Congressional Committee Requests Revisited: Professional Expertise, Multiple Goals and Representation

House members pursue multiple goals during their legislative career. The goals of reelection, good policy making and power affect member voting and committee composition. Yet in arguably a legislator’s most important choice, committee request, only the goal of reelection has empirical support. I argue that a member utilizes all three goals when going through the committee process and requests a committee assignment that will maximize their utility across all legislative goals. Utility maximization is achieved when a member can gain influence within a policy jurisdiction through leveraging their prior expertise. I employ a multinomial logit model in examining committee requests, for eight committees over fifty years. My findings indicate that across five of the eight committees a member’s prior occupation is a strong and consistent predictor of a legislator’s request. It is plausible, given the results that members pursue multiple goals in making their request for committee assignment

The politics of public versus private social welfare

The United States has a divided social system in that both the public and private sectors provide citizens with benefits and services. The effects of political party control on public social policy are widely known. An area of study less understood is how partisanship influences private social benefits. I develop and test a theoretical argument that political parties' choice between indirect and direct social expenditures is primarily motivated by a desire to alter the balance between public and private power in society. The two major political parties have divergent philosophies on the role of government in society due to their significant differences in core democratic values and electoral coalitions. First, I properly conceptualize social policy as a choice between direct and indirect spending, using a new data set of federal tax expenditures. Next, I find no statistically significant difference between the Democratic and Republican parties in annual changes to total social expenditures. Additionally, my results show that Republican influence in the legislature results in a higher ratio of indirect to direct social spending, more private-sector spending, and increases to income inequality. These results have implications for determining the providers and beneficiaries of social benefits, the balance of power in society, and economic inequality

Pulmonary Metagenomic Sequencing Suggests Missed Infections in Immunocompromised Children

This article is made available for unrestricted re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic or until permissions are revoked in writing.BACKGROUND: Despite improved diagnostics, pulmonary pathogens in immunocompromised children frequently evade detection, leading to significant mortality. Therefore, we aimed to develop a highly sensitive metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS) assay capable of evaluating the pulmonary microbiome and identifying diverse pathogens in the lungs of immunocompromised children. METHODS: We collected 41 lower respiratory specimens from 34 immunocompromised children undergoing evaluation for pulmonary disease at 3 children's hospitals from 2014-2016. Samples underwent mechanical homogenization, parallel RNA/DNA extraction, and metagenomic sequencing. Sequencing reads were aligned to the National Center for Biotechnology Information nucleotide reference database to determine taxonomic identities. Statistical outliers were determined based on abundance within each sample and relative to other samples in the cohort. RESULTS: We identified a rich cross-domain pulmonary microbiome that contained bacteria, fungi, RNA viruses, and DNA viruses in each patient. Potentially pathogenic bacteria were ubiquitous among samples but could be distinguished as possible causes of disease by parsing for outlier organisms. Samples with bacterial outliers had significantly depressed alpha-diversity (median, 0.61; interquartile range [IQR], 0.33-0.72 vs median, 0.96; IQR, 0.94-0.96; P < .001). Potential pathogens were detected in half of samples previously negative by clinical diagnostics, demonstrating increased sensitivity for missed pulmonary pathogens (P < .001). CONCLUSIONS: An optimized mNGS assay for pulmonary microbes demonstrates significant inoculation of the lower airways of immunocompromised children with diverse bacteria, fungi, and viruses. Potential pathogens can be identified based on absolute and relative abundance. Ongoing investigation is needed to determine the pathogenic significance of outlier microbes in the lungs of immunocompromised children with pulmonary disease

Public Attitudes Toward Social Spending in the United States: The Differences Between Direct Spending and Tax Expenditures

This paper uses a survey experiment to examine differences in public attitudes toward \u27direct\u27 and \u27indirect\u27 government spending. Federal social welfare spending in the USA has two components: the federal government spends money to directly provide social benefits to citizens, and also indirectly subsidizes the private provision of social benefits through tax expenditures. Though benefits provided through tax expenditures are considered spending for budgetary purposes, they differ from direct spending in several ways: in the mechanisms through which benefits are delivered to citizens, in how they distribute wealth across the income spectrum, and in the visibility of their policy consequences to the mass public. We develop and test a model explaining how these differences will affect public attitudes toward spending conducted through direct and indirect means. We find that support for otherwise identical social programs is generally higher when such programs are portrayed as being delivered through tax expenditures than when they are portrayed as being delivered by direct spending. In addition, support for tax expenditure programs which redistribute wealth upward drops when citizens are provided information about the redistributive effects. Both of these results are conditioned by partisanship, with the opinions of Republicans more sensitive to the mechanism through which benefits are delivered, and the opinions of Democrats more sensitive to information about their redistributive effects

Interview with Christopher Faricy, author, Welfare for the Wealthy: Parties, Social Spending, and Inequality in the United States

Christopher Faricy makes a return visit to New Books Network for Part II of a conversation about Welfare for the Wealthy: Parties, Social Spending, and Inequality in the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and the ways in which the U.S. welfare state is configured to obscure its real beneficiaries. We’ll also talk with Prof. Faricy about what a Trump Presidency and unified Republican control of Congress might mean for tax policy, social spending, and inequality

Pulmonary Metagenomic Sequencing Suggests Missed Infections in Immunocompromised Children.

BackgroundDespite improved diagnostics, pulmonary pathogens in immunocompromised children frequently evade detection, leading to significant mortality. Therefore, we aimed to develop a highly sensitive metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS) assay capable of evaluating the pulmonary microbiome and identifying diverse pathogens in the lungs of immunocompromised children.MethodsWe collected 41 lower respiratory specimens from 34 immunocompromised children undergoing evaluation for pulmonary disease at 3 children's hospitals from 2014-2016. Samples underwent mechanical homogenization, parallel RNA/DNA extraction, and metagenomic sequencing. Sequencing reads were aligned to the National Center for Biotechnology Information nucleotide reference database to determine taxonomic identities. Statistical outliers were determined based on abundance within each sample and relative to other samples in the cohort.ResultsWe identified a rich cross-domain pulmonary microbiome that contained bacteria, fungi, RNA viruses, and DNA viruses in each patient. Potentially pathogenic bacteria were ubiquitous among samples but could be distinguished as possible causes of disease by parsing for outlier organisms. Samples with bacterial outliers had significantly depressed alpha-diversity (median, 0.61; interquartile range [IQR], 0.33-0.72 vs median, 0.96; IQR, 0.94-0.96; P &lt; .001). Potential pathogens were detected in half of samples previously negative by clinical diagnostics, demonstrating increased sensitivity for missed pulmonary pathogens (P &lt; .001).ConclusionsAn optimized mNGS assay for pulmonary microbes demonstrates significant inoculation of the lower airways of immunocompromised children with diverse bacteria, fungi, and viruses. Potential pathogens can be identified based on absolute and relative abundance. Ongoing investigation is needed to determine the pathogenic significance of outlier microbes in the lungs of immunocompromised children with pulmonary disease