Jeffrey A. Singer Today President Trump announced he will ask Congress to enact what he calls “The Great Healthcare Plan.” The proposal is light on details, but one item on the White House fact sheet jumped out at me: making more proven, safe drugs available over the counter. From the fact sheet: Allow More Over-the-Counter Medicines Make more verified safe ...
Chris Edwards The Minnesota fraud scandals have put the spotlight on wasteful federal aid-to-state programs. The scandals surround federal aid for food programs, health care, and day care. My new study on community development aid raises similar issues of fraud and waste. The federal government spends $1.1 trillion a year on 1,400 aid-to-state programs. I have argued that Congress should ...
Michael F. Cannon President Trump’s “Great Health Care Plan” has great ideas that greater simplicity could make even better. The best proposal: “Allow More Over-the-Counter Medicines.” Government-imposed prescription requirements increase prices and block access to countless medicines. The best idea: Let consumers control health care dollars. “Obamacash for enrollees” would expand Obamacare and create countless problems. “Universal health accounts” would ...
Neal McCluskey In Tuesday’s Supreme Court oral arguments about two cases concerning transgender female athletes participating in women’s sports, Justice Brett Kavanugh sounded the right note. As SCOTUSblog reported: Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested (among other things) that the Supreme Court should stay out of the debate right now given the “scientific uncertainty” and the “strong assertions of equality interest on ...
Romina Boccia, Michael F. Cannon, and Adam N. Michel Republicans won in 2024 in part by vowing to lower the cost of living through restraining federal spending and ending policies that drive up prices. Reconciliation is a powerful policy tool for realizing those goals and delivering results for the American people. As House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington put it, “You ...
Colleen Hroncich In her recent State of the State address, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs painted the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program as an unaccountable “entitlement” riddled with fraud. This is a flawed portrayal that ignores the benefits of the program. ESAs enable parents to use state education funds to choose educational options that work best for their children. Interestingly, ...
Matthew Cavedon Yesterday, the Supreme Court decided Barrett v. United States. While the decision, written by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, was virtually unanimous (apart from a disagreement about a few citations to legislative history), in the background lurks a dispute among the justices over whether Congress or the Constitution should drive the reach of double jeopardy protections. The Fifth Amendment’s ...
Walter Olson Number 19 in our series of occasional roundups on election law and policy: Here’s the deal, says the US Department of Justice to states: We’re going to send you lists of voters we think are ineligible, and you’re going to take them off the rolls. That “would hand the federal government a major role in election administration, a responsibility ...
David J. Bier The State Department announced it will suspend immigrant visa processing for nationals of 75 countries starting next week. This ban builds on prior bans that had already barred immigrant visas for 40 countries, accounting for one in five legal immigrants. This new ban brings the number of banned nationalities up to 93, 42 percent of those in the world, ...
Jeffrey Miron As of late 2025, more than two dozen US states had enacted laws that partially or completely ban gender-affirming medical care for minors; roughly half of all transgender adolescents now live in states where such care is restricted or at risk of being banned. In addition, the federal government recently adopted measures that effectively ban gender‑affirming care for ...