This week, Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent put college accreditors on notice: comply with federal civil rights law or risk losing the authority that gives them control over billions in taxpayer-funded student aid. Kent’s warning was directed at the Middle States Commission on Higher Education and the Commission on Accreditation in Physical Therapy Education. The National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI), a federal oversight board, recently documented concerns about these accreditors. Established by Congress in 1992, NACIQI is an 18-member independent advisory board that evaluates accrediting agencies and makes recommendations to the Secretary of Education on whether to recognize them. Its members are appointed by Congress and the Secretary and serve six-year terms. While NACIQI doesn’t make final decisions, its recommendations carry significant weight. Concerns about one of the accreditors, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, center on its “Guiding Principle 3.” This standard encourages institutions to consider racial diversity in areas such as student learning, employment practices, strategic planning, and institutional governance. Kent concluded that the standard effectively “prioritizes racial diversity over merit.” As for the other accreditor, the Commission on Accreditation in Physical Therapy Education, that group’s “Standard 2B” goes even further. It requires programs to promote “justice, equity, diversity, inclusivity (or JEDI), belonging, and anti-racism,” and to demonstrate how their mission and outcomes align with those aims. The Commission didn’t clearly define diversity in race-neutral terms, as Kent also pointed out. Accreditation used to be a voluntary, peer-review process for colleges and universities. It wasn’t until federal lawmakers introduced the second G.I. Bill in 1952, which provided federal assistance to servicemembers to attend college in honor of their service to the country, that institutions were required to be accredited to enroll students using federal loans. In 1965, Congress decided to expand the role of accreditors to promote academic quality among accredited institutions. Yet that influence has not translated into meaningful accountability. A 2022 report from the Postsecondary Commission, an aspiring, nonprofit institutional accreditor that’s focused on student economic outcomes, found that “less than three percent of accreditor actions involved penalizing an institution due to poor student outcomes or academic programming.” Instead, accreditors are focused on enforcing DEI standards or wrongly engaging in institutional governance decisions. This has been documented previously by scholars at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and The Heritage Foundation. Kent’s letters rightly call attention to these issues. Both the Middle States Commission on Higher Education and APTA were deemed “substantially compliant” and must now submit reports detailing how they will eliminate standards that violate federal law. Failure to do so could result in denial, suspension, or termination of their federal recognition. The Trump administration has made accreditation reform a priority. A 2025 executive order directed the Department of Education to expand opportunities for new accreditors and make it easier for institutions to switch agencies. The Department is also convening a negotiated rulemaking committee to revisit regulations governing higher education accreditation, reversing the previous administration’s reluctance to allow new entrants. Today’s system of accreditation has allowed accreditors to become ideological gatekeepers of federal dollars rather than guarantors of quality. Ultimately, Congress should decouple federal aid eligibility from federally sanctioned accrediting bodies. This would open the door to state and private quality assurance entities that evaluate institutions on student outcomes rather than ideology. In the meantime, it is reassuring to have Kent and others at the Education Department holding accreditors accountable to federal law. The post Kent’s Warning Signals a Shift in Accreditation Oversight appeared first on The Daily Signal.

When Vanguard Group announced that it would settle its portion of a lawsuit brought by 13 state attorneys general, opponents of “Environmental, Social, and Governance” (ESG) declared victory. And they weren’t wrong. The suit, led by Texas AG Ken Paxton, accused Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street of conspiring to push green-energy initiatives through their coal-company holdings, allegedly raising electricity prices for consumers. “A huge win in the fight to stop … ESG,” “incredible news”—the celebrations came quickly. The damage done to the ESG cause is significant, and the celebration is justified. But it may also be premature—and for reasons that have nothing to do with ESG. The more important question is one that almost nobody is asking: Why, exactly, did Vanguard settle? The firm says it settled “solely for the purpose of avoiding the burden and expense of litigation”—standard lawyer-speak for “we want you to leave us alone, but we can’t admit wrongdoing.” While it’s almost certainly the case that Vanguard wanted to avoid extended legal action and the associated expenses, the idea that the settlement was reached “solely” for that purpose strains credulity. After all, the firm agreed not only to pay almost $30 million in fines but also to turn over communications related to its ESG activities—a massive, potentially embarrassing and costly concession. The true “costs” of letting this case reach trial, in other words, must have far exceeded the mere “burden and expense of litigation.” Vanguard is not the same as the other two members of the Big Three and is profoundly different from BlackRock in particular. BlackRock may be the biggest asset manager in the world, with more than $14 trillion in assets under management, but Vanguard is, by far, the biggest manager of passive assets. Of its total of $12 trillion in AUM, almost all is passively managed. By comparison, only 35%-40% ($5-$6 trillion) of BlackRock’s assets are passively managed. While State Street is far more passive-focused than BlackRock, it is much smaller than Vanguard and is not entirely passive. Vanguard is, put bluntly, the undisputed king of passive investing, controlling roughly half of the entire passive investment market that has been growing at a staggering clip. According to Morningstar, passive funds saw nearly 250% growth in AUM between 2014 and 2023, compared to 36% growth for active funds. In the United States, passive AUM surpassed active AUM last year, and growth continues apace. Passive investing isn’t just Vanguard’s business model. It is Vanguard. That’s what was at stake. About a year ago, Denise Hearn and Cynthia Hanawalt, two climate investment researchers at Columbia University, published a paper noting that a trial in this case would provide the first legal test of the “common ownership theory,” which posits that index investing—in which managers hold multiple companies in the same sector—creates incentives to reduce or eliminate competition between the companies, resulting in a slowdown or stoppage in innovation, artificially inflated prices, reduced output, etc. Hearn and Hanawalt argued that the case against the Big Three was flawed but could, at trial, produce unexpected results that would profoundly disrupt the asset management business. Historically, the common ownership theory has been dismissed as ideologically tinged and is refuted specifically by an appeal to “passivity.” Managers take no advantage of the competition-deadening incentives; they are mere inert observers. But that defense may be weaker than it appears, and this is where the story gets genuinely interesting. We would argue that passivity actually has the opposite effect. Because it dulls the price-discovery mechanism, which traditionally enforces competitive behavior on corporations, passive investing creates the circumstances in which the structural incentives of common ownership—the dampening of competition in the interest of industry-wide profitability—can function without check or intent. Active collusion between managers becomes unnecessary because the competitive dampening happens by default. As a result, passivity doesn’t refute common ownership theory; it operationalizes it. The implications are potentially staggering. Together, the common ownership theory and the theory that passivity operationalizes competitive dampening could undermine the last quarter-century of capital market growth and consolidation—and destroy the very idea that passive investing is an appropriate process for capitalizing business at all. No single development in this case would have guaranteed that outcome. But none could have ruled it out, either. And if you happen to run a firm with $12 trillion in assets under management—virtually all of it passive, in a market still growing at breakneck speed—is that a chance you could afford to take? That, likely, is why Vanguard settled. The post The Real Reason That Vanguard Settled appeared first on The Daily Signal.

New York’s desperate governor is turning to a well-known practice in New York City: aggressive begging. While speaking at Politico’s “New York Agenda: Albany Summit” last week, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, admitted that the state’s tax base has eroded and that it faces a deepening fiscal crisis. She then put out a call for wealthy, former New Yorkers to come back to the state so they can be robbed again by beneficent government overlords. Kathy Hochul making a weak plea for wealthy people who have left New York (to red states like Florida) to come back to pay their high taxes to fund failing (unaccountable) social programs: “I need people who are high net worth to support the generous social programs we have in… pic.twitter.com/7quhsFyWyn— Matt Whitlock (@MattWhitlock) March 18, 2026 “I need people who are high net worth to support the generous social programs we want to have in our state,” Hochul said. “There are some patriotic millionaires who stepped up. Ok. Cut me the checks. But if you want to be supportive, maybe the first step should be to go down to Palm Beach and see who you can bring back home.” This is unbelievably, well, rich of her to say. As more than a few folks on X recalled, Hochul was insistent in 2022 that anyone who disagreed with the leftward direction of the state should just “jump on a bus and head down to Florida.” Whats really Ironic about the Kathy Hochul Begging for Millionaires to come back to NYC is that in her Victory Speech after she defeated Lee Zeldin in 2022 she told people that didn't like her Policies to "Get Out of Here, We Don't Need You Here"And they did…and it turns out… https://t.co/lRHHfE1X3F pic.twitter.com/8viXgKY205— Jason Robertson (@JRobFromMN) March 19, 2026 Whelp, I guess a lot of them did and now she’s pleading with them to come back so they can be milked like cows and bilked like suckers. What a great message. Keep in mind that the New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the New York legislature have proposed a bevy of new “wealth” taxes to make up for their growing budget shortfalls. I think Hochul knows that Mamdani’s socialist schemes and ridiculous fiscal requests are a recipe for disaster. But she can’t or won’t do anything about it. The young leftist is far too popular with the Democrat Party base; his New York City experiment is seen as critical to the Left’s success elsewhere. So Hochul and her allies in Albany have no choice but to mitigate, to squeeze what they can from the rest of the state and pathetically beg former New Yorkers to come back from Florida’s greener pastures. And if it isn’t obvious already, well-run states like Florida have created quite an embarrassment for Hochul and the most petulant defenders of the blue state model. There is a reason why California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is totally not running for president, keeps concocting bizarre narratives about how Texas and Florida are high tax states compared to California. Yes, he really thinks people are dumb enough to believe that. The comparison between Florida and New York is certainly an instructive one. The two states have roughly the same population. New York has an estimated population of just under 20 million. Florida’s population is around 23 million. Yet, Florida spent about $115 billion last year and New York spent $235 billion. New York City’s budget alone was nearly the same as Florida’s despite having less than half the population. And remarkably, that budget still isn’t enough for New York politicians. Mamdani intends to spend enough to insult even the most profligate drunken sailors. He already plans to raid the city’s rainy-day fund, ensuring that nothing will be there in a real crisis. No surprise, Moody’s financial rating service has already issued a warning to the city by giving it a negative credit outlook. Meanwhile, Mamdani’s working hard to ensure that legitimate public services are overrun by vagrants, and services for vagrants are overrun by NGO leeches. NYC spends more per homeless person than the median NYC household earns. $81,705 per person in FY2025.And $81,705 is a floor. It excludes supportive housing (~$500M/yr), mental health response teams, and NYPD encampment costs. The city projects ~$97K per person in FY2026. pic.twitter.com/haXJenA4Q3— Charlie Smirkley (@charliesmirkley) March 16, 2026 Some are calling for the “grownups” to step in and convince Mamdani and his minions to see reason. Unfortunately, Hochul is the adult in this scenario and she’s not going to do anything to put serious pressure on the Left’s favorite mayor. It’s bleak, and she knows it. On the other hand, with a much lower budget, Florida mostly delivers on its more limited governmental promises. From K-12 schools to even public transit, Florida has been going in a positive direction for years. Americans—and not just the “rich”—have been moving en masse to the Sunshine state because it has lower taxes, lower cost of living, a better job market, and isn’t foisting transgenderism on children along with a litany of other woke garbage. So why would someone who has decided to make the swap decide to go back unless they absolutely must? They won’t. And New York’s leaders are unlikely to address what’s going wrong. Their only hope might be for a federal government to step in and save them after they’ve made it their proud mission to stop the operations of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. If they think President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are going to bail them out I have a bridge to sell them in Brooklyn. The post Hochul Begs Wealthy Floridians to Return to New York. She Can Pound Sand. appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The use of the agricultural input glyphosate may be one of the most hotly contested issues within public health right now. For some, glyphosate is proof that modern agriculture is poison. For others, it is an example of anti-science panic. Both reactions avoid the hard truth: glyphosate is a critical agricultural input with contested cancer literature, collapsing public trust, and a set of policy tradeoffs that are too often ignored.The large scale skepticism of glyphosate safety started in 2015 when the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as probably carcinogenic (Group 2A), based on “limited” evidence in humans alongside animal and mechanistic evidence. However, this legitimate concern is based more on potential theoretical hazards rather than an assessment of real-world exposure levels. Regulating agencies ask a different question: whether a substance poses an unacceptable risk when used as labeled. In the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency has maintained that glyphosate is “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans.” However, it has since withdrawn its 2020 interim decision following U.S. Court of Appeals Ninth Circuit litigation and is now revisiting parts of its analysis. Across the pond, the European Food Safety Authority said in 2023 that it found no “critical areas of concern,” and the European Commission renewed glyphosate’s approval through 2033. Similarly, the European Chemicals Agency concluded that the available evidence did not justify classifying glyphosate as carcinogenic, mutagenic, or reprotoxic. As for the studies used to justify such decisions, one of the strongest prospective cohorts in the debate, the Agricultural Health Study. The study followed more than 54,000 licensed pesticide applicators in North Carolina and Iowa. An analysis from 2018 found no overall association between glyphosate and non-Hodgkin lymphoma but did report some evidence of increased acute myeloid leukemia risk in the highest exposure groups. Later, a pooled AGRICOH analysis from 2019 covering more than 316,000 farmers and agricultural workers in France, Norway, and the U.S. similarly found no association, though it reported a borderline elevation for diffuse large B-cell lymphoma among long-term users of glyphosate. When looking at meta-analyses, which are literature reviews of several studies to ascertain patterns, the data is still contested. In 2019, a meta-analysis of the Agricultural Health Study’s highest exposure cohort found a 41% increased relative risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. However, in 2020 another meta-analysis and its follow up in 2021 came to more restrained conclusions, cautioning readers about the literature’s publication bias but confirming that diffuse large B-cell lymphoma cannot be ruled out. An honest summary of the literature neither exonerates nor condemns glyphosate. High exposure individuals, like farmers with specific lymphoma subtypes, are worth monitoring. This scientific uncertainty should give policymakers pause. Glyphosate has become the most used pesticide (specifically as an herbicide) in the US, sprayed on over 100 crops. U.S. glyphosate usage has risen from less than 5,000 to over 80,000 metric tons per year between 1987 and 2007. This more than 15-fold increase was accompanied by the deployment of glyphosate-tolerant crops and reduced tillage practices. Most prevalent among these was Roundup by Monsanto, which was purchased by Bayer in 2018. Whatever one thinks of glyphosate and Bayer’s acquisition of Monsanto, banning such a prevalent pesticide may create regrettable substitutions. In fact, Bayer actually stopped selling glyphosate-based Roundup for the U.S. residential market in 2023, citing ongoing litigation issues rather than safety concerns. As of February, 2026 the company has paid $11 billion for civil suits. Some Roundup formulations were replaced with diquat dibromide, which is banned in the EU due to its higher toxicity. According to the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, glyphosate’s chronic intake threshold is 1 milligram per kilogram of body weight per day while the European Food Safety Administration sets their threshold at 0.5 milligram per kilogram of body weight per day. Comparatively, diquat dibromide’s threshold is between .002 and .005 milligram per kilogram of body weight per day, which is 100-500 times lower than glyphosate. However, it is worth noting that actual formulations containing diquat may be substantially lower than glyphosate, mitigating some risk. Evidence aside, the decision to restrict glyphosate usage also depends on safe, efficient, and effective alternatives. One important insight to consider is how glyphosate itself replaced more dangerous pesticides used prior to its introduction. Agent Orange, the infamous defoliant used during the Vietnam War, contained one of glyphosate’s predecessors, 2,4,5-T. This compound was unfortunately contaminated with dioxin, a potent neurotoxin, due to inconsistent chemical treating. Dioxin’s threshold is .0000000007 milligram per kilogram of body weight per day, which is around a billion times more toxic than glyphosate. This formulation has thankfully been banned since the mid-1980s, accompanying glyphosate’s rise in popularity. Glyphosate was detected in about 81% of Americans, with an average concentration of 0.000411 mg/liter of urine, which is thousands of times lower than the chronic intake threshold. This is not to dismiss concerns over glyphosate toxicity, as many have raised questions about glyphosate’s effect on the gut microbiome. Others also have germane concerns about glyphosate mixed with other “enhancing” chemicals that increase toxicity. Neither extreme should dominate the debate. Advocating for banning or restricting a well-used pesticide may lead to alternative pesticide regimes with more chemical alternatives, more over-applications, more tillage and soil erosion, or higher costs shifted onto families. Glyphosate’s path forward demands nuanced, evidence-based policy including rigorous ongoing monitoring (especially for high-exposure populations), innovation in alternatives, transparent risk communication, and balanced regulation that takes these genuine concerns seriously and analyzes the realities of tradeoffs soberly. The post The Truth about Glyphosate: Genuine Concerns and Sobering Realities appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Most discussion of the SAVE America ACT has focused on how it would require proof of citizenship for voter registration and photo ID to cast ballots in federal elections. Lying Democrats claim that citizenship-confirming birth certificates are beyond the reach of mere mortals. Never mind that private and government websites help Americans order them online for home delivery.  Also, racist Democrats argue that black and brown voters are too dense to acquire photo ID, even though tens of millions of them have drivers licenses and present photo ID daily—to rent cars, cash checks, and enter Democrat-run government buildings and campaign events. Yet another SAVE benefit has received far less attention: It would Make Absentee Ballots Great Again. SAVE finally would end a major “temporary” pandemic-era measure: In 2020, Democrats used the COVID-19 virus as a Trojan horse to slip in virtually every long-sought Left-wing scheme to slacken voting. These unprecedented procedures eased Democrat election theft.  Democrats argued that social-distancing merited thin crowds at precincts. So, they harnessed new laws, court orders, and unconstitutional edicts to blastmail-in ballots across counties and states. California, Nevada, New Jersey, and Vermont spewed ballots as if from fire hoses. Unrequested ballots went to everyone on often-outdated rolls. This included double-registered, relocated, and dead voters. The federal pandemic Public-Health Emergency officially ended on May 11, 2023. To whatever extent these massive voting changes made microscopic sense while COVID marched through America’s institutions, those dark days brightened nearly three years ago. Likewise, the rationale for mass-mail-in ballots has vanished like airline mask mandates. The SAVE America Act will prohibit states from air-dropping ballots on “voters,” as California did so promiscuously in fall 2022. The Public Interest Legal Foundation reported that Golden State authorities mailed 21,184,707 ballots. Of these, 10,891,525 (51.4%) were unaccounted for. As PILF explained: “Election officials do not know what happened to them.” That’s right: 10.9 million ballots vanished—nearly enough for everyone in North Carolina.  At best, this is weapons-grade waste. At worst, with that many loose ballots sloshing around, who could trust that only legitimate ones were counted? Even the mere appearance of fraud deepens concerns about electoral dysfunction.   The SAVE America Act should prevent mail-in ballots from landing in places such as those in Nevada where PILF discovered registered “voters”: a firehouse, an Iron Workers Hall, a head shop, a gravel-filled vacant lot, and an abandoned mine. What could go wrong?  SAVE should spare Americans the sickening sight of sacred ballots being mailed to voters and then filling trash cans after former residents of a Las Vegas apartment complex failed to claim them. Mail-in ballots languish in the trash. Las Vegas, Nevada, October 2020. (Courtesy of Jim Murphy.) “We don’t want mail-in ballots,” President Donald J. Trump told WKRC-TV’s Tyler Madden in Cincinnati on March 11. “We want to have it accurate, and you can’t do that with mail-in ballots.” Trump added that SAVE would preserve absentee ballots for those who are—what a concept!—absent. These would include, Trump said, “our military, our people that are ill, people that are away. So, we’re generous in that way. But people don’t want mail-in ballots, because you have crooked elections. It guarantees a crooked election.”   Curbing mass mail-in ballots removes the rationale for terminally opaque ballot harvesting and unsupervised, easily stuffed drop boxes. With any luck, these once ubiquitous COVID-era relics will make like Dr. Fauci and fade away. SAVE resurrects the secret ballot. Completing mail-in ballots at home or work exposes voters to pressure and even threats from spouses, relatives, bosses, and ballot harvesters. Conversely, polling booths let voters choose with zero outside influence. President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker’s Federal Election Reform Commission declared in September 2005: “Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.” Senate passage of SAVE will terminate mass-mail in ballots in federal elections and finally place the American people within striking distance of the free and fair elections that we deserve. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post SAVE America Act Will Make Absentee Ballots Great Again appeared first on The Daily Signal.