August 12, 2026

Photo credit: Douglas Graham / Contributor / CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images

Since 1966, the federal Head Start program has spent over $240 billion on early education and anti-poverty services for children up to age five. It has been far from a success.

A randomized controlled trial found that any gains that enrollees made in school readiness had diminished by the end of first grade and were completely gone by third grade. Some studies found that the program did not improve high school or college completion rates or wages. Others found that it led to worse outcomes in some areas.

So when the Trump administration announced last year that it was considering cutting $12.2 billion from Head Start funding (about what the total program costs), it was welcome news. The White House cited the program’s focus on DEI and use of LGBTQ books for toddlers.

But under pressure from Head Start supporters, the administration reversed course, announcing that it would not cut the program’s budget. “The administration should have stood its ground,” Heather Mac Donald writes. “Taxpayers have already coughed up too many billions of dollars for failed antipoverty efforts whose subtext is displacing parents as primary caregivers.”

Read more.

It’s common for governments to interfere in bond yields. Japan did this for decades by buying its own debt (to keep yields low) and passing regulations so that entities like pension funds buy the debt. Governments intervene because they want to choose the borrowing price—not let the market decide.

“But intervention has its limits,” Allison Schrager writes. Indeed, Japan eventually had to contend with inflation, thanks to the low rates that were putting upward pressure on prices. “This is Tokyo’s third intervention this year,” Schrager observes, “and the markets keep coming for the Yen because yields remain too low relative to other countries, let alone to the Japanese economic outlook.”

Read more about the risks of yield-curve repression.

Since the 1990s, Title IX has required that men’s and women’s sports be able to access the same resources and achieve proportional parity—so, for example, if women make up 55 percent of the undergraduate student body, they should make up 55 percent of athletic slots as well.

But 2025’s House v. NCAA settlement puts college sports on a collision course with this requirement, allowing schools to share revenue with athletes—revenue that will likely go to the athletes who generate the most value.

“Football and men’s basketball generate the overwhelming share of television revenue, ticket sales, and donor support at major programs,” Scott Yenor explains. Allocating money to those athletes “invites challenges that the distribution violates Title IX’s requirement for equitable treatment,” he writes.

Read more.