The Investigative Journal’s weekly survey of new research from policy institutes across the ideological spectrum. We summarize key findings, note institutional orientation and major funders, and link directly to original publications so readers can examine the underlying evidence themselves.
Washington’s policy research class produced an unusually dense week of output between May 4 and May 11, 2026, with the Brookings Institution releasing the most consequential single document: a preliminary assessment of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025, the sweeping tax-and-spending package President Trump signed into law on July 4, 2025. Below, we summarize seven notable releases from across the spectrum, with attention to who funds the work, what the methodology shows, and how the findings intersect with the beats TIJ tracks — tax policy, defense procurement, housing affordability, and the regulatory state.
1. Brookings Institution — “One Big Beautiful Bill? A Preliminary Assessment”
Orientation: Center-left, with a long tradition of bipartisan economic and foreign policy work. Major funders: The Hutchins, Rockefeller, Gates, and Hewlett foundations; corporate and individual donors disclosed in the institution’s annual reports.
Published May 11, 2026, by Jessica Riedl, this paper offers what the author describes as a first comprehensive analysis of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Riedl’s assessment, available at brookings.edu, walks through the law’s tax provisions, spending changes, and projected budgetary effects, drawing on Congressional Budget Office scoring as well as Brookings’ own modeling.
The paper indicates that the package combines extensions of expiring Tax Cuts and Jobs Act provisions with new individual and business cuts, partially offset by reductions to Medicaid eligibility and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program changes. Riedl’s analysis suggests the law’s distributional effects skew toward higher earners in absolute dollar terms, while lower-income households see proportionally larger gains from expanded child credits. The author flags significant uncertainty around dynamic revenue effects, noting that growth assumptions in supporting administration documents are at the upper end of academic estimates.
2. Tax Foundation — “Can Tax Reform Solve the Debt Problem — or Just Slow It?”
Orientation: Center-right, focused on pro-growth tax policy. Major funders: Charles Koch Foundation, Searle Freedom Trust, and a broad base of corporate donors; the Foundation publishes a list of supporters on its website.
The Tax Foundation’s modeling simulated nine major tax-policy proposals, ranging from wealth taxes to tariff hikes to broad-based consumption levies, and concluded that none would on its own close the primary deficit over a multi-decade horizon. The Foundation’s release noted that, in its modeling, the most politically popular proposals — raising taxes on the wealthy and increasing tariffs — “tend to target a narrow set of taxpayers and produce the least sustainable revenues.”
The paper, with supporting interactive tools at taxfoundation.org, argues that broad-based reforms with lower marginal rates and wider bases generate more durable revenue than narrowly targeted hikes. The Tax Foundation also released a separate brief noting that the average IRS refund through early March 2026 stood at $3,676, up 10.6 percent from the same point in 2025 — a movement the institute attributes to interactions between the new law and withholding tables.
3. American Enterprise Institute — Pielke on Antitrust, and the Housing Market Indicators
Orientation: Center-right, free-market. Major funders: The Bradley, Searle, Donors Trust, and Smith Richardson foundations, along with corporate and individual donors.
On May 6, 2026, AEI published an essay by Roger Pielke Jr. arguing that antitrust enforcement should be grounded in careful empirical analysis of market structure rather than political narrative. Pielke’s piece, available through AEI’s research portal at aei.org, argues that enforcers should “understand the actual economy before filing cases,” and contends that recent high-profile actions have at times been guided more by political framing than by documented consumer harm.
Separately, AEI’s Housing Center, led by Edward Pinto, Arthur Gailes, and Tobias Peter, released its monthly Housing Market Indicators on May 5. The data show the median purchase note rate at 6.25 percent in week 18 of 2026, with year-over-year home price appreciation at 1.2 percent in March — the slowest pace in roughly a decade. The report flags an unusual divergence between Sun Belt markets, where inventories have risen sharply, and the upper Midwest, where supply remains constrained.
4. Cato Institute — “Federal Budget Reform Opportunities in Higher Education for 2026”
Orientation: Libertarian. Major funders: Historically associated with the Koch network; current donors include foundations supporting limited-government scholarship and individual contributors disclosed in Cato’s annual reports.
Authored by Andrew Gillen and published as Policy Analysis No. 1016, this paper, available at cato.org, argues that targeted reforms to federal student loan programs and Pell Grant administration could save approximately $265 billion over a decade. Gillen’s proposals include capping graduate borrowing, eliminating origination fees, and restructuring income-driven repayment to limit interest subsidies.
The analysis uses Department of Education data and CBO baselines to estimate fiscal effects. Cato’s release frames the work as both a deficit-reduction tool and a means of reducing what the institute argues is upward pressure on tuition driven by federal lending. Critics of similar proposals from progressive education researchers argue that aggressive borrowing caps would shift costs onto students from lower-income households; TIJ notes that Gillen’s paper acknowledges this tradeoff and discusses offsetting Pell expansions.
5. RAND Corporation — Semiconductor Forecasting and China’s S&T Strategy
Orientation: Nonpartisan, with deep ties to the U.S. Department of War (formerly Defense) and federal agencies. Major funders: U.S. government contracts and federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) arrangements account for the majority of RAND’s budget; foundation and philanthropic support supplements specific programs.
RAND researchers released two notable national-security papers this week. The first, published May 7 and available through rand.org, assesses two forecasting methodologies for tracking China’s efforts to indigenize advanced semiconductor lithography. The authors conclude that scenario-based forecasting outperforms purely quantitative trend extrapolation in fast-moving techno-economic domains, but caution that both approaches require regular updating against export-control developments.
A companion paper, published May 5, examines how Chinese leadership conceptualizes science and technology as a pillar of national strategy, drawing on Chinese government documents, academic literature, and international reporting. The paper argues that Beijing has moved beyond a “catch-up” framing toward a self-reliance posture that integrates civilian and military research more tightly than the U.S. system permits — a finding with direct implications for the Bureau of Industry and Security’s ongoing export-control rulemakings.
6. Manhattan Institute — “The New GOP” Survey Analysis
Orientation: Center-right, urban policy and market-oriented reform. Major funders: The Bradley, Searle, and Sarah Scaife foundations; individual donors disclosed in the institute’s reports.
The Manhattan Institute released a national survey of nearly 3,000 voters, with substantial oversamples of Black and Hispanic Republicans and 2024 Trump voters. The report, available at manhattan.institute, examines coalition dynamics inside the contemporary Republican Party.
The findings indicate substantial heterogeneity within the GOP coalition: only 56 percent of voters the survey classifies as “New Entrant Republicans” — many of them 2024 first-time Republican voters — said they would “definitely” support a Republican congressional candidate in 2026, compared with 70 percent of “Core Republicans.” The report cautions that coalition cohesion depends on the administration’s ability to deliver on economic and immigration priorities. Methodological notes appended to the survey detail weighting procedures and margin of error.
7. Hoover Institution — Deutch and Fedor on National-Security Architecture
Orientation: Center-right, market-oriented; affiliated with Stanford University. Major funders: Endowed by Herbert Hoover; supported by Stanford, foundation grants, and individual donors.
Distinguished Visiting Fellow John Deutch, a former CIA director and undersecretary of defense, and Policy Fellow David Fedor published a Hoover essay arguing that the federal national-security architecture — designed during the Cold War — is poorly matched to the strategic-competition era. The piece, accessible through hoover.org, recommends restructuring interagency processes to better integrate economic, technological, and military instruments of statecraft.
Separately, the Hoover Monetary Policy Conference held May 8 featured remarks from Federal Reserve Vice Chair Michelle Bowman, Governor Christopher Waller, Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee, and San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly. Conference papers and transcripts will be released in coming weeks; TIJ will cover their substantive findings in a separate analysis.
8. Carnegie Endowment, CFR, and CAP — Notable Commentary
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (nonpartisan; funded by Carnegie Corporation, foundation grants, and individual donors) published commentary May 5 on Azerbaijan-Ukraine defense cooperation, examining how Baku is drawing on Ukrainian battlefield experience to modernize its own forces.
The Council on Foreign Relations (nonpartisan, membership organization; funded by foundation grants, member dues, and corporate contributions) released a paper by Erin Dumbacher on May 6 examining how cancelled missile deployments and dwindling weapons stockpiles affect NATO deterrence posture — findings relevant to ongoing congressional debates over Pentagon procurement timelines.
The Center for American Progress (left-leaning; major funders include the Sandler, Hewlett, and Ford foundations) issued a May 11 statement criticizing the administration’s elimination of the Bureau of Land Management’s Public Lands Rule. CAP’s analysis frames the rollback as a long-term productivity issue for grazing, mining, and recreation interests. The statement is at americanprogress.org.
What This Means for TIJ Beats
This week’s releases bear directly on several investigative threads TIJ is tracking. The Brookings and Tax Foundation analyses, taken together, reinforce a finding that has been documented across the ideological spectrum: that long-run fiscal sustainability is unlikely to come from any single tax-policy lever and will require structural reform to entitlement spending, which the One Big Beautiful Bill Act addresses only in part. Readers interested in the underlying data can consult the Congressional Budget Office’s most recent baseline projections.
The AEI Housing Center indicators and the Urban Institute’s affordability tracker, available at urban.org, present complementary pictures of housing-market stress. Both show that supply has begun to catch up with demand in much of the Sun Belt while remaining sharply constrained in the Northeast and upper Midwest, with corresponding effects on rents and ownership rates. The Economic Policy Institute’s most recent jobs analysis, drawn from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ April release and available at epi.org, shows the national unemployment rate at 4.3 percent and the Black unemployment rate at 7.3 percent — the latter elevated relative to other demographic groups.
On defense and export controls, the RAND semiconductor papers and the CFR deterrence analysis converge on a single message: U.S. industrial-base capacity in critical technologies and munitions is a binding constraint on policy options. That convergence across institutions of differing orientation is the kind of signal TIJ follows closely. Finally, the R Street Institute’s middle-skills workforce paper and Niskanen Center’s earlier work on unemployment insurance solvency, available at niskanencenter.org, both point toward bipartisan reform space in labor-market policy that has so far attracted limited congressional attention.
The Investigative Journal will continue tracking these reports as more substantive analyses follow. Readers with tips on specific findings or methodological concerns can reach the editorial desk through our standard contact channels.