Search and filter by content type, issue area, author, and keyword
March 11, 2025
AbstractCongress is considering ways to reduce spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by $230 billion over ten years. Reforms are likely to include one or more of the following cost-saving elements: reducing the maximum SNAP benefit, reducing deductions, expanding work requirements, and ending broad based categorical eligibility. In this paper I analyze each…
March 11, 2025
While occupied with budget bills to keep the government open and set future spending and tax levels, Congress is also cleaning up past messes. Today, the House is expected to vote on legislation to hold criminals accountable for stealing over $100 billion in pandemic-era unemployment benefits. All agree on the urgent need for action, but Democrats’…
March 10, 2025
Key Points Introduction By now, the awful results from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)1 have been publicized, chewed over, and digested—and they are already moving into the rearview mirror as states, school districts, and teachers fall back into the comfortable routine of doing the same thing over and over again. But continuing that…
March 4, 2025
As Congress considers instituting work requirements to maintain eligibility for Medicaid, it is illustrative to examine an effective model for how such requirements have been implemented in New York City to maintain eligibility for the federal cash welfare program Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). Proposals to mandate work requirements as a condition of receiving…
March 3, 2025
Like other Cabinet agencies, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is moving quickly to undo long-standing progressive policies. New HUD Secretary Scott Turner has asserted that the agency is now “DEI-free.” Perhaps even more significantly, the agency is considering implementing time limits and work requirements for tenants of public and subsidized housing. Although we should expect howls of protest from tenant…
February 28, 2025
The pullback from diversity, equity and inclusion programs — in government agencies and business — has focused on their impact at the individual level — on hiring, or college admission. But an under-the-radar initiative of the Biden administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development planned DEI for communities across the country. It would do so through required “equity…
February 28, 2025
Congress is considering implementing work requirements for Medicaid. This reform could help Congress achieve its goal of reducing federal expenditures and simultaneously strengthen the incentive for Medicaid recipients to work. At the same time, individuals who do not comply with the work requirement may lose health insurance coverage. Underlying the policy debate is the extent…
February 27, 2025
While Elon Musk was chainsawing at CPAC, his ex-girlfriend, the singer Grimes, pleaded with him to attend to their child’s medical crisis. This dustup followed a claim by the conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair that she had given birth to Musk’s 13th child. Musk’s complicated family life, combined with the admiration for Musk among many conservative writers,…
February 27, 2025
We are used to thinking about how burgeoning artificial intelligence (AI) may affect jobs and employment. Usually, this means fixating on whether or not AI systems will replace or augment human labor. What is less often considered is the way AI will, and in fact already does, spur new demand for labor that has nothing…
February 27, 2025
For more than a century, American progressives have argued that the costs and conditions of American housing prove that the private market has failed. In the early twentieth century, the often-rough tenements of New York’s Lower East Side were deemed the work of rapacious “slumlords,” while small single-family or duplex homes that sprouted in cities…