In recent decades, local governments have stepped up to tackle some of the most pressing economic challenges of our time, including raising minimum wages, developing popular paid leave programs, and ensuring that public contracts lead to good jobs and stimulate local economic development. Local action to raise wages or strengthen labor standards has often been motivated by state and federal inaction in the face of stagnating wages and growing income inequality. Many such local policy innovations have in turn served as important models for popular new state legislation and for the inclusion of important labor standards in major federal laws, such as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act.

At the same time, the ability of local policymakers to innovate and address local economic conditions has increasingly faced obstruction from state legislatures through the abusive use of preemption—state laws that block, override, or limit local ordinances on workers’ rights.

For nearly a decade, the Economic Policy Institute has tracked the spread of state laws that preempt workers’ rights and limit local democracy. New updates to EPI’s workers’ rights preemption tracker document the most recent legislative changes and point to both troubling and promising developments:Read more

EPI’s updated fact sheets calculate the costs of child care in every state, showing that child care is unaffordable for working families across the country. This early care and education is crucial for children not only because it allows their parents to participate in the labor force, but also because it boosts their socialization, cognitive development, and school readiness. Child care is one of the largest expenses in a family’s budget partly due to early care and education requiring long operating hours for better access and a low student-to-teacher ratio for better quality.

Child care costs vary widely across the country, ranging from as low as $521 per month in Mississippi to as high as $1,893 per month in Washington, D.C., for a household with one 4-year-old child. This variation is even wider across counties and metro areas, as can be seen in our recently updated Family Budget Calculator.

In our fact sheets, we use state-level data from the Department of Labor and Child Care Aware of America on the cost of infant and 4-year-old care to determine child care costs for one- and two-child families. We incorporate the latest available data, in most cases for 2023, and adjust everything to 2024 dollars using the appropriate indexes.

Below, we use New Mexico as a case study to show the different data points offered in the fact sheets. As federal COVID-19 relief funding for child care stabilization grants came to an end in September 2023, New Mexico was the first of a number of states to step up and address the child care needs of working families. While these investments have already begun having positive effects, there is more work to be done.

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Tonight, President Trump will deliver an address to a joint session of Congress where he will outline his political agenda for the next year. Among many other topics, the president is expected to highlight the numerous actions directed at reducing the federal workforce and federal spending, expelling a narrative of rooting out waste and fraud in the federal government. In reality, these actions are nothing more than attacks on federal workers and the services they provide, and an attempt to erode the public’s faith in the federal government.

President Trump has issued a record number of executive actions aimed at the federal workforce, including issuing an executive order to make it easier to fire federal workers in jobs that are normally apolitical; revoking an executive order that protected their collective bargaining rights; eliminating remote work options; and requiring all agencies to identify and review retention needs of all probationary federal employees, resulting in the firing of thousands of federal workers.  

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You could plausibly claim that the 2024 presidential election was about any number of issues— immigration, inflation, or tariffs. But nobody can seriously claim that the candidates ever debated whether a corrupt billionaire should be given the illegal power to destroy vital state capacity on a whim. Yet that’s precisely what the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been doing.

The cynical response to the illegal firings and impoundments pursued by DOGE has been, “So what? Government doesn’t do anything useful anyhow.” But that’s far too cheap a response given the stakes involved. The federal government performs functions that are vital for a decent society. It performs a number of them suboptimally and could use a good faith drive to improve its efficiency and step up its capacity. But compared with the other big centers of power in the U.S. economy—say the tech or finance sector—its employees do far more valuable work for far less money. Relative to these sectors, it is the epitome of efficiency.

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Colorado lawmakers are debating legislation (HB 1208) that would lower the subminimum wage for tipped workers in places like Denver and Boulder County. Such action would be a reversal of the progress Colorado has made recently to tackle one of the largest challenges in the economy: low wages for working people.

While the federal minimum wage continues to stagnate, states like Colorado have set higher standards for their workers. In 2016, voters passed an initiative that increased the minimum wage to $12 an hour and required annual inflation adjustments. As a result, Colorado’s minimum wage in 2025 is $14.81. In 2019, Colorado lawmakers repealed a ban on local wage-setting, allowing cities and counties to set higher minimum wages to respond to local economic factors—like the high cost of living in urban areas. Following this decision, a handful of localities have passed higher minimum wages, demonstrating the popularity of and need for stronger wage floors in the state (see Table 1).

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The U.S. statutory debt ceiling is an absurd, arbitrary, and worthless political institution, yet it also poses a profound danger of throwing the economy into a full-blown crisis whenever it looms. Elon Musk’s behavior over the past month is eerily similar—including the exact mechanisms through which this behavior could cause a crisis. If the statutory debt ceiling is a potential economic crisis looking to leap off paper legislation, Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team are a potential crisis blundering through the physical (and virtual) halls of government.

Let’s start with a quick recap about the debt ceiling and how it could cause a crisis. The U.S. Treasury draws on banking accounts at the Federal Reserve to fund federal governmental activities—remitting paychecks to federal government employees, sending Social Security checks to beneficiaries, reimbursing doctors for treating Medicare-covered patients, paying defense contractors and interest to bondholders, and so on. These accounts are fed on an ongoing basis by both tax revenues and the proceeds from selling bonds (debt). But because the United States has a statutorily imposed limit of how much outstanding debt is allowed, in theory the debt ceiling means that when it’s hit that Treasury would no longer be allowed to sell bonds and deposit these proceeds. In this scenario, accounts at the Federal Reserve would dwindle as they are now only fed by ongoing taxes, which are insufficient to cover all spending. It’s worth noting that this would be such a disastrous outcome that policymakers should feel obligated to engage in any possible workaround.

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In the first month of his new administration, President Trump has taken drastic steps to reduce the size of the federal workforce, from offering nearly all federal employees a “deferred resignation” buyout to illegally firing senior officials at several agencies. While many of these efforts are being challenged in court, the strategy behind them is clear: Villainize public servants, fire or push them out of their jobs, and then dismantle the federal services they were faithfully executing. By sowing public distrust in those who provide government services, the public’s faith in the goods provided by the government is at risk of eroding too, making it easier for the administration to eliminate core government functions that hundreds of millions of Americans rely on.

The public goods provided by federal agencies are so commonplace that we may not even recognize how prevalent they are in our lives. When we walk into the grocery store, we purchase our food knowing that it won’t make us sick because of the efforts of the Food and Drug Administration. When we travel in a car, we have confidence in reaching our destination safely because of the standards set and enforced by the Department of Transportation. We can evacuate areas in advance of life-threatening natural disasters because of the efforts of the National Weather Service and other federal agencies. These and countless other services provided by the federal government are possible because of the dedication and expertise of federal employees who are now under attack.

The impact of these attacks will be felt throughout the country. Every congressional district has federal workers. Below, we provide a snapshot from FedScope of the federal workforce and the actions the Trump administration has taken to undermine them.

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The clearest legislative priority of the Trump administration and the Republican-led Congress is to keep taxes low for the richest households and corporations. Last week, House Republicans submitted a budget resolution that calls for $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid—the program that provides health insurance for low-income Americans—to help pay for extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), which primarily benefits the highest earners. President Trump endorsed the House plan earlier this morning, despite vowing yesterday to not cut Medicaid.

Besides being unfair, the cost of this overall tax cut would be large enough to put huge stress on other parts of the economy, no matter how it is paid for. But the costliest way to pay for this would be to enact large cuts in spending programs like Medicaid that provide benefits to economically vulnerable families. These cuts would equal almost 11% of all Medicaid spending over the proposed time period.

In a forthcoming report, we highlight just how damaging these Medicaid cuts would be for typical families. Health coverage is expensive in the U.S., and the value of Medicaid’s coverage is equal to a huge share of the total income of poorer families. In fact, a family health insurance plan in private markets can cost more than what the bottom 20% of families earns in an entire year.

Figure 1 below shows the House budget resolution’s average cut to Medicaid benefits for the bottom 40% of the income distribution, expressed as a share of average income. It also shows how much extending the TCJA’s expiring provisions would boost incomes for these groups and the top 1%. The upshot is that the bottom 40% would be unequivocally worse off: Proposed cuts to Medicaid would reduce incomes for the bottom 40% more than extending the TCJA would boost them—and the lowest-income households would fare the worst. Strikingly, this is true even as the full $880 billion in Medicaid cuts would only pay for about 20% of the total cost of the TCJA—other cuts and economic damage falling on non-rich families stemming from tax cuts for the rich would still be forthcoming. Meanwhile, the TCJA boosts the incomes of the top 1% significantly, while these households do not rely in any way on Medicaid.

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Reparations for Black Americans—whether for chattel slavery at the federal level or more local forms of redress for past harm at the state and municipal levels—have long been dismissed as unrealistic and unattainable from a policy perspective. Broad public support for reparations policies has consistently remained shy of a majority nationally, even at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, when mass protests and awareness campaigns highlighted the history of harm and injustice done against Black people in the United States. While most Black Americans support reparations, the majority of white, Hispanic, and Asian Americans surveyed do not.

The incoming presidential administration has been hostile toward efforts to promote equity through government. On day one of the administration, President Trump rescinded all previous executive orders related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and introduced new executive orders to explicitly preclude future federal efforts pursuing equity. Rhetorically, the administration and its supporters have resisted any consideration of racial equity, even by private institutions.

In an environment where pursuing equity goals could invite dangerous scrutiny, one could reasonably ask: Is it still prudent to talk about reparations in 2025?Read more

This piece was originally published at In These Times. 

Less than a month into his second term, President Trump has undertaken dozens of actions that harm workers, the economy, and our democracy. If it feels like déjà vu, it is. Many of these actions were introduced during his first term, when President Trump attacked unions, workers’ wages, and workplace health and safety. But now, equipped with policies from the Heritage Foundation’s far-right Project 2025, Trump is going even further to prioritize the interests of corporations and billionaires like Elon Musk over working people. 

On day one, President Trump issued several executive orders that impact the federal workforce. This included reinstating Schedule F, which upends longstanding job protections for federal career employees and makes it easier to fire them for any reason. He also overturned federal collective bargaining and affirmed due process protections, instituted a federal hiring freeze, and mandated federal workers return to in-person work five days a week. 

President Trump also created the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by tech billionaire Elon Musk, to help ​“reduce wasteful spending” in the federal government. Under the guise of budget reductions, DOGE has demoralized and villainized the more than two million federal workers—nearly 30% of whom are union workers—who provide essential government services. 

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