The Alabama Policy Institute (API) has delivered its “Blueprint for 2026: Building a Stronger Alabama” with the seasonal timing of a policy wonk’s Christmas morning, complete with 30 wrapped proposals arranged beneath three conceptual ornaments: free markets, limited government, and strong families.
The Blueprint’s architecture reflects traditional conservative priorities: 11 proposals bolster strong families, 10 advance limited government, and seven promote free markets. Rather than attempting to unwrap all 30 – a task that would try even Santa’s patience – permit me to examine a few consequential proposals.
Consider first the free market category, where two issues demand immediate attention. API rightly emphasizes the need to fully fund the state’s universal school choice program. The CHOOSE Act, enacted in 2024, established Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) to empower families to direct taxpayer funds toward educational options beyond public schooling.
Predictably, the program’s demand has exceeded its funding:
“More than 37,000 students applied for ESAs, demonstrating that many families desire to seek alternatives to traditional public schools. A large share of applications came from private-school and homeschool families. Among public-school awardees, roughly 58% used the $7,000 credit to switch to private schools, while about 13% used a $2,000 credit to begin homeschooling.”
These are not statistics; they are votes of confidence – or rather, votes of no confidence in the existing system.
The second free market priority addresses a different monopoly, one with the euphemistic designation “Certificate of Need.” API explains that CON laws are “regulations that require any new or expanded healthcare service or facility to be approved by Alabama’s state government,” a process that enriches attorneys, burdens providers, and ultimately inflates costs for patients.
API notes, “CON regulations restrict the supply of medical facilities and equipment, making them more expensive.” We have been getting conned by CON for decades; it is past time to acknowledge that limiting supply does not improve access, any more than rationing bread makes a population better fed.
The limited government category offers the perennial favorite: provide tax relief to all Alabamians. At fiscal year 2025’s conclusion, Alabama collected an unprecedented $14.504 billion in tax revenues, a figure that should prompt reflection rather than celebration.
When government coffers overflow, the conservative impulse should be to return surplus funds to the taxpayers who earned them. Tax reform would allow Alabamians to retain more of their hard-earned money.
Two less conventional proposals within this category warrant particular attention. First, API recommends alternative accreditation options for Alabama’s colleges and universities. Florida and several other states recently created a new accreditor, challenging the regional monopolies that have long governed higher education.
It is peculiar – perhaps embarrassing – that Alabama was excluded from this initiative. Surrounded by rapidly progressing red states that embraced this reform, Alabama risks becoming the cautious laggard in a region otherwise characterized by bold conservative governance.
Second, the Blueprint addresses the need to reform the governance of the Alabama High School Athletics Association (AHSAA), a de facto monopoly that recently became embroiled in controversy over the CHOOSE Act’s ESAs.
The AHSAA, operating as a quasi-public institution while enjoying public benefits and status, has demonstrated the accountability typical of unelected bureaucracies, which is to say, very little. API identifies the need to strip this organization of its public functions, largesse, and benefits. Monopolies – whether in healthcare, education, or high school football – rarely serve the public interest with the efficiency and responsiveness of competitive alternatives.
As an educator by training and experience, I was drawn to two proposals in the “strong families” category. API advocates promoting and improving civics education in K-12 public schools, a particularly urgent priority as we approach the Semiquincentennial in 2026. A republic cannot long endure if its citizens remain ignorant of its founding principles, its constitutional structure, and the habits of self-governance that sustain free institutions.
More controversially, API proposes promoting the lessons of the 10 Commandments in public schools. Before reflexive objections are raised, consider that the original public meaning of the First Amendment would never have prohibited such instruction.
The Founders understood religious instruction and moral formation as compatible with – indeed, essential to – public education. The Establishment Clause was designed to prevent a national church, not to expunge religious and moral instruction from the local public square. To claim otherwise is to impose upon the founding generation a secularist ideology they would have found both alien and alarming.
Like any Christmas wish list, the API’s Blueprint contains items that range from the obvious to the aspirational, from the urgent to the merely desirable. But unlike a child’s letter to Santa – filled with requests for toys that will be forgotten by February – this document offers a coherent vision for governance grounded in time-tested principles: that free markets allocate resources more efficiently than bureaucrats, that limited government preserves liberty better than expansive government, and that strong families form the irreducible foundation of a healthy society.
Whether Alabama’s legislators will prove as generous as Saint Nicholas in granting these policy wishes remains to be seen. One suspects that special interests – the defenders of CON laws, the education establishment, the AHSAA – will prove less accommodating than Kris Kringle. But then, serious policy reform was never supposed to be easy. It requires not the magic of Christmas morning, but the harder work of persuasion, legislation, and sustained political will.
Allen Mendenhall is a Senior Advisor for the Capital Markets Initiative at the Heritage Foundation. A lawyer with a Ph.D. in English from Auburn University, he has taught at multiple colleges and universities across Alabama and is the author or editor of nine books. Learn more at AllenMendenhall.com.
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