You're the president in 2029. The political leadership of Chicago and Illinois are holding an emergency press conference. They're broke. No more money for cops, teachers, trash collectors.

The question, from @ProfSchleich:
Do you bail them out? statecraft.pub/p/should-the-f… It's not a crazy hypothetical.

Chicago itself operates 4 pension funds. All of them are in big trouble, as is Illinois' state pension system.

People think broken windows is just "clean up graffiti, and people will commit less crime"

But the original broken windows theory and practice were both much more nuanced (1/n)

https://twitter.com/MattZeitlin/status/1961849838565240992

Kelling and Wilson wrote the eponymous essay in 1982, and they do sketch out the idea most people think of as "broken windows theory": In a disorderly neighborhood, people are more likely to commit crimes.

theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

Federal hiring is broken. It can take years to get a job, the pay scales are too rigid, you can't promote a rockstar, and you can't fire a dud.

Today on Statecraft, @judgeglock asks: What if we just copy what the states already do? statecraft.pub/p/how-to-fix-g… Almost half the states have at-will employment, i.e., no civil service protections. In many states, government managers can hire someone off the street, just like the private sector.

But at the national level, there's a 300-page hiring rulebook to follow.

Dean Karlan's spent his career obsessing over a development economics question: How can we actually test what works?

For the past two years, his job was to make USAID more efficient — to get the maximum value out of each dollar.

Then came DOGE.
statecraft.pub/p/how-to-fix-f… This morning, Ross Douthat interviewed one of the DOGE team members involved in restructuring USAID.

Interesting to read/listen to the two conversations in parallel with each other. nytimes.com/2025/07/31/opi…

Look, I've been in the "you don't hate journalists enough" camp my entire professional life.

But a lot of my SF friends have this strong intuition that it's immoral to profile public figures critically. I think that's a crazy overcorrection.

https://twitter.com/atroyn/status/1950293028587131005

DOGE was the biggest news story in the country for months. DOGE team members said their work was vital to save the nation. Maybe it was! But if that's true, then people are going to write about you.

Even if you think caring about this stuff is a red flag, it behooves you to have the facts straight.

Quick thread on some highlights (although the full slide deck is a quick read):

https://twitter.com/jesusferna7026/status/1929278948350771281

Total fertility rate is down everywhere.

Plenty of middle-income countries have it worse than the rich+ East Asian countries.

NSF director is resigning — he was a Trump appointee in 2020.

A week ago, he was told to prepare a plan to cut more than half of the NSF staff and budget. science.org/content/articl… The proposed DOGE cuts to the NSF are similar to those proposed at the DOE's Loan Programs Office:

They're bad ideas in their own right, and they'll hamstring the administration's ability to fulfill its own goals.

https://x.com/rSanti97/status/1910333957587017867

In 1980s NYC, it was normal to see >100k robberies a year.
Miss Piggy was mugged in Central Park in 1984's Muppet movie. No one batted an eye.

In 1994, crime dropped off a cliff.

@PeterMoskos explains exactly how policing saved New York.
statecraft.pub/p/how-to-fix-c… Before this interview, I didn't understand the scale of the success in the 1990s.

The drop in NYC crime in one year was 25% of the entire US crime decline that year.

California knows it has a fire problem. So why can't the state solve it?

To try and understand, I talked with the fire policy adviser to CA's Dem congressional delegation.

New Statecraft:
statecraft.pub/p/how-to-beat-… It's not like CA politicians don't get the fire mitigation issue.

But their fixes have been bogged down in "bureaucratic bottlenecks" and "Byzantine environmental approval process."

Our very first Statecraft interview was with Mark Dybul, the creator of PEPFAR.

He lays out why it works so well and why it's been such a huge break with traditional "global health" approaches.

Timely read.

statecraft.pub/p/saving-twent… I'm agnostic on the "soft power" value of PEPFAR (and on the concept of soft power in general).

The value of the program is that it saves the lives of many pregnant women and their children for very cheap.

DOGE is working on hiring and firing, IT modernization, and regulation-slashing.

But what about the spicy stuff?

For @commonplc, @matthewesche and I tackle everyone's favorite topic: federal data collection. commonplace.org/2025/01/21/swe… We look at three problems with federal data collection:

1) It’s too hard to collect voluntary data from American citizens.
2) The data the feds collect is often impossible to use.
3) We don't measure some things we really care about.

Every advocate for high-skilled immigration I know has been flagging these issues with the H1B for years.

https://twitter.com/rubirosarevival/status/1872022731119820808

It’s obviously bad that a handful of outsourcing companies take the lion’s share of H1B visas.

The NYT was covering this a decade ago. Long overdue for a policy fix.

So DOGE is going to be a blue ribbon committee. What are those good for, anyway?

Three weeks ago, we investigated exactly that question. statecraft.pub/p/how-to-fix-d… Commissions work when commissioners are bought in and when they can generate political pressure for their recommendations. With Elon, both boxes are checked.

One quarter of all kidneys from organ donors get thrown in the trash.

At Statecraft, we uncovered why a corrupt monopolist has managed organ procurement for 40 years, and how it’s getting fixed.
statecraft.pub/p/how-to-stop-… This is a story about so many crazy things, but this stands out to me.

One loose clause in the bill leads directly to a decades-long monopoly.