Policy Practice in the Wild

The federal government awarded $2.2 million to states and Tribes to modernize foster-home licensing, with projects focused on problems such as fingerprinting delays, outdated technology, business processes, staff training, and workflow evaluation. Utah plans to target background-check delays in rural and high-barrier households, while Alaska plans to use mobile fingerprinting to reach rural and remote communities. The grants sit within a larger federal effort to increase foster-home capacity.

With education and early-childhood budgets under pressure, Brookings convened researchers and practitioners around a persistent evaluation problem: policymakers often have evidence about program outcomes but weak or inconsistent information about what those outcomes cost. The new framework seeks to standardize how education programs generate and use cost evidence.

The rapid expansion of data centers has moved artificial intelligence infrastructure into local land-use and economic-development politics. Communities are weighing investment and development against electricity costs, environmental effects, workforce questions, opaque development agreements, and resident opposition. The panel brings community, economic-development, and technology perspectives into the same discussion.

This is longer than the typical item for the series, but unusually well suited to DPP students. The authors review economic research and argue that policymakers cannot reliably predict which occupations artificial intelligence will ultimately disrupt. They recommend targeted rather than economy-wide responses, including displacement support, employer-linked training, apprenticeships, and wage insurance. They also recommend pilots and ongoing evaluation where evidence remains limited.

This piece examines proposed federal changes to Head Start through the specific experience of children in foster care. The proposal could reduce administrative requirements and potentially create additional capacity, but it would also loosen requirements involving classroom ratios, staff qualifications, discipline, quality monitoring, and service coordination. The authors estimate that only about one in five eligible young children in foster care participates in Head Start, while carefully noting that limitations in the underlying datasets may make even that estimate too high.

Tom Wheeler argues that access to increasingly capable artificial intelligence may create a different kind of inequality than the broadband digital divide. Lower per-use prices may not eliminate disparities if frontier models remain expensive, usage grows, and computing infrastructure becomes more concentrated. He argues that familiar subsidy-based approaches may therefore be poorly matched to the problem.

The Postal Service has stopped work on a centralized computer system developed to support new federal mail-voting requirements after the courts blocked the underlying policy. The proposed system would have required states to provide voter information and would have changed aspects of mail-ballot processing. The episode puts a concrete administrative system behind a much larger constitutional and political dispute over federal and state authority in election administration.