Category: Uncategorized

Canter in The New York Post: Blue states with strong teachers’ unions have lower student literacy levels: study shows

Posted on by Alex Terr

[…]

The assessment was conducted by the PPI’s Director of Education Policy, Rachel Canter, who spent nearly two decades in Mississippi advocating for systemic reforms, which transformed the state’s students from having among the lowest literacy rates in the nation to having some of the highest

And Canter’s study found one overwhelming and shocking throughline — the stronger the state’s teachers’ union the worse its student literacy scores were, results which did not exclusively follow party lines but strongly trended that way and often to the detriment of Democrats.

“Democrats, however, don’t often ask me how to replicate Mississippi’s success,” Canter said. “They ask if it’s possible at all, given the power of teachers’ unions in their home states.”

One reason for the disparity, Canter argued, is that states where teacher unions have a strong grip are slower to enact better programs.

She looked at 18 literacy policies recommended by ExcelinEd and found Democratic states had undertaken nine of them on average, while Republican and swing states had adopted an average of 13.5.

“States dominated by Democrats have been slower to embrace similar reforms,” Canter said. “Organized labor might explain some of this gap.”

Canter’s successes were a meteoric transformation of Mississippi’s students — in 2013 the state had some of the worst test scores for middle and elementary students in the country, but by 2024 they had climbed to seventh in literacy and 13th in math.

[…]

Read more in The New York Post

Investment Heroes 2026: Getting Big Things Done

Posted on by Alex Terr

Published annually since 2012, PPI’s Investment Heroes report spotlights the public companies making the largest capital investments in the U.S. economy. Previous reports have focused on topics such as the relationship between higher capital investment, on the one hand, and lower inflation and faster job creation, on the other.

The main theme of this year’s report is simple: getting big things done. In recent years, Americans have become increasingly concerned that the United States has become a bumbling giant, unable to execute complex, forward-thinking projects. The result is stagnant living standards and a loss of the ability to defend ourselves.

Yet this year’s Investment Heroes report shows that America can still rise to the occasion to address our biggest economic and military challenges. By analyzing corporate financial reports, we find that the country’s top 25 Investment Heroes collectively invested $520.4 billion in the U.S. in 2025. This marks a 29.2% increase from our 2024 estimates.

The $520 billion in investment in equipment and structures spans much of the American economy, from factories and fiber networks to power grids and retailers. But the clear standout of this year’s investment is computing and the infrastructure needed to power AI. The four largest investors this year — tech firms Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft — collectively invested more than $269 billion in the U.S. in 2025, a 61.1% increase from their 2024 spending.

This year’s sizable investments in compute capacity are building the foundation for the expansion of AI applications beyond software and back-office efficiency. The country faces major challenges, including high costs of food, healthcare, housing, and energy; archaic government systems; and cybersecurity vulnerabilities, among others. The buildout led by this year’s Investment Heroes is creating the capacity and knowledge needed to tackle these challenges head-on.

True, many Americans are apprehensive about AI displacing human labor and possibly escaping human control. There’s a need for public vigilance and comprehensive safeguards. Moreover, data centers can bring real issues, such as electricity costs, water use, and noise. However, these concerns are manageable. As PPI has written, local and state governments have access to a selection of practical tools that minimize impacts and ensure that communities reap the benefits of the investment they host. The massive buildout of data centers, chips, transmission, and connectivity is positioning the country for growth and strategic strength.

Read the full report

Mandel in The Hill: AI Buildout Propels Tech Firms to Top of US Investment Ranking: Study

Posted on by Max Sherrill

The rapid buildout of artificial intelligence is making technology firms some of the top capital investors in the U.S., according to new research shared first with The Hill.

The report, to be published by the think tank Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) Wednesday, found tech firms Amazon, Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft invested more than half — $269 billion — of the $520 billion in U.S. capital spending last year.

Amazon tops this list, with just over $93 million in estimated domestic expenditures last year. Financial and non-health insurance companies were excluded from the analysis.

This marked a 61.1 percent increase from their spending in 2024, with analysts pointing to the increased demand for compute and the infrastructure needed to power AI. Oracle also made the top 10, spending more than $15.7 million in domestic investments.

Michael Mandel, PPI’s chief economist who runs the annual “Investment Heroes” report, told The Hill his team hasn’t “seen any great growth out of the companies that are investing in the AI boom.”

Read more in The Hill

Build Back Belief: France Update

Posted on by Alyssa Brown

RESEARCH SUMMARY

  • The National Rally in France continues to be in pole position for the next Presidential election in 2027 – whether led by Le Pen or Jordan Bardella.
  • While Le Pen is most known, Bardella has built up a reputation with voters as someone who broadens the National Rally’s appeal and has less baggage. They see him as fresh compared to Le Pen.
  • Swing voters who participated in the research were leaning towards the National Rally in the absence of a strong alternative from the centre and centre-left.
  • The voters were exercised about crime and the degradation of their localities, fearing criminal gangs and disrespect on the streets. They want to see a restoration of order, and their politicians focussed on a strong France – they see this as a zero sum game.
  • They feel there is little to lose from switching to the National Rally, despite their misgivings on economic policy and community cohesion.
  • Success for the centre/ centre left depends on offering a positive and strong alternative for these working-class voters that focusses on their priorities of local safety and patriotism / national strength.

PPI has been conducting research with voters around the world as part of its Project on Centre-Left Renewal, which aims to create a strong centre-left dialogue to fight against radical right-wing populism. Our report published in 2025, ‘Build Back Belief: how governments around the world lost trust in government and how to win it back,’ showed that centre-left parties need to win back significant numbers of the ‘working middle’ of society with examples from around the world. In June, PPI conducted focus groups of women and men in towns and cities in France, who are non-graduate swing voters currently moving from left to right. City voters were screened to have voted centre or centre left in 2026 – town voters were a mix.

Read the full update here.

Measuring AI’s Impact on Workers Requires a Better-Funded BLS

Posted on by Max Sherrill

On March 5, a bipartisan coalition of senators published a statement urging the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to improve their “collection, analysis, and dissemination of high-quality, timely data regarding artificial intelligence.” The question of whether — and how severely — AI will displace workers has become one of the most consequential and least settled questions in contemporary labor economics.  

 Accurate data is the backbone of our national response to labor displacement. To inform public policy, business decisions, and individual career choices, the BLS needs greater funding to generate accurate, AI-specific data using modern statistical methodology.  

 Over the past year, apocalyptic statements made by tech leaders have fueled widespread concern around AI’s future role in the labor force. Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, for instance, predicted in early 2026 that within 18 months, nearly all white-collar work would be automated. Studies from Stanford and Brookings predict significant disruption to white-collar employment. Meanwhile, reports from the Yale Budget Lab (YBL), the European Investment Bank (EIB), and Goldman Sachs assessed more moderate improvements in productivity.  

 For example, the EIB report found that firms that adopted AI increased labor productivity by 4%, with no adverse effects on their employment. The YBL report concluded that in the first 33 months since ChatGPT’s release in November 2022, there has been no major economic disruption in the labor market. By contrast, the Stanford study measured a 16% relative decline in employment among early-career workers aged 22 to 25 between 2022 and 2025. Additionally, it found that employment growth for young workers has been stagnant, with substantial declines in occupations heavily exposed to AI. In 2024, Brookings advocated for a working paper by the University of Pennsylvania and OpenAI with similar results, which estimated that roughly 19% of U.S. workers are in occupations where at least half of their tasks could be disrupted by generative AI.  

 The EIB used data from 12,000 firms across the EU and 800 firms in the United States. But in general, most of these studies rely heavily on data from the BLS, including Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), the Current Population Survey (CPS), and the Department of Labor’s O*NET task database. Key surveys for labor force statistics, like the CPS, are jointly sponsored by the Census Bureau and the BLS. 

 The BLS publishes 10-year occupational projections annually, but the agency itself acknowledges its projection methods are “not designed to capture extremely rapid technological change.” To enable the best possible decision-making by national stakeholders, better labor projections and data are both indispensable. 

 In November 2025, the Census Bureau added AI questions to the Business Trends and Outlook Survey (BTOS), a necessary starting point for the collection of AI-specific data. The BLS states clearly that the CPS needs modernization, as a response to both declining response rates and lack of AI-specific data. In April 2026, the BLS outlined what this modernization should look like:  

 The BLS has already begun the implementation of the internet self-response (ISR) instrument, which would run in conjunction with the CPS and provide critical additional data. The adoption of the internet survey response instrument and parallel surveys, as recommended in their report, addresses lower response rates and insufficient AI data. These modernization efforts go hand in hand with existing economic literature on AI data best practices. Common practices include the use of task-based AI exposure scores and LLM-based task annotations, which better capture the changing scope of AI’s impacts. Reform proposals tend to call for expanded data collection and better frameworks to process it. This proposal would cost an additional $60 million a year in funding. Currently, however, the agencies are unable to conduct testing at the scale necessary to ensure the accuracy of the new surveys due to funding constraints. 

 The big picture: The real (inflation-adjusted) funding for the BLS has declined by 13.8% since 2016. In January 2025, the BLS almost resorted to cutting the sample size of the CPS until a last-minute revision was made to the continuing resolution that allowed the BLS to spend CPS funds at a faster rate. The gravity of these potential cuts prompted two former BLS commissioners to urgently call upon Congress for funding.  

Fiscal Year  Nominal Spending ($K)  Real Spending (FY2025 $K) 
FY2016  609,000  816,907 
FY2017  609,000  799,867 
FY2018  612,000  784,642 
FY2019  615,000  774,455 
FY2020  655,000  814,775 
FY2021  655,000  778,214 
FY2022  687,952  756,800 
FY2023  697,952  737,444 
FY2024  697,952  716,317 
FY2025  703,952  703,952 
FY2026 (request)  647,952  631,981 
Change from FY2016  Nominal  Real 
FY2025 vs. FY2016  +15.6% (+$94,952K)  −13.8% (−$112,955K) 
FY2026 request vs. FY2016  +6.4% (+$38,952K)  −22.6% (−$184,926K) 

 For FY2026, the Trump administration’s budget request would be a $56 million decrease from the FY2025 budget, citing proposed reorganization efforts that would save money and move the BLS under the Department of Commerce. This sharp drop in necessary funding would almost guarantee furloughs and a stark decrease in the quantity and quality of BLS data at the moment it is needed most. 

 The BLS funding decline makes it difficult to maintain current operations, let alone respond to potential AI-induced labor volatility. For the BLS to generate concrete employment data in the world of AI, it will take funding to hire data scientists with AI expertise, to train existing staff on new tools and methodologies, and to secure reliable data-sharing agreements with private sector partners.  

 These reforms are essential. Without them, the labor market will remain impossible to measure accurately for the foreseeable future. Timely labor statistics are an invaluable asset when fast-paced economic conditions arise, so now more than ever it is necessary for the federal government to invest in its statistical agencies.

The Physical AI State of Play

Posted on by Max Sherrill

AI has embedded itself in America’s digital industries, such as software, finance, and entertainment. But for AI to raise productivity across the broader economy, efficiency and cost gains must extend to the physical industries that build homes, manufacture goods, and produce our food. Now, so-called “physical” AI is beginning to enable robots, machinery, and self-driving cars to perceive, reason, and perform actions in the physical world.

That’s essential. Physical industries such as construction, manufacturing, and agriculture have suffered from years of lagging productivity growth, along with a deep and worsening skilled-labor shortage. The good news is that the growth of AI in these industries may be accelerated by a collapse in sensor costs and dramatic increases in the quality of AI physics simulations. Across this dispersed and uneven frontier, machines that can perceive, reason, and understand physics may soon bring AI into new markets.

As with all technology-driven productivity, small improvements often seem like individual stepping stones until a full path is revealed. No one can promise hockey-stick-style exponential growth, but should it arrive, the effects on the cost of living and our politics would be profound. This brief will explore the state of play for physical AI across three critical sectors, construction, manufacturing, and agriculture, and consider what lies ahead for each.

Construction

The construction sector in the United States has been plagued by falling productivity since its peak in the late 1960s. Over the past twenty years alone, construction output per hour has fallen by 8%, while output per hour in the overall nonfarm business sector has risen by 40%.

Not unrelated, falling productivity is a key reason why prices in the construction sector have risen far faster than the overall inflation rate. From 2005 to 2025, the construction price index rose by 117%, double the 58% price increase for the economy as a whole.

Amid a lack of R&D in construction equipment, stringent land-use regulations, and a dearth of economies of scale, the construction industry’s plight has played its part in fueling the cost-of-living crisis. In simple terms, America would’ve gotten more bang for its construction buck, meaning more homes, factories, hospitals, and infrastructure from the same spending.

As a result, the output of the construction industry today is lower than in 2005 in real terms. Had construction prices risen at the same rate as the prices of the overall economy, the same nominal spending would have corresponded to a real construction output 30% above its 2005 level.

Physical AI could increase workers’ output through autonomous machinery. Among the many pioneers in the field, Bedrock Robotics has begun retrofitting excavators and bulldozers with lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) sensors, GPS, and cameras. Their package, titled the Bedrock Operator, completed the industry’s largest supervised-autonomous excavation on a 130-acre site. The start-up is targeting fully operator-less excavators in 2026 after its $270M Series B fundraiser, with total funding above $350M. Additionally, Built Robotics’ solar panel pile driver automates utility-scale solar pile driving: repetitive, precise, dangerous work where autonomy wins on cost and safety.

Caterpillar unveiled a generation of autonomous excavators, dozers, haul trucks, and compactors at CES 2026. This next generation of heavy equipment can work faster, longer, and more safely than human-operated equipment. WLTR, Wall Laying Terra-Based Robot, the brick-laying bot from GreenBuild, lays 108 square feet of brick per hour, roughly the output of five bricklayers, and requires the supervision of a worker from a safe distance. The robot uses glue instead of the carbon-intensive cement, which accounts for 7-8% of the world’s carbon emissions. Fastbrick Robotics (FBR) is pioneering similar bricklaying robotics, with successful Wall as a Service (WaaS) projects completed in Florida via their advanced construction robot, Hadrian. Hadrian is capable of building the load-bearing walls of a house, both external and internal, up to 360 blocks per hour, in less than a day.

By adopting these technologies, the construction industry can improve safety and output. To operate these novel technologies, workers must be upskilled and shifted towards higher-productivity, safer supervisory roles. Construction workers could become the managers of an AI-enhanced fleet of heavy equipment, shielded from environmental hazards and chronic injuries.

Manufacturing

U.S. manufacturing productivity, as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has been basically flat for the past 15 years. The issues in manufacturing are multifaceted, including geographic disparities, wage stagnation, competitive threats from China, and tariffs. Physical AI offers a chance to rapidly expand U.S. manufacturing capacity, develop more competitive products, and create stable, high-paying jobs.

First Solar, a solar manufacturer, has embraced physical AI across its production process. By utilizing AI computer vision in its newest Louisiana factory, deep learning tools spot defects and guide technicians to make real-time adjustments. The factory has a fully integrated production process and directly employs over 825 people. Average compensation sits at around $90,000, close to triple the area’s per capita income. First Solar is expected to produce more than 14 GW of solar capacity in 2026, with more than 17 GW of capacity when all five of its facilities are operational.

ABB Robotics and NVIDIA recently launched the integrated NVIDIA Omniverse simulation into RobotStudio (“HyperReality”), a physics simulation model for robotics, claiming to reduce costs by up to 40% while also accelerating time-to-market by 50%. Foxconn plans to pilot this in electronics assembly; the release to ABB’s 60,000 customers is scheduled for the second half of 2026.

Automaker giant Stellantis, NVIDIA, and Accenture are deploying AI digital twins across global plants. Digital twins pair physical production with an AI physics simulation of production to create a “predictive and autonomous” model driven by real-time data. In June 2026, LG and NVIDIA announced an AI-factory partnership that embeds NVIDIA’s robotics and physics models (Isaac, Cosmos, and GR00T) into LG’s “PhysicalWorks” robotics platform to connect procurement through delivery in real time. These NVIDIA models connect real-world information and visual data, robotics platforms for inference, and physics simulations to drive efficiency and increase safety. AI-powered robotics manufacturer MiR shipped the MiR1200 Pallet Jack, an AI pallet handler trained on 1.2M images that autonomously identifies, lifts, and delivers pallets in live warehouses. As with construction, physical AI’s integration with American manufacturing has been plant-by-plant rather than sector-wide, but the tools for widespread adoption are now commercial.

Agriculture

U.S. agricultural total factor productivity rose by only 1% from 2013 to 2023, according to the latest data available from the Economic Research Service at the Department of Agriculture. By contrast, agricultural TFP rose by 17% in the preceding 10 years (TFP measures output relative to all major inputs, whereas labor productivity measures output only relative to labor input).

Within the sector, impediments to further productivity growth remain, particularly for soft-flesh fruits such as berries, avocados, and tomatoes, which require hand-picking. Immigrant fruit pickers have been the backbone of this workforce. Recent policies from the Trump administration regarding ICE raids have raised questions about the labor supply of agricultural workers. Agricultural Secretary Brooke Rollins announced changes to the H2A visa program, effectively cutting the wages of workers between $1 and $7 per hour, depending on the state. The net effect of these policy changes remains to be seen. Still, the effective wage cuts create disincentives to innovation and automation, while questions remain about whether the labor demand will be met.

Either way, physical AI presents an opportunity to increase productivity and lower costs, which can translate into lower grocery bills for Americans. Monarch Tractor sells an autonomous, driver-optional electric tractor for specialty crops. Agtonomy and Kubota unveiled their line of autonomous tractors at CES 2025. The Agrobot E-Series is an electric, autonomous strawberry harvester that uses up to 24 decentralized robotic arms, each equipped with real-time AI, advanced vision sensors, and onboard graphics processing units, to assess and gently pick fruit without damaging it. The Agrobot E-Series illustrates how integrating sensor-based safety systems and automated labor solutions can bolster domestic agricultural supply chains, mitigate chronic farm labor shortages, and enhance worker safety.

Additionally, Carbon Robotics’ LaserWeeder uses computer vision to kill weeds without chemicals. John Deere has also developed its own line of autonomous tractors, equipped with 16 cameras, advanced computer vision, and remote-control capabilities for farmers via a smartphone app. The company has also developed a retrofitting kit that converts the 8R and 9R series into fully autonomous machinery. Although current use cases are primarily tilling, the company has also expanded into autonomous orchard tractors and commercial landscaping.

Policy Framework

To boost adoption, physical AI needs a policy framework that expands access to technology and establishes regulatory clarity for producers and users. Key initiatives could include a refundable adoption credit for small- and medium-sized enterprises, specifically targeting robotics-as-a-service in housing and specialty-crop production, so adoption isn’t tied exclusively to ownership. Regulatory clarity should also be built into an autonomous-vehicle framework for job sites; for example, by building on the BUILD America 250 Act and directing OSHA and NIST to develop rigorous safety and interoperability standards. Finally, restoring federal R&D funding to pre-2025 levels and indexing it for inflation would help sustain innovation.

Physical AI has yet to show clear effects on productivity or labor markets. No one can be sure when, or if, we are headed for a hockey-stick moment. Similar quiet progress occurred in generative AI during the years prior to the ChatGPT moment. Across construction sites, factory floors, and farm fields, the pieces are already in play. If the stepping stones connect, physical AI could raise output and lower costs across America’s physical industries, passing savings along to Americans through more affordable food, housing, and manufactured goods. Policymakers would be wise to adopt a proactive framework that allows physical AI to flourish, rather than a reactive one.

Mandel and Pearson on Radically Pragmatic: At Least AI Isn’t Killing Jobs — Yet

Posted on by Alyssa Brown

AI has the potential to disrupt the labor market, but we haven’t seen any evidence of that yet.

Before the public began to worry in recent weeks that AI would destroy humanity altogether, we mostly worried it would take our jobs. For the past several years, we’ve heard a stream of corporate executives and economists warning about the looming AI employment apocalypse. The media seized on tech layoffs and a spike in the youth unemployment rate in 2025 as the first signs of the great job disappearance.

But in reality, economists are seeing few signs of AI disruption in the labor market. Youth unemployment fell to 7.1% in August 2026, down from an average of 8.3% in 2025. Employment in computer and mathematical occupations such as software developers and information security specialists reached an all-time high in August, according to government surveys. And overall private employment keeps climbing month after month, buoyed in part by data center spending, which is pushing up demand and wages for occupations such as electricians.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) recently released its assessment of which occupations had “very high,” “high,” “moderate,” and “low” exposure to AI. The BLS warns that “[a]n exposure category is not a forecast of employment growth or decline.”

Indeed, many occupations that have “very high” or “high” exposure to AI grew over the past year, while other occupations with “low” exposure to AI are shrinking. For example, in the first eight months of 2026 compared to the first eight months of 2025, employment is up by 1.3% in computer and mathematical occupations (which include computer programmers, software developers, data scientists, and mathematicians), all of which uniformly have “very high” exposure to AI. Similarly, employment is up by 1.7% in architectural and engineering occupations, all with high or very high exposure to AI. Employment is up by 1.8% in life, physical, and social science occupations (which include biologists, physicists, historians, and economists), almost all of which have high or very high exposure to AI.

Continue reading on Substack.

Change Britain Build Back Belief: UK Update

Posted on by Alyssa Brown

INTRODUCTION

Across developed democracies, many feel an increasingly powerful sense of injustice that the economy and society no longer work for people like them, and that government is not on their side. This sentiment is fuelling support for right-wing national populists who promise easy solutions, yet, once in power, increase societal division and chaos.

PPI’s project on centre-left renewal began in 2023 to exchange ideas, strategies, and tactics for making centre-left parties more competitive and improve their governing performance. Successful strategies have all had a sharp focus on a change agenda for working-class voters — what we termed the “working middle” in our original research published in July 2025 as people who felt they were working harder and harder yet felt that ‘business as usual’ politics and economics wasn’t working for them, personified by strong candidates who displayed their conviction and ability to deliver for them.

Our research with working-class voters in the US, UK, Australia, Germany and France shows that they are crying out for change and for strong politicians who are willing to do what it takes to make that change happen. This report updates our original research with a deep dive into the UK, with polling and focus groups conducted in July 2026, just before Andy Burnham became Prime Minister to understand the hopes and fears of the voters who have been moving away from Labour since it was elected just two years ago.

We found that the frustration voters felt deeply before electing Labour had intensified, after PPI’s project on centre-left renewal began in 2023 to exchange ideas, strategies, and tactics for making centre-left parties more competitive and improve their governing performance. Successful strategies have all had a sharp focus on a change agenda for working-class voters — what we termed the “working middle” in our original research published in July 2025 as people who felt they were working harder and harder yet felt that ‘business as usual’ politics and economics wasn’t working for them, personified by strong candidates who displayed their conviction and ability to deliver for them. what they deemed a disappointing tenure by Keir Starmer’s new government. Many working-class voters who had given Labour their support in 2024 were planning to vote for other parties, from Reform UK, to the Greens. In this UK update, we outline what this means for the centre-left in the UK, and the lessons others around the world can draw as they seek to represent the change these voters are looking for.

Read the full report.

PPI Brief Urges Court to Strike Down Trump’s Forced-Labor Tariffs

Posted on by Alex Terr

WASHINGTON (September 14, 2026) — The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) filed a friend-of-the-court brief Friday urging the U.S. Court of International Trade to strike down the Trump administration’s Section 301 tariffs on goods from 60 countries, arguing that the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) never showed that the countries actually import forced-labor goods, or that such imports burden American commerce.

The brief, filed in In Re Section 301 Forced Labor Cases (Court No. 26-cv-3555-3JP) by Nithya Nagarajan of Husch Blackwell on behalf of PPI and Ed Gresser, Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI, supports two groups of small businesses and a coalition of 25 Democratic state attorneys general who separately sued to challenge the tariffs. The Court of International Trade, which ruled last year that the administration’s separate emergency-powers tariffs exceeded presidential authority, is scheduled to hear oral arguments in the forced-labor imports case September 30.

On July 23, USTR imposed tariffs of 10% to 12.5% on goods from the 60 economies, which together supply 99% of U.S. imports, asserting that these countries either lack laws banning forced-labor imports comparable to America’s or else fail to sufficiently enforce the laws they do have.

In order to impose tariffs under Section 301, an administration must demonstrate that a foreign government’s “unreasonable” policies impose a “burden” on U.S. commerce. PPI’s brief points out that the Trump administration’s tariff order entirely fails to do this, since it neither presents evidence that any of the 60 targeted countries actually import forced-labor goods, nor proves that such imports would “burden” U.S. commerce. PPI estimates the tariff, if upheld, will cost Americans roughly $100 billion a year, nearly 100 times the $1.3 billion in goods Customs and Border Protection has blocked annually, on average, over the last five years on suspicion of forced-labor content.

“Section 301 does not authorize any general tariff increase of this sort,” said Gresser, “and any administration hoping to use it to impose tariffs on goods from specific countries must show clear evidence of actual policies imposing a ‘burden’ on U.S. commerce and demonstrate these policies’ real-world economic harm. Since, as our Amicus brief shows, the Trump administration has done neither of these things, it has no right to impose these tariffs.”

PPI’s Amicus brief concludes by affirming that “forced labor is an egregious abuse of human rights, and U.S. policy has an important role to play in eliminating it at home and worldwide,” and urging the U.S. government, once the Burlap and Barrel case has closed, to “return to vigorous support for forced-labor remediation and eradication abroad and at home, and cooperation with governments seeking to improve their laws and implementation.”

Read the amicus brief 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

Manno for DatiaK12: What Happens When You Ask Students About AI And They Tell You the Truth?

Posted on by Max Sherrill

The devices are winning. Grades are covering for it.

Three-quarters of high school students say they misuse technology during class every day. A quarter say they’ve used AI to help them during a quiz or a test, an activity that’s supposed to measure what a student actually knows.

Those numbers come from a new Thomas B. Fordham Institute survey of just over 2,000 current and recent high schoolers.

The report is worth more than passing attention because the findings aren’t coming from watchdog researchers or worried parents. They’re coming from students, describing their own classrooms.

The picture the survey builds isn’t really about phones, or even about AI on its own. It’s about how those two things interact with school-issued devices and with grading policy to erase whatever used to keep them in check.

Two-thirds of students say YouTube is freely accessible on their school laptop. Nearly half say they’ve used AI to solve math problems outright, more than a third to summarize a book so they don’t have to read it, and a quarter to help during an exam.

Sixty-two percent of students spend the majority of their class time on a school-issued device. The more time students spend on those devices, the more likely they are to believe missing class won’t hurt their grade.

Meanwhile, the guardrails that might offset all of this are thin. Twenty-nine percent of students say they get partial credit for assignments they never turned in. Most say they can retake a test at least once if they don’t like their score.

All this taken together makes this more than just another AI story. It becomes a story about trust in the K-12 public education system.

Read more in Datia K12

 

PPI Urges Senators to Reject CLARITY Act Over Lack of Money-Laundering and Ethics Safeguards

Posted on by Alex Terr

WASHINGTON (September 14, 2026) — Today, Paul Weinstein Jr., Senior Fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), released the following statement regarding the upcoming Senate vote on the CLARITY Act, scheduled for September 15:

“PPI would welcome considerably more clarity with regards to the crypto industry. Unfortunately, the so-called CLARITY Act fails to provide it. Despite some last minute concessions by Republicans, the bill still falls short of providing robust money-laundering and ethics safeguards needed to crack down on illicit activities and corruption. Just as concerning, the bill fails to permanently close the deposit interest loophole that would drain deposits from community banks that serve as the primary source of credit for Main Street America.

“PPI encourages senators to vote against the CLARITY Act as currently constructed, and work to develop legislation that would actually provide the safeguards needed to create a robust stablecoin sector.”

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

Jacoby for Washington Monthly: Europe Struggles to Respond to Russian Attacks

Posted on by Alex Terr

The Ukrainian team visiting Oslo in late August came armed with a hefty research report—73 packed pages of open-source intelligence and policy proposals designed to help Norway prepare for a confrontation with Russia. The most likely scenario, the paper warned, would be more like the Battle of Britain than Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany’s 3.8 million-man World War II invasion of the Soviet Union. Moscow is unlikely to send tanks or troops to Norway, the report said. Russian strongman Vladimir Putin knows he can’t win a direct military clash with NATO. More likely would be a combined blitz of drone assaults, sabotage, and cyberattacks—what the paper compiled by the Kyiv-based Sahaidachnyi Security Center and paid for by the Ukrainian drone manufacturer Buntar Aerospace called the “Battle of Norway.”

But even the hawkish Ukrainian team was unprepared for what hit Norway just days later on August 24. The day after Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre visited Kyiv, promising continued support and a fourth annual payment of $9.1 billion, a pro-Russia hacker group calling itself Server Killers startled the Nordic nation with social media post. “We declare cyber war” on Norway, the message read—white letters against a fiery background featuring an image of the Kremlin and a Russian flag.

Server Killers is an experienced hacking collective with documented Moscow connections and a long rap sheet—attacks in Britain, Canada, Denmark, Spain, and Romania. Over the next three days, it targeted Digdir, the agency overseeing Norway’s cutting-edge digitization of public services, bombarding its servers with so much spam that government websites stopped working for citizens. The “distributed denial of service attack” was the largest in Norway’s history—if not the start of the battle of Norway, certainly an alarming warning.

Disruptive as it was for Norwegians, the Server Killer attack hardly made international news—Russia is now launching so many so-called “hybrid” or “gray-zone” assaults on Europe that it can be hard to keep track of them.

Read more in Washington Monthly

Kahlenberg and Lin in Real Clear Politics: Higher Education Must Overcome Comforting Delusions

Posted on by Alex Terr

[…]

Earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal, Richard Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, and Lief Lin, a PPI policy research fellow, offered dramatic evidence of scholarship’s corruption by progressive bias, with baleful implications for liberal education throughout the nation.

In “American Studies Can’t Stand Its Subject,” Kahlenberg and Lin argued that “many of the serious scholars who study America – its history, literature and culture – fail to provide a balanced and nuanced account of the country’s complex tale.” The authors’ Journal op-ed drew on their report, “The Distortion of American Studies,” for which they reviewed the almost 100 articles that appeared in American Quarterly – a peer-reviewed journal edited by scholars and published by Johns Hopkins University – over three years.

According to Kahlenberg and Lin, American Quarterly, “widely considered the country’s premier journal of American studies,” overwhelmingly featured scholarship that advances the outlook of “the academic left” by presenting “a one-sided and unrelentingly negative portrait of the U.S.” The authors report that “80% of articles published between 2022 and 2024 were critical of America, 20% were neutral, and none were positive.” Criticism “focused on American racism, imperialism, classism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia.” Some scholarly attacks on America passed over into the absurd: “One essay posited that thermodynamics – the science dealing with the relationship between energy, heat, work and temperature – is ‘an abstract settler-capitalist theory that influenced the plunder of Indigenous lands and lives.’”

Kahlenberg and Lin “couldn’t find a single positive article” about America in the prestigious journal from 2022 to 2024. Not one contribution during that three-year period explored “American ingenuity” or examined “why as of 2020 the U.S., representing about 4% of the world’s population, won 42% of the individual Nobel Prizes since the awards’ creation in 1901.” Not one considered “why the U.S. was the first country to land a man on the moon.” Not one dealt with “America’s vanquishing Nazi Germany in World War II or the Soviet Union in the Cold War.” And not one contained a “discussion of why the U.S. is rated as the most desirable destination for immigrants across the world.”

[…]

Read more in Real Clear Education

Kahlenberg and Lin in New Republic: Dems Want to Regulate AI. But Will AI Money Divide Them?

Posted on by Alex Terr

[…]

At the centrist Progressive Policy Institute, Richard D. Kahlenberg and Lief Lin pen a new report on “Teaching American Democracy,” probing “where civics [education] went wrong” and how to “revitalize” it. One of the recommendations: “All states should require three years of American Democracy, just as they typically require three years in math and reading. Helping all students understand who we are as Americans and why,” Kahlenberg and Lin write, “is of enormous importance in a country where liberal democratic norms are under steady attack—as important as literacy and numeracy.”

[…]

Read more in The New Republic

Jacoby in Nordic Defence Watch: Denmark offers Ukraine’s arms makers a safe base to expand, expert explains

Posted on by Alex Terr

Ukraine’s defence industry sees several advantages in setting up production in Denmark.

So says Tamar Jacoby, the Kyiv-based director of the Progressive Policy Institute’s New Ukraine Project. She writes regularly about the Ukrainian defence industry for American media and is a frequent expert commentator on the sector.

“Primarily, it’s about security and reducing the risk of being bombed. Most Ukrainian companies have distributed production sites across Ukraine and must hide where they are,” Jacoby says.

Read more in Nordic Defence Watch

Amicus Curiae Brief of Ed Gresser and Progressive Policy Institute Against Forced Tariffs

Posted on by Alex Terr

INTEREST OF THE AMICI CURIAE

Amici Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), a 501(c)(3) non-profit think-tank, established in 1989 and active on a broad range of public policy issues.1 PPI institutionally, and Gresser personally, have an interest in this case given their long-time advocacy for trade policy grounded in sound economic analysis and careful assessment of facts and trade statistics, and their assessment that forced labor is an egregious violation of human rights. Amici submit this brief to assist the court on a discrete question of statutory authority: whether Section 301 permits USTR to impose tariffs on 60 economies accounting for nearly all U.S. imports, based on general assertions that trade anywhere in the world in goods of an indeterminate amount that have potentially been made with forced labor sufficiently demonstrates a burden on U.S. commerce.

INTRODUCTION

USTR’s June 2nd, 2026, Report entitled “Section 301 Investigations of Acts, Policies, and Practices of Various Economies Related to the Failure of Each Economy to Impose and Effectively Enforce a Prohibition on the Importation of Goods Produced with Forced Labor” (hereafter “the Report”), covers 60 economies. Together they provided about 99% of America’s imported goods in 2025. The Report provides the justification for USTR’s “Final Determination”2 imposing tariffs of 12.5% above MFN rates on goods from 41 of these economies, 10% above MFN rates on goods from 17, and 10% on two, as a “remedy” for their lack of a law similar to America’s ban on imports of goods made wholly or partially with the use of forced labor, or for supposed failure to sufficiently enforce such a law. Extrapolating from ten months’ experience with the 10% worldwide tariff temporarily imposed by Executive Order 14257, this will likely cost American goods-buyers – families, manufacturers, construction firms, restaurants, clinics, retail shops, and so on – about $100 billion annually. This is roughly double the money raised by the lawful and Congressionally authorized Harmonized Tariff Schedule, and nearly 100 times the combined $1.3 billion average annual value of goods shipments Customs and Border Protection has blocked or seized over the last five years on “reasonable suspicion”, or actual demonstration, of forced labor content.

We at PPI share the view expressed in the Report that forced labor is an egregious violation of human rights. We likewise agree that U.S. policy has an important role in eliminating it worldwide as well as at home. We are not, however, persuaded by the Report’s premise that the self-evident effectiveness and superiority of U.S. policy justify imposing tariff penalties on virtually all U.S. imports from every other major economy. And as a matter of law and policy, we are not persuaded that the Report’s recommendations are genuinely intended to address forced labor, given the lack of any discussion of using the tariffs as leverage to eliminate the offending practices or adopt stronger enforcement mechanisms.

Whatever the administration’s intent, the Report does not satisfy the basic requirement Section 301 imposes for imposition of tariffs – that is, it does not demonstrate that each foreign government’s “unreasonable or discriminatory” “acts, policies or practices” have created a “burden” on American commerce. The Report does not show that any of the 60 listed economies actually import goods made with the use of forced labor. Neither does it show that such imports, if they actually occur, have any necessary effect on U.S. exports or American import-competing businesses and workers. The Report does not establish any burden on U.S. commerce. Therefore the tariff action taken pursuant to it is illegal.

Read the full amicus curiae