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- The Worst Way to Cut Government Spending
The Trump administration is threatening to use the government shutdown to permanently reduce the size of the civil service. Its ambitions for these cuts are many, including punishing Democrats by harming their pet projects and curbing “agencies that don’t align with the administration’s values” and are a “waste of the taxpayer dollar,” as Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt warned last week. Yet as a tool to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the federal government, these cuts are risible.Let’s first take the claim that the U.S. federal government is reckoning with problems of bloat. The truth is that even before DOGE took a chain saw to government programs, the United States was actually understaffed relative to other advanced industrial democracies. Federal-, state-, and local-government employees in the U.S. made up about 14.6 percent of total employment in 2023, according to OECD data. This is below the OECD average of 18.4 percent… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.4 days ago - No One Gave a Speech Like Patrick Henry
Editor’s Note: This article is part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” a project exploring 250 years of the American experiment. Patrick Henry is generally treated as a second-string Founding Father. He didn’t write—or even sign—the Declaration of Independence. He didn’t write the Constitution. Instead, fearing that it allocated too much power to a centralized government, he did all he could to defeat it. He was not a Revolutionary military hero. He did not explain lightning, invent bifocals, take Paris by diplomatic storm, or write an autobiography that has become a classic in American literature. Henry did attend the First and Second Continental Congresses, but made little mark. After 1775, he remained in his home state of Virginia, where he would serve five terms as governor. He did not again take up national service.What Patrick Henry did above all was talk—and get talked about. He astonished his listeners as the most compelling… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.4 days ago - How the Revolution Tore Apart the Franklin Family
Illustrations by Maggie O’KeefeEditor’s Note: This article is part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” a project exploring 250 years of the American experiment. On the whole, the Founding Fathers, those towering patriarchs, fared poorly when it came to sons. George Washington and James Madison had none. Thomas Jefferson’s only legitimate one died in infancy. Samuel Adams also outlived his. With the exception of John Quincy Adams, no other son of a Founder rose to his father’s stature. The unluckiest of all may have been Benjamin Franklin, who, in the course of a deeply familial contest, lost a cherished son the hardheaded way: to politics.The two were for years each other’s closest confidant. As one associate noted, William Franklin had, by his late 20s, become his father’s “friend, his brother, his intimate and easy companion.” Franklin raised his son with all the advantages he had not enjoyed. Where he had only briefly… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.4 days ago - The Black Loyalists
Editor’s Note: This article is part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” a project exploring 250 years of the American experiment. The man who would come to be called Harry Washington was born near the Gambia River, in West Africa, around 1740. As a young man, he was sold into slavery and endured the horrors of the Middle Passage. In Virginia, he was purchased by a neighbor of George Washington, who then bought the young man in 1763 for 40 pounds. After working to drain the colony’s Great Dismal Swamp—one of George Washington’s many land ventures—he was sent to Mount Vernon to care for the horses.Then came war. With General Washington in Massachusetts leading the Continental Army, Harry Washington, like thousands of other enslaved people, abandoned the plantation, risking torture and imprisonment, to join the British cause. In exchange for his freedom, he enlisted in what was known as the Ethiopian Regiment.Virginia’s… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.4 days ago - The American ExperimentEditor’s Note: This article is part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” a project exploring 250 years of the American experiment. “A magazine, when properly conducted, is the nursery of genius; and by constantly accumulating new matter, becomes a kind of market for wit and utility.”Thomas Paine made this (true) statement in 1775, in the first issue of The Pennsylvania Magazine, for which he served as editor. In this same manifesto, he had unkind words for the magazine’s older cousins. “The British magazines, at their commencement, were the repositories of ingenuity: They are now the retailers of tale and nonsense. From elegance they sunk to simplicity, from simplicity to folly, and from folly to voluptuousness.”Paine, though enamored of the new American style of magazine making, resigned his post after less than a year because the owner refused to give him a raise. His premature departure allowed him time to write Common Sense,… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.4 days ago
- Trump’s ICE Crackdown Stalled This SummerFew provisions in President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act were as thrilling to immigration hard-liners as the $45 billion it provided to supersize the ICE detention system. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials had long complained that a lack of jail space constrained their ability to deport more people. The bill gave ICE enough money to nearly triple its detention capacity to more than 100,000 beds—a “once-in-a-generation opportunity,” the White House called it.But in the three months since the bill was signed, the agency has added little to that capacity. The lack of beds may be limiting ICE’s ability to expand its enforcement; the number of arrests it’s made peaked in June and has declined in the months since. The agency’s focus on partnerships with state governments has done little to add capacity, despite driving up costs. And overcrowding has worsened in short-term holding cells at ICE processing centers,… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.5 days ago
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