The Investigative Journal’s weekly survey of policy research reads across the ideological spectrum so you don’t have to. Each entry notes the publishing institution’s political orientation and principal funding sources, summarizes the central findings, and links directly to the original document. Inclusion is not endorsement; where an institution’s analysis is contested, we say so.
The week of June 22, 2026 produced an unusually dense crop of research, with several flagship institutions timing releases to America’s approaching 250th anniversary. The Heritage Foundation rolled out a new cultural index, the Cato Institute published a fresh accounting of federal waste, and analysts from Washington to the foreign-policy establishment weighed in on housing, education, energy security, China’s navy, and the global retreat of democracy promotion. Below are eight reports worth your attention.
1. Heritage Foundation: ‘Index of Culture and Opportunity’ warns of a more secular, less family-centered America
Orientation: Conservative. Funding: The Heritage Foundation is a 501(c)(3) that, according to its own disclosures, declines government grants and is financed largely by individual donors and conservative foundations.
Heritage this week unveiled its 2026 Index of Culture and Opportunity, a new companion to its long-running Index of Economic Freedom and Index of U.S. Military Strength. Roger Severino, the foundation’s vice president of economic and domestic policy, described the picture as “more secular, more government, and less family,” while Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who wrote the foreword, framed cultural decline as an under-measured driver of economic hardship.
The index aggregates dozens of indicators. Among the data points it highlights: roughly 40% of American children were born to unmarried parents in 2021, up from 5% in 1960; the share of Americans describing themselves as “extremely” or “very” proud to be American fell from 87% in 2001 to 58% in 2025; and the total fertility rate has sat below the 2.1 replacement level for more than a decade. The report also tracks rising obesity, declining religious attendance, and falling charitable giving, and it credits the recent expansion of school choice as a bright spot.
Readers should weigh the framing as well as the figures. The index is explicitly normative—it treats marriage, religious participation and self-sufficiency as goods and reads the data through that lens—and several of its policy prescriptions, such as SNAP work requirements and cuts to federal spending, are contested by analysts on the left. Heritage presents the index as a diagnostic “first step” rather than a settled verdict.
2. Cato Institute: federal spending is a ‘leaky bucket’
Orientation: Libertarian. Funding: Co-founded in 1977 with early backing from Charles Koch, Cato today reports financing from individuals, foundations and corporations and says it accepts no government funding.
In Policy Analysis No. 1020, released June 23, economists Chris Edwards and Ryan Bourne argue that the costs of federal spending extend well beyond the dollars appropriated. Borrowing from Arthur Okun’s “leaky bucket” metaphor, they contend that taxation, deadweight losses, bureaucracy, mismanagement and faulty planning mean each dollar transferred delivers far less than a dollar of value—and that some programs impose costs exceeding their benefits.
The paper builds on Cato’s broader “Downsizing Government” project and uses program examples, including crop insurance, to illustrate how subsidies can distort behavior and invite fraud. Edwards and Bourne stop short of arguing that government should do nothing, instead pressing for a stricter cost-benefit standard before new spending is authorized.
Critics of this framework, including many center-left economists, counter that “leakage” estimates are sensitive to assumptions and can understate the value of public goods and insurance against catastrophic risk. The debate is methodological as much as ideological, and Cato’s figures should be read alongside competing estimates.
3. American Enterprise Institute: the $30 billion ed-tech question
Orientation: Center-right/conservative. Funding: AEI reports support from corporations, foundations and individual donors.
AEI’s June 1 report, “The $30 Billion Question: Why Doesn’t the Education Market Reward What Works?”, examines why a large and growing education-technology market continues to expand despite thin evidence that many products improve learning. The authors argue that procurement incentives in K-12 systems reward marketing, compliance and ease of adoption rather than demonstrated effectiveness.
The report’s prescription is structural: build better evidence pipelines, tie purchasing to outcomes, and reduce the information asymmetries that let unproven tools flourish. For accountability-minded readers, the analysis is notable for treating wasteful private-sector spending—underwritten by public dollars—with the same skepticism conservatives typically apply to government programs.
4. Center for American Progress: tariffs and the Iran war seen lifting summer prices
Orientation: Progressive/center-left. Funding: Founded in 2003 by John Podesta, CAP discloses support from foundations, corporations, labor and individual donors; watchdogs such as OpenSecrets have catalogued its donor base.
In a June analysis, CAP argues that the combination of tariffs and the 2026 conflict with Iran is pushing consumer prices higher. The group reports that West Texas Intermediate crude rose from about $67 a barrel on Feb. 27, the day before the war, to roughly $103 by mid-May, with the national average gasoline price climbing from $3.30 a gallon in April 2025 to $4.24 in April 2026. It also cites sharp increases for fresh tomatoes, ground beef and sirloin.
CAP is an advocacy-oriented institution and its analysis is explicitly critical of administration policy; its price attributions blend tariff effects, war-driven energy costs and climate-related supply disruptions, and the relative weight of each is debated. We present CAP’s findings as the case the group makes. Independent trackers have likewise recorded higher pump prices this spring, but causation is contested, and the administration and its allies attribute energy moves chiefly to global market conditions. Readers should treat the price data as verifiable and the causal apportionment as analytical judgment.
5. Urban Institute: converting vacant housing as a supply lever
Orientation: Nonpartisan, generally center-left. Funding: Established in 1968, the Urban Institute is funded by government agencies, philanthropic foundations and corporations.
A June 17 piece from the Urban Institute’s Housing Matters initiative, “Converting Vacant Housing Can Help Solve the Housing Crisis,” argues that bringing vacant and underused properties back into service should be part of any serious affordability strategy. The analysis situates conversion alongside new construction and upzoning, noting that supply expansion alone has not closed the affordability gap for the lowest-income renters.
The argument lands amid an active housing-policy moment: Congress passed a bipartisan housing-supply bill this month, and think tanks across the spectrum—from Heritage’s call to “build more homes” to Urban’s conversion proposals—have converged on the diagnosis that the United States is under-housed, even as they differ on the policy mix. That rare cross-ideological agreement on the supply problem is itself a notable feature of the week’s research.
6. Brookings (with AEI): a ground-level look at rural recovery in Eastern Kentucky
Orientation: Centrist/center-left (Brookings), produced jointly with the center-right AEI. Funding: Brookings reports support from foundations, corporations, individuals and some foreign governments.
Published June 22 by Adam Aley and Junjie Ren, “America’s Rural Future: Eastern Kentucky site visits” is a field report from the Brookings-AEI Commission on U.S. Rural Prosperity. The authors document locally led recovery, Main Street reinvestment and the role of civic institutions in a region still absorbing the loss of coal employment.
The dispatch is qualitative rather than statistical, but its through-line is instructive: in Manchester, local leaders described situating opioid-recovery efforts within a broader renewal strategy that also addresses outmigration and the availability of jobs. The bipartisan authorship is worth flagging—it is one of the few venues where center-left and center-right institutions co-sign a shared rural agenda, and it suggests place-based policy remains an area of possible consensus.
7. RAND Corporation: China’s navy is growing faster than it can maintain
Orientation: Nonpartisan. Funding: RAND’s research is financed predominantly by U.S. government contracts and grants, with this line of work tied to national-security sponsors.
RAND’s “Understanding China’s Naval Maintenance Management” examines a less-discussed dimension of the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s rapid expansion: sustainment. The authors find that the PLAN’s shift from small, iterative ship classes to series production of larger vessels could streamline some maintenance requirements but is straining its maintenance workforce and training organizations.
The report projects that, if overhaul rates for newer ship classes track those of older destroyers, overhauls of China’s most capable surface combatants will begin around 2031 and continue through at least 2042—a window with direct implications for fleet readiness during any extended conflict. For U.S. planners, RAND frames sustainment capacity as a meaningful and often overlooked metric of Chinese naval power, alongside raw hull counts.
8. Carnegie Endowment: democracy promotion without American leadership
Orientation: Nonpartisan, foreign-policy focused. Funding: Carnegie draws on a century-old endowment supplemented by foundations and, for some programs, government grants.
In “Post-U.S. International Democracy Support: Aspiration in Search of Substance,” Thomas Carothers, a veteran scholar of democracy assistance, surveys whether other democracies are filling the vacuum left by a diminished U.S. role. His answer is sobering: aspiration outpaces substance.
Carothers finds Canada, under Prime Minister Mark Carney, leaning into “middle power” cooperation and joining the European Political Community, while East Asian democracies such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have modestly upgraded their rhetoric but remain cautious about confronting Beijing. In Latin America, he notes a rightward, more Trump-aligned shift that complicates traditional democracy-support coalitions. The assessment is descriptive rather than prescriptive, and it offers a useful map for understanding how a multipolar field is—and is not—picking up the slack.
Why it matters for TIJ’s beats
Several threads in this week’s research bear directly on the accountability questions The Investigative Journal follows. Cato’s “leaky bucket” analysis and AEI’s ed-tech critique both turn a fiscal-discipline lens on waste—public and private—and offer a template for evaluating whether dollars are buying results. The Heritage and Urban housing proposals, together with this month’s bipartisan housing legislation, point to a rare cross-spectrum consensus on supply that will shape affordability coverage for the rest of the year.
On national security, RAND’s sustainment findings add nuance to the China naval-buildup story, and Carnegie’s survey reframes the democracy debate around capacity rather than intentions—both relevant as Washington recalibrates after the Iran conflict. Finally, the dueling economic narratives—Heritage and Cato on spending and self-reliance, CAP on tariff- and war-driven prices—underscore why sourcing matters: the underlying data are often verifiable even when the causal stories diverge. We will keep linking to the primary documents so readers can judge for themselves.
Have a report we should cover next week? Tips and source documents are welcome via The Investigative Journal’s newsroom.