Category: Uncategorized

FDA’s Modified Risk Tobacco Product Authorization: What Policymakers Need to Know

Posted on by Alex Terr

Policymakers are seeing a growing number of proposals — on taxation, retail access, and product regulation — that involve tobacco products the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has authorized as Modified Risk Tobacco Products (MRTPs). As the nicotine marketplace continues to diversify, the number of products seeking and receiving MRTP authorization is likely to increase.

Policymakers are receiving sharply different advocacy accounts of what MRTP authorization means. This brief explains what the MRTP pathway is, why Congress created it, what evidentiary standards are required for an MRTP authorization, and why policymakers should give the FDA’s MRTP determinations serious weight when evaluating tobacco-related legislation.

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Ainsley on Moral Maze: Are America’s founding ideals a reality or a myth?

Posted on by Alex Terr

In 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal, endowed with unalienable rights… life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. During his lifetime Jefferson owned more than 620 slaves. As America marks 250 years since the Declaration, that contradiction is impossible to look past: a document of universal liberty, written by men who denied it to the women in their households, the people they enslaved, and the nations whose land they were settling.

One reading says this was hypocrisy – that “all men” never meant all men, that the rhetoric of equality was cover for the interests of rich, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and that the centuries of struggle since have been a slow correction of a lie dressed up as a promise. Another reading says something genuinely radical was set loose that day – a principle larger than its authors, one that would eventually demand Abolition, Enfranchisement and the end of Segregation, precisely because the words of the Declaration meant more than the men who put their names to it could envisage. On this account, the Founding Fathers endorsed an ideal and left their descendants to grow into it.

That same split runs through America today. The current presidency has departed from constitutional norms everyone had assumed were solid – over courts, elections, the press and the limits of executive power. One view says this is a crisis the Republic will survive: a serious one, but a blip in the two and a half centuries during which American institutions have weathered civil war, economic depression, and social upheaval, and during which the founding ideals have always held firm. The soul of America gets shaken, but it holds. The other view says the Republic was never held together by Constitutional Law – it was held together by a myth – a shared belief, perhaps deluded, that Americans would behave decently and that the norms would prevail. Once a leader has tested every one of those boundaries and paid no price, the myth shatters, and there is nothing to stop the next leader from going further. On this view, the current administration is a distorted reflection of what America truly is.

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‘Global-economy’ debates are not new

Posted on by Alex Terr

FACT: ‘Global-economy’ debates are not new.

THE NUMBERS: Merchandise trade/U.S. GDP ratio* –

 

2025 18.20%
2016 19.50%
2008 23.30%
2000 19.70%
1980 16.60%
1790                 22.3%?

* Modern GDP and goods trade figures from BEA and Census. 1790 GDP estimates and trade from measuringworth.com and Almanac of Statistical Abstracts.

WHAT THEY MEAN: 

Two of the Declaration’s 27 grievances relate to tariffs and trade:

16. “For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world;
17. “For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:”

The abstract question of taxation and representation aside, the Continental Congress delegates and their successors in early-republic government had lots of practical reasons to think about these things. Data illustrate:

Nobody really knows how large America’s early economy was; www.measuringworth.com, a Virginia-based economic history project, makes an admirable try. They believe that in 1790, the 13 states and 3.9 million Americans combined to produce a GDP of $193 million. Alexander Hamilton’s 119 newly hired Customs agents counted $23 million in imports and $20 million in exports that year. Assuming the GDP estimate is reasonable, the early republic’s trade-to-GDP ratio would have been 22 percent, about equal to the 23% modern-era peak in 2008. (We’re a bit lower now: the Bureau of Economic Analysis put U.S. GDP at $30.8 trillion in 2025 while Census reported $3.4 trillion in goods imports and $2.2 trillion in exports, for an 18.2% ratio.)

Similar circumstances can elicit similar thoughts. So, for this July 4th weekend, three post-Independence perspectives on “globalization”:

1. Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures (1791): In the first U.S. government paper on trade policy and “competitiveness,” Hamilton — then in his third year as Treasury Secretary — patiently refutes claims that low-wage foreign competition (from Industrial Revolution Britain and continental Europe) makes it impossible for American manufacturing to succeed:

“While in the article of wages the comparison certainly turns against the United States … the degree of disparity is diminished in proportion to the use which can be made of machinery. To illustrate this last idea: let it be supposed that the difference in price in two countries of a given quantity of manual labor requisite to the fabrication of a given article is as ten, and that some mechanic power is introduced into both countries which, performing half the necessary labor, leaves only half to be done by hand, it is evident that the difference in the cost of the fabrication of the article in question, as far as it is connected with the price of labor, will be reduced from ten to five.”
The balance of the Report calls for a battery of “industrial strategies” to encourage manufacturing: Hamilton pitches import of labor-saving machines, a patent law, incentives for high-skilled immigration and cash prizes for innovative factories, public investment in roads and ports, and an infant-industry trade protection scheme using temporary tariffs or subsidies for products ranging from starched wigs, bell-metal, and glue to whiskey, whale-oil, pewter cups and bowls, furniture, chocolate, rifles, and books. Samples: he suggested tariff rates of 7.5% on iron or steel tools, 7.5% on cotton clothes, and 10% on copper, and thought the existing 12.5% tariff on glass was high enough. Hamilton’s 1787 Federalist Papers partner James Madison was by then the opposition leader in the House of Representatives, and made sure the program mostly got nowhere.

2. Thomas Jefferson’s Report on Foreign Commerce (1793): Jefferson’s alternative to Hamilton’s ideas came two years later. His “Report on Foreign Commerce,” the first U.S. government catalog of foreign trade barriers, is a lot like the “National Trade Estimate Report” the U.S. Trade Representative Office has published since 1985. It tallies trade barriers — tariff rates, product exclusions, state trading monopolies, and shipping (“navigation”) restrictions — in Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, and their various western-hemisphere colonial possessions, and advocates a “reciprocity” program based on FTA relationships when possible, and when not, matching U.S. tariff rates and port practices to those of other countries.

“Instead of embarrassing commerce under piles of regulating laws, duties, and prohibitions, could it be relieved from all its shackles in all parts of the world, could every country be employed in producing that which nature has best fitted it to produce, and each be free to exchange with others mutual surplusses for mutual wants, the greatest mass possible would then be produced of those things which contribute to human life and human happiness; the numbers of mankind would be increased, and their condition bettered. Would even a single nation begin with the United States this system of free commerce, it would be advisable to begin it with that nation; since it is one by one only that it can be extended to all. … But should any nation, contrary to our wishes, suppose it may better find its advantage by continuing its system of prohibitions, duties and regulations, it behooves us to protect our citizens, their commerce and navigation, by counter prohibitions, duties and regulations, also. Free commerce and navigation are not to be given in exchange for restrictions and vexations; nor are they likely to produce a relaxation of them.”

Sample findings:

“Our bread stuff is at most times under prohibitory duties in England, and considerably dutied on re-exportation from Spain to her colonies. Our tobaccoes are heavily dutied in England, Sweden and France, and prohibited in Spain and Portugal. Our rice is heavily dutied in England and Sweden, and prohibited in Portugal. Our fish and salted provisions are prohibited in England, and under prohibitory duties in France. Our whale oils are prohibited in England and Portugal. And our vessels are denied naturalization in England, and of late in France. … Spain and Portugal refuse, to all those parts of America which they govern, all direct intercourse with any people but themselves. … We can carry no article, not of our own production, to the British ports in Europe, nor even our own produce to her American possessions.”

3. Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1790): From a non-government, dissenting-
intellectual perspective, Common Sense author Paine argues that international trade helps deter war and strengthen peace:

“I have been an advocate for commerce, because I am a friend to its effects. It is a pacific system, operating to cordialise mankind, by rendering nations, as well as individuals, useful to each other. If commerce were permitted to act to the universal extent it is capable, it would extirpate the system of war, and produce a revolution in the uncivilised state of governments. … Commerce is no other than the traffic of two individuals, multiplied on a scale of numbers; and by the same rule that nature intended for the intercourse of two, she intended that of all. For this purpose she has distributed the materials of manufactures and commerce, in various and distant parts of a nation and of the world; and as they cannot be procured by war so cheaply or so commodiously as by commerce, she has rendered the latter the means of extirpating the former.”

Cautionary note: Those looking to enlist the Founders as allies in modern global- economy debates should do so with care. As first-generation policymakers, they were learning on the job and often changed their minds. Hamilton’s arguments supporting the 1794 “Jay Treaty” with the U.K. — the first post-Constitution U.S. trade agreement — diverge radically from those in the Report on Manufactures. Jefferson likewise took at least three irreconcilable positions in 30 years in government: first Paine-like unilateral free trade as Minister to France in the 1780s; then “reciprocity” as Secretary of State in the Report on Foreign Commerce a decade later; finally, enthusiasm (ill-advised, as it turned out) for trade sanctions as a foreign policy tool as President in the 1800s. Paine remained consistent throughout, though maybe in part since, as an independent intellectual, he didn’t have to put his ideas into real-world practice.

We wish readers and friends, whatever their views, a happy and reflective 4th of July.

FURTHER READING

PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:

  • Defend the Constitution and oppose rule by decree;
  • Connect tariff policy to growth, work, prices and family budgets, and living standards;
  • Stand by America’s neighbors and allies;
  • Offer a positive alternative.

Happy 250th:

The National Archives’ official Declaration transcript.

PPI’s newly launched American Identity Project, led by Richard Kahlenberg, expresses faith in a common American identity and seeks a “deep and healthy sense of reflective patriotism.”

… and joins the Center for New Liberalism to publish three prize-winning 2026 essays by young Americans on “what it means to be an American.” They respond through the lenses of immigrant experience and individual liberty, America seen from abroad, and family.

Some classics:

Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures (1791)

Jefferson’s 7-country Report on Foreign Commerce (1793)

And Paine’s Rights of Man, 1790; passage on commerce in chapter 5.

Then & now:

Census (1970) reprints colonial-era and early republic trade data.

“Measuring Worth” estimates GDP, per capita income, etc. for the U.S., Australia, the U.K., and Spain from the 1790s forward.

BEA’s modern GDP data.

Census’s trade data.

ABOUT ED

Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.

Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.

Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.

Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.

Read the full email and sign up for the Trade Fact of the Week.

Democrats Should Learn From Colorado’s 20-Plus-Year Winning Streak, Not One Victory in Deep-Blue Denver

Posted on by Alex Terr

WASHINGTON (July 1, 2026) — Today, Will Marshall, President of the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), issued the following statement on Tuesday’s Colorado primary elections:

“Melat Kiros’s win over Diana DeGette in Colorado’s First District will be celebrated by the party’s left flank as proof that the socialist insurgency is unstoppable. It’s proof of something more narrow: that voters are in an anti-incumbent mood. The outcome also says more about generational than ideological change, since DeGette is the most progressive member of the Colorado delegation.

“The election result sits oddly with the state that produced it. In 2025, PPI chose Colorado to launch our latest renewal effort because Democrats there have built a two-decade winning streak built on a strategy of radically pragmatic policymaking.

“Kiros’s primary campaign ran against nearly every plank of that playbook. In a D+29 district, this race tested little about swing voters. The same night, John Hickenlooper defeated a socialist primary challenger by 14 points, a result that required winning votes across an entire state rather than a single safe district.

“Today, a record 58% of Americans think Democrats are too liberal, and the working-class voters the party needs lean moderate to conservative on immigration, crime, and cultural issues. If national Democrats treat Kiros as the model instead of the past two-plus-decades of pragmatic politics in Colorado that actually beat Trumpism, they will win more Denvers and fewer majorities.”

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

Michigan Climate Goals at a Crossroads

Posted on by Alex Terr

Many states have had great early success in cutting their carbon emissions since enacting ambitious net-zero targets at the start of the 2020s. The declines occurred thanks mostly to the switch from coal to natural gas, though heavy investments in solar, driven by Biden-era tax credits, also played a role.

Today, those states are now grappling with rising demand, rising prices, and the Trump administration’s hostility to renewable development. This is necessitating a fresh look at the climate goals set in a much different economic and political time.

Passed and signed into law at the end of 2023, Michigan’s Clean Energy Future Plan mandates 100% clean energy by 2040. This aggressive timeline in the face of increasing load demand and rising costs now risks energy reliability and economic repercussions in a state whose energy-intensive automotive manufacturing industry makes up two-fifths of the state’s GDP. 

By switching from coal to gas generation, Michigan has cut carbon emissions by two-thirds since 2005. This rate was faster (1.6% per year) than across the country as a whole (1.2% per year). Cool summers increase residential efficiency, lowering the state’s per capita energy consumption to 9% below the national average. Michigan’s total per capita energy spending is 11% below the national average. 

Michigan is the country’s eleventh-largest electricity generator and exports surplus power to neighboring states. Fossil fuels accounted for 67% of in-state generation in 2023, and the proportion had decreased only slightly from 70% in 2005. Coal-fired generation has been cut by two-thirds, mostly replaced by gas, which has increased fourfold. Non-fossil generation comes mostly from nuclear, but the share from wind and solar has grown fast. Nuclear generation has fallen in recent years following the shutdown of the Palisades nuclear power plant for decommissioning in 2022. But plans to re-open Palisades are at an advanced stage. The facility has received new fuel assemblies, and the main turbine generator and cooling systems are being refurbished. Reopening the Palisades nuclear power plant, targeted for 2026, promises 800MW of new, carbon-free firm generation.

Despite these positive developments, Michigan faces a looming supply-demand collision. As demand grows through data center development and policy-driven electrification efforts for EVs and heat pumps, firm supply must keep pace with the growth. Advocates of closing firm and efficient natural gas generation in the face of rising demand are ignoring the looming economic and climate ramifications. 

Policies that accelerate reductions in firm generation without replacements make energy more expensive, threatening the core manufacturing base of the state. This is neither economically nor politically wise. Driving jobs from the state to areas with more affordable energy is a recipe for disaster for the climate and for the economy.

Fortunately, there is an off-ramp. The Clean Energy Plan offers a mechanism to delay closures of needed generation if it is required to meet demand. Michigan can take this offramp while continuing to reduce carbon emissions through coal-to-gas switching and accelerating renewable development. To ignore this opportunity risks political blowback that only worsens the likelihood of reducing emissions. 

Read the full report.

Canter in Leadership Launchpad: What Can Mississippi Teach Us About Lasting Change

Posted on by Alex Terr

[…]

At first, a “miracle” sounds like a compliment, and I’m sure whoever first used the term thought of it like that and probably enjoyed the alliteration of “Mississippi Miracle.” But the implication of “miracle” is that it is something no human could have achieved through their own efforts, and then it begins to look very suspicious to people inured to too-good-to-be-true educational success stories.

Our NAEP data clearly show a long, slow climb from the bottom to the national average in fourth grade reading and fourth grade math, and a significant closure of the gap in eighth grade math. When adjusting for demographics, we led the nation on the 2024 NAEP in those grades and subjects. Our eighth grade reading NAEP data isn’t as stellar, but we have made progress, and when adjusting for demographics, we ranked fourth in eighth grade reading in 2024.

I want people to appreciate just how much hard, focused work we did as a state for a really long time to get those gains. Just because the country seems to have heard about us yesterday does not mean that this happened overnight. When people call it a miracle, they dismiss all of our effort, including the sustained hard work of teachers and students and families. They also dismiss the possibility that other states could run the same playbook and get the same results.

[…]

Read more in Leadership Launchpad

Manno for Community College Daily: The dawn of the Workforce Pell era needs a credential transparency compact

Posted on by Max Sherrill

The Workforce Pell program, launching on July 1, faces a serious implementation problem. The accountability infrastructure it needs to distinguish between programs that open doors and programs that merely collect tuition doesn’t yet exist at scale.

The U.S. Department of Education estimatesthat federal government program costs over the next decade will total $3.2 billion. So that scale of new money entering a marketplace that can’t yet say which programs build careers could be a gamble, not an investment.

Two new tools, the Certificate Earnings Explorer from The HEA Group and Open Campus, and the Credential Value Index from the Burning Glass Institute, point toward what that infrastructure could look like. Together, they suggest the terms of a transparency compact to guide this work.

Read more in Community College Daily.

 

Kahlenberg on Radically Pragmatic Substack: Trump’s Wrongheaded War On Economic Affirmative Action

Posted on by Alyssa Brown

The Justice Department now says giving poor kids an edge in university admissions amounts to racial discrimination by “proxy.” Its position is absurd.

The Trump administration has launched the next big fight over affirmative action. In doing so, it is not only rejecting decades of conservative orthodoxy, but is also taking the Republican party from a position of great political and legal strength to one of vulnerability.

Earlier this month, the Justice Department issued a 12-page letter finding that the University of California Davis Medical School has engaged in illegal “proxy” discrimination, favoring Black and Hispanic applicants by giving a leg up in admissions to students of all races who come from less privileged backgrounds.

The complaint focuses on the medical school’s “Davis Scale,” which provides a “continuous measure of socioeconomic disadvantage,” including“parental income and education,” and “growing up in a medically underserved area.” The DOJ claims that because this policy is especially helpful to minority applicants, who tend to be poorer, and because Davis values racial diversity, the practice is tantamount to the kind of explicit racial preferences the Supreme Court struck down in 2023.

That the administration would go after economic affirmative action at U.C. Davis is a story layered with ironies.

U.C. Davis Medical School was the defendant in the famous 1978 Bakke case in which the Supreme Court banned the use of explicit racial quotas in university admissions. The school had set aside 16 of 100 seats for racial minorities, which the court concluded violated the Constitution and the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The justices in Bakke allowed racial preferences to survive, as long as race was one of many factors. But for decades, conservatives (along with a few liberals like me) argued that economic affirmative action would be the fairest way to achieve racial and economic diversity.

Continue reading on Substack.

Moss in Deadline: What Comcast-NBCUniversal Split Faces On D.C.’s Trump-Influenced Regulatory Road

Posted on by Max Sherrill

[…]

If there is some kind of future deal, there could be some antitrust issues, more so if NBCU is not the buyer but the entity being sold. Diana Moss, vice president and director of competition policy at the Progressive Policy Institute, wrote via email, “If it is a bigger player, then the question is whether that creates higher concentration in streaming. Who they sell to is more complicated than most would think.”

As for Comcast, she wrote that there may be issues with a combination in an industry that already has seen the proposed merger of Charter with Cox. She wrote, “There is pretty high concentration in cable and digital broadcast satellite multi-video programming distribution. Some past cable mergers have been controversial for that reason.” She wrote that she would expect “political intervention by Trump” and other regulators. “Sad…,” she wrote.

For now, Comcast is dismissing M&A talk, but there also is the matter of timing. If a Democrat is elected to the White House in 2028, the pressure on the new president could be on to take an overall hard line against mergers, creating something of a scramble to get deals through even in a Trump-influenced environment.

[…]

Read More in Deadline

 

Manno for London School of Economics: What the UK can teach the US about how to get disconnected youth back into work

Posted on by Alex Terr

The transition from school to work should be a bridge. For one in seven young Americans, it’s a gap. Roughly 5.5 million of those aged 16 to 24 are disconnected from school and work. These opportunity youth are full of potential but don’t have a reliable path forward. Millions more are marginally attached, working a few hours a week or taking a single class. One disruption, like a family health crisis or an unaffordable bill, disconnects them from the institutions that help them build a future.

Lessons from the UK on disconnected youth

A 2025 RAND study found that disconnected youth showed signs of struggling socially and academically well before leaving school. They reported more symptoms of depression, higher rates of substance use, and weaker social supports than their connected peers. This disconnection accumulates. By the time it’s visible, it’s hard to reverse.

The UK government just issued the first of two reports on its version of this problem, titled Young People and Work. It calls the situation “a generational fault line” and a “moral crisis” that creates “a strategic economic risk for Britain.” It uses the label NEET, not in education, employment, or training, to describe the group of nearly one million people aged 16 to 24, roughly one in eight young people. A second part with policy recommendations will be published later in 2026.

While the British and US technical definitions of disconnected youth differ, they measure the same underlying reality. These are young people who’ve lost their footing when early adulthood should be taking shape. So, we can take lessons from across the Atlantic for the US.

Read more in London School of Economics

PPI Calls on Gov. Spanberger to Continue to Champion High Expectations for Student Learning in Virginia Public Schools

Posted on by Alex Terr

WASHINGTON (June 26, 2026) — Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) Director of Education Policy Rachel Canter released the following statement in response to the Virginia State Board of Education’s vote to move forward with raising learning expectations for Virginia schools on their original timeline and reject further delays:

“The Virginia State Board of Education sent a strong message in a 7-0-1 vote yesterday that children in Virginia can’t wait any longer for the state to get honest about how they’re doing in reading, math, and science.

“In 2025, the Virginia State Board of Education made the forward-looking choice to increase the definition of grade-level learning on its state assessments from the lowest bar in the country to among the highest. This move was not only a recognition that the lowest-in-the-country learning expectations are not good enough for Virginia, but also a vote of confidence in the potential of Virginia students and teachers to meet the higher bar. After much debate between those who wanted the change to happen immediately and those who wanted a long runway, the Virginia State Board chose to compromise: the bar would be phased in over four years, by boosting the definition of ‘proficient’ until reaching the permanent, higher bar in 2029-2030.

“But as almost always happens, there’s an effort afoot working harder to hide behind low expectations than helping students and teachers meet higher ones. On Wednesday, the State Board heard a proposal from the Virginia Department of Education to forgo increasing expectations until the 2028-2029 school year and then move the bar in one fell swoop.

“Thankfully, the Virginia State Board of Education recognized that calls to delay raising standards are just the nice façade people put on their true intentions to kill them entirely whenever the next deadline comes. Let’s be honest why: Some schools and districts that look just fine right now will look less stellar when the system becomes more rigorous. It’s not about student learning; it’s about the perception of a system run by adults.

“But temporary growing pains — and that’s what they are whenever we reach for better with kids — are not a reason to keep lying to children and families about how much students really know. We learned this lesson in Mississippi: Until we were truthful about what every child really knew, we couldn’t start the process of getting a whole lot better. The sky did not fall when we leveled up what we wanted from kids. Instead, families gave us the grace to keep going because we all understood that leaping over a low state bar had only ever given us one thing — last place nationally.

“Every governor in America is an education governor, whether they know it or not. States spend an enormous portion of their budgets, and frequently a significant share of local taxes, on public education. It’s one of the issues that touches the lives of every citizen in a profound way, helping to determine their opportunity in life and the economic vitality of the state and its communities. The great difference among our 50 education governors, then, is whether the person in the mansion leads on education with vision.

“Governor Spanberger has a rare opportunity to show the country what it looks like for a Democratic governor to speak loudly in support of high expectations for student learning, the belief that all children can learn, and the fundamental principle that improvement in any system begins with honesty about your starting place. She can show this commitment by supporting the State Board in staying the course. Between now and August, she can also fill the pending state board vacancy with a new member who shares the vision that Virginia students are capable of learning at high levels and that the job of education leaders is to align their work and resources to that end.

“Virginia students, like those in every state across the nation, deserve no less.”

The Reinventing America’s Schools Project inspires a 21st-century model of public education geared to the knowledge economy. Two models, public charter schools and public innovation schools, are showing the way by providing autonomy for schools, accountability for results, and parental choice among schools tailored to the diverse learning styles of children.

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

The Unpopular Reintroduction of the American Innovation and Choice Online Act

Posted on by Alyssa Brown

I. The Much-Changed Digital and Economic Landscape

In early June, Senators Amy Klobuchar and Charles Grassley introduced the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA, S.2992). Like its predecessor, introduced four years ago, AICOA attempts to restrain practices by large online platform owners that limit competition — both on their platforms and between competing platforms.

Since AICOA 1.0 was introduced in 2022, however, much has happened. The courts have handed down key decisions in a number of U.S. federal and state digital tech antitrust cases. Artificial intelligence (AI) has exploded, and digital regulation in Europe continues to be controversial.

Yet AICOA 2.0 picks up where its predecessor, AICOA 1.0, left off. This disconnect makes it uncomfortably clear that the authors are aiming to support the agenda of anti-monopoly activists in targeting the digital sector, rather than helping consumers contend with high prices for food, healthcare, and housing.

II. AICOA’s Authors and Sponsors Aren’t Reading the Room on Consumers

The U.S. is facing one of the biggest cost-of-living crises in history. AICOA 2.0’s expansive applicability to digital market players and potential for disrupting the U.S. antitrust enforcement system has enormous implications for consumers.

For example, enforcement of AICOA 2.0 is guaranteed to divert massive, scarce antitrust resources toward enforcement in digital markets. That means resources will (necessarily) be taken away from enforcement in other sectors, including food, healthcare, energy, and housing, where serious market power problems drive up consumer prices and reduce choice and innovation.

The failure of the bill’s sponsors and co-sponsors to read the room on the problems facing American consumers could become a political liability. The high probability that voters will take to the polls in November with cost-of-living issues top of mind may explain why AICOA 2.0 has far fewer co-sponsors, both Democrat and Republican, than AICOA 1.0.

Read the full analysis here. 

Manno on The Newell Normand Show: Are career pathway programs actually leading Louisiana students to good jobs?

Posted on by Alex Terr

Are career pathways actually leading Louisiana students to good jobs, or are we just giving them more programs, credentials, and options that look impressive on paper but don’t clearly connect to meaningful employment? Dr. Bruno V. Manno, Chair at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, joins Newell to talk about what has to happen for education, training, and the workforce to line up.

New PPI Report Warns Delivery Regulations Could Disrupt Markets That Benefit Millions

Posted on by Alex Terr

WASHINGTON (June 25, 2026) — A new report from the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) explains the supply-and-demand dynamics behind the “three-sided markets” that power online food delivery and finds that Americans are spending far less time traveling to and from restaurants and bars, a shift driven in large part by the ease of delivery. The report cautions that a growing wave of state and local regulations could disrupt these markets, which benefit consumers, merchants, and delivery workers alike.

The report, “A Tale Of A Three-Sided Market: Understanding Online Food Delivery Services,” explains how platforms such as DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Instacart coordinate near-simultaneous transactions among three groups: merchants, delivery workers, and consumers, and why poorly calibrated rules on fees and pay risk hurting all three.

Drawing on Bureau of Labor Statistics time-use data, the authors estimate that Americans spent about 35.3 hours per person traveling to and from “eating and drinking” in 2023-24, down 16% from 42.1 hours before the pandemic. That adds up to roughly 2 billion fewer hours a year, reduced travel time, the report estimates, is worth about $46 billion at $25 per hour, a figure that does not even include the value of delivering items like groceries and prescriptions.

The “eating and drinking” industry appears to have prospered in the era of online food delivery. After dropping sharply during the pandemic, employment at restaurants and bars has recovered to about 11.4 million, close to an all-time high, while the number of U.S. eating and drinking establishments has climbed almost 10% from 2019 to roughly 670,000. Over the same period, DoorDash’s global orders rose from 263 million in 2019 to nearly 3.2 billion in 2025.

The authors argue that delivery fees, often criticized as “junk fees,” generally do not meet the definition. Junk fees are typically hidden, poorly explained, or unavoidable, the report notes, whereas major platforms usually disclose delivery and service fees early in the ordering process and explain what they cover.

The report points to Seattle as a cautionary case. After the city’s “PayUp” pay floor took effect in early 2024, platforms raised consumer fees to cover higher wages, and DoorDash reported that orders fell, wait times grew, and average hourly driver earnings dropped more than 20% from a year earlier.

“For consumers, time is money, and these platforms are saving people billions of hours a year,” said Michael Mandel, Vice President and Chief Economist at PPI. “Three-sided markets work because supply and demand stay in balance across all three sides. When price controls knock that balance out, everyone loses; consumers, merchants, and drivers alike.”

“Fees aren’t a glitch in these markets. They’re the mechanism that keeps drivers available and orders moving,” said Andrew Fung, Senior Economic and Technology Policy Analyst at PPI. “Policymakers who want to help workers and consumers should be careful not to disrupt the dynamics that make these benefits possible in the first place.”

The report urges policymakers weighing new rules on delivery commissions, consumer fees, or driver pay to be cautious before disrupting markets that now provide benefits to so many, accounting not only for what each group gains, but also for the pricing flexibility that has kept these markets stable and growing.

Read and download the report 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

A Tale Of A Three-Sided Market: Understanding Online Food Delivery Services

Posted on by Alex Terr

INTRODUCTION

In recent years, several state and local governments have passed or considered new regulations on services providing rapid delivery of items such as restaurant-prepared meals, groceries, and time-sensitive packages like medicine. These regulatory efforts are ostensibly intended to help consumers, workers, and businesses by forcibly lowering prices, raising wages, and eliminating “junk fees.” Perversely, however, they run the risk of disrupting these complicated markets and actually hurting market participants. For example, New York City’s experiment with fee caps led to reduced orders and revenue for small businesses, and the policy was ultimately rolled back.

In this paper, we examine and explain how these complicated “three-sided” markets work, facilitating near-simultaneous transactions between three different groups of economic actors: the merchants, the people doing the delivery, and the ultimate consumers. Such services require near-flawless coordination between the business providing the product and the people doing the delivery because of the time-sensitive nature of the goods being delivered. The result, if done well, is a huge increase in consumer welfare, in the form of time saved; an increase in flexible earning opportunities for individuals doing delivery and other related tasks, such as personal time to spend with loved ones or relaxing; and an increase in demand for restaurant meals and groceries by reaching new consumers who couldn’t access the good or didn’t know about the merchant previously.

The novel structure of these newly created markets has also sparked new questions and the interest of policymakers. For instance, how should compensation for delivery drivers be structured? How should consumers be informed about the costs associated with delivery? These questions — and any potential policy changes — should be considered in parallel with their impacts on the market functions of these platforms.

In this paper, we will first offer a basic explanation of how these marketplaces work, and why they benefit all the participants — the merchants who supply the products, consumers, and the people who handle the actual deliveries. Though some academic and corporate publications have focused on related topics, an easily accessible explanation is unfortunately missing from the public policy discussion.

Then, we will look more closely at the price structure of three-sided delivery markets and show how fees and prices in these markets are structured. The section will directly address the ongoing debate about “junk fees” and the flurry of recent legislation at the state level.6 Junk fees, affecting goods like hotels, concerts, and airplane tickets, have drawn sharp criticism in recent years from consumers and regulators. There is no agreed-upon definition of junk fees, but in one 2023 report, the Biden White House implicitly defined junk fees as “unnecessary, unavoidable, or surprise charges that inflate prices while adding little to no value.”  Though regional variation makes definitive generalization challenging, most online food delivery fees do not fit these criteria.

Read the full report.