Justice Alito’s proper respect for originalism’s restraint on judicial mischief is ill-served by the court’s reliance on the 14th Amendment’s less substantive Due Process Clause to do the work the Privileges or Immunity Clause was meant to do. Not for nothing does the latter come first in the amendment. Still more, unlike with the former, there is precedent to guide the court: Justice Bushrod Washington’s ample explication of Article IV’s Privileges and Immunity Clause in 1823 in Corfield v. Coryell. If we are all originalists now, as Justice Elena Kagan remarked in her confirmation hearings, let’s not be fair-weather originalists. The text is there for a reason.

Agents working this protest have been instructed by their supervisors to be on the lookout for possible illegal immigrants and anti-government agitators. The agents activate a surveillance plan. Maria first encounters it shortly after pulling out of her driveway. As her red Honda Accord passes an automated license plate reader (ALPR), it captures an image of one of her bumper stickers with a pro-immigration slogan: “No human being is illegal.” The ALPR has been trained to recognize text such as bumper stickers, sending an automatic alert to a central computer. In turn, the computer sends signals to nearby artificial intelligence (AI)-enhanced “smart” street cameras to monitor the car’s movements.

A camera hanging from the W 71st St. overpass zooms in and captures an image of Maria’s face. The camera sends another ping to the computer, which identifies the driver as Maria (with, say, 91 percent confidence) based on her driver’s license photo and recordings of her at past rallies from officers’ body-worn cameras. The computer collects other data known about Maria from public records, including her registered nursing license. From the license, it pulls Maria’s home address. Next, the computer connects that information with recent police reports from the area. Nothing serious, but the report includes several mentions of pro-immigration graffiti on an abandoned building three blocks from where Maria lives. Possibly more significantly, the computer uncovers court records from 20 years ago, referring to a family dispute after Maria’s father was deported from the United States.

As the computer builds its profile of Maria’s life, she arrives near the park. Over the din of nearby traffic and speeches shouted through megaphones, she could not hear the whir of a police drone’s blades 400 feet above her even if she knew to listen. The drone’s cameras detect what they deem a suspicious bulge in Maria’s coat by her left hip and send that information to the computer, with, say, a 26 percent confidence calculation that she is a threat. The computer compiles that information with everything else it knows about Maria, crosses an unknown threshold determined by its algorithms, and alerts state and federal officers to be on the lookout for Maria. As she steps onto the green, an agent approaches.

“Hi, Maria,” the woman in camouflage fatigues says. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

Spooked, Maria returns to her car and goes home, passing another round of drones, cameras, and ALPRs. The federal government does not follow up. Maria wonders if the State of Illinois will turn its gaze on her next weekend—when she gets back in her red Honda Accord, with its other bumper sticker reading “a person is a person, no matter how small,” and heads to a pro-life sidewalk vigil.

Panopticon in 2026

Maria’s story is fictional. The surveillance it describes is not, and the coordination between devices required to make her story a reality is rapidly approaching due to advances in AI.

ALPRs (which, again, stands for “automated license plate readers”) are omnipresent and, at this point, misnamed. Over 6,000 cities nationwide have ALPRs, each of which can scan up to 2,000 vehicles per minute. Over 130,000 of these devices have been deployed across the U.S.

ALPRs are misnamed because they do not simply read license plates anymore. The leading ALPR manufacturer, Flock Safety, used to insist that this was all its technology could do. Yet according to August reporting by Wired, Flock “has now built … an artificial intelligence tool for police that can identify drivers and track vehicles by their patterns of movement alone.” Flock’s AI-driven system “can pick out potential witnesses by how often their cars pass through a neighborhood, or surface a driver’s ‘associates’ from the cameras they pass together.” It combs through police files, 911 logs, commercial records, and other public information to connect tags to “names, home addresses, and relatives.”

According to Wired, an officer can use the system to “search for people in an area drawn on a map based on nothing more than a physical description.” The system is easy to use, supplying 69 prompts for officers “as a menu of canned searches,” for instance: “Find me witnesses based on vehicles most seen in [neighborhood] during [last 14 days] during [daily timeframe] *(will not include whitelisted vehicles).” Officers can also ask for a list of everyone “arrested more than twice in two years” for nondrug offenses, along with a map of their homes and detailed dossiers on “the top three individuals” who seem most suspicious, as selected by AI. With just one query, an officer can receive a report listing a person’s associated vehicles, any time they were mentioned as a witness in a police investigation, family members, phone numbers, and online accounts.

Prompts need not be based on criminal records. They include behavioral patterns as well. Law enforcement has searched using terms such as “heavy-set male with a black and white hat,” “person on skateboard,” and “person wearing orange vest and construction hat.” A study of 12 million searches submitted to Flock found that a fifth contained generic words such as “investigation,” “suspect,” or “query”—while hundreds of searches mentioned protest as a behavior of interest. (This is reason enough to doubt the effectiveness of Flock’s new policies requiring “officers to attach case codes to their searches.”) In 2019, California agencies scanned more than a billion tags, but “99.9% of this surveillance data was not actively related to an investigation when it was collected.” Some searches of Flock’s database have even been based on race or apparent political affiliation.

ALPRs will not stop here. Flock is hiring engineers to build new features, “including automated lead generation and cross-camera correlation.” Another company is developing a product called SignalTrace. It will enable ALPRs to read signals emitted by cellphones, wearable devices such as fitness watches and rings, and other Bluetooth-connected technology—enabling ALPRs to determine who and what is inside the cars passing them.

Moving up past eye level, public-monitoring security cameras have also become much more sophisticated. Many are “capable of 360-degree video, infrared vision, or the ability to pan, tilt, and zoom,” and they “can be equipped with real-time face recognition or license plate recognition software.” These cameras are often integrated with other devices such as ALPRs, drones, “smart” streetlights, gunshot-detection systems, and cell-site simulators that “mimic cell towers and trick phones” into sending them information. Security cameras are not the closed-circuit television devices of old. They can combine visual surveillance with audio and digital information-gathering to comprehensively monitor people within their range.

These devices can also be deployed on vehicles. News recently broke that Dallas garbage trucks have been equipped with AI cameras that photograph properties and assign a “blight score” based on suspected code violations. City officials expect the cameras to scan the entire city once a month. It is no stretch to imagine this technology quickly evolving from a means of punishing code violations into a massive database of images over time that government can use for whatever purposes it desires.

AI-enhanced cameras are the eyes on the ground of the modern surveillance apparatus. Yet the ones overhead are still more impressive.

Varying in size from “business jets [to] small enough to fit into the palm of someone’s hand,” drones can be “virtually undetectable.” They can carry cameras, thermal imaging sensors, microphones, ALPRs, facial recognition software, cell-site simulators, and even weapons. They can, and do, “observe individuals in previously private and constitutionally protected spaces, like their backyards, roofs, and even through home windows.”

More than 1,400 police departments now use drones, a number that is growing as cities continue to adopt “drone as first responder” programs. These programs deploy drones in response to 911 calls and nonemergency service requests, and drones can help officers assess a situation before arriving at the scene. However, they also enable around-the-clock warrantless—often, suspicionless—surveillance.

Since Chula Vista, California, began its drone-as-first-responder program in 2018, drones have “criss-cross[ed] the skies … nearly 20,000 times.” The drones have amassed hundreds of hours of video footage of the city’s residents, routinely flying “over backyards and above public pools, high schools, hospitals, churches, mosques, immigration law firms, and even the city’s Planned Parenthood facility.” While Chula Vista maintains that the city does not use drones for routine surveillance, city records show that it is not uncommon for drones to be deployed in response to minor complaints, such as “reports of ‘loud music’, a ‘water leak,’ and someone ‘bouncing a ball against a garage.’” Other cities have used drones to surveil public events and protests, search for zoning and code violations, and enforce pandemic-era social distancing—even to monitor Labor Day backyard parties.

As with ALPRs and security cameras, the door remains open to even more terrifying technologies. Drones such as the military’s Gorgon Stare—which provide citywide, high-definition imagery from 25,000 feet in the air—could be deployed by law enforcement.

Somewhere in the ethereal data “clouds” are the AI systems that make this information storable and usable by law enforcement. There are not enough human officers on Earth to meaningfully assess the infinite data points collected from the devices described above. Law enforcement relies on AI to swiftly navigate through the information housed in acres of data centers.

Yet how those systems function is a mystery by design. Any system simple enough for a human to neatly understand would not be sophisticated enough to enable the quantum leaps in investigation the modern panopticon promises. An entire field of computer science called “interpretability” recognizes this shift, moving from treating AI processes as readily understandable tools toward understanding them as “complex structures arising from unknown rules.” Like “galaxies and starfish and cancer cells,” stepping back and treating AI as a “black box” may prove the more honest approach. These systems use unknown processes to interpret data. They do so in ways that have proved to be dangerous.

The Weaponization Threat

AI-powered devices already enable disparate treatment according to viewpoint and federally protected characteristics. In 2019, the Department of Justice reported it had awarded the Chicago Police Department a grant to work with a state university and develop “algorithms to collect information and form initial groupings that focus on constructing social networks and performing analysis to determine potential high-risk individuals.” In other words, the Chicago Police Department would build “predictive policing” technologies to decide who in the community might pose a threat of violence.

Three years later, scholars researched the program’s effects. The academics determined that Chicago’s predictive-policing AI had yielded only “limited insight into the social system of crime” even as it “enhance[d] state power through criminal surveillance.” Data from Chicago and other cities using the system reflected that “the response to increased crime is biased by neighbourhood socio-economic status, draining policy resources from socio-economically disadvantaged areas.”

More broadly, a May RAND report commissioned by the Council on Criminal Justice (of which one of the co-authors is a member) warned: “AI applications relying on past criminal justice data tend to systematically reproduce racial and socioeconomic disparities.” As the American Civil Liberties Union explains, “bias is in the data used to train the AI—data that is often discriminatory or unrepresentative for people of color, women, or other marginalized groups—and can rear its head throughout the AI’s design, development, implementation, and use.”

In addition to targeting people based on federally protected characteristics, AI surveillance can readily be weaponized based on viewpoint. This is due to serious gaps in the constitutional jurisprudence that regulates law enforcement. The Supreme Court has yet to say whether the following count as a search or seizure for Fourth Amendment purposes:

• Collecting data about every call made to or from a number, as the Biden administration did with Republican members of Congress.
• Pulling data from 83,000 Flock cameras to track a woman who had an abortion, as a Texas deputy did.
• Accessing ALPR data over 100 times to track a veteran who lawfully recorded a traffic stop, as happened recently in Waukesha, Wisconsin.
• Spying into apartment bedroom windows using cameras on utility poles, as the New York Police Department could readily have done.
• Following someone’s every public move using military-grade Predator drones, as the Department of Homeland Security did at anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) protests last year.
• Demanding bank and internet records without notifying the person under investigation.
• Telling protest observers: “We have a nice little database, and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist. So have fun with that,” as an ICE officer did to a Maine woman.
• Demanding that Google hand over internet records and deploying investigators to the homes of critics, as the Department of Homeland Security did to a Pennsylvania retiree who sent an email in support of an Afghan refugee.

At least as far as the public can tell, not all of these measures have been used to pressure political dissenters—yet. But on Dec. 4, 2025, the Department of Justice ordered the FBI to make an unprecedented list of organizations it considers “domestic terrorists” who allegedly advance anti-American agendas, and then create a bounty system to reward tips. The Trump administration is also creating a previously unheard-of “reaction force” of National Guard troops to combat “civil unrest.” And it has vowed to “disband and uproot networks, entities, and organizations that promote organized violence, violent intimidation, conspiracies against rights, and other efforts to disrupt the functioning of a democratic society.” One of the first major operations appears to have been conducted in Minneapolis, where federal agents surveilled progressive, labor, and immigrant-rights groups.

It is hard to imagine any such campaign, or any other targeting entire swaths of Americans for their political beliefs, being executed without the AI analysis of colossal amounts of data and the deployment of myriad AI-enhanced surveillance technologies. AI policy must be designed to prevent its misuse for illegal discrimination and political oppression.

Sensible Safeguards and Obstacles to Implementing Them

Experts have begun developing guidelines to ensure that AI enhances legitimate law enforcement purposes without sacrificing equality, privacy, and political freedom. The Institute for Justice has drafted model legislation with four key requirements: (a) judicial warrants for nonemergency police review of a person’s historical location data; (b) limits on the transfer of historical location data to third parties; (c) verifiable documentation of who accesses historical location data and for what purposes; and (d) mandatory officer training on these rules. The RAND report for the Council on Criminal Justice recommends policies around AI method verification, human oversight and final decision-making, bias reviews, transparency, accountability, education, and “clear boundaries for algorithmic influence in domains that can have grave consequences for individual liberty.”

Yet policy barriers will work only if law enforcement and AI providers accept democratic supervision.

Illinois law blocks the use of ALPR data for federal immigration enforcement—but state regulators found that Flock violated those limits and ran a pilot program anyway. While federal immigration officials do not have a contract with Flock, “the agency sources data from Flock’s cameras by making requests to local law enforcement,” with “more than 4,000 nation[al] and statewide lookups by local and state police done either at the behest of the federal government or as an ‘informal’ favor to federal law enforcement.” This practice has happened in Illinois despite its being illegal under state law. Even if one state agency is unwilling to share data with the federal government, it is often sharing it with other agencies that may acquiesce. Designing better laws to govern AI would be wise—and insisting on enforcing existing state limits on data-sharing is important, too.

Other reforms to criminal law would also help reduce the threat posed by AI-aided surveillance. Criminal law contains myriad offenses buried in regulations and codebooks, constructing a legal framework that tries to reach every social ill. Many of these provisions are crafted so vaguely that their enforcement depends almost entirely on the discretion of prosecutors and police. That enables undue surveillance: A government with an axe to grind against a critic can readily dream up excuses to put someone under its gaze.

Compounding this problem, the Supreme Court allows law enforcement to stop and search people using pretextual reasons. According to the Associated Press, the Border Patrol is using AI predictive algorithms to flag vehicles agents deem suspicious, which are then stopped by officers “for reasons cited such as speeding, failure to signal, the wrong window tint or even a dangling air freshener blocking the view. They are then aggressively questioned and searched”—all the while unaware that this is happening because of federal AI assessments. And these practices are not limited to what most people think of as America’s borderlands: The Border Patrol operates surveillance “near the Michigan-Indiana border to capture traffic headed towards Chicago or Gary, Indiana.”

Without civil liberty protections, these methods may even be used against critics of AI surveillance. Flock’s chief executive Garrett Langley recently called the company’s opponents “terroristic.” Joint intelligence centers run by federal, state, and local law enforcement are monitoring social media accounts critical of AI-enhanced surveillance. After Rhode Island police officer Noel Pichardo criticized his department’s use of Flock cameras, “he was subjected to five internal affairs investigations in less than two years.” Policymakers should address the risks faced by citizens critical of AI surveillance.

Lastly, lawmakers should abolish qualified immunity. That legal doctrine prevents victims of rights violations by state and local officers from receiving redress unless officers violate a right that is “clearly established.” Due to the rapid development of AI-powered surveillance, courts will struggle to issue precedents establishing what counts as a rights violation before the case law becomes effectively obsolete. The government will often be able to draw some factual distinction between whatever surveillance it uses and past case law, thwarting victims from a judicial remedy.

Law enforcement is using tools that can tell officers who you associate with, where you sleep, and what you believe. They call it safety. The law should call it a search and impose the safeguards and remedies that accompany one.

While the government has occasionally taken stakes in private companies, it has generally done so—rightly or wrongly—as a temporary measure to address a perceived emergency. However, never in U.S. history has the executive branch taken ownership stakes in private companies simply because the president wanted his own federal investment portfolio. And this administration has done so without clear legal authority.

As of this writing, the administration has announced deals giving the federal government equity stakes in 34 private companies and counting. Thus, after Trump has spent much of his second term acquiring the means of production, his pitch ahead of the November elections is that he will stop Democrats from … acquiring the means of production?

To be sure, there are anti-market Democrats who have long desired to make government ownership of companies a permanent federal policy tool. Indeed, how they have responded to the administration’s equity deals offers clues about how they may deploy this tool when Republican dominance in Washington ends.

But first, a question: Why is Trump’s unprecedented expansion of the federal government’s ability to directly manipulate economic activity receiving relatively little pushback?

AWOL Opposition

Several reasons help explain the relative lack of attention, let alone resistance, to this potentially monumental expansion of federal power into the economy.

For starters, the pre-2016 GOP is dead. Congressional Republicans could have put an end to the administration’s equity spree at any time. They still can. Up till now, however, the GOP’s response has ranged from feeble “concern” to servile enablement. One can only imagine the outrage and indignation from Republicans if this were occurring under Presidents Obama or Biden. Or “Comrade Kamala.” Republican-friendly media outlets would be in a frenzy, and similarly associated advocacy groups would have launched public campaigns calling on Congress to halt this dangerous threat to American free enterprise.

Next, the administration’s barrage of policy announcements has made it difficult to focus in depth on a specific issue. That’s by design, as Steve Bannon’s infamous “flood the zone” quote reminds us. At the outset of Trump’s second term, the bulk of the attention focused on anticipated items on the administration’s immediate agenda, notably DOGE and tariffs. With Trump’s second-term administration filled with loyalists, his impulsive policy pronouncements have sent officials scurrying to improvise ways to fulfill his half-baked wishes.

Another issue is that the administration’s deals are intentionally opaque and often complex, the policy rationales are inconsistent, and the legal authority to make any of them is unclear. In short, the administration has been making it up as it goes along. Two weeks after retaking office, Trump issued an executive order instructing his administration to draw up a plan for a sovereign wealth fund. A sovereign wealth fund is a government-owned investment fund that buys stocks and other assets to earn returns, often using budget surpluses or proceeds from natural resources. When the White House discovered that creating one would require Congress and deny Trump sole control, the administration embarked on an improvised solution: create an equity portfolio for the boss in which the government obtains ownership of part of a company in exchange for subsidies to it.

More on that later, but well over a year after President Trump embarked on this acquisition spree, the public still knows little about the deals beyond press releases and SEC filings from publicly traded companies. The deals have emerged through different agencies and financing arrangements, with different ownership and control rights. Meanwhile, the administration has yet to publicly release a legal opinion making the case for the myriad statutes it’s cited in announcing the deals. Even the administration’s reasoning for the entire equity endeavor has vacillated between making money for taxpayers and shoring up strategically important industries, with the occasional admission that it’s indeed building a government investment portfolio for the president.

Commandeering the Private Sector

Consider the administration’s “golden share” in U.S. Steel that gives Trump veto authority over key business decisions. Last fall, the White House blocked the company’s plan to stop processing steel slabs at its Granite City, Illinois, plant by threatening to use that power. U.S. Steel had explained that shifting the work to other plants would avoid “extensive cost inefficiencies.” One would think that congressional Republicans would at least express some concern about how a President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might use the same authority over an oil company or mine operator to advance her own agenda.

But far from resisting, Republicans are trying to reward the administration’s clear disregard for Congress with after-the-fact legal cover. The House’s Defense Production Act reauthorization bill would put executive branch equity acquisitions on a statutory footing. And the Senate Armed Services Committee’s annual defense bill would expressly authorize the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital to acquire ownership stakes. That’s despite the committee’s own warnings about market distortions and complaints that the Pentagon hasn’t provided the information Congress needs to assess its deals. The GOP is thus moving to supply the authority the administration has claimed to have, which strongly suggests it does not have it.

More Accountability, Less Statism

To their credit, congressional Democrats have demanded answers about the deals. A February letter from House and Senate Democrats sought the administration’s legal justification and warned that the administration was “essentially picking winners and losers,” which may “undermine broader market competition and the development of innovative technologies.” (That is the kind of thing that might have come out of Republican mouths pre-MAGAfication.)

In June, Democrats pressed the White House about reports that presidential adviser Peter Navarro had intervened to secure a Pentagon loan for Vulcan Elements, a company backed by Donald Trump Jr.’s investment firm. A July letter demanded answers from Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial services firm previously led by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and now run by his sons, about conflicts of interest involving the administration’s USA Rare Earth deal. Last week, four Senate Democrats challenged the Pentagon’s authority to take a stake in a shady Venezuelan oil company, demanding the deal’s terms and answers about whether Trump’s family or donors would benefit.

There have been multiple reports that a Democratic majority would be prepared to act on those inquiries. For example, Democratic lawmakers recently told S&P Global that investigating the deals would be a priority if they regain control of either chamber. The committee gavels held by the majority party would let them hold hearings and issue subpoenas without Republican cooperation. In March, Republicans blocked a subpoena to compel Trump Jr. to testify about Vulcan. More recently, Republicans on a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee similarly blocked a subpoena for the administration’s records regarding the Venezuelan oil company deal.

All this is disturbing given that Vulcan was offered $670 million in federal support about three months after 1789 Capital, where Trump Jr. is a partner, invested in it. Navarro reportedly pressured the Pentagon to move the company’s loan request to the front of the line. USA Rare Earth, meanwhile, hired Cantor to arrange the private financing tied to its $1.6 billion federal package. These arrangements have turned political access into a form of capital—exactly as one would expect in authoritarian economies.

There’s plenty to investigate given the administration’s refusal to provide information on deals that stink of corruption and cronyism. Democrats would be performing a public service by aggressively looking into them if they obtain a congressional majority.

However, there’s a significant concern that they’ll make political hay out of the administration’s dubious unilateral approach but then use it to push for Congress to create a formal “investment” fund. Instead of divesting, Congress might consolidate the equity stakes now scattered across federal agencies into a single fund with its own management and investment rules. That would turn Trump’s improvised portfolio into a permanent federal investment operation, much like the sovereign wealth fund he originally wanted.

Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren insists, “We need to hose the corruption out.” But she has also endorsed equity stakes as a condition for companies receiving federal subsidies. In 2022, Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders proposed taking equity or warrants in companies receiving CHIPS assistance. Their amendment wasn’t adopted, but note that their underlying argument—that taxpayers should share in the gains of subsidized companies—is the one that the Trump administration is making to justify its equity deals.

Sanders has since proposed taking a 50% stake in America’s largest artificial intelligence companies through a tax paid in stock, with government voting rights and board representation. He is explicit that he wants those powers used to block corporate decisions he considers harmful and push policies he considers beneficial. In fact, Sanders cited Trump’s executive order for a sovereign wealth fund as justification, which would make it extremely difficult for Republicans to object if his idea gains traction. That’s hardly far-fetched, given that even mainstream Democrats have been flirting with it.

Democratic Socialism

The likeliest outcome, then, is that Democratic-led investigations would expose rank cronyism and improvised dealmaking in this administration. But instead of scrapping Trump’s equity portfolio altogether, Democrats will merely want to put it under more “responsible” management.

Yet a formal investment fund would make it harder for companies that are not receiving government subsidies to compete. They’d have a harder time attracting private capital. Moreover, when a government investment goes sour, policymakers would face pressure to provide additional government privileges to avoid admitting failure. Far from safeguarding American taxpayers, as Trump says he’s doing, this scheme would make them more liable.

Courts have thus far constrained Trump’s efforts to impose sweeping tariffs, most notably in the Supreme Court’s decision in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump (a case I helped litigate), which struck down Trump’s massive imposition of tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA). But perhaps import bans would be different. Trump himself said after the IEEPA decision that “I can destroy the trade. I’m even allowed to impose a foreign country destroying embargo.”

That claim is badly wrong. Like tariffs, import restrictions are a congressional power under the Constitution, not an executive one. Thus, the president cannot impose import bans without congressional authorization. While some statutes delegate import restriction authority to the president, that power is strictly limited. And, as with tariffs, interpreting these authorities in a way that gives the president a blank check to impose import bans would run afoul of the major questions doctrine and constitutional nondelegation.

It remains to be seen whether Trump or a future president might decide to claim sweeping authority to impose import bans at will. But when and if such an effort materializes, courts should strike it down.

The Tariff Precedent

Trump may resort to import bans because courts have so far taken a dim view of his attempts to impose sweeping worldwide tariffs. In Learning Resources, the Supreme Court not only ruled that IEEPA doesn’t authorize tariffs but also emphasized that tariffs are a congressional power, and that the president does not have the power to “impose tariffs on imports from any country, of any product, at any rate, for any amount of time.” Thus, the Court invalidated Trump’s plan to impose 10 percent tariffs against almost all U.S. trading partners and additional supposedly “reciprocal” tariffs on many others.

Significantly, three Supreme Court justices also emphasized that the tariffs run afoul of the major questions doctrine, which requires Congress to “speak clearly” when authorizing the executive to make decisions of “vast economic and political significance.” The two lower court decisions in the case (by the U.S. Court of International Trade and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit) also relied heavily on the major questions doctrine in striking down the IEEPA tariffs.

The Court of International Trade and Justice Neil Gorsuch (in a Supreme Court concurring opinion) also emphasized that, if the administration’s interpretation of IEEPA was correct, it would violate the constitutional nondelegation doctrine, which constrains delegation of legislative power to the executive. While the limits of the nondelegation doctrine are far from clear, virtually unlimited delegation of a major congressional authority to the executive would violate the doctrine, if anything does.

Later, Trump sought to impose similar tariffs using Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. The U.S. Court of International Trade rightly invalidated these tariffs in May (although appellate litigation continues), and they have since expired (Section 122 tariff impositions are limited to 150 days). The court ruled that Trump’s tariffs violate Section 122’s terms and that the administration’s interpretation of the statute would render it unconstitutional under the nondelegation doctrine.

In July, Trump sought to use Section 301 of the same 1974 act to impose tariffs of 10 to 12.5 percent on imports from 60 U.S. trading partners, including Canada, Australia, the nations of the European Union, and others, under the pretext that these countries allow imports of goods using “forced labor,” thereby supposedly burdening U.S. exports. The Section 301 tariffs are also likely illegal, and the U.S. Court of International Trade is currently considering multiple challenges against them.

Most recently, Trump used Section 338 of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 to impose 50 percent tariffs on some Canadian goods and ban others entirely. No legal challenges have been filed against these actions yet. But these impositions are vulnerable because Section 338 has been superseded by later statutes, because Trump’s tariffs violate the terms of the law, and because the administration’s interpretation of Section 338 runs afoul of the major questions and nondelegation doctrines.

Constitutional Limitations on the Power to Ban Imports

Like the tariff power, the power to impose nontariff import restrictions is a congressional authority, not an executive one. It arises from Congress’s “power to regulate commerce with foreign nations,” enumerated in Article I of the Constitution. The president, by contrast, is not given any independent authority to impose import bans. Thus, import bans—like tariffs—can be imposed only with congressional authorization.

For this reason, executive claims of authority to impose import bans are subject to the same major questions and nondelegation constraints as executive invocations of the tariff power. If the president claims a sweeping power to impose large-scale import bans, it must, under the major questions doctrine, be clear on the face of the statute. And if that power lacks meaningful constraints, it can be invalidated under the nondelegation doctrine. Just as the president lacks the power to “impose tariffs on imports from any country, of any product, at any rate, for any amount of time,” he also doesn’t have the power to impose bans on imports from any country, of any product, for any amount of time. In last year’s decision in Federal Communications Commission v. Consumers’ Research held that delegations of the power to impose taxes and other similar levies must have a clear floor and ceiling and that “[t]he guidance needed is greater when an agency action will affect the entire national economy than when it addresses a narrow, technical issue.” Delegations of the power to impose import bans should be subject to comparable constraint.

In one key respect, sweeping executive power to impose import bans is even more problematic than a similar power over tariffs. Tariffs still allow continued importation of covered goods, even if at a much higher price. By contrast, import bans forbid it entirely, thereby inflicting even greater suffering on consumers, investors, and others. This further strengthens the case for applying the same constitutional constraints to executive import bans as those that restrict executive imposition of tariffs.

Limited Nature of Statutes That Might Authorize Import Bans

A number of federal laws might potentially authorize import bans in some situations. But all are limited in nature. None give the president sweeping authority to ban any imports he wants.

IEEPA may provide the broadest such authority. Although, as the Supreme Court ruled, the act does not authorize imposition of tariffs, it does empower the president to “regulate” or “prohibit” importation of goods. But, like other authorities granted by IEEPA, the law makes clear that these can be used only to “deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States, if the President declares a national emergency with respect to such threat.”

There is nothing “unusual,” “extraordinary,” or threatening about the vast majority of imports to the United States. Such imports are commonplace, happen routinely, and pose no threat. To the contrary, basic Economics 101 shows that international trade is generally beneficial: The U.S. buys goods from other countries that they produce better or more cheaply than we can, freeing our own productive capacity for tasks at which we have a comparative advantage. At the very least, no extraordinary or unusual threat is posed by imports from liberal democratic allies such as Canada, Australia, and the nations of the European Union, which Trump has repeatedly tried to impose tariffs against (and, in the case of Canada, now also import bans).

In the IEEPA tariff litigation, we and other plaintiffs argued that trade deficits (cited by Trump as the rationale for his “Liberation Day” tariffs) did not pose any unusual and extraordinary threat, and that the tariffs did not “deal with” the supposed threat of fentanyl imports (used as a rationale for tariffs against Canada, Mexico, and China). The Court of International Trade based its decision against the fentanyl tariffs in part on that basis. The Supreme Court did not address these issues because it ruled that IEEPA does not allow tariffs at all.

IEEPA has previously been used to impose narrowly targeted import bans, usually against authoritarian adversaries of the United States. But if Trump were to use IEEPA to impose sweeping import bans, including against U.S. allies, courts should not simply defer to the administration’s claims that the imports in question pose some threat. That would conflict with the statutory text, and convert an emergency power intended for use only in extreme situations into a blank check for the executive. It would also run afoul of the major questions doctrine. A sweeping power to impose import bans at will would undeniably be a major question. And it is, at the very least, far from clear that IEEPA’s text requires such deference. A virtually unlimited executive import-ban power would also violate the constitutional nondelegation doctrine.

Section 338 also has an import-ban provision. But it applies only if the president concludes that a trading partner hit with initial Section 338 tariffs in response to its own discriminatory trade restrictions has “maintained or increased” those discriminatory policies. Thus, any import ban imposed under this statute is legal only if the initial Section 338 tariffs the ban is supposed to reinforce were themselves legal. Those targeting Canada are not, and therefore Trump’s follow-up import ban is also illegal. In addition, as previously noted, there is a strong case that Section 338 has been superseded by later laws and is therefore defunct.

More generally, as with IEEPA, turning Section 338 into a blank check for tariffs and follow-up import bans would run afoul of the major questions and nondelegation doctrines. It is far from clear that Section 338 grants such sweeping authority (or even remains in effect at all). And if it did grant such power, it would create a constitutional nondelegation problem.

Other statutes that can potentially be used to impose import bans raise similar issues. They, too, are limited in nature, and attempts to turn them into a blank check for executive-imposed import restrictions would similarly violate the major questions and nondelegation doctrines.

Section 301, for example, authorizes “duties or other import restrictions,” but only when the U.S. trade representative concludes, after an investigation, that “an act, policy, or practice of a foreign country is unreasonable or discriminatory and burdens or restricts United States commerce.” Attempts to turn this into a blank check for import restrictions are vulnerable to all the same objections as the administration’s effort to turn Section 301 into a blank check to impose tariffs. As I have detailed in an article and an amicus brief in the current Section 301 litigation (filed on behalf of the Cato Institute, prominent executive power scholar Michael McConnell, and myself), these include a variety of problems under the text of the statute, plus major questions and nondelegation issues.

Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 allows presidents to, among other things, “adjust” imports of articles when necessary to protect national security. Some presidents have used this provision to impose import bans against adversaries such as Iran. But, once again, this is not a general grant of power to impose bans. In its 1976 ruling in Federal Energy Administration v. Algonquin SNG, Inc., the Supreme Court emphasized that the executive discretion granted by this provision is “far from unbounded” and that any such blank check would violate constitutional constraints on delegation. Today, such an interpretation of Section 232 would also violate the major questions doctrine (mostly developed by the Supreme Court in more recent years).

Section 232 has been abused before, such as when Trump used it in October 2025 to impose tariffs on imported upholstered furniture and kitchen cabinets on the pretext that such products somehow threaten national security. Courts should crack down on such shenanigans. Lower courts have sometimes been overly deferential to presidential invocations of national security threats under Section 232. But Section 232 is not a blank check for protectionism, and current Supreme Court precedent does not require courts to allow it to become such.

Other laws allow imposition of import bans on goods from specified countries, such as those that support terrorism, those that use chemical or biological weapons, and those subject to relevant United Nations Security Council sanctions. But these and other similar laws apply to only a narrow range of states, and any attempt to turn them into a blank check for executive import bans (for example, through bogus, unsupported claims that trading partners support terrorism even if they don’t actually do so) would be at odds with the statutory text and also raise major questions and nondelegation problems.

The president can, of course, use some of these statutes to impose relatively narrow, targeted import bans. And such tools have been used against U.S. adversaries, such as Iran and Soviet bloc nations during the Cold War. But that does not mean they can serve as the basis for Trump’s massive campaign of worldwide protectionism.

It is also possible the administration will find some little-used or superseded statute, as they have attempted with Section 338 and Section 122 (a provision never previously used, because it was supposed to be utilized in conditions that can arise only under a fixed exchange rate monetary system of a kind the United States has not had since 1973). But such efforts will be subject to legal challenge and cannot justify any sort of sweeping executive import-ban power.

Courts cannot prevent all dubious import bans and restrictions. Elsewhere, I have outlined how and why we need stronger congressional constraints on various emergency powers, including IEEPA. Among other things, Congress would do well to limit “national emergencies” and other similar invocations of extraordinary powers by setting strict time limits. But even existing legislation sets extensive constraints on executive-imposed import restrictions. And if it did not, it would violate the nondelegation doctrine.

In sum, import bans are not some magic wand the president can use to constrain trade at will. They are subject to most of the same kinds of legal restrictions as tariffs. Courts should rigorously enforce those constraints if Trump or a future president decides to use import bans as a tool for a massive executive-driven trade war.

But the devil is in the details, and it is important to see how the text in his proposal defines those who ought to be punished. An overly broad definition could deem those acting in good faith and holding themselves to the highest standards liable simply because something went wrong. They can still be considered responsible in some way, but they should not face the same punishment as a truly negligent or reckless actor.

More to the point, these episodes of misalignment should not be an excuse to advance Hawley’s broader regulatory agenda. He cites various AI proposals, ranging from picking winners and losers in the tax code to enacting likely unconstitutional age-verification mandates for AI chatbots. Hawley and his peers would be wise to focus on the urgent, narrowly defined issue at hand, rather than advance a broad and heavy-handed anti-AI regulatory agenda.

Clarifying rules on the legal liability for developing and deploying AI systems would provide valuable guidance for these companies and give the public reassurance about what they can do when something goes wrong.

The Senate recently failed to advance the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, also known as the Clarity Act, and with the midterms around the corner, there is no realistic path to reviving it before the end of the year.

The Clarity Act, as its name suggests, sought to establish a framework for market structure: the rulebook that sorts crypto tokens into legal categories, licenses the firms trading them, and determines how supervisory authority should be divided between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

If enacted, the bill would have unlocked crypto’s considerable potential, including its ability to expand financial inclusion and reduce the costs of cross-border payments. Realizing any of that at scale takes more than technical ingenuity, because regulated institutions naturally hesitate to commit capital while the rules remain unwritten, and everyday Americans have little reason to trust a market that no one fully oversees.

Congress has long understood the need for a comprehensive regulatory framework. Legislative efforts date back to the Token Taxonomy Act of 2018, and successive attempts across four Congresses have all faltered, though none came as close as the Clarity Act.

Progress will effectively reset when the new Congress is sworn in, because key senators who quarterbacked the bill will not be on the ballot again. Cynthia Lummis (R‑WY), who chairs Senate Banking’s Subcommittee on Digital Assets, is retiring, and so is Thom Tillis (R‑NC), who helped broker the bipartisan compromise on stablecoin rewards that cleared the Clarity Act’s path out of committee.

What makes the bill’s defeat all the more exasperating is that the hardest part was already done. The fundamental questions concerning market structure had largely been resolved, which explained the uniquely broad coalition that assembled behind the bill. Wall Street and the crypto industry made for unlikely bedfellows, yet firms such as Goldman Sachs and BlackRock also endorsed the Clarity Act.

Full agreement on every detail is rare for legislation of this scope, and a handful of loose ends inevitably remained. But what ultimately held the bill up was ethics, specifically the risk of conflicts of interest at the highest levels of government. The United States gains little from a crypto sector widely perceived as rife with corruption and self-dealing, and safeguarding public trust is crucial.

Even so, it was a mistake to sacrifice the Clarity Act on the altar of ethics, because other legislative avenues for addressing such concerns would have stayed open even if the bill had passed.

Underlying all of this is a question of fairness. Nearly every other part of American finance operates within a defined regulatory perimeter, where firms know which rules bind them and which regulator enforces compliance. Crypto has no such perimeter written into law. Elsewhere, many developed economies—from the European Union and the United Kingdom to Japan and Singapore —have established one. International precedent should not dictate American policy, but it is instructive that so many others have already settled this.

The next Congress must finish what its predecessors did not. For nearly a decade, crypto regulation has been painstakingly pushed up the hill, only to tumble back down again. Sisyphus, at least, had earned his fate. He betrayed the gods and cheated death twice over. Whatever crypto’s faults, it does not warrant a sentence like his.

Federal debt held by the public now equals the size of the annual economy — and is growing. Yet investors continue buying Treasury securities. No government bond sale has really failed, no one has suddenly refused to finance Washington’s spending, and no unmistakable moment has forced Congress to change course.

That leads some people I cross paths with in academic life to conclude that despite decades of dire warnings, we’ve managed to go from a 35% debt-to-GDP ratio in 2007 to 100% today with no devastating consequences. Their implication is that we can keep going right up to 175% in 2056, which is the trajectory if Congress fails to reform Social Security and Medicare and if interest rates rise only modestly.

The idea that all this debt won’t bring a reckoning may sound tempting, but it’s questionable at best.

First, markets have already reacted. The 2021–2022 inflation spike, the worst in four decades, was the price level adjusting to a $5 trillion flood of deficit spending that investors did not believe future fiscal surpluses would cover.

That fear led to inflation. It’s hard to believe we won’t get another market response when Congress commits to borrowing nearly 16 times what it did during COVID-19, plus interest payments, without any repayment plan.

Incidentally, interest rates are well above what we saw from 2009 to 2021 (back when fiscal doves thought rates would always stay low). Some of the recent increases come from AI investment raising the demand for capital. Also at work, though, is a higher term premium. With inflation still an issue and no fiscal austerity on the horizon, investors — still worried that future debt will be devalued rather than truly repaid — want more compensation for holding long-term treasuries.

But let’s just suppose Washington can stay the course without provoking a bond-market response. Assume that Uncle Sam can borrow an additional $138 trillion, including interest payments over the next 30 years — the amount projected by the Congressional Budget Office — and that there won’t be a market reaction that raises interest rates or inflation.

How? First, it could be that investors expect Congress to eventually reform entitlements by raising taxes, reducing benefits, or both, so it won’t need to increase borrowing. But if future Congresses don’t deliver, the reckoning will come.

Second, it could be that despite all the risks in this scenario, investors would still value treasuries as the safest and easiest assets to trade. The world still needs dollars. Given the messes Europe, the UK and other governments find themselves in, some of this could be true.

Third, there’s AI, which could supercharge economic growth. Faster productivity growth will mean higher incomes and a larger tax base, making debt easier to carry. But even here, there is no free lunch. AI investment may already be pushing up interest rates; a boom capable of substantially easing deficits would be even more likely to do so. So, as existing Treasury debt matures, it would be refinanced at higher prevailing rates.

Thus, faster growth improves the fiscal arithmetic, but whether it is enough depends on how fast the economy grows, how high borrowing costs rise and, ultimately, whether Washington continues running larger primary deficits.

Even if we assume the best-case scenario, this debt accumulation isn’t costless. A bond-market crisis is not the only danger. Government borrowing competes with private borrowers for the economy’s available savings, which is another way to end up with higher interest rates. It also means less private investment than we would otherwise have — in factories, software, housing and, yes, the very AI investments we are counting on to raise future growth.

Financing government spending through high and distortionary taxes carries its own economic costs. And, as my colleague Jack Salmon has documented, higher government debt is associated with slower growth. That matters even in a world where AI makes us richer.

Finally, government debt displaces other spending. Annual net interest payments now cost us more than national defense, and older, cheaper debt is being refinanced at today’s higher rates. Those are dollars that can’t shore up entitlements or help during the next emergency, when the ability to borrow matters most. CBO projects interest payments becoming the largest federal expenditure by 2040, consuming roughly 40% of the government’s revenue by 2056.

I wouldn’t count on markets to stay calm. But even the calm scenario means less investment, slower wage growth and a budget increasingly spent on past obligations. Without action and perhaps a more obvious cue to complacent congresses, the damage will continue, sometimes quietly, and the danger will grow.

All too often, however, American politicians who find themselves in a self-made hole don’t reverse course; they keep on digging.

This is certainly not a new failing. Every tariff, subsidy, mandate, and waiver creates winners who stand to lose big if the policy goes away, and the politicians who created the policy stand to lose at the ballot box if they ignore the winners’ pleas and publicly admit error. Once a policy is enacted, it acquires lobbyists, congressional champions, and regulators with a stake in its survival. So, the political response to the policy’s effects—even very predictable ones—is usually another intervention, not backtracking or repeal. In this way, these policies are much more like quicksand than a simple hole: Once you’re stuck, it’s incredibly hard to get out—and the more you struggle, the deeper you get.

The White House in 2026 has given us a host of new examples.

The (Possible) Diesel Export Ban

The diesel export ban now under consideration provides the most salient recent case. Trump’s war with Iran has left the Strait of Hormuz semi-closed and significantly reduced Middle East refinery runs and diesel exports. This foreseeable outcome, along with Ukrainian airstrikes on Russian refineries and a Russian export ban, has crippled global diesel supplies because refineries everywhere (including here) are already running full steam and can’t pick up the slack. World market prices, in turn, have hit historic highs, and energy producers warn the situation will persist for another year even if the war stops tomorrow.

The United States makes a ton of diesel but has still been affected. Diesel prices here are closely tied to global prices, so the Iran supply shock has driven the national average above $6.50 a gallon, almost a full $3 above where it was last year and hurting a wide range of U.S. firms that rely on the workhorse fuel.

High diesel prices are especially bad for American farmers, who are now heading into harvest season, when they burn the most diesel. Their fuel bills have increased by tens of thousands of dollars per month, and suddenly deep red places like Iowa and Kansas, where farmers and ranchers were already miffed by U.S. trade policy (more on that in a sec), are in play for Democrats.

Instead of ending the standoff with Iran (if he even could), or at least broadening the Jones Act waiver (which he unfortunately narrowed last month), the president says he is “thinking very seriously” about banning diesel exports, which have boomed in response to the global supply void. The White House insists no decision has been made, but the indecision hasn’t stopped experts (including my Cato colleagues) and industry groups from widely agreeing that a ban would be a huge mistake.

Fuel prices are set on global markets, and the U.S. doesn’t have sufficient transport capacity—pipelines, ships, etc.—for all regions to consume only U.S. production, which is concentrated on the Gulf Coast. An export ban would therefore leave U.S. refiners with nowhere to send their product, so they’d eventually reduce output, thus causing domestic diesel prices to eventually match the now-higher global price. Some Americans would see a few weeks of price relief, but it would land in the wrong places: The biggest price increases are in places—the West Coast, the Rockies, the Midwest, and New England—that need to import at least some fuel from abroad, where diesel prices would rise in response to the export ban. (Oxford Economics, a global economics advisory firm, estimates that European wholesale prices could jump 40 to 50 percent.) Over the long term, new Washington-made risks to U.S. oil production and profitability would discourage investment in the domestic energy sector, while the global price hike would anger allies and encourage foreign customers to find more reliable suppliers, including Chinese ones.

In short, diesel export restrictions would deliver a small, temporary price break to the Americans who need it the least, while making things worse in the medium and long term. Indeed, U.S. fuel export bans of the 1970s depressed domestic production and raised prices before Washington repealed them. No wonder, then, that even Energy Secretary Chris Wright has called export restrictions a blunt tool that won’t work.

Most of the alternatives on the table—“voluntary” export curbs, a suspension of the federal diesel tax, and state-level relief—are more of the same quicksand. Each treats the diesel price, which is a symptom, instead of causes that Washington controls: Iran, record biofuel blending mandates, the Jones Act, and a permitting regime that discourages or even blocks new pipeline construction. As my Cato colleagues explain, fixing the pipeline problem would actually lower diesel prices without wrecking export markets, but they’re not the quick, politically palatable fix the White House wants. That’s why a Jones Act waiver that’s helped coastal areas access huge amounts of U.S. diesel now requires slower, case-by-case approval and is scheduled to expire in mid-November.

So, since Trump can’t or won’t end the war, we might get an export ban—and sink deeper into the very mess the administration’s bad decisions helped create.

And then there’s trade.

The diesel ban hasn’t happened yet, of course, but the administration has followed through on plenty of other quicksand policies. Most notable are its attempts to “fix” the predictable problems caused by Trump’s tariffs and trade wars, which not only raised prices but also cut U.S. farm exports to China to their lowest level since 2007 and, as I wrote last week in the Washington Post, have become a major midterm problem for campaigning Republicans because of their wide and growing unpopularity.

The Trump administration has nixed a few tariffs to address affordability issues, but the vast majority of them remain. And the Trump administration has dug even deeper through a series of policies that attack the tariff regime’s predictable results, spend more taxpayer money (that we don’t have), and further expand the administrative state:

• Farmers, hurt by lost exports and higher input and machinery prices, got billion-dollar bailouts: $12 billion last December, after $23 billion in the first term. They also got the ethanol bailout they’ve been demanding (to offset tariff harms): The EPA issued an “emergency” E15 waiver for this summer and finalized the highest biofuel blending requirements in the program’s history for 2026 and 2027, which will require output to rise by more than 60 percent over 2025 levels. Ironically, these mandates raise American refiners’ costs, which is why my Cato colleagues suggest relaxing them to lower U.S. diesel prices.
• Fifteen years of solar tariffs have failed to produce a booming domestic industry, so the administration followed up with the seventh major solar trade action in that span (and the fourth legal authority used to impose it) and an effective tariff rate on solar imports nearing 100 percent. It also proposes tariffs, minimum import prices on polysilicon (the main input used to make solar cells), and an unprecedented effort to stop U.S. importers from predictably stockpiling ahead of the polysilicon restrictions’ implementation date.
• Multinational companies’ lawful attempts to mitigate Trump’s tariffs (and keep prices lower for American consumers) have produced a new battalion of federal tariff-evasion cops. As the president’s senior trade counselor, Peter Navarro, acknowledged in the New York Times, these moves have been driven by tariff arbitrage, i.e., companies logically shifting their supply chains from higher-tariff countries to lower-tariff ones. Navarro’s big plan: more customs scrutiny of firms’ supply chains (including an AI system named—I kid you not—“Detective Border”), an executive order targeting importers, and new U.S. trade deals that police tariff “circumvention” (i.e., inputs from China and other high-tariff countries being incorporated into “not-China” products in other countries). As we’ve discussed, some of this stuff is surely fraud, but most of it is perfectly legal—and has been well known and well documented for years (great new research here). It’s also utterly unsurprising: As I explained in May 2025, high and variable tariffs like the ones Trump imposed would inevitably prompt companies to rearrange supply chains, exploit loopholes, and engage in illicit transshipment. That’s exactly what happened.
• Then there’s Trump’s absurd plan to replace potash (fertilizer) from our new trade enemy Canada with imaginary supplies from landlocked (and Russia-allied) Belarus. Canada supplied about 90 percent of last year’s U.S. potash imports, yet Trump announced he is negotiating a “massive Deal” with Minsk for substantially cheaper supply. Belarus’ own president has already said that the country lacks the volumes because everything is contracted, mostly to Asian buyers, but because Trump’s trade war with Canada has imperiled the stable potash supplies Americans get from their next-door neighbor (and close ally), he desperately needs to offer alternatives—even if they’d have to travel through Russia to get here. (This one is also an example of the havoc wreaked by the Iran war: CNN ties the scramble to fertilizer costs surging alongside diesel.)

None of it makes any sense, but Trump just likes tariffs, so here we are, doing the same kinds of crazy, ineffective trade workarounds that Trump did during his first term, only on a much grander scale.

But wait, there’s more. As the Wall Street Journal just reported, the president’s price-increasing policies (tariffs, Iran, immigration restrictions, etc.) and total disinterest in fiscal restraint have combined with a longer-term, bipartisan refusal to deal with the federal debt’s systemic drivers to push up inflation, U.S. bond yields, and interest rates. Most notable in this regard is the rate on a 30-year mortgage, which topped 7.5 percent this week and surely added to voter angst over housing affordability. The Journal reports that, per White House advisers, the debt barely registers with Trump, who instead (and bizarrely) thinks that interest rate cuts would be a magical shortcut to shrinking the government’s bill, which is partly driven by now-trillion-dollar interest payments.

So, instead of pursuing any semblance of fiscal restraint, the administration has turned to gimmicks. As we discussed in February, Trump ordered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy $200 billion of mortgage bonds, which only dented rates for a couple of days (they now sit more than a full percentage point above their late-February low). More recently, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has tried bond buybacks to lower Treasury yields, tripling the size of his department’s normal operations. Yet the 10-year yield actually rose after Bessent’s most recent announcement, and institutional investors openly warn that Treasury’s moves could undermine its credibility and (rightly) signal that the government is unserious about taming the debt, perversely pushing yields even higher.

Lessons abound.

In case after case, the Trump administration has moved to “fix” bad policy with even more bad policy, instead of addressing what got us here in the first place. Often these fixes make matters even worse, and—outside of maybe a broader Jones Act waiver (inshallah!)—they’re always pushing the government deeper into the U.S. economy.

This policy quicksand certainly isn’t limited to Republicans in 2026. As I wrote in 2021, both Trump and Joe Biden repeatedly tried to paper over the effects of their economic interventions with even more interventions, often making things worse—and undermining better reforms—in the process. A year later, the fossil-fuel antagonist Biden responded to the 2022 gas/​diesel price spike with a call for gas tax holidays and a scolding letter to refiners, and his administration issued E15 waivers in 2022 through 2024, which Trump has continued. Earlier presidents did similar stuff, and Congress surely isn’t blameless, either.

On the bright side, most of the White House’s moves right now are executive actions rather than statutes and thus not certain to last beyond Trump’s term, if even that long. But they still raise real risks. Any “temporary” policy that delivers goodies to politically powerful groups—farmers, steelmakers, homebuyers, whatever—becomes difficult to reverse once a constituency starts depending on it and a politician starts viewing the scheme as a shortcut to reelection. These Band-Aids also let politicians avoid fixing the underlying policies—on trade, foreign adventurism, or anything else—that created the problems the political pacifiers supposedly ameliorate.

As the classic Milton Friedman quote indicates, this dynamic is common, and we’re seeing it again right now, as farm groups lobby to make E15 permanent after five straight years of “temporary” waivers. Denying them would cost votes in critical states, so the safe money’s on E15 sticking around. The policy’s long-run damage—to our engines, food supply, economy, and political system—will likely never show up on a ballot, and the policies that actually hurt American farmers in the first place will likely remain in place indefinitely.

This quicksand risk should factor into all discussions of economic and foreign policy, especially in widely studied areas like taxes, tariffs, and debt, where we have a very good idea of how market players will react. Yet it rarely does, and we’re all worse off for it. Considering the risk doesn’t mean the government should stop making policy altogether, of course, but it does urge caution about enacting “bold” new policy experiments that contradict a well-earned consensus. The problem is not only that the experiment might fail, but that the policymakers who enacted it will, instead of admitting fault, enact even more bad policy to hide their mistakes and win the next election.

That’s an option the market thankfully doesn’t offer to private parties who make similar errors, and that’s yet another reason to favor it over whatever scheme the guys in Washington come up with next.

Markets FTW

Northern Ireland has strict alcohol regulations that prevented the German-owned supermarket chain Aldi from selling beer and wine at one of its Belfast locations. So, the company did the smart thing: apply for a pub license and build a giant pub inside the store. Now the pub, called the “Middle Ale” (get it?!), is wildly popular with locals. “It’s a good excuse to go shopping,” said one patron, “If I forget the toilet roll, I can just come back for another glass of wine on the way.” Sounds divine.

Chart of the Week

Wow.

America’s getting richer all the time:

Trade deals ain’t working yet (especially because Switzerland is mostly gold):

I’m sure this will work out well for American farmers:

What followed was more than an ordinary concert. Syrian flags rippled through the huge audience, who sang every lyric back to her, many in tears. “I never thought this day would come. It’s like a beautiful dream,” one 56-year-old woman told reporters. Assala herself seemed to struggle to hold back emotion as she opened with “Syria Janna” (“Syria Is Heaven”), a song she released the week Assad’s regime finally collapsed in Dec 2024. Culture Minister Mohammed Yassine Saleh, who joined Assala on stage, praised her return as a symbol of “freedom over oppression.”

What was most remarkable was the diversity of the crowd, which included many women who wore a hijab, many who did not, and men from all walks of life. As Asya Hesham, a Syrian TV presenter, put it on X:

This was indeed a beautiful message of inclusion that Syria desperately needs after more than half a century of brutal tyranny and over a dozen years of devastating civil war. The country has a large Sunni Arab majority, with varying degrees of religiosity, along with Alawites, Christians, Kurds, the Druze, and others. What will hold them together, in peace and prosperity, is a pluralist sense of nationhood, where everyone’s faith, identity, and way of life is respected. And that will be enhanced by moments where they can all come together – like an Assala concert – to share common inspiration, joy, and hope.

Puritan Backlash

This pluralist vision is not easy to accomplish, though – just as it isn’t in the West these days – since there are always those who would like to make their own tribe or creed dominant. In the weeks before the concert, a group of conservative clerics led a campaign to cancel the event. The loudest voice was Hani Dahab, an Egyptian preacher known as Sheikh al-Dhahabi, who denounced “sinful concerts,” and who even claimed – falsely, as it turned out – that the show had already been called off.

Meanwhile, on Sept. 6, a formal statement signed by 62 public figures, including two members of parliament and a reinstated Syrian diplomat, called on the government to review the rules governing public events and to withdraw official support from anything deemed incompatible with “Syrian society’s identity and values.” The statement did not name Assala, but its timing left little doubt about what it was about.

To its credit, the government did not fold. The Ministry of Culture even announced that it would help sponsor Assala’s next album. This was yet another sign of recent efforts by the government of President Ahmed al-Sharaa to embrace Syria’s broader society – alongside reaching an agreement with Kurdish-led forces, reopening Christian schools shuttered for decades under the Assad regime, and taking steps to return confiscated properties to Syria’s long-displaced Jewish community. (These hopeful moves have, unfortunately, co-existed with less inspiring campaigns, including incidents of persecution of Alawites and Druze.)

The controversy in Syria reminds us, once again, the Muslim world has many forces willing to reshape society according to their own notions of right and wrong. Against such puritan ambitions, we need not just political decisions to keep them at bay, but also religious thought that can criticize them from within.

The first step in such pluralist religious thought is to ask a simple but crucial question: Do Muslims have the right – let alone the duty – to impose the obligations of Islam, as they understand them, on other Muslims?

For puritans like al-Dhahabi, the answer may be obvious. They believe “instrumental music, mixing between the sexes, a woman’s voice and public concerts” are simply haram, or religiously prohibited. Then they easily take the next step of calling on the government to ban these things, thinking they are fulfilling a Quranic duty: “commanding the right and forbidding the wrong.” The Taliban regime does the same thing, systematically, through its “Ministry of Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong” – a government institution aimed at monitoring the behavior of citizens according to Taliban standards.

Yet there is a big gap in the puritans’ reasoning. Not every Muslim – let alone every citizen – agrees on what is “right” and what is “wrong.” Not every Muslim, for example, thinks music is haram, or sees a problem with “mixing between the sexes,” as long as it stops short of debauchery. (In Turkey, my home country, none of this is a public issue.)

Therefore, when the puritans try to enforce “Islam” on society, all they really do is dictate their own narrow understanding of Islam to everyone else. They don’t advance genuine piety based on sincere conviction – they only advance the tyranny of their own beliefs.

This problem was spotted by another Damascus-based Islamic scholar – a much older and wiser one – back in the 17th century. This was Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi, a Hanafi scholar who taught at the Umayyad Mosque, and who had opposed the puritans of his own time: the Kadizadelis, who caused much havoc in the Ottoman Empire with their zeal for “commanding the right and forbidding the wrong” through violence and coercion. Like today’s puritans, the Kadizadelis believed music was haram, which led them to attack the Sufi orders that sang and danced. They also viewed two novelties in Ottoman society (coffee and tobacco) as haram, and their campaign helped push Sultan Murad IV (r. 1623–40) to ban both across the empire on pain of death. For a while, people, seriously, were executed in the streets of Istanbul simply for drinking coffee.

Against this zealotry, al-Nabulsi raised a crucial argument in his work Al-Hadiqah al-Nadiyyah, or “The Dew-Moistened Garden.” The Quranic duty of “commanding the right and forbidding the wrong,” he wrote, is a “matter of the tongue” – meaning it should be carried out only through preaching. Moreover, people had the right to dismiss that preaching, al-Nabulsi added, by citing Qur’anic verses:

In other words, al-Nabulsi, an Islamic scholar from 17th-century Damascus, opposed religious coercion and defended what we would today call “religious freedom” – all with Quranic references. It is a wisdom that can still help the Damascus of the twenty-first century, and elsewhere in the Islamic world, where some preachers can’t distinguish between their own conceptions of piety and the government policy concerning all citizens.

Preach and Let Live

In practical terms, al-Nabulsi’s vision means that Syria’s ultra-conservative clerics, who don’t approve concerts like Assala’s, are free to preach their views, and those who agree with them can act accordingly. But they shouldn’t demonize, threaten, or try to discipline those who disagree.

Meanwhile, those who think that concerts in Damascus somehow betray the spirit of the Syrian revolution – as some clerics have claimed passionately from pulpits — should hear what Hassan Daghim, an Islamic scholar and a member of the Syrian People’s Assembly, said on X amid the controversy:

Indeed, the Syrian Revolution has triumphed in toppling a monstrous tyranny, ending its unspeakable murders and tortures, and liberating its victims. It will continue to do so by extending freedom to all Syrians, regardless of religion, sect, ethnicity, or way of life.

Many Syrians are hoping for this bright future – as do many others, including myself. For Syria is the silver lining of our dark times, and its achievement excites us all. And that is why Assala’s return to Damascus resonated so broadly, not just with the daughters and sons of Syria, but also with millions of others around the world.

Nevertheless, political disputes in the U.S. only rarely turned violent. In some other countries assassinations became almost common. For that reason the 2025 murder of Charlie Kirk was so shocking. More ominous, however, might be the earlier killing of Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthCare.

Kirk courted controversy. That didn’t justify his assassination, of course, but his activism turned him into a target. Thompson was a businessman who did nothing unusual or nefarious. He simply ran an insurance company. A firm which sold health insurance.

He was murdered by Luigi Mangione, an intermittently employed 26-year-old who pleaded guilty to the crime and will be sentenced in December. He evidently blamed Thompson for the state of American health care. The reason for Mangione’s animus was unclear: after all, he was never insured by UnitedHealthcare, which differs little from other industry participants. Nevertheless, hostility toward insurance firms is widespread.

Mangione immediately attracted fans, who contributed to his defense. Some supported his action as “self-defense.” His plea bargain resulted in disappointment, not repudiation, among his backers. And many still stand by him. For instance, the December 4 Legal Defense Committee, which raised $1.5 million from 42,000 people, is continuing its activities. Sam Beard, the organization’s spokesperson, stated: “We are committed to helping provide Luigi support until he is free.” That’s not all. Added Beard: “In the event that Luigi ends up serving time for what he pled guilty to, we will continue to provide support for Luigi.”

Thankfully, unlike the Committee’s founders and funders, most Americans do not effectively endorse murder. Nevertheless, many Americans believe the insurance industry shares responsibility for Mangione’s action. According to the Associated Press: “About 7 in 10 adults say that denials for health care coverage by insurance companies, or the profits made by health insurance companies, also bear at least ‘a moderate amount’ of responsibility for Thompson’s death. Younger Americans are particularly likely to see the murder as the result of a confluence of forces rather than just one person’s action.”

There is much to criticize about American health care, which is a mishmash of government programs, restrictive statutes and regulations, private providers and insurers, and perverse incentives. For reasons stretching back to wage controls during World War II, the U.S. system is overwhelmingly based on third party payment, that is, roughly 90 percent of medical costs are in the first instance paid by someone else—primarily government and private insurers. Indeed, health insurance has largely become prepayment of common medical expenses, rather than coverage for unexpected and significant expenditures. (Imagine if auto insurance covered oil changes, tire rotation, and gasoline fill-ups.) Which inflates demand, since patients care little about prices, and thus cost. Both public authorities and private firms then use eligibility standards and utilization controls to limit spending.

This leads to complaints about denial of coverage. Sometimes firms abuse that practice. But most times that decision simply reflects what the policy covers. If you buy a cheaper policy, you typically get less coverage. Yet most Americans have come to believe that someone somewhere should pay for everything, irrespective of what the policy says. Unfortunately, the system of employer-provided insurance—an anomaly, since we don’t expect firms to pay for our auto or homeowners’ insurance—means we don’t choose our health insurance, so most of us don’t choose what is covered.

Understandably, then, health care has long been one of Washington’s most important and contentious issues. Advocates of government-provided health care continue to push to expand federal coverage, with “Medicare-for-all” the latest cause. Most governments worldwide play a significant role in providing health care, though their programs differ markedly. However, government-provided care is no panacea. No one has found a way to simultaneously expand coverage and reduce costs. It simply cannot be done.

There is no “Christian” position on health care. A good society should include access to medical attention, with support for those who lack the means to afford some minimal level of care. What that means in practice, however, is a matter of substantial debate. How to provide how much care is not self-evident. Should everything be “free,” meaning paid for by someone else? If so, by whom?

And should everything be free? Am I entitled to every medical test and remedy known to man? How about treatments with a very low likelihood of success? Which may offer only minimal benefits? What of experimental procedures? Moreover, very important, who gets to decide? Me? The president? Congress? Or some obscure committee buried within the federal bureaucracy?

No system can escape the essential reality of scarcity. Someone must make decisions about who gets what. Nationalized systems tend to ration by delaying care, with significant wait times for appointments and treatments, and, even more important, denying care, with sometimes serious deleterious health consequences. In some countries governments make the brutal calculation—rarely acknowledged publicly—that the elderly, with shorter life spans, should not receive more expensive treatments. In a system in which the state largely determines who has access to what, a denial of care is far more devastating than in America, where companies and charities often underwrite treatment, and in which family members, friends, and even interested members of the public can help someone afford otherwise unaffordable remedies.

In confronting America’s complicated, malformed, consequential, and often irrational system, it makes no sense to blame insurance companies and their executives. The system, ultimately formed by a mix of government policies and market forces, has generated insurance companies, rather than the reverse. If you think the current system is broken, imagine making your way without health insurance, in which case you’d have to pay the entire bill for emergency or life-saving care. It is in practice foolish and, indeed, immoral, to blame United Healthcare or any other company for a system others created. Of course, there are errant and even, occasionally, criminal operators, and they should be punished accordingly. But most of the public criticism of insurers is that they insist on fulfilling their basic purpose of providing insurance rather than charity.

Health care in the United States needs reform. However, that process obviously will not be advanced by murdering health insurance executives. Although only a small minority of people see that as an answer, the fact that tens of thousands of people contributed to the defense of an admitted murderer is more than disturbing.

Instead, Americans must realize that there is no “free lunch,” as the saying goes. The more treatment you want, the more you will have to spend. And, ultimately, we all will have to pay the resulting bills. While market economics cannot determine our ultimate objectives, it can help us decide what we want and how to get there. Addressing our health care needs is yet another reason we need to declare a political truce and cooperate collectively to address the many deep policy challenges facing our nation.

President Donald Trump’s popularity is suffering badly from another seemingly endless Mideast war. Amid rising prices, even some MAGA voters are turning against him, after supporting him due to the “affordability” crisis under the Biden administration. Since returning to the White House, Trump has dismissed the issue, claiming that prices are falling, and offered a $5,000 “dividend”—but only if Republicans retain control of Congress after the midterm elections.

Of course, politicians commonly fault their predecessors. But Trump’s excuses appear increasingly threadbare as he nears the halfway mark of his second term. He has dominated American politics for the last decade and remains firmly in charge of the GOP, which controls the House and Senate and can claim a majority of Supreme Court justices as ideological allies. He emphasizes his own influence in other ways, too, claiming to be the greatest American president and most powerful person who ever lived, while “running” the world.

Power he has in abundance, and he has used it in ways that harm Americans. To start, he, no less than Joe Biden, is responsible for Washington’s ongoing proxy war against Russia. During his first term he reversed Obama administration policy and provided lethal military aid to Kiev. Although last year he dropped Biden’s direct financial and military assistance to Ukraine, he approved the sale of U.S. weapons to European governments for transfer to Kiev. He also continued U.S. intelligence support for the Zelensky government, aiding its drone and missile attacks. He was unconcerned about the destructive impact of those attacks on Russian oil and diesel production until energy prices reached record levels.

Those prices spiked because of the Iran War, yet here too the president has sought to avoid blame, arguing that record diesel prices are somehow a result of Biden’s actions against Russia but not Trump’s surprise attack on Iran. Since March, he has routinely promised they will drop dramatically as soon as Tehran yields, which he has also repeatedly, indeed, almost constantly, predicted. Yet the war continues.

Trump has presented the conflict as one of necessity, citing Tehran’s possession of enriched uranium. There was no evidence that Tehran was pursuing a nuclear weapon when last year Trump ended negotiations and claimed to “obliterate” its nuclear program. And the only reason Tehran possessed the stockpile cited by Trump was because in 2018 he killed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, i.e., the Iran nuclear deal, which had restricted Tehran’s nuclear activities. After withdrawing from the agreement, Trump imposed what he called a “maximum pressure” campaign and essentially demanded Tehran’s surrender. Instead, the Islamic Republic ultimately accelerated its nuclear activities, causing Trump to complain about its failure to accept his terms before the 2020 election.

Despite having claimed to solve the Iranian nuclear problem last year, in February he joined Israel in another military assault on Iran, contending that it was essentially nanoseconds away from developing nuclear weapons and blowing up the world. Which indicates that the 2025 operation was a failure. Or that, if it really was a success, he had no justification for making Israel’s war on Iran into America’s war.

In either case, the ill consequences were his responsibility, not Biden’s. The Pentagon had long war-gamed Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, but Trump seems to have dismissed the possibility of such an action. The Pentagon also feared Iranian attacks on its bases throughout the Persian Gulf, which he likewise dismissed. Moreover, the Iranian blockade affected the global supply of other critical products, most notably fertilizer and helium. The recent revival of conflict between the Saudi government and the Ansar Allah or Houthi movement in Yemen has further impeded oil supplies.

Trump repeatedly sought to influence energy markets by predicting a diplomatic settlement and claiming the strait was under U.S. control, while ignoring the predictable consequences of the dramatic drop in energy shipments. Indeed, it was widely recognized by most everyone other than the president that attacking Iran was almost certain to spike oil—and consequently gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel—prices. Although the impact of the war has been cushioned by unexpected mitigating factors, such as China’s reduction in oil imports, the market appears to be coming under increasing pressure.

The president’s undisciplined and arbitrary trade war against most nations on earth has also had a negative economic impact. While tariffs never would make Americans rich, as he claimed, he could have used carefully targeted levies to raise revenue—the federal government is running a $2 trillion annual deficit—and achieve foreign policy objectives. For instance, a more limited effort, conducted in cooperation with allied states, would offer a possible strategy for constraining Chinese economic influence.

But his blunderbuss campaign created malign consequences that he has consistently denied. Most importantly, American consumers, sellers, and producers pay most of the resulting cost increases. These are substantial, especially for the most basic building blocks of an industrial society. For instance, hiking the price of aluminum and steel increases costs throughout the economy. Indeed, the president has implicitly acknowledged that fact by repeatedly lifting duties on sensitive consumer goods, most recently beef, in response to complaints over rising prices. In practice, when even he could no longer maintain the fiction that taxing imports did not raise their price, Trump reduced the tariff.

Such levies also raise prices indirectly, by reducing or eliminating alternative products. A market economy is based on freedom of entry and rigorous competition. One objective of tariffs is to promote domestic production by blocking cheaper imports. Whatever the wisdom of attempting to promote “infant” American industries or revive enfeebled “sunset” enterprises, doing so depends on pushing up prices. With the federal government banning low-cost alternatives, domestic producers charge more. The president’s endlessly repeated denials do not change what Americans pay for essential goods.

Trump’s core policies—promiscuous warmaking in the Middle East and expansive mercantilist economic practices worldwide—reflect a return to an earlier age. They are mistaken, in my view, but reflect traditional if widely disputed policy paths. Facing rising popular dissatisfaction, however, the president has chosen to run away from the inevitable consequences of his actions rather than defend them. Someone styling himself as history’s most consequential person should do better.

The “truce era” of U.S.-China relations is pitched between visions. The first is suggested by a “constructive relationship of strategic stability,” the awkward framing both sides adopted at the Beijing summit in May. In this view, a durable “strategic stalemate” requires a bilateral reset. Beijing and Washington must accept that the power gap between them has narrowed to such a degree that the relationship must be recast to sustainably protect each side’s redlines, particularly regarding political issues like Taiwan and the U.S. alliance system.

The second is that the truce is just what it sounds like: a useful lull for each side to get its house in order. Trump 2.0, in this read, is just a temporary exception to the hawkish impulses of official Washington, and the bilateral power gap is not guaranteed to continue narrowing in China’s favor—especially given the revolutionary promise of AI. It follows that the truce is not an opportunity to set the relationship on a more sustainable path, but rather to patch techno-economic vulnerabilities, corral allies, and prepare for a long-term resumption of confrontation and instability.

The deliverables most likely to emerge from Xi’s visit will be notionally compatible with both visions. They will sustain the truce and begin to flesh out the “constructive relationship of strategic stability,” but they will also be easily reversible in the event of a sudden downturn in the relationship. Under the October deal, both sides rolled back tariffs, the U.S. paused an expansion of export controls on Chinese firms, and China agreed to resume rare earths exports to the U.S. and pause a licensing regime that could restrict trade in any goods containing Chinese inputs.

The Chinese side reportedly wants to extend this arrangement until the end of Trump’s term, but the U.S. has offered only six months, possible because it believes China has not fulfilled its promise to restore rare earths shipments. Preparatory talks last weekend between Treasury Secretary Bessent and China’s Vice-Premier He Lifeng did not settle the issue. The truce is vague and fragile. This summer it was strained by U.S. import bans on Chinese robots and power equipment and retaliatory Chinese sanctions on American firms. Still, it is low-cost for both sides and now serves as the central ballast of the relationship. Expect it to be renewed when Trump meets Xi.

The Bessent–He talks apparently produced a tentative agreement to create a “U.S.-China AI dialogue.” According to Bessent’s remarks to reporters last Sunday, the body will help establish joint understandings of AI threats and might also include a “notification mechanism” for each side to alert the other of AI safety incidents such as the recent cases of rogue behavior by AI agents. Like the 2024 Biden–Xi agreement to keep AI out of each side’s nuclear command and control systems, a notification mechanism is not enforceable or verifiable. The best case is that it becomes a frequently used channel for both sides to develop a common vocabulary of AI policy and communicate red lines. The worst case is that it suffers the fate of previous U.S.-China hotlines: No one will pick up the phone.

Progress on military-to-military talks will be similarly incremental and reversible. This week’s meeting will reportedly build on work done to resuscitate bilateral military contacts in the wake of the Busan and Beijing summits. This might include regularized meetings between U.S. and Chinese theater commanders, as well as a resumption of the arms control talks China broke off in 2024 following U.S. arms sales to Taiwan.

The arms-control mechanism may lead to other crisis stability measures, such as a formal missile launch notification agreement (U.S. officials pushed for this late in the Biden administration). And Elbridge Colby, the head of the Pentagon’s policy office, may finally get the green light to visit Beijing, reportedly a longstanding goal of his. These would all be valuable measures, but they will make flimsy scaffolding absent efforts to address the political sources of the U.S.–China rivalry.

First among those is Taiwan. Trump’s decision to pause a $14 billion arms sale to the island has probably been vital to sustaining the truce. After the Beijing summit he told Fox News the sale is a “good negotiating chip” and that he is “not looking” for Taiwan to go independent. With each passing summit, Washington’s China-watching community holds its breath, concerned that Trump may assent to China’s wishes and significantly weaken the US commitment to Taiwan. A U.S. policy shift such as formally “opposing” Taiwan independence given in exchange for commensurate Chinese concessions would signal both sides are willing to reconcile their interests to sustain “constructive strategic stability” in the long run.

But despite many China-watchers’ fears (and some restrainers’ hopes), a grand bargain is unlikely. Trump disciplines his rhetoric about precious few topics, and one of those topics is Taiwan. Unlike his predecessor, who said four times the U.S. would definitely defend Taiwan, Trump consistently hews to the traditional US policy of “dual deterrence,” which sustains the status quo by keeping both Taiwan and China guessing about US intentions.

An overture to Kim Jong Un is a more promising avenue for political cooperation. Xi and Trump will recall that their coordination in 2017–18 helped end the Korean missile crisis. It also served as a stabilizing force for the broader U.S.–China relationship, which at that time was strained by Trump’s first tariff war. Since then, North Korea has tripled its nuclear arsenal and entered into an expansive security alliance with Russia. Its neighbors, including China and South Korea, increasingly accept that denuclearization is no longer a viable basis for relations with the Kim regime; still, they continue to see engagement as in their national interests. In August President Trump renewed his diplomatic push on the issue and said he wants to meet with Kim “this year.”

The North has rebuffed Trump so far, likely because it sees no evidence Washington is modifying its insistence that U.S.–DPRK relations can only improve if denuclearization occurs. China reportedly offered to help broker a potential new round of Trump–Kim talks, and this week’s summit could bring those into being. The White House readout from the Beijing summit contained the stock reaffirmation of the goal of denuclearizing North Korea. New joint language this time—perhaps explicitly elevating stable engagement over denuclearization—would signal to the North that the U.S. is serious about talks. It would also provide an opportunity for U.S.-China cooperation on a regional security challenge that touches both sides’ vital interests.

This week’s summit will mostly be an exercise in marking time, yielding smiles and incremental agreements. That is better than many alternatives. It was easy to imagine that the second Trump administration would pick up China policy where the first one left off and resume the Covid-era hardline. Instead, Trump kept the China hawks in his administration at bay. Neither Trump nor Xi is allergic to confrontation, but each ultimately sees the other as a powerful peer he must work with to secure his own country’s interests. This week, and in the two further meetings to come in 2026, both sides need to begin to give political expression to “constructive strategic stability.” Otherwise, the truce will wither, and the relationship will remain at the mercies of accident and force.

Most of that chichi was just foreplay before Thursday’s negotiations to extend the one-year trade war truce between the nations that’s set to run out in November. It’s quite the welcome for a leader of a country the administration calls America’s chief adversary.

Then again, it’s no easy thing to follow the details of Trump’s trade policy.

His first term was different. Trump’s Section 301 tariffs and most of the other tariffs starting in 2018 were aimed almost exclusively at China. They were misguided because they were mostly applied to products with no national security significance, like furniture and home appliances, but they were theoretically related to the unique challenge posed by one nation.

Trump’s second term has been widely different. In 2025, he raised the average U.S. tariff on the rest of the world from 3% to more than 18%. Officially, the rationale is to establish some leverage against every trade partner, no matter how friendly, plus good old protectionism and a little tariff revenue tossed in for good measure. The U.S. Trade Representative describes this strategy as using tariffs to defend American economic and national security and to promote balanced and reciprocal trade. China is just one part of this wide-ranging fight.

If you’re confused by all these goals, you’re not crazy. Leverage in negotiations requires tariffs you can trade away for something else. Revenue from tariffs requires imports to keep coming. Protection requires them to stop. One instrument cannot simultaneously hit all three targets.

Plus, let’s be honest, it’s convenient to make dubious promises to the American people. Last November, the administration promised a $2,000 dividend check to low- and middle-class Americans, paid for with tariff revenue. Another promise of free money came just a few weeks ago: $5,000 for every adult American if Republicans keep the House and Senate in the upcoming midterm elections — also paid by tariffs. A bigger defense budget? Balancing the budget? Paying down the debt? Eliminating the income tax? Tariffs can pay for that too. Best of all, Congress won’t have to cut a single spending program!

Tariffs are indeed raising some revenue, totaling $264 billion last year. But that was funded almost entirely on the backs of American consumers. Additionally, more than half of these revenues came from unconstitutional levies that the administration is now refunding to American companies.

Amid all this confusion, the administration still leans hard on the China story. To be fair, China does present some real national security challenges. Beijing has shown willingness to weaponize rare-earth export licenses, threatens Taiwan and engages in corporate espionage. The administration has cause to address the legitimate threats with targeted tools, but its actual policies and rhetoric have made that harder while damaging American prosperity.

For instance, an all-out trade war with just about every country certainly does not lessen our dependence on China. A July New York Times story described a small American flashlight importer that spent years pursuing supply from Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia. Then Trump’s latest tariffs put those countries’ rates at roughly the same level as the rate on Chinese goods, so the importer shifted back to his Chinese supplier. That’s Trump’s trade policy in one anecdote.

While we shouldn’t worry too much about where our flashlights come from, all of this makes America less safe. As scholar Samuel Gregg explains in a study for the American Institute for Economic Research, it boils down to the fact that military power rests on economic power. The United States outlasted the Soviet Union in part because a larger, faster-growing economy let it match Moscow’s defense spending while committing a smaller share of its output to the effort. Tariffs erode the U.S. advantage by raising costs for American producers and slowing growth, shrinking the economic base that funds the Pentagon.

Protectionism also costs us friends. Gregg points to the Morrill Tariff of 1861, which angered Britain (a country with every reason to back the Union against the slaveholding South) enough to settle into an uneasy Civil War neutrality. In recent weeks, Trump’s furious attack on Canada has not just alienated our closest neighbor, dependable trading partner and NATO ally. It sent one friend running into the arms of China. Some might be eager to call the move stupid in the name of owning Trump. The more important reality is that it makes America weaker.

Finally, stretching the term “national security” to cover every steel mill and auto plant drains it of meaning. A government that calls everything a security threat will have trouble rallying allies, or voters, when a real one arrives.

Maybe the Xi-Trump meeting will clarify some of this. I doubt it.

Prediction markets, as well as attempts to banish them, have made their way from Renaissance Italy to modern-day America. These markets let people trade contracts that typically pay a dollar apiece if an event occurs. A contract’s price reflects the odds: One trading at 70 cents implies a roughly 70 percent chance that the event happens. And Americans are piling in. When the 2026 National Football League season kicked off, hundreds of millions of dollars flowed through these markets in a single weekend.

New York recently sued Kalshi, a major prediction-market platform, for allegedly running an unlicensed gambling business. Similar lawsuits are pending across the country.

But a prediction market is not simply a casino. It produces a public good: a real-time projection, accessible to anyone, of the likelihood of a particular event occurring.

These exchanges are not perfect, but the challenges they present are not insurmountable. For instance, a small circle of winners takes most of the profits. But that’s how the system works. Researchers at Yale University and London Business School, sifting through three years of Polymarket transactions, found that only around 3 percent of accounts consistently steered prices closer to what actually ended up happening. If a handful of sharp traders are doing most of the work of keeping those prices accurate, it is hardly surprising that they collect the majority of the rewards.

Perhaps the most serious criticism is that trading on prediction markets can tip off adversaries to state secrets. In the hours preceding the U.S.-Israeli offensive against Iran in February, a wave of money flooded into Polymarket contracts predicting the strike would happen. Much of it came from newly created accounts taking unusually large positions on an outcome the market still considered unlikely. Because those trades were visible on a public ledger, the surge was a signal, legible to anyone watching, that something might be imminent.

Yet clues often surface regardless. For decades, observers have watched late-night activity at pizza shops near the Pentagon for hints that something consequential may be happening inside. Prediction markets, much like the “Pentagon Pizza Index,” are public and therefore visible to the decision-makers responsible for protecting America’s national security. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has even joked that he might order random pizzas “just to throw everybody off.” When such indicators are open-source, those charged with operational security can monitor them too — and act if they begin to reveal something they should not.

None of these objections justify a heavy-handed approach, and history provides reminders about the futility of attempting to suppress the market. Nearly two centuries after Gregory XIV’s decree, Londoners were doing much as the Romans had done. Wagers were recorded on all manner of political events, including the controversies over the Stamp and Tea Acts that helped set the stage for the American Revolution. Westminster spent decades trying to curb the practice through measures such as closing public betting houses and restricting its promotion. Yet the law had limited influence over the private clubs beyond its reach, where the wagering carried on.

One lesson from across the Atlantic is that a blunt prohibition pushing markets out of sight is no substitute for targeted enforcement. Attempting to suppress the market is a policy failure not only because it deprives the public of a valuable forecast but because it does not solve the root of the problem. The through line connecting many of the reservations about this growing industry is that specific individuals are abusing the markets, be it through manipulation or insider trading. The answer, therefore, is to police those individuals rather than restrict everyone else.

That is the logic of a bipartisan bill from Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D‑New York) and Dave McCormick (R‑Pennsylvania) that would bar the president, lawmakers and senior officials — those with unusually broad access to classified information — from trading in prediction markets. It would create a bespoke framework that, among other things, empowers the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to design and enforce insider-trading rules customized to prediction markets. The bill is not flawless, but it recognizes that prediction markets are better embraced than driven underground.

Centuries later, Europe is still making the same mistake. Britain and Italy have largely treated prediction markets as little more than unlicensed gambling, while many European jurisdictions significantly restrict access for the general public. Europe has chosen its path, and the United States stands at a crossroads: It can repeat the past or chart a new course. My money is on Washington making the right call.

Last week, however, data revisions changed the narrative. The Office for National Statistics offered a new “component approach” to calculating productivity, or output per hour worked. Rather than leaning on workers’ recollections of their hours as in the Labour Force Survey, the method drew on various datasets to account carefully for annual leave, bank holidays, sickness and overtime.

Its indicative conclusions are stark. Britons worked far fewer hours than previously estimated, meaning each hour worked was more productive than past data implied. Estimated hourly productivity growth between 2009 and 2019 has therefore been revised up from 0.7 per cent a year to 1.3 per cent — still below the pre-financial crisis rate of 2 per cent, but hardly a trivial correction.

Now, this doesn’t mean Britain is richer. As my colleague David Smith explained on Tuesday, the fundamental economic problems remain much as they were before. For real wages and the public finances, output per worker is a more relevant gauge than output per hour. Growth in that measure barely changes under the new calculations. Many reforms proposed to lift productivity would therefore still have been useful.

Productivity growth itself has also still been historically slow. Had it continued along its pre-crisis trend, output per hour in 2024 would have been 10 per cent higher by 2024. That’s better than the 18 per cent shortfall implied by the old method, but still grim. Since 2019, even the new metric for hourly productivity growth has been just 0.7 per cent.

What, then, would have been different in our politics if we’d known these revised facts earlier?

First, there would have been less anguished discussion of British exceptionalism. On comparable component-based measures, Britain now appears to have recorded hourly productivity growth of roughly 1.1 per cent a year since 2009, against 0.9 per cent in Germany and 0.4 per cent in France. America still did considerably better. But there would have been less worry about a British disease.

Second, claims that Britain’s recent productivity gap chiefly reflected an investment drought would have carried less force. Critics of the coalition’s deficit-reduction programme argued that cuts to public investment had damaged the capital stock and productivity. The revised measure leaves a much smaller hourly productivity shortfall to be explained. The picture looks less like workers losing their ability to produce and more like a sluggish recovery that drew more people into lower-hours work.

That does not make pro-growth reforms to stimulate investment redundant. Planning restrictions, unstable taxes and poor infrastructure choices still hold the economy back and remain ripe for overhaul. But there would have been less confidence that capital “shallowing” explained Britain’s supposedly unique collapse in hourly productivity, because much of that collapse didn’t occur.

Finally, the much-celebrated British jobs miracle would have faced more scrutiny. Between 2009 and 2024, filled jobs increased by about 15 per cent, but total hours worked rose by only 10 per cent, as average hours per job fell by more than 4 per cent. That should have focused attention sooner on underemployment, additional holiday and sickness absences, more part-time and flexible employment, workers choosing greater leisure and an ageing workforce.

The new figures don’t tell us how much of the hours difference reflects people’s preferences. But we would surely have spent more time asking whether minimum-wage increases, the tax and benefits system, rising inactivity and ill health were discouraging hours. In other words, we’d have put less focus on investment and more on labour markets.

In March 2018, the US’s opening tariff salvo – implemented via Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 – aimed to roll back Chinese industrial policy and blunt Beijing’s push for dominance in advanced manufacturing. Subsequent tariffs and export controls added more goals: shrink China’s trade surplus and policy-driven overcapacity, reduce US dependence on Chinese goods, slow China’s technological advance, and weaken Beijing’s geopolitical position.

Granted, there have been a few superficial victories. Between 2017 and 2025, direct imports from China declined from about 21.6% of US goods imports in 2017 to roughly 9% by 2025, a level not seen since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. Export restrictions have denied Chinese companies easy access to Nvidia Corp.’s best chips and ASML Holding NV’s best chipmaking equipment. And American firms such as Apple Inc. shifted production capacity from China to India, Vietnam, Mexico, and other low-wage alternatives.

Beneath the surface, however, there’s little for trade hawks to cheer. New research finds that Chinese content – either directly or lawfully embedded in third-country goods – has been entering the US at levels only modestly below those in 2017, confirming the anecdotal evidence. Illegal transshipment and customs fraud have also increased – another predictable result of high and complex US tariffs. The 2025–26 drop in China’s import share, meanwhile, is mainly owed to surging AI inputs from Mexico and Taiwan – goods that were never made in China to begin with.

Outside the US, China’s trade position has never been stronger. Its trade surplus in goods rose to a record $1.19 trillion last year and is on pace to meet or exceed that total in 2026, with substantial export gains in non-US markets and in advanced industries like electronic vehicles. China also remains the world’s top manufacturing nation and the largest producer and exporter of intermediate goods – both by large margins. Chinese firms have ramped up both sales to and outbound investment in third-country production hubs facing lower US tariffs. Overall, Chinese exporters responded to new trade barriers not by shrinking but simply going around them.

China’s state capitalist economic model is also unchanged and may have been further entrenched by the US’s confrontational approach. In 2021, Beijing responded to US tariffs with a five-year plan that doubled down on industrial policy and technological self-reliance. According to the US-China Business Council, Beijing’s latest (15th) plan “suggests that industrial policy is no longer just one policy area among many but rather an organizing logic for the whole economy.”

Today, policymakers in Europe and elsewhere worry aloud about a destabilizing wave of Chinese exports – a “China Shock 2.0” – fueled by massive Chinese subsidies. State-owned enterprises, meanwhile, continue to play a large role in China’s economy and trade. Per the Peterson Institute, companies with full or substantial government ownership still accounted for 60% of the combined market value of China’s top 100 listed firms. American farm export targets in the most recent US-China trade deal perversely depend on state-owned Sinograin and COFCO.

American policy has proven ineffective – if not counterproductive – in other ways, too. Following the shock of US tariffs and export restrictions during Trump’s first term, Beijing worked to reduce its vulnerability to economic pressure from Washington and to develop asymmetric countermeasures should US coercion reemerge. This deepened Beijing’s involvement in China’s economy, led Chinese companies to look inward for technology and innovation, and gave the CCP new leverage – most notably over the rare earth minerals that US firms depend on – in bilateral talks. The moves help to explain why the 2018 wave of US tariffs produced a “Phase One” deal that (superficially, at least) favored Washington, while Trump’s second-term escalation has produced a stalemate.

Today, the US-China détente has, along with other Trump tariffs on non-China goods, so narrowed the gap between tariffs on Chinese imports and those on China alternative nations that some supply chains are now moving back into China. German firms are boosting their China investments while cutting US outlays. India has engaged with China after years of tension. And polls find China is viewed more favorably than the US in numerous countries for the first time.

American export controls and sanctions have also proven leaky. Research firm Epoch AI estimated that by the end of 2025 hundreds of thousands of Nvidia’s advanced artificial intelligence chips had reached China in violation of US export controls. Washington has relented on advanced chip sales to China, but no one there is buying because US restrictions prodded Chinese chipmakers to build passable alternatives. American firms, the Brookings Institute concluded in June, are now “shut out of the high end of the world’s largest chip market.”

These US policy failures don’t mean that China is an unstoppable hegemon in waiting. Beijing has set its lowest growth target in decades. Chinese technology still lags behind in certain advanced manufacturing industries, including top-end semiconductors. And the Chinese economy faces long-term headwinds – pervasive capital misallocation, sub-frontier productivity, smothering debt, and a rapidly aging population – that no amount of exports can fix.

But that’s very much the point. The problems in China’s economy are owed to factors beyond Washington’s control, and US trade restrictions since 2018 have done little to alter China’s trajectory while imposing a significant cost on American companies and consumers.

After eight years of failed unilateralism, Trump officials still don’t seem to understand that Washington can’t fundamentally change how the Chinese government organizes its economy, and that it’s better to focus US government efforts on a narrow set of real Chinese threats, on deepening non-China alliances, and on fixing American economic competitiveness across a range of issue areas.

Dramatic changes to Chinese policy must come from Chinese officials. Washington unfortunately keeps giving them reasons not to change.

The total national debt hit $40 trillion, with $32 trillion held by the public. Federal outlays this fiscal year, which concludes on September 30, are expected to run $7.3 trillion, with a deficit of $1.9 trillion. Interest paid on the debt will total almost $1.3 trillion, running ahead of both the Pentagon and Medicare.

The Social Security Administration recently predicted that the retirement trust fund — a convenient accounting fiction — would run out of money in 2032. The following year, Medicare’s Hospital Insurance trust fund will run dry, while overall Medicare outlays are expected to exceed those of Social Security by 2036. The Iran war already has cost more than $100 billion. Earlier this year, the House approved $1.15 trillion for the Pentagon in 2027, but the president wants $1.5 trillion. With Uncle Sam adding $2 trillion in borrowing every year and interest rates accelerating, federal interest payments will rise even faster, likely exceeding $2 trillion annually by 2036, overtaking Medicare.

Congress has demonstrated its inability to budget responsibly. It last approved all appropriations before the next fiscal year in 1996. Since then Congress has relied on massive continuing resolutions, amid budget battles that inevitably degenerate into partisan rancor and government shutdowns.

Worse are the resulting compromises, consistently increasing outlays often twinned with reductions in revenues, leading to even larger deficits. Hence the inexorable rise in the ratio of publicly held debt to GDP — 101 percent this year, expected to hit 108 percent by 2030, breaking the previous record set in 1946, after the greatest war in human history.

Interest rates also have been rising. Ruchir Sharma, Chair of Rockefeller International, observed:

Alas, this is likely only the start. The Congressional Budget Office recently predicted that the debt/​GDP ratio will hit 175 percent by 2056. The Brookings Institution’s Jessica Riedl warned that legislators and presidents are unlikely to hold the line either on outlays or taxes, making a 243 percent figure far more likely. As the debt continues to spiral upward, so too will interest rates. She explained:

A fiscal and financial crisis is likely to arrive long before then, though, probably wrecking US finances and threatening a global economic cataclysm. While Washington has been constantly on call to bail out other governments, who could save the American system? Even Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent admitted that “the world is awash in debt.”

What to do? There is no painless answer to a problem that worsens daily, indeed, hourly. Americans could pay higher taxes. But everyone would have to do so. Taxing the “rich” wouldn’t be enough. The middle class is where the money is. Most Republicans refuse to contemplate upping old rates or adding new levies. Even Democrats are wary of squeezing average folks.

Which leaves massive spending cuts. Trimming, say, outlays for the national parks and economic grants wouldn’t be nearly enough. Roughly 85 percent of the budget goes to entitlements, health programs, interest, and military outlays. Retirees believe they have paid for their benefits (even as they receive back an average of twice what they paid in). Medical care for the poor and elderly is expensive. The only way to reduce interest outlays would be to repudiate the national debt. The famed military-industrial complex underwrites a politically powerful bipartisan coalition of ideologues committed to American primacy and domination, irrespective of cost.

Realistically, the only way to establish even a modicum of fiscal discipline is to address both revenue and outlays. Where to start? Although members of the vaunted “Blob” (as the policy establishment is known) urge policymakers to target entitlements, at least these outlays benefit Americans, including those who pay the most in taxes. As a result, these payments are politically popular. Anyone who barnstorms retirement communities across America urging that Social Security and Medicare be slashed to preserve US subsidies for Europe’s defense, allowing its residents to enjoy their more generous welfare systems, is unlikely to receive a warm reception.

Better to start with military welfare abroad. Of course, the “common defense” is specified in the Constitution and reflects Washington’s most basic responsibility. However, defense means defense, not trying to turn the rest of the world into America. In fact, the Pentagon’s globe-spanning military presence has little relation to US interests, let alone defense of America’s people, territory, prosperity, principles, and constitutional order. As George Washington famously warned, “nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded.”

Even if the Middle East once warranted a substantial US military presence, it is not a vital interest today. Nor is Europe. To paraphrase Poland’s premier, it makes no sense for 540 million Europeans to expect 340 million Americans to protect them from 140 million Russians. More than eight decades after the conclusion of World War II, European governments should forge a common defense and take over responsibility for their own security. But that won’t happen until Washington ends military welfare for Europe.

China poses more of an economic than a military challenge. Beijing is neither interested in nor capable of a continental invasion of the US homeland. China is interested in dominating its near neighbors, most notably Taiwan, which lies barely 100 miles from the mainland, as close as Cuba is to America. In response, Washington should aid its Asian friends, starting with Japan, in developing their own “anti-access/area denial” strategies.

What is most threatened is American economic strength. That would be best achieved by downsizing a bloated military currently deployed around the globe, and by forging cooperative investment and trade policies with friendly nations throughout Asia, Europe, and elsewhere.

There is no painless panacea to halt America’s slide toward fiscal oblivion. Tough decisions will be required all around. The starting target for retrenchment should be America’s expansive, even imperial foreign policy. Washington is foolishly play-acting as a globe-spanning empire. This is pushing the US toward insolvency, and more. Two centuries ago Secretary of State John Quincy Adams warned:

America should return to its roots as the peaceful republic that it was always intended to be.

In a new Cato Institute-Morning Consult survey of 4,150 registered voters, a startling 75 percent said tariffs will be important to their vote in the midterms this November, including 35 percent who said the issue is very important. Trade has been yanked from the political shadows, and those responsible won’t like what they see.

Among respondents, 74 percent said tariffs raised prices at the store. Fifty-three percent said tariffs weakened the U.S. economy, versus 33 percent who said they strengthened it. Forty-nine percent said tariffs made their own lives worse; just 23 percent said better. Only 21 percent accepted President Donald Trump’s position that foreigners primarily pay tariffs. Fifty-seven percent also viewed his handling of trade unfavorably.

Given the president’s affection for tariffs, Democrats unsurprisingly led the opposition, but independents — who often decide elections — weren’t far behind. Seventy-three percent of independents had an unfavorable view of Trump’s handling of trade policy, and opposition to broad tariffs tilted 47 percent to 28 percent. Fifty-two percent of independents said tariffs weakened the economy, and just 11 percent said the measures improved their quality of life — even lower than the 16 percent of Democrats who said the same. Sixty-four percent of independents said tariffs would be important to their midterm vote.

The current trade policy also lacks support from the working-class voters that Trump claims his tariffs champion. Across numerous questions, the views of both non-college-educated respondents and those whose households make less than $50,000 per year were within a few percentage points of the population overall. More than 70 percent of each group thought tariffs raised prices, while more than half thought the measures weakened the economy. Contrary to the White House’s narrative, the nation’s “forgotten” men and women are not demanding more tariffs.

Just as important are the survey’s questions on real-world trade-offs. When asked about using tariffs to boost American manufacturing and jobs, 45 percent of respondents favored taxing most imports. Yet this support fell as tariffs’ annual price tag rose: 38 percent were willing to pay $100 per household, and just 29 percent would pay $1,000. (The Yale Budget Lab puts the real bill at roughly $1,100 per household annually.)

These responses show that many voters willing to support tariffs in the abstract oppose them when asked to pay less than they’re actually paying today. Republicans are no exception: Their support dropped from 70 percent to just 39 percent when asked to pay $1,000 per year to fund their guy’s signature policy.

The Cato survey’s results are hardly outliers. In nearly every major poll over the past year, tariffs drew 55 to 65 percent opposition or disapproval. Even more respondents, 70 to 75 percent, believed that tariffs raised prices. State battleground polls showed similar findings. This month, CBS-YouGov found that likely voters preferred a congressional candidate who opposed the president’s tariff approach by a 26-point margin. And, per a September Fox News poll, GOP support for tariffs has declined 21 points since “Liberation Day” last year, with only “MAGA Republicans” still saying the measures help the economy.

Campaigns have noticed. In contested Senate races in Texas, Georgia and North Carolina, the Democratic candidates’ affordability pitch includes nixing Trump’s tariffs. Iowa’s Senate race is suddenly a toss-up, where populist Democrat Josh Turek promised to “end the chaotic tariffs that are sending farms toward a 1980s-style farm crisis.” Even Democrat Sherrod Brown, long the Senate’s most reliable protectionist, is now running against tariffs in Ohio. Wonders never cease.

Back in Washington, Senate Republicans such as Thom Tillis, John Cornyn and Susan Collins — echoed by many anonymous colleagues — have openly warned about the consequences of Trump’s tariffs. Prominent Senate Democrats Ron Wyden and Chuck Schumer — the latter of whom once co-sponsored a pro-tariff bill (repeatedly) — have each introduced “messaging” bills to repeal Trump’s tariffs and the laws authorizing them. Other Democrats have, too.

In their words and deeds, American politicians of both parties have confirmed what the polls show: Trump’s “populist” tariffs are historically unpopular.

Several lessons emerge. First, after winning on an affordability message in 2024, Trump’s early-term decision to repeatedly embrace a policy that, in both design and result, raises domestic prices was an epic political blunder. Voters now widely distrust Republicans’ handling of the economy. And defending tariffs by deriding inflation-weary Americans’ desire to have cheap and abundant goods added literal insult to injury.

Second, voters’ hostility toward tariffs today reflects an important policy reality: Things that might sound good in a theoretical vacuum are often rejected when their real and predictable trade-offs become apparent. It was easy for armchair populists to sell tariffs by blaming the modern, dynamic economy’s inevitable disruptions on a single cause — imports — and promising a magical, costless alternative implemented by enlightened technocrats. Today’s real-world tariffs are far more difficult to defend now that their drawbacks (higher prices, legal and economic uncertainty, diminished influence abroad, cronyism, and more) have once again been revealed. Even diffuse costs become visible when they’re regularly in the press and itemized on a receipt.

Finally, the public’s growing opposition to tariffs undermines the conventional wisdom in Washington that protectionism is widely popular and electorally necessary in the United States. American voters across partisan lines recoiling at the first whiff of trouble indicates that the 2016–2024 realignment was not the grassroots mandate for global tariffs it’s often made out to be.

None of this means protectionism is, in all cases, a permanent political loser. For the select few who benefit from them, tariffs’ concentrated rewards will still drown out even broad public opposition. Few Democrats have become full-throated globalists. Committed free traders acknowledge, moreover, that national security might warrant restrictions on defense-related goods made by U.S. adversaries. But research and experience consistently show why tariffs should remain a narrow exception, not a general rule, and American voters now overwhelmingly agree.

How long will it take the president — and a U.S. Congress that just gave him even more tariff authority — to catch up?

Some will be quick to argue that seeking health or medical advice from a chatbot is dangerous, but an increasing number of people turning to chatbots for health-related information could actually be a good thing for both patients and physicians.

Unfortunately, outdated policies could make it harder for patients to access this information. Even worse, some states are making it harder to use AI in certain health settings, such as mental health care. Lawmakers have considered imposing restrictions on AI, claiming it violates physician licensing requirements. Organized medicine is already urging lawmakers and regulators to require physician oversight of AI that performs clinical functions, using anachronistic licensing laws to preserve physicians’ role as gatekeepers even as AI becomes capable of performing more of those functions.

A better response would be for policymakers to examine how AI, like telemedicine before it, can expand access, and whether states should consider alternatives to the 19th- and 20th-century licensing framework that constrains these technological advances.

It is important to consider why Americans may be turning to AI for their health and medical questions. Cost and help in deciding when to seek treatment were among the top reasons individuals gave for consulting chatbots before medical professionals. Many Americans lack the time or resources to see a doctor for a minor ailment or injury, but they may still want general guidance on what to do and whether to see a clinician. In this way, AI is not replacing medical advice or doctors but helping fill an important gap by providing better, more personalized information.

AI has the potential to reduce the information asymmetry that has long characterized the doctor-patient relationship. This can empower patients to make more informed choices and exercise greater control over their healthcare. That is also why lawmakers should carefully consider the effect that policy proposals restricting the use of AI in medicine or other licensed applications could have on free speech. These restrictions can limit individuals’ access to information they could otherwise obtain from books or other sources while also restricting the expressive rights of AI developers by limiting the information they can use to build their systems.

AI has another potential advantage compared to human physicians: it doesn’t judge. Patients may feel more comfortable sharing sensitive or embarrassing matters with an AI they might hesitate to discuss with another person, and those details can sometimes be crucial to making the right diagnosis. Stigma can be a factor in why individuals, including physicians themselves, do not seek treatment for certain problems like mental health issues.

Of course, AI can make mistakes. So can doctors. Growing evidence suggests that, for some tasks, AI can already perform as well as or better than physicians. In a randomized clinical trial published in JAMA Network Open, GPT‑4 alone substantially outperformed physicians on diagnostic reasoning tasks.

We need serious conversations about data privacy and ensuring individuals make informed choices about their medical data. Some individuals may be comfortable with the risk, while others may want to provide more sensitive health information only in anonymized ways or through AI products with more limitations on data use. As we help consumers understand the privacy choices around their medical data when interacting with AI, we should remember that most people who use AI this way say they find it helpful.

As AI improves, it will likely perform more of the tasks requiring physicians and other health professionals, and at a fraction of the cost. That can increase the supply of healthcare services, give consumers more choices, intensify competition with human providers, and put downward pressure on prices.

ChatGPT is not your doctor, but AI chatbots can be an important tool for empowering patients, improving access to information, and even providing better medical care. This future is not guaranteed. Outdated policies, or those that focus only on risks, could prevent the typical American from realizing these benefits.

The second action was an executive order directing federal agencies to scrutinize H‑1B applications more closely, particularly from companies that have laid off employees. The executive order could lead to more Requests for Evidence, as companies saw during Donald Trump’s first term.

H‑1B temporary visas are often the only way for high-skilled foreign nationals to work in the United States long term. Employers must pay the higher of the actual or prevailing wage paid to U.S. professionals with similar experience and qualifications. Companies recruiting at U.S. universities find that international students make up about 75% to 80% of full-time graduate students in AI-related fields, such as computer and information sciences.

The Trump administration is proposing or implementing several policies to restrict employer access to foreign-born talent. These measures include:

• A Labor Department proposed rule to substantially increase the prevailing wage required for H‑1B visa holders and employment-based green card applicants.
• A DHS proposed rule to enact a $103,265 fee on new H‑1B professionals subject to the annual limit.
• An upcoming DHS rule to impose new restrictions on the H‑1B visa category.
• A proposed rule to eliminate the ability of many spouses of H‑1B visa holders to work in the United States.
• A proposed rule to end the 60-day grace period for H‑1B visa holders who lose jobs.
• A final rule to restrict international students and J‑1 visa holders to fixed four-year periods. A federal district judge recently postponed the final rule’s effective date.
• A rule on the regulatory agenda to impose a significant fee on Optional Practical Training for international students

Trump Extends $100,000 Immigration Fee On New H‑1B Visa Holders

The Trump administration has extended the $100,000 fee imposed on the entry of new H‑1B visa holders. “On September 19, 2025, Proclamation 10973 (Restriction on Entry of Certain Nonimmigrant Workers) (2025 Proclamation), was issued to address significant abuses of the H‑1B nonimmigrant visa program,” according to the proclamation. “The restrictions enacted by the 2025 Proclamation have proven to be highly effective but the underlying conditions necessitating the restrictions persist. It is therefore in the interests of the United States to extend the 2025 Proclamation for an additional 12 months, until 12:00 a.m. eastern daylight time on September 21, 2027.”

The proclamation states it was necessary to extend the $100,000 fee for an additional 12 months. “Although the 2025 Proclamation and subsequent rulemaking have had the desired effects, the underlying conditions precipitating their issuance persist and, without an extension of the 2025 Proclamation, it is highly likely that progress will halt and program abuse will resume, undermining American workers and posing a threat to the labor market that would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.”

In June, U.S. District Court Judge Leo T. Sorokin, in the District of Massachusetts, agreed with a coalition of 20 states, led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, and supported the plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment against the administration’s $100,000 fee imposed on the entry of new H‑1B visa holders. He declared, “The Policy implementing the Proclamation is declared unlawful and is vacated in its entirety.”

Judge Sorokin said the case raised significant constitutional separation-of-powers issues. “Plaintiffs allege both that the Policy exceeds the scope of the President’s authority under the Immigration and Nationality Act, and that it encroaches upon Congress’s exclusive power to tax under the Constitution,” he wrote. According to the judge, “The Supreme Court’s reasoning in this pair of precedents supports a finding that the $100,000 payment requirement amounts to a tax, not a penalty.” The two Supreme Court precedents are Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Company and National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius.

In July, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit rejected the Trump administration’s motion to stay Judge Sorokin’s decision. The Trump administration has appealed.

While the administration may have hoped to preserve its legal options by reissuing the proclamation, the document also contains elements that undermine its proposed rule imposing a new $103,265 fee on all H‑1B petitions subject to the annual cap.

First, the proclamation is newsworthy because it provides data showing the $100,000 fee acted as nearly a complete prohibition on foreign nationals who needed their employer to pay the fee to enter the United States. That contradicts the central premise of the proposed rule, that so many employers would be willing to pay a $103,265 fee that DHS would still approve 85,000 H‑1B petitions and raise $8.8 billion to fund various federal immigration functions.

“The 2025 Proclamation went into effect on September 21, 2025, and, since then, the $100,000 payment has been made for over 700 petitions,” according to the new proclamation. (Emphasis added.) The revelation means DHS will have to explain how the administration can claim at least 85,000 individuals will still gain H‑1B status each year by paying a $103,265 fee when employers were unwilling to pay an almost identical amount for only about 700 such professionals. DHS did not mention in its Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for the $103,265 fee that only about 700 payments of the $100,000 fee were made over the past year.

The $100,000 fee imposed in September 2025 applied to new H‑1B petitions filed outside the country because the presidential proclamation used authority that blocks entry. The proposed rule applies to all H‑1B petitions subject to the annual cap.

The proclamation creates another problem for DHS’s proposed rule. DHS justifies the rule based on one specific reason: “The new fee is designed … to recover a portion of the full costs of providing immigration adjudication and naturalization services incurred by multiple Federal agencies.” However, the new proclamation, levying an almost identical fee, states plainly that the administration imposed the original $100,000 and its extension not to raise revenue, but to restrict immigration and access to the H‑1B category.

“Since the effective date of the 2025 Proclamation and subsequent promulgation of the DHS final rule, there have been several measurable impacts on the H‑1B program, including a significant reduction in H‑1B registrations filed by large IT outsourcing firms,” according to the proclamation. “There has also been a large reduction in consular processing requests, which are used to bring workers into the United States, noting a nearly 97% decrease from the FY 2025 to FY 2027 cap seasons.”

Administration attorneys will likely have to explain to a judge why a measure designed to discourage employers from hiring H‑1B visa holders is now alleged to being used to raise revenue when put into the form of an agency rule. The news that only 700 or so individuals entered the United States after their employer was willing to pay $100,000 will further undermine the credibility of the DHS assertion that the $103,265 fee will not significantly deter H‑1B hiring by employers and, thereby, allow it to raise $8.8 billion.

The proclamation did not mention that any employer over the past year received a waiver from paying the $100,000 fee because an individual’s entry was in the national interest.

Executive Order Directs Immigration Authorities To Increase Scrutiny Of H‑1B Applications

On Sept. 18, the White House released an executive order on “Enhancing Program Integrity and Interagency Coordination in the Administration of the H‑1B Nonimmigrant Visa Program.” The order asks the State Department, Labor Department and Department of Homeland Security further to scrutinize H‑1B petitions for initial and continuing employment.

Immigrant attorney Cyrus Mehta said in an interview that the order’s language suggests administration officials intend DOL and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services scrutiny to extend beyond visa issuance abroad and encompass the adjudication of H‑1B petitions, including extensions. Mehta notes that the executive order delegates authority under INA § 215(a), but § 215(a) is fundamentally an entry-control provision.

“That delegation arguably supports restrictions tied to visa issuance and admission rather than USCIS adjudications of extension petitions filed by individuals already in the United States,” he said. “That could become a basis for challenge if DHS attempts to apply the order aggressively to extensions.”

“When processing petitions, labor condition applications, and visas for the entry into the United States of aliens as nonimmigrants to perform services in a specialty occupation under section 101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Labor, and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall coordinate and consult with the Secretary of Commerce, the Secretary of Education, and the Administrator of the Small Business Administration to ensure the compliance of such petitions, applications, and visas with statutory requirements, including those in sections 101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b), 212(n), 214(i), and 274B of the INA,” according to the executive order. The Commerce Department, Education Department and SBA “shall provide any relevant wage, employment, academic, industrial, or other economic information.”

The executive order states, “The Secretary of State, the Secretary of Labor, and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall take into account in any labor condition application, petition, visa, and entry of aliens entering or attempting to enter the United States as H‑1B nonimmigrants to perform services in a specialty occupation whether the employer sponsor directly or indirectly engaged in layoffs within the previous year or plans future layoffs that negatively affect the employment of similarly situated United States workers.”

According to the executive order, “Within 30 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Labor, through the Administrator of the Wage and Hour Division, shall begin reviewing data related to previously submitted labor condition applications to determine whether further action against sponsoring employers is warranted under section 212(n)(2)(G).”

“The executive order cannot rewrite the statutory framework. Section 212(n) only imposes recruitment and layoff attestations on H‑1B dependent employers and willful violators,” said Mehta. “Congress specifically chose not to subject all H‑1B employers to those obligations. Therefore, even though Section 3(a) of the executive order directs agencies to consider layoffs by sponsoring employers and Section 3(b) instructs DOL to review LCAs and consider further action, it is difficult to see how the government can take enforcement action against a non-dependent employer merely because it laid off U.S. workers unless there is some independent statutory violation.” H‑1B-dependent employers are companies with 15% or more of their U.S. workforce in H‑1B status.

Mehta believes the executive order may signal heightened scrutiny of layoffs in adjudications and investigations, but questions whether it can legally create new substantive requirements that Congress did not enact. “Any effort to deny petitions or impose sanctions solely because a non-dependent employer conducted layoffs would likely be in violation of the statute,” he said.

The executive order may signal a return to the immigration policies of Donald Trump’s first term, which resulted in high denial rates and many Requests for Evidence. Mehta said, “If USCIS starts treating recent layoffs as evidence that U.S. workers are available, we could see a significant increase in Requests for Evidence and denials despite the lack of an express statutory basis for such inquiries.”

These concerns are understandable. But they should be addressed by expanding legalization, not abandoning it. Millions of people want to use marijuana, and prohibition does not eliminate that demand. Instead, it mainly shifts production and distribution underground, where no one tests for contaminants or resolves disputes without violence.

Massachusetts’ legal market was supposed to displace that underground trade. Instead, the legal market competes with the underground component on unfavorable terms. This is not surprising.

A legal purchase carries a combined tax of roughly 20% based on state excise, sales, and local option taxes. More than a third of the state’s cities and towns ban retail dispensaries, pushing consumers toward unlicensed sellers or neighboring towns, and licensed operators face a broad range of costly regulations.

When governments make the legal product more expensive, some consumers stick with the more convenient but illegal product. Thus excessive regulation is just back door prohibition.

Another reason state legalization works imperfectly is that marijuana remains illegal under federal law. Because it is still a Schedule I substance for recreational purposes, cannabis businesses face restrictions ordinary companies do not.

Section 280E of the federal tax code bars marijuana companies from deducting ordinary business expenses; an April 2026 rule change began easing that, but only for state-licensed medical operators. On top of that, cannabis cannot legally cross state lines, so every state market operates as an island. Most banks still refuse to serve the industry, forcing many dispensaries to operate in cash. Federal prohibition keeps costs artificially high, even in states that have legalized.

Some argue that marijuana is detrimental because of health risks, but alcohol and tobacco are equally, if not more, dangerous. In those cases, however, society regulates without deliberately sabotaging the legal market. The same logic should apply to cannabis.

Proponents of prohibition argue, for example, that capping potency is safer because it lowers real-world doses, but that isn’t necessarily true. For example, hard seltzer and beer sales made up almost 80% of all the alcoholic liquids purchased by Americans in 2023. By contrast, alcohol prohibition pushed drinkers toward stronger spirits, which were easier to conceal and transport. Banning legal marijuana risks a similar shift toward unregulated, untested products.

It’s also worth asking what legalization does to other substances, and whether more adult use is even a problem. Evidence on substitution is mixed: one study tied U.S. legalization to a small increase in drinking among younger adults, but another reports a substantial decrease in traffic fatalities. If legalization lets more adults choose a product whose risks mainly fall on the user, not the public, that is policy working as intended.

None of this means marijuana must go entirely unregulated. Basic safeguards like minimum ages, bans on impaired driving, and accurate labeling requirements are unlikely to incentivize an underground trade. The government can regulate for safety without using regulation as a disguised prohibition.

The past decade’s real lesson is that legalization has largely worked. Teen marijuana use has kept falling for more than a decade, even as more states legalized for adults: high schoolers’ past-month use has dropped by double digits since 2012. Reported adult use has risen, though part of that may reflect reduced stigma rather than more real consumption, since fewer people now hide legal behavior from surveys. Meanwhile, the state has collected nearly $2 billion in cannabis tax revenue.

The right response to an imperfect legal market is less oppressive state regulation, ideally combined with federal legalization. Massachusetts should complete the experiment it started in 2016, not reverse it.

Reports suggest that Cedartown officers were assisting Polk County Police with locating a missing person. The officers had entered his owner’s property without “permission or warning.” When the baby donkey approached them in the dark, braying — as donkeys tend to do — an officer opened fire.

HeeHaw’s owner, Hannah Israel, has vowed legal action. While such a high-profile case may induce the city to settle, absent a settlement offer, the doctrine of qualified immunity largely puts justice out of reach. But it wasn’t supposed to be this way.\

In 1982, contrary to congressional command, the Supreme Court inserted the words “clearly established” into the text of Section 1983 in the Civil Rights Act of 1871. The result is that today, state and local law enforcement officers are immune from civil liability unless the plaintiff can identify precedent with nearly identical facts at a high level of specificity sufficient to put officers on notice that their precise conduct is unconstitutional.

Accordingly, officers who devise novel ways to violate our constitutional rights are rewarded with immunity. Allowing that doctrine to persist is a deliberate policy choice, but it’s one Congress can easily address. What happens when elected representatives refuse to step up to the plate?

How Another Georgia Case Led to This Injustice
Back in 2014 on the other side of the state, Coffee County Sheriff’s Deputy Michael Vickers was pursuing a suspect who had wandered into Amy Corbitt’s backyard. When the family dog, Bruce, appeared, Deputy Vickers fired at him without provocation or threat.

His first shot missed, and Bruce retreated under the house. Ten seconds later, Bruce reappeared near his owners, and Vickers fired again — missing the dog, but striking Corbitt’s 10-year-old child lying on the ground just 18 inches away. The bullet tore through the child’s knee, causing severe trauma requiring ongoing orthopedic care.

Corbitt sued Vickers under a federal statute commonly known as Section 1983, which states that any state actor who violates constitutional rights “shall be liable to the party injured.”

The district court properly denied Vickers’ qualified immunity, emphasizing that there was no conceivable safety threat justifying lethal force against the family dog — precisely the scenario with Heehaw.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit reversed, however, and granted Vickers qualified immunity because the circuit had no precedent indicating that shooting an unthreatening dog but missing and hitting a child violates the Fourth Amendment.

Worse, courts are no longer even required to determine whether the officer’s conduct was unconstitutional if no identical precedent exists. Declining even to decide the constitutional question as the Eleventh Circuit did in Corbitt v. Vickers ensures that the law will not be “clearly established” going forward either.

No Precedent for Police Shooting a Braying Donkey
This situation is not unique to Georgia or the Eleventh Circuit. In 2013, Fresno, California police officers stole $225,000 worth of cash and rare gold coins.

Such blatant abuse of authority would seem to be one of the most obvious examples of the sort of “unreasonable searches and seizures” prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.

Yet the Ninth Circuit granted the officers qualified immunity, noting that while “the theft [of] personal property by police officers sworn to uphold the law” may be “morally wrong,” the officers could not be liable because the Ninth Circuit had never issued a decision specifically involving the question of “whether the theft of property covered by the terms of a search warrant, and seized pursuant to that warrant, violates the Fourth Amendment.”

Given the unique circumstance surrounding HeeHaw’s killing, it’s highly likely that no prior case involving substantially similar facts exists. Unless the Eleventh Circuit has precedent on the books specifically establishing that shooting a braying donkey in an open pasture while searching for a missing person after midnight is unlawful, the officer who killed Heehaw will benefit from qualified immunity, putting justice out of reach for Hannah Israel.

If qualified immunity means that an officer can escape liability simply because no court has previously considered the precise circumstances in which he violated someone’s rights, then that doctrine will be a license to violate the Constitution indefinitely. Hannah Israel should not need to point to a judicial precedent involving the police killing a donkey in a dark pasture to vindicate her rights.

Recently, President Donald Trump also amplified this narrative during an appearance on The Glenn Beck Program, saying he would “absolutely prohibit the Sharia Law thing,” and adding: “Where we see it, we take it out.”

But is there really such a threat to liberty in America? Or might this fear itself, and its likely consequences, pose a greater threat to liberty?

First, one should grant that the fear of Sharia is not entirely groundless. This ancient legal tradition, in its classical interpretations, includes many prescriptions that threaten modern liberties: Apostasy and blasphemy laws, for example, target people who leave Islam or speak out against it. A hierarchical system of rights favors men over women, and Muslims over non-Muslims. Terrible things like child marriage or stoning can be, and have been, justified through it.

Moreover, in certain countries—such as Afghanistan, Iran, or northern Nigeria—Islamist movements have made these archaic rulings the law of the land, with grave consequences for women, minorities, and dissidents. That is why Muslim reformists, including myself, argue that a reform of Sharia, to bring it into line with modern human rights, is long overdue.

Yet for the vast majority of the world’s nearly 2 billion Muslims—who are not Islamists with authoritarian ambitions, but ordinary believers concerned with their own salvation—Sharia is about much more modest things: how they pray, dress, or eat; how they raise their kids and honor their parents; how they trade honestly, avoid usury, or marry and divorce. None of this, so long as it is followed voluntarily, threatens freedom. Its very practice, in fact, is an exercise of freedom.

That is why calls to “ban Sharia” often end up in a dialogue of the deaf. Advocates of such bans probably mean to target corporal punishments and enforced burqas, which, of course, should not be permitted. But Muslims worry that their mosques, halal kitchens, or voluntarily worn headscarves will be swept up as well.

Which is what seems to be happening in Texas, as Asma Uddin, an American scholar of law who has long defended religious freedom for all, has recently warned: “Elected officials across Texas are increasingly treating ordinary Muslim religious practice – prayer, dress, marriage counseling, even mosques themselves – as evidence of a political threat and saying so openly.”

The good news is that the United States already has a brilliant solution to this tension. It is called the First Amendment, which protects the free exercise of religion, so long as it is not imposed on anyone. So, Islam, too, should be freely practiced, as long as it is not imposed on anyone.

The bad news, however, is that there are voices on the American right today who explicitly argue that while their own religion is, of course, protected by the First Amendment, Islam is not—because, they say, it is not merely a religion but a “political system” that will always seek to subvert, conquer, and subjugate everything else.

Against this argument, one needs a sense of history: The exact same case was once made by American and European Protestants against other religious groups. Catholics were long suspected of being subversive “Papists” with theocratic ambitions. In the United States, this suspicion gave rise to a whole political movement, the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s, whose platform was built substantially around barring Catholics from public office. Its members saw new Irish immigrants as a force of “foreign invasion,” as they believed the “new Catholic immigrants would help subjugate America under the authority of the Pope.”

Earlier, in 18^th century Europe, Jews were accused of following a strangely legalistic religion—with a religious law, Halakha, resembling Sharia—that could never fit into the modern liberal West. Even the Enlightenment’s towering figure, Immanuel Kant, made this argument against Judaism. In his view, Christianity was the perfect religion to match Enlightenment values, thanks to its “idealized, spiritualized ethical teachings based on pure love.” Judaism, by contrast, failed to produce ethical human beings because it demanded “only external obedience to statutes and laws.” The core problem, Kant argued, was that Judaism had been “originally established … [as] a collection of merely statutory laws supporting a political state.” Kant went so far as to call it a “political organization which is only masquerading as religion.”

However, despite these essentialist suspicions toward Catholicism and Judaism, both Catholics and Jews adapted to Western liberalism, which in turn inspired reformist trends within their own traditions—such as the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, and the liberalizing direction the Catholic Church took at the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.

Today, there are the beginnings of similar liberal currents within Western—especially American—Islam. Some firebrands in this community may capture the attention of Islamoskeptics, but larger trends point to growing integration if not assimilation. A recent poll found that most American Muslims embrace their national identity: 95 percent say they’re proud to be American, 85 percent believe in the American dream, 76 percent call the U.S. one of the greatest countries in the world, and 67 percent say Muslims enjoy more freedom here than anywhere else.

No wonder average American Muslims receive sweeping criticism from Islamists and conservatives who think they’ve gone way too liberal. “Almost every American Muslim I interact with, including some Imams and shuyukh [elders], have subconsciously adapted the American worldview and allowed it to affect their understanding of Islam,” a South African Islamic scholar recently complained on X. He then noted what this “American worldview” entails: “feminism, hyperindividualism, hustle culture.” “American Islam killed the masjid [mosque] as a sacred space,” another conservative lamented. “It’s now a relic of the past … a ‘bus stop’ for World Cup watch parties, cafe, basketball tournament and matchmaking space for the bourgeois.”

While some concerns about spirituality may be valid, such conservative complaints about “American Islam” only point to something good: In the United States, the land of freedom, Muslims are discovering how to be Muslims as they personally think, feel, and believe, while also adapting to modern life and broader secular society. It is a promising experiment that should be welcomed not only by those who want to keep America free, but also by those, like myself, who hope to advance freedom in modern-day Islam.

Meanwhile, even the Islamosceptics should at least consider that crushing this experiment with a sweeping anti-Islam campaign would only help the radical Islamists they fear most, who have long portrayed the United States as a hypocritical empire whose professed values are nothing but a façade. (The same is true for Europe, as The Economist rightly warns: “The European populist right’s promises of mass deportation, segregation and dress bans all terrify Muslims, inhibiting integration and driving them into the arms of extremists.”)

Finally, on whether the broader American experiment should include Islam, probably no one should be more authoritative than America’s Founding Fathers—some of whom explicitly said, “yes.” One was Thomas Jefferson, who envisioned religious freedom for “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.” Another was Benjamin Franklin, who wrote: “Even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service.”

So let us cherish that noble vision today. This means, of course, that there should be no enforcement of “Sharia law” in America, and we should oppose anyone who seeks it, if they are really out there. But it also means ensuring that America’s liberty and justice is truly for all—for the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Muslim, and for people of every other persuasion.

“For the foregoing reasons, plaintiffs’ motion for APA § 705 relief, a preliminary injunction, or, in the alternative, summary judgment, is GRANTED to the extent that it seeks to postpone the effective date of the Final Rule pursuant to the Administrative Procedure Act,” according to a memorandum and order on a motion for preliminary injunction by U.S. District Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV. “To the extent that plaintiffs seek vacatur of the Final Rule, summary judgment, or other relief, the motion is DENIED without prejudice to its renewal.”

University groups and attorneys were pleased with the decision in Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education, et al., v. DHS. “The judge has blocked the rule from taking effect,” said Dan Berger of Green & Spiegel in an interview. “Not just for members of the plaintiff organizations, but for everyone. This means the judge believes that the government is likely to lose eventually in court, and so the rule should not be allowed to apply while the court case is pending.”

Berger said the ruling is a “great step for students and scholars,” arguing “it keeps decisions about programs with the academic advisers where they belong.” He pointed to aspects of the DHS rule that gained less attention but were of significant concern to educators. The rule prevented international students from obtaining a second degree at the same or lower level. In their complaint, plaintiffs also raised the restrictions the rule placed on changing majors or moving to another school.

“It is possible the government will appeal, but in my opinion the judge did an excellent job issuing a detailed, well-written opinion, so it will be as strong as possible on appeal,” said Berger.

Under the scope of relief, the judge noted that plaintiffs asked that the rule be vacated (nullified legally). “Under the circumstances, while vacatur (under § 706) may ultimately prove to be appropriate, the Court will take the more cautious approach of postponing the effective date of the Final Rule,” wrote Judge Saylor.

He noted that the plaintiffs represented almost 600 educational institutions, but he hesitated to grant relief only to those schools, given that there are more than 5,000 U.S. colleges and universities. He thought it could lead to “maintaining parallel regulatory regimes,” complicated by issues such as students transferring or pursuing joint degrees. “In this case, nationwide relief … prevents chaos and confusion that a party-specific order would inevitably generate. The Court will therefore grant the motion for a preliminary injunction to the extent it seeks to postpone the effective date of the Final Rule.”

The decision represents a significant victory for university organizations and international students. The plaintiffs in the case are the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration; NAFSA: Association of International Educators; Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts; American Federation of Teachers; Graduate Labor Organization, AFT Local 6516; The NewsGuild-CWA; International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America; and United Auto Workers Local 2322. Dana McSherry and Paul Hughes of McDermott Will & Emery are counsel for the plaintiffs. The case was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts.

“The court’s nationwide preliminary relief is an important step toward preserving a fair and predictable system for international students and scholars and the institutions that welcome them,” said Fanta Aw, executive director and CEO of NAFSA: Association of International Educators, in a statement. “At a time when countries around the world are competing for talent, the United States should be strengthening our ability to attract the best and brightest, not creating new barriers to it.”

“Today’s decision recognizes the serious and irreparable harm this rule would cause to international students and scholars, higher education institutions, and communities across the country, as well as to the U.S. economy, research and innovation,” said Miriam Feldblum, president and CEO of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, in a statement. “We greatly appreciate the court’s clear and careful consideration. While the case continues, this relief preserves the longstanding system that enables our colleges and universities—and our country—to attract, educate, and retain global talent.”

The rule is part of the Trump administration’s efforts to restrict all categories of legal immigration and certain temporary visa categories. Economists and educators said the administration’s final rule would reduce international student enrollment, weaken American universities’ finances and deprive companies of talent. At U.S. universities, international students account for 80% of full-time graduate students in computer and information sciences, 75% in electrical and computer engineering, 62% in mathematics and statistics and a majority in industrial engineering, civil engineering and mechanical engineering. An upcoming administration rule may impose a prohibitive tax or fee on the ability of international students to work after graduation on Optional Practical Training.

A Judge Issues A Decision Against The DHS Immigration Rule

Judge Saylor began his 48-page memorandum and order by outlining the significant role international students play at universities and in the U.S. economy. “’More than half of all international students major in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, or mathematics). According to a source cited in the complaint, ‘[i]nternational student alumni have … founded one quarter (143 of 582, or 25%) of all the billion-dollar start-ups in the U.S.’ Immigrants to the United States who attended American universities have been named as inventors on a disproportionate number of patents and have been awarded a disproportionate number of Nobel Prizes.” (I authored the National Foundation for American Policy billion-dollar startups study.)

The judge detailed the rule’s provisions and public comments addressing the rule. “Despite the massive anticipated impact of the rule, DHS provided an exceptionally short, and barely legal, 32-day period for public comments.” Still, approximately 22,000 commenters responded, mostly in “strong opposition.” He wrote, “Among other things, commenters pointed out serious flaws in DHS’s reasoning and offered multiple alternatives that would achieve the stated objectives with far less harmful effects on students, universities, journalists and the American economy.”

According to Judge Saylor, “DHS summarily rejected those views, dismissing their concerns as merely ‘speculative,’ based on mere ‘predictions,’ or ‘unquantifiable.’ In fact, because it asserted that the impact on enrollment was unquantifiable, it effectively concluded that the cost of that impact was zero. And in support of its own position, it offered almost entirely conclusory statements, non sequiturs, and statements of ‘belief’ without supporting reasoning.” The judge added, “To the extent DHS engaged at all on the substantive issues, its responses were largely disconnected from academic or practical realities.”

“The government’s contention that the rule is necessary to safeguard national security borders on the absurd,” wrote Judge Saylor. “It is based almost entirely on a small handful of anecdotes, each of which involved incidents that the new rule would do nothing to prevent or even mitigate.”

The plaintiffs’ complaint argued, “Commenters also pointed out that DHS’s anecdotal examples were illogical. For instance, with respect to national security, the National Foundation for American Policy contended that ‘DHS’s argument is not credible’ as ‘[i]f individuals represent national security concerns, hoping that they apply for an extension after four years so that an immigration officer can review their application is a woeful or even absurd security measure.”

Judge Saylor wrote, “For example, in its brief, the government points to five such instances involving eleven individuals (out of tens of millions of individuals admitted under a program in effect for more than four decades). Three of those (involving nine individuals) involved Chinese students attempting to photograph military installations or exercises. The other two involved an individual who overstayed his visa and a Russian intelligence operative who entered the U.S. with an F‑1 visa obtained with a fraudulent Brazilian identity.

“But the government makes no real effort to explain how the four-year cap would eliminate, or even reduce, those types of such activities. Presumably, a foreign student who wishes to photograph military bases could do so during a four-year period—or, indeed, could do so on a six-month B‑1 tourist visa. The Russian agent who obtained a visa by fraud, for example, had been present in the U.S. for only two years. And the government failed to consider less drastic and more obvious ways to address security vulnerabilities, or even attempt to explain why the arbitrary four-year cap was preferable to the alternatives.”

The judge said DHS invoked national security in an attempt to “insulate its actions from judicial review to the greatest extent possible.”

The Judge Finds At Least Four Ways The Immigration Rule Is Arbitrary And Capricious

Judge Saylor wrote that he does not have the power to block a federal rule because it might be misguided, only if it violates a law. “In this context, at least, the only authority that the Court possesses is to ensure that when the government promulgates a new regulation, it adheres to the law. In this case, the relevant law is the Administrative Procedure Act. That statute permits courts to set aside agency actions that are arbitrary, capricious, or contrary to law.”

The judge found the DHS final rule is “arbitrary and capricious” in at least four ways. First, “DHS failed to conduct any reasoned calculation of the costs and benefits of the Final Rule. In particular, DHS effectively ignored the immense costs of restricting international student enrollment, research and teaching by international individuals, and press nonimmigrant travel.”

The judge noted that although DHS included one bullet acknowledging the “potential reduction in the enrollment of nonimmigrant students and exchange visitors … DHS made no real effort to quantify those costs.” He wrote, “To justify its decision not to quantify decreased enrollment costs, DHS relied on conclusory statements and unsupported expressions of belief.”

He explained that many commenters cited a study on the rule’s negative impact on enrollment by economist Michael Clemens, Amy Nice and Jeremy Neufeld, published by the Institute for Progress, which the complaint noted estimated the economic costs of eliminating duration of status would reach $72 to $145 billion annually after 10 years, far higher than the costs DHS quantified in the rule. “Yet in response, DHS stated only that it disagreed with Clemens’s 10% assumption because the study relied on survey results which ‘often reflect hypothetical preferences rather than actual behavior,’ and that it ‘remain[ed] uncertain as to how many students will choose not to enroll due to this rule.’ And the agency provided no counter-estimate, let alone any methodology, of what it deemed to be the cost of declining enrollment.”

According to Judge Saylor, the second way the rule is arbitrary and capricious, “DHS failed entirely to perform a meaningful consideration of reasonable alternatives,” the judge wrote, pointing out precedents that require a federal agency to consider significant alternatives. DHS ignored alternatives that included improvements to existing tools such as the SEVIS system that tracks international students. DHS also did not explain why commenters’ suggestions to improve vetting and monitoring to address national security concerns did not represent viable alternatives. The judge noted that DHS also did not address why it believed commenters were wrong to ask that if fixed terms were necessary, they could not align with academic reality. For example, the median years to complete a Ph.D. is 5.7 years, not four years.

Third, “DHS failed to provide meaningful responses to significant comments,” according to Judge Saylor. He wrote that DHS did not respond to comments about the rule reducing international student enrollment and how it would disadvantage U.S. universities competitively. The judge also noted that DHS failed to respond to suggestions of less burdensome alternatives, comments that the rule is incompatible with Ph.D. programs, the reliance interests of students and journalists and the undermining of press freedoms. “DHS failed to consider the concerns of commenters that regular extension of status applications would swamp USCIS with hundreds of thousands of additional applications annually.”

Finally, “DHS failed to show that there is a rational connection between the Final Rule and its purported objectives of preventing fraud and furthering national security,” according to Judge Saylor. He stated that DHS cited only a series of anecdotes and did not respond to commenters who suggested: “a hostile actor could plan and execute his illegal activities within a four-year window.”

He noted DHS asserted the rule would curtail visa overstays. “But again, there is no rational basis for that assertion.” He referenced comments to the rule citing a National Foundation for American Policy study that found, “DHS’s overstay data may be ‘inflated’ and contain ‘significant flaws’ due to syncing errors, capturing data from students who are properly maintaining status, or counting students whose departure may have occurred but has not been verified.” The judge added, “In any case, those who overstay unlawfully under the duration-of-status rule could also overstay unlawfully under the fixed-period approach. Indeed, eliminating duration of status may well increase the risk of unintentional overstays because it shortens the departure period from 60 to 30 days.”

In the end, the judge ruled that the immigration rule likely violated the law. “For all of those reasons, plaintiffs have demonstrated a substantial likelihood of success on their claims that the agency action (the adoption of the Final Rule) was arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act.”

Through social media and events like the Oslo Freedom Forum, I’ve learned that professors use the CBDC Tracker to help their students understand what is happening in the world. Government officials have discovered what their own central banks were doing through the CBDC Tracker. And it has been a way for people to make sense of the risks of CBDCs.

I’ve also learned where the CBDC Tracker can be improved. Today, those improvements are here.

Keeping Count

Time and again, people have said they want a better sense of how many jurisdictions are pursuing CBDCs. Therefore, the legend next to the globe now includes counts for each designation, making it easier to see where the world is heading.

The counts should be referenced carefully. CBDC development is not limited to countries. There are also currency unions, territories, and special autonomous regions to consider. That’s why you will often see me referring to “jurisdictions.” For example, the CBDC Tracker currently features data on 150 jurisdictions, spanning from Albania to Zimbabwe.

Tracking Tyranny

Another thing people have wanted is a better sense of what these jurisdictions are like. This year, HRF launched the Tyranny Tracker, making integration with the CBDC Tracker a natural next step. When you look at the data snapshots for each jurisdiction, you will immediately see whether a jurisdiction is democratic, hybrid authoritarian, or fully authoritarian.

And if you look at the two trackers side by side, you’ll quickly notice that authoritarians are at the forefront of CBDC adoption worldwide. Recent history shows that authoritarians are increasingly looking to the financial system as a means to target advocates, activists, pro-democracy organizations, journalists, and other opponents. Unfortunately, it seems they recognize that CBDCs are a new tool at their disposal.

New Terminology

The CBDC Tracker is radically different from other resources, but one choice has often been a source of confusion for the general public: pilot designations. Today, we are addressing that. The problem is that many jurisdictions describe their CBDC as a “pilot,” yet they have thousands, or even tens of thousands, of users. If real people are making real transactions in their real lives, then the CBDC Tracker labels these jurisdictions as being in the “launched” phase. We don’t go by government claims; we go by real experience.

To help clarify the designations, we have renamed “pilots” as “experiments” in the CBDC Tracker. This new designation better reflects that a proper pilot is defined as a limited and closed test within an experimental environment.

Updates Going Forward

Finally, to make it easier to stay up to date, the CBDC Tracker now has a blog. Expect updates, explainers, interviews, and much more. Posts will roll out slowly, since updates to the map will always take priority, but the blog will help elevate the stories that are shaping the world.

If you have questions or concerns that you’d like us to address on the blog, don’t hesitate to reach out.

Final Thoughts

The CBDC Tracker has everything you need to get up to speed on CBDCs. And now, we’ve made it more accessible than ever to track the governments that are trying to track you. However, please let us know if you see room for improvement. The only way we stop the rise of CBDCs is if we do it together.