Random Excerpts

• Encourage and enable religious organizations to participate in apprenticeship programs, etc. Both DOL and NLBB should facilitate religious organizations helping to strengthen working families via apprenticeship programs, worker organizations, vocational training, benefits networks, etc.

Unnecessarily focused on schools ina specific geographic region, institutional accreditation reviews have also become wildly expensive audits by academic “peers” that stifle innovation and discourage new institutions of higher education. Of particular concern are efforts by many accreditation agencies to leverage their Title IV (student loans and grants) gatekeeper roles to force institutions to adopt policies that have nothing to do with academic quality assurance and student outcomes. One egregious example of this is the extent to which accreditors have forced colleges and universities, many of them faith-based institutions, to adopt diversity, equity, and inclusion policies that conflict with federal civil rights laws, state laws, and the institutional mission and culture of the schools. Perhaps more distressingly, accreditors, while professing support for academic freedom and campus free speech, have presided over a precipitous decline in both over the past decade. Despite maintaining criteria that demand such policies, accreditors have done nothing to dampen the illiberal chill that has swept across American campuses over the past decade.

Reduce overclassification. The USSF must move beyond the Cold Warera culture of secrecy and overclassification that surrounded military space to facilitate greater coordination and synchronization of efforts across the government and commercial sectors.

• Providing education choice for “federal” children. Congress has a special responsibility to children who are connected to military families, who live in the District of Columbia, or who are members of sovereign tribes. Responsibility for serving these students should be housed in agencies that are already serving these families.

The Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) is the only federal agency solely dedicated to the growth and competitiveness of minority-owned businesses. The Minority Business Development Act of 2021 was signed into law as part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. This legislation made MBDAa permanent federal agency, created a Senate-confirmed Under Secretary position, and expanded programs and outreach. The Act:

Families are the basic unit of and foundation for a thriving society. Without women, there are no children, and society cannot continue. As evidenced by the confirmation testimony of now-Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the progressive Left has so misused and altered the definition of what a “woman” is that one of our U.S. Supreme Court Justices was unable to delineate clearly the fundamental biological and sexual traits that define the group of which she is a part. USAID cannot advocate for and protect women when they have been erased globally along with the values and traditional structures that have supported them.

Congress should build on the Trump Administration’s efforts to expand choices for small businesses and workers, both in and out of the exchanges, by codifying an expansion of association health plans, short-term health plans, and health reimbursement arrangements (including individual coverage HRAs). CCIIO should also work with the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to give consumers more flexibility with their health care dollars through expanded access to health savings accounts.

Administration, Budget, and Appropriations. Recent practice has been for career staff to serve as gatekeepers between department leadership and external budget and appropriations partners at the OMB and on Capitol Hill. By serving not just as a central point of contact but as the sole staff-level communicators of departmental priorities, these career officials can, have, and will slow down—and even stop—changes in policy, even at the line-office level.

Even content that went well beyond fair and accurate reporting on U.S. domestic and political problems could not be reined in by front office leadership under the Firewall Regulation. Soon, VOA’s White House correspondent was posting content highly critical of, and personally insulting to, the U.S. President—in contradiction of VOA’s own journalistic standards, policies, and procedures. USAGM career officials considered such content sacrosanct and bravely independent “journalistic”

By the middle of 2018, it was clear that the CCP had no intention of bargaining in good faith. As a result, on June 15, President Trump began to impose a series of tariffs*? on Chinese products that would eventually rise to cover more than $500 billion of Chinese imports. These tariffs would lead Communist China’s lead negotiator, Vice Premier Liu He, to agree tentatively in April of 2019 to what would have been the most comprehensive trade deal in global history.** On May 8, 2019, however, Liu would renege on that 150-page deal and seek its drastic re-trading.*