The Investigative Journal’s weekly survey of policy research from across the ideological spectrum. We summarize the findings, link to the original papers, and note each institution’s orientation and funding so readers can weigh the source alongside the substance.
The week’s most consequential document was not a think tank paper at all but a government one: the 2026 Social Security Trustees Report, which landed during the week and set off a wave of analysis. The clearest accounting of what it means came from the Brookings Institution, and it anchors this week’s roundup. Below, eight notable releases — from the right, the left, and the nonpartisan center — with the data each puts on the table.
Brookings: the Social Security clock keeps ticking
In a June 10 commentary titled “Moving backwards on Social Security reform,” Brookings scholars Sarah Binder, Jason Brown, and Gopi Shah Goda read the new Trustees Report as confirmation of a long-known problem that policymakers keep declining to fix. The combined Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability trust fund is projected to deplete its reserves in 2034, the authors note, at which point an across-the-board benefit cut of roughly 17 percent would follow absent congressional action; the retirement-only fund is projected to run short in 2032, covering 78 percent of scheduled benefits. The program’s 75-year actuarial deficit, they write, has more than doubled from 1.89 percent of taxable payroll in 2000 to 4.42 percent today — meaning the size of any eventual fix has grown as Washington has waited.
Notably, the analysis spreads responsibility across both parties, observing that recent legislation signed by Presidents Trump and Biden alike — the bipartisan Social Security Fairness Act and provisions of the 2025 reconciliation law that reduced taxes on benefits for seniors — added costs without new revenue. The authors urge candidates in the 2026 cycle to state plainly how they would avert automatic cuts. Brookings, a centrist-to-center-left institution, says it is “supported by a diverse array of funders” spanning foundations, corporations, and governments, and states that each publication reflects only its authors’ views.
Heritage Foundation: a “generational investment” in defense
On the right, the Heritage Foundation published Backgrounder No. 3964 on June 9, an assessment by Wilson Beaver, Robert Peters, Brent Sadler, and Mike Jernigan of the administration’s fiscal year 2027 defense budget request. The request totals roughly $1.45 trillion — about $1.1 trillion in base discretionary authority plus $350 billion in mandatory spending — and the authors describe it as a “generational investment” that prioritizes procurement of ships, planes, and munitions for great-power competition with China in the Indo-Pacific. They single out for praise the multiyear “block buys” of precision-guided munitions and increased pay and housing investments for junior enlisted troops.
The paper is not uncritical of the request it broadly endorses. Heritage’s analysts flag the Navy’s shipbuilding plan as the weak point, noting the request contains no funding for additional public shipyards and reduces destroyer orders even as 11 battle-force ships are slated for decommissioning this year. Their recommendations to Congress include ordering more Virginia-class submarines and Arleigh Burke destroyers and protecting munitions funding from appropriators. Heritage is an avowedly conservative institution; public records indicate it is financed largely by individual donors and conservative foundations, and it states that its work is not intended to aid or hinder any specific legislation.
Cato Institute: “Trump Accounts” as welfare, not tax relief
The libertarian Cato Institute offered a pointed but constructive critique of a signature administration initiative in “Improving Trump Accounts” (Policy Analysis No. 1019, June 9), by tax-policy director Adam Michel. The new accounts seed $1,000 from the government for children born from 2025 through 2028 and allow added family, employer, and charitable contributions. Michel’s analysis concludes that, for most families, the accounts function “as a welfare program, not a tax-advantaged investment account,” because investment gains are taxed as ordinary income on withdrawal rather than at lower capital-gains rates.
By Cato’s stylized math, a family contributing $5,000 to a Trump Account would end up about $2,451 poorer after 30 years than if the same money went into an ordinary taxable brokerage account — a finding that is a projection under stated assumptions rather than a guaranteed outcome. The paper proposes folding the structure into a simpler, more flexible “Universal Savings Account” modeled on Canadian and British accounts. Cato was co-founded in 1977 with backing from Charles Koch and is funded by individuals, foundations, and corporations; its market-skeptical read of a Republican program illustrates the independence such roundups are meant to surface.
AEI: the $30 billion the ed-tech market wastes
The center-right American Enterprise Institute turned to education markets in “The $30 Billion Question,” a June report by Mark Schneider and Auditi Chakravarty. American K-12 spending on education technology reached $30 billion in 2024, the authors write, even as test scores stagnate — because the market rewards what sells over what demonstrably works. The core problem, they argue, is a missing “bridge between research and scale” that would move proven tools into classrooms and keep unproven ones out.
The report’s recommendations lean on examples of public and philanthropic funding — from the federal Institute of Education Sciences to private R&D funds — that successfully carried literacy and math tools to market, and it calls for fixing federal contracting and peer-review incentives that “reward process over results.” One author discloses that he leads a philanthropy referenced in the paper, a transparency point worth noting. AEI is funded by individuals, corporations, and foundations and is generally classified as center-right.
Economic Policy Institute: the case for a higher wage floor
From the left, the labor-aligned Economic Policy Institute pressed its minimum-wage campaign through June, building on the report “Setting high standards for a federal minimum wage” by senior economist Ben Zipperer. EPI argues the $7.25 federal minimum, frozen since 2009, sits at its lowest real value in 77 years, having lost about 30 percent of its purchasing power. Pegging the floor to two-thirds of the national median wage — roughly $17.70 today and a projected $20 by 2030 — would raise pay for an estimated 39.6 million workers, about one in four wage earners, with the largest gains for Black workers and women.
EPI contends, citing state experience and California’s $20 fast-food minimum, that “the labor market can absorb minimum wages of this size with little to no employment cost.” That conclusion is contested: the Congressional Budget Office and many labor economists have estimated that large federal increases reduce employment for some low-wage workers, a trade-off readers should weigh against EPI’s estimates. EPI was founded in 1986 with close ties to the labor movement and, disclosures indicate, continues to draw significant funding from unions — context that bears on how one reads its wage findings.
Tax Foundation: tallying the tariff bill
The center-right Tax Foundation continued its running analysis of the 2026 tariffs, an effort notable for cutting against the grain of its usual pro-tax-cut audience. The group’s modeling estimates the tariffs amount to an average tax increase of roughly $700 per U.S. household in 2026 and will raise about $98 billion in federal revenue this year — equal to 0.31 percent of GDP and, by its ranking, the 20th-largest tax increase since 1940. The Foundation finds the tariffs reduce after-tax incomes across all income groups while doing little to shrink the trade deficit.
The same analysts credit the 2025 reconciliation tax law with boosting long-run GDP by an estimated 1.2 percent, while cautioning that the tariffs “threaten to offset much of the economic benefit” of those cuts. These are model-based projections, sensitive to assumptions about how businesses and trading partners respond, and the administration argues the tariffs advance reshoring and leverage in trade talks. The Tax Foundation, founded in 1937, is a business-oriented group funded by foundations, corporations, and individuals.
RAND: how China sustains its growing navy
On the nonpartisan side, the RAND Corporation published “The People’s Liberation Army Navy’s Approach to Maintenance Management” on June 18, a peer-reviewed study of whether Beijing can keep its rapidly expanding fleet at sea. The authors find the PLA Navy has shifted from building small, varied ship classes to series production of larger ones — an approach that could streamline maintenance but has strained its maintenance workforce and training pipeline. If overhaul rates track older destroyer classes, they project, major overhauls of China’s most capable surface combatants will begin around 2031 and run through at least 2042.
The report concludes the PLA Navy still depends heavily on higher-echelon repair units for sophisticated work and faces morale and retention pressures among shore-based crews — constraints that bear directly on its ability to sustain a fight. RAND is a nonprofit research institution that describes its work as nonpartisan and peer-reviewed; the study was sponsored by the Defense Department’s Office of Net Assessment, a government funder it discloses on the report. It pairs instructively with the Heritage budget paper on the same strategic competition.
Carnegie Endowment: reading Trump-era multilateralism
Finally, the nonpartisan Carnegie Endowment for International Peace offered a framework for a contested debate in “Retreat, Rebel, Replace, or Reform?” (June 16), by Gabriela Romero and Stewart Patrick. The authors argue that the common claim that the second Trump administration has simply abandoned international institutions is “incomplete.” Instead, they sort its behavior into four categories — disengagement, disruption, substitution, and conditional continuity — and contend the record varies considerably across issues and institutions.
Their assessment is two-sided: it credits the administration with leverage in some forums while warning that prioritizing “short-term leverage over long-term stewardship” could weaken tools the United States still needs on issues from AI governance to pandemic response. Readers should note this is the authors’ interpretive argument rather than an empirical finding. The Carnegie Endowment, originally endowed by Andrew Carnegie, is a nonpartisan foreign-policy institution funded by foundations, governments, and individuals.
Also on the radar: reform-minded research for TIJ’s beats
Several other releases touch directly on accountability, regulation, and state-capacity questions this publication follows. The center-right Niskanen Center argued in “Ready for Reform” (June 18) that Congress should tie federal transportation funding to housing growth and data-driven project selection, as lawmakers advance the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act; Niskanen reports it is funded almost entirely by foundations, including Arnold Ventures and the Hewlett Foundation. The free-market R Street Institute found in a June policy short that more than half of middle-skills jobs now require a government-issued license — versus 20 to 30 percent of other occupations — a barrier to mobility; that paper discloses funding from the Lumina Foundation. And the nonpartisan Urban Institute continued its work on the safety net and on the financial fragility of grant-dependent nonprofits, documenting how deeply local charities rely on government funding.
Taken together, the week’s output underscores a recurring theme across the spectrum: from Social Security to the savings code to the defense-industrial base, analysts of every persuasion are converging on the gap between what policy promises and what the numbers can sustain. The Investigative Journal will continue to read these papers so its readers don’t have to — and to flag who is paying for the research as readily as what the research concludes.
Sources: Direct links to each cited publication are embedded above. This roundup summarizes published findings in the authors’ own framing; characterizations of political orientation and funding are drawn from the institutions’ public disclosures and reporting and are noted with appropriate qualification. Where findings are contested or model-dependent, opposing perspectives are indicated.