№ 119The Open Hand
Israel has raised more than $53 billion from its diaspora in bonds since 1951. India raised $4.2 billion in a single issue in 1998, under sanctions, in weeks. Sub-Saharan Africa, whose diaspora sends home about $54 billion a year in remittances, has raised almost nothing this way, because the bonds that were tried were unregistered, unguaranteed and unconvincing. Build the platform: a standard registration, sale through the Postal Bank in $100 notes, a partial American guarantee for partners meeting the Compact's conditions, and every dollar tied to a named project the buyer can visit.
Released October 30, 2026
№ 118The Open Hand
The crops that ended famine in Asia came from public research: dwarf wheat and rice bred in institutes the United States and the Rockefeller Foundation paid for, given away without patent. The network that grew from them, CGIAR, runs on about $900 million a year across 89 countries and was cut 13 percent in 2024 and 20 percent in 2025. Africa's maize yields are a fifth of America's. Endow the African round, breed the varieties in the open, put the seed in the public domain, and pay the breeders per bushel of yield gained on the farm.
Released October 29, 2026
№ 117The Open Hand
Since 2000 the United States has let 32 African countries sell 6,000 products into the American market duty-free, on a law that expires every few years and did expire, on September 30, 2025, for four months, before Congress extended it by one year. A factory in Lesotho cannot be built on a preference that lapses. Make the access permanent, replace the President's annual eligibility review with a published scorecard, and ask the partners of the Marshall Compact to open their own markets over twenty years in return. A door that opens and closes is not a door.
Released October 28, 2026
№ 116The Open Hand
African governments spent about $163 billion servicing debt in 2024, nearly triple what they paid in 2010, at interest rates of 8 to 10 percent on bonds a rich country would issue at 4. Zambia waited 38 months for a restructuring; Ghana's bondholders took a 37 percent loss. Much of the debt is not unpayable. It is expensive, because the lender priced in a risk the borrower's partners could remove. Refinance it at America's rate, with America's guarantee, on the discipline attached, and the interest saved builds the grid instead of paying the coupon.
Released October 27, 2026
№ 115The Open Hand
Africa has 2,144 living languages and the machines that are learning to read, write and translate have been trained on almost none of them. The best open datasets for African languages were built by a volunteer collective, Masakhane, founded in 2019 with no budget. A model that cannot speak Hausa, Amharic or Lingala is a model that has decided who the future is for. Fund the open datasets, the speech corpora and the models for every African language with a million speakers, as the Model Commons of № 029 abroad, owned by the people who speak them.
Released October 26, 2026
№ 114The Open Hand
Africa has 37 weather radars for 1.2 billion people, one for every 32 million, and in 2019 only one weather station in five met the international standard. American weather data is the best in the world and most of it is already free. What Africa lacks is the stations that feed the forecast and the systems that deliver the warning. Fund them, station by station, with the data flowing both ways, and the country that shares the sky earns something no rival can buy: the warning that arrived before the flood.
Released October 25, 2026
№ 113The Open Hand
Malaria killed about 610,000 people in 2024, 95 percent of them in Africa, most of them children under five. The United States spent $15.6 billion against it over twenty years and got, by one estimate, $5.80 back for every dollar, and then shut the programme with the agency that ran it. The world invests $3.9 billion a year against a target of $9 billion. Stop paying for nets shipped. Pay per case prevented and per death averted, verified, to whoever delivers, on a standing contract that no administration can cancel by memo.
Released October 24, 2026
№ 112The Open Hand
About 95 percent of the world's internet traffic crosses the ocean in cables, and Africa's are being laid now: 2Africa, the longest cable ever built, circles the continent with 46 landings in 33 countries and a consortium that includes both Meta and China Mobile. Only four companies on earth can build the underwater equipment, and one is Chinese. The cables that carry a continent's data will be owned by someone for fifty years. Finance them, hold a share, keep them open, and put the landing station in the host's hands.
Released October 23, 2026
№ 111The Open Hand
About 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, nearly half the population, have no electricity. The American programme that helped bring 14,000 megawatts and 41 million connections to financial close was shut in 2025 with the agency that ran it. The continent's grid will be built this century by someone; the question is who will own it. Underwrite the buildout the way № 006 underwrites ports: American guarantees, African ownership, a share for the people connected, and payment per verified connection. Three hundred million connections by 2040.
Released October 22, 2026
№ 110The Open Hand
The Peace Corps has 3,322 volunteers in the field, most of them teaching English and health, on a stipend, for a budget of $430 million. It is a fine institution built for 1961. The century this catalog describes needs a different one: engineers, linemen, water technicians, nurses and agronomists, paid a real wage, attached to the grids, ports and cables that № 006 finances and Africans own, each one training two local apprentices, with the doubled dividend of № 005 waiting at home. Ten thousand of them.
Released October 21, 2026
№ 109The Open Hand
In 2024, for the first time, China had more diplomatic posts in the world than the United States: 274 to 271. In Africa the count is 60 to 56, in East Asia 44 to 27, in the Pacific 9 to 8. The country that wants to be followed has fewer people in the room than the country it worries about, and in 2025 it laid off more than a thousand of the ones it had. Count the gap, publish it annually, close it, and start where the century will be decided: a resident embassy in every country, and a consulate in every African city of a million.
Released October 20, 2026
№ 108The Open Hand
Three Pacific nations, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau, give the United States exclusive military access to a stretch of ocean from Hawaii to the Philippines and the right to keep every other military out. In return they receive about $355 million a year, renegotiated every twenty years in a process that lapses, stalls, and leaves China an opening each time. It is the cheapest strategic asset the country holds and it is treated as a grant programme. Make the compacts permanent, fund the trusts to independence, and treat the islanders as the partners they are.
Released October 19, 2026
№ 107The Perimeter
Fentanyl killed about 48,000 Americans in 2024, down from 76,000 the year before, and nobody can say with confidence why. It is made from a short list of chemicals that leave a factory somewhere, cross a border somewhere, and arrive in a Mexican lab, and the country that buys most of the world's chemicals has never required the chain to be recorded. Track the precursors the way the world tracks nuclear material, sanction every link automatically, publish the ledger quarterly beside the death count, and pay for verified results rather than announcements.
Released October 18, 2026
№ 106The Perimeter
About 15.8 million people live in the United States without authorisation. Four in five have been here more than five years; nearly half, more than twenty. The country has argued for a generation about whether to deport them or make them citizens, and has done neither, because both answers are wrong. There is a third. Give the long-resident the guest status of № 003: honest papers, taxes, the scan, the compact's rules, and no path to citizenship or the vote. The line between member and guest holds. The people already inside it get a document that says which they are.
Released October 17, 2026
№ 105The Perimeter
A consular officer who refuses a visa is required to give no reason beyond a section number, and the refusal cannot be appealed to any court or reviewed by anyone but a colleague, if that. Millions of refusals a year, each in a two-minute interview, each final. No other decision a federal official makes about a person is beyond review. A great power that wants to be followed should be able to explain itself at its own front door. Require a reason in writing, and one appeal.
Released October 16, 2026
№ 104The Perimeter
About 27.6 million people in the United States speak English with limited proficiency, nearly double the number in 1990. The federal government funds classes for about 750,000 of them, less than 5 percent of the need, and three in five programmes keep a waiting list; some run three years. A guest who cannot speak to the doctor, the teacher or the police is a guest the country has half-admitted. Fund a free English and civics class for every guest and every resident who wants one, in person and online, as the condition of the visa and the gift of the host.
Released October 15, 2026
№ 103The Perimeter
About 8.7 million lawful permanent residents are eligible to become citizens and have not, two-thirds of them here more than a decade. The country naturalised 818,500 people in 2024 in ceremonies held in courthouses and conference rooms on whatever day the paperwork cleared, and about 11,000 of them, in 195 ceremonies, on the Fourth of July. Make that the rule. One day a year, in every county, the country welcomes its newest members in daylight, and the oath becomes something the whole town attends.
Released October 14, 2026
№ 102The Perimeter
In 1986 Congress made it illegal to hire an unauthorised worker, and then never enforced it. In a recent year the government arrested 1,800 workers at their jobs and convicted 49 employers. The worker is deported; the employer hires the next one. With the Citizen Card and the guest credential, checking a hire is a scan. Make the scan mandatory for every hire, put the penalty on the payroll rather than the worker, and let the worker who reports an illegal employer walk out with a visa.
Released October 13, 2026
№ 101The Perimeter
A guest who commits a violent felony in the United States is, under the law, removable. Under the practice, the removal is a second proceeding, years after the sentence, subject to discretion at every step, and sometimes never happens because the home country will not take the person back. Criminologists have known for decades that certainty deters and severity does not. Make the consequence certain: the removal order is entered by the sentencing judge, executed the day the sentence ends, the bar is permanent, and a country that refuses its own citizens loses its visas. No discretion, no exceptions, and no drama.
Released October 12, 2026
№ 100The Perimeter
An asylum claim filed today will be decided in four to seven years. Meanwhile 83 percent of people pass the first screening and about 30 percent are eventually granted, which means the wait itself is the benefit for most claimants and the injustice for the rest. The Netherlands decides in six months. Put a clock on it: 180 days from filing to a decision, with the clock running against the government, and an honest answer either way. A faster system grants fewer people and removes more, and it is fairer to everyone in it.
Released October 11, 2026
№ 099The Perimeter
The judges who decide whether a person is removed from the United States work for the Attorney General, who can overrule any decision, refer any case to himself, and discipline a judge for a ruling. There are about 570 of them, carrying 2.4 million pending asylum cases at 3,300 each, and the average case takes about 900 days. Congress built independent courts for taxes and bankruptcies under Article I. Build one for immigration, appoint judges for fifteen-year terms, triple their number, and let the outcome depend on the law rather than on who runs the Justice Department this year.
Released October 10, 2026
№ 098The Covenant
Between 70 and 100 million Americans have a criminal record, and most of them will carry it to the grave, because clearing one requires a petition, a fee and often a lawyer, and only about 6 percent of those eligible ever file. Pennsylvania sealed 30 million records automatically in 2019 by simply running the eligibility rules against the database. Michigan followed and found that people whose records were cleared earned 22 percent more within a year. Set the clock nationally: a clean period, then the record seals itself, no petition, no lawyer, no fee.
Released October 9, 2026
№ 097The Covenant
A federal juror is paid $50 a day. The median state pays $25; Missouri pays $6. Most employers are not required to pay anything, so the jury that decides a case is the people who could afford to be there: the retired, the salaried, and the unemployed. When Texas raised its juror pay, the pool got more representative; when San Francisco paid $100 a day, the same. Pay every juror the local median daily wage from the first day, and the jury looks like the county again.
Released October 8, 2026
№ 096The Covenant
The Constitution promises a lawyer to anyone who cannot afford one, and the country funds the lawyer on the other side two to four times as well. California's counties spent $2.2 billion on prosecutors in a recent year and $1.2 billion on the defence; the state added a billion for prosecution and $150 million for defenders. Public defender workloads rose 47 percent in a decade. A trial with one side rationed is not a contest. Fund the defence at no less than three-quarters of the prosecution, by statute, with caseload caps and an independent commission to spend it.
Released October 7, 2026
№ 095The Covenant
On any night, roughly 400,000 Americans are in jail without having been convicted of anything, most of them because they could not pay a sum a judge set in ninety seconds. New Jersey ended money bail in 2017 and its pretrial jail population fell 44 percent with no rise in missed court dates or new arrests. Illinois ended it in 2023 and rural jail populations fell by a quarter. Freedom before trial should turn on a finding, not a bank balance: a hearing in 48 hours, a published risk table the judge must address on the record, and no one held for being poor.
Released October 6, 2026
№ 094The Covenant
More than 94,000 Americans are waiting for a kidney and 13 of them die every day. A 1984 law makes it a crime to pay a donor anything. Iran began paying donors in 1988 and its waiting list was gone by 1999. Medicare spends about $100,000 a year keeping each dialysis patient alive, and a transplant costs a fraction of that and lasts a decade or more. Let the government, not the patient, pay a living donor a fixed sum with lifetime care, and keep every other rule that stops a market. The country already pays. It pays for dialysis.
Released October 5, 2026
№ 093The Covenant
In 1997 Congress, expecting a surplus of doctors, froze the number of physician training positions Medicare would pay for. Medical schools kept growing; the residencies did not. The country now faces a projected shortfall of up to 86,000 physicians by 2036, and every spring thousands of graduates with a medical degree cannot get the residency the law requires them to practise. Congress has lifted the cap twice, by 1,200 slots in 27 years. Lift it by 5,000 a year for a decade, and send the slots where the doctors are missing.
Released October 4, 2026
№ 092The Covenant
Since 2021 every American hospital has been required by federal rule to publish its prices. Most publish something; by the strictest audit about one in five publishes what the rule actually requires. The government has sent 2,291 warning letters and collected 27 fines. A rule with no consequence is a suggestion. Make the price binding: a hospital may not collect more than the price it published in advance, and a price it did not publish it may not collect at all.
Released October 3, 2026
№ 091The Covenant
5.6 million American households have no bank account, and the ones that don't pay to cash their own paycheques. The Postal Service has 30,972 retail offices, more than every bank branch network combined, and it ran a savings bank from 1911 to 1967 that held $3.4 billion at its peak. The Fund is about to owe every citizen a dividend, and a dividend needs somewhere to land. Reopen the counter: a basic account, a debit card, cheque cashing at cost, and a small loan at the soldier's rate, in every post office in America.
Released October 2, 2026
№ 090The Covenant
A worker on disability insurance who earns $1,689 a month keeps the benefit. One who earns $1,691 loses all of it. About 7 million Americans live under that cliff, about one in eight of them works in a given year, and fewer than one in ten ever leaves the rolls by working. Every other rich country pays a partial benefit for a partial capacity. Replace the cliff with a ramp, add a partial tier, and make it easy to come back. And be honest: the government's own trial of a ramp did not move employment much.
Released October 1, 2026
№ 089The Covenant
The average American family pays $13,184 a year for child care, and in 38 states a year of infant care costs more than a year at the state university. Quebec has charged parents about $9 a day since 1997, mothers' employment rose to the highest in Canada, and the province says the programme largely pays for itself in taxes. A place for every citizen child from age one, at $10 a day, through the providers that already exist, with a quality floor and a payment to the parent who stays home instead. Cost, said out loud: about $70 billion a year.
Released September 30, 2026
№ 088The Covenant
The United States is the only member of the OECD with no national paid leave for a new parent. The average member pays a mother for 18 weeks; the average entitlement to parental leave is 39. Thirteen American states have built their own programmes and 37 have not. One paid year per child, split between two parents with a share reserved for each, at two-thirds of pay, citizens only, funded like Social Security. Say the cost out loud: about 0.8 percent of payroll.
Released September 29, 2026
№ 087The Covenant
About 57 million American workers, nearly half, have no retirement plan at work. Britain fixed the same problem in 2012 by enrolling every worker automatically and letting them opt out; participation went from 40 percent to 89 percent. Twenty-one states have built their own versions and 1.2 million people are saving who were not. Do it nationally: every citizen worker without a plan gets one by default, invested in the fund's own index portfolio at a twentieth of a percent, portable for life.
Released September 28, 2026
№ 086The Covenant
About 1 in 5 American workers, some 30 million people, has signed a contract promising not to work for a competitor after they quit. Sandwich makers have signed them. California has banned them since 1872 and built Silicon Valley without them. The FTC tried to ban them nationally in 2024, lost in court, and gave up in 2025. Only Congress can do it. Ban the noncompete, keep the trade secret, and let an employer who wants a worker to sit out pay them to sit.
Released September 27, 2026
№ 085The Covenant
More than 1 in 5 American workers needs a government licence to do their job, and most of those licences stop at the state line. A nurse, a barber or an electrician who moves from Ohio to Texas starts over: a new application, a new fee, sometimes a new exam, for the same work. Arizona decided in 2019 that a licence earned anywhere was good enough, and 28 states have followed in some form. Make it 50, by federal rule: a year of clean practice in one state is a licence in all of them.
Released September 26, 2026
№ 084The Covenant
Employers take more than $15 billion a year from American workers by paying less than the minimum wage alone, more than all robberies, burglaries and car thefts combined, and less than 3 percent of it is ever recovered. A worker in the ten largest states who is underpaid loses about $3,300 a year, a quarter of what they earned. The country publishes the names of restaurants that fail a health inspection. Publish the names of employers who steal wages, triple the damages, put a lien on the building, and pay the investigators from the fines.
Released September 25, 2026
№ 083The Covenant
In 2006 Congress decided that no lender may charge a service member more than 36 percent a year, all fees included, because the Pentagon found that payday debt was wrecking readiness. Twenty years on, the same loan that is illegal to sell to a private is legal to sell to her brother at 400 percent. About 20 states have adopted the military rate for everyone. Extend the Military Lending Act to every citizen. If it is predatory for a soldier, it is predatory.
Released September 24, 2026
№ 082The Dividend
The outer continental shelf is the largest undivided public asset the country has. Oil, gas, wind and minerals on it earned more than $7 billion for the Treasury in fiscal 2024; one wind auction off New York raised $4.37 billion in a day. The states, the tribes, the conservation and reclamation funds each take their statutory share, and the residual, about $6 billion a year, goes to the general fund and disappears. Norway built a $2 trillion fund on exactly this residual. One royalty regime for everything on the shelf, and the Treasury's share to principal.
Released September 23, 2026
№ 081The Long Game
A 1920 law requires that any ship carrying goods between two American ports be built in America, owned by Americans, crewed by Americans and flagged American. The fleet that qualifies is 93 oceangoing ships. Puerto Rico pays about $200 a person a year for it; Hawaii by some estimates far more. The country builds a handful of large ships a year and China builds hundreds. Keep the American flag and the American crew. Drop the American-built requirement, and fund the shipyards directly, in public, through the Shipyard Compact.
Released September 22, 2026
№ 080The Covenant
In 2024 the largest tenth of subsidised farms collected 65 percent of federal commodity payments. Nearly 10,000 operations have been paid every year for forty years. Some 80,000 residents of big cities collected $2 billion in farm subsidies in five years, and in 2025 Congress raised the per-person payment limit from $125,000 to $155,000. A subsidy that follows acreage follows wealth. Cap it hard, close the loopholes, publish every recipient, and turn what is saved into a floor under the farms that can actually fail.
Released September 21, 2026
№ 079The Covenant
Americans pay about twice the world price for sugar, 51.5 cents a pound against 24.9, because a federal programme limits imports and guarantees growers a floor. The Government Accountability Office puts the cost to consumers at $2.5 to $3.5 billion a year, for the benefit of about 4,000 farms. The candy makers moved to Canada. End the quota over five years, buy the growers out once, in public, as the country bought out tobacco in 2004, and never grant a new commodity a quota again.
Released September 20, 2026
№ 078The Long Game
The federal gas tax has been 18.4 cents a gallon since 1993 and buys 55 percent less than it did. Congress has moved $275 billion from the general fund to cover the gap since 2008 and calls the result a trust fund. An electric car pays nothing for the road at all. Four states already charge by the mile. Do it nationally: a fee per mile, by weight, indexed, replacing the gas tax over ten years, with the ledger published and the general-fund transfers ended for good.
Released September 19, 2026
№ 077The Dividend
New York started charging $9 to drive into lower Manhattan on January 5, 2025, after twenty years of argument, a last-minute pause, and a federal attempt to kill it. In its first year traffic fell 11 percent, deaths in the zone fell 40 percent, and the toll raised $550 million. Every study says it works; every city that proposes it faces a revolt. Stockholm's voters opposed it before and supported it after. Give every city the right to charge, and require that half the money come back to residents as a cheque.
Released September 18, 2026
№ 076The Dividend
At JFK, LaGuardia and Washington National, the right to land a plane at 8 a.m. was handed to whichever airline held it in 1968 and has been inherited ever since. In 2026 a bankrupt airline sold its LaGuardia slots for about $80 million. The government that owns the airspace got nothing. The FAA tried to auction slots in 2008 and was stopped by the airlines, a GAO opinion and a court. Give it the authority, lease a tenth of the slots each year, and bank the proceeds.
Released September 17, 2026
№ 075The Dividend
Catch shares saved American fisheries and made the people who were given the quota wealthy. A halibut quota holder in Alaska can lease the right to fish for more than half the value of the catch and never leave the dock. The law caps what the public may recover at 3 percent, for management costs only. Iceland charges a resource rent on every landed fish and sends it to the treasury. The fish belong to the public. Charge a royalty on the public's fish, exempt the small boat, and bank it.
Released September 16, 2026
№ 074The Dividend
The Forest Service sells about 3 billion board feet of timber a year from 193 million acres and has missed its own targets by a tenth for a decade. It has sold timber for less than it cost to prepare the sale, and it has never published, in one place, how much the forest grew against how much was cut. A forest is principal. Sell only the growth, never below cost, publish the growth against the cut every year, and bank what is left after the counties take their quarter.
Released September 15, 2026
№ 073The Dividend
A rancher grazing cattle on federal land pays $1.35 per animal per month. The private pasture across the fence, in the same 17 Western states, averages $23.70. The government spends about $144 million a year running the programme and collects about $21 million. Charge the county's going rate, phased over ten years, pay half of it back to any rancher whose range passes a health inspection, and bank the rest. The public's grass should not be the cheapest grass in the West.
Released September 14, 2026
№ 072The Perimeter
America allocates its 85,000 capped skilled-work visas by lottery, and since September 2025 charges $100,000 for each one, paid to the general fund. A million-dollar "gold card" residency exists beside it. The right to work in the United States is the most valuable permit the country issues, and it is given away at random or sold with no receipt. Auction half the capped slots to employers, rank the other half on merit, and deposit every dollar as principal. The guest pays the host, in the open, instead of paying a smuggler.
Released September 13, 2026
№ 071The Long Game
The federal government owns about 640 million acres, 28 percent of the country, plus the minerals under much of it and the seabed off all of it. On its balance sheet, 97 percent of that land is carried at nothing, because the accounting rule says stewardship land is expensed when bought and never valued. A landlord who has never counted the estate cannot charge rent on it. Count every parcel, what it earns, and what it is worth, and publish the ledger before anyone decides what to do with it.
Released September 12, 2026
№ 070The Dividend
State treasuries hold about $70 billion that belongs to 33 million Americans, one in seven, in forgotten accounts, uncashed cheques and abandoned deposits, and the Treasury holds another $32 billion in savings bonds nobody has redeemed. States return about $4.5 billion a year and spend the float; Delaware runs 13 percent of its budget on it. The government already knows who most of these people are. Match the money to the owner automatically, pay it without a claim, and bank what truly has no owner for everyone.
Released September 11, 2026
№ 069The Dividend
The federal government collected $195 billion in customs duties in fiscal 2025, two and a half times the year before. A tariff is a tax paid at the checkout by the public, and this catalog takes no side on whether the country should have one. It takes a side on where the money goes. Today it disappears into the year's spending. Under this rule, every dollar above the old baseline is split in two: half back to every citizen as an equal cheque on Dividend Day, half into the fund as principal.
Released September 10, 2026
№ 068The Dividend
The Federal Reserve earned $107 billion in 2021 and sent almost all of it to the Treasury, where it vanished into that year's spending, as more than a trillion dollars had before it. The profit of issuing the world's money is the return on an asset every citizen owns. Route it to the fund as principal instead. The timing is unusually honest: the Fed has sent nothing since 2022 and owes itself $243 billion before it sends anything again, so the rule can be written now and cost nothing until it bites.
Released September 9, 2026
№ 067The Dividend
A permanent fund stays permanent by one piece of arithmetic: it pays out its real return and not a dollar more. Norway set its rule at 4 percent in 2001 and cut it to 3 in 2017 when returns fell. Alaska pays 5 percent of a five-year average and has argued about the number every year since. The rule for the American fund is written here: 3 percent of the average value over five years, paid on Dividend Day, with the amount allowed to fall and the date never allowed to move.
Released September 8, 2026
№ 066The Dividend
In 2021 the board of the Alaska Permanent Fund fired its executive director without giving a reason, and by 2025 the governor had simply stopped filling the seats. Norway's fund has outlasted nine governments because the ministry sets the mandate, a separate office executes it, and neither can touch the other's job. A trillion dollars that nobody may spend needs a board that nobody can capture: nine trustees, fourteen-year terms, no more than five from one party, removable only for cause, with a duty to the unborn written into their oath.
Released September 7, 2026
№ 065The Dividend
Norway's fund owns about 1.5 percent of every listed company on earth, 9,000 of them in 70 countries, and picks almost none of them. It tracks an index, by law, at a cost of about a twentieth of a percent a year, and it returned 15 percent in 2025. An American fund that let a manager, a committee or a Congress choose its stocks would be a slush fund within a decade. Write the rule in: buy the world at market weight, pick nothing, cap the fee, and vote the shares by a published policy that no official may touch.
Released September 6, 2026
№ 064The Long Game
About 3,500 newspapers have closed since 2005, 213 counties now have no local news outlet at all, and 1,524 have one. In 2025 Congress rescinded the public broadcasting budget and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting dissolved, which settled the argument about whether an annual appropriation can be independent. The founders' answer in 1792 was a permanent subsidy through the post. Do it again as an endowment nobody can rescind, paid out by formula, with a firewall in statute.
Released September 5, 2026
№ 063The Open Hand
Famine is the one catastrophe the world can see coming. America built the system that sees it, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, in 1985, and in February 2025 switched it off for the first time in forty years while famine was confirmed in Sudan. The grain reserve meant to answer the warning has held no grain since 2008. Make the guarantee explicit and permanent: where famine is projected, an American-led response arrives within 60 days, from a reserve that is physically full.
Released September 4, 2026
№ 062The Open Hand
The United States keeps about 750 military installations in 80 countries, at a cost near $55 billion a year, and the Pentagon stopped publishing the full list. The towns that host them get the noise, the traffic and the crime, and none of the rent. Okinawa holds 0.6 percent of Japan's land and 70 percent of the American footprint, and voted 72 percent against the newest base. Pay every host town a published dividend, per resident, from the basing budget, and put the whole list back in print.
Released September 3, 2026
№ 061The Covenant
In a federal courthouse, the difference between the most lenient and the most severe judge, for the same crime and the same record, averages more than two years in prison. That gap has doubled since the guidelines became advisory in 2005, and the judge is assigned by lottery. Publish the table, publish every sentence against it by judge, and require a written reason for every departure. Not mandatory minimums. Daylight.
Released September 2, 2026
№ 060The Perimeter
Immigration detention is civil. Nobody in it is serving a sentence, and 3 in 4 of the 65,000 people held in November 2025 had never been convicted of anything. A bed costs $165 a day; supervised release costs about $5 and produces court appearance rates above 90 percent. The Supreme Court said in 2001 that six months is the outer edge of reasonable and in 2018 that the statute sets no clock at all. Write the clock: a hearing in 7 days, a judge's finding every 30, and release at 180.
Released September 1, 2026
№ 059The Open Hand
America has 2 hospital ships. Both were oil tankers launched in 1975 and 1976, and they spent 2021, 2023 and 2024 tied to the pier. China's one ship has treated 290,000 patients in 45 countries; a Texas charity's 2 ships perform 6,000 surgeries a year. Build 10, crew them permanently, keep 5 at sea at all times, and station them where the sick are. A great power is followed for what it does.
Released August 31, 2026
№ 058The Covenant
Police killed at least 1,365 people in 2024, the most on record. That number comes from a nonprofit, because the FBI's own count is voluntary, has never reached the participation it needs to publish in full, and the newspaper that kept the best tally stopped on January 1, 2025. Congress ordered every death in custody reported in 2013; nine states reported zero in a year the auditor found 124 in four of them. Make the count a condition of every federal dollar, and publish it by agency, every quarter.
Released August 30, 2026
№ 057The Open Hand
Nearly 700 current or former heads of state and government studied in America on an exchange the State Department paid for. It is the cheapest influence a great power has ever bought, and the 2026 budget proposed cutting it by 93 percent while China pledged 60,000 scholarships to Africa in three years. Fund a standing fleet of 10,000 fully paid American degrees a year for the world's best students, Africa first, with a stake waiting at home for the ones who go back.
Released August 29, 2026
№ 056The Covenant
In 1965 American police solved 9 murders in 10. In 2022 they solved about half. Germany and Japan solve 19 in 20. Since 1965, more than 350,000 American killings have gone unsolved, about 5,000 more every year. The federal government pays local police for officers hired and drugs seized and asks nothing about cases closed. Pay for the case closed, publish the rate by city, and fund the three things that close cases: detectives, laboratories, and witnesses who live to testify.
Released August 28, 2026
№ 055The Perimeter
№ 051 promised that the stop gets its own rule. Here it is. Today an immigration stop needs no reason on the record, and an arrest that crosses a threshold, a front door, a shop's back room, a courthouse hallway, needs only a warrant one immigration officer signs for another. A federal judge said in January that isn't enough for a home. This proposal writes that into a national rule instead of a single ruling: a specific reason on the record before any stop, and a judge's warrant before any arrest that isn't made in public with consent.
Released August 27, 2026
№ 054The Covenant
Not loan forgiveness. Forgiveness pays one group of people for one decision they made, and leaves the nurse who paid her loans off, the welder who never borrowed, and the parent saving for a child with nothing. Instead, one cheque to every adult citizen, spendable only on education, anyone's education, and shrinking every year that tuition comes down. A jubilee is a reset for everyone, not a rescue for some.
Released August 26, 2026
№ 053The Long Game
Federal science funding pays for the attempt, not the result. This year, fewer than one in five early-career researchers who applied for the government's most common research grant received one. A cash prize a fraction of the cost of a single grant program once produced a private space industry that has since drawn over a billion dollars in follow-on investment. Fund more results, not more applications.
Released August 25, 2026
№ 052The Open Hand
A great power is followed for what it does, not only for what it can do. Canadians have privately funded and resettled refugees, five citizens at a time, since 1979. Americans got a pilot version in 2023, and it exists at the discretion of whichever administration is in office. Write it into law: citizens doing the welcoming, the state doing the vetting, and no change to how many are admitted.
Released August 24, 2026
№ 051The Perimeter
In five years ICE arrested 674 people who may have been American citizens, detained 121 of them and removed 70, and its own auditor found it does not systematically track any of it. Meanwhile the country argues about voter ID as if proving citizenship were hard. Issue every citizen one free card that proves one fact, and make the rule that no stop ends in a cell once the card is scanned.
Released August 23, 2026
№ 050The Dividend
The United States already publishes an annual financial report. Its auditor has refused to certify it every year since 1997, and almost no citizen has read a page of it. If every citizen is a shareholder, every citizen gets a statement.
Released August 22, 2026
№ 049The Covenant
Insurers are leaving whole states, and the state-run plans meant to be a last resort are becoming the market. A house nobody will insure is a house nobody can mortgage. Backstop the tail, price the risk honestly, and pay to make the houses survivable.
Released August 21, 2026
№ 048The Covenant
A pandemic cost America 1.2 million lives and something like $16 trillion. The preparedness budget that might have blunted it was a rounding error, and it was raided between crises, as it always is. Fund the watchtower permanently, and pay for the antibiotics nobody can sell.
Released August 20, 2026
№ 047The Open Hand
America buys munitions one year at a time, so the factories that make them cannot invest, so the capacity does not exist when it is needed. Deterrence that is visible prevents wars. Fund the production line as insurance, not as a purchase order.
Released August 19, 2026
№ 046The Perimeter
America educates the world's best engineers, then puts them in a lottery with an 85,000 cap and a green card queue measured in decades. The people we most want to keep are the ones we make wait longest, and other countries have noticed.
Released August 18, 2026
№ 045The Long Game
A law written to make government think before it builds has become a law that makes it impossible to build. The average environmental impact statement takes four and a half years, and then the lawsuit starts. Set a clock, name one agency, and shorten the window to sue.
Released August 17, 2026
№ 044The Long Game
America invented the commercial reactor and then forgot how to build one, at a cost of $35 billion for two units in Georgia. France built 56 in 15 years by building the same one 56 times. Order a fleet, fix the clock, and pay the town that takes the waste.
Released August 16, 2026
№ 043The Covenant
Americans pay roughly three times what other rich countries pay for brand-name medicine, through a pricing system so opaque that almost nobody in it knows the real price. Publish the price, pay the middlemen a fee instead of a cut, and make what nobody will make.
Released August 15, 2026
№ 042The Dividend
Taxpayers fund the riskiest years of American invention, then buy the results back at monopoly prices and hold no stake in any of it. Keep the funding. Keep the patents where they are. Take a share.
Released August 14, 2026
№ 041The Covenant
The IRS already knows what most Americans earned. It receives the W-2 before you do. Yet 100 million people pay someone to tell the government a number the government has, and the poorest lose billions in credits they never claim.
Released August 13, 2026
№ 040The Long Game
Social Security's trust fund empties around 2033, and the law then cuts every cheque by about a fifth, automatically, with no vote. Fix it while the fixes are still small, and let the fund own assets instead of only IOUs.
Released August 12, 2026
№ 039The Long Game
Low Earth orbit is a finite public resource being handed out free, first come first served, to whoever files the paperwork fastest. We auction spectrum on the ground and give away the sky. Charge for the orbit, and bond the debris.
Released August 11, 2026
№ 038The Dividend
A price on carbon is the cheapest way to cut emissions and the fastest way to lose an election. The fix is not a better argument. It is a cheque with the citizen's name on it, arriving every year, larger than their fuel bill went up.
Released August 10, 2026
№ 037The Dividend
Oil, gas and coal pay the public a royalty for minerals taken from federal land. Gold, copper, lithium and uranium pay nothing, under a law signed by Ulysses Grant. Charge for the ore, and clean up the holes.
Released August 9, 2026
№ 036The Covenant
Rural counties host the transmission lines, the mines, the reactors and the water that run the country, and get the disruption without the ownership. Guarantee them a floor of care and connection, and give them a permanent share of what they host.
Released August 8, 2026
№ 035The Dividend
Monopoly is a private tax collected from the whole public. When the government finally breaks one, the money disappears into general revenue and the public never sees it. Send it to the endowment instead, where it stays visible forever.
Released August 7, 2026
№ 034The Long Game
The West divided a river it had measured during the wettest stretch in centuries, and has been spending the difference ever since. Measure the water, let it move to where it is worth most, and pay the people who give it up.
Released August 6, 2026
№ 033The Long Game
America finances a permanent country with temporary money. The average Treasury matures in about six years, so the debt is refinanced at whatever the world charges that morning. Fund the hundred-year assets with hundred-year paper.
Released August 5, 2026
№ 032The Dividend
Upzoning creates enormous value with a signature, and hands all of it to whoever happened to own the parcel. Capture a slice of the uplift the public itself creates, build the homes, and bank the rest.
Released August 4, 2026
№ 031The Dividend
Profits move offshore, data resists definition, labor already pays. Compute is metered, physical, and sits in a building you can find. Tax it a little, and make every citizen an owner.
Released August 3, 2026
№ 030The Long Game
Ninety percent of the world's advanced chips are made on one island. America needs surge capacity it can call on, and it should buy options, not a warehouse of hardware that rots.
Released August 2, 2026
№ 029The Long Game
In 1862 America gave away federal land to build a university in every state. Do it again with compute and open models, so intelligence is infrastructure rather than a subscription.
Released August 1, 2026
№ 028The Covenant
Half of young Germans are apprentices. Two percent of young Americans are. As AI makes taught knowledge cheap, the thing you can only learn on the job becomes the scarce one.
Released July 31, 2026
№ 027The Covenant
No American should be denied a job, a loan, a home, or a medical claim by a machine alone. Explanation, human review, and appeal, in the seven places it actually matters.
Released July 30, 2026
№ 026The Covenant
America answered forty years of displacement with retraining, and the evaluations say it did not work. The one part that did work was wage insurance. Make that the main instrument.
Released July 29, 2026
№ 025The Long Game
America has no idea how many jobs machines are taking. Require large employers to report it, the way they already report layoffs, before we legislate on anecdote.
Released July 28, 2026
№ 024The Dividend
Data centers are already raising your power bill by billions. Make them pay the cost they cause, and pay the households who carry them a dividend for the load.
Released July 27, 2026
№ 023The Long Game
America has a national debt and no national balance sheet. Bind the Fund with two locks — never borrow to build it, and let every citizen's dividend rise only as the debt falls.
Released July 26, 2026
№ 022The Perimeter
America counts everyone who arrives and almost nobody who leaves. Finish the exit record Congress ordered in 1996 — it is the one thing that makes a generous visa affordable.
Released July 25, 2026
№ 021The Covenant
Fifty-nine million Americans perform a trillion dollars of unpaid care a year. Pay the ones doing the heaviest work, credit their Social Security, and stop pretending love is a funding mechanism.
Released July 24, 2026
№ 020The Dividend
The taxpayer is already the first investor in nearly every major American invention. Start taking the position that comes with it — a small, silent, permanent share for the Fund.
Released July 23, 2026
№ 019The Open Hand
Every authorization to use force expires in two years, every war is paid for while it is fought, and every dollar freed when a war ends becomes principal in the nation's endowment.
Released July 22, 2026
№ 018The Open Hand
America's immigration system punishes the people best equipped to develop the world's poorest places for going there. Stop the clock, cut the remittance toll, and turn brain drain into brain circulation.
Released July 21, 2026
№ 017The Covenant
One day a year, every citizen is paid the same amount and the nation publishes its books. The ritual is not decoration — it is what makes the Fund impossible to dismantle.
Released July 20, 2026
№ 016The Dividend
Your data is worth almost nothing. Everyone's data is worth a fortune — so pay for it collectively, as rent on a commons, not as pennies to individuals.
Released July 19, 2026
№ 015The Dividend
The airwaves are public property. Stop selling them to cover one year of spending — deposit the proceeds as principal and let the nation collect rent forever.
Released July 18, 2026
№ 014The Long Game
AI is making expertise abundant. Multiply the elite slots by shrinking them — tiered licenses, fractional professions, and status shared by the hour.
Released July 17, 2026
№ 013The Covenant
Legalize the way Americans already work — kill the moonlighting clause, make benefits ride the worker, and let the second job pay what it should.
Released July 16, 2026
№ 012The Open Hand
Negotiate visa-free travel for America's vetted residents — so citizenship is chosen for love, not logistics.
Released July 15, 2026
№ 011The Perimeter
A constitutional amendment letting sojourners choose, before they come, a visa that is faster because it is honest — temporary all the way down.
Released July 14, 2026
№ 010The Open Hand
Publish the full, honest price of war next to the price of peace — one page, every year, mailed with your taxes.
Released July 13, 2026
№ 009The Long Game
Twenty states already run permanent funds. Give all fifty the machine, and prove the national one at state scale.
Released July 12, 2026
№ 008The Long Game
Every American child born with a stake: a seeded, locked account that compounds from the birth certificate onward.
Released July 11, 2026
№ 007The Perimeter
A border that is fully seen, fast, firm, and humane — a doorbell, a lock, and a host who answers.
Released July 10, 2026
№ 006The Open Hand
Replace aid with co-ownership — America underwrites Africa's buildout, African publics own it, and both collect the dividends.
Released July 9, 2026
№ 005The Covenant
A voluntary American Year of service — rewarded with a doubled citizen's dividend for life.
Released July 4, 2026
№ 004The Covenant
Single-payer health coverage for every American citizen, from birth, for life — and honest, mandatory private coverage for guests.
Released July 4, 2026
№ 003The Perimeter
Make an American visa one of the easiest documents on earth to get — and decouple it, honestly and humanely, from citizenship.
Released July 4, 2026
№ 002The Dividend
Let founders donate startup equity to the nation's endowment when it is cheap — and take the deduction when it becomes real.
Released July 4, 2026
№ 001The Dividend
Establish the American Permanent Fund — a citizens' endowment that pays every American an equal dividend, forever.
Released July 4, 2026