When it comes to the most important issues in the just-completed presidential election, education was not likely among them, coming in sixth in recent Gallup polling behind the economy, concerns about democracy, and a few other issues. The topic got only fleeting mentions in presidential debates and was never brought up by moderators. And education is rightly small in federal elections: It is a matter reserved to individuals, communities, and states by the Constitution, though there are many things Washington is doing in education that need to end.

So how was education important? While it does not show up as a distinct issue in polling, there seems to be a growing conclusion that one of the things that cost Vice President Harris votes was the question of transgender athletes, specifically players born biologically male competing in women’s sports. It is an issue at both the collegiate and K‑12 levels, and some people believe the Biden administration has threatened schools that prohibit transgender girls from playing girls’ sports under Title IX regulations that interpret protections based on “sex” to include gender identity. The administration says it is working on separate regulations for sports, but opponents argue the current rules sweep up all school activities.

Whatever the nuances of the regulations, this is largely an education fight, with sports embedded in our government-dominated education system, especially when it comes to elementary and secondary-aged kids. Around 87 percent of school-aged children attend public schools, which makes the vast majority of school athletes subject to federal rules. That dominance also means even privately educated athletes will be directly impacted by public school rules if they want to compete for state championships.

The sports fight, while somewhat distinct because direct competition is heavily influenced by physical differences, is a subset of the overall culture war we have seen burning especially hot in education over the last four years. It has been fueled by many cultural and social factors, but a fundamental problem is government dictating the values that will apply to all children.

This is most clear when it comes to federal regulations, which seek to impose one “solution” nationwide. You cannot even move to a different state to get education you think is right. When the Biden administration tried to impose its view of “right” with Title IX, it guaranteed that a difference of values—equality of participation versus equality of competition—would become a divisive national battle of values, requiring all Americans to fight politically for what they thought was best for their children.

Leaving decisions to states or districts is better than national imposition—smaller units can craft policies more consistent with the values predominant in specific communities—but states and districts often themselves contain people with conflicting values and desires. This is a major reason that educational freedom—often reduced to “school choice”—is crucial. It fundamentally changes decisions from top-down, winner-take-all, to free and individualized.

Do you as an educator or parent value equality of competition over equality of participation? Go to a school that shares that valuation and competes against like-minded institutions. Feel the other way? Do the same. And as long as you can make those choices without having to sacrifice education tax dollars, it is a free decision, not a political imposition.

The good news is that we have been making considerable headway toward the freedom model of education, and it has, at least this year, accompanied declining conflict. Of course, one year is not a trend, and correlation is not causation, but we can look to other countries to see that embracing choice in education has reduced wrenching social conflict. And yes, three state referenda seeking to expand educational freedom failed on election day, but polling typically shows majority support for choice, while the challenges to securing choice through referenda are largely peculiar to the referendum model itself, in which special interests such as teacher unions have especially outsized influence.

Restructuring education from a government-controlled to a choice-driven system will not end values-based conflicts. Wherever two or more people get together, disagreements will likely occur. But it will lower the political stakes, and thus the heat, and enable people to more peacefully coexist. 

Coming into office next year, Donald Trump will face massive budget deficits of $2 trillion a year and rising. Trump and every member of Congress now know that excessive deficits and spending can spike inflation, which is very unpopular with voters. The president and his budget team must find spending cuts to tackle the deficit monster.

However, Trump wants tax cuts, which would increase deficits. He also doesn’t want to cut Social Security or Medicare, and he may increase defense spending. Those are the three largest programs in the federal budget.

On the other hand, Trump has tasked Elon Musk with helping him cut federal spending, and there are many programs—even aside from the big three—that they should put on the chopping block:

1. K‑12 public school subsidies. President George W. Bush favored federal subsidies and top-down rules for the nation’s K‑12 schools. That approach failed, and Republicans now know that the future of K‑12 is state-driven school choice. The pandemic-era public school shutdowns bolstered the case for choice. The time is ripe to zero-out federal aid for public schools to save more than $30 billion a year.
2. Urban transit subsidies. Many urban rail systems attract few riders and cost far more than promised. Locally funded bus systems are a more efficient solution for moderate-income commuters. Trump should zero out $20 billion a year in federal subsidies for urban transit.
3. Foreign aid. The federal budget includes $47 billion for international aid programs in 2024. There is a lot of waste in foreign aid that should be cut. Poor countries grow their economies by market-based reforms, not by aid.
4. Green subsidies. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 is costing the budget about $100 billion a year in green energy tax breaks and subsidies. The expected cost of the bill has ballooned since it passed, and we are finding out that wind power, solar power, lithium batteries, and electric vehicles themselves cause environmental harm.
5. Broadband subsidies. The 2021 infrastructure bill added $65 billion in broadband subsidies, which came on top of more than $100 billion of broadband subsidies since the 1990s. New spending should be cancelled, as satellite internet service is now available everywhere.
6. Public housing and rental subsidies. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) hands out $55 billion a year for public housing and rental aid. This spending should be zeroed out, public housing should be privatized, and local governments should deregulate land use to spur private housing construction.
7. Community development grants. HUD hands out $21 billion a year to cities and counties for street projects, business subsides, arts facilities, and the like. These activities should be funded by local governments and the private sector.
8. Junk food subsidies. Trump partner Robert F. Kennedy Jr. favors cutting food stamp spending on junk food, which accounts for almost one-quarter of the $100 billion annual cost of the program. Junk food subsidies make no sense given America’s obesity crisis.
9. Farm subsidies for the rich. Trump and the Republicans generally support farm subsidies, but it should be politically feasible to cut aid to the wealthiest farmers. About 60 percent of the benefits from the three largest programs go to the top 10 percent of farms. Cuts would save billions of dollars a year.
10. Medicaid. This health program has grown explosively because the federal government subsidizes state program expansion in an uncontrolled manner. The government could save $300 billion a year within a decade by imposing a hard cap on aid to each state.

President-elect Trump says that Elon Musk will be in charge of cost-cutting, and Musk has talked about a new Department of Government Efficiency. But Musk seems to understand that we need program eliminations, not just efficiency, and he suggested a goal of $2 trillion in savings.

A key target for eliminations should be aid-to-state programs, such as K‑12 education, housing, and transit. Aid programs cost $1.1 trillion a year, and they are inherently inefficient and undemocratic because they impose costly regulations and top-down controls on the states. Federal aid should be phased out, allowing the states to design their own policies to match local preferences.

The Trump-Musk spending cut effort will, of course, face hurdles in Congress. The administration should focus on a handful of ripe targets, such as those listed here, and make a detailed argument for each cut. Trump should insist on eliminations in must-pass bills, such as the upcoming debt-limit in early 2025.

America risks a sustained economic crisis if we don’t cut federal spending. But cuts are also an opportunity to improve the nation’s governance and strengthen democracy by handing power back to the states. Furthermore, scrapping the top-down rules that come with federal programs would enhance diversity and expand freedom.

Every once in a while, I talk to someone who is doing so many amazing things that it’s hard to know where to start. Kansas mom Dalena Wallace is a perfect example. Like many education entrepreneurs, she started out homeschooling her own children. Her journey has included starting a microschool, a homeschool co-op, a network of school founders in her local community, and AIM Educational Collaborative LLC to support founders in similar situations.

A future Friday Feature blog will delve more deeply into Dalena’s tremendous work mentioned above. But her newest project is so unique that I wanted to cover it first. The Heartland Education Reformation Organization (HERO) connects Kansas churches and faith-based educators who want to start or support what she calls Creative Christian Learning Environments (CCLEs).

Dalena started HERO after realizing that many of the school founders she met—locally in Wichita and around the country—were Christians who were starting schools because they felt called by God and were mission-driven. Like her, many of the founders were homeschool moms. But a lot were former public school teachers who took the risk of quitting their jobs and giving up a steady income to serve their communities.

While Dalena appreciates them viewing their efforts as a ministry, as she does with her own work, she wondered, “What about your church? Your local church or your pastor? Does your own congregation support this?” Many of them told her they don’t talk about it in their congregations because they don’t want to cause trouble with members who are really invested in or teach in the public schools.

“What I can do to support them is to help rally the Church and the body of Christ,” Dalena realized, so she launched HERO. “I’m targeting the Church and asking the Church to get on board with this and support those who are out there doing the work. These school founders who are teaching and sacrificing their steady income and they’re just doing this work as missionaries out there. Now I’m asking the Church to support them.”

Through HERO, churches can support Christian education in one of three ways. First, they can host a school or start a school of their own. “We all know there’s a church on every corner, and they’re just sitting there empty Monday through Friday. So they might as well open their doors and let education happen,” explains Dalena. “The second option is that they can sponsor one of the existing schools that are in their community. They can show support by sending volunteers, saying we’re praying for you, donating supplies, things like that. And then the third option is to provide scholarships for students to attend these schools.”

In addition to encouraging churches to support CCLEs and connecting church leaders and potential founders, HERO offers resources to help people start, run, and promote schools. For churches, that includes assistance navigating the legal and regulatory landscape, discounted accounting services, and marketing opportunities. For educators, there is also training, teaching resources, and a community of fellow CCLE founders. The website features a directory of CCLEs in the network, which can help parents who are looking for a Christian education for their children.

“A lot of times when you talk to people about starting a school, they kind of go over a list of barriers and reasons why it wouldn’t work or what would be difficult about it,” says Dalena. “And I get that. But we’re not going to focus on that because they’re not insurmountable. These are things that you can easily overcome. And so I shine a light on the success stories of churches and schools partnering together, pastors and parents partnering together. And my goal is that it will inspire others—inspire other churches and pastors to do this, and school founders to take that first step.”

To Dalena, these partnerships make perfect sense. “This is what the Church says that they want to do. They want to make disciples, they want to educate and train people in the Lord. What better mission field than K12 education?” she points out. “And they’re really geared towards community service and missions. So it’s just kind of connecting that for them, letting them understand there’s a mission field right here in your own backyard. You guys are missing a prime opportunity for ministry.”

While this is a community service and mission opportunity, hosting CCLEs is also beneficial for churches. For example, one group in the HERO network was looking for a new facility. They found an old country church whose congregants were all elderly. Dalena says they hadn’t had young families and children in the church for decades. The church had a parsonage—which was down a long country road surrounded by acres and a pond—that wasn’t being used. The group approached the church and asked if they could use the parsonage for their school. The congregants welcomed them with open arms and said they’d love to have kids there again. The church had been suffering financially, so the partnership helped them by providing some extra income and by infusing life by having young families on the church grounds throughout the week.

“This is absolutely a grassroots thing. Churches are not usually the ones implementing this. The pastors, the elders, the boards of deacons, and all that. They are not the ones saying, ‘Hey, we see a need, we need to do this.’ What’s happening is that their members and community members and parents and teachers are starting this,” Dalena emphasizes. “I’m just letting them be aware of it and saying, ‘This didn’t start with you. But now’s your chance to get on board and get involved in this because it is from God, and it is important. So jump on that wagon, you know, and let’s go.’”

The Metropolitan Council, a regional planning and policymaking body for the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, is pushing ahead with a second suburban light rail transit extension while struggling to complete another one which is nine years behind schedule. The Council’s actions, like those of other agencies pursuing light rail, show a disregard for taxpayers and other stakeholders.

As Minnesota’s Legislative Auditor has reported, the Council originally obtained federal support for its Southwest Green Line Light Rail extension in 2011 based on an estimated cost of $1.25 billion and a revenue service date of 2018. The most recent available estimates (from two years ago) call for service to begin in 2027 and an overall project cost of $2.74 billion.

The pre-pandemic daily ridership estimate for the extension was a modest 28,900 daily rides. It remains to be seen whether those anticipated riders show up. Ridership on the current Green Line service which connects downtown Minneapolis and downtown St. Paul is around 25,000, well below 2019 levels.

Yet despite its struggles with the Green Line extension, the Met Council is going full steam ahead with plans to extend the Blue Line through the northwestern Minneapolis suburbs of Robbinsville, Crystal, and Brooklyn Center. The project is listed as one of those in line for a Federal Transit Administration Capital Investment Grant as shown on the agency’s monthly dashboard.

The Blue Line extension has been in the grant pipeline for several years but suffered a setback in 2018 when BNSF broke off discussions with the Met Council about allowing light rail trains to share its existing freight rail tracks. A few years later, planners returned with a more expensive plan to create a new right of way for the line, mostly along County Route 81.

David Robins who led opposition to the Blue Line extension in 2023 before moving away from Robbinsville told me:

The Met Council members are not elected, but rather, appointed by the governor to handle a huge range of disparate tasks in the metro Twin Cities area, such as wastewater treatment, parks planning, aviation oversight, public housing and public transit. They have no set budget. Their decisions often override the decisions of local municipalities. It’s unbridled power. SLR81 has always favored responsible, scalable, low impact and safe public transit, but there’s ample evidence Light Rail isn’t even needed, and alternative options have been flatly dismissed. There are legitimate concerns about massive cost overruns and project delays on other lines, crime along existing lines, and disruptions to core business and residential areas. It makes little sense to trust the largest public works project in Minnesota history to the Met Council.

The 695 signers of Robins’s anti-Blue Line extension petition at change​.org cited a variety of reasons for their opposition, including potential business displacement, pedestrian safety, and crime. Suburban residents often oppose transit projects because they make it easier for perpetrators to reach their neighborhoods from urban areas, a fear that has some support in academic literature.

Another concern with the Blue Line is the potential for gentrification. If proximity to new transit stations raises land values, owners might raise rents or evict tenants to build more costly housing. The Met Council asked the University of Minnesota Center for Urban and Regional Affairs to propose measures that would alleviate the impact of Blue Line gentrification. The Center recommended that residents living along the new line receive a basic income, while also benefiting from rent controls, government-funded legal representation upon receipt of an eviction notice, and other protections. It is not clear how this package would be funded, or whether it is even necessary given the uncertainty around ultimate ridership. But the Met Council accepted the proposals anyway.

Rather than worry about the spread of crime and the risks of gentrification, the Met Council should consider abandoning the Blue Line extension. If that is a step too far for the planners, perhaps they can at least defer further work until the Green Line extension is finished and actual ridership data become available.

In September 2023, a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory panel informed the agency that, 50 years after the FDA certified phenylephrine hydrochloride as a safe and effective oral decongestant, the evidence suggests it works no better than a placebo. The advisory report came several years after a couple of academic pharmacists had reviewed the research behind the 1970s FDA claims and determined the evidence of efficacy sorely lacking. As I wrote in a blog post that month and a month later in a USA Today column, stomach and intestinal juices break down ingested phenylephrine, rendering it inactive. I hypothesized that, despite the pharmacists’ warnings, the FDA dragged its feet reviewing phenylephrine’s efficacy because it didn’t want to undermine another federal agency’s efforts to wage war on methamphetamines.

When the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act went into effect in 2006, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) ordered all oral decongestants containing pseudoephedrine removed from pharmacy shelves and placed behind the pharmacist’s counter. The DEA also required pharmacists to register customers who bought pseudoephedrine so that law enforcement could monitor their purchases. Furthermore, the DEA put strict limits on the amount of pseudoephedrine a customer could purchase during a 30-day period. This was because many meth dealers at the time were converting pseudoephedrine products they legally purchased into methamphetamine in clandestine labs.

The DEA moves chilled customers who ordinarily purchase products containing pseudoephedrine, which remains an effective decongestant when taken orally. Drugmakers began offering consumers oral decongestants that substituted phenylephrine for pseudoephedrine to help them avoid the queues, surveillance, and stigma of buying pseudoephedrine at the pharmacy counter. More than half of American households trusted and used oral phenylephrine, accounting for an estimated $1.76 billion in sales in 2022.

Of course, we all know what happened next: Mexican drug cartels got into the meth-making business and found more cost-effective ingredients, such as phenyl-2-propanone or P2P, and meth-related deaths soared a whopping 1,400 percent from 2006 to 2020, proving once again that prosecuting the war on drugs is like playing a game of whack-a-mole.

The FDA remained silent when the advisory panel announced its findings 14 months ago. Today, it finally responded. It announced a proposal to order phenylephrine removed from the market as an active ingredient in oral decongestants once it concludes a request for comment period. That period runs from November 8, 2024, until May 7, 2025.

The private sector has been much more agile, as usual. Within a month of the advisory panel’s report, the CVS pharmacy chain announced it was taking oral phenylephrine decongestants off its shelves and would no longer sell them.

CVS, a private company, didn’t want to risk its reputation by keeping customers in the dark about the money they were wasting on oral phenylephrine products. In contrast, the FDA remains in no hurry to inform the public.

My colleagues and I have spent much time addressing the arguments raised by those who favor further restricting legal immigration to the United States. Our research on terrorism, crime, economic, fiscal, welfare consumption, and culture addresses specific arguments against liberalized immigration. All those fit into our bigger strategy based on theories of why people are opposed to immigration. They are the understandable fear of border and immigration chaos, security concerns, and the untrue belief that the legal immigration system isn’t restrictive. Those concerns all explain much of the sharp move in public opinion toward immigration restrictionism in the run-up to the 2024 election that many of us saw rising years ago.

The issues above matter to voters, intellectuals, and policymakers—but one enormous issue was always more important to politicians who actually make policy: politics. Many Republican politicians and their supporters are worried about immigrants and their descendants being permanent Democratic voters and that more legal immigration would usher in generations of Democratic Party dominance. “Demographics is (political) destiny,” restrictionists would say while invoking mythology about the Immigration Act of 1965 being a Kennedy conspiracy to change America (it wasn’t, just the opposite) and gesturing toward voting patterns by nativity, ethnicity, or race. The cruder and less common version of this is the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, and many left-wing partisans did all they could to stoke it with confident predictions of demographic change caused by immigration turning the entire country into California. In essence, it was a reverse Curley Effect that wasn’t a crazy conspiracy theory and that resonated with the self-interest of politicians who thought immigrants and their descendants would vote Democratic for all time.

In 2020, political data scientist David Shor told us that demographic trends were failing to lead to the promised Democratic dominance, but people didn’t pay much attention to him, and exaggerated fears of noncitizen voting were a consistent Republican claim during the 2024 election. Now, nobody can ignore the massive shift when 46 percent of Hispanic voters cast their ballots for Trump, with Hispanic men favoring him by 10 points. There is no end state of history so long as humans exist. There is no point in talking about destiny or understanding changes in civilization through a model that incorporates destiny, but Hispanics splitting their votes between the two major political parties is certainly a different demographic voting pattern than predicted by Democratic and Republican partisans.

In 2016, I wrote how the nativist reaction in California helped turn the state blue by convincing Hispanics and others to vote Democratic—among other changes in California. My 2016 piece was intended to warn Republicans against embracing immigration restrictionism. Last month, I updated that piece for an event at the University of Pittsburgh for the 30th anniversary of Proposition 187. I added these sections:

In October 2014, I wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed that argued the modern nativist movement may doom the national Republican Party to electoral defeat if it succeeded in taking over the party. I followed that up with other pieces, research, and appearances on television and the radio. My evidence was the history of the California Republican Party, the Federalists, Know-Nothings, and Whigs in the 19th century all committing seppuku on an altar of immigration restrictionism, and opinion polling that seemed to show that many non-white and younger voters rejected immigration restrictionism while also holding several mainstream or conservative opinions.

However, Republicans have done well since then by winning the 2016 Presidential election and they seem to be very close to winning in 2024 too. They bombed the 2018 midterm, lost the 2020 election, and underperformed in the 2022 midterms, but little if any of their underperformance there can be blamed on immigration and the border chaos in 2022 may have slightly helped the GOP. Most of their political problems since I wrote my WSJ op-ed stem from the personality of their presidential candidate in each election since 2014, the conservative electorate’s deference to him, and unrelated policy issues like abortion. Border chaos and the GOP’s restrictionist reaction to it may have even helped them. Thus, I was wrong about the political consequences of embracing an anti-immigration position.

Conservatives skeptical of immigration often go further, claiming that modern immigrants and their descendants are less likely to become Republicans than the descendants of earlier immigrant groups. Polls show that Hispanics lean Democratic in the 2024 election, but not by much. Polls like these overstate Democratic support among the subsequent generations of Americans because there are millions of descendants of Hispanic and Asian immigrants who do not self-identify as Hispanic or Asian in polls because of ethnic attrition. Ethnicity and race (with the likely exception of being black) are not as sticky in the United States as many progressives and conservatives assume—the government just created a new one that will likely result in a new and deeply held ethnic identity for many because culture is often downstream of politics. Despite my warnings in The Wall Street Journal a decade ago, I’ve long maintained that immigrants and their descendants are basically assimilating to American policy and political opinions—for better and worse.

My research on immigrant policy opinions showed that their positions were similar to those of native-born Americans on most issues except for immigration, where immigrants supported liberalization. The policy and institutional effects of immigration were positive or neutral from a conservative perspective. However, immigrants and Hispanics still tended to vote Democratic and severely limited the reach of this research. After all, a self-interested politician would reasonably only look at voting patterns. Another problem was that everybody overlearned lessons from 1990s California. Yes, the GOP committed suicide there by embracing nativism—but the lesson did not translate to other states. The effect was not generalizable, as a social scientist would say.

Here’s how I ended my recent updated piece on Proposition 187 and immigration politics in California:

The California Republican Party’s decision to represent the anti-immigration wing of the American electorate in the early 1990s destroyed that state’s GOP for at least a generation in exchange for winning one election in 1994 and a symbolic victory on Proposition 187 that didn’t actually change policy. That was a bad deal. What happened in California at that time appears to be a perfect storm of events that undermined the GOP in that state, but state Republican Parties in other states that passed harsher immigration laws like Arizona, Texas, and Florida don’t seem to have suffered the same fate and neither has the national GOP.

The oft-repeated phrase “as California goes, so goes the nation” should be replaced with “as California goes, so goes California” in at least this one case. Anti-immigration politics can likely explain California’s dramatic shift leftward, but that effect is confined to the Golden State. 

Immigrants and their descendants are assimilating well into American society and politics. The GOP didn’t need to moderate its immigration position, and maybe demographic voting patterns would have converged sooner with more of a GOP emphasis on law and order or other appeals than nativism, but that’s a counterfactual we can’t test and will never be able to. In all, I’m happier for the future of the United States that immigrants and their descendants are assimilating well than I would be if immigration were a political wedge issue like I thought it was a decade ago. This week’s election returns are dramatic evidence that immigrants and their children are assimilating to American political norms, that they are voting Republican in huge numbers, and that Donald Trump defeated the best politically self-interested argument for Republicans to oppose increased legal immigration.