Back in 2016, the Economic Policy Institute found that raising the minimum wage from $6.75 to $8.00 per hour back in the day in California decreased state public assistance payments by $2.7 billion. It only makes sense.
Hartmann Report
June 9, 2025
An open letter by six Nobel laureate economists from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute said: “The most acute and immediate damage stemming from this bill would be felt by the millions of American families losing key safety net protections like Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.
“The Medicaid cuts constitute a sad step backward in the nation’s commitment to providing access to health care for all. Proponents of the House bill often claim that these Medicaid cuts can be achieved simply by imposing work reporting requirements on healthy, working-age adults.
“But healthy, working-age adults are by definition not heavy consumers of health spending, so achieving the budgeted Medicaid cuts will obviously harm others as well.”
Newsweek
June 9, 2025
The bill’s critics are hoping it may see some change’s in Congress’s upper house. Those include six Nobel-prize winning economists, who this week penned an open letter published through the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
“As economists who have devoted our careers to researching how economies can grow and how the benefits of this growth can be translated into broadly shared prosperity and security, we have grave concerns about the budget reconciliation bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on May 22, 2025,” the letter says.
CNBC
June 9, 2025
The House-passed budget bill includes no taxes on tips and overtime through 2028, fulfilling one of Trump’s campaign promises. The idea of no tax on tips was appealing enough to voters that even former Vice-President Kamala Harris added it to her campaign platform.
The Economic Policy Institute has criticized the idea, arguing that it helps relatively few workers, undermines pay increases for non-tipped workers and could expand the use of tipped workers, a system “rife with discrimination and worker abuse.”
Albuquerque Journal
June 9, 2025
Federal-worker job security and morale is at a low point after nearly five months of the Trump administration’s anti–civil service agenda, and this proposal is just one more facet of an agenda to prioritize loyalty over worker rights. According to Margaret Poydock of the Economic Policy Institute, it’s all part of President Trump’s larger goal of reducing the friction of the federal bureaucracy and making it easier for him to enact his agenda.
“Basically, what he’s trying to do is create precedent where he can nominate individuals in those positions who are more aligned with his view, and if they don’t rule in favor of his view, then they potentially could be fired,” she said.
American Prospect
June 9, 2025
Morgan Lewis’ services help companies like Amazon and Trader Joe’s discourage union organizing by dragging out the timeline to a collective labor agreement, even if workers at a location win a union election, according to a January 2025 report on corporate union-busting practices by the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
“Carey’s nomination as NLRB General Counsel is certainly another example of Trump’s attacks on workers and the right to organize,” EPI senior policy analyst Margaret Poydock told Sludge. “However, given the state of the agency, it hardly matters who is nominated to the GC role because Trump has already effectively destroyed the agency’s independence, which began when he fired Gwynne Wilcox from the Board for ‘disfavoring employers’ in her decisions. That decision is still working its way through the courts, but the justification he gave essentially means anyone who wins a nomination to serve at the agency, whether the Board or General Counsel, knows that they will be expected to favor employers to stay in Trump’s good graces and keep their job.”
Sludge
June 9, 2025
Whichever way you look at it, said Ronil Hira, a Howard University political science professor and research associate at the Economic Policy institute, the PERM process is crying out for reform. As he put it, “Everyone in the industry knows it’s a joke.”
ProPublica
June 9, 2025
Along with the Institute for Policy Studies and the Economic Policy Institute, Barber’s organization, Repairers of the Breach, re-released an earlier report Monday on the proposed budget with additional information about communities that would be impacted if the budget is passed into law.
Common Dreams
June 9, 2025
DOGE’s unprecedented access to Americans’ data “is alarming, made worse by the complete absence of meaningful oversight,” according to Ben Zipperer, a senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute. “That unrestrained access to data will likely worsen the problem of identity theft in the United States, which could cost working families tens of billions of dollars annually.”
The Independent
June 9, 2025
This reluctance to leave an abusive worksite can be compounded by the fact that many H-2A workers arrive with debt they’ve accrued from paying recruiters to get here. Employers are required to pay all recruitment costs, but recruiters’ practices go largely unregulated since they operate internationally.
The D.C.-based liberal think tank Economic Policy Institute has said this amounts to a program that exploits and silences migrant workers, replacing year-round workers in the process. In some cases, U.S. prosecutors have accused farmers and recruiters of using the H-2A program to engage in forced labor trafficking.
AL.com
June 9, 2025