Walter Olson President Donald Trump’s series of executive orders proclaiming various lawyers and law firms guilty of supposed offenses and subjecting them to severe unilateral penalties—“orders of attainder,” as Prof. Paul Horwitz evocatively calls them—have largely focused on lawyers who’ve engaged in campaign, electoral, or prosecutorial work against Trump personally. Now two new penalty orders broaden the range of targets ...
Colleen Hroncich Honey Sayler has a passion for helping children learn to read. In addition to her elementary and special education degrees, she’s trained in the Orton-Gillingham method for literacy. So she was frustrated in public schools when students would have to drop into single-digit proficiency levels before being referred for special education. “We had to wait until kids got ...
Michael Chapman President Donald Trump is not a libertarian, but some of his policies for downsizing the federal government certainly fall in the libertarian column. This is true, for instance, of the administration’s drive to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which helps to fund PBS and NPR. Scholars at the Cato Institute have called on Congress for decades ...
Kayla Susalla One of the slew of executive orders President Donald Trump issued since assuming office includes re-evaluating visa programs to weed out potential national security threats. In response, federal agents have detained, and are seeking to deport, multiple international college students and faculty members, and universities have issued warnings advising students that traveling to certain countries could impact their ability to re-enter ...
Thomas A. Berry and Mike Fox Property owners in New Braunfels, Texas, have long exercised the fundamental rights to acquire and make use of their property, including the right to make their homes available for rent on a short-term basis. That all changed in 2011 when the city adopted an ordinance banning short-term rentals from all residential areas. The city’s ...
Adam N. Michel and Joshua Loucks As Americans file their taxes and square up with the IRS, it’s worth taking a closer look at where the federal government’s $4.9 trillion in revenue came from last year—and what it actually pays for. Despite persistent political narratives, IRS data show that the federal tax system is not only highly progressive but has ...
Jeffrey Miron In the name of “political fairness,” some US officials advocate unprecedented government regulation of social media. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr claims platforms are “discriminat[ing] against viewpoints” and pose “the greatest threat [to free speech] we have seen.” Senator Josh Hawley (R‑MO) champions government oversight of social media, introducing the “Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act” to deny Section 230 protections ...
Emily Ekins and Hunter Johnson 89 Percent Favor Auditing All Government Spending to Root Out Waste, Fraud, and Abuse; Americans Would Cut 40 Percent Across the Board Findings from the Cato Institute’s 2025 Fiscal Policy National Survey of 2,000 Americans reveal a bleak assessment of the government’s financial responsibility. More than three-fourths (76 percent) of Americans believe the federal government ...
Chris Edwards With a bloated cost structure and falling demand for its products, the US Postal Service (USPS) is in trouble. I contend that privatizing the agency is the best way forward, and President Trump seems open to the idea. Currently, the president’s DOGE team is digging into USPS operations to find cost savings. A recent report on foreign postal systems provides ...
Jeffrey A. Singer Below is an excerpt of the new book, Your Body, Your Health Care (Cato Institute 2025) by Jeffrey A. Singer, MD, a senior fellow in Health Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, a practicing surgeon, and a fellow of the American College of Surgeons. Chapter One A central tenet of the liberal tradition is that every individual ...