Heritage Explains

Washington has a really bad habit of mistaking paperwork for progress.

In some places, like the billion forms needed to get a driver's license, this is simply annoying. But in programs meant to help children and families, pencil pushing masquerading as actual work is dangerous.

The federal government has produced thousands of pages of guidance and demand endless compliance reviews while still failing to make kids better off.

Trump 2.0 is looking to fix this. Over the past year, the Administration for Children and Families has pushed for commonsense reforms to ensure social services benefit their intended targets.

Some reforms ask states to end the so-called orphan tax and launch a nationwide effort to recruit more foster families. Others eliminate mountains of outdated federal guidance to cut bureaucracy and refocus the agency on results.

All in all, this looks like a very different ACF than we've seen before.

To walk us through all the work going on at the ACF, I’m joined by Alex Adams. He's the Assistant Secretary over at Administration for Children and Families.

Every day, my wife takes our two young boys to their activities a few miles from our house in the family car. As she drives, she shares the road with gargantuan 40-ton trucks. We assume the people behind the wheel have been properly trained and can understand the signs.


But I fear a day where our family experiences what Dalilah Coleman's family did. Dalilah was five years old when she was hit by an 18-wheeler driven by an illegal alien. The truck plowed into her stopped car at over 60 miles an hour. After spending 3 weeks in a coma, 4 months without half her skull, and 6 months in the hospital, she now enters first grade unable to walk, talk, or eat without assistance.


Illegal immigrants and drivers who cannot adequately speak English have obtained commercial licenses, while federal officials have raised alarms about CDL mills pushing unqualified drivers through the system.


Now lawmakers are pushing Dalilah’s Law, named for the little girl, designed to make sure such a tragedy never happens again.


But how did we get here? How widespread is the problem? And what needs to change to make America's roads safer?


Joining me today to explain is Lora Ries, Director of the Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation.

You'd be forgiven if you'd never heard of the US International Development Finance Corporation. Even by Washington standards, DFC sounds like an agency specifically designed to make your eyes glaze over, but push past your initial misapprehension at the label, and DFC is actually one of the most essential agencies in the District of Columbia and a key player in our fight against the Chinese Communist Party.
 
For years, Beijing has used its economic heft to expand its influence through initiatives like Belt and Road. Beijing invests in infrastructure in the developing world, locking down access to critical minerals and making itself indispensable to countries that might otherwise rather deal with us. In response, America realized, that maybe letting China corner everything important is a bad idea.
 
Enter the DFC. In its own words, the agency mobilizes private capital to advance U.S. foreign policy and economic development. So rather than simply handing out foreign aid and hoping for the best, DFC utilizes the power of capitalism to counter Chinese communism. What's more American than that?
 
That raises some interesting questions, though. How is this any different than the scuttled USAID program, filled to the brim with wokeness? Where should America be investing? And can Washington actually behave like an investor without eventually devolving into bureaucratic bloat? Here to answer those questions is Ben Black, the current CEO at the DFC.

Last week, Heritage Explains spoke with Director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at The Heritage Foundation, Nile Gardiner, about the riots rocking France. In the few days since our interview, things have gotten way worse.

Over the weekend, masked rioters broke into the historic 19th-century Town Hall in Limoges and set it ablaze. There is perhaps no better symbol of the war raging to define the West than a nearly 150 year old building which survived two World Wars burnt to the ground by socialists and Islamists.

Beyond burning buildings, the fight for France has also been playing out on French university campuses. At the prestigious Sorbonne university, members of the La Cocarde Étudiante student organization confronted left-wing activists over university blockades and attempted to reopen access to campus, to much resistance from university and government authorities.

President Emmanuel Macron addressed the country, condemning the violence while acknowledging legitimate grievances among peaceful demonstrators. But to many this isn’t enough.

To dive even deeper into the war for the West’s soul raging across the Atlantic, we spoke with Laura LaCombe, a spokeswoman with La Cocarde Etudiante to get the on the ground story.

It’s a day ending in Y in France, which means rioting.  

Following in the spirit of 1789, the French are burning buildings, fighting the police, and overall behaving very poorly.  

This time, the revolutionaries are highschoolers joined by Islamo-communists and anarchists waving Palestinian flags, but France has seen this style of faux revolution before. The rioters are the proud heirs of May ’68, an event that looms so large in the French psyche, the mere mention of soixante-huitards, or 68ers, is enough to spark furious debate.  

Against the smoke and sirens lies a bigger question over whether France’s current system can hold. French presidential elections are coming soon, and far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon wants to replace the Fifth Republic with a Sixth, led by, in his words, créolisation. By contrast, leader of the right-wing Marine Le Pen represents a nationalist defense of the old France, but both movements are deeply skeptical of the European Union.  

That’s a lot to cover. And who better to navigate us through some French politics than a Brit? My conversation with Nile Gardiner, Director of The Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center.

Washington has spent decades proving the bigger government gets, the more money it wastes and the less accountable it becomes. 

The infamous Minnesota “learing centers,” incident showed how craven many fraudsters are when it comes to stealing federal funds, while the downstream benefits of dismantling USAID show how effective government action can be in saving taxpayer money. 

Waste, fraud, and abuse are the inevitable results of a federal government that measures success not by results, but by the size of budgets. 

The Trump Administration has taken several steps towards remedying America's fraud problem, but many questions remain.  

To help answer some of those questions, we asked Director of the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget at the Heritage Foundation Dan Kowalski to break it all down.

Check out more of The Heritage Foundation's wrok here: https://x.com/Heritage

For the better part of a decade, China has played the role of America’s greatest long-term strategic competitor.
 
American foreign politicos have long advised a pivot to Asia as Washington slaps tariffs on Chinese goods. The CCP has served as America’s bête noire, guilty of repeated intellectual property theft, human rights abuses, and imperial ambitions towards the essential island of Taiwan.
 
And yet, as Bob Dylan once crooned, the times, they are a changin'.
 
President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping recently wrapped up a new round of talks here in Washington, with many noting the meeting seemed much more amicable than expected.
 
If polls are to be believed, Americans are less hostile toward China than they were just a few years ago with younger Americans considerably less likely than their parents to see China’s rise as a critical threat.  
 
Overseas, countries that have traditionally looked to Washington are increasingly weighing closer economic ties with Beijing.
 
At the same time, China still dominates critical supply chains, including rare earth minerals and questions remain about whether the United States can or should decouple its economy from Beijing.
 
So where does the U.S.-China relationship stand? Are Americans becoming more comfortable with Beijing and Can China really present itself as an alternative to the United States on the world stage?  
 
Jeff Smith, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center may have the answers.

Watch Myth vs. Fact: The Closing of The Department of Education

I was eight years old when my family got our first home computer. I remember this hulking grey Dell computer taking up massive amounts of space on the desk, and I remember thinking to myself how amazing technology was.

The mood around tech is no longer nearly as cheery. Over the past five years, Americans have grown increasingly concerned over the broadening prevalence of AI. Pew Research reports 52% of Americans say they are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life, a 15-point jump since 2021.

That’s not to say that AI and tech have always had a positive portrayal in the American consciousness and these fears are a recent development. In 1984, audiences gasped as killer robots sent by rogue AI Skynet hunted Kyle Reese and Sarah Connors in Terminator.
Nearly two decades earlier in 1967, sci-fi author Harlan Ellison penned I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. The short story depicts an AI uprising and a military supercomputer named AM who gains sentience and eradicates humanity except for five individuals who it tortures in perpetuity. And who could forget the cold, unfeeling gaze of HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey?

But is humanity condemned to face an army of Terminators or a maniacal AI overlord? I wanted to cut past the doomsaying, so I invited Jay Richards, Heritage Foundation’s Vice President of Social and Domestic Policy and the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow in American Principles and Public Policy and author of the Human Advantage, to discuss.

As stories about non-citizen voting and voter fraud become disturbingly common, Americans are beginning to lack confidence in our elections. The debate over the elections process has taken on a renewed urgency given we are just months away from the 2026 midterms and a few years out from what promises to be a contentious 2028 election.

That's why Heritage Foundation recently launched the latest edition of its Election Integrity Scorecard, a tool that evaluates how states are protecting election integrity. The scorecard provides Americans a clear look at where states are making progress and where reforms are still needed.

Mark Guiney recently sat down with Ken Cuccinelli, former Virginia attorney general and the Chairman of Heritage Action’s Election Transparency Initiative, to discuss Heritage's election integrity projects and what election officials must do to strengthen confidence in our elections.

Energy is the nucleus of everything. The oil that powers our cars, the natural gas heating out homes, and the nuclear keeping the lights on: it’s all tied back to energy policy.

Reliable energy is essential to both American prosperity and national security.

To help lay out just how essential understanding energy policy is, and what the future holds for it, we spoke to Jack Spencer, Director of the Center for Energy, Climate and Environment at The Heritage Foundation, host of The Power Hour podcast, and author of the book “Nuclear Revolution: Powering the Next Generation.” 
 
Power Hour Podcast: https://www.heritage.org/the-power-hour

Nuclear Revolution: Powering the Next Generation: https://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-Revolution-Powering-Next-Generation/dp/088890357X