Dominik Lett Emergency designations were originally intended as a narrow exemption to spending limits to provide for true, unforeseen crises. Over time, Congress has increasingly come to treat emergency designations as a pressure valve to evade spending limits and fund non-emergency, routine government operations. Preventing further abuse of the emergency designation—and the fiscal harm that comes with it—starts with revitalizing ...
Walter Olson Today, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formally rejected the Trump administration’s proffer to nine universities of a supposed “Compact for Excellence.” The proposed deal doesn’t seem much more popular at other institutions, which have given it little if any affirmative response so far; at a meeting of University of Virginia faculty, 97 percent rejected the idea. My ...
Jeffrey A. Singer During a White House cabinet meeting on October 9, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., claimed there may be a link between the circumcision of male babies and young children and autism, stating circumcised boys were twice as likely as uncircumcised boys to be diagnosed with autism. He cited two studies, saying the link ...
Ian Vásquez Maria Corina Machado has won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize “for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.” The Nobel Committee made an excellent choice. Maria Corina Machado is one of the world’s most admirable leaders. After a quarter ...
Colleen Hroncich When Jennifer Granberry found out during pregnancy that her youngest son would likely have Down syndrome, she and her husband immediately started thinking about what his future would look like. “We want him to have the best life that he can have. And we want him to have the same opportunities, as best he can, that everybody has,” ...
Ryan Bourne and Nathan Miller President Trump first mused about a US Sovereign Wealth Fund during his 2024 presidential campaign. Shortly after taking office, he signed an executive order instructing his Treasury and Commerce secretaries to design such a fund. Those plans would ultimately stall, but as we summarized in August, what we’ve seen instead is a wave of ad hoc stakes ...
Matthew Cavedon In 2017, St. Louis police officer Christopher Tanner shot fellow officer Milton Green when both were in the line of duty. Tanner claimed that he shot Green, who was off-duty and outside his own home, because Green—despite facing the opposite direction—had pointed a gun at him and defied his commands. But Green alleged that he actually kept his ...
Chris Edwards The federal government shutdown is damaging the nation’s air traffic control (ATC) operations. Thousands of flights have been delayed due to short staffing at ATC facilities. ATC employees are supposed to be on duty during shutdowns, but some are staying home because they are not being paid. We’ve seen partisan budget battles screw up our aviation system before. ...
Michael F. Cannon Grumpy economist John Cochrane, the Rose-Marie and Jack Anderson Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a Cato Institute adjunct scholar, has published a kind and lengthy write-up of my National Affairs article, “U.S. Health Care: The Free-market Myth.” Cochrane and I may have some differences of interpretation. Where I write: Medicare pays ambulatory ...
Matthew Cavedon On Monday, Senator Chuck Grassley (R‑IA) revealed that the FBI spied on nine Republican senators during the Biden administration. Politico responded by dismissively huffing that the agency did not technically tap the Senators’ phones—it merely tracked the time and length of the calls they made. It should have added that the FBI also logged who was involved in ...