We previously covered Palantir's new "American Tech Fellowship" which plans on producing the future AI leaders of America out of overlooked talent "in the Heartland." This comes on the heels of the company's previous "Meritocracy Fellowship," a four-month internship for high school graduates designed to poach students disregarded by the Ivy League.

Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar has just published an op-ed in The American Conservative explaining the logic for this plan.

"We’re launching the American Tech Fellowship because something extraordinary is happening," he writes. "America is entering a new golden age of innovation. The AI revolution isn’t just coming; it’s already here. Companies are using AI to automate millions of tasks, transform workflows, and take their workers to the next level. AI represents the greatest opportunity in generations to rebuild American manufacturing, revitalize our communities, and restore our national power."

Furthermore, "The demand for qualified engineers is exploding. Meeting that demand means expanding beyond typical recruiting pipelines, candidate profiles, and policy approaches. The reflex of many in business and government is to import the solution, when the real solution is staring them in the face. There’s extraordinary talent in every American community, and we’re going to prove it."

We agree with the basic insight. Of course we need more of this.

Programs of this type tend to be successful. The Thiel Fellowship, which pays twenty kids under twenty every year to drop out and pursue independent projects, has produced many billion-dollar companies.

In France, Ecole 42, founded by billionaire Xavier Niel, is a 100% free three-year program in computer science, whose students are admitted purely on the basis of a cognitive test and then an intense three week program called "la piscine," or "the swimming pool," because the students are thrown into the deep end of the pool, where students are advised to bring sleeping bags because they will be sleeping under their desks more often than not. 42 has rocketed to the top of French engineering school rankings, in a country whose engineering schools are world-class.

Big Tech companies such as Google and Microsoft have apprenticeship programs, but these don't seem to be geared toward excellence. They have low pay and DEI selection criteria and don't lead to important roles within these companies, which are still—it's an open secret—reserved for graduates of Top 20 schools. Microsoft explicitly describes its "Leap" apprenticeship program as a "diversity program." Google's application process for its apprenticeship program explicitly encourages candidates to "demonstrate your commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion" as part of their application.

The Administration should do everything to encourage more of these types of programs.

Policy News You Need To Know

#OBBB — Senator Hawley, who has been particularly opposed to the Senate bill's treatment of Medicaid provider taxes, has tweeted: "Talked to @realDonaldTrump, on his way home from NATO, about the Senate Medicaid hospital cuts. He said, Stay with the House!" Meaning, presumably, President Trump favors the House bill's more lenient approach.

#OBBB — The Tax Foundation has published its updated analysis of the OBBB, taking into account the Senate text.

#OBBB #SALT — At The Daily Economy, Michael Munger looks at the data showing that SALT encourages more spending in blue states.

#JudicialActivism — A welcome reality check from Harvard Law School Professor Adrian Vermeule on the supposed war between the Executive Branch and the Judiciary: "This administration has an excellent win-loss record at SCOTUS, which has stayed or overturned a dozen or so lower court orders. It’s less a clash between branches and more a clash between lower and higher courts within the judicial branch." He added: "Before someone says 'selection effects - the administration only brings Supreme Court petitions that it thinks it can win.' Selection effects operate if anything probably more heavily at the District Court level. Activist organizations only bring cases they think they can win and they have the added benefit of forum shopping."

#Internet #Kids — The Senate Commerce Committee voted to advance COPPA 2.0, a bill that would extend online privacy protections to anyone under 16 instead of the current 13, and regulate how companies use the data of users under 16. It used to be attached to KOSA but now it is making its way on its own through the process.

#Crime — Striking: "Early crime data for 2025... suggests a strong possibility that the United States will report the lowest murder rate ever recorded, the lowest property rate ever recorded, and the lowest violent crime rate since 1968." More here. Likely causes? Aging population, mass incarceration, and walking back the Summer 2020 craziness?

#ThinkTanks — Interesting profile of EPIC, the new group, in The Hill: "A 2-year-old conservative group with a grand-sounding acronym has packed a major punch as congressional Republicans push forward the 'big, beautiful bill' of President Trump’s tax cut and spending priorities."

#PeoplesRepublicOfNewYork — Some clever people on social media have pointed out that the Communist Control Act of 1954, which is still in force, allows the government to "prevent members of Communist organizations from serving in certain representative capacities," and that this might be applicable to Zohran Mamdani, who has publicly expressed sympathy for communists and has expressed communist-leaning sentiments. Or perhaps the people of New York know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard…

#FedIndependence — As the war of words between the Fed and the Administration potentially heats up, Stephen Moore points out a very telling fact: "90% of staff economists at The Fed are affiliated with the Democratic Party." (Source.) This is all the more striking given that, in many cases, the lack of Republican professional staff is due to a "pipeline" problem where there just aren't enough qualified Republicans for those posts, but there's no shortage of Republican macroeconomists (even if most of them probably wouldn't agree with many Trump policies).

#VotingRights — We covered this before, but worth pointing out again since this is a very important issue and FBI leadership is doubling down. FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino have said publicly that the previous FBI leadership hid evidence of a plot by the Chinese government to hijack the 2020 election with fake mail-in ballots in favor of Joe Biden, Just The News reports. There had previously been reporting about a report to that effect sent by the FBI to Congress, and they have just confirmed it. “Based on our continued review and production of FBI documents related to the CCP’s plot to interfere in the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, previous FBI leadership chose to play politics and withhold key information from the American people – exposing the weaponization of law enforcement for political purposes during the height of the 2020 election season," Patel and Bongino said in statement given to Just the News. 

#VotingRights — One reason to think Democrats might be trying to get non-citizens to vote is…they keep trying to get non-citizens to vote. DOJ press release: "Justice Department Files Suit Against Orange County California Registrar of Voters for Refusing to Provide Non-Citizen Voter Removal Records in Violation of Federal Elections Laws"

#PleaseGetThisRight — FHFA Director William J. Pulte has issued a directive requiring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to formally consider cryptocurrency holdings as assets in single-family mortgage loan risk assessments. This sounds crazy, but it might not be. The directive instructs Fannie and Freddie to include risk mitigation measures in their proposals, addressing the inherent volatility of cryptocurrencies and the proportion of reserves held in digital assets. Some people do have significant holdings in crypto, and if a rule says that they should not be taken into account at all, for purely arbitrary reasons, as opposed to taken into account in a prudent way that is cognizant of their inherent volatility.