Susan Dudley, writing in the Wall Street Journal, urges that DOGE be about more than nothing. Two slices:
Messrs. Musk and Ramaswamy say they’ll rely on the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024), which overturned an earlier ruling that required courts to defer to agencies’ interpretations of ambiguous statutes. That may work in some cases, but Loper Bright cuts both ways. It also means courts won’t automatically defer to the Trump administration’s interpretation of ambiguous statutes as it deregulates.
Messrs. Musk and Ramaswamy wrote in the Journal that they will “focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws.” But anything passed by executive action can be reversed just as easily. The two should work with Congress to achieve more-lasting reforms. One immediate opportunity will be using the Congressional Review Act to rescind regulations issued during the final months of the Biden administration, which requires only a simple majority in both chambers and the president’s signature.
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Messrs. Musk’s and Ramaswamy’s entrepreneurial experience will bring fresh ideas to government, but they must recognize that the regulatory state is bound by procedures designed to ensure transparency and accountability. They can’t yada yada yada over the important parts. They must do their homework and work with Congress to ensure that DOGE’s reforms stick.
Also writing about DOGE is my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy.
And for even more worthwhile commentary on DOGE, here’s the great Bruce Yandle. Three slices:
Today, the number of federal regulations is another story. In 1980, the Code of Federal Regulation, the resting place for all active federal rules, stood at just over 100,000 pages. Last year, the count was 195,000. In this way, We the People are more restricted by rules than ever. Pages of regulation, not the number of people employed in government, are the first thing that should be drained.
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Trump and Reagan have similar goals for government reform, but there is one fundamental difference separating them: Reagan spoke fervently for unleashing the free spirit of man—of all men and women, wherever they lived, even behind the walls that once divided East from West Germany and separated Americans from competing nations. He was unrelenting in his support for freedom and free trade, while understanding that at times the goal would be compromised.
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Trump has another vision of America, presenting himself as a protective Colossus standing in our harbors, bargaining across America’s closed borders to determine who and what may enter by immigration controls and tariffs.
President Biden promised when he ran in 2020 to exclude investor protections from new trade agreements. His Administration hasn’t negotiated any owing to hostility from unions and leftwing groups like Public Citizen and Rethink Trade. Unsatisfied, progressives are urging him to remove investor protections from existing agreements.
“These provisions tilt the playing field even further in favor of large corporations, incentivizing offshoring and undermining the sovereignty of the United States and other governments,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren and 32 other Democrats wrote to Trade Rep Katherine Tai last spring. ISDS “continues to harm human rights and hinder efforts to address climate change.”
Their exhortations come as leftwing governments in Latin America seek to seize and maroon foreign investments, especially in energy and mining. Mexico’s new president Claudia Sheinbaum wants to ban hydraulic fracturing and new open-pit mining. American investors are also tangling with the Mexican state-owned oil company Pemex.
Andrew Stuttaford calls out Lina Khan and the ‘Khanservatives.’ A slice:
For Khan to praise [Margrethe] Vestager is appalling, but, given her disdain for American tech and for the way that U.S. antitrust law has been practiced in recent decades, it is not surprising. Khan’s politics are what they are, and, to the extent that they have hindered U.S. tech they have been a gift to Brussels and Beijing.
And yet she has her fanboys in the GOP, including (judging by this WSJ article), Matt Gaetz, the inevitable Josh Hawley, and, regrettably, JD Vance, whom the newspaper quoted speaking at a conference in March (before he became a candidate for the vice presidency), where he said:
“I look at Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job.”
Low bar and all that, but no.
James Pethokoukis ponders U.S. productivity.
John O. McGinnis rightly praises the great American historian Gordon Wood. A slice:
Wood’s scholarship can also help us understand how the revolutionary experience transformed the very meaning of a constitution. In Britain, as Wood aptly quotes Lord Bolingbroke, a constitution was merely “an assemblage of laws, institutions, and customs,” with no authority above ordinary legislation. By contrast, the Americans revolting against Parliament conceived of a constitution as supreme law, binding even the legislature.
This shift created a political conundrum. If a constitution were to restrain legislatures, it could not be enacted by ordinary legislative processes. From this necessity arose the idea of special conventions to ratify state constitutions. These conventions reinforced the view that constitutions were acts of the people themselves. The majestic preamble of the federal Constitution, beginning with “We the People,” is a direct result of this revolutionary logic.
Wood’s analysis of how the revolutionary generation distinguished American constitutions, state and federal, from the British constitution sheds light on a critical contemporary debate in constitutional law. Jonathan Gienapp, in his provocative book The Second Creation, argues that the Constitution should not be seen as fixed, drawing an analogy to the British constitution’s fluidity. Yet Wood’s insights suggest otherwise; his revolutionary focus on writing, precision, and ratification by special assemblies underscores the idea that the Constitution’s meaning was intended to be fixed at its creation.
John Phelan reports on “the economic roots of France’s political collapse.” A slice:
Americans inclined to think that their politics offer a display of dysfunction unique among the nations of the earth might console themselves with a look at France. But they should avoid too much schadenfreude.
In June, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) forecast a federal budget deficit of $2.0 trillion in 2024 which “grows to $2.8 trillion by 2034.” The CBO drily notes that these “deficits equal 7.0 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2024 and 6.5 percent of GDP in 2025…By 2034, the adjusted deficit equals 6.9 percent of GDP — significantly more than the 3.7 percent that deficits have averaged over the past 50 years.”
The result: “Debt held by the public rises from 99 percent of GDP this year to 122 percent in 2034, surpassing its previous high of 106 percent of GDP.”
