The COVID-19 pandemic presented enormous challenges to the administration of the 2020 elections. How effectively did the American system respond? A major new report led by John C. Fortier and Charles Stewart III concludes that "the main lesson learned from the 2020 election is that the system was robust and resilient." During a global pandemic, voters turned out at historic rates, and election officials made major changes to facilitate voting. The election, however, revealed significant issues that need to be addressed, including the speed and transparency of counting votes, conflicts between competing government institutions during emergencies, the budgeting process for elections, and the polling place experience.

Bruce Meyer and a team of researchers find the Biden administration's proposal to increase maximum benefits of the child tax credit (CTC) would come "at a higher cost per child raised above the poverty line than any other means-tested program." When accounting for the new policy's use of a universal basic income–type benefit, the research finds that the new CTC would nudge 1.5 million out of the labor force, far more than what proponents of the legislation had been forecasting. For more on this study, read Scott Winship's post on AEIdeas.

Joseph W. Glauber and Vincent H. Smith survey the field of agricultural policy and find that over the past several decades, it has "serve[d] primarily the interests of farm organizations whose members operate relatively large enterprises and environmental and conservation lobbies' concerns." They see more of the same on the horizon.

In response to this week's Facebook outage, many policymakers called for increased regulation of the social media giant. But Bronwyn Howell is skeptical that regulation could have averted the outage, in part because it seems to have been a result of human error.

Finally, Gregory S. Weiner explores why we feel any sense of obligation toward the founders: "We are obligated to the Constitution not because it or its framers were perfect — neither it nor they were — but rather because we hold their legacy in trust."