Frozen cherry pie manufacturers have finally been liberated from one of the most unnecessary Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations. And it only took nearly 20 years of lobbying!
On March 14 ("Pi Day," of course), the FDA announced that "standards of identity and quality" for frozen cherry pies that were implemented in 1971 were revoked as of April 15. These standards of identity mandated how many cherries needed to be in frozen cherry pies (25 percent by weight) and how blemished they were permitted to be (only 15 percent) in order to be included in these pies.
What made these standards unusual, even taking into account the reams of FDA regulations that exist, is that these regulations applied only to cherry pies, and specifically to frozen cherry pies. Fresh cherry pies did not have to meet these standards. Frozen apple pies did not have to meet these standards. Only these pies did.
There are costs to these regulations, to be clear. There's an entire complicated compliance process the FDA implemented in 1971 to make sure manufacturers put the right amount of high-quality cherries into pies.
What was absent from all of this was any evidence that Americans needed the federal government's protection from lower-quality frozen pies. The American Bakers Association submitted a petition to the FDA all the way back in 2005 to see if this rule could be revoked.
Eventually the FDA agreed and announced plans for a rule change. As an example of how long it takes for even the tiniest amount of deregulation to happen, this initial announcement came in December 2020, under former President Donald Trump's administration. But that was just the announcement of the pending rule change; the whole lengthy process wasn't actually completed until March 2024.
The FDA explained when it announced the change was finally coming:
No standards of identity and quality exist for any other types of frozen fruit pies, or for any non-frozen fruit pies, including non-frozen cherry pie. We conclude that the standards of identity and quality for frozen cherry pie are no longer necessary to promote honesty and fair dealing in the interest of consumers.
Reason covered the announcement of the change back in 2020, noting at the time, "The reality is that it's not 1971 anymore, and innovations in both agriculture and food preparation have given Americans more options and competition, such that people don't actually have to settle for crappy frozen cherry pies." If some pie manufacturer decides to put out unpalatable cherry pies now that the government has eased the rules, consumers can simply buy somebody else's, or even make their own much more easily than they could have in 1971.
It has taken nearly 20 years to eliminate a petty food regulation that doesn't really serve a purpose, one that advancements and improvements in the marketplace had already rendered obsolete.
The post After Nearly 20 Years, They Finally Freed the Frozen Cherry Pie appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>William D. Eggers is co-author, with Donald F. Kettl, of Bridgebuilders: How Government Can Transcend Boundaries to Solve Big Problems. He's now the executive director of Deloitte's Center for Government Insights, but 30 years ago, he ran the privatization center for Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason.
Eggers has since worked with dozens of governments at all levels, both in the United States and internationally, and he's written a shelf's worth of books on the proper scope and function of government. Reason's Nick Gillespie talked with Eggers about Bridgebuilders, what he's learned over the past three decades about making government more effective and less intrusive, and why it's long past time to move beyond what he and his co-author call "the vending machine model" of government.
The post Can the Government Be More Effective? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>This week, after more than a decade of debate, government officials chose a location for a new FBI headquarters, replacing the J. Edgar Hoover Building that has stood in downtown Washington, D.C., since the 1970s. The new building, which will be located in Maryland, will be able to accommodate thousands of agents and is expected to cost billions.
The government has long advocated for a new building, with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) noting in 2011 that the Hoover building was "nearing its life-cycle age and exhibiting signs of deterioration" and "do[es] not fully support the FBI's long-term security, space, and building condition requirements."
A much more budget-conscious solution, which lawmakers seem not to have considered, would be to simply shrink the size of the FBI.
FBI officials wanted to keep the building in Washington, citing proximity to both the White House and the Department of Justice (DOJ). The bureau even suggested building a secondary facility in Maryland or Virginia to act as "a command center for cyber operations." But lawmakers from those states were unswayed, inserting language into a 2022 spending bill that directed the General Services Administration (GSA) to choose a new headquarters site from three options: Greenbelt, Maryland; Landover, Maryland; and Springfield, Virginia.
On Thursday, the GSA announced that it had chosen Greenbelt, where it would build a new facility in addition to a smaller facility in downtown Washington that could house up to 1,000 agents. The GSA noted that the Greenbelt location is very close to a Metro stop and would involve the cheapest and quickest timeline for acquisition and construction.
Each of the proposed sites had problems: According to an October DOJ inspector general report, the FBI was "concerned" that the Greenbelt site "was half wetlands and the amount of buildable space was far less than what was anticipated when the site was selected." The Springfield location, while most convenient to access the FBI training facility in Quantico, Virginia, "had multiple government agencies…that needed to be relocated, which the FBI believed would be costly, time-consuming, and logistically complicated." FBI officials found all three options lacking, but favored the site in Landover, even though it "had the worst mass transit access," according to the DOJ report.
No matter the site, the new headquarters won't be cheap: In its FY 2024 budget proposal, the DOJ asked Congress for $3.5 billion for the new building, which it says would house "at least 7,500 personnel."
But while lawmakers and government agencies have been arguing over where to house these many workers, they've largely ignored the fact that they could simply reduce the FBI's footprint.
Proponents of a new facility say that the Hoover building is too small to accommodate the size of the current FBI. In a 2011 response to a GAO report, FBI Associate Deputy Director Thomas Harrington noted that the building "houses just 52% of headquarters staff with the remainder at 21 off-site leased locations." Plans for the new headquarters refer to it as a "consolidation" effort intended to bring nearly all agents under one roof.
It's not clear that the FBI needs so many agents in the first place. From its inception in 1908 until the Hoover building opened in 1975, the FBI operated within the DOJ building. During that time, it mostly enforced interstate crimes like banking fraud or forced labor.
Over time, the bureau's mandate has increased dramatically—and excessively. "When the FBI first occupied the Hoover Building, it was primarily a law enforcement organization," the 2011 GAO report noted. "Since then, its mission has grown in response to evolving threats and now includes counterterrorism, counterintelligence, weapons of mass destruction deterrence, and cyber security." As the purview of federal law enforcement has expanded, especially since 9/11, federal agencies have expanded in turn.
Lawmakers have fought for over a decade about whether to consolidate the FBI's massive work force at a multibillion-dollar facility in Maryland or Virginia. They should have been considering a very different issue: how to shrink the expensive and expansive agency.
The post The FBI Needs Downsizing, Not $3.5 Billion for a New Headquarters appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The federal government is sitting on millions of square feet of unused office space.
That's the upshot of a new report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which found that even before the COVID-19 pandemic cleared out offices and introduced much of the country to remote work, "federal agencies have long struggled to determine how much office space they need to fulfill their missions."
"The federal government owns over 460 million square feet of office space that costs billions annually to operate and maintain," the report notes.
The GAO surveyed the 24 federal agencies that use most of the federal government's buildings; these included the Departments of State, Commerce, Justice, Transportation, Homeland Security, and Education, as well as agencies like the Social Security Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency. Then, the GAO calculated the square footage of each agency's headquarters compared to its average in-person attendance during one week each in January, February, and March 2023.
The report found that, on average, 17 of the 24 agencies surveyed used 25 percent or less of the available space in their headquarters buildings. Even agencies on the higher end only averaged between 40 percent and 49 percent.
This problem is not unique to the federal government. Washington, D.C.'s WTOP News reported in July that 18.9 percent of office buildings in the nation's capital are empty, a record high. In the first quarter of 2023, the vacancy rate in New York City rose to 16.1 percent, signifying 76 million square feet of empty office space.
But the situation is obviously very different when the taxpayers are the ones footing the bill. The GAO report notes that the 24 agencies it surveyed "spend about $2 billion a year to operate and maintain owned federal office buildings." Owing to the sheer size and scope of the cost, some agencies put off maintenance and repairs. The GAO recommends "disposing of underutilized buildings in need of repair" as a cost-saving measure.
To make matters worse, even as agency headquarters are mostly empty, "federal agencies spend about $5 billion annually to lease office space from the private sector and from the federal government," accounting for over 83 million square feet of office space.
The GAO recommends that agencies reassess their respective needs, using "benchmarks…that account for greater levels of telework." It also notes that there is a "unique opportunity to reconsider the federal government's real property portfolio."
Getting rid of unused real estate could also have positive effects outside of federal balance sheets. "In the local economy, unneeded properties and land could be put to productive use," the report notes. "Selling a federal building to the private sector also can increase the local tax base, as federal buildings are generally exempt from local taxes."
Reason previously reported on an earlier version of the final report, related to data compiled by government watchdog organization OpenTheBooks.com, showing that government agencies spent more than $3.3 billion on office furniture since the beginning of the pandemic even as their buildings sat largely vacant.
The post Federal Agencies Maintain Offices That Sit Mostly Empty appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>More than three years since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, it appears that working from home is here to stay. A March 2023 Pew Research survey noted that of all Americans who have the option, more than one-third work entirely remotely—a fivefold increase from pre-pandemic levels. Another 41 percent work a hybrid schedule of both remote and in-person work, an increase from 35 percent in January 2022.
Federal employees are no different: According to a November 2022 survey, one-third of federal employees work entirely remotely while 60 percent work a hybrid schedule; most of the hybrid group go into the office one day per week and work remotely the other four days.
So why, then, is the federal government still spending billions of dollars on office furniture?
According to a new report by the government watchdog organization OpenTheBooks.com, the federal government has spent $3.3 billion on office furniture since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The report found "no material difference in the amount federal agencies collectively spent on office furniture between the years 2018 and 2022." In fact, the government spent considerably less in 2018 than in any of the subsequent four years.
A July 2023 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) surveyed the 24 federal agencies that occupy most of the federal government's buildings. It found that 17 out of the 24 agencies "used an estimated average 25 percent or less of their headquarters buildings' capacity in a three-week sample period across January, February, and March of 2023."
In fact, none of the agencies surveyed—which included the Departments of Defense, Commerce, State, Justice, Homeland Security, and the Treasury, among others—used more than 49 percent of their capacity in an average week.
The GAO report notes that none of the surveyed agencies have returned to pre-pandemic staffing levels and have instead embraced the hybrid model. The situation presents a cost-saving opportunity, according to the report, as "the federal government retains more space than it needs" and did so even prior to the pandemic.
Not that the government seems to be paying attention. Using the GAO report's ranges, OpenTheBooks.com compared expenditures on office furniture with the agencies' respective levels of in-person staffing. In one example, despite only using around 9 percent of its office space, OpenTheBooks.com found that the Department of Agriculture spent almost $57 million on furniture between 2020–22. The General Services Administration—which manages federally owned buildings, including the purchase of office furniture—also uses only around 9 percent of its total office space, and yet it spent $308 million on furniture.
The biggest pandemic purchaser was the Department of Defense, which spent $1.2 billion on furniture although it only uses 23 percent of the space at its administrative headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, according to OpenTheBooks.com.
"Most federal headquarters are barely a quarter full on a given workday, and no major agency is at more than half capacity," OpenTheBooks.com founder and CEO Adam Andrzejewski said in a statement. "Yet for some reason we've bankrolled [billions of] dollars in desks, chairs, couches and more – while employees clock in from their own living rooms."
Government furniture scandals are nothing new: In 2017, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) spent over $31,000 on a dining room set for Secretary Ben Carson's office. The HUD inspector general later reported that it "did not find sufficient evidence to substantiate allegations of misconduct" as Carson canceled the expenditure once it was reported in the media.
In 2018, the West Virginia House of Delegates impeached members of the state's Supreme Court of Appeals over lavish spending of state funds. The justices reportedly spent more than $3 million on furnishings and renovations as the struggling state made tens of millions of dollars in budget cuts. One justice in particular spent over $500,000, including $28,000 on rugs; another spent $32,000 on a blue suede sectional sofa.
The post The Federal Government Spent $3.3 Billion on Office Furniture as Employees Worked From Home appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>This week's featured article is "After 50 Years, the DEA Is Still Losing the War on Drugs," by C.J. Ciaramella.
Audio generated using AI.
The post <i>The Best of Reason</i>: The DEA at 50 appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"COCAINE UNIQUELY FITS THE FAST-PACED AMERICAN LIFESTYLE," reads a caption for an exhibit at the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Museum in Arlington, Virginia. "The Federal Bureau of Narcotics considered cocaine a nearly defeated drug," it continues. "However, cocaine use rebounded, reaching its highest use level ever at the end of the 20th century." It's an oddly candid observation to find in a place you'd expect to celebrate the federal agency whose mission is to "enforce the controlled substances laws and regulations of the United States."
The DEA is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, marking half a century of abject mission failure. During five decades as a bottomless money pit that has destroyed countless lives while targeting Americans for personal choices and peaceful transactions, the agency's annual budget has ballooned from $75 million to $3.2 billion. The DEA currently operates 90 foreign offices in 67 countries. It has seized billions of dollars in drugs, cash, vehicles, and real property. Since 1986, it has arrested more than 1 million people for manufacturing, distributing, or possessing illegal drugs. Yet in 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) counted more than 107,600 drug-related deaths—an all-time high. The DEA's own data show a steady, gradual decline in price and rise in purity for most street drugs since the 1980s. The DEA's 2020 National Drug Threat Assessment notes that methamphetamine "purity and potency remain high while prices remain relatively low," and cocaine availability remains steady.
While there are some reasons to believe Americans may finally have tired of the DEA's oversized role in their lives, the agency remains a powerful force. To understand what went wrong—and why it will keep going wrong—you have to go back to the agency's origins.
On April 4, 1972, President Richard Nixon's drug war landed in Humboldt County, California. The DEA, which was established the following year, was still only a glimmer in Nixon's eye at this point. But its playbook was being written here, outside the backwoods cabin of 24-year-old Dirk Dickenson.
As a Huey helicopter touched down near the cabin, plainclothes law enforcement officers brandishing pistols and long guns leaped out. The chopper was accompanied by five police cars. There were 19 law enforcement agents in total, including the county dogcatcher. Two television cameramen and a newspaper photographer were in tow as well, lured by a deputy sheriff's promise of the biggest drug bust in county history. They were expecting to find a huge PCP lab guarded by gun-toting, long-haired freaks.
The officers were the tip of the spear in a new campaign. A year earlier, Nixon had declared drug abuse "America's public enemy number one" and vowed to "wage a new, all-out offensive" against it.
Dickenson and his girlfriend both initially wandered outside to gawk and wave at the helicopter landing on their property. Dickenson, like many other California hippies, had drifted into rugged Humboldt County to escape the bummers of city life. When they caught sight of the guns, Dickenson and his girlfriend realized this wasn't a friendly house call and rushed back inside.
Several things then happened very quickly, all under the deafening sound of the helicopter's rotors. The officers started breaking down the front door of the cabin. Dickenson ran out the back and bolted for the treeline. Several officers gave chase, but one of them stumbled and fell. Lloyd Clifton, a former Berkeley police officer and an agent of the federal government's 4-year-old Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), assumed his bumbling comrade had been shot. Clifton stopped, leveled his .38 revolver at the fleeing, unarmed hippie, and shot Dickenson in the back while TV cameras rolled.
Dickenson died from massive internal bleeding while waiting to be evacuated to the hospital. Police found personal-use amounts of marijuana, hashish, peyote buttons, and LSD in Dickenson's cabin, but no giant drug lab. A judge later dismissed charges of second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter against Clifton, the first federal drug agent to be charged with homicide.
The BNDD was the precursor to the DEA, created as part of a plan to consolidate federal drug enforcement—then split among several agencies and departments—under one umbrella agency and massively increase its funding. At its founding in 1968, the BNDD had 615 agents and a $14 million budget. Its early efforts were focused on three sources of drugs consumed by Americans: marijuana pouring in from Mexico, heroin smuggled from France, and domestically manufactured LSD. The lead agent in the Dickenson raid had previously arrested Owsley Stanley, the Grateful Dead's soundman and one of the biggest acid cooks in the country.
In 1973, the DEA was formally created by a reorganizational plan that Congress approved, absorbing the BNDD and several other federal agencies. Its beginnings were not auspicious. The agency's leadership was hamstrung by backbiting and accusations of corruption, and its on-the-ground operations were dogged by incompetence.
A 1973 New York Times investigation found a string of botched drug raids by BNDD task forces, soon to be the backbone of the DEA, across the country. "Such incidents have resulted in at least four deaths, including one policeman slain when a terror stricken innocent woman shot through her bedroom door as it burst open," the Times reported. "In California one innocent father was shot through the head as he sat in a living room cradling his infant son."
A Rolling Stone editor, Joe Eszterhas, spent two years investigating federal drug enforcement, including the Dickenson raid, and concluded these narcotics agents weren't police officers, whom he had some respect for. They were "deputized gangsters," he wrote in his book Nark!
That was the public perception as well. The DEA's first director, John R. Bartels Jr., complained the American people did not know what the agency really did and regarded its agents "as corrupt Nazis who don't know how to open the door except with the heel of their right foot." (Dirk Dickenson was unavailable for comment.)
But instead of being shelved as an unpopular mistake, those early joint task forces became the blueprint for how domestic drug enforcement is still carried out today. Congress passed new laws, and courts hacked away at the Fourth Amendment to accommodate the drug war and shield officers from liability, allowing the raids to continue unimpeded and largely out of public view.
The DEA Museum does not mention any of the botched raids that figured prominently in the agency's early history, although it does display a .38 revolver like the one that killed Dickenson. The gun looks old-timey and quaint next to the displays of submachine guns and shotguns that DEA agents would soon be armed with.
Federal marijuana enforcement in the 1970s was a failure by every objective measure. It did not put a dent in the U.S. marijuana supply, despite several busts of massive grow operations. In 1979, for example, a DEA/FBI task force busted Miami's "Black Tuna Gang," which smuggled more than 500 tons of pot into the country over a 16-month period. Yet "by the 1980s," an official DEA history notes without further reflection, "more than 60 percent of American teenagers had experimented with marijuana and 40 percent became regular users. Supply also continued to increase."
The Reagan administration's solution was to double down. In April 1981, presidential adviser (and future attorney general) Edwin Meese announcedto a room of 250 prosecutors that the administration would mount "a more massive and extensive" campaign against drug trafficking than ever before attempted.
In 1985, another helicopter landed in Humboldt County, this time outside the home of Judy Rolicheck and her family. The air power was part of the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, a task force of federal, state, and local law enforcement officers that used helicopters—and even U-2 spy planes—to surveil Northern California for outdoor marijuana grows. After the helicopter landed, around 25 task force members held the Rolichecks at gunpoint for two and a half hours and shot their dog. There was a marijuana grow about 600 yards away, out of sight of the house, but the Rolichecks had nothing to do with it. The agents left, and the family was never charged with a crime.
A lawsuit filed that year by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) on behalf of numerous Humboldt County residents, including Rolicheck, alleged they were being harassed by the low-flying helicopters and that the agents were ransacking their houses and seizing property without warrants. The U.S. Supreme Court would later rule, in a 1989 case involving marijuana, that police could use aircraft to perform warrantless searches of backyards.
This was the beefed-up war on drugs. The DEA was in an arms race against sophisticated cartels and smuggling operations inundating the country with cocaine and marijuana, and the reality on the streets was far messier than the pastel-draped heroics of Miami Vice.
Legendary Miami Herald crime reporter Edna Buchanan described an incident in which a DEA informant who made money on the side by robbing drug dealers ripped off two undercover DEA agents by mistake. The agents responded by initiating a running gun battle down a South Miami street. The informant escaped but turned himself in the next day after reading a newspaper article that explained who his robbery victims were. Since he was a good informant, the feds accepted a heartfelt apology and the return of the stolen cash in lieu of prosecuting him.
During the 1980s, the DEA's powers continued to expand while oversight of its widespread domestic and foreign operations was minimal. In a 1986 cover story for Reason, Dale Gieringer investigated the slimy underworld of the DEA and its confidential informant program, warning that "the DEA has become a law unto itself, an agency out of control." Gieringer described illegal extraditions, abusive searches and seizures, and suspects who were beaten by foreign law enforcement officers at the order of DEA agents.
"Under the aegis of President Ronald Reagan and Attorney General Edwin Meese, the DEA has pursued increasingly aggressive and unscrupulous tactics of entrapment, seizure, surveillance, and paramilitary violence," Gieringer wrote. "Thanks to public antidrug hysteria, a compliant Congress, an uncritical press, and a court system increasingly dominated by Reaganite judges, the DEA has enjoyed virtual carte blanche to trample on individuals' rights."
The Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 strengthened the DEA's influence by expanding civil asset forfeiture, which allows police to seize property allegedly related to criminal activity. The law allowed the federal government to share up to 80 percent of forfeiture revenue with state and local police, creating a strong financial incentive for departments to work with federal task forces and redirect resources to drug enforcement.
In places like Humboldt County, entrepreneurial innovation once again triumphed. The DEA's official history brags that the marijuana eradication campaigns of the 1980s and early '90s "put so much pressure on growers that many abandoned their outdoor cultivation on public and private land for the safety of indoor cultivation." But it adds that "indoor cultivated marijuana created new concerns for law enforcement; it was of such high quality and potency that American marijuana became the most sought-after cannabis in the world."
In a televised 1989 speech, President George H.W. Bush announced yet another escalation of the war on drugs while waving a plastic baggie of crack purchased from a dealer whom DEA agents had lured to "a park just across the street from the White House." The dealer got almost a decade in prison, and Bush got his prop. Describing illegal drug use as "the gravest domestic threat facing our nation," he said "we won't have safe neighborhoods unless we are tough on drug criminals—much tougher than we are now."
Tapped to deliver the Democratic Party's response, then-Sen. Joe Biden (D–Del.) complained that Bush was not tough enough. "The president said he wants to wage a war on drugs," Biden said. "But if that's true, what we need is another D-Day, not another Vietnam; not another limited war fought on the cheap and destined for stalemate and human tragedy."
Democrats and Republicans ensured the drug war was not cheap, but the human tragedies continued. During the next two decades, tough-on-crime bills pushed by Biden and like-minded legislators bore their rotten fruit. The total incarcerated population in the United States skyrocketed from roughly 500,000 in 1980 to more than 2.3 million at its peak in 2008.
Drug crimes were not the primary driver of mass incarceration; violent offenses were. But in the federal prison system, about half of all inmates were serving sentences for drug offenses, and they still account for roughly the same share.
Mandatory minimum sentencing laws led to draconian penalties, especially for crack cocaine offenses. Thousands of crack cocaine offenders received federal prison sentences substantially longer than what they would have received for an equivalent cocaine powder violation.
In 1998, for example, Jason Hernandez, then 21, was sentenced to life in federal prison plus 320 years for conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine. President Barack Obama commuted his sentence in 2013. "The person who supplied me [with cocaine] ended up getting 12 years," Hernandez told me in 2016. "I got life because I converted it to crack cocaine. I deserved to go to jail. I deserved to go to jail for a long time, but I didn't deserve to die in there."
The war on drugs also consistently produced racially disparate results. In fiscal year 2020, the U.S. Sentencing Commission reports, 77 percent of federal defendants sentenced for crack trafficking were black, while 16 percent were Hispanic and 6 percent were white. In 2019, The Washington Post reported that none of the 179 defendants arrested in DEA "reverse-sting" cases during the previous decade in the Southern District of New York were white.
Meanwhile, the DEA's response to the "opioid crisis" offered a stunning example of drug enforcement's perverse effects. The DEA, working with local and state police, started monitoring doctors and cracking down on those suspected of running "pill mills." The threat of prosecution, combined with restrictions imposed or encouraged by regulators, legislators, and the CDC, drove opioid prescriptions down. But those efforts had the opposite effect on opioid-related deaths, which not only continued to rise but rose at an accelerated rate.
When local pain clinics were shut down or scared away and anxious doctors began eschewing opioid prescriptions, not only addicts but people with legitimate chronic pain issues were left to suffer—or turn to black market alternatives that were much more dangerous because their composition was highly variable and unpredictable. The DEA Museum obliquely acknowledges the unintended but predictable consequences: "Following a crackdown on overprescribing, users turned to heroin. Overdose deaths increased rapidly."
The hazards of black market drugs were magnified by the rise of illicit fentanyl as a heroin booster and substitute, which made potency even harder to predict. Heroin-related deaths quintupled between 2010 and 2016. That number has fallen since then. But for the category of opioids that includes fentanyl and its analogs, deaths rose more than twentyfold between 2013 and 2021. As Reason's Jacob Sullum argued, the DEA's enforcement efforts were not only futile; they were "remarkably effective at making drug use deadlier."
An exhibit just outside the DEA Museum is called "Faces of Fentanyl." Displayed on the walls are thousands of pictures of people who died from fentanyl poisoning, all contributed by family members. The oldest person on the wall is 70. The youngest is 17 months old. The display is sobering but also infuriating given the policy failures that led to its creation.
In addition to making drug use deadlier, the DEA makes air travel perilous by robbing passengers who dare to carry large amounts of cash. Stacy Jones became one of those victims when a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screener stopped her at the Wilmington, Delaware, airport in May 2020.
Jones was not very worried at first. She and her husband were returning to their home in Tampa after a casino trip. They had $43,000 in cash in a carry-on bag, which the TSA screener found alarming.
Even after the screener called over a sheriff's deputy, who started to ask about the source of the cash, Jones remained confident that everything would be sorted out. She knew the law, or she thought she did. She knew it was perfectly legal to fly domestically with large amounts of cash. "We're gamblers," Jones says. "We've hit jackpots, and we've traveled with money. So we've never, ever thought that this could happen. Never."
They had a solid explanation: They said they had flown to North Carolina for a casino reopening. They had dinner with friends, who were interested in buying a Maserati that Jones' husband owned. The friends paid for the car in cash. Because of a sudden death in the family, Jones and her husband never made it to the casino. They booked a last-minute flight home. Jones put the money from the car sale, along with cash she had for gambling, in the carry-on bag and headed for the airport.
It was when the deputy called in two DEA agents that Jones got concerned. "When the DEA walked in, it felt serious at that point," she says.
In the interrogation room with the two DEA agents, the pressure on Jones ratcheted up. They made Jones and her husband go over the story again—casino, car purchase, vacation cut short. They brought in drug-sniffing dogs. A DEA agent followed Jones into the bathroom and stood outside the stall. She felt like a criminal, even though she knew she wasn't."
I was shaking, crying, panicking, worried about my job, worried about the money, worried if they were going to take us to jail," Jones says. "The humiliation of that—it's a helpless feeling."
The DEA agents decided the couple's story did not add up. They announced that they were seizing the cash based on suspicion it was drug money. After taking all of the cash the couple had, except for $500 in a bank envelope, they released Jones and her husband to catch their flight home without a receipt or any other paperwork.
Thanks to the laws passed in the 1980s, DEA agents did not need to charge Jones with a crime to seize her money. They simply needed probable cause to believe the money was connected to illegal activity, a judgment that in practice may amount to nothing more than a hunch.
"They just tell you your story doesn't add up," Jones says. "And then they take your money and make you fight for it."
After the couple got home, Jones started researching what had happened to them. She had never heard of civil asset forfeiture before. She quickly discovered she was not alone.
A 2016 USA Today investigation found the DEA, working with local police departments, had seized more than $209 million from at least 5,200 travelers at 15 major airports during the previous decade. The newspaper reported the DEA regularly snoops on travel records and maintains a network of confidential informants in the travel industry.
That was just a partial survey. According to a 2017 report from the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General, the DEA had seized more than $4 billion in cash from people suspected of drug activity during the previous decade. More than three-quarters of that sum—$3.2 billion—was seized from people who, like Jones and her husband, were never charged with a crime.
Although Jones was not prosecuted, she was suspended from her job at Delta Air Lines during the ordeal. After a few months, she was forced to resign until she could clear her name.
When an owner tries to recover property seized by the DEA, the government is supposed to prove a criminal nexus by "a preponderance of the evidence," meaning it is more likely than not that the property is connected to illegal activity. Federal law allows an "innocent owner" defense, which requires a claimant to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that he either did not know about any illegal activity or did all he reasonably could to stop it.
Since this is a civil process, however, property owners are not entitled to an attorney. They bear the cost of challenging a forfeiture action and proving their innocence. When Jones called a local attorney the day after the seizure in Delaware, he told her it would cost too much and advised her to just let the money go.
Fortunately for Jones, her research showed that many victims of the DEA's airport seizures were fighting back with help from the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm that combats forfeiture abuse. In July 2020, Jones joined a class action lawsuit the Institute for Justice had filed against the TSA and the DEA. The lawsuit contends the DEA has a policy or practice of presumptively seizing cash in amounts of $5,000 or more from travelers at airports, "regardless of whether there is probable cause for the seizure." That practice, the complaint says, violates the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures.
On November 13, 2020, the U.S. government agreed to return the money the DEA had taken from Jones and her husband. Although Jones was rehired by Delta, the couple never received an apology from the DEA. But why would they? The DEA is only doing what presidential administrations have ordered it to do, and what courts have emboldened it to do for 50 years: fight a pointless, wasteful war that sacrifices the rights of innocent Americans.
While all of this has been going on domestically, the DEA's foreign operations have drawn more scrutiny, for understandable reasons. The history of those efforts is littered with headline-grabbing scandals.
In 1985, drug traffickers abducted and murdered DEA Special Agent Enrique Camarena in Mexico. It was a pivotal moment in DEA history, impelling the agency to focus on transnational cartels. Since then, the DEA's foreign operations have generated some of its greatest successes: the killing of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar in 1993 with the assistance of DEA technology and manpower, the dismantling of the Cali Cartel, and the interdiction of vast quantities of cocaine and other drugs.
But the massive amount of money flowing through the drug trade makes these foreign posts prone to bribery and corruption. During the last decade, DEA offices in Mexico, Honduras, Colombia, and Haiti have all been plagued by accusations of serious misconduct.
A 2015 report from the Justice Department's inspector general revealed that at least 10 DEA agents stationed in Colombia had sex parties with prostitutes hired by cartels. Two years later, another inspector general report concluded the DEA had lied to the public, Congress, and the Justice Department about a 2012 incident in which DEA advisers ordered a Honduran law enforcement helicopter to open fire on a water taxi full of civilians, killing four people, including two women and a 14-year-old boy. Although the DEA insisted someone on the boat had fired on them first, video evidence strongly suggested otherwise.
More recently, a veteran DEA agent, José Irizarry, was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison for conspiring to launder a Colombian cartel's money. But before he went to prison in 2022, Irizarry decided to take everyone else down with him. In a series of interviews with the Associated Press (A.P.), he accused dozens of his colleagues of skimming millions of dollars to fund extravagant lifestyles and debauchery across three continents.
"We had free access to do whatever we wanted," Irizarry told the A.P. "We would generate money pick-ups in places we wanted to go. And once we got there, it was about drinking and girls."
Irizarry repeated the harshest criticisms of the international war on drugs, but this time from the perspective of someone on the inside. "You can't win an unwinnable war," he said. "DEA knows this, and the agents know this….There's so much dope leaving Colombia. And there's so much money. We know we're not making a difference."
In March, the DEA released a review of its foreign operations, initiated in the wake of the Irizarry scandal. While the report makes several recommendations for improving oversight of the agency's foreign posts, the fundamental problem with the DEA's mission to disrupt international drug trafficking can't be fixed: Everyone knows what the score is.
"The drug war is a game," Irizarry observed. "It was a very fun game that we were playing."
The DEA Museum takes up a couple of large rooms on the first floor of the agency's headquarters. It's a muted, occasionally amusing collection. Among the exhibits are several issues of High Times, a Homer Simpson bong, a copy of Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems, a "life mask" of Pablo Escobar donated by the Colombian National Police, and the Versace-branded, diamond-studded guns of the notorious cartel boss Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán.
To its credit, the DEA Museum is professional and, if not critical, at least somewhat realistic about the game of whack-a-mole the agency has been playing for the last 50 years. The museum does not ignore marijuana legalization, and it alludes to the disastrous impact of the DEA's crackdown on prescription opioids. But there's always the weight of hanging questions and things left unsaid. Visiting the museum is an exercise in ironic distance; it's a place that public opinion is leaving behind.
In May, Minnesota became the 23rd state to legalize recreational marijuana. A 2022 Pew Survey found that 88 percent of U.S. adults say marijuana should be legal for either medical or recreational use. According to Gallup, two-thirds of Americans favor the latter policy.
In 2020, Oregon became the first state to decriminalize simple possession of all drugs. Another Oregon ballot initiative approved that year authorized the use of psilocybin at state-licensed "service centers." Last year Colorado voters went further by eliminating criminal penalties for noncommercial production, possession, and distribution of five naturally occurring psychedelics. Several cities have taken more modest steps in the same direction.
The DEA continues to dump sand in the gears of legalization where it can. But as the gulf between public opinion and federal drug policy widens, the agency's duties seem increasingly farcical. Five decades should be long enough to admit we've made a terrible mistake and relegate the DEA to a museum.
The post After 50 Years, the DEA Is Still Losing the War on Drugs appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Customers dissatisfied with Amazon Prime—the $14.99 monthly subscription service that includes free shipping and unlimited access to Amazon's streaming television service—must jump over an unreasonable number of hurdles to cancel their memberships, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleges.
In a lawsuit filed Wednesday against Amazon, the FTC explains that consumers must click "a minimum of six times" to navigate from Amazon.com's main page through the entirety of the cancellation process. In the FTC's telling, this is a harrowing journey that requires users to navigate confusing options like "end membership" to, well, end their membership. One must also have the fortitude to endure a page in which Amazon tries to dissuade the cancellation with a reminder about the benefits of being a Prime member. This six-click process is deliberately difficult to navigate, the FTC claims, and is part of a "deceptive" scheme to lock consumers into their memberships.
Ah, but do you know how many clicks it would take to submit your feedback to the FTC about its decision to file this lawsuit? Seven.
That tally, courtesy of Patrick Hedger, executive director of the fiscally conservative Taxpayers Protection Alliance, sums up the silliness of the FTC's latest attack on Amazon.
To be clear, the too-many-clicks claim is the heart of the lawsuit filed Wednesday by the FTC, which asks a federal court in Washington to find that Amazon "used manipulative, coercive, or deceptive user-interface designs…to trick consumers into enrolling in automatically-renewing Prime subscriptions" and "knowingly complicated the cancellation process."
Maybe the ideal number of clicks to cancel an online subscription is four or five instead of six—but it seems unlikely that a federal court is the best venue to determine that sort of thing. Indeed, it seems absurd for the FTC to act as if this is a situation that requires government action at all.
According to The New York Times, there are more than 200 million Amazon Prime subscribers who spent about $35 billion last year on those memberships. Prime subscriptions are a major revenue stream for one of the world's most successful companies. Still, the available evidence suggests that people are opting into Prime memberships because they want to do so—or, at least, that they find the benefits worth paying for.
Likewise, there's little evidence that consumers are mad at Amazon's behavior. A recent Morning Consult report found Amazon to be the second most trusted brand in the United States, trailing only Band-Aid. In the same survey, it was reported that Amazon Prime users have a more favorable opinion of the company than the general U.S. population does.
Contrary to the FTC's lawsuit, there does not appear to be a class of individuals who need rescuing from Amazon Prime, a service that subscribers can cancel in less time than it takes to read an article bemoaning that the FTC is once again wasting coercively obtained tax dollars harassing a private company funded by voluntary transactions.
The post It Takes 6 Clicks To Cancel Amazon Prime and the FTC's New Lawsuit Says That's Too Many appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"If the Durham report shows anything, it is that the FBI leadership bent over backward to protect [Hillary] Clinton's campaign while launching a full investigation into [Donald] Trump's campaign on the thinnest of pretexts," writes journalist Eli Lake in a recent article for The Free Press.
Lake says the 306-page report from special counsel John Durham, released to the public on May 15, is a "black eye for the FBI," which he says was sloppy, inconsistent, and possibly "helped inject what may have been Russian disinformation into the American political discourse."
Join Reason's Nick Gillespie and Zach Weissmueller this Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern for a deep dive into the contents of the Durham report and a discussion with Eli Lake of the questions it raises about the integrity of the FBI, the honesty of the media, and the lasting effects that the Russia investigation has had on U.S. politics.
Watch and leave questions and comments on the YouTube video above or on Reason's Facebook page.
The post Dissecting the Durham Report appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>For nearly two decades, the vast majority of foreign nationals working in the United States have been able to renew their visas only by returning to their home countries and obtaining a visa stamp at a U.S. embassy or consulate. Only workers on diplomatic visas can renew them in the United States. But that will change when the State Department brings back domestic visa renewals for some nondiplomatic foreign workers.
Foreigners working in the U.S. on H and L visas will be eligible for the targeted pilot program. That move will be especially significant for H-1B workers, who are employed in highly specialized jobs. As of 2019, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services reported that roughly 583,000 authorized-to-work H-1B holders were present in the country. The renewal program could eventually be expanded to other visa holders, according to a Bloomberg News interview with Julie Stufft, deputy assistant secretary for visa services in the State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs.
Historically, all U.S.-based foreign workers could renew their visas without leaving the United States. But the State Department discontinued stateside visa renewal in 2004 as a result of the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act, a post-9/11 law intended to enhance security in the visa issuance process. The law's precautionary provisions included additional interview requirements and the gathering of biometric identifiers. The State Department said it was "not feasible" to collect the latter information domestically.
Many foreign workers have had to endure lengthy waits to get their visas stamped in their home countries, which is a precondition of reentering the U.S. after traveling abroad for personal or business reasons. Delays only got worse as a result of COVID-related consulate closures and processing backlogs at the State Department. Well into the pandemic, foreigners were still waiting months for their appointments—and as long as a year at consulates in India as of 2022. Immigration advocates and trade groups have cited domestic renewal as a viable solution to the gridlock, especially for Indian visa holders.
Domestic visa renewal will eliminate one of the many hoops foreign workers in the U.S. must jump through, helping them and their employers. It should also reduce backlogs at American consulates abroad, shortening the queue for visa appointments.
Because the State Department plans to open a new consular division to handle domestic renewals, there is no clear start date for the program yet. The sooner, the better, both for U.S.-based companies and for the foreigners they employ.
The post State Department To Bring Back Domestic Visa Renewal for Some Foreign Workers appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>If you worry that one day armed federal agents might kick down your door, you probably assume that they would at least come from a law enforcement agency. But as it turns out, they might just be tax collectors.
That revelation comes from a newly updated report compiled by Open the Books, a government watchdog organization. It follows up on revelations first made by Open the Books founder and CEO Adam Andrzejewski in a 2016 Wall Street Journal op-ed.
The report alleges that since 2006, 103 federal agencies not contained within the Department of Defense (DOD) have collectively "spent $3.7 billion on guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment" (all numbers adjusted for inflation). Of those 103 agencies, 27 are "traditional law enforcement [entities] under the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)."
That leaves 76 agencies—including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—without a direct law enforcement purview. As the report put it, "There are now more federal agents with arrest and firearm authority (200,000) than U.S. Marines (186,000)."
The IRS in particular has spent $35.2 million on guns and ammo since 2006. Of that, according to a spreadsheet Andrzejewski provided to Reason, over $9.75 million has been spent just since 2020, including more than $2.2 million on ammunition, $474,000 on rifles, $463,000 on shotguns, and $1.17 million on ballistic shields, plus another $1.3 million on "various other gear for criminal investigation agents." According to a December 2018 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), in 2017–18, the agency had 4,461 guns and 5,047,300 rounds of ammunition in inventory.
The existence of armed IRS agents is not new information: Last year, the Inflation Reduction Act apportioned $80 billion in new funding for the agency, including $45.7 billion in "enforcement," estimated to support as many as 87,000 new hires. When some Republicans recoiled at the idea of tens of thousands of armed tax collectors, fact-checkers helpfully pointed out that only one division of the agency, IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI), employs special agents who carry guns. IRS-CI has been around since 1919, charged with enforcing crimes like money laundering and narcotics trafficking. An IRS-CI spokesperson told Reuters that of the more than 81,600 IRS staff, only the 2,100 IRS-CI special agents carry guns.
PolitiFact further reported that while the IRS "did spend about $725,000 on ammunition" in 2022, "that is not unusual, and is actually a bit less than what was spent in other recent years."
But is that really a comforting statistic? Dividing $725,000 by 2,100 agents suggests that, on average, every single IRS special agent gets $345 in ammunition per year. And while PolitiFact notes that IRS-CI "famously investigated gangster Al Capone," each of the "top 10 cases of 2022" listed on its website consisted of nonviolent schemes like money laundering and fraudulently obtaining pandemic aid; its No. 1 case was the conviction of attorney Michael Avenatti for payroll tax fraud. It's not clear, in that context, why the IRS even needs its own gun-toting police force, much less why it needs rifles, shotguns, 5 million bullets, and more of each every year.
As Open the Books details, the IRS is not the only agency with a swelling stockpile: The HHS employs nearly 500 special agents, and since 2006, it has spent $154 million on "guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment." According to a spreadsheet that Andrzejewski provided to Reason, since 2020, the HHS has spent over $427,000 on "tactical combat gear," $247,000 on ammunition, $100,000 on "law enforcement weapons," and $99,450 on a "virtual reality weapons simulator," among other expenditures. This is all in addition to a $685,000 line item simply listed as "law enforcement equipment."
Why, exactly, does the federal agency, whose stated mission includes "fostering sound, sustained advances in the sciences underlying medicine, public health, and social services," spend so much on guns, ammo, and combat gear?
Partly, that total includes the National Institutes of Health's Division of Police, a 96-member police force that patrols NIH facilities around the country. But it also includes the HHS Office of the Inspector General (OIG), the agency's oversight authority that was tasked with protecting Anthony Fauci after he received death threats in 2020. At the time of the December 2018 GAO report, the HHS OIG had 1,061 pistols, 12 revolvers, two rifles, one shotgun, 194 "fully automatic firearms," and 929,461 rounds of ammunition.
Police militarization is a serious problem: Between 2006 and 2016, the federal government gave local police departments $2.2 billion worth of equipment intended for military use. During the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, the American public saw riot police deploying tear gas while riding in armored trucks that looked more suited for a war zone in the Middle East than a town in the Midwest.
So it's that much more troubling that not only are local police departments stocked with military-style weaponry, but federal administrative agencies are armed to the hilt as well. Andrzejewski told Reason in a statement, "A generation ago, there were clear distinctions between general administrative agencies and law enforcement agencies. Since we broke this story on the militarization of the federal agencies in 2016, the feds are continuing to blur the lines."
The post Why Do Federal Bureaucrats Need So Much Firepower? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Is everything not forbidden then permissible for federal agencies? That's the question at the heart of a legal battle that the Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear—a case which could (hopefully!) curtail the power of the administrative state.
Does statutory silence—that is, nothing in a law saying yay or nay—on powers narrowly granted elsewhere mean that a federal agency has the authority to use those powers broadly? Or must explicit authority to act be granted by Congress? One would think (and hope) that it's the latter; otherwise, the power of federal bureaucrats is basically unchecked. Unsurprisingly, the government is essentially arguing the former.
The case is Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimando, and it concerns a National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) rule requiring fishing vessels to fund a federal monitoring program. Under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, fishing boats must accommodate federal monitors, though the law says nothing about requiring boat owners to pay for them.
But the impact of this case goes way beyond fisheries. How the Court rules here could have major implications for federal regulations of all sorts.
That's because the court is set to take another look at Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, a 1984 case setting a precedent of extreme deference to federal agencies in cases concerning the limits of their statutory authority. The Chevron precedent "has been extensively used by the U.S. government in arguing environmental, financial and consumer protection cases," notes Robert Barnes at The Washington Post.
It's frequently cited by the government to justify regulations when the authority to pass said regulations is being challenged.
In the current case, the group challenging the NMFS rule is a coalition of New Jersey fishing firms. Their lawyer (and former solicitor general) Paul D. Clement told the Post that the Supreme Court's decision could not only "deliver justice to these fishermen but also…reconsider a doctrine that has enabled the widespread expansion of unchecked executive authority."
"It's the phrasing of the question presented…that is of particular interest," writes Case Western Reserve University law professor Jonathan Adler at The Volokh Conspiracy:
The petition for certiorari in Loper Bright presented two questions to the Court:
- Whether, under a proper application of Chevron, the MSA [Magnuson-Stevens Act] implicitly grants NMFS the power to force domestic vessels to pay the salaries of the monitors they must carry.
- Whether the Court should overrule Chevron or at least clarify that statutory silence concerning controversial powers expressly but narrowly granted elsewhere in the statute does not constitute an ambiguity requiring deference to the agency.
Of note, the Court only granted certiorari on the second question, meaning that the briefing and argument will focus on whether the Court should "overrule" or "clarify" Chevron v. NRDC. To say this is significant is an understatement.
The prospect of overruling Chevron already has legal commentators in a tizzy, but it is important to note that the question presented is not limited to whether the Court should overturn Chevron. The QP asks the Court, in the alternative, to limit Chevron—some would say, confine Chevron to its proper domain—by making clear that a statutory silence does not constitute the sort of ambiguity that justifies deference to the agency. Put another way, the QP asks the Court to reinforce the principle that agencies only have that authority Congress has actually delegated to them or, if you prefer, that a statute grants what it grants, and the rest is silence.
In recent years, the Court has not relied on Chevron when deciding cases, though the Chevron doctrine is still used regularly by lower courts.
Libertarians and conservatives have both been skeptical of this reliance.
"Courts deferring routinely to regulators' interpretation of the law encourages them to aggregate power to themselves while depriving harmed parties of effective judicial remedies," commented Iain Murray, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. "Natural justice and due process require a judiciary that is more involved in determining what the law says. Chevron deference should be overturned as a matter of regulatory hygiene."
Adler thinks the Court will not overturn the Chevron doctrine but is likely to narrow it, making "clear that statutory silences and ambiguities should not be construed as grants of agency authority."
"This is of a piece with…the elevation of the Major Questions doctrine," he points out. "This is a way to curtail the ability of agencies to aggrandize their power, but without destabilizing judicial review of agency action."
Americans worry about misinformation but disagree about its causes. A new survey from the Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights suggests that the vast majority of people are worried about the spread of misinformation. Some 93 percent of those surveyed said the spread of misinformation is a problem. But people were much more divided when asked where to place the blame:
About two-thirds of adults attribute responsibility for the spread of misinformation to U.S. politicians, social media companies, and their users. But nearly as many (58%) are holding the news media responsible as well. And when it comes to fixing the problem, 63% of adults say the news media has a great deal or quite a bit of responsibility to address the spread of misinformation.
More here.
Nick Cowen, a senior lecturer in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the U.K.'s University of Lincoln, talked to Aaron Ross Powell about the role of markets in delivering social justice. A sample:
I think when it comes to things like harm, what people on the left will draw a lot of attention to is the externalities of markets, so things like pollution which have bad impacts on people's well-being. I think a very current thing that's happening at the moment is the debate about what kind of energy we should be reliant on. Should we be relying on fossil fuels, nuclear power, or renewables?
When it comes to car driving, are we going to be using petrol or gasoline or moving over to electric? It's interesting because it matches up with some cultural conflicts, a bit of the culture wars. On that front, I tend to think that the basic thrust of what progressives are trying to achieve is actually quite right. There are a lot of externalities that come from our current reliance on fossil fuels. It's not just climate change. It's literally the urban environment that we're in.
There's a lot of social harms out there. What they slightly miss is the dynamic aspect of this, that these technologies themselves were at some point ways of solving other problems. We're not born into a world where externalities don't exist and then we just introduce them. We're always already in a position where we are engaging in activities that are beneficial to the immediate parties but have some impacts on people around them.
Normally, or at least hopefully, these individual actions are small enough that they don't require direct intervention. When the level of activity, say the amount of car usage rises enough, and suddenly, it's having visible effects on people's health. Also when technology changes such that it's possible to track that behavior, to track that activity, and there's new alternatives that come in, then it is time to transition. How does that transition happen? It is going to happen substantially through things like innovation and incentives coming out through commercial society. That's the way that I try and pitch our position.
As market liberals, we shouldn't be married to a particular set of institutions or set of technologies, regardless of whether they emerge thanks to the state or thanks to the market—or as is realistically the case—a combination of the two. We always have a lesson about the process by which we're going to move from a relatively worse position to a relatively better position. The other thing is that we're nearly always talking about relatively better positions, not ultimately the best position. We don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good in our political economy.
Listen to or read the whole interview here.
• "At long last, the U.S. federal government will end the COVID-19 vaccine mandates for international travelers, federal workers, Head Start employees, and the healthcare industry," notes Reason's Robby Soave. "The mandates will expire on May 11, the date that President Joe Biden has designated as the formal end of the COVID-19 public health emergency."
• Pornhub blocks viewers in Utah.
NEW: Pornhub has blocked Utah from viewing its adult content, in protest of a new age-verification law the #utleg passed that goes into effect this week: https://t.co/qOemD1H8jv @fox13 #utpol #Utah
— Ben Winslow (@BenWinslow) May 1, 2023
• Minnesota lawmakers have approved a bill legalizing recreational marijuana use.
• "Mom influencer" Katie Sorensen has been convicted of filing a false police report after claiming—in a story that went viral—that strangers were trying to abduct her kids at a Michaels store.
• Inside the scene at Bluesky, the possible Twitter replacement created by former CEO Jack Dorsey.
The post Supreme Court Could Rein In Administrative State With New Case appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>After months of revelations about government working behind the scenes (both cooperatively and coercively) with online platforms to suppress disfavored speech, it's fair to assume that a federal official knows what he's saying when he calls for increased efforts to root out what he describes as "misinformation." That the official in question is the head of the FDA, which recently admitted to major missteps, calls for humility and more respect for the right to disagree with the powers that be.
"Life expectancy in the U.S. is between three and five years lower than the average in other high-income countries—and the gap comes in part from misinformation," Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf told CNBC last week. The FDA head lamented America's standing relative to other developed countries and attributed it to bad information about vaccines, food, and lifestyle.
"Why aren't we using knowledge of diet? It's not that people don't know about it," Califf wondered. "Why aren't we using medical products as effectively and efficiently as our peer countries? A lot of it has to do with the choices that people make because of the things that influence their thinking."
So, what is Califf's solution? If you guessed he thinks something must be done about that bad information, you get a gold star.
"I think there is a real need for better regulation of how we deal with this complex information," Califf said. "I'm highly aware that in our society, people don't want government to have too much power, but I think specific authorities at FDA, FTC, other areas are gonna be needed."
Califf has been banging this drum for a while now. Last October, at the National Food Policy Conference, he railed against "rampant misinformation and disinformation that is destabilizing communication, undermining confidence in science and the work we do, and weakening faith in governmental and other institutions, including the FDA." Somebody must have whispered in his ear since then about constitutional limitations on his power.
"I'm not arguing here that we should suppress free speech," Califf belatedly added in last week's CNBC interview. "The First Amendment is the First Amendment. But we have to counter that information with truthful information and reach many, many more people."
The thing is, there is a lot of bad information out there. But some of it comes from the government itself. That's at least part of the explanation for the "weakening faith" that upsets Califf.
Back in 2021, even normally pro-establishment CNN complained that government officials "lack consistency on masks" and that "keeping track of mask mandates and recommendations can feel like a full-time job." The best research now suggests the controversial impositions did no good.
Likewise, the once not-to-be-discussed-in-polite-company lab-leak theory of COVID-19's origin is currently endorsed by federal agencies including the Department of Energy and the FBI.
Is "better regulation" of information going to be focused on misinformation for the ages? Or will it be turned on whatever ideas are unpopular with a temporarily ascendant faction?
And while Califf makes a government official's rote genuflection to the First Amendment, he does so after extensive revelations that his colleagues did their worst to bypass free-speech protections.
"The United States government pressured Twitter to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19 and the pandemic," David Zweig reported for The Free Press in December after new owner Elon Musk revealed its behind-the-scenes dealings. "Internal emails that I viewed at Twitter showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform's content according to their wishes."
Some media cooperation with government was seemingly willing, though it's hard to know when officialdom can twist arms with threats of legislation and regulation.
"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) played a direct role in policing permissible speech on social media throughout the COVID-19 pandemic," Reason's Robby Soave reported. "Confidential emails obtained by Reason show that Facebook moderators were in constant contact with the CDC, and routinely asked government health officials to vet claims relating to the virus, mitigation efforts such as masks, and vaccines."
Government pressure "disfavored perspectives that dissented from official advice, and it encompassed not just demonstrably false statements but also speech that was deemed 'misleading' even when it was arguably or verifiably true," Reason's Jacob Sullum wrote in January.
So much for targeting a clearly identifiable class of "misinformation." And so much for "The First Amendment is the First Amendment." The government has already leaned on private companies to suppress speech that turned out to be at least debatable when not entirely accurate.
Califf should know all about official fallibility, including of the FDA over which he presides. Just last summer he conceded that the FDA's restrictive rules were partially to blame for the baby formula shortage. "The FDA intends to consider enforcement discretion requests until the temporary shortage is addressed," he said in a statement.
What would a government that kneecapped the baby formula supply chain with ill-considered red tape and has demonstrably been wrong about what constitutes "misinformation" do with the FDA head's fulfilled wish of expanded power to enforce "better regulation of how we deal with this complex information?" If you're thinking that the result would be a hot mess of suppressed conversations and at least some bad data elevated over good, you're paying attention.
It's no revelation that government officials want us all to sit down, shut up, and abide by whatever trendy advice occupies their fancy—until it changes. But evidence evolves, ideas are tested by debate, and facts are more elusive than what can be captured by government memos about misinformation. Officials' obsession with policing what we say to the point of sneakily evading constitutional protections for speech demonstrates a blind spot as to their own fallibility.
Free speech protections aren't based on the assumption that truth will always prevail, but on the knowledge that it's slippery and can't be determined by decree. FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf wants to suppress misinformation, but he's in no position to reliably distinguish truth from falsehood.
The post FDA Head Wants 'Better Regulation' of What Government Considers Misinformation appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>While technically unconnected to each other, recent reports about the Secret Service and Immigration and Customs Enforcement playing fast and loose with rules regarding cellphone tracking and the FBI purchasing phone location data from commercial sources constitute an important wake-up call. They remind us that those handy mobile devices many people tote around are the most cost-effective surveillance system ever invented. We pay the bills for our own tracking beacons, delighted that in addition to tagging our whereabouts, they also let us check into social media and make the occasional voice call.
"The United States Secret Service and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security Investigations (ICE HSI) did not always adhere to Federal statute and cellsite simulator (CSS) policies when using CSS during criminal investigations involving exigent circumstances," the Department of Homeland Security's Office of the Inspector General reported last month. "Separately, ICE HSI did not adhere to Department privacy policies and the applicable Federal privacy statute when using CSS."
The OIG report referred to the use of what is commonly called "stingray" technology—devices that simulate cellphone towers and trick phones within range into connecting and revealing their location. "When used to track a suspect's cell phone, they also gather information about the phones of countless bystanders who happen to be nearby," the ACLU warns about their use.
Because of their indiscriminate nature, stingrays are supposed to be used only with court authorization. That usually means a warrant, and the report found the agencies got a warrant when required. But in "exigent" circumstances requiring fast action, law enforcement is still supposed to get a lesser pen register order. Even under emergency circumstances involving risk of death or serious injury, applications for a pen register order are required within 48 hours of use, essentially authorizing surveillance after the fact. That doesn't always happen.
For a subset of investigations from 2020 to 2021, "the Secret Service did not obtain pen register court orders for [redacted] investigations using CSS under exigent circumstances, as required by policy and statute," noted the OIG. During the same period, for a redacted category of investigations, "ICE HSI did not obtain warrants and was unable to provide evidence it applied for or obtained pen register court orders."
Investigating agents from the agencies also failed to document "supervisory approval before CSS use and data deletion upon mission completion."
"The fact that government agencies are using these devices without the utmost consideration for the privacy and rights of individuals around them is alarming but not surprising," commented Matthew Guariglia, senior policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). "The federal government, and in particular agencies like HSI and ICE, have a dubious and troubling relationship with overbroad collection of private data on individuals."
And that brings us to the FBI's cellphone surveillance. This revelation might be a bit less dramatic, referring as it did to a (supposedly) past practice of determining where people have been rather than where they are now, but it was still eye-opening.
"To my knowledge, we do not currently purchase commercial database information that includes location data derived from internet advertising," FBI Director Christopher Wray responded to a question from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) during a March 8 Senate Intelligence Committee hearing. "I understand that we previously, as in the past, purchased some such information for a specific national security pilot project. But that's not been active for some time." He then offered to provide more information in closed session.
"When we use so-called adtech location data it is through court-authorized process," Wray added.
Wray's "adtech" is software and tools used to target digital advertising campaigns. In order to personalize advertising, the apps we use on our mobile devices gather a lot of data on us, what we do, and where we've been that is tied to a unique ID.
"The IDs, called mobile advertising identifiers, allow companies to track people across the internet and on apps," Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson wrote for The New York Times in 2021. "They are supposed to be anonymous, and smartphone owners can reset them or disable them entirely. Our findings show the promise of anonymity is a farce. Several companies offer tools to allow anyone with data to match the IDs with other databases."
The tracking-beacon nature of our phones is so obvious and intrusive that the Supreme Court ruled in Carpenter v. United States (2018) that "the Government will generally need a warrant to access [cell-site location information]." But adtech gathers GPS data from commercial tools, not locations from cellphone companies, and is considered marketing data. That data is openly available for sale. Among the buyers are government agencies working around the Carpenter decision.
Wray said that, to his knowledge (nice hedge there), the FBI doesn't currently purchase adtech. But even if true, that's a policy decision, not a legally binding guarantee. Other agencies very definitely do purchase commercial cellphone location data, and the courts have yet to weigh in.
And, post-Carpenter, even the most precise phone company location data remains available with court approval. The courts are currently mulling multiple cases involving "geofence warrants" whereby law enforcement seeks data not on individuals, but on whoever was carrying a device in a designated area at a specified time. Think of high-tech fishing expeditions made possible by smart phones.
"We argue these warrants are unconstitutional 'general warrants' because they don't require police to show probable cause to believe any one device was somehow linked to the crime under investigation," EFF surveillance litigation director Jennifer Lynch wrote in January. "Instead, they target everyone in the area and then provide police with unlimited discretion to determine who to investigate further."
So, the next time you leave your home to do something you'd rather leave unobserved, give some thought to what's in your pockets. If their contents include your phone, you might as well be carrying a tracking beacon.
The post Federal Agencies Are Still Using Our Phones as Tracking Beacons appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>It's Sunshine Week—the week when reporters complain more than usual about government stonewalling and the government brags that it doesn't stonewall quite as often as it used to.
Sunshine Week intentionally coincides with the birthday of President James Madison, who wrote in 1822, "A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy."
To mark the event, the Justice Department announced that it was updating its guidance to federal agencies on applying the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the landmark law that guarantees public access to government records. Specifically, the Justice Department clarified how agencies should apply a presumption of openness and the "foreseeable harm" standard, which was codified into law in 2016. These standards were supposed to direct agencies to release public records, even when an exemption could apply, unless it foresees that disclosure would harm an interest protected by one of the nine FOIA exemptions.
"The guidelines make clear that the Justice Department will not defend nondisclosure decisions that fail to apply such a presumption," Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said this week. "And the guidelines also emphasize the importance of proactive disclosures and removing barriers to accessing government information."
Someone should alert the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). The Reason Foundation, which publishes Reason, filed a FOIA lawsuit against the BOP earlier this year to pry free records of inmate deaths at two federal women's prisons that have been dogged by allegations of unconstitutional medical neglect. The BOP frivolously redacted conclusions of mortality reviews from one prison and simply failed to turn over any records from another.
Unfortunately, this is not an unusual problem. As Anne Weismann, a veteran FOIA litigator, wrote this week, while the FOIA is a powerful and vital law on paper, government delays and obfuscation have neutered it in practice. That's why Micky Dolenz of The Monkees is suing the FBI for records on himself (he's not monkeying around), and why Bloomberg News is suing to discover if former President Donald Trump actually issued a "standing order" declassifying the boxes of documents he schlepped to his Mar-a-Lago resort.
If you need more examples, the folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation have collected the worst of government stonewalling at the federal, state, and local levels for their annual ignominious award series, The Foilies. You can read about the feds censoring paintings from Gitmo detainees and a small New Jersey town suing an elderly woman for filing too many records requests.
Even if you despise the media, you should be rooting for more government transparency. Some of the worst journalism happens when no one has hard evidence one way or another and the only sources are government press releases and anonymous officials. Take for example the months of speculation surrounding the death of U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, all of which was enabled by erroneous government statements and the fact that Capitol Police records and autopsy reports were confidential. As I wrote then, "In a vacuum of primary sources, bullshit will prevail. If you want faster, more accurate reporting, demand better public record laws and more transparency from officials."
The power-hungry demagogues and partisan pundits trying to tear this country apart dream of a perfectly fact-free environment where anything can be claimed and nothing can be confirmed. Strong public record laws are the antidote to the farces and tragedies they would inflict.
The post Want Better Journalism and Less B.S.? Demand Stronger Public Record Laws. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and a Legacy of Rage, by Jeff Guinn, Simon & Schuster, 400 pages, $29.99
Jeff Guinn is a good popular historian. That is not intended as faint praise: He takes interesting topics of real cultural importance—Jonestown, Bonnie and Clyde, Charles Manson—and writes credible and well-researched accounts of them. His new, very readable book on the Waco affair of 1993 is no exception.
As we mark the siege's 30th anniversary, Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and a Legacy of Rage is an essential addition to any collection of books addressing that incident, and it is particularly good on the workings of federal law enforcement. That still leaves room to debate whether Guinn situates the whole affair properly in the context of the time.
The basic story is well known, although virtually every word in any summary would be contested by at least some commentators. In February 1993, agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) launched a massive raid on the "compound" of an apocalyptic-minded sect called the Branch Davidians, who were based at the Mount Carmel Center near Waco, Texas. The Davidians resisted the assault and effectively drove off the federal agents, who were promptly replaced by the FBI. A siege lasted until April 19, when the FBI stormed the Davidian residence. A fire broke out in the building. It is heavily disputed whether those flames arose from a Davidian desire for mass suicide or from the unintentional effects of the gas canisters used by the federal agents.
In all, 82 Davidians, mainly women and children, died during the whole encounter, as did four ATF agents. Depending on one's perspective, this was an appalling case of mass cult suicide, a hideous massacre of a peaceful minority religious sect, or a screaming example of bureaucratic incompetence and miscommunication on an epic scale.
Adding to the long-familiar account, Guinn offers some significant new material, especially from ATF personnel involved in the disastrous first assault on Mount Carmel. That ATF side of the story constitutes about a third of the finished book. This is important because most accounts pass rapidly over the initial ATF fiasco before focusing on a day-by-day narrative of the lengthy FBI involvement.
Guinn gives the reader an excellent sense of what it must have felt like being in the ATF ranks during this operation, and we observe the evolving mess in something like real time. We witness the decision making process, with all its flaws. We come to understand that the ATF had a vital political agenda in generating dramatic media coverage of a heroic assault on a cult/terrorist/gunrunning/drug making fortress of evil (feel free to choose your rationale). Basically, the agency was facing yet another attempt to close it down and merge it with some other federal office, and it had to justify its existence. Footage of shackled cultists and seized weaponry would serve that purpose well.
Two basic questions emerge at this stage of the incident. The first involves the necessity for a military assault. The Mount Carmel "cultists" had excellent relations with local Texas law enforcement, and the group almost certainly would have been open to a straightforward warrant search for the rumored drugs, illicitly adapted guns, or other contraband, none of which actually existed. ("Nothing like that here, officer! Care for some ice cream?") Horrified Davidians made desperate phone calls to the local sheriff's office during the ATF onslaught, seeking urgent assistance against what arguably was an illegal federal use of armed force.
It is equally baffling why the ATF agents proceeded with the attack when they knew that the Davidians were forewarned. If nothing else, Guinn's Waco supplies a valuable contribution to the burgeoning literature on military and paramilitary blunders.
Guinn does not say much about the cultural context of the era, but that would have been helpful. The 1980s and early '90s were marked by a number of raging social and moral panics in the United States, variously involving drug syndicates and evil cults. In 1993, for example, we were at the height of the panic over Satanic ritual abuse, so any invocation of words like cult and compound automatically carried a very rich freight for the average news consumer.
No less important, for a television audience thoroughly immersed in images of Jonestown and poisoned Kool-Aid, the language of cults offered a powerful hint of potential mass suicide. Those expectations proved useful in the aftermath of the catastrophic fire. The Justice Department plunged wholeheartedly into generating and defending the suicide interpretation, to the exclusion of any other view.
Guinn himself presents several possible readings of the final outcome, but he clearly leans toward some form of the suicide theory, which I personally find untenable. Reasonably, he stays away from the florid range of conspiracy literature surrounding the disaster, but he might have paid more attention to William Gazecki's 1997 documentary Waco: The Rules of Engagement. It makes a convincing case that rash FBI actions caused the fire, however unintentionally.
That film is also very good on the FBI besiegers' macho and militaristic attitudes and their unconcealed desire to get revenge for the insults that the Davidians had inflicted on fellow federal agents. If something like the Waco siege happened today, we would be much more likely to hear it framed in terms of police brutality and racial oppression, and indeed of Black Lives Mattering. Many of the Davidian "cultists" who perished were black. The group tried to present this element of the story to the wider world by prominently flying a banner proclaiming "Rodney King, We Understand!" At the time, that racial angle attracted virtually no notice in news coverage.
The press's role is critical to understanding the Waco story, and Guinn really could have said more here. Television and print media alike enthusiastically pushed those images of ruthless cult fanaticism, which offered a cultural framing that supported the government's grimmest and most diabolical interpretations of the episode. Notably absent from such accounts were any criticisms of the federal agencies. While such media analysis does not fit Guinn's narrative purposes, they really are vital to understanding the politics of the story as it developed.
In the immediate aftermath of the first shootout, Time offered a double image of Davidian leader David Koresh ("whose heavily armed sect gunned down federal agents") alongside Omar Abdel-Rahman, the Al Qaeda–linked leader of the first World Trade Center attack, which had occurred only two days before. Time averred that both men showed what went wrong "when believers embrace the dark side of faith." These themes were reinforced two weeks later, when an anti-abortion activist murdered a doctor who performed abortions in Pensacola, Florida.
In its various forms, it seemed, religious fanaticism was rampant in the United States. Still more potent visuals followed the final April fire. Time's shocking cover was frankly propagandistic. It featured a laughing Koresh superimposed on the burning compound and included a biblical subhead: "His name was Death, and Hell followed with him." People, another mass-circulation magazine, reported from "Inside the Waco Cult," with its "Evil Messiah," a pedophile who led his fanatical disciples to tragedy. Cartoons depicted Koresh alongside Abdel-Rahman and (inevitably) with a ghostly Jim Jones, who offers Koresh a Kool-Aid. The uncritical acceptance of the mass suicide story made it all but impossible for critics of federal actions to make their case without being denounced as conspiracy nuts.
Guinn ends his book with a consideration of Waco's contributions to driving the militia movement that became such a potent national force in the mid-1990s. He is undoubtedly correct on his basic point about the "legacy of rage," but I would disagree with him about the genealogy of this phenomenon. As Guinn notes, Timothy McVeigh was appalled at news of the Waco fire, and two years later, to the day, he perpetrated the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. That linkage seems clear enough, but another view is possible.
Throughout the 1980s, multiple neo-Nazi and other far-right groups had been active in the United States, and McVeigh had contacts with several, including a group based at Oklahoma's Elohim City. Another former resident of Elohim City was Richard Wayne Snell, who murdered a police officer and was executed on the very day of the Oklahoma bombing. Meanwhile, any suggested links between the Oklahoma City bombers and the rising militia movement are extremely slim, to the point of scarcely visible. But from a media perspective, the simple Waco/Oklahoma City/militia connection makes for a more dramatic narrative.
Anyone interested in the violent fringes of American religious history should read Guinn's Waco. But they should be ready to range further for a fuller account.
The post <i>Waco</i> Offers New Insights From ATF Agents appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Tucked into the 4,000-plus-page omnibus spending bill that's making its way through Congress this week is a provision that will provide huge pay increases to Transportation Security Administration (TSA) workers and will make the agency more difficult to abolish or privatize.
The omnibus bill incorporates portions of a bill passed by the House in July that aimed to bring TSA employees under the same rules that apply to all members of the federal workforce—including scheduled pay increases and full collective bargaining powers. Rep. Bennie Thompson (D–Miss.), that bill's sponsor, said at the time that its passage could provide average pay increases of about 30 percent to current TSA employees. The bill aimed to put TSA screeners on the same pay scale as other Homeland Security Department agencies, like U.S. Customs and Border Protection, according to Government Executive, a trade publication covering the federal bureaucracy.
The omnibus bill includes only $397 million in new funds for the TSA—down from the $1.6 billion that would have been required to fund those massive pay increases. Even so, TSA agents are set to get smaller pay raises and collective bargaining powers that will effectively ensure further pay increases in future years.
"I am pleased that we are closing out this Congress by providing much-needed improved pay and collective bargaining rights for TSA's frontline workforce," Thompson said in a statement on Tuesday. Even though the omnibus bill does not put the TSA into the federal pay scale system governed by Title V, as Thompson's bill originally intended, the congressman noted that "this funding still represents by far the biggest advancement for the workforce in TSA's history. With this new funding, TSA should be able to start providing pay raises as early as July of next year."
As part of the omnibus bill, the TSA is also getting $61 million to hire new workers.
The raises might rightfully infuriate Americans who have to keep paying the tab for (and keep getting fondled by) a federal agency that, more than 20 years after it was created to combat airplane-related terrorism, has still never foiled a single attack and routinely fails to stop weapons and other illegal substances from being smuggled aboard commercial aircraft. The federal government is more than $30 trillion in debt and borrowed nearly 50 cents of every dollar spent last month, so fattening the paychecks of the rent-a-cops who patrol the nation's airports probably shouldn't be a top priority—but the same thing could be said for a host of other items in the omnibus bill.
The bigger issue, however, might be the slow-motion effort to incorporate the TSA into the rest of the federal workforce, which is something that public sector unions and the Biden administration are both pushing. That's a big change from how the TSA was initially conceived. The agency was deliberately siloed off from the rules governing most other federal employees—for good reason.
"The fundamental problem with TSA is that there is an inherent conflict of interest between an aviation security regulator also providing the security services it is supposed to be regulating," explains Marc Scribner, senior transportation policy analyst with the Reason Foundation, which publishes this website. "This latest move follows a string of actions by Congress and the administration that have compounded the problems baked into the TSA's flawed institutional design from the beginning."
The TSA ought to be privatized or abolished. Instead, it's getting more expensive and further cemented into the federal bureaucracy.
The post TSA Gets $400 Million for Pay Raises in Omnibus Spending Bill appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Early Tuesday morning, the Senate finally released its omnibus spending bill, which would fund the government through September of next year. The deadline to pass the bill actually passed on Friday, requiring a one-week stopgap bill to avoid a government shutdown.
Part of the delay stemmed from disagreements over where to build a new location for the FBI's headquarters. But at a time of record debt and continuing trillion-dollar deficits, it's worth asking whether the bureau even needs a new building.
The FBI has operated out of its current location, the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in downtown Washington, D.C., since 1975. The 2.8 million-square-foot Brutalist structure was budgeted at $60 million but ended up costing more than twice that, at $126 million ($689 million in 2022 dollars). The building was named after longtime FBI Director Hoover in 1972, days after his death and years before construction was completed.
In 2011, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a damning report on the building's long-term viability. The Hoover building is "aging and inefficient," the report found, and "does not meet the FBI's long-term security requirements." In 2015, agents complained to The Washington Post about cracked concrete and a crumbling parking structure.
The GAO report presented three plausible solutions: repair and refurbish the current building; demolish the current building and build a new one in its place; or build an entirely new facility somewhere else. It estimated each option could cost as much as $1 billion or more.
This year, the General Services Administration (GSA) announced that it would soon select from three different D.C.-area sites, two in Maryland and one in Virginia, on which to build a new facility. In negotiations over the omnibus spending bill, Rep. Steny Hoyer (D–Md.) and Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D–Md.) fought to insert language more favorable to putting a new facility in Maryland, while Democratic Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, each of Virginia, wanted to keep language that would have favored their state.
In the released draft of the bill, the two sides compromised: The GSA will "conduct separate and detailed consultations with individuals representing the sites" in order to "consider perspectives related to mission requirements, sustainable siting and equity." The bill would apportion $375 million toward the project.
Before spending $1 billion or more, though, it's worth noting that there are other options besides a brand-new, state-of-the-art facility.
In 2018, under President Donald Trump, the GSA indicated a preference to keep the FBI at its current location, demolishing and rebuilding on the same spot. Democrats accused Trump, who operated the nearby Trump International Hotel at the time, of simply wanting to deny the real estate to a potential competitor.
But the Trump-era GSA plan went further than just a tear-down-and-rebuild: In a presentation to Congress, it proposed not only constructing a new building but relocating 2,300 people, around one-fifth of the on-site staff, to facilities in Alabama, Idaho, and West Virginia.
One thing we learned from the COVID-19 pandemic is that plenty of jobs can be done remotely. Granted, some FBI staff deal with sensitive information that can require specialized facilities, so it's not a perfect candidate for a shift to work-from-home, but there are already more FBI field offices than there are U.S. states, so the infrastructure exists for operating remotely.
In fact, nearly half of the current "on-site" staff doesn't even work in the Hoover Building. Due to space limitations, more than 4,500 of the 10,000-plus D.C. staff work in over a dozen off-site "annex" spaces, which the FBI leases. Why are there so many more agents than the building can accommodate?
As the 2011 GAO report explained, "When the FBI first occupied the Hoover Building, it was primarily a law enforcement organization. Since then, its mission has grown in response to evolving threats and now includes counterterrorism, counterintelligence, weapons of mass destruction deterrence, and cyber security." And for nearly 70 years before that, the bureau operated entirely within the Department of Justice building. The growth of the federal law enforcement apparatus brought the growth of the federal work force, and now there's not enough space for them all.
It's not unreasonable to make the case that the FBI has a proper role to play; originally, it mostly policed interstate crimes, like banking fraud or forced labor. But when it has the bandwidth to, for example, coordinate with Twitter to request moderation for joke tweets, then clearly there is fat to trim.
The bureau could keep a central force in the capital but otherwise embrace remote work, transitioning a percentage of staff to locations outside the Beltway. Then it could make do in a more modest facility and let 6.66 acres of downtown real estate go to the highest private-sector bidder.
The post A New FBI Building Would Cost Billions. Do We Even Need One? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Sustaining an imperial presidency in the air isn't a cheap proposition. It's somehow managing to get more expensive.
On Thursday, airplane maker Boeing announced that the two replacement Air Force One jets it's building will be further delayed and further over budget. Securities filings first reported by the Wall Street Journal show the company expects to lose an additional $766 million on the new presidential shuttles that are also years behind schedule. That brings the company's total losses on the project to $2 billion.
Boeing cited a litany of reasons for the delays and cost overruns, including the bankruptcy of one its suppliers, COVID-caused supply chain issues, and difficulty finding workers with the requisite security clearances.
The fixed-price nature of its Air Force One contract means taxpayers aren't on the hook for the cost overruns, but Boeing has said it might ask for more money anyway. The Journal says it will still cost the public additional money to maintain the current 30-year-old Air Force One shuttles.
The $3.9 billion taxpayers are giving Boeing to build two airplanes is still pretty galling all on its own. The expense of the new jets is partially explained by the security and communications equipment they have to come with and the massive commercial airliner size. All of that is intended to keep the president in constant, secure contact with the government on the ground, while also providing enough room for journalists, foreign leaders, and other members of the president's retinue to fly along with him.
It all starts to feel monarchical pretty quickly. That's because America, despite its best historical efforts, has ended up with an imperial president who sits atop a vast federal government that spends trillions a year on various interventions and interferences in private citizens' lives. The president is also the commander of one the largest militaries in world history, whose forces are constantly embroiled in conflicts and military operations overseas.
For anyone who would prefer a far smaller federal government—and one less dependent on the whims of the executive branch in particular—the tremendous price tag of Air Force One is a reminder of how far away we are from that reality.
Ideally, the president wouldn't need to be occupied 24/7 with the details of dishwasher regulations and drone strikes while jetting off to another climate change summit. If he weren't, we'd all be a little freer, a little richer, and a little safer too. The president would also benefit from a less hectic schedule. With fewer responsibilities, he could afford to put his phone in airplane mode while he travels.
That's not the world we live in. A $3.9 billion flying White House is arguably a necessity for a modern president. We'd be better off with one who could do their job traveling in business class.
The post Air Force One Cost Overruns Are a Reminder of How Expensive an Imperial Presidency Can Be appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Despite pledges from the Biden administration last year to combat processing delays and backlogs at U.S. immigration agencies, a new report published by Syracuse University finds that by the end of FY 2022 in September, over 6,000 lawsuits will have been filed against the federal government since September 2021 to compel action from U.S. immigration authorities. This is a 50 percent increase in lawsuits compared to the previous fiscal year.
But President Joe Biden can only shoulder so much of the blame. Shortly after former President Donald Trump took office in January 2017, the federal government implemented a broad hiring freeze on all nonmilitary employees that lasted for several months. In February 2020, the Trump administration directly targeted U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), freezing hiring for all nonasylum agent employees. Funded by the fees on paperwork submissions, USCIS' revenue dried up during the COVID-19 pandemic as applications dwindled, prompting the administration to furlough three-quarters of the government's immigration work force in the summer of 2020. Even though the furlough was resolved in August 2020 by Congress, many employees left the agency permanently, worried that it would become a permanent layoff.
While Biden lifted that hiring freeze in March 2021, many experts say the effects will persist. "When you implement a hiring freeze, what you're actually doing is shrinking more personnel," Jorge Loweree, managing director of programs and strategy at the American Immigration Council, tells Reason. He notes that Trump's actions did not lessen the agency's load but merely stopped it from replacing workers lost to attrition. "USCIS has had to do essentially more work with less staff and fewer resources, which has led to a tremendous backlog across most form times."
As Loweree points out, these delays can be incredibly pressing for refugees applying for asylum or temporary protected status (TPS). "Your application can take seven months, potentially well over a year to be adjudicated," he said. "When your TPS designation is only in place for 18 months, that's a significant problem because you end up receiving a benefit for a far shorter period of time."
A USCIS spokesperson pointed to what they see as promising trends in their processing ability: a 14 percent drop in the naturalization queue from January to September 2021, a reduction in the number of pending biometrics appointments from 1.4 million in January 2021 to 7,000 as of May 2022, and a full elimination of the "front-log" of cases awaiting intake processing that occurred in July 2021. They feel confident the agency will resolve these issues by the time it reaches its 95 percent hiring target by the end of 2022.
While staffing up may alleviate the federal government's current bottleneck, no amount of USCIS employees can keep the country's bad immigration system from working as designed. The larger problems with how we choose who can live here and for how long lie with U.S. immigration law and policy.
"Even if more agents are hired, aggressive streamlining will still be necessary," David Bier, associate director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, tells Reason in an email. "It can't just be hiring more people without better systems."
The post Thousands of Lawsuits Have Been Filed Over Wait Times, Backlogs at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The confused and muddled messaging of The G Word, a six-part Netflix documentary miniseries about federal government bureaucracies hosted by Adam Conover and produced by former President Barack Obama, is well illustrated toward the end of the very first episode.
Conover has spent much of the episode explaining how the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) works and its role in monitoring our food supply. He takes viewers to a meat processing plant for an explanation of the relationship between USDA inspectors and domestic meat suppliers, heavily weighted toward the importance of having the federal government overseeing the process.
When Conover visits a supermarket, though, the episode shifts and explains the less savory side of the USDA. Conover notes how federal crop subsidies distort the natural food marketplace, line the pockets of wealthy agricultural corporations, and contribute to a flood of cheap but unhealthy junk food.
"It sure feels like the government's mission to help farmers is getting in the way of its mission to help eaters," he says. "Especially since the same USDA that keeps agriculture afloat is also responsible for crafting the dietary guidelines that advise us what to eat. I wonder if that's a little bit of a conflict of interest." It is, of course.
Conover knows that junk food is junk, even if it's delicious, regardless of whatever food pyramids the government may shove in front of us. And he says so, but as he's opining in the checkout line, he complains, "Every article and ad tells us that the key to healthy eating is to make better choices. But why is it all on us? Maybe instead of worrying so much about what we choose off the shelves, we should pay more attention to what the government chooses to put on them. Because only it has the power to determine if our food is safe and fit to eat."
Wait, what? Only the U.S. government has the power to determine if our food is safe and fit to eat? He just noted that he has the ability to independently evaluate the quality of the food he's consuming and yet consumes food that he knows is unhealthy because he likes the taste. He knows full well that we have experts completely outside the realm of government who can adequately advise us on healthy eating. And he even just noted that part of the corruption of the USDA's dietary guidance was the result of the government ignoring these experts for the benefit of agriculture interests.
This is the weirdness of The G Word in a nutshell. Across the six 30-minute episodes, released in late May, Conover details what various federal agencies do and notes how they frequently fail to do what we need them to do. Nevertheless, the purpose of The G Word is to sell to viewers that a large and powerful federal government is good and that citizens need it for protection. Essentially, Conover's flipped his typical script and is trying to unruin the government.
Obama appears in just the first and last episode, but his fingerprints are all over the show's sense of technocratic optimism, a consistent belief that government is supposed to be big and broad and deployed to serve our best interests, whatever those might be. There's an emphasis on what I call the imaginary "we," a familiar refrain of Obama's presidency: the insistent and utterly mistaken belief that "we" all largely want similar things from our government. We do not.
To the extent that the federal government fails or struggles, the show largely lays the blame on two factors—outside corporate manipulation and reductions in funding and staffing. In the second episode, the show calls out AccuWeather's attempts to restrict public access to National Weather Service data so that it can profit off providing them, a very specific claim of meddling. But when talking about the many, many failures of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), it's somewhat vaguely attributed to differing goals and agendas of the various organizations under the agency's umbrella and funding being unfairly distributed based on the political power of differing states (also known as democracy in action).
The funniest moment in the series comes not from the various attempts at humorous sketches. The segment that presents the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a parody of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is cringe-inducing to the very edge of unwatchability. The only time I laughed out loud was purely unintentional. At one point, when explaining FEMA's failures to adequately respond to the needs of Puerto Ricans in the wake of Hurricane Maria in 2017, Conover blames "red tape," which he then describes as "the archnemesis" of government. If I had been drinking, I would have done a spit-take here.
While the show is happy to get specific about corporate malfeasance in attempts to capture and control government, it treats the excesses of government bureaucracy as things that just come up out of nowhere and uninvited, like mold growing on bread. The G Word does not in any way approach bureaucracy as itself a form of internal corruption designed to make government more expensive and more powerful in the service of various interested parties that fiscally benefit with contracts and jobs when government is bigger and more intrusive. At no point when the show mentions FEMA's failures in Puerto Rico does anybody mention anything like the federal Jones Act, a deliberately protectionist law that benefits the maritime industry (and its unionized employees) and at the same time makes it extremely expensive to ship anything to the island. It's an example of bureaucracy that is not just some magical evil force showing up out of nowhere. It's there deliberately, and it made it exorbitantly expensive for Puerto Ricans to recover from the disaster caused by the hurricane. Yet, President Joe Biden's administration continues to support it because the maritime unions support it.
Later in the series, Conover expresses confusion that his mother—a public school teacher—was one of those types of people who believed that government is big and wasteful. Rather than tackling any of the many, many, many examples of government being wasteful, The G Word essentially insults the intelligence of the audience by suggesting that the push to shrink the size of government is a modern movement pushed by certain types of people (including think tanks, so presumably Reason falls into this category) as a reaction to the civil rights movement. The G Word says the call for smaller government only really began to build under President Ronald Reagan, shown as an actor performing comically inept surgery on a hunky Uncle Sam.
And while it's true that Reagan did run on the promise of reducing the scope and size of government, federal employment numbers actually increased during his eight years of office, from 2.9 million to 3.1 million. Today's numbers are back down to 2.8 million. Most of the job cuts actually took place under President Bill Clinton (and the show does note that both he and Obama agreed to cutting the size of government), but the data just simply doesn't support the claim that the federal government has actually been reduced in size and scope. If Conover wanted to make the claim that the money going to government isn't being used how it's needed, the problem then lies in the show's unwillingness to explore the reality of the "red tape" or the waste. When the show vaguely references the lack of affordable housing in our cities, it doesn't properly blame it on NIMBYs abusing environmental protection procedures to halt construction or labor unions suing to block projects unless they get a cut of the money but on "anti-housing capitalists," because capitalism apparently somehow hates providing goods in exchange for money?
To its credit, the show is, in a limited sense, willing to explore how federal and local government power is used to cause harm. The DARPA segment discusses the positive private use of drones (to film a wedding) contrasted with our government's deadly deployment of them to assassinate targets in countries we aren't even officially at war with. The G Word even rejects the Obama administration's lackluster undercounting of civilian victims and instead uses independent observer numbers to show how our drone strikes have killed hundreds of unintended targets. (The show, however, stops short of pointing out that the federal government has imprisoned Daniel Hale, the whistleblower who helped reveal how poorly the drone program operated.)
Toward the end, the final 15 minutes of the final episode, The G Word turns its sights toward local government in an attempt to optimistically encourage local election engagement. Here the show notes that this is where, in particular, criminal justice reform needs to take place because most who are serving prison time are in state custody, not in federal prisons. But even here the show is strangely vague, turning to some activists in Philadelphia who were involved in getting District Attorney Larry Krasner elected. But the show apparently no longer has any time to elaborate on why Krasner's election was important or even really explain much of his platform other than a vague reference to reducing cash bail. Krasner doesn't even appear on the show. It doesn't engage with the backlash against progressive district attorneys and their proposed reforms. It doesn't discuss the awkward public safety balancing act that comes from trying to make sure citizens feel safe while also not unnecessarily imprisoning people who would be better served by other systems.
After attributing attempts to reduce the size of government to people with bad intentions, it completely ignores the "Defund the Police" part of the criminal justice reform movement. It doesn't engage with it or attempt to even push the conversation in the direction of getting more mental health and social service experts to respond to certain emergency needs. It just completely ignores it.
On this Independence Day weekend, it's worth noting this series because of the tendency of some people to worship at the altar of big and powerful government as a solution to all our ills even when they absolutely know how frequently it fails, how frequently it hurts people, and how frequently it serves only itself and its friends. There's nothing unusual about Conover (and Obama) thinking that government is failing because it's just somehow not powerful enough or effective enough. It's very American, in fact. But The G Word shows that holding onto this belief that our government isn't funded enough requires completely ignoring huge chunks of what the government does with its money and authority.
The post <em>The G Word</em> Begs Americans To Fall Back in Love with Uncle Sam appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A Florida judge has vacated the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) mask mandate for transportation, calling it an "unlawful" expansion of federal authority.
"Our system does not permit agencies to act unlawfully even in pursuit of desirable ends," wrote U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, who was appointed during the Trump administration.
Mizelle's ruling brings an immediate halt to the mandate, though the government could ask the court to stay the judgment while an appeal is made. Under that scenario, the travel mandate—which applies to airplanes, trains, buses, and subway systems—could return.
In either case, it's not clear how much longer the CDC planned to keep the mandate. It was initially set to expire today, but the agency extended it for two additional weeks. Given that the air quality on airplanes is highly filtered, the CEOs of major airlines have testified that the mask requirement is unnecessary for their industry.
"It makes no sense that people are still required to wear masks on airplanes, yet are allowed to congregate in crowded restaurants, schools and at sporting events without masks, despite none of these venues having the protective air filtration system that aircraft do," wrote the CEOs of all major airlines in a letter to the Biden administration.
They certainly have a point. It's difficult to imagine that unmasked travelers and commuters are at significantly greater risk of catching COVID-19 than unmasked restaurant and gym customers: There's much less talking and heavy breathing on an airplane than there is at a bar—but the latter has practically no masking requirements at this point in the pandemic. In most respects, people are now free to decide for themselves what their personal risk tolerance is with respect to COVID-19 and behave accordingly.
In her decision, Judge Mizelle chided the CDC for taking shortcuts and exceeding its own statutory authority. Under the law—specifically, a federal law known as the Administrative Procedures Act—the agency is required to submit new policies for outside review and comment. The CDC declined to do this, arguing that any delay in implementing the mandate would cost lives. The agency also maintained that the mandate was not a new rule but, rather, a clarification of previous guidance relating to "sanitation."
Mizelle was unpersuaded, however, that the Public Health Service Act of 1944—the law the CDC cited as giving the agency the power to take such actions—considered disease prevention to be a form of sanitation.
"Wearing a mask cleans nothing," wrote Mizelle. "At most, it traps virus droplets. But it neither 'sanitizes' the person wearing the mask nor 'sanitizes' the conveyance. Because the CDC required mask wearing as a measure to keep something clean—explaining that it limits the spread of COVID-19 through prevention, but never contending that it actively destroys or removes it—the Mask Mandate falls outside of [applicable law]."
The mask mandate is "best understood not as sanitation, but as an exercise of the CDC's power to conditionally release individuals to travel despite concerns that they may spread a communicable disease (and to detain or partially quarantine those who refuse)," wrote Mizelle. But she is not convinced that Congress has actually delegated this power to the CDC in the case of individuals traveling within the U.S.
"The power to conditionally release and detain is ordinarily limited to individuals entering the United States from a foreign country," she wrote.
The lawsuit was brought by two Florida residents who argued that being required to wear masks on airplanes aggravated their anxiety—a condition that is not exempted from forced masking under the mandate. They are represented by the Health Freedom Defense Fund, a conservative legal group.
The post Florida Judge Declares CDC's Federal Travel Mask Mandate 'Unlawful' and Vacates It appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Now that one of the available COVID-19 vaccines has been officially approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), President Joe Biden is leaning on private sector businesses to mandate vaccination for employees and customers.
"If you're a business leader, a nonprofit leader, a state or local leader, who has been waiting for full FDA approval to require vaccinations, I call on you now to do that. Require it," Biden said Monday. "Do what I did last month and require your employees to get vaccinated or face strict [testing] requirements."
It's true that Biden is in some ways leading by example. In July, he issued an executive order requiring that the roughly 4 million federal employees (and many of the millions of federal contractors) get vaccinated or face weekly COVID testing and other inconveniences.
But vaccines are only a means to getting things back to normal, not an end unto themselves. And, right now, it seems fairly obvious that the federal bureaucracy is not even close to anything resembling normalcy. Until it is, Biden should lay off trying to tell private businesses what to do.
Take the Social Security Administration (SSA), for example. One of the biggest federal agencies—and one that most Americans can't avoid encountering, at least occasionally—employs more than 60,000 people and runs more than 1,200 field offices around the country. And yet, more than four months after COVID-19 vaccines became widely available, many of those offices remain in the same state that they've been since March 2020: closed.
The SSA announced plans for a "partial" reopening of field offices in May, and began allowing beneficiaries to handle some things online that previously would have required an in-person visit. But, bureaucracy being bureaucracy, a lot of what the SSA does requires physical paperwork to be passed around. That means a lot of the work is being done via mail.
Or, rather, not being done.
A July report from the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for the Social Security Administration found massive backlogs at the 73 facilities visited by auditors. One service center "had more than 9,000 unprocessed original documents it had received as early as November 2020," according to the report. At another field office, auditors found "667 unprocessed applications dated as early as July 2020" for new or replacement Social Security cards. In another location, they found "more than 20,000 pieces of returned mail, some of which were over one year old." Half the field office managers interviewed by OIG staff reported being "overwhelmed" by the mail volume.
Auditors concluded that the "SSA has no performance metrics and does not maintain management information on the volume of incoming, outgoing, or pending mail" and, more ominously, that the administration "lacks comprehensive policies and procedures to track and return original documents—including driver's licenses, birth certificates, passports, and naturalization documents—that customers provide as proof of eligibility for benefits" or to obtain a Social Security card.
What if you don't trust the SSA—or, for that matter, the U.S. Postal Service, which has had plenty of pandemic-related issues of its own—not to lose your most important documents? You can still make in-person appointments at an SSA office, but it doesn't seem like an easy process, as Reason contributor Bonnie Kristian recently discovered:
I'm trying to get an in-person appt and was just told I have to call Monday, as *maybe* they'll have appointments then
— Bonnie Kristian (@bonniekristian) August 24, 2021
Privately, Kristian told me that she tried to get a new card via the SSA's online portal, only to be told that applying for a new card still requires mailing or hand-delivering key documents. When she visited her local SSA office, an unmasked clerk—sitting behind a sign telling all guests they must be masked—told her the office was closed and that she would have to call to make an appointment. After two phone calls to two different offices, both of which Kristian says "strongly discouraged me from trying to get an appointment," she eventually got one…for next month.
It's not May 2020 anymore. The entire federal workforce is vaccinated or getting tested regularly. Most of the general public is vaccinated as well. Why is the federal bureaucracy still operating as if routine public interactions are a public health threat?
The SSA did not respond directly to Reason's request to provide a timeline for when field offices would be fully reopened. "We are increasing the number of personnel in our field offices to provide more in-office appointments," Nicole Tiggemann, a spokeswoman for the administration, wrote in an email. "Our reentry plan will be phased and will take into consideration health conditions and any applicable labor obligations."
Part of the problem is the union that represents federal employees. In May, the American Federation of Government Employees told Congress in a letter that "remote work works, and has allowed employees of key agencies like the Social Security Administration to continue to deliver essential services." In light of the OIG's report, that claim seems laughable.
But it's not just the SSA that's refusing to get back up to speed. More than 60 percent of American consulates remain fully or partially closed, despite the fact that consular officers have been eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccines since May.
"For the open consulates, the wait times have grown from 95 days in April to 189 days in August for business and tourist traveler visas, from 25 to 38 days for student and exchange visitor visas, and from 40 to 51 days for all other nonimmigrant visa categories," notes David J. Bier, a research fellow on immigration issues for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
The slower-than-usual federal bureaucracy is causing cascading issues. As many as 100,000 green cards that would grant permanent residency to immigrant workers could expire in September before they get out the State Department's door. That's just a part of the department's backlog of immigrant and nonimmigrant visas that reportedly tops 500,000. Among other things, that means foreign students waiting on visas so they can come to the United States to study have no idea if they'll get them in time. American families have had travel plans upended unexpectedly. And, of course, the State Department's COVID-related visa-processing issues have contributed to the chaos in evacuating U.S.-affiliated Afghans from Kabul.
In order to address the student visa issues, "we urge the State Department to provide predictable and consistent consular services; maximize alternatives to in-person visa interviews by providing waivers and virtual interviews; extend visa eligibility waivers; authorize staff overtime and increase hiring; and initiate meaningful engagement with outside stakeholders and agencies," a group of 10 senators wrote to Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this month.
Those are good ideas! It's also somewhat stunning—though depressingly typical—that the federal government is still mandating in-person visa interviews in a world where so much else is being done over Zoom. Either change the rules, or get vaccinated bureaucrats back to work—full time and in their offices. Preferably, do both.
To be sure, there are plenty of aspects of the federal bureaucracy that can only be improved by a COVID-related slowdown. If federal regulators aren't working on new labor rules or if the Department of Commerce seizes up because employees are quitting over the vaccination mandates, there would be no need for concern. If half of the Department of Education simply vanished tomorrow, Thanos-style, would anyone miss it?
Unfortunately, there are parts of the federal government that people must interact with if they want to work a legal job or cross an international border. Those are the positions—you could call them "customer service" jobs, except that's really not fair to people who do actual jobs that serve willing customers—where average Americans have no choice but to deal with the hassle of bureaucracy.
Months after vaccines have been readily available and weeks after Biden ordered federal employees to get the shot, there's simply no excuse for those kinds of government offices not to be fully reopened to the public. Biden should let private businesses set their own rules and keep his focus squarely on the employees and agencies that actually answer to him.
The post Biden Lectures Businesses About Vaccines While Fully Vaccinated Feds Stay Home From Work appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On today's Reason Roundtable Matt Welch stokes Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie on natalist policies, public-school hesitancy, and gender disparities.
Discussed in the show:
1:16: How policies do or do not affect people's personal decisions re: baby-making. Plus, child subsidies, and universal basic income for parents.
21:31: Parents give pause to their children returning to public schools after 2020 proved public schools to be finicky and teachers unions to be nasty.
32:54: No, the high rate of unemployment and gender disparity in the recent Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report are not surprising.
41:19: Weekly Listener Question: I work with small business owners, many of whom are
restaurant owners. Many are in the process of applying for the newly available Restaurant Revitalization Fund operated by the Small Business Administration. The program opens today (May 3). However, if you are not a woman, veteran, or socially or economically disadvantaged (read: from a certain race) business owner, you will not be considered for support from this program for 21 days, regardless of need. From a libertarian perspective, do you feel that this is a discriminatory or racist program, or is this a fair approach to supporting small businesses?
54:15: Weekly Media Recommendations.
This weeks links:
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Assistant production by Regan Taylor.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve.
The post Can the State Influence Baby-Making With Policy? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>CDC said no to COVID-19 testing for asymptomatic quarantine patients. Reuters explores how the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) "missed chances to spot COVID's silent spread," finding plenty of blame to go around.
Critics have widely asserted that the CDC fumbled key decisions during the coronavirus scourge because then-President Donald Trump and his administration meddled in the agency's operations and muzzled internal experts. The matter is now the subject of a congressional inquiry. Yet Reuters has found new evidence that the CDC's response to the pandemic also was marred by actions - or inaction - by the agency's career scientists and frontline staff.
At a crucial moment in the pandemic when Americans were quarantined after possible exposure to the virus abroad, the agency declined or resisted potentially valuable opportunities to study whether the disease could be spread by those without symptoms, according to previously undisclosed internal emails, other documents and interviews with key players.
The CDC first refused to test a group of Americans evacuated from Wuhan, China, in early February 2020.
"It is CDC's position that since the research is being proposed for a group of individuals who are detained under a federal quarantine order, the circumstances of voluntary participation would be extremely difficult to assure and therefore, CDC does not approve this study," the CDC told researchers at Camp Ashland, where those returning from Wuhan were being quarantined.
The CDC also resisted testing asymptomatic people evacuated from the Diamond Princess cruise ship later that month.
"It's difficult to know whether more aggressive early testing among asymptomatic people would have significantly altered the trajectory of the pandemic in the United States, which has infected 24 million people and killed more than 400,000," says Reuters.
But in reality, it would take months before the CDC and other government officials took asymptomatic spread seriously—while testing protocols, stay-at-home advisories, and other rules and precautions were developed around the premise that infected people would almost always have a fever, cough, loss of smell, and other common symptoms.
In those early months of the pandemic, a lot of people who were exposed to COVID-19 but hadn't yet developed symptoms struggled to get tests, thanks to CDC recommendations and state and local testing protocols that overlooked asymptomatic cases. Without symptoms or permission to be tested, many potentially infected people continued to work, see family, and more.
People making personal decisions about what activities to engage in also relied on that calculation, as did employers when setting worker absence policies. To this day, many people who are exposed to COVID-19 think that not developing symptoms within a few days is a sign they're in the clear.
Government guidance only goes so far, but it's not crazy to think that better, earlier CDC guidance on asymptomatic spread could have helped mitigate misinformation about COVID-19 and some of the spread.
Toward the end of last February, the CDC did begin to allow testing of asymptomatic quarantined people, finding at least 10 asymptomatic cruise ship passengers who tested positive for the COVID-19. Yet the agency still didn't update its testing guidance on asymptomatic infections.
It would be almost another month before the agency started publicly acknowledging it happened and almost two months until, on April 27, it expanded the recommendations to sometimes include "persons without symptoms." The change came 11 weeks after the first U.S. army base researcher had asked the CDC for permission to test asymptomatic quarantine patients who consented.
Art project stresses continuity between sex worker activism in early 1900s and today. "On Jan. 25, 1917, sex workers in San Francisco marched to the Central Methodist Church to meet with Rev. Paul Smith, who had organized a campaign to rid and protect the city from vice. This was the first sex worker-led protest in the U.S.," writes Kaytlin Bailey, founder of the Old Pro Project, at The Daily Beast.
Old Pro Project is commemorating the historic push for sex worker rights and decriminalization with a series of art advocacy projects created by sex workers in New Orleans, New York, Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle.
"It's important to remember that we're part of a multigenerational struggle, and that sex workers have been resisting their criminalization since the beginning," said Savannah Sly, National Coordinator of the #OldProProject https://t.co/cDGFfBs4bT
— Feminists for Liberty (@FeministLiberty) January 25, 2021
Why the Parler case is a success story for Section 230. "Initially, civil liberties advocates (including us) were shocked at the speed and coordination with which Parler was taken down and Trump de-platformed," notes the Internet Governance Project. (Yep.)
But "now that the dust has settled, however, the charge of 'private sector censorship' looks overstated," suggests Milton Mueller. "Indeed, the overall functioning of the legal and policy regime governing US platforms ends up looking pretty good in this case – especially when compared to the alternatives."
Mueller finds three conclusions to be drawn from the Parler case, including "the major platforms are not 'the Internet'" and "international anarchy has its upside." Mueller also says the case demonstrates how Section 230 is working:
Social media are being simultaneously blamed for having too much control over speech and for letting speech be completely out of control. Both sides of this divide fail to appreciate the way immunities and distributed private actor responsibilities walked a fine line between control and freedom.
The Section 230-based legal regime is a way of reconciling free political expression with the need to limit or remove certain kinds of speech from the public sphere. A potential threat to public safety was addressed, but not in a rigid, permanent and coercive way, not through state action, but through contractual arrangements and private ordering. The response is distributed, flexible and ongoing, just as social media content is. And if the response was too harsh, as it inevitably will be in some cases, there were still spaces where the suppressed entity could regroup and try to grow again. A state actor-driven response is going to be a lot more binary and a lot less correctible in cases of excess. Passing a law would impose a single, uniform standard, which would inevitably be applied in a way that would serve the interests of those in power and marginalize challengers.
The post How the CDC Bungled Testing of Early COVID-19 Quarantine Patients appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The most positive aspect of President Donald Trump's legacy is his administration's success at slowing the growth of federal regulations. It's also perhaps his most fragile.
During his first days in office, incoming President Joe Biden is planning to sign "dozens of executive orders, presidential memoranda" which will involve rejoining the Paris Climate Accords, expanding wilderness protections, and moving the country toward a 100 percent "clean energy" economy.
In order to facilitate this flurry of presidential activity, Biden will also need to take aim at Trump's executive orders that attempted to account for the costs of new regulations and limited the number of new rules which could be imposed.
"The priority of the Trump administration has been to reduce regulatory burdens," says James Broughel, a senior research fellow at George Mason University's Mercatus Center. "The Biden administration is going to want to issue lots of new regulations. That's a near certainty. We're going from an era where reducing burdens was the goal to where burdens will be added in the name of achieving certain social goals."
The guiding light of the Trump administration's deregulatory efforts was Executive Order 13771. That 2017 order instituted the famous rule that regulators issue two deregulatory actions for every new regulatory action. It also created a system of accounting for the costs of new regulations and the cost savings of deregulatory actions. This was used to give federal departments regulatory budgets that limited the costs of new regulations they could impose, and often required them to find regulatory savings.
Using this measurement of regulatory savings, the Trump administration has been modestly successful at its goal of deregulating the economy, claiming $198 billion in eliminated regulatory costs. From fiscal years 2017–2019, the administration claims to have eliminated 3.6 rules for every new rule added. That ratio is 3.2 for fiscal year 2020.
Using other measurements, the Trump administration has been less successful. In some areas, they've done more to slow the growth of the administrative state without significantly reducing it. The length of the Code of Federal Regulations stayed essentially flat during Trump's time in office, hovering at around 185,000 pages. The Mercatus Center's tracker of restrictive words in the federal regulatory code comes to a similar result, finding that these words grew from 1.08 million at the beginning of Trump's term to 1.09 million as of January 1, 2021.
Trump "leaves us with fewer regulations than Hillary Clinton would have—though not many fewer regulations than we had before," summarizes Robert Verbruggen in a November National Review article.
One can expect this limited progress to be more than reversed under the new administration. Biden has already announced plans to reinstate Obama-era regulations that were pared back by the Trump administration.
Politico reports that he'll likely try to revive the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan—which regulated carbon dioxide emissions from power plants—that the Trump administration had replaced in 2019. Biden's housing platform calls for a revival of the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule that Trump gutted in July 2020. The Trump administration's replacement of the Obama administration's clean water rules will also likely be ditched.
The incoming administration's attempts to revive big Obama-era rules that Trump eliminated or scaled back will likely spark legal challenges. Biden will still have plenty of room to issue a steady stream of less significant regulations that typically don't attract lawsuits.
In order to facilitate new rules, large and small, Biden will almost certainly rescind Executive Order 13771 and all the limits it imposed on new red tape.
"All the cost caps will probably be eliminated," says Broughel, as will the regulatory budget the Trump administration used to account for the costs of new rules. Doing so would be a "slap in the face at trying to estimate the effects of the regulatory system."
Nevertheless, the fact that the Trump administration was able to adopt a regulatory budget at all proves that it can be done. Other future administrations might be more able and willing to pick it up again.
"I suspect in some form the regulatory budget will come back," says Broughel. "The Trump administration showed that it was workable."
Throughout his presidential campaign, Biden promised Americans a return to normalcy after the unusual, often unsettling administration of Donald Trump. There could be nothing more normal than the federal government issuing a steady stream of red tape without bothering to account for its costs.
The post Will Joe Biden Destroy Trump's Legacy of Deregulation? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>As the coronavirus pandemic rages on, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) can't stop proving itself useless and incompetent. In the latest debacle, the agency just posted new guidance on Friday saying that COVID-19 is primarily spread through airborne particles rather than through contact with infected surfaces—something the majority of scientists and public health experts have been saying for months, and a fact that's already trickled down to many Americans as conventional wisdom.
The CDC's long lag time on sharing correct information would be laughable if the topic wasn't so deadly serious. (And if folks weren't demanding that CDC guidance get priority treatment on social media).
As it stands, the nation's top public health agency has—for those inclined to listen to its advice—helped normalize ineffective "hygiene theater" such as incessant wiping down of public surfaces while downplaying or ignoring more relevant preventative measures (like masks, proper ventilation, and air circulation in buildings). The agency has been in the business of giving people a false sense of security while ignoring disease-reduction best practices as hundreds of thousands of Americans fall sick and die from the coronavirus.
But it gets worse. A few days after finally posting information about airborne spread, the CDC took down that information and said it was posted in error.
"The agency had posted information Friday stating the virus can transmit over a distance beyond six feet, suggesting that indoor ventilation is key to protecting against" it, notes The Washington Post. But by today, "all references to airborne spread, except for a disclaimer that recommendations based on this mode of transmission are under review," have been removed from the CDC website.
"Unfortunately an early draft of a revision went up without any technical review," Jay Butler, deputy director for infectious disease at the agency, said yesterday. "We are returning to the earlier version and revisiting that process. It was a failure of process at CDC."
This isn't the agency's first unexplained flip-flop. From the Post:
In May, the CDC updated an information page that suggested the coronavirus did not spread easily from contaminated surfaces. It also edited that revision after the update received widespread media attention to clarify that the tweak was "not a result of any new science."
And last week, the CDC reversed testing guidelines to again recommend that anyone, regardless of symptoms, who has been in close contact with an infected person be tested. The White House coronavirus task force had directed the agency to change those guidelines in August, allowing that asymptomatic people did not need to be tested.
Some have read into this a conflict between impartial scientific types at the CDC and more political types who want to keep the Trump administration happy. But "experts with knowledge of the incident said on Monday that the latest reversal appeared to be a genuine mistake in the agency's scientific review process, rather than the result of political meddling," reports The New York Times.
In any event, the CDC has lately been issuing warnings and publishing data as if the virus spreads through air anyway, despite the agency's lack of official acknowledgment of this. For instance, on Friday, the CDC published a study saying 15 people were sickened with COVID-19 after a passenger on a flight from London to Hanoi had it.
Media has been spreading the London-to-Hanoi flight study as if it's evidence that flying is totally unsafe right now. But it's important to note that this flight took place on March 1, back when information about how the disease spread was a lot less known and many current precautions surrounding airports and requirements for flight passengers weren't yet in place.
While publishing information about in-flight spread that took place nearly seven months ago, the agency has also been spreading the alarming-at-first-glance statistic that 11,000 people may have been exposed to COVID-19 while flying. But the CDC also states—in what has become much less headline-garnering news—that it has not confirmed a single case of in-flight transmission on a U.S. flight.
Some have taken this as evidence that flying is much less risky than the agency is making it out to be. Others see it as evidence that the agency just hasn't tried very hard to confirm cases of COVID-19 stemming from air travel and should be stepping up its contact tracing. But whichever way you look at it—and I think a little of both is at play—the CDC, once again, doesn't look so good.
More on President Donald Trump's corruption surrounding TikTok (in which he threatened to ban the video app unless its owner sold it to a U.S. company, then insisted the federal government get a cut of whatever deal is brokered in order to fund Trump's "patriotic education" dreams):
Absolutely nothing about the Oracle/TikTok deal makes sense, UNLESS you view it through the lens of pure cronyism and corruption. Then it makes perfect sense, and should have everyone furious. https://t.co/rENEOt7zxS
— Mike Masnick (@mmasnick) September 21, 2020
I hope everyone who defended the idea of TikTok's undergoing a forced sale to an American company because of not-entirely-articulated security concerns has taken a look at the arrangement Trump finally approved. Still certain this was motivated by "national security"?
— Mike Godwin #WakandaForever (@sfmnemonic) September 22, 2020
For background, see:
More evidence in support of decriminalizing prostitution:
New @nberpubs: "Crimes Against Morality: Unintended Consequences of Criminalizing Sex Work" https://t.co/cVEnz2MY5Z pic.twitter.com/9NDUYIHHl5
— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) September 22, 2020
• "Older people have become younger," Neuroscience News characterizes a new study from researchers at the University of Jyväskylä. "The physical and cognitive health of people aged 75 to 80 is significantly better than those of that age range thirty years ago."
• An interesting thread on the politics of Justice Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation and how it might affect the current Supreme Court nomination process:
I actually think this is true. But relatedly, I think conservatives are a little blasé about how radicalizing a confirmation here will be even for moderate Dems — especially given the decisions that may follow — and so unwisely assume there won't be the votes to pack the court. https://t.co/GTAJjgqxh3
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) September 21, 2020
• Jacob Sullum examines the record of Judge Amy Coney Barrett, who is rumored to be Trump's pick to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court.
• "We're scarily seeing a repeat of the 1970s and 2000s when a falling dollar made housing the top asset class," warns John Tamny at Forbes.
• Vice talks to "five women who say they underwent gynecological surgery they either didn't want or did not fully understand while detained at the Irwin County Detention Center, which is run by the private prison company LaSalle Corrections and houses immigrants detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)."
• The period immediately following this November's election is going to be nuts:
MADISON, Wis. (AP) -- Federal judge in battleground Wisconsin extends deadline for receiving absentee ballots for 6 days beyond election.
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) September 21, 2020
• "Florida prosecutors said Monday that they won't appeal a court's decision blocking video that allegedly shows New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft paying for massage parlor sex, making it likely the charges against him will be dropped," reports the Associated Press.
• See who's spying on you:
Using Blacklight, @ASankin found that some of the most sensitive websites on the Internet - banks, medical clinics, child safety – were sharing their users personal data with third parties.
SunTrust Bank was sending user passwords to a 3rd party!https://t.co/ZfAOc35Kvw pic.twitter.com/1o9UIWJMHm
— Julia Angwin (@JuliaAngwin) September 22, 2020
• Apparently there is "a non-profit that oversees emoji standards and is responsible for new releases."
The post Can the CDC Get Anything Right? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The killing by Minneapolis police officers of George Floyd, and rage over similar deaths elsewhere, is fueling protests against brutal police tactics and the disproportionate use of such tactics against racial minorities. But most of that anger is targeted at traditional cop shops, potentially letting other law-enforcement agencies escape overdue scrutiny. The ominous appearance this month of federal law enforcement agents at Washington, D.C. demonstrations was a timely reminder that governments in this country employ a lot of enforcers, and we should be concerned about all of them.
"Few sights from the nation's protests in recent days have seemed more dystopian than the appearance of rows of heavily-armed riot police around Washington in drab military-style uniforms with no insignia, identifying emblems or name badges," Politico noted on June 5. The federal cops were apparently drawn from multiple agencies including the Bureau of Prisons, but they all work in one capacity or another for the federal government as part of its growing army of enforcers.
"To put it another way," Politico added, "Every year since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the federal government has added to its policing ranks a force larger than the entire Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives."
Those ranks are pretty deep. "As of the end of fiscal-year 2016, federal agencies in the United States and U.S. territories employed about 132,000 full-time law enforcement officers," according to a 2019 tally by the Office of Justice Programs. That number does not include any classified or military personnel, only officers openly employed by civilian agencies including the ATF, the Bureau of Prisons, Customs and Border Protection, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the National Park Service, and even the Smithsonian Institution.
Politico's description of the federal government hiring an ATF-worth of new enforcers every year isn't encouraging, given that the agency is a hot, steaming mess when it comes to abuses. Eight years ago, after the ATF was caught running guns to Mexican criminal gangs, the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General concluded that "failures within ATF, which included a long term strategy in Operation Fast and Furious that was fully supported by the U.S. Attorney's Office, were systemic and not due to the acts of only a few individuals."
A year later, in 2013, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported on "a botched ATF sting in Milwaukee—that included agents hiring a brain-damaged man to promote an undercover storefront and then arresting him for his work." The newspaper added that "ATF agents befriended mentally disabled people to drum up business and later arrested them in at least four cities in addition to Milwaukee."
Reporters found examples of ATF agents damaging private property, commissioning gun thefts, luring teenagers into criminal activity, instructing people on how to modify firearms in ways that made them illegal and then arresting them for following the instructions, and more. The Journal-Sentinel ultimately produced an investigative series of articles on ATF fiascos.
Such fiascos led to calls for abolishing the ATF, or else combining it with another agency. "ATF, both its personnel and its mission responsibilities, should be merged into the FBI," concluded a 2015 report from the liberal Center for American Progress.
But the FBI has its own problems. This is, after all, the agency that taught its agents that "under certain circumstances, the FBI has the ability to bend or suspend the law and impinge on the freedoms of others." The memo containing that advice came to light in 2012. Five years later, nothing had changed when The Intercept published "a trove of long-sought confidential FBI documents" that "shines a bright light on the vast powers of this law enforcement agency, particularly when it comes to its ability to monitor dissent and carry out a domestic war on terror."
Of course, the FBI has a long history of domestic spying, going back long before the Senate's Church Committee complained in 1976 that the bureau "has placed more emphasis on domestic dissent than on organized crime and, according to some, let its efforts against foreign spies suffer because of the amount of time spent checking up on American protest groups."
Surveillance remains as big a concern as ever, with drones, facial recognition, spy planes, and low-tech tools used by law enforcement to monitor recent protests. But the "war on drugs" that encouraged up-armored and aggressive police departments also deserves attention—and at the heart of that prohibitionist effort is the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
The DEA "has existed for more than 40 years, but little attention has been given to the role the agency has played in fueling mass incarceration, racial disparities and other drug war problems," the Drug Policy Alliance noted in 2015.
Those racial disparities exist not just in the agency's treatment of suspects—none of 179 defendants arrested in sketchy, reverse-sting, entrapment-style cases in the Southern District of New York were white, the The Washington Post reported last year—but also of its own personnel. Dozens of retired DEA agents complained last week about the agency's discriminatory treatment of African-Americans.
To the litany of concerns about federal law enforcement, we could add details about Border Patrol, the Bureau of Prisons, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and more. The feds employ a lot of enforcers, and those enforcers are trouble.
They're even more trouble when they shield cooperating local police from state and city efforts at reform. That's because "local cops assigned to joint task forces are not bound by department rules, such as wearing body cameras, which the feds have prohibited. The FBI and U.S. Marshals allow the use of deadly force if a person poses an 'imminent danger,' using a definition that is less strict than many police departments,'" according to The Marshall Project, which covers criminal justice issues.
To its credit, the Justice in Policing Act of 2020, pending in Congress now as a response to national concern regarding police abuses, seeks to rein-in the use of force by federal law enforcement officers as well as state and local police. It would limit justifications for deadly force and for "less lethal" force.
But many of the bill's provisions are open to interpretation by cops, prosecutors, and officials who are invested in law enforcement as it is. It also vastly expands federal involvement in policing, including a flood of funding that subsidizes the very system that protesters want to restrain. And the bill does nothing about the federal government's army of cops, or the well-documented dangers they pose.
Deep ranks of enforcers with expansive powers and wide-ranging responsibilities will always pose a risk to the public's safety and liberty, no matter which level of government employs them.
The post Federal Policing Needs Reform Too appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Protest surveillance. Law enforcement planes and helicopters were flown over protests in D.C., Las Vegas, and Minneapolis last week, sparking fears that the authorities were using federal tools to track and intimate protesters and capture their cellphone data.
Members of the U.S. House of Representatives have now sent a letter to leaders of the FBI, the National Guard Bureau, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) expressing dismay at whatever was going on.
"We demand that you cease any and all surveilling of Americans engaged in peaceful protests," the letter says. "The First Amendment protects the right of Americans to assemble and protest government actions. Further, the Fourth Amendment protects '[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons…against unreasonable searches and seizures,' a restriction that applies to the agencies you lead."
The letter cites press reports that:
• the FBI and National Guard flew RC-26B aircraft equipped with infrared and electro-optical cameras over Washington, D.C. and Las Vegas;
• the FBI may have flown Cessna 560 aircraft equipped with 'dirtboxes,' equipment that can collect cell phone location data, over Washington, D.C.;
• the CBP flew Predator drones that collected and disseminated live video feeds over Minneapolis, San Antonio,and Detroit; and
• the DEA was granted broad authority to "conduct covert surveillance" over protesters responding to the death of George Floyd.
The representatives add that there's past evidence that federal agencies "have used other technologies to surveil Americans, such as Stingrays, which mimic cell towers to collect location, call, text, and browsing data of nearby cellular devices; facial recognition technology; and automated license plate readers."
The letter was signed by 37 Democratic members of Congress—many of whom have their own not-so-great histories with privacy and First Amendment issues, but we'll leave that for another time.
"The FBI has not specifically confirmed or denied the use of aircraft to surveil protests," says CNN. When asked, the bureau told CNN it has been "focused on identifying, investigating, and disrupting individuals that are inciting violence and engaging in criminal activity." In addition:
The National Guard confirmed to [Sen. Chris] Murphy that an RC-26B surveillance aircraft, operated by the West Virginia Air National Guard, was involved in responding to protests in the DC area but that such flights have since been suspended, according to a Senate staffer with direct knowledge of the situation.
"The national guard confirmed that it was air national guard and that it was an aircraft out of Lester, West Virginia. But the Department of Defense has not given any more information," the staffer told CNN, adding that the directive to hcalt these flights was made after lawmakers raised questions. Early appearances of surveillance flights began as early as May 29 when flight data shows a US Customs and Border Protection MQ-9 Predator B making a hexagonal pattern at 22,000 feet above Minneapolis where Floyd was killed days earlier.
In a letter to Congress, the Department of Homeland Security said that the unpiloted drone "was preparing to provide live video to aid in situational awareness at the request of our federal law enforcement partners in Minneapolis," but when "no longer needed for operational awareness" returned to base in North Dakota. The letter did not say which agency initially requested the flights.
Customs and Border Protection has been using the remotely piloted Predator B since 2005, agency documents show, "to safely conduct missions in areas that are difficult to access or otherwise too high-risk for manned aircraft or CBP ground personnel."
"The European Union is planning formal antitrust charges against Amazon," reports The Wall Street Journal. The charges are said to come from the site's treatment of third-party sellers—an issue that U.S. lawmakers and attorneys general have been hyping up lately too.
The meat of these claims is that Amazon prioritizes its own goods over those from third parties in customer searchers, and that it sometimes attempts to undercut these sellers by offering lower prices or somehow using third-party seller data. It's like getting mad that grocery stores offer lower-priced, store-brand versions of name-brand goods and give their own food brands better placement on store shelves.
In short, it's a silly thing to fuss over. If you want to be mad at Amazon, here's a better reason: A lot of people aren't buying the company's moratorium on letting police use its facial recognition tech. "This is nothing more than a public relations stunt," said Evan Greer, deputy director of Fight for the Future, in a statement.
See also, from Reason's Ron Bailey: "Microsoft and Amazon Adopt Temporary Bans on Police Use of Their Facial Recognition Tech. That's Not Nearly Enough."
New nutrition secrets unlocked? An interesting new study of metabolism from King's College London looks at how different people's bodies clear fat and sugar from their blood following meals. The results, published in Nature Medicine, are part of a larger ongoing nutritional study. "Despite wide variation in metabolic responses between participants, results from identical meals eaten on different days showed that individual responses to the same foods were remarkably consistent for each person," notes a press release from the university.
Lead researcher Sarah Berry, a nutrition lecturer at King's College, said in a statement:
We found that the increase in fat and glucose in our blood after eating a meal initiates an inflammatory response which differs hugely between individuals. Dietary and lifestyle strategies to reduce prolonged elevations in blood fat and glucose may therefore be a useful target to reduce low grade inflammation, and help prevent people from developing low-grade inflammatory conditions such as type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Some additional findings:
• The optimal time to eat for nutritional health also depends on the individual rather than fixed "perfect" mealtimes. The researchers found that some people clearly metabolised food better at breakfast while others saw no difference.
• Optimal meal composition in terms of fat, carbohydrates, proteins and fibre (macronutrients) is also highly individual, so prescriptive diets based on fixed macronutrient ratios are too simplistic and will not work for everyone. For example, a sensitive glucose responder may need to reduce carbohydrates whereas someone else may be able to eat these freely.
• With Breonna's Law, Louisville has banned no-knock raids like the one that killed Breonna Taylor.
#Louisville Metro Council President David James, #BreonnaTaylor's mother Tamika Palmer, and @AttorneyCrump appear together to celebrate passage of #BreonnasLaw. pic.twitter.com/6M2sO91ebY
— Kailani Koenig (@kailanikm) June 11, 2020
• Michigan Libertarian Rep. Justin Amash's bill to end qualified immunity, already co-sponsored by Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D–Mass.), now has a Republican co-sponsor, Rep. Tom McClintock of California. This makes it a rarity: a tripartisan piece of legislation.
• European policing is under scrutiny too.
• "As the protests continue across the United States, we risk finding ourselves lost in the same pattern of unproductive behaviors that have long plagued the country. An obsession with modes of racial protests rather than with the meaning of them belies an unwillingness to face the flaws they expose in the nation's ability to live up to its ideals and fulfill its obligations to the citizenry," writes Theodore R. Johnson in a very good piece for National Review.
• Protest update:
A full week later, Williams is STILL locked up at MDC for his allegedly breaking @NYCMayor's curfew — and, as a result, violating his parole. Last night, he called me from jail and we spoke for 30 minutes… https://t.co/JFuphz4O5k https://t.co/DN6sEx7YzY
— Jake Offenhartz (@jangelooff) June 11, 2020
• "City officials have not interacted with 'armed antifa militants' at this site, but will continue to be on site to monitor the situation closely," Seattle city spokesperson Lori Patrick told CNN, referring to the new Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.
• An immigrant rights group says that 100 percent of the people detained at an Ohio jail have tested positive for COVID-19.
• Check out Reason TV's video on Only Fans:
#OnlyFans didn't save #sexworkers. Sex workers saved themselves. Watch my latest @reason video with @SiouxsieQMedia @CathyReisenwitz @conpenley https://t.co/4b7Svais3k
— Paul Detrick ????️???? (@PaulDetrick) June 11, 2020
• Actor Zachary Levi continues to stand up for third parties:
I think @Jorgensen4POTUS is as viable an option for a 3rd party as any. But again, this is less about voting for a specific 3rd party candidate, and more about voting to break the unending cycle of "Red VS Blue" partisan politics bullshit that we all can't get out of. ???? https://t.co/4lDPDR19HE
— Zachary Levi (@ZacharyLevi) June 11, 2020
• How trendy hotels are coping with the pandemic.
The post Federal Aircraft Accused of Tracking Protesters appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A major conflict is now underway on the U.S. Supreme Court between Justices Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch over the issue of judicial deference to the administrative state.
Their division centers in part on whether an important Supreme Court precedent, Auer v. Robbins (1997), should be overruled. In Auer, the Court held that when an "ambiguous" regulation promulgated by a federal agency is challenged in court, the judge hearing the case should defer to the agency's preferred interpretation of its own regulation. That interpretation, the Court held in Auer, is "controlling unless plainly erroneous or inconsistent with the regulations being interpreted."
In June, the Court decided a case that asked the justices to end Auer once and for all. Writing for a narrow majority in Kisor v. Wilkie, Justice Elena Kagan saved the precedent from total destruction. "Auer deference retains an important role in construing agency regulations," Kagan wrote. "When it applies, Auer deference gives an agency significant leeway to say what its own rules mean. In so doing, the doctrine enables the agency to fill out the regulatory scheme Congress has placed under its supervision."
Critics of Auer say the doctrine empowers bureaucrats at the expense of judges. Kagan acknowledged those critics but insisted that the doctrine is not an abdication. "First and foremost, a court should not afford Auer deference unless the regulation is genuinely ambiguous. If uncertainty does not exist, there is no plausible reason for deference." According to Kagan, Auer "is a deference doctrine not quite so tame as some might hope, but not nearly so menacing as they might fear."
Gorsuch disagreed. "It should have been easy for the Court to say goodbye to Auer," he wrote in Kisor. Not only does Auer require judges "to accept an executive agency's interpretation of its own regulations even when that interpretation doesn't represent the best and fairest reading," but the precedent also "creates a 'systematic judicial bias in favor of the federal government, the most powerful of parties, and against everyone else.'"
Federal judges routinely "reach conclusions about the meaning of statutes, rules of procedure, contracts, and the Constitution," Gorsuch pointed out. "Yet when it comes to interpreting federal regulations, Auer displaces this process and requires judges instead to treat the agency's interpretation as controlling even when it is 'not…the best one.'"
When the next case testing the bounds of the administrative state reaches the Supreme Court, Kagan and Gorsuch will be the ones drawing the battle lines.
The post Kagan and Gorsuch Clash Over Judicial Deference to the Administrative State appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>President Donald Trump just announced two executive orders to rein in unlawful administrative state action.
The first order declares that its goal is "to ensure that Americans are subject to only those binding rules imposed through duly enacted statutes or through regulations lawfully promulgated under them, and that Americans have fair notice of their obligations."
The second complements the first, promising that Americans will not "be subjected to a civil administrative enforcement action or adjudication absent prior public notice of both the enforcing agency's jurisdiction over particular conduct and the legal standards applicable to that conduct."
That's all well and good, but how could two executive orders fundamentally change the administrative state and the presumed authority it has amassed in over a century of unlawful accretion of power? They target a specific, pernicious tool of federal agencies—guidance—by employing a new regime that is elegant in concept and elementary in operation.
Federal agencies issue memoranda, notices, letters, bulletins, circulars, directives, and blog posts (among other things) to evade the rulemaking process established by Congress in the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). Agencies euphemistically refer to these documents as "guidance." Guidance has been responsible for revoking permits to conduct business, barring Americans from working in their chosen occupations, prohibiting taxpayers from taking deductions, levying post-conviction penalties for crimes, and seizing property, without statutory or constitutional authority and without due process. Think of guidance as an off-the-books way for the government to ignore commonly held understandings of fairness. It's a shameless, unconstitutional scheme designed to skirt judicial review, avoid public scrutiny, and evade accountability.
Guidance Is an Offer Regulated Parties Can't Refuse
Substantive rules impose enforceable obligations or prohibitions on regulated parties. Congress' APA rulemaking is the only lawful way an agency may issue substantive rules. Conversely, interpretive rules—or guidance—cannot impose enforceable obligations or prohibitions, so they don't require APA rulemaking.
But here hangs the forbidden fruit: Since guidance lacks notice, comment, and process requirements, it's easier, faster, and cheaper than substantive rulemaking. Agencies almost always give in to the temptation; they disguise substantive rules as interpretive and call them "guidance." When they are feeling really cheeky, they describe their hard-and-fast rules as "merely guidance."
Trojan horse rulemaking to create substantive guidance isn't just unlawful, it's unconstitutional, as it intrudes on the exclusive province of the legislature. "All legislative powers…shall be vested in a Congress" after all. That quote is not just the first article of the Constitution, it's the first section of the first article. Even a federal agency can't miss it.
But there's another constitutional problem. Agencies use substantive guidance to avoid judicial review, which prevents the accused from benefiting from their constitutional right to due process. Agency action must be "final" before a regulated party can sue an agency, but courts don't typically view guidance as final agency action. For instance, a common agency tactic is to issue a warning letter to a regulated party, threatening enforcement. Though the regulated party has little choice but to comply with the agency's demands, courts will not intervene because the letter itself does not establish sufficiently concrete legal consequences, as it is "merely" a notice.
Don Vito Corleone would call this an offer a regulated party can't refuse. Agencies call it guidance.
A Welcome Change
The Executive Orders require agencies to post all guidance online within 120 days of implementation. Guidance must be searchable and specifically articulate the statute or regulation that authorizes its implementation.
This level of transparency will hold agencies accountable by ensuring that a regulated party can't be held responsible for conforming with guidance that isn't accessible online. Additionally, the executive orders allow the public to petition agencies to revoke substantive guidance, putting the burden on agencies to demonstrate the interpretive nature of their posting. Moreover, agencies will be required to tender "economically significant" guidance to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for approval.
This new standard of accountability will make the process more fair. If an agency notifies a regulated party of nonconformance with guidance, it must have previously codified its process for conducting administrative investigations through APA rulemaking. The executive orders also prohibit agencies from imposing legal consequences upon regulated parties for guidance nonconformance unless parties have received prior notification of the investigation and had an opportunity to respond to—and defend against—the agency's allegations. Most importantly, posted guidance will be a final agency action, so guidance will finally be reviewable by courts. This shouldn't be a revolutionary change, but it is.
By specifying straightforward conditions for issuing and enforcing guidance, the Trump administration has increased the cost to agencies for issuing guidance.
Loosening the Grip of the Administrative State
Trump's regulatory gambit conditions agencies' use of guidance on meeting simple conditions. Substantive guidance is already unlawful, so another president pronouncing its unlawfulness wouldn't cure a sick system where the administrative state has metastasized into an unconstitutional fourth branch of government. Instead, the administration has set forth simple conditions for guidance implementation that mirror the transparency, accountability, and fairness features of APA rulemaking. Moreover, with OMB review and public petitions for revocation, these executive orders create backstops to prevent unlawful substantive guidance from slipping through the cracks.
Substantive guidance's days are numbered. Agencies will no longer be able to blindside individuals and businesses with their schemes of secret rules, obtuse interpretations, and mafia-like shakedowns.
The post Trump's New Executive Orders To Restrain the Administrative State appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A major conflict is now underway on the U.S. Supreme Court between Justices Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch over the issue of judicial deference to the administrative state.
Their division centers in part on whether or not a contentious Supreme Court precedent, Auer v. Robbins (1997), should be kept in place by the justices or struck down in its entirety. In Auer, the Court held that when an "ambiguous" regulation promulgated by a federal agency is challenged in court, the judge or judges hearing the case should respect the expertise of the agency and its staff and therefore defer to the agency's interpretation of its own regulation. An agency's interpretation, the Court held in Auer, is "controlling unless plainly erroneous or inconsistent with the regulations being interpreted."
Last month, the Supreme Court decided a case that asked the justices to overrule Auer once and for all. Writing for a narrow majority in Kisor v. Wilkie, Justice Elena Kagan managed to save Auer from total destruction. "Auer deference retains an important role in construing agency regulations," Kagan wrote. "When it applies, Auer deference gives an agency significant leeway to say what its own rules mean. In so doing, the doctrine enables the agency to fill out the regulatory scheme Congress has placed under its supervision."
Critics of Auer deference argue that the doctrine is tantamount to judicial abdication, that it tells judges to stop doing their judicial duty. Kagan acknowledged those critics, but insisted that the doctrine, while deferential, does still have some teeth. "First and foremost, a court should not afford Auer deference unless the regulation is genuinely ambiguous. If uncertainty does not exist, there is no plausible reason for deference." According to Kagan, Auer "is a deference doctrine not quite so tame as some might hope, but not nearly so menacing as they might fear."
Justice Neil Gorsuch was not persuaded by Kagan's positive view. "It should have been easy for the Court to say goodbye to Auer," Gorsuch wrote. Not only does Auer require judges "to accept an executive agency's interpretation of its own regulations even when that interpretation doesn't represent the best and fairest reading," but the precedent also "creates a 'systematic judicial bias in favor of the federal government, the most powerful of parties, and against everyone else.'"
Gorsuch also challenged Kagan's claim that the Auer doctrine has some judicial teeth. On a daily basis, Gorsuch wrote, federal judges "reach conclusions about the meaning of statutes, rules of procedure, contracts, and the Constitution. Yet when it comes to interpreting federal regulations," he continued, "Auer displaces this process and requires judges instead to treat the agency's interpretation as controlling even when it is 'not…the best one.'"
It is no surprise that Kagan and Gorsuch are now squaring off over this particular issue. In their respective pre-SCOTUS careers, the two figures basically stood on opposite sides of the same general debate.
For example, in a 2001 article for the Harvard Law Review, Kagan, who was then a Harvard law professor, made the case for broad judicial deference not only to federal agencies, but also to those presidents who seek to wield extensive influence over federal regulators. As an example of this phenomenon in action, she pointed to President Bill Clinton:
Faced for most of his time in office with a hostile Congress but eager to show progress on domestic issues, Clinton and his White House staff turned to the bureaucracy to achieve, to the extent it could, the full panoply of his domestic policy goals. Whether the subject was health care, welfare reform, tobacco, or guns, a self-conscious and central object of the White House was to devise, direct, and/or finally announce administrative actions—regulations, guidance, enforcement strategies, and reports—to showcase and advance presidential policies. In executing this strategy, the White House in large measure set the administrative agenda for key agencies, heavily influencing what they would (or would not) spend time on and what they would (or would not) generate as regulatory product.
Under Kagan's view, the courts should generally extend the same deference to such presidential behavior as the courts already extend to the regulatory agencies.
Gorsuch, by contrast, established himself as a critic of judicial deference to the administrative state while serving as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit. In his 2016 concurrence in Gutierrez-Brizuela v. Lynch, for example, Gorsuch challenged the notion that judges should defer to an agency's interpretation of an "ambiguous" federal statute. "Under any conception of our separation of powers," Gorsuch wrote, "I would have thought powerful and centralized authorities like today's administrative agencies would have warranted less deference from other branches, not more."
In sum, when the next big case testing the bounds of judicial deference to the administrative state reaches the Supreme Court, it will be Kagan and Gorsuch drawing the battle lines.
The post Gorsuch and Kagan Clash Over Judicial Deference to the Administrative State appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The federal government spends a disproportionate amount of its budget for outside contractors in the final month of the fiscal year, as agencies rush to blow through cash before it's too late. Among the more noteworthy expenditures in 2018, according to the watchdog group Open the Books, was $4.6 million for lobster tail and crab.
Such use-it-or-lose-it spending stems from the fact that each federal agency is given a certain amount of money it can spend on outside contractors for the fiscal year. If the agency comes in under budget, Congress might decide to appropriate less money the following year.
Or as The Office's Oscar Martinez explains to Michael Scott in "The Surplus": "Your mommy and daddy give you $10 to open up a lemonade stand, so you go out and you buy cups and you buy lemons and you buy sugar. And now you find out that it only cost you $9, so you have an extra dollar," he explains. "So you can give that dollar back to mommy and daddy. But guess what: Next summer, and you ask them for money, they're going to give you $9 because that's what they think it cost to run the stand. So what you want to do is spend that dollar on something now, so that your parents think that it cost $10 to run the lemonade stand."
It works the same way at the federal level. Just replace that $10 with $544.1 billion—the amount federal agencies spent on contracts in the last fiscal year.
Of that $544.1 billion, almost $97 billion was spent in September 2018, the final month of the fiscal year, including $53.3 billion in the final seven days of the month. That's compared to $47 billion spent in the entire month of August. As the fiscal year came crashing to an end, bureaucrats apparently did their best to spend as much money as quickly as possible.
The Department of Defense led the pack, spending $61.2 billion in September. The Pentagon was followed not-so-closely by the Department of Health and Human Services ($5.7 billion), the Department of Veterans Affairs ($5.4 billion), and the Department of Homeland Security ($4.2 billion).
Federal agencies spent $402.2 million on food that month, with the Pentagon shelling out $2.3 million on crab and $2.3 million on lobster tail. Also, "agencies spent $2.1 million on games, toys, and wheeled goods," Open the Books notes, as well as "$412,008 on paint and artist's brushes." A whopping $490 million went to furniture, including a baffling $9,341 for a Wexford office chair. Agencies also spent $49,515 for skis and ski poles, $11,816 for a foosball table, and $258,901 on pianos.
The biggest recipients of the contracts were a trio of military companies: Lockheed Martin ($8.3 billion), Boeing ($5.3 billion), and Raytheon ($3.4 billion).
That $97 billion last September represents a 16 percent increase from the $83.7 billion federal agencies spent on contracts in September 2017. The figure was nearly $73.6 billion in 2016 and $69.6 billion in 2015.
In August, a bipartisan group of senators that included Kentucky Republican Rand Paul wrote letters to 13 federal agencies expressing their concerns about wasteful end-of-year spending. Their efforts appear to have failed.
The post Pentagon Spent $4.6 Million on Lobster Tail and Crab in One Month appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Now that California Gov. Gavin Newsom has acknowledged the truth—that the state's proposed high-speed train plan doesn't have a realistic future beyond the first stage—the feds (and a gloating President Donald Trump) are swooping in to try to get their money back.
Yesterday the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) sent a letter to the California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) informing the state agency that the FRA plans to cancel more than $900 million in federal funds set aside to assist in the construction of the Central Valley portion of the route.
This is only part of the $2.5 billion the state has already received from the feds in order to launch the $77 billion-plus boondoggle. The three-page letter sent by the FRA documents that California has not met the terms of the agreement for the grants. California has not contributed adequate state funds, and is now demonstrating that it's not going to complete the project on time. The letter notes that more than 40 status reports submitted to the FRA thus far were either late or lacked necessary details, making it difficult for the FRA to fulfill its oversight role.
Furthermore, the letter notes Newsom's recent state of the state address, during which he announced that he was scaling back the scope of the bullet train. The initial plan called for building a bullet train that traveled between San Francisco and Los Angeles (through the Central Valley) in less than three hours. But funding became a problem, and Newsom acknowledged that it was unlikely to ever be finished, as it's already years behind schedule and billions over budget. Instead, he declared that they'd build the first Central Valley link and then research and work out other ways to connect that portion of the train heading north and south.
The FRA is extending an opportunity for CHSRA to make a case that it's appropriately advancing the project and meeting its goals, and that Newsom's announcement isn't a fundamental change in what the FRA agreed to support. But it also warns that the FRA may terminate the cooperation agreement entirely and attempt to claw back the money it has already sent.
If the FRA goes that route, it could jeopardize finishing even the first leg, unless California makes up the difference. Newsom has responded that this move is political payback for Trump's regular tangles with California; in particular, the Golden State joining others in challenging Trump's "national emergency" to get the border wall funded. From the Los Angeles Times:
"It's no coincidence that the Administration's threat comes 24 hours after California led 16 states in challenging the President's farcical 'national emergency,'" Newsom said in a statement, referring to Trump's emergency declaration to secure funding for his wall on the Mexican border. "The President even tied the two issues together in a tweet this morning. This is clear political retribution by President Trump, and we won't sit idly by. This is California's money, and we are going to fight for it."
Despite the fact that Trump had previously declared support for high-speed rail (because countries like China have it), he mocked the California bullet train on Twitter and pointed out he's asking for far less for his border wall. This morning he declared he wants the money back:
California now wants to scale back their already failed "fast train" project by substantially shortening the distance so that it no longer goes from L.A. to San Francisco. A different deal and record cost overruns. Send the Federal Government back the Billions of Dollars WASTED!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 20, 2019
He's not wrong at all. Not only is the project not what was presented to the FRA, it's not what was presented to the voters when they first approved the project back in 2008.
California will now have a half-built train in a non-urban part of the state that is already served by passenger rail. Over at the Reason Foundation (the non-profit that publishes this blog), Baruch Feigenbaum and Marc Joffe note the absurdity of what we're left with:
The operating segment that Gov. Newsom says is going to continue would connect Bakersfield, Hanford, Fresno, Madera and Merced — covering a total distance of about 165 miles in the Central Valley. Realistically, no fiscally prudent government entity or private developer would plan a high-speed rail line to serve such a short, low-density, low-population corridor.
The region is already served by Amtrak's San Joaquins train, which has seven daily departures. The existing Amtrak service is relatively slow, at just over three hours, so a new train could provide faster connections between these cities. But the benefits will be limited. Although high-speed rail has a theoretical maximum speed of 220 miles per hour, average speeds are much slower given time spent in stations, accelerating and decelerating. End to end travel time for Central Valley High-Speed Rail could be in the range of 90 minutes.
Cities at the northern end of the operating segment have relatively low populations, so the most common trip along the route will be between Fresno and Bakersfield, covering a distance of about 110 miles. The current two-hour trip between these cities would likely be reduced to about one hour.
The post Feds Cut Off Funding for California Bullet Train, Threaten Potential Clawback of $2.5 Billion appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Understandably, Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees are no more enthusiastic about working when their paychecks are delayed than is anybody else on the planet. That's why they've been calling-in sick in increased numbers—some to seek temporary work elsewhere in order to pay their bills—as the more-theater-than-reality "government shutdown" drags on. But, isn't this an opportunity for us all? Given that the world is a better place when TSA employees and other government minions don't do their jobs, and some are already seeking alternative employment, what a great opportunity to shut down their agencies, shrink the government, and make everybody's lives a little better!
"If you don't have a check to pay your bills, what are you going to do?" complains Rudy Garcia, president of the chapter of the American Federation of Government Employees that represents Dallas TSA employees, many of whom have been calling in sick in as they seek part-time employment. "You will look for something outside of what you're doing now."
And who can argue with that? Nobody wants to work for an employer who holds off on cutting paychecks until a more convenient moment, and that's just what the federal government is doing during its "shutdown"—a spectacle that almost seems crafted to demonstrate how easy it is to live without the leviathan in Washington, D.C.
Along those lines, it's nearly ideal that the federal sick-out has begun among TSA employees, since their agency is so astoundingly incompetent and abusive at its assigned tasks and is skilled only at angering travelers of all political persuasions. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) may be more explicitly malevolent, but their fans and detractors tend to break down along ideological lines. Even the Internal Revenue Service can find boosters among whoever it is who keeps weeping over those regurgitated press releases about how hard it is to be a tax collector. But sharing vicious comments about the TSA clowns squeezing people's junk is a game we can all play while suffering in line at the airport.
Not that there's any point to all of that groping beyond the purely recreational aspect. Undercover investigators were able to smuggle weapons and explosives past TSA agents 95 percent of the time, according to a 2015 Homeland Security Investigator General report. Maybe that's because agents are relying on dowsing rods or Spidey sense—they're certainly not depending on the expensive equipment they make travelers and baggage file through.
"Because TSA does not adequately oversee equipment maintenance, it cannot be assured that routine preventive maintenance is performed or that equipment is repaired and ready for operational use," The Inspector General office also noted.
Given the pointless hassles inherent in passing through the security checkpoints at airports, I'm not sure why we don't all get ourselves those security badge backstage passes that let airport workers wander hither and yon through secure areas; TSA oversees the issue of those badges and they don't seem that hard to get.
"An official from the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport said that, over 2 years, more than 1,400 badges were lost or stolen," the Inspector General added in 2016. "Some members of Congress expressed concern that these missing badges would allow an unauthorized person access to an airport's secured areas."
TSA agents aren't getting paid? Are they sure? Maybe they just misplaced the checks.
I kid. They really aren't getting paychecks at the moment, but I can't really think of a good reason why their jobs should exist at all.
"Security theater" is what security expert Bruce Schneier, a lecturer at Harvard University's Kennedy School of government, calls most of what the TSA does. They're "measures that make us feel safer without improving security… I've repeatedly said that the two things that have made flying safer since 9/11 are reinforcing the cockpit doors and persuading passengers that they need to fight back. Everything beyond that isn't worth it."
If it isn't worth it, why pay for it?
And now many TSA agents are looking for alternative employment. Most of them are probably landing gigs in the private sector (we know the feds aren't paying at the moment) for employers willing to exchange their own money for what the sometime federal security agents have to offer. That suggests a good chance that their new jobs may well be worth something more than what they do for the government. So let them go!
And maybe they could take their federal colleagues—including those at the ATF and the DEA—with them.
"ATF operations nationwide employed rogue tactics, including tapping those with mental disabilities … then charging them with gun crimes," the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported in 2013 as part of a series of horrifying stories on the federal agency. Among the failures of the agency tasked with regulating firearms, "ATF agents lost track of dozens of their own guns."
The DEA "has existed for more than 40 years, but little attention has been given to the role the agency has played in fueling mass incarceration, racial disparities and other drug war problems," the Drug Policy Alliance notes. That's what DEA agents do when they're not enjoying "'sex parties' with prostitutes hired by local drug cartels," as The Washington Post puts it.
Without even turning to the larger federal apparatus, isn't a widespread sick-out among government workers sounding like a pretty attractive idea right about now?
So, TSA agents, I wish you good luck in finding new jobs as you try to cover your bills. And once you land those new gigs, please, don't come back.
The post Please, TSA Workers, Don't Come Back appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>If Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren had taken a page out of Virginia Delegate Nick Freitas' book, she might not be in the pickle she is today.
Warren is spitting mad at Mick Mulvaney, the Office of Management and Budget director who does double duty heading up an agency whose creation Warren championed: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The CFPB's previous director was an ideological ally of Warren. Since Mulvaney took over, Warren has ripped the agency's decisions. Warren said Mulvaney is giving "the middle finger" to consumers, and she railed at Mulvaney's indifferent response to the 10 (!) letters she has sent him demanding answers to more than 100 questions.
The other day she tweeted that she is giving Mulvaney "one last chance." Yet as The Wall Street Journal points out, she has only herself to blame for her apparent impotence.
Time and again during debate over the CFPB, conservatives and libertarians warned that its powers were too great and that its accountability to the other branches of government was too limited. But that was just the way Warren and other supporters wanted things. Neither Congress nor other political forces could influence an unaccountable regulatory agency. Now Warren finds herself thwarted by the very lack of oversight she championed.
Be careful what you wish for.
Freitas, who is running for the Republican nomination for Senate in Virginia, made this very point on Saturday in his debate against Corey Stewart, the bombastic chairman of the Prince William Board of Supervisors.
Asked whether the federal government should punish local officials who defy federal immigration laws, Stewart said yes: "Prosecute any local or state official who declares themselves [sic] a sanctuary city," he said.
Freitas took a different view: "If we ever, God forbid, had a Hillary Clinton presidency, and they passed federal gun bans, when a sheriff … refuses to enforce it the federal government is going to go in and put that person in jail."
Freitas draws out an important point: When you think about what you want government to do, put specifics aside and focus on the more general principle.
Philosopher John Rawls famously invented a mechanism for doing just that: the "veil of ignorance": If you are designing the rules for a society, you should assume that you know nothing about your place in that society. If your race, age, physical abilities, mental prowess, and so forth are all a complete mystery, then you are likely to design a political-economic system that is fair to all. Just in case you wind up at the bottom of the social pile.
Having a president who makes policy through signing statements, his "pen and phone," and other forms of executive action, for example, seems brilliant when the opposing party controls Congress. It seems less so when the opposing party controls the White House.
Should intelligence agencies keep tabs on Islamists who might pose a threat of domestic terrorism? Then don't be surprised if a different administration turns the focus to right-wing militias.
California lawmakers have passed sanctuary legislation protecting illegal immigrants from deportation. Stewart—who, in an ironic twist, spent much of last year cheerleading for neo-Confederate causes—thinks they should be arrested for it. But as Freitas points out, that could set a precedent Stewart might one day regret.
Speaking of California: The Supreme Court will soon decide a case about that state's abortion-notice law. The law requires anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers to post notices that the state offers contraception and abortion at little or no charge. Abortion-rights activists say this is necessary for consumer protection.
But while giving the government the power to compel speech might sound good to abortion supporters in liberal California, they might not like to see that power exercised elsewhere. Imagine Mississippi forcing clinics to post signs bearing the anti-abortion slogan "Abortion stops a beating heart" and advising women where they can find adoption services.
Circuit courts already have split on another form of compelled speech: Forcing doctors who perform abortions to conduct an ultrasound, display the results to the patient, and offer to let her hear the fetal heartbeat. Conservatives who don't like the California law tend to favor this sort of compelled speech—and liberals who find compelling speech by a doctor offensive are much less troubled at the thought of compelling bakers to make wedding cakes for gay couples.
It is not enough simply to think you might not always hold the reins of power. It's also prudent to wonder what your enemies would get up to if they held them—because someday, they will.
The post Under Trump, Elizabeth Warren Suddenly Discovers the Downside of Unaccountable Federal Agencies appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>As the government shutdown dominates the news and partisan posturing today, you might be thinking we're temporarily freer from the oppressive hand of The Man. Don't celebrate. The feds who carry around guns and arrest people are almost all still working.
Bloomberg has gone through the list of federal agencies to determine the breadth of the shutdown. Here's what they had to say about law enforcement:
The federal drug war will see no reprieve. Nasty, heartless immigration enforcement tactics will continue.
Some libertarians may see any closure of the government as a win, but the Cato Institute's Jeffrey Miron explains that this partial, temporary shutdown does nothing to reduce the size and scope of government power:
To begin with, shutdowns are (presumably) temporary. The average length of previous government shutdowns was seven days. And if history is a guide, then most of the suspended expenditures for salaries, benefits, and the like will be paid retroactively. If you think a shutdown helps keep the budget in check, you're wrong.
Shutdowns also have zero effect on entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare, which continue automatically unless Congress explicitly amends them. Shutdowns only influence discretionary spending that has to be reauthorized every year. Because entitlements constitute the large majority (roughly 67 percent) of federal expenditure, and because this component is growing at an unsustainable rate, shutdowns cannot have any meaningful impact on the budget deficit. And even with discretionary spending, around half is exempt given that many Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security functions are exempted from the shutdown, because they are considered "essential" services.
I would add that because, unfortunately, large chunks of America's market interactions require permission from federal bureaucrats, extended federal shutdowns end up harming private economic activity. The guys with guns are at work. The guys with approval stamps are not. A shutdown means the government can't give you permission to do things, but it can sure as heck still stop you.
The last time we had a federal shutdown, in 2013, I detailed some of the completely private economic activity hampered because people couldn't get permission to do their jobs. Craft brewers couldn't get labels for their products approved and thus couldn't introduce new beers into the market. Fishermen couldn't get permits for the latest season of crab-catching in the Pacific Northwest. We'll probably see more stories like this if the shutdown drags on. As I noted back then:
The government is so involved in our lives that even basic commerce—simply hiring people—is threatened by political jockeying. Democratic Sen. Harry Reid attacked Republicans as "anarchists" for bringing about the shutdown. Nothing could be further from anarchy than fishing boats sitting idle, waiting for a government functionary to give sailors permission to work. And yet, the common response is anger about the government shutdown, not anger about having to jump through so many hoops in the first place. Even before the shutdown, it would take months for the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau to approve permits for craft breweries.
The Trump administration may have scaled back some regulations, but the regulatory state is still enormous. Many, many people will find their private economic activity impaired by the shutdown.
The post Reminder: The Parts of the Federal Government Authorized to Shoot You Are Still Functioning appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The fidget spinner: harmless fad that suffered a cultural backlash almost as soon as we became aware they existed? Or deadly killer?
It's a harmless fad, but months after we've all grown tired of even thinking about the things, the federal government is here to make sure you don't kill yourself, kill everyone around you, and burn down your neighborhood with a small spinning toy.
Guys, there's a Fidget Spinner Safety Information Center. The United States Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) has a new "guidance" out with a page explaining how to safely spin a toy.
The commission's acting chair, Anne Marie Buerkle, even put out a press release encouraging people to let them know about unsafe fidget spinners and "help our agency stay on top of this emerging hazard."
The agency's efforts have prompted a CNN piece about the not-terribly-hidden dangers of the toy. Primarily, fidget spinners have small parts that children can choke on. That's a consumer product warning so typical that it's almost meaningless. There was one notable choking incident in May that resulted in a 10-year-old having to get surgery to remove part of a spinner. As CNN notes, manufacturers already warn that the spinners are potentially a choking hazard.
Some fidget spinners also have batteries in them to operate little lights, so if you have one of those, go make sure your smoke detectors are in working order right this minute! I'm not exaggerating: One of the CPSC's safety tips is to check that you have working smoke detectors if you have fidget spinners with batteries in your house. And don't charge it overnight while you're sleeping!
Disappointingly, the CPSC does not warn against attempting to sharpen the edges of the fidget spinner so it becomes a ninja star. That seems like the kind of thing certain types of kids would try to do.
The CPSC also warns that there are all sorts of regulations fidget spinner manufacturers must adhere to in order to legally sell their product in the market.
Well, at least they actually get to sell their wares on the marketplace. Readers may recall the fate of small magnet toys like Buckyballs and Zen Magnets, which the CPSC intimidated out of the market out of exaggerated fear of their risks. Watch ReasonTV on Buckballs vs. the CPSC back in 2012 below. Buckyballs are, by the way, back for sale! (And Zen Magnets are available here.)
The post The Government Is Here to Make Sure Your Fidget Spinner Doesn't Kill Everybody appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A draft version of the U.S. Global Change Research Program Climate Science Special Report has been leaked to The New York Times.
Notwithstanding the Times' alarmist headline suggesting "drastic" climate impacts on the U.S., a glance through the 545-page report finds that it is essentially an aggregation of climate change studies that support the scientific consensus that man-made global warming is occurring.
According to the report, the global annual average temperature has increased by more than 1.6°F (0.9°C) from 1880 to 2015; the average annual temperature of the contiguous U.S. has increased by about 1.2°F (0.7°C) between 1901 and 2015. Climate models project increases of at least 2.5°F (1.4°C) over the next few decades, which means that recent record-setting years in the U.S. will be relatively "common" in the near future.
The report concurs with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's conclusion that it is "extremely likely that most of the global mean temperature increase since 1951 was caused by human influence on the climate." The report also finds that extremely cold days in the U.S. have become fewer while the number of extremely hot days has increased. In addition, extreme percipitation events have become more common in the U.S. The report notes that there is still considerable controversy among researchers when it comes to future trends in hurricane frequency and intensity.
Politicians, like most people, don't want to hear bad news that appears to contradict their views. The saga of how the the first National Climate Assessment fared under the George W. Bush administration is cautionary tale. Basically, Bush administration officials edited the report in ways that suggested greater uncertainty about scientific findings than the researchers who put together the report thought were warranted. That effort backfired when the administration's artful editing was leaked to and reported by the media.
The new report states that "it does not include an assessment of the literature on climate change mitigation, adaptation, economic valuation, or societal responses, nor does it include policy recommendations." This appears to be accurate, though the report does note that "significant reductions in global CO2 emissions relative to present-day emission rates" would be needed to meet the Paris Agreement on Climate Change's goal of limiting future warming to below 2°C.
Scientific data can identify a problem, but they do not tell policy makers the right way to handle a problem. Maybe the best thing to do is to let emissions increase while growing the economy as fast possible, so as to create the wealth and technologies that will enable future generations to deal with whatever problems climate change may generate. Or perhaps more research needs to be directed toward developing cheap low-carbon energy technologies.
The report was no doubt leaked by someone with an agenda, and I don't blame anyone in the Trump administration who thinks a shadow science group of Obama leftovers is trying to thwart what it perceives as the president's climate and energy policies. In any case, since that the draft report is available to anyone with an internet connection, it would be ridiculous for officials to try to "suppress" it now.
Update: Climate report found over at Internet Archive. Fox News cites several researchers who assert that that means it's been public for months. When the National Academy of Sciences released its report evaluating the process for how the draft Special Report was put together, I did a fairly extensive online search for the draft report and could not find it. Even now over at the official federal U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) website the link to any copy of the report appears to be absent—maybe because the comment period is over? Even so, why not leave the report available on the website for interested members of the public to read?
The final report is supposed to be released by August 18. Assuming that the deadline is met, it will be interesting to see what changes have been made in that version.
In any case, a #FakeNews tweet from the president is no doubt in the offing.
The post The Administrative State Strikes Back: Federal Climate Change Draft Report Leaked appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Let's start with the best news from President Donald Trump's Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis: Their interim report does not call for new harsh laws or punitive measures against American citizens who abuse drugs. It doesn't call for more jail cells or new mandatory minimum sentences. It does not pretend that American can arrest its way into ending opioid overdose deaths.
On the flip side, the commission recommends even greater government meddling in the frequency and manner by which doctors prescribe pain medication, bureaucratic behavior likely to result in more pain sufferers being denied treatment and potentially turning to the black market for dangerous alternatives.
That's the unfortunate irony of the report from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's commission, made up of four elected politicians and a former White House drug policy official who want to keep marijuana as a Schedule I forbidden drug.
Read the full report here.
The commission's stated goal is to try to reduce the recent dramatic increase in opioid overdose deaths. The report is deeply concerned about black market access to synthetic opioids and notes that it comes directly as a result of the tightening of access to prescription drugs.
Yet the report calls for more government involvement in overseeing the practices of pain medication prescribers and more state-level monitoring of prescription access to "assist prescribing doctors." Though the report doesn't appear to suggest punitive measures toward doctors who prescribe more than the government believes is appropriate, it's very easy to see how these practices will end up there.
Indeed, given that the news coverage of the report is focusing on the commission's desire to get Trump to declare opioid overdoses to be a "national emergency," it's hard to imagine how its recommendations won't be used as a mechanism to overwhelmingly scale back pain medication prescriptions.
The report says America has a drug overdose death toll equal to September 11 every three weeks. They even underline the "every three weeks" for emphasis. Drug overdoses now kill more Americans than gun homicides and car crashes combined, though the report doesn't mention gun and crash deaths trends had been on the decline.
It is true that drug overdose deaths have been trending upward, and have been for a while. But it's an absurd exaggeration for the report to claim "If this scourge has not found you or your family yet, without bold action by everyone, it soon will."
The report addressed Trump directly, telling him he's the "only person who can bring this type of intensity to the emergency and we believe [he has] the will to do so and to do so immediately."
So if they don't want to throw people in prison, what do they actually want after declaring such a crisis? That's easy: More money. More federal spending to the states.
The first recommendation is for the federal government to facilitate more inpatient clinics getting access to Medicaid reimbursement money for treatment. The report authors know that legislation is technically necessary to make changes, but they believe that if Trump declares an emergency, the Department of Health and Human Services can grant waivers to individual states so that reimbursement can happen more easily, and the availability of treatment will hopefully increase.
The report also calls for federal incentives to increase access to medication-assisted treatments like buprenorphine and methadone to help addicts, particularly among veterans and Medicare patients.
And while the report doesn't call for more harsh laws, it does call for more funding for the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice to fight the flow of synthetic drugs across the border into the United States. It may not want to punish Americans for being drug addicts, but the commission remains committed to fighting the war on drugs.
Possibly the most positive component of the report is the recommendation that the feds assist the states in equipping law enforcement officers with naloxone to reverse opioid overdoses. It calls for the feds to help craft model legislation for the states to make the practice spread. And it encourages support for "Good Samaritan" laws that protect people from prosecution when they call 911 to report drug overdoses if they're also in possession of drugs or under the influence.
It's very much a mixed bag. It's great the commission is resisting the push by Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions to make the war on drugs even more punitive. But it fails to acknowledge how government meddling in prescription practices helps contribute to the black market for opioids.
Furthermore, at the end it bulletpoints a bunch of topics they may ultimately address in their final report. One of those topics includes a "supply reduction" of pills via law enforcement pushes, meaning yet more cranking up of the war on drugs. Those punitive measures the interim report is avoiding may make its way in eventually.
For an alternative solution, read Jeffrey A. Singer's recommendation that we consider a harm reduction approach for addicts (which, to be fair, is a concept this federal report certainly includes) instead of trying to tell doctors they have to prescribe less to people who are in serious pain.
Update (August 2): While this commission may not be calling for more punishment, it turns out the Justice Department has its own plans. On Wednesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a task force to try to crack down on doctors who overprescribe opioids. Read more here.
The post Opioid Addiction Report Uses Panic to Sell More Federal Spending appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In 2015, IRS agents strode into a Dallas wedding boutique, shut it down, and sold the entire inventory in just four hours to recoup alleged unpaid taxes. Now, the former owners are seeking financial compensation. They have filed a $2 million lawsuit, alleging multiple IRS rule violations and acts of impropriety.
Tony and Somnuek Thangsongcharoen opened their store, Mii's Bridal Salon, in Dallas, Texas, in 1983. The elderly Thai immigrants sunk their life savings into designer wedding dresses and were left penniless when the IRS sold them all, according to the couple's attorney.
"They've really been destitute," Jason Freeman, their attorney, tells Reason. "This really completely wiped them out financially."
In the lawsuit, the couple claims that the IRS conducted the entire seizure illegally, broke multiple statutes, and ultimately conspired to shut Mii's down.
According to the legal filing, the IRS believed Mii's owed $31,422.46 (which the couple disputes) and internally documented their 1,600 dress inventory as being worth $615,000.
The legal filing claims that the agent on the case originally recognized that the entire inventory would not need to be sold to satisfy the debt. However, Freeman obtained internal IRS communications through a Freedom of Information Act Request and found that IRS higher-ups decided that the agency should "shut down this failing business."
The lawsuit contends that the IRS violated its own rules in the process.
On the day of reckoning, March 4, 2015, 20 armed agents and members of the Dallas Police arrived at Mii's and told the Thangsongcharoens that they had two hours to write a $10,000 check or forfeit the entire inventory.
It was "totally improper to come in and demand a check like that within a matter of hours," Freeman says.
The couple didn't fill out a check, so four hours later, the IRS had sold the entire inventory and additional items through auction for $17,000. In conducting the sale so quickly and from within the store, the plaintiffs believe the IRS failed to comply with notice of sale and public sale requirements.
The auction took place under the IRS perishable goods sale procedures. Invoking it allows the IRS to seize and sell goods immediately instead of waiting 10 days and posting public notice of a sale, as is typically required. According to Freeman, such a quick sale "really circumvents statutorily prescribed safe guards" and is only meant to be used for perishable goods, not wedding dresses.
But the procedures also allow the IRS to sell goods immediately if it claims it would cost more to store them than they would gain from waiting to sell them. And that's how the IRS justified the immediate auction.
Freeman's internal documents show that the IRS internally devalued Mii's inventory in order to justify the perishable goods sale. They arrived at a valuation of $6,000—about $4 for a designer wedding dress. The IRS then claimed that storing the dresses would cost the agency more than they could sell them for.
Freeman also argues that the IRS overstated the costs that would be necessary to store the dresses, making the entire scheme "a bad faith engineered valuation designed to get what they wanted".
The IRS had decided that a perishable goods sale would be the "resolution where the government will benefit the most," as stated in internal communications.
Mii's was never able to reopen after the seizure. Tony Thangsongcharoen claims the stress of the ordeal caused him to have a heart attack and undergo quadruple bypass surgery.
The $1.8 million lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas Dallas Division earlier this year. It is meant to cover "damages resulting from the reckless, intentional, and/or negligent disregard of the Internal Revenue Code (I.R.C.) and governing Regulations by officers, agents and/or employees of the Internal Revenue Service ('IRS')".
Freeman says he hopes this lawsuit will help prevent future IRS misconduct.
"I don't think this is how citizens and taxpayers should be treated, ever … ," Freeman says. "While most government acts are performed with unquestionable integrity and good faith there are unfortunately exceptions to the rule. … When it happens they need to be held accountable. That's the only way to prevent it from becoming the rule."
So far, the government has moved to keep this case from getting a jury, requested the amount requested in the lawsuit to be trimmed, and commented that the Thangsongcharoens lack legal standing. According to the government, only Mii's, the bridal shop itself, should remain as a plaintiff.
The post Why Did the IRS Seize this Wedding Boutique and Sell Everything for Next to Nothing? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Americans often look to Scandinavian countries for examples of successful policy and governance. It's easy to see why: These countries boast some of the best quality-of-life rankings in the world. Denmark in particular is praised for its stellar telecommunications services. The country has topped the International Telecommunications Union's ranking of global information and communication technology (ICT) provision for years due to its expansive broadband and wireless penetration, fast Internet speeds, and ample provider competition.
The Danish reputation got a boost among the American left in last year's presidential election, when none other than Bernie Sanders himself plugged the country as a model for the United States to emulate. But admirers of the popular democratic socialist politician may be surprised to learn exactly how Denmark was able to become an international leader in ICT delivery. It wasn't super-charged regulation, top-down "net neutrality" rules, or major government subsidies that did the trick.
So how did Denmark do it? Deregulation. By virtually eliminating their equivalent of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Danes now enjoy some of the best ICT service on the planet.
A new Mercatus Center working paper by Roslyn Layton and Joseph Kane describes precisely how Danish telecommunications officials undertook successful deregulatory reforms. It starts with Danish regulators who quickly understood the promise of digital technology and realized that government policies could quash innovative applications that would benefit consumers and businesses alike. From there, they developed a plan to prioritize competition and development instead of central control. This hands off-approach was so successful that eventually the country's National IT and Telecom Agency (NITA) was disbanded altogether.
Committed to Competition
In 1994, when most governments hadn't even started to consider the impending digital revolution, Danish authorities had already laid out a clear path for simple telecommunications policy. Their plan emphasized facilitating interactions between the public and private sectors instead of rushing to regulate.
The Danish government also undertook early efforts to modernize their own services by digitizing government records, thereby becoming a key buyer of ICT services. Government services became more efficient, and the infant ICT sector got an enthusiastic and large client.
Policymakers clearly stated their opposition to subsidy-driven "growth" and heavy-handed regulation. The country's state-owned telecommunications provider, Tele Danmark (TDC), was completely privatized in 1998 through the efforts of Social Democrat Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen. The next year, a consortium of Danish political parties formed a "Teleforlig," or telecommunications agreement, that outlined their goals. It stated:
It is important to ensure that regulation does not create a barrier for the possibility of new converged products… Regulation must be technologically neutral, and technology choices are to be handled by the market. The goal is to move away from sector-specific regulation toward competition-oriented regulation.
And Danish regulators kept this promise. For example, following the privatization of TDC, NITA levied special regulations on the provider so that it would not abuse its previous monopoly to prevent new competition in wireless. TDC was therefore subject to controls on its access to mobile networks and call origins. But NITA discovered that the wireless industry was sufficiently competitive by 2006, with four active providers in the market. Remarkably, NITA then dissolved the TDC regulations. As one official stated, "We are obliged to remove the regulation when the competitive situation demands it. There is no need to regulate something that market forces can take care of."
By 2011, Danish ICT provision had become so competitive and responsive to market needs that NITA closed up shop all together. Interestingly, this major deregulation was not the undertaking of a wild-eyed free market party, but rather a consortium of the center-left ruling parties. Nor did the development make much of a splash in the public eye, receiving very little public press or debate. According to those involved with the reform, there was simply no need to operate a specialized telecommunications regulator anymore. Plus, the existence of a specialized telecommunications regulator could lend itself to regulatory capture and corruption—why invite temptation? Hence NITA was disbanded and its limited regulatory functions were transferred to the general Danish Business Authority.
What Americans Can Learn From Denmark
As so-called "net neutrality" again grabs headlines in the U.S., the Danish experience is especially stark. Where the allegedly "socialist" Denmark has consistently stripped down onerous telecommunications regulations and enjoyed enhanced competition and service, the allegedly "capitalist" United States has continually expanded the FCC's reach and limited market entry. In fact, as my colleagues Brent Skorup and Kane have pointed out, the FCC has found creative ways to extract new authorities for itself throughout time. The result is a massive, labyrinthine regulatory complex with little critical oversight or even understanding of its actions or the rationales behind them.
The Danish example is proof that an FCC-like body is not necessary to enjoy the outcomes Americans desire. I've already discussed the market benefits that telecommunications deregulation brought. But Denmark is actually a leader in self-regulation as well.
Consider net neutrality. In 2011, a group of Danish industry representatives and government regulators formed a private body called the Net Neutrality Forum. This group developed a set of voluntary net neutrality principles comparable to the FCC's "Four Freedoms" of 2004. The group meets on an ad hoc basis to adjudicate any conflicts with their principles that do arise. (To date, there has been only one issue concerning a surcharge for WhatsApp access; the body advised against the practice, and the industry participants voluntarily obliged.) The result? Denmark's voluntary net neutrality system sparked a revolution in mobile-app development in the country. Meanwhile, countries that chose top-down net neutrality regulation have remained stagnant.
In the United States, commentators are absolutely losing their minds over a congressional overturn of one arbitrary FCC regulation. That regulation, which bars internet service providers from selling bulk data to advertisers in the way that Google and Facebook do, could perhaps be better addressed by existing Federal Trade Commission rules anyway; perhaps FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai is taking a page from the Danish book by moving to yield regulatory authority to a more appropriate, generalized body. Yet even this minor rescinding of a rule that has not even taken effect yet is generating major controversy.
The Danish model shows that living without the FCC is not only possible, it is downright desirable. Yet it also demonstrates how important bipartisan collaboration and reasoned discussion are to successful regulatory reform. Judging by the emotional rhetoric that so often accompanies any discussion of the golden calf of "net neutrality" in America, we might have quite a bit of work to do.
The post Denmark Proves We Don't Need the FCC appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>President Donald Trump has released what was being touted as a "skinny" budget, meaning that it would put federal spending on a diet. Would that that were true. The blueprint, which doesn't engage with entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security and other forms of "mandatory" spending at all, simply balances cuts to various parts of the government with increases to the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security. In fiscal 2017, the government plans to spend around $1.1 trillion in discretionary spending (this is spending that is voted on every year; the rest of the federal budget is essentially on autopilot). Under Trump's plan, it will spend that much again in 2018. Overall federal spending will still come in around $4 trillion.
Let's call this what it is: Unacceptable.
Federal spending remains at historically high levels both in absolute terms and as a percentage of GDP. Since 2008, outlays have been higher than 20 percent of GDP, well above the post-war average and most of the 1990s. While revenues have soared to record levels in absolute dollars, they come nowhere close to matching outlays, the result being continuing deficits and growing national debt, which is already greater than annual GDP. Because of the automatic spending increases built into "mandatory" programs such as Medicare and Social Security, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects growing debt over the next decade. Given the well-established correlation between persistent, high levels of national debt and reduced economic growth—"debt overhangs"—this is not simply bad news but ruinous. Left-wing economists affiliated with the University of Massachusetts found "the average real GDP growth rate for countries carrying a public-debt-to-GDP ratio of over 90 percent is…2.2 percent." That's the same sluggish growth found by more market-friendly economists Carmen Reinhart, Kenneth Rogoff, and Vincent Reinhart: "On average, debt levels above 90 percent
are associated with growth that is 1.2 percent lower than in other periods (2.3 percent versus 3.5 percent)." Indeed, in 20 out of 26 debt-overhang cases studied by Reinhart, Rogoff, and Reinhart, the period of reduced growth lasted a quarter-century, substantially reducing GDP and living standards (see chart to right).
As it stands, CBO is already projecting historically low rates of economic growth over the coming decade. Earlier this year, CBO said it expects the economy to grow by just 1.8 percent annually through 2027, well behind post-war rates of 3 percent or higher. And that already meager growth comes after eight years of just 1.4 percent on average per year. In a conversation with Matt Welch and me at the 2016 International Students for Liberty Conference, George Will observed that the difference between 2 percent annual growth and 3 percent annual growth is the difference between a positive, forward-looking country in which politics recede from everyday life and a Hobbesian nightmare in which interest groups slug it out over a barely growing pie. Note that he was talking about 2 percent annual growth, which seems positively aspirational in the 21st century.
That's not to say that Trump's budget blueprint, which he has already signaled is merely the start of negotiations with Congress, doesn't have some positives. Indeed, it's bracing and good to see a plan that takes a hacksaw if not a chainsaw to various federal departments (even as I suspect most cuts will be bargained away in order to secure the hikes he wants). Here's Table 2 of his plan, which summarizes how departments and agencies would be affected:
In percentage terms, there are double-digit cuts to cabinet departments such as Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Interior, and Transportation. The EPA takes it on the chin, facing a 31.4 percent budget cut. The howls of indignation from supporters of the status quo are already sounding around the internet and cable news programs, but there's every reason to believe that such savings can be accomplished with little to no impact on public safety or essential government functions. Another way of saying this is that government is a lagging indicator in American society and just as every business, household, and individual has spent the last decade-plus becoming more efficient, productive, and economical, now it's the feds' turn.
The fact of the matter is that while discretionary government spending has been relatively flat over the past several years, there were major, across-the-board increases pushed through during the Bush years and the early Obama years. As Mercatus Center economist and Reason columnist Veronique de Rugy has documented, spending ballooned by 53 percent in real terms under George W. Bush and has never gone down to anything like pre-9/11 totals. And we need to underscore that, on balance, Trump spends exactly as much as last year's discretionary budget. This is where he loses any credibility with libertarians. There is no reason to think that the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security could not function with the same sort of double-digit cuts the president levies on other departments and agencies. If Trump were truly a foe of the administrative state in any sort of principled way, I'd expect him to be abolishing Homeland Security, a widely criticized agglomeration of power that has few supporters outside of those drawing food from its trough. "The President's 2018 budget ends the arbitrary depletion of our strength and security, and begins to rebuild the U.S. Armed Forces," reads the blueprint. It's good, I suppose, that the White House recognizes that all the wars of the past 15 years were in some way "arbitrary," but the way to stop depleting our military is to stop sending it all over the globe in fruitless endeavors that have turned Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places into danger zones. In the same breath, Trump's document brags that the $52 billion increase he seeks above current levels of defense spending "exceeds the entire defense budgets of most countries." Do we really need it then? Worse still: De Rugy and Harvard economist Robert Barro found that "a dollar increase in federal defense spending results in a less-than-a-dollar increase in GDP when the spending increase is deficit financed." If government spending is rarely stimulative under the best of circumstances, the sort of defense hike Trump is pushing actually shrinks an already wizened economy.
To this point, we've only been talking about discretionary spending, which accounts for only about one-third of the federal budget. The rest covers mandatory spending on Medicare, Social Security, and other entitlements along with interest on the debt. If Willie Sutton robbed banks because that's where the money was, any plan to seriously reduce government spending and debt service and thus hack away at the administrative state must confront entitlements. Trump has been unambiguous in saying that he doesn't want to touch Social Security or Medicare/Medicaid, which are already the two biggest-ticket items in the federal budget and will only grow over the coming years due to the aging of the baby boom generation.
To date, all of the baby boom presidents—Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama—punted on serious entitlement reform, stoking instead generational warfare between relatively young and poor Millennials and relatively old and wealthy boomers. Trump, who may well be the last boomer president (here's hoping), shows every indication of putting his cohort's interests before those of his children and grandchildren. Although basic budgetary realities will sink old-age entitlements sometime around 2030 and inflict 25 percent or more cuts in benefits, the Democrats and Republicans writ large have refused to seriously address the iceberg on the horizon.
Many of Donald Trump's supporters evinced an interest in "burning it down," in razing Washington figuratively as the British did during the War of 1812. In his first budget blueprint, their champion has not only failed to do that, he hasn't even really thrown a good first punch. Despite offering significant reductions to parts of the federal budget, he hasn't even submitted a plan that would reduce overall outlays after a decades-long spending spree that has purchased little but debt, deficits, and economic malaise.
The post Why Trump's Budget Blueprint Loses Libertarians appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The U.S. government's most-used websites almost universally "fail to meet basic standards for security, speed, mobile friendliness, or accessibility," according to a new report issued by the nonprofit public policy organization Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) — a group which the University of Pennsylvania ranks as the top science and technology think tank in the United States (and second in the world).
ITIF's report is built on thorough analysis of 297 of the federal governement's most popular websites (out of the more than 6,000 sites currently operated by the feds).
The report's lead author Alan McQuinn said in a statement, "Despite years of progress in digital government, a striking number of federal websites do not even meet many of the U.S. government's own requirements, let alone private-sector best practices." McQuinn added, "Considering that many constituents rely on federal websites to interact with government, it is incumbent upon the new administration, supported by Congress, to make websites more convenient, accessible, and secure."
The report makes a number of recommendations of action for the Trump administration, including that government agencies be required to maintain websites which — at the very least — meet the government's own "standards and best practices;" for the Office of Budget Management (OMB) to "launch a website consolidation initiative" to get rid of "duplicative or unnecessary websites;" and for the White House to "launch a series of website modernization 'sprints' to fix known problems with the most popular government websites."
Read ITIF's entire report here, and check out Ira Stoll's great Reason column, "Why Government Websites Cost More and Perform Worse Than Private Sector Websites."
The post U.S. Government Websites 'Fail to Meet Basic Standards,' New Report Says appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>There seem to be embarrassing new "Internet of Things" failures every week now. Sometimes, they are on the humorous side, like when a "smart toilet" was hacked to randomly flush at startled bathroom-goers. Other times, they can be disturbing, as in case of critical vulnerabilities in St. Jude's implantable cardiac devices that could put users' lives in the hands of hackers. But in all cases, these failures tend to grab headlines and inflame calls for government regulation.
It's not hard to see why. When faced with some kind of public dilemma, many people immediately assume that the government alone can solve the problem. And when you throw in futuristic fears about losing control of everyday things around us, the prospect of a savior from above seems all the more necessary. But we must take care that such "solutions" don't create more problems than they supposedly solve. Such would almost certainly be the case with one recent proposal: a "Department of Technology Policy."
A 'World-Size Robot'
Recently, Bruce Schneier, a veteran in information-security studies and leading voice in technology policy, penned a long article for the New Yorker in which he argues for the creation of a new federal agency—the "Department of Technology Policy"—that would consolidate control of technological regulations into a single body. Schneier explains how the incredible rate of "smart"-device adoption has created some new and unprecedented security challenges.
Few people realize just how quickly IOT devices have saturated the world around them. This will only accelerate—Schneier likens the rise of IOT technologies to building a "world-size robot," with all of the sensors, commands, and computations to match. And with an expanded connected reality comes an expanded digital threat set. Computer bugs and software vulnerabilities no longer merely endanger personal data and hardware, they can potentially shut down connected home devices or hijack moving cars and even cause us physical harm.
Indeed, there have been considerable security problems with connected devices. Often, the issues are theoretical: Security researchers warn the public at conferences and in journals of major vulnerabilities they discover in popular consumer routers or printers or security cameras—vulnerabilities which may or may not end up getting patched.
But sometimes these vulnerabilities are actually exploited. Last October, some of the Internet's most popular websites—Twitter, Amazon, GitHub, Reddit—were knocked offline thanks to insecure IOT devices. Some malicious actor was able to infect an army of DVRs, cameras, baby monitors, and printers with a malware called Mirai, directing these devices to launch a distributed-denial-of-service (DDOS) attack on those websites' hosting provider, Dyn. While the attack was short, and the fallout was mostly limited to inconvenience and loss of sales, it was a major warning signal for security researchers who envisioned how such an attack could have been much more devastating.
The main problem, as Schneier sees it, is that many companies developing and selling connected devices do not have the right security chops to make sure that they are safe before people buy them. Technology companies like Google and Apple have large dedicated teams to locate and patch software vulnerabilities as soon as possible—and even this process is imperfect. Now, companies who have no such software experience may put IOT products out to market without the necessary testing, which could create major unexpected problems down the road. And the home consumers who buy such devices are seldom equipped to evaluate the security settings on their own.
Whose Failure?
While Schneier's essay does an excellent job of describing the new security challenges that smart devices create, it falls short on solutions. "The market can't fix this," Schneier suggests, "because neither the buyer nor the seller cares … There is no market solution, because the insecurity is what economists call an externality: It's an effect of the purchasing decision that affects other people. Think of it kind of like invisible pollution."
Like many who make "market failure" arguments, Schneier believes that the government alone can intervene to fix the problem. Specifically, he thinks an entirely new federal agency is needed, fearing that without a Department of Technology Policy nothing could compel device manufacturers to internalize the externalities of poor digital security.
But behind every suspected market failure is usually an existing government failure. Schneier himself says as much when he discusses the many laws that inhibit security research and contribute to smart-device insecurity. In particular, laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) penalize computer scientists who try to test or report certain software vulnerabilities. These laws should be amended before we do anything else.
Perhaps more importantly, when considering how best to address market failures, we must not succumb to what economist Harold Demsetz called the "Nirvana fallacy." If you compare an imperfect existing situation with the perfect ideal of government intervention, of course the government solution will be tempting. But government bodies operate in an imperfect reality, and once created, they will generate their own set of unintended consequences, which will be very hard to turn back.
Tech Policy Touches Everything
Beating back even a single federal regulation often requires a rare combination of years of scholarly attention, unwavering political will, and random chance. Unfortunately, bad government policy can inflict society for decades by mere virtue of institutional inertia. If a newly-created "Department of Technology Policy" proves useless, incompetent, or corrupt, it would be very hard if not impossible to set it right or close up shop. And since "technology" now touches so much of our lives, any new Department of Technology runs the risk of becoming entrenched in most of the things that we do.
Often, social problems can seem unprecedented or difficult to solve when new technologies are involved. Yet again and again, society has developed legal and social solutions borrowed from some earlier problem that can be applied to the new technology. For example, the "security pollution" that Schneier describes could perhaps be addressed with common law precedents in the courts, or through voluntary standards-setting bodies, or third party audits.
In other situations, new technological solutions may be appropriate. Entrepreneurs and researchers are hard at work on new IOT security solutions, because after all, where there is a great social need, there is a great profit opportunity. But if a "Department of Technology Policy" preemptively blocks such research, or requires companies to dedicate resources elsewhere by mandate, these solutions may never be discovered.
Security researchers like Schneier provide a great service in bringing attention to the newest technological problems that arise. Markets are not perfect, and they certainly don't immediately fix problems in the exact ways that we might want. But where government regulation is inflexible and susceptible to capture, market processes are adaptive and biased toward improvement. Rather than wishing for a Department of Technology Policy, we should focus on overturning the bad existing government policies that undermine security. With patience and humility, we may find that what we thought was a "market failure" was in actuality a market opportunity all along.
The post Why We Don't Need a Department of Technology Policy appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Dull Disasters? How Planning Ahead Will Make a Difference, by Daniel J. Clarke and Stefan Dercon, Oxford University Press, 160 pages, $22.95
As you might expect of a volume with the word dull in the title, Dull Disasters? is not a sexy book. The authors, Daniel J. Clarke and Stefan Dercon, are an actuary and an economics professor, respectively. Their thesis is that with better planning and coordination, natural and humanitarian disasters can become less exciting TV viewing and more, well, dull. In a good way.
"Be prepared" is sound and uncontroversial advice, but which people do the preparation matters. The correct dispute, F.A. Hayek wrote, is not "whether planning is to be done or not. It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally…or is to be divided among many individuals."
Therein lies the tension in Clarke and Dercon's book, and in disaster policy more broadly. They assume that centralizing the planning process is both efficient and possible. Yet many of their examples show people's ingenuity in devising systems tailored to their own needs. Rather than centralizing these examples into one-size-fits-all programs, we should appreciate the flexibility and uniqueness of local solutions.
The heart of Clarke and Dercon's argument is a critique of the "begging bowl"—their term for the system by which government agencies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) beg for taxpayer and private dollars after a disaster. This "medieval" approach, they argue, is "too slow" and "leads to a fragmented response."
They have a point. Waiting until a disaster strikes to gather funding and craft an overarching plan means that valuable time is spent pandering for cash rather than rebuilding. As they write, "The way forward is to act before disasters strike, preparing credible plans with rules-based decision-making and early action and held together with sound financial planning agreed beforehand." After a disaster, the relevant policy question should be how rules will be enforced, not what kind of new rules will be put in place.
Agencies and NGOs already plan, of course. But once disasters strike, they tend to cast these plans aside, introducing uncertainty and causing delays. As Clarke and Dercon write, politicians "prefer discretion over rules."
The results are uninspiring. After Hurricane Katrina, for example, Congress appropriated over $100 billion for disaster recovery. If it had bundled the cash into helicopters and dropped it over major population centers, the results might well have been superior to what we saw. Consider Louisiana's dysfunctional Road Home Program. Funds weren't acquired until August 2006, roughly a year after the storm. In July 2007, only about 25 percent of that money had found its way to homeowners, who found themselves in a Byzantine application process that took years to resolve. It wasn't until 2013 that the program got the majority of the dollars out the door.
As the authors note, this is partly a problem of incentives. "Why should a politician invest in a sensible system to reduce risks and enable a quick response to a strong earthquake if the political benefits from such a system are likely to be reaped by that politician's political successor?" they ask. It's a good question, but one that the book leaves largely unanswered.
Instead, it focuses on the patchwork, overlapping, and ad hoc systems (another word might be polycentric) for preparing for and responding to disasters. Such systems, they complain, are limited in scale and lead to redundancies; centralized systems, they suggest, could as effectively serve a larger population.
They argue that centralization can be effectuated through insurance. Clarke and Dercon's chief interest is securing funding to respond to disasters before they occur so that funds can be distributed quickly afterward. That way, they say, time and energy wasted on rattling the begging bowl can be reallocated to humanitarian needs.
Insurance is no doubt important to rebuilding after disasters. But it's no panacea.
In the U.S., there's a division between homeowners insurance that covers hazards (left to markets that are, depending on the state, somewhat to quite robust) and flood insurance (virtually only available through the National Flood Insurance Program). After Hurricane Katrina, some Louisianans were left without funds to begin rebuilding for months as their (private) homeowners insurers and (semi-public) flood insurers debated whether water damage had come from the ground or from the sky. Each insurance provider had an incentive to push the costs of rebuilding onto the other, which only prolonged people's suffering.
Clarke and Dercon also blur the line between voluntary insurance schemes and programs run by the public sector. They cite the mutual aid and burial insurance associations of India, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia as praiseworthy examples of how local knowledge and relatively simple insurance mechanisms can ameliorate negative shocks. These groups do offer critical services, such as the resources needed to follow traditional burial rituals, to individuals who understand the importance of planning ahead. But what is laudable in these systems does not necessarily transfer to international schemes involving dozens of governments, hundreds or thousands of NGOs, and potentially millions of people. Centralizing such systems could ruin everything that is good about them: their flexibility, customization, and effective mechanisms for monitoring participants and enforcing the rules.
Herein lies the central flaw in the authors' thesis. "It is far, far better to have one well-coordinated plan than a number of fragmented plans," they assert. Why? Because of "economies of scale in financing and logistics."
But consider those burial associations. Hundreds if not thousands of them exist around the world. If they are praiseworthy, why not run them as obligatory nationalized insurance schemes? For one, expanding mutual aid from a community into a savings system for the whole nation alters the nature of the beast: Incentives change dramatically, and local knowledge is set aside. Also, it's one thing to have enough funds on hand to quickly help a grieving mother bury her child. It's another to quickly disburse funds to rebuild a major city.
The model also doesn't translate to disaster preparedness, as uncorrelated risks within a given population are different than risks that befall large areas and groups. The social bureaucracies of wealthy western countries have been capable of paying death benefits for decades. Death is clearly defined in law and triggers a rules-based sequence of events, culminating (in the U.S.) with a widow or widower receiving $255 from the Social Security Administration. Compare that with the complicated task of figuring out who has been affected and the extent of their losses after a disaster. As the failures of Katrina recovery highlight, public bureaucracies are severely limited in their ability to manage this task.
Fortunately, decentralization isn't actually an obstacle to overcome. Polycentric decision making is good for recovery.
After a disaster, people are often cut off from one another. Roads and infrastructure may be damaged; power and communication systems may be down. People are separated from their loved ones, unable to go to work, uncertain about what comes next. The situation on the ground is constantly changing, requiring everyone to adjust their plans quickly and frequently. Information is hard to acquire and act upon, making it more difficult to adapt. How then do people tackle the challenging task of getting their lives back to normal?
Research conducted by us and others—including hundreds of interviews after Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy—shows how commercial, social, and political entrepreneurs drive community recovery.
After Hurricane Sandy, residents of Rockaway in Queens were without power for two weeks. Before government agencies could arrive, the area's Orthodox Jewish community sprang into action. Synagogues became depots for hot food, dry clothes, and charged cellphones, and a local crisis center that specializes in medical emergencies helped reinvigorate a fund first developed to help community members after the 2008 financial crisis.
The group raised over $3 million and disbursed the funds quickly to those in need, using the maligned begging-bowl approach. Rabbis who knew the community screened aid applications; lawyers and accountants volunteered their time to help negotiate private and public bureaucracies. Like the developing-world mutual aid systems praised in Dull Disasters?, this system worked precisely because it was small and flexible.
Officials should ask how they can facilitate such bottom-up systems. Imagine, say, a state law that creates professional licensing reciprocity in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster, so that out-of-state contractors, plumbers, electricians, doctors, nurses, and other specialists can legally practice their trades in the affected area. Suspending such requirements would do wonders to speed recovery and reduce uncertainty.
Making disasters dull is an admirable goal, but it requires acknowledging the limits of public policy and the power of dispersed knowledge. More planning, yes. More central planning, no.
The post Disasters Should Be Dull appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>After Trump's transition team apparently issued what members of the federal bureaucracy think of as "gag orders," I predicted the result would be that Trump Makes Government Leaks Great Again! Not with any especially great perspicacity, I also noted that the Obama administration was, for the most part, able to keep unflattering leaks to a minimum largely because the bulk of the federal workforce was simpatico with its policies. This is unlikely to be the case with the Trump administration. Well, that didn't take long.
The first revolt began with some tweets about climate change from someone evidently associated with Badlands National Park aimed at contradicting Trump's earlier assertions that man-made global warming is a "hoax." It turns out that Trump is not the only person who knows how to tweet. A veritable flood of anonymous alternative Twitter feeds are tweeting their defiance of the incoming Trump Administration with handles like @RogueNASA, @AltForestService, @altUSEPA, @Altnatparkser, @Alt_FDA, @ActualEPAFacts, @Alt_NIH, @Alt_CDC, and @BadHombreNPS.
The creation of these feeds may, of course, be just a momentary spasm expressing bureaucratic displeasure and will go fallow over time. While these alternative feeds can keep the public apprised of what the bureaucracy sees as the nefarious machinations of Trump and his minions, they are no substitute for real transparency in government. As I earlier noted, with exception perhaps of some minor amount of national security intelligence, there is no good reason that any information, data, studies, and reports that federal agencies produce should be kept from the public and press. In any case, I will be following the Alt_Bureaucracy feeds for a while.
Trump rose to power on tweets; maybe tweets will take him down too.
The post Trump, Twitter, and the Revolt of the Permanent Government appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>First, let's acknowledge the Obama administration was obsessive about controlling the flow of information from the executive branch. The "most transparent administration in history" simply wasn't. In 2015, 40 journalism and government accountability organizations under the auspices of the Society of Professional Journalists sent an open letter to President Obama complaining about the lack of transparency. The letter listed among other techniques used by the administration to keep the media tamed:
prohibiting staff from communicating with journalists unless they maneuver through public affairs offices or through political appointees; refusing to allow reporters to speak to staff at all, or delaying interviews past the point they would be useful; monitoring interviews; and speaking only on the condition that the official not be identified even when he or she has title of spokesperson….
The public has a right to be alarmed by these constraints–essentially forms of censorship–that have surged at all levels of government in the past few decades. Surveys of journalists and public information officers (PIOs) demonstrate that the restraints have become pervasive across the country; that some PIOs admit to blocking certain reporters when they don't like what is written; and that most Washington reporters say the public is not getting the information it needs because of constraints. An SPJ survey released in April confirmed that science writers frequently run into these barriers.
President Donald Trump is evidently taking a lesson out of the Obama administration's media squelching playbook, at least initially. Specifically, the Environmental Protection Agency has reportedly received memoranda from the White House ordering what has been described a "temporary media blackout." Every incoming administration needs time to get organized and, of course, seeks to control the flow of information from executive agencies so as to put its policies in the best light. In the short run, that's annoying to those who want to know how their government is performing at any given time, but is to be expected.
The Obama administration was, for the most part, able to keep unflattering leaks to a minimum largely because the bulk of the federal workforce was simpatico with its policies. This is unlikely to be the case with the Trump administration. If Trump tries to keep federal workers muzzled past a short transition period, I predict that he will succeed brilliantly in making government leaks great again! Maybe some minor portion of national security information needs to be kept secret, but it's hard to see why any information, data, studies, and reports that the EPA and other agencies produce should be kept from the public and press.
The post Trump Makes Government Leaks Great Again! appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>