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Ifo Institute: Career Entrants in Germany With Modern Vocational Training Earn More
MUNICH, Germany, March 20 (TNSxrep) -- ifo Institute issued the following news release on March 19, 2026:* * *
Career Entrants in Germany with Modern Vocational Training Earn More
Career entrants in Germany earn 3.3 percent more on average thanks to modernized training adapted to technical progress. That's according to a recent study by the ifo Institute on the influence of technological change on vocational training in Germany. Where vocational training has been adapted to technical progress, it leads to wage losses for older skilled workers (aged 55 to 65) of up to 10 percent. "Professions ... Show Full Article MUNICH, Germany, March 20 (TNSxrep) -- ifo Institute issued the following news release on March 19, 2026: * * * Career Entrants in Germany with Modern Vocational Training Earn More Career entrants in Germany earn 3.3 percent more on average thanks to modernized training adapted to technical progress. That's according to a recent study by the ifo Institute on the influence of technological change on vocational training in Germany. Where vocational training has been adapted to technical progress, it leads to wage losses for older skilled workers (aged 55 to 65) of up to 10 percent. "Professionshave fundamentally changed as a result of technological progress. It's not solely completing the training itself that is crucial, but also what is taught in the training curriculum," says ifo researcher Cacilia vom Baur.
Modernized training curricula focus primarily on teaching trainees new skills required by non-routine work. "Although the training content particularly for professions that are heavily affected by technological change has been modernized much more frequently, sufficient attention is still not paid in many training curricula to technical progress," says vom Baur.
According to the study, around 40 percent of training curricula for professions that are affected to a high degree by technological change remained unchanged even after 15 years. For professions only slightly affected by technology, the figure is even around 70 percent. "Training regulations adapted to the state of the art can significantly improve wages for new skilled workers. At the same time, providing further training for older skilled workers is becoming increasingly relevant, to ensure that they don't get left behind by technological change," say vom Baur.
The study covers data from 756 state-approved vocational training courses. The researchers linked the data with the development of US patents regarded as an indicator of technological progress. To measure how much training professions are affected by new technologies, the study compared the texts of the training regulations with patent texts.
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Original text here: ifo.de/en/detail-suche?size=n_10_n&filters%5B0%5D%5Bfield%5D=bundle.keyword&filters%5B0%5D%5Bvalues%5D%5B0%5D=pressemitteilung&filters%5B1%5D%5Bfield%5D=bundle.keyword&filters%5B1%5D%5Bvalues%5D%5B0%5D=pressemitteilung&filters%5B2%5D%5Bfield%5D=bundle.keyword&filters%5B2%5D%5Bvalues%5D%5B0%5D=pressemitteilung&filters%5B3%5D%5Bfield%5D=bundle.keyword&filters%5B3%5D%5Bvalues%5D%5B0%5D=pressemitteilung&sort-field=_score&sort-direction=desc
[Category: ThinkTank]
Hudson Institute Issues Commentary: What to Watch at the Trump-Takaichi Summit
WASHINGTON, March 20 -- Hudson Institute, a research organization that says it promotes leadership for a secure, free and prosperous future, issued the following commentary on March 18, 2026, by deputy director William Chou and senior fellow Masashi Murano, both of the Institute's Japan Chair:* * *
What to Watch at the Trump-Takaichi Summit
Introduction
On March 19, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi will be making her first trip to Washington as Japan's leader, where she will have the opportunity to demonstrate two things: 1) Japan is an ally that follows through on its promises; 2) that American ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, March 20 -- Hudson Institute, a research organization that says it promotes leadership for a secure, free and prosperous future, issued the following commentary on March 18, 2026, by deputy director William Chou and senior fellow Masashi Murano, both of the Institute's Japan Chair: * * * What to Watch at the Trump-Takaichi Summit Introduction On March 19, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi will be making her first trip to Washington as Japan's leader, where she will have the opportunity to demonstrate two things: 1) Japan is an ally that follows through on its promises; 2) that Americanand Japanese priorities are closely aligned, and that collaboration are vital towards achieving the president's agenda.
Takaichi previously met President Donald Trump back in October 2025, when Trump stopped in Tokyo on his way to the Asia Pacific Economic Community (APEC) meeting in Seoul. This visit, which occurred merely days after Takaichi became prime minister, was a success. The two governments signed agreements on critical minerals, shipbuilding, and energy. Perhaps more importantly, both leaders demonstrated personal chemistry, thanks to their shared political priorities and affection for former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe.
Since October, though, four key developments have occurred.
* Takaichi won a landslide electoral victory in February, and her Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) now holds a supermajority in the lower chamber.
* The two governments announced the first batch of projects under the $550 billion strategic industrial fund.
* China began using aggressive economic coercion against Japan after an opposition party politician forced Prime Minister Takaichi to affirm that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could constitute "survival-threatening situation," in which case Japanese law would allow Tokyo to undertake collective self-defense.
* The Trump administration began undertaking military operations against Iran, which is impacting global energy markets and undermining China's partnership of convenience with Tehran.
Upcoming developments later this year will further shape the tenor of the United States-Japan relationship. For example, President Trump will likely visit China later this year, and the two nations will negotiate issues concerning host nation support this summer. Japan also plans to release its new national security documents at the end of this year.
Against this backdrop, Takaichi's likely aim this trip is to affirm how the Japan is America's most dependable ally, an ally that follows through on its promises. At a time when other countries make empty, unrealistic gestures or have a history of not fulfilling their agreements with the US, Japan stands apart. In the face of challenging global economic and security challenges, Takaichi will show how the two countries' economic, technological, and security are aligned and benefit from stronger cooperation.
Much of the expected announcements out of the summit will focus on economic rather than security issues. However, the broader bilateral diplomatic relationship, as well as the uncertain regional and global environments, provide the implicit setting for the two leaders' meetings. Here are several key issues that the visit will--or should--address.
Key Issues
The $550 Billion Strategic Industrial Fund
The foremost issue that the two leaders will address is the $550 billion strategic industrial fund, a key element of the two countries' trade deal from July 2025. The fund--which will support projects in key strategic sectors including artificial intelligence, energy, and critical minerals--announced its first batch of projects on February 17. The three projects in this group consist of:
* A 9.2 gigawatt-hour gas power plant in Portsmouth, Ohio, that will power AI data centers. Total cost is estimated at $33 billion, and SB Energy, a subsidiary of Softbank, will be the operator. Japanese firms such as Toshiba, Hitachi, and Mitsubishi Electric are interested in providing relevant equipment.
* A deepwater oil export terminal in Brazoria County, Texas, that will generate $20-30 billion in US crude exports. Total cost is estimated at $2.1 billion, and Sentinel Midstream will be an operator. Mitsui O.S.K. Lines, Nippon Steel, JFE Steel, and MODEC have expressed interest in providing relevant equipment and materials.
* A high-pressure, high-temperature synthetic diamond grit facility in Georgia that will service the semiconductor, automotive, and energy industries. Total cost is estimated at $600 million, and Element Six, which is part of the De Beers group, will be the project operator. Japanese diamond toolmakers Asahi Diamond Industrial and Noritake are interested in offtake.
Neither government, however, has released the administrative or financial terms of these projects, suggesting they are still under negotiation. Discussions with the private sector indicate that more information about such terms, as well as solutions to address workforce availability and regulatory processes, will be vital for encouraging industry from both nations to propose further projects for the $550 billion fund.
The upcoming Trump-Takaichi summit will likely show continued momentum behind the $550 billion fund. In addition to clarifying the first projects' terms, the summit should announce a second round of projects. One venture could be a $13 billion Japan Display plant that would service American automotive, medical, and defense needs. The two countries can also cooperate on nuclear energy or on a copper refining facility. Such projects can strengthen US-Japan cooperation in strategically important sectors.
Critical Minerals and Supply Chains
The two leaders will likely introduce new initiatives to cooperate on critical minerals, building on their October 2025 agreement to diversify their mining and processing of these materials. This builds off of a flurry of international bilateral agreements that the White House has advanced on critical minerals and rare earths, such as similar agreements with Australia, Malaysia, and Thailand last year. Subsequently, the Trump administration pushed ahead on a number of multilateral critical mineral initiatives, such as the State Department's Pax Silica and the critical minerals ministerial from February 2026. At the same time, Japan has been proactive as well, signing rare earth development agreements with entities in France and Brazil, and collaboration with other G7 countries to secure critical minerals.
The common thread in these initiatives emanating out of Washington and Tokyo is opposition to Beijing's dominance of rare earths and key supply chains. In the past year, Beijing instituted global restrictions against rare earth and legacy semiconductor exports, and more recently, "dual-use material" export restrictions targeting Japan. These coercive actions were in response to geopolitical or economic measures that angered Beijing, but they are also part of China's larger desire to acquire downstream supply chains through technology theft. Such aggression may currently target Japanese firms, who occupy midstream positions in supply chains. But these policies also hurt American manufacturers who depend on Japanese suppliers, and who will eventually come under threat themselves from Chinese competitors.
Critical minerals cooperation will therefore be a key issue during the Trump-Takaichi summit, with preparatory work leading up to the meeting. The two countries just announced that they will create a "US-Japan Critical Minerals Project" in Indiana, North Carolina, and Arizona, to address rare earths, copper, and lithium development. Last weekend, Minister of Economy, Trade, and Industry Ryosei Akazawa announced at an Indo-Pacific energy ministerial that Japan will work with the US on a rapid-response group for supply chain disruptions that will entail information sharing. At the same ministerial, Japan and other Asian nations signed more than $57 billion in 22 agreements for energy and critical minerals. In addition, the US Trade and Development Agency renewed its partnership with the Japan Bank for International Cooperation to collaborate in the infrastructure investment needed for such energy and critical mineral projects. The Office of the US Trade Representative is working with the Japanese government to design a trade deal that will include a price floor and tariffs for materials to compete against Chinese market distortions. Finally, there is expectation that both countries will sign an agreement to cooperate on deep-sea mining for rare earths, especially off Japan's Minami-Torishima island.
As China has made it clear that it will continue to double down on its dominance over critical mineral supply chains in its latest draft of its upcoming Five-Year plan, US-Japanese cooperation in this area bolsters both countries' economic security. It will also give President Trump leverage in his upcoming trip to Beijing.
Shipbuilding
A third issue of likely announcements later this week will be shipbuilding. Shipbuilding is a high priority for both the United States and Japan, two maritime powers dependent on global commerce and the naval power needed to secure it. American shipbuilding--as exemplified by Liberty ships and Essex-class carriers--played a major role in our victory in World War II, while Japan became the world's leading shipbuilder by 1956 and dominated global shipping well into the early 1990s. Since then, however, Japan's share of global shipbuilding has declined to about 8 percent, and America's share has declined to less than 1 percent.
Each country has introduced plans to revitalize its shipbuilding sector. In April 2025, the White House announced its intention to restore American maritime dominance. The Maritime Action Plan (MAP), finally published in February 2026, introduced several measures to strengthen American shipbuilding. This includes a universal fee on foreign-built vessels to fund future shipbuilding measures. It also includes the creation of a Strategic Commercial Fleet (SCF) of US-built and US-flagged ships. Finally, it encourages a "bridge" strategy that permits foreign construction while eventually shifting to US construction. Finnish icebreakers are the obvious case, but the "bridge" strategy will likely also extend to Japan and South Korea given the two nations' shipbuilding agreements with the US.
Japan has had shipbuilding plans of its own for several years now. This includes measures within the 2022 Economic Security Promotion Act (ESPA) to support more resilient supply chains for ship components. In June 2025, the LDP proposed a 1 trillion-yen fund to support the shipping industry; the Japan Shipbuilding Industry Association matched it with a 350-billion pledge to double Japan's shipbuilding volume. In December 2025, the Japanese government introduced a 720 billion yen, over 10 years, to support the shipping industry through doubling gross tonnage produced, automation and robotic ship construction, facility expansion, and equipment procurement.
The two countries' shipbuilding priorities should prompt further announcements of cooperation during Takaichi's visit this week. The US and Japan created a working group to address these goals after Trump's visit to Tokyo in October 2025. The group has held extensive discussions on cooperation in shipbuilding, industrial base investments, increasing vessel demand, workforce development, and technological innovation. Yet conversations with working group members indicate there are differing priorities and investment timelines.
Such differences over policy and planning between close allies is natural. But at a time when Chinese shipbuilding is dominant--accounting for three-quarters of future LNG carrier orders--both Washington and Tokyo must work to address these differences to ensure maritime prosperity and security for our two nations.
Artificial Intelligence and Cutting-Edge Technology
Takaichi's visit to Washington should also prompt new cooperative agreements in AI-driven research and development in cutting-edge technological fields. In November 2025, the White House announced the creation of the Genesis Mission, which seeks to "build an integrated AI platform to harness Federal scientific assets...to train scientific foundation models and create AI agents to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and to accelerate scientific breakthroughs." Genesis is thus at the foundation of the Trump administration's numerous efforts to support AI development and its application in order to support the priorities of industrial revitalization and technological leadership.
The Takaichi government, which has similar ambitions to spark Japanese economic growth and technological innovation through investment in 17 strategic sectors, is keen to collaborate with America. At the SupercomputingAsia conference in Osaka in January 2026, Japan became the first international partner to work with the US on the Genesis Mission. Takaichi has placed a great deal of emphasis on investment in critical technologies to fuel her plans to place the Japanese economy on a growth trajectory in the long term. As such, her visit this week is likely to yield further progress on areas of AI-powered research and development between the US and Japan, building on existing research efforts between Riken, Fujitsu, and Nvidia to develop a successor to Japan's Fugaku supercomputer.
As technological innovation becomes the currency of geopolitical competition, both the US and Japan understand that continued R&D and implementation will be how we can deter unfair competitors. The two leaders in Washington and Tokyo understand this, and both will work during this summit and in the future for this effort to "run faster."
Golden Dome
In addition to these economic and technological agreements, Trump and Takaichi are expected to discuss Japan's participation in the "Golden Dome" missile initiative. The aim will be to cooperate in the joint development of interceptor missiles, the construction of a satellite network, and to improve Japan's ability to counter hypersonic glide vehicles that China, Russia, and North Korea are currently deploying.
The president has made Golden Dome a priority for a long time, issuing a directive for planning development in January 2025, and then holding a conference in May 2025 announcing that it will be operational by the end of his term. Bringing such a project online will be a considerable feat, requiring operational scaling, technological integration, and security sufficient resources. Yet in the face of new missile challenges, existing ballistic missile defense may no longer be sufficient.
Japan, which lies at the front lines of hypersonic missile threats from China, Russia, and North Korea, and hosts 55,000 US service members, has both incentive and capabilities to contribute to Golden Dome. Tokyo plans to build a satellite constellation by March 2028 for missile intelligence and tracking. This capability and intelligence sharing will be vital to bilateral cooperation on Golden Dome, as will the development of the Glide Phase Interceptor (GPI).
At the same time, Golden Dome should not be conceived solely as a system for the defense of the continental United States. To be strategically effective, it must also contribute to the defense of forward US territories and allied operational spaces across the Pacific. This includes Hawaii and Guam, as well as the broader maritime and airspace extending toward Japan and Taiwan along the First and Second Island Chains. Integrating these regions into a more resilient missile defense architecture would strengthen deterrence and help safeguard the economic interests and long-term prosperity of the United States in the Indo-Pacific, where secure sea lines of communication and regional stability remain vital to American and allied economies.
Defense Coproduction
Bilateral cooperation on Golden Dome highlights the need for stepped-up defense industrial base cooperation between the two countries, even if specific announcements are not expected during Takaichi's visit. There are three avenues for doing so going forward:
First, both countries should strengthen allied defense industrial supply chains by encouraging companies to release critical technical information to trusted allies. In the case of missile defense, technical data for key components, such as missile seekers, should be available for licensed production within the alliance. As they directly affect the alliance's defensive capabilities, these decisions cannot be left entirely to corporate caution. Should firms be reluctant to release sensitive technologies, governments should support efforts to develop alternative component suppliers to provide comparable capabilities. Such efforts are already underway, such as in the case shipbuilding with South Korea; they should be expanded across the broader defense industrial base.
Second, defense industrial cooperation must expand to scalable and adaptable systems. US-Japan defense industrial cooperation has traditionally emphasized high-end systems, such as SM-3 Block 2A, which are highly capable but produced in limited quantities. Recent conflicts in Iran and Ukraine, however, suggest these systems alone cannot sustain prolonged operations. Affordable, sufficiently capable, and mass-produceable weapon systems must also be part of bilateral industrial cooperation. Candidates include low-cost precision munitions for counter-drone and point-defense missions, such as Advanced Precision Kill Weapon Systems (APKWS), as well as scalable stand-off strike systems like JDAM-LR and Barracuda. Systems such as anti-ship variant LUCAS-type loitering munitions and balloon-based high-altitude platforms (HAPS) also point toward new operational concepts built around scalable and adaptable capabilities.
Third, Japan must continue to revise its own policy framework to support and expand its defense industrial capacity. Japan is now moving to revise its defense exports policy, which previously limited exports to five nonlethal categories--rescue, transport, reconnaissance, surveillance, and minesweeping. Under the new proposal from the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the Japanese government will classify defense equipment into "lethal" and "nonlethal," with the former exportable after review from Japan's National Security Council, to countries with defense equipment and technology transfer agreements with Japan.
Such a shift aligns with how public sentiment in Japan increasingly supports helping allies and like-minded partners facing security challenges. Yet historically Japan's defense industry has been largely focused on meeting domestic demand, leaving little capacity for exports. Revising the principles could change this dynamic by allowing Japan to build production capacity that includes surplus output capable of supporting allied demand. This would represent not merely a change in export policy but an opportunity to expand the industrial foundation that underpins alliance deterrence.
Conclusion
Prime Minister Takaichi's visit to Washington will likely build upon the positive start that she and President Trump shared during their meeting in Tokyo last October. Though there have been several significant economic, security, and economic developments since their last meeting, both countries share numerous priorities and are in positions to support each other through deepened cooperation. At a time when economic and security challenges abound, Japan is earnest and serious in its efforts to implement collaboration in the areas of strategic industries, critical minerals, shipbuilding, advanced R&D, missile defense, and defense industrial base. As she heads to Washington, Takaichi understands that in these challenging circumstances, real and tangible results--even if the result of tough negotiations--are the currency of a true ally.
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William Chou is a senior fellow and deputy director of Hudson Institute's Japan Chair.
Masashi Murano is a senior fellow with Hudson Institute's Japan Chair.
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Original text here: https://www.hudson.org/foreign-policy/what-to-watch-at-trump-takaichi-summit-william-chou
[Category: ThinkTank]
Hudson Institute Issues Commentary to Washington Times: Trump as a Constitutional Originalist
WASHINGTON, March 20 -- Hudson Institute, a research organization that says it promotes leadership for a secure, free and prosperous future, issued the following commentary on March 19, 2026, by China Center Director Miles Yu to the Washington Times:* * *
Trump as a Constitutional Originalist
The president is restoring our founding principles.
*
President Trump is often portrayed as a disruption of the American political tradition -- an outsider who shattered long-standing norms. Yet that interpretation may miss the larger historical context.
In important ways, Mr. Trump represents not a ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, March 20 -- Hudson Institute, a research organization that says it promotes leadership for a secure, free and prosperous future, issued the following commentary on March 19, 2026, by China Center Director Miles Yu to the Washington Times: * * * Trump as a Constitutional Originalist The president is restoring our founding principles. * President Trump is often portrayed as a disruption of the American political tradition -- an outsider who shattered long-standing norms. Yet that interpretation may miss the larger historical context. In important ways, Mr. Trump represents not abreak from America's founding principles but rather a return to them.
His political instincts, sometimes blunt, sometimes controversial, echo ideas that have shaped the United States since its birth: common sense over technocratic abstraction, national sovereignty over global management, and economic independence, patriotic confidence and a preference for conflict settlements or peacemaking to counter China's systematic promotion and bankrolling of global conflicts.
At the center of Mr. Trump's political appeal is something deceptively simple: common sense. Common sense has deep roots in American political culture.
The American Revolution was launched under that banner. Thomas Paine's famous pamphlet urging independence from Britain was titled "Common Sense" for a reason. Paine's argument was not built on complicated theory or elite philosophy. Written in plain language for ordinary people, it made the straightforward case that a distant monarchy ruling a continent-sized society made little sense.
Thomas Jefferson used a similar concept in the Declaration of Independence while describing America's founding principles as "self-evident truths."
That phrase is essentially the philosophical equivalent of common sense: ideas that do not require elaborate justification because ordinary people recognize them immediately.
Mr. Trump's supporters often frame many of his policy positions in precisely those terms as modern "self-evident truths." Among them: no biological men in women's sports, requiring proof of citizenship to vote, imposing tougher penalties for violent crime, hiring based on merit in federal agencies, limiting gender transition procedures for minors, pursuing energy independence, insisting on reciprocal tariffs in trade and demanding fairer pricing for prescription drugs.
Critics may disagree with these policies, but the rhetorical strategy is clear. Mr. Trump presents his agenda not as ideological experimentation but as practical, intuitive solutions to problems many voters believe elites have unnecessarily complicated.
Mr. Trump's worldview also reflects another core principle of the American founding: the primacy of national sovereignty.
The Founding Fathers were deeply wary of allowing the young republic to become entangled in global power struggles. Jefferson argued that the United States should remain independent from Europe's rivalries and act as a sovereign nation free from external domination. This did not mean isolation from the world. The Founders believed strongly in trade and diplomacy, but on terms that preserved American independence.
George Washington warned against permanent political alliances with foreign powers. Jefferson summarized the preferred approach with his famous line: "Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations -- entangling alliances with none."
Washington's Neutrality Proclamation of 1793 reflected this philosophy. The United States, he argued, should avoid involvement in foreign wars unless its own security was directly threatened.
Economic independence was another priority. Alexander Hamilton's "Report on Manufactures" in 1791 argued that the United States needed to develop its own industrial capacity rather than rely too heavily on foreign producers. Hamilton understood that political sovereignty ultimately depends on economic strength.
Mr. Trump's emphasis on domestic manufacturing, supply chain security and reciprocal trade reflects a modern version of that same concern.
The Founders also deeply worried about foreign influence within the United States. Washington and James Madison warned that outside powers might attempt to manipulate American politics. More than two centuries later, those concerns remain relevant in an era of geopolitical rivalry and global information warfare.
Beyond policy details, Mr. Trump taps into something deeper in the American tradition: a strong belief in the uniqueness of the American experiment.
The Founders believed they were attempting something unprecedented: a political system based not on hereditary privilege but rather on popular sovereignty and individual liberty.
The Constitution's architecture, including separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism, was designed to protect freedom by limiting the concentration of power. They also believed that the American example might inspire others around the world. The United States was not merely another country; it was a democratic experiment with universal significance.
Mr. Trump's rhetoric frequently reflects this sense of national pride. In tone, it echoes earlier moments of American political leadership. President Reagan captured the same sentiment when he warned, "If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth." Mr. Trump expressed a similar idea in his 2017 inaugural address: "We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example for everyone to follow."
In foreign policy, Mr. Trump has emphasized a principle long embedded in American diplomacy: fairness and reciprocity. Trade, in this view, should not be one-sided. If other countries impose tariffs on American goods, then the United States has every right to respond in kind.
Mr. Trump has framed strategic competition with China as a defense of international fairness and freedom of navigation, particularly in critical waterways such as the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait. From this perspective, the goal is not global domination but the preservation of open commerce and sovereign equality among nations.
Finally, Mr. Trump frequently describes himself as someone who prefers negotiation to endless conflict. He has said he would like his legacy to be that of a peacemaker.
That aspiration also fits within a long American tradition. Many U.S. military interventions, from World War I and World War II to the Cold War, were justified not only as acts of national defense but also as efforts to preserve global stability and prevent future wars.
Seen through this historical lens, Mr. Trump begins to look less like a political anomaly and more like a modern expression of an older American tradition rooted in common sense, national sovereignty, economic independence, patriotic confidence and the pursuit of global peace for equal opportunity in commerce.
Whether one agrees with his policies or not, the deeper argument is difficult to dismiss: Trumpism, in this interpretation, is not an accident of history. It is part of a long American story.
Read in The Washington Times (https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/mar/16/trump-constitutional-originalist/).
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At A Glance:
Miles Yu is a senior fellow and director of the China Center at Hudson Institute.
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Original text here: https://www.hudson.org/politics-government/trump-constitutional-originalist-miles-yu
[Category: ThinkTank]
Hudson Institute Issues Commentary to RealClearMarkets: Spectrum - When One Head Is Better Than Two
WASHINGTON, March 20 -- Hudson Institute, a research organization that says it promotes leadership for a secure, free and prosperous future, issued the following commentary on March 19, 2026, by senior fellow Harold Furchtgott-Roth to RealClearMarkets:* * *
Spectrum: When One Head Is Better than Two
The old adage goes: "Two heads are better than one." That likely is true when the two heads agree with one another. But when they disagree, only one head can, and should, prevail.
Bad and costly turmoil ensues when two entities each believes it has the right to make decisions. Consider that the ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, March 20 -- Hudson Institute, a research organization that says it promotes leadership for a secure, free and prosperous future, issued the following commentary on March 19, 2026, by senior fellow Harold Furchtgott-Roth to RealClearMarkets: * * * Spectrum: When One Head Is Better than Two The old adage goes: "Two heads are better than one." That likely is true when the two heads agree with one another. But when they disagree, only one head can, and should, prevail. Bad and costly turmoil ensues when two entities each believes it has the right to make decisions. Consider that theU.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit recently remanded a case, Ligado v. United States. That case is ultimately a dispute about which of two federal agencies, the until-recently independent Federal Communications Commission (FCC or Commission), or the executive branch itself, determines and limits the spectrum rights of federal agencies.
Ligado claims that the federal government, in particular the Department of Defense, has encroached on its licenses that the FCC modified in 2020. Ligado further claims that the federal government has failed to cooperate in allowing Ligado to meet the conditions necessary to commence commercial services. Ligado seeks damages for an uncompensated taking by the federal government.
The executive branch appears to claim that the FCC was never authorized to diminish the property rights of DoD users of spectrum. Whose property rights should prevail: Ligado or the DoD? And whose assignment of property rights should prevail: the FCC or the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), the manager of federal spectrum?
Spectrum licenses, and even unlicensed spectrum, have enormous value precisely because of property rights. So too do federal uses of spectrum. At the core of property rights are a bundle of rights articulated in economic terms by Armen Alchian (determination of use, benefit from use, and benefit from transactions).
Based on the pleadings in the case, the Court reasonably focuses part of its remand on the property rights associated with proper FCC licenses. Those should be preserved. An arbitrary taking away of an entity's lawful license would harm not only that entity but such a precedent would harm all licensees and the public at large.
But equally important are the property rights of federal users including the Department of Defense. Can those be eroded by the FCC without economic harm? Can the FCC unilaterally change those federal property rights, even, as the Court notes, over the consistent objections of NTIA and the Executive Branch? As the Court insightfully states: "An accurate view of the relationship between the Commission and non-FCC agencies in the allocation of spectrum-use rights may bear on the property right analysis."
The root cause of the dispute before the Court is that our federal government has not one but two agencies that manage property rights for assignment: NTIA for federal users and the FCC for non-federal users. In practically every instance, the two agencies work well together and respect the prerogatives of the other. An exception where the two agencies were at odds with one another is the 2020 Ligado license modification. NTIA opposed; the FCC supported. In its remand order, the Court reviews statutory language suggesting the limited authority, if any, that the FCC has over federal spectrum. Historically, that has been the case. For much of the past 150 years, spectrum usage in the United States, and around the world, was government usage, and primarily military usage. Non-governmental usage was limited to various specialized services such as maritime communications (consider the Titanic) and broadcasting.
Congress long ago addressed the topic of whether there are property rights in spectrum outside of those narrowly assigned by license. As explained by Professor Thomas Hazlett, in the early 1920s radio broadcasters claimed property interests in both licenses and the underlying spectrum. After a federal court found that the federal government had little discretion in licensing broadcasters, Congress passed the Radio Act of 1927 which expropriated all private interests in spectrum and codified the language now found in Section 301 of the Communications Act. The purpose of both acts is "to maintain the control of the United States over all the channels of interstate and foreign radio transmission." Independent of any license structure, the "United States," the federal government, asserts ultimate control over all wireless spectrum.
As recently as the 1990s, the vast majority of spectrum was in the federal inventory that the FCC could not regulate in any manner. If the FCC could regulate federal spectrum, there would have been no need for a series of statutes instructing NTIA to transfer from the federal inventory to the FCC bands of spectrum for auction for commercial use. Even after an FCC auction, federal users retain certain rights such as compensation for relocation.
The tragedy is that the FCC in 2020 modified the Ligado licenses by assigning property rights to Ligado that infringed on the property rights of DoD users. The DoD and the Executive Branch claim they never agreed to transfer certain spectrum property rights to the FCC, and for the FCC in turn, to assign those property rights to Ligado or anyone else. Ligado disagrees and says that its FCC-issued licenses must be honored despite DoD's protests.
Improper transfers of property rights by the FCC are rare but not unprecedented. For example, in 2001the FCC attempted to reauction licenses assigned to NextWave that the Supreme Court later held were protected by bankruptcy law.
Six years after the 2020 FCC license modification for Ligado, confusion reigns. The dispute could have been avoided if there were one, rather than two, federal authorities in charge of spectrum. The unresolved dispute between NTIA and the FCC would have been resolved by one agency clearly in charge.
It is difficult to look at the federal government and federal communications law and see how the FCC has authority unilaterally to take spectrum property rights away from the DoD or any other federal agency.
But it is equally difficult to see that Ligado has not been harmed by its reasonable reliance on an FCC license modification. Based on the FCC's action, Ligado was induced to spend vast sums to develop a business model based on an FCC license modification that now seems tenuous. Ligado could have a strong claim for wrongful inducement, but that is not Ligado's claim.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is interested in property rights in this case. But those rights are efficient only with a single, undisputed authority of property. When there are two or more authorities at odds with one another, property rights and the parties interested in them are diminished. The federal government should consolidate spectrum management into a single agency rather than two.
Read in RealClearMarkets (https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2026/03/19/spectrum_when_one_head_is_better_than_two_1170467.html).
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At A Glance:
Harold Furchtgott-Roth, former commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
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Original text here: https://www.hudson.org/technology/spectrum-when-one-head-better-two-harold-furchtgott-roth
[Category: ThinkTank]
CSIS Issues Commentary: Could Iran Disrupt the Gulf Countries' Desalinated Water Supplies?
WASHINGTON, March 20 -- The Center for Strategic and International Studies issued the following commentary on March 19, 2026, by David Michel, senior associate (non-resident) for water security with the Global Food and Water Security Program:* * *
Could Iran Disrupt the Gulf Countries' Desalinated Water Supplies?
The economies of the Persian Gulf countries depend on oil and natural gas. Their populations depend on desalinated water. Nature endows the Arabian Peninsula with scant freshwater resources. Consequently, all of the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nations lining the Gulf's southern ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, March 20 -- The Center for Strategic and International Studies issued the following commentary on March 19, 2026, by David Michel, senior associate (non-resident) for water security with the Global Food and Water Security Program: * * * Could Iran Disrupt the Gulf Countries' Desalinated Water Supplies? The economies of the Persian Gulf countries depend on oil and natural gas. Their populations depend on desalinated water. Nature endows the Arabian Peninsula with scant freshwater resources. Consequently, all of the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nations lining the Gulf's southernshores critically rely on desalination plants drawing seawater from the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea. The war on Iran that began on February 28 puts these essential water systems at risk. Desalination facilities in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) suffered indirect damage from missile and drone strikes early in the conflict. Subsequently, plants in Bahrain and Iran have reportedly been intentionally attacked. Deliberate targeting of desalination infrastructure would represent a significant conflict escalation, potentially threatening vital water supplies for millions of people across the region.
Petrostates and Saltwater Kingdoms
The Middle East is one of the most arid regions on Earth. Across the whole of the Arabian Peninsula, not a single permanent river flows. Only Oman and Yemen enjoy a handful of small, often brackish, natural lakes. For the GCC countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, UAE, and Saudi Arabia), most of their freshwater supply comes from a constellation of groundwater aquifers. Many of these, however, are severely over-exploited, depleted at rates far exceeding what nature can replenish. The total renewable surface and groundwater resources of the six GCC countries together amount to 7.21 billion cubic meters (m3) a year--less than the annual flow of the Potomac River for a population of 62 million.
Water managers generally consider that societies require 1700 m3 of renewable freshwater per person each year to meet their populations' water needs, from drinking, cooking, and washing to the demands of agriculture and industry. Below that threshold, "water stress" emerges, and competition for water resources may begin to impact countries' social welfare. By this metric, the members of the GCC exhibit "absolute water scarcity." According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Oman enjoys no more than 286 m3 per capita of annually available renewable freshwater resources; Bahrain and Saudi Arabia each possess only 75 m3 per capita per year; Qatar has 20 m3 per capita per year; while the UAE and Kuwait receive just 15 m3 and 4 m3, respectively.
But technology and geology have given the GCC countries an alternative means to meet their freshwater needs. Hydrocarbon riches have provided these nations with the financial and energy resources needed to develop desalination systems capable of supplying their growing economies and populations. While the first saltwater "distillation" efforts in Saudi Arabia date to the early twentieth century, Gulf desalination capacity accelerated exponentially in the wake of the 1970s oil crises. From 1990 to 2022, annual desalinated water production soared by 314 percent across the GCC, rising from 1.4 to 5.9 billion m3. The six Gulf states now count some 3,401 operational desalination plants, comprising 19 percent of all desalination facilities worldwide. Collectively, these plants can churn out 22.67 million m3 of desalinated water each day--enough to fill over 9,000 Olympic-size swimming pools--representing 33 percent of global daily production capacity. The "petrostates" have become "saltwater kingdoms."
A Strategic Vulnerability
For the GCC countries, extensive desalination systems constitute indispensable critical infrastructure. Desalination fulfills 77.3 percent of total water demand in Qatar, 67.5 percent in Bahrain, 52.1 percent in the UAE, 42.2 percent in Kuwait, 31 percent in Oman, and 18.1 percent in Saudi Arabia. Desalination plants are especially important for meeting drinking water needs. Qatar derives 99 percent of its drinking water supplies from its network of desalination facilities, and Bahrain over 90 percent. For Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, the figures are 90 percent, 86 percent, 70 percent, and 42 percent, respectively. Cities such as Doha, Dubai, Manama, and Kuwait City would not be possible without desalination. Qatar and Bahrain, in particular, also rely heavily on desalination for industry, too, devoting over half their desalinated water production to sectors such as petrochemicals and data centers. Damage or disruptions to the region's desalination infrastructure could compromise crucial water resources for business, industry, and thousands or even millions of people across the Persian Gulf.
Concerns for the security of Gulf desalination systems rose from the outset of the Iran war. Within the first days of the conflict, reports circulated that the Fujairah F1 power and water complex in the UAE and the Doha West power and water station in Kuwait had been damaged by missiles or falling debris from intercepted drones, though operations continued uninterrupted at both facilities. Then on March 7, Iran accused the United States of attacking a desalination plant on Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz. Claiming the strike impacted water supplies to 30 villages, Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi warned, "the U.S. set this precedent, not Iran." The following day, the Bahraini Ministry of Interior alleged that an Iranian drone had hit one of the country's desalination centers, but without affecting water supplies.
Though the war in the Persian Gulf has not so far materially disrupted the region's water supplies, the prospective risks are real. The GCC's desalination plants are large, fixed, open-air industrial complexes. Mostly concentrated along the coast within 350 kilometers of the Islamic Republic, they are as exposed to Iranian weaponry as any of the civilian infrastructure that has yet been targeted, from oil and gas terminals to airports and hotels. Desalination plants are also essentially linear facilities, meaning that the seawater-to-freshwater transformation takes place through an ordered sequence of stages. Damage to sensitive parts of the system, such as high-pressure pumps or membrane buildings, could disable production entirely, potentially requiring weeks to repair.
By the same token, the GCC's desalination infrastructure is susceptible to multiple vulnerabilities, from its energy and seawater supplies to its distribution networks and operating systems. Desalination is an energy-intensive process, for example. Due to that energy need, some three-quarters of desalination plants in the GCC countries are integrated power and water production facilities. Freshwater output from these installations could thus be interrupted not only by strikes on the water treatment units but also on the energy plants and grid connections supplying them. Cut the water by cutting the power. Similarly, water produced by central desalination plants must then be distributed to consumers. Iran might attempt to degrade GCC water systems by targeting the pumping stations and pipelines that deliver desalinated water to users.
On a different register, Gulf desalination plants require a continuous supply of incoming seawater. Iran might seek to incapacitate GCC water systems by blocking or fouling their saltwater intakes in the Persian Gulf. This scenario has unfolded before. In 1991, during the first Gulf War, Iraqi forces purposely destroyed most of Kuwait's desalination capacity and dumped millions of barrels of oil into the northern Persian Gulf, jeopardizing water intakes for plants in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. After coalition forces retook the country, water shortages forced Kuwaiti authorities to cut household water services to four days a week while relying on contracted tanker ships and hundreds of tanker trucks to deliver bulk water for the population. The Seawater Reverse Osmosis (SWRO) technologies predominating today's desalination plants could be markedly more vulnerable to clogged intakes and fouled filtration membranes than the thermal processes common in the 1990s. Tellingly, in 2008-2009, a massive "red tide" algal bloom shut down several installations in Oman and the UAE for up to two months due to this risk.
Finally, industry analysts judge that GCC desalination plants could face Iranian cyber threats. Attackers might penetrate water providers' IT networks, for instance, or compromise their operating technologies or industrial control systems. Iran has actively targeted water sector infrastructure, utilities, and energy systems around the GCC (as well as in the U.S. and Israel) for many years, and Tehran has already launched aggressive cyber retaliation operations in the current conflict.
Weaponizing Water
Deliberately striking at the Gulf's vital desalination systems would represent a significant escalation in hostilities. Article 54(2) of the 1977 Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions expressly prohibits attacking or destroying "objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as . . . drinking water installations and supplies." Targeting such essential civilian infrastructure violates international law and could constitute a war crime.
Yet Iran might come to calculate that threatening GCC water supplies could provide an effective asymmetric strategy for waging an existential struggle for regime survival. Iran can neither defeat the United States and Israel militarily nor prevent them from striking Iranian territory at will. Instead, Tehran has embarked on a campaign of both "horizontal" and "vertical" escalation. Closing the Strait of Hormuz, throttling global energy and fertilizer markets, and unleashing missile and drone barrages at soft targets in the GCC and other countries all serve to widen the war's scope and raise its stakes, increasing the costs of continuing conflict for governments, economies, and publics far beyond the Persian Gulf. The goal is not military victory but strategic leverage in a war of political attrition in which Iran believes it can outlast the United States. So far, the GCC states have not been direct combatants in this fight and have not taken offensive actions against Iran. Targeting their water sources could change that. But Iran might gamble that attacking critical water infrastructure could alternatively (or simultaneously) work to drive wedges between the Gulf governments that Tehran views as helping enable the conflict and the U.S. and Israeli governments prosecuting it, while also heightening pressures on GCC capitals to seek an end to a war they did not choose.
Whether deliberate Iranian attacks would succeed in substantially compromising GCC water supplies remains an open question. Desalination systems are widely distributed, with each country maintaining dozens to hundreds of installations. Damages even to multiple facilities could likely be largely compensated by production from others. Yet within these dispersed supply networks, each country also operates a number of mega complexes, some serving a million people or more. Successful attacks on these hubs could be far more disruptive. Likewise, missile and drone strikes pose the greatest threat to individual plants. Major weaponized oil spills, however, could potentially cripple whole city systems for hundreds of miles around. Without greater (unlikely) knowledge of remaining Iranian capacities and actual GCC vulnerabilities, the effective impacts from cyber risks can only be speculative. Extreme scenarios of concerted attacks integrating all three tactics--drones, oil, and cyberwarfare--while improbable, should not be dismissed as unimaginable.
Importantly, though the GCC countries have developed considerable production capacity for desalinated water, they have not, for the most part, established corresponding capacity for stockpiling against supply disruptions. The UAE, for instance, in 2017 unveiled its 2036 Water Security Strategy to increase water efficiency and boost national water storage. But realizing the initiative's goal would provide water stores for only two days of national demand under normal conditions, potentially lasting up to 16-45 days under rationing for extreme emergency. Saudi Arabia, too, has created strategic reservoirs furnishing modest water reserves. But Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar possess insufficient storage capacity to buffer significant supply interruptions.
Wells of Anxiety
The ultimate ramifications of any Iranian attacks on GCC desalination systems would depend upon the specific circumstances. Which country or countries are targeted? Which plant(s) are struck? What is the nature and extent of the damages and the duration of the resulting disruption? The most important effects could well be psychological. The GCC countries have devoted decades to cultivating a business model premised on their reputation as islands of prosperity and stability even in seas of geopolitical turmoil. Iran's continuing coercive capacity to precipitate potential water crises across the GCC prospectively casts this premise into question. "The real weapon is not the drone," in the words of one analyst, "it is the insurance cancellation, the rerouted tanker, and the investor who pauses." For insurers, investors--and inhabitants--potentially forced to envisage relying on tankers and trucks to bring vital water for their homes, hospitals, schools, and businesses, confidence in the continuing security of that business model could dry up long before the last water from their taps.
More than 40 years ago, a classified CIA analysis, made public in 2010, called out the security vulnerabilities created by the Gulf countries' dependence on desalination. The current conflict reveals with force that the dependence has deepened and the vulnerabilities remain. When the guns fall silent, GCC conceptions of their water security and of their national security will likely stand transformed.
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David Michel is a senior associate (non-resident) for water security with the Global Food and Water Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
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Original text here: https://www.csis.org/analysis/could-iran-disrupt-gulf-countries-desalinated-water-supplies
[Category: ThinkTank]
America First Governors & AGs Urge Senate to Pass the SAVE America
WASHINGTON, March 20 -- The America First Policy Institute issued the following news release on March 19, 2026:* * *
America First Governors & AGs Urge Senate to Pass the SAVE America
The America First Policy Institute's (AFPI) Governors' and Attorneys General Councils sent joint letters to U.S. Senate leaders, urging passage of the SAVE America Act.
The letters underscore growing concerns about vulnerabilities in the nation's election system, including the risk of non citizens voting, and call for a uniform federal standard requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote and voter ID for ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, March 20 -- The America First Policy Institute issued the following news release on March 19, 2026: * * * America First Governors & AGs Urge Senate to Pass the SAVE America The America First Policy Institute's (AFPI) Governors' and Attorneys General Councils sent joint letters to U.S. Senate leaders, urging passage of the SAVE America Act. The letters underscore growing concerns about vulnerabilities in the nation's election system, including the risk of non citizens voting, and call for a uniform federal standard requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote and voter ID forall state and federal elections.
AFPI Governors cite their firsthand experience with declining public confidence in the integrity of American elections. The Attorneys General warn that states without voter ID requirements, often those with large illegal populations, have failed to adequately secure their elections. This lack of safeguards can allow those states to wield outsized influence over national elections. The Attorneys General also refute claims that the SAVE America Act would restrict lawful voter access and disenfranchise Americans, emphasizing that the legislation protects eligible American voters while strengthening election security.
Governors' Council letter available here (https://www.americafirstpolicy.com/assets/uploads/files/AFPI_GOV_COUNCIL_SAVE_AMERICA_LETTER_03.2026.pdf). Attorneys General Council letter available here (https://www.americafirstpolicy.com/assets/uploads/files/AFPI_AG_COUNCIL_SAVE_AMERICA_LETTER_03.2026.pdf).
AFPI supports commonsense election integrity measures, including voter ID, to ensure that only American citizens can legally vote in American elections. Click here (https://www.americafirstpolicy.com/policy-areas/election-integrity) to learn more about AFPI's election integrity work.
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INFODOC: https://www.americafirstpolicy.com/assets/uploads/files/AFPI_GOV_COUNCIL_SAVE_AMERICA_LETTER_03.2026.pdf
INFODOC: https://www.americafirstpolicy.com/assets/uploads/files/AFPI_AG_COUNCIL_SAVE_AMERICA_LETTER_03.2026.pdf
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Original text here: https://www.americafirstpolicy.com/issues/america-first-governors-ags-urge-senate-to-pass-the-save-america
[Category: ThinkTank]
12News' and Ivy League Expert's False ESA Claims Collapse--Retraction Required
PHOENIX, Arizona, March 20 [Category: ThinkTank] -- The Goldwater Institute posted the following news:* * *
12News' and Ivy League Expert's False ESA Claims Collapse--Retraction Required
*
Over the past several weeks, Arizona 12News reporters Craig Harris and Joe Dana have repeatedly, falsely, claimed that 20% of the use of the state's Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program consists of improper "unallowable" purchases. Now, as their narrative implodes under public scrutiny, an actual statistical analysis conducted by the Arizona Department of Education (ADE) shows program misspending ... Show Full Article PHOENIX, Arizona, March 20 [Category: ThinkTank] -- The Goldwater Institute posted the following news: * * * 12News' and Ivy League Expert's False ESA Claims Collapse--Retraction Required * Over the past several weeks, Arizona 12News reporters Craig Harris and Joe Dana have repeatedly, falsely, claimed that 20% of the use of the state's Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program consists of improper "unallowable" purchases. Now, as their narrative implodes under public scrutiny, an actual statistical analysis conducted by the Arizona Department of Education (ADE) shows program misspendingis less than 2% (with actual "fraud or egregious purchases" totaling just 0.3% ).
Yet rather than retract their false claims, 12News simply recruited "a Princeton education researcher" to bail them out-featuring her in a subsequently unveiled news segment to proclaim ADE's analysis illegitimate: "Quite frankly this would not fly," she declared of the department's analysis. "This would be a failing grade if it was a paper."
12 News' Craig Harris promptly laundered her claims as established fact, proclaiming, without any ambiguity:
"The ADE released an audit today by one of its employees who says 2 percent of purchases are unallowed. However, the research is largely skewed, has a miniscule sample and underrepresents two key areas... The data was significantly skewed to lower the unallowed/fraud rate."
Indeed, citing supposed evidence of a major blunder in ADE's analysis, 12News' Ivy League academic confidently assured the network's audience:
"The innocent explanation would be that this is simply an error on the part of the [ADE] analyst. The impolite explanation is that this is an active attempt to mislead the public about the current rate of unallowables."
Unfortunately for 12News and their ostensible expert (sociology professor Jennifer Jennings), it turns out (as shown in more detail below) that her words described her own mistaken analysis-meaning the claims parroted by the 12News' reporting duo to discredit ADE's findings and absolve themselves of the need to retract their prior stories were yet again...demonstrably false.
This is especially significant because Mr. Harris, Mr. Dana, and Prof. Jennings occupy positions of enormous public trust, representing media and academic institutions they did not build and whose reputations and esteem they did not create. Using the eminence of such institutions to advance claims based on anything but a relentless and objective commitment to the truth is a betrayal of that public trust and of these storied institutions themselves.
These individuals thus have a duty to uphold the standards of journalistic and academic integrity and retract the erroneous and deceptive statements they have made, respectively, against the Arizona Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program, the families it serves, and the men and women who implement it on behalf of over 100,000 children.
I understand that journalism and scholarly inquiry are by their nature messy-and that we should welcome, rather than denounce, good-faith efforts to understand and interpret available evidence even when those interpretations ultimately prove incorrect. This may be indeed be the case with Prof. Jennings, whose misinterpretation of the data could very well be the result of honest error.
But regardless of the explanation, if Mr. Harris, Mr. Dana, and Prof. Jennings are to retain any credibility in their reporting and analysis of Arizona's school choice programs, they must retract and cease repeating the false claims below. Trying to redirect to the supposed misstatements of others or trying to rewrite the obvious history of 12News' recent claims are not sufficient or acceptable remedies-particularly when these false claims have been shared with tens of thousands of viewers by 12News and are now used to justify and fuel an active political campaign against a program serving over 100,000 children.
Claim #1: 20% of ESA purchases are unallowed
( Mr. Harris ): "Empowerment Scholarship supporters say there is minimal fraud in the program: 1% or less. But new department of education records that 12 News obtained show that unallowed purchases like those cell phones are actually around 20%. That's 1 in 5."
( Mr. Dana): A" very big story from my colleague Craig Harris reveals an audit of a very large sample of ESA purchases that shows just over 20% are considered unallowable. 20%. That's higher than any previous official estimates."
(12News Mark Curtis ): Some people claim the number of people gaming the system is tiny, but now [12News] has uncovered records that show the abuse is much more widespread"
Basic journalistic ethics should have compelled 12News' reporters to admit at the outset that this 20% figure was not based on a representative sample of ESA purchases overall. Instead, it reflected the rate of unallowable purchases among ESA transactions that had been specifically flagged by the department's audit protocols as higher risk.
Claiming otherwise would be akin to declaring that if 20% of suspects investigated by the police are guilty of a particular crime, that 20% of Americans overall are guilty of that crime.
Claim #2: ADE's analysis exposing 12News' deception was defective & not actually based on a random, representative sample.
Harris : " The ADE released an audit today by one of its employees who says 2 percent of purchases are unallowed. However, the research is largely skewed, has a miniscule sample and underrepresents two key areas."
Harris : "The Arizona Department of Education says it did a random sample of ESA expenditures to show misspending is low... In looking at the data, it does not appear it was truly random... In the simplest terms, a random sample is supposed to work like pulling names from a hat. If the sample is truly random, it should look broadly like the full set of transactions it came from... But the state's own datafile has a basic problem: the sample does not appear to match the underlying transaction mix. That means the sample was not random...
Harris : "And, it contains far too few Marketplace and reimbursement transactions... "
Harris : "Had ADE accurately used the correct data set, it would have found over 12 percent of transactions and 14 percent of dollars were "unallowed.""
Harris' claims were based on the analysis of their Princeton consulted expert, Prof. Jennings, which was glowingly shared in another 12News segment compiled by Mr. Dana:
Dana: "There are 4 ways ESA parents buy items. The state has provided 12News access to two of those ways: reimbursement and marketplace data. All that data for fiscal year 2026 shows marketplace made up 75% of all transactions. Reimbursements made up 25%. In other words, 3 marketplace transactions for every 1 reimbursement. But the audit sample described by the Arizona Department of Ed shows 40% of marketplace and 60% reimbursement. "
Jennings: "It turns out to be the case that those ratios [in ADE's audit] are roughly flipped. And that wouldn't matter if they didn't have different rates of unallowed expenses, but in fact, marketplace has a much higher rate, which then in turn produces a different portrait of the overall unallowed rate."
Unfortunately, this entire claim-which underpins 12News' and Prof Jennings' assertion that ADE's analysis was defective-is simply, factually wrong. And this is more than a mere minor technicality, as it renders 12News' primary claims completely false, forcing them to again confront the fact that an actual random sample of ESA purchases has entirely discredited their original claims of 20% unallowable spending rates in the program.
As shown below, when looking specifically at the mix of marketplace and reimbursement transactions that 12News/Jennings analyzed, we see that data confirm the validity of ADE's audit and expose the erroneous analysis of its critics:
Based on the full datasets made available by ADE and looking at the same time period as 12News/Jennings, it turns out the dollar amounts associated with ESA marketplace purchases in FY 2026 (through Dec. 31, 2025) total $51.3 million dollars. The total for reimbursements was $81.3 million. That means marketplace spending made up 39% of the total marketplace/reimbursement spending, while reimbursements made up 61%.
Notice those are almost exactly the same ratios that appear in ADE's randomized audit sample, which 12News and Prof. Jennings complained about above, in which they said: "But the audit sample described by the Arizona Department of Ed shows 40% of marketplace and 60% reimbursement."
In short, ADE's sample correctly reflects the makeup of spending on marketplace and reimbursement orders in terms of actual dollars spent. (Further confirming the actual alignment between the audit and the program-wide ESA purchases, the ratio of marketplace to reimbursement dollars in ADE's audit is 37% to 63%.)
But of course, even if the dollars are right, we would still expect the relative number of transactions in ADE's audit to also resemble the broader program data if it is truly a representative, random sample. According to 12News/Jennings, this is where we see evidence that ADE "flipped the ratios."
Again, according to 12News/Jennings: "All that data [for the full program] for fiscal year 2026 shows marketplace made up 75% of all transactions. Reimbursements made up 25%. In other words, 3 marketplace transactions for every 1 reimbursement. But the audit sample described by the Arizona Department of Ed shows 40% of marketplace and 60% reimbursement."
So, did ADE's sample somehow get the dollars right, but the number of purchases, wrong?
No.
As 12News and Prof. Jennings should have acknowledged, the data from ADE for the full program was provided on an item level for marketplace purchases, but on a transaction level for reimbursements. (Families submit an entire receipt for all items in a transaction together when reimbursed, but all items are individually automatically logged when purchased through the marketplace).
This means that each of the 1 million FY 2026 marketplace records provided by ADE were for individual items. But each of 345,000 reimbursement records were for transactions (many of which have many items). And when you compare the number of marketplace items vs the number of reimbursement transactions, you get (as 12News/Jennings did) a 75% marketplace vs 25% reimbursement ratio.
This mashup of two different units of measure unsurprisingly creates the illusion of a discrepancy when compared to the ratio of marketplace ( transactions) vs reimbursement ( transactions) found in ADE's audit sample, which (as 12News/Jennings complained), produces a 40% marketplace vs 60% reimbursement ratio.
Yet, as already shown above, this latter 40%-60% ratio of transactions in ADE's audit also lines up closely with the ratio of dollars. This alone should have tipped 12News/Jennings off to the fact that something was wrong in their preferred analysis.
And, if 12News/Jennings had bothered to look, they would have seen that ADE's audit sample even yields almost exactly that same ratio that 12News and Jennings expected (75% vs 25%) if measured using the same mismatched process Jennings used for the overall ESA dataset: ADE's audit sample includes 1,028 reimbursement transactions and 2,663 marketplace items (excluding 7 returns), for a 72% marketplace vs 28% reimbursement split.
In other words, using their mashup of transactions vs items, 12News and Jennings find a 75%/25% split among ESA purchases overall, while the random sample in ADE's audit yields a similar 72%/28% split when using the same calculation approach.
That's obviously a lot of numbers and math, but the takeaways are that:
1) ADE's audit sample almost perfectly mirrors the overall ESA program data for actual dollars spent by expenditure type: roughly a 60%-40% split between reimbursement and marketplace expenditures in both the overall program data and the audit sample.
2) 12News / Jennings bungled their comparison of the relative share of ESA purchases by failing to acknowledge that half the records they were looking at were items, and half were transactions. Inconsistently comparing these two created the alleged discrepancies they claimed existed in ADE's data.
3) 12News' / Jennings' claims against the representativeness of ADE's audit sample are simply unsupported by the data. Without the fig leaf of being able to allege a discrepancy in ADE's audit, 12News should immediately retract its false stories and claims.
Perhaps most damning of all, as I have written previously-to no response from Mr. Harris-his complaints that ADE's audit "contains far too few Marketplace and reimbursement transactions" is not only an inaccurate claim (as shown above), but also a nakedly hypocritical indictment.
The most recent official ESA quarterly report of all transactions ( FY 2026, Q2 ) shows marketplace transactions made up 12.9% of all ESA dollars (including spending on 'direct pay', debit cards, etc.). In ADE's statistical analysis of the random sample of ESA purchases, marketplace transactions made up 13.2% of sampled ESA dollars. In other words, ADE's random sample once again mirrors the overall program data. In contrast, in the risk-based audit Mr. Harris relied on to peddle the original fictitious 20% "unallowable" spending narrative, marketplace purchases made up a whopping 44.9% of the total records. Yet inexplicably, Mr. Harris was completely unbothered by the unrepresentative nature of the risk-based audit sample he used for his narrative, while incorrectly attacking ADE's.
Claim #3: 12 News Never Said "Fraud"
Mr. Harris' recent assertions that "12News never said 20 percent fraud" (emphasis added) is an intellectually bankrupt attempt to hide the obvious implied meaning in Harris' statements: As mentioned above, Mr. Harris' declared in the news segment for his original story:
"Empowerment Scholarship supporters say there is minimal fraud in the program: 1% or less. But new department of education records that 12 News obtained show that unallowed purchases like those cell phones are actually around 20%. That's 1 in 5."
And this was not an isolated statement. In his written article for that same bombshell story, Harris reiterated :
"Arizona Republican leaders, including state Schools Chief Tom Horne, have long insisted fraud in Arizona's Empowerment Scholarship Account program is minimal.
'One percent or less,' Horne often has said.
But 12News has obtained new public records -from Horne's Department of Education -that tell a very different story.
Documents uncovered by 12News Investigates show unallowable purchases -spending explicitly banned under ESA program rules -may account for about 20 percent of transactions."
If, as Harris now claims, he was not seeking to induce casual readers into believing that fraud was 20%, then it was a spectacular breach of journalist standards to declare that the data "tell a very different story" from the claim that "fraud" is "one percent or less."
On this point, to my knowledge, Mr. Harris is correct that he has carefully avoided explicitly stringing the words together in a way that would count as outright declaring fraud to be 20%. But the legal standards of a courtroom are not the same as the standards of basic journalistic ethics, which he has far more indefensibly breached.
As is clear from the above, the central premise promoted recently by the 12News team-that ESA "abuse" is "widespread"-has been built on falsehoods, errors, and deceptive framing.
Certainly, any individual that knowingly uses ESA funds to purchase unallowable items-particularly egregious non-educational items-should be subject to rigorous penalties and enforcement.
But 12News' attempt to now rewrite history and suggest that their 20% "unallowable" spending rate is still a legitimate measure (even after it has been dismantled) because they assert that roughly 20% of parents have made at least 1 unallowable purchase at some point in their ESA careers (out of hundreds or thousands of purchases, and typically for something like a lunchbox) is nothing but a continued effort to stretch all bounds of reason and avoid responsibility for their claims.
To that end, if it is I who am in error with respect to any of the claims or analysis above, I will publicly retract them and express gratitude for the correction.
ESA families and Arizona voters expect and deserve the truth from those charged with reporting the news or with educating many of our nation's next generation. May those individuals act and speak accordingly.
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Original text here: https://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/12news-esa-retraction-required/