This week, Congress moved closer to passing four separate bills with $95 billion in funding for Ukraine, Israel, Indo-Pacific allies, and the domestic submarine industrial base. This funding has been debated for months, with much of it intended for wars that have been going on—and likely will continue—for a while. In other words, it’s not […]
More than 30 million Americans have signed employment contracts that limit their ability to switch jobs to a competing company, and those contracts are regulated by laws in 47 states. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) swept all of that aside in one fell swoop this week, as the commission voted down party lines to ban […]
How at risk must a pregnant woman be before she’s allowed to get an abortion? That’s the issue underlying a case before the U.S. Supreme Court today, though the central question before the court is whether a 1986 federal law called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) preempts state abortion bans like one […]
Data privacy talk in Congress seems kind of ironic coming just a week after lawmakers rejected a proposal to make federal authorities get a warrant to search Americans’ electronic communications. But in keeping with that move, the American Privacy Rights Act—a draft data privacy bill that will be getting a hearing in the House Innovation, […]
It’s a given at this point that much pandemic-related fiscal stimulus was lost to fraud. The government flooded the world with money, we were told, to offset the disruption of economies paralyzed by people minimizing social contact and (especially) by mandated closures. Sure, that was a crude “solution” to an avoidable problem. But government officials […]
This year’s Free Application for Federal Aid (FAFSA) form—which is required for students seeking federal loans and grants, as well as institutional financial aid at most colleges—has been riddled with catastrophic technical bugs. How did the situation get so bad? It starts with an attempt to simplify the form—in part, by importing families’ financial information […]
Is it a crime to take the Lord’s name in vain on TV? Someone in Davidson, North Carolina, seems to think so, judging from a list of citizen complaints about Saturday Night Live submitted to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from January 2023 to February 2024. “Someone on Saturday night live said God’s name in […]
As just about every American adult knows and is dreading, Monday, April 15, is Tax Day. Each year, taxpayers scrounge together each income statement the government requires and any random receipt that may result in a modest deduction in the amount they’re expected to pay. The IRS wants taxpayers to know that if you made […]
A measure requiring federal agents to get a warrant before searching American communications collected as part of foreign intelligence failed to pass the House of Representatives today. The measure received 212 votes for and 212 votes against. “This is a sad day for America,” said Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.). “The Speaker doesn’t always vote in […]
Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle recently wrote that the best argument made in favor of limiting the size of the stimulus during the Great Recession—part of a larger conversation about austerity—was one of ethos. “We weren’t spending the money in theory,” she wrote, “or in 1945, when an ethos of fiscal responsibility prevailed. We were […]