This article is from a cover package of essays entitled Ten New Ideas for the Democratic Party to Help the Working Class, and Itself. Find the full series here.

For many years, outside observers, including the editors of this magazine, have warned that the Democratic Party cannot win if it continues to hemorrhage the support of working-class Americans. The results of the November election should put an end to any debate about this.

The tragedy is that as president, Joe Biden did a lot to try to bring back these voters. He openly supported unions and was the first sitting president to walk a picket line. He pushed through major legislation to fund infrastructure and manufacturing projects that would produce, he said again and again, good-paying jobs that you don’t need a college degree to get—and by design these projects were disproportionately located in red areas. He signed other bills that put cash in the pockets of average Americans, including a short-lived but successful child tax credit. He began a revolution in competition policy that took on corporate power and greed in favor of small businesses and employees. When he dropped out of the race, Kamala Harris picked a running mate with working-class rural roots and proposed to help ordinary Americans buy a first home, start a new business, and secure protection from corporate price gouging. 

Yet despite all of this, Donald Trump not only won the election but also gained ground with working-class Americans of every race and gender and in every part of the country. 

There are ongoing debates about why this happened. The most obvious culprit is inflation, which hit working-class Americans hardest and led to electoral drubbings of every incumbent party in every major country that held elections in 2024. But there are other reasons, too. Chief among them is that the coalition that makes up the Democratic Party includes many groups and demographics whose demands over the past four years have been different from, and in many ways counter to, those of rural and working-class Americans. Younger college-educated progressives insisted that Democrats focus on trans rights, DEI, student debt relief, police brutality, and the plight of undocumented migrants. Older, wealthier liberals, especially those working in the upper echelons of the tech and financial sectors, warned party leaders against going “too far” with its populist economic agenda. 

Biden and Harris tried to accommodate all these voices, which often took the form of blunting their own. The result was a party that took half measures toward true economic reform, made early mistakes in areas like border enforcement that it couldn’t overcome, and had a brand that was toxic to too many working-class voters—especially after Trump’s propaganda machine was done with them. Instead, a majority of those voters wound up supporting a candidate many of them knew to be a criminal and a liar but who at least promised radical actions to shake up a status quo that has not benefited them in decades. 

If Democrats hope to take back power again, they are going to need to do more than wait for Trump’s policies to create chaos and failure. Even if that happens—and, yes, it will—working-class voters who are clearly in revolt against existing institutions and arrangements are unlikely to shift their support to a party they see as representing that failed establishment. Instead, Democrats are going to have to take to heart, more seriously than they have, the true conditions, opinions, and interests of rural and working-class voters—and convince members of their coalition to do the same. And they’re going to have to offer plans for more thoroughgoing change than they have up until now considered. 

If you think those voters are permanently in the GOP camp and forever lost to the Democrats, consider recent history. In 1980, after solidly supporting Democrats for decades, working-class voters swung hard for Ronald Reagan, who campaigned on ideas about shrinking government and massively expanding defense that had been considered extreme even within his party a few years before. In 1992, Bill Clinton won those voters back with a set of “New Democratic” ideas about welfare, trade, policing, and bureaucratic reform that scandalized traditional liberals and the left (and still do) but that led to (or at least coincided with) rising wages, falling crime, and increased public confidence in government. George W. Bush, with his “compassionate conservatism,” stole away many of those voters, but Barack Obama won them back with his “One America” politics. Trump and the GOP have them now, and in such numbers that it’s hard to imagine the situation changing. But it can if the right political talent meets the right set of ideas.

We offer 10 such ideas in the essays that follow. Some are drawn from the Monthly’s Old Testament of long-held policy positions, which have never been more relevant; others are New Testament additions fitted to emerging realities. The topics covered—immigration, health care, college costs, regulation, and so on—are wide ranging but far from exhaustive. We see this package as the beginning of a conversation with our readers and the broader public. Several of the ideas we offer are easy for average Americans to grasp and can be utilized immediately to challenge Trump’s agenda—and potentially attract some GOP allies and voters. Others will require time for liberals to absorb, debate, and coalesce around, and even longer—years, perhaps—to bring millions of misdirected voters, step by step, into the light. This package of essays is not, in other words, an exercise in political “messaging.” It is an effort to provide the policy scaffolding of a new liberalism that addresses, not in word but in deed, the long-neglected interests of working-class Americans.  

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The post Ten New Ideas for the Democratic Party to Help the Working Class, and Itself. appeared first on Washington Monthly.

This article is from a cover package of essays entitled Ten New Ideas for the Democratic Party to Help the Working Class, and Itself. Find the full series here.

According to exit polls, the top reason voters gave for not supporting Kamala Harris was inflation. Yet by the time of the election, official measures showed that inflation had moderated to historical norms. Meanwhile, other conventional economic indicators showed that wages had been rising far faster than prices for the previous two years. So why were so many voters convinced that their standard of living was falling? 

Here’s one factor that has been largely overlooked. Everyone complains about the high price of drugs and hospital stays. But few people are aware of how hidden health care costs that don’t show up in the Consumer Price Index are profoundly eroding their purchasing power. 

To understand how this giant rip-off works and how to fix it, you need some background. Most working- and middle-class Americans receive their health care coverage through employer-sponsored insurance plans. Most of us covered by such plans know full well that we are perpetually being asked to pay higher deductibles and co-pays. Most of us also know when our premiums go up. Individual workers covered by such plans typically pay around 20 percent of the cost of the premium in the form of a paycheck deduction. Workers who insure a spouse and two children under an employer plan typically see about 32 percent of the cost of the premium deducted from their paycheck. 

But here’s what most people miss. They think their employer pays the rest, which is true, but only literally. Your employer does send a check to the insurance company, but it’s a shell game. Any economist will tell you that workers in an employer-sponsored plan pay nearly all the cost of their benefits, and that it’s a very, very big number. This year, according to the Milliman Medical Index, for a typical middle-aged worker who enrolls their spouse and two children in a typical employer-sponsored family plan, the annual cost of their insurance has reached a staggering $32,066. 

The reason workers bear nearly all the cost of such plans is simple. When employers compensate workers with health care benefits, they almost always offset this expenditure by offering that much less in wages. They do this because they can and have no reason not to. All that matters to them is that the total compensation package allows them to recruit or retain the workers they want. For employers, their contributions to the health care plan are thus effectively free so long as they reduce other forms of compensation by the same amount. But for workers, the employers’ contribution to the health care plan usually means less take-home pay and other benefits. 

A corollary to this truth is that when the costs of a health care plan go up, employers compensate by either laying people off or giving lower raises than they otherwise would. For businesses that are losing money or operating at small margins, there often is literally no other choice. And for others, holding down salaries in the face of rising health care costs is the rational choice even if they could afford to do otherwise. 

This poorly understood reality has huge consequences for the finances of ordinary Americans. The employee-benefits expert Syl Schieber has calculated how much rising health care costs have lowered what he calls the “kitchen table” income of workers with employer-sponsored health care plans—that is, the income they have available each month to pay for housing, groceries, gas, and other day-to-day expenditures. He finds that due to the wage suppression caused by the rising cost of their health care plans, lower-income workers with family coverage had $2,500 less kitchen table income in 2019 (adjusted for inflation) than they brought home two decades earlier. In effect, health care inflation gobbled up all of the meager raises they received as they gained seniority, and more.

The hit on lower-income workers is particularly hard because employer-sponsored plans are financed by what is effectively a hidden and regressive head tax. The plan imposes the same flat costs on all employees regardless of how much they make. This means that the janitors on the plan pay a much higher share of their earnings than do the C-suite executives for the same coverage. 

Yet even workers in the top 10 percent of the income distribution are getting hosed. In his book Healthcare USA: American Exceptionalism Run Amok, Schieber shows that between 2000 and 2019, such high-income workers saw more than half of the total increase in their compensation over the period diverted into the cost of their health care plan. Put another way, that’s like finding, as you gain seniority and obtain increasingly valuable job skills, that your purchasing power is going up at only half the rate as the value you’re adding to your employer’s bottom line because (unknown to you) your employer has diverted the other half to covering the mounting cost of health care inflation. 

And that cost keeps rising. Since 2010, health care costs for the average family of four with an employer-sponsored plan have risen by more than $13,000, or over 71 percent. Currently, the cost for individuals covered by such plans is rising by 6.7 percent a year, roughly double the official rate of inflation. No wonder so many Americans, even those “privileged” enough to have employer-sponsored health insurance, feel like the economy is not working for them. 

The Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton attribute the rising death rates among working-class Americans in part to the economic hardships created by these plans. In their book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, they write, “The cost of employer-provided health insurance, largely invisible to employees, not only holds down wages but also destroys jobs, especially for less skilled workers, and replaces good jobs with worse jobs.”

What can be done? Abolishing our employer-based health care finance system and replacing it with something like a government-financed, “Medicare for All” program might be a good idea. But it hardly needs saying that it is a political nonstarter at the moment.

Fortunately, there’s another way. 

It turns out that in addition to all their other faults, employer-sponsored plans are terrible at negotiating with health care providers for lower prices. That’s supposed to be one of their key functions. They are supposed to go to hospitals, doctors, and drug companies and say, “If you want to be part of our network of preferred providers, you have to give us discounts.” Yet it turns out that on average, when people on these plans go to the hospital to have a specific procedure done, the hospital charges an average 254 percent more than they do when they perform the same operation on a Medicare patient. Hospitals also charge commercial plans more than 100 percent more for any drugs they administer, according to a massive ongoing survey conducted by the RAND Corporation. 

This disparity is not entirely the fault of the plans. Thanks to rampant hospital mergers and the roll-up of independent doctors and other providers, many health care markets these days are dominated by a single mega health care provider with so much market power that it can simply dictate prices even to the largest purchasers of health care. In other places, insurers and providers have merged into a single, self-dealing conglomerate. Either way, in the face of so much monopoly power, most employer-sponsored plans are not providing any real value to their members when it comes to negotiating for fair prices.

So here’s the solution. Just mandate, going forward, that all employer-sponsored plans pay providers the same, or close to the same, prices Medicare does. And further mandate that employers share the enormous resulting savings with their workers. 

Will hospitals object? Of course. But their case is weak. Abundant evidence shows that the U.S. hospital system could easily sustain itself with prices that are much closer to Medicare reimbursement rates. This should come as no surprise, since Medicare sets these rates by calculating what a well-run hospital needs in revenue in order to cover its costs and earn a respectable profit. (“See Don’t Blame Medicare for Rising Medical Bills,” June 19, 2023.) Most hospitals are classified as nonprofit, charitable institutions for tax purposes. It’s time they operated as such, rather than behaving as profit maximizers. And it’s time American workers stopped seeing so much of their well-deserved earnings siphoned off by medical monopolies charging predatory prices. 

In 2018, the Washington Monthly published an article that worked through the details of how such a plan could be implemented and how much it would save workers. In 2020, we reported on how a similar plan had been successfully implemented by Montana on behalf of its state employees. 

Maybe now, as Democrats look for ways to improve the real and perceived economic security of working- and middle-class voters, it’s time to consider implementing “Medicare Prices for All.” It’s a plan that doesn’t require raising taxes or forcing anyone to give up their private insurance. But it offers a way to squeeze the monopoly rents out of the health care system and return them to the American people.  

The post Medicare Prices for All appeared first on Washington Monthly.

This article is from a cover package of essays entitled Ten New Ideas for the Democratic Party to Help the Working Class, and Itself. Find the full series here.

The moment that President Trump puts his hand on that Bible and takes the oath of office,” said incoming Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller to the Fox News host Sean Hannity after the election, “the occupation ends, liberation day begins. He will immediately sign executive orders, sealing the border shut [and] beginning the largest deportation operation in American history.”

Democrats should expect Donald Trump to follow through on that threat. We know from the last time Trump was president that he likes to begin with shock-and-awe exercises of executive power, as with his abrupt ban on travel from seven Muslim-majority countries. And we know he views brutal, inhumane tactics as a deterrent to immigration, which we saw in his policy of migrant parent-child separations.

But Democrats should also expect voters to judge Trump’s second-term mass deportations with as much revulsion as they did his first-term travel ban and family separations, swinging the public opinion pendulum back in their direction. Even though Joe Biden’s administration, and Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, struggled to mitigate public ire over the record number of border crossings on their watch, Trump’s own brand of chaos will present a fresh opportunity for Democrats. Sooner than you might think, voters will be open to hearing Democratic ideas for solving the immigration mess that would restore order, respect humanity, and reflect the desires of most Americans. 

The solution needn’t be invented from scratch. It’s the same one every Democrat in the Senate, and plenty of Republicans, supported more than a decade ago: tough restraints on employers who hire undocumented migrants combined with generous opportunities for those migrants to become legal immigrants. It won’t disrupt the economy or require mass militarized roundups. And once those disruptions and roundups begin under Trump, it’ll look increasingly appealing to the public.

We know Trump’s plans go far beyond his limited mandate. The 2024 exit poll asked if undocumented immigrants should be deported or given a chance at legal status. Only 40 percent wanted deportation, while 56 percent preferred legal pathways. Clearly, Trump didn’t win the national popular vote or the swing states on the deportation vote alone. He needed a piece of the legal pathway vote to seal his victory, and snagged 22 percent of it. 

And in his first term, we saw Trump lose support, and drag the entire Republican Party down with him, because of his nativist fixations.

FiveThirtyEight began tracking the average of Trump’s first-term job approval rating on January 23, 2017, four days before he imposed the travel ban that detained people at airports, stranded visa holders abroad, and separated families. While his average approval was always below 50 percent, he started his presidency with a level of approval slightly higher than disapproval. However, one week after the controversial ban, Trump’s approval number sunk underwater, and it stayed that way for the rest of his presidency.

Separating families who cross the southern border seeking asylum, a policy publicly announced in April 2018 as “zero tolerance,” did not help Trump’s political standing. Public outrage was so intense that Trump signed an executive order in June instructing the Department of Homeland Security to keep families together (though some separations quietly continued). 

Then, in October 2018, as the midterm election neared, Trump tried to whip up panic about a “caravan” of Central American migrants heading to the American border, relying on a familiar mix of bigoted lies and conspiracy mongering about their intentions. Playing the fear card failed to prevent Democrats from seizing control of the House by keeping the focus on health care. Exit polls showed that a plurality of 41 percent of voters named health care as their most important issue, and three-quarters of them voted Democratic. Only 23 percent cited immigration, and Democrats picked up about one-quarter of those.

Backlash against Trump’s attacks on immigrants continued to build. Gallup polling in the spring of 2020 registered the highest share of people in at least two decades, 77 percent, holding the belief that immigration is good for America. And for the first time since at least 1965, more Americans expressed support for an increase in levels of immigration than for a decrease. 

Yet in the 2020 presidential primary, most Democratic candidates excessively interpreted the shift in public sentiment and rushed to support very loose immigration laws, such as lowering an illegal border crossing from a criminal offense to a civil one. The leftward lurch on immigration didn’t pose a political problem in a general election dominated by Trump’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic. But when the Biden administration faced a record influx of migrants, the perception of possessing a lax attitude toward immigration left Democrats vulnerable to attack. 

Biden and Harris tried many different approaches to limit the flow of migration and steer it toward legal avenues. (Recall Harris’s controversial 2021 visit to Guatemala when she told potential migrants, “Do not come.”) In 2024, the administration imposed strict border limits by executive order that dramatically reduced the number of illegal crossings. But their efforts did not register with most voters. Frustration with immigration was not nearly as central to Trump’s victory as was frustration with inflation—75 percent of voters said they had experienced some degree of “hardship” from inflation in the past year. But most voters, 53 percent, sided with Trump over Harris on the question of who they trusted more to handle immigration. And we have anecdotal evidence that some voters with a moderate view on deportations set aside Trump’s vitriol and charitably assumed he would take a narrow approach. For example, The New York Times interviewed an immigrant business owner in Pennsylvania who said, “Me, worried about deportations? No, not one worry. Trump knows he needs immigrants to work. Us, we’re here to work, we commit no crimes.”

Such voters are about to have a rude awakening. Trump’s incoming border czar, Tom Homan, made clear that the administration will not limit deportations to those who have committed crimes inside the United States, but will target anyone who is undocumented. He said on Fox News, “I’ve talked about prioritization of public safety threats and national security threats. But if you’re in the country illegally, you’re not off the table.” To maximize manpower beyond the agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Stephen Miller has said the Trump administration will enlist state National Guard units. If and when Democratic governors don’t cooperate, Miller has suggested that units from Republican states will cross state lines.

Trump is also expected to revoke the legal status of hundreds of thousands of people who were granted “humanitarian parole” or “temporary protected status” after fleeing dangerous circumstances in their home countries. Miller has even voiced plans for a “turbocharged” denaturalization program—stripping citizenship away from the naturalized who have committed crimes or, potentially, for minor transgressions.

The aggressive strategy could hit logistical roadblocks. Since other nations might not readily accept deportees, Miller and Homan have floated various mass detention options, which are easier to talk about than to build and manage. Trump’s competence in carrying out nativist policies is highly questionable; in his first term, despite the cruel tactics deployed, illegal border crossings rose during the pre-pandemic years, and the pace of interior deportations trailed his predecessors. 

Yet harsh tactics can still inflict harm on undeserving people who only want the opportunity to join the American middle class and contribute to our economic growth. And most American voters don’t want their government to break up families and disrupt local businesses reliant on immigrant labor. At the same time, they also didn’t want the disturbances experienced during the Biden administration, when surges of migrants strained the ability of state and local governments to provide shelter and schooling. Any Democratic response to Trump’s disruption should involve policies designed to bring order, not further disruption.

Fortunately, the hard work of developing such policies has already been done.

The Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013 was crafted by a bipartisan Senate group dubbed the “Gang of Eight,” and if you don’t remember it, you will be gobsmacked by some of the cast of characters involved: Jeff Flake (anti-Trump Republican turned Biden administration ambassador to Turkey), Lindsey Graham (anti-Trump Republican turned Trump sycophant), John McCain (Barack Obama’s 2008 opponent turned savior of Obamacare), Bob Menendez (convicted of bribery), and Marco Rubio (anti-Trump Republican and now Trump’s secretary of state appointee).

The bill was held together by a series of interconnected bargains. Undocumented immigrants already here could obtain legal status and get on a path to a citizenship if they had no criminal record and paid penalties. But before people could pursue green cards, border security goals needed to be met, including a 90 percent rate of preventing illegal crossings. At the same time, steps would be taken to clear out a backlog of visa applicants—people trying to enter through legal means. 

And all employers would be required to use the “E-Verify” computer background check system to ensure that their employees were legally documented. As the Los Angeles Times reported in October, “E-Verify is free for employers, with more than 98% of those checked being confirmed as work-authorized instantly or within 24 hours,” but as of today it’s mostly voluntary and rarely used. 

In other words, people who are already here and contributing to America can stay, our workforce would no longer be reliant on illegal labor, and a more orderly system for future immigration would be put into place.

The bill passed the Senate in a bipartisan 68–32 vote. But as anti-immigrant sentiment within the Republican Party grassroots boiled over, Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner refused to bring the Senate bill to the floor. Similar legislation has not been formally considered since.

Earlier this year, a different bipartisan immigration compromise was attempted in the Senate with a limited focus on border security. Republican Senator James Lankford, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, and independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema struck a deal designed to expedite adjudication of asylum claims and give border security officials more power to turn people away at the border. Senate Republicans sabotaged the compromise with a filibuster, prompted by Trump, who did not want Biden getting credit for a border security bill. 

While most Democrats were prepared to support the bill, some progressive immigration advocates deemed the border provisions too restrictive. But if they were incorporated into a comprehensive bill that also improved the processing of legal visa applications, the restrictions would be more palatable. 

The collapse of the 2013 bill made “comprehensive” a dirty word. Too many compromises gave critics too many targets, so the argument went. But narrower immigration reform bills haven’t fared much better in the last decade. The politics are just as complicated, and the policies can’t work as well when implemented piecemeal. For example, this year a bipartisan Senate bill to mandate E-Verify was introduced but went nowhere, for good reason. If we suddenly imposed E-Verify on every business, without any other fixes to the immigration system, about 8 million undocumented workers would not only lose their jobs but be removed from the workforce entirely. During a period of low unemployment, that would force many businesses to close and risk recession. To avert that risk, mandatory E-Verify should be paired with legal status for existing undocumented workers. It needs to be part of a comprehensive reform bill. 

The problem with stymieing comprehensive immigration reform was never the complexity of the legislation. The problem was and is a Republican Party taken over by nativists uninterested in finding commonsense solutions reflective of the public will. Once Trump reminds us all over again that, when it comes to immigration, he is a chaos agent, Democrats will have a fresh opportunity to show they are the problem solvers.  

The post Make Employers Secure the Border appeared first on Washington Monthly.

This article is from a cover package of essays entitled Ten New Ideas for the Democratic Party to Help the Working Class, and Itself. Find the full series here.

If there’s one message the Washington Monthly has been trying to get across over the years in its writing about higher education, it’s this: Stop obsessing over wealthy elite universities that educate the few, and pay more attention to the underfunded, unfancy schools that educate the many. For Democrats (or anyone else) concerned about America’s costly and inequitable higher education system, this should be common sense. If your aim is to make the country more prosperous and fair, focus your reform efforts on the institutions of higher learning that affect the most people. 

It is hard, however, for this idea to penetrate the minds of the affluent liberals who have outsized influence over the agenda of the Democratic Party. That’s because they are fixated on the kind of elite colleges they went to, or tried to get into, or desperately want their kids to attend. The New York Times, written by and for such people, mentioned Harvard University about a thousand times in non-sports-related stories over the past year, according to a Google search. It cited Arizona State, the country’s largest university (with 80,000 students on campus, versus Harvard’s 7,100), only 79 times. It referred to the University of Central Florida, the nation’s fourth largest (69,000 students), fewer than 20 times. In all, the Times cited Harvard more often than the 10 largest U.S. universities combined. 

When these liberals consider how higher education might ameliorate the plight of the underprivileged, they naturally think the solution is to open for racial minorities the path that brought them wealth, status, and influence—admission to a selective university. That’s a big reason why, for decades, affirmative action in college admissions was at the center of liberal efforts to advance racial justice. 

The main argument for affirmative action in higher education was, and remains, sound. Elite colleges produce a disproportionate number of a country’s leaders, and it’s unhealthy for a democracy if that elite core of students doesn’t at least roughly reflect the diversity of the country. And affirmative action did some good—the percentage of Black students admitted to selective colleges rose considerably in the 1960s and ’70s before leveling off in the 1980s. 

Yet affirmative action never benefited more than a tiny fraction of minority students, even as it proved politically divisive in ways helpful to its conservative critics. A Brookings study found that only 13 percent of Black students, 14 percent of Latino students, and 8 percent of Native American students in 2019 attended a college that practiced affirmative action. The rest went to schools that admitted most or all applicants so felt little need to adjust admissions numbers based on race. After the Supreme Court in 2023 made most race-based admissions practices illegal, more than two-thirds of Americans, including nearly half of African Americans, told Gallup the decision was “mostly a good thing.” 

Over the past decade, the left has championed another set of policies aimed at easing the paths of racial and ethnic minorities on colleges campuses: DEI, short for diversity, equity, and inclusion. These policies include everything from hiring “chief diversity officers” to mandatory antiracism seminars for students to requirements that prospective faculty sign statements pledging to advance DEI goals in their teaching. Though present to some extent on a wide range of campuses today, DEI programs are highly concentrated among elite institutions. North Carolina’s two flagships, the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill and North Carolina State, spent nearly twice as much on DEI programs as the Tarheel State’s other 14 public universities combined, even though the latter educate more than twice as many students. 

DEI’s defenders argue that these programs are necessary to combat institutional racism on campuses. But while that goal makes sense, it’s hard to find evidence that DEI programs as currently structured have advanced it. As the Washington Monthly contributing editor Nicholas Confessore reported in The New York Times Magazine this past fall, the University of Michigan has invested nearly a quarter of a billon dollars on DEI programs since 2016, more than any university in America, but has seen no increase in the percentage of Black students admitted to the institution. Moreover, he wrote, “in a survey released in late 2022, students and faculty members across the board reported a less positive campus climate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belonging.” In the past two years, seven red states, including North Carolina, have rolled back or eliminated DEI programs in their state colleges.

Here’s the harsh truth: The strategy of trying to advance the interests of African Americans and other minorities by reengineering the policies of elite schools has failed. Spectacularly.

That doesn’t mean, however, that liberals should abandon the cause of racial justice in higher education. It means that they should shift their agenda to efforts that will do more good. 

It’s not like there hasn’t been racial progress in higher education. The percentage of African Americans who earned a college degree grew by 9.3 percentage points between 2009 and 2022, compared to 9 percentage points for whites, according to the Lumina Foundation. Elite colleges, however, contributed virtually nothing to that progress. Instead, it largely happened on campuses that most affluent liberals are only vaguely aware exist and probably wouldn’t be eager for their own kids to attend: regional public universities. 

These are the schools with “state” in their name, like Grand Valley State University in Michigan, or that reference their location, like Northern Arizona University. They tend not to be very selective, admitting 80 percent or more of applicants. They charge tuition that is more than 25 percent cheaper on average than other colleges. They generally draw working- and middle-class students from their surrounding regions, and their student bodies reflect the diversity of those regions. 

Regional publics are the workhorses of higher education, conferring more than 40 percent of all four-year degrees in America. But here’s the most striking fact: They award 58 percent of all bachelor’s degrees earned by African Americans. No other sector comes close (historically Black colleges and universities, another crucial path for Black achievement, grant 13 percent of Black BAs, but many of those schools are also regional publics). They also bestow 44 percent of the four-year degrees Latinos earn.

Regional publics accomplish this astonishing feat despite grossly inequitable funding. On average, they receive $1,091 (or about 10 percent) less state support per student than flagships, one-twentieth the funding from federal research grants and contracts, and a tiny fraction of income from endowments that elite schools enjoy. 

Liberals who are serious about racial justice in higher education should stop listening to elite colleges about how to achieve it. If those institutions want to maintain a fair share of minorities on their campuses—still a worthy goal—there’s a way forward. They should spend some of their own sizable resources on building the kind of prep schools that U.S. service academies like West Point use to meet their diversity needs (promising but underprepared students spend a year at these prep schools getting their grades and test scores up before entering the academies). The Supreme Court has not outlawed this method of race-conscious admissions.  

Instead, liberals should put all their energies into raising awareness of and demanding more funding for regional public universities—along with community colleges, the other big, racially integrated sector of higher education that serves working- and middle-class students. To their credit, President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats advocated legislation—the American Families Plan—that would have helped these institutions by, among other things, greatly boosting Pell Grant funding. It was blocked in the Senate by 50 Republicans and two Democrats. Biden also pushed a provision to make community college free. It was quietly sabotaged by lobbyists for elite colleges that would not benefit from it.

For too long, affluent liberals have been led to believe that elite universities are at the vanguard of the fight for racial justice. Turns out they were being duped, and the real action was elsewhere all along. 

The post Open a New Front for Racial Justice appeared first on Washington Monthly.

This article is from a cover package of essays entitled Ten New Ideas for the Democratic Party to Help the Working Class, and Itself. Find the full series here.

Perhaps the largest group of Americans who have no home in the political status quo are the self-employed. According to the U.S. Census, this demographic includes 16.5 million workers, or about 10.4 percent of the total working population. But this is likely a significant undercount, because it fails to capture the full range of self-employment types, which includes gig work, side hustles that supplement traditional employment, contract work, and sole proprietorships (small businesses with no employees). A more comprehensive survey conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that 15 percent of workers are best classified as independent; another from MBO Partners that includes in its count those who work independently only some of the time puts the share of self-employed workers as high as 44 percent. 

And this cohort is swelling: Millions of Americans who were laid off or furloughed during the pandemic found new opportunities in independent work and never went back. Historically, self-employed workers were disproportionately educated, white male professionals who earned high incomes. But especially since the pandemic, this group has gotten younger, more diverse, more female, and lower earning. A 2024 study found that 18 percent of independent workers are Black—a higher share than in the workforce as a whole (13 percent). Today, the self-employed population looks remarkably like the traditional base of the Democratic Party.

As such, you might think that this growing army of freelancers, gig workers, and micro-business owners would be a key target of the Democrats’ messaging and policy making. In fact, almost the opposite is the true. The 2024 Democratic Party platform mentions “workers” 78 times and “union” 23 times, but “self-employed” workers and “independent contractors” just once each. As they try to understand why they’re losing the support of the multiracial working class—and formulate a plan to win such voters back—Democrats might start by focusing on what they can do to connect with and help the self-employed. 

Democrats would have a good story to tell about what they’ve done for this group if they chose to tell it. In 2010, they passed the Affordable Care Act, which gave self-employed workers and small business owners access to affordable, comprehensive health insurance, enabling more workers to strike out on their own without fear of losing coverage. Joe Biden’s administration made investments in the economy under the American Rescue Plan, CHIPS and Science Act, and Inflation Reduction Act that led to an explosion of small business creation in recent years and a doubling of the Black business ownership rate between 2019 and 2022. On the campaign trail, Kamala Harris proposed to help small businesses by increasing the start-up expense deduction tenfold, to $50,000, and offering partially forgivable loans to entrepreneurs.

Democrats at the federal and state levels have also taken the lead in cracking down on corporate exploitation of the self-employed. A 2020 study from the National Employment Law Project estimates that between 10 and 30 percent of companies misclassify employees as independent contractors to dodge paying employee benefits. In early 2024, the Biden administration finalized a rule that imposes a stricter rubric to determine whether a worker is an employee of a company. In California, Democrats in the state assembly passed a bill in 2019 designed to reclassify many gig workers as employees, granting them benefits and labor protections. 

Yet, confoundingly, Democrats almost never talk about how their agenda has helped the self-employed. In fact, they almost never talk about independent workers as a discrete group at all. Part of the reason is that no one is pushing them. Unlike labor unions, which represent a smaller (10 percent) share of the American workforce, the self-employed lack organized representation with which to pressure elected officials to see them as a defined group and pay attention to their needs. Democratic campaign professionals slice and dice the electorate in all sorts of ways to better understand important demographics, but seldom do their polls contain cross-tabs for “self-employed.” “It just hasn’t occurred to most of them,” says the liberal political analyst Michael Podhorzer. “When I ask progressives, ‘What percentage of the self-employed do you think are in economically precarious positions?’ they lowball it by at least half.”

Republicans seldom talk about self-employed workers either. Donald Trump made no promises specifically to them on the campaign trail in 2024. The closest he came was his promise to exempt tips from federal taxes. (Many gig workers who use digital platforms like Uber rely on tips.)

Republicans are masters, however, at promoting policies in ways that seem appealing to self-employed workers but, in reality, screw them. For instance, in 2017, Trump promised that his signature Tax Cuts and Jobs Act would help middle-class entrepreneurs. (“The rich will not be gaining at all with this plan,” he said of the bill, presumably with a straight face.) Indeed, the bill included a provision that allowed sole proprietorships and other so-called pass-through entities to deduct 20 percent of their revenue from their taxable income. But this ultimately was just another giveaway to the wealthy. As a 2024 study found, the wealthiest 1.5 percent of filers received more than half of all pass-through deductions. Filers with an income below $160,000—the large majority of sole proprietorships—received just 13 percent of the total pool of deduction dollars. 

The real purpose of the provision was to push traditionally employed workers to quit and become contractors, relieving the payroll burden on big businesses, which would no longer have to pay employee benefits. Similarly, in the waning days of Trump’s presidency, his administration issued a rule that aimed to make it easier for companies to classify workers as independent contractors rather than employees. (The Biden administration later stopped it from taking effect—a measure they did little to advertise.)

In 2017, Trump also issued an executive order allowing collectives of small businesses and self-employed individuals to purchase group health insurance plans. This, too, sounded beneficial to self-employed workers but in fact was the opposite. These association health plans (AHPs) were not required to follow ACA rules, which meant they could omit basic benefits like mental health care and prescription drugs and deny coverage for preexisting conditions. AHPs were also notoriously susceptible to fraud and financial instability, often leaving members with unpaid medical bills when plans collapsed. In 2019, a federal judge struck down the rule, and last spring, the Biden administration formally repealed it, having previously made ACA insurance policies less expensive for the self-employed by getting Congress to put more money into the program. 

Over the next four years, the Trump administration will undoubtedly try to pass off still more policies that hurt the self-employed as favorable to them instead. Democrats can use these occasions to expose his duplicity. But to win the support of self-employed voters, they need something more: a robust plan to help them. 

Such a plan begins by understanding the two fundamental ways the current system mistreats the self-employed. The first is that the American social safety net is largely tied to traditional W-2 employment. Self-employed workers lack access to benefits like unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, and overtime pay that federal law requires employers to provide their workers, as well as 401(k) retirement plans and paid medical leave, which most companies offer. As a result, workers outside the traditional employment system are left to buy costlier individual insurance and save for retirement without employer contributions. When they’re sick or can’t find work, they’re left in the lurch.

The second way self-employed workers are taken to the cleaners is through the array of federal rules and regulations that, over recent decades, has led to corporate monopolization of markets. For example, small online sellers have little choice but to ply their wares on Amazon’s online marketplace. By 2023, the tech giant was taking a whopping 45 percent of sellers’ revenue in the U.S through various fees—up from 35 percent in 2020 and 19 percent in 2014. It’s the same story for self-employed workers trapped on other exploitative digital platforms: Uber’s dominant market position allows it to impose high commissions, offer unpredictable pay, and shift costs onto drivers, leaving many earning less than minimum wage after expenses.

Monopolists squeezing independent workers is a problem in legacy industries, too. Big poultry producers exploit the independent farmers who supply them with chickens by enforcing one-sided contracts, controlling key inputs, and manipulating pay systems to maximize their own profits while shifting risks and costs onto the farmers. This system traps farmers in debt and dependency, leaving them with little autonomy or recourse against abusive practices.

Another prime example: Visa and Mastercard control more than 80 percent of credit card transitions and use this duopoly power to charge businesses exorbitant swipe fees. Small businesses, with their smaller sales volume, are disproportionately harmed by this abusive practice.

In November, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Democratic Senator Dick Durbin’s proposed Credit Card Competition Act, which would guarantee that merchants have access to networks other than Visa and Mastercard. The bill, first introduced in 2022, is cosponsored by a small, bipartisan group of senators but faces precipitous odds of becoming law: Industry lobbyists funded by Visa and Mastercard have spent some $80 million fighting it. The bill is an object lesson in the challenges sole proprietors and small-scale entrepreneurs face in shaping federal policy without well-funded pressure groups or the strong support of party leaders. (The closest thing they have to a presence in Washington, the National Federation of Independent Business, is really a right-wing, Big Business–led astroturf group.) 

It’s time Democrats offered self-employed workers more. Fighting misclassification is only part of the answer. Most independent workers don’t see themselves as mis-
classified full-time workers—in fact, according to one survey, more than half of freelancers say that no amount of guaranteed money could persuade them to return to a conventional job. “Not only do most freelancers not have an obvious would-be employer who is misclassifying them, but for many of them, the freedom, flexibility, and ownership they get from freelancing is of the essence,” the organizer Sara Horowitz writes in her 2021 book, Mutualism: Building the Next Economy From the Ground Up.

One of the more sensible ways to help them is to finally sever the outdated tie between basic social safety net protections and traditional W-2 employment. As Steven Hill first proposed in the Washington Monthly in 2016, Democrats should advocate for a “portable benefits” model for independent workers. Under this approach, benefits like health insurance, retirement savings, paid leave, and other employment-related protections would not be tied to a single employer but would instead move with workers across multiple jobs. Each employer would pay an allocation for benefits (prorated based on the number of hours an independent worker was contracted) into that worker’s “individual security account,” which would be managed by the federal government or a private agency specializing in benefit administration.

Such “multi-employer plans” are common in industries like construction and mining. If employers were required to give identical benefits to both employees and independent contractors, the incentive for them to turn employees into contractors would be gone, making the question of worker misclassification mostly irrelevant. There’s been some progress on making portable benefits a reality: In May 2023, a bipartisan group of legislators, led by Senators Mark Warner and Todd Young, reintroduced the Portable Benefits for Independent Workers Pilot Program Act. This bill proposes a $20 million grant program through the Department of Labor to encourage states, localities, and nonprofits to test various models for portable benefits.

The other important step Democrats can take to help the self-employed is to continue promoting the fight against market consolidation. The Biden administration brought major antitrust lawsuits against Amazon for its exploitation of small-scale sellers and its monopoly over online retail; against Cargill and other top poultry producers over their treatment of independent chicken farmers; and against many other monopolists that abuse their power over contractors and small businesses. But the administration rarely presented its pro-competition agenda as a means to help the self-employed as a defined class of workers.

With Trump already promising to limit benefits for gig workers, there is a clear opportunity for the Democratic Party to position itself as the champion of the modern American workforce. Campaigning on portable benefits, antitrust enforcement, and other measures that help self-employed workers and micro-business owners could prove important in future elections.  

The post Champion the Self-Employed appeared first on Washington Monthly.

This article is from a cover package of essays entitled Ten New Ideas for the Democratic Party to Help the Working Class, and Itself. Find the full series here.

Donald Trump has vowed to pursue sweeping deregulation of the economy in his second term. He has also called for elimination of at least one federal agency—the Department of Education—and set Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to work deconstructing the remaining administrative state. 

So it might seem like an epic case of not reading the room to now propose that Democrats advocate for a new regulatory agency with broad powers over the single most critical sector of economy. Yet I am going to do just that, while hastening to point out to skeptical Republicans that if they get behind this proposal they will not only be more likely to achieve many of their stated goals, such as revitalizing heartland America and loosening ties to China, they will also be undoing the work of key Democrats of the last generation, from Ted Kennedy to Ralph Nader and Jimmy Carter. 

Starting in the late 1970s, Democrats enacted, with Republican support, a radical new policy idea. The press mostly treated it as a banal, technical matter. But over time this quiet policy shift would profoundly tilt the balance of political economic power in the United States and wind up hurting tens of millions of people in both blue states and red states. 

The radical idea was to get the government out of the business of regulating prices and terms of service in transportation markets. In all of American history, nothing like this had ever been tried before. In colonial times, Americans applied English laws dating back to the Middle Ages that prevented the owners of ferries, toll roads, and stagecoaches from charging some customers higher fares than others for the same trip. Later, American governments, at first at the state and local levels and later federally, banned this kind of discrimination whenever a new form of transportation came along, from canals, railroads, and steamships to trucks and airlines.

By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as more and more commerce flowed by rail across state lines and came under the control of giant corporations, even the most conservative advocates of laissez-faire came to understand that Washington had to join in setting market rules for this increasingly dominant mode of transportation. The free enterprise system—let alone democracy—would not work if the winners and losers in American life were determined not by who came to market with the best products but by who got the best deal from the self-dealing financiers who controlled the railroads. 

At the same time, even the plutocratic owners of giant rail systems came to advocate for federal regulation in this sector as a way of avoiding the ruinous price wars that frequently broke out among them. Railroads often charged predatory prices where they enjoyed a local monopoly. But where more than one railroad competed, they often had to set rates below cost in order to defray their high fixed expenses, leading to massive bankruptcies. In the 1870s, railroads accounting for nearly a third of domestic mileage failed or fell into court-ordered receivership.

Thus, in 1887, Congress created one of the federal government’s first regulatory agencies, the Interstate Commerce Commission. By the early 20th century, the ICC was effectively setting the industrial policy of the United States by ensuring that the prices railroads charged were publicly posted and nondiscriminatory. Under ICC price regulation, all rail shippers, regardless of their market power or geographic location, paid roughly the same price per ton and per mile for transporting the same kinds of goods for the same distance. Similarly, railroads had to charge passengers the same price per mile regardless of whether their trip was long or short, or between major cities or remote destinations. The ICC set rates at a level that allowed railroads to maintain their infrastructure and earn a fair return on their capital. But the carriers had to use some of the profits they earned on highly profitable mainlines to cross-subsidize service on less profitable or money-losing routes or lines of business. Finally, railroads could not abandon routes or cancel service without ICC permission. 

In 1916, Congress extended these same principles, known as “common carriage” law, to maritime transportation. The Shipping Act created a new agency, the U.S. Shipping Board, and charged it with ensuring that all ocean carriers publicly posted their prices and offered all “similarly situated” shippers roughly equal terms of service. In 1935, Congress extended the same regulatory model to interstate trucks and buses by giving the ICC jurisdiction over these modes. Then it followed up three years later by applying the same models to airlines, putting the newly created Civil Aeronautics Board in charge of enforcement. 

Under this regulatory regime, the United States developed into an industrial powerhouse, with a transportation system that, while far from perfect, was unrivaled in its efficiency, equity, and levels of innovation. Prairie farmers gained access to global markets, and both small and large manufacturers in heartland cities like Buffalo, St. Louis, and St. Paul could compete on an even playing field. Operating under the same market rules, air transport expanded rapidly after World War II, becoming safer and cheaper to the point that by the mid-1970s, two-thirds of all Americans over 18 had traveled by plane, and jet travel to tourist destinations in Florida, the Caribbean, and Europe was becoming routine. 

Yet beginning in the Carter administration, key Democrats decided to remove these crucial, regulatory ingredients from America’s trademark formula for broad-based, capitalist prosperity. In 1978, at the urging of Ted Kennedy and the consumer activist Ralph Nader, Jimmy Carter signed legislation that permitted airlines to engage in systematic price discrimination and to abandon or roll back service that did not offer high volumes of profitable traffic. Two years later, Carter did the same for railroads and trucking firms, again at the urging of leading Democrats. Then in 1984, President Ronald Reagan followed through by signing legislation that ended price regulation and reduced common carriage requirements in ocean shipping. 

At the time, policy makers hoped that this wave of deregulation would foster more market competition and cheaper prices. And it did, at least partially and at first. After deregulation, many small new airlines popped up offering bargain fares, for example. But as unmanaged competition drove down fares below cost, most of these new carriers soon failed or wound up merging into bigger, monopolistic systems. Service to midsize cities in what became known as “flyover” America either disappeared or became much more expensive, fueling regional inequality by helping to concentrate economic growth in a handful of elite coastal cities. Meanwhile, flying became a miserable experience, marked by ever-shrinking seats, baggage fees, delays, and restrictions, as airlines merged into a handful of giant systems with overlapping ownership that sought to maximize profits by cutting costs and engaging in more refined methods of personalized pricing. 

The deregulation of railroads also seemed to work at first. But in combination with lax antitrust enforcement, it led to financiers and private equity firms exacting monopoly rents from captive rail shippers, thus making heavy manufacturing in the United States increasingly expensive and logistically difficult. The railroads’ abandonment of all but the most profitable routes and lines of business has also disrupted supply chains, causing shortages and inflation. Meanwhile, it has led to unregulated, energy-inefficient, pollution-spewing trucks hauling a rapidly growing share of the nation’s freight while also causing surging numbers of highway deaths and harm to roads and bridges. 

Finally, the deregulation of ocean shipping has also proved to be a failure. In the absence of price regulation, ruinous price wars broke out among domestic carriers, causing many to go broke and contributing eventually to the near-total collapse of the nation’s merchant marine fleet. Deregulation has led to an ocean shipping system dominated by a handful of foreign-owned cartels that have a stranglehold not only over American commercial life but over its military sea lift capacity as well. 

There were, to be sure, faults with the Interstate Commerce Commission and the other agencies that were once involved in regulating transportation markets. But these faults provided arguments for reform, not for abolishment, and now we are paying the price. If Republicans are serious about reindustrializing America and overcoming our economic and military vulnerability to China, then they need to join Democrats in building a new agency to manage and coordinate competition across the transportation sector. And if Democrats also want to lower carbon emissions, reduce highway deaths, and fight the “greedflation” caused by unregulated transportation monopolies, they need to embrace the same program to make 21st-century America truly great. 

The post Make Transportation Fair Again appeared first on Washington Monthly.

This article is from a cover package of essays entitled Ten New Ideas for the Democratic Party to Help the Working Class, and Itself. Find the full series here.

Donald Trump won the 2024 election on a promise to radically shake up the federal government. Voters were hungry for that message, as was obvious to anyone who looked at the polls, and even more from the election’s results. A Pew Research Center survey released in June 2024 found that 56 percent of Americans believed that government is “almost always wasteful and inefficient.” That belief is not new. From 1979 to 2015, Gallup asked Americans what percentage of every tax dollar they thought the federal government wastes. The answers ranged from 38 to 51 percent. 

Of course, what constitutes “waste” depends on your point of view. Conservatives might think anti-poverty programs are wasteful but that defense expenditures are worth every penny; liberals might think the opposite. Navigating those disagreements is the job of Congress, which writes the laws and appropriates the funds. The president’s job is to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” with the laws and money that Congress provides. Or so the Constitution says. 

In general, however, the voters aren’t wrong: The federal bureaucracy does waste too much of the money Congress gives it to deliver public services. It undoubtedly could deliver those services more efficiently and effectively. The Washington Monthly has been arguing for years that Democrats need to face this reality. Alas, the Joe Biden–Kamala Harris administration and Democratic leaders in Congress shut their ears—and now the party is shut out of power, without a tool kit for dealing with these issues. 

The good news for them is that Trump’s plans for the federal government—which he has outsourced to Elon Musk and his ill-defined advisory group, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—are likely to upset voters, including his own. 

That’s because Trump and his DOGE sidekicks both misunderstand the nature of the problem and risk undermining the government services that their base depends on. The primary source of government waste and inefficiency isn’t what they say it is: a bloated civil service insufficiently “loyal” to the president. Rather, as writers for this magazine—including yours truly (see most recently “Memo to AOC: Only You Can Save the Government,” July/August 2021)—have tried to explain, the problem is the opposite. Federal agencies have too few civil servants with the right expertise to manage the contractors who increasingly deliver the federal government’s services. The key to reducing waste and increasing efficiency is for the government to hire more high-quality government employees and shrink the number of contractors. And there’s even a huge opportunity here of bringing in the technology and people skills to remake government so it’s ready for the challenges of the future.

To grasp this counterintuitive point, it helps to look at the numbers. The federal government’s civilian employment now stands at 2.28 million people. That’s about the same as during the Lyndon B. Johnson administration. In the meantime, the U.S. population has increased by about 70 percent and federal spending has quintupled in inflation-adjusted dollars. 

To handle this mounting workload, Washington has increasingly relied on contactors—not just to build hardware like fighter jets and levees, but to do much of the work that civil servants once did, from conducting security clearances to overseeing the work of other contractors. These “service contracts” are typically performed by giant firms like Booz Allen Hamilton and McKinsey, and then are often subcontracted to small companies most people have never heard of. Private contractors working for the federal government have grown to the point that they outnumber federal employees by more than three to one, according to a 2022 Brookings Institution estimate. 

Sometimes these service contracts make sense and provide good value. It can be hard to get good expertise in the door fast. Too often, however, they are a taxpayer rip-off. A 2011 study by the Project on Government Oversight found that in 33 of 35 different government occupations, federal employees were less expensive than comparable contractors, even accounting for federal benefits. In the case of “claims assistance and examining” work, contractor rates were almost five times higher than the cost of having federal employees do the job. And according to a 2024 CBO analysis, workers in the highest-skilled positions—and these are the positions most likely to be contracted out—are paid one-fifth more in the private sector.

Privatizing federal work has made government not just more costly but also less effective. There are too few federal employees with the needed skills, charged with managing too many contractors. That’s led to endless cost overruns and policy snafus, which the press inevitably blames on Washington—and on incompetent federal bureaucrats. The fault lies in not having enough bureaucrats to begin with. 

Fixing these problems will require a considerable increase in the number of civil servants, especially ones with the right training and experience to manage complex contracts. We need civil servants, in particular, with the skills to ensure that government is a smart buyer: that it can define what it needs, that it can choose who can best deliver it, and that it can be sure we get our money’s worth. An aggressive effort to fire expensive contractors and bring work in-house, combined with reasonable reforms of civil service personnel rules, would be the kind of dramatic overhaul that voters have been looking for. It’s just the reverse of what they’ve been told for decades: The key to more responsive government at a lower price is often having government employees do the work. 

That is not, to say the least, what Trump and his DOGE advisers have in mind. Vivek Ramaswamy, who until recently co-led DOGE with Musk, announced in the fall of 2024 that he’d like to fire all the feds whose Social Security numbers begin or end with an odd number. “Boom,” he said. “That’s a 75 percent reduction done.” His quip conveyed not only his contempt for federal employees but also his ignorance of how government works. No president has the power to fire mass numbers of civil servants. Congress sets personnel levels in the agencies. 

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed after the election, Ramaswamy and Musk got more specific—if not more persuasive—in how they intend to achieve “mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy” without asking Congress. Their plan begins with recent Supreme Court rulings that have checked the power of agencies to write expansive new regulations. These decisions, they say, also give the executive branch greater power to unilaterally rescind existing regulations. The president can then cut the federal workforce “at least proportionate to the number of federal regulations that are nullified.” 

Assessing the merits of these legal arguments is best left to constitutional law scholars (see Peter Shane’s essay). As a student of public administration, however, I can say that if Trump and his team are relying on regulatory agencies for a substantial share of their civil service scalp quota, they are going to be mightily disappointed. That’s because the regulatory reductions they hope to achieve will require more feds, not fewer. 

The statutorily defined procedures the Trump administration will have to follow to unwind regulations are as cumbersome and time consuming as the ones required to create them—and recent Supreme Court rulings don’t give the administration a pass on that. Agencies must justify their deregulatory proposals in writing, allow time for public comment, redraft their plans to take account of the comments, and respond to the almost inevitable legal challenges that groups and individuals will bring to court. That whole process can take years—and lots of government lawyers. The complexity of the process is a big reason why, in his first term, Trump failed to fulfill his pledge to cut the overall number of federal regulations (they actually went up a bit). 

Even successful deregulatory actions typically require civil servants to enforce them. If, say, the Trump administration rescinds the Biden-era rule that colleges taking federal Title IX money can’t bar trans women from playing on women’s sports teams, federal staff will be needed to inform colleges that aren’t in compliance and handle the lawsuits that will inevitably arise. 

Musk and Ramaswamy, in their op-ed, identify other means at the administration’s disposal to achieve major staff reductions and budget savings. One is aggressive use of “reductions in force,” or RIF, the rules the executive branch follows to carry out layoffs. Those rules, however, only apply under certain circumstances, such as when Congress fails to appropriate funds for existing programs. The idea that the president can RIF employees whenever he wants is farcical. A second route is to challenge the constitutionality of the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which bars presidents from refusing to spend congressionally mandated funds. A third is to assert that the president is not obliged to spend funds Congress has appropriated but not reauthorized. 

These assertions don’t pass the constitutional laugh test, either. But with this Court, who knows? So, for the sake of argument, let’s assume Trump and team get their way, and the administration is free to cut spending and staffing levels unilaterally to its heart’s content. 

Most Americans won’t complain if the administration uses those powers to make a few, largely symbolic cuts—say, eliminating every DEI office in the government. But racking up even a fraction of the savings Musk and Ramaswamy have promised—half a trillion dollars a year—will require making cuts that Trump’s supporters won’t appreciate. In poll after poll, we’ve learned one thing for sure: Everyone wants to cut back on government. There’s no consensus, however, about which part of government to cut—and, in fact, most people want more of the government they themselves get. 

The employees at the dozen largest federal agencies together account for 75 percent of all federal jobs. Among them is the VA. Is the administration prepared to turn off health care for the veterans, from the constellation of military branches and agencies that Republican voters revere? Then there are the various agencies of the Department of Homeland Security, where, if anything, the Trump administration will want to increase employment—deporting millions of undocumented migrants will require a bigger, not smaller, workforce at Customs and Border Protection. And there’s the FAA, which is already struggling to keep planes flying on time because of the shortage of air traffic controllers. There’s the Bureau of Prisons; no one is going to want to turn convicted criminals loose because there aren’t enough prison guards. And then Social Security—try clogging up a payment system that provides half the income for two-thirds of the nation’s seniors. 

That leaves 25 percent of all federal employees to manage the other 400 federal government agencies, from the Forest Service (should we just let fires burn the West Coast to the ground?) to the Coast Guard (the next boat in trouble might just have to sink to the bottom of the sea). 

Radically reducing these vital government services would outrage the public. To avoid that result, but still fulfill their promise to cull the civil service, the Trump administration will surely be tempted to bring in even more contractors. As it is, the federal government spent $307 billion in salaries and benefits for government employees in fiscal year 2023. That’s a lot of money that Musk would love to slash. But, in the same year, it spent three times as much on private service contractors. If, at the end of four years, the contractor budget soars and total federal spending rises, will anyone care?

Maybe not, but here’s what voters do care about: disasters. Remember when the Obamacare website failed to work when it was unveiled? The problem was caused by federal managers who didn’t have the knowledge to oversee the contractors who built the website (and it was solved by adding experienced federal managers into the mix). Remember the George W. Bush administration’s incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina? That calamity was the result of the president putting inexperienced federal managers (“Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job”) in charge of FEMA. And what about Trump’s own shambolic management of COVID-19, including, among other things, shutting down the Obama administration’s pandemic preparedness office and failing to resupply the strategic stockpile with ventilators and other medical equipment? 

Each of these debacles did serious political damage to the administrations in charge. In fact, the point at which Bush’s negatives exceeded his positives and never recovered was in the immediate aftermath of Katrina. In Trump’s case, it may have cost him the 2020 election. Yet these fiascos will seem like fender benders compared to what could happen over the next four years if the Trump administration decimates the civil service and tries to fill the void with more contractors, who are left home alone without oversight to make sure they’re giving taxpayers what they’re paying for. 

During the campaign, Trump promised that his government efficiency commission would “develop an action plan to totally eliminate fraud and improper payments within six months.” Musk and Ramaswamy echoed those claims in their Wall Street Journal op-ed. It’s true that there are big savings to be had. The Government Accountability Office estimates that improper payments have totaled $2.7 trillion since fiscal year 2003 and that the federal government is losing somewhere between $233 billion and $521 billion each year to fraud. In Medicare, for example, a fraud ring was submitting bills for unnecessary medical equipment, which led to before overbilling of more than $2 billion since 2022. 

The reason we aren’t doing more to rein in fraud and overpayments, however, is not a lack of will but insufficient federal staff capacity and technological muscle. Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) account for roughly 23 percent of all federal spending, but the agency that oversees that spending, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), employs just 0.2 percent of all federal employees. Critics pounced on Trump’s appointment of Dr. Mehmet Oz for lacking experience in running a large bureaucracy. But CMS isn’t a large bureaucracy—it’s a small bureaucracy charged with overseeing a mammoth contractor system. Seniors visiting their doctors are often told, “We’ll see if Medicare will pay for this.” It’s a safe bet that it’s not CMS but a private contractor that ultimately makes the call about what public money will pay for. 

Fixing the problem requires more feds with better IT to detect and correct the overpayments and find the fraudsters. If Trump cuts the CMS workforce, all these problems will surely get worse.

Of all the unilateral power grabs Trump has announced, none is more frightening—to liberals, at least—than “Schedule F.” This is the plan to strip job protections from 50,000 senior civil servants and essentially turn them into political appointees who can be dismissed at will, all the better to ensure their “loyalty” to his agenda. Schedule F is also, alas, the most constitutionally defensible of his plans—presidents really do have significant power to make civil servants at-will employees. Legality notwithstanding, Schedule F is a terrible idea for all kinds of reasons, including its potential unworkability. No administration in recent memory has filled all its 4,000 current political appointees, let alone the 50,000, because it’s hard to recruit individuals with the right expertise for jobs that don’t pay a lot and that they might lose in the next election. But for our purposes, two aspects of the plan are most relevant.

The first is that the senior civil servants most likely to become Schedule F employees are also the ones most likely to have supervisory roles over contracts. If the administration replaces capable people with loyalists who have less contractor oversight experience, all the problems of the current system—cost overruns, performance failures, fraud, overpayments—will get worse.

The second is that politicization of the civil service could lead to politicization of contracting. For all its faults, the government’s traditional contracting system generally follows accepted legal procedures in everything from choosing the best contractors to overseeing their work. But with loyalists in charge of the process, it wouldn’t be hard for the administration to steer contracts to firms it sees as friendly (because, say, their executives provide sizable campaign contributions to the GOP) and away from those it deems unfriendly (because its executives give to Democrats). This kind of political control over government contractors is common in illiberal counties like Hungary, Turkey, and Russia. And it tracks with how Trump governed in his first term—when, for instance, he used antitrust enforcement to reward his friends in industry and punish his enemies. But if the administration goes in that direction, it will be hard to hide from investigative reporters, inspectors general, and anyone else who bothers to look—especially if Elon Musk maneuvers to garner special deals for his own companies.

There’s a high likelihood, in other words, that four years from now, voters who supported Trump and his MAGA plans to shake up the government for the benefit of the American people will feel swindled. And they might just be ready to support those who have a different and better plan for government reform.

The post Fire the Contractors appeared first on Washington Monthly.

This article is from a cover package of essays entitled Ten New Ideas for the Democratic Party to Help the Working Class, and Itself. Find the full series here.

In late 2023, then candidate Donald Trump released a series of internet videos outlining his agenda for education. Mixed into his typical stew of bald-faced lies and racial denialism, alongside plans to abolish the U.S. Department of Education and privatize public schools, was something that, coming from Trump, should be cause for genuine surprise: a sensible policy idea. 

Trump proposed creating a new, free, online university called the American Academy, which would offer high-quality courses in an array of subjects ranging from ancient history to accounting to training in the skilled trades. The American Academy would accept transfer credits from other colleges and universities and offer the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree, increasing access to higher education and creating new price competition in the college market to help tamp down rising tuition prices and spiraling student debt.

Information technology really does hold the potential to make college more affordable and accessible—so much so that I devoted a whole book to the subject in 2015. As I wrote for CNN that year, George Washington himself called for creating a “National University” in his final annual address to Congress. He even left money to build it in his last will and testament. Technology creates the opportunity to realize Washington’s dream at a national scale.

We shouldn’t have much faith that the onetime proprietor of the fraudulent Trump University will do a good job getting this new university built, if he builds it at all. But the idea is a step toward solving the crisis of affordability and access that plagues higher education—a problem that Democrats have been unable to systematically address. President Joe Biden spent most of his four years in office focused on lifting the burden of student debt, a worthy goal but only a treatment of symptoms, not the underlying problem. 

Many undergraduates, particularly first-generation and academically underprepared students, need the personal touch that brick-and-mortar colleges provide. They also need that education to be affordable and of high quality, a promise on which our dysfunctional and inequitable system often doesn’t deliver. Today, top-tier colleges are swimming in money while the lesser-known institutions most students attend are starved for funds. Credits often don’t transfer, good teaching isn’t rewarded, and students are recruited with deceptive prices that often leave them with unmanageable debt. 

What’s needed, in short, is transformational reform. In the summer of 2020, I proposed such a plan in these pages—a plan that would rework the federal government’s financing of higher education from top to bottom. Key aspects of it were reflected in the Biden administration’s proposal to make community college free. But that same summer, other forces were at work, and would turn the administration’s focus in a different direction. 

Over the past decade, college affordability has moved to the forefront of the Democratic domestic policy agenda, mostly through the combination of expansive “free college” and mass student loan forgiveness policies championed by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and other members of the progressive left. When Biden won the Democratic nomination in 2020, he consolidated party support by signing on to a version of the loan forgiveness plan. He also included a robust free community college plan in his “Build Back Better” agenda, along with expanded child care, family leave, and much else. Unfortunately, only half of that platform survived. 

Thanks to changing economic circumstances and the whims of a couple of centrist Democrats in the Senate, Biden was forced to abandon the community college plan. Instead of addressing the root causes of unaffordable tuition and high debt, Biden was left to try fixing the problem after the fact by using a 2003 federal law that gives broad authority to “waive or modify” student loan provisions in a time of national emergency, which the COVID-19 pandemic definitely was. Biden’s plan was to forgive $10,000 from nearly all federal loans, and $20,000 for loans held by low-income students. But the Supreme Court abandoned its textualist pretenses and struck down the program based on the “major questions doctrine,” an alleged legal principle that the Court’s six-member Republican majority made up out of whole cloth the year before. 

This is where things started going off the rails.

The Supreme Court has dealt a series of major blows to progressive causes in the past five years, on issues including abortion, affirmative action, environmental protection, and more. Activists have responded in a variety of ways, including grassroots organizing, political action, and calls to reform and expand the Court. 

What they haven’t done is send the same exact issues right back to the same six justices who just a minute ago created damaging legal precedent that could rule American law for decades to come. But this is what happened with student loans—the Biden administration doubled and tripled down, devoting its energy to a cause it knew was headed nowhere in hopes voters would see and reward the effort.

On cue, the Department of Education dared the federal courts to stop them by vastly expanding the generosity of an existing student loan forgiveness program, and then used the federal rulemaking process to conjure up a bunch of new ones out of thin air—even though, in its decision, the Supreme Court explicitly told the department it has no authority to do so. Even the SAVE loan forgiveness plan, which the Education Department based on existing statutory authority, was blocked by Republican state attorneys general filing lawsuits with federal judges eager to implement the Court’s radical new anti-regulatory doctrines.

By this point, it was more and more difficult for borrowers to understand how to pay back their loans, or which among the alphabet soup of forgiveness programs were real, tied up in court, or might never be implemented at all—especially since this was all happening at the same time that the pandemic pause on loan payments was winding down in its own complicated way. 

Yet this was the moment when the administration decided to release yet another forgiveness program, one that was more legally tenuous and logically indefensible than any that had come before. The new regulations were conveniently released just two weeks before this year’s presidential election, and were designed to forgive the student loans of anyone experiencing financial “hardship.” To determine whether someone qualifies, the Department of Education would predict ahead of time who is likely to someday default on their loan, based on 17 different factors, one of which is whether people are making regular payments on the debt. In other words, if you don’t want to pay your loan back, all you have to do is not pay your loan back. 

This is a kind of Alice in Wonderland version of loan policy. A private bank evaluates an application and doesn’t lend to people it thinks will default, or charges them a higher interest rate. The Education Department proposed a system where everyone gets a loan, no questions asked, at the same interest rate, and then the people who it thinks might default don’t have to pay their loans back at all. It would create huge incentives for people to make their credit worse. 

Because this system was apparently not weird and complicated enough, the department also proposed that borrowers whose loans are not automatically pre-forgiven could also receive a “holistic” review of their hardship, based on “circumstances.” How the department would manage to spend hundreds of millions of dollars it doesn’t have to hire vast legions of currently nonexistent “holistic” evaluators was left wholly unexplained. 

The hardship regulations are truly a descent into public policy madness. They represent the final logical collapse of a loan forgiveness movement that began with good intentions but wandered step by step into an ever-more-confusing thicket of policy ideas that amount to making higher education affordable by allowing colleges to charge whatever they want, loaning students vast amounts of taxpayer money to pay those prices, and then forgiving the loans in the most diabolically complicated way possible. The Trump administration is going to do the next Democratic president a favor by ripping out the hardship regulations, root and branch. The party should take the opportunity to return to sane ideas that address the underlying causes of college unaffordability. 

Trump’s American Academy is a good idea if done well. Democrats should support the plan if it’s implemented in good faith, but oppose anything that hints of propagandizing or for-profit exploitation. And even the best possible version of a national online university is no substitute for doing a much better job of supporting and regulating the public universities we already have. 

The bones of a better system are in the Biden free community college plan. As I argued in the Monthly four years ago, the plan should be expanded to include four-year public and private universities that have a mission of providing access to large numbers of first-generation and Pell Grant–eligible students. All of these institutions would be given the option of receiving direct federal subsidies in exchange for adopting a simple, transparent price schedule that charges zero tuition for low-to-moderate-income families and modest tuition to everyone else. The policy that many public universities used to have, in other words, before losing their way.

Colleges and universities that voluntarily choose to join this network would agree to meet basic standards of ensuring that students are able to succeed in their careers. They would also accept the credits of other institutions in the network, so students would be able to transfer or attend multiple institutions without wasting valuable money and time. If the federal subsidy were large enough—say, $10,000 per student—most of the participating institutions would have enough money to meet the tuition requirements and invest in raising faculty salaries, reducing class sizes, hiring more tenured professors, improving buildings and equipment, and providing students with the academic and social support services they need. 

This plan is sweeping, but it’s not entirely new. American higher education worked like this back in the 1960s and ’70s, before some states began cutting funding and many public universities chose to hike tuition in pursuit of prestige. Reworking the system would restore the promise of that era, where working- and middle-class Americans could attend state or regional college and receive a quality education at low cost. Those kinds of institutions would likely see increased funding under this program, but not at the expense of elite schools, which could simply choose not to participate. Harvard would remain Harvard, a hotbed of research, innovation, and ruling-class acculturation. Meanwhile, we would rebuild the pathway to opportunity whose state of disrepair has bred such resentment among the voters without a college education who supported Trump. 

Even in a time when political party identification is increasingly tied to college diplomas, reports of declining confidence in higher education are greatly exaggerated. Americans of all political stripes continue to place a high value on affordable colleges. Democrats need to learn from their student loan forgiveness misadventure and return to policies that work.

The post Free College for the Working Class appeared first on Washington Monthly.

This article is from a cover package of essays entitled Ten New Ideas for the Democratic Party to Help the Working Class, and Itself. Find the full series here.

During the tense negotiations over his “Build Back Better” bill, President Joe Biden fought hard to include a $400 billion provision that would have dramatically lowered the cost of child care and expanded access to pre-kindergarten. He did not succeed, thanks to opposition from Senate Republicans and one key Democrat, Joe Manchin. But the effort signaled a new level of commitment among most Democrats to address what policy wonks often refer to as “the care economy.” During her campaign, Kamala Harris stressed her support not just for increasing public funding for child care but also for another urgent issue: the lack of affordable long-term care for the elderly and people with disabilities.

Though elements of the MAGA movement have advocated for more federal support for families with children, today it seems unlikely that the Trump administration will do much. Another federal push to fund the care economy is likely years away.

That delay, however, could be a blessing if those who are committed to helping families use the time wisely to address a growing problem with social service delivery: its capture by corporate interests. Experience has demonstrated that when the federal government steps in to provide more public support for different facets of the care economy, too often the unintended consequence is to attract new players to the sector who are motivated by greed. Examples include a vast corporate ecosystem of privately owned, publicly subsidized, and massively predatory providers that range from dental chains specializing in the overtreatment of children on Medicaid to abusive, monopolistic dialysis centers gorging on Medicare dollars.

Before more spigots of federal money get opened, advocates need to figure out how to corporate-proof the care economy. The way to do that is to focus their energies at the state and local levels. That’s not only where reform actions will be possible over the next four years—it’s also ground zero for the care economy itself. After all, child care facilities, hospitals, nursing homes, and most other health care providers operate almost exclusively in local or regional markets, and they have long been subject to regulation, and subsidy, by state and local governments.

Get those regulations and subsidies right, and great things can happen, even in red states. It’s worth remembering that Oklahoma, which voted for Donald Trump twice by huge margins, has operated a no-cost pre-K program open to all four-year-olds regardless of income since 1998, which is widely considered among the best in the country.

Get the ground rules wrong, however, and government programs can become captured by corporate interests. That’s especially true with the spread of private equity. Firms like Apollo, Carlyle, KKR, and Blackstone are the rebranded descendants of the corporate raiders and leveraged-buyout firms that wreaked mayhem on industrial America during the junk bond boom (and bust) of the 1980s and ’90s. These 21st-century raiders use wealthy clients’ funds and high quantities of debt to buy control of companies, restructure these companies to maximize short-term profits, and then sell them off to the highest bidder within three to five years. 

The consequences are often disastrous. Bankruptcies of care providers, including hospitals, are rising due to private equity’s debt-fueled acquisitions and asset stripping. Private equity–owned providers are driving up prices for patients, and have been behind the surge in surprise medical billing for out-of-network care in hospitals and emergency rooms. Private equity cost cutting has delayed and deteriorated the quality of care received by hospital patients and nursing home residents, killing thousands of people every year.

Until now, regulators have largely acted retroactively, waiting for evidence of harm to emerge before closing the loopholes that enabled these outcomes. For example, Congress banned surprise medical billing as part of its pandemic relief efforts, while the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services set new minimum staffing levels for nursing homes to limit the risk of fatalities from understaffing.

What can state governments do to get ahead of the problem? Policy makers’ immediate instinct may be to prohibit private equity from entering these socially critical sectors. And short of a total ban, private equity ownership should at the very least trigger extra scrutiny from regulators. 

Nevertheless, such a ban would not, by itself, protect states against companies or investors that, although organized through a different corporate form, mimic the worst of private equity’s tactics. So a broader approach is needed. 

State governments can start by leveraging their control over the distribution of public money for federal and local care programs. They should set clear expectations in return for their funding, including standards for the quantity or quality of care provided, the wages and working conditions for caregivers, and the costs that will be passed on to care recipients and their families. States can also place restrictions on asset sales, executive compensation, dividend payments, and other corporate methods for passing a company’s wealth on to Wall Street. 

Meanwhile, states should take the lead in enforcing competition policy rules against companies that profit from illegal, anticompetitive behavior. This is especially important in highly fragmented care markets that are typically populated with small, independent businesses—like family doctors, dentists, and veterinarians, or like child care centers—that can be rolled up into chains and then sold at a profit to even larger chains.

Addressing this trend at the federal level is challenging because the scale of each individual deal is so small that the cumulative impact does not immediately register on the national radar. But state attorneys general are closer to the problem and do not need to wait for federal regulators to act. 

For example, the Colorado attorney general this year broke a private equity–owned anesthesiology chain’s monopoly over the Denver and Durango markets, requiring them to suspend contracts with five hospitals and dissolve their noncompete agreements with local doctors. 

One important issue reformers must deal with is the many care providers, ranging from independent doctors to nursery school owners, who are tempted to sell their small businesses to large chains or private equity firms. There are some legitimate issues of fairness here for providers who have built up their businesses without the benefit of direct public subsidies, and are now hoping to be relieved of administrative burdens or just to cash out. But going forward, care providers who benefit from large infusions of public dollars and who operate essentially as public subcontractors have no legitimate expectation of making huge returns on the public’s money. In the care sector, everyone should make a fair and decent income, but we need people driven by mission, not margins. 

One way to deal with this issue is for states to encourage community development finance institutions or public pension funds to invest in smaller providers. This source of funding can give older caregivers the ability to transfer ownership of their businesses to their employees or to local entrepreneurs or nonprofits and still provide for their retirements. Another way is for states to discourage the roll-up of smaller providers by helping them with publicly subsidized administrative services or through shared service alliances with other providers. 

Whichever mechanisms states choose, they should deepen their collaboration with people on the ground: care workers; small business entrepreneurs; care recipients and their families; and community leaders. Not only should these stakeholders participate in designing local regulation and market rules, they also should be included as partners in the fight against corporate chains’ and private equity’s campaign to corporatize and financialize the local care economy.

The post Corporate-Proof the Care Economy appeared first on Washington Monthly.

This article is from a cover package of essays entitled Ten New Ideas for the Democratic Party to Help the Working Class, and Itself. Find the full series here.

The subject of K–12 education barely came up during the 2024 presidential campaign. But it’s likely to be a big issue in Washington soon if, as many observers expect, the Trump administration and congressional Republicans push for federal legislation to allow families to use tax dollars that would have gone to their public schools to pay for private schools. It’s a terrible policy idea on the merits—in addition to weakening public schools by draining away their funding, such “privatization” programs mostly benefit the affluent, and there is a lack of evidence that they improve student performance. But a GOP effort to privatize public education could be a golden political opportunity for Democrats if they fight it hard and propose a better plan to improve the nation’s schools—a plan that, as of now, they don’t have. 

Allowing public tax dollars to flow to private schools has been a dream of conservatives for decades. Scores of states and cities set up such programs, typically using private school vouchers, in the 1990s and 2000s. But these were often small scale and targeted to low-income families. Betsy DeVos, the education secretary in Trump’s first term, included provisions in her budget requests that would have allowed families regardless of income to use public money for private schools. Democrats in Congress shot down those proposals. But in the past few years, eight GOP-controlled states have launched what conservatives euphemistically call “universal choice” programs that are open to even the wealthiest families. And, not surprisingly, affluent families have so far disproportionately taken advantage of them.

Just because education privatization is growing, however, doesn’t mean it’s popular. In fact, it’s deeply unpopular, including with many Republican voters who live in small towns and rural areas where the local public schools are treasured civic institutions and private school options are sparse. The November elections made that clear. A ballot measure in Colorado over a state constitutional amendment that would have merely opened the door to private school programs in the future went down to defeat roughly 51 to 49 percent thanks to tepid support in rural counties. In Nebraska, a less urban state than Colorado, 57 percent of voters chose to partially repeal a state-funded private school scholarship program. And in heavily rural Kentucky, 65 percent of voters rejected a proposed constitutional amendment that would have given every student in the state the right to use public money to attend private schools.

With that record in mind, you would think Trump would hesitate to push universal choice programs at the federal level. Prudence, however, has not been his defining characteristic. Rather, he offered praise of universal choice in the rare occasions when he talked about the issue during the campaign. The idea was also endorsed by the Heritage Foundation’s controversial Project 2025 and by its rival transition organization, the America First Policy Institute, which was chaired by Linda McMahon, Trump’s current pick to be secretary of education. Despite the risks, the temptation to privatize a vast part of the public sector will be hard for Trump to resist, if history is any guide.

George W. Bush didn’t talk much about privatizing Social Security during the 2004 campaign, either. Yet once he was reelected, he grabbed the third rail of politics with both hands by pushing for the creation of individual retirement accounts using Social Security funds. The result was an epic failure. The more the public learned about his plan, the less they liked it. Minority Senate leader Harry Reid and minority House leader Nancy Pelosi whipped their caucuses into unified opposition and refused to negotiate with the Republicans. GOP leaders retreated, and the measure never came up for a vote. Bush’s approval ratings fell and never recovered.

Democrats should treat any plan to privatize public education the same way. But they will be missing an opportunity to help the working-class voters they most need to win back if they offer no alternative agenda for improving America’s public schools. And right now, the party generally lacks any such plan beyond “Pay teachers more” and similar items on the wish lists of teachers’ unions. 

The inequities in education spending and quality that have long diminished the life chances of poor and working-class kids are still there, even if we don’t talk about them as much as we did in the 1990s and 2000s. The federal reforms of that era—higher academic standards, test-based accountability mandates, and support for charter schools—helped boost some metrics of learning but proved divisive and lost political support. What Democrats need are new reform ideas that would be popular with voters, measurably improve student outcomes, unite the Democratic caucus, and possibly win some support across the aisle. 

One such idea is tutoring. Affluent parents have long known the value of paying private tutors to boost their kids’ academic success. But over the past three years, the federal government funded a vast, nationwide experiment to provide that benefit to millions of poor and working-class students. The American Rescue Plan, the mammoth $1.9 trillion COVID-relief measure that President Joe Biden signed in March 2021, contained an estimated $7.5 billion in funds that public schools used for online tutoring programs to help students during the pandemic. Not all the tutoring efforts panned out. But as Thomas Toch and Liz Cohen wrote in these pages last summer,

Schools that implemented “high-impact” tutoring—where students work in small groups during the school day with the same tutor in 30-minute sessions three times a week over several months—have been strikingly successful. Those programs are producing an average of more than four months of additional learning in elementary literacy and nearly 10 months of additional learning in secondary school math, says Susanna Loeb, a Stanford education economist who leads a highly regarded tutoring research center. “The effects we see for high-impact tutoring are larger than what we see for most other education interventions, including class-size reduction, extended day, and technology support for students,” Loeb says.

Federal money for this giant experiment in school reform is running out. But its success has prompted governors in both blue states (New Jersey and Oregon) and red ones (Tennessee and Florida) to pledge funding to continue tutoring programs. 

Despite this bipartisan enthusiasm at the state level, Republicans in Washington have shown little interest in continuing to fund a tutoring program that blossomed under Joe Biden. But there are other evidence-based education reforms that they might find more politically satisfying. For instance, in recent years, education experts have increasingly signed on to a “science of reading” consensus that the best way to teach young children to read prioritizes phonics, a traditional approach that conservatives have long championed but that got sidetracked for decades in favor of the whole language system and other methods. Democrats could give Republicans a chance to spike the ball by agreeing to support a new grant program to states and districts that embraces the new science of reading. 

Even in the minority, Democrats have the ability to develop and publicize ideas like these that have real potential to improve the quality of the schools that average Americans send their kids to. And once the war over privatizing schools is fought and won, they might be in a position to turn those ideas into policy.  

The post Tutorize, Don’t Privatize, Public Schools appeared first on Washington Monthly.