David J. Bier President Donald Trump is promising to sell green cards “with a path to citizenship” to one million or more immigrants who pay his administration a fee of $5 million. He plans to shut down the EB‑5 immigrant visa category for investors and replace it with what he calls the “Trump Gold Card.” He has stated that he ...
Travis Fisher and Joshua Loucks What can the federal government do to avert ballooning deficits, unsustainable entitlement programs, and unfunded tax cuts? A leaked document from several House committees outlined a host of fiscal reform options available to the 119th Congress and President Donald Trump. Some promising ideas from the energy sector appear to be on the menu, including repealing ...
Scott Lincicome In today’s Wall Street Journal, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins revealed the Trump administration’s plan for lowering US egg prices, which have again spiked due to a large-scale outbreak of avian influenza. Buried among her proposals was a remarkable one (at least when coming from a Trump official): increasing egg imports to “reduce egg costs in the short ...
Jeffrey A. Singer A February 25 press release from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on provisional data showing that drug overdoses in the US dropped to 87,000 from October 2023 through September 2024. The previous year saw 114,000 overdose deaths. Fentanyl-related overdose deaths fell to 55,126 for that year, compared to 79,432 in the prior year. For perspective, ...
Colin Grabow In the Biden administration’s final days it released a deeply flawed report, conducted as part of a Section 301 investigation, that blamed China for many of the US maritime industry’s troubles. The report’s verdict cleared the path for punitive retaliatory measures, raising the question of how the newly ensconced Trump administration would handle the matter. Last week, the ...
Walter Olson President Donald Trump has moved to strip security clearances from lawyers at the storied international law firm of Covington & Burling to punish it for providing legal assistance to former special counsel Jack Smith, who led the federal prosecution of Trump over Jan. 6, the New York Times reports. The move is an extraordinary attack on the independence ...
Walter Olson Only days ago, Trump administration lawyers were unable to tell a judge who was the administrator of DOGE, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which by slashing agency outlays and personnel around the federal government has stirred broad national controversy. As a legal matter, the question is important because the answer could help determine whether DOGE, also known ...
Robert A. Levy This blog post updates and substantially enlarges my previous post on December 20, 2024. 1. When are executive orders valid and when are they invalid? The ground rules are: First, the president can issue executive orders pursuant to a grant of authority from Congress. Second, executive orders are legitimate if they relate to the president’s role as commander-in-chief, ...
Stephen Slivinski Ten years ago, on February 25, the Supreme Court of the United States reminded us that maybe the Sherman Antitrust Act, the federal statute passed in 1890 intended to enforce and increase market competition, should be aimed at the only lasting anti-competitive force in the modern market economy: the government itself. It all started nearly 20 years ago when ...
Jeffrey A. Singer When Mark Ibsen, MD, spoke as a panelist in the Cato online event “Pain Refugees: Collateral Damage in the War on Drugs” last December, he had no idea that representatives of the Montana Board of Medical Examiners (BOME) were watching. Three days later, he was shocked to receive a letter from BOME demanding he justify mentioning deceased ...