A new report from the great guys at the American Principles Project (APP) alleges that the Biden administration has systematically targeted Christian colleges through aggressive enforcement actions, with fines against religious institutions exceeding all other higher education penalties over the past seven years combined. The report was authored by APP director of Policy Jon Schweppe.

The report focuses on Ed's Office of Enforcement, saying it has become a weapon against religious institutions in higher education. According to the APP's analysis, nearly 70% of the office's enforcement actions have targeted faith-based or career education schools, despite these institutions representing only about 10% of college students nationwide. The analysis is based on newly released federal data about Department of Education enforcement actions, though the report notes that this data was only recently made public following Congressional pressure for transparency.

The Office of Enforcement was originally created under the Obama Administration in 2016, was less active during the Trump years, and was restored by the Biden-Harris Administration in 2021. The report notes that the office's budget increased by nearly 600% last year (!), with another 230% raise requested this year.

The most interesting part of the report for us was the outline of the Office of Enforcement's three-pronged strategy to harass Christian colleges. According to the report, the first tactic involves imposing outsized financial penalties against prominent institutions, exemplified by the record $37.7 million fine against Grand Canyon University and $14 million penalty against Liberty University. These large-scale enforcement actions against well-known institutions appear designed to send a message to similar institutions.

The second and third tactics work in tandem: conducting resource-draining investigations while simultaneously threatening access to federal funding. The report details how the office scrutinizes schools through extensive documentation demands and compliance reviews, particularly focusing on Clery Act violations and IPEDS survey requirements. This creates a costly administrative burden for smaller institutions. Meanwhile, the threat of losing Title IV funding access serves as a powerful lever, as many smaller religious colleges depend heavily on students' ability to use federal aid. The report notes that over 60% of students at colleges with fewer than 1,000 students receive Title IV federal aid, compared to only 35% at larger institutions. When a school loses Title IV access, it can face a death spiral, as students are forced to transfer and enrollment rapidly declines. This combination of tactics - burdensome investigations coupled with threats to funding - creates significant pressure on targeted institutions while avoiding the appearance of capricious targeting.

This kind of stuff is exactly why the administrative state, and administrative state reform matters. Nobody has heard of this little-known division of Ed, and yet it can wreak untold damage under the radar, targeting political enemies while remaining within the letter of the law. Republicans need to learn from this, especially given that Democrats and liberal elites use an amorphous blob of NGOs and other technically non-state institutions to do their political work. Excellent work from APP, which has done great things to support American families.

Policy News You Need To Know

#EscapeFromTheLonghouse — Happy International Men's Day! We can think of a worse way to commemorate this day than to spend some time perusing the material on the website of the American Institute for Boys and Men, which has great research on the crisis facing men in America today. Another way might be to read the classic essay by publisher Lomez on "the Longhouse."

#DEI — Speaking of using the Federal government's powers of investigation to achieve political goals, Robby Starbuck, an anti-corporate DEI activist who has had significant successes shaming large corporations into abandoning DEI practices, has a helpful suggestion: the Trump-Gaetz DOJ should investigate DEI-related civil rights violations by large corporations. Just a few should be enough to put the rest of Corporate America on notice.

#SanctuaryStates — Speaking of the importance of administrative state reform to Republican policy goals, a big obstacle to Trump II's plans for mass deportations is the existence of sanctuary cities and sanctuary states. In theory, of course, these jurisdictions do not have the right to nullify Federal law. Indeed, we fought a big civil war over this very issue (the left reminds us often) and collectively decided that this constitutes, ah, how do you call it again, yes, "treason." Today, astonishingly, there are 13 American states that shield foreign criminals from immigration enforcement. In practice, if a Republican Administration, as has been the case historically, lacks the political will, or the technical administrative talent, or both, to enforce Federal law on recalcitrant jurisdictions, these jurisdictions will do what they well please. However, Phillip Linderman, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, has a very good idea over at TAC on how to ensure this compliance, short of starting a new civil war: the Secretary of State should stop issuing student visas to all foreigners who seek to matriculate at universities and schools located in sanctuary jurisdictions. As Linderman points out, "Foreign students overwhelmingly attend universities in sanctuary zones, and they bring billions of dollars to pay tuition and living expenses ($40 billion a year nationally). This steady stream of foreign students represents the Achilles’ heel of California, New York and Massachusetts—all three states representing major redoubts for non-cooperation with ICE. California alone has over 237,000 foreign students, and almost all of them pay the full tuition costs at the state’s overpriced universities." This is a very good place to start.

#WokeCapitalism — Excellent idea and outstanding new report from EPPC's Alexandra DeSanctis and Nathanael Blake: the pair have undertaken "a detailed analysis of each Fortune 100 company’s family, parental leave, and abortion policies." The takeaway? Well, something of a mixed bag. "While some corporations have come a long way in offering support and flexibility to employees with children, the largest American businesses have a misguided view of how to integrate parents, especially mothers, into the workforce in a way that respects human dignity,” DeSanctis writes. Corporations like it better when women are infertile and more interested in their career than their children or family.

#MAHA #SunAndSteel — Anecdotally at least, we know our subscriber base includes some mix of young conservatives who are "very online" and have adopted the doctrine of "sun and steel", of weightlifting and a crunchy, outdoorsy lifestyle as the key to health and vitality; and older Republicans who might be less plugged-in to these subcultures. As a French native who has always believed in the fundamental toxicity of American-style mass-produced processed food, this cultural shift on the right has been very interesting to watch for your correspondent. Of course, there is a big overlap between this right-wing online subculture and the crunchy former-libs, worried moms, independents, and others who have been brought to the big Trumpy tent in RFK Jr's wake. Of course, like every dissident subculture, this world has a mix of the true, the wise, the commonsense, the dubious, the crankish, and the frankly insane. For example, a big part of the narrative shared by the online right and RFK is the idea that seed oils have had a particularly nasty role in the obesity epidemic and in the epidemic of chronic disease. The statistics blogger Crémieux has an interesting thread with the case against the proposition, and for the case that the explanation for obesity is the dumbest and most straightforward one, known in the world of dietetics as "CICO", or "calories in, calories out." Over the past decades, Americans have added the equivalent of "a single McDonald's cheeseburger" to their daily intake.

#ManagerialClass — Outstanding new NBER paper by Ran Abramitzky, Jennifer K. Kowalski, Santiago Pérez, and Joseph Price. Let us first note the incredible amount of work that went into it: the authors compiled and analyzed records for "2.5 million students at 65 elite (private end public) colleges" over a period spanning the last 100 years. So, what did they find? We will just quote from most of the abstract: "We document the following: First, despite a large increase in the share of lower-income students in the overall college-going population, the representation of these students at elite private or public colleges has remained at similarly low levels throughout the last century. Second, the representation of upper-income students at elite colleges decreased after World War II, but this group has regained its high representation since the 1980s. Third, while there has been no increase in the economic diversity of elite private and public colleges, these colleges have become more racially and geographically diverse. Fourth, two major policy changes in the history of American higher education, namely the G.I. Bill after World War II and the introduction of standardized tests for admissions, had little success in increasing the representation of lower- and middle-income students at elite colleges." Many things here that vindicate the conservative worldview. First, IQ is in large part hereditary! Though there will often be reversion to the mean at the level of families, at the level of society, smart people will match up with other smart people and have smart children, and the reason why these children tend to go to the same kinds of elite colleges their parents went to is mostly because they are also smart, mostly not because of socioeconomic privilege as such. And conversely, the reason why many children of the working class will stay in the working class is because they don't have the IQ to get out of the working class, and not because anything Marx or Bourdieu wrote. There is nothing wrong with having a moderate or low IQ or being in a working class job! What is wrong is when a nation's cognitive/social/political/cultural elite don't work towards having a society where everyone, including those cognitively less-endowed, can work and live with dignity. Second, the fact that efforts to increase racial diversity have done nothing to increase socioeconomic diversity vindicates a lot of populist/new right arguments about "wokeness as class warfare." Many have often had a suspicion that affirmative action are really a way for the American upper class to exclude white working class Americans, who they see as their real competitors, from elite institutions.

#Immigration — The Post has gotten its hands on a new and terrifying DHS memo, which states that the "Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua has expanded its territory to at least 16 US states — an area that includes half of America’s population."

#Ed — The Department of Education has failed its third audit in as many years, the House Education Committee reports. Just totally normal, non-third-world stuff.

#DOGE — Speaking of government reform, Elaine Karmack, who is Director of the "Center for Effective Public Management" at Brookings, is not a big fan of DOGE. She points out that "the vast majority of the government’s work is not conducted by civil servants paid by the federal government—it is conducted by contractors who spend tax dollars" and therefore "efficiency would have to take a look at contractors as well as the federal workers." Fair enough. Another fair point: "people like to say they want less government spending but hate it when their favorite program is cut." She says DOGE should cut the government "with a scalpel, not an axe." We would say: what's between those two?

#Politics — The ever-astute Henry Olsen has a good article at American Compass on how, he believes (and his political observations should never be underestimated), the multi-ethnic character of the Republican coalition is here to stay.

#Life — Euthanasia shouldn't be underrated as a future culture war issue in the US. The global left clearly wants it. In Canada, it has become a part of life. The UK's new Labour government is currently forcing through an assisted dying bill. In France, the centrist parties in the current government's minority coalition have said (in the middle of a budget crisis) that they will not support the government unless it puts forward an assisted dying bill. Anyway, Wesley Smith has an important article arguing that euthanasia is false compassion.