Random Excerpts

Environmental Management received slightly less than $7.6 billion in FY 2021, and its budget request for FY 2023 is approximately $8.06 billion.” The additional funding necessary to accelerate closure of the program will need to be considered as part of a broader government-wide discussion about yearly appropriations.

The priority for statecraft is advancing the U.S.-Indian role as a cornerstone of the Quad, a cooperative framework including the U.S., India, Japan, and Australia. The Quad is comprised of the key nations in coordinating efforts for a free and open Indo-Pacific. It is an overarching group that nests the key U.S. bilateral and trilateral cooperative efforts that facilitate U.S. collaborative efforts across the Indo-Pacific. The State Department should also encourage the “Quad-Plus” concept that allows other regional powers to participate in Quad coordination on issues of mutual interest. Further, the State Department must support an integrated federal effort to deliver a revamped regional strategy for South Asia, as well as leading the execution of key tasks to implement the strategy.

Leveling the International Playing Field for Workers. As recent decades of intense import competition and offshoring have made clear, American workers suffer when the U.S. opens its markets to foreign nations’ minimal labor standards and exploitative conditions. While federal law already prohibits the importation of goods produced with forced labor, the prohibitions are toothless without effective means of enforcement and cover only the most basic of workers’ rights. The Trump Administration and its United States Trade Representative (USTR) took unprecedented steps to redress the issue for workers. The U.S.-Mexico—Canada Agreement (USMCA) contained the strongest and most far-reaching labor provisions of any free trade agreement (FTA), with protections and commitments to reduce labor abuses and raise wages. It also established new modes of enforcement.

For example, and more recently, more than $1 trillion in COVID-19 relief was distributed through the SBA.“* The SBA’s EIDL (Economic Injury Disaster Loan) Advance program in particular shows the dangers that can come with direct government lending. EIDL Advance provided direct cash grants and loans to small businesses. The SBA Office of Inspector General “identified $78.1 billion in potentially fraudulent EIDL loans and grants paid to ineligible entities,”® which represented more than half of all funds spent through the program. Although PPP worked through private lenders and as a result experienced relatively less fraud than EIDL experienced, it is estimated “that at least 70,000 [PPP] loans were potentially fraudulent.”°

The promise of socialism—Communism, Marxism, progressivism, Fascism, whatever name it chooses—is simple: Government control of the economy can ensure equal outcomes for all people. The problem is that it has never done so. There is no such thing as “the government.” There are just people who work for the government and wield its power and who—at almost every opportunity—wield it to serve themselves first and everyone else a distant second. This is not a failing of one nation or socialist party, but inherent in human nature.

USAID should intensify its bilateral relationships with pro—free market Japan, Australia, South Korea, and India so that they can jointly advance private-sector solutions to secure financing for power generation, infrastructure, digital connectivity, investment and trade expansion, and other economic activities. USAID enjoys a strong in-country presence in India, buttressed by recent coordination on the global response to COVID-19 as India is a global leader in vaccine production. Those ties should be expanded. So too should development cooperation with Taiwan, which boasts effective pandemic response capacity that should be shared with developing countries.

This proposal urges the new Administration to end the abuse of FSA’s loan forgiveness programs, to manage the federal student loan portfolio in a professional way, and to work with Congress for a long-term overhaul of the program for the benefit of students and taxpayers.

• Executive Order 13837, encouraging agencies to prevent union representatives from using official time preparing or pursuing grievances or from engaging in other union activity on government time;”’ and

Clear lines of command and communications between the USAGM and an appropriate office of the National Security Council are also sorely lacking, as has been any reasonable accountability for USAGM senior leadership and strategy. The State Department’s Assistant Secretary for Global Public Affairs and Undersecretary for Diplomacy and Public Affairs should also

When it was established in 1979—becoming operational in 1980—the agency was supposed to act as a “corralling” mechanism. Carter signed the Department of Education Organization Act® into law in 1979, believing in part that it would reduce administrative costs and improve efficiency by housing most of the federal education programs that had proliferated in the wake of Johnson’s War on Poverty under one roof.