RealClearInvestigations Newsletters: RCI Today
RealClearInvestigations Picks of the Week
RealClearInvestigations'
Picks of the Week
May 17 to May 23
RCI Podcasts & Videos
On this week’s episode of the RealClearInvestigations Podcast, RCI Editor J. Peder Zane and RCI Senior Reporter James Varney speak with Politico’s former CEO, Patrick Steel, about the fast-changing business of media.
On The Miller Report: Real Clear Journalism, Maggie Miller speaks with investigative reporter Walter Curt to discuss his recent RCI article on the explosive growth in Medicaid home and community-based care programs.
Featured Investigation:
The Replacements: How US Policy Helps
Foreign Workers Take American Jobs
Steven Edginton reports for RealClearInvestigations that America's H-1B visa program, created in 1990 to fill skilled jobs that qualified Americans couldn't, has become the center of a fierce political battle pitting Big Tech against U.S. workers and immigration reformers. Critics say the program has strayed far from its original purpose, flooding Silicon Valley with cheap foreign labor while sidelining experienced American workers – and Washington is taking notice.
- Two thirds of Silicon Valley's nearly 400,000 tech jobs are now held by foreign-born workers, with Indians (23%) and Chinese (18%) combined outnumbering American-born employees (34%), according to a 2025 report from Joint Venture Silicon Valley.
- Harvard economist George Borjas estimates companies save nearly $100,000 per worker over six years by hiring H-1B holders, who earn roughly 30% less than their American counterparts. Software developers alone account for 38% of all H-1B workers.
- A record 406,348 visas were approved in 2025 – up sharply from 275,317 a decade earlier – with 70% going to Indian nationals. The program's weak legal framework means most companies are not required to prove they first tried to hire qualified American workers.
- The Trump administration imposed a $100,000 fee on companies hiring H-1B workers from overseas, but companies have found workarounds by recruiting foreign workers already inside the U.S. through student visa pathways.
- Critics allege ethnic favoritism in hiring by foreign-born tech leaders, a charge supported by a recent $8.4 million jury verdict against Cognizant Technology for discriminating against non-Indian workers.
- Reform proposals range from abolishing the program entirely to raising minimum salary requirements. But with Big Tech spending millions annually on lobbying, meaningful change faces a steep uphill battle.
Featured Investigation:
Ivory Tower Rumble: Florida Politicians
Battle Professors in High-Stakes Match
Vince Bielski reports for RealClearInvestigations that Florida has mounted the most aggressive state-level assault on progressive higher education in the country, using legislation, curriculum purges, and ideological appointments to reshape what is taught at its 40 public universities and colleges. The conflict pits conservative officials who believe academia has been captured by left-wing activism against faculty who say the state is dismantling academic freedom — and nowhere is the battle more intense than in the discipline of sociology.
- Florida's SB 266 (2023) bans general education courses focused on systemic racism, sexism, identity politics, and related theories, resulting in the elimination of hundreds of courses on topics ranging from feminism to LGBTQ history. A post-tenure performance review provision puts veteran faculty at risk of sanctions or termination for violations, and history is reportedly the next target.
- Sociology has drawn the sharpest battle lines. State officials declared every introductory sociology textbook non-compliant and oversaw a politically fraught rewrite that reduced mentions of racism from 115 to five. When faculty resistance proved too widespread, officials eliminated introductory sociology as a general education course across all 40 institutions.
- Critics within sociology acknowledge the field's problems. Research shows 90% of social science papers lean left, sociologists lag peer disciplines in data transparency and research rigor, and the ratio of Democrats to Republicans in the field runs 44 to 1.
- Declining enrollment in sociology — down 20% over the last decade — is likely to accelerate as the loss of general education status reduces student exposure to the discipline.
- A reform movement is emerging from within. A candidate for president of the American Sociological Association is urging the field to abandon political activism and return to rigorous, open-minded research, arguing that ideological capture poses as great a threat to sociology's survival as government interference.
Waste of the Day
by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books
GAO: Congress Has 610 Recommendations, RCI
Congress Has 610 Recommendations, RCI
University Endowments Soar, RCI
Urinal Cakes Speak, RCI
Trump 2.0 and the Beltway
The Front Groups Fueling the 2026 Midterms, Intercept
The Scourge of Left-Wing Violence, National Review
Other Noteworthy Articles and Series
Iran Consolidating Control of Hormuz
Reuters
Iran is consolidating its control of the Strait of Hormuz. As its fighters patrol the waters, Iran has instituted a system for passage that can involve government-to-government arrangements, intense vetting by the Iranian government, and sometimes fees in exchange for safe passage. The new Iranian mechanism includes a tiered system giving preference to ships linked to its allies Russia and China, followed by countries such as India and Pakistan with close ties to Tehran, and then government-to-government agreements that let vessels pass.
In a separate article, the Washington Post offers a dramatic account of what happened to one ship that sought unauthorized passage through the Strait. The ship’s owners, this article reports, were desperate to move their cargo out of the Strait of Hormuz; they repeatedly offered their 23-crew members hefty bonuses to attempt the perilous crossing. On four separate occassions the crew voted no. The fifth time around, they decided to chance it, setting off on April 7.
Two skiffs, carrying three or so people each, soon began tailing the ship, the two seafarers said. One crew member used binoculars to check and saw a “high-powered gun,” then he shouted, “Get down, there’s a gun!”
One seafarer described hearing “a chipping hammer ... Ding, ding, ding, ding.” At first, he thought it was on-ship construction, but radios paged news of the attack throughout the ship. The gunfire was on-and-off for more than 20 minutes, seafarers said. “Too many bullets, too many sounds,” one of them said.
One bullet flew through the bridge’s window, missing a crew member by a few feet as he crouched low to send a distress signal call. Panicked crew members hid behind a metal door. The Post reviewed photos and videos of the attack and aftermath.
After the attack, the crew found at least nine dents from bullets on the ship, including two through glass windows.
This article reports the crew made it out safely and is heading back to South America – potentially to do the whole thing over again. “One of the crew members said he believes the shots were “a warning” signal by Iranian naval authorities, because the ship went slightly off the authorized passage plan – shallower lanes closer to the shore than usual. But shooting through windows into the ship’s occupied bridge is hardly the typical warning.
In a separate article, the Atlantic reports about conflicting evidence regarding the collision of two U.S. refueling planes over Iraq in March. The official story is that the two KC-135 Stratotankers, which carry up to 200,000 pounds of jet fuel, mistakenly collided in mid-air. One of the planes safely landed with a badly-damaged tail; the other crashed, killing six service members, constituting almost half of U.S. military fatalities in the Iran conflict. But this article reports that “Initial intelligence reports told a different story. They indicated that the U.S. government had detected anti-aircraft fire by Iran-backed militias in the area around the time of the collision and that the pilots may have been forced to take evasive actions. … But Centcom’s leaders, citing different, more highly classified information, were convinced that those initial reports were mistaken. Militias had never fired surface-to-air missiles that could have threatened the aircraft, according to their assessment.”
What the San Diego Mosque Shooters Believed
Free Press
Muslims weren’t the only people hated by the two teenagers who killed three at San Diego mosque before turning their guns on themselves. According to the 75-page unfinished document left behind by Caleb Vazquez, 18, and Cain Clark, 17, the pair also hated Jews, blacks, legal migrants, illegal migrants, Latinos, Asians, industrial society, gays, trans people, Donald Trump, “MAGAtard boomers,” liberals, conservatives, moderates, and women. Although the shooters have been described as white supremacists, Rob Dreher writes:
If these are supremacists, they have absorbed a large dose of victim culture to go with it, which is why they see themselves neither on the right nor the left, and sound like both and neither. That’s the heart of it, for both killers. The racism, antisemitism, misogyny, and all the rest is a construct built on a nihilistic, radically atomized base. And this is why we would be fools either to brush this off as the one-off deeds of radical racists, or attempt to make sense of their killings by slotting them into familiar categories. That is, it might give us a sense of relief to believe that the killers were nothing but Muslim haters, antisemites, and so forth, because it would allow us to believe that if only we can counter these bigotries, we can stop incidents like the mosque shootings.
Dreher notes that the pair were “like countless young men of their generation across America. The hatred that drove them to kill innocent Muslims as part of a self-described ‘crusade’ is part of the crisis that almost certainly led them down the rabbit hole of online radicalism in the first place: a crisis of meaning. That, and a closely related crisis of belonging.”
Autism Overdiagnosis Is a National Scandal
National Review
Autism was once a rare and severe diagnosis reserved for people who could not speak, could not care for themselves, and would never live independently. Today, one in 31 American children carries the diagnosis, nearly five times the rate recorded in 2000. If overdiagnosis were merely a labeling problem, this article reports, it would be a concern for clinicians and parents. But it is far more than that. In the American health-care system, an autism diagnosis is a key that unlocks substantial public funding and, once that door opens, it is extraordinarily difficult to close.
Federal law requires states to cover all medically necessary services for children on Medicaid, and a 2014 federal clarification made ABA therapy, originally developed for children with severe developmental delays, effectively mandatory for any child with an autism diagnosis. ABA is billed by the hour, with no hard cap on how many hours a provider can prescribe. Because the federal government reimburses states for 50 to 83 cents of every Medicaid dollar, a state approving a new claim spends as little as 17 cents of its own money. Meanwhile, the workforce needed to convert diagnoses into billable services has expanded dramatically. The credentialed professionals who supervise ABA programs and enroll as Medicaid providers numbered roughly 12,000 nationwide in 2014; by 2025, that figure had reached 81,000, a nearly sevenfold increase that far outpaces the doubling of diagnoses over the same period.
This article reports that a recent Cato Institute analysis across eight states with publicly available data found “combined Medicaid spending on autism therapy grew from $347 million to over $2.2 billion in recent years. The national total is certainly much larger, but most states do not report autism therapy as a separate line item.”
LA a Magnet for Nation's Homeless
City Journal
Hollywood’s decline may have dimmed LA’s attraction for star-struck dreamers, but it remains a powerful draw for at least one group: the homeless. This article reports that transplants are a big reason the City of Angels has the nation’s largest unsheltered population.
In 2020, the city-county Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) found that one-third of “unsheltered Angelenos” became homeless outside of Los Angeles County. In 2024, the nonprofit RAND Corporation reported that 41 percent of the street homeless surveyed across three Los Angeles neighborhoods – Hollywood, Venice, and Skid Row – were “last housed” somewhere other than L.A. County. Both reports cut against the narrative of left-wing politicians and activists, who insist that any claim that out-of-town homeless are flooding L.A. is a myth.”
This article notes that, like everyone else, the homeless respond to incentives. “They flock to places where it is easy to camp, do drugs, and commit crimes, and where the government provides housing, benefits, and drug paraphernalia. That’s exactly what Los Angeles has done. As a result, there is a ‘magnet effect’ that continuously attracts the homeless from around the world.”
In a separate article, the Wall Street Journal reports that LA’s 2022 effort to help struggling renters and build low-income housing by increasing taxes on high-value properties is backfiring. The so-called “mansion tax” makes no distinction between a Bel-Air mansion and a market-rate apartment building, As a result, it has made it more expensive to build affordable housing. “The tax adds a new expense atop many hurdles that already make building in L.A. difficult, including challenging permit requirements, frequent neighborhood opposition and high land and labor costs.”
In a separate article, the Los Angeles Times reports that a top franchisee of California’s iconic burger chain, Carl’s Jr., is declaring bankruptcy as “the high costs of doing business in California [especially its $20 minimum wage], festering labor issues, fierce competition and crime have hit the chain hard in Southern California.”
Home Builders Buried in Claims of Shoddy Construction
Wall Street Journal
This article reports that the legal liabilities of some of America’s biggest home builders have surged in recent years as buyers allege builders are using cheaper materials, cutting corners and hiring unqualified and undersupervised subcontractors, resulting in shoddy homes.
Mounting legal bills represent another headache for the home-building industry, which is already coping with a stagnant housing market by offering buyers significant mortgage-rate buydowns. Labor shortages and rising materials costs are also making building homes more expensive. D.R. Horton and Lennar, the two biggest builders in the U.S. by total volume, have experienced the biggest surges in potential legal costs. Lennar’s self-insurance reserve, earmarked for liabilities that insurance won’t cover, rose 21% in fiscal 2025 to $336.9 million, according to the company’s annual financial statement.
This article reports that the reserves for legal claims by another big builder, D.R. Horton, which include expectations for future claims, rose 57% to $1.1 billion from the end of fiscal 2022 to the end of fiscal 2025. “Nearly all of Horton’s reserves for legal claims last year were for construction-defect matters. The company resolved 405 claims for a total cost of $57.2 million, more than double the number of claims and their costs in 2022.”
