Manhattan Institute for Policy Research

06/05/2026

What did journalists know about terrorism before 9/11? How has national security reporting changed? Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Judith Miller reflects on her long career covering global conflicts, terrorism, intelligence, and the Middle East. Watch the full episode: https://bit.ly/4apPYSH

06/04/2026

New York City has a de facto multiparty system. Despite recent reforms like ranked-choice voting, its electoral rules channel political competition into lower turnout and intra-party factional fights, rather than contests between multiple distinct parties in the general election. Proportional representation (PR) offers a way to fix this problem.



In a new report for the Manhattan Institute, electoral system expert Jack Santucci and director of Cities John Ketchum examine how PR could reshape New York City's City Council elections. They find that the current single-seat district system produces two problems: right-leaning voters, being geographically dispersed, win far fewer seats than their vote share warrants (roughly 10% of seats on 22% of votes), while low-turnout Democratic primaries give organized factions like the Working Families Party outsized influence over who gets elected.



The report simulates two PR alternatives using 2025 council election data. Open-list PR (OLPR) would use the five boroughs as multi-seat districts, while mixed-member proportional (MMP) would retain current districts and add 20 citywide seats to correct imbalances. Both systems would bring seat shares closer to vote shares without dramatically changing who wins.

Read the full report: https://bit.ly/4avCzIS

On May 28, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the creation of a Charter Revision Commission (CRC), called the Commission on Government Efficiency, with a mandate to make government work better.[1] The CRC has an opportunity to address the democratic deficit produced by the city’s current electoral rul...

05/29/2026

Will New York City end the use of local delivery partners for logistics giants like Amazon? MI's Adam Lehodey breaks down why this decision could be catastrophic for New Yorker's wallets.

Read the entire piece: https://bit.ly/4vnCxLn

05/29/2026

Award-winning crime journalist Joe Marino joins Rafael Mangual for a candid, in-depth conversation on the realities of crime, policing, and public safety in New York City on this week's City Journal Podcast.

Watch the entire episode and subscribe: https://bit.ly/4dTRNIK

05/28/2026

Why do states subcontract Medicaid to private insurers when government funds it, sets coverage and prices, and often doesn’t competitively bid contracts?

A new MI report by Chris Pope finds Medicaid Managed Care covers 77% of enrollees but shows little evidence of cost savings or better care. Instead, opaque contracting has enabled funding loopholes, including a $19B windfall in California over four years.

It also finds higher denial rates than Medicare Advantage and weak payment transparency—raising serious questions about how the system is working in practice.

Pope recommends closing funding loopholes, standardizing contracts nationally, requiring detailed spending disclosures, and allowing states to outsource claims administration directly to the federal government for greater accountability.

Read the full report: https://bit.ly/49q7R3s

05/22/2026

Federal agencies often govern through informal guidance documents—not just formal regulations—creating what some scholars call “regulatory dark matter.”

A new MI brief by Alex J. Adams examines how HHS's Administration for Children and Families eliminated roughly 75% of its outdated or redundant guidance documents and implemented reforms to prevent future buildup.

Read the entire issue brief: https://bit.ly/3PRsM93

05/21/2026

“What kids need, and this is very good research, it's been replicated hundreds of times, what kids need is rules. They need authority, and they need to be held to account if they break the rules.

And we've known this. We stopped doing it, and part of the reason we stopped doing it is we shamed parents out of it."

Abigal Shrier joins Rafael Mangual to talk about the role of parents, the values shaping modern families, and more.

Watch the entire City Journal Podcast episode and subscribe: https://bit.ly/4eZNr4X

05/20/2026

More than half of L.A.’s street homeless population are not from Los Angeles.

In a new City Journal piece, Christopher F. Rufo and Kenneth Schrupp report that a majority of individuals experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles originated outside the city or county.

In a street survey of more than 200 individuals across Hollywood, Venice, and Skid Row:

• 64% said they were from outside the City of Los Angeles
• 53% said they were from outside Los Angeles County
• Nearly 40% said they were from other U.S. states
• 6% said they were from outside the United States

These findings align with prior LAHSA and RAND datasets, which also found a significant share of unsheltered individuals were last housed outside the region.

The implications of the survey are clear: simply building housing will not solve Los Angeles’s homelessness problem, and the wrong kind of housing program may even make it worse. Providing permanent housing with no conditions, the argument goes, simply encourages more nonresidents to come to Los Angeles.

The real solution, it concludes, is to reverse the polarity of the “magnet” by enforcing drug and camping laws, mandating treatment, and insisting on clean and orderly streets.

Read the entire piece: https://bit.ly/4uiAdVL

05/14/2026

"Modern schooling is systematically terrible at forming well-adjusted, curious, intellectually creative, entrepreneurial adults.

Schools, even much better schools, cannot solve this.

Here's the truth: Nobody loves your kids as much as you do."

- The Honorable Ben Sasse at the 2026 Alexander Hamilton Awards.

05/13/2026

"New York City spends roughly $37 billion/year to educate about 850,000 kids. That's over $42,000 per child per year. And the results are abysmal.

Two-thirds of fourth graders can't do math properly and almost three-quarters can't read at grade level...
..What we can do, Mr. Mayor, is tell every mom in NYC that the $42,000 currently spent on that terrible education is going to be her money."

Jeff Yass, one of the 2026 Alexander Hamilton Award honorees, on how we can solve NYC's education crisis through school choice.