Policy Solutions

About this page

These are policy fixes: legislation, structural reform, and proposed solutions to specific problems. Every one has been covered on the show, and every one is something I would at least consider. That is a lower bar than endorsement and a higher bar than somebody proposed it.

Where I have landed on a position, it is on the Where I Stand page. If you want to know how a system actually works before judging a fix for it, that is the What People Get Wrong page.

The organizations advancing many of these are on the Solutions in Action page, because this page is about the policy and that one is about the people doing the work.

DEMOCRACY AND ELECTIONS

Voting method reform: STAR and approval voting

What it is. Two alternatives to pick-one voting. STAR, meaning Score Then Automatic Runoff, has you score every candidate zero to five, sends the two highest scorers to an automatic runoff, and counts your ballot for whichever of the two you rated higher. Approval voting is the simpler version: check every candidate you find acceptable, and the most approved wins. Approval requires no change to most ballot equipment, which is why it has actually been adopted in places where STAR has not.

The problem. Any race with more than two candidates forces you to guess. Vote for who you actually like and you may help elect who you like least. That single mechanic creates the spoiler effect, locks out third parties, and pushes people into strategic voting instead of honest voting.

How it fixes it. Scoring or approving each candidate separately removes the penalty for supporting someone outside the top two. Under STAR you can give your favorite a five and the more viable candidate a four, and the automatic runoff guarantees your ballot still counts between the two who can actually win. Under approval you simply mark everyone you could live with. Either way there stops being a reason to vote against your own preference, which is the mechanic that props up the duopoly.

Uncapping the House of Representatives

What it is. Lifting the 435 seat cap frozen since the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929. The Equal Voices Act sets a formula rather than a number: divide the national population by the population of the least populous state and round to the nearest odd number.

The problem. The chamber has been the same size since the country had roughly a third of today's population. Each member now represents around three quarters of a million people, far more than almost any peer democracy, which makes real constituent contact impossible. Because Electoral College votes are tied to House seats, the freeze distorts presidential elections too.

How it fixes it. Smaller districts mean a representative serves a number of people they can actually know, which lowers the cost of running and makes it harder to win on money and name recognition alone. Tying the formula to the smallest state also pulls the Electoral College closer to the popular vote as a byproduct of fixing representation.

A national identification card

What it is. A free, universally issued national ID establishing identity and citizenship in one document, replacing the patchwork of state credentials and removing any need for a voter to produce underlying paperwork at the polls.

The problem. Two things are true at the same time. Most Americans want some assurance that a voter is who they say they are, and that is not an unreasonable thing to want. But the SAVE Act's answer puts the burden on the citizen, demanding a passport or a birth certificate, and roughly 21 million voting age Americans do not have ready access to those documents. Meanwhile noncitizen voting is already a federal crime and the documented case counts are tiny: 15 in Michigan out of 7.2 million registered voters, 9 in Georgia out of 8.2 million.

The United States is also an outlier. Around 131 countries issue a mandatory national ID. We issue none, so we improvise with driver's licenses from more than fifty jurisdictions running different standards. That patchwork is a barrier in itself. Over 34.5 million people either lack a current state ID or hold one whose name or address no longer matches, and more than half of Americans living in photo ID states cannot correctly describe their own state's rule.

How it fixes it. It flips who carries the burden of proof. Rather than asking a citizen to prove citizenship with paperwork the government may never have issued them, the government issues one document that settles identity and citizenship together. Showing ID at the polls stops being an obstacle once everyone actually has one, which is the step the current debate skips entirely. It also collapses fifty some standards into a single one, so moving between states does not mean relearning the rules, and it answers the identity concern directly instead of by proxy. The design detail that decides whether this works is enrollment: if the card is issued through a process that still requires a birth certificate to obtain, the barrier has only moved upstream rather than disappeared, so reaching the people currently without documents has to be the first phase rather than the last.

Banning or reforming partisan gerrymandering

What it is. Taking district drawing away from the legislators who benefit from it, through independent commissions, statutory standards a map has to meet, or both.

The problem. Mid decade redistricting has become a national arms race, with states redrawing maps years outside the census cycle because the president's party needs seats. The Supreme Court's Callais decision made it worse by letting a state defend nearly any map by asserting it discriminated on party rather than race, a distinction with little practical difference across much of the South. When the legislator picks the voters, the general election stops mattering and the primary becomes the only real contest, which is a large part of why Congress behaves the way it does.

How it fixes it. Removing the mapmaker's self interest is the entire mechanism. It will not make every district competitive, because Americans increasingly sort themselves geographically, but it stops the deliberate manufacture of safe seats. One caution on the numbers: a widely cited poll showing majorities of partisans backing their own side's redistricting appears to be an artifact of how the question was asked, and support for partisan gerrymandering as a principle remains low in both parties.

Making Election Day a federal holiday

What it is. Designating Election Day a federal holiday so that voting does not compete with a shift.

The problem. We hold national elections on a Tuesday in November, a schedule set for the convenience of 19th century farmers, and then ask hourly workers to choose between a paycheck and a ballot. The people most likely to lose that tradeoff are already the least likely to vote.

How it fixes it. It removes one specific, well documented barrier. Worth being honest about the limit: a holiday helps salaried workers most and does little for people in retail, food service, and healthcare, who tend to work holidays anyway. Paired with expanded early voting, which does more of the work, it is a real improvement. Alone it is a gesture.

Capping campaign finance and lobbying, and ending anonymous political money

What it is. Contribution and expenditure limits, restrictions on the revolving door between government and lobbying, and disclosure requirements so no political spending arrives without a name attached.

The problem. Dark money hit a record 1.9 billion dollars in the 2024 federal races, per the Brennan Center. That is money whose source the public is not permitted to know, spent to change how the public votes. Add a lobbying industry that helps write legislation and then staffs the agencies enforcing it, and you get the result Seven Ten measured: bills pass at roughly the same rate whether they have 30 percent public support or 70 percent.

How it fixes it. Disclosure is the piece with the clearest path, because it restricts no speech at all, it only removes the anonymity from it. If an argument is worth funding, it is worth signing. Caps are harder, since Citizens United and the cases after it limit what Congress can do without a constitutional amendment, which is exactly why serious reform effort concentrates on disclosure.

Breaking the two party duopoly

What it is. Lowering the structural barriers that make a third choice unviable: ballot access rules written by the two parties, debate thresholds set by bodies the two parties control, and the pick one ballot that turns any third candidate into a spoiler.

The problem. The largest bloc in American politics identifies as independent and has almost no representation, because the system is not built to produce any. This is not a shortage of good candidates. It is a set of rules that makes voting for anyone outside two options an act of self sabotage.

How it fixes it. No single change does it. The ballot method is the load bearing one, which is why voting reform sits at the top of this page, but ballot and debate access matter too. The honest version of this argument is not that third parties should win. It is that the two parties should have to compete for votes they currently take for granted.

EXECUTIVE POWER AND THE COURTS

Pardon power reform

What it is. Two tracks. A constitutional amendment barring self pardons, pardons of family members and administration officials, and pardons issued for corrupt purposes. And a statute requiring the Justice Department to give Congress the underlying case materials for a pardoned individual while making pardons sold for bribes explicitly illegal.

The problem. The pardon power is nearly unlimited by design and the Supreme Court has said so directly. George Mason warned at the Constitutional Convention that a president could pardon crimes he had advised himself and shield the people who carried them out, and nothing currently prevents that. Because a pardon also erases remaining restitution, it can wipe out court ordered repayment to victims with a signature.

How it fixes it. The amendment closes the four categories where the conflict of interest is total and no argument for mercy applies, leaving the rest of the power intact, because the case for clemency is real. The statute handles the achievable part: it restricts nobody, but it makes the reasoning visible to Congress and turns selling a pardon from a scandal into a crime.

Supreme Court reform: term limits, ethics, and the expansion question

What it is. Three separate reforms that usually get discussed as one. Eighteen year terms with staggered appointments so each president gets two picks per term. A binding ethics code with mandatory recusal standards, financial disclosure, and an independent body to review complaints. And court expansion, adding seats beyond nine, which is the most discussed and the weakest of the three.

The problem. Nine lifetime appointments governed by a self policing ethics framework with no enforcement. Which president reshapes American law for a generation depends largely on actuarial accident, which turns every vacancy into a national crisis and gives both parties reason to treat the Court as a prize rather than an institution.

How it fixes it. Staggered terms make appointments routine and predictable. If every president gets two, no single vacancy decides the direction of the law for thirty years, which lowers the temperature on confirmations and removes the incentive to time a retirement politically. The ethics piece is simpler and more achievable, because it needs no constitutional change: it applies to the Supreme Court the same recusal and disclosure rules that already bind every other federal judge in the country.

On expansion, I want to be straight about where this one sits. Adding seats is clearly constitutional, since the Constitution never set the number and Congress has changed it before. It is also the least popular reform on this page, drawing somewhere between 34 and 40 percent support, running 24 points underwater with Republicans, and carrying a high share of not sure responses that suggest even the support is soft. The structural objection is real too: whatever one party does with the Court's size, the other will do when it regains power. I am putting it on this page because it is a live option and I would rather argue about it honestly than pretend it is off the table. But it is the weakest item here, and anyone who leads a Court reform argument with expansion instead of term limits and ethics is choosing the version least likely to persuade anybody.

Removing presidential immunity

What it is. The No Kings Act, which would state in statute that federal criminal law applies to a president, sitting or former, and that acts taken in an official capacity are not shielded from prosecution. It uses Congress's power under the Exceptions Clause of Article III to limit the Supreme Court's appellate jurisdiction over the question.

The problem. The Court's 2024 immunity ruling created a category of presidential conduct that criminal law does not reach. That is a structural change to the office, not a ruling about one man, and it will apply to every president who follows. Hamilton's whole argument in Federalist 69 for why an American president was not a king was that a president would be, in his words, amenable to personal punishment and disgrace.

How it fixes it. It restates the rule that Congress, not the Court, decides who federal criminal statutes cover. The jurisdiction stripping mechanism is the aggressive part and also the contested part, because it invites an immediate fight over whether Congress can wall the Court off from reviewing the very statute limiting it. That fight is the point: this is Congress asserting a power it has on paper and has rarely used.

Filibuster reform or removal

What it is. Either eliminating the 60 vote threshold for legislation, or reforming it, most commonly by restoring the talking requirement so that blocking a bill costs the objector something.

The problem. The filibuster was an accident. The Senate removed the motion to end debate in 1806 without meaning to create anything, and unlimited debate was the byproduct. There was no way to force a vote at all until 1917. Today a senator does not even have to speak: after the 1975 double tracking reform the chamber simply moves on, so obstruction is free. Meanwhile both parties already carved out nominations in 2013 and 2017, so judges and cabinet officials need 51 votes while legislation needs 60. We have already decided the threshold is optional. We just apply it to the branch that writes laws.

How it fixes it. Removal means a majority can legislate, which is what a legislature is for, and it ends the pattern where a bill passes the House, holds majority support in the Senate, and dies without a vote. The talking filibuster is the middle path: it preserves minority delay as a real tool while making it cost floor time and physical stamina, so it gets used for things a senator will actually stand up for rather than as a routine default. The argument against either version does not change with the calendar: whichever party you are in, you will be in the minority again.

Better policy transparency to constituents

What it is. Requiring that what a member of Congress actually does reach the people they represent in a usable form: how they voted, what they sponsored, what is in a bill before the vote, and who funded the campaign.

The problem. The information is technically public and practically invisible, scattered across systems built for insiders. So most people learn about their representative's record from campaign advertising, which is the least reliable source available and the one the representative controls.

How it fixes it. It changes the default. A constituent who receives a plain summary of a vote does not have to go looking, which is the step almost nobody takes. This will not fix accountability by itself, since knowing is not the same as acting, but the current arrangement makes even the knowing part require unusual effort, and that is a choice rather than a fact of nature.

CIVIC PARTICIPATION

Civic education at every stage of school

What it is. Embedding civic education throughout schooling rather than as one semester course, including getting students physically into city halls where decisions are made.

The problem. Most Americans are not equipped to participate in their own democracy, not because they are incapable but because the system never prepared them. People do not know how local government works, who represents them, or how decisions about their taxes, schools, and neighborhoods actually get made.

How it fixes it. Knowledge of process is what converts an opinion into participation. Someone who knows a zoning board exists, meets on a schedule, and takes public comment can act on a complaint about their neighborhood. Someone who does not knows only how to be angry about it. Putting students in the room makes the machinery concrete in a way a textbook cannot.

Direct digital feedback for local government

What it is. Systems that push clear notice to every resident when a city council proposes a budget change or a new initiative, with a real mechanism to weigh in.

The problem. Local participation is gated by friction. Weighing in currently requires digging through a buried government website or taking a day off work for a Tuesday afternoon meeting. The people most affected by local decisions are usually the least able to attend one.

How it fixes it. It moves the cost of participation from the resident to the government, where it belongs. Notice that arrives, in language a person can read, with a way to respond that does not require unpaid time off, changes who gets heard on decisions about their own neighborhood.

Incentives for community building and local involvement

What it is. Making local participation something people are actively drawn into rather than something they have to seek out: employer time for civic service, recognition and credit through schools, and support for the institutions where people meet neighbors who are not like them.

The problem. The civic infrastructure that used to produce local involvement, meaning unions, congregations, service clubs, and bowling leagues, has thinned dramatically, and nothing replaced it. Political identity increasingly comes from a feed rather than from a room with people in it. Young people are not joining conservative movements because of ideology; the right offers community, access, and belonging that other spaces failed to create.

How it fixes it. Belonging is the actual product being sold in politics right now, and whoever supplies it gets the political loyalty attached to it. Rebuilding the places where people know each other in person is slower than any messaging strategy and considerably more durable, because a person embedded in a real community is much harder to radicalize by algorithm.

National service at 18

What it is. A period of civil service for young adults after high school, either voluntary and heavily incentivized or universal and required. I am putting this on the page as an open question rather than a settled position, because the mandatory version raises objections I have not resolved.

The problem. Americans increasingly grow up without meeting anyone outside their own class, region, or politics, and enter adulthood with no shared experience of contributing to anything larger than themselves. Meanwhile there is a long list of work the country needs done, in disaster response, conservation, elder care, tutoring, and public health.

How it fixes it. Mixing is the mechanism. The strongest historical argument for national service is not the labor, it is that it puts eighteen year olds from different places in the same unit with a common task, which is the one condition that reliably reduces mutual suspicion. The honest counter, and the reason this is labeled a question: compelled service is a serious imposition on individual liberty, and a voluntary program with real benefits attached may capture most of the value without that cost.

IMMIGRATION

Expanding and cleaning up work visas

What it is. Expanding legal work visa channels while fixing the design flaw that ties a worker's legal status to a single employer.

The problem. The current system rewards employers for keeping workers undocumented, because undocumented labor means no payroll taxes, no Social Security contributions, no workers' compensation, and no accountability. The Americans competing against that arrangement are the ones it harms most. Meanwhile the visas that do exist tie status to one employer, so losing the job means losing the right to be here, which is exactly the leverage that makes exploitation work.

How it fixes it. Bringing work that happens anyway onto the books forces employers to pay the prevailing wage and follow the rules, raising the floor for everyone in that labor market. Decoupling status from a single employer removes the threat that stops workers from reporting wage theft and unsafe conditions, which is what makes those laws enforceable at all.

Funding and staffing the asylum system

What it is. Resourcing immigration courts and asylum officers to clear the backlog, rather than treating the border as purely an enforcement problem.

The problem. In Miami people wait eight to nine years for an initial asylum interview. Not a decision. An interview. A backlog that long produces exactly the outcomes people across the spectrum say they hate: it gives weak claims years of de facto residence and leaves strong claims in limbo for most of a decade. Politicians who campaign hardest on illegal immigration have provided no resources and no policy to fix the part of the system that is actually broken.

How it fixes it. A functioning process resolves cases while the facts are fresh and the incentive to disappear into the interior is lowest. It also removes the argument that the system rewards filing regardless of merit, because a claim heard in months rather than a decade cannot be used that way.

Simplifying legal immigration

What it is. Streamlining the lawful pathways so that more people can come the right way, paired with fortified protections against unauthorized entry.

The problem. Unchecked illegal immigration is a real problem and letting people in without vetting is not wise. But the legal process is slow, expensive, and complicated enough that it pushes people toward the illegal one, which means the difficulty of doing it correctly is itself a driver of doing it incorrectly.

How it fixes it. Making the lawful route usable changes the calculation for people who would prefer it and can currently not access it. Enforcement works better against a smaller and more clearly defined population, which is what a functioning legal channel produces.

Immigration enforcement accountability

What it is. Mandatory body cameras for federal immigration agents, use of force policy written into statute rather than internal guidance, and legal protection for sensitive locations, meaning schools, churches, hospitals, and courthouses.

The problem. Federal immigration agents have operated in American communities with far less accountability infrastructure than local police, in some cases in paramilitary gear without recording requirements a city officer would face. When something goes wrong there is often no independent record and no codified standard to measure the conduct against.

How it fixes it. Cameras and a statutory use of force standard give an investigation something to work with, which is what turns an allegation into a case rather than a dispute between accounts. Protecting sensitive locations addresses a separate harm: when people are afraid to send a child to school or go to an emergency room, enforcement is reaching people it was never meant to reach, including citizens.

HEALTHCARE

A public option, preventive care, and coverage that follows the person

What it is. Three connected pieces. A government run insurance plan competing alongside private plans on the exchange. A deliberate shift of spending toward preventive care. And coverage that belongs to the person rather than the employer, so changing jobs does not mean changing plans, networks, and doctors.

The problem. Tying health insurance to employment is an accident of World War Two wage controls that we have treated as a design ever since. It means losing a job means losing coverage at the exact moment a person can least afford to buy it, it locks people into jobs they would otherwise leave, and it forces a change of doctor every time someone changes employer. On the spending side, the system pays generously to treat conditions late and poorly to prevent them early, which is expensive in both money and life.

How it fixes it. A public option introduces a competitor that does not need to return a margin, which pressures private premiums without ending private insurance, and it gives people in thin markets an actual choice where many now have one or none. Portability breaks the employer link so that coverage follows the person through job changes, layoffs, and self employment. Preventive investment is the piece with the best return and the worst politics, because the payoff lands years later and in a different budget line than the one that funded it.

HOUSING AND TRANSPORTATION

Public transit and places worth walking in

What it is. Investment in public transportation and in the zoning that makes walkable neighborhoods legal to build: mixed use development, smaller lots, and an end to the parking minimums that force every destination to sit inside an asphalt field.

The problem. In most of America a car is not a choice, it is a prerequisite for employment, and that is a policy outcome rather than a natural one. It costs a household thousands of dollars a year they cannot opt out of, it excludes people who cannot drive, and it is a hidden and regressive tax on exactly the people with the least margin. Housing and transportation are the same conversation, because what you are allowed to build determines whether anything is close enough to walk to.

How it fixes it. Removing car dependence removes a fixed cost from household budgets, which is a raise that does not require an employer. Density and transit reinforce each other: transit only works where enough people live near it, and people can only live near it where the zoning allows it. This is also the housing supply argument arriving from a different direction, since the same rules that ban the corner store ban the apartment above it.

Fixing mortgage qualification rules

What it is. Modernizing underwriting to measure actual repayment behavior, and reforming how community property states count a spouse's finances.

The problem. The qualification system penalizes people for things that are not risk. Student loans in deferment count against an application even with no payments due. Credit utilization penalties hit people who never missed a payment, purely for using the credit limit they were given. In nine community property states a spouse's debt counts against you but their income does not. People with clean payment histories get denied for reasons unconnected to whether they would pay the mortgage.

How it fixes it. Underwriting on demonstrated repayment behavior puts the decision back on the question the lender actually cares about. Fixing the community property asymmetry removes a rule with no defensible logic in either direction, since counting the liability without the asset describes a household that does not exist.

Voucher conversion and down payment assistance

What it is. Expanding use of programs that already exist, including converting Section 8 rental vouchers into homeownership vouchers, zero dollar down payment assistance, and homebuyer education.

The problem. Households that could qualify to buy stay renting because nobody told them these programs exist. The homeownership gap is stark, with white homeownership at 72.4 percent against 44.7 percent for Black households on 2023 data, and mortgage denial rates of 21 percent for Black applicants and 17 percent for Hispanic applicants against 11 percent for white applicants.

How it fixes it. These programs are funded and underused, so awareness alone moves people who already qualify from renting into owning. Voucher conversion in particular redirects money already being spent on rent into equity for the same household, which changes the long term wealth outcome without new spending.

Zoning and permitting reform

What it is. Loosening the local rules that determine what can be built and how long it takes to get permission, including upzoning along commercial and transit corridors and eliminating parking minimums.

The problem. The binding constraint on housing supply is what we allow to be built and how long approval takes. This is a harder argument than blaming institutional investors, who own a small share of the stock, but it is the one supported by the evidence.

How it fixes it. Supply responds when the rules allow it. Auckland's 2016 upzoning roughly doubled housing permits within five years. The more instructive case is Minneapolis, where ending single family zoning got the headlines and produced about one percent of new units, while corridor upzoning and eliminating parking minimums produced 87 percent. The unglamorous changes do the work, which is worth knowing before spending political capital on the famous one.

The ROAD to Housing Act provisions

What it is. A bipartisan housing law that restricts investor purchases of single family homes, establishes a federal pilot for whole home repairs, and raises the affordable housing cap from 15 to 20 percent.

The problem. Housing costs have outpaced incomes badly, and the existing federal levers were too small to matter. The bill passed Congress with bipartisan support and became law in July 2026 without a presidential signature, held up in the process by an unrelated fight over a voter identification bill.

How it fixes it. The affordable cap increase is the provision most likely to matter at scale, since it changes how much of a subsidized project can serve lower income households. The repair pilot addresses a specific and overlooked problem, which is homeowners who own an asset they cannot afford to maintain and eventually lose.

EDUCATION

Free community college

What it is. Guaranteed tuition free access to community college, with a case to be made for extending support further.

The problem. Too many people are going into debt for degrees they do not use, and college is genuinely necessary mainly for specialized fields. Meanwhile the alternatives, including online courses and hands on training, are underfunded and carry a stigma.

How it fixes it. It removes the financial penalty for exploring before committing. Someone uncertain about a career can test a direction without taking on debt that will outlast the decision, which is exactly the population currently making the most expensive mistakes.

Fully and constitutionally funding public schools

What it is. Meeting state constitutional obligations for public education funding, and modernizing a system that has not been meaningfully redesigned in over a century.

The problem. Public education is being defunded through the back door while the underlying design goes untouched. The structure of the school day, year, and curriculum was built for a different economy and has been patched rather than rethought.

How it fixes it. Funding is the floor, not the fix. Meeting the constitutional obligation stops the bleeding, and treating the century old design as a design problem rather than an inevitability is what makes actual improvement possible instead of just arguing about who gets the existing pot.

Paying teachers more

What it is. Raising teacher compensation enough to close the gap with comparably educated professionals, and treating that gap as the recruitment and retention problem it is.

The problem. In 2025 public school teachers earned 25.2 percent less in weekly wages than similarly educated workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Even counting their better benefits, the total compensation penalty was 14.5 percent. This is not a longstanding fact of the profession: the penalty was 6.1 percent in 1996. Over thirty years, inflation adjusted teacher wages fell 6.2 percent while other college graduates' wages rose 28.8 percent. In 25 states the penalty now exceeds 25 percent, and college students consistently name pay as the main reason they do not go into teaching.

How it fixes it. Compensation is the lever that determines who enters and who stays. Districts currently paper over shortages with unqualified staff and permanent vacancies, which is a quality cut disguised as a budget line. Closing the penalty is expensive and it is the intervention with the clearest causal path to who ends up in the classroom.

Real physical activity in schools

What it is. Building substantial daily physical activity back into the school day, structured to be enjoyable rather than competitive, so that kids move for hours rather than minutes.

The problem. Physical education and recess have been squeezed out by testing requirements at exactly the moment childhood physical and mental health has deteriorated. The activity that got cut was also, for a lot of kids, the only part of the day that was unstructured and social.

How it fixes it. The physical health case is obvious. The part that gets missed is the mental health and academic case: activity is one of the better documented interventions for attention, mood, and sleep in children, which means the time taken from instruction is not straightforwardly a loss to instruction. Making it fun rather than competitive matters, because a program built around athletic performance loses the kids who need it most.

POLICING AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE

Neutral custody of body camera footage

What it is. Requiring body camera footage to upload in real time to a neutral third party system rather than being stored and released by the department under investigation.

The problem. The camera is rarely the issue. Custody is. Footage gets held, delayed, selectively released, and in some cases edited by the same agency whose conduct is in question, which means the record of an incident is controlled by the party with the most to lose from it.

How it fixes it. Real time upload to an outside system means the file exists beyond the reach of the people it might implicate from the moment it is recorded. It removes the discretion to decide what the public sees and when, and it makes a missing or altered file into evidence itself rather than an unanswerable question.

Standardized probable cause and validated sobriety testing

What it is. Federally standardized definitions of probable cause and sobriety testing methods that have actually been scientifically validated.

The problem. The threshold for a stop, a search, or an arrest varies by jurisdiction and by officer, and several widely used roadside sobriety tests have far weaker scientific support than their courtroom treatment implies. That inconsistency is where a large share of disputed encounters begin.

How it fixes it. A common standard gives officers a clear rule to follow and gives courts a consistent measure to apply. Requiring validation means a test that puts someone in handcuffs has to actually predict the thing it claims to predict.

Community based policing

What it is. Policing models built on sustained presence and relationships in a specific community rather than rotating enforcement deployments.

The problem. Trust between police and the communities they serve is the input that makes everything else work, from witness cooperation to de escalation, and it is currently low in exactly the places where it matters most.

How it fixes it. Officers who are known in a neighborhood get information that officers cycling through do not, and encounters between people who recognize each other escalate less often. This is not a defund position. It is an accountability position, and the two get confused constantly.

Scrutiny of prison labor

What it is. Examining prison labor systems for their effects on wages in the broader labor market, particularly in states like Alabama where the practice is extensive.

The problem. Prison labor may be suppressing wages for workers who have never been arrested, by supplying employers with labor priced far below market. That is a labor market question, not just a criminal justice one, and it goes largely unexamined.

How it fixes it. Establishing what the wage effect actually is turns an assumption into a finding. If incarcerated labor is undercutting free labor in a regional market, that is a competitiveness argument that reaches people who are not moved by the prison reform framing.

GUNS

Universal background checks and a national registry

What it is. Background checks on both commercial and private sales, and a national firearms registry.

The problem. Private sale exemptions mean a check applies to some transactions and not others, which limits how much the existing system can accomplish. Without a registry there is no reliable way to trace a firearm or enforce the rules that do exist.

How it fixes it. Applying the check to every transfer closes the gap between where the law applies and where guns actually change hands. A registry makes tracing possible, which is what turns a rule into something enforceable rather than something on paper.

Security, education, and mental health screening

What it is. Enhanced security measures in public spaces including schools, comprehensive gun education, and routine mental health assessments.

The problem. In a permitless carry environment, the assumptions the old system relied on no longer hold. On mass shootings specifically the core issue is mental health, and there is currently no routine point at which a deteriorating situation gets identified before it becomes a crisis.

How it fixes it. Security measures address the immediate risk in the places most exposed. Education addresses the handling and storage failures that cause a large share of accidents. Routine mental health assessment creates a moment where something can be caught, which is the only part of this that operates before an incident rather than after.

SPEECH, PLATFORMS, AND YOUTH

Transparent moderation with a public process

What it is. Clear published standards for what platforms remove, with consequences applied through a process the public can see and understand.

The problem. Violence, incitement, and obscenity are not protected and warrant removal. Slurs, hate speech, and harassment are harder, and platforms currently handle them through opaque rules applied inconsistently, which convinces everyone that the process is rigged against them specifically.

How it fixes it. Transparent consequences replace arbitrary ones. People can disagree with a standard they can read. What destroys trust is a standard nobody can see, applied by a process nobody can appeal.

Getting kids off adult social platforms

What it is. Either a minimum age for mainstream social media, or a separate heavily moderated platform built for children and teens, with adult content categorized and separated and clear rules for parody accounts.

The problem. Children are on platforms designed for adults, running the same recommendation systems tuned for the same engagement targets. The parents of this generation grew up with social media and understand its effects perfectly well, and the tools available to them are still blunt: supervise an adult product in real time, or take the phone away and isolate the kid socially. Neither is a policy.

How it fixes it. A ban is the cleaner instrument and the harder one, since enforcement means age verification, which brings its own privacy problem and tends to end in everyone uploading identification to a social media company. The moderated alternative avoids that but has to actually be somewhere kids want to be, or they will simply lie about their age on the platform their friends use. The design question underneath both is the same one: a system built for children optimizes for something other than time on device, and until that changes the supervision burden stays on parents.

Banning pornographic advertising

What it is. Prohibiting sexually explicit advertising in spaces where people, including children, have not chosen to encounter it.

The problem. Advertising is the one category of content nobody opts into. A person can decide what to seek out; they cannot decide what appears next to it, and neither can a child using the same device. Explicit ad content also arrives through networks with almost no accountability, which is why it shows up on sites that would never host the content directly.

How it fixes it. It separates the question of what adults may access from the question of what gets pushed at people unasked, which are constantly conflated and are not the same. Regulating advertising is also on firmer constitutional ground than regulating the underlying content, since commercial speech has always carried less protection than speech generally.

Standards for content creators

What it is. Professional standards for creators with large audiences, potentially including legal or public relations representation.

The problem. Creators are role models whether they accept it or not, and influence scales with audience. Right now a person with millions of young followers operates under no professional standard at all, in a role that would carry one in any comparable field.

How it fixes it. Representation puts a check between an impulse and a broadcast, which is the same function it serves for public figures in every other industry. It also changes the incentive: the current system rewards the most irresponsible version of a creator, and a standard makes that a liability rather than a strategy.

PROTEST

Funding disclosure and a protesters' bill of rights

What it is. The Transparency in Political Demonstrations Act, requiring funding disclosure for large coordinated demonstrations on the same logic applied to political campaigns, paired with a bill of rights and responsibilities that sets obligations for demonstrators and for law enforcement, including mandatory de escalation training.

The problem. Most Americans do not know what their protest rights cover. You can protest on public property without a permit in most circumstances, you can film police, and you do not have to disperse absent a lawful order. Meanwhile most people watching a protest have no idea who organized or funded it, and there is no consistent standard governing how police engage a crowd.

How it fixes it. Disclosure lets people distinguish an organic movement from a manufactured one, which is information the public currently cannot get and which changes how a protest should be read. The rights and responsibilities framework does the other half, giving demonstrators a clear statement of what they may do and police a defined standard of engagement, so both sides are measured against something written down rather than improvised.

ECONOMY, CLIMATE, AND TECHNOLOGY

Taxing extreme wealth and narrowing the gap

What it is. Taxing very large fortunes closer to how wages are taxed: raising rates on capital gains, closing the step up in basis that lets appreciation pass untaxed at death, and addressing the borrow against assets strategy that lets the very wealthy fund a life without ever realizing income.

The problem. The decline of the middle class alongside the widening gap between the rich and everyone else is one of the most pressing issues facing this country, and the mechanism is not mysterious. Wages are taxed as they are earned, automatically, before the worker sees them. Wealth is taxed when it is sold, which is a choice the owner controls and can defer indefinitely. Two people with identical economic lives can face completely different effective rates depending on which category their money arrives in.

How it fixes it. Aligning the treatment of wages and asset appreciation removes the arbitrage. This is not about hostility to wealth. There is a difference between earning success and rigging the game so nobody else can, and when billionaires fund campaigns, bankroll think tanks, and purchase policy outcomes, that is not capitalism, it is oligarchy. The design problems here are genuine, particularly valuation of illiquid assets and capital flight, and any serious proposal has to answer them.

Restructuring the work week

What it is. Reducing the standard work week without reducing pay, including the version where the day off falls midweek so no one works more than two days consecutively.

The problem. The five day week is not a law of nature; it was itself a reform, won in living memory, and it has not been revisited since. Meanwhile productivity per hour has risen enormously and essentially none of that gain has been returned as time.

How it fixes it. The largest trial run to date covered 61 organizations and roughly 2,900 employees in a six month pilot at 20 percent fewer hours with no pay cut. Revenue rose slightly, about 1.4 percent among the companies reporting it. Sick days fell 65 percent, attrition fell 57 percent, and 71 percent of employees reported lower burnout. Of the 61 companies, 56 intended to continue. The midweek variant is the less tested idea and the more interesting one: a Wednesday off breaks the week into two short stretches rather than one long one, which targets the fatigue accumulation a three day weekend does not.

Transitioning to green energy

What it is. Accelerating the shift to clean electricity, meaning solar, wind, storage, and nuclear, to reduce reliance on fossil fuels.

The problem. Oil dependence is a foreign policy problem before it is an environmental one. When roughly a fifth of the world's oil moves through a single strait, an adversary closing that strait sets American grocery prices, which is exactly what happened when the Iran conflict pushed energy up 14.7 percent over the year and drove more than 60 percent of one month's inflation. Every barrel we do not need is leverage an adversary does not have.

How it fixes it. Domestic clean generation cannot be embargoed, blockaded, or repriced by a foreign government, which is the entire strategic argument and the one that travels furthest across the aisle. On nuclear specifically: it belongs in the clean column, not the fossil one. It is zero carbon, it produces the steady baseload that solar and wind do not, and it is the one energy source whose public support has been rising in both parties. The real constraints are the grid and the permitting queue rather than the technology, which is the same build more, block less problem as housing.

Rerouting food waste and fixing recycling

What it is. Moving edible surplus food to people instead of landfills through donation liability protection, tax treatment, and the logistics to actually move it, alongside recycling standards that produce material anyone will buy.

The problem. Roughly 29 percent of the American food supply goes unsold or uneaten, about 60 million tons headed for landfills, incinerators, or fields. That is around 325 billion dollars of food and the equivalent of nearly 114 billion meals a year, in a country where one in eight people rely on food assistance. Recycling has a parallel problem: we collect material and then discover much of it has no market, so it is landfilled after the sorting.

How it fixes it. The food side is mostly a coordination failure rather than a scarcity one, which is what makes it tractable. Grocers and restaurants generally want to donate; what stops them is liability worry, storage, and the cost of getting food somewhere before it spoils. Fixing those three moves food that already exists to people who already need it. On recycling, the honest fix runs upstream to packaging standards, because a recycling stream only works if someone downstream actually wants the output.

Practical climate innovation

What it is. Climate solutions that integrate into daily life without requiring major lifestyle changes, including materials innovation such as paint embedded with algae that absorbs carbon dioxide.

The problem. Climate change is real and undeniable, and the policy debate has largely been framed around asking individuals to consume less, which has limited political durability and shifts responsibility onto people with the least leverage.

How it fixes it. A solution that works without requiring behavior change does not depend on sustained public willingness to sacrifice, which is what most climate policy has failed to hold. Innovation that gets embedded in things people were already going to buy scales on its own economics.

Preparing for AI displacement

What it is. Proactive planning and worker retraining ahead of AI driven job displacement, rather than after.

The problem. When the head of a leading AI company warns the technology could eliminate half of entry level white collar jobs and the head of a leading chipmaker says it will create more jobs than it destroys, the honest answer is somewhere in between, and we have to prepare for both. Retraining programs historically arrive after the displacement, when the affected worker has already lost the income that would have funded the transition.

How it fixes it. Building the retraining capacity before the displacement means it exists when it is needed rather than being assembled during a crisis. It also changes the politics, because a worker who can see a path through a transition responds very differently than one who is told to adapt with no mechanism to do it.

FOREIGN POLICY

NATO as an advocate for liberal democracy

What it is. Treating the alliance as a political project rather than only a military one, using it to defend and advance liberal democratic governance and cooperation among member states, not just to deter an invasion.

The problem. NATO is currently being discussed almost entirely as a burden sharing dispute over defense spending percentages. That framing concedes the more important argument. The alliance held for seventy years because members shared a form of government, and several members are now moving away from that form while the conversation stays fixed on budgets. Meanwhile threatening allies with tariffs and territorial demands has done real damage: the share of Canadians calling the United States a reliable partner fell from 83 percent in 2022 to 35 percent in 2026.

How it fixes it. An alliance that stands for something recruits and holds better than one that is a protection payment. Allies do need to carry their weight, and that criticism is legitimate. But the answer to a struggling alliance is diplomacy and shared purpose, not threats against partners who have stood with us for decades, because allies who plan around American unreliability do not come back when the polling does.

GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAINS

Funding forced labor import enforcement

What it is. Resourcing Customs and Border Protection to actually investigate imports tied to forced labor, which is already illegal under existing law.

The problem. Roughly half the coffee Americans drink is tied to extreme poverty, child labor, or modern slavery conditions. Ninety eight percent of coffee farmers live in poverty. The law banning forced labor imports exists and is simply not enforced at a scale anyone has to take seriously. There is also a connection few people make: when farming communities collapse under exploitation and deforestation, displaced families migrate north.

How it fixes it. Enforcement is the durable lever because it does not depend on consumer virtue or corporate goodwill. A credible risk of an import being stopped changes sourcing decisions at the point where the decision is made. The estimated cost of fixing the entire coffee industry is two to three cents more per cup, which is why the only real explanation for the status quo is that nobody with power has been made to care.

THE SAFETY NET

State administration with structure neutral benefits

What it is. Moving welfare program administration to the state level, with benefits designed to be equitable regardless of family structure.

The problem. Government has a real responsibility to aid its citizens, particularly the underprivileged, and the concept holds genuine value. But there are serious questions about how effectively the current system delivers, and program design should never create an incentive against a household staying together.

How it fixes it. State administration puts the program closer to the conditions it operates in, since the cost of living and labor market of one state are not those of another. Structure neutral benefits remove the perverse incentive directly, by making the payment depend on need rather than on household composition.

Restoring faith in equal opportunity programs

What it is. Rebuilding public confidence in programs meant to widen access, by designing them around measurable outcomes and defending them on the merits rather than on the slogans.

The problem. These programs are being dismantled in an environment where most people cannot accurately describe what they actually do. Part of that is a deliberate campaign against them. Part of it, honestly, is that many programs became performative checkbox exercises focused on optics rather than results, which handed critics real examples. The response to bad implementation should be better implementation, but the argument was lost before it was made because the public was never given a clear account of what the programs were for.

How it fixes it. Outcome measurement is the whole thing. A program that can show who it reached and what changed is defensible; one that reports only its own existence is not. That is a demanding standard and applying it will kill some programs, which is the point: the ones that survive it will be far harder to dismantle than the ones being dismantled now.

Incentivizing family and relationship formation

What it is. Removing the financial and structural obstacles to forming households and raising children, through the child tax credit, childcare cost relief, housing that a young family can afford, and benefit rules that do not penalize a couple for staying together.

The problem. People are consistently telling researchers they want partnership and children and are not getting there, and the reasons they give are material: housing, childcare, debt, and instability. Meanwhile some benefit designs still create the perverse incentive the man in the house rule created decades ago, where a household is financially better off apart than together.

How it fixes it. It addresses the obstacles people actually name rather than the cultural explanation usually offered. Structure neutral benefits remove the penalty for staying together directly. The rest is the affordability agenda arriving under a different heading, which is worth noticing: housing costs, childcare costs, and wage stagnation are the family formation policy, whether or not anyone labels them that.