Thomas A. Berry and Ethan Yang Civil forfeiture allows the government to seize assets allegedly connected to a crime, even without a criminal conviction. This process was originally intended to be a tool for law enforcement to target the profits of criminal activity, such as stolen property. However, the lack of due process protections surrounding forfeiture proceedings has allowed the ...
Tad DeHaven A 2011 poll taken during the Obama administration found that 60 percent of those surveyed believed that the federal budget could be balanced by simply eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse. Half said Social Security and Medicare aren’t a problem for the budget. Those respondents were wrong. If that survey were conducted today, the results would probably be about ...
Peter Van Doren The Washington Post recently analyzed the role of federal land in constraining new housing construction in Las Vegas. About 1.5 million homes could be built on developable federal land within two miles of the Las Vegas city limits alone. The article described a policy innovation developed by Sen. Harry M. Reid (D‑NV) that allows the Bureau of Land ...
Romina Boccia and Ivane Nachkebia When it comes to Social Security, Congress keeps dodging the inevitable—real reform. Instead, we get piecemeal proposals like the Land and Social Security Optimization Act (the LASSO Act), introduced by Rep. Paul Gosar (R‑AZ), which attempts to shore up funding by allocating revenues from public land to Social Security. While well-meaning, this proposal is a ...
Walter Olson The February 18 executive order moving to assert White House supremacy over federal regulation is momentous, but not for the reason mistakenly surmised in some early reports. In declaring a general presidential authority to pronounce on legal interpretation, in particular, the order does not aim to aggress against the role of the courts in saying what the law ...
Jeffrey A. Singer Representative Nicole Malliotakis (R‑NY) has long opposed overdose prevention centers (OPCs). The City of New York and its Department of Health authorized the harm reduction organization OnPointNYC to open two OPCs, one in East Harlem and one in Washington Heights. They opened on November 30, 2021. Rep. Malliotakis opposed the move, and asked Attorney General Merrick Garland ...
Adam N. Michel House Republicans recently passed the first key legislative hurdle to modify and extend the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). The budget resolution allows a net $4.5 trillion tax cut, limiting the types of additional tax cuts Congress can include. Expanding the child tax credit (CTC) is likely one of the add-ons that will be curtailed. ...
James A. Dorn When Chinese AI firm DeepSeek released its innovative R1 model in late January—an open-source model that performs strongly with models developed at much higher cost by leading tech firms—the AI world was taken by surprise. US venture capitalist Marc Andreessen called R1 “one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I’ve ever seen.” It is built on DeepSeek’s ...
Tad DeHaven Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) chief Elon Musk recently said the following: “I think we do need to delete entire agencies as opposed to [leaving] part of them behind … If you leave part of them behind … It’s kind of like leaving a weed. If you don’t remove the roots of the weed, then [it’s] easy for ...
Alex Nowrasteh Congress is currently debating whether to spend about $175 billion on deportations to avoid future payments like the $650 million that Congress spent on shelter and other services for migrants last year. Poorly spending $650 million last year doesn’t justify spending 269 times as much to avoid similarly relatively small costs when Congress could just decide not to ...