Chris Edwards The US Postal Service (USPS) is losing billions of dollars and has a bleak outlook. One reason why is that young people have gone digital and have little use for letter mail. With the continued relentless decline of letters in the coming years, roughly half of the USPS’s current revenues may disappear. Demographic data on postal system use ...
Norbert Michel and Jerome Famularo On September 1, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that President Trump may declare a “housing emergency” in the fall. This move comes after a long list of politicians, commentators, and think tanks have deemed the US housing market to be in a “crisis” that demands immediate federal government action. Additionally, Bessent has claimed that administration officials ...
David J. Bier Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is diverting criminal law enforcement agents away from their investigations and enforcement responsibilities to conduct civil immigration enforcement operations on a massive scale. New data highlight how widespread this misuse of government personnel and resources is. Congress should prevent this diversion of appropriated funds in the next government spending bill. According to ...
Jeffrey Miron Do government policies result from good intentions or from the self-interest of those who expect to benefit? Often, the answer is “both.” The classic illustration is US alcohol prohibition. Baptists thought it saved souls; Bootleggers believed it generated excess profits for those willing to break the law. New research applies this perspective to the rise and fall of ...
Matthew Cavedon Architecture can say a lot. The places that do the citizens’ work with the taxpayers’ money should be meaningfully open forums, not defiantly hostile fortresses (like, say, Boston’s City Hall, a notorious concrete middle finger to the public). That is especially the case for courts. While they face security challenges, the Constitution requires all their proceedings to be ...
Dominik Lett Following the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Republicans’ mammoth $4 trillion tax and spending law, Congress is now slowly turning to address the next series of budget debates, including annual appropriations for FY2026 and the expiration of pandemic-era enhanced Obamacare subsidies. As Romina Boccia and I outlined in our fiscal agenda paper earlier this year, ...
Neal McCluskey With Labor Day behind us, we are in full back-to-school swing. For the rest of the week, Cato Center for Educational Freedom scholars will be getting you up to speed on what’s happening in education policy as kids return to their assigned public elementary, pine-needle-cushioned forest school, hallowed Ivy League home, and more. To start things off, an ...
Patrick G. Eddington Northern District of California Judge Charles Breyer today issued a 52-page opinion and order finding that President Trump’s deployment of the California National Guard (CA NG) and active duty Marines to Los Angeles earlier this summer violated the Posse Comitatus Act—the 1878 law that generally bars the use of federal troops for domestic law enforcement operations. He ...
Mike Fox The plight of Jay Carey, a 54-year-old North Carolina Army veteran, began not with a roar, but with a flicker—a flame held to an American flag in Lafayette Park. The act was a protest, a statement against what he saw as injustice, but it quickly became something else: a legal battle that would shine a light on one of ...
Chris Edwards A recent US Postal Service (USPS) forecast shows that the relentless decline in paper mail over two decades will continue in coming years. Personal letters, invites, bills, bank statements, periodicals, and advertising junk mail are being replaced by the internet. The mail-sourced revenue supporting the massive 640,000-employee USPS is disappearing. This USPS figure shows that mail volume peaked ...