RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week

RealClearInvestigations'
Picks of the Week
April 20 to April 26, 2025

Featured Investigation:
Trump’s Migrant Hunt Digs Into
the IRS and Social Security

In RealClearInvestigations, Benjamin Weingarten explores how the Trump administration is using the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security Administration as part of its crackdown on immigration – and meeting fierce outside and internal resistance:

• This month the IRS signed an information-sharing agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that raised hackles among immigration activists and reportedly prompted the tax bureau’s acting chief to resign in protest. 

• Also in recent days, as part of a self-deportation push, the Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration have coordinated to strip benefits from illegal migrants who entered the country to work during the Biden administration.

• In response, several immigrant advocacy groups have sued to thwart the IRS and Department of Homeland Security, claiming that they are likely to violate taxpayer confidentiality. 

• The controversy highlights the sometimes novel ways the Trump administration is seeking to break down walls between agencies to share data in pursuit of its policies – whether to combat illegal immigration, streamline government, or ensure election integrity.

• The Social Security Administration is ground zero for these efforts. Millions of non-citizens have been issued Social Security numbers in recent years after entering the country and being legally authorized to work. 

• This month DHS revoked the temporary parolee status of over 6,300 migrants either on the FBI's terror watch list or with FBI criminal records. The federal government had issued all of them Social Security numbers and many were receiving benefits.
  
  

Featured Investigation
Another Thing Folks Like About the South:
Public Education’s Revival

In RealClearInvestigations, Vince Bielski reports on the Southern Surge – the surprising public school revival in a handful of mostly southern states, with Louisiana and Mississippi leading the way:

• Over more than a decade, Louisiana and Mississippi have skyrocketed from the very bottom to near the top of the rankings in proficiency tests. 

• Their rise is all the more improbable because they are the two poorest states in the nation, a condition that researchers trace to the particularly deep penetration of slavery in their economies and their subsequent anti-union laws that have suppressed wages. 

• But their relatively weak teachers’ unions have been unable to stand in the way of the kinds of reforms that have faced union opposition elsewhere -- reforms that are driving up proficiency scores in the two states.

• Since both states are in the bottom quartile in public education spending, their educational gains suggest that better schools aren’t just a matter of funding. 

• As public education sinks deeper into a crisis of low performance and high absenteeism, the southern states are demonstrating how schools can significantly lift student achievement. 

• The question is whether this reform movement can break out of its niche and expand into more liberal states in the Northeast and West to make a bigger national splash.

Waste of the Day
by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books

HHS Grants Teach Kids About Sex Toys, RCI
NY Staircase Costs Almost $1M Per Step, RCI
Calif. Official Globe-Hops on Taxpayer Dime, RCI
Oregon City Spent Big Replacing Arty Signs, RCI
Oil and Gas Royalties Under-Collected, RCI

Trump 2.0 and the Beltway

U.S. Has Quietly Been Bombing Yemen for Six Weeks, Axios
Trump’s War on Data Collection, ProPublica
Hegseth Said to Have Shared War Plans in 2d Signal Chat, New York Times
Fauci’s ‘Retirement’ Is a Cash Bonanza, Documents Show, Daily Caller
Kamala Paid LeBron James Co. $50K After His Endorsement, Free Beacon
Mueller Prosecutor's Russiagate Statements Under Scrutiny, Just the News
Political Connections Behind Trump Tariff Exemptions, ProPublica
The Little-Known Agency Pushing to Overhaul U.S. Elections, AP
Trump’s Deportation Raids Catch 219 Tied to Terror, New York Post
Zuckerberg’s Ingratiating $24 Million DC Campaign to Save Meta, New York Post

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

Trump Takes a Big Step
Toward Restoring Meritocracy
City Journal

From the Annals of It's Been a Long Time Coming: RCI's Paul Sperry reported in 2019 that the Trump White House was contemplating a ban on the use of a controversial numbers-focused racial-bias theory known as “disparate impact.” The move, Sperry wrote, would represent a sharp pullback from federal efforts to correct imbalances in outcomes for minorities in everything from housing to hiring, not by demonstrating racial animus but simply by showing that neutral policies had disparate impacts on various groups. Trump finally issued that executive order this week. Heather Mac Donald reports for City Journal it will help “restore meritocracy to American society”:

[Disparate-impact theory] has been used to invalidate literacy and numeracy standards for police officers and firemen, cognitive skills and basic knowledge tests for teachers, the use of SATs in college admissions, the use of grades for medical licensing exams, credit-based mortgage lending, the ability to discipline insubordinate students, and criminal background checks for employees and renters. It has been used to eliminate prosecution for a large range of crimes, including shoplifting, turnstile jumping, and resisting arrest; to end police tactics such as proactive stops (otherwise known as stop, question, and frisk); and to purge safety technologies like ShotSpotter and speeding cameras from police departments. In none of those cases has it ever been demonstrated that the disfavored standard was implemented to exclude blacks or other minorities from a position, opportunity, or right. The genius (if a diabolical one) of disparate-impact theory was that it obviated any need to show discriminatory intent on the part of a targeted employer or institution. Discrimination was inferred simply by the effect of the colorblind standard.

Mac Donald notes that Trump’s executive order can just as easily be reversed by another administration. In response, she argues, “the White House needs to persuade Congress to clarify that civil rights mean freedom from discrimination—not the legitimization of ‘reverse discrimination.’ Congress must amend 1960s-era statutes to confirm explicitly their original colorblind intent.”

Princeton’s War
on Civil Rights
City Journal

Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber has established himself as a leader in the fight against President Trump’s effort to reform higher education. After the administration suspended hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded grants to Princeton as part of its investigation into racial discrimination and anti-Semitism, Eisgruber told the New York Times he is “not considering any concessions” and called for other university presidents to follow his lead. This article, co-written by prominent enemy of wokism Christopher F. Rufo, details some of the programs and policies Eisgruber is trying to protect:

A City Journal investigation confirms that Princeton has, in fact, entrenched a system of racial discrimination and segregation. We have obtained more than a dozen internal documents and conducted interviews with a half-dozen employees, who confirm that the university has flagrantly violated the principles of the Civil Rights Act in the name of “social justice.” The basic structure of this system is the university’s “diversity, equity, and inclusion” bureaucracy, which has expanded dramatically under Eisgruber’s tenure [which began in 2013]. An infographic circulated by Princeton shows at least 40 academic and administrative departments with established DEI committees, with the express purpose of adjusting the campus’s racial composition. As Princeton’s first annual diversity report noted, “Every administrative and academic leader is being held accountable for demographic evolution.” According to several Princeton faculty members, “demographic evolution” is a euphemism for racial quotas and outright discrimination in academic hiring. 

The article reports that Princeton’s race-conscious initiatives extended beyond faculty hiring. Its multiyear plan for “Supplier Diversity,” for example, called on departments to award contracts based not on quality or cost, but on race.

'Powder Keg': St. Louis Jail
and 'Decades of Neglect'
Marshall Project

The St. Louis City Justice Center jail, this article reports, is a microcosm of the broader challenges – crime, untreated mental illness, concentrated poverty and indifference – that plague prisons and jails across the country:

Forty-five people in custody have died since the high-security facility opened in 2002 through February of this year, including 29 who were pronounced dead after being transported to area hospitals, according to public records. … About a quarter of the roughly 800 jail residents are on psychotropic medication, said Doug Burris, a consultant who studied the facility. … A federal lawsuit against the city over jail conditions describes officers using excessive force, chemical agents and water shut-offs to control those in custody. There have been multiple riots. A correctional officer was taken hostage. The closure of the city’s second jail forced hundreds more people into the already troubled facility. As that happened, the number of officers staffing the city jail dwindled.

This article ends on a hopeful note. Doug Burris, a consultant who studied the facility and was recently named interim commissioner of the city’s Corrections Division, said he had already seen progress:

Frontline staffing had risen 30% to about 90 people. Residents had access to one free telephone call a week. Job trainers and library books were welcomed inside. He was encouraged that only 15 out of 148 people booked into the jail in the previous week needed detox. He hadn’t gotten anywhere on creating a new court docket for long-term residents, but he had reached out to the presiding judge.

Allies Underfunded NATO
by $827B Since 2014 
1945

America’s NATO allies have collectively underfunded their defense commitments by more than $827 billion during the last decade, according to a new report from the Heritage Foundation. Notable shortfalls include Germany ($249 billion), Italy ($150 billion), and Spain ($150 billion). This article reports that since 2014:

The U.S. averaged defense spending equivalent to 3.42 percent of GDP, while the average NATO member spent 1.59 percent – less than half as much as the U.S. spent and well below NATO’s 2 percent benchmark first articulated in 2006 and reaffirmed by all members at the 2014 Wales Summit. Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its invasion of Ukraine in 2022 exposed the consequences of decades of underinvestment. European nations have struggled to deliver on promised military support to Ukraine, with depleted stockpiles and limited industrial capacity – especially in munitions – undermining their ability to take the lead on military aid to Ukraine.

This article reports that there are growing calls for a 3 percent threshold – not as a new obligation, but as a necessary correction for more than a decade of underinvestment. In fact, however, most countries that have a deficit in spending will likely take until 2030 to 2035 just to reach the original 2-percent minimum target agreed upon in 2014.

Frackers Facing
Gargantuan Water Problem
Wall Street Journal

As fossil-fuel production has jumped to records in recent years, so has the volume of water used. Frackers in the Permian Basin of West Texas and New Mexico pump about four barrels of water for each barrel of crude. Last year, Permian drillers discarded roughly 5.5 billion barrels of water that way, roughly equivalent to the amount of water that New York City consumes in about eight months. The challenge: what to do with the gargantuan amounts of noxious water they produce alongside crude?

Now, companies are investing millions of dollars testing technologies to evaporate the water faster, and strip it of salt so it can be reused outside the oil patch. They are crafting plans to release scrubbed water into rivers—and hope to one day provide it to farmers and municipalities. … The devices, manufactured by Colorado-based RWI Enhanced Evaporation, blow air down on the pond of produced water to create droplets and ripples, which speeds up the evaporation process. One machine costs about $46,000 and consumes about as much electricity as a wet-dry vacuum cleaner. 

This article reports that the Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency last month announced it would reconsider wastewater regulations for the oil-and-gas industry to “help unleash American energy.” Peggy Browne, the EPA’s acting assistant administrator at the office of water, said the review would consider reusing produced water for everything from cooling data centers to fire control, power generation, and ecological needs.