Chris Edwards With today’s massive budget deficits, the Trump administration and Congress should look for savings in every federal department. That includes the massive $859 billion Department of Defense (DOD) and the huge $365 billion Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). The Congressional Budget Office released charts last week with an overview of spending in the two departments. This chart breaks ...
Alex Nowrasteh The Trump administration issued an executive order (EO) on January 20, 2025, to create a process to designate some international criminal organizations and drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs). There have been no updates to the State Department’s list of FTOs yet. To be designated an FTO, the State Department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism (SDBCT) must demonstrate that ...
Jeffrey Miron Since at least Aristotle, new technologies have raised fears of major job losses as businesses substitute machines for people. The industrial revolution led to the Luddite movement in early 19th-century England; 100 years later, Ford’s assembly line sparked fears that skilled artisans would no longer be needed. A priori, the net impact of “labor-saving” technologies is ambiguous. In some ...
Chris Edwards The federal government is hurtling toward a fiscal crisis. Accumulated debt is reaching historic highs, borrowing rates are rising, and spiking inflation is a major risk. President Trump and Congress must focus on control of spending and deficits. Given their plans for tax cuts and defense spending increases, Republicans need large budget cuts to prevent the government’s $2 ...
Brandan P. Buck President Trump was elected in 2024 partly on his promise of ending “America’s endless wars.” The Trump administration says it doesn’t want new wars, boldly declaring that “[w]e will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end—and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.” While ...
Adam N. Michel The final installment in our tax bootcamp series covers the international tax system. It starts by describing what multinational tax systems attempt to do, covers the three theoretical types of international tax systems, discusses how real-world rules fit the theory, and reviews the magnitude of profit shifting—the boogieman that drives aggressive international rulemaking. The last section briefly ...
Nicholas Anthony Debanking is generally characterized as the sudden closure of a financial account. The causes of debanking, however, are just as important as the end result. And it’s for that reason that it may be time to refine how debanking is discussed. When looking at different cases of account closures, there tend to be two types of debanking taking ...
Michael Chapman Ayn Rand was born on Feb. 2, 1905, one hundred twenty years ago this week, and died on Mar. 6, 1982. Ayn Rand is world-renowned because of her pro-capitalist novels, such as Atlas Shrugged, which continue to sell hundreds of thousands of copies every year. Yet her nonfiction writing and public lectures are just as compelling as her ...
Walter Olson In its early executive orders and actions, the Trump administration has regularly taken steps that go beyond what standard legal opinion would have to be its authority. This weekend, according to news reports, the administration indicated that it is dissolving the US Agency for International Development, possibly folding some of its functions into the State Department, even though ...
David J. Bier President Trump signed several executive orders on his first day in office that relate to immigration. These orders will backfire and result in a more disorderly, dysfunctional, and expensive immigration system. He is diverting America’s military and all types of law enforcement away from their primary public safety and security missions and toward this economically destructive and ...