The New World Screwworm’s Return and the Paradox of Prevention

Lately, I’ve been reading the book Spillover by David Quammen. It’s a fascinating look at “zoonoses,” the term for contagions from animals that spill over into human populations. Illnesses such as HIV, ebola, and coronaviruses (like the one that caused the COVID pandemic) fall into this category.

As the human population has exploded over the past few centuries and we have encroached ever further into areas formerly uninhabited by humans, the crossover of sicknesses from animals to people has become more common. Disease-causing organisms which have long circulated in animal populations can make a foray into people and cause human suffering and economic losses whenever humans encroach onto formerly wild spaces. No one knows how many yet-undiscovered germs lurk in animal populations which could cause new human diseases, and as such, it’s hard to be prepared for these threats.

The idea of these novel bugs from far-flung corners of the world at the interface between human settlements and wilderness may capture your imagination (as it has mine throughout Quammen’s book), but biological threats do not have to be novel or exotic to catch us unprepared. Frequently, the biological threats governments struggle to contain are not actually mysterious or new at all. Some are familiar, well understood, and quite preventable. The comeback story of the New World screwworm offers a clear example.

New World Screwworm’s Eradication and Resurgence

In June, the US Department of Agriculture confirmed that the New World screwworm had returned to the United States. It was first found in a calf in Texas 50 miles from the US-Mexico border, then reported in more cattle and a dog in the weeks that followed. 

Screwworms are parasites which can take humans, livestock, pets, and even birds as their host. Screwworm flies can lay eggs in skin scrapes as small as tick bites or in the mucous membranes of warm-blooded animals or people. Once hatched, the larvae burrow into the skin and feed on living tissue before leaving their host to transform into adult flies. Screwworm infection can prove deadly if left untreated.

Screwworms also impose substantial costs on agriculture. Infested livestock may die or require veterinary treatment, while ranchers must spend more time and money inspecting animals, treating wounds, and controlling outbreaks. Infestations can also reduce meat and milk production. The US Department of Agriculture estimates that a widespread outbreak in Texas alone could cost $1.8 billion annually in livestock deaths and treatment costs. 

The screwworm detections in Texas were noteworthy because the US successfully eradicated the New World screwworm from its soil in the 1960s by releasing millions of sterile male flies over the course of years. These sterile flies mated with females and crowded out fertile males in such large numbers that future generations became successively smaller until eventually, local populations were eradicated.

The US continued the effort after local eradication, releasing sterile flies south of our border in partnership with central American countries. By the early 2000s, the campaign had pushed screwworm south to Panama, and then even Panama was formally declared screwworm-free in 2006. Governments working together had rid the entire North American continent of the parasite.

The program was costly. The production and release of sterile flies cost about $1.3 billion across North America over roughly 55 years. But the economic benefits of eradication were much larger. An estimate updated in 2021 places annual benefits to livestock producers in the United States at $896 million, with an additional benefit of $329 million in Mexico and $88 million in Central America. That study identifies livestock producers as the primary direct beneficiaries and describes additional benefits including greater availability of livestock and dairy products, fewer meat and milk shortages, and reduced reliance on food imports. It notes that public health benefits may also exist, but those are separate from the producer benefit estimates.  The US Department of Agriculture estimates that screwworm eradication also resulted in $2.8 billion in annual benefits to the wider economy, although the agency does not detail how that broader estimate is calculated or divided among different types of benefits.

Even so, as the eradication effort moved south, sterile screwworm production and release facilities in the US consolidated. Domestic facilities stopped producing sterile male flies and production of the flies moved to a Mexican facility. Given that the problem had retreated, this made sense; Mexico was a better location to invest the funds and efforts. Eventually, though, the last fly production plant in Chiapas, Mexico, closed in 2012, after the US transferred its ownership to the Mexican government. This closure left a facility in Pacora, Panama as North America's only producer of sterile flies.

For a decade afterward, all seemed well. Then, in 2023, a screwworm outbreak in Panama  prompted a local state of emergency. The screwworm began to march north again, and by the following year, it was spotted in Mexico. The US Department of Agriculture formulated a response plan in 2025, then announced plans for a new facility in Texas to produce sterile flies in March 2026. 

 By June 2026, the screwworm had infected over 170,000 animals and 2,000 people in Central America and Mexico, causing 10 human deaths. That same month, the screwworm was detected in Texas.

The Price of Rebuilding Defenses

The old adage is that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Although the US continued funding containment efforts in Panama long after screwworms were eradicated on US territory, regional sterile fly production became concentrated in a single facility without enough capacity to respond to the large outbreak which emerged. Now that the barrier has been breached, eradicating the screwworm in the US again will be costly.

The remaining facility in Panama can currently produce approximately 100 million sterile flies per week. This is nowhere near enough capacity for the present problem, so the US Department of Agriculture is building a $750 million facility to produce up to 300 million sterile flies per week in Texas. They are also spending $25 million to release sterile flies in Arizona, and spending $21 million on sterile fly production at a facility in Mexico which should churn out 100 million flies per week once active. These represent initial investments; once operational, the Texas facility will cost additional operating dollars each year, and fly releases will likely be needed again in Arizona in future years, too. 

In addition to these efforts, the US Department of Agriculture awarded $105 million to 40 other projects meant to strengthen the US defense against screwworms. The US will also fund projects to provide Mexico traps and lures, enhance live animal inspections at ports of entry, and to audit Mexico’s animal health controls. 

Preventing screwworm’s resurgence will certainly be expensive, but the potential for agricultural losses if we do not stop it extends well beyond Texas. Before eradication, the screwworm was endemic to Florida, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, and Kansas.

There’s substantial crossover between that list and the list of the largest cattle inventories among US states today. Texas had 12.5 million heads of beef or dairy cattle in 2022, by far the largest inventory. Kansas ranked #3, with 6.1 million, Oklahoma #5, with 4.5 million, and Missouri #6, with 4 million. 

If the U.S. federal government allows screwworm to continue claiming ground, ranchers owning a sizable share of the US cattle supply would need to spend money surveilling their cattle. The infection is generally treatable so long as it is caught early, so ranchers would be incentivized to keep a close eye on their herds. Once spotted, veterinary care and quarantining are needed, all of which raise operations costs for farms and would be likely to raise the final price of beef and dairy for consumers.

Why Governments Underinvest in Prevention

After the COVID pandemic, it might seem obvious that governments should spend more to detect and contain biological threats before they become emergencies. Screwworm shows us why that remains difficult, though. The US did not wholly abandon its prevention efforts once the problem disappeared from its soil; it maintained a sterile fly barrier south of our border for decades. But as the parasite disappeared from public view and faded from recent memory, production facilities eventually closed, leaving the system dependent on one Panamanian plant with limited capacity. This approach left the US with little margin for error and no slack capacity in the case of a reappearance of the flies. 

The choice to consolidate sterile fly production to one facility may have seemed appropriate at the time. Maintaining multiple facilities would have cost more during normal years and may have been hard to justify. But as soon as the problem reemerged, we saw why capacity was needed: biological production cannot be turned on overnight. The facility the US Department of Agriculture is funding in Texas won’t open until the end of 2027. 

The lesson is perhaps that successful prevention often paradoxically makes itself appear unnecessary. When prevention programs work as intended, their benefits manifest as bad outcomes that people never have to experience. In the case of screwworm, it’s livestock that don’t die, veterinary treatments not needed, cattle trade that isn’t interrupted, and beef prices that don’t rise. It’s all hypothetical and invisible. The facilities, expertise, surveillance, and institutional capacity that prevent those outcomes can start to look like wasteful public spending when their benefits are so intangible. These kinds of programs could be an easy cut for politicians looking to scale back budgets.

While as a policy analyst, I understand that prevention programs frequently have benefits which outweigh their costs, I also understand the impulse to undervalue prevention. If you recall, my introduction to this topic was the tangentially related book, Spillover. That book is filled with unfamiliar pathogens emerging from strange animals in exotic forests and caves. These frightening biological threats captured my attention readily; they appeal to a sense of discovery and danger. The book inspired me to set out looking for the next potential strange disease emerging from some distant corner of the world. Instead, I found this story about an old agricultural parasite that governments had already spent decades beating back. Though I hope this post is interesting, I know it won’t be in the same way that Spillover is. Managing old problems is not as inherently interesting as the mystery and intrigue of fighting a new one.

Because of this, a novel threat can easily generate headlines, emergency declarations, and new funding. Screwworm was an old problem we believed we’d already solved. Its long absence made continued preparedness harder to justify investment in, and now that screwworms have returned, the US must rebuild its defenses while also responding to the incursion the screwworms have already made. 

The New World screwworm’s resurgence is a reminder that discovering and defeating biological threats are only one aspect of the public health challenges we face. Governments must also stay vigilant at the task of sustaining the institutions that keep old threats from becoming new emergencies, long after their original danger has faded from public memory.

Which U.S. cities will implement congestion fees next?

Earlier this week, Scioto Analysis released a cost-benefit analysis of New York City’s Congestion Relief Zone during its first full year of operation. We found that congestion pricing in New York City produced $2 billion in net benefits in 2025. Some of these benefits are reduced air pollution, driver time savings, and avoided vehicle crashes. 

Cities across the globe have implemented congestion relief zones prior to New York City, including Singapore, London, Stockholm, and Milan. All four of these cities saw reductions in traffic between 11% and 45% during the first year of congestion relief zone operation. This got me thinking: if congestion relief zones are so effective at reducing traffic, then which cities in the United States should be next for congestion relief zones?

Which cities across the United States are most congested?

The easy answer would be cities in the United States that suffer the most from congestion. The table below shows the top ten cities based on 2024 annual hours of delay according to the Texas A&M Transportation Institute’s Mobility Division.

Most Congested Cities in the United States
City	2024 Annual Hours of Delay
Los Angeles, CA	1.1 million hours
New York, NY	890,000 hours
Chicago, IL	420,000 hours
Miami, FL	340,000 hours
Houston, TX	270,000 hours
San Francisco, CA	270,000 hours
Atlanta, GA	260,000 hours
Washington, DC	230,000 hours
Dallas, TX	230,000 hours
Philadelphia, PA	220,000 hours

These annual hours of delay are for the year before the congestion relief zone in New York City began. Using congestion data alone, Los Angeles might be a better candidate for a congestion relief zone than New York City. If anything, it seems like Los Angeles is the obvious next choice for a congestion relief zone: New York City and Los Angeles stand alone in terms of congestion. The third most congested city is Chicago, which has less than 40% the congestion of Los Angeles.

While high congestion is the prerequisite for implementing a congestion relief zone, it certainly isn’t the only factor at play. At its core, a congestion fee charges drivers to enter designated zones during peak hours. The logic is simple: we are taxing traffic because we want less of it. 

However, people are entering these zones for a reason: work, recreation, shopping, or something else entirely. A congestion fee won’t be high enough to deter everyone from entering the zone. Some drivers whose destinations lie outside the zone may instead reroute around it, potentially shifting traffic into surrounding areas. But for anyone who still needs to get into the zone and won't be deterred, there has to be a viable alternative form of transportation. Otherwise, congestion pricing places a disproportionate burden on drivers who can’t afford the fee.

Which cities have the best public transit?

One answer to this problem is public transit. If a city has high-quality public transit, then people should still be able to get where they need to go without driving. According to the AllTransit Rankings from the Center for Neighborhood Technology, we rank the top ten cities for public transit in the United States in the table below.

Best Public Transit Systems in the United States
City	Transit Performance Score
New York, NY	9.6
San Francisco, CA	9.3
Jersey City, NJ	9.2
Chicago, IL	9.2
Washington, DC	9.1
Boston, MA	9.1
Philadelphia, PA	9.1
Newark, NJ	8.8
Miami, FL	8.5
Seattle, WA	8.3

New York City ranks at the top of public transit rankings in the United States. New York residents who choose not to drive in designated zones due to congestion pricing can instead take the subway or bus to get where they need to go. Some other cities that have both high congestion rates and high-quality public transit are Chicago, San Francisco, Miami, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC.

One city that is missing from these rankings is Los Angeles, the most congested city in the country. Public transit in Los Angeles ranks 18th in the United States. This means that Los Angeles has a similar quality public transit system to my home city, Cleveland (which has a tenth of the population of Los Angeles). 

Which cities have the busiest central business districts?

To create a congestion relief zone, there needs to be an identifiable zone to implement congestion fee pricing in. This means that congestion shouldn’t be widely dispersed across the city; it should be concentrated in a particular area. 

One pattern we noticed during our analysis of New York City’s congestion relief zone is that congestion relief zones have generally been created around a city's central business district. If we assume that the next United States city would take the same approach, we can estimate which central business districts suffer from the heaviest traffic.

While neighborhood-level traffic data is difficult to collect, we can use the share of jobs located in the central business district as a proxy. If a large chunk of a city’s jobs are in the central business district, then lots of people have to travel there on a daily basis. Using a 2020 report from Demographia, the table below shows the top 10 cities in the country ranked by the proportion of jobs located in their central business districts.

United States Cities with Highest Proportion of Jobs in Central Business District
City	Jobs in Central Business District	Percentage of Total
New York, NY	1,900,000	20.2%
San Francisco, CA	370,000	16.3%
Washington, DC	430,000	13.0%
Chicago, IL	570,000	12.5%
Honolulu, HI	56,000	11.4%
Seattle, WA	210,000	11.2%
Boston, MA	260,000	10.1%
Hartford, CT	63,000	10.1%
New Orlean, LA	59,000	9.9%
Richmond, VA	61,000	9.8%

Once again, Los Angeles is missing from this list. Despite being the most congested city in the country, it ranks 49th in the proportion of jobs located in its central business district, with just 2.6% of Los Angeles jobs in the central business district.

Which cities are next for congestion fees?

Based on these rankings, it's easy to see why New York City was the city most fit for a congestion relief zone in the United States. The only remaining cities that have high congestion, high-quality public transit, and a large share of jobs in their central business districts are Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, DC. Based on the success that New York City has seen so far with its congestion relief zone, one of these cities might be next.

What is the cost of commuting?

Last week, I wrote about a quick analysis I did trying to see if housing prices were related to commute times in cities across the country. Go check out that blog for the full details, but in short I found that yes, higher housing prices are correlated with longer commute times. 

Commutes are a fact for most working people in the United States. According to the American Time Use Survey, Americans who have to travel for work spend an average of 45 minutes per day commuting. This means that over the course of a year, the average adult who has to travel for work spends almost 275 hours on their commute, the hour equivalent of nearly seven full work weeks. 

How people commute

According to census data, the majority of workers commute by themselves in a car. 

Table 1: The majority of workers drive themselves to work

The dominance of driving has important implications for both individuals and policymakers. Because such a large share of workers rely on personal vehicles, changes in fuel prices, road congestion, or highway infrastructure affect millions of people every day. At the same time, the relatively small share of workers using public transportation or active transportation reflects the reality that these options simply are not available in many parts of the country. 

Cost of commuting

When considering how much commuting costs, there are a few things that we can measure. First are the direct costs associated with travel: gasoline, vehicle maintenance, parking, and pollution. These are largely straightforward to calculate and represent the costs that people see most clearly in their monthly budgets. 

A less straightforward cost is the opportunity cost associated with commuting. If people didn’t spend 45 minutes per day in their cars, what else could they accomplish? 

Economists think about time as a scarce resource. Every minute spent commuting is a minute that cannot be spent working, exercising, spending time with family, or enjoying leisure activities. The value of that lost time differs from person to person and understanding these tradeoffs can help us design better policies. 

Differences in commuting types

This is where the tradeoffs between commute styles become apparent. A bike or walk commute may be longer than driving, but it produces less pollution and serves as a form of exercise. Perhaps for some people the additional commute time is made up entirely because they no longer have to spend time going to the gym after work hours. 

There also exists the potential for people to do something productive with alternative forms of commuting. People who take buses or trains to work have the opportunity to read, answer emails, study, or simply relax during their trip in a way that someone driving cannot. On the other hand, public transportation often involves fixed schedules, transfers, and less flexibility than driving. This could lead to longer overall commute times, which has been shown to have some serious negative outcomes.

Policy implications

Different commute types have a lot of tradeoffs, and which one is best is certainly an individual question. Whether people like being able to get things done on a train, they like combining exercise with their commute, or they value the flexibility that comes from driving a car, there is no one size fits all solution. 

Because of this, in a world without budget constraints policymakers should try and make it so every possible form of transportation is available to everyone. Under budget constraints however, priorities need to be established. 

Those priorities should ultimately reflect the needs of the communities they serve. Dense urban areas may receive the greatest benefit from investments in public transportation, while rural communities often depend on reliable roads and highways. Likewise, improving sidewalks, bike lanes, and pedestrian infrastructure may make sense in neighborhoods where short trips are common. Rather than assuming one mode of transportation is inherently better than another, policymakers should focus on providing people with practical options that fit their circumstances.

What does policy analysis cost the federal government?

Public policy analysis is crucial for developing good policy because, among other things, it helps policymakers allocate public funds efficiently. This is another way of saying that public policy analysis helps us prevent money from being wasted. Given the vast scale of public spending, even modest improvements in how funds are allocated can justify the cost of policy analysis.

This does not, however, mean that public policy analysis is without cost. Federal, state, and local governments across the United States spend a significant amount of money on public policy analysis every year with the goal of making more effective and more cost-effective public policy.

What does the federal government spend on public policy analysis?

The agency in the federal government’s policy analysis ecosystem with  the largest budget is the United States Census Bureau, which has a current budget of about $1.5 billion. The Trump Administration has requested an increase in this budget to about $2 billion in anticipation of the lead up to the 2030 Census. The Census Bureau is not technically a policy analysis agency: it is focused mainly on data collection. The data it collects, however, is key to policy analysis across the federal government, and also for policy analysis at the state level, local level, and in private-sector organizations. Although its data has applications that go far beyond public policy analysis,  it could be chalked up as a key input for public policy analysis in the United States.

The second-largest of these analysis-focused agencies is actually a quite specialized office: the Millennium Challenge Corporation, which has a current budget of $830 million. The Millennium Challenge Corporation is a free-standing agency formed through bipartisan legislation in 2004 to support sustainable economic growth and poverty reduction in developing countries. I first encountered the Millenium Challenge Corporation at a 2019 meeting of the Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis, where I learned that many analysts at this agency were conducting benefit-cost analyses of investments in foreign aid. Most of the funds for this agency go to programs, though, not policy analysis.

The largest of the pure policy analysis agencies in the federal government is the Government Accountability Office, which currently has a budget of about $810 million. The Government Accountability Office is the supreme audit institution of the United States federal government, in charge of ensuring federal funds are spent efficiently and effectively, investigating allegations of illegal use of public funds, reporting how well government policies are meeting their objectives, performing policy analyses, and a range of other charges.

The largest policy analysis institution within a federal agency  is the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, which is currently funded to the tune of $770 million. It is the statistics, research, and evaluation arm of the Department of Education. The Trump Administration has proposed reducing its funding to about $260 million as part of its broader effort to cut the Department of Education's budget.

Another key federal statistical agency is the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is the principal fact-finding agency for the Federal Government in the broad field of labor economics and statistics. It is currently housed under the Department of Labor and has a budget of $640 million. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is closer to the U.S. Census Bureau than it is to the Government Accountability Office, in that it is more focused on collecting statistics that are used by other agencies for policy analysis than it is on analyzing policy itself.

Beyond these largest analysis agencies, several others have annual budgets between $120-$140 million. The Congressional Research Service ($140 million), Energy Information Administration ($140 million), Office of Management and Budget ($130 million), HUD Policy Development and Research Office ($120 million), and Bureau of Economic Analysis ($120 million) each have budgets in this range. Other key agencies like the Economic Research Service ($91 million), Congressional Budget Office ($75 million), Department of Justice Research, Evaluation and Statistics Account ($55 million), Joint Committee on Taxation ($14 million), and Council of Economic Advisers ($5 million) all have budgets under $100 million.

All accounted for, these appropriations add up to a total of about $5.5 billion.

Compare this to the total of all federal spending. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the federal government spent about $7.4 trillion in Fiscal Year 2026. That means total policy analysis expenditures made up less than $1 for every $1,000 spent by the federal government that year.

What is the right amount of spending on policy analysis?

In Results for America’s book Moneyball for Government, a bipartisan group of analysts recommend each department in the federal government set aside 1% of department funds for evaluation of public policies. If we use this for a benchmark, then the federal government’s spending on evaluation in the agencies listed above only make up about 7% of recommended spending on evaluation.

We can quibble about the definitions of evaluation versus policy analysis, data infrastructure versus core policy analysis work, and specialized policy analysis versus backbone policy analysis that supports the federal government as a whole. But no matter what way we slice it, there seems to be space for more policy analysis in the federal government, and it would be likely to pay for itself in savings to the federal government budget, especially if it were deployed in a thoughtful way.

This is not even to touch on state and local government. As underinvested as the federal government is in policy analysis, state and local governments often have even less institutional capacity and conduct less policy analysis overall. I would like to dig into policy analysis done by state and local  governments and the private sector, but this blog post is already getting a bit long, so I will leave those questions for another time. For now, suffice to say that policy analysis is not especially costly in the context of overall public sector spending.

Original Analysis: Scioto Analysis finds New York City’s Congestion Pricing Produced $2 billion in Net Benefits in 2025

Today, Scioto Analysis released a new cost-benefit analysis of New York City’s Congestion Relief Zone during its first full year of operation. 

The analysis estimates that the program produced approximately $3.3 billion in social benefits and $1.3 billion in social costs in 2025. This amounts to approximately $2 billion in net benefits, with the program generating $2.60 in benefits for every $1 in costs.

New York City implemented the Congestion Relief Zone in January 2025, becoming the first city in the United States to charge most vehicles entering its central business district. During its first year, traffic entering the zone declined by 11%, or approximately 73,000 vehicles per day.

To evaluate whether the program benefited New York City overall, analysts estimate impacts on mobility, road safety, environment and health, public expenditures, and businesses. 

• Reduced air pollution produced the largest estimated benefit. Lower particulate matter 2.5 exposure inside the zone generated approximately $810 million in health benefits, while reduced carbon dioxide emissions produced an additional $9.4 million.

• Drivers experienced substantial time savings both inside and outside the zone. Drivers traveling within the zone received an estimated $560 million in time savings benefits, while drivers using nearby roads outside the zone received approximately $740 million. 

• Reduced traffic congestion also saved drivers approximately 3.3 million gallons of fuel, producing $10 million in benefits. Faster bus travel produced an additional $7.6 million in benefits for riders.

• The analysis’ primary estimate finds that changes in crash patterns inside the zone produced approximately $250 million in safety benefits. However, alternative methods find that crashes may have instead imposed between $20 million and $100 million in costs, making roadway safety one of the analysis’ largest sources of uncertainty.

• The largest cost was establishing and operating the tolling system, estimated at approximately $410 million. Other costs included discouraged vehicle trips, increased crashes in nearby spillover areas, environmental mitigation spending, and a potential increase in particulate matter 2.5 exposure in the South Bronx, which may be offset in future years by the benefits produced by environmental mitigation spending.

The analysis also tests how its findings change under alternative assumptions. A simulation of 10,000 possible outcomes produced a median net benefit of approximately $1.6 billion, with 90% of outcomes falling between approximately $1 billion and $2.1 billion in net benefits. Benefits exceeded costs in every simulation. 

Though the Congestion Relief Zone produced a positive net benefit overall, its benefits are not experienced equally across the population. Drivers who continued entering the zone benefited from faster travel but paid the zone fee, while drivers who stopped making trips into the zone lost access to travel they valued. Residents inside the zone may have benefited from cleaner air, while nearby communities may have experienced increased crashes or pollution. The positive overall result therefore does not mean that every person or neighborhood was made better off by the policy.

The full report can be accessed here.

What could Ohio spend its budget surplus on?

Ohio’s fiscal year 2026 just ended on June 30th. The state ended the fiscal year with a $1.75 billion budget surplus, meaning that they collected $1.75 billion more in taxes in fiscal year 2026 than they planned to spend. According to State Representative David Thomas, about 75% of the budget surplus is already allocated, with about $350 million going to seniors in homestead relief, and about $320 million going to an extended sales tax holiday next year.

Earlier this year, my colleague Michael asked the question: should Ohio spend this extra money, or should they stash it away in a rainy day fund? Spending a budget surplus can be good– people generally prefer to get things now over later. However, saving extra funds is a safe option, as the timing of recessions, natural disasters, or unexpected budget shortfalls is always uncertain. Today, I want to ask the question: what could Ohio spend its $1.75 billion surplus on?

Ending Homelessness

In 2024, my colleague Rob wrote a blog post about what it would cost to end homelessness in the United States. He used data on the number of homeless people across the country and average monthly rent prices to make a simple estimate: how much would it cost to provide one year of housing to all homeless people in the country?

We can apply the same logic to Ohio. According to Zillow rental data, the average monthly rent for all property types in Ohio is $1,350. As of 2025, HUD’s most recent Annual Homelessness Assessment Report, there are 12,196 homeless people in Ohio. 

If we assume that each homeless person is supplied with a living space with a $1,350 monthly rent, and the state paid for 12 months of rent for each person, then ending homelessness for one year in Ohio would cost $198 million, about 11% of the budget surplus from this past fiscal year. If monthly rent prices continue to rise according to Zillow’s year-over-year change, Ohio could pay for eight years of housing with its $1.75 billion budget surplus.

Universal Pre-K

Last year, Scioto Analysis released a cost-benefit analysis about universal prekindergarten in Ohio. In the report, we estimated that each year, universal prekindergarten would cost taxpayers about $8,308 per participant enrolled. Adjusting for inflation, we estimate that universal prekindergarten would cost taxpayers $8,865 per participant in 2026.

Under a high-enrollment scenario, universal prekindergarten in Ohio would result in an additional 29,000 children in prekindergarten per year. This means it would cost about $257 million to place 29,000 Ohio children in universal prekindergarten for one year, about 15% of Ohio’s $1.75 billion budget surplus. If Ohio were to use its whole surplus on universal prekindergarten, the state could fund it for six years.

Child Tax Credit

In March 2025, Governor DeWine proposed a child tax credit that would give Ohio families up to $1,000 per child under the age of seven each year. The credit would be calculated as 5% of a taxpayer’s income up to the maximum $1,000. For combined filers, families would be eligible for the child tax credit with a combined income of $94,000 or less. For single filers, income must not exceed $69,000. The child tax credit was included in one version of House Bill 96, the biennial state budget, but was ultimately rejected by the General Assembly.

A child tax credit typically helps families pay for childcare, healthcare, groceries, diapers, rent or other necessary costs. Scioto Analysis has conducted analysis on child tax credit policies for Ohio and Minnesota previously. Child tax credit policies are associated with higher future earnings for children, lower healthcare expenses, and less crime. Governor DeWine’s proposal was expected to cost the state $450 million, about 25% of Ohio’s budget surplus. This means that with the budget surplus, the state of Ohio could pay for nearly four years of Governor DeWine’s proposal.

Universal Free School Meals

Last year, Scioto Analysis released a cost-benefit analysis about universal free school meals in Ohio. We found that universal free school meals in Ohio would result in net social benefits of $520 million. The economic benefits include food cost savings for families, wages for cafeteria staff, increased lifetime earnings for students, reduced healthcare costs, and time saved by families on meal preparation.

Under a proposed Senate Bill from 2025, the state of Ohio estimated that universal free school meals would cost about $300 million per year. This means that the state of Ohio could pay for universal free school meals with about 17% of their budget surplus from this past fiscal year.

What does this mean for Ohio’s budget surplus?

If Ohio were to provide housing to its entire homeless population, implement universal prekindergarten, create a refundable child tax credit, and provide universal free school meals, the state would still have about $545 million leftover from its budget surplus.

The best use of a surplus is ultimately up to policymakers, but these four policies might be a good place to start.

Quick analysis: Do high housing prices cause longer commutes?

This is going to be a quick analysis where I attempt to answer a question in what basically looks like the first pass I’d do for a larger research project. The goal is not to conclusively answer the question I pose, but rather to show how you could go start exploring a question like this and get at least some evidence and see if this is worth exploring further.

Research question

Hypothesis: Higher housing costs are associated with longer commute times. I came across this idea in a newsletter I got this week that was looking at commute times in cities around the world. The author included the following sentence which got me thinking: “Transportation researchers often say a city's average commute tells you almost as much about its housing market as its roads.” 

The logic behind this hypothesis is that when housing costs are high, people have fewer options for housing in their price range. Less housing choices may lead to more people living farther away from where they work, which leads to longer commute times.

Methods

I’m going to use American Community Survey data for every metropolitan and micropolitan statistical area in the United States. I’ll collect their average commute time and their average housing cost and I will check the scatter plots to see if there are any obvious trends. Then, we can do a simple linear regression to see if those trends are statistically significant.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ll do the regression on two samples: the 5-year ACS estimates from 2024 and from 2019. I suspect that if there is a trend, it is likely to be much stronger before the pandemic made working remotely significantly more common. 

Results

Both scatter plots appear to have a slight positive trend, though the effect size is likely quite small. Both linear regressions confirm this first glance and find that there is a statistically significant positive correlation between housing costs and commute times. The fact that both of these results are positive and statistically significant does provide some early evidence that our hypothesis is true. The regression using the most recent 2024 data suggests that commute times increase by an average of one minute for every $500 of increased monthly housing costs. Note that the median housing cost in the 2024 data was about $1,000 per month and the max was about $3,000, so there is not a ton of variation on average.

Figure 1: 2024 housing and commute times by metropolitan area

Looking at the 2019 data, we find that commute times increase by an average of one minute for every $250 of increased monthly housing costs. It is hard to tell because the two plots aren’t overlayed but the slope of that two lines is essentially twice as steep implies basically double the impact. This supports the prior hypothesis that the COVID-19 pandemic weakened the correlation between housing costs and commute times. An alternative hypothesis as to why the effect is weaker today than in 2019: rising housing prices nationwide has made the baseline cost for housing higher, so marginal increases in housing prices have less of an effect on commutes than they used to in a 2019 world of lower baseline housing costs. 

Figure 2: 2019 housing and commute times by metropolitan area

Limitations

This is not a causal analysis. This is not enough evidence to claim that higher housing costs cause people to have fewer options when it comes to where they live and therefore live farther away from their work. Notably we aren’t controlling for any other factors that might influence how long commutes are or how high housing costs are.

Another limitation is that I’m just looking at average housing costs and commute times across metropolitan areas. I don’t believe this is necessarily the best way to capture the relationship that I’m interested in, and maybe it would be better to look at individual level data. 

Preliminary conclusions and next steps

Based on these regressions, I would say there is definitely evidence to support this hypothesis and it would be worth exploring further in a more concrete way. A good next step would be to see if there are any historic examples of natural experiments that could be exploited to better identify a causal effect.

What will happen if we adopt permanent daylight savings time?

Last week, the U.S. House passed legislation that would make daylight savings time permanent across the country. If it passes in the Senate, then it would mean the annual tradition for most of the country of switching clocks back and forth twice a year would be officially over.

Back in 2023, we studied what the impacts of daylight savings time were in Ohio. The biggest takeaway from that study was that for Ohio, either permanent daylight savings or standard time was preferable to switching back and forth, but which of those you preferred depended on what the impacts were. Permanent daylight time led to lower crime thanks to more light in the evening, permanent standard time led to energy savings since the sun lines up better with human energy use.

While the average economic outcome might be the same for permanent daylight savings and permanent standard time, a closer look at the issue will tell you that not everyone has the “average” opinion, and a lot of people have reason to prefer one option over the other.

Why some people might oppose permanent daylight savings time

Although the evidence points to the fact that changing clocks twice a year causes a lot of problems to society as a whole, there are people who think that changing to permanent daylight savings time is a negative outcome. For instance, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine strictly prefers permanent standard time and its earlier sunrise. Their position is that across the country, standard time better lines up with our circadian rhythm which in turn leads to many health benefits. AASM has gone as far as to “condemn” this new legislation. 

Another major concern about switching to permanent daylight savings time is that in Northern states, the sun rising so late during the winter might present other challenges. In Minnesota for example, the sun won’t rise until 9:00 am during some times of the year. This is a difficult proposition for children and teachers who will start school in the pitch dark if school times stay the same.

The extent of many of these concerns depends on geography. States farther north experience shorter winter days, making the effects of permanent daylight savings time more noticeable than they would be in southern states. Similarly, the western portion of each time zone already experiences later sunrises than the eastern portions. A one-size-fits-all national policy inevitably produces different outcomes depending on where people live.

Other policy options

One thing local governments could do if they are forced to adopt permanent daylight savings time is move the start times of their schools. Schools could even go as far as twice a year changing the start time by an hour, moving back in winter and moving it forward again in spring. 

One alternative that isn’t readily available but might make the most sense is to just let states pick what timezones they want to be in. The timezone map is already full of oddities, and this would give states the flexibility to choose specifically when they want their sunlight to be. If you wanted to take this a step further, let states choose in half-hour increments! It’s only weird until people get used to it.

Any sort of significant restructuring to how we keep our time is an opportunity for creative changes to other parts of our daily schedules. Our society relies on clocks to tell us where to be when, and we’ve had to adjust our bodies to respond to changes in the numbers. The point of all of this is at least in theory to help line up our lives with the sun. Maybe settling on a fixed time for the whole year can be an opportunity to rethink when certain things start.

Should Ohio freeze utility rates for a year?

Earlier this month, Ohio state Rep. Desiree Tims introduced a bill to freeze utility rate increases in Ohio for the next year.

Tims’s bill comes in a time of increasing concern about affordability. According to the Energy Information Administration, the residential price of electricity per kilowatt hour in Ohio grew 29% from 2019 to 2024.

Utility prices are an element of family budgets where the state has a clear lever for controlling costs.

Since electricity companies are regulated entities, they negotiate with the state public utilities commission to set prices for their ratepayers. The state has the ability to freeze these prices for a year if it wishes to do so.

In a lot of ways, this sort of policy change is like a sales tax holiday, which the state of Ohio has embraced in the past, or a gas tax holiday, which legislators have bandied about recently to offset gas price increases endured by Ohio in the wake of the U.S. war with Iran.

It represents a temporary suspension of a cost for ratepayers to provide relief in the short-term.

In the short term, a utility freeze would help low-income households.

According to the United States Department of Energy, the average low-income household in Ohio spends about 11% of their income on utilities compared to 3% for a median-income household and 1% for a high-income household.

While a utility freeze would be less targeted than an earned income tax credit, it would likely disproportionately benefit low-income households.

Energy insecurity can lead to unsafe health outcomes for households.

As many as 1 in 10 U.S. households report keeping their household temperature at an “unsafe” level due to energy prices.

A utility freeze could help households stabilize their finances without forcing them to cut back on heating or cooling their homes.

Stability in energy prices could even lead to stabilization in home environments that could have spillovers into educational outcomes, like what we’ve seen with federal energy assistance programs.

While low-income households spend a larger percentage of their income on energy, evidence from the Energy Information Administration suggests the highest-income households consume energy at nearly twice the rate of the lowest-income households.

This means upper-income households could be saving twice as many dollars from a utility rate freeze as low-income households, reducing the inequality impact.

The biggest problem with a rate freeze is that it could lead utilities to defer maintenance of existing infrastructure, which could impact reliability of electricity service and grid modernization efforts.

This could lead to more blackouts, especially as growth in energy demand is leading to more users taxing the power system.

Ultimately, this policy represents a bet that utility increases over the next year will not be used for essential maintenance, efficient grid modernization, or reliability upgrades that outweigh the short-term benefit the freeze would have for household incomes, especially for low-income households.

If Rep. Tims is right, this could mean better outcomes for households at little cost to the public.

If she is wrong, the short-term benefits would come at the cost of a quicker degradation of the grid, which means more blackouts and could lead to higher costs in the long run. 

While there is part of me that wants to see if her bet is correct, there is another part of me that thinks a more targeted policy, like an earned income tax credit expansion, would achieve the same boost to household income without the potential costs to the grid.

We’ll see if the General Assembly has an appetite for either.

This commentary first appeared in the Ohio Capital Journal.

Where are Ohio’s data centers headed?

Data centers have been one of the biggest news stories of the past year. Last month, my colleague Rob wrote about this trend: everyone is talking about data centers. For community members, worries about the environment, electricity prices, and societal change have become widespread. For developers and investors, the exponential growth of data centers across the United States is generating excitement.

In Ohio, data center construction has received a lot of pushback from local residents. Many people don’t want to see more data centers being built near their homes. For instance, in Columbus, residents are urging local lawmakers to require large data centers to submit water conservation plans and create decommissioning plans. Some data center proposals have been rejected across the state and many communities are considering pausing data center development entirely (a proposal we asked Ohio economists about a few months ago). 

Earlier this week, the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency announced it would not move forward with a permit that would have allowed data centers to discharge wastewater into natural water sources after receiving more than 7,000 comments on the proposal from the public. With all of this talk about data centers, I wanted to take a deeper dive into the existing and proposed data centers across the state. What kind of facilities already exist, and where are they located?

Where are data centers in Ohio?

Using data from DataCenterMap and Cleanview, we compiled a list of all existing and proposed data centers across Ohio. We found that there are 151 existing data centers in Ohio and an additional 143 data centers that have been proposed or are in development. We count each building as a separate data center, meaning that for larger data center campuses that include multiple facilities, each building is being counted separately. Below is a map of where the existing and proposed data centers are across Ohio. Seven planned data centers are omitted from the map due to insufficient data about the locations of these facilities. 

Data centers are most concentrated in Licking County and Franklin County in Central Ohio, where there are 66 and 64 existing and planned data centers respectively. Franklin County has a lot of existing facilities, a total of 50, while 38 of the 66 facilities in Licking County are planned or proposed. 23 of the 38 planned facilities in Licking County are from Amazon Web Services alone. Between 2015 and 2024, Amazon invested $6.2 billion in its Amazon Web Services data center infrastructure in Licking County. 

The next largest county for data centers in Ohio is Fayette County, home to Washington Court House and Jeffersonville. Fayette County doesn’t have any existing data centers, but has 23 planned and proposed data centers. All 23 of these data centers are from Amazon Web Services, for a total of nearly 1,800 megawatts of power (which would power 1.44 million homes, 125 times the number of households in Fayette County). Early last year, Amazon purchased 590 acres of land in Fayette County for just over $100 million to build these 23 facilities. They are expected to be completed within the next one to four years.

Similar to Fayette County, Portage County, home to Kent, Ravenna, and Streetsboro, has no existing facilities but 14 planned data centers. All 14 facilities will be part of one campus in Shalersville run by Bitdeer, a cryptocurrency mining and artificial intelligence cloud infrastructure company. The Bitdeer campus will be at least 650 megawatts (which would power 520,000 homes, 8 times the number of households in Portage County) and 257 acres of land. Bitdeer is expected to open its first two facilities in 2029 and the remaining 12 facilities in 2031.

How fast are data centers growing in Ohio?

The first data center in Ohio opened in 1966. Through the twentieth and early twenty-first century, data center growth was steady. Starting in 2017, data center growth became exponential. For reference, the first large language model (the first GPT model from OpenAI) was released in 2018, and ChatGPT released publicly in 2022.

If anything, the next several years is likely an underestimate, as there may be more data centers that will be planned and developed in Ohio in the next several years that aren’t yet announced (unless Ohio residents vote for a ban on data center development).

In addition to the total number of data centers in Ohio, the size and energy capacity of data centers is increasing exponentially as well. The number of hyperscale facilities, defined as data centers that take up at least 100,000 square feet of physical space and an energy capacity of 100 megawatts or more, is growing rapidly.

By 2034, Ohio is projected to have at least 36,000 megawatts of data center energy capacity across the state. 36,000 megawatts could power 28.8 million homes, which is 6 times the number of households in Ohio, and 21.5% of the number of households across the entire United States.

As data center growth continues, development will be a balance of competing interests: demand for digital services and artificial intelligence, environmental concerns, and local community priorities. Navigating these trade-offs requires us to weigh immediate capital gains against broader societal external costs and long-term resource availability. Evidence-based policy analysis is the key to understanding these tradeoffs moving forward.

This fall, Scioto Analysis will be releasing a cost-benefit analysis of existing and planned data center projects in Ohio to give policymakers and communities a clearer picture of the economic and environmental impacts of data centers across the state.