There is a push for making public sector employees at will, i.e. they can be fired for any reason by politicians. Trump shows how such powers will be abused. This report does a great job of debunking claims that at will employement is working at the state level. ourpublicservice.org/publications...

ICE killing #AlexPretti should remind you of police killing #PhilandoCastille. Both men had concealed weapon permits, did not draw their guns, & were killed in Minn. These homicides are the price of unaccountable policing. These deaths are variations on the same fatal theme.

Angry? We should be. Show up this afternoon with @handsoffnyc.bsky.social to reject ICE terror.

We spent months (years?) talking about how covid would affect our children - their schooling, their mental health etc. I don't even know where to begin to support kids who are living in fear right now. Is someone working on this?

New WP on stigma and the social safety net! Even though most people agree stigma is pervasive, there's real disagreement about whether it affects take-up. Four nationally representative studies say it matters a lot - above and beyond political ideology. See here: dash.harvard.edu/server/api/c...

ICE detained a 5-year-old Minnesota boy coming home from school + took him and his dad to Texas, school officials say. The family has an active asylum case + entered the US at a port of entry. "They’re taking children. They're not violent criminals. They're little kids," the superintendent told me.

This guy went to work today, put a mask on, kidnapped a 5 year old child, and then used him as bait so both he and his father could be sent behind bars

This is true in every city, not just NYC, btw. *Right now* your municipal government’s staffers are doing somewhere between a dozen and several hundred different things to keep you comfortable and safe.

I am so grateful to the thousands of incredibly brave people who are each doing their part to document, protest, support victims, sue, and speak up. It's time.

My heart is breaking for all the parents who are desperately trying to figure out how to protect their children from their own government. My heart is breaking even more for those who came to the US to avoid this exact situation.

Kid has transitioned from demanding only Taylor Swift to playing Weird Al's "Albuquerque" - they grow up so fast.

🚨 Deadline this Sunday (11 Jan 2026)! 📢 Call for Papers – 4th CESifo Junior Workshop on the Economics of Education PhD students & early postdocs: don’t miss this opportunity, apply now! 🚀 👇

If this week isn't a turning point, I'm afraid there may never be one.

New year, new you? Do you thrive in challenging, fast-paced environments? Do you love impact-oriented research and see investing in government as part of the solution to social challenges? Can you do data work very very well? We can't wait to hear from you!!

My favorite level of faffing.

100pct correct. Empirically, we are as close to a consensus on this as we are likely to see on any topic. It's wild how pervasive the stigma and rhetoric remain.

No social challenge can be solved without investing in and supporting a functional public sector. Happy New Year!

When @melrobbins.bsky.social asked me the biggest lie we've all been told about change, here's what I said...

On DOGE’s watch, federal spending did not go down at all. It went up. But is still led to cuts that closed offices, canceled programs and deprived people of food, medicine and other aid. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/u...

It's been a wild year for those of us who study government, work in government, or work with government. It's nice to take a moment to remember that we also accomplished some things despite the chaos.

Officially out with @mayasen.bsky.social! We find defendants assigned to former public defenders are less likely to be incarcerated, providing insight into the relationship between criminal legal disparities and judicial characteristics. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Correct.

Today's the day we solve the "state capacity in government" challenge! Join us!

If anyone can define and implement a research agenda on evidence adoption at scale, it's this group of people!

Thrilled to be co-sponsoring this workshop! Looking forward to learning from the Latin American admin burden community!

Fifteen Years xkcd.com/3172/

Difficult to overstate how profound a failure DOGE was. Spending in FY2025 was not only than in FY2024 – but higher than it was projected to be when Trump first took office.* The little bit of spending DOGE cut has already killed hundreds of thousands and will eventually lead to millions of deaths.

DOGE was both an operational and moral failure. But please remember this, next time someone implies that a team of "innovators" with no respect for public sector employees will quickly solve social challenges by working around or bypassing "the bureaucracy." It's more common than you think.

This is a new open position but we have other open positions too! Please apply!

Just two quotes from my kid tonight as a gift to you: 1. "The first human in the whole world was called Lucy. And there was a man too, right? Adam and Lucy?" 2. "Today we had to write down what we were thankful for. I said my family, my friends, and Felipe's taqueria."

Cool paper!

this has got to be one of the best things the onion has done in years

Who said people don't want to work in government anymore.... This will be exciting to follow/study!

#APPAM2025 day two! Here is where you can find The People Lab today...

Standing room only at 8:30am! What a committed group :)

TPL is @ APPAM! Come say hi!

Thrilled to be in Seattle for the Evidence Matters fair! See if you can spot a @thepeoplelab.bsky.social star, representing our work and speaking to the dedicated public servants of King county.

📣 New NBER Working Paper out today 📣 "The Consequences of Faculty Sexual Misconduct" Sarah Cohodes & Katherine Leu

*Women receive substantially lower "potential" ratings despite receiving higher performance ratings *Differences in potential ratings account for half of the gender promotion gap *Women’s lower potential ratings do not reflect future performance: women subsequently outperform male colleagues

How - and I truly mean *how* is it possible to have lived through the DOGE failures and the "run government like a business" debacles, acknowledge the gross disinvestment in public sector workers, and then still go back to the old and tired "maybe if we privatize?" routine.

Zohran Mamdani will become New York City's next mayor, CNN projects, after a meteoric rise in Democratic politics. Follow live updates. https://cnn.it/43gCYeJ

🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊 🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊

Ughhh so many people worked so hard on this.

There is no way to understand what is happening around SNAP without talking about the deep and pervasive stigma against being poor in America.

Pleased to share that the Kennedy School has been authorized to conduct a faculty search in American politics This is as an extraordinary opportunity for us - please share widely with your networks and consider applying academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/15418

Very thought-provoking piece by an excellent scholar and colleague. www.bostonglobe.com/2025/10/22/o...

Hiring for a research associate to join the team! Please only apply if you have over two years of work experience post-undergrad (this is not entry level!) and a genuine interest in the work that we do. We're so excited with how our team is growing!