Winning the Case, Losing the Ground: How Policy Threats Still Govern—Especially Through Proposed Funding Cuts, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Winning the Case, Losing the Ground: How Policy Threats Still Govern—Especially Through Proposed Funding Cuts

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

April 24, 2026

A court victory can halt a policy. It cannot, on its own, undo the conditions that policy created. The recent injunction against the NIH’s proposed cap on indirect costs is a clear legal win—one that reaffirms procedural integrity and the limits of executive overreach. But the terrain on which universities operate has already shifted, and it has shifted most decisively through the politics of funding cuts.

The Trump administration’s proposed 15 percent cap on indirect research costs—long a source of uncertainty across higher education—ultimately met a significant legal barrier. In a January 5, 2026 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit unanimously affirmed a lower court ruling blocking the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from implementing the cap. The court held that the policy violated federal law, bypassed required procedures, and unlawfully imposed a blanket limit across all NIH grants. The nationwide injunction remains in place. Universities, for now, can continue to rely on their negotiated indirect cost rates (American Council on Education, 2026).

This is, by any reasonable measure, good news.

And yet, without reckoning with the politics that animate it, this is far from the whole story.

Even before the courts intervened, the proposed cap had already begun to do its work. As Zahneis (2025) reports, internal communications at the University of Iowa reveal a striking institutional response: confusion, financial alarm, and a palpable sense of political constraint. Faced with the prospect of losing tens of millions in research support, university leaders acknowledged their “limited ability to publicly fight” the policy. Faculty were advised to speak only as private citizens. Public messaging was deliberately softened—“we will need to tone it down a bit.” Meanwhile, the institution began pausing grant submissions, slowing hiring, and preparing for contraction.

In other words, the chilling effect preceded the legal outcome.

This is what governing through funding looks like. It is also what I have called shadow censorship: a form of constraint that operates not through formal prohibition, but through anticipatory compliance. The policy itself may be blocked, but its signal—its warning—circulates widely. Institutions read that signal and adjust accordingly. Speech narrows. Risk tolerance declines. Strategic silence emerges, not by mandate, but by design.

The First Circuit’s ruling is therefore both a victory and a revelation. It affirms that agencies like the NIH cannot unilaterally rewrite the terms of federal research funding in ways that violate congressional intent or established regulatory frameworks. It also reinforces the role of the courts as a critical check on executive overreach. Importantly, the court’s reasoning is likely to shape parallel cases involving the Department of Energy and Department of Defense, suggesting broader implications for the governance of federal research.

But the decision does not—and cannot—undo the anticipatory effects already set in motion.

The lesson here extends beyond Iowa, beyond NIH, and even beyond this particular administration. We see similar dynamics in Texas under SB 17, in Florida’s higher education restructuring, and in federal policy proposals that signal ideological priorities through funding mechanisms. Across these contexts, the pattern is consistent: policy operates not only through what is enacted, but through what is threatened, implied, and anticipated.

Institutions do not wait for final rulings. They adapt early.

This is why the notion that “the courts will fix it” is, while comforting, insufficient. Legal victories matter—they create space, restore rights, and set precedent. But they do not automatically restore the conditions of open inquiry or institutional courage that may have already been compromised. By the time a policy is blocked, its disciplining effects may already be embedded in organizational behavior.

So yes, this ruling deserves recognition. It is a meaningful check on unlawful governance and a reminder that procedural integrity still matters.

But if we stop there—if we treat this as a resolution rather than a moment of reflection—we risk missing the deeper transformation underway.

The more difficult question is this: What would it take for institutions not only to survive such policy threats, but to resist their anticipatory force? What would it mean to refuse the quieting of institutional voice before the law has even spoken?

Because the central lesson remains unchanged.

Policy does not need to be fully enacted to be effective. It need only create enough risk to reshape behavior.

And in that sense, even a policy that fails in court can still succeed in governing. 

And then we wonder why there is public distrust of higher education.

References 

American Council on Education. (2026, April 13). Higher education associations fight federal cuts to indirect cost rates. https://www.acenet.edu/Policy-Advocacy/Pages/Law-Courts/Association-Lawsuit-NIH-FA.aspx#:~:text=The%20lawsuits%20include:%20*%2022%20state%20attorneys,halting%20the%20implementation%20of%20the%20DOE%20cap

Zahneis, M. (2025, June 16). Facing research cuts, officials at U. of Iowa spoke of a “limited ability to publicly fight this.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/facing-research-cuts-officials-at-u-of-iowa-spoke-of-a-limited-ability-to-publicly-fight-this

Facing Research Cuts, Officials at U. of Iowa Spoke of a ‘Limited Ability to Publicly Fight This’
By Megan Zahneis

June 16, 2025 | Chronicle of Higher Education

Illustration by The Chronicle; Getty Images

The National Institutes of Health’s announcement in late February that it would cap indirect research funding at 15 percent sent universities across the nation into a panic. Emails obtained by The Chronicle via a public-records request offer a glimpse into how one research-intensive institution reacted in the immediate aftermath of the unexpected news — with confusion, concern, and at times, a sense of powerlessness.

Asked by a faculty member what he and his peers could do to help, the University of Iowa’s interim vice president for research suggested only “acting as a private citizen to call our legislators and tell them what a bad idea this is (from your own phone or using your own email).” The campus’s location in a solidly red state hindered it from fighting the policy change, Lois J. Geist seemed to imply in her reply. “Being located where we are we have limited ability to publicly fight this as faculty or as an institution.”

While the funding cap is frozen pending a federal judge’s ruling, the messages exchanged between Geist and other top officials at the University of Iowa provide a rare and revealing glimpse into internal conversations on a campus facing millions in cuts — and clear incentives to stay quiet. (Geist and one of those officials, through a university spokesperson, declined an interview. Four others did not respond to requests for comment.)

‘Tone It Down’

Within hours of the NIH’s announcement, which came late on the afternoon of Friday, February 7, a flurry of emails among Iowa administrators had commenced. The cap, an Iowa associate vice president for research predicted Friday night, “is going to have a significant effect on us (and everyone else).” By early the following morning, efforts were underway to gauge just how significant it would be. A manager in the division of sponsored programs shared a “back-of-the-envelope calculation” that estimated an average annual budget gap of $45 million, based on Iowa’s current reimbursement rate of 55.5 percent for indirect costs.(Often referred to as “facilities and administrative” costs, indirect costs account for money that institutions spend on research but that isn’t tied to a specific grant or project, such as facilities, equipment, and staff expenses.)

While the director of Iowa’s grant-accounting office worked through the weekend on producing more precise figures, others discussed the university’s public response. Peter S. Matthes, vice president for external relations and senior adviser to the president, proposed wording for an update on the webpage where the university posts federal-policy news.

“Overall, the federal transition continues to be a rapidly changing environment,” read the update, which was soon posted under Geist’s name. It said the university was working with organizations like the Association of American Universities and Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities to “monitor and interpret” the Trump administration’s policy changes. Iowa, it promised, was “actively engaging with our federal delegation as well to ensure they understand the profound impact this change would have.”

Administrators also kept tabs on how their colleagues at other institutions were responding, both through email chains (the listserv of provosts in the Big Ten Academic Alliance, Iowa Provost Kevin C. Kregel noted, “is very active!”) and by tracking their public statements. Jennifer Lassner, an associate vice president for research, forwarded a link to a message from the University of Michigan as a “communication example"; in that memo, Arthur Lupia, Michigan’s interim vice president for research and innovation, stressed that the at-risk funding was used to conduct “vital research that saves lives, creates jobs, enhances national security, and improves quality of life for people in every part of our state and across the nation.”

The then-director of strategic communications in Geist’s office responded approvingly — “nice message!” she said of the Lupia memo — and suggested using it as a model for one Geist could send to the campus. The federal-update post, she noted, “is sort of passive — folks will have to go looking for it.” Geist said she was “fine” with issuing a statement, but added: “We will need to tone it down a bit.”

While Michigan and Iowa list one another as peer institutions and share membership in the Big Ten and an R1 designation, their home states operate under opposite political circumstances: Michigan is run by a Democratic trifecta, but Republicans control both houses of the Hawkeye State’s government as well as its governor’s office. Michigan also stands to lose about three and a half times as much as Iowa does under the 15-percent indirect-cost cap, according to a Chronicle analysis.

Indeed, the message Geist sent the afternoon of Monday, February 10 — approximately 72 hours after the NIH announced its policy — was more circumspect than Lupia’s, referring to “high-impact research” that “has tangible benefits for the lives of Iowans” and promising that “we recognize the urgency of the situation and are working to assess potential impacts at the college, department, lab, and investigator level.”
‘We Need the Foundations’

In her message, Geist said that “until we have more clarity,” Iowa would not submit new NIH grant applications and advised researchers “exert extra caution and defer starting new activities.” The university, she wrote, would also avoid hiring graduate research assistants whose salaries hadn’t already been budgeted as a direct cost on a funded project. Within a half hour, at least five faculty members had replied, expressing concern and asking questions. Among them was the faculty member whom Geist told that the university would have “limited ability to publicly fight this.” In response to another email, Geist said that the university would not be joining the lawsuit that 22 states — all led by Democratic attorneys general — brought against the NIH to stop the cap.

A third faculty member asked Geist to share concrete numbers to “make these impacts quantifiable.” Turning to an analysis prepared by Maria H. Soliman, the director of Iowa’s grant-accounting office, Geist told him the university would be on the hook for about $50 million. Beyond that, she said, Iowa would “lose grants and the ability to hire people on those grants because the amount of available money will be inadequate.” She also indicated the university would likely rely on outside support: “We need the foundations to weigh in to stop this as it will also impact our ability to do their research.” (The private sector has since faced its own troubles trying to offer patchwork funding.)

A federal judge in April issued a permanent injunction against the 15-percent cap, which the NIH is appealing. Meanwhile, a cohort of organizations that represent research universities has sketched out two alternatives, STAT reported last week; one would vary indirect-cost rates by institution and grant type, and the other would require each grant proposal to list its indirect costs as line items.

Andy Thomason, assistant managing editor at The Chronicle, contributed reporting.
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When Consolidation Is Elimination: Ethnic Studies, Faculty Governance, and Power at UT, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

When Consolidation Is Elimination: Ethnic Studies, Faculty Governance, and Power at UT

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

April 24, 2026

UT President Jim Davis talks with Daily Texan
News Editor Maryam Ahmed in his office during the
first sit-down interview of his tenure.

In an April 9, 2026 interview with The Daily Texan, reporter Maryam Ahmed pressed UT President Jim Davis on decisions that cut to the core of the university’s academic mission: the consolidation of Ethnic Studies and related departments, the restructuring of faculty governance, and the question of public trust in higher education (Ahmed, 2026a, 2026b). What emerges is not reassurance, but a troubling portrait of governance redefined, faculty voice narrowed, and critical fields rendered administratively vulnerable under the language of “efficiency” and “stewardship.”

At issue is not whether combining departments yields intellectual “fullness,” as Davis suggests. Ethnic Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies are already deeply interdisciplinary by design. They were built to cross boundaries, challenge siloed thinking, and interrogate power. The claim that they must be consolidated to achieve interdisciplinarity reflects not innovation, but a misreading—or dismissal—of their intellectual foundations.

What remains unspoken is that “consolidation” is rarely neutral. It often functions as a quiet form of elimination—not of people, but of departmental standing, autonomy, and power. Departments carry budget authority, hiring lines, curricular control, and institutional visibility. Collapse them, and you reduce the number of sites where faculty exercise collective authority. This is not merely organizational—it is political. Power moves upward and inward, away from the very units that have historically produced the most sustained critiques of inequality.

Equally flawed is the premise that these fields are not already in dialogue. Ethnic Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies have long operated in robust conversation—through joint appointments, cross-listed courses, and shared theoretical frameworks. To suggest they must be administratively merged to “see from different angles” misreads their history and erases existing collaboration. What is presented as integration risks becoming administrative diminishment.

When department chairs raised objections, Davis acknowledged “difference of opinion,” but deferred to a “consensus recommendation.” The question is unavoidable: whose consensus—and under what conditions was it produced?

That question takes on added urgency in light of Texas Senate Bill 37. The elected Faculty Council has been replaced with an appointed advisory body that, by Davis’s own admission, is “not intended to be representative.” This is not a procedural adjustment; it is a redefinition of governance itself. Representation is not incidental—it is the democratic core of faculty authority. What replaces it is curated input: invited voices without collective power.

Davis casts this shift as a move from “discord” to “stewardship.” But governance without disagreement is not governance—it is management. The Faculty Council’s openness enabled contestation, visibility, and record. Informal conversations, however frequent, cannot substitute for structures that allow faculty to deliberate, dissent, and hold leadership accountable. They invite candor, perhaps—but not power.

Seen in this light, the consolidation of Ethnic Studies is not an isolated decision. It is part of a broader transformation in how authority is organized and exercised. When representative structures weaken, decisions about curriculum and resources become more susceptible to top-down rationales—especially those framed in neutral administrative language. Terms like “efficiency” and “balance” function as what critical policy scholars call “discursive cover,” recasting political choices as technical necessity (Fairclough, 1992; Tauber & Wolf, 2018).

Davis denies that political pressures shaped the decision. Yet this claim must be read within the context of Texas Senate Bill 17, which has already dismantled DEI infrastructure and chilled institutional commitments to equity. Even without explicit directives, universities operate under conditions of anticipatory compliance—aligning themselves with perceived political expectations to avoid risk. In such an environment, structural changes to fields like Ethnic Studies rarely occur in a vacuum.

The same ambiguity surrounds resources. Davis insists that “nothing has changed,” yet acknowledges uncertainty ahead. Faculty concerns about moving from multiple funding streams to fewer reflect well-established patterns: consolidation often leads to internal competition, diminished autonomy, and eventual contraction. The metaphor of a recombined pie obscures a central reality—who controls the knife.

There is also an intellectual cost. Ethnic Studies does not simply add perspective; it anchors critical inquiry into race, power, colonialism, and inequality. When absorbed into larger units, its distinctiveness—and its capacity to challenge dominant frameworks—can be diluted. The result is not interdisciplinarity, but incorporation: difference folded into sameness.

Public trust will not be restored through consolidation or administrative redesign. It is built through transparency, accountability, and genuine shared governance. It requires not only listening to faculty, but ensuring they have real, representative power in shaping institutional direction.

UT Austin is not just reorganizing departments—it is redefining who gets to decide what counts as knowledge, whose voices carry authority, and which fields are allowed to remain visible as distinct sites of critique.

And that is the real stakes of this moment: not whether programs are combined, but whether the university still has the structural capacity—and the political will—to sustain knowledge that speaks back to power, rather than being quietly reorganized out of it.

References

Ahmed, M. (2026a, April 9). Exclusive: UT President Jim Davis reflects on first year leading University. The Daily Texan. https://thedailytexan.com/2026/04/09/exclusive-ut-president-jim-davis-reflects-on-first-year-leading-university/

Ahmed, M. (2026b, April 9). Read the full transcript of UT President Jim Davis’ first interview since taking office. The Daily Texan. https://thedailytexan.com/2026/04/09/read-the-full-transcript-of-ut-president-jim-davis-first-interview-since-taking-office/

Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and social change. Polity Press.

Tauber, R., & Wolf, S. (2018, December 5). Students, faculty discuss free speech. The Williams Record. https://williamsrecord.com/4037/news/students-faculty-discuss-free-speech/

America Isn’t Ready for What AI Will Do to Jobs—Should We Be Worried?

The short answer as to whether we should be worried about AI is—yes! And this is not because mass AI-driven unemployment is already a settled fact, but because the speed of change, the incentives driving corporate adoption, and the absence of serious public planning together create a dangerous vacuum. 

As Josh Tyrangiel writing for The Atlantic makes clear, the real threat is not simply that AI may displace workers, but that it could do so faster than our institutions can respond, leaving millions vulnerable while political leaders, CEOs, and policymakers look the other way. 

Even economists who disagree on timing acknowledge the stakes: if AI compresses years of labor-market disruption into months, the damage will extend far beyond jobs to democracy itself, deepening inequality, anxiety, and political instability. What should concern us most is not only the technology, but the nation’s striking lack of preparation for a transition that may already be underway.

-Angela Valenzuela

America Isn’t Ready for What AI Will Do to Jobs

Does anyone have a plan for what happens next?

By Josh Tyrangiel

Illustrations by Stephan Dybus March, 2026 | The Atlantic

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In 1869, a group of Massachusetts reformers persuaded the state to try a simple idea: counting. The Second Industrial Revolution was belching its way through New England, teaching mill and factory owners a lesson most M.B.A. students now learn in their first semester: that efficiency gains tend to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is usually somebody else. The new machines weren’t just spinning cotton or shaping steel. They were operating at speeds that the human body—an elegant piece of engineering designed over millions of years for entirely different purposes—simply wasn’t built to match. The owners knew this, just as they knew that there’s a limit to how much misery people are willing to tolerate before they start setting fire to things.

Still, the machines pressed on.

So Massachusetts created the nation’s first Bureau of Statistics of Labor, hoping that data might accomplish what conscience could not. By measuring work hours, conditions, wages, and what economists now call “negative externalities” but were then called “children’s arms torn off,” policy makers figured they might be able to produce reasonably fair outcomes for everyone. Or, if you’re a bit more cynical, a sustainable level of exploitation. A few years later, with federal troops shooting at striking railroad workers and wealthy citizens funding private armories—leading indicators that things in your society aren’t going great—Congress decided that this idea might be worth trying at scale and created the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Measurement doesn’t abolish injustice; it rarely even settles arguments. But the act of counting—of trying to see clearly, of committing the government to a shared set of facts—signals an intention to be fair, or at least to be caught trying. Over time, that intention matters. It’s one way a republic earns the right to be believed in.

The BLS remains a small miracle of civilization. It sends out detailed surveys to about 60,000 households and 120,000 businesses and government agencies every month, supplemented by qualitative research it uses to check and occasionally correct its findings. It deserves at least some credit for the scoreboard. America: 250 years without violent class warfare. And you have to appreciate the entertainment value of its minutiae. The BLS is how we know that, in 2024, 44,119 people worked in mobile food services (a.k.a. food trucks), up 907 percent since 2000; that nonveterinary pet care (grooming, training) employed 190,984 people, up 513 percent; and that the United States had almost 100,000 massage therapists, with five times the national concentration in Napa, California.

These and thousands of other BLS statistics describe a society that has grown more prosperous, and a workforce endlessly adaptive to change. But like all statistical bodies, the BLS has its limits. It’s excellent at revealing what has happened and only moderately useful at telling us what’s about to. The data can’t foresee recessions or pandemics—or the arrival of a technology that might do to the workforce what an asteroid did to the dinosaurs.

I am referring, of course, to artificial intelligence. After a rollout that could have been orchestrated by H. P. Lovecraft—“We are summoning the demon,” Elon Musk warned in a typical early pronouncement—the AI industry has pivoted from the language of nightmares to the stuff of comas. Driving innovation. Accelerating transformation. Reimagining workflows. It’s the first time in history that humans have invented something genuinely miraculous and then rushed to dress it in a fleece vest.

There are gobs of money to be made selling enterprise software, but dulling the impact of AI is also a useful feint. This is a technology that can digest a hundred reports before you’ve finished your coffee, draft and analyze documents faster than teams of paralegals, compose music indistinguishable from the genius of a pop star or a Juilliard grad, code—really code, not just copy-paste from Stack Overflow—with the precision of a top engineer. Tasks that once required skill, judgment, and years of training are now being executed, relentlessly and indifferently, by software that learns as it goes.

AI is already so ubiquitous that any resourceful knowledge worker can delegate some of their job’s drudgery to machines. Many companies—Microsoft and PricewaterhouseCoopers among them—have instructed their employees to increase productivity by doing just that. But anyone subcontracting tasks to AI is clever enough to imagine what might come next—a day when augmentation crosses into automation, and cognitive obsolescence compels them to seek work at a food truck, pet spa, or massage table. At least until the humanoid robots arrive.

Many economists insist that this will all be fine. Capitalism is resilient. The arrival of the ATM famously led to the employment of more bank tellers, just as the introduction of Excel swelled the ranks of accountants and Photoshop spiked demand for graphic designers. In each case, new tech automated old tasks, increased productivity, and created jobs with higher wages than anyone could have conceived of before. The BLS projects that employment will grow 3.1 percent over the next 10 years. That’s down from 13 percent in the previous decade, but 5 million new jobs in a country with a stable population is hardly catastrophic.

And yet: There are things that economists struggle to measure. Americans tend to derive meaning and identity from what they do. Most don’t want to do something else, even if they had any confidence—which they don’t—that they could find something else to do. Seventy-one percent of respondents to an August Reuters/Ipsos poll said they’re worried that artificial intelligence will “put too many people out of work permanently.”

This data point might be easier to dismiss if the modern mill and factory owners hadn’t already declared that AI will put people out of work permanently.

In May 2025, Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI company Anthropic, said that AI could drive unemployment up 10 to 20 percent in the next one to five years and “wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs.” Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, estimated that it would eliminate “literally half of all white-collar workers” in a decade. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, revealed that “my little group chat with my tech-CEO friends” has a bet about the inevitable date when a billion-dollar company is staffed by just one person. (The business side of this magazine, like some other publishers, has a corporate partnership with OpenAI.) Other companies, including Meta, Amazon, UnitedHealth, Walmart, JPMorgan Chase, and UPS, which have recently announced layoffs, have framed them more euphemistically in sunny reports to investors about the rise of “automation” and “head count trending down.” Taken together, these statements are extraordinary: the owners of capital warning workers that the ice beneath them is about to crack—while continuing to stomp on it.

It’s as if we’re watching two versions of the same scene. In one, the ice holds, because it always has. In the other, a lot of people go under. The difference becomes clear only when the surface finally gives way—at which point the range of available options will have considerably narrowed.

AI is already transforming work, one delegated task at a time. If the transformation unfolds slowly enough and the economy adjusts quickly enough, the economists may be right: We’ll be fine. Or better. But if AI instead triggers a rapid reorganization of work—compressing years of change into months, affecting roughly 40 percent of jobs worldwide, as the International Monetary Fund projects—the consequences will not stop at the economy. They will test political institutions that have already shown how brittle they can be.

The question, then, is whether we’re approaching the kind of disruption that can be managed with statistics—or the kind that creates statistics no one can bear to count.

AUSTAN Goolsbee is the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, the Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, and a former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under Barack Obama. He’s also one of the few economists you would not immediately regret bringing to a party. When I asked Goolsbee if any conclusive data indicated that AI had begun to eat into the labor market, he delivered an answer that was both obvious and unhelpful, smiling as he did it. The nonanswer was the point.

I’ve known Goolsbee long enough to enjoy these moments, when he makes fun of our shared uselessness. Economists are rarely equipped to give straight answers about the present. Journalists hate when the future won’t reveal itself on deadline.

We spoke in September, shortly after the release of what’s come to be known as “The Canaries Paper,” written by three academics from the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. By crunching data from millions of monthly payroll records for workers in jobs with exposure to generative AI, the authors concluded that workers ages 22 to 25—the canaries—have seen about a 13 percent decline in employment since late 2022.

For several days, the paper was all anyone in the field wanted to talk about, and by talk about I mostly mean punch holes in. The report overemphasized the effect of ChatGPT. Youth employment is cyclical. The same period saw a sharp interest-rate spike—a far more likely source of turbulence. “Canaries” also contradicted a study released a few weeks earlier by the Economic Innovation Group, which argued that AI is unlikely to cause mass unemployment in the near term, even as it reshapes jobs and wages. That paper was knowingly titled “AI and Jobs: The Final Word (Until the Next One).”

This was the point Goolsbee wanted to emphasize: Economists are constrained by numbers. And numerically speaking, nothing indicates that AI has had an impact on people’s jobs. “It’s just too early,” he said.

A lack of certainty should not be mistaken for a lack of concern. The Fed’s mandate is to promote maximum employment, so the corporate pronouncements about imminent job loss have Goolsbee’s attention. But the numbers don’t add up. It’s possible that the labor market is softer than it looks, but that the softness is being absorbed within firms rather than showing up in the unemployment rate. If companies are sitting on more workers than they need, however—a phenomenon known as labor hoarding—you’d expect that to reveal itself as weak productivity growth. It’s as predictable as a hangover: too many workers, not enough work, sagging productivity. “But it’s been totally the opposite,” Goolsbee said. “Productivity growth has been really high. So I don’t know how to reconcile that.”

Productivity is the cheat code for a more prosperous society. If each worker can produce more in the same hour—more goods, better services, faster results—then the total economic pie grows, even if the number of workers doesn’t. It’s the rare efficiency gain that expands the pie rather than merely redistributing slices.

America has been on a productivity tear for the past few years. It might be temporary, the result of a onetime boost, such as the COVID-era boom in new small businesses. But with the special joy of someone paid to complicate everything, Goolsbee pointed out that general-purpose technologies such as electricity and computing can create lasting productivity gains, the kind that make whole societies wealthier.

Whether AI is one of those technologies will only become clear over time. How long before we’ll know? “Years,” Goolsbee said.

In the meantime, there’s another complication. The immediate risk to employment may not be AI itself, but the way companies, seduced by its promise, overinvest before they understand what it can actually do. Goolsbee reached back to the internet bubble, when companies spent wildly on laying fiber cables and building capacity. “In 2001, when we found out that the growth rate of the internet is not going to be 25 percent a year, but merely 10 percent—which is still a pretty great growth rate—it meant we had way too much fiber, and there was a collapse of business investment,” Goolsbee said. “And a bunch of people were thrown out of work the old-fashioned way.”

A similar crash in AI investment, if it comes, would likely look familiar: painful, destabilizing, and accompanied by surges of CNBC rants and recriminations. But it would amount to a financial reset, not a technological reversal—the kind of outcome economists are especially good at recognizing, because it resembles a thing that’s happened before.

This is the paradox of economics. To understand how fast the present is hurtling us into the future, you need a fixed point, and the fixed points are all in the past. It’s like driving while looking only at the rearview mirror—plenty dangerous if the road stays straight, catastrophic if it doesn’t.

David Autor and Daron Acemoglu are among the most accomplished rearview drivers. Both are at MIT, and both excel at understanding previous economic disruptions. Acemoglu, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2024, studies inequality; Autor focuses on labor. But both insist that the story of AI and its consequences will depend mostly on speed—not because they assume lost jobs will automatically be replaced, but because a slower rate of change leaves societies time to adapt, even if some of those jobs never come back.

Labor markets have a natural rate of adjustment. If, over the course of 30 years, 3 percent of employees in a profession retire or have their jobs eliminated annually, you’d barely notice. Yet a decade later, a third of the jobs in those professions would be gone. Elevator operators and tollbooth attendants went through this slow fade to obsolescence with no damage to the economy. “When it happens more rapidly,” Autor told me, “things become problematic.”

Autor is most famous for his work on the China shock. In 2001, China joined the World Trade Organization; six years later, 13 percent of U.S. manufacturing jobs—about 2 million—had disappeared. The China shock took a disproportionate toll on small-scale manufacturing—textiles, toys, furniture—concentrated primarily in the South. “Many of the workers in those places still haven’t recovered,” Autor said, “and we’re obviously living with the political consequences.”

But AI isn’t a trade policy. It’s software. Even if it hits some professions and places first—a lawyer in a large urban firm, say, may feel the impact years before a worker in a less digitized industry—the technology won’t be constrained by geography. Eventually, everyone will be affected.

All of this sounds foreboding, until you remember the most important thing about software: People hate it, almost as much as they hate change.

This is what gives many economists confidence that the AI asteroid is still at least a decade away. “These tech CEOs want us to believe that the market for automation is preordained, and that it will all happen smoothly and profitably,” Acemoglu said. He then made a disdainful noise from his Nobel Prize–winning bullshit detector. “History tells us it’s actually going to happen much slower.”

The argument goes like this: Before AI can transform a company, it has to access the company’s data and be woven into existing systems—which sounds easy, provided you’re not a chief technology officer. A trade secret of most Fortune 500 companies is that they still run many critical functions on lumbering, industrial-strength mainframe computers that almost never break down and therefore can never be replaced. Mainframes are like Christopher Walken: They’ve been going nonstop since the 1960s, they’re fantastic at performing peculiar roles (processing payments, safeguarding data), and nobody alive really understands how they work.

Integrating legacy tech with modern AI means navigating hardware, vendors, contracts, ancient coding languages, and humans—every one of whom has a strong opinion about the “right” way to make changes. Months pass, then years; another company holiday party comes and goes; and the CEO still can’t understand why the miracle of AI isn’t solving all of their problems.

Every new general-purpose technology is, for a time, held hostage by the mess of what already exists. The first electric-power stations opened in the 1880s, and no one debated whether they were superior to steam engines. But factories had been built with steam engines in their basements, powering overhead shafts that ran the length of the buildings, with belts and pulleys carrying power to individual machines. To adopt electricity, factory owners didn’t just need to buy motors—they needed to demolish and rebuild their entire operations. Some did. Most just waited for their infrastructure to wear out, which explains why the major economic gains from electrification didn’t show up for 40 years.

NONE of this is reassuring enough for the economist Anton Korinek. He’s “super worried,” he told me. He thinks that America will see major job losses—“a very noticeable labor-market effect”—as soon as this year.

“And then those economists you’ve been talking to, they’re going to say, ‘I see that in the data!’ ” Korinek paused. “Let’s not joke about it, because it’s too serious.”

Korinek is a professor and the faculty director of the Economics of Transformative AI Initiative at the University of Virginia. Last year, Time magazine put him on its list of the most influential people in AI. But he did not set out to become an economist. He grew up in an Austrian mountain village, writing machine code in 0s and 1s—the least glamorous form of programming, and the most unforgiving. It teaches you where instructions bottleneck, where systems jam, and what breaks first when pushed too hard.

He’d kept a close watch on developments in AI since the deep-learning breakthroughs of the early 2010s, even as his doctoral work focused on the prevention of financial crises. When he got his first demo of a large language model, in September 2022, it took “about five seconds” before he considered its consequences for the future of work, starting with his own.

We met for breakfast in Charlottesville in the fall. Korinek is youthful and slender, with delicate wire-frame glasses and a faintly red beard. My overall impression was of someone who’d rather be customizing Excel tabs than prophesizing doom. Still, here he was, saying the five words economists disdain the most: This time may be different.

Texas Freedom Network (TFN) Statement on Ten Commandments Appellate Ruling, April 22, 2026

Friends:

Source: San.com

The 9–8 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit allowing Texas to mandate the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms should set off alarm bells across the country (Nigrelli, 2026; TFN Press Release, 2026). 

This is not about heritage. It is not about morality. It is about power. As Texas Freedom Network President Felicia Martin makes clear, religious freedom means the state does not get to decide which beliefs are elevated and displayed for all children. Yet that is precisely what this ruling permits—by a single vote. One vote to move the state from protector of religious liberty to arbiter of religious truth. That is not neutrality. That is state-sanctioned imposition.

And let’s be clear: this is not an isolated decision. It is part of a coordinated reordering of public education in Texas—one that is narrowing what can be taught, who gets to decide, and now, what must be believed. From dismantling DEI to restructuring university governance to inserting religious doctrine into K–12 classrooms, the pattern is unmistakable. 

Public schools are being transformed from spaces of inquiry and pluralism into instruments of ideological control. The Ten Commandments on the wall are not the beginning of this story—they are the latest move in a much larger project. The question now is whether we recognize it for what it is, and whether we are willing to confront it before the line between education and indoctrination disappears altogether.

And this is all the more reason to attend our meeting this evening with the Democrat members of the Texas State Board of Education per my earlier post this morning.

-Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Reference

Nigrelli, C. (2026, April 22). Court rules Texas can require Ten Commandments in classrooms. San Antonio Express-News. https://san.com/cc/court-rules-texas-can-require-ten-commandments-in-classrooms/

TFN Statement on Ten Commandments Appellate Ruling

Spokespeople available in Spanish and English for additional comment or interview at request



FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

April 22, 2026

CONTACT: Andrew Freeman, andrew@tfn.org, 512-746-8404

AUSTIN, Texas – The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 9-8 Tuesday that Texas can require public schools to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms.

Several families and faith leaders sued school districts to block the law from taking effect after Senate Bill 10 was passed by the Texas Legislature last summer.

Texas Freedom Network President and Executive Director Felicia Martin (she/her) issued the following response:

“Religious freedom means the government does not get to decide which faith belongs on a classroom wall. This ruling gets that wrong, and it does so by just one vote. One vote should not be enough to take that freedom away from Texas families. At Texas Freedom Network, we will continue our support of the diverse families and faith leaders challenging this decision and any further legal action to bring it before the Supreme Court.”

###

The Texas Freedom Network (tfn.org) is a grassroots organization of religious and community leaders and young Texans building an informed and effective movement for equality and social justice.

INVITATION to Texas SBOE MTG. THIS PM @ 7 PM on ZOOM RE: "Democrats seek to pause Texas’ social studies revamp over $70K grant from conservative think tank"

Friends,

At a moment when the future of public education in Texas is being actively shaped—and contested—I encourage you to tune in this evening at 7PM for an important Town Hall hosted by the Democratic members of the Texas State Board of Education.

This conversation centers on the proposed overhaul of the Social Studies TEKS standards, set for implementation in 2030—standards that will shape what over 5.5 million Texas students learn about history, democracy, and the world. Recent reporting raises serious questions about transparency, influence, and the integrity of the revision process, including a $70,000 grant from the Texas Public Policy Foundation to a university center led by a key adviser guiding these changes.

This is not simply about curriculum—it is about whose knowledge counts, how history is told, and whether public education will remain a space for critical inquiry or become further narrowed by ideological influence.

I strongly encourage you to read the article below in advance and come prepared to listen, learn, and engage.

Register here to attend: https://us05web.zoom.us/meeting/register/Lu49SiFeTGy3_UuBnzbVRw#/registration

These are decisions with long-term consequences. Your awareness—and your presence—matter.

With urgency and hope,

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Democrats seek to pause Texas’ social studies revamp over $70K grant from conservative think tank

The Texas Public Policy Foundation awarded the grant to Schreiner University’s Texas Center, which is led by a historian guiding the state in its social studies revision.

by Jaden Edison April 8, 2026, 3:36 p.m. Central

Marisa B. Perez-Diaz, the District 3 State Board of Education member, listens during public testimony on proposed revisions to the Social Studies Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) standards as the SBOE holds meetings at the Barbara Jordan State Office Building in Austin on April 7, 2026. Kaylee Greenlee for the Texas Tribune

Audio recording is automated for accessibility. Humans wrote and edited the story. See our AI policy, and give us feedback.

Democrats on the State Board of Education want to pause Texas’ overhaul of its social studies curriculum after finding out that the university department of a historian advising the group received a financial contribution from an influential conservative think tank.

In a letter provided to The Texas Tribune, Democrats raised concerns about a 2024 tax filing showing that the Texas Public Policy Foundation awarded $70,000 to the Texas Center at Schreiner University in Kerrville for the purposes of developing state learning standards, which outline what students should know before they graduate.

Donald Frazier, a Texas historian, is director of the Texas Center. Last year, State Board of Education members appointed him as one of nine expert advisers responsible for helping guide the state as it rewrites how public schools will teach social studies for years to come.

In the letter signed by all five Democrats on the board, members called for “a comprehensive and independent investigation” into the conditions of the $70,000 grant, agreements between Frazier and the conservative think tank and actions taken by Frazier during Texas’ social studies rewrite that may have influenced decisions.

“Given the scope and significance of this work, which impacts more than 5.5 million public school students across Texas, it is essential that the process remain transparent, objective, and free from undue influence,” the letter states.

“Board members have devoted significant time to hearing public testimony and reviewing extensive input from Texans across the state, many of whom have already expressed concern about the pace and transparency of this process,” the letter continues. “Proceeding without resolving these issues risks undermining public trust and calls into question the validity of any final decisions.”

In emails to the Tribune, Frazier defended the grant, saying his private university works with organizations from across the state. Frazier noted that as an adviser to the State Board of Education, he provides recommendations but that the board maintains final say on what students will be required to learn.

“Texas Public Policy hired us to discuss Texas ideas, which is what we do,” Frazier said. “Apparently, we are good enough at it that our time is valuable. The idea that I am some Great Oz figure with huge influence on this state board process, while flattering, is wishful thinking.”

“Clearly someone doesn’t like what I have to say, which is lamentable, but not surprising in today’s environment,” he added. “I’d love to visit with the aggravated folks one-on-one, or even face-to-face, but these accusers and insinuators have not reached out.”

Asked what he produced for the conservative organization, Frazier directed the Tribune to his department’s website, saying his passion is “demonstrating the connections between the world, US, and national story.”

The Texas Public Policy Foundation said in a statement, “This is obviously a delaying tactic by certain members of the SBOE.”

“They should focus on the quality and merits of the curriculum and ensure that Texas students are getting the best possible education,” said Brian Phillips, a spokesperson for the Austin-based conservative think tank.

Phillips did not immediately respond to follow-up questions about what Frazier’s team produced under the agreement.

The State Board of Education began last year to redesign Texas’ social studies standards. The board plans to vote on the standards this summer, with classroom implementation expected in 2030.

Up to this point, a Republican majority of the group has approved plans to center Texas and U.S. history in social studies while deemphasizing world cultures, world history and geography. The panel of nine advisers has helped guide the process, almost all of whom have no K-12 classroom experience in Texas and several of whom have ties to conservative activism.

Critics say the panel has assumed full control of Texas’ social studies rewrite and undermined teacher expertise, when in previous years, teachers have normally guided the process. Draft proposals of the social studies changes, critics argue, prioritize memorization over critical thinking and simplification over accuracy. They also say the current plan focuses heavily on Western civilization at the expense of other cultures, lacks historical perspective of people of color and prioritizes Christianity over other major world religions.

Frazier previously served as chair of Texas’ 1836 Project advisory committee — the state’s counter to The 1619 Project, a collection of essays from the New York Times that examined the foundational role slavery played in the forming of the U.S.

He was appointed a social studies adviser to the State Board of Education last year. Since then, he has become a vocal leader of the group, often one of the first to provide his thoughts and perspective in public meetings.

“I am pleased by the move toward a narrative approach to history, and an emphasis on Western Civilization as shaping the bedrock principles of our nation. I am glad to see an open discussion of Christianity as an influential force in shaping the American character,” Frazier recently wrote. “Other world religions are treated with respect in most cases, yet the single most important shaper of American culture is sometimes treated with trepidation. Mentioning Christianity is not proselytizing, but rather an admission of the reality of the history of the United States.”

The Texas Public Policy Foundation, meanwhile, holds significant influence in state politics, often hosting events with top Republican leaders, including Gov. Greg Abbott, and leading conservative policy debates at the Legislature. In the past year, the organization has been a strong advocate for a Texas-centric approach to social studies instruction.

During a September board meeting, Matthew McCormick, the organization’s education director, was asked directly by a board member if the group had any involvement in the development of the current social studies framework.

“TPPF was not involved,” McCormick responded.

On Tuesday, Democratic board member Marisa B. Pérez-Díaz asked Republican board chair Aaron Kinsey when the board could discuss the working relationship between Frazier and the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Several Republican board members objected to Pérez-Díaz asking questions about the connection, saying the board needed to instead focus on social studies content.

“One of the challenges with the question is she made an assertion that it was for a certain purpose — whatever she was talking about — some payment. I haven’t seen that,” Kinsey said of Pérez-Díaz’s inquiry. “I don’t know anything about any private contracts. I know about SBOE contracts; I know about my business contracts. I don’t know anything else, so I can’t tell you when I can advise on that, because I don’t have information on that. Nor do I anticipate giving information.”

Tom Maynard, one of two Republicans who appointed Frazier as an adviser on social studies standards — referred to as Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, or TEKS — called insinuations that Frazier engaged in wrongdoing “troubling.”

“I think the implication is that there’s some sort of quid pro quo,” Maynard said. “There’s no evidence, and it’s just a smear tactic, and I think it’s not productive. And I think we need to stay focused on what we’re doing here and move forward and get TEKS done and not play political games with this thing.”

Democrats, however, said they consider the process “too important to continue under a cloud of uncertainty.”

“We must ensure that any standards adopted by this board reflect the highest level of integrity,” their statement said, “and serve the best interests of all Texas students.”

Disclosure: New York Times, Schreiner University and Texas Public Policy Foundation have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.