Random Excerpts

Assuring a safe and orderly school environment should be a primary consideration for school leaders and district administrators. Unfortunately, federal overreach has pushed many school leaders to prioritize the pursuit of racial parity in school discipline indicators—such as detentions, suspensions, and expulsions— over student safety. In 2014, the Obama Administration issued a Dear Colleague Letter that muddied the standard for civil rights enforcement under Title VI for student discipline cases. Before the DCL, a school would be in violation of federal law for treating black and white students differently for the same offense (disparate treatment); under the Obama Administration schools were at risk of losing federal funding if they treated black and white students equally but had aggregate differences in the rates of school discipline by race (disparate impact).

needs to hire people trained to oversee mechanics, engineers, and pilots. It is time to consider promoting the FAA’s top executive team from within and requiring strict professional requirements for its top appointees. Organizations such as the FAA whose sole responsibility is public safety should be fully auditable and led by experts in their field or industry with oversight from DOT leadership.

We will have to address the structural problems that have plagued our economy for decades: the decline in labor force participation, income and racial inequality, and serious underinvestment in crucial public goods like childcare, education, and physical infrastructure. And then there are rising challenges, like climate change, which, left unchecked, will undermine every aspect of our economy from supply chains to the financial system.*

Countries with strong health institutions and sound public health practices responded quickly to and recovered more rapidly from the COVID-19 pandemic. This demonstrates the importance of “localization,” by which USAID helps governments and the private sector in developing countries to strengthen their own ability to address needed training, services, accountability, and organizational capacity.

OLEM’s mission is to partner with other federal agencies, states, tribes, local governments, and communities to clean up legacy pollution and revitalize land for reuse. OLEM executes this mission by protecting human health and the environment while leveraging economic opportunities and creating jobs. OLEM also oversees the agency’s emergency response. The main statutes that OLEM executes are the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA)* to regulate waste management; the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA)* to clean up Superfund sites and provide resources for cleaning up brownfields sites; and Section 112(r) of the Clean Air Act* to reduce the likelihood of accidental chemical releases.

President Reagan’s OPM began by limiting such SES burrowing-in, arguing that the proper course was to create and fill political positions. This simultaneously promotes the CSRA principle of political leadership of the bureaucracy and respects the professional autonomy of the career service. But this requires that career SES employees should respect political rights too. Actions such as career staff reserving excessive numbers of key policy positions as “career reserved” to deny them to noncareer SES employees frustrate CSRA intent. Another evasion is the general domination by career staff on SES personnel evaluation boards, the opposite of noncareer executives dominating these critical meeting discussions as expected in the SES. Career training also often underplays the political role in leadership and inculcates career-first policy and value viewpoints.

In all of this, Congress can make certain points clear. It could focus legislation on dominant, general-use platforms rather than specialized ones. This could include excluding comment sections in online publications, specialized message boards, or communities within larger platforms that self-moderate. Similarly, Congress could legislate in a way that does not require any platform to host illegal content; child pornography; terrorist speech; and indecent, profane, or similar categories of speech that Congress has previously carved out.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: [he preparation of this chapter involved contributions from members of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project. Most contributors to this chapter are listed at the front of this volume—and in

The next conservative Administration should restore and build on the Trump Administration’s counter-China infrastructure at USAID, end the climate policy fanaticism that advantages Beijing, and assess bilateral aid through the lens of U.S. national security interests, rewarding those countries that resist China’s debt diplomacy. It should finance programs designed to counter specific Chinese efforts in strategically important countries and eliminate funding to any partner that engages with Chinese entities directly or indirectly. USAID’s Bangkok-based Regional Development Mission for Asia should focus its strategic attention on supporting cross-border initiatives designed to counter Chinese influence.

However, technology is not a panacea; human expertise in information holdings and routine validation of the technology will always be necessary. With or without machine assistance, agencies will require more people and more varied skill sets to improve their ability to meet the electronic records era’s classification and declassification demands and serve an incoming Administration’s goals.