WASHINGTON (April 28, 2026) — The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) today released “Fortifying the Guardrails: Reforming Federal Criminal Justice After Trump’s Revenge Prosecutions,” a comprehensive analysis by Jonathan Wroblewski, contributing author and former Director of the Office of Policy and Legislation in the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. The report examines how the Trump administration weaponizes federal criminal law against political opponents and provides a blueprint for structural reforms to prevent future abuse.
The report documents how the current federal criminal justice system, despite constitutional safeguards, proved vulnerable to politicization during the first 15 months of Trump’s second term. Through case studies of high-profile targets, including former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, and six Democratic lawmakers, the report reveals systemic weaknesses that enabled selective prosecution and investigative harassment.
The report identifies five critical areas requiring reform:
Criminal Code Reform: Federal criminal statutes are so vaguely defined and broadly written that they invite selective enforcement. The case against AG James, charging her with bank fraud for an allegedly misrepresented home purchase that caused no loss, exposed how prosecutors can manufacture serious felonies from minor conduct. Congress should undertake comprehensive code reform to clearly define crimes, distinguish degrees of severity, and eliminate undefined terms that prosecutors exploit.
Subpoena and Grand Jury Reform: Investigative subpoenas can be weaponized to intimidate and harass without court oversight. Pending amendments to Federal Rule 17 would allow prosecutors to issue subpoenas for sensitive personal information without judicial review or notice to the affected party.
DOJ Independence: While the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States limits congressional ability to insulate the DOJ from presidential direction, internal policy reforms remain viable. Future administrations should codify the Principles of Federal Prosecution, increase transparency around White House contacts with the DOJ, and empower career officials and inspectors general to report and resist improper directives.
Accountability: Those who designed and executed revenge prosecutions must face consequences. Disciplinary action, including potential termination of Department officials, referrals to state bar authorities, and congressional inquiry are essential to signal that weaponizing criminal power is incompatible with the rule of law.
Foundational Principle: Federal criminal law must not be so broad or easily manipulated that it becomes a tool of political or personal payback. As Justice Robert Jackson observed in 1940, federal prosecutors wield vast powers that demand “the highest level of ethical integrity” to deliver equal justice under law.
The report notes that some systemic resilience emerged. Grand juries refused to indict several targets despite prosecutorial pressure, and courts dismissed cases against Comey and James on constitutional grounds. Yet legal fees, psychological toll, and chilled speech impose costs that survive dismissal and demonstrate that the system requires deliberate strengthening to prevent future abuses.
The report calls on Congress and the next administration to enact these reforms without delay, building on existing bipartisan support for concerns about overcriminalization and criminal code modernization.
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.
Donald Trump has used his second term in office to launch a series of revenge prosecutions against political enemies unparalleled in U.S. history. His high‑profile targets, ranging from former FBI Director James Comey to a group of sitting Democratic lawmakers, have dominated the headlines. But the president’s assaults on impartial justice reveal threats to everyday Americans, too, whose constitutional rights are jeopardized by a system that lacks sufficient institutional guardrails against abusive investigations and indictments.
I spent over 30 years at the Department of Justice as a prosecutor and as a policy lawyer. I worked with countless attorneys who were committed, first and foremost, to justice, integrity, fairness, and equality under the law. Many of them now rightly express sorrow that the values of impartiality and political neutrality that animated the DOJ’s ethos for decades have broken down. Some suggest there is little that can be done to restore them in the face of a Supreme Court devoted to the “unitary executive” theory, which gives the president effectively unfettered control over his branch of government. Nonetheless, I believe there are concrete steps a new administration could take to strengthen the guardrails against a rogue president, and propose them in this report.
They stem from a simple premise: Federal criminal law and the procedures in place to administer it must not be so broad, vague, or easily manipulated that they can be readily turned into tools of political or personal payback. That is precisely what has occurred over the first 15 months of the second Trump term. Cases transparently animated by presidential grievance or political messaging have been packaged as ordinary law enforcement. At every stage of the criminal process — from the drafting of criminal statutes, to the decision to open an investigation, to the use of subpoenas and other grand jury process, to the independence (or lack thereof) of the Justice Department — the system has proven more fragile and susceptible to political manipulation than we who worked at the department ever thought possible.
In 2016, many of us assumed Trump’s calls to lock up Hillary Clinton were just a crude performance designed to thrill his base rather than a literal promise of future criminal prosecutions. The stump speech punchline has turned into a governing strategy of domination via legal warfare that goes far beyond just criminal law, encompassing punitive state action against universities, law firms, those who investigated the president in the past, and many others. Many of those actions have been thwarted by the courts or by grand juries. Nonetheless, the damage the Trump Administration is doing to the integrity of the nation’s justice system is deep and pervasive.
The problem is also not abating: This month, the Justice Department indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center based on the fanciful theory that it had defrauded donors by paying undercover informants within hate groups it had sought to disrupt, such as the Ku Klux Klan. The highly politicized case appears to be an audition of sorts by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s pliant former personal lawyer, in his bid to permanently succeed former Attorney General Pam Bondi, who was fired from her position in part because the president believed she failed to prosecute the president’s foes aggressively enough. Unless Republican Senators take a stand and reject a nominee who threatens to act as a political hatchet, we may well see more politicized indictments.
This report focuses on the most prominent case studies of revenge prosecutions so far and the reforms they suggest. The prosecution of New York Attorney General Letitia James, for example, spotlights the dangerous combination of an overbroad federal criminal code and highly discretionary charging authority. James’s indictment rested on an elastic interpretation of fraud statutes — interpretations that could be, and were, stretched to fit a political vendetta. Although those charges, along with those against James Comey, were ultimately dismissed because the acting U.S. Attorney lacked constitutional authority under the Appointments Clause, this legal defect could not erase all the fear, anxiety, pressure, and financial costs imposed on the targets and their families. Nor did it resolve the underlying problem: a federal criminal code so expansive and ill‑structured that it invites selective and abusive enforcement.
Congress and the next administration must repair today’s politicized federal criminal justice system. There is already bipartisan support to address overcriminalization and code reform. We urge lawmakers to build on the existing concerns by developing a process to review the criminal code and amend it where necessary to embody core criminal law principles, including clearly codified criminal laws, coherently graded, distinguishing crimes that are more serious from those that are less. Statutory definitions must be sharpened, limiting vague terms that invite prosecutors to “find a crime” once they have chosen a target. Such an architecture would more faithfully embody constitutional values and make it harder for any administration to use loosely worded laws against disfavored individuals.
The case of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell illustrates the use of investigative subpoenas as instruments of pressure and humiliation. In Powell’s case, Chief Judge Jeb Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia found that subpoena power, designed as a neutral mechanism of information‑gathering, was being deployed by President Trump’s subordinates to send a clear political message to the Chair: fall in line with the president’s demands to reduce interest rates or face intrusive, public, and costly criminal scrutiny. Subpoena reform, including tighter judicial oversight, clearer relevance standards, and safeguards against the use of subpoenas to chill lawful policy disagreement or public criticism, is needed.
The case of the “Seditious Six” — Democratic lawmakers who drew Trump’s ire by urging troops on video to resist illegal orders — illustrates both how the grand jury can be a shield for citizens against an abusive executive but also a vehicle for prosecutorial abuse. The report reviews this episode and recommends reforms to the grand jury process to ensure its proper role as an investigative body and a buffer between citizen and state, and not an opaque instrument of intimidation and political revenge.
Overlaying these case‑specific reforms is the need for greater independence at the Department of Justice from the whims of an unscrupulous president. The Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States limits what Congress can do to ensure Justice Department independence. But internal DOJ policies, including the Principles of Federal Prosecution developed by Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti in 1980 to rebuild public confidence in the integrity and independence of the Justice Department and designed precisely to prevent politicized charging decisions like what we’ve seen this last 15 months, need to be reembraced and reinforced. President Trump won’t be the last president tempted to politicize criminal law. But codifying and strengthening the norms of impartial justice will illuminate when pressure from the White House — sometimes public but sometimes conveyed through back channels or social media messages — distorts prosecutorial judgment and blurs the line between appropriate and political criminal law decision‑making. Future administrations should codify regulations that protect the DOJ from direct presidential or political interference in individual cases, increase transparency around contacts between the White House and the Department, and empower career officials and inspectors general to report and resist improper directives.
Finally, this report examines the question of accountability for President Trump’s accomplices in suborning justice. To deter future abuses, blatant misconduct must be punished. We outline a menu of accountability mechanisms: a congressional inquiry into these cases; potential disciplinary action, including termination, against Department officials who violated professional norms or legal obligations; and, where warranted, referrals to state bar authorities or inspectors general. Accountability is not about vengeance against individuals but about fully recognizing and signaling that using criminal power as a political weapon is incompatible with the rule of law.
Taken together, the five recommendations advanced here — criminal code reform, subpoena and grand jury reform, stronger DOJ independence, and meaningful accountability — are not a cure‑all. No statute or regulation or set of actions can fully prevent a determined president from trying to exploit the system. But they can raise the costs of doing so, narrow the opportunities for abuse, and equip future institutions with clearer tools to push back. The revenge prosecutions should be understood as a stress test that the current justice system partially passed and partially failed. The task now is to learn from the failures and fortify the guardrails before the next test arrives.
National Apprenticeship Week, April 26 to May 2, focuses attention on earn-and-learn pathways to opportunity. It also underscores a larger truth. Higher education has a work problem.
For decades, the script for upward mobility asked students to do something that, for many, was a financial burden. They should push work to the margins, gain a degree, and then get a job.
That model left many with debt, limited work experience, and reasons to wonder how a college degree and economic mobility fit together.
The apprenticeship degree is emerging as an important answer to that problem. It’s not anti-college. It’s not anti-separation. It treats work and postsecondary education as partners, not rivals.
Higher education is caught in a contradiction. Americans are losing confidence in colleges and universities, yet many students say their education is valuable, career-relevant and worth the money. That tension isn’t a statistical curiosity. It’s at the heart of the sector’s problem.
Public confidence in colleges and universities fell from 57% in 2015 to 36% in 2024, then rebounded modestly to 42% in 2025, according to Gallup. At the same time, the Pew Research Center reports that 70% of Americans now say the higher education system is headed in the wrong direction. Those aren’t the views of a small dissatisfied minority. They reflect a broad erosion of trust in one of America’s central civic and economic institutions.
And yet students report something more positive, according to Gallup and Lumina Foundation. About seven in 10 rate the quality of their education as excellent or very good, 69% say they feel they belong on campus, roughly nine in 10 say their degree is worth the investment, 93% say they are learning career-relevant skills, and 88% believe their degree will help them get a job.
This isn’t the portrait of a generation writing off college as a bad bet. It is the portrait of students who often value their own experience even while the wider public doubts the system that delivers it.
That gap matters. It suggests that the crisis in higher education isn’t simply one of educational quality. It’s a crisis of legitimacy.
Four years into the full-scale war in Ukraine, with asecond major conflagration raging in the Persian Gulf and an increasing number of Western countries talking about adapting Ukraine’s way of war, there is growing recognition of the potential mutual benefit that can be derived from more cooperation between Kyiv and the West.
Policy makers and practitioners in the West and Ukraine have argued for exploring new forms of cooperation above and beyond Western military aid. Kyiv could give or sell its innovative, low-cost, battle-proven weapons to the West. Training, now largely one directional – Europeans training Ukrainian fighters – could evolve into more of a two way street. Western strategists have much to learn from Ukraine about how to integrate unmanned vehicles – air, land, and sea drones – into their battle plans. But one of the most promising approaches, often neglected in the West, is collaborative manufacturing.
Ukraine has been talking about industrial cooperation for more than two years, and a handful of European countries have explored promising experiments. Under the so-called ‘Danish model’, launched in mid-2024, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, and several other donors alongside the European Union, bolstered Ukraine’s defence procurement by covering the cost of selected arms purchases. More recently, some dozen Ukrainian companies have signed agreements to produce weaponry in Western Europe, either alone or as part of a joint venture with a Western firm.
The war in the Persian Gulf has spurred new international interest in Ukrainian defence technology. Yet by and large, these are still small experiments – ingenious ideas with significant promise for both the West and Ukraine, but not yet meaningful steps toward the integration of Ukrainian and European security.
This paper asks why. What have these experiments hoped to achieve? What have they accomplished? What lessons have been learned by Ukraine and its international partners? What if anything can be done to improve these fledgling initiatives and, most important, scale them?
The paper concludes with recommendations for policy makers, manufacturers, investors, and facilitating middlemen. What can be done to build on the experiments under way, including the Danish model and a handful of government-sponsored joint ventures – an approach Kyiv calls ‘Build With Ukraine’? Europe’s future security may turn on the results.
“Being an UpSkill youth apprentice has taught me more than I ever imagined. It led me to study business in college. It gave me responsibility and a clearer sense of direction.”
That’s what college student Owen Snyder said during a recent webinar about his high school senior year apprenticeship at German American Bank in Bloomington, Indiana. It shaped his pathway to Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, where he’s a sophomore and continuing his apprenticeship.
His story captures what many young people want and many schools struggle to provide: not just information about possible future jobs, but practical ways to prepare for and get them.
For Hampton University freshman Maegan Godoy, the skills she learned as a high school apprentice at New America’s Partnership to Advance Youth Apprenticeship, or PAYA, have already proven their worth in her coursework as a political science major, she said during the same webinar.
Far from being just a pathway to an occupation, youth apprenticeships deepen academic learning, helping students connect classroom study to the habits, judgment and responsibility that adult work requires.
This National Apprenticeship Week is the right time to focus on these types of youth-focused programs, because they are a promising way to strengthen the bridge from school to work and adulthood. But there are barriers to their expansion.
President Trump is inflicting tariffs on America in a vain attempt to revive traditional manufacturing. Private investment is gushing instead into data centers, where the AI economy is being hatched.
The U.S. is the epicenter of this global investment boom in data centers, which support the internet, cloud computing and the training of ever-more capable artificial intelligence models. Spending on data centers is growing exponentially. Much of it comes from the “hyperscalers” like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Oracle and OpenAI. The first four of these digital giants alone plowed $425 billion last year into centers, a figure expected to top $600 billion this year.
Surging capital investment in data centers and AI has helped propel the stock market to new heights. And for now, at least, it is making America the world’s foremost computing superpower, the pace car in a race against China and others to master AI. More than 4,000 data centers — almost 40 percent of the world total — are located here, compared to just 368 in China.
However, the U.S. digital goldrush is running into a groundswell of local resistance.
In Virginia, which has the nation’s biggest concentration of data centers (570), voters are having second thoughts. Three years ago, 69 percent said they were comfortable with new data centers in their community. That number has since dropped to 35 percent, with 59 percent voicing discomfort. Prince William County has nixed plans for a 1,700-acre campus near the Manassas civil war battlefield, which would have hosted dozens of data centers.
Maine recently became the first state to pause building large data centers pending a study of its energy needs. And Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) are pushing a bill in Washington to impose a national moratorium on construction.
The backlash springs from three main sources. First and most pervasive is the fear of soaring electricity bills. Data centers have a voracious appetite for power, putting pressure on utilities to generate more and upgrade local grids to transmit it. Residents worry that it portends higher monthly bills, even as energy costs already are rising faster than inflation. The centers also consume large volumes of water to cool servers, which could mean shortages and higher water bills. That has made them especially controversial in the desert West.
Second, a majority of Americans say they’re anxious about losing their jobs to AI. Such fears may be premature, but they cannot be airily dismissed. And while initially welcomed for creating construction jobs and generating substantial property tax revenues, data centers, essentially warehouses crammed with servers, have turned out to be only modest as job creators. An average facility might employ around 200 people.
This week on Facing the Future, host Bob Bixby spoke with Ben Ritz, Vice President of Policy Development at the Progressive Policy Institute, about recent tax policy proposals, budget challenges, and the broader implications for fiscal responsibility in the United States.
Critique of Major Tax Cut Proposals
The conversation focused heavily on two significant tax cut proposals introduced by Democratic Senators Cory Booker and Chris Van Hollen. Both plans aim to exempt a large portion of middle-class Americans from paying federal income tax—up to $75,000 under Booker’s plan and $92,000 under Van Hollen’s. Ritz was critical of these proposals, describing them as “slopulism,” a term he said meant “low-effort and designed to trend on social media algorithms rather than be good policy.”
He explained that with these proposals, “If you say them really quickly to someone – ‘Should we cut taxes on the middle class and working Americans?’– people say, ‘Yeah, sure, that sounds good.’ And then you actually look at the proposal and they have a lot of really bad consequences if you just think about the details for 5 minutes”
Ritz pointed out that the Van Hollen and Booker proposals are actually regressive despite appearing progressive at first glance. Because of the way deductions work, higher earners receive a disproportionately larger benefit. He noted, “Someone who earns $175,000 a year is getting twice the tax cut as somebody who earns $75,000” Furthermore, the cost implications are staggering: Van Hollen’s plan would cost about $1.5 trillion, while Booker’s proposal is nearly $7 trillion—exceeding the size of the Trump tax cuts and COVID relief spending.
Ritz emphasized the importance of fiscal responsibility, especially for Democrats who want to expand government programs. He warned, “If you want to be the party of ‘government can do things,’ you have to make it so that the government can do things.”
Budget Process and the President’s Proposal
Turning to the broader budget landscape, Ritz expressed skepticism about the President’s recent budget proposal, noting it lacked completeness and realism. “I didn’t see a budget proposal from the president. I saw a proposal for maybe 30% of the budget. There’s nothing on revenue and he only talked about discretionary spending, nothing on mandatory spending, which is about two-thirds of the budget when you include interest… I thought it was incomplete and irresponsible.”
“We’re spending $1 trillion a year on interest now and basically every year into the future”, Ritz said. “As a percent of GDP, it is the highest it has ever been. We have never spent as much of our national resources on federal interest payments as we do now, and are going to in the future. It’s more than we spend on national defense, or at least as we were before the war on Iran. We’ll see how that changes. But it’s more than we spend on Medicare and Medicaid, at least individually. And if we keep going on our current path, eventually it’s going to be even bigger than Social Security, which is the biggest program in the budget.”
Potential Solutions: Fiscal Commissions and Automatic Stabilizers
Ritz was “lukewarm positive” about the idea of a new fiscal commission, acknowledging its potential to restart conversations on budget reform. However, he stressed that “the process isn’t the problem, the people and the policy and the politics are the problem.” He advocated for action-forcing mechanisms to be part of a commission process, such as requiring Congress to vote up-or-down on commission recommendations to increase accountability.
On automatic stabilizers—mechanisms that would automatically adjust taxes or spending based on economic conditions—Ritz expressed strong support: “I’m a big proponent of them… I’d rather the default be an ideal outcome rather than an unsustainable one.”
Social Security and Holistic Budget Planning
With Social Security’s trust fund projected to become insolvent by 2032, Ritz supported forming a specific commission to address the issue but cautioned against treating it in isolation. He explained, “Social Security isn’t the only problem we have in 2032. Medicare’s main trust fund is going to run out at the same time, so we’re actually going to have multiple problems hitting at the same time. I don’t think you can look at Social Security entirely in isolation from the rest of the federal budget. What are you going to do about our other fiscal challenges? I think if we’re doing a Social Security-only commission, it needs to be circumscribed so that they can’t take all the solutions for all the other problems we face off the table.”
THE NUMBERS: Mississippi 4th-grade reading scores, compared to national averages –
2024
+4
2022
+1
2017
-6
2011
-11
2007
-12
2000
-14
WHAT THEY MEAN:
Next month, Mississippi’s 235 high schools will send 28,000 graduating seniors off carrying their diplomas to first jobs, military service, college dorms, gap years, etc, and adult life. The 28,000 figure represents a 90.8% graduation rate, the highest in Mississippi history and one of America’s 10 highest. By contrast, when this spring’s grads arrived in kindergarten in 2012, Mississippi’s graduation rate was 75%, tied with Alabama for the country’s 6th-lowest rate. What has happened? And what might school-watchers learn from it?
Offering lessons drawn from her two decades of hands-on experience with Mississippi school reform, PPI Education Director Rachel Canter argues in PPI’s newest research paper that to make American schools a lot better, reformers should avoid hoping for miracles. They should run marathons instead. Background, and then some conclusions:
Every three years since 2000, the U.S. has joined 37 other OECD members, and 57 other interested governments abroad, in the Programme for International Student Assessment (“PISA” for short). Every three years, PISA tests 5,000 15-year-olds in each participating country on reading, science, and math, and then publishes assessments of student achievement that governments, parents, and educators can compare both over time and among countries. The data span some big U.S. national education reform efforts — No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Common Core — and, a little dishearteningly, show American school performance staying about the same. The newest results are from the 2022 tests — 2026 figures arrive in September — and almost perfectly match the oldest:
Year
Reading
Math
Science
2022
504
465
499
2018
505
478
502
2012
498
481
497
2009
500
487
502
2000
504
493
499
PISA’s rankings of American students vis-à-vis foreign countries are a little more variable than their scores, but tell a similar story. Just as U.S. school performances typically show New England at the top, the Deep South and Southwest at the bottom, and the others in between, each PISA comparison has put East Asian schools — Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan – first, with Canada and some smaller northern European countries (Estonia, Switzerland, Ireland) a shade below. U.S. students usually score a bit above the world median and a tier below the best performers. Since 2000, they’ve placed in a range from 8th to 17th in reading, 25th to 30th in math, and 10th to 20th in science. The U.S.’ best-ever ranking was 6th in reading in 2022, not because that year’s American teens improved on their elders’ performance, but because foreigners’ pandemic scores fell more sharply than America’s. In essence, U.S. schools get a sort of “B-” average, sustained with little change throughout the 21st century.
This sort of result can lead to fatalism and passivity. If big national efforts don’t change outcomes much, and what matters instead are locality and family commitments (or even more dispiriting, amorphous cultural or historical factors), why bother? But Canter’s in-depth review of Mississippi’s reading progress shows that fatalism is wrong.
Outside stereotypes of Mississippi mix high culture and outsized historic impact – Faulkner and Welty, Delta blues, the civil rights movement — with low incomes, social stratification, outmigration, poor health, and white flight from public schools. School outcomes before 2010 didn’t do much to disprove this, generally placing Mississippi in the bottom five, if not 49th or 50th. But this spring’s graduates are leaving a school system very different from the one they joined in 2012. Mississippi’s reading ranking, for example, is up to 9th nationally — best in the south and at par with Connecticut and Utah — and Canter notes that “normalizing” data for family income would put Mississippi’s teenage readers first in the country.
How did this happen? Canter objects to the commonly used term “Mississippi miracle”. (A “miracle” implies divine intervention, or some unexpected flash of insight enabling rapid and easy change, and little actual work.) Instead, she attributes Mississippi’s schooling rise to a long “marathon” of stable and essentially non-partisan policy basics, dutifully implemented over a period of years. Her list of “policies” is shorter than the description of their steady implementation in practice:
A reading competency law in 2013 that required holding back students who don’t pass a reading exam, along with special help for struggling students
Support for teachers in understanding and using better practices, like scientifically based reading instruction
Annual “A to F” grades for schools based on student achievement, with state intervention in schools at the bottom.
In sum: Using the “marathon” metaphor, over the life of one school cohort — from their arrival as kindergarteners in the autumn 15 years ago, to the spring morning when they break the tape as graduates — Mississippi’s schools got much better.
So: As Mississippi’s May grads flip their tassels, tired school reformers should take heart from their story. Mediocre schools can, in fact, become very good, and good ones can become great.
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;
Canter’s Mississippi First nonprofit advocates for education reform, reading programs, and public charter schools. (PPI note: The name dates to 2008, and has no relationship to current administration slogans.)
The Education Department’s “National Education Report Card” has maps with state-by-state rankings and scores for reading, math, and science.
… and from the same source, a look at Mississippi schools’ changing fortunes, 1992-2024.
Good examples abroad:
The OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment has data and analysis of school performance in the 38 OECD member countries, plus 57 “partner” countries also joining the PISA assessments.
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.
A new report from the center-left Progressive Policy Institute documents how Mississippi climbed from last in the country in fourth-grade reading to above the national average. The report’s insights offer useful guidance for New York State.
The report identified four reasons for Mississippi’s success. Its widely touted “science of reading” initiative, which implemented evidence-based reading programs, was one. The other three were rigorous standards and accountability, real consequences for poor performance, and careful state-level implementation.
WASHINGTON (April 21, 2026) — A new report from the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) finds that Illinois has built one of the nation’s cleanest and most affordable energy systems, but warns that calendar-driven mandates to phase out natural gas generation could undermine grid reliability, drive up costs, and push investment to neighboring states.
Authored by Neel Brown, Managing Director at PPI, and John Kemp, an internationally recognized energy markets expert, “The Illinois Challenge: Balancing Decarbonization with Economic Reality,” outlines a strategy grounded in reliability, technological maturity, and economic competitiveness.
Illinois has reduced emissions faster than the national average, driven largely by its dominant nuclear fleet and a steady, market-led shift from coal to natural gas. Emissions fell 2.1% annually between 2005 and 2023, compared to 1.2% nationwide, and the state now emits 188 tons of carbon dioxide per $1 million of economic output, more than 10% below the national average and well below every other Midwest state. Household energy spending is nearly 12% below the national average, underscoring the affordability gains that have sustained public support for continued climate progress.
“Illinois’ progress shows that durable emissions reductions come from markets, innovation, and firm low-carbon generation, not from rigid calendar deadlines,” said Brown. “The state already leads the country in clean nuclear power. The next phase requires a pragmatic strategy that protects reliability and affordability while continuing to drive emissions down.”
The authors note that the 2021 Climate and Equitable Jobs Act mandates a full phaseout of natural gas generation by 2045, a timeline that the state’s own 2025 Resource Adequacy Study warns could open significant capacity gaps just as electricity demand is surging. Illinois is currently the country’s fifth-largest electricity generator and a net exporter, but eliminating in-state gas generation is projected to turn it into a net importer reliant on the PJM and Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) regional grids, both of which are expected to face capacity shortfalls by 2030.
Upward pressure on prices is already emerging. Wholesale electricity costs in the PJM region serving northern Illinois surged more than 40% in 2025 amid rapid data center growth, and residential rates jumped 11% in a single year. The authors caution that retiring firm generation before proven replacements are in place will pull energy-intensive industries to higher-emission states such as Indiana and Ohio, exporting both jobs and carbon emissions. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has taken a constructive step by committing to two gigawatts of new nuclear generation and lifting the state’s longstanding moratorium on new reactor construction, reflecting the kind of pragmatic, state-specific policymaking the report recommends.
To navigate this transition, the authors outline three core principles for policymakers:
Embrace new nuclear as the foundation of a clean, firm electricity system capable of supporting 24/7 industrial loads and backstopping intermittent renewables.
Reform gas transition timelines so infrastructure retirements are aligned with the proven readiness of replacement technologies rather than calendar deadlines.
Prioritize grid reliability by heeding regional capacity warnings and avoiding policies that risk blackouts, price spikes, or the loss of in-state generation.
The authors conclude that Illinois’ path to decarbonization must reflect its unique position as the nation’s top nuclear producer and a major electricity exporter. A successful strategy will build on the state’s market-driven progress while avoiding mandates that risk destabilizing the grid, raising costs for households and businesses, or pushing investment across state lines.
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.
Historically, Illinois has operated from a position of strength in the energy market with a low-carbon foundation that other states are only beginning to strive toward. However, policies that are aimed at abolishing current dispatchable generation to meet climate goals set in 2021 threaten to undermine the state’s energy and economic successes.
Illinois’ per-person energy consumption is close to the national average (see fig. 1), but greenhouse gas emissions are well below (see fig. 2) thanks to its status as the country’s top generator of nuclear power — the state’s largest source of electricity. Coal use has gradually shrunk; gas overtook it as the second-largest source of power in 2023 (see fig. 3) while wind generation has doubled in just seven years and is on course to move up to third place. Total spending per person on electricity, gas, and gasoline is among the lowest in the country, at almost 12% below average (see fig. 4). Economic output per person is high, and as a result, total energy spending accounts for just 4.7% of state output, more than 16% below average.
Illinois has also been more successful than most other states at lowering emissions in recent decades, cutting them 2.1% per year between 2005 and 2023, compared to 1.2% for the country as a whole. The state achieved this speedy reduction mostly because gas replaced coal-fired generation while its population stayed flat.
Compared to the size of its economy, Illinois’ carbon emissions are now the 18th-lowest in the U.S.; it produced 188 tons for every $1 million of output in 2023 (see fig. 5), down 42% since 2005 after adjusting for inflation, and more than 10% below the national average. Illinois emits much less CO₂ per $1 million of output than other Midwest states, including Minnesota (207 tons), Wisconsin (250 tons), Michigan (255 tons), Ohio (260 tons), Missouri (291 tons), Iowa (337 tons), and Indiana (381 tons). It performs well on this measure thanks to the local dominance of high-value-added, low-energy-use industries such as finance and insurance, as well as significant nuclear output.
Illinois is the country’s fifth-largest electricity generator and exports surplus power to neighboring states. In 2024, it was by far the country’s largest nuclear producer (99 billion kilowatt-hours), well ahead of second-place Pennsylvania (75 billion kWh). Nuclear accounted for more than half of in-state generation. Fossil fuels accounted for 31% of generation in 2023, down from 51% in 2005. Coal generation has been cut by two-thirds, mostly replaced by equal amounts of wind and gas. As a result, its energy mix has the country’s fifth-lowest carbon intensity (see fig. 6). Nonetheless, residual coal generation is among the highest in the country, which explains why Illinois has not made even faster progress reducing emissions.
July 4, 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the colonists’ claim to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The year 1776 also recalls a quieter but significant anniversary. Adam Smith published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, giving the modern world a language for thinking about markets, productivity, and prosperity.
Before Smith wrote about markets, though, he wrote his The Theory of Moral Sentiments. There he explored sympathy—our capacity to enter into the feelings of others—and the moral discipline of what he called the “impartial spectator.” That discipline was not mere politeness. It involved learning to govern one’s passions, judge one’s conduct as others might judge it, and become fit for life among free and equal persons. Smith’s insight was that liberty depends not only on institutions and incentives, but also on habits of self-command and regard for others that no market can create on its own. He understood that commercial society rested on moral and social foundations it did not itself create.
A free society must ask not only how wealth is produced, Smith teaches us, but how it is shared, accessed, and made usable in ordinary life. Today, those questions are relevant to one of the biggest problems we face: what some have called “the loneliness crisis.” Revisiting Smith’s writings can help demonstrate that this crisis of disconnection is not merely a public-health concern or a matter of loneliness, but a civic and cultural problem with implications for self-government.
That requires attention not only to economic and human capital, but also to social wealth: the relationships, habits, associations, friendships, local loyalties, and institutions that help people find belonging, weather hardship, and turn learning into opportunity. Social scientists often call this social capital, but the two ideas point to much the same reality. If economic wealth describes a nation’s productive assets, social wealth describes the civic and moral reserves that make freedom workable and prosperity widely accessible.
The new model in the United States of paying college student athletes emerged from a complex settlement in the 2025 House v. NCAA private antitrust class action. The settlement supercharged Division I schools’ incentives to fund high-revenue sports programs because they need to pay for millions of dollars in required revenue-sharing with their student athletes. The prospect of generating this revenue relies heavily on the financially lucrative spillover effects of winning championships, such as media rights, ticket sales, and donations.
Of course, winning requires fielding the best teams by recruiting top athletes that, in turn, requires significant financial resources. Evidence from the NCAA March Madness men’s basketball tournament shows that much of this change has likely been “priced-in.” This means that pumping additional resources into top programs probably won’t increase the probability of winning beyond current levels, prompting us to ask: Is the massive level of spending on college sports in the post-House v. NCAA era sustainable?
There is no shortage of uncertainties amid the fighting in the Persian Gulf: Is it over? Who won? Will Iran emerge stronger or weaker? How badly will the world economy be damaged? Yet two things are clear: The conflict dealt a deep, perhaps lasting blow to American global leadership, and it is straining an already troubled transatlantic relationship—to the detriment of both the U.S. and Europe.
But there may be one upside: The rift between the U.S. and Europe could accelerate continental efforts to prepare for a future in which America no longer provides a reliable security guarantee.
American supporters of the Iran War are furious with Europe. My email inbox is filled with messages from friends who see the continent’s refusal to join the fighting as a craven betrayal of the NATO alliance that has kept peace in Europe since the end of World War II. “Alienation,” “frustration,” “outrage,” “disgust”: the language grew sharper as the weeks wore on—and of course, no one was madder than President Donald Trump.
One Republican ally who spoke to the president in mid-March told the press he had “never heard him so angry.” “COWARDS,” Trump bellowed on social media. “You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself,” he warned Europeans, “the USA won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us.”
But there’s another way to see the widening divide between Europe and Washington.
For the past several years, education has been captivated by yet another “miracle” story. Mississippi, persistently among the lowest-performing states in the nation, has posted some of the strongest gains in the country, especially in early literacy. In a new paper and a companion essay in The Atlantic, Rachel Canter of the Progressive Policy Institute urges us to retire that language. Mississippi’s gains, she argues, are better understood not as a miracle, but a marathon: 26.2 miles, run step by step, over years and even decades. No shortcuts, no charismatic visionary rattling the china, no breakthrough moment. Just sustained effort, aligned policy, and a surprising degree of disciplined follow-through.
It’s a bracing and necessary corrective. Education has always had a weakness for miracle stories. We want to believe that somewhere, someone has discovered the right program or policy, the right idea that can be lifted out of one locale and parachuted into another. In this telling, decades become moments, complicated enterprises become transferable “programs,” and sustained effort is mere magic.
The popular version of the Mississippi story is by now familiar and reductive: The state embraced the “science of reading,” overhauled its literacy instruction, implemented third-grade retention, and saw dramatic gains. There’s truth in that account, but it’s incomplete in ways that matter. Canter is well-positioned to paint a fuller picture. Before decamping for PPI and think-tank world, she was the founder of Mississippi First, a policy and advocacy organization that played a key role in advancing and sustaining the state’s reforms.
Her paper fills in the missing context. Mississippi’s progress rests on four interlocking elements: clear standards and assessments; real consequences for failure; a shift toward evidence-based instruction; and sustained support for implementation. Just as important, these elements did not arrive all at once. Canter’s timeline shows that Mississippi’s accountability infrastructure predates its literacy reforms—a sequencing that suggests these gains were not the product of a single policy shift, but of a system built over time.
