December 11, 2025
Trump Family Policy Fails to Deliver at the One-Year Mark
When President Trump tapped J.D. Vance as his pick for Vice President, it seemed likely that the second Trump administration would place special emphasis on family policy. Prior to his political career, Vance highlighted fertility decline as a core issue. As a politician, Vance continued to emphasize fertility and family policy, suggesting it’s necessary to…
December 2, 2025
What To Do About Benefit Cliffs?
Everyone wants poor families to work their way off welfare and ascend the income ladder. Yet an increasing number remain trapped on government benefits, struggling to support themselves. Some blame the recipients, politicians, the economy, racism, or even capitalism. But few focus on perhaps the most obvious factor – government programs themselves, which actively discourage…
November 25, 2025
Congress should restore local autonomy over homeless aid
The Trump administration recently announced a major shift to the scoring rubric for the federal government’s main source of homeless aid—the Continuum of Care program—which annually distributes $3.9 billion in competitive funding to local communities. The new rubric will target funds to recovery-oriented, time-limited housing programs, a reversal of a decades-long emphasis on no-strings-attached permanent…
November 13, 2025
Is the US Really an Outlier on Pregnancy Deaths, and Have Such Deaths Spiked?
US pregnancy and postpartum deaths receive substantial news coverage, and reporting is frequently alarmist. This summer, a LiveScience article claimed that “pregnancy is deadlier in the US than in other wealthy countries.” The article stated that there were 19 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births in the US, or more than twice as many…
November 10, 2025
The Welfare Program You Never Heard About During the Shutdown
Americans have heard plenty about how, effective November 1, the federal government shutdown suspended regular food stamp payments to 42 million individuals. Food stamps are important welfare benefits paid to low-income families—or in recent weeks not paid. For all that attention on food stamps, however, almost no one has mentioned what once was the nation’s…
September 23, 2025
Why the USDA Is Justified in Ending the Food Security Survey
The USDA announced plans to discontinue future Household Food Security reports, ending the annual supplemental survey that, among other things, was used as the government’s official statistic on “food insecurity”. The supplemental survey had been attached to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey each December since the late 1990s, asking households a battery of questions…
August 7, 2025
Perspective on the OBBBA’s SNAP Cuts
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) will reduce federal spending for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by $186.7 billion over the next 10 years. While these reductions are substantial, they require important context.
June 25, 2025
Yes, there’s still a shared American story. If we’re to live in freedom, we need to embrace and defend it.
A year and a half ago, I wrote an essay in The Social Breakdown arguing the need for a revived civic national story and the existential consequences for the country not having one. Even more so today, protecting our liberal democratic experiment requires that Americans set aside their partisan or policy differences. But we need…
June 24, 2025
Putting the CBO’s Estimates of SNAP’s Work Requirement into Context
Recent proposals to expand the work requirement in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) have been almost universally portrayed as a punitive effort to push low-income recipients off the program. Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that over 3 million people will leave SNAP due to the work requirement expansions. However, it is important…
May 20, 2025
The share of Medicaid recipients in compliance with the House bill’s community engagement requirement
Last week, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce approved several changes to Medicaid as part of the reconciliation bill. One major change is the imposition of community engagement requirements for non-disabled working age adults without dependent children. This change would take effect in January 2029, although some House members have argued for moving up…