That puts many low-income people in the tricky position of threading a very thin needle. A single mother, for example, may be trying to balance time spent attending community college and raising kids, while working just enough hours to earn some money without violating the Medicaid income limits. A full-time job which provides health care coverage would be best, of course — but finding one that pays enough to cover childcare may not be possible without more schooling.
In this context, the most attractive employers for Medicaid recipients may be those which offer a lot of flexibility in working hours to help stay under the income limits, with the possibility of jumping to full time work when appropriate. A new study from the GAO analyzed data from a small number of selected states and identified the top employers of NDNE Medicaid and SNAP recipients in those states. These included large private employers such as Walmart, Amazon, and Fedex; universities and healthcare systems such as Indiana University, Brown University, Mass General Brigham, MaineHealth, and Emory Healthcare; and public entities such as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the U.S. Post Service, and the Georgia Department of Human Resources.
In many ways, being named on the GAO’s list of top employers who hire Medicaid recipients is a badge of honor. Especially with work requirements tightening up in 2027, we need to encourage more employers to hire Medicaid recipients, not discourage them.
It’s not unreasonable to expect that large employers should offer full-time employees access to healthcare. But note that the GAO’s employer analysis contains absolutely no direct information about whether the Medicaid recipients at these large organizations were in full-time jobs. As part of the same paper, the GAO did a separate statistical analysis of the national workforce which suggests that most wage-earning nonelderly Medicaid recipients work for smaller companies, and less than half work full-time, full-year jobs.
Indeed, people — Medicaid recipients or not — often seek out flexible work because they are caregivers, military spouses, students, retirees supplementing Social Security, parents of school-age kids, or have some other life circumstances which require that flexibility. These types of opportunities allow people to be productively employed when they might otherwise be excluded from work altogether.
Kahlenberg and Lin for the Radically Pragmatic Substack: What’s Wrong with American Studies?
The field of American Studies appears to be in a defensive crouch.
This January, we published a study analyzing the flagship journal of the American Studies Association, American Quarterly. In the report, we objected to Donald Trump’s attempt to whitewash negative aspects of our country’s story but found that the articles in American Quarterly did the reverse by erasing anything good about the United States. Examining nearly 100 articles over a three-year period, we found that 80% were critical of America, 20% neutral, and not a single article was positive.
We published the full report, “The Distortion of American Studies: How the Field’s Leading Journal Has Embraced a Worldview as Slanted as Donald Trump’s,” with the Progressive Policy Institute and a summary in the Wall Street Journal, under the headline “American Studies Can’t Stand Its Subject.” We said there were plenty of valid reasons to critique America, but also asked, how could the articles in American Quarterly show no curiosity about any of America’s worthwhile attributes? How could there be no articles exploring, for instance, why the United States is cited as the most desirable destination for immigrants, or why we have so many Nobel Prize winners?
The response to our findings from leading academics has been as revealing as the original study. We thought professors might argue that particular articles should have been categorized as positive. Alternatively, academics might have seen the study as an opportunity for self-reflection, to ask whether they needed to do a better job of telling the full American story. Instead, with one admirable exception, their responses have been mostly misleading and dismissive, mischaracterizing the way we conducted our review and going so far as to deny the very existence of objective historical truths.
Read more on the Radically Pragmatic Substack
Manno for Daita K12:The Nuance in the Social Media Debate That K-12 Leaders Can’t Afford to Miss
A new survey from the American Survey Center at the American Enterprise Institute complicates the tidy story most people tell about teenagers and social media. That complication is exactly what K-12 school leaders need to hear.
The survey, authored by Daniel Cox, finds real harm associated with social media use among teenagers. But it’s not the harm, and not the population, that dominates the public conversation.
The effects show up almost entirely among heavy users, teens spending four or more hours a day on these platforms. Moderate and light users look statistically similar to each other. And the effects concentrate among girls. Heavy-using teen girls report satisfaction with their lives at less than half the rate of girls who use social media lightly, a 30-point gap.
Sleep, reading for pleasure, excitement about the future, and self-rated health all show the same pattern. Notably, the survey finds no relationship between social media use and friendship formation or satisfaction. This runs counter to the common claim that these platforms simply make teenagers lonelier.
Read More in Datia K12.
Guenther and Mandel for Florida Today: Florida’s space play offers a roadmap for beating China
China has a secret weapon in the modern day space race that the United States isn’t taking enough advantage of: state and local investment.
Chinese provinces and municipalities such as Shanghai are spending billions and leading the effort to build space infrastructure and satellite systems. For example, Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology (SSST) was initially founded with capital from Shanghai’s municipal state asset management commission and Shanghai Alliance Investment, a state-owned venture capital firm.
It’s working, at least so far. SSST aims to have a global LEO internet network fully operational by 2030, which sets it up to compete with American companies like Starlink and Amazon Leo. Though there are mounting questions about state and local debt, some of which is the result of duplicative spending.
The U.S. system cannot and should not seek to copy China’s system, but it would be foolish not to learn from what’s working for our biggest competitor.
Read more in Florida Today
Ainsley and Mattinson in Politico Magazine: A New Report Offers a Stark Warning to Centrists in France
Far-right politicians in Europe and the Americas have amassed support vowing to check the disruptions of globalization, promising strict borders and inward-looking economic and security policies.
In France, voters have another reason to consider the hard right: Many see no alternative.
That’s the conclusion of a new study of French voters conducted by Deborah Mattinson and Claire Ainsley, two prominent British political strategists. Mattinson and Ainsley, both affiliated with the center-left Progressive Policy Institute, have conducted focus groups with persuadable voters across Europe, the United States and Australia. For long-established political parties, the picture is bleak.
The collapse of the center and the rise of extremes is a global trend, confirmed in scores of elections and PPI’s international focus groups. Even in that bilious context, France stands out as a land of political desolation — a country where voters are so despairing and the center and left so depleted that Marine Le Pen, criminal conviction and all, may well be the next president.
“One of the things that came really clearly from these focus groups is that National Rally are on track to win because they are sort of the only show in town,” Mattinson told me, referring to Le Pen’s party.
The Mattinson-Ainsley research, which they shared with POLITICO Magazine, is arresting reading for anyone contending with the far right’s appeal to working-class communities, or hoping to resurrect a coalition nearer the center.
Read more in Politico
Canter and Manno for Thomas Fordham Institute: Good programs aren’t enough: States need a work-based learning strategy
In Philadelphia, a young person leaving Launchpad Philly’s post-high school graduate training track is on pace to earn nearly $30,000 within nine months and $50,000 within one year. That far outpaces the roughly $12,500 a young Philadelphian with only a high school diploma typically earns.
That’s not a best-case anecdote. It’s a design choice. And it’s one of six such designs documented in our new report, A Practical Guide to Work-Based Learning, which also examines a network of career and technical charter schools in South Bend, Indiana; an industry-themed school network in San Antonio; a rural coordination model spanning a thinly populated Indiana county; a Purdue-affiliated early college network; and a multi-district rural collaborative in Colorado.
Each program provides, by any fair measure, excellent preparation for college and career. And each one raises the same uncomfortable predicament. Education has no shortage of good ideas. What it lacks is a strategy for making them commonplace.
States should stop treating work-based learning primarily as something individual schools or districts choose to pursue and start treating it as something the state itself is responsible for enabling at scale. Based on what separated our six success stories from the much larger number of well-intentioned efforts that stall out, here are four actions state policymakers can pursue.
Read more in Thomas Fordham Institute
Trump’s New Tariffs, Likely Illegal, Will Cost Americans $100 Billion a Year
WASHINGTON (July 23, 2026) — Today, Ed Gresser, Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets of the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), released the following statement in response to the Trump administration’s announcement of “Section 301” tariffs on goods from 60 U.S. trading partners, 10% for 22 partners and 12.5% for the other 38 compared to a legal “simple average” rate of 3.5%, ostensibly related to imports of products made with forced labor:
“The experience with the Trump administration’s illegal ‘international emergency’ tariffs last year suggests that its new Section 301 tariff decree, if it survives court scrutiny, will likely cost Americans $100 billion a year. Mr. Trump and his trade officials have clearly told American families to expect higher prices for groceries, back-to-school supplies, Christmas presents and other goods this fall. And it has warned American businesses grappling with the high cost of essential goods and business inputs — farmers, manufacturers, restaurants, building contractors, retail shops, clinics and others — to expect no relief.
“The administration’s decree, however, may fail in court just as last year’s IEEPA Executive Orders did. As PPI’s testimony earlier this month explained, measured either against the Constitutional separation of powers or the statutory rules of Section 301, its vague claims about forced labor abroad do not hold up. Constitutionally, it is likely impermissible as an attempt to use a law designed for problem-solving abroad to impose a general tariff increase. And legally, Section 301 requires administrations to demonstrate ‘unreasonable acts, policies, or practices’ which impose a burden on U.S. commerce, which this Executive Order fails to do. While making emotive claims about forced labor, it neither presents evidence that the listed countries are buying goods made with the use of forced labor, nor demonstrates that if they were, this would impose the statutorily required ‘burden on U.S. commerce.’
“Thus, the Executive Order looks vulnerable to challenge, and courts would have good reason to strike it down. The courts, however, should not have to make this call. Rather, Congress should act to restore Constitutional policymaking after a year of erratic, constantly changing, and basically inappropriate administration attempts to rule by decree. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) this week introduced important legislation to terminate Mr. Trump’s tariff decrees en bloc and restore a Constitutionally appropriate, Congressionally-driven system for setting tariff rates. The appropriate next step is for House Speaker Mike Johnson, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, and their Senate counterparts Majority Leader John Thune and Finance Committee Chairman Mike Crapo to pass this bill and restore the Constitutional order.”
Read more about Section 301 and how the Trump Administration is trying once again to circumvent Congress to implement tariffs and skyrocket costs for Americans 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
PPI Background on the Trump Administration’s Attempt to Implement Section 301 and Forced Labor Tariffs
“Section 301,” a trade statute drafted in 1974, authorizes presidents to use tariffs as negotiating leverage to solve specific trade policy problems, after demonstrating that the government of a relevant country is implementing unreasonable “acts, policies, or practices” that impose a “burden on U.S. commerce.”Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent announced that the Trump administration would use this law, along with “Section 232,” to restore the International Emergency Economic Powers Act tariff rates the Supreme Court struck down that month.
Five months later, the Trump administration’s Executive Order uses Section 301 to impose tariffs of 10% on goods from 6 U.S. trading partners (Canada, Ecuador, the European Union, Indonesia, Pakistan, and the U.K.) and of 12.5% on goods from another 54, from Australia, New Zealand and Japan to Chile, Colombia, Mexico, China, South Africa, and Bangladesh. Together, these countries are the source of about $3.3 trillion in goods, roughly 97% of the consumer goods, groceries, industrial inputs, and raw materials American families and businesses buy from abroad. Based on the $82 billion raised by last year’s 10% “IEEPA” global tariff, imposed on April 9, 2025, and in place until the Supreme Court’s decision in February, the action is likely to cost Americans roughly $100 billion a year.
The administration’s argument for this action is a claim that (a) the countries on its list are importing goods made with the use of forced labor, and using them to produce other goods competing with American products, and (b) this imposes a “burden” on U.S. commerce by unnaturally reducing the prices of their goods. Gresser’s July 2026 testimony, given before the U.S. Trade Representative Office’s “301 Committee,” rebuts both claims, arguing that the action fails on Constitutional grounds, and also fails to meet Section 301’s evidentiary standards:
- Secretary Bessent’s comment demonstrates that this action, along with the accompanying Section 301 investigation of “structural excess capacity” in manufacturing in 16 economies, is simply meant to replace the illegal IEEPA Executive Orders of 2025 and impose a general tariff increase, rather than to address a forced-labor policy question through policy reform. Section 301 does not authorize general tariff increases, as the Constitution reserves this to Congress by assigning power over “Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises” to Congress in Article I. The Executive Order is therefore an impermissible breach of the separation of powers.
- The U.S. Trade Representative Office’s Report of June 2 recommending these tariffs fails to demonstrate that any of the countries it names are importing forced labor goods. Rather, it simply notes that there is some forced labor trade in the world, and that the listed countries must therefore be buying some. In some cases — for example, Spanish breweries’ imports of Burmese rice for malt liquor — it accuses the countries of buying goods Americans also buy. This cannot justify tariff imposition.
- USTR’s Report also fails to demonstrate that, if any of the listed countries are in fact buying forced labor goods, this would impose a “burden” on U.S. commerce. It argues that “in general”, forced labor enterprises would produce goods at lower costs than honorable and law-abiding businesses. This may well be true in some cases, but as Gresser’s testimony points out, the largest recent U.S. forced-labor enterprise – “Rojas Avila Harvesting,” a labor contractor active in Georgia onion and blueberry picking, 24 of whose executives and associates have pleaded guilty to human trafficking, forced labor, and other crimes — operated for years without affecting the prices of goods. Only empirical data and analysis could demonstrate the price effects USTR assumes to be a general pattern, and its report offers none.
- Outside the bounds of this particular action, the Trump administration has shown little interest in forced labor. To the contrary, it has sharply scaled back U.S. government efforts to eliminate forced labor, canceling all U.S. support for forced labor elimination overseas through DOGE last year and reducing the number of Labor Department inspectors to fight it at home.
Pearson for CCDaily: Don’t get too excited about Workforce Pell, yet
Education officials have had high hopes for this month’s launch of the long-awaited Workforce Pell program. For the first time ever, students attending short-term vocational programs in fields like healthcare support and the skilled trades will be eligible for federal grant aid, just like their peers studying English or biology at a university — a potential “game changer” for career training, in the recent words of Undersecretary of Education Nicholas Kent.
Workforce Pell does indeed promise a step toward rectifying the imbalance in federal funding for college-going Americans and those who seek to join the workforce sooner. But higher education leaders might need to temper their expectations, at least early on. No matter what, it will take at least a few years for states to fully implement Workforce Pell, which requires them to decide which programs will be eligible and track their results. Design choices by the federal government, as well as the basic realities faced by short-term job training programs, may limit the program’s initial potential, too.
That’s the conclusion I’ve reached after conversations with multiple community college system leaders in recent weeks, who I offered confidentiality in order for them to speak freely.
Read More in CCDaily.
Canter on Radically Pragmatic Substack: How Mississippi Almost Abandoned Its Education Reforms
The little-known story of how backlash to Common Core nearly sank the policies that have turned the state into a national model.
Adapted from Rachel Canter’s PPI report.
One of the most remarkable aspects of Mississippi’s education reforms has been its durability. Unlike the policy churn familiar to education advocates in most of the country, the state has steadily built on its reform agenda for around 15 years to create a coherent and comprehensive policy framework — one that includes not only strong learning standards and rules that hold schools accountable for their results, but also evidence-based instructional practices like the science of reading and real support for implementation down to the classroom level. As I’ve written, it was this marathon approach that helped propel us to the top of the national leader board in reading and math, when adjusting for demographics, in 2024.
What some may not realize is that our ability to keep going wasn’t simply dumb luck. It was grit. By the time Mississippi began making efforts to dramatically improve learning, the national mood had already begun to sour on ideas like accountability and rigorous standards. The bipartisan consensus for reform was pulling apart at the seams, and states across the country were already starting to turn back, or water down, measures they had enthusiastically adopted only a few years before.
From the left, longstanding complaints about standardized testing found new purchase with the public after several years of No Child Left Behind, which used grade-level scores on exams as the exclusive measure of whether schools could be designated as “in need of improvement” and face consequences. When reformers began to advocate that tests be used to evaluate teachers, their unions saw an opportunity not only to cast the effort as an attack on educators but to delegitimize all standardized testing and the broader concept of school accountability. A 2008 Time Magazine cover of the first mayorally-appointed Chancellor of DC Public Schools, Michelle Rhee, holding a broom became emblematic not of reformers’ desire to clean up overly bureaucratic and ineffective school districts but of the teachers union’s accusation that reformers sought to fire their way to success.
On the right, the Common Core State Standards, adopted by most states in 2010, became the subject of evolving and increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories online and in conservative media. Reasonable critiques — ranging from concerns the standards didn’t emphasize phonics enough in the early grades to philosophical disagreements about whether the federal government should incentivize the adoption of particular state learning standards — were completely blown away by allegations that the standards were a sinister plot to indoctrinate children in left-wing ideologies. Conservatives dubbed the standards “Obamacore,” despite the entire effort preceding Obama’s presidency and having its genesis in a wholly state-driven process, because many states had rushed their adoption to be competitive in the first round of Race to the Top, the president’s signature education grant initiative.
Continue reading on Substack.
Gresser in The Economist: The tariffs that just won’t die
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But they could soon rise further. Later this year, the USTR is expected to impose further country-specific duties under Section 301 investigations into “structural excess capacity” among 16 of America’s largest trading partners. The administration accuses these countries of “producing more goods than they can consume or productively invest domestically”, a definition that Ed Gresser of the Progressive Policy Institute, a think-tank, calls “eccentric”.
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