Governing: State and local government news and analysis
The platform has undergone several changes since Elon Musk bought it and took it private late last year — especially when it comes to credibility and verification features, critical to government communications.
Judges at the state and federal levels are becoming more nakedly partisan, ruling in ways that reflect not careful contemplation but the desire for particular policy outcomes.
The declaration that the COVID-19 public health emergency is over doesn’t mean the end of its impact, or of the virus itself. What comes now?
The pandemic forced local governments to activate their innovation skill sets. Now city leaders must grow that spirit of inventiveness beyond the tactical, building it into the day-to-day work of government.
A new report from RAND Corporation argues that progress against opioid drug abuse and addiction is best understood — and addressed — in the context of everything that comes with it through an ecosystem view.
Pro football represents a peculiar combination of high demand and low frequency that is a highly inefficient use of urban space. What cities need is housing.
A half-century ago, a Republican president moved to devolve power from Washington to states and local governments. Today it’s the right that’s trying to turn that around.
The Safe Streets and Roads for All program, which provides direct funding to cities to make street improvements, is accepting applications. Other grants for transportation infrastructure are open or opening soon as well.
State and local financiers now face interest rate markets that anticipate decelerating inflation and a weaker economy. Public treasurers and debt managers need fresh ideas, agility and prudent strategies.
Too often it’s our youth who are the targets of racial- and gender-based animus and attacks. Rather than making life harder for children, public officials should be protecting them.
By slashing budgets, dictating what can be taught and gutting tenure protections, lawmakers are putting their states' public universities on a glide path to uselessness.
Opponents of church-state separation have been emboldened by recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions and the growing acceptance of Christian nationalism on the right.
America’s intervention in the Russo-Japanese War a century ago cast Theodore Roosevelt as an unlikely but ultimately successful diplomat. Teddy would be surprised to see who is leading the diplomatic offensive this time.
Colorado has a draft rule that would impose oversight and transparency requirements on insurance companies that use big data about consumers or feed such data into predictive models and algorithms.
New net metering rules have taken effect, giving solar owners a much worse deal than they had before on the excess power they sell back to the grid. The change could diminish the state's lead in small-scale solar electricity.
The state's public transit systems want $5.15 billion to avoid budget deficits and service cuts over the next half-decade. They’re expecting a tough fight.
Daniel Cameron was supposed to have the Republican nomination all sewn up at this point, but he, instead, finds himself under attack. Meanwhile, Oklahoma's legislating grinds to a halt and the motivating power of hatred.
Declining enrollment and poor completion rates raise concerns that underserved students and communities could be left behind. Gregory Haile, the president of Broward College, sees a way forward.
The planned $700 million island campus will foster coastal sustainability and job training for the green economy. And befitting the Big Apple, it will be unlike any other climate research facility in the country.
Primary elections are where most of those who govern us are chosen. Can making them nonpartisan — or eliminating them altogether — diminish the impact of ideological fringes? What has happened in Louisiana suggests that it can.
As Washington state rolls out its new cap-and-invest program to cut greenhouse gas emissions, it's bringing in new money to fund a range of important transportation projects.
There’s a secret order to the way traffic moves in African cities — less regulated, more spontaneous.
It’s especially hard to get low-income Americans living in multifamily buildings across the digital divide. But states and nonprofits are finding ways to do it.
Technical fixes can help, but there are other ways governments can make public service more attractive. Here are four promising approaches.
The Transportation Modernization Act will bring “choice lanes” to the state for the first time. Dubbed by some as "Lexus lanes," they will let drivers pay to bypass traffic, but aren’t likely to reduce congestion overall.
In attempting to regulate use of social media by young people, the state has pushed the idea the furthest, and other states may follow its lead. Will it work? And will it survive the inevitable legal challenges?
The fifth president is best known for the doctrine named for him that helped keep European powers from further meddling in the New World. And given the political environment today, you would be excused for being envious of his Era of Good Feeling.
The city of Los Angeles uses a scoring system for subsidized housing gives Black and Latino people experiencing homelessness lower priority scores.
A boom is coming in transmission line construction. But legislatures in a dozen states, under pressure from utilites, have passed “right of first refusal” laws that are raising concerns about higher energy costs for consumers.
A succession of mayors have tried and failed to eradicate the city’s rodent population. Now, Eric Adams has appointed Kathleen Corradi, a former schoolteacher and sustainability expert, to tackle the city's epic rat problem.
