Francis Fukuyama discusses the unintended consequences of an 'America First' policy
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Washington Post
5 days ago
- Washington Post
‘I'm not a politician,' says NIH director. But it's not that simple.
'I'm not a politician,' the new director of the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya insists. 'I'm not going to get involved in the political fight over things.' Easier said than done. The great challenge facing the former Stanford University doctor and economist as he guides the world's largest public funder of biomedical research is that science and American politics have become intertwined as perhaps never before. There is little ideological distance between NIH headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland, and the White House in nearby D.C.
Newsweek
5 days ago
- Newsweek
Map Shows 18 States Where Americans Have Received a Basic Income in 2025
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Universal or guaranteed basic income programs are gaining momentum across the country, as local governments and nonprofits experiment with the bold new alternative to traditional welfare models. According to Stanford University's Basic Income Lab, which tracks ongoing UBI or GBI pilot programs across the U.S., citizens in 18 states, as well as the District of Columbia, have taken part in some form of basic income study this year. "UBI differs quite radically from welfare as we know it because it goes to all without means tests or work requirements," said Juliana Bidadanure, founder of the Basic Income Lab. "It builds a robust floor that prevents all from falling too low, and it achieves that with a principle of radical inclusivity (everyone is opted in automatically)." Why It Matters Neither UBI nor GBI programs have yet become a nationwide practice in any country, and their implementation will continue to be hindered by political and fiscal concerns some governments may have over providing citizens with unconditional payments. However, the studies that have been conducted have provided important data on the benefits and drawbacks of income guarantees for citizens, and could lead to further adoption in the future. Given that economies across the globe are faced with mounting inequality and the prospects of automation depriving millions of working opportunities, advocates believe that providing a basic income is an increasingly necessary means of ensuring financial security in the face of rapid economic shifts. What To Know According to the Stanford Basic Income Lab's tracker, 57 basic income experiments were ongoing as of late January, with over a dozen in California alone. While many have concluded, others remain ongoing, varying in payment amounts, recipients and intended purposes. One such experiment is currently being conducted by the Southern California non-profit Inland SoCal United Way in conjunction with the California Department of Social Services. The pilot program will provide unconditional cash payments of $600 per month for 18 months to hundreds of pregnant women in their first or second trimesters, as well as $750 per month to 21-year-olds who have spent time in the foster care system. Another is the Richmond Resilience Initiative, operated by the city's government and now in its fifth year, which focuses on providing support to those who serve as their household's primary caregiver. Participants receive $500 per month for a period of two years, and it is aimed at "reducing financial instability for working families." Canadian health economist and basic income scholar Evelyn Forget told Newsweek that current welfare programs are plagued with bureaucratic obstacles and inefficiencies, issues she believes are made easier by an unconditional payment system like UBI. "In North America, we have a range of social programs — most underfunded and virtually all 'conditional,'" she said. "These conditions, on their face, seem reasonable... In practice, many of these conditions are imposed in ways that make access to cash difficult: How do you 'prove' residency when you have no ID? How do you 'prove' an episodic mental illness? How do you access child support when you're the grandmother caring for the kids but their parents, who may be unreachable, have custody?" Amy Castro, co-founder of the Center for Guaranteed Income Research at the University of Pennsylvania, said that the heightened interest in unconditional cash programs has been driven by "pervasive economic strain." "Americans are working more and making less to the detriment of our health, well-being, and relationships," she said. "Living with chronic financial stress like not knowing if you will receive enough shifts at work to make rent drives poor public health outcomes, food insecurity and a range of mental health stressors." Castro added that the benefit of such programs is that cash "is provided with no strings attached, no conditions on how the money can be spent," and that this can work alongside existing social safety nets. Based on data from over 30 basic income pilots across the U.S., the Stanford Basic Income Lab tracked how Americans spent the money they received through these programs. The majority of expenditures went toward retail sales and services. Food and groceries were the second-highest at 32 percent, followed by transport and housing/utilities, both at 9 percent. What People Are Saying Juliana Bidadanure, founder of the Stanford Basic Income Lab, told Newsweek that a system of simple, unconditional payments "suppresses bureaucratically burdensome eligibility tests and protects individuals in poverty from being subject to the discretionary power of state agents. It implements a real right to live free from abject poverty, no questions asked, no paperwork filed." "The universal feature of UBI also makes it harder to demonize or stigmatize those on benefits," she added. "This is important since a common feature of Western countries with targeted cash payment has been the stigmatization of benefits recipients as scroungers and welfare queens." Danny Avula, Mayor of Richmond, Virginia, upon launching the fifth Resilience Initiative basic income pilot, said: "In Richmond, we believe everyone has a right to thrive, not just survive. The Richmond Resilience Initiative reflects our ongoing commitment to creating a city where families have the stability and support they need to build a better future." Amy Castro, co-founder of the Center for Guaranteed Income Research, told Newsweek: "The advantage of cash is that it is flexible, fungible, and efficient—particularly when enduring an unexpected economic shock like a natural disaster or sudden drop in the market. Traditional safety net benefits like WIC, SNAP or housing supports require constant administrative recertification and are plagued by the benefits cliff where working families are penalized for every dollar they make above the income threshold." "People spend tremendous amounts of time and cognitive bandwidth negotiating these cliffs to make sure they don't lose benefits crucial for surviving a risky economy," she added. "This traps people at the poverty line because they must choose between a raise at work or an extra shift and potentially losing their benefits."
San Francisco Chronicle
22-07-2025
- San Francisco Chronicle
Trump's immigration raids are wreaking havoc on California's economy and schools
The Trump administration's unrestrained assault on immigrants has battered California's economy and driven down attendance at its schools, a pair of recent reports contend. Taken together, the studies by researchers at UC Merced and Stanford University assert that President Donald Trump's mass deportation agenda is having cascading effects that extend beyond California's under-siege immigrant communities. Examining monthly population totals from the U.S. Census Bureau, UC Merced found that nearly 465,000 California workers withdrew from the labor force the week of June 8, when federal immigration authorities descended on Los Angeles-area neighborhoods and work sites to arrest nearly 2,800 people. The drop in workers depressed private-sector employment by 3.1% from May. In the past four decades, only the COVID-19 pandemic and the Great Recession saw greater monthly declines in private-sector workers, said associate sociology professor Edward Orozco Flores, the report 's lead author and faculty director at UC Merced's Community and Labor Center, a public research institution based in the San Joaquin Valley. The data can't explicitly say which workers stayed home or were laid off and furloughed, and doesn't indicate which industries experienced the greatest declines. But the effects were not limited to Southern California, Flores said. 'Geographically, there was no statistical difference between L.A. and the rest of the state,' he said. The reason, he surmised, was the immigration enforcement tactics on display in the state. Along with sending federal immigration agents and thousands of military troops to Los Angeles, the Trump administration has dispatched masked immigration agents to health clinics, schools, home improvement stores and immigration courts in other parts of the state, including San Francisco, where protesters clung to an unmarked ICE van leaving a courthouse earlier this month. 'What's become clear is this administration is making a remarkable spectacle around immigration enforcement,' Flores said. 'The majority of it (the worker loss) seems some kind of response to a very visible display of immigration enforcement.' Trump's California crackdown exacted a geo-specific toll in the world's fifth-largest economy, the UC Merced report shows. While the state's labor force declined significantly, the U.S. as a whole experienced a half-percent increase of roughly 563,000 workers between May and June. Most of the evaporated workers in California — 271,541, or 58% — were American citizens. Flores said there are several reasons why this would be the case, and they revolve around how interwoven the immigrant population is into the state economy. When crops go unharvested by predominantly immigrant farmworkers, the rest of the agricultural supply chain is paralyzed. When immigrants stop shopping at supermarkets and retail stores, managers reduce their employees' hours. When the immigrants who make up a significant proportion of in-home caregivers are too afraid to leave their homes, the working adults in those homes also can't go to work. 'We have long known that noncitizens do not work in a vacuum,' Flores said. 'When noncitizens are not working, it harms the entire supply chain.' Gov. Gavin Newsom noted the implications for California's economy earlier this month, when he called for an end to the raids in Los Angeles. 'Instead of targeting dangerous criminals, federal agents are detaining U.S. citizens, ripping families apart, and vanishing people to meet indiscriminate arrest quotas without regard to due process and constitutional rights that protect all of us from cruelty and injustice,' Newsom said in a July 7 statement. 'Their actions imperil the fabric of our democracy, society, and economy.' Even before Trump's recent escalation in California, parents in the state's agricultural epicenter were keeping their children home from school at alarmingly irregular rates in response to heightened immigration enforcement, according to a Stanford report released in June. On Jan. 7 — a day after Congress certified Trump's election victory — Border Patrol agents from the agency's El Centro sector conducted an unusual immigration sweep 300 miles north of their post in rural Kern County. Their Operation Return to Sender resulted in 78 arrests and about 1,000 detentions, criticism by Biden administration officials, an ACLU lawsuit and a spike in student absenteeism at southern valley school districts touched by the dragnet. Stanford Graduate School of Education professor Thomas S. Dee examined three years of daily attendance figures from five school districts in four counties — Fresno, Kern, Kings and Tulare — whose districts serve more than 500,000 students, more than 70% of whom are Hispanic. He found that, in January and February, absences jumped by an average of 22% across all the districts and by about 30% among the youngest students — those in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade. 'That's a period where kids are learning really critical foundational skills, such as how to read,' Dee said. As with the economy, the effects are manifesting with nonimmigrant students and families. Jesus Martinez, executive director of the Central Valley Immigrant Integration Collaborative, said the Fresno-based nonprofit's educational partners have reported widespread fears among all their students, including U.S.-born students with immigrant parents and friends. 'It extends beyond the undocumented individual,' he said. Some 5.5 million U.S.-born children live with a parent who is an unauthorized immigrant, according to a Center for Migration Studies analysis of census data. The California Legislature has considered 23 immigration enforcement-related bills this year, seven of which concern schools. Bills to deny access to federal immigration authorities to schools if they don't have a warrant or a court order and to require schools to notify parents and staff when immigration authorities are on school grounds require two-thirds support to pass. Dee said public schools are still grappling with a post-pandemic knot of chronic absenteeism, sagging enrollment and declining funding, problems he expects the raids to exacerbate. He said fall enrollment figures will help indicate how California's schools, whose funding is tied to enrollment, responded to the Trump administration's immigration incursions. 'What we're seeing could eventually become reduced enrollment if families flee the region,' he said. 'There are reasons to be concerned.' Dee also acknowledged the Trump administration would likely be untroubled by this result, as another one of its priorities is dismantling the public education system. 'It seems consistent with other ways in which the administration has been creating disruptions and even chaos in education,' he said, noting the administration's 'evisceration' of the Department of Education and its threats to Title I funding, intended to address achievement gaps among lower-income students. As for what happens next, Flores pointed to the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Along with adding as much as $6 trillion to the national debt, Trump's signature domestic policy achievement will supercharge immigration enforcement by $170 billion and turn U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement into the country's largest law enforcement agency. 'No one has a crystal ball, but I think it would be reasonable to expect that this trend will continue and possibly even worsen,' Flores said. 'If this is the effect we're seeing due to the escalation of June 8 and we can expect further escalations, it is difficult to imagine that things simply go back.'
