NEW: The Sphere Podcast is back!

PolicySphere Publisher Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry interviews Harry Moser of the Reshoring Initiative. Harry received a BS and MS in mechanical engineering from MIT, and an MBA from the University of Chicago (so serious degrees from serious schools), and became CEO of an American manufacturer of machine tools. This gave him a front row seat to the hollowing-out of American manufacturing. After retiring, rather than sip pina coladas on a beach somewhere, he decided to do something about it, and founded the Reshoring Initiative, a non-profit that helps American companies reshore manufacturing and advocates for American manufacturing. We love the Reshoring Initiative because it's much more than a think tank; its "customers" are not politicians or donors but actual real-world manufacturing businesses.

Pascal and Harry discuss the Reshoring Initiative's recent survey of American manufacturers, and go over everything the Trump Administration has done on trade and manufacturing since January, awarding merits and demerits.

Watch the episode on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

Subscribe to the Sphere Podcast on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

ALSO NEW: Opinion: How The Trump Administration Can Take Over The Ivy League

Previously on PolicySphere Articles:

→ Manhattan Institute Publishes Great New Manifesto On Higher Education

→ Opinion: Five Reasons Why Even A Temporary Amnesty Or Guest Worker Program Is A Very Bad Idea

→ Modest Proposal: President Trump Should Hire Bill Gates As Global Ambassador For Development Programs

→ Opinion: The Trump DOJ Is Probably Right About Jeffrey Epstein

The Senate voted Tuesday to advance President Donald Trump's request to claw back $9 billion in foreign aid and federal funding for public broadcasting, through the rescision process. The vote was 51-50, with Vice President JD Vance breaking a tie, with "no"s from Collins, Murkowski, and McConnell.

As expected, the bill defunds the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds NPR and PBS, and a slew of foreign aid programs, including USAID. However, notably, PEPFAR was saved.

Technically this was a procedural vote to advance the bill to the floor, but the floor result should be the same. Because this makes the Senate-passed version of the bill different from the House version, it now goes back to the House.

Congress has until Friday to get the bill to the President's desk. This isn't a self imposed deadline like the OBBB's July 4th deadline, but part of the rescission process as governed by the Impoundment Control Act. Once the administration pauses disbursement of funds and asks Congress to approve rescission, a 45 day clock starts.

Here's what we wrote earlier about the cuts to NPR and PBS:

When it comes to public broadcasting, we have often said that our preferred option would be to keep it, maybe even increase its funding, but totally replace the current personnel with people of high taste and sensibility aligned with the Administration. Alas, that was always a pipe dream.

However, there is an important argument in favor of defunding, which is political:

cutting funding to public broadcasting has been a promise made by essentially every Republican Presidential candidate in this writer's lifetime, a promise never fulfilled. And in the intervening time, problems of media bias have only gotten worse, particularly at NPR and PBS. Trump's identity as the candidate who fulfills his promises, in marked contrast with his establishment Republican predecessors, would be greatly enhanced by the passage of this bill.

Demonstrating that politicians can and actually do enact promises once in office is healthy for America's wounded democracy.

Meanwhile, when it comes to those foreign aid programs, particularly PEPFAR, here's what we wrote in an other article, outlining a way to save them while cutting government spending:

The paradox is this: if these programs save so many lives, and they do it in such an efficient and straightforward and measurable way, with tremendous value for money, then, they should have no problems finding alternative sources of funding.

Which means that the argument for continued funding of these programs is also an argument for sunsetting them.

And conversely, that if these programs cannot find alternative sources of funding, then it stands to reason to believe that they are perhaps not quite so efficient and not quite so life-saving as we have been told.

After all, the funders are out there: there is the UN, and its affiliated constellation of international aid organizations; the EU, and the various governments of Europe; and, of course, private foundations and individuals. Collectively, they spend many hundreds of billions of dollars per year on aid programs.

MORE: Modest Proposal: President Trump Should Hire Bill Gates As Global Ambassador For Development Programs

Policy News You Need To Know

#HigherEd — Speaking of, yesterday the House Committee on Education and the Workforce held a hearing on antisemitism in higher education. Interestingly, during the hearing, Rep. Michael Baumgartner discussed foreign funding and foreign influence. According to the recap, "When asked whether he would commit to full transparency of foreign funding, Chancellor Lyons stated he has several donors who request anonymity and could not commit to transparency." The issue of foreign influence on American campuses is real, which is why it justifies the President using Section 1702 of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to freeze their funds, as we recommend in our article on higher ed reform.

MORE: How The Trump Administration Can Take Over The Ivy League

#HigherEd — Speaking of, according to a new AEI study, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and MIT will pay more than $1 billion by the end of 2030 under the OBBB's new university endowment tax. It's a start…

#TheEconomy #Inflation #Tariffs #TheFed — The Producer Price Index (PPI) for June 2025 unexpectedly dropped below the predictions of all 50 economists surveyed by Bloomberg, signaling potential deflationary pressures in the U.S. economy, contrary to mainstream expectations of steady or rising inflation. This isn't the first time that economists and analysts have overestimated future inflation because of what they imagine the impact of Trump tariffs will be. Some might counter that PPI doesn't include imports, but this is missing the point: the allegation that is being made about tariffs is that they will cause inflation, ie, price increases across the board. This is certainly what the 50 economists who all got it wrong seemed to think. This is not good for the economics profession; it's also not good for Fed Chair Powell, because his refusal to cut rates looks more political with every passing day.

#TheFed #PowellDelendaEst — Speaking of, Steven Richards at JustTheNews has a good overview of the fracas over the Fed's $2.5 billion office renovation and how the scandal could lay the groundwork for Chairman Powell getting fired.

#Chyna #NationalSecurity #Globalization #Immigration — We double-checked to see if we were reading correctly, but it appears to be true: according to reporting by Renee Dudley at ProPublica, and we quote, "Microsoft is using engineers in China to help maintain the Defense Department’s computer systems — with minimal supervision by U.S. personnel."

#Judiciary — Incredible reporting from The Federalist's Margot Cleveland: Memo Reveals D.C. Judges Are Predisposed Against Trump Administration.

#Crime #Disorder #Fentanyl — Very good news, per CNN: President Donald Trump will host congressional leaders and families affected by the fentanyl epidemic for a signing ceremony on bipartisan legislation that would strengthen prison sentences for fentanyl traffickers.

#Census #Citizenship — House Republicans introduced a bill that would prohibit funds earmarked for the Census Bureau from being used to count illegal aliens in connection with apportioning congressional seats. President Trump wants to stop counting illegal immigrants for the purposes of apportioning congressional seats, which is surely correct. The very notion is grotesque. Benjamin Weingarten at RealClearInvestigations has more.

#Immigration — Declan Leary has a very good article at Commonplace, the magazine run by American Compass, making the case for stepping up enforcement on employers of illegal aliens.

#Immigration — Good op-ed from Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow in the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at Heritage, at the Washington Times, pointing out how out-of-step with the mainstream and with common sense Democrat attacks on the Administration's immigration policy are.

#Immigration — Senator Cotton has introduced a bill to end birthright citizenship for children of illegal aliens and terrorists.