Washington Monthly – General Political | Politics & Government

In the 2025–2026 academic year, American nursing programs turned away 93,176 qualified applicants, the highest number ever recorded, and nearly 30,000 more than just two years earlier. These were not students who failed their prerequisites; they met every requirement. The doors were closed to them because the schools lacked open seats. The reasons? There are not enough professors because a nurse who teaches earns far less than a nurse who practices. Experienced clinicians cannot afford to change sectors. Nor do many small- and medium-sized institutions have the financial means to fund student scholarships and the facilities and specialized equipment necessary for training. At the same time, the healthcare industry has spent years warning of a catastrophic nursing shortage. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the estimated annual openings for registered nurses (RNs) will be 189,100 through the year 2034. The shortage of full-time RNs is expected to be 267,000 nationally by 2028. Yet the hospitals and healthcare systems that desperately need nurses are not paying to produce them. That cost lands on universities and, ultimately, on students, their families, and the taxpayers who fund public higher education in the United States. The pipeline to alleviate a scarcity everyone insists is a national emergency is so narrow it can only trickle. Still, the industries downstream (the ones who will hire graduates) are nowhere to be seen at the production source (colleges and universities), where a modest investment would widen the pipeline permanently. This is true in many other fields beside nursing, from cybersecurity to data analytics. The philanthropic landscape supporting nursing is surprising. Despite the growing awareness of the nursing shortage since COVID-19, “private giving for the nursing profession is just one penny of every dollar given for health care,” according to a 2023 American Nurses Foundation report. Most major gifts to nursing programs have been funded by individuals, family foundations, and community foundations that support large institutions. Leonard A. Lauder, heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetics fortune, and his $125 million gift to the University of Pennsylvania’s Nursing School; Bill and Joanne Conway’s donation of over $80 million to the Catholic University of America, the University of Virginia, and Virginia Commonwealth University; and Mark and Robyn Jones’s $100 million to Montana State University are high-profile examples. Very few of the major contributors are health care corporations.   In most cases, institutions, especially small- and medium- sized schools in… [TheTopNews] Read More.

In a mid-July column, I detailed how internal polls, combined with scarce independent polling, warped perceptions of Graham Platner’s electoral resilience in Maine’s Senate race before he bowed out. I further raised an eyebrow at the flurry of internal polls showing fat leads for Abdul El-Sayed over Representative Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, when other springtime polls depicted a much closer race.   Prompted in part by the internal polls, the former Wayne County health department chief and left-wing insurgent was crowned the frontrunner by mainstream media outlets. Several independent polls very late in the campaign echoed El-Sayed’s internals, firming up the media narrative. Two days before Election Day, a rumor shot through the X social media platform that Stevens’ own pollster told the candidate she was down 14 points and had “no path to victory.” The pollster denied it, but the rumor further fed a perception that the cake was baked.  Yet my earlier skepticism proved warranted. El-Sayed beat Stevens, but by a single percentage point, not the double digits forecast by the surveys affiliated with his campaign.   The colossal miss raises the question of whether El-Sayed’s internal poll flex led to a case of “herding,” the polling phenomenon once described by Nate Silver as “file-drawering (not publishing) results that don’t match the consensus or torturing their turnout models until they do.” Following the surprise Michigan result, The New York Times noted the challenge for pollsters to anticipate the demographic mix of primary election turnout: “Conducting surveys in partisan primaries has long presented a challenge to pollsters, as it requires them to make assumptions about who will actually turn out to vote. Without mandatory party registration in Michigan, pollsters must guess who will show up on Election Day.” Fearful of becoming an embarrassing outlier, “independent” pollsters had an incentive to make like-minded guesses.  One pollster who worked for a pro-El-Sayed political action committee, Zenith Research’s Adam Carlson, published a post-mortem in which he acknowledged his turnout model “undershot” demographic groups favorable to Stevens: senior, low-income, and rural voters. One possible explanation Carlson offered is that his company uses “text-to-web” technology to reach out to potential respondents, as opposed to more expensive “live calling,” which may have tilted the respondent pool towards younger votes more partial to El-Sayed.  Less noticed over the weekend was Hawaii’s First Congressional District Democratic primary, which pitted moderate incumbent Ed Case… [TheTopNews] Read More.

The relentless attacks on higher education from Donald Trump’s administration notwithstanding, many high school graduates of the class of 2026 are headed to college this fall. By now, most students have decided where they’ll attend. In some circles, given the frantic competitiveness of both students and parents to land coveted spots at our nation’s most elite institutions, more than a few students are disappointed not to be granted acceptance at their dream school. Rejection always hurts. It can sting like a hornet. Many people internalize rejection, assuming that they are less than capable. Most adults can recall a moment(s) where they encountered negations that seemed cataclysmic. Thus, it’s totally rational for parents to want to protect their children from feelings of inadequacy or from being deprived of the acceptance letter they wanted. Reading the words “we regret to inform you that we are unable to” can conjure sadness, anger, or despair. It shouldn’t. First, admission to more selective institutions has become dramatically more intense. Augmenting academic standards, ever-rising tuition costs, drastic cuts in state funding for higher education, and increasingly abrasive attacks coupled with fiercely acerbic debates about the value (or lack) of a college education have steadily increased in various segments of our society. Pockets of dissension aside, we should congratulate those young men and women who hit the jackpot, so to speak. Hopefully, their academic journey will be happy, fruitful, and productive. For those not as fortunate, it is not the end of the world, and this is where parents and adults need to intervene and reassure them that high-prestige schools don’t always deliver. Lesser-known ones can provide a great education at a reasonable cost, something the Washington Monthly has been touting for two decades in its annual College Guide. Indeed, the fact is that: There is no one pathway to success; a student’s first-choice school may not necessarily be the best one for them; Many successful people often fail along the way; and Things tend to have a way of working out. There are several reasons a particular admissions committee/institution denied a student admission. Their SAT or ACT scores were strong but not exceptional (trust me, test scores will not predict your future success), or their transcript was solid but not outstanding. Working in an admissions office as a graduate student (not an actual admissions officer) in my… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Peter Meijer was one of ten House Republicans who voted to impeach President Donald Trump for “incitement of insurrection” for his actions and inactions related to the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol. A Michigan moderate little known outside his district, the then-33-year-old had been a member of Congress for just ten days when he cast his vote.   Meijer saw his impeachment vote as a moral imperative, yet knew that by casting it, he may have doomed his political career. When ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos asked as much, he replied, “I may very well have.”   He was right. He didn’t survive his next party primary.  Many lauded Meijer for his political bravery—the quality that Senator John F. Kennedy described in his 1956 book, Profiles in Courage. “In no other occupation but politics,” the future 35th president wrote, “is it expected that a man will sacrifice honors, prestige, and his chosen career on a single issue.”  But in Congress, courage like Meijer’s is often ephemeral, as we’ve seen. The night of the insurrection, after the Senate had reconvened to certify Joe Biden’s election as president, Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham spoke forcefully from the Senate floor, pillorying President Donald Trump for what he had done to encourage the rioters and for arguing that he had won the 2020 election long after a slew of courts had concluded otherwise. Soon after, though, McConnell traveled to Mar-a-Lago to make peace with Trump, and Graham, who died this summer, emerged as one of his most vocal supporters.  To understand true political courage and why it is in short supply today, I asked four current and former House members—Republican and Democrat—for guidance. They agree on little. But on this matter, they’re aligned with Trey Gowdy, a Fox News host and former four-term House Republican from South Carolina: “The number of Sir Thomas More moments that happened in Congress [while I was there], I don’t remember them.”  Tom Suozzi is a fourth-term U.S. representative from a New York swing district who describes himself as “a Democrat, a true-blue Democrat, but also a true-blue American.” He was one of six House Democrats to cross party lines and vote with Republicans in November to end the 43-day federal government shutdown. Suozzi said he did it because the two parties were stalemated over health care, the Democrats’ position on the issue was already clear to voters, and… [TheTopNews] Read More.

At undisclosed locations, in nondescript warehouses, vast troves of print books are scheduled for destruction. Each one awaits its bindings hacked off so that its pages can be scanned into a central library, where they will be used to train artificial intelligence models to enhance their capabilities. The more books consigned to oblivion, the more effective these models become at generating outputs that not merely mimic human-like text and speech but become indistinguishable from the real thing. Burning the past to build the future seems like a fiction inspired by Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, but it is a real undertaking by the artificial intelligence giant, Anthropic, to feed its chatbot, Claude, with physical texts. It’s called Project Panama, and the company is acutely aware of how bad it looks, as shown in internal documents revealed by legal filings reviewed by The Washington Post. “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” the documents state. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”  This destructive scanning is a fairly common practice, but Project Panama is distinguished by its world-devouring scale. It’s hard to avoid the feeling that Anthropic, which has yet to be publicly traded but is estimated to have a value of close to $1 trillion, tried to keep it under wraps because it seems to provide more evidence that AI giants have little regard for the human value of creative work, apart from its utility in building a post-human future. This modern-day variation of physical book burning also comes at a time when public opposition to AI accelerationism is becoming fevered. Despite the opposition of AI labs like Anthropic, Meta, and OpenAI, authors have sued the tech giants over allegations of copyright infringement. Anthropic recently notched a win when U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled that training Claude on legally purchased books falls under fair use. According to Alsup, the act of destructively scanning texts into an internal archive for training AI models counts as “transformative.” Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act, transformative uses have a better chance of being considered fair use. “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs [large language models] trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them—but to turn a hard corner and create something different,” Alsup concluded. Alsup’s ruling is a significant victory but… [TheTopNews] Read More.