March 31, 2025
Reimagining Federal Education R&D: DARPA for Education
Earlier in my professional life, I was the head of the political science department at Stony Brook University. When the chairs of the arts and science met, someone from the physical or life sciences would inevitably argue that the “hard” natural sciences deserved more support than the “soft” social sciences. My rejoinder was one of…
March 31, 2025
Putting Children First: Child Welfare Priorities for the New Administration
Event Summary On March 31, AEI hosted a discussion on child welfare priorities, moderated by AEI’s Naomi Schaefer Riley. Experts Jedd Medefind of the Christian Alliance for Orphans, Rachel N. Morrison of the Ethics & Public Policy Center, Darcy Olsen of the Center for the Rights of Abused Children, and Tom Rawlings of Child Welfare…
March 28, 2025
Cracking the Code Behind Dismal 8th Grade Reading Scores
The most recent round of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results delivered a familiar gut punch: Just 30 percent of eighth graders in the United States read at or above the proficient level, a number that’s barely budged in decades. Even in states like Mississippi and Louisiana, which have earned national attention thanks to literacy reforms that have…
March 28, 2025
Unfreezing New York’s Projects
The imposing brick blocks covering much of the territory from West 16th to 27th Streets, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, superficially have much in common with the rest of the city’s sprawling, dilapidated public housing system. From July 2023 to July 2024, the 2,070 apartments making up the Fulton & Elliott–Chelsea…
March 27, 2025
The Looming Debt Crisis, the Trump Tax Cuts, and Medicaid
Let’s start with a chart to understand the dire fiscal situation we are in as a nation. Figure 1. Federal Debt Held by the Public as a Share of Gross Domestic Product, 1940-2054 You’re looking at how sizeable federal debt has been and will be relative to gross domestic product (GDP). From 1960 to 2008, the federal debt held by…
March 26, 2025
How Large Would SNAP Be? Simulating the Size of SNAP Based on Changes to the Unemployment Rate
Abstract The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is a means-tested transfer program that is available to all households that meet the eligibility criteria. Therefore, SNAP is also a countercyclical program, meaning that the size of the program increases during recessionary periods and decreases during expansionary periods. A large literature quantifies the magnitude of the relationship…
March 25, 2025
Reimagining Federal Education R&D: IES, Workforce Skills, and State Leadership
The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) has taken a hit from DOGE, losing about 90 percent of its workforce. Regardless of the future of the Education Department, we need to continue to improve education R&D and identify what in IES should be preserved, or indeed expanded, to meet the nation’s needs today and in the…
March 24, 2025
Tax Abatements: The Best-Kept Secret to Revitalizing Struggling Communities—Without Spending Taxpayer Money
A well-designed property tax abatement program can dramatically shift project economics by temporarily reducing tax burdens, making new housing development financially viable—without requiring government subsidies. Philadelphia’s 10-year tax abatement is a powerful example: a simple policy that helped reverse decades of decline by unlocking private investment and spurring the construction of tens of thousands of…
March 24, 2025
The Student Loan Payment Pause Was a Catastrophic Mistake
In March 2020, as America shut down in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress passed a law suspending federal student loan payments for six months. The payment pause ended up lasting, in effect, for four and a half years. Though well-intentioned, the pause and its repeated extensions may go down as one of the worst mistakes in…
March 21, 2025
Increasing Financial Aid Isn’t the Solution to High College Costs
Harvard University recently announced it would make tuition free for students from families earning below $200,000—but for middle-class students not lucky enough to receive a Harvard acceptance letter, college tuition is still far too expensive. As a solution, many have proposed significant increases in taxpayer-funded financial aid to reduce or even eliminate tuition for many students. This…