Under the leadership of the Jury Commissioner, the Ada County, Idaho Jury Office, which handles roughly two to three thousand jurors monthly, launched several initiatives to prioritize juror comfort, streamline processes, and recognize citizens for their service. In 2020, the Jury Assembly Room underwent a significant remodel, featuring new furniture, carpet, and workstations. Recognizing the challenges of navigating downtown Boise, especially for rural and older jurors, the office created a YouTube video to guide jurors to the building and designated parking. Mobile-friendly online questionnaires and a chat feature offer jurors real-time assistance and convenience. With a concise five-day service term, most jurors are released within hours if not selected. Moreover, 90% of the time, jurors are not required to return, minimizing the financial impact and stress associated with jury service. Expeditious processing of claims and reimbursements is a top priority. The numerous enhancements by the Jury Office have led to substantial positive outcomes. Donations from jurors choosing to forgo their jury service pay totaled nearly $200,000 in 2023. This fund supports transportation, childcare costs, counseling, and more, ensuring that jurors in need are comfortable, supported, and not financially burdened. The transition to online questionnaires saves approximately $3,000 monthly in paper, printing, and staff time while promoting sustainability. Partnerships with restaurants and transportation services, such as Uber and Lyft, ensure quality meals and affordable transport for jurors. Collaborations with county departments have enabled free shuttle services and entertainment facilities for sequestered jurors. Hundreds of appreciative cards received monthly from jurors highlight the excellent service provided by bailiffs, judges, and other court staff.

Whistleblower programs expose hidden corporate wrongdoing. They do so by offering retaliation protection and financial bounties to those who bring original information to law enforcement about unseen, and often complex, misconduct. Under a standard account, whistleblowing serves the public interest by increasing the ex-post detection of illegal activity and the ex-ante risk of its exposure. That standard view, which casts whistleblowing as about detecting wrongdoing, is incomplete, however. To present a fuller view, this article introduces a complementary model that recasts whistleblowing as a way of preventing wrongdoing. These two models together show that a whistleblower program can do more than enable detection at the late moment when misconduct is afoot. It can also prompt action against wrongdoing that has yet begun. This prevention and detection distinction exposes conflict between public and corporate interests versus those of whistleblowers and prosecutors. The former interests favor early whistleblowing that intervenes against inchoate wrongdoing. Whistleblowers and prosecutors, however, have financial, personal, and political incentives that favor late whistleblowing. Given those incentives, whistleblowers might strategically delay reporting, which prosecutors are weakly motivated to police against. Current policy fosters this conflict by embracing the detection model alone. As a consequence, it privileges the interests of whistleblowers and prosecutors over those of the public and firms. This article urges an updated approach to whistleblower design that embraces both prevention and detection, which could reconcile early and late whistleblowing. Closer alignment between the interests of the public, firms, whistleblowers, and prosecutors would follow such a reconciliation.

Students have a number of existing and emerging physical and mental health needs that require specific approaches, and schools play a key role in supporting student wellbeing. Health and wellness have been at the top-of-mind in governors’ State of the State addresses and has seen a lot of activity in the research team’s legislative tracking the last several years. Given the importance, state policymakers are adapting comprehensive health supports to provide a well-rounded foundation of support in health education, mental and behavioral health, and nutrition services. This report reviews trends in recent legislation and in governor’s State of the State addresses from 2022 to 2025 and highlights examples of enacted policy related to K-12 student health and wellness as a reference for state leaders interested in taking similar action.  For example, California requires that recess be at least 30 minutes on regular instructional days and at least 15 minutes on early release days. Louisiana requires schools to offer mandatory age-appropriate training on suicide prevention to students in grades six to 12. New Hampshire established a farm-to-school local food incentive pilot program to reimburse eligible schools for money spent to purchase food from New Hampshire and other New England food producers. And Pennsylvania announced an investment of half a billion dollars over the course of five years to fund mental health counselors and services in schools.

What happens when college students cannot enroll in the courses they want? Using conditional random assignment to oversubscribed courses at a large public university, the research team found that a course shutout reduces the probability that a student ever takes any course in the corresponding subject by 30%. Course shutouts are particularly disruptive for female students, reducing women's cumulative GPAs, probability of majoring in STEM, on-time graduation, and early-career earnings. In contrast, shutouts do not appear to be disruptive to male students' long-run outcomes, with one exception—shutouts significantly increase the probability that men choose a major from the business school.

Early childhood educators receive low wages, which negatively impacts centers’ ability to recruit and retain staff and to provide high-quality services for families and children. Offering higher pay may address staffing challenges, but many centers struggle to offer competitive pay without also raising tuition for families and compromising their access to care. Public investments in early educators’ compensation give centers a lever for offering higher pay and have the potential to reduce turnover and stabilize staffing. The District of Columbia (D.C.) began enhancing the wages of early childhood educators in its licensed childcare facilities in 2022 through a landmark initiative supported by tax revenue. The initiative is designed to increase early educators' wages to achieve pay parity between early educators and their K–12 school counterparts. These wage enhancements have demonstrated continued benefits for childcare businesses, educators, and children. Between March 2023 and March 2024, 64% of educators maintained employment at the same licensed childcare center. When educators left their jobs, most left the D.C. childcare field altogether (77% of teachers who left), whereas just under one quarter left for a job in another D.C. childcare center. Educators’ employment patterns over this period indicate a preference for employment at centers receiving funding to implement wage enhancements. Centers serving children with subsidies saw much lower educator turnover when offering wage enhancements compared with centers that did not. Educators switching employers or newly beginning a career in D.C. childcare were more likely to seek employment at a center offering enhanced wages. In interviews, center directors shared views on the importance of offering higher wages and described how competitive wages offered at other centers might impact their staffing and sustainability.

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA) included 21 energy tax expenditures— 20 credits and one deduction—that support greenhouse gas emission reduction and other goals. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, the expenditures may result in at least $200 billion less revenue collected between 2022 and 2031. The tax expenditures—reductions in a taxpayer's liability or payments to the taxpayer resulting from exemptions and exclusions from taxation—cover a range of activities such as fuel production and residential energy efficiency upgrades. These expenditures vary as to when taxpayers may claim them, among other things. Many include novel features that distinguish them from other tax expenditures. For example, bonus provisions allow taxpayers to claim additional amounts for some tax expenditures if they meet certain requirements, such as using a certain amount of domestic content to construct a facility. Agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), have made progress in implementing these tax expenditures. As of January 2025, the Department of the Treasury and IRS coordinated to draft and publish 18 of 23 (78%) proposed rules and 11 of 19 (58%) final rules IRS planned to publish. The total proposed rules do not equal the total final rules because Treasury and IRS can combine multiple proposed rules into final rules. IRS tax expenditure data were available internally as of January 2025 for six tax expenditures and IRS estimates data for an additional 11 will become available internally during 2025. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has consistently called for greater scrutiny of tax expenditures. For example, in 2005, GAO recommended that the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, in consultation with Treasury, produce a framework for reviewing the performance of tax expenditures. However, as of January 2025, the recommendation had not been implemented, limiting policymakers' ability to regularly review their effectiveness. The GAO previously developed a framework for assessing tax expenditures and a fraud risk framework to help federal program managers strategically manage fraud risks. The GAO applied these frameworks and other sources to provide policymakers with questions supporting evidence-based assessments for overseeing the IRA energy tax expenditures.

Financial institutions' use of artificial intelligence (AI) presents both benefits and risks. AI is being applied in areas such as automated trading, credit decisions, and customer service (see figure). Benefits can include improved efficiency, reduced costs, and enhanced customer experience—such as more affordable personalized investment advice. However, AI also poses risks, including potentially biased lending decisions, data quality issues, privacy concerns, and new cybersecurity threats. Federal financial regulators primarily oversee AI using existing laws, regulations, guidance, and risk-based examinations. However, some regulators have issued AI-specific guidance, such as on AI use in lending, or conducted AI-focused examinations. Regulators told GAO they continue to assess AI risks and may refine guidance and update regulations to address emerging vulnerabilities. Unlike the other banking regulators, the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) does not have two key tools that could aid its oversight of credit unions' AI use. First, its model risk management guidance is limited in scope and detail and does not provide its staff or credit unions with sufficient detail on how credit unions should manage model risks, including AI models. Developing guidance that is more detailed and covers more models would strengthen NCUA's ability to address credit unions' AI-related risks. Second, the NCUA lacks the authority to examine technology service providers, despite credit unions' increasing reliance on them for AI-driven services. The GAO previously recommended that Congress consider granting NCUA this authority. Such authority would enhance NCUA's ability to monitor and mitigate third-party risks, including those associated with AI-service providers. The federal financial regulators are increasingly integrating AI into their general agency operations and supervisory and market oversight activities, with usage varying across agencies. The regulators use AI to identify risks, support research, and detect potential legal violations, reporting errors, or outliers. Most regulators told GAO that AI outputs inform staff decisions but are not used as sole decision-making sources.

This paper examines the long-term impact of keeping versus losing one’s home following a mortgage delinquency in the aftermath of the Great Recession, studying the trajectory of homeownership, consumption, and financial well-being over the subsequent decade. The research team’s research design leverages the substantial number of households that experienced temporary income shocks and the turbulence of the foreclosure crisis — the research team focused on individuals who were seriously delinquent on their mortgages and compare outcomes between those who received a mortgage modification and those who did not. These two groups exhibit highly similar pre-trends in financial outcomes prior and during the Great Recession but diverge by 36 percentage points in their short-term likelihood of retaining homeownership. More than half of this disparity persists nearly a decade later, translating into an average capital gain of $83,000 in the housing market. Despite these significant differences in homeownership and wealth accumulation, keeping a home does not appear to influence the path of creditworthiness, proxies for consumption, and the income rank of one's residential neighborhood.

The share of mothers who worked before their first birth more than doubled to 78% over the past half century. The share of fathers who took paid leave after the birth of their first child rose in recent decades, too. The policy and employment landscape changed in that period, including the introduction of the federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) which guarantees eligible employees up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave. Using the 2022 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), the Census Bureau explored parental leave and employment patterns among first-time mothers and fathers in the decades leading up to 2022. The 2022 survey collected data from a nationally representative sample of households, asking when parents had their first biological child. Parents are grouped based on the time period their first child was born (referred to as “cohorts,” e.g., “prior to 1981”) to protect the identity of survey respondents. The share of fathers working before their first child’s birth remained stable (around 76%) for the cohorts whose first born came prior to 1981 until the 2006–2010 timeframe. In contrast, the share of first-time mothers who worked before their child’s birth was as low as 38% for the cohort whose child was born prior to 1981, climbed to 53% from 1981 to 1985 and remained relatively stable at around 60% from 1986 to 2015. But by the 2021–2022 cohort, the share of first-time parents who worked before their first child was born had increased for mothers (78%) and remained stable for fathers (81%). Almost a third of mothers took unpaid parental leave, compared to 13% of fathers.

Effective treatments for restoring visual field defects (VFDs) in patients with stroke necessitate validation through randomized clinical trials. To evaluate the efficacy and safety of a personalized digital therapeutic based on visual perceptual learning for treating poststroke VFDs. A multicenter randomized clinical trial was conducted from October 19, 2022, to November 8, 2023, at 12 hospitals in South Korea. The study included poststroke outpatients 19 years or older with persistent VFDs (>3 months after stroke) and neuroimaging-confirmed stroke lesions in the visual pathway. The training group underwent personalized visual discrimination tasks (orientation and rotation) using a mobile virtual reality headset 5 days a week for 12 weeks, with 360 trials per day. The control group received no intervention. The primary outcome was improved visual areas (defined as sensitivity increased by ≥6 decibels [dB] during 12 weeks) assessed using Humphrey visual field tests at baseline and 12 weeks. In this randomized clinical trial of a digital therapeutic for chronic poststroke VFDs, the visual perceptual learning–based training demonstrated significant improvements in the whole field and defective hemifield.