June 1, 2026

Photo credits: Chip Somodevilla / Staff / Getty Images News via Getty Images

More than a year ago, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that a net 1.1 million “other foreign nationals” would be added to the U.S. population in 2025.

The CBO recently revised that number downward by a massive 1.5 million immigrants—meaning not only that the number of immigrants is not going up, but it’s falling by 360,000.

What explains the huge revision? President Trump’s border policies. The CBO specifically highlights Executive Order 14165, a move that “reinstated the policy of Migrant Protection Protocols, which require people who want to apply for asylum in the United States to return to the territory from which they came.”

Indeed, under President Biden, illegal immigrants who arrived along the southwestern border were typically released into the U.S.

“While the mainstream press emphasizes ICE raids and deportations, the Trump administration’s removal of aliens from the U.S. interior accounted for less than one-tenth of the CBO’s downward revision in net illegal immigration—it estimates that 120,000 people were removed from the U.S. interior in 2025,” Jeffrey H. Anderson writes. “Far from being driven by deportations, more than 90 percent of the Trump administration’s success in reducing illegal immigration has come from limiting border crossings, per the CBO’s figures.”

Read more.

Established in 1965, Medicaid provides federal matching funds for states to offer health care to low-income Americans. While states once paid for medical services directly, they increasingly subcontract with private insurers, known as Managed Care Organizations, to administer care.

Why would states do this when the government is already providing the money and telling insurers what they have to cover? What is the purpose of a Managed Care Organization?

“The answer, as I show in a new Manhattan Institute report,” Chris Pope writes, “is that private insurers are exempt from normal limits on fees that states can claim from the federal government to finance Medicaid services. Routing money through these firms makes funding much harder to track—in turn letting states obtain billions of dollars in federal aid every year for purposes Congress never approved.”

Read more about the practice.

Kevin O’Leary and his business partners are planning to build a massive AI data center in Utah—one that would take up more than 40,000 acres’ worth of land and eat up more power than Manhattan. Furious protests have erupted in response.

In fact, in the first quarter of 2026, groups came out against nearly 100 data center projects. We’ve seen these reactions to new technologies before.

“Foundational revolutions that mark pivots in history are rare, but they are commonly resisted when they occur,” Mark Mills writes. “It may be of little comfort to those living through the current techno-resistance movement, but history has relevant lessons: many things we now view as commonplace were once radical and disruptive.”

Read about some of those earlier disruptions and what we can learn from them.

With the publication of Ironweed in the early 1980s, William Kennedy became one of the most admired novelists in America. The Albany-based author resists the label of “Irish-American novelist,” though—it’s limiting. “He has always said that his proper subject is human nature—what finds us selfish and sinful, petty and mean, and occasionally redeemed by moments of grace,” Jonathan Clarke writes. “As a social historian of small-city American life, he is virtually unmatched; as a prose stylist, he rewards strong reading; and as a human soul in search of other souls, he exhorts us to do likewise.”

Read more about Kennedy’s life and career.