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Heritage Explains: Daily Summaries Delivered
by The Heritage Foundation
A podcast that explains major policy issues at a 101 level. Experts from America's leading public policy organization break down major news stories and policy debates raging in culture and Congress alike.
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- 5 days ago11 min
A Tough Night for Conservatives: Now What? | Steve Chartan
Heritage co-founder Dr. Ed Feulner had a well-known saying. “In Washington, there are no permanent victories or permanent defeats.” But victories and defeats there are, and President Trump and the Republican Party received a decisive defeat at the ballot box in yesterday’s midterm election. As of this morning’s recording, Democrats have secured significant majorities in both the House and Senate, and have lost several key governorships across the country. Even in places where President Trump had a commanding lead in the 2024 election, support for Republicans has collapsed. No better example of this is Texas, where Democrats have secured victories in all statewide races, including for Senator and Governor. This outcome was considered a stretch by analysts on the left and unthinkable by those on the right. It’s clear that the 2026 midterm elections will be an inflection point in American political life. And that begs the question: what next? Here to help us understand what happened and where we go from here is the Executive Vice President of Heritage Action, Steve Chartan.
- 1 weeks ago31 min
BONUS | Can American Foster Care Be Fixed? | Alex Adams
Washington has a really bad habit of mistaking paperwork for progress.In some places, like the billion forms needed to get a driver's license, this is simply annoying. But in programs meant to help children and families, pencil pushing masquerading as actual work is dangerous.The federal government has produced thousands of pages of guidance and demand endless compliance reviews while still failing to make kids better off.Trump 2.0 is looking to fix this. Over the past year, the Administration for Children and Families has pushed for commonsense reforms to ensure social services benefit their intended targets.Some reforms ask states to end the so-called orphan tax and launch a nationwide effort to recruit more foster families. Others eliminate mountains of outdated federal guidance to cut bureaucracy and refocus the agency on results.All in all, this looks like a very different ACF than we've seen before.To walk us through all the work going on at the ACF, I’m joined by Alex Adams. He's the Assistant Secretary over at Administration for Children and Families.
- 1 weeks ago18 min
How Did We Get Truck Drivers Who Can’t Speak English? | Lora Ries
Every day, my wife takes our two young boys to their activities a few miles from our house in the family car. As she drives, she shares the road with gargantuan 40-ton trucks. We assume the people behind the wheel have been properly trained and can understand the signs.But I fear a day where our family experiences what Dalilah Coleman's family did. Dalilah was five years old when she was hit by an 18-wheeler driven by an illegal alien. The truck plowed into her stopped car at over 60 miles an hour. After spending 3 weeks in a coma, 4 months without half her skull, and 6 months in the hospital, she now enters first grade unable to walk, talk, or eat without assistance.Illegal immigrants and drivers who cannot adequately speak English have obtained commercial licenses, while federal officials have raised alarms about CDL mills pushing unqualified drivers through the system.Now lawmakers are pushing Dalilah’s Law, named for the little girl, designed to make sure such a tragedy never happens again.But how did we get here? How widespread is the problem? And what needs to change to make America's roads safer?Joining me today to explain is Lora Ries, Director of the Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation.
- 2 weeks ago16 min
BONUS | How Can We Succeed Where USAID Failed? | Ben Black
You'd be forgiven if you'd never heard of the US International Development Finance Corporation. Even by Washington standards, DFC sounds like an agency specifically designed to make your eyes glaze over, but push past your initial misapprehension at the label, and DFC is actually one of the most essential agencies in the District of Columbia and a key player in our fight against the Chinese Communist Party. For years, Beijing has used its economic heft to expand its influence through initiatives like Belt and Road. Beijing invests in infrastructure in the developing world, locking down access to critical minerals and making itself indispensable to countries that might otherwise rather deal with us. In response, America realized, that maybe letting China corner everything important is a bad idea. Enter the DFC. In its own words, the agency mobilizes private capital to advance U.S. foreign policy and economic development. So rather than simply handing out foreign aid and hoping for the best, DFC utilizes the power of capitalism to counter Chinese communism. What's more American than that? That raises some interesting questions, though. How is this any different than the scuttled USAID program, filled to the brim with wokeness? Where should America be investing? And can Washington actually behave like an investor without eventually devolving into bureaucratic bloat? Here to answer those questions is Ben Black, the current CEO at the DFC.
- 2 weeks ago20 min
Is France a Warning for the West? | Laura LaCombe
Last week, Heritage Explains spoke with Director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at The Heritage Foundation, Nile Gardiner, about the riots rocking France. In the few days since our interview, things have gotten way worse.Over the weekend, masked rioters broke into the historic 19th-century Town Hall in Limoges and set it ablaze. There is perhaps no better symbol of the war raging to define the West than a nearly 150 year old building which survived two World Wars burnt to the ground by socialists and Islamists.Beyond burning buildings, the fight for France has also been playing out on French university campuses. At the prestigious Sorbonne university, members of the La Cocarde Étudiante student organization confronted left-wing activists over university blockades and attempted to reopen access to campus, to much resistance from university and government authorities.President Emmanuel Macron addressed the country, condemning the violence while acknowledging legitimate grievances among peaceful demonstrators. But to many this isn’t enough.To dive even deeper into the war for the West’s soul raging across the Atlantic, we spoke with Laura LaCombe, a spokeswoman with La Cocarde Etudiante to get the on the ground story.
- 3 weeks ago27 min
Why is France on Fire? | Nile Gardiner
It’s a day ending in Y in France, which means rioting. Following in the spirit of 1789, the French are burning buildings, fighting the police, and overall behaving very poorly. This time, the revolutionaries are highschoolers joined by Islamo-communists and anarchists waving Palestinian flags, but France has seen this style of faux revolution before. The rioters are the proud heirs of May ’68, an event that looms so large in the French psyche, the mere mention of soixante-huitards, or 68ers, is enough to spark furious debate. Against the smoke and sirens lies a bigger question over whether France’s current system can hold. French presidential elections are coming soon, and far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon wants to replace the Fifth Republic with a Sixth, led by, in his words, créolisation. By contrast, leader of the right-wing Marine Le Pen represents a nationalist defense of the old France, but both movements are deeply skeptical of the European Union. That’s a lot to cover. And who better to navigate us through some French politics than a Brit? My conversation with Nile Gardiner, Director of The Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center.
- Oct 7, 202623 min
Are We Winning the War on Fraud? | Dan Kowalski
Washington has spent decades proving the bigger government gets, the more money it wastes and the less accountable it becomes. The infamous Minnesota “learing centers,” incident showed how craven many fraudsters are when it comes to stealing federal funds, while the downstream benefits of dismantling USAID show how effective government action can be in saving taxpayer money. Waste, fraud, and abuse are the inevitable results of a federal government that measures success not by results, but by the size of budgets. The Trump Administration has taken several steps towards remedying America's fraud problem, but many questions remain. To help answer some of those questions, we asked Director of the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget at the Heritage Foundation Dan Kowalski to break it all down.Check out more of The Heritage Foundation's wrok here: https://x.com/Heritage
- Sep 30, 202633 min
Should We be Friends With China? | Jeff Smith
For the better part of a decade, China has played the role of America’s greatest long-term strategic competitor. American foreign politicos have long advised a pivot to Asia as Washington slaps tariffs on Chinese goods. The CCP has served as America’s bête noire, guilty of repeated intellectual property theft, human rights abuses, and imperial ambitions towards the essential island of Taiwan. And yet, as Bob Dylan once crooned, the times, they are a changin'. President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping recently wrapped up a new round of talks here in Washington, with many noting the meeting seemed much more amicable than expected. If polls are to be believed, Americans are less hostile toward China than they were just a few years ago with younger Americans considerably less likely than their parents to see China’s rise as a critical threat. Overseas, countries that have traditionally looked to Washington are increasingly weighing closer economic ties with Beijing. At the same time, China still dominates critical supply chains, including rare earth minerals and questions remain about whether the United States can or should decouple its economy from Beijing. So where does the U.S.-China relationship stand? Are Americans becoming more comfortable with Beijing and Can China really present itself as an alternative to the United States on the world stage? Jeff Smith, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center may have the answers.Watch Myth vs. Fact: The Closing of The Department of Education
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About Heritage Explains
A podcast that explains major policy issues at a 101 level. Experts from America's leading public policy organization break down major news stories and policy debates raging in culture and Congress alike.
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